Bonus Sample: Project 2025's Disdain for Public Education
Project 2025 is the libertarian conservative Heritage Foundation’s systematic governance plan for the next Republican president. The 920-page plan aims to implement the "unitary executive theory," which would give all of the power of the US government to the executive branch—Donald Trump, if he wins in November.
Derek and Julian read the chapter on the Department of Education, which focuses on unlocking public funds for Christian schools while banning any discussion on DEI, CRT, or gender theory.
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Okay, Julian, another week, another chapter of the 920-page Project 2025 Authoritarian Playbook produced by the Heritage Foundation.
I am beside myself with joy.
I know, it's so exciting.
Now, listener, if you haven't been following, we've covered this project in full on episode 187 on the Maid Feed.
Julian and I have now looked at three chapters so far, the Department of Health and Human Services in January, Governmental media agencies in early February and last week we got into the Department of Agriculture.
This document is the result of generations of conservatives trying to create a completely free market in America with all governing decisions decided by the president with all other branches of government supporting the executive's power.
And that is not hyperbole.
Head over to Project2025.org if you dare, because you can download the same document we've been reading from and read it for yourself.
Now, since the Republican nominee will be Donald Trump, who has no interest in actually governing, Heritage has positioned itself to be the bureaucratic arm of the next Republican president.
That is their explicit and stated goal.
Yeah, you're not exaggerating.
Unitary executive theory is at the heart of their agenda.
It would give the president king-like absolute power.
This just underlines the pure hypocrisy of claiming to be constitutionalists when the framers actually sought to prevent exactly that kind of maneuver.
And if that wasn't enough, he'd be a king ruling over a state run on reactionary theocratic principles based on this document.
Yes.
Now today, we're diving into the chapter on the Department of Education, which was written by Lindsey Burke.
Now, who's that?
Julian, would you do the honor and read the first paragraph of her official bio from the Heritage Foundation website?
I'd be glad to.
As director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, Lindsay Burke oversees Heritage's research and policy on issues pertaining to preschool, K-12, and higher education reform.
Burke's research has been presented at academic conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals, including Social Science Quarterly, Educational Research and Evaluation, and the Journal of School Choice.
And her commentary and op-eds have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers.
She's a frequent guest on radio and television shows and speaks on education reform issues across the country and internationally.
She has published evaluations of education choice options for public policy foundations across the country and has done extensive work shaping and evaluating education savings accounts or ESAs.
Yeah, so it sounds very buttoned up and professional.
As you'll see as we get into this, she is not.
But let me say off the top that school choice, or in this framing, education choice, is a longtime conservative ploy to have taxpayers fund religious schools.
And by religious, I mean Christian schools.
It's presented as this idea of your child should have a choice in what school they attend.
Yeah, madrasas as well, right?
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Now, while in practice, it's a way of diverting public funds to private institutions.
And yeah, it's really Christian-based schools because other religious schools like Muslims have tried to get on this and then conservative groups have blocked their ability to do so.
Now, another definition before we get into this, education savings accounts are effectively a conservative way of saying no free public schooling.
And again, this sounds simplistic, but strip away the language, and the initiative is similar to FSAs, or flexible savings accounts, which allow you to add pre-tax dollars to cover healthcare expenses.
That sounds great, right?
But what is it actually hiding?
The fact that the hundreds of dollars you pay each month for health insurance still isn't enough to cover your health expenses.
And yes, you can use an FSA to cover basics like aspirin, but in practice, a lot of people stored away to cover primary health care costs like my wife and I do.
So an ESA allows you to pay for your children's education expenses from K-12 with tax-free savings.
Now on its face, seems like a good idea.
But just like FSAs obscure the fact that they're a perk in a country with a crippling for-profit healthcare system, ESAs are simply a band-aid on the fact that we don't have free schooling in America save public schools, but those are taxpayer-funded of course.
But the right doesn't like public schools because of the whole, you can't pray here thing.
And so it makes sense that Burke would champion ESAs, which lets you put pre-tax dollars, meaning you're not taking tax dollars out, to put into your school system of choice, which is predominantly going to be Christian in their worldview.
Okay, I hope that made sense, because there's a lot there, but when you read closely, that's what's going on.
Now, Burke fancies herself as an author, and she writes articles with titles like, The Root Cause of the Insanity on College Campuses is Older Than You May Think, which includes sentences like, The oppressor oppressed worldview that paints democratic Israel as the oppressor and Palestinian terrorists as the oppressed is pure Marxism.
