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.
He Formed The First Young Republicans Club In The Soviet Union, But Soured On America After Ukraine’s Orange Revolution
Russian emigrant Edward Lozansky became a Republican shortly after arriving in America with an improbable story that led to Capital Hill and a 40-year career which has evolved into him becoming the dean of the Putin apologist propagandists in Washington, D.C.
The anti-communist crusader emigrated from Moscow to the United States via Rome in 1977 and since then quickly managed to ingratiate himself into the highest level of American politics and stay there for four decades.
Today, he’s sharing space in Moscow with Vladimir Putin’s top propagandist in Eastern Ukraine with his fake university.
Within months of arrival, his Soviet-themed Romeo and Juliet story of family separation became the lever through which he made friends in western New York’s Jewish community and how his story was quickly carried to the floor of the United States Congress by his Republican
The war in Ukraine is being decided on the battlefields in the south and east of the country.
But how it’s discussed in America helps shape those battlefields. Military aid from the West has helped Ukrainian forces turn the tide. Economic aid has allowed the Ukrainian economy to cling
One KSORS board member — and regular guest of Russian Center New York — was Edward Lozansky, whose career is even more intriguing than Branson’s.
Lozansky is a former Soviet physicist who fled to the United States but then spent much of his life cozying up to both the Kremlin and the political right in the U.S.
He published pro-Kremlin articles on platforms including RT. But that’s only a fraction of his work. He founded the club Russia House and the annual World Russia Forum event, both of which brought together Russian VIPs and U.S. political movers and shakers. In earlier years, it attracted many American lawmakers but its star faded as Russia ramped up militarism in the 2010s.
Lozansky would come to know many important conservatives. He knew conservative icon Paul Weyrich, who founded a huge number of powerful organizations, inc
The new religious right has turned against the old religious right.
Or, to put it another way, the focus of the movement is changing. I spent more than 20 years defending religious liberty in federal courts. Our objective was to defend liberty so that religious organizations enjoyed the liberty to do good, free from state discrimination.
Yet now the focus of Christian right isn’t on the defense of liberty; it’s on the accumulation of power. And it is using that power to impose its will, including by imposing its will on Christian organizations it has decided are woke or opposed to President Trump’s agenda.
Few things illustrate that reality more clearly than the Trump administration’s decision to unilaterally — and often unlawfully — defund Christian organizations, including evangelical organizations, that serve poor and marginalized people at home and abroad.
In the first three weeks of his administration, Trump issued a series of stop-work orders and funding freezes
Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School, is an “ideological lodestar” among conservatives who are impatient with originalism—the idea that the Constitution’s meaning can be determined by its text and the founders’ intent, according to a story by the New York Times.
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Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School, is an “ideological lodestar” among conservatives who are impatient with originalism—the idea that the Constitution’s meaning can be determined by its text and the founders’ intent, according to a story by the New York Times.
Vermeule, dubbed “the godfather of post-originalism” by the New York Times, argued in a March 2020 essay in the Atlantic that originalism has “outlived its utility.”
Vermeule instead embraced an approach that he called “common-good constitutionalism” that goes beyond originalism in incorporating conservative values. Common-good constitutionalism is based on the idea that government helps direct society generally “toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate,” he wrote.
**The main aim of common-good constitutionalism “is certainly not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power,” Vermeule wrote. Instead the aim is “
The Heritage Foundation Returns to Its Roots By Chelsea Ebin The Radical Mind author Chelsea Ebin writes about the Religious Right and Project 2025 for
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when I first sat down to read Project 2025, I was most struck not by the newness of the proposals but by their deep familiarity. Half a century after its founding, Heritage Foundation has gone back to its roots and to the vision of one of its key founders, the right-wing political activist Paul Weyrich. To understand Project 2025 and its implications for the United States, we need to understand what it was Weyrich sought to create and what he hoped to accomplish.
It is worth noting what Weyrich hoped to accomplish through Heritage. In an untitled memorandum from 1973, Weyrich mused:
*The social gospel tells us to change man’s environment and that will change the world. The real gospel tells us to reform man first, so that a reformed man can change the world. But the citizens of our Nation have few beacons of truth upon whom they can rely. Only the truth can make us free, and the truth must be based on the commandments and the moral law. So, even though we deal with “politics and
Inspired by Ronald Reagan and funded by the right's richest donors, a web of free-market think tanks has fueled the nationwide attack on workers' rights.
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Inspired by Ronald Reagan and funded by the right’s richest donors, a web of free-market think tanks has fueled the nationwide attack on workers’ rights.
Founded in 1992 by businessman and Reagan administration insider Thomas Roe—who also served on the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees for two decades—the group has grown to include 59 “freedom centers,” or affiliated think tanks, in all 50 states.
SPN’s board includes officials from Heritage and right-wing charities such as the Adolph Coors and Jacqueline Hume foundations. Likewise, its deep-pocketed donors include all the usual heavy-hitting conservative benefactors: the Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation, which funds the Cato Institute and Heritage; the Castle Rock Foundation, a charity started with money from the conservative Coors Foundation; and the Bradley Foundation, a $540 million charity devoted to funding conservative causes. SPN uses their contributions to dole out annual grants to member groups, ranging from a
Nelson seeks to document the connections between "the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives." Many of these connections, she writes, were made possible through the CNP, whose members have included such familiar names as Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, former White House strategist Steve Bannon, the Christian Coallition's first executive director Ralph Reed and NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre.
Nelson traces the group from its founding in 1981 "by a small group of archconservatives who realized that the tides of history had turned against them" — specifically, activist Morton Blackwell, commentator Paul Weyrich and direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie. (Other founding members included Phyllis Schlafly and Left Behind author Tim LaHaye.) The CNP's structure, Nelson writes, was similar to a group called the Council on Foreign Relations (of which Nelson herself is a member) — like that grou
Only the purest of the movement had gathered at Coronado: men like Oliver North, Pat Robertson, and Larry Pratt (whom the press had recently drummed into exile for his alleged ties to white supremacists). In the past, the group's clandestine revival meetings had spawned liberal warnings of a right-wing conspiracy.
But this morning, the council would plot against its own internal enemies: GOP apostates. And the chief conspirator was Paul Weyrich, the man who founded the Heritage Foundation, orchestrated the party's alliance with evangelical Christians, and, more than any other figure, organized the right inside the Beltway. "I will tell you that this is a bitter turn for me," Weyrich confessed. "I have spent thirty years of my life working in Washington, working on the premise that if we simply got our people into leadership that it would make a difference.... And yet we are getting the same policies from them that we got from their [Rockefeller] Republican predecessors." **It wa
Roe created the State Policy Network in 1992. to influence policy at the state level, allegedly after being urged to do so by Ronald Reagan. SPN currently has a network of think tanks in all 50 states.
The mayor of Moscow and dissidents from the old Soviet system last week raised the flag of the Russian Republic on a beaux-arts house at 1800 Connecticut Ave. And everyone cheered.
The ceremony marked the establishment of Russia House, a for-profit corporation for cooperation. The go-between for Russian and U.S. businesses is said to be the first of its kind, although others from Eastern Europe may follow to learn and earn with U.S. entrepreneurs. Moscow's nonprofit International University will also have its headquarters in the grand old building.
The corporation is also privately funded. Officers of its board are Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov; Paul Craig Roberts of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former treasury assistant secretary; and Dean Booth, an Atlanta lawyer. Businessman Robert Krieble, who donated fax machines, computers and copiers to dissidents in the Soviet Union when "they were illegal," Lozansky said, is one of the financial supporters.
A REPUBLICAN IN MOSCOW
By David S. Broder
December 3, 1989
A trip behind the Iron Curtain by an influential conservative leader may have significant impact on the restructuring of U.S.-Soviet relations that could emerge from the Bush-Gorbachev summit. Paul Weyrich, conservative activist and president of the Free Congress Foundation, went to Hungary, Estonia and the Soviet Union to teach dissidents techniques of political organizing -- remarkable enough in itself. What he learned from them may be even more important for American politics.
Though less well-known than some of the noisy self-promoters on the right, Weyrich swings as much weight through his personal standing and his organizational network as anyone from that part of the political spectrum. After Weyrich's testimony about John Tower's drinking habits helped sink Tower's nomination as secretary of defense, President Bush thought it prudent to send Weyrich a note saying that there were no hard feelings. That is clout.
More than 30 years before Project 2025, Weyrich openly suggested dismantling democracy and government institutions in response to the Iran Contra, because he believed it reflected a system that allowed for failed leadership and inexperienced cabinet advisors.
AS PROPONENTS of a strong foreign policy and defense, conservatives have a special responsibility. Our advocacy brings with it the burden of doing the job competently. We must be leaders in thinking deeply and carefully about America's role in the world, about relating goals to means and about our national strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities and constraints they impose. If we fail to do this, we lose our legitimacy as advocates.
In the Iran-contra mess, conservatives have failed. Obviously, they failed in the way the matter was handled. But the failure is really much more profound than that. The scandal is not a disease, but a symptom. It is a symptom of some underlying contradictions in our national strategy and