From Founding Principles to Project 2025: The Shift from Service to Control

By Norman Franklin

Norman Franklin

We live in a political and cultural climate of quick fixes and short attention spans. Today’s outrage becomes tomorrow’s afterthought. Headlines churn, hashtags trend— and then dissolve into the digital ether. Even the most consequential issues fade fast beneath the weight of the next viral frenzy.

Project 2025 was one such moment. Leading up to the 2024 election, it emerged, stirred dust, and sparked debate. It trended for a news cycle. Because of its content and implications, many elected officials denied knowledge of it— especially those seeking re-election or broader public trust. But now, the buzz has quieted. And that’s exactly the danger.

Once the dust settles from these radical ideological shifts, the 900 page blueprint known as Project 2025 may well take its place alongside America’s sacred documents—not as a complement to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, but as their ideological replacement.

A product of the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 aims to restructure the framework of democracy and redefine the purpose of government. It’s not a hashtag trend— it is the decades-long, methodical reshaping of the American people’s understanding of government, what it is, and who it serves.

Election campaigns, public policy, and both mainstream and social media have been complicit in this shift. Not merely influencers, but instruments—conditioning the electorate through repetition, misdirection, and distraction. We cannot deny what the patterns of governance and decades of social injustice reveal.

The Heritage Foundation, found ed in 1973, was a strategic and well funded backlash to the civil rights gains of the 1960s. Conservatives perceived these gains as evidence of an out-of-control federal government caving to advocates for equal justice. Any bend toward the will of the people was framed as weakness, and every effort toward equity was condemned as federal overreach.

Their ideology rejected government intervention to level the playing field or promote social equity. The New Deal expanded the state; the Great Society threatened market supremacy; civil rights laws endangered racial hierarchies; Brown v. Board of Education challenged cultural control.

Project 2025 is the logical out come of this decades-long trajectory. It was designed for immediate implementation—Day One of a new Trump administration. While the President has disavowed knowledge of the Project’s content, many of his cabinet picks and administration officials are closely tied to the Heritage Foundation. Some even authored sections of the Project 2025 platform.

The playbook includes shuttering agencies, downsizing vital federal departments, slashing safety net programs, curtailing foreign aid, privatizing public services, and centralizing ideological control.

Elon Musk’s executive overreach, and economic experiments are demonstrations of this agenda. The “shenanigans of DOGE,” express the harsh realities of this ideological shift. From service to control.

The rhetorical shift has been subtle—but strategically powerful. Government became a dirty word. “Law and order” became code for oppression. “Welfare” was racialized. “Local control” masked resistance to equity and justice. The aim is clear: transform government from a public trust to a private arm of ideological enforcement.

The idiom “a leopard can’t change its spots” offers an apt metaphor. The architects of Project 2025 cling to traditional values and a selective reading of constitution al order—one that once justified violent resistance to civil rights. Their target is not “big government.” Their target is shared power in a multiracial democracy.

What’s sinister is how easily the American people have been conditioned to accept this trans formation. Decades of fear-based messaging, loaded language, and disinformation disguised as com mentary have dismantled critical thinking. Many Americans now believe they’ve given a mandate for change, when in fact they’ve been handed a manufactured crisis.