The Midas Cult strikes back Rick Perlstein has been punishing himself reading a copy of Project 2025. He’s plowing through the internal contradictions so you don’t have to. His second installment uncovers needles in that haystack as well as dirty needles in plain view. Among them: “Discrimination is singled out as a bad thing, to be sure,” Perlstein finds. “Heritage would just render it impossible to fight” by not measuring it. Simply “prohibit racial classifications.” Problem solved! Becasue racial tracking of employees is a crime against “the diversity of the American workforce.” There’s plenty of weirdness authored by “the reactionary wing of … the Holy Roman Catholic Church.” Perlstein makes this observation on how the faith insinuates itself into policy. One of the ways Catholicism builds its influence within so many diverse societies around the globe is “syncretism”: emphasizing church teachings that resemble sacred beliefs of its host culture—like enslaved Brazilians being told that Catholic saints were a lot like the panoply of spirits in the local version of West African religion. Here, Heritage deploys a Catholic version of our sacred symbol: individualism. Not the good, liberal kind, where people choose their values from their own experience and self-reflection; that’s a heresy. I’ve reflected plenty on our need to sanctify profit-making, another sacred belief of American culture. It’s a principle reason the Midas Cult is determined to divert the hundreds of billions collected for Social Security or spent each year on public education to the private sector: It’s bad enough that states are not providing…