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"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
"A Vote for 'ABBH' (Any Body But Harris) is a Vote for Trump and Republo-Fascism" (S. Jonas, March, 2024)
(N.B. I tried to get an image for "Project 2025" from both Wikipedia and Flickr for this space. I found a good one of the cover of the document, but the system would not transfer it over. Let's just hope that that is a metaphor for what will happen to this 925-page long(!) proposal for the destruction of Constitutional Government in the United States,)
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"Project 2025" is on the mind of just about anybody who has an interest in national policy and in the upcoming Presidential election. For good reason it was mentioned, with some of its most terrifying details revealed, numerous times throughout the Democratic National Convention. Most of the time those concerns were presented in a serious manner. But P2025 even was the subject of a skit narrated for us by one of the leading actors from "Saturday Night Live," Kenan Thompson. Thompson highlighted some of the Democrats' main objections with the project (see the list, just below) concluding by saying: "So yeah, right back to the Stone Age." Here is a summary of its major components, as they were dealt with at the Democratic National Convention.
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"Project 2025 takes center stage at the DNC. What to know about the conservative policy plan Kamala Harris and other Dems keep attacking.""Some of its directives include:
- An overhaul of the Department of Justice and FBI, the former of which it labels "a bloated bureaucracy" with employees "who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda."
- Implement Schedule F, a Trump-era executive order that the Biden administration repealed that would allow the reclassification -- and potential replacement -- of thousands of government workers.
- Eliminate the Department of Education.
- Shut down the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.
- Impose wide restrictions on abortion access, including reversing federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone.
- Allocate funding for "construction of additional border wall systems."
- Ban pornography and imprison anyone who produces or distributes it.
- Promote "Sabbath Rest" by encouraging Congress to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to require people who work these days to be paid time and a half.
- Have the federal government promote "biblically based, social science reinforced" heterosexual marriages.
- Call on the new Health and Human Services secretary to "reverse the Biden Administration's focus on 'LGBTQ+ equity'" and "subsidizing single-motherhood."
- Remove sexual orientation, gender identity, diversity, equity, inclusion and gender equality from any federal rule, regulation, or legislation.
- Revive Trump's plan to open most of the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska to leasing and development.
Read more from the BBC: Project 2025: A wish list for a Trump presidency, explained."
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This list (surprise, surprise) has produced a torrent of criticism (which of course in my view, and I have dealt with it in previous columns, is well-deserved). In this column, I will begin with quotes on the content from two sources, one a personage that one might not expect to be critical, the other from a source that one will would definitely expect to be critical. Then I will go on to a major feature of P2025 that has not received much attention to date: how its imposition and mode of implementation would essentially destroy Constitutional government in the United States.
First, some words from Anthony Scaramucci, likely the most well-known occupant of the position of White House Communications Director who happened to last in it for only 10 days. To his great credit, he did eventually become an anti-Trump Republican. I cannot speak to what his political affiliation is today, but here, after a brief introduction, are some of his thoughts on Project 2025. (It should be noted that the list of former Trump officials, major Republican Federal office-holders, Trump staffers, and so on, who have announced that they will not be supporting him [if not actively opposing him] in the 2024 election is very long.) And so: "Trump Is Planning To Use 'Project 2025' To Build a Russia-Style Oligarchy in the United States."
"Anthony Scaramucci was the former president's communications director and, in this exclusive op-ed for Zeteo, he denounces Trump's manifesto for a Christian, conservative state.
'Project 2025 has been in the news and it's very unpopular. It is a manifesto to recreate the US government and morph it into a Christian conservative state. The goal of Project 2025 would be to disavow the Constitution and the current republican, representative democracy. According to its authors, our democracy is too messy and now perhaps obsolete, and we would be better served by people in our government who could pass a loyalty test to Donald Trump and the people who want to control him should he return to the presidency. . . .
'The project insists that the FBI report directly to the president and effectively become his/her own security force. Under the plan, every ambassador worldwide would have to resign immediately and be replaced by only those who pass a loyalty test. There would be an immediate gutting of 50,000 government staffers with the same idea. [That is, without the benefit of legislation, a President Trump wold repeal the Civil Service Act of 1883, as amended, on his own authority.] This would be done to remake the government in the shape of Trump and his anarcho-Christian conservative allies. The problem with all of this is that they want to eliminate all non-partisan watchdogs and other impartial elements of the government which would open the door to massive elected official corruption. . . .
'The project also wants to end all government processes that monitor disinformation. Trump praises autocrats for a reason. He's literally asking them for help in taking over the American government and signaling to them that he'll transform the US government into something similar to the governments that they themselves are running.
'They blatantly talk openly about deporting 15 million 'illegal' immigrants from our country but don't explain the process of how to do that. It would include the National Guard and armored vehicles with SWAT teams, and eventually concentration camps as they figure out when and how to deport these people. . . . In order for Project 2025 to end up in the dustbin of history, Americans need to understand the evil of it."
And this is someone how used to be a Republican speaking.
Then we can turn to the Americans United for the Separation of Church and States (which separation, I might note, is provided for in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to which clause many-too-few people refer when dealing with the issue of The Right to Choose in the matter of the outcome of Pregnancy).
Concerning Project 2025 Americans United have posted a list of organizations behind it. Among them are:
"The Christian Alliance Defending Freedom (an aggressively anti-LGBTQ+, anti-abortion legal group behind the Supreme Court cases that overturned Roe v. Wade and gave Colorado businesses a right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ customers); the Family Research Council (another anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion organization whose mission is "to serve in the kingdom of God by championing faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview"); the First Liberty Institute (which among others has held that a public school football coach who wanted to pray, on the field, with students, should be able to do so); the American Center for Law and Justice - founded back in the 1990s by televangelist Pat Robertson and led by Jay Sekulow (and featured in my 1996 book "The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022," the third edition of which is about to be published) the ACLJ is known for its anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ stances, and also has been flagged by the Council on American-Islamic Relations for its anti-Muslim propaganda. In all, according to Americans United "there are more than 100 organizations, politicians, funders and others who have been publicly connected to Project 2025."
Now let us turn to that less-discussed aspect of Project 2025, both in how it is being introduced to the public, principally by the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, and the anti-Constitutional form and content that Roberts is promoting for making the changes, legal, political, and social that he and his henchmen are promoting their brainchild that it is so opposed to U.S. Constitutional Democracy in so many ways . As Roberts, has said "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." That is the president of the Heritage Foundation declaring that a new revolution is already underway in the U.S. He appeared to warn Liberals that violence could erupt if they tried to stop it. So, further, let's see what that means, at a minimum.
First of all, some organization with a lot of right-wing money behind it and many Right and Ultra-Right organizations and personages (including many former members, and promoters, of the Trump Administration) contributing their far-right-doctrinal ideas and writings (after all, it is 925 pages long) to it, can, just like that, declare a "2nd American Revolution." Well, it would be a revolution indeed, because in just looking at the short list of its major components above it would wreak revolutionary on the American political system in particular and society, very broadly. And it would be just a declared and handed-down "revolution." Well, Kev., historically, revolutions, see the American, the French, and the Russian, just don't happen by decree. So maybe you had better study up on your history. (But that is another matter.)
Indeed, what you are proposing is indeed the overthrow of U.S. Constitutional Democracy. For example, by decree the President (Trump, of course; I can't see that you would want the particular government-by-declaration power you are proposing to be given to any other President, say, to pick one out-of-the-air, a President Kamala Harris) could repeal the Civil Service Act of 1883, as amended, by decree. Or that you would eliminate a government Department without the benefit of legislation. And so on and so forth. The list of un-Constitutional and extra-Constitutional powers that would give to the President (President Trump, that is) is lengthy. And you really think that "the Left," as well as a long list of the conventional Right (as in the long list of Republican Trump opponents cited above), and Center individuals and institutions, would really take this lying down?
And yes, Kev, if the existing U.S. political and judicial (of course what the Trump-Supreme-Court would do with such attempts to overturn Constitutional government in the United States is, giving all but Alito and Thomas some credit, is anybody's guess) institutions would not deal with this imposition of fascism-in-practice (see the definition of fascism below) there would be violence at one or more levels of importance and potential effect.
In summary (for now), in my view even more important, at this time, than what Heritage is proposing to impose upon our nation is how they propose to do it: by replacing Constitutional government --- however imperfect the results of that system are and have been, especially from the Left-perspective --- with Government-by-Decree, a system that historically, since the advent of capitalist political-economy, has otherwise been known as Fascist (see just below). In sum, Heritage and "Project 2025" MUST be attacked on its proposed process as well as it proposed content.
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A definition (mine) of fascism: "There is a single, all-powerful executive branch of government, in service of a capitalist ruling class that controls, for the most part, the functions of production, distribution, finance, and exchange. There is no separation of the principal governmental powers: executive, legislative, and judicial. There are no independent media. There is a single national ideology, based on some combination of racism, misogyny, religious bigotry and authoritarianism, homophobia, and xenophobia. There is a political party supporting the movement. There is a state propaganda machine using the big and little lie techniques. There may be a full-blown dictatorship, a charismatic leader, engagement in foreign wars, and the use of the mob/private armies to enforce governmental control."
(Article changed on Aug 30, 2024 at 1:59 PM EDT)
(Article changed on Aug 31, 2024 at 12:25 AM EDT)
