Heritage Chief's 'Violent' Talk Upsets Delicate Fascist Who Ran Project 2025
Undoing democracy is a job for gentlemen, sir!
[This is a post by Doktor Zoom, but the substack folks have asked us to keep it up without the byline, which fell off, so they can investigate why that is happening. Okay bye!]
Paul Dans, the former director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, seems to be at odds with his former boss, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, according to an interview with the Washington Post (gift link). Dans condemned what he considers “violent rhetoric” from Roberts, and what’s more called for JD Vance to retract the foreword he wrote for Roberts’s book, which is scheduled to be published November 12, one week after Election Day.
Project 2025, you’ll recall, is the set of instructions for How To Undo Democracy As We’ve Known It, written by a crowd of former Trump White House aides as a policy wish list if Donald Trump returns to power. Once Project 2025 started getting more attention than Trump himself, he angrily distanced himself from it and insisted his real second-term plan was a thing called Agenda 47, which was a lot like Project 2025 but written in crayon and actually worse in several ways. Not long afterwards, Dans resigned from Heritage, explaining that Project 2025 had accomplished all the work it needed to do, or at least that any of You People would be allowed to see.
Dans explained to the Post that gosh darn it, there’s such a thing as decorum, and if you want to enable a sociopathic narcissist who wants to wield dictatorial powers, you need to keep a civil tongue. (We are paraphrasing broadly.)
“If we’re going to ask the left to tone it down, we have to do our part as well. […] There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts.”
Specifically, Dans was aghast at Roberts for saying that this summer’s Supreme Court decisions marked yet another “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.” Your righties love them a good second American Revolution, and declare them about as frequently as they see Wars On Christmas.
Roberts declined to be interviewed, the Post says, but Heritage spokesperson Noah Weinrich huffily explained that Roberts was only warning that “the Left” might become violent, not that it would be asking for violence, and “Any attempt to mischaracterize Dr. Roberts’s comments as supportive of violence is grotesque and completely contrary to the observation he was making,” so there.
In addition, the Post adds, Dans was concerned about how Roberts was marketing his upcoming book Dawn’s Early Light, not so much because everything with these guys is a goddamn Olde Tyme American Glorie reference, but because its original subtitle was “Burning Down Washington to Save America,” and the cover even pictured a wooden match. (Wouldn’t it have been cool to include an actual box of matches?)
Roberts used similarly incendiary imagery in promotional materials for the book, too, although the Post didn’t include that lovely adjective, perhaps considering it overkill. Gosh, English idioms are violent!
In early versions of the text reviewed by The Washington Post, Roberts called for “a political revolution” to “overthrow today’s incarnation of the ruling class,” argued that the nation “must be destroyed and replaced,” and supported the elimination of institutions including the Ivy League, the FBI, Fairfax County Public Schools and the Boy Scouts.
However, following the first assassination attempt against Trump right before the Republican convention, which killed a member of the audience and wounded some idiot’s ear, the promotional copy was toned down a bit:
Gone was a reference to overthrowing the ruling class; the revolution was specified as “peaceful”; and Fairfax County schools and the Boy Scouts were spared. The subtitle changed from “Burning Down Washington” to “Taking Back Washington,” and the match disappeared from the cover.
We’ll assume that the basic message remains of imposing rightwing rule on Americans whether they like it or not, but it’s a kinder, gentler fascism now. Roberts decided in August to hold the book until after the election, and Weinrich insisted that wasn’t violent language anyway:
Dr. Roberts initially was using a rhetorical turn of phrase to emphasize the need for certain aspects of the federal government to be restored to a citizen-centered balance, rather than being the captive of a small minority from the Left. However, following the slanderous media coverage of Project 2025, Dr. Roberts did not want to allow the same voices to attribute false allegations of violence to his book as well.
Even so, Dans told the Post, “There’s really no place for this level of rhetoric, let alone from the head of an august think tank. And by doing that, he’s essentially besmirched the professional reputations of everyone involved in Project 2025.”
Oh no, not besmirch statements!
The article also includes more gossipy discussion of Sweet Valley Beltway drama and backbiting among all the major characters than we want to go into here; you have your gift link if you want to indulge. There’s a fun closing paragraph, noting that for all the griping about his vitriolic tone, Roberts’s only regret seems to be that he was too nice; at a New York Times conference on September 25, he reflected, “We allowed the radical Left to define the brand Project 2025. […] We should have — figuratively speaking — punched back. Lesson learned.”
Also, we don’t know when Paul Dans was interviewed for the story before last Sunday, when Trump called for sending the US military to go after his political enemies. It seems like someone should probably ask him about that, considering his principled rejection of violent rhetoric. Gosh, if only the Post had known Trump sometimes says such unpleasant things!
[WaPo (gift link)]
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You know who else became violent in response to fascism?
The United States of America, which sent thousands upon thousands of American troops to defeat fascism in WWII.
𝑶𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝑷𝒓𝒐𝒋𝒆𝒄𝒕 2025 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒈𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒆 𝒂𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒏 𝑻𝒓𝒖𝒎𝒑 𝒉𝒊𝒎𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒇, 𝒉𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒓𝒊𝒍𝒚 𝒅𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒅 𝒉𝒊𝒎𝒔𝒆𝒍𝒇 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒊𝒕 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍 𝒔𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒅-𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒎 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒏 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒂 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒄𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒆𝒅 𝑨𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒅𝒂 47, 𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒄𝒉 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒂 𝒍𝒐𝒕 𝒍𝒊𝒌𝒆 𝑷𝒓𝒐𝒋𝒆𝒄𝒕 2025 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏 𝒊𝒏 𝒄𝒓𝒂𝒚𝒐𝒏 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒖𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒔𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝒔𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝒘𝒂𝒚𝒔.
No way trump wrote A47 in crayon, he wrote it with a Sharpie.