Project 2025 Begins with One Man: Paul Weyrich

🌑 GLITCHED | PROJECT 2025

Episode 1 — Project 2025 Begins with One Man: Paul Weyrich

Before the blueprint… before the headlines… before the government we’re living under right now…
 there was one man.

 A man most Americans have never heard of.
 A man whose fear-based worldview would become the seed of the most powerful conservative machine in modern history.

This is where Project 2025 truly begins.

In this pilot episode of Glitched, we go back—way back—to Racine, Wisconsin, where a quiet boy in a quiet town grew into the architect of a political empire that would one day fuse religion, power, and control. This is the origin story nobody told you. And the one we all should have seen coming.

Tonight, we trace the early years:
 his upbringing, his small-town roots, his first taste of messaging and power, and the moment he realized one thing—
 fear unites people faster than faith ever will.

This is Episode 1 of what will become a multi-part series.
 The story starts here.

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🔥 COMING SOON

Mindf*ck Monday — Next Episode Drops Monday at 9 AM CT

Because the news should come with a trigger warning.
 Join me as we break down the chaos, the courtrooms, the constitutional crises, and the headlines you didn’t ask for but damn well need to know.

🔮 GLITCHED | PROJECT 2025 — EPISODE 2 TEASER

Episode 2: Falwell & Weyrich — The Alliance That Changed America

If Episode 1 is the spark, Episode 2 is the explosion.
 Next week, we move into the moment everything shifted:
 when Paul Weyrich met televangelist Jerry Falwell.
 Two men with power.
 Two men with purpose.
 Two men ready to merge politics, pulpits, and fear into one unstoppable machine.

The unholy alliance begins.

⚠️ DISCLAIMER

This content includes satirical commentary, altered media, and opinion-based political analysis intended for educational, cultural, and advocacy purposes. Some imagery is recreated for narrative effect. Viewer discretion and independent research are encouraged.

Chapters

• 0:00 A Glitchy Introduction And Premise
• 0:38 Racine Roots And Family Order
• 2:35 Vanished Women And Silent Influence
• 4:20 Discipline, Faith, And Adolescent Certainty
• 5:42 Cold War Fear As Moral Purpose
• 7:12 Goldwater, Movement Conservatism, And Media
• 9:15 From Reporter To Senate Press Secretary
• 10:35 Discovering Durable Power In Institutions
• 12:00 Building The Environment Elections Live In

Transcript

Speaker: 0:05

Quiet home. Quiet home. We go back to the beginning. Before Project 2025. Before the headlines. Before the blueprint. To the man whose worldview would replace American politics. Is the world glitching? Or is it just me? Wait, are we glitching? Feels like we're glitching. A new sassy politics series. With me. Christy Chanel. Racine, Wisconsin, a factory town stitched together with rail lines and Sunday church bells. The kind of place where life wasn't meant to change, only to repeat. This is where Paul Weyrich was born. But before we get to the man, we have to understand the world that built him. His father, Ignatius, was a first-generation German American, a railroad worker whose days were defined by steel, grit, and a routine that never loosened its grip. He woke before dawn, worked with his hands, and came home to a house where he expected order. His wife, Anne-Marie, was nine years younger. A woman who stayed inside the domestic world she was raised in. She was first generation as well, shaped by Catholic gender roles so rigid you could feel the weight of them in the walls. She kept the home, the meals, the children, and the rituals. And yet history barely remembers her. Not her voice, not her humor, not a single detail about who she was when nobody was watching. Even photographs blur her into something unrecognizable. Anne Marie survives in the record only as housewife, mother, Catholic. Meanwhile, America remembers other women. Marilyn Monroe, the woman the country adored because she was beautiful, and Amelia Earhart, the woman who refused the ground entirely and paid for it by becoming a mystery. These were the women history kept. Women who were visible only because they were exceptional or desirable or impossible to forget. But women like Anne Marie, they vanished. Not because their lives were small, but because no one wrote them down. And that silence mattered. It's the silence Paul grew up inside. He was the youngest of four, the baby of the family. And in Catholic households of that era, the youngest often absorbed the least freedom, but the most expectations. He watched his father enforce discipline and his mother slip into duty. He learned early that some people speak and others serve. Some people lead and others fade. We can't know exactly what he felt about the discipline in his home. The records don't tell us. But we can say this. He grew up in a house where structure was sacred, obedience was moral, and tradition was not questioned, only followed. Two things were non-negotiable in that house: God and order. The little Paul absorbed both. By the time he reached St. Catharines High School, Paul Weyrich had already learned how to disappear into a room without ever feeling small. He wasn't the kid telling jokes in the hallway or chasing girls after class. He wasn't even trying to fit in. He moved through adolescence like someone who had already decided he didn't have the luxury of adolescence. Former classmates remembered him the same way. Rigid posture, books held like armor, a seriousness that didn't quite match his age. Not moody, not shy, just certain. As if he saw something the other kids didn't or believed he did. And this is where we have to pause and look at the psychology. When you grow up believing the world is at stake, you don't become the class clown. You become the kind of young man who starts looking past the present and towards something he thinks is waiting for him. While other teenagers were discovering baseball or first kisses or Friday Night Freedoms, Paul was discovering something else. The Cold War. He consumed headlines the way other boys consumed comic books. Not casually, devotionally. To him, communism wasn't a geopolitical concept. It was an existential threat. A darkness creeping towards American soil, toward American churches, toward the order he had been raised to worship. He didn't see world events, he saw a battlefield. Cold War fear didn't just shape Paul, it gave him purpose. It told him that doubt was weakness, compromise was surrender, and faith, real faith, required action. Quietly, without anyone noticing, the teenager sitting in the back row of St. Catharines was already becoming something else. A believer sharpening into something far more consequential. The blueprint wasn't on paper yet, but the mindset was. This is where the ideology takes root. Paul Weyrich didn't stumble into politics. He was already circling it long before he spoke into a microphone. In the early 1960s, before the radio job, before the voice, before the ideology sharpened, Paul was an eager young foot soldier in the Racine County Young Republicans. 19 years old, handing out flyers, stuffing envelopes, absorbing the mechanics of campaigns like oxygen. And in 1964, he did something that told you exactly who he was becoming. He joined Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign.

Speaker 1: 7:00

The philosophy of something for nothing, the cult of individual and government irresponsibility, is an insidious cancer that will destroy us as a people unless we recognize it and root it out now. I say it is time to put conscience back in government and by good example put it back in all walks of American life. In your heart, you know he's right. Vote for Barry Goldwater.

Speaker: 7:26

The campaign that electrified the conservative movement, that fused anti-communism with moral identity, and this campaign would eventually shape Ronald Reagan. So when he walked into the newsroom later that year, he wasn't just a reporter with a notepad. He was a true believer armed with a microphone. At 21, sitting in a cramped radio booth with ham-me-down equipment, Paul wasn't just learning to speak. He was learning to listen. To politicians, to power brokers, to local officials who controlled city budgets, to state legislators fighting over Cold War policy, to anyone whose decision bent the rules other people had to live under. He wasn't choosing stories randomly. He was unconsciously mapping power. Most reporters saw interviews as assignments. Paul saw them as reconnaissance. This was the moment the transformation began. The boy with a rigid Catholic upbringing, the teenager shaped by Cold War fear, the young man learning the tempo of influence. He wasn't just observing the system anymore. He was preparing to enter it. Two years after leaving college, 23 years old, most young reporters would have been begging for a bigger station, a bigger market, and a bigger microphone. Not Paul. He did the unthinkable for someone in his position. He left journalism and walked straight into the halls of federal power. He became a press secretary to Republican U.S. Senator Gordon L. Alat of Colorado. Let's be clear. You don't go from small-town radio to the United States Senate because someone liked your voice. You get that job because you've shown something else: ambition, commitment, and a deep strategic way of seeing the world. In the Senate, Paul wasn't reporting anymore. He was shaping narratives, framing messages, controlling how information flowed. Inside the Capitol, Paul learned something that would define the rest of his life. Politicians come and go. Terms end. Elections flip. Faces fade. But institutions? Institutions last. Committees, foundations, networks, organizations that outlive presidents and outmaneuver elections. Paul saw it clearly. Maybe more clearly than anyone else in that era. If you want to change America, you don't win elections. You build the environment elections live in. This is the seed, the first draft of the blueprint. The moment the future architect of the new right understands what he was put on this earth to do, he saw the truth most people never learned. Politicians weren't powerful, they were temporary. They made speeches, signed letters, shook hands, and every few years they rotated out like replaceable cogs. Paul watched young staffers come and go. He watched senators lose elections they believed they were destined to win. Real power doesn't sit in the Senate chambers. Real power sits in the shadows behind them. In the networks, in the institutions, in the organizations that survive every election cycle and outlive every politician. America was shaped by structures, committees, foundations, think tanks, religious networks, political ecosystems that kept operating long after presidents left office. If you want to change the direction of a country, you don't chase election wins. You build the environment where elections take place. You influence the judges. You guide the staffers. You script the policy language. You frame the moral arguments that politicians repeat on camera like they came up with them. Paul wasn't mesmerized by the senators. He was watching the people who told senators what to do. This right here is the quiet birth of the modern new right. A machine that would turn faith into fuel, fear into strategy, and institutions into weapons. Washington didn't turn Paul Weyrich into a powerful man. It taught him how to build the power in other people. People who shared his worldview. And there was one group whose size, devotion, and outrage could transform American politics if someone could figure out how to unite them. The churches. The Catholics. The evangelicals. The believers who felt America was slipping away from God. They didn't trust each other. They didn't worship the same way. They didn't even vote the same way. But they carried something Paul recognized instantly shared fear.