Anglosphere Conservatives Links – ADF Alliance Defending Freedom – Heritage Foundation

Article from Nicole Hemmer in The Conversation ‘Explainer: what are the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom?’ relating these organisation to Liberal Party and Christian conservatives in Australia including Tony Abbott and Kevin Andresw, also linked to the US  fossil fueled ‘Koch Donors Network’ with links globally via Atlas, including U.K. and Hungary. 

In Australia these include the IPA Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne and CIS Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, plus AIP Australian Institute of Progress in Brisbane, while a quasi environmental NGO SPA Sustainable Population Australia, has links with the Tanton Network, via original ZPG Zero Population Growth (Rockefeller Bros. Fund), which shares donors with Koch Network.

Further, the same former conservative politicians also attend events and visit think tanks in Budapest, Hungary, respectively the MCC Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Danubius Institute, led by former Thatcher aide John O’Sullivan and partnered with the Heritage Foundation.

In the background it’s quite a confusing dichotomy or these groups’ public messaging is different from what they quietly promote in private?

‘Explainer: what are the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom?

American conservative organisations have loomed large in Australian politics in the past week. Former prime minister Tony Abbott delivered a speech in New York to one such group, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). And, on Tuesday, former defence minister Kevin Andrews will be in Washington to speak on Australian security and defence at a gathering of the Heritage Foundation.

Even many Americans don’t know much about organisations like the ADF and Heritage. But these groups play a critical role in advancing conservative policies. Here’s a look at how each is remaking American politics – and what it might mean for Australia.

The Alliance Defending Freedom

The ADF is not quite a lobby group. Originally called the Alliance Defense Fund, it is a legal advocacy group. Unlike lobbying groups, which typically work to influence legislation, the ADF aims its arrows at the judiciary.

Through test cases, legal strategies, and consultation with state legislators, the ADF seeks to promote conservative interpretations of the law, particularly on issues important to the religious right. It has more than 40 lawyers on staff, and has trained more than 1300 law students and 1700 practising lawyers.

It is primarily interested in any cases to do with gay rights or reproductive rights. In 2003, the ADF filed an amicus brief defending the right of states to criminalise gay sex. The Supreme Court subsequently ruled such laws unconstitutional. Having lost that fight, it turned its attention to defeating same-sex marriage laws.

Same-sex marriage is now legal nationwide in the US. So, the ADF has not been very effective on the issue. But, in recent years, the ADF – like a number of other conservative legal advocacy groups – has shifted tactics. Now it carries the banner of “religious liberty”, arguing that legislation expanding same-sex rights or reproductive access infringes on the religious freedom of conservative Christians.

Don’t want to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding? Worried that your child’s biology textbook contains references to contraception and sexually transmitted infections? Call the ADF.

On a broader scale, the profusion of “religious freedom restoration acts” (RFRAs) in the US can be traced to work done by groups like the ADF, which consults state legislatures on how to draft RFRAs that have the best possible chance of surviving a legal challenge.

While public pressure has put the brakes on RFRAs in many states, the strategy has had a major impact nationally.

The ADF was the prime mover behind the Hobby Lobby case, which argued that for-profit corporations could not be required to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees if such coverage violated the owners’ religious beliefs. The Supreme Court found in favour of Hobby Lobby and the ADF, essentially ruling that not only were corporations people, but they were people with inviolable religious rights.

The alliance was founded in 1994, in the midst of the culture wars in the US. Leaders of the religious right felt that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had remade the relationship between church and state, pushing religion further and further outside the public sphere.

As a result, Christian leaders like Bill and Vonette Bright (founders of Campus Crusade for Christ) and James Dobson Jr. (founder of Focus on the Family) pooled their resources to create an ACLU for the religious right. Their goal was to use legal arguments, rather than religious ones, to advance their agenda. Twenty years later, the New York Times deemed the ADF the “largest legal force of the religious right”.

The Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation is a think-tank. It uses policy papers, political advocacy, and public relations to support its conservative policy goals. Its range is expansive, covering everything from free-market economics to decentralised governance to a muscular foreign policy.

Though the Heritage Foundation was founded by members of the New Right more interested in domestic policy, it has had a profound effect on defence spending and military action in the US. Ronald Reagan got the idea for his Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly derided as Star Wars) from Heritage. And Heritage policymakers were at the leading edge of the push for the first Iraq War in 1990.

But Heritage is not as reliably neoconservative as the American Enterprise Institute, another prominent conservative think-tank. For instance, Heritage founder Paul Weyrich became an early conservative critic of the second Iraq War, arguing the US had to be more strategic about the wars it entered. He also opposed the doctrine of pre-emptive war.

Heritage has been one of the most effective policy shops in Washington since its founding in 1973. In 1981, when Reagan became president, Heritage published Mandate for Leadership, which was essentially a blueprint for a conservative administration. Reagan loved it. He passed it out to key administration officials and instituted a majority of its recommendations (which numbered in the thousands).

Heritage also worked closely with Speaker Newt Gingrich on the Contract with America, the agenda that drove the 1994 Republican landslide.

Another more recent measure of success occurred in 2013. Republican Jim DeMint resigned from the Senate to take up the leadership of the Heritage Foundation. Think about that. DeMint thought he could exercise more influence leading a think-tank than as a senator.

Heritage pays a lot more than the Senate, but still. That’s a big move.

So, do these organisations matter?

At a time when all eyes are on the Republican primaries, it’s important to remember that elected officials are only a small part of how policy is made in the US – and in Australia.

That Australian leaders like Abbott and Andrews are spending time at these institutions suggest they understand that. And given that they are visiting some of the most successful conservative organisations in the US, there’s a good chance they’re picking up some ideas to try out when they get home.

Nicole Hemmer – Research Associate, Miller Center, University of Virginia, and US Studies Centre, University of Sydney’

For more blogs and articles on Ageing Democracy, Conservative, Eugenics, Evangelical Christianity, Koch Network, Political Strategy, Populist Politics, Radical Right Libertarian and Russia click through:

Russia and Anglosphere – Conservatives and Oligarchs – War vs EU and Future

World Congress Of Families WCF, Russia, The Kremlin, Christian Conservative Nationalists, Dugin, Conservatives and US Evangelicals

Project 2025 – Koch Heritage Foundation Plan – Trump GOP – Permanent Republican Government

Rishi Sunak and US Radical Right Libertarians in UK – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

Abortion Reproductive Rights for Conservatives or GOP Evangelical Christian Support

Trump January 6 Insurrection, Conspiracy and Project 25 for Autocracy

IQ, Bell Curve, Charles Murray, Libertarian Economics and Eugenics – Extremist Trajectory

Climate Confusion, Astroturfing, Pseudo-Science, Population Movement and Radical Right Libertarians

British Young People Thrown Under a Bus for Votes in Ageing Demographics

Relevant article from John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde on how age determines divides in British politics, and not class in Conversation article ‘Age, not class, is now the biggest divide in British politics, new research confirms’.

This also suggests the impact of demography i.e. ageing populations living longer, with above median age voters being targeted by not just parties and policies, but consolidated right wing media and US Koch Network linked think tanks at Tufton on broad social economic policies including Brexit, immigration, pensions and health care.

‘Age, not class, is now the biggest divide in British politics, new research confirms

21st September 2023

John Curtice

Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Social Research, and Professor of Politics, University of Strathclyde

“Class is the basis of British politics; all else is embellishment and detail.” So wrote Peter Pulzer, the former Gladstone professor of politics at the University of Oxford in the 1960s. Nowadays, however, it is age, not social class, that is the biggest demographic division in Britain’s electoral politics.

According to the British Election Study, at the 2019 general election, the Conservatives won the support of 56% of those aged 55 and over, but only 24% of those under 35. Conversely, Labour was backed by 54% of those under-35s who cast a vote, but by just 22% of those aged 55 and over.

In contrast, support for Britain’s two main parties among those in working class occupations was little different from that among those in professional and managerial jobs.

But what underpins this age divide? We typically think of Labour as a party that is more “left wing”, more concerned than the Conservatives about inequality and more supportive of “big government”. So does young people’s greater willingness to support Labour mean they are more left wing than their older counterparts?

Are they more concerned about inequality and more inclined to believe that government should be acting to reduce it? And are they more inclined than older voters to want the government to spend and tax more?

These questions are addressed in a chapter in the latest British Social Attitudes report, published by the National Centre for Social Research. Based on the 40 years of data the annual BSA survey has collected since it began in 1983, the chapter reveals that while younger people have become more concerned about inequality in recent years, this is not accompanied by greater enthusiasm for more tax and spend.

Since 1986, nearly every BSA survey has regularly presented its respondents with a set of propositions designed to measure how “left” or “right wing” they are on the issue of inequality. People are, for example, asked whether they agree or disagree that “there is one law for the rich and one for the poor”, and “government should redistribute income from the better-off to those who are less well-off”.

Their answers to these and similar statements can be summarised into a scale measure that runs from 0 to 100, where 0 means that someone is very left wing and 100 indicates that they are very right wing.

Young people shift left

When the scale was first administered in 1986, there was no difference between the average score of those aged under 35 and those aged 55 or over. Both had a score of 37.

Equally, 30 years later, in 2016, younger people’s average score of 38 was little different from that of 37 among older people. The growth in Labour’s support among younger people that was already in evidence by then was not underpinned by a more left-wing point of view.

However, a gap has emerged during the last three or four years. In the latest BSA survey, conducted towards the end of 2022, young people scored 28 – ten points below the equivalent figure in 2016. In contrast, at 36, the outlook of older people has barely changed at all.

Yet this does not mean that younger people want more taxation and spending. Every year since 1983 BSA has asked people what the government should do if it has to choose between increased taxation and spending on “health, education and social benefits”, reduced taxation and spending, or keeping things as they are.

In the 1980s, younger people were typically more likely than older people to say that taxation and spending should be increased. In 1984, for example, 42% of those aged under 35 expressed that view, compared with just 33% of those over 55.

But since the mid-90s the opposite has been the case. By 2015, 41% of younger people wanted more taxation and spending compared with 49% of older people.

Meanwhile, the gap has since widened further. Whereas support for increased taxation and spending has risen to 67% among older people – the highest it has been in the last 40 years – among younger people it is still no more than 43%.

Lost faith

So why might have younger people become more concerned about inequality, yet at the same time less supportive of more spending? The answer may well lie in the distinctive economic position in which those in today’s youngest generation find themselves.

The ageing of Britain’s population means that a larger proportion of government spending goes on health and social care from which older people primarily benefit. Meanwhile, while older people are in receipt of relatively generous pensions that have been protected by the triple lock, younger people who have been to university find themselves in effect paying a higher level of “income tax” in order to pay off their student loans.

Meanwhile, although the pandemic posed a greater threat to the health of older people, it was younger people who were more likely to find their educational and economic lives disrupted, and to have found themselves having to endure lockdown in lower quality accommodation. At the same time, home ownership has become more difficult, not least because so many are spending a significant proportion of their income on rent.

There is, then, good reason why younger people have become more concerned about inequality but seem at the same time to doubt that increased taxation and spending would help them.

The challenge to the parties at the forthcoming election could well be to convince these voters that the next government will offer them a brighter future, rather than add to their woes. But to do that they may well need to be willing to think outside the traditional mindsets associated with the terms “left” and the “right”.’

John Curtice, Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Social Research, and Professor of Politics, University of Strathclyde

For related blogs and articles on Ageing Democracy, Conservative, Demography, Government Budgets, Media, Pensions, Political Strategy, Populist Politics and Younger Generations click through:

Collective Narcissism, Ageing Electorates, Pensioner Populism, White Nativism and Autocracy

Narcissistic Political Leaders – NPD Narcissistic Personality Disorder – Collective Narcissism – Cognitive Dissonance – Conspiracy Theories – Populism

Nationalist Conservative Political Parties in the Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Ideology and Populism for Votes

Ageing Democracy, Nativism and Populism

Growth of Conservative Hard Right Wing or Nativist Authoritarian Regimes

Trump January 6 Insurrection, Conspiracy and Project 25 for Autocracy

Thom Hartmann in Alternet has written a prescient article, ‘What if Trump’s conspiracy was way bigger than we know?’ that both infers from the noise around Trump and also asks, is there something deeper occurring around the GOP, US and transnational politics?

Interesting overview and thesis, withstanding Hartmann has not included related machinations in the Anglosphere, especially U.K., Australia, Russia, Central Eastern Europe and Hungary whether Brexit or Russian influence.

Linked to the latter has been Tufton St. London, US #KochNetwork influence on Brexit, due to antipathy towards EU regulation on environment, fossil fuels, financial transparency and taxes, not to forget open society, liberal democracy and empowered citizens; shared by the Kremlin and right wing Murdoch media.

Then, as disturbing, but maybe not unrelated, is another push from Koch’s Heritage Foundation for GOP permanence in Project 2025 – Koch Heritage Foundation Plan – Trump GOP – Permanent Republican Government.

‘Opinion | What if Trump’s conspiracy was way bigger than we know?

Thom Hartmann 11 Sep ‘23

There was, it increasingly appears, a conspiracy involving some in the most senior levels of the Trump administration to end American representative democracy and replace it with a strongman oligarchy along the lines of Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary.

This would be followed, after the January 20th swearing-in of Trump for a second term, by a complete realignment of US foreign policy away from NATO and the EU and toward oligarchic, autocratic nations like Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary.

So, what did Trump do, and why did he do it? And who helped him and why?

There’s little dispute that on January 6th, 2021, an armed mob incited by Donald Trump and led by members of several white supremacist militias tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 7-million-vote victory in the November 2020 Election.

Evidence is growing, however, that the leadership of this conspiracy to end our form of government and replace it with a Putin-style strongman oligarchy wasn’t limited to Trump, Stone, Giuliani, and a few dozen militia members.

If Trump was truly planning not just to hang onto the presidency but to concurrently seize every lever of power in Washington — the way coups conducted from “inside of government” (like Putin and Orbán did) typically happen — he’d need some help, particularly from the military and the senior levels of federal law enforcement. So let’s start there.

Over at the Department of Defense then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel (formerly of Devin Nunes’ staff) were running the place.

They controlled the Pentagon and our armed forces but, more importantly, they controlled the National Guard, whose troops had previously surrounded buildings in the Capitol area three-deep during the peaceful BLM protests in the summer of 2020.

Commander-in-Chief Trump (on whose behalf he acted), then issued a memo (attached at the end of this article) on January 4th specifically directing McCarthy and the National Guard that they were:

• Not authorized to be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.
• Not to interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others.
• Not to employ any riot control agents.
• Not to share equipment with law enforcement agencies.
• Not authorized to use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities in assistance to Capitol Police.
• Not allowed to employ helicopters or any other air assets.
• Not to conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.
• Not authorized to seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.

Then-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations General Charles Flynn, the brother of convicted/pardoned foreign agent General Michael Flynn (who had been pushing Trump to declare martial law and seize voting machines nationwide) was on the call; both the Pentagon and the Army, it has been reported, lied to the press, Congress, and, apparently, to the Biden administration about his presence on that call for almost a year.

It wasn’t until December that it was widely reported that the National Security Council’s Colonel Earl Matthews (who was also on the call) wrote a memo calling both Charles Flynn and Lt. Gen Walter Piatt, the Director of Army Staff, “absolute and unmitigated liars” for their testimony to Congress in which they both denied they’d argued to withhold the National Guard on January 6th.

If they were involved in a plan to help Trump take over and run the government — as usually happens when coups involve senior levels of the military — it’s going to take a lot of digging to find out, since this coverup of their activities and conversations on January 6th was apparently in place for almost a full year before it was discovered.

This was at the same time that Trump was maintaining possession of documents for which foreign governments would be willing to spend billions. In fact, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and others have spent billions of dollars on acquiring secrets and documents of that sort, via their annual intelligence Budgets.

Trump would also have needed the support of several foreign governments if he was planning to end American democracy and re-align our nation with oligarchies run along the lines he and Putin were possibly envisioning. Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia would logically be at the top of that list because of their military, oil, and financial power, followed by Turkey, Hungary, and Egypt because of their strategic locations.

A couple of events from last year might highlight the echoes of those plans to end American democracy and re-align our government with Russia/China/Saudi Arabia. If Trump was coordinating with foreign governments, suddenly a lot of seemingly disparate and inchoate events make sense.

Trump and Kushner already had a history of illegally sharing Top Secret “human intelligence” information with Saudi dictator Mohammed Bin Salman dating back to when MBS staged his own coup/takeover of the Saudi Government.

As The Jerusalem Post reported on March 23, 2018: “Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.

“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner read avidly….

“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to Mohammed.” The day before, CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating that Kushner was “in his pocket.”

The Washington Post noted that:

“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing “… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls.

“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”

Meanwhile, throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Russia’s President Putin (over 20 have been identified, including one just days before the 2020 election). 

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump Campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, who previously worked on behalf of Vladimir Putin, has recently admitted that he was regularly feeding inside campaign information to Russian intelligence. There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history.

There are, after all,credible assertions that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, explicitly celebrating a victory they truly believed they helped make happen.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador, resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” (relocate, change identity of) that spy. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime US spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

On July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The White House told Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Within a year, The New York Times ran a story with the headline:

“Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by Donald Trump himself.

As early as 2018, for example, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a private note from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown.

Senator Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s side with regard to the 2020 election and, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago this month, responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act. 

About six months after the Saudis gave Kushner that second batch of billions, we learned that for several months “dozens” of American spies and agents had been “captured or killed” around the world. AsThe Washington Post reported on October 5, 2021:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.”

Is it possible that all these different data points are part of one whole?

That Trump had a plan, worked out with Putin, MBS, a few dozen high administration officials, and a large handful of Republicans in the House and Senate, to overthrow our government and establish an oligarchic system like what is currently in place in Russia and that Fox “News”showcased in Hungary?

That once that overthrow was completed under the gimmick of six Republican-controlled states “discovering voter fraud” and changing their Electoral College votes, the plan was that Trump and his GOP allies (including the 11 Republican senators who, this May,voted against aid to Ukraine) would quickly move to re-align America away from NATO/EU and toward Russia/Saudi Arabia?

• And that the deaths of our spies, the Saudi-driven explosion in oil prices when Biden came into office, Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine, and even Xi’s cranking up his aggression against Taiwan were all just the echoes of Trump’s failed plan?

• Was there a high-level conspiracy in the Trump administration, done in concert with one or more foreign countries, to end democracy in America?

• Did they intend to seize control of our government on January 6 and never let Go?

• Was their next plan to realign us with autocratic nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary?

Given how effectively it appears much of the evidence including emails, phone calls, and text messages (that could exonerate as well as convict) has been destroyed, much of that destruction apparently done by Trump himself while in office (toilets, papers being burned, etc.) and, more recently, by Trump appointees still in our government, we may never know.

For other related blog and articles on EU European Union, Media, Koch Network, Political Strategy, Populist Politics and Russia click through:

Russia and Anglosphere – Conservatives and Oligarchs – War vs EU and Future

Conservative Christian CNP – Council for National Policy in US – Influence in UK, Russia and Europe

Russia Report – Anglo Conservatives Compromised by Russian Interference on EU and Brexit

Assange – Useful Idiot or Willing Dupe of the US Right and Putin’s Russia?

Russian Brexit Coup by Putin and Compromised British Conservatives

Strange Conservative Political Links – The Anglosphere, Hungary and Russia

Project 2025 – Koch Heritage Foundation Plan – Trump GOP – Permanent Republican Government

The Koch or Atlas Network flagship Heritage Foundation is prepared for any GOP or Trump Presidential victory in 2024 claiming, in an Orwellian and Kafkaesque sense, that ‘leftists’ have taken over institutions, courts, education and public institutions, requiring aggressive action by ‘conservative’ groups including Christians and the GOP or Republican Party to oppose and then implement permanent solutions. 

No doubt it will be also justified under the guise of ‘freedom and liberty’ like Brexit, supporting Russia over Ukraine (& conversely critical of NATO support for Ukraine), involved in related events in Hungary, demanding rights for ‘Christians’, highlighting the anti-semitic ‘great replacement’ and stacking the Supreme Court with conservative justices, to in turn legislate and enforce 19th century social outlooks, often informed by eugenics .

‘Project 2025

31 January 2023

Spencer Chretien – Associate Director, 2025 Presidential Transition Project at the Heritage Foundation

KEY TAKEAWAYS

It’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.

The policy book Mandate for Leadership represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success.

The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. 

Will we be ready for them?

With the Biden administration half over and with the immediate dangers inherent to one-party rule in Washington behind us for now, it’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right. For decades, as the left has continued its march through America’s institutions, conservatives have been outgunned and outmatched when it comes to the art of government.

One reason is because the Republican establishment never moved on from the 1980s. Beltway conservatives still prioritize supply-side economics and a bellicose foreign policy above all else. Belief in small government, strangely enough, has manifested itself in a belief among some conservatives that we should lead by example and not fill all political appointments. Belief in the primacy of the national security state has caused conservative administrations to defer political decisions to the generals and the intelligence community.

The result has been decades of disappointment.

Fortunately, this situation is changing. The conservative movement increasingly knows what time it is in America. More and more of our politicians are willing to use the government to achieve our vision, because the neutrality of “keeping the government out of it” will lose every time to the left’s vast power. The calls for a “new Church Committee” represent a momentous shift in energy; while conservatives used to lament liberal Sen. Frank Church’s original project as a kooky leftist attack against “The Brave Men And Women of Our Intelligence Community,” we’re now the ones agitating for Congress to go after the three-letter agencies.

This new vigor of the right can be found at Project 2025. Organized by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 has brought together 45 (and counting) right-of-center organizations that are ready to get into the business of restoring this country through the combination of the right policies and well-trained people. The Project’s foundation is built on four interconnected pillars.

>>> Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project

The first pillar, the upcoming production of the policy book Mandate for Leadership, represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success at each federal agency during the next administration. Presidential candidates won’t be able to ignore what the conservative movement demands in this book.

The second is our online personnel database. This “Conservative LinkedIn” will launch in March and will provide an opportunity for rock-solid conservatives to place themselves in contention for roles in the next administration. This pillar will bring Mr. (and Mrs.) Smith to Washington.

The third is our Presidential Administration Academy. When conservatives do finally make it into an administration, they often don’t know what to do or how to seize the gears of power effectively. Through their action, inaction, and their encyclopedic knowledge of volumes of technicalities about the federal workforce, certain career federal employees are masterful in tripping us up. Our interactive, on-demand training sessions will change that. They will turn future conservative political appointees into experts in governmental effectiveness.

The fourth and final pillar of Project 2025 is our Playbook, which will take the policy ideas expressed in Mandate for Leadership and transform them into an implementation plan for each agency to advocate to the incoming administration. What regulations and executive orders must be signed on Day One? Where are the greatest needs for more political appointees? How can we effectively use the mechanisms of government to face our most challenging problems? Our Playbook will put our movement to work answering questions like these.

In November 2016, American conservatives stood on the verge of greatness. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a triumph that offered the best chance to reverse the left’s incessant march of progress for its own sake. Many of the best accomplishments, though, happened only in the last year of the Trump administration, after our political appointees had finally figured out the policies and process of different agencies, and after the right personnel were finally in place.

The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. Will we be ready for them? That’s where Project 2025 comes in. We have two years, and one chance, to get this right.

This piece originally appeared in The American Conservative’

For more related blogs and articles on Ageing Democracy, Conservative, Demography, Eugenics, Koch Network, Libertarian Economics, Political Strategy & Radical Right Libertarians,  click through:

Anglosphere Oligarchs – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

Rishi Sunak and US Radical Right Libertarians in UK – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

BBC: 55 Tufton Street London – Libertarian Think Tanks – Koch Network

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

Confected Attacks on Freedom of Speech on University Campuses

IQ, Bell Curve, Charles Murray, Libertarian Economics and Eugenics – Extremist Trajectory

Anglosphere Nativist Libertarian Social Economic Policies or Return of Eugenics?

James Buchanan – Economist – Koch Influencer – Radical Right Libertarian – Anglo Conservatives

AC Grayling on the Need for more Educated and Informed Citizens

When people question seemingly uninformed voter choices, they are averting their gaze from politicians of the right, right wing media and related who are desperate to keep or put right wing parties in power, by attacking the centre and sensible legislation, why or how?

Not understood that across the Anglosphere and Europe mostly ageing voters dominating, with politicians, media and influencers, who are less educated and less diverse than younger generations, backed up by ‘collective narcissism’ and ‘pensioner populism’; see Brexit, Trump, Meloni, Orban et al.

However, in the ByLine Times article excerpts below from AC Grayling, his explanation of how we arrived here cites education as the issue; though this ignores amongst older dominant voters who are informed by activist right wing legacy media, influencers and including US fossil fueled think tanks versus younger who are outnumbered; not education now but the past?

Further, there are attempts through influence and lobbying to dilute education standards from the same fossil fueled Koch Network think tanks, in support of far right policies now adopted by ‘conservatives’ including more Christianity or religion in schools vs. attacks on supposed ‘woke’ or LGBT friendly policies.

However, this masks concerted efforts in the Anglosphere replicating education curricula from less developed authoritarian states including teaching, curriculum syllabi and content e.g. more religion &/or nationalism, less analysis, less maths/science and basically avoiding the hidden curriculum i.e. developing essential soft skills a la Bloom’s Taxonomy and well rounded citizens.

There is a collective need to avoid attempts getting at young people in preparation for when demographics balance out, neutering the dominance of less educated but more active above median age voters, especially in regions.

From ByLine Times:

‘Who or What to Blame? Education, Education, Education’

Too many voters are insufficiently informed and reflective to vote other than tribally or self-interestedly in exploitable ways due to failings in how we conceive of ‘education’, writes 

AC Grayling  2 August 2023

Let us ask why so much influence has been exerted by a dishonest and ultra-partisan media owned by non-dom billionaires with a vested interest in destabilising the country so that their preferred version of anarcho-capitalism can flourish. And let us ask why social media has found the British population such a plastic, malleable, easy playground for its bubble-creating, conspiracy-promoting, false-fact-spreading downside.

And then let us reflect on the answer: because well-informed and reflective people would not be so easily duped by either a dishonest press or unreliable and distorting social media, it must be that enough of the British population is insufficiently well-informed and insufficiently reflective – more bluntly: ignorant enough and unthinking enough – to be ripe for serving as their dupes.

How has this happened?

The Need for Active Enquirers

The fact remains that, in 2019, 43% of those who voted chose Conservatives, and enough Uxbridge voters – blaming a Labour London Mayor for Tory policies on the environment – voted Tory in a seat formerly held by Johnson. What explains them? Indeed, even supposing half of these were principled, loyal, Conservatives who had thought hard about the Government of the past 13 years and somehow liked what it saw – what explains how they could?

From among a plethora of answers let us focus on one very central one: the failure of our education system to achieve a good standard of active intelligence in enough of the population.

By ‘active intelligence’, I mean the useful general knowledge and the constructive scepticism that prompts people to test claims and promises made by those who want their money or their votes.

The price we pay is careless voters exploitable by a system and its career politician operatives into putting someone as grossly unfit as a Boris Johnson into Downing Street – to say nothing of the inadequacy of the compeers such an individual surrounds himself with.

To educate – not merely to train in enough basics of literacy and numeracy to qualify as a squaddy in the economic infantry – classes need to consist of fewer than 10 pupils, so that teachers have time to work with the individual grain of each pupil’s mind and personality.

Pupils should be active enquirers, not just passive learners sitting behind desks in a classroom: that means getting out and about, doing, travelling, finding out, making.

The value of musical education and art on general cognitive development, enhancing its capacities for success in maths and applied sciences, has been all but lost in the English education system.

Historical and geographical ignorance, and wholly inadequate levels of competence in a second and third language – plus frequent and active travelling in the countries where they are spoken – make for narrow, parochial, limited mindsets. 

I defy anyone to claim that the level of achievement represented by GCSE today is comparable to that of the ‘O’ levels of yore – and even the ‘O’ levels of yore did not pass the test of what is necessary for the informed and thoughtful populace that is the minimum requirement for any version of democracy.

Democracies are being made to fail all round the world today because increasingly larger portions of already significant percentages of populations are too easily taken for a ride by the political and politically-motivated agencies which benefit from their incapacity.

This problem with education means that efforts to explain why some claim or promise does not stack up simply go over the heads of enough people to make it possible for those who claim or promise to get away with it. This happens all the time.

As we know too well, serious newspapers and current affairs programmes get little traction because they speak to tiny minorities only, while tabloid media cleave to the parochial interests and prejudices of their consumers because that is what makes money – with little if any concern to inform or engage beyond the usual sodden fare of celebrity gossip and whatever is the hysteria of the moment.

The landscape of our democracy is accordingly a dismal one indeed. Its poverty and barrenness have been cruelly exposed by Brexit – arguably inconceivable in a better-educated nation (look at Scotland) – and its emblems will forever be Johnson and the gang of coarsely unsuitable appointments he has made over the past three years. 

Too many voters are insufficiently informed and reflective to vote other than tribally or self-interestedly in exploitable ways, and a large part of the reason for this is that our education system is too poorly funded to achieve in enough cases the kind of intellects that would be more resistant to such exploitation.

I argue that the systemic failure of our political order, for which this insufficiency of education is responsible, led to Brexit: and that Brexit is the ultimate condemnation of both.’

AC Grayling is a philosopher, Master of the New College of the Humanities, and Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College at Oxford University

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