The new religious right has turned against the old religious right.

Or, to put it another way, the focus of the movement is changing. I spent more than 20 years defending religious liberty in federal courts. Our objective was to defend liberty so that religious organizations enjoyed the liberty to do good, free from state discrimination.

Yet now the focus of Christian right isn’t on the defense of liberty; it’s on the accumulation of power. And it is using that power to impose its will, including by imposing its will on Christian organizations it has decided are woke or opposed to President Trump’s agenda.

Few things illustrate that reality more clearly than the Trump administration’s decision to unilaterally — and often unlawfully — defund Christian organizations, including evangelical organizations, that serve poor and marginalized people at home and abroad.

In the first three weeks of his administration, Trump issued a series of stop-work orders and funding freezes that effectively yanked funding from religious groups that have been providing lifesaving care to many of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Caritas International, a confederation of international Catholic relief agencies, has warned that the cuts are “catastrophic” and said that the “ruthless and chaotic” way that the administration has made its cuts “threatens the lives and dignity of millions.”

The Trump administration’s cuts are immaterial to the deficit. U.S.A.I.D.’s foreign assistance constituted less than 1 percent of the federal budget, for example. All direct foreign aid (including the surge in aid to Ukraine) adds up to a mere 1.17 percent of total government spending in the 2023 fiscal year.

Yet cuts to foreign aid endanger people’s lives, including those of Afghan refugees who risked everything helping Americans during our longest war.

The cuts are also symbolic. They demonstrate the extent to which Trump is influencing the evangelical church more than the church is influencing him.

So what happened? The answer is complex, but two factors stand out. The Republican Christian right made a hard turn against immigration and, in its most extreme political faction, is turning against empathy itself.

Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School, is an “ideological lodestar” among conservatives who are impatient with originalism—the idea that the Constitution’s meaning can be determined by its text and the founders’ intent, according to a story by the New York Times.

Vermeule, dubbed “the godfather of post-originalism” by the New York Times, argued in a March 2020 essay in the Atlantic that originalism has “outlived its utility.”

Vermeule instead embraced an approach that he called “common-good constitutionalism” that goes beyond originalism in incorporating conservative values. Common-good constitutionalism is based on the idea that government helps direct society generally “toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate,” he wrote.

The main aim of common-good constitutionalism “is certainly not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power,” Vermeule wrote. Instead the aim is “to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well,” Vermeule wrote.

October 2024

Police in Belize have temporarily paused their deal with U.S. facial recognition company Biometrica following concerns over moving data overseas.

The project was created to improve the tracking and identification of suspects in the popular Central American tourist destination. The collaboration, however, would have required sharing the county’s criminal database, including biometric fingerprint data, with Biometrica.

Belize Police Commissioner Chester Williams said that the agreement is on hold while they are looking for ways to keep data from Belizeans from being taken abroad. If this is not possible, Belize will look for a different software provider, the commissioner added.

“Perhaps if it is that they can develop a software and then we just get that software without the exchanging of data where we can keep our data in-house then we may be able to go with that,” says Williams. “But even the company itself had also called to say that they could not go through with the agreement because of some issue with the software they had developed.”

Williams also noted that Biometrica’s software is facing issues in other Caribbean countries, as reported by the local news outlet Channel 5 Belize. Biometric Update has reached out to the company for more information.

Biometrica has been working with law enforcement agencies in the U.S. The company’s eMotive criminal background checking software was integrated by the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC) to track potential child abductors and traffickers with facial biometrics.

Belize has been working on a national biometric strategy that was approved by the Cabinet in June.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto's office has agreed to pay six figures to a Georgia man who was jailed for nearly a week over a bad identification using facial recognition technology.

The $200,000 payout to Randal Quran Reid was sealed last month in federal court in New Orleans, a transcript shows. It resolves a civil rights lawsuit that Reid, now 31, filed against Lopinto's office over his arrest in DeKalb County, Georgia on a warrant signed by Jefferson Parish Judge Paul Schneider.

The affidavits supporting all of those warrants make no mention of facial recognition. They cited only "a credible source" for the suspects' identities. Schneider signed the warrants for all three. The case highlights the pitfalls of a technology that more police agencies are adopting in Louisiana and across the country — including in New Orleans, where some officials are pressing to expand its use.

The case highlights the pitfalls of a technology that more police agencies are adopting in Louisiana and across the country — including in New Orleans, where some officials are pressing to expand its use.

This is the same sheriff that recently made news after he left his personal gun in his unlocked car.

Sheriff’s gun stolen from car, “Do as I say, not as I do”

when I first sat down to read Project 2025, I was most struck not by the newness of the proposals but by their deep familiarity. Half a century after its founding, Heritage Foundation has gone back to its roots and to the vision of one of its key founders, the right-wing political activist Paul Weyrich. To understand Project 2025 and its implications for the United States, we need to understand what it was Weyrich sought to create and what he hoped to accomplish.

It is worth noting what Weyrich hoped to accomplish through Heritage. In an untitled memorandum from 1973, Weyrich mused:

The social gospel tells us to change man’s environment and that will change the world. The real gospel tells us to reform man first, so that a reformed man can change the world. But the citizens of our Nation have few beacons of truth upon whom they can rely. Only the truth can make us free, and the truth must be based on the commandments and the moral law. So, even though we deal with “politics and issues,” our real task is a moral one . . .

For Weyrich, who was a devout traditionalist Catholic, conservative policymaking needed to adopt a new moralism that went far beyond the tenets of fiscal responsibility and small-government conservatism. It also had to embrace a conservative Christian worldview and seek to impose a narrow definition of the common good on society.

The “pro-family” platform is not a liberal platform. For the Catholic New Right and New Christian Right, there is only one version of the good life and only one path to religious and political salvation. Therefore, the role of government is not to preserve individual rights and manage competing interpretations of the good but to impose and enforce a singular conception of the good through the regulation of social relations. At the heart of the Catholic New Right project and of Project 2025 lies a desire to harness the coercive capacity of the state to impose a conservative Christian vision of the good not only on government but on all of society. Revisiting the history of the New Right helps us to understand that this is a radical project, but it is not a new one.

Inspired by Ronald Reagan and funded by the right’s richest donors, a web of free-market think tanks has fueled the nationwide attack on workers’ rights.

Founded in 1992 by businessman and Reagan administration insider Thomas Roe—who also served on the Heritage Foundation’s board of trustees for two decades—the group has grown to include 59 “freedom centers,” or affiliated think tanks, in all 50 states.

SPN’s board includes officials from Heritage and right-wing charities such as the Adolph Coors and Jacqueline Hume foundations. Likewise, its deep-pocketed donors include all the usual heavy-hitting conservative benefactors: the Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation, which funds the Cato Institute and Heritage; the Castle Rock Foundation, a charity started with money from the conservative Coors Foundation; and the Bradley Foundation, a $540 million charity devoted to funding conservative causes. SPN uses their contributions to dole out annual grants to member groups, ranging from a few thousand dollars to $260,000, according to 2009 records.

There's a lot of convoluted history behind what led to Project 2025, and that's likely on purpose.

This is a place to collect information about that history into one place, and hopefully get more awareness and discussion going about any odd or interesting information relating to the Heritage Foundation and it’s members or affiliate groups.

If you’ve got obscure information/articles written by or mentioning people like Paul Weyrich, Ed Feulner or other associates and organizations, such as the Heritage Foundation, Council for National Policy (CNP), State Policy Network, and many others, please drop them here.

The mayor of Moscow and dissidents from the old Soviet system last week raised the flag of the Russian Republic on a beaux-arts house at 1800 Connecticut Ave. And everyone cheered.

The ceremony marked the establishment of Russia House, a for-profit corporation for cooperation. The go-between for Russian and U.S. businesses is said to be the first of its kind, although others from Eastern Europe may follow to learn and earn with U.S. entrepreneurs. Moscow's nonprofit International University will also have its headquarters in the grand old building.

The corporation is also privately funded. Officers of its board are Moscow Mayor Gavril Popov; Paul Craig Roberts of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former treasury assistant secretary; and Dean Booth, an Atlanta lawyer. Businessman Robert Krieble, who donated fax machines, computers and copiers to dissidents in the Soviet Union when "they were illegal," Lozansky said, is one of the financial supporters.

At the inauguration of Russia House, furnished only with a lectern and radio and television microphones for the ceremony, Paul Weyrich, head of a group called Free Congress, said, "When we first went to the Soviet Union we were considered foolish. But democracy is real. The change is real."

"Russia House is not financed by governments but by private people," Mayor Popov said. "Aid in the form of commercial goods and food should not be the main effort. Aid would be over soon, and all would be as before. We need a free-market economy -- but we don't have people who can run a free market," he said, speaking through a translator. "I told {Treasury} Secretary {Nicholas} Brady that many Americans will sign treaties with ministers -- who then will disappear. Trade should be with private individuals and businesses."