The Heritage Foundation has not told the truth in decades.
Posted by Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers, Checked
- Sources
- 5 context
- Said
- 1 time·
- Confidence
- 30%
Platypus Economics with Justin WolfersSep 10, 2026
The claim is a sweeping, opinion-style characterization of Heritage Foundation's honesty over decades, which cannot be checked as a literal factual statement.
What was said
… Eagles, Fireworks, Guns, Wahoo, um, they're not very imaginatively named, but if they sort of sound like, um, a bad college rock band, um, they're probably in the propaganda business. Again, not uniformly true. They're very good and very serious think tanks. The Heritage Foundation is a joke that hasn't told the truth in decades. The American Enterprise Institute is a center right organization that I hold in quite high esteem. The Brookings Institution is a very serious outfit I hold in very high esteem, closer to center left, um, so thinking about the who, unfortunately, is a very …
Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers · · from the transcriptPost →What we found
Context. Snopes rated a claim about Heritage's voter-fraud conviction database (about 140 convictions over 20 years) as mostly true, showing that some of its specific factual outputs have been checked and found largely accurate.[1]
Context. Media Bias/Fact Check rates Heritage's factual reporting as MIXED, citing misleading claims on global warming and tobacco, and records no failed fact checks.[2]
Context. Krugman's 2025 column calls Heritage 'a fraud' and 'a propaganda mill', which is an opinion piece and not an authoritative record of specific false statements.[3]
Context. Sources also note that a Heritage voter-fraud database drew criticism, including a 2017 Brennan Center assessment calling its cases 'grossly exaggerated,' but none of the sources adjudicates Heritage's honesty across decades as a whole.[4][5]
Sources
5 sources: 1 fact-checker, 4 not rated
- 1Did US Only Have 143 Absentee-Ballot Fraud Convictions ...snopes.com · fact-checker · cited for: context
- 2Heritage Foundation - Bias and Credibility - Media Bias/Fact ...mediabiasfactcheck.com · not rated · cited for: context
- 3The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundationpaulkrugman.substack.com · not rated · cited for: context
- 4Heritage Foundation: History, Project 2025, and Policy Impactlegalclarity.org · not rated · cited for: context
- 5PolitiFact | White House evidence doesn’t prove Trump ...api.politifact.com · not rated · cited for: context
Where this claim was made
Said in 1 published post
Related claims
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