My series on Project 2025 has been read more than three million times so far. Yes, that’s a real number.
And I’ve heard you loud and clear: you want more on this topic. So let’s dive in. If you missed any of the previous installments, you can read them here:
Is it my job to scare you about Project 2025?
Project 2025: Building a Conservative LinkedIn
There Can Be No Meaningful Change Without a Shared Reality
As a Teacher, the Way Project 2025 Classifies Educators is Insulting
A New Black List
I’ve already told you about how Project 2025 is creating a personnel database, like a conservative LinkedIn, of people to work for Donald Trump if he is reelected. During his last term, he had difficulty attracting a sufficient quantity of political appointees, leaving more than 1,000 jobs unfilled.
Now, one group is taking it a step further with a plan to preemptively and publicly call out government employees who might resist Trump’s policies should he be reelected.
This “black list” of sorts is being built by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), with a $100,000 grant from The Heritage Foundation, the think tank that’s behind Project 2025. Heritage called the grant an Innovation Award.
Tom Jones, a former Capitol Hill staffer under Senators Jim DeMint and Ron Johnson, leads AAF. In 2021, Jones told Fox News that he wanted to "take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration."
According to The Associated Press, Jones and the AAF are now looking into the backgrounds, social media posts, and other searchable information of government employees. They're using tips from Jones' network of contacts, including current and past federal employees, to aid them in their search. Jones told The Associated Press, “We need to understand who these people are and what they do.”
The plan is to publicly list names of government workers who might stand in the way of the changes the Heritage Foundation and Donald Trump might want to enact. Jones calls it Project Sovereignty 2025. Critics say it is a recipe for harassment, doxxing, and retribution.
To start, six researchers across the country are currently searching for information about senior executives and high-ranking officials in Homeland Security and the State Department. It's not entirely clear what information they’re looking for besides “proof” that these workers would put up roadblocks to stop Trump’s plans for borders and higher numbers of deportations.
Their names, salary, and rank would all be published.
Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, said the federal government has been weaponized by the “deep state of entrenched leftist bureaucrats,” and he supports AAF’s efforts to root out “bad actors.”
Critics of the list have referenced Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hearings from the 1950s, where he dragged people he suspected of being a communist, often with little to no evidence, in front of Congress. McCarthy ruined lives, caused suicides, and had a very fraught relationship with the truth.
Tom Jones says comparisons to McCarthy are “nonsense” but did admit he uses his “gut instinct” on whether a person might or might not try to block the next president’s conservative agenda.
LGBTQ Rights and Abortion Policies
In addition to investigating government employees, Project 2025 also wants to change how members of the LGBTQ community are treated under federal law.
Many of you have asked me to explain this specific part of Project 2025’s agenda in more detail.
Project 2025 has several stated goals, including:
Remove gender identity and sexual orientation as protected groups under discrimination laws.
Emphasize policies that define marriage as between a man and a woman.
Disallow transgender individuals from serving in the military because, “Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service.”
Remove gender identity and sexual orientation from Title IX protections (which regulates discrimination at publicly funded schools)
Project 2025’s Vision for “Restoring the Family” and “Protecting Children”
Project 2025 says it wants to “restore the family” and says the Department of Health and Human Services should pursue an agenda that is focused on the “biological reality” that gender is defined by your sex at birth and not able to be changed.
They write: “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
They also want the government to state that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children should be raised by the men and women who conceived them.
Impact on Transgender People and Nonbinary Individuals
Project 2025 also discusses Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination at any school that receives federal funds (which is most schools).
Project 2025 wants to define “sex” under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth.
They also urge the next president to “remove all guidance issued… concerning sexual orientation and gender identity” from Title IX and “issue a general statement of policy specifying that it will not enforce any prohibition on sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination.”
They also write that “no public education employee or contractor shall use a pronoun in addressing a student that is different from that student’s biological sex without the written permission of a student’s parents or guardians.” The same applies for names, no employee at a public school can call a student by a name that’s different from the one on their birth certificate unless they have written permission.
There’s no way to know at the moment how many of these policy proposals in Project 2025 will be put into place if Trump is reelected, although the Heritage Foundation has an excellent track record of getting their policy recommendations adopted by Republican presidents.
What else are you wondering about? How can I help? Tell me in the comments.
Y’all have been asking me for years to come out and meet you, and in a few months, I’m finally going to be on tour! Tickets are going very quickly, so snag a seat before they’re gone! I can’t wait to see you.
