- Paul Krugman on the decline and fall of the conservative Heritage Foundation, and how it’s always been a fraud;
- Heather Cox Richardson on how the ideology of MAGA is smashing against reality;
- Short items about Republicans destroying the safety net, Trump dropping tariffs on countries who give him gifts, how religious groups are safe havens for sexual predators, and conservative predictions that Mamdani will starve NYC;
- James Greenberg on Facebook expresses salient truths about how modern civilization knows about the ways it’s being undone, but denies them, i.e. about climate change denial.
How principled conservatism has morphed into “conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry.”
Paul Krugman, 14 Nov 2025: The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation, subtitled “Its descent into conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry was utterly predictable”
There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute.
This is about the recent Tucker Carlson podcast interview with Nick Fuentes, “a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories.”
This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.
So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews?
(I’ve not realized until now that the idea of globalism, an inevitability not just because the population keeps expanding but because it’s necessary to solve global existential threats, is equated by conservatives with a Jewish conspiracy!)
Krugman thinks this isn’t a new development, but that Heritage has always been a fraud.
It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class.
The priorities of the Republican party have been obvious for decades. Krugman reviews more history of Heritage, including its accusation that he, Krugman, was a pedophile (“As they say, every accusation by the modern right is really a confession.”). And concludes,
Again, it’s important to get the story of Heritage correct, because it is also the story of the modern right as a whole. Heritage was never a respectable institution doing honest research. It was always in the business of telling lies on behalf of its wealthy supporters. But now it’s trying to turn itself into a MAGA/Groyper institution, less focused on telling economic lies and more focused on bigotry and conspiracy theories.
And if this shocks and surprises you, well, you just weren’t paying attention.
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How often have I said that conservatives are not reality-based?
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American: November 13, 2025
We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.
The economy, tariffs, price statistics from DoorDash, violence against purported immigrants, war with Venezuela, and on and on.
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Briefly noted.
- Slate, Shirin Ali, 14 Nov 2025: Republicans Are Ripping a New Giant Hole in the Social Safety Net, subtitled “After punishing hungry people during the government shutdown, the GOP has a new plan to make life harder for the most vulnerable.” — — The cruelty is the point. Or: conservatives somehow believe that the poor deserve their fate.
- JMG, 14 Nov 2025: Trump Drops Swiss Tariffs After Getting Lavish Gifts (from NYT) — — This is how it works. It keeps happening over and over.
- Friendly Atheist, 14 Nov 2025: How the Assemblies of God became a safe haven for sexual predators, subtitled “A sweeping NBC investigation exposed decades of abuse, cover-ups, and indifference inside the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination” — — But hasn’t this kind of thing been obvious for decades, especially in the Catholic Church?
- JMG, 14 Nov 2025, from Family Research Council: FRC: NYC Will Starve Under Mamdani’s “Police State” — — No, it won’t. More conservative paranoia and cynicism. They predict things like this over and over, and they never come to pass. Also, our rights *do* come, explicitly, from the government. What rights come from God, exactly, in the Bible? Free speech?
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I have no idea who this guy, James Greenberg, on Facebook is, except that he’s from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has 58K followers.
But his post from a couple days ago captures some salient truths.
Never before has a civilization known so much about the forces undoing it—or worked so hard to deny them. How is it that, despite all the scientific data and even the evidence of our own experience, so many people continue to believe that climate change is a hoax?
The simple answer is that fossil-fuel money turned denial into an industry. For decades, public-relations firms have flooded the media with carefully crafted doubt, transforming an empirical question into a cultural battle. Climate change has become less about carbon molecules than about identity, loyalty, and belonging.
And,
Yet the roots of denial run deeper than propaganda. They lie in how human beings construct meaning. We do not perceive the world as it is, but through the lenses of culture and language. Our understanding of reality—and even what we count as evidence—is shaped by cultural logics that organize experience, emotion, and belief. These logics give coherence to our lives, but they can also make us blind to facts that threaten them.
This isn’t quite how I would put it, but, yes. Then he describes an anthropological story. Then:
Every society faces uncertainty and risk. Cultures manage these by imposing order—by creating systems of knowledge, ritual, and morality that render the world predictable. Science and religion both perform this work, but through different logics. Science grounds knowledge in evidence and predictive power; religion anchors meaning in faith, ritual, and revelation.
Scientific knowledge is always provisional, open to revision. Religious belief, by contrast, rests on premises that cannot be proven or disproven: that God or the gods exist, that creation has purpose, that human rituals, prayers, and offerings are efficacious. Those premises give life moral coherence, but they also sanctify other ideas: that authority is divinely ordained, that power signifies virtue, that prosperity is a sign of favor. When belief fuses with identity, it becomes impermeable to evidence.Climate change denial arises not from ignorance but from refusal—the insistence on preserving meaning against a truth that demands moral reckoning. Science challenges the old cosmology of human dominion over nature as a divine exemption from consequence. It reveals that nature operates under immutable laws, that our pretense of mastery has limits, that extraction carries costs, and that the planet itself can rebel. For those whose sense of order depends on human exceptionalism, that is not merely threatening—it is heresy.
And more. Very good.
