OH BOY. Project 2025…
This is where i have to crawl out of the closet:
THIS RESPONSE ADDRESSED TO: Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundation’s Poobah)
See below, a few high points i am compelled to address…
Otherwise… this could be a sleepless, nightmare, Hellscape of a year.
OR… go HERE for a less angry synopsis (pro & con).
From “A Note from Project 2025”
History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it. (xiii)
Ummm… ok… organized political action, kudos.
In the winter of 1980, the fledging Heritage Foundation handed to President-elect Ronald Reagan the inaugural Mandate for Leadership. (xiv)
So… in effect, giving POTUS marching orders? You go on to say, for Project 2025, you need to go “back to the future…” ??? LOL… love this wordsmithing, so subtle. I’m starting to warm up to these loopers… 😉
The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. (xvi)
Ok… seriously… what are you talking about, here? “Cultural Marxism”… what the hell does that even mean? This? -or- This? For now, let’s just put it in the “straw man” category, that way we can get on with it, as Monty Python would say.
The federal government is a behemoth… (xiv).
Truedat… like anything else… there are good and bad aspects. Reform should be a regular feature. As well, some attempt to keep communication and information management capabilities up to date would be nice.
The federal government is weaponized against American citizens and conservative values… (xvi)
Bullshit… bullshit… straight-up bullshit! But even if it were true, no part of the weaponized librul gub’mnt is gonna murder conservative standard-bearers like when the flip was on the other flop. Remember… when America was great, in the 1960s?? Please? Can we just skip over the breathless hyperbole?
…with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. (xvi)
What the hell does this even mean??
Seriously… c’mon… skip the hyperbole…
Ok… now, a quick summary of the four pillars of the… plan… manifesto? Can we call it a manifesto? Sure… let’s do that.
Pillar I: With the help of partisan consultants, each president gets to decide how each federal agency is run. (xiv)
Intriguing, but won’t this lead to a counterproductive level of chaos? Oh… that’s right… you don’t plan to cede power to pedophilic cultural Marxists ever again, am i reading this right? Sure. Got it.
Pillar II: Populate federal agencies with partisan activists only… (xiv)
So… anyone see Stalinist overtones, here… Buhler… Buhler…?
Pillar III: Presidential Administration Academy, an online educational system taught by experts from our coalition. (xvi)
READ => Political indoctrination/grooming… hello…!
WAIT…! Isn’t this what conservatives accuse leftists of doing all the time? Isn’t this some classic Freudian Projection? Is every accusation gonna end up, after the receipts come in, freaking confessions? Hey… i’m just asking questions here.
Pillar IV (the playbook): …we are forming agency teams and drafting transition plans to move out upon the President’s utterance of ‘so help me God.’ (xiv)
Ok… you’re ready to rumble as soon as you get your emperor installed. I wonder if anyone saw this coming? Hmmmmmm…
Ok… moving on to Kevin Roberts Ph.D’s forward:
Forty-four years ago, the United States and the conservative movement were in dire straits. Both had been betrayed by the Washington establishment and were uncertain whom to trust. (1)
Still sore about Nixon’s fall from grace?
Now, as then (1970s), our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. (1)
Couldn’t agree more… but… to lay it all at the feet of your political opponents is disingenuous at best, political expedience at second best, willful deceit in fact.
Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s ‘radical chic’ to build the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.’ (1)
Totalitarian cult? Again… disingenuous treatment. You see, in the wake of the ‘summer of racial reckoning’ there was an academic movement scrutinizing the plague of institutional racism. The media bubble Jon Stewart calls “Bullshit Mountain” and others, latched onto this moniker (The Great Awokening). They identified a convenient boogyman, and are now furiously tilting at it while the rest of us stand back and marvel at the energy expelled by these Errant Knights of Christendom.
Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril. (1)
Please explain yourself… cos, to me, this sounds like desperation. Your churches are losing their cultural dominance, and you want to call this “moral decline” as if your moral compass is the only one worth considering? I know this might sound harsh, but bless you, bless you, and by all means, bless all the way off. Yours is not the only worthy moral code out there. In fact, it’s not even the most beneficial. Please take a look at your ten commandments… four out of the ten are no better than tossing glitter to the sky for all the benefit they provide. Again… bless you, and the unicorn you rode in on!
We brought together hundreds of conservative scholars and academics across the conservative movement. Together, this team created a 20-volume, 3,000-page governing handbook containing more than 2,000 conservative policies to reform the federal government and rescue the American people from Washington dysfunction. (2)
Admirable collective effort, no knock there. Unfortunately, your policies are not popular with the one-person-one-vote world. You know… democracy? I suspect you had picked up on this, and so now, you want to keep Mr. Trump’s 2025 campaign platform mum till such time as it is too late for voters to thoughtfully consider the implications. You employ subterfuge and obfuscation to slip your plan into a place that can’t be easily dislodged? Hey… i get it, your pragmatism is admirable, but i think i’d rather see a federal government reflect the actual will of the governed… you know the kind of government Lincoln dedicated his life to preserve. Ah shucks, i know… that’s just me… me and 81,283,500 others.
As Ronald Reagan put it: (2)
Seriously… i. don’t. care! The only thing i’ll remember about Mr. Reagan, other than that whole Bed Time for Bonzo business, is his VooDoo economic plan gutting the US middle-class, turning them into the “working poor.” Congratulations Conservatives (in name only), you’ve made billionaires very happy. all the while slowly deleting the very thing that made America Great in the first place (a thriving middle-class).
The bad news today is that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline. (2)
Unfortunately, it’s hard to mount a counter argument here, but again with your disingenuousness. The blame does not simply lie at the feet of your political opponents. I know that kind of talk gives your base a swell of righteous pride, and gives your opponents a rallying cry against zero-sum zealots, but to the rest of us (non-affiliated independents), it just makes you look like playground simpletons, and thanks a lot, you’ve allowed the neighborhood bully into your “cool kids” clique… tsk tsk.
…this book is the work of the entire conservative movement. As such, the authors express consensus recommendations already forged, especially along four broad fronts that will decide America’s future:
1) Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children, 2) Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people, 3) Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats, and 4) Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’ (3)
- Right… to have our kids raised with loving, stable families is super important, but restoring the “nuclear family?” … yea… no thanks… this is an outmoded bankrupt system of determining a man’s “chattel property” … it’s no longer a sustainable model… let’s go back to the drawing board, shall we?
- Yes, there have been difficult and dysfunctional periods in the regulatory movements and agencies in the past. But these agencies have also done much to mitigate dangers inherent with laissez-faire capitalism. Example… Denver’s “brown cloud“… in the 70s… damn… very bad… by the time the Clinton Admin was finished, much improvement. I imagine this story isn’t uncommon among industrial centers of the USofA.
- Yes… agree, but immigrants aren’t the enemy. The real question should be whether the USofA still has carrying capacity for more of the world’s “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? If not, then we should start restricting immigration to emergency cases? I don’t know… and i wouldn’t want to be responsible for making these damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t decisions.
- Just what are you referring to with this “blessings of liberty” thing? I suspect this is just an excuse for “predatory acquisitive individualism” because, founding fathers, baseball, apple pie, Mom… Jesus? And though i have given over to the logic of markets, i’m not sold on the current trend of rendering individual votes subordinate to the almighty dollar. See, the gap between those obscenely rich and merely getting by, those millions of “working poor,” is so wide now as to be unimaginable for anyone not trained in exponential mathematics. Democracy is at stake, but not due to the straw man right-wingers have constructed (the deep state), but rather the corrosive influence of filthy rich donors manipulating power in their favor, against the interests of the working poor, and the doomed. Yea… in other universes, this might be known as institutionalized corruption.
This was one of the secrets of conservatives’ success in the Reagan Era, one our generation should emulate. (3)
Again… we have a fundamental disagreement on the matter of Reagan’s legacy… and i would be fine if we never brought it up again. I’ll make an exception if you want to discuss Mr. Reagan in the context of the relative merits of “Supply Side” economics.
…conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children. (6)
So… first, let’s take a look at the premise of this longstanding argument. That advocates for female agency and bodily autonomy do not “value human life”? Again, with the disingenuousness… you KNOW your political opponents value life, and their children. Yet, your bald-faced lie persists. In my view, the cruxt of the disagreement is where we can logically recognize a sentient human life. The Roe standard is at the point of “fetal viability,” that is the point where a NICU could keep a baby healthy and vital outside the confines of the mother’s womb. You profess to believe a dignified, ensouled human life is created as soon as the egg accepts a sperm and begins cell division. But… this is at odds with your own holy book. Genesis 2:7 says life begins with the first breath. Not deterred, you declare, your conception of Pro-Life to be the ultimate moral stand, and with self-righteous pomposity, you say it out loud between bites of a pulled pork sandwich, then proudly assert yourself occupier of the high ground, like Donald J. Trump at a NATO summit, all the while cheering the latest state-sanctioned execution… “Pro-Life”? Please…?? I’ve read Orwell… i’m on to your jam.
Listen: You KNOW there have been instances of unjust capital punishment, but you rationalize it as a deterrent anyway. Living, dreaming, self-aware human beings? In my view, one unjust execution is too many and should trigger YOUR “right to life” instinct far more than the abortion of a 12-week-old fetus. Astounding hypocrisy! And then there’s the exercise of geo-political power in the form of war. We willingly kill those we perceive as enemies… living, dreaming self-aware human beings? No problem. But… abort an unplanned, unwanted, pre-viability pregnancy, even IF it’s the product of rape or incest, and oh boy do we have a problem! In my view, it’s none of your business what goes on with Shelly down the street’s rape baby, or Patty’s oops. Medically reversing these mistakes engenders more outrage in you than the execution of an innocent person… especially when that innocent person doesn’t look like you or any of your neighbors? Tsk tsk… shame on you!
Want to hear an alternative vision for where humanness begins? Yea, i know, you don’t. You think your view is backed by the creator of the universe. Wow! News flash! Your view of the source of “ultimate authority” isn’t universally embraced. In fact, the fastest growing religious affiliation in the US is “none of the above,” a group to which i belong after a reasonably normal childhood of indoctrination, groomed in the Christian bosom (baptized Mennonite). So, that said, i’ll throw it out there, cos i can. What if true humanness requires self-awareness? You know, that point when a baby starts recognizing Mom or Dad. When the baby starts looking at items around them, like toes, and toys, and crib bars, etc. Two months or so after trauma of birth? Does anyone actually want to draw the line there? No one i know of, but you could put the logic to the test. And what if that logic was put to the test, and what if it were determined the baby isn’t really self-aware until weeks after the trauma of birth, would that justify infanticide for unwanted or defective pregnancies as Mr. Tumpty Dumpty repeatedly alleges? Hell to the no! But drawing the line needs to address all concerned parties. Yes, even the pearl-clutching church crowd. In my view, Roe got it about as right as it can be got. Listen, if we could interview everyone approaching legitimate medical practitioners for abortion services, i believe we’d find an ocean of remorse and mourning for the life that could have been, and the means for reversing the course nature was on. Again… none of my, or your, business.
And if we can just drop all the subterfuge surrounding this issue, we’d have to acknowledge this full-court press to stop abortion as a means of birth-control is more about a fear of brown people outbreeding whites than anything else. With the white grievance crowd fearing browns might exact a similar sort of oppression that they (whites) exercised and continue to exercise over non-whites now. If we can drop the obfuscation and subterfuge, we can confess this “Project 2025” is all about control. But i suspect this control, if applied, is going to be no more effective than the legend of the Dutch boy holding back the dam with his finger. I learned from my civil-engineering friends, water always finds its way “downhill.” This whole Project 2025 swagger has got desperate fear written all over it. And you, Kevin Roberts, when you say the quiet part out loud, when you threaten your political opponents with violence, you will answer to the government of, by, and for the people when the people finally prevail. It may not be this time around, but it will happen. You will lose in a truly democratic contest. And when you do, you will have to account for your authoritarian aspirations.
The people will out… “From many, One. E’Pluribus Unum.” “One Nation, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All.”
Onward through the fog… Rohlfie
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