“Rhetoric of Hate: Adolf Hitler, Vichy France, and Project 2025/Agenda 47,” Essay, BJ Bruther
Adolf Hitler constructed a single text which presented his life story and his playbook for a restored and renewed Germany in 1924-1925. During his prison sentence, he wrote the text, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Within the text he revealed himself as the destined leader of an awakened and restored German nation and outlined his vision of that renewed Germany. This essay will explore Hitler’s vision, its later adaptation to a more traditional conservative regime in Vichy France, and its influence on the conservative American plans for the United States under a Trump presidency, known as Project 2025/Agenda 47.
What kind of Germany did Hitler want to create? First of all, Hitler had a visceral hatred of the Jewish people. He was heir to a long history of religious, economic, and racial hatred of Jews that coursed through the bloodstream of European history. By the first decade of the twentieth century, certain ideas had taken firm root in the ideologies of ethnic nationalists in Europe. Jews were not only the killers of Christ, but also a cabal of the wealthy who controlled the world’s economy and the world’s press. They were an insidious enemy, poisoning the blood of the true rulers of the world, the Aryans, through intermarriage and corrupting the minds of the Aryan youth with their calls for “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” in the French Revolution (1789-1799). Over the nineteenth century, those calls had become the basis of a new political order called liberalism which gave birth to a more insidious revolutionary dogma, Marxism, which called for class struggle to end the dominance of the bourgeoisie (and aristocrats). Accordingly, the Jews had destroyed the benevolent and authoritarian rule of the God-ordained king and destroyed the very pillars of that society, the Church and the Family. The Jews were responsible for the immorality, dissipation, and unrest of modern society and caused rampant political disorder in the nations.[1] Over time Hitler had come to believe these ideas; he saw the world through the prism of racial superiority and inferiority. He believed that he was the man who would lead Germany out of its slavery to the Jews. He would rip out the poison from the Aryan race.
Hitler believed the mass of people were credulous, eager to listen to any message, just as long as it was simple, easy to remember, and repeated again and again until it became fact. One should not try to please the young aesthetes nor the educated elite with reasoned argument, but should appeal to the emotions of the audience.[2] Hitler blamed “theater, art, literature, cinema, vaudeville, the press, posters”, and even “window displays” for the popularity of “sexual ideas and stimulations” and the “perfume of modern eroticism” in the German society of his time. All were products of the intelligentsia (educated elite). It was essential that Aryan society be purged of these aberrant and degenerative ideas and arts.[3] The Aryan must be restored to his rightful place in the world’s culture. For the Aryan had been the founder and bearer of a superior culture in the world. He had created all of the arts, sciences, and technologies. He possessed a divine spark of genius which he carried throughout the world. There, he had met the destroyer of culture, the Jew. The Jew was a parasite, who possessed no divine spark, and therefore chose to destroy all the Aryan had brought into the world. He controlled the economy. He controlled the press. He fostered religious toleration, civil rights, and democratic ideals. The German Volk (and state) had been weakened by the Marxists, democrats, pacifists and others in their midst. It was a paramount duty of the Aryan nation-state “to prevent” its people “from falling into the hands of bad, ignorant, or even vicious educators. The state, therefore, has the duty of watching over their education and preventing any mischief.”[4] To Hitler, mischief is talk of “universal suffrage”, “equal rights”, the encouragement of crass materialism and the denigration of physical labor in the classroom. Education should be used to boost national pride, patriotism, enhance an understanding of German history (as the history of the Aryan), and end in military service on behalf of the nation. The Aryan must be a man of will power and physical strength, a man of the Volk, not an intellectual locked in his ivory tower away from the masses, indulging himself in sedentary lifestyle. Once the Aryan had been educated, his education must be reinforced through the national press, as it is the instrument of popular education. Therefore, the nation-state must exert control over that press.[5]
After the First World War, the German economy had become mired in a ruinous inflation fostered within the parasitic international economy of the Jews; it had fallen into industrial strife and collapse. Jews had encouraged the creation of trade unions which were the product of their insidious idea, Marxism. Trade unions made demands of their bourgeois owners, impossible demands given the Jewish control of the world’s capital, such as an end to “the inhumanely long working day, abolishing child labor, safeguarding and protecting the woman, improving sanitary conditions in the workplace and home.” These demands lead to unrest and violence in the streets. Although the Marxist trade union was an abomination to Hitler, he advocated for trade unions, not based upon class identity (and struggle), but one based upon racial identity (and harmony). Owners and workers together might make the appropriate changes and improve the lives of the German Volk. Hitler supported old age pensions, child labor laws, shorter work days, even went so far as to support strikes against predatory corporate executives. He felt that the German Volk freed from the tentacles of capitalism could create the necessary booming economy that could make a mockery of the international capitalist economy.[6]
The Aryan must purify his bloodlines. Adolf Hitler was the champion of the Aryan race. He believed that the Jews, as bodies, posed an existential threat to that race. The nation-state, in the guise of the German Volk, must take steps to protect itself for a nation that did not do so, would fall into ruin and desolation. It was necessary to purify the blood.
“…what we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.”[7]
He turned his attention to citizenship, marriage and the family as the pillars of his restored German Volk. Hitler based his understanding of citizenship on racial identity. He condemns both birthright citizenship and naturalization which do not distinguish between those of superior intelligence and physicality and those of a lesser being beset with hereditary ills. He believed that citizenship should be restricted to males who were in superb mental and physical condition and performed military service.
After the conclusion of his military service, two documents should be issued: his citizenship diploma, a legal document which admits him to public activity, and his health certificate, confirming his physical health for marriage.[8]
As for the proper role of the woman in his restored Germany, she is a subject, as are her children. She becomes a citizen upon her marriage. Her sons become citizens upon completion of their military service, and her daughters, citizens upon marriage.[9] Hitler encouraged early marriage, which he believed facilitated the birth of healthy children to physically healthy males and females. Aryan males were the masters in the marriage; Aryan females were the mothers of the next generation. He was an advocate of eugenics in which hereditarily unhealthy individuals and sexual degenerates would be prevented from procreation. To Hitler it was essential to prevent racial mixing for it lowered the level of the higher race, resulted in a physical and intellectual regression of the race, and sinned “against the will of the eternal creator” who decreed subjugation of the inferior (the Jew).[10]
Finally, he reveals his endgame for the German Volk.
National socialism, as a matter of principle, must lay claim to the right to force its principles on the whole German nation without consideration of previous federated state boundaries and to educate it in its ideas and conceptions … National socialist doctrine [is] the master of the German nation. It must determine and reorder the life of a people.[11]
Once Germany had been restored and reawakened, Hitler turned his attention to foreign policy. Germany must be free to act on the world’s stage unrestrained by the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain, and must not be restrained from bringing all German Volk into a newly awakened Reich. It cannot be bound to outmoded alliances or borders. It deserves “an adequately large space on this earth” in which to flourish as a nation-state, as a Volk. It needs a proper military force in order to achieve this goal, and therefore, the new Germany must rearm itself.[12]
After Hitler got out of jail in 1925, he built the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) into a national electoral power. By the time of the elections of 1930 and 1932, the Party had solidified its appeal in a program of Twenty-Five Principles. They emphasized several points that Hitler had made in Mein Kampf: the necessity to overturn the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain, to rearm Germany, to restore and enlarge the borders of the German nation-state. They also demanded lebensraum (living room) for the German Volk, to establish colonies in near Europe, especially to the “East”, in order to maintain the homeland and settle surplus population. Hitler had advocated for the restriction of citizenship to those of pure Germanic or Aryan bloodlines. The party platform emphasized that demand. In the new Germany, only citizens could exercise the franchise or hold public office. They established the laws of the nation-state under the wise guidance of an elected authoritarian leader. They were expected to work for the good of the nation-state and the Volk. Men and women were required to maintain a healthy lifestyle and engage in daily in physical activity. Men were to marry early and provide a secure homelife for their wives and children. Women were encouraged to fulfill their primary function in society—that of motherhood. They were nurture and raise the next generation of healthy Germans/Aryans. Maternity centers were to be established for this purpose, in order to ensure successful pregnancies and the birth of healthy children. As the children grew, the Party advocated for proper education, excellent healthcare, and old age pensions. The nuclear family and one with faith in God and the Leader were seen as the pillars of the German nation-state and Volk. Urban dwellers and rural farmers should work together and benefit the German Volk. To create a booming economy, they needed to break the stranglehold of international capitalism: destroying monopolies, ending punitive interest, and stopping ruinous rural land speculators.
Hitler and his Party were xenophobes and anti-Semites[WB1] . They emphasized that only those of German/Aryan bloodlines were citizens of the awakened and restored Greater Germany. Foreigners and Jews were simply guests of the Volk. They were subject to expulsion at the will of the Volk. The law of aliens applied to them. Germanic law must be reformed, Rome forgotten, and the ancient common law reinstated. The death penalty must be applied to all traitors, usurers, and profiteers. Although Hitler’s virulence about the Jews was extreme, his ideas and later legal sanctions were not considered outrageous or dangerous. Many other nations, especially those in Eastern Europe, had stringent quotas (or demands for such about Jews) on Jews in public life or even considered revocation of citizenship. The program resonated with many Germans, and the Party benefited, becoming one of the most powerful parties in the Reichstag in 1930. Hitler became the German Chancellor in a coalition government on January 30, 1933.[13]
Once Hitler became the Chancellor and later the undisputed ruler of Germany, following the passage of the Enabling Law in March, 1933 and the death of President Hindenburg in 1934, he set his agenda in motion. He rearmed Germany, setting aside the treaties of Versailles, and reoccupied former German territories. Dissent was forbidden, and those who spoke against his regime were locked in concentration camps. Both Jews and those deemed unworthy of life were removed from German civil society. In 1939 he attacked his Western European enemies (France and the United Kingdom) and started his conquest of the East in Poland. By May, 1940, his military forces had occupied all of Western Europe (except for the neutral states of Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland). France had been split into two areas, one in the north and west that was occupied by the Germans, and another, in the south, ruled by the surviving state bureaucracy under the rule of Marshal Phillipe Petain, the hero of Verdun, and Pierre Laval, as the head of government, in the resort town of Vichy. Following the signing of an armistice with Germany, this new French government, known as Vichy France (1940-1944) embarked on a national revolution. This national revolution was based upon four core understandings: a moral order based upon Catholicism, a centralized state apparatus, a capitalist economy, and finally the use of coercive means (law and police) to enforce the revolution. The motto of the new regime was Travail (Work), Famille (Family), Patrie (Country).[14]
France had undergone an industrial revolution; the Vichy governors believed deeply in a capitalism, untainted by Marxist/Socialist workers unions and strikes, was good monetarily for the nation. Under Vichy labor unions and strikes were forbidden by law. For small businesses, in particular, something of a return of the dominance of the individual artisan was rewarded. Vichy bureaucrats preferred a peasant-based, agricultural France. They encouraged families to leave behind the urban world and return to the soil. The peasant, honest and fertile, was the backbone of France. More farms and more produce (meat and vegetables) for the French table meant the end of hunger nationwide. The governors wanted the French family to escape from the horrors of industrial, urban life— its cultural and sexual decadence. They wanted an end to the class struggle of the modern industrial world (its unions and its strikes), to the constant bombardment of sexual imagery (in cinema, plays, and printed materials) and to the ungovernable and immoral new woman. Respect for authority needed to be restored to the French nation and its people.[15]
The Vichy governors believed a Catholic-based moral order was essential to restore that respect for authority. They brought an end to anti-clericalism in the French school system legally, purging teachers deemed Socialist or Marxist or Freemasons from the system. God returned to the schools. Catholic religious property and religious orders were restored nationwide. The Catholic Church became an essential pillar of the new Vichy order.[16]
The traditional family became a core pillar of the Vichy regime. The authority of the father (male) in the family was enhanced. He was the individual given control over the direction of his children’s education, “bonds [were] granted to the head of the family to send children to a school of his choice.”[17] Sons who took care of their parents were given preference legally; they inherited the family patrimony, especially if they wanted to farm. Large families were encouraged and given privileges. Divorce was restricted. Women had no real legal position outside of the home and remained under the control of their husband or father.[18] Interwar France had already “outlawed abortion in 1920 … and banned the advertising and sales of contraceptives … the interwar state justified its intervention in private life by appealing to notions of professionalism, of scientific expertise and apolitical competence.”[19] The thinking of many conservatives and even those on the Left was pro-natalist; the huge losses in the First World War led many state parliaments to ban abortion and contraceptives, hoping to encourage the birth of more babies. And those babies should be raised in traditional families, the father should work, the mother produce and raise the children. Vichy France continued these policies, making them even more stringent—making abortion a capital offense.[20]
Like the writers of the Protocols and Mein Kampf, the Vichy regime was quick to blame the strangers in their midst for all the ills of the French state and society. France, they thought, should be for the French people alone. The ideas that those strangers had brought to France—questioning authority (God and Ruler), religious toleration, class struggle and free love—had contaminated the minds of the patriotic, hard-working, faithful peasants and artisans. Those intellectuals, those teachers in the schools had indoctrinated a generation of French children in those dangerous ideas. They needed to be rooted out from civil society. It was imperative that respect for authority, Catholicism, and patriotic unity be reestablished through legal and coercive methods. Targets of the National Revolution were recently naturalized citizens, foreign nationals, Marxists/socialists, Freemasons (bourgeois revolutionaries and anticlerics), and Jews. A systematic review was ordered in late summer of 1940 that focused on those naturalized individuals who presented a danger to the peace and public order. All acquisitions of French nationality came under scrutiny, including “those born abroad to foreigners married to French nationals and to children born in France to foreign parents.”[21] Citizenship of those individuals was revoked—they were no longer Frenchmen and women in the eyes of the regime. They were stateless, subject to the decisions of the bureaucrats in Vichy. They had no protection from deportation to the Greater Germany, as coerced laborers.[22]
France had a long history of antisemitism, so it was no surprise when the National Revolution targeted the French Jews. What surprised many, including the German occupiers in Paris, was how quickly antisemitic legislation was approved of and implemented in Vichy France. On the 27th of August, 1940, a regulatory decision was made to remove all previous bars on antisemitic publications, allowing for blatant racist statements to be made in the French press and even allowing for attacks on religion.[23] On the 3rd of October, 1940, a Jew was defined legally as an individual who had two or more grandparents of the Jewish faith. This regulation applied to all individuals in France itself and its overseas holdings. Some Jews were exempt from the consequences of this rule, as veterans or notable individuals, but the rule applied to all those defined as a Jew. The consequences were dire.
Jews were excluded from political office, judicial appointments, diplomatic and prefectorial posts, and senior branches of public services. They could not be officers or heads of enterprises in which the state was involved. They could not be managers or directors in the press, radio, cinema or theatre. A quota, numerus clausus, … was imposed for positions in the liberal profession.[24]
Within a day the Vichy regime authorized the internment of foreigners and naturalized Jews. By the 27th of October, 1940, the regime mandated that a census of France’s Jewish inhabitants be carried out with name and residence required from all those labeled legally as Jews. Subsequently, Aryanization of all Jewish owned enterprises and the liquidation of all Jewish properties and assets was ordered in March, 1941. Jews were pushed out of civil society, bankrupted, and restricted to their residences.[25] Jews were rounded up and placed in internment camps over the next six months, and deportations to the East started in August of 1941 and continued until August of 1944. Of the 76,000 individuals arrested and detained by the Milice (French paramilitary police units) and the Gestapo (German Secret State Police), then deported to the extermination camp, Auschwitz, only 2,300 returned alive to France in 1945.[26]
Nearly 168 discriminatory edicts were issued in Vichy France. Virtually all the techno-bureaucrats of the regime, prewar civil servants for the most part, adhered to the letter of the law. They remained loyal to Petain and Laval. They carried out the agenda of the regime, making increasing use of coercive methods (arrest, detainment, and execution) in their pursuit of Jews, Communists/socialists, the Romani (Roma/Sinti), Freemasons, and even Protestants.[27]
Both regimes, the one in Greater Germany and in Vichy France, believed that in order to make Greater Germany and Vichy France great again, they must impose ethnic homogeneity, legal discrimination, and expulsion of the “Other” on their peoples. Diversity, equity, and inclusion were foreign ideas to them.
Today echoes of the Hitler and Vichy French regimes are found in the current Heritage Foundation Project 2025, a playbook for the administration of a conservative President of the United States of America. Nostalgia for an imagined past dominates the politico-social agenda contained within Project 2025. The writers attribute all the ills of modern American politics and society to a collapse of the Christian moral order. That order has given way to a secular, soulless, and immoral world order based upon cultural Marxism and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). Project 2025 calls upon conservatives to join with the next “conservative” President to roll back the cultural Marxism poisoning American society and the Administrative State strangling American freedoms. Paul Dans, the director of the Heritage Foundation until his recent resignation in favor of Kevin D. Roberts, writes in the brief note at the beginning,
History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it. … For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now.[28]
Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee for President, and his running mate, J.D. Vance, cannot disavow knowledge of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, for they know its composers. Nineteen out of thirty-four authors of the chapters dealing with their plans for all the Departments and other administrative functions of the federal government were members of the Trump administration between 2017 and 2021. Kevin D. Roberts, the current director of the Heritage Foundation and writer of the Project’s Foreward: “A Promise to America”, has met with Trump and is a personal friend of J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate. Roberts has written a book, By Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, slated for release in mid-November 2024 (originally mid-September 2024) soon after the election. Roberts champions a Second American Revolution, in which the horrors of cultural Marxism and DEI will be swept away in favor of a Christian moral order and nation.[29]
The Heritage Foundation lives up to its name, emphasizing male privilege and traditional values in its playbook. There are eerie echoes of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and Vichy France in their condemnation of what they call cultural Marxism and DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) in the general introduction to their playbook, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025. They see a conspiracy of the intellectual and political elites worldwide to indoctrinate the impressionable masses through education and the press. The American press has embraced globalization and multiculturalism, which the Heritage Foundation believes, has undermined the economic and national security of the United States. Primary and higher education has fallen victim to the twin destructive currents of cultural Marxism and DEI, ideas that they call “woke”. Their “woke” enemy indoctrinates children and young adults in an educational setting, introducing what they label radical ideas about sexual orientation, gender identity, gender equality, reproductive rights and even civil rights to impressionable young minds. To the Heritage Foundation history is immutable. American history, in particular, is the story of great white men, the Founding Fathers, and a Christian moral order. When the Founding Fathers established the Constitution, they focused on the “pursuit of happiness” as linked to the divine, the “pursuit of Blessedness.” To the Heritage Foundation, the Founding Fathers thought “religious devotion” and “spirituality” were gifts of the Creator. They were the foundation of happiness, so each individual “must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish—in the context of the family.”[30] Very simply, the Heritage Foundation believes that ideas concerned with righting historical wrongs and restructuring societal privilege undermine the American way of governance and life. The cure for those dangerous and soulless modern ideas and behaviors, the “woke” agenda, is a return to traditional values found in Family, Work, and Church.[31]
The Heritage Foundation’s advocacy for the Church is subtle and embedded in the discussions of the various departments and entities of the federal government. They believe that Judeo-Christian America is under siege.
Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent. The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke warriors.[32]
The Heritage Foundation advocates for what they call freedom of conscience and religion worldwide. They call for international religious freedom, especially for Christians (and other religious minorities) trapped in Muslim and godless nations. Traditional societies must be supported; faith-based organizations allowed the freedom to preach the tenets of their religion. Traditional societies and their churches should be freed from the imposition of Western ideas about civil rights and reproductive health care. A pro-life and pro-natalist policy of the United States should support those faith-based organizations for the Heritage Foundation believes gender ideology (LGBTQ) and abortion are anathema to the traditional societies, especially those in Africa.[33]
As for religious freedom at home in the United States, once more, faith-based organizations, churches, charities, and schools should be freed from any required standards and criteria that undermine their religious beliefs. Furthermore, “[the] Secretary [Health and Human Services] should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect the sacred rights of conscience, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.”[34] The Heritage Foundation maintains that DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) discriminates against conservative and religious viewpoints, especially in relationship “to regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”[35] The Secretary should take steps to protect faith-based organizations (churches and charities) “that maintain a biblically based, social-science reinforced definition of marriage and family.”[36] The Secretary should protect individuals who believe that contraceptives and preventative pregnancy pills (abortion pills), even condoms are against the tenets of their religion. They should be allowed to deny service to individuals requesting such materials.[37]
Buried in their discussion of reforms in the Department of Labor was advocacy for a day of Judeo-Christian Sabbath Rest and paid overtime for those forced to work on that day, which defaults to Christian Sunday, (includes Friday from sundown to Saturday sundown to accommodate Jewish workers.)[38] The Heritage Foundation supports the Church, defined indirectly as an evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant faith organization, chipping away bit-by-bit of the establishment clause in the first amendment to the United States Constitution, as one pillar of its conservative regime.
Work is the next pillar of the conservative regime that the Heritage Foundation envisions in its Mandate. Labor policy should “give workers the support they need for rewarding, well-paying, and self-driven careers, and restore the family-supporting job as the centerpiece of the American economy. The Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family.”[39] Able-bodied individuals should work for a living, embracing the dignity of honest, paying work and freeing themselves from the pernicious and bureaucratic welfare state. The Heritage Foundation wants to stop the flow of DEI and CRT understandings of American history and society from contaminating the American workspace, discounting the long history of male (white) privilege and systemic racism there. Within the workspace they champion what they call pro-life initiatives, blocking abortion, surrogacy and other treatments from coverage in corporate healthcare policies. Although they call for “reasonable accommodations” for pregnant women in the workspace and on-site childcare, they maintain that those accommodations may be ignored should they “impose an undue hardship on the operation of the [employer’s] business.”[40] Throughout Project 2025, there is an argument over and over again in favor of deregulation, privatization, and prevailing market values (wages, pensions, and goods) in the workspace.[41]
Church and Work support that most important pillar of their particular worldview—the Family. As described previously, the family is defined in very narrow terms, biblically based terms, heavy on biological determinism, essentially a nuclear family of two biologically opposite sex individuals (unrelated to each other) and their children. Roberts maintains that “[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 of the absence of a father. Fatherlessness is one of principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school drop outs.”[42]
Accordingly, the next conservative President and his government must strengthen and restore the true family; one, that is not a creation of gender ideology (and women’s empowerment), a family with an authority figure—a father. For far too long, men have been discriminated against in the past century, their masculinity and needs have been subordinated to a spurious gender ideology and feminism run wild. It is time to redress this wrong, according to the Heritage Foundation. Responsible and hardworking men should be encouraged to marry and father children, providing a benevolent authority in their lives.[43] Nostalgia dominates here. The perfect nuclear family found, not in reality, but in the television shows of the Eisenhower era. For example, “Leave It to Beaver”, popularized the benevolent, hard-working father, attentive to the needs of his homemaker wife and his rambunctious sons. He was ready to discipline the sons, but also provide valuable advice. The Heritage Foundation prefers to retreat into the past, an imagined past, and rollback the gains of women and People of Color (POC) over the last seventy years. Unstated, but implied, they would prefer to back away from female suffrage, and return to a golden age, one of the nineteenth century when women and POC knew their place in the world—in the home and in the fields.
As for the Heritage Foundation’s plan for women, it unfolds in the recommended policies for various Departments and federal agencies in Project 2025. The ultimate goal of those policies is to force women out of the public sphere into the private sphere (the home). A first step in this program was the alignment of the Heritage Foundation with the pro-life movement and their attacks on Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. Over time, the Grand Old Party (GOP) adopted the stance of the pro-life movement, working to overturn Roe v. Wade through the Supreme Court. During the Trump administration, they succeeded. Abortion went back to the states. Many state legislators rushed to ban women’s access to abortion, emergency contraceptives, the shipping of those contraceptives, tracing and criminalizing women who traveled out-of-state for reproductive care, and permitting hospitals to wait for women to develop life-threatening (and fertility-threatening) conditions before action was taken. The Heritage Foundation hopes the next conservative President and his agencies will make those policies effective nationwide. Throughout Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation rails against “woke” policies that “under the guise of sexual and reproductive health” advance gender equality (and women’s empowerment). They also condemn ordinary contraceptives and even condoms, none of which should be covered in healthcare plans. Federal funding for any universal childcare should be rescinded, and the monies paid to in-home caregivers, primarily women. Women should have ample recourse to fertility awareness means of birth control and pregnancy centers to handle their reproductive and healthcare needs. The proper place for the woman is in the home, nurturing her children and looking to her husband for discipline and guidance.[44]
Children are the future. What role do they play in the plans of the Heritage Foundation? It is a complicated question, given the pro-natalist policies espoused in the text, one would imagine a great focus on their physical and emotional well-being. Yet, there is little attention given to their needs, from proper healthcare and adequate education for adulthood and the ever-changing future. Fathers are privileged figures and are the implied decision-makers in the nuclear family. Early childhood care should be in the home, not in Head Start or some form of universal childcare provided through public funds. Any such public funds should be used for in-home childcare. It is presumed that the mother or even the grandmother is the natural caregiver. Fathers should be the hard-working public face of the family. Parents should exercise control over school choice and school curriculum on behalf of their children. They should be able to choose from among private, charter and or public schools. Furthermore, any federal money should travel with the child to a private or charter school of the parent’s choice. It should be used for any educational purpose, including special classes and private tutoring. Parents should be informed about their child’s choices as pertains to gender identity, pronoun and name use. Teachers should use the name and biological sex of the child on his/her birth certificate.[45] The Heritage Foundation recommends that all schools accepting federal money open their doors to military recruiters and increase their membership in the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) program. Finally, all schools should “require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery” test by all students.[46] Given their strong opposition to DEI, it seems young women might be exempt from such requirements. Another change for students in secondary schools would be their ability to work outside the home: the Heritage Foundation supports ample deregulation in the labor realm.
Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs … [the] DOL should amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teen works to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent.[47]
Given the Project’s focus on China, as the great enemy of the United States, economically and militarily, it is not hard to see an effort to build a conventional, large and obedient military force out of these young adults.
Education, in their eyes, should engender obedience to God and authority, inculcate an obligation for hard work, and engender intense patriotism. Critical thinking is not a necessity in a conservative world. The child, if a male, should become a responsible, hard-working father to a biblically-sound nuclear family composed of a nurturing homemaker and obedient children. Women should embrace their time-honored roles as wife and mother. This idealized family is the core pillar of an American society based upon Judeo-Christian moral imperatives in Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation offers the next conservative President their expertise in finding, vetting, and appointing loyal political employees untainted by “woke” ideology in every federal Department and agencies. These political appointees will carry out his agenda, purging intellectuals, political elites, high-ranking military personnel and others who support such policies from the administration and military forces. The Heritage Foundation exhibits a deep hatred of intellectual and scientific expertise; they prefer a world of the imagined past, a world untainted by questions of systemic racism, gender equality, social justice, and climate change. Underlying Project 2025 is a pathological fear of the “Other”, represented by Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and an embrace of male (white) privilege and a fundamentalist Judeo-Christian moral order. The entire Project has strong ideological links to the rhetoric of hate embedded in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and the Vichy French regime of World War II (1940-1944).
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https://jessica.substack.com/p/project-2025
Kershaw, Ian. To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949. (New York: Penguin, 2015)
Mazower, Mark. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. (New York: Vintage, 1993)
Nilus. Sergyei. Translator Victor E. Marsden. Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (1905) https://ia903409.us.archive.org/6/items/books
Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944. (Columbia University Press, 1972, reprint 2001).
Citations
[1] Sergyei Nilus. Translator Victor E. Marsden. Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (1905), Protocols No. 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, and 19. https://ia903409.us.archive.org/6/items/books
[2] Adolf Hitler. Translator Ralph Manheim. Mein Kampf, 180-183. https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-by-Adolf-hitler
[3] Adolf Hitler. Translator Ralph Manheim. Mein Kampf, 254 and 262. https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-by-Adolf-hitler
[4] Adolf Hitler. Translator Ralph Manheim. Mein Kampf, 241. https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-by-Adolf-hitler
[5] Adolf Hitler. Translator Ralph Manheim. Mein Kampf, 242, 423-436. https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-by-Adolf-hitler
[6] Adolf Hitler. Translator Ralph Manheim. Mein Kampf, 290-299, 306, 314-317, 321, 384, and 596-606.,https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-by-Adolf-hitler
[7] Hitler originated the fourteen words in this statement. David Eden Lane simplified the statement for his American audience: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” https://extremismterms.adl.org/.../hate-symbol
Adolf Hitler. Translator Ralph Manheim. Mein Kampf, 212. https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-by-Adolf-hitler
[8] Adolf Hitler. Translator Ralph Manheim. Mein Kampf, 414. https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-by-Adolf-hitler
[9] Hitler made only one exception to this rule, a single woman whose economic activity is necessary to the German Volk. Adolf Hitler. Translator Ralph Manheim. Mein Kampf, 414. https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-by-Adolf-hitler
[10] Adolf Hitler. Translator Ralph Manheim. Mein Kampf, 286, 414, 438-441. https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-by-Adolf-hitler
[11] Adolf Hitler. Translator Ralph Manheim. Mein Kampf, 577-578. https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-by-Adolf-hitler
[12] Adolf Hitler. Translator Ralph Manheim. Mein Kampf, 609-611, 632, 641-649. https://archive.org/details/mein-kampf-by-Adolf-hitler
[13] Ian Kershaw. To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949. (New York: Penguin, 2015), 195, 210-214.
Anton Drexler (1920) and Gottfried Feder (1930) NSDAP Twenty-Five Point Manifesto. https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar 2/rise
[14] Michael Curtis. Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime. (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2014), 69; Robert O. Paxton. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944. (Columbia University Press, 1972, reprint 2001), 142.
[15] Paxton, Vichy France, 165-167, 200-201, and 210-215.
[16] Paxton, Vichy France, 149-157.
[17] Paxton, Vichy France, 151.
[18] Paxton, Vichy France, 165-167; Curtis. Verdict on Vichy. (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2014), 94-97.
[19] Mark Mazower. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. (New York: Vintage, 1993), 84-85, 91.
[20] Curtis, Verdict on Vichy, 94-95.
[21] Curtis, Verdict on Vichy, 105.
[22] Curtis, Verdict on Vichy, 171-173; Paxton, Vichy France, 169.
[23] Curtis, Verdict on Vichy, 105-106.
[24] The mandatory numerus clausus was 2% in the professions and 3% for students. Curtis, Verdict on Vichy, 112.
[25] Curtis, Verdict on Vichy, 113-115; Paxton, Vichy France, 171-174.
[26] Curtis, Verdict on Vichy, 156-163, 180-188, and 267-269.
[27] Paxton, Vichy France, 186-189, 192-193, 196-200, 223-228, and 267-268.
[28] The Heritage Foundation. 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. https://static.project2025.org, xiii.
[29] Broadside decided to delay release until after the election in early November 2024, because J. D. Vance wrote the Foreward for the essay. Kevin D. Roberts. By Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. (Broadside Books, 2024) https://amazon.com
[30] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 13-14.
[31] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 5 and 10.
[32] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 4.
[33] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 185, 192, 260-262.
[34] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 450.
[35] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 582-584.
[36] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 450 and 481.
[37] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 483-485, 582-584.
[38] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 589.
[39] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 581.
[40] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 585.
[41] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 581-611.
[42] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 4.
[43] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 480.
[44] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 259, 455-459, 471-474, and 476-489.; https://jessica.substack.com/p/project-2025
[45] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 319, 343-344, 346, 349-350, 482.
[46] Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 102-103.
[47]Heritage Foundation, Mandate, 595.