“Law clerks are not supposed to be part of a cohort of secretly financed and trained partisans of an organization that describes itself on its own web page as ‘the bastion of the American conservative movement,’”
It almost sounds like some kind of right-wing conspiracy. Vastly.
Bwahahahaha! Good one!
Seriously though, decades-long, in-the-shadows conspiracies to subvert democracy are a genuinely rare thing. Like the kind you’d have in a movie, where a secret society meets and the leader raises a toast: “gentlemen! To Evil!”. This creepy grooming of ideological fellow-travelers, coached in what to say in public versus how they should act once confirmed… that’s scary stuff
New York Times sheds light while cockroaches scatter.
How do you spell deep state?
H E R I T A G E… F O U N D A T I O N
Oh. Well there you go.
At what point do the various nefarious activities of Republicans and their aligned special interest groups constitute revolution against the American government?
Heritage and the Federalist Society have been undermining the Enlightenment for the last 30 years. Anything that limits those 2 organizations is double plus good.
“Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch were picked from a list of contenders curated by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, another conservative organization focused on the judiciary.“
I think you are referring to the pretender ‘Justice’ Gorsuch, and the high functioning drunkard and attempted rapist ‘Justice’ O’Kavanaugh.
1972, I think.
We don’t need a ‘Star Chamber’ in Amerika.
Get people to the polls November 6th and vote like your life depended on it.
It’s too bad nobody managed to infiltrate that group and publish their materials.
Can you imagine the outrage if any group with a different alignment funded a madrassa for law clerks?
“Some legal experts told the Times that it is inherently problematic for a very conservative group to secretly train future judges to have loyalty to its ideals and practices.”
Some ??? I’d think that most if not all legal experts would see that it is inherently problematic to secretly train future judges to have loyalty to anything other than the law.
“The idea that clerks will be trained to elevate the Heritage Foundation’s views, or the views of judges handpicked by the foundation, perverts the very idea of a clerkship.” Now there is biting bit of understatement if ever there was one.
Anyone know how long this has been going on?
There’s a great cottage industry in right wing grift that goes back to the explosion of dark money onto the political scene back in the 1980s, when Charles Koch’s checkbook was born.
In addition to buying up the entire Republican Party through a combination of bribery and propaganda, the dark money crowd started organizing “foundations” and “think tanks,” mostly for purposes of the reactionary equivalent of money-laundering, but also as useful fronts for the mass purchase of journalists, economists, and other culture warriors.
All kinds of third-rate men who might otherwise have ended up teaching night school, or offering their accounting services during tax season, followed the sweet smell of cash and became spokesmen and frontmen for the death of democracy.
After nearly forty years,some grifters have learned that they don’t always have to put a great feverish effort into growing rich off the dark money set: they don’t have to write really bad books and appear on the PBS News Hour on a regular basis.
They can sit just quietly, like Ferdinand the Bull, along the banks of the Heritage Foundation, and hold out nets as great wads of dark money tumble past.
It’s an easy living, and the lovely thing is, if you have to throw back a “law clerk training academy” as some kind of violation of gaming regulations, you just wait to catch the next vast, sweet-meat stack of bills to come rolling by. There’s always another fish in the grifters’ sea
Not nearly as rare as you might think. I would commend to you the recently published work by Nancy MacLean, “Democracy in Chains” “The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.” It will leave you stunned, and it’s also like one of those illusion puzzles that, once you’ve figured out the illusion, you can’t miss it. After reading this book, for me at least, a lot of things I see happening today make a lot more sense.
Shall we say it again? It’s all projection all the time.
How did the NYT find out about this?
This reminds me of that business a few years ago where young religious extremists would train as pharmacists just so they could get hired and refuse to provide healthcare services they disapproved of. Whatever happened to that racket? I don’t think it ever got properly slapped down in court.
As soon as they lose control of the narrative.
By accusing Democrats of the same thing, they inoculate themselves by turning it into a ‘He said, D said’ argument.