Project 2025 Will Decapitate Civilian Oversight of the U.S. Military – Mikey Weinstein

Talia Baroncelli
Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. I’ll shortly be joined by Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. We’ll be speaking about Project 2025 and the implications it has for the U.S. military.

If you’d like to support the work that we do, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Make sure you’re on our mailing list; that way, you’re always up to date every time a new episode is published. You can like and subscribe to the show on YouTube or on other podcast streaming services such as Apple or Spotify. See you in a bit with Mikey.

Project 2025 is a lengthy policy agenda authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative and Christian nationalist think tank. Investigative outlet ProPublica recently obtained Project 2025 private training videos, which involve several former Trump officials. This corroborates the connection between former President Trump and the Heritage Foundation.

One of the videos features Bethany Kozma, a former Deputy Chief of Staff at USAID during the Trump administration. In this video, she discusses Project 2025’s opposition to legislation trying to mitigate the effects of climate change. She reads from page 364 of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, which states that “In the name of combating climate change, policies have been used to create an artificial energy scarcity that will require trillions of dollars in new investment, supported with taxpayer subsidies, to address a problem that government and special interests themselves created.” They don’t perceive climate change or carbon-intensive industries as posing a threat to society or to the environment but as a set of policies meant to create energy scarcity and benefit a certain segment of the elite.

Joining me to discuss these issues is Mikey Weinstein. He is the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring the constitutional right of religious freedom for the U.S. Armed Forces. He is also a lawyer and a former Air Force officer and served as White House Legal Counsel to the Reagan Administration. He also served as first general counsel to Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who ran for president twice. He’s the author of several books, including Was God on Our Side and No Snowflake in an Avalanche. It’s great to have you again, Mikey.

Mikey Weinstein
Thanks, Talia. I’m looking forward to it as well.

Talia Baroncelli
Before we get into Project 2025, can you explain to our viewers what you do at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation?

Mikey Weinstein
Absolutely. We are a weapon, and we’ve been fighting Christian nationalism and calling it out before anybody else did, that I’m aware of, going back to the early 2000s. Our job is to protect the U.S. Constitutionally mandated wall, separating Church and State in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind, which is the U.S. military: the Marine Corps, Navy, Army, Air Force, and Space Force.

We have clients in all 18 national security agencies. Some are well-known, like the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, etc. We have clients in the U.S. Coast Guard, which is not the DOD; that’s the Department of Homeland Security, and even the U.S. Maritime Service, specifically the Merchant Marine Academy, which is part of the Department of Transportation.
We are closing in on 90,000 clients, about 95% of our clients, and this is an interesting statistic, Talia, are actually Christians themselves who are being brutalized for not being Christian enough by their chains of command. We have clients from pretty much every religious faith that there’s ever been, except we’ve never had a Scientologist yet. Maybe Tom Cruise will come to us if he gets involved with the government or the military.

We have many atheists, agnostics, secularists, humanists, and satanists. Our job is we don’t care whether they believe in Spider-Man or not. Our job is to make sure that a particular religious faith or non-faith tradition is not being pushed by superiors against their otherwise helpless subordinates in the U.S. military.

We have well over a thousand people who work here. Like many civil rights organizations, lots of our folks are volunteers. We have MRFF representatives on most military installations around the world. We have them on nuclear submarines and large aircraft carriers. They’re everywhere. We are very much in the thick of this fight.
I’m doing this interview with gun smoke in my face. Clients are calling in, and again, we fight what we used to call fundamentalist Christian dominionism, but the term now is nationalism in an attempt to prevent America from using this weaponized version of Christianity or Christian nationalism to conquer what has been the world’s most beautiful democracy, and perhaps the rest of the world as well. That’s a way of putting it, Talia.

Talia Baroncelli
Right. Well, last time we spoke, we also addressed this issue of Christian nationalism within the military and how there’s proselytizing in the military that’s illegal and the effects of that. We’ll probably get into that throughout the interview.

I did want to ask you about Project 2025. This is an agenda that was put forward by the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative think tank established in 1973. They’ve been instrumental in shaping Republican policy over the decades. They’ve been advancing a very right-wing agenda that emphasizes free enterprise and limited government, but also a lot of other really controversial things, such as not supporting reproductive rights or abortion and also wanting to essentially change the nature of the U.S. government and the way the U.S. government functions. Why don’t you explain to us what Project 2025 is and what the implications would be for the U.S. military as well?

Mikey Weinstein
I spent over three years in the West Wing working there during the Reagan administration. The Heritage Foundation started this whole thing back in 1973, and the first presidential administration to start implementing their views of this Christian nationalism was, unfortunately, the Reagan administration. I was there. I could see it. About 2,000 different proposals coming from the Reagan administration were tied to the Heritage Foundation.

I guess the best way to describe it in the brief interview here that we’re doing for your supporters and folks who are interested in hearing about this, your fan club, and everybody else because we love theAnalysis, is an analogy. That is, Mein Kampf is to Hitler as Project 2025 is to Trump and “Make America Great Again” or “Make America Germany in 1933 Again.” It is absolutely a blueprint written by some lawyers, scientists, doctors, whatever. It’s 920 pages. It has four separate sections. It’s 30 chapters. Too long to read, but tons of people have talked about it.

When it got discovered (I wrote an op-ed on it months ago), suddenly, Trump tried to distance himself from it. Indicating he had no idea about any of this. But of course, nearly, I think it’s well over two dozen of the folks that were in his administration are principal drafters of this. So, of course, it’s absolutely part and parcel of the MAGA agenda. Among other things, it’s trying to get rid of the FBI, the Department of Justice, the National Weather Service, and women won’t get to have abortions. There’ll be no teaching of critical race theory. It hates diversity, equity, and inclusion. Anything that appears to be good for us moving forward as a species, it is against. The driver is Christian nationalism. Not the Christianity that many Americans or other folks in the world follow, but this idea of a muscular, weaponized Christianity, which is you either accept our view of this or you don’t deserve the right to be an American citizen, and we’re not quite sure you even deserve the right to be alive.

Our military is the vanguard of our constitutional rights. The bottom line is– there’s a great phrase in Latin that I now forget, but basically, who will guard the guards? The guardians of our society are our military. If our U.S. military is infiltrated and becomes inextricably intertwined with Christian nationalism, it’s over.

We have such tremendous prestige, power, and wealth associated with the U.S. military that this can’t happen if we’re going to avoid what Margaret Atwood talked about in The Handmaid’s Tale, Gilead, that version of a fundamentalist Christian nationalist entity. We were very pleased a number of years ago when the producers of that show on Hulu from the book reached out to us for help because they wanted to do an entire episode of what happens with the military in Gilead in the near future that’s there, that dystopian future.

I think it’s on pages 102 and 103 of Project 2025. It talks about, I’ll give you two examples, strengthening the rights of military chaplains to follow the mandate of their ministries in accordance with the basic tenets of their faith. It sounds great, but the problem is the Great Commission, one of the central aspects of fundamentalist Christianity. You can see it in Mark 16:15 and Matthew 28:19. It’s one of the last things, Talia, that Jesus is supposed to have told his disciples, which is to go out and make disciples of all nations. Every chaplain is an officer, which becomes a problem in and of itself.

The moment you come out of a commissioning entity, whether it’s the military academies, ROTC, OTS, Officer Training School, Officer Candidate School, or a direct report, if you come in as a O-1, a secular lieutenant or an ensign in the Navy, at that moment, as the most junior officer, you outrank 90% of the military. Why? Because you’re an officer. I understand that most Americans do not understand the difference between officers and enlisted, but I’m telling you, even the most junior officer has incredible power. So you’re outranked 90% already. Chaplains are officers.

It’s our best sense that somewhere about 84% of the chaplaincy in our military, and there are multiple thousands of them across the various branches, are evangelical, which by itself is okay because evangelicals will still follow the time, place, and manner restrictions of our Constitution and the directives, instructions, or regulations of the Department of Defense. But when they go bad, they become fundamentalists, and they say, “No, we are unrestricted, and we can carry and push forth the gospel of Jesus Christ.” It’s our best sense that about a third of that 84% of the chaplaincy are fundamentalist Christian nationalists.

Keep in mind, I think Hitler had 7.9% in his National Socialist Movement. Stalin only had about 2.8% or 2.9% of his movement, and look what they were able to do. Remember, chaplains, however, they are staff officers, like military doctors, like I was a judge advocate. They’re not the commanders, but they have a huge influence. We still see this massive amount of Christian nationalism in the command chain. We literally see it every day around the clock here.
Your military superior, I want to make it very clear, the person that orders you around in the military, your boss, your commander, your immediate superior, the dynamic between you and that person is not, not, not, not remotely close to, say, your shift manager at Starbucks or KFC. There’s a separate criminal code, Talia, in the military, called the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Insubordination is a felony. It is also a felony to have sexual intercourse with someone other than your spouse. Adultery. It’s also a felony if you’re ordered to go to the base dentist at 15:00 hours or 3:00 PM and you don’t go. If you’re even being gently evangelized by your military superior, get the F out of my face, sir or ma’am, is not an option for you.

Talia Baroncelli
Right. The military code–

Mikey Weinstein
We do it for that.

Talia Baroncelli
The military code that you mentioned is also important because there was a Supreme Court ruling in 1974, Parker v. Levy, which talks about the way the First Amendment applies to people who are in the military. So there are different responsibilities to be had when you’re in the military, and how the First Amendment would apply to you is slightly different than how it would to a civilian.

Mikey Weinstein
Actually, that’s a very good point, but it’s not even slightly. Parker v. Levy was an 8 to nothing decision; somebody didn’t vote. I don’t know why it was, but it came down and made it clear that once you put the uniform on, the rights that you have in the First Amendment are severely truncated because the compelling governmental interest is not what it is for me as a civilian civil rights activist or the rest of civilian America, which is to give us as much as we can get. It’s focused on maximizing the lethality of our military so that, indeed, it can protect the full panoply of constitutional rights for the rest of us civilians. How do you do that? You buttress, and you validate good order, morale, discipline, and unit cohesion.

The concept is that if you wear the uniform, you don’t get to have the same rights of the First Amendment, all the aspects of it that civilians get. That is still a very good case law. Yet we’re facing this incredible quagmire where we’ve been fighting; as I’ve described before, Christian nationalism is part of the very fabric of the Department of Defense.
The last speech that President Eisenhower gave, to this day, is most well known as his farewell speech, where he warned America and the world about the so-called military-industrial complex. What we fight here at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, with laser-like precision, is a fundamentalist Christian parachurch, Congressional, corporate, military proselytizing complex. There are three dozen, maybe even more, parachurch organizations that, again, run rampant through our U.S. military. The military’s approved solution is, again, this concept of weaponized Christianity is the best way to go and the best way to advance.

Project 2025 opens the door for that. It talks about auditing the classes at West Point at the Air Force Academy, which is my alma mater and the alma mater of three of my kids at Annapolis. The other U.S. Service Academies, like the U.S. Maritime Academy and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, to make sure that we rid itself of any Marxist doctrines, like diversity, equity, and inclusion, critical race theory, any of that stuff. That has to go. If you’re transsexual, you have absolutely no right to be in the U.S. military. It destroys LGBTQIA+ rights, and it once again fosters a climate of complete denial of reproductive rights for women, which is the worst type of misogyny.

This is real, everybody, if you’re watching the interview. It’s not some… I’m trying to calm down about this. It’s not some dream that isn’t really happening. If you don’t know what Mein Kampf is, that was the book that Hitler wrote in prison, and that became his Bible, if you will, his manifesto for Nazi Germany.

Talia Baroncelli
Well, maybe to give a more concrete example so that people who maybe don’t know very much about this will be able to get some context. The head or the founder of the… I don’t know if he is the founder, but the current President of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, has ties to Opus Dei. He is a right-wing, extreme Catholic. He is a Catholic, and I’m not trying to put down Catholicism, but his brand of extreme Catholicism is quite dangerous. He has spoken in many interviews about how he would want to rebrand the Department of Health to the Department of Life, i.e., not mentioning any reproductive rights for women or for other people, transgender, or LGBTQ people. His language is very, very militaristic. It’s very violent. Can you give more context as to who Kevin Roberts is and who’s behind Project 2025?

Mikey Weinstein
Talia, let me try without trying to drill down on Roberts or people like Charlie Kirk. I’m sure you know who he is. These are leading people who have been fostering the concept of Christian nationalism. They didn’t come up with this idea last Tuesday. It’s been going around for decades. Opus Dei is connected with Catholicism. We’re not knocking Catholicism. I think it’s one-fourth of our 95%, as I said, over 89,000, almost 90,000 clients are Catholics. We’re talking about the Catholicism that Hutton, the father of Mel Gibson, Hutton Gibson, and Mel Gibson tend to follow. As you said, it’s extremely dangerous. Without trying to get into specific personalities, these are people that have been around for a very, very, very long time who have been looking for ways in which to influence every atom or molecule, neutron, and electron of our lives, to drive it to this concept of, again, weaponized Christianity, which is very digital, one and zero. You accept our version of Christianity, or you don’t have a right to exist. We’ll take all of your rights away, and we’ll see where that ends up.

Remember, 2025 talks about massive deportations. You heard J.D. Vance the other day, the presumptive Vice Presidential candidate, say, “Let’s start with a million.” Really? Really? Let’s start with a million, and then we’ll see where it goes. Remember what Trump said? He lies like he reflects light, circulates blood, and breathes, but he said he won’t be a dictator except starting on day one. What do you want to see? What more do you want to understand? Again, no one’s going to sit down and read a 920-page, 30-chapter report. But you can see Project 2025 is everywhere. They’re not trying to hide it. Their view is that if we say that it’s good, we being MAGA, then you’re going to fall in line and say, “Yeah, it must be wonderful. It must be great.” Even though Trump tried to distance himself from it, it shows you how closely tied it is because it terrified him. He was afraid to be tard and feathered with this. Now, the roosters are coming home, and it doesn’t sit quite as pretty. That’s the purpose of this interview.

When I talk about expanding the rights of chaplains of the military, that means everybody else to follow the dictates of the basic tenets of their particular faith, and it sounds beautiful. Why can’t they just follow it? Chaplains are there to provide or to perform services. If they can’t perform a service, they’re going to go find some other way to provide it. It is not a mission field for them to convert. Yet they are supported by large numbers of the chain of command, the same entities that follow nuclear weapons.

I wanted to give you an example. I got permission from a client today who contacted us. This client is a graduate of a military camp. He serves in a position involving the direct stewardship of nuclear weapons at a large installation. I won’t tell you where the installation is. I will tell you that he came to us because he was extremely upset that there was a history briefing being given by one of the commander’s very close friends, who is a history buff in a local town that is almost adjoined to where the installation is. It’s been that way for well over one and a half centuries. It turns out the commander goes to this off-based MAGA church. It’s a Christian nationalis

t Church, very misogynistic, and falls right in line with everything with MAGA. This buddy is a history buff.
The commander brought him in to give a history presentation to the assembled troops that were there for some other command reason. They talked about the history of the installation, which goes back to the mid-19th century. When it got to the late 1860s and 1870s, the commander’s hand-picked history expert indicated that the job of the installation at that time was not nuclear. There were no nuclear weapons there, as there are now. It was to domesticate the hostile Sioux Nation, S-I-O-U-X, and to bring them to the joys of Christianity, the grace of Christianity.

Now, I want you to think about how offensive that would be, particularly if you’re a member of the Sioux Nation, you’re an officer, you’re attending there, and you went to a military academy because that’s our client. He had to sit there, domesticate the hostile Sioux Nation, and bring them to the grace of Jesus Christ. That was on the PowerPoint. If that doesn’t bother you, then turn the damn thing off. Get the fuck out of here. I don’t want to see you if you don’t understand. I’m not running for election. I’m not looking for your vote. That’s not the purpose of me deciding to put valuable time into this interview with Talia on theAnalysis.

So our client came to us because he did complain to the commander. The commander told him, “Look, this sounds to me like you don’t like history.” It sounds a little bit like critical race theory. I guess you don’t like the fact that perhaps it was the fact that you are Native American that helped you get into the military academy that he went to. Do you people understand how fucking offensive that is? Do I need to babble more to explain that? So we are going to engage on this, I can assure you.

On top of this, there’s an actual instruction in this particular branch of the military that talks right to this very point. It doesn’t make a difference. They’ll violate all of these directives, instructions, and regulations anyway. But you can imagine if you’re a member of the Sioux Nation and a graduate of one of our nation’s three major military academies, and you have a specific nuclear weapon responsibility, and you’re getting a history lesson during a commander’s call from the commander’s hand-picked historian who goes to his MAGA Evangelical Christian nationalist Church off base. There you see it in the late 1860s and 1870s, the various wars against the Sioux Nation, the hostile Sioux Nation. We needed to domesticate them. You know, like you domesticate wolves or wild dogs or feral cats and bring them to the grace of Jesus Christ. There was nothing more this officer could do. He came to us. There are others that are now supporting him, and we will now roll in on this, and we’re going to win it. We win about 98% of the time. Most of our clients do not want us to talk about this. They don’t want to give their names or whatever. They fear reprisal and retribution.

Project 2025 supports this commander in saying, well, this sounds like you don’t like basic history. The commander even said something that’s true. He said, “You know when MacArthur took over command of Japan after we dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said, “What I need are 10,000 Christian missionaries and one million New Testaments.” MacArthur did say that. This commander tried to tie it right in there, historically. Now, if you think MacArthur was right, then you’ve got another thing coming.

Talia Baroncelli
There’s a lot in Project 2025 that illustrates this militaristic worldview that the authors have. They want to get rid of all mention of climate change in federal documents. They don’t support any nondiscrimination, so they would go against Supreme Court decisions on nondiscrimination, such as Bostock v. Clayton, which ensures that there’s no discrimination towards LGBTQ people in the military, but a lot of other things.

As you mentioned, they’re against social justice and against diversity. There’s an argument to be made, from the left at least, that diversity and inclusion do have some negative sides to it if you’re applying diversity and inclusion in a manner that is not actually trying to change material conditions. If you’re trying to get people of color or people of different genders on a corporate board, yes, that might reflect diversity within society. But if you don’t have policies that redistribute wealth or make things more equitable for people or ensure that people have access to health care and that sort of thing, then it’s very vacuous. Then you have the CIA saying, “Oh, well, we have people of color in the military dropping bombs on Afghanistan or whatever.” That is not something necessarily to get behind. However, the way that they’re attacking it is the people who wrote Project 2025 perceive diversity and inclusion as a threat to their worldview in a way.

Mikey Weinstein
Well, you’re completely right, Talia. It is a threat because the concept of suddenly having to share your toys with other people that you’ve never shared before translates to oppression to those who’ve always had the privilege of being able to play with their toys alone and not sharing them.

Remember, Project 2025 wants to get rid of the Department of Education. That by itself is astonishing, let alone the National Weather Service. He had Noah and a whole bunch of other people. It is a MAGA wet dream to turn this country into the hellscape of Gilead. It’s as simple as that. The purpose of this interview is not to sit down and start at page one; let’s go through that. Page 920, four months from now. This is real, and we’ve known it is real.

I lived under this concept from the Heritage Foundation. I didn’t really fully understand it during my three years in the Reagan administration, but I saw it. I could feel it. I could see the floodgates opening when I was there, and it was of great and grave concern even then over 40 years ago. But at the same time, now it’s not as if they’re trying to hide it. They do try to put a little bit of lipstick on the pig by not calling it Project 2025. It’s Agenda 47 since the next president will be the 47th president. It is a clear and present danger. It is a twisted, disgusting, putrescent, odious perversion of our U.S. Constitution.

We actually have a Constitution. Other countries don’t. Israel has no Constitution as an example, but we do here. It’s bad enough when you see Christian nationalism, as we’ve discussed, Talia, in other parts of the government, or locally, even, with the police department, the sewage workers, the firefighters, in public schools and legislatures, but where you see all of the nuclear weapons, the drones, the tactical weapons, the laser-guided weapons, that’s the U.S. military. It isn’t, again, a mere problem issue or a challenge. It’s a national security threat, not just to this country but to the world. Much worse than what we’re seeing from the Taliban or Al Qaeda or anything else like ISIS, and this has to be fixed here.

By order of magnitude, keep in mind that there are about two million civil servants. We haven’t even talked about Schedule F yet.

Talia Baroncelli
Yeah, I wanted to get to that.

Mikey Weinstein
This is a concept that the federal government has about two million civil servants in it. Prior to the concept of Project 2025 and Schedule F, which Project 2025 creates, there are 4,000 political appointees that are loyalists to Trump. Under this new procedure with [Project] 2025, there’d be 50,000 Schedule F loyalists. They would change the job descriptions of many of the merit-based career civil servants to excise them out of the military. So this would essentially lubricate, as opposed to granulate the process to implement all of these mind-rippingly, hideous, far-right, white supremacist, Christian supremacist, male supremacist, and heterosexual supremacist positions.

Again, I’m not going to try to take you through an entire personnel concept of how you handle HR, but that’s a tremendous amount. I was a political appointee when I left my job as a Career Air Force Officer I was still at the White House. One day, I went from being a captain to being a political appointee in a very senior position. It’s a nice cushy job, but you also serve at the pleasure of the president, which means that if you transform a bunch of these key positions in the military, rather in the government, that for years have been career civil servants, suddenly into the Schedule F, that means the president can fire them by clicking his finger there and put his loyalists.

Talia Baroncelli
Earlier, you said excise them from the military, but I think you meant excise them from the government in general. So also excise them from different governmental departments. 

Mikey Weinstein
Yes, but remember, we have a military that is subservient to civilians. Although we have a Chief of Staff in the Army, there’s an Army Secretary. Although we have a Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Allvin, there is an Air Force Secretary, Frank Kendall. Randy George is the Chief of Staff of the Army. Christine Wormuth is the Secretary of the Army. In the Navy is Carlos Del Toro. He’s the Civilian Secretary. The Chief of Naval Operations is a career, obviously a military person. But these people in the military are all political appointees. They would be Schedule F.

One of the things Schedule F tries to do is to massively cut the amount of admirals and generals known as flag officers that we have. But why do you think they would do that? Because Trump and MAGA don’t like senior officers standing in the way of their Christian nationalist agenda. They didn’t know what to do in 2016. They had things pretty much together in 2020. But oh, my gosh, they lost the election, the largest and most secure election in American history, the so-called “stolen election.” They made it clear this time that if they lost this election, it was rigged and stolen. If they win, that’s fine. But the only way that it will be a fair election is if they win.

If you can’t understand, again, how perverted and wrong, illicit, illegal, base, evil, and vial this is, turn off the [inaudible 00:30:23] and go back and turn on Fox or Breitbart or Newsmax or One America News because you’re wasting your time other than for opposition research.

We know what it feels like to be targeted. We got targeted a year ago, last June, in 2023, by MAGA, members of the House of Representatives, when they tried to amend the largest part of the federal budget, Talia. You know this, the National Defense Authorization Act, by, get this, making it a felony under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for a sailor, soldier, Marine, Airman, or Guardian, that’s what they call them in Space Force, to reach out to us for help. It took us six months working on the census side to get that taken out before Biden signed it in December. We wear that as a red hat.

Talia Baroncelli
King of like making it illegal for someone who’s maybe a victim of police violence to go to the ACLU and to litigate their rights there.

Mikey Weinstein
Yes. Perfect analogy. If you go to the ACLU, then that’s a felony. We understand what the stakes are here. We understand what it feels like to wear a [inaudible 00:31:21]. We get many, many threats on an almost hourly basis. That’s why we live with bodyguards, attack-trained, elite-level, protection German shepherds, a close relationship with law enforcement, a lot of cameras, a lot of guns, and other countermeasures. It is hard to do this. We understand why our clients are afraid of revenge, retaliation, and retribution. That’s what we’re here for.

That officer who called in today, who is a member of the Sioux Nation, is going to get our full support, which we often refer to as AARP. In America, you say that usually stands for the American Association of Retired Persons. But here, it stands for anonymity, action, results, and protection because we understand what it feels like to be retaliated against.
If Project 2025 is implemented, it will be the end of any semblance of democracy in this country, and it will involve the rapid birth, by rapid, I mean, immediate, instantaneous emergence of Gilead, filled to the brim with nuclear weapons.

Talia Baroncelli
I wanted to ask you a bit more about Trump’s connections to the Heritage Foundation because we already addressed the fact that Trump said that he has nothing to do with Project 2025 and that he doesn’t even know what the Heritage Foundation is. But, of course, numerous officials from his administration are involved in Project 2025. There was a report by Media Matters that showed that in his presidency from 2016 to 2020, over 64% of the policies he adopted were actually recommended by the Heritage Foundation. There’s a clear link there.

Kevin Roberts, who we just spoke about, his book on Project 2025; the forward to it was written by J.D. Vance, who is Trump’s VP nominee. So why do you think Kevin Roberts is delaying the publication of his book? Is it because there’s just so much coming out now that could potentially maybe make things more difficult for Trump in terms of how absolutely absurd some of their agenda is?

We also saw some of the leaked videos. ProPublica published a bunch of leaked training videos from Project 2025 showing how they train people who would actually potentially join the rank, so to speak, or would be hired into the government if other career civil servants are fired. A lot of the things they’re speaking about there, going against reproductive rights, eradicating any language around climate change or a climate agenda, that sort of thing, do you think that’s why he’s delayed the publication of his book?

Mikey Weinstein
I can’t go into Kevin Robert’s head. I think all of those are plausible. I bet that many of us do remember another piece of shit man by the name of Stephen Miller, who looks every bit the part of a Nazi, going back to the 1930s and ’40s. He was an integral part of Project 2025. He was one of the closest confidants to Trump. He’s Jewish himself, or at least he claims to be. From what I understand, he’s been excommunicated and estranged from certain members of his family. I don’t know for sure. It’s my opinion that he’s a horrible human being. I don’t know what’s in his head either. But I can tell you that if Trump realized he needed to put distance between himself and that, it was like, I got caught with the goods.

Remember, Trump is a sociopathic, narcissistic, pathological liar. He’s a coward. The top 100 things on his agenda are not what you see in Project 2025. They are all what is best for Donald J. Trump. I’m not going to be telling people because we can’t, as a 501(C)(3), who to vote for. That isn’t the point. We’re here to discuss Project 2025, where it came from, what it means, and where it came from. It’s here now, what it may look like, again, in this dystopian hellscape of what might be left of our country if it gets in there.

More particularly, if MAGA takes both Houses of Congress, they’ve already got the Supreme Court; it’s “Katie, bar the door!” There would be no ability to really fight back against this using the levers that we currently have in place in a democracy. This is an ugly, ugly turn, and I hope it’s not too late for people to understand it.

The average American, when you start saying Project 2025, their eyes begin to glaze over. What do you mean? What’s the real problem? It’s just like if you watch a video anywhere, it better not be more than one or two minutes because if someone sees seven minutes and 14 seconds, they’re not going to touch it. A news article better not be more than about three or four paragraphs, even that’s pushing it because in our bite-size structure of getting news, it’s got to be quick, easy, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Even this interview, I’m hoping most people will watch it. This is not a two-minute. You can’t talk about this in one minute or two minutes. But essentially, those who want to sit down and take a good, careful look at this, I don’t know how many people watching this interview are on the fence about this and would push one way or the other. If you’re not already clearly aware of what’s happening in this country, if you understand the essence of Project 2025, it’ll either delight you or scare the motherfucking shit out of you. If it’s the latter, then you should get off your ass and do something. Maybe you can do something besides vote. Maybe you can do something to help in your community. Maybe you can support organizations that are trying to prevent this from happening. Whatever you could do to help. We help many military females who are in trouble and are stationed in a red state where they do not have any abortion rights to get to blue states. It makes me sad.

We’ve been doing this for, hell, 21 years now. It started with Mel Gibson when his wonderful movie, The Passion of the Christ, came out on February 4, 2004. When I saw my own children at the academy, I had three of them there at the time, and other people were going through at the Air Force Academy, from the push from their command structure, both cadet and officer command structure, to go see this film. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but it’s pretty much a snuff film for Jesus. It was Mel Gibson’s, if you’ve seen him in Braveheart, he’s real good when it comes to blood and guts, or his movie Apocalypto. I like some of his movies. I didn’t like this one too much. When you make this part of the mandate for our U.S. military, you’ve put a dagger right next to the throat of democracy. Small puncture and move it either way and it’s over. You’ll bleed out. We’re not going to let it bleed out. That’s why we’re going to fight.

I’m a civil rights activist. I’ve got a team. We have others that are out there. It’s through the good graces of entities like theAnalysis and doing this interview that we could try to meaningfully alter the minds of some people to get off their asses and do something. Take some action to stop this evil because if you care about anything, whether it’s just dogs, squirrels, your grandkids, your children, or your neighborhood, you need to think about what’s going to happen to this country. Go to Hulu if you don’t want to read the book The Handmaid’s Tale. There are many seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale. Take a look and see if you want that to be the future of this country because it’s this far away. I think we’re 84 days when we do this interview, maybe 86 days away from the election.

Talia Baroncelli
Right. By speaking about Project 2025, we’re in no way trying to paper over the institutional failures of the current Biden administration and of past Democratic Party policies. There were some modest gains made under Biden when he implemented the Inflation Reduction Act, some positive things when it came to decarbonization, but obviously not nearly enough to prevent big oil and gas from enhanced oil recovery and from getting more carbon out of the ground, essentially.

What Project 2025 is envisioning is a complete eradication and elimination of safeguards of standards when it comes to the climate. One example is illustrated in a video which was published by ProPublica. It was a private training video. This particular video showcased Bethany Kozma, who used to be a Deputy Chief of Staff at USAID under the Trump administration and Katie Sullivan. In this particular video, they were explaining what a government employee should advocate under Project 2025’s rubric. Then Bethany Kozma was saying “When I think of climate change, I think of population control, don’t you?” A bit further on in minute 33, she goes on to say, “Remember, our intelligence community identified climate change as the number one threat to America. So even if you do not work at the Department of Energy, no matter where you work, because of the Biden administration’s executive orders and policy priorities, you will have to look for climate change language and get rid of it.” This shows the approach that they have when it comes to the climate.

Mikey Weinstein
There’s a saying in Washington, D.C., it’s a little sexist. It says, “Under Republicans, man exploits man. But under Democrats, it’s just the opposite.” Can you guys get that? We had all kinds of problems, even under Obama’s eight years that we’re there. Even during the Biden administration, we were not seeing the action that we expected to see. We are still fighting to get blatantly Christian Bibles off of the POW/MIA tables in many Veterans Administration Medical Hospital, medical centers (I’m a veteran) because we can’t get people like Tanya Bradsher, who’s the deputy secretary of the VA, to get off of her ass to tell them to take that Bible or put the Satanic Bible there, or put some atheist book there. Why do you get to claim something in the POW/MIA table that’s exclusively Christian? It’s a small example.

What you’re saying is correct. However, we’re not here to tell you who to vote for. We’re not going to talk about the virtues of one entity over another. We’re trying to leave it out on the table for you to understand that right now there is a massive asteroid heading towards our democracy. If you’ve seen the movie Deep Impact or Armageddon, and that is this gigantic Project 2025, associated with those who want to implement it and exactly how they’re going to do it. It’s not that complex. It is pretty simple. We’re going to stop it. We can’t let them take over, and they’re this far away.

Talia Baroncelli
Mikey Weinstein, it’s been great speaking to you. Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, thanks so much for joining us.

Mikey Weinstein
Thank you, Talia, until the next time. Appreciate everything that you all do, you and Paul, at theAnalysis. Thank you, guys. Thank you, everybody, for watching.

Talia Baroncelli
Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. If you’d like to support us, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and get onto our mailing list. That way, you’re always up to date every time a new episode is published. See you next time.