I don’t know how The New York Times missed the lede on this interview from yesterday’s Sunday magazine section, but they did:
Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for ‘Institutionalizing Trumpism’
“People will lose their jobs,” the think tank’s president says about federal workers. “Hopefully their lives are able to flourish in spite of that.”
Near the end of the interview with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro has this exchange with Roberts:
Do you believe that President Biden won the 2020 election?
No.
Can you tell me why?
Sure. I think there are unknowns. I don’t know the outcome, but that’s why I can’t say yes definitively. And I am no conspiracy theorist at all, as some of the election-integrity people on the right will tell you. Still a lot of unknowns about two counties in Arizona, multiple counties in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Is it possible he won? Sure. But can I say definitively that he won? No. Having said that, I was very vocal at the end of 2020 and early 2021 that that’s what we knew and the election needed to be certified. And so let’s move on.
Pretty much every bit of evidence has shown there was no substantial fraud.
We have an election-fraud database at Heritage that shows a lot of instances of fraud. What I’m not saying is that the examples in that database prove that Biden didn’t win. I’m not certain that he won.
Yes, this interview is mostly about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 designed to, essentially, gut the federal government, but the fact that the head of the most influential conservative political institution is a lunatic election denier (and, sorry, Kevin, yes you are a conspiracy theorist despite your protestations to the contrary) reveals how deeply embedded the lies, paranoia and ludicrous conspiracy theories have become in the entire conservative movement.
Roberts is yet another far right (Catholic) Christian jihadist seeking to impose an extremist religious agenda on a vast majority of the population that strenuously disagrees with the right’s retrograde vision of America.
The entire interview is revealing, if unsurprising. Roberts openly declares his admiration of fascist Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and of Orban’s policies. He openly discusses plans to gut the federal government and install loyalists, especially in the Justice Department, in a second Trump administration.
Disturbing lunacy from perhaps one of the most influential conservatives in the country.
