Hosting this fall’s gathering so soon after the election risked turning the summit into a wake.

It was the opposite.

Even before the event officially began, Ms. #Wiles was in Las Vegas,
headlining an outdoor Saturday dinner at a steakhouse for about 30 Rockbridge donors and friends.

Around the jubilant open bars and music-filled ballrooms, attendees openly traded notes on what Trump administration roles they might get
and debated whether Mr. #Musk was the world’s most powerful person.

“Generally everyone at Rockbridge was very happy that technologists and politicians are working together directly again
and not openly hostile toward each other,”
said #John #Coogan, the co-founder of Soylent who attended.

“It’s no longer a question of whether technology will drive the future, but how we guide its impact.
So it makes sense that tech billionaires and the political elite are partying together.”

Mr. #Vance did not attend, a rare absence and a disappointment to some loyalists.

But his victory made Rockbridge suddenly a hot ticket and spurred some last-minute sign-ups.

After sometimes letting prospective members attend for just $5,000, Rockbridge raised the minimum cost to $25,000
(although some people said privately that they had been able to get in for less).

The cost of Rockbridge membership ranges from $100,000 to be a “limited partner”
to $1,000,000 for a “principal partner,”
according to a prospectus seen by The Times.

That money goes toward the eight vehicles that Rockbridge steers,
including four dark-money 501(c)(4) organizations,
two super PACs,
a donor-advised 501(c)(3) fund for nonprofit activity
and the Rockbridge Network umbrella organization,
an L.L.C. Mr. Buskirk’s main super PAC, "Turnout for America", has raised at least $25 million this year.

These eight Rockbridge groups have primarily run get-out-the-vote operations.

One, called "Faithful in Action", claims to have 160,000 members
and organizes small churches with field teams twice a week.

The group has no public presence.

Rockbridge groups have also produced documentaries that investigate prosecutors pursuing cases against Mr. Trump.

Rockbridge, according to the prospectus, has since 2020 “underwritten” polling “that has been made available for free to allied media organizations.”

And the group has helped pay for
“local and national investigations” that are “published by aligned media outlets.”

The NASA administrator at the time,
Sean O'Keefe,
sought to develop a new generation of spacecraft
powered by nuclear reactors as part of what he called #Project #Prometheus.

He believed that a mission with Europa as its main target offered a perfect test case for the technology,
and thus, the "Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter"
was born.

This was a highly ambitious mission. A typical spacecraft uses on the order of a few hundred watts of power.

This probe, powered by a nuclear reactor, would have had on the order of 100,000 watts of power.

The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter was audacious in other ways,
such as using a landing component to directly sample Europa's ice.

Unfortunately, the mission also became insanely expensive,
with a budget blasting past $20 billion.

When O'Keefe was replaced by a new administrator in 2005, Mike Griffin, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter was put on ice.

Galileo sparked an incredible amount of interest in Europa.

First, NASA tried a fast, cheap mission.

Then the agency worked on the most ambitious spacecraft concept ever put forward.

Both failed. A decade was lost.

A new champion emerges

In 2000, a conservative Texas attorney named
#John #Culberson won election to the US House of Representatives for the first time.

For a time, he focused on local issues, such as freeway construction in the greater Houston area.

However, after the cancellation of the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, he was furious.

Most people in Congress, to the extent they care about NASA, do so for parochial interests and local jobs.

For Culberson, that meant Johnson Space Center, which was located in a district adjacent to his.

But Culberson was also deeply interested in planetary exploration,
and he wanted to be associated with NASA's first mission to find life on another world.

So he became an advocate of funding for a NASA center on the opposite side of the country,
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
which led the agency's robotic exploration efforts.

As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Culberson began to tuck funding into NASA's budget for the ongoing study of a Europa orbiter.

During this period, as a science reporter for the Houston Chronicle,
I began to bump into Culberson at various events around town.

He was both a conservative Christian politician and a life-long science geek.

Skeptic that I am, I wondered if his interest in science was an act to ingratiate himself with constituents,
given that the Houston area has a large biomedical community.

Eventually, however, I began to realize it was totally genuine.

He is fascinated by the Solar System and wants to know more about its origin and whether it harbors life on worlds other than Earth.

We bonded over this mutual interest.

In the meantime, there were more furtive starts on a Europa mission.

In 2007, NASA began studying mission concepts for #Europa and #Ganymede in the Jovian system,
as well as the moons #Titan and #Enceladus around Saturn.

Working with international partners two years later, NASA eventually down-selected to a combination mission in which the US space agency built an orbiter for Europa
and the European Space Agency one for Ganymede

(eventually, this European mission did launch, as #JUICE, in 2023).

NASA's part was known as the Jupiter Europa Orbiter.

However, a year later, new NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was looking for ways to cut the agency's budget.

By now, you probably know what was about to happen.

Sure enough, the Jupiter Europa Orbiter's budget was ballooning to above $3 billion.

And there was another problem
—Mars became ascendant in the agency's exploration interests.

"For the first time in 20 years, #Mars was brought into competition with the outer planets," Brown said.

"The top endorsement in a painful budget environment was a Mars Sample Return. As a result, the Jupiter Europa Orbiter died."

Once again, Culberson was not happy. But this time, he would soon be in a position to do something about it.

Backed by a cabal of wealthy conservative patrons like industrialist #David #Koch,
banker #Richard #Mellon #Scaife,
and the devout Catholic entrepreneur #Frank #Hanna,
the Federalist Society under Leo became a breeding ground for conservative judges who were recruited at law school,
groomed through the society’s program of events and talks,
and then bound together through their careers.

“The key was to figure out how to develop what I call a ‘pipeline’
— basically, where you recruit students in law school,
you get them through law school,
they come out of law school,
and then you find ways of continuing to involve them in legal policy,” Leo later explained.

In 2005, the Federalist Society began openly advocating for #John #Roberts
— a former member
— to be nominated to fill a vacant seat at the Supreme Court,
the first time it had campaigned publicly for a particular candidate.

A few months later, its sway had grown so much that it torpedoed President George W. Bush’s own preferred candidate for another vacant seat on the Supreme Court
— #Harriet #Miers, a judge and close friend of the president who wasn’t a member of the Federalist Society
— and pressured him to nominate #Samuel #Alito, one of its members, in her place.

Leo worked closely with the "Judicial Confirmation Network",
a new nonprofit organization set up using funds from #Robin #Arkley, a California businessman known as the
“foreclosure king,” who had made billions buying up mortgages of people in financial difficulties.

The idea for #JCN had been hatched at a dinner in Washington attended by Leo and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia shortly after Bush’s reelection in late 2004.

JCN spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on radio and online advertisement to shape public opinion.

It was run by #Neil and #Ann #Corkery, a couple who had been members of #Opus #Dei since at least the eighties.

Neil had been a critical figure in getting a new residence for male, celibate members of the Catholic movement built in Reston, Virginia.

“Opus Dei members preach their faith through their work as well as the friendships they develop,” Ann explained.

She and her husband would later preach their faith by becoming central figures in a series of nonprofits that would channel dark money for Leo’s efforts.

Edgar Uihlein Jr.’s second child, #Dick, born in 1945, grew up in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Bluff and got the same sort of blue-blood education
(Phillips Andover, Stanford)
as his father (Hotchkiss, Princeton).

Amid the social upheavals of the ’60s, #Dick #Uihlein didn’t waver:
He married Liz before graduating from college in 1967,
joined the family business and immersed himself in conservative politics.

He worked on the 1969 Illinois congressional campaign of Phil Crane, who won a crowded Republican primary in an upset on a hardline anti-tax and anti-communist platform.

In one of the only interviews he’s ever given, Dick Uihlein told National Review in 2018 that he got his politics from his father,
who often went by Ed.

At the family breakfast table growing up, Uihlein recalled,
“My father would talk about the importance of capitalism and the evils of socialism.”

Dick said that same year that
“my father shared many of the same values that I have, conservative values.”

Dick and Liz Uihlein continue to revere Edgar Jr., who died in 2005.

Dick Uihlein named the family foundation after his father, and it now sends tens of millions of dollars to right-wing institutions.

Among the recipients of the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation’s grants are the
#Federalist #Society and think tanks that have pushed misleading claims about the 2020 election, such as the #Conservative #Partnership #Institute
and the
#Foundation #for #Government #Accountability,
as the Daily Beast reported.

Tucked in toward the back of the Uline catalog released this summer,
sent out to millions of homes and businesses,
was a long tribute to the “wise” Edgar Uihlein Jr.

“Father Uihlein, the head of the family, had a towering presence, and we respected his values,” wrote Liz Uihlein under a picture of her husband and father-in-law,
recalling “frequent dinners at his house, where business, issues of the day, fishing muskies and, always, politics were discussed.”

She ended on a note of nostalgia tinged with bitterness:

“Living your life and raising your kids were easier in an easier time.
There was no legalized marijuana, defund the police or social media.

We, like so many families, were raised with a sharp moral compass.

The rules were the rules, but it was OK.”

The Uihleins’ political giving reflects these longings for a bygone era.

Dick Uihlein is a major funder of the #American #Principles #Project,
which runs ads attacking what it calls “#transgender #ideology,” #abortion and the teaching of “#critical #race #theory.”

Last year, Uihlein weighed in on recalling four school board members in a small town north of Milwaukee because of their support for COVID-19 #safety #protocols and “#equity” training for teachers.

More recently, in his home state of Illinois, Uihlein has spent more than $50 million to back the Republican gubernatorial candidate #Darren #Bailey, who has drawn criticism for saying the #Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to the toll of abortions and for accusing Democrats of “putting #perversion into our schools” for adopting a sex ed bill that includes information about gender identity and same-sex couples.

The Uihleins were huge beneficiaries of a tax provision promoted by Sen. #Ron #Johnson, R-Wisc., that was included in the Trump tax overhaul and are continuing to support the Wisconsin senator and fund attack ads against his opponent.

For all the Uihleins’ dismay at the disorder they see consuming the country, there is one domain where they can exert near total control.

Former employees of Uline told ProPublica the couple’s traditionalist politics govern the smallest details of how the company is run.

For new staffers, it begins with the #dress #code in the employee handbook:
Women are not permitted to wear pants except as part of a pantsuit or on Fridays;
hose or stockings must be worn except during the warmer months;
dresses “that are too short” and corduroy of any kind are strictly prohibited.

The handbook defines “tardy” as one minute past an employee’s scheduled start time.

Just four personal items are allowed on employees’ desks,
with maximum dimensions of 5 inches by 7 inches.

One former staffer at Uline’s headquarters recalled a coworker who was forced to remove several drawings done by his young child.

“Liz would walk up and down the aisles, and if your desk looked off, you’d be written up,” he recalled.
#Uline #Dick #Liz #Uihlein #Doug #Mastriano #Jim #Marchant #election #falsehoods #antisemitic #speech #Edgar #John #Birch #Society #fluoridation #segregation #Edwin #Walker #George #Wallace