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Right Wing Watch reported in November that right-wing activist Katy Faust had appeared on the Family Research Council's "Washington Watch" program to promote the End Obergefell movement she was organizing. Today her anti-equality coalition officially launched its campaign to get the Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that the Constitution protects the right of same-sex couples to marry.

The coalition of 47 right-wing groups is calling their campaign “Greater Than” and using the tagline, “Children are greater than equal.” The basic message is that same-sex couples who want to get married and become parents are selfishly putting adult “fantasies” and “desires” over the wellbeing of children. A number of religious-right figures are featured in a campaign launch video. Influencer Allie Beth Stuckey, for example, mocks equality advocates’ use of the phrase “love makes a family.”

In an interview about the campaign with American Family Radio, Faust made it clear that the campaign will continue a long and dishonorable legacy of anti-LGBTQ forces smearing gay people and couples as threats to children. She called parenting by same-sex couples a “destructive state-sanctioned gaslighting experiment on children.” Faust names a few of the religious-right leaders involved in the campaign, saying, “We’re all going to speak with one voice, and it is ‘don’t touch the kids.’”

The campaign announcement was made through the Heritage Foundation’s “Daily Signal,” which was not surprising given that the Heritage Foundation responded to the Obergefell ruling by insisting that it was not legitimate and publishing a road map to overturning it.

Last year, as equality advocates celebrated the tenth anniversary of Obergefelland the supermajority support for marriage equality among the American public, Right Wing Watch reported that anti-LGBTQ religious-right groups were determined to overturn it. And in November, when the Supreme Court rejected Liberty Counsel’s request to overturn marriage equality, the religious-right legal group insisted that “it’s not if, but when, Obergefell will be overturned.”

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65,093 views Premiered Jan 25, 2026 #politics #lincolnsquare #democracy

Sam Osterhout and Andra Watkins

FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS SUBSTACK

break down a newly released Heritage Foundation document that lays out a sweeping Christian nationalist blueprint for remaking American families, marriage, and personal freedom. This isn’t a conspiracy theory — it’s a published plan.

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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's Kevin Roberts to speak at NY Times’ Climate Week NYC event

Roberts has referred to environmentalism as a “pseudo-religion” and called for unleashing our “vast reserves of oil and natural gas”

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

:{Published 09/06/24 mma

The New York Times announced the speakers for its September 25 “Climate Week NYC” discussion, an annual event coinciding with the United Nations General Assembly session in New York City that promises to “bring together some of the world’s most engaged climate voices as part of a community focused on change.” The event’s lineup notably includes Kevin Roberts, the president of right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation who has led the Project 2025 initiative — the controversial conservative transition plan of policy and staffing proposals for a potential second Trump presidency.

IFrame Content

As detailed in its nearly 900-page policy book, titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 rejects climate science and dismisses efforts to reduce planet-warming pollution and transition to a clean energy economy in favor of serving the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Overseen by Roberts, who wrote the book’s foreword, the Heritage plan for a future GOP administration seeks to gut or hamstring federal agencies working on renewable energy deployment, climate science, and environmental safeguards while opening up state and federal public lands for oil and gas extraction.

In Project 2025’s policy book, Roberts attacked environmentalists, the U.N., and the Environmental Protection Agency, calling for the unfettered use of oil and gas

In the foreword of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership policy book, Roberts sets the tone for the plan's hostility toward climate action and wholesale endorsement of fully extracting our oil and gas reserves, a path scientists have warned would be catastrophic.

Roberts calls environmentalism a “pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.” He claims that those who suffer most from environmental policies are the “aged, poor, and vulnerable.” Roberts continues, “At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human” because it promotes “population control and economic regression” by “regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

Roberts attacks global elites and calls for abandoning international organizations like the United Nations. Claiming that “global elites” and organizations like the United Nations are making decisions on climate change that are insulated “from the sovereignty of national electorates,” Roberts argues, “International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed: They should be abandoned.” Additionally, Project 2025 demands that “the next conservative Administration should withdraw the U.S. from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.” Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023]

Roberts claims the EPA “quietly strangles domestic energy production,” later adding, “The next conservative President should go beyond merely defending America’s energy interests but go on offense, asserting them around the world.” Roberts goes on to claim that “America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth. American dominance of the global energy market would be a good thing: for the world, and, more importantly, for ‘we the people.’” Under Roberts’ leadership, Project 2025’s section on energy production was reportedly written by the oil and gas industry and provides a blueprint for how the next president can turn “drill, baby, drill” into federal policy. Notably, the industry is already producing record amounts of oil and gas under the Biden-Harris administration, all while holding thousands of unused drilling permits. Project 2025, *Mandate for Leadership*, [2023; Media Matters, 8/8/24; Vox, 3/13/24; PolitiFact, 3/29/22]

*:{Update (9/9/24):The Times replied to this piece with the following statement: “Climate Forward is a live journalism event that has a history of bringing together newsmakers who seek to influence climate and political policy for a day of rigorous, challenging interviews. We anticipate the same for this year's event.”

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an july 24

Election law expert and Democracy Docket publisher Marc Elias has been warning that if President Joe Biden or another Democratic candidate wins the 2024 election, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump and his allies will do everything they can to overturn the election results — only they will be better equipped this year than in 2020.

Now, the Heritage Foundation is claiming, without evidence, that Democrats are planning to steal the election.

The Washington Post's Isaac Arnsdorf reports that Heritage made that claim during a "war game" presentation at their headquarters on Thursday, July 11.

"Barbra Streisand kidnapped by Hamas, Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility, the FBI arresting Donald Trump two days after winning the election — these were among the far-fetched scenarios imagined by a simulation of threats to the 2024 election showcased on Thursday by the right-wing Heritage Foundation," Arnsdorf explains. "The presentation, delivered at the Foundation's Washington headquarters, stated as a given that the Biden Administration was already engaged in a sweeping conspiracy to use multiple forms of federal power to influence the presidential election. It did not supply any evidence."

Mike Howell, executive director of Heritage's Oversight Project, claimed, "As things stand right now, there's a zero percent chance of a free and fair election. I'm formally accusing the Biden Administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election."

Arnsdorf notes that the July 11 simulation, billed as the "2024 Transition Integrity Project," is "technically independent of the Heritage Foundation but included multiple Heritage employees."

Heritage has recently been drawing a great deal of scrutiny over Project 2025, its 900-page blueprint for a second Trump presidency. The proposals range from severe abortion restrictions to giving the U.S. federal government's executive branch considerably more power, and Project 2025 is so controversial that even Trump himself is trying to distance himself from it.

READ MORE:['Toxic': Experts mock Trump’s sudden and strident Project 2025 denial

Kevin Roberts, the far-right Chrisitan nationalist who heads the Heritage Foundation, is also being criticized for some recent remarks that his detractors say were promoting violence.

During an appearance on Real America's Voice, Roberts said, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

In response, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch argued, on X (formerly Twitter), "The author of Project 2025 is calling for revolution and suggesting bloodshed if liberals dare oppose them."

Conservative/libertarian former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Virginia) warned, "Kevin Roberts is threatening violence to anyone not following his dear leader. Every network should cover this. All of this happening while Dems whinge and play new candidate lotto."

*Read the Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).

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mma Unearthed video: Trump in 2018 celebrated following policy recommendations of the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025

07/23/24

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The amount of attention the far-right Heritage Foundation and its authoritarian Project 2025 playbook for the next Republican administration have been getting is also ensnaring several major GOP figures.

On Tuesday, Democratic election attorney Marc Elias' Democracy Docket website delved into the ties nine high-ranking Republicans have to Project 2025. Some of those links are direct while others are more tangential. However, these Republicans are likely to be asked about their connections to the controversial initiative on the campaign trail as Project 2025 and its proposals continue to garner media coverage. In fact, one recent poll found that just one in 10 Americans had a favorable view of Project 2025 after learning about it.

IFrame Content

1. Rep. Jim Banks (R-Indiana)

Democracy Docket reported that as chairman of the Republican Study Committee, Banks published a budget blueprint that was praised by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. That document called for funds to build a border wall, diverting money from several federal agencies to boost the military budget and protecting Americans from what he referred to as "the Radical Woke Agenda."

"The Republican Study Committee, led by my friends Chairman Jim Banks and the RSC Budget and Spending Task Force Chair Kevin Hern, have put forward an important Blueprint to Save America," Roberts said in a statement. "The RSC is going on offense, setting the tone for what conservatives must do when the people take back control."

2. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas)

Cruz, who is running for a third U.S. Senate term this November, previously spoke at a Heritage Foundation event in 2019 in the wake of former President Donald Trump's first impeachment. He complained about the House's impeachment over Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which the former president threatened to withhold aid unless Ukraine investigated then-candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Cruz accused House Democrats of impeaching Trump "without an article claiming a criminal violation."

"There’s no federal statute that makes abuse-of-power — what they’ve called it — a criminal offense. They’ve just made this up," Cruz said.

3. Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska)

Like Cruz, Fischer is also running for reelection this fall. Democracy Docket reported that Fischer spoke at a virtual Heritage Foundation session on the "future of nuclear modernization" in 2021. One of Project 2025's proposals is to bring back nuclear weapons testing at Yucca Mountain in Nevada (less than 100 miles from Las Vegas). The document also calls for radioactive waste to be deposited there again after former President Barack Obama ended it in 2009. Nevada Republican Governor Joe Lombardo, who has endorsed Trump, is against the proposal.

4. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri)

Hawley, who is running for a second Senate term this fall, has common ground with one of Project 2025's core goals and has spoken at several Heritage events. In its report on the document, People Magazine called it "a blueprint for marrying church and state at the highest levels of government," which is a goal of Christian nationalists. Rather than run from that label, Hawley embraced it at a recent conservative conference.

“Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian Nation. So I am,” Hawley said. “And some will say that I am advocating Christian Nationalism. And so I do.”

5. Former Governor Larry Hogan (R-Maryland)

Maryland's former two-term Republican governor is now the Republican nominee for the Old Line State's open Senate seat. Despite his more moderate reputation, Hogan still elevated a senior fellow at Heritage to a post within his administration in 2017. To his credit, Hogan has since distanced himself from Project 2025, saying it would put the country on a "dangerous path" in a Washington Post op-ed.

6. Governor Jim Justice (R-West Virginia)

West Virginia's billionaire coal baron governor — who switched parties from Democrat to Republican in 2017 — is likely to win the U.S. Senate seat left open by the outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin (I-West Virginia). In 2021, Justice signed a bill into a law that directs education funds from public schools to home schools and private school tuition. Heritage lauded the bill and credited one of their experts for advocating for it in the West Virginia legislature. Project 2025 calls for the total elimination of the Department of Education in favor of "parental authority," meaning it would champion policies that weaken public education while strengthening home school programming.

7. Rep. David Schweikert (R-Arizona)

In Obama's last year in office, his Department of Health and Human Services put a regulation in place to protect LGBTQ+ youth in foster care. Project 2025 has called for repealing that regulation, which advocacy group DemocracyForward estimated would impact more than 368,000 kids. In 2020, Schweikert participated in a virtual Heritage Foundation session on proposed changes to the foster care system.

8. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida)

Florida's junior U.S. senator is currently in a tight race for reelection against former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Florida), who is within striking distance of Scott in the latest polls. Scott — who is in the running to become the next Republican leader in the Senate after Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) retires from the role next year — participated in Heritage's five-part video series on inflation and the economy. Scott repeatedly blasted the Biden administration for higher prices, even though real wages (meaning inflation-adjusted) are up and the rate of inflation has leveled off significantly.

9. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi)

Mississippi's senior U.S. senator, who is the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is running for a fourth term this fall. In January, he participated in a Heritage Foundation talk on "Restor[ing] America's Military Power." Project 2025 has called for rescinding Pentagon policy that pays for female service members' travel costs in the event they have to travel out of their home state to get an abortion — the same policy Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) protested in his months-long blockade of military promotions. Project 2025 also proposes restoring Trump's ban on transgender Americans serving in the military.

Click here to read Democracy Docket's full report.

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TUCKER REDEMPTION PENSION?

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Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson closed out the all-day Heritage Foundation policy fest on the first day of the Republican National Convention. He warned the crowd that they are in a “spiritual battle” against “anti-human” forces that want to “eliminate” Christians.

In a strange choice for talking to political activists, Carlson began by describing politics as a “repulsive” process and politicians in general as ruthless and power-hungry and miserable people. But he said he is “thrilled” by Trump picking Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate, because “every bad person I’ve ever met in a lifetime in Washington was aligned against J.D. Vance.” Carlson said that was because “they thought he would be harder to manipulate and slightly less enthusiastic about killing people…that he would be an impediment to their exercising power.”

Carlson veered into spiritual warfare rhetoric, saying that since he spoke at the Heritage Foundation’s 50^th anniversary celebration 15 months ago, he has experienced “a total change in the way that I see the world,” explaining, “this is not ultimately political. This is much deeper…There is a spiritual battle underway.”

From Carlson’s remarks:

And I think what happened on Saturday, the assassination attempt against President Trump, reminded a lot of people this, or awakened a lot of people to this. There is a spiritual battle underway. There is no logical way to understand what we’re seeing now in temporal terms. You just can’t.

These are not political divides. There are forces, and they’re very obvious now. They’ve decided, for whatever reason, to take off the mask, whose only goal is chaos, violence, destruction. And there are the rest of us who, once again, are not always certain we’re right, but we know that that’s bad and we’re against that, sort of standing, watching, thinking, ‘Is someone going to explain to me why this is politics?’

This is not politics at all. This is much deeper and older and more recognizable than that. This has been going on since the beginning of time. And I do think, by the way, that the more literal among us, and I would count myself in that category, fail to see this because we’re so desperate to ascribe some kind of recognizable human motive to what we’re seeing.

So we call it leftism or neoliberalism or communism or anarchism. We come up with some phrase to describe it, but those phrases are inadequate. They do not describe what’s actually happening. So what you’re seeing now is really not at all different in substance from what you saw in 1789 in France, from what you saw in 1936 in Spain, from what you saw in 1917 in Russia, from what you saw in 1975 in Phnom Penh. It’s all the same. These are forces of chaos and destruction which are fundamentally anti-human, which are against people.

Carlson railed against a number of movements he described as “anti-people,” including what he called “the climate cult.” He told the activists to pay close attention to what makes “them” angriest.

What group do they dislike most? What group are they absolutely terrified of and hoping to eliminate? Well, it’s Christians. That’s who it is. It’s Christians. … The group that makes them angriest, triggers them most, I guess we would say now, is Christians. Christian nationalism. People pray outside abortion clinics. People celebrate Easter, not trans visibility day. These are their real enemies.

Carlson talked about religious persecution during the Cultural Revolution in China and the French Revolution. He said at the start of the Spanish Civil War, the “anti-Christian” side opened fire on a statue of Jesus. “If you find yourself firing bullets at a statue, what you’re really doing is revealing your deepest priority, and that’s to kill Christians,” he said.

“I don’t know if any Christians here or people who are interested in continuing to live in the country you grew up in, but these are the terms and these are the stakes,” Carlson said. “They are not the ones that we’ve been told they are–left versus right, Republican versus Democrat.”

Carlson also talked about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, saying that Trump’s show of strength—fist raised in defiance—had won him the election, because people want and need strong leaders.

After delivering his remarks, Carlson engaged in some Q&A with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. In response to a question about what kind of conversations people could have to bring their friends and neighbors into the MAGA movement, Carlson said they should pray for people who are willing to accept the status quo. He then veered into a diatribe against “weak men,” saying that fathers should be willing to beat up school counselors who “indoctrinate kids and try and turn them into freaks, circus freaks.” Roberts agreed, saying that “what we’re all yearning for is just a return to normal. And it is normal for a strong man, for a man period, to respond the way you describe to the school counselor.”

Asked about what kind of message the Trump team should be delivering, Carlson said the campaign was trying out a “unity message,” to which he responded:

And a lot of people hear “unity” and they think, well, unity implies some sort of compromise conversation. You can’t have a conversation with people who are unwilling to compromise. The left, which is a religious movement, is unwilling to compromise on any level at all. They won’t even admit men can’t become women. So you how can you have unity with people like that? And of course, you can’t.

Carlson recommended that Trump’s team ignore his critics and simply show through his actions that he is calm and in command. He urged activists to take Trump’s bravery as a model for their own political engagement.

Tags: Kevin Roberts Tucker Carlson Christian Persecution Election 2024 Republican National Convention Spiritual Warfare Heritage Foundation Republican Party

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far-right conspiracy theorist webcaster Alex Jones is not happy with former President Donald Trump's about-face on Project 2025.

According to Newsweek, Jones took Trump to task this week for his attempt to distance himself from the infamous Heritage Foundation-backed policy agenda, which has triggered alarm among political scientists and is being used as a wedge issue by President Joe Biden's campaign to alarm moderate voters who may be considering a vote for the former president.

"Trump gets told by his advisers and people who really just don't want competition in his new White House … 'Oh God, these are radicals, sir. You've got to come out and distance yourself,'" Jones told his listeners. "It's the Heritage Foundation, Trump. And again, Trump's really smart; he's got good instincts. He doesn't understand Republican machinery."

Project 2025 calls for the top-to-bottom restructuring of the entire federal government, with most of the civil service being dismissed and replaced with party loyalists who stand ready to implement far-right policy, from codifying Christian nationalism to harshly scaling back immigration, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, military families' benefits, public transportation, and a wide variety of other programs and investments.

Amid the public attention on the program, Trump took to his Truth Social platform last week and proclaimed that, "I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they're saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."

This was followed up by Heritage Foundation officials also asserting that their proposals are not affiliated with the Trump campaign.

Despite these disavowals, many of the people who have helped to craft Project 2025, like John McEntee, previously served in the Trump administration, and Trump tried to implement at least some of the policies outlined in the project on his way out of office, like reclassifying federal employees to strip them of labor protections.

Jones, whose InfoWars radio program and associated dietary supplement empire has long been a staple of the far-right conspiracy theory ecosystem, entered bankruptcy after being found liable in a series of lawsuits by the families of Sandy Hook school shooting victims after he used his platform to proclaim them hoaxers and turned their lives upside down with harassment. A bankruptcy court last month approved the orderly winding down of InfoWars' parent company and the liquidation of Jones' personal assets.

His program remains on the air at least for the time being.

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Hamilton’s relationship with the Heritage Foundation has continued. In March, he participated (https://www.heritage.org/immigration/event/virtual-event-battling-the-biden-border-crisis) in a panel discussion on the “Biden border crisis” hosted by Carafano, alongside Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. ToHamilton’s relationship with the Heritage Foundation has continued. In March, he participated (https://www.heritage.org/immigration/event/virtual-event-battling-the-biden-border-crisis) in a panel discussion on the “Biden border crisis” hosted by Carafano, alongside Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Rep. Tom McClintock of California.m McClintock of California.

resources:

https://www.americanoversight.org/investigation/stephen-millers-influence-on-immigration-policy-and-throughout-the-administration

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4 24 chris hayes mckay coppin, plus another big study? atl?

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Project 2025, a scheme led by the Heritage Foundation to “take the reins of government” after former President Donald Trump or another MAGA Republican becomes president, is backed by more than 100 right-wing organizations. The project’s harmful agenda and destructive operational plans have generated significant critical media coverage, to which Heritage has responded with snarky commentary that confirms the organization’s identity as a propaganda arm for the MAGA movement.

Project 2025 is a detailed policy agenda and action plan meant to advance two different long-term goals. One is a libertarian-leaning effort to gut federal agencies from within and limit their ability to regulate corporate behavior and protect the climate. The other is an openly authoritarian plan to empower the president to dismantle checks and balances, impose his will on the executive branch, use federal agencies to punish his critics and enemies, and deploy the power of the government to enforce the religious right’s “traditional” views on abortion, family, sexuality, and gender.

The scope and intent of Project 2025 is alarming, and journalists and progressive activists have been sounding the alarm about its consequences for democracy, people and the planet.

In response, Heritage has critical news coverage and published an electronic pamphlet titled “5 Reasons Leftists HATE Project 2025,” which declares, “Radical leftists are terrified…and they should be.”

The Heritage flyer is less of a substantive engagement with Project 2025 critics and more of a Trumpish exercise in name-calling and inflammatory MAGA-movement rhetoric meant to demonize opponents.

For example, a section promising that Project 2025 will “restore the American family” begins with these claims: “The radical left hates families, because when people have strong families, they don’t worship big government and succumb to leftist ideologies like gender ideology. The Left wants to eliminate the family and replace it with the state.” Among the policies Heritage says will somehow restore families: imposing work requirements for food stamps, censoring teaching about race and gender, promoting privatization of public education, outlawing pornography, and banning abortion.

Another section of the pamphlet boasts that Project 2025 will “dismantle the deep state”—code for purging professional civil servants, weakening regulation of corporate behavior, and eliminating institutional checks on the president’s power. Heritage says Project 2025 will eliminate “woke propaganda at every level of government” and shut “wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices.” If you get past the “wasteful bureaucracy” rhetoric and wade into Project 2025’s detailed agenda, you find out that means defunding, dismantling, and redirecting agencies that provide vital services and protect Americans and their communities, like the Environmental Protection Agency.

When it comes to immigration, the Heritage pamphlet equates the Biden administration with “the radical left,” which Heritage claims “rejects the idea of borders and national sovereignty.” While that claim shouldn’t be taken seriously, Project 2025’s plans for aggressive detentions and massive deportations should be.

Heritage also brags that Project 2025 will “reject climate hysteria.” Its pamphlet contains no recognition of the well-documented harms already caused by climate change and its potentially catastrophic future effects. Heritage dismisses the very idea of a “climate crisis” as simply “a tool for scaring Americans into giving up their freedom.” Like Trump’s “drill, drill, drill” ideology, Project 2025 focuses on maximizing fossil fuel production, abandoning sustainable development goals, and otherwise undermining or reversing federal government actions to protect the climate and regulate pollution.

The fifth reason Heritage says that “leftists” hate Project 2025 is that it promises to “stop socialism in its tracks.” For MAGA movement leaders, the actual meaning of words or the truth of statements doesn’t seem as important as their potential propaganda value. Just as Heritage Foundation’s MAGA-minded president Kevin Roberts and Trump aides like Stephen Miller smear opponents as “communists,” Project 2025 lumps progressives together with both communists and fascists: “Leftists today are driven by the same rotten socialist ideas that nearly destroyed much of the world during the 20th century. The promise of socialism—Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, whatever name it chooses—is simple: Government control of the economy can ensure equal outcomes for all people.”

Given what we know about Trump’s admiration for authoritarian strongmen, his equating brutality with strength, and his willingness to undermine the Constitution for his own benefit, the Heritage Foundation’s hopes for Project 2025 read as a clear threat: “The next conservative president will enter office with a simple choice: greatness or failure,” declares the Heritage Foundation, adding that “Project 2025 will ensure the next president has the tools needed to succeed at this daunting task.”

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booktv

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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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e and 3 legit

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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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

https://www.desmog.com/**2022/12/16**/heritage-foundation-hosts-uk-climate-science-denier-at-event-opposing-green-energy/

an influential US think tank has hosted a well-known UK climate science denier at an event attacking what one speaker called Europe’s “socialist” net zero policies.

The Heritage Foundation panel event on December 8, called “Lessons for America from Europe’s Green Energy Disaster”, featured Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s main climate science denial group.

The GWPF published two reports this year rejecting climate science on the greenhouse effect. Its campaign arm Net Zero Watch, of which Peiser is also director, in October called for “a new fleet of coal fired power stations”.

The event is the latest example of UK and US groups working together to oppose climate action. Other links across the Atlantic include the Atlas Network, a fossil fuel-linked US think tank that works with UK libertarians, to the GWPF receiving money from its US “Friends of GWPF” fundraising arm.

Peiser used the event, which was streamed online, to claim that the energy crisis is caused by “a dogmatic prioritization” of renewable energy over alternatives like “shale gas or nuclear”.

According to the International Energy Agency, however, the energy crisis is caused by the high wholesale cost of gas and fuelled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Heritage Foundation presents itself as a mainstream think tank and has influenced several Republican US administrations. However, along with Peiser, this week’s event featured a number of links to climate science denial.

Fossil Fuel Links

The event’s chair Diana Furchtgott-Roth – who is director of Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment – wrote an article for Forbes last month which argued that the West should encourage “all countries” to use “natural gas, coal, and nuclear” to help the poor.

The article also cast doubt on climate science, suggesting “some research shows little change” in extreme weather, downplayed sea-level rises, adding: “Climate change is going on, as it has for millennia.”

In 2019, Furchtgott-Roth received $227,304 from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a think tank which received more than $3 million from oil giant Koch Industries’ charitable arm Koch Foundations, according to a Greenpeace investigation.

The panel’s other speaker was Nile Gardiner, director of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, who said: “I do think the British government needs to rethink the whole green energy agenda. It’s not a conservative agenda, in fact it’s a socialist agenda.”

He said: “I think net zero has become basically a form of religion, and anyone who questions the dogma on this immediately is accused of being a heretic.”

Climate Deniers

Gardiner also repeatedly endorsed calls for a Brexit-style referendum on the UK’s net zero policies, an idea which has been pushed by climate science denial groups.

Gardiner cited a YouGov survey commissioned by CAR26, whose director Lois Perry said in August: “I do not believe that man-made climate change is a thing.” In November 2021, Perry spread the conspiracy theory that global warming is a “con” by “elites” to make people poor and hungry.

He also argued that a “net zero referendum” was justified due to what he called the “vast sum of public money” involved in cutting emissions to net zero. The UK’s net zero target will cost less than 1 percent of GDP per year by 2035, according to the government’s advisory Climate Change Committee.

The economic policies of Liz Truss received high praise from Gardiner.He stated her “overall approach” of cutting taxes was “absolutely right”, adding that she was brought down by “her U-turn over the issue of [abolishing] the top rate of tax”. Truss’s mini-budget cost the UK economy £30 billion, according to analysis by the independent Resolution Foundation.

The Heritage Foundation event was attended by Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received funding from ExxonMobil. Ebell was tapped by Donald Trump’s team to lead its transition for the Environmental Protection Agency in 2016.

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In June, John R. Allen resigned from his position as president of the Brookings Institution following allegations that he had secretly lobbied on behalf of the government of Qatar. Journalist Michael Schaffer, in an article published by Politico on October 14, reports that there has been a considerable “uproar” following that controversy — including “a new wave of congressional scrutiny and proposed legislation” that has been “driven largely but not exclusively by conservatives” and “could ultimately complicate life at” think tanks.

But Schaffer stresses that right-wing think tanks could be among the ones that such legislation would affect. Schaffer cites Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa on the right and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts on the left as two senators who have proposed bills that could affect how think tanks function. Warren’s bill, according to Schaffer, “would require think tanks to disclose donors — not just foreign ones — that pay for lobbying materials, among other things.”

“For all the joy that conservative pols have taken at Brookings’ latest turn in the barrel, conversations with people around the industry reveal an irony: Any potential new wave of government-mandated disclosure rules, especially those that go beyond foreign money, would actually represent a bigger cultural change at right-wing organizations, some of which historically have tended to see donations as a form of free speech,” Schaffer reports. “Establishmentarian center-left outfits like Brookings already share significant pieces of that information — thanks in part, it should be noted, to previous funding imbroglios, and their reliance on corporate dollars. The Heritage Foundation, by contrast, says less than two percent of its income comes from corporate sources.”

Heritage is one of the most famous right-wing think tanks in the United States. Another is the Cato Institute, which has much more of a libertarian outlook than the socially conservative Heritage. Meanwhile, the Claremont Institute is a right-wing think tank that has taken a very MAGA turn in recent years.

“It’s also notable that none of the proposals that have been publicized since the tumult at Brookings would have done much about Allen, whose allegedly fishy work for Qatar was done before he took over Brookings and would theoretically be covered by the Foreign Agent Registration Act,” Schaffer writes. “He’s denied improper behavior and hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing. What the scrutiny of Allen did do, though, was re-focus attention on the organization’s broader history with the emirate.”

Schaffer points out that different think tanks have different policies when it comes to who they will or won’t accept money from.

“Under the status quo,” Schaffer observes, “there are few rules about who a think tank may accept money from and who it has to tell. And there are probably as many internal policies as there are think tanks: The Heritage Foundation doesn’t take any money from governments of any sort, foreign or domestic. Brookings does take money from governments, but only democratic ones. The Center for American Progress also takes foreign money, but not for any specific project. It also discloses donors, unless those donors choose to remain anonymous, something deep-pocketed types occasionally do to avoid being hit up by others.”

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Although some progressives believe that President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel some student loan debt doesn’t go far enough, a long list of Republicans — from U.S. senators to right-wing think tanks to state attorneys general — have accused the president of overreaching and are looking for ways to undermine Biden’s plan. The National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke is even calling for Congress to “impeach and convict President Biden.”

Student loan debt has become a major problem in the United States, where it isn’t uncommon for students to graduate from college with six-figure debts that they will spend decades paying off with interest. This debt affects a variety of decisions that college graduates make as young adults, from deciding whether or not to have kids to being able to buy a house. Some older Baby Boomers, according to common complaints from Millennials and members of Generation Z, fail to comprehend the severity of the problem — as they graduated from college at a time when tuition was much more affordable than it is now.

Journalists Tony Romm, Jeff Stein and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel take a look at GOP reactions to Biden’s student loan debt plan in an article published by the Washington Post on September 1, stressing that some of those Republicans are considering lawsuits.

“Republican state attorneys generaland other leading conservatives are quietly exploring a slew of potential lawsuits targeting President Biden’s plan to cancel some student debt — challenges that could limit or invalidate the policy before it takes full effect,” the Post reporters explain. “In recent days, a number of GOP attorneys general from states including Arizona, Missouri and Texashave met privately to discuss a strategy that could see multiple cases filed in different courts around the country, according to a person familiar with their thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential talks.”

Romm, Stein and Douglas-Gabriel continue, “Other influential conservatives — including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and allies of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — are mulling their own options as they ratchet up criticism of Biden’s debt-relief plan, two additional people familiar with the matter said. And a conservative advocacy group founded by a major Trump donor said it would file a lawsuit against the policy.”

The Post interviewed John Malcolm, who serves as director of the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, has been around 49 years — and its Meese Center was named after Edwin Meese, who served as U.S. attorney general during President Ronald Reagan’s second term and is now 90.

Malcolm told the Post, “The conservative public interest law firms in our network are exploring filing lawsuits against this. They are doing background legal research, trying to find out who might be the most suitable clients for them. They have to find a client with the standing and the gumption to take on a lawsuit. There are several groups in our network who are exploring that right now.”

Biden’s plan would forgive up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt, or as much as $20,000 if the former student also received Pell Grants. Some liberals and progressives were hoping to see larger amounts of student loan debt forgiven, but the centrist Biden believes that $10,000 or $20,000 is a step in the right direction.

The Post interviewed some former college students who have a lot of student loan debt, and they were appalled that Republicans oppose even the modest amounts that Biden favors.

One of those interviewees was 31-year-old Ohio resident Michael Loomus, who dropped out of the University of Toledo and has been struggling to pay down the $11,400 that he owes. Loomus told the Post, “It just seems they are continuously trying to keep borrowers in debt. I don’t make a lot of money.… and before this, it just felt like I’d never pay off my loans.”

===

wow vlad?

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).

2x?

rev door 360?!

pension = rev dr lobby

two top environmental officials from the Trump administration are taking on new positions in Washington, it was announced Monday.

Andrew Wheeler, the former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, is joining The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, as a visiting fellow.

David Bernhardt, the former Interior Secretary, is rejoining lobbying and law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, as senior counsel.

Spokesperson Lara Day said in an email that Bernhardt has “no intention” of lobbying the Interior Department or its agencies.

“David’s counsel, expertise and perspective will complement our teams and add immediate value to our clients,” Day said, adding that Monday was the Trump official’s first day on the job. “David will focus on big picture, strategic opportunities.”

Bernhardt’s page on the firm’s website says that he “assists client’s efforts to solve matters of federal administrative law,regulatory compliance, infrastructure siting, natural resources development, energy andgovernment investigations.”

The Heritage Foundation released a statement saying that Wheeler, in joining them as a visiting fellow, will advise on the economic and environmental impact of energy, climate change and environmental regulations.

“His service on Capitol Hill as well as in the private sector will help bolster our team’s expertise on a range of important policy issues. Andrew has proven in his career a commitment to protecting America’s natural resources while rejecting aggressive government regulation,” Heritage Foundation President Kay James said in a statement, referencing Wheeler’s prior employment, including his work for the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee.

While serving in the Trump administration, Wheeler :{spoke at some:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: Heritage Foundation events.

“I am deeply honored to join this well-respected team as we work together to advance conservative values with policies that will benefit all Americans,” the former environment official said in a statement.

Both Bernhardt and Wheeler are also among the Trump administration officials who have recently joined former Vice President Mike Pence’s conservative political group.

TAGS ANDREW WHEELER ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY EPA HERITAGE FOUNDATION INTERIOR DEPARTMENT MIKE PENCE TRUMP OFFICIALS

pension bench

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/546848-pence-launches-conservative-political-group/

rev dr pension wheeler and bernhardt

former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday announced the creation of a new political advocacy group,

his latest step to remain involved in the conservative movement as he plots out his political future.

Pence launched Advancing American Freedom, while opposing the Biden administration’s agenda. Advancing American Freedom plans to build on the success of the last four years by promoting traditional Conservative values and promoting the successful policies of the Trump Administration,” Pence said in a statement. “Conservatives will not stand idly by as the radical Left and the new administration attempt to threaten America’s standing as the greatest Nation in the world with their destructive policies.”

The nonprofit advocacy group will be advised by several former Trump administration officials and prominent leaders in the conservative movement. Kellyanne Conway, Larry Kudlow, Russ Vought, Seema Verma, Andrew Wheeler, Robert Lighthizer and David Bernhardt are among the former Trump officials on its advisory board.

The group will advocate for policies focused on three areas: The economy, foreign policy and “American liberties” like school choice and anti-abortion policies.

The launch of the advocacy group isPence’s latest bid to remain a key player in conservative politics. Since leaving office, he has joined the Heritage Foundation as a distinguished visiting fellow where he has a regular column and podcast, and he also joined former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) Young America’s Foundation as a scholar.

Pence is expected to speak later this month in South Carolina in his first speech since leaving office.

The Washington Examiner reported that the new advocacy group comes with the support of former President Trump, who has patched things up with Pence after attacking his former vice president for refusing to illegally subvert the certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6. Pence was the target of threats when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol that day, and he was taken away to a secure location when rioters entered the complex.

The former vice president is known to be interested in running for president in 2024, but the end of his tenure has raised questions about whether he would be embraced by Trump supporters. Other former Trump administration officials, such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, are also likely to launch presidential bids.

TAGS 2024 ELECTION ANDREW WHEELER CONSERVATIVE POLITICS DONALD TRUMP KELLYANNE CONWAY LARRY KUDLOW MIKE PENCE MIKE POMPEO NIKKI HALEY ROBERT LIGHTHIZER TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

https://www.foxnews.com/world/russia-funding-environmental-groups-europe-united-state

no lnx pix [vid?]

RUSSIA Published March 15, 2022

Russia duped Europe into energy dependence by funding 'rabid environmental groups': experts

Expert James Carafano: 'Russians actually fund some of the most rabid environmental groups in Europe'

By Emma Colton | Fox News

[soc med]

[Biden engaged in 'war on American energy,' finally banned Russia oil over bad news cycle, House rep says

NEW

You can now listen to Fox News articles! BeyondWords]

For years, world leaders have accused Russia of funding environmental groups in Europe to steer nations away from energy independence and strengthen Russia’s iron grip over the continent.As nations across the globe begin shunning Russian oil in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. leaders are also questioning how deep Russia’s ties go in the environmental community.

"The Russians actually fund some of the most rabid environmental groups in Europe because they sic them on the energy projects that aren’t Russian," James Carafano, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital in a recent phone interview.

RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE: LIVE UPDATES]

Back in June 2014, just months after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, European leaders sounded off that Russia was using disinformation operations with environmental groups to steer countries away from fracking in favor of Russian oil.

"I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas," Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark and then-secretary-general of NATO, said, according to the Guardian.

NATO’s press office passed the remarks off as Rasmussen’s personal views, but one NATO official sounded the alarm that Russia’s grip on Europe was tightening.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS DEMAND ANSWERS FROM ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS OVER ALLEGATION OF COLLUSION WITH RUSSIA

"We don't go into the details of discussions among allied leaders, but Russia has been using a mix of hard and soft power in its attempt to recreate a sphere of influence, including through a campaign of disinformation on many issues, including energy. In general, the potential for Russia using energy supplies as a means of putting pressure on European nations is a matter of concern. No country should use supply and pricing terms as tools of coercion," the NATO official told the Guardian in 2014.

Environmental groups have meanwhile feverishly denied any ties to Russia.

"The idea we’re puppets of Putin is so preposterous that you have to wonder what they’re smoking over at NATO HQ," Greenpeacetold the Guardian in 2014.

By 2016, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Scotland and Bulgaria had all banned fracking, either temporarily or permanently. Russia’s power over European energy grew large by 2022, providing roughly 40% of the continent’s natural gas supply. Lithuania, for example, gets 83% of its oil imports from Russia, Poland gets 58% and Finland 80%, The Hill reported. [DENMARK?]

"You're not really an independent nation if you depend on foreign countries so heavily for your energy supplies," Michael Shellenberger, thebest-selling author of "Apocalypse Never," told Fox News earlier this month.

EUROPE'S GREEN ENERGY POLICIES STRENGTHENED PUTIN, MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER SAYS

Shellenberger said that 15 years ago, "Europe produced more natural gas than Russia," but that all changed as "Russia increased its natural gas production and Europe reduced it."

"Europe decided not to frack in large part in response to climate activists," Shellenberger told Fox News. "We now think there is strong evidence suggesting [the climate activists] were supported directly through financing from Russia."

REPUBLICANS CALL ON YELLEN TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER RUSSIAN MONEY FINANCED USA GREEN GROUPS

In the U.S., Republican Reps. Lamar Smith and Randy Weber sent a letter to then-Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin in 2017 arguing that Russia’s goal is to "suppress the widespread adoption of fracking in Europe and the U.S." by funding such environmental groups.

The two Republicans even cited former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who complained during a private 2014 speech about "phony environmental groups" pushing an anti-fracking agenda.

"We were even up againstphony environmental groups, and I’m a big environmentalist, but these were funded by the Russians to stand against any effort, ‘Oh that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem for you,’ and a lot of the money supporting that message was coming from Russia," Clinton said, according to excerpts leaked by WikiLeaks in 2016.

Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are now holding three environmental groups’ feet to the fire.

The Republicans, led by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, are demanding that the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club disclose their ties to aSan Francisco-based nongovernmental organization that Russian President Vladimir Putin allegedly uses to wield power over American energy production.

[PIX: Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a Security Councilmeeting in Moscow, Russia.

]

"Provided the public reporting of Putin's dark money influence in Europe and the concerns surrounding similar efforts in the United States, we write today to explore your connections withSea Change," the Republicans wrote in the letter to the three groups last week. "Any action by President Putin, the Russian government, or Putin's allies to undermine American energy security must be addressed."

The three groups denied any ties in a previous comment to Fox News, describing the accusations as "completely false," "rooted in a smear campaign," and a phony "conspiracy theory."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"It is vital to our national security to know if Vladimir Putin, the Russian government, or Putin’s allies are meddling with America’s energy affordability and security. If the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, or Sierra Club have nothing to hide, then we look forward to seeing the evidence they provide by March 25th," House Energy and Commerce Committee Republican leader McMorris Rodgers told Fox News Digital.

booktv wackos

NOVEMBER 6, 2021

LAST AIRED JANUARY 16, 2022

Race Crazy - BLM, 1619, and the Progressive Racism Movement

Seeking Educational Excellence (SEE) executive director Charles Love argued that Black Lives Matter and the 1619 Project are a danger to the future of American democracy. AM560 Radio’s “The…

680 VIEWS

FEBRUARY 15, 2022

LAST AIRED MARCH 5, 2022

BLM

Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez took a critical look at the Black Lives Matter movement and its leaders. He argued that they are Marxists who want to dismantle the…

Mike Gonzalez (born 1943) is a British historian and literary critic who was Professor of Latin American Studies in the Hispanics Department of the University of Glasgow.^[1]

He has written widely on Latin America, especially Cuba and the Cuban Revolution of 1959. He characterizes Cuba as a state-capitalist economy rather than socialist.

A long-time member of the British Socialist Workers Party, he testified in Tommy Sheridan's defence at the Sheridan defamation trial and HM Advocate v Sheridan and Sheridan. Gonzalez is also a member of Solidarity - Scotland's Socialist Movement, the party Sheridan formed after the split in the Scottish Socialist Party.

Selected articles/works

Cuba, Castro and Socialism (with Peter Binns) (1980)
Cuba, socialism and the third world with Peter Binns and Alex Callinicos) (1980)
Nicaragua : revolution under siege (1985)
Nicaragua : what went wrong? (1990)
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Chile
Which way forward for the movement? (with Alex Callinicos) (2002)
Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution (2004)
Bolivia: Rising of a People(2005)
A rebel's guide to Marx (2005)
The split in the Scottish Socialist Party(2006)
Hugo Chávez: Socialist for the Twenty-First Century (2014)
The Last Drop: The Politics of Water (2015) with Marianella Yanes

External links

Mike Gonzalez Internet Archive
'Revolution Stalled? Venezuela and Bolivia: An Interview with Mike Gonzalez' State of Nature, July 2010

References

^ From the Hispanic Studies section of the Glasgow University website.

show

Authority control

Categories:

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/heritage-foundation/

...

Influence

In January 2020, for the third consecutive year, Heritage was ranked as the top think tank in the “Significant Impact on Public Policy” category of the 2019 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program. In its annual ranking, the Penn report considers more than 8,200 think tanks in the world and surveys the opinion of nearly 4,000 journalists, donors, and policy experts. [39]

Heritage’s policy range covers dozens of subject areas, and most every major issue that affects federal and state elected officials. In 2019 Heritage policy experts testified 33 times before Congressional committees, and produced more than 200 advisory documents, including 12 special policy reports. [40]

Heritage has had major influence over both policy making and policy successes during several Republican presidential administrations, in particular those of Reagan and Trump. [41] It also has been critical of Republican presidents when they have rejected Heritage’s policy goals[42] and accomplished major policy objectives during a Democratic presidential administration. [43] [44]

REAGAN ADMINISTRATION

During the 1980 presidential election, Heritage produced Mandate for Leadership, a 20 volume, 3,000-page guide of policy advice for whomever won the presidency. After winning the election, President Ronald Reagan delivered a 1,100-page abridged edition of the document to attendees of his first cabinet meeting. A follow-up set of recommendations was published for Reagan’s second term in office. [45] [46]

According *The Atlantic*, the Reagan Administration implemented at least 60 percent of the proposals. The late right-leaning essayist and National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr., quipped that Heritage’s influence was the reason “Mr. Reagan’s tenure was 60 percent successful.” Analyzing 22 policy ideas put forward by Reagan in his second inaugural address in 1985, a *New York Times* report noted that “the wording of the president’s speech and the foundation’s document were different” but “many of the proposals were strikingly similar.” [47] [48]

Examples of Heritage ideas the Reagan administration turned into federal policy included a 23 percent reduction in federal taxes across all income groups, the creation of “enterprise zones” (tax and regulatory relief offered to entrepreneurs willing to invest in blighted urban areas), and the Strategic Defense Initiative (research on a defensive shield to protect the nation from a nuclear missile attack). [49] [50]

GEORGE H.W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION

....

no lnx

CONTENTS

Background

Influence

Reagan Administration

George H.W. Bush Administration

Clinton Administration

Trump Administration

Policy Advocacy

Environment

Nuclear Energy

Energy Subsidies

Education

National Security and Foreign Policy

Health Care

Programs and Communications

The Daily Signal

Digital Media

Mass Media and Events

Index of Economic Freedom

Cooperation with the Center-Left

Heritage Action for America

Strategic Goal

Legislative Scorecard

The Sentinel Program

Personnel

President

Board

Staff

Finances

2018 Finances

Private Foundation Support

DeMint Tenure Controversy

Alleged Management Dispute

Heritage Action

Sheldon Whitehouse Enemies List

References

Related Profiles

Associated Organizations

Donor Organizations

Form 990 Information

Sheldon Whitehouse Enemies List

During July 2016, Heritage was one of 32 free-market policy organizations that were denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate by 19 Democratic senators. Led by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the campaign was aimed at passage of a Congressional resolution that would have called on the non-profit groups to cooperate with “active or future investigations” of their climate-policy positions that might be launched against them by federal or state law enforcement officials. Whitehouse accused Heritage and the other organizations of work that was creating a “filthy thing in our democracy.” [192] [193]

Whitehouse’s proposed resolution was adding onto the work he had begun in a May 2015 opinion piece in the Washington Post, wherein he advocated for a federal lawsuit against the energy industry using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Originally designed for and used in criminal cases to prosecute the mafia, RICO has a civil-lawsuit component that has since been applied to corporate targets such as cigarette manufacturers. Whitehouse admitted in the opinion piece that he did not “have enough information” to know whether “racketeering activity” had occurred with the energy industry but speculated the civil discovery in a RICO lawsuit might uncover the evidence he was seeking. In March 2016, then-U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced she had referred Whitehouse’s RICO concern to the FBI. [194] [195]

During the early summer of 2016, the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands sent a subpoena to the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), demanding private internal research records, communications, and donor information. Two weeks later, Whitehouse and the 18 Democratic senators launched their program demanding that Heritage and other free-market organizations fully cooperate with investigations of this type. [196]

The CEI president responded, saying Whitehouse had become the “new Sen. Joe McCarthy,” and that it “is unhealthy for democracy and abusive when members of Congress create an enemies list based on policy positions.” [197] And a joint letter sent to all of the Democratic Senators from Heritage and 22 free-market think tanks stated: “Your threat is clear: There is a heavy and inconvenient cost to disagreeing with you. Calls for debate will be met with political retribution. That’s called tyranny. And, we reject it.” [198]

References [long]

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/trump-job-numbers/

no lnx twt

Head of federal agency responsible for wildly inaccurate jobs numbers is Trump holdover

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement November 18, 2021

Some areas of the U.S. federal government are sacrosanct.

The CDC doesn't screw around with reporting COVID information, because millions of people, including scientists, make life or death decisions based on those data.

The Labor Dept. doesn't tweak jobs numbers for political purposes, or to make a president look good or bad, because to report inaccurate results leads to tremendous distrust of the government, messes up markets, and plans of major corporations.

And yet under President Donald Trump the Health and Human Services Dept. altered CDC documents – once considered sacrosanct documents – for political purposes, CNN reported last year.

"Amid tension between the administration and the CDC, former Trump campaign official turned chief HHS spokesman Michael Caputo and his team had demanded to see reports out of the CDC before they are released, a senior administration official said. Officials within HHS had defended the demand, saying the CDC fell under the agency's umbrella and that all communications and public documents needed to be cleared at the top."

A federal official told CNN that in addition to reviewing reports, HHS political appointee Paul Alexander has regularly added his input — often interpreted by CDC officials as political in nature — to weekly scientific reports intended to track the ongoing coronavirus pandemic response. The development marks the latest example of political interference by administration appointees at the nation's health agencies.

So when The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the federal government "sharply underestimated job gains for most of 2021, including four months this summer in which it missed more job growth than at any other time on record," some expressed concern.

"In the most recent four months with revisions, June through September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported it underestimated job growth by a cumulative 626,000 jobs — that's the largest underestimate of any other comparable period, going back to 1979. If those revisions were themselves a jobs report, they'd be an absolute blockbuster," the Post noted.

They add, "recent revisions have been big enough to turn a substantial slump into a surprising surge."

Americans, in other words, have been living under the false belief that the labor market wasn't exactly hopping, thanks to wildly inaccurate numbers out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency under the Dept. of Labor that collects, tracks, and analyzes these critical numbers.

Curiously, as the Post also noted, the exact opposite happened last year, when Donald Trump was president.

"Revisions in the already calamitous months of March and April 2020," under Trump, "found the economy had lost 922,000 more jobs than initially reported."

Oops.

Given what we know happened at CDC, you'd think some might be wondering what's going on.

Well, we are.

As it turns out, William Beach – the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that since the start of the pandemic has been churning out wildly inaccurate (but very pro-Trump) numbers – was appointed by Donald Trump, used to work for a very pro-Trump think tank known as the Heritage Foundation, worked for a university research center that is funded by the very pro-Trump Charles Koch (as in the Koch Bros.), and also used to work for the Republicans on the the Senate Budget Committee.

(And while it's unclear when Beach left Heritage, it's important to know that right wing think tank is a purveyor of climate change denialism, fake critical race theory and voter fraud claims, and voter suppression legislation.)

So, who cares if the labor numbers are wrong?

Well, everyone, when they read headlines calling Biden's jobs numbers a "colossal miss," "ugly," "dismal" and "disappointing," as The Post noted. Companies make major decisions based on these numbers, which everyone realizes are just estimates, but up until last year were good indicators of what is going on.

Under Beach, the Biden administration has been slammed, giving Republicans a false tool to attack. And like bad newspaper articles that appear on page one and linger in Americans' minds for days, corrections only appear on the back pages, invisible to the vast majority of people who only remember what was false.

An important side note: the Bureau of Labor Statistics is also responsible for reporting out the Consumer Price Index, which in recent days has claimed massive price increases.

NCRM emailed Commissioner Beach on Wednesday, asking if he intended to resign, and asking him to explain what caused these massive errors and if that has been fixed.

We also asked if he maintains any professional, personal, or financial ties to The Heritage Foundation, Senate Republicans or any of his previous right wing employers.

Commissioner Beach did not respond, but Bureau of Labor Statistics Deputy Commissioner William J. Wiatrowski did – with a boilerplate explanation of revisions, and a statement assuring us that the “integrity of BLS data collection and reporting is paramount. The BLS commissioner, as has always been the case, does not see data until they are finalized. Civil servant economists and statisticians tabulate and analyze the data."

No word on any resignation – or if this massive problem has been fixed.

There's no evidence to say these massive screw ups are intentional – or worse, politically motivated – but the American public and American businesses deserve better, they deserve factual data they can count on, and they deserve to know what's actually happening on their President's watch – any president.

If that cannot happen under this commissioner, it's time for a new one.

our last best hope?

https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/the-economic-consequences-waxman-markey-analysis-the-american-clean-energy-and

The Economic Consequences of Waxman-Markey: An Analysis of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009August 6, 200934 min read Download Report

Authors:

David Kreutzer, Nicolas Loris, Ben Lieberman, Karen Campbell and William Beach

After a truncated debate and last-minute changes, the House of Representatives narrowly passed climate-change legislation on June 26, 2009, designed by Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA). The 1,427-page bill would restrict greenhouse gas emissions from industry, mainly carbon dioxide from the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas.

Since energy is the lifeblood of the American economy, 85 percent of which comes from CO2-emitting fossil fuels, the Waxman-Markey bill represents an extraordinary level of economic interference by the federal government. For this reason, it is important for policymakers to have a sense of the economic impact that accompanies any environmental benefits.[1]

Analysis by The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis (CDA) makes clear that Waxman-Markey promises serious perils for the American economy for the years and decades ahead. Waxman-Markey requires arbitrary and severe restrictions on the current energy supply and infrastructure. These restrictions can be met only through large-scale deployment of still-undeveloped or uneconomical technologies [CCS?] and alternative energy sources.In addition to the direct impact on consumers' budgets through higher electric bills and gasoline prices, the resultant increase in energy costs will reverberate throughout the economy and inject unnecessary inefficiencies at virtually every stage of production.It would suppress economic activity and reduce employment, especially in the manufacturing sector. Virtually all costs would eventually filter down to the American people.

Get exclusive insider information from Heritage experts delivered straight to your inbox each week. Subscribe to The Agenda ]

vs action?

ziegler xian a fellow desantis

aha hmmn bookers just poach other shows?

...

Moms for Liberty regularly boosts the Heritage Foundation

Moms for Liberty also appears to be affiliated with -- or at least a frequent promoter of -- the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Koch-funded think tank with a history of attempting to influence public education.

According to a recent report by the UnKoch My Campus campaign on “ultra right think tanks and critical race theory,” the Heritage Foundation and other groups have “used their influence to generate and spread talking points, briefed state and federal legislators on model policy, and attempted to generate grassroots mobilization against local school districts.”

The “resources for parents” page on Moms for Liberty’s website is almost exclusively composed of links to the Heritage Foundation.The page first directs parents to a “Heritage Action for America” guide to filing an open records request. Next, the page directs parents to the Leadership Institute -- an organization run by Morton Blackwell, who received the Heritage Foundation’s “Titan of Conservatism Award.” The Heritage Foundation’s website is listed as the next resource. After that, the Heritage Foundation’s guide to the Constitution is listed.

The Heritage Foundation has spent much of 2021 using scare tactics to boost opposition to CRT, publishing commentary, reports, and even a legislation tracker on the issue.

desmog

May 17, 2016

Writing at RealClear Energy, Doug Domenech cites a Heritage Foundation study as proof that the 97% consensus of scientists on man-made climate change is a “myth”: [13]

“On Earth Day, The Heritage Foundation published, ‘The State of Climate Science: No Justification for Extreme Policies.’ The report reviews much of what climate apologists insist is true including the myth that 97 percent of all climate scientists agree on global warming. That is a powerful rhetorical point and often quoted by the President, but it is also false and based on a faulty review of the abstracts of a limited number of papers,” [elsewhere calimed 77 papers?] Domenech wrote. [13]

“There is little doubt that the proposed solution to the CO2 ‘problem’ will be all-pain with no-gain. The high cost will produce animmeasurable difference in CO2 concentrations,” he added. [13]

pension plan trumpistas wheeler and cooch?

pence

Found 106 Experts

Andrew Vanderplas

Research Associate, Center for Data Analysis

John Venable

@JVVenable

Senior Research Fellow For Defense Policy, Center for National Defense, Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy

Hans A. von Spakovsky

@HvonSpakovsky

Manager, Election Law Reform Initiative and Senior Legal Fellow, Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies

Andrew R. Wheeler

Visiting Fellow

Robert L. Wilkie

Visiting Fellow, Center for National Defense

Paul Winfree

@paulwinfree

Director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies and Richard F. Aster Fellow

Chad F. Wolf

@ChadFWolf

Visiting Fellow, Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy

Genevieve Wood

@genevievewood

Senior Advisor and Spokesperson

Dakota Wood

Senior Research Fellow, Defense Programs, Center for National Defense, Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy

Charmaine Yoest, Ph.D.

Vice President, Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity, and the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow

who?

LeadershipDirectorsExpertsOther Staff

ALL A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Found 15 Leaders

John P. Backiel

Vice President, Finance and Accounting

Tommy Binion

Vice President of Government Relations

Robert B. Bluey

@RobertBluey

Vice President, Communications and Executive Editor, The Daily Signal

Chris Byrnes

General Counsel and Secretary to the Board of Trustees

James Jay Carafano

@JJCarafano

Vice President, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, and the E. W. Richardson Fellow

Wes Dyck

Vice President, Personnel

Kay C. James

@KayColesJames

President of The Heritage Foundation

Eric Korsvall

Vice President, Operations

John Malcolm

@malcolm_john

Vice President, Institute for Constitutional Government, Director of theMeese Center for Legal & Judicial Studies and Senior Legal Fellow

Andrew McIndoe

Vice President of Development

Angela Sailor

@angelasailor

Vice President, The Feulner Institute

Jack Spencer

Vice President, theInstitute for Economic Freedom

----

The Heritage Foundation is governed by an independent Board of Trustees chaired by Barb Van Andel-Gaby.

Barb Van Andel-Gaby, Chairman

Michael W. Gleba, Vice Chairman, Heritage Trustee Since 2016

Kay Coles James, President, Heritage Trustee Since 2005

**Larry P. Arnn, Ph.D.**, Heritage Trustee Since 2002

Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D., Heritage Trustee Since 1973

Steve Forbes, Heritage Trustee Since 2001

Robert P. George,**D.Phil.**, Heritage Trustee Since 2019

**Ryan Haggerty**, Heritage Trustee Since 2017

**Price Harding**, Heritage Trustee Since 2020

**Virginia Heckman**, Heritage Trustee Since 2016

Jerry Hume, Heritage Trustee Since 1993

**Mark A. Kolokotrones**, Heritage Trustee Since 2015

**Edwin Meese III**, Heritage Trustee Since 2017

**Rebekah A. Mercer**, Heritage Trustee Since 2014

The Hon. J. William Middendorf II, Heritage Trustee Since 1989

Abby Spencer Moffat, Heritage Trustee Since 2009

Nersi Nazari, Ph.D., Heritage Trustee since 2006

Robert Pennington, Heritage Trustee Since 2009

**Anthony J. Saliba**, Heritage Trustee Since 2012

**Thomas A. Saunders III**, Chairman Emeritus, Heritage Trustee Since 2005

Brian Tracy, Heritage Trustee since 2003

HONORARY TRUSTEES

**David R. Brown, M.D.**, Chairman Emeritus

The Hon. Frank Shakespeare

SOCIETY OF EMERITUS TRUSTEES

Phillip N. Truluck, Chairman,Heritage Trustee from 2001 to 2015

Midge Decter, Heritage Trustee from 1981 to 2015

**William E. Simon, Jr.**, Heritage Trustee from 2008 to 2015

**Belden H. Bell**, Heritage Trustee from 2000 to 2016

**J. Frederic “Fritz” Rench**, Heritage Trustee from 1973 to 2014

loris cites zycher and this primer:

https://www.heritage.org/environment/heritage-explains/the-right-way-ensure-cleaner-environment

no lnk but youtube

HERITAGE EXPLAINS

The Right Way to Ensure a Cleaner Environment

Big-government climate policies are all economic pain, no environmental gain.

In the 1970s, Americans were told we were in a global cooling crisis and if something weren’t done, we’d enter a new ice age.

When that didn’t happen, a few decades later we were told that entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000.

Despite the consistent failure of these apocalyptic warnings, that hasn’t stopped climate change alarmism. We’re now being told we only have 12 years to combat climate change and the solution is to fundamentally dismantle the system of free enterprise. That means Washington controls things like how we produce our energy, what food we eat and what type of cars we drive. [see fork 4 hot air tour kochsuckers]

The question is, even if we believed their alarmist, catastrophic predictions, would their proposals work?

Not according to the climate scientists’ own models. Based on those models, even if the United States cut its carbon dioxide emissions to zero, it would only avert global warming by a few tenths of a degree Celsius — in 80 years!

We would see no noticeable difference in the climate, yet it would come at an enormous cost to the American people. Climate change is happening and human activity undoubtedly plays a role, but big-government climate policies are all economic pain, no environmental gain.

After all, the purpose of climate change regulations is to drive energy prices higher so families and businesses use less energy.Abundant energy sources such as coal, oil and natural gas have allowed Americans to affordably drive to their jobs, light and heat their homes, and power their refrigerators, computers, and iPhones.

On the other hand, more heavy-handed climate regulations would drive up electricity bills and prices at the pump. Families would be hurt multiple times over, paying not just more for energy but also more for food, clothing, and healthcare, as energy is critical for every stage of planting, harvesting, manufacturing, and transporting goods to consumers.[mike rowe]

These rising costs would stifle economic growth, one of the most important factors for maintaining a cleaner environment.As a country’s economy grows,the financial ability of its citizens to take care of the environment grows, too. So creating more economy-killing climate regulations and taxes would not only harm the livelihoods of the American people, they would also harm our ability to protect our environment.

he just reads text

3 min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXR2MlQf57g

youtube recs

Why renewables can’t save the planet | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxDanubia

TEDx Talks

2.8M views

2 years ago

Instead, government should focus on keeping the economy strong by reducing taxes and eliminating regulatory barriers to energy innovation. For example, some states produce clean, cheap natural gas, but excessive regulations and litigation prevent the construction of pipelines to distribute natural gas to other parts of the country. Furthermore, competitive electricity markets can give consumers the option to buy 100 percent renewable power if they like. And fixing a broken regulatory system will allow new, innovative commercial nuclear technologies to get off the ground.

This is how we can ensure affordable, reliable, and cleaner energy. It’s how we can keep our economy growing. And ultimately, it’s how we can ensure a cleaner environment for America.

View more of America's Biggest Issues

incubator grad:

https://www.heritage.org/the-academy

online eg

Rafi Levitt, Graduate Student, George Mason University

"As the Executive Director for the Young Conservatives of Texas, educating students is my number one priority. ..

last week, President Biden _{signed an Executive Order}_ encouraging U.S. leadership in the clean car sector with a goal of half of all new car sales in the U.S. being zero-emission by 2030. It took them a few days, but deniers seem to have assembled their response by cobbling together a mix of old lies, new misrepresentations, and bizarre logical fallacies.

For example, a response that in any sane outlet might be praise for Biden’s plan was published in the Koch-funded RealClearEnergy as an attack: _{President Biden’s Electric Car Future is Union Made}_. Bruce Yandle, a fellow at the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is upset that Biden invited three major U.S. car companies to attend the announcement because they were the largest employers of workers in the United Auto Workers union, and didn’t invite non-American companies with non-union workers to his event promoting good American jobs.}:

By Climate Denier Roundup

Obviously, it’s no surprise that a Koch crony is anti-union and anti-EV, unless you confuse organized labor with organized denial.

Speaking of organized denial, while the _{once-Koch-funded}_ Daily Caller has since _{basically given up}_ on regular climate denial reporting, and its IPCC story was _{a straightforward rip-off}_ of the _{AP’s “code red” coverage}_ (sans any Koch-network denial quote, because no-pay, no-play, we assume). The Caller still occasionally publishes guest opinion pieces and _{ran one from Charlotte Whelan}_ of the (_{pro-Covid}_) Independent Women’s Forum andSteamboat Institute (which is hosting _{Marc Morano and a slate of other rightwing pseudostars at an upcoming festival}_).

Whelan is also upset the White House invited union workers to its pro-union-jobs event, and adds (with a deliberately misleading citation) the claim that “it could take more than 15 years to recoup the upfront extra costs in fuel savings. The average American certainly can’t wait that long to ‘make back’ the additional upfront cost” But the work cited (_{an NRDC post}_ based on _{a peer-reviewed study}_) doesn’t even measure how long it would take to recoup the upfront cost of an EV with cheaper charging and a more efficient propulsion system. The study did, however, use 15 years as the unit of measurement for a car’s life. So the calculations show that over an average 15-year lifespan of ownership, it can be almost $15,000 cheaper to go with an electric car.

Over at theKoch-funded Heritage foundation’s media arm, their policy analyst _{Katie Tubb makes a similar claim}_ about EVs being for rich people, which we’ve addressed before as part of _{their propaganda campaigns}_, as well as the _{old racist dog whistle about China}_.

Finally, we get to a new name to us, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who wrote that Biden’s move was “costly and counterproductive” in the _{industry-funded}_ Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

After a column _{defending the auto industry from 5G in January}_, and another in March with the phrase “nothing beats personal vehicles for social distancing.” Furchtgott-Roth makes similar points to the other professional disinformers in her most recent City Journal piece, but she also _{a:{dds a particularly baffling claim:(style="background-color:#ffff33;"):}:}_ that because “the United States has achieved energy security by becoming a net exporter of oil and natural gas,” then “mandating sales of electric vehicles would weaken that security.”

But if exporting oil makes us stronger (by her logic) then wouldn’t having more of it to export because our own cars are using less of it be a good thing, that would make us stronger?

Why would someone write something so inane and illogical, despite a byline that includes “former deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation” and “adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University?” Those are both legitimate organizations, not industry-funded disinformation operations!

Well it turns out that the DOT appointment was made by notoriously-bad-hiring-manager Donald Trump, and prior to that, _{Furchtgott-Roth was an economist for the American Petroleum Institute}_, _{proving once again}_ that _{when someone says something stupid about EVs}_, it’s _{probably on purpose}_.

(Originally appeared at DailyKos.)

_PARIS

bad code

https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/staying-paris-agreement-would-have-cost-families-20k

...Global compliance with the Paris Agreement has been nothing short of abysmal....Those who are clamoring for action on climate change are the ones who should actually be most upset with what a sham the Paris agreement is

....https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.heritage.org%2Fenvironment%2Fcommentary%2Fstaying-paris-agreement-would-have-cost-families-20k...bad code]...

Editor’s note: The U.S. just took a new, major step to leaving the Paris Agreement, a climate change deal between several countries. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said,

“Today the United States began the process to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Per the terms of the Agreement, the United States submitted formal notification of its withdrawal to the United Nations. The withdrawal will take effect one year from delivery of the notification.”... President [Donald] Trump made the decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement because of the unfair economic burden imposed on American workers, businesses, and taxpayers by U.S. pledges made under the agreement. The United States has reduced all types of emissions, even as we grow our economy and ensure our citizens’ access to affordable energy. Our results speak for themselves: U.S. emissions of criteria air pollutants that impact human health and the environment declined by 74% between 1970 and 2018. U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions dropped 13% from 2005-2017, even as our economy grew over 19 percent.

Here’s a version of a previously published article from Heritage Foundation researcherNick Loris on why the Paris Agreement wouldn’t significantly affect the climate–but would cost America jobs and would hurt some families’ incomes.

President Donald Trump is right to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. While the climate is indeed changing and human activity is playing a role, the chances of looming climate catastrophe are simply unrealistic and not grounded in reality.

But even granting such a looming catastrophe, the Paris Agreement itself would do little to alter the climate. To have any impact whatsoever on climate, the entire world would either have to quickly change the way it consumes energy or simply remain undeveloped. Both options are devoid of reality.

While many countries are rapidly expanding their use of renewable power, forecasts indicate that coal, oil, and natural gas will continue to provide the overwhelming majority of the world’s energy needs well into the future. [MIKE ROWE]For developing countries, the highest priorities are to reduce energy poverty and improve living standards. [GREEN DEATH BS]

Those who are clamoring for action on climate change are the ones who should actually be most upset with what a sham the Paris agreement is. It’s been celebrated as a breakthrough achievement of the world’s developed and developing countries coming together, but it is anything but that.

>>>The Right Way to Ensure a Cleaner Environment

With no enforcement mechanisms in place and no repercussions for failing to meet emissions reduction targets, countries are essentially free to do whatever they want, meaning they will continue on their business-as-usual trajectory without making any changes. China, for instance, can peak its emissions in 2030 even though projections have their peak emissions falling before that year.

India, for its part, has pledged to reduce its emissions levels, or cuts its ratio of carbon emissions to gross domestic product. That ratio may well go down so long as carbon emissions rise at a slower rate than GDP, but carbon emissions will keep rising all the same.

Actually, India committed to emissions reductions that are less than what the country would achieve if it continues on the same track it is currently on today. In other words, it set the bar so low that it can continue along its businesses-as-usual trajectory of emissions intensity and come out looking like a climate hero.

As the Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass wrote, “It’s easy to slim down to 180 pounds, if you weigh 175 to begin with.”

Pakistan was more honest than most about its emissions prospects, stating bluntly, “Given the future economic growth and associated growth in the energy sector, the peaking of emissions in Pakistan is expected to take place much beyond the year 2030. An exponential increase of [greenhouse gas] emissions for many decades is likely to occur before any decrease in emissions can be expected.”

Global compliance with the Paris Agreement has been nothing short of abysmal. In fact, most nations will soon fail to meet the deadlines they agreed to.

The original hope that each nation’s contribution might somehow push other countries to “do more” is not playing out. This deal was a hodgepodge of arbitrarily defined commitments with no enforcement mechanism. It was doomed from the start.

Following through with the Obama administration’s commitments would impose clear economic harm on the U.S. by driving energy prices higher—and that’s just a small part of the overall cost. Americans would pay more for food, health care, education, clothes, and every other good and service that requires energy.

These higher costs would be spread across the entire economy and would shrink overall economic growth and employment. Heritage Foundation analysts estimated that the regulations required to meet the Obama administration’s commitments would impose the following costs by 2035:

An overall loss of nearly 400,000 jobs, half of which would be in manufacturing.
A average total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four.
An aggregate GDP loss of over $2.5 trillion.

Other countries would continue getting a free pass under the agreement, but if the U.S. signed back on, one can be sure that environmental activist lawsuits would make sure the U.S. kept its obligations.

To make matters worse, the climate regulations encompassing the U.S. target may not even achieve the desired results and would require additional regulations. And that would just be the beginning. The Paris Agreement requires ever-increasing targets as time goes on, which would further increase the cost of compliance. These efforts would return us to the same costly and ineffective policies that the current administration is unwinding.

Congress should instead advance pragmatic policies that will actually drive innovation in energy and environmental protection.

This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal

ref

https://judithcurry.com/2018/11/24/is-rcp8-5-an-impossible-scenario/

blog?

is RCP8.5 an impossible scenario?

Posted on :{November 24, 2018:(style="border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;outline:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: by curryja | 202 Comments

by Judith Curry

In considering ‘worst case’ climate change impacts, we first need to assess the realistic worst case for global carbon emissions.

The recently published U.S. National Climate Assessment shows that we are currently on track for RCP8.5.

The assumptions that underlie the IPCC emissions scenarios are described in the 2000 IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios [link].

RCP8.5 is sometimes referred to as a ‘business as usual’ scenario. It is not. Rather, it is an extreme scenario.

Larry Kummer wrote a 2015 guest post at Climate Etc. entitled A closer look at scenario RCP8.5. LK describes RCP8.5 as a “useful worst case scenario.”

RCP8.5 figures prominently in the most alarming of future climate scenarios. I am wondering if RCP8.5 is too extreme, in the sense that is may be impossible, given constraints on recoverable fossil fuel supply.

In particular, there is a fairly large number of papers arguing that assumptions about coal are incorrect: (list of papers courtesy of LK).

The first major study questioning the actual extent of coal reserves: “The Peak in U.S. Coal Production“ by Gregson Vaux, 27 May 2004
More evidence that reserves are overstated: “Coal Of The Future (Supply Prospects for Thermal Coal by 2030-2050)“ by Energy Edge Limited, Prepared for the Institute for Energy of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, February 2007
More evidence that reserves are overstated: “Coal: Resources and Future Production“ by Energy Watch Group, March 2007 (47 pages,)
The major study showing that coal reserves are overstated: “Coal: Research and Development to Support National Energy Policy“ by the National Academies, June 2007
“Why do climate change scenarios return to coal?” by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi in Energy, 1 December 2017.

For broader fossil fuel supply issues, see

Wang et al. (2017); The implications of fossil fuel constraints on climate change projections — A supply side analysis [link]. From the Abstract:

Climate projections are based on emission scenarios. The emission scenarios used by the IPCC and by mainstream climate scientists are largely derived from the predicted demand for fossil fuels, and in our view take insufficient consideration of the constrained emissions that are likely due to the depletion of these fuels. This paper, by contrast, takes a supply- side view of CO2 emission, and generates two supply-driven emission scenarios based on a comprehensive investigation of likely long-term pathways of fossil fuel production drawn from peer-reviewed literature published since 2000. The potential rapid increases in the supply of the non-conventional fossil fuels are also investigated. Climate projections calculated in this paper indicate that the future atmospheric CO2 concentration will not exceed 610 ppm in this century; and that the increase in global surface temperature will be lower than 2.6 C compared to pre-industrial level even if there is a significant increase in the production of non-conventional fossil fuels. Our results indicate therefore that the IPCC’s climate projections overestimate the upper-bound of climate change. Furthermore, this paper shows that different production pathways of fossil fuels use, and different climate models, are the two main reasons for the significant differences in current literature on the topic.

Ritchie and Dowlatabadi (2017) explain that RCP8.5 contains a return to coal hypothesis, requiring increased per-capita coal use based on systematic errors in coal production outlooks. Ritchie and Dowlatabadi conclude that RCP8.5 should not be used as a benchmark for future scientific research or policy studies.

It looks like substantial technological advances would be needed to tackle the less recoverable resources. Given the climate change and environmental quality issues, how realistic is it to expect these technological advances to be pursued — rather than pursuing greener energy technologies?

So my main questions are:

Should RCP8.5 be used as a ‘worst case’ emissions scenario?
Is RCP8.5 impossible based upon the knowledge we currently have?

RCP8.5 may be useful for climate research, for considering processes in a substantially altered environment.

However, many ‘catastrophic’ impacts of climate change don’t really kick at the lower CO2 concentrations, and RCP8.5 then becomes useful as a ‘scare’ tactic.

For policy making, I’m not sure that RCP8.5 is a useful scenario.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

ref his url 404

https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-climate-empire-strikes-out-the-perils-of-policy-analysis-in-an-echo-chamber/

9/2018

the American Enterprise Institute — which as an institution takes no positions on policy issues — on September 6 hosted an event on how “carbon” pricing (both explicit and implicit) can be used to implement more effectively the 2015 Paris international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. With the exception of one presentation, this panel discussion was not useful in terms of advancing the policy debate, largely because the panelists were chosen so as to present a uniform policy view. The event provided little in terms of valuable information for the attendees and viewers and did a disservice to the American Enterprise Institute.

Because all the panelists are supporters of international climate policy generally and of the Paris agreement in particular, the common and explicit assumption was that the agreement must be strengthened (that is, made more costly), ostensibly so as to limit warming to 2°C or less by the end of the century.None of the panelists made a distinction between natural and anthropogenic warming, nor was the purely political rather than scientific genesis of that goal addressed at the event.

There appeared to be considerable confusion among the panelists about the actual impact of the Paris accord (0.7°C), even if implemented immediately and enforced strictly throughout this century.The obvious political difficulties of “strengthening” the Paris emissions limits were shunted aside. The panelists seemed not to understand that under the lower Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) GHG concentration scenarios in the latest assessment report (AR5)—those most consistent with the historical trends—the 2°C limit is very likely to be met without any climate policies at all.[emph]

Accordingly, they seemingly did not grasp the implications of the shift begun in the Paris accord from the 2°C limit to a 1.5°C limit, a tacit admission by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that the 2°C limit, again, will be achieved even without international climate policies. Accordingly, that shift is a transparent effort to move the goalposts. Nor did the panelists seem to understand the implications of the higher GHG concentration scenarios used by the IPCC in AR5. Under those scenarios, the reductions in GHG emissions required to reach the 2°C limit will be impossible to achieve.

The “insurance” argument in favor of international climate policy is far weaker than commonly assumed, in part because it ignores the trivial amount of such insurance yielded by plausible emissions reductions, in part because it ignores the potential benefits of anthropogenic warming, and in part because it ignores the likely adverse consequences of government policies to increase energy costs. Such policies would be likely to impoverish additional tens or hundreds of millions of people around the globe, and the implications of an effective international climate policy to drive up energy costs—an international government tax cartel — are not salutary in terms of the economic growth needed to move massive numbers of people out of poverty. Nor are they likely to prove consistent with the preservation of individual freedom in the face of an expansion of the coercive and confiscatory power of states acting both individually and collectively.

Other central points are as follows. The purported administrative ease of a carbon tax is an illusion. The individual emissions-reduction promises made at Paris are unenforceable and can be “met” without any change whatever in underlying emissions behavior. Notwithstanding several assertions by members of the panel, government revenues from a carbon tax are not a social benefit of GHG policies; instead, they are a wealth transfer. The “co-benefits” of GHG policies in terms of reduced emissions of conventional pollutants are a deeply problematic policy justification in the US context. At an international level, in particular for the developing economies, the co-benefits argument for GHG policies might (or might not) be efficient narrowly in terms of improved life expectancies, but the September 6 panel failed even to ask the fundamental question of whether that benefit might be outweighed by the adverse life expectancy effect of higher energy costs and the attendant reduction in national and per capita incomes.

Expansion of unconventional electricity (wind and solar) generation as a tool for implementation of the Paris GHG limits is likely to yield perverse outcomes. Wind and solar generation technologies inflict their own set of serious environmental problems, including a likely increase in the emission of conventional pollutants and GHG as an attendant effect of the up-and-down cycling of backup fossil units used to avoid blackouts in the face of the unreliability of wind and solar power. And the higher costs of unconventional power simply are incontrovertible.

There is little evidence in the available data that increasing GHG concentrations have yielded serious climate impacts. It may prove to be the case that such evidence will emerge, but any such assumption is a poor basis for policy formulation. Moreover, the term “carbon” is little more than political propaganda. One would think that the organizers of this event would have understood that even unanimity on the scientific issues would not yield consensus on the policy issues.

One would think that the economists on the panel would have thought to ask the most basic of cost-benefit questions. One would think that the organizers of this event would have understood that a panel discussion characterized by a common set of assumptions and outlook—one without any contrasting views—would be far more likely to ignore the central policy questions and thus to achieve no advance in policy understanding. In all of those dimensions: One would be wrong.

Print the full report.

Continue reading this piece

...

benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on energy and environmental policy.

Before joining AEI, Zycher conducted a broad research program in his public policy research firm, and was an intelligence community associate of the Office of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, US Department of State. He is a former senior economist at the RAND Corporation, a former adjunct professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and at the California State University Channel Islands, and is a former senior economist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He served as a senior staff economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, with responsibility for energy and environmental policy issues.

Zycher has a doctorate in economics from UCLA, a Master in Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Arts in political science from UCLA.

Experience

Senior Fellow, Pacific Research Institute, 2009–2020
President, Benjamin Zycher Economics Associates, 2004–13
Associate, Intelligence Community Associates Program, Office of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, US Department of State, 2010–12
Adjunct Professor of Economics and Business, Martin V. Smith School of Business and Economics, California State University, Channel Islands, 2009–10
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 2006–09
Senior Economist, RAND Corporation, 1998–2004; Economist, RAND Corporation, 1985–91
Adjunct Professor of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles, 1985–2000
Vice President, Research, Milken Institute, 1991–98
Senior Economist, Arroyo Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 1983–85
Senior Staff Economist, President’s Council of Economic Advisers, 1981–83

Education

PhD, economics, University of California, Los Angeles

MPP, public policy, University of California, Berkeley

AB, political science, University of California, Los Angeles

REF 2 PRETTY MUCH RECYCLED above

https://www.heritage.org/energy-economics/commentary/democrats-want-rejoin-the-paris-accord-lets-recall-why-it-was-such-bad

WHen the Obama administration negotiated the Paris climate agreement, conservatives argued that it should move through the proper treaty process and be sent to the Senate, where elected senators could weigh in and potentially reject the deal.

President Barack Obama didn’t do that. Instead, he unilaterally signed the deal, making it all the more easy for a future president to un-sign it.

Now that President Donald Trump has announced his intent to withdraw from the costly, ineffectual agreement, House Democrats think it’s time to involve Congress.

Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced the Climate Action Now Act, a bill that would block the Trump administration from withdrawing from the Paris accord and enforce the commitments made under the Obama administration. Those commitments include reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 by 26-28% compared to 2005 levels.

Trump was right to announce his intent to withdraw from Paris. While the climate is indeed changing and human activity is playing a role, the chances of looming climate catastrophe are simply unrealistic and not grounded in reality.

But even granting such a looming catastrophe, the Paris Agreement itself would do little to alter the climate. To have any impact whatsoever on climate, the entire world would either have to quickly change the way it consumes energy or simply remain undeveloped. Both options are devoid of reality.

While many countries are rapidly expanding their use of renewable power, forecasts indicate that coal, oil, and natural gas will continue to provide the overwhelming majority of the world’s energy needs well into the future. For developing countries, the highest priorities are to reduce energy poverty and improve living standards.

With no enforcement mechanisms in place and no repercussions for failing to meet emissions reduction targets, countries are essentially free to do whatever they want, meaning they will continue on their business-as-usual trajectory without making any changes. China, for instance, can peak its emissions in 2030 even though projections have their peak emissions falling before that year.

As the Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass wrote, “It’s easy to slim down to 180 pounds, if you weigh 175 to begin with.”

Global compliance with the Paris Agreement has been nothing short of abysmal. In fact, most nations will soon fail to meet the deadlines they agreed to.

An overall loss of nearly 400,000 jobs, half of which would be in manufacturing.
A average total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four.
An aggregate GDP loss of over $2.5 trillion.

Congress should instead advance pragmatic policies that will actually drive innovation in energy and environmental protectioN

anti union, lib arts and worker report:

provide fodder for BS reports: Many hypertext links in the End Notes don't work, including the first. Others point to web pages that generate a "404" page missing response. While some End Notes refer to official data, many point to ideological marketing organizationslike the Heritage Foundation and polemics based on *a priori*assumptions.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/house-republicans-paint-a-labor-vision-thats-straight-out-of-the-19th-century-robber-barons-era/

dcj dcr

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/prominent-gop-mega-donors-enthusiastically-supported-congressional-candidate-marjorie-taylor-greene-despite-her-extremist-pro-qanon-views-report/

no lnx pix twt

Prominent GOP ‘mega-donors’ enthusiastically supported congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene despite her extremist pro-QAnon views: report

Written by Alex Henderson August 24, 2020

One of this summer’s most disturbing Republican victories came on Tuesday, August 11, when QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene defeated fellow Republican John Cowan in a primary in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. Given how overwhelmingly Republican Greene’s district is, she is likely to win in November — and bring her pro-QAnon views to the U.S. House of Representatives. Journalist Julia Carrie Wong discusses Greene’s campaign in an article published in the Guardian on August 24, stressing that some well-known GOP mega-donors have supported the Georgia Republican despite her extreme views.

Greene’s campaign, Wong reports, received financial support from “groups connected to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and his wife” as well as “the chairman of the board of prominent conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation” and “multiple Republican mega-donors.”

The QAnon conspiracy cult believes that President Donald Trump, who congratulated Greene after her primary victory, was sent to the White House to combat an international ring of pedophiles and Satanists that has infiltrated the U.S. government and that an anonymous figure named “Q” is giving them updates on Trump’s battle. And Greene gave the QAnon movement her enthusiastic support in a video posted on YouTube in 2017.

In addition to her support of QAnon, Greene has a history of racist, anti-Islam and anti-Semitic remarks. Her opponent in the congressional primary, John Cowan, is a hard-right Trump supporter, but he wasn’t extreme enough for some Republican voters in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District.

Wong notes that Greene “received significant backing” from theHouse Freedom Fund, a political action committee associated with the far-right House Freedom Caucus — and the Meadows-associated political action committee Your Voice Counts donated $2000 to Greene’s campaign in March.

According to Wong, “Greene received further support from the Meadows family when the RightWomen PAC, whose executive director is Debbie Meadows, Mark’s wife, endorsed Greene and spent $17,500 to oppose Cowan in the runoff…. In addition to spending more than $30,000 on an independent expenditure campaign to support Greene over Cowan, theHouse Freedom Fund raised nearly $90,000 from its own donors, earmarked for Greene’s campaign. These earmarked donations include $5600 from Barb Van Andel-Gaby, the chairman of the board of the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank.”

One outfit that is now making a point of distancing itself from Greene isKoch Industries, which donated $5000 to her campaign though its PAC. After Greene’s victory, a spokesperson for Koch contacted AlterNet and stressed that “Koch does not support her campaign” — pointing out that “in June, upon learning of Ms. Greene’s past comments, KOCHPAC immediately requested a refund of its contribution” and saying that Koch does not condone Greene’s “harmful and divisive rhetoric.”

Never Trump conservative Tim Miller, who formerly served as communications director for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and is now political director of Republican Voters Against Trump and a frequent contributor to The Bulwark, is vehemently critical of Republicans who have openly supported Greene.Miller told the Guardian, “Getting involved in a primary on behalf of an absolutely insane, conspiracy-minded, explicitly racist candidate in a seat that is reliably conservative is mind-bogglingly irresponsible. This is how you signal to the Trump base, ‘We are with you. We

https://relationshipscience.com/person/barb-van-andel-gaby-3501183

Barb van Andel-Gaby is on the board of Alticor Corp., The Heritage Foundation and Richard & Barbara Gaby Foundation and Member of National Association for Female Executives, Member of Home School Legal Defense Association and Member of Grand Rapids Association of Realtors. In the past she was Chief Executive Officer for Peter Island Resort & SpA and Vice President for Amway Hotel Corp. She received an undergraduate degree from Hope College and an MBA from Indiana University.

Former Chief Executive Officer at Peter Island Resort & SpA

Barb Van Andel-Gaby

Former Chief Executive Officer at Peter Island Resort & SpA

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Peter Island Resort & SpA

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218

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RELATIONSHIPSView Relationship Details

RelSci Relationships are individuals Barb Van Andel-Gaby likely has professional access to. A relationship does not necessarily indicate a personal connection.

Edwin J. Feulner, Jr.

Founder at Heritage Foundation