I guess that's why so many former Republican Trump staffer's are speaking out against it?
I guess that's why Australia's ABC’s flagship current affairs program “4 Corners” ran a special on Project 2025?
It's all those Democrats! Riiiiiiight.
It's not clear to me how this actually disproves anything I said. It's a bogeyman because it's what the Democrats kept screaming about even though, once again,
they so constantly exaggerate or lie about what's actually in it. Given all of their screaming, of course other outlets are going to mention it and, it seems, buy into the hype that people seem unable to actually back up. At most this just proves that it's the bogeyman of more people than the Democrats, which doesn't actually make my statement wrong.
The attempts to tie it to Trump are rather questionable as well; the Heritage Foundation have been publishing these mandate for leadership documents for decades at this point; the one for Project 2025 isn't anything new in this regard. They write a big work that has a bunch of policy recommendations for the current or next conservative president. This last one was published before anyone even knew who the Republican nominee was; it came out in April 2023, and the first primary was on January of 2024.
As for your video, the video you link to is a whopping one hour long. I am not going to watch the whole thing. But I glanced over the video, particularly the parts that looked to be about Project 2025, and saw some people making claims about it, but not much in the way of actually backing those claims up like saying "hey, here's the page where this thing is mentioned."
If Project 2025 was such a democracy killer (and this was a claim made in at the Democratic National Convention, albeit, to be fair, as part of a joke), why is it that people seem unable to properly point to the things in the document that show it to be such? Why all the lies and exaggerations instead? I'm sure there's a lot in it for some people to vehemently oppose on policy grounds, but that's a rather different thing--and even there, exaggerations seem to abound.
Watch the 4 Corners and the 2 interviews above.
I discussed the 4 Corners thing, but in regards to the 2 interviews, they're certainly very critical of Trump, but it doesn't look like the first one mentions Project 2025 at all, and the second only briefly and rather vaguely, giving no actual specifics or citations to back up their (vague) accusations.
Snopes summarised a few key points I'm concerned about:-
- Changing how the FBI operates. According to the plan, the agency is "completely out of control," and the next conservative administration should restore its reputation by stopping investigations that are supposedly "unlawful or contrary to the national interest." Also, the document calls for legislation that would eliminate term limits for the FBI's director and require that person to answer to the president.
While I can certainly see why someone wouldn't
like this, I don't see it as some kind of anti-democracy thing or some kind of crazy extreme suggestion.
Now, I should note that Snopes doesn't actually bother to do the simple thing of pointing to the page numbers where the things it cites are, which make it harder to look up. As noted above, we saw--at the Democratic National Convention--someone misrepresent Project 2025 greatly despite offering actual page numbers. So if someone makes a claim without a page number, I'm going to be more suspicious.
Still, I can sometimes make do with the search function on the PDF to try to see what they're referring to. I found what I believe it's referring to, but I notice it phrases things somewhat weaselly. It throws in "supposedly" before the unlawful or contrary to the national interest (this is page 549), even though we can be pretty sure there are investigations that
are unlawful or contrary to national interest. No doubt people might disagree on what qualifies, but the document doesn't go any farther outside of simply stating that. It does not seem unreasonable as an idea. Using "allegedly" would have been better than "supposedly."
The statement of "eliminate term limits for the FBI's director" is a bit more misleading. This makes it sound like the FBI director should be perpetual, when their suggestion is the opposite. Here is what is actually said (pages 551-552), as part of a list of things the President should do:
"Submit a legislative proposal to Congress to eliminate the 10-year term for the Director. After J. Edgar Hoover’s decades-long term as FBI Director came to an end following his death in 1972, and in light of oversight conducted by Congress into alleged Intelligence Community and FBI abuses in the 1970s, Congress limited the Director’s tenure to one “ten-year term.” The realities of the FBI’s abuses and overreach in recent years demonstrate that further reform is still necessary. The Director of the FBI must remain politically accountable to the President in the same manner as the head of any other federal department or agency. To ensure prompt political accountability and to rein in perceived or actual abuses, the next conservative Administration should seek a legislative change to align the FBI Director’s position with those of the heads of all other major departments and agencies."
When we read this, two things are noted. First, its whole point about getting rid of the ten year term isn't about getting rid of a term limit to let them serve perpetually, but to rather say that a ten year term is too long. The whole reason they instated it was because, as noted above, J. Edgar Hoover was in charge for so long (37 years!) and used the longevity of that position to do a whole lot of legally questionable things (actually, "legally questionable things" is underselling it, a bunch of his stuff was straight up illegal). So limiting them to 10 years was a way to try to stop that from happening again. Project 2025 is asserting that this didn't go far enough, and they may have a point. In fairness, this misrepresentation may have just been poor phrasing on Snopes's part.
In regards to reporting to the President, this would be, as it notes, not different than the other federal departments or agencies. The rejoinder, I suppose, is that it's important for the FBI to be more independent because it could be used to go after political enemies... but that's no less true (and perhaps
more true) for the Department of Justice, which does answer directly to the President. Maybe someone could argue that also needs to be more independent, which may have merit as a policy idea, but again this supposedly horrible anti-democratic idea is to have the FBI work like the Department of Justice does.
These are things someone can object to on political grounds, surely. But a threat to democracy? Nah.
- Eliminating the Department of Education. The plan explicitly proposes, "Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated." The report also calls for bans on so-called "critical race theory" (CRT) and "gender ideology" lessons in public schools, asking for legislation that would require educators who share such material to register as sex offenders and be imprisoned.
One may as well say "Thought crime".
"Thought crime"? Try "a lie." Because that's what the claim is, at least as phrased. I suppose it may have just come about via them not reading what they wrote properly, so perhaps it was not an intentional lie--but it's also pretty obviously false.
First, let's start with the parts that are a bit more honest. It does indeed assert that the federal Department of Education should be eliminated (with its functions moved to other departments) or at least limited. Conservatives have long had various problems with the Department of Education (some legitimate, some less so), so Project 2025 isn't really bringing up anything new here; even before Trump announced his initial candidacy, there was dislike of it among conservatives. And it does (on page 5, for the record) say "The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country." However, neither of these can be construed as some kind of threat to democracy; perhaps they're policy decisions some people really disagree with, but that's it. Certainly, the country was able to function democratically before the Department of Education was founded in 1980.
But, it's presumably not those portions that you're referring to as the issue, but the last portion, "asking for legislation that would require educators who share such material to register as sex offenders and be imprisoned." And this is where the falsehood is. As it is written, the material is "critical race theory" and "gender ideology". But that's false. This is the only paragraph I can find in the document that refers to teachers being classified as sex offenders (though nothing explicitly about prison), but it isn't simply for distributing critical race theory or gender ideology materials:
"Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered."
So when Project 2025 says educators should be classed as registered sex offenders, it's for... distributing
pornography. (and as part of a larger anti-pornography effort) There is a stab of transgender ideology, but it's clearly in the context of when that's used to distribute pornography. I've no doubt plenty of people would describe the above as too harsh, but again this is talking about pornography distribution, not what Snopes claimed it was.
So it seems Snopes deliberately lied, did a really bad job at reading their post before putting it up, or despite being a fact-checking website did such a poor job fact-checking they made this error. Whatever it was, their statement as written is false.
- Reversing Biden-era policies attempting to reduce climate change. The document's authors call for increasing the country's reliance on fossil fuels and withdrawing from efforts to address the climate crisis — such as "offices, programs, and directives designed to advance the Paris Climate Agreement."
This one is less about backsliding on democratic integrity, and more about a policy outcome I really care about. But hey - if America wants to kneecap itself economically - well - that's history now.
- Stopping cybersecurity efforts to combat mis- and disinformation. The document recommends the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to stop its efforts to curtail online propaganda campaigns, arguing the federal government should not make judgment calls on what's true and what isn't.
Because that kind of thing is inconvenient when Trump wants to push his narcissistic "Big Lie".
- Changing immigration policies. Authors want the federal government to deprioritize DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the program that temporarily delays the deportation of immigrants without documentation who came to the U.S. as children; phase out temporary work-visa programs that allow seasonal employers to hire foreign workers; impose financial punishments on so-called "sanctuary cities" that do not follow federal immigration laws, and divert tax dollars toward security at America's border with Mexico. (While the Biden campaign claims Project 2025 calls for "ripping mothers away from their children" at the border, there's no explicit mention of separating families. Rather, it calls for stronger enforcement of laws governing the detainment of immigrants with criminal records and restricting an existing program that tracks people in deportation proceedings instead of incarcerating them. In some cases, those changes could possibly play a role in border control agents detaining a parent while their child continues with immigration proceedings.)
And by handing it over to private corporations on a profit-per-detainee model - people with minor paper work glitches (NOT illegal immigrants) on friendly business trips from Canada are being detained for up to 2 weeks!
- Reversing protections against discrimination in housing. The Biden campaign emails reference a portion of the document that calls for repealing a decades-old policy—strengthened under Biden—that attempts to prevent discrimination and reduce racial disparities in housing. Project 2025 also recommends making it easier to sell off homes used for public housing — a benefit to real estate developers — but result in fewer cheap housing options for poor and low-income families. The Facts About Project 2025: The Pro-Trump Proposal To 'Reshape America'
But watch the 4 Corners pieces. This was just Snopes.
The remaining ones are hard for me to see as any kind of threat to democracy as the document is cast as. They might be policy ideas someone really disagrees with, though.
So I don't feel my point has been assailed at all.
tl;dr veresion I'm sure any liberal is going to have giant problems with Project 2025, simply on policy disagreements. But the screams of how it's some kind of democracy-killer just doesn't make sense. If the document
actually had these ultra-extreme things people claim it does, why can't they actually point to them? Why, in a perfect opportunity to show the world how extreme and how anti-democracy the document was, were the Democrats apparently unable to do so and instead resorted to exaggeration? And why is this the case with other critics? (again, I'm not talking about merely saying something is bad policy, but those who go further and cast it as a serious thread to democracy) The conclusion I have to draw is that they do this because they don't actually have things in the document that are all that extreme, so they're forced to do these exaggerations in order for their references to it to have rhetorical effect.
