The Henchman’s Award

An invitation to see James O’Keefe receive the Heartland Liberty Prize has been extended to me. Obviously The Heartland Institute doesn’t know who I am (I am a leftist) because there’s no way I’d pay a dime to attend a conservative fundraiser. The bigger question here though is, do they know who James O’Keefe is? Because the man has been repeatedly exposed as a fraud. I’m not going to go into examples of how he’s a fraud because that plays into his game. Mr. O’Keefe makes gotcha videos and he knows that even if the headlines eventually read “Video showing corruption at XYZ was deceptively edited” his intended audience will still vaguely remember “Video showed corruption at XYZ.” I’ll just mention that he has paid $100,000 in a legal settlement and pled guilty in federal court.

This postcard sent me down a rabbit hole. Who else had won the Heartland Liberty Prize? I decided I needed to dig into what had to be a list of knobheads.

Walter Williams

A local newspaper, West Newsmagazine, used to publish a weekly column by Dennis Prager. About a month after Neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville and murdered a woman, Mr. Prager wrote an article declaring that there was no racism in America. Outraged, I pushed West Newsmagazine to stop carrying his column and to their credit, they did. A few months after that though they started publishing columns by Walter E. Williams, who said much of the same racist crap that Dennis Prager did. However, it probably didn’t seem as racist coming from a black man, and that was probably why West Newsmagazine felt comfortable publishing it. Here is one of my letters decrying Williams from 2019:

In the column "Discrimination and disparities" Walter E. Williams argues that the troubles of minorities are entirely of their own making and not the result of any historical oppression. First of all, this walks right past the reality that racism, sometimes even deadly racism, still exists today. Walter points out that Jews suffered some of the worst historical injustice, yet "no one can argue that as a result Jews are the most disadvantaged people." Therefore "Politicians and others who are now calling for reparations to blacks for slavery should take note" This conveniently ignores that Germany has paid $89 billion in reparations to the mostly Jewish victims of Nazi crimes and that Jewish people are still targets of racism, sometimes even deadly racism, today.

William talks about a single historically successful black school that causes him to wonder about separate schools being inherently unequal. The man is an apologist for segregation in 2019. Are we supposed to take him seriously as an intellectual?

West Newsmagazine continued to publish Walter E. Williams till he died.

John Stossel

When I was a teen I actually liked John Stossel’s segments on 20/20. And his stance that all the fun stuff governments like to outlaw should generally be legal is still agreeable to me. But scrolling through Stossel’s twitter gets nauseating pretty quickly. He hates poor people so much. The idea that society should do anything to help people is anathema to him. He also hates the environment, fuck those icebergs. What he does like is defending rightwing ghouls like Steven Crowder and Jordan Pederson.

Lee Walker

I can’t even figure out who this guy is. I don’t think they gave an award to a Welsh professional snooker player.

Al Salvi

This is one where Heartland bet on the wrong horse. Salvi was supposed to be a rising star in the Republican Party, but he never got further than the Illinois House of Representatives. Also Salvi falsely accused Jim Brady, a man who was disabled by a gunshot wound, of selling machine guns.

Ed Crane

Ed Crane founded the Cato institute which he was only able to do with funding from the Koch Brothers. You know who else gets funding from the Koch Brothers? The Heartland Institute. Small world, hun?

Dave Padden

This is another one I can’t figure out. Who are these people? There’s just a list of names on the Heartland website without any bios. Though I suppose there’s a small chance they gave the award to the guitarist from the Canadian thrash metal band Annihilator.

Mae and Martin Duggan

When I searched for these two the first result that came up was from, of all places, West Newsmagazine. Of course that source had nothing but positive things to say about a self described conservative provocateur. Mae Duggan was an early proponent of school vouchers. School vouchers being a method used by people like Betsy DeVos to screw over public school systems by funneling money away from them and towards for-profit schools.

Robert Rector

Rector works at the Heritage Foundation. You might want to sit down for this information: the Heritage Foundation gets funding from the Koch brothers. I could write a whole article about direct harm Rector has caused; you can directly tie him to policies screwing over the poor and he has been called the "architect of the abstinence-only movement."

Jack Roeser

A guy who liked Roeser said of him “There’s homophobia and then there was Jack Roeser homophobia.” and “Then, in Jack’s mind, the only thing worse than homosexuals, were the teachers.” The one good thing I’ll say about Roeser is that the republican candidates he gave millions of dollars to always lost.

Jim Johnston

Oh man, I really hope they actually gave an award to the guy who does theme songs for World Wrestling Entertainment.

George Clowes

This is a guy who worked at the Heartland Institute. They just gave their stupid award to themselves.

Gary Becker

At first I was confused as to why this guy got the prize; Becker is best known for his work showing how racism affects economies (badly). I’m pretty sure he got the award because he was also an advocate for school vouchers.

Robert Poole

Poole works for the Reason Foundation. The Reason Foundation’s top funder is the Koch brothers. It’s Koch brothers all the way down.

Robert Sirico

Sirico's life story is a bummer. In the 1970’s he was a leftist advocate for gay marriage. Along the line though he realized that it was more profitable to declare that Christianity demanded a neoliberal free market and “traditional” marriage. This priest earned a salary of $264,480 in 2018.

Dennis Avery

Dennis Avery was the director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute. In this role Avery led the fight against organic food while getting funding from companies like Monsanto. He also worked for Heartland.

S. Fred Singer

Singer was another Heartland Institute employee. He was mainly known as a climate change denialist.

M. Stanton Evans

An author best known for Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies. Which has been referred to as a "remarkable fantasy.” One has to wonder what drove Evans to try to make a hero out of one of America’s greatest villains.

Don Devine

Devine is best known for screwing over federal employees under the Reagan administration. I’d like to just share some titles of articles he’s written: Catholics Bad Americans? ; U.S. Ethno-National Suicide? and Torture Conservatives?

Morton Blackwell

While I would have liked to just say that Blackwell looks like a villain in a 1950’s period piece, he warrants a bit more examination. He is the founder of The Leadership Institute, which trains conservatives for careers in politics. Alumni of it’s programs include Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, and *sigh* James O'Keefe. The Leadership Institute is part of the State Policy Network, which is funded by the Koch brothers.

Joseph and Diane Bast

Joseph is the CEO of the Heartland Institute (I feel like Heartland couldn’t line up any good speakers for their fundraiser so he just gave the dumb award to himself). His wife Diane contributes to the cause by spreading misinformation about climate change. Apparently the only way for a woman to get this award to is to co-win it with her husband.

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This article was written by Buck Hardcastle, winner of the prestigious Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.