Conservatism

Stephanie Slade | 1.23.2026 10:35 AM

On a Thursday night in December, I got a breathless call from a Heritage Foundation senior scholar. John Malcolm and Jessica Reinsch, the director and a deputy director of the think tank's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, had just been summarily fired. 

A Heritage spokesman would later accuse Reinsch and Malcolm of conduct inconsistent with the organization's mission and standards and breach of fiduciary duty. Sources close to the situation say they were actually dismissed after their superiors learned they were about to take jobs elsewhere—and realized that they may not be the only ones. A few days later, the bulk of the think tank's economic and legal/constitutional studies teams decamped en masse for Advancing American Freedom (AAF), a nonprofit founded by former Vice President Mike Pence.

More resignations would follow. But according to my source on that December night, Heritage President Kevin Roberts and his lieutenants had a message for those who stayed behind: "​​They've been going around the building telling everyone that our whole purpose now is to support and do everything Kevin Roberts wants."

While the proximate cause of the ongoing staff exodus is a video Roberts recorded in October defending Tucker Carlson's decision to amplify the white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes, the turmoil at Heritage has been brewing for far longer. In fact, Reason has learned, Heritage leadership has been directing employees to read Roberts' 2024 book, which agitates for a "Second American Revolution," and to leave if they can't agree with the positions therein.

Scores of board members, employees, and visiting fellows have opted to depart, variously citing antisemitism, misogyny, retaliation against employees who dare to speak up, and an institutional pivot away from free market principles. In conversations with more than a dozen current and former staffers, I repeatedly heard that Roberts' belief that he alone should get to determine all of the think tank's stances has provoked resentment among his own subject matter experts.

"The issue is you have the president of an organization committing everybody in it to his position unilaterally," one senior staff member told me in November. "Because Heritage has a one-voice policy, when the president goes out and says Heritage Foundation has this position"—be it support for tariffs or support for Tucker Carlson—"he implicates everybody down the chain, and he makes everybody stand for that."

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A Heritage statement responding to last month's mass flight to AAF begins with "Our mission is unchanged." Likewise, in a January 1 letter printed in The Wall Street Journal, Heritage Vice President Roger Severino insisted that the think tank has changed tactics but not principles. 

Multiple recently departed staff members confirm that they were told by........

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