A private workshop took place on 11 March 2025 in Washington DC, hosted by the Heritage Foundation, to discuss proposals by European right-wing lobby groups to dismantle the European Union and the European Court of Justice.
The Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025 – which is seen by many as the blueprint for the policies being enacted by the current Trump administration – welcomed right-wing thinktanks and lobby groups from Hungary and Poland. They debated the contents of a paper with a title stolen in part from the World Economic Forum ‘The Great Reset: Restoring Member State Sovereignty in the 21st Century’.
The attendees: a right-wing alliance
As the meeting was a private one, there isn’t an official list of attendees; but VSquare, a Central European news platform, obtained a copy of an invitation to the event which provided important details of the meeting. It is known to have featured contributions from two prominent right-wing organisations: Hungary’s largest private educational institution with a Brussels-based thinktank, Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), and the Polish Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture. Also participating was the American Christian legal activist group, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
On the menu were suggestions to rename the European Union the ‘European Community of Nations’ as a symbolic gesture to mark an end to the existence of the EU, the weakening of the European Commission, and the neutering of the European Court of Justice.
All three groups present are highly connected to the political leadership of their respective countries, and they all have something in common: a firm belief in reducing the role of government, controlling the judiciary and installing a conservative religious approach in terms of access to reproductive healthcare for women, divorce and same-sex marriage.
Origins of the Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation was created in 1973 by Joseph Coors, Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner. Coors, of the Coors brewery dynasty known for its union-busting, anti-environmental and anti-equal rights stances, provided the finance. Weyrich, infamous for stating that he ‘didn’t want everyone to vote’ and that he sees theocracy as the preferred system of government, recruited the Christian right vote. And Feulner, as a congressional aide to congressman and former secretary of state for defence Melvin Laird, facilitated political access.
They created a thinktank promoting a fusion of social conservatism, small government and Catholic-influenced Christian evangelicalism which, in a relatively short period of time, went on to become one of the most predominant political influences in US politics.
Its current leader, and architect of Project 2025, Kevin Roberts, has close links with Opus Dei, a small but powerful organisation within the Catholic Church. He has compared abortion to slavery, lynchings, the Holocaust, antisemitic violence and terrorism.
His core beliefs have long included support for the total banning of birth control, the dismantling of the Department of Education and ending of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Two of these goals have already begun to be achieved within the first eight weeks of Donald Trump’s second term.
Mathias Corvinus Collegium: from scholarships to propaganda
The MCC started out as a relatively modest foundation offering scholarships and support to talented students. In 2020, things changed when Viktor Orbán government gifted over £1.3bn in state funding and shares in oil and pharmaceutical companies to the organisation. This injection of cash fuelled a massive expansion in reach and an ideological alignment with Orbán’s nationalist and socially conservative policies.
It now plays a significant role in Hungary’s educational and cultural landscape, described by some as a propaganda arm of the government with opaque funding. It also aims to open centres in Berlin, Vienna and London.
Ordo Iuris: crusading for control
Ordo Iuris is an ultra-conservative, Catholic-leaning, Polish thinktank founded in 2013 and closely tied with the Law and Justice party which, until recently, was the governing party in Poland.
One of the major reasons Law and Justice lost the election was the stance it took, in accordance with Ordo Iuris-devised policy, against the reproductive health rights of women, LGBT rights and divorce. Ordo Iuris drafted a bill entirely criminalising abortion which sparked nationwide protests in 2016 and, though eventually abandoned by the Polish parliament, the group went on to successfully push for a watered down version which has effectively banned abortion in Poland since 2020.
Alliance Defending Freedom: a legal weapon
The ADF is an American legal advocacy group which campaigns outside women’s healthcare centres, and drafts bills to encourage lawmakers to restrict abortion and minority rights. Founded in 1994 by two male Christian evangelicals, James Dobson and Bill Bright, they use their substantial financial clout to implicate themselves in legal cases to restrict women’s access to reproductive healthcare. Examples include Burwell v Hobby (2014), which denied millions of women medical insurance cover for contraception, and the catastrophic Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) which effectively ended women’s universal right to an abortion in the USA.
They are now working on extending the reach of the Dobbs case to restrict legal rights to contraception, same-sex marriage and homosexual acts. Mike Johnson was previously legal counsel and senior spokesperson for the group. He is now speaker of the house and second in line for the presidency of the USA.
Global connections
These groups have long been interconnected. Hungary regularly hosts Conservative Political Action Conference events, the next scheduled for May, and the ADF provides financial support to anti-abortion campaigners across Europe on a regular basis. The 2022 arrest in Bournemouth of Adam Smith-Connor, cited by JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February as proof of British descent into authoritarianism, was heavily publicised by the ADF who funded his (unsuccessful) legal defence.
The Heritage Foundation is a member of the Atlas Network of right-wing thinktanks with strong connections to the British right and the equivalent lobby groups associated with 55 Tufton Street. Liz Truss, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, Matt Goodwin and Nigel Farage are all contributors to Heritage Foundation events, and in 2023 we were treated to the bizarre spectacle of Conservative politicians putting on an evangelical Easter display on Twitter (now X) which, although it seemed out of place in modern Britain, would warm the heart of every Republican Christian nationalist in America.
The Great Reset fact sheet discussed at the March workshop in Washington DC, suggests employing the same arguments used against the EU by British Eurosceptics in 2016 – sovereignty, unelected bureaucrats and foreign courts – to foster nationalist and isolationist sentiments across the continent.
Attacking the EU to erase 20th-century progress
This radical right ideology fused with Christian and Catholic fundamentalism seeks to redirect western society away from the 20th-century gains of social protections and civil rights back to a 19th-century structure with strict social norms and governments reduced to a role of protecting private property, providing police, courts and military services primarily for the privileged. A vision where the ultra-rich would live a gilded existence free from the restrictive burdens of taxation and regulation, while the majority eke out an existence in a workplace with no protections, spending Sundays at church, with women pushing out children they can’t afford and for whom there is no healthcare and little education, and the only accepted form of love is heterosexual.
The dystopian New World Order
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency performatively enacts its destruction of the administrative state in the USA with dubious legality and offers fantastical and distracting promises of life on Mars. Trump opines that the EU was formed to “screw the United States”, and the powerhouse behind the president and his programme is now turning its malign attention to Europe.
This month in Washington DC, plans were being laid.
Hope springs eternal
The vast majority of humanity looks upon Trump and his acolytes as a global disaster. A country whose citizens have been raised on a diet of American exceptionalism, who think they have won every war, whether true or not, and which constantly sees itself as the good guy, might not appreciate attacking its allies and rubbing shoulders with dictators.
In Europe we are waking up to the misinformation campaigns from which we are no longer protected by outlets who call themselves ‘platforms’ to avoid the legal responsibilities of publishers, which is what, in reality, they are.
Europe must be on its guard. Extreme vigilance is required. We have to believe that good will prevail.
But for now, sadly, that excludes the USA.
