Networked conspiracism and autocracy in project 2025

In 2023, the Heritage Foundation published the ninth iteration of the Mandate series, Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise, also known as Project 2025. This book and associated initiatives are a call for what Kevin D. Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, calls “the second American Revolution.” While policy analysts suggest that the governmental and cultural ramifications of Project 2025 would be catastrophic if achieved, we concern ourselves with the rhetorical tactics of the document, which rely on metonymic linkages among conspiratorial fragments. Project 2025 authors argue through a networked mélange of conspiratorial subtexts, falsehoods, and symbols that prop up the urgency of Project 2025's ongoing implementation. This essay analyzes the metonymic connections among the rhetorical elements of the document to illustrate how Project 2025 urges audiences to corral and condense broad, and often contradictory, demands into a codified policy mandate. We argue that the metonymic tropes leveraged in Project 2025 illustrate the functions of networked conspiracism.