"An Outsourced Staff" --Cicero Institute and Homelessness Policy

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.

Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle at NYT:

A team from the Cicero Institute, an upstart think tank, flew to Indiana this year to help make it a crime for homeless people to sleep on the street.

It was their third attempt. Even in the conservative state, previous efforts to ban street camping had failed. Catholic leaders said the measure would hurt the poor, and sheriffs had warned that arrests would crowd the jails. “We’re Hoosiers — we’re better than that,” a Republican state senator, Ron Alting, said last year, urging a more caring approach.

But much had changed since the group, founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of President Trump’s, had made its initial efforts. Mr. Trump had issued an executive order on homelessness that so fully reflected Cicero’s agenda it was hard to tell 
where the group stopped and White House policy began. The sponsor of the Indiana law was fresh from a Cicero conference, Cicero lobbyists worked the bill, and three Cicero analysts testified that the threat of arrests would push homeless people into treatment for mental illness or addiction.

The ban passed just before the legislature adjourned.

...

With few rival groups working on homelessness, the institute had its lane. After Texas passed a statewide camping ban in 2021, Cicero made it into a model bill to take to other states.

Cicero was too small to matter in Washington, but about two dozen states had Republican control of the legislature and governorship. For harried legislators frustrated by encampments, Cicero’s bill offered a stance. And with no housing or services included, it required no spending.

“In most states, state legislators don’t even have policy staff,” explained Jared Meyer, an early Cicero recruit, on Mr. Lonsdale’s podcast. “The best thing you can do is be an outsourced staff.”

GOP v. Trends in Higher Ed

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Schickler E, Rodriguez EM. The College Campus and the Culture War: The Development of Party Polarization on Higher Education, 1980–2025. Studies in American Political Development. Published online 2026:1-21. doi:10.1017/S0898588X26100327

Abstract

We draw on a dataset of 1,044 state and national party platforms from 1980 to 2025 to track the evolution of Democratic and Republican positions with respect to higher education. The sector enjoyed considerable bipartisan support in the 1980s and early 1990s, with both parties generally expressing the view that 4-year colleges and universities contribute to economic vitality and student advancement. Starting in the mid-1990s, Republicans’ position gradually became more critical—even so, there is considerable diversity in views across states as late as 2010. In recent years, the party’s platforms have become almost uniformly negative toward higher education. The first line of GOP criticism focused on concerns about speech and alleged liberal bias. In the past decade, the party increasingly focused its criticism on higher education’s approach to racial and gender/sexuality issues—just as the intensity of opposition ramped up. Democratic platforms show much more stability but have expressed increased concern about college costs since the 2010s. Democrats also became more likely to express a liberal position on race and gender/sexuality policies just as the GOP became more vocal in criticizing these policies from the right. Our evidence suggests that the shift in the GOP’s positioning began at the national level and was instigated by nationally oriented ideological activists rather than mass-level demands. In a highly polarized and nationalized two-party system, the case of higher education illuminates the dangers that exist for any civil society institution when one party becomes hostile to its purposes and orientation.

Policy Schools Are Short on Conservative Voices

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Frederick Hess at AEI:

It’d be good for everyone if there were a deeper bench of Republican policy professionals who really knew how government works. That’s why it’s such a big problem that the nation’s public policy schools serve as owned-and-operated subsidiaries of the Democratic Party.

Faculty at leading programs lean lopsidedly to the left; unsurprisingly, they emphasize predictable priorities, such as prison reform, homelessness, or healthcare. The technocratic progressives are joined by colleagues who go further still, recasting policy debates in identity-driven and baldly ideological terms to “expose” systemic racism and the evils of U.S. capitalism.

Right-leaning priorities are routinely marginalized or dismissed as backward-looking, as is the case with immigration enforcement, entitlement reform, educational choice, or tax-cutting. As a result of this bias, a broad swath of aspiring conservative policy professionals has sensibly opted to avoid these programs altogether. The result: Republicans are short on skilled policy professionals, while left-leaning students and scholars operate in a blue bubble in which they too rarely engage with those who think differently.

Pink Slime in California

Many posts have dealt with misinformation, disinformation, and partisan pseudo-news sites.

Colin Lecher at CalMatters:

Earlier this year, as the political battle over Congressional redistricting brought California into the national spotlight, Facebook users were shown a curious series of ads.

The ads, from a straightforward-looking news site called the California Courier, often felt a lot like campaign commercials, linking to articles hammering Democrats in the state, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. Few punched in the other direction, toward Republicans. One said “California Democrats just rewrote their gerrymandering plan so voters will see their partisan map on the ballot this November.” Another called Proposition 50, which passed in November, “a scheme critics say is meant to undermine voter-approved protections and entrench one party rule in California.”

A reader who clicked through to the Courier’s website would find stories that largely align with a conservative view of the news, like a video of a child “riding a scooter through San Fran’s drug-ravaged streets,” or an anonymous piece that cites “confidential sources” cautioning against a “left-wing educator” running for a position with an Orange County school district.

What a reader would not find is any disclosure of the Courier’s ownership or funding, including what appear to be ties to a network of conservative organizations in California that, according to one researcher, scaled up a series of right-leaning news sites in three other states just ahead of the 2024 election.

...

One of the named writers describes himself on social media as a “content creator” for the Lincoln Media Foundation, a conservative group, and links to Courier articles. Another shares a name with a Republican strategist based in Orange County, and a third lists a resume with conservative organizations in a short bio.

The Lincoln Media Foundation is tied to the Lincoln Club, a group based in Orange County that bills itself as “the oldest and largest conservative major donor organization in the state of California.” The club funnels anonymously-donated money to conservative candidates and causes.

... 

Researchers have taken to calling sites like those operated by Lincoln Media “pink slime” news, a name coined after a meat-industry additive. These sites don’t produce outright false news, like others, but they do not meet basic journalistic standards. That often means low-quality content and failing to disclose associations with outside organizations.

The sites generally aren’t designed to generate revenue, but to sway public opinion. The majority, according to researchers, lean toward a conservative agenda, and if the site’s stories gain traction on social media, they can travel widely.

 

.

The Decline of Heritage

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.

 Jessica Riedl at X:

So for anyone interested, I was a Heritage fellow from 2001-2011 and saw the seeds of the mess starting in 2008. 

It's been long enough...I feel comfy telling the story:

In 2008, with the economy and markets collapsing, my colleagues in the econ dept felt necessary to endorse TARP. They were free marketers, but also Ph.D economists and accomplished lawyers trying to avert the threat of a potential depression. Anyway, TARP passed, markets recovered, and nearly all of the money was repaid. Agree or disagree with TARP, the scholar’s research at the time were wholly defensible and well-accepted by economists. (FWIW, I was not involved in the TARP debate).

Yet, after Obama took office, and many people linked up TARP with the Obama stimulus, a grassroots backlash developed claiming that Heritage had endorsed “Obamanomics and socialism” - and this spread to the board.

The key is that - ultimately - instead of defending their scholars, the fear of angering the small dollar donors, Fox News, and the Board won out. Within a few years, much of the economic team - including nearly anyone with a Ph.D. - was gone. They were often replaced with younger scholars who lacked the academic credentials but could be counted on to produce predictably partisan analysis without all the complicated nuance you get from more accomplished Ph.Ds and JDs.

This is also the time that Heritage Action was created, much of the Foundation leadership was replaced, and even Ed Feulner left by 2013. Nuance was out, brass-knuckles partisan politics were in.

I left during this time in 2011, following an incident when a reporter called me to fact check Rep. Michelle Bachmann's claim that we could balance the budget with a few waste tweaks (I endorsed the tweaks while gently noting they would not balance the budget).  

When the newspaper fact check column included my information, I learned that under the new rules, “friends of Heritage” were not to be publicly disagreed with, no matter how incorrect they may be.

As punishment, I was banned from talking to the media – or even answering my own office phone (a gallingly infantilizing punishment for a scholar with 300 publications and thousands of successful media appearances). Essentially, I was being told to put partisanship above truth and intellectual integrity. The Heritage I knew was gone, and as soon as I found the right job with Sen. Portman, so was I.

I hadn't told this story because I didn't want to spill beans on a former employer. But 1) its been 15 years, and 2) my ex-employee status didn't stop their leaders from trolling and mocking me when I came out last year.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Right Rot

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.

Kim Holmes at The Dispatch:

Which leads me to my first and most important definition of what a think tank should be. Above all, it should be about ideas. As soon as the purpose becomes advocacy alone, or some other purpose related to gaining money or power, the “think” part is lost. The organization becomes a mere propaganda machine. There is nothing inherently wrong with policy advocacy for its own sake. But an organization that does only that should not be described as a think tank. Nor should its word on policy be trusted. Any policy research organization worth its salt will respect the rules of evidence and argumentation and avoid sensationalist rhetoric and ad hominem attacks. And it should certainly avoid besmirching the think tank’s reputation by flirting with toxic and vile media personalities.

The ideas themselves must have integrity. There is no such thing as pure political science when it comes to policy analysis. All public policies are grounded in one way or another in principles of governance over which much disagreement will occur. But there is a difference between analyzing a policy problem from a particular point of view and simply tailoring your analysis to partisan talking points. The former requires evidence and reasoning, while the latter appeals solely to emotion and prejudice for the purpose of gaining influence and power.

For many years, the Heritage approach was to apply the principles of economic freedom, limited constitutional government, and strong national defense to the task of formulating policies. Today that is no longer the case. The doctrines driving Heritage’s output, as determined by the foundation’s president and the board of trustees, are a combination of Pat Buchanan-esque populism, nationalism, Trumpism, and various strains of what is called postliberalism. There are still some Reaganite conservatives left on the staff, and they write papers and make public appearances. But they are no longer the dominant voice, and their numbers are dropping ever lower amid a recent wave of resignations.

At Reason, Stephanie Slade writes of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute:

Former ISI President Christopher Long and former ISI Chairman Thomas Lynch resigned as trustees after the other board members voted against removing Burtka at a meeting on November 7. The pair explained their decision in an open letter posted to X, in which they object to "ISI's celebration of the odious and un-American ideas espoused by" figures such as Carlson and Curtis Yarvin and warn about the rise of "white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, and bigotry" on the right.

Carlson was the headliner at ISI's 70th anniversary gala in 2023. ISI also placed one of its three media fellows with Tucker Carlson Tonight this year—that is to say, after his Russia trip and Cooper interview—at a cost of $75,000, according to a document prepared for the board of trustees ahead of the November 7 meeting and reviewed by Reason.

Meanwhile, Yarvin, a blogger and leading "neoreactionary" thinker, was featured in the inaugural episode of ISI's Project Cosmos, a YouTube series hosted by Burtka that launched in August. Like Fuentes (who has claimed, among other things, that "a lot of women want to be raped"), Yarvin has a history of making highly controversial statements, including that he is "not exactly allergic" to white nationalism, that Americans need to "get over their dictatorphobia," and that an ideal society would find a way to accomplish "the removal of undesirable elements" while avoiding the "moral stigma" associated with genocide.

Yarvin, Fuentes, and Carlson are also among those who question or reject the notion that anyone who accepts this country's founding creed should be welcome here. Instead, they suggest—sometimes explicitly, sometimes subtly—that a certain ethno-religious or cultural background is a requirement to be truly an American, such that newcomers have less of a claim to belonging than do "legacy" or "heritage" Americans who can trace their bloodlines to the land for many generations.

Such thinking was until recently considered idea non grata on the mainstream right, and to see it making inroads into respected intellectual institutions has been a cause for alarm among many more traditional conservatives. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute's annual gala on Monday night, the historian of the American Revolution Gordon S. Wood pointedly warned against a view of American nationhood as rooted in blood, soil, religion, or race. Though he didn't mention Carlson by name, the impetus for his remarks wasn't hard to guess.

Conservative Split

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.

Christopher Long at X:

An Open Letter to the Conservative Movement The battle for the heart and soul of the American Conservative Movement is being fought on many fronts, with the latest trench warfare occurring in the boardrooms of its long-standing and most influential foundations and think tanks. The recent controversy @Heritage points to how Conservatism’s venerable institutions have been infiltrated and quietly taken over by a tight-knit, fringe group of post-liberal thinkers who believe America has been “off the rails” since the Founding.

In their minds, the Declaration and Constitution must take a backseat to usher in a new, post-democratic, post-capitalist economic system that advocates isolationism, an immigration ban, and a domestic policy that blurs distinctions between church and state. While often described as MAGA or populist, this group is more tightly aligned to the philosophy of media crank @TuckerCarlson than President Trump’s agenda.

As longtime board members and leaders of @ISI, the oldest conservative campus organization in America, founded in 1953 by William F. Buckley Jr., we have fought to preserve ISI’s longstanding mission from falling victim to a post-liberal hijacking. That battle was lost at a board meeting held last Friday, at the conclusion of which we tendered our resignations.

We hope our experience will serve as a wake-up call that the integrity and longstanding values of conservative institutions are being systematically and intentionally undermined by post-liberals who promote a “no enemies to the right” mindset.

We urged our fellow trustees to terminate ISI’s current President, @johnnyburtka, who formerly served as executive director of the post-liberal journal @amconmag, and return ISI to its core academic work of “Educating for Liberty” by helping American college students to learn and appreciate the perennial ideas and timeless values that have made America great.

ISI has largely abandoned its on-campus philosophical programming, which equipped future leaders to better uphold American ideals. Instead, it focuses on ideological and political podcasts that introduce audiences to alt-right online personalities, such as Tucker Carlson and others who seek to undermine the liberal ideas of the American Founding.

This fundamental shift in ISI’s focus was done behind the board’s back. It’s new signal program, the podcast Project Cosmos, was dropped on X (formerly Twitter) on August 19, featuring postliberal icon @PatrickDeneen and neo-reactionary @curtis_yarvin. Despite two board meetings taking place between the podcast’s release and the start of the costly production in February, the board was never informed of the existence of Project Cosmos.

Three Heritage Foundation directors, @LarryArnn of @Hillsdale, Michael Gleba of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and Heritage’s current president, @KevinRobertsTX, are trustees of ISI and attended the Friday meeting. None objected to or questioned the judgment of platforming Yarvin in Project Cosmos’s inaugural episode. This, after being confronted with a long list of damning quotes from Yarvin.

Yarvin is a self-described neo-reactionary, unapologetic monarchist, and a leader of the Dark Enlightenment movement who advocates for “rebooting” and replacing liberal democracy. He writes, “If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” He has also said, “Although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff.”

Rather than peeling away disaffected young males who flock to the noxious ideas of Fuentes and Yarvin, ISI’s Project Cosmos fawns over their anti-liberal philosophies. They appear to be successful in appealing to the Yarvin-Fuentes-Carlson echo chamber, as Project Cosmos reported that the video garnered six million views on X, with a skewing of more than 90% male.

What is unclear is how many women and other traditional ISI students, professors, alumni, and donors are turned off by ISI’s celebration of the odious and un-American ideas espoused by Yarvin, Fuentes, and Carlson. Traditionally, ISI’s mission was to teach American ideals to curious students on college campuses. The mission of helping students search for truth is now replaced by the post-liberals’ lust for political power in Washington.

The Heritage Foundation and Hillsdale College are not the only pillars of the modern Conservative Movement to subsidize @TCNetwork. Carlson was the headliner at ISI’s gala two years ago, and this year, one of its three $75,000 annual fellowships went to the Tucker Carlson Network. Before Burtka’s arrival, fellows were found at genuine journalism outlets, including  @WSJ, @USATODAY, @NRO, and @dallasnews.

What happened at Heritage and ISI in recent weeks underscores how a cadre of post-liberals has worked together, behind the scenes, to wrest control of conservative institutions from actual conservatives. They have quietly filled boardrooms with post-liberals, integralists, and other fellow travelers who disdain traditional conservatism’s central tenets of free markets, limited government, individual liberty, and personal responsibility. These usurpers of conservatism, as Yarvin puts it, find America’s core principles to be “historically leftist” and prevent the right from defeating the left both philosophically and at the ballot box.

The leaders of the postliberal project continue to be close friends with Carlson, Yarvin, and their ilk, to be open to discussion with the likes of Fuentes and other racists and antisemites, and to praise autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orban—and Carlson even lauds the “social values” of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolas Maduro. They echo Yarvin’s call to overcome the fear of dictatorship and relinquish respect for representative government and the checks and balances the Founders established.

Traditional conservatives who believe in America’s Founding principles and look back at the Reagan Revolution as a step in the right direction need to wake up and understand the battle currently underway.

Heritage’s Founder and longtime ISI Chairman Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., presciently warned in the final article he penned in @NationalAffairs before his death this past July: “An existential identity crisis now grips the American right. A political movement once united by commitment to limited government, moral order, and a robust defense of American ideals now appears fractured, its purpose clouded by populist grievances and ideological drift.”

Supporters of ISI, Heritage, and other mainstream Conservative institutions must be on notice that the programs and purposes they are funding may no longer be what they think they are. Today is the time for choosing. We hope all conservatives will choose to fight on the side of William F. Buckley, Jr. and give no corner to those preaching white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, and bigotry. Onward!

Christopher Long, former President, Intercollegiate Studies Institute Thomas Lynch, former Chairman, Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Political Violence in the United States

Many posts have discussed political violence.

Daniel Byman and Riley McCabe at CSIS:

The tragic killing of political commentator and conservative activist Charlie Kirk has once again put the spotlight on political violence in the United States, with figures on both sides of the political aisle decrying extremism on the other. To understand the danger of political violence today and to find the best solutions for reducing it, it is important to understand the overall threat landscape and how both left- and right-wing violence have evolved and could change in the future.

Our analysis of terrorism trends in the United States shows that, indeed, left-wing violence has risen in the last 10 years, particularly since President Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence in 2016, although it has risen from very low levels and remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers. More contentious politics in the United States and the expansion of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement appear to have reenergized violent left-wing extremists. The left-wing movement as a whole has not returned to its violent heights of the 1960s and 1970s, but the number of terrorist incidents involving left-wing extremists so far this year puts 2025 on pace to be the left’s most violent year in more than three decades. Moreover, 2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing attacks outnumber those from the far right.

Indeed, the increase in left-wing attacks is particularly noticeable because attacks from right-wing perpetrators have sharply declined in 2025. This decline is striking, and explanations are speculative. One possibility is that many traditional grievances that violent right-wing extremists have espoused in the past—opposition to abortion, hostility to immigration, and suspicions of government agencies, among others—are now embraced by President Trump and his administration.

Similarly, jihadist attacks have declined in frequency since their peak in the 2010s, owing largely to the destruction of major groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State and the subsequent decline in the power of the jihadist ideology to inspire attackers.

Left-wing attacks are remarkably less lethal overall than jihadist or right-wing attacks. However, even incidents that do not result in mass casualties can still have significant impact. Fortunately, many left-wing attackers (though not all) have demonstrated limited skill in carrying out violence, and the movement is disorganized, with little formal coordination.

The rise in left-wing attacks merits increased attention, but the fall in right-wing attacks is probably temporary, and it too requires a government response. In any case, many of the prescriptions for fighting terrorism effectively apply to violence from both the left and right. These include ensuring proper counterterrorism resourcing, avoiding overreactions, and having leadership unequivocally condemn such attacks.

ACB

Many posts have discussed the independence of the judiciary.

At NYT, Jodi Kantor writes of Justice Amy Coney Barrett:

She has become the Republican-appointed justice most likely to be in the majority in decisions that reach a liberal outcome, according to a new analysis of her record prepared for The New York Times. Her influence — measured by how often she is on the winning side — is rising. Along with the chief justice, a frequent voting partner, Justice Barrett could be one of the few people in the country to check the actions of the president.

...

On the court, she stands somewhat alone. One of only two former law professors, she is also the least experienced judge, the youngest member of the group, at 53, and the only mother of grade-school children ever to serve. The sole current justice who was not educated at Harvard or Yale, she is a Washington outsider and foreigner to the power-player Beltway posts that shaped most of her colleagues.

Her apartness shows in her votes and her signature move of joining only slices of her colleagues’ opinions. She agrees with most of the supermajority’s outcomes, but sometimes writes to say they took the wrong route to their conclusion. (One person from the court called her the Hermione Granger of the conservatives, telling the men they’re doing it wrong.) Or she joins the liberal justices but stipulates that she can’t fully buy in.

How often Barrett voted with the majority

Conservative decisions

100%

91%

84%

80%

60%

Liberal decisions

40%

20%

2020-21 term

2021-22

2022-23

2023-24

Nonunanimous decisions that were orally argued and signed

 

Source: Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, Washington University in St. Louis; and Michael J. Nelson, Penn State

 

The New York Times

 

Share of conservative votes

100%

Alito

80%

Thomas

Kavanaugh

Gorsuch

60%

Roberts

Barrett

40%

Jackson

Kagan

20%

Sotomayor

2020–22

2022–present

Nonunanimous decisions that were orally argued and signed

 

Source: Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, Washington University in St. Louis; and Michael J. Nelson, Penn State

 

The New York Times

About the Data

The data in this article come from an analysis prepared for The Times by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson, of Penn State. The researchers used the Supreme Court Database, which contains information about every Supreme Court case since 1791. More information on how decisions are coded “liberal” or “conservative” can be found on the database website.