When Sidney Watts first posted his thoughts about Project 2025 to his TikTok page in early June, warning of the “hell” he believes would come if the collection of far-right policy proposals came to fruition, he had no idea how it would be received. He also didn’t care. In a 3-minute video to his 28,000 followers, Watts rattled off a bevy of reasons he rebuked the plan’s mission of overhauling the federal government, which he felt, up to that point, hadn’t been talked about enough. Within days, he said, the video had been viewed more than half a million times.
“I wanted it to be talked about, whether good or bad,” said Watts, 21, a college student and content creator from Queens, New York. “It just needed to be out there.” Watts has had plenty of company: The playbook of conservative priorities for a future presidential administration has been championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America. Some, like fourth-year middle school math teacher Marquis “QBtheDon” Bryant, have been warning their followers against the “dangers” of Project 2025, while others, like college student Lili Orozco, have recently shared why implementing it could have benefits for the country. Many creators have picked apart pieces of the plan in their own monologues, while others have shared short clips with their reactions. In all, more than 30,000 posts have been tagged with #Project2025 on TikTok.
Though some Democratic politicians have been raising concern about Project 2025 intermittently over the last two years, it wasn’t until the past week that widespread attention began to coalesce around the political platform, with many content creators already weeks, if not months, ahead of the curve. Taraji P. Henson cautioned viewers about the project at last week’s BET Awards, and John Oliver, Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert have used their late-night perches in recent days to bring attention to it. Search interest spiked sharply in late June, according to Google Trends data.
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have also taken notice. Biden’s campaign has told people to “Google Project 2025,” while Trump has distanced himself from the project, saying he knows “nothing” about it and calling pieces of it “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” on his platform, Truth Social. But Biden and Democrats have pushed back against that narrative, saying the project “was written for him—by those closest to him.”
What is Project 2025? Developed by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and dozens of allies of Trump, Project 2025 is a transition project, or blueprint, for the next Republican president, namely Trump. Hoping to hit the ground running on Day One, authors of the plan, which was released in April 2023, say it’s a guide to undo the “damage” to America caused by Democratic presidents. The project’s main “playbook,” called “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” outlines four broad recommendations in more than 900 pages: restore the family as the centerpiece of American life, dismantle the administrative state, defend the nation’s sovereignty and borders and secure God-given individual rights to live freely.
Specifics of the plan include strictly limiting access to abortion, shutting down all climate change initiatives, abolishing the Education Department, dismantling or downsizing federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and taking a harder stance on immigration, which includes expanding the deportation powers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and finishing the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Supporters of the plan want less government oversight overall.
Ed Benton, a constitutional scholar and political science professor at the University of South Florida, called the plan “a very far-right-wing approach to government.” “It would certainly affect people who depend on the government — low-income, senior citizens and those on Medicare and Medicaid,” he said. “The thought is to retrain, almost indoctrinate, people in the field of civil service … to be puppets of whoever’s pulling strings at the top of the federal hierarchy.”
Content creators remain split over Project 2025. Christopher “Topher” Townsend, a hip-hop music artist and conservative social media influencer, said he started posting about Project 2025 because he felt not enough people were talking about it from his perspective: Black, Christian and Republican. In a video with over 1.4 million views, Towsend acts out an exchange suggesting how other conservatives redirect conversations about Project 2025, which he believes has good policy suggestions but is being used by Democrats to “fearmonger” voters to vote against Trump.
“I just couldn’t sit back and watch how everything is so one-sided,” said Townsend, 33, of Philadelphia, Mississippi. “Some people disagree with whatever they disagree with, but there are some things in it that I think are great for a conservative leadership.” Towsend, who campaigned for Trump in 2020 and plans to vote for him in this year’s election, supported Project 2025’s plan to amplify parental rights in education and dissolve federal agencies. His goal in sharing content about policy proposals like Project 2025, he said, is to push people to think deeper about issues.
“I’m trying to get people to look beyond [a knee-jerk reaction], because it’s more deep than that,” he said. “I really believe in critical thinking and the ability to say, ‘I like that, but I hate that.’” Other conservative content creators on social media have applauded the project’s harsh stance on immigration and plans to turn around the country’s budget. More progressive content creators have said that the plan is extreme on women’s rights, diversity, equity and inclusion programs and that it targets low-income and low-resourced communities. Many Democrats hope the increased attention on Project 2025 will act as an effective attack on the ills of what another Trump presidency would look like, particularly when support for Biden, even within his own party, is reeling.
Bryant, a seventh grade math teacher in south Atlanta who goes by QBSkiiii online, posted about the playbook back in May after he saw a breakdown of the plan by Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas. Before then, he said, no one in his circle or on his timeline was talking about it. The proposed changes to education hit close to home for Bryant, an educator in a low-income community. In his video, which has more than 2.4 million views, Bryant talked about the impact of one of Project 2025’s proposals to slash funding for Title I, a federal program that provides financial assistance to school districts and schools with high percentages of children from low-income families.
“It’s going to widen the gap between wealthy and impoverished schools,” said Bryant, 25, a native of Florida, who called it “the worst thing that could happen to this country for these kids.” “If we give [all the power] back to the state and local governments, those states who have the funding will excel, like Utah, Massachusetts,” he added. “But the states who don’t have the funding — Mississippi, Georgia, Kentucky — they’re going to fall behind.” Bryant said that though he most often posts funny videos of classroom experiences on TikTok, he feels a deeper responsibility to inform his followers about things like Project 2025.
“I feel like you have a responsibility to your people in letting people know what’s really going on out there, especially because the world is on the internet, the world is on TikTok,” he said. And while he disagrees with most of what he has read about Project 2025, he encourages people to also be open to hearing differing viewpoints about controversial issues, particularly online. “I do appreciate the opinions of other people, because it’s some stuff that I may have not looked into that the person who is for Project 2025 may be more informed on the topic,” he said. “Not all of it is all bad, but enough of it is.”
The engagement itself is notable, if only because young people are expected to play a role in what could be a close election. “The increase in content generated about Project 2025 and the metrics suggests young people are paying attention and doing their homework in the way they know how — on social media and using short-form video content to share their take,” said Jiore Craig, a senior fellow for digital integrity with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research organization. In an era when public trust in mass media has fallen to historic lows, “social media trends play an important role in an information ecosystem increasingly fractured and low on trust,” Craig said.
Source: NBC News, Pew Research Center
