Heritage Foundation

So What’s With The “Groypers”?

/ Jack Marshall / 37 Comments

I guess because I regard podcasts as a waste of time, the term “Groyper” was happily outside my consciousness until very recently. The main reason I encountered it at all was the latest Tucker Carlton controversy that metastasized into a big PR problem for the Heritage Foundation. Tucker—note please that Ethics Alarms identified him as a principle-free, self-aggrandizing, cynical Ethics Villain years ago, even before his Fox News stardom: See? “I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says!”—has been cozying up to Hitler apologists, Holocuast-deniers, anti-Semites and white supremacists because, as usual, he’s decided that its where the clicks and “likes” lie among the easily fooled and ignorant. After he had a slobbering interview with white supremacist (above) Nick Fuentes (whose followers call themselves “Groypers“), Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, posted a disgaceful video on social media praising and defending the creep (I mean Carlson in this case) while using terms that sounded like anti-Semitic dog-whistles.

I should have posted on it, but I wrongly assumed Roberts would have been forced to resign by now. The board of Heritage should get cracking: one thing conservatives, Republicans and MAGA do not need is for the #1 conservative think tank to be perceived as backing fascists (referring to Fuentes this time) and lying assholes (back to Tucker).

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KABOOM! My Head Just Exploded! Biden’s Executive Orders Used an Autopen???

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Wait, what? An Executive Order can be legal and go into effect without a President actually signing it? A so-called “autopen signature” counts? EVEN WHEN THE PRESIDENT MAY NOT BE CAPABLE OF KNOWING WHAT HE’S “SIGNING”?

A Heritage Foundation investigation has discovered that the majority of official documents signed by President Joe Biden used the same autopen signature. The Oversight Project, which is an initiative within the conservative Heritage Foundation that investigates the government, announced, “We gathered every document we could find with Biden’s signature over the course of his Presidency. All used the same autopen signature except for the announcement that the former President was dropping out of the race last year. Here is the autopen signature,” the group said, attaching photo examples like these:

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And Still More Post-Debate Ethics! [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

The <gasp!> apocalyptic news was the New York Times posting an editorial board statement telling Biden he has to go “for the good of the country.” Of course, the Times can’t be expected to accept a share of responsibility for saddling the U.S. with Biden by burying the credible account of a staffer who claimed he raped her, hiding the Hunter laptop story until the success of Joe’s basement campaign was cinched, and generally serving as an uncritical Democratic Party cheering section when it counts. The Times also let the completely discredited Lincoln Project take a typical shot at Trump in its op-ed pages. And a silly one: the Project’s mouthpiece said that Trump botched the debate because he didn’t “lay out a positive economic plan to appeal to middle-class voters feeling economic pressure” (Sure he did: get Joe Biden out of the White House! Works for me!) and reverse himself on abortion, saving “young girls” from having to “endure extremist politicians eager to criminalize what was a constitutional right for two generations.” No woman is in danger of ever being imprisoned in the U.S. for having an abortion. Dumb prosecutors will do dumb things, but that’s no reason to ignore the critical issue at the core of the abortion problem: the delicate human lives abortion enthusiasts want to ignore. In the debate, Trump focused on that. It wasn’t a mistake.

As for the Times board, it dutifully parroted the official DNC talking points about Trump’s lies and “lies,” as if Biden wasn’t spitting out whoppers himself when it was possible to figure out what he was saying. The Times also used the latest trope from the Axis: Republicans should consider replacing Trump. Sure, that makes sense. If Biden was a complete vegetable and still beating Trump in the polls, is there any chance that Democrats would replace him as their nominee? Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

More:

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Nice Of The Heritage Foundation To Confirm All Those Accusations Of Bias, Don’t You Think?

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Yup. It's the Heritage Foundation, all right.

Yup. It’s the Heritage Foundation, all right.

It didn’t take long for the the leadership of an ultra-ideological ex-Senator to make the Heritage Foundation to jump the shark, did it?

News Item:

“Jason Richwine, the co-author of a controversial immigration study released this week by the Heritage Foundation, tells Post Politics that he has resigned his position with the organization….The study written by Richwine and Robert Rector argued that the immigration reform bill would cost $6.3 trillion, but it was widely panned by conservative groups pushing for immigration reform as not accounting for the economic benefits of immigrants.

“Complicating matters were a series of revelations about Richwine, including that he had written a doctoral thesis at Harvard University arguing that the United States should focus its immigration efforts on those with high IQs and that he had written for a Web site that describes itself as “nationalist.”

Here is who else needs to resign: Jim DeMint. Continue reading →

What Good Are Think Tanks If Only Partisans Will Believe Them?

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Better to be blind than to be proven wrong?

Better to be blind than to be proven wrong?

As you probably have heard, the conservative Heritage Foundation, one of the most venerable think tanks, now overseen by former GOP Senator Jim DeMint, has released a report showing that the proposed immigration reform will cost over 6 trillion dollars. Naturally, no non-conservatives are treating it as anything other than a partisan document and a biased study. The same thing happens regularly when the Urban Institute or Brookings puts out a study, though the press, being tilted the same way, tends to treat these with more deference.

This is one more horrible way that bias makes truth-seeking difficult if not impossible. Ideally and logically, all think tanks and research institutions, not to mention the researchers themselves, should be objective. But donors, as they say in professional fundraising, give for their reasons, not yours, and when enough of your funding comes from  those with allied interests, their reasons inevitably become your interests. An American Enterprise Institute study that supported a liberal policy objective, like eliminating the capital gains discount, would have immediate credibility. It would also probably be suicidal. Thus the only think tank likely to examine the issue and show that capital gains should be taxed at regular rates would be one supported by George Soros or others like him…and for that reason, capable of influencing nobody. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce Follow-up: Justice Thomas’s False Disclosures

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

From the New York Times:

“Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court acknowledged in filings released on Monday that he erred by not disclosing his wife’s past employment as required by federal law.
Justice Thomas said that in his annual financial disclosure statements over the last six years, the employment of his wife, Virginia Thomas, was “inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions. To rectify that situation, Justice Thomas filed seven pages of amended disclosures listing Mrs. Thomas’s employment in that time with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy group, and Hillsdale College in Michigan, for which she ran a constitutional law center in Washington.” Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Justice Clarence Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Will Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas be impeached because he failed to disclose his wife’s income, as required by Federal law, for at least five years? No.

Should he be? Probably not, though if it was proven that he intentionally used incorrect information, he could be found guilty of perjury. More likely is a civil penalty. In any event, his wife’s income isn’t a crucial piece of information in Thomas’s case, though his ideological enemies will argue otherwise. Such an omission is virtually never a cause for judicial discipline.

Is it a serious breach of his duties nonetheless? Yes. Continue reading →