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Americans: Walking to Gilead With Eyes Wide Shut
Project 2025 was modeled after The Handmaid’s Tale
Author Margaret Atwood has always insisted that The Handmaid’s Tale contains nothing that hasn’t happened somewhere, at some time, to someone. When she wrote the novel in the 1980s, it was a speculative warning, not science fiction. The authoritarian regime of Gilead, with its white bonnets, forced births, and theocratic brutality, was a collage of history’s real abuses, reassembled to feel both ancient and disturbingly close. Today, that closeness is no longer a metaphor. With the emergence of Project 2025 and the mainstreaming of Christian nationalist rhetoric, what once passed as literary dystopia now reads like a political blueprint.
Project 2025 is a comprehensive plan spearheaded by the infamous Heritage Foundation and a coalition of right-wing organizations designed to dismantle federal agencies and remake the American government under an authoritarian executive branch. Buried among its 900 pages are dystopian policies aimed at “restoring the family,” “protecting children,” and enforcing “Biblical values” — language that sounds benign until it’s translated into law.
Behind the euphemisms is a campaign to strip civil rights, erase the separation of church and state, and replace democratic institutions with patriarchal…
