Paul Weyrich and the Beginnings of Project 2025

The seeds of Project 2025 were in place from the beginning.

In a 1980 speech, Paul Weyrich gave voice to the restrictive voting policies now practiced by Republican state governments across the country:

"So many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Weyrich co-founded the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the Republican Study Committee. The Heritage Foundation is the organization that published Project 2025 last year, the instruction manual for how to turn the United States into a theocracy. This is the latest in their Mandate for Leadership series which saw it's first edition in January of 1981 just in time for the Reagan administration, which put 60 percent of it into play the first year.

What has been puzzling is the connection between the corporate interests and the religious interests. At what point in time did the evangelicals and the corporate interests make a connection? The answer is that the connection was there from the beginning. It wasn't apparent in that first mandate for leadership provided to the Reagan Administration. The religious push was directed toward the Moral Majority and Christian Voice.

Partially because of who Paul Weyrich was and what he believed, the Heritage Foundation promoted cultural change as well as a hands off approach to business from the beginning. Weyrich's later writings reflected a dark view of the United States and possibly a Dominionist world view. Donors such as Joseph Coors were devoutly religious. Others such as Charles Koch, while tending to be more secular, still support the Heritage Foundation. Political movements have to have constituents.

In 2001 Eric Heubeck wrote a treatise titled "The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement." It was published on the Free Congress Foundation's website. FCF is now American Opportunity. Here's a chilling excerpt. "Our movement will be entirely destructive, and entirely constructive. We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and eventually destroy them. We will endeavor to knock our opponents off-balance and unsettle them at every opportunity. All of our constructive energies will be dedicated to the creation of our own institutions."

Steve Bannon has made similar statements, every bit as chilling, and recently gave an "Amen" to Jack Posobiec's statement at CPAC: "Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn't get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here." And then held up a cross necklace. There has been speculation that Posobiec's statement was a bad joke. I would hazard a guess that Bannon's "Amen" was totally serious.

The Powell memo was a bit different. It was a blueprint for corporate interests to influence government, but didn't delve into religion. There may or may not have been a connection between the Powell memo and the beginning of the Heritage Foundation.

According to Nancy McLean in a Slate article a couple of years ago, the Powell memo didn't single handedly create all the right wing movements that exist today. It did help create it's share.

As of last October the Heritage Foundation had 75 other right wing organizations supporting Project 2025. The plans are there in print to do away with the right to privacy and bring theology to government. The Project wants to end measures to combat climate change, end DEI, and put in place a national abortion ban. The Heritage Foundation has been around since 1973 and they've been scheming the whole time. The only way to stop this madness is to vote the Biden-Harris ticket. Donald Trump, with the planning in Project 2025, would end this democratic republic experiment.

Thank you to all my new subscribers and followers. I appreciate each of you. Hopefully this information will be useful in discussing the November election with your friends and neighbors.

Notes:

https://time.com/6052051/anti-democratic-threat-christian-nationalism/

https://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/09/11752/paul-weyrichs-troika-reunited-alec-partners-republican-study-committee-heritage-f

http://www.theocracywatch.org/#Dominionism

https://prospect.org/article/legend-powell-memo/

https://crookedcrosses.wordpress.com/behind-the-scenes/think-tanks/the-heritage-foundation/

https://www.newsweek.com/jack-posobiec-end-democracy-cpac-1872694

https://globalextremism.org/project-2025-the-far-right-playbook-for-american-authoritarianism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weyrich