 We are going to be prepared day one, January 20, 2025, to hit the ground running as conservatives to really help the next president. This task in 2024 is too big for any one think tank. This has to be a movement. And what we've done is use our convening power heritage to bring the entire movement together. But what we're doing is systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state. The Heritage Foundation and dozens of right-wing dark money organizations have come together to formulate Project 2025, which is a set of personnel and policy recommendations intended to guide the next Republican administration through their first 180 days in office. And if they successfully pressured the president to adopt everything on their wish list, America would look like a completely different country. They would dismantle the administrative state, expand the power of the executive, enact nationwide internet censorship, ban porn, and politically-emprison LGBTQ plus people potentially. And should the next Republican president choose to pursue this unconstitutional agenda, he'd have the backing of the Supreme Court most likely. Now, all of this is moot if, A, a Republican loses the 2024 election, or B, a Republican wins, but chooses to ignore this agenda entirely. But if the Federalist Society has taught us anything, it's that Republicans always listen to well-funded right-wing think-takes, because those are the organizations that their donors send money to, so why wouldn't they listen? And Ed Corrigan, who's one of the architects of Project 2025, casually explained why they're very confident that this is not going to be ignored. This has been really a team effort. You got 50 different conservative organizations have contributed to this. That's what makes this a strong product. No presidential campaign or president is gonna be able to ignore it. No presidential campaign or president is going to be able to ignore it. And he's right about that. He said it in a very nonchalant way, but it's still very ominous nonetheless. But let's break it down. What is Project 2025? Well, the first order of business would be for them to expand the power of the presidency in order to lay the groundwork for unconstitutional policies that they really wanna implement. As Bryn Tannehill of Day Magazine explains, the mandate for leadership is a 920-page document that details how the next Republican administration will implement radical and sweeping changes to the entirety of governments. This blueprint assumes that the next president will be able to rule by fiat under the Unitary Executive Theory, which posits that the president has the power to control the entire federal executive branch. It is also based on the premise that the next president will implement Schedule F, which allows the president to fire any federal employee who has policy-making authority and replace them with the presidential appointee who is not voted on in the Senate. The president would directly manage an influence department of justice and FBI cases, which would allow him to pursue criminal cases against political enemies. Environmental law would be gutted and states would be prevented from enforcing their own environmental laws. So there's a lot to this and it's pretty complicated, so let me try to parse this out for you. What this basically means is that federal agencies which currently operate independently would lose that independence. Many federal agencies that they don't like would just be abolished or weaponized to their own liking. For example, they plan on gutting the EPA predictably and shifting them away from their focus on climate change entirely while directing other agencies to expand fossil fuel infrastructure, like the Department of Energy, for example. And you're probably thinking, well, couldn't the president already effectively do that by just appointing the studio or industry plan? I mean, we've seen this again and again. So why not just make somebody who is a fossil fuel CEO, for example, the head of the EPA? Well, the president could do that, but this is different because it goes further than that because once they re-implement schedule F via executive order, they also plan to clean house, which is very different than last time because the salon explains by replacing federal employees with like-minded officials, Trump-era conservatives are planning to remove federal employees whom they perceive as obstacles to the president's agenda early on. This would avoid the pitfalls of Trump's first years in office and eliminate the possibility of any resistance a Republican president would encounter the AP reported. And what this would do is create a sort of organizational harmony. So you wouldn't see the pushback that we saw in Trump's first years in office, for example, because remember, he wanted to do a lot of really terrible things, but he couldn't. There are limits to the president's power, but this is kind of the answer to that. It's a way to address these obstacles that he had countered and remove them and think about it this way. So remember when Bill Barr was attorney general and he contradicted Trump's lies about the election and he said that he's not gonna open up a probe into the FBI's investigation of Trump's 2016 campaign. Like he openly defied Trump essentially. Well, Barr was able to do that because as the attorney general, as the head of the Department of Justice, you have independence, you have autonomy, right? Trump can't influence what you do. He could simply fire you and replace you with somebody else who's more loyal. But even that power is limited because Trump tried to do this. Remember when Justice Department officials threatened to resign en masse when Trump considered replacing Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey Clark when he was trying to steal the election? I mean, that was really important. That stopped Trump from proceeding forward with his attempt to steal the 2020 election. But I mean, think about what would happen in that scenario if the president assumed a direct control of the Department of Justice and worse replaced every legacy employee with Trump loyalists who would be less likely to defy him. I mean, you start to kind of see how this would become a threat to democracy directly and why this would be much worse than last time. Because those existing checks that limit the president's power would simply not exist anymore under this philosophy, which they want to embrace. It would give him virtually unlimited power over the entire executive branch and every agency. And that is a problem. And Trump had authoritarian ambitions before, right? But the problem is that he didn't have the power or the know-how to actually pull off his dictatorial ambitions. But this time would be different because many of the 300 plus conservatives involved in Project 2025 came from Trump's administration and they would likely return for round two if he were re-elected. And what's scary is that Trump has already embraced this vision for the executive. So if he's re-elected, this will likely become a reality. So what they're doing is they're looking back at the obstacles that he faced the first time he was in the White House and they're trying to eliminate all of those obstacles going forward. So that way he can do all of the terrible things that he wants to do. But once they consolidate presidential power, they then move on to the second order of business, the implementation of policy. And a lot of that includes deregulation, giveaways to their donors, that fund, you know, this network, the traditional conservative things that you would expect. But there's also a component regarding conservative social policy and it's a sort of wish list that would basically transform the United States into a Christian theocracy. And they're pretty explicit about this. So Dame explains, the social conservative wish list calls for ending abortion, diversity and inclusion efforts, protections for LGBTQ people and most importantly, banning any and all LGBTQ content. In fact, the mandate for leadership makes eradicating LGBTQ people from public life its top priority. Its number one promise is to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. They are explicit in how they plan to do so as you'll see in the paragraph below. They plan to proceed by declaring any and all LGBTQ content to be pornographic in nature. And this is a direct quote from Project 2025's document. Quote, pornography manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian not inextricably binding of disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protections. 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. That is absolutely chilling. But the question is, what would this look like in practice? And to be honest, nobody knows for sure, but at best it looks like a nationwide implementation of don't say gay in all schools and a likely ban on gender from and care in all 50 states. But at worst, this also could look like the literal imprisonment of anyone who is openly LGBTQ. Dame speculates it's also arguable that LGBTQ parents would be subject to arrest, imprisonment and being put on sex offender registries for exposing children to pornography simply by being LGBTQ and having children. It could be argued as well that people who are visibly trans and public are pornographic or obscene because they might be seen by a minor. This understanding of intent is in line with the call to eradicate transgenderism from public life. So this is genuinely terrifying because we are looking at a situation where every single queer person and arguably queer allies would no longer be safe in this country. They could all be subject to imprisonment or being on a sex offender list just because they're gay or trans. I mean, many people would be forced to leave, especially if they're in red states with governors not willing to protect them. This would create an LGBTQ refugee crisis of mass proportions and that's what they want. But it gets worse because they wanna crack down on the internet. Now first let's talk about the way that that would affect LGBTQ plus people and their allies. So with pornography being outlawed and all queer related content being designated as porn, well anyone who disseminates said pornographic material like myself apparently and the website that allows for said dissemination like YouTube apparently as well as the internet service provider that gives users access to this website that disseminates pornographic material would all be subject to punishment or imprisonment at worst. In other words, if YouTube doesn't cleanse their website of pornographic LGBTQ plus content then internet service providers would be forced to cut them off which would effectively kill off all of these websites unless they comply. And LGBTQ content isn't the only thing that they would designate as porn. Let's be clear about that. Think of all of the movies and video games that would be censored if this all came to fruition. I mean, we're looking at a censorship regime here that's far worse than China's and more similar to Saudi Arabia's and the Taliban's. That's where we're at. That's what they're openly saying that they want. But if they try to do this, they'd obviously be extreme pushback from blue states. But of course, they've thought about that too and they have a plan. Game continues, the organizations that drafted the mandate for leadership understand that blue states which have sanctuary laws for transgender people are unlikely to comply. It's difficult to imagine California arresting and prosecuting teachers, librarians, doctors, therapists, bookstores, virtual or physical, LGBTQ parents and especially LGBTQ people merely for existing in public. This is why they include the following paragraph, quote, where warranted and proper under federal law initiate legal action against local officials including district attorneys who deny American citizens the equal protection of the laws by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions. This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the left's favorite defining characteristics of the would-be offender, race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, et cetera or other political considerations, e.g. immigration status. This is calling for the executive branch to use the Department of Justice to threaten prosecution of any local or state officials if they do not charge LGBTQ people and their allies with crimes under the pretense that they are breaking federal and state laws against exposing minors to pornography. If people at the Department of Justice refuse to go along with this then they can simply be replaced under Schedule F. And we're really not even scratching the surface because remember this document is 900 plus pages long and we're just looking at the LGBTQ policies but think about the ways that they'd hamstring state's ability to provide women with abortions. Think about how this will impact people on welfare, people getting social security, Medicare, employment. I mean, the possibilities are endless and every possibility ranges from a threat to democracy from an outright violation of democracy. And the only check on the president in this scenario would be Congress and our far-right Supreme Court. Don't really like those odds, right? Even if Congress tried to reign in the president's power and passed some sort of a law to stop this from happening. Well, the Supreme Court could go along with it. They could embrace unitary executive theory and strike down that law on grounds that it's unconstitutional and the president could continue to do this. It's a literal nightmare scenario. Like imagine, do you think that Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito would not go along with this? Of course they would. But having said that though, before we get a little bit too down, this is only a wish list. Odds are they're not gonna get 100% of the things that they ask for but what if they get 50% or 25%? I mean, certainly if they tried this, there would be a massive legal battle with judges striking it down initially and it making its way to the Supreme Court. So there would be time for us to prepare how we're gonna respond to this. But regardless, even if they got 10% of it and Trump just did what he says he's going to do, which is expand the power of the executive that is still very troubling. Consolidating executive power is not a new phenomenon because each president has continued to expand power. Everyone, Democrats and Republicans alike, Obama, Bush, Trump, but we're talking about a massive expansion of presidential power that gives the president virtually unlimited authority over the entire executive. But even if in the best case scenario, they get nothing. None of this comes to fruition and Trump doesn't even do what they say he should do with regard to taking control of the executive. Well, I still think this is worth our attention because this is the vision of 50 right-wing think tanks, think tanks that have a lot of sway over Republican politicians. That's huge. They are telling us that this is what they want for our country and end to US democracy, a dictatorship with the Republican on top. And I think that they wrote Project 2025 with Trump in mind but they'll take anyone. They'll take DeSantis, they'll take Nikki Haley, they will take anyone who is willing to do what they want to do. And if maybe they say, we're gonna endorse a candidate, give them lots of donations if they pledge to support Project 2025 in their first 180 days in office, well then this could give a little bit more teeth to this authoritarian manifesto, right? But the fact that this is what they want as soon as a Republican comes back into the White House means that we have to fight that much harder to keep a Republican out of the White House for as long as we can, to at least buy us some time, right? So, you know a little bit about Project 2025, do with this information what you will. Excuse me. Vigina.