Democrat and media panic over Project 2025 is a new Red Scare

I’m sure you’ve heard Democrats blast Trump’s supposed Project 2025 as a sinister scheme to destroy Our Democracy. I heard it yesterday numerous times by Kamala Harris and her followers in YouTube campaign event she held. And President Mannequin brought it up his speech at the LBJ Library in Texas, at 5:20:

They're serious, man. They're planning another onslaught attacking civil rights in America. For example, Project 2025 calls aggressively attacking Diversity, Equity and Inclusion all across all aspects of American life. 

He didn’t look good. Later, at 13:54, he apparently went off script and mumbled the way he does:

By the way. These guys mean it. These guys mean it. Project 2025 is real.

Actually, it’s fake. As I describe below in my Sunday column in the Orange County Register. Subscribe here to the online edition for $9 a year.

Democrat and media panic over Project 2025 is a new Red Scare

By John Seiler

Back in 1988, Ed Feulner visited the Orange County Register Editorial Board. He was the president of the Heritage Foundation and now is its emeritus.

The conservative think tank was preparing the third volume of its advice for a Republican administration. The first two were “Mandate for Leadership” and “Mandate for Leadership II,” for each of President Reagan’s administrations.

Feulner asked us for ideas on a title with more pizazz. I suggested, “Mandate for Reaction.” He chuckled. Later they named it “Mandate for Leadership III.” Boring. The soon victorious George H.W. Bush administration took none of their advice and canned Heritage-connected Reagan appointees.

Heritage has continued issuing volumes in the series most quadrennial elections since. Few took notice until the latest volume, “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” which actually came out in April 2023. It is the policy document of Heritage’s Project 2025 and already is outdated. It will be further outdated should Donald Trump take office Jan. 20.

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” the project’s website enthuses. “If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place.”

Former President Donald Trump said he had nothing to do with the project and has his own agenda. But several past and potentially future Trump officials were involved in the development of the document.

Project 2025 has alarmed numerous commentators, ironically mimicking Joe McCarthy’s 1950s Red Scare about communism. 

On July 22 on X, Hillary Clinton branded it “the Project 2025 agenda to take away our freedoms.” 

The Los Angeles Times warned July 18, the last day of the Republican Convention, the project “routinely accuses California’s Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Gavin Newsom of being out-of-touch liberal elites who are destroying the country – a theme that also comes up in the 16-page Republican Party platform.”

I’m shocked!

I could cite dozens of similar attacks. The fact is D.C. is clogged with hundreds of think tanks jockeying for publicity and influence. Heritage is just one.

What’s actually in the 887 boring pages of the ninth “Mandate” tome? Basically, boilerplate conservative stuff you’ve already heard many times. There’s the call dating back to the 1980s to privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its subsidiaries, PBS and NPR. They were started in the 1960s when there were only three commercial TV news networks. In 2024, with millions of news websites and video channels, tax-funded news is pointless.

“Mandate” urges, “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” That dates back to Reagan’s 1980 platform.

The report actually contradicts Trump’s move toward non-interventionism. It concedes disagreement among conservatives over Ukraine policy, but insists “the conflict has severely weakened Putin’s military strength and provided a boost to NATO unity and its importance to European nations.” Fifteen months after that was written, the opposite is true. 

This month a World Bank report upgraded Russia to a “high-income state.” And, as vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance detailed in the New York Times, the U.S. and NATO are unable to supply adequate arms and Ukraine’s supply soldiers is dwindling. 

There’s also an air of unreality. The document insists North Korea cannot “remain a de facto nuclear power with the capacity to threaten the United States or its allies.” Little Rocket Man has 30 nukes and won’t give them up. 

It doesn’t even discuss the developing “multipolar” world, led by Russia and China, displacing U.S. leadership because of Biden’s incompetence. 

There are some good ideas, such as, “Reduce the number of generals.” There are more of them than in World War II.

During the anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s, it’s said there were “Reds under the beds.” Now Democrats are searching for conservatives under beds clutching copies of “Mandate for Leadership.”