A new book by the chief architect of Project 2025, a hugely controversial policy plan for a second Trump term, repeatedly employs imagery of fire and burning, including calling for rightwingers to “burn away the rot” of American institutions and organizations deemed opposed to conservative aims.
The news comes after a White House address on Thursday, two days after Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in the US presidential election, when Joe Biden called on Americans to “bring down the temperature” after months of heated political battle.
Mixing classical quotes with cliche (“it is time to fight fire with fire”) and metaphors about forest fires and Smokey Bear, Kevin Roberts, president of the far-right Heritage Foundation, advocates “a long, controlled burn” of targets including the FBI, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the New York Times, “every Ivy League college” and even the Boy Scouts of America.
Roberts’s book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy, but the book has proved controversial already. This summer, news outlets used review copies to report violent imagery in an introduction by the Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential pick, and to highlight both Roberts’s own violent language and his work on Project 2025. Roberts’s original subtitle – Burning Down Washington to Save America – also attracted attention, as did incendiary language in promotional materials.
As Trump sought to distance himself from the book and Project 2025, including by lying about not knowing Roberts, publication was postponed until after election day. Now, with Trump victorious, Roberts’s heated rhetoric seems likely to alarm progressives all over again.
Beginning with a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid – “My spirit kindles to fire, and rises in wrath to avenge my dying land” – Roberts writes: “In 2020, our country went up in flames.
“Some of those conflagrations were intentional arson, such as the ‘mostly peaceful’ protests [for racial justice after the police murder of George Floyd] that caused more than a billion dollars in damage [a controversial claim] in some of America’s greatest cities: Others were more unintentional, such as the record-setting California wildfires that torched more than 4 million acres of our most beautiful forests.
“In fact, all those fires were connected. They spring from a conspiracy against nature – against ordered, civilized societies, against common sense and normal people – orchestrated by a network of political, corporate, and cultural elites who share a set of interests quite apart from those of ordinary Americans.
“… Be it Black Lives Matter (BLM) in the cities or the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the countryside, the … playbook is the same: destroy the embodied institutions that define the American way of life and replace them with ideological commitments and bureaucratic imperatives.
“It is time to fight fire with fire.”
Alluding to prominent Project 2025 aims – including political purges of the federal government and legal attacks on groups including women and LGBTQ+ Americans – Roberts continues: “Fire has the potential to destroy … To escape our current darkness, restore America’s civic life and take back our country for good, conservatives can’t merely continue putting out fires; we must be brave enough to go on the offense, strike the match and start a long, controlled burn.
“There’s plenty of fuel. Like deadwood in a forest, many of America’s institutions have been completely hollowed out … Decadent and rootless, these institutions serve only as shelter for our corrupt elite. Meanwhile, they block out the light and suck up the nutrients necessary for new American institutions to grow. For America to flourish again, they don’t need to be reformed; they need to be burned. A nice start would include:
“Every Ivy League college, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, 80% of ‘Catholic’ higher education, BlackRock, the Loudoun County Public School System, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party, and the National Endowment for Democracy.”
Roberts does not elaborate on qualifications for his list. But it does contain one name that may jar with rightwing readers: BlackRock, a major financial firm, has been a key investor in Trump Media & Technology Group, the president-elect’s social media company. Larry Fink, BlackRock’s billionaire co-founder, has been linked to an appointment as treasury secretary under Trump.
Turning from Virgil – and the composer Gustav Mahler – to Smokey Bear, Roberts says the US Forest Service mascot might not approve of his aims. But, he insists, “any good conservationist can tell you that fire is an intrinsic part of the cycle of life … without regular controlled burns, a conflagration eventually occurs that wrecks the forest rather than renews it.”
Saying his aim is “to inspire the New Conservative Movement to rekindle the fire of the American tradition, and to empower real Americans to take back our country”, Roberts says that despite advocating burning down the FBI, he represents “the Party of Creation” against “the Party of Destruction – those who seek to abolish the existing order in the name of emancipation, freedom, and progress”.
Roberts’s fiery imagery and rhetoric does not end there. Elsewhere, he compares progressive policies to Dutch elm disease, with affected bodies needing to be “promptly burned”; says “the only way to revive” institutions “haggard with age, decay, and bloat, is to burn away the rot”; and even meditates on the nature of fire itself.
“Man’s taming of fire is the cornerstone of human culture,” Roberts muses. “That’s the funny thing about fire. It is so fleeting, a flame flickering from moment to moment, yet in its evanescence, it is eternal. Of all the elements, fire is most associated with transformation, renewal, and change. You can’t have a blaze without some kind of sacrificial transformation of fuel into fire. Yet precisely for this reason, fire demands an attention to continuity. Unlike any of the other elements, fire dies … a fire must be continually tended.”
Particularly, it seems, if it is set under the Boy Scouts of America.
