Project 2025: Democrats’ ‘Big Lie’ of 2024

I must be a rotten conservative. I had not even heard of Project 2025 until June 6 of this year, when it was written on a scrap of paper and presented as a question to the panel at a Pints and Politics event featuring your beautiful Gazette opinion staff. (Todd Dorman was also there.)

Within a month, it was all Democrats could talk about — Project 2025, the sinister 900-page agenda supposedly devised by Donald Trump to take away your freedoms and destroy the country if he wins in November.

It’s doom and gloom. It’s also a lie.

And as Democrats’ obsession with Project 2025 grows, so has the lie. Now, one might call it a “Big Lie.”

I’m just saying, if your claims about Project 2025 can’t even survive a fact-check by CNN, then there’s a pretty good chance they’re … false. That one’s all you, Tim Walz.

Yet the false claims keep spreading. Last week, I came across a Facebook post from Rep. Art Staed, who is running for State Senate in District 40 in Cedar Rapids. Staed had attended a presentation on Project 2025 and listed several “highlights” of Project 2025 in his post, some of which were, to be fair, correct. Others were … open to interpretation. But what caught my eye was that a number of the claims highlighted by Staed appeared to be false.

I remember when it was supposedly disqualifying for a person seeking elected office to spread misinformation. In fact, I think it was just, like, two weeks ago.

The Project 2025 presentation had been put on by Steve Corbin, a retired marketing professor from the University of Northern Iowa and the husband of a former Democratic state legislator. Corbin has written multiple articles about Project 2025 for online publication The Fulcrum, dating back to June. Corbin’s articles have also been received and published by The Gazette.

On June 14, The Fulcrum ran a piece stating that Corbin’s June 4 article, “Project 2025 is a threat to democracy” had already become their site’s most popular post of 2024 and announced the launch of its “cross-partisan project” of editorials to “explore the nuances and complexities of the subjects and issues covered in the Project 2025 plan.”

Given his implied expert level of knowledge about Project 2025, I was surprised to see that Corbin’s article also contained several claims actively disputed by The Heritage Foundation, the 51-year-old conservative organization behind Project 2025. Both The Heritage Foundation and Trump claim that he is not involved with Project 2025. Trump has gone as far as to publicly reject it.

Democrats make claims about Project 2025 they purport to be true. Project 2025 leaders say those claims are false. A seeker of truth has to decide which to believe.

Why not just go straight to the source? Project 2025’s full “Mandate for Leadership” book is available online through a simple Google search.

I emailed both Corbin and Staed last week and asked them if they could cite the claims that appeared false in the “Mandate for Leadership” book. For instance, Staed’s public Facebook post included a claim that Project 2025 would “oppose any form of birth control and IVF (in vitro fertilization) treatments.” Corbin’s June 4 Fulcrum article said it “calls for banning abortion.” Project 2025 leaders say none of that is true.

Staed did not respond to my email. Instead, he went back to Facebook and listed each of his earlier claims with sources he said were “easy to cite.” None were from the Project 2025 book. The source for his birth control/IVF claim was a communication from the Democratic National Committee, which, like Staed, claimed that both would be restricted. But the text of Project 2025 does not mention IVF or any fertility treatments for would-be parents struggling to conceive — at all.

Corbin, for his part, referred me to The Fulcrum’s website and said that if I would read the “30-plus cross partisan op-eds” that were published after his June 4 article, I “would have a complete answer” to my questions.

I counted 28 editorials tagged with “Project 2025” on The Fulcrum’s website, one of which was written by Corbin himself. My review of those articles found no references to the project’s text verifying the specific claims I had questioned.

BIRTH CONTROL AND FERTILITY TREATMENTS: SAFE

Similar to Staed, Corbin had written that Project 2025 will “restrict access to contraception.” The word “contraception” or any derivative is listed exactly four times in all 900 pages of the Project 2025 manuscript, none of which suggest, propose or advocate for any restriction or ban of any type of birth control. The phrase “birth control” is not found at all.

The project recommends that a single type of emergency contraceptive called Ella, which is substantively different from levonorgestrel-based ECs such as Plan B and only available via prescription, be removed from the contraceptive mandate under the Affordable Care Act.

But those recommendations make no suggestions on their legality or regulatory approval. It cannot be said that Project 2025 “opposes birth control.”

Absent that same specificity, it also cannot be said that Project 2025 “calls for banning abortion,” as Corbin wrote in June. Notably, the Fulcrum editorial on abortion that was part of the trove Corbin said would answer my questions also did not identify a proposed ban on abortion.

DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE: SAFE

Corbin explicitly claims that Project 2025 would “eliminate the Department of Commerce,” for which there is no supporting text in the project manuscript. Instead, the chapter that discusses policy related to the department describes how the next conservative president should consider proposals that streamline and consolidate various bureaus and offices and acknowledges that “drastic structural change to the department is neither imminent nor likely.”

That chapter even goes so far as to call the department “blessed with many quality civil servants and strong statutory authorities that, directed properly, can help ensure U.S. success in 2025 and beyond.”

None of the articles Corbin cited described the Department of Commerce as on the chopping block.

PUBLIC PROTESTS: SAFE

Project 2025’s leaders deny that the project calls for “deploying the U.S. military when protests erupt,” as both Staed’s social media post and Corbin’s June 4 article explicitly stated in identical words. The very few instances of protest even mentioned in the project, they argue, are “referenced positively.”

A search of Project 2025’s entire manuscript for terms such as “protest,” “unrest,” “riot,” “troops,” “soldiers,” “National Guard” and “deploy” do not produce any references or context to support Corbin and Staed’s claims that the project calls for bringing in the military to quell protest.

DISCUSSING SLAVERY IN SCHOOLS: SAFE

Project 2025 leaders also explicitly deny that the project calls for the banning of books and school curriculum about slavery, which Staed and Corbin again respectively claim using identical phrasing. No opposition to the critical discussion of slavery exists in the project manuscript, which actually cites America’s eventual rejection of slavery (which we fought a war over) as one of several examples of our “assertions of patriotic self-assurance.”

RACE, SEX DISCRIMINATION LAWS: SAFE

Corbin also claims — with absolutely no ambiguity — that Project 2025 calls for eliminating Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Simply put, this is false.

Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Title IX deals specifically with sex-based discrimination in education, without which women’s and girls’ scholastic sports would not be where they are today.

Contrary to rejection, conservatives have embraced Title IX in recent years as a safeguard against recent — and harmful — Biden administration rules redefining protection on “the basis of sex” to include gender identity. That will likely lead to students being forced to share intimate spaces with the opposite sex, female athletes being forced to compete against males with distinct physical competitive advantages, and students being forced to alter their speech to affirm to another’s gender identity in a manner that violates their conscience.

Project 2025 criticizes those regulatory changes that ones that “jettison” Title IX’s enforcement. It also recognizes that diversity, equity and inclusion policies promote the categorization of race and racial preference and specifically calls for Title VII to be enforced as a means of prohibiting policies that prioritize certain races over others.

That a number of Corbin and Staed’s claims are incorrect is a good thing. That such an egregiously false claim is plainly stated by community leaders who purports to be knowledgeable on the subject is not good.

Don’t get me wrong — I don’t suspect anything sinister in their motives. They’re each men with political beliefs who made interpretations based on sources that were probably not accurate.

But false is false, and false interpretations of Project 2025 have spread like wildfire in a matter of months, with more staying power than even — good grief — the bizarre claims of migrants eating cats.

Project 2025’s purported lethality is a talking point of Democrats from the kitchen table to the Oval Office, fretted about in letters to the editor, social media posts, op-eds and campaign ads. Its claims are shamelessly tossed about in Kamala Harris campaign ads.

And much of it is nothing more than the Democrats’ very own “Big Lie.”

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com