Project 2025: Backward Foreword

In the foreword to the Project 2025 manifesto, the Heritage Foundation president says the document speaks for the conservative movement, but “conservative” is the wrong adjective to describe people who plan to dismantle the federal government and ruin our democracy. They are more accurately “the dismantlers.”

The foreword begins with rage against the “political class.” This imaginary demographic is engaged in “wholesale dishonesty and corruption.” Other people—an evil cultural elite—are corrupt and dishonest. Other people are responsible for any number of social ills: inflation, drug overdoses, drag queens, “transgenderism,” and pornography in school libraries, as well as for the Chinese cold war against America’s values, all of which is a sad case of neurotic projection, the psychological phenomenon involving the dismantlers’ belief that other people have undesirable traits that they themselves possess and practice.

The dismantlers imagine that an evil totalitarian cult imperils society’s moral foundations. They call this evil “The Great Awokening.” The Awokening, they believe, has driven America toward decline. The dismantlers plan to defeat the anti-American Left, and Project 2025 is the “opening salvo.” The plan is built around four delusional promises.

PROMISE #1: RESTORE THE FAMILY AS THE CENTERPIECE OF AMERICAN LIFE AND PROTECT OUR CHILDREN.

Promise #1 presupposes that “family” is in crisis. The manifesto blames absent fathers. The crisis is the result of too many single-parent families headed by mothers. If more children were brought up by married parents, the dismantlers believe, many of society’s ills from poverty to crime, mental illness to substance abuse, would vanish. They promise to use federal power to “rescue” children from family breakdown. Work requirements for food assistance programs, they suggest, would somehow help.

A ban on “pornography” would also help to restore family and protect children. So, educators and librarians, if found to possess it, would be registered as sex offenders. But banning objectionable books in school and public libraries does not go far enough for the dismantlers. Banning the use of words is a more granular solution. The manifesto includes a selection of words to ban: sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, and reproductive rights. This selection of words demonstrates a peculiar focus on, and an unhealthy preoccupation with, sex. The dismantlers would ban these words and others from all federal rules, regulations, contracts, grants, and every piece of legislation “that exists.”

Dismantlers promise to authorize parents to decide what gets taught in schools. But which parents? Parents of what political persuasion? Who can say? Authorized parents would determine curricula, and any school district that fails to adopt classes consistent that curricula would “immediately” lose federal funding.

Dismantlers would also “excise” critical race theory and gender ideology from public school curricula because they believe these concepts “poison” our children by teaching them “to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.”

Let us never deny our creatureliness.

The promise to protect children includes “unborn children.” Unfortunate women who find themselves in “immensely difficult and often tragic situations” (rape, incest, non-viable fetuses, sepsis, etc.) would be required by law to become mothers.

PROMISE #2: DISMANTLE THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE AND RETURN SELF-GOVERNANCE TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

Dismantlers fabulize an entity that does not exist: the Administrative State. It is not an actual thing. It is not an institution having legal or constitutional reality. It is the necessary villain. The imagined Administrative State is composed of “woke culture warriors” who perpetrate all manner of federal government wrongdoing.

The manifesto advises the next conservative president to dismantle the Administrative State by firing thousands of federal agency employees. The dismantlers believe that the administrative functions of government belong exclusively to Congress, and yet they blame Congress for passing intentionally vague laws and for delegating decision-making to federal agencies.

The manifesto promises to retrieve congressional power from the bureaucrats. In the meantime, the next “courageous conservative president” should use executive authority to “handcuff” bureaucracy, push Congress to return to its constitutional responsibility, and restore power over Washington to the American people.

PROMISE #3: DEFEND OUR NATION’S SOVEREIGNTY, BORDERS, AND BOUNTY AGAINST GLOBAL THREATS.

At the root of “global threats” to our sovereignty lurks other necessary villains. The dismantlers believe that “woke progressive elites” and “centers of Leftist power” reject as “hate speech” the principle that government authority derives from the consent of the people. The elites and Leftists, who do not believe in self-governance or the rule of law, feel superior to “humble, patriotic working families” and believe that an enlightened, highly educated elite should run things.

The “elites” support international entities such as the United Nations and the European Union because such entities share “elite values” and are insulated from national elections. Likewise, the elites want America to sign international treaties on everything. Treaties, dismantlers believe, “invariably” endorse policies that the U.S. Congress would never pass (although the Constitution requires that treaties be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate). The manifesto promises to abandon international agreements.

The elite penchant for international agreements in some way explains why “the Left” supports “open borders” and would destroy the concept of nation-states. The manifesto claims that “pro-open borders elites” favor illegal immigration because it “suppresses the wages of their housekeepers, landscapers and busboys.” The dismantlers’ promise is to end illegal immigration and to seal the border.

Environmentalism, the manifesto says, is “a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue” at the expense of the aged, poor, and vulnerable. Environmentalism, dismantlers believe, is anti-human. The manifesto promises to do nothing to avert the effects of climate change, even to protect the humans the dismantlers pretend to care about.

The manifesto identifies China as a threat to American sovereignty. The dismantlers believe that America’s political, economic, and cultural leaders have embraced China and its genocidal Communist Party (CCP) while hollowing out America’s industrial base. China has compromised and coopted the American higher education system, and America’s elites have betrayed the American people. “Big Tech” has become a tool of the CCP. The manifesto promises to disengage the American economy from China and to outlaw agents of Chinese propaganda. Universities that take money from the CCP should lose accreditation and eligibility for federal funds.

PROMISE #4: SECURE OUR GOD-GIVEN INDIVIDUAL RIGHT TO ENJOY “THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY.”

The Declaration of Independence calls the “pursuit of Happiness” an unalienable right, yet the dismantlers would alienate happiness. They believe the Founders meant, instead, to declare a right to pursue “Blessedness.” It is a distinctively Christian idea that all blessings come from God (James 1:17). This blatant re-write of the Declaration promises to warp America’s founding document into an establishment of Christian religion.

The pursuit of Blessedness, dismantlers believe, is found primarily in family—marriage, children, and Thanksgiving dinners. They believe religious devotion and spirituality are the greatest sources of happiness around the world. The “rich and powerful” have hated the concept of liberty since 1776, they say. The next conservative president should champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-directed socialism.

The Left as imagined by dismantlers does not believe that all men are created equal—they think they are special. The Left does not accept that all people have an unalienable right to pursue Blessedness. The Project 2025 manifesto is a plan to unite the dismantlers against elite rule and woke culture warriors. The manifesto’s promises represent the next conservative president’s last opportunity to save our republic.

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Theirs is a dark world. It is a world of made-up anti-American villains. The dismantlers see an America in decline due to the malevolence of a sinister Great Awokening from which the republic must be saved.

Theirs is a world in which vilification, name-calling and fear replace civil discourse. It is a world where ideology justifies the dismantling of government with no examination of real-world practicalities or consequences.

Dismantlers aspire to a saved republic where they do not trust teachers to teach and where they do not trust their own children to decide what to learn and what ideas are okay to think. To achieve a saved republic, they would attempt to control learning by banning books, banning words, and banning ideas.

The republic will be saved, they believe, by disengaging from the rest of the world and hiding behind borders that are sealed. They refuse to believe in global climate challenges because that would ultimately require international cooperation, the antithesis of disengagement. Mocking climate science as a pseudo-religion repeats the pattern of attempting to control the future by banning ideas.

The Project 2025 manifesto was written as a guide for the next conservative president, who, the dismantlers believe, will take office on January 20, 2025. The manifesto is that president’s last opportunity to save our republic.

But if that conservative president is not elected, the dismantlers offer only doom.

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Some other stuff for later,