Last year, the Heritage Foundation published a 920-page document that lays out the conservative organization’s road map for the next Republican president’s first four months in office, which could very well be Donald Trump. Project 2025 rests on four pillars devoted to the implementation of the unitary executive theory—basically, all levers of the American government bowing down to the executive branch. If this sounds like a roadmap to authoritarianism, that’s because it is.
With 54 conservative and religious organizations signing on and over 450 contributors, as well as untold millions in dark money, Heritage is leading the charge with this anti-abortion, anti-LBGTQ+, anti-DEI, anti-civil liberties game plan. To date, they’ve interviewed thousands of prospective candidates for the next administration, with the goal of hiring tens of thousands of subservient bureaucrats ready to implement this Christian Nationalistic plan.
Today we break down what the document says and how it could rapidly erode American democracy. And if that sounds like hyperbole, it isn’t.
Show Notes
Project 2025
The Power Worshippers | Katherine Stewart
Behind the Curtain — Scoop: The Trump job applications revealed
The Conservative Plan to Take Over the Country (you need to know about this)
The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world
Dr. Kevin Roberts | Catholic Citizens Annual Banquet
Living a Life of Catholic Integrity in a Hostile World | Roger Severino
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Republican frontrunner faces trial on 91 indictments, including trying to overturn the last election.
And evangelicals are praying for his return because power suits their agenda.
In the mirror world of fabricated conspiracies and weaponized paranoia, America is in danger of being taken over by blue-haired woke Marxists who hate freedom and want to tell your children that Jesus was a black non-binary immigrant.
I mean, it's all moral panic, culture war nonsense, of course, but the stakes are actually incredibly high.
And if every accusation is a confession, the real plot to dismantle democracy is fast approaching.
Hey, everyone.
Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspiratuality 187.
The New Year is often a time for goal setting and ambition, coming off the reflective final
week of the year.
January is a passage, but it's also always a continuation, both of which inform the focus of this week's episode and, honestly, This year, as well as the coming years here in America and beyond.
So we've been flagging Project 2025 for a few months now, and here today we are with a broad discussion of the Heritage Foundation's 920-page document that lays out the conservative organization's roadmap for the next Republican president's first four months in office.
Yes.
Happy New Year, everyone, as ironic as that may sound given what we're about to talk about.
Today's episode is primarily informational.
Derek has been immersed in the topic and organizing his thoughts now for many weeks.
Today, you'll learn what Project 2025 is and why it is so significant in terms of a truly chilling and systematic agenda.
You'll also get a first taste of if and how it defines the evolution or perhaps I should say metastasizing of the phenomenon we call conspirituality.
At the heart of this particular document is the installation of a machinery of absolute executive and capitalist power Yeah, there's a lot here.
dismantles democracy and any government protections of the people and the
environment all under the guise of reclaiming religious virtue from amoral
Marxist wokeism. Yeah there's a lot here and one thing about our podcast is that
we are not specifically a political podcast but there's been so many
crossovers with politics and I feel like it's really reaching ahead with this
particular document. I mean there's a lot here.
I mean, culture transforming, democracy overturning a lot.
And so we have to look at what this document is, who's behind it, and what it means for American society.
So we're going to give a high level overview of some of the sections, and in the coming months, Julian and I will be breaking down individual chapters of this foundational text on Patreon bonus episodes, and I know Matthew is also going to be working on this in that venue as well.
Yeah, I will, especially looking at how deeply embedded radical traditional Catholicism is in the fabric of this document, and I'm really glad that you did.
That legwork here, Derek, because it's really a mammoth text and we really should get caught up on it because, as I understand it, it's going to be in heavy circulation on the right as a field manual and I think it's good to get a first read on a document that a lot of bad actors will already be memorizing by chapter and verse.
Yeah, I've criticized the left and progressives for a long time for our general lack of organizational skills, especially in a meta picture.
Usually individual ground efforts are much better and the right is much better organized.
And it's kind of frustrating to me how few people in my circles even know that this document exists when the foundation has poured millions of dollars and has influenced tens of thousands of people already.
So let's dive in.
The seeds of Project 2025 were planted in 2021 when a man named Kevin Roberts assumed the role of the presidency of the Heritage Foundation.
Heritage, if you don't know, is an activist conservative think tank that was founded in 1973 by Joseph Coors, who is an heir to, or was, I should say, an heir to the Coors beverage dynasty.
Life-long conservative bureaucrat Edwin Fulner and Paul Weyrich, who six years later would go on to found or co-found the religious political action group Moral Majority alongside Jerry Falwell.
Now Weyrich, or Weyrich, I should find out how to say that correctly.
So I'll say Weyrich is going to be our focus when we interview Catherine Stewart, who is the author of The Power Worshippers, Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
And we'll be talking to her in a few weeks because he was one of the architects responsible for the rise of Christian nationalism in America.
OK, so we're talking about Kevin Roberts coming to power in 2021, but you're going all the way back to 73.
So this document has super deep roots, as it turns out, right?
Yeah, that's what I meant by saying about the organizational power of the right.
They focus on things for generations, and we are seeing that right now.
So Heritage was created under the Nixon administration.
It rose to prominence under Reagan, and it played a big role in helping select key players in Trump's administration.
And honestly, when Trump came in, as we know, he was surprised.
It was very scattered.
He was looking for anyone to just fill slots for him.
But now, if he gets back in, Heritage hopes to fully own that role of choosing members of the administration if he is re-elected.
And it's important to note here that Project 2025 is a roadmap for any conservative president.
And since Trump is leading in the GOP polls, the focus is on him.
But he is honestly expendable in Heritage's eyes.
They just have to work with what they have at the moment.
Yeah, I kind of imagined the meeting in which Roberts is at the whiteboard and he's saying, OK, Trump was our guy, but he was undisciplined and reactive.
He needs a guidebook for next time.
But if for some reason it's not him, let's get everyone lined up behind a real strategy for creating absolute power.
Yeah, I can imagine they'd be more on board with someone who's on board with them, but we'll see how this plays out.
But let's look at Kevin Roberts a little because it's important.
So before assuming a leadership role at Heritage, he served as the president of the Wyoming Catholic College and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is another conservative think tank which I kid you not, part of their agenda is explaining the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels.
Wait a minute, there was a moral case for fossil fuels?
There still is, according to these think tanks, yeah.
Basically, the moral case is that oil helps to make economies run, which trickles down to help everyone, and so therefore we should exploit them, and it is actually what lifts us up economically and financially.
That's the moral case.
Sure.
So, Kevin Roberts also played a role in Texas Governor Greg Abbott's COVID-19 task force, which shines through in the pages of Project 2025.
We'll get to that.
And we should note that Roberts earned a doctorate in American history from the University of Texas at Austin because, like other religious conservatives we're going to mention today, he's able to lean on his academic pedigree when he presents an entirely reconstructed version of American history.
And sadly, this is quite common in conservative Christianity.
But it's also a real step up from Young Earth creationists with degrees from Liberty University.
Roberts comes with a lot of polish and intellectual weight, but I want to underline the Catholic part because he is also a celebrity on the Tradcath speech circuit.
I watched a few of his talks.
And when he's fully mask off, which means like he's cheerleading in front of halls full of priests and nuns, he explicitly conflates what he describes as moral decay in America with a decline in religiosity among Catholics.
Quote, the crisis of culture, he says in a speech to the Catholic Citizens' Annual Banquet last year, Yeah, I mean, it is noteworthy that political reactionaries often want to return to fundamentalist faith as well, and vice versa.
These are two forms of authoritarian control.
I think what's different lately is this more ecumenical organization, to reference Derek's idea, right?
Across the different lines where before there were much more serious fractures, and we'll get into that a little bit more later.
Yeah, and perhaps the fractures are being mended by a kind of shared, unwavering certainty that, as we know, often will find its peak expression in religious language.
Now, for Roberts, reforming American politics is instrumental to the restoration of Catholic dominance.
Like, I don't even think that the American electoral system or the first, you know, four
months of the next presidency is his primary focus. I think he's actually focused on the long
game of the prominence of the Catholic Church in the world. So we're not talking about Kennedy
family Catholicism here at all. And if listeners start clocking just how anti-democratic this
document is, I think a big part of that starts here. And I think it also explains why the project
isn't Trump dependent, because anyone willing to wield power in an anti-democratic way will be a
useful fool for God, according to this particular worldview.
Yeah.
So let's look at the document.
Here is the high-level overview.
It is not enough for conservatives to win elections.
If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.
This is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.
The project will build on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative administration.
And let's hear what those four pillars are.
Pillar one, mandate for leadership.
This is the 30 chapter, 920 page downloadable document that features contributions from over 450 conservative and religious authors.
The document lays out every policy and agency change the group aspires to implement.
Pillar two.
People are policy.
This is the administration selection process, which involves an in-depth interview questionnaire that we'll get into in a few minutes.
Basically, this pillar involves vetting people who will serve under the next conservative president without question, implementing all of his directives.
Pillar 3.
Training.
After the vetting process, selected candidates will undergo training to make sure they're in lockstep with Heritage every step of the way.
Pillar 4.
Executive Orders.
Project 2025 relies on a debated legal tactic called the Unitary Executive Theory.
In short, they claim the Constitution grants all power to the executive or president, and that all the laws they want passed should be accomplished through executive orders, bypassing the other branches of government.
So if this all smells like authoritarianism, your senses are fully intact and working.
And I know that word is thrown around a lot, but it is really fitting in this case.
The Unitary Executive Theory means all power would be placed into Trump's hands, or any conservative president, or any president, really.
I mean, there's been a debate about this idea for generations.
And it would basically be handed legislation from heritage to sign into law, so direct into the president's hands.
The theory itself has been around since 1787, but most scholars and legal jurists who value democracy don't treat the president as a dictator.
Yet that's exactly what Heritage is proposing, and they're not being shy about it.
I will include a link in the show notes.
You can download this.
You can read most of it like I did.
You can read all of it.
You can put chapters into JATGPT and try to get synopsis.
There are many ways to understand this.
And if you think we're being prone to hyperbole here, just consider one of the very first paragraphs in the document written by Kevin Roberts.
The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.
This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Gender.
Gender equality.
Gender equity.
Gender awareness.
Gender sensitive.
Abortion.
Reproductive health.
Reproductive rights.
And any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
Okay, guys, let me just go back to this first sentence.
The next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.
That is a little bit confusing to me.
Is he saying that he is trying to accelerate the sort of, I don't know, No, I don't believe so.
I think it's a weird use of language.
administrative state by making it more sort of susceptible to wokeism or is it, what is
he actually saying there?
No, I don't believe so. I think it's a weird use of language. My interpretation is that
he means we must make the institutions of American civil society unassailable to progressive
We must lock in and make completely bulletproof all of the changes that we want to do in a reactionary way so that we can't have any more of this woke nonsense.
I see, and the primary way of doing that is making sure that there's no language in federal documentation that they can grab onto or to exploit or something like that.
Yeah, we're going to erase any of this Marxist critical race theory DEI agenda from every aspect of government, in other words, right?
And I want to go back actually just to the unitary executive theory, like essentially what it is for anyone who's hearing about it for the first time is it's saying let's get rid, now we can make all sorts of criticisms about American democracy, but let's get rid of the checks and balances That have allowed for things like the peaceful transfer of power, like the deadlock that we all decry between Congress and the Senate, like having the judiciary be independent.
Let's get rid of as many things as possible so that whoever is president can just make decrees as they choose and there's all frictionless, right?
It's not even get rid of, it's actually Congress and the Supreme Court are there to support the President.
So it's not like they're getting, those instruments would be used to support whatever the President is putting forward, right?
Yeah, any of the ways that those instruments may have served as checks and balances, we're going to subvert.
So with regard to language erasure, you know, this is a mirror world application of the First Amendment.
So deleting language is fundamental to free speech, according to these guys.
Exactly, exactly.
And claiming that the language of social progressivism violates the Establishment Clause is also in there, too, because things like DEI is, you know, actually a form of religion.
You know, and I just have to mention that there are no bigger language Nazis than Catholic language Nazis.
And anybody over the last few weeks who has tracked the uproar following like the Pope's recent directive, which is called fiducia supplicans, which basically permits priests to informally bless same-sex couples, but not in a liturgical or marriage setting.
They will have been treated to hours of lawyering over the tiniest details of language, the minute differences between union and couple.
And I think this is crucial to understanding them, especially devout Catholics, because they believe that language has magical power.
Because that's the only way that the words of a priest turns bread and wine into blood and flesh.
It's why so many of them are campaigning for a return to the mass in Latin.
Because for the super devout Catholic, the presence of a word like transgender in some official governmental document could well be seen to have an incantational power that can somehow make transgenderism just happen.
So if that opening paragraph did not convince you of what's going on, here's another one from the introduction by Kevin Roberts.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Jordian 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.
Pornographers should be outlawed.
The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.
Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders, and telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
The noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country.
Incredible mask-off promotion of crotch Christianity, and I want to just tag Holy Post host Sky Jatani for that phrase, which is excellent.
It conflates all non-normative sexuality with criminal acts like pedophilia and quarantines sex criminality to librarians and social progressives, actually.
Amazing.
And that's because traditional Catholics love to, and I think they need to, project dirty church laundry outward.
And I also want to underline that Roberts is basically calling for the imprisonment, the prosecution of all sex workers, some of whom Own the means of production via online streaming, or who run their own in-real-life businesses.
Now, next week, we'll have Esme Providence Brown back as a correspondent, this time to talk about the rank hypocrisy of this mindset, as well as how it endangers women who work in various sectors of the sex industry.
It's such a fascinating paragraph because it pinballs around, right?
It's like weaving together different points from across the ideological spectrum and from different fields, like it's talking about pornography is addictive, it's talking about these are These people are misogynistic explorers of women, because of course we're all for women's rights over here at the Heritage Foundation.
And then woven through all of it is this explicit kind of main point that pornography is associated with transgender ideology and sexualization of children.
Like, where are you getting this shit?
I think the pinball metaphor is really good and we should table that for later because I think we see that in the generalized, I would say, technique of gish galloping that's predominating the political landscape now.
I mean, these kinds of connections, they remind me of the connections that RFK Jr.
makes between things.
Put anything together.
It's a great example of diagonalism in my opinion.
As Matthew just flagged a few moments ago, masks are off right now and this is certainly
the case in post-Roe America.
So since the battle over abortion kicked off in 1979, which was not the year of Roe v. Wade's passing, as Catherine Stewart notes in her book, we'll talk to her about that as well, there's been an orchestrated assault on civil liberties coming from the religious right.
So, another example is the idea of school choice, which has been around since the 70s, but it really picked up steam in the aughts, and that's really a dog whistle for school segregation.
Now, to be fair, there has been some Republican pushback to Project 2025, especially around the Heritage take on climate change.
But in general, the small pushback has been from the left, and As I said a few moments ago, it is small because I still don't think most people even know about the project or are taking it seriously, even though Heritage has already screened thousands of potential candidates for administrative positions in 2025.
In fact, as of October of 2023, over 5,000 applications have been submitted.
Okay, so this is not just a planning document.
It's actually an employment app.
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
They've actually gone to, I believe, the Iowa State Fair.
They were vetting there.
They were looking for people.
So it's not even that they're just accepting them online.
They're actually going out and recruiting people for it.
It's also interesting to note that Heritage has met with Trump, obviously, because they want him to know about this, but they've also briefed Ron DeSantis about this document, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and guess what?
RFK Jr.
has met with them as well.
Yeah, of course.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Hold on a second.
You have confirmation that they've briefed RFK Jr.
on their plans?
According to Axios, yes.
Wow.
I wonder what he did with that.
That's a trip.
Yeah.
Let's have a taste here of what Heritage is vetting for.
I've pulled a lot of the questions out, but I think, again, it's really important to just understand how far-reaching into the ideological mindset of conservative Christianity that this whole project is about.
So Axios, as I just mentioned, they were also able to obtain a copy of the screening questionnaire
and it asks for each candidate's social media handles to vet their public persona.
Now here we're going to run through a list of the true-false questions they asked to
see if these people are eligible for employment in the next administration.
I'll let your imagination run wild with what you would expect the correct answers to be.
The UN should have authority over the citizens or public policies of sovereign nations.
The US has the right to select immigrants based on country of origin.
The education industry should be opened to increased competition through vouchers or tax credits for private schools.
Life has a right to legal protection from conception to natural death.
The permanent institutions of family and religion are foundational to American freedom and the common good.
That's a real litany of undefined terms.
Government should subsidize the use or production of energy, particularly for new and innovative energy technologies.
Union membership should be at the option of the employee, not a requirement for employment.
Okay, so then we're full of false choices here as well, right?
The federal government should guarantee a universal basic income.
Who wrote this thing?
What's going on here?
The U.S.
needs nationalized healthcare.
Okay, oh, so they're also baiting people with clear no responses, right?
According from their point of view.
The U.S.
should increase legal immigration.
The police in America are systemically racist.
The gender wage gap is a result of prejudice and discrimination.
The U.S.
should scale back its strong military presence overseas.
So, RFK Jr.
liked that one.
Yeah, I mean, that's classic America First stuff, right?
We're getting into this isolationist, far-right kind of mentality.
In combating censorship by big tech, we must look to more than just the free market.
The president should be able to advance his, her agenda through the bureaucracy without hindrance from unelected federal officials.
I'm just stuck on that.
In combating censorship by big tech, we must look to more than just the free.
That's an Orwellian, like, wait, what?
Because it really is more than true-false.
Like, you can't just run down this.
You actually have to stop and think about what they're saying there, which is, if they're taking laissez-faire attitude, it's like, no, the free market will solve all those problems.
But they started off in such a way as to make you think we have to shut them down.
It's quite fascinating.
Next one, the federal government should recognize only two unchanging sexes, male and female, as a matter of policy.
All right, so the U.S.
should impose tariffs with the goal of bringing back manufacturing jobs, even if these tariffs result in higher consumer prices.
Okay, so this one isn't clear to me.
Like, what answer would they want here?
Are they trying to repatriate manufacturing?
Yes.
I mean, that's the interesting thing about this is that there's always this idea that the U.S.
should have more manufacturing jobs, like quit sending jobs overseas.
But again, they're testing people to think through the questions because if these people are going to play out the Heritage Playbook, if they are hired for these positions, they want to make clear that they understand what those policy points are.
Yeah, this is also a Javier Millet economic style, right?
Yeah, right.
We're going to create massive change based on this set of libertarian capitalist principles and, you know, for a while you're going to have to pay, what is it, 100% more for your bus ticket or something?
Overnight, overnight things doubled.
That's crazy.
Actually, no, not 100% more.
It's 10 times more.
Yeah.
It's 10 times more for your, for your bus ticket.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was whatever, whatever the currency is.
I think they're trying to switch the currency to dollars, but it was like, it was like from, from 50 to 500.
Okay.
Next one.
We should be proud of our American heritage and history, even as we acknowledge our flaws.
All right, so that is, again, just a sample.
I chose about half the questions on the questionnaire.
There's more there.
But that last one is pretty funny, because as you read through the Project 2025 document, you think the only flaws in America have come from the left, and that our actual history, when conservatives were in power, is pretty flawless.
Yeah, yeah.
So I want to ask you guys, I mean, first of all, it's bizarre that any kind of policy document includes injunctions about us having to be proud of something like, you know, like all all all citizens will be proud for henceforth.
But but, you know, guys, People who are offering employment have an interview process, they have a vetting process, they have questions that they ask to see if people are going to be a good fit.
What do you think is the difference?
Like, what's the big deal here?
Oh, I don't think it's much different at all.
I think that the value of the questions as we review them is just, it just makes the sort of thought process of vetting pretty clear.
And I mean, they're complicated questions.
I think, Derek, you're right that Being able to answer them, even if you didn't score perfectly according to the sort of the hiring committee, would give people, would give, you know, the people who are overseeing it the sense that you were actually engaged with all of these issues.
And I'm very impressed at the wide sort of spectrum that the subjects covered, you know, take up.
Well, I've made this point before because I've worked in industries that I'm sure a lot of our listeners are critical of.
I know that, like cryptocurrency, I've worked for blockchains.
And the thing about it is, when you're hired at a company, you're hired to do a job.
And think about the scope of this.
There are many progressives and liberals who worked in crypto.
It's not all crypto bros, but they definitely exist as well.
It is a wide range of people I've met for five years of working for three companies.
But in this case, no matter what administrative role you're in, no matter what your job duties are, even if you're just doing datasets or you're filing paperwork, they want 50,000 A thousand people who know how to answer all of those questions correctly in their view, and the scope of that I have never seen before.
There's a lot of criticisms that companies will vet your social media before they hire you, which is kind of fucked up on its own, but this is another level of that.
Well, and it goes beyond content, too, and to speak to your sort of question, your open question, Julian, about imagine an injunction about being proud within a questionnaire.
I think that if that is not answered correctly, then you don't have this sort of overall piety and sort of disciplined attitude that really looks to the flag in all instances.
Yeah, so I think that sort of ties the whole questionnaire subject matter up into almost like a religious creed, right?
Like the reason that we're doing these things is to express a kind of exceptionalism and pride.
This is a questionnaire that provides, if you qualify, entry into a database, the database which will then be used under the next conservative administration to fill all of the positions in all the different agencies within government so that you are selecting from a very specific pool.
It's going one step further in terms of creating complete ideological conformity.
I want to add to that my first deep dive into this topic, Project 2025, came through the YouTube channel, a really good channel of this lawyer named Leah Miller, as L-E-E-J-A Miller.
She brings a very technical lens to her political commentary, and she has a moment in that video that made me laugh, and she describes submitting an application to this particular, through this particular portal, taking this test Answering every question honestly.
And, you know, she has this sarcastic moment where she says it would be a terrible shame if their web portal got flooded with thousands of other progressives making similar applications.
Oh, because they would get a lot of spam.
Yeah, just completely trolling them, gumming up their system, injecting noise into their database of lockstep, useful idiots.
Yeah, I mean, it's a great it's a great idea.
We've got to do more than that.
But I do wish that the left had the organizing power of K-pop.
Because if we did, we could actually make an impact.
And you're both looking at me like I'm crazy, and if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's because, like, when people piss off the K-pop army, they will do the same thing.
They will go on and flood websites to break them down.
All right, Taylor Swift, you're up.
So I mentioned earlier that there's over 450 authors contributing to the document, and that's not just writing, but that's also the mindsets and what they actually gave to the actual authors who crafted this document.
But let's drill down for a moment on specifically who's involved.
So first there's the Project 2025 Advisory Board, and that consists of 54 conservative and often religious organizations.
Now, these are organizations lending institutional and sometimes financial support in accomplishing the shared agenda of the document.
A few of these include Family Research Council, an evangelical think tank that opposes stem cell research, abortion, divorce, and the LGBTQ plus rights.
The group was founded in 1981 by evangelical author James Dobson, who also founded Focus on the Family.
Then there's FreedomWorks, which is a libertarian think tank founded by the Koch brothers and the group responsible for Tea Party mobilization and activation during the Obama years.
The Family Policy Alliance, an anti-LGBTQ plus Christian lobbying group that grew out of focus on the family and whose mission statement is to advance biblical citizenship, equip and elect statesmen, promote policy, and serve an effective alliance all committed to a common vision.
That vision includes the abolishment of same-sex marriage, transgender rights, abortion, sex education, and marijuana decriminalization, which leads to all the others, apparently.
We also have, as players in the advisory realm, The Honest Elections Project, a conservative organization linked to Leonard Leo, which grew out of the Federalist Society.
And now, if you guessed that this project took part in lawsuits based on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, yes, you're correct.
The Honest Elections Project.
Liberty University, a private evangelical college in Lynchburg, Virginia, founded by Jerry Falwell.
It's predominantly an online college and also features a department of osteopathic medicine, as it happens, with every course centered around the idea of training champions for Christ.
But it's not just sports, right?
Well, it's sports.
It's sports, but it's more than that.
Well, everything as a sport, I suppose.
All right, then we have the Independent Women's Forum, which sounds suspiciously leftist until you realize the group was founded in 92 to push back against sexual allegations against Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court nominee.
And, you know, Independent Women's Forum is actually considered an anti-feminist group.
So that's six.
There's 48 more.
We have a time limit on this podcast.
Let me just point out two important factors here.
Most authors of the 30 chapters in this document were employed in the last Trump administration, and they specifically write about the agencies and policies they were already involved with, and the 54 organizations on the advisory board, along with other organizations these authors are involved with, account for hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in power that this agenda represents.
Yeah, essentially this is a conglomeration of every conservative think tank that responded to the bath signal, right?
We always think of these groups that are crafting propaganda, grooming pundits, creating bridges and invisible back passages between big money donors and religious zealots and candidates for office as being ideologically in sync.
But more loosely networked via their overlapping priorities, right?
And often there's going to be some kind of infighting and small disagreements.
But this, to me, is terrifying.
This is Borg-like.
It's a manual for lockstep, disciplined unity.
And it underlines something we've touched on already about how the patient, long game strategy of Christian nationalism, and we mentioned Leonard Leo a moment ago, he's part of this, makes the left look to me like drunken dilettantes who can't find their shoes.
Yeah, and if you're talking about the general DNC apathy or the chaos of, you know, identity politics fractures within the left, I'm with you.
I also don't think you have to be drunk to just visibly and earnestly struggle with democracy, coalition building, taking the time to listen to diverse voices.
I mean, it just turns out that questioning authority is just harder than seizing it, and I think it's important to acknowledge that authoritarian modes are just more efficient than progressive democratic modes.
Yeah, so as with the sort of ecumenical thing that we've described happening now between churches that used to be a lot more combative with each other, in this political sphere, the prizing and prioritizing of power Above anything else becomes an incredible way to move beyond ideological disagreements, whatever those might be, as long as we're all aligned and trying to get power for the right.
I think authoritarianism prizes efficiency and speed and coercion.
So, of course, I agree with you.
It's a sober thing to do to struggle with political progress.
But I am saying that the disciplined presence, the disciplined patience of Christian nationalists and neo-fascists does often make the left look to me like we're disoriented all over the place, distracted by infighting and either taking the bait or providing the fodder for much more persuasive, though unapologetically dishonest, right-wing propaganda instead of galvanizing support behind popular issues and messages.
Disoriented all over the place, distracted by infighting, yes, yes, yes.
And also, lacking a kind of fundamental mythos.
Like, I think more and more as I listen to ourselves reporting on this and I think about the sort of theological bedrock behind all of this material.
There's a very clear teleological outcome for the American story for these people that I wouldn't really, as a leftist, be able to name for myself other than in generalized terms of more equality, more fairness, more wealth distribution and access to services and respect for basic human rights.
Like, those are not triumphalist stories to tell my compatriots, you know?
But if you're talking about the political project that ushers in a golden age of religious, I don't know, glory, that's something different altogether.
Well, the version that we had of it on what we might call the left in the U.S.
was that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.
Sure.
And for many people, there was a kind of mythopoetic, you know, triumphant sense when Obama was elected that that dream had come to pass, that MLK's dream had come to pass.
Now, we know that in a lot of ways it was empty because Obama was kind of a center-right Hawkish, you know, person as much in service to the big corporations as anyone else.
And then I think we had the sense of like, okay, Hillary is anointed and we're going to have our first female president and she's going to be the wife of this other president who, you know, was celebrated for a lot of different reasons by the Democrats.
And all of that fell apart.
And we all got bushwhacked by Trump.
And then I think what rose in its place has been largely ineffective and disorganized and often self-indulgent.
So I think what you're describing here, Derek, also exposes the mirror-world-like irony of right-wing propagandists banging on about the web of influence of folks like George Soros, you know, trying to keep Europe from going full authoritarian and trying to help candidates who want to enact criminal justice reform in accordance with the democracy we say we're so proud of.
And yet here's the out in the open elaborate conspiracy to cynically undermine everything that actually makes America somewhat great in the name of unlimited profit and complete power as they throw climate crisis concerns, and that's one of the big ones here, onto the bonfire of woke vanities.
I recently had a beer with a friend, a new friend here in Portland, and he's studying psychology, and he was talking about how he doesn't think that money is that important for organizing, and it's just a spiritual thing.
We got into it a little bit, but I don't think that well-intentioned, good-hearted people understand what happens when you have hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars flowing into lobbying power and agencies.
And so, another differentiating factor of what you were just talking about is, you're right, Matthew, there is no foundational mythos here.
It's a lot of different ones that actually, to look at from a positive perspective, represent the diversity of thought.
Yes.
The problem with that is that because there's no one thing, it all gets a bit scrambled.
And in The Power Worshippers, Catherine Stewart makes a lot of good points, but how it's not about doctrine, how it's not about theology or religion, it is just about power, hence the title of the book.
And there's a moment when she quotes J. Randy Forbes, who is the founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, and it really brings home the fact that what we're up against here are people who understand that the power does not reside in the majority.
So the quote is, Our studies and what we have seen is 10% of the people in any country in the world can change that country if they have the right strategies, if they persevere, and if they will just find a way to put their differences aside and come together.
That's not a new idea.
I want to bring in another book, which is Dark Money, The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, which was written by, of course, The New Yorker author Jane Mayer, who is excellent.
Jane Mayer, sorry.
And she cites a different circumstance in which this playbook was highly effective.
If the estimates were correct, the actual number of hardcore Tea Party activists was not, by historical standards, all that large.
But the professionalization of the underground infrastructure, the growth of sympathetic and in some cases subsidized media outlets, and the concentrated money pushing the message from the fringe to center state was fully consequential.
You know, as we're talking about the organizational capacities of both sides, there's an echo here of something that's been brewing in left-wing climate crisis circles for years.
You know, Extinction Rebellion has long touted the research by sociologist Erika Chenoweth, who found that change movements need about 3.5% of any population on board with protest actions to provoke Now, there's some questions about how they use that actual research and, you know, what societies it applies to, but I've been reading If We Burn by Victor Bevins, which is an incredible book.
And he basically says that protest actions on the left over the past decade have not only failed but provoked massive populist backlash because, as his diagnosis says, left-wing movements have been weakened by identitarianism.
And an inability to overcome the differences that Forbes is clocking amongst conservatives, but also because the left is allergic to hierarchy and long-term planning.
So movements, I think, like Extinction Rebellion come close to Project 2025 energy with zero cash and with very small leadership, you know, networks.
Yeah.
And they do so when they're working with climate collapse timelines.
But these efforts and I think these instances are pretty rare.
And if climate organizations emphasize unity over openness, they usually destroy themselves.
And that's, for instance, what happened with Deep Green Resistance, which completely flamed out when they decided that extending kindness to trans people would compromise
their second-wave feminist class solidarity.
And then also the leaders were really toxic about it.
So, very difficult organizational challenges that Bevins describes.
So, both Mayer and Stewart do really good jobs at detailing how these networks cross-pollinate
and support each other.
And this is really a generational project, as I mentioned earlier.
The people behind it know they're going to lose as much, if not more often than they win in the courts.
Last year's overturning of Roe v. Wade wasn't the first attempt.
But there's something especially insidious about Project 2025 because Heritage has gathered so many players in these underground and not-so-underground networks.
There's no possible way anyone can map all the connections we'd have that crazy conspiracy board all over, but we can certainly feel the effects in terms of the erosion of our civil liberties.
Yeah.
Mayer's observation of a subsidized media outlet is also prescient.
Her book, which investigates the dark money trails of the Koch family, was published in 2016 before Trump's presidency.
And since that time, media has become even more bifurcated.
Right-wing media will never look at the organizations behind Project 2025 critically because they're in favor of these mandates that they're putting forward.
And so you have an entire media ecosystem that will view this project as beneficial, while two other entire media ecosystems, left-leaning, sure, but also centrist investigative outlets like ProPublica, for example, They're barely looking to it at all, at least so far.
There are a few, but I fear progressives don't understand the enormity of this project
and what it means for democracy and civil rights moving forward.
Okay, that was all preamble to Project 2025, the documents.
So what does it say?
Now, as I said, Julian and I will be breaking down chapters pertinent to our podcast beat in upcoming Patreon episodes, and Matthew is going to focus on some aspects as well.
But here's an overview of just a few of the 30 chapters of the document.
So we're going to start with the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services, which was written by Roger Severino, who served in the HHS under Trump.
He's a lawyer.
He previously served as the director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, and if you're wondering if that's Betsy DeVos's family, as in Betsy and her brother Eric Prince of Blackwater notoriety, and they are both children of Edgar Prince, yes, that is all jumbled together.
Severino is a staunch Catholic and is extremely anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ.
So again, remember, this is a policy document.
Here he is proposing separating the CDC into two groups with no contact, and he writes, We need a national epidemiological agency responsible only for publishing data and required by law to publish all of the data gathered from states and other sources.
A separate agency should be responsible for public health with a severely confined ability to make policy recommendations.
Okay, so I'm getting a little red-pilled on the possibility that there's a Catholic conspiracy driving this whole thing, because like Roberts, I looked into Severino a little bit.
He's also absolutely mask-off when talking with Catholic audiences about the church being the model of moral and political authority that he wants everybody to look to.
He's also ambivalent about whether Trump is a church ally or a church tool.
There was one Q&A at Thomas More College where someone asked him whether Trump will become Catholic, and he kind of shrugs and says, pray for it.
In other words, it would be nice, but it doesn't really matter.
And it just reminded me about what the Anons say, which is that God always wins.
Like, whatever happens, whatever comes through the news shoot, God always wins.
I know I keep flagging Catherine Stewart here, but it was the perfect book to read before diving into this episode.
And she goes into detail about how the evangelicals had trouble getting Catholics on board in the early days of the anti-abortion movement.
Because Catholics had been ostracized for so long by other brands of Christianity.
Yeah, so sad.
Yeah, but at some point, it seems like theology landed secondarily to power across these different brands of Christianity, which Severino seems to be hinting at here.
Yeah, and we've observed how rejecting quarantine measures during COVID in the name of religious freedom seemed to usher in a new era of ecumenical cooperation for groups who in the past were more adversarial due to theological schisms.
So Severino never wants a government agency to be able to even recommend wearing masks or getting vaccinated, which is the point of these agencies, and that is not hyperbole either.
He writes, Never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that schoolchildren should be masked or vaccinated.
Yeah, so stripping all power away.
Severino effectively wants to deregulate the HHS, the FDA, and the CDC out of existence Except when it comes to monitoring women's bodies, which he is very invested in.
So he favors an extremely hands-off approach to governance, but he wants to know as much as women's periods and their menstrual cycles as possible, which is really fucking eerie.
And suddenly, even though we read a moment ago that we should shut down big tech, he has all four surveillance data.
He writes, The CDC's abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate.
Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.
Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother's state of residence, and by what method.
So I just want to say that so far a lot of this, you know, to some people might come across as very sort of abstract and legalistic and, you know, about like arcane policy kind of details.
Here we start to get an exact sort of punching through into reality of what some of this stuff could mean in the lives of real people.
And I'm getting big Islamic Republic of Iran vibes here with regard to women's rights.
And I'm just, I'm like, I'm actually, Emotionally impacted by hearing you read that term, Matthew, abortion tourism.
I mean, go fuck yourself.
Yeah.
It's quite something to say you want to track women so intimately because you think more women are dying from abortions than reported.
And what's really tragic is that there's some good ideas in this 50-page chapter.
Like, he talks about ending federal laws that shield pharmaceutical companies from competition and making generics more widely available.
On board with that?
Great!
You'll find some common sense legislation in every chapter.
But you lose track when Severino spends most of his time trying to make abortion pills federally illegal or trying to strip rights from the LGBTQ plus community.
Speaking of which, let's move on to another chapter.
We have Federalist Society member Jonathan Berry, who worked under Trump as the Acting Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Labor, and he writes an entire chapter about that department.
Another staunch Catholic, by the way.
I mean, at this rate, I'd say that intra-church arguments about whether Francis is leading Catholics to hell are kind of important to track as a template for how these guys are doing politics.
So one of the very first line items is stripping transgender people of labor rights.
He writes, Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.
The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, in case you didn't hear it right the first time, right?
Et cetera.
You missed et cetera.
I love when policy wonks write et cetera.
Et cetera.
Anything else you can think of that's in the same spirit of the thing I'm saying.
So if that's not direct enough, he elaborates in the very next line item.
Direct agencies to refocus enforcement of sex discrimination laws.
Jesus.
The president should direct agencies to focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of sex.
So, you know, Julian and Derek, I think this is where the rhetoric of transgenocide becomes really salient and maybe even proven.
Like Barry is saying, we should allow employers to refuse to employ trans people.
Yep.
Which begs the question, like, what the fuck are they supposed to do?
Like, how are they supposed to eat?
Yeah, it's atrocious.
Protecting vulnerable minorities from discrimination is the new discrimination.
It's basically using the power of the state to punish branded sinners through excommunication from society and from the very economy itself, which is the thing they truly hold sacred.
It's a bit like Modi enabling continuing violence and discrimination against Muslims in India by just sort of not paying attention.
There's a way you read it, Matthew, which is to discriminate against hiring, but I also wonder, the language seems to be that if they are already hired and they come out as transgender, sure, discriminate away.
Go ahead, you have those rights.
Yeah, exactly.
Right, right.
As with Kevin Roberts, Barry wants nothing more than to end those pesky DEI trainings in the workforce.
He wants to eliminate racial classifications and CR trainings across the board.
Like Severino, he wants anything remotely hinting at abortion gone, including any funding for women's healthcare services that are performed at clinics that also offer abortions.
But in the workplace, he wants to see more legislation helping pregnant and new mothers.
I mean, great, that's a good thing, but it's set in direct competition with abortion services, especially when he writes that he wants to see pro-life workplaces.
I mean, these are the people who favor small government, right?
And not having government interfere with people's lives.
Let's just underline that cursed phrase, pro-life workplaces.
Yeah, and that's a direct quote.
Absolutely.
But, you know, the Christians are really the persecuted ones here because he wants more religious freedom.
Which is code for allowing discrimination in hiring practices for Christian-based companies.
He wants to phase down H-2A and H-2B visa programs, and he wants employers to favor U.S.
citizens over immigrants.
So there we go back to the hiring practices we flagged earlier.
He pretends to care about workers' representation, but Barry makes sure that he wants to say unionization should be more difficult.
Many companies vote to unionize by secret ballot so employees aren't later retaliated against.
But in Barry's America, a new union would first have to submit signed pro-union cards to the National Labor Relations Board before voting.
No, no, no.
Which gives all that data directly to the government.
That's not going to happen.
No, no way.
I wouldn't say never, Matthew!
Barry also wants to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which ensures local prevailing wages are rendered for laborers and mechanics on public works projects because Barry thinks the market should decide their wages.
But really importantly, not the local market, like not the market where you actually live or where you're interacting with your neighbors.
I mean, I thought they were against the globalists, right?
Yeah.
And this is the aspect of race to the bottom that comes through here in terms of, you know, what these think tanks have been working on.
Let's, let's look at all of the places in which we're being stopped from enacting our capitalist agenda and just block off any, any possible exit.
The Department of Justice chapter is also a lot of fun.
It was written by Gene Hamilton, who served in the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security under Trump.
Hamilton played a key role in ending DACA.
He's the man who created the Zero Tolerance Family Separation Policy, aka Kids in Cages.
He helped revoke immigrant protections from Sudanese immigrants, so great guy here.
He now works alongside friend of the pod, Stephen Miller.
He as the VP of American League First Legal.
And before Trump, he worked under Jeff Sessions.
What a pedigree this guy has.
So at last, we now get to a serious legislator.
Here's his second bullet point, which describes why the American public no longer trusts the Department of Justice.
Personnel within the FBI engaged in a campaign to convince social media companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation campaign, while the FBI had possession of the laptop the entire time and could have clarified the authenticity of the source.
Thank you, Schellenberger and Taibbi and Elon Musk.
I mean, writing Federal government policy based off of Fox News chyrons.
There's so much of that in this document.
Hamilton goes on to say that Antifa activists were never prosecuted, and he calls transgender surgeries genital mutilation of children, claiming these are all part of the real reasons America is going to hell.
He also mentions election integrity and then goes on to discuss something that's of utmost importance for restoring the integrity of the DOJ.
Prohibit the FBI from engaging in general in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity.
The FBI, along with the rest of the government, needs a hard reset on the appropriate scope of its legitimate activities.
It must not look to or rely on the past decade as precedent or legitimization for continued action in certain spaces.
This is especially true with respect to activities that the FBI and the U.S.
government writ large claim are efforts to combat misinformation, disinformation, or mal-information.
Yeah, those last three terms were in quotes, and if that all sounds like an apology for the January 6th insurrectionists, that idea of letting them go and that it wasn't an insurrection is actually baked into the entire document.
Kevin Roberts frames the entire initiative in terms of declinism, right?
That's the psychological bias that posits an ideal past that never actually existed, and they're rewriting history all over in this document.
They choose a caricature of the left as the enemy that forced the decline that took away American greatness.
So in this light, true American patriots, like those subject to misinformation about what really happened on January 6th, become useful pawns to display in this reconstructionist
history.
This is all possible because, as Jane Mayer noted, they're sharing these messages in a
right-wing subsidized media ecosystem.
Yeah, I mean, also when you hear them directly mention the three categories, misinformation,
disinformation, or malinformation.
That's coming straight out of Rene Diresta's work.
It's coming straight out of the different groups who have been actively trying to do this research and identify all of these.
Deeply like crisis oriented digital problems, a lot of which is coming out of Russia and Iran and North Korea directly at Americans.
And as you're saying, they want to, they want to identify these true American patriots who are subject to misinformation and protect them from finding out the truth, which is just, yeah, we're deep in the mirror world.
That makes me think of two other things, Derek.
The first is, I'm sure we all saw, House Speaker Mike Johnson openly saying he wants to blur the faces of January 6th riders in the video footage so that they can't be charged by the Department of Justice.
Wow.
Yeah.
And then the second is, did you guys see this?
This was actually last year, actually 2022.
But it's the thing of America going to hell due to genital mutilation of children.
Now, we criticized Joe Rogan a lot on this podcast for very good reasons, but I don't know if you noticed this.
He had this amazing moment of fact-checking the Daily Wire's trans and homophobe in chief, Matt Walsh.
He had asked Walsh how many kids he thought had gotten onto puberty blockers.
And, you know, Walsh replies that, in his guess, there were millions.
And Rogan then looks it up and fact checks him in real time, and it's less than a thousand a year for the last five years.
Wow.
So Walsh then reduces his guess down from millions to, well, it's been, I think it's been hundreds of thousands.
And then Rogan just looks at him and laughs and says, well, a million sounds great.
Well, I'm glad that Rogan all of a sudden can fact check something.
Let's have RFK back on so that he can do it there.
Now, you would want a policy document designed to reform America to at least be written in an intellectually stimulating tone, but you're not going to find any of that here.
I mean, yeah, there's wonky sections, but it always comes back to Twitter-level trolling, like these two paragraphs from the end of Kevin Roberts' introduction.
Ultimately, the left does not believe that all men are created equal.
They think they are special.
They certainly don't think all people have an unalienable right to pursue the good life.
They think only they themselves have a right along with a moral responsibility to make decisions for everyone else.
They don't think any citizen, state, business, church, or charity should be allowed any freedom until first they bend the knee.
This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.
I love Roberts, man.
I love this line.
They don't think any citizen state business or church or charity should be allowed any freedom until they first bend the knee.
Says the guy who bootlicks at the altar every Sunday, and if the ring was offered, he'd be all over it.
He'd kiss it, kiss it, kiss it.
My God.
I mean, I'm saying it too much, but it's straight up mirror world reversal, right, Matthew?
They want an authoritarian theocracy, but they accuse progressives of demanding they bend the knee.
To what?
To democratic freedoms and equality?
It's just so bizarre.
I also love the conflation of elite rule and woke cultural warriors.
Yeah, yeah.
These are the guys who are courting billionaires and doing their bidding.
Most people I know who are more on the left don't have that kind of money or influence.
So throughout the entire document, anything that even hints of left-leaning politics is just to be destroyed, completely dismantled, erased from history actually.
Project 2025 wants to strip the United States Agency for Global Media, which includes entities like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, of all funding because of its purported anti-American talking points and propaganda.
They want to strip NPR, Pacifica Broadcasting, and PBS of all funding due to liberal bias.
The plan calls for funding media efforts only when there's a direct line to the President.
So that is, that is the definition of state-sponsored media.
Yep.
Yep.
And these are the people always talking about propaganda from the left.
I mean, I've said before that this was decades in the making, but there's another angle here too.
And it has to do with a totalizing worldview and a multi-tentacled policy platform built on and justified by and argued from conspiracism.
This, this here, this is the next wave.
Conspiracy peddlers have now conditioned a huge swath of the population to accept these paranoid and slanderous false premises as fact.
They may even have convinced themselves.
It's Richard Hofstadter writ large, paranoid narratives all the way down, with no recourse to facts and evidence.
It's also not just election denial and woke moral panic.
They're rallying the troops to fight back against the despicable war on Jesus with a theocratic power grab that would force everyone to live as their fundamentalism dictates or else suffer punishment almost as if we were in Iran or Saudi Arabia.
I just love the freedom I'm smelling, guys.
USA!
USA!
Well, we've looked at a few chapters.
I'm going to bullet point a few ones here.
And again, if you are so inclined, you can download, go to their website.
So, the Department of Education, gone.
They instead want a, quote, diverse set of school options and learning environments.
They actually want to institute Milton Friedman's 1955 plan that uses a taxpayer funded education savings account to allow families to choose where to send their children, which is really just a slick way to use public dollars for religious schools.
But diversity.
It's diversity, Derek.
This is another flag for our upcoming conversation with Catherine Stewart, because she writes extensively about the DeVos family's generational plan for charter schools, which is really just a return to segregated schools.
Now, at the very least, the very least, they at least want to strengthen environmental protection laws.
Of course, I am not serious.
They want to deregulate industries so that the EPA has no teeth whatsoever, or in their words, create a, quote, conservative EPA, which results in initiatives like this.
Remove the greenhouse gas reporting program for any source category that is not currently being regulated.
The overall reporting program imposes significant burdens on small businesses and companies that are not being regulated.
This is either a pointless burden or a sort of Damocles threat of future regulation, neither of which is appropriate.
So if you didn't catch that, that's basically saying don't track oil companies or large corporations like Walmart, Amazon, don't track any of their emissions.
That's because it hurts small businesses, basically.
Now, this document is filled with good old faux Americana, and so you would think that farmers would get a fair shake, but no, of course not.
Fuck the USDA as well.
Project 2025 wants to deregulate big ag as much as possible because food safety regulations, quote, undermine efforts to meet consumer demand.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Food safety regulations undermine efforts to meet consumer demand for toxically dangerous food?
Yeah, it's a fascinating document because they basically also, I didn't even get into this, they want to strip all sorts of food assistance.
Actually, I'm going to get into it in a moment, but at the same time, let all of as much toxic food go into circulation as possible.
It's just, it's bonkers.
You know, the plan also calls for moving low-income food programs, like just flagged, like SNAP to the HHS, which, as a reminder, they want to strip all funding and power from.
They're also demanding more requirements to enroll in food assistance because low-income people don't have enough going on, which is really just a way to give them even less money than the poverty level they currently subsist at.
They want to reform free school lunch programs, which of course were started by the Black Panthers in the 1960s.
What always impresses me is this bet they make on how easy it is to create and maintain class warfare if you distract people with culture war issues.
Like, they just don't have any compunction about fucking over the poor because they're really quite confident that no one will effectively organize against them.
Yeah.
Now, everything we've been saying is on a federal level, but this is already happening in the states.
So recently, Iowa's conservative governor, Kim Reynolds, said that her state won't participate in a U.S.
food assistance program this summer because, quote, an EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.
So, if you happen to possess the ability to string two thoughts together, you might be asking, aren't food insecurity and poverty predictors for childhood obesity?
Well, you won't be surprised that one of the things stripped out of education and government is intersectionality, which of course is the framework for understanding how social and political identities result in various instances of discrimination and privilege.
Apparently the right needs a safe space away from discussions like these.
But we can't shy away from this discussion.
I started reading on Christian nationalism and its intersection, sorry Kevin, with right-wing politics over two decades ago.
I've always watched from afar, but over time it just keeps getting closer and closer to home.
And now the many organizations that have been chipping away at civil liberties are all chomping at the bit to completely reform America in their very distorted image come January 2025.
And that means electing the conservative nominee, which we know will be Trump, into office first.
This plan for finding yes-men is only one layer.
A lot of that dark money is going to be flowing into the election first.
And from what I can see, the left has nowhere near the financial might or the organizing power or, frankly, the patience needed to build back up what the right is so rapidly dismantling.
Derek, you've done such great work on this.
And one thing, extra thing, that I'll just preview here on this recurrent theme of the mask coming off is that this coming Saturday, we're going to be dropping a brief report on how RFK Jr.
has appointed Del Bigtree.
the anti-vax kingpin as his communications director.
So, logistically and skills-wise, it's a pragmatic choice.
But I also think it's a sign that not only right-wing, but also diagonalist political figures
are moving into this don't-give-a-fuck stage.
Big Tree is really just a more respectable and church-friendly version of Alex Jones
when it comes to content and integrity.
So Bobby is actually betting, I think, that if he just lays it all out on the line and hires someone, Who often sounds more unhinged than he does, he'll strike it big.
So, I think we're talking about an era of not only zero shame, but almost negative shame.
You know, like the opposite of shame.
But, you know, I don't want us to leave this story here today without flagging Some strengths that we might still have, even in the shadow of, you know, Palpatine and the Final Order.
So, for what it's worth, I think the new year will feel more survivable if we remember, you know, maybe it's in morning prayers, maybe it's on bike rides, that most of us who would oppose this stuff belong to a long intellectual and political tradition that has always generated You know, generative visions and compassionate strategies in really bad times.
And money and fundamentalism are powerful, but also rigid, and sometimes brittle.
And, you know, I'll just say again, because these days at my house with the kids, it's all Star Wars all the time, and I'm always pointing out how the Empire keeps building these booby traps of hubris into their death machines.
There's always something that's going to make something blow up with some very little effort that's targeted in just the right way because these systems don't nourish people.
They choke them off from community and care.
But the best ideas, like from vaccination to ending sex and gender discrimination, like the very best ideas are always born in small and diverse spaces of Yeah, I often have that sense too, Matthew, that all good things start in humble, small, community-based initiatives where ordinary people are getting in touch with what really matters and thinking about how to treat one another.
We're also up against a very organized and strategic machine here and, you know, we've identified several really important, you know, key hot spots in terms of what's going on around women's rights, around gay and trans rights, around the environment, around government regulations that protect people from exploitation and, you know, just being completely at the mercy of whatever corporations want to do.
Opponents are going to have to communicate, educate and organize effective and pragmatic coalitions at scale to save democracy.
And, you know, we talk about every election being the most important in the history of the country, like every few years these days.
This time, I think it really is true.
And the stakes are preventing the backsliding on the progress of the last 50 years.
Pushing back against Project 2025 and everything that it represents is a project that every American of good conscience needs to be working on right now.
We can't be caught again wondering, huh?
How did that happen?
Because it's been happening for generations.
It's just never been so right in front of our eyes as now.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
