Why Do Some Associations Matter More Than Others?
Robert P. George, the well-known conservative professor at Princeton, announced his resignation from the board of The Heritage Foundation earlier this week. George said he “could not remain without a full retraction of the video released by [President] Kevin Roberts, speaking for and in the name of Heritage, on October 30th.” His statement noted that “Although Kevin publicly apologized for some of what he said in the video, he could not offer a full retraction of its content.”
George clearly disagreed with Roberts’s public support—and therefore Heritage’s support—of Tucker Carlson after he sparked a furious backlash by having Nick Fuentes on a recent episode of his podcast.
Almost immediately after George shared his resignation letter on social media, some began pointing to another association: George’s own friendship with Cornel West. The two have been pictured together countless times, smiling with arms around each other as they share a classroom or a stage.
The point is not that West has political views almost diametrically opposite to George’s—akin to the marriage between James Carville and Mary Matalin that surprised political observers in the 1990s—but that West is friends with the notorious Louis Farrakhan. The problem is that this friendship, one degree removed, doesn’t seem to pose any identifiable public issues for George.
Josh Abbotoy recounted a brief sample of Farrakhan’s notorious record. He has “praised Hitler and called Jews termites, Satanic,” and the “worst enemies” of black people. Farrakhan has charged Jews with being ultimately responsible for the assassinations of American presidents, from Lincoln to JFK. He’s also made the case that Jews were behind chattel slavery in America. They supposedly owned both the slave ships that moved the slaves to America and the plantations where they toiled away under the hot sun. To be fair, though West has called Farrakhan his “dear brother,” he has also denounced what he calls Farrakhan’s “anti-semitic, anti-Jewish statements.”
West himself has taken some fairly controversial stands on Israel. During an interview with CNN’s Abby Phillip during a short independent presidential run last year, West and his running mate “declined to call on Hamas to release hostages taken from Israel in exchange for a ceasefire.” Moreover, they “repeatedly refused to criticize Hamas for its actions in the war,” and “opted not to condemn the group for the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.” These positions are certainly outside of the mainstream, to say the least.
The friendship between George and West began around 20 years ago, when both were teaching at Princeton (West now holds the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary). George and West then began co-teaching a freshman seminar titled “Adventures of Ideas,” a course centered on 12 influential works in the Western canon, such as Augustine’s Confessions, John Stuart Mill’s writings, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
Over the years, their partnership deepened beyond the classroom into a personal friendship, involving family interactions, joint travel, co-teaching stints, and even shared prayer. In just the past five years alone, they’ve visited countless institutions: the University of Arizona, Oregon State University, Swarthmore College, Florida International University (where they launched a presidential speaker series in June 2025), and Dartmouth. They’ve talked about politics, philosophy, learning, and, of course, George’s love of playing the banjo.
Earlier this year, they even co-wrote a book, Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division. George and the man he calls “Brother West” were the first guests on Peter Robinson’s new podcast, “Unbridled,” produced by the University of Texas-based Civitas Institute. (Robinson was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and has hosted “Uncommon Knowledge,” an interview-based show for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, for more than two decades.)
In addition to being good friends with Cornel West, George has also boosted and celebrated the work of Christina Buttons, an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute. She admitted in a long Substack post last year that she used to do porn and has long dealt with severe mental health issues. Now, it looks like she has turned her life around.
But Buttons still retains views that fall outside mainstream conservatism, especially in Christian circles. In a piece for Queer Majority in 2023, she was disapproving of anti-Pride Month boycotts. She also mentioned being “critical of some aspects of trans ideology” (my emphasis). Lastly, and most importantly, Buttons is an atheist, as she noted in a post about visiting a church service for the first time after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
The point is not that one needs to police their friends’ every belief—most of us likely have at least one or more friends or family members with whom we disagree on a whole host of important issues. The discrepancy comes into play when specific individuals who lean left—or are far-left—are publicly boosted without any pushback to speak of.
Someone might reply that Roberts and George hold different positions, thus demanding different standards of conduct and accountability. Admittedly, George isn’t the president of a think tank that annually rakes in over $100 million in revenue. But he has held—and currently holds—many prestigious public positions.
He’s just the sixth McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence in the history of Princeton (this position was endowed in 1897 by Mrs. Cyrus H. McCormick Sr. and her sons, heirs to the McCormick harvesting empire). George also directs the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which hosts a series of lectures for undergrads and a program for first-class visiting and postdoctoral fellows each year.
According to George’s biography on Princeton’s website, he’s also served as Chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, on the President’s Council on Bioethics, as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and as a U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology.
This impressive resume demonstrates that George occupies the same elite circles as Roberts.
Unless the inconsistencies behind George’s resignation are properly explained, it’s likely that younger generations will increasingly reject not only George and others like him but also the very principles they stand for. Since principles apply universally, they’ll wonder why they apply only in some instances but not others.
Putting Farrakhan to the side, even West himself has espoused views that are seemingly more severe than anything Tucker Carlson has said in public about Israel. On principle, shouldn’t George have to publicly denounce and distance himself from West as well?
Far more than simple hypocrisy, Gen Zers may conclude that questionable associations on the Right are punished in the social realm far more severely than ones on the Left, if at all. This could be yet another catalyst for more young men, in particular, to flock to the very people whom George and the broader old guard conservative movement say are corrupting the youth.
This is another clear reason why the Right must reject the framework of liberalism, which ultimately lurks behind these discrepancies. As Josh Abbotoy commented on George’s resignation, “Even intellectuals who you really respect in some regards can have blind spots where their moral compass seems to come more from broader social mores than from first principles.” The social mores created by modern liberalism, per Daniel McCarthy, produce a culture of victimhood that works against conservatives. One has to show their anti-fill-in-the-blank bona fides, since Nazis are always on the march just beyond the horizon line.
Every culture, of course, has a dense web of social boundaries that are enforced through extra-legal means. The problem is not the existence of such limits—the law of fashion, as John Locke called it—but the character of the limits themselves.
By fighting on liberalism’s battlefields, conservatives have helped prop up a culture that undermines the faith young generations have in their forebears, helping to produce the conditions we’re currently seeing in the youth culture. The Right needs to stop playing the current cancellation game.
None of this is meant to diminish George’s influence on the thousands of students he has taught and helped over the past decades. Those who have served as fellows in the Madison program have come to his defense this week, singing his praises and pointing out his various virtues. But it does highlight that George’s resignation from Heritage’s board shouldn’t be immediately seen as the “principled” approach. There are far larger factors at play that must be considered, factors that have been mostly screened from the public mind.
The fight inside and outside Heritage, among other conservative institutions, is yet another sign of the growing fissures on the Right as we begin to shift to a post-Trump epoch. Navigating these difficulties without being ensnared by liberalism’s designs will take wisdom and courage in an age that’s heavy on moralism, therapeutic thinking, and issuing denouncements—and short on strategic thinking.
