The Anti-Democratic Group Wants to Bring Back Theocracy –

By Glynn Wilson –
The Full Big Picture –

Americans of all stripes who favor keeping our democratic Republic have many good reasons to be concerned about Project 2025. But the underlying reason we should all be concerned is not just all the horrendous policy proposals that would fundamentally change our democracy and harm a lot of people.

This is a dream document by conservatives in the Catholic Church that Trump would not be able to implement in full if he tried. What people must understand is that the goal of this so-called “conservative” Heritage Foundation plan is to DESTROY our DEMOCRACY, implementing in its place a theocracy many early Americans came here to escape. Their solution is a crypto-fascist dictatorship in the person of Donald Trump. Also known as “Christo-fascism.” (*See footnote).

Talking about Project 2025 is not some insane conspiracy theory. The 900 page document, however, is exactly that. It’s a written down conspiracy to replace our republic with a monarchy, overseen by the Catholic Church.

The Biden administration and now the Harris campaign have a website explaining it here.

Project 2025: Trump’s plan to take your power, your control, and your money.

You demand evidence? Here it is.

In an important breaking news contribution to this developing story, the Guardian newspaper broke a story on Friday, July 26, that exposed the underlying motivation of one of the key authors of the report. Kevin Roberts is the Heritage Foundation president and the architect of Project 2025, they report, the conservative think tank’s road map for a second Trump presidency. He has close ties and receives regular spiritual guidance from an Opus Dei-led center in Washington D.C., a hub of activity for the radical and secretive Catholic group.

What is Project 2025 and what is Trump’s involvement?

We must be clear in framing this issue, however, as the reporting is great, but the underlying dot is not connected. We do that here.

The paper reports that one of the core tenets of Opus Dei is that it does not believe in the traditional separation of church and state. Yes, and anyone could find that out with a search of Wikipedia. Of course the separation of church and state was considered fundamental to establishing a democratic republic from the beginning of the American experiment in government “of, by and for the people.”

The paper quotes Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, who says the group believes “the two ought to have a symbiotic relationship.”

“They are secretive, so while they are not [outwardly] part of this [Project 2025] per se, it is not surprising at all that some of their members are part of it. They see this moment in politics – and the possibility of allowing ‘woke ideology’ to win – as fundamentally changing the nature of America, western civilization and Christianity,” Faggioli said.

“Opus Dei is part of [a movement of] U.S. conservative and traditionalist Catholicism that holds a view that the United States is the last bastion of Christendom, so that if the United States goes a certain way, so goes Christianity, and Catholicism.”

Roberts made it clear earlier this month that he believes the U.S. is at a crossroads (where the deal with the devil always goes down, right?). He says we are …

“in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

So are you willing to let these religious radicals remake our country into Europe of old and threaten a bloody civil war if we do not lie down and take it?

They are not just American “conservatives.” They are anti-democracy. And they are willing to help an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump ascend to the presidency (to be followed by J.D. Vance?) so they can turn it into a dictatorship, kowtowing to the radical right-wing Catholics, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society.

Talk about amassing power. The liberals could learn a thing or two. You want to see a Deep State? This would be it.

They are hiding in plain site and this is not American “conservatism.” They call it that because it makes it popular and helps it fit in with the de-evolution of Republican thought going back decades. But this is NOT the conservatism of William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, or even Milton Friedman for that matter. That was just the Chicago School for economics.

And Trump is not even hiding his intentions.

Trump told Christians on Friday that if they vote for him this November, “in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

Reuters and other news outlets reported this but said “it was not clear what the former president meant by his remarks.”

What? He is entirely clear. Connect the dots people. Or we will for you.

Trump tells Christians they won’t have to vote after this election

Roberts acknowledged in a speech last September that for years, he has visited the Catholic Information Center, a K Street institution headed by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the archdiocese of Washington, on a weekly basis for mass and “formation” or religious guidance. Opus Dei also organizes monthly retreats there.

In the speech delivered at the center, recorded and available online, Roberts spoke candidly about his strategy for achieving extreme policy goals he supports that are out of step with the views of a majority of Americans.

What the Guardian reporters and editors must not have noticed is that J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for Vice President, was there, sitting in the front row. Watch the first few seconds of the video.

Outlawing birth control is the “hardest” political battle facing conservatives in the future, the 50-year-old political strategist said, but he urged conservatives to pursue even small legislative victories – what he called “radical incrementalism” – to advance their most rightwing policy objectives.

Video:

Roberts gained notoriety this year as the leading force behind Project 2025, a foundation plan backed by more than 100 conservative groups that seeks to radically upend a broad range of policies if Trump gets elected again, from limiting abortion access and LGBTQ+ rights and dismantling the Department of Education, to ending diversity programs and increasing government support for “fertility awareness” programs, like ovulation tracking and practicing periodic abstinence, instead of more reliable contraception, as the Guardian put it.

What they don’t mention is that it also advocates getting rid of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, minimum wages laws, and many other proposals that would further damage the working class and middle class in the United States – already under serious stress even as the stock market booms and corporations report record profits.

It’s true that Roberts’ personal ties to Opus Dei and the significance of his affiliation “have received far less attention,” according to the Guardian, so let’s change that right now.

Gareth Gore, the author of a forthcoming book on Opus Dei, called the Catholic organization “a political project shrouded in a veil of spirituality”.

The group’s founder, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, saw his followers as part of a “rising militia”, Gore said, who were seeking to “enter battle against the enemies of Christ”.

“Like Project 2025, Opus Dei at its core is a reactionary stand against the progressive drift of society,” Gore said. “For decades now, the organization has thrown its resources at penetrating Washington’s political and legal elite – and finally seems to have succeeded through its close association with men like Kevin Roberts and Leonard Leo.”

Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society executive vice-president, is a conservative activist who has led the Republican mission to install the rightwing majority in the supreme court and finances many of the groups signed on to Project 2025.

Like Roberts, Leo also has links to the Opus Dei-linked center. In a 2022 speech accepting the group’s highest honor, the John Paul II New Evangelization award, Leo praised the center while also referring to his political opponents as “vile and amoral current day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who were “under the influence of the devil.”

Democrats, including Kamala Harris, have been sounding the alarm on Project 2025 to warn voters of what a second Trump administration could do.

“[Trump] and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. We know we have to take this thing seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing?” Harris said this week in her first presidential campaign rally, to laughter. “Read it. It’s 900 pages.”

The Biden administration and now the Harris campaign have a website explaining it here.

Project 2025: Trump’s plan to take your power, your control, and your money.

Trump, for his part, has sought to distance himself from the project, though the people behind it have close ties to the former president, and the policies it envisions often align with Trump’s ideas. Roberts has said he is “good friends” with J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, and Vance has praised Project 2025 as having “some good ideas”.

Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 and wrote the foreword to Roberts’ forthcoming book, praising the author for articulating a “genuinely new future for conservatism”.

“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” Vance wrote. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”

Opus Dei does not disclose the names of its members, according to the Guardian.

But the group’s roots date back a century. It was established in Spain in response to a clash between conservative Catholics and anti-Catholic socialism and communism in Spain. Decades later, the group was granted special status by the conservative pope John Paul II, who supported Opus Dei and saw it as a response to the rise of liberation theology in Latin America, a progressive church movement.

Some of Opus Dei’s special rights were revoked in recent years by Pope Francis, however, who is seen as a more progressive pontiff.

Asked whether it had a view on Roberts’ remarks or Project 2025, a spokesperson for Opus Dei told the Guardian in a statement: “Opus Dei is an institution of the Catholic Church that tries to help people come closer to God in their work and everyday lives. Opus Dei’s aims are purely spiritual and it does not endorse or have any opinion on any political project of any kind.”

It’s a blatant lie. And the group and church should have their tax exempt status challenged as a result of their obvious partisan political activism.

Opus Dei is controversial not only in the U.S. Dozens of women from Argentina and Paraguay filed a complaint to the Vatican over labor exploitation and abuses of power they say they experienced after joining the group at sites in multiple countries, the paper reported. And reporting in Australia gave insight into schools run by Opus Dei, where former students allege their education left them with “psychological damage”.

Roberts’ personal background suggests his ties to Opus Dei are not just limited to the CIC. A school founded by Roberts in Louisiana, called John Paul the Great Academy, considers Opus Dei-founder Escrivá its “patron”.

Roberts was also involved in an Opus Dei-affiliated high school leadership program in Austin, Texas. A website that tracks Opus Dei men’s activities called Where You Are included a profile of the high school program in Austin where Roberts appears to volunteer and “contributes significantly “ to the school’s career and leadership program.

Roberts was featured as a guest at another Opus Dei-linked school, the Camino Schools, in 2023. In introductory remarks before Roberts spoke, the school’s chairman, Bob Rose, praised schools that teach boys and girls they are “different”, they learn differently and are inspired by different things, and where boys are taught by “manly men” who serve as role models.

Roberts’ critics said concerns about his ties to Opus Dei were not connected to his identity or beliefs as a Roman Catholic.

“Kevin Roberts, like all Americans, has a guaranteed freedom to worship or not under our constitution,” said Lisa Graves, co-founder of Court Accountability, a non-partisan group that seeks to combat judicial corruption.

That is not at issue.

“What is of concern is how some powerful elites, like Roberts, who have failed to persuade the American people to embrace their agenda, seem eager to use the power of the executive branch to impose their personal religious views as binding law on other Americans – by barring abortion, using the government to endorse the rhythm method of contraception, even banning mention of ‘condoms’ in women’s preventative health, as well as assailing the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,” the Guardian concludes.

Heritage did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the CIC.

During Roberts’ speech, which received little notice at the time but is posted on the center’s YouTube page, Roberts detailed how conservative Catholics and their allies could advance U.S. policy to end access to abortion, same-sex marriage and contraception.

Knowing the unpopularity of banning birth control – a harder political battle to wage than advancing anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage policies – he encouraged an incremental approach to pursuing this long-term goal.

“Even in a politically conservative setting, that can be a very difficult thing to advance,” Roberts told attendees at the CIC event. “A majority of Roman Catholics don’t believe in that teaching, if public opinion surveys are the case. And so it makes it very difficult to advocate for that.”

The faithful should practice the “gift of discernment” to know when to bring it up: “Sometimes the right thing at the right time to the right person isn’t the full teaching of humanity, right? It isn’t the full teaching of contraception. And recognizing that that’s not the time is no way turning into Judas. In fact, it’s being apostolic. And the very definition of the word, which is in modern common parlance, meeting someone where they are.”

In espousing his theory of “radical incrementalism”, or what he called the “enchilada theory”, he said it was critical for conservatives to work first to achieve a small part of a larger policy goal based on what’s politically possible at the moment. Sometimes, he said, having even half an enchilada could be a victory.

On abortion, he noted that Roman Catholics believe “no abortion can be morally justified”, but that even in conservative circles in the U.S., this is not a majority opinion, and it’s an “even more difficult position to hold” after the Dobbs decision. Using the “same vocabulary of our faith” in the policy arena has a negative effect on electoral outcomes, he said.

Supreme Court Dismantles Liberty, Rights and Freedoms, and Not Just for Women

Roberts advised listeners not to accept the “narrative framing of the other side” on these issues. He said conservatives who are anti-abortion should stop talking about it the way the left wants them to and instead “talk about the fact that many of them want abortion to be legal until birth”.

Strategies of incrementalism and narrative framing don’t always apply, he added, because sometimes you just have to fight.

“Right now, we have to fight on religious liberty and, in particular, religious liberty as it relates to protecting institutions of faith,” he said. “And that’s not a time for strategic retreat. It’s not a time to be savvy, it’s not a time to be sweet. It’s not a time to develop friendships with the other side. It is a time to take our fist – figuratively, Father Charles – and bust them in the nose because they hate what you and I believe.”

Catholicism in American History

In the early days of American history, even before the United States fought a Revolution and became a country, Catholics were very unpopular here. The Baptists were the ascendent denomination of Christianity, and they advocated adamantly for a separation of church and state, fearing that the Catholics would come to power and rule over our political system like they had done for centuries in Europe.

Thomas Jefferson and most of the others who orchestrated the separation from England and created the United States believed no democracy could survive without a strict wall separating church and state. Just look at what he wrote to the Danbury Baptists in Connecticut after he became the third president in 1801.

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”

Trump Supreme Court Dismantles Wall of Separation Between Church and State

It was not until 1960 when Americans elected the first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, but he was not devout, and certainly not a “conservative” who followed the likes of Opus Dei. But the sneaky bastards with the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, having captured Republican politicians through massive funding programs, saw Trump’s popularity as an opportunity to implement their long term plans here on these shores.

They’ve already captured the United States Supreme Court, the most important institution at the top of our legal system. They have already bought and paid for many allies in Congress, threatening our Legislative Branch. If they get Trump elected again, they will have the Executive Branch in their hip pocket. And there goes the democratic Republic we fought and died for.

President Joe Biden acknowledged this in his address to the nation Wednesday night.

I told this story in great depth from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania back in August of 2018, before the midterm elections. The headline?

If You Want to Keep Democracy Alive, Vote Nov. 6 Like Your Life Depends on It

By now you know the famous true story of what Dr. Benjamin Franklin said at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 as he left Independence Hall on the final day of the deliberations of the Continental Congress to head over to City Tavern for a cool ale.

“Well, Doctor, what have we got?” a woman asked. “A Republic or a Monarchy?”

“A Republic,” Franklin replied. “If you can keep it.”

So too we must all vote on Nov. 5 this year, to save democracy one more time, and keep our Republic.

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* Crypto-fascism is the secret support for, or admiration of, fascism or trends close to the ideology. The term is used to imply that an individual or group keeps this support or admiration hidden to avoid political persecution or political suicide.

* Christian fascism is a far-right political ideology that denotes an intersection between fascism and Christianity. It is sometimes referred to as “Christofascism”, a neologism which was coined in 1970 by the liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle.

* In this case both apply.

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