Project 2025

A reporter called me last week asking for my impressions about Project 2025, including new reports that several of its contributing authors have shared or espoused outwardly racist views in the past.

This gave me good reason to revisit the document, and led me to a simple conclusion: Project 2025 is fundamentally racist.

The document itself is 922 pages and lays out an expansive conservative vision for America. A short Substack post can’t do it justice. However, the Foreword, which describes “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future,” provides a foundation of what it’s all about:

1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”

Let’s go line by line.

Revitalize the Family But Ignore How We Helped Destroy It

The first section focuses on what it calls the crisis of fatherlessness, in particular among Black families. Yet nowhere does it mention mass incarceration and the ways in which the criminal justice system has disproportionately harmed and decimated Black communities, including Black families, one of the hidden victims of the US carceral system. In addition, the document fails to discuss how bias and racism impacts access to housing, health care, and education, all of which disproportionately impact communities of color. If you want to help American families, in particular communities of color, then improve civil rights protections and stop targeting them with bullets and jail cells.

Downsize the Government But Strengthen the Military

I’m sympathetic to this idea. The government has grown too large and needs to be downsized, and yet the area which needs the most drastic cuts, the military, is conveniently excluded. Defense spending accounts for 12% of all federal spending in America, and nearly half of our discretionary spending. By way of comparison, the U.S. spent more than 40% of the world’s total military expenditures in all of 2023. If the authors had their way, we would reduce the size of the government at large, while simultaneously giving the military industrial complex even greater control over our politics and resources. This too, of course, can’t be divorced from the reality that military recruiters prey on Black communities to join the military as a means for economic mobility all to fight America’s wars. Meanwhile, our military adventures are nearly always waged against brown bodies in Muslim and Arab majority countries.

Fear TikTok But Not White Supremacy

The authors consider TikTok, oil dependence, and threats from China, Russia, and the Middle East to be the most urgent safety and global challenges facing America today. Nowhere do they mention police violence, gun violence or hate violence. Indeed if you were to read this section, you would have no way of knowing that you are many times more likely to be killed by a white supremacist in America today than a refugee, Muslim, or really anyone else. Needless to say, climate change isn’t considered a global threat either! Moreover, in its discussion about securing our borders, the document fails to mention forced migration, namely how U.S. policies continue to sew division, inequality, and conflict abroad, thus forcing migration to our borders. The Office of Refugee Resettlement was itself created in 1980 for the express purpose of managing and relocating hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees after our disastrous military campaign in Southeast Asia.

Live Free But In Our Puritanical Way

This takes the cake. The document calls for Americans to enjoy the blessings of liberty but circumscribes this to family, marriage, and children. America 2025 thus seeks to control how people of color and other diverse communities organize, work, play, and live. It seeks to regulate what Americans do with their bodies, including women; how they advocate for their rights on streets and college campuses; how they build family and community; and how they experiment and have fun; all while disregarding the historical injustices and contemporary persecution these communities have experienced. It’s a throwback to a puritanical world, where people are expected to follow a singular path, with little regard for individual, community or cultural preference.

It isn’t the least bit surprising really that some of the most destructive voices in America are championing Project 2025. It would change America as we know it, for the worse.