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RIP to the Heritage Foundation, which functionally died this week, as its most prominent staffers made a beeline for the exit.
The Suspect: President Trump and his posse of online shitposters.
The weapon: Antisemitism.
The room: Phoenix Convention Center.
Having offered up their not-inconsiderable reputations and intellectual firepower, these once-respected thinkers realized too late that they were never steering the ship. The goal was always a personalist regime that wrecked the economy for the benefit of a few oligarchs.
You love to see it … sort of.
Gambling at Rick’s?!?
Antisemitism is at the center of the Republican project.
From decrying “globalists” and George Soros, to embracing the “real” Jews in Israel, the GOP is inextricably entwined with Christian nationalism. In polite company, the party manages to keep this antisemitism as subtext. They openly attack other minorities, particularly trans people and Muslims; but Jew-hatred is expressed as rage at “elites” or ancient blood libel repackaged for the modern era, such as Pizzagate and Qanon.
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But “trolling the libs” necessitates saying the unsayable. And Trump, who won by embracing the most online people on earth, is constantly playing footsie with the fringe figures who endorse him. That’s how he wound up hosting Kanye West and Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, both avowed antisemites and Holocaust deniers. But bringing trolls inside the tent means the GOP can’t plausibly deny that they’re central to the project.
Republicans can’t very well maintain a veneer of separation from bomb throwers like Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Laura Loomer when they’re being boosted by the president himself. And so the “normie” Gippers steadfastly assure themselves that they are the real GOP — the signal, not the noise.
In October, Tucker Carlson tossed a turd into this already cloudy punchbowl by interviewing Fuentes on his podcast. Carlson, who has leaned hard into online conspiracies since being booted from Fox, denounced “Christian Zionists” who have been “seized by this brain virus.” Fuentes in turn railed against “organized Jewry.”
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The backlash was fierce. Even House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to mildly tut-tut at Carlson for undercutting the claim that antisemitism is purely the province of the left. But then Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, raced in like LEEEROYYY JENKINSSSS, confirming that there’s no daylight between the conservative graybeards and the online rabble rousers.
“Christians are entitled to critique the State of Israel without being labeled as antisemitic,” Roberts said in a video posted to X, adding later that “conservatives should not be compelled to automatically support any foreign government, regardless of the pressure from the globalist elite or their representatives in Washington.” (Roberts also referred to critics of Carlson as a “venomous coalition.”)