Why I Am Resigning from the Heritage Foundation (Guest-Post by Adam Mossoff)

[DB: This is a guest post from my Scalia Law colleague Professor Adam Mossoff, reprinting his letter to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts resigning his position as a visiting fellow at the Foundation. As Adam says, this is a time for choosing on the political right: you either abandon conservatism and stand with Tucker Carlson and nihilism, collectivism, Nazism, and Jew hatred, or you stick up for (conserve, if you will) the American traditions of individual rights, religious and ethnic pluralism, and the rule of law.]

Dear Dr. Roberts,

It is with a heavy heart that I am resigning my Visiting Fellow position in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation. My resignation is effective immediately.

Please know that I did not come to this decision lightly, as it has been truly an honor to work for John Malcolm in the Meese Center for the past six years. John represents the best of Heritage, and he has inspired me. I have been tremendously proud of my legal memoranda on intellectual property law and innovation policy, and of the Intellectual Property Working Group that has been my charge. I am even more proud of my chapter on the Copyright and Patent Clause in the new edition of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution, an impressive monograph representing the fruits of a multi-year productive effort by John and his co-editor, Josh Blackmun.

Unfortunately, your October 30 video, and your subsequent interviews, videos, and commentary, have made it clear to me that Heritage is no longer the storied think tank that I was proud to join in 2019.

I waited two weeks to send my resignation notice because I did not wish to act in haste, and I wanted my decision to be the result of a considered judgment, not a reaction based on the passions of the moment. Thus, I have been following closely the follow-on commentary and discussions by you and others, both externally and internally. From these observations, I have concluded that your October 30 video, as confirmed by your subsequent comments, interviews, and meetings, was not a mere mistake; rather, it reflects a fundamental ethical lapse and failure of moral leadership that has irrevocably damaged the well-deserved reputation of Heritage as “the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement” (your words in your October 30 video).

Your October 30 video was indefensible. So were your purported explanations and backtracking in subsequent interviews and social media posts. The October 30 video was worse than a poor choice of words or a mere mistake; it was a profound moral inversion to use the language of ancient antisemitic blood libels, such as “globalist class” and “venomous coalition.” It was especially loathsome to use this same language to defend Tucker Carlson.

Tucker is quickly following Candace Owens down the very dark path of Jewish conspiracy theories and defenses of Nazis. (After Candace’s “explanation” a couple years ago of Kristallnacht as a burning of communist books and not an attack on Jews, this was the final straw for me and my judgment has been repeatedly confirmed by her in the ensuing years.) Similar to Candace’s “just asking questions” strategy, Tucker is increasingly hosting friendly, head-nodding-in-agreement interviews with people who explicitly praise Nazis and are unrepentant in their antisemitic slurs of Jews and Israel, such as his interviews of Darryl Cooper and Agapia Stephanopoulos. Tucker’s friendly, smiling interview with Nick Fuentes, an avowed Nazi, was simply the nadir of Tucker’s increasing number of friendly interviews with nihilists and antisemites.

In all of these interviews, Tucker has blatantly refused to challenge any of their calumnies, propaganda, and falsehoods, despite your subsequent claim in a follow-on X statement on October 31 that we should “challenge them head on” in open debate. This bears emphasizing: Tucker has never challenged one of these evil guests on his show. For example, in a two-hour interview with Fuentes, Tucker never asked Fuentes a single question about his Nazi views or even his Nazi slur of Vice President JD Vance as a “race traitor” given Vice President Vance’s marriage to Usha and their “brown” children (to quote Fuentes). This is neither debate nor critical engagement with ideas with which we profoundly disagree. This is toleration of or agreement with evil ideologies and ideas. This is made even more clear by Tucker’s contrary treatment of anyone he deems to be a “zionist.” Unlike his interviews of Fuentes, Cooper, Stephanopoulos, and many others, Tucker engages in skeptical interviews with pointed, hard-hitting questions of Senator Ted Cruz and others about their “zionist” or “pro-Israel” positions.

All of this makes it absolutely clear that Tucker gives credence to his millions of viewers that evil ideologies — collectivism, nihilism, and antisemitism — are consistent with conservativism and the America First movement. Tucker’s friendly and laughing conversation with Fuentes signals to his millions of young viewers that it is permissible to give a pass to such evil. Even in the best light possible, Tucker makes clear we at least should tolerate such evil, because, as you said in your October 30 video, we should not be “attacking our friends on the right.”

This is a massive moral inversion. This is the opposite of what the Heritage Foundation has consistently stood for over many decades in American political discourse: the ideals of the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, our inalienable natural rights, limited government, the rule of law — and the free markets and flourishing society that results from these ethical and political commitments. This is the eminent think tank I first joined.

Although you told us in the townhall last Thursday that you made a mistake in your October 30 video, you have not retracted or withdrawn the video. It remains on your X account with more than 24 million views to date. Thus, it remains unclear precisely and specifically what you regard as your moral mistake and failure in leadership. This is compounded by the mixed messages you have been giving to us and to the world about the lesson you have learned. You have continually reiterated, for example, your claims in your October 30 video that we should not “cancel” our “friends,” and that Tucker “always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” As far as I’m aware, you have not disavowed this claim. But you falsely conflate here the struggle sessions and cancelation campaigns that the woke left inflict on their apostates and heretics with the proper and steadfast moral condemnation of nihilism, collectivism, Nazism, and Jew hatred.

Aristotle observed in his seminal treatise on ethics that, in a choice between truth and friendship, it is to truth that we must always give our primary allegiance. Even with your mixed messages, one thing is clear: By your words and actions, Heritage is wedded to Tucker and everything he has come to represent on the periphery of the Groyper movement created by Fuentes. Instead of the truth, you have chosen a false friend of the American ideals that Heritage has represented.

In the abstract, this profound failing of truth and justice would give me serious pause and I would still ultimately resign, but it’s even more pressing today to call out this moral failing and to take a stand. It is still shocking to me that the worst single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the invasion and attack of Israel on October 7, 2023, has unleashed a tsunami of violent antisemitism that has swept Europe and the U.S. In the past two years, woke Brownshirts have been screaming genocidal slogans in the streets and on university campuses (including my own university). They have been doing much worse than merely screaming slogans like “Free Palestine!” and “From the River to the Sea!”; they’ve acted in harassing and assaulting American Jews, firebombing and vandalizing homes and business, and murdering American Jews in DC, Colorado, and California. This has never before happened in the U.S.

This nihilism and collectivist bigotry has driven woke leftists into frenzies unseen in the West since the original Nazi Brownshirts terrorized Jews in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, and it has now reared its ugly head on the American political right. Now is the time to differentiate the right from the left, not to join the left in embracing this toxic fusion of collectivism and antisemitism. Since October 7, I have been stating on X: antisemitism is just the tip of the spear of a collectivist and nihilist ideology that seeks the destruction of Western Civilization. Your videos and statements have made it clear that we embrace as “friends” those who embrace and proselytize these evil ideas under the guise of a big tent on the right in which self-proclaimed conservatives can have friendly and cheery conversations with modern Nazis.

To employ President Ronald Reagan’s iconic phrase from his justly famous 1964 speech, today is “a time of choosing.” Notably, “a time of choosing” is the same adage used by historians and scholars to describe the 1930s when Germany raced headlong from social exclusion of Jews to political and legal discrimination against Jews, and then in the 1940s to the first industrial genocide in human history. The rise to prominence of the same nihilism and antisemitism on both the American political left and right has made it clear that today is again a time of choosing.

You have made clear your choice: endorsement and toleration of false friends of freedom, rights, liberty, and the American ideals of the Founding Fathers, despite their Orwellian claims to the contrary that they are advocates for America First or represent conservativism. Worse than false friends, they have proven to be advocates for the evil ideologies that seek to destroy these achievements of Western Civilization, as represented by the United States of America — what President Reagan beautifully referred to as the “shining city on a hill.”

It is one thing for you to make this choice as an individual, but you have made this choice for the Heritage Foundation. I cannot stand by in silence. It is a time of choosing. I choose to resign.

Sincerely,

Adam Mossoff