What is Project 2025? (Part II)
Who is behind it and what do they want?
I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.
-Former President Donald Trump (via Associated Press)
The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions— even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.
-Yale historian Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Last week’s piece was about Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, and specifically the 800+ page document’s plans for defunding and dramatically scaling back federal oversight over public education. (If you would like a more concise rundown, education writer Peter Greene created a good one for Forbes.)
Obviously, there’s a lot more to say.
Too Long, Didn’t Read: Just like the Congressional budget bills the authors complain about (see Mandate for Leadership, page 7), the Mandate seems designed not to be read by the average person. This has predictably resulted in confusion, misinformation (accidental skewing of the ideas contained) and disinformation (intentionally false summaries or attributions intended to frighten people, or even to create the impression that the Mandate couldn’t really say the things it actually does say).
Its form reminds me of Project 2025 advisory board member Palmetto Promise’s inflammatory “dossier” on what editor (and supposedly reformed neo-Confederate) Oran Smith called the “constellation of the Left”. Both are pseudo-academic white papers that double as dystopian manifestos labeling political opponents as enemies and characterizing policy disagreements as warfare.
Is Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership former president Trump’s campaign platform?
Trump has explicitly distanced himself from the Project and its authors, and of course no one can prove what is in a candidate’s mind. Still, it’s reasonable to think the former president supports much of what is in the Mandate, because his campaign has stated so on his official website, as has the official GOP platform (which you can read here).
Crucially, all three documents call for what they term “universal school choice” (page 5 in the Mandate): unregulated federal funds flowing to individuals, regardless of their family income, for the purpose of buying private educational services.
It’s also clear that the majority of the contributors to the Mandate are former Trump officials and/ or current Trump associates. And as I wrote last week, the Mandate’s editors are Paul Dans and Steven Groves, who both worked for Trump’s presidential administration.
The GOP plan has a wish list very in line with both Project 2025 and Agenda 47:
Other policy priorities include: stripping federal funds from any school that engages in “inappropriate political indoctrination,” guaranteeing that students can pray and read the Bible in school, “hardening” schools’ disciplinary standards as a way of curbing violence, eliminating teacher tenure and adopting merit pay, and rejecting efforts to nationalize civics education. (Associated Press)
And where the Mandate’s authors describe a planned purge of around 50,000 federal employees, to be replaced by what the report repeatedly calls, “political appointees,” Trump himself has said, via a transcript on his campaign website, “First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively.”
And specifically on education, it’s easy to see overlap. Trump’s campaign even cites the main organization behind Project 2025, by name in the “Agenda 47” section of his website, to bolster his plan for universal school vouchers: “Freedom in education increases school accountability. A Heritage Foundation report found that school choice creates a ‘feedback loop that does not exist in the more centralized, top-down systems like the district schools’.”
Trump also, characteristically, uses similar fevered rhetoric to that in Mandate: his website includes transcribed remarks about “Marxists,” “indoctrination” and other familiar loaded terms from Project 2025, and from the broader education wars.
Included in his official education platform are the words “President Trump will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female—and they are determined at birth.” This mirrors the anti-trans language from the Mandate, including its section on education policy, which I discussed last week.
There are details where the plans differ. For example, while Trump‘s team claims, “The Trump administration restored state and local control of education by faithfully implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act, which prohibits the U.S. Department of Education from ‘attempting to influence, incentivize, or coerce a state to adopt the Common Core State Standards or any other academic standards common to a significant number of states,’” the Mandate argues that states should be relieved of requirements of ESSA (331)— this isn’t technically a contradiction, since the Mandate focuses on the “next conservative president’s” next term, but it does demonstrate a difference of emphasis, at least.
And Agenda 47 adds add least one bizarre proposal that is evidently unique: “To ensure that America’s students are receiving the best possible education, President Trump will support the direct election of school principals by the parents.”
More significantly, after setting the stage for the overturn of Roe, Trump has evidently realized how broadly unpopular total abortion bans are. During the debate he sought to attack a straw man that allowed him to avoid revealing much about his actual plans for abortion policy, making ridiculous claims that Democrats supported “abortion after birth,” but didn’t support a ban on Mifepristone. This— whether or not Trump is sincere— actually is a break from The Mandate’s call the FDA to withdraw existing approval for abortifacient drugs (457).
Does it matter if Trump endorses it? Ultimately, whether he does it or not, the Mandate is a useful window into what the participating organizations and individuals behind it— many of them politically powerful in their own right, and many likely to be members of Trump’s cabinet if he wins— are supporting.
Citizens on all points of the political spectrum could learn a lot if they actually read The Mandate: my advice would be to treat it like a reference text by using the search feature (CTRL+F) to look for words related to specific policies, or to claims being made in political conversations and online.
So who is definitely behind it? According Heritagewebsite, there are 100 “conservative” groups that make up the advisory board for Project 2025. (You can also see a full list on this document.) Here are just a few of them:
Alliance Defending Freedom is a “pro-life,” anti-transgender activist group. The group’s Matt Sharpe, who is based in Arizona, often travels to other states to testify in favor of anti-trans legislation, as he did in South Carolina a few months ago (where he was the only speaker in favor of the legislation). According to The New Republic, ADF is also behind the Supreme Court case intended to ban Mifepristone.
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the right-wing “bill mill” behind Stand Your Ground, for-profit prisons, “Education Savings Account” legislation, and many other pro-corporate, anti-regulation policies. Their claim to fame getting legislators to join them for conferences where they can mingle with corporate representatives, away from public scrutiny.
Claremont Institute, another “conservative” think tank, this one with ties to the more extreme, all-male Society for American Renewal.
Discovery Institute, another think tank, this one with a history of advocating against teaching the theory of evolution in schools, and a current purveyor of the “Marxist indoctrination” narrative.
Hillsdale College , which hosted Chris Rufo in his now-infamous “Laying Siege to the Institutions” speech (which essentially outlined the plan to stoke fears about “Critical Race Theory” to create “universal distrust” in public schools for the purpose of promoting “universal school choice”). The president of Hillsdale is one of the folks behind the 1776 Project, and the College’s curriculum is being marketed as a rightwing replacement for public school’s allegedly “woke” content obsessions. Hillsdale’s president, Larry Arnn, was heavily involved in the Trump Administration’s 1776 Commission Report.
Liberty University, a private Christian college which has a long history of lawsuits and allegations related to the suppression or mishandling of rape reports on campus, in violation of one of the Mandate’s favorite bogeymen, Title IX.
Moms for Liberty, a group I’ve probably covered enough.
National Association of Scholars wrote many of the anti- “Critical Race Theory” bills that made their way around the country in the last two legislative sessions. The group has a long history of pushing school censorship actions and policies.
Palmetto Promise Institute is yet another “conservative” think tank created by former Heritage President Jim DeMint and formerly headed by South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver— who has indicated she might like SC to stop taking money from the federal government for education, in order to get out from under requirements like Title IX . The group is passionately pro-voucher and has swiveled further and further into extreme culture war rhetoric in recent years.
If you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, please consider doing so to access the rest of this piece, including a section about why Project 2025 is obsessed with what they call “pornography”. If you can’t afford to subscribe right now, but feel this information will benefit you, please reach out to me directly. Information is power, but I also have to pay the bills.
Other contributors and supporters include prominent voucher proponent and internet provocateur Corey DeAngelis, and former Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro (who must have made his contributions shortly before he also reported to prison for contempt of Congress after helping to plan attempts to overturn the 2020 election).
One co-author, Russ Vought, is a self-identified “Christian nationalist” who wrote a piece defending “Christian nationalism” for Newsweek in 2021. He was also Trump’s budget director.
Vought is also president of the Center for Renewing America (CRA), another signatory, and according to Politico,
One document drafted by CRA staff and fellows includes a list of top priorities for CRA in a second Trump term. “Christian nationalism” is one of the bullet points. Others include invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests and refusing to spend authorized congressional funds on unwanted projects, a practice banned by lawmakers in the Nixon era….
Vought has promoted a restrictionist immigration agenda, saying a person’s background doesn’t define who can enter the U.S., but rather, citing Biblical teachings, whether that person “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history.
According to the Associated press, Vought also helped draft the national GOP platform.
So what do the authors envision for America under the “next conservative president”?
“Smaller” government through a more powerful president and executive branch: According to a recent piece from BBC, “Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control— a controversial idea known as ‘unitary executive theory’”.
The kind of “conservative” “small government” proposed by the Mandate is one with an extremely powerful president— “small” in the sense that its checks on executive power are incredibly weak, allowing the president to force through what the cadre of lobbyists and political insiders in the Project couldn’t accomplish through Congress.
The plan also— conveniently, given its preferred “next conservative president”— intends to reduce the federal government’s ability to combat misinformation and disinformation. (As law professor Dr. Mary Anne Franks argued recently during Congressional testimony, researching and pointing out misinformation is not a violation of Free Speech, but using government power to target what she called “disfavored speech” certainly is.)
The Forward of Mandate for Leadership is by Heritage President/ former Trump administration official Kevin Roberts (the guy who called for the “Second American Revolution”). It is largely a list of nightmarish alleged threats to the fabric of American society (especially to white, straight, conservative, Christian American society).
So what are we all supposed to be scared of now, to justify these radical and unpopular changes?
First of all, everything: “Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries” (1). As we’ll see later and throughout the document, the Mandate painstakingly defines families as, at the very least, straight and cisgender.
And obviously we all need to be terrified of “wokeism”: The foreword alone uses the word “woke” at least ten times, warning in apocalyptic terms about “the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening’” (1).
Transgender people: The manifesto as a whole is deeply transphobic, referencing gender around 110 times throughout its 800+ pages, often in the context of “gender ideology” (here, any belief that gender is more complicated than a male-female binary) being part of a “wokeist” plot against America and the traditional family. (For comparison, the phrase “school lunch” is used about four times, despite sweeping plans to scale back school meals and change a host of FDA requirements.)
The destruction of the family: Roberts complains about “fatherlessness” (in a way that seems mostly like a racist dog whistle blaming the supposed evils of nontraditional family units on The Welfare State). It’s extremely revealing that the authors generally avoid outright racism, while feeling extremely comfortable treating “gender dysphoria” as a mental illness or pushing for bans of transgender Americans from military service (104).
Porn: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned” (5). (emphasis mine)
Wait, why are they so obsessed with pornography? First, we can’t really know what they mean by “pornography,” which has been a legal hornet’s nest for a very long time.
As the MTSU Free Speech Center explains, “In their attempts to balance freedom of speech and expression against the state’s ability to protect the health, safety, welfare, and morals of the people through their inherent police power, [Supreme Court] justices ultimately determined that they would have to examine pornography issues on a case-by-case basis,” with conservative Justice Potter Stewart famously writing in Jacobellis v Ohio (1964), “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”
Project 2025 seems to take a much more expansive view of “pornography” than the Court, one that includes books and instructional materials already being used in school libraries and classrooms— even though I am aware of no reports of what the Court would have deemed “pornography” being supplied to school children by teachers or librarians. In other words, they are not referencing what most people would likely consider pornography— Justice Stewart’s famous statement was included in an argument that a sexually explicit film was not “hardcore pornography” and therefore could not be limited while respecting Free Speech.
While the Free Speech implications of the Mandate’s war on supposed “pornographers” are bad enough, it’s likely that in the Project’s ideological world, “pornography” includes content which would normally be protected by the Courts. It makes sense that Moms for Liberty is a proud member of the advisory board— they have made “pornography” accusations a central part of their strategy to make an end run around parents’, students’, and teachers’ right to engage in discussion of diverse texts and to receive information, often using this exact argument
So have state officials. When SC Superintendent Ellen Weaver defends her sweeping and controversial book censorship regulation, she makes essentially this argument, inaccurately claiming the regulation only bans materials that are “sexually explicit,” when in fact it is worded so broadly as to implicate much non-explicit and non-sexual content: in fact, most challenges already made in SC under similar local rules did not contain “sexually explicit” material by any definition.
When the Mandate’s authors write, “Educators and public librarians who purvey [pornography] should be classed as registered sex offenders,” it seems fairly clearly that they, like Weaver, are using an expansive definition of “pornography” to criminalize ideas they don’t like, and to threaten people teaching or sharing those ideas with criminal consequences. (That is, objectively, a form of state censorship.)
The only solution to these rampaging threats is, of course “parental rights”:
In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue…
The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.
Allowing parents or physicians to “reassign” the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end. For public institutions to use taxpayer dollars to declare the superiority or inferiority of certain races, sexes, and religions is a violation of the Constitution and civil rights law and cannot be tolerated by any government anywhere in the country. (5)
And if you’re concerned that all of this is sounding a lot like propelling personal religious beliefs (the word “creatureliness” is one very strong indicator) using government policy and funding, Roberts has this ahistorical nonsense to offer: “When the Founders spoke of “pursuit of Happiness,” what they meant might be understood today as in essence “pursuit of Blessedness.” That is, an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish” (13).
Of course, as Peter Greene points out, there’s nothing in here about the rights of students— to learn, to receive information, to access healthcare, including healthcare recommended by medical experts. Students, in this expansive vision of “parents’ rights,” are property of their parents and vessels for their ideas and beliefs.
The forward, like the Mandate itself, is full of weird contradictions:
Left to our own devices, the American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women, mercantilism, socialism, Wilsonian globalism, Fascism, Communism, and (today) wokeism. To the Left, these assertions of patriotic self-assurance are just so many signs of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority—proof that, in fact, we need a ruling elite making decisions for us.
But the next conservative President should be proud, not ashamed of Americans’ unique culture of social equality and ordered liberty. After all, the countries where Marxist elites have won political and economic power are all weaker, poorer, and less free for it…
There is no such thing as “the government.” There are just people who work for the government and wield its power and who—at almost every opportunity—wield it to serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second. This is not a failing of one nation or socialist party, but inherent in human nature. (14)
In other words, Roberts argues that somehow “Americans” naturally defeated slavery, but that, simultaneously, “human nature” makes collective efforts impossible. Similarly, Roberts later writes, “Ultimately, the Left does not believe that all men are created equal—they think they are special,” but a few pages later claims, “Conservatives—the Americanists in this battle—must fight for the soul of America, which is very much at stake” (19).
If all men are created equal, but “Leftists” are inherently un-American and unnatural, the implication is that those who disagree with the Project’s plans are, in essence, inhuman.
This is dangerous rhetoric: as historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny, “…Hitler’s language rejected legitimate opposition: The people always meant some people and not others… encounters were always struggles…”. (Notably, Snyder sees this kind of rhetorical danger from many groups throughout history, including the Czech communist party; this is not a Nazi thing, but an authoritarian thing.) The purpose of dehumanizing rhetoric is to boil legitimate policy discussions or disagreements to good versus evil battles where any means of winning is acceptable.
The Mandate is full of contradictions that rely on this reductive idea of who the people are:
Authors complain about the personal “ideologies” of government bureaucrats, then say the “next conservative president” should fill agencies with “political appointees”.
They warn that “Presidents should not issue mask or vaccine mandates, arbitrarily transfer student loan debt, or issue monarchical mandates of any sort. Legislatures make the laws in a republic, not executives,” (21) in the midst of a document that contains sweeping expansions of presidential authority over all kinds of personal decisions. In another section, Dustin Carmack, a key DeSantis aide and Heritage contributor says, rightly, that “The American people are understandably frustrated by the fact that those who abuse power are rarely held to account for their actions” (202). But this is as part of a document that is setting out plans for the first convicted felon to still presumably get to president!
They push a fantasy about the free market efficiently taking over government services like education, but don’t want private entities— like religious colleges— that receive government funds to have to answer to that free market by being honest about their practices (357).
They bemoan “censorship” (155) even when the government action in question is to stop misinformation from spreading, but want to use executive power to shut down agencies and fire people from their jobs for not holding the “correct” worldview.
What do they really want?
In terms of education policy, at least, even Heritage is pretty blunt about their goals— which is striking, since those goals are so broadly unpopular. As Jennifer Berkshire recently wrote on Twitter.com, “Tells you something that the Project 2025 folks go to such lengths to clear up the many *myths* about their own policy aims. Except for their education policies— which they own,” before including a screenshot from Project 2025 including “Eliminate the Department of Education: TRUE… Use public, taxpayer money for private religious schools: TRUE…”.
That’s pretty much it: the rest is window-dressing for the actual goal of forcing taxpayers to fund the specific private interests of the Heritage Foundation and what Palmetto Promise’s Oran Smith might call the “constellation of the right” if he were a serious historian.
Extending this out from education, the larger goal of Project 2025 (and much of Trump’s Agenda 47) is also pretty clear: deregulate and defund programs that don’t directly benefit the coalition and its sponsors, while expanding the role of the executive branch, as controlled only by “the next conservative president” and his senior staff— who, if the history of his last administration repeats itself, would be largely made up of the people behind the Mandate for Leadership.
Project 2025 is not the only group to frame the election as a “revolution” or a “battle… for the soul of America” (Mandate for Leadership 19), but its authors have used violent and often dehumanizing language about those who disagree, directly and indirectly calling them “wokeist” (14, 38) or “Marxist” (14, 16, 103)— terms that are repeated often enough— what historian Timothy Snyder calls “shamanistic incantation”— that they lose any literal meaning and offer a stand-in for abstract evil. The Mandate often frames these enemies as “pornographers” (5) or as the opposite of “Americanists” (19). And they have used language to erase marginalized groups, particularly those in the LGBTQ+ community.
Heritage President Kevin Roberts, earlier this month, said “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.” That might have seemed cute to Roberts at the time, while he was a guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast (Bannon could not attend, because he is in jail for defying a Congressional subpoena relating to the Jan 6 investigation), but provoking people across the political spectrum to either fear implied violence or to take violent action is not a laughing matter.
This kind of language— from anyone— promotes real violence, and whatever motives the shooter had, real human people— not simply avatars of political ideologies— have died or been seriously injured as a result of real bullets.