Democrats, Media Panic Over Project 2025 Is a New Red Scare – Orange County Register

In 1988, Ed Fireman attended the Orange County Register Editorial Board. He was president of the Heritage Foundation and is now emeritus.

The conservative think tank was preparing the third part 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 for a more punchy title. I suggested “Mandate for Reaction.” He chuckled. Later they called it “Mandate for Leadership III.” Boring. The soon-to-be-victorious George H. W. Bush administration ignored all advice and cut Reagan appointments with Heritage ties.

Heritage has continued to publish volumes in the series the most quadrennial elections since. Few took notice until the final installment, “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” which was originally due out in April 2023. It is Heritage’s policy document Project2025 and is already outdated. It will be even more outdated when Donald Trump takes office on January 20th.

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” the project’s website states enthusiastic“If we are to save 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 former and possibly future Trump officials were involved in the development of the document.

Project 2025 has alarmed many commentators and ironically recalls Joe McCarthy’s fear of communism in the 1950s.

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

The Los Angeles Times warned July 18, the final day of the Republican National Convention, the project “routinely accuses California Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Gavin Newsom of being out-of-touch liberal elites who are destroying the country — a theme echoed in the 16-page Republican Party platform.”

I am shocked!

I could name dozens of similar attacks. The fact is that DC is filled with hundreds of think tanks vying for publicity and influence. Heritage is just one of them.

What’s actually in the 887 boring pages of the ninth “Mandate” volume? Basically standard conservative stuff you’ve heard many times before. There’s the call going back to the 1980s to privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its subsidiaries, PBS and NPR. They 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 meaningless.

“Mandate” urges that “federal education policy be limited and that the federal Department of Education be ultimately abolished.” This dates back to the Reagan era. 1980 platform.

The report contradicts Trump’s move toward noninterventionism. It acknowledges that conservatives disagree on Ukraine policy, but insists that “the conflict has severely weakened Putin’s military strength and given a boost to NATO’s unity and its importance to European countries.” Fifteen months after it was written, the opposite is true.

This month a report from the World Bank was released upgraded Russia into a “high-income state.” And, as vice presidential candidate JD Vance detailed The New York Times reports that the US and NATO are unable to supply enough weapons and that Ukraine’s supply of soldiers is dwindling.