Tag Archives: Heritage Foundation

Heritage, Again

As Trump continues to disintegrate before our eyes, and special elections confirm what the polls have been telling us, I think Americans can begin to breathe again. Granted, this evil and incompetent administration will continue to wreak havoc for three more years, but there’s reason to believe that the midterms will put a halt to much of the destruction, and that the political pendulum will swing back from Trump’s gulag to support of something more closely resembling the America we thought we inhabited.

What happens then, however, will depend upon what we’ve learned from this horrifying episode. What rot within the body politic allowed the ascent of people so morally and intellectually unfit for public office? I think there are three interrelated answers to that question. An unfair, “gilded age” economy and a fragmented, politicised media landscape have combined to facilitate the re-emergence of bigotries that had been suppressed but obviously not eliminated.

Research has confirmed that the single most potent predictor of support for MAGA and Trump is racial resentment. But racism is almost always accompanied by other hatreds: of women, of Jews, of Muslims, of immigrants (at least those with Black or Brown skin). Those attitudes haven’t just been fostered and encouraged by “Christian” nationalist churches, publications and social media posts, but also by (mis-named) think tanks. The election of America’s first Black President lit the flame of the rancid ideology they had carefully nurtured during more civil times.

And that brings me to the Heritage Foundation.

With the publication of Project 2025, Heritage shed its disguise as a research institution, and identified itself as a purely ideological enterprise, intent upon remaking American society into one dominated by White Christian males. Minorities aren’t the only elements of the population who would lose status should its fever dream be realized–women would be returned to subservient status too.

The Atlantic has recently documented Heritage’s misogyny. As the article noted, Heritage’s current unmasking may have begun with Kevin Roberts’ defense of anti-Semitism, but disclosure of the nature of the “Heritage” it is trying to protect includes the recent decision to hire Scott Yenor to lead its Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. The author says the choice “poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens.”

In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, Yenor labeled professional women “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He frequently uses the term AWFLs (short for “affluent white female liberals”). He was ejected from a position as chair of the University of West Florida’s board of trustees when even Florida’s MAGA Republican-controlled state Senate wouldn’t confirm him.

Yenor believes that employers should be legally permitted to discriminate against women in the workplace, and has advocated for legal changes that would allow businesses “to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage”—that is, denying women jobs solely on the basis of their sex or paying men more for performing the same job as women. He also believes that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”

Yenor’s ideas are rather obviously outside both the American and conservative mainstreams–and not just his opinions on employment discrimination. He has also dismissed women’s suffrage as “a feat of social engineering.” Feminism, he has asserted, weakens the all-important institution of marriage–a situation that calls out for policy change.

So Heritage now faces an uncomfortable question: Does it agree with its new director of American studies?

What makes the question particularly pressing is Heritage’s “one voice” policy. “While other organizations may have experts advocating contradictory points of view,” the institution explains, “Heritage employees are always rowing in the same direction.” If this is Yenor’s view, and he’s now a Heritage director, does that make it Heritage’s official view?

Heritage was founded in 1973 by Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., Joseph Coors, and Paul Weyrich. Despite the obvious political ambitions of those founders, until very recently the media has portrayed it as a legitimate, albeit Right-wing, think tank. And that brings me to the role played by the media in MAGA’s capture of our government.

One of the thorniest problems we will face as we try to repair the systemic flaws that allowed bigotry and misogyny to drive  political behavior will be what to do about a media landscape that abets false equivalences–a landscape that allows Americans to avoid “inconvenient” realities and  choose “news” that confirms their biases.

I have no idea what we do about that.

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The Phoenix Declaration

What–you may ask–is the Phoenix Declaration, recently adopted by Florida educators? 

The Declaration is a product of the Heritage Foundation, and a recent post in Lincoln Square pretty much summed it up.

The Phoenix Declaration smuggles a theocratic worldview through pleasant, familiar vocabulary—turning words like “truth,” “freedom,” and “the good life” into vehicles for a single religious ideology. Once you decode that language, the stakes clarify fast: a public education system where scientific method is replaced with biblical literalism, where civic history is rewritten through a sectarian lens, and where moral autonomy is redefined as submission to someone else’s theology. The danger isn’t just Florida’s adoption of the document—it’s how easy it would be for unsuspecting school boards in other states to nod along…

The Declaration is firmly rooted in Heritage’s Project 2025, which probably tells us all we need to know. Both documents are products of Christian nationalism. Both explicitly frame education as a process of eliciting a student’s “God-given potential,” and inculcating (their version of) virtue, moral formation, and the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” The Declaration says its educational mission is “helping children achieve their full, God-given potential,” by educating them in “truth and goodness,” civic virtue, character formation, and a love of country– echoing the Christian-nationalist belief that America is a “Christian nation,” and that public life should reflect that Christian “heritage.”

The Declaration appears to be part of Project 2025’s effort to institutionalize its worldview through a takeover of public education.  That certainly is the view of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which has noted that several of the declaration’s principles echo those of Project 2025–for example, proposals to expand school vouchers, promote religious instruction with public funds, and curtail diversity and civil rights efforts.

The declaration includes several statements that appear benign on their face but reveal a deeper ideological agenda when read in context.

On “objective truth” and morality, the document states: “Students should learn that there is objective truth and that it is knowable. Science courses must be grounded in reality, not ideological fads. Students should learn that good and evil exist, and that human beings have the capacity and duty to choose good.”

Language like this has been routinely used by Christian nationalist groups to cast evidence-based teaching about gender, sexuality and modern science as “ideological fads,” while elevating religious beliefs about morality as neutral “truth.”

On cultural transmission, the declaration asserts: “True progress comes only by building on what has been learned and achieved in the past. Students should therefore learn about America’s founding principles and roots in the broader Western and Judeo-Christian traditions.”

This explicitly frames public education through a sectarian lens. The United States is not founded on “Judeo-Christian traditions” as a governing principle, and public schools cannot privilege one religious heritage over the nation’s actual pluralistic history.

FFRF points out that several members of the Declaration’s drafting committee and signatories are representatives of organizations openly committed to religious education, Christian nationalism or the dismantling of secular public institutions. (Moms for Liberty is a signatory. Need I say more?)

It isn’t surprising that Florida would adopt the Declaration–Governor Ron DeSantis has made his war on “liberal” education a high priority, in the process destroying the academic integrity of Florida universities. 10 Tampa Bay News has reported on responses to adoption of the Declaration, including that of the Florida Educational Association,

“This political campaign disguised as a declaration seeks to hand over control of our classrooms to political operatives and shift blame, pointing fingers rather than offering real solutions,” FEA stated. “Instead of chasing ideological agendas, the State Board of Education members should focus on what truly helps students: Making sure public schools are fully funded, addressing the critical teacher and staff shortage, and guaranteeing that every child has access to a strong, neighborhood public school.”

FEA was not the only organization to see past the Declaration’s ambiguous language. Julie Kent, the president of Florida National Organization for Women, pointed out that the Declaration’s standards “impose an ideology under the guise of neutrality, marginalize diverse perspectives, undermine public education and politicize curriculum reviews.”

The Declaration’s standards reveal the accuracy of the criticisms. That standard on “Truth and Goodness,” declares students must learn that there is “objective truth” –truth which the Declaration finds rooted in a particular version of Christianity.

I guess it’s not enough to send tax dollars to religious schools via vouchers. The Right wants to Christianize our public schools too.

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Heritage’s History

Those of us who know about Project 2025–and were properly horrified by it–also know that those 900+ pages attacking everything that makes America America was a product of the Heritage Foundation. (Now we know just what sort of “heritage” that organization was created to protect.)

Earlier this month, Paul Krugman traced the Foundation’s history, in a newsletter he titled “The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation.”

Krugman began with the “fall” part– the recent controversy triggered by the response of Keven Roberts, Heritage’s president, to Tucker Carlson’s interview of rabid neo-Nazi and anti-Semite, Nick Fuentes. In a video, Roberts defended Carlson and attributed the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase that–as Krugman notes–is routinely used to attack Jews.

Why did Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites — despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned.

Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA.

According to Krugman, Heritage has always been a fraud rather than a genuine think-tank,  “a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution.” Its problem now is that its “original scam” was designed for a different time. Back in the Reagan years the Right’s bigotry and intolerance were far more discreet; those prejudices were more subtly employed to elect Republicans who could then be counted on to deliver deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was there to lend superficial respectability to policies that were regressive and discriminatory, and that overwhelmingly benefitted the rich.

Krugman writes that he first encountered Heritage when the organization was working for repeal of the Estate tax, arguing that the tax was a “massive burden on small businesses and farms, which was simply a lie.”

In 2004 only around 300 small businesses and farms owed any estate tax at all. No, I’m not missing zeroes. And the number has gone down over time. These days basically no small businesses or farms pay the tax.

So Heritage wasn’t doing research. It was just pumping out dishonest propaganda.

Krugman cited another example, this one from 2011, the year Heritage released widely ridiculed projections about the positive effects we might expect of Paul Ryan’s budget proposals–again, producing propaganda rather than economic research.

But telling lies on behalf of the wealthy isn’t enough in the MAGA era. To be a right-winger in good standing you also have to be a sexist, a racist, and an anti-Semite, while promoting QAnon and other conspiracy theories.

Krugman cites the “economists” employed by Heritage as examples of its true purpose. In 2014. it was Stephen Moore, a fixture in right-wing circles, who mainstream economists describe as utterly incompetent.  He was replaced by E.J. Antoni, who Trump tried to install as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Antoni’s nomination was withdrawn after reports surfaced that his Twitter account was filled with “sexually degrading attacks on Kamala Harris, derogatory remarks about gay people, conspiracy theories, and crude insults aimed at critics of President Donald Trump.” (CNN also reported that Antoni “repeatedly tweeted that liberal economist Paul Krugman was a pedophile, a smear for which there is no evidence – and one he also hurled at former President Joe Biden and former FBI director James Comey.”)

Heritage lists Antoni as its “Chief Economist.”

Krugman is correct when he insists that Heritage’s history is consistent with–and illustrative of– the story of the modern Right as a whole.

Heritage was never a respectable institution doing honest research. It was always in the business of telling lies on behalf of its wealthy supporters. But now it’s trying to turn itself into a MAGA/Groyper institution, less focused on telling economic lies and more focused on bigotry and conspiracy theories.

Krugman’s analyses are amply corroborated by Project 2025, which Wikipedia accurately describes as a political effort to “reshape the federal government of the United States and consolidate executive power in favor of right-wing policies.”

Roberts hasn’t changed the historic character of Heritage. He has merely–and probably accidentally– illustrated its true mission.

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A Constitutional Convention?

During the past couple of weeks, the subject of a Constitutional Convention has been raised twice: once during a question-and-answer session following a speech, and once via an email from a good friend. So it would seem reasonable to revisit the subject, and explain why I find that prospect–as proposed currently– horrifying.

Would it be possible to improve upon our centuries-old charter? Sure. We now see flaws that have emerged over the years, (If nothing else, there’s the Electoral College–a system used by no other country, for reasons that have become increasingly apparent…). If the idea of a reasonable review seems innocuous, however, we can be disabused of that conclusion simply by looking at the people pushing for a redo. The most prominent are ALEC (the far-Right American Legislative Exchange Council) and the Heritage Foundation. (Yes, the same Heritage Foundation that produced Project 2025.)

The goals of these and the other ideologues advocating such a convention are entirely inconsistent with the values of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Back in 2017, members of Indiana’s legislature were calling for such a convention, and I explained my opposition. As I wrote then, proponents clamoring for shortcuts to major change—revolution, a new constitution—always assume that the changes that ultimately emerge will reflect their own preferences and worldviews. History suggests that’s a naive assumption.

Indiana’s proponents wanted the state to join the calls for a Constitutional Convention. They claimed that a convention could be limited to budgetary matters–to devising “a framework for reigning in overspending, overtaxing and over-regulating by the federal government and moving toward a less centralized federal government.”

Constitutional scholars disagree with the assertion that such a convention could be limited to specified goals, but even if it could be, the specified matters would open a Pandora’s box. Think about it.

Wall Street bankers could argue that financial laws are “over-regulation.” One definition of “overspending” might be the massive subsidies enjoyed by (very profitable) U.S. oil companies; others might be Medicare or farm subsidies. Many Americans think we spend too much on the military; others target foreign aid. “Less centralization” could justify virtually any limitation of federal government authority, from FDA regulation of food and drug quality to laws against discrimination.

But the risk isn’t simply that a convention could rather easily be hijacked by people who disagree with the conveners about the nature and extent of needed changes. It isn’t even the likely influence of well-heeled special interests. The real danger is in calling together a presumably representative group of Americans and asking them to amend a document that few of them understand.

At the Center for Civic Literacy I founded at IUPUI (now IU Indy), we focused on the causes and consequences of what we’ve come to call America’s civic deficit. The data we accumulated was depressing. The last time I looked at survey results, only 36 percent of Americans could name the three branches of government, and only 21% of high school seniors could list two privileges that United States citizens have that noncitizens don’t. Etc. Even bright graduate students came into my classes with little or no knowledge of American history, episodic or intellectual. Most had never heard of the Enlightenment or John Locke. They certainly hadn’t read Adam Smith. A truly depressing percentage of undergraduates couldn’t explain what a government is, and they had no idea how ours operates. Separation of powers? Checks and balances? The counter-majoritarian purpose of the Bill of Rights? Blank stares.

Given the Trump administration’s current attacks on the Constitution and media attention to those attacks, those percentages have undoubtedly improved, but civic ignorance is still obviously widespread. Do we really want to turn over the task of rewriting our Constitution to people who don’t understand the one we have?

Common Cause has looked at the unanswered questions implicit in these calls for a convention–questions that lay bare the dangers involved: How will delegates be chosen? Will there be any limits placed on the role of well-funded special interests in influencing the selection of delegates? How will votes be allocated amongst delegates? One person one vote? One vote per state? Something else? What kinds of changes would the convention consider? Will the Convention start with the U.S. Constitution or write an entirely new document?

The civically-ignorant and clinically-insane megalomaniac who occupies the Oval Office is currently being restrained only by the existing U.S. Constitution, which he has clearly neither read nor understood. The likely result of a constitutional convention would be to empower him.

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The Company Heritage Keeps…

Because I’ve been on the road, heading for a much-needed vacation (and hopefully, a brief hiatus from my daily contemplation of the various–and frankly terrifying– threats to my country and its Constitution), I’m taking the lazy way out this morning, and posting an eye-opening compendium of the contributors to Project 2025. These are the “think tanks” (note quotation marks) and other far-Right organizations that worked with Heritage to produce that document.

You can find the list here.

Some of these names will be chillingly familiar. I found others to be a mystery. Those I recognized, and a few unknown ones I was able to trace, are all members of a category we might dub “scary.” Or unAmerican–at least if one defines unAmerican as  rejection of the underlying philosophy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights (especially but certainly not exclusively the First and Fourteenth Amendments.)

Click through, take a look at the list, and–as the anti-science folks like to say–do your own research.

I’ll be back to my usual hectoring and too-wordy routine tomorrow.

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