The First Amendment guarantees religious freedom and the separation of Church and State, basic tenets of American democracy which conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation is intent on undermining. Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, describes how the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 would upend military protocols to eliminate civilian oversight. He believes a dystopian future in which the rights of racialized and marginalized groups are denied would be in store under a second Trump presidency. 

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Talia BaroncelliHi, I'm Talia Baroncelli, and you're watching theAnalysis.news. I'll shortly be joined by Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. We'll be speaking about Project 2025 and the implications it has for the U.S. military.

If you'd like to support the work that we do, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and hit the donate button at the top right corner of the screen. Make sure you're on our mailing list; that way, you're always up to date every time a new episode is published. You can like and subscribe to the show on YouTube or on other podcast streaming services such as Apple or Spotify. See you in a bit with Mikey.

Project 2025 is a lengthy policy agenda authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative and Christian nationalist think tank. Investigative outlet ProPublica recently obtained Project 2025 private training videos, which involve several former Trump officials. This corroborates the connection between former President Trump and the Heritage Foundation.

One of the videos features Bethany Kozma, a former Deputy Chief of Staff at USAID during the Trump administration. In this video, she discusses Project 2025's opposition to legislation trying to mitigate the effects of climate change. She reads from page 364 of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership, which states that "In the name of combating climate change, policies have been used to create an artificial energy scarcity that will require trillions of dollars in new investment, supported with taxpayer subsidies, to address a problem that government and special interests themselves created." They don't perceive climate change or carbon-intensive industries as posing a threat to society or to the environment but as a set of policies meant to create energy scarcity and benefit a certain segment of the elite.

Joining me to discuss these issues is Mikey Weinstein. He is the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring the constitutional right of religious freedom for the U.S. Armed Forces. He is also a lawyer and a former Air Force officer and served as White House Legal Counsel to the Reagan Administration. He also served as first general counsel to Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire who ran for president twice. He's the author of several books, including Was God on Our Side and No Snowflake in an Avalanche. It's great to have you again, Mikey.

Mikey WeinsteinThanks, Talia. I'm looking forward to it as well.

Talia BaroncelliBefore we get into Project 2025, can you explain to our viewers what you do at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation?

Mikey WeinsteinAbsolutely. We are a weapon, and we've been fighting Christian nationalism and calling it out before anybody else did, that I'm aware of, going back to the early 2000s. Our job is to protect the U.S. Constitutionally mandated wall, separating Church and State in the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind, which is the U.S. military: the Marine Corps, Navy, Army, Air Force, and Space Force.We have clients in all 18 national security agencies. Some are well-known, like the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, etc. We have clients in the U.S. Coast Guard, which is not the DOD; that's the Department of Homeland Security, and even the U.S. Maritime Service,