Writers featured in the report told NR the Times never reached out to them before lifting out-of-context quotes for the article.
Looking across a sharply divided America in 2017, J. D. Vance saw an area of hope: one idea that Republicans and Democrats alike could agree on, he wrote, was that “we should have some measure of ‘equality of opportunity’ in our society.”
“The very notion of an American dream,” he wrote at the outset of Donald Trump’s administration, “presumes that our poor and middle-class children possess the right to reach as high as their talents and work ethic allow.”
But, he added, there were reasons to be concerned about “communities in crisis” and declining opportunities for many: shuttered factories and storefronts, opioid addiction, the changing nature of work, able-bodied men leaving the workforce, and “good people” who fear “their children are unlikely to live a life better than the lives of past generations.”
And, he noted, that opportunity in America is inextricably linked to culture. Conservatives who want to increase opportunities for future generations “must confront culture in all of its complexity,” he wrote, urging likeminded Americans on the right to avoid victim blaming and to “consider the very intuitive fact that the way we grow up shapes us.”
That was Vance’s message in the introduction he wrote to the Heritage Foundation’s 2017 Index of Culture and Opportunity. The report featured about 30 conservative writers and thinkers grappling with cultural and economic trends, including declining marriage rates and church attendance, and increasing teen drug use and food stamp reliance.
By and large, their essays conveyed traditional conservative perspectives on a diverse range of topics: marriage, fertility, abortion, volunteerism, welfare, and student-loan debt, among others. The 126-page report was heavy on graphs and talk of “upward mobility,” but light on specific policy prescriptions or particularly radical proposals.
But readers of the New York Times this week received an entirely different view of the report, which national political reporter Lisa Lerer described as “a sweeping conservative agenda to restrict sexual and reproductive freedoms and remake American families.”
To the Times, the conservative essayists weren’t just expressing varying degrees of hope and concern about trends in American culture. Rather, they were “seeking to instruct Americans on how to raise children” as well as “on what their families should be.”
And Vance, the paper noted, praised the report as “admirable.”
The Times appears to have resurfaced the seven-year-old report in an effort to tighten the link between Vance, who is now an Ohio senator and Trump’s running mate, and Heritage, the influential conservative think tank behind the Project 2025 initiative, which Democrats have turned into a bogeyman to frighten voters. “Vance Championed 2017 Report on Families From Architects of Project 2025,” the Times’s headline reads.
At the time he wrote the report’s introduction, Vance had just released his best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, and was a partner in a Washington, D.C.–based investment firm. He had been a Trump critic but has since rebranded himself as a defender of the former president and an opponent of liberal global trade and unchecked immigration.
Vance’s camp says he had no role in editing the essays and “did not have any input on the commentary.” A Vance spokesman said it was “bizarre that The New York Times is writing an entire piece attacking Senator Vance for the views of other individuals.” Vance’s spokesman did not respond to a request for comment from National Review.
Left-wing news outlets have jumped on the Times’ story to push its misleading narrative.
“JD Vance Has Yet Another Connection to Project 2025,” read a Mother Jones headline. MSNBC declared that Vance “endorsed a Heritage Foundation report in 2017, and it has come back to haunt him.”
A Heritage Foundation spokesperson said in an email that the “report’s main purpose was to identify the trends that hold Americans back from succeeding, not to produce a detailed policy agenda,” adding that “the ideas put forth in the index are mainstream conservative policies that have been the cornerstone of the movement for decades.”
Heritage produced similar reports between 2014 and 2018, the spokesperson said.
Despite the Times‘ effort to portray the 2017 report as a nefarious blueprint for the social engineering of American families, a closer reading reveals it to be far less menacing — it’s mostly boilerplate conservatism from an era when conservatism was changing.
National Review reached out to some of the essay writers — a step that it appears the Times failed to take. The essay writers called the Times report a “cheap shot” that did not accurately characterize their contributions.
“The New York Times’ politically-motivated hit piece illustrates why a growing number of news-watchers routinely refer to the ‘Gray Lady’ as ‘formerly a great newspaper,’” Bill Mattox, with the Florida-based James Madison Institute, wrote in an email.
Mattox’s 2017 essay addressed father absence, and how fewer fathers playing catch with their sons has aided in the decline of youth-baseball participation.
“It hardly qualifies as a finger-wagging screed,” he said.
The Heritage Foundation released the report in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, which the organization said “revealed a deeply unsettled spirit in many Americans.” The report focused on ten-year trends in 31 economic and cultural areas, and included short commentaries from Heritage-affiliated scholars, academics, and leaders.
To portray the report as a right-wing plot, the Times relied heavily on scare quotes pulled without context and on left-wing framing and language.
To the Times, essays that called for better education about the effectiveness of in vitro fertilization treatments, frowned on hookup culture and pornography, and expressed support for pro-life legislation that enjoys “broad popular support” were, in fact, proposals to “restrict sexual and reproductive freedom.”
Essays that extolled the virtues of healthy lifelong marriages and noted “decades of research” that has shown that “the ideal situation for any child is growing up with the mother and father who brought that child into the world” were, to the Times, “an effort to instruct Americans on what their families should be” and an attack on gay parents.
The essays were mostly uncontroversial and in line with mainstream conservative thought. The essayists wrote that “healthy marriages and a strong family life are deterrents to poverty”; urged prevention efforts to “safeguard our youth—and our future—from drug and alcohol exposure”; called reading and literacy fundamental to American liberty; and stated that the “federal government spends and taxes too much.”
The Times raised red flags about columnist Cal Thomas citing “hunger as a ‘great motivation’ for Americans to find work.” But Thomas wasn’t calling for starving America’s poor — he was critiquing welfare programs and handouts that “rob individuals of their dignity” and their “motivation.”
Amid the national debate over IVF, the Times also highlighted an essay by Jennifer Lahl, a nurse who has long warned about the high failure rate of the fertility treatments and the risks involved with postponing pregnancy until later in life. She is one of the authors who the Times said “opposed the spread of in vitro fertilization” and was arguing for women to “become pregnant at younger ages.”
But Lahl wasn’t making demands. Instead, her essay warned about the overhyping of IVF, and noted that most IVF cycles fail. She was also calling for the nation as a whole to do a “much better job of educating people on the limitations of human fertility.”
She told National Review that the Times did not reach out to her for comment.
“If only the NYT would read my writings on the medical ethical issues, and not take cheap shots, where I continue to call out the high failure rates of IVF practices in the U.S. which can easily be fact-checked on the CDC website,” Lahl wrote in an email. “There is plenty in the medical literature about the risks and complications to both the mother and the child created this way if only Ms. Lerer took the time to call me or search the medical literature.”
Contrary to the Times claim that the 2017 report proposed a “sweeping conservative agenda,” its policy recommendations were mostly broad and rarely specific.
The report called for pursuing policy “that promotes life, marriage, and religious liberty,” pursuing “limited government, encouraging personal responsibility and concern for neighbors,” promoting “student-centered education choices,” advancing welfare reform that eliminates “work disincentives,” and reducing “governmental regulations that impede entrepreneurship and the growth of small businesses.”
Heritage has said the purpose of the report was to allow the essay writers to weigh in on cultural and economic trends and to explain how each “relates to Americans’ opportunity to achieve upward mobility and prosperity.”
“Most conversations about opportunity focus on economic indicators such as unemployment and job creation. But opportunity springs from much more than that,” Jennifer Marshall, the editor of the report, wrote at the time. Marshall is no longer with Heritage and did not comment for this piece. “Family and community are powerful in shaping the opportunities Americans have to advance in this nation.”