Eve, here. Hey there, kid. Conservative creeps like Lee Zeldin, who submitted fake signatures to gain access to the New York gubernatorial election ballot, are trumpeting a new idea of electoral purity by denying the wrong kind of adult vote. The details are unclear, but this probably means the messaging isn’t perfect. But the basic idea is that only people with property and/or taxpayers should vote. This conveniently ignores that all adults are taxpayers through sales taxes, gas taxes, and even property taxes as a landlord expense collected as payment for rent. But the Heartland Institute avant-garde cannot care less about facts that contradict their neatly discriminatory worldview.
Written by Rei Takver, Freelance Climate Researcher at DeSmog. Research on climate disinformation and environmental justice has also been published in ENDS Report and Now then Magazine. Originally published on DeSmog Blog
“Look, I’m about to say something very controversial. Not every adult over the age of 18 should have the right to vote,” Jim Lakeley, communications director for the Heartland Institute, said on an early April episode of the group’s “In the Tank” podcast.
Hartland was a contributor to Project 2025, the policy blueprint for President Trump’s second term.
“When the framers of the Constitution founded this country, we didn’t have universal suffrage. There were some variations from state to state, but basically you had to be a white male. You had to be the owner of a certain amount of property, and that was pretty much just white men,” Lakeley said. “Of course, we’ll never go back to that situation, and I’m not really going to advocate that. But there’s something to be said for the way they set it up intentionally, because they wanted to make sure that only people who had a stake in the country, primarily people who paid taxes to support the government, had a franchise and could choose the direction of the government.”
Lakeley’s comments, which are quoted in full at DesMog’s request, were released just days before Heartland is hosting a two-day conference in Washington, D.C., with a keynote address by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin. Zeldin is being floated as President Trump’s attorney general to replace Pam Bondi.
Zeldin praised the Heartland Institute, which has long been on the front lines of spreading misinformation about climate change, and strongly supported the EPA’s recent report on “dangerous findings,” an Obama-era resolution that weakened the federal government’s authority to limit the air pollution that causes climate change.
Zeldin said it was time to “celebrate the vindication” of the group’s decades of anti-climate activism.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and Media at the University of Pennsylvania, said all Americans should be concerned that Trump administration officials publicly praised groups that question universal suffrage.
“Heartland’s authoritarian and anti-democratic policies are now clear for all to see,” Mann told DesMog in an email. “The attack on climate change and the attack on democracy are one and the same, an effort to advance the authoritarian policies of fossil fuel interests and the politicians who reward them.”
When asked for comment, the EPA told Desmogg, “Secretary Zeldin is doing something truly different at EPA, refocusing the agency on its core mission of protecting human health and the environment, and exercising statutory authority as written, rather than as drastically reimagined as in the past. Secretary Zeldin will continue to advance President Trump’s policies on behalf of the American people who elected President Trump to do just that.”
“Reducing franchises”
In the podcast, ST Karnick, a senior fellow at Heartland, supported Lakeley’s comments about the vote. “The original plan in America was to give each property-owning family one vote,” Karnick said. “It’s been hacked for decades, and now two and a half centuries.”
“Okay, can I go back?” I added. “Well, anything is possible, but it’s never going to be possible for the country we live in to start reducing the franchise.” Kernick said another solution would be to “repeal the stubborn 17th Amendment,” the 1913 addition to the Constitution that established direct election of U.S. senators, and return to a system in which senators are elected by state legislatures. “That would be a way to keep the popular vote away,” he said.
Heartland researcher Linnea Lucken and editorial director Chris Talgo also appeared on the podcast.
On the Heartland podcast, Lakeley falsely claimed that the use of mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic has created “significant” and “easy natural election fraud” and said, “If you could go to the grocery store, if you could go to BLM.” [Black Lives Matter] Come March, you can participate in the election by lining up at your local polling place and voting. ” When DesMog asked Lakeley for comment on this last claim, Lakeley responded, “I stand by it.”
Zeldin, a longtime Trump supporter, has previously supported similar claims. After Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Zeldin, then New York’s 1st Congressman, “sided with Republicans who were fueling doubts about the election’s legitimacy” and shared ideas with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on how to discredit Biden’s victory, according to the New York Times. On January 6, 2021, Zeldin voted against certification of the election results.
The following year, Zeldin, running as a Republican candidate for New York governor, was disqualified from seeking an additional spot on the Independence Party ballot after nearly 13,000 of the petition signatures his campaign submitted to the State Board of Elections were copied.
Immediately after taking over the EPA in 2025, Zeldin promised that the agency would begin “putting a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Since then, he has canceled billions of dollars in climate funding, cut thousands of EPA jobs and rolled back dozens of clean air and water protections.
In his keynote address at Heartland, Zeldin argued that reversing these policies was “what the American people voted for” when Trump was re-elected.
The EPA administrator praised the Heartland audience for being “on the front lines” of the movement against this endangered discovery. “Thank you for your thoughtfulness to look years and decades ahead of your time.”
Attorney General Zeldin?
If Mr. Zeldin were to succeed Mr. Bondi, he would oversee the Justice Department’s defense of his EPA lawsuits in court, including lawsuits by states and environmental groups over the repeal of endangered certifications.
“In my opinion, the Supreme Court will say that the EPA should not impose trillions of dollars in regulations without a vote in Congress,” Zeldin said in a speech, adding that members of Congress “have done so as recently as November.” [mid-term elections]When we put our names on the ballot and go before the people, the American people will decide who represents them in this republic. ”
Mr. Zeldin’s record of election refusal is exactly befitting the current head of the Justice Department.
Since President Trump took office, the department has shifted from enforcing voting rights laws to investigating allegations of voter fraud, including scrutinizing whether states held fair elections and prosecuting intimidation of election officials. Most of the lawyers who worked in the voting section of the agency’s civil rights division have left, and many of their replacements have ties to election-denial groups, Wired reports.
Now, as President Trump’s approval rating among voters skyrockets and paints a grim picture for Republicans in the November elections, the Trump Justice Department is openly supporting them as part of President Trump’s efforts to manipulate the midterm elections.
Under the former AG Bondi administration, the department began collecting voter data from cooperating states and sued to obtain more states, apparently with the aim of directing roll deletion. Although the FBI raided election offices and seized 2020 voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, in January, and Trump lost, it is no secret that voter fraud is extremely rare in the United States, and no voter fraud occurred in 2020.
Many red states have already heeded President Trump’s call to increase the number of House seats for Republicans through redistricting. More moves are now underway, as the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled in late April to water down the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and allow states to effectively rewrite electoral districts in ways that weaken the voting power of blacks and other minorities.
Within hours of the decision, several Southern states began taking steps to draw electoral maps that would increase the number of Republican House seats.
badge of dishonor
The Heartland Institute has denied that humans are causing climate change as a “delusion” and boasted of its “strong” ties to “big names” in the Trump administration.
As DeSmog reported at the time, during President Trump’s first term, Hartland advised the EPA on staffing and policy decisions. “They recognized us as an outstanding organization that opposes radical climate change concerns and instead promotes sound science and policy,” Tim Huelskamp, a former Republican congressman who led Heartland at the time, said in 2018.
Hartland also advised William Happer, a longtime climate change denier on the administration’s National Security Council, on how to discredit the fact that burning fossil fuels is causing dangerous levels of global warming.
When President Trump announced in 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, he invited Heartland’s then-CEO Joseph Bast to attend the announcement at the White House.
The Heartland Institute received at least $676,000 from U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil between 1998 and 2007. The company receives donations from Republican donors from the Mercer family and from foundations linked to the owner of Koch Industries, a fossil fuel giant and leading sponsor of climate science denial.
“What a disgrace to be the keynote speaker at this plutocrat-funded propaganda event disguised as a ‘conference.'” Mann told DesMog, noting Zeldin’s ties to the group, “The pollution interests can only advance their agenda of a fossil fuel-dependent America by keeping the Republican Party in power.”
