He has said this on television so many times, across so many seasons of Shark Tank, that it has become a kind of brand; the unsentimental investor, the deal-maker stripped of sentiment, the man who will tell you your baby is ugly if your baby is ugly and the valuation doesn’t justify the asking price. He calls himself Mr. Wonderful with the self-awareness of a man who knows the nickname is ironic and has decided to lean into it anyway.

This is relevant context for what follows. Because what follows is not a story about an investor who didn’t know better. It is a story about an investor who knew exactly - who had measured it, named it, and broadcast it - and whose knowledge made no discernible difference to where the money went.

If you cannot move the most self-interestedly rational investor in the room, the problem is not information.

The problem is the room.

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The O’Leary Contradiction

Kevin O’Leary has stated publicly, on CNBC, on multiple occasions, that 75% of his total Shark Tank returns have come from companies run by women.

He invests in women-led companies 19% of the time.

This is not a small contradiction, nor is it a rounding error or a statistical quirk or a function of the specific deals available in any given season. It is a sustained, documented, multi-season pattern in which a man who can calculate compound interest in his head and who has staked his professional identity on being guided purely by returns continues to direct more than 80% of his capital toward the demographic that generates 25% of his returns.

O’Leary has not been quiet about the data. He has named it specifically and he calls the gap between male and female founder target-setting “testosterone bravado”. This is his phrase which he has used repeatedly on national television, delivered with the confidence of someone who has run the numbers and arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion about half the human race. He notes that male founders set targets 30% higher than comparable female-led companies. He notes that male founders hit those targets 65% of the time. He notes that female founders set more realistic targets and hit them 95% of the time.

And then he writes the check to the man.

His best investment ever on the show was Basepaws, a cat genomics company founded by Anna Skaya. She walked into the tank with a cat, a cotton swab, and a $29.95 consumer genetic testing kit. O’Leary’s initial response was characteristically blunt: why would anyone buy that when they could buy a new cat for five dollars? Skaya declined to be dismissed. She presented her data, held her ground, and left with a deal. Zoetis, one of the world’s largest animal health companies, acquired Basepaws in 2022 and O’Leary called it his best investment ever.

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He calls it his best investment ever. And yet the pattern of his portfolio has not shifted in the direction the evidence suggests it should.

There is a name for the gap between what someone knows and what they do. Behavioural economists call it the knowing-doing gap. It is well documented across domains, in public health, in environmental behaviour, in financial decision-making. Knowing the right thing and doing the right thing are not the same cognitive act. The friction between them is not ignorance. It is something older and less amenable to data.

The Shark Report Card

O’Leary is not alone, but he is the most honest about it.

Here is the full Shark Tank gender investment record, assembled from ten seasons of documented data.

Lori Greiner. The most balanced investment record on the panel. Closes deals on more than 20% of the pitches she hears. The highest close rate of any investor on the show. Portfolio value estimated near $158 million. Actively champions female inventors, using her QVC platform to amplify women-founded consumer products with a specificity of intention that the data reflects.

Barbara Corcoran. Most balanced record alongside Greiner. Closes 60% of her on-air deals through off-camera negotiation, more than 10 percentage points above the show’s average. Corcoran has spoken publicly about recognising herself in female founders who are told their ambitions are too large for the room they’re standing in. The recognition is visible in the portfolio.

Mark Cuban. Below the show’s average for female-led investment but above the next two. The most total deals on the panel. The highest average investment size. A portfolio that reflects breadth more than targeted preference in any direction.

Daymond John. Below average across the series. Stronger in fashion (a category with higher female founder representation than technology or consumer electronics) but overall below the show’s gender investment average.

Kevin O’Leary. 19% of deals with female-led companies. 75% of returns from them. The knowing-doing gap, at scale, over many seasons.

Robert Herjavec. 17% of deals with female-led companies. The lowest gender investment rate of any regular shark on the panel.

The pattern across these six investors is stark and repeated. The two women fund women at higher rates. The four men fall below the show’s average. The academic gender match effect - female investors 35% more likely to fund female founders - is visible in the data with a clarity that is almost pedagogical. It is as if the show has been running a controlled experiment for sixteen seasons without knowing it, and the results keep coming back the same way.

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What The Scorecard Measures

It would be easy to read this data as an indictment of individual investors, of O’Leary’s contradiction, of Herjavec’s record, of the four men whose portfolios collectively underweight female founders despite the performance evidence pointing in the other direction, but individual indictment misses the more important structural point.

The Shark Tank panel, with two women out of six investors, over-represents women relative to the broader venture capital industry, where men hold 83% of partner roles and three quarters of firms have no female investing partners at all. The show’s gender investment gap, with women receiving fewer deals than their performance warrants, exists in a context that is more favourable to female founders than almost any other investment environment in America.

If the knowing-doing gap is this visible in a room where women are relatively over-represented, what does it look like in the rooms where they are not?

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The answer is the 2% figure. The global venture capital ecosystem, in which men make virtually all the decisions, directs 2% of available capital to female founders despite the documented performance advantage those founders carry. The Shark Tank data is not an exception to that pattern. It is a mild, televised version of it.

O’Leary knows. The data knows. The academic literature knows. The industry has been told, in peer-reviewed journals and business school case studies and CNBC interviews and sixteen seasons of primetime television. And the money goes where it has always gone.

Sources: CNBC Make It, “Kevin O’Leary: 75% of my returns have come from companies run by women,” September 2022. IBTimes UK, “Kevin O’Leary Says Women-Led Businesses Generated Most of His Wealth,” May 2026. The Hustle, “Shark Tank deep dive: A data analysis of all 10 seasons,” October 2024. Jetter et al., “Gender Match and the Gender Gap in Venture Capital Financing: Evidence from Shark Tank,” Empirical Economics, 2022. Failory, “Shark Tank Statistics — Deals, Investments, Success Rates,” July 2025. Inc. Magazine, “Here Are the Shark Tank Judges’ Investment Track Records,” February 2020. Shark Tank Blog, May 2026.

It is not the boardroom (though women are increasingly there). It is not the corner office (women are starting to occupy more of these, but there is work to do). It is not the negotiating table (though women are learning to ask for more and receive it).

It is, of all places, the Shark Tank.

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And the fact that this room exists, that there is a documented, controlled, sixteen-season longitudinal study of what happens when women get the chance to pitch for capital on equal terms with men should have restructured the entire venture capital industry. It should have redirected billions of dollars. It should have changed, in a fundamental and irreversible way, the story we tell about women and money and risk and ambition.

It has not done any of those things.

This is the central paradox of the Show Me The Money series. Not just that women are excluded, but that the exclusion persists even after the evidence has been assembled, published, analysed, and handed to the people making the decisions with a bow on it.

The data is in, the verdict is clear, and the system has looked at both and decided to carry on regardless.

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The Numbers, Assembled

Let us begin where all good arguments begin; with what actually happened.

Across ten documented seasons of Shark Tank, 60% of women who made it onto the show secured a deal. 53% of men did. That seven-point gap, modest on its face, becomes something more interesting when you examine it season by season, not as a static average but as a trend, a momentum, a direction of travel.

Season 10: women closed 63% of their pitches. Men closed 56%.

Season 13: women hit 67%.

As the show has matured and its data has accumulated, the performance gap between female and male founders has not narrowed in men’s favour, it has widened in women’s. Each season the evidence compounds and each season, the system absorbs it and continues.

The academic literature corroborates what the television data shows. A peer-reviewed study published in Empirical Economics examining Shark Tank outcomes specifically found that the gender of the investor matters enormously in determining who gets funded, but that when controlling for investor gender, female founders perform at least as well as male founders in the room. The performance gap is not in the pitch, it’s in who sits across the table from the pitcher.

We will return to that finding. It is load-bearing.

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The Paradox

Here is what makes the Shark Tank success rate data so specifically damning.

If women were underrepresented in the application pool (which they are, at roughly 25% of applicants despite starting 49% of new American businesses) because they were building weaker companies, the deal rate would reflect it. The filter of the application process would select for quality, and the quality gap would show up in the outcomes.

It does not show up in the outcomes.

Women who clear the application barrier outperform men who clear the same barrier. Which means the barrier is not a quality filter. It is something else entirely; a tangle of network access, industry prioritisation, referral culture, and structural disadvantage that operates upstream of quality and removes women from the process before quality can be demonstrated.

What Shark Tank proves, across sixteen seasons of documented evidence, is this: the room is not the problem, the problem is who gets to enter it.

Because if the room were the problem - if women pitched and lost, pitched and were undervalued, pitched and were turned away despite strong businesses - the solution would involve changing what happens inside the room; better training for investors, blind evaluation processes, structured decision-making frameworks that reduce the influence of pattern-matching and affinity bias.

But if the problem is the door. If women are being filtered out before they reach the room, then the solutions required are structural, not procedural. They involve changing who controls access, who sits in the chairs that decide which applicants advance, who builds the networks through which opportunity circulates and who funds the early-stage companies that become Shark Tank-ready.

They involve, in other words, changing the entire upstream system that produces the room rather than the room itself.

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The Gender Match Effect

The peer-reviewed finding I mentioned earlier deserves its full moment.

Academic researchers studying Shark Tank investment patterns found what they termed a “gender match effect”; female investors are 35% more likely to fund female founders than male founders, while male investors show no systematic gender preference in either direction.

Female investors actively seek and fund female founders at meaningfully higher rates. Male investors are, on average, neutral, neither seeking nor avoiding female founders in any statistically significant pattern.

In a world where investment decisions were made by a gender-balanced pool of investors, this asymmetry would wash out. The female investors’ 35% premium for female founders would offset the male investors’ neutrality, and the overall funding rate for women would approach parity.

But investment decisions are not made by a gender-balanced pool. Men hold 83% of venture capital partner roles. Nearly three quarters of American VC firms have no female investing partners at all, which is not just a low number, not just a disappointing number, but not a number at all. The gender match effect, operating in a system structurally dominated by male decision-makers, produces systematic disadvantage not through anyone’s active prejudice but through the simple arithmetic of who is in the room writing the checks.

The two women on the Shark Tank panel, Lori Greiner and Barbara Corcoran, have the most balanced investment records of any sharks on the show. Greiner closes deals on more than 20% of the pitches she hears, the highest rate of any investor on the panel. Corcoran closes 60% of her on-air deals off-camera, more than 10% higher than the show’s average.

The male sharks (O’Leary, Cuban, Herjavec, John) fall below the show’s average for female-led investment, with Herjavec at 17% of his deals with female-led companies and O’Leary at 19%.

As we make the gender match effect visible, the two women in the room fund women. Four men in the room reflect the industry average. And the industry average, as we have established, directs 2% of available capital to female founders.

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So, What Have We Done With This Evidence?

Little. And there is a particular kind of cruelty in evidence that exists and does nothing.

The Shark Tank data has been available for over a decade. The academic studies examining it have been peer-reviewed, published, and cited. Kevin O’Leary (a man who requires no academic literature to form an opinion) has looked at his own portfolio, noted that 75% of his returns come from women-led companies, and said so on national television multiple times. The Boston Consulting Group has published the finding that women-founded companies generate 78 cents of revenue per dollar invested compared to 31 cents for male-founded companies. PitchBook has documented that female-founded companies deliver 2.5 times better returns than their male-founded counterparts.

This evidence has not closed the gap, in fact, the gap has not meaningfully moved in over a decade.

There is a word for a system that receives evidence of its own dysfunction and continues unchanged and the word is not “broken”. Broken things fail accidentally, through entropy or neglect or the simple passage of time. The word is “designed”, because a system that consistently produces the same outcome despite evidence to the contrary is a system that was built to produce that outcome, and that is working as intended.

The room where women win exists. It is documented. The evidence of what women do when given the chance to compete on something approaching equal terms is not ambiguous.

And yet only 2% of the capital flows their way.

The room is not the problem - the door is the problem.

Next Sunday we meet the people who built the door, one investor at a time. The Shark by Shark breakdown. The knowing-doing gap. And the question that the data, no matter how thoroughly assembled, has so far failed to answer: when you know that women perform better and you fund men anyway, what exactly are you choosing?

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Sources: The Hustle, “Shark Tank deep dive: A data analysis of all 10 seasons,” October 2024. Jetter et al., “Gender Match and the Gender Gap in Venture Capital Financing: Evidence from Shark Tank,” Empirical Economics / Springer, 2022. Shark Tank Blog, “The Hidden Pattern Behind 45.3% of Women Landing Deals on Shark Tank,” May 2026. Failory, “Shark Tank Statistics,” July 2025. Boston Consulting Group, “Why Women-Owned Startups Are a Better Bet,” 2018. PitchBook Female Founders Dashboard. TheAnna.io, 2026 State of Female Founders Report. Founders Forum Group, “Women in VC and Startup Funding: Statistics and Trends 2025 Report,” December 2025.

They are approximately 25% of Shark Tank applicants.

Lets sit with that for a moment. Not the funding gap. We will get to the funding gap. Not the valuation gap or the returns gap or the pipeline myth. Just this one number, at the very beginning of the process before a single pitch has been made or a single check has been written.

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Women are building businesses at record rates. Almost half of all new companies in America are started by women. But when those women go looking for the most visible investment opportunity in the country (the one with the cameras and the panel of millionaires and the national television audience) they make up only a quarter of the people in the room.

The gap between 49% and 25% is not a confidence gap, nor is it a preparation gap. It is not explained by the quality of the businesses women are building, nor by any deficiency in the women building them.

It is a structural gap, and it begins before anyone sees your pitch deck. It begins before you fill out the application, in the rooms where information gets shared, in the networks where people learn that applying is even an option, in the industries that get prioritised, in the communities where this kind of opportunity circulates as common knowledge rather than hidden currency.

Understanding how it works is the first step to understanding everything else that follows.

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The Application Is Not The Starting Line

Most conversations about the venture capital gender gap begin at the pitch - who gets funded, who gets passed over, what the investors say in the room. This is understandable as the pitch is visible, the outcomes are documentable, and the drama of someone walking away with or without a check is narratively satisfying.

But the pitch is not where the gap begins.

Before you pitch on Shark Tank you have to apply. Before you apply you have to know that applying is worth your time. Before you know that you have to be connected to the networks where that information lives - the entrepreneurial communities, the business school alumni groups, the industry associations, the accelerator programs, the investor relationships that generate referrals to production companies looking for compelling founders.

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These networks are not neutral, they reflect, with remarkable consistency, who was already in them. And who was already in them reflects decades of decisions made by institutions, by investors, by gatekeepers of various kinds about whose entrepreneurship was worth cultivating, whose businesses were worth funding at the early stage that leads to the kind of growth that makes you a compelling Shark Tank applicant, and whose time and ambition were worth taking seriously.

Women have been building businesses throughout all of this. They have been doing it with less access to early-stage capital, less representation in the accelerator programs that feed the pipeline, less visibility in the industries the show historically prioritises, and less connection to the informal networks where opportunity circulates.

The 25% application rate is the accumulated result of all of that. It is not a starting line problem, it’s an everything-that-came-before-the-starting-line problem.

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The Industries The Show Prioritises

Shark Tank has, across sixteen seasons, shown a consistent preference for certain categories of business. Consumer products. Food and beverage. Technology. Fitness and wellness. Retail.

Some of these categories skew female in their customer base but male in their founding teams; a gap that reflects broader patterns in who gets early-stage funding to build the companies that eventually become Shark Tank-ready. Technology in particular has a well-documented gender funding gap that predates the show by decades. Female founders in tech receive a fraction of what their male counterparts receive at seed and Series A stage, meaning fewer women are building the kinds of technology companies that make compelling Shark Tank pitches not because women aren’t building technology companies, but because women’s technology companies are being starved of the capital that would make them ready for this stage.

The show reflects the industry. The industry reflects its funding patterns. The funding patterns reflect fifty years of decisions about whose entrepreneurship was worth backing. By the time a woman is considering whether to apply to Shark Tank, she has already navigated a system that has been working against her application for years.

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What The Referral Network Looks Like

Getting on Shark Tank is not simply a matter of submitting an online application and waiting. The show receives tens of thousands of applications per season. What separates the applicants who make it to the tank from those who don’t is partly the business, but, like life, it is also partly who you know.

Production companies conducting casting for entrepreneurship-focused shows actively look for referrals from investors, accelerators, business schools, and entrepreneurial communities. These referral sources reflect their own demographic compositions. The investors who refer founders to casting opportunities are predominantly male and men still hold 83% of venture capital partner roles. The accelerator programs that feed these pipelines have their own gender gaps. The business school networks that generate referrals skew toward industries and business models that have historically received more male than female attention.

None of this is a conspiracy, it’s the organic operation of networks that were built by and for a particular demographic and that continue to reproduce that demographic through the referral relationships that feel, from the inside, entirely natural and meritocratic.

The result is that women (who are building at the same rate as men and in many cases outperforming men on the metrics that should matter to investors) arrive underrepresented at the application stage of a process that presents itself as a pure meritocracy of ideas.

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The Stat That Should Change Everything

Here is the finding that I want you to emphasize throughout the rest of this series because it reframes everything that follows:

Once women get in the room, they win more.

Across ten seasons of documented Shark Tank data, 60% of women who made it onto the show secured a deal. 53% of men did. In Season 10, women closed 63% of their pitches compared to 56% for men. In Season 13, women hit 67%.

The room that is hardest for women to get into is the room where women outperform.

This is not a small finding. it’s the central piece of evidence that the application gap cannot be explained by the quality of women’s businesses or the strength of women’s pitches. If women were underrepresented in the application pool because they were building weaker businesses or pitching less compellingly, we would expect to see that reflected in their deal rate. We do not. We see the opposite.

Women who clear the application barrier perform better than men who clear the same barrier. Which means the barrier itself and not anything on the other side of it is where the gender gap lives.

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Beyond Television

Shark Tank is a television show. Its applicant pool and its deal outcomes are not a perfect representation of the broader venture capital industry. The show has selection effects, editorial decisions, and production considerations that shape what we see on screen.

But the application gap it reveals is real. And it maps with striking consistency onto the broader VC data.

Female founders receive 2% of available venture capital globally. Female-founded companies generate 78 cents of revenue for every dollar invested compared to 31 cents for male-founded companies. Female founders hit their targets 95% of the time compared to 65% for male founders.

The performance data says women should be receiving dramatically more capital than they do. The application data says women are being filtered out before they get the chance to demonstrate that performance. The deal data from Shark Tank says that when that filter is removed and when women do get in the room, they outperform.

The gap is not in the room, the gap is the door, and someone (men) built the door.

We are going to spend the next five weeks finding out who, and why, and what we do about it.

Next Sunday: the success rate paradox in full. What sixteen seasons of data shows about what actually happens when women pitch. The finding that should have restructured the entire venture capital industry. And why it hasn’t.

Sources: Founders Forum Group, “Women in VC and Startup Funding: Statistics and Trends 2025 Report,” December 2025 (ff.co). TheAnna.io, “2026 State of Female Founders Report.” The Hustle, “Shark Tank deep dive: A data analysis of all 10 seasons,” October 2024. Shark Tank Blog, “The Hidden Pattern Behind 45.3% of Women Landing Deals on Shark Tank,” May 2026. PitchBook Female Founders Dashboard (pitchbook.com). Boston Consulting Group, “Why Women-Owned Startups Are a Better Bet,” 2018. Jetter et al., “Gender Match and the Gender Gap in Venture Capital Financing: Evidence from Shark Tank,” Empirical Economics, 2022.

Women started 49% of all new businesses in the United States last year - esstentially half of all new companies were built by women, from nothing, in a country that offers them no paid maternity leave, no subsidised childcare, and a federal equal pay law that has been introduced in Congress seventeen times and has never once passed.

And then those women went looking for capital.

They received 2% of available venture capital.

Not 20%. Not 12%. Not even a number you could charitably describe as a work in progress.

2%.

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I have spent the last several weeks living inside the data behind that number. Academic studies, sixteen seasons of documented Shark Tank outcomes, Boston Consulting Group returns analysis, PitchBook dashboards, per-investor breakdowns, and the paper trail of fifty years of policy decisions that produced this specific outcome in this specific country at this specific moment in history.

What I found was not what I expected. The story is not the one that gets told about women and money. It is simultaneously more infuriating and more clarifying than that story, and it ends somewhere the VC industry would very much prefer you not look.

Starting today across platforms, I am going to take you through it

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What This Series Is

CAPTURED: Show Me The Money is a six-week investigation into the venture capital gender gap using sixteen seasons of Shark Tank as our case study and the broader VC data as our evidence base. Why? Shark Tank is a cultural phenomenon with almost two decades worth of data, AND it tells a version of this story data from the finance industry doesn’t.

We are going to look at who gets in the room before the pitch starts. What happens when women do pitch and trust me, the answer will surprise you. What the per-investor data actually shows about who is funding women and who is claiming to while not doing it. What the long-term performance data says about what happens after the deal. And then (because “Captured” always follows the money to its source) we are going to look at who built the structural conditions that produced the 2% figure and why.

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This is not a series about leaning in and it’s not a series about pipeline problems. It is not a series about individual bias or imposter syndrome or the confidence gap or any of the other frameworks that locate the problem inside women rather than inside the system.

The system is the problem. The system was built deliberately. The people who built it are not hiding. And it’s now time for women to rise, lead and rebuild it all.

Why Shark Tank

Because the data is there and it is sixteen seasons deep.

Most conversations about the venture capital gender gap rely on aggregate industry data - broad numbers that are accurate but abstract. Shark Tank gives us something different: a documented, controlled environment where we can track exactly who pitched, who got funded, who got what valuation, and what happened to those companies afterward.

The dataset that emerges is one of the most comprehensive publicly available records of how capital gets allocated between men and women in a single venue. It is not perfectly representative of the broader VC industry, it is television, after all, with all the selection effects that implies. But it is real, it happened, the outcomes are documented and what those outcomes show is so consistent across sixteen seasons that the pattern cannot be explained by chance, personality, or the quality of any individual pitch.

I will be citing academic research throughout this series - peer-reviewed studies from Cornell, Northeastern, and multiple economics journals that have studied Shark Tank data specifically. These are not think pieces. They are empirical analyses with documented methodologies and the receipts are real.

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The Thing I Did Not Expect To Find

When I started researching this series I expected to find that women pitched less, got funded less, and performed worse. That is the conventional narrative andwhat the 2% figure implies.

The data tells a different story.

Women who get in the room win more often than men do. Across ten seasons of documented data, 60% of women who made it onto Shark Tank got a deal. 53% of men did. In Season 13, women closed 67% of their pitches. The room that is hardest for women to get into is the room where women outperform.

Women-founded companies generate 78 cents of revenue for every dollar invested. Male-founded companies generate 31 cents. Female-founded companies deliver 2.5 times better returns than male-founded startups, per PitchBook’s documented analysis.

Kevin O’Leary (Mr. Wonderful, the most famously unsentimental investor on the show) has stated publicly, on CNBC, that 75% of his total Shark Tank returns have come from companies run by women. He invests in women-led companies 19% of the time.

He knows, he has measured it and he says it on television.

And then more than 80% of his capital goes to men.

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The investment gap is not explained by performance. This is the central finding of this series and I want you to sit with as we begin. Women perform better. By every metric that investors claim to care about - revenue efficiency, return on investment, target achievement - women outperform. And yet they receive 2% of available capital. That gap has not moved meaningfully in a decade.

Something other than performance is driving investment decisions. We are going to find out what.

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Where This Ends

I will tell you now, because this account does not do slow reveals for dramatic effect, but documented arguments assembled in order.

The venture capital gender gap is not a Silicon Valley problem, nor a Shark Tank problem. It’s not even a bias problem in the conventional sense of individual investors making individual bad decisions.

It is a structural problem. The structure was built deliberately, by specific institutions, with specific funding, over fifty years. The same institutions we have been documenting in this series (CAPTURED) from the beginning.

The policies that would have changed the 2% figure, such as equal pay enforcement, subsidised childcare, paid maternity leave, healthcare independent of employment are the financial preconditions for women taking economic risks, for leaving jobs, for surviving the first year of building something, for competing in a funding environment designed by and for people who have never had to think about any of those things.

Every one of those policies has been systematically opposed for fifty years by a think tank in Washington DC that is registered as a charity and is currently running your government.

The extraction economy - oil, then finance, then big tech, now AI - was built by men with access to capital in a system designed to give men access to capital. The community economy - care, protection, connection, the businesses women build when they get the chance - has been running on 2% of the fuel.

We are six weeks away from understanding exactly how that happened. And more importantly, who made it happen.

The series is free to follow on all platforms. The deep dives, the full data, the full receipts, the full paper trail live here, for paid subscribers, every Sunday for six weeks.

If you are not yet a paid subscriber and you want the complete picture: the button is below.

If you are already a paid subscriber: thank you. This one is for you.

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Sources for this article: TheAnna.io 2026 State of Female Founders Report. Founders Forum Group Women in VC and Startup Funding Report 2025. PitchBook Female Founders Dashboard. Boston Consulting Group, “Why Women-Owned Startups Are a Better Bet,” 2018. CNBC Make It, Kevin O’Leary interview, September 2022. The Hustle data analysis of ten Shark Tank seasons, October 2024.

Communism.

Trump called it “the biggest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, September 11.” JD Vance said it was “something we haven’t seen in the U.S.” Mike Johnson called DSA-backed candidates “self-described, self-identifying Marxists.” Jesse Watters on Fox News said these candidates were “here to steal our money” and “here to steal our country.” Far-right voices called for reviving the 1954 Communist Control Act (which banned the Communist Party) to crack down on Democratic Socialists.

All of them said this in the same week. All of them used the same word. None of them, as far as any documented record shows, were asked to define it (or CAN define it, as far as any documented record shows).

Here’s what set it off. A 29-year-old PhD student named Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term Democratic incumbent in Denver. A 32-year-old named Darializa Avila Chevalier beat the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in New York. DSA-backed candidates won or advanced in five states. The candidates ran on Medicare for All, universal childcare, housing affordability, and higher taxes on the wealthy. Policies that poll between 60 and 80 percent approval across party lines.

The Republican response was to invoke the Soviet Union.

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What Communism Actually Is

Democratic socialism is not communism. This is not a matter of opinion or framing. It is a documented factual distinction that the people using the word this week are fully aware of and deliberately ignoring.

Communism, as defined by Karl Marx and as practiced by the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, involves the elimination of private property, state ownership of the means of production, and the abolition of market economies. It is a specific economic and political system with a documented history.

Democratic socialism, as practiced by the DSA candidates who won this week, involves expanded government programs funded by higher taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. Medicare for All. Universal childcare. Affordable housing. These proposals would operate within a market economy. The United States has 33 million small businesses, a home ownership rate of 65.2%, and roughly 156 million Americans who own publicly traded stocks. A country with that economic profile is about as far from a communist economic model as it is possible to be.

The GOP’s own campaign committee chair, Richard Hudson, acknowledged this week that the communism line might not resonate with all voters, particularly younger people. He said it in the context of explaining that Republicans need to tailor the message to individual districts. He did not say it because he thinks the message is inaccurate, he said it because he knows it isn’t hitting the way it used to.

Beverly Gage, a Yale history professor who has written extensively on Joe McCarthy, said earlier eras of anti-communism politics took hold because there was a large and active Communist Party in the United States and the Soviet Union was the country’s primary geopolitical rival. Neither of those things is true in 2026.

She also noted something specific about Trump’s relationship to this rhetoric: his ties to Roy Cohn, a Trump confidant and mentor who earlier in his career worked directly for Joe McCarthy. The lineage is not metaphorical, but is personal (and documented).

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Kevin Roberts Said McCarthy Was Right

The Heritage Foundation president (earning $953,920 a year to run what is technically a charity) has said publicly that Joe McCarthy was right and the institutions that destroyed him were wrong.

This is not a fringe position inside Heritage’s current leadership. It is the stated view of the man running the organization whose blueprint is governing the United States. Steve Bannon has argued for years that McCarthy was right about communism’s widespread infiltration into the U.S. government.

Coming from a movement who care little about facts or definitions, perhaps they refer to communisim merely as “anything we don’t like”.

What is happening this week is not a spontaneous political reaction to DSA primary wins. It is a fifty-year-old argument getting deployed from a fifty-year-old library the moment new political material appears to require it. Heritage spent decades building the intellectual framework that equates progressive economic policy with communist infiltration. McCarthy said it in the 1950s. Heritage refined it into respectable policy language. Bannon brought it back to the surface. This week, the entire Republican leadership delivered it simultaneously.

The Coordination You Watched In Real Time

Former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair; recruited at 19 through Turning Point USA, a following of over a million on X, now in litigation against Elon Musk’s company over AI-generated deepfakes of her, spent nearly a decade inside the conservative influence operation before leaving publicly at significant personal cost. She has described, with screenshots and documented specifics, how the machine works.

Right-wing influencers access platforms built by GOP operatives where they can view active campaigns and opt in to promote specific messaging. Compensation is structured per click or as a flat fee. The coordination also runs through group chats on X, one of which St. Clair named specifically, called “Fight Fight Fight,” containing the official Trump War Room, members of the administration including White House deputy chief of staff James Blair, and prominent MAGA influencers.

St. Clair estimated that 99 percent of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, with most arrangements locked behind confidentiality agreements designed so that anyone who later wanted to speak publicly about the system would face litigation they couldn’t afford.

There is a Federal Trade Commission loophole that only mandates disclosure for tangible goods. A right-wing influencer can take a sum and a script from a political operative and post it without any hashtag flagging it as an advertisement. The FEC requires disclosure when campaigns pay consulting firms, but once the money moves from firm to individual influencer, no further reporting is required. The audience never learns the post was paid for.

By the time the message reaches a general audience, it has passed through enough accounts to look like independent thought.

Watch what happened this week through that lens. Trump posts. Vance echoes. Johnson echoes. The Fox hosts amplify. The influencer network - most of whom are compensated, per St. Clair’s documented account - picks up the word and runs it across their platforms simultaneously. By Wednesday morning, “communism” was everywhere. By Thursday, people who had never given two thoughts to DSA primary results in New York were repeating the word.

The word is not the point. The word is the delivery mechanism. What it’s delivering is fear, specifically, fear calibrated for an older demographic that came of age during the Cold War and associates the word with an existential threat rather than a policy disagreement.

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Why It Probably Won’t Work This Time

Republican campaign strategists know this, so much so they are actually saying it, which is notable.

Hudson, who is running the House GOP campaign committee, acknowledged the communism line might not resonate in the same way with all voters, particularly younger people. A researcher at GW’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics put it plainly: “Young voters, who I would argue are driving a lot of the electoral energy that we’re seeing, came of age politically in a post-Soviet world. The attacks don’t land in the same way when Donald Trump was politically of age.”

Polling shows that 66% of Democrats have a positive view of socialism, while only 42% view capitalism favorably. Democrats under 50 are dramatically less likely to view capitalism favorably than older Democrats, and that gap has widened since 2010.

The candidates being called communists ran on Medicare for All and universal childcare. Two-thirds of Denverites under 35 view socialism favorably. The district Kiros won is solidly blue. She ran against a 15-term incumbent and won by running on the economic conditions her constituents are actually living in; housing costs, healthcare costs, wage stagnation, and the perception that the institutional Democratic Party has not been fighting hard enough for any of it.

Calling that communism doesn’t make it communism. It makes the people calling it communism look like they either don’t know what communism is, or know perfectly well and are hoping you don’t.

Neither is a good look in 2026.

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What The Escalation Tells You

Ralph Reed (the conservative activist who hosted Trump at a Faith and Freedom Coalition conference last week) acknowledged that Republicans are facing “steep headwinds” this year. He said the DSA wins allow Republicans to present a contrast between “common sense and crazy.”

That framing tells you everything about the strategy and nothing about the substance. When your argument is “they’re crazy,” you have already conceded that you can’t win on the merits. The headwinds Reed acknowledged are real - and so they should be: Medicaid cuts, Social Security threats, the largest increase in the national debt in history paired with the largest cut to public programs in history, a war with Iran, and an administration that has fired 300,000 federal workers and dissolved entire agencies.

Against that backdrop, a 29-year-old running on healthcare and childcare won a congressional primary. The Republican response was to call her a communist.

The coordinated messaging machine deployed the word within hours across every platform simultaneously, through paid and unpaid channels, through official accounts and influencer networks, through Fox News prime time and social media group chats. It was fast, disciplined, and loud.

It was also, for the first time in a long time, audibly afraid.

The machine is loudest when it is most threatened. This week it was very loud.

Sources: Associated Press, “Trump and Republicans return to communist attacks against Democrats ahead of the midterm elections,” July 2, 2026. ABC News, Times Argus, Courthouse News Service — same AP wire. Axios, “GOP reboots the Red Scare as young Democrats embrace socialism,” June 30, 2026. NPR, “Democratic socialist Melat Kiros poised to become first Gen Z woman in Congress,” July 1, 2026. MS NOW, “Democratic socialists are winning,” July 1, 2026. NOTUS, “Democratic Socialists of America Are Seeing Surge in Membership,” July 3, 2026. Decoding Fox News Substack, “The New Red Scare: A Weapon of Mass Distraction,” July 2026. Yahoo News, “Former MAGA Influencer Describes the Exact Platform Where Political Operatives Pay for Posts,” April 2026. Slate, “Trump ballroom: Ashley St. Clair exposes secret group chats for MAGA’s messaging,” April 2026. Zeteo/Mehdi Hasan interview with Ashley St. Clair, May 2026. The Singju Post, Mehdi Unfiltered transcript, May 2026.

Not a political organization, not a lobbying firm and not a PAC. A charity. Giving it the same legal category as Doctors Without Borders, the same tax status as your local food bank and the same classification as the organization your grandmother donates to every Christmas.

Every dollar donated to Heritage is tax-deductible, which means every time a billionaire writes a check to Heritage (and they do, because Heritage is founded by them to advance their interests), the U.S. Treasury (funded by your taxes, my taxes, the taxes of every person whose rights and wages and healthcare Heritage is actively working to eliminate) covers part of the bill.

We are, absolutely infuriatingly, involuntary donors. And we can’t opt out.

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THE NUMBERS

Heritage reported $101 million in revenue in its most recent IRS filing. A lot of money for an organization registered as a charity!

The tax subsidy embedded in that $101 million is not trivial. If even half of Heritage’s donors were in the top federal tax bracket (and let’s be real, most Heritage donors are exceptionally wealthy, corporations or representing the interests of either), the U.S. Treasury forfeited approximately $18.7 million in revenue that would otherwise have been collected and could have funded public schools, infrastructure, healthcare, or any of the other government programs.

The circle jerk here is Heritage advocates for cutting the IRS (the agency that enforces the tax rules Heritage’s donors benefit from most), Heritage advocates for cutting public education spending, Heritage advocates for cutting Medicaid and the tax subsidy that partially funds these advocacy campaigns comes from the same public revenue that would otherwise fund the things Heritage is trying to cut.

The people whose programs are being eliminated are helping to pay for the elimination - by design.

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WHAT “CHARITY” MEANS (LEGALLY)

A 501(c)(3) organization, which is Heritage’s IRS designation, is legally prohibited from engaging in substantial political campaign activity or attempting to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities. The organization must operate primarily for charitable, educational, religious, or scientific purposes.

Heritage’s stated mission is “formulating and promoting conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”

That mission statement describes a political advocacy organization. Heritage has been producing policy papers designed to influence legislation since 1973. It has placed political appointees in every Republican administration since Reagan. Its political arm, Heritage Action for America, co-ordinates voting restriction legislation across battleground states. Its millionaire president has publicly described the organization’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”

The IRS clearly says charities must not participate in political campaign intervention such as public statements of position in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. Heritage gremlin president, Kevin Roberts, has made numerous such statements and the IRS has investigated nothing.

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THE ENFORCEMENT GAP

The IRS’s ability to scrutinize politically active nonprofits was effectively neutered by a 2013 scandal in which the IRS was accused of targeting Tea Party groups during application review, and it severely chilled the agency’s appetite for nonprofit enforcement across the board. Congress then cut the IRS enforcement budget, the staff devoted to nonprofit oversight declined as the number of politically active nonprofits exploded. Shocking.

Heritage’s policy agenda includes further cutting the IRS, meaning an organization that benefits from the IRS’s inability to enforce the rules governing its tax-exempt status is also actively lobbying to make the IRS less capable of enforcing those rules.

The Heritage Foundation, its personnel and its doctrines have infiltrated every branch, every layer, every system in our government.

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WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH THIS INFORMATION

Understanding the tax subsidy is the first step to understanding how Heritage’s funding model works and where its vulnerabilities are. The going-concern audit Heritage received in 2024 flagged substantial doubt about the organization’s ability to continue operating, and suggests their funding model is under stress. Institutional donors follow institutional credibility. When Heritage loses credibility it loses money.

The tax rules that govern Heritage’s charitable status are enforced by the IRS, overseen by Congress, and shaped by the political environment that Congress operates in. Electing members of Congress who will restore IRS enforcement funding and demand nonprofit accountability is one of the most direct levers available. Show up to vote! We hear every election is the “most consequential” of our lifetimes, and over the last decade they certainly have been. The upcoming midterms are, at this given moment, the most consequential election of our lifetime.

The other lever is transparency. Every Heritage donor who gives through a donor-advised fund (and many of them do) is shielded from public disclosure by a system that Heritage has actively lobbied to protect. Donor-advised fund reform legislation, which would require timely disbursement and improved transparency, has been repeatedly blocked by the financial firms that profit from the current system.

Your retirement savings are almost certainly managed by one of those firms.

More to come on that.

The point of sharing this is not to frighten, but to empower. We cannot fight back unless we know what we are up against, and I will keep working to ensure we do.

Sources: Heritage Foundation IRS Form 990. Tax Policy Center. ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. IRS Publication 557. Campaign Legal Center documentation.

As is the through line with almost all devastating leaders on the right, his ties to the Heritage Foundation run deep (and lucrative. For him).

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On February 13, 2021, Mitch McConnell walked onto the Senate floor and delivered one of the most remarkable speeches in the history of that institution.

He said January 6 was “a disgrace.” He said Americans had “beat and bloodied” their own police. He said the mob acted because they had been “fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on earth.” He said there was “no question, none” that Donald Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”

He had voted to acquit him eleven minutes earlier.

Understanding why requires going back not to 2021, or to the Trump presidency, or even to the Obama years. It requires going back to 1974 and tracing fifty years of the most consequential judicial project in American history.

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The Origin: Ford Administration, 1974

McConnell’s judicial education began before most people’s political careers. As a young official in the Ford administration, serving as deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, he worked alongside a group of lawyers whose names would later define the American right’s relationship with the judiciary: Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork, Laurence Silberman.

These were the men whose originalist legal philosophy, the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original meaning rather than evolving standards, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society would spend the next fifty years turning into the dominant framework of the federal bench. McConnell worked with them at the exact moment their philosophy was being formalized, before it had an institutional home.

He has known, for fifty years, exactly what the project was.

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The Reversal: On The Record

In 1970, McConnell said something that almost sounds reasonable and even principled: the Senate should only consider the qualifications of judicial nominees, not their politics.

In October 2019, he appeared at a Federalist Society conference in Kentucky alongside former White House Counsel Don McGahn. He said his earlier view was wrong. He said this very publicly, at a Federalist Society event - the organization that had become the primary vetting arm for conservative judicial nominees, Heritage Foundation’s most important partner in the judicial project, and the institution that had supplied the ideology for every Trump judicial confirmation McConnell was in the process of shepherding through the Senate.

The reversal wasn’t reluctant, nor was it hedged. It was proud. By 2019, McConnell had already confirmed a record 54 appeals court judges in Trump’s first two years, a pace surpassing historical norms, with 200 confirmations achieved faster than any predecessor in the prior 40 years. He knew what he was doing and he said so.

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The Blockade: Manufacturing The Vacancies

Before McConnell could fill the judiciary with Heritage and Federalist Society vetted judges, he needed vacancies. So he manufactured them.

Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, McConnell ran what historians and legal scholars have described as “a disciplined, sustained, at times underhanded campaign to deny the Democratic president the opportunity to appoint federal judges.” The numbers are the story: Obama’s final two years as president saw 18 district court judges and one appeals court judge confirmed, the fewest since Harry Truman. The number of federal judicial vacancies at the end of Obama’s term was more than twice the number at the end of George W. Bush’s term.

McConnell didn’t just slow the process. In a 2019 interview, he credited himself explicitly for the large number of judicial vacancies created in the last two years of Obama’s presidency. He was proud of it.

Then came the Garland blockade.

Within hours of Justice Antonin Scalia passing in February 2016, McConnell issued his statement: the Senate would not consider any Supreme Court nominee Obama put forth. The justification he gave was a historical tradition of not confirming justices in election years. The Brookings Institution subsequently documented that this tradition does not exist. McConnell fabricated the historical justification for denying Garland a vote. He held the seat open for 293 days. Trump won the election. Neil Gorsuch (yet another Federalist Society stooge) was confirmed.

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020 just 46 days before the election, McConnell moved within hours to confirm Amy Coney Barrett (oh, wait… yes, another Federalist Society stoogette). 27 days later, we had a new Supreme Court Justice. The principle he had cited four years earlier was abandoned.

Brookings called it fabricated history, McConnell called it consequential. He was right about that part.

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The Financial Network

The relationship between McConnell and Heritage’s judicial project is more than just ideological and operational, there’s a documented financial node connecting them through Leonard Leo’s network.

Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network (formally known as the Concord Fund) is the dark money organization that spent millions of dollars on advertising to stymie Merrick Garland’s nomination and to boost Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. It raised a record $48.1 million between July 2020 and June 2021, all from donors who remain anonymous.

In its tax filings, the Concord Fund reported giving $9 million to One Nation, the McConnell-aligned dark money group that poured more than $85 million into the 2020 elections and became the largest donor to the Senate Leadership Fund, McConnell’s primary Senate political operation. In the same filing, the Concord Fund gave $1.9 million directly to Heritage Action for America.

Same pot.

McConnell’s Senate operation and Heritage Action were both receiving money from the same Leo-connected dark money network in the same filing period - the period covering the Barrett confirmation and the 2020 election.

This is a documented funding network doing exactly what funding networks are designed to do: move money to aligned institutional actors simultaneously so that everyone with a stake in the same outcome is resourced to pursue it.

McConnell’s Heritage Action lifetime legislative scorecard is 59%. He’s not Heritage’s puppet on policy. He’s Heritage’s delivery mechanism. He delivers the Senate. Heritage and Leo deliver the vetted judges. The Concord Fund resources both. The judiciary gets reshaped. We live with the consequences.

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The Delivery: 234 Judges

When Trump won in 2016, McConnell wrote in his memoir that before he went to bed on election night, he had resolved to make the federal judiciary his personal priority. He and Don McGahn designed a confirmation process specifically built for speed and ideological reliability. Every member of the White House Counsel’s office was a Federalist Society member. The Federalist Society provided the list and McConnell moved them through.

234 Article III federal judges. Three Supreme Court justices. A record 54 appeals court judges in Trump’s first two years. The most consequential reshaping of the federal bench in American history as described by the Reagan Foundation, not critics, as making McConnell “probably more responsible than anyone except perhaps Leonard Leo for reshaping the courts and the judiciary.”

He and Leo. The Senate and the network. Documented, in the Reagan Foundation’s own assessment.

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The Acquittal: The Last Act Of Protection

By February 2021, the judges were confirmed and the legacy was built. What remained was protecting the coalition that had made it all possible.

McConnell prevented the Senate from holding the impeachment trial while Trump was still president. He refused to call an emergency session. Trump left office. The trial began nineteen days after the impeachment. Trump was now a private citizen. McConnell voted that it was constitutionally impermissible to try a former president having first voted, with 44 other Republicans, that the trial itself was unconstitutional before it began.

He then walked to the Senate floor and delivered the prosecution’s closing argument. He said Trump was practically and morally responsible. He said Trump’s supporters had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on earth. He pointed toward criminal prosecution as the appropriate remedy. He said, “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he’s in office.”

The criminal prosecution never came and he acquittal stood. Not only this, but the Justices McConnell shoehorned onto the Supreme Court would later grant Trump complete immunity from prosecuted for “official matters” conducted while in office, which he of course managed to win again in 2024 instead of being banned from running, which he would have been had McConnell’s spine stood tall for but a moment and he worked to convict Trump in the senate.

McConnell didn’t do this for Heritage. He did it for the coalition Heritage’s judicial project had required and that McConnell’s Senate operation had built and maintained. Convicting Trump threatened that coalition. Acquitting Trump, while publicly excoriating him, preserved it while giving McConnell the aesthetic of having said the right thing.

It is the most Mitch McConnell thing Mitch McConnell has ever done.

The Legacy

The six Supreme Court justices shaped by the Heritage/Federalist Society network have since overturned the federal constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs. Eliminated Chevron deference (the forty-year doctrine governing the regulatory state) in Loper Bright. Established presidential immunity from criminal prosecution in Trump v. United States. Weakened the Voting Rights Act across multiple decisions.

These decisions were pending when McConnell voted to acquit. He knew they were coming. The judges who would write them had been confirmed by the Senate he ran, vetted by the network he’d been connected to since 1974, resourced by the dark money operation that funded both his Senate political apparatus and Heritage Action simultaneously.

He said Trump was guilty. He built the escape hatch. He used it.

The project was already complete, he was just protecting the investment.

Sources: Reagan Foundation, “Mitch McConnell and His Presidents,” November 2024. A-Mark Foundation, “How Did Mitch McConnell Shape the Federal Judiciary?” November 2025. Brookings Institution, “McConnell’s fabricated history to justify a 2020 Supreme Court vote.” CREW, “Group behind Trump SCOTUS picks brought in nearly $50 million in secret money,” June 2022. CREW, “Mitch McConnell benefits from corporate cash,” April 2021. CBS News, “McConnell says Trump was ‘practically and morally responsible’ for riot after voting not guilty,” February 2021. Kentucky Law Journal, “McConnell’s Acquittal of Trump,” August 2025. Wikipedia, “Mitch McConnell” and “Second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.” Heritage Action scorecard, McConnell lifetime score. Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, “Project 2025 and the Project to Take Over Our Courts and Our Rights,” October 2024.

Not in those exact words, of course…. In these exact words: “Biological limits are real, but digital potential is infinite. If we starve our data infrastructure of cooling resources just to sustain baseline human comfort, we are actively delaying the birth of a super-intelligence that could solve all of our resource problems in the first place. Sometimes you have to prioritize the intelligence that will save us over the biology that slows us down.”

So this quote may be satire, but the argument I am making remains - we have seen this playbook before. The technology to create a better world exists, but the industry has adopted the Heritage Foundation checklist to make sure we think we are powerless to stop a machine we are being told is inevitable.

Your water, your “baseline human comfort” is standing in the way of his machine(s).

Before we go any further, let’s hammer home this point: this is not a hot take, not a hostile interpretation, not me being uncharitable to a billionaire having a bad week (poor billionaire). This is Jeff Bezos holding a microphone and using his giant platorm explaining his actual position on whether HUMAN BEINGS SHOULD HAVE ACCESS TO WATER OVER HIS IMAGINARY CHAT BOT THAT DOESN’T YET EXIST.

Honestly, we are not mad enough and this is a Free Rage Farm. I have created a container for your rage. Feel free to use it.

If this sounds familiar, it should. We have been here before and this time we are just old enough this time to recognize it.

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This Is Not A New Genre, It’s A Sequel.

For fifty years, the fossil fuel industry ran a specific, documented playbook to protect its profits from the inconvenient fact that its product was cooking the planet. The playbook had six steps, and they were blindingly obvious once you knew to look for them (and we do).

Step one: the industry knows the real cost internally, often decades before the public does. ExxonMobil’s own scientists confirmed the link between fossil fuels and climate change in the 1970s. The company knew it and kept producing anyway. The insurance industry knows it - that’s why hurricane insurance in Florida and fire insurance in Southern California is diabolical. They know.

Step two: fund think tanks to manufacture public doubt about a cost that isn’t, in fact, in doubt. The Heritage Foundation has been one of the most prolific producers of climate denial content in American history, publishing hundreds of reports questioning climate science and opposing every regulatory mechanism that would have priced in the damage.

Step three: reframe the cost as the price of progress, prosperity, or freedom. Tell anyone who will listen your shitty product is necessary and will lead to… Jobs! Innovation! The American way of life! Never, ever, ever say “this will make your air unbreathable and water undrinkable”, even though OF COURSE IT WILL.

Step four: turn the reframe into a bipartisan talking point so opposing it looks extreme rather than reasonable.

Step five: use that manufactured consensus to block regulation at the state and federal level simultaneously, so there’s no jurisdiction left where accountability can take root.

Step six: let the communities nearest the infrastructure absorb the actual damage - the asthma, the contaminated water, the property values, the cancer clusters - while the profits flow somewhere else entirely. Up.

We know this playbook because we are currently living inside its consequences. The communities near refineries and chemical plants who’ve spent decades breathing what the rest of the country exported elsewhere. The coastal towns watching their land disappear into rising water. The kids in Houston’s east side with asthma rates the EPA can map with a precision that should embarrass everyone responsible for it.

AI data centers and the technoligarchary pushing them are running the exact same playbook right in front of our faces, with most of the public not aware it’s happening again. The only difference is that this time, Jeff Bezos skipped step three. He didn’t bother to reframe the cost, he just told you the cost doesn’t matter as much as his project.

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The Numbers He’s Asking You To Ignore

Here’s what “baseline human comfort” actually means in numbers.

By 2030, AI data centers globally are projected to consume 945 terawatt-hours of electricity; enough to triple the power consumption of 650 million people (only 2x the population - cool, cool). Their water use is projected to match the basic annual needs of 1.3 billion people (oh, that’s almost 4x the population). Their land footprint will exceed 14,500 square kilometers, an area roughly twice the size of greater Jakarta. In U.S terms, that’s almost 6,000 square miles. The United States coast-to-coast is about 2,800 miles.

A single large data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water A DAY. Training one large AI model (a single model, before it’s even deployed to the public) can use 700,000 liters of water just for cooling.

This water isn't coming from nowhere. It's coming from the same freshwater systems serving the towns these facilities are built next to. In Fayette County, Georgia, residents started noticing their water pressure dropping last year. An investigation found a 615-acre data center campus, owned by Blackstone, had been drawing from public water through industrial-scale connections, one allegedly installed without the county's knowledge. The state is now in severe to exceptional drought, with wildfires burning in the south and the governor declaring a state of emergency. In Texas, data centers used over 50 billion gallons of water in 2024 alone, and are projected to consume nearly 400 billion gallons a year by 2030, enough to draw down Lake Mead, the country's largest reservoir, by more than 16 feet in a single year. Two-thirds of all data centers built or planned since 2022 sit in water-stressed regions: southern Arizona, the Colorado River Basin, Texas, and a growing list of Southern states already living through severe drought. These are not hypothetical futures, but present-tense realities in American communities that, like the ones near American refineries fifty years ago were never meaningfully consulted before the water started disappearing. Oh, and the communities will also be absorbing the increasing cost of electricity AND the cost of upgrading the power grids which will be required next to every data center built. Every one.

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Guess What? The Alternate Tech Already Exists

This detail is what makes this tragedy a choice…

Water-free cooling technology is not science fiction. It is not five years away. It is operating at hyperscale, right now, in 2026.

Microsoft began deploying zero-water, closed-loop cooling systems in 2024. The results are documented: savings exceeding 33 million gallons of water per facility, per year. Liquid immersion cooling (where servers are submerged in engineered, non-conductive fluid) cuts water use by 90% and cooling costs by 40%. Companies including Crusoe, Iceotope, LiquidStack, and Vertiv are actively building data centers on exactly this model, today.

So why isn’t every data center built this way?

Because evaporative cooling, the water-intensive kind, is cheaper to install. Water-free systems require more capital up front. When the choice is between a marginally higher initial investment and somebody else’s water table, the industry has, by default, been choosing the water table (so screw you, human!). Not because there’s no alternative, but because the alternative costs more and nobody with the power to force the better choice has forced it yet.

We tend to have the solutions. What we don’t have is the infrastructure to change the narrative. The Heritage Foundation and the fossil fuel industry spent fifty years claiming the technology to reduce emissions didn’t exist or wasn’t ready, while not even quietly defunding the research showing it did. The AI industry doesn’t even need to lie about whether the technology exists. They’re simply hoping you don’t ask the question.

We’re asking it now.

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Heritage’s Role: Same Function, New Industry

Heritage Foundation has a Tech Policy Center. Its director, Kara Frederick, has publicly praised federal AI legislation specifically because it “avoids innovation-killing overregulation”, the exact rhetorical move Heritage has deployed against environmental regulation, financial regulation, labor regulation, and consumer protection for fifty straight years. Strike the right balance, they say. Don’t let caution slow down progress, they say. It is the same sentence and it always yields the same result - f*ck you and your right to drinkable water and breathable air when there are marginally more profits to be made by the people who donate to us.

This is what Heritage actually does. It is not a coincidence that the organization providing intellectual cover for fossil fuel deregulation in 1985 is providing intellectual cover for AI data center deregulation in 2026. It is the institution’s entire function: launder a profitable industry’s preference for no accountability into the language of economic competitiveness and national security, then hand that language to politicians who would otherwise have to explain why they’re prioritizing a billionaire’s water bill over a town’s drinking supply.

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The Money Moving Right Now

While Heritage builds the framing, the industry is building the war chest.

The AI industry has assembled a $125 million-plus political spending operation heading into the 2026 midterms. One super PAC alone, Leading the Future, disclosed $70 million in cash on hand entering this year, funded by names you’ll recognize: OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife gave $25 million. Andreessen Horowitz gave $25 million. Joe Lonsdale, Ron Conway, and the AI company Perplexity round out the major donors.

Their stated goal is explicit and documented: block state-level AI regulation in favor of a single, lighter federal framework. Translation - make sure no individual state can protect its own water supply, power grid, or residents if the federal government declines to. This is the AI industry’s version of ALEC’s fifty-year project to draft model legislation and move it through every statehouse simultaneously, except compressed into a single election cycle with nine-figure funding behind it.

The PAC’s first publicly disclosed target was a New York Democrat who supported a state-level AI safety law. Not a partisan villain, a legislator, of either party, who tried to protect their constituents. That is the tell. This was never about left versus right, it is about industry versus everyone else, exactly like the fossil fuel fight always was.

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Why This Time Is Different - Because We Already Know How The Story Ends

It doesn’t have to be this way this time. We are the power they are trying to pay off.

We have already lived through this exact playbook and we are living through its consequences right now. We know what it looks like when an industry funds the doubt before the public catches on. We know what it looks like when a think tank launders self-interest into the language of progress. We know what it looks like when regulation gets blocked at every level simultaneously, while communities with the least political power absorb the damage that follows.

The fossil fuel industry got fifty years of head start because almost nobody recognized the playbook while it was running. The doubt took hold before the science caught up to public consciousness. The think tanks built their credibility before anyone thought to ask who was funding them. By the time the receipts surfaced (Exxon’s internal documents, the leaked donor lists, the coordinated messaging campaigns) the damage was already structural, embedded in the atmosphere, in the water tables, in the asthma rates of an entire generation of kids who grew up near the infrastructure nobody asked them about.

We do not have that excuse this time (and that’s empowering).

We know what Heritage Foundation’s “innovation vs. overregulation” framing actually means because we have watched it deployed against the EPA, against the CFPB, against every protection that ever stood between ordinary people and an industry’s bottom line. We know what it means when a billionaire tells you a resource you depend on is a comfort, not a necessity because we have heard some version of that sentence before, about your wages, your healthcare, your reproductive autonomy, your right to clean air. We know what a manufactured bipartisan consensus looks like, because we watched the AI industry’s first super PAC target a Democrat for the exact thing it will soon use to attack a Republican who steps out of line. The industry doesn’t care about your party, it just wants all of our complicity.

That recognition is the asset we didn’t have in 1973, or 1989, or 2008, or any of the other moments this series has documented where the public found out too late what had already been decided on their behalf.

Jeff Bezos told you in his own words that your water is an acceptable cost. The technology to avoid that cost already exists and is already running in production at companies that simply chose to spend the money. The political infrastructure to block any state or community from saying no is already funded, already organized, and already targeting its first races. Heritage Foundation is already providing the cover story.

None of this is hidden anymore. None of it requires a leaked memo or a whistleblower or fifty years of hindsight to understand. It is happening in public, this month, in his own quoted words, while the money moves through FEC filings anyone can read.

The fossil fuel fight was lost in the dark, before most of us knew there was a fight happening at all. This one is starting in full daylight, and we are the generation that already knows exactly how the lights get turned off.

Use that. It’s the only head start we’re going to get.

Sources: ThePrint, “Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says human water consumption is limiting AI’s potential,” June 19, 2026. UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, “Environmental Cost of AI’s Energy Use,” June 2026. Microsoft zero-water cooling deployment documentation, 2024. Sustainability Magazine and Data Centre Magazine reporting on closed-loop and immersion cooling adoption, 2025-2026. NOTUS, “AI Industry Super PAC Enters Midterm Elections With a $70 Million War Chest,” January 2026. Houston Public Media and Texas Tribune reporting on AI super PAC spending in Texas races, April 2026. Heritage Foundation press release, Tech Policy Center statement on AI legislation. CBS News Chicago, “Data centers for AI use huge amounts of electricity, water,” February 2026. InsideClimate News on ExxonMobil’s internal climate research. DeSmog profile of Heritage Foundation’s climate denial funding.

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This was not an independent commentator’s opinion piece that Heritage happened to share. The author, Jennifer Galardi, is a Senior Policy Analyst for Restoring American Wellness in Heritage’s DeVos Center for Human Flourishing. The publication, the Daily Signal, is Heritage Foundation’s own media outlet, created by Heritage to function as a news organization while actually operating as institutional messaging. Heritage’s own Threads account then promoted the article as if it were independent commentary worth your attention.

While positioned to appear this way, this is not journalism covering a cultural moment, but a think tank publishing its own employee’s opinion through its own media outlet and then distributing it through its own social account, made to look like an organic editorial. Nothing but a closed loop. And it was a lie.

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What The Article Actually Says

Galardi attended Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Conference in San Antonio and concluded that “feminism is dead.” Her argument: women’s “most powerful tool” is their reproductive biology, and when that biology is “devalued, dismissed, or discarded,” women seek fulfillment through “other avenues like career or activism” , implying this is a kind of malfunction rather than a legitimate choice.

She described protesters outside the conference as unattractive, claiming that they “were not unattractive because of their physical characteristics” but because they are “filled with hatred.” She quoted her Heritage colleague Scott Yenor’s description of such women as “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome”, the same phrase Yenor has used in his own published work arguing that women should be discouraged from pursuing careers in medicine, law, and engineering.

Same think tank. Same talking points. Different bylines.

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Where This Sits Institutionally

Because all the right-wing fuckery knits together like a bargain bin ugly Christmas sweater.

Turning Point USA, the organization whose conference inspired this piece, is not a neutral youth group that happened to host an interesting event. TPUSA lists Heritage Foundation as a documented event sponsor. The Bradley Impact Fund (a donor-advised fund that channels conservative megadonor money while obscuring individual donor identity) has given TPUSA more than $23.6 million since 2014, making it one of the organization’s largest funding conduits.

Since founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September 2025, the organization has undergone what analysts describe as a significant ideological shift. A Kirk confidante told the Daily Mail that Groyper ideology - the far-right, antisemitic current associated with Nick Fuentes - has “seeped in and influenced much of TPUSA in recent years.” TPUSA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit programming is explicitly rooted in the Seven Mountains Mandate, a Christian nationalist framework holding that believers should seek dominant influence across government, education, media, and business to reshape culture according to biblical principles.

The Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Atlas, surveying 22,000 adults across all fifty states, found that two-thirds of Americans qualify as skeptics or outright rejecters of Christian nationalism. TPUSA’s current leadership has bet the organization’s future on the ideology most Americans reject. The “RIP Feminism” piece is a press release for that bet.

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Who Funds The Broader Network

Understanding individual articles and individual conferences in isolation misses the structural picture. The same network of donors funding TPUSA also funds a sprawling ecosystem of think tanks and media outlets producing this exact messaging at scale.

Texas oil billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks have built what observers call the most powerful political machine in Texas; a network of think tanks, PACs, media organizations, and nonprofits coordinating to push state and national politics toward explicitly theocratic governance. Texas state Rep. James Talarico has stated plainly: “Every single far-right policy can be tied back to the efforts of Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn.” Peter Montgomery of People for the American Way has noted that it is “hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum” as Dunn and Wilks.

Wilks provided the initial $4.7 million in seed funding for Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire. Dunn and Wilks have funded PragerU, the right-wing media organization producing educational content that challenges climate science and promotes traditionalist gender roles in curricula distributed to American classrooms. Dunn’s Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking directly funded TPUSA in its early years and continues funding the broader network of organizations that supply TPUSA’s speakers and messaging infrastructure.

This is not a coincidence of overlapping interests, it is a documented, funded, coordinated media and political infrastructure applied specifically to reshaping how American women understand their own purpose, value, and place in society - the same model Heritage Foundation pioneered with its own think tank network.

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Why This Matters Beyond One Article

The “RIP Feminism” piece is not significant because of what it says. Heritage and its affiliated network have been saying versions of this for years. It is significant because of what it reveals about the machinery producing it.

A Heritage Foundation employee writes an opinion piece, which runs on Heritage’s own media outlet. It quotes Heritage’s own senior fellow approvingly then it is promoted through Heritage’s own social account. It celebrates a conference funded in part by Heritage and funded substantially by a donor network documented to be pushing explicitly theocratic governance, and it arrives at the exact moment Heritage’s own 2026 policy documents describe the explicit goal of restoring a society with a male breadwinner at the center and women’s reproductive autonomy restricted.

This is culture being manufactured, funded, published, and distributed by the same institutional infrastructure that writes the policy designed to make that manufactured culture into enforceable law. It is absolutely not culture happening organically and Heritage is merely commenting on it.

They didn’t observe feminism dying, they are trying to kill it, and they’re using their own employees, their own media outlet, and their own donor network to write the eulogy in advance.

Now you know whose hand is on the pen.

Sources: The Daily Signal, “RIP Feminism: Reflections From TPUSA’s Women’s Leadership Conference,” June 13, 2026. Heritage Foundation staff page, Jennifer Galardi. Heritage Foundation, Restoring American Wellness initiative page. Texas Tribune and ProPublica reporting on Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, “The Empire Strikes Out.” Katie Couric Media reporting on TPUSA funding. IBTimes investigation into TPUSA donors. Public Religion Research Institute, 2025 American Values Atlas. Wikipedia, Turning Point USA.

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share, raising $75 billion and landing a $1.77 trillion valuation - the largest initial public offering in stock market history, beating Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record by a factor of more than two. By the time markets closed, SpaceX had become the seventh-largest company in America.

Bigger than Berkshire Hathaway. Bigger than Tesla.

Most headlines are going to call this a triumph; a space company becoming one of the most valuable entities on earth. What they’re not covering is the eighteen months of corporate engineering that got it here, and what that engineering reveals about who’s actually exposed if (when) this goes wrong.

So let’s walk through it - three companies, one guy, a lot of moving money.

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Company one: the dead bird

In 2022, Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, a price he immediately regretted and tried to back out of. Within a year, Fidelity (one of the investors who’d put money in alongside him) marked their stake down by 65%. By late 2024, independent estimates put the platform’s value at somewhere around $9 to $10 billion. A company that was worth $44 billion was now worth a fifth of that.

Normally, that’s just a loss. Somebody made a bad bet, the value’s gone, everyone moves on.

That’s not what happened here.

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Company two: the cash incinerator (and CSAM network)

xAI, Musk’s AI company, was burning roughly a billion dollars a month trying to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. It needed capital and it needed a story.

In March 2025, xAI “acquired” X (formerly Twitter) for $33 billion - $45 billion including the $12 billion in debt that came along for the ride. A platform that the market had priced at $9 billion was suddenly worth $33 billion, because Musk’s other company said so.

This is where our eyebrows should go up: when the same person is both the buyer and the seller, an “acquisition” isn’t a market transactionm, it’s a valuation reset that conveniently erases a loss by relocating it onto a different balance sheet.

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Company three: the rocket/holding company

Then in February of this year, SpaceX (a company that posted a lostt of $4.93 billion in 2025) acquired xAI in an all-stock deal worth roughly $250 billion. xAI, the debt, the dead Twitter platform now wearing an AI company’s clothes, all of it, absorbed into SpaceX.

SpaceX’s S-1 filing (the document meant to tell investors what they’re buying) now presents all three businesses as a single entity going back to 2023 and 2024, even though they were independently run companies until six months ago. The growth story investors are reading isn’t SpaceX’s growth story, it’s three different companies’ numbers stitched together into one narrative, retroactively. Not to mention SpaceX is company built off the backs of American tax payers through grants, government contracts and excessive tax breaks.

And Tesla? Tesla shows up 87 times in SpaceX’s IPO filing - odd for a rocket company. Because in January, Tesla, over shareholder objections, after a similar proposal had already been voted down sent $2 billion into xAI. Weeks later, that investment got silently converted into a stake in SpaceX. Tesla’s xAI data centers also bought $697 million in Tesla Megapacks and $131 million in Cybertrucks from…. Tesla. Money moving in a circle, each loop generating a transaction that looks like business activity.

A shareholder lawsuit already alleges Musk used Tesla’s balance sheet to prop up his private companies. The SpaceX absorption of xAI doesn’t resolve that lawsuit. It just adds another layer to the web the lawsuit is about.

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The debt vanishes right on schedule

In the weeks before the IPO, X and xAI moved to pay off $17.5 billion in debt in full, including paying bondholders a premium of 17 cents on the dollar to retire bonds early, bonds that weren’t supposed to be redeemable for another two years.

Where did the money for this come from? Nobody’s saying. Bloomberg reported the source of repayment funds was undisclosed, but the effect is clear: right before the public is asked to buy in, the balance sheet gets a deep clean, the mess gets paid down using money nobody can trace immediately before the moment when investors are looking at that balance sheet to decide whether to participate.

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The 4% trick

The part that actually matters most if you’re trying to understand what you’re looking at…

SpaceX is “worth” $1.77 trillion. But the IPO only sold 555.6 million shares, or about 4.3% of the company. The other 95.7% remains in the hands of existing shareholders (mostly Elon Musk), none of whom sold anything in this offering.

Of that 4.3%, roughly 30% was set aside for retail investors - an unusually generous allocation, well above the typical 5-10%, which sounds great, until you realize what it means in absolute terms: regular people got access to roughly 1.3% of the entire company.

So the price of a $1.77 trillion business was set by the trading of a sliver this small. And because SpaceX forced the SEC to break all sorts of regulation to qualify for inclusion in major stock indexes, index funds (the ones in your 401k) are mechanically required to buy shares to match their benchmarks, regardless of price, regardless of whether the valuation makes any sense. This is not investor confidence, but forced demand hitting an artificially scarce supply.

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Trickle up stock trading.

Meanwhile, Musk personally controls 82% of the voting power and can’t sell a single share for 366 days. Other insiders’ lockups start unwinding in tranches as early as the second earnings report; expected around late July or early August, just weeks from now.

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Who’s actually exposed here

Strip away the rocket-company branding and look at the financial substance: SpaceX is being valued primarily as a Starlink business (genuinely profitable, $11.4 billion in revenue, a real 39% operating margin) that is now carrying an AI division burning $7.72 billion in a single quarter, plus the wreckage of a social media platform, plus an $18 billion debt load that was just hastily restructured using money from an undisclosed source.

The accumulated deficit since founding stands at $41.3 billion. The company posted a net loss of nearly $5 billion last year. And it just became one of the largest companies in America based on the trading of 4% of its stock.

If this valuation holds, Musk will continue to hold the title of the world’s first trillionaire; his combined SpaceX and Tesla stakes already put estimates over $1.1 trillion. If it doesn’t hold, here’s who’s positioned to absorb the fall: not Musk, who’s locked in for a year and has already moved his exposure around twice. Not the early investors and insiders whose lockups start releasing in weeks. It’s whoever bought shares at release at $135. It’s every index fund that was mechanically required to buy in. It’s every retirement account sitting inside one of those funds, whether the person holding it has ever heard of SpaceX or not.

Ponzi schemes don’t collapse because someone discovers the math was wrong. The math is usually fine, right up until the moment new money stops flowing in faster than old money needs to flow out. What this IPO did was guarantee a permanent, structural source of new money - index funds with no discretion, retail investors locked into a narrative, and a 96% slice of the company that insiders can start cashing out of within weeks.

The Heritage Foundation built the architecture. The tech oligarchy is now running the operating system on top of it. And yesterday, they made sure the rest of us are paying the electric bill either way.

Sources: Reuters, NPR, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fortune, Investing.com, Electrek, Teslarati. Full citations in show notes.

This week, House Speaker Mike Johnson went on a Louisiana radio show and confirmed the plan.

“Entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and things like Social Security, they have to be adjusted and fixed. We have a plan to do that next year. It’s critical, because we’re at $40 trillion plus in debt. At some point you get into a hole so deep you can’t climb out of it, so desperate times call for desperate measures.”

They have a plan. They will do it next year. After the midterms.

Never mind that about 25% of that debt was racked up by our barely awake current president - the one Mike Johnson manages to swallow all his morals to protect on a daily basis.

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On The Word “Entitlement”

Before we get to Johnson himself, let’s talk about the language, because the word “entitlement” is doing enormous work in that statement.

Heritage Foundation has been calling Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid “entitlements” for fifty years. It is a deliberate framing choice and one of the most successful pieces of political language engineering in American history. The word implies these are handouts; programs people receive without earning them. Things the government gives you out of generosity that the government can therefore take back.

This is the opposite of how these programs work.

Social Security is funded by a dedicated payroll tax, the Federal Insurance Contributions Act, that you and your employer pay into throughout your entire working life. It has its own trust fund, separate from the general federal budget. It does not contribute to the federal deficit. You earn it and you pay for it. Calling it an entitlement is like calling your own bank account a gift from the bank.

Medicare is similarly funded through a dedicated payroll tax and through premiums that beneficiaries pay directly. You earn it through decades of work and contribution.

Medicaid is different; it is means-tested and funded through general revenue. But it serves the most vulnerable Americans: people with disabilities, elderly people in nursing homes, children in poverty, and pregnant women. Seventy percent of nursing home residents are on Medicaid. The program is not a luxury. For millions of Americans it is the difference between medical care and none.

Johnson called all three of these “entitlements” in the same breath, using Heritage’s fifty-year-old framing, and announced that they “have to be adjusted and fixed.”

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What Has Already Happened

This is not a future threat, they have already started.

In April 2025, Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill. It made the largest single cut to Medicaid in American history. The Congressional Budget Office projected that 4.8 million people would lose Medicaid coverage as a direct result of the bill’s work requirements, paperwork requirements, and eligibility restrictions.

When asked about those 4.8 million people, Johnson said on Meet the Press that they would “choose” to lose their coverage by not meeting the new work requirements. He said: “You’re telling me that you’re going to require the able-bodied, these young men, for example, to only work or volunteer in their community for 20 hours a week. And that’s too cumbersome for them? I’m not buying it.”

The Congressional Budget Office found that many of the people who would lose coverage are not able-bodied young men. They are people with disabilities whose documentation lapses, they are caregivers who cannot document their caregiving as qualifying work and they are people who work but whose employers don’t provide the paperwork the new requirements demand.

Johnson called this “common sense.” 4.8 million people losing healthcare is, to him, a reasonable outcome.

And now he says Social Security is next.

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Who Mike Johnson Is

Johnson’s ascent to the speakership is worth investigating because it did not happen through conventional political ambition. He was the fourth Republican candidate in three weeks of chaos after Matt Gaetz (in an act of spectacular self-destruction that ultimately ended his own congressional career) filed a motion to vacate against Kevin McCarthy. Three higher-profile candidates failed to win enough Republican votes. Johnson emerged as the compromise candidate and he won unanimous Republican support on the fourth ballot in October 2023.

He was not well known nationally. He had not been a prominent legislative figure. What he had was a specific set of credentials that the people running a certain foundation cared enormously about.

Johnson spent nearly a decade (from 2002 to 2010) as a senior attorney and spokesperson for Alliance Defending Freedom. The ADF is the organization that wrote the abortion ban that was the basis for the legal challenge that ultimately led to Dobbs. It is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its work to re-criminalize homosexual activity and its opposition to LGBTQ rights globally. Johnson described homosexuality as “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle” in a 2004 editorial for a Louisiana newspaper while working for ADF.

He was also a member of the Council for National Policy — the secretive organization that The New York Times has described as “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.” CNP members include the leaders of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Bradley Foundation, and the heads of DonorsTrust. Johnson’s membership is documented in CNP directories obtained by the investigative outlet Documented.

He flies a Christian nationalist flag outside his congressional office. He has described abortion as a “holocaust.” He has blamed the fall of Rome on LGBTQ people. He has cited great replacement theory.

Argulably, he is an idiot.

Unquestionably, he is exceptionally unqualified to be the third in line to the presidency of the United States of America.

The New York Times described him as the “most important architect of the Electoral College objections” on January 6, 2021, the legal strategy that attempted to use claims of constitutional infirmity in pandemic-era election rule changes to reject certified results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

As we pull the pieces of this milquetoast puzzel together, it becomes clear Mike Johnson is also a puppet.

When Johnson won the speakership nomination, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who has publicly called Heritage’s role “institutionalizing Trumpism” and who earns $953,920 a year running what is technically a charity called him “my good friend.”

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The Debt Argument That Doesn’t Hold

Johnson’s stated rationale for cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is the national debt. We are at $40 trillion in debt. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

This argument collapses immediately when you apply it to the One Big Beautiful Bill that Johnson championed and that Trump signed. That bill (the same bill that already made the largest Medicaid cut in history) is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to add nearly $5 trillion to the national debt over ten years because of its tax cuts for corporations and high-income earners.

Republicans cut healthcare for 4.8 million people. They added $5 trillion in debt. They are now planning to cut Social Security.

The debt is not the reason, but it is the cover. The reason, documented across fifty years of Heritage Foundation policy papers, personnel operations, and legislative campaigns, is the systematic elimination of the programs that allow ordinary Americans to survive without depending entirely on the private market for healthcare and retirement income.

Heritage has been working toward this for fifty years. Johnson is the Speaker of the House. He says they have a plan.

Mike Johnson is the legislative arm of this operation. When he became Speaker in October 2023, his first personnel decision was the tell: he hired Dan Ziegler as his policy director (a lobbyist whose clients had included Elevance Health, one of the largest private health insurers in America, and several pharmaceutical companies. Eli Lilly's PAC has given Johnson $7,000 in documented contributions since 2018, including $5,000 in March 2024) the same year Johnson championed the One Big Beautiful Bill that cut Medicaid while protecting private insurer profits. The health insurance industry made Johnson one of its top congressional recipients after he became Speaker. Johnson is a documented member of the Council for National Policy, whose membership includes Heritage's leadership, the Federalist Society, and the heads of DonorsTrust. He is now executing Heritage's fifty-year healthcare agenda line by line: cutting public programs, protecting private industry, and planning to do it again next year. The money flows in from the industry, so policy flows out protecting the industry. The Speaker calls it desperate times calling for desperate measures. I call it corruption.

Sources: Moon Griffon Show transcript via Joe.My.God and Daily Kos, June 2026. Congressional Budget Office analysis of One Big Beautiful Bill. NBC News Meet the Press Johnson interview. Congressional Freethought Caucus white paper on Johnson’s Christian Nationalism (January 2024). Documented.net — Johnson and the Council for National Policy. New York Times description of Johnson as “most important architect” of Electoral College objections. SPLC designation of Alliance Defending Freedom. Heritage Foundation statement on Johnson speakership via Kevin Roberts.

The conversation is back because:

• the methods didn’t die when the company did

• we didn’t do enough to protect oursevles after 2016 so it got worse

• oh, and the Heritage Foundation has its sticky fingerprints all over it

Current political campaigns now deploy psychographic profiling three times more granular than what Cambridge Analytica used in 2016. The infrastructure that Cambridge Analytica was prosecuted for exploiting hasn’t been dismantled, in fact, it’s been industrialized.

Political data brokers now legally sell profiles containing 1,847 attributes per voter compared to Cambridge Analytica’s 250. Instead of ending the practice, bad actors mainstreamed it.

That’s alarming enough on its own, but there’s a thread in this story that I want to pull on while I have your undivided attention.

The woman who co-founded Cambridge Analytica still sits on the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees, and Heritage Foundation is currently running your government.

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Who Rebekah Mercer Is

Rebekah Mercer is the daughter of Robert Mercer; a hedge fund billionaire who built his fortune at Renaissance Technologies running quantitative algorithms on financial markets. The Mercer Family Foundation, which Rebekah runs, has funded influential right-wing organizations across the conservative ecosystem for decades.

Politico called her “the most powerful woman in GOP politics” in 2016. That description was accurate then and arguably understates her influence now.

In 2013, the Mercer family became the principal investors in Cambridge Analytica - the London-based data analytics firm that claimed to build detailed psychological profiles of voters and use them to target political messaging with surgical precision. Rebekah sat on Cambridge Analytica’s board alongside sentient bar mat Steve Bannon. Her father invested $15 million to get it off the ground. Rebekah Mercer also invests in Steve Bannon’s far right propoganda website, Breitbart.

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What Cambridge Analytica Actually Did

2016 wan’t coined “The Facebook Election” for nothing. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg actually had a human emotion and was concerned about the damage his platform had done to our elections and our democracy by not safeguarding against the Trump win. How quaint.

Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal data of more than 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent. The mechanism was a personality quiz app that collected not just the data of people who took the quiz but the data of all their Facebook friends - people who had never agreed to share anything. The resulting profiles were used to build psychographic models of voters: their personality traits, emotional vulnerabilities, political persuadability, and the specific messaging most likely to move them.

The firm was paid $5.9 million by the Trump campaign in 2016 for its work.

What the money bought, according to documents published by the Campaign Legal Center, was more than data analysis. Cambridge Analytica functioned as a conduit for illegal coordination between the Trump campaign and a Mercer-backed pro-Trump super PAC called Make America Number 1. In one documented email, a Cambridge Analytica employee confused the firm’s work for Trump with its work for the super PAC. A shared project calendar listed both the Trump campaign and the super PAC as active accounts. The digital ads Cambridge Analytica produced for the super PAC were strikingly consistent with the messaging and themes of the Trump campaign’s own ads.

Campaign finance law prohibits coordination between campaigns and supposedly independent super PACs. The documents suggest Cambridge Analytica was running both simultaneously and not maintaining the firewall the law requires.

Cambridge Analytica was investigated by authorities in both the United States and the United Kingdom. It closed in 2018. Its CEO was suspended. Its data practices were exposed. And the global conversation about data privacy, psychographic manipulation, and the industrialization of political propaganda - all of it traces back to what this company did.

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The Heritage Connection

Rebekah Mercer did not lose her Heritage Foundation board seat when Cambridge Analytica closed.

She currently sits on Heritage’s board of trustees and on Heritage Action’s board simultaneously, one of only five board members on Heritage Action for America, the 501(c)(4) political arm that coordinates voting restriction legislation across battleground states and runs Heritage’s direct political operations.

On the money: the Mercer Family Foundation gave $500,000 directly to Heritage Foundation in 2016 (and in 2014 and 2015), documented in IRS Form 990 filings. Additional Mercer money has flowed to Heritage through DonorsTrust (the dark money conduit that shields donor identity) in amounts that cannot be publicly verified by design.

The Mercer family has also funded the Federalist Society to the and Leonard Leo’s network of judicial advocacy organizations, the pipeline that shaped six of nine Supreme Court justices.

All of this is not a collection of separate political interests that happen to share a donor, this is a unified network - a right wing circle jerk of infulence working to protect the weatlhy from paying their share of taxes, to overturn climate protections and force women back to the dark ages. This network runs the policy blueprint, the judicial pipeline, the data operation, the dark money conduit connected at multiple nodes by the same family money and in several cases by the same people sitting on the same boards.

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What Didn’t End When Cambridge Analytica Closed

The company closed. The methodology continued.

The same psychological architecture that Cambridge Analytica pioneered (identify emotional vulnerabilities, target messaging to those vulnerabilities, suppress turnout among opposition voters while amplifying enthusiasm among base voters) is now standard practice across the political data industry. It is legal, scaled, and it is running in the 2026 election cycle right now.

The data broker that inherited much of Cambridge Analytica’s methodology after the firm’s collapse now legally sells voter profiles containing 1,847 attributes per voter to campaigns that operate without any of the legal scrutiny Cambridge Analytica faced. Because Cambridge Analytica got caught using Facebook data without consent. The current industry simply purchases the data legally from data brokers, from apps, from the digital infrastructure of everyday American life and builds the same profiles without the consent problem.

Cambridge Analytica was prosecuted for the mechanism, not the goal. The goal continues.

The most instructive comparison to what Cambridge Analytica built is what Elon Musk built legally. When Musk purchased Twitter and rebranded it as X, he acquired one of the largest real-time human behavior datasets in history - billions of posts, interactions, emotional responses, and political opinions and then built Grok directly on top of it. The data infrastructure Cambridge Analytica had to steal from Facebook, Musk owns outright. His political action committee, America PAC (through which he spent over $250 million to elect Trump) is under active investigation by Michigan's attorney general for its voter data collection operation in swing states. And Grok itself spread documented false information about ballot deadlines to millions of voters during the 2024 election, with five secretaries of state formally demanding Musk correct it. Cambridge Analytica was prosecuted for accessing data without consent, so Musk built the consent into the terms of service. The acquisition of the “global public square” and its decent into a right wing cesspool was worth every penny of the overinflated $44B price tag.

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Why This Matters Right Now

The reason Cambridge Analytica is back in the collective consciousness is pattern recognition; the slow, uncomfortable realization that the scandal was just a preview.

The woman who co-founded the operation that pioneered psychographic voter manipulation for American politics sits on the board of the organization whose blueprint is currently governing the United States. The methodology her family funded in 2013 has been industrialized across an entire political data industry that operates without meaningful regulation.

Heritage built the policy infrastructure.

Leo built the judicial infrastructure.

Cambridge Analytica built the data infrastructure.

The Mercer family funded all three - directly, through DonorsTrust, and through a board seat that survived the scandal that closed the company.

Understanding Cambridge Analytica as a standalone scandal misses the point entirely. It was never standalone, it was one node in a network that is still operational, still funded, and still sitting on the boards of the organizations running your government.

The scandal is that nothing has stopped it from continuing.

Sources: Campaign Legal Center documented analysis of Cambridge Analytica coordination (campaignlegal.org). Mercer Family Foundation IRS Form 990 filings via SourceWatch (sourcewatch.org). Monitoring Influence (monitoringinfluence.org). Wendy Siegelman reporting on Rebekah Mercer and Heritage Foundation (wendysiegelman.substack.com). DeSmog profile of Rebekah Mercer and Mercer Family Foundation (desmog.com). Cambridge Analytica 2026 analysis of current psychographic profiling industry (cambridgeanalytica.org). CNBC reporting on Mercer DonorsTrust donations.

America PAC voter data investigation: Michigan Attorney General. Grok election misinformation: five secretaries of state letter documented by Brennan Center (brennancenter.org). America PAC FEC filings.

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Not only is it essentially a group of men in arrested development with no critical thinking skills, the Heritage Foundation (the organization whose 900-page blueprint is currently being implemented across the federal government, agency by agency, worker by worker, right by right) is registered with the IRS as a charity.

Heritage is not a political organization, a lobbying firm, or a PAC. Its a charity, in same legal category as Doctors Without Borders. With the same tax status as your local food bank.

Every dollar donated to Heritage is tax-deductible, which means every time a billionaire writes a check to Heritage, the U.S. Treasury (funded by your taxes, my taxes, the taxes of every person whose rights and wages and healthcare Heritage is actively working to eliminate) covers part of the bill.

You are, in the most technical and infuriating sense of the word, an involuntary donor.

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And we’ve talked about the Powell Memo. The $250,000 check. The briefcase test. Nine employees in 1973 who became the governing brain trust of the most powerful country in human history. The six billionaire family networks. The $1.6 billion single donation. Your Fidelity account. The dark money machine. The going-concern audit.

The people who actually benefited. The 2008 crash Heritage helped cause and then denied. The $8 billion extracted annually from single mothers. The unions they broke. The women they targeted specifically.

Trump as the wrecking ball. Three hundred thousand workers. USAID dissolved. A 142-year civil service protection system broken on Day 1. The transaction that was never formalized but was always real.

Six of nine Supreme Court justices. Two hundred and thirty-four lifetime appointments. Chevron dead. Dobbs. Presidential immunity. Voting rights weakened.

The campaign finance violations nobody prosecuted. The Korean intelligence money. The Malaysian government consulting firm. The leaked video. The FEC stonewalling. The IRS doing nothing. The accountability gap as product.

The left’s more money and less power. The five gaps. The honest accounting.

The counter-institution. The six design principles. The twenty-five year horizon. The base Heritage never had and cannot buy.

You’ve seen the full picture now. Assembled in one place. For the first time.

And here is the only question that matters after everything this series has documented:

What the hell do you do about it?

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Where We Are ?

As of May 2026, the Trump administration has initiated or completed approximately 53% of Project 2025’s domestic policy agenda. Two hundred and eighty-three actions in sixteen months.

Heritage president Kevin Roberts unveiled “Heritage 2.0” at the end of 2025 - four new policy cornerstones explicitly designed for post-Trump conservatism, with a stated planning horizon through 2036.

Twenty-thirty-six.

While the machine they built is 53% through implementing the most ambitious right-wing governing agenda in American history, they are simultaneously writing the agenda for the administration after the next one.

That is the discipline we are up against. That is the patience we have to match.

The other 47% of Project 2025 is still coming. The judges already placed will be making decisions for thirty to forty more years. The state-level legislation passed across twenty-two Republican-controlled states will require state legislative majorities to reverse.

None of this is comfortable to sit with. But sitting with it accurately is the prerequisite for responding to it effectively.

So. Here is what we do.

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One: State Legislative Races

This is the single highest-leverage investment most people can make right now.

State legislative races are won and lost on margins of a few hundred votes in districts that haven’t seen serious organizing in years. The people who win those races draw the congressional maps, set the voting rules, confirm the state judges, and build the federal bench. A $50 donation to a competitive state house race in North Carolina or Wisconsin or Michigan in 2026 does more structural work than a $500 donation to a Senate campaign in a state that’s already decided.

Organizations like States Win and Every State Blue are specifically focused on electing progressives to state legislatures, operating on the understanding that the fight for the future of democracy is being waged at the state level.

The State Innovation Exchange needs to be in all fifty states. It is in seven. The gap between seven and fifty is your opportunity.

This is not exciting. State legislative races don’t trend on social media. The candidate probably won’t be on cable news. That’s precisely why they’re underfunded and precisely why your investment there matters more than it does almost anywhere else.

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Two: Organizations Building Long-Term Infrastructure

Most political giving flows toward the next election. Heritage wasn’t built on electoral cycles. It was built on endowments and patient multi-decade investment in the infrastructure that shapes what’s possible before the election happens.

The organizations doing this work on the progressive side are real and underfunded relative to their need.

The American Constitution Society is building the progressive judicial pipeline - the counter to the Federalist Society. It needs to be funded at the scale the Federalist Society is funded. Every dollar to ACS is a dollar toward a federal bench that reflects the values of the people it governs.

SiX needs state directors in all fifty states not seven. The progressive personnel pipeline organizations need to be building the bench for 2029 right now in 2026 so that the next Democratic administration doesn’t spend its first six months figuring out who should run the EPA.

Fund the work that happens between elections because that’s the work Heritage funded. And it’s why Heritage won.

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Three: Show Up Where It’s Local

Heritage’s state operation works because it has people in the room. Local lobbyists. State directors. Advocates who know the legislators by name, who show up at committee hearings, who build the relationships that make model legislation feel like local initiative rather than outside imposition.

The most durable progressive power has always been built the same way.

Tenant unions. Labor organizing. School board campaigns. City council races. County commission seats. These are not consolation prizes. They are, as Heritage has demonstrated for fifty years, the actual foundation of durable political power.

If you have the time, the organizational skill, the local knowledge to show up consistently in one of these arenas, that is worth more to the long-term project than any number of donations to national organizations.

The people who ran for school boards in the 1990s created the political ecosystem that produced the progressive local officials of the 2020s. The people who run for city council in 2026 will create the ecosystem for the generation after that.

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Four: Find Your People

This one doesn’t get said enough in political organizing circles because it sounds soft. It isn’t.

Paul Weyrich co-founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell in 1979, four years before he co-founded ALEC, fourteen years before Heritage Action. He built the community before he built the machine. He understood that sustained political engagement requires belonging somewhere. It requires people who share your analysis and your urgency and who will still be showing up five years from now.

The isolation of watching what this series has documented and feeling like you’re one of the few people who sees the full picture is part of what makes it feel insurmountable. It isn’t insurmountable, but it requires community to sustain the effort that countering it demands.

Find the people in your life and your community who are asking the same questions you’re asking. Build the local infrastructure of trust and shared analysis that makes everything else possible. Share this series with someone who needs to see the full picture. Bring one person into the room who wasn’t there before.

That’s how Heritage built the Moral Majority. That’s how the conservative movement built the coalition that made everything else possible.

Community is not a soft add-on, it is the foundation.

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The Proof That It Works

Before you conclude from the current situation that none of this is possible, look at what happened in 2025.

Democrats secured a trifecta in Virginia. Passed Proposition 50 in California protecting against partisan gerrymandering. Won decisive victories in Pennsylvania. Flipped house districts in South Carolina and Oklahoma that nobody imagined were competitive.

In 2023, Janet Protasiewicz won the Wisconsin Supreme Court by eleven points (in a state Trump had won twice) specifically on abortion rights and democratic norms, specifically driven by women voters and small donors.

These victories happened because people showed up. Not because a celebrity told them to. Not because a well-funded national campaign targeted them. Because someone knocked on a door. Because someone organized a neighborhood. Because the work was done locally by people who showed up consistently.

That is the proof of concept. The energy exists. The question is whether it gets channeled into the institutional work that compounds over time, or whether it gets poured into the next presidential cycle and evaporates when the cycle ends.

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The People Who Have Always Shown Up

Here is the thing that this series has been building toward since Episode 3 when we first named who holds the money, and Episode 4 when we first named who paid the price.

The most activated, most organized, most reliable constituency in the progressive coalition is women. Specifically women of color.

Women turned out at higher rates than men in every election cycle since 1980. Women drove the 2018 blue wave. Women drove the Dobbs backlash in 2022 and 2023. The Women’s March produced the largest single-day protest in American history. The small-donor base of the progressive movement is majority female. The volunteer base is majority female. The organizing infrastructure at the ground level is majority female.

And Heritage’s machine was built specifically to dismantle the protections women depend on. Their own documents say so. Scott Yenor (Heritage’s own senior fellow) said women should be removed from medicine, law, and engineering. Their 2026 documents call for restoring the nuclear family with a male breadwinner at its center. The judicial pipeline they built eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.

They built a machine designed to harm women specifically.

Which means the people with the most at stake in building the counter, with the most documented reason to show up, the most material interest in the outcome, the most proven track record of actually doing it are women.

The counter-institution that can undo what Heritage has built has to be led by them. Governed by them. Designed around what they actually need, not what a donor class decided they should want.

That is not a symbolic statement, but a structural requirement. The governance models that produce better outcomes (Nordic countries, Indigenous community structures, cooperative economic models) are the ones that reflect the communities they serve. The counter-institution reflects the coalition that has been paying the price for fifty-two years.

That coalition is women and we are fucking ready!

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The Only Part of This Story That Isn’t Already Written

We started this series with a $250,000 check in 1973.

We end it in 2026 with 53% of a 900-page plan implemented in sixteen months, three hundred thousand workers gone, entire agencies dissolved, a civil service system a century and a half old broken by executive order on Day 1, and six of nine Supreme Court justices shaped by a network that no American ever voted for.

That is what fifty-two years of patient, disciplined, generationally consistent institutional work produces.

The people who built Heritage are not smarter than you. They did not have better values. They did not have a better understanding of what America is or what it should be. They had a plan. They had patience. They had the discipline to measure success not in election cycles but in decades.

Edwin Feulner spent thirty-six years building Heritage and died in July 2025, just as the agenda he spent his life building reached its peak implementation. He never saw all of it. He built it anyway.

The counter-institution that can undo what Heritage has built and build something better, something that actually serves the people who live here, something led by the communities who have paid the price gets built the same way.

By people who understand they are planting trees whose shade they may never sit in.

By people who measure success not in the next election but in the next generation.

By women who have shown up, election after election, crisis after crisis, march after march and who now build the machine that matches their energy.

Heritage started in 1973. Their agenda is 53% implemented. They are already planning for 2036.

The long con worked because the marks never saw the full picture assembled in one place.

You’ve seen it now.

We’ve seen it.

The rest is up to us.

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That’s Episode 10 of Captured: The Anatomy of a Hostile Takeover. That’s the series.

Ten episodes. Fifty-two years of history. The complete anatomy of how the Heritage Foundation built, funded, and executed a plan to capture the American government and what it’s going to take to build something that fights back.

I want to be straight with you about something. I built this alone. No network, no production budget, no team of researchers in matching blazers. Just me, an economics and public policy background, an Australian upbringing that gave me the outside perspective to see the American system clearly, and a deep conviction that someone needed to put this whole picture together in one place.

You are that someone’s audience. And I am genuinely grateful you’re here.

If this series gave you something - clarity, language, outrage with somewhere to go, the feeling that someone finally assembled the full picture, I have two asks.

First: buy me a coffee. The link is in the show notes. Every coffee funds the next project. And there is a next project. Because the capture doesn’t stop and neither do I.

Second: come join the Progressive Chaos Gremlins Club on Substack. It is exactly what it sounds like. A place for fellow gremlins to unite, scream into the void together, pull it back together, and start reimagining a future built on justice, equality, and a solid dash of matriarchal mayhem. The written episodes live there. The community lives there. And the next phase of this work; the proposals, the counter-institution blueprint, the actionable forward lives there too.

This isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of the part where we build.

The long con worked because we didn’t see it coming.

We see it now.

I’m Claire Armstrong. This is Captured.

Let’s go take that power back.

This episode is different from all of them.

This episode stops diagnosing the problem and starts building the solution.

Not the fantasy version. Not “if only Democrats had more spine” or “if only progressives coordinated better.” The actual structural answer to the actual structural problem this series has documented. What would it take built from scratch, with full knowledge of what Heritage built and why it worked to close the gaps we named in Episode 8?

Before we get there, one thing needs examined: this is not an argument for building a left-wing Heritage Foundation. Heritage’s model has costs that this series has documented in detail. The intellectual dishonesty, the donor capture, the willingness to abandon fifty-year positions under political pressure, the way it traded genuine credibility for proximity to Trump; all of it is a cautionary tale. The goal isn’t a mirror. It’s something better. Something that closes Heritage’s gaps without replicating Heritage’s compromises.

Here’s what that looks like.

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The Context: Heritage Is Already Writing The Next Blueprint

Before we get to design principles, one detail worth naming.

While Heritage is 53% through implementing its current agenda, it is simultaneously already writing the next one.

At Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in late 2025, Kevin Roberts unveiled what he called “Heritage 2.0”; four new policy cornerstones explicitly designed for post-Trump conservatism: The American Family, The Dignity of Work and the Future of Free Enterprise, National Security, and American Heritage and Citizenship.

Roberts was explicit about the timeline: “Whoever the standard-bearers are for conservatism in 2028, 2032, 2036, their policy ideas are going to sound a lot like Trump’s.”

Twenty-thirty-six. Roberts is already planning for 2036.

Roberts also said something else in 2024 that deserves to be taken seriously as the context for everything this episode is about to propose: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

He meant it as a threat. I want you to hear it as a description of what patient, disciplined institutional work can accomplish, and what the counter requires in response. Not a reaction. A revolution of its own. Built with the same patience. The same discipline. The same generational horizon.

Heritage started in 1973. Their full agenda wasn’t implemented until 2025. Fifty-two years.

The counter-institution starts now, and here’s how it’s built.

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Design Principle One: Speed Without Sacrificing Truth

The first thing a counter-institution needs to solve is Heritage’s founding insight — the briefcase test. A policy brief that arrives after the vote has already happened is a historical document, not a political instrument.

What the briefcase test requires is not dumbed-down research. It requires a different kind of organization, one where policy experts and political operatives work in the same building, share the same calendar, and understand that when a legislative window opens, there are hours (not months) to fill it with something usable.

Heritage has this. When the 2020 election results came in, Heritage had model voting restriction legislation ready in weeks. It didn’t write that legislation in response to the moment. It had been developing it for years, waiting for the moment to arrive.

A genuine counter-institution builds the same way. Anticipatory, not reactive. What are the policy fights arriving in the next two years? In the next five? What legislation will be needed after the next major court decision? What executive orders will a future progressive administration want to sign on Day 1?

That work happens now, before the moment arrives. So that when the moment does arrive, the brief is in the briefcase.

The American Constitution Society has done some of this work on the legal side building a network of progressive lawyers and educating its members on the executive branch appointments process. That’s the right instinct, partially executed. The model needs to scale and extend beyond law into every major policy domain.

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Design Principle Two: State First

The second thing a counter-institution needs to get right (and that the progressive ecosystem has gotten wrong for fifty years) is that states are where American policy is made.

ALEC members hold all top leadership positions in seven states where Republicans control both chambers. In 24 of 28 states with Republican legislative majorities, ALEC members hold at least one top leadership position. For fifty years this operation has been running at the state level - moving coordinated conservative legislation through statehouse after statehouse.

The State Innovation Exchange exists and does real work. But it was founded forty years after ALEC. SiX’s own leadership has described it as a “David and Goliath situation.”

A genuine state-first counter-institution has staff in every state. It has model legislation developed across every major policy domain ready to hand to progressive legislators the moment they have a majority, just as ALEC has been doing for fifty years. It treats state legislators not as minor figures in a federal drama but as the primary constituency whose wins and losses determine everything downstream.

The counter-institution doesn’t neglect statehouses because the presidential race is more exciting. It invests in statehouses because that’s where the congressional maps get drawn, where the voting rules get set, and where the next generation of federal elected officials gets built.

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Design Principle Three: The Personnel Database, Built Honestly

The third thing a counter-institution needs is what Heritage has always called its most important lever: a database of people.

Not a pile of resumes. Not a job board. A curated, maintained, actively managed list of people who are trained, vetted, and ready to walk into government positions at every level the moment a progressive administration takes office.

Third Way’s Moderate Talent Pipeline is identifying and recommending candidates for key government and campaign positions, explicitly building what it calls “the bench” for 2026, 2028, and beyond. The Progressive Talent Pipeline has placed more than 40 endorsed candidates in congressional jobs. These are real efforts. They are not unified, not coordinated, and not operating at anything close to Heritage’s scale.

A genuine counter-institution builds this comprehensively from the start. It identifies progressive lawyers in their 30s who could be federal judges in the next Democratic administration. It identifies policy experts in their 20s who should be agency staff in the one after that. It tracks them, supports them, helps them into the right jobs.

And critically (unlike Heritage) it builds this database with genuine diversity as a design requirement, not an afterthought. Heritage’s pipeline has historically produced a federal bench and agency apparatus that looks like its donor class. A counter-institution whose pipeline reflects the actual coalition it serves - racially diverse, economically diverse, geographically diverse, majority female - is not just more just. It’s more politically durable.

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Design Principle Four: Unified Command Without Donor Capture

The fourth design requirement is the hardest one, because it runs directly into the tension at the heart of progressive funding.

Heritage has unified command because it has a narrow donor base with aligned interests. The six billionaire families we documented in Episode 3 want the same basic things. That alignment makes unified command possible.

Progressive donors have divergent interests. The climate donor and the labor donor and the reproductive rights donor don’t necessarily agree on priorities or timelines. The result is a well-funded but incoherent ecosystem where individual organizations do excellent work that doesn’t add up to a coherent power-building strategy.

The Democracy Alliance was founded in 2005 specifically to solve this problem. Twenty years later, the tension between building long-term infrastructure and funding electoral cycles and between organizations closely aligned with the Democratic Party and those operating outside it was never resolved. It was just managed, cycle by cycle.

A genuine counter-institution solves this not by eliminating the tension but by building a governance structure structurally insulated from donor capture. An endowment model, not a grant-dependent model. A board structure where community accountability is built in alongside donor accountability. Explicit rules: you can fund the institution, you cannot direct the research agenda.

Heritage got this wrong in the Trump era. The institutional credibility it spent fifty years building was traded for proximity to power that its own auditors are now flagging as a going-concern risk. A counter-institution learns from that failure before it happens.

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Design Principle Five: Language That Actually Lands

The fifth design requirement is the framing operation built in from the start, not bolted on after the research is done.

Heritage produces language first. The policy comes second. “Death tax” preceded the estate tax repeal campaign. “Right to work” preceded the union-busting legislation. The language was tested, refined, and distributed through the media operation before the legislation was introduced, because Heritage understood that how a policy is named determines whether it can pass.

A counter-institution needs to build this capability, not as a communications department that translates finished research into press releases, but as a core function integrated with the policy work from the beginning. What do we call this? Who does it speak to? What values does it invoke? What does the opposition call it, and how do we preempt that?

This is not manipulation. Heritage’s version was manipulative; “right to work” is a deliberate inversion of what the policy actually does, and Heritage knew it. The counter-institution’s version tells the truth, but tells it in language that connects with how people actually think about their lives, not in the technical vocabulary of policy professionals talking to each other.

Anat Shenker-Osorio has spent fifteen years testing progressive messaging frameworks. George Lakoff has been writing about this for twenty years. The work exists. What doesn’t exist is an institution that makes this work as central as the policy research itself.

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Design Principle Six: Lead From The Constituency

This is the design principle Heritage never had and the one that makes the counter-institution structurally different in kind, not just in ideology.

Heritage’s power structure is almost entirely male. Its donor class is entirely male. Its agenda explicitly targets women’s economic independence, reproductive autonomy, and workforce participation. The counter-institution cannot replicate that structure and claim to serve a different agenda.

The counter-institution’s board majority must be women. Not as a diversity metric. As a structural requirement because the communities most harmed by Heritage’s agenda are predominantly female, and an institution that doesn’t reflect that in its power structure will eventually replicate the same capture it’s trying to fight.

There are documented models for what this looks like in practice. Nordic countries (where women’s political representation has been highest) consistently produce better outcomes on healthcare, education, economic equality, and environmental protection. Not because women are inherently better leaders, but because governance that reflects the full population produces policies that serve the full population. Indigenous governance structures in multiple contexts have demonstrated the durability of consensus-based, community-accountable decision-making over top-down donor-directed models.

The cooperative economic model (where workers and community members hold governance stakes alongside capital holders) has produced businesses and institutions that are more resilient, more equitable, and less prone to the kind of donor capture that is currently destroying Heritage’s credibility.

These are not utopian ideas. They are documented governance models with measurable outcomes. The counter-institution builds from them — not as aspirational values but as operational design requirements.

The single most activated, most organized, most reliable constituency in the progressive coalition is women. They have shown up, election after election, in numbers no amount of billionaire dark money can manufacture. The counter-institution is built to be led by them, accountable to them, and designed to serve what they actually need, not what a donor class decided they should want.

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What The Counter-Institution Actually Is

Put these six design principles together and here is what you have.

A 501(c)(3)/501(c)(4) structure - the same architecture Heritage uses, for the same legal reasons. The (c)(3) does the research. The (c)(4) does the advocacy and lobbying.

Three integrated functions that Heritage has but that no progressive institution has combined under unified command:

Policy research - fast, usable, anticipatory. Briefcase-test documents ready before the opening arrives. Covering every major policy domain at the federal level, matched by equivalent state-level work for every competitive state.

A personnel pipeline - a maintained, actively managed database of progressive people trained and ready for government service at every level. Not a job board. A talent operation. Built with genuine diversity as a design requirement. Expanded explicitly to cover state government as the federal bench-builder it is.

A state-level organizing infrastructure - model legislation ready in every domain, state directors in every competitive state, relationships with progressive legislators as the primary constituency.

Governed by a board that reflects the coalition it serves - majority women, racially diverse, accountable to communities not just donors. Funded by an endowment model that reduces grant-cycle dependency. Explicitly prohibited from the donor capture that turned Heritage’s intellectual credibility into a going-concern audit.

And built with a twenty-five year timeline. Not for this cycle. Not for the next president. For the generation after that.

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The Assets Heritage Never Had

Heritage was built by billionaires, for billionaires. Its power rests on donor money, media infrastructure, and the willingness of politicians to use it as a governing brain trust in exchange for credibility they don’t have to earn themselves.

A counter-institution built on those same foundations would be vulnerable to the same failure modes. Donor capture. Ideological drift. The “going concern” moment when the donors move on.

The progressive coalition has something Heritage has never had. People with genuine stakes in the outcomes.

The five million educators in the NEA and AFT don’t fund their unions because they got a tax cut. The two million SEIU healthcare workers don’t show up at school board meetings because a billionaire told them to. The women who have driven progressive electoral victories in every competitive cycle since 2016 didn’t mobilize because a think tank produced a white paper.

They mobilized because the outcomes are their lives.

This is the asset Heritage cannot buy and cannot replicate. Authentic stakes. Real constituencies with real material interests in the outcome of real policy fights.

A counter-institution genuinely accountable to these constituencies — not just to the donors who fund it — is also more durable. It doesn’t need a billionaire’s going-concern check to keep operating. It has a base. Heritage’s base is a checkbook. That checkbook now has doubts.

The counter-institution’s base is people. People who, as this series has documented, have been paying the price for Heritage’s agenda for fifty-two years.

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The One Thing Heritage Got Right That We Have To Keep

Before we close this episode, one more honest acknowledgment.

Heritage’s founding discipline (the thing that everything else rests on) was patience.

The Powell Memo was written in 1971. Heritage was founded in 1973. The Mandate for Leadership was published in 1980. The Federalist Society was founded in 1982. The first Heritage-vetted Supreme Court justice wasn’t confirmed until the late 1980s. The full conservative legal supermajority wasn’t achieved until 2020. The full Heritage agenda wasn’t implemented until 2025.

Fifty-two years.

And Heritage is already planning for 2036.

The progressive impulse, completely understandable, given what’s happening, is to want results by 2026. By 2028. The urgency is real. The damage is real.

But the lesson of Heritage’s success is also clear: the institutions that change the world for a generation are built on a twenty-five year timeline, not a four-year one. You start now, not because you’ll win in 2028, but because the people who come after you will have something to work with that you didn’t.

The machine Heritage built was built by people who would never live to see all of it completed. Edwin Feulner spent thirty-six years building Heritage and died in July 2025 just as the agenda he spent his life building was reaching its peak implementation.

The counter-institution that can undo what Heritage has built (and build something better in its place) gets built the same way. By people who understand they are planting trees whose shade they may never sit in.

Start now. Build for the generation after yours. Lead from the constituency that has shown up every time.

And come back for the final episode, because the last question this series answers is the only one that actually matters: what do you do, specifically, right now, with the life you have and the time you have?

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That’s Episode 9 of Captured: The Anatomy of a Hostile Takeover.

I want to be straight with you … I’m doing this alone. No network. No production budget. No team of researchers in matching blazers. Just me, a concerning amount of IRS filings, and a deep personal conviction that someone needed to put this whole picture together in one place.

If this episode made you think, made you angry, made you want to flip a table and then immediately register ten people to vote, that’s the goal. And if you want to help keep it going, there are two ways to do that.

First: buy me a coffee. The link is in the show notes. I promise it goes directly toward caffeine and the continued will to live while reading Heritage Foundation tax documents.

Second: come join the Progressive Chaos Gremlins Club on Substack. It is exactly what it sounds like. A place for fellow progressive gremlins to unite, scream into the void together, pull it back together, and start reimagining a future built on justice, equality, and a solid dash of matriarchal mayhem. The written episodes live there. The community lives there. And frankly it’s the most fun corner of the internet I’ve found in a while.

Link is in the show notes. The final episode — Episode 10 — drops Friday. That’s the one where we stop talking about what needs to be built and start talking about what you do right now. Don’t miss it.

I’m Claire Armstrong. This is Captured. See you Friday.

If the right could build this - the think tanks, the judicial pipeline, the dark money infrastructure, the state-level model legislation machine, the personnel database - why hasn’t the left?

It’s the right question and it deserves an honest answer, which means sitting with some uncomfortable facts before we get to the structural gaps. Because part of the honest answer is: the left has built some of this. In some areas, progressive funding dwarfs conservative funding. And the left is still losing.

That gap between money in and outcomes out is the real subject of this episode. Understanding it is the precondition for building anything that works.

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First: Let’s Kill the Myth That the Right Has More Money

The single most persistent misconception in progressive political circles is that the right wins because it has more money. It’s understandable; Heritage’s funders are dramatic, the Koch network is real, the dark money flows are genuinely enormous. But the raw dollar comparison does not favor conservatives.

The Arabella Advisors network (the left’s primary dark money operation) took in close to $3 billion in dark money in the 2022 election cycle alone. In the 2020 cycle, Arabella’s nonprofits took in $2.4 billion; more than the combined fundraising of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. Combined.

George Soros’s Open Society Foundations have committed more than $21 billion to progressive causes since 2000. In 2021 alone, $2.7 billion flowed through the Open Society network. Democrats consistently outraise Republicans in federal elections. In the 2020 presidential cycle, Biden outraised Trump by roughly $1 billion.

And here’s a detail worth noting: in November 2025, Arabella Advisors rebranded to “Sunflower Services.” The reason? The Arabella name had become too politically toxic, too well-known, too associated with dark money operations. The organization built to be the left’s anonymous funding infrastructure became a political liability because it got too visible.

Heritage has been operating under the same name, in the same building, for fifty-two years. The left’s equivalent became so prominent it had to change its name.

So if it’s not money, what is it?

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The Speed Gap

The first structural gap is the one Heritage identified in 1973 and exploited for fifty years: speed.

Heritage’s founding insight (the briefcase test, the one-hour policy paper, the brief that arrives before the vote) was not about intellectual rigor. It was about usability. About getting the right information to the right person at the right moment in a form they could actually deploy.

Progressive think tanks are, as a rule, still operating on the old model. CAP, Brookings, the Urban Institute, the Economic Policy Institute all produce serious, rigorous, heavily footnoted research that takes months to develop and arrives long after the legislative window has closed. The right critique of these institutions is not that they’re wrong. It’s that they’re late.

When Heritage Action decided in 2021 to run its $24 million voting restriction campaign, it had model legislation ready to hand to state legislators within weeks of the 2020 election results. Almost two dozen election bills were introduced by Republican state legislators based directly on Heritage’s model in early 2021. The legislation existed before the political moment arrived.

The progressive response to those bills was a 600-page counterproposal called H.R. 1 that couldn’t get 60 votes in the Senate. The legislation was comprehensive, serious, and well-researched. It was also dead before it arrived.

Speed is not a minor tactical advantage. In legislative politics, timing is often the entire game.

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The State Gap

The second structural gap is the most consequential one — and it gets the least attention in national progressive circles.

ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council, founded the same year as Heritage, by the same Paul Weyrich - is Heritage’s state-level equivalent. It brings together conservative state legislators and corporate representatives to draft model legislation, which member legislators then introduce in their home states.

ALEC members hold all top leadership positions in seven states where Republicans control both chambers. In 24 of the 28 states with Republican legislative majorities, ALEC members hold at least one top leadership position.

For fifty years this operation has been running at the state level — moving coordinated conservative legislation through statehouse after statehouse. Right-to-work laws. Voter ID requirements. Stand-your-ground statutes. Anti-abortion trigger laws sitting dormant, waiting for Dobbs. Environmental preemption legislation blocking cities from setting higher standards than states. All of it drafted centrally, distributed efficiently, introduced locally.

The progressive equivalent - the State Innovation Exchange, or SiX, founded in 2014 - is real and does useful work. But it was founded forty years after ALEC. SiX’s own leadership has described it as a “David and Goliath situation.”

The result of this fifty-year head start is not abstract. Republicans currently control both the legislature and governor’s mansion in 22 states. Democrats control both in 15. That structural advantage at the state level is where gerrymandering happens, where congressional maps are drawn, where federal judges are selected from state benches, where voting rules are set.

The left’s funding advantage in national elections has not translated into state-level power because the state-level infrastructure was never built to match.

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The Personnel Gap

The third gap is the one Heritage’s own architects have described as their most important lever: personnel.

When a new Republican administration takes office, Heritage has a database. Thousands of vetted, trained, ideologically reliable people ready for government jobs at every level: agency heads, deputy secretaries, general counsels, special assistants, policy directors. They know what they believe. They know how to implement it.

CAP has placed people in Democratic administrations. One CAP official emailed the Biden State Department: “you keep taking all our good people.” But CAP’s pipeline runs to a relatively narrow set of senior positions. Heritage’s pipeline runs deeper and wider to agency staff offices, to general counsel positions, to the career-track civil service placements that embed ideologically vetted appointees in permanent positions that persist across administrations.

A Democratic administration can appoint a progressive-aligned EPA administrator. But if the agency’s career staff (the people who actually write the regulations, process the permits, enforce the rules) have been shaped by a decade of Heritage-vetted appointments, the administrator is governing through a system that doesn’t share her priorities.

There is no progressive equivalent to the Heritage personnel database. Not yet.

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The Coordination Gap

The fourth gap is the one that the raw dollar comparisons most obscure: coordination.

Arabella’s $3 billion in the 2022 cycle is real money. But it flows through hundreds of separate organizations with separate donors, separate boards, separate priorities, and separate theories of change. The Sixteen Thirty Fund funds electoral work. The New Venture Fund funds issue advocacy. Various donor-advised funds flow to climate groups, reproductive rights organizations, criminal justice reform organizations, voting rights groups, immigration advocacy groups, labor unions, and on and on.

The money is real. The unified command is not.

Heritage has a president who says publicly that his organization’s goal is to transform the federal government for the next generation. Every paper, every personnel decision, every state-level initiative, every media appearance is in service of that unified goal.

Progressive infrastructure is, by disposition and design, more decentralized. Different donors have different priorities. Different organizations protect their turf. A climate donor won’t fund a labor organization. A reproductive rights donor won’t fund state legislative infrastructure. A criminal justice reform donor won’t fund electoral work.

This is not purely a strategic failure. It reflects genuine values differences on the left about centralization and who gets to set the agenda. Those are real tensions. They are also, at the level of political outcomes, significant liabilities.

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The Framing Gap

The fifth gap is the one George Lakoff has been writing about for twenty years and that progressive institutions have been systematically ignoring for just as long.

Heritage doesn’t just produce policy. It produces language. The “death tax” instead of the estate tax. “Job creators” instead of wealthy shareholders. “Right to work” instead of union-busting legislation. “Election integrity” instead of voter suppression. “School choice” instead of voucher programs that defund public education. “Regulatory relief” instead of the removal of consumer and environmental protections.

Every one of these framings was deliberate, tested, and distributed through Heritage’s media operation. The language arrived in congressional testimony, in op-eds, in talking points handed to Republican members of Congress, in cable news appearances.

The progressive response has been to argue the facts. To publish the data. To explain that “death tax” is technically misleading. To note that “right to work” actually lowers wages. To document that “election integrity” measures are solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist.

All of that is true. None of it lands the way “death tax” lands. Because language works on values and identity first, and facts second. Heritage understood this before most progressive institutions did. Some of them still haven’t fully internalized it.

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The Honest Problem

Here is the part of this episode that requires saying something uncomfortable.

The progressive ecosystem has more money than Heritage. It has more organizational capacity in some areas. It has the labor movement, which Heritage has spent fifty years trying to destroy precisely because it understood how powerful it was. It has demographic trends on its side. It has public opinion on its side on most major policy questions.

And it has still produced the outcome we are currently living in.

Some of that is Heritage’s extraordinary strategic discipline over fifty years. Some of it is structural (the Senate, the Electoral College, gerrymandered state maps) that systematically advantages rural, predominantly white constituencies. Some of it is the judiciary lock-in that Episode 6 documented.

But some of it is self-inflicted. The coordination failure is self-inflicted. The state-level neglect is self-inflicted. The speed gap is self-inflicted. The framing failures are self-inflicted.

The progressive movement has built a better version of what Heritage built in 1973 - the slow, academically serious think tank that Heritage was explicitly founded not to be. And then it built a massive dark money operation that moves money effectively but has no unified theory of change. What it has not built is what Heritage actually is: a unified, fast, state-penetrating, personnel-deploying machine for converting donor money into durable governing power.

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The Gender Gap

Here is the thing that almost nobody in this conversation says plainly.

The most activated, most organized, most reliable constituency in the progressive coalition is women.

Women turned out at higher rates than men in every election cycle since 1980. Women drove the 2018 blue wave. Women drove the Dobbs backlash in 2022 and 2023. In 2023, Janet Protasiewicz won the Wisconsin Supreme Court by 11 points (in a state Trump had won twice) specifically on abortion rights and democratic norms, specifically driven by women voters and small donors. The Women’s March produced the largest single-day protest in American history. In special election after special election since Dobbs, women have shown up in numbers that no amount of dark money can manufacture.

The small donor base of the progressive movement (the people giving $5 and $25 and $50) is majority female. The volunteer base is majority female. The organizing infrastructure, at the ground level, is majority female.

And the institutional infrastructure built to channel that energy into durable power; the think tanks, the dark money networks, the personnel pipelines, the state legislative organizations is still predominantly led by men, designed by men, and governed by men.

Heritage’s power structure is almost entirely male and it serves an agenda that explicitly targets women’s economic independence, reproductive autonomy, and workforce participation. The progressive movement’s institutional power structure doesn’t look much different at the leadership level, even though it claims to serve the opposite agenda.

The most powerful, most mobilized, most proven constituency the progressive movement has is women. The institutions that were supposed to channel that constituency’s energy into structural power were not built to reflect it, are not led by it, and were not designed around what it actually needs.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s a design failure. And it’s the most important thing to fix when building the counter.

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But Here’s What Does Exist

This episode would be dishonest if it ended there.

The labor movement - even weakened - represents millions of organized workers with genuine material stakes in the outcomes of policy fights. The NEA and AFT alone represent more than five million educators. SEIU represents nearly two million healthcare and service workers. These are not donors writing checks. These are people whose daily lives are directly affected by the policies Heritage has spent fifty years shaping.

The demographic coalition that drove Biden’s 2020 victory (young voters, voters of color, college-educated women, urban working-class communities) represents the emerging majority of the American electorate. Heritage’s coalition is aging and shrinking.

And the proof of concept is already there. Wisconsin 2023. The Virginia trifecta in 2025. House districts flipped in South Carolina and Oklahoma. Special elections won in places nobody expected, driven by voters - overwhelmingly women - who showed up because the stakes were their lives.

That energy is real. That base is real. Those are assets Heritage never had and cannot replicate.

But assets are not infrastructure. Anger is not a machine. Motivated voters are not a personnel database. And small-donor energy has, repeatedly, been poured into electoral campaigns that win or lose in a single November rather than into the patient institutional work that moves the country between elections.

The gap is real. It is also closable. But closing it starts with being honest about what it actually is and about who has consistently shown up to close it. Election after election, cycle after cycle, the people most ready to build something different are women.

Next episode: what it actually looks like to build something that reflects that.

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That’s Episode 8 of Captured: The Anatomy of a Hostile Takeover.

I want to be straight with you — I’m doing this alone. No network. No production budget. No team of researchers in matching blazers. Just me, a concerning amount of IRS filings, and a deep personal conviction that someone needed to put this whole picture together in one place.

If this episode made you think, made you angry, made you want to flip a table and then immediately register ten people to vote — that’s the goal. And if you want to help keep it going, there are two ways to do that.

First — buy me a coffee. The link is in the show notes. I promise it goes directly toward caffeine and the continued will to live while reading Heritage Foundation tax documents.

Second — come join the Progressive Chaos Gremlins Club on Substack. It is exactly what it sounds like. A place for fellow progressive gremlins to unite, scream into the void together, pull it back together, and start reimagining a future built on justice, equality, and a solid dash of matriarchal mayhem. The written episodes live there. The community lives there. And frankly it’s the most fun corner of the internet I’ve found in a while.

Link is in the show notes. Episode 9 drops Wednesday. That’s the one where we stop diagnosing the problem and start building the solution. And it’s the most hopeful episode in the series.

I’m Claire Armstrong. This is Captured. See you Wednesday.

This episode is different.

This episode is about the times Heritage and its political arm broke the law - or came close enough that investigators, federal courts, and journalists said so on the record. About the times foreign intelligence money entered the picture. About the enforcement agencies that were supposed to stop it, and what happened when they didn’t.

We’re going to be precise here. These are documented allegations, documented investigations, documented court findings, and documented enforcement failures. Where the legal picture is contested, we’ll say so. The overall picture, when you assemble it, is not contested: Heritage has operated for decades in an accountability vacuum that was not created by accident.

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Violation One: The Campaign Finance Case (2018–present)

In August 2018, Heritage Action for America (the 501(c)(4) political arm Heritage created in 2010) announced plans to spend $2.5 million to back Republican House candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. Heritage Action’s own executive director told donors directly: “Every dollar we raise over our budget we can effectively pour more into these races.”

Under the Federal Election Campaign Act, spending money to influence federal elections triggers a clear legal obligation: disclose your donors. When you spend money to elect candidates, the public has a right to know who paid for it.

Heritage Action didn’t disclose anything.

In October 2018, the Campaign Legal Center filed an administrative complaint with the Federal Election Commission, alleging that Heritage Action violated federal law by failing to disclose the contributors who funded hundreds of thousands of dollars in independent expenditures supporting Republican House candidates.

What happened next is a case study in how enforcement failure becomes permission.

The FEC had 120 days to act. Campaign Legal Center waited more than 850 days - more than two years - for any action. CLC then sued the FEC itself for failing to enforce federal disclosure laws.

A federal court then issued a ruling that should have ended the matter. On March 25, 2022, the district court declared that the FEC had illegally failed to act for more than three years on CLC’s credible, supported allegations and ordered the FEC to act within 30 days.

The FEC missed that deadline. A court found the FEC had again failed to comply with the law which triggered CLC’s right to sue Heritage Action directly. CLC filed suit against Heritage Action on May 5, 2022.

The FEC then quietly voted (without making that vote public) to dismiss the original complaint. Heritage Action’s lawyers argued this secret vote satisfied the legal precondition for the citizen suit. The appeals court agreed.

As of February 2025, now more than six years since the original complaint, Campaign Legal Center filed yet another notice of appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court, after a district court ruled the FEC had properly conformed by voting to dismiss.

Six years. Three separate court phases. Multiple court orders declaring the FEC acted contrary to law. Heritage Action has still never disclosed a single donor connected to its 2018 election spending.

The voters who were targeted by those ads never learned who paid for them. The accountability mechanism failed at every step. And Heritage Action kept its dark money secret.

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Violation Two: The Foreign Intelligence Money

In the autumn of 1988, members of the South Korean National Assembly obtained a document. The document described a covert transfer of funds from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (the intelligence service of the South Korean government) to an American institution. The amount: $2.2 million. The recipient: the Heritage Foundation. The timing: the early 1980s, when Heritage was positioning itself as Reagan’s governing brain trust and producing policy on U.S.-Korea relations.

If that money came directly from a foreign intelligence agency, Heritage would have been legally required to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act; one of the most serious legal obligations an American organization can face, carrying criminal penalties.

Heritage denied the allegation. What they said instead was that the donation came from the Federation of Korean Industries “at the encouragement of the KCIA.”

Read that distinction carefully. They didn’t deny that Korean intelligence was directing the money flow. They said the money moved through a private industry group first. The semantic distance between “money from a foreign intelligence agency” and “money from a private industry group at the direction of a foreign intelligence agency” is not as large as Heritage’s denial implies.

Heritage never registered as a foreign agent. No federal investigation was ever opened.

Then Heritage created an Asian Studies Center. The center raised more than $13 million over the next decade and a half - almost all of it from South Korean, Taiwanese, and other Asian government-connected foundations and corporations. Heritage also acknowledged a $400,000 grant from Samsung and almost $1 million over three years from the Korea Foundation - which serves as a direct conduit for South Korean government money.

The pattern of foreign government money, Asian Studies programming, and policy influence on U.S.-Korea relations was documented by multiple journalists. No federal investigation was ever opened.

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Violation Three: The Malaysia Affair

In 2001, Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner traveled to Malaysia with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and other Republican members of Congress. The trip was officially sponsored by Heritage.

At around the same time, a for-profit consulting firm called Belle Haven Consultants was co-founded by Feulner and Heritage’s Asia policy chief. Belle Haven operated out of the same Hong Kong office suite as Heritage’s Asia operations. Belle Haven began representing Malaysian business interests. Belle Haven hired Alexander Strategy Group (a Republican lobbying firm run by a former chief of staff to Tom DeLay) to help represent its Malaysian clients. Feulner’s wife held paid roles as both a senior adviser to Belle Haven and a paid consultant at Alexander Strategy Group.

Documents filed with the U.S. Justice Department showed Belle Haven paid Alexander Strategy Group at least $620,000 in fees originating with Malaysian business interests. By the end of 2004, Belle Haven, now representing the Malaysian government directly, signed a contract for $840,000 over ten months.

During precisely this same period, Heritage’s policy publications shifted their tone on Malaysia. The authoritarian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad who had jailed political opponents and made repeated antisemitic public remarks, suddenly received considerably more favorable treatment in Heritage’s coverage.

The Washington Post reported that experts said the relationship “could pose a problem for Heritage’s status as a nonprofit group.” A tax law expert said Feulner was “on the edge” legally.

The IRS never investigated. The Justice Department never investigated. Heritage denied any conflict of interest.

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Violation Four: The Voting Restriction Coordination

In April 2021, Jessica Anderson (the executive director of Heritage Action) stood in front of a room of Republican donors at a private conference in Arizona. She did not know she was being recorded.

Anderson told the crowd that Heritage Action had successfully engineered an “echo chamber” among political groups and Republican lawmakers, hiring local lobbyists and using, in her words, “a sentinel on our behalf to give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.” She described giving conservative groups “marching orders for the week ahead” through regular coordination calls. “All so we’re singing from the same song sheet,” she said. About Iowa, where Heritage had quietly piloted its strategy: “We did it quickly and we did it quietly.”

The internal plan obtained by the investigative outlet Documented and shared with the New York Times showed Heritage Action planned to spend $24 million over two years in eight states - Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin - to pass restrictive voting laws. The strategy included hiring state lobbyists in key states, mobilizing state-based activists, and running television and digital media campaigns.

Almost two dozen election bills introduced by Republican state legislators in early 2021 were based directly on Heritage letters and reports.

Here is the legal issue. Heritage Action is a 501(c)(4), meaning it can engage in political activity, but it cannot coordinate that activity with a political party. When Anderson described working with Republican state legislators to draft model legislation designed to shift electoral outcomes in battleground states, explicitly to “right the wrongs of November”, she was describing exactly the kind of coordination between an ostensibly independent organization and a political party that campaign finance law prohibits.

There’s something else worth naming here. Those eight targeted states (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, Wisconsin) are the most competitive electorates in the country. They are also states where women voters have consistently provided winning margins for Democratic candidates. Women vote at higher rates than men. Any strategy explicitly designed to shrink the electorate in those states is not a gender-neutral operation. It is a strategy that disproportionately targets the constituency most likely to vote against Heritage’s agenda.

No federal investigation was opened. No charges were filed. The laws passed. In Iowa, Georgia, Arizona, and Florida, Heritage Action’s model legislation became law.

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The Enforcement Collapse

Assembled together, what these four cases reveal is not a series of separate incidents but a single systemic pattern: Heritage and its network operate in an accountability vacuum that was not created by accident.

The Campaign Legal Center’s own review found that dysfunction at both the FEC and the IRS, combined with congressional budget cuts and staff attrition, has allowed dark money groups to operate with total impunity, even when they are plainly breaking the law.

The FEC is structurally deadlocked by design. Six commissioners. Three from each party. Any serious enforcement requires bipartisan agreement. Any organization that understands this structure - and Heritage absolutely does - knows that enforcement against Republican-aligned organizations requires Republican commissioners to vote against their own allies. They don’t. The FEC sat on Heritage Action’s 2018 complaint for 850 days. When ordered by a federal court to act, it missed the deadline. When ordered again, it voted to quietly dismiss. Six years later the case is still in appeals.

The IRS enforcement division was effectively neutered by a 2013 scandal in which the IRS was accused of scrutinizing Tea Party groups during application review which severely restricted the agency’s ability to police political nonprofits across the board. Congress used the scandal to cut IRS enforcement budgets. The number of employees devoted to nonprofit oversight declined precisely as the number of politically active dark money groups exploded.

Heritage president Kevin Roberts has publicly called Heritage’s role “institutionalizing Trumpism,” said Joe McCarthy was right, called for a conservative “counter-revolution,” and publicly stated he didn’t believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The IRS defines political campaign intervention as public statements of position in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. Under a straightforward reading of that definition, Roberts’s own statements would qualify for investigation. The IRS has done nothing.

Now let’s name something plainly that almost nobody says.

The FEC is structurally controlled by men. The IRS enforcement leadership is predominantly male. The Department of Justice has never investigated Heritage’s foreign money. The organizations they are protecting (Heritage Foundation, Heritage Action) are led by men and funded entirely by men. The laws being selectively enforced - campaign finance laws, foreign agent registration requirements, nonprofit political activity rules - were designed to protect the democratic process from exactly this kind of capture.

The voters most directly harmed by the voting restriction coordination Heritage Action ran are disproportionately women. The reproductive rights eliminated by the judicial pipeline Heritage helped build (documented in Episode 6) affect only women. The economic protections stripped by Heritage’s agenda (documented in Episode 4) fell hardest on women.

The accountability gap doesn’t just protect Heritage from legal consequences. It protects a male-dominated power structure from accountability to the majority of the country it governs.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s the architecture.

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Why It Matters That Nobody Was Prosecuted

There’s a version of this episode that ends with the observation that none of this was proven in court, and therefore none of it constitutes established guilt. That’s technically true and entirely beside the point.

The story isn’t that Heritage broke the law and got away with it, though the circumstantial case for at least some of that is strong. The story is that the accountability mechanisms, the FEC, the IRS, the Justice Department, the Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement are so thoroughly captured, defunded, deadlocked, or chilled that an organization with Heritage’s resources and connections never faces serious scrutiny.

The rules exist. The violations are documented by investigative journalists, court filings, leaked video, and congressional testimony. The enforcement never comes.

That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the system Heritage and its allies have spent fifty years building. When your organization’s policy agenda includes defunding the IRS, appointing commissioners who won’t enforce campaign finance laws, and cutting enforcement budgets, you’ve also built the conditions under which your own violations go uninvestigated.

The accountability gap is the Heritage product.

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Next episode: You’ve now seen the complete architecture … the money, the machine, the wrecking ball, the courts, and the violations nobody prosecuted. The question everyone asks at this point is: why doesn’t the left have anything like this? The answer is more honest (and more uncomfortable) than most people on either side want to engage with.

That’s Episode 7 of Captured: The Anatomy of a Hostile Takeover.

I want to be straight with you — I’m doing this alone. No network. No production budget. No team of researchers in matching blazers. Just me, a concerning amount of IRS filings, and a deep personal conviction that someone needed to put this whole picture together in one place.

If this episode made you think, made you angry, made you want to flip a table and then immediately register ten people to vote — that’s the goal. And if you want to help keep it going, there are two ways to do that.

First — buy me a coffee. The link is in the show notes. I promise it goes directly toward caffeine and the continued will to live while reading Heritage Foundation tax documents.

Second — come join the Progressive Chaos Gremlins Club on Substack. It is exactly what it sounds like. A place for fellow progressive gremlins to unite, scream into the void together, pull it back together, and start reimagining a future built on justice, equality, and a solid dash of matriarchal mayhem. The written episodes live there. The community lives there. And frankly it’s the most fun corner of the internet I’ve found in a while.

Link is in the show notes. Episode 8 drops Friday. Episode 8 is the one where I tell some uncomfortable truths about the left’s own failures. It is not a comfortable episode. But it is a necessary one.

I’m Claire Armstrong. This is Captured. See you Friday.

Agencies can be refunded. Regulations can be rewritten. Executive orders can be rescinded (Biden reversed Schedule F on his first day in 2021, and Trump reinstated it on his first day in 2025). The pendulum swings. The back and forth is maddening and exhausting. But it’s recoverable.

Except for one thing.

The judges.

Once a federal judge is confirmed, they serve for life. Not four years. Not eight years. Life. No election can remove them. No future president can fire them. No popular majority can vote them out. They interpret the laws. They determine what the Constitution means. They decide which regulations are valid and which aren’t. They rule on which executive actions are lawful and which exceed presidential authority.

And for forty years, the Heritage Foundation and its partner organization the Federalist Society built a machine specifically designed to fill those lifetime seats with people who shared their worldview.

That machine has now succeeded beyond anything its founders imagined.

And its achievements cannot be voted away.

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The Beginning: Two Law Students and a Problem

In 1982, two Yale Law students were frustrated. Antonin Scalia was their faculty advisor. The Federalist Society was founded that year; a club, initially, for conservative and libertarian law students who felt isolated on campuses that skewed heavily progressive.

The problem they were solving was the same problem Heritage was founded to solve, applied to the legal system specifically: the conservative movement had electoral victories, but the people who actually interpreted and applied the law came almost entirely from institutions - law schools, legal academia, the bar establishment - that were culturally progressive.

You could elect Reagan. You could pass his tax cuts. But when those policies were challenged in court, the judges who evaluated them came from a legal culture that didn’t share Reagan’s philosophy. And they served for life.

The Federalist Society’s solution was generational: build a parallel legal culture. Create a network of conservative and libertarian law students, law professors, and lawyers. Develop the intellectual frameworks (originalism, textualism) that would provide a coherent conservative legal philosophy. Identify the most talented young lawyers in this network. Track them. Support their careers. And when Republican presidents came to power, be ready to hand them a list.

From its founding as a campus club, the Federalist Society grew into what is now described as the most influential legal organization in the United States, capable of dramatically redefining American jurisprudence for decades to come.

And in recent years, Leonard Leo has been funneling dark money directly into law schools themselves, not just placing judges, but reshaping who becomes a lawyer eligible to become a judge. The pipeline that feeds the pipeline.

It took forty years. But it worked.

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The Man in the Middle: Leonard Leo

Nobody in American history who was never elected to anything has had more influence over the federal judiciary than Leonard Leo.

Leo spent decades as the vice president of the Federalist Society, running what amounted to a judicial staffing operation for Republican presidents. He wasn’t just identifying candidates, he was cultivating them, building their careers, tracking their records, ensuring their ideological reliability, and then working the phones with White House counsel and Senate leadership to get them confirmed.

At age 25, Leo helped with Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Thomas is a godfather to one of Leo’s daughters. For decades, Leo organized events and donor meetings with Thomas and Samuel Alito; not professional courtesy calls but sustained personal relationships that put Leo at the center of the conservative legal world’s social fabric as well as its institutional one.

Leo drew up the lists of potential justices that Donald Trump released during the 2016 campaign. He advised Trump on the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Before that, he had helped pick or confirm the court’s three other conservative justices: Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito.

Six of nine Supreme Court justices. Shaped, in various ways, by one man who never held elected office, whose name most Americans couldn’t have told you until recently, and who Justice Clarence Thomas once jokingly called “the third most powerful person in the world.”

At least five of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices are current or former Federalist Society members.

And that’s just the Supreme Court. The larger story is the lower courts, where almost all federal law actually gets made in practice.

In Trump’s first term alone, he appointed one-third of the Supreme Court’s nine justices, about 30 percent of the powerful U.S. appellate court seats, and about a quarter of U.S. district court seats - 234 federal judges in total. On average, his appointees were younger than those of his predecessors, meaning the lifetime appointees from Trump’s first term will be serving long after he leaves his second term.

Nearly 90 percent of Trump’s judicial nominees were affiliated with the Federalist Society, ensuring the nominations went to people who had been screened for ideological reliability.

Two hundred and thirty-four federal judges. A third of the Supreme Court. A third of the appellate courts. All with lifetime tenure. All selected through a vetting process run by organizations whose connection to Heritage and the broader conservative donor network we’ve documented in detail across this series.

That’s the guarantee. That’s the lock.

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The Doctrine That Changed Everything

In June 2024, the six-justice conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court did something that had been on Heritage and the Federalist Society’s wish list for decades.

They killed Chevron deference.

Chevron was a 1984 doctrine (ironically, born from a Reagan-era case) that said when federal laws are ambiguous, courts should defer to the relevant agency’s interpretation. The logic was sensible: the EPA understands environmental science better than federal judges. The FDA understands pharmaceutical regulation better than federal judges. When a statute is unclear, the expert agency should fill in the gaps.

For forty years, this principle undergirded the entire regulatory state. The Chevron doctrine had been cited more than 18,000 times across federal court decisions. Agencies built many of their rules relying on Chevron deference.

Conservative legal theorists had despised it for just as long. If agencies can interpret their own authority, they can expand their own authority. The EPA can regulate more. The CFPB can do more. The Department of Labor can do more. The whole administrative state - everything Heritage wanted to shrink - ran on the fuel of Chevron deference.

On June 28, 2024, in a 6-3 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court overturned it. The decision signals a new era for the administrative state, marked by a hobbled executive, an empowered judiciary, and a Congress that must now more explicitly delegate any authority left to federal agencies.

In plain language: the Supreme Court gave itself and the entire federal judiciary the power to override any agency’s interpretation of any ambiguous law. The FDA’s expertise in drug safety is no longer sufficient to defend its own regulations. The EPA’s scientific judgment on climate pollution can now be second-guessed by judges who spent their careers in corporate law firms. The NLRB’s understanding of labor relations can be overridden by a district court in Texas that never handled a labor case.

A Stanford environmental law expert noted that the decision will make agencies “less willing to color outside the lines of older statutes to address modern problems; precisely the effect that conservative commentators intended.”

Justice Kagan’s dissent put it plainly: the majority “gives itself exclusive power over every open issue no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden involving the meaning of regulatory law.”

Heritage had been arguing for this outcome for decades. The judges who delivered it were placed on the Court through the pipeline Heritage and the Federalist Society built over forty years.

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What Lifetime Tenure Actually Controls

Let’s be specific about what this court has already done and will continue to do.

They eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, decided June 2022 by the same six-justice majority, overturned Roe v. Wade after fifty years. The decision was written by Samuel Alito, a Federalist Society member whose nomination Leo helped engineer. The Heritage Foundation celebrated it immediately, calling on state lawmakers to “seize the new opportunities.”

Let’s say plainly what this means in the context of everything this series has documented. The same network of men - Leonard Leo, Heritage’s donor class, the Federalist Society that built the judicial pipeline to kill regulatory oversight for fossil fuel companies also built the judicial pipeline that eliminated the constitutional protection for women’s bodily autonomy. These are not separate agendas running on separate tracks. They are the same agenda. Remove democratic accountability from decisions about markets and bodies simultaneously. Place both in the hands of unelected judges with lifetime tenure who answer to no electorate.

The Dobbs decision was not a surprise to anyone inside Heritage. It was a planned outcome of a forty-year project. Heritage had been building toward it since Paul Weyrich co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979. The judicial pipeline was the mechanism. The six-justice majority was the product. And the women who lost a constitutional right they had held for fifty years are living in the consequence of decisions made by people they never voted for, funded by donors whose names they may never know.

They also established presidential immunity: Trump v. United States, decided July 2024, granted the president substantial immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. The same six-justice majority. The decision will define the limits of presidential accountability for every future president, for decades. Combined with Schedule F’s gutting of the civil service and the dismantlement of inspectors general across agencies, it creates conditions for executive power that the founders of the civil service system in 1883 could not have imagined.

They weakened the Voting Rights Act: in multiple decisions, removing key provisions that allowed the federal government to preemptively review voting law changes in states with histories of discrimination. The same Heritage Action that drafted model voting restriction legislation across eight battleground states was working alongside a Supreme Court that was simultaneously removing the federal oversight mechanism designed to prevent exactly that.

These decisions will still be governing American life when the last person who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 is gone.

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The Irony That Splits the Machine

Here is the part of this story that nobody predicted (and that reveals something important about where we are).

The machine Heritage and Leo built was designed to serve a conservative ideology. But Trump isn’t really an ideologue. He’s a transactionalist. And in his second term, when the judges he appointed started ruling against his tariff policies and blocking his executive orders, he turned on them.

In May 2025, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that Trump had overstepped his executive authority when he imposed sweeping global tariffs. One of the three judges had been appointed by Trump himself in 2017, in consultation with the Federalist Society.

Trump called Leonard Leo a “sleazebag” and “a bad person who probably hates America.” He declared that he is “disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations.” His deputy White House chief of staff told CNN that Trump is no longer using the Federalist Society to screen candidates for the bench.

The fracture is real. But don’t let it obscure what matters most.

The judges are already there. Whether Trump likes Leo or not, whether Heritage keeps its policy credibility or not, six of nine Supreme Court justices were shaped by this network. More than 234 lower federal court judges, many of them in their 40s and 50s, will be sitting on the bench for the next thirty to forty years.

The machine has already produced its output. The output has lifetime tenure. And the fracture between Trump and the network that built it changes nothing about what that network has already built.

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The Long Game, Finally Won

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, speaking at the Federalist Society’s 2018 annual gala, praised his own work and that of the Federalist Society in “transforming the judiciary for as long into the future as we can.”

For as long into the future as we can. Not for this administration. Not for this generation. As long as we can.

This is the fifty-year vision finally achieved. In 1971, Lewis Powell wrote that the judiciary was “the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.” In 1973, Heritage was founded with that insight as foundational. The Federalist Society was founded nine years later with the same premise applied specifically to law. For forty years, the network built the pipeline — the law schools, the clerkships, the career tracks, the vetting processes, the confirmation operations.

And now: six of nine Supreme Court justices are Federalist Society members. More than 234 lower court judges hold lifetime seats. Chevron deference is dead. Abortion rights are gone. Presidential immunity is established. The regulatory state has been judicially hobbled in ways that will outlast every election for the foreseeable future.

The Heritage Foundation helped engineer all of this. Not with votes. Not with a majority of public opinion, polls consistently show the Supreme Court’s decisions on abortion, gun rights, and voting restrictions are unpopular with most Americans. But with a forty-year project, extraordinary amounts of money, and the patient, disciplined understanding that democracy runs on institutions and if you can capture the institutions, the democracy follows.

The judges are in. The pipeline is built. The work is done.

And it doesn’t matter who wins in 2028.

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Next episode: They built it. They funded it. They ran it through Trump. They locked it into the courts. And along the way, they broke the law. Or came close enough that federal courts said so. Next: the receipts. The documented violations, the foreign money, and the enforcement collapse that made all of it possible.

That’s Episode 6 of Captured: The Anatomy of a Hostile Takeover.

I want to be straight with you — I’m doing this alone. No network. No production budget. No team of researchers in matching blazers. Just me, a concerning amount of IRS filings, and a deep personal conviction that someone needed to put this whole picture together in one place.

If this episode made you think, made you angry, made you want to flip a table and then immediately register ten people to vote — that’s the goal. And if you want to help keep it going, there are two ways to do that.

First — buy me a coffee. The link is in the show notes. I promise it goes directly toward caffeine and the continued will to live while reading Heritage Foundation tax documents.

Second — come join the Progressive Chaos Gremlins Club on Substack. It is exactly what it sounds like. A place for fellow progressive gremlins to unite, scream into the void together, pull it back together, and start reimagining a future built on justice, equality, and a solid dash of matriarchal mayhem. The written episodes live there. The community lives there. And frankly it’s the most fun corner of the internet I’ve found in a while.

Link is in the show notes. Episode 7 drops Wednesday. That’s the one where we go through every documented legal violation, every foreign intelligence dollar, and every enforcement failure. It is the angriest episode in the series. For good reason.

I’m Claire Armstrong. This is Captured. See you Wednesday.

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Heritage critiqued him for favoring “Big Government” and not being nearly conservative enough. They all but pulled the trigger on an endorsement of Ted Cruz in the primaries. Heritage came out strongly against Trump’s tariff proposals and their policy analysts regarded him as an embarrassment; a real estate developer from Queens who had donated to Democrats, supported single-payer healthcare at various points, and had no coherent governing philosophy whatsoever.

He was not their guy and was never supposed to be the vehicle.

And then he won … and everything changed.

Not because Heritage changed what it believed. But because Heritage did something far more calculating: it looked at what Trump could do that no conventional Republican president ever would, and decided that was worth every ideological compromise required to get there.

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The Calculation

The decision Heritage made between November 2016 and January 2017 was one of the coldest strategic calculations in modern American political history.

Heritage’s strategic pivot was a cold-blooded institutional decision. Trump had done something Heritage couldn’t do on its own: he had cracked open the electoral map in ways that conventional conservatives couldn’t. He brought to the polls millions of non-college white voters who had been dormant, who had essentially sat out elections since Ross Perot. He won Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, states that had been structurally Democratic for a generation.

Heritage needed those votes. Without them, none of their policy agenda gets implemented. After 2012, when Mitt Romney lost despite running what Heritage types considered an ideologically correct campaign, the conservative establishment had to confront a brutal reality: their preferred coalition couldn’t win anymore.

Trump solved the electoral math problem. So Heritage made a deal.

The assessment inside Heritage was frank: behind the crass populist lay a politician who would bend to embrace their core policy goals; lower taxes for the wealthy, smaller government across all areas apart from military and security spending. He was, in the words of at least one Heritage-aligned analyst, their useful idiot.

That phrase is harsh but structurally accurate. Not because Trump was unintelligent. But because Heritage’s relationship with Trump was never ideological. It was operational. Trump needed something Heritage had. Heritage needed something Trump had.

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What Each Side Got

Trump got: intellectual infrastructure he didn’t have and didn’t want to build.

Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint had told Trump in a meeting prior to the 2016 convention: “We could help provide the people and policies that could help make America great again.” Heritage had been building support for the issues Trump ran on (repealing Obamacare, securing the borders, draining the swamp) for years. By being prepared, Heritage made itself indispensable.

Trump’s instincts were often right as in he knew how to energize his own base by yelling gut the bureaucracy, restrict immigration, cut deals, but he had no mechanism to convert those instincts into actual policy. Heritage gave him the mechanism. The personnel database, the training academy, the 900-page Mandate. All of it was essentially a governing kit handed to a man who had no governing apparatus of his own.

Other conservative think tanks had “Never Trump” staff during the 2016 election. Heritage stayed quiet. That silence bought them a seat at the table that no other conservative institution had.

CNN reported in January 2017 that “no other Washington institution has that kind of footprint in the transition.” Heritage placed at least 66 of its employees and alumni into Trump’s first administration. Several hundred people from their database ultimately entered the administration. Five became cabinet members.

Heritage got: a wrecking ball.

Trump’s illiberal, authoritarian tendencies and his manner of expression which resonated powerfully with his base had an affinity for and facilitated the political ends and ideological program of his more intellectual, informed advisors. Heritage provided the coherent program. Trump didn’t need to understand or care about Schedule F reclassification or the precise mechanisms for dismantling the CFPB. He just needed to sign things, give Heritage’s people jobs, and stay in office long enough for the agenda to embed itself.

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The First Term: The Slow Start

The first Trump administration was, by Heritage’s own assessment, a partial success and a partial failure.

By the end of Trump’s first year, Heritage determined that 64 percent of its policy prescriptions had been included in his budget, implemented through regulatory guidance, or were under consideration. The tax cuts passed. Judges were confirmed at unprecedented rates. Regulatory rollbacks happened across agency after agency.

But the failure was operational and Heritage studied it carefully. The problem wasn’t the agenda. The problem was execution. Too many positions filled by people who didn’t know the ideological playbook. Too many “adults in the room” … establishment figures who slowed down or blocked the most aggressive elements of the program. Too many career civil servants who knew how to file objections, slow-walk implementation, and wait out a disruptive administration.

Heritage president Kevin Roberts distilled the lesson publicly in 2024: “The Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start. And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”

Must never be repeated. Not “we hope to do better.” A categorical imperative. The lesson of the first term was: the machine needs to be faster, more disciplined, and more complete. Every slot needs the right person. Every agency needs a pre-written plan. Every adult in the room needs to be replaced before they can interfere.

That analysis produced Project 2025.

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What Trump Uniquely Offered

Here is the thing that Heritage understood about Trump that most political analysts missed entirely.

For fifty years, Heritage had been trying to do three things that kept failing against the institutional resistance of the federal bureaucracy.

First: fire the career civil servants who by design, through the merit-based civil service system established in 1883 are protected from political removal.

Second: consolidate power in the executive branch over independent agencies specifically designed to operate with insulation from presidential control.

Third: dismantle whole agencies, not just cut their budgets. Actually abolish the structural apparatus so that a future administration can’t simply restore funding and resume operations.

Every conventional Republican president had been constrained. Not because they lacked desire, but because they cared about something Trump demonstrably did not: institutional legitimacy. The appearance of governing by norms. The concern about what history books would say.

Romney wouldn’t do this. Jeb Bush wouldn’t. Even Ted Cruz probably wouldn’t go this far. They all believed in institutions too much, or were too worried about their historical legacy, or had too many relationships with the permanent Washington class to burn it all down.

Trump didn’t care about any of that. And Heritage recognized that this was exactly the asset they needed.

The architects of Project 2025 said plainly that their aim was “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

Bend or break. Not reform. Break. That language tells you everything about what Trump uniquely offered. A conventional Republican president would bend the bureaucracy. Only Trump would break it.

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What Breaking It Looks Like

Let’s make this concrete with what has actually happened since January 20, 2025.

About 300,000 federal employee layoffs have been announced in the second Trump administration, almost all attributed to DOGE. On January 28, 2025 (eight days into the term) the administration offered a “deferred-resignation” deal that 75,000 federal workers accepted. Federal agencies were instructed to dismiss probationary employees across the board.

Three hundred thousand people. In the first year.

USAID, the Agency for International Development was dissolved entirely. An entire agency. Gone. The people who ran America’s global humanitarian aid programs fired. 83% of USAID programs officially canceled by Marco Rubio.

The U.S. Institute of Peace (an independent agency established by Congress) was taken over by DOGE staffers who showed up at the headquarters, fired most of the 300-plus staff members, and sent termination notices to personal emails. Within two hours, it was gone.

Schedule F, the executive order reclassifying tens of thousands of federal workers as political appointees, stripping their civil service protections was reinstated on Day 1, January 20, 2025, via Executive Order 14171. The civil service protection system established in 1883. 142 years of protection for career government workers from political purges broken by executive order before the inauguration champagne was flat.

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Who Was Actually Fired

The 300,000 workers fired number is staggering in the abstract. Let’s make it concrete in a way that rarely gets said plainly.

Federal employment has historically been one of the most reliable pathways to middle-class stability for women and workers of color with pay equity protections, union agreements, and advancement opportunities that the private sector has never matched. The federal government, for all its imperfections, was the sector of the American economy that came closest to paying women and men equally for equivalent work. It was where the gender pay gap was narrowest. Where advancement regardless of sex was most enforced.

The mass firing of federal workers is not a gender-neutral event. It is the targeted dismantlement of the sector that had done more than any other to close the wage gap and provide economic security for women in the workforce. Heritage cheered it. Called it necessary. Called the people it fired “deep state” obstacles.

They were teachers. Nurses. Scientists. Veterans’ services workers. Food safety inspectors. The people who made government function for ordinary people. Disproportionately women. Disproportionately workers of color. Gone.

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The Second Blueprint Nobody Noticed

Most people focused on Project 2025 missed a second blueprint running alongside it.

Project Esther: a Heritage Foundation project framed around combating antisemitism was quietly implementing a parallel agenda. By May 2025, the Trump administration had called for or acted upon more than half of Project Esther’s proposals.

Critics across the political spectrum, including Jewish journalists and scholars, noted that Project Esther did not address right-wing antisemitism; the form that has produced the most documented violence against Jewish communities in America. What it did do was provide a framework for suppressing pro-Palestinian campus protest, restricting academic freedom, and targeting speech under the banner of combating hate.

Victoria Coates; former deputy national security adviser to Trump and Heritage’s VP overseeing the project confirmed the implementation was underway: “The phase we’re in now is starting to execute some of the plan.”

One machine. Multiple blueprints. All running simultaneously.

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The Price Heritage Paid

The deal had real costs for Heritage.

Free trade: Heritage had been an aggressive free trade advocate since the 1970s. Trump’s tariffs are the most aggressive protectionist policy in generations. By 2025, Heritage’s own economist nominated to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics was publishing what were essentially blog posts praising Trump and calling him a genius for tariffs.

Political scientist E.J. Fagan put it plainly: “In 2017, 2018, they’re not publishing things that are pro-tariff. That’s a real shift.”

The scholars who made Heritage credible: constitutional law professors, economic policy analysts, legal scholars began leaving when the institution’s culture shifted from policy research to MAGA advocacy. The mass resignations of late 2025 accelerated a process that had been underway for years.

Heritage’s own Project 2025 documents explicitly repudiated Heritage’s own forty-year legacy. Spencer Chretien, Project 2025’s associate director, decried “decades of disappointment” because the “Republican establishment never moved on from the 1980s,” continuing to peddle “supply-side economics, a bellicose foreign policy, and belief in small government.”

Heritage’s own project rejected Heritage’s own history. The institution had decided that Trumpism was more important than Reaganism.

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The Agreement They Never Had to Sign

Here is what makes this relationship so unusual and so important to understand: there was never a formal agreement. No contract. No written understanding. The transaction was conducted entirely through alignment of incentives.

Trump needed Heritage’s infrastructure. Heritage needed Trump’s willingness to break things.

At a Heritage Foundation dinner in April 2022, Trump acknowledged the relationship explicitly: “The critical job of institutions such as Heritage is to lay the groundwork, and Heritage does such an incredible job of that. They’re going to detail plans for exactly what our movement will do... when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

He wasn’t talking about Heritage as an intellectual inspiration. He was talking about it as an operational partner. They would do the planning. He would execute it. Each would pretend publicly to be separate.

When asked about the relationship, Heritage said Project 2025 was “independent of any candidate.” Trump said he’d never heard of it. Both parties benefited from the fiction. The work continued regardless.

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The Wrecking Ball, Plainly

Trump is useful to Heritage the same way a wrecking ball is useful to a real estate developer who wants to build something new on a site with an existing structure.

You don’t need the wrecking ball to have a vision for what goes on the site. You don’t need it to care about the blueprints. You don’t need it to be precise. You just need it to be powerful enough, indiscriminate enough, and willing enough to swing so that when it’s done, the old structure is gone and you can build what you actually wanted all along.

Heritage has the blueprints. Trump is the wrecking ball.

There’s one more thread worth pulling on before we leave this episode. Because Coors (Heritage’s founding donor, the beer billionaire whose $250,000 check started all of this) didn’t just write a check. He used his access to engineer appointments. One of them was Anne Gorsuch, appointed EPA administrator under Reagan. She gutted the EPA from within. Her son is Neil Gorsuch - now a Supreme Court justice appointed by Trump, in consultation with Leonard Leo’s network, who in 2024 wrote the majority opinion killing Chevron deference.

From Coors’s check in 1973 to the Supreme Court killing the regulatory state’s foundational doctrine in 2024. One family thread, fifty years, running through the same machine.

The wrecking ball is still swinging. But the part of this plan that doesn’t need Trump …the part that outlasts every election … is what we cover next.

The courts. And what Heritage spent thirty years doing to them.

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That’s Episode 5 of Captured: The Anatomy of a Hostile Takeover.

I want to be straight with you; I’m doing this alone. No network. No production budget. No team of researchers in matching blazers. Just me, a concerning amount of IRS filings, and a deep personal conviction that someone needed to put this whole picture together in one place.

If this episode made you think, made you angry, made you want to flip a table and then immediately register ten people to vote, that’s the goal. And if you want to help keep it going, there are two ways to do that.

First: buy me a coffee. The link is in the show notes. I promise it goes directly toward caffeine and the continued will to live while reading Heritage Foundation tax documents.

Second: come join the Progressive Chaos Gremlins Club on Substack. It is exactly what it sounds like. A place for fellow progressive gremlins to unite, scream into the void together, pull it back together, and start reimagining a future built on justice, equality, and a solid dash of matriarchal mayhem. The written episodes live there. The community lives there. And frankly it’s the most fun corner of the internet I’ve found in a while.

Link is in the show notes. Episode 6 drops Friday. That’s the one about the courts; the part of Heritage’s plan that survives every election, every administration, every vote you will ever cast. It is the most important episode in this series. Don’t miss it.

I’m Claire Armstrong. This is Captured. See you Friday.

Trickle-down.

The idea that if you give enough money and freedom to the people at the top: cut their taxes, strip away the regulations that constrain them, remove the consumer protections that slow them down the benefits will flow downward. The rising tide lifts all boats. The wealth created at the top spreads out and reaches everyone.

Heritage’s entire economic agenda is built on this premise. Has been since 1973. The Mandate for Leadership, the tax cut advocacy, the deregulation campaigns, the war on consumer protections, all of it flows from this single claim.

So let’s test it. Not with Heritage’s numbers. With the actual data.

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The Tax Cut Record

In 1980, the year before Ronald Reagan took office and Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership became the governing bible of the United States, the top marginal income tax rate was 70%. The top 1% of earners controlled about 9% of total national income.

Today, after four decades of Heritage-influenced tax policy implemented across Republican administrations, the top marginal rate is 37%. And the top 1% now controls more than 20% of total national income, more than double their share in 1980.

The Gini coefficient (the standard measure of income inequality) rose from approximately 0.4 to 0.5 since the 1980s. The top 1%’s income share grew from 10% to over 20% of total income. The bottom 50%’s wealth share declined from 5% to less than 1%. Current inequality levels rival the Gilded Age.

In 1980, the top 4% of taxpayers earned as much as the bottom 39%. By 2019, the top 4% earned as much as the bottom 57%. The top 10% of Americans had three times the wealth of everyone else in the country combined.

The top 1% of households saw their after-tax income increase by 175% between 1979 and 2007, while the bottom 20% saw a rise of only 18%.

These are not disputed statistics. They come from the Congressional Budget Office, the IRS, and the Census Bureau. They represent the documented, measured outcome of the economic agenda that Heritage has been advocating and implementing for fifty years.

The wealth didn’t trickle down. It accumulated at the top. Precisely as any economist not on Heritage’s payroll could have predicted, and many of them did.

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The Story Heritage Doesn’t Tell About the 2008 Crash

In the fall of 2008, the U.S. financial system came within days of complete collapse. The proximate causes are complex and disputed. The background conditions are not.

For twenty years before the crisis, Heritage had been one of the loudest voices in Washington advocating for the deregulation of financial markets. They argued — repeatedly, in paper after paper, in congressional testimony after congressional testimony — that the regulations separating commercial banking from investment banking were unnecessary, anticompetitive, and harmful to consumers. They celebrated when those regulations were weakened and repealed.

When those regulations were gone, banks that held ordinary Americans’ deposits were also the banks making billion-dollar bets on exotic financial instruments tied to subprime mortgages. When those bets collapsed, they took the deposits with them.

Eight million jobs were lost. Ten million families lost their homes. Retirement accounts tied to the market saw catastrophic losses.

Women, who had less accumulated wealth to buffer the shock, saw their retirement savings wiped out at higher rates than men — and were more likely to be simultaneously caring for children or elderly relatives, with no income to replace what was lost. The crash didn’t land equally. It landed hardest on the people with the least cushion.

Then Heritage published a paper arguing that financial deregulation had nothing to do with it.

Heritage’s position: there is “no evidence” that pre-Glass-Steagall repeal banking activity led to more failures, and the “notion that the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall caused the 2008 financial crisis is also dead wrong.”

This is what Heritage does when the evidence comes in against its agenda: it publishes more papers. The people who lost their homes in 2008 didn’t get to publish papers in response. They just lost their homes.

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The Payday Loan Story

This one is specific enough that it’s worth dwelling on, because it illustrates with precision how Heritage’s agenda works in practice at the level of individual families.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created after the 2008 crash specifically to protect working-class borrowers from predatory lending. One of its most important rules developed over five years of research, including analysis of 15 million loan sequences, restricted payday lenders from making loans to people who couldn’t repay them, targeting the “debt trap” model where a borrower takes out a loan, can’t repay it, rolls it over, and pays fees that quickly exceed the original loan amount.

The CFPB’s own research found that more than 80% of payday loans are re-borrowed within two weeks of repayment of a previous loan. Without the rule’s protections, the payday lending industry drains Americans of $8 billion annually in fees.

Heritage’s position? The rule was terrible for consumers. They called it an attack on “free markets” and a threat to “access to credit.”

Heritage wrote: “The CFPB’s regulatory solution is bad news for consumers, those who work for short-term lenders, and the people who supply the capital to make these loans.”

Notice what happened there. Heritage framed payday lenders - companies charging 300-400% annual interest rates to people in financial emergencies - as providers of a valuable service being attacked by government overreach. The people being trapped in cycles of debt were recast as consumers exercising free choice. The $8 billion in annual fees extracted from the most financially vulnerable Americans was reframed as the natural operation of a healthy marketplace.

Here’s who that marketplace actually targets.

The single largest demographic in the payday loan customer base is single mothers; women who are sole financial providers for their families, in financial emergencies, paying 300-400% annual interest rates. These communities are disproportionately concentrated in areas with a high proportion of people of color. The $8 billion Heritage helped protect is extracted almost entirely from people with the fewest alternatives.

Heritage fought the regulation that would have protected them. They called it an attack on free markets.

When the Trump administration (staffed by Heritage-vetted personnel) rolled back those protections, Heritage celebrated. The single mothers paying 300% interest did not.

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The Union Destruction Record

Heritage has consistently advocated against unions: opposing card check legislation, supporting right-to-work laws, advocating for restrictions on public employee collective bargaining. They frame this as pro-worker: restrictions on unions give workers more freedom to negotiate individually.

The data tells a different story.

Union membership declined from 20% to 10% of workers since the 1980s, driven partly by right-to-work laws and policy changes Heritage advocated. Over precisely the same period, wages for non-union workers stagnated and income inequality exploded.

This correlation is not coincidental. Unions are the primary mechanism through which workers collectively bargain for higher wages, better benefits, and safer working conditions. When union density declines, the bargaining power of workers declines with it.

The public sector - teaching, nursing, social work, government administration - is where union membership has historically been highest. It is also where women make up the majority of the workforce. It is not a coincidence that public sector unions are Heritage’s primary target. It’s where women’s collective bargaining power is strongest. Weaken those unions and you don’t just weaken labor broadly, you specifically weaken the economic power of the sector where women have built the most institutional protection.

The corporations on Heritage’s board of trustees were not funding Heritage because they wanted their workers to have more negotiating power.

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The Environmental Ledger

Heritage has been one of the most prolific producers of climate denial content in American history. They’ve published hundreds of reports arguing against carbon pricing, against emissions regulations, against renewable energy subsidies, against every policy instrument that would impose costs on the fossil fuel industry. As we established in Episode 3, that industry has been among Heritage’s most consistent funders.

The costs of climate change are paid disproportionately by people who didn’t cause it. Flooding hits poor communities harder because wealthy communities have better infrastructure and insurance. Extreme heat kills elderly people in apartments without air conditioning. Drought devastates small farmers who can’t afford the irrigation systems that larger agricultural operations can. Air pollution from fossil fuel combustion causes asthma and cardiovascular disease at higher rates in communities of color and low-income communities located near industrial facilities.

Women, particularly in the Global South and in low-income American communities, bear disproportionate climate burdens, because they are disproportionately responsible for securing food, water, and care for children and elderly family members when those systems are disrupted.

The benefits of preventing regulation of fossil fuels accrue entirely to the companies doing the polluting and their shareholders.

Exxon Mobil (one of Heritage’s donors) knew internally since the 1970s that their products were causing climate change. Their own scientists told them. They funded Heritage and similar organizations to produce public doubt about that science while privately planning for a warmer world.

The people in coastal Louisiana who’ve watched their land disappear into the Gulf of Mexico did not benefit from this arrangement. The shareholders of ExxonMobil did.

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Who Heritage Actually Serves: The Honest Accounting

Heritage’s stated mission is to help “all Americans.” Their actual policy record, measured against documented outcomes over fifty years, tells a more precise story.

The consistent winners in every major policy area Heritage has influenced: fossil fuel companies, financial institutions, large corporations, high-net-worth individuals.

The consistent losers: people who work for wages, people who borrow money because they don’t have enough, people who breathe air near industrial facilities, people whose pensions were vaporized in 2008, people who need the government to enforce the rules that stand between them and the entities with more power than they have.

Heritage has a word for those government protections. They call them “red tape.”

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The Cruelty of the Framing

The most insidious thing about Heritage’s work is not the policy outcomes. It’s the framing.

Every single policy we’ve just examined, every tax cut for the wealthy, every gutted consumer protection, every weakened environmental regulation was sold to the public as being for ordinary people.

Tax cuts were for working families. Deregulation was for small businesses. Gutting the CFPB was for consumers who deserved access to credit. Opposing climate regulation was for workers who would lose jobs in coal country. Weakening unions was for individual workers who deserved freedom.

Heritage routinely published state-by-state analyses of climate legislation showing job losses and economic harm to working families. They were genuinely skilled at finding the real-but-small costs to ordinary people of progressive policies and amplifying them, while never publishing equivalent analyses of their own policies.

This is the con at the heart of the long con. Not that Heritage lied about everything, they didn’t. It’s that they told half the truth, consistently, for fifty years. They found the real ways that regulations impose costs on ordinary people and highlighted them relentlessly, while systematically obscuring the ways that their preferred policies impose much larger costs on those same people and redirect enormous benefits to their donors.

The $8 billion a year that payday lenders extract from financially desperate single mothers is not a Heritage research topic. The trillions in wealth destroyed in 2008 by financial deregulation is not a Heritage research topic. The generations of compounding inequality driven by forty years of tax cuts is not a Heritage research topic.

The regulation that costs a small business owner $500 in compliance costs? That’s a Heritage research topic. The headline, the paper, the congressional testimony, the lobbying campaign … all of it, every time.

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The Gender Line That Runs Through All Of It

We’ve been following money through this series - who holds it, how it moves, who it protects.

Now let’s follow the cost.

The people who paid the highest price for fifty years of Heritage’s agenda are disproportionately women. In their wages, suppressed by union destruction and the devaluation of feminized labor. In their retirement savings, wiped out in 2008 at higher rates than men. In their healthcare, as Medicaid (the program that covers 70% of nursing home residents, most of them women) is perpetually targeted for cuts. In their bodily autonomy, as the same judicial pipeline that killed regulatory oversight also eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion. In their daily financial lives, as single mothers pay $8 billion a year in payday loan fees to an industry Heritage protected.

That’s not a coincidence. It’s the architecture.

The money that built Heritage came from industries hostile to women’s economic advancement. The policies Heritage implemented removed the protections that women specifically depended on. The judicial pipeline Heritage helped build locked in those outcomes for a generation.

And Heritage’s own 2026 documents describe the goal explicitly: restore the nuclear family with a male breadwinner at its center, remove women from the professions that generate independent capital, restrict reproductive autonomy that enables economic independence.

They didn’t just build a machine that happened to harm women. They built a machine that was designed to.

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Next episode: They built the machine. Funded it. Ran it. And then they found the wrecking ball. The story of how Heritage went from opposing Trump in 2015 to placing their people inside every federal agency in 2025 — and what Trump uniquely offered that no conventional Republican president ever would.

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Episode 4 of Captured: The Anatomy of a Hostile Takeover.

I want to be straight with you — I’m doing this alone. No network. No production budget. No team of researchers in matching blazers. Just me, a concerning amount of IRS filings, and a deep personal conviction that someone needed to put this whole picture together in one place.

If this episode made you think, made you angry, made you want to flip a table and then immediately register ten people to vote — that’s the goal. And if you want to help keep it going, there are two ways to do that.

First — buy me a coffee. The link is in the show notes. I promise it goes directly toward caffeine and the continued will to live while reading Heritage Foundation tax documents.

Second — come join the Progressive Chaos Gremlins Club on Substack. It is exactly what it sounds like. A place for fellow progressive gremlins to unite, scream into the void together, pull it back together, and start reimagining a future built on justice, equality, and a solid dash of matriarchal mayhem. The written episodes live there. The community lives there. And frankly it’s the most fun corner of the internet I’ve found in a while.

Link is in the show notes. Episode 5 drops Wednesday. That’s the one where we follow the wrecking ball — and it is not a gentle episode.

I’m Claire Armstrong. This is Captured. See you Wednesday.