Rebecca Phillips (GOV: IPP) interned this summer at the Heritage Foundation in the Davis Institute for Foreign Policy. She worked under Mike Gonzales, a senior fellow at Heritage, researching and co-authoring an article that was key in defunding government-funded media. Rebecca also wrote multiple articles for The Daily Signal and College Fix and was interviewed by Newsmax about why the YMCA should not be federally funded.
“The Heritage Foundation has the most robust internship in D.C. It's the longest program, and they're the most selective. Just having PHC on my resume helped set me apart, because they are looking for students who think critically, come from a liberal arts background, have read and studied the classics, and engage with Catholic and Protestant Christian thought,” Rebecca said.
During her internship, she lived in an apartment building next to the Heritage Foundation, only two blocks away from the Supreme Court. Oftentimes, she passed violent protesters on her way to work, and at least one day a week, she and the other interns would have to be escorted out the back of the building to their apartment (or Union Station for people who lived further away) because there were very agitated protesters in the front and at the side entrance.
“That was challenging, but it was also super encouraging to see how everyone reacted. No one caved, no one lost their cool, and no one said anything unkind to the protesters. They were of the attitude that ‘We are working hard. We're working for something we believe in, and so we're just going to keep plugging along and not let that bother us,’” Rebecca said.
Along with the forty-nine other Heritage interns, Rebecca participated in collaborative projects, visited Mount Vernon and Congress, and listened to lectures by speakers who were brought in from different career paths to talk about anything from border security to the Second Amendment to international policy and economics. However, her main project was researching and co-authoring the article for Mike about cutting government-funded media.
For twenty years, Mike has been working and lobbying for this, especially in the cases of National Public Radio (NPR) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). “This summer was really the culmination of those decades of work,” Rebecca said.
She and Mike worked together on a problem that some conservative republican senators pointed out as why they weren't going to vote for the resistance package: that NPR and PBS are critical in weather alert systems, so if NPR and PBS are defunded, then rural areas and Native American tribes in the Midwest would not be able to get weather alerts. They researched whether that was true and what the alternatives were.
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“It was a tedious and obscure thing to write on, but it was worthwhile,” Rebecca said. “The paper was critical to actually getting the resistance package passed and defunding public media.” According to Mike, the research was influential in changing two of the senators’ votes, which was necessary to get the 51-51 vote threshold for it to pass in the Senate.
One of the questions that came out of the rescissions package was whether the YMCA should be federally defunded. Newsmax, having heard about Rebecca’s high school experience of seeing a transgender man in her YMCA locker room, contacted her for an interview. The Heritage Foundation set her up in one of their media studio rooms for a professional interview.
“I got to speak about why the YMCA should not be federally funded, and why the government shouldn't federally fund any institution that actively promotes transgender policies, but especially transgender stuff for minors,” she said.
Along with the Newsmax interview, Rebecca co-authored several articles for the Daily Signal and wrote several more for the College Fix.
“I've been able to interview a bizarrely wide range of people. Only twenty minutes ago, I was going through the transcript on my phone from a call that I had about an article on public discourse on college campuses. I also interviewed a rabbi about antisemitism on an Ivy League college campus,” she said. “It's been a really good way to grow intellectually outside of campus and build my resume.”
This summer has been a picture of what Rebecca wants to do after graduation: she wants to work for the Heritage Foundation.
“I either left work knowing that I have grown in my beliefs and convictions and capacity to influence the world for Christ, or wanting to become smarter, a harder worker, and a better Christian. I would totally do it again,” she said.
Patrick Henry College exists to glorify God by challenging the status quo in higher education, lifting high both faith and reason within a rigorous academic environment; thereby preserving for posterity the ideals behind the "noble experiment in ordered liberty" that is the foundation of America.
