The Friday Brief, November 7, 2025

Supersized edition!

Inside
MAGA’s Nazi Problem
Will SCOTUS Save The Economy
Soviet Sharia Trans York City
Some Photos Speak Volumes
The Secret Network
Jeff Flake On MAGA’s Bad Week
The MAGA Crackup, Week 1
ICE and Its Imitators
Thorium Is Your Friend
Fox Feeds The Stupid
What I’m Reading
Scenes From The Home Front

The Big Picture

MAGA’s Nazi Problem Comes Home to Heritage

Let’s start with the part that makes Washington’s respectable conservatives clutch their pearls: this wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t a “whoops, I didn’t realize Nick Fuentes is a Holocaust-denying, openly racist, Hitler and Stalin fanboy.” This was the logical end state of a decade of “no enemies to my right,” influencer politics, and a movement whose immune system stopped working the minute Donald Trump sat down to dinner with the guy at Mar-a-Lago, and the party mostly shrugged.

So now even the Heritage Foundation, the buttoned-up home of Project 2025, the place where Reaganites used to write white papers on marginal tax rates, is in open revolt because Kevin Roberts decided to publicly defend Tucker Carlson after Tucker gave Nick Fuentes two-plus hours of unchallenged oxygen.

Then Roberts had to crawl back in front of his own staff, apologize, and blame it on a script written by a now-resigned chief of staff. That’s not leadership; that’s a man trying to outrun a fire he started in a dry forest.

Here’s the basic outline of the fiasco: Tucker platforms Fuentes. Conservative and pro-Israel elements inside Heritage say, “Absolutely not.” Roberts, wanting to show he’s in the cool-kids club with Tucker, puts out a defense. Staff, including people on Heritage’s own antisemitism task force, are legitimately furious and start resigning.

Then there’s a two-hour town hall where, by every account, Roberts gets absolutely filleted by his own people, who point out the rather obvious fact that normalizing Fuentes is not what a serious conservative institution does. This all happened while pretending that one Donald John Trump didn’t already open the door to Fuentes-world three years ago. The denial is as awful as it is artful.