Conservative groups write 'game plan' for U.S. government takeover - Public News Service

Conservative groups write game plan for U S government takeover / Public News Service

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Conservative groups write 'game plan' for U.S. government takeover
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If a Republican wins the White House in the future, the Heritage Foundation has a plan to overhaul such federal agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to operate under conservative regulation. (Tada Images/Adobe Stock)

Despite concern over the influence of foreign money on statewide elections, Montana has just increased its campaign contribution limits for PACs and individuals to $1,120 from $1,000. (Adobe Stock)

The U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision held that the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations. (Adobe Stock)

Seattle is the largest city in the U.S. to ban political contributions from foreign-influenced companies. (JHVEPhoto/Adobe Stock)
By Carrie Baker for Ms. Magazine. Broadcast version by Mark Richardson reporting for the Ms. Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration

Wealthy right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation has published a detailed plan for the next Republican president to use the executive branch of the federal government to attack the rights of women, LGBTQ people and the BIPOC community, by eliminating the agencies and offices responsible for enforcing civil rights laws and placing trained right-wing ideologues in staff positions throughout the federal government.

Called the 2025 Presidential Transition Project—or “Project 2025,” for short—the plan has “four pillars”:
a 180-day playbook, which is what they hope to achieve in the first 180 days if Trump takes office in January 2025.

To develop this plan, the Heritage Foundation organized a broad coalition of over 90 conservative organizations—a who’s-who of groups that have led attacks on reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, gender studies, the Equal Rights Amendment and #MeToo initiatives.

The Heritage Foundation claimed over 400 “scholars and policy experts” participated in writing the policy agenda, titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”

Their main target: what they call “the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.’”

Throughout “The Conservative Promise,” they rail against “woke progressivism,” “woke culture warriors,” “woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon,” “woke extremism,” “woke propaganda,” the “woke agenda,” “wokeism,” the “woke-dominated system of public schools and universities,” “woke revolutionaries,” the “radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction,” the “woke policies in corporate America” and the “woke gender ideology.” They describe the Department of Education as a “convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.”

They have particular vitriol for colleges and universities, which they describe as an “establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel.”

The authors invoke their first Mandate for Leadership book series, written in 1979, which guided the Reagan presidency: “In 1979, the threats we faced were the Soviet Union, the socialism of 1970s liberals, and the predatory deviancy of cultural elites. Reagan defeated these beasts by ignoring their tentacles and striking instead at their hearts.”

Like their current leader, Donald Trump, they dehumanize Democrats by likening them to animals.

The plan has four goals:
Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

The contradictions are glaring:

The authors of “The Conservative Promise” claim to support equality, while advocating for dismantling the government agencies that enforce laws ensuring equality, such as Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.

They claim to support freedom and liberty, while advocating for a total ban on abortion, rolling back the rights of LGBTQ people and closing the border.

They claim to support free speech, while advocating for banning any mention of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” from schools and other societal institutions.

They claim to support the working class, while calling for tax cuts for the rich, elimination of labor protections and deregulation of big business and the oil industry.

Throughout “The Conservative Promise,” the authors condemn “ruling elites,” which they refer to as “Washington elites,” “establishment elites,” “Marxist elites,” “socialist elites,” “Hollywood elites,” “entrenched elites,” “globalist elites,” “pro-open border elites” and” cultural elites.”

They explain:

“Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist European head of state, than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas. Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people. But under our Constitution, they are the mere equals of the workers who shower after work instead of before.” — p. 10 They assume the worst of intentions of people they brand elites, whom they charge with “making decisions for us” and working to “serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second.” They describe the “elites” as power-hungry socialists: “For socialists, who are almost always well-to-do, socialism is not a means of equalizing outcomes, but a means of accumulating power. They never get around to helping anyone else” (p. 15).

The irony is that the Heritage Foundation and many of the organizations in their coalition are led and funded by billionaire capitalists, most of whom don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes or be limited by labor laws or environmental regulations designed to protect the public from economic abuse, pollution and climate change. The conservatives criticizing the elites are themselves elites.

They argue that “the Left” opposes equality and liberty established in the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: “It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good—that the ruling class disdains” (p. 14).

Yet this “inalienable right to self-direction” does not appear to extend to pregnant women or LGBTQ people.

They even invoke women’s rights to call for the destruction of women’s rights: “Left to our own devices the American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women,mercantilism, socialism, Wilsonian globalism, Fascism, Communism, and (today) wokeism” (p. 14).

They charge the left with trying to control other people’s lives, while they themselves are the ones who propose and champion state-level and federal bans on abortion and gender-affirming care: “The Left does not believe that all men are created equal—they think they are special. They certainly don’t think all people have an unalienable right to pursue the good life. They think only they themselves have such a right along with a moral responsibility to make decisions for everyone else. They don’t think any citizen, state, business, church, or charity should be allowed any freedom until they first bend the knee” (p. 16).

Yet they want to use the force of law to impose their religious beliefs on others by determining intimate bodily decisions for pregnant women and LGBTQ people. Lawmakers that identify with the political left supports laws to empower individuals to make their own decisions about their bodies and lives, whereas the political right is passing laws limiting people’s ability to make these choices.

They explain what they believe freedom means in the Constitution: “An individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like” (p. 14). Thanksgiving dinners? What we ought? His Creator?

On immigration reform, they say, “The only direct impact of open borders on pro-open borders elites is that the constant flow of illegal immigration suppresses the wages of their housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys” (p. 11).

On “billionaire climate activists,” they say their concern for the environment “is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue” (p. 11).

Climate-changing oil and gas is not the problem; it’s the solution, they say: “America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth” (p. 13).

They condemn socialism and push free market capitalism, private property and deregulation in the name of liberty:
“In socialist nation after socialist nation, the only way the government could keep its disgruntled people in line was to surveil and terrorize them. By contrast, in countries with a high degree of economic freedom, elites are not in charge because everyone is in charge. People work, build, invest, save, and create according to their own interests and in service to the common good of their fellow citizens.” — p. 15

Despite a longstanding American tradition that career employees of the federal government are not political appointees, “The Conservative Promise” calls for removing any federal government employee who disagrees with their beliefs and replacing them with conservative ideologues. They boast about “how to fire supposedly ‘un-fireable’ federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of Government” (p. 9).

They promise the total destruction of the federal government: “The solution to all of the above problems is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. These are problems not of technocratic efficiency but of national sovereignty and constitutional governance. We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch” (p. 12).

Some of the specific action items include:
Department of Education: Eliminate the Department of Education, which enforces civil rights law, including Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education; Revert to the Trump administration’s Title IX sexual harassment and assault standards, which placed burdensome restrictions on the ability of survivors to report assault and obtain justice; Reverse the Biden administration’s definition of sex under Title IX to include sexual orientation and gender identity, and redefine sex to mean biological sex assigned at birth Increase public funding of religious education through expansion of “school choice” policies and give federal funds to states as block grants with no strings attached. Department of Health and Human Services: On abortion— Under threat of funding loss, require “liberal states” to report to the CDC, “accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths”; Require treatment of “fetuses born alive” after abortion; Withdraw Medicaid funds for states that require abortion insurance or that discriminate in violation of the Weldon Amendment, which declares that no HHS funding may go to a state or local government that discriminates against pro-life health entities or insurers; Audit states for Hyde amendment compliance; Require the CDC to track “abortion across vari­ous demographic indicators to assess whether certain populations are targeted by abortion providers” (based on false allegations of eugenic motivations); Reverse Biden administration support for travel to get abortion health care; Prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds and allow states to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans; Reverse FDA approval of mifepristone or at least go back to the pre-2016 limitation and prohibit the mailing of abortion pills; Prohibit stem cell research and stop “the development and testing of the COVID-19 vaccines with aborted fetal cell lines”; Affirm “rights of conscience” to deny medical care; Declare that abortion and euthanasia are not health care; Reverse Biden interpretation of The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) that requires treatment of women miscarrying. On gender-affirming care— Block gender-affirming health care End Centers for Disease Controls’s collection of data on gender identity; Block National Institute of Health research on gender identity and transgender health care and instead fund studies into the “short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions”; Reverse Biden administration’s redefinition of “sex” to include gender identity, sexual orientation and pregnancy status. Other— Add work requirements to receive Medicaid; Condemn single-motherhood and same-sex marriage; “HHS should prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, health, and welfare policies.” Administration for Children and Families: Use TANF (welfare) money to promote “Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy”; Child support in the United States should strengthen marriage as the norm, restore broken homes, and encourage unmarried couples to commit to marriage.

Led and funded by multi-billionaires, such as oil moguls Charles and David Koch, conservatives have fought for years to cut taxes, deregulate business, ban abortion, eliminate civil rights protections as well as public health and environmental regulations, privatize government institutions such as public schools and prisons and eliminate welfare programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food assistance.

In 2017, Donald Trump enacted many of these policies, which were later reversed by the Biden administration.

With careful planning, conservatives today are working to make their policy priorities permanent, no matter what happens in future elections.

Montana is one of a half-dozen states where the spending was most prevalent.

OpenSecrets - which follows money in American politics - focused on companies owned at least 1% by a single foreign investor, or at least 5% by a group of foreign investors who are donating to statewide elections.

OpenSecret's editorial investigations manager Anna Massoglia said voters could easily assume that companies active in Montana campaigns are totally owned by U.S. investors, but that is often not the case.

"For Montana," said Massoglia, "companies - like Altria Group, Barrett Gold Corp., Centaur Resources, Reynolds American - companies that we don't necessarily think of as being 'foreign' but are, indeed, foreign influenced."

The report shows six states - Montana, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New York and Washington - received $163 million in foreign funding between 2018 and 2022.

Washington topped the list, at $67 million.

Massoglia argued the increase in foreign money in state elections is the result of the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which loosened the rules for corporate and union campaign donations - and in the process, crippled state campaign finance laws.

"One of the issues that some activists have raised about foreign-influence companies participating in elections," said Massoglia, "is the fact that they may be beholden to foreign owners or foreign investors, who do not necessarily have American interests at heart."

As of this year, individuals and Political Action Committees can donate $11,020 to a governor and lieutenant governor candidate, $790 to a candidate for statewide office, and $450 to a candidate for other public offices.
Support for this reporting was provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Despite federal laws that prohibit campaign contributions by people who are not United States citizens, foreign-influenced corporations and their subsidiaries have found ways to pour millions of dollars into political campaigns, according to a new OpenSecrets report.

Anna Massoglia, editorial and investigations manager and report co-author with Open Secrets, said that's a problem because foreign owners do not necessarily share the nation's best interests.

"It really underscores the need for transparency to address the challenges posed by these companies that are at least in part foreign owned, and more need for examination of the influence that they wield, as well as who's pulling the strings behind the scenes," she explained.

Researchers studied state-level campaign donations made by more than 800 companies with at least 5% foreign ownership, or an individual foreign owner over 1%, between 2018 and 2022. The fossil-fuel sector was the largest campaign contributor in Colorado, with Noble Energy on top at $7.5 million.

Including Colorado, researchers found that foreign-influenced corporations contributed more than $163 million to political campaigns in Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New York and Washington.

"Some states attracted much more money from foreign-influenced companies going into political contributions than others," Mossoglia continued. "Washington was the top state; Colorado came in second with more than $44 million. And so, we're seeing huge money pouring into very specific states."

Before 2010, corporations were prohibited from contributing to independent expenditures - such as super PACS - campaigning for or against candidates. But Massoglia said that all changed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporate money deserved the same protections as speech in its Citizens United ruling.

"It ended up invalidating a number of state laws, leaving it up to them to regulate spending by corporations and giving by corporations. It opened the door for foreign-influenced companies to be able to pour money into state elections," she explained.

Washington state took in more than $67 million in contributions during that time. Anna Massoglia is the editorial and investigations manager for OpenSecrets.

"It really underscores the need for transparency to address the challenges posed by these companies," said Massoglia, "that are at least in part foreign owned and more need for the examination of the influence that they yield, as well as who's pulling the strings behind the scenes."

The energy company Phillips 66, Coca-Cola and BP were some of biggest contributors to Washington state elections.

Massoglia said there has been some attempt to crack down on the impact of foreign money on U.S. elections.

"In Washington, the Seattle City Council passed a bill banning political spending on local elections from corporations that met the same threshold for foreign influence," said Massoglia, "that 5% aggregate foreign ownership or 1% individual ownership. But even with that we were still seeing substantial money going into Washington at the state level."

The other states analyzed in this report were Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana and New York. Across the six states, OpenSecrets found more than $163 million in contributions.

Support for this reporting was provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.