The Coup is Underway - a summation
Project 2025 is not a theory or a conspiracy
Project 2025 is the playbook. It is what Republicans will actually do if they regain the White House this November or any November. They realized that in 2017, they were disorganized. The new president did not have a platform to execute upon. Now they do. The Heritage Foundation has written this guide. Which means a far right ultra extreme “think tank” funded by morbidly rich people will pull the strings of government. Forget Lincoln’s GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE.
The first four sections of this series about Project 2025 focused on:
The removal of all government employees who can’t prove they are loyal to King Donald. Use your imagination as to who would replace them.
Putting the Bible (their version) ahead of the Constitution, making laws based on a narrow and bigoted interpretation of Christianity.
Passing a national ban on all forms of abortion and restricting contraception.
Turning the Department of Justice into a military arm of the president using the DOJ as a tool of revenge.
In the interests of brevity and my own mental health, I am concluding this series by laying out below the other five sections of Project 2025 right here. You can read all the details in the original document. You can read a complete review of it at Media Matters from where I have clipped the assessments below. And for a woman’s perspective consider reading this article.
But if your time is limited, here is a nutshell version of parts five through nine:Attack LGBTQ rights
Attack immigrants and plan for massive deportation
Attack teachers unions and eliminate the Department of Education
Attack DEI. Crush efforts to provide training in diversity, equity and inclusion
Attack efforts to recognize the impact of human activity on the Climate Crisis calling it “environmental extremism”.
In conclusion, Republicans who support Donald Trump and the “MAGA” movement would eliminate all the guardrails of democracy and establish a totalitarian government not unlike that of Russia - where diversity and the Climate Crisis are dirty words and dissent is punished.
Talking about politics with everyone we know all the time can be tedious and counterproductive. Life has to hold more. But now, we have a moral and patriotic duty to ask all of our friends and family if they know what Project 2025 is and what it promises to deliver.
Please share Project 2025 with anyone who doubts Trump’s fascism Open some eyes. Open some hearts. Get some disinterested person to be aware. Ask them to vote. Tell them it might be their last chance to do so.
You can stop reading right there if you are willing to spread the word and/or just can’t deal with the gory details below. But another option is to scroll right down to Number Nine, Number Nine…
Here is an elaboration on the five more ways the next Republican administration will take a wrecking ball to the United States and the Earth itself.
Even the Pope calls anti LGBTQ laws “sinful” Project 2025 takes extreme positions against LGBTQ rights, seeking to eliminate federal protections for queer people and pursue research into conversion therapies in order to encourage gender and sexuality conformity. The policy book also lays out plans to criminalize being transgender and prohibit federal programs from supporting queer people through various policies. The project partnered with anti-LGBTQ groups the Family Policy Alliance, the Center for Family and Human Rights, and the Family Research Council.
- calls for HHS to stop all research related to gender identity unless the purpose is conformity to one's sex assigned at birth.- states that “allowing parents or physicians to ‘reassign’ the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end.
- demands that the next GOP administration “reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military.”
“We don’t need no fuhrners in this country” Project 2025 proposes to severely roll back both legal and unauthorized immigration through a number of untested, novel approaches that extend far beyond the policies of Trump’s first term. The plan would potentially make hundreds of thousands of people vulnerable to deportation through the loss of temporary protected status, and could ensnare their families, those they live with, and other members of their communities. Extreme anti-immigration organization the Center for Immigration Studies has partnered with Project 2025 in supporting these radical immigration policy ideas.
- Project 2025 aims to severely restrict legal immigration to the United States by dismantling the DREAM Act and restricting the DACA program.
- The policy book also suggests restricting T visas, which are temporary visas for certain victims of human trafficking, and U visas, which are given to victims of crimes that occur in the U.S. [Niskanen Center, 2/20/24]- Project 2025 calls for a massive increase in the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations. ICE deportation officers should prioritize “the civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate.
- Even people who are simply adjacent to unauthorized immigrants could be punished.
- Under Project 2025, “The next Republican administration … would also strip hundreds of thousands of individuals, many of whom have been in the U.S. for decades, of their legal protections by repealing all Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations.”
Project 2025 would let the states define education for Americans Project 2025’s proposal for America’s education system would be one of the most extreme plans yet, calling for eliminating the Department of Education, getting rid of all teachers unions, and tearing down regulations on education spending. Far-right “parental rights” organization Moms for Liberty and the anti-union Institute for Education Reform have partnered with Project 2025 to create these proposals.
- The first sentence of Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Education simply states: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
- Project 2025 seeks to eliminate the National Education Association’s congressional charter, which allows for the existence of teachers unions, calling it “a demonstrably radical special interest group.
- The plan also wants to remove federal oversight for funds under Title 1, “which provides support for low-income districts,” instead handling them as “no-strings-attached” state grants “with no regulation or oversight.” Federal education funding for students with special needs would “also be converted to unregulated block grants.”
- The proposal also aims at eliminating any policies implemented under the Obama administration that support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives - the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.
Diversity, equity, inclusion are now bad things? Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership advises the next administration to rid federal rules and legislation of the term “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “DEI.” The mandate also outlines the ways in which DEI efforts supposedly undermine the purpose of several federal agencies, ignoring the tangible benefits of a diverse workforce in the government. Project 2025 has collaborated with other groups leading the anti-DEI crusade including right-wing nonprofit the Claremont Institute and anti-critical race theory group Moms for Liberty.
- In the foreword to the Mandate for Leadership, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts calls for the deletion of DEI “out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” He states, “The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms … used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
I saved the most horrifying policy of Project 2025 for last. It affects every living cell on the planet.
Project 2025 would eliminate environmental protections and further delay climate action. In the foreword, Heritage President Kevin Roberts calls environmentalism a “pseudo-religion,” claiming “environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human” because it promotes “population control and economic regression” by “regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.” Project 2025 is supported by climate change-denying organizations The Heartland Institute and the Institute for Energy Research.
- The Department of Energy chapter in the policy book, written by former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission head Bernard McNamee, calls for “eliminating three agency offices that are crucial for the energy transition” and reducing funding to different agencies related to renewable energy. McNamee also calls for cutting the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, and the Loan Programs Office. [The Guardian, 7/27/23; Politico, 7/28/23]
- An entire chapter dedicated to the Environmental Protection Agency, written by former Trump EPA chief of staff Mandy Gunasekara, calls for shrinking the agency by firing new hires and eliminating the environmental justice department.
- In a chapter on the U.S. Agency for International Development, Heritage research fellow and Trump’s former chief operating officer of USAID Max Primorac suggests the next administration “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs” and shut down any offices or departments connected to the Paris Climate Agreement.
- The policy book recommends reopening the Arctic for oil drilling, expanding other drilling projects, and leasing land in western states for coal mining.
https://www.project2025.org/ - the original Heritage Foundation playbook
https://www.mediamatters.org/heritage-foundation/guide-project-2025-extreme-right-wing-agenda-next-republican-administration - the detailed review
https://msmagazine.com/2024/02/08/project-2025-conservative-right-wing-trump-woke/ - project 2025 from a woman’s perspective
A difficult subject to focus on, Bill, but thanks for doing it. It's painful to realize the human species has produced beings capable of devising such a murderous script for cultural and planetary annihilation under the auspices of political policy, but there it is for all America to read and contemplate. If the majority of the nation's citizens vote for this MAGA madness the stage will be set for armageddon and it won't take long for the horror of that to engulf us all. I find it hard to believe that people I encounter harbor the illusion that the upcoming election is "politics as usual," but there are armies of these mindless reactionaries out there in TV Land. Wake up America! The GOP of Trump is not a political party; it is a "domestic terrorist force" as Robert Hubbell has often described it and their intention is to destroy liberal democracy and tear up the Constitution. Vote as if your life depends upon the outcome because it does!
You are indeed a trooper to get through the entire dismal document Bill; congratulations and thanks. The level of amorphous fear that must be driving the creators of Project 2025 is almost inconceivable and, after we defeat them decisively 4 1/2 months from now, we should provide such help as might be available to encourage them to see the world as it is, not as they are terrified it might become. We need to avoid falling into the same trap ourselves. It will be interesting on Thursday to see how long the Convicted Felon and failed insurrectionist lasts before having a very public and unavoidably visible meltdown. One hopes that will seal his electoral fate for at least the 70% of the population that aren't committed cultists.