A tourist wears a MAGA hat while visiting the US Capitol on May 21, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesKey takeawaysThe internal Republican fight over Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson is a sign of the right’s most controversial internal debates breaching containment and going public.The diverging interests of different factions in the GOP, together with Trump’s looming lame duck status, means that this sort of divisive infighting is likely to get worse rather than better.This dynamic has been ongoing since 2016, but Israel and antisemitism are such divisive topics that they have sparked a civil war.For the past several weeks, the American conservative movement has been publicly embroiled in a bitter, existential conflict between factions seeking to win control of its future. And after speaking with a number of people on the right, including a well-placed source who describes seeing some ugly events at the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential think tanks in the conservative movement, I’ve come to think this is not a one-off struggle.Rather, it’s a harbinger of the post-Trump future to come.The Fort Sumter moment of this particular civil war came in late October, when Tucker Carlson — arguably the MAGA right’s most influential journalist — hosted Nick Fuentes, a gutter antisemite with a large online following, on his podcast for a friendly interview. The subsequent attacks on Carlson pulled in his ally Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, who vehemently defended Carlson and his decision to platform Fuentes from the “venomous coalition” on the right attacking him.Then the backlash began in earnest, with some Heritage scholars and even Republican senators speaking out publicly. Chris DeMuth, one of Heritage’s most prominent recent hires, quit in protest. In a November staff meeting, video of which leaked to the press, more than one staff member told Roberts to his face that they expected him to resign.And the conflict is escalating well beyond Heritage.In early November, two board members of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute — the oldest right-wing campus organization in America — resigned in protest over what they saw as an unacceptable drift toward Carlson-style politics. Afterward, the two men published a letter calling on conservatives to “choose to fight on the side of William F. Buckley, Jr. and give no corner to those preaching white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, and bigotry.”When you hear this rhetoric, you may think that this is a simple struggle between the honorable conservative old guard and the insurgent online right. And yet, there is an obvious problem with this framework: The remaining “old guard” on the right today is almost uniformly pro-Trump. Those Buckleyite conservatives who opposed him, warning of precisely the kind of degradation we’re seeing today, have functionally left the movement; their institutions-in-exile, like The Bulwark, now make up the right flank of American liberalism.What is happening now, then, is less about preserving the genteel Buckley-and-Reagan right (which itself was always more dependent on extremists than many conservatives are willing to admit). Rather, it is about defining what comes next — or, more precisely, what comes next after Trump. And the leaders of right-wing institutions no longer have the power to police their own and say, “We will go this far, but no farther.”The result is that the right is going through its own version of the left’s 2020, when ideas from its most radical factions broke containment and became debated in the traditional halls of power. Only, instead of police abolition and “white fragility,” the ideas in question are pushing women out of the workplace and executing “perfidious Jews.”The “rot” at HeritageGiven the anti-Roberts furor among some of Heritage’s staff, you might think that the organization is a bastion of principled conservatism reflecting on its recent choices. But one Heritage insider I spoke to painted a different, and more worrying, picture of its internal culture.This person is quite familiar with both Roberts and Heritage’s upper echelons; were I to publish their name, there is a very real chance their career would be over. But nonetheless, they felt the need to speak out, so we’re not disclosing their name in order to protect them from retaliation. The source had only kind words for Kevin Roberts as a person — “nothing but a gentleman” — and professed deep appreciation for the organization Roberts leads and its importance for the American right. “If I didn’t care about Heritage,” they said, “I would not be doing this at all.”But they were deeply alarmed at what had happened to the place, warning of extremist “counter-culture thinking [that] has seeped in” among a portion (though not all) of the staff. While the source believes leadership does not share these staffers’ politics, they believe it has created a climate of permissiveness — allowing a “rot” to set in.“My message to Kevin [has been that] I know that you don’t believe these things that have been going around the building,” the source said. “But he never had the courage to disavow it, to nip it in the bud when he could have.”To substantiate their claims, the source described witnessing several instances of Heritage personnel “being openly misogynistic and racist” in their presence. These include Heritage staff using racially derogatory language about a Black employee behind their back and referring to the 19th Amendment (which granted women the right to vote) as the cause of American society’s downfall.But perhaps their most striking recollection was a conversation with a donor who, during a discussion about liberal allegations of racism against the right, admitted to actually holding racist views — but keeping them a secret in public.Heritage, for its part, describes the claims as “defamatory” — asserting that “Heritage has zero tolerance for racism” and threatening Vox with legal action.“We’re used to Leftist lunatics spewing lies about conservatives, so it’s unsurprising that the so-called source is laundering this gossip through a far-Left outlet like Vox,” the organization said in its statement.Yet there are several independent reasons to believe that the source’s claims of “rot” are credible.First, evidence of toleration for hidden bigotry can be seen in Heritage’s treatment of E.J. Antoni, its current chief economist.Earlier this year, after the Trump administration nominated Antoni to be the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, CNN uncovered damning evidence that Antoni had maintained an anonymous Twitter account that posted “sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris [and] derogatory remarks about gay people.” The White House withdrew Antoni’s nomination after the article’s publication.Yet Antoni maintained his position at Heritage. He is currently listed on its website as “the Chief Economist, and Richard Aster Fellow, in The Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget,” and last published an article on Heritage’s website under that title on November 4 (well over a month after his withdrawal). Second, there is public evidence of Heritage hires engaging in some of the specific conduct alleged by the source. In 2023, Heritage brought on John McEntee — a key Trump ally who worked on personnel issues — to help construct Project 2025’s database of staffers for a future GOP administration. The next year, McEntee publicly “joked” about revoking women’s right to vote in a post on X.Third, other Heritage insiders have made related complaints after Roberts’s public defense of Carlson. Last Friday, professor Adam Mossoff — a visiting fellow at Heritage — released a letter of resignation addressed to Roberts in which Mossoff accuses him of tolerating rising extremism in the right’s ranks.“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,” Mossoff wrote.“It is one thing for you to make this choice as an individual, but you have made this choice for the Heritage Foundation.”The quiet part out loudFor all its notable issues, it is important not to treat Heritage in isolation. When you spend enough time talking with people on the broader right, it becomes clear that the line between the hard right and the mainstream has long been more porous than many think. It is quite common for someone to hold some provocative beliefs, especially on issues of identity and bigotry, that they do not wish to share publicly.It is unusual — but not unheard of — for such a person to openly identify their own views as “racist” or “sexist.” What’s more common is a sense that certain “truths” are unsayable in public, because anyone who offered them would risk professional or personal consequences from a mainstream in hock to leftist PC or “woke” sentiments.What exactly those “unsayable truths” are is a subject on which people across the right disagree among themselves. Take race, for example: There is a deep divide between those who blame persistent inequalities on alleged deficiencies in Black culture and those who assert that Black genetics mean they (as a group) are more likely to have low IQs.The point is not that all conservatives hold one of those two views on the causes of racial inequality, or any other similar issue. The American right is a broad and heterogeneous movement, many of whom would reject both of the above views in private and in public.Rather, the point is that these are normalized debates inside broader conservative spaces: the sorts of things that people employed at places like Heritage feel they can argue with each other about in safe spaces. For this reason, a real slice of the right’s internal dialogue — not close to all of it, but certainly a meaningful part — consists of debating the merits of ideas that outsiders might reasonably describe as bigoted. Over the course of the Trump era, these internal debates have breached containment: ideas once unsayable publicly becoming things that influential voices on the right freely and openly discuss. As recently as 2013, theorizing about the inherently lower IQ of Latino immigrants would get you fired from Heritage; today, such views are openly aired in the public debate. The president himself has talked about the “bad genes” of murderous undocumented immigrants.Many right-wingers acknowledge that the dam is breaking. In a recent essay, writer Helen Andrews — who has a history of pushing boundaries on race — dubiously argued that many of the ills of the modern American workplace can be blamed on women’s mass participation in it. Near its conclusion, Andrews describes feeling trepidation about airing her true views:In September, I gave a speech at the National Conservatism conference along the lines of the essay above. I was apprehensive about putting forward the Great Feminization thesis in such a public forum. It is still controversial, even in conservative circles, to say that there are too many women in a given field or that women in large numbers can transform institutions beyond recognition in ways that make them cease to function well. I made sure to express my argument in the most neutral way possible. To my surprise, the response was overwhelming. Within a few weeks, the video of the speech had gotten over 100,000 views on YouTube and become one of the most viewed speeches in the history of the National Conservatism conference. You can see, in Andrews’s comment, exactly the private-conversation-going-public effect that I’m describing. Views that she once aired privately in conservative circles, controversial even there, are now getting positive attention in public. Just recently, Andrews appeared on the New York Times’s Interesting Times podcast to make her case — in an episode initially titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”The uniquely divisive issue of antisemitismSo far, I’ve deliberately avoided talking about the main subject of the right’s current civil war: the role of Jewish people in American politics and society. That’s because the contours of the right’s internal discussion of that issue are qualitatively different from what they are on race or gender.Among conservatives, it’s widely recognized that the movement’s youth are, in general, more radical than their elders. My Heritage insider source, for example, warned that “some of the younger staff members [are] playing around with some really dangerous ideas I thought were going to lead to disaster, and we’re kind of living through that now.”Sometimes the young and old right are in directional agreement, even if they disagree vehemently on specifics. Younger conservatives might indulge in provocations — like calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment granting women the vote — that go too far for older conservatives, but they nonetheless express a shared dislike for feminism. The difference here is more about degree than kind.Yet on Jews, the two generations face a genuine divergence in orientation. The older guard on the right is not only staunchly pro-Israel, but also more likely to see Jews as a kind of “model minority”: proof that a minority group can overcome discrimination through grit and hard work rather than government handouts. The youth cadres, by contrast, are instinctively skeptical of US commitments to foreign states and deeply suspicious of the (mostly liberal) Jewish community’s influence on American politics.This generational divide, born out by the best survey data on antisemitic attitudes, was vividly on display at the leaked Heritage meeting. While the staff excoriating Roberts skewed old, the ones who defended him (and the pro-Tucker video) seemed to be disproportionately young. Their ranks included Evan Myers, a speechwriter for Roberts, who claimed that a proposal for the organization to host an apologetic Shabbat dinner would amount to an insidious form of discrimination against Christians like him.Any discussion about generational divides risks gross generalization. So I want to be clear: It’s not that all, or even most, young Republican operatives are Fuentes-style antisemites. But many of them — far more than outsiders would likely believe — sure sound like it.The most alarming estimate, offered repeatedly by social conservative pundit Rod Dreher, is that 30 to 40 percent of Gen Z Republicans in DC have views like Fuentes’s. There is no real statistical basis for this estimate, and Dreher is known for a certain level of hysteria: He recently wrote that a chair breaking during a visit to Rome could be a personal warning to him from Satan.But the value of the number is less as a precise estimate than it is as a reflection of the level of concern about the youth among conservatives of Dreher’s generation. They feel like large numbers of young conservatives do not share their values when it comes to Jews and Israel, and that the rise of people like Fuentes and Carlson represents an existential threat to the movement as they understand it — much more so than race-and-IQ theorizing or Andrews-style reactionary gender politics.“For Republicans, the donors and the…movement rank-and-file have been aligned on most issues. So we haven’t seen this kind of tension before, not in recent memory,” says David Austin Walsh, a historian of conservatism at the University of Virginia.In the past, such a fraught conversation might be the sort of thing that could be cordoned off into private right-only spaces. But now, under conditions where the right’s external and internal conversations are merging, the fights invariably spill out into the open. And when it’s divisive enough, as the subject of antisemitism is, a public disagreement can quickly turn into a civil war.The post-Trump factional divides behind the GOP’s public infightingThere are many reasons why the right’s internal conversation has gone public. Some of the biggest ones are technological: Social media has demolished gatekeepers of all kinds, and the rise of direct online payment models has made it so people like Carlson can make a handsome living in ways that the right’s traditional elite have no ability to shut off.But what’s important now is less why this is happening than what it means for the movement’s future. And on that front, I think one of the most revealing conversations I had came with a formerly canceled conservative columnist named Jack Hunter.In the late ’90s and early 2000s, Hunter was a kind of proto-Fuentes. He hosted a South Carolina radio show under the moniker “the Southern Avenger,” a shock-jock persona who wore a Mexican-luchador style mask with a Confederate flag on it.The Southern Avenger endorsed Lincoln’s assassination, claiming to raise a toast every year on John Wilkes Booth’s birthday. He mooted modern-day Southern secessionism and called on someone to “whip” the Black director Spike Lee. He said that “a non-white-majority America would simply cease to be America for reasons that are as numerous as they are obvious.”As he got older, Hunter moved away from this racism — turning instead to a more principled kind of libertarianism and becoming an aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). But after Paul hired Hunter as his social media director in 2012, he became a visible target for their internal GOP enemies.In 2013, a reporter from the Washington Free Beacon — a neoconservative outlet opposed to Paul and Hunter’s foreign policy views — dug up evidence of Hunter’s neo-Confederate past. Though Hunter apologized, the controversy was too much. He resigned from Paul’s office two weeks after the story broke.In the years following the controversy, Hunter has repeatedly disavowed the Southern Avenger’s beliefs and built a career as a libertarian writer advocating for a non-interventionist foreign policy. People I trust say Hunter is sincere in his conversion, and after speaking to him for nearly an hour this week, I agree. When I asked him what he thought about Fuentes, he was unequivocal: “I think he’s awful,” Hunter said, describing the Groyper king as a “dickhead” for good measure. And yet, when I asked about Roberts and Carlson’s behavior, Hunter took their side. He thinks Carlson was right to platform Fuentes, and that Roberts was right to defend Carlson.Part of this is personal: Carlson had been kind to Hunter in the past, and he’s a loyal guy. Part of this is that he sees Carlson’s actions differently, not as an attempt to mainstream Fuentes but, rather, to win his viewers.But Hunter’s biggest motivation, the one he came back to the most in our conversation, was strategic. Hunter sees the current fight not through the lens of bigotry-versus-principle, but rather as factional infighting over US-Israel policy.At the moment, the right’s position on Israel and US foreign policy more broadly is up for grabs in a way that it hasn’t been in the modern era. Hunter sees people like Roberts and Carlson as trying to move it in a saner direction — away from an unquestioning lockstep alliance and toward the kind of relationship that won’t implicate the US in what Hunter describes as a “genocide” against Palestinians. “People think the world is ending. I think it’s healthy as hell,” he tells me. “If you were going to shake America, and particularly the American right, from this Israel obsession…it was always going to look like this stateside.”His willingness to countenance some ugliness among allies appears, in part, to be a lesson of his own cancellation in 2013. That episode, he believed, stood as proof that the right’s interventionists will resort to character assassination against their internal enemies. In this kind of war, he argues, the gloves need to come off.“They have no moral scruples about kicking the shit out of anybody who’s anti-war, especially on the right,” he tells me. “We have a chance to do the same to them. I’m a Christian, I believe in forgiveness, but there’s a special exception carved out for those people.”Hunter’s comments point to the crucial subtext behind so much of the right’s newly public fights: the looming factional conflict over what the GOP will stand for after Trump leaves office.Anyone with eyes can see that Donald Trump is the figure currently holding a fractious right together. There are many different sub-factions inside the GOP, many of which disagree with each other viciously. But Trump’s ideological incoherence, together with his charismatic cult of personality, allows him to unify them under the banner of fighting the left.But now, with the imminent prospect of his departure from office looming, the question of what the post-Trump conservative movement stands for is becoming more urgent. And while there is no plausible vehicle for a return to the pre-MAGA era, there are plenty of policy issues within the right — ranging from tariffs to Israel — where there is no consensus and the future remains uncertain. That means that party actors view each individual spat not just through the lens of principle, but also factional interest going forward. So it’s not just that taboos over private debates on the right are breaking down. It’s that these newly public debates over offensive topics are becoming a critical part of the right’s post-Trump struggle for power. In such a brawl, battle lines are not just determined by moral sensibilities but also by raw power politics. Each side condemns the offensive speech of their enemies, while giving the excesses of their friends a pass.JD Vance’s decisionIt’s hard to say how any of this will shake out at present. But one person is shaping up to be a key figure: Vice President JD Vance.Vance is, by most accounts, the current favorite to win the GOP nomination in 2028. But more than that, he’s the political avatar for the right flank of Very Online Conservatism. Previously defining himself as a “postliberal” opposed to the American “regime,” he has more recently been defending Republican operatives who got caught privately texting things like “I love Hitler.”You’d think this would make him the natural candidate for the Fuentes faction. And indeed, he is close with both Roberts and Carlson, the latter of whom reportedly played an instrumental role in Vance’s selection as vice president.Yet at the same time, Fuentes regularly rails against Vance — with one of his principal gripes being that Vance’s wife, Usha, is of Indian descent. Perhaps for this reason, many on the older right believe they can win Vance to their side. Dreher, among others, has both privately and publicly pleaded with the vice president to intervene to police the right’s boundaries.There is no option to stay neutral here for Vance. Amid these pleas, saying nothing would send a clear message that he won’t rein in Carlson or Roberts’s flirtation with Fuentes. Whatever decision he makes, it appears, will be a defining one: It will help decide not only which factions are currently ascendant in Washington, but also whether the right’s top leadership will even attempt to shove some of its newly public discourse back into the conservative closet.