The Heritage Foundation Built Tucker Carlson. Now He's Helping Them Build America.
Following the money, the meetings, and the movement hiding in plain sight.
Something is off about Tucker Carlson’s whole rebrand and not enough people are talking about it.
One of the biggest names in right wing media, a guy who spent years cheerleading for Trump and everything that came with it, is now out here acting like he’s some kind of truth teller speaking out against the very movement he helped build. People are eating it up. They are calling him brave. They are calling him based. They are sharing his clips like he just discovered something the rest of us missed.
But here is what those people are not asking: turned against who, exactly?
Because when you actually trace Tucker Carlson’s career, his money, his connections, and his loyalties, the story looks a lot less like a man having a political awakening and a lot more like a man doing exactly what he was always going to do.
Tucker Carlson did not turn against the right. Tucker Carlson is the right. The New Right, and the institution that shaped everything he is today has been pulling strings in American politics for over fifty years.
Tucker Carlson Probably Works For the Heritage Foundation.
Yes, the very people who wrote Project 2025.
Carlson actually started his career at Heritage in 1991 as a fact-checker, proofreader, and writer for the foundation’s quarterly journal Policy Review. That was his entry into Washington.
He never forgot it. “It turned out to be the greatest job ever, mostly because of the people I worked with,” Carlson said in a 2018 interview. That same year, Heritage gave him their Salvatori Prize, awarded to those who, “advance America’s founding principles.”
In 2023, he was the keynote speaker at their 50th anniversary gala.
Fox Corp fired him days later, and Heritage President Kevin Roberts publicly defended him, saying America needed more leaders like Carlson. Roberts then offered Carlson a standing job at Heritage.
Heritage ran a donation page sponsored by Carlson's media company, featuring a quote from Carlson praising both Roberts and the foundation.
“Tucker Carlson is a fearless American who is unafraid to challenge the Washington regime, ask tough questions, and hold the ruling elite accountable. His nightly show is must-see TV for anyone who realizes we have a limited window of time to save this country,”
— Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.
And in October 2025, after Tucker Carlson sat down with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes there was enormous uproar and people wanted answers because of just how connected Carlson & Heritage are.
Some people claimed Heritage was going to distance itself from Carlson.
Roberts posted a video response on Twitter where he adamantly denied that Heritage was “distancing itself” from Tucker Carlson. He said Carlson is, “a close friend” of the Heritage and said attempts to cancel him would fail.
He later quietly apologized when Project Esther — the Heritage Foundations Christian Nationalism and Zionism merger project — began to fall apart as the people in charge of it began to resign en masse causing Heritage to lose significant monetary and social support.
I am not surprised by any of this. Carlson’s ties to Heritage go back decades. They shaped everything he is today.
The Heritage connections run deeper, and they go back years, and the roots of corruption have since grown into the White House.
JD Vance, now Vice President, wrote the foreword to Heritage President Kevin Roberts's book about taking over America, Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. Roberts was also one of the people lobbying Trump to choose Vance as VP, calling him a “close friend” of Heritage.
JD Vance spoke at the Heritage Foundation Leadership Summit on Thursday, April 20, 2023. In his speech, Vance also stated Heritage, “is going to play a major role in helping us figure out how to govern, at the White House, at the Senate, at the House and all across our great country.”
The push to make Vance VP went far beyond the Heritage Foundation or its president Kevin Roberts.
Their long-time loyalist and former employee Tucker Carlson lobbied for Vance as VP, too. So did Elon Musk. So did Donald Trump Jr. He pushed his father to pick Vance, and some reports even place him in the room when Peter Thiel first brought Vance to Trump back in 2021.
This is why mapping the connections matters. And here are some more:
Tucker Carlson’s media company— that he started only after being fired from Fox and offered a job at Heritage — was only able to be start because it was funded by 1789 Capital, a capital investment firm run by the exact same people as JD Vance’s ultra-secretive Rockbridge Network. Tucker Carlson Network (TCN) was the very first thing 1789 Capital ever funded.
MORE ON ROCKBRIDGE: This is a political nexus that doesn’t have a website, public facing information, and it exists completely in the shadows with information only coming out through leaks. Tucker Carlson was at the founding meeting of Vance’s Rockbridge Network. The Rockbridge Network didn’t just have Tucker Carlson’s support. It had him in the room on day one.
So, given the connection between Rockbridge, Carlson, & 1789 Capital, it came as no surprise when his ally Donald Trump Jr. landed a top job at 1789 Capital in 2025, becoming a partner (meaning he now helps run the firm and shares in its profits).
Three months after Don Jr joined, 1789 invested in a rare-mineral company called Vulcan Elements. Then Trump declared a fake "national security emergency," which let him skip normal government bidding rules and pour hundreds of millions in Pentagon money straight into Vulcan and Don Jr’s pockets.
His son’s firm invested in the company. His national security declaration sent the federal money. His son profits. You could say it’s Trump’s corruption, but me? I think the lights are on but nobody’s home. Just like Ronald Reagan under the 1980’s Heritage Foundation coup, Trump is a puppet.
The Rebirth of the ‘New Right’ is the Biggest Goal of Project 2025
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Paul Weyrich set out to build think tanks that could support the emergence of a new right, feeling an acute institutional lack when it came to ideological support for right-wing policies and politicians.
He co-founded the Heritage Foundation itself.
Between 1971 and 1975, New Right activists launched more than a dozen political organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, the American Conservative Union, and the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NAT-CON).
The movement today pulls together members of the right-wing Claremont Institute, National Conservatives, Post-liberals, and the Hard Right.
These are the people that helped plan January 6th and created Project 2025. They have been extremely loud about all of it. No one is listening.
In 2020, John Eastman, a senior Claremont fellow (and Trump advisor) who actually wrote the memo explaining how Pence could just throw out certified electoral votes from seven states and keep Trump in office. This very same man — John Eastman — was at Trump’s rally on January 6th, 2021 where he told them to, “fight like hell.”
The Claremont Institute is also listed as an advisory board member of Project 2025. They advised the Heritage Foundation in writing the document.
So it’s not a surprise that Project 2025 is the same thing scaled up massively. Their own words literally say the goal is to build “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”
The 922 pages of policy proposals are almost not even the point. The infrastructure is.
They’ve built a personnel database, training programs, a 180-day takeover playbook. This is about building a movement durable enough to survive any single administration and keep going regardless of who wins what election.
You do not build all of that just to rewrite the tax code. And they’ve enacted a majority of the goals in 2025/2026. They are actively working their plan to take over the American government.
What Vance said during the Heritage Foundation summit in 2023 plays directly into this. And he’s said other things that support this as well.
For example, back in 2022 when Vance was running for Senate on Peter Thiel’s money, he was interviewed on conservative influencer Jack Murphy’s podcast. It was here that he blatantly admitted the plan to burn down the right from the inside and take over America. That’s not even an exaggeration.
You can see the clip by clicking here, or the full episode by clicking here.
They are telling us to our faces what they're going to do. They want to burn it all down and take over, and people are just... not reacting. I don't know if folks are too comfortable to care or if this country was just built that way, to keep people distracted and quiet.
Either way it's dangerous, and we need to keep fighting back.
That is the plan of the New Right, that is the plan outlined in Project 2025, and that is what we are seeing happening in real time.
Once it is born and America is put into an authoritative legal chokehold, they can begin to build the country as Heritage would like it, a Christian nationalist nation that bows to the billionaires.
SO, IN SUMMARY:
We have the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has been building toward this moment since 1973.
We have the Claremont Institute, which provided the legal blueprint for January 6th and advised on Project 2025.
We have Kevin Roberts, Heritage president, who lobbied for Vance as VP, defended Tucker Carlson after he sat down with a neo-Nazi, and wrote a book about taking over America that Vance personally wrote the foreword for.
We have Tucker Carlson, whose entire post-Fox career was funded by the same people running Vance’s secret political network.
We have Peter Thiel, who bankrolled Vance’s Senate run and personally introduced him to Trump.
We have Don Jr., now profiting off a company his father funneled Pentagon money into.
And at the center of all of it is Project 2025 and the New Right: a fifty year project to capture every lever of American government and use it to build a Christian nationalist state that answers to billionaires instead of voters.
They did not hide it. They wrote it down. All 922 pages of it.
The only question left is whether enough people are paying attention. Because this is not about left versus right anymore. This is about whether the American government is going to be run for the people in it or for the movement that spent fifty years planning to take it over.
They told us exactly what they were going to do. They built their movement over fifty years. We can build ours faster, because we have something worth fighting for.
Tucker Carlson is to journalism what a Swanson frozen TV dinner is to cuisine.
carlson, vance, trump, roberts, etc., are all a clear and present danger to the American people, as they wish to turn the clock back to the 1850s, when black people were slaves and women had no rights whatsoever; and if these two groups are disenfranchised, I dread to think what will happen to the groups and individuals that conservatives consider 'Undesirable'.