Project 2025: The US Oligarchs Double Down

In the proposed blueprint for a Trump administration, the stenographers of the oligarchs put forward four highly misleading and disingenuous goals.

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

These are in the massive document Mandate for Leadership the Conservative Promise. I have read it so you don’t have to grind through page after page of turgid propaganda. I cover each goal in turn below.

Trump recently stated lied by saying that he knew nothing of Project 2025. He is deeply connected with the Heritage Institute that produced the report detailing Project 2025, sharing many of the same oligarch donors, and the contents of that report are very close to Trump’s own Agenda 47. Its just not in Trump’s interests to fully divulge his plans for a second presidential term to the American voters. Standard practice for the oligarch-approved duopoly candidates, just look at all the broken promises of Obama and all the things he did while in office but never mentioned during his election campaigns.

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

This is both part of the culture war designed to align the religious and otherwise culturally conservative with the Republican agenda while acting against their own economic interests, and a back-door way of curtailing democratic governance.

Extremely clever and manipulative language is utilized to remove the true democratic role of the state, for example:

You see this in the popular left-wing aphorism, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” But in real life, most of the things people “do together” have nothing to do with government. These are the mediating institutions that serve as the building blocks of any healthy society. Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering. The name real people give to the things we do together is community, not government. Our lives are full of interwoven, overlapping communities, and our individual and collective happiness depends upon them. But the most important community in each of our lives—and the life of the nation—is the family.

This mirrors Margaret Thatcher’s contention that “there is no such thing as society”, with democratic power being reduced to the level of individual families and local communities; with of course some families, the oligarchs, having immensely more power than the rest. The state allows the many to offset the power of the oligarchic few so it must be defanged to allow the few to dominate the many. The many must be propagandized into believing that the democratic state is not their friend, and reduced to the level of families and small communities unable to stand up to the overwhelming power of the oligarchs.

There is much talk of the breakdown of the family, but of course none of the political-economic causes of that breakdown such as the gutting of the welfare state, falling real wages, neoliberal hyper consumerism, mass incarceration, and the role of the security state in propagating drugs in the US. Instead, the poor must be punished and disciplined even more

Some are obvious and long-standing goals like eliminating marriage penalties in federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements for food stamps

How does making single mothers spend time away from their young children help with family stability? No, it just provides more cheap labour for the oligarchs. Then there is the standard fake culture war comments over “wokeness”, “critical race theory” and “gender wars” that has been carefully constructed between the two wings of the oligarchic uni-party. All the better to keep working people’s minds away from questions of political economy. These issues are also used to push the “school choice” issue which is really a Trojan Horse for the dismantling of the public school system and its replacement with profit-driven charter schools where the majority will be taught how to work and obey but not how to critically think. There are of course extremes of critical race theory and wokeness, but the true history of the United States requires a coverage of centuries of racialized slavery, genocide, class struggle and racial bigotry. The oligarchs want to sell a fake history where their dominance and horrendous deeds are air brushed from view.

And of course the Republican oligarchs want to maintain the status of the churches that teach the capitalist-friendly Prosperity Gospel and the foreign policy friendly Zionist Scofield Bible, religion has always been the opium of the masses. To put them into a cognitive haze that precludes questions of political economy.

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

This really means “removing the shackles of democratic oversight from the oligarchs”. The American people will be severely damaged by this as everything from clean water to anti-monopoly regulations will be dismantled, with the democratic governance of the state removed. “Might Makes Right” will be the prevailing societal dynamic, with the oligarchs having the greatest Might.

The recent Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) decision goes a long way to fulfilling this by removing much of the legal support for the right of the administrative state to regulate society. The following deeply misleading and manipulative text sums the oligarch view very well, if it is read correctly:

Of course, the surest way to put the federal government back to work for the American people is to reduce its size and scope back to something resembling the original constitutional intent. Conservatives desire a smaller government not for its own sake, but for the sake of human flourishing. But the Washington Establishment doesn’t want a constitutionally limited government because it means they lose power and are held more accountable by the people who put them in power.

The original constitutional intent, created by the American oligarchy, was of course to remove any possibility of the democratic limiting of their power. The so-called “Washington Establishment” is simply the political and administrative class that has already been substantially bought and paid for by the oligarchy, but there are still some remnants of public service and respect for the American people as a whole that still exist there. Also, some basic self-interest from the courtier class that cannot remove itself from the oligarch fouling of society in the way that the oligarchs themselves can. So the oligarchs wish to shrink the government, and finally slay the New Deal compromise forced upon them in the 1930s, to only the pieces that serve their own interests.

Some of the “examples” used to point to the supposedly horrible nature of the administrative state:

A combination of elected and unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through difficult-to-understand rule making processes;

Bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security, following the lead of a feckless Administration, order border and immigration enforcement agencies to help migrants criminally enter our country with impunity;

Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms;

Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists;

Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend “training” seminars about “white privilege”; and

Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about “intersectionality” and abortion.

How dare the EPA try to address anthropogenic climate change! And God forbid, do other things like protect the quality of the water we drink, and the environment from oligarch dumping of toxins into it. The criticism of Homeland Security is completely performative, as high immigration levels are beloved of the oligarchy. Instead, immigrants will be more persecuted to increase their docility as good cheap workers. We have seen this game in the UK, where immigration actually surged after the BREXIT vote that was supposedly meant to facilitate much less immigration. And how dare the DoE push for a somewhat accurate view of American history that does not completely airbrush the oligarchy and its deeds! The next two points are part of the carefully engineered culture wars of the oligarchic duopoly “uni-party”. And how dare foreign aid programs be engineered to be even slightly beneficial to recipients rather than profiteering and destabilization programs for the oligarchs!

The following is just aa beautiful example of doublespeak, propaganda and utter misdirection:

Properly considered, restoring fiscal limits and constitutional accountability to the federal government is a continuation of restoring national sovereignty to the American people. In foreign affairs, global strategy, federal budgeting and policymaking, the same pattern emerges again and again. Ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them. They centralize power up and away from the American people: to supra-national treaties and organizations, to left-wing “experts,” to sight-unseen all-or-nothing legislating, to the unelected career bureaucrats of the Administrative State.

The oligarchy are the “ruling elites”! And yes they have worked hard to remove all accountability from their self-serving actions and those of their obedient courtiers (those career bureaucrats)! With the collapse of US power and the “Liberal International Order”, supra-national treaties and organizations are no longer just the tools and puppets of the US oligarchy and therefore must be ignored. Also, those courtiers sometimes don’t fully follow oligarch orders so the oligarch chains around them must be tightened. And of course, fiscal limits will not extend to the business dole of the military and security establishment budgets nor the financial bailouts and business subsidy troughs. No, just to the budgets of the regularity agencies and the major programs that benefit average Americans such as Medicare, Social Security and the other remaining pieces of the welfare state.

If we correct the propaganda a little we get to the truth:

The next conservative President must possess the courage to relentlessly put the interests of the everyday American oligarchs over the desires of the ruling elite everyday Americans. Their outrage cannot be prevented; it must simply be ignored

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

The continuation of US imperial aggression, while performatively moving to “control” immigration; the oligarchs greatly benefit from high levels of immigration that keep wages down and workers compliant. To correct the opening paragraph of this section:

The United States belongs to “We the people oligarchs.” All government authority derives from the consent of the people oligarchs, and our nation’s success derives from the character of its people owner oligarchs. The American people’s oligarchs right to rule ourselves over everyone else is the obverse of our their duty: We, the oligarchs, cannot outsource to others our obligation to ensure the conditions that allow our families, local communities, churches and synagogues, and neighborhoods us to thrive. The buck stops with each of us oligarchs, so each of us oligarchs must have the freedom to pursue the good for ourselves and those entrusted to our care to rule over everyone else.

That’s really what the oligarchs want, behind all the complex bullshit in this document. It also seems that the bought and paid for courtiers are just not towing the oligarch line well enough and may even have some public duty orientation in their bones, so that needs to be changed:

Instead, they believe in a kind of 21st century Wilsonian order in which the“enlightened,” highly educated managerial elite runs things rather than the humble, patriotic working families who make up the majority of what the elites contemptuously call “fly-over country.” in a way not absolutely totally in the interests of the oligarchs.

And, damn it those pesky bureaucrats may even want to combat anthropogenic climate change and protect nature somewhat from profiteering polluting oligarchs. The very same domestic oligarchs that form a major part of Trump’s capitalist coalition, like the uber polluting Koch family. Who needs electric vehicles and other new inventions that will reduce the demand for the products of many of Trump’s backers? Just leave those to the Chinese.

At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human. Stewardship and conservation are supplanted by population control and economic regression. Environmental ideologues would ban the fuels that run almost all of the world’s cars, planes, factories, farms, and electricity grids. Abandoning confidence in human resilience and creativity in responding to the challenges of the future would raise impediments to the most meaningful human activities. They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.

And now that globalization isn’t just benefitting the US oligarchs in the way that it did previously it needs to be tossed asap, and the US oligarchs protected from foreign competition so that they can increase the gouging of the average American. But its none of the oligarchs doing of course, its all down to those commie Chinese who have turned US corporate executives into commie tools!

The same goals are the heart of elite support for economic globalization. For 30 years, America’s political, economic, and cultural leaders embraced and enriched Communist China and its genocidal Communist Party while hollowing out America’s industrial base. What may have started out with good intentions has now been made clear. Unfettered trade with China has been a catastrophe. It has made a handful of American corporations enormously profitable while twisting their business incentives away from the American people’s needs. For a generation, politicians of both parties promised that engagement with Beijing would grow our economy while injecting American values into China. The opposite has happened. American factories have closed. Jobs have been outsourced. Our manufacturing economy has been financialized. And all along, the corporations profiting failed to export our values of human rights and freedom; rather, they imported China’s anti-American values into their C-suites

Of course the oligarchs are the very elites who “hollowed out America’s industrial base” and became “enormously profitable” as shareholders of US corporations; but no it was all the work of some other set of leaders! “Human rights and freedom” are of course code words for “US oligarchic dominance”, with China behaving badly by not allowing the US oligarchs to dominate their society and pillage it. And the commies are now taking over the minds of American children!

If you want to understand the danger posed by collaboration between Big Tech and the CCP, look no further than TikTok. The highly addictive video app, used by 80 million Americans every month and overwhelmingly popular among teenage girls, is in effect a tool of Chinese espionage. The ties between TikTok and the Chinese government are not loose, and they are not coincidental. The same can be observed of many U.S. colleges and universities. Through the CCP's Confucius Institutes, Beijing has been just as successful at compromising and coopting our higher education system as they have at compromising and coopting corporate America.

And then a huge section of utter bullshit to support a blank check for the domestic oil and gas producers which provide a significant part of Trump’s coalition, as well as fund the Heritage Institute that produced this document:

The next conservative President should go beyond merely defending America’s energy interests but go on offense, asserting them around the world. America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth. American dominance of the global energy market would be a good thing: for the world, and, more importantly, for “we the people.” It’s not just about jobs, even though unleashing domestic energy production would create millions of them. It’s not just about higher wages for workers who didn’t go to college, though they would receive the raises they have missed out on for two generations. Full-spectrum strategic energy dominance would facilitate the reinvigoration of America’s entire industrial and manufacturing sector as we disentangle our economy from China. Globally, it would rebalance power away from dangerous regimes in Russia and the Middle East. It would build powerful alliances with fast-growing nations in Africa and provide us the leverage to counter Chinese ambitions in South America and the Pacific. Locally, it would drive billions of dollars of private investment to the communities that have been hammered by globalization since the 1990s. And it would clarify our intentions to Beijing that the next President can ensure that a large part of America’s reindustrialization is in the production of the equipment we will need to dissuade future foreign meddling with U.S. vital interests.

We may expect a quick end to the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies for electric vehicle manufacturers, a Trump presidency could be an utter disaster for Tesla as well as for the US development of a competitive electric vehicle industry.

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

The oligarchic framers of the constitution made sure that the “Blessing of Liberty” were only meant for them, and it took much struggle to get the Amendments to the constitution in place that provided some of those blessings for the general population. The oligarchs now want to reverse what is left of those Amendments, after the gutting from such things as the Homeland Security Act and the anti-democratic SCOTUS.

Hamilton wanted an appointed president for life with the powers of a King to serve the oligarchy, and this document points to a fulfilment of the “Imperial Presidency” that has already been significantly put in place. Backed up by an oligarch-serving SCOTUS.

There is so much utter flowery blather in this section it was hard for me to get through it without revisiting my breakfast, here is just a small section:

Left to our own devices, 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.

The bit about the US oligarchs wanting to escape the oversight of Britain so that they could fully genocide the native population and steal their lands is nowhere to be seen, nor the extension of quasi-slavery into the 1960s, nor the long fight to gain full emancipation for the working people (and not for Blacks until the 1960s), nor the Wilsonian fascism of 1917-1921, nor the oligarchic brutal domination that was only relented somewhat during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The last sentence is utterly ridiculous given the colossal improvements in social welfare and industrial strength wrought by the Communist Party of China. American presidents should be ashamed of their nation’s history and even its present, and certainly not pushing some make-believe flowery view of US society. But of course that’s exactly what the oligarchs want, to airbrush their brutal dominance and crimes from American history.

The text above is followed by an utter lie “The United States remains the most innovative and upwardly mobile society in the world”, the US lost that position a while ago. Then later, a ridiculous attempt to equate fascism (the authoritarian rule by oligarchy aided by the mystification of history and politics) with socialism together with utterly misleading attacks on socialist governments that have had their economies undermined by US sanctions and sabotage. The democratically elected president of Venezuela is ridiculously called a “Marxist dictator”; his only real “crime” is to not fully open up his nation’s massive natural resources to US oligarch plundering.

And to correct another paragraph, which perfectly sums up the position of Trump’s major donors:

Ultimately, the Left oligarchy 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 to the oligarchy.

The only difference between Trump’s oligarchy and the more internationalist oligarchy is that the latter are a little more oriented toward actual science and limiting environmental harm, performative progressiveness (required to keep the culture wars alive), and maintaining some level of competitiveness in the green industries of the future that China is in the process of dominating. Otherwise, they are pretty much the same.

A good quick summary of the very real dangers of Project 2025 to what remains of US democracy and good governance: