The Heritage Foundation Wants You to Keep Quiet or Be Bloodied
Are You Ready for Some Christian Nationalism?!
I had different plans for the rollout, but welcome to Happy Glasses! Without spoiling those plans in whole, I can tell you that the title of this newsletter is a reference to the yellow-tinted lenses I sometimes wear for their blue light-blocking properties and the sensory effects of sharp edges and crispness of color that the pale lenses afford me. (Yes, they are prescription!)
Over the past few weeks, though, while I’ve been learning how to utilize Substack, tinkering under the hood, mapping out a posting schedule, constructing outlines for each post, and frankly overcoming a lot of anxiety about a weekly schedule of writing that will sometimes be about me, some ground-shaking has occurred across the American political landscape. This post, and some follow-ups I have planned, will have nothing to do with previously planned and now-postponed opening series about me and my glasses and some of my policy interests in the realms of education and employment.
Instead, I will focus on the heavy scary moment I think a lot of other people, like me, feel we’re in right now. I hope to illuminate and elucidate the very real threat a second Donald Trump presidency holds for all manner of folks across a broad majority of America’s striving multiracial, pluralistic society, and I hope you’ll read and share as widely as possible.
So enough about me! It’s time to reckon with the coming putsch!
There is a lot going on that demands attention, but in this and upcoming posts I’m motivated by and responding to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, or as I refer to it, the Christian Nationalist Handbook. I’ve been aware of Project 2025 since January but only became truly scared by it after the US Supreme Court’s recent decisions to strip federal agencies of their long-held status as expert arbiters in highly technical matters like the accumulation of nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere or the definition of a machine gun, and their other decision granting absolute immunity to any president for any action so long as it’s claimed as an “official act.” It was the delivery of those decisions, and also Kevin Roberts’ strident June 22, 2024 appearance on MSNBC’s The Weekend that really put a fire under my seat and prompted me to rethink my purpose with this newsletter.
I don’t recall with certainty when I first heard about the Heritage Foundation but it is likely that I had some inkling at least by the fall of 2011 when I asked students in a college composition course to analyze the Occupy Wall Street declaration along with Tea Party rhetoric. I’m certain by then I’d seen things like this direct statement of Tea Party boosterism by Heritage or a compare/contrast piece at Slate.com, or similar explanations. Of course, later work would delve more deeply into the funding and organization of the Tea Party, including strong ties to Heritage and the Koch brothers, but my general sense of Heritage was that the whole point of the thing was to deregulate for the benefit of large corporations for reasons related to money and greed for more of it.
My understanding, then as now, is that what looks like a “free” market to some looks to a great many more like an anticompetitive labor regime in which workers have no rights or recourse, or an ecosystem of polluted waters and lands that poison food and drinking sources for those with the fewest resources to find safe and healthy options, or a society that puts children and our elders and those with physical and mental disabilities at risk of neglect and abuse and injury, and an economy in which women and people of color earn less than their White male counterparts all other things being equal. So, no, I am not and have not been soothed by so-called neutral market perspective-taking, or whatever.
In any case things have changed in the dozen years since Jim DeMint left the US Senate to head up Heritage. No longer is it credible to refer to the organization as “a conservative research group.” That’s because their new leader, Kevin Roberts, in place as President of Heritage Foundation since 2021 and of Heritage Action (the lobbying arm) since 2023, is not engaged in a research project – he’s engineering what he calls a revolution.
Ominously, Roberts has proclaimed that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Even when he’s trying to reassure people that his intentions are political and not incitement to bloodshed, he will introduce the notion of violence without prompting:
We’re not saying they’re bad people. We’re not saying we want any harm to come to them. Let me be really clear about that. This is Heritage, you know, not some fringe group on the right. We’re talking about destroying political power. And they have political power. And they wield it.
Statements like this bind notions of ideological purity to messy bureaucratic purges and showcase a rabid vision of an autocratic revolution that is the only outcome that can result from the implementation of Project 2025.
The question for me is not whether Donald Trump, or Kevin Roberts, or Steve Bannon, or Stephen Miller are comfortable with violence as a means to power – I believe without equivocation that they each would welcome violence on behalf of their chosen policies or politicians and will probably even call for violence more brazenly in a (still hypothetical!) second Trump administration. The question for me is whether the people voting in this year’s presidential election know that the decision is between an old guy and another old guy who is a fascist. Because that’s what Trump is: an old fascist.
And Project 2025 is a blueprint designed for a fascist with a desire to seize total control over an administrative state weakened by numerous Supreme Court decisions, with newly-granted absolute immunity for all “official acts” to serve as a shield against any and all accountability, from day one. It's chock-a-block with sweeping proposals to overturn an ostensibly democratic government with one that is explicitly unitary and autocratic and founded on a narrow conception of Christianity that is coupled with a maximalist conception of executive power.
If you’re interested in getting a deeper sense of the “four promises” and other principles that guide Project 2025, OR if you’re interested more broadly in public policy (especially education), OR if you’re interested in some of the more personal content I plan for this newsletter, I hope you’ll consider subscribing.
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