Welcome back to False Flag, where FBI director Kash Patel’s jet debacle is only getting worse. After facing criticism for taking a government jet to see his country-singer girlfriend perform at a wrestling match, then flying to Nashville where she lives, Patel fired a senior FBI official in charge of the bureau’s planes. It’s not clear why Patel would do that, since his appearance at the wrestling match was first made public by his girlfriend, who posted a picture of Patel on X (reposted, in turn, by Patel himself). I guess she doesn’t have a social media manager Patel can sack? On Sunday, Patel, who is supposed to spend most of his time investigating criminals, uncovering foreign spies, and fighting terrorism, posted a bizarre, ChatGPTesque defense of his 27-year-old girlfriend, calling her a “country music sensation who has done more for this nation than most will in ten lifetimes.” But I was most intrigued when Patel made a remark about “our supposed allies staying silent” as the critics went off on him over his romance-fueled jet-setting amid a government shutdown. Because it’s true! Republicans have been mostly quiet as Patel takes this heat. In fact, some on the right are piling on. InfoWars host Chase Geiser tore into Patel on Sunday in crude language for essentially blowing MAGA’s big opportunity to root out the deep state in favor of fun trips with his girlfriend. And worse, one whose singing career Geiser isn’t impressed by! “Name one song she’s ever written or sang, other than the national anthem!” Geiser fumed. For today’s newsletter, however, I’m following a different internecine right-wing feud. While the Patel imbroglio may provide a fat slice of schadenfreude, the bigger story is the unfolding war between the conservative establishment and Tucker Carlson over Nick Fuentes. I wrote about it last week, and it’s only gotten uglier as the stakes have gone up since then! To support my work, and that of my Bulwark colleagues, sign up for Bulwark+ today! –Will
Heritage Americans Turn on One AnotherBEN SHAPIRO DID SOMETHING UNIQUE on Monday. Not only did he open his show with a fiery intervention in the right’s roiling feud over white nationalist Nick Fuentes—he devoted his entire show to the topic. “No to the groypers!” Shapiro said at one point, defiantly. The conservative commentator’s exhortation was the latest shot to be fired in the civil war that has been roiling the right since last week when Tucker Carlson welcomed the racist, antisemitic, Holocaust-denying Fuentes into the conservative mainstream with a friendly interview. It’s a conflict that has consumed the MAGA movement, unnerved activists, drawn in top lawmakers, and left some conservative institutions in a state of upheaval. Shapiro, taking his turn on Monday, called it “the most important thing happening in the country.” Shapiro focused most of his fire on Fuentes, playing clips of the young far-right podcaster praising Hitler as “really fucking cool” and promoting rape. And he attacked Carlson, saying he had betrayed Charlie Kirk, the assassinated conservative organizer, by giving Fuentes, Kirk’s archenemy, a platform with virtually no pushback. “Tucker Carlson has seen fit to launder Nick Fuentes, the person who hated Charlie most and who wished him destruction,” Shapiro said. “That’s not an act of friendship, it’s an act of sick evil.” But Shapiro had a third target that would have seemed baffling just a week ago: the Heritage Foundation, the monolithic conservative think tank that serves as one of the main pillars of the Republican establishment. In his broadcast, Shapiro suggested Heritage president Kevin D. Roberts had made a serious error in his handling of the Carlson-Fuentes fallout and was failing to lead the American right. “I hope Kevin Roberts and Heritage show us they can still be those leaders,” Shapiro said. “But if not, we’ll have to look elsewhere.” This broadside was just the latest that Heritage generally and Roberts specifically have taken in recent days. The think tank finds itself at the center of the Groyper War because it is one of the advertisers on Carlson’s online show. Curiously, in the aftermath of the Fuentes interview, Heritage edited a page on its website meant to generate donations from Carlson viewers, removing any mention of Carlson’s name. Close observers speculated that Heritage might be preparing to cut ties with Carlson. But in a video posted last Thursday, Roberts made clear that Heritage would not be distancing itself from Carlson. Instead, he blasted critics of Carlson’s promotion of Fuentes, saying they were part of a “venomous coalition” out to divide the MAGA movement. “The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right,” Roberts said, though he added that he does “abhor” some of Fuentes’s beliefs. All our journalism and commentary is made possible by the support of our Bulwark+ members. If you’re not a member already, please consider signing up—you’ll have access to all our locked content, you’ll be able to participate in the comment sections, and you’ll be joining our growing pro-democracy community. Give it a try: Robert’s video prompted a storm of criticism. The head of the National Jewish Advocacy Center resigned from a Heritage task force on antisemitism, saying Roberts’s decision to support the Fuentes interview made future involvement with the organization “impossible.” The Wall Street Journal editorial board called Roberts an “apologist” for Fuentes’s hateful views. Roberts tried to salvage the situation with a hastily arranged interview with right-wing pundit Dana Loesch, a Carlson critic. But he only blundered around more. At one point in the interview, Loesch asked Roberts if people who say they hate “Christian Zionists” would be the kind of “sowing division” that Roberts has criticized. Roberts agreed, only for Loesch to reveal the “Christian Zionists” quote came from Carlson himself. “Because Tucker said those things,” Loesch said. “Is that not sowing division?” Roberts paused for several seconds before answering. “It’s certainly not helpful,” he said. The cleanup efforts since then have been, to put it charitably, somewhat haphazard. Roberts’s chief of staff was reassigned, in an apparent effort to put the blame for the disaster on him; he then resigned entirely. Meanwhile, ex-Heritage officials began coming out of the woodwork to level criticisms. One said they’d left the think tank because Roberts did not tolerate opposing views. Another told The Bulwark they didn’t think Roberts would “last much longer.” “There’s a small group of true believers, but I think most people have just had it,” the former official said. The situation got so bad that Heritage spokeswoman Mary Vought—incidentally, the ex-wife of Office of Management and Budget chief and leading Project 2025 author Russell Vought—had to put down reports there had been a meeting of Heritage’s board to mull firing Roberts. On Monday, Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said he would cancel a planned event with Heritage, writing “I don’t work with antisemites.” Heritage’s defense of Carlson has also ratcheted up the acrimony more broadly among conservatives fighting over the Fuentes interview. In one representative barb, commentator John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, said pundit Sean Davis, who’s been friendlier with the Carlson faction, has a “brain [that] is home to the spirit of Hitler” and said Davis “pleasures himself while reading THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION.” Podhoretz added that Davis was “Adolf Jr.,” though he later deleted the tweet. For now, Roberts has kept his job. But whatever happens to him personally, his decision to put Heritage’s weight behind Carlson marks, for many, the decline into degradation of yet another conservative institution. It also certainly illustrates the right’s accelerating movement toward extremism, to the consternation of folks like Shapiro. –Andrew Egger contributed reporting New Pardon Campaigns Revving UpThere’s never been a better time to seek a presidential pardon. Not only are there numerous ways to ingratiate yourself to the president (Need an extra chandelier for your new ballroom, sir?), but Donald Trump seems to be doling out commutations and get-out-of-jail free cards without paying close attention to who is getting them. The president told 60 Minutes on Sunday that he doesn’t know anything about cryptocurrency king Changpeng “CZ” Zhao despite pardoning him last month. (While Zhao’s decision to help pump $2 billion into Trump’s own crypto-coin probably didn’t hurt his pardon odds, it doesn’t appear to have helped his name stick in Trump’s memory.) It raises a question: Who will be the most heinous criminal to receive a Trump pardon? I ask because there seem to be stirrings in MAGA world that two notorious federal prisoners could soon be getting that nod—and, at least in one case, the rumors are helping generate six-figure betting pools and not-impossible odds on Polymarket. First up: Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, now serving an eleven-year sentence for defrauding investors. On Halloween, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acolyte and popular Substacker Jessica Reed Kraus wrote that Holmes’s fraudulent blood-testing machines only made her a MAHA icon “ahead of her time.” Kraus argued that Holmes had been punished not for deceiving people with false HIV results and cancer diagnosis but for challenging Big Pharma. “Elizabeth Holmes should be trick-or-treating with her kids tonight,” Kraus wrote. The Free Holmes cause has also been picked up by Lila Rose, a prominent anti-abortion activist, who called Holmes’s sentence “unjust.” “Free Liz,” Rose wrote on X on Saturday. As of the publication of this newsletter, Holmes’s catching a Trump pardon in 2025 enjoys just 5 percent odds on Polymarket. But that’s larger than NXIVM cult founder and convicted sex trafficker Keith Raniere, who has received no betting activity at all. And yet, Raniere has a far more influential MAGA champion in his corner. Laura Loomer, fresh off supporting a successful campaign to lift U.S. sanctions on a Serbian nationalist, posted on X on Thursday to criticize Raniere’s prosecution. “Former U.S. Attorneys and FBI forensic examiners have described the federal prosecution in *United States v. Raniere* as the clearest instance of Department of Justice misconduct they have EVER encountered,” Loomer wrote. Loomer’s criticism of the Raniere case appears to come out of nowhere. As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a groundswell of support elsewhere in the MAGA movement for Raniere. But Loomer did manage to find enough footage to post a compilation of three-year-old videos from conservative online shows critiquing the government’s case against Raniere. These campaigns hold a nonzero chance of success not just because Trump seems eager to effectively legalize crime for rich people, but because years of right-wing counternarratives to Trump’s own criminal cases mean that it’s hard for conservative media outlets to admit any kind of federal prosecution is legitimate.¹ If Trump’s federal cases were unfair, why wouldn’t the prosecutions of Holmes and Raniere be, too? For what it’s worth, Polymarket is giving Hunter Biden a 2 percent chance of receiving a Trump pardon by the end of 2025. 1 Aside from federal prosecutions of Trump’s political adversaries, of course. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. 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