Power struggle erupts as establishment GOP struggles to 'expel the lunatics': analysis
“There was never that much distance between the Establishment and the extremists of the right, even in [William F.] Buckley’s era; now they are even closer,” reports Intelligencer Senior writer Sarah Jones.
In October, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts publicly cast his lot in with entertainer Tucker Carlson hours after Carlson had a cozy, normalizing interview with influencer Nick Fuentes, king of the white nationalist groyper army, without pressing him on his radical claims about the merits of Adolf Hitler and killing “perfidious Jews.” Roberts disavowed Fuentes in his video, but Jones said he was also careful to make a “big tent” argument in favor of including even bigoted elements in the conservative movement. “Canceling” Fuentes, he argued, “is not the answer either.”
Now a simmering civil war within Heritage — and the conservative movement itself — has spilled out into public view, said Jones.
“One faction, led by Jewish conservatives and Christian Zionists like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, accuses Roberts of coddling an antisemite. Another prefers a ‘no enemies to the right’ approach, which mirrors the language that Roberts used in his video,” reports Jones. “There have been prominent resignations, a contentious town hall at Heritage, and denunciations of various sorts. Throughout it all, the groypers cavort. The Establishment right, which they despise, may be ripe for implosion at last.”
Jones said the Roberts video arrived at a contentious moment for American conservatives. The post-Trump trajectory of the right “is not yet assured, and the movement is consumed by questions of succession, ideology, and strategy.”
“To many, like Roberts, the furthest-right fringe is more palatable than liberalism or the neoconservatism that preceded the Obama years. Only an alliance of the most radical tendencies on the right can transform the nation for decades to come, or so the logic goes,” she wrote.
Jones also notes that Roberts often says he knows ‘what time it is in America,’ which is a popular phrase inside extremist circles, according to political theorist Laura K. Field.
“If you know what time it is, you know that the hour is late, and it is time for radical action in America,” Field said in her new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.
Jones said the right has no immune system against hatemongers and grifters, and this is obvious in the rise of Fuentes — who President Donald Trump saw fit to meet and entertain. It’s also clear in the rise of Roberts’s career.
“Roberts may not be a groyper, but he volunteered for Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign,” said Jones, adding that Buchanan “is an antisemite who wrote for VDARE, a white-nationalist website, from 2006 until his retirement in 2023. Roberts calls him a ‘Cassandra’ in Dawn’s Early Light, published last year, for which J.D. Vance wrote the foreword.”
At a Heritage town hall, convened by Roberts in a bid to salvage his power after his controversial endorsement, conservative scholar Robert Rector invoked Buckley.
“The boundaries that he set forth, William Buckley, in the early 1960s, were twofold,” Rector said. “You have to expunge all antisemitism, all of it. But that’s just part of it … the other is you have to expel the lunatics.”
“... Yet the right’s eternal patience with antisemitism, and all other forms of racism and misogyny and queer hatred, are precisely what brought us here,” said Jones. “And so, despite all the heat, the board of Heritage is siding with Roberts for now.”
It’s a risky calculation, Jones added.
“If they continue to support him and his allies, they might further marginalize the institution with the public. Groypers are not popular. Nor are Roberts’s political views. Even Trump is deep underwater with voters. To the most extreme factions of the right, however, popularity doesn’t matter — not when you know what time it is. Their goal is to save America, even if that means saving it from Americans themselves. Roberts is digging in for a war.”
Read the Intelligencer report at this link.