Project 2025, Fifty Years in the Making

The Heritage Foundation, the right wing think tank behind Project 2025, began over fifty years ago. The first Mandate for Leadership was published in 1981.

Project 2025 lays out a plan to dismantle government functions that don't fit a narrowly defined "conservative" agenda and replace them with a corporation friendly Christian Nationalist leaning bureaucracy. A bureaucracy that gives lip service to "freedom" but ignores it in practical application.

Project 2025 did not begin with it's release in April of 2023, or even with the planning and writing leading up to it's publication. It's the ninth iteration of The Mandate for Leadership, first presented to President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In their own words the writers affiliated with this Heritage Foundation publication tell of it's beginning:

"Forty-four years ago, the United States and the conservative movement were in dire straits. Both had been betrayed by the Washington establishment and were uncertain whom to trust. Both were internally splintered and strategically adrift. Worse still, at that moment of acute vulnerability and division, we found ourselves besieged by existential adversaries, foreign and domestic. The late 1970s were by any measure a historic low point for America and the political coalition dedicated to preserving its unique legacy of human flourishing and freedom."

What this first paragraph of Project 2025 is referencing, at least in part, is the hippie lifestyle, the women's movement, and the aftermath of the Vietnam war. A little further on the publication lays into President Jimmy Carter:

"The Heritage Foundation is proud to have played a small but pivotal role in that story. It was in early 1979-amid stagflation, gas lines, and the Red Army's invasion of Afghanistan, the nadir of Jimmy Carter's days of malaise-that Heritage launched the Mandate for Leadership project. We brought together hundreds of conservative scholars and academics across the conservative movement. Together, this team created a 20-volume, 3,000-page governing handbook containing more than 2,000 conservative policies to reform the federal government and rescue the American people from Washington dysfunction. It was a promise from the conservative movement to the country-confident, specific, and clear.

"Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981-the same month Ronald Reagan was sworn into his presidency. By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy...."

This planning has been occurring as an evolving process ever since the Heritage Foundation began in 1973. It is an accrual of power and influence over a half century. Sixty percent of their 1981 plan was successful. So they kept planning and building atop that first success.

Heritage's mission statement mentions principles of free enterprise and limited government. Based on the Reagan, Bush 43 and Trump administrations, that would seem to translate to corporate tax cuts, the Reagan tax on higher bracket Social Security earnings and privatizing certain government programs such as the Postal Service. (Social Security and Medicare are still on the table too.) It also mentions individual freedoms and traditional American values. Except that in practical application individual freedom is limited, (Dobbs decision) and traditional American values are defined not by the Constitution, but by Christian Nationalist tenets.

The American Postal Workers Union does not have a high opinion of the Heritage Foundation, relating that "one of it's founders was the union-busting Joseph Coors."

On pages 4 and 5 we read a list of unacceptable terms that Project 2025 expects the next president to delete:

"The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts 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."

How the use of these words constricts freedom of speech is hard to comprehend. It seems that having a list of words that are not to be used would in itself be problematic. Any staffer assisting a legislator write a bill would have to be mindful of the words which are not to be written. (Or spoken?)

A couple of paragraphs later we see that "critical race theory" and "gender ideology" are "noxious tenets" and should be excised from all public schools. Unless things have changed, critical race theory is still a college level course. On the question of "gender ideology" the States Rights party is now promoting a federal ban, or so it would seem.

Page 6 suggests that conservatives should celebrate the Dobbs decision. The writers don't dwell on that very long. They recommend that the next conservative president go to work with Congress to pass the toughest abortion bans possible.

Again, this is only page 6. It is important to understand that this is about more than the presidential race. Donald Trump in combination with this treatise on subversion of our rights would be a disaster. However a lot of Republican Congressmen are supportive of these policies. Ask the tough questions. Demand answers. If you're an independent or a Republican who can't vote for Trump, please question your legislators. If they support these policies consider voting for the Democratic candidate.

We didn't get here because of a conservative think tank and a single president. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and other legislative anarchists didn't happen overnight. They are the result of a fifty year campaign by the big corporations and a large number of lobbyists and right wing organizations.

Republicans and Independents, please think about your vote. And share this with a friend or neighbor.

Thank you for reading. And thank you to my subscribers and followers.

Recommendations for further reading:

https://apwu.org/news/heritage-foundation-think-tank-mission-destroy-public-postal-service

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/20/donald-trump-allies-christian-nationalism-00142086