Heartland Institute and Scott Walker Join Forces

Image courtesy of the Heartland Institute.


Now that he survived his recall election, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is lending his support to an upcoming fundraiser for the Heartland Institute, a climate-denying think-tank.

On August 9, Heartland will celebrate its 28th anniversary with a $150-a-head dinner in Chicago (or you can just buy a whole table for $2,500). Heartland has grabbed plenty of headlines this year. In February, a bunch of internal Heartland documents were published detailing the group’s climate miseducation plans (along with one document that the group says was a fake). In May, the group put up controversial billboards comparing people who believe in climate change to the Unabomber. (Climate change isn’t the only issue Heartland brings its “free-market solutions” to address, but it’s the one the group has become most infamous for.)

The billboard incident has caused several funders to drop their support for the group, to the tune of $825,000 in lost donations. Enter Walker, who they described in an email to supporters as “the nation’s most influential and successful governor.” The email promises that the dinner “will be the biggest celebration of freedom in Chicago in 2012.”

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At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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