I downloaded the Project 2025 “book” from The Heritage Foundation website yesterday. Soon, I’ll dig into the contents and its proposals, but the first fascinating dissection examines the tone and nature of its introduction. This document is the product of frightened white men screaming into the void of their paranoia, defined as “a mental state where a person has an irrational fear of others and a persistent belief that they are being harmed or deceived.” The definition perfectly describes The Heritage Foundation and its pet Project 2025. The language is rife with raw hyperbole, blatant hypocrisy, and outright denial of the real cause of America’s disease of conflicted ideology, which is longstanding Republican incompetence in governance and blaming the Left for the problems it engenders.

The first paragraphs reap what it intends to sow, demonstrating the paranoia behind the document’s intention:

The Left has spent millions fearmongering about Project 2025, because they’re terrified of losing their power. And they should be. Project 2025 offers a menu of solutions to the border crisis, inflation, a stagnant economy, and rampant crime. It shows how we can take on China, fix our schools, and support families. But most importantly, it dismantles the unaccountable Deep State, taking power away from Leftist elites and giving it back to the American people.

The opening tactic, as you see here, is to accuse the other side of your own level of paranoia. This is the tone of the entire Project 2025 document. I’ve gone through the opening sections to examine how this fear-driven ideology stakes its ground and employs rabid hyperbole to incite self-righteous rage among its intended audience. They quickly move to accusations against the “cultural elite” they so despise.

“The bad news today is that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline. The good news is that we know the way out even though the challenges today are not what they were in the 1970s. Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left—at home and abroad. We did it before and will do it again.”

Notice the tactic of retreating to the Reagan Era to claim success in the so-called “Culture Wars.” Conservatives love to believe that Ronald Reagan restored conservatism to its rightful place to “unite the nation,” but that’s the first lie, because it ignores the fact that Reagan historically leveraged racial fears using terms such as “welfare queens” to enrage and divide Americans along bigoted lines. This salvo echoes to this day in Trumpism’s dog-whistle racism and fear of intellectual Black people while dismissing the many sins of men like Clarence Thomas whose long record of questionable behavior and ethical breaches earn no rebukes from hypocritical conservatives eager to claim Black men among their ranks. The Republican Party and its newest manifesto eagerly seek to leverage racism, bigotry, misogyny and Christian patriarchal rule over society as the foundation of what they want to call “democracy,” if that is a concern at all.

The passage above refers to revitalization of the economy, which Democrats under Clinton, Obama, and President Joe Biden all accomplished in the wake of Republican malfeasance and economic crashes wrought by massive tax breaks for the wealthy, refusal to respect or uphold financial regulations, and letting predatory lenders run amok with interest rates on credit cards to trading toxic mortgages. The cause of the 2008 recession was manifold, with both parties bearing aspects of blame, but the list of sins weighs heavier on the GOP side, because while selling subprime mortgages to consumers was a bad idea, like most sins, it was hiding the problem that made it far worse. The go-go, white-hot belief in eternal growth during the Bush era fueled conservative hubris that was too good to be true:

• Subprime mortgage crisis: During the housing boom, lenders expanded their definition of creditworthiness and began offering mortgages to borrowers with poor credit histories. These high-risk loans, known as subprime mortgages, were packaged and sold to investors. 
• Deregulation: The financial industry was deregulated, allowing for speculation on derivatives backed by mortgages. 
• Excessive risk-taking: Banks created too much money too quickly and used it to speculate on financial markets and push up house prices. 
• Increased borrowing: Banks and investors borrowed more money. 
• Regulation and policy errors: There were errors in regulations and policies. 

Before all that happened, we should not forget that it was the Savings & Loan crisis, as it was essentially Republican permission that first exposed the dangers of banking deregulations foisted on society by Reaganism. The Corporate Finance Institute summarizes it this way: “In conclusion, the banking and S&L crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s was caused by a combination of factors, including deregulation, interest rate risk, a volatile real estate market, risky loans, fraud, and mismanagement.”

This quick analysis of conservative deregulation efforts demonstrates how The Heritage Foundation ignores many things Reagan did wrong while claiming him as a hero for all time. Reagan Worship is at the heart of 2025ism, dependent on the emphatic denial that the despotic Grandpa people branded The Great Communicator led one of the most corrupt administrations in United States history. So the premise that going back to Reaganism would Make America Great Again is the principle falsehood behind conservatism’s sentimental views toward an eventually daft and dementia-ridden corrupt President. They’re repeating the same sin by re-elected a clearly compromised mental mess in Donald Trump after maligning Joe Biden as too old to run again. And worse, when Democrats took charge and counseled Biden to step down, the man did so in respect to his nation’s best interests. None of this can be said for Trump, whose mental deterioration is both evident and dangerous, but whose need to avoid convictions on multiple legal fronts forces him to run for his life. That’s the only reason, along with more opportunities to grift and steal from America’s wealth through personal and political channels, Trump had to again. Trump also wants to remake the world in his image. That’s how a toxic narcissist works.

And yet, the Republican Party loves to reminisce about Reagan’s own version of nation-forming, as “an unyielding Reagan told National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, “I want you to do whatever you have to do to help these people keep body and soul together” about the Contras down south. *PBS report

Those are not the words of a man who loves freedom. They are the words of a man who fears failure because he thinks he’s the most powerful man in the world and can’t admit that people won’t do what he says. Later, in a comic parlay of desperation and determination, Reagan shipped 1500 arms to Iran for a seven-man hostage release after claiming he’d freed all those other folks as his term began. That tells us that Reagan, like today’s Heritage Foundation, sought to undermine honest democratic processes to conduct shadow government activities, all while blaming the “Deep State” for supposedly secret ventures.

If “freedom is a fragile thing,” then so is democracy when it is gutted by the willful actions of a unitary executive and crooked accomplices. Nixon led the way on that, Reagan echoed it, and eventually it was the irascibly domineering VP Dick Cheney who gave voice to it. But all along, it was Republican administrations wishing their guy was king. At the same time, it was those “kings” who led the way in terms of criminal indictments and convictions compared to Democrat presidencies.

Reagan presided over the HUD scandal under James Watt and the Iran-Contra scandal, busting unions and gutting the middle class were just some of the ways Reagan used the government he claimed to despise to dismantle financial protections for Americans and mess around on the world stage. It is also speculated that Reagan played loose with constitutional laws to free the hostages held by Iran, but solid proof never emerged. But do we doubt that there were such efforts given the later actions by Oliver North to commit acts of subterfuge?

That sort of willful denial of past transgressions, extending to the likes of Newt Gingrich and his dismissive views on marriage, leaves The Heritage Foundation able to claim all kinds of high-minded family values and patriotism without a shred of guilt over the bogus values apologetics for Reagan, the Bushes, and now Donald Trump, a serial adulterer and constitutional shredder par excellence.

Republicans went full fever dream over Bill Clinton’s Oval Office blowjobs and the Blue Dress, but so-called righteous Republican never questioned Nancy’s astrological addictions in defiance of Christian despise for such things, much less her dirty little mouth. The euphemistically named “Christian Right” also “looked the other way” when it came to Nancy Reagan’s hooky-spooky astrological beliefs and Hollywood habits.

Nor did anyone follow up on Nancy Reagan’s odd reputation as shared by political commentator Hunter S. Thompson, who said, “I had a soft spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth, and also because his wife gave the best head in Hollywood.”

She put her mouth to other clandestine uses with her seemingly innocent anti-drug “Just Say No” campaign preaching substance abstinence to white suburban kids. But the people victimized by that campaign were instead thousands of Black Americans rounded up and jailed on small drug charges. But Republicans used that legacy as an accusatory tool of Jim Crow imposition on Black Men.The for-profit jail industry that emerged to reap dough from that travesty turned out to be a favorite among conservatives eager to punish Black Americans for standing up to White Authority of any kind. Private prisons also replaced slavery as tools for cheap labor.

It all began even earlier, under Nixon. As documented in the OpenSecrets website: “Since President Richard Nixon declared the national “War on Drugs” in the 1970s, the American prison population has skyrocketed; the same is true of the numbers of people locked up in private prisons, especially since the 1990s. Of the 2016 contributions that went to candidates or parties, 85 percent went to Republicans. That’s higher than in most previous cycles, but consistent with the conservative leanings of this industry. Since 1990, private prisons have given 73 percent of their total party-and-candidate contributions to Republicans.” The criminal persecution and prejudice against of Black men and women, on top of economic losses wrought by the disadvantage of slavery, is responsible for that culture’s familial difficulties, pursuant crime and gang activity, and the still-relentless blaming of “minorities” and immigrants for America’s problems. Many Black Americans lead the nation in every human endeavor, which is proof that the prejudice aimed against them in this nation is the travesty for which the country needs to account. That’s why the claims of The Heritage Foundation drip with bloody irony when making statements such as these in Project 2025:

“Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation[.]1 “

The Heritage Foundation loves to ignore the Republican affiliation with its dirty bedfellows, such as those openly waving flags at the insurrection. These include Confederacy holdouts, neo-Nazis, the KKK, anti-Semitic groups and influencers, and backwoods militias eager to overthrow the government using AR-15s atop their bulging waistbands. The GOP loves such complicity in its stalwarts and doesn’t seem to care if they stand for everything America isn’t supposed to be.

P25 loves to ring the bell of “family values” and freedom based ostensibly on the Constitution as one bookend and Christian values on the other. But the volumes between constitute a condensed library of bigotry, discrimination, religious persecution, and self-proclaimed victimhood. There’s also irony amid transitional statements like this one:

“Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”

Supposedly, conservatives don’t like the government interfering in the lives of people. That’s the opposite of conservatism. It’s unclear what or how The Heritage Foundation plans to do to impose “the family as the centerpiece of American life,” but if you look at the weird calls for corporal punishment tin schools, one wonders if Project 2025 isn’t a massive excuse for profligate child abuse. Yahoo News reports, “Oklahoma State Rep. Jim Olsen says corporal punishment in schools has been “successful” for centuries and should remain legal, even for students with disabilities.”

Pro-Life? More like Pro-Sperm.

Any organization refusing to hold men accountable for abortions caused my male imposition of sperm on women is hypocritical.

That’s right, every single abortion in America is caused by a man’s sperm.

But the so-called “Pro-Life” movement never mentions that fact. Instead, they persist in accusing women of being irresponsible by holding to what are now called “reproductive rights.” To enforce this misogynistic worldview, the Heritage Foundation identified potential Supreme Court justices willing to overturn the established law of Roe vs. Wade and throw the abortion rights issue back to the jurisdiction of states. Those justices acted deceitfully in their testimony, insinuating they respected established law on abortion, but in effect, they lied. Now the tragedies of undercutting women’s healthcare rights results in death for women facing medical emergencies.

The conservative faction of America even preaches that pregnancies wrought by rape should be “brought to term.” By those measures, women are nothing but vessels for male sperm according to The Heritage Foundation.

There is nothing “pro-family” about blaming women for problems caused by men or supported by busybody moralizing Christian women behaving like Conservative Mean Girls looking to control other women’s lives. They may “pray” to end abortion, and that’s fine. But then they vote for men willing to stick their dicks into women’s lives without remorse.

The hypocrisy of the Pro-Life defies its supposed roots in Christian values. The Bible shows Jesus dismissing those accusing a woman of adultery by stating, “Let he that is without sin cast the first stone.” With that statement, Jesus indicts not just the men seeking to kill the woman according to their laws (an idea recently raised in some US) but also indicts the authoritarian state from which the stoning tradition emanated. In other words, Jesus indicted the men who brought the women before him, not the woman accused by them.

This proves that if Jesus were alive today, he would say, “If you must depend upon the law to bring about the kingdom of God, you have already failed.”

So yes, on every issue, The Heritage Foundation fails America with its dystopian Project 2025.

(dys·to·pi·an/disˈtōpēən/ “relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.) version of authoritarian rule over society.

The HF P 25 is not only dystopian, it is fascist at its core. Consider the definition fascism as it relates to what you’ve already read and learned here, and what is about to come:

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy (Christianity), subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race (White people) and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

That last note about fascism on the Right, strong regimentation of society and the economy is ardently resisted by Republican fascists claiming instead that they advocate “free market economics.”

But since Reagan the forcible redistribution of wealth from the middle class to America’s wealthiest citizens is not a product of the “free market” at all. Reagan’s specious version of “trickle-down economics” is an economic experiment rewarding corporatism and a plutocracy aided by massive tax breaks for the uber-wealthy while workers’ wages remain flat or depressed. Efforts to raise minimum wages are called “socialism” by economic cynics, a gaslighting of the lower and middle class to subjugate their interests.

A small sector of the US population now possesses more wealth than the other 96% combined. Statistics aren’t the point. The real matter is how factions of society impacted by these policies now believe that the people who caused them are the cure to their problems! The wealthy plutocrat named Donald Trump makes all sorts of promises to Make America Great Again while bloating the national debt by 25%, promising tax cuts for the middle class that expired, and giving billions over to the rich who fund his feckless whims of tariffs, false accounting and outright lies. He’s promised to exclude corporations from environmental legislation who ante up billions to avoid being accountable. That’s environmental injustice bought and sold. The people typically victimized by environmental pollution are the poor, especially minorities.

The Heritage Foundation reflects this vow to sell off American virtues to the highest bidder by dismantling governmental protections and blaming Americans for their own problems:

“Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.”

There’s another counter to this P25 argument. The “administrative state” under Trump’s rule led to an attempt to overthrow the government after he lost the 2020 election. His lies about election fraud, the plot to assemble fake electors and his attempted coup through the January 6^th insurrection all prove that his vision of the “administrative state” is a fascist form of government where he rules like a king without question of his authority. The Heritage Foundation knows this, but refuses to admit it. In fact, it is their entire goal to use Trump as a leveraging device, wait for him to croak from his bad habits, and put in place a theocratic state ruling over the United States of American with administrative impact forcing itself into every aspect of our lives.

But oh, yeah, there’s also the “border crisis.” Let’s talk about that.  

“Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.”

Hey guys, you know who welcomed millions of immigrant into America over the last fifty years? That’s right: it was companies seeking cheap labor while privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. And the accounting of supposed “costs” to Americans in terms of taxes covering immigrant needs seem to ignore the tax contributions of those targeted by such accusations.

And yes, our schools and public facilities need support to deal with language-challenged immigrant children and adults. But that support should come from the companies employing cheaper immigrant labor, because they are privatizing the profits and exporting the costs to everyday Americans. That’s true in Big Ag. That’s true in the restaurant industry, hospitality, you name it. That’s not how the “free market” is supposed to work. If you use the product, which is immigrants, you should pay the bills for those benefits. What we’re actually seeing is socialized corporatism. The Nanny State of corporate welfare is the real problem, not benefits earned and secured by Americans through Social Security, Medicare, or Veteran’s Affairs.

But all P25 wants to talk about is God, because, you know, that sounds righteous and true.

“Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

Well, now we see how hypocritical the Heritage Foundation is. They opposite aims than to secure the “Blessings of Liberty.” People already suffer the effects of Right-Wing identity politics suppressing women’s rights, Black and civil equity, human diversity, or any kind of inclusion. The Heritage Foundation advocates fascism, not freedom, and is in truth a godless organization in all its principle claims. It spits on Jesus by seeking to create a society divided along ideological terms with specific terms of discrimination.

Anyone familiar with the parable of the Good Samaritan knows better. It was self-righteous religious zealots passing by the man left for dead in the ditch because he was considered “unclean” according to religious and cultural laws imposed by legalistic authorities. Instead, the Good Samaritan, a man from a people despised by the community, who saved the man from suffering, paid for his care (that’s socialism) and even funded his needs until he was nursed back to health. If left to the devices of The Heritage Foundation, that man rots in the ditch because he’s unworthy of protection under “God’s Laws” according to biblically literal interpretations of anachronistic scriptures. The Good Samaritan, while well-off, constituted a “radical, bleeding-heart do-gooder” of the type that Jesus proclaimed as worthy of God’s grace.

All of this proves that Project 2025 is a gaslighting pack of self-righteous lies.

“In 1979, the threats we faced were the Soviet Union, the socialism of 1970s liberals, and the predatory deviancy of cultural elites. Reagan defeated these beasts by ignoring their tentacles and striking instead at their hearts.”

No, Reagan did not “defeat these beasts.” Conservatism emphatically lost the battle to control the lives of people based on identity politics, but now they’re engaging in warlike attempts at a fascist takeover of American laws.

For sure, the Moral Majority movement took hold in the United States. It’s denial of reality became the foundation of right-wing politics. Religious conservatism embraced that fight by opposing the teaching of evolution and scientific truth in public schools, seeking to replace it with the “science of denial” based on creationism and euphemistic Intelligent Design. This inane ideology of denial infects nearly 40% of the American population. That is the “majority” that supports the likes of a devilish liar like Trump while claiming he’s a “man of God” made in the image of King David while insisting, quite devilishly in its own right, that “God works with flawed people.”

Well, guess what? John the Baptist would argue with that. The “man of the wilderness” defined the religious and political authorities of his day in advance of Jesus’ arrival on the scene. John called the religious authorities a “brood of vipers” in an echo of the legalistic Serpent who deceived Adam and Eve in that holy parable of humanity’s creation. The Baptist also tossed out religious rituals and the “pay for play” model of Prosperity Gospel in force at the Temple, where money-changers turned God’s house into a commercial enterprise. John later paid the price for his honesty when King Herod, the prophetically perfect model for Donald Trump in his melding of politics and religion, had John’s head chopped off on a promise to his daughter that if she danced lasciviously for his audience the King would grant her any favor she asked. Her corrupt mother asked for the head of John the Baptist because “he publicly denounced her marriage to Herod Antipas, criticizing it as unlawful since she was previously married to Herod’s brother Philip, which went against Jewish law; this public rebuke deeply offended Herodias and fueled her desire for revenge against John.”

Oh, my Lord! What does that say about the serial adulterer and thrice-married and divorced Donald Trump? It does not sound like John the Baptist, the precessor to Jesus in Judeo-Christian heritage, would approve of the sexually abusive narcissist whose relationship with Jeffrey Epstein revealed that he “likes them young?”

Well, even so. The Baptist’s disapproval still does not make it an “American Value” or representative of the liberties promised in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The Separation Clause in the 1^st Amendment proves that there shall be no state religion. But if the Project 2025 initiative DOES succeed, shouldn’t it impose John the Baptists indictment on the likes of Donald Trump? Okay! Bring it on! Let’s see it!

What about Russia and Putin?

As for threats from the Soviet Union being “defeated” by Reagan, America now lives under the thumb of Vladimir Putin’s dictates through Trump, including collusion that he denies, and documented election interference by the Russian state through American social media and even its conservative talking heads on Fox, Newsmax and many other outlets trumping talking points straight from the Pipeline of Putin. Trump is also a kompromat to Russian interests and investment in his businesses. And whether Trump likes to admit it or not, the information revealed about him in the dossier a few years back rings all too true given his corrupt and perverted behavior confessed in public and alluded in his Jeffrey Epstein affiliations.

But look at how P25 tries to avoid their support of a corrupt felon and adjudicated rapist.

“In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones. You see this in the popular left-wing aphorism, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” But in real life, most of the things people “do together” have nothing to do with government.”

Well, we know that Reagan once stated, “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.” And yet P25 plans to use the government to impose its well over all Americans. Again, the hypocrisy and gaslighting the fear and bigotry, the outright hate and delusion are all wrapped together in the paranoid fascism and accusations of the Right that the Left, whose main mission is equal rights, is somehow the cause of America’s problems.

Just look at the fascist tone of this insane statement:

“Furthermore, the next conservative President must understand that using government alone to respond to symptoms of the family crisis is a dead end. Federal power must instead be wielded to reverse the crisis and rescue America’s kids from familial breakdown. The Conservative Promise includes dozens of specific policies to accomplish this existential task.”

See how that works? When liberalism advocates for personal freedoms, it’s evil. But when conservatism threatens fascist impositions, it is liberty at work. These people are nuts. They are consumed with a paranoia so deep it infests their minds like brain worms. Perhaps that’s why RFK, Jr. is so popular a choice for an administrative post.

Here’s more P25 paranoia:

“Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.”

This might be justified given the many churches seem to be little more than political delivery points for fascist right-wing agendas. The entire premise upon which tax-exempt status is granted is avoiding political purposes through religion. That’s based on the First Amendment Separation Clause. So, get a clue, Heritage Foundation. The only reason churches would lose tax-exempt status is by doing your bidding. You’re the cause, not the solution to religious loss of liberty.

But Oh My God, the next bit of language sounds like Civil War.

“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.”

That’s a violent threat. That’s viciousness as policy. That’s un-American, and yet Trump embraces it by stating he plans to persecute “the enemy within.” The sociopathic tone of the hate directed toward “woke culture warriors” shows zero empathy for people long victimized by the longstanding cultural contract of bigotry imposed according to by race, sexual orientation, gender, and religion. Fascism loves to ignore its hateful side and history to claim perpetual authority.

“This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Well, look at that. A great example of censorship to impose bigotry and thought control. That’s George Orwell’s 1984 in action. Then look at the terrified word salad that comes along next. Paranoid much?

(“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi- tive, 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.”

That’s censorship, people. The Heritage Foundation wants to “cancel culture” everything it fears. What goddamned hypocrites.

Oh, and naked pictures? Well, that has to go too.

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian 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.”

We’ve been through many trials to determine the difference between art and pornography. Who else recalls the actions of the John Ashcroft covering up the metal breasts of nude statues in Washington?

We’ve learned that such prudes often have plenty to hide themselves.

As for child sexual abuse. Do you know who conducts some of the worst child predation and pedophilia in America? It’s religious institutions ranging from the Catholic Church to Protestant and Evangelical Youth Pastors. Even the Boy Scouts of America, a highly conservative organization, paid out billions to victims of youth sexual abuse for conduct documented for decades. Even former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert got caught hiding illicit behavior and child abuse from his wrestling coach days. The bigger they are the harder that fall.

All forms of child sexual abuse are awful, but The Heritage Foundation ignores the facts of its real sources to aim hatred at others, especially targets like Drag Queens, while ignoring its closest friends sticking their hands down the pants of boys and girls alike.

What P25 really fears is how many of its own folks can’t resist some good fapping. Even Speaker Mike Johnson enlisted his son as an anti-porn agent, which suggests it was a big problem for both of them. That’s pretty typical out there in the world of suppressed sexual urges. Many of the world’s worst offenders become anti-this-or-that oppressors until they’re ultimate exposed as liars about their own natures. And yes, porn is addictive. So if that’s a problem for you, take personal responsibility, get some treatment, and deal with it like one should for any addiction. Here’s a quick little fun game. When you read the next P25 excerpt in bold, replace the word “pornography” with “football,” and the language is pretty revealing and a bit amusing. Add in gambling and the whole package of the NFL, which behaves like a pornography invading every possible day of the week while claiming family values and military patriotism, feels obscene.

“Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography 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.”

Man, Oh Man. That’s some Orwellian language right there.

But let’s move on to education, a favorite target of Right Wing despotism and fear.

This writer is a substitute teacher with five years of experience working in public schools from Pre-K through high school. I’ve earned high praise as a teacher for encouraging kids with a wide range of capabilities to learn the best way they can. I’ve also learned skills in classroom management and teaching correct behavior. But the P25 wants to blame public schools for somehow undermining parental authority. Let me clue you in on something. That’s about as far from the real problem as you can get. If anything, it is self-righteous conservative parents bitching about their kid’s grades and telling teachers how to do their job that is the problem. =P25 loves bitching about education because they hate it as a path to critical thinking, which is what public schools and colleges are supposed to do; help us learn to think for ourselves. Any parent that doesn’t agree with that is a control freak, and potentially abusive in their indoctrination habits, oppressive insecurity, and inadequate feelings of self-importance. There, we’ve said it. Schools have a balancing role in society. The idea that parents are perfect and own all rights to their child’s mind is a product of a deeply flawed tribal narrative.  

“In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue.

P25 won’t admit it, but ‘school choice’ is a euphemism for ‘we don’t want our kids to learn science or history that conflicts with our conservative beliefs.’

Just look at what comes next in the P25 Manifesto. This is what this entire document is about. It is equivalent to a Unabomber Level incendiary call to gut American society and replace it with a paranoid religious conservative dystopian version of reality. Look at what they fear most:

“The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.”

No, you specious bigots. The United States has a racist and bigoted history of discrimination that needs to be taught to be understood. Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. If the Heritage Foundation lived up to its name, it would abide in that premise. Instead, its denials are a dishonest attempt to avoid conservatism’s deep role in the ugly aspects of our nation’s history. You’d rather lie to yourselves than admit that truth! The Heritage Foundation avoids our nation’s heritagebecause we are not a perfect country. Germany had the guts to apologize for the Holocaust. Gutless conservatives want to proclaim United States’ innocence in the face of all its transgressions. That is the sign of a deeply dishonest mindset.

The same thing goes for conservative, legalistic Christianity, a belief system long used to foment and support the ugliest forms of indoctrination and domination, especially of indigenous peoples. That bwing of religion focused on absolutism is evil in using its twisted version of God and Christ to marginalize people through biblical literalism and its supposed infallible authority.

“Of course, the surest way to put the federal government back to work for the American people is to reduce its size and scope back to something resembling the original constitutional intent. Conservatives desire a smaller government not for its own sake, but for the sake of human flourishing. But the Washington Establishment doesn’t want a constitutionally limited government because it means they lose power and are held more accountable by the people who put them in power.”

The eternal whine about government size is the originalist complaint that the “Founders” never intended for government to grow. That’s idiotic. As for being “accountable by the people who put them in power,” what was that event on January 6^th about again? Was that a “constitutionally limited government” at work for the people? Or was that the product of a conservatively supported lying fascist trying to gut the government for selfish purposes. We know the difference. The Heritage Foundation is the organization that aggressively denies our nation’s laws.

“In the case of making the federal government smaller, more effective, and accountable, the simple answer is the Constitution itself. The surest proof of this is how strenuously and creatively generations of progressives and many Republican insiders have worked to cut themselves free from the strictures of the 1789 Constitution and subsequent amendments.”

This is utter nonsense. The worst offense when it comes to superseding the 1789 Constitution and its amendments is the conservative gutting of the Second Amendment by splicing it in half to give unrestricted gun rights to any Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to carry military-grade weapons around and conduct mass shootings of children in schools, people in churches, concertgoer and 4^th of July parade crowds. The Second Amendment call for a “well-regulated militia” is the originalist value that should be restored.

“Consider the federal budget. Under current law, Congress is required to pass a budget—and 12 issue-specific spending bills comporting with it—every single year. The last time Congress did so was in 1996. Congress no longer meaningfully budgets, authorizes, or categorizes spending.”

Hey boys. Back when Clinton was President, he worked collaboratively with Republicans to balance the budget. Cross-party collaboration is how this is supposed to work. But the Tea Party radicalized the process and now MAGA extremists want to punish Americans for playing by the rules and make their own set of rules.  

“The term Administrative State refers to the policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal government’s departments, agencies, and millions of employees. Under Article I of the Constitution, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.” That is, federal law is enacted only by elected legislators in both houses of Congress.”

How ironic. The conservative Supreme Court has, for the last decade, been making laws and imposing legislation right and left. So shut the hell up about Congress, P25. You’re way off base about this one.  

“This exclusive authority was part of the Framers’ doctrine of “separated powers.” They not only split the federal government’s legislative, executive, and judicial powers into different branches. They also gave each branch checks over the others. Under our Constitution, the legislative branch—Congress—is far and away the most powerful and, correspondingly, the most accountable to the people.”

Here’s a real winner of a statement. The Republican-led House is the least effective legislative body in the history of the nation, and the Republican-led Senate refused to affirm the impeachment of Trump for the insurrection. Stop the apologetics for an incompetent political travesty on the Right.   

“Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening. Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one way or another, through the bureaucracy by Congress.”

Again, the US military once had an audit done and the accountants assigned to that task gave up. No one can tell where the money’s spent, what goes where, or what military-industrial contractors are benefitting the most.  

“Let’s be clear: The most egregious regulations promulgated by the current Administration come from one place: the Oval Office. The President cannot hide.”

And you see no irony in this statement when considering that Trump lied to the American people repeatedly about the threat of Covid? And that he golfed far more than he governed, and cheated at that? And his workdays started at 11:00 am to allow time to paint his face and execute his combover. And when presented with information it had to be summarized on one page so that his short attention span could handle it? And can he even read?

We’ve seen it all by now, and the President can hide. A ton. And Trump attempted coercion of Ukraine, and tried to hide it with obstruction of justice, to gain political dirt on his opponent Joe Biden. And, Trump engaged in election lies that led to an insurrection, and tried to hide that. He also hid Classified documents in his personal residence, and tried to hide that too. He tried to hide his scandalous relationship with a series of high-profile porn stars, including $130,000 payoffs as hush money, a case that is concluding as this piece is written. He also “hid” from the public a sexual assault years ago on a woman whom he defamed and now has to pay millions of dollars because he lied about it.

With all these clear indications of your pet president hiding the truth, what are you people at The Heritage Foundation doing beside kissing each other’s rings?  Oh wait. We’re about to see. You’re going to project all these faults on others. That’s the way you do it. You get your money for nothing and your chicks for free?

“A conservative President must move swiftly to do away with these vast abuses of presidential power and remove the career and political bureaucrats who fuel it.”

We’ve heard how you think this is supposed to work, but the incoming President is currently beholden to technology billionaires and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who dictates American foreign policy to a “conservative President” too damned weak yet patently narcissistic in his public shows of “strength” to stand up to authoritarians and wealthy figures he admires.

“As monolithic as the Left’s institutional power appears to be, it originates with appropriations from Congress and is made complete by a feckless President. A conservative President must look to the legislative branch for decisive action.”

Hey, Heritage biggies, what are you really talking about here? President Joe Biden stabilized the economy after Trump crashed it just like Obama did after Bush crashed it. And Reagan didn’t do anything good for the economy either! His buddie GHWB promise “no new taxes” but whoopsie doops! Many times now, Democrat Presidents saved America from economic devastation with steady hands and wise policy. There’s nothing monolithic about good governance. But Republicans don’t recognize it, so they blame others for the problems caused by conflicted ideology and religious denial.  

“Finally, the President can restore public confidence and accountability to our most important government function of all: national defense. The American people desire a military full of highly skilled servicemen and women who can protect the homeland and our interests overseas. The next conservative President must end the Left’s social experimentation with the military, restore warfighting as its sole mission, and set defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party as its highest priority.”

Does this statment mean The Heritage Foundation wants to start wars? Because that’s what Bush did after letting America’s guard down, allowing terrorist attacks in New York and DC, (including our Pentagon, for God’s Sake) and going to war on false premises and lies, conducting torture in the same cells used by Saddam Hussein, and generally messing around to the tune of $7T of unbudgeted war spending with no result but death and injury, mental suffering and PTSD for thousands of servicemen and women of all diversity spectrum willing to serve but deemed “suckers and losers” by the likes of Donald Trump, a draft-dodger.

“The next conservative President must possess the courage to relentlessly put the interests of the everyday American over the desires of the ruling elite. Their outrage cannot be prevented; it must simply be ignored. And it can be. The Left derives its power from the institutions they control. But those institutions are only powerful to the extent that constitutional officers surrender their own legitimate authority to them.”

Here’s a question for all your die-hard conservatives out there: What is “The Left?”

It’s people who believe trust that an understanding of the humanities, science, critical thinking and cultural equity are good things. Those are American values held closely by the Founding Fathers. So we have to surmise that it’s conservatism that undermines democracy when it chooses bigotry over equality, and fascism over democratic rule of law.

“To most Americans, this is common sense. But in Washington, D.C. and other centers of Leftist power like the media and the academy, this statement of basic civics is branded hate speech. Progressive elites speak in lofty terms of openness, progress, expertise, cooperation, and globalization. But too often, these terms are just rhetorical Trojan horses concealing their true intention—stripping “we the people” of our constitutional authority over our country’s future.

Perhaps it’s Time for a reality check, folks. Common sense does not mean acting like the world was created in six literal days, or that a global flood once covered the whole earth. We need to start with baseline concepts of reality if we’re going to discuss common sense.

And, when you talk about “openness, progress, expertise, cooperation, and globalization,” those are all aspects of the American experiment that promoted growth and international respect.  

“Instead, they believe in a kind of 21st century Wilsonian order in which the “enlightened,” highly educated managerial elite runs things rather than the humble, patriotic working families who make up the majority of what the elites contemptuously call “fly-over country.”

That’s quite a hard-on The Heritage Foundation has for the name “Wilson.”

Are they talking about that volleyball in the movie Castaway? Because that Wilson guy seemed like a good friend in a time of need, and America needs one of those right now. But also, no one on the Left calls middle America “fly-over country.” We live her. That’s a term invented by the Right to claim self-victimhood. Oh my gosh, they’re still bent over Wilson. Look at this.

“This Wilsonian hubris has spread like a cancer through many of America’s largest corporations, its public institutions, and its popular culture. Those who run our so-called American corporations have bent to the will of the woke agenda and care more for their foreign investors and organizations than their American workers and customers.”

There is no “woke agenda.” There is a commitment among respectful people to honor the personal autonomy of all people. We understand you’re either too stubborn or willfully ignorant to grasp that, but we know why. You’re profoundly afraid of people different than you––including young people, because THF is primarily angry old white men and batty bigoted control freaks––who want to punish people for being themselves rather than cowing to some whitewashed version of a Republican tombstone.

And take note, if you’re supposedlly “pro-life,” because when it comes to “cancer,” let’s recall who got rid of the vicious threat of “pre-existing conditions” as a determinant for who in American can get healthcare coverage and who can’t. The ironically “Darwinian” call by conservatives to exclude those with health problems from the healthcare system is a product of abjectly dismissive corporatism, not a liberal agenda. The real “death squads” acting on Americans are healthcare insurers denying claims and letting people die to collect more profits. If you couldn’t figure that out, that’s why the United Healthcare guy got shot. Got a clue yet?

Here goes P25 xenophobia next:

“Progressive policymakers and pundits in America either fail to understand this premise or intentionally reject it. They enthusiastically support supranational organizations like the United Nations and European Union, which are run and staffed almost entirely by people who share their values and are mostly insulated from the influence of national elections. That’s why they are eager for America to sign international treaties on everything from pharmaceutical patents to climate change to “the rights of the child”—and why those treaties invariably endorse poli- cies that could never pass through the U.S. Congress.”

Okay, you’re xenophobic. We get it. But collaborating with the world’s other nations on healthcare, for example, could help us prevent future pandemics. Obama planned for that and Trump gutted our agencies tasked with that purpose, then denied the threat of Covid and blamed everyone else for his lies and incompetence. He’s a vicious liar, that one. Selfish. Fearful. Narcissistic. Dismissive. A grifter willing to sell $100 Bibles made in China while screaming about Chinese influence on America.

“That’s why today’s progressive Left so cavalierly supports open borders despite the lawless humanitarian crisis their policy created along America’s southern border. They seek to purge the very concept of the nation-state from the American ethos, no matter how much crime increases or resources drop for schools and hospitals or wages decrease for the working class. Open-borders activism is a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”—publicly promoting one’s own virtue without risking any personal incon- venience. Indeed, the only direct impact of open borders on pro-open borders elites is that the constant flow of illegal immigration suppresses the wages of their housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys.”

Illegal immigration went down during Obama’s presidency. Get a clue.

And you don’t get to cite Dietrich Bonhoeffer about “cheap grace.” This is a complete misuse of that term, and an ignorant one at that. Bonhoeffer stood up to the specific forms of fascism the Heritage Foundation and P25 are now proposing. He gave his life defending genuine Christian principles and proposed that Christianity should give up its religiosity and embrace the “this worldliness” of its Judaistic heritage. He did this because religious legalism in league with political fascism led to The Holocaust, in which Hitler stated, “We’re only doing to the Jews what Christianity has been doing for 1500 years.” So you fake Christians at the Heritage Foundation do not get to use Bonhoeffer as an example of your virtues. You are the precise opposite of everything he stood for.

But now, let’s look at your other abuse of Bonhoeffer’s words…

“Cheap grace” aptly describes the Left’s love affair with environmental extremism. Those who suffer most from the policies environmentalism would have us enact are the aged, poor, and vulnerable. It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.”

On this subject you are absolutely wrong. The term “Environmental justice” describes how the poor and those of racial origins other than white peope are most often victims of pollution caused by industry and bad public policy. There is nothing ‘extremist’ about holding corporations responsible for these abuses accountable. But you flip it around casually to support your absolutely dishonest notions about “cheap grace.” You should be ashamed. Or do you have no shame, just a lousy grasp of theology and an addiction to stealing words from heroes to make yourself look heroic? You’re frauds. Just like Trump.

“At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human. Stewardship and conservation are supplanted by population control and economic regression. Environmental ideologues would ban the fuels that run almost all of the world’s cars, planes, factories, farms, and electricity grids. Abandoning confidence in human resilience and creativity in responding to the challenges of the future would raise impediments to the most meaningful human activities. They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.?”

Oh, so it’s still all about oil and gas, is it? And we know you think climate change “isn’t real.” That’s one more layer of terminal denial employed as an ideology of selfish profit-making and dismissal of accountability.

“The same goals are the heart of elite support for economic globalization. For 30 years, America’s political, economic, and cultural leaders embraced and enriched Communist China and its genocidal Communist Party while hollowing out America’s industrial base. What may have started out with good intentions has now been made clear. Unfettered trade with China has been a catastrophe. It has made a handful of American corporations enormously profitable while twisting their business incentives away from the American people’s needs.”

It’s frustrating to read statements like this when it was America’s corporations shipping jobs overseas in search of cheap labor while America’s unions were gutted first by Reagan and decades of corporatist dissolution. How Republicans try to claim the high road on this issue? Could you be any more specious about cause and effect? Yes, you can. So let’s see it.  

“For a generation, politicians of both parties promised that engagement with Beijing would grow our economy while injecting American values into China. The opposite has happened. American factories have closed. Jobs have been outsourced. Our manufacturing economy has been financialized. And all along, the corporations profiting failed to export our values of human rights and freedom; rather, they imported China’s anti-American values into their C-suites.”

What the heck does this mean… “Our manufacturing economy has been financialized.” Talk about Orwellian speak. Who taught you English? Do you just make things up to sound smart? Because you’re not sounding smart making statements like this that mean nothing.

But by the way, when it comes to American industry’s interests, President Joe Biden just blocked the sale of US Steel to Nippon in Japan. Democrats have stood by workers and manufacturers for decades, and Biden’s infrastructure investment is forward-looking and futuristic. Trump promised to bring back American jobs and did nothing.

“When the Founders spoke of “pursuit of Happiness,” what they meant might be understood today as in essence “pursuit of Blessedness.” That is, an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like. Many find happiness through their work. Think of dedicated teach- ers or health care professionals you know, entrepreneurs or plumbers throwing themselves into their businesses—anyone who sees a job well done as a personal reward. Religious devotion and spirituality are the greatest sources of happiness.”

This religious language is steeped in dog-whistle bigotry. If an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained, then leave people alone. Stop legislating religious morals based on anachronistic values long debunked by biblical scholars willing to confront the age-old tradition leading to persecution of Jews, gay people, Black people, women and more. You’re hypocrites on every front.  

“The American Republic was founded on principles prioritizing and maximizing individuals’ rights to live their best life or to enjoy what the Framers called “the Blessings of Liberty.” It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good— that the ruling class disdains.”

You don’t even hear yourselves speak, do you? Everything you cite here is exactly what liberalism advocates. But because you disapprove of gay people, or don’t want to hold men accountable for causing abortions, or think that teaching real American history with all its abuses and genocide, racism, slavery, and Confederate treason is going to ruin young minds, you’d rather lie that it’s bigoted people who are beset by government and “the Libs.” That’s just perverse logic.

“Left to our own devices, the American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women, mercantilism, socialism, Wilsonian globalism, Fascism, Communism, and (today) wokeism. To the Left, these assertions of patriotic self-assurance are just so many signs of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority—proof that, in fact, we need a ruling elite making decisions for us.”

Americans were not “left to our own devices.” People in that era arrived through principles of Enlightenment, not religion, at a belief that America should be self-governing, not subject to a king’s rule. But conservatives of the day wanted to stick with Britain! You’ve been on the wrong side of history from the beginning, and now you’re gutting our constitution with a “Promise” of a ruling elite based on theocracy, fascist instincts and denial of the Constitution as proven by Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government. Donald Trump is not a president for all people. He’s stated that emphatically.

“The promise of socialism—Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, whatever name it chooses—is simple: Government control of the economy can ensure equal outcomes for all people. The problem is that it has never done so. There is no such thing as “the government.” There are just people who work for the government and wield its power and who—at almost every opportunity—wield it to serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second. This is not a failing of one nation or socialist party, but inherent in human nature.”

There you go again, throwing words around to sound smart? It’s hilarious that you claim that there’s no such thing as “the government.” You’ve already spent thousands of word outlining what the government should be and needs to be, and haven’t even gotten to the part where you map out the dogmatic tactics you plan to employe. Interestingly, on review, the entire document created as Project 2025 amounts to a denial of its own existence because every contention is a dystopian dream that you’re somehow persecuted when the entire “plan” is to in turn… persecute, disenfranchise, punish, and depict “the other” as “the enemy within.” You’re clearly a paranoid pack of fools with an 8^th grade grasp of civics, immature, and decidedly antagonistic.   

“Analogous pro-growth reforms for America’s voluntary civil society are also in order. America is not an economy; it is a country. Economic freedom is not the only important freedom. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the freedom to assemble also represent key components of the American promise. Today, in addition to the problem of Big Tech censorship, we see speakers at universities shouted down, parents investigated and arrested for attempting to speak at school board meetings, and donors to conservative causes harassed and intimidated. The next conservative President must defend our First Amendment rights. “

When people are called to account for bigotry, lying about science, repeating disinformation as truth, claiming “alternative facts” (as Trump did) and generally trolling members of society as having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to gaslight people into submission, they are not the persecutors you claim. They’re standing up for the freedoms you say you defend yet abuse. The Fox News Network paid $750 in defamation lawsuits to a election machine tech company it publicly maligned. And Trump earned fines of $450M for illegal business practices. These are the abuses evidencing real corruption. And those people shouted down at school board meetings? Free speech works both ways.

“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 such 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 they first bend the knee.”

Um, let’s review the evidence here when it comes to “all men are created equal.” First, it is religious beliefs that deem folks the “chosen people” of God. America’s history includes the ugly effects of Manifest Destiny used to commit genocide and hold slaves, both of which defied equality for all “men.” It was conservatives denying women the right to vote, and it’s conservatives to this day denying gay people the right to marriage, all based on “special status” of the Christian religion as a dictator of values for America. That’s unconstitutional.

“Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right. With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.”

Look at the fear and desperation and the acknowledged brevity of the entire P25 premise, which is this: impose thy will on others quickly before they see the lies upon which it is based. That’s why Trumpism and MAGA works. They are shallow, slogan-based claims to authority based on fear, willful ignorance, self-proclaimed victimhood and dystopian paranoia.  The Right Wing media leverages these fears for profits.
 

I think you included the following quote in the P25 doc, but it might have popped up somewhere else too. It’s appropriate describing what’s going on in America, but not in favor of P25.

Just two years after the death of the last surviving Constitutional Convention delegate, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln warned that the greatest threat to America would come not from without, but from within.