The forward of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate For Leadership, or as most of us know it, Project 2025, shows the power of fear, and how specific some fears can be.
Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, speaks at the 2023 Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture in Washington, April 12, 2023. Roberts said Thursday, July 18, 2024, that most political violence committed in the U.S. in the past 25 years was the work of left-wing groups or individuals. But 2022 research shows that right-wing extremists are actually more likely to commit violence. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
By Denise Clay-Murray
Normally, I’d begin a piece on something like the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, or Project 2025, by telling you that the reason I’ve read it is to keep you from having to.
In this case, however, I’m not going to do that. Because if you’re a person of color, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, someone who practices a religion other than Christianity, or a woman of childbearing age, you need to see this.
That’s because you’re the threat that this 922-page document is designed to neutralize.
Now how do I know that? I know that because the combination of racism, homophobia, Christian nationalism, and misogyny jumps off the page so high that Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid couldn’t block it.
The fear encased in this document is not a new one. From the beginning, it talks about how the 1970s were a time of endangerment for conservatives because you had low-income communities “drowning in decadence” in the form of government assistance and drugs, the rise of communism and the “toxic normalization of transgenderism” and other forces leading to a “totalitarian cult known as The Great Awokening.”
I think that the best translation of this group of sentences comes from the late Gil-Scott Heron in his song “B-Movie”:
Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights…it’s all wrong
Call in the cavalry to disrupt this perception of freedom gone wild
Ironically, “B-Movie” was written about President Ronald Reagan, who was the recipient of the first version of “Mandate for Leadership.” If such things as calling for the end of unions, persecuting the LGBTQ community, and attempting to dismantle every piece of civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s feels familiar to you, it’s because the Reagan administration tried it first.
So, the Conservative Promise promises to go further than Reagan was allowed to and remake the presidency in such a way where we come dangerously close to being ruled rather than governed.
This plan breaks down into the following categories:
1-Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children;
2-Dismantle the Administrative State and return self-governance to the American People;
3-Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats, and;
4-Secure our God-given right to live freely, referred to in the Constitution as the “blessings of Liberty.”
Now, the SUN will break down the ways that these pillars show that the Heritage Foundation and its fellow travelers in the conservative movement are indeed capable of irony as we take you through Project 2025.
But it’s the last one, the “blessings of Liberty” thing, that I want to tackle in this piece.
When the Supreme Court dismantled Roe v. Wade via the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, everyone paid attention to the decision itself, and the dissent written by the three justices that voted against it.
But I paid attention to the concurrence written by Justice Clarence Thomas. Why I’m focusing on this concurrence because at one time, Thomas was the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, and like many of the people Republicans tend to appoint to such positions, he spent more time NOT enforcing civil rights laws regarding unemployment than he did anything else.
As you read “Mandate for Leadership,” you’ll see that there’s a fairly outsized focus on a lot of things that are, to quote Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz, things that folks would usually tell you to, “Mind your own damned business!” about.
Thomas covered many of those things in his concurrence in Dobbs. He called for almost every ruling the Supreme Court has made that enshrined a right to privacy to be reviewed, calling special attention to Obergefell v. Hodges, the ruling that legalized same-sex marriage and Griswold v. Connecticut, the ruling that gave married women the right to get contraception without their husband’s permission.
(Oddly enough, he left another Supreme Court ruling with privacy at its center alone. That ruling: Loving v. Virginia, the ruling that legalized interracial marriage. I can understand him on that. If I were married to a white man who helped foment an attempted coup d’etat like Thomas’s wife Ginny did on Jan. 6, 2021, I’d probably leave that ruling alone, too. If she can support the violent overthrow of our democracy, there’s no telling what she’d do if you ruled against her in court.)
For example, in the “restore the family” section of the forward, you get where Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance derived his belief that women should remain in marriages in which they are treated badly. There’s an outsized focus on single parent homes, especially in communities of color. According to this treatise, 70% of all Black children are born out of wedlock, a piece of information that’s not substantiated anywhere in the piece. I looked for a citation or a footnote or any kind of independent verification of that statistic and couldn’t find any.
I have always believed that much of what has gone on with what’s being called the conservative movement — true adherents to the vision of conservatism espoused by the late Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate and U.S. senator, would probably disagree with much of what Project 2025 promotes — is a result of the movements for equality of the 1960s. Because a lot of marginalized communities asserted themselves and demanded that America at the very least attempt to adhere to what its constitution says, those who were on the opposite side of that divide have been slowly making moves to bring America back to its original factory settings.
Settings that don’t include allowing many of us to, well, live.
While I freely admit that getting through all 922 pages of the Mandate for Leadership will be a pretty merciless slog — the writing alone shows what happens when you don’t have a good editor — It’s important that everyone in America, especially in places like Philadelphia, read this document. To find it, go to: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf.
There is a group of people trying extremely hard to make it so Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump gets the chance to shape America in an image that most of us will not recognize, using this document as a blueprint.
Whether or not they get to do that is entirely up to you.
Editor’s Note: Project 2025 — Why it Matters
Over the next few months, leading up to the general election on November 5, the SUN will explore some of the key points of the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate For Leadership,” widely known as Project 2025. We will try to connect the dots regarding how this plan could negatively affect our readers and cause irreparable harm to our democracy as we know it. Throughout our explainer series, the SUN strongly encourages our readers to visit www.project2025.org/policy to read each one of these initiatives for yourself, in context.
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