As I comb through the foreword to Project 2025, I am noting the scattershot nature of the author’s thinking and writing. If I were a professor I’d have failed Mr. Ph.D here for incoherence and lack of organization in this long-ass manifesto of his. Reducing complicated intellectual concepts to buzzwords that he won’t define certainly sticks out as a severe flaw. That way they can remain ominous to the uneducated, I guess. Broaching several subjects in one paragraph is another. Refusing to get to a point. Nonsensical, inappropriate words. Multiple subjects under one paragraph. Not finishing a subject. I am not a disciplined writer either, but I am not trying to limn out presidential policy for the next four years. I get pain at my temples when I try to break the thing down because it’s such a mess. Surely they could have found someone better for this task. Is this Catholic jerkoff the best that Heritage has to offer? What a rush job. Let’s hope these would-be gate crashers don’t have the mental heft to help anyone do their dirty work. They like Trump, so they were definitely graded on a curve.
So; two promises to go. Please pay attention more to what they say than what I say; you should draw your own conclusions. It’s more important that you see them than you see me, even though I love it when you come by to observe my typing.
PROMISE #3: DEFEND OUR NATION’S SOVEREIGNTY, BORDERS, AND BOUNTY AGAINST GLOBAL THREATS.
As an atheist I never hear the word “bounty” anymore. How about you? For those non-Catholics among us, it’s only used generally in a rote prayer before a meal. It’s a bizarre word to use in a political sense. Let’s just assume that in this context, he means “shit that God gave us”. In the real world, it’s often shit we took from others, but we can put that aside for a minute.
The United States belongs to “We the people.” All government authority derives from the consent of the people, and our nation’s success derives from the character of its people. The American people’s right to rule ourselves is the obverse of our duty: We cannot outsource to others our obligation to ensure the conditions that allow our families, local communities, churches and synagogues, and neighbor hoods to thrive. The buck stops with each of us, so each of us must have the freedom to pursue the good for ourselves and those entrusted to our care. To most Americans, this is common sense. But in Washington, D.C. and other centers of Leftist power like the media and the academy, this statement of basic civics is branded hate speech. Progressive elites speak in lofty terms of openness, progress, expertise, cooperation, and globalization. But too often, these terms are just rhetorical Trojan horses concealing their true intention—stripping “we the people” of our constitutional authority over our country’s future.
A nice vanilla opening, for the most part. I’m bored by the boilerplate conservative Tom Paine imitation, aren’t you? These people are not revolutionaries in any sense, they just couch their shit ideas within its rhetoric. A conservative is a counterrevolutionary. Let’s get that straight. In the upside-down world of theirs, openness, progress, cooperation, and expertise somehow are magically transformed into swear words. So far as globalization goes, I don’t know what is meant here. It means different things in different mouths. Based on what I hear from the America Firsters, this means strict nationalism and isolationism. While I think we can all agree that we should solve and prioritize our problems at home, I see no reason to shrink from the global stage, redefined as a positive force instead of an interruptive, recalcitrant and violent one. That’s probably nothing more than a pipe dream, though-it’s part of our legend more than it is our reality. Perhaps we need to go into the woods and think a while on what we’ve done. I hate neoliberals as much as this guy does-unfettered free trade is destructive for everyone. But conservatives have a piss poor record on nosing into other countries’ business as well and that is unlikely to change. I’ll believe them when they start pulling troops from the 50 or so global bases we have. We like other peoples’ bounty too much, I am sad to report.
America’s corporate and political elites do not believe in the ideals to which our nation is dedicated—self-governance, the rule of law, and ordered liberty. They certainly do not trust the American people, and they disdain the Constitution’s restrictions on their ambitions. Instead, they believe in a kind of 21st century Wilsonian order in which the “enlightened,” highly educated managerial elite runs things rather than the humble, patriotic working families who make up the majority of what the elites contemptuously call “fly-over country.”
No disagreement from me about the stranglehold corporations have Americans in. They’ll gladly ruin you and anyone who gets in their way to make a buck for their shareholders. If this is a conservative priority, I can’t wait to see what they will do to remedy this. If the past is any guide, it is not. I have an issue with the term “political elites”, though. This term is regularly abused by populists, unsurprisingly, conflating concepts. Real elites are often well hidden on interlocking corporate boards of directors who influence things. Real elites control your information, build self-driving cars that don’t and buy giant cruise liners and shoot themselves into space. If anyone was in the political elite in this century, it was Donald Motherfucking Trump, checking both boxes. And this guy is into Trumpism dick to dorsal. We certainly have problems with “bought” politicians, though. We could cooperate(!) to put an end to it. Why wait until 2025?
Woodrow Wilson was a goddamn racist interventionist piece of shit and no modern liberal would own him. Maybe he got a few things right but no one should point to him as a paragon of progressivism. The Democratic Party has been in thrall to people like him for a very long time. Small wonder that Americans feel like they have no good choices at the ballot box. We have been disappointed in recent times by Third Way pols like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who stirred neoliberalism and dreams of a better welfare state together in an unsatisfying brew.
A note on “flyover country”. The author has spent much of his life in it. I have traversed it myself by car. It’s worth taking a plane. There ain’t shit there for long, long stretches. There’s a reason why so many young people from it join the military for something to fucking do. I’ll admit to a certain air of conceit from being a former Northeasterner with proximity in my suburban youth to one of the biggest playgrounds in the world, New York City- so the shitkicker stall-mucker life sounds unimaginably dull. I can’t always relate to huckleberries, but I live in Georgia right now so I am working to curb my elitism.
This Wilsonian hubris has spread like a cancer through many of America’s largest corporations, its public institutions, and its popular culture. Those who run our so-called American corporations have bent to the will of the woke agenda and care more for their foreign investors and organizations than their American workers and customers.
FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR GOD, PLEASE STOP USING THE TERM WOKE. NO ONE IN LIBERAL LAND USES IT ANYMORE. YOU SOUND LIKE AN UNEDUCATED MORON. STOP BEATING THE WORD AGENDA INTO THE GROUND WHILE WE ARE AT IT. YOU HAVE ONE TOO. WORDS HAVE A TENDENCY TO LOSE THEIR MEANING WHEN USED IN TOO MANY CONTEXTS.
Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas. Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people. But under our Constitution, they are the mere equals of the workers who shower after work instead of before.
Boy, is that a bunch of hooey. We haven’t had a serious socialist movement since Eugene Debs ran for president from jail and got 13% of the vote. Do find me the hedge fund manager who wants to lose money to social welfare. They spend way too much on buying influence to stop that. I confess to preferring a bit of Fabian socialism myself, if only to close the gap between haves and have-nots.
Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity. One of the great premises of American political life is that everyone who can read in that book must have a voice in deciding the course and fate of our Republic.
This is very rich coming from a former university head with two fat degrees. I’m sure he was compensated just fine, even as he refused federal money for the school he was president of, money that might have cut the gargantuan price tag for access to the world of better careers. Everyone should have a shot at a brass ring; many, of course, will fall short and either cannot, won’t or don’t reach for manifold reasons. No one is denigrating those people. But the good doctor here is as elite as one can get. For Christ’s sake, he’s stumping for a billionaire to run the country again. He runs the largest conservative think tank in America. What is becoming clear here, as is almost always the case with the well-heeled, is that there is a serious disconnect between themselves and the people they imagine comprise their flyover country. They believe we all have the same values, have the same wants and do the same things, and that’s myopic at best. New culture wars make me reach for the Maalox. But if what you want is to go for the throats of the hedge fund managers, let’s eat the rich, doc. I’m down. I will take a small slice of your grey matter for an appetizer, just for being an elitist religious prick. You already write like someone who has lost some already. No one will notice.
Is he going to get around to sovereignty, borders and bounty anytime soon? I guess we’re dancing around the sovereignty argument by using the word “foreign” here somewheres and attacking corporations, but there’s way too many tangents, twists, and dumb rhetoric. I gotta get up and walk around before I get a goddamn hernia. Step away from the crazy man for a few minutes and do something important like the dishes or something. This is not worth my health.
All better, temporarily.
Progressive policymakers and pundits in America either fail to understand this premise or intentionally reject it. They enthusiastically support supranational organizations like the United Nations and European Union, which are run and staffed almost entirely by people who share their values and are mostly insulated from the influence of national elections. That’s why they are eager for America to sign international treaties on everything from pharmaceutical patents to climate change to “the rights of the child”—and why those treaties invariably endorse policies that could never pass through the U.S. Congress. Like the progressive Wilson a century ago, the woke Left today seeks a world, bound by global treaties they write, in which they exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability.
Finally, something about the subject of sovereignty. It’s been catechism for the right wing to attempt to drop out of the UN. For all the good we do within it, it’s almost pointless to argue. We run the fucking place. If there’s anything that protects American interests, it’s the UN. We have veto power over anything substantive. Even if the General Assembly razzes us, we ignore it. You only have to look at the news today to see that we couldn’t care less about the massacre happening in the Gaza Strip right now. We veto resolution after resolution to cover Israel’s ass. I’m utterly confused about why he has a bitch to pitch about the EU. Like the states within America, Europe has banded together for the benefit of its member states. I’m not surprised after two continent-rending wars. Nationalism in the extreme is noxious anyway. Sounds like the author has a problem with furriners running things the way they prefer. There’s a faint echo of Framer here about being suspicious of “foreign entanglements”. But it buggers the rational mind as to why anyone is against cheaper drugs (being mindful that Big Pharma needs to be watched of course), cooperating to stop the globe from frying like a county fair funnel cake, or protecting children internationally from egregious abuse, war, and slavery. As a matter of fact, it’s none other than Heritage who has worked to spike the ratification of some of these protections, and today the United States is the sole refusenik country on the planet. We are, as always teetering on the edge of becoming a rogue state, unaccountable to anyone.
At the risk of coming off as a utopian, we as a species never even tried all that hard to foster international cooperation. You would think that after we ended the last world war, we’d have done things differently. The Truman administration certainly had other ideas. We may not have much future left to do so if we keep pointing weapons at each other and trashing the environment with our rapaciousness. Electing leaders who will participate in mitigating these risks we have created is what is needed, not politicians and half-witted intellectuals who are obsessed with a go-it-alone, fuck the world viewpoint. Sadly, there’s a paucity of brave folk who go against the tide- most are just getting paid to make their donors happy.
Part of his critiques of the current situation, however inchoate resonate with me, but I am not ready to give away the store to a corrupt despot like Trump and maybe not even a benevolent who thinks more like I do. I’m fed up too, you know? But it cannot be repeated enough that these people are the true radicals of this age. That slur can no longer be restricted to left-spectrum thinking.
That’s why today’s progressive Left so cavalierly supports open borders despite the lawless humanitarian crisis their policy created along America’s southern border. They seek to purge the very concept of the nation-state from the American ethos, no matter how much crime increases or resources drop for schools and hospitals or wages decrease for the working class. Open-borders activism is a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoe er called “cheap grace”—publicly promoting one’s own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience. Indeed, the only direct impact of open borders on pro-open borders elites is that the constant flow of illegal immigration suppresses the wages of their housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys.
As usual, the case is utterly overstated if not totally false. Read the whole thing, as they used to say in the golden age of blogs. Border hypervigilance was born in racism and it hasn’t changed to this day, as conservatives regularly suggest there is a connection of immigrants to skyrocketing crime-as if ordinary American citizens are less likely to do so. And things like wages are of no concern to conservatives. They don’t like the minimum wage, they’d much rather let a free market determine your worth, which is decreasing every year in relation to purchasing power. You can’t afford America, folks. Maybe that’s why many turn to crime. Speaking of affording things, you may have noticed in the grocery store that you are taking a beating on food. Can you imagine what it would be like if immigrants didn’t feed you? I don’t see an army of Tom Joads and Jurgis Rudkuses coming from your white ass-communities. You moved to the suburbs because you could stop slaving at a factory farm. Thank a fucking immigrant for your egress, don’t shit on them. You’ll need them to replace your roof in 15 years.
Let’s see…some more bullshit about environmentalism. That was covered in a previous promise. You see what I mean here? This guy is just flailing, in worse need of an editor than I am, and that is saying a lot. He can afford one, though, so there is just no excuse for the badness of this manifesto. Hold your nose:
“Cheap grace” aptly describes the Left’s love affair with environmental extremism. Those who suffer most from the policies environmentalism would have us enact are the aged, poor, and vulnerable. It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.
Stop. Just stop. That was a painful metaphor.
As it is, we are being bankrupted by excessive electric and gas bills and out of control gas prices. That hasn’t got a thing to do with environmentalism. Market forces control all of that. If it’s an excessively hot summer, your rates go up. If it’s summer driving season, it costs more to fill your tank. If the collusive nature of the energy industry isn’t making enough money off of us, every price goes up. In my backyard, we just put a new nuclear reactor online for the purpose of adding to the energy mix. Did we see a reduction in our energy bill? Of course not. The energy company adds it to my bill to recoup the cost of construction. It’s a fucking racket. Seniors and the poor thankfully have access to federal programs like LIHEAP. When the Department of Health And Human Services is dismantled by these assholes, they are fucked.
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.
We’ve failed miserably at stewardship and conservation. Period. No corporation is going to let either concept stand in their way, and I thought the author and I were on the same page about those bloodsuckers. Far as the rest of this paragraph…I just can’t. If the goal here is to exhaust the reader, he’s got me in spades.
The rest of this promise is all about China. There’s an amazing amount of Sinophobia to unpack here. Guess this is the “global threat” part.
The same goals are the heart of elite support for economic globalization. For 30 years, America’s political, economic, and cultural leaders embraced and enriched Communist China and its genocidal Communist Party while hollowing out America’s industrial base. What may have started out with good intentions has now been made clear. Unfettered trade with China has been a catastrophe. It has made a handful of American corporations enormously profitable while twisting their business incentives away from the American people’s needs. For a generation, politicians of both parties promised that engagement with Beijing would grow our economy while injecting American values into China. The opposite has happened. American factories have closed. Jobs have been outsourced. Our manufacturing economy has been financialized. And all along, the corporations profiting failed to export our values of human rights and freedom; rather, they imported China’s anti-American values into their C-suites.
I think a lot of this fracas over China is just pure antediluvian paranoia about Communism. The author-clown is a history major…I suppose they didn’t cover in his school the genocide that had to occur to make America go from sea to shining fucking sea. Still, it’s fair to say that modern China is a brutal nation especially under Communist leadership-but historically, its wounds are self-inflicted through poor central planning, clan violence and brainwashing. And yet again, I feel the need to agree with the author about American corporations. But what is the right wing prepared to really do about it? This is all very new to me, this concern for the American worker by them. Knocking off the Bureau of Commerce seems like a bad move if they’d like to level playing fields and influence behavior.
If you want to understand the danger posed by collaboration between Big Tech and the CCP, look no further than TikTok. The highly addictive video app, used by 80 million Americans every month and overwhelmingly popular among teenage girls, is in effect a tool of Chinese espionage. The ties between TikTok and the Chinese government are not loose, and they are not coincidental.
This is in the headlines right now as the House has moved to ban TikTok unless its parent company spins it off from its Chinese owners. I see lots of articles about it, but have yet to really understand lawmakers’ concerns. Nor do I get the sense that the author understands his own, apart from his moral ones. I think I saw that military folk can’t use it in the field, as it does have geolocation as a feature. So do many phone apps-it’s probably best that we don’t bring unsecure tech out on our expeditions. It appears to be true that the Chinese government can ask for the data upon demand. We are probably through the looking glass on spying when it comes to social media, friends-it doesn’t matter if it’s Facebook, Instagram, X, Tiktok, whatever-it’s all highly invasive at some level and I kinda wish it never existed because it’s a super time-suck. But nevermind that-I’m just fuming that while the wealth gap grows and the planet continues to run a temp, this is the only thing our legislators can agree on. Making a new enemy is a bullshit move. I’m not interested in another fruitless Cold War.
The same can be observed of many U.S. colleges and universities. Through the CCP’s Confucius Institutes, Beijing has been just as successful at compromising and coopting our higher education system as they have at compromising and coopting corporate America.
The Confucius Institute brouhaha is old hat. Most of them do not exist anymore, thanks to the federal government threatening to withhold aid if they hosted them.
A casual reader might take the last few pages as surveying a broad array of challenges facing the American people and the next conservative President: supra national policymaking, border security, globalization, engagement with China, manufacturing, Big Tech, and Beijing-compromised colleges. But these really are not many issues, but two: (1) that China is a totalitarian enemy of the United States, not a strategic partner or fair competitor, and (2) that America’s elites have betrayed the American people. The solution to all of the above problems is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. These are problems not of technocratic efficiency but of national sovereignty and constitutional governance. We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch.
There goes 50 years of diplomacy with one of the world’s most populous countries. It is not the easiest thing to brush off his invective here-massive corporations like Wal-Mart have initiated a race to the bottom, delivering low prices using slave labor abroad. But we do that kind of business with a host of banana republics. China is not wholly to blame for the world’s hunger for its products. We have become a materialistic species, craving for gadgets and finery. It might prove difficult to revive large scale industrialism here anyway-most Americans don’t want those shit jobs anymore, especially if they offer poor pay and no benefits. Besides, who wants to live near that polluting shit? White people will scream NIMBY and their gutless politicians will accede. I thought stewardship and conservation were priorities, two things that will go by the wayside if we reindustrialize the United States. I’m afraid the author’s “revolutionary” answer is all too pat for me. I don’t have the answers either, and I don’t think an expanded executive running roughshod on the bureaucracy is going to fix it either. This new conservatism sure is bizarre.
The next conservative President should go beyond merely defending America’s energy interests but go on offense, asserting them around the world. America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem
Hang on, slappy. Merely asserting it don’t make it true. There’s tons of scholarship about how destructive these fossil fuels are. You have to be willfully blind to not find it.
American dominance of the global energy market would be a good thing: for the world, and, more importantly, for “we the people.” It’s not just about jobs, even though unleashing domestic energy production would create millions of them.
I tell you what would create that millions of jobs: green projects. We’re only just getting started with the infrastructure to make it happen. We’d have high-tech busy work for decades, cheaper energy prices and could decelerate the pace of environmental destruction.
There’s more about world domination through fossil fuel energy, but I really got winded and have got to close. Hot damn, this was a long one to read. I almost didn’t finish. I’m tired of this guy. Thankfully there’s only one promise to go. I’m out of practice with writing but I do want to make whoever I can aware that Project 2025 is truly nefarious in so many ways. Trump is Heritage’s wet dream; he’s dumb and enough of a fascist to go further than Reagan ever had in deregulating industry and defanging oversight. The tune has never changed with these bastards. Trash it all and let God sort it out. Joe Biden is a somewhat anemic president overall, but at this juncture I must take that over the strongman being offered by the Republicans.
The Illogical Seminary 