Heritage Explains

It’s a day ending in Y in France, which means rioting.  

Following in the spirit of 1789, the French are burning buildings, fighting the police, and overall behaving very poorly.  

This time, the revolutionaries are highschoolers joined by Islamo-communists and anarchists waving Palestinian flags, but France has seen this style of faux revolution before. The rioters are the proud heirs of May ’68, an event that looms so large in the French psyche, the mere mention of soixante-huitards, or 68ers, is enough to spark furious debate.  

Against the smoke and sirens lies a bigger question over whether France’s current system can hold. French presidential elections are coming soon, and far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon wants to replace the Fifth Republic with a Sixth, led by, in his words, créolisation. By contrast, leader of the right-wing Marine Le Pen represents a nationalist defense of the old France, but both movements are deeply skeptical of the European Union.  

That’s a lot to cover. And who better to navigate us through some French politics than a Brit? My conversation with Nile Gardiner, Director of The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center.

Washington has spent decades proving the bigger government gets, the more money it wastes and the less accountable it becomes. 

The infamous Minnesota “learing centers,” incident showed how craven many fraudsters are when it comes to stealing federal funds, while the downstream benefits of dismantling USAID show how effective government action can be in saving taxpayer money. 

Waste, fraud, and abuse are the inevitable results of a federal government that measures success not by results, but by the size of budgets. 

The Trump Administration has taken several steps towards remedying America's fraud problem, but many questions remain.  

To help answer some of those questions, we asked Director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation Dan Kowalski to break it all down.

Check out more of The Heritage Foundation's wrok here: https://x.com/Heritage

For the better part of a decade, China has played the role of America’s greatest long-term strategic competitor.
 
American foreign politicos have long advised a pivot to Asia as Washington slaps tariffs on Chinese goods. The CCP has served as America’s bête noire, guilty of repeated intellectual property theft, human rights abuses, and imperial ambitions towards the essential island of Taiwan.
 
And yet, as Bob Dylan once crooned, the times, they are a changin'.
 
President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping recently wrapped up a new round of talks here in Washington, with many noting the meeting seemed much more amicable than expected.
 
If polls are to be believed, Americans are less hostile toward China than they were just a few years ago with younger Americans considerably less likely than their parents to see China’s rise as a critical threat.  
 
Overseas, countries that have traditionally looked to Washington are increasingly weighing closer economic ties with Beijing.
 
At the same time, China still dominates critical supply chains, including rare earth minerals and questions remain about whether the United States can or should decouple its economy from Beijing.
 
So where does the U.S.-China relationship stand? Are Americans becoming more comfortable with Beijing and Can China really present itself as an alternative to the United States on the world stage?  
 
Jeff Smith, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center may have the answers.

Watch Myth vs. Fact: The Closing of The Department of Education

I was eight years old when my family got our first home computer. I remember this hulking grey Dell computer taking up massive amounts of space on the desk, and I remember thinking to myself how amazing technology was.

The mood around tech is no longer nearly as cheery. Over the past five years, Americans have grown increasingly concerned over the broadening prevalence of AI. Pew Research reports 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, a 15-point jump since 2021.

That’s not to say that AI and tech have always had a positive portrayal in the American consciousness and these fears are a recent development. In 1984, audiences gasped as killer robots sent by rogue AI Skynet hunted Kyle Reese and Sarah Connors in Terminator.
Nearly two decades earlier in 1967, sci-fi author Harlan Ellison penned I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. The short story depicts an AI uprising and a military supercomputer named AM who gains sentience and eradicates humanity except for five individuals who it tortures in perpetuity. And who could forget the cold, unfeeling gaze of HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey?

But is humanity condemned to face an army of Terminators or a maniacal AI overlord? I wanted to cut past the doomsaying, so I invited Jay Richards, Heritage Foundation’s Vice President of Social and Domestic Policy and the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy and author of the Human Advantage, to discuss.

As stories about non-citizen voting and voter fraud become disturbingly common, Americans are beginning to lack confidence in our elections. The debate over the elections process has taken on a renewed urgency given we are just months away from the 2026 midterms and a few years out from what promises to be a contentious 2028 election.

That's why Heritage Foundation recently launched the latest edition of its Election Integrity Scorecard, a tool that evaluates how states are protecting election integrity. The scorecard provides Americans a clear look at where states are making progress and where reforms are still needed.

Mark Guiney recently sat down with Ken Cuccinelli, former Virginia attorney general and the Chairman of Heritage Action’s Election Transparency Initiative, to discuss Heritage's election integrity projects and what election officials must do to strengthen confidence in our elections.

Energy is the nucleus of everything. The oil that powers our cars, the natural gas heating out homes, and the nuclear keeping the lights on: it’s all tied back to energy policy.

Reliable energy is essential to both American prosperity and national security.

To help lay out just how essential understanding energy policy is, and what the future holds for it, we spoke to Jack Spencer, Director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at The Heritage Foundation, host of The Power Hour podcast, and author of the book “Nuclear Revolution: Powering the Next Generation.” 
 
Power Hour Podcast: https://www.heritage.org/the-power-hour

Nuclear Revolution: Powering the Next Generation: https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Revolution-Powering-Next-Generation/dp/088890357X

A few weeks ago, conservative online discourse was focused on the price of a burrito. Yes, the Vice President of the United States, along with the right’s most celebrated minds, were arguing over whether a burrito should cost $20.

Beneath the viral posts was a serious question: why does it feel like the American Dream keeps getting more expensive? Me and my wife certainly feel the squeeze on the cost of groceries, housing, and everyday necessities.

We own a house, but homeownership is increasingly out of reach for young Americans. The problem has become existential, and Congress is once again debating how to tackle affordability.

To figure out what to do about this deeply pressing issue, I spoke with John Gibbs, Director of the Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. We chatted about what’s really driving America's affordability crisis, how we get more American families in homes, and what policymakers can do to make it happen.

New York Times journalist James Reston once quipped that "This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not always conform to our whim."  Never have those words been truer than now.

The world is a very dangerous place at the moment. We are still engaged in Iran, with little sign of things improving. China looms large in Asia, though we have abruptly stopped engaging with regional ally South Korea on military drills. The Ukraine/Russia war continues to rage, all while America’s defensive capabilities are under increased scrutiny.

It’s a lot to take in, but we think we have just the guy to break it down. Bob Peters is the Director for the Heritage Foundation’s Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for National Security. He’s here to walk us through the dire threats facing the nation from abroad.

Fertility is often framed as a women's issue, but do men have any place in the conversation? In this episode of Heritage Explains, Heritage Action's Doug Blair sits down with Dr. Marguerite Duane to discuss the realities of fertility, the factors contributing to declining birth rates, and why men play a much bigger role in the fertility conversation than many realize.

The pair also discuss Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's recent revelation that she is planning on freezing her eggs and the truth behind IVF, egg freezing, and all forms of fertility technology.

Check out FACTS About Fertility here: https://www.factsaboutfertility.org/
Follow FACTS About Fertility on X: https://x.com/FACTS_Fertility

Portland was once held up as a model of urban America: a walkable, vibrant city known for parks, restaurants, breweries, and a thriving downtown.

Today, record office vacancies, rampant homelessness, drug use, and shuttered businesses have turned the City of Roses into a warning for other American cities.

So what happened?

On this episode of Heritage Explains, we’re joined by Heritage Senior Fellow Mike Gonzalez, author of Next Gen Marxism, to examine the ideological forces reshaping Portland and cities like it.

We discuss how political activism can displace basic governance, why failing local leaders so often escape accountability, how modern Marxism differs from its predecessors, whether the Left is really moving away from “woke” politics, and why schools, museums, universities, and other civic institutions have become central battlegrounds in America’s political divide.

Can cities like Portland pull themselves back from the brink, or is their decline a preview of what’s coming elsewhere?

Follow Mike on X: https://x.com/Gundisalvus
Get the book here: https://www.amazon.com/NextGen-Marxism-What-How-Combat/dp/1641773537