Tag: heritage foundation
Heritage Foundation, Once Reputable, Veers Toward Far-Right Fringe

Heritage Foundation, Once Reputable, Veers Toward Far-Right Fringe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Heritage Foundation Chief Hails Neo-Fascist Victory In Italian Election

Heritage Foundation Chief Hails Neo-Fascist Victory In Italian Election

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roberts was highly criticized, even by fellow conservatives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

How Idaho Entrapped An Ex-Offender Into Voting Illegally

How Idaho Entrapped An Ex-Offender Into Voting Illegally

Laurie Erickson just came home from the Ada County Jail in Boise, Idaho.

Detained since March 1 of this year, Erickson admits she violated the law, although without any of the required intent.
Erickson voted in the 2020 presidential elections when she was on parole at the time for possession of a controlled substance, so she pleaded guilty to one count of felony illegal voting/interference with an election on June 23, 2022 which subjected her to a maximum prison sentence of five years and/or a $50,000 fine. She’s now serving a three-year sentence of probation for the new charge.

Erickson was working as a food delivery driver when parole officers picked her up. She’s back at it already, having dropped off orders from Chicago Pizza and Pojo’s Family Fun Center within an hour or two of walking out of the jail.

While she was detained, Erickson lost three months of income, though, and feared she’d lose her home. She didn’t, but only because her landlord likes her and her boyfriend, according to Mark Renick, Erickson’s friend and director of re-entry services at St. Vincent de Paul Southwest Idaho, a charity affiliated with the Catholic Church. If the landlord wasn’t fond of them, she’d likely be homeless right now.

So some luck wove its way into the plot line of Laurie’s recent past. But it's not all easy. Erickson has three months of back rent to pay and the court fees and costs stemming from the last three months total $1395.50 which she has to pay by July 2025, which is hard since that first shift delivering food she made $38.88. Only $100 of the total assessment is a punitive fine according to Renick.

Erickson’s story seems both cautionary — ineligible people shouldn’t cast ballots — and excessive — almost $15 per day for a charge that the state of Idaho didn’t really want to incarcerate her for (they had to take her into physical custody without a warrant because parolees aren’t allowed bond when charged with a new crime). It was an offense against the public order of Ada County, Idaho that the the Gem State ultimately valued at a whopping C-note.

The story seems unfortunate and preventable until one realizes that Erickson never sought the voter registration form that kicked off this mess. She received the form in the mail and returned it to get an absentee ballot; Idaho was one of 25 states where absentee ballots had to be procured by the voters themselves; counties were allowed to inform residents of this any way they chose and Ada County mailed out registration packets.

Erickson says she probably wouldn't have voted if the form didn’t arrive at her home unsolicited.

It’s not as if she was on a hunt for the form and just happened to pick one up at the parole office, where they’re available. Erickson says she saw signs when she was incarcerated on the original drug charge that said that once all fines and fees are paid and someone’s been out a year, they’re eligible to vote.

The signs, she says, were misleading because, when combined with the appearance of a voter registration form that arrived after she had been home for a year and paid off all of the legal financial obligations imposed by Idaho’s criminal legal system, they led her to believe she wasn’t committing a crime. She had no intent to break the law.

Initially, Erickson’s story sounds like entrapment. In Idaho, entrapment is an affirmative defense, with the burden of proof resting on the defendant who claims it. All Erickson would have had to do is prove that a state agent gave her the idea of voting --I'm looking at you, registrar who ordered forms mailed to residents because of the pandemic -- and that a state agent persuaded her to commit the crime. And she would have to show that she wasn’t ready and willing to vote as an ineligible person.

She could have tested this at trial, but Erickson was advised, incorrectly, by other inmates that there’s no entrapment defense in Idaho which is why she entered her plea of guilty last month.

Disenfranchised people voting isn’t a huge problem, numbers-wise. The conservative Heritage Foundation compiled a database of 1365 instances of proven illegal voting. Of those 1365, only 278 are for voting by an ineligible person. And of those 278 instances of voting by an ineligible person, only 77 were ballots cast by a person who was convicted of a felony whose rights had not been restored. Slightly over five percent of illegal votes are cast by people who’ve been disenfranchised by their status as convicted felons.

The larger problem is how situations like Erickson’s discourage positive and lawful conduct. “We are law abiding citizens and they act like we are scum because we voted,” she told me.

That’s a problem because voting correlates with lower recidivism. Offenders in states that permanently disenfranchise people are 10 percent more likely to reoffend. Back when former Florida Governor Charlie Crist re-enfranchised 155,315 offenders, less than one percent of the restored citizens recidivated, very likely because the ones who voted weren’t subject to arrest when they performed their duty as citizens.

In fact the better behaved parolees are more likely to land in a mess like this. According to Los Angeles attorney Arash Hashemi, who represents people on probation and parole, it’s the good parolees who can most easily fall victim to erroneous instruction.

"If you're actually someone who's trying to rehabilitate yourself and, you know, be a productive member of society, you're actually going to put your faith in your parole officer [and other government officials.]...So if they tell you you can go vote and you listen to them, then I think for them to later on say, no, you committed a crime is unfair,” said Hashemi in an interview.

Erickson should have done more due diligence and made an inquiry to her parole officer. But she didn’t see the need to do so because she was mailed the form. And even checking with a parole officer wouldn't have been dispositive. In North Carolina, where the voting rights status of people on probation and/or parole remains in limbo pending litigation, registration forms are still available at parole offices, where parolees may end up violating the law and the terms of their release if they vote.

You'd be surprised. A lot of people who were incarcerated when they get out, they're not that sophisticated with the everyday procedures that you and I take for granted," Hashemi said.

Erickson will be eligible to vote again in Idaho in 2025, after the 2024 presidential election. “I know all I want to know now…enough that I’ll never vote again,” she texted me.

It’s not the best news I’ve heard from someone who’s just been set free.

If you would like to donate to the Facebook fundraiser to help Laurie Erickson get back on her feet, please do so here.


Chandra Bozelko did time in a maximum-security facility in Connecticut. While inside she became the first incarcerated person with a regular byline in a publication outside of the facility. Her “Prison Diaries" column ran in The New Haven Independent, and she later established a blog under the same name that earned several professional awards. Her columns now appear regularly in The National Memo.

Partisan Battles In Swing States Are Costing Democracy Dearly

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Like endless candidate fundraising, partisan battles over accessing a ballot and voting have become akin to a "permanent campaign" in America's battleground states—where voters often decide which party holds national power.

Not every state's voters determine which party wins congressional majorities and the presidency. But among the states that tip these outcomes, partisan battles over the ease or difficulty of voting have become ongoing features of their political life—bleeding over from completed elections into state legislative sessions and forcing voters and local election officials to pivot as the cycle continues.

In America's 2020 general election, voters had more options than ever to vote—due to state responses to the pandemic. They set turnout records. But partisan fights over voting rules did not stop after Election Day, nor after the Electoral College met, nor after Donald Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.

In January, as lawmakers convened in the battleground states with Republican governors and GOP-majority statehouses, Republicans introduced a wave of restrictive voting legislation. Not every bill had traction, but bills rolling back access to a ballot and options to return it moved in Iowa, New Hampshire, Georgia, Arizona, Florida and Texas. In March, Iowa became the first state to enact rollbacks into laws, immediately triggering a lawsuit claiming that the restrictions violated its state constitution's right of equal access to a ballot. Advocates for Latino voters and the Democratic Party filed the lawsuit.

Republicans introduced similar bills in other battleground states with Democratic governors, such as in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. But unlike in the red-led states where some of the bills may yet become law, these states lack sufficient numbers of Republican legislators to override gubernatorial vetoes. In other words, their efforts attacking voting and undermining confidence in the most democratic of public institutions are posturing mostly intended to placate their base after Democrats swept control of Congress and the White House.

Either way, partisan fights over the options to access and cast a ballot appear to have become an ongoing feature in battleground states. This development is akin to what campaign consultants first coined as a "permanent campaign" during the 1970s, referring to nonstop "image making and strategic calculation." The most disturbing aspects of permanent campaigns, according to scholars, are how they disrupt and distort political representation, governing and now, voting.

"No one planned such an emergent pattern in the general management of our public affairs, yet it now seems to lie at the heart of the way Americans do politics—or more accurately—the way politics is done to Americans," wrote Hugh Heclo, for a joint publication in 2000 from the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute on permanent campaigns.

With fundraising, the endless drive to raise big money skews a candidate's time and attention. With voting, many lawmakers are driven to revise the rules to benefit their party. After 2020, some Democrat-led states, like Virginia, passed several laws expanding ballot access. But many more Republican-led states have sought to make voting harder. These power grabs often ignore warnings from election officials about deliberately complicating the process for voters and election administrators, which is what has been unfolding in Florida over a Republican proposal to ban absentee ballot drop boxes.

Another feature of the permanent voting wars is the nonstop campaigning that now surrounds the rules for casting ballots. In Georgia, for example, which arguably has the nation's most intense post-election battles—after ex-President Trump lost its 2020 general election and its two GOP senators lost in January's runoffs—Democrats and their allies have responded to restrictive GOP bills with lobbying, media, and calls to boycott Republicans' corporate donors. Ahead of the early March NBA all-star game, superstar LeBron James and his More Than a Vote group created a TV ad criticizing the Georgia rollbacks and emphasizing that this is a long-term struggle for representative government.

The GOP efforts in red-led swing states are also striking. Notably, Republican lawmakers are justifying their proposed rollbacks by citing falsehoods about voters and voting. The most activist Republican lawmakers continue to cast doubt on the legitimacy of 2020's presidential results, even after ex-Trump administration officials—starting with former Attorney General William Barr—stated there was no widespread election fraud. The professional organizations for top state election officials have repeatedly said that 2020's general election was the most transparent, secure, and problem-free exercise in decades—from a voting and vote counting perspective. But that hasn't stopped GOP attacks.

Some of these lies have been around for years, such as falsely claiming that the country is plagued by massive illegal voting—voter fraud by Democrats. Other lies are newer, such as Trump's evidence-free claim of millions of stolen votes.

While what unfolds inside statehouses may appear to be inside local political ecosystems, some of the falsehood-filled messaging and strategic calculations are coming from the Republican National Committee and its top partisan allies.

As Mandi Merritt, an RNC spokeswoman, recently told the Washington Post, the national party "remains laser focused on protecting election integrity, and that includes aggressively engaging at the state level on voting laws and litigating as necessary." She continued, "Democrats have abandoned any pretense that they still care about election issues."

On March 8, Fox News reported that Heritage Action, the grassroots front of the right-wing Heritage Foundation—which has, for years, perpetuated a myth that illegal voting is widespread and a blight—"plan[ned] to spend at least $10 million on efforts [media and ads] to tighten election security laws in eight key swing states."

"Fair elections are essential," said Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica Anderson. The group's website had links to a February 1 "factsheet" that listed purported problems that largely do not exist—such as failures to update voter rolls. (More than half the states cooperate on this task, including sharing more reliable data than these partisans advocate.)

While Heritage Action's swing-state ads will seek to sound authoritative as they fan fears about voting, its much-hyped "Election Fraud Database" bears scrutiny. Nationally, in 2020's election cycle, where more than 155 million people voted for president—and tens of millions more voted in primaries—Heritage's database only cited five examples of illegal voting by individuals. It cited examples of people illegally signing qualifying petitions for candidates and ballot measures, and also falsifying absentee ballot applications in 2020. But these latter illegal activities were detected by officials and prosecuted, meaning, among other things, that this handful of potentially illegal ballots were caught, not cast. More importantly, Heritage's numbers attest to the fact that illegal voting is very rare and almost always detected before it counts.

But such facts are often lost when more simplistic partisan disinformation and smears race ahead, often amplified by social media sites that elevate incendiary content that attracts readers, which is what advertisers seek. Such propaganda perpetuates fake narratives that mask the real agenda: gaming election results.

"The right-wing is organizing and spending millions to enact voter suppression laws," tweeted Marc Elias, who leads the national Democratic Party's legal team, in response to the Fox News report on Heritage Action's propaganda campaign.

The reality of permanent campaigns to reshuffle voting options and rules in battleground states is yet another sign that an even-handed federal response is vital. Whether the remedy is the Democrats' omnibus election reform bill, H.R. 1, or the narrower restoration of the Voting Rights Act's enforcement provisions, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, remains to be seen. But as Brookings and AEI scholar Hugh Heclo noted a generation ago, the "permanent campaign" is eroding foundational features of representative government.

"[B]y the beginning of the twenty-first century, American national politics had gone past a mentality of campaigning to govern. It had reached the more truly corrupted condition of governing to campaign," he wrote. "It is no exaggeration to use the imagery of true 'corruption' in its classic sense—something much darker than money or sex scandals."

"We can know quite well from history when democratic politics is passing from degradation to debauchery. That happens when leaders teach a willing people to love illusions—to like nonsense because it sounds good. That happens when a free people eventually come to believe that whatever pleases them is what is true."