Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I’ve written not a word in a week. Here, therefore, is an oldie from September 2021, a sort of backgrounder on the Heritage Foundation, whose “fellows” are even now hard at work on Project 2025 , which they hope will finish off democracy once and for all. How many times, over the last few decades, have we heard mention of the Heritage Foundation, and thought nothing of it? It’s always been one of those names in the background, just below the surface of the discussion. It’s often accompanied by the words “conservative think tank,” which led me to wonder what they think about. Especially in this age of big lies, insurrection, and election subversion. So I took a closer look. Turns out, “think tank” is an apt description, because these are the guys who do the actual thinking — such as it is — for the Republican party. Ever since Reagan, Heritage has provided Republicans with the specious reasoning they use to explain — or
A funny thing happened on the way to the 2024 horserace. The mainstream media brought Hitler into the conversation. Trump gave them no choice. He kept amping up his rants in terms that were so explicitly Nazi, so lifted — practically verbatim — from Hitler’s speeches, that it was hard for them to keep ignoring what they’ve willfully ignored for so long. When Trump used the word ‘vermin’ in his Veteran’s Day speech , he was taking a whole chapter from the fascism playbook. Whether he knew it or not. Dehumanization — the art of equating human beings with insects — is a classic stochastic terrorism technique, beloved of dictators the world over. In Rwanda in the nineties, the Hutu tribe openly called its rival Tutsis “cockroaches” on the radio, inciting its members to exterminate them with machetes, which they did. We’ll probably never know who actually wrote the Vermin speech — Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon are likely suspects — but we can be sure it wasn’t T