It’s called Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation is a religious relic from the Reagan era — a DC think-tank that has appeared to stand for traditional Conservatism. Of course that version of Conservatism has always included a generous dollop of Evangelical Christianity thrown in for good measure.
Of the Right Wing cranks on the political stage over the past 40 years, the Heritage Foundation has perhaps branded itself as more “balanced” (and as a result more innocuous) than the Pat Robertsons and Paul Crouch’s of the world, which lent them a certain veneer of respectability in the corridors of power.
But in the age of the Church of MAGA, that version of traditional Conservatism, along with its Ned Flanders-style negotiations, appears to be in the death rattle stage.
The Republicans with real power in 2023 are a new breed of crackpot.
They are now the crossfit instructor-meets- Qanon enthusiast-meets congresswoman from Georgia. They are the same people– not unlike the Jack Chick or Tony Alamo tract-toting street evangelists of yore who believed Jesuit agents and Satanists were taking over the world– who were formerly left out of adult discussions, because… well, because they were batshit crazy. The guy with the 21st century version of a Tony Alamo tract in his hand, espousing end times conspiracy narratives, is now a U.S. Senator from Middle America, with millions of followers on social media. They are legion.
Understanding this seismic shift in the Republican party over the past decade, the Heritage Foundation has retooled its militant focus and has collaborated with other overtly fringe groups to draft a blueprint for the federal government following the Second Coming of Trump– Project 2025.
The 900-page document called the Mandate for Change, a 22-million dollar project, outlines a battle plan for the first 180 days of a Republican administration. This includes how-to strategies on filling open government positions with the “right” kind of Christian, expanding Executive powers, pushing back against Deep State “wokeism”, combating climate science and limiting federal protections for gov’t employees.
The introduction should give those concerned a general whiff: “History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it… For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now. The entirety of this effort is to support the next conservative President…”
All of this, the Heritage Foundation creepily tell us, is to “return the balance” of democracy back to one of overtly Christian ideals and laws based upon sectarian dogma. What that also means for America is the eradication of those in government classified as “elites”– which translated from cryptic MAGA-glossolalia, literally means anyone with significant levels of academic and professional expertise in a given subject. In short, qualified people. And “public servants” too. Expertise, after all, has a well-established Left Wing bias (/s) These will be presumably be replaced with religious idealogues and those loyal to Trump.
Oh yeah–I almost forgot! Project 2025 is taking applications for positions in the future authoritarian Right Wing takeover of government. JOIN NOW!!!
