American Heritage Foundation — "Architects of Autocracy"

WASHINGTON (09-11) – Members from “For Liberation And Resistance Everywhere” (FLARE) an activist group, and Remember Your Oath, a veterans activist group and their supporters, are challenging the conservative extremist right-wing agenda of the Heritage Foundation, creators of “Project 2025-Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative Promise.” The two groups weekly protests at the Foundation headquarters building are where they “Wait for their staff to leave the building… and walk them to their cars. It’s peaceful but direct, and it sends a message: we see you. And we’re not backing down.”

Both activist groups have vowed not to let the Trump administration push the Project 2025 policy agenda quietly. Their mission is to draw attention to the Heritage Foundation headquarters and its authors, by making lots of loud noise, music, and chanting while holding signs and banners. After a noisy short march from their combined encampment at Union Station, the group arrived at the Foundation’s building where DC METRO Police were standing by as protesters began their loud cacophony, combined with hurtling invectives through bullhorns aimed at the headquarter building’s stone-cold façade. The only response after being called “fascists and nazis” and worse was that someone within the hallowed halls closed the blinds in an upper story window facing the boisterous crowd. Merely closing the blinds will not deter the anger many Americans are feeling about Project 2025’s implementation or reduce the message into the ears of those in the building from the protesters below.

Judging by the honking of horns and thumbs-up signs from passing vehicles, the group received a good deal of support and encouragement. Early on during the weekly protests when workers at the conservative think tank exited the building on their way home when walking through the protest, they were heckled and verbally provoked. Lately however, workers leaving have chosen other routes to avoid confrontations.

The Heritage Foundation was co-founded in 1973 by Edwin John Feulner Jr., an American political scientist, conservative think tank executive, congressional aide and foreign relations consultant who served as president of the conservative right-wing think tank until he retired in 2025. During his tenure, the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership designed by the Foundation became a voluminous 887-page document that incorporates its conservative hard-liner ideology in creating “policy solutions to solve the biggest issues facing America—solutions based on the core principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”

On immigration alone, the document relates that “Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized.” And most subjectively it proposes that “International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed: They should be abandoned.”

Project 2025’s architect and co-author of the extreme and controversial right-wing policy agenda is Russell Vought, who was rejected by Democrats as a candidate to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) whom they grilled intensely during his confirmation hearing. Congressman Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was quoted as saying that Vought was “the most radical nominee, who has the most extreme agenda, to the most important agency in Washington.”

Nevertheless, Vought was confirmed by a 53-47 vote that came down strictly along party lines in seeing him take the helm of this vital agency. Project 2025, along with Vought, is the major source of direction for Trump and his administration in implementing the Foundation’s radical conservative approach to all aspects of the federal government.

Among the policy topics within the document, in no particular order, are government efficiency along with workforce reduction, defense, environment, intelligence, media agencies, public health, education, trade, veterans’ affairs, labor, justice, commerce, elections, treasury, energy, and consumer protection among the exhaustive list of right-wing policy changes.

Most of these areas have already suffered from the effects of the sweeping changes implemented through Elon Musk and his DOGE minions and Trump through his innumerable executive orders. All this is a concerted effort to consolidate conservative power and to replace federal workers with presidential loyalists to keep the conservative political machine running.

Report and photos by Phil Pasquini

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