If you’re like me, you’ve seen a lot of online noise and assertions about Project 2025. Both of my college-age kids have asked me about some of the more bombastic contentions. For example, one of them asked whether it is true that Donald Trump’s Project 2025 contains plans to outlaw contraception. Given that this same kid is not super political, the question shows me that such claims once again prove the enduring accuracy of the old pearl about a lie being halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. Project 2025 has worked well as the political equivalent of the creature hiding under the bed. It is a vessel that can be filled with almost any anxiety and employed with confidence that few will actually go to the primary source to fact-check. Too many of us are credulous, especially when it comes to our fears.
Further examples of the lies told about Project 2025 include the following: It will end the free and discounted school lunch program, it will end no-fault divorce, and it will ban books and curricula about slavery. All of these claims can be found on X using the hashtag #Project2025isdangerous. The game depends on people not reading Project 2025 for themselves or basing their opinions on their pre-existing biases. It is sadly true that the combination of social media and partisan politics fosters that kind of unreflective propagandizing. Almost all of us are vulnerable to it under the right circumstances.
What is the truth of Project 2025? First, it is nothing new and is not former President Trump’s plan. There is no question that its authors would like for it to be his plan. The Heritage Foundation (perhaps the best-known of the conservative think tanks) has been preparing policy agendas in the hopes that they would influence newly elected presidents since 1981 when it published its Mandate for Leadership in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s election. Project 2025, also carrying the Mandate label, is a direct descendant of that earlier document and the many that have been produced in the last 40-plus years. It is actually the ninth edition of Mandate for Leadership and, like the others, contains many hundreds of pages of policy proposals. Older editions have attracted negative attention from the media, which correctly characterized the documents as plans to move the government to the right as quickly as possible. For a conservative think tank, such aspirations are hardly surprising. Likewise, it is business as usual when policy organizations on the left produce such proposals. The real difference is that a political strategist had the clever idea of weaponizing and creating the impression of novelty about something that is truly old hat.
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine)
Hunter (J.D., Ph.D.) is the provost and dean of faculty at North Greenville University in South Carolina. He is the author of The End of Secularism, Political Thought: A Student’s Guide, and The System Has a Soul. His work has appeared in a wide variety of other books and journals. He is formally affiliated with Touchstone, the Journal of Markets and Morality, the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy, and the Land Center at Southwestern Seminary.