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Heritage Action 2

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SEE HERITAGE 3 7 24 i thot this was main

SEE VOUGHT 3

no merri

see sentiNel SUPERPAC gotv COORDINATION?

technically initially the sister 501c4, now post 2/17

Ginni CNP adjacent? ADF, CPI, honest elections (Leo, cleta)

origin in 2012-3 gop autopsy freakout // demint and purge at cato?

SEE VOTER SUPPRESS

see kevin roberts ex TPPF

SEE INCUBATOR EG HAWLEY AND STAFFERS

see pjt 2025

see tim mellon funder

~ ESG TPPF prez?

includes main

Tags:  Heritage Foundation

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i missed something 2 23 ginni j6?

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Right-wing media rally behind Trump’s efforts to trigger regime change in Cuba

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 02/06/26

After right-wing media pushed for and then celebrated the Trump administration’s ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and seizure of the country’s oil supplies last month, they quickly pivoted to the administration’s reported efforts to overthrow Cuba’s government, which for now primarily involves starving the island of oil.

MMA //

  1. ### Trump delivered on right-wing media’s desire for regime change in Venezuela over oil

01/06/26

  1. ### Greenland, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Iran, and more: After Maduro’s capture, right-wing media encourage escalating US involvement around the globe

01/07/26

  1. ### Fox Noticias host suggests military buildup in the Caribbean could lead to toppling of Cuba's government

12/11/25

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Under Gramm’s tutelage, Vought developed a reputation as a master of the arcane rules that can get legislation passed or killed. He climbed the ranks of the Republican Party, going on to advise Pence, who was then the leader of the House Republican Conference. But the closer Vought got to the center of congressional power, the more disillusioned he became. In the late two-thousands, when Republican lawmakers, who professed to care about deficits and balanced budgets, voted in favor of bills loaded with corporate giveaways and pork-barrel spending, Vought felt that they were abandoning their principles and duping their constituents. He later recalled of this time, “I would say, ‘If there’s an opinion in this leadership room, I’m telling you it’s ninety-five per cent wrong.’ ” A former Capitol Hill colleague of Vought’s told me, “I think he thought the Republican leadership was a bigger impediment to conservative causes than Democrats were.”

In 2010, Vought quit working for House Republicans and helped launch Heritage Action for America, an offshoot of the influential conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. The foundation was known for dense policy papers and its voluminous “Mandate for Leadership” governing guide. Heritage Action had a different purpose—to strong-arm Republicans in Congress into acting more conservatively.

Vought was instrumental in turning Heritage Action into the interest group that congressional Republicans feared most. He picked fights with Party leaders over agriculture subsidies and greenhouse-gas regulations, and published a scorecard that rated how lawmakers voted on key bills. In Heritage Action’s first year, according to a person familiar with Vought’s work there, he came up with an idea for a mailer that attacked Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, for his vote to approve a nuclear-weapons treaty with Russia. The mailer featured a photograph of Corker alongside images of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Heritage Action’s tactics so infuriated the Republican leadership that Senator Mitch McConnell called on Heritage donors to stop funding the group. (McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2013, Heritage Action announced a campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act. Vought and his colleagues toured the country, whipping up the grass roots, and poured millions of dollars into advertisements and lobbying. They wanted Republicans in the House and the Senate to insist that any spending bill passed to avert a shutdown must also defund Obamacare. The Republican lawmakers who embraced the strategy came to be known as the “suicide caucus,” and their protest led to a sixteen-day government shutdown. In the end, Republican leaders cut a deal to reopen the government, leaving Obamacare intact.

Heritage Action saw the 2016 Presidential election as an opportunity to put a true conservative back in the White House. The group’s C.E.O., Michael Needham, openly supported Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, who, three years earlier, had helped orchestrate the shutdown. Trump, at least initially, was treated with disdain. During an appearance on Fox News in 2015, Needham called him a “clown” who “needs to be out of the race.”

Vought and Trump couldn’t have been more different: one was a deacon at his Baptist church; the other was a twice-divorced philanderer who had been caught on camera bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” But, after Trump won the election, Vought was offered a job as a senior adviser at the O.M.B., where he’d dreamed of working since his days in Phil Gramm’s office. Years later, Vought would say that, at the time, he had no ambition of one day running the agency. He had planned to help with the transition and some of the O.M.B.’s early efforts, then go to seminary to become a pastor. But, he later said in a podcast interview, “God had other plans.”

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By Zachary Albert

February 5, 2025 tpm

*This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

In his first few days back in office, President Donald Trump engaged in a whirlwind of executive actions, from exiting the World Health Organization, to deploying military personnel and National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Many of these actions are unprecedented. Some appear to be illegal and unconstitutional, according to legal experts and judges. But none of them should come as a surprise — nearly all of them were outlined in 2022 in a plan called Project 2025.

A Heritage Foundation representative attends a Moms for Liberty National Summit in Washington on Aug. 30, 2024. Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Project 2025 is top of Trump’s to-do list

Project 2025 is a multifaceted strategy to advance conservative policies in the federal government. Part of this effort revolves around the “Mandate for Leadership,” a 922-page document published in April 2023 that outlines a slew of proposed governmental policy changes.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank and advocacy group, organized the collaborative effort. A long list of other right-leaning research organizations and interest groups, like Moms for Liberty and Turning Point USA, also participated in Project 2025.

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Project 2025 participants wrote on the plan’s website that “to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left,” they would “need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.”

In my research on think tanks, I’ve investigated how these research organizations can influence public policymaking. The most potent strategy is to ally with a political party and support its objectives through research and advocacy. This is exactly what the Heritage Foundation has done via Project 2025.

Even though Trump said during his 2024 campaign that he was not affiliated with the project, evidence of Project 2025’s agenda can be seen throughout the beginning of his second term — as well as in his first administration.

For example, on Jan. 20, 2025, Trump echoed the plan’s statement that “men and women are biological realities” when he signed an executive order that, in part, recognizes “two sexes, male and female” that are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” This order led to the removal of transgender references from government websites.

Other orders are similarly aligned with Project 2025. Take Trump’s executive order that, in part, eliminated the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, or OFCCP, a government office previously charged with ensuring companies working with the government did not discriminate against any employees. Project 2025 recommended, quite simply, to “eliminate OFCCP.”

Some news reports have found that there are already many other examples of Trump policy decisions and executive orders that appear to mirror Project 2025 recommendations.

One CNN analysis from Jan. 31 found that more than two-thirds of the 53 executive orders Trump issued during his first week in office “evoked proposals outlined in [the] ‘Mandate for Leadership.‘”

Heritage Foundation’s decades of activism

Project 2025’s influence on Trump reflects the Heritage Foundation’s growing importance to the Republican Party.

In my forthcoming book about the polarization and politicization of policy research organizations, I show the many ways that think tanks like the Heritage Foundation have become embedded within partisan networks and intimately connected to politicians. Increasingly, Heritage and other partisan-aligned think tanks, including progressive groups like the Center for American Progress, use their research to consistently support partisan agendas that align with their policy goals.

The relationship between the Heritage Foundation and the GOP represents the most extreme version of this dynamic. The think tank has supported Republican presidents as far back as Ronald Reagan, using another policy document — also called the “Mandate for Leadership” — to secure significant policy gains through his administration. But the symbiosis between the Heritage Foundation and the GOP has been particularly notable since Trump gained more influence in the party.

At the start of Trump’s first term, as one Heritage Foundation researcher told me in 2017, the think tank recognized that the “administration didn’t have much policy depth, so when they won the election they were sort of like, ‘Now what do we do?’ And that’s where Heritage comes in. … We work on these issues year-round, so we’ll stand by your side.”

The Heritage Foundation also vetted potential staffers for federal government positions. This led to more than 66 Heritage employees or former employees working for the Trump administration by the middle of 2018.

But Heritage has not entirely dictated Trump’s agenda. While the group did say that Trump “embraced 64 percent of our 321 recommendations” by the end of 2017, the think tank has also revamped its agenda to align with Trump on the issues he cared most about, like trade and culture wars.

As the think tank’s president, Kevin Roberts, said in 2024, Heritage views its job as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”...

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'I'm advocating Christian nationalism': Josh Hawley's ties to Project 2025 exposed

States attorneys general participate in their meeting with President Donald J. Trump on protecting consumers from social media abuse Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020, in the Cabinet Room of the White House.

Alexandria JacobsonandRaw Story October 21, 2024

Two staffers for Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) are credited as contributors to the controversial conservative “presidential transition” plan, Project 2025, according to a Raw Story review of the 922-page document.

John Ehrett, chief counsel for Hawley since April 2023, according to LinkedIn and Congressional research website LegiStorm, is cited as a contributor to the plan from conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, that calls for curtailing abortion access, increasing deportations, eliminating government agencies like the Department of Education and banning transgender athletes from sports as part of a plan for a conservative presidency.

The contributor credit states Ehrett’s affiliation with the “Office of Senator Josh Hawley.”

Screen grab from Project 2025 document that says "John Ehrett, Office of Senator Josh Hawley" (https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLead...)

Two papers written by Vijay Menon, a legislative assistant for Hawley since March 2022, according to LinkedIn and LegiStorm, are cited in the Project 2025 document as well.

A 2019 paper co-authored by Menon advocates for the repeal of the Community Eligibility Provision in the National School Lunch Program, saying it “converts a federal assistance program meant to help families in need into an entitlement.” More than 71.2 million reimbursable school lunches were served in Missouri during the 2023-2024 school year, according to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

ALSO READ: How America will change if Trump wins

A 2018 report cited in the document is titled, “Understanding the Hidden $1.1 Trillion Welfare System and How to Reform It.” The Heritage Foundation said it came up with the 2016 figure from "Office of Management and Budget documents and other official government sources.”

Screen grab from Project 2025 document that shows a citation crediting Vijay Menon - highlighted by Raw Story (https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLead...)

Ehrett and Menon did not respond to Raw Story’s questions, nor did communications staff for Hawley’s congressional office and campaign.

Another Republican Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) told NBC Montana in August that he wasn’t aware that Chris Anderson, a national security adviser for his congressional office since May 2022, was credited as working on Project 2025. The contributor credit states his affiliation with the “Office of Senator Steve Daines.”

“In fact, the first I heard of that, I remember the press mentioned it. Look, there’s individuals here in Capitol Hill that work on lots of projects,” Daines told NBC Montana.

Anderson did not immediately respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

“I literally have not seen it,” Daines said to NBC Montana about Project 2025. “I spoke to President Trump about it, and he hasn’t seen it. Look, it’s something he’s not supporting.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025, but his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), has close ties with the Heritage Foundation and its founder, Forbes reported. According to CNN, more than 140 former Trump administration officials were involved in its creation.

Republican Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is directly quoted in the document saying, “The next conservative president must dismantle the administrative state and return power back to the states and the American people. This publication is a blueprint to do just that.”

Heritage Foundation ties

Hawley and several of his current and former congressional staff members have worked with the Heritage Foundation.

During the Heritage Foundation Leadership Summit in April 2023, Hawley credited the Heritage Foundation with helping “inspire my interest in conservative policy” during a summer internship in 2000. INCUBATOR

Hawley spoke at the Heritage Foundation another time in February of that year for a speech called, “China and Ukraine: A Time for Truth.”

Hawley has been particularly vocal about advocating for Christian nationalism, and such principles are found throughout the Project 2025 document.

“Some will say I’m calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. My question is: Is there any other kind worth having?” Hawley said at the National Conservatism Conference in July, The New Republic reported.

For example, a Project 2025 chapter on the “Department of Labor and other related agencies” by Jonathan Berry emphasizes Christian principles and “service to God.”

“The Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family. And Americans have long been known for their work ethic," the document says. "While it is primarily the culture’s responsibility to affirm the dignity of work, our federal labor and employment agencies have an important role to play by protecting workers, setting boundaries for the healthy functioning of labor markets, and ultimately encouraging wages and conditions for jobs that can support a family."

Current Hawley legislative assistant, Menon, was a former research assistant in domestic policy studies for the Heritage Foundation, according to its website. His LinkedIn says he was a graduate fellow and research assistant between June 2017 and March 2019.

Layne Nichols, a legislative correspondent for Hawley since January, completed a congressional fellowship with the Heritage Foundation this year from April to June, according to his LinkedIn. Nichols did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

Former Hawley staffers went on to work for the Heritage Foundation, including Alex Velez-Green, who worked with Hawley’s congressional office for at least four years, most recently as a national security adviser. He is now a senior policy adviser with the Allison Center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation.

Eric Teetsel was Hawley’s chief of staff until September 2022 when he moved on to serve as vice president, government relations for the Heritage Foundation for two years.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

Hawley is running for reelection against Democrat Lucas Kunce. A September survey of voters by Emerson College Polling and The Hill showed Hawley polling with 51 percent of the vote and Kunce with 40 percent.

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Project 2025 organizer Heritage Foundation gave $1 million for Trump’s convention

Written by Eric Hananoki

Published 10/18/24

The Heritage Foundation, the architect of Project 2025, gave $1 million to the 2024 Republican National Convention, according to a recently filed document. Because of a firestorm of criticism, Trump and Republicans have attempted to distance themselves from the embattled group.

Project 2025 is an extreme right-wing initiative that intends to provide policy and personnel to the next conservative administration. Its proposals include attacks on reproductive rights, education, and LGBTQ rights.

On September 16, the host committee that helped organize the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — whose official name is 170 Freedom Milwaukee 2024 Host Committee Inc. — filed its post convention report listing donors with the Federal Elections Commission.

One of them is the Heritage Foundation, which donated $1 million for the convention in February.

The nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute noted Heritage’s donation in an article last month.

Project 2025 contributor Tom Homan, a Heritage visiting fellow, and Peter Navarro, who authored a chapter of Project 2025’s guiding document, spoke at the convention. Heritage itself sponsored the convention and hosted a “policy fest” near the convention venue. Russ Vought, another chapter author, was the policy director of the RNC’s 2024 Committee on the Platform. And Heritage branding was also displayed at the Milwaukee airport.

Aside from the convention, Trump and his campaign have numerous connections to Project 2025.

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Group Behind Project 2025 Already Claiming Election Interference by Biden

The Heritage Foundation is "stoking irresponsible inflammatory fear of election fraud," said one journalist.

Julia Conley

Jul 13, 2024

One election law expert warned this week that the right-wing Heritage Foundation is already baselessly claiming that President Joe Biden is likely to respond to the voting results as his predecessor, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, did in 2020: by refusing to accept the will of American voters.

"This is gaslighting and it is dangerous in fanning flames that could lead to potential violence," Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles,toldHuffPost Friday.

The Heritage Foundation, the think tank that has spearheaded the drafting of Project 2025—a policy agenda threatening mass deportation and immigrant detention, the dismantling of federal agencies, and the consolidation of power with the president should Trump win a second term—said in a report released Thursday that Biden may try to continue his presidency "by force" even if he loses in November.

The claim has no basis in statements made by Biden, who has said he will accept the election results.

In May, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that Biden "will accept the will of the American people." Trump has not made the same commitment.

Nevertheless, the Heritage Foundation report went on to say that "the lawlessness of the Biden administration—at the border, in staffing considerations, and in routine defiance of court rulings—makes clear that the current president and his administration not only possesses the means, but perhaps also the intent, to circumvent constitutional limits and disregard the will of the voters should they demand a new president."

Mike Howell, executive director of the group's Oversight Project, saidat a press conference that "as things stand right now, there is a 0% chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America... I'm formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election."

"This is gaslighting and it is dangerous in fanning flames that could lead to potential violence."

Such comments show, saidNew York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica, that "these people are the insurrectionists. Or election terrorists."

Howell's comments echoed Trump's baseless warningsahead of the 2020 election that voting would be "rigged" by widespread use of mail-in ballots amid the coronavirus pandemic. Trump relentlessly attacked voting by mail despite admitting that he had used mail-in ballots to vote in numerous elections.

The Heritage Foundation has conducted "role-playing exercises" that it says show "left-wing efforts to interfere with the election" are possible in 2024, HuffPostreported.

The report said voters should "reflexively disbelieve and challenge the intelligence community's allegations regarding Trump, foreign interference, and Republican efforts to legally win the White House."

Hasen told HuffPost that the group appeared to be trying to create doubt among the electorate about institutions that "give voters truthful information they need to evaluate evidence before them."

Journalist Jane Mayer said the group was "stoking irresponsible inflammatory fear of election fraud."

Political scientist Don Moynihan of Georgetown University added that the Heritage Foundation's baseless accusations against Biden likely preview how the Trump campaign could respond to the election results if he loses, four years after the former president urged his supporters to violently attempt to stop the certification of Biden's victory.

"The end game is to allow men in suits finish what the January 6th rioters started," he said.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/07/us/politics/heritage-foundation-2024-campaign-immigration.html

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Heritage Foundation Spreads Deceptive Videos About Noncitizen Voters

The right-wing think tank has been pushing misinformation about voting into social media feeds. The Georgia secretary of state’s office called one video “a stunt.”

Once a staid think tank, the Heritage Foundation has recently made its mark seeding falsehoods about the integrity of the 2024 election across social media and conservative news outlets.Credit...Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Ken BensingerRichard Fausset

By Ken Bensinger and Richard Fausset

Sept. 7, 2024

In July, two men went door to door at a sprawling apartment complex in Norcross, Ga., an Atlanta suburb that is a hub for the region’s fast-growing Latino population, asking residents if they were U.S. citizens and whether they were registered to vote.

Speaking in Spanish, often peeking from behind half-closed doors, seven people told the men that they were not citizens but that they were registered to vote.

Although the two men claimed to represent a company helping Latinos navigate the election system, they were actually working with the Heritage Foundation and carrying a hidden camera. Days later, the conservative think tank posted a video on the social media platform X containing some of the footage the men had captured, calling it “staggering” evidence that 14 percent of noncitizens in Georgia — which Heritage said extrapolated to more than 47,000 people — were registered to vote.

“Based on our findings,” the video concluded, “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.”

The video was reposted by Elon Musk, X’s owner, who called it “extremely disturbing.” It quickly went viral.

But under scrutiny, those claims do not hold up. Three of the seven people Heritage filmed later said they had misspoken. State investigators found no evidence that any of the seven people on the tape had ever registered to vote. A spokesman for Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, called the video “a stunt.”

It was one of several misleading videos that the Heritage Foundation has pumped into social media feeds this year. While the once-staid think tank has received attention recently for Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a future Trump administration that the group funded, it has also made its mark with an aggressive effort to shape public opinion, seeding falsehoods about the integrity of the 2024 election across social media and conservative news outlets.

At the center of that effort is the Oversight Project, an arm of Heritage that conducts what it describes as investigations into immigration policy, among other topics. Borrowing from covert tactics used by the group Project Veritas, the Oversight Project has published videos about the supposed threat of migrant voting in shelters on the Texas border, in New York City and in North Carolina.

The project says it is preparing to release investigations of other states, including what its executive director, Mike Howell, recently described in a livestream on X as “a pretty big thing” targeting voter registration at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles.

“We view our role in this cause as breaking the bombshell news,” said Mr. Howell. The recording of the livestream appears to have been deleted after The New York Times contacted Heritage for this article, and the Oversight Project has so far not posted any videos about alleged noncitizen voting in Virginia.

Image

An open doorway into a room with a table and chairs. A large “Vote” sign in on the table.

An Atlanta polling location in March. There is no evidence to support Heritage’s findings in Georgia, a critical swing state with a large immigrant population.Credit...Christian Monterrosa for The New York Times

Few groups have done more to propel the false, but snowballing, theory that noncitizens are preparing to vote in droves in November, threatening the integrity of the election.

Heritage’s most recent effort, the Georgia video, tallied more than 56 million views, according to X’s statistics, and has become fodder for discussion on dozens of right-wing talk shows and podcasts, as well as on Fox News. The day after it was posted, both Mr. Raffensperger and Georgia’s attorney general, Christopher Carr, released statements, apparently in response to the video, pledging to investigate “specific” claims of voter fraud.

But there is no evidence to support Heritage’s findings in Georgia, a critical swing state with a large immigrant population, or, for that matter, anywhere else in the country.

Voting by noncitizens is illegal in almost all jurisdictions except for a few scattered municipalities that allow residents who are not citizens to vote in local elections. Any noncitizen convicted of trying to vote in a federal election faces stiff fines, prison time and potential deportation.

A study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a policy group that focuses on voting and criminal justice issues, found that one ten-thousandth of 1 percent of votes in the 2016 election were cast by noncitizens. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has said that “noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.” The Heritage Foundation’s own analysis found just 23 documented cases of noncitizen voting across the country between 2003 and 2023.

Regardless of the evidence, critics say efforts like the Heritage investigation in Georgia could be used by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to try to discredit the election results if he loses.

“The immigrant becomes the boogeyman,” said Richard L. Hasen, an expert on elections law at U.C.L.A. law school. “It provides a means of delegitimizing Democratic victories and creates a path for challenging them.”

Several election experts derided the Oversight Project’s methodology as deeply flawed. The group’s figures suggest it spoke to a total of 50 people — statistically, a tiny sampling — before coming to a determination that one in seven noncitizen residents of Georgia may be illegally registered to vote.

In an email to The Times last week, Mr. Howell stood by the group’s work in Georgia. “I am not surprised that when an individual admits to a crime on camera that they would later retract it when that video is made public,” he said.

Asked about research — including Heritage’s own data — showing how rare noncitizen voting is, he said: “The monumental number of noncitizens that have poured over our borders since 2021 have made any previous ‘study’ of noncitizens’ voting irrelevant.”

In a July interview on Real America’s Voice, a right-wing podcast network, Mr. Howell said that out of 40 people his investigators spoke to at an apartment complex in Charlotte, N.C., four said they were both registered to vote and not citizens. That led the Oversight Project to conclude that 10 percent of noncitizens in that state were most likely registered to vote.

Mr. Howell claimed the Biden administration was planning to “refuse a peaceful transition of power by relying on illegal aliens to vote for them, and that’s clear as day.”

In Georgia, Mr. Raffensperger's investigation into Heritage’s claims is continuing, according to Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office. Mr. Hassinger said investigators had found no records suggesting that the people who appeared in the video had registered or voted, and “no pending or rejected voter applications from 2024” from the apartment complex.

The state investigators went to the apartment complex and spoke to two of those interviewed by the Oversight Project. One said she purposely gave the men at her door a fake name, and told them what she thought they wanted to hear “to get them away.”

Mr. Hassinger described the Heritage effort as “a stunt,” adding, “There’s no better word for it.”

The Times also spoke with a woman interviewed in the video. The woman, an immigrant from Honduras who asked that she be identified only by her first name, Marta, because she feared being deported, confirmed to the Times that she was not registered to vote and had never tried to register in the nine years that she had lived in the United States.

She had been surprised to see two strangers appear at her door and feared that if she told them the truth — that she was not registered to vote — they might try to register her and ask her to sign documents, potentially putting her at risk with immigration authorities.

Marta said that she had no idea she was being filmed until she was shown the video online and that the two men did not ask for her full name or address. “I just wanted them to go away,” she said.

The woman was first identified by Lead Stories, a private fact-checking group hired by social media platforms to verify content. The group also tracked down two other women who were shown in the video. Both denied having registered to vote.

On social media, the Oversight Project said it had tried to locate the seven people on state voter rolls but was “unable to find them,” adding that “non-citizens have shoddy address history records and often use fake documents and names.”

Founded in 1973, Heritage was long known as a policy shop, focused on promoting conservative, pro-business policies in Washington. In recent years, it has taken a sharp turn under the leadership of Kevin Roberts, an academic who said his goal for Heritage was “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

Mr. Roberts started the Oversight Project just a few months after arriving at Heritage, asking it to provide “aggressive oversight” of the Biden administration and “institutional support” to the conservative movement.

The Oversight Project partnered with an outside group, Muckraker, to produce both the Georgia and North Carolina videos. In April, they also teamed up to produce a video about a flier encouraging migrants to vote for President Biden. The groups said the paper was found in a shelter in Matamoros, Mexico, but the founder of the shelter denied being behind it. She said she had received death threats after the video was posted.

In March, the two groups used a hidden camera to film employees of a migrant aid group, La Jornada, that was providing documentation they said could enable noncitizens to register to vote. The executive director of that organization, which is based in Queens, N.Y., later said the document they had provided was not identification that could be used to register to vote.

Anthony Rubin, the founder of Muckraker, in a recent interview on InfoWars, the conspiracy spreading podcast hosted by Alex Jones, said that “anybody who claims this isn’t happening, they’re just burying their head in the sand.”

In March 2022, Mr. Raffensperger announced the results of a statewide audit that determined that 1,634 noncitizens had tried to register to vote among all of Georgia’s registered voters at the time, and had been blocked from doing so by existing state verification procedures. He also noted that none of them had cast ballots.

“So, my fellow Georgians asked me, ‘Are noncitizens voting in Georgia?’” Mr. Raffensperger said in May on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I can say, ‘No, they aren’t,’ because we’ve checked it.”

Ken Bensinger covers right wing media and national political campaigns for The Times. More about Ken Bensinger

Richard Fausset, based in Atlanta, writes about the American South, focusing on politics, culture, race, poverty and criminal justice. More about Richard Fausset

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an oct 4 2024

The voter registration groups helping new prospective voters navigate the bureaucracy of adding their names to the voter rolls are now having to contend with conservative activists harassing them.

That's according to a Friday report in the New York Times, which focused on how Latino voter registration in Arizona is being complicated by the far right ahead of the 2024 election. The Times reported that the Heritage Foundation — which is the organization behind the controversial Project 2025 authoritarian policy blueprint — is now deputizing conservatives to follow and film people helping Hispanic residents of swing states get registered ahead of the November election.

Hector Sanchez-Barba is the executive director of the group Mi Familia en Acción, which is on the ground in eight states including battleground states like Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina. He told the Times that he's seen "a lot of intimidation on the front lines."

READ MORE:**Project 2025 leader was hoping for Vance VP pick — and got his way**

“My canvassers have been filmed, they’ve been yelled at,” Sanchez Barba said. “They’re just coming after us.”

Elsewhere around the country, advocacy groups have also been subjected to intimidation tactics when conducting outreach to Spanish-speaking communities. Latino Community Fund Georgia executive director Gigi Pedraza remarked that one incident in the Atlanta, Georgia area seemed "ethnically motivated" after a conservative activist filmed three women with voter registration forms outside of a butcher shop and spread it with the caption: "ILLEGALS BEING RECRUITED TO REGISTER TO VOTE."

“They were just sitting with the forms,” Pedraza told the Times. “You cannot register anyone to vote who’s not a citizen.”

The incidents may not be isolated, but rather part of a larger, well-funded effort headed by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project. Times reporter Jack Healy wrote that Heritage "has sent teams with hidden cameras posing as voter-outreach workers groups into apartment complexes in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia to ask the mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants there if they were citizens and registered to vote."

READ MORE:[Revealed: JD Vance once praised Project 2025 org's anti-woman essays as 'admirable'

Conservatives have seized on the videos — which show some of the apartment residents telling Heritage's undercover videographers that they are registered to vote while not being U.S. citizens — to justify false claims that undocumented immigrants are being added to voter rolls in major battleground states. The people who were surreptitiously filmed have since said they misspoke and that they were not actually registered voters.

"[The videos show] somebody admitting on camera to a crime. It’s basically the best evidence that you can get," Oversight Project executive director Mike Howell told Healy.

However, the Times reported that in Georgia, election officials say there is no evidence of any non-citizens being added to the Peach State's database of registered voters. Now, groups like Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA (Spanish for "struggle) are training their organizers in de-escalation tactics in the event they're confronted by conservative activists.

"Canvassers are out there doing really hard work, and to be harassed and accosted by people believing these conspiracies — it’s just disappointing. They’re just doing their job," LUCHA spokesman César Fierros said.

READ MORE:[Trump again denies Project 2025 — despite Vance writing foreword for chief architect's book

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Congressional Republicans are meeting in secret this week behind closed doors with allies of the far-right Christian nationalist authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán. Those allies, including from a Hungarian government agency that reportedly organized a far-right U.S. group’s conference in Budapest, are working to support Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal war against Ukraine. GOP lawmakers, especially in the House but increasingly in the Senate, have been voicing strong opposition to the U.S. sending any additional funding to Ukraine.

“Members of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and staff from the Hungarian embassy in Washington will on Monday begin a two-day event hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank,” The Guardian reports. The Heritage Foundation, once considered the premier conservative think tank, by 2016 was a pro-Trump group. Now, Heritage is behind the massive Project 2025, which aims toinstall tens of thousands of pro-Trump loyalists into the federal government if the ex-president re-takes the White House.

“The first day,” The Guardian explains, “includes panel speeches about the Ukraine war as well as topics such as Transatlantic Culture Wars. It is expected to feature guests including Magor Ernyei, the international director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights, the institute that organized CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) Hungary.”

Orbán, called “Putin’s Buddy” just last week by Politico, is “a strongman who cultivates close ties with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and who is widely seen as having undermined democracy and rule of law at home.”

READ MORE: ‘Ballsy Move’: Experts Praise Special Counsel for Not Playing Trump’s ‘Stupid Reindeer Games’

“In other words,” wrote U.S. Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-IL), “Far-right Republicans are conspiring with Hungary’s extremist Russian-sympathic PM Viktor Orbán to help former KGB dictator Putin defeat democratic Ukraine. Ronald Reagan and John McCain must be looking on in utter disbelief.”

Many are outraged that Republicans will be meeting with Orbán’s allies in D.C. while refusing to publicly acknowledge their attendance at the anti-Ukraine events. To date the guest list has not been published.

National security expert, former U.S. Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA), blasted the GOP’s secrecy: “A list of every representative in that meeting with Orban should be made available to the press. Public servants shouldn’t hide in the shadows— especially when discussing decisions with foreign leaders that could benefit Vladimir Putin.”

READ MORE: ‘They’re Coming After Our Children’: Watch Casey DeSantis’ Dystopian Fear-Mongering Ad

Conservative commentator Bill Kristol explained, “Heritage Foundation and Viktor Orbán are not simply against aid for Ukraine. They are against Ukraine. They hate Ukraine, because a) they’re pro-Putin, and b) they hate liberal democracy, especially one fighting to defend itself against a brutal dictator.”

National security and international law expert Eugene Vindman, a retired U.S. Army colonel whose twin brother made national headlines when he blew the whistle on Donald Trump and was mercilessly targeted for his actions, blasted both the Hungarian prime minister and the GOP: “Viktor Orbán is actively interfering in domestic politics and colluding with extremist republicans to help Vladimir Putin. This is dangerous. Republicans must stop putting Putin ahead of U.S. national security interests.”

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The Heritage Foundation uses fringe right-wing media to promote itself as it struggles to stave off competitors

The conservative think tank once defined conservative politics. Now Heritage is turning to the right-wing fringe in an attempt to recapture its glory days.

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 11/03/23

The right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation has increasingly used fringe, extremist media outlets to spread its message as it struggles to maintain its central position in the conservative movement. Its staff and fellows have appeared on the conspiracy theory network Infowars, on the show of a Hitler-praising antisemite, and on MAGA-aligned fringe programs defined by their nativism and commitment to spreading disinformation — all while Heritage fights to keep its spot atop the conservative policy world.

Founded in 1973, Heritage took center stage in the conservative movement in the following decade during the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Since then it has consistently been one of the most cited think tanks in the country. It also has a long history of pushing right-wing ideas, including denying the reality of climate change, opposing LGBTQ rights, and promoting for-profit prisons and harsher sentences throughout the 1980s and ‘90s.

Heritage’s role in determining policy has historically extended beyond just the Republican Party. It helped to shape what became known as welfare reform under former President Bill Clinton, causing deep and extreme poverty to skyrocket. Heritage also popularized the idea of including an individual mandate in health insurance reform, first during Mitt Romney’s time as governor of Massachusetts and later during debate over the Affordable Care Act.

The think tank saw its stock rise during former President Donald Trump’s time in office, but since his loss in 2020 it has faced stiff competition from new organizations looking to define and control the messaging and policy of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. Still, with revenue of at least $102 million as of 2021 — significantly more than similar organizations like the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute — it's still a major force in conservative politics.

Heritage is a longtime sponsor of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, and it’s organizing a massive effort to staff the next Republican administration. Its more than 115 fellows and employees are often cited as subject experts in mainstream media outlets, and they show up acrosscablenewschannels as well. Heritage also acts as a publisher of faux-intellectualpolicy papers — the thrust of which are often later debunked — as well as more broadly targeted op-eds and social media content.

For as much as Heritage attempts to present itself as respectable, the presidency of Joe Biden appears to have ushered in a new era at the organization as its personnel increasingly appear on fringe, extreme right-wing programs. As Media Matters has previously reported, Tom Homan — a Heritage visiting fellow and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — appeared on a Hitler-praising antisemite’s show and pushed the racist “great replacement” theory. Media Matters also reported that Heritage research fellow Peter St Onge recently appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars network and repeated a debunked conspiracy theory that falsely claims the Department of Justice designated conservative parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists.

One recent example shows how Heritage seeds radical ideas in far-right media, creating its own content to further amplify its messages. On October 18, Lora Ries, the director of Heritage’s Border Security and Immigration Center, published an op-ed at The Daily Signal (a media outlet run by Heritage) opposing Palestinian refugee resettlement to the United States. This issue is largely a moot point, as Israel — with the help of Egypt — has maintained a complete siege of Gaza. Even if Palestinians in Gaza were allowed to leave in large numbers, many are reasonably fearful that they will never be allowed to return and would face the prospect of a second Nakba, the term for the forced dislocation of roughly 750,000 Palestinians in 1948.

“To import a population of pro-Hamas Palestinians would be certain suicide for Americans,” Ries wrote, adding, “This population has no interest in assimilating into American culture and governance, or in expressing loyalty to America or American allies.”

Heritage then turned the piece into avideo for X (formerly known as Twitter), which was subsequently roundly criticized. (Heritage later removed the video from X.)

Ries has spread anti-immigrant messaging more generally on Just the News, hosted by John Solomon, a conservative writer with a history of spreading false information; One America News, a far-right Fox News competitor; and No Spin News, hosted by disgraced former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly.

The immigration center Ries runs at Heritage also lists Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, as a visiting fellow. Like Ries, Morgan has been a guest on Solomon’s show — he went on to implicitly demonize Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities by suggesting they are harboring terrorists — and fearmongered about migration levels with Sebastian Gorka. (In addition to his perch at Heritage, Morgan is also a senior fellow at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group.)

Morgan has also appeared on War Room, the podcast of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and a hotbed of anti-migrant demonization and election denialism — and Heritage personnel. In addition to Morgan, Bannon has also hosted Heritage President Kevin Roberts; distinguished fellow in economics Stephen Moore (for an episode titled “Stolen Elections Have Consequences”); and research fellow E.J. Antoni, among others.

Where Bannon is the standard-bearer for Trump-style nativism, Heritage fellows have found a receptive audience among the more explicitly Christian right as well (Bannon’s occasional ecclesiastical rants notwithstanding). Roberts and Antoni have both also been guests on The Charlie Kirk Show, whose host has increasingly embraced Christian fundamentalism. Moore — the economics fellow — has been on Huckabee on TBN, and Heritage senior legal fellow Sarah Parshall Perry has appeared on Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, both of which are televangelist programs.

One of Heritage’s most active figures is Hans von Spakovsky, who manages the think tank’s election law reform initiative, which in reality means he spreads myths about voter fraud that have been debunked and discredited. He has appeared numerous times on Fox News, One America News, and streaming programs including The Dan Bongino Show, Just the News, and America First with Sebastian Gorka. On April 28, 2022, Von Spakovsky appeared on the The Jenna Ellis Show “to discuss election litigation”; on October 24, 2023, Ellis pleaded guilty to one felony count for her role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Heritage no longer dominates the conservative policy world the way it once did, but its deep pockets and long history means it still wields considerable influence. Yet by all appearances, Heritage has fully embraced the far-right fringe of the movement it attempts to define, further delegitimizing itself in the process.

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Heritage Foundation fellow appears on Infowars to spread conspiracy theories

One Heritage fellow spreads conspiracy theories on Infowars as another spreads anti-Palestinian bigotry on social media

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM REED MCMASTER

PUBLISHED 10/20/23

Peter St Onge, a research fellow at the influential conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, appeared on Alex Jones’ Infowars network on Thursday, signaling a further erosion of the boundaries between the establishment and fringe elements of the conservative movement.

“Alex, I’ve of course been a fan for many, many years,” St Onge said at the beginning of the roughly hour-long interview. “I saw you speak in San Antonio about eight years ago and still remember that.”

Jones and St Onge then took turns making the type of sweeping, conspiratorial accusations that Infowars is known for.

“What do you think they’re going to pull next?” Jones asked St Onge. “If you look at the tools in their little Swiss Army Knife here — what’s the next thing they’re going to pull?”

“They’re really pushing it on all fronts,” St Onge responded, not specifying to whom he was referring.

St Onge then repeated a common but debunked talking point on the right that the Department of Justice had labeled parents protesting school board meetings as domestic terrorists.

“I think terrorism really paid off for them in 2001, and you know terrorism has the attraction that there’s sort of this gray area where you can take very normal people right — you can take parents who are yelling at school meetings — I mean, you know, we just saw it,” St Onge said. “They’re going to try to criminalize domestic dissent.”

Video

CitationFrom the October 19, 2023, edition of Infowars' The Alex Jones Show

Although Jones has long been a discredited conspiracy theorist, in recent years he has also been embraced by the broader right-wing media ecosystem. He’s been invited on high-profile programs like The Charlie Kirk Show, and War Room, the podcast of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Jones received a standing ovation at an event hosted by Turning Point USA, a conservative youth-focused organization that Kirk founded.

Jones has spent years falsely claiming that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax staged to enact gun control laws. Families of the survivors of the shooting successfully sued Jones in Texas and Connecticut, resulting in more than $1.4 billion in awarded damages. Both Jones and Infowars later declared bankruptcy.

Whereas Jones proudly positions himself as the proud outsider, the Heritage Foundation sits at the center of the conservative media and political world. The conservative think tank is currently organizing an effort to staff the next Republican administration with right-wing ideologues, regularly sponsors agenda-setting events like the Conservative Action Political Conference. In this prominent role, the organization is influential in pushing anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and other extremist positions.

On Thursday, the Heritage Foundation shared a widely condemned, anti-Palestinian video to social media. “To import a population of Palestinians would be certain suicide for Americans,” said Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.

This is incitement @Heritage,” wrote Human Rights attorney and Palestinian advocate Noura Erakat. “Not even a week since 6 y/o Wadie Al Fayoumi was stabbed 26 times by a man screaming “You Muslims must die!”

“75 years ago — when the US wouldn't admit Jews in DP [displaced persons] camps into the US because of our supposed communist inclinations — these bigots were saying the same thing about us,” wrote Peter Beinart, editor-at-large for Jewish Currents.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/moms-liberty/salems-eric-metaxas-defends-moms-liberty-quoting-hitler

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https://www.mediamatters.org/moms-liberty/inside-moms-libertys-summit-big-money-and-even-bigger-conspiracy-theories

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last weekend’s Moms for Liberty summit cemented the group as a key player in Republican politics, with the party’s presidential primary front-runners Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis addressing attendees both at the conference and at home via livestream. But it’s what happened in the breakout strategy sessions that were closed to the press that reveals why the group has become so effective — and dangerous. 

In session after session, speakers offered a warped view of reality aimed at manipulating parents into believing they’re righteous liberators battling some ambiguous enemy located in public schools. They warned audience members that theteachers unions and other school officials that are “indoctrinating our kids” are on a mission to do everything from grooming their children to securing “world domination.” 

I’ve been following Moms for Liberty for over two years, and it’s now the fastest-growing self-described “parental rights” organization in the United States, hiding behind the innocuous descriptor to covertly push a far-right agenda. Its meteoric rise has coincided with an alarming increase in harassment and threats directed at teachers, administrators, and school officials across the country — so much so that theSouthern Poverty Law Center designated Moms for Liberty as an extremist group this year.

What always strikes me about Moms for Liberty is the leadership’s ability to provoke such intense and hateful reactions from members, like threatening gun violence against librarians and bringing a 10-year-old to tears. I was morbidly curious about what exactly they were telling them. Although I pieced together a decent enough picture by viewing recorded meetings, streamed events, documents, and interviews, I felt like I was missing something because I was behind a desk, not on the ground.

Until I attended this year’s summit.

The gathering lasted from Thursday night until Sunday morning, drawing over 700 attendees and a steady group of protesters positioned outside of the hotel. It was divided into two types of events: general sessions and breakout sessions. General sessions included big name speakers — Trump, DeSantis, Nikki Haley — catered meals, and a designated press area.

Both the breakout sessions and the main stage included speakers doubling down on a local Indiana chapter's uncritical use of an Adolf Hitler quote printed on the front of their newsletter. NBC News reported that a speaker at a breakout session told attendees to “never apologize.” At Saturday night's general session, co-founder Tiffany Justice said, “One of our moms in a newsletter quotes Hitler. I stand with that mom.” The crowd cheered.

Manufacturing terror to mobilize parents

We wanted to get a closer look at how Moms for Liberty instructs members behind closed doors, so Madeline Peltz, my colleague who was with me at the summit, and I split up the breakout sessions to cover more ground.

Kim Hermann, a lawyer affiliated with the Southeastern Legal Foundation, spoke in a breakout session which, according to the event description, was about “navigating legal challenges and advocating for your family.” She began by warning parents that they were “fighting a constitutional war.”

She said those running schools (“teacher unions, those that are indoctrinating our kids”) want to “undermine our republic and our way of government” and claimed that schools are intentionally withholding information from kids about their constitutional rights.

Her speech only got more extreme from there: She claimed that thesesame powerful actors are “trying to get rid of our Constitution” — somehow through critical race theory — and that their ultimate goal is to “destroy” America.

In another breakout session,Deb Fillman, a “homeschool consultant,” spent over an hour ranting about a faceless enemy attacking children through the weapon of social-emotional learning.

Fillman said that while she didn’t exactly know who benefits from this alleged child exploitation, she tends to agree that they’re probably “Marxists or globalists.”

But whoever they are, they’re out to “replace parents,” groom your children by creating an inappropriate “trust bond,” gather your child’s data to manipulate them, and ultimately pursue “world domination.” 

Conspiracy theories about impending child microchips and Bill Gates were sprinkled in the presentation, too. Fillman suggested that math software owned by Gates’ Microsoft is being nefariously used to “get every data point they possibly can on a kid.” In the same vein of corrupt data collection, she told audience members that she fears that microchips tracking students in schools (allegedly an “experiment” in China) is coming to the United States soon, which means the government would “know everything.” 

Education consultants teach how to overwhelm opponents 

Amid all of the conspiracy theories and fearmongering, there were select breakout sessions that offered actual strategies to “fight” the evils attendees had learned about.

Education consultant Jordan Adams’ presentation was focused on successfully flipped school boards, and it included detailed instructions about how to get newly elected board majorities to bulldoze through Moms for Liberty policy priorities.

Adams presented audience members with a how-to guide on destabilizing school districts within the first 100 days of taking office, including a worksheet that he encouraged participants to fill out listing a timeline of tangible steps meant to overwhelm the opposition (the image includes my notes for his suggested actions based on the presentation). The reverse side of the handout encouraged attendees to familiarize themselves with and counter common talking points from adversaries.

In order to pass controversial policies without backlash, Adams suggests that school boards bombard the district with an array of demands and changes so that the opposition can’t keep up. “These [school] boards, these majorities, they need to be meeting on multiple fronts, multiple issues,” he said. “They need to keep moving, and the idea is that the other side, the powers that be, they cannot keep up with all of it. Right? Oftentimes there will be one small thing, one thing at a time. And they can rally people around that. They can’t counter everything.”

Some of the first steps include putting school administrators “on notice that they need to cooperate with all of this” and advertising “the values” the new board is implementing when posting job ads for new teachers.

The second month is defined by policies: “Start introducing policies on CRT [critical race theory], eliminating DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] offices, reviewing contracts and initiatives, eliminate student surveys.” He also suggested putting a “moratorium on new technology.” 

Nearly every action step Adams discussed was also a consulting service he could both provide and profit from. Adams runs Vermilion Education, an education consulting business specializing in transparency audits, curriculum design, board advising, and teacher training. Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler (who also chairs the Sarasota County school board) suggested hiring Adams to her school system, which was the first to consider it. 

Meanwhile, Adams suggested that schools are “raking in cash from the state, from taxpayers” and “funneling it off to their friends.”

His wasn’t the only session to highlight school finances.

The Heritage Foundation runs the show

Learning that there was going to be a “dark money in education” breakout session at the summit made me laugh (the irony!). Learning who the speakers were — Katie Gorka (former research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and wife of far-right political commentator Sebastian Gorka) and Rhyen Staley (a researcher at Koch-connected Parents Defending Education) — made me attend.

The message of the session was “follow the money.” Aside from some absurd conspiracy theories about the Centers for Disease Control trying to install puberty blockers “without the barrier of parental permissions”and Gorka’s claim that there’s dark money behind critical race theory, sex education, drag queen story hour, and transgenderism, the session loosely taught the audience how to determine who is really behind different educational organizations.

To determine influence, the speakers instructed audience members to look at who sponsors conferences and what foundations are giving them money in order to exert control. The examples they used were aboutteachers unions, but they could have also pointed to the summit’s sponsors.

The event, held in Philadelphia, was lavish: Nearly every meal was elaborately catered and served by waiters. The organizers also booked the Museum of the American Revolution and chartered buses to get attendees there, which wasn’t a cheap endeavor.They had money, but whose? Ticket sales and meager membership dues wouldn’t likely cover this kind of costly event.

Applying the same logic I learned in the “dark money” session to Moms for Liberty would suggest that the group’s chapters are shills for organizations like The Heritage Foundation and The Leadership Institute, a decades-old nonprofit that trains young conservative activists and policy leaders to sell right-wing ideals.

Both Heritage and Leadership sponsored the summit at the highest tier possible. Both have regularly partnered with and given resources to Moms for Liberty since the group’s infancy. And co-founder Ziegler is now running the Leadership Institute’s School Board Leaders Program. 

And there’s more. Breakout session speaker “Billboard Chris” Elston, a Canadian anti-trans activist, revealed that the Heritage Foundation identified and brought together 40 people, including him, in March 2022 to “fight gender ideology” — indicating that the think tank is helping to organize this coalition.

In the same session, Jay Richards, a senior research fellow at Heritage, claimed that he was the first one to approach Heritage with the idea to “fight gender ideology”and has spearheaded that movement.

Moms for Liberty was awarded Heritage’s Salvatori Prize for American Citizenship in 2022 for embodying “the virtues of the American Founding.” It also came with a nice little $25,000 prize.

Backed by and affiliated with individuals and organizations attempting togut and privatize public schools, Heritage is one of the leading crusaders trying to destabilize public education. So it’s no surprise that it’s using Moms for Liberty members as pawns to further that cause.

Having closely monitored Moms for Liberty longer than just about anyone else, I can say with confidence that the group is only becoming more openly extreme. It’s been headed that way for years, but now the mask is off.

Moms for Liberty is embracing rhetoric that not only appeals to far-right conspiracy theorists, but creates them.

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the Heritage Foundation for more than a year has been drafting a policy playbook in preparation for a Republican administration to take over the federal government in 2025. The hope is that this time around conservatives won’t be caught flat-footed like they were in 2016.

The conservative think tank has produced a transition project ever since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980. But Heritage says this effort stands out in terms of level of involvement and vigor.

“We’re really starting ahead of time,” Paul Dans, director of Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project,said in an interview late last year. “We’re looking to bring new blood to Washington."

the effort has been something of a pet project for Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who took over in fall 2021 after five years leading the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a nonprofit backed by GOP donors and oil money.

“I would describe it as an obsession,” said a former Heritage employee who was granted anonymity to speak freely about his former workplace. “It is one of the main priorities of senior leadership.”

The revved-up effort from Heritage comes as the venerable think tank, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last week, has struggled in recent years through leadership changes and staff turmoil.

Roberts came on after complaints from conservatives like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson over the leadership of Kay Coles James, who stepped down amid the criticism. And in the post-Trump era, several new organizations are now competing on policy turf once dominated by Heritage.

The transition project also seems to be a way to regain stature for Heritage and distinguish itself from those competitors, some outside observers interviewed for this story said.

The project has three pillars. One involves creating something of a “conservative LinkedIn” to ensure hundreds of political appointees are primed to immediately descend on federal agencies should a Republican prevail in 2024. The second involves training videos for those appointees about how to serve in an administration.

And the third part creates a policy playbook with input from more than 400 outside conservative contributors and nearly 50 member organizations that meet monthly — if not more often in an informal setting. The idea is to hammer out ideological differences, including about whether or not to support Ukraine aid.

Conservatives say they learned a lesson from President Joe Biden, who managed to staff up nearly a thousand political posts within hours of his inauguration. Many of those picks came from the Obama alumni network.

In contrast, in 2017, Republicans had trouble filling positions in the new Trump administration. Trump wound up bringing in few people with real government experience.

Dans, a former top official at Trump’s Office of Personnel Management, likened the early approach to “preseason scrimmaging.”

He said the group plans to release their policy playbook this spring. “This is not the end-all, but we are getting enough people in the room to say this is the majority” opinion on certain policies, Dans said.

Heritage said it is still finalizing policies it would recommend to an incoming GOP president, but a spokesperson pointed to a 2020 white paper from the group that is something of a free-market wish list.

Its recommendations includeending all energy-related tax credits and subsidies, eliminating all loan guarantees, ending the renewable fuel standard, spinning off environmental reviews to the states, expanding leasing on federal lands, repealing new source review, and ending the social cost of carbon.

Competition on the right

Nearly a dozen conservative policy experts and advocates interviewed for this story, who were all granted anonymity to speak candidly, alluded to the growing influence of Heritage Action.

It is the separate lobbying arm of the organization that churns out newsletters describing critical race theory and the investing strategy known as environmental, social and governance as “woke left attacks.”

Heritage has also been highly critical of big technology companies and has called for big cuts to defense spending, echoing calls on the far right.

Last week, Heritage announced that Carlson, who has dabbled in white nationalist theories, will be the keynote speaker for its 50th anniversary gala in April.

Roberts praised him as a “fearless American who is unafraid to challenge the Washington regime.”

Heritage’s lurch toward populism has been raising eyebrows among some.

“Heritage will have to decide whether it wants to stick with its conservative principles or evolve to more nationalist-type of policies,” one conservative policy advocate said.

Divisions at Heritage are illustrative of larger tensions within the Republican Party, observers noted.

One hypothesized that the transition project was in part a way for Heritage to regain some stature. Others noted it is not entirely unusual for think tanks to be at odds with their lobbying arms.

When asked about the influence of Heritage Action, Rob Bluey, vice president of communications, said the partnership between Heritage and its campaign arm is “even stronger today under Jessica Anderson’s leadership.”

“Heritage Action advocates for the American people in Washington, D.C., and state capitals based on the principles espoused by The Heritage Foundation,” he said.

A second conservative policy advocate thought it was unusual how far in advance Heritage launched the 2025 project, which has already been underway for more than a year.

“That’s something you don’t usually see in Washington, D.C.,” the advocate said.

He thought that could sideline the organization’s efforts to conduct rigorous oversight of the Biden administration for the next two years.

“It’s just interesting that Heritage is willing to take on a project that won’t have any impact until 2025,” the person said.

The conservative landscape changed in the Trump era, and in recent years a number of conservative policy shops popped up, like the Center for Renewing America led by Russ Vought, the former White House budget director. The Center for Renewing America sits on the project’s advisory board.

In recent years, several dozen staffers left the 275-person foundation, news which was first reported in September by the conservative-leaning Dispatch.

A Heritage spokesperson did not refute turnover but said the organization also brought on 90 new hires in all of 2022 — the year after Roberts took over.

“His optimistic vision and always-on-offense approach to policymaking are helping us build an exceptional team,” said Bluey. “As a result, Heritage experienced tremendous growth in 2022, proudly welcoming many talented policy experts and outstanding conservative leaders to the organization.”

‘Brainwashing our kids’

One of those new hires is Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a longtime economist who joined last August as the director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment. She worked at both the Transportation and Treasury departments under the Trump administration. Before that she spent nine years as a director at the Manhattan Institute, a think tank.

At a January forum held at Heritage, Furchtgott-Roth complained to Rep. Kevin Hern, the chair of the Republican Study Committee from oil-and-gas rich Oklahoma, about how decarbonization efforts from the Biden administration were, as she put it, “completely changing the American way of life.” She wondered how Republicans planned to “fight back an area that they are brainwashing our kids about.”

Replied Hern: “Well, I’m from Oklahoma, next question.” The crowd laughed.

In a recent interview, Furchtgott-Roth espoused familiar GOP energy views promoting all-of-the-above energy sources.

But another observer noticed more “red-meat critiquing” from her shop. A recent article she wrote suggested Biden favored clean energy merely to boost Chinese markets after reports surfaced that the Penn Biden Center received Chinese donations.

Similarly, one of her first events at the organization featured authorsJerome Corsi and Marc Morano— both reject mainstream climate science — to speak on a panel about “The Politics of Climate Change.”

“This is not as much an economics question but a political question, and that’s why we are so glad to have these two authors with us today,” Furchtgott-Roth said in opening remarks.

Corsi suggested climate advocates adopted the term “climate change” “because they know global warming cannot be true.” He rejected the idea carbon dioxide contributes to extreme weather like hurricanes. “It’s completely a lie,” he said.

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Heritage Foundation and its vice president, Roger Severino, are praising the Supreme Court’s decision last week favoring the First Amendment rights of a Colorado business owner and designer over the Equal Protection rights of the LGBTQ community as a “victory for tolerance.”

Heritage, the once-vaunted right-wing think tank that has melded into pro-Trump MAGA right-wing extremism, just weeks ago attacked President Joe Biden and his historic White House Pride Month celebration, declaring: “The ‘Pride Flag’ does not represent anything good and it certainly does not represent America. It should have never disgraced the South Portico of the White House.”

Now it is using the Supreme Court decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis to continue its anti-LGBTQ attack.

“The LGBT Left says they just want to live like everybody else. That’s a lie,” Heritage on Monday wrote. “If you don’t compromise your beliefs and kowtow to their demands, they’ll make an enemy out of you.The 303 Creative decision rejects their efforts to make Americans pledge allegiance to their flag.”

Roger Severino is a former Trump administration official who served as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights. He used that position as a sword to attack the LGBTQ community.

READ MORE: ‘Treacherous March of Normalization’: ABC News Slammed for ‘Puff Piece’ Profile on Moms for Liberty

In 2019, Severino was the Trump administration’s top official behind a new regulation offering special religious rights to medical providers while harming LGBT people.

“Patients want doctors who match their values,” he said, defending the policy, which would allow medical professionals to deny service to anyone for reasons of conscience.

In 2020, Severino, as The New York Times reported, “finalized a regulation that will erase protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies, a move announced on the four-year anniversary of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando and in the middle of Pride Month.”

In an interview with Newsmaxposted on Monday, Severino called the Supreme Court ruling in 303 Creative v. Elenis, “a tremendous victory for free speech and tolerance and pluralism.”

“The Supreme Court opinion focused a lot on West Virginia v. Barnette, which is a case from World War II,” Severino said. “That said Americans cannot be forced to pledge allegiance to the flag. Now this opinion elaborated and essentially saying, you can’t force Americans to pledge allegiance to the pride flag as well.”

There is no indication anyone of any authority has ever tried to “force Americans to pledge allegiance to the pride flag.”

Watch below or at this link.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/15/us/politics/trump-indictment-justice-department.html?smid=tw-share

deep state BS imp prez reboot // ctr renewing am

The most powerful conservative think tanks are working on plans that would go far beyond “reforming” the F.B.I., even though its Senate-confirmed directors in the modern era have all been Republicans. They want to rip it up and start again.

“The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation,a mainstay of the conservative movement since the Reagan years. He added, “Small-ball reforms that increase accountability within the F.B.I. fail to meet the moment. The F.B.I. must be rebuilt from the ground up — reforming it in its current state is impossible.”

{{  ===

https://podtail.com/en/podcast/drilled/the-anti-esg-campaign-gets-a-boost-from-raga/

no lnx

The Anti-ESG Campaign Gets a Boost from RAGA - Transcripts

June 13, 2023

Ever since the Securities and Exchange Commission announced its intention to make Environmental Social and Governance metrics actually mean something to investors, polluting industries have suddenly turned on ESG. Now that fight has a legal strategy, being carried out by the Republican Attorneys General Association.

Transcript: https://www.steno.ai/drilled/the-anti-esg-campaign-gets-a-boost-from-raga

Hello and welcome back to Drilled, I'm Amy Westervelt. We've talked before on this show about the growing backlash against taking environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, factors into consideration when it comes to investing. The watchdog group Documented first revealed last year that state treasurers were getting in on the action, kicking woke investment firms likeBlackRock out of their states. Back then I wondered when the attorneys general would show up to join the fray, and now sure enough, they are here. The Republican Attorneys General Association, RAGA, our old favorite, has come to play in the anti-ESG space. But first, a quick reminder, why all this upset about ESG all of a sudden in the first place? Good question. For a really long time, oil companies actually kind of loved ESG. It was all very loose and self-reported, and it gave them a way to unlock so-called green capital. But in 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, looked around and went, huh, there are all these different SEG ratings, and some of them seem a little scammy, and no one knows what these disclosures even really mean. These are the kinds of things it's our job to clean up. So we are going to provide formal guidance on climate risk disclosure.

And that is when you start to see corporate interests, fossil fuel companies, and right-wing politicians lose their minds over ESG. Because all of a sudden, they couldn't just write whatever they wanted to in a report, they might have to actually disclose what their real climate risks are.

Speaker 5  00:02:16

Here is Jesse Coleman withDocumented. I think that a lot of this, both the legislative side, this legal strategy, the strategy of using state treasurers to pressure asset managers into attack climate disclosure, all of this is really mostly aimed at SEC scope three emissions disclosure requirements coming, you know, supposedly coming soon

Speaker 4  00:02:43

in the next couple of months, even. Wait, sorry, I'm gonna pause to define scope three. That means how your product's actually being used, not how you're making it, which is a big deal for especially heavy polluting industries

Speaker 5  00:02:58

like oil and gas companies, for example. Yeah, yeah, it's a really big deal. Whereas ESG, having a non-standardized ESG disclosure is no big deal to a major company. The SEC coming and saying, how much carbon emissions are you really responsible for? Not just, you know, what you're claiming you're responsible for, but if you're an oil company, for example, how much carbon are you actually putting in the atmosphere from everything that you've gotten from underground? What is your real impact? And that is a really big deal. It's probably one of the biggest climate policy issues in play right now. So, you know, in my opinion, a lot of this anti-ESG stuff, which doesn't make a lot of sense on its face, you know, these state bills that have passed in some states and been introduced in a ton of states, the actual thing that those bills are gonna do, they're not gonna have a really big impact. And sort of this antitrust stuff is very similar in the sense that, you know, the claims are kind of weak and it's hard to say exactly what the impact is gonna be specifically. But at the same time, it's building up all of this pressure and it's building up all of this political inertia that is all aimed at opposing, disclosing climate emissions. And that's what this SEC rule would do when it comes out, is that it would require publicly traded companies to disclose those emissions.

So, you know, in my opinion,

that's the real goal, is to keep that from happening. You may have heard Jesse mention there the words antitrust. That is where the Republican Attorney's General Association comes into the picture. Back in June, 2021, a guy named Jason Isaac, who spearheads the Texas Public Policy Foundation's work on energy, went to a meeting of theAmerican Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, with an idea for a legal strategy that he thought could take ESG down.

Speaker 7  00:05:04

Documented shared audio from that meeting with us.:

Yes, so earlier, a couple months ago,our state affairs committee voted nine to nothing. So, broad bipartisan support, every single member voted in support to give the committee subpoena authority.

So, they have sent out a couple months ago,

our state some paper documents to find out where this collusion is happening. We anticipate truckloads of documents being delivered. And so, we look forward to the Texas Public Policy Foundation to going through those meticulously, because we believe that there is, and we actually partner withC. Boyden Gray, Boyden Gray Associates law firm out of Washington, D.C.

Corporate collusion, liability risk for the ESG agenda to charge higher fees and rig the market. We believe that there's antitrust violations. This is really kind of geared towards our attorneys generalto lay the foundation for antitrust violations on this corporate collusion. Find out the connections with the Glasgow Financial Alliance for net zero, which has over, I think, $100 trillion under managed assets in there. And there are the connections with the glad zero, this Paris Accord, which is net zero. So, I hope our committee gets a ton of paper bac

from these large financial institutions.

Hope our committee gets in the courts and our attorneys generalaround the country filed antitrust violations.

So, yeah, cartels colluding for decarbonization.What the hell is he talking about here?We're gonna try to answer that question right after this quick break. And we're back. So, after COP26 in Glasgow, insurers and asset managers, both formed groups focused on ESG. In both cases, these firms were saying, look, all sorts of environmental and social factors can impact our bottom line, and we would like to know what those risks might be so we can factor that into our decision-making around what to ensure and what to invest in. But according to Isaac, these firms talking to each other, issuing joint statements about what kind of information they'd like to see from companies, that's colluding to rig the market. In the wake of that 2021 ALEC meeting you heard Isaac talking at before, not only did Texas continue with the investigation Isaac mentioned, but Arizona Attorney General, Mark Bernovich, opened an investigation into ESG investing. And Raga coordinated a letter to various asset managers and politicians with more than a dozen attorneys general signed on, stating their concern that ESG investing might actually be an antitrust violation.

Speaker 5  00:08:13

Here's Jesse Coleman again. We started to see some of the bright lights of the Republican Attorneys General Association file various kinds of legal attacks on ESG issues, whether that's going directly after asset managers and asking them questions about their net zero commitments, or that's going directly after ratings agencies

Speaker 4  00:08:38

and saying that you're boycotting fossil fuels. And they seem to have coalesced around this idea of painting ESG as some sort of corporate collusion, you know, building an antitrust case. Can you explain what the thinking is there,

what they're trying to prove?

The allegation is that a lot of large asset managers get together in a shadowy cabal and they plan to collude to reduce carbon emissions. The reason these groups are alleging antitrust violations is that antitrust violations are very scary to companies. If a jury finds you guilty of an antitrust violation, it's very expensive. And it's a pretty hard bar to meet. And most experts are saying that the antitrust allegations that are coming from these people that are opposing climate policy, they probably don't have a leg to stand on, but a lot like slap suits and other kinds of legal tools that are used to silence people, just defending against the antitrust allegation is very, very expensive. So, you know, you see companies really backing away from participation in these kind of global groups that are trying to address climate emissions and trying to address investment

10:08

in the fossil fuel industry by large asset managers. In 2022, Alec once again held a meeting with a session on how to handle ESG at the state level. And again, the antitrust strategy was front and center. This time, Isaac was in the room cheering on new proponents of the strategy, including Will Hild with Consumers Research, which is funded by former Federalist Society President Leonard Leo, Paul Watkins, who used to work in the Arizona Attorney General's office and now runs an outfit called Fusion Law, advising on these sorts of strategies. Andy Puzder, former CEO of the Food Conglomerate that is home to Wendy's and Hardee's, and Catherine Gonzalez with the Heritage Foundation. Puzder kicked things off by comparing ESG investors

to, not kidding here, the Nazis. I wanna tell you, ESG investing is socialism in sheep's clothing. I mean, this is the challenge of your generation. My father's generation's challenge was the Nazis, who, by the way, were, of course, very proud socialists. The challenge of my generation was the communists, who were, of course, very committed socialists. The challenge of your generation is ESG investing, and it's more insidious than communism or the Nazis. It's the thing they're doing it. So ESG, Environmental Social and Governance. Like, how bad could that be, right? It sounds so innocuous, but it's a ruse. It's a ruse to conceal the fact that it's a direct threat to our founding principles.

11:53

It's a threat to our democracy. How bad could that be, right?

It's a threat to our democracy.

Speaker 6  00:12:02

Hild and Watkins kept it focused on the litigation strategy. They get in rooms and they talk about they're gonna set a policy across the market. Now, it's been a while since I was in law school,

but when I was there, that was antitrust 101. And that's why you see U.S. senators saying this is potentially criminal antitrust liability.

Speaker 4  00:12:22

You see AG saying that they're going to investigate. And again,I have yet to speak with a single legal expert who thinks that this strategy could actually win in court. But like we said before, that is not necessarily the point. It's already having a chilling effect on investment firms and insurance companies in these net zero groups. And now that Republicans have control of the House, it's the focus of a series of oversight committee hearings too. The first one happened back in May and featured the attorneys general of Utah and Alabama as witnesses.

Speaker 1  00:13:00

Here'sSean Reyes, attorney general of Utah. But ever since the signing of the Paris Agreement, there's been anopen conspiracy to bypass Congress using the power of horizontal agreements by key players in our financial system. Some of these groups are Climate Action 100, the Glasgow Alliance for Net Zero, which include the largest asset managers, banks and insurance companies globally. These horizontal organizations seek to use their collective market power over tens of trillions in assets

to force burdensome changes on American companies.

amy: The Democrats witnessed during this hearing, Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs gave a great and completely non-climate related example

of where ESG can safeguard profits. The more data we as investors have, the better informed our decisions are when selecting investments over the long term. ESG is about looking at a wider range of risks and value opportunities that could have a material financial impact on investment performance. For example, if you're investing in apharmaceutical company, it's thinking about whether that company has exposure to massive lawsuits because of its role in the opioid epidemic. Our approach is to integrate material ESG factors into investment decisions along with many other considerations. We are not ignoring traditional financial factors like profitability and credit worthiness. We are integrating more data into our decisions

to give us a better idea of risk and growth prospects. Frerichs also pointed out that limiting the information investors can get about the companies they're investing in

is the exact opposite of a free market idea. This pushback is anti-free market and anti-investor. It is misleading and it is harmful. It harms retirement savers, pensioners, working people, businesses, and it harms America. This coordinated campaign is focused on ESG investing. Most people don't know what ESG is. ESG is data. ESG is simply additional information that investment professionals use to assess risk and return prospects. It is about value, not about values. In order to maximize returns, an investor must be able to manage and mitigate risk. The more data we as investors have, the better informed our decisions are when selecting investments over the long term. ESG is about looking at a wider range of risks and value opportunities.

It could have a material financial impact

on investment performance. Last week, the House Oversight Committee held its second hearing on this subject,

calling on none other than Jason Isaac himself to testify. I'm Jason Isaac. I'm the director of LifePowered, a national initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation to raise America's energy IQ. And I live a high carbon lifestyle. And I think the rest of the world should too. That's why I refer to the ESG agenda as the China ESG agenda. It does very little to help Americans. It does everything to help the Chinese Communist Party. And again, making energy expensive, scarce and government controlled. This body, the United States Congress has not ratified the Paris Treaty. It is not the law of the land here in the United States, butto force an American entrepreneur to admit that his company will comply with that

is just mind blowing to me.

Whether the committee will hold a third hearing remains to be seen. I'm not sure the anti-ESG bench of experts rolls that deep. Plus, while these ideas might get folks at an ALEC meeting riled up, they're remarkably unpopular with American voters, including the majority of Republican voters. New Mexico rep Melanie Stansberry

made that point at last week's hearing. What I find particularly strange about this conversation is that over 63% of American voters actually oppose, directly oppose, any kind of government interference in investing strategies. And the vast majority of Republicans oppose it as well. And when you look at the bigger picture, when you look at what the American people are actually asking Congress to do, asking businesses in the private sector to do, almost 70% of Americans are in support of actions to address climate change,

to transition to a clean energy economy. Whether the SEC will be swayed by the antitrust argument remains to be seen.

That's it for this week. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. Drilled is an original critical frequency production. Our producer is Sarah Ventre. Sound design, mixing, and mastering are by Peter Duff, who also wrote our original score. Our first amendment attorney is James Wheatman at the First Amendment Project. And the show is reported, written, and hosted by me, Amy Westervelt.

==}}

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the Heritage Foundation, a massively funded right-wing “think tank” that currently functions as a marketing and political enforcement arm of the MAGA movement, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week. A line-up of Republican politicians addressed the group Thursday, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will speak Friday. The celebration will culminate in a Friday evening keynote address by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which may tell you everything you need to know about the intellectual seriousness and integrity of Heritage as it turns 50.

Heritage was founded by right-wing corporate and foundation funders as one of the movement-building investments that followed future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo calling for corporate America to fund a multifaceted response to what he described as an attack on the free enterprise system in education, the media, and the courts. Heritage made a big splash with its “Mandate for Leadership,” a right-wing policy wish list that became the governing agenda for the Ronald Reagan administration.

A pillar of the conservative wing of the Republican establishment for decades, Heritage has moved aggressively toward the far right over the past decade, shedding conservative scholars in favor of ideological warriors in its rush to align itself with the party’s Tea Party wing. During the Obama administration, and especially under the leadership of former Sen. Jim DeMint, Heritage favored obstructionism over governing, pressuring Republicans to shut down the government in an attempt to crush the Affordable Care Act.

During the Trump era, Heritage was all-in for the former reality star turned president, filling his transition team and administration with appointees and helping fill the courts with judges who could be counted on to advance the political agendas of the GOP’s hard right. Much of its updated “Mandate for Leadership”—including massive tax cuts heavily favoring the wealthiest Americans—became Trump policy.

Since Trump’s defeat, Heritage’s MAGAfication has continued. In 2022, Heritage’s president, Kay Cole James, left to work for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and was replaced by Kevin Roberts, “a Texas firebrand more determined to fight pandemic restrictions, critical race theory in schools, and ‘teaching transgenderism to kindergartners,’” in the words of the Washington Post. Roberts, now competing for right-wing funding with newer Trump-aligned organizations like the Center for Renewing America, can be heard on Fox denouncing “woke corporations.”

In his speech opening this week’s celebrations, Roberts said the 2024 election “may be our last, best chance to rescue this nation from a woke, socialist left bent on its destruction.” He portrayed the governmental response to the COVID-19 crisis as “tyranny” and mocked “non-vaccine vaccines” and “useless masks.” He declared that there must be no bargaining with the “woke left” and asserted that “dismantling the woke and weaponized Administrative State” is a matter of national survival.

Today, Heritage and Heritage Action are part of the dishonest and harmful right-wing campaign against public schools and school boards. A Heritage ebook about **critical race theory** suggests that systemic racism does not exist in the United States because racial discrimination is illegal, a ridiculous claim akin to suggesting that illicit drugs cannot be a problem in the U.S. due to their being illicit.

Heritage is also leading the “2025 Presidential Transition Project,” a coalition of Christian nationalist, voter suppressing, anti-LGBTQ, anti-government, Big Lie-promoting, and Trump-cheerleading groups to “position the movement to take the reins of government” after what they hope will be Trump’s return to power—or the election of another Republican in 2024. Under Heritage’s leadership, the coalition is pushing for mass firings of federal employees to “dismantle the deep state that undermined Trump.”

As Heritage celebrates its 50th anniversary, Right Wing Watch offers this brief and admittedly non-comprehensive look at some of the ways this powerful institution works to make the U.S. less democratic, free, and equal.

Making American Less Equal

Heritage has opposed virtually every advance toward legal equality for LGBTQ Americans and portrayed those advances as dire threats. Immediately after the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling in 2015, Heritage promoted a plan to overturn it. Heritage’s role in the far right’s current war on the rights of trans people includes model legislation that exposes the right’s hypocrisy in claiming to act on behalf of “parents’ rights” while undermining parents who affirm their trans kids.

Making America Less Welcoming

Heritage brags that it played a leading role to “crush” bipartisan immigration reform in 2007. Heritage founder Ed Fuelner backed Trump’s controversial claim that he could use an executive order to eliminate the birthright citizenship guarantee of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In a 2017 email, Fuelner called birthright citizenship “just another form of amnesty” and claimed (wrongly and contrary to Supreme Court precedent) that Congress could eliminate it simply by passing a resolution. Heritage infamously published a report making bogus claims about immigrants’ cost to society, written by a fellow who had argued in a previous paper that immigration policy should take into consideration that Hispanic people have lower IQs than white people.

Making America Less Free

Heritage backed the long right-wing campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs and Republicans taking a House majority that same year, Heritage called for anti-choice lawmakers to “go on offense,” calling on Congress to “restrict or prohibit” the availability of abortion medication by mail and telemedicine.

Making America Less Democratic

Heritage has aggressively promoted bogus election-fraud claims as justification for states to pass more restrictive voting laws. Heritage Fellow Hans von Spakovsky, a longtime promoter of debunked claims about voting fraud, was a member of Trump’s short-lived sham “election integrity” commission to which he urged that no Democrats or moderate Republicans be appointed. (The commission shut down a short time later after failing to find any instances of widespread fraud.) Von Spakvosky also denounced a 2021 federal voting rights bill—the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—as “an invasion of state sovereignty.” In 2018, a federal judge slammed von Spakovsky for making “myriad misleading statements” about purported voting by noncitizens.

Making America Less Just

Heritage played a key role in the long right-wing campaign to take dominion over the Supreme Court and federal judiciary. Heritage Action helped identify and then promote Trump’s Supreme Court nominees; it called Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination “our chance to secure the Supreme Court for decades to come.” Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s current president, has said that the hard-right court majority cemented with Trump’s justices “could open new avenues of constitutional entrepreneurism.”

Making America Less Safe

Heritage has pushed to limit the ability of the federal government to regulate corporate behavior in ways that protect workers, consumers, communities, and the environment. In his address to Heritage on Thursday, Sen. Mike Lee argued that regulation by federal agencies is contrary to the Constitution and amounts to “tyranny.” Heritage aggressively opposed the Affordable Health Care Act and the expansion of Medicaid, both of which have granted millions of Americans access to health care. Heritage officials have also pushed climate change denialism, ignoring the plight of Americans facing extreme weather and climate change in favor of energy companies’ bottom line.

Deep Pockets

Heritage has plenty of resources to bring to its aggressive plans to steer America’s future course far to the right. In 2021, its revenue topped $100 million and its net assets $367 million.And that’s not counting the resources of the mini-Heritage Foundations that make up the State Policy Network and push similar agendas at the state level.

Such funding, partnered with red-state Republicans aggressively pushing Heritage’s agenda into law all around the country, helps explain Roberts’ optimism that Heritage will triumph in this “existential” struggle. “The left started this new culture war,” he declared at Thursday’s celebration. “We will finish it.”

Tags: Ed Feulner Kevin Roberts Ron DeSantis Tucker Carlson Election 2024 Heritage Foundation

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three of the most prominent rightwing groups which spread election denial lies and advocate for restrictions on voting rights in the US 

have joined forces in a secret attempt to woo top election officials in Republican-controlled states.

Led by the Washington-based conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, the groups have created an incubator of policies that would restrict access to the ballot box and amplify false claims that fraud is rampant in American elections. The unstated yet implicit goal is to dampen Democratic turnout and help Republican candidates to victory.

Details of the two-day “secretaries of state conference” held in Washington in February were obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian.

Officials from 13 Republican-controlled states, including 10 top election administrators, participated in the event. Attendees discussed controversial “election integrity” ideas of the sort weaponized by Donald Trump.

Among the participants were nine secretaries of state and Virginia’s election commissioner, all of whom preside over both statewide and federal elections in their states including next year’s presidential contest. A list of attendees namechecks the chief election officials of Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

Documented also obtained the conference agenda which lists a number of Trump associates among the speakers. They include Ken Cuccinelli who, as acting deputy secretary for homeland security, played a key role in setting elections policy for the Trump administration.

Cuccinelli now runs the Election Transparency Initiative which is fighting Democratic efforts in Congress to shore up voting rights, and has been active in pushing state-level vote restriction measures.

Heritage Foundation Secretaries of State Conference Agenda, obtained by Documented.

The keynote speech was given by Ken Blackwell,former secretary of state in Ohio. He was an early adopter of Trump’s lie about rigged elections, championing the idea in the 2016 presidential race which Trump won.

Blackwell now chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute,a rightwing thinktank led by former Trump officials. The center has been touting election-related model legislation.

Heritage was careful to organize the conference amid tight secrecy. Among the records obtained by Documented is an email from Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the foundation who leads their election work.

Responding to a query about the event from a Texas official, Von Spakovsky said: “There is no livestream. This is not a public event. It is a private, confidential meeting of the secretaries. I would rather you not send out a press release about it.”

Email to Texas Senator Paul Bettencourt's staff from Hans von Spakovsky, obtained by Documented

Von Spakovsky has long been at the forefront of efforts to undermine US elections by claiming falsely that fraud is endemic. He helped spearhead the attack on voting by mail during the pandemic, holding private briefings with Republican state election officials – a drive that became a core part of Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Heritage and its political arm, Heritage Action for America, have spent tens of millions of dollars promoting their own model bills that impose strict restrictions on voting. They have targeted the investment on key battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan that could hold the balance of power in the 2024 presidential race.

Heritage began hosting annual gatherings of Republican secretaries of state at the start of the Trump presidency in 2017. February’s in-person conference was the first to be sponsored by three rightwing powerhouses of election denial and voter suppression – Heritage, together with the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), and the Honest Elections Project (HEP).

Pilf is a conservative legal group that sues election officials to force them to purge voter rolls, a process that has affected eligible US voters. The group is led by J Christian Adams, a former justice department lawyer who tried to use the Voting Rights Act to claim voting discrimination against white people.

Trump’s former lawyer Cleta Mitchell also sits on the Pilf board.

HEP is a conservative dark-money group closely tied to the Republican operative Leonard Leo who was instrumental in engineering the current conservative supermajority on the US supreme court. Reporting by ProPublica and the New York Times last year revealed that Leo has received control of a staggering $1.6bn to advance rightwing causes.

Concern about the potential of top election officials to subvert democracy intensified during the 2022 midterm elections when a number of individuals committed to Trump’s stolen election lie also ran for office. They formed the “America First Secretary of State Coalition” which became a conduit of far-right conspiracy theories linked to QAnon.

Most of those candidates failed in their bid to take over the reins of election administration in their states. But the Heritage conference suggests that the desire to deploy Republican secretaries of state as channels of voter suppression and election misinformation remains very much alive.

Though chief election officials are tasked with ensuring that ballots are fair and impartial, the Heritage conference was attended only by Republican secretaries of state.

The Guardian asked Heritage to explain why its conference was held in secret and with only Republican attendees. The group did not answer those questions.

Von Spakovsky said that the event was an “educational summit intended to provide information on current issues in elections and ensure that our election process protects the right to vote for American citizens by making it easy to vote and hard to cheat”.

He disputed the argument that security measures at the ballot box such as voter ID suppressed turnout. “The claim that secure elections somehow promote greater restrictions is outrageous and has been clearly disproven,” he said.

Von Spakovsky also pointed to Heritage’s election fraud database, which he said sampled “proven instances of election fraud from across the country”. The database records 1,422 “proven instances of voter fraud” stretching back to 1982 – a 41-year period during which billions of votes have been cast in the US.

Several of the participants at the conference have election denial and voter suppression track records. They include Florida’s secretary of state, Cord Byrd,who, soon after beingappointed by Governor Ron DeSantis last spring, refused to say whether Joe Biden had wonthe 2020 presidential election.

Byrd runs Florida’s “election integrity unit” that was set up by DeSantis last year to investigate election crimes, even though there is scant evidence of substantial voter fraud. More than a dozen citizens accused of illegally voting have been arrested at gunpointunder DeSantis’s crackdown on supposed voter fraud.

Another attendee – Jay Ashcroft, secretary of state of Missouri – has been a leading proponent of that state’s new restrictive voting law. His office has been named in numerous lawsuits in the last year for imposing extreme constraints on voter registration, including a recent lawsuit accusing Ashcroft of illegally blocking a ballot measure.

Tennessee’s secretary of state, Tre Hargett, another listed participant, has been accused by Democratic leaders in Tennessee of purging thousands of voters from the official rolls.

Panel discussions laid out in the agenda were held on several of the core talking points of the current Republican party. The opening discussion, moderated by Von Spakovsky, was on “Auditing Expertise”.

The main speaker was Paul Bettencourt, a state senator in Texas who has sponsored several bills making it harder to vote including a measure that would deploy armed “election marshals” to oversee polling stations.

Before the conference-goers attended a cocktail reception and dinner held at an upscale restaurant in downtown Washington, day one ended with a session entitled: “Realistic Eric Fixes and Reforms”. Eric – the Electronic Registration Information Center – is a non-profit group run collectively by 28 states which is used to finesse the accuracy of state voter rolls.

In recent months it has become the target of rightwing conspiracy theories fueled by Trump who claimed falsely that it was rigged to benefit Democrats.

Ashcroft, the Missouri secretary of state, was one of the speakers in that session. Earlier this month he announced that he was pulling Missouri out of Eric, making it one of the first Republican-controlled states to quit the organization along with Alabama, Florida and West Virginia.

A guest post by

Ed Pilkington

Ed Pilkington is chief reporter of the Guardian in the US

https://www.mediamatters.org/glenn-beck/glenn-becks-radio-show-heritage-foundation-president-celebrates-his-plan-eliminate

GLENN BECK (HOST): So, let me re-ask, Kevin, just to clarify. I'm talking about things like shutting down the Department of Education.

KEVIN ROBERTS (GUEST): Yes.

BECK: Are you guys talking about those kinds of things?

ROBERTS: Oh, we're not just talking about it. We have the plan. In fact, literally sitting on my desk is the draft of that plan. And I'll be doing -- reading through that today. And so, let me be really, really blunt. We will eliminate the Department of Education piece by piece, block by block. It has to be part of the next administration in the first term. We also, as I know is a big interest of yours, going to up end the Department of Justice. And our plan for the Federal Bureau of Investigation is to select-all delete and start from scratch.

BECK: Wow.

ROBERTS: That gives you a sense of the vigor of this plan.

BECK: So, is this going to be something that will be able to be adopted, and talked about and given to people so they can say, hold the president, whoever it's going to be accountable and say, we want you to do this if you win?

ROBERTS: Absolutely. In fact, Glenn, historically, what Heritage and the conservative movement have done is issue this plan sometime after Election Day --

BECK: Yeah.

ROBERTS: Which is -- which. I mean, it was better than nothing, but --

BECK: Right.

ROBERTS: We're two years ahead. And so, the very reason that we're issuing this plan or parts of the plan in April of this year is precisely so that two things can happen. Number one, Americans, everyday Americans can be part of this and talking about it, asking people who want to be their elected officials about it. But secondly, to the heart of your question, when we start having debates among the Republican presidential aspirants, they're talking about that plan. It -- the plan becomes the very reason that we, as Republicans, will nominate someone.

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/13/heritage-foundation-voter-suppression-lobbying-election-action-plan

guk

tax filings reveal advocacy arm of Heritage Foundation spent $5m on lobbying in 2021 to block voting rights in battleground states

Brendan Fischer and Ed Pilkington

Fri 13 Jan 2023

The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative thinktank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states.

Previously unreported 2021 tax filings from Heritage Action for America, which operates as the foundation’s activist wing, shows that it spent $5.1m on contracting outside lobbying services. The outlay comes on top of $560,000 the group invested in its own in-house federal lobbying efforts that year, as well as registered lobbying by Heritage Action staffers in at least 24 states.

The 990 tax filing was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian. It points to the pivotal role that Heritage Action is increasingly playing in shaping the rules that govern US democracy.

The efforts help explain the unprecedented tidal wave of restrictive voting laws that spread across Republican-controlled states in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.The Brennan Center reported that more voter suppression laws were passed in 2021 than in any year since it began monitoring voting legislation more than a decade ago.

The expenditures also signal a dramatic increase in Heritage Action’s advocacy activities. In 2020, Heritage Action had reported no spending at all on outside lobbying.

[An attendee at the Poor People's Campaign march on Washington on 18 June 2022.

Republicans filed record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022 – report

Read more[

Heritage Action, whose board includes the Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, is set up as a 501(c)4 under the US tax code which exempts it from paying federal taxes. It operates as a “dark money” group, avoiding disclosing the sources of its total annual revenue of over $18m.

In the past two years the organization through its public messaging has echoed Donald Trump’s lie that US elections are marked by rampant fraud. A private plan prepared by Heritage Action last year set out a two-year, $24m “election integrity” strategy.

The plan, obtained by Documented, proposed a two-pronged approach that would work to block moves by Democrats in Congress to bolster voting rights while at the same time pressing Republican-controlled states to impose restrictions on access to the ballot box. It said: “Where Democrats hold power, we must defend against bad policy. Where conservatives and our allies are in power, we must advance changes that protect the lawful votes of Americans.”

The Heritage Action plan, which was first reported by the New York Times, is being published by the Guardian for the first time [docs]

Part of Heritage Action’s two-year strategy is to promote what it calls “model election laws”, focusing initially on eight battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin. In a private meeting with donors in Tucson, Arizona, in 2021, the group’s executive director, Jessica Anderson, boasted about the role Heritage Action had played in pressing Republican-controlled legislatures to impose strict restrictions on voting, including limits on mail-in voting and early voting days.

In a video of that meeting obtained by Documented, Anderson told the donors that the group acted “quickly and quietly”, bragging that “honestly nobody noticed” their behind-the-scenes influence. Heritage Action staff have registered to lobby in at least two dozen states.

[Voting rights in 2023: what are the key issues for US democracy?

Read more]

The laser-like focus on key swing states like Georgia appears to have had an impact. The New York Times found that one-third of the 68 voting bills filed in Georgia in 2021 contained policy measures and language that aligned closely with proposals from Heritage Action.

The group has publicly claimed that it had a hand in advancing 11 voting bills in at least eight states in 2021, though in some cases legislation was passed in only one chamber or went on to be vetoed by the state’s governor.

Heritage Foundation, under the auspices of its elections supremo Hans von Spakovsky, curates an “election fraud database”. It claims to expose the errors, omissions and mistakes made by election officials, but it presents incomplete and misleading information and underscores how exceptionally rare fraud is within the US system.

Its records stretch back 40 years, a period in which billions of votes have been cast. Yet the database records only 1,402 “proven instances of voter fraud” – a “molecular fraction” of votes cast nationwide, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The newly disclosed tax filings also show that Heritage Action ramped up its spending on advertising as it sought to influence lawmakers and the public around its controversial voting agenda. In 2021, the organization reported paying $6.1m to outside contractors for “marketing and advertising” – a sharp rise from $1.8m the previous year.

Among the top contractors employed by Heritage Action was CRC Advisors, the consulting firm tied to Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society who is best known for his decades-long campaign to pack federal courts with rightwing judges. CRC Advisors was paid over $797,000 for “marketing and advertising” in 2021.

Some of that ad spending was targeted in Georgia. After that state’s 2021 restrictive voting law caused a backlash from businesses and led Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado, Heritage Action spent nearly $1m on TV ads defending the law aired on CNBC and local TV stations.

[Conservative donors pour ‘dark money’ into case that could upend US voting law

Read more

The group also spent nearly $500,000 on Georgia TV and digital ads during the MLB All-Star Game,and spent at least $700,000 more on ads supporting the Georgia bill’s passage.

On the federal level, Heritage Action also ran ads in West Virginia, Arizona, Montana and New Hampshire urging the Democratic senators in those states tooppose reforming the filibuster to pass democracy reform legislation with a simple majority. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Anderson said of potential filibuster changes at the April 2021 donor summit.

Heritage Action was formed in 2010 out of the rightwing policy empire embodied in the Heritage Foundation, which dates back to 1973. The foundation was created by Paul Weyrich, a richly networked conservative who wanted to inculcate small government, anti-regulation ideology at both federal and state level.

From the start, restricting access to voting was a core part of Weyrich’s mission. In 1980 he infamously articulated his thinking by saying: “I don’t want everybody to vote … Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. Brendan Fischer is a campaign finance specialist with Documented

===

DIRTY TRICKS

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/16/democratic-strategists-launch-war-room-00065498

group of top Democratic strategists are launching a multi-million-dollar hub to counter an expected investigative onslaught by the likely incoming House GOP majority — digging into President Joe Biden, his administration and his son, on top of potential Cabinet impeachments.

The newly relaunchedCongressional Integrity Project initiative, details of which were shared first with POLITICO, will include rapid response teams, investigative researchers, pollsters and eventually a paid media campaign to put congressional Republicans “squarely on the defense,” founder Kyle Herrig said in an interview.

It’s designed to serve as the party’s “leading war room” to push back on House Republican investigations, Herrig said in an interview. He added that the project would “investigate the investigators, expose their political motivations and the monied special interests supporting their work, and hold them accountable for ignoring the urgent priorities of all Americans in order to smear Joe Biden and do the political bidding of Trump and MAGA Republicans." [vid]

a team of researchers has already begun scouring public records, press clippings and other documents in a bid to immediately undercut House GOP leaders, from Minority Leader — now speakership hopeful — Kevin McCarthy to the likely committee chairs expected to manage probes of Biden and his network.

The House GOP views investigations as a key piece of its agenda for the next Congress once it takes the narrow majority that’s now expected, particularly as much of its legislative wish list is on track to stall thanks to the Senate filibuster and Democratic president. McCarthy has privately talked with committee chairs-in-waiting to coordinate plans, making the swift launch of the outside-group pushback plan a potential godsend to Democrats.

Democratic leadership on the Hill has been briefed about the project’s relaunch, according to a person familiar with its plans.

Brad Woodhouse, a longtime Democratic strategist who is part of the project’s new leadership team, called the House GOP’s looming investigations a “vendetta” after two impeachments of and investigations into former President Donald Trump while Democrats controlled Congress, including the bipartisan select committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The project “will exploit every tactic available,” Woodhouse said, adding: “It’s not enough to wait and see what they’re going to do and how far they’re going to go.”

Republicans wouldn’t formally take the House until January, but its leaders are already vowing to cut a broad investigative swath. As McCarthy put it during his conference’s recent agenda rollout: “Every committee has responsibilities for oversight.”

“They’ve virtually outlined no substantive agenda for governing,” Herrig said of House Republicans. “This is what they’re going to do ... so you really need a concentrated effort that’s doing this every day.”

In addition to Herrig and Woodhouse, the project’s leadership team will include Leslie Dach, a well-known Democratic communications specialist who has led progressive organizations for decades, served in the Obama administration and advised the Biden administration’s pandemic response.

In a sign of the important role the initiative will play over the next two years — and its proximity to the White House — other senior advisers include Jeff Peck, a former Biden aide during the president’s time in the Senate who served as treasurer and vice chair of the Biden Foundation as well as a senior adviser to the Biden-Harris transition.

The Congressional Integrity Project leadership team will include Leslie Dach, a well-known Democratic communications specialist who has led progressive organizations for decades. | Brian Stukes/Getty Images for Protect Our Care

For the final two years of Biden’s term, Republicans will be aided in their oversight push by a coalition of outside conservative research groups that have already mapped out potential targets and started digging into issues ranging from Hunter Biden’s business dealings to immigration policy.

And GOP lawmakers have left their own investigative breadcrumbs that make it clear where they intend to go. Likely Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) will lead the Hunter Biden investigation, with Republicans already preparing to elevate the probe to Joe Biden although no evidence has publicly emerged that his decisions were affected by his son’s business dealings. Comer recently told POLITICO that he and likely Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) would provide a public update this week.

Jordan, meanwhile, is preparing to use the gavel he’s poised to take for conduct a sweeping investigation into the Justice Department and FBI, two frequent targets of Trump’s ire. That probe is likely to touch on everything from the search at Mar-a-Lago for classified documents to tracking threats against local school officials, which the GOP slams as an effort to target parents despite denials from the bureau. [vid]

other GOP areas of interest include the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Ukraine aid and a coronavirus probe that is likely to sweep up longtime public health adviser Anthony Fauci.

McCarthy and his allies are under pressure from their base and some members of their own conference to pair their investigations with impeachment articles; some in the party are clearly itching for payback after then-President Trump was impeached twice. Though impeaching Biden is likely a heavy lift — and a step that McCarthy isn’t endorsing for now — Republicans see Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a more likely target for attempted removal from office.

congressional Democrats and others close to the administration view Republicans’ vows to investigate Mayorkas’ department and the border as the latest sign that they aren’t serious about trying to pass immigration legislation. And they slam Republican investigative plans writ large as thinly veiled attempts to help Trump, pointing to Jordan’s public remarks earlier this year that characterized GOP probes as helping “frame up the 2024 race.”

The Congressional Integrity Project is also aiming to raise funds for a paid media campaign, including dedicated websites, digital ads, mobile billboards, newspaper ads and, occasionally, TV ad buys. Its public opinion research will be shared with like-minded organizations and congressional allies to contrast GOP investigations with issues the American public cares most about, project leaders said.

Their goal is to prevent a repeat of the 2016 presidential campaign when Republicans also controlled the House and created a select committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. That GOP select panel ended up zeroing in on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she prepared to ascend to the Democratic nomination, culminating in an 11-hour grilling of Clinton.

Republicans’ two-year Benghazi investigation spent $7 million in taxpayer money and dogged Clinton on the campaign trail before finally producing an 800-page report that didn’t focus on the former secretary of state.

Then-Majority Leader McCarthy quipped in 2015 to Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the Benghazi committee had successfully driven down Clinton’s poll numbers. “He took a lot of crap for it, but in the end, it was true” that the investigation hurt Clinton politically, recalled Woodhouse.

Rather, Democrats hope the flood of investigations will lead to a repeat of the 1998 midterm elections, held amid the GOP push to impeach then-President Bill Clinton. Voter backlash against that move helped Democrats defy historical trends in House races that favor the party that doesn’t occupy the White House gaining seats.

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axios

gop Republican congressional aides huddled this month with conservative think-tank leaders on Maryland's Eastern Shore to hone tactics and messaging for Biden administration probes, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: If the GOP wins control in the midterms, leaders want to kick off high-profile investigations as soon as the new Congress is seated. Republicans plan to draw on investigative power from allies across Washington.

Details: The retreat was hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Partnership Institute and the American Accountability Foundation, a nonprofit run by Trump administration alumni that's dogged Biden nominees with independent investigative work.

The big picture: With unified Democratic control in D.C., Republicans have been limited in their efforts to wield Congress' probative powers around high-profile issues such as a southern border immigration surge, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and economic shocks that threaten a U.S. recession.

Behind the scenes: Over two days, congressional aides at the retreat got briefings from prominent conservative activists and organizations on a host of investigative tactics.

What they're saying: "We are pleased we brought together senior staff and leading outside researchers to focus on enhancing oversight skills, particularly since we're expecting increased oversight opportunities in the future," Jones said in an emailed statement.

Howell, who leads Heritage's Oversight Project, t0ld Axios the goal of the event was to ensure congressional staff members are equipped to kick-start investigations as soon as the new Congress is gaveled in.

Between the lines: The event provides a glimpse of where Republicans see potentially fruitful oversight avenues.

Republican oversight won't be confined to federal agencies or the White House, Howell said.

an maya 1 23

For nearly half a century, billionaire Charles Koch has quietly _{funded, initiated, and supported}_ efforts to _{dismantle democracy}_ in the United States, two professors wrote for Progressive Magazine.

Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe distinguished professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and Lisa Graves, executive director of _{True North Research}_ and a co-creator of the websites Koch Exposed and Koch Docs, detailed a seemingly never-ending list of ways one of the richest people in the world and his wealthy allies continue to “divide the American electorate.”

The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has long been funded by Koch and his late brother, David, has strategized on ways to enforce voter suppression efforts by passing voter ID laws – which began when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.

READ MORE:_{**How Koch Industries is fighting democracy both 'at home and abroad': journalist**}_

Last year, the Center for Media and Democracy, for which Graves sits on the board, found that a handful of Koch-backed groups collectively _{spent more than $1 billion}_ on the 2020 election.

One of the organizations, Americans for Prosperity, spent around $70 million leading up to the 2022 midterms, involving itself in over 450 races on efforts that heavily targeted swing voters.

Soon after the election, Koch released *Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World*, a book in which he claimed he was ready for “a final act building bridges across political divides.” No more political involvement. MacLean and Graves noted that a few days prior to the book release, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake.”

The book even contained phrases like, “Boy, did we screw up.” “What a mess!” “This is crazy! Are we going to have a civil war?” He had convinced the public that his time toying with democracy was over.

READ MORE:_{**Charles Koch must be held accountable for his climate disinformation campaign**}_

But, MacLean and Graves said that “mainstream news editors seemed to forget that” they were reporting on “a specialist in strategic disinformation, who had perfected the practice of deceiving the public during his network’s three decades of climate change denial” – a mastermind of finesse.

Even with that, what Maclean and Graves call Koch’s “most diabolical” move thus far, is how he bandwagoned the “white supremacist” reaction to nationwide civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, by initiating a campaign that geared fear-mongering language towards the idea of teaching race in schools – also known as critical race theory.

The Koch network proceeded to fund organizations that actively fought against CRT, although a spokesperson from a Koch-funded group claims that is untrue.

Two examples of Kock-backed anti-CRT initiatives include ALEC’s financial support of a workshop titled “Against Critical Theory’s Onslaught,” featuring the main figurehead of anti-CRT rhetoric, Christopher Rufo in 2020; and when a coalition of Koch-funded groups including the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation advocated against the idea of teaching race in schools in a published letter.

READ MORE:_{**'That's oligarchy': Bernie Sanders batters billionaires over election spending**}_

Aside from funding organizations that promote anti-CRT language, Koch also funds Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), which work in tandem to promote anti-trans language. For example, the groups created a “Women’s Bill of Rights” which asserts that trans women are not women.

MacLean and Graves wrote, “Just as Koch-funded operations weaponize and intensify racism to secure political power, they also exploit and escalate misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia by any means to boost Republican power.”

Despite his claim that he was removing himself from politics two years ago, it’s clear that with the success of a majority conservative Supreme Court, the continued push to control the bodies of women; anti-CRT, anti-trans, and other discriminatory laws that Koch’s behind-the-scenes funding and staunch support of those who can bring he and his allies' vision of a fully dismantled democracy to life presses on.

READ MORE:_{**Koch keeps doing business in Russia as top journalist says family fortune came from Hitler: report**}_

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/heritage-foundation/

no lnx twt vid

Conservative think tank pays $1.3 million to air anti-LGBTQ ad during Thanksgiving weekend

Daniel Villarreal and The New Civil Rights Movement November 24, 2022

The Heritage Foundation, an anti-LGBTQ think tank, is reportedly spending $1.3 to air an anti-LGBTQ ad on TV and online during Thanksgiving weekend.

The ad seeks to turn public sentiment against The Respect for Marriage Act, a bill that would require U.S. states to legally recognize same-sex marriage.

The bill would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the 1996 law that prohibited federal government recognition of same-sex marriages. The act requires federal and state governments to recognize same-sex marriages that occur in states that provide them. Any state that refuses can be sued by the married same-sex couples.

The Heritage Foundation’s ad disingenuously says that the bill would “expose religious schools and nonprofits to lawsuits and attacks from the IRS just because they believe in traditional marriage.”

“Before Republicans can take over the U.S. House, liberals are hurrying to cram through their far-left agenda,” the ad adds. “[Politicians in Washington D.C.] think you won’t stop this attack on people of faith.”

The 30-second ad will air in local broadcasts during the NFL Thanksgiving Day matchups between the New England Patriots and Minnesota Vikings, Buffalo Bills and Detroit Lions, and New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys. The ad will also be seen during coverage of four rival college football games, including Iowa Hawkeyes vs. Nebraska Cornhuskers on Friday and Indiana Hoosiers and Purdue Boilermakers on Saturday,” Fox News reported.

The ad directs people to visit the foundation’s website. One of its articles admits that discriminating against same-sex couples is similar to racist discrimination. It also admits that it wants to protect this right to discriminate.

As proof that the bill would harm religious individuals and organizations, the article mentions legal challenges against businesses that refused to provide services to same-sex couples. But these legal challenges predate the bill and occurred, not because of the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing marriages, but because the individuals involved violated state anti-discrimination protections.

Rather than informing the public, the ad is really meant to compel voters to call their Republican senators to get them to oppose the bill. Twelve Republican senators already voted in favor of furthering the bill towards a full vote.The vote is expected to occur after Thanksgiving. If these 12 senators all vote in favor of the bill, it’ll become law barely a month before Republicans gain a House majority.

Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee recently introduced an amendment to the bill that would specifically provide an exception for religious groups and individuals to discriminate. He and 20 other Republican senators signed a letter asking the 12 Republicans who supported the law to withdraw their support.

However, a revised version of the bill submitted earlier this month added a section that pledged to uphold all federal “religious liberty and conscience protections.” No individual or group will be forced to “solemnize” same-sex marriages nor will the legislation threaten any individual or group’s tax-exempt status, the revised bill states.

Watch above or at this link.

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/heritage-foundations-new-model-legislation-combines-attacks-on-trans-youth-and-public-education/

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badash AN 9 22

**Heritage Foundation** is ranked as the third most influential think tank – left or right – in the U.S. A right-wing D.C. organization, it’s where Donald Trump went to deliver a speech in April when he was trying to reposition himself as someone who was getting ready to run for president again, this time with “policies.”

Policies are what once made the Heritage Foundation the jewel of the conservative movement. It provided Ronald Reagan with the backbone of his body of work that transformed the American right into what it was until Trump took it over. It’s now home to at least four former top Trump administration officials, including former Vice President Mike Pence.

Critics on both sides of the aisle overnight were stunned and outraged when the new head of the Heritage Foundation, Dr. Kevin Roberts, applauded Italy’s election this weekend of a fascist, Giorgia Meloni, to be its new prime minister.

READ MORE: [How Trump’s Big Lie Is Threatening the Future of Elections

“Italy’s far-right coalition led by Meloni wins election, exit polls say,” is the headline at European news agency France 24, calling her a “neo-fascist.

Here in the U.S., ABC News’ headline reads: “How a party of neo-fascist roots won big in Italy.”

“A century after Benito Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, which brought the fascist dictator to power, Meloni is poised to lead Italy’s first far-right-led government since World War II and Italy’s first woman premier,” the article, from the Associated Press makes clear.

It also makes clear Meloni’s fascist focus: “Yes to the natural family. No to the LGBT lobby. Yes to sexual identity. No to gender ideology,” the AP says she “thundered” at a rally.

The Heritage Foundation has assets of around $400 million. Its latest annual report, 2021, is titled, “Always on Offense.” The cover boasts a flattering quote praising the organization from former Trump Secretary of State and possible 2024 presidential hopeful Mike Pompeo.

Dr. Kevin Roberts leads Heritage. He’s the former CEO of the far-right wing Texas Public Policy Foundation, based in Austin, Texas.

READ MORE: Critics Blast Top US Conservative Think Tank President for Applauding Italy’s Election of a ‘Neo-Fascist’ Prime Minister

TPPF has received funding from Koch Industries, is a big supporter of school vouchers, and an even bigger supporter of climate change denialism.

Its Fueling Freedom Project, it says, is working to “Explain the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels.”

Back in 2016 Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott proposed nine major changes to the U.S. Constitution. He chose to make his announcement at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Those proposals could have led to the elimination of many federal LGBTQ protections, including same-sex marriage.

Dr. Roberts is a former president of Wyoming Catholic College. In 2015 he decided to opt out of accepting federal financial aid, citing the school’s religious beliefs against LGBTQ people as part of the reason.

“Roberts said that his university loves all people and has charity towards all, but they would have problems with the admissions and employment of transgender individuals or people with a same-sex sexual orientation,” Fox News reported at the time.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that Roberts celebrated Italy’s election of a fascist leader with a strong anti-LGBTQ agenda Sunday evening – urging conservatives to fuel more elections of people like Meloni.

“If exit polls are right, then conservatives will come to power in Italy, just weeks after conservatives in Sweden won,” he tweeted, glossing over the fascistic aspects of their conservatism.

“This can be a trend,” he urged, “conservatives everywhere need to define the choice as what it is—US vs THEM, everyday people vs globalist elites, who’ve shown they hate us.”

[twt]

roberts was highly criticized, even by fellow conservatives.

Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic who is the popular and now retired U.S. Naval War College professor and an expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security, blasted Roberts.

READ MORE: Watch: Torba Warns GOP to Not ‘Disavow or Condemn Us’ Because ‘Christian Nationalists Are the Republican Party’

“The president of a DC think tank explains how he’s just a regular guy helping the little people against the globalists, and not all aligned with a political movement that trades in hateful rhetoric,” tweeted Nichols, a Never Trump conservative.

Former Bloomberg Opinion columnist Noah Smith who writes about economics at Substack mocked Roberts.

“‘Globalist elites’? Man, you have a PhD and you’re the president of a think tank that fights for free trade. Who do you think you’re kidding??” he tweeted.

Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the right wing Manhattan Institute, slammed Roberts’ remarks.

“I’d just like a party that stands for free markets, less government, originalist judges, strong defense, and against woke excess. Count me out with this Pat Buchanan-style tinfoil hat populism,” he tweeted, referring to the far-right anti-immigration former Nixon-Ford-Reagan advisor.

A former editor for the right wing Cato Institute also criticized Roberts.

“When the president of your think tank is cheering on the electoral victories of actual fascism, that’s probably a sign it’s time to resign from the organization if you’re an employee, or pull your dollars if you’re a donor. American conservatism mustn’t continue down this path,” warned Aaron Ross Powell.

“Recovering libertarian” writer and editor Jay Stooksberry also mocked Roberts.

“Careful, Kev. If I saw somebody with the title ‘Ph.D. and CEO of one of the largest, most influential think tanks in D.C.’, I’d assume they were one of the ‘global elite’. Us-versus-them populism is some raunchy, anti-intellectual, and dangerous thinking, my dude.”

Conservatives weren’t the only ones criticizing the Heritage Foundation head, with some seeing his “globalist elites” remarks as antisemitic.

“American fascists, crawling out of their holes,” wrote Jay Bookman, author and award-winning journalist.

“We see you and your cutesy code words. You want to embrace fascism? We will stop you and your ilk. Our democracy will destroy your fascism,” David Sugarman, an Oregon attorney, wrote.

Writer and director David Avallone did not mince words in response to Roberts’ remarks.

“L’Shanah Tovah, you absolute fucking Nazi scumbag,” he tweeted. “Stop being a pants shitting coward. Just say ‘Jews’ when you mean Jews.”

an 9 22

For Americans who are old enough to remember the Cold War and the Reagan era, it is ironic that some of today’s MAGA Republicans aren’t shy about openly expressing their admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin — even during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This admiration for Putin, liberal New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman noted in a scathing column published on September 12, has been expressed by everyone from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to the leader of the MAGA movement: former President Donald Trump. In that column, Krugman argued that praising Putin’s authoritarianism fits right in with the “MAGA ethos.”

But liberals and progressives certainly aren’t the only ones who have been calling out the pro-Putin attitudes in the MAGA movement. More than a few Never Trump conservatives have been slamming Putin’s MAGA sympathizers, including veteran columnist Mona Charen. In an article published by The Bulwark on September 14, Charen lambasts “pro-Putin, pro-authoritarian” Republicans as the “new useful idiots.”

“At the moment when freedom-loving people around the world are elated, if on tenterhooks, at the progress of Ukrainian forces in pushing back the Russian invaders, Heritage Action, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has joined with other self-styled conservative groups to oppose helping Ukraine fight for its life,” laments the 65-year-old Charen, who was a speechwriter for First Lady Nancy Reagan during the 1980s. “I know, I know, the Trumpification of the GOP has been a fact for six years, and yet, this heel turn is remarkable. It’s as if People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals announced that they support puppy mills for medical research.”

READ MORE: Why Ukraine’s victories are a humiliation for 'MAGA tough guys': Paul Krugman

Charen adds, “Responding to President Biden’s request that Congress appropriate another $13.7 billion to help the Ukrainians cope with energy price hikes and other security needs, Heritage Action urged a no vote, railing that ‘These funding requests ignore the concerns of the American people.’”

The conservative journalist/author points out that “pro-Putin” Republicans are also likely to be admirers of far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“The pro-Putin, pro-authoritarian voices in the GOP are not yet a majority — about a quarter of House Republicans and 11 of 50 Senators voted against the $40 billion aid package for Ukraine in May — but they’re not a small minority either, and the wind is at their backs,” Charen explains. “CPAC has all but canonized Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orbán, and in the first hours after Putin rolled into Ukraine, Trump reveled in the murderer’s ‘savvy’ and ‘genius.’ The 2022 election could bring more authoritarian-friendly Republicans to Congress, and meanwhile, hatcheries of conservative orthodoxy like Fox News and The Federalist are doing the spade work of persuading the base that Kremlin propaganda is more trustworthy —pravda, if you will — than the New York Times.”

Charen continues, “Just two weeks ago, Tucker Carlson, Putin’s favorite American broadcaster — clips from his show are routinely featured on Russian state TV — told viewers that Biden’s steadfast support of Ukraine was absurd…. It was bad enough to excuse Putin before February 24 on the risible grounds that he represented some sort of Christian champion (against the) scourge of wokeness. But after? That a spokesman for a so-called ‘conservative’ TV network can cheer the rape of a free country — Carlson has said he ‘roots’ for Russia to win — is not just morally depraved, it violates the basic tenets of what used to be conservatism.”

READ MORE:**Libertarian writer slams MAGA Republicans' ‘creepy’ affection for Viktor Orbán**

Charen also calls out two Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidates — Blake Masters in Arizona and “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance in Ohio — for their indifference to the invasion of Ukraine.

“The vapidity of this new ‘conservatism’ is bottomless,” Charen writes. “They haven’t bothered to consider that brutal aggression by a larger against a smaller state invites a Hobbesian international disorder in which no one is safe….

Putin’s Russia differs from the USSR in ideology, but in repression and rapacity, it is comparable. And it’s scarcely believable that the ‘useful idiots’ who make excuses for it today — who actually root for its success — are ‘conservatives.’”

READ MORE:**CPAC official melts down over Joe Biden's 'semi-fascist' label despite its embrace of Viktor Orbán**

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not sure it's action

omg

:{https://www.nytimes.com:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{/2022/08/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{05/climate/republican-treasurers-climate-change.html:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

no lnx

How Republicans Are ‘Weaponizing’ Public Office Against Climate Action

A Times investigation revealed a coordinated effort by state treasurers to use government muscle and public funds to punish companies trying to reduce greenhouse gases.

Riley Moore stands in an office wearing a dark suit jacket unbuttoned with a white collared shirt without a tie. On the walls hang portraits of presidents and other officials.

Riley Moore, the West Virginia treasurer, announced last week that several major banks would be barred from government contracts with his state.Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times

By David Gelles

Gelles reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents and emails while reporting for this article.

Aug. 5, 2022

Nearly two dozen Republican state treasurers around the country are working to thwart climate action on state and federal levels, fighting regulations that would make clear the economic risks posed by a warming world, lobbying against climate-minded nominees to key federal posts and using the tax dollars they control to punish companies that want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the past year, treasurers in nearly half the United States have been coordinating tactics and talking points, meeting in private and cheering each other in public as part of a well-funded campaign to protect the fossil fuel companies that bolster their local economies.

Last week, Riley Moore, the treasurer of West Virginia, announced that several major banks — including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo— would be barred from government contracts with his state because they are reducing their investments in coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

Mr. Moore and the treasurers of Louisiana and Arkansas have pulled more than $700 million out of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment manager, over objections that the firm is too focused on environmental issues. At the same time, the treasurers of Utah and Idaho are pressuring the private sector to drop climate action and other causes they label as “woke.”

And treasurers from Pennsylvania, Arizona and Oklahoma joined a larger campaign to thwart the nominations of federal regulators who wanted to require that banks, funds and companies disclose the financial risks posed by a warming planet.

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At the nexus of these efforts is the State Financial Officers Foundation, a little-known nonprofit organization based in Shawnee, Kan., that once focused on cybersecurity, borrowing costs and managing debt loads, among other routine issues.

Then President Biden took office, promising to speed the country’s transition away from oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet.

The foundation began pushing Republican state treasurers, who are mostly elected officials and who are responsible for managing their state’s finances, to use their power to promote oil and gas interests and to stymie Mr. Biden’s climate agenda, records show.

The New York Times reviewed thousands of pages of internal emails and documents obtained through public records requests by Documented, a watchdog group, that shed light on the treasurers’ efforts since January 2021.

At conferences, on weekly calls, and with a steady stream of emails, the foundation hosted representatives from the oil industry and funneled research and talking points from conservative groups to the state treasurers, who have channeled the private groups’ goals into public policy.

The Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute and the American Petroleum Institute are among the conservative groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry that have been working with the State Financial Officers Foundation and the treasurers to shape their national strategy.

Many Democratic state treasurers support efforts to combat climate change and want banks and investment firms to be clear about risks posed to returns for retirees and others.Democratic lawmakers in California and New Jersey are working on legislation that would require their state pension systems to divest from fossil fuels.But Democrats have not mounted anything like the national campaign being orchestrated by the State Financial Officers Foundation.

The Republican treasurers skirt the fact that global warming is an economic menace that is damaging industries like agriculture and causing extreme weather that devastates communities and costs taxpayers billions in recovery and rebuilding. Instead, they frame efforts to reduce emissions as a threat to employment and revenue, and have turned climate science into another front in the culture wars.

“This is a departure from their traditional roles,” said Robert Butkin, the former Oklahoma treasurer and a professor at the University of Tulsa. “There used to be a strong nonpartisan and bipartisan ethic among treasurers, but you’ve seen a lot of that erode over the past several years.”

‘Politically motivated’

In November, as major banks and corporations at a global summit in Glasgow were promising to take climate action, the Republican state treasurers were huddling at a State Financial Officers Foundationconference in Orlando, Fla., talking about ways to stop them.

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At the meeting, the group’s chief executive, Derek Kreifels, made a presentation about a new law that had been signed by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican. It prohibited state agencies from investing in businesses that have cut ties with fossil fuel companies.

The Biden Administration’s Environmental Agenda

President Biden is pushing stronger regulations, but faces a narrow path to achieving his goals in the fight against global warming.

[Long-Sought Climate Action: After decades of failed attempts, Congress is on the cusp of passing the nation’s first major climate law. The bill avoided the political pitfalls of past legislative attempts by offering only incentives to cut climate pollution, not taxes.

Extreme Heat: President Biden said that he would expand existing federal programs to help Americans cope with the extreme heat wrought by climate change, stopping short of declaring a national emergency.

Supreme Court Ruling: By limiting the Environmental Protection agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions, the court made it much harder for the president to achieve his climate goals.]

Within weeks, Mr. Moore was working with legislators in West Virginia to write a similar bill, which became law in March. While Texas officials have been slow to enforce their law, Mr. Moore was quick to put it into action.

Last week, he notified five major financial institutions — Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley — that they are barred from doing business with West Virginia because they have intentionally wound down their dealings with coal companies.

“If a bank, for instance, decides to say they have a no-lending policy as relates to thermal coal, well, then we’ll find a bank that doesn’t have that policy,” Mr. Moore said in an interview.

Mr. Moore went on to offer a classic denial of the overwhelming scientific consensus that the continued burning of oil, gas and coal will lead to planetary catastrophe.

“The climate has been changing in the world since Earth was created,” Mr. Moore said. “Whether these greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to the warming of the globe, I’m not sure I necessarily agree with that.”

The banks targeted by Mr. Moore say they are not boycotting the fossil fuel industry. All of them still do substantial business with oil and gas companies, but in the long run, they say, moving away from fossil fuels makes economic sense. West Virginia, for example, is the second-largest coal-producing state in the country, but production has declined significantly during the past two decades.

“He’s trying to counter pressure that’s coming from progressives on the left,” said Loren Allen, general counsel of the West Virginia Bankers Association, which lobbied against the new law celebrated by Mr. Moore. “Our banks are tied up in the center of a battle that no one can really win.”

Mr. Kreifels declined an interview but said in a statement that concerns over issues like climate change were “putting politics over profits, and likely reducing shareholder value.”

Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma have passed similar laws this year.“Kentucky joins our growing coalition of states that have taken concrete steps to push back against the woke capitalists who are trying to destroy our energy industries,” Mr. Moore said in a news release praising the moves by the states.

Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen other states, including New York, Oregon and Virginia, are trying to advance similar legislation.

The laws could cost taxpayers. A recent study found that Texas cities, where some financial institutions have voluntarily left the market because of laws targeting companies that embrace environmental, social and governance priorities, collectively known as E.S.G., are likely to incur up to $532 million in higher interest costs in less than a year because of the legislation.

“These officials are using the public finance market to make political statements,” said Daniel Garrett, a finance professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the study. “They can use these laws as a carrot or stick as they desire, but the costs can be potentially quite large.”

The treasurers are increasingly going after individual financial institutions.

In addition to the banks targeted by Mr. Moore, the treasurers of Utah and Idaho are criticizing plans by S&P Global, the ratings agency, to integrate climate risk into its credit ratings of states. And BlackRock, which manages some $8.5 trillion, has been the target of withering attacks for its stance on environmental issues.

Larry Fink, the BlackRock chief executive, has been outspoken in his desire to steer away from fossil fuels and toward what he considers a more sustainable, greener economy.

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“Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change,” Mr. Fink wrote in a public letter in 2020 in which he described the integration of climate risk into investment decisions as “a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

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In response, Mr. Moore’s office stopped using BlackRock to help manage West Virginia’s operating funds, withdrawing about $20 million.

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“Larry Fink has stated it very clearly that he thinks capitalism has the power to shape society,” Mr. Moore said. “But my state doesn’t want the same shape of society that Larry Fink does.”

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Other treasurers followed suit. In March, the Arkansas treasurer, Dennis Milligan, pulled $125 million from BlackRock. And in April, the treasurer of Louisiana, John Schroder, emailed Mr. Moore and Marlo Oaks, the Utah treasurer, and boasted about withdrawing more than $600 million from BlackRock accounts. Mr. Schroder said he had also blocked Citibank, Bank of America and JPMorgan from almost $1 billion in bond financing.

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“That’s excellent, John!!!” Mr. Moore replied, according to emails reviewed by The Times. “Great work!!!”

BlackRock declined to comment.

Mr. Milligan, the Arkansas treasurer, emailed a statement in which he said, “I feel a strong sense of responsibility to do my part in not allowing the liberal ‘woke’ agenda to disadvantage the very people I was elected to serve.” Mr. Schroder and Mr. Oaks declined requests for interviews.

Withdrawals by a few states represent a tiny slice of BlackRock’s business. But inside banks and investment firms, there is mounting concern that the state bans could spread to pension funds, which account for nearly $4 trillion in investments across the country.

“We already have a lot of divisions in this country,” said Noah Friend, the former general counsel for the Kentucky treasurer. “I don’t like the idea that if you’re a Republican you have to bank with this company and if you’re a Democrat you have to bank with that company. Everything becomes this politicized decision about who you do business with.”

‘A coordinated attack’

Julie Ellsworth, the Idaho treasurer, asked the State Financial Officers Foundation to distribute a memo that misrepresented the position of banks on environmental, social and governance issues.]

Behind the treasurers and the State Financial Officers Foundation is a complex web of conservative groups linked to the fossil fuel industry, as well as some of the biggest names on Wall Street.

In March, Julie Ellsworth, the Idaho treasurer, asked Mr. Kreifels to distribute a memo about the fossil fuel boycott bills to other state treasurers, according to the emails.

The memo had been prepared using research from the Heartland Institute, a think tank with a history of denying climate science, and it misrepresented how banks and other financial institutions were implementing their E.S.G. strategies.

“If you’re a small-business owner with a gasoline powered car, you’re eventually going to be phased out of banks’ portfolios, unless you switch to electric vehicles, of course,” the memo said in a section about how banks would use E.S.G. to force businesses to change. “Similarly, if you want to buy a house in the future that runs on natural gas, you, too, won’t be able to get a mortgage until you put solar panels on the roof.”

No banks have proposed such measures. Ms. Ellsworth declined to comment.

The Heartland Institute has also worked to amplify the treasurers’ message and connect them with influential conservative media personalities including Glenn Beck, records show.

Other groups supporting the treasurers’ efforts include the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has long opposed action to combat climate change and that has received substantial funding from the oil billionaires Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch.

The State Financial Officers Foundation this year hired CRC Advisors, a conservative strategy firm that was founded by Leonard Leo, who has led a multiyear effort to stack federal courts with judges who oppose climate action. In recent months, CRC Advisors has helped coordinate media responses for treasurers, including Mr. Oaks of Utah, according to emails reviewed by The Times.

And the State Financial Officers Foundation shares many ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a conservative group with longstanding ties to the Koch brothers.

The American Legislative Exchange Council chief executive, Lisa Nelson, is on the State Financial Officers Foundation board, and ALEC’s chief economist, Jonathan Williams, is a senior policy adviser to the foundation.

Last July, the State Financial Officers Foundation hosted a conference in conjunction with ALEC, and the two groups have even shared blocks of discounted hotel rooms for their event. Mr. Moore and Mr. Kreifels were among the treasurers attending ALEC’s annual meeting in Atlanta last week.

“The State Financial Officers Foundation is a key node in a network of political groups waging a coordinated attack on climate policy,” said Jesse Coleman, a senior researcher at Documented, the watchdog organization that obtained the emails. The group is working “to weaponize state treasurers’ offices against federal appointees, regulations, and corporate policies that address climate change,” he said.

As a nonprofit organization, the State Financial Officers Foundation is not legally required to disclose its funders. A partial list of the organization’s financial supporters on its website shows that it gets funding from not only conservative groups but also from some of the biggest companies in the world, many of which say they are committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They include JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Visa, Mastercard, Fidelity, Federated Hermes and SAP — all of which have publicly embraced E.S.G. principles.

Most of the sponsors declined to comment, and many of their contributions were relatively small. In a statement, Beth Richek, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, acknowledged the bank’s support for the group. “While we may not agree with every position they take, our mutual engagement is important for our company, employees, and customers,” she said.

Blocking federal appointees

Saule Omarova, President Biden’s first nominee to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, withdrew after treasurers portrayed her as a “radical extremist.”Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times]

Mr. Biden came to office with a vision: the entire federal government would be focused on reducing the country’s emissions, with new rules implemented across federal agencies staffed by political appointees who embraced the effort.

Among the obstacles Mr. Biden didn’t anticipate were the state treasurers.

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An early sign of turbulence came in May 2021, when 15 treasurers sent a letter to John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s climate envoy, raising concerns about what they said was the administration’s hostility toward the oil and gas industry.

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“Reckless attacks on the fossil fuel industry ultimately cut off paychecks for workers and take food off the table for hard-working middle-class families,” the letter read.

By the end of the year, the treasurers were publicly lobbying against a bevy of proposed rules and nominees.

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Among their first targets was Saule Omarova, Mr. Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency. Ms. Omarova was heavily criticized by Republican senators, some moderate Democrats and the banking industry for her desire to limit speculative trading by banks and to open the Federal Reserve to retail banking.

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But she drew the ire of the treasurers for saying that if fossil fuel companies went bankrupt it would help fight climate change. The State Financial Officers Foundation issued a letter signed by more than 20 financial officers calling her a “radical extremist.”

When Ms. Omarova withdrew her nomination in December, Mr. Kreifels sent an email to the treasurers congratulating them. “It’s an honor to work along side you all,” he said in an email titled “VICTORY!”

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Two months later, the treasurers focused on another nominee: Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom Mr. Biden had nominated to be the Federal Reserve’s head of bank oversight. Ms. Raskin, a former Federal Reserve and Treasury official, has argued that financial regulators should police climate risks more diligently.

Mr. Kreifels urged the treasurers to speak out against Ms. Raskin, describing her as an “anti-energy climate change alarmist.”

In emails to state treasurers, the foundation provided draft tweets and other messaging strategies. “We must make as much noise about this as possible,” Mr. Kreifels wrote. “Make this THE ‘kitchen table’ issue in your state for the week.”

Like Ms. Omarova, Ms. Raskin withdrew her nomination. “Sarah was subject to baseless attacks from industry and conservative interest groups,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.

The treasurers have also set their sights on new federal rules and regulations intended to strengthen the government’s ability to act on climate change.

Late last year, the State Financial Officers Foundation worked with the Heritage Foundation to respond to proposals from the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a government panel assigned to minimize risk in the financial sector, on ways to reduce the threats posed by climate change, records show.

And soon after that, Mr. Oaks, the Utah treasurer, drafted a letter opposing a potential Department of Labor rule that would allow retirement plans to consider risks from global warming in their investment strategy. Mr. Kreifels distributed the draft to the foundation’s members, and more than a dozen treasurers signed the final letter. The Department of Labor has not decided whether to implement the rule.

This year, the treasurers targeted the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. After the agency proposed a rule to require banks to consider climate-related financial risk, executives from the Heritage Foundation sent Mr. Kreifels and Mr. Oaks a memo outlining their opposition. Within weeks, dozens of state treasurers and attorneys general from Republican-led states submitted comments objecting to the proposed rule.

“This special concern for and attention to climate-related risks is irrational,” one comment read.

And in May, Mr. Kreifels organized a call with the treasurers to discuss regulations proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission that would require companies to publicly disclose climate risks to investors. The featured guest was a representative from the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm of the fossil fuel industry.

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The next month, the State Financial Officers Foundation sent a 20-page letter signed by more than a dozen treasurers, calling the S.E.C.’s proposed rule, which has not yet been enacted, “irrational climate exceptionalism, elevating climate issues to a place of prominence in disclosures that they do not deserve.”

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wow

WAPO https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/24/republican-gop-pro-russia-pro-putin-ukraine-war-isolationism/

ukraine war

That brings us to the bad news: Isolationism — or is it Putinism? — remains disturbingly resilient within Republican ranks. In the Pew poll, more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats said that the United States is providing too much aid to Ukraine. Roughly a quarter of House Republicans and a fifth of Senate Republicans share that view. Some of the influential voices opposing aid to Ukraine include former president Donald Trump, Fox “News” host Tucker Carlson, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Heritage Action for America (the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation), and FreedomWorks (the Koch-supported advocacy organization).

origin? 2012 autopsy?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/demint-marks-a-new-sharper-edge-for-heritage-foundation/2012/12/06/

Politics

DeMint marks a new, sharper edge for Heritage Foundation

By Karen Tumulty and

Allen McDuffee

December 6, 2012

When the Heritage Foundation set up shop in a red-brick Capitol Hill townhouse more than three decades ago, it represented the cutting edge of conservative thought. Ronald Reagan himself once lauded it as “that feisty new kid on the conservative block.”

Now, as the think tank hands over its leadership to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a tea party icon known more for his confrontational political style than his policy chops, the question is whether Heritage can catch up to the movement it once helped lead.

The changing of the guard comes at a crucial moment, when conservatism itself is gripped by self-doubt and angst in the wake of back-to-back Republican presidential defeats.

“This organization is in a position to do more to save our country than any other organization I’m aware of,” DeMint told more than 200 Heritage staff members shortly after it was announced that he would succeed Edwin Feulner, who co-founded Heritage in 1973 and has served as president for the past 36 years.

“I believe that we have put together here the power, the muscle, the ideas to turn things around,” DeMint added.

What you need to know about Sen. Jim DeMint

View Photos

The GOP senator from South Carolina has announced his retirement to lead the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Measured in dollars, that muscle is enormous. According to Heritage’s financial report, the foundation brought in nearly $70 million last year.

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And Heritage remains deeply embedded in the DNA of the Republican establishment. Nearly half of the advisers to Mitt Romney’s presidential effort were former or current Heritage scholars — among them Lanhee Chen, the campaign’s policy director.}:

But the intellectualism that was once the Heritage hallmark has become somewhat suspect in an era in which the insurgent passion of the tea party sets the terms of political activism.

During the 2012 presidential campaign, for instance, Heritage was often cited as the originator of a concept that most conservatives now find heretical — the “individual mandate” in the Obama health-care law requiring people to buy insurance coverage if they do not receive it from their employers or government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Heritage had already begun to retool its brand for the tea party era by setting up a separate political and lobbying arm it called Heritage Action for America.

That activist effort has received mixed reviews. Many congressional Republicans were dismayed when it put out a scorecard dinging them for being insufficiently conservative for what the lawmakers regarded as relatively insignificant votes.

DeMint, on the other hand, scored a near-perfect 99 percent rating by Heritage Action — the highest of any senator.

The selection of DeMint to head the foundation “kind of moves Heritage firmly into the anti-establishment, conservative, populist side of the equation,” said Craig Shirley, a Reagan biographer. “It’s going to push that argument that the party needs to have with itself.”

In an interview, DeMint said that by taking the job, he was also taking a side in that argument.

:{“The election showed me that my party was not doing a good job and that we weren’t going to win another national election until we got control of our message,” DeMint said.

“We need to separate the conservative movement from the Republican Party,}:” he added. “We didn’t do a good job. It wasn’t a failure of conservative ideas; it was a failure of the Republican Party.”

Heritage is not the only conservative organization to face an identity crisis during this turbulent political season.

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Earlier this week, former House majority leader Richard K. Armey left the conservative tea party group FreedomWorks during an internal dispute over its future direction.}:

And in March, the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch filed a lawsuit seeking control of the libertarian Cato Institute, which they helped establish and fund.The legal dispute was resolved after Edward H. Crane, Cato co-founder and its only president since 1977, agreed to step down.

Though Feulner had long ago signaled his desire to relinquish the day-to-day operation of the Heritage Foundation, many had expected his successor to be David Addington, who had served as chief of staff to former vice president Richard B. Cheney and who had joined the foundation’s top ranks in May.

DeMint’s selection is likely to be popular with many of the foundation’s conservative financial backers, particularly the legions of small donors who contribute in response to its direct-mail solicitations. But it remains to be seen whether he has the temperament or connections required to manage many of its bigger benefactors.

“Bringing DeMint in makes more ideological sense than others, including David Addington,” said James McGann, director of the Think Tanks and Civil Society Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

“But that might not be best for Heritage in the long run,” McGann said. “Feulner has a long history of strong relations with Heritage donors, his senior staff and Washington political elite, and it’s not clear DeMint has those same qualities outside of his time in the Senate.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Karen Tumulty is a Washington Post columnist covering national politics. She joined The Post in 2010 from Time magazine and has also worked at the Los Angeles Times. Follow

Allen McDuffee writes about politics and policy and covered think tanks for The Washington Post from 2011 to 2013. He freelances and hosts a podcast at governmentality.net and is currently working on a book about the influence of think tanks in Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/magazine/trump-government-heritage-foundation-think-tank.html

How One Conservative Think Tank Is Stocking Trump’s Government

By placing its people throughout the administration, the Heritage Foundation has succeeded in furthering its right-wing agenda.

no lnx

By Jonathan Mahler

June 20, 2018

On the day after Thanksgiving in 2016, Ed Corrigan, then the vice president for policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation, was summoned to Trump Tower in New York to join the senior leadership team of the Trump transition. From inside the building where the climactic personnel decisions of “The Apprentice” were once taped, Corrigan oversaw the staffing of 10 different domestic agencies. Donald Trump, the former reality-TV star, was now the president-elect of the United States, and he had an administration to fill.

The job of staffing the government is the first, and in many ways defining, challenge faced by every president. As the size of the government has grown to accommodate the nation’s economy, frequent military interventions and increasingly complex geopolitical obligations, so have the scale and gravity of the task. In 1933, there were just over 200 presidential appointees in the executive and legislative branches. At the end of the Barack Obama’s second term, there were 4,100.

Filling enough of these jobs in time to get the government off the ground on Jan. 20 is difficult in the best of circumstances, which is to say when the president-elect has some sort of pre-existing political infrastructure to draw upon. Even Ronald Reagan, who, like Trump, campaigned as a Washington outsider, relied on both his inner circle from the California Statehouse and a kitchen cabinet of mostly self-made millionaires who helped finance his political rise. Trump would be coming to the White House with little more than the remnants of a campaign staff that included his daughter and son-in-law, a contestant from his reality-TV show and his longtime bodyguard. What is more, in the days after his election, Donald Trump replaced the head of his preliminary transition operation, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, with Vice President-elect Mike Pence and purged Christie’s allies from the team, throwing away months’ worth of their work recruiting and vetting personnel; a senior Trump aide, Stephen K. Bannon, made a show of gleefully dumping binders filled with résumés into the trash.

The Trump team may not have been prepared to staff the government, but the Heritage Foundation was. In the summer of 2014, a year before Trump even declared his candidacy, the right-wing think tank had started assembling a 3,000-name searchable database of trusted movement conservatives from around the country who were eager to serve in a post-Obama government. The initiative was called the Project to Restore America, a dog-whistle appeal to the so-called silent majority that foreshadowed Trump’s own campaign slogan.

In some ways, Trump and Heritage were an unlikely match. Trump had no personal connection to the think tank and had fared poorly on a “Presidential Platform Review” from its sister lobbying shop, Heritage Action for America, which essentially concluded that he wasn’t even a conservative. (“Despite his rhetoric, Trump’s history suggests a reluctance to engage in debates over protecting civil society from the imposition of left-wing values,” it read in part.) After Trump mocked John McCain’s P.O.W. experience in Vietnam, Heritage Action’s chief executive, Michael Needham, called the candidate “a clown” on Fox News and said “he needs to be out of the race.” Trump claimed to want to shake up the Washington establishment. The Heritage Foundation is a Washington institution. Its large, stately headquarters sits just a few blocks from Capitol Hill.

And yet Heritage and Trump were uniquely positioned to help each other. Much like Trump’s, Heritage’s constituency is equal parts donor class and populist base. Its $80 million annual budget depends on six-figure donations from rich Republicans like Rebekah Mercer, whose family foundation has reportedly given Heritage $500,000 a year since 2013. But it also relies on a network of 500,000 small donors, Heritage “members” whom it bombards with millions of pieces of direct mail every year. The Heritage Foundation is a marketing company, a branding agency — it sells its own Heritage neckties, embroidered with miniature versions of its Liberty Bell logo — and a policy shop rolled into one. But above all, Heritage is a networking group. It has spent decades fashioning itself into the hub of a constellation of conservative individuals and organizations united by their opposition to government regulations — from taxes to gun control to environmental protections — and socially progressive causes like same-sex marriage.

Today it is clear that for all the chaos and churn of the current administration, Heritage has achieved a huge strategic victory. Those who worked on the project estimate that hundreds of the people the think tank put forward landed jobs, in just about every government agency. Heritage’s recommendations included some of the most prominent members of Trump’s cabinet: Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos (whose in-laws endowed Heritage’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society), Mick Mulvaney, Rick Perry, Jeff Sessions and many more. Dozens of Heritage employees and alumni also joined the Trump administration — at last count 66 of them, according to Heritage, with two more still awaiting Senate confirmation. It is a kind of critical mass that Heritage had been working toward for nearly a half-century.

“Feulner’s first law is people are policy,”Ed Feulner, Heritage’s founder and former president, told me recently. Feulner was the head of domestic policy for the Trump transition, charting the direction of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and several other agencies. We met late on a Friday afternoon, in a sitting room at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, a private social club founded by a group of Treasury Department officials during the Civil War. At his feet as we spoke sat a small box of table cards for a dinner he was hosting at the club that evening for the newly appointed director of Trump’s National Economic Council, the television personality Larry Kudlow — another name on Heritage’s Project to Restore America list. Now 76, ruddy, white-haired and content, almost jovial, Feulner founded Heritage decades ago as an ambitious young legislative aide with a radical dream built on a simple concept. As he put it, sinking deeper into his club chair: “First, you have to have the right people.”

Heritage was born in the spring of 1971 in the basement cafeteria of the United States Capitol. Feulner had just turned 30 and was working for Representative Philip Crane, an Illinois Republican who had written a book, “The Democrat’s Dilemma: How the Liberal Left Captured the Democratic Party,” arguing that left-wing radicals inspired by the Fabian Society, a socialist group in Britain, were secretly trying to turn America into a socialist state via the Democratic Party. As an undergraduate at Regis College, Feulner had been drawn to an emerging conservative movement that saw as its enemy not only Democrats but also moderate Republicans who threatened to do to their party what they believed the Fabians had done to the Democrats. In 1964, as a graduate student at the Wharton School, he organized a campus group to support the insurgent presidential candidacy of his political hero, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

Over breakfast at the Capitol, Feulner and another Hill aide, 28-year-old Paul M. Weyrich — later credited with coining the phrase “moral majority” — commiserated over a recent study from the American Enterprise Institute, an established conservative think tank, about a proposed supersonic transport plane. The report could have helped buttress their argument that the government should continue to fund the plane as part of its effort to win the Cold War, but A.E.I. had withheld it until after the Senate voted on the issue so as not to bias the debate. This was, to their thinking, the wrong approach. What if they could create a new sort of think tank, one that would actively seek to cultivate and influence politicians, and in the process advance the cause of movement conservatism?

Soon after, they made their pitch to Joseph Coors, the highly motivated Colorado beer baron who would later, at the suggestion of the Reagan White House aide and future National Rifle Association president Oliver North, wire $65,000 to a Swiss bank account to buy a cargo plane for Nicaraguan rebels. Coors had come to Washington in search of a conservative institution in which to invest. The meeting was held in the office of the irreverent ex-newspaperman and Nixon aide Lyn Nofziger. Weyrich had heard that Coors was also considering investing in A.E.I., which gave Nofziger the idea for “a little artifice,” as the official history of the Heritage Foundation describes it. Before Coors arrived, Nofziger sprinkled some cigar ashes on a thick American Enterprise Institute study resting on his bookshelf. When Coors asked about A.E.I., he took the book off-the-shelf and blew off the ashes. “A.E.I.?” he asked. “That’s what they’re good for — collecting dust.”

Coors invested $260,000 in the new venture, and within a few years, Heritage had taken its place at the center of the growing conservative counterestablishment. Its initial fund-raising success foreshadowed the rise of the Republican donor class as a political force: Another early and generous giver was the banking and oil heir Richard Mellon Scaife, who went on to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in conservative media outlets and nonprofit organizations that, among other projects, targeted the Clintons during the 1990s. (Heritage trustees used to joke that Coors gave six-packs; Scaife gave cases.)

Feulner packaged his fledgling think tank’s ideology into five basic principles: free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional values and a strong national defense. They would guide Heritage’s agenda, which would be set by Feulner and his senior leadership team. Feulner also anticipated the danger of his new think tank’s being dismissed as a tool of rich Republicans. To build a Heritage member base that would assert the foundation’s anti-establishment identity, he turned to Richard Viguerie, the conservative marketing pioneer known for his high-quality mailing list and his uniquely apocalyptic warnings of imminent national collapse.

Think tanks are sometimes referred to as universities without students, suggesting intellectual diversity within a general philosophical orientation. Heritage, by contrast, was strictly results-oriented. Feulner once likened his strategy to Procter & Gamble’s approach to Crest toothpaste: “They sell it and resell it every day by keeping the product fresh in the consumer’s mind.” One way to promote Heritage’s brand was to inundate Congress with an unending barrage of bite-size “backgrounders”; another was by networking. Heritage hosted weekend retreats for lawmakers, study groups for young congressional staffers and semester-long internships for college students, complete with Heritage housing. In its early years, Heritage took up numerous political battles: It published papers advocating making Social Security voluntary, argued against giving striking workers access to food stamps and warned parents about the danger posed by the advancement of “secular humanism” in public schools. To Feulner, they were all worthy fights, but they were just a prelude to what Heritage’s official history calls “the Big Gamble” — its decision to invest in the presidential candidacy of the 68-year-old Ronald Reagan.

Feulner saw something in Reagan long before he became president. “We had met with him when he was governor in California; we had visited his ranch and seen copies of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek with marginal notes in the book,” Feulner told me. “So we knew that he was one of us.” In the run-up to the 1980 election, Heritage spent $250,000 to assemble a comprehensive guidebook for conservative rule that it called “Mandate for Leadership” and aggressively marketed it to members of Reagan’s transition team, in particular Edwin Meese, who was Reagan’s chief of staff in California and later became his attorney general in Washington. The big gamble paid off: Meese told me that Reagan asked that the 1,093-page document be distributed at his first cabinet meeting. Reagan also turned to Heritage and Feulner to help staff and organize his administration. An enduring, mutually beneficial friendship was born. Meese wrote a letter on White House stationery stating that members of Heritage’s President’s Club — at the time, donors of $1,000 or more — would “provide a vital communications link between policymakers and those key people who made possible Reagan’s victory,” as Sidney Blumenthal reported in his 1986 book “The Rise of the Counter-Establishment.” The relationship worked both ways. When Reagan’s second term ended, Meese joined Heritage as its first Ronald Reagan Fellow in Public Policy, with an annual salary of more than $400,000. Now 86, he remains at the think tank as distinguished fellow emeritus of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

Reagan’s image is everywhere at Heritage, the informal poses and settings — on a horse, on a putting green, relaxing at his ranch — suggesting less a political actor than a beloved family member. But Heritage had its complaints about Reagan at the time. On the first anniversary of his presidency, the think tank issued a report characterizing his tenure as a disappointment to conservatives. Heritage laid much of the blame on personnel who were insufficiently committed to the president’s agenda. “They were looking for competent people,” Nofziger, who had gone on to become a key political strategist for Reagan, later recalled. “I tried to explain to them that the first thing you do is get loyal people, and competence is a bonus.”

Over the following decades, Feulner continued to pursue his dream of turning the counterestablishment into the establishment. The prospects had perhaps never looked bleaker than they did in 2012, when Obama was easily elected to his second term. Having just turned 70, Feulner decided that it was time to retire. At that moment in conservative history, it was not difficult for him to see where the future of the think tank lay: the Tea Party. Heritage had helped organize and underwrite the anti-tax, anti-government — and, most of all, anti-Obama — movement, even creating a lobbying organization, Heritage Action, to help harness the energy it unleashed.

A couple of years earlier, in 2010, Feulner heard a talk given by one of the movement’s leading figures, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, at a meeting of a conservative dinner group in Georgetown. “When it was over, Richard Viguerie said to Jim: ‘That was such a fantastic speech. Why don’t you run for president?’ ” Feulner told me, recounting the events of the evening. “DeMint locked eyes with me and said, ‘The only thing I’ve ever wanted to be president of is the Heritage Foundation.’ ”

Feulner decided DeMint was someone to watch, and the next year, the senator earned the highest possible rating on Heritage Action’s new congressional scorecard, which evaluated lawmakers’ voting records on the think tank’s principles — higher than Michele Bachmann and much higher than Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell. (“With each vote cast in Congress, freedom either advances or recedes,” Needham said when Heritage Action unveiled the new rating system.) DeMint had fought the federal bailouts of the banks and carmakers, supported school prayer and opposed abortion and Obamacare. No less important, DeMint, who had an M.B.A. from Clemson University, shared the Heritage belief that politics was as much about sales and recruiting as it was about legislating or governing. Before running for office at the age of 47, he had operated his own marketing company; as a senator, he created a political-action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund, to raise cash for select conservative candidates. He was clearly a skilled fund-raiser, which was a big part of the Heritage job. He would have to be willing to give up his Senate seat to run a think tank, which was maybe not as far-fetched as it sounded. In addition to influence, Heritage offered something the government couldn’t: money. Without even having to taint his reputation by becoming a lobbyist, he would get a roughly 400 percent raise from his government salary, to nearly $900,000 in his first full year.

DeMint started at Heritage in 2013. He created a new layer of senior staff that included allies from Capitol Hill, in the process effectively demoting many of Heritage’s veteran leaders. He also went on a hiring spree of young conservatives for the think tank’s media and internet operations. “Conservative ideas are invigorating,” DeMint told The New York Times in 2014. “We had allowed them to become too serious.” (DeMint declined to be interviewed for this article.)

While Feulner and his senior staff had reserved the right to review policy papers, they generally avoided intervening in the research and publication process. DeMint and his leadership team were much more aggressive. Papers were heavily edited or even withheld from release altogether. Several scholars quit. DeMint replaced them, bringing in as Heritage’s chief economist Stephen Moore, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer and a founder of the Club for Growth, a lobbying group that advocates cutting taxes.

DeMint intensified the think tank’s marketing efforts, targeting Obamacare in particular. A Heritage billboard went up in Times Square — “Warning,” it read, “Obamacare may be hazardous to your health” — and DeMint led a “Defund Obamacare Tour” across the country. In Congress, he had been something of a one-man ideological enforcer. Now he had at his disposal the power of an $80 million institution whose name was a one-word shorthand for movement conservatism; the backing of some of the country’s richest, most politically engaged Republicans; and a significant slice of the conservative base. Within months of his arrival, he was pressing House Republicans to send the president a spending bill that wouldn’t fund the Affordable Care Act, thus inviting a government shutdown. “There’s no question in my mind that I have more influence now on public policy than I did as an individual senator,” he said in an interview with National Public Radio in 2013.

But his most audacious bid for influence came the following year, when he inaugurated the Project to Restore America.“What we learned from talking to Heritage folks who had been in the Reagan administration was that we needed to be in the game early,” Ed Corrigan, one of DeMint’s Capitol Hill hires, told me. With its focus on staffing, the new effort was the logical extension of his fixation on recruiting the right conservatives for Congress, not to mention the concept at the very heart of Feulner’s vision for Heritage. To lead the project, DeMint turned to a woman who had spent decades building Heritage’s network and knew just how to staff a government:Becky Norton Dunlop, a former deputy personnel director for Reagan.“I know this is going to be hard to believe, but he said — and I agreed — that it was highly likely that a conservative would be elected president,” Dunlop told me, recalling her first conversation about the effort with DeMint. “We needed to be prepared.”

Dunlop’s name may be unfamiliar to most Americans, but she is something of a legend among movement conservatives. She came to Washington in 1973 straight from college to work for the American Conservative Union, the lobbying group best known for organizing the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, and later married an aide to Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who gave her away at their wedding. (Her father, a Baptist minister, officiated.) Congress eventually pushed her out of the Interior Department for trying to demote or fire several National Park Service employees and replace them with political appointees. Years later, after a controversial stint as Virginia’s secretary of natural resources — “Gunning for the Environment?” was the headline of a 1997 Washington Post profile in the Style section — she landed at Heritage as its vice president for external relations and has been there ever since.

Dunlop tapped her extensive network, groups like the Family Research Council, Liberty University and theCouncil for National Policy, an organization that brings together advocates of various conservative causes. “I talked to them all,” Dunlop said. “ ‘You need to think about this, and you need to spread the word. If you’re interested, get your house in order, talk to your spouse and get ready, because we need to save our country.’ ”

Not only was Trump an awkward fit for a staunch conservative like DeMint, but the Heritage president had strong ties to two of his primary opponents. His PAC had raised close to $600,000 for Marco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaign, and he and Rubio were both associated with the C Street house, a group residence on Capitol Hill affiliated with the Fellowship Foundation, the nonprofit organization that sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast. Ted Cruz — to whom DeMint’s PAC had given nearly $1 million for his 2012 Senate run — had been a featured speaker on DeMint’s “Defund Obamacare” tour. Trump’s campaign promises to punish American companies that export jobs were anathema to Heritage’s 45-year history of support for free trade, not to mention the interests of some of its biggest donors. Even as Trump was gaining momentum, some senior staff members continued to resist the idea of embracing him, arguing that it would damage Heritage’s reputation, but DeMint decided to get out ahead of the rest of his party and work with Trump’s insurgent campaign.

DeMint understood better than most what lit up the conservative base; after all, he had spent years stoking its anger at the Republican establishment. At a private dinner on Capitol Hill in January 2016, two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, DeMint was the only one of a group of a dozen conservatives, including Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, who predicted that Trump would win the nomination.

Trump’s political views were less important than his approach to hiring. With DeMint’s guidance, he could bring in trusted conservatives who supported a Heritage agenda that included opening offshore drilling on federal lands; opposing mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food; reducing regulations on for-profit universities; revoking an Obama executive order on green-energy mandates for federal agencies; phasing out federal subsidies for housing; and opposing marriage equality and nondiscrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity. “The watchword of personnel is: Get people who you want on the bus, and then figure out what seat you want to put them in,” Dunlop said.

In March 2016, the Republican establishment stepped up its effort to stop Trump. More than 100 Republican national-security experts signed an open letter publicly committing to fight his election, calling him a “racketeer” and denouncing his dishonesty and “admiration for foreign dictators.” A number of the signatories were fellows of conservative think tanks; none were affiliated with Heritage at the time. Heritage treated Trump as it would any other candidate, giving his campaign staff more than a dozen briefings and sending them off with decks of cards bearing Heritage policy proposals and market-tested “power phrases.” At the same time, Heritage’s leaders were lobbying furiously behind the scenes to secure senior appointments to Trump’s post-nomination transition team. “It was the top priority for everyone at Heritage,” Dunlop told me.

Later that month, Trump’s campaign lawyer (and future White House counsel) Donald McGahn convened a gathering of conservative leaders at the Capitol Hill offices of his law firm, Jones Day. Only a small group attended: Newt Gingrich, Senator Jeff Sessions, a handful of other sitting lawmakers who were supportive of Trump — and DeMint. “At that time,” Gingrich told me, “Trump’s views were so unknown to the average conservative the concern was, is he going to be reliable?” As the conversation evolved, an idea emerged: What if Trump could present to the public a list of Supreme Court nominees? DeMint enthusiastically volunteered to help provide one. When he returned to Heritage’s offices, though, some senior staffers balked. One concern they raised was that it would be counterproductive for Heritage to explicitly endorse possible judicial appointees: Because the think tank was considered to the right of the Republican mainstream, its approval of candidates could make them toxic in the confirmation process. But DeMint was adamant, insisting that this was an opportunity Heritage should not pass up. The head of Heritage’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, John Malcolm, ultimately wrote the list in the form of a post for Heritage’s news and commentary website, The Daily Signal. By then, Trump had already singled out Heritage at a news conference, announcing that it was one of the groups he was working with on a Supreme Court list.

Feulner, still active at Heritage as a member of its board, was the first from the think tank to join the Trump transition after the Republican National Convention. “August 2016, Christie calls, and then candidate Trump calls to confirm: Would I take over the domestic side?” Feulner told me. As he saw it, Trump held even more promise for Heritage than Reagan had. “No.1, he did clearly want to make very significant changes, and No.2, his views on so many things were not particularly well formed,” Feulner said. “And so if he somehow pulled the election off, we thought, wow, we could really make a difference.”

Yet even as he was drilling further into the Trump team, DeMint was running into trouble inside his own building. Over the summer, complaints about his heavy-handed management style started to reach some members of Heritage’s 22-person board. DeMint and his loyalists rejected the criticisms of his leadership, suggesting that they were the work of Mike Needham, the 36-year-old chief executive of Heritage Action. Needham came from a different world than DeMint. He grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and joined the think tank straight out of Williams College, beginning as Feulner’s research assistant and rising to become his chief of staff. He left in 2007 to work on the presidential campaign of Rudolph W. Giuliani and then went on to attend Stanford Business School but returned after he graduated. As DeMint and his allies saw it, Needham was trying to orchestrate a palace coup, turning a handful of isolated complaints about his hiring practices and handling of Heritage’s research into a major case against DeMint as part of his own campaign to take control of the think tank. They knew, too, that Needham and Feulner were close and were convinced that Needham was trying to undermine DeMint with Heritage’s founder.

By early November, the tension between DeMint and Needham had escalated, and the senior staff was divided by their respective loyalties. It was just the sort of factionalism that would soon come to define the nascent Trump administration, with its personnel conflicts and firings. As the election approached, it seemed to some at Heritage that DeMint’s future was uncertain. The Republican Party appeared to be headed for defeat and years of soul-searching, which might present a natural occasion for new leadership at the think tank.

On election night, Heritage turned its first floor over to a viewing party with an open bar, chicken wings and red, white and blue cupcakes. The mood grew increasingly celebratory as the evening wore on and Trump’s tally of electoral votes built toward 270. Some staff members stayed until dawn, went out for breakfast and came back for an all-staff meeting called by DeMint in the larger of Heritage’s two auditoriums. “As you know, I’m kind of a serious guy, so it’s rare that I feel giddy,” he began. DeMint said that Heritage had taken a huge risk — “we were criticized by a lot of our friends in the movement for even going to meetings with Trump” — but that it had paid off. “Most of you are too young to remember the old ‘Mission: Impossible’ series on television, but after they had accomplished their impossible mission, they were all sitting around lighting cigarettes, and the commander would always say, ‘I love it when a plan comes together!’ ” (He was most likely recalling another television program, “The A-Team.”)

Corrigan had been in close contact with the Trump campaign for months. Now he told the assembled crowd of about 200 people what Heritage had been doing for the campaign and previewed the opportunities ahead. There were thousands of jobs to fill, and the priority was to fill them with “change agents,” he said. “When it comes to personnel decisions, that is the most frequently asked question, even before ‘Are they qualified?’ ‘Are they a change agent?’ ” In the coming days, employees were encouraged to join the transition and were assured that as long as they were working as volunteers, Heritage could continue to pay their salaries and hold their jobs for them.

The Trump transition offices quickly filled with Heritage staff members recruiting and vetting hires for the administration. The upheaval inside the transition caused by Christie’s firing worked to DeMint’s advantage: Pence was an old friend and conservative ally on Capitol Hill. Christie’s departure also opened the way for Rick Dearborn to take control of the daily decision-making. Dearborn, the longtime chief of staff to Jeff Sessions, had already been a strong presence on the transition team. He went back years with Corrigan, who was the director of the Senate’s conservative caucus for nearly a decade before joining Heritage with DeMint. Corrigan had been informally feeding Dearborn names for months.

Matthew Buckham, [dad ed MTG?] a project administrator in Heritage’s communications department who joined the transition to vet ambassadors and diplomats, told me that he and the rest of Heritage’s staff on the transition tried to put forward every Heritage employee who wanted to work for the administration, whether in policy, administration or management jobs. “Any list we touched we made sure had as many Heritage people as possible,” he said. One of Heritage’s labor economists, James Sherk, an advocate of rolling back labor rights, joined the White House domestic-policy council; another, David Kreutzer, who was a co-author of a Heritage policy paper arguing that “no consensus exists that man-made emissions are the primary driver of global warming,” joined the Environmental Protection Agency. Roger Severino, the director of Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, who has opposed extending civil rights protections to gay, lesbian and transgender people, joined the Department of Health and Human Services to run its Office for Civil Rights.Sean Doocey, a former Heritage employee who had worked at the think tank’s Training and Recruitment Center, joined the Presidential Personnel Office — the little-known agency responsible for recruiting and vetting appointees for the executive branch — as its deputy director.

Heritage helped place countless others, from staff assistants to cabinet secretaries. In some cases, DeMint intervened directly, calling Pence to argue for Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman whose political career DeMint helped start years earlier in South Carolina.Mulvaney is now the director of the Office of Management and Budget,and as this article went to press, he was serving out the remaining time in a stint as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a consumer-protection watchdog agency that he had voted to disband in Congress. (He recently fired all 25 members of the agency’s advisory board.) “Not only were we not going to bash the president,” Buckham told me. “We were going to help him and push our friends into positions of policy and influence.”

In the spring of 2017, just a few months into his tenure, President Trump expressed his gratitude to both DeMint and Heritage in a speech at the National Rifle Association: “Those people have been fantastic; they’ve been real friends.” And yet even in this moment of triumph, DeMint was losing the battle to keep his job. Emboldened by Trump’s victory, he asked for a new contract on the eve of the inauguration. (He earned $1.2 million the previous year.) Heritage’s three-person leadership team — Barb Van Andel-Gaby, a member of one of the families that founded the multilevel-marketing company Amway; Thomas A. Saunders III, a private-equity executive; and Nersi Nazari, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur — were noncommittal. Soon after, they came to Washington for a few days to perform their own internal investigation of the personnel problems, interviewing various staff members about DeMint’s leadership.

By the time the foundation’s largest donors — $10,000 or more a year — gathered in April 2017 for their annual retreat at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar in San Diego, Heritage’s senior management, like that of the administration it was staffing, was consumed by chaos, confusion, resentments and infighting. DeMint, by now, was blaming Feulner as well as Needham; he was certain that Feulner still effectively controlled the board and was turning it against him. Shortly after DeMint and his management team returned to Washington, he was stripped of his power while his severance package was negotiated. Many of the people he had brought in, including Corrigan, James Wallner (a research executive), Wesley Denton (a communications executive) and Buckham, soon left, too. Rumors swirled that Stephen Bannon would be taking over. He was still at the White House at the time, but he was close to Mercer, and it was no secret that Trump was turning on his power-hungry, attention-seeking chief strategist.

Amid the upheaval, Saunders, the board’s chairman, issued a statement on the ouster. “Heritage is bigger than any one person,” it read. In his first address to the staff, the think tank’s new interim president, Ed Feulner, assured them that Heritage would continue to be “Donald Trump’s favorite think tank.”

Heritage’s longer-term future was placed in the hands of an 11-person presidential search committee, made up of trustees. They spent months looking for a candidate who could provide continuity, building on the relationship with Trump that DeMint had established, but also signal a departure from the DeMint era. By last fall, they had assembled a short list that was leaked to The Washington Post. It included Marc Short, the White House legislative director and longtime aide to Mike Pence; Todd Ricketts, the Chicago ​Cubs co-owner and major Republican donor who had recently been nominated as deputy commerce secretary; and David Trulio, then the vice president for international government affairs at the defense contractor Lockheed Martin. None of them got the job. Just as Dick Cheney had once led George W. Bush’s search for a vice president before securing the position for himself, thepresidency of Heritage went to the chairwoman of the search committee, Kay Coles James.

James, who is 69, is an almost total anomaly in the political world: a black female Republican who supports Donald Trump. In her first address to the Heritage staff, she spoke about her difficult childhood in Richmond, Va., with an absentee father and a mother on welfare. The hiring of a black woman as its president seemed like a coup for an institution that has been widely accused of representing only the interests of white men. “She did not get the job because of her gender or race,” Feulner told me. “She got it because she’s such an extraordinary individual. My only regret is that she’s not 10 years younger.”

In many respects, James does have the perfect résumé for Heritage. She served under Reagan and George Bush and was the director of the office of personnel management for George W. Bush. Along the way, she worked for several conservative organizations, including Pat Robertson’s Regent University, and served on the board of Focus on the Family, the evangelical group known for its opposition to abortion, premarital sex and gay and transgender rights. In 2005, she did a brief stint with a defense contracting firm whose founder, Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty a year later to bribing a congressman with more than $1 million in return for favors and earmarks. James went on to start her own nonprofit, the Gloucester Institute, which describes itself as a leadership training center; it offers mentoring and networking programs to black and Latino undergraduate and graduate students. According to Gloucester’s 990 tax form, she earned $50,000 as president of the organization in 2016, the year before she became president of Heritage.

James worked on the Trump transition, overseeing the White House’s budget and personnel management offices. In March, on a Politico podcast, she said that she had been eager to join the administration to work on the president’s “urban agenda.” She was blocked by Omarosa Manigault Newman, the former “Apprentice” villain and director of communications for the White House Office of the Public Liaison, who during the campaign was charged with African-American outreach. “The way it was described to me is she approached the whole thing like it was ‘The Apprentice,’ ” James said on the podcast. “So she looked around Washington and said, ‘O.K., who do I need to get rid of first?’ ” (Newman herself was pushed out last year.)

I met James, who has short, graying hair and favors colorful blazers, in May in her new Heritage office, which is enormous and looks out at the Capitol. After we settled onto a large, comfortable couch, she described her new job at Heritage as “the crown jewel” of her career in the conservative movement. I asked James how she thought Trump was doing. “People are focused up here on the trouble and all of the noise that you hear in Washington,” she said, gesturing at eye level. “But down here, the bass notes are strong and loud. There’s a lot of good that is going on, but we are in such a partisan, vitriolic atmosphere in this town right now that very often we overlook the bass notes.”

In recent months, James has applauded Trump’s tax cuts and deregulatory agenda; his crackdown on illegal immigration; his choice of the hard-liner John Bolton as national security adviser; his effort to rescind funding for a variety of federal programs, including the Children’s Health Insurance Program; and an executive order that will curtail the amount of time that federal union representatives can spend helping colleagues file claims for workplace grievances, including sexual harassment. Part of her task at Heritage, James told me, will be to expose a more diverse audience to the think tank’s ideology. “If you talk to anyone about shaping the future of this nation, they will tell you that there are certain demographics that must be touched — millennials, women and minorities,” she said. “And so I tell people that unless our ideas are reaching those demographics, then we are going to be looking at a shrinking minority view in this country.”

A few weeks later, on a rainy morning in Washington, Heritage held a party for the dedication of a new dormitory for its interns, a gift from the family of E.W. Richardson, a World War II bomber pilot who went on to become a successful Ford dealer. Donors ate finger food and drank mimosas under a tent on Heritage’s rooftop. Some wore name tags on their lapels and dresses identifying them by their level of giving; those who had added Heritage to their wills wore an extra ribbon: “Legacy Society.” James was the only person of color I saw in a crowd that easily exceeded 200 people.

Forty-five years after its founding, Heritage may finally be the establishment, but its self-image remains fixed in time. It is, as ever, the nation’s last line of defense against the advancing forces of progressivism, perpetually in need of financial reinforcements. Speaking to the gathered group of donors and Heritage staff members, James, standing beside an American flag and a large portrait of Richardson in his flight gear, described the new intern dorm as an expansion of the think tank’s “base of operations” against what she characterized as a “very determined and very well-resourced foe. They want to change America into something she was never intended to be. And they might succeed if we don’t fight every single day of our lives.”

On the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, Heritage marked the occasion with news releases and a booklet, “Blueprint for Impact,” promoting how much of Heritage’s agenda Trump had already embraced — 64 percent, according to the think tank’s analysis. Heritage’s director of congressional and executive branch relations, Thomas Binion, went on “Fox & Friends” to discuss the report, saying the think tank was “blown away” by Trump’s performance. The president, apparently watching in the White House, promptly tweeted, inaccurately: “The Heritage Foundation has just stated that 64% of the Trump Agenda is already done, faster than even Ronald Reagan.”

The president and his favorite think tank continue to draw closer. Administration officials speak regularly at Heritage and give frequent interviews to The Daily Signal. In April, Pruitt and Attorney General Jeff Sessions were both scheduled to speak at a Heritage donor conference in Palm Beach, Fla. (Sessions, under fire from the president because of the Russia investigation, dropped out.)

Even with DeMint gone, Feulner is enjoying unique access to the Trump administration.During one of our conversations, he told me he had recently accompanied the vice president on Air Force Two to Hillsdale College, a Christian stronghold of conservative thought in Michigan. And last year, he was the lone think-tank head invited to a White House dinner for the conservative movement’s “grass-roots leaders.” He was seated right beside the president. Feulner’s dream had finally been fulfilled. I asked him if he believed the Trump presidency would be transformative for the country. “I think we’re very, very optimistic,” he said.

There is still a huge number of vacancies across the administration. At this point in their presidencies, Obama had filled 584 of his politically appointed, Senate-confirmed positions, and George W. Bush had filled 652; Trump has filled just 450. The Presidential Personnel Office was portrayed in a recent Washington Post article as a frat house, with widespread workplace vaping and happy-hour drinking games involving Smirnoff Ice.

The turnover rates have also been historic. In March, The New York Times reported that nine of the top 21 White House and cabinet positions have been emptied and refilled at least once; neither Obama nor Bush had lost a single cabinet member by that point in their administrations. Since taking office, Trump has replaced more than half of his 65 most influential advisers, according to a tracker created by the Brookings Institution. Christie recently laid the blame for the turnover on what he described as a “brutally unprofessional” transition, saying that proper vetting would have caught a lot of Trump’s most problematic appointees. A number of other senior advisers seem to be on shaky ground with the president, and an exodus is anticipated after the November midterm elections.

Churn is a central feature of this administration, even for its unofficial staffing agency. Paul Winfree, a Heritage economist who helped draft Trump’s first budget, is back at the think tank. So are Stephen Moore, who worked on the Trump tax cuts;David Kreutzer, who played a key role in dissolving a White House working group that was studying the monetary costs associated with climate-warming carbon dioxide; and Hans von Spakovsky, who helped run the now-defunct voter-fraud commission, which was created to find evidence to support Trump’s baseless claim that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton.

In a sense, the transition is still going, and as long as Trump remains in office it may never end. “I get calls from people every day who still want to go in,” Dunlop told me. “Or I’ll hear from the White House, or I’ll run into someone at a reception or over coffee, and I’ll say, ‘I’ve got a name for you. I’ll send it along.’ ”

https://documented.net/media/heritage-action-brags-about-writing-gop-voter-suppression-bills

video  24m$ in 2 yrs

===

big lie?  voter suppression 5

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2021/11/16/alec-academy-featured-a-whos-who-of-voter-suppression-leaders/

an “Academy” for state lawmakers on voter suppression strategies run by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in July featured a veritable who’s who of the right-wing leaders behind this year’s disinformation campaign about voter fraud and assaults on voting rights across the country, documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) show.

While the July 26-28 session was ostensibly led by the dark money group Honest Elections Project, it was organized, hosted, and bankrolled by ALEC, despite repeated claims by its CEO, Lisa Nelson, that the group does not work on voting issues.

Nelson provided the formal welcome at the conference’s opening session, ALEC staff organized turnout, and ALEC provided two nights of accommodations at the five-star Grand America Hotel, five meals, and a $450 travel reimbursement for attendees. ALEC’s annual meeting was held at the same hotel immediately after the Academy.

An invite published by CMD in July stated that “13 legislators from across the country” would be in attendance, but the materials acquired by CMD do not include an attendance list.

Rather than email materials to ALEC lawmakers that may be subject to open records laws, ALEC distributed hard copies of the agenda at registration along with a “zip drive containing a resources document and a one-pager on your state’s election policies,” according to an email from Sarah Wall, ALEC’s manager of legislative outreach and coalitions, obtained by CMD. Wall’s email also lists Michael Bowman, president of ALEC Action, as a key contact for the event.

Nelson tipped her hand about ALEC’s voter suppression subterfuge in May at a meeting of the far-right Council for National Policy. Video of the event obtained by CMD shows Nelson speaking frankly about ALEC’s work on voting and revealing its plans to outsource model policy on the controversial topic to avert the spotlight. “We don’t have model policy. We will be developing that at the Honest Elections Project [Academy], through them,” Nelson said.

Honest Elections Project, the group ALEC chose to carry the ball on its voting agenda, is a dark money operation formed in February 2020 to push for voting restrictions and spread baseless and dangerous claims about election fraud, laying the groundwork for Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. It is a project of The 85 Fund, the new legal name for the Judicial Education Project, a group linked to Leonard Leo that played a central role in Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges.

Speakers at the Academy featured many of the key strategists and leaders on the Right spreading misinformation around voter fraud, promoting Trump’s lies around the 2020 election, and pushing sweeping new voting restrictions.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita gave the keynote address. A proponent of Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, Rokita recently testified in front of the U.S. Senate against strengthening the federal Voting Rights Act.

Rokita was one of only four state attorneys general to not sign a National Association of Attorneys General letter condemning the Jan. 6 violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and is a member of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). RAGA was a member of the “March to Save America” coalition that organized the Jan. 6 rally, and its policy arm, Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent out robocalls urging supporters to “march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.”

Agenda Focused on Election Legislation

Most of the Academy sessions focused on legislation, giving legislators a chance to discuss bills to restrict voting that have already been introduced and passed in their states this year and hear from Republican-aligned leaders about what more they think needs to be done.

By the time ALEC held its voter suppression Academy in July, 18 states had already passed 30 laws this year making it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The Honest Elections Project’s Executive Director Jason Snead, who worked with ALEC to organize the event, laid out “priorities for election integrity across the states” and polling results in a breakfast session and appeared on another panel on how to “shore up” legislative control over election processes with Jason Torchinsky and Lee Goodman.

The Honest Elections Project has aggressively promoted a radical legal theory called the “independent state legislatures doctrine,” which holds that state courts don’t have the authority to review state election laws and would empower heavily gerrymandered state legislatures to determine election outcomes.

Republican legislators have already introduced and passed bills in 2021 “interfering with nonpartisan local election administration and consolidating power to administer and determine elections results themselves,” the Voting Rights Lab reported.

Snead is a former senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation where he developed its Election Fraud Database, which the Brennan Center for Justice says “grossly exaggerated” the extent of voter fraud.

Torchinsky is general counsel for the National Republican Redistricting Trust and has been defending ALEC against CMD’s state complaints alleging that ALEC illegally gave sophisticated voter management campaign software linked to the Republican National Committee to its legislative members.

Goodman is an elections attorney and a former Republican chairman and commissioner of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2013 and 2018.

Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, and Ken Blackwell, executive director of the MAGA voter suppression center at America First Policy Institute led another legislative session on “securing absentee ballots.”

Anderson bragged to Heritage donors in April that policies, “severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes” and “preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters” were among recommendations Heritage gave Georgia for its massive voter suppression bill.

Blackwell’s Center for Election Integrityrecently published a “Top 25 Common-Sense State Election Integrity Reforms” fact sheet that includes these Heritage recommendations alongside other extreme voter suppression wish-list items, such as eliminating no-excuse absentee ballots and requiring an affidavit for absentee applications.

Blackwell also moderated a panel at the Academy with state legislators “discussing election challenges they’ve faced in their own states.”

Another panel over breakfast covered “things to consider with implementation of laws” related to election day voter registration, “election observer protections,” and organizing seniors to work the polls. Chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Donald Palmer, a Trump appointee, and Cleta Mitchell, chair of the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Election Integrity Network, led the session.

Mitchell is a Big Lie fueler and Trump legal advisor who lost her job at Foley & Lardner following news that she participated in a January call in which Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to make him the winner of the state’s electoral votes.

“On Dec. 30, Cleta Mitchell wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud,” The Washington Post Magazine reported. Meadows is now a colleague of Mitchell’s at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

Three Republican secretaries of state, Tennessee’s Tre Hargett, Kentucky’s Michael Adams, and West Virginia’s Mac Warner, spoke on a panel about “what policies the states need to employ to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

“Easier to vote and harder to cheat” has been a favored talking point of Republicans in recent years.

All three are active in the Republican Secretaries of State Committee (RSSC), with Hargett serving as chair and Adams as vice chair. Republican secretaries of state produced a report on “Best Practices for Making It Easier to Vote and Harder to Cheat” for the Republican State Leadership Committee, obtained by CMD.

The RSSC holds monthly calls that Commissioner Palmer often attends. Secretary Warner and Palmer also participated in an “off-the-record” Election University session on June 21 as part of the U.S. House GOP’s “Faith in Elections Project,” as first reported by CMD.

ALEC Lawmakers Consider Litigation

ALEC’s Academy featured two panels on litigation. The first dealt with “anticipating challenges to the Voting Rights Act in Arizona,” legal challenges mounted by Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias, and redistricting fights, and was led by with Republican lawyers Torchinsky, Michael Thielen, and Brian Barnes.

Thielen is the executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association and served on the national board of Lawyers for Trump in 2020. Barnes was involved in legal challenges to changes in voting procedures in North Carolina and Pennsylvania last fall.

Goodman and Utah’s former Solicitor General Tyler Green led the second panel on “operationalizing litigation challenges.” Noted in the description of the panel are “ways to challenge the scope of litigation attacks on new election integrity legislation (defense) as well as advance the ball on election integrity (offense).”

As of Oct. 3, “at least 43 voting cases have been filed in 12 states, and Georgia and Texas lead the way with ten new lawsuits each in 2021,” the Brennan Center reports.

Training Sessions on “the Left”

Two trainings focused on “the Left” filled out the remaining agenda at the ALEC Academy. Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow and manager of the Heritage Foundation’s “Election Reform Initiative,” and Ken Cuccinelli, former Trump staffer and chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, led a session focused on “the Left’s attack on our election system” through “state-level attacks on election integrity legislation” and HR 1, the sweeping voting rights and campaign reform bill pending in Congress....Spakovsky, who was appointed by Trump to his voter fraud myth from the Right for well over a decade.president of the  Scott Walter gave the keynote for a “Mapping the Left Lunch.” Walter and CRC received funding from the Bradley Foundation... ;inspired by CMD’s SourceWatch, called “Influence Watch.” The site was “constructed in partnership with Berman and Company,” run by PR spin doctor Richard Berman, and in collaboration with ALEC.

rww 921

right-wing groups continue to resist honest teaching about racism in American history and the country’s institutions while inflaming and mobilizing right-wing voters with wild claims and dire warnings about the march of “critical race theory.” The Heritage Foundation, a mammoth right-wing think tank and marketing operation, has packaged its anti-critical race theory material into an eBook entitled “Knowing Critical Race Theory When You See It and Fighting It When You Can.” The 18-page “eBook” is little more than a glorified pamphlet that builds on Heritage Action’s “toolkit” for opposing critical race theory.

Critical race theory is an academic approach to the study of systemic racism. Since last summer, right-wing activists and organizations have sounded alarms about the supposed threat of critical race theory to white people and to the future of the United States itself. Right-wing groups are using such manufactured fears to drive conservative voters to the polls in school board races and in future elections.

The new Heritage Foundation eBook is being promoted via Facebook ads claiming that critical race theory “is invading our K-12 schools, workplaces, state and federal governments, and even the military.”

If you missed this invasion, Heritage says, it’s because you didn’t recognize it. “There’s a good chance that you—and your children—have encountered it,” the Facebook ad claims. “And there’s an even better chance that you didn’t realize it.”

The Heritage Foundation eBook claims that it can help people identify when critical race theory is being stealthily employed. One way to identify critical race theory, according to the Heritage Foundation, is to watch for curricula or training sessions “that teach that racism is systemic and structural” and “demand that Americans work to dismantle laws, traditions, norms, institutions, and free-market enterprise—the entire American system itself.”

The eBook quotes as an example of “CRT at work” this statement from a Michigan State University professor: “It’s important to try to help youth understand how bias and oppression are institutional, structural and systemic, and not simply interpersonal.”

Heritage contrasts that statement with a section labeled “THE FACTS,” which states, “Racial discrimination is illegal in America,” and suggests that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 cleared things up on that front. “There is not evidence to suggest that our social order is oppressive and dangerous,” the eBook declares. In reality, the well-documented impact of systemic racism is evident in disparities that exist in “every facet of America life, including employment, wealth, education, home ownership, healthcare, and incarceration,” in the words of a Business Insider article published last year.

Heritage also highlights the concept of“white privilege” and warns its readers about the supposed threat of any “curricula or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program that compels students or employees to accept their white privilege and/or work to abandon it.”

Another warning sign, according to the Heritage Foundation, is any reference to “equity,” which the Heritage eBook claims has become the “functional opposite” of “equality.” Here’s how Heritage explains the dangers of equity, using language that echoes rhetoric used by right-wing activists opposed to progressive taxation: “Attempts by government officials to take the fruits of your achievements and give them to those who did not earn it will hurt those whose rewards are diminished as well as the intended beneficiaries.” According to Heritage, “This betrays the idea that the American dream belongs to all of us, and everyone should have the same opportunity to pursue success.”

Among the action steps recommended in the section on how to stop critical race theory are to “engage” with local school boards and to report examples of critical race theory trainings to the Heritage Foundation’s “news” service, to anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo, or to Parents Defending Education, a group launched earlier this year that is promoted by right-wing media. Readers are also urged to become a “Heritage Action Sentinel,” a member of what Heritage Action describes as “a grassroots army of committed conservative activists who are the front line against the liberal agenda.”

Melody Clarke, a senior regional coordinator for Heritage Action, spoke at a Tuesday evening protest organized by the Alliance Defending Freedomand other right-wing groups outside the Loudoun County school board meeting. Clarke promoted saveourschools.com, a Heritage Action website that urges people to report evidence of critical race theory in schools, including “pictures of books, handouts, assignments, etc.”

Tags: Melody ClarkeCritical Race TheoryPublic EducationSchool BoardsHeritage ActionHeritage Foundation

omg

no lnx

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie

The New Yorker

A Reporter at Large

August 9, 2021 Issue

The Big Money Behind the Big Lie

Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.

By Jane Mayer

August 2, 2021

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election.Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.

Approximately 2.1 million Presidential votes were cast in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for most of the state’s population. In recent years, younger voters and people of color have turned the county’s electorate increasingly Democratic—a shift that helped Biden win the traditionally conservative state, by 10,457 votes. Since the election, the county has become a focus of ire for Trump and his supporters. By March, when Logan’s company was hired, the county had already undergone four election audits, all of which upheld the outcome. Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican and a former Trump ally, had certified Biden’s victory. But Trump’s core supporters were not assuaged.

As soon as the Fox News Decision Desk called the state for Biden, at 11:20 p.m. on November 3rd, Trump demanded that the network “reverse this!” When Fox held firm, he declared, “This is a major fraud.” By the time of the “Deep Rig” première, the standoff had dragged on for more than half a year. The Cyber Ninjas audit was supposed to conclude in May, but at the company’s request Fann has repeatedly extended it. On July 28th, the auditors completed a hand recount, but they are still demanding access to the computer routers used by Maricopa County and also want to scrutinize images of mail-in-ballot envelopes. The U.S. Department of Justice has warned that “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling” ballots could face prosecution for failing to follow federal audit rules. Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on Arizona’s audit, describing it as a step toward his “reinstatement.” On July 24th, he appeared in Phoenix for a “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” and said, “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy—I’m the one trying to save American democracy.” Predicting that the audit would vindicate him, he rambled angrily for nearly two hours about having been cheated, calling the election “a scam—the greatest crime in history.”

In June, I stood in the bleachers at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the audit was taking place, and witnessed people examining carton after carton of paper ballots cast by Arizonans last fall. Some inspectors used microscopes to investigate surreal allegations: that some ballots had been filled out by machines or were Asian counterfeits withtelltale bamboo fibres. Other inspectors looked for creases in mail-in ballots, to determine whether they had been legitimately sent in envelopes or—as Trump has alleged—dumped in bulk.

As the audit has unfolded, various violations of professional norms have been observed, including inspectors caught with pens whose ink matched what was used on ballots. One auditor turned out to have been an unsuccessful Republican candidate during the election. As I watched the proceedings, black-vested paid supervisors monitored the process, but their role was cloaked in secrecy. The audit is almost entirely privately funded, and a county judge in Arizona recently ordered the State Senate to disclose who is paying for it. Last week, Cyber Ninjas acknowledged having received $5.7 million in private donations, most of it from nonprofit groups led by Trump allies who live outside Arizona, including Byrne.

I was joined in the bleachers by Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state and a Republican, whom the State Senate had designated its liaison to the audit. He acknowledged that, if the auditors end up claiming to have found large discrepancies, “that will of course be very inflammatory.” Indeed, a recent incendiary claim by the auditors—that the vote had tallied about seventy thousand more mail-in ballots than had been postmarked—prompted one Republican state senator to propose a recall of Arizona’s electoral votes for Biden. (In fact, the auditors misunderstood what they were counting.) Nevertheless, Bennett defended the audit process: “It’s important to prove to both sides that the election was done accurately and fairly. If we lurch from one election to another with almost half the electorate thinking the election was a fraud, it’s going to rip our country apart.”

Many experts on democratic governance, however, believe that efforts to upend long-settled election practices are what truly threaten to rip the country apart. Chad Campbell, a Democrat who was the minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives until 2014, when he left to become a consultant in Phoenix, has been shocked by the state’s anti-democratic turn. For several years, he sat next to Karen Fann when she was a member of the House, and in his view she’s gone from being a traditional Republican lawmaker to being a member of “Trump’s cult of personality.” He said, “I don’t know if she believes it or not, or which would be worse.” Arizona, he added, is in the midst of a “nonviolent overthrow in some ways—it’s subtle, and not in people’s face because it’s not happening with weapons. But it’s still a complete overthrow of democracy. They’re trying to disenfranchise everyone who is not older white guys.”

Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.

Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, whose office has authority over the administration of elections, told me that the conspiracy-driven audit “looks so comical you have to laugh at it sometimes.” But Hobbs, a Democrat, who is running for governor, warned, “It’s dangerous. It’s feeding the kind of misinformation that led to the January 6th insurrection.” QAnon followers have been celebrating the audit as the beginning of a “Great Awakening” that will eject Biden from the White House. She noted, “I’ve gotten death threats. I’ve had armed protestors outside my house. Every day, there is a total barrage of social media to our office. We’ve had to route our phones to voice mail so that no one has to listen to it. It can be really traumatizing. I feel beaten up.” She added, “But I’m not going to cave to their tactics—because I think they’re laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 elections.”

Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.

One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions.

Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.

Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.

These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.

It might seem improbable that a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in current struggles over American democracy. But the modern conservative movement has depended on leveraging the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries. In 1903, Lynde Bradley, a high-school dropout in Milwaukee, founded what would become the Allen-Bradley company. He was soon joined by his brother Harry, and they got rich by selling electronic instruments such as rheostats. Harry, a John Birch Societyfounding member, started a small family foundation that initially devoted much of its giving to needy employees and to civic causes in Milwaukee. In 1985, after the brothers’ death, their heirs sold the company to the defense contractor Rockwell International, for $1.65 billion, generating an enormous windfall for the foundation. The Bradley Foundation remains small in comparison with such liberal behemoths as the Ford Foundation, but it has become singularly preoccupied with wielding national political influence. It has funded conservative projects ranging from school-choice initiatives to the controversial scholarship of Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” which argues that Blacks are less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite.” And, at least as far back as 2012, it has funded groups challenging voting rights in the name of fighting fraud.

Since the 2020 election, this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, “We need to regard what’s happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.” Pillars of the conservative establishment, faced with a changing U.S. voter population that threatens their agenda, are exploiting Trump’s contempt for norms to devise ways to hold on to power. Senator Whitehouse said of the campaign, “It’s a massive covert operation run by a small group of billionaire élites. These are powerful interests with practically unlimited resources who have moved on to manipulating that most precious of American gifts—the vote.”

An animating force behind the Bradley Foundation’s war on “election fraud” is Cleta Mitchell, a fiercely partisan Republican election lawyer, who joined the organization’s board of directors in 2012. Until recently, she was virtually unknown to most Americans. But, on January 3rd, the Washington Post exposed the contents of a private phone call, recorded the previous day, during which Trump threatened election officials in Georgia with a “criminal offense” unless they could “find” 11,780 more votes for him—just enough to alter the results. Also on the call was Mitchell,who challenged the officials to provide records proving that dead people hadn’t cast votes. The call was widely criticized as a rogue effort to overturn the election, and Foley & Lardner, the Milwaukee-based law firm where Mitchell was a partner, announced that it was “concerned” about her role, and then parted ways with her. Trump’s call prompted the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, to begin a criminal investigation.

In a series of e-mails and phone calls with me, Mitchell adamantly defended her work with the Trump campaign, and said that in Georgia, where she has centered her efforts, “I don’t think we can say with certainty who won.” She told me that there were countless election “irregularities,” such as voters using post-office boxes as their residences, in violation of state law. “I believe there were more illegal votes cast than the margin of victory,” she said. “The only remedy is a new election.” Georgia’s secretary of state rejected her claims, but Mitchell insists that the decision lacked a rigorous evaluation of the evidence. With her support, diehard conspiracy theorists are still litigating the matter in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta. Because they keep demanding that election officials prove a negative—that corruption didn’t happen—their requests to keep interrogating the results can be repeated almost indefinitely. Despite three independent counts of Georgia’s vote, including a hand recount, all of which confirmed Biden’s victory, Mitchell argues that “Trump never got his day in court,” adding, “There are a lot of miscarriages of justice I’ve seen and experienced in my life, and this was one of them.”

Mitchell, who is seventy, has warm friendships with people in both parties, and she often appears grandmotherly, in pastel knit suits and reading glasses. But, like Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate,” to whom she bears a striking resemblance, she should not be underestimated. She began her political career in Oklahoma, as an outspoken Democrat and a champion of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was elected to the state legislature in her twenties, but then lost a bid for lieutenant governor, in 1986. She told me that she subsequently underwent a political conversion: when her stepson squandered the college tuition that she was paying, she turned against the idea of welfare in favor of personal responsibility, and began reading conservative critiques of liberalism. When I first interviewed her for this magazine, in 1996, she told me that “overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times.”

On behalf of Republican candidates and groups, she began to fight limits on campaign spending. She also represented numerous right-wing nonprofits, including the National Rifle Association, whose board she joined in the early two-thousands. A former N.R.A. official recently told the Guardian that Mitchell was the “fringe of the fringe,” and a Republican voting-rights lawyer said that “she tells clients what they want to hear, regardless of the law or reality.”

In our conversations, Mitchell mocked what she called the mainstream media’s “narrative” of a “vast right-wing conspiracy to suppress the vote of Black people,” and insisted that the fraud problem was significant. “I actually think your readers need to hear from people like me—believe it or not, there are tens of millions of us,” she wrote. “We are not crazy. At least not to us. We are intelligent and educated people who are very concerned about the future of America. And we are among the vast majority of Americans who support election-integrity measures.” Echoing what has become the right’s standard talking point, she declared that her agenda for elections is “to make it harder to cheat.”

Mitchell told me that the Democrats used the pandemic as a “great pretext” to “be able to cheat”: they caused “administrative chaos” by changing rules about early and absentee voting, and they didn’t adequately police fraud. She denied that race had motivated her actions in Georgia. Yet, in an e-mail to me, she said that Democrats are “using black voters as a prop to accomplish their political objectives.”

Few experts have found Mitchell’s evidence convincing. On November 12, 2020, the Trump Administration’s own election authorities declared the Presidential vote to be “the most secure in American history.” It is true that in many American elections there are small numbers of questionable ballots. An Associated Press investigation found that, in 2020, a hundred and eighty-two of the 3.4 million ballots cast in Arizona were problematic. Four of the ballots have led to criminal charges. But the consensus among nonpartisan experts is that the amount of fraud, particularly in major races, is negligible. As Phil Keisling, a former secretary of state in Oregon, who pioneered universal voting by mail, has said, “Voters don’t cast fraudulent ballots for the same reason counterfeiters don’t manufacture pennies—it doesn’t pay.”

What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”

Alarmism about election fraud in America extends at least as far back as Reconstruction, when white Southerners disenfranchised newly empowered Black voters and politicians by accusing them of corruption. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some white conservatives were frank about their hostility to democracy. Forty years ago, Paul Weyrich, who helped establish the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, admitted, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Like many conservatives of her generation, Cleta Mitchell was galvanized by the disputed 2000 election, in which George W. Bush and Al Gore battled for weeks over the outcome in Florida. She repeatedly spoke out on behalf of Bush, who won the state by only five hundred and thirty-seven votes. A dispute over recounts ended up at the Supreme Court.

Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 made plain that the voting-rights wars were fuelled, in no small part, by racial animus. Bigoted conspiracists, including Trump, spent years trying to undermine the result by falsely claiming that Obama wasn’t born in America. Birtherism, which attempted to undercut a landmark election in which the turnout rate among Black voters nearly matched that of whites, was a progenitor of the Big Lie. As Penda Hair, a founder of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, told me, conservatives were looking at Obama’s victory “and saying, ‘We’ve got to clamp things down’—they’d always tried to suppress the Black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.”

Mitchell was at the forefront of the right’s offensive. In 2010, she accused the Majority Leader of the Senate, the Democrat Harry Reid, who was running for reëlection in Nevada, of planning “to steal this election if he can’t win it outright.” Her evidence was that Democrats in thestate had provided “clearly illegal” free food at voter-turnout events—a negligible infraction, given that Reid won by more than forty thousand votes.

A year later, Mitchell successfully defended Trump, who had been exploring a Presidential bid, against charges that he had taken illegal campaign contributions. She had been recommended to Trump by Chris Ruddy, the founder of the conservative media company Newsmax, which was also a Mitchell client. Later, Ruddy introduced the future President to Mitchell over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. (She told me that she found Trump “gracious,” and noted that, since the 2020 election, she has talked with him “pretty often.”)

In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act,eliminating the Justice Department’s power to screen proposed changes to election procedures in states with discriminatory histories, one of which was Arizona. Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and a Democrat, told me that “the state has a history of voter suppression, especially against Native Americans.” Before Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, in 1971, he lived in Arizona, where he was accused of administering literacy tests to voters of color. In the mid-two-thousands, Goddard recalled, Republican leaders erected many barriers aimed at deterring Latino voters, some of which the courts struck down. But the 2013 Supreme Court ruling initiated a new era of election manipulation.

Around this time, Mitchell became a director at the Bradley Foundation. Among the board members were George F. Will, the syndicated columnist, and Robert George, a Princeton political philosopher known for his defense of traditional Catholic values.By 2017, Will, who has been a critic of Trump, had stepped down from the Bradley board. But George has continued to serve as a director, even as the foundation has heavily funded groups promulgating the falsehood that election fraud is widespread in America, particularly in minority communities, and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of Biden’s win. The foundation, meanwhile, has given nearly three million dollars to programs that George established at Princeton.He has written in praise of Pence’s refusal to decertify Biden’s election, and has lamented that so many Americans believe, “wrongly,” that “the election was ‘stolen.’ ” But he declined to discuss with me why, then, he serves on the Bradley Foundation’s board.

The board includes Art Pope, the libertarian discount-store magnate, who serves on the board of governors at the University of North Carolina.? Pope, who has also acknowledged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, declined to discuss his role at the foundation. Another board member is Paul Clement, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis,who is one of the country’s most distinguished Supreme Court litigators. He could not be reached for comment.

Mitchell argues that the right spends “a pittance” on election issues compared with the left. “Have you looked at the Democracy Alliance?” she asked me. The Alliance, whose membership is secret, distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money to many left-leaning causes. But, when it comes to influencing elections, the contrast with the Bradley Foundation is clear. Whereas the Alliance’s efforts have centered on increasing voter participation, the Bradley Foundation has focussed on disqualifying ostensibly illegitimate voters.

Like most private nonprofits, the Bradley Foundation doesn’t disclose much about its inner workings. But in 2016 hackers posted online some of the group’s confidential documents, which showed that, once Mitchell became a director, she began urging the foundation to support nonprofit organizations policing election fraud. Mitchell has professional ties to several of the groups that received money, although she says that she has abstained from voting on grants to any of those organizations.

One recipient of Bradley money is True the Vote, a Texas-based groupthat, among other things, trains people to monitor polling sites. Mitchell has served as its legal counsel, and hacked documents show that she advocated to the I.R.S. that the group deserved tax-exempt status as a charity. To earn such a designation, a group must file federal tax forms promising not to engage in electoral politics. In a letter of support, she asserted that “fraudulent voting occurs in the United States,” citing a 2010 case in which the F.B.I. arrested nine Floridians for election violations. But, as with many voter-fraud allegations, the details of the case were less than advertised. The accusation involved a school-board election in a rural Black community in which a campaign had collected dozens of absentee ballots, in violation of the law. The charges were eventually dismissed. The judge found “no intent to cast a false or fraudulent ballot.” True the Vote, which was granted tax-exempt status, has since been the subject of numerous complaints from voters, who have accused it of intimidation and racism.

Last year, a Reuters report characterized Mitchell as one of four lawyers leading the conservative war on “election fraud,” and described True the Vote as one of the movement’s hubs. The story linked the group and three other conservative nonprofits to at least sixty-one election lawsuits since 2012. Reuters noted that, during the same period, the four groups, along with two others devoted to election-integrity issues, have received more than three and a half million dollars from the Bradley Foundation.

It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board.

One of the group’s directors is John Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University, in California. On January 4, 2021, he visited the White House, where he spoke with Trump about ways to void the election. In a nod to the Independent Legislature Doctrine, Eastman and Trump tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, instead throwing the election to the state legislatures. Pence was not persuaded.

Two days later, Eastman spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally in Washington, hours before the crowds ransacked the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. “This is bigger than President Trump!” Eastman declared. “It is the very essence of our republican form of government, and it has to be done!” He thundered that election officials had robbed Trump by illegally casting ballots in the name of non-voters whose records they had extracted, after the polls had closed, from a “secret folder” in electronic voting machines. He told the crowd that the scandal was visible in “the data.” There is no evidence of such malfeasance, however. Eastman, who recently retired, under pressure, from Chapman University, and was stripped of his public duties at another post that he held, at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me he still believes that the election was stolen, and thinks that the audits in Arizona and other states will help prove it. The Bradley Foundation declined to comment on him, or on Mitchell, when asked about its role in funding their activities.

Two other Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyers—its president, J. Christian Adams,and another board member, Hans von Spakovsky—served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where they began efforts to use the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect Black voters, to prosecute purported fraud by Black voters and election officials. Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife with serious fraud, and in 2017 they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidence of election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded. Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade, sustained partly by Bradley funds. Von Spakovsky now heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, which has received grants from the Bradley Foundation.

At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases. But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from 2016 to 2020, only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state. There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes.

Even Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”

The Voter Fraud Brain Trust lent support to Trump’s lies from the time he took office. In 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. Soon afterward, von Spakovsky gave Trump’s false claim credence by publishing an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove the allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”

More than a year before the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the Council for National Policy,a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”

One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.

In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec, the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec, and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently.

Mitchell and Bolick declined to answer questions about the working group’s focus, but it appears that Bolick’s participation was productive. After the election, she signed a resolution demanding that Congress block the certification of Biden’s victory and award Arizona’s electors to Trump. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of theIndependent Legislature Doctrine. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and alec are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”

Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles. Clarence Thomas, one of the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore laying out the Independent Legislature Doctrine, is the godfather of one of Clint Bolick’s sons. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.

Months before the 2020 vote, Lisa Nelson, the C.E.O. of alec, also anticipated contesting the election results. That February, she told a private gathering of the Council for National Policy about a high-level review that her group had undertaken of ways to challenge “the validity” of the Presidential returns. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky.

Although the law bars charitable organizations such as theCouncil for National Policyfrom engaging in electoral politics, Nelson unabashedly acknowledged, “Obviously, we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote.” She went on, “But it’s very clear that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” One plan, she said, was to urge conservative legislators to voice doubt to their respective secretaries of state, questioning the election’s outcome and asking, “What did happen that night?”

By August, 2020, when the Council for National Policy held another meeting, the pandemic had hurt Trump’s prospects, and talk within the membership about potential Democratic election fraud had reached a frenzy. At the meeting, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president,echoed Trump’s raging about mail-in ballots, describing them as “the No. 1 left-wing agenda.” He urged conservatives not to be deterred by criticism: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.”

A younger member of the organization, Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA, which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism. He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc. “Please keep the campuses closed,” he said, to cheers. “Like, it’s a great thing!”

Five months later, Turning Point Action, a “social welfare organization” run by Kirk’s group, was one of nearly a dozen groups behind Trump’s “March to Save America,” on January 6th. Shortly before the rally, Kirk tweeted that the groups he leads would send “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” His tweet was deleted after the crowds assaulted the Capitol.

Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud. Turning Point’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a member of the Republican National Committeeand a former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party. Bowyer’s friend Jake Hoffman runs an Arizona-based digital-marketing company, Rally Forge, that has been Turning Point’s highest-compensated contractor.In the summer of 2020, Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformationabout the coming elections.

In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the 2016 campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. Some messages were posted under the teens’ accounts, but others were sent under assumed personae. Many posts claimed that mail-in ballots would “lead to fraud,” and that Democrats planned to steal the Presidency.

Turning Point Action denied that it ran a troll farm, arguing that the teen-age employees were genuine, but a study by the Internet Observatory at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center documented the scheme, along with other dubious practices by Rally Forge. In 2016, the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs, a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona. The ploy, evidently intended to siphon votes from Biggs’s Democratic opponent, didn’t go far, but it was hardly the company’s only scam. The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in 2018, apparently to hurt Democrats in several races.

In October, 2020, Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House—and won. Remarkably, the chamber’s Republican leadership then appointed him the vice-chair of the Committee on Government and Elections. Since getting elected, Hoffman has challenged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, called for election audits, and, in coördination with the Heritage Foundation, used his position to propose numerous bills making it more difficult to vote.

This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise. As a leaked video of her remarks revealed, she told supporters that, with the help of Hoffman and other state legislators, the nonprofit group was rewriting America’s election laws. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe,” Anderson explained. “We’ve got three bills done in Arizona!” She continued, “We’re moving four more through the state of Arizona right now . . . simple bills, all straight from the Heritage recommendations.” One of the bills, she noted, was “written and carried by Jake Hoffman,” whom she described as “a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

Hoffman’s bills have made the Heritage Foundation’s wish list a reality.Voting by mail has long been popular in Arizona, with as many as ninety per cent of voters doing so in 2020, but one of Hoffman’s bills made it a felony to send a mail-in ballot to residents who hadn’t requested one, unless they were on an official list of early voters. Another bill, which Hoffman supported, will, according to one estimate, push as many as two hundred thousand people off the state’s list of early voters. Opponents say that this legislation will disproportionately purge Latinos, who constitute twenty-four per cent of the state’s eligible voters. Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. (One of the bill’s targets was Mark Zuckerberg, whose foundation helped county election officials in Arizona handle the pandemic.) In February, at a hearing of the Committee on Government and Elections, a witness from the Washington-based Capital Research Center—also funded by the Bradley Foundation—testified in support of Hoffman’s legislation. Athena Salman, the ranking Democrat, told me she was incensed that Hoffman—“a guy who paid teen-agers to lie”—was put on the election committee. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse!” she said.

Anderson, of Heritage, declined to respond to questions about the group’s collaborations with Hoffman, instead sending a prepared statement: “After a year when voters’ trust in our elections plummeted, restoring that trust should be the top priority of legislators and governors nationwide. That’s why Heritage Action is deploying our established grassroots network for state advocacy for the first time ever. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.”

Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment. Kristin Clark, a Democrat who mounted a write-in campaign against him after the news of his troll farm broke, called Hoffman an “unintelligent man who wants to be a big guy.” She told me, “The Republicans here have changed. They were conservative, but now they’ve sold out. It’s money that’s changed it. All these giant, corporate groups that are faceless—it’s outside money.” In her view, “Jake Hoffman is but a cog.”

The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district.The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral.

Among the first to spread the Sharpiegate conspiracywas another one of Charlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld. Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.” Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense. But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!”

A day after the election, the office of Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, reported that, based on a routine, bipartisan hand recount of a sample of ballots, “no discrepancies were found” in Maricopa County. Within days, the mainstream media had called the election for Biden, based on late returns from Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. But Cleta Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia, told Fox News, “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted.” As Georgia was ratifying its results with a recount, she tweeted that the tally was “fake!!!”

Meanwhile, on the conservative Web site Townhall, Hoffman demanded “a full audit of the vote count in swing states,” adding that the election was “far from over.” He claimed that there had been “countless violations of state election law, statistical anomalies and election irregularities in more than a half dozen states,” and argued that state legislatures should therefore have the final say. By December, he had joined his friend Bowyer and other members of the state’s Republican Party in filing suit against Arizona’s governor, calling for the state to set aside Arizona’s eleven electoral votes and allow the legislature to intervene.

At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy. Leo didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Hasen believes that Leo is trying to preserve “minority rule” in elections in order to advance his agenda. Hasen told me, “Making it harder to vote helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.”

In the case of Arizona, it took only a week for a federal district court to dismiss Hoffman and Bowyer’s suit, citing an absence of “relevant or reliable evidence.” The court admonished the plaintiffs that “gossip and innuendo” cannot “be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Hoffman and the other plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March. In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control.

On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. Soon after, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, was picking up takeout food for his family when the board’s chairman—one of four Republicans on the five-person board—called to warn him to be careful going home. Ninety angry people had gathered outside the chairman’s house, and Gates’s place could be next. “We’d all been doxed,” Gates told me. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin. “It’s chilling to see the parallels,” Gates told me. “You’d never think there were any parallels to a strongman autocracy in Africa.” Gates considers himself a political-science nerd, but, he said, “I had no concept that we were heading where we were heading.”

Gates, who moved to Arizona as a teen-ager, was a latchkey kid whose idea of entertainment was watching C-span. He is forty-nine and describes himself as a “child of the Reagan Revolution” who started a Republican club in high school. He attended Drake University, in Iowa, partly so that he could witness the state’s Presidential caucuses. Winning a Truman Scholarship opened his way to Harvard Law School, where he joined theFederalist Society,the Harvard Law School Republican Club, and the Journal of Law and Public Policy. At Harvard, membership in all three was called the “conservative trifecta.” Gates can scarcely believe how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have changed in the years since.

Over breakfast in June, in Phoenix, he apologized for his eyes welling up with tears as he described his efforts to stand up to his own party’s mob. He said that he and the other county supervisors had been “feeling great” about how well their administration of the election had gone despite the pandemic. But, as the final ballots were counted and Trump fell behind, Maricopa County became the focal point of conspiracy theorists. “Alex Jones and those guys start coming out here, and they’re protesting outside of our election center as the counting is going on,” he said. He could hear people screaming, and what sounded like a drum: “It was Lollapalooza for the alt-right—it was crazy.” He started getting calls and e-mails saying, “You guys need to stop the steal.” Gates told me, “I’d wonder, Is this a real person?” But some angry messages came from people he knew. They said they’d never support him again. “People thought I was failing them,” Gates said. “I have been called a traitor so many times in the last six months.”

Gates says that Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate’s president, confided to him that she knew there was “nothing to” the fraud charges. (She didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Nevertheless, she buckled under the political pressure and authorized a subpoena of the county’s ballots, for the “forensic audit.” At one point, county supervisors were told that if they didn’t comply they would face contempt charges and, potentially, could be imprisoned. For a time, the official Twitter account for the audit accused the supervisors, without evidence, of “spoliation” of the ballots. “I get a little emotional when I talk about it,” Gates said. “My daughter called me, frantically trying to find out whether or not I was going to be thrown in jail.” Trump supporters set up a guillotine on a grassy plaza outside Arizona’s statehouse, demanding the supervisors’ heads. Inside, Gates recalled, one Republican member after another rose to denounce the county supervisors.

A representative for the national Republican Party tried to silence Gates when he spoke out to defend the integrity of Arizona’s election. He told me that Hoffman’s ally Tyler Bowyer, of the Republican National Committee, paid him a visit and warned, “You need to stop it.” According to Gates, Bowyer made it clear that “the Republican National Committee supports this audit.” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Bowyer, denied that the visit was an official attempt at intimidation, calling it instead a “personal courtesy.”

Gates said that after he received death threats he fled with his family to an Airbnb. At one point, the sheriff sent two deputies to guard Gates’s home overnight. Trump supporters, Gates said, “are basically asking Republican leaders to bow before the altar of the Big Lie—‘You’re willing to do it? O.K., great. You’re not? You’re a rino. You’re a Commie. You are not a Republican.’ It’s been incredibly effective, really, when you think about where we’ve come from January 6th.”

Part of what had drawn Gates to the Republican Party was the Reagan-era doctrine of confronting totalitarianism. He’d long had a fascination with emerging democracies, particularly the former Soviet republics. He had come up with what he admits was a “kooky” retirement plan—“to go to some place like Uzbekistan and help.” He told me, “I’d always thought that, if I had a tragic end, it would be in some place like Tajikistan.” He shook his head. “If you had told me, ‘You’re going to be doing this in the U.S.,’ I would have told you, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”

Some of the political pressure on election officials in Arizona was exerted directly by Trump and his associates, potentially illegally. Interfering in a federal election can be a crime. As the Arizona Republic has reported, the President and his legal adviser Rudy Giuliani phoned state and local officials, including Fann. The White House switchboard tried to connect Trump with the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, but, even though the chairman was a Republican, he ducked the call, lest the President interfere improperly. Giuliani called Gates’s cell phone when he was shopping at Walgreens on Christmas Eve. Not recognizing the number, Gates didn’t answer. “You can’t make this stuff up,” he told me. Giuliani left a voice mail saying it was a “shame” that two Republicans couldn’t work things out—he’d come up with a “nice way” to “get this thing fixed up.”

“I never returned the phone call,” Gates said. A week later, when news broke of Trump’s notorious call to officials in Georgia, Gates was more relieved than ever that he hadn’t called Giuliani back. A panel of judges in New York has since suspended Giuliani’s law license, for threatening the public interest by making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” about the Presidential election.

By New Year’s Eve, when Trump tried and failed to reach the chairman of the Maricopa County board, his Administration was in extraordinary turmoil. Attorney General William Barr had resigned from the Justice Department after declaring that it had detected no significant election fraud. Even so, Trump continued to demand that the department investigate a variety of loony conspiracies, including a plot to erase Trump votes using Italian military satellites. According to a leaked e-mail, a Justice Department attorney disparaged the satellite theory as “pure insanity.” A man supposedly involved in the plot issued a denial to Reuters, and Italian police suggested that the allegation was baseless.

But the conspiracy theory, which became known as Italygate, had bubbled up from the same pools of dark money that were funding other election misinformation. Records show that Italygate was spread by a “social welfare organization” called Nations in Action, whose directors included von Spakovsky. When Talking Points Memo contacted von Spakovsky, he said that he had resigned from the board on January 8th. But the money trail remains. Crooks and Liars, a progressive investigative-reporting site, dug up tax filings showing that the group’s 501(c)(3) sibling, the Nations in Action Globally Lifting Up Fund, had received thousands of dollars from the Judicial Crisis Network—a nonprofit enterprise, closely tied to Leonard Leo, that also funds Turning Point Action.

While Justice Department officials were fending off conspiracy theories being spread by tax-exempt charities in Washington, the pressure was even more acute on local officials in Phoenix. Trump tweeted relentlessly about the audit. He “clearly has had a fascination with this issue, because he thinks it’s the key to his reinstatement,” Gates told me. “It’s not about Arizona. We’re literally pawns in this. This is a national effort to delegitimize the election system.” Gates predicted that, if “Arizona can question this, and show that Trump won,” the game will move on to Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia, all of which have sent Republican delegations to observe Arizona’s audit. Noting that both QAnon followers and his own state’s Republican Party chair had referred to “dominoes” in connection with the audit, Gates said, “We know what that game is, and how it works.”

It would be tempting for Gates, a lifetime Republican with political ambitions, to blame only Trump for his party’s anti-democratic turn. But he has few such illusions. What’s really going on, he believes, is a reactionary backlash against Obama: “I’ve thought about it a lot. I believe the election of President Obama frightened a lot of Americans.” Gates argues that the fear isn’t entirely about race. He thinks it’s also about cosmopolitanism, secularism, and other contemporary values that make white conservatives uncomfortable. But in the end, he said, “the diversification of America is frightening to a lot of people in my party.”

Gates believes that his party’s reaction may backfire. Polls show that, although the Arizona audit is wildly popular among Republican voters in the state, it alienates independents, who constitute approximately a third of the state’s electorate—and whose support is necessary for statewide candidates to win.

For now, though, conservative groups seem to be doubling down on their investments in election-fraud alarmism. In the next two years, Heritage Action plans to spend twenty-four million dollars mobilizing supporters and lobbyists who will promote “election integrity,” starting in eight battleground states, including Arizona.

It is coördinating its effort with the Election Transparency Initiative, a joint venture of two anti-abortion groups, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project. The Election Transparency Initiative has set a fund-raising goal of five million dollars. Cleta Mitchell, having left her law firm, has joined FreedomWorks, the free-market group, where she plans to lead a ten-million-dollar project on voting issues. She will also head the Election Integrity Network at the Conservative Partnership Institute, another Washington-based nonprofit. As a senior legal fellow there, she told the Washington Examiner, she will “help bring all these strings” of conservative election-law activism together, and she added, “I’ve had my finger in so many different pieces of the election-integrity pie for so long.”

Back in Arizona, where the auditors are demanding still more time, Gates believes that the Big Lie has become a “grift” used to motivate Republican voters and donors to support conservative candidates and political groups. “The sad thing is that there are probably millions of people—hardworking, good Americans, maybe retired—who have paid their taxes, always followed the law, and they truly believe this, because of what they’ve been fed by their leaders,” he said. “And what’s so dispiriting is that the people who are pushing it from the top? They know better.” ?

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/dark-money-2653023239/

All over the United States — from Georgia to Arizona to Iowa to Texas — Republicans in state legislatures have been pushing voter suppression bills that are designed to make it harder to vote. And CNN has obtained a copy of a leaked video showing the role that "dark money" in the form of Heritage Action for America (the Heritage Foundation's sister organization) has played in crafting these bills, some of which have already been signed into law by Republican governors who include Georgia's Brian Kemp and Florida's Ron DeSantis.

In the leaked video aired by CNN and previously reported by Mother Jones, Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica Anderson can be seen bragging about the group's influence on those bills. Anderson, in the video, declares, "We're working with these state legislatures to make sure they have all of the information they need to draft the bills. In some cases, we actually draft them for them. Or, we have a sentinel, on our behalf, give them the model legislation so it has that grass roots, you known, from the bottom up, type of vibe."

CNN host Chris Cuomo, before airing the video, explained, "We're going to show just how ugly the game has gotten when it comes to the effort to suppress the vote." And he went on to explain why Anderson's use of the word "sentinel" is important.

Cuomo, the brother of Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, told viewers, "I want you to remember the word sentinel and the phrase, 'You know, they pass it along so it has that grass roots vibe.' This is the game…. Money matters."

The CNN host noted how deceptive Heritage Action's claims are. Heritage, in a statement to CNN, claimed that its intention is to make voting more transparent; Cuomo disagrees.

Cuomo said of Heritage, "You want to cheat. You want to limit how many people can vote — for minority groups and big urban areas, and those local officials you want cut out of the process. That's what you want because that is the far-right sale of White fright. These suppression advocates organize and then weaponize, many selling White fright and false notions that the election was stolen by big groups.

Mother Jones has published video of Anderson bragging about Heritage Action's voter suppression efforts. Watch the video below:

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/05/heritage-foundation-dark-money-voter-suppression-laws/

no lnx

Leaked Video: Dark Money Group Brags About Writing GOP Voter Suppression Bills Across the Country

“We did it quickly and we did it quietly,” said the executive director of Heritage Action.

ARI BERMAN

NICK SURGEY

In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”

The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson,in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones. Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration.

All of these recommendations came straight from Heritage’s list of “best practices” drafted in February.With Heritage’s help, Anderson said, Georgia became “the example for the rest of the country.”

The leaked video reveals the extent to which Heritage is leading a massive campaign to draft and pass model legislation restricting voting access, which has been swiftly adopted this year in the battleground states of Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and Iowa. It’s no coincidence that so many GOP-controlled states are rushing to pass similar pieces of legislation in such a short period of time.

Republican legislators claim they’re tightening up election procedures to address (unfounded) concerns about fraud in the 2020 election. But what’s really behind this effort is a group of conservative Washington insiders who have been pushing these same kinds of voting restrictions for decades, with the explicit aim of helping Republicans win elections. The difference now is that Trump’s baseless claims about 2020 have given them the ammunition to get the bills passed, and the conservative movement, led by Heritage, is making an unprecedented investment to get them over the finish line.

“We’re working with these state legislators to make sure they have all of the information they need to draft the bills,” Anderson told the Heritage Foundation donors. In addition to drafting the bills in some cases, “we’ve also hired state lobbyists to make sure that in these targeted states we’re meeting with the right people.”

“In some cases, we actually draft [the bills] for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”

To “create this echo chamber,” as Anderson put it, Heritage is spending $24 million over two years in eight battleground states—Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin—to pass and defend restrictive voting legislation. Every Tuesday, the group leads a call with right-wing advocacy groups like the Susan B. Anthony List, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks to coordinate these efforts at the highest levels of the conservative movement. “We literally give marching orders for the week ahead,” Anderson said. “All so we’re singing from the same song sheet of the goals for that week and where the state bills are across the country.”

Days before the Georgia legislature would pass its sweeping bill rolling back access to the ballot, Anderson said she met with Gov. Brian Kemp and urged him to quickly sign the bill when it reached his desk. “I had one message for him,” said Anderson, a former Trump administration official in the Office of Management and Budget. “Do not wait to sign that bill.If you wait even an hour, you will look weak. This bill needs to be signed immediately.” Kemp followed Anderson’s advice, signing the bill right after its passage. Heritage called it a “historic voting security bill.”

Anderson said she delivered “the same message” to Republican governors in Texas, Arizona, and Florida. Texas is the next big fight for Heritage. Anderson said Heritage Action wrote “19 provisions” in a Texas House bill that would make it a criminal offense for election officials to give a mail ballot request form to a voter who hadn’t explicitly asked for one and would subject poll workers to criminal penalties for removing partisan poll challengers who are accused of voter intimidation. It’s expected to pass in the coming days. 

“Gov. Abbott will sign it quickly,” Anderson said. She warned of corporate opposition to the bill, following actions by Georgia-based companies to distance themselves from the restrictive voting bill there. “American Airlines, Dell, they’re coming after us,” she said. “We need to be ready for the next fight in Texas.” 

In response to a request for comment, Anderson said in a statement, “We are proud of our work at the national level and in states across this country to promote commonsense reforms that make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. We’ve been transparent about our plans and public with our policy recommendations, and we won’t be intimidated by the left’s smear campaign and cancel culture.”

Heritage Foundation fellow Hans von Spakovsky, a former George W. Bush administration official who for two decades has been the driving force behind policies that restrict access to the ballot, spoke alongside Anderson at the donor summit.

“Hans is briefing governors, secretaries of state, state attorney generals, state elected officials,” Anderson said. “Just what three weeks ago, we had a huge call with secretaries of state, right?”

“We’ve now for several years been having a private briefing of the best conservative secretaries of state in the country that has so annoyed the left that they have been doing everything they can to try to find out what happens at that meeting,” von Spakovsky replied.

“So far unsuccessfully,” Anderson said. “No leaks.”

Though the bills shaped by Heritage have been sold as advancing “election integrity,” they appear aimed more at helping GOP candidates take back power. “We are going to take the fierce fire that is in every single one of our bellies,” Anderson told the donors in April, “to right the wrongs of November.”

The Heritage Foundation was co-founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, a well-connected conservative activist on a mission to create more aggressive conservative infrastructure to rival more liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institution.Weyrich, who was also Heritage’s first president, went on to co-found the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which pairs corporations with conservative state legislators to draft model legislation, and the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell, which mobilized evangelical voters behind GOP causes and candidates. Heritage received major funding from leading right-wing donors such as Charles and David Koch, Richard Mellon Scaife, and Joseph Coors.

Speaking in 1980 at a meeting of evangelical leaders in Dallas, Weyrich bluntly articulated his radical views on voting rights. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

In the years since, the Heritage Foundation became the driving force behind much of the Republican Party agenda, writing many of the policy recommendations that were enacted under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

Heritage is spending $24 million over two years in eight battleground states—Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin—to pass and defend restrictive voting legislation.

It remains one of the best-funded organizations in GOP circles. It raised more than $76 million in 2020, according to its most recent annual report. More than $1.6 million of that was raised from corporations, most of which chose to remain anonymous. But according to the annual report from 2019, Google, the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, and the multi-level marketing company Amway all gave at least $100,000, and Citigroup and Hitachi each gave $25,000.

In 2010, as opposition on the right to the Obama administration reached a fever pitch, Heritage launched Heritage Action, a dark money group that does not have to disclose its donors but has received at least $500,000 from the Koch brothers. The goal was to connect the Heritage Foundation to the growing Tea Party movement and to enable the group to undertake more aggressive political activities, such as leading opposition to the Affordable Care Act and promoting a government shutdown in 2013. This right-wing advocacy alienated Republicans on Capitol Hill, with former Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn accusing the group of “destroying the Republican Party.”

Former Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint described the relationship between Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action as “the one-two punch.” The foundation writes the policy, and Heritage Action makes it happen. Heritage Action raised more than $11 million in 2019.

The mastermind behind the nationwide voting restrictions operation is von Spakovsky, who’s done more than just about anyone in GOP circles to spread the myth of widespread voter fraud over the past two decades.

During the Bush administration, von Spakovsky was a special counsel at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where he played a key role in the department’s approval of a 2005 voter ID law from Georgia—among the first of its kind—over objections from career department lawyers, who said it was discriminatory. While advocating internally for the law, von Spakovsky published a law review article under the pseudonym “Publius” praising voter ID laws, in a move that experts said violated Justice Department ethics guidelines. (Von Spakovsky said in a statement that he received approval from a Justice Department ethics adviser and his supervisor for the article. He added, “Contrary to the maliciously false claims in the Mother Jones story, I have worked hard for many years to ensure that every eligible citizen is able to vote.”)

“It’s like he goes to bed dreaming about this, and gets up in the morning wondering, ‘What can I do today to make it more difficult for people to vote?’” the late civil rights icon John Lewis once said of von Spakovsky.

“I don’t want everybody to vote,” said Heritage co-founder Paul Weyrich.

In 2017, von Spakovsky joined Donald Trump’s ill-fated Commission on Election Integrity, which was formed after Trump falsely claimed 3 million people voted illegally in California in the 2016 election, with the aim of unearthing evidence of voter fraud in order to justify new ballot restrictions. Von Spakovsky argued the commission should exclude Democrats and “mainstream Republican officials and/or academics” and helped Vice Chair Kris Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, draft a letter requesting sensitive voter data from all 50 states. The request was met with massive pushback, and the commission, facing a flurry of lawsuits, abruptly disbanded in January 2018 without finding any evidence of fraud.

Though Anderson called von Spakovsky “the premier election law expert across this country,” his work has not fared well in court. During a trial challenging Kansas’ proof-of-citizenship law for voter registration, Kobach hired von Spakovsky to support his claim that illegal votes by noncitizens had swung US elections. But under questioning, von Spakovsky admitted he couldn’t name a single election where votes by noncitizens had decided the outcome. A federal judge wrote that the court gave “little weight to Mr. von Spakovsky’s opinion,” citing “several misleading and unsupported examples of noncitizen voter registration.”

Nonetheless, von Spakovsky’s sensationalist claims about stolen elections and advocacy for policies that restrict voting have found an increasingly receptive audience among Republicans following Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

“The one good thing that came out of last year’s elections,” von Spakovsky said at the Heritage Action event in April, “is I think finally a lot of members of the public, and particularly state legislators, realized that these vulnerabilities exist, have existed for a long time, and have figured out in many states we really need to do something to fix it.”

Indeed, Heritage has been at the forefront of weaponizing Trump’s Big Lie of widespread voter fraud in order to build support for policies that restrict access to the ballot. “A lot of bad things happened in 2020,” Heritage Foundation senior adviser Genevieve Wood said in April to the donors, who ranked “election integrity” as their top issue in a survey this year. “But you should know a lot of good things are beginning to happen now in 2021. You’re seeing it in Georgia. You’re seeing in the state of Arizona. You’re beginning to see it in Texas and so many more.”

Heritage began its lobbying campaign early in Georgia. In February, a representative from the group delivered a letter signed by 2,000 conservative activists to Republicans in the state legislature, urging them to rewrite the state’s voting laws after GOP defeats in the November presidential election and the January Senate runoffs (where Heritage Action contacted 1.5 million voters on behalf of the losing Republican candidates). The activists wrote that they had “lost faith in the process and the outcome of their elections.” Soon after, bills restricting voting access started moving through the legislature.

“Then we provided testimony, expert witnesses, analysis, and actually how to draft these bills so that they were legally tight,” Anderson said. “So, [Democratic voting rights lawyer] Marc Elias, if you know that name from the progressive left, he’s like their legal pit bull. He goes after all of this with lawsuits, so that Marc Elias can’t find any holes.”

Elias has filed a suit challenging the Georgia law. “The Georgia law violates both the Voting Rights Act and the US Constitution,” Elias told Mother Jones. “Heritage Action claiming that this is legally tight is like hearing from the Titanic shipbuilders about how much confidence they have in its maiden voyage. This law is based on a Big Lie, denies Black, Brown, and young voters of their rights, and will be struck down in court.”

Republican state Rep. Barry Fleming, the author of the bill in the Georgia House, was a guest at Heritage’s donor summit.“I can tell you, back in February, I felt like some days we were alone in Georgia,” Fleming said. “And then the Heritage Foundation stepped in, and that began to bring us a boost to help turn around, get the truth out about what we were really trying to do. And I’m here in part to say thank you and God bless you.”

A number of majority-Black counties that Fleming represents as a lawyer in private practice when he’s not at the legislature fired him in protest after the bill passed. But he credited Heritage for helping Republican legislators resist what Anderson called “economic terrorism.” (The group has launched a $1 million ad campaign to defend the law on CNBC and local Georgia stations, which Anderson said is aimed at “woke CEOs [who] didn’t read the bill.”)

“But for the Heritage Foundation and you stepping up to help us, what are other part-time legislators across this nation going to think when they try to do the right thing and secure our elections if they’re allowed to fire us from our jobs, threaten our livelihoods just because we stood up to try to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat?” Fleming asked.

Other measures Anderson said Heritage drafted included “three provisions” in legislation adopted by Iowa Republicans a few weeks before Georgia’s law, including one placing voters on inactive status if they sit out one election cycle and removing them from the rolls if they fail to take action, a system that could lead hundreds of thousands of voters to be purged.

“Iowa is the first state that we got to work in, and we did it quickly and we did it quietly,” Anderson said. “We worked quietly with the Iowa state legislature. We got the best practices to them. We helped draft the bills. We made sure activists were calling the state legislators, getting support, showing up at their public hearings, giving testimony…Little fanfare.Honestly, nobody even noticed. [chris h trms ~]My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.’” (Elias has also filed suit against the Iowa law.)

Heritage has been at the forefront of weaponizing Trump’s Big Lie of widespread voter fraud in order to build support for policies that restrict access to the ballot.

Anderson also took credit for a Arizona lawenacted in early April that prohibits election officials from accepting private funding, which was used in 2020 in both red and blue counties for things like opening more polling locations and drop box sites, saying, “We’re kicking Mark Zuckerberg out of all of our state and federal elections.” And she claimed that another bill signed by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Tuesday, which could purge more than 100,000 people from the state’s list of voters who automatically receive a mail ballot, was “straight from the Heritage recommendations.”

A Heritage lobbyist met early on with Florida Republicans to draft a bill largely mimicking the Georgia law, which passed the legislature over the unanimous opposition of Florida’s county elections supervisors. While the bill worked its way through the legislature, Anderson urged DeSantis to champion it. “I’ve got a call this afternoon with Gov. DeSantis’ team getting an update,” she said on April 22 to her donors. “Why is that? He needs to do more. He needs to say, get this bill on my desk.” DeSantis signed the bill on May 6 behind closed doors, with only Fox & Friends cameras allowed in for an “exclusive.”

“The scandal is the national pressure coming down on states with an intent to keep people from voting,” says Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of the corporate watchdog group Public Citizen. After record turnout in 2020, “writing these bills, pushing these bills, is a mechanism to attempt to return to those new voters being unable to vote.”

In addition to pushing state-based voting restrictions, Heritage Action is leading the effort to block the passage of HR 1, Democrats’ sweeping democracy reform bill that would preempt many of these voter suppression laws by enacting policies like automatic and Election Day registration, two weeks of early voting, and expanded mail-in voting on a nationwide basis. “HR 1 is basically the dream bill of every left-wing advocacy group we’ve been fighting against for years on election issues,” von Spakovsky said at the donor event.

Von Spakovsky said at the beginning of the year that Heritage put out “a short summary of the worst provisions of a 900-page bill. Now, you all know congressional staffers don’t like reading 900-page bills. That fact sheet we put out is being used by congressional staffers, members of Congress, to go up and fight HR 1.” The group dubbed the bill the “Corrupt Politicians Act,” a label that was soon being used by leading Republicans like Ted Cruz.

“We’ve made sure that every single member of Congress knows just how bad the bill is,” Anderson added. “Then we’ve made sure there’s an echo chamber of support around these senators driven by your Heritage Action activists and sentinels across the country where we’ve driven hundreds of thousands of calls, emails, place letters to the editor, hosted events, and run television and digital ads.”

In March, the group organized a rally in West Virginia to urge centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to oppose the bill and “stand up for WV values,” according to an invitation obtained by Documented, even as it bused in conservative activists from states hundreds of miles away. Heritage Action announced on Wednesday it would run ads this summer pressuring Democratic senators in West Virginia, Arizona, Montana, and New Hampshire to preserve the filibuster in order to block HR 1.

“It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Anderson said in April. “If we don’t win this, we lose our republic, period.”

To Elias, the video from the Heritage summit is proof that Republican state lawmakers are pursuing voting restrictions not in response to real local problems, but at the behest of well-funded Washington insiders. “It’s not being run by a coalition of state legislators,” he says. “It’s not being run by election administrators. It’s being run out of an office in Washington, DC, by people whose sole agenda is to make it harder for Black, Brown, and young voters to participate in the electoral process. Republicans who adopt these model laws should be ashamed of themselves.”

Watch the full video here. This story has been updated to include comment from Hans von Spakovsky.

Nick Surgey is an investigative reporter and the executive director of Documented.

===

https://heritageaction.com/about/staff-1-1

off bs

cute as a bug, looks a bit like hillary

The Heritage Action team is passionate and dedicated to restoring conservative principles to America. The team is located in Washington, DC and across the country to ensure we can be the voice for reason and sound policy for the American people.

Anderson LG Circle

Jessica Anderson

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Jessica Anderson serves as the Executive Director of Heritage Action. In this role, Anderson is responsible for the strategic vision and operations of Heritage Action while working alongside The Heritage Foundation leadership to ensure both organizations are working toward common goals.

Prior to serving as Executive Director, Jessica Anderson served as Vice Presidentto the organization, where she was responsible for the strategic operation and day-to-day activities of the government relations, policy, digital marketing, and grassroots teams.

Before returning to Heritage Action in 2018, Anderson served as Associate Director, Intergovernmental Affairs and Strategic Initiatives for the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump Administration. Anderson has over 10 years of political experience which includes herfirst tour at Heritage Action as Grassroots Director. Anderson landed on the 2017, 30 Under 30 Forbes List for Law and Policy and is a recipient of othertop 30 Under 30 awards from Newsmax and Red Alert and is a 2020 Buckley Award winner for conservative leadership. Jessica Anderson has been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Real Clear Policy, The Hill, and The American Spectator. She graduated Cum Laude from the University of Florida and is a graduate of the Koch Associate Program. Anderson is a founding Board Member of N2 America.

Bess LG

Garrett Bess

VICE PRESIDENT OF GOVERNMENT RELATIONS AND COMMUNICATIONS

Garrett Bess is the Vice President of Government Relations and Communications. He is responsible for managing the government relations, grassroots, and digital team. He has served for nearly a decade on the Hill as a senior staff member to two Members of Congress. He is a native of Tampa Bay, Florida.

===

~ impeach

hmm redstate: hit vuln dems: tv ad, dark post; rad left witchunt: acu schalpp, heritage action, fredomworks, presidential coalition, am 1st pol, cfg; censure schiff, text msg dirty 30--> 75K calls to congress;

==

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/meet-the-right-wing-group-that-helped-pick-neil-gorsuch

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said that he would only nominate a justice to the Supreme Court whose named appeared on two lists developed by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.

While the Federalist Society is a conservative group that focuses closely on legal issues, Heritage takes a much wider scope, working on everything from domestic policy to foreign affairs.

Heritage, led by former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, has played a major role in the Trump administration, especially on staffing and policy ideas. Conservative activist Marjorie Dannenfelser called Heritage “the fulcrum” of Trump’s administration, and one source told Politico’s Katie Glueck that Heritage launched a “shadow transition team.”

“Perhaps Heritage’s most significant involvement during the campaign was its experts’ shaping of Trump’s list of Supreme Court choices,ultimately resulting in a selection of conservative thinkers who oppose abortion rights,” Glueck adds.

Heritage is so far to the right that many Republicans have publicly complained about its extremism.

Trump picked Neil Gorsuch, a judge on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, from the Heritage-developed lists, which Trump assured conservatives would only include “pro-life” judges in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia.

Heritage’s role in Gorsuch’s selection should raise doubts that Trump was looking for a mainstream nominee.

In fact, Heritage is so far to the right that many Republicans have publicly complained about its extremism.

Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast dubbed Heritage Action, the think tank’s political arm, “The Group too Radical for Republicans,” and The Atlantic’s Molly Ball described in detail “Heritage’s transformation from august policy shop to political hit squad.”

DeMint, who left the Senate in 2013 to lead Heritage, was one of Congress’s most radical members and “the primary conduit through which the Religious Right’s agenda makes its way in the halls of Congress.”

He said that gay people and unmarried women who have premarital sex shouldn’t be allowed to teach in public schools and led the unsuccessful drive to defeat a hate crimes bill because it protected people based on sexual orientation and gender identity, falsely claiming that it would criminalize free speech and land pastors in jail.

Jim DeMint has said that gay people and unmarried women who have premarital sex shouldn’t be allowed to teach.

Even before DeMint took the reins, Heritage had taken anti-LGBT stances, criticizing the Supreme Court ruling that knocked down bans on gay sex, and Heritage staffer Ryan Anderson has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of marriage equality and nondiscrimination laws.

DeMint has also denounced immigration reform, universal health care and abortion rights, which he said should be banned even in cases of rape or incest.

Heritage also tasked its analyst Jason Richwine with studying the supposed negative effects of immigration reform. Previously, Richwine wrote articles for White Nationalist Richard Spencer’s racist Alt-Right website linking Latinos to crime and authored a doctoral dissertation claiming that Latinos have a genetically inferior IQ to white people and that the children and grandchildren of Latino immigrants will persist in having low IQs, dragging down American society unless the U.S. adopted a more discriminating immigration policy.

Naturally, Richwine’s heavily criticized report for Heritage reflected his view that the U.S. should discriminate against “low-skilled” immigrants.

The group has also tried to put an academic face on climate change denialand emerged as one of the driving forces promoting the false claim that U.S. elections are riddled with widespread voter fraud, and DeMint even admitted that Heritage is promoting voter restriction laws “all over the country, because in the states where they do have voter ID laws you’ve seen, actually, elections begin to change towards more conservative candidates.”

Heritage is now aiming to bring its political agenda, viewed as radical and extreme even by many Republicans, not only to the Trump administration, but also to the Supreme Court.

Tags: Jim DeMintNeil GorsuchRichard SpencerSupreme CourtHeritage ActionHeritage Foundation

==

Heritage Action for Americais a "sister organization" of the Heritage Foundation. As a 501(c)(4) organization located in Washington D.C., Heritage Action "advance[s] conservative policy."[1]

Heritage Action for America's website displays a "Scorecard" to "measure[e] votes, co-sponsorships, and other legislative activity to show how conservative Members of Congress are." The "scorecard" is updated "weekly while Congress is in session."[2].

Personnel

Articles and Resources

References

  1. ↑ Heritage Action for America, About, Heritage Action for America, accessed October 18, 2013.
  2. ↑ Heritage Action for America, Heritage Action Scorecard, Heritage Action Official Website, accessed October 18, 2013.
  3. ↑ Heritage Action for America, About, Heritage Action for America, accessed October 18, 2013.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/19544-a

President Obama signed a debt deal at 12:30 a.m. averting a catastrophic debt default in the nick of time.

In a city of manufactured crisis it is sometimes hard to distinguish real issues from fake ones, but the debt ceiling deadline is a serious issue. Since Congress failed to pass a budget, the Treasury Department ran out of authority to borrow months ago. October 17, 2013 was the day that the Treasury Department said it would be unable to juggle the accounts to pay the nation's obligations.

The consequences of a default to the economy would be catastrophic, stocks and pension funds would crash as interest rates would jump. Just the two-week government shutdown and the threat of default took a $24 billion dollar bite out of the economy, says the S&P.

"There are certain weapons that are just improper to use against humanity," Warren Buffet told CNBC on October 16 as the stalemate continued in Congress. "It is a political weapon of mass destruction and both sides should say we’re not going to touch it, just like with poison gas or nuclear weapons. It’s too powerful."

Extremist Tea Party reactionaries in the Congress led our nation to the very brink, passing a deal hours before midnight on October 16.

As the very real threat of a catastrophic debt default loomed this week, the Koch Brothers were running for cover. Koch Industries sent a letter to Congress saying the corporation controlled by two of the richest billionaires in the world was not responsible for the shutdown.

David Koch's Americans for Prosperity group helpfully clarified that it did not support the strategy to defund the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it just wanted to repeal it.

It’s time for a fact check. The Koch family foundations and the newest known Koch vehicle -- Freedom Partners, which is staffed with by operatives connected to the Kochs and housed in the same building as Charles Koch’s foundation -- have bankrolled practically every group working to create a fake grassroots uprising against the ACA. Many of the groups linked to the Kochs have also pushed an extreme “shut-it-down” position that led the U.S. to the brink of a historic government debt default.

Here is a field guide to some of the Koch O’ Nuts and what is known about their funding.

Americans for Prosperity’s Goal Is the Repeal of “Obamacare”

Freedom Partners funding in 2012: $31,600,000. Plus an additional $4,278,000 from Center to Protect Patient Rights in 2011. The total amount of funding from David Koch himself directly to AFP versus filtered through Freedom Partners is not disclosed.

AFP was founded by David Koch in 2004, when Koch’s “Citizens for a Sound Economy” split into FreedomWorks and AFP. Known funders in the past include Koch family foundations, the Scaife Foundation and the Bradley Foundation. Today it is one of the largest beneficiaries of a previously unknown stream of money from Freedom Partners

According to AFP: “Americans for Prosperity has led the charge against Obamacare implementation throughout the summer, with events around the country and millions spent in television and radio ads.” The New York Times reports that AFP has run $5.5 million in television advertising against the law over the past three months.

According to USA Today (September 19, 2013): “Between July 1 and Sept. 16, Americans for Prosperity led all advertising [on the subject of ACA, either for or opposed], running more than 3,200 spots to slam the law, according to a tally of advertising by Kantar Media.”

These ads include:

According toAFP, its state groups held a total of 150 "healthcare related events" in the months of August and September, including town hall style events featuring members of Congress like Pennsylvanian Congressman Pat Meehan. Campaign websites include ObamacareRiskFactors.com and JustExemptMe.com.

Controversial Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who spearheaded the effort to shutdown the government over the ACA, was featured at AFP’s national “Right Online” conference last month, where he advocated the repeal of the ACA through defunding it and tying that defunding to the budget fights.

Video of Ted Cruz’s speech at the David Koch headlined conference is available here.

The Executive Director of AFP, Tim Phillips, praised Jim DeMint for his efforts at the Heritage Foundation to "do what’s right" (Heritage Action, as noted below, was a primary advocate of the shutdown). He also praised Cruz, his featured speaker, for sticking to the agenda of "we're going to do what’s right from day one," like DeMint, plainly referencing their fight against the ACA.

Heritage Action for America Helps Ted Cruz Get His Stump Speech Ready

Freedom Partners funding in 2012: $500,000. Total amount of direct funding from the Koch family fortune is not known.

The Heritage Foundation has received an undisclosed sum from the Koch family fortune over the years, but it has close ties to the Koch agenda and David Koch's AFP strongly endorsed the Heritage Foundation’s agenda as Congress returned from summer recess.

Heritage Action for America gives Heritage Foundation’s new Executive Director, former U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), a big platform for a reactionary political agenda.

Heritage Action has pushed the extremes in its effort to defund Obamacare at any cost with weekly Action Alerts demanding that their supporters call Congress and reject any deal that did not defund Obamacare. On the night before the government default deadline the group continued to urge no deal the "proposed deal will do nothing to stop Obamacare’s massive new entitlements from taking root -- radically changing the nature of American health care" and told Congressional leaders their votes would be scored.

"Heritage Action was also responsible for running internet ads against 100 Republican politicians who failed to sign a letter to House Speaker John Boehner encouraging him to defund Obamacare at any cost,” reports the Business Spectator.

For Heritage Action the war has been many months in the planning. It launched a "Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour," nine events held from August 19-29 featuring DeMint and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz. Jim DeMint: "We have an opportunity to change the direction of our nation by defunding Obamacare and advancing conservative policy solutions that will help place us back on the path toward fiscal responsibility."

Tea Party Patriots Push for the Extremes

Freedom Partners funding in 2012: $200,000. Total amount of direct funding from the Koch family fortune is not known.

David Koch’s AFP has funded numerous events advancing the Tea Party agenda. The Tea Party Patriots are one faction of the Tea Party. Tea Party Patriots have been among the most extreme "shut it down" factions of the far right. The group produced a "Defunding Obamacare Toolkit for Activists" with talking points, sample social media posts, and more. "We've pushed very, very, very hard, and we’re doing that because we understand that this law [Obamacare] is having very real effects on millions of Americans right now," National Coordinator Jenny Beth Martin told Politico. The Tea Party Patriots joined FreedomWorks’ paid political consultant Glenn Beck at a Saturday rally on Capitol Hill with Sarah Palin and others.

On the brink of default on October 16, the Tea Party Patriots were urging no deal. "The Ruling Elites in Washington, D.C. have completely abandoned the American people," said Martin. "The deal cut in the Senate does NOT protect the American people from this unfair and unworkable law."

Center to Protect Patient Rights Acts as a Conduit

Freedom Partners: $114,678,000. Total funding from the Koch family fortune is unknown.

The New York Timesdescribes the Center to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR): "Run by a political consultant with ties to the Kochs and listing an Arizona post office box for its address, the center appears to be little more than a clearinghouse for donations to still more groups, including American Commitment and the 60 Plus Association, both ardent foes of the health care law."

CPPR is at the center of a probe by the California Elections Board on "dark money" spent through shell groups to influence two ballot initiatives, among other concerns that have been raised about it.

The 60 Plus Association, a Big Money Front Group Focused on Seniors

Freedom Partners funding in 2012: $114,678,000. Plus an additional $14,029,000 from the Center to Protect Patient Rights in 2011. Total amount of funding from the Koch family fortune is unknown.

The 60 Plus Association has long campaigned against Obamacare. The New York Times reports that it was "among a handful of groups calling themselves the 'Repeal Coalition' that sent a letter in August urging Republican leaders in the House and the Senate to insist 'at a minimum' in a one-year delay of carrying out the health care law as part of any budget deal."

On September 23, the organization called for a budget with no Obamacare, "Pull the Plug" said their release and on September 25, as Ted Cruz began his "filibuster" the 60 Plus Association issued a statement in support to Cruz and his efforts on the Senate floor to stem the funding and implementation of Obamacare.

American Commitment Pushes Tea Party Candidates

Freedom Partners Funding: $6,260,000. Total amount of funding from the Koch family fortune is unknown.

American Commitment is run by another Koch operative Phil Kerpen. Kerpen was the "legislative strategist" at Americans for Prosperity for over five years. The group has opposed the requirement in the ACA that requires all Americans to purchase health care and has supported legislation to require members of Congress to subscribe to the plan.

On its website it has ads in support of Steve Lonegan who was defeated by Cory Booker last night for the New Jersey U.S. Senate seat. Lonegan was the State Director of the New Jersey chapter of Americans for Prosperity and ran for governor of New Jersey in 2005 and 2009. Lonegan was passionately opposed to Obamacare and on October 10 boasted that his election would end the shutdown: "When I win, Obama will fold." "My victory in this election on Wednesday will send a message to Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that the American people want an end to Obamacare and the rest of the President’s radical agenda," said Lonegan.

Generation Opportunity, Another Dark Money Group Marketing to Youth

Freedom Partners funding in 2012: $5,040,000. Total amount of funding from the Koch family fortune is unknown.

One of the most well-known and most misleading anti-Obamacare ads comes from a new group called Generation Opportunity. Thead portrays Uncle Sam giving a woman a gynecological exam and calls for people to "opt out of Obamacare."

Generation Opportunity purports to be "the voice of young people in Washington and in local communities and we will act to protect our future." But its glitzy ad campaigns and its Freedom Partner funding reveals that it is another astroturf front group for powerful special interests.

Prior to joining Generation Opportunity as President, Evan Feinberg was Program Manager at the Charles Koch Institute, where he “Managed the institute’s efforts related to government spending."

Generation Opportunity intends to host events at college football tailgate parties, music concerts and other events in the fall of 2013, urging young people to opt-out of Obamacare, which of course would net them a penalty.

Concerned Women for American Legislative Action Committee

Freedom Partners funding in 2012: $8,150,000. Total amount of funding from the Koch family fortune is unknown.

CWALAC got a surge in funding, a 300 percent increase (from 2M to 8M) for the 2012 election cycle, almost all from Freedom Partners, which no one knew about at the time, and then it they turned around and announced a $7 million ad campaign on "issue ads" critical of Obama in the summer leading up to the election.

The related Concerned Women for America is an overtly religious group that has opposed Obamacare, claiming its opposition is on the grounds of "religious liberty." The president of the group alleges that the exchanges will charge enrollees an “abortion surcharge,” a minimum of $1 per month, which pays into an "abortion slush fund" obscured by a “secrecy clause.”

According to the Washington Post, CWALAC spent at least $3 million on 3,141 ads during the 2012 Presidential campaign, spending $1 million on ads in Wisconsin and more than $700K in both Iowa and Minnesota.

According to CWALAC, the group spent $6 million on an anti-ACA ad titled "Care" that aired in six states -- Iowa, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Virginia and Wisconsin -- in June 2012.

American Legislative Exchange Council Spearheads Opposition in the States

Koch Industry funding: More than $1 million.

Over the years, Koch Industries has given ALEC at least $1 million in addition to the substantial funding ALEC has received from the Koch family fortune, for example from the foundations it controls. The total amount of funding the Koch fortune has contributed to ALEC is unknown.

For the past two decades Koch Industries has been a leader of ALEC with a seat on its corporate board, and with Koch Industries playing an influential role bankrolling ALEC, the group has spearheaded efforts to push state legislators to "repeal Obamacare," echoing the same message as David Koch's AFP. ALEC has also urged state legislators to pass resolutions urging Congress to repeal the ACA, in addition to peddling numerous bills to defund or stop implementation of the ACA over the past three years, as detailed in its legislative handbook: "A Legislators Guide to Repealing Obamacare."

Through these and other efforts, ALEC has sought to stop the ACA at the state and federal levels, while indoctrinating its legislative members with talking points that have been echoed by opponents of the law in state capitols and also in Congress during the debates over the budget this year. Congress has numerous ALEC alums among its ranks, including House Majority whip, Eric Cantor (R-VA), who was recently given one of ALEC’s highest awards for advancing ALEC’s agenda in Congress.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

**Heritage Action for America**, more commonly known simply as "**Heritage Action**," is aconservative policy advocacy organization, founded in 2010. It works with citizen activists nationwide to generate support for legislation in the U.S. Congress.[1] The organization has state operations in North Carolina and Pennsylvania[2] and is a sister organization of the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation.[2][3] Heritage Action has been called a "powerhouse in a new generation of conservative groups"[4] and "perhaps now the most influential lobby group among Congressional Republicans."[5] It is led by chief executive Michael A. Needham.[6]

Contents

  [hide] 

Activities

The organization was launched primarily as a response to The Heritage Foundation's growing membership, and the fact that The Heritage Foundation is not allowed to back pieces of legislation due to its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. Heritage Action fulfills this role and provides a link between the think tank and grassroots conservative activists.[7] Heritage Action was first announced in April 2010 by Ed Feulner, president of The Heritage Foundation. He stated the purpose of the organization was to harness "grassroots energy to increase the pressure on Members of Congress to embrace The Heritage Foundation’s policy recommendations." He also stated it would not be involved in election campaigns.[8]

Heritage Action launched its first advocacy campaign in July 2010, targeting Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), President Barack Obama's health care reform law.[7] By August 2010 the organization had helped to secure 170 Republican co-sponsors for a petition by Rep. Steve King to force a vote on repealing the healthcare reform.[9] Following this, in September 2010, the group began a 10-day television and web campaign to persuade Democrats to sign onto a repeal of the law.[10] The group opened its state operations in North Carolina and Pennsylvania in January 2011, specifically to focus on mobilizing voters against the health care law.[11]

Heritage Action received attention in late 2010 for its opposition to the New START treaty, an agreement between the United States and Russia to reduce nuclear weapons.[12] The organization sent out fliers to a targeted group of conservatives in Tennessee, which argued that the treaty could lead to nuclear proliferation.[13]

Heritage Action for America produces the radio show Istook Live!, hosted by former Oklahoma congressman Ernest Istook.[14][15]

Heritage Action launched a campaign in August 2013 to link the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as the ACA or "Obamacare," with laws to keep the federal government open or to increase the federal debt limit.[16] The organization played an instrumental role in the government shutdown of October 2013.[17][18] While the shutdown was ongoing Heritage Action continued to urge lawmakers not to negotiate a measure to fully fund the government without dismantling the ACA.[16] The strategy of Heritage Action in tying the ACA to the shutdown, according to Needham, was to make President Obama "feel pain" because of the shutdown.[19] Senator Orrin Hatch criticized Heritage for warning legislators not to vote for the Senate budget compromise during the government shutdown of 2013:

There's a real question on the minds of many Republicans now -- I am not just speaking for myself, for a lot of people: Is Heritage going to go so political that it really doesn't amount to anything anymore? I hope not. I'm going to try to help it survive and do well. Right now I think it's in danger of losing its clout and its power around Washington, D.C.[20]

According to a New York Times 1 March 2014 editorial, since the Heritage Action successfully "urged the House to stop legislating and focus only on attacking the Obama administration" (a somewhat inaccurate description) in 2013, there has been a wave of retirements from the 113th Congress, the "least productive in history". Discouraged by the "death of legislation", twenty-one House members and six senators chose retirement. Some of these retirees are described by "congressional scholar Norman Ornstein as the "problem-solving caucus", —legislators such as—Doc Hastings, Frank Wolf, Howard “Buck” McKeon, John Dingell, Henry Waxman, Carl Levin, Jay Rockefeller, Tom Harkin, Rush Holt, James Moran, Carolyn McCarthy.[21]

Legislation supported

Legislation opposed

Funding

Heritage Actions is supported by individual and corporate donors, with its 2012 tax return indicating that 44% of its overall contributions came from small donations of $5,000 or less that year.[33] At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in October 2013, Needham conceded that Heritage Action was "not being transparent" with their donors as they have generally declined to disclose who their donors are.[34] One exception to this was a donation from conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch: the Koch brothers donated half a million dollars in October 2013.[34]

References

  1. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ May, Caroline (17 June 2010). "Heritage spin-off targets ObamaCare in first grassroots campaign". The Daily Caller. Retrieved 20 January 2011.
  2. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Action#cite_ref-Christensen_2-1) Rob Christensen (January 11, 2011). "Heritage Foundation sinks its roots in N.C.". The News & Observer. Retrieved October 11, 2013.
  3. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Weber, Joseph. "Hybrid groups using freedom, cash clout; Conservatives purchase ads,start petitions". The Washington Times.
  4. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Fineman, Howard (October 9, 2013). "Heritage Action Bails On Debt Ceiling Fight". The Huffington Post.
  5. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Martin, Jonathan; Rutenberg, Jim; Peters, Jeremy W. (October 19, 2013). "Fiscal Crisis Sounds the Charge in G.O.P.’s ‘Civil War’". The New York Times.
  6. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Hopkins, Christopher Snow; Khan, Naureen (9 October 2010). "People; Interest Groups". The National Journal.
  7. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Action#cite_ref-Smithwick_7-1) Smithwick, Benjamin (5 July 2010). "The Fight to Repeal Obamacare". Human Events.com. Retrieved 17 January 2011.
  8. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Ed Feulner (9 April 2010). "Morning Bell: Heritage Action for America". Morning Bell. The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved 20 January 2011.
  9. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Gizzi, John (27 August 2010). "Sen. Chuck Hagel Strikes Again". Human Events.com. Retrieved 17 January 2011.
  10. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Arsenault, Mark (11 September 2010). "GOP focus is jobs, not health care; Candidates mostly avoid issue party pledged to hammer". The Boston Globe.
  11. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Budoff-Brown, Carrie (7 January 2011). "Anti-Reform Dems Cool to Repeal Vote". The News & Observer.
  12. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "Right wing group uses fear to fight New START". RT.com. 9 November 2010. Retrieved 17 January 2011.
  13. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Theobald, Bill (12 December 2010). "Corker Faces Political Dilemma on Nuclear Treaty". The Tennessean.
  14. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "Tuesday, July 10, 2012". Talkers. July 10, 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2013.
  15. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "Heritage Action for America Launches 'Istook Live!' Radio Show". Entertainment Close-Up. July 13, 2012. Retrieved October 15, 2012.
  16. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Action#cite_ref-yahooshutdown_16-1) Moody, Chris (October 9, 2013). "Meet one of the conservative advocacy groups behind the GOP's government shutdown strategy". Yahoo! News.
  17. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Joseph, Cameron (October 9, 2013). "Heritage Action leader: Paul Ryan's shutdown offer off-target". The Hill.
  18. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Miller, Zeke J (September 30, 2013). "Hidden Hand: How Heritage Action Drove DC To Shut Down". Time.
  19. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ McCormack, John (October 9, 2013). "Heritage Action's Shutdown Strategy". The Weekly Standard.
  20. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Taylor, Jessica (October 17, 2013). "GOP senator: Heritage in danger of not amounting to ‘anything anymore’". MSNBC.
  21. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ The editor (1 March 2014). "The Dying Art of Legislating". Retrieved 2 March 2014.
  22. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ DeSantis, Ron (14 Feb 2013). "Federal pay freeze bill paves way for reduced spending". The Hill. Retrieved 5 April 2013.
  23. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Lunney, Kellie. "House to Vote on Fed Pay Freeze". goveexec.com. Retrieved 5 April 2013.
  24. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "H.R. 273 - Congress.gov". United States Congress. Retrieved 5 April 2013.
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  31. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Action#cite_ref-HouseRetreatsPete_31-1) Kasperowicz, Pete (4 March 2014). "House retreats from 2012 flood reforms". The Hill. Retrieved 6 March 2014.
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  33. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/10/more-than-kochs-small-donors-fueled.html
  34. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Action#cite_ref-politico.com_34-1) http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/koch-brothers-heritage-action-donation-98054.html

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