Kevin D. Roberts is president of The Heritage Foundation and the author of the foreword to the Mandate for Leadership. According to his bio on the foundation’s web site, his PhD is in American history. The bio goes on to list Roberts’s conservative credentials. In Heritage usage, “conservative” equals what those outside its sphere might call “far-right,” as Roberts’s foreword implicitly makes a distinction between “conservative” and “the Washington establishment,” which includes Republicans.
The foreword makes several of Roberts’s ideological biases clear. He writes that “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries,” for example, without citing a source that shows how the existence of transgender people (including transgender children) and the acceptance of them as part of society is in any way toxic. (See PDF page 33, book page 1 of the Mandate for Leadership.) Neither does he cite a single instance of drag queen story hours taking place in—not invading–school libraries (rather than public libraries and bookstores). He does not cite a single instance of pornography “invading” a school library. It is worth noting, however, that the Mandate for Leadership’s implied definition of “pornography” includes any book or media that mentions transgender people, rather than the standard definition of “pornography” as material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic feelings. (See PDF page 37, book page 5 of the Mandate for Leadership regarding pornography.)
In the foreword, Roberts goes on to list more horribles in the parade: “low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence.” In his mindset, “government dependence,” aka a social safety net or welfare, is something one can drown in instead of being helped by. One tenet of the libertarian right is that government should not, as the preamble to the Constitution puts it, “promote the general welfare,” if that means helping the poor with such things as basic income, food subsidies, or financial assistance with housing or healthcare. Such help, in their view, promotes dependency (rather than stabilize a poor family’s living situation, enabling them to secure more steady employment and education) and disincentivizes finding work (which presumably pays enough to live on, even though in reality many jobs do not pay enough to live on without help, let alone lead to prosperity). As for addiction, studies have shown that while there is a higher risk of addiction among the poor, wealth is no guarantor that one will not fall into addiction. Furthermore, actual addiction rates do not support the notion that poor neighborhoods are “drowning” in addiction. Predictably, Republicans have recently opposed using government funds to fight addiction.
When discussing Roberts’s writing, it is helpful to consider a word: phantasm. Collins dictionary online lists the word as meaning “an illusory perception of an object, person [or] (in the philosophy of Plato) objective reality as distorted by perception.” In Roberts’s mind, for example, the existence of transgender people (an objective reality) is distorted into some sort of existential threat to, say, “the very moral foundations of our society.” Another example: He decries “the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening,” which does not exist; in reality some people do identify as woke, which the dictionary does not define as a catch-all descriptor of things conservatives do not like. Another example of what may be called a reverse phantasm: Roberts claims that “climate change” is a meaningless term. “Climate change” is not a meaningless term, just as “anthropogenic climate change” and “global warming” and “greenhouse gases” are not meaningless terms.
Roberts’s bio includes several articles he has written. One article is titled “What I Learned at Davos” and discusses a time that Roberts attended one of the well-known meetings of VIPs in the Swiss town. Roberts calls the attendees “elites,” which they are. He does not identify himself as a member of the elite, even though he is the president of a highly influential organization, one that is arguably more influential than the one that sponsors the meeting at Davos. Roberts has also been a college president and president and headmaster of another school. He is among the top 1.2 percent of Americans who have a doctorate degree. At ProPublica’s nonprofit explorer, Roberts’s 2022 salary is listed as $622,489, with $46,391 listed as “other,” presumably compensation for such expenses as first-class travel. The nonprofit explorer lists the Heritage Foundation’s assets in 2022 as $331,987,871. Roberts points out that few of the elites at Davos have “won an election.” If Roberts has ever won a political election, there is no mention of it in his Heritage Foundation bio.
In another dig at transgender people, in the essay about attending Davos, Roberts opposes acceptance of “the delusion that a man can become a woman” and says “We’re going to stop obeying the so-called “experts” for their opinions on public health, public safety, the environment, sexual ethics, and the rest.” Regarding public health, the Heritage Foundation has expressed opposition to mask mandates (although in a more measured way than many on the right). Heritage also considers a Supreme Court decision allowing for more people to carry guns as good for public safety. Heritage generally opposes environmental regulations. Regarding sexual ethics, in a post on Twitter, Heritage has stated that “Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”
The subtitle of Roberts’s account of his trip to Davos is “The Future of Democracy Is Secure.” Is the Heritage Foundation a supporter of democracy? As historian Nancy MacLean writes in her book Democracy in Chains, for decades leading forces on the far right have taken steps to constrain democracy so that people cannot effectively vote to implement policies that, for example, favor proportional or progressive taxation of the rich, publicly funded social welfare programs (including public schools), and environmental regulation for the sake of public health. Some of the leading proponents of this anti-democratic mission have been the Koch brothers (along with Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife, among others), who have financially supported the Heritage Foundation.
Before taking the helm at Heritage, Roberts served as president of Wyoming Catholic College, which adopted “a policy of refusing to accept federal student loans and grants, lest it be forced to violate Catholic tenets.” What Catholic tenets would be violated by adhering to federal rules?
According to the Campus Pride web site’s Worst List, “The colleges & universities listed have chosen to openly discriminate against LGBTQ youth and/or have requested Title IX exemptions to perpetuate the harms of religion-based bigotry.” Campus Pride includes Wyoming Catholic College on its Worst List of colleges that are the worst choices for LGBTQ+ students to attend.
Title IX does more than offer protections to LGBTQ+ people. It also helps protect victims of sexual discrimination, harassment, and assault. “Under Title IX, discrimination on the basis of sex can include sexual harassment or sexual violence, such as rape, sexual assault, sexual battery, and sexual coercion.”
According to a post on Twitter by @lourdesgnavarro, an account of Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who writes for the New York Times, “The head of the Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts tells me he doesn’t think Biden won in 2020, Joe McCarthy had the right idea but wrong tactics, Communists have infiltrated the government and how he wants to ‘institutionalize Trumpism.’” Ms. Garcia-Navarro’s account of her interview with Roberts appears in the New York Times magazine. It seems that the phantasm of the U.S. government’s being infiltrated by communists has not faded away with the passing of Joe McCarthy. According to the Open Democracy web site, “Trumpism” is an “extreme far-right ideology that attacks democracy and normalizes violence against progressive agendas and liberal cultures, while promoting full market deregulation.”
Kevin D. Roberts is the head of the lead organization behind Project 2025 and the Mandate for Leadership. He is the author of the foreword to the Mandate for Leadership. His views and history should therefore be taken into consideration when evaluating Project 2025 and what it hopes to accomplish.
