Zach Kessel writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a significant development in the American conservative movement.
Leaders of Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the nonprofit led by former vice president Mike Pence, said that their move to hire more than a dozen former Heritage Foundation employees represents a significant shift within the American right.
AAF president Tim Chapman described the organization’s addition of Heritage Foundation’s legal, data, and economics centers, a move that doubles its size, as a “reorganization of the conservative movement.”
“People are voting with their feet as to where they feel they are best suited to be,” Chapman said.
The mass defections from the Heritage Foundation are part of the continuing fallout from president Kevin Roberts’s release, in October, of a clumsy video taking aim at critics of the podcast host Tucker Carlson, who had recently conducted a friendly interview with the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
The new AAF hires include John Malcolm, who led the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and will lead the new Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at AAF; Richard Stern, who directed Heritage’s economics center and will lead the Plymouth Center for Free Enterprise at AAF; and Kevin Dayaratna, who ran Heritage’s data analysis center and will build a similar program at his new institution.
Roberts told staff on Sunday that Heritage Foundation scholar Cully Stimson would take over the think tank’s legal center after Malcolm’s departure, “with assistance from Hans von Spakovsky.” But both Stimson and von Spakovsky tendered their resignations on Monday as well, the two confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon.
In a sign of the tumult at Heritage, the think tank fired Malcolm because he planned to resign and would not disclose where he planned to work next, according to National Review. AAF said Monday that “additional staff announcements will be coming soon.”
