On Tuesday of this week a 32 year man in a suburb of Philadelphia murdered and decapitated his own father. He then recorded and broadcast a 14 minute video in which he displayed his father’s severed head and explained why he, a self described militia leader, would commit such a heinous crime against his father who’s supposed transgression was merely working for the federal government for 20 years. The details are shocking, the images are gruesome, but perhaps most alarmingly the motivating intent and ideology is far from representing a political outlier.

Why would this relatively young, seemingly unstable person come to believe that being a federal worker equates to being a “traitor” to this country? Where would he get the idea that President Biden has a “regime” that requires violent opposition? Why would he think that it is his role to do anything about it?

While it might seem unfathomable, I am inclined to believe that assertions like these are actually natural conclusions to be drawn from the largest consensus driven policy document written by Republicans in publication today. Win or lose in November, this is the legacy and the message that the Republican Party, their donors, and their plethora of media figures and influencers, plan to spread far and wide.

Their stated beliefs and bombastic rhetoric will impact you in one way or another. We can’t hide from the ramifications of this unchecked and totally unrepentant Republican extremism anymore. Cases like this sad and unfolding tale in PA are why this topic matters to you and me, cases like this are why we all need to pay attention.

Last year the Heritage Foundation published a lengthy and nearly exhaustive public policy document designed to outline a political consensus among American conservatives as part of their ever expanding Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project.

In the opening acknowledgments the editors lay forth their plans, “Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” Following a belief that “personnel is policy” they note of the document, “This book is functionally an invitation for you the reader—Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith—to come to Washington or support those who can.”

Why? According to them, “History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it. In recent election cycles, presidential candidates normally began transition planning in the late spring of election year or even after the party’s nomination was secured. That is too late.”

How? They plan to implement this strategy through a pursuit of “four pillars”: 1. crafting and publishing a comprehensive consensus policy agenda; 2. building a LinkedIn style “Presidential Personnel Database” for prospective candidates who are vetted by ideological purity; 3. hosting an online training certificate program called the the “Presidential Administration Academy”; 4. planning for a transition “playbook” to maximize the effectiveness of the first 100 days.

The majority of the funding effort behind the project is likely going into the personnel recruiting, vetting, and training aspects of the project. Their intention is to fill thousands of political appointments on day one of a new administration, but also to potentially replace up to tens of thousands of previously classified nonpartisan federal workers with hand picked and carefully vetted ideologues. However their already published policy agenda is the key to understanding what they are recruiting all these people for and how they intend to use them in the future.

But what are they so afraid of? According to the editors of their policy agenda, “In 2023, the game has changed. The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement.”

So the enemy is the administrative state, the Federal bureaucracy, and those who lead it. And the call is for everyday Americans who agree with their agenda to drop whatever they are doing and to support them in this plan in DC or at home to undermine and dismantle the “behemoth” of the “marxist” federal government which they claim represents a direct threat to this country and your personal freedoms. It is a rhetorical call to arms to face a supposed existential threat.

Who is behind it? Well, on paper at least, quite a lot of people. The contributor list to the policy agenda reads as a who’s who’s of conservative scandals and figureheads of both the recent and long past. And current headlines are full of updates assuring us of new partners and new sources of funding. So yes, it is a “collective action” and their coalition is continuing to grow even as the GOP primary tightens and Donald Trump seems almost certainly poised to win yet another nomination.

But it is also fundamentally a project created by the Heritage Foundation, inspired by their project legacy that began in 1980 with a more modest “Mandate for Leadership” written for Ronald Reagan and successfully implemented during his first term. It’s that legacy of perceived success they hope to model again, but this time with a more expansive and ambitious policy agenda and action plan.

The editors of this new policy agenda are Heritage employees, both with their own storied reputations: Paul Dans, who also serves as the Director of Project 2025, is a former commercial litigator who was appointed to work in the Office for Personnel Management during the Trump administration where he developed a reputation for “upsetting all kinds of apple carts without any basis of knowledge.” Whereas Steven Groves worked as Nikki Haley’s chief of staff when she served as the US ambassador to the UN, even though he was “known to be deeply skeptical of international institutions and multilateral agreements”, only to resign a year later and join the White House Counsel’s defense of the Mueller investigation and later move on to the press office.

Dans and Stevens are working under the direction of the controversial and relatively new President of Heritage, Dr. Kevin Roberts, who has a plethora of extreme views that he is more than willing to eagerly share in public and who previously served as the executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (more on him next week).

While their collective resumés might not scream brilliant masterminds or even successful power brokers, their stated goals shouldn’t be brushed aside. As Roberts recently explained:

“What we’ve never gotten right in the modern conservative movement, even under Reagan, was having a network of right of center professionals who were ready to go”…“To get 10,000 to 20,000 names into this database who are not only submitting their resumes but also being vetted to some extent, and who, depending upon the classification of the position we think they’re suitable for, are going through these training modules — that’s the part that’s never been done before…Do we have conservatives who are experts at killing bureaucracies? No. The conservative movement has not developed this capability. But we’re going to as a result of Project 2025.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/19/project-2025-trump-reagan-00115811

And while Roberts (and most certainly many of his donors) might seem eager to label their efforts as a “center right” movement, the reality is anything but. Which is why I intend to blog my way through their nearly 1000 page manifesto, examining a new section every week. As it is quite a long document, this effort will take me into the fall of this year, but hopefully along the way we will all come to a better understanding of the what’s, why’s, and how’s for their stated goals in every major area of public policy today.

People like Roberts, Dans, and Stevens and their many many contributors within Republican spheres of influence can only convincingly call themselves “center right” when we don’t take the time to really listen to what they have to say. There is no conspiracy here, no reading between the lines or attempts to project complex or outdated philosophies upon their goals like we are using a secret decoder ring in a spy novel, these are just their own openly stated agendas.

The Caveats: There are many analysts who seek to dismiss project 2025 as naive, impossible to implement, or perhaps irrelevant. Either Donald Trump won’t win, or he will win but won’t care what Heritage and company has to say, or he will care but they will all be hamstrung by limitations in congress and within the courts.

However, while some of these arguments that seek to minimize the importance of Project 2025 certainly have merit, it misses the mark on why we as regular Americans still need to care. 

We need to care because this is what the entire GOP establishment says they want. This is what they want to achieve and how they want to achieve it and they care enough about this initiative to lend their names and their credibility and their money to the project. They believe in it. So we should care to know what they are willing to invest so heavily in. Because if we don’t agree and if we don’t support it then we shouldn’t vote for it.

We shouldn’t vote for anyone who says that this type of extremism is what they want. The days of taking candidates seriously but not literally needs to end.

And that starts by taking politicians and the people who fund and staff and support them at their word. If they use apocalyptic and violent language, if they claim they want “holy wars” against people like Taylor Swift, if they say they want to promote a national abortion ban and throw women in jail, if they say they want to reverse Obergefell and split up preexisting lgbtq marriages, if they call your average government employee a threat and traitor to America, then we should take all of that seriously and literally. We should know what they are saying and we should believe them and then we should hold them accountable for it. All of it.

The GOP should be held accountable for their own stated extremism the ballot box, but also in the media and in our public comments and discourse. When an unstable young man murders his own father in the name of defending against the evil Biden “regime” run by supposedly demonic federal workers, we should understand where those ideas come from, who is promoting them, and who is trying to normalize them.

Perhaps most importantly, looking ahead to next November, we should be prepared to clearly and loudly and directly explain all of this to our neighbors and fellow citizens. 

In publishing their new “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” the GOP establishment is not hiding. This not just about Donald Trump, this is about all those people who surround him, this is about all the people who said they knew he was uncouth and maybe even dangerous but decided that they could use him to achieve their own ends anyway, this is about all the people who were supposed to be the “grownups in the room” only to fail miserably time and again but who still have the gall to ask for us to believe in their good intentions one more time.

By signing onto this document and by supporting this massive recruiting and training initiative they are all declaring exactly who they are and what they want. So they might try to label all of their views as moderate or average, but their own words frequently betray that image and have a much different story to tell.

It is long past time for us regular Americans to hear them and to believe them, to really believe that all these extreme things are exactly what they actually want because that is what they say they want.

The sad truth is most of us didn’t believe them the first time they showed us who they really are. Instead we made excuses, explained away the craziest comments, and tried to justify what deep down we knew didn’t sound quite right. And maybe we didn’t believe them times two through twenty either and maybe we kept voting or excusing them into power anyway.

But it’s never too late to change your mind, to learn new things, or to redraw your own boundaries and beliefs. And that is exactly what we will do here together over the next several months.