Something made very clear in the opening pages of Project 2025 is how much they supposedly hate and fear China. It borders on an obsession and exists in an analytical vacuum that impoverishes their understanding of foreign relations as whole, often to the benefit of regimes like Putin’s Russia.

Said obsession is on full display in the preface to “Mandate for Leadership”, written by Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation. Roberts, a bit of an election denier (“I’m not certain that [Biden] won” he recently told reporters) has an educational background in history and earned his PhD in American History from the University of Texas at Austin.

Now Dr. Roberts, while fully lacking in any form of credentials on international politics, has chosen to make “global elites” and the dangers of China a focus of his high profile advocacy over the last two years. Earlier this year he even claimed he “crashed” Davos and addressed the World Economic Forum (he was actually invited as panel guest, but simply chose to use his message to claim the participants of DAVOS are “part of the problem”). In his remarks Roberts called China, “the number one adversary not just to the United States, but to free people on planet Earth.” This is a core assertion the “Mandate for Leadership” policy document is going to make over and over again.

As part of Roberts’ “Promise to America” he lays out their strategy for fulfilling promise #3: “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats” in regards to China specifically. He first explains the dangers of various sub issues connected to China’s strategic efforts to gain in global influence, such as the problematic surveillance features built into the usage of TikTok (a point the Biden administration agrees with) and then adds:

“But these really are not many issues, but two: (1) that China is a totalitarian enemy of the United States, not a strategic partner or fair competitor, and (2) that America’s elites have betrayed the American people. The solution to all of the above problems is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. These are problems not of technocratic efficiency but of national sovereignty and constitutional governance. We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch.” 

That last line perfectly encompasses their entire approach to addressing all that supposedly ails us. Consider American “conservatives” officially members of the party who wish to burn it all down. There is, apparently to them, not much left worth conserving. It remains to be seen how you counter a “threat” like China while simultaneously burning diplomatic ties to the “elites” within nearly all of our many allied nations or by firing all the staff within the State Department with regional knowledge but such appears to be their plan.

He continues:

“International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed: They should be abandoned. Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized. Economic engagement with China should be ended, not rethought.

Our manufacturing and industrial base should be restored, not allowed to deteriorate further. Confucius Institutes, TikTok, and any other arm of Chinese propaganda and espionage should be outlawed, not merely monitored. Universities taking money from the CCP should lose their accreditation, charters, and eligibility for federal funds.”

The answer then is found in taking on “global elites”, essentially defined as whoever disagrees with them. And then they intend to oversee “America’s reindustrialization”.

This response in the preface mirrors what Roberts told the World Economic Forum when asked what a future Trump presidency might look like:

Moderator: So, day one of the Trump presidency, what does he do? What are the first two or three actions that he does?

Roberts: As soon as what I hope is a very brief inaugural address concludes, and brief not because what would be in it would be unwise, quite the opposite, but because our country is on fire. 

First, there needs to be Schedule F civil service reform so that the president can fire a good number of the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state. The administrative state is the greatest threat to democracy in the United States, and we need to end it. 

Second, he needs to really confront all of the policies surrounding so-called climate change. We’ve had a great discussion here by Walter and Allison, who are excellent on that point, about focusing on fiscal policies that have nothing to do with wrong-headed and really harmful subsidies of wind and solar.

We love wind and solar energy at Heritage, we just want them to stand on their own in the free market. And because that affects human prosperity, more than a billion people in the world have been lifted out of poverty in the last 35 years because of fossil fuels. The president is going to take that on.

Third, and this would be a bit of a departure from [Trump’s] last administration, when he spent too much money, is really be focused on fiscal restraint. Because we simply can’t afford it. It’s something that transcends the political Left and the political Right. And I can certainly tell you from the standpoint of Heritage and all of us at Project 2025 will be zealously supportive of all three of those actions.

https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/what-davos-can-expect-republican-admin

In case you haven’t noticed Roberts and company believe there are actually quite a few “number one threats” to American freedom and prosperity. There is China. There are federal bureaucrats. There are “global elites” and their frustrating desire to address climate change through legislation. There is immigration. There are fatherless households. There is the very existence of international laws and agreements. On and on it goes with every monolithic scapegoat just as scary as the last. It strikes me as borderline delusional that our national affairs are so urgent the next conservative president does not have time for an average length inaugural address, but such is the current frenzied mental state of the American GOP.

Which brings us to their promise #4, to “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

Roberts very much enjoys dressing up his movement with a thin veneer of the appearance of virtue. He writes, “When the Founders spoke of “pursuit of Happiness,” what they meant might be understood today as in essence “pursuit of Blessedness.” That is, an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish.”

But there’s a problem with defining “happiness” as “blessedness” as if the constitution is now a wall sign sold at Hobby Lobby. He continues: “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.” 

So how does he define this “liberty” to do “what we ought”? By which standards?

Well perhaps Roberts’ revealed part of their idea for what that means when he was asked about last year about the future of Obergefell:

For Heritage, the fight over same-sex marriage, for example, is not over.

“We would like to see a court case go up to the Supreme Court and completely tear out, root and branch, Obergefell. Which means that — well, it could mean that marriage goes back to the states, but Heritage’s position, to be really plain, is that marriage is between one man and one woman, full stop.”

I ask if that means annulling existing same-sex marriages. Roberts doesn’t flinch.

“I hope so. That would be good for civil society. And almost — not every single but almost every single study that I have read, we’ve pored over here, about the effects of same-sex marriage on children being raised in those families is negative.

“And I know what I’m saying: There’s nothing against the human persons who are in those partnerships, certainly nothing against their children. It’s just that this is a really bad social experiment that we’re only beginning to see the rotten fruit of.””

https://nypost.com/2023/04/03/at-50-heritage-foundation-confronts-the-new-right/

So we at least know that in this Republican controlled future, members of the LGTBQ community will not be granted their “God-given individual rights to live freely”, rather they will be expected to live as they “ought” as defined by conservative christian ideology. You have to wonder what else they might wish to control and reverse under the mentality that our present free choices are not blessed enough to achieve their collective standards for “human flourishing”.

In “Promise to America” Roberts tries to keep it all high minded, of course. His argument is that American people make good choices and economically flourish when left to their “own devices”. So therefore it is the business of the American government to free them of obnoxious regulations and restrictions that make it harder for them to make these excellent and wise choices. UNLESS they begin to favor something counter to what they “ought”. Then it’s the role of the federal government to intervene. He writes:

“…the American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women, mercantilism, socialism, Wilsonian globalism, Fascism, Communism, and (today) wokeism. To the Left, these assertions of patriotic self-assurance are just so many signs of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority—proof that, in fact, we need a ruling elite making decisions for us. But the next conservative President should be proud, not ashamed of Americans’ unique culture of social equality and ordered liberty. After all, the countries where Marxist elites have won political and economic power are all weaker, poorer, and less free for it.”

https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

Now how exactly did we end slavery? How exactly did we reject “second class citizenship for women”? It was through federal legislation, supreme court cases, and even civil war to protect against the traitorous impulses of a pro-slavery vision of “state’s rights” that some of these achievements were won. And while modern day conservatives certainly plan to use the federal government to guide the morals of the general public (ironically in an act by a self perceived enlightened few) their plans seek to limit the rights and behaviors of the American people, not expand them. The danger of the “Great Awokening”, as they tell it, is that people are being misled into making what they believe are bad personal choices and it is therefore the role of the government to step in and punish people so that our personal choices are limited only to what they deem is morally correct.

Earlier he wrote, “It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good—that the ruling class disdains.” But of course what they object to is the promotion of rights for other people. They don’t like the promotion of LGBTQ or DEI influenced “ideology”. So what they really want to reclaim is the right to discriminate and censor.

Given that reality, which side of those great ideological achievements sounded most like this kind of rhetoric? Which side said they didn’t need the government telling them how to live? Which side made it all about “us” vs “them”? The slaveholders and southern states, perhaps? The misogynists who didn’t believe women deserved full civil rights? Doesn’t Roberts’ own values sound closer to the historic foes of expanded liberties for all vs those who campaigned and fought for the very civilizational achievements he wishes to claim on historical examples on his own side? He wishes to extoll the virtue of “self-direction” while simultaneously seeking to *criminalize* those who make choices counter to his personal ethics. How is that in any way “anti-elitist”? How is that about protecting or expanding our “liberty”?

This level of incoherence continues into his understanding of economic history and control:

“Government should stop trying to substitute its own preferences for those of the people. And the next conservative President should champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-directed socialism…

The promise of socialism—Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, whatever name it chooses—is simple: Government control of the economy can ensure equal outcomes for all people. The problem is that it has never done so. There is no such thing as “the government.” There are just people who work for the government and wield its power and who—at almost every opportunity—wield it to serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second. This is not a failing of one nation or socialist party, but inherent in human nature.

Nighttime satellite images of the Korean peninsula famously show the free-market South lit up, with homes, businesses, and cities electrified from coast to coast. By contrast, Communist North Korea is almost completely dark, except for the small dot of the capital city, Pyongyang, where a psychotic dictator and his cronies live. The same phenomenon is on display in the infuriating fact that four of the six richest counties in the United States are suburbs of Washington, D.C.—a city infamous for its lack of native productive industries.”

https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

Notice first how they collapse multiple distinct ideologies into a single threat of “socialism”. This waters down the distinct definition and meaning of socialism (a form of government we do not have, neither do any successful American politicians – not even Bernie Sanders – wish to fully implement here) but it also blunts them against criticism for their own version of a right wing abuse of power. How can they be fascist, in aspiration or in fact, when they so vehemently claim to oppose it? If it’s a “leftist” ideology then certainly that can’t define their own “conservative” impulses of governance? See how that works?

Then consider the closing analogy. America is wonderfully prosperous, in fact Roberts calls it, “the most innovative and upwardly mobile society in the world”. But somehow our current government, under the tyranny of the evil “administrative state” is also akin that of North Korea, the poorest and most repressive government on earth?

Are not other counties in America also very wealthy? In fact, are not plenty of our other wealthiest counties around America also centers of finance, international trade, and innovation and found in areas where the local people freely choose Democratic leadership, a style of leadership that manages to oversee and ensure their continued prosperity and growth? And are not our poorest, darkest, least populated counties and states not found in areas where people freely choose Republican leadership, a form of leadership that seems content with allowing their own supporters to wallow in poverty while blaming everyone and everything except for themselves?

The nightly array of lights viewed across America are just like those in South Korea, evidence of the success of our free-market and our democracy co-existing with the supposedly terrible horrors of the “administrative state” of the federal government, which nonetheless worked side by side to make us the one of the wealthiest, most productive, and most powerful nations on earth. That’s not to say we are perfect or that there aren’t ways we can improve, but compare America to North Korea and their hysterics about all of these supposed threats begins to look rather ridiculous.

Unfortunately, modern conservatives do not agree. They would rather promote a self described “plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors” than seek to find solutions that work for all Americans, including for those who disagree with them. In a massive act of projection, Roberts suggests, “Ultimately, the Left does not believe that all men are created equal—they think they are special. They certainly don’t think all people have an unalienable right to pursue the good life. They think only they themselves have such a right along with a moral responsibility to make decisions for everyone else. They don’t think any citizen, state, business, church, or charity should be allowed any freedom until they first bend the knee.”

And yet it is Roberts and the legions of Conservatives who have signed onto this vision of government who want to tell us who to marry, which medical treatment we can seek, what kind of books we can read, and which type of ideology we are allowed to even communicate about let alone believe in. What they morn is not a loss of freedom but rather a loss of cultural dominance. What they are promising us is not an act of liberty, but rather an act of authoritarianism based on the arbitrary rules of whatever they determine we all “ought” to do.

Instead of taking ownership for their own failures as a political party, they look to blame everyone else. Federal workers. Teachers. Librarians. Kids on TikTok. Registered Democrats. So many hard working Americans are demonized in an attempt to deflect blame for their own failures, and unfortunately their promise is to turn that rhetoric into political action as a form of revenge for their many fanciful grievances.

He concludes, “Our movement has not been united in recent years, and our country has paid the price. In the past decade, though, the breakdown of the family, the rise of China, the Great Awokening, Big Tech’s abuses, and the erosion of constitutional accountability in Washington have rendered these divisions not just inconvenient but politically suicidal. Every hour the Left directs federal policy and elite institutions, our sovereignty, our Constitution, our families, and our freedom are a step closer to disappearing.”

Notice the complete disinterest in introspection. His inability to look at their own role in all these supposed weaknesses, their refusal to take any amount of personal responsibility for their own priorities not being as popular or dominant in American life as they might wish. It’s always someone else’s fault. It’s your fault and it’s my fault and it’s our neighbor’s fault.

By not agreeing with them we have destroyed the American family. By not agreeing with them we are all just bossy elites in need of a comeuppance. By not agreeing with them we have become traitors to our national security. By not agreeing with them we are enemies of “liberty”. The very presence of people who choose what they want and not what they “ought” is an affront to their vision for America.

So long as we are perceived by them as an “other” of any kind they will blame us, all of us, as scapegoats for all of their many imagined crimes. And Roberts already makes perfectly clear that they will deal with all of us much the same way their supposed ideological enemy of China deals with their own political and ethical opposition.

They will criminalize our objections and competing ideologies. They will limit our ability to communicate. They will put some of us in jail. They will shut down businesses who don’t agree. They will fire federal employees who won’t go along with these extreme measures. They will stifle all objection. Because in the end their idea of “liberty” is actually a straightforward form of tyranny, implemented on a massive scale. That is the lesson and message of their four promises to America. That is what the entire GOP establishment, in and out of MAGA, wants to accomplish. That is why now is the time to listen and take them at their own word.