Forget Project 2025, what about Agenda 2030?

You have to hand it to Democrats, they are so much better than Republicans when it comes to running campaigns of distortion. In a heartbeat, they can make a description of hell sound like Heaven, or at least like a mostly peaceful protest, never mind the flames all around you.

Ethically speaking, it’s preferable that the Republicans are not so good at this and choose (mostly) to trade in honest policy prescriptions rather than in snake oil.

Politically speaking, well, we’ll see.

Since the coup d’etat that gave us Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee, we have been treated to a steady diet of dissimulation. Somehow now the vice president is a progressive moderate, whatever that is, rejecting all those radical policy positions that she embraced full monty during her Senate years and in the 2020 presidential campaign.

No one liked all those policies then, and they won’t now, which is why she is assuring us that her values haven’t changed, even if everything else has. Now she’s no longer for fracking bans, no longer wants to eliminate private health insurance, no longer wants to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, no longer for decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

Those were responsible things to call for then, apparently, but unjust things to call for now. Times change, don’t you know, and an election is approaching. It’s almost as if she’s no longer a radical Democrat.

Except she is.

It’s not just Harris. The Democratic Party has for years been able to sell repackaged goods as brand new and improved, not to mention centrist, and to pull shiny new candidates out of nowhere, or from the back bench. Bill Clinton was busy declaring that the era of big government was over even as he was pushing socialized HillaryCare and selling out the heartland to the globalist left through NAFTA.

And even now, nobody is really sure where Barack Obama came from, except from somewhere over the rainbow.

What’s more, progressives have been much more adept at absurdly defining as extremist the political positions of Republicans than Republicans have been at exposing the real radicalism of Democrats. The ads showing a supposed Paul Ryan, of all people, pushing granny off a cliff were deadly. Not since the days of Lee Atwater, who Willie Hortoned Michael Dukakis, have the Republicans been better at pillorying Democrats.

And they are at it again, this time with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. According to the Democrats, it’s a “far-right manifesto,” a “domestic extremist right wing” compendium, a “radical right-wing wrecking ball” that Trump will take to democracy if elected.

It isn’t anything such. What it is, is an almost 900-page document chock full of policy suggestions for a new conservative administration to consider. More than 100 respected conservative organizations—you know, wild-eyed extremists like the American Main Street Initiative (AMSI)—and 400 scholars and policy experts contributed to the project, which the Heritage Foundation describes as a movement “to take down the Deep State and return the government to the people.”

Call that extremist if you will, but only if you consider the Constitution of the United States extremist because that’s what this encyclopedic policy manual comes down to—an ode to the constitution, as Jeffrey Anderson, president of the AMSI, has called it. Or, as the introduction to Project 2025, puts it: “Above all, the President and those who serve under him or her must be committed to the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Most of all—and this is what terrifies the left—it would take a wrecking ball to the biggest threat to the constitution and to our liberties and rights: the administrative state.

Specifically, Project 2025 calls for such beyond-the-pale ideas as civil service reform to put an end to bureaucratic trespass upon elected authority; abolishing the federal Department of Education to return education to the states and to the people; and banning biological males from competing in women’s sport to ensure equal opportunity for all. Heaven forbid!

To be sure, the conservative movement is not monolithic. There are policy prescriptions in Project 2025 that I agree with and disagree with. There are policy prescriptions that depart from the Republican platform. And there are policy prescriptions that Donald Trump doesn’t agree with, as he himself has noted: “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Except for the length and scope of this particular project, the effort is no different from any other policy enterprise on the right or left during a presidential year—you get your prescriptive ducks in a row and trot them out there to lobby and influence the incoming administration, especially if it’s your ideological ally. It’s nothing more and nothing less—except, again, better prepared and more in-depth—and Trump’s reaction is nothing exceptional, either.

Still, the Democrats have demonized some pretty routine positions—staples of constitutional conservatives for years now—and begun to weight it around Trump’s neck like an albatross, as if he wrote the thing himself one night while on his extended break from X. Suddenly Project 2025 is Trump’s and Trump’s alone.

In Wisconsin last week, the left-wing Better Wisconsin Together screamed in its press release that “Trump’s Project 2025 agenda is sure to fall short in Wisconsin.” Or, as the group’s communications director, Lucy Ripp, said: “Donald Trump and his Project 2025 agenda have no place here in Wisconsin …” Over at the Democratic National Committee, they were putting up billboards across the state to “call out Trump’s Project 2025 tax scam.” Not to be outdone, the Harris campaign itself called attention to the Wisconsin tour of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who “highlights VP Harris’ plan to lower costs, slams Trump’s Project 2025 agenda during Wisconsin tour.”

Suddenly in the presidential election, Democrats decided to make Donald Trump and Project 2025 synonymous. Americans were seeing through the lawfare, so the Democrats thought it better—wisely, I might add—to prioritize painting Trump as part of the “far right,” which they characterize as anti-democratic and racist, as central to reaching and persuading that thin crust of independent voters sitting atop the electoral pie.

It’s crazy, but they are being effective at it, which is why they keep doing it and why they’ve stopped what was not working, namely, the convicted felon routine. Project 2025 gave the progressives a concrete vehicle through which they could ferry their message—it gave them a hook, and they took it.

You know what isn’t crazy? What isn’t crazy is the supposition that it’s the Democrats who are extreme and anti-democratic, not to mention anti-women’s rights, and, for that matter, anti-women as a general rule as they seek to erase an entire gender.

It’s more than supposition. As it turns out, in keeping with the Project 2025 theme, there’s even an agenda and a year to go with the Democratic project—it’s called Agenda 2030, as in the United Nation’s Agenda 2030, which predates Project 2025 by years. This fine instrument is truly a radical departure in that it secedes from the foundations of the U.S. Constitution, and, if enacted, would effectively surrender U.S. sovereignty to a massive international bureaucratic government.

Sadly, the Republicans haven’t successfully exposed Agenda 2030’s radicalism, or tied Democrats to it, or even really tried to. At the first hint that Democrats took offense at Republican exposure of a truly extremist platform, Republicans fearful of being labeled wing nuts recoiled and quit pointing out its subversively transformative nature. Instead, they end up on the defensive about credible works such as Project 2025.

None of which changes the truth, that Agenda 2030 is and has been a radical anti-democratic and anti-nationalist scheme. Especially given the authoritarian policies of the Biden administration during the pandemic—a mimicking of World Health Organization (WHO) orthodoxy— Republicans should pounce on what it truly is, pointing out the explicit ramifications along the way.

If we want to get technical with the name, the Biden administration has gone all in on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which the United Nations describes as a movement in which “all stakeholders: governments, civil society, the private sector, and others, are expected to contribute to the realization of the new agenda,” and “a revitalized global partnership at the global level is needed to support national efforts.”

Central to the agenda is the action plan to fight climate change, anchored in the famous Paris Accords. Trump withdrew from the accords, while Biden and Harris got us right back in on their first day in office. Essentially, we commit to onerous carbon reduction standards set for us elsewhere—committing to a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050—while “developing” nations such as China aim for 2060 or later. The latter is a laugh, though, as Climate Action Tracker itself acknowledged in its most recent estimate of China’s policies and actions, which it tagged as “highly insufficient” and labeled China’s chances of reaching its emission goals as “poor.”

As the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) reported in April, China did improve its air quality pre-pandemic by controlling PM2.5, the most harmful particulate matter, but has failed to reverse the increase of other pollutants, such as surface ozone, and still has no multi-pollutant emission reduction strategy. Not least, CFR Fellow Yanzhong Huang wrote, it has an “increasing dependency on fossil fuels. Before the pandemic, China had successfully reduced coal’s share in its energy mix from 67.4 percent in 2013 to 57.7 percent in 2019. However, following widespread electricity shortages in 2021, China authorized 218 GW of new coal power within just two years—enough to power all of Brazil.”

So much for clean energy, except in the mindset of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The Biden-Harris administration continues to blindly seek to follow U.N dictates, and they are expensive in terms of national debt, higher costs for consumers, and, ultimately, a lower standard of living. Treasury secretary Janet Yellen recently told an interviewer that the global energy transition to a net-zero goal would require $3 trillion in new spending every year through 2050. Others estimate the cost to be much higher—as much as $300 trillion by 2050.

Beyond climate change, but in keeping with Agenda 2030, there is the Biden-Harris ongoing land grab, known as “America the Beautiful,” or 30x30—a goal by executive order to protect 30 percent of the nation’s land and water by 2030, in keeping with the U.N. Sustainable Development plan’s goals to permanently protect 30 percent of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030. Right now, 40 percent of U.S. land is owned by government at some level, and 12 percent is permanently protected; to reach the 30 percent target, another 400 million acres needs to be surrendered to government—the size of nine states the size of Nebraska or two states the size of Texas, as American Stewards of Liberty points out.

Again, the costs to the economy are enormous, not to mention the costs to liberty, for whosoever controls the land controls the people. In the economy alone, more government ownership means less public access; it means the pausing and canceling of oil and gas leases, actions already undertaken by the Biden administration; it means shutting down industries and preventing any economic development on those lands.

In Wyoming right now, the Bureau of Land Management has proposed, in its Rock Springs Resource Management Plan, to close hundreds of thousands of acres of land to both traditional and renewable energy development, not just oil drilling but wind and solar power and geothermal power projects, too. According to Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, the plan would decimate Wyoming and the West.

“The Biden-Harris administration is pushing Wyoming off an economic cliff with nothing more than a tattered parachute,” Barrasso said on August 22. “The Rock Springs Resource Management Plan strangles responsible natural resource development. This plan isn’t designed to manage Wyoming’s natural resources. It is designed to suffocate them.”

Don’t think it’s just out west. In Wisconsin, think of the massive Pelican River Forest easement this year and more tracts of land the state is taking control of through conservation easements.

Finally, if all that is not bad enough, the administration has supported the WHO’s attempt to draft a new world pandemic treaty that would have transferred wealth from the U.S. to the so-called developing world, including China. The plan is now stalled but conservatives should not consider it dead, and Americans should also realize that a Harris administration will be all on board with it, just as the Biden-Harris administration has been.

If it can be revived, Harris certainly would try.

Early on, American conservatives primarily denounced the plan as taking away America’s sovereignty but that was a mistake. Technically it was true—the WHO director-general would get to declare when a pandemic occurs, triggering massive costs and potentially authoritarian policies, including censorship and lockdowns—but, as Democrats pointed out, a nation could just refuse to follow the treaty if push came to shove.

Still, the idea that the Biden administration was willing to sign away sovereignty even technically is a huge signal for its intentions and beliefs, and the treaty would still have created any number of costs in the meantime. For instance, as analysts Brett Schaefer and Steven Groves pointed out, the treaty would have obligated the United States to establish a “no-fault vaccine injury compensation mechanism, with the aim of promoting access to financial remedy for individuals experiencing serious adverse events resulting from a pandemic vaccine.”

Wait, weren’t we were told all these vaccines were safe? This might be a good time to mention that WHO’s current policy on mandated vaccination is to make vaccination voluntary, but only so long as people agree to do it—“in other words, mandates should be considered only after people have been given the opportunity to get vaccinated voluntarily and/or once there is sufficient reason to believe this alone will not be enough to achieve important societal or institutional objectives.” Note that in that last sentence the WHO thinks mandatory vaccination is OK not just when it is in the public interest but when it is in the WHO’s bureaucratic interests.

The proposed treaty also demanded that signatory nations fund a “mechanism” for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response and to contribute “financial resources for the effective implementation of the WHO Pandemic Agreement.” There was a “capacity development “ fund to pay for, but what the capacity was being developed for was never defined. There was lot to pay for, all up front.

United States companies and the federal government would have also been expected to share proprietary technology and knowledge and waive their intellectual property rights with developing-country manufacturers, including China. And it would have contributed to an already massive effort to censor “misinformation,” in other words, to shut down speech.

All in all, Agenda 2030 is a mesh of international bureaucratic-socialist wealth and power redistribution that would cripple America’s standard of living, take control of the population through land control, and redistribute wealth, both real and intellectual, away front our shores.

Frankly, it’s hard to imagine a bigger threaten to our freedoms and standard of living as Agenda 2030, and the Biden administration has been one of its most vocal cheerleaders. Why conservatives haven’t tried to tether this actual extremism and potential misery to Democrats as the Democrats are doing to Republicans with Project 2025 is a mystery.

After all, polls show that globalization and globalist polices are not popular. An American Compass survey just this year showed that, by a 47 percent to 33 percent margin, people think the nation has suffered at the hands of globalization rather than benefited. By nearly two-to-one, the survey stated, Americans say they would rather pay higher prices to strengthen American manufacturing than pay higher prices to combat climate change.

“Asked whether policymakers should focus more on ‘helping struggling areas recover’ from job loss or ‘helping people move to opportunity’ where new jobs are created, Americans choose helping struggling areas by more than two-to-one,” American Compass reported, and the survey further showed that Americans believe that making concrete progress at home—by improving education (73%), strengthening democracy (70%) and maintaining U.S. economic power (66%) helped the U.S. enhance its global influence.  

If Americans want to see these hopes come to fruition, they need to see the dangers that Democrats pose to them. So where are the billboards denouncing the extremist Agenda 2030 manifesto? Where are the ads pointing out the amount of lands being taken and the cost to jobs, wages, and economic development? Where are conservatives spelling out the consequences of the Paris Accords, especially with respect to China? Where are the reminders of the loss of civil liberties during the pandemic, and spelling out the looming specter of vaccine mandates, lockdown edicts, and loss of free speech—all favorites of the WHO and Harris.

Conservatives need to expose Agenda 2030 for what it is and then weight it around the Democrats’ neck like an albatross, over and over again hammering the consequences of the international agenda in our daily lives, and stitching the Democrats and Kamala Harris to every plank of its dangerous platform.

With Agenda 2030, the Democrats have given conservatives a hook; they should take it.