In the past two weeks, the news media has exploded with stories about “Project 2025”, a set of policy proposals from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and many Pagans have posted memes and discussions about it across social media. The concern about Project 2025 is widespread; the hype is that it is a playbook for undermining our freedoms and suppressing dissent.
For the folks looking ahead at a long editorial and hoping for a TL,DR: the posts are not wrong. It is a takedown of every advance of civil liberties, worker freedoms, and women’s bodily sovereignty of the last 100 years. But there’s plenty more to digest.
I took a deep dive into the 900+ page document detailing the agenda to see what it might have in store for Pagans, Witches, Heathens, and other polytheists. I can’t say that much of what is in there surprised me, given the latest rise of a new severe and orthodox brand of conservatism in the USA and other parts of the West. It should be a concern not just for Pagans, but for anyone who is not a straight white male Christian conservative deeply intoxicated with patriarchal obsessions about controlling women and minorities.
Project 2025 Cover Via The Heritage Foundation
Before going on, I think it is worth honoring another part of this story. Last week on the BET Awards show, Taraji P. Henson gave an impassioned statement about Project 2025:
“Show up and show out when it’s time to vote, because it’s not just about the presidential election, you guys. It’s time for us to play chess, not checkers. It’s about making decisions that will affect us as human beings. Our careers, our next generations to come. Did you know that it is now a crime to be homeless? Pay attention. It’s not a secret: Look it up. They are attacking our most vulnerable citizens. The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!”
Her plea seemed to go unremarked upon, just like Cassandra’s, until everyone took a clear look. But it is clear that Henson was seeing something we should all be paying attention to.
Even the business magazine Forbes wrote this past week: “Whatever your politics, the extreme, ideologically driven policies being suggested for Trump’s second term will undermine democracy, supercharge government corruption, and devastate the American economy.”
They’re not wrong.
Web Searches for Project 2025 via Google Trends
Here is a quick primer on the effort. Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, aims to prepare a comprehensive conservative governing agenda for the potential next conservative administration, beginning in January 2025.
The Heritage Foundation was founded during the Nixon administration and has been printing a “Mandate for Leadership” since 1981, where it was used by the Reagan administration. That history speaks to the concerns being raised. In the 1981 version of the Mandate, out of 2000 proposals, some 1200 (60%) were implemented.
The Heritage Foundation was the leading voice in Operation Desert Storm during the G.H.W. Bush administration; it provided the foundation policies for House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994; it was a leading voice opposing those criticizing the war on terror in the G.W. Bush administration; and it proposed the “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans” policy in 1989, which eventually became the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare.
In other words, it has a long history of being effective.
In 2016, it opposed Donald Trump’s presidential bid at first but later came to support it. In 2020, Heritage hired three Trump administration officials as well as former vice-president Mike Pence, who then left in 2022. The Heritage Foundation, based on an op-ed piece by Pence, did reject the notion that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump. But their proposals are out there and being pushed toward the Republican frontrunner just the same.
Project 2025 may be so draconian that even Trump disavows his connection to it. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform:
Former President Trump’s comment on July 5, 2024 via Truth Social
Bluntly, this is difficult to believe. As stated, senior members of Trump’s White House staff are part of Project 2025.
“As we’ve been saying for more than two years now, Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign,” the Project 2025 team said in response on X (formerly Twitter) to Trump’s comments. “We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy & personnel recommendations for the next conservative president.”
The term “conservative” is misleading, here. Since 2022, after Pence left the organization, the Heritage Foundation has aligned itself with an extreme variant of conservatism that broadly supports nationalism, assimilation, and monoculturalism while opposing internationalism, minority political inclusion, multiculturalism, and globalism. It favors, perhaps above all else, individual assimilation into the dominant culture, restrictions on immigration, and strict law and order policies.
Conservatives once were a bulwark to strengthen the military and keep fascist regimes at bay. But in May 2022, the Heritage Foundation wrote that the “Ukraine Aid Package Puts America Last.” Their National Defense director, Thomas Spoehr, was taken aback and resigned in protest.
Heritage Foundation also aligns itself with the Danube Institute, supported by the Hungarian government and Victor Orbán. The Danube Institute, as Hungarian journalists at Atlatszo have noted, is “one of the main tools of the Orbán government’s ideological expansion abroad” and one of the “main vehicles” to “building a political network in the United States” to create an international right-wing utopia.
To me, that’s already chilling. These are the authors of the new Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, the “180-Day playbook” that outlines actions to be taken in the first six months of the new administration.
The initiative is organized around four main pillars:
- A Policy Agenda described through the website and laid out in their Playbook;
- The creation of a Personnel Database to identify and vet conservative candidates from across the country to staff the next administration, ensuring that the right people are in place to implement the policy agenda;
- A training Initiative called the Presidential Administration Academy to identify appointees for their form of effective governance in the next conservative administration; and
- A “Playbook” promise that Project 2025 is “forming agency teams and drafting transition plans to move out upon the President’s utterance of ‘so help me God.'”
Project 2025 is backed by a coalition of over 100 conservative organizations, including think tanks and advocacy groups, some with names that belie their motivations.
The Project aims to implement an agenda to address issues such as deregulation, energy policy, immigration, and national security, with a focus on implementing conservative values and policies swiftly and effectively upon taking office.
The Mandate for Leaderships lays out four fronts to be addressed:
- Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
- Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
- Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
- Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”
Almost immediately, the Mandate addresses the wellspring it claims has been creating damage in the USA since the 1970s:
Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.
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.
This is the basis the Mandate relies on to address its supposedly necessary reforms. The Mandate includes eliminating the Department of Education; scaling back Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; reversing renewable-energy initiatives to benefit the fossil fuel industry; restricting mail-order abortion pills; and abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring policies in federal programs. The Mandate also seeks to consolidate executive presidential power, a stance even more meaningful in the context of last week’s Supreme Court decision in Trump vs. United States.
In other words, the goal is to destroy the Great Society, the set of domestic programs launched by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s to eliminate poverty and racial injustice in the United States. The Great Society gave us Medicare and Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty, funding schools including those in poor areas, environmental protection laws, and regulated urban development to prevent housing discrimination and support social housing.
Other reforms proposed include:
- Eliminate Racial Classifications and Critical Race Theory Training.
- Restrict the application of the Bostock decision prohibiting sex discrimination, with a special emphasis on the transgender community;
- Rescind regulations that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.
- Promote stable flourishing families consisting of a married mother to a father and their children;
- Eliminate civil service protections for federal employees particularly those with job titles that include “policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating.”
- Promote pro-life workplace accommodations for mothers.
- Remove employment protections some of which have been in place for over 100 years
- Pass a law requiring equal (or greater) benefits for pro-life support for mothers and clarifying abortion exclusions;
- Keep anti-life “benefits” out of benefit plans;
- Provide Robust protections and accommodations for Religious Employees;
- Non-Union Worker Voice and Representation;
- Pornography should be outlawed;
- Eliminate woke extremism about “intersectionality”;
- Delete terms like sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any similar other term;
- Register any educators and librarians who provide information on the above as sex offenders.
As for religious freedoms, the Mandate doesn’t make a specific statement honoring one faith over another. Instead, it demonstrates its objectives using the problematic term “Judeo-Christian,” offering a nod to Judaism more as a convenience than through serious respect of Judaic Scripture.
“The Judeo-Christian tradition,” says the Mandate, “stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family.”
It also adds this proposal:
Sabbath Rest. God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest, and until very recently the Judeo-Christian tradition sought to honor that mandate by moral and legal regulation of work on that day. Moreover, a shared day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time off together, rather than as atomized individuals, and provides a healthier cadence of life for everyone. Unfortunately, that communal day of rest has eroded under the pressures of consumerism and secularism, especially for low-income workers.
Congress should encourage communal rest by amending the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)9 to require that workers be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath. That day would default to Sunday, except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time (e.g., Friday sundown to Saturday sundown); the obligation would transfer to that period instead. Houses of worship (to the limited extent they may have FLSA-covered employees) and employers legally required to operate around the clock (such as hospitals and first responders) would be exempt, as would workers otherwise exempt from overtime.
Clearly, the Mandate frames its argument to a favored religious viewpoint. It does not support the separation of church and state, but the mobilization of religion on behalf of the state.
I’m skeptical they will add the Wheel of the Year to their list of observances.
The document then demonstrates that Pagans are also an enemy, albeit obliquely. Tucked in the section about environmentalism, we find the only mention of another god in the 900 pages of the new Mandate:
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.
It speaks for itself and aligns with other recent pearl-clutching about the fictional tsunami of an oncoming tyrannous paganism ready to oppress billionaires who live only to serve the blue-collar traditional nuclear family.
In short, Project 2025 is a plan for dismantling advances in equality and equity while assembling a state steered by conservative Christian doctrine. Its objectives are clear. Project 2025 may avoid the term “national conservatism,” but it doesn’t pass the duck test.
History is riddled with these types of mandates – and none of them end well for communities like ours.
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