Monday, September 18, 2023

Heritage Foundation Scholars Forced To Remove Names From Manifesto

Here is more from Politico, in a piece entitled "Too Hot for Heritage!: Why did a pair of Heritage Foundation scholars need to hastily un-sign a conservative group's manifesto?":

Avik Roy, a longtime fixture in Republican policy-wonk circles, made a splash this summer when he organized a manifesto pushing back on the nationalist, market-skeptical tendencies on the new, Trump-era right. The document, signed by Jeb Bush, Grover Norquist, George Will, and a couple hundred other conservative worthies, generated a decent amount of inside-the-Beltway buzz when it launched in July.

It wasn’t just that Freedom Conservatism: A Statement of Principles highlighted a family feud within the movement. It was the very fact that its pieties about the majesty of capitalism were even controversial — an indication of just how far conservative economic theology had drifted.

An even bigger indication came early this month. That’s when Joel Griffith and Peter St. Onge, two scholars from the Heritage Foundation, reached out to Roy to ask that their names be removed from the document.

“They both emailed me at the tail end of Labor Day weekend saying that they had been required by Heritage to take their names off the signatory list,” Roy told me. Unlike many think tanks, Heritage has a longstanding policy requiring that employees vet their publications to make sure they don’t contradict the foundation’s official stance — a rule the pair had apparently fallen afoul of.

 

A number of think tankers outside of Heritage signed the manifesto that Joel Griffith and Peter St. Onge were forced to un-sign, including those from the Hoover Institution, Niskanen Center, Manhattan Institute, Bipartisan Policy Center, Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and the R Street Institute.