Originally at https://slate.com
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s toxic playbook for a second Trump administration, has so inflamed Democrats that it was invoked every night of their convention in Chicago last week. But the awful truth is that Trump doesn’t have to win in November for this Christian nationalist blueprint to be put into action across the country. Outside the sight of the national political press and seemingly beyond the reach of the Biden Justice Department, MAGA-dominated states are enacting policies that implement the same retrograde worldview that animates Project 2025. And whereas Project 2025’s proposals would be advanced mainly by federal agencies and prosecutors, these state programs are enforced by everyone from sheriffs to school boards and ordinary citizens.
The system red states are constructing works by empowering extreme ideologues and partisans to impose their will on their communities, whatever level of popular support they happen to enjoy. Dissenters get the right to set public health and educational policy, overriding the judgment of elected school boards and expert regulators. Anti-abortion vigilantes and anti-LGBTQ+ extremists are empowered to surveil their neighbors and rewarded for bringing legal proceedings against them. Lax open-carry laws, immunity from criminal prosecution, promises of kid-glove treatment from police and prosecutors, and pardons when “leftist” prosecutors try to crack down on right-wing thuggery signal to militias and other reactionary radicals that they can engage in political violence with near impunity.
Examples abound. This year, Indiana’s Republican attorney general, Todd Rokita, launched a website with the Orwellian name “Eyes on Education.” The website invites informants to report on teachers who share “objectionable curricula, policies, or programs”; it also posts personally identifying information that can easily be used to dox or harass educators. Among the “objectionable” materials reported through the site is an email from a superintendent who vowed to “address societal injustice in our classrooms” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. After Florida enacted its Safety in Private Spaces Act, banning transgender people from using state-owned bathrooms that match their gender identity, transgender and cisgender residents alike have reported being assaulted by bystanders claiming that they “don’t belong” in public restrooms. Local ordinances designed by Jonathan Mitchell, the lawyer behind Texas’ anti-abortion bounty-hunter scheme, use vigilantes to target individuals who cross state lines to secure abortions. Georgia is implementing changes to its electoral rules that practically invite hardcore partisans to disrupt the certification of election results, a strategy with origins in the 2000 presidential election that MAGA leaders returned to in 2020 and 2022.
States’ mini–Project 2025s are already dividing communities and unleashing terror in the jurisdictions where they’ve been adopted, triggering an exodus of marginalized families from red states to safer havens. (Many more would surely follow suit if they had the means to do so.) Importantly, these state policies will remain in place regardless of who wins the race for the White House this November. But a Trump win—and the all-but-certain efforts to implement parts of Project 2025 by his appointees—would turbocharge them.
For example, one of the most widely reported proposals in Project 2025 is its threatened “campaign to enforce the criminal prohibitions” of the Comstock Act “against providers and distributors of abortion pills.” That law, enacted in 1873 amid a sexual-purity crusade, purports to make it illegal to mail any “article or thing … intended for producing abortion.” For decades, federal agencies under both Republican and Democratic administrations interpreted the Comstock Act narrowly, to apply only when the person mailing an article or thing intended that it be used unlawfully. Reversing this long-standing position would trigger not only a wave of federal criminal prosecutions, as speakers at the Democratic National Convention stressed. It would also kick off a surge of vigilante lawsuits under local laws that authorize ordinary citizens to enforce federal abortion restrictions.
Just as importantly, because Project 2025 has already burrowed itself into state law, a Democratic victory in November is not enough to keep its agenda from being realized. That agenda must also be fought in the states, a task made considerably more difficult by voter suppression, partisan gerrymandering, and other moves insulating lawmakers from being held accountable at the ballot box.
A crucial piece in this effort is for liberal and progressive lawmakers to recognize that their states have as much power in the new culture wars as red states; indeed, blue states may have more power than red states thanks to their economic and cultural clout. Those lawmakers can adopt protections for interstate travel and medical records, housing and economic supports for individuals fleeing red states, and measures holding vigilantes liable for attacks on fellow citizens. These measures will go a long way toward leveling the playing field between opponents of Project 2025’s agenda and red states that are implementing it. They will also provide a prototype for new federal civil rights protections, which would shield Americans wherever they live.
Put another way, the response to Project 2025 must be as dexterous and multifaceted as Project 2025 itself. Just as the movement behind the initiative operates all the way from the halls of power in Washington to county clerks’ offices and local school boards, so must those who recoil from its vision for America.
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