Gene Strandberg, Gilpin County. Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, Ed Feulner and Joseph Coors. Heritage and ALEC are the cornerstones for the corporate takeover as preached in the Powell Memorandum.

Just as Reagan took office in January 1981, Heritage published Mandate for Leadership, and the Heritage Foundation has basically determined policy, judicial appointments and key administration appointments for every Republican U.S. President since.

Mandate for Leadership contained 2000 proposals to move the federal government farther right. By the end of his first year, Reagan had enacted 1200 of those ideas. Heritage called for a new ballistic missile defense system, so Reagan introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative. 

For a moment after George H.W. Bush was elected President, it looked as though Republicans might do something for society. Jack Kemp, who called himself a ‘bleeding-heart conservative’, was Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He tried a free market solution to fight poverty by developing incentives for businesses to invest in inner cities. He also devised a plan to encourage and help public housing tenants to buy their own apartments.

Already demonstrating a most disturbing influence over policy, Heritage co-founder Edwin Feulner said that wasn’t going to happen. “We [conservatives] just don’t believe in being compassionate with other people’s money.” 

H.W. Bush fell in line. Mandate for Leadership III contained ten reforms. Bush included six of them in his 1990 budget. Heritage lobbied for Operation Desert Storm and H.W. Bush obeyed. 

In the 1990s Heritage called for the right-wing to “Strangle the environmental movement. It’s the single greatest threat to the American economy.”

Heritage lobbied for the Iraq war and W. Bush obeyed.

Heritage scaled back its criticism of Malaysia, after Ed Feulner entered a business relationship with its Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad.

Heritage was paying Premiere Networks, the company that syndicated Rush Limbaugh’s show, about $2 million/year to promote its position on the air.

Heritage has long been a leader in climate change denial. In March 2009 it was a sponsor of a climate change conference, which had received over $47 million in funding from energy corporations and right-wing foundations. 

In May 2009 Heritage held a panel discussion titled “Busting the Myth of Green Jobs”. It was later revealed that the entire panel, Dr. Gabriel Calzada, Robert Murphy, William Bogart and Host Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation, had all accepted substantial funding from ExxonMobil.

In 2010 Heritage co-sponsored another climate change conference, funded at over $40 million by Koch foundations, Scaife Family Foundations and ExxonMobil.

In October 2010 Heritage posted a story that the Royal Society had ‘significantly softened its position on global warming’. The author, Heritage ‘expert’ and research fellow Nicholas Loris (formerly with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation), had selectively edited 48 paragraphs of text to give a misleading conclusion. 

Despite his dishonesty, Loris must be their kind of guy, since he wrote a series of Heritage propaganda papers.      

  In a 2011 report to reject climate change regulations Loris wrote, “Congress should vote to prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse-gas emissions…” Citing Richard Lindzen, Loris said, “…there has been plenty of dissent among the scientific community on the causes and magnitude of climate change.”

In 2012 Loris produced the Heritage report ‘Hydraulic Fracturing: Critical for Energy Production, Jobs and Economic Growth’. 

In 2015 Loris published ‘The Many Problems of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and Climate Regulations: A Primer’. In this one Loris claims, “Higher energy bills for families, individuals and businesses will destroy jobs and strain economic growth – and it will all be for naught.”

In 2016 Heritage research fellow Steven Groves testified before a House committee that Congress should block funding for the Paris Climate Agreement. Loris also claimed to have modeled Obama’s plans to combat climate change and said it has ‘essentially zero environmental benefits’. 

Also in 2016 Heritage was named in a Massachusetts subpoena looking for communications between ExxonMobil and climate change denier organizations.

A Wyoming Bureau of Land Management rule to establish federal water, chemical disclosure and construction requirements for fracking operations on federal and Indian lands was defeated. Heritage policy analyst Katie Tubb called the defeat ‘A win for good environmental policy’.

In July 2016 the U.S. Senate introduced the Web of Denial Resolution which confronted the climate change denier groups that accepted fossil fuel industry money.

Heritage was one of twenty-two organizations that responded with an open letter calling the Senate action “an affront to free speech.” The letter also read, “We hear you. Your threat is clear. There is a heavy and inconvenient cost to disagreeing with you. Calls for debate will be met with political retribution. That’s called tyranny. And we reject it.” They ranted but had no valid denials to the charges of collusion. With the exception of one organization, they had received a total of $92 million of fossil fuel money in twenty years.

 In May 2017 Heritage Foundation signed an open letter to Trump from 40 right-wing organizations, asking him to “withdraw fully from the Paris Climate Treaty and to stop all taxpayer funding of UN global warming programs.” Trump promptly obeyed.

The Heritage Foundation produced a report for Congressional Republicans to quote, claiming it would “add thousands of dollars to Americans’ energy bills and lead to devastating unemployment.”

(Originally published in the January 9, 2020, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)