The Daily Signal - Remembering Ed Feulner: A Legacy of Conservative Leadership

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

Over the weekend the Founder of the Heritage Foundation Ed Feulner passed away at the age of 83. Joe Thomas sits down with one of the people Ed looked to to keep refreshing the way the truth about American Conservatism was shared to talk about his life and legacy.  Daily Signal editor-in-chief Rob Bluey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Farming is rewarding. But it isn't always easy. The Farmer Wellness Initiative is here to help. Call 1-866-267-625 to access-free unlimited counseling. Funded in part by the governments of Canada and Ontario under the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership, a five-year federal provincial territorial initiative. Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast.

I'm your host, Joe Thomas, Virginia correspondent for the Daily. Signal. Before we dive into today's interview, I want to thank you for tuning in today. If you're a first time listener, The Daily Signal, brings you fact-based reporting and conservative commentary on politics, policy, and culture. And I hope you join our band of regular listeners to our podcast. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and also take a moment to rate and review us wherever you get your podcast. You can find additional content at DailySignal.com. Now, let's get started with today's conversation right after this. Over the weekend, we lost a giant in the world of constitutional restoration.

I often say, I don't like to think of myself as a conservative anymore. I want to be a restorative, almost. And Ed Felner was one of those people. I got to meet him one time, and I was a giddy schoolgirl because I'm like, well, you know, I'm never going to meet Russell Kirk. I'm pleased to know that every now and then Annette Kirk listens online. But I said, well, here's a guy who knew and embraced the idea of constitutional conservatism and founded this little art house company you might have heard, mentioned it in the news a couple of times over the last year.

The Heritage Foundation. The founder of the Heritage Foundation passed away, born in 1941, and joining us now to talk a little bit about. his impact and why they is as much as Donald Trump was living rent-free in most of the progressive left's mind, the Heritage Foundation, had a bedroom in that apartment as well. Rob Bluie, the editor-in-chief and director of the Daily Signal. Rob, good morning, sir. How are you? Good morning, Joe. It's good to be with you. And thank you for that, those kind words about, and, you know, the thing about him is that he carried the U.S. Constitution with him everywhere,

he went. It was always in his jacket pocket, and you could count on Ed pulling it out and testing a liberal or someone in the media who may have challenged him with a point. So you have an apt description of him for sure. Well, and certainly he probably didn't need to refer to it. He knew it better than anyone. And he understood, you know, when, and it really, it was fascinating, kind of going into the history. I've worked with the Heritage Foundation for 20 years or more as a talk show host, I've done my radio show from the studios there at the Heritage Foundation headquarters in Washington. But it was interesting to me. I didn't realize it was Nixon's y'all to the left, you know, taking us off the gold standard, all the different capitulations

to the damage that we could have stopped of the great society at the time that really was the seed from which Ed and his co-founders of Heritage said, We need some place to put voice to what Nixon was seemingly just ignoring, whether it be because he was afraid of what was going to come of Watergate or what, or he just didn't have the courage to stand up to the handout society that had already been born. Am I overstating that foundation? You have an absolutely correct. And Ed Follner and Phil Truluck, John von Kannon, the three individuals who were most responsible for founding and then turning him. heritage into the powerhouse that it is today. Ed was a member of the Republican Study Committee as a staffer. He was the executive director. He had spent a couple of years on Capitol Hill,

and he was frustrated that there was no conservative organization, constitutional organization in Washington, D.C. that was responding to the growth of government. And this was in Richard Nixon's second term. You're absolutely correct about that. He had won a re-election in 1972, of course. and you had a situation where you had all of these great society programs that Lyndon Johnson created. You had new agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and others that Nixon was really giving a lot of responsibility and power to. And I think that frustrated Ed, and he was also frustrated by the fact that there weren't institutions in Washington doing a whole lot to stop it. And those that did exist at the time essentially produced policy papers that, as Ed would say, collected, does. on someone's bookshelf rather than having a member of Congress, you know, implement those ideas.

Sure. And that's the thing. And I often talk about this. There are think tanks and then there are do tanks. And I think that was one of the things that I always was struck by the Heritage Foundation. And certainly, you know, right now, we need due tanks, ones that will say to a congressman here, this is what you should be proposing. This is what the legislation should look like. Because you know the left has those people. Oh, they absolutely do. And certainly that was the case back in the 1970s and long before. It's not that the Great Society ideas just came out of nowhere. I mean, those came from institutions that had long existed in Washington, D.C. And what Ed wanted to do is he had a couple of things that he really emphasized for heritage. Number one was this idea that you

could produce a really concise and timely policy report about legislation that was being debated in Congress and probably influence the members of Congress and ultimately how they voted. Now, Heritage at the time didn't have a lobbying arm, so they were somewhat, you know, limited in terms of what they could do, but they could still produce those ideas and get them in the hands of members of Congress. And Ed created what he called the briefcase test, and that was, could a member of Congress read the policy paper, this is pre-internet, read the policy paper on their way from Capitol Hill to Reagan Airport or vice versa. And so that was his test for making sure that Heritage was relevant. You saw that evolve over the years with the creation of policy review,

which was a popular policy journal, the creation of town hall.com, which happened under Ed's Watch. He was the co-founder of that institution because he recognized that the internet was transforming things and he wanted to make sure that it was a player. And then eventually, Joe, he laid the groundwork for the Daily Signal. I came to work at Heritage in 2007, right when so many social media platforms and the internet, you know, had started to change how not only members of Congress and their staff consume information, but how the American people interacted with their lawmakers. And so, yes, Ed was an innovator. First and foremost, that's one of the things that I appreciated most about working with them. And the fact that he was always willing to give a young guy,

in my case, the opportunity to try something new because he recognized that if you weren't innovating, you were probably going to be losing. Well, and it's an interesting. point. I brought up Russell Kirk before, and one of his 10 conservative principles is that the conservative is actually the one that more frequently is the arbiter of true substantial societal change because of our attitude towards investigation, curiosity, vetting, and therefore, once, you know, having thoroughly run something through our ringer, saying, yeah, this is going to work, and it will work. You know it's going to work. And Heritage, I think, is a great testimony to his life. But like you said, a lot of people, Rob, would have said, oh, I've started Heritage and, you know, been pleased with what it

had done and not tried, you know, to open up other doors, like you mentioned. Well, and the thing about it, we've talked a lot about domestic policy, but I mean, certainly that's the case when it comes to foreign policy, too. Joe, you're probably familiar with the Index of Economic Freedom, which was another creation of eds. He decided that he was going to rank each country in the world based on the economic freedom of those countries. He had a set of metrics and he was very data driven. He wanted to make sure that you did everything that you could. He created the Center for Data Analysis and Heritage to compete against the Congressional Budget Office and others on Capitol Hill, who he just felt it might not be doing the research and the work in a way that was really

transparent and beneficial to the American people. So that index of economic freedom I spoke about, it really was a motivator for a lot of these countries. Ambassadors would come to heritage and they would say, how do I improve my score this year? I want to make sure that I'm at the top of that list. And Ed was a world traveler. I had the good fortune of taking it, from what I recall, at least one trip with him internationally. And so, yes, just somebody who not only is going to be here in the United States, but on a global scale for how he really impacted the policy landscape over the course of four decades. Rob Bluey is on with us. DailySignal.com is where you find the newspaper. The founder of the Heritage Foundation, Ed Felner, had passed away. 83 years young

over the weekend. We're visiting with Rob Blewey, the editor of the Daily Signal, who was a creation of the Heritage Foundation. But long before that, Rob, and I appreciate you. you've taken some time on a Monday morning to talk with us about it. But long before that, I think as far back as the 80s, but certainly as the Tea Party movement started in the mid-2000s, the heritage became more and more of a public face. I think it was during the Reagan stuff with Gorbachev, the Washington Post tried to expose, not for the last time, the Heritage Foundation as the shadowy group that was influencing Ronald Reagan as if, you know, a Democrat doesn't get, Jimmy Carter didn't have people trying to influence him in the same way as in advising or giving some work there. But talk about, you know, when the heritage started to pivot and start to say, hey, we should talk to the voters, sort of that Bright Bart-esque, you know, get upstream from politics where the culture is.

You certainly have that right. I mean, Heritage really started to make a name for itself during those rates. in years, starting in 1981, in fact, with the publication of mandate for leadership. This was the policy book that Reagan put on the chair of every single cabinet secretary in his administration and said, I will be judging your performance based on how you implement these ideas. But for very much of that time, and even during the Clinton years, remember, Heritage had a significant win when Bill Clinton adopted welfare reform. Those were ideas that came out of the Heritage Foundation. So working across the aisle, But Joe, it wasn't really until that Tea Party movement, and I think it was the year 2010 when Ed said, you know what, there's limitations on what the Heritage Foundation can do as a policy and education organization.

We need to create a grassroots and lobbying arm. And so that was what led to Heritage Action, which is a 501C4, for those who know the distinction in the tax code. And it allowed Heritage to do things that it hadn't been able to do before, including lobby at the federal level, and also create a grassroots. Army, over 2 million people now are Heritage Action supporters and members. They have an elite group of sentinels who go out into their communities and make sure that they're educating their members of Congress or increasingly their state lawmakers about different policy ideas. And so those were really ideas that Ed, again, as we talked about previously, saw the need really to innovate in order to make sure that conservative policy ideas remained at the forefront. And so whatever he had to do,

He figured out a way to get it done. And I think that's what made him so effective and admired. And it's just great to see so many tributes from members of Congress, from leaders of all stripes. The vice president, former vice president, Mike Pence, has an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal today. So it's really, I think, a testament to the fact that Ed did have an impact on so many of their careers and certainly the policy ideas they pursued.

Well, but also, and for the listener, And as I alluded to it, the onset, I mean, the Heritage Foundation has been kicked around by the mainstream press. And our listeners, and one of the things I'll try to do for our listener, Rob, is they're going to get beat up by somebody in their family or their workplace or whatever, not physically. But, oh, you're a guy and Epstein and blah, blah, blah. And so Ed and Heritage was getting this as far back as 1981, 81, 82. Oh, well, who's this heritage? All the way through the Project 2025, which, by the way, as Rob has been on this program and said, was just the most recent policy suggestion for an incoming president that you pretty much put together every four years.

That's right. That was the irony of the whole thing. I don't know whether those in Washington were that uneducated about Heritage's history or what the deal was, Joe. But to your point, the thing that made Ed and Heritage different from other policy organizations and particularly think tanks in Washington is the fact that he did invest heavily in communications and marketing. And he always talked about how there needed to be a balance. You can't just have all of the resources go to the policy team. You needed a way to get the message out. And so certainly I benefited from that and in the creation of the daily signal.

But prior to that, I mean, there were all sorts of things that Ed would do in 2012, for instance, the Heritage Foundation co-hosted with CNN a Republican presidential primary debate. Oh, that's right. I mean, who would think that Heritage would do something like that? Heritage always embraced talk radio. I mean, I think you saw that firsthand. The studios that Heritage are named. honor of Rush Limbaugh, for instance, because Heritage had a great relationship with the late

great Rush Limbaugh and people like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram and others who were clearly talking to the grassroots and talking to the American people. And Heritage recognized that if you weren't part of that conversation, you might be irrelevant. And so, yes, even though there were attacks from the legacy and liberal media, Heritage figured out a way to go around them. And certainly with the creation of and the growth of so many new media platforms over the years, the thing about Ed was he wanted to be front and center. And oftentimes, Ed was the one who was willing to put himself forward and go up against those attacks. And it's not just, you know, policy, budget policy. If you go to heritage.org, I mean, it is everything. You got Bill Bennett talking about

education reform. And, you know, finally we're seeing some of that. But mostly it's a about how you don't let the, there was a book that my mother used to give to everyone. It was by Sandra Boynton, don't let the turkeys get you down. But, you know, Ed, and nobody at the Heritage Foundation ever seemed to lose a step because people were assailing them in the media. And I think that's a big message for our listener, don't you think, the turkeys are going to try to get you down? They certainly will.

And in a town like Washington, D.C., you better be prepared for it. for all of the incoming fire that you're going to face. And I think particularly what happened was Heritage in its early years, you know, kind of maybe flew under the radar. And then in 1981, when you had a president say, take these ideas that Heritage has created. And by the way, the thing that was so unique about that first mandate for leadership is that Ed really convened

the conservative, libertarian, all of these individual scholars. And he said, come together and put these ideas in a single policy book that we can give this administration, and it was remarkably successful. Just I think within the first year of the Reagan administration, about 50% of those ideas had been implemented in one way. And by the way, Ed was not satisfied with that. He said something to the effect of, well, 50% is a failing grade, so, you know, Reagan needs to do better.

And you're even seeing, Joe, just a final point on this, you're even seeing ideas that came of age during Reagan's time implemented now by Donald Trump. I think about missile defense, which was for a long time, you know, championed by the Heritage Foundation. Or the reduction of the Department of Education, all that. Rob, thank you for everything at daily signal.com, heritage.org. And you have a wonderful morning. And thank you for giving us some insight into Ed's life and legacy. Well, thank you, Joe. I appreciate it. And you have a great day as well. That'll do it for today's show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button. so you never miss out on new episodes from The Daily Signal.

Every weekday you can catch top news in 10 to keep up with the day's top headlines in just 10 minutes. And every weekday afternoon catch Victor Davis Hansen's thoughtful analysis for the Daily Signal. If you like what you hear on this show, would you take a minute and leave us comment? We love hearing your feedback. Thanks again for being with us today. Trust and safety is becoming a key driver of customer experience, influencing how users engage, how safe they feel, and ultimately how likely they are to return. Because I don't know about you, but if I've had too many bad experiences on a platform,

I'm definitely not rushing back for more. This is the intersection we're here to explore today. Tap to keep listening to how trust and safety redefined CX for brands like TikTok, Trust Pilot and more. A conversation with InTouch CX.