Project 25 terrifies them, that’s because it strikes at the very root of their malignant networks

Is Trump’s distancing from it strategic or an error?

Project 25 has been in the news cycle, and it has Democrats terrified. Across the legacy media, rippling even to the shores of Britain, startled globalists, leftists and ‘mainstream’ respectable types have been howling about how dangerous and wicked Project 25 is. Progressives are horrified by the idea that the Right might actually have an agenda.

The people who have lived and loved the instructions handed down to them in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the people who have successfully followed Gramsci’s long march through the institutions to the point where every institution you could name right down to your local swimming club serves their interests, are deeply offended, suddenly, by the idea of people thinking about what they will do with power, before they get it.

For over a century the ‘other side’ have been creating a bewildering array of organisations. When they are in government, they expand the State, creating new Departments and agencies. Most notoriously, of course, Roosevelt and other Democrats built a gigantic State security apparatus, although plenty of Republicans have played a part in the inexorable growth of this too.

But the reality is that there is no CIA in the Constitution. There was no FBI there either. Nor was there an NSA envisaged by the Founding Fathers. The entire national security apparatus of the modern USA is composed of things that would have given the Founders nightmares and apoplectic seizures. Billions of US dollars spent spying on US citizens? A Presidential candidate or an incumbent President spied on by this shadowy network, briefed against by them, or in an older case like Kennedy, actually murdered by them? (I’m talking most likely, rather than conclusively proven on that one, I’ll admit).

But the federal Beast that has gradually shambled into existence against the expressed purposes of the Constitution (which is a document primarily about limiting government, not expanding it) has never stopped growing. It’s voracious hunger, and it’s huge number of employees, are the primary reason for America’s eye watering national debt of 33 trillion or more.

And the vast State security apparatus represents only the most obvious teeth and claws of this monstrous federal creation. Whole departments spring into existence, like the Department of Education, with very few people questioning how it was that children were educated prior to the existence of such a body (and educated far better than they have been since the administrative educational bureaucracy was formed).

People do question what the purpose of this relentless growth of the State has been, and how effective the various publicly funded bodies are. But the growth still continues, along with the ever larger spending bills and the ever more gigantic debt. The growth of the State past a certain point becomes a perpetual engine of growth that would continue even without determined corruption. The natural inclination of a bureaucracy is to expand, because such expansion of ‘the Agency’ makes the agents of the bureaucracy more important and more powerful individually.

And you don’t have to be utterly corrupt to feed this Beast. Those who sincerely think they are doing good, will of course sincerely demand more funding to do more good. Those who want more money and power for themselves out of pure self interest, will demand the exact same thing, their pure self interest disguised as social concern. Many people who work for the expanded State won’t even be conscious that when they vote for a bigger State, when they demand that “the Government should do more”, when they are for example a teacher telling us how education needs more spending or a nurse telling us that the healthcare system needs more spending, they are serving their own interests. The idea that much of the money is wasted or they themselves do a bad job doesn’t occur to these people, any more than it occurs to them that they all vote the same way and that isn’t accidental either.

These people become conditioned to believe that their sinecure is of vital national importance, that their State funded parasitism is a job for ‘key workers’, and that their self interest is altruism. The same people who would sneer at private sector ‘greed’ or the incompetence of a person who gets a position by an accident of birth, are fine with positions awarded by the patronage of a party that uses State funding to reward those most likely to vote for it and which incompetently wastes sums an 18th century aristocrat never possessed and could barely comprehend.

And remember, these are merely the lowest level of person, the people who take out the least and perhaps do provide something needed (at times, and when it can be freed of their own political prejudices, which isn’t often). There are at least some real things that a nurse or teacher does that we might want them to do and agree to fund. But the expansion of the State is the expansion of bureaucracy and agency far beyond the ‘front line’ of jobs we can see and understand. It also becomes a vast network of ‘support roles’ and ‘administrative roles’. In the UK for instance the NHS, one of the largest employers in the world (dwarfed by few organisations beyond the State armies of China and India and the USA) has more administrators than nurses or doctors.

Both these background roles, and more senior management and executive roles, are where the greatest opportunity lies for the expansion of the State, directed and most supported by One Party, to be politicised into a permanent patronage network where every unnecessary post represents another lifelong purchased vote. But more than that, the posts become things that ONLY exist to serve the policies of the One Party, posts that are ONLY political or that police the politics of the rest of the staff on entirely partisan lines. Then you get the diversity officers, and the DEI policy documents, and the fact that your local hospital now seems to be funding black supremacist lectures instead of performing medical operations.

The truth is that the expansion of the State always favours the Left, is always supported by the Left, and is never for the aims claimed or the purposes cited. The expansion of the State beyond a few universally agreed core duties (with employees and agencies required to stick solely to those core duties and nothing else) is always a machine for enforcing and expanding the power of the Left. It gives them a bank of reliable votes. It gives them brainwashed followers entirely dependent on their patronage. It uses the resources of the department to expand their politics further and brainwash even more people.

Rightwing tax payers pay for leftwing teachers to indoctrinate their kids. Rightwing tax payers fund school headteachers who invite black supremacists or drag acts to interact with their kids. Right wing tax payers find that all those trillions of public spending have largely been spent on the promotion of leftwing social causes or the jobs and pensions of well remunerated leftwing ‘public servants’ who hate them and everything they value.

One of the most obvious and urgent activities for any real organisation of the Right, then, is addressing the leftist and progressive capture of State institutions. Anyone on the Right who has any sense of self preservation should as a first principle want to see a profound and deep reduction of the network of Democrat favouring corruption that is the State (or Labour favouring in the UK).

The argument that the Right has traditionally made against State expanse is an economic one. It’s that too much money is being spent. Or it’s that the money that is being spent is spent unwisely, is wasted, and could be spent in better ways. For instance, we point to league table educational results, or the number of pupils emerging from State schools still unable to read compared to the relentless rise of the budget of the Department of Education. Or it’s that all of this has built the highest levels of national debt ever seen on Planet Earth and that eventually that mountain of debt topples over and crushes us all.

All of these arguments are true. But all of them really avoid the full realisation of what matters about the expansion of the State beyond a deliberately minimal set of universally agreed functions. The real argument is not, in the end, economic. It is existential and cultural. Because the relentless growth of the State is the relentless shrinking of Man outside or above or beyond the State. The expansion of the State doesn’t just change our society. It changes us. It changes everyone around us. Where the State expands, the individual shrinks. Psychologically, spiritually, and in terms of the rights we consider normal. The growth of agencies is the death of our individual agency. We defer our responsibilities to the State, and the State ignores more and more of our individual rights. Collectivism and individualism are opposites. When the State governs everything, you govern nothing…not even your own body, as we saw with COVID vaccine mandates.

COVID vaccine mandates could only be considered normal by a population ALREADY trained through generations to defer their individual choices to the State and to have ALREADY given too much to the State.

We become dependents and slaves. We lose the ability to sustain ourselves. We lose the dignity of doing things for ourselves, and the skills needed for that, too. Until even the ability to independently reason, to think something you aren’t required or told to think, withers and dies. Who has the most conformist, the most unimaginative, the most programmed minds in our society today, if not the people who tend to work for the State, or the people who have spent longest in State educational facilities?

The NPC meme describes this mental dependency. The NPC meme, like the COVID vaccine mandate, can only exist and make sense when vast numbers of people have already deferred most of what makes them ‘a person’ already.

So the political threat of State funded huge bureaucracies controlling and rewarding vast numbers of Democrats that Republicans pay for, and those Democrats then having power over the public rather than being their servants, is also the psychological threat of a new form of consciousness deprived of the capacity for independent thought and the existential threat of the very nature of Man (as a self aware and self sustaining organism capable of independent action) changing.

How does a world of NPCs go back to being a world of real people?

Slowly, dimly, falteringly, the Right have become aware of these wider issues, even if they don’t consciously express it. The ‘official’ Right, long since captured in the ever expanding network of patronage and mind control they refused to combat, have not, and you can tell who they are if they pretend that none of these issues exist or that anyone expressing them is mad. But the Right that can see both the huge expansion of the State and some of its existential threats (as well as the fascist entangling of Business and Corporation in all this) is of course the ‘populist surge’. Populism is what happens when the official Right joins the other side, and when boring moderate conservatives like me with views commonplace fifty years ago now find themselves described as far right extremists simply for wanting a few things the State or the Democrat Party or the Labour Party or ANY political party isn’t allowed to take away.

Project 25, then. All that is the context of Project 25, which is the Populist Right finally beginning the work of having a defined set of ideas and an actual programme of responses addressing the way the State and all the respectable institutions of the land have been both captured and expanded by our enemies.

Project 25 is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, and represents a coordination of the efforts and writing talents of over 100 conservative organisations. It is a 900 page document outlining a programme for the next Trump government, and its key recommendations call for a massive cull of the expanded State. In both its level of organisation (coordinating 100 separate organisations, moving from talking shop complaints to an actual agenda of power, building its own infrastructure) and the scale and directness of its proposals for tackling the administrative State and its obscene growth, Project 25 represents the most serious and positive step forward by any populist movement in any western former democracy. It comes very late, with most of our nations already leftist-progressive tyrannies (controlled by Globalist banks and transnational bodies). But other than Javier Miliei’s efforts in Argentina, it represents the first time populism has seriously addressed the fact that the western State has been captured.

Here is the BBC on the fundamentals of what Project 25 proposes (link to the Project itself in bold):

The Project 2025 document, external outlines four main aims: restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation’s sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely…Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control – a controversial idea known as “unitary executive theory”.

In practice, that would streamline decision-making, allowing the president to directly implement policies in a number of areas.

The proposals also call for eliminating job protections for thousands of government-employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees.

The document labels the FBI a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization” and calls for drastic overhauls of this and other federal agencies, including eliminating the Department of Education.”

Of course the BBC do not provide the vital context for these aims, which is that State institutions and departments no longer serve their original purposes and instead serve as parts of the Democrat power network enforcing the Democrat agenda. The BBC tries to portray the Project as a sort of Caesar like expansion of the powers of the Presidency, when really it’s nothing of the sort. What Project 25 proposes would not make a President a King. It addresses the way the administrative state and the Deep State went to war on an elected President and made it obvious that all these generations of the ever expanding State were building a progressive-Marxist dystopia.

What we saw with Trump was that these left leaning State agencies not only refused to enact legitimate orders and policies an elected President gave them, they actively conspired at the removal of that President. And subsequently under Biden, even more then we saw under Obama, the State has acted as a regime, as a One Party rule arresting dissidents and ignoring and reshaping the Constitution and the law code at will. Republicans were of course part of this and enabled it (effective One Party rule, because large sections of the Republican Party were already captured). Bill Barr’s complete refusal to investigate the theft of 2020, for instance.

Project 25 then is not about making Trump a dictator, it’s about allowing Trump (or anyone else populist) to rule as a reasonable and still limited leader would without every policy and every position endorsed by the public vote being ignored or undermined by a partisan administrative state and a throughly malign Deep State. And it strikes at the very roots of Leftist progressive and globalist power. The State, and monopoly of the spending of the State always directed to their purposes.

The dismantling of the whole machine of Democrat patronage and Deep State political interference, the removal of power from thousands of activists and Democrat permanent managers, the restoration of individual rights and liberty via the shrinking of the intrusive, oppressive and increasingly totalitarian State and its agencies. Striking at the root of these people paying themselves to police and control us. Turning off the patronage network, shutting off all that public funding and forcing these people to win the argument in an election rather than being permanently there no matter who wins. That’s what dismantling the administrative state does. It removes the inherent bias in the system towards the Left, AND it pushes back the State, away from the individual and the liberty of the individual.

No wonder it scares them. If enacted it would be a victory to make the repeal of one abortion ruling or the securing of Trump’s first term look trivial. This programme, if carried out, would actually reverse a lot of the evil that has grown over the last hundred years. It would perhaps not slay the Federal Beast, but would definitely put a firm leash on it, and restore its control to the hands of actual patriots.

So why has Trump disowned it with these words:

“I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them."

On the surface it’s a strange response. Project 25 embodies a MAGA attitude. It says if it isn’t serving America, scrap it. If it’s working against America, stop funding it. This is instinctively the kind of response Trump always calls for, and which Trump’s quest for a fair deal for the average American always looks for. Plus the people involved in Project 25 are exactly the sort of people Trump should be able to trust by now-some of them are former administration figures who have stuck with him and with MAGA ideas. Project 25 Director Paul Dans was Chief of Staff at the Office of Personnel Management under Trump. Associate Project 25 Director Spencer Chretien was a former special assistant to Trump and associate director of Presidential Personnel in the Trump administration. Project 25 Adviser Russell Vought worked in Trump's Office of Management and Budget.

So the question becomes does Trump really think these (great, necessary, potentially US saving) proposals are abysmal? Or is his repudiation a strategic response to the way in which the leftist globalist media are attacking Project 25 and terrified of it? There are we should recall huge numbers of those anti Trump pro Democrat activists on the State payroll who have already backed absolute tyranny against Trump’s basic rights and those of MAGA Americans. A certain amount of distancing makes sense if you don’t want to show your entire hand in the poker game of getting through the bets and counter bets without the Democrats flipping the table altogether.

If you can let them think they still control some limits on your behaviour, that might help you get to the point where you actually can enact that radical populist programme.

If it’s tactical distancing, there’s nothing to worry about. But if Trump really does think America doesn’t need a radical populist assault on the administrative state and the Deep State, at this late stage and after all they have done to him, those of us who have backed him and believed in him could be on course for a major disappointment. Because almost everything in Project 25 makes perfect sense, and almost all of it would be needed to really restore the freedom of the US citizen and thereby provide a model of what populists need to do in the UK, Canada, Australia or any other western nation where the State has become a leftist tyranny.