I have a confession to make.
If you told me five years ago that I’d be an intern at The Heritage Foundation, the most influential conservative think tank in America, I would have been stupefied.
I’m a Californian born and raised, so inevitably, I was a very passionate liberal for most of my teenage years. I even had a shirt with a cat on it that said, “Proud Demo-cat.”
After reading Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” in my high school U.S. history class, I was convinced that the United States was a country built on racist ideals designed to imprison “people of color.” I dreamed of becoming a civil rights lawyer so that I could take down the “white oppressors” who led the country and dismantle the “systemic racism” that—I was told—plagued American institutions and government.
My obsession with the cult of so-called
