The ideologues behind the blueprint for President Trump to “dismantle the administrative state” in the U.S. are working to shake up Europe, and they hope to dismantle the European Commission and the European Court of Justice.
The conservative Heritage Foundation worked with U.S. partners, including the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, to create Project 2025, a 900-plus page blueprint for dismantling and weakening government agencies and reducing regulations, including those addressing energy industries and climate change.
The second Trump administration already has enacted 42% of Project 2025’s goals, according to one tracker.
Now, Heritage and ADF are gathering European partners seeking similar changes, according to reporting from DeSmog, a U.S. group that reports on climate disinformation, and VSquare, a Polish news outlet.
Here’s a look at how Heritage and its partners say they want to make Europe “great again” by returning to “traditional family values.”
Psychologist Jordan Peterson announced the founding of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in a 2023 episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. Peterson said ARC’s purpose was to fight environmental policies favored by the 54-year-old World Economic Forum, which hosts the annual Davos gathering: “We’re trying to put together something like an alternative vision of the future, say an alternative to that kind of apocalyptic narrative that’s being put forward, at least implicitly, by organizations like the WEF, you know, and that’s the virginal planet, rapacious tyrant, you know, all-devouring consumer religion.”
The ARC hosted 4,000 people for its February forum. DeSmog described the event as a “global far-right Woodstock” for those opposed to “climate efforts, the sexual revolution and progressive politics.”
Crowd listening to Jordan Peterson at ARC Conference. (Screencap)
Conference sponsors included high-tech firms, arms suppliers, fossil fuel companies and Focus on the Family, which promoted Truth Rising, a film produced with the Colson Center.
“Focus on the Family and the Colson Center share the same commitment as ARC 2025 to address the issues facing Western civilization,” said Focus’ film promotion website. Focus said the film examines “the decline of Western civilization and the confusion about the defining issues of our time.”
President of the Heritage Foundation Kevin D. Roberts (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Organizers said the ARC Conference was designed to explore “some of today’s most important social, economic, cultural and moral questions,” including free enterprise, energy and the family. ARC promotes monogamy and child-bearing.
“How do we govern our corporate, social and political organizations so that we promote free exchange and abundance while protecting ourselves against the ever-present danger of cronyism and corruption?” said ARC of its forum.
The ARC forum featured numerous U.S. speakers:
- Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America
- Kristen Waggoner, CEO of Alliance Defending Freedom and ADF International
- Mike Johnson, speaker of the United States House of Representatives
- Chris Wright, Trump’s secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy
- Eric Metaxas, an author and radio host who supported Trump’s 2020 election lies and has been sued for defamation
- Chris Lunsford (aka Oliver Anthony), a musician who had a surprise hit with the song “Rich Men North of Richmond”
- Vivek Ramaswamy, former Republican presidential candidate who is a candidate for governor of Ohio.
Jordan Peterson
Heritage’s Kevin Roberts told ARC forum attendees the European Commission, the United Nations and the World Health Organization harm member nations and “rob us of our individual sovereignty.” Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO Jan. 20, the day he was inaugurated.
Heritage and its partners also hosted a March “closed-door workshop” in Washington, D.C., that featured leaders from two of Europe’s most powerful conservative groups, who together presented a paper that echoes Project 2025: “The Great Reset: Restoring Member State Sovereignty in the 21st Century.”
“The Great Reset” was the work of Mathias Corvinus Collegium, founded by Hungary’s autocratic ruler, Viktor Orbán, and Poland’s Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, a Catholic organization.
Both groups oppose abortion, gay rights and “gender ideology,” and both could be said to promote forms of Christian nationalism.
The Mathias Corvinus Collegium, or MCC, is funded by Hungarian taxpayers and has worked with Jordan Peterson, Heritage’s Kevin Roberts, Tucker Carlson, Dennis Prager, R.R. Reno of First Things, and representatives of the Federalist Society, the Manhattan Institute and Project Veritas.
Rod Dreher
One of MCC’s most famous American partners is Rod Dreher, who wrote that the MCC is creating “institutional resistance to the academic left’s ideological hegemony.”
Dreher left his native Baton Rouge, La., to move to Budapest for an all-expenses-paid fellowship at the Danube Institute, another think tank funded by the Hungarian government.
Hungary has become increasingly autocratic under Orbán, who has been Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, and critics say MCC is little more than a propaganda arm for Orbán.
But Dreher sings his benefactor’s praises, claiming Orbán has made Hungary “more free than many western liberal democracies that have surrendered to the dictatorship of woke.”
Poland’s Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, or Ordo Iuris, aims to “research the legal, culture and spiritual heritage in which Polish culture is rooted, and to promote them in public life and the legal system.”
In practice, that has meant proposed legislation to ban abortion and LGBTQ rights.
The American news outlet Vice profiled Ordo Iuris in a 2021 story, “The Mysterious Lawyers Trying to Create Europe’s Most Ultra-Conservative State:”
“Ordo Iuris rejects the Istanbul Convention, a treaty that seeks to end violence against women, which Poland ratified in 2015. Instead the group would like to see the Polish government adopt the ‘Convention on the Rights of the Family,’ a document it created. The Ordo Iuris convention defines marriage as ‘a free and permanent union of woman and man,’ does not recognize same-sex relationships and is anti-abortion in its outlook.”
Unlike Hungary’s MCC, Ordo Iuris does not publicize partnerships with American conservatives, except for one. It partners with the European Center for Law and Justice, which is affiliated with the American Center for Law and Justice, founded by televangelist Pat Robertson and former Trump attorney Jay Sekulow.
ACLJ Action, ACLJ’s political arm, is one of the 13 Christian groups that were partners in Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
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