(Nov. 13)
The man who is surely Louisiana’s single biggest contribution to the national conservative movement has now weighed in, on the correct side of course, of the national news-making controversy roiling the famous Heritage Foundation think tank.
Thank goodness. Maybe it will help.
For those who missed it, Heritage — for decades the single most important national generator of conservative policy ideas — has rightly been under assault since Oct. 30. That was the date Heritage’s uber-MAGA president, Kevin Roberts, issued an Oct. 30 video defending hateful provocateur Tucker Carlson for Carlson’s buddy-buddy interview with white-supremacist, antisemitic activist Nick Fuentes. If you aren’t familiar with Fuentes, he essentially is Louisiana neo-Nazi David Duke’s dream come true, except without a federal felony-fraud conviction.
Since then, Roberts has issued a series of semi-apologies — sometimes with a smirk as if he is just humoring his critics — which have failed to stem the criticism or stop a series of high-profile resignations by key Heritage personnel. By now, almost every major news outlet in the country has run stories about how this Roberts-Carlson-Fuentes imbroglio is causing a “crackup” of sorts not just at Heritage but within the whole overlapping Trump-MAGA/conservative edifice.
Numerous Trump-world figures, especially Vice President JD Vance, have fellow-traveled with the authoritarians and bigots. But now that the Heritage controversy has erupted, more and more conservative leaders are emerging belatedly from their shells to say the ever-louder authoritarians and bigots should be anathema.
Now enter Morton Blackwell, except that he was ahead of the game rather than belated. Blackwell is a Louisiana native who began building the Louisiana Republican Party in the early 1960s before going national as the premier organizational genius of the Goldwater-Reagan conservative movement. He also literally was a key participant in the conversations that resulted in Heritage’s founding in 1973. In 2020, Heritage itself gave Blackwell its inaugural Titan of Conservatism honor for his six decades in the political vineyards.
Blackwell’s Leadership Institute since 1979 has trained about 250,000 young people with skills for campaigns, media appearances, public speaking and more. (Full disclosure: I am on the board of an inactive, cashless holding company for LI’s historical records.) As I saw when I attended one of his training schools in early 1983, Blackwell teaches campaign workers to be clever, practical and tough, but he devotes a whole segment to insisting, in no uncertain terms, that all campaign work must be not just legal but also ethical and devoid of any sort of bigotry.
Blackwell through the years has chaired so many key conservative organizations (in addition to running his own LI), and with such graciousness that he almost never makes enemies, that there is no single voice more respected, behind the scenes within conservative networks, than his.
“The question,” he wrote, “is whether moral people and serious institutions should associate with or legitimize ideas that contradict the foundational principles of ordered liberty and human dignity.” Noting that years ago LI was “the first conservative organization to identify, expose, and expel Nick Fuentes from our programs,” Blackwell wrote that Fuentes’ “hateful views … represent a danger to conservative principles and to all who labor in good faith to advance liberty.”…. [AND MORE! For the rest of this column, follow this link.]
