What should be a very exciting story slipped under the radar this week. For some reason, conservative media ignored the important story, which you’d think conservatives would want to know all about, and you’re going to like a lot. Instead it was mainly covered only in woke media.
Politico ran one of the stories this week mysteriously headlined, “Too Hot For the Heritage Foundation!” The imponderable sub-headline added to the mystery: “In the Trump-era GOP civil war, a pair of scholars at the think tank signed the wrong manifesto.”
Politico’s story is a nearly incomprehensible mishmash of complaints about Heritage, gossip, and descriptions of insider conflicts between conservatives that are wholly uninteresting unless you know the people they’re talking about.
But the article swirled dramatically around a $22 million dollar Heritage Foundation project called “Project 2025.”
A couple months ago, when the Project first surfaced on liberal radar, a frantic New York Times article labeled it as a “conservative version of Linked-In:”
Think of it as a right-wing LinkedIn. This so-called Project 2025 — part of a $22 million presidential transition operation at a scale never attempted before in conservative politics — is being led by the Heritage Foundation, a group that has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era.
Heritage usually compiles its own personnel lists, and spends far less doing so. But for this election, after conservatives and Mr. Trump himself decried what they viewed as terrible staffing decisions made during his administration, more than 50 conservative groups have temporarily set aside rivalries to team up with Heritage on the project, set to start Friday.
They have already identified several thousand potential recruits and have set a goal of having up to 20,000 potential administration officials in their database by the end of 2024, according to Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. Heritage has contracted the technology company Oracle to build a secure personnel database, Dr. Roberts said.
“In 2016, the conservative movement was not prepared to flood the zone with conservative personnel,” Dr. Roberts said. “On Jan. 20, 2025, things will be very different. This database will prepare an army of vetted, trained staff to begin dismantling the administrative state from Day 1.”
Heritage and its project partners have already briefed Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and their teams, Dr. Roberts said.
Although most conservatives have never heard of this encouraging plan, the leftwing media is calling it the worst thing that has ever happened, a million times worse than Adolph Hitler. Far-left influencers are sounding the alarm, like this self-described trans “super villain” and “heretical Christian,” who sees Project 25 as literally ending America:
Wednesday, the Lincoln Project’s co-founder Reed Galen described Project 2025 as a direct threat to democracy:
CLIP: Reed Galen complaining about Project 2025 (0:43.)
Finally, a Mother Jones article run last week and written by owner David Corn himself finds a rising conservative dictatorship in Heritage’s project:
Corn connected Heritage’s Project 2025 to Trump’s developing plan to replace vast numbers of deep state termites on his first day in office:
These plans include altering the rules governing the civil service so that tens of thousands of federal workers—maybe more—would be subject to immediate dismissal by the White House. That would mean that Trump could fire employees at federal agencies who do not pledge their loyalty to Trump—or who question the legality or appropriateness of White House directives…
Dozens of conservative outfits—led by the Heritage Foundation—have banded together to produce what they call Project 2025, which has released a 1,000-page report, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which provides a blueprint for a wannabe-White-House-autocrat. Their proposals include removing protections for federal employees so perhaps as many as 50,000 could be fired and replaced with Trump (or Republican) loyalists. This would be done under the banner of annihilating the supposed “deep state” bureaucracy and smashing the “administrative state.”
While it’s impossible to briefly summarize Heritage’s 1,000 page Mandate for Leadership, here’s the gist: Heritage has assembled a broad coalition of effective conservative organizations and think tanks, has created a practical step-by-step road map for effectively deconstructing the deep state, and has begun compiling a vast database of reliable conservatives to staff federal agency positions to carry out the plan.
And it’s terrifying liberals.
I’m telling you about Project 2025 to encourage you. It means conservatives have not been asleep at the switch, after all. They have not failed to learn the lessons from Trump’s administration, when bad early staffing decisions stymied swamp-draining plans.
Now we just need to get the Republican nominee elected.
