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Posted on 11/13/2025 10:04:29 AM PST by MtnClimber
The internal conflict over the future of the MAGA movement is described as a generational divide: On one side are the boomers, the Republican Party’s old guard that attached itself to Donald Trump’s winning agenda, and on the other side are the Zoomers, the rising generation of conservatives angry that, in their view, the president has betrayed his own movement. The split is anything but organic. Rather, it’s the intended result of a campaign waged by a revisionist faction determined to seize control of MAGA, and the Republican Party, by erasing Trump.
The fight has been simmering on social media since the 2024 election but recently jumped to a different venue: the nominally staid environment of Washington, D.C., think tanks. At the end of October, The Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts released a three-minute video that opened with him defending the right of Christians to “critique” Israel without being called antisemitic. The broadside seemed to come out of the blue—given that critics of Israel routinely lament that they’re not allowed to criticize Israel, what specific incident had inspired Roberts’ exhortation? It wasn’t until a minute or so into the video that the context became clear.
“We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” said Roberts. “That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains and, as I have said before, always will be a close friend of The Heritage Foundation.”
Roberts was responding to criticism of Carlson after a recent episode of his podcast in which he interviewed Nick Fuentes, king of the “Groypers,” an informal association of disaffected, mostly young men who exercise their grievances through attacking (only rhetorically, to date) women, minorities, and their chief target, Jews. Because Carlson failed to push back on Fuentes for praising Hitler as well as Stalin—and because Carlson himself attacked evangelicals, including Trump’s Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, for supporting Israel—he was accused of mainstreaming his guest and right-wing antisemitism.
But even with the context, Roberts’ message seemed random. There’s no evidence that anyone outside of Heritage pressured the think tank to end its relationship with the former Fox News host. It was when the internal debate at Heritage spilled into public view that it became clear Roberts was defending his own position at least as much as Carlson’s right of critique. One of the internal flashpoints, presumably, was the $1.2 million Heritage reportedly spent sponsoring Carlson’s show between June 2024 and June 2025. It’s still not clear whether Roberts used unrestricted donations to pay Carlson or whether a particular donor laundered payments through Heritage to fund a podcaster whose obsession with Jews and the Jewish state might cause a patron some public embarrassment.
Indeed, even Roberts has been aware of Carlson’s compulsion for some time. The think tank head indicated in a Heritage town hall several days after the video that he’d signaled his displeasure with Carlson after his controversial interview with podcaster Darryl Cooper. During the show, the popular historian expounded on his revisionist account of WWII, its causes and effects (Hitler mistakenly blundered into the final solution), its heroes and villains (Churchill was the bad guy). It’s essentially the same thesis that Pat Buchanan laid out in his 2008 book Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”—which can hardly come as a surprise since Buchanan’s political and intellectual legacy is at the core of the current conflict.
“I guess he’s an antisemite,” Trump said of Buchanan when he was vying with him for the 2000 Reform Party nomination. “He doesn’t like the Blacks, he doesn’t like the gays,” said Trump. “It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy.”
Trump reportedly apologized to Buchanan in 2011 for what he’d said a decade earlier, but Buchanan fans have a long memory. In Roberts’ now infamous statement, apparently written for him by his now former chief of staff, he referred to those objecting to Carlson’s slurs against Jews and evangelicals as a “venomous coalition,” thus evoking a 1991 Anti-Defamation League report titled “Anger on the Right: Pat Buchanan’s Venomous Crusade.”
Buchanan’s disciples believe they are waging a counterinsurgency just like his and against the same breed of phony conservatives to retake the movement that they rightly own. In their view, Buchanan is MAGA’s George Washington.
“Buchanan didn’t just predict the challenges we face today; he laid the intellectual foundation for the America First resurgence that has redefined our politics,” Roberts wrote on X in August. “From his time as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration to his founding of The American Conservative in 2002, Buchanan never stopped fighting for America’s forgotten men and women. That’s the reason I volunteered for his campaign in 1992, and that’s why today I’m eager to recommend him for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Honoring him would not only recognize his extraordinary contributions but also send a powerful message: the era of globalism is over, and the future belongs to those who put America first.”
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