The Dispatch Podcast - The Heritage Foundation’s New Foundation | Interview: Tim Chapman

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Steve Hayes invites seasoned conservative Tim Chapman, president of Advancing American Freedom, to discuss the controversy surrounding Tucker Carlson’s recent interview of Nick Fuentes, the current state of the conservative movement, and the impact of populism on the political landscape. The Agenda:—A crisis of consciousness—Populism and the New Right—Nick Fuentes is not a good person—What happened to the Heritage Foundation?—Politicos are too online—Where are the principled conservatives? Show Notes:—Nick Catoggio’s Boiling Frogs on Fuentes and Carlson—Nick Catoggio's Boiling Frogs on the Heritage Foundation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. I'm pleased to be joined today by Tim Chapman, who is president at Advancing American Freedom, Public Policy Advocacy Organization Think Tank, founded by Mike Pence. Tim has a long experience, two plus decades worth of experience working in the conservative movement. He was the executive director of Heritage Action, which is the sort of advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation. He was chief. of staff at the Heritage Foundation. He served as advisors, senior staff to Senators Jim DeMint, Don Nichols, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, long-time activist in the conservative movement and somebody who knows the conservative movement as well as just about anyone. I wanted to bring Tim on today for a conversation about this moment in the conservative movement in light of the controversies over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, the Heritage Foundation and its pretty dramatic change of course. what we're seeing in online discourse among young Republicans and conservatives. Nobody better equipped to answer those questions.

So I hope you'll stick around. Hey, Steve. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Of course. Of course. Happy to happen. Let's start with a big picture look at the conservative.

movement at this moment in time. We're recording this late October, early November, 2025. You have the president of the Heritage Foundation recording a video defending Tucker Carlson, who's the most popular news podcaster in the country on charges of anti-Semitism after Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes, a famous anti-Semite, racist, and white nationalist on his podcast. You have Donald Trump imposing tariffs, sort of on again, off again tariffs on virtually everybody for virtually any reason and Republican Party more or less cheering him on. You have the administration, I think, define rule of law questions by detaining, sometimes American citizens without cause, holding them without cause. You have my longtime mentor, current friend, Bill Crystal, endorsing Zoran Mamdani, the socialist in the New York City mayor's race. What's going on with the conservative movement?

Yeah, I mean, we're having a crisis of conscience right now. And I think a lot of conservatives are unsure of the principles that we've built this moving on and whether those are sustainable for the future and can be adapted to the time we live in. right now, I look back at it, and I try to take the long view of this, I think you look at the last 20 years of Republican leadership and some conservative leadership, and you can identify areas where there began to be a break between rank and file conservatives at the grassroots level and Republican leaders. And I look through, you know, I look through at the first decade of the 2000s, and I look through the Bush years. And I remember very well being one of those foot soldiers in the conservative movement and being very disenchanted with our inability as Republicans

to grapple with some of the big issues facing this country, in particular the growth of the size and scope of the federal government. And so I think you began to see some real dissatisfaction at that time. You began to have grassroots conservatives move away from their loyalty to the leadership of the Republican Party because they were so upset about our ability to deliver. And that I think is a very understandable thing. And then, you know, you started to see rumblings of this. I mean, you saw rumblings of this in 2008 during the financial crisis and a massive amount of dissatisfaction with bailouts for corporate America. And then you saw rumblings of this in the 2010 Tea Party wave. And that was the rise of a populism within the conservative movement that at that time,

I thought, was a very healthy reaction to our inability to lead. But since then, I think that populism has taken a much different turn. And it's gone in places that I think are very unhealthy for the future of the Republican Party and the country. I mean, the country desperately needs a very healthy Republican Party to counteract the left.

The country needs a Republican Party that still fights for the things that we've always fought for, which is those three legs of the stool. We believe in a strong national defense and American leadership, the idea there being that this is an exceptional nation and that this nation is good.

the other leg of the stool we want to fight for is, you know, the social conservative leg of the stool, the idea that families, communities, the little platoons of this nation are the things that make this nation great. And then we wanted a limited government. And we want to support capitalism and free trade. But right now, this crisis of conscience within the right that is built upon all that frustration of those two decades from 2000 to 2020, really. is threatening to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And that's where we are right now. And we're asking ourselves as conservatives, do we still stand on the shoulders of giants? Or are we this new generation that's going to completely remake what the conservative movement is all about?

And I think you're seeing that now. And I just think it's borne out of a frustration of failure and a frustration with the elite institutions in this country, the Republican Party being one of them, failing the American people. So I understand where the populist sentiment and urge is coming from, but I think it's really dangerous where it's headed right now. Let me, there's a million things I want to follow up on it in that answer. So we've got plenty

to talk about. Let me start with this sort of current populist moment and the events really of the past 48 hours, which I think are deeply, deeply troubling and reflect. something sort of rotten to the core of the current conservative movement. What happened just to bring people up to speed over maybe a week ago, Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes, who, as I said, is a prominent, open racist, a white nationalist, Holocaust denier, anti-Semite on his podcast. and sat with Nick Fuentes and gave him what by any reckoning was a very, very friendly interview. We've seen what it's like when Tucker wants to go after somebody.

This was not that. And in reaction to that, you had Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, released this video in which he says, I'm sticking with Tucker Carlson. People have asked questions. Is the Heritage Foundation sticking with Tucker? I'm sticking with Tucker. You know, we can't engage in cancel culture. I might not agree with everything Nick Fuentes says,

but he's got a right to say it when we're sticking with Tucker. I want to before I ask you to respond to that and to Kevin Roberts in particular, given your tenure at the Heritage Foundation, you know, that was my first job out of college, was at the Heritage Foundation. I want to share with people some of the things that Nick Fuentes has said over the past. because I think it's important that people actually hear the words and that we don't just use the label anti-Semite racist because it's the words that actually matter. Pick your first family.

Would you like a woman president? I want a female president with a black son-in-law and some manlit bald cuck husband versus the God emperor of mankind and the son, Alexander. You take your pick. You tell me which one you'd prefer. Is it a little bit racist? Yeah. It is. Oh, my goodness. She openly loves her husband, Joshua Jackson. I loves me some Joshua Jackson. That's Nick Fuentes. He went on to speak of Haley's son-in-law in a mock black accent and acknowledged that he was being not just a little bit racist, but quote, straight up racist was the way that he put it.

At another time, Fuentes said, I'm a new generation. of white person. I'm not living around blacks. Sorry. You know, I want white kids and I don't want my white kids bringing home black people to marry. It's racial for me. And call me racist. Oh, very Christian to you. I don't give a fuck. Another video, Fuentes recorded castigating people who claimed that Adolf Hitler was a pedophile without acknowledging that Hitler was in Fuentes words. Well, he was also really cool. So, and any boy, knows that. Anybody who watches these videos where he's rolling down the street and stuff, it's like, this guy's, this guy's awesome. This guy's cool. Talking about Jews in another video and says,

we're in a holy war and I will tell you this, because we're willing to die in the holy war, we will make them die in the holy war. Jews are running society. Women need to shut the fuck up. Blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part. would live in paradise. It's that simple. It's literally that simple. So let me just get you to respond first to what we've heard from Nick Fuentes. Yeah, I mean, it's just vile stuff. And it's the kind of stuff that plays really well online and has built him a pretty tremendous following. But it has no room in the conservative movement. And this is something that, you know, I talked earlier about a crisis of conscience within the conservative movement. There's this idea that is bubbling up on the

right right now, the idea that we should have no enemies to our right, right? There's no policing that we do within our own movement, which, first of all, historically, is completely out of line with how we built this movement. I mean, the great William F. Buckley built this movement by running the birchers out of the movement. He knew he had to police the movement in order to build a strong coalition that could do great things for this nation. Right now, we don't seem to want to follow the Buckley path on that by any means. And in fact, you know, Tucker Carlson, and is called William F. Buckley, one of the great villains of the modern conservative movement. So that's a real problem right there.

And then I think as you go as you go on, you know, you have to wonder what is going on in the minds of our leaders right now that is allowing this no enemies to the right thing to occur. You know, one of my favorite authors, G.K. Chesterton, you know, once famously said that, you know, the point of an open mind is to eventually close it on something solid and true. Right? So open minds are good. I agree. We should talk to people. We should learn where people are coming from. But the point is not to forever have an open mind like an infant. The point is to grow up and figure out what is true and good and then embrace that. And then where you see it not happening, you work to push back against that. There's way too little of that going on in the conservative movement right now. And so we want to be able to find a way to push back on that. But right now, when it's Tucker Carlson who's leading it or when even groups like Heritage, and this is a tough one for me to talk about, Steve, you referenced it, I spent 15 years in that institution.

I think it's one of the pivotal institutions of the conservative movement. It helped build all the good things that we have. And I know the men and women who built that organization, but for Heritage to take this approach of no enemies to the right and to not close their minds on the things that are true and good and beautiful and fight back against this kind of vile, this vile work that we see coming from the Nick Fuentes of the world.

That's a real harbinger for the right. And I think it's something we have to take seriously right now. And I'm afraid right now that the cool thing to do is to just keep that mentality on X, enjoy a lot of the new followers you get, a lot of the clicks you get on X, and try to build a movement with those people inside of it. But as William F. Buckley knew,

if you have a cancerous agent within your movement, eventually you will die. And that's what I'm afraid of right now. So what you've said there is, to me, very simple, and I don't mean this is an insult to you, but obvious. Like, of course you can't tolerate having racists and anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers. Of course, you don't want to make common cause with people like that. But we saw in this video from Kevin Roberts, effectively doing that. I mean, it's not just that, you know, he had sort of a passive, while I don't agree with everything that Nick Fuentes says, you know, he stands up and takes Tucker Carlson's side in this fight.

As Tucker's getting grief for hosting and platforming and amplifying someone like Nick Fuentes, Kevin Roberts is saying, you know, that's good. We're happy with that. And I guess I wonder what your thoughts are on why someone in his position would say the things that he said in that video. Yeah, well, let me try to be as charitable as I can in my interpretation of this, though that's not really where my heart is right now on this. But if I try to be as charitable as I can be in this, I would say that heritage and other people, pillar institutions of the conservative movement right now have made a decision to change their role in the conservative coalition. So you look historically, the Republican Party and the conservative movement have never been the exact same thing. The Republican Party have been

politicians, right? And the politicians have benefited from having a conservative movement that was outside of them and called them to higher standards. Right. And historically, that's what heritage did. Heritage, uh, heritage, uh, heritage built itself as a permanent institution. I remember heritage, you know, I, you know, when I was there in the early 2000s getting kicked out of Tom DeLay's office because they opposed him on a, on a new entitlement program. And they were kicked out of his office for six years. I remember stories of Ed Fulner going in, uh, to George Bush's office and opposing him, the first Bush, and opposing him on his, uh, desire to hike taxes. And He was told you'll never be invited back to this White House.

And, you know, and Fulner at the time said, with all due respect, Mr. President, Heritage will be here a long time after you're gone. And that was a really powerful thing. And a lot of conservative institutions grew up thinking of themselves as outside the party leadership. So what I think is happening now, though, is a lot of institutions like Heritage are saying, you know what? you know, we are going to change our role as that true North beacon calling Republican leaders to something better. And we're going to become the enforcer of the party leadership. So we're on the team now. We're going to become the enforcer. And they've rationalized it because they understand that this country is in a great crisis. And that, and they now view Trump and the Trump

movement as the only hope to push back against the excesses of the left. So therefore they've rationalized changing their institutional mission. We now need to be the enforcer. So there's no more dynamic that used to exist where they call them to their better angels. It's whatever comes out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is what we are going to enforce. So we're going to take the 80 to 100 million dollars we raise every year, and we're going to put it behind enforcing what's coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So that is the rationale for that. Now, there's another part of this, too, which is that they are also thinking of themselves. If their job is to be enforcer, then they also have to build a coalition. And they think that the future of the Republican

coalition has to include the Tucker Carlson wing, the Steve Bannon wing, And sadly, they even think it has to include the Fuentes wing, which is why they're so hesitant to push back on it. And it's a really misguided way of thinking about this. Because what they don't understand, like we were saying earlier, is how cancerous that Fuentes wing is, how it will eat the party alive from within. And we'll wake up on our deathbed five years from now

because we tolerated it. But I think they think, oh, we can allow the cancer to fester for a while, then we'll have a strong enough treatment five years from now. We will be able to eradicate it. But at that point, it's metastasized. And this is the crisis we really face. I mean, we have to take this very seriously. And again, Buckley saw this. Our forefathers in the movement saw this and understood that this kind of stuff couldn't be let inside the tent. And so we're not saying don't talk to anybody. I'm not saying don't talk to anybody. I think you need to talk to everyone, all right, but you need to be really vigorous in how you talk and you need to not give an inch on

the moral imperative that's at stake when you have these conversations. And I just don't see that happening right now. Yeah. Well said. Get no frills delivered. Shop the same in-store prices online and enjoy unlimited delivery with PC Express Pass. Get your first year for 250 a month. Learn more at PCexpress. When I look at Heritage, and I think back to my time there, you know, I was fresh out of college. It was my first job after graduating from undergraduate. And I came in as a writer and researcher for Ed Fulner and the folks in the development, basically the fundraising department.

And I was the editor of Heritage's quarterly newsletter called Heritage Members News, where we just, it was, you know, 10, 12, maybe 16 pages, and we just gave people updates about what was going on at Heritage. And I got there, and I will admit I was conflicted. I did a lot of answering of Ed Fulner's emails. I mean, not emails. Actually, this was pre-email. His actual letters, written letters to people or from people,

often responses to direct mail. And, you know, I had these sort of moments of, of crisis of conscience because I would get an email from someone responding to a direct mail piece saying, you know, Mr. Fulner, I had to choose between paying for my medicine this month or donating to Heritage. But I read your letter and it's so important, I believe so strongly in what the conservative movement is doing, what the Heritage is doing, that I'm choosing to forego my medicine. And I'm doing it. And I thought, gosh, that's crazy. But the other thing that I loved about working at Heritage and working for Ed Fulner in particular was he would get letters all the time

from, you know, average everyday members who donated three bucks a month to people running foundations that donated millions and millions of dollars to Heritage to the elected officials that you talked about him confronting the past. And what he would say is we at the Heritage Foundation believe in certain principles. These are the principles. He'd walk people through the principles. And if they were writing, encouraging Heritage to take a different position because it was popular, there was a moment, he would tell them, sorry, we're not going to do it because we believe things. And you're free to take your money elsewhere. And I remember in particular, him doing this on the question of immigration heritage was always a fairly, I mean, it got blasted a lot from

the sort of Pat Buchanan, more nativist wing of the Republican Party. because it argued sort of aggressively and openly for more legal immigration and thought that immigration was good for the economy, good for the country, what have you. And there were letters that I, you know, helped draft, took to Folner where we said to people who were writing us. I mean, this was shortly after Buchanan, you know, had had his rise in 1992. And there was this Buchananite movement afoot in the Republican Party. And the letters said, in effect, hey, we believe this stuff.

We think immigration is good for the following, you know, five reasons. And if you don't agree with us, we respect your views, but that's what we believe. I just get the sense that that's not where Heritage is these days. They seem to be willing, you know, Heritage was opposed tariffs forever for its entire existence and is now making accommodations for this president's tariff agenda because I think they want to, be close to this president. Am I too cynical about that on a policy level? No, I mean, it's true on its face. I mean, if you go to Heritage website right now, a lot of the papers that used to exist on free trade are gone. And they're memory old. And look, this is what happens when you change your mission. And again, what's happening in

Heritage is indicative of what's happening across the broader movement. When you change your mission and you say the actual mission of this organization is to be the enforcer and the external coalition builder, you put yourself in a political position, not a policy and a principled position. And so the policies and principles don't matter as much anymore. What matters is keeping this coalition together. And what your project really is, is trying to build a coalition for 2028 and then 2032. And again, that may be justifiable. You know, if heritage supporters want that, that's great but it's it is a shift in what the institution has been my point is that when institutions like heritage do that the party itself is going to get weaker because the party benefits from the

external accountability the party benefits from iron sharpening iron that dynamic is critical for republican leaders to be able to be the best they can be we we cannot count on politicians to get it right all the time you know we've seen them fail us over over and over and over again. And especially when you're in an environment where the leader of the party is President Trump, and President Trump makes no bones about it. The guy's not a conservative. He's very, he's almost non-ideological.

And so he doesn't have core beliefs that are aligned with the conservative movement's core beliefs of the last 50 years. So he's going to be worse off, though, because at the end of the day, he will, end up losing elections because of this. If we believe in our ideas as conservatives and we believe those ideas, if put into policy, actually help people, then at the end of the day, that's good politics. And if you deviate from that, like the tariffs are just such a great example. The tariffs right now are carving apart the strongest part of the coalition that Trump himself built. Trump himself brought working class voters into the Republican coalition. Working class voters are the first people who are getting hurt by this tariff agenda.

You look all across the country and look at small businesses who are struggling because of what's happening from the tariff agenda. I mean, I was just reading a story from the North Carolina newspaper about a fifth generation family business that just had to close 50 people out of a job, five generations of work. It's a lumber mill in North Carolina. they can't afford to eat any margins because they're not making any margins. Okay? So they had to close. That's five generations of work down the tube. Those are Trump voters.

I mean, these people are not rolling in the dough. They are Trump voters. And at the end of the day, this is an example of how bad policy makes bad politics. Yeah, yeah. Let's go back to the Carlson Fuentes conversation for just a moment and then I want to return to policy. And then I want to return to your diagnosis of the problem dating back 20 plus years. When you were talking earlier about the conversation between Tucker Carlson and between Nick Fuentes, you noted that the kinds of inflammatory things that Carlson and Fuentes are saying are popular online.

Why is that? So when I watched that conversation, I was struck. I watched most of the conversation, first hour of the conversation. I was really struck by how much of their conversation, both of them was animated by grievances in their own lives, right? Both of them were talking about people who had slighted them or they felt disrespected by in some sort of way. And every time that they were slighted,

they got a little bit more radicalized. And so to me, it's like that's emblematic of the problem of what's happening on the populace, right? It's a grievance politics culture. And I think grievance politics plays really well online. And I think what they're doing is they're feeding an environment online, especially with young men in the conservative movement who are thinking of themselves as potential Trump voters and could become conservatives, but they're feeding a race to the bottom.

Okay. And there are lots of reasons why young men should feel aggrieved. I mean, like we talked about earlier, the excesses of the left have gone after young men. Okay. So there are many reasons for it. But they're doing the opposite of what some of the better people on the right, like a Jordan Peterson would be doing. We need Jordan Peterson back, and we need Jordan Peterson back in a big way. The idea that somebody comes out and talks to young men and says, you know what, the way to get ahead in this world is to make your bed.

Wake up, make your bed. You are not a victim, you know. But what I see both Tucker and Nick doing is saying you are a victim, you're always. going to be a victim. And at the end of the day, that's not conservative. That's leftist. That's the way the left runs their political project is through grievance politics and victim politics. And so that's very unhealthy for the future of the movement. And again, I will keep saying this. It will be a political loser because we're not going to out grievance the left. And you're already starting to see it. You're already seeing the horseshoe theory come true on a lot of this stuff

where young conservatives or young populace are starting to look at the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. Or you look at the candidate they're running up there in Maine who might win for Democrats in Maine in the Senate. That guy could be a MAGA guy. And this is happening all over the place. And so the horseshoot theory is real

and it's going to end up hurting our ability to hold our coalition together and to build something better for the future. I had the exact same reaction as I watched that Carlson Fuentes video. And I will acknowledge it was revealing in ways I didn't expect it to be revealing, in part because there's such a parallel between what Tucker has done in his trajectory. He's my age. He's a lot older. Fuences is just, you know, a few years out of college.

And the parallels between Tucker's experience and Fuentes' experience are striking. And I think you're right. They both have this sort of grievance politics. It's, it's, conspiracies, the number of uses of the ill-defined pronoun they, they're doing this, they are getting, they're the ones, yeah, was really striking. The other thing that struck me was the thirst for audience. And I think this explains a ton of what we've seen from Tucker as he's gone, you know, as we've witnessed his dissent was, you know, this is a guy who in 2011, went to CPAC and announced the launch of the Daily Caller.

Yes. And explicitly said the purpose of the daily caller was to be like the New York Times of the right. Yeah. And it was going to do reporting and they were going to get out, do the hard work. I remember it. And then he was in that business for a very short amount of time and discovered that the things that worked was outrage. That's what would get you the clicks. That's what you could monetize.

So he doubled down and tripled down on outrage. And before long, it was this sort of outrage arms race between the Daily Caller and Breitbart. And as Breitbart had more, you know, more influence in the Trump campaign with Steve Bannon, who was the chairman of Breitbart, more influence eventually in the Trump White House, the Daily Caller kept going further and further right and ended up with, you know, several white nationalists working there. Tucker and company claimed that they didn't know these folks were white nationalists, but they made the same mistake in the same direction many, many times. But it's this sort of search for audience, peddling grievance politics to grow your audience, which I think is what they sort of have in common. Yeah, I mean, and that's the dynamic of the world we live in right now, which is one of the discouraging things that we have to find a way

around. Look, there's a reason why when Tucker had Fuentes on, you know, you saw it there, you saw it, oh, you know, Fuentes, you know, made a remark about how, you know, Lenin was one of his favorite figures. Tucker seemed, excuse me, Tucker seemed so surprised, said, we'll come back to that, never came back to it, right? But why don't you come back to it? You don't come back to it because then you have to have a conflict. And when you have a conflict, you lose your ability to take Fuentes' audience and make it your audience. I fear part of what's happening with Heritage and other groups is a similar dynamic, right? So you want to pull those people into your world. And again, this is what I was talking about earlier. You'll take a little bit of the cancer now

and then try to exterminate it later. But at the end of the day, once it metastasizes, it's a real problem. So the grievance politics plays so well online. And it's something that we, we, we, The only way around this thing is through it. People have to go and confront it head on. And if we don't, we're going to end up in a really bad place five years from now. But I think that's the dynamic that's fueling a lot of the downward spiral in the conservative movement. I say this as an aside.

You know, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, you know, I didn't know what to think about it at the time. But now that I think I have no hopes that Elon will do this. but Elon, if he wanted to be one of the great beneficiaries of all mankind and this nation, could pull the plug on this thing. Pulling the plug on that would just be like it would instantaneously change the dynamics because the way X works right now is that the algorithm promotes all of that kind of stuff. And everybody's looking at your performance on X. And I just find it ironic that, you know, guys at Heritage are saying,

well, we're not paying attention to X posts. we'll do whatever, you know, we'll do what we think is right. But it feels a lot to me like they really do care about the ex-posts and a lot that they care about the feedback that they get there. So I think it's a real challenge for us. And I think the only way around it again is through it. And the only way through it is to be principled and weathered the storm. And look, people at the end of the day, I don't think, I've got teenagers.

You've got teenagers too, Steve. Like, I know what they're, you know, assaulted with online every single day. But I also know they want to be challenged and called to something better. And there's not enough people doing that. And the more that you do that, the more you have the ability to sway the direction of this problem. And I think conservatives just need to engage more. Yeah. This Kevin Roberts' video defending Tucker and I think minimizing Nick Fuentes, all of the problematic things that Nick Fuentes represents,

didn't come out of nowhere. There's a history here. If you go back to 2021, Tucker 2020, 2020, 2021, Tucker seemed to pick Heritage as one of the conservative movement establishment organizations that he was going to go after.

Yeah. And he went after Heritage again and again, viciously. Yes. And in particular, focused his ire on K. Cole James, the former president of the Heritage Foundation. She made a statement during the BLM riots.

He badly mischaracterized that statement on air, said that she called the country irredeemably racist when she had said no such thing. Went after Heritage and encouraged his viewers to no longer donate to the Heritage Foundation. Yes. And you probably have a lot more insight about this than I do, but I remember talking to people at the time who said that this sparked sort of a wave of panic at heritage in the leadership.

It led to a pretty dramatic decline of small dollar donors, small dollar giving in the short term. And the leadership team, or at least some on the leadership team, the people on the leadership team who eventually prevailed, said, we've got to win Tucker back. And there was a campaign to get on Tucker's good side that culminate. in Tucker eventually, I think, winning an award from Heritage and giving a major speech at a Heritage dinner. How much did that factor into this trajectory? I mean, Kay Cole James essentially left Heritage after this criticism. There were other reasons we don't need to get into them. And that's when Kevin Roberts sort of came to Heritage as the new president.

How much of that history factors into this moment? the kinds of things that Robert said in the video? Well, I mean, I think it's a big factor. You know, I was there during the years when Tucker would spend his 8 o'clock hour attacking heritage. I would correct one thing. It actually, there was a significant worry when he was attacking us at that time

that it would impact our small dollar donors. It turns out it didn't much. Really? Yeah. It turns out that the impact was minimal. and that as long as we were communicating with our small dollar donors, we were in a strong position. So we felt that we could do that. The worry was that if this keeps up for five, 10 years, does that have an impact and how do you address that? And I think that's a very,

that's a prudent concern for the directors of the Heritage Foundation to be thinking about and for the donors of the Heritage Foundation to be worried about. But it wasn't an existential crisis by any means. It was not hurting the bottom line in the way that people feared that it might. There was just a worry that over time it would. And so I think that Heritage has, Heritage at that time was thinking about, well, how do we, there is something happening on the populist right that we need to address. And I think that's a good thing that Heritage needs to be self-aware, needed to be self-aware, needed to understand the moment that they were in. But how do you take that populist energy and channel it towards the things that we believe in.

And so I think that's what they were trying to do in the 2020s. And they did try that, even under the new leadership team for a while. I mean, there were very clear positions from the Heritage Foundation that were consistent with long-term conservative positions. I remember when Heritage was flying the Ukrainian flag during the first six months of the invasion of Ukraine. And it was still very aligned with that I think that part of the problem is what you referenced earlier, which is this culture of like looking for online feedback

and where the energy is online and trying to think of yourself as gaming a coalition for the future. And when that began to be a predominant concern, it feels like the organization started to shift a little bit. And so Tucker was relentless in his tax there. I do have to give Tucker credit. He was relentless not only in his attacks on heritage and ultimately did change heritage significantly. But he was relentless on his attacks on politicians across the board as well. I remember, you know, a great example of this is, you know, he used to spend almost as much time attacking Mike Lee as he did the Heritage Foundation. And so he would attack Mike Lee for being on. Mike Lee's this principal conservative. Mike Lee should be, who doesn't understand what time is.

Mike Lee should be using federal power, especially to go, you know, after tech companies, or Mike Lee had a position on tech companies that was more free market than Tucker was comfortable with. So he relentlessly attacked him on it. And then Mike Lee changed too. And I think it was an overreaction from principled conservatives. I think that they see the power of the clicks online. I think that they see the followers.

I think they read too much X. And I think they think that there's a movement out there that stronger than it really is. I think they can withstand it and should have withstood. it and try to channel that energy in a more positive and conservative direction. But here we are. So no crying over spilled milk. We are where we are. But why? Let me push you on that. Yeah. Let me push you on that because this is, I mean, this is something you and I have talked about offline as well. I mean, I think the thing for me that's been so intellectually disorienting

is if you go back to the Tea Party era and even before, you know, you look around if you work in conservative media as I did, you work in these conservative movement institutions as you have. And, you know, I could write up a list of 50 people who I thought were influential and more or less believed the things that I believed and had come to Washington to advance the values and policy the objectives that I, you know, was, was interested in advancing. And if I had made such a list, let's say in the heart of the Tea Party era, and I look at that list of 50 people today, there are like four remaining on that list. Right.

Were we just really naive to believe that these people who were sort of their working alongside us, really believed this stuff that they believed in the way that we did. Why has it been so easy for people to just flip? I mean, Mike Lee is a good example. I have a long relationship with Mike Lee. I really admired him for a long time, spent most of the 2016 convention with Mike Lee, interviewed him dozens of times over the years. And he's unrecognizable to me. I just don't, I talk to him at the, the, the, Republican convention in 2024 and asked him some of these questions, didn't give me answers that I thought were very satisfactory. What accounts for this? Were we naive to believe the things

that we believed and believed that others believed them too? I don't think we were naive, Steve. I think they did believe it. I think Mike Lee was a genuine believer in principled conservatism and limited government. I think, again, it's a confluence of circumstances. Lots of things are working on this. First of all, power is seductive. Okay. And so there is an element of if you can't beat them, join them. And they feel right now like the power is with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And they've rationalized with themselves so that, you know, I need to stay in this camp and maintain my influence. And maybe someday in the future, you know, I can do, I can kind of tack back a little bit. So I think part of it is that. I think the other part of it is the amount of

amount of time people spend engaging with the online culture. And Mike Lee is a great example of that. I just think he spends way too much time engaging on X. And I think it's actually slowly but surely changed him. And then let me add a third element, which I think is the most charitable element here. And that is that a lot of conservatives have convinced themselves that we're in an existential fight.

And that if we don't defeat the left with any and all power that we can accumulate, there will be no future conservative movement. And so with that, they've been, they've grown far more comfortable with going in a national conservative direction. They've become far more comfortable with a, with a battlefield mindset. This is where we get into this concept on the right that's grown very popular, which is that we live in a post-constitutional republic, that the regimes, that the regimes of the past were not really constitutional regimes. And so, you know what, Steve, if you want to have all those nice norm, and, you know, civil rules, and you want to follow the Constitution, that's great.

But we don't have time for that when we're trying to fight for our very lives. But think about that. They mock the things that they really ostensibly cared about, right? I mean, that was the Tea Party, right? It was a constitution-driven populist movement. And the ends were limited government. I mean, aside from you and me and a handful of us, who's even talking about limited government anymore? I mean, do people even care about limited government?

Honestly, it's, I look around and it's like you don't have either of the major political parties making sustained arguments. You know, there's occasionally a flare up from the House Freedom Caucus or a principled conservative here or there in elective office. But you don't have anybody, you know, holding office today and very few people in sort of our world making a sustained case. for limited government anymore. It's almost like that's passe. We've got to do what we've got to do. The ends justify the means. The means justify the ends.

Well, there's no doubt about that. And I agree with you. Again, the mind shift that I've seen is people have said limited government is something we still believe in, but we don't have the luxury to fight for it anymore. Right now, we have to put all of our energy behind defeating the left. The only way to defeat the left is through the Trump movement and then through the Vance movement after Trump. And that's where people are right now. And I think it's a real challenge for us. I mean, what we have to be able to do is articulate how, when you have

two parties that don't care about the Constitution, two parties that don't care about limited government, two parties that don't care about representing the vast swath of the American middle right now, then you're going to end up in a very bad place at the end of the day. And I think we have to just continue trying to make that case. But yeah, look, there are still some who believe in the limited government. They just said that's a third-tier issue at this point. I mean, I don't know. It's part of the reason I came to Washington. Yeah. Big part of the reason I came to Washington. It's like one of the singular animating factors of the conservative movement, one of the most important things. Yeah. Of course. Let me ask a little bit about the work

that you're doing at AAF. I mean, it's been fascinating to watch you grow and to watch AAF really become a trusted, and for those of us who do believe in limited government, sort of a trusted, reliable place to go and get policy research and to sort of check in, to say, okay, what are movement conservatives? What do people actually believe in limited government doing and saying these days? There are times when I look at what, at the things that you say, at the things that Mike Pence says, the kinds of policy positions that AAF is promoting and, you know, you're very critical sometimes of the Trump administration on tariffs on RFK Jr.

And some of the crazy, I think, that's coming out of the Department of Health and Human Services. But there are other times when you're not. I mean, you've been very favorable towards Trump on some of what he's done in the Middle East. You were more enthusiastic about his one big, beautiful bill, certainly than I was. Right.

How do you all approach this? When you're making these arguments and you're putting out policy positions, do you stop and think, like, oh, we're going to be with the Trump administration on this and against them on this? Or do you just say, this is what we believe. We're telling you what we believe. Yeah, I mean, we do our best to just call balls and strikes and try to take the personality out of it. It's hard to take personality out of it in this dynamic, this world we live today, where the personalities are everything. But we try to call balls and strikes. So to your point, Steve, we have been very critical of the Trump administration on those issues that you talked about.

We were supportive of the one big beautiful bill or whatever we're calling it these days. We were supportive of it mainly because we didn't want taxes to go up on the American people. But we were very clear during our support of that that we thought it needed to be paired with a reconciliation 2.0 that actually dealt with the spending issue. And that's a much harder one to get across the finish line because the Trump administration doesn't support it. But our mentality was, look, the economy is already going to go through massive headwinds. The tariffs are, I think we're really on a nice edge right now. And without the, you know, at least tax certainty from the one big beautiful bill, we could be falling off that cliff. And we just don't want that for the American people.

We just don't, and so we have to, we have to keep pushing on the spending cuts, but pushing on the spending cuts, I think at the end of the day is going to require a reinvigorated conservative movement, one that we do not have right now. And that's part of our project at AAF is to be here, become a permanent institution of the right, become in many ways what some of the other legacy institutions have ceased to be, which is to be that outside organization that, you know, iron sharpens iron. and tries to hold Republicans accountable to the things they say that they believe in. And if we can gain traction in that, we can be part of the solution in steering this party back towards a more fiscal, conservative perspective. I hate to end on this note on a question about spending debt and deficits, size and scope of government because there's not much. It's fun to end on an optimistic note. It's just hard to be optimistic at this point.

We're $38 trillion in debt. You had for at least a time a Republican Party through the reforms that Paul Ryan and others were pushing in the 2010, 2011, 12 time frame had fully embraced entitlement reform. There were people who disagreed. They didn't like it tactically. They thought it could be politically costly. But that was in the Republican budget, I believe, from 2011 to 2015, 16. which was a big, struck me as a big deal. Those are, the entitlements are what's driving our deficits and ultimately our debt.

Now with interest on the debt, taking up an even more problematic spot in building the long-term debt. Is there any prospect that people will, that Republicans, that conservatives will again embrace entitlement reform in the near-term future? I mean, Donald Trump is opposed to it. He's against it. It's not just like, it's not just that he's not for it. He's actively opposed to it. And Democrats are, in some respects, worse. Although I have more respect for Democrats who propose massive tax, like, confiscatory taxes to address the problem because at least they acknowledge the problem than I do with Trump, who's basically says this isn't a problem.

Everything's going to be fine. And what's the future sort of near-term, mid-term, long-term on this question of entitlement reform? So look, I'll tell you this, that there are people even within the Trump administration, you know, my friend Russ vote over at OMB, who I, you know, obviously don't agree with everything. But I think Russ is still a limited government conservative. A lot of those people over at OMB are limited government conservatives. The mentality that I feel that exists over there is that we don't yet have the credibility to do what we need to do on entitlement reform because we have to cut the little things before we can cut the big things. And so if you give them the benefit of the doubt, they're saying, well, we got to do some recidious packages and, you know, we got to test the muscle memory of members of Congress and start to build this up within our own coalition long term to have more support. for it and then we will do it. The problem with that, obviously, is that it's always next time,

always next time, every single time, right? And then the other thing that I would say, and this is anecdotal, but we go all over the country and we talk to conservatives all over the country. We were down at University of Texas, Austin, three weeks ago. The fiscal stuff is the thing that came up over and over and over again. So, and a lot of these people, you know, we had 200 room, 200 people in the room. A lot of them are students at UT. They're not, they have not given up on the fiscal thing. It still is something that animates them. So I think there's latent support within the Republican coalition that we need to figure out how to tap. But right now, that's being depressed by leaders who are saying, no, we can't do it right now. So I still think it's

there. But I think you've got to build, you've got to build a different kind of Republican Party. And that's the project, is how do we get to a place between now in 2028 where conservatives, the conservative coalition, and I think that's what we've got to think of ourselves, it really is a coalition or a faction within the Republican Party, where the conservative faction is large enough and serious enough that whoever the nominee in 28 is has to come to us for something. And then one of the things should be fiscal restraint. So that's the project. But right now, it's like, you know, obviously right now there's not a lot of, there's there's not a lot of momentum for fiscal restraint. That is the understatement of the century. Tim, thanks so much for spending some time with us. This is a very important topic. We probably should spend more at the dispatch focusing on some of these internecine conservative movement fights.

We usually look toward the bigger picture questions on policy issues. But as you said earlier, the personality stuff really matters. And when you look at something like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes and Kevin Roberts defending that, it suggests that there's sort of deeper and further exploration to be done. Tim, thanks for joining us. Steve, thanks for having me. You know,