The crowd-sourced Project 2025

An overview, by Carrie

Continuing with our project, where intrepid volunteers offered to read a chapter (or chapters) of the HeritageFoundationTrumpRepublican plan for our future, Project 2025, this segment is borrowed by permission of the author, at her Substack, You’re Overthinking It. You really should read her Substack. It’s smart and to the point and well-written and if I was the jealous type, well, I’d be jealous. We have another piece scheduled from Carrie later today, and this probably should have been the first one published for our crowd-sourcing project, given that this is an excellent overview, but I said I would publish these pieces in the order in which I received them, so…

One more thing: Yesterday, readership for this Substack was triple what it is normally. This is working because you volunteered to research and write, and because you’re sharing this with your friends. Thank you. And swords up.

Project 2025: Know what it is. Be very afraid.

I ran into someone the other day - someone who is very well-informed - who looked at me and said, “Have you heard of Project 2025? Someone just told me about it.”

I bade him sit down, as I opened the pdf of the forward to the 920-page document by the Heritage Foundation.

I have the rest of the document saved in 11 other pdfs.

The forward is 16 pages long. An annotated version of it is below.

Download

My notations in the 16-page forward of Project 2025

The forward serves as an effective summary of what Project 2025 is all about, and why you should be very afraid of a Republican president winning.

I don’t just mean Trump, although he is the Republican presidential nominee du jour. In the 16 pages of the forward, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts refers to some variation of “the next conservative president” 28 times.

I’ve highlighted these instances in yellow in the pdf.

Project 2025 was published in the spring of 2023, before the Republican primaries, when it still looked like Ron DeSantis had all the momentum.

Roberts is not talking specifically about Trump. He is writing to ANY of the men and woman who eventually challenged Trump for the Republican nomination.

Don’t fool yourself, neither Nikki Haley nor Asa Hutchinson would have been able to stand up to the conservative consensus that makes up the architects of Project 2025. I honestly doubt if Chris Christie would have been able to be his own man had he had won the nomination.

The entire 920-page document has 39 different writers, from Critical Race Theory conspiracist Russ Vought to current federal inmate Peter Navarro to sodomy law champion Ken Cuccinelli.

It’s published by the Heritage Foundation, but represents dozens of different organizations that are the backbone of a fascist strain that has taken over the Republican Party.

The goal is to end democracy and set up an all powerful president.

They will do that by eliminating the Department of Education.

They will do that by eliminating the CDC. Hello polio!

They will do that by taking away birth control.

They will stop food stamps - which will hurt farmers as much as it will hungry people.

They will eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency. So any waterway can be polluted with anything, and a train full of toxic chemicals can blow up in any city without repercussions.

That’s just a taste of what’s in this plan, which I will be writing about every couple of weeks between now and the election.

This week, I want to go through the forward, which is full of false allegations - or, as we journalists say when we’re talking to our spouses outside of work, lies.

Elite Rule

The most humorous thing about Project 2025 is how often it uses the word “elite” to mean “liberal.” 

The end of the forward reads, “This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.”

According to Guidestar, The Heritage Foundation has a yearly budget over $140 million, with assets at over $387 million, including it’s fancy real estate on K Street in D.C.

Speaking of fancy real estate, a group of conservative organizations, under the rubric of the Conservative Partnership Institute, have bought enough real estate since the Trump presidency ended that they are creating a campus in D.C., just steps from the capital. Some Project 2025 contributors, such as Stephen Miller, are part of this group.

This is, perhaps, the most prime real estate in the nation, outside of some areas of Manhattan.

Last year the Federalist Society - which is the de facto owner of today’s Supreme Court - was the beneficiary of Wisconsin entrepreneur Barry Seid’s will - to the tune of $1.6 BILLION.

These are just a few examples. The people who run conservative institutions are not people who live in the middle of the country and, as the P25 forward states, “shower after work instead of before.”

They are elitists, who want to control every aspect of how we live, according to their increasingly warped view of Christianity and government.

I’m not joking! Too many people don’t know about this!

Sexual “Deviance”

Project 2025’s first “promise” is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”

Sounds anodyne. Until the next sentence.

“In many ways,” Roberts writes, “the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones.”

Ah, yes. We get to the heart of it. “Unnatural.” This is on page 4 of the 920-page document.

Project 2025 will start “with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

There’s so much to unpack in this paragraph. First, notice that “gender” and “gender equality” are two of the terms that will be deleted from federal contracts and regulations. There will be no way for the government to ensure that women are paid the same for the same jobs as men. There will be no way for the government to even keep track of what women are paid.

Any. Mention. Of. Gender. Will. Be. Gone.

This is meant to appeal to the frog-brained transphobes. But we know that transphobia and homophobia are just subsets of sexism. It’s all about conforming to gender roles. And boy does Project 2025 reek of that.

Abortion, reproductive health and reproductive rights are part of the above list.

What chills me is the reference to every “piece of legislation that exists.”

They are planning to change laws. They are not planning to lobby Congress to change laws. They are planning to take over Congress - much as they have taken over the House at this moment - and make representatives change laws they want changed.

If conservatives win both houses of Congress and the presidency - in 2024, in 2028, in 2032 - the architects of Project 2025 will put this plan into place.

I also want to address the “centralizing political power trope” that P25 uses without definition. What they call “centralizing political power” I see as government working for people, and people participating in their government. P25 uses a lot of projection to trick readers into thinking that dismantling government will free people to participate and have control over their own lives. The reality is, the vision of P25 will only make people slaves to the people who have the money. Because money will be the only way to achieve power.

It already is. Under Project 2025, it will be much worse. Oligarchs will reign.

Dismantle the Administrative State

As I write, we are waiting for the Supreme Court to make a ruling on Loper v Raimondo, which may dismantle the Chevron Doctrine - a 1984 decision that allows federal agencies to write rules to carry out laws passed by Congress. Federal agencies don’t just decide a rule in a lunch meeting. There are all sorts of requirements for getting feedback from people and organizations who might be affected by the rule.

Project 2025 will go further than the Supreme Court, whatever the Court’s ruling in Loper.

What the architects of P25 don’t like is when an agency, like the EPA, gets public feedback that overwhelmingly favors restricting businesses from leaching toxic chemicals into ground water, or letting meat sit out for hours before packaging it. To these conservative stalwarts, that public feedback has been ginned up by people with an agenda to harm corporations. It’s not really what people want.

So, they want to get rid of the “rigged” public feedback.

You see how that kind of deflection of the will of the people leads directly to “the 2020 election was stolen,” don’t you? Trump didn’t make this tactic up. He just weaponized it way better than anyone before him.

Social security is part of the administrative state. Project 2025 wants to privatize that.

The authors want to “wind down” the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and give banks unlimited power. We had a taste of that in 2008. What will happen if this is put into place will be unimaginably worse.

When this happens, and tens of millions of people are out of work, there will be no federal unemployment insurance.

Nor, if P25 is put in place, will the Small Business Administration be able to lend directly to business owners. The Payroll Protection Program - which gave so many small business owners, and their employees, a lifeline during the pandemic - would never happen under a government run by the ethos of Project 2025. That would be “direct lending,” by the SBA, which the authors of P25 say on page 750 will end.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is also federally funded. P25 would eliminate that. Say goodbye to Arthur and Sesame Street. And Masterpiece Theatre. And local, non-commercial news.

This hardly ensures “freedom” to ordinary people.

Global Threats

There’s a lot of gobbleygook in the forward about how words like “openness, progress, expertise, cooperation, and globalization” are somehow un-American. Then comes the big lie. Or lies.

That’s why today’s progressive Left so cavalierly supports open borders despite the lawless humanitarian crisis their policy created along America’s southern border. They seek to purge the very concept of the nation-state from the American ethos, no matter how much crime increases or resources drop for schools and hospitals or wages decrease for the working class.

If you value truth, you cannot argue that presidents Biden and Obama were soft on immigration. Biden’s policies are almost the same as Trump’s - except he’s not separating families.

Resources have been taken away from schools and hospitals because of privatization of education and health care - which P25 would do more of. Wages have decreased for working families because conservative economic principles eliminated good paying jobs and sent them overseas.

Biden is countering that by opening factories in the U.S. to make things such as microchips and solar panels. This is counter to the neoliberal economic playbook. Which may be more important than the actual bible to most of these P25 authors.

Also crime has not increased! It’s gone down. A lot.

As independent journalist Judd Legum noted this week:

According to the latest FBI data, violent crime and property crime are down sharply in 2024. The new data shows substantial drops in every category, including murder (-26.4%), rape (-25.7%), robbery (-17.8%), and property crime (-15.1%). These declines follow steep drops in violent crime and property crime in 2023.

What the entirety of P25 is banking on is that the people whose lives will be affected are so wrapped up in hate for “woke” people, that they will gladly vote in a fascist government under which crime will go up. But it will be perpetrated by the state.

I have been thinking lately of a probably apocryphal story about a German man in the 1930s who had a daughter with Downs Syndrome. He was an avowed Nazi supporter. And he loved his daughter more than his life. One day, the Gestapo came to his house and took her. He was devastated. He hated the Jews! He never dreamed he was sowing his sweet daughter’s fate!

Blinders

What I fear most is that people on the left, who are not happy with Joe Biden’s Israel policy - who think that Democrats and Republicans are the same - won’t know what Project 2025 is, or will dismiss the danger is poses. P25 plays to that group - with promises that under ultra-conservative, free-market leadership, people will “receive the raises they have missed out on for two generations.”

What Roberts is not saying is that the reason incomes have been stagnant for two generations is because of the policies put in place by the first sweeping Heritage Foundation project in the 1980s, and laws put in place by Reagan and Clinton to break unions and align CEO pay with stock prices. Thus creating a scenario in which a corporate leader’s focus is just on stock price, not on goods, services or workers.

What terrifies me is the reaction people will have when Project 2025 is put in place, once ANY Republican wins the presidency. People will be jailed for protesting. Government will sweep up even citizens with Hispanic surnames. Prices and unemployment will soar. And, like that German father, people with their heads in the sand will be shocked by it. 

But by then, it will be too late.