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Michael Cianchette is a Navy reservist who served in Afghanistan. He is in-house counsel to a number of businesses in southern Maine and was a chief counsel to former Gov. Paul LePage.
Back in the early 2010s, I had a lot of conversations with some of my like-minded political friends. Several of them were worried about “Agenda 21.”
Their concerns stemmed from what they had heard in some corners of the internet and on news station talk shows. Some commentators had their tinfoil hat on a little too tight and drank a little too deeply from the Kool-Aid, which had spill-on effects.
There were a litany of theories about what Agenda 21 “really” sought to do. One of the more remarkable was the book authored by pundit Glenn Beck, who detailed a dystopian future of UN hegemony, more “1984” than “Brave New World.”
Reality, as usual, was much more mundane.
The “Agenda 21” document spoke for itself. It read like a thesis from pro-globalism bureaucrats at the United Nations — because that is exactly what it was.
Article 5.29 declared that “in formulating human settlements policies, account should be taken of resource needs, waste production and ecosystem health.” Much of the document is full of equally bland, mostly self-evident statements. Then it calls for billions in spending on the UN.
I encouraged my right-leaning friends to read the “Agenda” for themselves. It was published online, not exactly a sequestered secret of some shadowy cabal. Once they actually flipped through it, most realized it was just regular fare reflecting the worldview of the groups that created it.
Project 2025 is this decade’s Agenda 21.
Earlier this week, one column in the Bangor Daily News compared Project 2025 to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
Let’s read on, shall we?
Like Agenda 21, Project 2025 is publicly available. It is a 922-page PDF anyone can click on. Its authors are various conservative-leaning wonks, officials, and academics. Many of them served in the Trump administration. A lot of the proposals are pretty garden-variety GOP beliefs.
For example, on page 319, it says “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” This was a stated goal of President Ronald Reagan in 1980. The “Contract with America” Republicans added it to the party platform in the 1990s. Texas Gov. Rick Perry made the same campaign promise in 2011 while seeking the GOP nomination for president.
The idea that education policy should be decided at the local and state levels — not in Washington D.C. — is common amongst conservatives. Not exactly “Mein Kampf.”
Another major theme in Project 2025 is that the president should have more authority over executive branch personnel. After all, the Constitution says unequivocally “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
If you can’t pick your team, it becomes pretty hard to administer the government. This idea is decried because it might disempower career government employees. That isn’t a bad thing from a conservative perspective. When we elect a president, we expect them to lead. The check on them is not the bureaucracy, it is Congress.
This is not some wild new proposal. President Abraham Lincoln spent countless hours dealing with people seeking appointed public office. The Great Emancipator is not someone commonly correlated with Hitler.
The mundane reality is that Project 2025 is pretty standard fare from right-leaning academics and policy wonks. It isn’t a secret charter for the Hunger Games or the foretelling of some American Holocaust.
Are there things in it that people can — and should — disagree with? Absolutely. Do progressives have very different beliefs about the appropriate size and role of the federal government? They do.
But, before deciding that we are in the end times, read the document for yourself. That holds true whether it is Agenda 21 or Project 2025 or whatever will invariably come next.