Background: Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich traveled to Moscow in the late 1980s holding mock elections and teaching soviet politicians all about Democracy and snuck computers and other electronics in to dissidents.

In 1991 several members of Heritage formed the first of its kind go between for U.S. and Russia businesses to help them make the transition to capitalism.

Weyrich later gave a talk at a Christian college in 1996, and while taking questions from the audience he casually mentioned that as far as he knew, Gorbachev's right hand man wanted to crack down on him while he was holding mock elections. He claims when Gorbachev responded in silence the right hand man left his office frustrated and angry, then allegedly began planning the coup the next day unbeknownst to anyone from the U.S. (as in the U.S. totally had nothing to do with the fall of the Soviet Union 😉 it simply all worked out the way it did because it was just God's will)

Somebody made a documentary about some of their involvement in 2012 that aired once on PBS and then never again, but it's available on YouTube.

Weyrich was always a religious zealot, but apparently his experience "liberating Russia" from the clutches of communism felt like God was working through him. He mentions it a bit in the speech in 1996, and there's also a mention at one point in the documentary that Weyrich felt compelled to walk around Soviet Moscow one night in the late 1980s screaming "Christ is risen!"

Weyrich is also no doubt the reason the Catholic right has such an established foot hold in the modern day conservative movement, and created the alliance between evangelicals and conservative Catholics. He was from a very old school traditional Catholic family. Apparently they left the church in protest of Vatican II because and switched to Orthodox.

What's really interesting is there is this foundation that mentions talks to unite Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches, as discussed by Weyrich and Frank Shakespeare, one of Reagan's cabinet members

The ultimate goal of the Urbi et Orbi Foundation, however, is the complete reunion of the Orthodox Churches with the Roman Catholic Church, that is, an end to the greatest schism in Christianity, dating from 1054 A.D.

In America, in conversations with former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Frank Shakespeare
and the late Paul Weyrich, the leading figure of the “New Right” 30 years ago and a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, we have been told in no uncertain terms that this project is of vital, critical importance for our Church, for our country, for our culture. (Indeed, Weyrich, who became a deacon in the Greek Melkite rite of the Catholic Church toward the end of his life, told us there was no other foreign policy initiative more critical to the future of the United States than an effort to make contact and build friendships with the Orthodox of the East, and particularly with the Russian Orthodox.)

I came across a recent NYT article regarding the alleged boom in orthodox Christianity membership in the U.S.

It got me thinking about Weyrich and his role in the Orthodox church, especially regarding his views on his duty to spread Christianity in Moscow along with teaching soviet politicians about America's election system (1989). Ended up finding this really interesting letter written just beforehand (1988).

It's also interesting to me that the Russian Orthodox church has played an increasingly prominent role in Russia's perception of patriotism, and is featured throughout their own conservative nationalist agenda (Project Russia) which seems to share a lot of oddly similar overlap with Project 2025.

How the Russian Orthodox Church Became a Weapon of Political Warfare