Here’s a handy-dandy, easy-to-use PR tip: When you see a raging wildfire off in the distance, for the love of God, don’t race to it and toss your brand’s carcass atop its simmering, smoldering flames!
Yeah, you’d think that would be kinda-sorta obvious, but it runs headlong against another uber-popular PR tactic. This “shoehorn” technique works like this: If there’s a hot news story that the media’s gonna talk about with or without you, opt for the “with” and shoehorn yourself into the storyline.
For example, tomorrow morning, there’s gonna be tons of news stories about Election Day in New York City. You know it, I know it, and your neighbor knows it! So, if you’re a no-name NYU historian who just wrote a book about New York’s political past, the easiest, quickest way to land top-tier media coverage — and sell some freaking copies — is to offer media outlets an intriguing perspective of the Mamdani-Cuomo-Sliwa race.
I mean, you could try promoting your book directly, focusing on your thesis and key historical takeaways. (And eventually, someone, somewhere will probably cover it.) But by a ridiculously wide margin, the path of least resistance is to figure out what the media is gonna talk about anyway — and then “poach” the storylines.
Pinsker’s Law of PR #10: It’s infinitely easier to help the media do what THEY want than to convince ‘em to do what YOU want.
I don’t care if you’re a PR novice, a PR pro, or a PR grandmaster: Talking a reporter into writing “your” story is really hard; helping him write “his” story is surprisingly easy.
Sure, it’s low-hanging fruit — but you know what? Low-hanging fruit is just as delicious as the fruit on the top of the tree.
And I suspect that’s what Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, the world’s preeminent conservative think tank, was attempting to do when he threw his brand’s carcass atop the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes pyre:
There has been speculation that @Heritage is distancing itself from @TuckerCarlson over the past 24 hours.
— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) October 30, 2025
I want to put that to rest right now—here are my thoughts: pic.twitter.com/F8bcxBIqKI
For the uninitiated, Tucker Carlson recently hosted a lovefest with Nick Fuentes, arguably America’s most visible neo-Nazi, antisemite, and white supremacist. As Fuentes professed his admiration for Stalin and hatred for Judaism, Carlson nodded like a bobblehead, grinning, giggling — and agreeing — as Fuentes attacked “disloyal Jews” like Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and Dennis Prager.
Most pro-MAGA conservatives were aghast for five key reasons:
- Nazis are despicable, disgusting people. Racists suck.
- Conservatism celebrates the God-given potential of each individual. It’s the other party that judges people via ethno/religious identities!
- Being pro-Israel is a standard, run-of-the-mill, non-controversial GOP position: A higher percentage of conservatives are pro-Israel than even pro-life, and despite Carlson’s criticism, GOP support for Israel actually increased in 2025 from 66% to 71%.
- After the Democrats spent ten long years accusing Donald Trump and the MAGA movement of being “literally Hitler” — and claiming every clumsy hand motion was a secret “Nazi salute” — WHY the hell would we validate their claims by embracing real, actual racists?! Especially after Donald Trump just won record numbers of minority voters!
- Morality aside, embracing a white nationalist agenda would be electoral suicide: Only 59% of the U.S. population is white (and that number is dropping each year). In 2024, Donald Trump won 55% of the white vote. Which means, even if the 2028 candidate improved on Trump’s numbers and captured an incredible 75% of the white vote… he’d still lose by 12 points.
I’d also like to offer a sixth reason: Vice President JD Vance is the odds-on favorite to be our standard-bearer in 2028. Personally, I think he’d be a wonderful nightcap to the Trump presidency. But alas, he has an Indian/Hindu wife and (gasp) “mixed” children, which makes him unacceptable to vile racists like Fuentes:
Anyone not repulsed by this evil lowlife please do me the courtesy of unfollowing me. How can anyone approve of his heinous views, much less his low class manner of expression? I’m no prude but I’d have to be a gutter rat to tolerate this. https://t.co/YjB8BPwVI0
— David Limbaugh (@DavidLimbaugh) November 1, 2025
Some predictably nasty stuff popping up about Vance's wife. https://t.co/quJDAwX9rm
— Eugene Daniels (@EugeneDaniels2) July 16, 2024
Nick Fuentes talks about JD Vance marrying an Indian Wife because he hates his own race.
— KaizerRev (@Kaizerrev) August 6, 2025
He's gonna defend White Identity? He couldn't even do that in his own home.
"It doesn't matter what he says, it matters who he is & he's NOT one of us." pic.twitter.com/ctuzB7xOwo
Question to the audience: Isn’t it weird how Carlson had plenty of time to ask Fuentes about “disloyal” Jewish conservatives like Shapiro, Levin, and Prager — and even reposted those segments under loaded YouTube titles like “Nick Fuentes Destroys Ben Shapiro” — yet never asked Fuentes to defend his insidious bigotry towards Vance’s wife and children?
Why is that?
Arguably, no man matters more to the long-term future of the MAGA movement than Vance, and Carlson didn’t say a thing. Very odd choice for a serious, hard-hitting journalist whose modus operandi is “just asking questions.”
Gosh, if I didn’t know better, I might come to the conclusion that Carlson is an insincere propagandist who platformed Fuentes just so he could attack their common enemy: those pesky, un-American, “disloyal” Republican Jews.
But Roberts of The Heritage Foundation didn’t find it odd at all. In his assessment, the REAL troublemakers were Tucker Carlson’s critics, whom he dubbed as “globalists”:
My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always. When it serves the interests of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology. But when it doesn’t, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.
[…]
We will always defend truth, we will always defend America, and we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains — and as I have said before, always will be — a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division.
To the credit of The Heritage Foundation’s staffers, they certainly weren’t hesitant to condemn Roberts’ defense of the Carlson-Fuentes ideological putsch.
Some Heritage employees are not being shy about expressing their disagreement with Roberts’s sentiments.
“NAZIS ARE BAD,” read the caption on a meme shared by Heritage research fellow Preston Brashers.
Richard Stern, the director of Heritage’s economic policy institute and federal budget center, retweeted Brashers and added that it was “Evidently, a truth that is never more than one generation away from being forgotten.”
Brashers’ tweet was also shared by Heritage staffers Jason Bedrick, Jay Greene, and John Peluso.
Bedrick also retweeted a post from The Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry, submitting that “The Pagan Right’s call for ‘unity’ is the call of a murderer demanding his victim stop struggling.”
Perhaps the most eloquent deconstruction of Roberts’ cockamamie logic came from Michael Scott Doran:
This statement by Kevin Roberts is reprehensible for the following reasons.
— Mike (@Doranimated) October 31, 2025
First, it is dishonest. Roberts opens by declaring that “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being anti-Semitic” — as if the issue were free speech or foreign policy. It is not. Tucker… https://t.co/n5KgzTonw6
The Heritage Foundation is an extraordinarily lucrative entity. Roberts makes about $953,920 annually (thanks, donors!). In 2023, its 517 employees’ average compensation was $96,000 — with 15 employees making over $300,000.
Its annual revenue was over $100 million!
And if The Heritage Foundation lived up to Roberts’ claims of being “the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement,” it would be money well spent.
But if it’s using its resources to defend Fuentes, Carlson, and white supremacy, there’s nothing “intellectual” about it. Instead, it’s an enemy of the MAGA movement, because white supremacy will kill it.
And it’ll destroy Vance in 2028.
I’m guessing Roberts was neck-deep in damage control after connecting The Heritage Foundation’s brand to neo-Nazis and white supremacy, because the following day, he posted a follow-up X post. The tonal shift was glaring.
Gone was his earlier bravado about “globalists” and his steadfast defense of Carlson:
Yesterday I said that I abhorred views expressed by Nick Fuentes—and that the best way to fight antisemitic ideas was to challenge them head on.
— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) October 31, 2025
Fuentes replied on X by saying “I don’t know what exactly you ‘abhor’ about my views.” Allow me to elaborate—because there is plenty…
Among the excerpts:
First, the @Heritage Foundation and I denounce and stand against [Nick Fuentes’] vicious antisemitic ideology, his Holocaust denial, and his relentless conspiracy theories that echo the darkest chapters of history. We are disgusted by his musings about rape, women, child marriage, and abusing his potential wife.
[…]
Racism and antisemitism are not relics of the past. They have blossomed on the Left on university campuses and grown on the Right through figures like Fuentes.
Nick Fuentes's antisemitism is not complicated, ironic, or misunderstood. It is explicit, dangerous, and demands our unified opposition as conservatives. Fuentes knows exactly what he is doing. He is fomenting Jew hatred, and his incitements are not only immoral and un-Christian, they risk violence.
Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place.
Whereas other commentators (including my PJ Media colleague and friend, Robert Spencer) have already noted the intellectual incongruity of Roberts challenging “poisonous ideas at every turn” while refusing to condemn the YouTube host who’s platforming, mainstreaming, and popularizing these ideas, but I don’t wanna rake him over the coals.
At least, not yet: Roberts realized he had stepped in feces and immediately tried to correct his mistake. So let’s give him credit for that.
And in many ways, I’m sympathetic to Roberts’ burden, because it’s a daunting PR task: How do we reach the millions of Americans who are intrigued by Fuentes and Carlson?
Isn’t it better to have dialogue with these people, as opposed to just writing ‘em off? After all, in a close election, those racist Groypers could be the difference between winning and losing.
There are no easy answers.
Perhaps another conservative think tank could offer guidance: The Leadership Institute’s Laws of Public Policy, rule #34: “You cannot make friends of your enemies by making enemies of your friends.”
The Heritage Foundation stands at the crossroads. What it does next is entirely up to it: It can return to its conservative roots and champion the cause of American nationalism, small government, economic liberty, and rugged individualism — or it can carry water for white supremacists, bigots, and their enablers.
For its sake and ours, I hope it chooses wisely.
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