Brains Behind the Buffoons: The Quiet Coup of Conservative Think Tanks
Behind the clownish chaos of the American right lies a cold, coordinated elite effort to dismantle democracy. This is your wake-up call. Fight back.
Let me say this once, loud enough for the people in the back of the Heritage Foundation to hear it through their mahogany-paneled offices: The face of this coup may look like a clown show, but the brains are polished, vicious, and old-money dangerous. While we were all watching shirtless yahoos in Viking helmets storm the Capitol like it was Burning Man for fascists, the real damage was being done quietly, efficiently, and with surgical precision by Ivy League-credentialed ideologues who never raise their voices, only judicial majorities.
And no, they didn’t just show up with Trump. The seeds of this rot were planted decades ago, carefully watered in the dead soil of Nixonian paranoia and Reaganite revanchism, and they have been blooming in federal courts, school boards, and statehouses ever since.
The dumb ones are the distraction. The real villains wear robes and cite Blackstone.
I. Set the Stage: Dumb and Dumber is a Distraction
Let’s be clear: January 6 was not a spontaneous riot of the disenfranchised. It was a pantomime coup performed by the useful idiots, the MAGA moms and Proud Boys, the QAnon shamans and Boomer Facebook warriors, to give cover to a much more disciplined operation. While the public face of Trumpism slobbered over conspiracy theories and live-streamed their own crimes, the legal war to dismantle democracy marched forward in loafers, not jackboots.
And we fell for it. Because our media is addicted to spectacle, and our nervous systems are shot from too many years of bad news and broken systems. We were trained to laugh at the stupid. That’s the trick: strategic idiocy. Weaponized foolishness. A kind of professional, performative incompetence that keeps the public distracted while elites redraw the map.
II. Meet the Brain Trust: Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation
If you haven’t heard of the Federalist Society, it’s probably because they don’t want you to. But they have quietly become the single most powerful force in reshaping American law in the past 50 years. Founded in 1982 by a handful of conservative law students and bankrolled by the Scrooge McDuck-level fortunes of donors like the Kochs and Scaifes, the Federalist Society set out to do one thing: build a parallel legal system, one court clerk and law professor at a time.
They didn’t scream. They didn’t riot. They built networks. They mentored future Supreme Court justices. They took over law schools. They created ideological purity tests for the judiciary. And they did it all while claiming to be “non-partisan.”
The Heritage Foundation, meanwhile, is the creepy older cousin in this family of authoritarian ambition. Founded in 1973, Heritage has long acted as the policy shop for the conservative movement, turning fringe ideas into “serious” policy recommendations and ghostwriting legislation for Republican lawmakers who can’t spell “legislation.” If the Federalist Society grooms the judges, Heritage writes the script.
Let’s talk about Project 2025: a Heritage-led blueprint for the next Republican administration that lays out exactly how they plan to gut federal agencies, fill every office with loyalists, and eliminate any vestiges of civil service neutrality. It’s a full roadmap for authoritarian governance, wrapped in white paper and perfumed with institutional respectability.
This is not conservatism. This is infrastructural fascism.
III. Strategic Idiocy as a Weapon
Do you think Trump’s incoherence is an accident? Do you believe Marjorie Taylor Greene is some off-brand anomaly? Bless your heart. These people are decoys, reality TV gladiators, sent into the arena to draw fire while the real generals sit behind glass walls drafting legal theory.
It’s not new. Look at Berlusconi in Italy: play the clown on TV, buy up media, destroy the judiciary from within. Look at Boris Johnson in the UK: charm the rubes with bumbling antics, then ram through Brexit with hedge fund money.
In America, this takes the form of a Republican Party that plays dumb while executing surgical strikes against voting rights, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ protections, and environmental regulation. Every absurd tweet is a smoke grenade. Every press conference meltdown is cover for a judge being confirmed for life.
IV. The Infrastructure of the Authoritarian Right
Here’s the part that should chill your bones: this isn’t just ideology. It’s infrastructure. A full, functional replacement for democratic governance.
ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) churns out pre-written legislation for Republican-controlled statehouses like a fascist Hallmark card factory.
Federalist judges, handpicked and fast-tracked, are now the majority in the federal judiciary.
Think tank laundering turns deranged blog posts into “serious scholarship.” You think that voter suppression law was some redneck’s idea? No. It was vetted, funded, and delivered.
Dark money networks, powered by billionaire heirs and corporate overlords, keep the wheels greased and the operatives loyal.
We are not dealing with a “culture war.” This is class war, cloaked in culture and executed through courts.
V. Our Disarray is Their Strategy
You’re tired? Of course you are. They want you tired.
They want you doomscrolling until your soul turns to ash. They want you convinced that all politics are performative, that voting doesn’t matter, that all sides are the same. That’s their favorite lie: “You can’t win, so why try?”
Meanwhile, they show up everywhere. School board meetings. Library budget hearings. Local zoning commissions. Because that’s where power starts, and because most of us are too damn burned out to fight them at every level.
They built this machine for attrition. And we are the ones bleeding out.
VI. Fighting the Hydra: Strategies for Resistance
Do you want to fight this? Then stop chasing clowns and start burning down castles, metaphorically, legally, and strategically.
Build counter-institutions. We need progressive legal pipelines, movement lawyering programs, and watchdog groups with bite, not just bark.
Make the boring parts sexy. Civic education. Local elections. Procedural rules. That’s where they hide the bodies — start unearthing them.
Call out the think tanks. Expose them. Name them. Make “Heritage Foundation” a term that curdles milk.
Reclaim media. Invest in actual journalism. Meme the truth. Out-narrate them with facts and fury.
Unite across silos. This isn’t about red vs. blue. It’s about democracy vs. aristocracy. We are in a generational fight against consolidated power, and they win when we atomize.
VII. The Final Warning
This isn’t theoretical. They’ve already succeeded in states like Florida and Texas. Abortion banned. History rewritten. Schools censored. Books pulled. Gays and trans people terrorized. Courts locked up for decades.
That future is not inevitable. But it is imminent unless we move.
So here’s the truth, stripped of all polite language: the dumbest coup in history is being backed by the smartest fascists money can buy. And they are counting on us to laugh while they win.
They want you to laugh at the clown show so you won’t notice the hands sliding knives into the Constitution backstage.
