This morning, I will speak at the Unitarian church in Danville. I was asked to address Project 2025, Here’s what I will be telling the congregants.
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I’ve done a lot of research recently into the emergence of the White Christian Nationalism that forms the basis of the MAGA movement. Project 2025 does a great service for anyone who wants to know what life would be like if the 40% of Americans who identify fully or partially with those beliefs manage to win control of Congress and the Presidency—especially at a time when the Supreme Court has been captured by ideologues who are sympathetic to their aims and apparently unwilling to follow longstanding constitutional precedents.
PROJECT 2025 was produced mainly by the Heritage Foundation, but it had the assistance of over 100 other conservative think tanks. (If you go online, you can find lists of them. They represent a longstanding, well-organized and well-funded effort to claim the country for their particular tribe of White Christian males.) Project 2025 is the product of over 400 contributors and writers, including the 240 former Trump administration authors who wrote 31 of the 38 chapters of the 920 page document.
Despite Trump’s effort to separate himself from Project 2025, it mentions him over 320 times, and in 2023 he referred to it as “great work. Our roadmap.”
Those who produced that “roadmap” claim that it would “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect children,” “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people,” and “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.” What that lovely language really means, of course, is spelled out in the details—and whoever coined the phrase “the devil is in the details” might have been referring to Project 2025.
I don’t have time—and neither do you—to go through a comprehensive list of the regressive, and frankly, insane, proposals in this document, but I will hit some of the highlights (or low lights).
The chapter on “DEFENSE OF AMERICA” proposes to “” Restore warfighting as the military’s sole mission.” It proposes to end what it calls “the Left’s social experimentation in the military” by halting the admission of transgender individuals. It would increase the Army by
50,000, bring overseas troops home, grow the Navy and Air Force, and triple the number of nuclear weapons—while withdrawing America from all arms reduction treaties.
Project 2025 would withdraw the U.S. from NATO, and expressly disavow NATO’s Article Five, which is NATO’s mutual defense pact. It also proposes to make our Allies pay for any weapons we might provide them.
With respect to Trade and Foreign Assistance, the Project wants USAID to defund women’s rights provisions in foreign aid initiatives, withdraw from all multi-lateral trade agreements, stop providing financial aid to Ukraine, and institute 60% tariffs on Chinese goods and 10% on all other imports. (Every reputable economist—conservative and liberal—has pointed out that tariffs are a tax on Americans, and that imposing them would cost American families thousands of dollars a year and throw the country into recession. If a future administration actually imposed those tariffs, the economy would tank.)
There’s a lot more in this section, but the effect would be to make the world far less safe, and Americans far less rich.
Moving on…
To the extent that the media has reported on Project 2025, it has focused mostly on the Project’s proposed changes to American governance– especially the plan to replace 50 thousand civil service employees with Trump loyalists. I recently read that the Heritage Foundation is currently “vetting” individuals in order to facilitate that replacement should Trump win.
The replacement of civil service workers, however, is only the tip of the iceberg.
The Project also proposes to eliminate or re-write the First Amendment so that the government can operate on what the authors call “Christian Principles.” Those of you in this congregation, and other Christian clergy, might dispute their interpretation of Christian principles….
The media has also reported on the proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, Head Start, Title 1, & school lunch programs. The less-reported portions of their “education” policies are equally regressive: they would eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and post the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms (they don’t specify which version…probably the Cecil B. DeMille version). They would eliminate any books addressing race or gender from the nation’s classrooms, withdraw federal funding from any school requiring vaccinations, and require states to provide vouchers for religious schools.
They’d also arm teachers and defund NPR and PBS.
As I said, I can’t go through the entire list of Project 2025’s looney-tunes and profoundly unAmerican proposals, but let me just reference a few more: they’d privatize Medicare and TSA, and entirely eliminate the EPA, OSHA, the EEOC and the FDIC.
When it comes to elections, they’d eliminate mail-in ballots, and require federal elections to be done in one day, on paper, with stringent voter ID requirements.
When it comes to how their proposed government would deal with what the Project delicately calls “minorities,” the bigotries become very visible. They’d begin with the immediate mass deportation of undocumented persons that Trump and Vance have promised, ignoring both the inhumanity and the practical impossibility of conducting such a massive effort. Other measures they propose in connection with immigration include construction of internment camps and limiting lawful immigration to 20,000 annually—good luck to any of you who need to hire people to work in restaurants or pick crops or any other jobs disproportionately done by immigrants. They’d deport all the Dreamers (who came as children with their parents, and most of whom have never known another country). They want to end birthright citizenship—which I note would require amending the 14th Amendment– and ban Muslims and Haitians from entering the country. Lest you wonder where the homophobia and misogyny come in, they propose to roll back gay rights, invalidate same-sex marriages, and outlaw transgender rights and no-fault divorce.
Given our recent experience with hurricanes, I thought I’d just end with the Project’s ”Principles Guiding Climate Decisions.” Those “principles” begin with science denial. I guess their version of God will protect them…
Authors of the Project say—and I quote– the “climate is not changing and schools are not to teach that it is.” Since climate change is just a liberal myth, they would eliminate climate and environmental protections, eliminate the regulation of greenhouse gases, and defund FEMA. (I will note that both Mike Braun and Jim Banks—currently running for Governor and Senator—both recently voted against funding for FEMA.) Project 2025 would return management of emergencies to the states. (I imagine even Ron DeSantis might now disagree with that one…)
Project authors want to dismantle the National Hurricane Center and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. They would halt all climate research and revoke the Global Change Research Act of 1990. Of course they would once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Accords. And they would halt research into electrical vehicles and revoke tax incentives for clean energy.
If even a small portion of this truly insane wish list became reality, the America we inhabit would disappear. Unfortunately, we’d take most of the world down with us.
In my blog, I keep warning readers about the threat posed by a well-organized, well-financed theocratic movement. The small dip into Project 2025’s 900 pages that I’ve just shared should illuminate that threat.
I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that these people hate the America we inhabit. They love an America that existed only in their fevered imaginations. This is a very scary time.
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