Principled Leadership in a Challenging World

There’s Edwin Meese III, of course, our Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow Emeritus. His contributions won national recognition when President Donald Trump awarded him the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Meese continued to play a leadership role in the conservative movement, leading our biannual Legal Strategy Forums, as well as monthly coordinating meetings of freedom-based public interest law groups.

Distinguished Visiting Fellow Rick Dearborn is no stranger to the halls of power in Washington—those inside government as well as out. Over the past 30 years, he has served two U.S. presidents and six U.S. senators. He also served as Heritage’s director of congressional relations from 1993 to 1996.

In 2018, he returned to Heritage to take charge of a new initiative: the Federalism Project. In 2019, he worked on developing a master plan for devolving power back to the states and the people—as the Founders intended.

He also advised Vice President Tommy Binion on how best to maneuver Heritage policy recommendations through the executive branch. Thanks to Dearborn’s tenure as President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, his insights and contacts proved invaluable, helping get Heritage research into the right hands before final decisions were made.

Becky Norton Dunlop, our Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow, maintained a busy schedule. Her advice on policy and personnel matters is regularly sought by administration officials. In the first quarter of the year alone, she met with officials at the White House, Peace Corps, Office of Personnel Management, and the departments of Labor, Justice, Interior, State, Transportation, and Homeland Security.

She was also involved in building a principles-based conservative movement in Brazil, meeting extensively with elected and appointed government officials as well as faith and civil society leaders. And her leadership in building the Association of American Educators, an alternative to the teachers’ unions, proved quite valuable to allies running union opt-out campaigns across the country.

Our Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought, Dr. Lee Edwards, is widely regarded as the leading historian of the conservative movement. In 2019, however, he concentrated much of his attention on combatting a current problem: the growing acceptance of socialism in America.

In a series of commentaries, Edwards documented the dangers and disappointment of this seductive ideology. Among these writings were: “Socialism: A Clear and Present Danger” (for FoxBusiness.com), “Three Nations That Tried Socialism and Rejected It” (National Review), “The Totally, Utterly Irrefutable Case Against Socialism” (The Daily Signal), “THESE Are the Most Telling Failures of Socialism” (Fox News), and “The God That Failed … Over and Over Again” (American Thinker).

In August, C-SPAN aired “In Depth With Lee Edwards,” in which he discussed The Conservative Revolution, Goldwater, and Just Right: A Life in Pursuit of Liberty—just three of his more than 25 books. During the two-hour interview, he also gave a personal testimony—about how his exposure to communism in Europe turned him into a lifelong conservative.

Distinguished Visiting Fellow Stephen Moore continued to write his weekly syndicated column, while also contributing analyses to The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, The Hill, and other news outlets.

In addition to commenting on the news, he made news in 2019 with groundbreaking research that showed median household income had soared by $5,000, to an all-time high of $66,000, in less than three years.

These findings triggered two completely opposite reactions. President Trump enthusiastically tweeted out the good news about middle-class income gains and took to reciting Moore’s statistics in virtually every speech.

The Left, however, tried to bury them. When that failed, they simply denounced his findings—ignoring the fact that they were based wholly on reliable economic data from the U.S. Census Bureau.