The Heritage Foundation debacle isn’t over. The decision of Kevin Roberts, the conservative think tank’s president, to embrace podcaster Tucker Carlson, criticize those who push back on Mr. Carlson’s Jew-baiting and friendly interview with Hitler fanboy Nick Fuentes, and even accuse critics of serving a “foreign government” continues to damage the institution’s reputation.
Among those unpersuaded by Mr. Roberts’s defense is Princeton University professor Robert P. George. Mr. George announced Monday he is resigning from the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees. The reason? Mr. Roberts’s insufficient clean-up after his initial video defending Mr. Carlson from a “venomous coalition” of critics who serve “someone else’s agenda.”
Mr. George said he “could not remain without a full retraction of the video released by Kevin Roberts, speaking for and in the name of Heritage, on October 30th. Although Kevin publicly apologized for some of what he said in the video, he could not offer a full retraction of its content.”
Mr. George is unfailingly civil. He demonstrated this in his announcement, in which he professed sadness over his decision and had nothing but kind words for other board members.
His credentials as a conservative are impeccable. Mr. George has played an essential role in articulating and advancing a robust social conservatism rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition and the American founding. He has taught generations of principled conservatives from his position at Princeton, standing athwart the Rawlsian liberalism regnant in the academy.
Mr. George’s departure from the Heritage board means that the institution may be less likely to heed his call to be “unbending and unflinching” in its fidelity to these principles.
But a decision this serious may be owed in some part to his sense that Heritage’s commitments were already deteriorating during Mr. Roberts’s tenure. Others in the institution are confronting this same dilemma.
Some of Mr. Roberts’s defenders are celebrating Mr. George’s departure as a victory for their form of conservatism. For them, it may be. But that is a reflection of a worldview that doesn’t resemble the conservatism for which Heritage has long stood. A “conservatism” that plays footsie — or worse — with antisemitism and white identity politics, and those who traffic them, doesn’t merit the name.
To criticize Mr. Roberts for such dalliances isn’t to criticize President Trump or MAGA.
Mr. George has sent a clear signal that Mr. Roberts’s conduct has been unacceptable. It’s a shame to see a valuable institution lose its way, but Heritage has.
