I recently made a video going over the very long document put together by the Heritage Foundation called the Mandate for Leadership, one of the four pillars of their Project 2025 plan. Trump and his ilk have distanced themselves for the plan, though, as I note in that video, he’s a virulent liar, the Mandate notes that he instituted two-thirds of their 2016 Mandate for Leadership, and many of the people involved are key allies of his.
There are those who dismiss any conversation or concern over Project 2025 by pointing to the Trump campaign’s desire to put distance between it and themselves. In part, that seems to come from a recognition that the country at large views many of the policy ideas advocated in the Mandate to be extreme, far-right, terrible ideas that they do not want. That’s likely part of the reason why the GOP’s 2024 national platform doesn’t have much of any policy in it. It isn’t simply that it’s an incompetent document written by unserious actors who think their Republican base is filled with hateful morons who are incapable of reading and digesting an actual policy plan. The lack of policy also makes it harder for those of us on the left to use it as an attack this election cycle. Of course, it doesn’t make it hard. Like, we’re firmly flaccid here. The platform is a pretty easy way to attack the extremism of the Republican Party. I did it.
As I said in my video over the Mandate for Leadership, though, it’s important to talk about Project 2025 regardless of its connections to Trump. The guy could sincerely denounce it and enter into some magical binding vow to avoid the damn thing, and it’d still be important to talk about. It’s a massive piece of policy work worked on by plenty of powerful people and groups in the conservative movement.
To condense a 90-minute video: the groups and people who worked on Project 2025 signed off on a document that consigns pregnant women to avoidable deaths, calls for the imprisonment of anyone who discusses trans issues or identity, pushes for the government to kill more people, aims to destroy education, puts forward a tax plan that will increase taxes on the majority of Americans while shuttering many non-profits, aims to open up dangerous jobs for child labor, desires to enforce your employer’s religious beliefs on you, and longs to firmly fracture free speech. Who are these people? Some of them are well known names and entities. Some aren’t. All need this shame eternally attached to their names until they have thoroughly demonstrated a commitment against it.
Let’s go.
One - Organizations on the Original Advisory Board
Let’s start big then get small. I know. Normally you go the other way because that’s more fun. But the list of individuals is quite a bit longer than the list of organizations so we’re saving the flesh for last and starting with the Big O. Yes, I like euphemisms. I think they’re slightly amusing which is my favorite kind of amusing. These won’t all be incredibly detailed because there’s a lot to get through. Let’s go. Alphabetically.
1.1 - Alabama Policy Institue
Let’s go over what’s on API’s website first. They’re anti-abortion, of course, though they only mention a dislike for elective abortion, so those that aren’t related to the health of the mother or fatal fetal abnormalities. That actually makes them a bit less extreme than the Mandate for Leadership which implies that abortion, even in the case of necessity for the health of the mother, doesn’t count as healthcare. It’s unsurprisingly against recreational marijuana because they love the ineffective war on drugs and they realize if given the choice, most people in Alabama would probably be stoners to deal with the hell that is living in Alabama. Much like the Mandate, they would like to take federal funding away from public education and pump them into predatory for-profit charter schools. Speaking of schools, they hate that vaccines and masks work and that you should care about your state’s children. They also despise trans people. It attacks the teacher’s union, though it doesn’t outright call for its abolition. You would think it would talk about multiple unions on its “Public Sector Unions” page, but it doesn’t. It only talks about the teacher’s union. Project 2025 calls for the destruction of all public sector unions, and API signed onto it. So then we can extrapolate they would like to bust the teacher’s union AND the police unions. Isn’t that fun? I think perhaps Republican voters should think about the amount of conservative groups calling to get rid of the police unions.
In 2021 they decried non-discrimination ordinances that include queer people in part because they think you should be able to use religion in order tooooo prevent a gay couple from renting a room. So this isn’t merely, “We don’t want to participate in weddings.” This is, “We should be allowed to deny any good or service to queer people.”
Their Senior Director of Fiscal Policy, Justin Bogie, as the Heritage Foundation says, “served as budget policy advisor to the Trump presidential campaign and also served as a member of the Presidential Transition Team” back in 2016.
1.2 Alliance Defending Freedom
Ah, one of the great ironically named organizations. What freedom are they defending? Well, the right to torture queer people. As I’ve noted a few times in past videos, ADF was the group defending conversion therapy piece of shit Brian Tingley. Mr. Tingley is an idiot who thinks you can change your sexuality by having a religious bigot tell you how wrong it is to be gay. This makes sense for the ADF because it’s an anti-gay hategroup. To quote its website, “At Alliance Defending Freedom, we believe government policy should reflect the truth about God’s created order: that biological differences between men and women matter, that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and that children are best cared by their moms and dads.” In August of 2024, they’re still pumping out drivel that implies gay marriage goes against the goodness of society. Speaking of Obergefell with The New Yorker, ADF general counsel Kristen Waggoner said, “I think it is wrong and it should be reversed.” They seem to not understand that intersex people exist and of course they despise trans people. As part of their hatred of queer people and kids, they want to force schools to out children to their parents. The effect of this will be to in children to the closet. They also want to force states to place children, including LGBT children, in the homes of anti-gay and anti-trans bigots. That New Yorker article talks about how the ADF is going after mifepristone. Project 2025 wants the FDA to revoke its approval. As I talked about in the first video, that drug is also used in the treatment of miscarriages. ADF doesn’t care about this because they don’t care about women.
ADF pretends to be vehemently anti-censorship. In fact, they say, “It is impossible to have a free society without the freedom of speech. … Free speech is for everyone. People should be free to express their views regardless of whether the government agrees with them and regardless of whether the ideas are popular.” And yet they signed onto a document calling for the complete criminalization of porn where “transgender ideology” is classified as pornography. The Mandate calls for intense government censorship. When Grant Atkinson writes, “For freedom to thrive, we must not let the government silence ideas it disagrees with, but must instead work to ensure all people are free to express what they believe without fear of government punishment,” he really meant, “We’re going to send people to jail if they do speech we don’t like.”
Who else do they want to send to jail? According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, gay people in general as it “has supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad.” In fact, they opposed the Lawrence decision and have argued internationally that conversion therapy works when, again, it doesn’t, it never has, and it never will.
A member of their leadership, Ali Kilmartin worked for Trump in the Department of Labor. As did senior counsels Erik Baptist, who worked for Trump’s EPA, and Matt Bowman, who worked for Trump’s HHS.
1.3 American Compass
American Compass is a conservative financial thinktank. Okay, you’re probably thinking, so there’s probably insane stuff about labor policy, like maybe they’re the ones pushing for kids to work dangerous jobs. Surely there isn’t too much beyond that, right?
“The decision to form a family and raise children is not a … choice…. It is the basic obligation of life and citizenry.”Uh-oh, that sounds like we’re going to attempt to force people to have children and punish them when they don’t. They also push for failed age verification laws. Instinctively, we assume age verification for the internet will protect kids. But in the research I did for my video over the censorship of NSFW online, the effect of the laws wasn’t protecting children. The purpose of a system is what it does. These laws mostly function as censorship bills. On another page, they suggest we should research and focus on fertility in policy, saying, “(A) policy that invades some personal freedoms but enables child-rearing may advance the common good.” Did you taste that? Under the initial flavors it tastes like… yes, that’s right, thinly disguised anti-woman and anti-gay rhetoric. Most gay men can’t impregnate each other after all, and access to abortion, contraceptives, and Plan B can get in the way of pumping out babies. Hm.
One thing I find interesting about their “everyone needs to have babies!” articles is their consistent YIMBY-beliefs. In article after article, they argue that increasing the housing supply will encourage further family rearing. I find it hard to disagree with that. After all, it’s easier to make the choice to raise a child when you feel more secure. It’s easier to feel secure when you can live somewhere with good jobs without having to run yourself into the grave to afford a place to live.
Unfortunately, they are one of the drivers behind the complete lack of understanding about education. They assume that education is about sending people off to jobs. It is not. Or well, if you skim their site and make connections to the idiotic Mandate they signed on to, you might come to that conclusion. American Compass does acknowledge the actual goal of liberal arts education: to give a citizenry the powers and abilities to engage with many ways of seeing and thereby forge the destiny of both themselves and the world, beyond the limits of what they might have otherwise assumed possible.
But, well, they signed onto the Mandate for Leadership which calls wholeheartedly for the destruction of public education. If we’re concerned with having a well-educated citizenry then we have to actually educate them. It also seems like American Compass might share a fundamental trait with Donald Trump: a penchant for lying. Norbert Michel writes about a series of lies at the very heart of the organization, some around easily searched facts and others about cherry-picked data.
Leadership member Duncan Braid “served in the Trump Administration for all four years.”
1.4 The American Conservative
Who’s the enemy of the people?! The news media! Oh wait, what’s that? The American Conservative is a magazine? People who say that rarely ever mean it, they just mean reporting that doesn’t stroke their egos? Wow.
Carmel Richardson argues in it that conversion therapy, the debunked and ineffective attempts to turn queer people cishet which have well-documented associations with increases in suicidality, is integral to the world. If we ban it, then we get rid of “every sort of healthy morality.” She claims being gay or trans is an ailment and laments, “The ailment itself is no longer even called an ailment; instead, it is celebrated.” Richardson and, by extension, The American Conservative, would like a world where queerness is a disease that must be cured and eradicated. This is because they are bad people. Rod Dreher writes several mean-spirited, whiny articles about how much he hates gay people while pretending what he’s doing is journalism and not blog posting. Included in his list of shamlessness is a belief that religious entities should be allowed federal dollars without following federal rules on discrimination because they hate gays and it should be fine to hate us queers and still get tax-payer money.
In an article trying to argue for conservatives to stop attempting to paint themselves as punk rock, which, you know, fair enough, you aren’t, Bradley Devlin is racist against Vice-President Kamala Harris and continues the JD Vance “those dumb cat ladies” sort of attack because Devlin is a moron who, despite arguing that he’s normal, is a clear weirdo.
1.5 America First Legal Foundation
America First Legal is ran by notorious anti-semite and far-right white Dumbo Stephen Miller. At the New York Times reports, it’s anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-drag, and anti-treating Felon Trump like an American citizen subject to the rules of law. Despite claims that Trump and Project 2025 aren’t connected, AFL being connected seems to throw heavy suspicion on that. “Mr. Miller … is highly likely to return to a second Trump administration. … His legal group includes several lawyers who worked in Mr. Trump’s Justice Department…”
This includes Gene Hamilton, Reed Rubinstein, and Daniel Epstein. Uh-oh, that’s all four members of its leadership team.
1.6 American Accountability Foundation
THe AAF, from I can tell, is a conservative advocacy group mostly concerned with attacking Biden appointments to various political appointments in the executive, but they also take time to go after AOC and push for lawmakers to investigate certain claims of theirs.
Their website over Kalpana Kotagal complains that her appointment to the equal employment opportunity commission… would lead to less discrimination and hostility against queer people in the workplace, which they think would be a bad thing, because they think it’s normal to be cruel to others. They’re just fundamentally transphobic. This comes up in their attacks on Pamela Karlan, too. They use peoples support for abortion as an attack on them because they agree with Project 2025 that abortion is not healthcare despite the fact that this belief does and will lead to the deaths of women.
Maybe that’s because AAF is a sexist organization. The New Yorker notes that org, “which is run by conservative white men, has particularly focussed on blocking women and people of color.” It’s founder, when asked for comment, decided instead to dox the female reporter reaching out to him. In their oppo research campaigns, they also seem to have a history of simply lying. And because people by and large don’t care about the truth, their lies have gone largely unchallenged in the nominations they’ve derailed.
They have been challenged by the IRS though for seemingly lying about their spending habits. Politico notes that, despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads that might count as lobbying, they reported zero spending on the two. Uh-oh.
1.7 American Center for Law and Justice
ACLJ, in reporting on the DNC which occurred while writing the script for this video, called the protestors at the event “thousands of pro-Hamas protestors.” I have and will continue to critique pro-Hamas elements on the left and any other instinct towards “correct” cruelty that some leftists have, like the red triangle people, the “we commend Hamas” Red Star people, those who yearn for the torture of the enemies and so on. But. Outide the DNC included the leaders of the Uncommitted movement for instance. The vast majority of people agitating for a ceasefire and for the Palestinian people are not in favor of the atrocities committed on October 7, however, it does play well for certain people’s rhetorical goals to pretend that all extremist elements speak for all movements remotely aligned with them. You see this type of rhetoric play out in the GOP’s National Platform. They decry the DNC for apparently fearmongering about the GOP’s extremism on abortion, telling people to look at the platform… but they signed onto Project 2025. Project 2025 is anti-abortion extremism. If ACLJ didn’t agree with it, why did they sign onto an extreme document? Do you think maybe they’re lying about how extreme they are? Huh. Probably.
Speaking of extremism and agreeing with Project 2025: they explicitly call for the dissolution of the Enviornmental Protection Agency because they prefer the environment rat fucked by giant radioactive horny rats in the hope that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles become real. You know who I bet they care less about than mutant rats? Disabled and sick Americans. They echo Project 2025’s playground bully approach of talking about workers with disabilities and mental illnesses.
Something that ought to make you ill is that, based on this report from Rolling Stone, is seems like ACLJ’s main purpose isn’t fighting for extremist right-wing Americans, as awful as that would be. Instead, it seems to mostly exist to funnel money to its head Jay Sekulow. As NPR says about it and another charity, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism, “Charity watchdogs note that a large amount of the money raised by the two groups goes to Sekulow, his family members, and businesses they run.”
ACLJ and Jay have a heavy history of anti-LGBT bigotry, including arguing for the criminalization of homosexuality both in american and abroad. The Southern Poverty Law Center says they “worked in Kenya to criminalize gay sex” for instance. All of this is likely because, as SPLC puts it, ACLJ “claims that the Founding Fathers did not intend a strict separation of church and state.” So they probably love that whole “force sabbath observation through labor regulations” thing in Project 2025.
So it’s chief counsel is Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s many lawyers for all of those crimes he did. Another one of Trump’s lawyers, Andrew Ekonomou, is one of ACLJ’s senior counsels. James Rockas, one of their government affairs people, had an affair with Trump’s whitehouse, meaning he worked for it at the Departments of State and Commerce.
1.8 American Cornerstone Institute
ACI is apparently an educational outfit put out by Dr. Ben Carson, the famed intellect behind sort of just standing there when your name is called. He also happens to be an author of one of the chapters in Project 2025 so you can probably guess how this is going to go.
They put out an article arguing that queer kids should be placed in homophobic and transphobic foster families because, as is often the case with these types of conservatives, they don’t care at all about the health and well-being of children, they care about making sure religious bigots never have to question their beliefs or get denied an opportunity to force their religion on someone else.
So gay kids should be forced to deal with non-affirming Christian people who won’t respect them, but Donald J. Trump should be allowed to do whatever crimes he wants and get away with it. The J stands for Justice-must-be-denied.
Because this is mostly just a “Hey, what’s Ben Carson up to? Buy his book!” org and little else, they also link to a bunch of his opinion articles. He suggests that more people identify as queer now because of a social contagion, which isn’t how any of this works. The cars are on but I guess they’re on idling in the garage because he’s Dr. Brainsoff.
1.9 American Council of Trustees and Alumni
ACTA claims to be a leader in higher education policy, advocacy, and reform. Where do you think they pop up in Project 2025? That’s right, in its hatred of accreditation. In their accreditation guidebook, one of the things they dislike is that… to have class credits count when transferring to an accredited university, your credits also have to come from an accredited institution. But, well, yeah, obviously. Accreditation, as they point out, ensures a minimum standard of academic quality. Unaccredited schools do not have to meet that minimum burden. They also hate that accreditors focus on higher education instead of for-profit, non-degree programs. Of course they don’t. Those aren’t colleges. They have nothing to do with higher education. They are specifically outside of their purview AND are not as good for a holistic education, a liberal arts education, as a college education with general ed requirements. It seems their dislike here is actually a dislike for standards that don’t push students into the uncaring profit schemes of their capitalist crony, anti-education friends.
Oh, speaking of accreditors, one thing they hate is accreditors telling schools not to do a discrimination. Entirely shocking, I tell you.
In their article complaining about specific majors, they do note that the point of education is not jobs which, hey, is to their credit. A credit. Oh shit they hate that. In it, they decry that the quality of an English major has declined because of woke and pop culture, but, uh, that entirely misunderstands critical theory, the actual requirements for humanities degrees, and what analysis even is. They roll their eyes at people studying Harry Potter for instance. This is a common refrain you’ll see in educational debates. There’s an assumption that contemporary pieces are unworthy of study in part because they aren’t classics and because they’re believed to be less challenging. I assume these same people would roll their eyes at studying the musical Hamilton, but as I argue in my video over it, Hamilton is a complex work that most people who roll their eyes at it entirely misunderstand because they refuse to engage with it. Any piece of art can be picked apart and analyzed and discussed and studied. ACTA simply doesn’t understand humanities degrees. I graduated with a theatre degree in 2020. I can tell you exactly what goes on in higher education and I have my critiques of it as well. But mine aren’t denigrating learning and analysis because I’m a serious person who actually cares about education more than the performance of education. ACTA is actually short for ACT a fool.
1.10 American Legislative Exchange Council
ALEC is where a bunch of state legislators go because he’s an excellent, discreet service bottom. They go more specific and wild on education than I’ve seen most conservative whackos go in that they endorse education savings accounts and school choices specifically because they “provide an opportunity for businesses to shape or endorse curriculum.” In other words, school choice means for-profit businesses can decide what your child can or should learn in order to shovel them into the workforce as good little worker bees.
Some of its workers also worked for Trump, including Grabriella Uli and Alex Hinson. As a collection of state legislators, it’s home to plenty of politicians. Some of its chairs have connections to Trump-land like West Virginia Senator Mark Maynard,
1.11 The American Main Street Initiative
AMSI is a thinktank, here meaning that their ability to think has tanked. Their front page directly links to a defense of Project 2025 written by their founder. Jeffrey Anderson actually wrote for the Mandate so we’ll get to him later. Throughout its articles there seems to be a theme of fearmongering about COVID mitigation, specifically pushing the lie that masks are largely themselves unhealthy.
Board member Charles Kesler was part of the racist 1776 Commission.
1.12 American Moment
Here’s an interesting tidbit: American Moment found one of its first backers in couch enthusiast and VP candidate JD Vance. Based on a Politico profile they happily shared to their website, American Moment is led by and embraces casual cruelty and bullying towards even its allies. This profile, which they happily have on their website, says their “long-term goal is to nurture a new class of Beltway elites who are steeped in an explicitly reactionary worldview.” Those young reactionaries are apparently a big part of Project 2025 as American Movement played a strong part in building the effort’s personnel database.
1.13 American Principles Project
APP is a supposedly pro-family project. And by pro-family, of course, it means anti-LGBT. Its 2022 document slash listicle of threats to the family includes the Equality Act, non-discrimination readings that logically and correctly call discrimination due to gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation sex discrimination, and abortion, that medical procedure that is perfectly fine to seek anyway but can also be lifesaving.
They pretend that drag is inherently sexual which likely means they’re part of the driving force behind Project 2025’s radical redefinition of pornography to include non-sexual, non-titilating acts and depictions. They also support DeSantis’s bigoted Don’t Say Gay Bill, which in part explains Project 2025’s endorsement of and call for more legislation in the vein of Don’t Say Gay.
APP says its Founding President Frank Cannon was a”regular gues at the White House under the Trump Administration,” claiming his work there achieved some conservative wetdreams. Anthony LaBruna serves as another connection between APP and Trump.
1.14 Center for Equal Opportunity
What are they the CEO of? Apparently Audacity because their main concern is reverse racism and reverse sexism. In their announcement that they’re joining Project 2025, they start whining “boooo how dare you want to reduce and reverse the negative effects of historic systematic discrimination that have disadvantaged entire generations and demographics, we should just pretend the past doesn’t effect the present at all. Stop itttt.”
Its President Devon Westhill worked for the Trump Administration
1.15 Center for Family and Human Rights
Their website calls themselves C-Fam. They would, of course, like to C Fams destroyed. Specifically LGBT families. They frame attempts to say that families are not simply man-woman marriages as an attack on the family. The claim all LGBT identities “deny the biological reality of men and women” and claim that pushes for LGBT rights also include pushes children to have intercourse which is a ridiculous and extremist lie that certain far-right hate-mongers like to pull out in order to deny queer rights and smear us all as pedophiles. This is always fun to contrast with the insane amount of US states that allow for child marriage, something I go over in my video on the homophobia of the GOP. As part of its embrace of extreme homophobia, it celebrates Russia’s increasing hostility for LGBT people, claiming those are “pro-family” policies. One could almost guess then they would similarly like to criminalize all mention and expression of queer identity. Of course, if you’re policing people’s sexualities, you also have to be vehemently anti-sex work, though they’re not SWERFs because they’re not feminists.
1.16 Center for Immigration Studies
CIS. Damn. It’s a slur on twitter. Don’t tell Elon. They shared an op-ed which calls for a change in immigration policy that results in an immigration rate as close to zero as reasonably possible. They actually pull of some wild 20th century racism by ranking the civility of stereotypically white demographics. Um. It was a bit crazy to read. That’s somehow going even a step farther than even Project 2025 dares to go, it’s kind of brazen, kind of… well, while other orgs have annoyed or angered me, this one made me want to immediately stop looking into them.
Its connections to the Trump admin include: Julie Axelrod, Jon Feere, George Fishman, Elizabeth Jacobs, Ronald Mortensen, and William Chip.
1.17 Center for Renewing America
C-Ra is She-Ra’s much less fun and more evil cousin. It decries how alleviating historic disadvantages discrimination has dealt certain communities results in supposed discrimination against cishet white guys. In an article that seems to fully misunderstand deconstruction, they claims that “racist” and “sexist” are smears. It’s very close to the JK Rowling “slurred as bigots” turn of phrase, where pointing out bigotry becomes the same as bigotry. Ironically, it’s a type of disingenuous motte and bailey that the article claims to be denouncing.
On reading an article on obscenity, which I’ll get to in a sec, I noticed some more obvious typos and typographical mistakes. And, look, yes, typos happen. But I’m much more forgiving of mistakes and quirks in and amateur, personal, and creative endeavors, not so much when coming from professional organizations who have or desire to have power in the US government.
It advocates for expansions of censorship and a crackdown on expression. It wants to do all it can to make pornography in all its forms illegal. Here’s the challenge they’re going to run into. Even in their proposal to get around the Miller test, the courts and juries would suddenly be the arbiters of what qualifies and doesn’t qualify as art. Here’s the thing: there is no human being or machine qualified to make that distinction because it doesn’t exist. There is no line at which something becomes or stops being art. Its amorphous category that defies definition. We can discuss form and genre and school of thought or expression, but art is, well, pretty much everything. Pornography is inherently film. Erotica is creative writing. Naked pics are photography. So on and so it goes. They all make arguments about the nature of arousal and sexuality, even if they don’t know they’re making those arguments. An OnlyFans video in which someone sits there and takes off their socks is a film making the argument that the removal of clothing is of the erotic. Unfortunately for them, that makes artistic expression categorically protected by the First Amendment. Obscenity laws are inherently unconstitutional. We see their influence in Project 2025’s complete misunderstanding of pornography and the First Amendment. C-Ra aims to redefine obscene as 1) something real that matters and 2) any remote depiction of the erotic. Project 2025 aims to redefine the erotic as including things that do not exist for the purpose of titilation. They’re both dumb as shit.
Its connections to Trump include Russ Vought, who we’ll get to later, Adam Candeub, Rachel Cauley, Jeff Clark, Ken Cuccinelli, Ashlea Frazier, Paige Hauser, Dan Kowalski, Micah Meadowcroft, Mark Paoletta, and Kingsley Wilson.
1.18 Claremont Institute
An article for the thinktank argues that the founders believed Politics required religious morality, a stance people often take when trying to argue that the Establishment Clause does not grant a freedom from religion in any way, even though there is no logical way to fulfill the demands of the first amendment while making religious laws. This is underlined by the constant appeal to the idea of natural law, most commonly a dog whistle used by anti-gay extremists who want to pretend a secular basis for their homophobic policies. It implies that hedonism, narcissism, and nihilism are all the same when they’re not really connected. Nihilism rejects meaning and says it’s impossible. Hedonism finds that meaning is found through pleasure and its pursuit. Narcissism is a medical disorder.
Speaking of nihilism, though, the New Republica says embodies “a kind of nihilistic yearning to destroy modernity” composed of people “who are openly contemptuous of democracy.” Yet their contempt doesn’t stop them from wanting power, of course. They’re not the internet communists annoyed by the ContraPoints critique power meme. “If either Trump of DeSantis becomes president in 2024, Claremont and its associates are likely to be integral to the ‘brain trust’ of the new administration.” And Claremont signed onto Project 2025. Wow. Shocking.
Claremont has a publication called The American Mind. It does this fun thing a lot of publications do, even those ran by political think tanks, where it claims that any articles don’t necessarily show what the institute believes, so they can claim plausible deniability and put distance between themselves and any controversial publications. I think this is less the case in instances where Claremont’s own website links to a specific article such as this one by James Poulos where he strongly implies that we are a Christian nation whose worries will all ease and our country will improve when we turn to Christianity again.
Speaking of, an article in The Guardian connects several leaders of Claremont with an extremist fraternal order called the Society for American Civic Renewal. Based on my reading of the article, it seems as if the Society is a group of white supremacist Christian theocrats looking to rule the country via military might.
In an article for The Atlantic, its president Ryan Williams told reporter Emma Green, “the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people.” This is fundamentally opposed to the idea of a free country. Freedom cannot exist in a theocracy. Freedom of religion certainly can’t, not least of all because there is no universally accepted dogma amongst Christian sects, believers, or scholars.
So what people behind this anti-American, anti-First Amendment, anti-constitutional program are involved in Trump-land? John Eastman is a former Trump lawyer and indicted co-conspirator who tried to get Pence to mess with the certification of the 2020 election because Claremont does not care about our democracy. At all. We once again see 1776 Commission member Charles Kesler and fellow member Larry Arnn. We also have Theo Wold.
1.19 Coalition for a Prosperous America
C-Pa, no hands! That’s what guys with a daddy kink say. Here’s a crazy thing for a group that signed onto Project 2025 who hates windmills because they’re an eyesore: CPA correctly argues that we should aim to be the global leader in the production, research, and invention of green energy tech. They specifically cite solar and wind power. So I guess Project 2025 whispered in their ear that they have to find wind power that doesn’t use windmills I guess.
I’ll readily admit that economic policy, especially trade, is not my thing. From looking at their articles, they do appear to actually have bipartisan aims and goals. I think their idea of a flat 10 percent tariff is probably dumb. But at first glance they don’t seem as nakedly partisan as the rest of these orgs so far. But I think that comes into question when they signed onto Project 2025. In part it seems to come from a general protectionist view on trade and an underlying America First philosophy. It also has connections to Trump world, with Dan Dimico, Greg Autry, and Stephen Vaughn.
1.20 Competitive Enterprise Institute
It seems like what we’re competing for is the destruction of union work. Finally, the group who might be behind Project 2025’s call for the destruction of public sector unions. In one article, they view the idea of congressional staff unionization as a funny punishment to put on democrats because it might be complicated and messy to implement and oversee, something that should apparently scare us into cowering away from allowing every worker a union.
Speaking of, they uncritically share a view from Philip Howard that public sector unions shouldn’t be legal. And if they are, they shouldn’t be allowed to do much. They specifically point to police unions as a place that prevents reform which is interesting given the general conservative dislike of critiquing the police and the police union at all. But this is clearly where Project 2025’s “destroy all public unions” sentiments come from. If there’s one thing communists LARPing in a democratic socialist org and capitalist crony conservatives can agree on, it’s hating unions.
They oppose mandatory paid sick leave because they would like people who come down with an illness to get screwed. Who here, handymen all, with their screws aimed screwing us all, has a connection to Trump? There’s Dan Greenberg, David McFadden, Joel Zinberg and Travis Burk.
1.21 Conservative Partnership Institute
If you recall back to the AAF, the New Yorker said it got launched in part by CPI. Aren’t acronyms fun? We’re saving so much time in this totally short video. The Nation claims CPI has helped in the thorough Trumpian takeover of the conservative apparatus with the aim to “advance a hard-right, Christian nationalist agenda.” Oh hey, weren’t we just talking about Christian nationalism? That seems to be a running theme of these orgs. Another running theme appears to be self-dealing, which is like gooning but with money. The New York Times details how CPI frequently spends money on groups where CPI insiders or their family members are leaders. Make of that what you want.
CPI also has hands in people we’ve already talked about besides AAF, including America First Lecal, American Moment, American Cornerstone Institute, and Center for Renewing America.
CPI has been pretty consistent in pushing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump because they do not care about democracy, so it doesn’t matter if they’re unpopular and they lose. It matters that they cling to power. As part of that, of course they oppose any consequences for the insurrectionists of January 6. And they likewise oppose Trump not being above the law.
They are, of course, against abortion and celebrated the overturning of Roe. They called its overturning “the doorstep of history.” Regardless of the way you interpret that turn of phrase, it’s clear that it means their work on getting rid of abortion is not yet over. Christian Nationalists can’t only be opposed to democracy and abortion, though, they have to hate gay people. CPI opposed the Respect for Marriage Act and pulled out the old homophobic mainstay of being like “but then you’ll have incest marriage” because they haven’t updated their firmware since the mid-2000s.
Connections to Trump: Chairman Jim DeMint, Mark Meadows, CEO Ed Corrigan, Trump lawyer who attempted to subvert democracy Cleta Mitchell, COO Wesley Denton, Hugh Fike, and Babs Hough.
1.21 Concerned Women for America
CWA is a different sort of Christian nationalist group than the others in that it’s for women who want to get rid of other people’s rights. Yay, feminism! And by feminism, of course, we mean getting rid of women’s bodily autonomy because of course one of their main focuses is destroying abortions and ignoring its position as healthcare and none of their business. Of course, they want to ban mifepristone, same as Project 2025, entirely ignoring its use in treatment for miscarriages because they don’t care about women and women’s health and women’s safety. They care about control.
They pretend that recognizing trans people and preventing discrimination based on gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation will “erase” women.
They’re also champions of KOSA, the internet censorship bill that pretends to protect children. I talked about that bill, its faults, and actual goals in my video on NSFW censorship. They actually flat out talk about the actual goal of the bill - making sure trans kids can’t find information and community online.
But feminism is, you know, defending the felon who brags about sexual assault by claiming he should be above the law and never face consequences for his actions.
Like some other groups signing onto Project 2025, CWA has a past of endorsing conversion therapy, a debunked practice that results in the deaths LGBT people. In a document they still have on their website, they talk about so-called ex-gay people, tell parents to go to the now defunct conversion torture group Exodus International, and call gay marriage “evil.” Yes, the groups behind Project 2025 are extremist hate groups.
Its president Penny Nance worked for Trump.
1.22 Defense of Freedom Institute
DFI is focused on education. Given the crazy that populates Project 2025’s positions on education, you can bet this is going to be annoying.
They push the idiotic idea that parents should be in charge of school curriculum. They would also like for a national version of the various Don’t Say Gay bills that hide behind the guise of parents rights when what they amount to is allowing conservative evangelical parents and politicians to control the education of children who aren’t their own, ironically restricting the very rights of other parents that they pretend to protect.
They are, of course, antagonistic toward trans-children and want schools to forcibly out kids to their parents and guardians. They lament that validating a trans person’s identity might lead to them continuing to be trans which is an implicit endorsement of conversion therapy and forcing trans people to live in fear in the closet. This is in part because they believe being trans is a social contagion. It is not. They likely know this, too, and they’re lying. Between assuming people are idiots and assuming they’re dishonest, I tend toward assuming dishonesty. Of course, anti-trans policies are both.
Speaking of idiotic, this education policy thinktank laments that college degrees supposedly aren’t leading to “actual job skills.” Besides being entirely incorrect on the outcomes of highed ed, it continues the trend of many of these orgs entirely misunderstanding the purpose of education. They also seem like they might be behind the Project 2025 call to allow religious school to discriminate and apply for exemptions to nondiscrimination regs while making sure the public does not have access to a list of what schools desire to use religion as an excuse to discriminate.
Time for the Trump connections: President Rebert S. Eitel and Jim Blew both worked for Trump’s Department of Education.
1.23 Ethics and Public Policy Center
What does Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Greek myth monster Argus have in common? E PP C. I think that joke is hilarious.
They flat-out say they’re aiming to to stick their religious beliefs into the government so it give it up for another Christian nationalist group. Despite hosting a whole host of articles, they do the cowardly thing of going, “Hey, we don’t necessarily believe anything these people say.” I suppose that’s good and well because one of their articles disgustingly blames Robin Williams’ suicide on abortion. That’s right.
After jerking off Elon Must because they like man-scent I guess, they go on to “oh poor baby” him for being a transphobe who drove his trans-daughter out of his life. Rather than embrace her, he goes on and on about how her transition killed his her. They call transition self-destruction. The article is explicitly “we must follow Christianity” type of nonsense. This is because they aren’t merely transphobic, homophobic bigots. They are, in fact, pushing for a specific form of conservative Christian theocracy.
And it is a specific interpretation because they flatly reject any deviation from their version, which calls into question how they would treat Christians who disagree with them in their imagined theocracy. For instance, they mourn the Church of England slowly moving towards affirmation or at least allowing affirmation, specifically the blessing of gay unions. I remember seeing a stink about this and Synod on twitter because sometimes I like to look at Side B Christians, a collection of queer homophobes who are light-ex-gay.
That also explains their linking to an article which goes “nooo NSFW isn’t free speech, we should haaate it.” Project 2025 similarly misunderstands, lies about, and wishes to heavily restrict speech.
1.24 Family Policy Alliance
Another batch of reading, another Christian conservative group. F-PA, a category popular on adult websites. FPA claims to follow that “conception to natural death” line but they don’t mention being opposed to the death penalty, which makes sense because they signed onto a document that seems giddy at the idea of killing more people.
Speaking of killing people, they support using religion as a means to deny healthcare, specifically citing efforts to not offer birth control, a drug which people do use, surprise surprise, for medical reasons beyond contraception such as preventing deadly ovarian cysts. They also oppose efforts to ban conversion therapy, again, a practice that does not work and does lead to LGBT people killing themselves because it is torture.
Speaking of LGBT people, they want businesses to be able to fire people for being LGBT and discriminate against queer people. Of course they hate trans people, but their hatred also seems to be based in a sort of “omg men and women have inherent societal roles and personalities based on sex” which is a very sexist sort of biological essentialism that is often used to oppress women. They want anti-queer bullying to be perfectly acceptable. They want schools to teach that being gay is unhealthy. And hey! They want employers to be able to not extend the full benefits of marriage to gay couples. And of course they’re anti-surrogacy because birth is bad when gay couples are involved.
A hate group signed onto Project 2025. Shocking.
1.25 Family Research Council
FRC is a conservative mainstay that I’ve talked about beforehand. I’ll reuse some of that here and give you some highlights: they push conversion therapy and pretend it’s a thing that works and doesn’t hurt people when it doesn’t work, there is no evidence for that, but there is plenty of evidence that it hurts people. They fearmonger about LGBT people by pretending that we’re all pedophiles. Believe businesses should be able to discriminate against us. Claim gay marriage will destroy society. And they’ve consistently argued against the Lawrence v Texas decision that decriminalized gay intercourse because they want queer people to be arrested and thrown in camps and subjected to conversion therapy because they’re an extremist hate group whose popularity in conservative politics is an indictment on the entire conservative movement in the US. They’re a disgusting organization that wants a Christian nationalist state and they hate both individual freedom and freedom of religion.
There’s a consistent pattern of Project 2025 advisory groups being Christian extremists who hate this country and all it stands for.
Let’s connect them to Trump now. Ken Blackwell was on the Trump transition team. There’s also Meg Kilgannon.
1.26 First Liberty Institute
You’re going to be shocked. This is another Christian supremacist org. Their deep misunderstanding or, to be more accurate, perversion of religious freedom includes championing requirements to display the Ten Commandments. Hi, that violates the Establishment Clause. Sorry. Of course, they don’t care about that. What they care about is forcing Christianity, and their version of it, on the rest of us. They’re actually really insistent that religious freedom is the government forcing the display of the ten commandments, in schools, in prisons, on public property. That isn’t religious freedom. But they know that.
They’re of course in favor of discriminating against LGBT people and continuing to receive federal funding even when doing discrimination.
What they’re not in favor of is felon Donald Trump facing criminal liability for all those crimes he did. Perhaps that’s because they’re in favor of the constant spewal of Christ-like hate Trump represents. You can see this in their ardent support of homophobe and sexist Harrison Butker.
1.27 Forge Leadership Network
Forge is forging the next gen of conservatives and I can at least appreciate the low effort but kind of fun time with language this is. It’s more inventive than most of the groups involved. Reading through their newsletter, it does also seem they’re an explicitly Christian group, because of course it is. When you click on “learn more” about their summit which they tell you almost nothing about, they tell you to give you an email and phone number because I suppose they don’t want public access to what’s going on.
They do this really annoying young person thing of being an org with little actual written material so I had to do something I despise doing: listen to a podcast. I clicked on one episode about social policies and their speaker was a transphobic asshole. The recording does a disservice to its listener by referencing visuals it doesn’t describe and having question and answers where the students being asked can’t be heard at all. It’s an immediate “Oh hey this is what we believe as Christians” because their goal is Christian nationalism. It claims that welfare programs don’t work. Apparently, sexual freedom leads to poverty. It talks about economic impact to argue against allowing divorce. There’s some “omg athiests can’t have morals” stupidity. Apparently trans people exist because we’re godless heathens. He makes fun of queer people and claims no queer person can be Christian. There’s an anti-choice message at the end that implies that we should ban abortion and make expressions of homosexuality and the state of being trans illegal. Uh-oh. Sounds like perhaps Forge is an anti-queer extremist group aiming to inject a specific form of conservative Christianity into the government. There’s an embrace of ascetics and an assertion that only Christianity can lead to happiness. The implication then is that our government, for the purpose of human flourishing, should embrace and accept a Christian theocracy.
1.28 Foundation for Defense of Democracies
FDD is foreign policy time. Immediately on October 7 following the horrific Hamas attacks, FDD called for Isreal to make sure its response was “overwhelming,” not just against Hamas but against Iran, implicitly calling for a large scale war in the Middle East. Given the reporting since then, it seems Israel took their advice.
I’m going to be honest, they put out dozens of articles practically every day it seems and this already isn’t an area I’m super great with. From what I’ve pieced together about the general vibe, they continue to fully support all of Israel’s actions which doesn’t sit well with me given all of the atrocities and horrible images and reports that we’ve all seen.
An article in The Nation jibes with its October 7 statement by claiming that FDD has long been advocating for war of some sort with Iran, potentially at the behest of certain elements within Israel. An article in Law & Crime details when they randomly spread an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. So you can assume they were pushing for a hawkish, pro-war angle when advising Project 2025.
Connections to Trump include Bonnie Glick, Matt Pottinger, Anthony Ruggiero, John Demers, Karen Evans, Charles Kupperman, Brent Park, Kenneth Rapuano, and Samantha Ravich.
1.29 Foundation for Government Accountability
FGA which is what a dyslexic frat guy would call me. They seem to simply give up on the idea of being the leading innovator and exporter of green technology, pretending it’s simply impossible for it to ever be meaningful. Of course, this is simply a rhetorical framing set up by their overlords from oil and gas companies who don’t so much care about the US or its standing in the world.
They desire more child labor, including allowing teenagers to work more dangerous jobs, something Project 2025 calls for, because they don’t care about the health of children. This includes a desire to allow upper-level school children to work late into the night, which, huh, seems like something that would eat into their abilities to deal with school time, almost like they don’t care about students or school.
Trump connection time! There’s Brian Blase, Trevor Carlsen, and Paige Terryberry.
1.30 FreedomWorks
Welcome back Christian Nationalism, it’s been so long. Wait. What’s that? FreedomWorks no longer exists? It shut down in May 2024? According to the Politco article announcing its closure, its president Adam Brandon blamed it on the rise of populism in the Trump era, explicitly contrasting it with libertarianism which is a great time for me to reiterate that populism, as it currently manifests, is not about following the will of the people, though populists will claim it is. Populism is based on creating in and out groups and exploiting hatred of the out group. It’s a politic based almost entirely on the performance of anger. The performance of anger often manifests itself in, say, nationalism and isolationism.
In another Politico article from 2023, Brandon apparently “said he feared Republicans would run on a social issues platform unpopular with the general electorate.” That’s somewhat amusing given that the policy platform his group was named in, Project 2025, is exactly that. It’s an extremist document unpopular with the electorate which is why you see some conservatives try to pretend like it doesn’t matter despite the fact that plenty of its big name groups and figures play massive roles in it.
That’s also funny considering that they pushed Trump’s stolen election lies and backed the extremist homophobia of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay Bill.
I was able to use the Wayback Machine to access their website from before they dissolved in order to look at the people who worked for them and look at any connections to Trump world. It seems like the only one is that Matt Maraist worked on Trump’s 2020 campaign as a video producer.
1.31 The Heritage Foundation
Alright, to the big guys themselves, the powerhouse behind Project 2025: The Heritage Foundation. As I mentioned in the last video, Heritage has been pushing conversion therapy well into the 2020s because they’re an anti-gay hate group. That is of course why they cry “but my religious freedom” when told that you shouldn’t be able to discriminate against people for being LGBT. Of course, that’s their same argument for denying women medical care such as birth control and drugs used to treat miscarriages.
The do the song and dance where they pretend being trans is a fetish. It has nothing to do with sex which any serious adult, even serious anti-trans bigots, recognize. They frame it in the language of the obscene so they can criminalize it. Speaking of, they go on to defend foreign countries who make it a crime to be gay. Shocking. The Heritage Foundation being an extremist hate group that wants to throw LGBT people in prison and force us to go through conversion therapy? They’re the ones who wrote Project 2025? Wow, so shocking. To the Heritage Foundation, religious freedom is using religion to marginalize, criminalize, and discriminate against people. They believe religious freedom is controlling the government through religious beliefs they agree with. That almost sounds like they don’t believe in religious freedom at all. Wow. That’s a somewhat consistent theme with these groups. They pay lip service to religious freedom just to loudly go on about how they wish the rest of us were forced to subordinate ourselves to their beliefs.
The Heritage Foundation believes any mention of LGBT people, including simply pride collections, so rainbow outfits, is an exposure of explicit sexual material to children. So when we read Project 2025 calling “Trans ideology” pornography, we know they’re not exactly being explicit in all of their desires. They think all LGBT identities, expressions of them, and discussions around them are inherently sexual and pornographic. So when P2025 calls to ban porn and make its creation and distribution illegal, it seems likely that the Heritage Foundation wants to make any content, art, educational material, advertisement, reporting, and simple discussion fo queer people inherently illegal.
It’s importnat to really note the influence of the Heritage Foundation in conservative politics. As an Atlantic article reports a decade before Project 2025 was released, “The story of the conservative movement that has come to dominate the Republican Party over the last four decades is inextricably intertwined with the story of the Heritage Foundation. In that time, it became more than just another think tank. It came to occupy a place of special privilege–a quasi-official arm of GOP administrations and Congresses…”
You could make hours and hours of content exploring the past and present of the Heritage Foundation and all its inherited hate that it wants to pass down onto the rest of us, tax free. But that’s not this video. So, instead, let’s look at its connections to Trump.
There’s Dan Mauler, Roger Severino, Mary G. Vought, Robert Greenway, Mike Howell, Nina Owcharenko Schaefer, Paul J. Ray, Lora Ries, Steven G. Bradbury, Victoria Coates, Thomas Dans, Steven Groves, Mario Loyola, Max Primorac, Hans A. von Spakovsky, Erin Walsh, Kyle Brosnon, Spencer Chretien, and Kay Coles James. There is potential that other members of its staff have connections to Trump, whether that’s working for campaigns, transitions, or his administration, but I didn’t go rooting deep in the roots of all their listed staff members.
1.32 Hillsdale College
We’ve got a private Christian university here signing onto an extremist policy document so that’s great. Totally doesn’t speak to a desire by the creators to enact a Christian theocracy on the American people.
Hillsdale once asked everyone on its email lists to pray for the end of gay marriage, calling it evil. You know what is evil though? Hillsdale, like many of these Christian Nationalist outfits, doesn’t care about democracy. This is most obvious in how they pushed and pursued Trump’s election conspiracies and attempts to destroy democracy. As the New York Times reports, its president “musied about Republican-dominated state legislatures’ bypassing the voters and taking direct control of their states’ electoral votes. ‘There’s a wild idea,’ he said.”
You know what’s more evil than all of that, though? Hillsdale doesn’t take any federal funds and its students can’t take federal student aid because Hillsdale doesn’t want to comply with Title IX because I suppose they want to discriminate based on sex. Or, perhaps, they don’t want to take seriously the health of its female students, as alleged in lawsuits accusing Hillsdale of taking little to no action after the sexual assault of its students. The allegations include that the school threatened them for checking in on the investigations.
When the college newspaper at my alma mater went investigating how the school handles Title IX investigations, especially in regards to professors, the paper bravely stood up to the administration and committed itself to journalistic integrity and the safety of we students. That isn’t the case at Hillsdale. In regards to the lawsuit, its student paper went, “OMG these pesky lawsuits will destroy religious freedom.” That almost sounds like a targeted effort to smear and fearmonger so that Hillsdale can continue to proudly do wrong by its female students. One of their fears? That the lawsuit might result in Hillsdale no longer being able to discriminate. How awful and scary for them. Fuck you.
Since Hillsdale is a college, it does have a lot of alumni in the conservative eco-system. I won’t be looking into them unless they work for the college as well, but I did want to throw out there that Hillsdale and what it pushes to its students does have an effect on conservative politics. One of the editors of the badly written RNC platform, after all, is a Hillsdale grad who used to write those terrible, badly written speeches for Trump, though that does make me question the ability of their English department.,
Larry Arnn pops up against here, the president of the college who was eyeing the destruction of our democracy in favor of a Donald “34 Felonies” Trump. He was on the 1776 Commission.
1.33 Honest Elections Project
I expected them to be another group advocating for the overthrow of democracy via embracing Trump’s attempts to win despite losing. But, hep hep hoorah, NPR says they actually opposed those efforts and said Jan 6 was awful and dumb.
Though they did push for the independt state legislature theory which, NPR points out, opponents say would pretty much result in state legislatures choosing the results they want, gerrymander in anyway they choose, so on and so forth. SCOTUS rejected ISL theory.
But that actually brings me to some speculation. HEP did participate in a lawsuit over Pennsylvania’s results in 2020. A law profesor called lawsuits like that threats to our democracy. He claims the goal of HEP is to make it harder to vote because doing so “helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.”
This is the first of the orgs that seems to be hiding its members and boards. It only had one person listed on its website, I found one more through googling, and then connections to other groups via an article in the Guardian linking it to Leonard Leo who is says “has shaped Donald Trump’s unprecedented effort to remake the federal judiciary.”
1.34 Independent Women’s Forum
If there’s one thing you can rely on when it comes to conservative women’s groups, it’s intense transphobia. They continually mock the very idea of being trans and push the idea that the only correct way to deal with it is through non-affirming therapy, or, in other words, talk therapy with the goal of telling trans people that they aren’t actually trans and they should be cis. This is, correctly, often labelled as conversion therapy. The way they phrase it, they make it seem as if the “neutral” option is to make sure people don’t continue identifying as trans. This is the same eliminationist rhetoric that leads one to being Kelly Jean Keen, and it is not, actually, neutral therapy.
But hey, at least they want more guns in schools. Specifically, they’d like armed school staff, not even just school resource officers. They’re of the idea that gun control would make us less safe. So they’re quite dumb, but, to their credit, they at least mention gun control, unlike both Project 2025 and the Republican National Platform.
They’re so feminist, they oppose the Equal Rights Amendment, in part because it could lead to “equal pay,” which is a wild thing to list in a series of reasons they might oppose it. You know what else they oppose? The Affordable Care Act. In part, they oppose it because… it covers people with pre-existing conditions. They argue this only effects the self-employed and independent contractors, as though our lives are unimportant, while then going on to argue that, well, insurance shouldn’t be tied to employers at all, meaning everyone would be put in the same market as the self-employed and independent contractors, effectively removing all rules about the coverage of those with pre-existing conditions, throwing their faith that the free market will fix things. In other words, they would like the sick people in this country to go into debt or fuck off and die for the sake of their wallet. Wow, that’s so very feminist and kind of them.
Trump connections: Larry Kudlow, Ellie Cohanim, Laura Cunliffe, Brianna Howard, May Mailman, and Mary Vought.
1.35 Institute for the American Worker
I 4 AW. You’re either saying your eyes are only for the amazing, you are deserving of awe, or I guess you’re masquerading as a pro-worker organization.
In an argument against a proposed 32-hour work week change to labor law, they kind of imply that the 40 hour work week and overtime requirements are a bad thing we should consider getting rid of in order to allow companies to need fewer employees in the coming years by instead working their workers into their early graves.
My general sense looking through their posts is that they’re antagonistic towards unions and organizing. That tracks with them signing onto Project 2025 given that it calls for busting any and all public sector unions. They especially don’t like the teachers unions, and that’s probably because attacking them is a proxy for attacking public education in general, but again, I remind you, this also results in an attack on every police union throughout the country, something I would guess would annoy most lay people who vote conservative.
Its president F. Vincent Vernuccio worked for Trump. Other Trump connections: Matthew Mimnaugh, James Sherk, and Maxford Nelsen.
1.36 Institute for Energy Research
IER seems to mostly function as an anti-green energy lobbying effort. They oppose Tim Walz because he has a record of pushing for clean energy and caring at all about climate change, something they hate.
They use the damage caused by a damaged wind turbine to fearmonger about wind energy, conveniently passing over the massive, dangerous oil spills of the past and the deadly earthquakes caused by fracking. Why do that? Well, that would be because it’s bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry. Wow. That’s so shocking.
So which of these dunk-the-ducks-in-oil advocates have connections to Trump? As far as I can tell, it’s just Thomas Pyle.
1.37 Institute for Women’s Health
You know a group advocating for women’s health is surely going to say some great things after signing onto a document which denies healthcare! What’s that? One of their main things is pushing the Geneva Consensus Declaration that Project 2025 upholds and I discussed in the previous video, the one where the majority of state signatories are countries that discriminate against women or damage their health in one way or the other, making it clear this sin’t about the health of women or babies but instead about controlling women? That’s so… expected. One thing about all of this is there’s no drama looking up any of these groups. They’re pretty much all exactly who you expect them to be.
Almost every single one of their op-eds is about abortion. One of the few that isn’t says that women’s health is at risk because less people are religious. They push the idea that religion will help cure ailments and cure mental health. A former friend of mine once told me I would be happier if only I became Catholic and denounced my homosexuality. It’s a lie that insecure religious extremists push.
They specifically push the lie that abortion cannot ever be healthcare. This is implicitly says that in the instances where it’s required to save the life of a woman, that’s still not healthcare. That woman’s life doesn’t matter. IWH is either monstrous and doesn’t care about the women who will die preventable deaths from this sort of posturing or they’re run by morons who are entirely incapable of thinking through their ideas.
Are any of these idiots connected to Trump? Well, the author of those articles and the group’s CEO Valeria Huber as well as COO Alma Golden.
1.38 Intercollegiate Studies Institute
You know all the conservatives who whine about how colleges are hostile to them being asocial little bigoted gremlins all over the place? Well ISI is… that’s really close to just saying ISIS. ISI claims to be another one of those super influential conservative orgs. Justices Gorsuch and Alito are alumni. So it’s important to note again just how entrenched Project 2025 is in the entire conservative movement in the US. Even if you do buy that it has nothing to do with Trump, it’s totally fringe… It has its hands in every conservative cookie pot in the country.
Oh, and they’re explicitly for a religious takeover of society because of course they are. Apparently if you don’t make society Jewish and Christian, and you can bet they specifically mean their conservative versions of those religions, then apparently you’re going to cause the downfall of free society.
You know that speech JD Vance gave where he suggested giving parents more votes and claiming that being a step-parent doesn’t count as being a parent, mocking Kamala Harris for being a step-mother? Guess who he gave that speech to. That’s right, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
1.39 James Madison Institute
This is a Florida specific think tank so lets go into the filthy swamp for a brief second. Of course they’re going to approve of DeSantis’s Don’t Say Gay bill because they hate gay and trans people. They also defended his retaliation against Disney for them saying “hey maybe don’t do a censorship and hatred bill.” They claims trans people defy the laws of nature, that whole natural law nonsense that only ever equates to people whining about how their personal disgust at queer people can’t be a character flaw, it has to be a universal feeling every human has.
One of the rare shocks I’ve had, they oppose KOSA, correctly pointing out that it’s a censorship bill disguised as a bill meant to protect children. That’s interesting given that they’re part of Proejct 2025 which calls for even more intense censorship than even KOSA. Then again, their opposition to KOSA was put out over a year after the Mandate for Leadership was published.
1.40 Keystone Policy
Okay, so… I was only able to find a twitter page for this. I’m not entirely sure this group… exists? Or is real? It’s twitter page consists of defending Project 2025 and retweeting transphobia. Whoever they are, they don’t like abortion, they don’t like trans people, and they don’t like gay people. They never link to a website. Never seem to take ownership of an article or present themselves as an organization of people. It legitimately just seems like a twitter account of some random anonymous person. I do not know why the Heritage Foundation decided to legitimize a twitter account in this way, but I legitimately cannot find anything else about them.
1.41 The Leadership Institute
At least we’re back to actual things that exist.
This is another “let us train you on how to do politics” place. It keeps a list of those it’s trained, so it’s likely that its main contribution to Project 2025 is to that conservative LinkedIn database thing.
Apparently they run something called Campus Reform. They call it a “leading site for college news.” Its coverage of gay events regularly includes scare quotes. The writing is generally bare bones and seems as though it thinks presenting information about queer people and events is hilarious or critique? If Campus Reform is a showcase of the training the Leadership Institute gives… I’d be reluctant to hire anyone who goes through it.
Trump connections: Brent Lowder and John Koons.
I’m not including people who seemed to be low, low level workers on the Trump campaigns.
1.42 Liberty University
LU is a well-known conservative Christian college, and I do wonder if they’re another group that said, hey, Project 2025, you should make it so the American people can’t find out that we want to discriminate against people, so please make it illegal for the government to publish that anywhere, okay, thaaaaanks.
Liberty restricts the entertainment its students are allowed to consume both on and off campus because they don’t actually believe in freedom of speech or artistic expression and that’s an insane thing. And of course it’s fundamentally transphobic and homophobic in its honor code. Not only that, but you’re not allowed to be anything but homophobic and transphobic if you’re a student there. AND this means you’re not even allowed to hold the hand of someone of the same-sex in a friendly way because their fear of homosexuality extends so far as to prohibit any and all affectionate signs of kinship. I wonder why men are supposedly so lonely. So anyway, yes, bigotry is baked into their campus. So baked, in fact, it did conversion therapy on its own students.
Listen, if you want a deep dive into Liberty, Fundie Fridays is out there ready to tell you all the deep and dirty secrets. But if you want a taste: Earlier this year, Liberty was fined $14 million for its mishandling criminal and dangerous activities. They “did not adequately respond to incidents of sexual violence, failed to tell the campus about criminal activities or dangerous situations (such as gas leaks), and did not maintain an accurate or complete list of crimes.”
1.43 National Association of Scholars
N-AS because they be showing it. They would like state legislatures to be able to veto gen ed requirements which is incredibly dumb. They are of course anti-trans and want to force all colleges to be anti-trans. They want a “intellectual diversity” act which seems to make it illegal to fire someone for, say, espousing Nazi rhetoric, racism, homophobia, sexism, or any other such thing.
They would like to drastically ease the standards to which teachers are held as far as liscening and education.
Trump connections: Teresa Manning and Adam Kissel.
1.44 National Center for Public Policy Research
While looking up this group there was a sort of interesting pragmatism that popped up in one article about the RNC. Rachel Barkley works at Able Americans, part of NCPPR, and she laid out that even if she and her group disagree with other disability advocacy groups on, say, abortion, they can still come together in order to advance the causes of and improve the lives of those with disabilities. A lot of really outspoken people in partisan politics are opposed to the idea of strategic partnerships so it was sort of refreshing. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m about to sing NCPPR’s praises. They did sign onto Project 2025, whose policy proposals will result in preventable deaths and, it seems, the loss of insurance and government benefits for those with disabilities that require consistent medicalization.
For instance, NCPPR is so homophobic and transphobic that it threatened Best Buy in an attempt to get them to stop donating from groups such as the Trevor Project, which you may know as that group whose goal is to make sure less queer kids commit suicide. Apparently they did this sort of thing to multiple companies, though which ones aren’t apparent. They despise trans people. They grab shares in companies and then point at boycotts led by other hateful conservatives about how much they despise LGBT people and say, “Supporting LGBT people violates your fiduciary duty! You should hate them like we do.”
Of course, they want tax payer money to go to religious schools because, again, the majority of these groups despise public education and secularism and would like a less educated citizenry stomped under the boot of a conservative Christian theocracy. They would also like to make it harder to vote because they don’t really like democracy.
Trump connections: Steve Milloy, Derrick Hollie, Michael Austin, and Terris Todd.
1.45 Pacific Research Institute
Have you been thinking to yourself, “Okay, but when will one of these groups be opposed to making insulin affordable to people who need it to live?” Well, worry not, because PRI has got your back. They don’t want generic insulin or price-caps because they don’t care about American citizens. That jives well with Project 2025.
PRI would like to destroy all public unions, specifically calling out teachers, cops, and firefighters, so yes, they specifically want to destroy police unions. Again, not something I’m sure the Republican base would appreciate if this was brought loudly into their attention.
Do they connect to Trump? Yep, via Lance Izumi.
1.46 Patrick Henry College
Does anyone remember Maidson Cawthorn? I know, I know, he’s old news by now, cast to the wayside of yesteryear as far as politics is concerned. But if you do remember the dude, have you ever wondered to yourself, “Where did he potentially sexually harass a whole bunch of women?” Luckily for you, this section provides your answer: It was at Patrick Henry College.
That seems to be a pattern at the college. I read an emotionally difficult article in The New Republic from 2014. It lays out a series of alleged behavior and mishandling of sexual assault and harassment. Allegedly, women were blamed for the abuses they recieved, punished, and treated as silly, dramatic children. You should read it. Sexual Assault at God’s Harvard by Kiera Feldman, but just know, it’s a lot.
Of coure, they’re anti-abortion, anti-evolution, anti-divorce, and anti-gay.They think women are subservient to men. Seems to believe in a Christian theocracy but aren’t super concerned with forcing it to happen.
You’re apparently required to be healthy to be a good human. They want to entirely ban NSFW art. They’re anti-trans. Apparently clothes are gendered.
Boardmember Michael Farris worked to overturn the 2020 election.
1.47 Personnel Policy Operations
They’re an explicitly America First group so probably a MAGA type. Specifically, it seems like they exist as a legal defense fund for people who wanted to overturn the 2020 election because they don’t believe in our democracy. They believe the 2020 election was rigged and illegitimate. According to them, you should be able to try to overthrow democracy and attempt a coup without facing any legal repercussions. They’re part of Project 2025. Hm. A group that explicitly exists to defend Trump’s attempt to cling to power. I wonder if that might say anything about whether or not Project 2025 has anything to do with the former Felon in Chief.
PPO’s LinkedIn says it worked for the White House. Hillsdale alum Troup Calhoun Hemenway is the org’s president. He worked for Trump’s Whitehouse. Joshua Whitehouse is another connection between the two.
1.48 Recovery for America Now Foundation
RAN is an addiction recovery and advocacy group. That sounds great, and for a moment I thought I was only going to mention that, say it’s weird they signed onto 2025 given that there isn’t really any addiction advocacy in the Mandate for Leadership. But unfortunately we can’t have nice things, at least not any touched by Project 2025. Under the guise of of advocating for treatment and recovery for addicts, RAN argues against harm reduction. They do not want the government to offer things such as clean needle programs because they claim they’re enabling. If you’re not on the road to recovery, RAN thinks you’re not worthy of having anyone be interested in trying to help maintain your health.
Based on their twitter page, they’re also against pot legalization. It also seems like a lot of their support for Project 2025 might be because of border policies. Oddly, they haven’t tweeted since 2023. Their blog stopped updating in 2022, and their instagram link is broken. That leads me to think that the group is now defunct, but I can’t be entirely sure.
Regardless, it has or had some Trump connections. Dr. Art Kleinschmidt, Katie Sullivan, Joe Grogan, Kayla Tonnessen, and Jaun Caro.
1.49 1792 Exchange
This is an anti”woke” org. That expresses itself by being against green energy, pretending climate change and science aren’t real, and whining about how they don’t like trans people.
In fact, a lot of their effort seems to be based around their hatred of LGBT people. They dislike 1-800-flowers, for instance, because it supports the Equality Act which would ban discrimination based on LGBT status. This is because they wish to discriminate. They don’t like Zillow because, besides supporting nondiscrimination, they also opposed the Floriian Don’t Say Gay bill. You can imagine how this continues throughout their ratings. If you’re cool with gay and trans people, 1792 Exchange despises you.
So which of these whining morons worked for Trump? Katharine Sullivan did.
1.50 Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America
Well, welcome to another anti-abortion group. They oppose abortifacients that are also used to treat miscarriages because they don’t understand healthcare. And of course they’re against the Equality Act.
Connections to Trump: he didn’t work for him, but apparently Frank Cannon was a frequent Trump guest. Then there’s Stephen Billy, who actually worked for Trump.
1.51 Texas Public Policy Foundation
On their higher ed page they immediately show off the racist 1776 Report so we’re off to a great start. They say everything is bigger in Texas. Hopefully this section isn’t much bigger than previous ones because this video is too damn long!
They imply that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from Donalt Trump because, through innuendo or elsewise, it seems like a decent amount of the advisory board groups for Project 2025, at least as far as when the Mandate was published, don’t care about democracy. They care about conspiracy and forcing their way to power. It does at least denounce the Jan 6 attempted coup.
Of course they’re anti-trans and anti-drag, comparing Drag Queens to blackface. They support Don’t Say Gay bills and are against comprehensive sexual education, because they don’t care about data and health. They try to quickly slip in that some conservatives believe in what the Texas GOP’s platform says about gay people. Earlier in the same article, they mention a proposed amendment where about parental rights regarding, for instance, religious training and medical care. When you combine those two things, you have to recall that the Texas GOP’s platform explicitly endorses conversion therapy. TPPF attempts to pretend as if that’s not what they’re advocating for here by not mentioning it, instead crying that Equality Texas is opposing the amendment because of a desire to indoctrinate children or something instead of the real and clear danger Texas Republicans present to LGBT children.
They claim the constitution does not grant a separation between church and state, instead claiming all it means is the government can’t run a church itself. That is insane and kind of gives away the game: they are, as most of these groups, Christian nationalists who would like a country run by their religion.
They also push the lie that porn addiction is real, comparing consumption of it to drug use.
In a similar vein: Trump. Connections time, but not the fun New York Times game. There’s Josh Findlay, Melissa Ford Maldonado, and board member Brooke Rollins.
1.52 Teneo Network
Teneo has approximately no information on their website which makes them more in line with the Republican National Platform than with Project 2025, ironically.
ProPublica reported that one of its members is… JD Vance. Uh-oh, looks like there’s a pretty direct line from the Trump campaign to Project 2025. In a speech to a Teneo event in 2021, Vance did what any reasonable person would do, he defended Alex Jones, the gay-frogs let me lie about dead children dude.
Despite the GOP’s capture in the populist rhetoric of Trump, the whole “normal people versus the evil elites,” the thing that Vance attempts to ride in on, based on an internal document released by ProPublica, Teneo would rather replace the elites. It’s the top of society, it argues, that shapes the world and culture, not the masses. They do, coincidentally, seem to have a better theory of change than most people express. Maybe this is because I’m to a degree an idealist, but you change society, often times, through shaping media. They say they need to engage in propaganda and the creation of culture. Not to praise an evil group, but, well, yes. That seems really basic to me, but I’m an arts person. If you want to truly change the culture, you have to take part in and help create culture. That involves making, for instance, a metric fuck ton of movies.
According to its co-founder, plenty of Teneo members were working for Trump in 2019. Because they don’t publish anything about its membership, on purpose, mind you, it’s impossible to get a real feel for how true that is, but I’m going to take their word on it. This signatory to the Mandate for Leadership had infected the Trump Administration. It’s likely it will infect a second one if, god forbid, a second one occurs.
One person definitely involved is Leonard Leo, who advised Trump on all his SCOTUS noms.
1.53 Young America’s Foundation
YAF is another one of those major players in conservative politics and it has been for a long time, apparently, despite the fact that I’d never heard of them before this. I think that means there’s hope for me? I’m not yet the lamest I could be. I could keep reading political documents and destroying myself.
Obviously they immediately jump into transphobia because what unites conservatives like nothing else is hating people. It also seems like they think being gay is a choice. Being LGBT is apparently being part of a cult and existing outside of the closet is apparently our devious design to recruit children. Yes, these people are extremist homophobes. A large amount of their articles, actually, are about how much they hate LGBT people. It’s almost constant.
They pretend to be pro-speech but of course they pretend that NSFW art doesn’t count as free speech. Is this because they don’t understand art and expression? Probably. They’re stupid. But that does mean they probably love the ideas in Project 2025 that all porn should be illegal and also that the existence of LGBT people is enough to classify anything as porn because, again, they’re stupid.
I didn’t find any Trump connections in their staff partially because their website is so annoying to navigate. It wouldn’t let me open anything in a new tab and it took a hot sec to load anything. Terrible UI.
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