2025 Mandate for Leadership is 922 pages long. I'm going to attempt to dig into it, because you can bury a lot of shit in 922 pages.
Starting today with the Foreword.
Promise #1 is "Restore the Family as the Centerpiece of American Life."
It starts by arguing that Left-Wing Big Government is supplanting the family, replacing "people's natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones". However, the solution to this is...government forcing nuclear families.
What does the Heritage Foundation view as threatening "the family"?
- Removing tax-exempt status of religious institutions/schools/charities
- Words like "diversity", "gender equity", and "reproductive health" being allowed in US laws/regulations/grants
- Pornography
- Public schools that don't adhere to strict conservative ideology
- Parents allowing their children to have cell phones and use social media apps
- Abortion and people being able to control their own reproductive health and families
On the one hand, Project 2025 insists that parents should be the ultimate authority over their children.
On the other, Project 2025 insists that parents shouldn't be allowed to make many choices for their children that conservatives don't approve, explicitly conflating these with child abuse.
Allow your child to read books conservatives disapprove? Child abuse.
Buy your child a cell phone? Child abuse.
Let your child use social media? Child abuse.
Allow your child to explore their own gender and sexuality, in accordance with your family's values and beliefs? Child abuse.
It's not enough for Project 2025 to call these things child abuse. They want to put the full force of the federal government behind in ensuring every family exists under the same ideological and religious strictures that they do.
I want to double click on Project 2025's concerns about porn.
Not only do they argue pornography should be outlawed at the federal level, but that anyone who produces/distributes it should be imprisoned.
What's more, teachers and librarians who "purvey" porn should be registered as sex offenders.
If you're confused about what "pornography" teachers and librarians might be distributing to minors that would result in them being registered as sex offenders, take a look at Moms for Liberty's 111-page document on book ban guidance.
drive.google.com/file/d/1BNfa...
Project 2025's concerns about porn are less about protecting children from being sexually exploited than they are criminalizing adults who allow teens to read age-appropriate books about gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse/assault, which don't align with conservative ideology.
No aspect of private family life is exempt from the prying eye and control of a GOP federal government. Project 2025 deems parents allowing their own kids to have a cell phone, be on social media, read the "wrong" books, and wear the "wrong" clothes and using the "wrong" pronouns to be child abuse.
Project 2025 absolutely believes their right to control your private life extends to your ability to decide whether and under what circumstances to have children, advocating for the next GOP president and Congress to institute a federal abortion ban.
Project 2025's policies don't make "the family" the centerpiece of American life.
They make the right-wing Evangelical movement the centerpiece of every American's private life, placing the federal government squarely in your bed, your book shelf, your closet, your phone, and your doctor's office.
Onto Project 2025's promise #4: Secure Our God-Given Individual Right to Enjoy "the Blessings of Liberty"
This section kicks off with a casual re-write of the Declaration of Independence, because apparently Thomas Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" was too hedonistic for the Project 2025 crowd.
Section 1 of the 2025 Mandate for Leadership (aka Project 2025) is entitled "Taking the Reins of Government". Hard to imagine a left-wing political roadmap claiming such a thing in writing, and it not resulting in complete media apoplexy.
Let's take a look.
No actual help for pregnant individuals in "difficult and often tragic situations" but they will "recognize" (propagandistically glorify) the "heroism" (unwilling sacrifice) that results from your "choice" (ideologically-imposed death sentence)!
