You've Already Been Living The Project 2025 Test Drive

Shock over public school closures, public library book bans, ending of child labor laws–this *is* the plan.

For the last couple of weeks, the noise over Project 2025 has been growing. Project 2025, a 900-some page document from The Heritage Foundation, is the right-wing framework for America under a second Trump administration. Too many people have not taken it seriously until right now, and even now, too many people have lamented that they don’t have the time or energy to read 900 pages.

And that right there is precisely what these groups not only hope for but are counting on.

Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening. Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one way or another, through the bureaucracy by Congress. Colleges and school districts are funded by tax dollars. The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its turf. Members of Congress shield themselves from constitutional accountability often when the White House allows them to get away with it. Cultural institutions like public libraries and public health agencies are only as “independent” from public accountability as elected officials and voters permit. — from Project 2025

Project 2025 isn’t new. The document dropping was but one additional tentacle in the multi-tentacled approach to dismantling democracy. The emerging panic around it now, in summer 2024, is late. The groundwork has been laid for the last four years, playing out beneath the noses of every American. Yet, most Americans aren’t paying attention and have written off the increasingly paternalistic and fascist legislation passing across the nation. They have instead written off the warning signs as alarmist nonsense, then in turn reacted in shock when the very thing that was told would happen happens.

Take, for instance, Idaho.

Back in May, the Donnelley Public Library (DPL) announced that due to the new state law–which permits parents and guardians to demand any book they deem inappropriate for those under the age of 18 be moved in a public library and, if it’s not, they can sue the library and thereby decimate its budget–they would need to go to an adults-only model because they did not have the physical space to move books. The DPL director had been shouting for months about the detrimental law, as had library workers statewide since its mid-March introduction on the Idaho House floor. Their cries, like so many of those over the last several years, were not only not heard by many outside the state. They were all together ignored. Every library worker in the state hustled from the moment the bill hit the House until its passage less than one month later, knowing that July 1 meant the entire public library system would be irrevocably changed.

But then July 2 hit and social media lit up from people shocked to discover the new law in Idaho.

The engagement on this tweet–which was one of several similar ones–is out of this world. Nothing written about the law in the months prior came close to holding a candle to this.

Then came the backlash, of course. Many believed the sign in the image to be fake. Many refused to believe this law was real.

And yet, both are. Signs like this in Idaho aren’t the first. Similar “no minors allowed” signage went up in Sumner County Public Libraries in Tennessee last fall, when their library board elected to ban all of those under 18 from any “adult” section of the library. DPL posted the following to their Instagram account, reminding users that because their library did not magically expand since their last warning, the law would still go into effect:

Library workers in Idaho protested. They begged.

Now, they’re not even believed online when signage that explains to patrons the draconian changes instituted by their fascist legislature is shared online.

That law is but one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of attempts to work Project 2025 into the country right before our eyes. As it turns out, even when it happens, people refuse to believe it.

Idaho isn’t alone. South Carolina just instituted unbelievable restrictions on school library materials through a loophole in their legislative process, and they’ve put public libraries in their sites through a state budget proviso, too. Most disturbing in South Carolina is that the Superintendent of the State Education Department hired, to the tune of $25,000 in taxpayer money, a Federalist lawyer to ensure this bill would get through. She got away with it. Utah’s book banning bill, which will create a statewide register of books that need to be removed from every school, will begin to shock people when it goes live in August, despite the months of news and protests against it. Tennessee’s book banning law went into effect July 1, requiring all “age inappropriate” material to be removed from school classrooms and libraries.

Both Iowa and Texas, which passed similar book ban laws last year, have their laws entangled in their respective circuit courts. That has stopped neither from removing books under the auspices of said laws.

Every single one of the above is the right-wing playbook in action. Look at not only the success rate but the surprise rate. Why is it shocking? The agenda has never been hidden.

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. — from Project 2025.

We’ve already seen this. Librarian criminalization bills were abundant in 2024, and Alabama has already re-filed a similar bill from the one that failed this year for the 2025 legislative session. It’s right there, folks, and it has been right there.

Project 2025 squarely targets the US Department of Education. That began in 2016 with the appointment of Betsy DeVos to the most important seat in the department. It continued with the work of Moms For Liberty post-Trump. The group, with ties to the very Heritage Foundation who wrote the Project 2025 manual, has been ramming their “pornography” claims through public schools and libraries since 2021. BookLooks, their own “ratings” system, plays right into everything that the Project lays out. They are looking for “pornography,” which is not the pornography defined through the Miller Test. It’s books by and about queer people and specifically, any material with trans and nonbinary representation in it.

Project 2025 redefines porn in the same way Moms For Liberty has already started to do. This isn’t coincidence. This is intent.

The purposeful destruction of the Department of Education is to ram through more voucher programs that privatize public goods like education. Creating discord in public schools like we’re seeing now with book bans and bans on curriculum is meant to show these institutions are unstable and thus, don’t “deserve” tax revenue. Private and capital-H right-wing Homeschool programs can step in and do the work that public education can’t–all on the taxpayer’s dime. Your money, instead of funding your local school district and your local students, would instead line the pockets of those who educate under the Advanced Training Institute and other similar Christian, white supremacist ideologies. Take a look at what’s happening in Iowa: the changes made by a Trump-supporting governor has already closed own public school down with others likely to be shutting down at any time. There’s no longer even a way to know what your operating budget might be month to month, let alone a year in advance.

In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds — from Project 2025

The chipping away at educational standards, including the blanket banning of diversity, equity, and inclusivity curriculum; social emotional learning; and sexual education have been long underway. Outlawing them from the classroom to the state government level serves not only to harm institutions of knowledge; it’s meant to reinforce the nuclear family as the solution to actual historical and modern social problems.

Today, the American family is in crisis. Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children. There is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father. Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts. So many of the problems government programs are designed to solve—but can’t—are ultimately problems created by the crisis of marriage and the family. The world has never seen a thriving, healthy, free, and prosperous society where most children grow up without their married parents. If current trends continue, we are heading toward social implosion. — from Project 2025

If we remove the opportunity for people to learn about what actually causes social problems, then we, the government, can legislate against the rights of every individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Again: we’ve already seen this with the rollback of Roe and the continued insistence by the right that “aliens” and “migrants” are “taking all of the jobs.”

We see it in the SCOTUS decision to roll back the Chevron Doctrine, a 40-year-old ruling that put the power of understanding and interpreting law and policy into the hands of people who are experts. Politicians, not trained, practiced, educated professionals, have nearly unmitigated power in deciding what things mean. “Inappropriate books” or “pornography?” That just means books by queer people. By Black or Brown people. About actual American history and not the whitewashed Christian version of it.

Moms For Liberty now has more power than actual librarians or educators to decide what is or is not appropriate for classrooms and libraries. That’s not accidental.

That’s Project 2025.

Indeed, Project 2025 also plans to roll back the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). This little tidbit took social media by surprise, too, this week, despite the fact that this has also already been happening. Look at the rollbacks on child labor law and protection in states like Iowa. Kids as young as 14 can now work hours and shifts that rival those of full-grown adults. They can serve alcohol in restaurants at the age of 16, and they can operate dangerous machinery and work hazardous construction jobs–all without the employer facing penalties. Arkansas no longer requires work permits for those under 16, either, in a bill that passed last year.

They’re innocent children when it comes to books about gay parents, but they’re perfectly capable adults when it comes to the labor force. Teachers and librarians should be registered as sex offenders for having “inappropriate” books, but employers will face no penalties for putting children directly in harm’s way. Profit and policy over people.

The test runs of Project 2025 are proving immensely successful over and over again.

With more young people admitting they don’t read the news but instead turn to “trustworthy” influencers online who digest news for them, the lack of urgency from these influencers around the right-wing takeover of American democracy since the document dropped is deeply concerning. (And to think that the TikTok ban has nothing to do with Project 2025 is to be duped as much as the democrats who’ve fallen for it, too–and that doesn’t touch the dangers of the Kids Online Safety Act, either).

You need to read the Project 2025 document. If you can’t or you know folks who can’t, there are plenty of ways to skim it and plenty of authoritative outlets offering a breakdown. But that in and of itself is an issue. We as Americans need to give a whole shit and not just part of one. That starts by reading the playbook out there for public consumption and understanding it’s not a pipe dream. It’s not lofty.

It’s happening right here and right now.

The election will just determine how much faster it’s implemented and how much quicker we see our democracy and civil liberties demolished.