A look at Project2029.me

The concept of responding to the implementation of Project 2025 with Project 2029 is wildly popular. From social media to local organizing, people understand we need a comprehensive response.

Project2029.me is a grassroots, citizen-led effort to reclaim our democracy. They are not affiliated with or supported by any political party or political action group (PAC). Their organizers are unpaid. They do this work because of their civic and moral values, and hope for America.

In today's episode, we discuss the project with founder Jake Orlowitz and communications director Susan Swords. We hear about what the project means to them, how they work, and how you can get involved.
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You can find out more at project2029.me

Travis Retzlaff: Project 2029 is a grassroots, citizen led effort to reclaim our democracy. They are not affiliated with or supported by any political party or political action group. Their organizers are unpaid, and they do the work because of their civic and moral values and their hope for America. From project 2029. Not me. Today we have their communications chief, Susan Swords, and their founder, Jake.

Travis Retzlaff: Also, it's, Susan, why don't you introduce yourselves?

Susan Swords: Thank you, Travis, and hello to everyone. Yes. As Travis said, my name is Susan Swords and the communications chief for project 2029. I'm a lifelong communications professional now retired. My last position was as the assistant director of public information for the new Jersey Office of Legislative Services, which was a nonpartisan arm of the new Jersey State legislature.

Susan Swords: I worked in a number of other state agencies, either doing public information, public relations or communications. So that's been my background, and I am doing my best to translate all of those skills to promoting project 2029.

Travis Retzlaff: Fantastic. Thank you. And Jake.

Jake Orlowitz: Well, I don't have a bio so much as a couple of snapshots from my life. You know, I was, I was the star baseball pitcher, and then I was the wrestling star, and then I was the, you know, first in my class in high school, and then I went to a little school, called Wesleyan University, steeped in liberal politics, but I studied classics of the European Enlightenment.

Jake Orlowitz: And then I went to Colorado because I wanted to get out of the suburbs, and I started skiing, and then I pretty much lost my mind. I had this period, this kind of literally and psychologically dark period where I just was lost and I needed help, and I was resistant to getting it. And when I got it, thank God, thankfully, I came back with a vengeance.

Jake Orlowitz: I was all of a sudden eager to use my political chops and intellectual history understanding to work on this open project that you may have heard of called Wikipedia. And I became one of the foremost Wikipedia editors in this open community, sharing knowledge for no money. And then I built a library for Wikipedia editors as part of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. And then I, got involved in all kinds of interesting and thorny political debates, kind of reignited my passion for politics and political theory and that led to a private consultancy where I work with museums and non-profits on, Wikipedia issues that they're having and how to engage with the community and work on, on content or images or whatever tools, whatever kind of projects they're interested in. But, I'll pause it there because I, I'm also now the founder, and technically CEO of project 2029. And I'm sure you have some question of where did that come from?

Travis Retzlaff: Yeah. Yeah. That's let's go back to the the genesis of the idea. Where where did you come up with the idea that that you wanted to do something about this?

Jake Orlowitz: You know, it was a moment of desperation. It was a moment of darkness that I think we have all felt where you're scrolling through the news and your soul is sinking into the abyss. And I felt depressed. And this is just when protests were starting to happen in 2025 was around February, and I really was not motivated to get out into the streets. In fact, I was unmotivated or anti motivated. I just wanted to hide. And I realized that that psych, that psychological disposition, was exactly where, the current administration wanted us to be is to feel paralyzed and disempowered and overwhelmed from flooding the zone, and to just put your hands up and surrender. And basically, I just realized that I couldn't do that, but I also couldn't, merely engage with this regime from the news. So I just happened to come across like a literal meme, a sketch of something that said project 2029 and had seven policy ideas, just kind of, grassroots nuts and bolts policy ideas. And I thought, oh my God, why are we doing project 2029? Why are we doing that?

Travis Retzlaff: Like 2025? Project 2025.

Jake Orlowitz: Yeah. In the spirit of Hitler being a good orator, it worked. It was a bad, bad group of people doing bad things to the country for bad ends. But it was well organized, and we need to do something like that for good, for the people, for the common and woman in person, and they and them. And we need to be. And then all of a sudden I was like, oh my God, I feel uplifted. I'm like, let me throw something together and then throw it out into the internet, particularly on blue Sky, which was just forming, and just see if it gets any traction. And it did.

Travis Retzlaff: Fantastic. And there's a couple of things I like. There is there's the as I said, the common response to throw up your hands. The next level response is people screaming back at the abyss, going on social media and venting their friends situation and raising awareness that at this point, like, I think everybody's got awareness. I understand the desire to do it, but it can take the place of real action. So you made that leap from, what do we really need here is is not more shouting into the void, but we need we need something that we're fighting for instead of just what we're fighting against. And you need you probably need some of both, but there's, not as many people delineating and outlining and making plans of what we should fight for. So I like that. And to your other point about, I will give project 2025 it's due is they were out in the open. They said this is exactly what we want to do. And my whole life I've always heard people complaining. Politicians don't tell us what they're going to do. We do. We never know what we're voting for. And here was a case where they came right out and said it, and they had a detailed plan. And as much as the people that were running for office ran from it, they decided that they were actually going to implement it. So it's like, I know there's some kind of, oh, I don't know about wanting to pick that nomenclature, putting that name behind it because it harkens back to project 2025. But it doesn't matter. Like the core good idea is you've got to have a plan. You've got to have a more cohesive vision. Then I want affordable housing. I want better health care. I want to raise minimum wage. You need to have a more comprehensive plan, because we've got a lot of stuff we need to do. Yeah. So that is great. So you're Susan?

Susan Swords: Yeah. I wanted to underscore Jake's point, regarding the group that comprise this project, 2029, if you were to talk to more people than just me and Jake, the common thing you would hear is I had to do something. You know, I, I can write my representatives. I can show up to protest. I can join a great group like indivisible. But I really felt like I had to do something concrete. That was my motivation for joining. And you will hear that from just about everyone else. And how grateful they are that now we've got this, that we can work on, that we really feel like we are working towards something, something good, something better. And you feel like you're being productive while the whole world is falling into pieces around us, right.

Jake Orlowitz: And, you know, I, I consider myself part of the left, broadly construed. And I'm. So I share this with with love. But there were some movements like occupy, which had a great slogan and a good, kind of optical game, but no clear. I mean, the common complaint was no clear demands, and if you even ask, like historians of, nonviolent protest, protest without demands, protest without plans, without vision and direction doesn't affect change. So we view ourselves as complementary to indivisible and 5051 there and even just the, self-governed, or self-organized groups like in Minnesota right now, you know, it takes courage to get out into the street and there's a bravery and a revelry there, but it's not enough to get out the vote. It's not enough to present a, it's not enough to get you a coherent governing vision. And that's often, very different kind of work than mobilizing direct action.

Travis Retzlaff: Yeah. Exactly. It takes it takes all kinds. But, we need we need people to be resisting and on the streets and providing mutual aid to impacted communities and raising awareness. And we need people doing the work behind the scenes to say, okay, we don't like this. What is the next vision look like? And it again, to the point of of non-action and other like raising awareness. It was very easy and it still is to say, well, somebody should be doing something about this and why don't the Democrats have a plan? And it's like, we are the progressives, we are the left. We are the Democrats. We are the people that want a plan. We shouldn't be waiting for some official party. To some extent. We have to tell the party this is what we want, right? They are also always looking to see what do people want so they can get elected. And we have to be vocal about organizing around. This is what it should be, and not waiting for some mythical other to tell us what that is. Right.

Jake Orlowitz: Yeah. And you know, the Republicans party had a rule like you never criticize another Republican. First of all, our coalition is not just from the left. And it's not just from the progressive left or the, kind of Bernie Sanders left, but he's a great example of, you know, a motivating politician. But what I will say is many of us share frustrations with the opposition party known as the Democrats. We may have voted for them, many of us for most of our lives, but we have not felt like the opposition to the regime currently in power has been sufficient. And so we are not only not affiliated with the Republicans or the Democrats. We're not really happy with that. We really think that most people want something better than what's been offered in the past.

Travis Retzlaff: Oh yeah, I would agree. Right. So the it's the independents that aren't in the system. It's the, once you can talk to people about the policies they're interested in, there's a lot of very popular policies that neither party is really talking about or will work to implement. And I assume that's kind of the space you're speaking to in terms of like, there's, popular policies that we should be doing that nobody will will even touch Republican or Democrat.

Jake Orlowitz: Yeah, not in the mainstream of either party, maybe on the fringes, but, you know, I was thinking about this, like, if someone forced me to pick a single politician that holds our approximate views, and I couldn't think of one. But I thought, like, well, if you like, somehow, like, merged the DNA of Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, it would get about 80%, 80% of where we're trying to go. But of course, you have to you have to do that merging, which is actually quite complicated. Sometimes moderates and progressives fight harder than progressives and the MAGA folks. You can have the most internecine battles with your friends and neighbors over, over, just slight differences. And that's part of what we try to avoid. We try and focus on big picture direction. We try. And it's it's a constant challenge that I feel responsible for steering. We try not to get bogged down in the theoretical, the academic. Not that we're not. We are evidence and research based, but we try not to get bogged down in minutia because people are are waiting. People are suffering. People are starving and dying. And like, this is not a time for waiting until we get it perfect.

Travis Retzlaff: Exactly, exactly. Right on. So the, the effort, at this point, there there are, what do you call them? The pillars of the platform. What are the pillars of the platform today?

Jake Orlowitz: So the this is since the beginning, in February of 2025, there were, 27 pillars, and they've remained fairly consistent, 27 is a lot, but we have a big, complicated country we need to, to govern. Well, so I'm going to tell you the buckets that the pillars are in and then maybe call out a couple. So the first is without making government work. So, you know, this is about everything from term limits to having, robust civil service to making sure that votes are equally, counted. And by that I don't mean literally counted, but that they have the same weight in the Electoral College. And then fundamentally, at the top of the list is getting money out of politics because you can't have free and fair elections until, you know, Citizens United is just booted. And now we're seeing the, the fruits of that with billions of dollars flowing into elections. It's just, if you wanted to create a situation where democracy would be trampled on, this is it. And so making government work is first because otherwise we're going to be right back in the situation.

Travis Retzlaff: So is that. First in terms of priority or just first in terms of those first, you mentioned.

Jake Orlowitz: I think it's a necessary condition. It may not be the first because it requires like actual Supreme Court overrule, but, how you get there, these are not in order. I think it's first. And if you ask Lawrence Lessig, who's a great scholar first from the tech space, tech law, but who moved into politics, he had a phrase called, you have to you have to attack the problem at the root, and the root problem of all other problems in our democracy is money in politics. So in that sense, it's first. But I think we are open, you know, should we have the ability to influence, the democratic or governing agenda in some fashion or an individual politician's agenda? We're pragmatic. I think that's a term that defines us quite well. I view myself as a progressive personally. Some of us are centrists. Some of us are independents. We have people of faith. We have vets, veterans. We have, doctors and, journalists and all kinds of folks. But I personally am a progressive, just steeped in that. And yet I view myself as pragmatic rather than dogmatic. So we'll take the winds where we can get them. And some winds are also going to come from someone like me saying, okay, I'm going to like, reach further across the aisle than I'm used to and form alliances that are not unthinkable, but maybe a little bit uncomfortable because I recognize the humanity and the shared burden in other people in the country who don't think just like me and together will get something done which will protect our country. Like if we're split, if we're evenly divided, even 60, 40, we're very, very vulnerable to authoritarianism and fascism, like of the of the real kind. Not the not the hyperbole kind, but the actual kind, the kind we learn about in history books and are terrified of the kind of, you know, my friends from Venezuela, because I work on Wikipedia, my friends from all over the world, but my friends from Venezuela and other countries have experienced directly what authoritarianism is. We are like inches away from it. And so this is, again, no time for purity tests.

Travis Retzlaff: Yeah. And I agree, there's there's a pragmatic and the dogmatic and from a dogmatic perspective, you really need to fix the machinery that makes laws. If you're going to make significant progress with laws. But the pragmatic is that may not be a lever. You can get pulled far enough right away, and you need to make progress without delay. You can't say, this is the order. I want to do it in. So yeah. Yeah. What what's what are the other buckets of pillars then?

Jake Orlowitz: I mean obviously economics, you know, as they say, it's economics stupid. That's, that's what wins elections. But really economics is about is about, justice. Not it's about, paying fair share of taxes, you know, whether that means, realigning tax brackets or a wealth tax. It's about strengthening the social safety net. It's about, robust free education, or subsidized education available through all stages of life from, you know, early childhood education all the way through vocational training for those who don't want to go on to, a secondary degree in, in academia and, you know, also things like we have a, a pillar around just valuing devalued work, like if you are in, a country in, God forbid, I compare a lot of Europe as, you know, a paragon. But if you're in Europe and someone is a janitor, they have dignity, they have a fair wage, they are not treated as scum of the earth servants. So we need to hold up those who do service jobs, those who work with children and the elderly, those who teach. I mean, you could talk forever about the value of teachers in there under that, how underpaid they are. So it's about time, economic opportunity and economic justice of the humankind, not economic justice of the like, the kind you find in an econ 101 textbook. Okay, so the second is about security. And this is essential. You can't, and especially as a, as a progressive progressives ignore security at their peril. You you can't feel safe. You can't be safe if your data isn't safe, if your climate is falling apart and starting to attack you back. If there are mass shootings in your schools, which, of course, relates to gun control, if there's not, human security is not just about. I mean, this is an understatement. It's not just about guns. It's also about health care. You know, cancer will kill you more often than a gun. Well, but we don't treat health care as, a right or as a human need, and yet it is.

Travis Retzlaff: And that's regardless. It's treated as a profit center in the United States. That's very true. It is.

Jake Orlowitz: But we also believe not to be completely heads in the sand, that we do need to have strong borders, but not just strong borders, so that you can have, people detained in cages. I mean, we we're talking about strong borders with pathways to citizenship, like real pathways. And for things like dream of groups like dreamers who have been here since they were 2 or 3, 4 or 5 years old. Enough is enough when it comes to, keeping people in this horrific limbo of whether or not they're citizens. And you see the analogy with ice, what it exposes those people to, you know, if you can take the citizen level citizenship level down just a notch, then you can abuse your power with a kind of impunity that shouldn't be there.

Travis Retzlaff: Right. Good point.

Jake Orlowitz: And then last, the last bucket is about, what we call justice and participation. You know, these are aspirations that are fundamental to democracy and to the country, to the founding of the country, ensuring the rule of law is applied equally to all people. You shouldn't have to say it, but we do because it's not. Also, there is just a horrid excess of incarcerated, nonviolent people in our country because prisons are also profit centers. Now, and, drugs and addiction are profit centers. We are sending people with, abuse, drug abuse disorders that don't harm anyone but themselves, for the most part, treat, you know, secondary crimes. Secondarily, and they need to they need rehabilitation and harm reduction. And this has worked in other countries. In fact, a lot of these ideas have worked in other countries. If you look around the world and take inspiration rather than kind of fear and derision from it, very little on this list is actually radical. It's just about can every person participate fully in American life? I mean, that is a beautiful goal. Who wouldn't want that? I don't understand.

Travis Retzlaff: Yeah. And that's that's a great point. We don't need to do, like, some decade long research project to figure out how to tackle these problems. We need an awareness of how they tackled elsewhere and an understanding that we're not perfect. We could be better and we can do these things. We absolutely can. So yeah, that's a great point. You guys, don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel here. The is just kind of pulling in, getting that framework of, of pillars and buckets and prioritization of what's important and then starting to fill in those gaps. So now, Susan, maybe you can pivot to you for a little bit here. Let's talk about how people can participate. In particular, you know.

Susan Swords: Absolutely. And thank you for bringing that up, because we are always looking for good volunteers. We have, openings for volunteers in just about every area in my area. Communications. We could certainly use people who might like to donate their time to help with our social media, to help with some of our media outreach, to help write blogs, on subject matters, not just our policies, but current events. We've had a couple. We just had someone who submitted a oh, he's a former Minnesotan, and he submitted a really good, heartfelt blog on everything that's going on in there. I'm not done editing it yet, but it will get posted soon. We have chair, a former journalist who wrote, some very good pieces on lesser known parts of, local government that affect all our lives, things like school boards and sheriff's offices and things like that. Now, particularly how they would interact with Ice. So there's opportunities to write. There's opportunities to do social media. If you're not a writer, there's opportunities to, help with, some media outreach. We have a marketing group that's working on some branding things to help us refine our message and, and get that out there to the media and to the public. We also have, we've got a, an outreach group that, is a small but very hard working group that is trying to liaison with other nonprofits, other allied groups that have similar interests to us, not just in general, but in specific people who may deal with, immigration rights, people who may deal with health care. We're working up a health care policy now, which is a huge one. So we're we've been talking with some different groups to exchange information and resources with them. If someone would like to help with that, great. Just, you know, it's all on our website. You can sign up on our website. We can use people even with some more, different, types of, skills and backgrounds, legal in, if you want to make sure that we're not running afoul of anything, that might get a central legal financial, to, you know, we are receiving donations, that are just strictly people donating their money through our website. Like, just individual donors, to help manage those kinds of things. There's many, many types. We have people who would be very helpful if they could, volunteers who would be very helpful with doing, like, data analysis to look at where we're aiming our efforts. And are we really getting a good bang for our buck? There is I don't think we've turned too many people away. We get a lot of great resumes in, and we've gotten pretty good at finding places for them. We've had so many wonderful volunteers, as I said, all with the same goals and the same desire to really set this country straight and get everybody on a better path to benefit the citizens of this country. So we've really been very fortunate in that we've had quite a few wonderful people, lots of subject matter experts, unsurprisingly, quite a few former federal employees, who may not be working for the federal government anymore, have a wealth of experience and knowledge that have been helping us, particularly in framing the policies. So anyone who has that type of experience or, if you're a teacher and you're like, I'd like to help, what can I do? Contact us, we'll talk to you and we'll figure out where we can put you. Yeah. Check. Did I did I miss anything?

Jake Orlowitz: No. I think the one thing I wanted to call out there is that for more former, people that worked in federal government or former politicians when project 2025 was developed, they had like 400 people were part of that plan, and they spent millions of dollars. And a lot of the people had very specific experience that could help get the details in there on the types of levers you would pull and how one thing could lead to another. And, for. Example, people. Had experience that involved. This is absolutely invaluable to take, an idea that, again, to Jake's point, maybe we've seen it work in other countries, but how can we get that through the system? You have to know the system today as it's broken, how you can navigate it.

Susan Swords: Absolutely. They they and many of them functioned very well and did their jobs very well. So they lend that expertise to us as well, you know, to be able to look at something and say, you know, well, this particular system is you know, it's it's really taken a nosedive under this current administration. We were running it well before. This is what we can do to help fix it again. So their their input has been really valuable as well as their subject matter. Expertise.

Travis Retzlaff: Cool. I'll just.

Jake Orlowitz: Yeah. Without, associating any of our volunteers, we do, you know, keep, privacy to the extent that we can. We don't share our full volunteer list, although our leadership and board are on our way. Right. But there's no the. So here's the breakdown. We have about 5000 members in our project. About 150 of them are organizers. And we've raised about $5,000 in small dollar donations. I think the biggest donation we ever got was $100. So it's essential to us, although we we do want to raise funds, more funds, it's essential to us to not be captured by big money. We've we've done these things. And so, you know, if, some liberal or centrist or just, you know, someone with a conscience and $5 billion wants to donate, okay, cool. But don't expect it to buy influence because what we've done is created a series of boards so that there's checks and balances, and it's built into the bylaws. So we take that seriously.

Travis Retzlaff: Yeah. No, I love that. And that goes back to the part of the point about the pillars is putting taking money out of politics. If you're if your own organization is filled with money from politics, it's very hard to build trust there. So that's that's very cool. I'm excited about. I'm working with you guys. And putting up the content. And so how can people find you? Where can they where can they find more information about how to volunteer and what's the what's the social media website?

Jake Orlowitz: Yeah. Our domain name is project 2029 dot me. And that was deliberate. It's project 2029 for me. It's also from me. So it belongs to you. It belongs to us. That's the idea of of the citizenship and the connection. You can find us at dot me. You can find us. We have our biggest footprint currently is on Blue Sky. We call ourselves Blue Sky natives because that's where we really scaled our efforts first. And you can find us at at P 2029 on Blue Sky. And we're working on expanding to Instagram and thread and, Tick Tock and some other channels. But that's where we started. But if you want to find the full range of activities, everything's linked from the website project 2029 dot me.

Travis Retzlaff: Fantastic. Well, thanks, both of you. This has been a lot of fun. I really am glad to be doing it. And as I said, there is this common reaction of pushing away the darkness and pulling up the blankets, but at a point, you have to get out of bed. And as much as, that can feel overwhelming, having a place to step into that is productive and ready. And where there's already work to be done and frameworks laid out and things you can pick up and help with makes that step a lot easier. So thanks for doing the work.

Susan Swords: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Jake Orlowitz: Yeah. The one thing I would say is like, if you are, going out to protests and making signs, that's really great. And if you're calling your senators, that's even better. And if you're just reading the news, it's not that it's not good enough. It doesn't feel good. Like find a way, whether it's with us or even just volunteering at a food bank, like find a way to connect to humans right now."

Susan Swords: And that's what we need. We need connection. And I'm thrilled that this group provides that human connection in this dark time for me. But everybody needs it. Or else you just, And that doesn't feel good. Yeah."

Travis Retzlaff: It helps. I, I found for me, it's like, sustained hope, you know, to be constantly involved in this. And I think that's really important. As Jake said, to have that human connection, even if it's virtual."

Travis Retzlaff: Action cures anxiety. And and when you're the one doing the action, you know first hand that, hey, somebody is doing something about it. This and I know because I am the one doing it."