"What is Project 2025, anyway?" the well-meaning voter asked the big-name mainstream media journalist.
"That's the beauty of Project 2025," the big-name journalist said in a rare moment of candor. "It can be anything we need it to be. Really, it's just a wish list of policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation, the kind of thing Heritage and every other think tank puts out every four years. But nobody ever reads them so it's really easy for us big-name media people to make them out to be whatever we need them to be."
The well-meaning voter looked perplexed. "I don't get it."
"Project 2025 is a conservative platform and my network — hell, all the networks — have spent decades telling people that conservatism, especially social conservatism, means bringing back slavery and turning women into real-life 'Handmaid's Tale' baby factories. So it didn't take any work at all to take a pretty meaningless phrase like 'Project 2025' and make it sound like Freddy Krueger with a Bible in one hand and a whip in the other."
"What if people Google it?"
The big-name journalist laughed. "They're on the same team we're on. Why do you think the White House programmed their brain-dead moron to shout, 'Google Project 2025!' every nine minutes?"
"I still don't see what good it does," the well-meaning voter said.
"That's the beauty of it, why we spend so many years laying all this groundwork. We tell you that Trump is crazy and evil. We tell you that Project 2025 is evil and crazy. And then we tie the two together. Heritage is conservative. Trump is conservative. Elect Trump and he'll institute Project 2025."
"Didn't Trump disavow the whole thing?"
"You bet he did," the big-name journalist admitted. "The Heritage guy in charge of the project even resigned after that. Good riddance, as far as I'm concerned — just another Republican scalp, and I didn't even need to get my tomahawk. But we didn't give those stories much coverage. And when we did, we made you think the Republicans were in chaos, infighting, all that stuff."
The big-name journalist had gotten himself so excited that he couldn't stop talking. "I've got some friends at the Washington Post — Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, Hannah Knowles. Dedicated players. They just ran another hit piece this week. You should see the headline. 'Trump took a private flight with Project 2025 leader in 2022.'"
"That's it?" the well-meaning voter asked. "Two big names on the right shared a flight and that's supposed to make me believe all that Handmaid stuff?"
"Yeah, you're right, the Washington Post has lost its touch. And, honestly, the Project 2025 thing hasn't done much for us. But we still have a couple of advantages. One is that we get to throw spaghetti up against the wall and see what sticks. The other is that we never, ever run out of spaghetti."
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