Henry Olsen’s essay last week—“Does Heritage Support Discrimination Against Women?”—may be the worst Atlantic disaster since the Titanic. And yet conservatives of every tribe should read it, especially the New Right thinkers Olsen believes he’s shading.
The topic of Olsen’s essay is the Heritage Foundation’s hiring of Boise State professor Scott Yenor to direct its Center for American Studies. Yenor is an old-school conservative who is not afraid to push buttons and challenge all sorts of post–sexual revolution priors. The subtext is the establishment right’s ongoing conniption about Heritage’s MAGA-era openness to populist, nationalist, and traditionalist ideas that are supposedly anathema to the respectable, fusionist conservatism of most Beltway think tanks.