The Far-Right Playbook ~ Project 2025 part 1

Project 2025 is a blueprint for authoritarianism that threatens American civil and human rights. It aims to enhance executive powers, strip rights protections from marginalized communities, dismantle the federal government, and restrict various rights and policies. The project promotes increasing authoritarianism by politicizing institutions, spreading disinformation, and weakening checks and balances. It targets vulnerable communities, particularly the LGBTQ+ community, and stokes violence while corrupting elections. Trump's leadership has contributed to a rise in political violence and threats against public officials. Rejecting the far-right's efforts is crucial to preserving an inclusive democracy. Table of Contents. 1. Project 2025, a blueprint for authoritarianism. 2. The role of Christian nationalism. 3. Gutting the civil service. 4. Ending racial equity efforts. 5. Eviscerating LGBTQ plus rights and equality. 6. Restricting sexual and reproductive health and rights. 7. Hardline immigration policies. 8. Ending climate change efforts and restricting environment policies. 9. Ending woke military policies. 10. Reforming public education. 11. Restricting human rights and exiting international bodies. 12. Profiles of Project 2025 organizational supporters. 13. Full list of Project 2025 organizational supporters. Project 2025 is a threat to our democracy, and we must treat it as such. That robust governing agenda bears the hallmarks of authoritarianism. It threatens American civil and human rights and our very democracy. The America that Project 2025 wants to create would involve a fundamental reordering of our society. It would greatly enhance the executive branch's powers and impose on all Americans policies favored by Christian nationalists regarding issues such as sexual health and reproductive rights, education, the family, and the role of religion in our society and government. It would strip rights protections from LGBTQ plus people, immigrants, women, and people of color. It would dismantle much of the federal government and replace our apolitical civil service with far-right partisans it is already training in anticipation of a power shift. It would end attempts to enhance equity and racial justice throughout the government and shut down agencies that track progress on this front. Efforts to tackle issues such as climate change would be ended, and politicized research produced to back the Project's views on environmental policy, the evils of transgenderism, and women's health would take priority. Project 2025 is an authoritarian roadmap to dismantling a thriving, inclusive democracy for all. Even if a Project 2025 favorite doesn't win in 2024, this plan will continue to drive the thinking of the far-right into the future and they will continue to push for these changes wherever possible. As a country, we can and we must reject the far-right's efforts to lead us down the dark path away from an inclusive, vibrant democracy and toward authoritarianism. The main elements of Project 2025 Gbaje's analysis of Project 2025 focuses on two issues. First, a description of the Project's advisory board's supportive organizations, outlining their assertions, activities, and beliefs, many of which can be described as extremely far-right. Second, it analyzes their plans for a far-right presidential administration as laid out in the Project's main text, Mandate for Leadership, A Conservative Promise. This analysis identifies the aspects of Project 2025 that promote increasing authoritarianism as defined in Protect Democracy's The Authoritarian Playbook, specifically, the politicizing of independent institutions, spreading disinformation, aggrandizing executive power, weakening checks and balances, quashing criticism or dissent, marginalizing and restricting the rights of specific communities, corrupting elections, and stoking violence. Project 2025, A Blueprint for Authoritarianism Authoritarian regimes generally abolish or restrict civil liberties, concentrate political power, and impede and weaken free elections that allow for alternations of power. Authoritarian states might nominally contain democratic institutions such as political parties, legislatures, and elections, which are managed in such a way as to entrench authoritarian rule, for example gerrymandering and a restriction of social services, including education. Authoritarianism's opposite is liberal democracy, which the bipartisan Freedom House, the oldest American institution defending global democracy, defines as encompassing much more than elections and majority rule. Liberal democracies are typified by governance based on the consent of the governed, accountable institutions, adherence to rule of law and respect for human rights. They have independent courts, an independent press, and a thriving civil society. Liberal democracies are open to changes in power, with rival candidates or parties competing fairly to govern for the good of the public as a whole, not just themselves or those who voted for them. The path to authoritarianism usually first involves democratic backsliding, propelled by political figures and parties with authoritarian instincts who employ specific tactics. These factors are evident in Project 2025, which explicitly advocates politicizing independent institutions by replacing the federal bureaucracy with conservative activists and removing independence for many agencies. It advocates for gutting what it calls the Deep State, a conspiracy theory shared by the project's authors that blame civil servants for a coordinated effort to undermine a conservative agenda. Project 2025 claims to already be recruiting and training those who would replace career civil servants, with Project Director Paul Dan saying, we want conservative warriors. Trump and many of his supporters have bought into the idea that this Deep State undermined his presidency, particularly regarding his relationship with Russia, and by sabotaging his policies. For example, the project claims that bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America's classrooms and bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about intersectionality and abortion. There is no evidence for these claims. Perhaps most ominous, Project 2025 targets the Department of Justice, DOJ, and the FBI. The project states about the next president that he will need to decide expeditiously how to handle any major ongoing litigation or other pending legal matters that might present a challenge to his agenda rather than allowing the DOJ and FBI to act independently to ensure the rule of law. A very real fear with Project 2025's recommendations for the president to take control of investigations and prosecutions is that a president will abuse that power to target political rivals and those who disagree with their policies. Since Watergate, presidents of both parties have worked to ensure the independence of prosecutions from political influence. There are several elements of the project that spread disinformation about medical issues including COVID, abortion, sexual and reproductive health rights, sex education, and other issues, including DEI programs, climate change, civil rights, and marginalized communities, especially the LGBTQ plus community. The entire project is devoted to aggrandizing executive power by centralizing authority in the presidency, and a key aspect of democratic backsliding is viewing opposition elements as attempting to destroy the real community, an essential aspect to quashing dissent. Project 2025 paints progressives and liberals as outside acceptable politics, and not just ideological opponents, but inherently anti-American and replacing American values. Targeting vulnerable communities is a core tenet of Project 2025. Certain populations, in particular the LGBTQ plus community, are treated as deviants with ill intent rather than humans and Americans, and do not appear to exist within the far-rights framework of those deserving of fulsome human rights and protection from discrimination. Perhaps even more frightening, the left, the LGBTQ plus population, and the woke, are described as subversive elements aimed at destroying the country and its real values. The attack on the LGBTQ plus population is particularly ominous as recent research by Ucklass Williams Institute has found a correlation between democratic backsliding and diminution in the rights of LGBTQ plus communities. LGBTQ plus people are the canaries in the authoritarian coal mine. Protect democracy points to two other factors as key to growing authoritarianism, stoking violence and corrupting elections. Trump was notorious for stoking violence against political opponents, those who upheld Biden's 2020 election win, and election workers. And during his campaign rallies where supporters violently attacked people, he verbally attacked immigrants and other communities, and even suggested he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it? Trump's words and his authoritarian ways have made the U.S. a more dangerous place based on an October 2023 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute. Nearly one in four Americans now believe political violence is justified to save the U.S., a higher number than just two years ago. The numbers grow even higher among Americans who believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, to nearly one in every two people, among Americans who like Trump, to 41%, among Americans who believe in the white supremacist great replacement conspiracy theory, to 41%, and among Americans who believe the core tenet of white Christian nationalism, that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians, to 39%. This has real-world implications. A Reuters investigation published in August 2023 showed that political violence began rising in 2016, in tandem with Trump's leadership. Research from the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, NSIGHT, published that same month found that threats against public officials are growing. And, of course, there was the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, which was encouraged by Trump, and combined stoking mob violence with corrupting elections to prevent certification of the 2020 presidential results. NSIGHT found that the second most targeted group for political violence were elected officials and those who run or manage elections, who have been abandoning their positions in droves since 2020 due to threats from Trump supporters and the election denial movement that grew in the wake of Trump's constant barrage of lies about the outcome of the 2020 election. This has profoundly harmed America's election system. Trump has been identified as a key factor in American democratic backsliding. The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found in 2021 that the U.S. fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on a democratic scale. The Institute pointed to Trump and called his baseless questioning of the legitimacy of the 2020 election results a historic turning point that undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process and culminated in the Capitol insurrection. America's V-Dem Democracy Index score shows a peak in 2015 and a sharp decline after 2016. In 2018, the U.S. was downgraded to a flawed democracy by the Economist Intelligence Unit in its annual Democracy Index report and by Freedom House. The Brookings Institute in 2023 pointed to two factors in American democratic decline, election manipulation and executive overreach. It also pointed to a decline in nongovernmental institutions critical to a healthy public sphere, including an independent media, a thriving education system, and an engaged civil society, as symptoms of democratic backsliding. Project 2025 would further advance democratic backsliding in the U.S. It would politicize key institutions such as the Department of Justice and strip civil rights protections from multiple communities, but particularly the LGBTQ plus community. The project especially demonizes the transgender community, equating transgenderism and transgender ideology with pornography. Immigrants are demonized with false claims of inherent criminality, turning them into a national security threat that must be dealt with harshly. And anti-black racism is evident in the project's sweeping denunciation of the noxious tenets of critical race theory, only taught at the college level and beyond, which it falsely claims is advocating for more racial discrimination rather than acknowledging America's history of racism. Authoritarian states often frame themselves as standing against a mortal threat. Project 2025 appears to describe a two-fold threat. Internationally, it is China, describing it as the defining threat to U.S. interests in the 21st century. Domestically, it is the left, immigrants, the LGBTQ plus community, and those advocating for racial and social justice. They too are treated as enemies of the state. Typical to democratic backsliding, the project attacks the media and voting. It proposes ending government funding for nonpartisan media such as NPR and PBS, which they describe as compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views and argues for aggressive investigation of leaks to the media. It describes mainstream media as an anti-U.S. chorus that is denigrating the American story. It would make voting more difficult, and proposes more aggressive prosecution of so-called voter fraud, for instance moving DOJ investigations from its civil rights division to the criminal division because, otherwise, voter registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction will remain federal election offenses that are never appropriately investigated and prosecuted. It also proposes a full-scale review of DOJ's election guidance to states on various forms of voting and is adamantly against any efforts the DOJ has engaged in to protect elections, condemning DOJ's suits against multiple states to enhance election integrity. Many of the principals involved in Project 2025 are also key players in another effort that is aimed at restricting civil rights and gutting the federal government, the Convention of the States, COS, whose president Mark Meckler is co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. Among the senior supporters to the Convention of States is Alec Michael Ferris, former CEO of the rapidly anti-LGBTQ-plus Alliance Defending Freedom, and former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. Also supporting are far-right extremists Ben Shapiro and Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk. The Convention of the States, COS, like Project 2025, has not received the attention it deserves. The plan is to alter the Constitution through amendments using Article V, which empowers states to call for a constitutional convention. The article reads, On the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments. It should be noted that almost no rules apply to an Article V convention and the consequences could be dire for our democracy and our civil and human rights. So far, 28 states, six shy of the required 34, have called for a constitutional convention aimed at sharply reducing federal powers through the Convention of States campaign or other convention campaigns. COS has passed its resolution in 19 states and has had its legislation introduced in enough states to achieve the convention should they all pass it. On its site, the COS wants to limit the powers of the federal government, achieve fiscal responsibility, and impose term limits. In their simulated conventions, they agreed to seek to restrict the federal government's discretionary spending authority, land ownership rights, and ability to regulate interstate commerce. It would also remove from the federal government the power to enforce any federal law or regulation with which the majority of state legislatures disagree. Unbelievably radical, this would allow a simple majority of states to band together to rescind any act of Congress, the President, or a federal agency. Furthermore, it gives state legislatures exclusive power to nullify federal laws and regulations, making it clear that state executive and judicial branches shall have no authority or involvement in this process. COS also adopted a proposal to restrict the Commerce Clause, which is the basis for most federal environmental, labor, consumer, and civil rights protections, and nullify all existing laws and regulations in conflict with COS' reading of the Constitution. Make no mistake, democracies can and do succumb to illiberalism, sometimes rather quickly. There is a pattern to democratic backsliding that has played out in formerly democratic countries like Hungary, where civil liberties have been curtailed, marginalized communities have had their rights stripped, media is co-opted by the regime, and elections are not free and fair due to various tactics, including keeping opposition parties from publicizing their proposed policies. This is the path Hungary has taken under the rule of Viktor Orban. Starting with attacks on the LGBTQ plus community and migrants, the Orban regime progressively undermined independent institutions installing its partisans in the Constitutional Court, the National Media Authority, the Competition Authority, the State Audit Office, and the Public Prosecutor's Office. Independent media was gobbled up by Orban allies, academics attacked, and the ability of opposition parties to fairly run in elections stymied. It also redefined real Hungarians as Christians. In 2022, the European Commission decided to hold back millions in EU funds until Hungary meets conditions related to judicial independence, academic freedom, LGBTQ plus rights and the asylum system. That same year, the European Parliament issued a statement that Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracy, but is rather an electoral autocracy. The EU money was still on hold as of November 2023. Here in the U.S., the far-right applauds Orban, who has spoken at far-right extremist events like CPAC repeatedly and hosted far-right Americans including Trump and Tucker Carlson in Budapest. Project 2025 would set the U.S. on the Hungarian path if implemented. The Role of Christian Nationalism Project 2025 is very clearly on a path to Christian nationalism as well as authoritarianism. It rejects the constitutional separation of church and state, rather privileging religious beliefs over civil laws. Religious freedom is referenced throughout the plan and is seen to trump all other civil rights which should be subsumed to an individual's religious rights. The message that America must remain Christian, that Christianity should enjoy a privileged place in society, and that the government must take steps to ensure this is clear in every section of the plan, as is the idea that American identity cannot be separated from Christianity. As a result, Project 2025 favors a government mandated by biblical principles, which excludes certain communities, particularly the LGBTQ plus community, from civil rights protections. To accomplish this, the project relies heavily on interpretations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, RFRA, which states government shall not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability. It has been described by the Supreme Court as a kind of super statute, displacing the normal operation of other federal laws that might supersede Title VII's commands in appropriate cases. RFRA, passed in 1993 with almost unanimous approval from the House and Senate, was originally intended to protect religious exercise but has over the years been used to erode civil rights and deny healthcare under the guise of religious freedom, as in the case of Burwell v Hobby Lobby, where the Supreme Court ruled that employers could deny certain healthcare services if it went against their religious beliefs. In Bostock v Clayton Country, the Court ruled that discrimination based on sex includes protection for sexual orientation and transgender status which the project demands be very narrowly interpreted to only include hiring and firing and that all materials in federal agencies that would interpret Bostock more liberally be withdrawn. This plan is for the next conservative president, but the project's sponsors have been working to achieve this vision for years and will continue to do so, regardless of who wins in 2024. Official supporters of Project 2025, specifically the Alliance Defending Freedom, ADF, have had much success with recent Supreme Court rulings on abortion and a company's right to refuse service based on religious principles. Little could have been as fortuitous for this movement as the election of Rep. Mike Johnson, our law, a former employee of the anti-LGBTQ plus ADF, to U.S. House Speaker, second in line to the presidency. He is an election denier who claims his worldview can be ascertained from the Bible, including its denial of evolution and a belief that the earth is about 6,000 years old, despite all science to the contrary. Former ADF head, Michael Ferris, has said that Johnson is the highest ranking biblically trained conservative Christian that he and his fellow evangelical Christians have ever seen and that Johnson will usher in the most conservative House of Representatives. The project's Christian nationalist goals are inherent in its dehumanizing language about LGBTQ plus people, putting them in the same sentence as pornography and pedophilia, rabid rejection of wokeness, its promotion of the traditional family writing that families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society, its certainty that gender identity is binary and that being LGBTQ plus is an ideology rather than a natural state. It goes on to say that work on the Sabbath should be paid at time and a half, and that the government should protect the letter and spirit of religious freedom and conscience protection law, and employers should be able to abide by their religious beliefs regarding marriage, the LGBTQ plus community, women's health care, race, and any other religiously held conviction regardless of anti-discrimination laws. The project wants a general statement of policy specifying that it, the government, will not enforce any rules against sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination by health care providers who receive federal funds in the Affordable Health Care Act, and indeed, the DOJ should aggressively defend a provider's right to discriminate in court challenges. Many of the project's recommendations are based on the false idea that the left is determined to rescind religious protection saying, today the left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent. And about education, it would upend the accreditation requirements for schools and universities by removing rules the project sees as biased against religious schools or doctrine, but still allow Title IV funds to be available to these institutions. It also wants an executive order to remove what it calls the list of shame, the list of schools that have applied for religious exemptions to Title IX, from the Department of Education website. The project demands that faith-based adoption and foster care institutions be able to deny a child a home if the home doesn't meet with their religious tenets. While not all aspects of the desire to infuse far-right interpretations of Christianity are apparent in the wording of Project 2025, they are abundantly clear in the missions and activities of many of the advisory board and the project leader, Heritage Foundation. Examples include the American Conservative Advocating for Christian Conversion Therapy Council in claiming that a law protecting young people from harmful conversion therapy infringes upon their free speech, the California Family Council whose mission and vision are, advancing God's design for life, family, and liberty through California's church, capital, and culture, and God's people living as principled citizens of both heaven and earth, biblically faithful, civically responsible, culturally impactful, and the Eagle Forum which seeks to define and defend more effectively the Judeo-Christian worldview of the U.S. Constitution and legal system in today's culture war and refers to supporting LGBTQ plus rights as a religion in itself. Gutting the Civil Service. One of the project's key efforts is to replace as many civil service employees as possible with conservative partisans and materials indicate that they are already identifying and training those people. The project portrays the federal bureaucracy as an enemy and part of a woke deep state working in secret to undermine efforts to install conservative principles in the U.S. For Project 2025's collective thinking, electoral results favoring the right are systematically undermined by this nefarious cabal. This is particularly the case, the project alleges, because career staff are often hired due to membership in certain ideologically aligned groups or based on illegal considerations such as race, religion, or sex, as opposed to merit and aptitude. The plan isn't just to stack the civil service with those who support the far-right agenda. Much of Project 2025 is dedicated to eviscerating departments and agencies, essentially gutting the federal government and investing nearly unfettered power over the executive branch, including the Department of Justice and FBI, in the presidency. The plan is to assemble thousands of properly vetted and trained personnel from across the country who will be ready on January 20, 2025, to begin dismantling our unaccountable fourth branch of government, the administrative state. The end goal is to gut the federal bureaucracy and fight the deep state, the latter being a reference to popular right-wing conspiracies that there is a clandestine network of members of the federal government, particularly in the Department of Justice, DOJ, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, working to thwart the conservative movement's goals, versions of this conspiracy theory have existed for decades. Trump popularized this idea, alleging that the federal staffers were literally working to destroy him, and it is a central aspect of other conspiracies such as QAnon, which Trump openly embraced. Trump's conspiracist talk has had an effect, more than one in three Americans have come to believe the deep state really was undermining Trump. Mandate for Leadership, the conservative promise, where the project's plans are laid out in detail, explains how to gut the civil service. It features sections on how to fire supposedly unfireable federal bureaucrats, how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices, how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of government, how to restore the American people's constitutional authority over the administrative state, and how to save untold taxpayer dollars in the process. It proposes that any employee that has been involved in diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, efforts and did not object on constitutional or moral grounds should be subject to per se grounds for termination of employment. The project lays out what it calls the the specific deficiencies of the federal bureaucracy, meaning its size, levels of organization, inefficiency, expense, and lack of responsiveness to political appointees. It claims that this deep state is far too influenced by the progressive ideology that unelected experts can and should be trusted to promote the general welfare in just about every area of social life. Thus an essential reordering is required to conform with the project's far-right principles. The kinds of people Project 2025 is looking to install in the civil service becomes clear in the project's personnel questionnaire. The application is prefaced with the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them. We will take back our government. For the most part, the survey is filled with leading questions that would clearly screen in candidates who are far-right, anti-LGBTQ+, and against international institutions. Some of the questions applicants are asked to agree or disagree with include, the federal government should recognize only two unchanging sexes, male and female, as a matter of policy, the UN should have authority over the citizens or public policies of sovereign nations, the president should be able to advance his slash her agenda through the bureaucracy without hindrance from unelected federal officials, the police in America are systemically racist, and the permanent institutions of family and religion are foundational to American freedom and the common good. Project 2025 is already training, though in academy, aspiring appointees with the insight, background knowledge, and expertise in governance to immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government. They will be armed with knowledge for recognizing and addressing the dangers of the administrative state. Ending Racial Equity Efforts A particular target of Project 2025 are efforts to improve racial equity, especially through diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, programs. The project views these efforts as hostile attacks, as affirmative discrimination, alleging that DEI efforts have become the vehicles for this unlawful discrimination, and all departments and agencies have created equity plans to carry out these invidious schemes. Delving further, the project views DEI efforts as part of a managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology, where 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. In the Upside-Down World of Project 2025 efforts to improve equity are actually a form of racist policy-making that must be forcefully opposed and reversed. Project 2025 generally sees ending DEI and equity programs as a way to stop woke revolutionaries, who believe America is, and always has been, systematically racist and not worth celebrating. They also frame these attacks as a way to return to American ideals, American families, and American culture-all things in which, thankfully, most Americans still believe. There are multiple calls to undermine the DEI agenda by dismissing or barring any implementers and grantees that engage in ideological agitation on behalf of the DEI agenda. The project would end efforts to improve racial equity, which it says the Biden administration has pushed, in every area of our national life, including in employment, and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race. The project calls for an end to racial classifications and critical race theory, CRT, trainings, and advocates for an executive order that would ban CRT training. A new law barring the use of taxpayer dollars to fund CRT trainings, and the elimination of all equal employment opportunity data collection, which is used to assess the diversity of the workforce. The project advocates that the next administration should take affirmative steps to expose and eradicate the practice of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, throughout the Treasury Department, and all other departments. The plan further wants the Department of Education to end anti-American ahistorical propaganda into America's classrooms. And for those who might persist in DEI efforts, it calls for termination of their employment, eviscerating LGBTQ plus rights and equality. Under the banner of restoring the family, Project 2025 aims to gut protections for the LGBTQ plus community, which is negatively contrasted with the traditional American family and whose civil rights are seen as opposed to the project's religious tenets. The project would privilege family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including the tax code to favor traditional families. The project says, families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden's HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on LGBTQ plus equity, subsidizing single motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families. The project claims falsely that only heterosexual, two-parent families are safe for children, and that all other family forms involve higher levels of instability. The average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages, financial stress or poverty, and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes. Their data on the length of marriages is false. The plan calls on the next president to make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. To do so, it advocates deleting the term 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. And it calls for the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, anti-discrimination policy statements to never conflate sex with gender identity or sexual orientation. It demands changes to Title VII, calling for a restriction of Bostock's Bostock v. Clayton County application of sex discrimination protections to sexual orientation and transgender status in the context of hiring and firing and to rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics. Sex discrimination should be restricted to a biological binary meaning. Further, it calls on the HHS Secretary to proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care and that 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. The project dehumanizes the transgender community by making unfounded, hyperbolic claims that children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries, repeatedly linking transgender people to pornography, writing, Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian not inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. At one point, the project attacks the Department of Justice, DOJ, for undermining girls' sports and caving on the issue to satisfy transgender extremists. The project also likens gender-affirming health care to child abuse. This position is rejected by the medical establishment. It calls on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, CMS, to reissue a stronger transgender national coverage determination, which would restrict medical care for the community. In pursuit of promoting life and strengthening the family, the project would abolish the Gender Policy Council, which would eliminate central promotion of abortion, health services, comprehensive sexuality education, education, and the new woke gender ideology, which has as a principal tenet gender-affirming care and sex change surgeries on minors. Claiming the National Institutes of Health, NIH, has long been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science, a conservative HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department's foray into woke transgender activism. Instead, NIH should fund studies into the short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions, including affirmation, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, and the likelihood of desistance sick if young people are given counseling that does not include medical or social interventions. An emphasis must also be put on efforts to affirm the role fathers play in the lives of their children and must teach fathers based on a biological and sociological understanding of what it means to be a father, not a gender-neutral parent. Finally, the project calls for the Department of State to abandon pro-LGBTQ plus initiatives in Africa, where punishing laws against the community are being proposed or have been enacted, such as Uganda's recent passage of a law that criminalizes same-sex conduct, including potentially the death penalty for those convicted of aggravated homosexuality, restricting sexual and reproductive health and rights. It is in the realm of women's health that the Christian nationalist views of Project 2025's creators come to full fruition. It should not be surprising that such a far-right effort would unequivocally want to ban all abortions and restrict people's bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights. The project reads, the next conservative president should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. But it goes farther than that, calling for a ban on abortion pills and tasks the Department of Justice, DOJ, to criminally prosecute providers and distributors of such medications. It claims the Food and Drug Administration, FDA, has failed to abide by its legal obligations to protect the health, safety, and welfare of girls and women. It never studied the safety of the drugs under the labeled conditions of use, ignored the potential impacts of the hormone-blocking regimen on the developing bodies of adolescent girls, disregarded the substantial evidence that chemical abortion drugs cause more complications than surgical abortions, and eliminated necessary safeguards for pregnant girls and women who undergo this dangerous drug regimen. It would end Medicaid funding of planned parenthood health services, remove abortion from health care plans, and transform the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, into the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care. HHS must pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology. It contends that abortion is not health care, and no federal agency should treat it as such. In addition, it calls for new legislation, the Protecting Life and Taxpayers Act, to defund abortion providers such as planned parenthood. It would treat sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, with a focus on strengthening marriage and sexual risk avoidance, rather than medically advised treatments. And it calls on federal agencies to produce politicized research that backs the project's beliefs about the negative health effects of abortion. The American Psychological Association reports that scientific research from around the world shows having an abortion is not linked to mental health issues but restricting access to the procedure is. The project would force all Americans, in contrast with the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe that left abortion policy to the states, to abide by the wishes of those Americans for whom abortion violates the conscience and religious freedom rights. The project would ban abortion travel funding for all Americans, and overturn Biden's executive order that allows the HHS Secretary to use his authority under Section 1115 to waive certain provisions of the law in order to use taxpayer funds to achieve the administration's goal of helping women to travel out of state to obtain abortions. It claims that the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, DOJOLC, issued a politicized legal opinion declaring Biden's order is not in conflict with the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortion services but does not restrict states from doing so. It calls on the Centers for Disease Control, CDC, to eliminate projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation. The CDC should back studies into the risks and complications of abortion and ensure that it corrects and does not promote misinformation regarding the comparative health and psychological benefits of childbirth versus the health and psychological risk of intentionally taking a human life through abortion. It also tasks the CDC with collecting data from states used for abortion tourism and data on medical outcomes related to abortion. And the Office of Refugee Resettlement is accused of transporting pregnant minors across state lines from pro-life states to abortion-friendly states apparently to be victimized by the abortion industry. Finally, the project actually attacks contraception in many different ways, pushing for example to eliminate the morning after pill, and suggests instead that fertility awareness-based methods of family planning the rhythm method, which is much less effective than birth control are part of women's preventive services under the ACA Affordable Care Act. In sum, the project would restrict as much as is possible any access to services it views as related to abortion, even contraception if necessary, even in those states that have elected to keep the procedure legal. Hardline immigration policies. One of the pillars of Project 2025 is defend our borders, and it demonizes immigrants as a crime-ridden plague. The project writes, thousands of illegal aliens are allowed to bond out of immigration detention only to disappear into the interior of the United States where many commit crimes. It proposes incredibly harsh immigration policies, including tent cities and restricting asylum for those fleeing gang violence and domestic violence. It would dismantle the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, and place all immigration-related activities across the administration in one agency. Eliminating DHS wouldn't just address its perceived immigration failures, but also would eliminate the problem of DHS being affected by the left's wokeness and weaponization against Americans whom the left perceives as its political opponents. While not spelled out, this is likely a repudiation of DHS's work against far-right domestic terrorists, largely white supremacists and anti-government militias, whom the FBI and most federal agencies have determined are the top threat for domestic terrorism in the U.S. The call to shutter the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which the project describes as having been weaponized for domestic political purposes supports that conjecture, as that is where monitoring of far-right domestic extremist threats lives in DHS. Project 2025 wants to restrict asylum and chain migration and authorize state and local law enforcement to participate in immigration and border security. They characterize the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, as helping migrants criminally enter our country with impunity. The plan would expand U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, detention, create a single nationwide detention standard, and draw local police forces into the immigration system, which weakens trust between law enforcement and communities. The project advocates for the flexibility to use large numbers of temporary facilities such as tents to house migrants and the restriction of T visas, given to the victims of human trafficking, and U visas, meant to help crime victims suffering from mental or physical abuse, asserting that victimization should not be a basis for an immigration benefit. Asylum would become harder, and sanctuary cities banned. Additional agencies, including the Department of Justice, DOJ, would be made to assist DHS in enforcing immigration policies and shutting down sanctuary jurisdictions. The project would also reorder the bureaucratic design of certain immigration departments, moving the Office of Refugee Resettlement from the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, to DHS and the Executive Office for Immigration Review from DOJ to DHS, in addition to consolidating departments related to immigration in DHS into one entity. The project alleges that HHS and OR, Office of Refugee Resettlement, have forgotten their original refugee resettlement mission and instead have provided a panoply of free programs that incentivize people to come to the U.S. illegally. The project also proposes to use the military in border protection operations, meaning it would militize the border, and to assist in expanding the border wall, ending climate change efforts and restricting environment policies. Project 2025 would end programs to address climate change, which it calls climate fanaticism, and many other environmental protection efforts. It describes the Biden administration as following a radical climate policy and is particularly angered with the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, declaring itself a climate agency. It describes the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, as a coercive agency, full of embedded activists. In the world of Project 2025, environmental protections actually hurt the aged, poor, and vulnerable and environmentalism has become a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals' ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue. At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human. The project even recommends ending such things as efficiency standards for appliances. It views the Biden administration as 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 hysterical language is perhaps not surprising as project supporters include many climate change deniers and others suspicious of efforts to advance clean energy policies and protect the environment. Clean energy policies are a particular bugaboo. The government should stop any policy making that gets in the way of private sector energy innovation and the EPA must stop strangling domestic energy production. Initiatives like the Climate Hub Office would be shuttered and any international climate change agreements, such as the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would be abandoned. The Department of Energy, though, should end the unprovoked war on fossil fuels, restore America's energy independence, oppose ice or windmills built at taxpayer expense, and respect the right of Americans to buy and drive cars of their own choosing, rather than trying to force them into electric vehicles and eventually out of the driver's seat altogether in favor of self-driving robots. A reform of the Department of the Interior would remove protections for endangered species, open up many areas to oil, gas, and coal development, and abandon protections for federally owned lands. The project also advises repeatedly that there be no government role in promoting environmental, social, and governance, ESG, objectives, objectives many corporations and investors adopt to help them effectively manage their impact on the environment and society. The project is particularly concerned about USAID's efforts to address climate change. It advocates rescinding all climate policies from its foreign aid programs, specifically USAID's Climate Strategy 2022-2030, shut down the agency's offices, programs, and directives designed to advance the Paris Climate Agreement, and narrowly limit funding to traditional climate mitigation efforts. And USAID must cease collaborating with and funding progressive foundations, corporations, international institutions, and NGOs that advocate on behalf of climate fanaticism. Ending Woke Military Policies Project 2025 presents the Pentagon as one of the most woke parts of the federal government, a deeply troubled institution that has allegedly abandoned its warfighting mission for Marxism. Project 2025 claims that the Pentagon is teaching white privilege and has emphasized leftist politics over military readiness, and needs to eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff. The Heritage Foundation, principal driver of the project, describes cultural Marxism as, American Marxists cloak their goals under the pretense of social justice, they now seek to dismantle the foundations of the American Republic by rewriting history, reintroducing racism, creating privileged classes, and determining what can be said in public discourse, the military, and houses of worship. Unless Marxist thought is defeated again, today's cultural Marxists will achieve what the Soviet Union never could, the subjugation of the United States to a totalitarian, soul-destroying ideology. The cultural Marxism conspiracy theory was originally developed by white supremacists and antisemites, but has increasingly been accepted by the far right. Additionally, it calls for audits of the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination. Many of these provisions are already included in the proposed and controversial U.S. House version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, which annually provides funding for our military and national security. An NDAA has not passed as of early November 2023. The project further asserts that Obama appointees rule the roost in the officers corps thus corrupting the organization and pushing this Marxist agenda, and a fundamental transformation is needed to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense related matters, including climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed forces and discourage our nation's finest men and women from enlisting. It demands that the next president end the left's social experimentation with the military, restore warfighting as its sole mission, and set defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party as its highest priority. It is particularly troubling that the project attacks manufactured extremism. Both active-duty soldiers and veterans have been key actors in white supremacist and anti-government domestic terrorism in the United States and in events like the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Conservatives have already hampered the efforts to confront extremism that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin began after January 6, and the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act has been stripped of initiatives to counter extremism, which Republican elected officials have alleged defame the armed forces and hurt recruitment. Abandoning the effort against extremists in the military is certain to make Americans less safe. The project would also reverse policies that allow transgender people to serve in the armed forces. It would expel those with gender dysphoria, likely referring to transgender individuals, and reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. It claims that gender dysphoria is incompatible with military service, and that the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for service members should be ended. It also obsesses over the idea that mask mandates and mandatory vaccines have somehow weakened the armed forces, even though the requirement to be vaccinated against COVID has been dropped. Reforming Public Education A big part of Project 2025 is changing the nature of America's public education system to remove elements from the curriculum that are seen as too woke and supposedly inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America's classrooms. The project characterizes public schools as poisoning and indoctrinating children with leftist ideologies and undermining parents' role in their children's education, and advocates for private schooling, often religious, paid for by public monies. It would close the Department of Education, DOE, which it calls a one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, and return all responsibility for education to the states. The project wants to reform public school curriculum to remove noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology, which it claims poison our children. It sees public schools as responsive to leftists' advocates' intent on indoctrination, rather than parents. The plan would also radically alter public schooling by instituting universal school choice and subsidizing private school attendance, including for religious schools. It views the Department of Education, DOE, as not particularly concerned with children's education. DOE is viewed as an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm, which should be shuttered. If that can't be accomplished, the Secretary of Education should insist that the Department serve parents and American ideals, not advocates whose message is that children can choose their own sex, that America is systemically racist, that math itself is racist, and that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ideal of a colorblind society should be rejected in favor of reinstating a color-conscious society. The project writes, enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory and ensuring that Title IX is enforced using biological sex recognized at birth. It attacks critical race theory, CRT, as a particular danger, arguing that in its applied dimension, supporters believe that racism, in this case, treating individuals differently based on race, is appropriate-necessary, even making the theory more than merely an analytical tool to describe race in public and private life. It undermines America's founding ideals of freedom and opportunity and when used in schools leads to mandatory affinity groups. Teacher training programs in which educators are required to confess their privilege, or school assignments in which students must defend a false idea that America is systemically racist, all supposedly disrupting the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness. In addition to CRT, radical gender ideology must be shown to have a devastating effect on school-aged children today especially young girls. Names and pronouns must be based on birth certificates and no education employee or contractor should be forced to use a pronoun that doesn't match the person's biological sex, as that would be against their religious or moral convictions.