Ed Feulner, Ed Meese and the Heritage Foundation’s Exodus

The Wall Street Journal has published my new commentary, titled “Ed Feulner, Ed Meese and the Heritage Foundation’s Exodus.” This follows on my resignation from Heritage last month. Here is the introduction:

Rome didn’t fall in a day, and Heritage didn’t fall in a tweet. Kevin Roberts’s bungling defense of Tucker Carlson might have triggered the mass resignation of scholars from what was once America’s leading conservative think tank, but this exodus was years in the making. The Heritage Foundation made a strategic choice to adapt to the current political moment by refusing to exclude anyone from its boundless tent. That led Heritage to depart from its principles and embrace people who have no credible claim to conservatism, even at the expense of pushing out the brains that built the foundation. By obsessing over “what time it is,” Heritage lost sight of hard lessons learned from the past.

And from the conclusion:

But the Heritage Foundation has no power to cancel anyone. All it can do is protect its own integrity by declining to associate with unsavory figures like Mr. Fuentes. That’s what National Review editor William F. Buckley did in 1962, when he denounced John Birch Society leader Robert Welch who claimed, among other things, that Dwight Eisenhower was a communist, and whose organization disseminated antisemitic propaganda even while professing to oppose antisemitism.

I agree with Ben Shapiro’s message to Mr. Roberts: “If Heritage Foundation wishes to retain its status as a leading thought institution in the conservative movement, it must act as ideological border control.” Because it failed to do so, scholars are self-deporting. What time is it? Too late to save the Heritage Foundation.