Biffle is a podcast host and contributor at BillTrack50.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy and personnel proposals for a second Trump administration, has four main goals when it comes to the Federal Communications Commission: reining in Big Tech, promoting national security, unleashing economic prosperity, and ensuring FCC accountability and good governance. Today, we’ll focus on the first of those agenda items.
But first, what is the FCC?
The Federal Communications Commission regulates U.S. communications, promoting free speech, economic growth and equitable access to advanced connectivity. Its goals include supporting diverse viewpoints, job creation, secure networks, updated infrastructure, prudent use of taxpayer money and “ensuring that every American has a fair shot at next-generation connectivity.” The FCC is an independent agency led by five president-appointed commissioners (including a chair who sets the overall agenda) serving five-year terms, with typically three aligning with the president's party.
A significant portion of the FCC's budget ($390.2 million requested in 2023) is self-funded, coming from regulatory fees and spectrum auction revenue. The agency's specialized bureaus focus on 5G transitions, net neutrality and FCC-licensed entity mergers. It also manages the Universal Service Fund, which supports rural broadband, low-income programs, and connectivity for schools and health care facilities.
The FCC plays a pivotal role in regulating Big Tech companies like Meta, Google and X, which significantly influence public discourse and market dynamics. These companies are often criticized for using their market dominance, which many feel is enabled by favorable regulations, to suppress diverse political viewpoints and for not paying a fair share towards programs that benefit them.
Project 2025 has several proposed initiatives aiming to address these issues:
Reform of how Section 230 is interpreted: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides websites, including social media platforms, with immunity from liability for content posted by users. Project 2025 proposes the FCC clarify this immunity, suggesting that it does not apply universally to all content decisions, and thus guidelines to delineate when these protections are appropriate should be considered.
Implement new transparency rules: The report recommends the FCC impose transparency requirements on Big Tech, similar to those for broadband providers, and require mandatory disclosures about content moderation policies and practices. In addition, it calls on the agency to create transparent appeals processes for content removal decisions.
Legislative changes: Project 2025 wants the FCC to work with Congress to ensure "Internet companies no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech while maintaining their Section 230 protections." Solutions could include introducing anti-discrimination provisions to prevent bias or censorship of political viewpoints
The report calls for passage of several bills related to Section 230:
- The Break Up Big Tech Act of 2020 aims to limit the immunity granted to interactive computer services under Section 230.
- The Protect Speech Act aims to ensure that immunity under Section 230 incentivizes online platforms to responsibly address illegal content.
- The CASE-IT Act seeks to hold Big Tech companies accountable for their content moderation practices.
- The Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act would prevent interactive computer services from claiming immunity for claims involving their use of algorithms to rank, promote, recommend, or alter the delivery or display of information.
- The PACT Act would requires transparency, accountability, and
protections for consumers online.
Two states have already passed related legislation:
- Texas prohibits companies from removing content based on an author’s viewpoint.
- Florida bars social media companies from removing politicians from their site.
Further empower consumers: Project 2025 wants the FCC and Congress to prioritize "user control" as an express policy goal. Section 230 does encourage platforms to provide tools for users to moderate content themselves, including choosing content filters and fact-checkers. It also advocates for stricter age verification measures.
Require fair contribution to the Universal Service Fund: Finally, Project 2025 wants the FCC to establish regulations requiring Big Tech companies to pay their “fair share”into the USF. Currently, the USF is funded by charges on traditional telecommunications services, an outdated model as internet usage shifts to broadband. Big Tech is not currently required to contribute to this fund.
Is Project 2025 justified in seeking these changes?
On the surface, Project 2025's proposal to hold Big Tech accountable and "protect free speech" appears justified. There's a broad consensus that Big Tech should not have total immunity and should bear some responsibility for platforms' impact on users and content promotion. However, the implications of these changes could potentially cause more harm than good.
For example, requiring platforms to host all content under anti-discrimination laws could lead to the spread of harmful speech. Broad applications of these rules might limit effective moderation and allow harmful content to spread unchecked, posing risks to public health and increasing abuse and discrimination.
Additionally, the debate over whether internet platforms should be held responsible for the content they host continues across the political spectrum. The courts and Congress must weigh in with respect to balancing the risks of over-moderation. Without careful analysis, unnecessary removal of content due to fear of litigation could have the unintended consequence of allowing illegal or harmful content to thrive.
More articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.