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Project 2025

Heritage Foundation Makes Plans to Staff Next G.O.P. Administration - The New York Times - "No matter the Republican, the effort has set a goal of up to 20,000 potential officials in a database akin to a right-wing LinkedIn."
The Heritage Foundation is the publisher of Project 2025 and its predecessors all the way back to the Reagan years. It was also a prominent present at the Republican National Convention this year.

"... virtually every chapter calls for additional appointees to wrest power from longtime career staff members in their respective departments." saying that “Large swaths of the State Department’s work force are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative president’s policy agenda and vision,” and about the Department of Justice that “Large swaths of the department have been captured by an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical left ideologues who have embedded themselves throughout its offices.”

"The book calls for the reinstatement of Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order that would allow the president and political appointees to convert many career civil service positions into appointed roles, thus making those people easier to dismiss and replace with loyalists"

Seems like bringing back the  Spoils system where politicians appoint their friends and relatives and supporters to government jobs. This was done over the first century of the US, and it was brought to an end by the  Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. "The act mandates that most positions within the federal government should be awarded on the basis of merit instead of political patronage."

Also, it must be noted that lovers of checks and balances in government ought to love a government bureaucracy that is at least somewhat insulated from politics.

At the E.P.A., for example, the document calls for a new science adviser and at least six new appointees charged with reforming the agency’s scientific research; qualifications for those roles should stress managerial skills rather than “personal scientific output.” Throughout the book, descriptions of new research agendas are often paired with the explicit findings that such research should yield, whether on the mental and physical damage that abortion inflicts on women or the pernicious impact of taxes and regulations on minority-owned businesses.
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A new administration also ought to insure that “any research conducted with taxpayer dollars serves the national interest in a concrete way in line with conservative principles.”

Except that that's not what research is all about. It's not about justifying preconceived ideas but about testing hypotheses and learning new things.
 
Despite its professed desire to reduce the size and ambition of government “back to something resembling the original constitutional intent,” in practice, the document’s contributors are willing to build significant bureaucracies. “Mandate for Leadership” calls for dismantling the Department of Homeland Security, for example, and instead creating a major stand-alone federal immigration department. It would piece together Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as well as portions of the Health and Human Services and Justice Departments to build a Cabinet-level body employing more than 100,000 federal workers. This would be “the third-largest department measured by manpower,” the book boasts.
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A lot of bureaucracy, but bureaucracy that these right-wingers *love*.

The authors recognize the bipartisan dangers of excessive political appointments in the executive branch, but they worry about that mainly when their opponents are the ones benefiting.
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So they are only worried when they are the ones being bitten in the butt.
The book regards pursuit of the president’s agenda — variously described as the president’s “needs,” “goals” or “desires” — as always consistent with the law. “The modern conservative president’s task is to limit, control and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people,” it states. And the American people’s needs, goals and desires are conflated with those of the leader.
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I'm sure that Donald Trump would *love* to believe something like that.
 
In the book’s foreword, Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, writes that the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence should be understood as the “pursuit of blessedness,” that is, that “an individual must be free to live as his creator ordained — to flourish.” The Constitution, he explains, “grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.” The book ties this argument to the philosophical and legal concept of “ordered liberty,” in which individual rights are weighed against social stability.
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That seems like an autocrat's definition of freedom, because the word more usually means in this context "unconstrained".
The notion that liberty entails the discipline to do the right thing, as opposed to the choice to do whatever things we want, has a long lineage in American political thought, dating back to the Puritans and the “city on a hill.” But in “Mandate for Leadership,” the answer to what we ought to do depends on the cultural and religious proclivities of the authors. “This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family — marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners and the like,” Roberts writes. It is also found in work, charity and, above all, in “religious devotion and spirituality.” Later, in a chapter on the Department of Labor, the book suggests that because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest,” American workers should be paid extra for working on that day. “A shared day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time off together, rather than as atomized individuals,” it says.
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Seems like theocracy.

How will the Project 2025 executive branch relate to Congress?
Congress’s powers of oversight, for instance, would diminish in various ways. Rather than endure the process of congressional confirmation for people taking on key positions in the executive branch, the new administration should just place those officials in acting roles, which would allow them to begin pursuing the president’s agenda “while still honoring the confirmation requirement.”
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Seems like they could ignore Congress about those officials.
Lawmakers would no longer review U.S. foreign arms sales, the book states, except when “unanimous congressional support is guaranteed,” a requirement that renders those reviews pointless. The Department of Homeland Security should have the power to select and limit its congressional oversight committees. And the White House can tell the State Department when to remain “radio silent” in the face of congressional inquiries.
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There go checks and balances.
 
In “Affirming the Separation of Powers,” the document states that the executive branch has as much right as any other branch of government to “assess constitutionality.” A new admin must “embrace the Constitution and understand the obligation of the executive branch to use its independent resources and authorities to restrain the excesses of both the legislative and judicial branches.”
Excesses?

Seems like all of absolute monarchy but hereditary succession. Something that the Founders were firmly opposed to. In their Declaration of Independent, they did not portray King George III as some good tsar with bad underlings. They portrayed him as a big villain.

It is consistent, though, with the leadership of a president who likes to talk of the nation’s top jurists as “my judges” and who referred to a former speaker of the House of Representatives as “my Kevin.”
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The Heritage Foundation is not alone in proposing what a second Trump Admin might do. Opinion | The Shadow War to Determine the Next Trump Administration - The New York Times - mentioning the America First Policy Institute. “The Heritage people look down on the A.F.P.I. people like they’re a joke. And the A.F.P.I. people look at the Heritage people like they’re phony MAGA.”

"The difficulty with Trumpism is Trump himself, who renders any coherent ism impossible." - Project 2025 suggests that Europeans only depend on the US for a nuclear deterrent, while Donald Trump has stated that he would “encourage” Russia to attack NATO allies who don't “pay their bills.”
 
“Mandate for Leadership” is a game effort, nonetheless. Its ability to obscure drastic change with drab prose is impressive. Its notions of an executive less encumbered by laws or oversight is of a piece with Trump’s views on the immunity and impunity that the president should enjoy.
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Someone who likes Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un while neglecting Ukraine and NATO, Taiwan, and South Korea.
The document’s willingness to empower the administrative state when doing so suits ideological or policy preferences is remarkable, especially given its rhetoric to the contrary.
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Then mentioning Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s book "The Imperial Presidency" about Richard Nixon's presidency half a century ago.
 
I don't know if anyone has posted this, but...

https://www.stopthecoup2025.org/

Clearly an activist site aiming to help stop Project 2025, lots of info, tools, and resources for ALL of us, not just current activists.

Here's a bit of the home page so you can see what it's about.

It does have a donation function, but it's for supporting specifically Stop the Coup 2025, not for any candidate so there's no worry about candidate donations being kept by a third party donation site. (If you want to donate to a candidate, go to their campaign site, not a third party site. Some third parties are good and some are not.)

Screenshot 2024-07-31 194123.jpg
 
JD Vance writes foreword for Project 2025 leader’s upcoming book | Books | The Guardian
The Republican senator and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance has written the foreword to a forthcoming book by the head of Project 2025, the vast rightwing plan for a second Trump administration Democrats say shows the authoritarian threat posed by the GOP – and which Donald Trump has tried to disavow.

In publicity material for the book, Vance says of Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation: “Never before has a figure with [his] depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism.”

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Roberts’ book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, will be published in September.
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That book is still in the works: Dawn's Early Light – HarperCollins

JD Vance writes glowing foreword to Project 2025 leader’s upcoming book | JD Vance | The Guardian - "Republican vice-presidential nominee praises Kevin Roberts’ conservative vision, stymying Trump’s efforts to deny ties"
JD Vance endorses the ideas of Kevin Roberts, leader of Project 2025, as a “fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics” and a “surprising – even jarring” path forward for conservatives, the Republican vice-presidential nominee writes in the foreword of Roberts’ upcoming book.

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“The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump,” Vance writes. “Yet it is Heritage’s power and influence that makes it easy to avoid risks. Roberts could collect a nice salary, write decent books, and tell donors what they want to hear. But Roberts believes doing the same old thing could lead to the ruin of our nation.”

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In the hours before the foreword was published by news outlets, Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, said he was stepping down from his role and that some of the project’s work was winding down, though it’s not clear what that means.
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Heritage Foundation President Rails Against IVF, Dog Parks in Project 2025 Book
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, the mastermind behind the widely publicized Project 2025, rails against in vitro fertilization (IVF), abortion, contraceptives, childless adults, and even dog parks in his upcoming book, according to a new report.

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“In vitro fertilization (IVF) seems to assist fertility but has the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes,” Roberts writes.
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What a bullshit argument.
According to the leaked excerpts, Roberts considers IVF a “contraceptive technology,” which he defines as one of the “revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family.” He blames these factors for rising abortion rates.

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“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” Vance wrote. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

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In another excerpt from the book highlighted by Media Matters, Roberts decries the Swampoodle Dog Park and Playground, a small green space in D.C.’s NoMa neighborhood, for allegedly prioritizing space for dogs over playground equipment for children. He claims the dog park is an example of “the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.”
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Dogs vs. children?
 
Read J.D. Vance’s Violent Foreword to Project 2025 Leader’s New Book | The New Republic
The subtitle and cover of Roberts’s book were softened as scrutiny of the Trump campaign’s ties to Project 2025 grew. The book, which is scheduled to be published on September 24, was originally announced with the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America” and featured a match on the center of its cover. The subtitle is now “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match is nowhere to be seen. Promotional language invoking conservatives on the “warpath” to “burn down … institutions” like the FBI, the Department of Justice, and universities has also been removed or toned down, though it is still present in some sales pages.

But the inspiration for that extreme language can be found in Vance’s foreword, which ends with a call for followers to “circle the wagons and load the muskets,” and describes Roberts’s ideas as an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay [sic] ahead.”
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Eek.

JD Vance and Kevin Roberts are both Catholics from poor families who had difficult childhoods, and they are now both working in DC to remake the country.
First, he praises Roberts for his willingness to criticize corporations and break with the GOP’s free-market orthodoxy; then, for his strong emphasis on the family. “Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics,” Vance writes, by “recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.”

Vance’s foreword is also, notably, a call for revolution. “The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems,” he writes. “We are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach.”
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So the market is not providing very well here.

Then reproducing JD Vance's preface to that book.
 
Project 2025’s Mastermind Personally Thanked J.D. Vance in His New Book
In the uncorrected proof of the book’s acknowledgments section reviewed by The Intercept, Roberts thanks “friends” like Tucker Carlson and Newt Gingrich for “reviewing the draft and for writing some excellent blurbs,” which are also on the current Amazon page.

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On Tuesday, Hemingway blasted the Trump campaign’s dig at Project 2025. “Trumpworld bows down to left-wing media lies, and keeps signaling he doesn’t want his most loyal foot soldiers — who kept with him even when very few others did — or their conservative ideas in his next administration,” she wrote on X. “Interesting.”

Along with Vance, Roberts expresses gratitude to several other conservative politicians. “A few elected officials were vital to this book,” Roberts writes in the acknowledgments, singling out two more by name: his “friends Rep. Chip Roy and Sen. Mike Lee, with whom I’ve had long and esoteric discussions about conservatism.”
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Apparently the details of how they are going to implement Project 2025 are too controversial to publish.


And since we are talking about Vance endorsing crazy books, here's another one:

(New York Times opinion piece, archive version so there's no paywall.)

The title should be enough to scare you: "Unhumans".
 
Book with ties to Project 2025 and JD Vance delayed until after the election - "Project 2025 has provided ample fodder for Democratic attacks on Trump, linking him to its most incendiary policy proposals and ideas to remake the federal government."

Original NYT link: Opinion | JD Vance Just Blurbed a Book Arguing That Progressives Are Subhuman - The New York Times

 Unhumans - "Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them)"

Publisher's page: Unhumans "The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them)" by right-wingers Jack Posobiec, Joshua Lisec, and Steve Bannon
For nearly 250 years, far-left uprisings have followed the same battle plans—from the first call for change to last innocent executed, from denial a revolution is even happening to declaration of the new order. Unhumans takes readers on a shocking, sweeping, and succinct journey through history to share the untold stories of radical takeovers that textbooks don't teach.

And there is one conclusion: We're in a new revolution right now.

But this is not a book about ideology or politics. Unhumans reveals that communism, socialism, Marxism, and all other radical-isms are not philosophies but tactics—tactics that are specifically designed to unleash terror on everyday people and revoke their human rights to life, liberty, and property. These are the forces of unhumanity. This is what they do. Every. Single. Time. Unhumans steals their playbook, breaks apart their strategies piece by piece, and lays out the tactics of what it takes to fight back—and win, using real-world examples.
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with reviews that include
“In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”
—J. D. Vance, Senator (R-OH)

“The far Left murdered 100 million people in the twentieth century and have repeatedly shown that they will stop at nothing to achieve their totalitarian goals. They have torn down countless societies using a sophisticated playbook of propaganda. The only way to stop them in the future is to use their own subversive playbook against them. Unhumans reveals that playbook and teaches us how to deploy it immediately to save the West.”
—Donald Trump, Jr.

“With beauty, rhythm, and prose more often seen in fiction, Unhumans is a breakneck adventure through millennia of human history. Posobiec and Lisec guide the reader through Ancient Rome, Maoist China, Franco’s Spain, and more as they chronicle the awesome and ancient battle between civilization and uncivilization, humans and unhumans. Placing the current culture war in historical perspective, Unhumans teaches readers to combat the tyrannical forces that have crumbled empires—and that have come for our own.”
—Dr. Peter Boghossian
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Also by Tucker Carlson, Lt. Gen., USA (Ret.) Michael T. Flynn, obert Stacy McCain, The American Spectator
 
More from the NYT:
The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today.
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Late Roman Republic? Seems like the  Gracchi brothers The French Revolution? Some right-wingers continue to have a grudge against it.

Back to that book. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” the authors write. Spanish dictator Francisco Franco they call one of the "great man of history”, comparable to George Washington. He led the overthrowing of the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930's, and then ruled as a dictator for the rest of his life. He stated “We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.”
“Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.

Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years.
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“The great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists must occur on all terrains of society they currently possess and on those they aim to seize,” the authors wrote, “It is achievable but only with the resolve of Franco and the thoroughness of McCarthy.” (Joe McCarthy, of course)
 
Compare that to what Vance said on the alt-right podcast “Jack Murphy Live” in 2021, when he argued that Republicans, upon taking power, should purge their opponents the way Iraq’s government once purged members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
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“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left,” he said. “We need like a de-Baathification program, but like a de-wokification program in the United States.”

After stating that “we don’t have a real constitutional republic anymore,” he proposed that if Donald Trump gets re-elected, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Something in Project 2025. If the courts object, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Finally, the book's authors write “Much like the United States founding fathers, Franco and his fellows saw themselves as rebels intended to overthrow a corrupt, tyrannical government that aided and abetted murder and rape as well as other repugnant sins.”

Was King George III a left-wing ogre?

"Unhumans" seems mistitled. It ought to be "Our Struggle", or better yet, "Unser Kampf".
 
This is what I don't understand. The uberwealthy run everything already. Why do they want to get rid of democracy, or at least the facade of it?
 
lpetrich said:
Compare that to what Vance said on the alt-right podcast “Jack Murphy Live” in 2021, when he argued that Republicans, upon taking power, should purge their opponents the way Iraq’s government once purged members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
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“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left,” he said. “We need like a de-Baathification program, but like a de-wokification program in the United States.”

After stating that “we don’t have a real constitutional republic anymore,” he proposed that if Donald Trump gets re-elected, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Something in Project 2025. If the courts object, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Finally, the book's authors write “Much like the United States founding fathers, Franco and his fellows saw themselves as rebels intended to overthrow a corrupt, tyrannical government that aided and abetted murder and rape as well as other repugnant sins.”

Was King George III a left-wing ogre?

"Unhumans" seems mistitled. It ought to be "Our Struggle", or better yet, "Unser Kampf".
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I think the problem is that wealthy people and many among the religious manipulated by the wealthy do not think of themselves as subject to government and law but the owner and director of it, and any official in government or whole government who thinks the rich and religious are subject to said government is de facto a tyrant and illegitimate. The government should be a literal servant to them and do what they say. In their eyes the government exists as a tool that is supposed to always work on their behalf to make their lives happier and their bank accounts bigger just like any employee in their business firms The government is supposed to do things like police, have a judicial system, and maintain an army so the rich do not have to go through the trouble of having to set up and run these things directly personally like was done in ancient and middle age times either by de jure or defacto. Anytime the general public gets it in their head the government is supposed to see its needs met or should consider its views regarding law and policy and it somehow affects the wealthy and their goals the government becomes illegitimate and out of bounds. I've heard stories about what life was like before the governement "got big". You better watch what you did or said even if on the law books it was legal. You might not be welcome in a town and the well off hire thugs to beat you up if you didn't leave and the police to scared of these wealthy families to do anything because they ran the local government or employed family of local government officials.
 
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