A Leaky Foundation, PART II
MORE highlights from the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Personnel Database
Welcome back, KTB readers.
And happy July 4th weekend. Celebrate by fighting for our democracy.
Last week, KTB called out 17 individuals whose names are in the Heritage Foundation’s “Presidential Personnel Database.”
That database was leaked two weeks ago. It contains the names of thousands of wannabe Trump appointees. It also contains those wannabes’ responses to Heritage’s screening questionnaire, including their “short essay” responses.
This week, KTB has continued to sift through the database and has identified a second crop of job seekers who warrant naming and shaming.
They include a pair of white nationalists, another J6er, the self-described “Secretary of Retribution,” a guy who proudly calls himself “scandal’s right hand man,” and other hateful, paranoid, careerist, and obnoxious MAGA.
Let’s call them out now.
More wannabe appointees
Viswanag “Vish” Burra is in the database. Vish is “scandal’s right hand man” - that is what his own Twitter/X profile says, quoting a blurb about him from Politico.
Vish has earned that epithet. He was a staffer to Matt Gaetz. Then he was George Santos’s Chief of Staff, a role in which Vish sexually harassed a reporter and sought bribes from a job-seeker. Vish is also a protege of Steve Bannon and a former producer of his podcast. Oh, and a convicted drug dealer, too.
Mark Ivanyo is also in database. Mark is the executive director of a far-right outfit called Republicans for National Renewal (RNR), and he was billed as a VIP Speaker at last year’s AFPAC which is a white nationalist conference (Mark attended AFPAC, but he didn’t actually speak). Mark also got caught having drinks with the “Texas European Community,” a club of local ethno-nationalists.
No wonder Mark champions “the preservation of Western cultural identity” in his short essays. Nice euphemism for white power, Mark.
RNR’s former political director, Chris Betts, is also in the database. Chris was also outreach coordinator for another far-right outfit called the True Texas Project, and he emceed TTP’s own conference of white nationalists.
In 2023, somebody leaked a video of Chris screaming racist slurs and violent threats at his girlfriend. That sunk his career, and I doubt he is going to make a comeback by putting a misspelled dad joke in his short essays:
“They clal [sic] us the Right for a reason. Its [sic] because we're right.”
Clever.
Jessico Bowman is Secretary of the Republican Liberty Caucus. Jessico has done interviews on Breitbart TV, including one on “anti-Tesla violence” which she ascribed to “like, multiple groups and individuals that are, like, posting these events where people show up and they already have, like, pre-printed graphics.”
Jessico is, like, in Heritage’s database. Thankfully, in her short essays, Jessico did not abuse the word “like” - but she did use “big tech” and “suppress” a lot.
The press has become the propaganda arm for the leftist federal government in collusion with big tech. Media that publishes outside the mainstream propagandized narrative has been blacklisted and censored by big tech. This must end. …
There must be accountability for the election interference of big tech in 2016-2019, in Russian Dossier propaganda paid for by the Clintons/DNC in 2020, by suppression of real information [about?] the Hunter Biden Laptop [and?] COVID through suppression of alternative medical therapies and medical tyranny, and following January 6, to distill fear in patriotic Americans while suppressing real footage from the Capitol and uplifting the highly political J6 committee [by?] which my family has been personally affected.
Dang, that’s a lot of conspiracy theories for one job application.
Do No Harm is an organization dedicated to “protecting healthcare from the disastrous consequences of identity politics.” Two of its staffers are in the Heritage database: Philip Jenevein, a kid just out of college, and Laura Morgan.
Laura got herself fired from a nursing job for refusing to take implicit bias training, so she went to work at Do No Harm where her full title is “Senior Director of Programs - Eliminating DEI in Medicine.” In her short essays, Laura tastefully complains that “medicine and healthcare is promoting segregation.”
Dylan Cronin is in Heritage’s database. Dylan’s short essays are typical MAGA rants about “foreign men” and “internationalist bodies”:
I believe America is losing its identity through the invitation of an endless flow of foreign men into the country illegally. What is happening is an invasion welcomed by an illegitimate government that has usurped power through the rigging of the 2020 election and are [is] following orders of internationalist bodies like the WEF, UN, and NATO…an orchestrated effort to destroy Western Civilization and the values it entails.
What Dylan’s essays don’t mention is that he is a J6 rioter who attacked the Capitol with his father and brother (awww, family…) and got eight months in jail.
Add Dylan to our list of J6ers in the database (KTB called out three last week). And let’s also add Sarah McAbee* but with that little asterisk because her husband was the rioter who went to jail. Sarah didn’t riot, but she did found Stand In The Gap, an advocacy organization for J6 goons like her hubby.
At least two ex-judges are in the database. One, the Honorable Vance Day was suspended from the Oregon bench for refusing to conduct marriages for gay couples and was also indicted for lending a handgun to a felon. In February, Trump gave Honorable Vance a job at the Justice Department.
The other ex-judge, the Honorable Mark Martin, is a former Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court and now a law school dean. In late 2020, Honorable Mark helped Trump’s legal team develop several crackpot legal theories for overturning the presidential election.
But one crackpot legal theory that was not Mark’s was the “Pence Card” theory; that was the baby of Ivan Raiklin who is also in Heritage’s database. Ivan, a former Green Beret, calls himself the “Secretary of Retribution” and wants to arrest or just kill people on his “Deep State Target List.” Seriously.
In fact, what Ivan wrote in his short essays reads like the hit list of a lunatic:
Creating consequences for those involved in Recent Global/US Corruption: 1. WEF/CCP (w Russia/Iran/North Korea Support) Take Over of USA Institutions; 2. Ensuring Nuremburg 2.0 for those involved in the CCP Lab Incident - Fentanyl precursors Big Pfarma [sic] CCP - 19 Products - Censorship Industrial Complex coverup (USG/BIG TECH/BIG MEDIA) that murdered untold amount of Americans; 3. Illegal POTUS/Other Elections from 2020-Today (Software, Machines, Corrupt Officials); 4. January 6 FEDSURRECTION COUP; 5. All those covering up for the above.
Yet, Ivan does like some people in the government: the Feds for Freedom (F4F), which had Ivan guest on their podcast. F4F is an organization of far-right federal employees, many of whom are anti-vaxxers and believe various conspiracy theories about the Deep State - even though they are, of course, part of the Deep State.
At least 16 members of F4F are in Heritage’s database. They include F4F’s former vice president, Cameron Hamilton who worked for the Department of Homeland Security and ran for Congress; F4F co-founder Jim Erdman, a former CIA employee who wrote in his short essays that “those without conservative ideals rooted in the Constitution have opportunistically seized internal control of our agencies and departments”; and F4F co-founder and current President Marcus Thornton who is a diplomat at the State Department and - KTB readers, you know where this is going… - a BFF.
BFF: Ben Franklin Fellowship, that club of far-right officials at the State Department that KTB has mentioned in two prior posts. At least 18 Fellows are in Heritage’s database, including Marcus and four who KTB named last week. An additional one is Drew Peterson who, in his short essays, lambasts “the crazy people on the Left,” the “radical-chic protest tourists living lives of utter hypocrisy in major U.S. cities and college campuses,” and - most terrible of all - the “Yale faculty lounge.”
One other fed in the Heritage database is Gregory Koch. Gregory works for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and in his short essays, he notes, “I was asked…to contribute to the Intelligence Community section of Heritage's ‘2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise’ policy book.”
That “Mandate for Leadership…” is the full title of the Project 2025 report, the infamous blueprint for MAGA-izing the government. Gregory helped write it, even though his name does not appear anywhere in its pages.
Gregory’s short essays heap praise on Donald Trump for having “fought hard against the Deep State” - which, of course, Gregory is a part of.
He adds, “[Trump] is a strong-willed fighter who never surrendered to special interest groups, the mainstream media, or the woke mob, and that's exactly what this country needs.”
And why, Gregory, is Trump exactly what this country needs?
I want the next conservative President to do everything in his power to make Diversity Equity and Inclusion (D.E.I.) quickly D.I.E. …
I fear that if we all allow this progressive liberal agenda to survive in our schools and public institutions, including the federal and state government, we will lose our country.
The next President needs to start on day one by eliminating all DEI programs in the federal government and across every Department and Agency, which includes firing all staff in those D/As pushing DEI training and hiring practices.
Also…
He should, on behalf of the federal government and as a matter of policy, recognize only two unchanging sexes, male and female. He should then bring all state governors together to ensure they, too, do everything in their power to stop this cancer from spreading.
Hatred of DEI and transphobia: that, Gregory believes, is why we need Trump.
Gregory, you may work in intelligence, but you sure don’t have much of your own.
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Hi, all. A couple quick thoughts of my own.
First, let's remember that the individual who this post labeled transphobic described trans people as "a cancer" and insisted Donald Trump declare there to be two sexes, which - putting aside for now people who transition - is a rather mean slight to people who are born intersex. I think we can all agree that that particular individual is embracing transphobia.
Second, my own view of gender affirming care is that it is something that should be between the patient and his/her doctor (and family, if the patient is a minor). Government needs to stay out it. So do I, for that matter - my job is not to get involved in that person's life, but just to support that individual whenever I can, letting him/her know that he/she is a loved person.
Third, my own view of gendered spaces - which I recognize is a minority view - is that the harm caused by a trans person entering one is, in most cases, non-existent. If a trans girl in high school swims on the girl's team, well, is that really going to have a huge effect on our country's well-being? If a trans person enters my restroom, am I in any /likely/ danger?
Yes, there are hypotheticals...but life is full of hypotheticals which never come to pass and therefore can't be used as reasons to make people feel bad about who they are.
Rather, we need to make people feel loved and respected for who they are - especially minors. Again, your being trans just doesn't affect me, so if you need my support, you got it - especially if you need someone to fight back against politicians who think they know better than you, your doctors, and your family and friends.
Thanks as always for reading.
Excellent work, please keep it coming.
One critique: not all those who oppose the overreach of trans activists are transphobic and/or anti-trans RWNJs.
Many of us are lifelong progressives who understand biology exceptionally well, and recognize that the rights of females have been subordinated to the demands of a small but vocal group of trans-identified men. People who have read the Cass report, the Skrmetti amici curiae, the UK Supreme Court “what is a woman” judgement; people who believe that children deserve evidence-based healthcare; people who also believe that trans people are as deserving of fundamental human rights as every other person, but who don’t believe that appropriating the spaces, services, and opportunities that women have fought for over decades is fair to women.
And failing to acknowledge those legitimate concerns, tarring those who hold them as transphobic, bigoted, or hateful, is an own goal for the progressive movement: too many women (and some men) have turned their backs on the Democrats for this betrayal of women’s rights, and some have even made the (fantastically wrong, imho) decision to support Trump & other GOPers.