How Heritage Became the Cult of Kevin Roberts

“True academic scholars have left.” Inside the Heritage Foundation’s stunning decline—and the board’s silence as its leader courted moral ruin.

As the conservative movement reels from Tucker Carlson’s friendly platforming of white nationalist Nick Fuentes—and from the Heritage Foundation leadership’s insistence that criticism of the exchange amounts to “cancel culture”—the right’s most powerful think tank now finds itself confronting its own moral collapse.

Heritage president Kevin Roberts publicly rallied to Carlson’s defense after the Fuentes interview ignited bipartisan outrage. “We will not bend the knee to the venomous coalition of the woke left and weak right,” Roberts declared, portraying moral outrage over Fuentes’s antisemitism and racism as a mere attempt to silence dissent. Only later, after mounting pressure, did he issue a tepid condemnation of Fuentes himself. The sequence captured the new reflex on much of the right: to debate censorship rather than confront evil.

Inside the leadership of Heritage, the moral drift runs deeper. In February 2025, a veteran staff member sent a detailed, multi-page letter to every trustee—two copies each, so no one could claim ignorance—accusing Roberts of cultivating fear, sectarian favoritism, and personal intimidation. The writer called Heritage “a sectarian RC organization” run by “a man of uncontrollable temper and arrogance,” adding: “Kevin Roberts swears at staff meetings and uses the F word on staff… I am frightened for my physical security when he suddenly, and for minor reasons, flies into a rage.”

According to multiple insiders, the Board received the letter and turned it over to Roberts himself rather than commissioning an independent review.

The same letter described a pattern of ego and reprisal: “KR has a huge ego problem… He dismisses all longstanding HF employees as ‘establishment Republicans.’ Many fine people have been bullied out of their jobs.” The author summed it up in one line: “He is a street angel and a house devil.”

One episode the letter recounts—Roberts allegedly failing to recognize a congressman’s donor-wife at the 2024 Republican National Convention, after which she stopped giving—captures the reputational damage at stake. Internally, the complaint was less about the gaffe than about a leader whose public piety and private conduct were corroding Heritage’s standing.

The sectarianism charge is explicit. The writer alleges Roberts “has an affirmative-action policy for Roman Catholics,” leads Catholic prayers in staff meetings, and imposes theological tests on policy staff. The author, identifying as a devout Christian, wrote that they leave such meetings feeling like they’re “in some weird cult.” Heritage’s original strength was pluralism: libertarians, evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, and hawks—all under one roof to argue toward truth. A confessional culture is the opposite of that tradition.

The letter also laments a talent drain: “True academic scholars have left HF… replaced by people with little experience… as he dumbs down the organization and fills it with sycophants who shower him with praise.”

That concern is not unfounded. Heritage currently lists Mario Enzler as “Senior Advisor to the President” in its Chief Advancement Office. Enzler resigned in 2022 as dean of the University of St. Thomas’s business school after multiple outlets reported he had falsified parts of his academic résumé, including claims of degrees from Yale and the Catholic University of America that he did not earn. His continued presence underscores the very decline in professional standards the letter describes.

Ideologically, the staff letter says Roberts has shifted Heritage away from its free-market roots—citing his praise for certain unions as emblematic—and it levels the gravest charge on culture: “KR insists that single women without children are failures with ‘no skin in the game’… Single heterosexual men are not humiliated in this way. That is completely reserved for females at HF.”

Multiple sources familiar with internal discussions say that at least four women raised concerns over the past two years about Roberts’s comments or conduct toward women, through formal or informal channels. Those familiar with the matter say the concerns reached senior leadership but produced no visible corrective action.

The same letter portrays an organization now too often cheerleading for power rather than arguing from principle: “The Trump team has no respect for KR, and most have lost respect for HF now that we are cheerleading everything he does regardless of merit.” It cites “embarrassing mismanagement” around Project 2025 and alleges Roberts instructed HR to publicly attack a former colleague—behavior that, if true, is inimical to institutional dignity.

What did the Board do? Multiple insiders allege trustees privately held a vote within the past year on Roberts’s future and that Chairwoman Barb Van Andel-Gaby cast the decisive vote to keep him.

The same leadership now invoking “cancel culture” to defend Carlson’s association with Fuentes—a man who has praised Hitler and mocked the Holocaust—is the leadership that ignored credible internal complaints about Roberts, alienated its best scholars, and tolerated mediocrity for the sake of loyalty. The outrage at supposed censorship rings hollow when the true scandal is moral cowardice.

Heritage’s defense of Carlson was not about free speech; it was about fear—fear of admitting error, fear of losing favor with the populist base, fear of confronting the darkness that now passes for boldness. The conservative movement’s problem is not that it cancels too much. It’s that it cancels the wrong things: virtue, truth, and courage.

For decades, Heritage’s value was its moral seriousness. It produced scholarship that policymakers respected because it was rigorous and grounded in principle. If the institution is now bleeding talent, hiring people with discredited credentials, and tolerating a climate of fear and hostility toward women, then the problem isn’t “division on the right.” It’s dereliction.

The staff letter closed with a plea that reads like an institutional conscience speaking: the Board once removed a president to protect Heritage’s reputation; it should do so again, or at least submit the current leadership to real scrutiny. The trustees were warned—twice, in duplicate—and they still have time to choose integrity over inertia.

The Carlson-Fuentes uproar is not a passing controversy. It is a mirror. The reflex to cry “cancel culture” reveals an unwillingness to confront moral rot when doing so might cost popularity. Conservatism, rightly understood, is about conserving the conditions of a free and virtuous society. That requires courage—the courage to hold allies to the same standards we demand of our enemies.

Heritage can recover. But that recovery begins only when its leaders stop hiding behind slogans and start living up to the principles they claim to defend.