What “Project 2025” Would Do to America

The Right has developed concrete plans to make America into a much nastier place for anyone who dares to deviate from the white Christian patriarchal order. That’s what is on the ballot in November

Photo credit: Megan Varner/Getty Images

This is the second part (of four) of my deep dive into “Project 2025” and the plans to establish a more effective, more ruthless rightwing regime. Part I focuses on the ideas, ideologies, and grievances fueling the project – the radicalizing siege mentality on the Right. This Part II offers a detailed dissection of the concrete policy agenda and strategies to impose a reactionary vision on the country. Part III contextualizes “Project 2025” by comparing it to what other rightwing factions, including Trump himself, are planning, situates these plans in the broader context of the Right’s history since the 1930s, and explores why a second Trump presidency would be operating under completely different conditions from the first – conditions that make it much more likely for these radical plans to succeed. Finally, in Part IV,  I dove deeper into Trump’s relationship to Project 2025 and why these radical plans represent the self-mobilization of a “conservative” establishment that is fundamentally in agreement with the extremist Right.

What would a second Trump presidency look like? What happens if the Reactionary Right returns to power?

Over the past few months, different factions on the Right have presented detailed plans for what they want to do the next time they get back to the White House. Among them, “Project 2025,” launched in April 2022 under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation, stands out because it unites much of the conservative movement and the machine of think tanks as well as activist and lobbying groups behind the goal of installing a more effective, more ruthless rightwing regime.

Last week, in Part I of my deep dive into “Project 2025,” I examined the worldview of the people behind these plans They see themselves as noble defenders of “real America” against a totalitarian “woke,” “globalist” assault. “Project 2025” is their declaration of war on multiracial pluralism. The “Promise to America” Heritage president Kevin Roberts has offered in his foreword to the “Project 2025” report perfectly captures the siege mentality, self-victimization, and grievance-driven lust for revenge that are fueling the Right’s plans. They are driven by a desperate sense that nothing short of a reactionary counter-revolution will suffice to save the nation from the onslaught of anti-American “woke” forces – and that there is very little time remaining to pull that off.

How seriously should we take “Project 2025”? Isn’t this all just the abstract raging of feverish minds? Just empty threats far removed from any chance of implementation? Mostly just a messaging effort intended to placate and mobilize a frenzied base? If only. “Project 2025” is evidence that the American Right has concrete plans and a detailed strategy of how to take over and transform American government into a machine that serves only two purposes: Autocratic revenge against the “woke” enemy – and the imposition of a reactionary vision for society against the will of the majority.

That doesn’t mean these reactionaries will be able to put all their plans into practice in exactly the way they have outlined within just a few short months upon re-taking power. But if they were to win the 2024 presidential election, they would be in a significantly better position to realize their vision than they were in 2017. Nothing is ever predetermined in history. But in all likelihood, a second Trump presidency would be causing a lot more damage and harm – to democracy, the fundamental rights of the vast majority of people in this country, and the lives of the most vulnerable groups in America. 

They weren’t ready in 2017 – in 2025, they will be

Trump world was not ready in 2017. Non one understands this more clearly than the American Right. The conservative machine was late to endorse Trumpism and hadn’t been fully mobilized in time to provide the personnel or policy plans. “Malevolence hampered by incompetence” was a prominent dictum in the early months of Trump’s first presidency, and there was definitely something to that. The extremist Right had to rely on more establishment types, as the Trump campaign entered office without a clue and with very few of their own people to staff government. Remember the infamous “adults in the room,” people like John Kelly as White House Chief of Staff, Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, James Mattis as Secretary of Defense, and H. R. McMaster as National Security Advisor? The idea that they would keep things from getting off the rails and prevent anything dangerous from happening – something they proved mostly unwilling and/or unable to do – was always silly. They did as much to legitimize and normalize Trump’s start as president as they did to constrain and contain him. And yet, it is also true that they were not fully radicalized extremists willing to do whatever necessary to implement reactionary authoritarianism. And certainly, the American Right now looks at them – and the many career civil servants, and lawyers, and bureaucrats in and around the executive who just continued to do their jobs – as a big reason why the first Trump presidency didn’t deliver what they had hoped for. They are determined to not let that happen again.

All the plans from 2025 start from this diagnosis of what, supposedly, went wrong the first time around. The central goal for the Right, therefore, is to have plans ready on Day 1 in January 2025 and implement them without hesitation. To achieve that goal, they are determined to eliminate all the hurdles that slowed them down – sabotaged them, as they see it – in Trump’s first presidency. This is exactly what “Project 2025” suggests. In their own parlance, “Project 2025” consists of four “pillars”: A policy agenda, spelled out in the 920-page report they published last April, titled: “Mandate for Leadership: A conservative promise” (I); a personnel database, intended to build an army of loyalists (II); a “training effort” that currently consists of online courses they call the “Presidential Administration Academy” to get these loyalists and all political appointees ready to implement the rightwing agenda (III); and, finally, “Project 2025” vows to create “a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies” (IV) – this fourth “pillar” is, at this point, still distinctly vague and seems to exist only in the form of an announcement of future action.

It is important not to get bogged down in the terminology here and not miss the forest for the trees. If we zoom out, “Project 2025” is a plan to execute what amounts to a comprehensive authoritarian takeover of American government. Broadly speaking, it envisions a vast expansion of presidential power over the executive branch. Moreover, “Project 2025” seeks to dismantle certain parts of government, the administrative state, and federal agencies – while simultaneously mobilizing and weaponizing others. Finally, “Project 2025” is a promise to purge from government anyone who is not all in on the Trumpist project and replace them with loyalists and ideological conformists.

A policy agenda to entrench white Christian patriarchal dominance

Let’s dive into the policy agenda of “Project 2025” to get a sense of what this all breaks down to in practice. This is the first of the aforementioned four “pillars,” and it is by far the most fully developed part of “Project 2025.” To the Right’s credit, they are not hiding their plans. In fact, they have outlined them in great detail in “Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise,” their 920-page report available freely online. The report is organized by five sections: “Taking the reins of government,” “The common defense,” “The general welfare,” “The economy,” and “Independent regulatory agencies.” In each section, specific departments as well as the many federal agencies and commissions each get their separate chapter, 30 in total, in which a host of different authors lay out what it is the Right wants to do with / to American government.

Broadly speaking, there are two dimensions to what “Project 2025” envisions: On one level, this is a radical program to dismantle the modern state. Certainly, the Right wants to rob the executive and the administrative state of any kind of tool that might be used to install boundaries for moneyed interests or help create a fairer pluralistic society. At the same time, however, they are also planning to weaponize and mobilize certain parts of the state. This is often presented as an attempt to “depoliticize” government. What that actually means is a far-reaching effort to punish and purge their enemies as well as impose their reactionary white Christian patriarchal order on American society.

There is undoubtedly a tension here between those two approaches: dismantling vs. mobilizing/weaponizing government. It mirrors a much broader conflict between different stands on the Right – broadly speaking, between a “libertarian,” market fundamentalist oligarchic wing and a reactionary traditionalist wing. The former has dominated the conservative legal movement, the latter stretches all the way from the Religious Right to the white supremacist extremist parts of the Right, with quite a bit of overlap between them. What emerged as the modern conservative political project in the middle decades of the twentieth century was in many ways defined by an alliance between these different strands of anti-liberalism, united in the fight against “communism,” and more specifically: against any attempt at leveling traditional hierarchies of wealth, race, gender, and religion. It’s certainly worth reflecting more on that tension and on whether or not it might derail “Project 2025” – more on that later. But first, let’s dissect the plans as they are detailed in the “Project 2025” report, with extensive quotes and concrete examples. What is outlined here is a radical, extreme vision for America. All the talk about liberal “alarmism” and hysteria must sound very silly to anyone who chooses to read rather than ignore or sanitize.

Dismantle government!

The rightwing plans for the Department of Education are a good starting point to explore the desire to dismantle modern government. The very first sentence in this chapter of the “Project 2025” report states: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” Under the guise of strengthening “parent’s rights” and “school choice,” the Right wants to abolish public education and replace it with a system of private schools. They have plans for higher education as well, where the enemy is the same as throughout “Project 2025” – those “woke” forces who seek to undermine the nation. In their own words: “Rather than continuing to buttress a higher education establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel, federal postsecondary education policy should prepare students for jobs in the dynamic economy, nurture institutional diversity, and expose schools to greater market forces.”

What is outlined here is not some fringe position on the Right. It is, in fact, very much in continuity with the reactionary crusade against public education that has always been a key element of modern conservative politics. Public education has always been highly suspicious to conservatives. Both strands of the modern conservative movement – the more “libertarian” and the more traditionalist strand, have, at least since the middle decades of the twentieth century, when they went into their anti-liberal alliance, focused on public education. The “libertarians” presented their critique in the form of arguments of efficiency and small government; it is fitting that the “Project 2025” report entails a nod to Milton Friedman. Since the 1970s, the neoliberal language of “choice” has transported and, unfortunately, mainstreamed that critique. Traditionalists and reactionaries have always derided public education as a Trojan horse for liberal, secular ideology.

Since the 1990s, specifically, conservatives have embraced “parents’ rights” as a way to undermine and de-legitimize public education. Newt Gingrich, for instance, adopted this idea as a key part of the Republican platform and his so-called “Contract with America.” It is a flexible concept that can mean total surveillance of what happens in the classroom by white conservative parents; and it definitely means that parents should be able to opt out of public education entirely and not have to contribute to funding it in any way.

On the surface, there is something weird about an increasingly authoritarian movement obsessing over school privatization. Authoritarian regimes – think: Viktor Orbán in Hungary – usually tend to oppose private education, as it removes kids from the direct reach of the state. The “school choice” fetish of the American Right reflects the specific alliance of “libertarian,” market fundamentalist forces and reactionaries that has shaped modern conservatism as a political project in the United States. Most importantly, private education, in the minds of the Right, does not mean letting kids go to “woke” progressive schools – they envision an empire of Christian schools and conservative indoctrination. So, from the American Right, we get both: The reactionary takeover of education in Florida, for instance, follows the standard authoritarian playbook and is explicitly modeled after what Orbán has done in Hungary: Tight ideological control over education to enforce a certain morality, national story, and national identity, one that normalizes existing power relations, legitimizes traditional hierarchies. At the same time, rightwingers push for the dismantling of public education because they want to prioritize private institutions that are fully devoted to those same ideological goals.

If you know anything about the rightwing crusade against the modern state, it will not surprise you that the “Project 2025” plans for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are another good example for what the Right means when they talk about dismantling the state. They want, as they put it, a “conservative EPA,” as opposed to what they describe as an “agency that has long been amenable to being coopted by the Left for political ends.” Once again, this is very much in line with the conservative legal movement general deregulation agenda and with business interests of the Republican donor class. The EPA is symbolically significant to the Right because it “has been a breeding ground for expansion of the federal government’s influence and control across the economy.” In particular, the report rails against the “Biden Administration’s assault on the energy sector” that is supposedly “forcing the economy to build out and rely on unreliable renewables.” The first thing that needs to go: those “job-killing regulations that serve to depress the economy and grow the bureaucracy.”

Climate change is the obvious elephant in the room here. To the extent it is acknowledged at all, it is presented as just another bogeyman the Left uses to scare people into compliance with their anti-American agenda:

“Although the U.S. environmental story is very positive, there has been a return to fear-based rhetoric within the agency, especially as it pertains to the perceived threat of climate change. Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.”

This is very much in line with what Heritage president Kevin Roberts, in his foreword to the report, calls “environmental extremism.” According to the Right, it only serves one purpose: “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.”

Zooming out from the EPA section, “Project 2025” does simply not acknowledge the climate crisis – the central collective action problem humanity faces in the twenty-first century – as a big deal. Measures to counteract and mitigate climate change are, however, derided throughout the report as pure “woke” radicalism. The chapter on the Executive Office of the President, for instance, rails against “the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism,” and demands the National Security Council stop paying attention to “social engineering and non-defense matters, including climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies.”

The U.S. Army is, supposedly, critically weakened by “a pervasive politically driven top-down focus on progressive social policies that emphasize matters like so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion and climate change, often to the detriment of the Army’s core warfighting mission.” And, to give you just one more example, the Biden administration is accused of “deforming” the Agency for International Development (USAID) by “treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.” In fact, all that “climate fanaticism” only serves the interests of China, the USAID chapter asserts – which makes sense, as the underlying diagnosis of all of “Project 2025” is that the “woke,” “globalist” enemy within is in cahoots with the Communist enemy without. USAID therefore must immediately cease “promoting abortion, gender radicalism, climate extremism, and other woke ideas.”

Mobilize and weaponize government!

The plans for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are a good example of how the deregulation/dismantling government agenda and the desire to weaponize the state intersect. Unsurprisingly, the people behind “Project 2025” hate the Centers for Disease Control (CDC): Mask mandates! Vaccination recommendations! Covid denialism shapes the critique of the CDC, which is derided as “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.” A very specific gripe against the CDC points to the Christian fundamentalist sensibilities that also inform this visceral disdain: “how much risk mitigation,” the report asks, “is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?” Non-Christian holidays and souls are not mentioned as a concern.

The recommendation, therefore, is to disempower the CDC and take it apart, to split it up into two different entities. The general goal is to preserve the CDC’s data-gathering function, but to eliminate its “political function,” which is what, according to the report, any kind of public health recommendation necessarily is: “For example, never again should CDC officials be allowed to say in their official capacity that school children ‘should be’ masked or vaccinated (through a schedule or otherwise) or prohibited from learning in a school building.”

Despite it’s supposedly disastrous actions during the Covid pandemic, “Project 2025” wants the CDC to play a key role in one very specific way going forward: As part of a much larger crusade against abortion rights. The CDC, in this vision, can help end “abortion tourism.” The problem, according to the report, is that “liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism.” One thing the CDC should do, therefore, is to collect abortion data from the entire country in one place, once those blue states will be forced to comply: “HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.” A unified databank with comprehensive data on every abortion in America in the hands of a patriarchal regime lusting for control over the bodies of women. Who could possibly object?

The plans for the Department of Health and Human Services are really not revolving around public or individual health at all. The overriding concern here is to impose a reactionary Christian patriarchal order and punish all those who object and deviate. As the first goal of HHS, the report names “Protecting Life, Conscience, and Bodily Integrity.” What follows is a broadside at bodily autonomy, self-determination, and the rights of lgbtq people – all under the umbrella of protecting “the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.”

“Project 2025” is very clear about instituting a total abortion ban: “HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.” In fact, it tasks the HHS Secretary with guaranteeing “that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.” Medical abortion and what the report calls “mail-order abortions” or “chemical abortions” are to be outlawed.

And “Project 2025” anticipates a much broader role for HHS in upholding a traditionalist, conservative Christian understanding of gender, family, and motherhood. Another of the Department’s key goals is defined as “Promoting Stable and Flourishing Married Families.” The report leaves no doubt what qualifies as “marriage” and “family” here: “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” No more of this unnatural pluralism of lifestyles, identities, and family structures – the report rails against the HHS’s agenda under President Biden of “focusing on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage.” Deviation is no longer to be tolerated, it is to be extinguished, its existence denied: “Radical actors inside and outside government are promoting harmful identity politics that replaces biological sex with subjective notions of ‘gender identity’ and bases a person’s worth on his or her race, sex, or other identities.” But no more. The goal is to turn the clock back to a time when the “natural”/divinely ordained hetero-normative, patriarchal order was still intact, and only those who comply are considered “healthy” and have a right to health care: “The Secretary’s antidiscrimination policy statements should never conflate sex with gender identity or sexual orientation. Rather, the Secretary should proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care.”

What “Project 2025” offers is a story of decline and a promise to restore former national glory by purging enemies and deviants from the nation. This is also what is supposed to happen in the Department of Defense (DoD). Some of this chapter reads as very standard Reaganist militarism, mostly directed at China as the adversary. But a big reason why the American armed forces are supposedly in such a sorry state is “the Biden Administration’s profoundly unserious equity agenda and vaccine mandates.” A key goal, we are being told, has to be to “Restore standards of lethality and excellence.” How do you do that? By going after the usual suspects who ought to be ostracized: “Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service.”

Another key goal: “Eliminate politicization, reestablish trust and accountability, and restore faith to the force.” Whenever “Project 2025” rails against “politicization,” the whole laundry list of rightwing culture war grievances is guaranteed to follow. “Eliminate politicization” in the Department of Defense means:

“Reinstate servicemembers to active duty who were discharged for not receiving the COVID vaccine.”

“Eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.”

“Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.”

No more tolerance for pluralism, no more acceptance of diversity. That is the main thrust of so much “Project 2025” has to offer, and it usually overrides everything else. Think of all the intricate problems and challenges the Department of Labor could and should tackle… But the first priority listed under “Needed Reforms” on the “Project 2025” policy agenda is: “Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy.” This is supposed to be a policy planning document. Yet most of it is just a propagation of the Christopher Rufo canon of reactionary moral panics. One big target is “DEI”: “Under this managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology, every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views.”

The next urgent reform on the list: “Eliminate Racial Classifications and Critical Race Theory Trainings.” And that leaves, predictably, stripping lgbtq people of labor rights as another key plank of this platform. The report very openly demands that the next president should “Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.” Because if something really ails the labor market and the American economy, it is the fact that you can’t legally discriminate like we used to anymore.

I don’t want to belabor the point too much – if you have read this far, you understand. Look almost anywhere in this 920-page policy agenda, and you will find a visceral disdain for any kind of pluralism and diversity channeled into a program aiming to extinguish it.

Let’s do one more: the Department of Justice (DoJ). People don’t trust the DoJ anymore, and certainly not the FBI, we are being told. Why is that? The answer is exactly the one you get from Fox News and the rightwing propaganda machine to the right of Fox News: First of all, “The Federal Bureau of Investigation, knowing that claims of collusion with Russia were false, collaborated with Democratic operatives to inject the story into the 2016 election through strategic media leaks, falsified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications, and lied to Congress.” Secondly, Hunter Biden’s laptop! No, really: “Personnel within the FBI engaged in a campaign to convince social media companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation campaign.” And finally, a big problem is that the Department of Justice hasn’t been going hard enough after “radical agents of the Left like Antifa” and instead threatened anyone not complying with the “liberal agenda.” But things are about to change. No more autonomy from the White House – “Project 2025” promises a DoJ entirely devoted to doing the president’s bidding.

The Great Purge: Installing an army of loyalists

Expanding presidential power, establishing total control over the government, weaponizing some parts of the executive while dismantling others – that is the first big focus of “Project 2025,” as it crystallizes in the policy agenda for every department, every agency. But all of this only works if the right people are in place to see this plan through – rather than “sabotage” it, as was the case during the first Trump presidency. Underlying all of these policy proposals, therefore, is the fever dream of a great purge of government officials who are to be replaced with a vast army of loyalists.

All incoming administrations bring in their own people who they have previously vetted. There are about 4,000 political appointees across the government, the executive, the many different agencies who will be reviewed, confirmed, or replaced by an incoming administration – many require Senate confirmation, but the majority don’t.

But the Right wants to go much further: “Project 2025” dreams of firing and replacing up to 50,000 people. How is that supposed to work? The short answer is: They want to implement Schedule F. Shortly before the 2020 election, Donald Trump signed an executive order – Schedule F – that was rescinded by President Biden immediately upon taking office, before it could do any damage. It was intended to fight the sinister “deep state,” and rightwingers are determined to execute Schedule F as soon as they get another chance. Schedule F would convert tens of thousands of career civil service positions into political appointments – starting with anyone in a policy-adjacent position or policy advisory role, but really, that’s just a rough approximation. The goal is to strip all these people of their civil service protections in order to make them fireable – and then fire them. No more independent experts and competent bureaucrats. An hour of wolves.

Opening 50,000 positions only makes sense if you also have the personnel to fill them. That is why “Project 2025” is currently building what they call the “Presidential Personnel Database” – an unprecedented headhunting operation to ensure ideological conformity. “We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” Paul Dans, the director of “Project 2025” and one of several Trump administration alumni Heritage has brought in since 2020, told the Washington Post: “We want conservative warriors.”

In order to find them, they are vetting thousands of people with the help of an online questionnaire that is designed to identify true ideological believers. Axios has published the questionnaire. It starts with a section on “political and philosophical approach” in which candidates are asked to name a person and a book that has shaped their political thinking, and a policy issue they are “most passionate about.” After that, they are asked to indicate whether or not they agree with a long list of statements on not only specific public policy fields, but also national values and identity. On basically every one of them, it is fairly easy to guess which is the answer that is considered correct. “The police in America are systemically racist” – I’d say they are looking for people who *do not* agree; “The federal government should recognize only two unchanging sexes, male and female, as a matter of policy” – I’m guessing disagreement would exclude you from the club… Once applicants have made their way through all the questions, they are to include a resume and a link to their social media profiles. Just to make sure.

This whole endeavor is certainly not about finding qualified people with subject matter expertise or political experience. It’s about finding people with the right kind of sensibilities and ideological commitments. This isn’t about identifying “conservatives,” at least not in the sense of what is usually – or used to be – associated with the term in the broader public discourse. The questionnaire is designed to make sure, as a Trump White House alumnus told Axios, to make sure that candidates are “listening to Tucker, and not pointing to the Reagan revolution or any George W. Bush stuff.” Conservatism from Reagan to GWB: That’s weak RINO nonsense. “Project 2025” is looking for purity and radicalism. They are looking to put Maga warriors firmly in charge of American government. No “adults in the room” this time.

A nastier, more hostile, more dangerous America

We are nearing the word limit of what most email providers will send out as a newsletter. We have still quite a bit of work to do if we want to properly understand the significance of “Project 2025” and situate it in the broader context of what is happening on the Right. I have a lot more to say about how “Project 2025” relates to the plans that have emerged from other rightwing factions, what to make of the tensions between the competing desires to dismantle vs. weaponize the state that are indicative of a broader conflict and potentially lasting realignment on the Right, and what the specific political circumstances are that would make a second Trump presidency a lot more dangerous than the first, even if it is highly unlikely that the people behind Project 2025” will succeed at realizing all their reactionary dreams right away. I will throw all this to a Part III, to be published next week. But after spending *a lot* of time with, first, the worldview behind “Project 2025” in last week’s Part I, and now this deep dive into the actual plans and initiatives this worldview has so far generated, my biggest takeaway is this: The forces that are fully in charge on the Right have a very clear idea of what they want to do the next time they get back to power. There is no doubt they would transform America into a much nastier, much more dangerous, much more hostile place for anyone who dares to deviate from the white Christian patriarchal order. And that is what is actually on the ballot in November.

Please find Part I of my three-part series on Project 2025 (titled “Project 2025 Promises Revenge, Oppression, and Autocratic Rule”) here, Part III (titled: “What Makes Project 2025 So Dangerous”) here, and Part IV (titled: “Allies Against Democracy”) here.