Project 2025 calls for the imprisonment of conservatism's enemies—and the right to declare anyone in America their enemy

The Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership is a 922-page document compiled by dozens of the biggest names in what once passed as American "conservatism." It is riddled primarily with the thoughts of former Trump administration officials and current hard-right think-tank denizens, the ones that stayed loyal to Donald Trump to the end, including both supporting the hoaxes that he and Republican lawmakers attempted to use to justify nullifying a U.S. presidential election and the fruition of those hoaxes, the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection and coup attempt.

Those Trump administration figures include Christopher Miller, Peter Navarro, Russ Vought, Rick Dearborn, Ken Cuccinelli, Paul Dans, Paul Winfree, and Roger Severino, and we have already heard Trump boast of his ties to and approval of the group's plans before claiming the opposite once those plans started to be broadly publicized.

But first thing to know about Project 2025 is that it is an explicitly fascist agenda, and none of the prominent Trump allies and hardliners went to any particular lengths to hide it. The 922 pages return again and again to two major themes:

• The unraveling of and criminalization of racial equality efforts of any sort, in any venue

• Imprisoning cultural enemies and criminalizing the distribution of their work

Much of the rest of the document is merely a laundry list of all the various things that must be banned or criminalized in order to meet these two goals; the sheer breadth of what is considered cultural apostasy seems, even after 922 pages, to only barely be touched on. It is a fascist document in that it perceives the nation's enemies to be within, and to consist of every citizen who does not share their movement's goals or abide by their movement's demands. It is fascist because it specifically calls for the criminalization of such opposition, even as it bellows that it is doing so as response to the "totalitarianism" embodied by that opposition's existence.

You need not go any farther than the conspiratorial opening manifesto to learn what will be criminalized and who will be jailed. The mere existence of transgenderism is repeatedly both rejected and declaimed here and throughout the rest of the document as "toxic" deviancy; the roots of America's problems are traced, by Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts, to the government's mere acknowledgement of race, gender, or reproductive rights.

The Project 2025 "mandate" demands that all such acknowledgements be stripped from government. From all of government.

The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms 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 other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.

It should be obvious just from the first snippet that these are the rantings of babbling lunatics. The federal government must not even acknowledge that "reproductive health" exists, lest it be used by conservatism's enemies, the woke culture warriors, to deprive conservatives of their "rights?"

What rights, exactly? What rights does this movement claim that demands "reproductive health," "reproductive rights" and "gender equality" and the rest of those phrases be specifically excised from all of federal government? That is cleared up in the very next sentences: the movement's rights are whatever the movement wants them to be. Bolding is mine:

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. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

Here in this "for instance" we are already introduced to the scope of rights conservatives are demanding. (1) Pornography should be outlawed; (2) "Pornography" consists not merely of sexually explicit work but in the mere presence of "transgender ideology," whatever the movement defines that to be; (3) Those who distribute "transgender ideology" should be imprisoned; (4) Educators and public librarians will be arrested and criminally charged for having works that promote "transgender ideology" in their possession. (5) Private companies that "facilitate" other people's expressions of "transgender ideology" will be subject to government closure.

These are not abstract demands: We are already seeing it play out in Florida and in other "MAGA"-dominated locales. Pornography now consists of anything the hard-right asserts it to be, from a few sketched lines implying rodent nudity in Art Spiegelman's Maus to a drawing of two men holding hands in a book about family to any acknowledgement of adolescence, of "reproductive health," or that more than a single sexual orientation even exists.

Spiegelman would be imprisoned, under this scenario. Judy Blume would be handcuffed and jailed. Any movie that acknowledged the existence of transgenderism or homosexuality would see its entire staff and the staff of the distributing corporation charged as criminals, registered as sex offenders, and their offices closed. And this is not abstract; it is precisely what the movement demands, in their own words.

It might seem bizarre for Roberts, as Heritage Foundation head, to launch headfirst into a demand to ban pornography as his first "for instance" of the entire 922-page document. It is not; it is tactical. It is intentional. There are few things in America that can boast as much support as a demand to keep pornography away from children, though broadening it to assertions that pornography is both "drug" and "crime" which narrows the popularity of the opinion considerably.

What the movement is demanding is the right to define cultural deviancy to mean whatever they declare it to mean. And that is the essence of fascism.

But what the movement is demanding is the right to define "pornography" to mean whatever they declare it to mean. It now means crossdressing. It now means expressing a "transgender ideology." It now means whatever Roberts and those who offer Trump their backing assert it to mean, and the movement reserves the right to redefine it to include other things as well. That is the pernicious part. Conservatism is not demanding the right to police, by force of law, perceived societal deviancies. It is demanding the right to define what is culturally deviant, then arrest those who disagree.

And that, bluntly, is what fascism consists of. It is more than mere authoritarianism; it asserts the enemy to be within. It asserts that national greatness can only be achieved by purging the civilians who oppose them, because those who oppose them are deviants whose rights no longer matter. It asserts that since elections and the rule of law have both proved incapable of delivering full authority to the movement, elections are illegitimate and the rule of law must be ignored.

The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children,

Again, two terms that the movement has defined for itself and that appear to encompass, from the legislation being pushed forward in multiple states, whatever the movement insists they encompass, including even mere mentions of racism or sexual orientation (which, says the moment, must be excised from federal documents of all kinds.)

For public institutions to use taxpayer dollars to declare the superiority or inferiority of certain races, sexes, and religions is a violation of the Constitution and civil rights law and cannot be tolerated by any government anywhere in the country.

This simply isn't happening. What is happening instead is that the movement has defined "critical race theory," a legal concept too esoteric for any movement leaders to understand, and all other race-conscious policies and advocacy to mean that.

Consider our approach to Big Tech. The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them addicted to their mobile apps. [...] TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child abuse to continue.

And so social media must be reined in; it is simply too dangerous, if we love our children, for our public communications to be so unfettered.

Once you understand that Project 2025's Mandate For Leadership, all 922 pages of it, is a demand that conservatism be granted sole authority to define what is is culturally deviant and to punish it, including demands that it be excised from documents, criminalized, and that its promoters "imprisoned," the seemingly unending specifications that litter the rest of the document become little more than footnotes.

The movement is almost glibly fascist. The only thing missing from historic manifestations of fascism is the use of government-backed violence to secure itself, and that detail is not missing, it is simply not yet in place. Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts is the voice behind all the words quoted above, and in public appearances he has been plain in asserting that if violence is necessary to enforce this war against perceived cultural opponents, then violence will be employed.

[L]et me speak about the radical left. You and I have both been parts of faculties and faculty senates and understand that the left has taken over our institutions. The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.

And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.

That is the ballgame. As we look at Project 2025's agenda going forward, remember the following:

1) These are not minor players. The document was compiled by dozens of the most influential conservative power brokers in the nation; it is authored in major part by ex-Trump administration officials, top conservative think tanks, and others who played foundational roles in developing Trump administration policies the last time around.

2) The document is encompassing. It does not merely demand that conservatism's alleged enemies be prosecuted and imprisoned, their works banned from public distribution and companies shuttered if they are found to have facilitated the sharing of such beliefs; it consists of hundreds of pages detailing what changes to government are required in order to bring that about.

3) Despite claiming to be a broad vision for conservative governance, the same themes are repeated over and over again: All programs intended to achieve racial equality or diversity must be abolished and criminalized. All programs that so much as acknowledge transgendered persons, non-heterosexual relationships, "gender equity," abortion, reproductive health or rights must be purged from American society. All media, scientific programs, foreign policy programs, and other instruments of public or private power must be monitored for non-movement-approved thought, and power structures put in place to root out such dissent.

The document's sections touches on executive governance, national defense, and regulatory powers, but these themes repeat throughout. They are omnipresent; the answer to each question posed is, at least in part, to remove the ability of the movement's enemies to object. And the heart of it is consistent, and familiar.

Project 2025 is the MAGA movement's assertion that it and it alone will determine which of the public's thoughts are deviant and which are not, and that it and it alone has the power to dole out consequences for those transgressions. It is wickedly fascist. It is also the product of deranged, sex-obsessed minds who remain perpetually aggrieved that their own racism is now disapproved of; if the movement has "policies" that do not revolve around one or the other, they are incidental at best.