Mapping the Authoritarian Movement: Part Four – The Far-Right Network of Think Tanks

The Major MAGA Individuals and Organizations

Unsurprisingly, the most influential organizations in the network that hold together the entire far-right coalition are some of the largest, well-connected, and financially-flush institutions.

Most Influential Organizations/Grouping and Individuals in the Network

Note: “Influence” as understood in GPAHE’s analysis consists of how “well-connected” a group or individual is to other entities, and not factors such as revenue. The centrality used for this is “Page Rank,” which takes into account both the “number” of ties to other entities, and the “quality” of these ties, meaning the level of interconnectedness to other entities each of their ties has. 

America First Policy Institute (AFPI): The “White House in Waiting”

The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) appeared as the second most influential organization, after the dozens of Project 2025 authors, in the entire network due to its large number of staff with connections to other pro-Trump outfits. As GPAHE’s analysis in part two of this series demonstrates, AFPI was the most well-connected organization to the Trump administration, boasting more than 26 principals appointed to positions in the executive branch. Their personnel are especially thick in the White House and the Department of Education, where AFPI policies are in effect (for more on the AFPI, see part two of GPAHE’s report here). AFPI’s revenue amounted to more than $27.3 million in 2023. 

Turning Point USA (TPUSA)

Charlie Kirk’s far-right “student organization” Turning Point USA (TPUSA) has become an influential node in the pro-Trump network, with a war chest of more than $81.7 million in 2023 and a large number of connections to other groups. Between the group’s board of directors, honorary board, and “advisory council,” TPUSA counts more than 80 ties to individuals within the far-right network, who themselves often have held public office before, have ties to elected officials, or have ties to other far-right organizations. 

One such individual on the board of TPUSA is the Tea Party conservative Jim DeMint, who heads the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) and is one of the most influential individuals in the entire network due to his longstanding ties to other organizations. DeMint has ties to the Heritage Foundation, where he served as president from 2013 to 2017. He was responsible for reorienting the think tank towards activism focused on supporting Trump’s agenda before being ousted in early 2017. DeMint was a member of the House of Representatives from 1999 to 2005, the Senate from 2005 to 2013, and served as a part of the Trump transition team in the first administration.

Also at TPUSA is Sebastian Gorka, who was in the first Trump administration, and has ties to Heritage and the Gatestone Institute (see GPAHE’s full profile of Gorka here). Gorka has a long history of far-right activity, from running for office in Hungary with former members of the antisemitic political party Jobbik in 2007 to working as a contributor to the far-right publication Breitbart before joining the first Trump administration. There is also former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who has ties to a number of religious organizations as well as the anti-LGBTQ+ Project 2025-affiliated Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. 

Jameson Campaigne is a member of the advisory board of TPUSA. He appears in GPAHE’s analysis as the second-most influential individual in the entire network due to his many ties to other organizations, such as the climate-denying Heartland Institute, the Freedom Journal Institute. which “champions a biblical worldview” and where he sits on the advisory board, and the American Conservative Union, where he has been a board member for over 40 years. He also once sat on the board of Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, the National Tax Limitation Committee, The Media Institute, and the Philadelphia Society, where he is a charter member.

Other highly-connected board members at TPUSA include former Florida Congressman Allen West, who is a senior figure at Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) and the Media Research Center (MRC), and has ties to a handful of other groups; Aubrey Shines, who has a number of ties to Christian nationalist, Christian Zionist, and anti-LGBTQ+ groups, including the anti-LGBTQ+ Family Research Council (FRC); Francisco Gonzalez, a chairman of the board for the disinformation outlet Project Veritas and friend of its founder James O’Keefe, is currently in the senior leadership at the conservative magazine National Review’s Institute; and Drew Ryun, the co-founder of American Majority which trains conservatives to run for political office, who has previously served in the senior leadership of the anti-LGBTQ+ legal groups American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) and European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ).

The Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation appears in the top five most influential organizations in the network and is highly influential primarily due to its many ties to well-connected individuals in the far-right orbit. GPAHE identified 108 individuals holding positions in the senior leadership, on the board of directors, or with previous positions at Heritage. While the Heritage staff is large, a number of these ties involve individuals who joined the think tank at one point or another as a fellow, a short-term position held by dozens of far-right figures over the years. Heritage is also one of the most well-funded organizations, reporting $101 million in revenue in 2023.

Much of Heritage’s influence is drawn from their shepherding of Project 2025. By way of the sheer number of connections, as well as the “quality” of these connections, being a part of the large-scale collaborative effort that resulted in the 900+ page Mandate for Leadership was the most influential grouping by far in the entire network. Consisting of more than 300 individuals representing more than 75 different Project 2025-affiliated organizations, affiliation with Project 2025 is a key aspect of today’s far-right universe in the United States. Naturally, due to their heavy involvement in organizing the coalition, the nodes for Heritage and Project 2025 are in very close proximity in the network, implying that there is a strong connection between the two. For more on Heritage and the Project 2025 network, see part one of this report here.

Liberty University

Another one of the highly-influential and well-funded organizations propping up the Trump coalition is the Christian conservative Liberty University (LU). Based in Virginia, Liberty was founded by Christian right leader Jerry Falwell Sr., and boasted revenue of over $1.57 billion in 2023. While LU has a large number of staff members, with over 60 individuals in the senior leadership of the university, LU’s influence over other organizations in the network is not as extensive as other groups, but still potent. Only four employees have ties to other groups in the network. Both Richard Lee and Penny Young Nance, on the board of LU, are members of the Council for National Policy (CNP), while Nance currently serves as president and CEO of Concerned Women for America (CWA). The LU President of the Board Dondi E. Costin, meanwhile, served as the president of the Baptist-affiliated Charleston Southern University (CSU) from 2018 to 2023.

The American Legislative Exchange Council

With an endowment of $11.3 million in 2023 and 38 principals, many of whom are well-connected in the network, the Project 2025-affiliated conservative lobbying group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) appeared as an influential organization in the far-right, pro-Trump network. ALEC focuses primarily on drafting conservative “model bills” ready to be signed by state legislatures alongside their SPN network of statewide think tanks, and was also a part of the “election law and ballot integrity” efforts in the lead up to the 2020 election. H. Sterling Burnett, an advisor at ALEC’s Natural Resources and Agricultural Task Force, is one of the most well-connected individuals in the entire network. He is the director of a center at the climate-denying Heartland Institute and a senior fellow at the fossil fuel-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation. 

Other influential individuals at ALEC include 1792 Exchange President Paul Fitzpatrick, who  previously worked with the anti-LGBTQ+ Family Research Council (FRC), and the American Main Street Initiative (AMSI), an organization created by Conservative Partnership Institute in 2022 to promote the issues of “everyday Americans.” ALEC President and Chief Economist Jonathan Williams serves on the board of the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) and is an adjunct fellow at the Kansas Policy Institute. Williams co-wrote a book with the conservative economist Arthur Laffer that argued for cutting taxes in order to raise revenue. Lisa Nelson, the chief executive of ALEC, is listed as a member of CNP in 2020.

State Policy Network Organizations

The Alabama Policy Institute (API) and the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) are two statewide think tanks with significant influence according to GPAHE’s analysis. Both are a part of the well-funded far-right State Policy Network (SPN), which drafts “model legislation,” alongside the ALEC, in the states in which they are represented. They both have around 40 connections in the network to individuals either in their senior leadership or who previously worked with them. They are more modestly funded than their national counterparts. TPPF’s endowment, which is predominantly funded by fossil fuel interests, was around $24.3 million in 2023, while the more modest API raked in $1.5 million in the same year.

API Senior Director of Fiscal Policy Justin Bogie, who served as a budget policy advisor in the first Trump administration, spent four years at Heritage as a senior policy analyst in fiscal affairs, while API President and CEO Stephanie Smith has many connections including previous experience with the anti-LGBTQ+ organization Concerned Women for America (CWA) and the anti-abortion Susan B Anthony list. Smith appeared as the sixth-most well-connected individual in the entire network. At TPPF, a number of their staff are veterans of the first Trump administration, while others, such as Katharine T. Sullivan, Brent Bennett, Andrew Gillen, Parker Stathatos, and Erin Valdez, are listed as contributors to Project 2025.

Some of the more connected individuals at TPPF include board member Tim Dunn, who is associated with AFPI, as well as former TPPF President Brooke Rollins, who co-founded AFPI after the first Trump administration, and joined the second administration as Secretary of Agriculture (see GPAHE’s profile of Rollins here). Former Congressman Allen West, the director of TPPF’s Booker T. Washington Initiative, has ties to TPUSA, the Project 2025-affiliated and Robert Mercer-funded “media watchdog” Media Research Center (MRC), and the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a think tank which was oriented towards finding market alternatives to major government programs such as health care, Social Security, welfare, and others.

AFPI Executive Vice President Chad Wolf is a current member of TPPF’s Border Security Coalition, and previously served as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation as well as a stint in the first Trump administration as acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Sullivan, the current associate director for justice and transportation in the Trump administration, has previous ties to both TPPF and AFPI, and is a veteran of the first Trump administration, where she worked in the Department of Justice. She previously served as general counsel of the Project 2025 group 1792 Exchange that pushes back against “woke” corporations. Finally, there is Joshua Treviño, TPPF’s chief transformation officer, who previously worked with the State Policy Network’s (SPN) Illinois Policy Institute, and the Project 2025-affiliated “free-market” think tank Pacific Research Institute, which is the California representative of the SPN. He currently serves as a senior fellow with AFPI.

Project 2025-Affiliated “Think Tanks”

The Project 2025-affiliated National Association of Scholars (NAS) appeared as a somewhat influential organization in the far-right network. NAS was created in 1987 to preserve “Western intellectual heritage” and seeks to return to a public school curriculum that promotes a positive, ahistorical vision of American history and “Western civilization” by removing courses on topics related to gender, race, and class. With an endowment of $2.97 million in 2023, and more than 36 individuals on their board of directors and in senior leadership, NAS stands out as a significant node in the network. Particularly well-connected individuals from this organization include Andrew Beck, a consultant for NAS who has ties to Liberty Fund, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Claremont Institute, and Adam Kissel, a former Department of Education official who sits on the NAS board, and is also a visiting fellow for higher education reform at the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at the Cardinal Institute, the far-right representative of the SPN in West Virginia.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a rabidly anti-immigrant think tank founded by white nationalist John Tanton, appeared as another influential organization in the network. Financed to the tune of $3.02 million in 2023, CIS counts among its staff 34 principals on the board and senior leadership. William W. Chip, a board member who served as a counselor at Homeland Security in the first Trump administration, sits on the board of another Tanton-founded anti-immigrant organization Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Based on GPAHE’s analysis, Chip appears as one of the most influential individuals in the entire network. CIS Senior Legal Fellow George Fishman, Director of Investigations Jon Feere, Resident Fellow Law & Policy Andrew “Art” R. Arthur, and Director Of Litigation Julie Axelrod are all listed as contributors to the Project 2025 manifesto, and Fishman, Feere, and Chip are all veterans of the first Trump administration. CIS’ Axelrod also holds a position at Judicial Watch, an activist organization that files Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to uncover alleged evidence of misconduct by democrats, while CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian writes for the conservative magazine, The National Review. 

The large, well-funded Discovery Institute, founded to promote the concept of “intelligent design” (creationism) through the “Teach the Controversy” campaign in 2005, is another Project 2025 organization with influence in the far-right network. In 2023, the Discovery Institute received $10.2 million in revenue, and their principals with ties to other organizations include Senior Fellow Keri D. Ingraham. Aside from the Discovery Institute, Ingraham is also a senior fellow at the Project 2025-affiliate organization Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), which was formed in 1992 after the outcry against the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court to defend him against criticism that he allegedly sexually harassed attorney Anita Hill.

Finally, the Project 2025-affiliated Claremont Institute, financed to the tune of $9.07 million in 2023, has a large number of individuals on staff with ties to other groups. Influential employees of Claremont include Claremont Review of Books Editor Charles R. Kesler, Vice President of Communications Andrew Beck, Senior Fellow Michael Anton (see GPAHE’s profile of Anton here), Chairman Thomas D. Klingenstein, and board member Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College.

Family Research Council

While not the most influential organization in the network, within the top 20 most well-connected groups is the Project 2025-affiliated, anti-LGBTQ+ Family Research Council (FRC). Due to his extensive ties to other far-right groups, such as the AFPI, and individuals in government, FRC employee J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former mayor of Cincinnati as well as the former treasurer and secretary of state for Ohio, appears in GPAHE’s analysis as the most influential individual in the entire network. Blackwell joined Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017. He is also a member of CNP, being listed in the 2014 membership list on the executive committee, and named in its 2022 tax documents as CNP vice president.

Well-Connected Individuals

While other organizations in the far-right network of think tanks and pressure groups are not without influence, they do not appear to be as well-connected as the groups and individuals so far described. Still, there are a number of individuals from these organizations that remain well-connected with other groups and maintain a significant amount of influence in the network. 

Take Dena Espenscheid, the director of “pro-life programs” at the Project 2025-affiliated Leadership Institute, for example. The Leadership Institute is a large organization which brought in revenue of more than $45 million according to 2023 tax documents, and exists to train conservative activists. Espenscheid has previously worked with a number of conservative campaigns and Christian right organizations such as anti-choice group Vote Yes for Life, the pro-abstinence group National Abstinence Clearinghouse, and others. 

Austin Ruse, president of the rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ Center for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM), is another well-connected individual in the network. Having worked in the past for several large newspapers in New York, Ruse is listed as a contributor to the rights-stripping Project 2025 plan. Ruse was also listed as an influential node in GPAHE’s report Mapping The Far Right, which covered individuals who spoke at far-right conferences, showing him as one of the main figures representing the international LGBTQ+ movement at such events.

Then there is Sumantra Maitra, a senior fellow at Project 2025 mastermind Russell Vought’s far-right think tank Center for Renewing America. He is the senior editor at The American Conservative, an outlet founded in 2002 by Pat Buchanan and other partners to promote a “paleoconservative” point of view over the dominant neoconservatism of the day. He is also a senior contributor at The Federalist and a former fellow at the Center for the National Interest, a Washington D.C.-based think-tank that promotes a “realist” vision of foreign policy. He is a regular contributor to Fox News and chaired the London 2023 foreign policy panel at the National Conservative (NatCon) Conference, which hosted a large number of European far-right leaders and supporters of authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Council for National Policy

The second most influential organization in the network is the Council for National Policy (CNP). CNP’s membership includes many individuals with ties to government officials and organizations within the far-right, pro-Trump network. They are, in many respects, an influential precursor to the Project 2025 coalition built by Heritage and others. 

Far right Catholic activist Leonard A. Leo, a longtime CNP member and wealthy financier of far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ causes, appears as the third-most influential individual in the far-right network according to GPAHE’s analysis. This is mainly due to his position at the influential Federalist Society legal organization, financed to the tune of $21.5 million in 2023, which includes more than 30 principals in the dataset, his longtime membership in the CNP, and his position on the board of the Catholic Prayer Breakfast. He is also tied to a series of other, very well-funded organizations set up for the purpose of transferring funds to conservative causes such as the Rule Of Law Trust, Freedom and Opportunity Fund (defunct as of 2018), American Engaged (defunct as of 2022), which provided funds to support the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, the BH Fund and BH Groups (defunct as of November 2022) which organized a large grant to George Mason University to rename the law school after conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the non-profit Marble Freedom Trust, and the Tea Party group Liberty Central. Leo and groups affiliated with him have reportedly donated an estimated $55 million to Project 2025-affiliated groups from 2021 to March 2024.

According to CNP’s 2014 and 2020 membership rolls, as well as their 2022 tax releases, among their membership is LU’s Nance, CPI’s DeMint, and FRC’s Blackwell, as well as AFPI’s Chair for the Center for the American Child Kellyanne Conway, previously a senior counselor to the president in the first Trump administration, and CPI’s Cleta Mitchell, who was a part of the effort to spread disinformation about the IRS conducting “witch hunts” against Tea Party groups during the Obama administration, and was allegedly on the phone call where Trump demanded the Georgia Secretary of State “find” enough votes to overturn the 2020 election. Brent Bozell, the founder and President of the Project 2025-affiliated organization Media Research Center (MRC) created to push back on media mainstream narratives, is listed as a CNP member in the 2014 and 2020 membership rolls, and was nominated to be the US ambassador to South Africa in the second Trump administration.

Methodological Note: For this report, two datasets were created according to traditional network analysis conventions, one for the most Trump-aligned organizations and individuals, which includes every group but excludes ties to the Trump administration, and an “ego-centric” network, which includes a node for the Trump administration (2025-) and excludes organizations and individuals with no ties to the administration. “Influence” is calculated using eigenvector centrality measures to measure both the quantity and “quality” of their ties, which provide higher scores for both the number of edges (ties) a node has and the number of edges that a node linked to them has as well. Individuals were included in the dataset if they belonged to the senior leadership of an organization GPAHE analyzed or were on the board of directors/trustees, and any previous experience with other organizations was coded as a link as well. Due to the focus on senior leadership, and not all employees of these organizations, the estimated number of principals from these networks in the Trump administration is likely an undercount.