Heritage Foundation Crazy Board

The new religious right has turned against the old religious right.

Or, to put it another way, the focus of the movement is changing. I spent more than 20 years defending religious liberty in federal courts. Our objective was to defend liberty so that religious organizations enjoyed the liberty to do good, free from state discrimination.

Yet now the focus of Christian right isn’t on the defense of liberty; it’s on the accumulation of power. And it is using that power to impose its will, including by imposing its will on Christian organizations it has decided are woke or opposed to President Trump’s agenda.

Few things illustrate that reality more clearly than the Trump administration’s decision to unilaterally — and often unlawfully — defund Christian organizations, including evangelical organizations, that serve poor and marginalized people at home and abroad.

In the first three weeks of his administration, Trump issued a series of stop-work orders and funding freezes that effectively yanked funding from religious groups that have been providing lifesaving care to many of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Caritas International, a confederation of international Catholic relief agencies, has warned that the cuts are “catastrophic” and said that the “ruthless and chaotic” way that the administration has made its cuts “threatens the lives and dignity of millions.”

The Trump administration’s cuts are immaterial to the deficit. U.S.A.I.D.’s foreign assistance constituted less than 1 percent of the federal budget, for example. All direct foreign aid (including the surge in aid to Ukraine) adds up to a mere 1.17 percent of total government spending in the 2023 fiscal year.

Yet cuts to foreign aid endanger people’s lives, including those of Afghan refugees who risked everything helping Americans during our longest war.

The cuts are also symbolic. They demonstrate the extent to which Trump is influencing the evangelical church more than the church is influencing him.

So what happened? The answer is complex, but two factors stand out. The Republican Christian right made a hard turn against immigration and, in its most extreme political faction, is turning against empathy itself.

Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School, is an “ideological lodestar” among conservatives who are impatient with originalism—the idea that the Constitution’s meaning can be determined by its text and the founders’ intent, according to a story by the New York Times.

Vermeule, dubbed “the godfather of post-originalism” by the New York Times, argued in a March 2020 essay in the Atlantic that originalism has “outlived its utility.”

Vermeule instead embraced an approach that he called “common-good constitutionalism” that goes beyond originalism in incorporating conservative values. Common-good constitutionalism is based on the idea that government helps direct society generally “toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate,” he wrote.

The main aim of common-good constitutionalism “is certainly not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power,” Vermeule wrote. Instead the aim is “to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well,” Vermeule wrote.

when I first sat down to read Project 2025, I was most struck not by the newness of the proposals but by their deep familiarity. Half a century after its founding, Heritage Foundation has gone back to its roots and to the vision of one of its key founders, the right-wing political activist Paul Weyrich. To understand Project 2025 and its implications for the United States, we need to understand what it was Weyrich sought to create and what he hoped to accomplish.

It is worth noting what Weyrich hoped to accomplish through Heritage. In an untitled memorandum from 1973, Weyrich mused:

The social gospel tells us to change man’s environment and that will change the world. The real gospel tells us to reform man first, so that a reformed man can change the world. But the citizens of our Nation have few beacons of truth upon whom they can rely. Only the truth can make us free, and the truth must be based on the commandments and the moral law. So, even though we deal with “politics and issues,” our real task is a moral one . . .

For Weyrich, who was a devout traditionalist Catholic, conservative policymaking needed to adopt a new moralism that went far beyond the tenets of fiscal responsibility and small-government conservatism. It also had to embrace a conservative Christian worldview and seek to impose a narrow definition of the common good on society.

The “pro-family” platform is not a liberal platform. For the Catholic New Right and New Christian Right, there is only one version of the good life and only one path to religious and political salvation. Therefore, the role of government is not to preserve individual rights and manage competing interpretations of the good but to impose and enforce a singular conception of the good through the regulation of social relations. At the heart of the Catholic New Right project and of Project 2025 lies a desire to harness the coercive capacity of the state to impose a conservative Christian vision of the good not only on government but on all of society. Revisiting the history of the New Right helps us to understand that this is a radical project, but it is not a new one.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/61850217

Roe created the State Policy Network in 1992. to influence policy at the state level, allegedly after being urged to do so by Ronald Reagan. SPN currently has a network of think tanks in all 50 states.

TIL that Krieble funded the first of its kind Russian corporation for cooperation between Russia and U.S. businesses in 1991

Inspired by Ronald Reagan and funded by the right’s richest donors, a web of free-market think tanks has fueled the nationwide attack on workers’ rights.

Founded in 1992 by businessman and Reagan administration insider Thomas Roe—who also served on the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees for two decades—the group has grown to include 59 “freedom centers,” or affiliated think tanks, in all 50 states.

SPN’s board includes officials from Heritage and right-wing charities such as the Adolph Coors and Jacqueline Hume foundations. Likewise, its deep-pocketed donors include all the usual heavy-hitting conservative benefactors: the Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation, which funds the Cato Institute and Heritage; the Castle Rock Foundation, a charity started with money from the conservative Coors Foundation; and the Bradley Foundation, a $540 million charity devoted to funding conservative causes. SPN uses their contributions to dole out annual grants to member groups, ranging from a few thousand dollars to $260,000, according to 2009 records.

The mayor of Moscow and dissidents from the old Soviet system last week raised the flag of the Russian Republic on a beaux-arts house at 1800 Connecticut Ave. And everyone cheered.

The ceremony marked the establishment of Russia House, a for-profit corporation for cooperation. The go-between for Russian and U.S. businesses is said to be the first of its kind, although others from Eastern Europe may follow to learn and earn with U.S. entrepreneurs. Moscow's nonprofit International University will also have its headquarters in the grand old building.

The corporation is also privately funded. Officers of its board are Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov; Paul Craig Roberts of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former treasury assistant secretary; and Dean Booth, an Atlanta lawyer. Businessman Robert Krieble, who donated fax machines, computers and copiers to dissidents in the Soviet Union when "they were illegal," Lozansky said, is one of the financial supporters.

At the inauguration of Russia House, furnished only with a lectern and radio and television microphones for the ceremony, Paul Weyrich, head of a group called Free Congress, said, "When we first went to the Soviet Union we were considered foolish. But democracy is real. The change is real."

"Russia House is not financed by governments but by private people," Mayor Popov said. "Aid in the form of commercial goods and food should not be the main effort. Aid would be over soon, and all would be as before. We need a free-market economy -- but we don't have people who can run a free market," he said, speaking through a translator. "I told {Treasury} Secretary {Nicholas} Brady that many Americans will sign treaties with ministers -- who then will disappear. Trade should be with private individuals and businesses."

A REPUBLICAN IN MOSCOW By David S. Broder December 3, 1989

A trip behind the Iron Curtain by an influential conservative leader may have significant impact on the restructuring of U.S.-Soviet relations that could emerge from the Bush-Gorbachev summit. Paul Weyrich, conservative activist and president of the Free Congress Foundation, went to Hungary, Estonia and the Soviet Union to teach dissidents techniques of political organizing -- remarkable enough in itself. What he learned from them may be even more important for American politics.

Though less well-known than some of the noisy self-promoters on the right, Weyrich swings as much weight through his personal standing and his organizational network as anyone from that part of the political spectrum. After Weyrich's testimony about John Tower's drinking habits helped sink Tower's nomination as secretary of defense, President Bush thought it prudent to send Weyrich a note saying that there were no hard feelings. That is clout.

Weyrich always has called things as he sees them. These days, he is speaking to his colleagues on the right with the fervor of a man who has seen something inside the Communist world he did not know was there.

Last month Weyrich and six other conservatives went on a two-week training mission, financed and arranged by the Krieble Foundation. They ran programs in Budapest and Tallinn. But the session in Moscow, where their official host was the Academy of Science, was the one that had the greatest impact on them.

They worked with 45 people, more then half of them members of the Supreme Soviet and the rest their campaign managers. Most of them were identified with the Inter-Regional Group of legislators pushing Mikhail Gorbachev for more radical reforms. Many of these novice politicians and legislators were scientists, academics or professionals, chosen in the first free elections the Soviet Union has known. ''We have been training people in politics for more than 15 years, all over the United States, and from Australia to Latin America, and this was absolutely the best group I have ever seen,'' Weyrich said. ''They asked penetrating and brilliant questions on everything from how you get a bill on the legislative calendar for consideration to how you balance your constituents' opinions against what you think is right. We had to summon every bit of knowledge we possessed -- and the members of our group have been in politics for 18 years on the average -- to respond to them. I've never seen anything like it.'

On the final day of the program, Robert McAdam, who directs the domestic training programs for the Free Congress Foundation, put the Soviet politicians through a simulated election-campaign exercise that represents a kind of final exam.

''They ran it better than I have ever seen our American trainees do,'' Weyrich said. As the program continued, several of the trainees sought out the Americans to discuss philosophy more than political technique. It came to a climax one evening at a Moscow hotel, where the Soviets shared their dream of building a society with free markets and constitutional protections of individual rights.

**They revealed their revulsion with a Communist society that, one physicist-politician said, ''contradicts every law of nature.'' With a catch in his voice, Weyrich told of one of the trainees giving him a pin with a miniature Soviet space shuttle on it. ''People have said that this shuttle resembles the American space shuttle,'' the Russian said. ''Thanks to you, we hope to build a a constitution and a nation that resembles yours.''

The child of immigrant parents, Weyrich said he told the Soviets, ''This is why I got into politics, but I never thought I'd have an opportunity like this.'' The consequences of the visit will be felt both there and here.

Weyrich's group has been invited to repeat the seminar in the Urals. The Soviet trainees tape-recorded everything and already have been on the air in Russia, offering tapes and training to others who may run in next year's elections.

As for Weyrich, he came back convinced that, ''There is no question profound changes are going on in the Soviet Union. We don't know how far they will go, but they are unquestionably real. And what I learned was that these are responses to fundamental forces at work in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev is not the source of these changes as much as he is the result of them.''

On the day we talked, he had spent the lunch hour arguing with other conservative operatives, most of whom, he said, ''don't believe anything is happening. They say the tanks are still there and it can all be reversed at any moment.'' Weyrich strongly disagrees now. ''Anti-communism has been a cementing force for the conservative movement,'' he said, ''and without it, the politics of the domestic scene will never be the same. But it would be a stupid strategy to deny the reality of what is happening.''

George Bush is always looking nervously to his right to see if the conservative activists are going to denounce him. Weyrich's trip shows that Bush may be freer than he could ever previously have hoped to pursue the possibilities implicit in his new relationship with Gorbachev.

Only the purest of the movement had gathered at Coronado: men like Oliver North, Pat Robertson, and Larry Pratt (whom the press had recently drummed into exile for his alleged ties to white supremacists). In the past, the group's clandestine revival meetings had spawned liberal warnings of a right-wing conspiracy.

But this morning, the council would plot against its own internal enemies: GOP apostates. And the chief conspirator was Paul Weyrich, the man who founded the Heritage Foundation, orchestrated the party's alliance with evangelical Christians, and, more than any other figure, organized the right inside the Beltway. "I will tell you that this is a bitter turn for me," Weyrich confessed. "I have spent thirty years of my life working in Washington, working on the premise that if we simply got our people into leadership that it would make a difference.... And yet we are getting the same policies from them that we got from their [Rockefeller] Republican predecessors." It was time, Weyrich concluded, to contemplate the once unconscionable: another revolution, this time against "our people."

Funny how in 1987 Weyrich blamed the democratic process for someone as inexperienced as Oliver North being allowed to fumble the ball during the Iran Contra scandal, but just 10 short years later, he was ready to ask for North's help to stage a revolution against the American people...

More than 30 years before Project 2025, Weyrich openly suggested dismantling democracy and government institutions in response to the Iran Contra, because he believed it reflected a system that allowed for failed leadership and inexperienced cabinet advisors.

AS PROPONENTS of a strong foreign policy and defense, conservatives have a special responsibility. Our advocacy brings with it the burden of doing the job competently. We must be leaders in thinking deeply and carefully about America's role in the world, about relating goals to means and about our national strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities and constraints they impose. If we fail to do this, we lose our legitimacy as advocates.

In the Iran-contra mess, conservatives have failed. Obviously, they failed in the way the matter was handled. But the failure is really much more profound than that. The scandal is not a disease, but a symptom. It is a symptom of some underlying contradictions in our national strategy and national institutions.

It is time for a new national grand strategy. Nothing less will address the real problem. Conservatives have a responsibility to take the lead in developing one.

Second, there is a basic contradiction between the structure of our government and our role as a great power. Our government was designed not to play great-power politics but to preserve domestic liberty.

Yikes 😬

As conservatives, we have to help the nation face a stark choice: either modify our institutions of government to play the game of great power, or move back toward our historic, less active foreign policy.

Our current system institutionalizes amateurism. Unlike European parliamentary democracies, we have no "shadow cabinet," no group of experts who are groomed by their party for decades before they take high office. Our presidents can be peanut farmers or Hollywood actors. They can choose their top advisors either from among "professionals" who may not share their goals or supporters who often have no background or expertise in policy. Either way, they lose, and so does the country. The current crisis could not make the point better: our foreign policy was set by an admiral and a Marine lieutenant colonel, neither of whom had any background in the field. The resulting failure is not their fault. The system by which they were chosen is defective.

Odd that Weyrich would feel policy under Reagan was so shameful. After being blown off by the peanut farmer, the Hollywood actor became the first President to use the Heritage Foundation's Mandate for Leadership (The origin of much of Project 2025) to guide policy making.

But, it also seems odd that the Heritage Foundation is back in the White House and directing policy in 2025 under a reality TV star.

If the Heritage Foundation learned so much from seeing Oliver North fail, it seems absurd that a 22 year old grocer was recently given top security clearance before being arrested for attempting to leak sensitive information to a spy agency in another county.

Or that a different 22 year old grocer (yes seriously) is now in charge of protecting the entire U.S. from terrorism and extremism after interning for the Heritage Foundation

Why would you put someone so inexperienced in such an important role? Odd that if he fails to do his job, it would seem to be proving Weyrich's point all over again. Were the failed policies that lead to the Iran Contra, really due to incompetence? Could they have been part of a larger strategy that was intended to fail in order to prove to America and the world why democracy doesn't work?

What about now in 2025?

Nelson seeks to document the connections between "the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives." Many of these connections, she writes, were made possible through the CNP, whose members have included such familiar names as Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, former White House strategist Steve Bannon, the Christian Coallition's first executive director Ralph Reed and NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre.

Nelson traces the group from its founding in 1981 "by a small group of archconservatives who realized that the tides of history had turned against them" — specifically, activist Morton Blackwell, commentator Paul Weyrich and direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie. (Other founding members included Phyllis Schlafly and Left Behind author Tim LaHaye.) The CNP's structure, Nelson writes, was similar to a group called the Council on Foreign Relations (of which Nelson herself is a member) — like that group, the CNP organized as a tax-exempt educational institution, although it was "designed to serve as the engine for a radical political agenda."

The CNP soon realized it could reach prospective voters through the media that many of its members owned. That included the radio broadcasting company Salem Media Group, co-founded by CNP members Stuart W. Epperson and Edward G. Atsinger; and would later include online publications like the Daily Caller. The programming of these various outlets, Nelson writes, "is not uniform, but it harmonizes."