Liana Graham, a 22-year-old research assistant in domestic policy at Heritage, who worked on the family policy report, insisted that Heritage does not condone any form of discrimination. But, she said, the purpose of life “is not confined to career achievements,” as she said that “one-size-fits-all feminism” has taught. She went on, “I’m not saying that you can’t pursue these things, but realistically, if this” — marriage, family — “is something you say that you desire, how do you order your life such that you can actually achieve that?” The Heritage approach is to “recognize that the role of government is limited, and there’s a lot to be said on the cultural side.”
For some staff members, the cultural side — both outside and inside the institution — was precisely the issue. In early 2025, an employee sent a letter to the Heritage board of trustees, a copy of which I obtained, laying out what the writer described as a toxic environment. Roberts, the author wrote, had admitted to staff that he had “anger management control and rage issues” and that his “insecurities” led him to dismiss “all longstanding HF employees with more experience than him as ‘establishment Republicans’ or ‘people who attend Washington cocktail parties.’” Those who disagreed with him had been “bullied out of their jobs.”
Catholic beliefs now reigned, the letter writer continued, and everyone at Heritage was required to be against I.V.F. as well as birth control, including for married couples. Single women without children were deemed failures with “no skin in the game,” which the author noted was “actionable in law.” The letter continued: “Competitive selections for positions have ceased to exist. We are now required to hire primarily RCs” — Roman Catholics — “who agree with every policy that KR dictates.”
Roberts described himself to me as a “dyed in the wool” conservative, though he isn’t offended when people suggest otherwise. Some of his closest colleagues, he says, are leading figures of the New Right, including Hazony, the Nat Con founder, and Patrick J. Deneen, a Catholic political philosopher who teaches at Notre Dame. “The point is, these are the great intellectual leaders, among others, in the conservative movement now,” he told me. “Any intellectually honest conservative or libertarian, we want him or her in our movement.”
But to observers, Roberts seems to have undergone a kind of political conversion — one that has informed his radical reshaping of Heritage. Richard Reinsch, a founder of the online magazine Law & Liberty, and himself a Catholic and free-market conservative, was one of Roberts’s first hires. During his interview, Reinsch told me, he and Roberts had a “meeting of the minds.” Reinsch had drafted a memo stressing “a lot of things that an old-school Heritage conservative would like,” on economics, he said, “but with a much more moralistic, natural law background.” Roberts appeared pleased, Reinsch said, but the proposal turned out to be “the exact opposite of the course he pursued.”
