Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said of Project 2025:
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will be bloodless if the left allows it.”
This is what the electorate wants to hear, but the 900-page plan for a massive increase in Republican power in the state apparatus is more in the spirit of an old-fashioned aristocratic system. The 13 US colonies had once declared their independence from the British Empire and King George III. The Heritage Foundation seems more intent on helping classical imperialism win against the concept of a modern republic.
From the beginning, there were two parties in the US that alternated, and they were very similar. It was not a question of left versus right as it is today, because socialism was not yet a thing. The main political debate was about how much of a republic would be desirable and how much of a classical empire to copy from the British.
In particular, the concept of a fraternal, elite, family-organized upper class was adopted from Britain. Pampered people who was allowed to attend special universities and grab the best offices and had the best opportunities to start larger companies. Anyone who did not belong to the special families and frequent the corresponding Masonic lodges was just an ordinary citizen.
How many spies the British had in the US immediately after the revolution and how they expanded these networks has never been adequately investigated by historians. The Heritage Foundation is one of the groups like Skull & Bones that trace their roots back to Britain.
“Project 2025” is not an American plan, but essentially a British aristocratic concept. Britain also tried early on to build up its own left-wing sphere and expand it internationally; a new coat of paint for old-fashioned serfdom. Accordingly, as an ordinary US citizen, you are at a disadvantage, regardless of whether you vote Republican or Democrat.
Project 2025 was designed, staffed and supported by a number of Trump insiders – including some of the former president’s highest-ranking and most influential advisers.
Trump is currently playing dumb and has distanced himself from part of the agenda. Not surprising in itself, since he doesn’t have time to read the 900-page plan or to educate himself further. He is known for reading almost nothing.
Many activists have been manipulated for years into cheering on the Republicans’ excessive aspirations for power. In the Bush era, many activists still believed that the party was the stronghold of the great global conspiracy.
Trump’s partial distancing was interpreted by influential influencers as betrayal; as if the presidential candidate was somehow too strongly influenced by conspiratorial oligarchs.
Influencer Alex Jones felt compelled to tell his radicalized audience what they wanted to hear and criticized Trump for not celebrating the Heritage Foundation’s project in its entirety. Jones was the most vocal critic of the Republicans’ powers during the Bush era. Later he turned 180 degrees and even advocated internment camps for leftists.
So you have the choice between extreme left and extreme right. Ordinary citizens are exploited either way. Either conservative-camouflaged serfdom or left-camouflaged serfdom.
In conservative serfdom, schools teach the 10 Commandments and generally have no LGBTQ agenda. But you can no longer afford a traditional family. In left serfdom, you get a woke circus, but you can’t afford anything.
Every freshman political science student knows that no extreme left or right line can find clear majorities. Modern psychometrics can even calculate groups of people precisely and run simulations. Most people choose their ideology according to their personality traits and how they grew up. So it is conceivable that there will be two Americas in the future: the beer can Bible redneck America and the woke clown show America.
Project 2025 is reminiscent of the Council for National Policy, which was founded in the 1980s. According to calculations at the time, there would be a left-wing majority within 50 years. The CNP, on the other hand, relied on a massive program in the media and politics that was extremely primitive. Superficial talk about the Bible and family values did not manage to achieve a conservative majority, but only the 50:50 deadlock between the two parties.
The CNP had created a shaky foundation. Young men today are no longer the same as they were 100 years ago and if they are not really compatible with women, there will be no traditional families.
“I don’t know anything about Project 2025,” Trump claimed on social media, referring to the 922-page plan presented by a group of conservative organizations led by the Heritage Foundation.
“I have no idea who is behind it.”
Seriously? The Heritage Foundation has played a major role in the Republican effort since the days of Ronald Reagan, and it overlaps with the Council for National Policy. Trump is no stranger to the CNP.
About 60% of Heritage’s 2,000 proposals were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan’s first year in office. The Heritage Foundation supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the war on terror.
After Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, the Heritage Foundation gained influence over his transition and tenure. Heritage claimed that the Trump administration had by then adopted 64 percent, or nearly two-thirds, of the 334 proposed measures on the foundation’s agenda.
The foundation’s trustees in the past have included people with ties to Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Mobil, Pfizer, Sears and other companies.
When Republicans meet in Milwaukee next week to vote on officially approving the first new Republican platform since 2016—the platform on which Trump and Republicans will run across the country—that platform will have been drafted and influenced by people with close ties to Project 2025.
A key part of Project 2025’s agenda is to expand presidential power and drastically cut funding for federal agencies like the Department of Education—measures Trump supported during the campaign. The proposal also calls for the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the abortion pill mifepristone.
Reducing the number of federal employees by 50% within a year and 75% within four years is a lofty goal that sounds good to the target audience. But Heritage ultimately stands for big government. Citizens who are not part of the club of the privileged are at a huge disadvantage.
Project 2025’s measures to raise taxes on the middle class, allow companies to stop paying their workers overtime, enforce a national abortion ban, and raise the Social Security retirement age are extremely unpopular.
Under Project 2025, anyone with enough money or political influence could be placed above the law at the whim of a president.
Project 2025 would give the president the power to use all federal resources to prosecute whomever they want – including political opponents.
CNP
To better manage the right-wing camp, the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP) was created in 1981; a mixture of shameless power-seeking and serious anti-communism. Some CNP members came from the military and intelligence agencies and knew directly about the horrors of real existing socialism. However, it was neither morally nor strategically justifiable to build a fanatical, pseudo-Christian cult movement as a counterpole to the left.
Recent books about the CNP such as “Shadow Network – Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right” shed a lot of light on the secretive organization, but are written from a typically left-wing perspective. When the CNP was founded in 1981, there were calculations that showed that young people tended more to the left than to the right. After 50 years, by 2031, a point of unstoppable decline would be reached. The CNP has maintained the artificial balance between left and right from 1981 to today, but a deeper-seated decomposition seems to have taken place on the right-wing spectrum, driven by overly harsh fanaticism, demands for a one-party regime, “Christian” laws and misogyny. This theoretically creates the option of allowing conservatism to collapse in the near future so that it can no longer recover. Even CNP members sensed in 2015 and 2016 that they were getting themselves into huge trouble with Donald Trump that would extend into the next generations. But the CNP leadership prevailed.
Texan Herman Paul Pressler III, a Houston judge who came from an influential family in the oil business, was a key figure in the formation of the CNP and also served as the organization’s president. In 2018, the Houston Chronicle reported that several men had been raped by him decades earlier when he was still a young priest. Paige Patterson, also an important figure in the early history of the CNP, covered up the matter.
The priest Jerry Falwell set the tone on many issues and Paul Weyrich used money from beer baron Joseph Coors and Richard Scaife (from the Mellon clan) to create the Heritage Foundation, a training ground that has produced countless Republican politicians. The term “Dominionism” refers to the intention to create a thoroughly Christian unity government. Other CNP founding members included preacher Tim LaHaye, oil entrepreneur Nelson Bunker Hunt (sponsor of the Birch Society, which for a long time controlled conspiracy media), and Joseph Coors.
The CNP was able to determine what became a bestseller: LaHaye’s novel series “Left Behind” sold more than 65 million copies. Millions of Christians ascend to heaven in history on Judgement Day, while the communists sink into misery.
CNP founder John Singlaub was a retired general and co-founder of the CIA. His activities extended to Manchuria during the communist revolution in China, the Korean War, Nicaragua, and the Afghani struggle against the Soviet occupiers. He was involved in the United States Council for World Freedom, the US division of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The chapter was involved in the Iran-Contra affair. The Associated Press reported that “Singlaub’s private group became the public cover for White House operations.” The WACL was described by former member Geoffrey Stewart-Smith as “largely a collection of Nazis, fascists, anti-Semites, forgers, vicious racists and corrupt self-seekers.”
Colonel Oliver North got into trouble over Iran-Contra and implied that the CNP was involved in active operations. In the 1987 hearings on the scandal, North was asked if he had been employed by the National Security Council on a plan for national emergencies. It had been revealed in the Miami Herald that the federal government was prepared to imprison U.S. citizens en masse, contrary to the provisions of the Constitution. There was even a secret exercise called “Readiness Exercise 1984” and programs such as “Garden Plot.”
Right-wing government circles expected the US to send troops to Central America, and then militant resistance would form within America in left-wing circles. When such preparations for insurrections continued in the 1990s under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton, some right-wing activists and influencers feared that it was all somehow part of the left-wing Jewish world conspiracy. Supporters of the classic conspiracy media (which was controlled by the Birch Society and the CNP) expected Bill Clinton to hand over control of the US to the United Nations, after which masses of US patriots would end up in internment camps. The end state would then be the “New World Order”. Later, under Republican President George W. Bush, preparations for counterinsurgency continued, and conspiracy activists panicked after the 9/11 attacks.
The new legislation, such as the Patriot Act, circumvented the Constitution, and the Republicans strongly implied that if another, major attack by Islamists were to take place, the party would ultimately rule dictatorially. Conspiracy influencer Alex Jones, who was closely associated with people from the Birch Society and the CNP, released the documentary series “Police State” about how FEMA and other parts of the government were preparing internment camps under the guise of disaster relief. When Alex Jones later moved closer to the Republican Party again in the Obama and Trump era, he explained that the camps were actually always intended for left-wing insurgents, not right-wing ones.
In the Reagan era, there was a massive expansion of political-religious radio programs by the CNP. Many of the target audience did not read newspapers or did not want to pay for newspaper subscriptions. You could listen to them in the car on the way to work or while you were at work.
Of course, the CNP had experts in psychological warfare and psychometrics. CNP member James Dobson was a psychologist and hosted the program “Focus on the Family.”
Pat Robertson, son of a Virginia senator and Yale law graduate, became a pastor and created the massive Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) and joined the CNP leadership team.
Between 2000 and 2015, the market for newspaper advertising shrank from $60 billion to just $20. The Internet also caused around 1,800 newspapers to disappear since 2004. The owners (or shareholders) of large corporations bought up newspapers like the Washington Post. Almost all of a newspaper’s content is supplied by news agencies like Reuters. Influential right-wing circles could subsidize newspapers and radio programs at will in order to then influence elections and legislation. Much of the political agenda favored wealthy circles and disadvantaged ordinary citizens, which increased the demand for socialist politics.
Billionaires from the oil industry like the Kochs or from multi-level marketing like the DeVos family with Amway were able to throw money around. It is clear that this cartel was able to take over the entire conservative sphere, so that nothing independent could ever develop. In the Internet era in the early 2000s, various people spontaneously started programs and produced documentaries, but you could sense that the people responsible were at least indirectly influenced by the John Birch Society or the CNP. In the Bush era from 2000 to 2008, there was a growing scene of conspiracy ideologues who rejected the Republican Party. They complained about a two-party cartel and a strategy of dividing the population. There was an urgent recommendation to rely less on ideology and to find common ground between left, right and Muslims. Anyone could spontaneously, without a budget, start a blog or put together an audio program or even a documentary. However, the activist movement was not able to force new investigations into 9/11 or establish significant new political candidates. The aged Ron Paul only ran symbolically as a presidential candidate in 2008. Resignation and frustration spread among the activists. Barack Obama’s election victory did not bode well and the Republicans had not changed a bit. 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were no longer topics to mobilize people. From 2008 onwards, the CNP recaptured the conspiracy ideologues. The greed for money and influence moved the new generation of activists. The Tea Party movement was initially an uncoordinated collection of activities and received help from CNP member Dick Armey and money from the Kochs. Then they stepped on the gas.
There was always enough money to finance projects. Betsy DeVos’ brother was Erik Prince, a CNP member and founder of the mercenary company Blackwater. The Salem Media Group, the Bott Radio Network and American Family Radio either bought entire radio stations or rented airtime. The IRS granted tax-exempt status to the Family Research Council and American Family Radio.
The content was always very simple: Christian values and faith, patriotism and agitation against leftists. The Bott Network and American Family Radio also made profits from dubious nutritional supplements. Alex Jones later copied this.
The CNP circles recruited new talent like Mike Pence, who had worked as a moderator for a long time. The machine ran relentlessly: the CNP leadership set the agenda, the donors provided the money, officials coordinated and the media people propagated.
Nevertheless, there was a big problem: large parts of the youth didn’t really have much to do with hyper-Christian slogans and strange ideas about what government should look like. Young women insisted on the right to abortion. Modern music was popular. Older conservatives were increasingly dying out. The CNP is said to have missed these trends, but this may have been the intention of higher levels. It is the major breaking point that can be used to stifle conservatism in the future if necessary.
The Trump era
The Mercer Family Foundation became more active and the new right trend wave appealed to many younger men. The new right media now has a relatively high level of agitation and humor. Gone are the days when leftists like Jon Stewart railed against Bush on the Daily Show and right-wing circles had no comparable programs.
However, Donald Trump created a major breaking point. Trump was very old and had a devastatingly bad reputation when it came to women. The Red Pill movement, as a counterpart to radical feminism, served to make young men extremely unattractive to women. The CNP revived the old doctrine of “dominionism,” i.e. the rule of a single party and “Christian” legislation. Troubled men hope that they will one day be able to find young, pretty girls in arranged marriages. CNP people were initially very skeptical and even hostile towards Trump. Female CNP members such as Marjorie Dannenfelser and Penny Nance tried to persuade voters in Iowa not to support Trump at all costs.
Things looked so bad for Trump that many people around him thought he was guaranteed to lose and that his candidacy would at least increase his fame and perhaps start a political TV channel afterwards. For ominous reasons, CNP people then decided to support him. Alex Jones suddenly hailed him as the savior of America. The QAnon sect celebrated the myth that Trump would arrest the Democrats with a secret team.
After his victory Trump’s administration was filled with people from the CNP orbit, the Heritage Foundation, etc., and the new Supreme Court judges also came from these cadres. It is quite obvious that the traditional elites were in control, but the marketing gave the opposite impression, that Trump had come to clean up.
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