Project 2025, in 2025.

I never want to hear anyone on the Left complain about how conservatives cling to “debunked” ideas.  Democrats are still using Project 2025 as a political boogeyman. There are only two problems.

1. Project 2025 was never a policy source for this administration. It was a third-party project, hoping Trump would take their recommendations.  A lot of the ideas in it (eg. abolishing the Department of Education) are so widespread in conservative circles that it would be amazing if there weren’t overlap between Trump’s agenda and the Project 2025 recommendations, but that’s an argument in the “You know who else wore clean underwear? HITLER!!!” category.”
2. Since none of them have read it (or at least they know that the audience for their memes hasn’t read it), they feel free to lie with impunity. “Handmaid costumes are mandated in Project 2025!”

I just saw the following on X, purporting to show how Project 2025 is happening right before our eyes, and somehow, it turned into my Memorial Day project.

First, let’s define some terms. These page numbers aren’t from “Project 2025, ” because Project 2025 isn’t a text. It’s an initiative by the Heritage Foundation that produced Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Project, a book-length text that does have page numbers. (It’s the ninth edition of Mandate for Leadership, as The Heritage Foundation has been producing a comparable text for elections dating back to Reagan.) The free PDF is right here.

let’s look at all the ones that don’t have a page number. Only one says “didn’t find a reference” — my guess is that the meme-maker realized that there were so many of these bullet points not present in Mandate For Leadership that it would invalidate his meme if he marked all of them, so he just left them blank.

A couple of notes on his other non-references:

Ban Muslims from entering the country – inferred from speeches

So what you’re saying is that, again, you couldn’t find it in Mandate for Leadership, or even as a Trump administration policy. You just want to believe it.

Continue to pack the Supreme Court, and lower courts with right-wing judges – literally happening rn

Um. I thought the point of this was to show specific policies as part of Project 2025. This note makes no sense, because it’s also not “literally happening rn.” What you’re seeing is a President appointing Judges, which is part of his duties (Article II, Section 2). The fact that his nominees match his political outlook is about the most unremarkable thing in the world. “Packing” is an entirely different thing, and it’s what your guys always look at.

So let’s just mark off all of the claims without page numbers and get an idea of what we’re looking at:

 

Different picture, huh?

Now let’s look at the references claims. You can follow along, as Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Project is a free PDF.

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Complete ban on abortions without exceptions -pg 449-503

That’s the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services; there are of course references to abortion to be found, but it’s not like fifty-plus pages talk about abortion. (And Trump has made clear that his policy is to leave it to the states and keep the federal government out of it.) But of course, the meme-maker counted on his audience simply accepting his bullet point instead of reading all of those pages for themselves.

So what does it say in that chapter? (Note: This is the Big Dog — most other bullet points reference a particular page, not a whole chapter.)

Page 450, discussing overarching goals for HHS:

Goal #1: Protecting Life, Conscience, and Bodily Integrity. The Secretary should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.

From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.

Pages 454-456, discussing the CDC:

Respect for Life and Conscience. The CDC should eliminate programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation. It should ensure that it is not promoting abortion as health care. It should fund studies into the risks and complications of abortion and ensure that it corrects and does not promote misinformation regarding the comparative health and psychological benefits of childbirth versus the health and psychological risks of intentionally taking a human life through abortion.

The CDC oversaw and funded the development and testing of the COVID-19 vaccines with aborted fetal cell lines, insensitive to the consciences of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people who objected to taking a vaccine with such a link to abortion. As evidenced by litigation across the country, it is likely that thousands were fired unjustly because of the exercise of their consciences or faith on this question, which could have been avoided with a modicum of concern for this issue from CDC. There is never any justification for ending a child’s life as part of research, and the research benefits from splicing or growing aborted fetal cells and aborted baby body parts can easily be provided by alternative sources. All such research should be prohibited as a matter of law and policy.

CDC should update its public messaging about the unsurpassed effectiveness of modern fertility awareness–based methods (FABMs) of family planning and stop publishing communications that conflate such methods with the long-eclipsed “rhythm” or “calendar” methods. CDC should fund studies exploring the evidence-based methods used in cutting-edge fertility awareness.

Data Collection. The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate. CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all. Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.

Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion. Moreover, abortion should be clearly defined as only those procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life. Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion.

Comparisons between live births and abortion should be tracked across various demographic indicators to assess whether certain populations are targeted by abortion providers and whether better prenatal physical, mental, and social care improves infant outcomes and decreases abortion rates, especially among those who are most vulnerable.

The Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 20239 would amend title XIX of the Social Security Act and Public Health Service Act to improve the CDC’s abortion reporting mechanisms by requiring states, as a condition of federal Medicaid payments for family planning services, to report streamlined variables in a timely manner.

Pages 457-459, discussing the FDA:

Abortion Pills. Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world. The rate of chemical abortion in the U.S. has increased by more than 150 percent in the past decade; more than half of annual abortions in the U.S. are chemical rather than surgical.

The abortion pill regimen is typically a two-part process. The first pill, mifepristone, causes the death of the unborn child by cutting off the hormone progesterone, which is required to sustain a pregnancy. The second pill, misoprostol, causes contractions to induce a delivery of the dead child and uterine contents, usually into a toilet at home. The abortion-pill regimen is currently approved for up to 70 days (10 weeks) into pregnancy and before Biden was subject to a heightened safety restriction called a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) that requires an in-person visit with a physician who can check for dangerous contraindications such as ectopic pregnancies and can advise the mother seeking an abortion of the risks of chemical abortion, including hemorrhaging, and what to do in such circumstances. Chemical abortion has been found to have a complication rate four times higher than that of surgical abortion.

Since its approval more than 20 years ago, mifepristone has been associated with 26 deaths of pregnant mothers, over a thousand hospitalizations, and thousands more adverse events, but that number does not account for all complications. Of course, this does not count the hundreds of thousands to millions of babies whose lives have been unjustly taken through chemical abortion. FDA should therefore:

• Reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start. The FDA failed to abide by its legal obligations to protect the health, safety, and welfare of girls and women. It never studied the safety of the drugs under the labeled conditions of use, ignored the potential impacts of the hormone-blocking regimen on the developing bodies of adolescent girls, disregarded the substantial evidence that chemical abortion drugs cause more complications than surgical abortions, and eliminated necessary safeguards for pregnant girls and women who undergo this dangerous drug regimen. Furthermore, at no point in the past two decades has the FDA ever acknowledged or addressed federal laws that prohibit the distribution of abortion drugs by postal mail; to the contrary, the FDA has permitted and actively encouraged such activity.

Now that the Supreme Court has acknowledged that the Constitution contains no right to an abortion, the FDA is ethically and legally obliged to revisit and withdraw its initial approval, which was premised on pregnancy being an “illness” and abortion being “therapeutically” effective at treating this “illness.” The FDA is statutorily charged with guaranteeing the safety and efficacy of drugs and therefore should withdraw this drug that is proven to be dangerous to women and by definition fatally unsafe for
unborn children.

As an interim step, the FDA should immediately restore the REMS by removing the in-person dispensing requirement to eliminate dangerous tele-abortion and abortion-by-mail distribution.

Mail-Order Abortions. Allowing mail-order abortions is a gift to the abortion industry that allows it to expand far beyond brick-and-mortar clinics and into pro-life states that are trying to protect women, girls, and unborn children from abortion. The FDA should therefore:

• Reinstate earlier safety protocols for Mifeprex that were mostly eliminated in 2016 and apply these protocols to any generic version of mifepristone. A bare-minimum policy of limiting abortion pills to the pre-2016 policy of 49 days gestation, returning to the pre-2021 in-person dispensing requirement, and returning to requiring prescribers to report all serious adverse events, not just deaths, to the drug sponsor would increase women’s health and safety.
• Address weaknesses in the current FAERS (FDA Adverse Events Reporting System). The Administration and policymakers should ensure that health care workers, particularly those in hospitals and emergency rooms, report abortion pill complications. Women who experience complications from abortion pills typically go to an emergency room, not to the abortion pill prescriber, so putting the onus of reporting on the prescriber who typically has no idea that a complication has occurred means that the FAERS is seriously undercounting adverse events. Submitting an adverse event to the database should be a quick and efficient process for busy health care practitioners. Currently, providers report that the process is difficult and convoluted.
• Implement a policy of transparency about inspections of the abortion pill’s sponsors, Danco and GenBioPro, as well as facilities that manufacture the pills. The FDA should respond to congressional requests and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about inspections, compliance, and post-marketing safety in a timely manner.
• Stop promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs.

Pages 460-461:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the world’s largest biomedical research agency and is made up of 27 different components called Institutes and Centers. Despite its popular image as a benign science agency, NIH was responsible for paying for research in aborted baby body parts, human animal chimera experiments, and gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.

Bioethics Reform. Research using fetal tissue obtained from elective abortions is immoral and obsolete. Research using human embryonic stem cells also involves the destruction of human life and should not be subsidized with taxpayer dollars. Good science and life-affirming, ethical research are not mutually exclusive. In fact, ethically derived sources such as discarded surgical tissue and adult stem cells (made pluripotent), not tissue obtained from elective abortions, have contributed the most successful treatments for a variety of ailments.

Congress authorized HHS to choose not to fund extramural abortion-derived fetal tissue research that fails ethics advisory board review, and in 2019, the Trump Administration’s HHS chose that course. Subsequently, however, the Biden Administration restored unrestricted funding of abortion-derived fetal tissue research. HHS should:

• Promptly restore the ethics advisory committee to oversee abortion-derived fetal tissue research, and Congress should prohibit such research altogether.
• End intramural research projects using tissue from aborted children within the NIH, which should end its human embryonic stem cell registry.
• Aggressively implement a plan to pursue and fund ethical alternative methods of research in order to ensure that abortion and embryo-destructive related research, cell lines, and other testing methods become both fully obsolete and ethically unthinkable.

Pages 471-474 :

LIFE, CONSCIENCE, AND BODILY INTEGRITY

• Prohibit abortion travel funding. Providing funding for abortions increases the number of abortions and violates the conscience and religious freedom rights of Americans who object to subsidizing the taking of life. The Hyde Amendment44 has long prohibited the use of HHS funds for elective abortions, but an August 2022 Biden executive order45 pressed the HHS Secretary to use his authority under Section 1115 demonstrations to waive certain provisions of the law in order to use taxpayer funds to achieve the Administration’s goal of helping women to travel out of state to obtain abortions. Moreover, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (DOJ OLC) issued a politicized legal opinion declaring, for the first time in the history of Hyde, that this action did not violate the Hyde Amendment and that Hyde applies only to the performance of the abortion itself in violation of the plainly broad language that Congress used.

Two of the first actions of a pro-life Administration should be for HHS to withdraw the Medicaid guidance (and any Section 1115 waivers issued thereunder) and for DOJ OLC to withdraw and disavow its interpretation of the Hyde Amendment.

• Prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds. During the 2020–2021 reporting period, Planned Parenthood performed more than 383,000 abortions.46 The national organization reported more than $133 million in excess revenue47 and more than $2.1 billion in net assets.48 During this same year, Planned Parenthood reports that its affiliates received more than $633 million in government funding and more than $579 million in private contributions.49 Planned Parenthood affiliates face accusations of waste, abuse and potential fraud with taxpayer dollars, failure to report the sexual abuse of minor girls, and allegations of profiting from the sale of organs from aborted babies.

Policymakers should end taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood and all other abortion providers and redirect funding to health centers that provide real health care for women. The bulk of federal funding for Planned Parenthood comes through the Medicaid program. HHS should take two actions to limit this funding:

1. Issue guidance reemphasizing that states are free to defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans.
2. Propose rulemaking to interpret the Medicaid statute to disqualify providers of elective abortion from the Medicaid program.

Congress should pass the Protecting Life and Taxpayers Act,50 which would accomplish the goal of defunding abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood.

CMS should resolve pending Section 1115 waivers from Idaho, South Carolina, and Tennessee, which, like Texas in January 2022, are seeking both to prohibit abortion providers from participating in state-run Medicaid programs and to work with other states to do the same. Abortion is not health care, and states should be free to devise and implement programs that prioritize qualified providers that are not entangled with the abortion industry.

Withdraw Medicaid funds for states that require abortion insurance or that discriminate in violation of the Weldon Amendment. The Weldon Amendment51 declares that no HHS funding may go to a state or local government that discriminates against pro-life health entities or insurers. In blatant violation of this law, seven states require abortion coverage in private health insurance plans, and HHS continues to fund those states. HHS under President Trump disallowed $200 million in Medicaid funding from California because of the state’s flouting of the law, but the Biden Administration restored it.

HHS/CMS should withdraw appropriated funding, up to and including 10 percent of Medicaid funds, from states that require abortion insurance coverage. DOJ should commit to litigating the defense of those funding decisions promptly to the Supreme Court in order to maximize HHS’s ability to withdraw funds from entities that violate the Weldon Amendment.

Additionally, California has announced that it will discriminate against pharmacies that do not carry chemical abortion drugs outside of California. California’s discrimination takes the form of cutting state contracts with such pharmacies and clearly violates the Weldon Amendment. The violation should likewise face the penalties discussed above.

• Rewrite the ACA abortion separate payment regulation. Section 1303 of Obamacare requires that insurers collect a separate payment for certain abortion coverage in qualified health plans that are approved to be sold on exchanges and that they keep those separate payments in separate accounts that are used only to pay for elective abortion services. Neither the letter nor the spirit of the law was enforced under President Obama, and a Trump-era regulation sought to correct this problem. The Biden HHS rescinded this regulation to allow insurance companies once again—contrary to the law—to collect combined payments for what are clearly required to be separate payments for elective abortion coverage. “Separate” does not mean “together.”

HHS should reinstate a Trump Administration regulation and enforce what the plain text of Section 1303 requires. That regulation should be further improved by requiring CMS to ensure that consumers pay truly separate charges for abortion coverage.

• Audit Hyde Amendment compliance. HHS should undertake a full audit to determine compliance or noncompliance with the Hyde amendment and similar funding restrictions in HHS programs. This audit should include a full review of the Biden Administration’s post-Dobbs executive actions to promote abortion. It should also encompass a review of Medicaid managed care plans in pro-abortion states.

• Reverse distorted pro-abortion “interpretations” added to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA)52 prohibits hospitals that receive Medicare funds from “dumping” emergency patients who cannot pay by sending them to other hospitals. It also mandates that hospitals stabilize pregnant women and explicitly protects unborn children. Hospitals or physicians found to be in violation of the statute could lose all of their federal health funding—Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and other funds—and face civil penalties of up to nearly $120,000.

In July 2022, HHS/CMS released guidance mandating that EMTALA-covered hospitals and the physicians who work there must perform abortions, to include completing chemical abortions even when the child might still be alive. The guidance also declared that EMTALA would protect physicians and hospitals that perform abortions in violation of state law if they deem those abortions necessary to stabilize the women’s health. This novel interpretation of EMTALA is baseless. EMTALA requires no abortions, preempts no pro-life state laws, and explicitly requires stabilization of the unborn child.

HHS should rescind the guidance and end CMS and state agency investigations into cases of alleged refusals to perform abortions. DOJ should agree to eliminate existing injunctions against pro-life states, withdraw its enforcement lawsuits, and in lawsuits against CMS on the guidance agree to injunctions against CMS and withdraw appeals of injunctions.

Page 477, concerning Administration for Children and Families (ACF):

Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) and Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP). TPP is operated by the Office of Population Affairs in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health; PREP is operated by the ACF Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation. Both programs should ensure that there is better reporting of subgrantees and referral lists so that they do not promote abortion or high-risk sexual behavior among adolescents. CMS should ensure that Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) proponents receive these grants and are given every opportunity to prove their effectiveness. SRA programs, both at ACF and at OASH and both discretionary and mandatory, should be equal in funding and emphasis. Qualitative research should be conducted on both types of programs to ensure continuous improvement.

In addition, certain provisions should be employed so that these programs do not serve as advocacy tools to promote sex, promote prostitution, or provide a funnel effect for abortion facilities and school field trips to clinics, or for similar purposes. Parent involvement and parent–child communication should be encouraged and be a part of any funded project. Risk avoidance should be prioritized, and any program that submits a proposal that promotes risk rather than health should not be eligible for funding.

Site visits should be revamped to ensure adherence to these optimal health metrics, and a cost analysis of programming as compared to students served should be a metric in funding (taking into account that in certain cases, intensive programs will serve fewer students and can have more positive results). These same parameters should apply to sex education programs at ACF. Any lists with “approved curriculum” or so-called evidence-based lists should be abolished; HHS should not create a monopoly of curriculum, adding to the profit of certain publishers. Furthermore, lists created in the past have given priority to sex-promotion textbooks. HHS should create a list of criteria for evaluating the sort of curriculum that should be selected for any sex education grant programs, both at OASH and at ACF, with the aim of promoting optimal health and adhering to the legislative language of each program.

There are other references through the chapter, but they’re of a piece with these, eg. that other offices should be involved in the initiatives above.

For those of you hardy enough to read these huge blocks of text: Is there ANYTHING in there that could possibly be interpreted “Complete ban on abortions without exceptions?”  If your reading comprehension is competent, the only answer is “Hell, no.”

FALSE

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Ban contraceptives – pg 449

Page 449 does not mention contraceptives or anything related.  This is the HHS chapter; the first mention of contraceptives in the chapter is on page 483:

Restore Trump religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate (also a CMS rule). HHS should rescind, if finalized, the regulation titled “Coverage of Certain Preventive Services Under the Affordable Care Act,” proposed jointly by HHS, Treasury, and Labor.70 This rule proposes to amend Trump-era final rules regarding religious and moral exemptions and accommodations for coverage of certain preventive services under the ACA. Preventive services include contraception, and it appears the proposed rule would change the existing regulations for religious and moral exemptions to the ACA’s contraception mandate. There is no need for further rulemaking that curtails existing exemptions and accommodations.

The following paragraphs are simply more detail on the process of doing so.

There’s a big difference between “ban contraceptives” and “allow organizations with religious or moral objections to apply for exemptions to the mandate under the ACA to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees.”

FALSE

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Additional tax breaks for corporations and the 1% – pg 691

Page 691 is the introduction to the chapter on the Treasury. This simply isn’t there.  (I’ll let you go through all of the policy proposals in the entire chapter to determine if this drive-by accusation holds any merit otherwise — condensing an overarching set of economic proposals to one statement that can fit on a bumper sticker has no chance of being accurate.)

FALSE

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Elimination of unions and worker protections – pg 581

Page 581 is the introduction to the chapter on the Department of Labor and related agencies. Unions are nowhere mentioned on that page.

Obviously, though, the chapter on the Department of Labor will mention unions often.  The first substantive mention occurs on page 599:

WORKER VOICE AND COLLECTIVE BARGAINING

Non-Union Worker Voice and Representation. American workers lack a meaningful voice in today’s workplace. Between 50 percent and 60 percent of workers have less influence than they want on critical workplaces issues beyond pay and benefits. Even managers are twice as likely to say their employees have too little influence rather than too much. But America’s one-size-fits-all approach undermines worker representation. Federal labor law offers no alternatives to labor unions whose politicking and adversarial approach appeals to few, whereas most workers report that they prefer a more cooperative model run jointly with management that focuses solely on workplace issues. The next Administration should make new options available to workers and push Congress to pass labor reforms that create non-union “employee involvement organizations” as well as a mechanism for worker representation on corporate boards.

The entire chapter proceeds in this vein: Proposing alternative labor arrangements alongside of unions, union transparency and fair representation standards, etc. That would be a lot of irrelevant verbiage if the administration’s goal were simply “Elimination of unions.”

FALSE

 

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Cut Social Security – pg 691

Again, this is the introduction to the chapter on the Department of the Treasury, and as such, contains no concrete policy proposals on ANYTHING.

The only mentions of Social Security in the whole chapter is of using it as a baseline for measuring other expenditures, not in changing it in any way.

FALSE

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Cut Medicare – pg 449

Again, this is the introduction to the chapter on HHS, and doesn’t mention Medicare at all. (Are we sensing a pattern here?)

From page 463:

Medicare. Medicare should be reformed according to four goals and principles:

• Increase Medicare beneficiaries’ control of their health care. Patients are best positioned to determine the value of health care services, working with their health care providers. They also benefit from increased choice of doctors, hospitals, and insurance plans. Access to reliable information with respect to physicians, hospitals, and insurers is therefore essential.
• Reduce regulatory burdens on doctors. Doctors must be free to focus on treating patients first, not entering codes on computers, and should not be tempted to change their medical judgment based on arbitrary or illogical reimbursement incentives.
• Ensure sustainability and value for beneficiaries and taxpayers. Prices are best for patients when determined by economic value rather than political power and when they are known in advance of the receipt of services. Government’s use of non-market-based methods to determine reimbursement leads to overspending on low-value services and products and underpayment for high-value services and products, stifles beneficial innovation, and because of Medicare’s size distorts payments throughout the health care system. Intermediate entities that can manage financial risk and ensure quality of care are important in transitioning to value-based care within the Medicare program.
• Reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, including through the use of artificial intelligence for their detection.

The rest is specific regulatory proposals in service of those four goals.

I mean, yeah, if you squint, you could spin this as “cutting Medicare,” if you’re one of those moral reprobates who’s fine with equating “reduce waste, fraud and abuse” with cutting.

PARTLY TRUE, MAYBE

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End the Affordable Care Act – pg 449

Once again, this is the introduction to the chapter for HHS, and nothing on that page mentions the ACA. And oddly enough, although repealing the ACA has been on conservative wishlists ever since it was enacted, that’s not mentioned at all in this chapter — there are a few calls for legislative modification of it, and several more regulatory reforms, but nothing about repeal. Not just in this chapter, in ANY part of Mandate for Leadership.

FALSE

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Eliminate the Department of Education pg 319

Well! It’s about time that we got to something that’s actually true! Page 319 (the introduction to the chapter on the Department of Education) very clearly advocates for the elimination of the whole department, instead letting the responsibility to back to the states where it actually belongs.  Pages 319-361 cover (a) the justification for Elimination, (b) transfer of still useful programs to other departments in the event of its elimination, and (c) needed reforms if the legislative elimination of the Department isn’t enacted.

TRUE

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Use public, taxpayer money for private religious schools – pg 319

An odd complaint, as if the previous one happens, there won’t BE a federal department giving out tax money for ANY schools. (And of course, page 319 is the introduction to the chapter, not a reference to any actual policy proposals regarding religious  schools.)

Hmm… No mention of “religious  schools” in the entire chapter, or “parochial schools.”

FALSE

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Teach Christian religious beleifs [sic] in public school – pg 319

(Sigh.) Once again, the “it’s somewhere in the chapter, honest” page number.

No mention of Christian beliefs anywhere in the chapter (spelled either accurately or erroneously).

FALSE

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End civil rights and DEI protections in government – pg 545-581

Good golly, an actual encompassing page reference? Will wonders never cease? (Although page 581 is the first page of the chapter on the Department of Labor and related agencies — pages 545-579 are the entire chapter on the Department of Justice, including the endnotes. So it’s not actually helpful.)

Most of the contention apparently rests on conflating civil rights and DEI. Ain’t gonna play that game, homie.

Page 548 lists “protecting civil rights” as one of the core responsibilities of the Department (along with enforcing our immigration laws, combating domestic and international criminal enterprises, and combating foreign espionage). Doesn’t sound like they’re doing away with it.

Once again, page 552 says:

If we are to continue to have informed and civil dialogue in the United States on issues of public concern, the DOJ must enforce applicable civil rights laws in an even-handed way when citizens’ livelihoods are threatened merely because they have exercised their rights.

REALLY doesn’t sounds like they’re doing away with it.

And page 561 says has a section entitled:

Pursuing Equal Protection for All Americans by Vigorously Enforcing Applicable Federal Civil Rights Laws in Government, Education, and the Private Sector.

REALLY REALLY doesn’t sound like they’re doing away with it.

Whereas our meme maker wants to conflate civil rights and DEI, Mandate for Leadership separates them quite completely. Also from page 561:

Even though numerous federal laws prohibit discrimination based on notable immutable characteristics such as race and sex,73 the Biden Administration—
through the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and other federal entities—has enshrined affirmative discrimination in all aspects of its operations under the guise of “equity.” Federal agencies and their components have established so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices that have become the vehicles for this unlawful discrimination, and all departments and agencies have created “equity” plans to carry out these invidious schemes.

You can have civil rights, or you can have DEI. You literally cannot have both. Thus, page 562:

Ensure that the DOJ spearheads an initiative demonstrating the federal government’s commitment to nondiscrimination. The department should also lead a whole-of-government recommitment to nondiscrimination and should be working with all other federal agencies, boards, and commissions to ensure that they are both complying with constitutional and legal requirements and using their authorities and funding to prevent discrimination not only internally, but also at the state, local, and private-sector levels. This will require particularly close coordination with several key agencies, including such obvious candidates as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; the Departments of Defense, Education, and Housing and Urban Development; and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It will also require enforcing contractual requirements that prohibit discrimination on federal contractors.

Reorganize and refocus the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to serve as the vanguard for this return to lawfulness. The Attorney General and other DOJ political leadership should provide the resources and moral support needed for these efforts. The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements.

PARTLY TRUE (but phrased falsely)

 

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Ban African American and gender studies at all levels of education – pg 319

Our meme-maker has gotten to the point of simply “making crap up” now, knowing that anyone who’s read this far on his list is obviously willing to swallow any camel put out there.

It’s easily disproved. There’s no mention of African American studies or gender studies anywhere in Mandate for Leadership.

FALSE

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Ending climate protections – pg 417

You all know how this works by now; page 417 is the introduction to the the chapter on the EPA, not any particular policy proposal.

But since “climate” is a pretty broad topic, the introduction actually becomes germane.

MISSION STATEMENT

Creating a better environmental tomorrow with clean air, safe water, healthy soil, and thriving communities.

A conservative U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will take a more supportive role toward local and state efforts, building them up so that they may lead in a meaningful fashion. This will include the sharing of federal resources and agency expertise. Creating environmental standards from the ground up is consistent with the concept of cooperative federalism embedded within many of the agency’s authorizing statutes and will create earnest relationships among local officials and regulated stakeholders. This in turn will promote a culture of compliance.

A conservative EPA will track success by measured progress as opposed to the current perpetual process and will convey this progress to the public in clear, concise terms. True transparency will be a defining characteristic of a conservative EPA. This will be reflected in all agency work, including the establishment of opensource science, to build not only transparency and awareness among the public, but also trust.

The challenge of creating a conservative EPA will be to balance justified skepticism toward an agency that has long been amenable to being coopted by the Left for political ends against the need to implement the agency’s true function: protecting public health and the environment in cooperation with states. Further, the EPA needs to be realigned away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator.

I guess if you define “climate protections” as “anything Her Lady Greta smiles upon,” then you’re probably going to be disappointed in the policy proposals in this chapter.

PARTLY TRUE, MAYBE

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Increase Arctic drilling – pg 363

Page 363 is the introduction to the chapter on the Department of Energy and related commissions, so it doesn’t contain any specific policy proposals. (I know, you’re  surprised.)

But yeah, this chapter does indeed include proposals to increase energy production in the Arctic, and unashamedly so.

TRUE

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Deregulate big business and the oil industry – pg 363

As page 363 is the first page on the chapter on the Department of Energy, it appears our meme-maker has bizarrely conflated all big business with the oil industry.

But yes, overall, the Trump administration is looking to reduce ALL regulation in ALL sectors — not eliminate (“deregulate”), but reduce it. It’s what conservatives do.

PARTLY TRUE

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End marriage equality – pg 545-581

You think the entire chapter on the Department of Justice is all about gay marriage? Get over yourself.

Actually, the chapter makes no reference to marriage of any sort. Nada. Zip.

FALSE

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Defund the FBI and Homeland Security – pg 133

Page 133 is the introduction to the chapter on the Department of Homeland Security, and yes, the first sentence is:

Our primary recommendation is that the President pursue legislation to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

There’s then a long discussion of moving constituent parts of it to other departments so that nothing essential about a redundant agency is lost.

But as this is a chapter solely about the DHS, one wouldn’t expect to find calls to defund the FBI, would one? And there’s not.

PARTLY TRUE

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Use the military to break up domestic protests – pg 133

Psst. Still the chapter on DHS.  Not gonna be a lot of military-specific proposals there. And there aren’t. (There’s a passing reference to Border Patrol being able to call upon military backup for border security; that’s not even remotely the same.)

FALSE

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Mass deportation of immigrants and incarceration in “camps” – pg 133

We’re still ascribing things to the chapter on DHS? Whatever. Any time you see someone claim that conservatives want to deport “immigrants” without any distinction between (a) legally present immigrants and (b) illegally present or criminal immigrants, you know you’re not talking to someone who wants to argue in good faith.

I mean, if you see something that says “enforce current immigration law” and say that that really means to deport all immigrants, you’re obviously not interested in accuracy or truth.

The “camps” claim is even easier to check; the quotation marks around it denote that it’s something specifically from the text. Let’s search… Campaign, W. Glenn Campbell (not the singer), campus, camp counselor… Aha! A reference to camps!

Oh wait, it’s in the chapter on the Agency for International Development, talking about humanitarian aid:

• In Burma, U.S. aid finances all of the food and medical care for hundreds of thousands of persecuted Rohingya that the military regime forces to live in open-air concentration camps.

• In northern Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis—targeted for genocidal extermination by ISIS—remain in miserable camps unable to return home because of the Iraqi government’s refusal to clear out Iran-backed militias occupying their homeland.

Other than that, no, sorry.

MOSTLY FALSE

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End birth right citizenship – pg 133

Odd that this is also ascribed to the chapter on DHS. In fact, despite this being a central aim of the Trump administration, it’s nowhere to be found in Mandate for Citizenship.

FALSE

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Eliminates [sic] federal agencies like the FDA, EPA, NOAA and more – pg 363-417

That’s the entire chapter on the Department of Energy and related commissions. Let’s take a look:

No mention of the FDA in the chapter, and no call for the elimination of the FDA anywhere in the book.

No mention of the EPA in this chapter, and no call for the elimination of the EPA even in the entire chapter on the EPA.

No mention of the NOAA in this chapter. On page 664, in the chapter on the Department of Commerce, we find this:

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.

(Did you even know that’s what “NOAA” stood for? I’m wondering how many die-hard NOAA activists there are.)

MOSTLY FALSE

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Shall we look at our score tally?

Now, the big question: Why did I spend a good chunk of my Memorial Day fact-checking a stupid infographic meant for stupid people who will never read this far or double-check anything that appears to confirm their conviction of Orange Man Bad?

To let you know, Person Who Read This Far. To confirm to you: They lie. Even when they don’t have to, they do. Lies are their oxygen. Lies are their chocolate. They love to luxuriate in it, slather it all over their bodies, feel it squishing between their toes.

And as their lies get harder and harder to maintain in the face of impossible-to-ignore facts, they will cling to them more desperately. More violently.

Some — most, I’d hope — will come out the other side ravaged but free of the mind virus.

Some few will take it to their graves, and if they can take others to their graves with them, they’ll think they’ve done the world a service.

Falsehood is never the side of the angels. Live not by lies.