Overview
Kevin Roberts has been the president of the Heritage Foundation since 2021. Previously, he was the chief executive officer of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) and the second president of Wyoming Catholic College. He also founded a classical Catholic school in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Roberts is the self-described “mastermind” of Project 2025, a policy guidebook for radically transforming the U.S. government and civil society.
Roberts’s tenure at Heritage has been marred by controversies of his own making. The director of Project 2025 resigned from Heritage and criticized Roberts for employing “violent rhetoric.” A separate Project 2025 contributor said that Roberts “aligned the Heritage Foundation with the rising tide of antisemitism on the right” after he failed to distance the organization from Tucker Carlson. Roberts’s stances have led to significant defections across the foundation’s board, trustees and staff.
Roberts has claimed that America is undergoing a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be” and argued that a “controlled burn” is necessary to destroy “many” of America’s institutions, including parts of civil society. Roberts has taken aim at public K-12 schooling as well as leading universities. He has argued that “[e]very Ivy League college” needs to be “burned.”
While seeking to demolish the existing education system, Roberts and Heritage have promoted a network of schools founded by controversial Christian nationalist Douglas Wilson. Roberts has claimed that Wilson’s institutions are “[p]reserving our way of life.” As explained below, Wilson has made Christian nationalist arguments that distort America’s founding and blur the separation between church and state.
As is explained below, Roberts has echoed the white nationalist “great replacement theory” and also falsely claimed that the January 6 defendants were victims of a “partisan witch hunt.”
Roberts: A “Second American Revolution” is Underway
On July 2, 2024, Roberts made a controversial appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. “We are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be,” Roberts said to Dave Brat, a former Republican congressman who was guest-hosting in Bannon’s absence. The Heritage Foundation repeated Roberts’s remark in a post on X (formerly Twitter) the following day.
Paul Dans, who served as the director of Project 2025, criticized Roberts for employing “violent rhetoric.” Dans reportedly resigned from the project the same month (July 2024) as Roberts’s interview. “If we’re going to ask the left to tone it down, we have to do our part as well,” Dans later told the Washington Post. “There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts.” (In response, a Heritage spokesman told the Post: “Any attempt to mischaracterize Dr. Roberts’s comments as supportive of violence is grotesque and completely contrary to the observation he was making.”)
In addition to criticizing Roberts’s rhetoric, Dans called on J.D. Vance, then a senator from Ohio and Donald Trump’s running mate, to retract his foreword to Roberts’s book prior to its publication. According to the Post, the publication of Roberts’s book was delayed and its contents “revised to soften some of the most inflammatory phrases” after an assassination attempt on Trump in July 2024. The subtitle was changed from “Burning Down Washington” to “Taking Back Washington.” And the original cover art, which featured an image of a match, was revised. Despite Dans’s call, however, Vance’s foreword was included in the published work.
Roberts also retained his claim that America was at the precipice of a second American Revolution. In the published version of his book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” Roberts writes:
“As more and more Americans have rallied against these corrupt elites in recent years, the groundswell of support has had an unmistakable historical parallel to the decades before 1776. I believe we are living at the dawn of the Second American Revolution…In some ways, our situation is even more dire than during the First American Revolution.”
According to Roberts, this supposed revolution targets not only government power but also civil society:
“Like the First American Revolution, the second began when a corrupt ruling class sought to overthrow the existing institutions of American life. But whereas the British passed laws and imposed colonial officials, our elites have been more subtle. Over the span of decades, they have substituted a growing network of institutions (public and private) that allow them to exert control without accountability, leaching away power from our constitutional order and installing it in the Deep State, in woke corporations, massive foundations, and more.”
Roberts: A “Controlled Burn” of America’s Institutions is Necessary
While the subtitle and cover art of Roberts’s book were edited to remove any mention of burning down Washington, D.C., the text of his work, as published, contains dozens of references to his desire to “burn” down mainstream American institutions. Just as controlled fire is used as “an essential task of forest management,” Roberts argues, so, too, is it necessary to burn down institutions, which he claims have been captured by a “Uniparty” (a common trope used to smear the political establishment).
“There’s plenty of fuel. Like deadwood in a forest, many of America’s institutions have been completely hollowed out—fully captured by the Uniparty,” Roberts writes. “Decadent and rootless, these institutions serve only as shelter for our corrupt elite…they block out the light and suck up the nutrients necessary for new American institutions to grow,” he adds.
Roberts does not advocate for conservative-minded institutional reform, but instead destruction. “For America to flourish again,” he writes, America’s institutions “don’t need to be reformed; they need to be burned.” Roberts then adds a long list of institutions that he believes should be “burned”:
“A nice start would include: Every Ivy League college, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, 80 percent of ‘Catholic’ higher education, BlackRock, the Loudoun County Public School System, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party, and the National Endowment for Democracy.”
The Chinese Communist Party is not an American institution. Nevertheless, the other institutions on Roberts’s list demonstrate that he is not merely interested in altering the way government works, but instead has public and private targets in mind for his “revolution.”
Roberts emphasizes throughout this book that destruction is necessary. He writes that it is “the most crucial” step in his plan. “Infected trees that cannot be saved must be condemned, cut down, and promptly burned,” Roberts writes. He sees many of America’s leading institutions as being compromised by “wokeness,” which goes “by many names,” including “critical race theory, cultural Marxism, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), progressivism, gender theory.” As such, “[w]ithout drastic action our institutions won’t recover.”
Roberts is critical not only of progressives but also many conservatives. In “Dawn’s Early Light,” he launches broadsides at unnamed “wax-museum conservatives” who disagree with his “radical” tactics. “Rather than join the fight, however, many self-styled conservatives prefer to sit on the sidelines and look down their noses at those of us who are working to save our country,” Roberts writes. “They use words such as divisive and populist to delegitimize their opponents as radical revolutionaries.” He adds: “Many will even describe this book that way. And, in a certain sense, they’re correct to do so.”
Roberts asks: “What is stopping us from burning down rotten institutions?” He then answers his own question, claiming that “many instinctual conservatives” have a “delusional belief” that “these institutions might yet be saved or that burning them down is not ‘realistic,’ that we need to take an incremental and compromising approach.” Such an agenda is unsatisfactory from Roberts’s perspective. “These ‘moderates’ prefer to talk about pluralism and reform, not plans for battle and reconquest,” he writes.
Roberts has “never heard anyone present a serious plan for wresting control of the Harvard Corporation or the Ford Foundation from the burrowed-in progressive class that has controlled them for decades.” The “idea of reforming these institutions seems like reckless and delusional optimism,” but Roberts “can easily imagine the steps required to destroy them, to strip them of wealth and status, and otherwise to totally marginalize them from power in America.”
“The American forest is overdue for a fire…a long, controlled burn,” Roberts writes.
Embrace of Christian Nationalist Institutions and Arguments
While seeking to burn down many of America’s mainstream institutions, Roberts lauds the growth of Christian nationalist ones, which he claims “have begun to form their own flourishing eco-system.” In “Dawn’s Early Light,” Roberts cites as his first example:
“You can see this in Moscow, Idaho where worshippers at Christ Church began to attract like-minded builders, establishing New Saint Andrews College, Canon Press, and now a growing orchard of start-ups, small businesses, flourishing families, and more. Preserving our way of life isn’t just about fighting for past glories. Attending to America’s future often means starting families, planting churches, and founding communities of our own, just like in Moscow. ”
Roberts does not name the man who founded the Moscow, Idaho institutions that he sees as a model for America. But that man is Doug Wilson, a well-known Christian nationalist who seeks to establish a Christian theocracy and patriarchal society on American soil. Wilson has led Christ Church since 1977. Roberts also praised New Saint Andrews College and Canon Press, which were founded by Wilson.
Elsewhere, Civil Defense has documented how Roberts and the Heritage Foundation have promoted schools affiliated with the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), which was also founded by Doug Wilson.
Below, Civil Defense examines some of Roberts’s public appearances in which he explains how his religious views inform his policy goals. Unlike Wilson, Roberts does not use the term “Christian nationalist” to describe himself. But he has argued that the “Bible and Christianity were the basis of America’s founding” and the “founders wanted a Christian nation.” This is false, as the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
Roberts has taken his own argument a step further, claiming that the West is currently embroiled in a conflict between the “secular elite” and “Christendom.” He hopes that the latter will prevail.
Speech at the Opus Dei Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C.
On September 21, 2023, Roberts delivered a speech at the Catholic Information Center (CIC) in Washington, D.C. The CIC is associated with Opus Dei, a “radical and secretive” organization within the Catholic Church.
Opus Dei, which means “Work of God” in Latin, has long been the subject of controversy. It was founded in 1928 by Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, a Spanish priest. Years later, it maintained close ties to Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco.
In 2022, Pope Francis issued a decree that reportedly reduced the organization’s “power and independence” within the Catholic Church. And in March 2026, the Vatican announced that Pope Leo XIV held a meeting with investigative journalist Gareth Gore, the author of “Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church.” According to the Guardian (UK), Gore’s book alleges that Opus Dei is “at the heart of a conspiracy involving child grooming, human trafficking, and psychological and emotional control, with former members saying the group used private confessions as leverage against members and drugged those under its sway.” For instance, women in Argentina have alleged that they were exploited as laborers by the group. Opus Dei has repeatedly denied these allegations.
During his speech at the CIC, Roberts explained that he had “come to the CIC for many years for mass and formation” and visited it “every week,” adding that “it is a real treat to be here with all of my friends at the Catholic Information Center.” Roberts said that he views “public policy through the lens, if you will, of military affairs, which is to say, pick the battle on ground of your choosing.”
Roberts laid out his vision for more conservative policies, saying “we believe that no abortion can be morally justified” and that the “hardest” issue to apply their faith to public policy is “contraception,” which the Catholic Church teaches is wrong.
Roberts also explained to the audience that Heritage has opposed same-sex marriage, recognizing that it is the law of the land while working to reverse this fundamental right. Heritage’s position is that marriage is “between one man and one woman forever,” Roberts said. He added that “you have to, oh, unfortunately you have to neutralize the opposition to our position by saying we accept what the law is, but we’re working toward what we think is a much better outcome for civil society.”
Roberts bragged that Heritage was “the first politically conservative organization last November [2022] to say we’re not going along with the misnamed Respect for Marriage Act,” a bipartisan bill that passed the Senate by a nearly two-to-one majority. Roberts said he did not know how any “political conservatives would deign to vote for such a thing.”
Roberts described his “philosophy toward public policy change” as “radical incrementalism.” He cited states passing universal school choice as an example of the success of this approach.
“Reigniting Christendom’s Fire”
Roberts has extended his critique of the elite to cover the entire West. During a speech at the “Catholics and Public Life Congress” in Madrid in late 2025, Roberts argued that there is an ongoing conflict between the “secular elite” and “Christendom.”
The “global elite” have “packaged together” an “official narrative” that “says Christendom’s time has passed,” Roberts said. But this “official narrative is a lie.” The “elite wants us to believe…it’s impossible to rebuild Christendom after a century or more of decline” and that “it’s impossible to revive distinct national cultures after generations of globalization.”
For Roberts, the elites’ supposed failures have created an opportunity for “Christendom” to be reborn. He argued that the “world sees the collapse of secular elite institutions as a crisis” and this has created an “opportunity” — “a providential one” at that. The “secular elites have already done half of their work for us,” serving as “our unwitting partners.” Roberts told the audience: “The splinters of their great discrediting is the fuel already reigniting Christendom’s fire.”
Roberts warned that “a rational secular elite has taken the reins” and now “run[s] the world,” as “[t]hey control the powerful institutions of government, finance and industry, science and education, popular culture and news media.” While “there is no denying their prestige and pedigrees,” however, “there is also no denying their failure.”
As in his book, “Dawn’s Early Light,” Roberts returned to his motif of fire and burning institutions to the ground. “Today, the ashes are the disintegrating secular establishment,” he said. “The fire is the reinvigorated West rising from them and spreading around the world.” The “discrediting of post-modern secular globalism” has led to “hope” for a “rekindled Christendom.”
Roberts referred to his “friend” Charlie Kirk, the Christian nationalist who led Turning Point USA until his assassination in September 2025, as a martyr. “I believe in [the] coming years that the West will indeed bear the fruit of the tragic martyrdom of Charlie, one of the most beloved, sincere and charismatic Christian witnesses of our time.”
With the “elites discredited,” Roberts called on Catholics “to lean into public life and to build.” The “comprehensive failure of elite secular globalism to meet the challenges of this century has created passionate demand for alternatives to the institutions that let us all down,” Roberts argued. “We see this most clearly in the rise of populist political movements across the West.”
Roberts credited President Trump with supposedly “saving America and the West,” claiming that on Trump’s watch “we’ve witnessed an explosion in classical education” without “anti-American, anti-Christian propaganda.” (Elsewhere, Roberts has reportedly likened Trump to Cyrus the Great, the Persian ruler who liberated the Jews from captivity in Babylon.)
A Distorted View of America’s Founding
In June, Roberts posted an episode of his online show that was recorded at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. He offered a distorted version of America’s founding. “The evidence is clear. The Bible and Christianity were the basis of America’s founding,” Roberts declared. “The bottom line is this: Our founders wanted a Christian nation.”
Bizarrely, Roberts repeatedly referenced Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson — two American founders who were deeply skeptical and even critical of the Bible and Christianity — as if they would have approved of the episode. Roberts asked one of his guests: “If Thomas Paine and Jefferson were sitting with us here, they would be nodding pretty effusively, right?”
Wrong.
Paine’s pamphlet, “Common Sense,” helped rally the colonists to rebel against the British monarchy. Roberts claimed that biblical references in “Common Sense” prove that Paine would have agreed with his arguments. While Paine was a master orator, and his work was intended to convince believing Christians and others of the righteousness of rebellion, he did not endorse the view that America was, or ought to be, a Christian nation. Quite the opposite.
In his subsequent work, “The Age of Reason,” Paine explained that he didn’t believe in any church. “My own mind is my own church,” Paine wrote. Shortly after he published “Common Sense,” Paine explained, “I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion,” such that the “adulterous connection of church and state” would be broken.
Jefferson, the chief author of the Declaration of Independence and America’s third president, was not an orthodox believer in Christianity in any sense either. Roberts pointed to Jefferson’s copy of the Bible, in which Jefferson removed all references to miracles, as somehow an example of his Christian faith. But it’s long been established that Jefferson, by editing the Bible and in his many other statements, professed a very different set of beliefs. “While Jefferson was a firm theist, the God in which he believed was not the traditional Christian divinity,” the website for Jefferson’s Monticello estate reads. “Jefferson rejected the notion of the Trinity and Jesus’ divinity.” He also “rejected Biblical miracles, the resurrection, the atonement, and original sin (believing that God could not fault or condemn all humanity for the sins of others, a gross injustice).” Therefore, “[i]n neither the eighteenth century nor today would most people consider a person with those views a ‘Christian.’”
While president, Jefferson wrote to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, explaining that the First Amendment built “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
Elsewhere, Roberts has questioned the separation of church and state, claiming it has been “completely misunderstood, at least in its origins in the United States.” Jefferson would likely disagree, just as he would disagree with Roberts’s assertion that the founders “wanted a Christian nation.”
Attempting to Redefine Freedom
Throughout his time at Heritage, Roberts has repeatedly tried to redefine what freedom means. “Our definition of freedom is not the freedom to do whatever the heck we want, but the freedom to do what we ought,” Roberts said during his controversial appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast in July 2024. “That is to say, it confers a moral obligation to our fellow Americans and to the Republic.”
Roberts has repeatedly used this phrasing. Indeed, he has gone further, claiming that American liberals are the ones who have distorted the meaning of freedom. “At the heart of this, of modern American liberalism, is the distortion of the definition of freedom, as the freedom to do whatever one…may do, versus what it really is, which is the freedom to do what one ought,” he said, while speaking at the Yale Political Union.
Roberts’s formulation appears to originate with Pope John Paul II, who defined the “only true freedom” as what one “ought” to do. Nevertheless, this stance depends entirely on the one determining what ought and ought not be done. In America, a substantial legal code, reflecting centuries of jurisprudence, determines the scope of citizens’ freedom – and not the religious leaders, nor any church.
Echoes the White Nationalist Great Replacement Theory
The white nationalist “great replacement theory” holds that elites are seeking to replace white Americans with non-white persons via mass migration. This racist and xenophobic belief has a long history. It was once confined to the far-right reaches of the internet but has become more mainstream on the right in recent years. Some versions of this debunked conspiracy are explicitly antisemitic, with Jewish leaders and organizations supposedly orchestrating the replacement via immigration policy. The American version of the conspiracy theory often holds that the elites are seeking to replace white Americans with migrants at the ballot box, such that non-white migrants vote for the elites’ preferred policies and keep them in power.
Roberts has repeatedly echoed the language of the “great replacement theory.” In a February 26, 2026, post on X, for instance, Roberts claimed the “plan all along” was to: “Flood the country with millions of illegal aliens, change their status on paper, and turn them into a new voting bloc that replaces the votes of Americans and cements the Left’s power.”
Roberts has also woven “replacement” language throughout his public appearances.
During an appearance before the Catholics and Public Life Congress in Madrid, Spain in late 2025, Roberts claimed that what “governing institutions…cannot capture, they try to usurp one way or another.” These same institutions supposedly “reject the fundamental concepts of human dignity and equality, national sovereignty and the rule of law.” Roberts then elaborated: “And when their selfish ambitions are checked by sovereign citizens, they open the borders of those recalcitrant nations to alien migrants.” In other words, according to Roberts, “governing institutions” rely on “alien migrants” to overrule the wishes of “sovereign citizens” — a clear invocation of replacement-style conspiracism.
During a speech at the Yale Political Union in March 2026, Roberts asserted that “[l]iberals’ lax border policies” were part of “a purposeful agenda to insert at least 11 million illegal aliens onto our voter rolls.” In reality, noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare.
Falsely Claims January 6 Rioters Were Victims of “Partisan Witch Hunt”
As one of his first acts in his second term, President Donald Trump granted clemency to all of the approximately 1,600 January 6th defendants and convicts. Nearly all of them were pardoned, while some had their sentences commuted. Roberts defended Trump’s decision on social media and in an official statement issued by the Heritage Foundation.
Roberts claimed that the pardons were a “necessary corrective to the brazen weaponization of our justice system by the Left” and accused Democrats of “turn[ing] January 6 into a political cudgel, using it to distract from their disastrous policies and to smear their opponents.” He claimed the January 6ers were victims of a “glaring double standard that turned peaceful dissent into a partisan witch hunt,” which “has no place in a free nation.”
Roberts’s claims are false. As documented by hours of video footage, the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was not an example of “peaceful dissent.” A minimum of approximately 140 officers were injured during the attack. And as of January 2025 (the same month as the pardons), according to Department of Justice statistics, 172 January 6th defendants “pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement” and 69 of them “pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement with a dangerous or deadly weapon.” An additional 130 defendants “pleaded guilty to obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder (riot).” Others were awaiting trial on similar charges.
Nor were the January 6th defendants the victims of a supposedly left-wing justice system. In fact, “well over 10,000” people are estimated to have entered the U.S. Capitol’s restricted grounds. Only about 1,600 of them were charged, meaning the justice system did not prosecute more than 80 percent of the people at the Capitol that day. Overwhelming evidence shows that far-right extremists planned for violence in advance, including to “storm” the Capitol building. And the leaders of prominent far-right groups, such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, were convicted of serious charges, including seditious conspiracy against the U.S. government.
Project 2025 Contributor: Roberts “Aligned” Heritage with the “Rising Tide of Antisemitism on the Right”
In October 2025, Roberts sparked an institutional crisis at Heritage after he refused to distance the foundation from Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host. On October 27, 2025, Carlson posted an interview with Nick Fuentes, a well-known white nationalist and antisemite, on his podcast. Three days later, on October 30, Roberts released a video defending Carlson on his X account. “The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now,” Roberts said.
Roberts argued that Heritage would, in effect, have no enemies to the right – focusing only on the American left. And he claimed that Carlson had somehow been slandered. “We will always defend America. And we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” Roberts said in his video. “That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains and, as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation,” Roberts continued. “The venomous coalition attacking him are [sic] sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail. Most importantly, the American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.”
Roberts said that he “disagree[s] with, and even abhor[s] things that Nick Fuentes says, but canceling him is not the answer either.” Roberts added: “When we disagree with a person’s thoughts and opinions, we challenge those ideas and debate. And we have seen success in this approach as we continue to dismantle the vile ideas of the left.” He also denounced Fuentes’s views in a follow up post on X on October 31.
Days later, on November 5, 2025, Roberts apologized to his staff, saying he had made a “mistake.” But the damage was already done. Roberts’s defense of Carlson led multiple senior-level Heritage personnel to leave the foundation, including leading members of the organization’s antisemitism task force, trustees and board members, as well as a former senior editor for the Heritage Guide to the Constitution.
“No institution that hesitates to condemn antisemitism and hatred — or that gives a platform to those who spread them — can credibly claim to uphold the vision that once made the Heritage Foundation the world’s most respected conservative think tank,” Shane McCullar, a board member who resigned in protest, said. “When an institution hesitates to confront harmful ideas and allows lapses in judgment to stand, it forfeits the moral authority on which its influence depends,” another former board member, Abby Spencer Moffat, said.
Josh Blackman, the former senior editor for the Heritage Guide to the Constitution, as well as a Project 2025 contributor, wrote in a letter to Roberts: “First, your comments were a huge unforced blunder, and gave aid and comfort to the rising tide of antisemitism on the right.” Blackman continued: “For reasons only you know, you aligned the Heritage Foundation with the rising tide of antisemitism on the right…Antisemitism is always the canary in the coalmine. History teaches us that any society that fails to protect its Jewish people is destined for despair.”
Indeed, Roberts’s defense of Carlson came at a time when some prominent American conservatives were publicly warning about the rising influence of Fuentes and his antisemitic followers, who have dubbed themselves “Groypers.”
Prior to the controversy over his interview with Fuentes, Carlson already had a well-established track record of promoting extremist beliefs and conspiracy theories. It is telling, therefore, that Roberts stood by Carlson even after he was ousted from Fox News in April 2023. For example, Carlson repeatedly promoted the white nationalist great replacement theory on his nightly cable show. An April 2022 analysis by The New York Times found that Carlson promoted this formerly fringe racist belief in more than 400 episodes of his show. (As explained above, Roberts himself has echoed the great replacement theory.) Carlson fed fears of the COVID-19 vaccine, falsely claiming that thousands of people had died after a dose was administered, a claim undermined by empirical data. Carlson also pushed phony claims about the 2020 presidential election, saying it “was a grave betrayal of American democracy.” And in a show for Fox Nation titled “Patriot Purge,” Carlson insinuated that January 6th rioters and extremists were somehow duped by leftwing antifa agitators or, conversely, “deep state” provocateurs in the FBI, a nonsensical claim.
All of these extreme claims, and more, were part of Tucker Carlson’s catalog before he was ousted from Fox News in April 2023. Just days before his dismissal, Carlson served as the keynote speaker at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala. After Carlson’s ouster, Roberts said in a statement that “no one in America has demonstrated more courage in speaking truth to power than Tucker” and that America “needs more courageous institutions and citizens, like Tucker.”
Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.