De bank! De bank! Are you a “politically exposed person”? If so, you could find yourself locked out of the banking system thanks to the pernicious practice of “debanking.”

• “Debanking is a kind of financial blackballing that has appeared within just the last 20 years,” explains EJ Antoni, a research fellow at the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget.
• “Dozens of tech and crypto founders have been debanked under Biden, and their inventions smothered,” Antoni writes. COVID-19 vaccine critic Dr. Joseph Mercola found his business accounts shut down by JP Morgan Chase. Melania Trump says her bank account was terminated after the Jan. 6 riots.

Antoni appeared on Fox Business last week. Watch the clip here. Read his commentary here.

Surprise: Leftists are taking their activism from the streets to the driveways—violating America’s long tradition of residential civility.

• “When conservative activists go too far, calls for civility follow. When leftists misbehave and act uncivilly, we don’t hear much about civility,” write Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky and Public Interest Legal Foundation President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams.

Read more here.

 

Stop the steal: Heritage has revamped its exclusive Election Fraud Database to include an interactive election fraud map, highlighting proven instances of election fraud. 

• “Our Election Fraud Database has helped educate countless Americans that election fraud is real...This upgraded fraud map highlights that states need to do more work,” said Vice President of the Institute for Constitutional Government and Senior Legal Fellow John Malcolm. 

Read more here. 

Even though President Trump won the 2024 election, no meaningful change can happen if the administrative state sabotages conservative reforms. The Heritage Foundation has a plan to dismantle the administrative state. And your support today can make it possible. Your gift today will:  

• Replace Washington’s leftist bureaucrats with loyal patriots.  
• Restore the federal government to its proper size and save the American Dream. 
• Reclaim the good life for all American families. 

To succeed, we need as many patriots as possible to support this plan. 

Please use this secure link to help dismantle the administrative state with your year-end gift to The Heritage Foundation: https://secured.heritage.org/end-of-year-campaign/.

Get real: For the Constitution to regain pride of place in our legal system, American law schools need a curricular overhaul.

• “Most students never seriously engage with originalism during their law school careers, much less learn how to do originalism in practice,” says The Honorable Amul R. Thapar, circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, who spoke at Heritage.

Read Judge Thapar’s full remarks here; watch the lecture here.

 

Winning: President-elect Donald Trump nominated former Tech Policy Center Visiting Fellow Mark Meador as commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Meador will be a strong proponent of commonsense tech policy reform.  

• “Our laws and social norms treat children differently," Meador previously wrote with Policy Analyst Annie Chestnut Tutor. "Abandoning that practice to pander to the interests of Big Tech would be incredibly dangerous,”

Read more here. 

Get risky: As the threat of nuclear war becomes greater, it is critical that the United States significantly increase its production of nuclear weapons.

• “The United States is building nuclear weapons at a glacial pace. At the current pace, decades will pass before the current arsenal is replaced. This is unacceptable,” writes Robert Peters, research fellow in the Allison Center for National Security at Heritage.

Read more here.

 

Applications for the Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prizes open Dec. 16. The program offers awards of $15,000 to current faculty members engaged in scholarship that explores topics related to The Heritage Foundation’s priority issue areas, as well as broader questions about freedom and opportunity.

• Prize winners will also participate in a summer 2025 colloquium with Heritage scholars and other thought leaders.

Deadline to apply is March 3. To learn more and apply, click here.

RIP: Heritage mourns the loss of Dr. Lee Edwards, who passed away on Dec. 12 at his home in Arlington, Va.

• Edwards was a distinguished fellow in conservative thought at Heritage and founding chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He was author, co-author, or editor of more than 25 books, and is often called the historian of the conservative movement.
• His book on the origins of The Heritage Foundation is titled “Leading the Way.”

Read some tributes here.

Restoring American Wellness Summit 

The growing coalition of Americans concerned about the country’s health presents a unique opportunity to confront the misalignment between the medical, health, and agricultural systems and the American people. A critical examination reveals systemic issues contributing to our national health crisis. Join Heritage experts for an in-depth discussion of these critical issues. 

 

Dec. 18, 10:15 a.m. Register here. 

• A Nuclear War in Ukraine Would Be a Disaster for America—Robert Greenway and Robert Peters
• Trump Should Secure Jimmy Lai’s Release—Mike Gonzalez
• Corporations Are Finally Giving DEI the Pink Slip—Jonathan Butcher
• Report: The Climate Shift: How Changing Weather Patterns Will Enhance Hydropower—Todd Myers
• Report: The Unreliability of Current Global Temperature and Solar Activity Estimates and Its Implications for the Attribution of Global Warming—Willie Soon, Ronan Connolly, and Michael Connolly
• Ending the Treasury Department’s Regulatory Overreach on Crypto Mixer Tornado Cash—Zack Smith
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love This Tariff-Like System—Preston Brashers

In an appearance on Fox Business, Victoria Coates, vice president of Heritage’s Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, said that it’s no coincidence that—just weeks after Donald Trump won the election—Hamas appears ready to make a deal on the hostages it has held for 436 days. Watch the clip here.