As was the case with most people who avoid the noxious and so had no idea who Charlie Kirk was until his assassination, so it was with the Heritage Foundation’s “Phoenix” program, a Kirkianist manifesto targeting education. The Florida Board of Education was first among neoconfederates to adopt it as an encyclical last month.
The CIA had a “Phoenix program” in Vietnam for a few years, a counterinsurgency campaign that quickly devolved into torture and extra-judicial murders of heretics opposed to the American Way. Heritage must’ve called its campaign a “Declaration” rather than a “program” to avoid association by Google. But the aims are similar. Heritage’s campaign against heresy imposes a purist, Christian nationalist interpretation of American history and education. Dissent will not be tolerated. It is more accurate to call it the Phoenix Doctrine.
The Doctrine opens with a line intended to echo the mythological phoenix’s self-immolation: “In this time of moral and political crises, when too many schools have lost their way…” It is a disingenuous run-on, equating “moral and political crises” with “too many schools that have lost their way.” Disingenuous, because while it’s hard to argue that we’re not in a bog of moral and political crises, let’s not pretend we don’t know who and what got us here.
Heritage, a think tank, was established in 1973 as the executive branch of National Review’s war on the New Deal. Reagan was elected in 1980 as their Messiah. “The unmaking of America” in Kurt Andersen’s words, followed. They denigrated government, vilified taxes, ridiculed how the other half lived, neutered voting and civil rights, salivated over public education dollars and found ways to embezzle them by slandering public education’s achievements while masking theft as “choice.” They wrecked FDR’s principles of equality and the freedom from want and fear. These masters of the self-fulfilling prophecy wrecked LBJ’s Great Society safety net then called it a failure.
Schools, colleges and universities–a Big Three far more important to America’s success than Detroit’s–haven’t been spared, starting with Allan Bloom’s reactionary Closing of the American Mind in 1987, the maga carta of the war on wokism as Trump was still adding the finishing lies to The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t until the pandemic (for public schools) and Israel’s genocide in Gaza (for colleges and universities) that the wrecking of those institutions triumphed.
Charters and vouchers, themselves financed on the public dime no different from welfare for the unaccountable, intentionally starved school districts of resources, making a direct assault on inclusive curriculums easier. Academic freedom and the right to protest in colleges and universities were demolished by different means. State legislatures amplified by reactionary media codified the principle that a Jewish life matters but an Arab life does not, that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic and Hamas-sympathizing but dehumanizing and mass-murdering Palestinians is patriotic. DEI was delegitimized, minority histories re-marginalized, non-heterosexuals were relegated to the pre-Stonewall age.
Bush-and-Cheney-like conservatives who see betrayal in Trump’s fascism are as artful as those who’d put daylight between Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes. There is a direct line from Reagan to Trump and Fuentes–between Reagan’s don’t-tread-on-me conservatism and the Jan. 6 assault on democracy, succored by the right-wing Leninism of National Review and Heritage.
If Heritage feels triumphant, it’s because it is. The unmaking has largely been successful. So successful that now, like the fentanyl dealer weeping before mass graves, Heritage is preaching to us about “moral and political crises” and handing down commandments from its cyber Sinai.
The doctrine might not have too much of an impact in Florida because it’s already in effect. But its official adoption clears the way for a more systematic eradication of liberal education and formerly American values founded in the Enlightenment such as rigor, skepticism, secularism, empiricism, and more recently, inclusivity, diversity, and above all, child-centered education. In Florida, the child’s rights are no longer first. Parents, that totem of infallibility, are.
The Phoenix doctrine never mentions children’s rights. Its leading tenet calls for “parental choice and responsibility.” It calls for parental omnipotence, “with public education funding following the child,” newspeak for school vouchers, or private education at public expense. Parents ideally want their children to be smarter and better off than they were. The doctrine ensures that parents’ ignorance will follow and smother the child. Teachers and professors, representing a limitless collective of knowledge, are reduced to servants of parental insularity.
Just as the algorithmic fragmentation of the media universe narrows our horizons exclusively to points of view that reinforce our biases, so must education be enslaved to the parents’ biases, not the child’s thirst for knowledge and vistas unimagined–or feared–at the child’s home. It’s that submission to parental omnipotence that the Supreme Court endorsed when it allowed parents to opt their children out of whatever class segment or curriculum doesn’t align with their purism. The tribalization demolishes the purpose of public schools especially. It is anti-democratic. That’s what the Heritage doctrine champions. John Winthrop would approve.
The rest of the Phoenix doctrine is variations on the same theme, some of them admirable–seek academic excellence, build the child’s character, respect the rule of law. But the whole doctrine is wrapped in a presumption of America-first chauvinism founded in “Judeo-Christian traditions,” that anti-Semitism-proof dog whistle of Christian supremacy. The mythological histories of Parson Mason Weems, who gave us the lie of George Washington’s cherry tree, are in. The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, the first account of what it was like to be enslaved by the likes of Washington, is out.
No one will argue that multiculturalism has its excesses, that political correctness, these days known as wokeness, can be absurd, hypocritical, oppressive, poisonously utopian. And none of it is new. The late historian Arthur Schlesinger devoted a whole book to the subject 30 years ago. But he was no fool to the end game for those looking to throw multiculturalism/wokism’s baby out with the bathwater. “The monoculturalists,” as Schlesinger called them, “are hyperpatriots, fundamentalists, evangelicals, laissez-faire doctrinaires, homophobes, anti-abortionists, pro-assault-gun people, and other zealots. They inveigh against ideas and books they deem blasphemous, atheistic, socialistic, secular humanistic, pornographic, and/or un-American and seek to impose on the hapless young their own pinched, angry, monistic concept of America.”
That’s the Phoenix doctrine’s America. The document itself ends with the phoenix rising from the ashes, proclaiming with a straight face right out of the Five O’Clock Follies in Saigon that “America is a great source of good in the world and that we have a tradition that is worth passing on.” Our contemporary heritage suggests otherwise.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
L. Bricker says
Thanks for writing about the Heritage Foundation’s Phoenix Declaration. The big picture campaign has been succeeding for more than 2 decades as described in the research by ProPublica, “On a mission from God: inside the movement to redirect billions in taxpayer dollars to religious schools,” 1-13-2025.
The president of Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, founded a school of a major religious sect.
He was also president of one of the sect’s colleges.
JW says
Just keep in mind that AI will finish the job. George Orwell’s novel “nineteen eighty-four” will be no longer be a novel. We don’t need to think anymore and thus humanity will disappear and, the Biblical End of Times prophecy will happen one day. Is that what we are longing for in our judeo-christian “culture”? We will all return to become animals again. Some are already behaving that way!
Al says
So much BS , you could have written that whole story in one paragraph. All it said is I hate conservatives because they think their children shouldn’t be indoctrinated by the system. This writer’s attitude is exactly why the children are being taken out of public schools. Almost every other day there’s a news story about a teacher with child porn or molesting a student. What about the principal and teacher that threw a drunken party last year for young teens. This why the old system is being dismantled, there is no teaching just indoctrination.
In 1964, the time of the great society I lived in Newark , N.J. . All of my family lived there by 1970 only one remained. I saw black families disintegrate and whole neighborhoods dissolve into chaos. LBJ ( liar, bum, and jerk ) destroyed the black communities all across the country and most have never recovered. The problem isn’t not enough liberal government involvement but rather too much.
R.S. says
So it was LBJ behind Tulsa, St. Louis, Rosewood, Wilmington, and so many other communities that were obliterated? Dang! But help me here with your timelines, Mr. Al? And liberals throw parties with drunken sex orgies in schools? Will we find a record of that in the Epstein files? Help me out here, Mr. Al.
Laurel says
Al: There is nothing “conservative” or Christian about what you say, but you, and your tribe, will continue to ignore the facts and will continue to promote the negativity served to you. The facts have been given to you, over and over and over again, yet you will still support the grift, theft and nastiness of the current administration.
Does it never occur to you that the more educated a person becomes, meaning they read classics, they can write with an extensive vocabulary and thought, who become scientists, physicists, authors, archeologists, astronomers, economists, astronauts, poets, physicians, mathematicians, engineers, and so on, for the most part, tend to lean liberal? Really, really, really, stop and think, why did Trump say “I love the poorly educated”? And if you don’t come up with the possibility people trained intellectually, tend to see through the likes of him, stop and think again. Think about DeSantis’ New College, a once liberal arts college, is now a supposed *conservative* college, that lost a huge chunk of its staff, and students, and is needing to use sports to get kids in while spending a whole lot more money on a whole lot less students.
I never had much interest in politics, but I did not like Reagan. I felt he was a puppet, and I still believe that. You wrote about black families “disintegrating.” Ronald Reagan called poor women trying to raise families as “welfare queens.” The nastiness began. The “trickle down” nonsense began. The divide between the haves and have nots was well on its way.
I used to wonder how on Earth people could support and honor Hitler in Germany during the 30’s. What an awful man, and the awful staff around him! Now, I’m seeing it here. People supporting and honoring an awful man. Never thought it would happen here. The hate you speak of flows from the mouth of that man daily. A man who is protecting himself from the information kept by his close friend of ten years. Since you are concerned about pedophiles, that should concern you too. The man who seems to know nothing when things go wrong.
But, since the media is owned mostly by the billionaires, who literally stood behind Trump, and now, only those news programs, and their reporters, who speak well of Trump, are the ones allowed in Oval Office, you will continue to consume only that *information* which will be government approved. Trump approved.
The Heritage Foundation is behind the dumbing down of our citizens. During these times, it is not about abortion, it is not about putting out fires in Democratic cities, it is not about stopping drug runners, it is not about choice in education, it is not about vaccines causing autism, it is not about transgender, it is not about religion, it is not about immigration. It is about controlling the masses.
There’s nothing more to say to those who will not listen, other than they are complicit.
Deborah Coffey says
Bravo! Spot on.
Al says
You are so wrong on multiple levels. If you don’t see the good Regan did for this country then there is no hope for you. I’m quite sure you must have agreed with Barry Obama that the the system needed to be overrun till it breaks then it could be redone the way the left wants it. The most narrow minded people I have ever met were all liberals, give it a rest and join in America rather than trying to destroy it.
Pierre Tristam says
Reagan was our first in a series of chiquita banana republic embracing juntoids posing as presidents. The 100-plus Reagan administration members criminally charged, indicted or convicted, with Reagan himself escaping by the skin of that lie about Iran-Contra, proves it. It’s been down from there, with the second bush and both trumps outdoing themselves in rotten-banana maggotry.
Laurel says
Yeah, I know, Reagan’s a God. After all, there is a giant portrait of Reagan in the Oval Office that Trump stands in front of during interviews. He’ll eventually make sure he rises above your God.
Sorry, but Trump will never hold a candle to Obama, who actually doesn’t cheat on his wife, or get convicted of 34 felonies, or be an adjudicated rapist, or badmouth people like a 10 year old brat, or hang out with pedophiles, or kill people without due process, or grift on merch during his Presidency, or, oh never mind, you’ll never get it simply because you don’t want to.
For you to state that I need to “give it a rest and join in America rather than trying to destroy it” is not only extremely offensive to me (congratulations) it shows me you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You just spout what sounds good to you.
Skibum says
Speaking of President Reagan and his wife Nancy’s very conservative interpretation of Christianity (which in today’s maga centric “christian -nationalist” movement would be labeled as leftist), their rightwing religious views are most likely partially, if not completely responsible for their son Ron’s rejection of religion altogether.
He has been a long time self avowed atheist. Even as a young man, Ron Jr. saw firsthand how some of his father’s political decisions were totally in opposition to stated Christian values. He witnessed many Americans’ lives negatively impacted and changed forever by Republican politics, and I’m sure Ron Jr.’s openness about his liberalism and anti-religious views were thorns in his parents’ sides for the remainder of his parents’ lives.
But Ron Jr. was honest to himself and to this day doesn’t shy away from publicly condemning traditional American religion and the damage that he believes was caused by it’s conservative adherents.
Bo Peep says
It would have never been an issue if the lefties hadn’t of been slipping books with age inappropriate material into classrooms in order to advance acceptance of their abnormal behavior. Stay away frm the children and let them learn without a liberal orientation.
Skibum says
Ha, what a croc. Thanks for the belly laugh! I needed that this morning.
Kennan says
Normal. Normal? Normal??? What is it exactly that you think is normal? You would prefer people not read at all, then they wouldn’t be able to formulate an opinion at all. I love listening to you LEMMINGS talk about indoctrination while you try to whitewash history, blame black and brown people for everything, while in the same breath push your rigid UN AMERICAN agenda on the majority melting pot you say you believe in. Oh, and then you have the audacity to use Christ, the Bible, and the politics you say anyone other than uses to get your way. Identity as a weapon because you’re “BUTT HURT”.
It’s bullshit and it’s bad for you.😊
Dusty says
Great idea to help let people decide where and what they want their children to learn. If public schools will not teach conservative values then they shouldn’t be able to teach a liberal agenda either so let them get back to math, trading, science, and arts and away from the progressive dulling or their minds.
JC says
“In Florida, the child’s rights are no longer first. Parents, that totem of infallibility, are.”
Go say that in public in front of most parents and let’s see if you will survive with that statement. So many parents will disagree with you and are glad you aren’t a teacher.
“State legislatures amplified by reactionary media codified the principle that a Jewish life matters but an Arab life does not, that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic and Hamas-sympathizing but dehumanizing and mass-murdering Palestinians is patriotic.”
Don’t agree with the state pushing the message above, but I prefer to live in the Jewish state than any Arab nation that’s for sure. And once again with regards to the Palestinians, they mostly deserved their punishment with their decades of terrible decisions that lead them to their current situation.
Laurel says
Gosh, so much misinformation! But I’ll just tackle one this time.
JC: Have you ever heard of the PTA? It stands for Parents and Teachers Association. It means that, for decades now, parents and teachers can get together and discuss programs and problems. Have you participated, or is it easier to just claim “Parental Rights” and move on? Explain this one to me, please.
Y’all are being distracted.
Laurel says
Yeah, again and again, crickets.
Wow says
So basically American Taliban?
Laurel says
Uh, yeah. Somehow, the far right (I won’t call them conservatives because they are not, and I won’t call them Christians because they ignore the teachings of Christ) have concluded that progression equals narrow mindedness.
“Progression refers to the act of moving forward or advancing, often in a logical or sequential manner. It can also describe a continuous series of events or steps that lead to a change or development.”
– Search Assist, Merriam-Webster, Cambridge University Press
“Narrow-minded refers to a person who is not open to new ideas or different opinions, often showing prejudice or intolerance. It describes a limited perspective that resists change or diversity in thought.”
-Search Assist, oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com, Dictionary.com
Again, rationalization is an interesting thing!