How Project 2025 will Destroy Public Education and Multi-Racial Democracy

[Celerity]

The Heritage Foundation’s Racist Origins and What That History Tells Us

https://washingtonspectator.org/heritage-foundations-racist-history/

What will the prescriptions in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 mean for parents, public schools, and multiracial democracy? The law professor and social critic Kimberlé W. Crenshaw interviewed historian Nancy MacLean recently at a “Homeroom” webinar of the Freedom to Learn Coalition, which plans a nationwide series of events on May 3. The following slightly reformatted and expanded text is adapted from their exchange.

CRENSHAW: These wars on curricula are not new, of course; they go far back in our history. What folks might not know is that the Heritage Foundation, the main convenor of Project 2025, cut its teeth on curricular wars in the 1970s. Can you tell us about this formative history and what it reveals about the sort of organization Heritage and its 2025 partners are?

MacLEAN: The Heritage Foundation today is the 800-pound gorilla on the radical right. With an annual budget of over $100 million, and a huge, multistory office complex in Washington, D.C., it is one of the top agenda-setting organizations on the right, if not the dominant one, so it’s not surprising that it took the lead in creating Project 2025. What people need to know is that—unlike some other groups on the right—from its outset the Heritage Foundation blended the toxic cocktail that today’s right is gulping in large doses to achieve its goals: libertarian economics; Christian nationalism; and the weaponization of racism, gender anxiety, and parental fears about sex. Back in 1974, a year after its founding, Heritage had a staff of five people in a rented office above a garage. That’s when its co-founder, Paul Weyrich, sniffed a big opportunity in West Virginia—in a textbook fight brewing in Kanawha County, home of the state capitol in Charleston. As Weyrich said later: “The alliance between religion and politics didn’t just happen.”

Heritage worked hard to make it happen. Heritage’s then-tiny team inserted itself in a fight opened by Alice Moore, a school board member, and the wife of a fundamentalist minister. She didn’t like the new multicultural language arts textbooks the district was adopting that including some 300 titles she had not read but objected to. First, she complained about literature that had any dialogue, whether Appalachian or “ghetto,” that was not “correct” English. Then it was that the books were “filthy, disgusting trash”— also “unduly favoring blacks.” Then it was that The Autobiography of Malcolm X, an option for high school seniors, disrespected Christianity. As with today’s culture wars, this one had interested backers from the beginning. Moore was already in the orbit of the John Birch Society and received counsel from Mel and Norma Gabler, the Texas-based couple who were transforming textbook adoption in states like their own by claiming bias over what they viewed as offensive content, such as evolution rather than creationism. Moore soon traveled to address the Christian Crusade of Tulsa on the theme “Public Schools Undermine God’s Law.”

All the while, the fledgling Heritage Foundation provided training, publicity, and links to potential allies. The result? The most violent textbook battle in U.S. history to date. Over the ensuing months, parents of one-fourth of the students in the county had kept them home to boycott the schools, some set up private “Christian schools,” gunshots were fired, Moore’s allies physically attacked supporters of the new curriculum at a school board meeting, and arson and bombings caused several schools to close. Some local protesters cut right to the chase and denounced the new recommendations as “n—–r books.” (From the start, the NAACP saw the all-white campaign against the new books as racist). As Maya Angelou once wrote: When people show you who they are, believe them—the first time. Because what Heritage showed then is that it would bring gasoline to any fight that would help to build a bench of reactionary religious voters—a strategy which was still in its earliest stages of development. And they would not blink at violence if it seemed to help their cause. Heritage provided legal counsel to a Christian minister, Marvin Horan, who was charged with plotting school bombings. Moran was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. (The Ku Klux Klan rallied support for Horan too, though at demonstrations, not in court).

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[Bundbuster]

1. People need to wake up to the danger

of the Toxic Reichwing Brew of anti-democracy organizations such as

- The Federalist Society
- The Council for National Policy
- The Heritage Foundation
- The Club for Growth
- ALEC
- Judicial Watch
- Americans for Tax Reform
- Alliance Defending Freedom
- Turning Point USA

and many more, springing up and growing like leprosy. Their one common goal - to reshape America into a country that oppresses minorities, promotes theocracy, protects gun rights, counters federal regulation, slashes taxes, favors plutocrats, and rolls back the social progress wrought by the New Deal and the Great Society.

This Toxic Reichwing Brew is the most dangerous threat to democracy today.

[Initech]

3. The Heritage Foundation isn't just a right wing think tank.

It's a terrorist organization who's primary goal is to install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. They've done more damage to this country than Al Qaeda could ever dream of.

[Initech]

2. The MAGA fuckheads have literally said they want to end the Department Of Education.

And Marjorie Shit For Brains even attempted to last year, but failed. Why this isn't terrifying more people is truly beyond me.

[Lonestarblue]

4. The danger of those behind Project 2025 is clear, yet mainstream media continues to ignore them.

Occasionally there’s a short reference to Project 2025, though such references are usually not in news articles but in opinions. It’s as though they want voters to be ignorant of how the Heritage Foundation plans to turn the US into a white, right-wing Christians only country without any protections of democracy.

We’re at the 1939 point in Germany and our media is cheering on the Nazis.