Radical right's vision for the future outlined in 'The Conservative Promise'

September 11, 2023

By Mike Weland

A 920-page manifesto, "Mandate for Leadership 2025; The Conservative Promise," with the stated goal of assembling "an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives prepared to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State" offers a clear and troubling look at what "Make America Great" means, and it isn't beholden to current GOP front runner Donald Trump, but any "conservative" Republican elected to the presidency in November, 2024.

"The next conservative President will enter office on January 20, 2025, with a simple choice: greatness or failure," the authors write. "It will be a daunting test, but no more so than every other generation of Americans has faced and passed. 'The Conservative Promise' represents the best effort of the conservative movement in 2023—and the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic."

The manifesto, written under the aegis of the Heritage Foundation by "more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country," is a litany of grievance and banal cries of victimization, filled with the words and phrases that have been used of late to instill false fears in their followers; "global elites," "woke," "our God-given rights," "drag queens invading school libraries."

It lays blame freely without taking any of the responsibility, vilifying those who don't wholeheartedly agree with their draconian and dystopian definition of what constitutes "great."

It is the foundation of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, organized by The Heritage Foundation, and builds off the foundation’s longstanding “Mandate for Leadership,” which has been highly influential for presidential administrations since the Reagan era.

"Most recently, the Trump administration relied heavily on Heritage’s 'Mandate' for policy guidance, embracing nearly two-thirds of Heritage’s proposals within just one year in office," they boast.

The book falsely blames so-called enemies, liberals and Democrats especially, of the crimes of which they themselves are guilty.

"Today, America and the conservative movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970s," Dr. Kevin Roberts writes in the forward. "Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries. Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values, and people—all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat. Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence. Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s 'radical chic' to build the totalitarian cult known today as 'The Great Awokening.' And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril."

It envisions a government in which the president holds almost dictatorial control, able to fire government employees at a whim and replace them with his own faithful. "It is the President’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies, not their own," the writers assert.

"As we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, which will take place during the next presidency, America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution," Section 1, "Taking the Reins of Government," opens. "The former believe that America is—and always has been—'systemically racist' and that it is not worth celebrating and must be fundamentally transformed, largely through a centralized administrative state. The latter believe in America’s history and heroes, its principles and promise, and in everyday Americans and the American way of life. They believe in the Constitution and republican government. Conservatives—the Americanists in this battle—must fight for the soul of America, which is very much at stake. Just two years after the death of the last surviving Constitutional Convention delegate, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln warned that the greatest threat to America would come not from without, but from within. This is evident today: Whether it be mask and vaccine mandates, school and business closures, eorts to keep Americans from driving gas cars or using gas stoves, or efforts to defund the police, indoctrinate schoolchildren, alter beloved books, abridge free speech, undermine the colorblind ideal, or deny the biological reality that there are only two sexes, the Left’s steady stream of insanity appears to be never-ending. The next Administration must stand up for American ideals, American families, and American culture—all things in which, thankfully, most Americans still believe."

The book calls for the vast curtailment if not the elimination of the Department of Health and Human Services, of Social Security and Medicare. "In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem," the book asserts. The book rails against the CDC and National Institutes of Health, " the duo most responsible—along with President Joe Biden—for the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic."

It rails against the FBI and Department of Justice, "weaponized" by Joe Biden and attorney general Merrick Garland, " resulting in 'politically motivated and viewpoint-based prosecutions' of political enemies and indifference to the crimes of political allies, has made the department “a threat to the Republic.'”

The Department of Education, "a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, which—as the COVID era showed—is not particularly concerned with children’s education," would be gutted as well.

Without coming right out and saying so, "The Conservative Promise" advocates a return to the halcyon days when whites, and particularly wealthy white Evangelical Christians, were clearly and rightfully supreme.

"Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideal of a colorblind society should be rejected in favor of reinstating a color-conscious society," they write.

To read more of "Mandate for Leadership 2025; The Conservative Promise," go to www.project2025.org.