Today I told a someone I work with that we might be mere months away from the end of American democracy.
“What, why haven’t I heard about this?” she said, as I could hear her frantically typing into her search bar. “What is it called again? Project 2025?”
I gave her the Cliff’s Notes (or Tiff’s Notes, as I like to call them), and she said she would do some more research after her work day.
“How did you hear about this?” she asked.
I’m still surprised people haven’t heard about Project 2025. It should be covered by every news outlet every single day. Every article about the 2024 election should mention that if we don’t vote the right way this year, we’ll likely never vote again.
If you’re having a similar water-cooler conversation, keep it simple enough to absorb. How do you eat an elephant? In small chunks. How do you defend democracy? The same way.
Four Fast Facts about the Danger of Project 2025:
ONE: It argues that Article II of the Constitution gives Trump unprecedented presidential power to act as a dictator.
Trump himself has said, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
He’s told the American public many times he won’t make the mistakes he made in his first term, mainly allowing career federal workers and other branches of government to rein in his overreach. Trump wants to eliminate protections for civil servants, violating human rights laws, and plans to make sweeping (and illegal) immigration policies on day 1, including “removing those who should never have been allowed into our country in the first place,” according to a Trump spokesperson.
TWO: It attempts to purge the federal workforce and replace it with sycophants whose names they’re already collecting in a database. One of the major functions of the Project 2025 website is attracting and coaching a new workforce, tempting potential candidates with questions like, “Want to be considered for positions in a presidential Administration?”
The organizations behind Project 2025, namely the Heritage Foundation, are screening potential employees with yes-or-no questions like:
The U.S. has the right to select immigrants based on country of origin.
The education industry should be opened to increased competition through vouchers or tax credits through private schools.
Life has a right to legal protection from birth to natural death.
THREE: Turn government offices against U.S. citizens and federal workers. Trump has talked about utilizing his new Justice Department — the ones he plans to replace career federal law enforcement personnel with — to go after some of his highest-profile critics in a second term. According to the Washington Post, some of the names on that list include former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, former US Attorney General Bill Barr, ex-Trump administration attorney Ty Cobb, and Gen. Mark Milley, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them,” Trump has said.
FOUR: Impose religious beliefs on private citizens. This would be a wholesale elimination of separation of church and state. It’s no surprise that most of the groups that have locked arms with the Heritage Foundation to impose Project 2025 are Christian based. The accusation that secular policies have ruined the country and that progressives are out to get Christians are rife throughout every chapter of Project 2025’s playbook, “The Mandate for Leadership”, which you can read on the website.
For example, in the chapter about Health and Human Services, the author writes that the United States “maintain a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
This is without question the beginning of an authoritarian state of government based on some people’s ideals of Christianity and the death of democracy as we know it. The people behind Project 2025 plan to weaponize methods that are technically legal and operate within the letter of the law, even though the way they’re constructing it violates the spirit those laws were created in.
But this doesn’t have to be our future. We’ll defeat Project 2025 by spreading the word through kitchen table and water-cooler conversations like the one I had with my coworker.
Onward, Democracy Defenders!
I am aware of Project 2025. It reminds me of PNAC, written in the late 1990s by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and other right-wing think-tank dipshits. "Progress for a New American Century" was a road map for, among other things, gaining control of the oil in the Middle East.
Politically, there are a few things that are really bugging me... such as... left-wing pundits starting their daily spiel with "If Trump wins in November..." No. Trump cheats and wins? Totally unacceptable. America goes Nazi? Uh... no. Government by "Assholes Without Borders"? Nope.
("You can squawk all you want, you MAGANAZI, feces-smearing redneck puppy killers, but you are NOT going to ride your bloated, scowling Golden Calf into the Oval Office again.")
These artless, narrow, embittered, racist, misogynist, bombastic pseudo-Christian fuckwads think that there will be no resistance. Who will obey Trump? Who will carry out his orders? Name names.
The "What If Trumps Wins" scenario is the height of left-wing milquetoast stupidity. This is 100% the wrong narrative. "The end of American democracy"? Total bullshit. It's time to cut the head off the snake.
You should put kill opponents. See https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tale-from-swamp-william-sanderson-a7ulc/?trackingId=SnByJNR3Q4YRwrP5Gcf7Pg%3D%3D for what Trump cronies do to innocent people.