The Media Research Center’s copious angst over the right-wing Project 2025 becoming too associated with Donald Trump continued in a July 26 post by Clay Waters:
Who did Amanpour & Co. invite on to discuss the supposed “Christian Nationalism” running rampant within Project 2025, the feared, loathed, seldom read presidential blueprint issued by the Heritage Foundation? Nobody but Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the author of something called Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
Bianna Golodryga was the fill-in host on Christiane Amanpour’s political talk show (whose episodes run on tax-funded PBS after first airing on CNN International) and set up the interview between liberal author Kristin Kobes Du Mez and liberal journalist Michel Martin by borrowing Du Mez’s subtitle: “Historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez tells Michel Martin how white evangelicals how white evangelicals have corrupted a faith and fractured a nation.”
Golodryga justified the show’s paranoid liberal focus on Project 2025 by noting “the contributors of the conservative playbook include some of [Trump’s closest political advisers, as well as organizations with Christian nationalist leanings.”
Martin confirmed the show’s producers had booked Du Mez as a voice known to be hostile to her idea of “Christian Nationalism.”
[…]Du Mez warned of the horrible policies in the document, including “restricting the anti-abortion pill, mifepristone” and restricting the mailing of contraceptives. Then Martin took the common-sense idea that children are better off with a mother and father into an establishment of a state religion.
Sarah Butler complained in an Aug. 1 post that “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin was “listing the GOPS ‘very dark vision’ of America, via Project 2024 [sic], including claims such as ‘getting rid of education, the Department of Education, getting rid of your overtime pay, making seniors pay more money for prescriptions. I mean the list goes on and on and on.’” She continued to get more facts wrong:
Hostin went on to read the foreword of Republican Senator J.D. Vance’s (OH) Book: “we are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets in the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.” Sarah Haines quickly asked: “Does he still have a musket?”
But to Haines, the “scariest thing” was when Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said “our collective efforts to build personal apparatus for policy makers of all levels, federal, state, and local will continue.” Haines’ word of advice was to “keep your eyes open because they’re trying to say don’t look over there while we all know what they’re talking about.”
Actually, the foreword was written by Vance for a book by Roberts designed to promote Project 2025 — a book that had to be delayed and softened in part because of all the violent imagery originally in the book’s subtitie (“Burning Down Washington to Save America”) and cover imagery.
Michael Wnek groused in an Aug. 7 post that Democratic strategist Maria Cardona “hoped that the vice president would ‘refocus on Donald Trump’s plan, Project 2025, and how almost every economist across the spectrum has said if he imposes that plan, it would be a disaster for Americans across the board and especially for low-income and middle-class Americans,’ even though the former president has repeatedly distanced himself from the Heritage Foundation initiative.” Wnek didn’t mention that dozens for former Trump administration staffers have contributed to Project 2025, making Trump’s attempt to distance himself from it a bit laughable.
Nicholas Fondacaro complained in a Aug. 12 post that “Good Morning America was also in a panic over Project 2025, which wasn’t even an official Trump campaign proposal,” similarly ignoring the Trump staffers who helped assemble it.
Jorge Bonilla whined in an Aug. 13 post:
MSNBC’s bitter race essentialist Joy Reid has crafted a recurring segment wherein she provides material assistance to the (now) Harris campaign’s efforts to disinform people into believing that Project 2025 is somehow an official product of the Trump campaign. In so doing, she exposed the generalized degeneracy of the left.
Watch as Reid decries the Project 2025 proposals dealing with the rollback and repeal of statutes and regulations that facilitate the sexualization of children and/or grooming into a potential gender transition:
[…]After building up tonight’s boogeyman, Reid then had a transgender ACLU attorney on to further talk about the imagined horrors of the policy proposals outlined in the anti-grooming section of Project 2025. But in trying to create revulsion and horror for Project 2025 in service of a Harris campaign narrative, Reid’s bleatings may well end up accomplishing the exact opposite.
[…]Furthermore, Reid decries both the proposed nationalization of Florida’s Parents’ Rights in Education Act, which bans children from exposure to inappropriate materials and the potential prohibition of such practices as “transition closets”, wherein students can act out their gender dysphoria in school without their parents’ knowledge.
In attempting to aid and abet the Harris campaign’s efforts to misrepresent Project 2025 as a Trump campaign product, Joy Reid may have brought its more appealing aspects into broader public view. She has also cemented opposition to these anti-grooming provisions as support for the sexualization of children.
Bonilla didn’t explain why non-heterosexual students must be silenced or why not hating LGBTQ students is somehow “grooming.” He also refused to acknowledge all the Trump staffers who worked on Project 2025.
Christan Toto groused in an Aug. 24 column about a “Saturday Night Live” skit criticizing Project 2025 that he claimed “even corporate media fact-checkers blew sizable holes in it. Plus, President Trump has repeatedly said he has no direct connection to Project 2025. Other than that, it’s 100 percent accurate.” Note that Toto’s link to “corporate media fact-checkers” goes to a link from a local TV station about … Good Housekeeping’s Family Travel Awards list. So, less than “100 perent accurate” on Toto’s part.
An Aug. 25 post by Brad Wilmouth complained that a Tennessee state representative — whom the MRC had previously lashed out at for taking part in an anti-violence protest on the floor of the state legislature that got him and other briefly expelled from the body — “complained about the Project 2025 plan for a second Donald Trump term, and talked up the need for Democrats to compete in more Southern states.”
Tim Graham huffed in his Aug. 28 podcast:
Meanwhile, the Kamala Harris Twitter account is displaying a new advertisement. The tweet says: “Project 2025 is the blueprint for Trump to make himself the most powerful president ever. We can’t let him win.”
The only serious problem with that is that Donald Trump has energetically sought to separate himself from the Project 2025 manual and its creators at the Heritage Foundation. Look, this was compiled by Trump loyalists and veterans of the first Trump administration, so they clearly created a blueprint for Trump. But it’s plain now that he wants no ownership of it. So why would the Democrats still claim it does?
Because it’s reasonable to assume that “Trump loyalists” are the real guiding force behind the document (kudos to Graham for finally admitting that fact) and that Trump’s record of lies means that even though he has “energetically sought to separate himself” from Project 2025, his word is worthless and can’t be trusted.
A Sept. 16 post by Graham made a big deal out of CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale investigating (but not ot TV) a claim made on Harris’ campaign Twitter/X account:
Dale noted the @KamalaHQ account frequently invokes Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation think tank’s right-wing policy proposals for the next Republican administration. An August 30 post from @KamalaHQ said, “Trump says he plans to bring back laws from 100+ years ago, echoing Project 2025: ‘We don’t pass laws like that. They are tough.’” The post included a seven-second clip of Trump speaking in Pennsylvania. “But the full video of the rally shows Trump was not even talking about Project 2025 or his future plans.”
Funny how Graham suddenly likes fact-checkers when they don’t fact-check Trump.
Waters returned for a Sept. 24 post:
Taxpayer-supported PBS again failed its own congressionally mandated test to “provide objectivity and balance” when covering issues. PBS News Weekend this Sunday featured a spokesman for a liberal scientific advocacy organization as its only guest to feed liberal fear-mongering about Project 2025.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is an activist group that does not “stick to science,” as its political criticism of Georgia’s decision to count ballots by hand demonstrates. The organization, founded in 1969, has a history of pushing left-wing causes, even those that are not connected to scientific studies such as the deployment of a missile defense shield (it even issued a book opposing Reagan’s “Star Wars” program) and was criticized for its hysteria over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the food supply.
But none of this context was raised on Sunday night, as PBS anchor John Yang set up his UCS guest, policy director Rachel Cleetus, who was not given a liberal label, to knock down “conservative” arguments unopposed.
Waters further huffed that “Yang invited Cleetus to provide a smashing rebuttal to Project 2025” and its plans to target National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for pointing out the role climate change plays in weather. But rather than defending Project 2025 directly, he whined about NOAA’s “maximalist climate-change views” and that the season thus far had seen few hurricanes than predicted (in addition to all those guilt-by-association attacks). That didn’t age well, given that in the following few weeks, Hurricanes Helene and MIlton wreaked massive devastation across the Southeastern U.S.