Heritage Foundation Crazy Board
There's a lot of convoluted history behind what led to Project 2025, and that's likely on purpose.
This is a place to collect information about that history into one place. Hopefully, this will also help increase awareness and discussion about everything that is truly behind this history.
Any odd or interesting information relating to the Heritage Foundation, and it’s members or affiliate groups is welcome here.
If you’ve got obscure information/articles written by or mentioning people like Paul Weyrich, Ed Feulner, or information about other associates and affiliate organizations, such as the Coors Brewing family , the Council for National Policy (CNP), State Policy Network, and countless other shady ties, please drop them here.
Rules:
Be respectful
No abusive language
No bigotry
No ads
No porn
view the rest of the comments
Conservatives inhabit a subjective reality that runs on naked tribalism. Strict hierarchy isn't their goal: it's how they think everything already works. I cannot overstress: everything. If a rightful authority moved a "falling rocks" sign, the rocks would fall somewhere else.
Anything else is proof that someone is in the wrong position. Right things are things said by right people. It is impossible for someone to simply be incorrect, because there is no objective means to evaluate claims. They can only be accepted or rejected based on interpersonal trust.
So of course they figure, what they need is a really really smart guy, but one who says what they want to hear. That's all we're doing - right? That's all there is.
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Nothing they do makes sense until you understand this.
I don't think it's all conservatives, but I think this relates to an inability to understand what empathy actually is. When people see it simply as a "weakness," or a tool used to manipulate and gain sympathy, they're either ignoring or missing a very important aspect of how useful it can actually be.
Empathy is a nonverbal means of emotional communication, and it allows you to "think about what others are thinking," and how it may or may not align with your own thoughts and conclusions.
The inability to do this, is actually itself a very big weakness that results in all or nothing/naked tribalism behavior. Then when people are like "why the fuck would you do that?" That's when you start getting the justifications like if I didn't do it somebody else would have, bc that's what I would do, and I can't really comprehend on a non surface level that other people aren't me.
I was listening to a podcast today about the Iran Contra and the advisors to Reagan during his first administration. This was when the Heritage Foundation presence was really strong.
They tried to keep Reagan from ever interacting with Americans at a one-on-one level, because they knew if he heard about something from an individual (rather than just an abstract group of strangers), he would often feel compelled to help solve the issue.
I believe that's kind of the case with the majority of conservatives, and humans in general. It's a lot easier to ignore something if you can't relate to it or if you just don't let yourself think about it too much.
It was still shitty that Reagan's policies ultimately harmed so many people, and definitely helped us end up where we are now. But it's also kind of insane to think that the people advising him literally tried to shield him from the reality of what his policies were doing to individuals, because they saw his very basic level of empathy as a weakness, and the individual Americans who were asking for help as "manipulative," simply because they were turning to their president to solve the issues he had created and had the power to fix.
I honestly believe the whole movement we're seeing on the right by Christian nationalists to convince people that "empathy is a disease" is a way to keep their base brainwashed and under their control. If they train people that anger and accusations of manipulation should be the default response to anything that makes you stop and think too much when something feels morally wrong or unjustified, it makes it easier to outgroup/distance from and label the people that are being mistreated as other or somehow less than human.
That tracks with how conservatives develop progressive views the moment their family is affected. Like Dick fucking Cheney being okay about gay rights because he has a gay daughter. But again: that's just interpersonal relations as the basis for moral judgement. Conservatism, as a worldview, is that practice. Right-wing politics are the most obvious extension of that - 'ingroup good' means tribalism, our tribe is best tribe, someone's gotta be king. The myth of small-c conservatives is a story they tell. But this pattern of behavior can exist in any context. It's how we get tankies insisting any leftist-sounding dictatorship must be good, because leftists are the ingroup, and ingroup good. End of thought. The rest is just shuffling cards to create pretense for that conclusion.
I don't think anyone has to be trained into this. That's the problem. This is humanity's default. This is how things worked in the ancestral environment, and it was a lot easier than all this thinky-thinky crap, and it usually turned out fine. We barely even noticed it until everyone's day-to-day thoughts were archived in black and white. Lone events may be written off as hypocrisy. The global pattern is an epistemological crisis.
I think to some extent, that is the default when the amygdala is kicked into hyperdrive by fear and the prefrontal cortex goes offline.
But dividing the U.S. into such black and white extremes of left vs right is directly the result of the heritage foundation creating the whole moral majority narrative, and essentially creating an advertising campaign out of abortion and Roe v Wade.
Originally Americans weren't even very divided on the issue, but Paul Weyrich seized the opportunity and targeted evangelical Christians several years after the Roe v Wade decision was even made.
Even leaders of the southern baptist church weren't opposed to Roe v Wade at the time the decision was made.
I grew up in the southern Baptist church in the 90s, so well after the pro-life narrative had been established as unquestionable in the church. In no way was it some kind of rosey utopia back then, it was pretty awful, but even since then it's gotten more extreme and politicized. Straight up denial and disgust with the literal word of Jesus and saying things like "empathy is a disease," is something new that is being gradually inserted into everyday "Christianity," so that eventually (just like abortion) it will just be accepted without question.
Before abortion it was civil rights.
Before that it was women's suffrage.
Before that it was slavery.
This pattern will always find an excuse - some reason to distinguish a moral crusade for our people's innate superiority versus the vile outgroup coming to humiliate us all. Therefore in the name of preserving the past we must commit unprecedented violence to protect what cannot possibly change!
They're just shuffling cards. The outright bastards who contradict themselves within one sentence are only saying the quiet part loud. And the fact their audience does not immediately call horseshit is a big hint that they're not engaging with this on an intellectual level. Their preacher says so, and he's up the hierarchy. Any cognitive dissonance means they gotta "study it out" and find excuses. Like how Leviticus plainly says don't eat shellfish, don't mix fabrics, don't get tattoos, but the only reason Christians reference it is to whinge about queer people. Calling it infallible means nothing - because the authority figure speaking confidently said nuh-uh.
Fear is not necessary. This nonsense is how outwardly-reasonable pillars of the community deal with everyday obstacles, sometimes in the condescending affectation of charity. They're the opposite of scared. They think they're helping! But what they're saying is, it's good that this child is hungry, because Father Dingleberry said so on Sunday, and mumble mumble yadda yadda jingly keys.
Really have to disagree with you here, fear is how groups of people are kept under control. It's the basis of authoritarian regimes
How did Bush gain support for the patriot act despite the fact that it clearly violated civil liberties?
Why did Trump stand in front of a camera a few days ago and yell about how much danger we're all in? You know he's full of shit, but the person who is in an echo chamber, and never exposed to any questions of regarding his greatness, will believe he's saying that because it's true and he's looking out for her best interest
But the pro life movement and the whole idea of a moral majority, was created by Weyrich to gain enough support for conservatives who created segregation academies in the south after the civil rights movement.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
When the supreme court threatened their tax exemption status, they knew the majority of Americans would not be sympathetic to them, and they needed a more palatable issue than segregation to gain support for the idea of a right to "religious freedom," that would allow them to maintain tax exemption.
When I say it was like an advertisement campaign. I mean they literally created films back when that was the best way to spread messaging, and toured the country screening those films and giving speeches in order to create the pro-life movement.
The moral majority is the alt-right is the Klan. It's all the same bullshit, over and over. They're always rebranding to claim they've been around forever. 'We're responsible for everything sensible and good, but now the evil outgroup has gone too far, so we must take extreme action to--' blah blah blah. The exact same pattern gave us Birth Of A Nation.
Fear is useful - but it's not necessary. People stuck in this mode are probably calmer than the rest of us, because they're not flipping their shit about observable reality. They don't live in it. They think The Idiot starting a fucking war doesn't count, on account of he said so. They've been exposed to decades of criticism against him - and they answer it by shuffling cards! He didn't say that. Well he didn't mean it. Well he's joking. Well it's out of context. Facts to the contrary are fake news. Study it out.
Facts don't fix it because it's not about ignorance. God help us, this worldview is stable. It is not fragile against contrary evidence. Evidence is not real, to people performing these excuses.