In the beginning to Now
When I first started researching Project 2025, I thought I understood what I was looking at. I thought the Heritage Foundation was a think tank that had produced Project 2025, and that Project 2025 was essentially the policy blueprint waiting for a sympathetic administration to implement it.
Then I started researching Heritage.
Like, seriously researching it.
I went through every possible link and section on the Heritage Foundation website. I went through the programs, the training, the personnel. Then I saw Heritage Action and thought, well, they are obviously connected. On Heritage Action, I looked through the scorecards, the grassroots network, the congressional connections, etc. I kept finding another piece underneath the piece I had just found.
Eventually, I had one of those moments where you stop reading and just stare at the screen.
Oh shit.
This was much bigger, much deeper than I thought.
I had been looking at Project 2025 as though it were the structure. What I was actually looking at was one part of a much larger infrastructure.
So, I started pulling the pieces apart.
I wanted to know exactly what Heritage was doing beyond producing policy. I wanted to know how they developed people, how they connected those people to government, how they moved policy from an idea into legislation, and how they built support for those policies outside Washington.
And then I realized something that was impossible for me to ignore.
It was a lot like church.
Same mechanisms. Just scalable.
That is when the word infrastructure started making sense to me.
Heritage has an entire training ecosystem. It reaches students, young professionals, Capitol Hill staff, foreign policy professionals, candidates, school board members and other conservative movement allies. It isn’t hidden. It is right there on their website.
The Heritage Training page describes the organization as a leader in “training and educational programming for conservatives.” That, to me, screamed training up disciples.
There are programs for high school students, college students, interns, congressional staff and professionals. There is a High School Fellowship. There is the Heritage Academy. There is the Local University Conservatives Network. There is the Conservative Hill Intern Program. There is the Heritage Congressional Fellowship. There is Ready, Set, HILL!
Think Sunday school. Youth group. Bible studies. Prayer meetings. Revivals. Conferences. I don’t know about you, but my church had conferences.
At first, I was still thinking about these as separate programs.
Then I took a step back and looked at it all together.
Then I started looking at what they actually do.
And then there was the hierarchy.
Churches have hierarchy. There are pastors and elders, ministry leaders and teachers, youth leaders and small-group leaders. There are people who have been there longer, people who are newer, people who teach, people who lead, and people who are being taught and prepared to take on more responsibility.
When I started looking at these organizations, I kept seeing that same basic structure. Different names, different jobs, different institutions, but people occupying different places within the system and moving through it in different ways.
I knew that structure.
I had lived in it.
It isn’t just a bunch of people who happen to believe the same things. There are different levels of participation and different roles within the system.
And that was familiar too.
The more I looked at it, the more I realized that what I was recognizing wasn’t one specific program. It was a collection of mechanisms that I had spent decades experiencing inside the church.
Formation.
Discipleship.
Hierarchy.
Community.
Recruitment.
Training.
Leadership development.
Mobilization.
The environment had changed.
The words, not so much. Some of you know what I mean.
The mechanisms were what I recognized.
But then I realized something else.
These mechanisms weren’t just operating within the organizations themselves.
They were being used to develop people, organize people, mobilize people, and connect them to political institutions.
And it wasn’t just the mechanisms.
It was the value and belief structure underneath them.
It was the intensity.
I recognized the certainty about what was right and wrong. The dividing lines. The vilifying of what didn’t fit within the biblical worldview I had been taught.
Some of the very things I was seeing pushed politically were things I had been punished and publicly disciplined for.
I knew what that felt like.
I had lived inside it.
And then I realized what that could mean for those of us who escaped.
We left the church. We left the environment. We did the work of figuring out what we actually believed and how we wanted to live.
And yet we can still find ourselves right back in their orbit of influence.
Because if the beliefs, relationships, training systems, political networks, and mechanisms of mobilization move into government, they don’t stay inside the church anymore.
The separation between church and state starts to blur.
And in some ways, it can begin to look like the two are being fused together.
That realization rattled me.
The entire process of researching and documenting this has been intensive. I’ve been tracing connections between institutions and following them through the pipeline, from policy development to implementation. Throughout this work, I’ve had an intuitive understanding of what to look for.
It hadn’t dawned on me why.
I recognized this structure because I have lived inside systems that taught me, unintentionally, how these kinds of networks function. I learned that structure from the inside, over the course of decades.
I had to take a minute to acknowledge it and process what it meant.
But it also solidifies my resolve.
The knowledge I carried without having words for it, the tacit knowledge of how these systems build relationships, develop leaders, create pipelines, distribute influence, and move ideas through institutions, is part of what taught me where to look.
Now I can give that knowledge language.
And, more importantly, I can document the evidence and expose it all.
Once I realized I wasn’t just looking at Project 2025, I suddenly had all these questions that needed answering.
I couldn’t just look at the document anymore. Every answer seemed to lead to another question.
I’d find one organization and then discover another one connected to it. I’d find a person and then discover where they had worked before. I’d find a training program and then start wondering where the people who went through it ended up.
The rabbit hole just kept getting deeper.
And at some point, my research changed.
I wasn’t just researching Project 2025 anymore. I was researching everything around it.
I stopped looking only at what Project 2025 recommended.
I started following the connections. I wanted to see where the ideas came from, who carried them, how people were developed and connected to one another, and what happened when those ideas and people reached government.
I had started with a document.
I ended up following a network.
The more I researched, the more obvious it became that I couldn’t understand what was happening by looking at individual organizations, people, or policies in isolation.
I needed to look at the bigger picture.
Once I started looking at the bigger picture, the scope of what I was researching changed completely.
Project 2025 was no longer the center of the research. It was one piece of something much larger.
What I was looking at was an interconnected network of organizations, institutions, personnel, training programs, advocacy groups, policy organizations, political networks, and government relationships.
That is the infrastructure I am documenting.
The point is not to claim that every organization involved is secretly part of one centralized organization.
The point is to examine the connections that can be documented and understand what those connections make possible.
There was the policy.
There were the people.
There were the organizations.
There were the networks.
And then there was government actually putting some of it into practice.
My research kept expanding, and I found myself going back over and over again to change things as the scope exploded. It was tedious, but it was also a good thing. Every time I found another piece, I had to make room for it.
Eventually, I realized I needed a fixed format for the research itself. That way the research could keep expanding without the framework changing underneath it. Just like I did with my framework for the whole project.
So I built one.
After all of that, this is where I am now.
#Governance #Implementation #InstitutionalCapture #LetThemEatCrow #Project2025 #ResearchMethods
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