There aren’t too many policy blueprints that can boast of having a lengthy Wikipedia entry. By September, the now notorious Project 2025’s entry, including footnotes, printed out at 56 pages—longer than any single chapter in the initiative’s hefty policy guide released last year, Mandate for Leadership. Admittedly, Project 2025 isn’t merely a policy blueprint, although that’s the part of the project that has gotten the most attention. Indeed, Project 2025 as a whole has received more attention than anyone could ever have imagined. This summer, while walking along a lightly traveled footpath connecting a non-touristy part of Virginia Beach to a quiet residential neighborhood, I saw a sticker on the back of a road sign, saying, “Know about Project 2025? You’d better!” Such warnings were everywhere during the election season. But the sign’s exhortation isn’t a bad one: to evaluate Project 2025 in any meaningful way, one must examine what’s in it.

According to Wikipedia, “[c]ritics have characterized Project 2025 as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to steer the U.S. toward autocracy.” What’s more, “[l]egal experts have said it would undermine the rule of law, separation of powers, separation of church and state, and civil liberties.” And all of this is in just the second paragraph of that 56-page Wiki entry! Later,