I am a former seven-year veteran of The Heritage Foundation and consider it to be the premier think tank of the conservative movement today. There has been a recent fracture in the movement, including some pretenders, and many up-and-coming conservative and center-right organizations have tried to take advantage by training their fire at Heritage in the wake of the Tucker Carlson controversy. I am part of the libertarian-ish wing of the movement and have my disputes with some of the policies of Heritage, yet I still look at that institution as the unchallenged leader of modern conservative thought.

I consider my time at Heritage to be formative years in my thinking. I was exposed to an amazing array of policy analysts who wrote educational papers targeting thought leaders in Washington, D.C. Paul Weyrich and Ed Feulner started the foundation in 1973 to be a conservative answer to the liberal Brookings Institution. The original focus of Heritage was on pro-business economic policy, anti-communism, and it weighed in on cultural issues of the day. That same core of economic, foreign policy, and ethical issues still prevail today at the think tank.

Clearly, the conservative movement........

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