By Laura Bray
For the “Progressive Views” column, Boerne Star, July 14, 2024
Project 2025 (P25) is the published plan for an “ideal” America if a conservative wins the 2024 presidential election; they call it the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Project.” P25 is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and is supported by more than 80 organizations. You need to be aware of P25 because it’s a plan for how the next Republican administration plans to gut our federal institutions and remake the nation into an authoritarian state.
To advise on and push the P25 agenda, Heritage has assembled a coalition of groups involved in everything from spreading hatred against LGBTQ+ communities, immigrants, Muslims, and people of color to propagating medical disinformation, climate change denial, and election denial. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has full profiles of all the participating organizations in their document, “The Far-Right Playbook for American Authoritarianism.”
The true implications of P25 are dire and beginning to gain more traction. In early July on a podcast produced by Trump ally Steve Bannon, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said they are winning what he called “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” In the days after that comment, the former President denied any knowledge of the group or its plans, which is not even slightly believable. A group doesn’t spend that much time and energy on a plan without the “top guy” not only in the know, but fully behind it. As evidence, sixteen of the thirty-nine named authors of the 900+ page document are former members of his administration. Political scientist Ian Bremmer quipped, “the second [A]merican [R]evolution [is] apparently not polling as well as the first in internal focus groups.”
Key elements of P25 include:
• Authoritarianism: P25 lays out a path to authoritarianism. It rejects the constitutional separation of Church and State, privileging religious beliefs over civil laws. As a result, P25 favors a government mandated by biblical principles, which excludes certain communities, particularly the LGBTQ+ community, from civil rights protections.
• Restricting Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: P25 wants to unequivocally ban all abortions and restrict people’s bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights. It reads, “The next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.” It also calls for a ban on “abortion pills” and tasks the Department of Justice to criminally prosecute providers and distributors of such medications. P25 also wants to restrict access to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and contraceptives.
• Gutting The Civil Service: P25 wants to replace as many civil service employees as possible with conservative partisans. The Project portrays the federal bureaucracy as an enemy and part of a so-called “woke” Deep State. Much of P25 is dedicated to eviscerating departments and agencies, essentially gutting the federal government. It goes deep into all federal agency structures to replace scientists, accountants, and other subject matter experts with people whose sole qualification for the job is loyalty to Trump.
• Hardline Immigration Policies: P25 demonizes immigrants as a crime-ridden plague. P25 states, “Thousands of illegal aliens are allowed to bond out of immigration detention only to disappear into the interior of the US where many commit crimes.” It proposes incredibly harsh immigration policies, including tent cities and restricting asylum for those fleeing gang violence and domestic violence.
• Ending Climate Change Efforts: P25 would end programs to address climate change, which it calls “climate fanaticism,” and many other environmental protection efforts. P25 believes that environmentalism has become a “pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue. At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human.” P25 wants to abolish the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) because the agency provides much of the data that enables scientists to track climate change and its effects. Remember that NOAA is the agency that provides your weather forecasts and alerts.
• Reforming Public Education: P25 wants to change the nature of America’s public education system to remove elements from the curriculum that are seen as too “woke” and which supposedly “inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms.” P25 characterizes public schools as poisoning and indoctrinating children with leftist ideologies and undermining parents’ role in their children’s education, and advocates for private schooling (often religious) paid for by public monies.
The more you learn about Project 2025, the worse it sounds. To read more about Project 2025 and other important Democratic issues, visit our Talking Points documents.
For more information on our activities and advocacy and how to get involved, call our office at 830-331-1243 or visit www.kcdems.us.
Laura Bray is Chair of the Kendall County Democratic Party and a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. JC Dufresne contributed to this column.
