The mass defection comes in the wake of Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’s video defense of Tucker Carlson
Leaders of Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the nonprofit led by former vice president Mike Pence, said that their move to hire more than a dozen former Heritage Foundation employees represents a significant shift within the American right.
AAF president Tim Chapman described the organization’s addition of Heritage Foundation’s legal, data, and economics centers, a move that doubles its size, as a “reorganization of the conservative movement.”
“People are voting with their feet as to where they feel they are best suited to be,” Chapman said.
The mass defections from the Heritage Foundation are part of the continuing fallout from president Kevin Roberts’s release, in October, of a clumsy video taking aim at critics of the podcast host Tucker Carlson, who had recently conducted a friendly interview with the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
Roberts told staff on Sunday that Heritage Foundation scholar Cully Stimson would take over the think tank’s legal center after Malcolm’s departure, “with assistance from Hans von Spakovsky.” But both Stimson and von Spakovsky tendered their resignations on Monday as well, the two confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon.
The new AAF hires include John Malcolm, who led the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and will lead the new Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at AAF; Richard Stern, who directed Heritage’s economics center and will lead the Plymouth Center for Free Enterprise at AAF; and Kevin Dayaratna, who ran Heritage’s data analysis center and will build a similar program at his new institution.
In a sign of the tumult at Heritage, the think tank fired Malcolm because he planned to resign and would not disclose where he planned to work next, according to National Review. AAF said Monday that “additional staff announcements will be coming soon.”
Since Roberts released the video in late October, three Heritage Foundation board members—Princeton University professor Robert George, Abby Moffat, and Shane McCullar—have resigned. McCullar said he took issue with the fact that the think tank “hesitates to condemn antisemitism and hatred” and “gives a platform to those who spread them.” George expressed frustrated that Roberts “could not offer a full retraction” of his video statement.
Several other Heritage Foundation scholars have resigned over two months. Josh Blackman, senior editor of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution, became the latest on Sunday when he wrote that Roberts’s “actions have made [his] continued affiliation with Heritage untenable.”
“First, your comments were a huge unforced blunder, and gave aid and comfort to the rising tide of antisemitism on the right,” Blackman wrote. “Second, in the wake of your remarks, jurists, scholars, and advocates have made clear to me they can no longer associate with the Heritage Guide they contributed to. Third, and perhaps most tragically, your actions have weakened the ability of the storied Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies to promote the rule of law.”
Chris DeMuth, who led the American Enterprise Institute from 1986 to 2008 and joined Heritage in 2023, also resigned in the wake of the Roberts video, though he did not state a reason for his departure.
Among those joining is Amy Swearer, who said in an all-staff meeting—video of which was obtained by the Free Beacon—that Roberts’s handling of the Carlson situation amounted to “a master class in cowardice that ran cover for the most unhinged dregs of the far right.” Chapman said the ordeal pushed a large group of Heritage employees who had been eyeing the exit doors to cement their decisions to leave.
“We were approached by a lot of the leadership of the three different institutes three or four weeks ago, and they told us that they and their teams were already at the point where they were ready to leave the Heritage Foundation, but that Tucker Carlson stuff and Nick Fuentes stuff was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back,” the AAF president told reporters. “I think the infamous video really put everyone over the edge.”
The Roberts video pushed another Heritage body, the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, to cut ties with the think tank before the exodus to AAF. The group’s chairman, Marc Short, said his organization will work to address the issue by shoring up support for Israel among young conservatives.”Being able to reach some of the Christian evangelical audiences with our nation’s heritage and why we have a relationship with Israel, I think it’s important to [Pence] and will be important to our organization moving forward, too,” he said.
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