‘Just disgraceful’: outcry as Heritage thinktank appoints far-right figure to key post

The Heritage Foundation, an influential rightwing thinktank currently mired in controversy over its president’s apparent apology for extremism, has appointed as a director the founder of a secretive all-male network of Christian nationalist fraternal lodges.

Scott Yenor, appointed as Heritage’s new director of the B Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, has also recently offered ultra-conservative opinions on women, marriage and LGBTQ rights in recent podcast appearances and speaking engagements.

They have included that there is an association between homosexuality and pedophilia; that adultery, homosexuality, no-fault divorce, and abortion should be outlawed under a regime of “soft patriarchy”; and that elements of the US Civil Rights Act, including its prohibitions against workplace sex discrimination, should be wound back.

Heritage appointed Yenor despite a string of controversies over his reactionary politics, including his resignation in April from the University of Florida’s board of regents following protests and concern from state legislators over his views about women.

Heidi Beirich, chief strategy officer and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said: “It’s just disgraceful that Heritage, especially given all of its recent scandals over providing cover for antisemitism, would hire Yenor, who has long bashed women and has been investigated by his former employer for civil rights violations.”

She added: “This is just another example of Heritage’s dismissive views of women and the organization’s radicalization over the past few years, which includes pushing Project 2025, an authoritarian plan that Trump is now implementing that is devastating the rights of multiple communities, including women.”

The appointment also came in the face of Heritage’s efforts to stave off criticisms about its president’s apparent defense of a Tucker Carlson interview with the antisemitic Holocaust denier and white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes. In November, Heritage president Kevin Roberts apologized after initially backing Carlson’s interview with Fuentes.

In an email to the Guardian, Yenor wrote: “Degenerates such as yourself who celebrated the assassination Charlie Kirk deserve nothing but scorn, let alone explanations of complex ideas.”

It was not immediately clear which celebration Yenor was referring to.

Heritage director of media and public relations Cody Sargent forwarded a statement from Heritage vice-president of domestic policy Roger Severino, which read: “Heritage does not, and does not believe employers should, discriminate on the basis of sex in matters of employment and remuneration. We advocate for the American family in law, policy, and culture.”

He also pointed to an X post from Heritage vice-president of development Genevieve Wood responding to commentary on Yenor’s appointment in the Atlantic.

Wood’s post – published two days prior to the Guardian’s detailed request to Heritage, and which did not address this reporting – read: “As an employee of @Heritage for almost 20 years, the entire premise of this piece is invalid and disingenuous … which is apparently why it’s in The Atlantic.

Wood added: “Heritage is fortunate to have amazingly talented teammates, where scholars and staff at all levels (and both sexes) are free to discuss and debate ideas on a wide range of topics without it being cast as a ‘Heritage policy.’”

Finally, Sargent wrote: “To your questions, you’re welcome to reuse this statement, attributable on background to a Heritage spokesman: ‘The Guardian is a leftist gossip rag. Its dishonesty is matched only by its uselessness. We don’t waste time answering its half-baked questions.’”

The statement matched one provided in response to separate recent reporting on the Heritage Foundation. The Guardian made no undertaking to accept Sargent’s comments on background.

‘Sodomy would be illegal … you could make adultery illegal; you can make fornication illegal’

In recent months, Yenor has made public speeches and podcast appearances spelling out a radical vision for instituting authoritarian patriarchal control in the US.

Yenor was a featured speaker at the “Trad Dad” conference held by Westminster Presbyterian church in Battle Ground, Washington. The conference was held in October 2024, according to the church’s website, but a video of Yenor’s talk, which was entitled Population Decline at the Micro Level, was posted to YouTube in June.

In the talk, Yenor rhetorically asked, “What would be the optimal conditions for family formation and people having kids?” and answered: “First of all, a healthy sexual constitution that reinforces monogamous, procreative marriage.”

In turn, he said, this would require “a set of laws and manners that reinforce having kids and penalize people for not having kids”, such that “divorce would be difficult to get or proscribed. Sodomy would be illegal, right?” He added: “You could make adultery illegal; you can make fornication illegal. These all reinforce marriage.”

Yenor went on to say that “the gays … the feminist ideology … the transgender ideologies, all of these ideologies” all “compromise family formation”, adding that “these ideologies can grow only if reality is a little sick. So, I consider feminism to be kind of an ideology of decadence.”

Towards the end of his address, Yenor offered what he called “difficult” advice, saying “the crucial thing you need to be attached to” is “a fertility cult”, adding that the only thing that “really acts as a prophylactic against the regime, is a fertility cult”.

As examples of fertility cults, Yenor cited “Haredi Jews and the Amish” who “reject hook, line, and sinker, the modern world”, and asked his listeners: “How can you simulate those cults locally, where your families are, where it’s not weird to have four kids?”

Citing things that work against the “social reinforcement” of fertility that “fertility cults” provide, Yenor said the “most pernicious of these things” are “young women who want to be known for their minds”, adding: “I’m glad that you have a good mind, but if that’s what you want to be known for, like, you’re not going to have kids.”

Yenor also suggested “political measures” to further the goal of fertility, saying: “I would like to end the sex discrimination regime. Sex discrimination would no longer be a civil matter. Businesses wouldn’t have to worry about it, schools wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

Yenor asked: “Is it illegal to say that men and women should have different destinies, or at least somewhat different destinies? That will get you in trouble in the workplace.”

Yenor said: “Basically, the Civil Rights Act, I think, institutionalizes the ‘battle of the sexes’ and puts the law on the side of feminist indoctrination.” And: “So the only way to kind of end that corrosive ideological commitment of our regime is to scale back how the Civil Rights Act applies to businesses, schools, and every other institution in the country.”

In June, Yenor appeared on the podcast of the so far pseudonymous Blaze Media presenter and columnist Auron MacIntyre in an episode entitled Have We Hit Peak Pride?, where the pair celebrated perceived defeats of the LGBTQ rights movement.

In the podcast, Yenor expressed homophobic beliefs and sought to draw a direct link between homosexuality and pedophilia. MacIntyre and Yenor traded perspectives on gay rights and the purported links between homosexuality and pedophilia.

The Guardian contacted Macintyre via the email address publicly listed for him on the Blaze’s website, but the email bounced back undelivered. The Guardian then sent a request for comment for MacIntyre via the Blaze’s press contact form.

In the podcast, Macintyre said: “If you let many of these activists talk long enough, even if they’re very high in message discipline, they’re eventually going to admit that pederasty is a pretty big part of male homosexuality and always has been, and that that’s actually what generates the relationship.” He added: “Despite the attempts for message discipline, there’s always this push to kind of lower the age of consent or remove laws between men and boys.”

Yenor replied: “The first wave of gay rights was open and honest about what gay rights would mean. And even to the point where they established a group called NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association.” He added: “They were out in the open about what they were going to try to accomplish.”

Yenor talked extensively about strategies for rolling back gay rights and turning public opinion against LGBTQ people.

At one point, he said: “There are always problems with the gay lifestyle. They always have psychological problems and physical problems.”

He also strategized about rolling back same sex marriage rights, expressing a hope that “necessity will be the mother of invention here”.

Yenor pointed to the Dobbs decision’s reversal of abortion rights as an example of overturning “things that seem to be untouchable”.

On that score, Yenor said: “I think same-sex marriage is a lesser issue than no-fault divorce.” And: “It’s very difficult to imagine growing any kind of sustainable marriage culture when you have no-fault divorce, at-will divorce as the basic law of the land.”

He added: “It’s impossible to see a victory for a pro-family culture that doesn’t, on some level, revisit that.”

Yenor’s history

The Guardian previously reported on Yenor’s central role in founding the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), a role that was revealed in emails obtained by public record request from his employer, Boise State University (BSU).

In an email, BSU confirmed that Yenor is still a tenured professor of political science at the college.

The documents included Yenor’s drafts of internal SACR materials in early 2021 that outlined vetting questions for prospective members, instructing members to “gauge alignment and fit” of prospects with questions such as: “What are your thoughts on Christian nationalism?”; “Comment on the Trump presidency and what it entails for the future”; and: “Describe the dynamic of your household in terms of your role and that of your wife.”

The organization’s “internal” mission statement prioritized recruiting men who “understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise” and aimed to “collect, curate, and document a list of potential appointees and hires for a renewed American regime”. The document made no mention of the US constitution or electoral participation.

SACR prayer documents drafted by Yenor drew parallels to biblical conquest narratives, such as Joshua’s forces vanquishing Jericho.

The Guardian also reported on would-be “warlord” Charles Haywood in establishing the SACR. That reporting revealed that Haywood is a former soap manufacturer who has repeatedly expressed a desire to serve as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network”, which he has mused might find itself in conflict with the federal government. Haywood has also expressed a desire to recruit “shooters” to help defend the “extended, quite sizeable, compound” he occupies in Carmel, Indiana, and has funded the SACR through his Howdy Doody Good Times foundation to the tune of at least $50,000.

Email records also revealed Yenor in October 2020 coordinating with SACR administrator Skyler Kressin to purchase Super-Afrikaners, a 1978 book about the Afrikaner Broederbond. The AB was a secretive, men-only, and self-described Christian nationalist network that promoted white Afrikaner interests and helped bring South Africa’s apartheid architects to power. When Kressin sent Yenor an Amazon listing for the book, Yenor replied within half an hour: “That’s the one.”

Beirich, the extremism expert, wrote: “The fact that he is a key player in the Society for Christian Renewal, a secretive men’s only Christian nationalist organization, should have also given Heritage pause.”

Separately, the Guardian previously revealed Yenor’s hitherto hidden role in Action Idaho, a media platform he funded with the help of wealthy donors such as Claremont Institute board chair Thomas Klingenstein, and which was, as the Guardian then reported, involved in an “attempt to mainstream extremism in Idaho politics”, according to Western States Center director of programs Lindsay Schubiner.

Emails showed Yenor’s attempt to hire the conservative writer Pedro Gonzalez – who was himself subsequently embroiled in controversy over antisemitic remarks in a private groupchat – as executive director with instructions to “establish the reputation of Action Idaho as a Christian nationalist, populist authority”.

In 2023 on X, Gonzalez reportedly posted that the messages, written in 2019 and 2020, were from a “different, dumb season in my life”.

The platform published inflammatory content attacking LGBTQ+ communities and Yenor’s own employer, Boise State University.

In 2023, Yenor took up a job with the Claremont Institute. He has repeatedly encountered controversy due to his strident anti-feminism.

In 2021, when he was employed full-time at Boise State, Yenor faced backlash over a speech he gave to the National Conservatism Conference (“one of the main meeting grounds for the global radical right”) in which he described “independent women” working “in mid-level bureaucratic jobs like human resource management, environmental protection, and marketing” as “more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be”.

In 2023, students at Boise’s Eagle high school “jeered and walked out on” a Yenor speech after he was invited to campus by a conservative student club.

Those remarks, along with other public commentary in which he highlighted the high proportion of women, Black people and Jewish people in the Democratic senate delegation, came back to haunt Yenor and Florida governor Ron DeSantis earlier this year, after the governor appointed the professor to the board of the University of West Florida in Pensacola.

Yenor’s comments about the make-up of the Senate earned a rebuke from fellow rightwing bomb-thrower, then Florida state senator and now congressman Randy Fine, who called him a “bigot” and a “misogynist”.

In a 4 July appearance on the Christian nationalist American Reformer podcast, Yenor addressed criticisms made of him during that time: “I didn’t ever publicly respond to any of the charges that were made against me. This was a little bit, you know, difficult for me.

He added: “One of them, one of the charges that came out was that Yenor may perhaps be an antisemite, because I had said that it doesn’t look to me like the Democrats would elect a Jew as a leader of their national party given their support for Hamas.”

Yenor continued: “And then one of the Republican senators picked that up, the headline up and said, ‘Oh, we can’t appoint an antisemite to the board of trustees’. And I guess I agree. But, you know, I didn’t like the application in my particular case.”

By April, Yenor had resigned from the board after Fine and other state senators in Florida’s Republican-dominated house appeared poised to break with the governor and tank Yenor’s confirmation.

Rightwing ructions

Yenor’s appointment has caused ructions on the right, with many conservatives objecting specifically to his views on women.

In the Atlantic, conservative writer and podcaster Henry Olsen detailed Yenor’s apparent belief that the success of feminists over more than a century in gaining independent legal recognition for women have had an unacceptable “wearing-down effect on the traditional family”.

Olsen wrote: “For the foundation to allow Yenor to make these arguments now that he’s on its payroll is still a choice, a declaration that it considers them to be reasonable. That’s political poison.”

He added: “Heritage and Yenor face a choice. Do they stand within the conservative consensus, seeking to extend its principles into the public consciousness and enact them into law? Or do they stand outside the Trumpian coalition because that coalition’s premises are inadequate to meet our challenges?”

On X, a range of far-right activists came to Yenor’s defense, including Christoper Rufo, who posted: “There is nothing ‘conservative’ about using a left-wing magazine to smear Scott Yenor for not upholding the principles of human-resources feminism.” He also said: “Scott’s idea that private companies should be able to prioritize hiring married men with families is completely within the bounds of reasonable debate.”