The Heritage Foundation's plan for America is worse than you imagined
It turns The Handmaid's Tale into reality
The Treaty of Tripoli, written in 1787 and signed by President John Adams in order to stop attacks on US shipping by Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean Sea, was crystal clear: America was not founded to be a Christian state. It is often used by opponents of Christian Nationalism to prove that America was never intended to be founded as a Christian state, a theocracy, or a religious nation in any way.
In fact, the Founding Fathers were quite clear about this fact. During the ratification of the Constitution many letters were written, speeches given, and debates occurred over this very question. And though these Christian Nationalists, who currently infest our government, control our airwaves, and pump Christian propaganda into the eyes and ears of Americans 24 hours per day, insist that the Founding Fathers were Christians, many of them didn’t even believe in the divinity of Jesus, which in fact, makes them Deists and not actual Christians.
In Europe, religious sectarian warfare began after the Protestant Reformation in 16th Century and continued into the 18th Century. These wars devastated much of Europe as the power of the Holy Roman Empire was contested by the rising power of the Protestant Reformation, culminating in the Thirty Years War that killed nearly one third of the German Population.
The Founding Fathers, having lived in the 17th and 18th Century, would have had the Thirty Years War fresh in their minds as they wrote the Constitution after gaining independence from the British Crown. In fact religious freedom was so important to them that they wrote the Establishment Clause as the very first Amendment to the Constitution, alongside Freedom of Speech. And in so doing they ensured that the newly formed United States of America would have a secular government that was not allowed to establish any form of religion as a national government.
But none of that matters to the Evangelical Protestant Christians that make up the current regime, nor does it matter to the Heritage Foundation that provides them with the written plan to literally turn America into Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale. The Heritage Foundation, as you surely must know, was the think tank behind Project 2025. And Russel Vought, Project 2025’s author, now sits in charge of the Office of Management and Budget.
Now before the 2024 election, alarm bells were ringing all over the country about Project 2025, and Trump being Trump, he denied having anything to do with it. Yet his regime has followed the Project 2025 playbook to a T. In fact we wrote about Project 2025 back in July 2024.
But following the Project 2025 plan is still not good enough for the Christofascists at the Heritage Foundation, who recently released yet another manifesto for Christian Nationalism called “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years”.
And if you thought Project 2025 was bad, well hold onto your hat.
These people literally believe that the traditional American family (one man, one woman, 2.3 kids) has been “dissolved” in the past 60 years and their solution is to:
Criminalize gay sex
Eradicate transgender people once and for all
Force women back into the home
Take away women’s right to vote
Criminalize sex out of wedlock, especially sex between consenting but non-married adults
Eliminate the Civil Rights Act so women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people can be discriminated against by “every institution in America”.
In other words, it’s an attempt to drag this country back to the 19th century. And it’s all rooted in the fear that white women are not pumping out enough white babies in order to maintain a white majority in this country. In fact Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s Medicare and Medicaid administer (and the man who lost to John Fetterman) recently had this to say:
“So, let me speak a little bit about the reality that one in three Americans are under-babied,” Dr Oz said.
“What does under-babied mean?” he asked. “That means that you either don’t have any children or you have less children than you would normally want to have.
“We have a crisis that’s causing our fertility rate to drop below 1.5. Replacement rate is 2.1. So, we’re way below what we need just to even replace the people that we have in America.
“And one of the challenges is that rural America, where there’s 60 million people, has a maternal mortality rate, when they have babies, that’s about 30 percent higher than if you live in an urban area.”
“The fundamental creative force in society is about making babies,” he said.
The solution to declining birth rates is, of course, immigration. But as we all know this regime is entirely hostile to immigration and is currently conducting one of the most draconian and brutal mass deportation efforts in history. Because if you read between the lines what Oz is talking about are white babies.
And it’s chart like these that make the Christian Nationalists at the Heritage Foundation to declare the “dissolving” of the family.
The Heritage Foundation has been a oligarch-funded organization utterly hostile to a changing and diversifying America and it began in 1971 when Lewis Powell, a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo” and sent it confidentially to the US Chamber of Commerce.
In this memo he stated that the American system of Free Enterprise was under attack from the Left, specifically in the form of “college campuses, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”
The antidote to this attack would be for Conservatives to form their own intellectual infrastructure in the form of think tanks and university programs, legal centers, and media outlets that would shift the country’s political center hard to the right and protect billionaire wealth from democratic accountability.
Nixon then appointed Powell to the Supreme Court two months after the memo was sent, and in 1973 Joseph Coors (yes, that Coors), alongside Paul Weyrich (the man who coined the phrase “Moral Majority) wrote a check for $250,000 and the Heritage Foundation was born.
Since then the Heritage Foundation has been bankrolled by six wealthy oligarch families: Joseph Coors, the Bradley Brothers, Charles Koch, the Mellon Scaifes, Barre Seid, and the Uihleins.
And it is absolutely their goal to transform the United States into their own vision of a Christian Oligarchy while at the same time loosening environmental regulations and promoting climate change denial. All things the Trump regime eagerly enacts.
The Heritage Foundation clearly believes that American society is best run by the rich and powerful while using Christian Nationalism as a weapon to enact their destructive theocratic agenda. And in order to maintain the USA as a free nation, we must do everything in our power to stop them, and that includes voting in every election.