RIGHT ON! | The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, & U.S. Presidential Elections

Hello friend!

It’s an election year in the U.S. yet again, and who are we to avoid getting sucked in?

But since a ton of other folks are already writing about the 2024 election non-stop, we made the radical decision to cover a U.S. election, but make it the 2000 election instead. One of the all time classics: Bush vs. Gore.

Nobody saw this coming.

As always, you’ll find the unsubscribe button higher in the scroll than any local garden center would dare – use that button if you must. For the rest of you sticking around:

How to Steal an Election

That’s right, on this installment of Climate Town, we take you all the way back to the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, when Al Gore not only won the popular vote, but also got more votes in the deciding state of Florida. But then:

Why have you never heard of President Al Gore?

Well, friend, a few things went very wrong in Florida (for Gore):

• Despite not having all the numbers, the mainstream media declared Bush the President on election night, immediately casting Gore as a sore loser and giving rise to one of the most devastating protest signs of all time. 

• A bad graphic design choice in Palm Beach County caused thousands of elderly Jewish democrats to accidentally vote for the far right antisemitic candidate. Whoopsie!

• Older voting machines that required voters to punch a hole (or chad) out of a ballot malfunctioned and caused incorrect counts.

• The Florida Secretary of State in charge of maintaining election integrity was also the co-chair of George Bush’s Florida presidential campaign.

• The governor of the state was George Bush’s little brother JEB! Bush.

• Speaking of Governor JEB!, Florida had just erroneously purged thousands of people from their voter rolls, and as chance would have it, the purged voters were disproportionately Democratic.

• Al Gore believed in the legal system and asked his supporters not to take to the streets to protest an election being stolen. This left plenty of room on those streets for Republicans to protest <checks notes> vote counting.

• A young Roger Stone and other Republican operatives successfully stopped the recount of Miami-Dade by sending a gaggle of paid Republican staffers to the counting room to protest. 

• After the Florida Supreme Court ordered the entire state of Florida to do a hand recount, the Supreme Court of the United States (which had 5 Republican-appointed justices and 4 Democratic-appointed justices) took the case and denied the recount, handing Bush the presidency.

And that’s how we got 4 years (followed by 4 more) of President George (Regular) W. Bush.

But what about this election that’s happening very soon?

Now we’re on track, Jackson. First off:

VOTE. 

But maybe even more importantly: 

Make sure you’re registered to vote.

According to this piece from Pew Research Center, around 63% of the voting-age population actually voted in the 2020 U.S. election. But of registered voters, NINETY FOUR PERCENT (94.1%, for you numberheads) voted. Which means, if you were registered, you were extremely likely to vote in 2020.

If you need to register (or double check that you’re registered), here’s a handy link from our friends at Climate Changemakers.

But then you might be wondering:

Who should I vote for?

And in the U.S. that pretty much comes down to two choices: the Republican or the Democrat?

And in case you haven’t heard, the Republican this year is Donald Trump and the Democrat is Kamala Harris. We have to put this information here to make sure you know, but if this is the first time you’re hearing of either or both of these people, let us know in the comments. We may want to talk to you.

And of those two choices, we have decided to endorse:

Kamala Harris.

That’s right, the folks who make videos under the name Climate Town, who spend a huge chunk of their lives advocating for action to avoid catastrophic climate change, have decided to endorse the Democratic candidate for U.S. President.

And if you’re wondering why we went with Harris/Walz, a lot of it comes down to the lines on this chart from Energy Innovation:

Three potential lines of U.S. emission, all pretty different:

1. Current policies (boring gray line) – basically the IRA until it runs out and then we do nothing.

2. Project 2025 (orange? dark yellow?) – more on this line in a bit (cliffhanger).

3. Continued Climate Leadership (beautiful blue line) – what it looks like if we actually get to net zero by 2050.

And if you ask us, that blue net zero by 2050 line is the one we want.

Now, to be clear, there are no guarantees that a Harris/Walz administration will hit that target. If they win the election, we’ll be right back in the battle for true climate action. Because iIf you look at the Biden/Harris administration:

• They passed the approximately $400 billion Inflation Reduction Act, guided by Senator Joe Manchin, who shepherded the legislation into its final, more-fossil-fuel-friendly form.

• And while the IRA is definitely a climate win overall, if you compare it to the plan Kamala ran on in 2019 ($10 trillion spending, carbon neutral power by 2030, etc.), the IRA shows up as a rounding error, depriving us of roughly $10 trillion worth of better climate action.

• Under this administration, the U.S. not only produces more crude oil than any other time in our history, but also more than any other country. Ever.

• And this is not climate-related exactly, but the Biden administration continues to directly support the genocide in Gaza – billions in weapons to aid the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, with 60% of buildings now damaged or destroyed.

But again, we basically have two choices for U.S. President here.

And we feel confident that a vote for Kamala gives a significantly better chance of desperately needed climate action and leadership. Which brings us back to our cliffhanger:

Project 2025.

There’s been a lot written about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, especially their 900-page Mandate for Leadership. And if you want to read that long-as-hell, ultra- conservative wishlist PDF, here’s the link. But if you’d rather read a couple good pieces about it:

• Drilled: Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA (by Amy Westervelt)

• HEATED: Why are Republicans so obsessed with refrigerators? (By Arielle Samuelson and Emily Atkin)

But this is not the first time the Heritage Foundation has put out a Mandate for Leadership. It’s not even the second. Or the third. Had enough? It’s the ninth.

And, as with a lot of things we cover, we’ve been here before:

Again, Let’s Make America Great Again, Again

It’s the early 1970s, and something was amiss in the Grand Old Party: the Republicans seemed to be losing their edge. 

Nixon, a Republican President, established the Environmental Protection Agency on December 2, 1970. Then there’s the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and campaign finance reform and more.

And worst of all – a lot of this stuff seemed to be pretty popular with average Americans.

But this could be the end of life as business-minded conservatives knew it. What if the EPA forced automakers to make cars way less polluting?

These fears and more were distilled by Lewis Powell, less than six months before he’d leave the executive committee of tobacco giant Phillip Morris to join the Supreme Court, in a document that came to be known as:

The Powell Memo.

Or maybe you’d rather call it by its title: Attack on American Free Enterprise System.

The 34-page memo generally comes down to this: life, as businesses know it, is under siege, and they must fight back for their own survival. They need to spread pro-business ideals through college campuses, television, books, politics, courts, and more. Corporations need to be heard, just like people. Oh and Powell had one person in particular he really didn’t like:

Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who — thanks largely to the media — has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.

To be clear, a lot of that Nader hate probably came from Nader’s 1965 Unsafe at Any Speed, which criticized car companies for making profitable death traps that killed thousands of Americans a year, while resisting safety features like seat belts. And that book is credited with helping create the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And Nader did it all while wearing the same dozen pairs of clearance Army shoes for 25 years. The man’s an antagonistic menace! 

Or as Robert A. Lutz, a former executive at BMW, Ford, Chrysler, and GM, put it:

I don’t like Ralph Nader and I didn’t like the book, but there was definitely a role for government in automotive safety.

Now, there’s some debate over how influential the Powell Memo really was in the rise of the modern Conservative movement. But we listened to a new podcast called Master Plan as we were researching for this newsletter (which you should listen to, if you want to learn more), and it seems fair to say that doc got around.

And one of the people who apparently took a good hard look at the Powell Memo was:

Joseph Coors, from the third generation of the Coors Brewing Company family.

These three things about Joseph Coors are true:

• He was president of Coors during a strike in 1977. But rather than settle the strike, they replaced the workers and got rid of the union. During that period, Coors also required potential employees to take lie detector tests, until they caved to public pressure and stopped the practice in 1986.

• His own brother once described him as “a little bit right of Attila the Hun” (at least according to Wikipedia).

• He’s from the town where Rollie grew up: beautiful Golden, Colorado.

And with his very conservative and very rich reputation, Joseph Coors was approached by young, congressional staffers Ed Feulner and Paul M. Weyrich with a radical new idea:

The Heritage Foundation.

And this wouldn’t be some stodgy, old think tank that puts tired and dated ethics over results. No, according to this great piece by Jonathan Mahler in The New York Times:

What if they could create a new sort of think tank, one that would actively seek to cultivate and influence politicians, and in the process advance the cause of movement conservatism?

Joseph Coors gave them around $250,000, and the trio founded the Heritage Foundation in February 1973. 

Without Joe Coors, the Heritage Foundation wouldn't exist, and the conservative movement it nurtures would be immeasurably poorer.

As Heritage built up funding and sway through the 70s, the first major test of their newfound status in Washington arrived:

Let’s Make America Great Again.

A few decades before Trump rolled out MAGA, Reagan won the 1980 Presidential election with a slogan so incredibly similar, you’d think they were basically the same. Except, actually Trump thought of that entirely by himself, without ever thinking of maybe the most famous modern Republican Presidential campaign slogan at the time.

One after another, phrases popped into his head. “We Will Make America Great.” That one did not have the right ring. Then, “Make America Great.” But that sounded like a slight to the country. And then, it hit him: “Make America Great Again.” 

“I said, ‘That is so good.’ I wrote it down,” Trump recalled in an interview.

But it’s one thing to win an election. It’s an entirely different thing to actually do the stuff you said you were going to do. And in this case, you is Reagan. And that’s where Heritage saw their opening.

Edwin Feulner, then the president of Heritage, recalls that the inspiration for Mandate was a meeting at which former treasury secretary William Simon complained that when he got to Washington to serve under Nixon, he had no guidance on any “practical plans” for enacting a conservative agenda. The Heritage Foundation set to work to make sure this wouldn’t happen again under Reagan in 1981. 

Heritage budgeted $250,000 (about a million dollars today, adjusted for goddamn inflation) to create a targeted Presidential transition package for the Reagan administration, featuring their brand new 20 volume, 3,000-page conservative federal policy tome:

Mandate for Leadership.

And again, you can read the whole thing if you want to, but here are a few highlights, paraphrased by a Washington Post article from November 1980:

Abolish the Department of Energy by 1982.

Revoke all executive orders requiring affirmative action for minorities in government hiring and contracting.

Strip the Office of Surface Mining of most of its powers in order to "make an example" of the agency.

Return most functions of the Environmental Protection Agency to the states or other government offices.

Use U.S. agricultural exports as a weapon in foreign policy.

Boost the 1981 defense budget by $20 billion, develop a new strategic bomber, deploy the neutron bomb in Europe and raise military spending by $35 billion in each of the next five years.

Revoke the guidelines that tell intelligence agencies how to operate within the Constitution, crack down on domestic radicals and revive internal security committees in Congress.

Impose a 10 percent across-the-board personal income tax cut.

After aggressively marketing the document to Reagan’s transition team, especially his campaign chief of staff Edwin Meese: on January 21st, 1981, at Reagan’s first cabinet meeting, the newest President in the country distributed copies of Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership.

It was a truly wonderful time to be the Heritage Foundation:

• Of the 2,000 policy recommendations in Mandate for Leadership, around two thirds were attempted or adopted by the Reagan administration (at least according to Heritage themselves). This included Reagan’s landmark tax cuts, passed in August 1981, cutting the top tax rate by 20% (from 70% down to 50%) – the U.S. has never returned to anything close to that level of taxation on the rich in the decades since.

• “At least three dozen of those who wrote or contributed to Mandate have switched from the stands to the playing field, accepting policy-making jobs in the administration.”

• Heritage published a cutdown 1,100-page version for the public, which became a bestseller.

Heritage even claims that Reagan followed their policy suggestions so closely that Gorbachev got pissed about their influence. And it must be true. It’s on their blog.

Heritage went on to publish another Mandate for Leadership in 1985, after Reagan won a second term with the incredibly boring, incredibly successful “It’s Morning Again in America”. And they’d keep pumping out Mandates pretty much every four years, until 2005. Except, by then, it wasn’t quite the same.

It just wasn’t fun anymore.

Or maybe their ideas weren’t getting the attention they used to. Whatever the reason, the sixth Mandate was a mere 156-pages, a shadow of the previous policy playbooks. That would be the last Mandate for Leadership for the foreseeable future.

In 2013, The Atlantic published a piece by Molly Ball called The Fall of the Heritage Foundation and the Death of Republican Ideas. Apparently, the Heritage Foundation was particularly involved with the Republican Study Committee, a large group of Republicans in Congress – Heritage would pay for their annual retreat in D.C. and also provide Chick-fil-A for their weekly lunch meetings, which Heritage lobbyists would also attend (no other outside groups were allowed).

But now (in 2013)? No more sandwiches. No more only-outside-group-allowed-in-the-Congressional-meeting. Their premier status was slipping.

But then, a shining light from the depths of the right:

Make America Great Again, Again.

At first, the folks at Heritage seemed pretty skeptical of Trump. Or, as Heritage Action leader Michael Needham put it in 2015:

Donald Trump’s a clown. He needs to be out of the race. But someone else who’s serious needs to step up and start channeling the voice of very frustrated American political voters.

But as the primaries approached, Heritage president (and former U.S. Senator) Jim DeMint saw the potential in Trump. He could actually win. And Heritage could be first in line after he does.

While establishment Republicans were pushing back on Trump, Heritage was jockeying for positions in his post-nomination campaign. Then, in August 2016, Ed Feulner, the Heritage co-founder and president from 1977 to 2013, joined Trump’s transition team: 

As [Feulner] saw it, Trump held even more promise for Heritage than Reagan had. “No.1, he did clearly want to make very significant changes, and No.2, his views on so many things were not particularly well formed,” Feulner said. “And so if he somehow pulled the election off, we thought, wow, we could really make a difference.”

From there, vintage Heritage launched back into action, including a brand new Mandate for Leadership, the first in over a decade. They also blasted out unsolicited emails looking for potential candidates for the Trump administration, which they signed:

RIGHT On!

In Trump’s first year in office, more than 70 former and current Heritage staffers began working for his administration. And that count included a bunch of high-ranking officials: Betsy DeVos (Secretary of Education), Scott Pruitt (Administrator of the EPA), Jeff Sessions (Attorney General), Mick Mulvaney (Chief of Staff), and more.

Trump even nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the son of Anne Gorsuch, who ran the conservatized EPA in Reagan’s first term – she received distinct praise from the Heritage Foundation in 1981 “for her swift dismissal of subordinates who did not share administration policy views.”

They’re baaaaack.

Heritage claimed Trump implemented or began work on 64% of the 321 policy recommendations in the seventh Mandate for Leadership in his first year, just a bit more than they claimed for Reagan in 1981.

As President Reagan did in the 1980s, President Trump has embraced the comprehensive recommendations made in the Mandate for Leadership.

And now, eight years later, we have the latest work from Heritage:

Project 2025.

Almost one thousand pages of brand new Heritage Foundation policy ideas, like “shutter” any technology or telecommunications company that facilitates the spread of porn. Goodbye, dear internet. And cell phones. Probably regular phones too. Restaurant where you talk about porn: shuttered.

There’s honestly a lot of wild shit in there. And, once again, the best way to avoid this document is to vote (if you’re a U.S. voter).

VOTE. REGISTER. VOTE.

Oh and they also made some Project 2025 training videos, which you’ve probably already seen. But just in case you haven’t, here’s a taste:

Official Rollie (no prize)

While cooking through archival footage of young Al Gore and young George Bush, something slowly became clear: 

These dudes had a real smoke show phase. 

We’re not saying they could have been characters on The O.C. or anything, and it doesn’t absolve anything they did during their lives, but handsome Gore/Bush was an unexpected twist in the research phase for this video. 

So, the Official Rollie (no prize) for this edition of the newsletter: find the most unexpectedly attractive photo of someone in politics. 

We’re casting a wide net here, so think big, dig deep. And, as always, remember that, no matter how perfectly you nail this assignment: there is no prize.

As for last edition’s Official Rollie (no prize), here are your recipients, each linked with their better-than-the-Michael-Bay-Got-Milk-commercial submission:

• Bill Barton

• Greg Bell

• Brendon Coghill

• David Cortright

• Leslie Ellison

• Caleb Hall

• Robert Jackson

• Jack Johnson

• Casey Lantz

• Pierre Fortier

• Daniel Quinan

• Justin [Redacted]

• Benjamin Roth

And an honorable mention to Ellen Woodrow, who described great commercials, but did not provide a video link. Ellen, you win nothing. There is no prize.

How about that, friend?

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Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited by: Caroline Schaper

Additional research by: Irene Plagianos, Carly Rizzuto, and Caroline Schaper

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Matt Nelsen and Rollie Williams