Are you familiar with Project 2025?

If not, take the time to read up.

If you haven’t been following social media closely since the American presidential debate two weeks ago, you are probably not familiar with Project 2025. It is imperative that you fix that; the project, led by a team of former President Trump staffers, aims to reform the United States of America into a fundamentalist Christian nation, on the level of the Taliban’s fundamentalist upheaval of Afghanistan. Think it is an exaggeration? Let’s explore what they are proposing, publicly, on their website. It is a play by play roadmap of their intentions.

If you are wondering how serious this threat is in this fall’s American election, consider that Trump is mentioned over 300 times in this document, including in the biographies of 18 of the 36 contributing authors and editors. This is not a coincidence. Run by the Heritage Foundation, the long name of Project 2025 is the Presidential Transition Project. They aren’t just making suggestions,.

For a President convicted of falsifying business records to pay off a porn star, the very first concrete recommendation in the roadmap to his next presidency is profoundly ironic, found on page 5: “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” Presumably for kissing and telling. It appears before, even, the document’s call to arms to outright ban all abortion for all Americans in all circumstances.

The commitments in the 900-page document are numerous and for the most part thoroughly documented, if couched in specious language. The word “divorce”, for example, does not even appear in the document, but the extensive discussion of the importance of traditional heterosexual marriages makes it clear where the document stands on the question.

Besides pushing the agenda of the pro-life movement — which was created based on white supremacy, not religious values — there are many references to making the US more religious. Forcing employers to respect the Sabbath on Sunday, as opposed to simply ensuring that employees get time off, for example, rates on that list. To make it less overtly Christian, they add “except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time (e.g., Friday sundown to Saturday sundown)” paying some degree of lip-service to the Judeo part of Judeo-Christian tradition.

There’s an undercurrent of racism throughout the document, with references to race, in particular of critical race theory, scattered throughout. In last week’s Presidential debate, Trump referred to migrants coming to the United States to take “black jobs”, something no mainstream media outlet has yet called on him to clarify.

There are, of course, numerous in depth analyses of Project 2025. Robert Reich wrote in The Guardian, “One key goal of Project 2025 is to purge all government agencies of anyone more loyal to the constitution than to Trump – a process Trump himself started in October 2020 when he thought he would remain in office.” Reich’s piece breaks down several more important aspects of the project and is worth the read. Wikipedia volunteers have been working to list the specific policy objectives of the project, any one of which should be raising alarm bells throughout American society, and anyone close enough to it to be significantly affected — like, say, Canadians.

Trump has, of course, denied that Project 2025 is the platform on which he plans to work or even knowing anything about it, claiming rather that Agenda 47 is his actual platform, which so far has nothing directly contradicting the Project. But over 200 of his former staffers and appointees are involved in Project 2025. Aside from the implausibility of there being no connection, one has to ask who has the financial interest and wherewithal to fund 200 former Trump staffers to ensure that this is the direction that the country will soon be headed?

We have, of course, seen this movie before. According to their own document, “Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981—the same month Ronald Reagan was sworn into his presidency. By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy” and, as history will note, this is also a key moment in the change of direction of western wealth distribution. As the referenced Guardian article shows, in 1981, the top 0.1% of American families owned about 8% of the US’s wealth, with the bottom 90% having around 33%. 30 years later they were tied at 23%, representing a massive wealth transfer. Canada under Mulroney and Britain under Thatcher concurrently followed similar paths, driving record wealth inequality across the English speaking world, and subsequent governments of all stripes in each of the countries have failed to significantly roll these changes back. Success for the Heritage Foundation’s ideas, indeed.

More recently, toward the end of the Clinton presidency, an organisation appeared called the Project for a New American Century. Their focus was narrower, mainly on retaining the supremacy of US military power around the world. Their manifesto called for, among other things, régime change in Iraq. Many of the signatories to this report served in George W Bush’s administration including Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz.

This document called for strengthening and expanding the US military but noted the lack of public enthusiasm for such an undertaking, stating, in 2000, “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” It is worth noting that eight months into George W Bush’s presidency, they had just such an event, and, as promised, used it as the catalyst to replace the régime in Iraq and increase military spending by over 50% as a function of GDP from 3.11% of GDP prior to his election in 2000 to 4.88% by the end of his second term nine years later.

The Project quietly shut its doors after Bush’s re-election, presumably having accomplished what they had hoped to.

When the American right promises dramatic change, believe them. Project 2025 will be American policy if Trump is returned to office, and a Canada under Pierre Poilievre would enthusiastically follow suit, just as Mulroney followed Reagan four decades before.

Caveat elector.