Republican presidential candidate J.D. Vance is "weird", but he's also got a taste for violent imagery—"load the muskets," he writes—as can be read in his foreword to the forthcoming Project 2025 book. The New Republic acquired and published the text of it from an advance readers' galley.
Vance's foreword is also, notably, a call for revolution. "The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems," he writes. "We are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach." That is where the muskets come in:
"As Kevin Roberts writes, "It's fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you've got to circle the wagons and load the muskets."
"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.
The Gilead-esque project's general association with presidential nominee Donald Trump (and its specific association with Vance) has made it too great a liability to their campaign; yesterday, it claimed to have ended its policy operations to avoid further associating them with its Christian Nationalist objectives.
But TNR reports that it has not in fact dissolved itself, as other media (and Trump himself) suggest.
"Reports of Project 2025's demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you," the Trump campaign said in a statement. But it's not clear that Project 2025 itself is ending, as Roberts reportedly is taking over its operations.(The Heritage Foundation, the Trump campaign, and HarperCollins did not respond to multiple requests for comment before publication.)
"Weird"—the buzzword of the hour—captures the strangeness of Project 2025, but hardly captures its extremism: its strict controls on overtime pay is a mundanely instructive example of how absurdly totalitarian it gets.
You should read the foreword, though. The first paragraph tries to evoke the life of Project 2025 book author Kevin Roberts with a quote from John Travolta's hitman character from Pulp Fiction. I shalln't say the word again, but it is certainly a great illustration of why this is the bad kind and not the good kind represented by, say, Al Yankovich.
