Angelo Carusone on Project 2025 and Right-Wing Media Dominance

Project 2025's Narrative and Goals

• 🎯 Project 2025 provided a core narrative: identifying the "deep state" (most federal workers) as the "bad guy" hindering conservative agendas.
• 🔑 The "good guy" is framed as the unitary executive, with Donald Trump as its embodiment.
• ⚡ While policy frameworks exist, the project's success lies in its storytelling, which is unfolding faster than anticipated.

Future Trajectory of Project 2025

• 📉 Project 2025 aims for significant federal workforce reductions, targeting 300,000 to 1 million federal workers to be removed, far beyond the current 70,000 layoffs.
• ⚖️ A key next step involves creating a collision between the executive and judicial branches to assert executive authority over Congress and the courts.

Countering Project 2025

• 💡 The policies of Project 2025 are unpopular with the general public, but the challenge is connecting these policies to the harms people experience.
• 📢 Building consensus around "not this" is crucial; otherwise, Project 2025 or its rebranded version will become the new norm.

Right-Wing Media Dominance

• 📈 A significant study reveals that 82% of major online shows (podcasts, streaming) are right-leaning or right-adjacent, indicating narrative dominance.
• 🎭 Even explicitly non-political content, like sports and comedy podcasts, often contains right-leaning political content (72% of non-political shows analyzed).
• 🧠 This saturation creates an information landscape where the majority of Americans receive right-leaning narratives, contributing to young people accelerating their shift to the right.

Addressing the Information Asymmetry

• 🗣️ Democrats are using an outdated playbook focused on messaging and discipline, which is ineffective in the current landscape.
• 🛠️ The solution involves investing in storytellers and creators online rather than relying on paid media.
• 🚀 Leaders need to be less afraid, as the dominant ecosystem can smooth over mistakes and even create reward systems for them, fostering confidence.