Project 2025: The "Cowboy Catholic" & the Conservative Counter-Reformation
"Mandate for Leadership," a totalitarian tome produced by the Heritage Foundation and its partners, is a how-to guide for ending the United States as we know it.
I. The “Cowboy Catholic”
Like many leaders of the reactionary right—Mike Johnson, Mike Davis, Stephen Miller, and so on—the current head of the Heritage Foundation has a dull, forgettable name: Kevin Roberts. He has a winsome smile, a doctorate in U.S. history, a background in academia, and a well-earned reputation as a nice guy. Who could have imagined that this bright, friendly Gen Xer would be leading a Christian conservative counter-reformation—a crusade to end American democracy?
In graduate school at the University of Texas, the Louisiana-born Roberts studied slave culture, producing a (fascinating) dissertation called “Slaves and slavery in Louisiana: the evolution of Atlantic world identities, 1791-1831.” This is from the abstract:
In addition to analyzing Louisiana as a geographical and imperial borderland, I situate my study at the convergence of several sub-fields of Atlantic World slavery: studies of the impact of specific West African cultures on the New World, the scholarship on the Age of Revolution, and the literature on slave resistance. Relying on an array of Spanish, French, and English sources—from civil documents to church registers, and from judicial cases to plantation records—I re-construct the various identities that enslaved people developed as participants in the contested construction of a slave regime.
Wyofile’s Rone Tempest, in his excellent profile of Roberts from earlier this month, includes this quote from Roberts’ thesis supervisor, James Sidbury:
[Roberts is] just an incredibly affable, good guy. He arrived as somebody who ideologically was a complete outlier and really kind of enjoyed that quite a lot. He enjoyed debating with people and always in a kind of completely open and friendly way. He came with an interest in slave culture. He is literally, to my knowledge, the only person in the post-U.B. Phillips [pioneering slavery historian Ulrich B. Phillips] era who is socially and culturally conservative but whose academic interests are in slave culture.
This is the guy who is now railing against critical race theory—which isn’t a “theory” as much as an acknowledgement that, yes, systemic racism is a historical feature of American society? “Slaves and slavery in Louisiana”—which is by no means a defense of slavery—seems to support that view.
In 2013, Roberts, who is Catholic, became the second president of Wyoming Catholic College, a strict, almost monastic institution established in 2007 that provides “a rigorous immersion in the primary sources of the classical liberal arts tradition, the grandeur of the mountain wilderness, and the spiritual heritage of the Catholic Church”—and that will throw you out if you hook up. When he took the reins, no one had heard of the place. He made national headlines in 2015 by rejecting Title IX federal student loans and grants; Wyoming Catholic refused to follow guidelines imposed by federal bureaucrats. They answered to God, not Washington. An article in the New York Times dubbed the maverick new president and his charges “cowboy Catholics,” an alliterative bit of branding that Roberts leaned into. Now, graduates of the ascendant college receive a black Stetson cowboy hat with their degree.
From Wyoming, the Cowboy Catholic moved back to Texas, working at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a think tank best known for promoting climate change denialism. He took the job at Heritage in the fall of 2021. He was not a conventional choice. But a dude media-savvy enough to put tiny Wyoming Catholic on the radar could clearly do much more at an august operation like Heritage.
And so he has. Under his guidance, Roberts organized Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, a plan for “institutionalizing Trumpism,” as he told the New York Times last month. “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” he explained. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”
Those allies, listed in the front of the book, include a healthy chunk of Leonard Leo-affiliated organizations. “There are 80 different groups involved in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which is going on right now,” Tom Carter told me on the PREVAIL podcast two weeks ago. “Leonard has ties to 40 of them. So it’s a lot.” (Leo, of course, is the radical Catholic dark money maestro who captured the Supreme Court.)
The fruit of this Presidential Transition Project labor is the 920-page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a sort of Baedeker for how to quickly, neatly, and radically lurch the federal government from republic to Orbán-style Christofascist autocracy. (Roberts, like so many Christian conservatives, loves him some Hungarian “illiberal democracy.”) Among its 400 contributors are Trump administration retreads Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Christopher Miller, Ken Cuccinelli, Rick Dearborn, John Ratcliffe, Anthony Tata, and the felon Peter Navarro; Leonard Leo associates Roger Severino and Austin Ruse; NRx hero Richard Hanania; and Ginni Thomas bestie and subpoena dodger Cleta Mitchell, best known for being on the phone call when Donald Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to scrounge up votes. The whole MAGA brain trust!
In the book’s foreword, Roberts invokes battlefield terminology, calling the contents of the tome “the opening salvo of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.” He writes, “Its 30 chapters lay out hundreds of clear and concrete policy recommendations for White House offices, Cabinet departments, Congress, and agencies, commissions, and boards.” And, in case anyone missed the point, he adds (boldface mine): “This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country from the brink of disaster.”
Make no mistake: if Trump were to be re-elected, he would install these loyalists and implement these policies. A second incoming Trump administration, unlike the first incoming one, would be immediately purged of anyone who did not put FPOTUS over country. And they’d impose all of this stuff right quick, Shock Doctrine style, before we knew what hit us. At least, that’s The Conservative Promise’s promise.
To get a taste of what this new America might look like, we need only peruse Roberts’s foreword to the book, which reads like Margaret Atwood fan fiction. Project 2025 seeks to undo all the progress made in the country since, basically, the McKinley assassination. That’s why I call it a “counter-reformation.” Heritage is pushing back on 12 decades of popular reforms that have made all of our lives better (including theirs). Roberts & Co. want to mortally wound government regulation, claw back civil rights advancements, eliminate numerous federal agencies, do away with all that woke New Deal stuff, and replace the brain trust at the CDC and the NIH and NASA and DARPA with [checks notes] “parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas.”
Roberts loathes experts in exactly the way he (wrongly) believes that uppity Leftists loathe him. “Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well,” he writes. By that metric, the country should be run by the Rich Kids of Instagram. Which, if Trump is re-elected, it kinda sorta will.
II. The Conservative Counter-Reformation
The foreword to Mandate for Leadership is a revealing document. What does the nation’s future look like to Kevin Roberts? What are the planks in the Cowboy Catholic’s Counter-Reformation? Here are eleven takeaways:
1. Cishet married nuclear family über alles!
Front and center is a focus on family. And not just any family—man and wife joined in holy matrimony, and the children born in wedlock to said couple. Other family dynamics are scapegoated and scorned.
Roberts also sets up a Reaganite argument that government is 1) inherently bad, and 2) something other than We The People organized for good governance. To Roberts, community is the people; government is a just bunch of faceless, power-mad bureaucrats. This excerpt gives some insight into his thinking:
The next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics—the well-being of the American family. In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones. 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.
Not that cishet families aren’t important. I’m the product of one, and I’m a member of one right now. I just don’t think they should be treated like the Brahmins in the American caste system, the paradigm for all that is right and good.
2. Delete gay, Lesbian, trans, and non-binary individuals.
Opposed to the idea of helping the LGBT community on theological grounds, Roberts proposes that we simply not acknowledge the existence of what he calls, I think derisively, “SOGI”:
The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
Every federal rule? Every piece of legislation? That means the end of marriage equality, the end of transitioning, the end of LGBT as a protected class under federal law—protected, that is, from discrimination based on “SOGI.” Kevin really doesn’t want gays to get that wedding cake. Or access to the ER when their partner is dying, and other rights straight married couples take for granted.
3. No more porn.
Roberts hates porn more than he hates treason:
Pornography…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.
While it is certainly true that some adult online content is created by child predators and sex traffickers, not all of it is—not by a long shot. Why does Roberts, presumably a big believer in entrepreneurship, want to shutter an entire industry that generates $12-14 billion in domestic revenue annually? Did he have a bad experience on OnlyFans? Because, like, even if the U.S. were to criminalize adult content in the draconian way Roberts suggests, it’s not like porn would stop being made or consumed. I guess he’s cool with offshoring one of America’s booming industries to China. Furthermore, why should sex workers be capriciously deprived of their right to free speech? As it is now, Neo-Nazis have an easier time publishing online their manifestos of hate than writers of erotic do their harmless smut.
And don’t bring up the Bible. Jesus had just one notable female friend: Mary Magdalene. And we all know what she did for a living.
4. Trans people are inherently pornographic.
Judge Potter Stewart said that he couldn’t define porn, but he knew it when he saw it. Roberts has a very specific, and dangerously wrong, definition. The ellipses in the previous quoted section is this dependent clause, in which Roberts elaborates on what he thinks porn is:
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance…
Putting aside for a moment the (unintended, I assume) implication that Roberts considers trans ideology and sexualized children erotic—for what is pornography if not commercialized erotic desire?—he is, by expressly connecting these things to pornography, suggesting that trans people are all sex objects, inherently X-rated, and therefore not suitable for public view. This is both untrue and harmful to that highly vulnerable population.
Literally the first recommendation in the Project 2025 book is that we “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” Why does Roberts not want to protect trans children? Oh, right, he already told us: he prefers to believe that they don’t exist.
But here’s the reality: God may not exist. Jesus may not exist. But trans kids absolutely do.
5. Zygotes > women.
If you’re going to take away one paragraph from Mandate for Leadership, it’s this one:
Finally, conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.
Copy and paste it. Share it with your friends who “don’t like politics” and think “Biden and Trump are both bad.”
The Cowboy Catholic and his Leonard Leo-backed extremists want to ban abortion at the federal level. They have stated this unequivocally, time and again. Trump is their vehicle for doing so. (Sidenote: Nikki Haley is totally on board with this, too.) And once abortion is outlawed, they’ll come for contraception, because these religious zealots harbor the erroneous belief that sex is for procreation only and not pleasure, and therefore semen denied access to the Fallopian tubes by a latex sheath is no different than dilation and evacuation.
6. Women can and should die in childbirth.
This is, for my money, the most ominous sentence in the entire foreword:
Conservatives should ardently pursue these pro-life and pro-family policies while recognizing the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations and the heroism of every choice to become a mother.
Recognizing the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations is not the same thing as protecting the lives of the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations. It’s clear the Roberts crew are going to eschew the latter to protect the unviable blastocysts they’re pleased to call “the unborn.” And what’s this hokum about heroism? That sounds like a play on Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro nondum nato mori.1 That’s fucking terrifying.
7. Forced-birth babies or babies born to dead mothers should be given to the state.
“Alternative options to abortion,” Roberts writes, “especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.” Given the fact that many, many more women will be dying in childbirth in a reign of Donald I, it’s hard not to read this as encouragement for the MAGA state to collect these babies and send them to good Christian hetero homes.
8. The administrative state should be dismantled.
The idea of taking a wrecking ball to the federal government—to dismantle the institutions that safeguard the air we breathe and the water we drink, that oversee our education system, that protect the LGBTQ community and other minority groups from discrimination, that keep our borders secure—is a Stephen K. Bannon hobby-horse and also a major theme of that neoreactionary Bible, the Unabomber Manifesto. Bannon and Ted Kaczynski are both 1) assholes, 2) criminals, 3) lunatics, and 4) nihilists. We should not listen to them!
If he had his druthers, Roberts would cripple, if not do away with entirely, the EPA, the Department of Education, the DOJ, the Pentagon, the State Department, and Homeland Security. At least, those are the agencies he singles out as being corrupt beyond measure.
And despite its gaudy price tag, the federal budget is not even close to the worst example of this corruption. That distinction belongs to the “Administrative State,” the dismantling of which must a top priority for the next conservative President. The term Administrative State refers to the policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal government’s departments, agencies, and millions of employees.
Those millions of employees would be suddenly out of work. This is something Roberts has considered and dismissed with a shrug. To paraphrase the genocidal Papal legate Arnaud Amalric: Fire them all, let God sort them out. As he told the New York Times:
People will lose their jobs. Hopefully their lives are able to flourish in spite of that. Buildings will be shut down. Hopefully they can be repurposed for private industry. But the administrative state — most importantly, what we’re trying to destroy is the political influence it has over individual American sovereignty, and the only way to do that, or one of the ways to do that, is to diminish the number of unelected bureaucrats who are wielding that power instead of Congress.
They may also be coming for unemployment insurance; I haven’t read that far into the rest of the book.
9. Progressives uniformly want fully open borders because of virtue signaling.
I have no clue what he’s talking about here:
That’s why today’s progressive Left so cavalierly supports open borders despite the lawless humanitarian crisis their policy created along America’s southern border. They seek to purge the very concept of the nation-state from the American ethos, no matter how much crime increases or resources drop for schools and hospitals or wages decrease for the working class. Open-borders activism is a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”—publicly promoting one’s own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience.
No one wants open borders, Kevin. It’s the GOP, not the Democrats, who have stymied any serious attempt at immigration reform. Marco Rubio came up with a sound immigration plan ten years ago. Why did he walk away from it?
10. Wanting to ensure that the planet can sustain human life after 2050 is “extremism.”
At this point, the only scientists who don’t think global warming/climate change is real are sellouts and kooks funded by the fossil fuel industry. Climate protestors are gluing their hands to tarmacs and tennis courts. Kids are throwing soup at Van Goghs. It’s a genuine crisis, and it’s so big and scary that it’s frankly impossible for me to fully wrap my head around it. If I lack the mental resources to process it, chances are, the family at the football game in Waco, Texas, is similarly hindered. Which doesn’t make what’s happening any less real or any less dangerous.
Roberts doesn’t see it that way:
“Cheap grace” aptly describes the Left’s love affair with environmental extremism. Those who suffer most from the policies environmentalism would have us enact are the aged, poor, and vulnerable. It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue. 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.
As Tempest points out in his Wyofile profile, Roberts is fond of the expression “knows what time it is,” which he uses as a compliment. So it’s somewhat ironic that the climate clock is ticking, and he has no idea how late the hour is.
11. Colonial leaders who signed the Declaration of Independence were neither rich nor powerful.
Here’s another headscratcher Roberts passage:
The American Republic was founded on principles prioritizing and maximizing individuals’ rights to live their best life or to enjoy what the Framers called “the Blessings of Liberty.” It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776.
Kevin, my dude: the rich and powerful haven’t hated anything about democracy in America since 1776, because they’re the ones who created democracy in America in 1776. (Well, a few years later, technically, but you get the idea.) Last I checked, Thomas Jefferson wasn’t working two jobs to feed his family. James Madison was not some general store middle manager. Fact check: Charles Carroll was the richest individual in the Colonies, the owner of real estate and slave holdings worth some $400 million in today’s dollars. And if he wasn’t, George Washington was. Not only that, but the Founders did not believe that all men are created equal. Some men, sure. Some white men. Some propertied white men. No one else mattered: not black people, not Native Americans, not anyone without a Y chromosome. And no one with a PhD in American history should suggest otherwise.
“It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good—that the ruling class disdains,” Roberts writes. But, again, it was the ruling class that set up our system of government.
12. Everyone should have the right to discriminate against anyone or anything because free speech!
Roberts shows his true colors here:
Ultimately, the Left 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.
What he’s really saying is that the government has no right to impose civil rights protections on the people. That’s what he means by “bend the knee.” Christian schools should be allowed to be segregated! Golf courses should be allowed to not allow membership to Jews! Bakeries and website designers should be allowed to not accept jobs from gays! How dare the federal government try to tell us Godfearing white Christians what to do!
III. Freedom
Pandering to his audience, Roberts begins his piece with a hagiographical ode to Ronald Reagan. But even this is misleading.
First of all, if Reagan, famous Cold Warrior, suddenly returned to life today, he would read the answer to the question of whether it is in the interest of the United States to help Ukraine beat Russia that Roberts gave the New York Times—
Yes, comma, if we do so in a way that is responsible with the people’s money, that articulates what the end game is, that is solely focused on military aid. And frankly, also recognizes that the United States of America, in both Democrat and Republican administrations, had a role in creating this conflict. Now, Putin and Russia deserve the blame. I’ve been very clear about that. Having said that, it was our saber-rattling about Ukraine entering NATO that is one of the many factors that led to this. And so, yes, it’s on the doorstep of a democratic Europe. We want the Ukrainians to win. But it would also be really helpful if the Germans, and the French in particular, would do more to support their neighbor.
—and find the nearest blunt object to (metaphorically) beat him over the head with. In that response, Roberts is parroting well-known Kremlin talking points and ceding the role of democracy’s global guardian to [reads quote again to make sure it’s real]…France? Fucking France? For shame!
More importantly: Roberts includes this quote from Reagan’s First Inaugural Address as governor of California, delivered on January 5, 1967:
Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation[.]
What he doesn’t provide is the context. In that part of the speech, Reagan was talking about the peaceful transition of power from one governor to the next—“the orderly transfer of administrative authority by direction of the people,” as he put it that sunshiny day. “And this is the simple magic of the commonplace routine, which makes it a near miracle to many of the world’s inhabitants: this continuing fact that the people, by democratic process, can delegate power, and yet retain the custody of it.”
In other words, Roberts has quoted Reagan celebrating the peaceful transfer of power in a book designed for an incoming administration of Donald Trump, an insurrectionist—the only president we’ve ever had who refused to heed that “simple magic” and vouchsafe “the orderly transfer of administrative authority.” Is Roberts intending to be ironical here? Is he trolling us?
Here is the full quote, which Roberts abridges, perhaps because he doesn’t want his readers contemplating the last line:
Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.
I have never agreed more with anything Ronald Reagan said.
We have managed to preserve our liberty for now, but if Trump wins—and the Cowboy Catholic and his cronies ram through the plans laid out in Mandate for Leadership—the grand American experiment won’t see its 250th birthday.
Freedom is a fragile thing, and fragile things are easy to break.
Photo credit: fun with hats.
I never took Latin, but this is what popped up when I put “It is sweet and fitting to die for the unborn” into Google translate.
To paraphrase Capital One commercials:
"What's in HIS closet?"
The real irony is that the Federal Government WOULDN'T HAVE TO make these laws to protect people if it weren't for assholes like Kevin Roberts and his cronies. Thank you for having a stomach strong enough to read through this truly evil manifesto and expose it for what it is, a declaration of hate from the true elitists. What psychological damage did this guy Roberts sustain that would cause this kind of extremist conversion? By the way, I recently learned that Thomas Jefferson kept meaning to free his slaves, but his lavish lifestyle meant that, he couldn't afford to, and they were all sold upon his death to pay his debts. Probably one of Roberts's heroes.