In his essay, Anderson writes, since its initial start with Coors' beer money, "Heritage has grown large enough to boast an annual budget of about $100 million and a staff of about 90 'experts' who hold such pseudo-academic titles as 'research fellow' and 'policy analyst.'"
With additional support from Coors, Weyrich also founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC), "an organization that trained and mobilized conservative activists, recruited conservative candidates, and raised funds for conservative causes."
Under Weyrich, the CSFC "was one of the first organizations to tap into evangelical Christian churches as places to recruit and cultivate activists and support for social conservative causes. In 1977, Weyrich co-founded Christian Voice with Robert Grant. Two years later, with Jerry Falwell, he founded the Moral Majority (1979--1989)."
"Over the next two decades, Weyrich founded, co-founded, or held prominent roles in a number of other notable conservative organizations. Among them, he was founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council, [ALEC] an organization of state legislators; a co-founder of the Council for National Policy, a strategy-formulating organization for social conservatives."
Heritage is not the only gun in the conservative movement's arsenal, but its impact is obvious in the current Trump administration.
Anderson writes:
"We are different from previous generations of conservatives," Weyrich said in the early 1980s. "We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country."
As a recent Salon essay notes: Trump is that movement's best hope yet for achieving its great dream of "gutting government."
Trump's proposed $1.15 trillion budget for 2018, appears to race forward in that gutting effort. Domestic agencies are trimmed significantly. Only the Pentagon budget moves higher, much higher.
Salon wrote that "Donald Trump is relying on a blueprint budget from the conservative Heritage Foundation and the guidance of a former Rand Paul staffer, to deliver the most extremely right-wing restructuring of the federal government in decades."
"The Trump transition team has been at work for months with career staffers at the White House and throughout the federal bureaucracy to draft a plan to cut $10.5 trillion out of the federal government over 10 years, according to multiple reports.
"The president-elect vowed to slash government spending on the campaign trail, promising to add those savings to the massive budget of the Department of Defense. New reporting now outlines just which parts of the federal government will be eliminated by the incoming Trump administration..."
As Anderson writes: "Heritage isn't an appendage of the Trump administration's radicalism. It's the heart of it. Trump is just a tool."
To those voters who hope that maybe the gutting of so many progressive dreams will be side-tracked with an impeachment or resignation of President Trump, Anderson delivers the bad news.
"Vice President Mike Pence ... has deep ties to the Foundation.
"In 2006, Weyrich, who considered himself a mentor of Pence's, said of him, 'Nobody is perfect, but he comes pretty close.'
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