The First Amendment guarantees religious freedom and the separation of Church and State, basic tenets of American democracy which conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation is intent on undermining. Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, describes how the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 would upend military protocols to eliminate civilian oversight. He believes a dystopian future in which the rights of racialized and marginalized groups are denied would be in store under a second Trump presidency.
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Talia BaroncelliHi, I'm Talia Baroncelli, and you're watching theAnalysis.news. I'll shortly be joined by Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. We'll be speaking about Project 2025 and the implications it has for the U.S. military.
If you'd like to support the work that we do, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Make sure you're on our mailing list; that way, you're always up to date every time a new episode is published. You can like and subscribe to the show on YouTube or on other podcast streaming services such as Apple or Spotify. See you in a bit with Mikey.
Project 2025 is a lengthy policy agenda authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative and Christian nationalist think tank. Investigative outlet ProPublica recently obtained Project 2025 private training videos, which involve several former Trump officials. This corroborates the connection between former President Trump and the Heritage Foundation.
One of the videos features Bethany Kozma, a former Deputy Chief of Staff at USAID during the Trump administration. In this video, she discusses Project 2025's opposition to legislation trying to mitigate the effects of climate change. She reads from page 364 of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership, which states that "In the name of combating climate change, policies have been used to create an artificial energy scarcity that will require trillions of dollars in new investment, supported with taxpayer subsidies, to address a problem that government and special interests themselves created." They don't perceive climate change or carbon-intensive industries as posing a threat to society or to the environment but as a set of policies meant to create energy scarcity and benefit a certain segment of the elite.
Joining me to discuss these issues is Mikey Weinstein. He is the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring the constitutional right of religious freedom for the U.S. Armed Forces. He is also a lawyer and a former Air Force officer and served as White House Legal Counsel to the Reagan Administration. He also served as first general counsel to Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who ran for president twice. He's the author of several books, including Was God on Our Side and No Snowflake in an Avalanche. It's great to have you again, Mikey.
Mikey WeinsteinThanks, Talia. I'm looking forward to it as well.
Talia BaroncelliBefore we get into Project 2025, can you explain to our viewers what you do at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation?
Mikey WeinsteinAbsolutely. We are a weapon, and we've been fighting Christian nationalism and calling it out before anybody else did, that I'm aware of, going back to the early 2000s. Our job is to protect the U.S. Constitutionally mandated wall, separating Church and State in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind, which is the U.S. military: the Marine Corps, Navy, Army, Air Force, and Space Force.We have clients in all 18 national security agencies. Some are well-known, like the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, etc. We have clients in the U.S. Coast Guard, which is not the DOD; that's the Department of Homeland Security, and even the U.S. Maritime Service, specifically the Merchant Marine Academy, which is part of the Department of Transportation.We are closing in on 90,000 clients, about 95% of our clients, and this is an interesting statistic, Talia, are actually Christians themselves who are being brutalized for not being Christian enough by their chains of command. We have clients from pretty much every religious faith that there's ever been, except we've never had a Scientologist yet. Maybe Tom Cruise will come to us if he gets involved with the government or the military.We have many atheists, agnostics, secularists, humanists, and satanists. Our job is we don't care whether they believe in Spider-Man or not. Our job is to make sure that a particular religious faith or non-faith tradition is not being pushed by superiors against their otherwise helpless subordinates in the U.S. military.We have well over a thousand people who work here. Like many civil rights organizations, lots of our folks are volunteers. We have MRFF representatives on most military installations around the world. We have them on nuclear submarines and large aircraft carriers. They're everywhere. We are very much in the thick of this fight.I'm doing this interview with gun smoke in my face. Clients are calling in, and again, we fight what we used to call fundamentalist Christian dominionism, but the term now is nationalism in an attempt to prevent America from using this weaponized version of Christianity or Christian nationalism to conquer what has been the world's most beautiful democracy, and perhaps the rest of the world as well. That's a way of putting it, Talia.Talia BaroncelliRight. Well, last time we spoke, we also addressed this issue of Christian nationalism within the military and how there's proselytizing in the military that's illegal and the effects of that. We'll probably get into that throughout the interview.I did want to ask you about Project 2025. This is an agenda that was put forward by the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative think tank established in 1973. They've been instrumental in shaping Republican policy over the decades. They've been advancing a very right-wing agenda that emphasizes free enterprise and limited government, but also a lot of other really controversial things, such as not supporting reproductive rights or abortion and also wanting to essentially change the nature of the U.S. government and the way the U.S. government functions. Why don't you explain to us what Project 2025 is and what the implications would be for the U.S. military as well?Mikey WeinsteinI spent over three years in the West Wing working there during the Reagan administration. The Heritage Foundation started this whole thing back in 1973, and the first presidential administration to start implementing their views of this Christian nationalism was, unfortunately, the Reagan administration. I was there. I could see it. About 2,000 different proposals coming from the Reagan administration were tied to the Heritage Foundation.I guess the best way to describe it in the brief interview here that we're doing for your supporters and folks who are interested in hearing about this, your fan club, and everybody else because we love theAnalysis, is an analogy. That is, Mein Kampf is to Hitler as Project 2025 is to Trump and "Make America Great Again" or "Make America Germany in 1933 Again." It is absolutely a blueprint written by some lawyers, scientists, doctors, whatever. It's 920 pages. It has four separate sections. It's 30 chapters. Too long to read, but tons of people have talked about it.When it got discovered (I wrote an op-ed on it months ago), suddenly, Trump tried to distance himself from it. Indicating he had no idea about any of this. But of course, nearly, I think it's well over two dozen of the folks that were in his administration are principal drafters of this. So, of course, it's absolutely part and parcel of the MAGA agenda. Among other things, it's trying to get rid of the FBI, the Department of Justice, the National Weather Service, and women won't get to have abortions. There'll be no teaching of critical race theory. It hates diversity, equity, and inclusion. Anything that appears to be good for us moving forward as a species, it is against. The driver is Christian nationalism. Not the Christianity that many Americans or other folks in the world follow, but this idea of a muscular, weaponized Christianity, which is you either accept our view of this or you don't deserve the right to be an American citizen, and we're not quite sure you even deserve the right to be alive.Our military is the vanguard of our constitutional rights. The bottom line is-- there's a great phrase in Latin that I now forget, but basically, who will guard the guards? The guardians of our society are our military. If our U.S. military is infiltrated and becomes inextricably intertwined with Christian nationalism, it's over.We have such tremendous prestige, power, and wealth associated with the U.S. military that this can't happen if we're going to avoid what Margaret Atwood talked about in The Handmaid's Tale, Gilead, that version of a fundamentalist Christian nationalist entity. We were very pleased a number of years ago when the producers of that show on Hulu from the book reached out to us for help because they wanted to do an entire episode of what happens with the military in Gilead in the near future that's there, that dystopian future.I think it's on pages 102 and 103 of Project 2025. It talks about, I'll give you two examples, strengthening the rights of military chaplains to follow the mandate of their ministries in accordance with the basic tenets of their faith. It sounds great, but the problem is the Great Commission, one of the central aspects of fundamentalist Christianity. You can see it in Mark 16:15 and Matthew 28:19. It's one of the last things, Talia, that Jesus is supposed to have told his disciples, which is to go out and make disciples of all nations.
