57. Money, Lies and Power- The History of the Heritage Foundation

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**Monte Mader** (1:58)
In 2024, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said, we are in the process of a second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. No violence, they insist, as long as you don't cross us or try to stop us. Just comply and everything will be just fine. If you do what I tell you, nobody gets hurt. It's abuser language, it's rapist language. It's not a plea for peace, it's a warning, that's a threat. This phrase comes from the Heritage Foundation, and it's been used in the foundation's desire to seize as much power as possible through donations, law, language, deceit and policy, all thinly veiled with conservativism and religion. And when there is resistance, when the floor falls out and people are subjugated by their narrow conservativism, the violence that ensues, the Heritage Foundation promises will solely be the fault of the left or the Democrats for not listening to the desperate whisper of, shh, don't scream, and I won't hurt you. That is the first move in this political movement to turn violence into a conditional clause and shift moral blame from those who are remaking the system onto those who refuse to be crushed by it. Within that framing, harm is not treated as a breakdown of order, it becomes the cost of restoring it. Recently I saw a tweet that said, well, we're going to have to do some things that make women sad to save the country. And what they meant by that was, well, we're just going to have to subjugate people a little bit, make them uncomfortable, force them to do what we want. Because force is being recast as response rather than domination. Think of how Pam Bondi sent an ultimatum to Minnesota. Give us the private voter data we have no right to, and we'll take out our ICE federal armed force. Protesters exercising rights guaranteed and protected by the Constitution are called agitators and domestic terrorists so that the ICE force is justified. Coercion cloaks itself in the language of self-defense. Beneath that phrase lies an older architecture, and this rests on the theology of authority that presents hierarchy as the natural divinely arranged and morally necessary order. It tells a story in which certain people stand closer to God, closer to truth, and closer to the levers of power. Everyone else occupies a lower rung, and it's your job to submit to the people that God has put in power over you. There writes, the people lower on this ladder are contingent, subject to trial, and revocable at will. But the power of the elite is not to be questioned. To make sense of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, and of this talk around revolutions and restoration, we have to see the architecture clearly. We have to understand the history of the Heritage Foundation. What is emerging is not new. It has been an updated operating system for an ancient conviction that authority should flow downward from on high. It should not be up to the people, the family. Remember us talking about them? Christian fundamentalists, Christian nationalists, the fall right, the moral majority. Movements throughout history have been working on this plan. But it's been in the United States specifically for over 100 years. It never changes. It just re-brands itself. It makes itself more palatable for the time. Democracy is only tolerable when it yields the right outcome for this particular group of people. Specifically, the right outcome for conservative men. Consent is negotiable. Hierarchy is not. So let's map out how this theology of inequality has traveled from the churches and religious institutions into our offices, our federal agencies and ultimately the White House. And how it has traveled into the bodies and lives of people that are least able to absorb the damage. Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation today on Flipping Tables.