Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Vision for the Future

The following is a lightly edited transcript from the premiere episode of For Justice! With Rakim Brooks, a Newsweek podcast. You can listen to the full episode here:

Have you all heard about Project 2025? A lot of my friends on the left have been bringing it up to me recently. It’s a project of the Heritage Foundation, essentially a presidential transition project, where they’re going to attempt to equip the next president—”the next Republican president,” they say, as though they don’t know who that would be if a Republican were elected—with the tools necessary to wrest control of the government from what they call the “radical left.”

The news coverage of Project 2025 has been fairly scathing. It has referred to it as a Christian nationalist document. It’s talked about authoritarian impulses. It claims that the project wants to strip the federal government down to the studs, firing thousands—if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands—of federal workers just through an executive order. It talks about the motivations really being an extension of the movement to overturn Roe and to continue to protect “the sanctity of the unborn child.”

Basically, there has been no positive coverage of Project 2025 on the left.

I would also say, however, that there’s been no truly descriptive coverage of Project 2025.

The best article I found thus far came from The Week magazine, which attempted to summarize everything that people have been saying about this project all in one place with various links. And I’d recommend it to you if you just need a quick read. But if you follow those links, I think you gain no greater clarity about the specific plans and how they all work together, which is really a shame because thanks to the Heritage Foundation, the “mandate for leadership,” which is what they call Project 2025, is all online. All 30 chapters of it are available to us to read for ourselves.

And so I suddenly had the impulse that maybe our listenership would be interested in knowing what each of these chapters said, or at least in big blocks what it says because it’s broken down into four or five distinctive parts.

And so that’s what I’m going to do.

In this episode, at least, I’m going to go over the introductory statements of Project 2025. But I’m of the belief that people should read things for themselves. The coverage has been interesting to me. It’s certainly alarmed me enough that it led me to this place where I wanted to actually read the document. But if you’ll take the time with me, I think we can actually make our own assessments of what this document says in critical detail so that we know exactly what a group like the Heritage Foundation is proposing for our country.

So let’s dig in.

The first essay, if you could call it that, is actually a note on Project 2025. It comes to you from the project director, a man named Paul Dans. It starts out and says, “We want you! The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025. Welcome to the mission. By opening this book, you are now a part of it.”

So I guess we’re in! We got this keys. All right, let’s see: What’s this about?

It says, “For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now.” It continues: “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”

I don’t know about you, but this all feels a little overstated.

In any case, it goes on to say, “This book is functionally an invitation for you the reader—Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith—to come to Washington or support those who can. Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”

So that’s the project. Everybody got that?

“On day one to deconstruct the Administrative State,” which apparently has been taken over by “cultural Marxism,” and this is the greatest threat to freedom and liberty in our lifetimes. No, not in our lifetimes—as never before. Never before in our history have we seen such a great threat to liberty and freedom since “the long march of Cultural Marxism.”

All right. If you’re me or anyone like me, you’re already very skeptical of this document, because none of this seems to comport with reality. But let’s go to the second essay, because that’s written by Kevin D. Roberts, who is president of the Heritage Foundation.

I first learned about Kevin D. Roberts just maybe a month ago or so, because there was a great New York Times magazine piece called “Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for ‘Institutionalizing Trumpism.'” And since I want to keep Trump as far from the White House as possible, the idea that you would institutionalize even his legacy seemed problematic to me, so I had to read this.

And there are many concerning parts of that interview—I recommend it to you—but to me the most important was that Roberts really seemed obsessed about the “focus on family policy.” And he describes “the motivation to realize that Hungary has to do something, as most countries in the world outside of Africa, have to do to reverse the declining birth rate” as a fundamental concern of the conservative movement.

I just don’t understand how that could possibly square with any notion of limited government. I do not want the United States government to be concerned with the national birth rate. That is really Handmaid’s Tale type of stuff.

Rakim H. D. Brooks is the president of Alliance for Justice and host of For Justice! With Rakim Brooks. Available everywhere your favorite podcasts are heard: