The Movement: Mike Pence sounds off on Tucker Carlson, Heritage, Steve Bannon, RFK

Former Vice President Mike Pence sees an opening for the right to “rediscover” what it means to be a conservative — saying Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are part of movements “contrary” to conservatism, and offering critiques of the Heritage Foundation.

Pence on Monday announced a book coming next year called “What Conservatives Believe: Rediscovering the Conservative Conscience.” A release bills the book as the 21st-Century version of Barry Goldwater’s foundational “Conscience of a Conservative.”

In a phone interview on Monday, Pence told me his concern with the direction of the Republican party has only grown in the two years since he ended his 2024 presidential primary campaign. Republicans, he said, are “embracing more isolationist views, particularly with regard to Russia’s unprovoked and brutal invasion in Ukraine.”

“There are voices that we’ve seen just in recent days, questioning, in no uncertain terms, American’s support for Israel,” Pence said. “We’ve seen our party walking away from a commitment to free market economics, embracing broad based tariffs — which are taxes — against friend and foe alike. We’ve seen an administration embracing the state ownership of business. We’ve seen members of Congress promoting price controls, and then going all the way back to the Republican platform in 2024 — the marginalizing of the right to life, the appointment of a pro-abortion secretary of [Health and Human Services] and an effort in the party to simply relegate the question of abortion to be a state-only issue.”

The book announcement comes as an ideological civil war rages about which principles and figures are welcome in the conservative movement in the wake of Carlson last week interviewing antisemitic white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes. IYMI, I wrote about that civil war on the right here — and much more on that below.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended Carlson in a stand against “cancel culture,” sparking massive backlash from others on the right. Later, signs at a Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas said “TUCKER IS NOT MAGA.”

Asked about the recent controversy, Pence said a chapter in his book is titled “The Case for Israel.”

“I have long-held the belief that literally, since the American founding, the support for Israel and return of the Jewish people to their historic homeland came straight out of the heart of the American people,” Pence said. “There’s no room in the conservative movement for opposing American support for Israel, and there’s absolutely no room in the conservative movement for antisemitism.”

I asked if Pence considers Carlson a part of the conservative movement.

“He’s part of an isolationist right that, frankly, has history in the Republican Party,” Pence said. “But I particularly have been frustrated to see his consistent opposition to U.S. support for Israel. When Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon came out against the use of military force to take down the Iranian nuclear program, I actually think they lost some footing with the president and with the movement, because President Trump took the bold and courageous step of using military forces to strike the Iranian nuclear capability.”

Carlson and Bannon, Pence said, are “part of an isolationist movement on the right that is contrary to the long tradition of the conservative movement in this country.”

Pence said he has a long history with the Heritage Foundation, relying on them when he was a talk show host and noting that the organization’s late co-founder and former president Ed Feulner became a member of the board for the think tank Pence founded, Advancing American Freedom. But he said he has “been disappointed and surprised on a number of occasions” by Heritage Foundation positions, like its opposition to an aid package to Ukraine, and to see it “embrace the broad-based tariffs that the president imposed on friend and foe alike.”

“When Heritage came out in favor of the appointment of a pro-abortion Secretary of HHS” — referring to Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — “it just struck me that the conservative movement would do well with a reminder of what we believe.”

Pence made criticisms of Kennedy’s leadership on the issue of abortion, though did not write off MAHA altogether.

“I very much identify with the need for us to be thinking very carefully about how we can improve the health of the people of this country,” Pence said. “But for me, at the end of the day, everything — everything — begins with the inalienable right to life, and the fact that Secretary Kennedy has not only not taken action on the widespread availability of the abortion pill that was made possible during both the Obama and Biden administration, but but also that he recently approved the generic version of the abortion pill, suggests to me that we can do better.”

Pence said there is an attempt in the Republican Party “to marginalize the right to life, to move to other issues,” arguing that conservatives “should never rest or relent until we’ve restored the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state in the union.”

I consistently hear worries from free-market, Reagan- and Goldwater-loving traditional conservatives about how edgy, populist, institution-shattering ideologies have gained enthusiasm in the last few years. I asked Pence, how can those traditional conservatives respond?

“As we go into this new century, give the voters a choice, not an echo,” Pence said. “Increasingly, populism and left-wing progressivism ultimately are born of the same kind of political principle. The goal is to tear down and not to build up institutions. The conservative ultimately believes in conserving, protecting, preserving and improving what’s best of our nation’s history.”

But adhering to old conservative principles, to Pence, does not mean never changing policy. When I asked about whether Pence had changed his mind on an issue during his political career, he said his position on China changed “dramatically” when he became vice president.

“I had, like most Republicans, believed that the more we exchanged economic trade and diplomatic commerce with China, that you would see China move forward, embrace greater freedoms and become less authoritarian. What I think Donald Trump understood was that actually, the opposite had happened,” Pence said. “My view today is free trade with free nations, which is different than most of my career.”

A lot of times when political figures write political manifestos like this, they are preparing for a future run for office.

Asked if he would run for president again in 2028, Pence didn’t rule it out.

“I have written this book to speak to conservatives today and conservatives tomorrow. And I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future,” Pence said. “A calling in my life right now is just simply to be a voice for the principles that drew me to this party and have always made America strong and prosperous and free. And we’ll let the future take care of itself.”

Welcome to The Movement, a weekly newsletter looking at the influences and debates on the right in Washington. I’m Emily Brooks, House leadership reporter at The Hill.

Tell me what’s on your radar: ebrooks@thehill.com.

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EARTHQUAKE AT HERITAGE AND BEYOND

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ initial defense of Carlson’s interview with Fuentes turned up the heat on the civil war on the right — and the slings and arrows keep flying.

The main casualty is Ryan Neuhaus, who was chief of staff to Roberts. A Heritage spokesman confirmed that he resigned, I scooped Monday. That comes after Roberts had sent an email to Heritage staff on Friday, scooped by National Review’s Audrey Fahlberg, announcing that Neuhaus would be reassigned to a senior policy adviser role within Heritage.

Neuhaus had reposted defenses of Roberts and hostile criticism of Heritage staff members seemingly counter-signaling Roberts, including one particularly controversial statement that Heritage employees who were “virtual signaling” in wake of the statement should “resign if so outraged,” and that it “would be addition by subtraction for the institution.”

Several Heritage staffers appeared to subtweet Roberts on X last week, as Mediaite reported. Tax policy research fellow Preston Brashers posted a meme that said “Nazis are bad.” Richard Stern, the director of the think tank’s economic policy institute and federal budget center, added: “Evidently, a truth that is never more than one generation away from being forgotten.” Daniel Fleish, senior policy analyst, said he stood by his colleagues for stating that “obvious fact.” Senior legal fellow Amy Swearer, senior research fellow Eugene Kontorovich, and fundraiser Jonathan Moy posted similar sentiments.

But there’s not just an uproar outraged about the statement. There’s an uproar from those aggressively defending Roberts — and now moving against those Heritage staffers who spoke up.

NEWS: Tom Jones, the head of the American Accountability Foundation that previously made headlines for its “DEI Watchlist,” sent an email to Capitol Hill offices on Monday, which I obtained, warning them to not hire any of the “deceitful and dishonorable staff who put their personal agendas ahead of that of the name on the door.” Here’s the full email.

“Setting aside the facially absurd attack on Kevin Roberts, let’s assume Messrs. Brashers, Flesch, Kontorovich, Moy, Stern and Ms. Swearer were sincere in their beliefs. If they were sincere, then it is hard to understand how they continue to work for someone who holds what are unquestionably noxious beliefs. The only honorable thing to do would have been to quit,” Jones wrote in the email.

He added: “If you hire them, when the boss decides to adopt a policy prescription other than the one they support, they’ll leak to the press, they’ll undermine the boss with his colleagues, and they’ll denigrate the boss’ thinking to other staff on the team. These people are toxic, because they simply do not understand that in the world we work, it isn’t about us. It’s about America and making our country better and doing that through serving Members, agencies, and groups that are organized to do that.”

In case you somehow missed the background:

Roberts — who I interviewed for the launch of this newsletter back in May — has been a major change agent at the leading conservative think tank, shepherding it in a more MAGA direction. Roberts has courted the populists and national conservatives on the “New Right,” and as Pence noted above, the organization has seen major shifts on foreign policy and economics — much to the alarm of the traditional Reagan conservative wing. Supporters argue Roberts has shaken the once-sleepy think tank to be more relevant.

Those tensions boiled over after Roberts posted a video statement Thursday asserting that a “venomous coalition attacking” Carlson over the interview with Fuentes was “sowing division,” and that the “attempt to cancel him will fail” — and that Fuentes also should not be canceled, but debated. Suddenly, many of those ideological debates and power struggles that were somewhat behind-the-scenes are now playing out in public.

Following significant backlash, including from Heritage’s own staff, Roberts elaborated Friday on what he abhors about Fuentes’s views in another statement: “He is fomenting Jew hatred, and his incitements are not only immoral and un-Christian, they risk violence.”

Roberts joined radio host Dana Loesch and Ben Domenich’s The Transom newsletter on Friday to explain further. Roberts said he was getting pressure for Heritage to distance itself from Carlson. No, he would not host Fuentes at Heritage, he said. Refusing to engage with the Fuentes audience, he argued, would backfire and create more disaffected young men. He said he made the video in the first place because Heritage was getting pressure to distance itself from Carlson.

“Not as many people as I thought,” Roberts told RealClearPolitics’s Phil Wegmann in a Saturday interview, “were ready for a little bit of nuance.”

Roberts elaborated even more in a speech at Hillsdale on Monday night, saying he made a “mistake” with “the best of intensions.”

There were rumors that Heritage’s board of trustees — some of whom made public statements about antisemitism and opposing the “no enemies to the right” ethos — called an emergency meeting over the weekend, with speculation about whether Roberts can stay in his position. Heritage Vice President of Strategic Communications Mary Vought on Sunday said those rumors were “completely baseless.”

There is a Heritage all-staff meeting on Wednesday.

All of the staff drama — pleasing some, infuriating others — is really about which ideas and figures are welcome on the right.

The debate still isn’t settled: Is Tucker Carlson welcome in the conservative movement?

As mentioned, signs at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas said “TUCKER IS NOT MAGA.” And we know where Roberts stands.

ON MY CALENDAR

Friday, Nov. 7: Breitbart News hosts a discussion with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Matt Boyle. RSVP: duffyrsvp@breitbart.com
Monday, Nov. 10: Breitbart News hosts a discussion with EPA Administration Lee Zeldin and Matt Boyle. RSVP: zeldinrsvp@breitbart.com
Friday, Nov. 21: The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity hosts its Freedom & Progress 2025 conference in downtown Washington, D.C.

THREE MORE THINGS

Book out today — “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” by Laura K. Field, an associate with the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution. The New York Times’s books preview: “In the ever-growing field of books aiming to explain the rise of the MAGA movement, Furious Minds, by a political theorist with longstanding experience in conservative academia, stands out for its emphasis on ideas. Field shows how the New Right, drawing on a loose network of academics and influencers, has coalesced around a vision of America that is socially reactionary, economically isolationist and deeply skeptical of pluralism as an inherent social good.”
Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire spent the entirety of his podcast on Monday tearing into Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. “No to the groypers. No to cowards like Tucker Carlson, who normalize their trash,” he posted.
President Trump said “it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required” to New York City if Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani wins the mayoral election today, and had some fashion advice for Republican mayoral nominee Curtis Sliwa while advocating for former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo for mayor instead. “A vote for Curtis Sliwa (who looks much better without the beret!) is a vote for Mamdani,” Trump posted on Truth Social.