Roger Kimball warns that the backlash against Heritage and Kevin Roberts is a proxy war aimed at stopping Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda, not a genuine debate about Tucker Carlson or antisemitism.

This clip aired on WarRoom’s morning show on November 14, 2025. Transcript begins below (lightly edited for clarity; may contain minor errors).

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Kimball, you are one of the smartest guys I think around and certainly in the MAGA movement one of our top public intellectuals. The pieces you have, we have you on all the time, but you wrote something that I think gets to the moment where we are. It was about Heritage. I would like you to take the floor and walk me through the argument of one Roger Kimball, sir.

ROGER KIMBALL (GUEST): A few weeks ago Kevin Roberts caused a storm when a very short video that he taped was released. He was supporting Tucker Carlson, saying Heritage is and will always be a friend of Tucker Carlson. And this caused great unhappiness. Personally, I have written this. I think that video was ill judged. Whoever wrote it, I think I know who wrote it, but I think he should have, as I put it, run a kind of rhetorical Geiger counter over that script of that brief video because it offended a lot of people. And I do not think Kevin, who is a friend of mine, has done as well as he might have done in cleaning it up.

That said, the attack on him has been really unhinged. The Wall Street Journal, I have lost count of how many pieces against Kevin they have written. Initially I thought it was fine. Everybody is susceptible to criticism. Nobody is perfect. And another friend of mine, Dominic Greene, wrote a robust, critical piece about Kevin. Although I did not agree with every single thing he had to say, I thought that was okay. But then it is just piece after piece after piece. And it occurred to me that actually the issue was not Kevin Roberts or Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes, somebody who I only recently became aware of. The issue is Donald Trump’s agenda. The Make America Great Again agenda.

Heritage under Kevin Roberts has been pretty closely aligned with that on trade, on foreign policy, on social issues, pretty much across the board. And I think what we are watching now is a kind of proxy war where Kevin Roberts and Tucker and others are just kind of cutouts for the unhappy denizens of what people call Conservative Inc. They are hoping to stage a comeback by using the rhetorical moral cover of antisemitism to further their own anti-MAGA agenda.

The idea that Kevin Roberts is somehow antisemitic, really? Immediately after October 7th, after the Hamas massacre in Israel, he established a task force to battle antisemitism. Victoria Coates, a scholar at Heritage, has been leading some of those efforts. It is very robust. And I would say that it is a gigantic misunderstanding. But, it is not a misunderstanding. This is the next front of the battle between the deep state and the Donald Trump agenda, the Make America Great Again agenda.

Someone during Trump’s first term talked about the need to deconstruct the administrative state. I believe it was one S. Bannon. And if that indeed is the task before us… but when I read things like I read just the other day that Mike Pence is considering a 2028 run. That is not going to happen, I believe. But that just tells you what we are up against.

The real battle here is not between Kevin Roberts and his support for Tucker. The real battle is between the Make America Great Again agenda. I like to spell out the acronym because often these days people use the acronym as a term of abuse. But if you say the whole thing, Make America Great Again, then it sounds a little different, does it not? So that is my take on this.

STEVE BANNON (HOST): I am not sure. Let us put a pin in the deep state part of it because I think it is just the neoliberal neocon mentality of the Murdochs and the Wall Street Journal. Those pieces in the Wall Street Journal, you are right, Paul Gigot every other day has some piece. That is not for the masses. Those are for the donors. They are telling the donors that you donors have to move on Kevin.

STEVE BANNON (HOST): One of the things that shows is that as much as the MAGA movement, we have brought new voters in. We have turned this into a working class party, middle class party, from the country club establishment it was. But when you really look on Capitol Hill, there are just a couple. They fear Trump and they will kowtow to Trump the way Lindsey Graham will kowtow to Trump to get the endorsement. But he is the farthest thing from MAGA. He is a neoliberal neocon to the ultimate extent.

So when you really look at the people up here who are elected, you have very few. The RNC is not MAGA at all. I mean it is a little more when Lara Trump is on top of things, but Whatley is not MAGA. And one of the reasons he is running so poorly in North Carolina, if you talk to the MAGA folks down there, they are just not enthusiastic about it.

And you do have these new institutions. Kevin Roberts is trying to change Heritage. He tried to do it in 2025 in the wilderness years. The reason they hate him is because of that. But Conservative Inc and the Republican donor establishment think we are going to revert back to neoliberal neocon.

The Daily Telegraph and Robert Crowley, one of the best reporters in DC. He is a Brit who used to be with the Daily Mail, now with the Daily Telegraph. He had a piece that Ted Cruz kicked off his campaign a couple of weeks ago because he goes to RJC. He is going to get all the big Jewish donors behind him. He is going to run as the Israel First candidate. Mike Pence is kicking tires. The Republican establishment.

You know little Marco. We have this situation in Venezuela that everybody is trying to figure out exactly what we are doing. But the reality is they hate Trump. They hate MAGA. They hate populism. They hate economic nationalism. They hate every aspect of it. They will give us a few things on the cultural side and pat you on the head. And they love the fact that you bring out working class voters they can never get to. But they would rather, as they have done for years, be in the minority where they are feeding off the carcass in the managed decline of the country than fight.

These people do not want to fight. They do not want to be turfed out of their private clubs. They do not want to be not accepted into the literary societies they belong to. They do not want their kids kicked out of the Whiffenpoofs at Yale. It is all of it, sir.

ROGER KIMBALL (GUEST): Yeah. Well, I think a little more highly of Ted Cruz than you do, but leave that to one side. And Marco, Marco has surprised me. I think he has been a good spokesman for Donald Trump.

STEVE BANNON (HOST): All I am saying about Ted Cruz, whether you think he’s great, because those are the constitutional conservative guys, but Ted Cruz is not MAGA. Ted Cruz never lifted a finger on the invasion of the southern border. All my point is he is a classic Republican. But he has already started his 28 campaign because they know that once Trump is gone, the Roger Kimballs and the Steve Bannons, this is all… that is all floats them and jets them.

ROGER KIMBALL (GUEST): Yeah. I was talking to someone else recently. I do not think that is going to happen myself, Ted Cruz in 28. I think it is going to be JD Vance or possibly Marco.

I myself would prefer JD,, but we will see. It is a lot. And you know Harold Wilson said a week is a long time in politics, and three years is an eternity. So a lot can change between now and then.

STEVE BANNON (HOST): First off, we have to get by 26, which Raheem is going to get on to. I will tell anybody in that administration, JD., Marco. If you are not blowing the tech bros right now, they are owned by the tech bros. They are owned by the Bro-ligarchs, and they are owned by David Sack and this crowd.

The big fight coming for MAGA is not really Conservative Inc because they are not as powerful as they were. But the tech bros are. They believe they are dominant. They believe they are taking over the MAHA and MAGA movement. They have got guys, this guy Isaacman, whoever at the White House, and I know who you are, that got Isaacman back in as head of NASA who is just going to give contracts to Elon.

That whole game of the tech bros is going to come crashing down in an end. It is going to be brutal, but it has got to be done. We cannot allow these guys who are all progressive Democrats hiding. They are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. So if you are in the White House not standing up to it, then you are part of the problem, and that is all going to get exposed.

Do you agree that the Conservative Inc that you talk about, it is a long way from dead. They just think we are a passing summer storm.

ROGER KIMBALL (GUEST): That is right. Well, they are hoping to wait Trump out. But three and a half years, or a little less than that now, is a long time. And I think everyone, even I, was astonished at the alacrity with which Trump has moved. He has been a positive whirlwind of activity. He has gotten a lot done. There is a lot more to do. People are very impatient. Why has this person not been indicted? Why has this promise not been fulfilled? But Trump has actually fulfilled a lot of promises. And people say if you get 70 percent of what you want, you should be happy. I think we are batting a little higher than that.

And one of the things I worry about, frankly, is internecine squabbling. I think that for us to continue to win, we need, as far as possible, to be able to stick together. We are not going to agree on every issue, but we need each other and those people who are on our side. And I think we want to have a pretty big tent as far as we can. And I am cautiously optimistic.

It was not just Heritage. A very similar event happened at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute a couple of days ago when their chairman of the board, and I think president or some other board member, suddenly resigned, saying this is terrible. They let in all of these post-liberal people who are people like Steve Bannon. They are listening to Curtis Yarvin. That is terrible. We have to kick the current president out and start over again.

I wonder whether that was an accident that it happened just days after the Heritage blowup, or was it somehow coordinated? I do not know. Was it the invisible hand of the zeitgeist moving so that the people on the board at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute somehow felt moved to make these objections? I do not know the answer to that, but I think it is kind of a bad sign.