Project 2025 as seen by a Pastor
July 28, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray
When Empire star, Taraji Henson stepped onto the stage at this years BET awards ceremony in this show stopping dress, probably the last thing anyone expected to hear come out of her mouth was a powerful and loud speech about a presidential transition plan written by the Heritage Foundation, but that’s what we got. She even said, “I know I look good, but it is time for you all to pay attention!” For more than a year we have been hearing admonitions in the news that we should all read the 2025 Project but, realistically, it is nearly 900 pages long and it doesn’t read like Moby Dick or Gone With the Wind.
Its chapters about how to revamp the federal government from top to bottom were written by 36 different conservative thinkers, 26 of whom served in the first Trump administration, some of whom had to do their writing from prison cells. Even though Trump claims to have no association with this huge document, clearly, it was written for his use by his own team who hope to be able to hit the ground running in a second Trump administration, accomplishing things he didn’t even dare to dream of in his first chaotic term in the White House.
Trump is trying to distance himself from this manifesto, which was written by his close friends and associates, but Trump is mentioned by name on 190 pages of this tome, so don’t believe his lies. Still, who wants to ruin a perfectly good day by reading the political musings of people like Peter Navarro and Ken Cuccinelli? I don’t but if you had the moral strength to look up into Taraji Henson’s eyes, you would have seen her fury when she loudly demanded that we “look it up.” So, I did.
The 2025 Project is important. It is frightening. It contradicts the values that we spiritual people, people who believe in freedom, justice, and the equality of all people, and we must suffer a bit to be more aware of what the right wing of American politics would like to turn this country and its government into.
There are 4 pillars to the Heritage Foundation’s mandate for leadership. This book is the outline of goals and objectives. The second pillar is a LinkedIn style catalogue of names of people with their ideology who can be hired by the administration. The third pillar is a kind of conservative academy, set up to train the conservative neophytes in how to run the government the way they want it run.
And the 4th is a literal playbook, outlining the steps to be taken in the first days of the next Trump administration to get all of this transformation started.
Kevin Roberts, the director of the Heritage Foundation and former president of the hair-growth for men club, outlines their objectives in the forward with 4 goals that have to be interpreted carefully to get past his sweet sounding language.
He says that we are in the midst of a second American Revolution which, he added, could be bloodless if the left allows it to be…. Which is to say, they won’t shoot us unless we resist.
The first of his objectives says: Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. In the details of the book, we learn how this will be done – by closing the Education Department, allowing book burning and far right Christians to control the school curriculum. They also want to do away, not only with the abortion pill but with contraception, and even no-fault divorce, forcing even violent and toxic families to stay together. They also want to make pornography illegal, putting those who produce and sell it in prison . . . and you can bet that would mean anything that portrayed homosexuality or gender changes as being normal. And they want to ban invitro fertilization for reasons I cannot even guess. They seem to believe that you can actually legislate sexual orientation . . . which they intend to try to do.
Their second goal, Roberts describes this way: Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people. In their mind, the administrative state is the Civil Service, tens of thousands of federal employees who have job security. They want to consolidate all authority in the executive branch into the hands of the president who can dismiss anyone and replace them puppets who work at his whim. They want to take down the intelligence forces, the FBI and the CIA, those agencies that have investigated Trump and his organized crime connections. Dismantling the administrative state will also do away with most poverty programs, food assistance, public housing, and things the restrict your freedom, like student loan forgiveness. You know, like Jesus always said, “Do your best to punish the poor for being poor.”
Robert’s says that their third value is to, Defend our sovereignty, borders and bounty against global threats. Which, again, when you dig into the book’s details, means not allowing people to come here from Muslim countries. It means stationing our armies on the border the Mexico to defend our border with lethal force, and putting the military in our city streets to defend our “bounty” which means the private businesses that might be looted or damaged in a protest. As well as shooting shop lifters or anyone else who threatens the assets of the rich.
And he ends these lofty goals with the most hypocritical statement of all saying that they want to “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely- what our constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’” Does that mean that women should be able to exercise their God-given individual right to manage their own reproductive life? No, obviously they don’t want women to have that liberty. And does that mean that people should be able to love the person they choose to love? No, not if you are gay, lesbian, trans, or anything that does not fit into their cisgender world view. And does it mean that our children get to exercise the liberty to go to school or a movie or a city park without fear of being murdered by some AR-15 wielding lunatic? No, of course not, even though we have more than 100,000 gun deaths per year now, nothing will come between these fanatics and their freedom to own lethal weapons. The blessings of liberty seem to redound only to their very narrowly defined minority of the white, privileged, conservatives.
As the constant speculation about whether Biden was going to drop out of the race after his abysmal debate performance, the news media seems to be giving Project 2025 more air time and at least reporting on pieces of it, what else can you do with a tome so large as this one but to try to feed it to the public, one bad tasting bite at a time. Still, I will echo Taraji Henson’s emphatic demand that you look it up.
No one wants to read 900 pages of this fascist stuff but if you will just give it 30 minutes of you time for three or four days in a row, you will get a sense of just how dangerous this proposed conservative civil war is.
Why do conservative Republicans want to replace what is left of our democracy with an authoritarian, dare we say, “fascist” government, consolidating the power of the president, making him immune to prosecution and turning our President into a king? People sometimes turn to an authoritarian leader when they are afraid, afraid of foreign invasion, of an economic depression, or some other social disruption.
But we are the strongest nation in the world, militarily and economically. Unemployment is at a record low. The stock market is at a record high. What problem are they trying to solve with this reactionary move to erase the social progress make in women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights, and ecological protections? What are they afraid of? You undoubtably have your own answers to that question but their agenda makes it clear to me that they are afraid of empowered women, they are afraid of racial and religious minorities claiming equal place in our society, and they are terrified of the normalization of gender and sexual orientation diversity.
Clearly, for them, making America great again is an appeal to going back to a previous era. Maybe back to the 1950’s when segregation was legal, abortion was illegal, and gay people were still in the closet. Maybe they want to go back to the early 20th century, when women couldn’t vote and Jim Crow laws were in force. I wouldn’t be surprised if they may want to go back to a pre-Civil War era. That may seem to be unthinkable to you now but then we have never had a king in America before so we just can’t predict where the safe boundaries would be in a world where a sociopath like Trump could become king.
It has been a long time since I have felt that I had to anchor every sermon to a passage of scripture. I don’t feel any compulsion to do so today, but I find the decision of ancient Judeans to have a king to be relevant. If you do not remember Israelite history very well, let me remind you that there is a debate that goes on in Hebrew scriptures, both in praise of their famous kings and in condemnation of the whole concept of having a king.
Remember, Moses was a religious leader but not a king. Joshua was a military leader but not a king. For the first centuries of Judaean history, their leadership came from wise men and women who were called “judges.” They looked to their tribal and community leaders until they asked their most prominent prophet, Samuel, to choose a king to rule over them. Samuel resisted and took the matter directly to God who, we are told in I Samuel chapter 8, was dead set against the idea but God was willing to let the people make their own mistakes. According to the text, God told Samuel to do it but to first give the people this warning.
10 So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots, 12 and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. 15 He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. 16 He will take your male and female slaves and the best of your cattle[b] and donkeys and put them to his work. 17 He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. 18 And on that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you on that day.”
The language is obviously from a small nation that existed 3000 years ago but the basic message remains the same. If we may free and fair elections something we can ignore or refuse to obey. If we allow our courts to make our leaders impossible to hold accountable to any legal standards, if we empower our executive branch to tax, wage war, and pick a ruling class that must be supported by the majority, we will be sorry that we did it, and once you do it, it is very difficult to undo it.
As slopy and inefficient as democracy is, as Winston Churchill famously said, the worst form of government except for all of the others. An imperial presidency may scratch the itch for power on the part of those who are afraid of the eclipse of white male privilege, but it sure to be bad news for everyone else.
In this pastor’s opinion, we should do whatever we can to help to protect our system of democracy with checks and balances and accountability to moral standards expressed in law, even for members of the supreme court and whoever lives in the White House. That is, of course, just my opinion but it enjoys the status of also being right.
