I read Project 2025 in order and analyzed it as I went. Here’s what I noticed about the rhetorical techniques they’re using, how they work, and why they’re effective at propagandizing people.

At right around the 1/3 mark, I noted that the most of the early sections of Project 2025 are earmarked by distorting and warping the truth to support their own agenda. Most of the underlying facts they cite are true. Their proposed solutions are twisted and fundamentally flawed, even as they sound good on the surface. They’re banking on people not looking anything up, and simply accepting what they say as credible. But the first 1/3 of the document DOES sound credible.

Around 1/3 of the way in, it appears that they run out of credible but misguided contributors, and switch to outright liars. They’re clearly banking on you trusting the legitimate-sounding first one-third of the document and giving up on slogging through the rest.

Not every single idea they have is bad. Some are good. I try to point that out where it’s true, but it’s more to my point to dissect what’s truly, egregiously awful here. 

I explain their rhetorical technique in Section 3: The General Welfare after it took me five paragraphs to (not even fully) address the lies contained in a single sentence of Project 2025, and I go into more detail about which other rhetorical/propaganda techniques Project 2025 is using (and are inherent to common political discourse) in this Bite-Sized Brief.

Suffice it to say, if I (inevitably) fail to address every single claim, it’s not that I’m letting that claim go unchallenged. I literally do not have enough time to debunk every single thing in the document. No one person does. And they’re counting on no one trying.

On a PC:
1. Full Screen: Press the ‘Print Screen’ (PrtScn) key. This captures the entire screen. Paste the image into an application like Paint using ‘Ctrl + V’.
2. Active Window: Press ‘Alt + Print Screen’ to capture just the active window, then paste it into an application.
3. Specific Area: Use ‘Windows + Shift + S’ to open the Snipping Tool, allowing you to select and capture a specific area of your screen.

On a Mac:
1. Full Screen: Press ‘Command + Shift + 3’ to capture the entire screen. The screenshot will be saved to your desktop.
2. Specific Area: Press ‘Command + Shift + 4’, then drag to select the area you want to capture. The screenshot will be saved to your desktop.
3. Window: Press ‘Command + Shift + 4’, then press the spacebar. Click on the window you want to capture.

Alternatively, you can download an app like LightShot, which makes screen-capping easy to do and easy to share, although everything on this website is fairly easily sharable with the buttons at the top and bottom of each page.

For my purposes, I have used for the citations the page number of the Project 2025 PDF, not the page number assigned by the document itself. Here’s the difference:

It’s a blueprint, put together by the Heritage Foundation, which details their plans/policy blueprint which they intend to be handed off and enacted by the next conservative president on day one of their administration, on 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025. (This is assuming that the winning candidate in 2024 will be the conservative candidate, Donald Trump.)

The history of Project 2025 goes back to the winter of 1980, when the Heritage Foundation handed President-elect Ronald Reagan their Mandate for Leadership.

They believe that the federal government has become “weaponized” against “conservative values.” They cite “cultural Marxism” as a big issue, and they claim that our freedoms and liberties are under seige, despite the fact that Project 2025 contains many restrictions on freedom and liberty.

Read it in their own words on page 13-14 of Project 2025, it’s in the introduction.

“Cultural Marxism” is a far-right antisemitic conspiracy that is a contemporary revival of the Nazi propaganda term “Cultural Bolshevism.” Read more about it here.

Here are their four pillars, as set forth in their introduction and appearing on page 14 of Project 2025:

In essence, this amounts to creating a comprehensive plan for how the United States should be governed, creating a database of loyalists who are willing to carry out their recommendations, training these loyalists on the basics of how the government works, then stacking government institutions, courts, and more with their personally trained supporters, whom they will then no doubt brand as “patriots.” By design, these will be people whose allegiance is to Project 2025 and their vision, not people whose allegiance is to the United States of America.

Visit the homepage for a more detailed, but concise list of their plans.

You can find that information and citation on the Advisory Board page of this website.

You can find that information on the Material Contributors page of this website.

Not according to his own advisers and Project 2025 contributors. In an August 15, 2024 interview, former Trump cabinet member and Project 2025 contributor Russ Vought candidly said, when asked about Trump’s repeated denials of any connection with Project 2025, “I see what he’s doing is just very, very consciously distancing himself from a brand,” Vought said. “It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”

Vought went on to say he had personally talked to Trump in recent months and received at least one personal “assignment” from him after he left office. He noted that the former president has “been at our organization, he’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it … he’s very supportive of what we do.”

Project 2025 Editor and Former Director Paul Dans, who served as chief of staff at the US Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration where he served as a liaison between the agency and the White House, told a gathering of conservative broadcasters earlier this year in Nashville that he intended to work for Trump again if he wins.

He has also assured Trump’s supporters that Project 2025 would become a reality if the former president returned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In June, he told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that Project 2025 was “gonna be a D-Day invasion plan” and urged listeners to “flood the zone with us.”

“We’re going to make this happen under President Trump,” Dans said. “And this is ultimately his direction and his team’s direction.” [source]

In a July 29, 2024 radio interview on WFEA, Project 2025 editor Steven Groves described Project 2025 as a “conservative think tank”, the purpose of which is to make “policy recommendations to the next conservative President; in this case, President Trump.”

From the foreword of Project 2025, written by Kevin D. Roberts, PhD, page 35, paragraph 2:

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.”

Editorial Commentary: We’ve seen their version of “protecting our children”, and it involves dismantling public education, banning books, separating children from their parents at the border, and their complete and utter refusal to enact ANY legislation which might prevent children from being murdered in schools. The cognitive dissonance between #2 and #3 is interesting to me – after you dismantle the government, with what will you be defending the borders? Surely you don’t want to use the government-funded military, correct? Point #4 comes with a heaping helping of cognitive dissonance as well, since so many of their policies involve restricting people’s freedoms, rather than expanding them.

They’re referring to the idea that government agencies and bureaucracies have substantial power to operate with a certain amount of autonomy from elected officials. It’s used in a critical context here to denounce the idea of unelected government officials having too much power to create and enforce regulations, often without direct accountability to voters or their representatives in Congress.

So when they argue for dismantling the Administrative State, they’re banking on deregulation being the intended result. Trump already rolled back a number of environmental regulations. More about that here.

Christian Nationalism is a political ideology advocating for a nation to be explicitly defined by and governed according to Christian principles.

This is explicitly unconstitutional. More about that here.

No. It was decided by the Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905, then further extended by Zucht v. King in 1922, with Justice Louis Brandeis saying the 1905 decision settled that it was “within the police power of a state to provide for compulsory vaccination.”

The original 7-2 majority ruling ruling read, in part, “The Constitution does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. Instead, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic. Its members may, at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”

So, vaccine mandates are many things, but “unconstitutional” isn’t one of them.

“The Bruno Strategy” is a term I coined for these analyses when I recognized that a recurring theme throughout Project 2025 is the authors’ apparent belief that removing words from documents and forbidding people to talk about certain topics, makes those topics magically cease to exist. i.e., “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.”

The terms equity and equality are often used interchangeably, but they represent different concepts. Equality is about sameness, while equity is about fairness.

Equality means treating everyone the same or giving everyone the same resources or opportunities, without regard for their actual needs or circumstances. It assumes that everyone is starting from the same place.

Equity is about fairness and justice. It involves recognizing that people have different needs and different starting points, so different resources or support may be necessary to achieve ACTUAL equality – resulting in everyone ACTUALLY being equal, rather than it just being assumed that they are. It ensures that everyone has an equal chance to succeed.

This illustration covers it nicely:

Source: Interaction Institute for Social Change

The first panel assumes everyone needs the exact same amount of help to see the game. In reality, the first man doesn’t need help at all (the wealthy, able-bodied, or otherwise advantaged), the second person has what they need (middle-class or average), and the third person (the poor, disabled, or otherwise disadvantaged) needs extra help on top of the assumed starting point. 

In this case, an equal distribution of resources left the poor behind, but an equitable distribution of resources ensured that everyone had what they needed, which resulted in them actually being equal.