THE OTHER SIDE: Project 2025 — the road to Purgatory

Before smart phones and several varieties of maps, there was Garmin, the physical gizmo that somehow communicated with the stars to tell you when and where to turn your car and how far you still had to drive. Sometimes wildly successful, other times, if you trusted completely, sending you on yet another wild goose chase. If you were smart, you would download the latest revisions Garmin generated, I am guessing, by those who were righteously pissed off that they ended up nowhere near where they wanted/needed to be.

Well, years later, MAGA has made it easy to download their road map to MAGA Purgatory. At first glance, I was thinking Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” was a map to Hell. But as dreadful a place Project 2025 has outlined, I am pretty sure if Trump actually wins 2024, as they pray, there is probably a much worse place they are intending for us.

The “Administrative State” is MAGA’s term for the government we rely upon to provide for our defense, our highway system, our national parks, veterans affairs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the protection of our public health, the environment, public education, and on and on, the very programs their fictional Mr. and Mrs. Smith have taken for granted for their own care and the care of their children. They call this Project 2025 their “Presidential Transition Project.” It is a very well funded blueprint they hope will ensure they will be fully prepared “to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.” Why? Because “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.”

MAGA knows well its lack of preparation and lax ideological vetting allowed a bunch of unreliable “RINOs” and some far-too-independent folks like Rex Tillerson and James Mattis and John Kelly to sneak into the first Trump administration. Last time around, these folks inconveniently provided a continuing counterpoint to Trump’s desire to break norms, disregard laws, and provoke insurrection.

I always find myself laughing at the very idea of the RINO (Republican In Name Only); it seems preposterous to me that a MAGA adherent imagines him/herself capable of determining who is or isn’t a legitimate Republican these days. The fact is that MAGA has abandoned pretty much all of what were previously considered bedrock Republican principles: the abiding hatred for all things Soviet/Russian/North Korean; the desire for a rigorous defense establishment and a strong NATO-led European and international framework to oppose Russian and Chinese expansion; respect for the intelligence agencies and the FBI; a concern for the deficit; a fundamental reliance on the principle of personal privacy; and a conservative fiscal policy.

Clearly, these folks have moved to a place once-upon-a-time-real Republicans like the Bushes probably never imagined. And as I discussed in my last column, MAGA and Project 2025—much like the Alitos—are publicly declaring that it is time to win at all costs:

Liberty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Contradictions abound. As The Washington Post reveals, Karl Marx seems to have missed a lot in his march through our institutions. Perhaps cultural Marxists work in mysterious ways. Or they just skipped Louisiana:

Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed legislation Wednesday requiring every public classroom in Louisiana to display the Ten Commandments, becoming the only state with such a law and inflaming tensions over the separation between church and state.

‘This bill mandates the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom — public elementary, secondary and post-education schools — in the state of Louisiana, because if you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses,’ Landry said at a bill-signing ceremony.

And has anyone in MAGA checked out the stock market? And the ever-increasing power of the billionaires like the Kochs, Adelson, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and more each day?

Clearly, I am a bit confused about what is meant by our “original moorings.” The America of the Constitution is an America that had made its accommodation with and accepted slavery and was comfortable with the oppression of women.

Such a large and critical undertaking, we are told that Project 2025 “is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement.”

Have I missed a study showing that more students have died from “transgendering with drag queens” than in our epidemic of school shootings?

First off, has anyone informed the authors of Project 2025 that, when it comes to the new Cold War against our values, their fearless leader has been sucking up to Vladimir Putin for decades now, just dying to open his dream project, Trump Moscow, or that he holds dear the love letters sent by the ruthless, sociopathic leader he would love to be, Kim Jong Un of North Korea? In this instance, the “globalist elite” in Washington are miles ahead of Donald Trump when it comes to recognizing the global threat posed by the totalitarians in Russia and China. He who is quite prepared to sacrifice Ukraine to please Vladimir.

Now, I must admit that while I was familiar with The Great Awakening of Colonial America, their reaction against rationalism and secularism and embrace of evangelical Calvinism, I didn’t quite get what Project 2025 was referencing. Not until I found the work of Alex Jones, the thief and huckster who continuously broadcast despicable lies about the murder of 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook. Jones concocted the phony conspiracy theory that Sandy Hook was a false-flag operation and no one was really killed, libels that earned him a $1.5 billion judgment. Amazon tells us that in “’The Great Awakening: Defeating the Globalists and Launching the Next Great Renaissance,’ the most persecuted man on Earth, Alex Jones, gives you the good news about the failing plans of the globalists to control humanity.”

Project 2025 is being steered by the Heritage Foundation:

But as our dozens of partners and hundreds of authors will attest, 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.

4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’

What makes these four pieces of the conservative promise so valuable to the next President is that they cut through superficial distractions and focus on the moral and foundational challenges America faces in this moment of history.

I should warn you, what you are about to read may very well be hazardous to your mental health. After all, there has got to be a limit to the brain’s ability to process shameless hypocrisy. At the heart of Project 2025 is Donald Trump and the effort to maximize his victory in the upcoming election. And in service of that mission, the folks at Project 2025 seem to have wrenched their collective brains around the notion that Donald Trump is the poster child for family values.

A great feat of imagination. And amnesia. Forgetting so much.

Trump’s first marriage was to Ivana, and they had three children: Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric. Their marriage lasted about a decade until it became obvious that Donald was having an affair with Marla Maples. Ivana sued for divorce in 1990. Tiffany was born out of wedlock in 1993, and Donald later married Marla. But they separated in 1997. Donald and Melania married in 2005, and Barron Trump was born in 2006. And, as we have learned again in his recent New York City conviction, in that same year, Donald had affairs that we know about with Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, sleeping with them before and after Melania’s pregnancy. So, I don’t really know what to say, except please read this claim from Project 2025 at your own risk:

Whose family I wonder? Hasn’t Donald done an impressive job of subverting several of his own families? When they refer to “Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering,” I am guessing they are fantasizing about some wealthy, white, Christian family they are inventing for a planned Netflix special funded by the Mercers.

Nonetheless, Project 2025 proudly trumpets the primacy of family and marriage. And so, if I get the terminology right, Donald’s love for Ivana, and then Marla, and then Melania somehow falls into the column of “natural” loves versus the love of the Marxists and globalists and the Democrats—and the Bidens, presumably—which are “unnatural” loves.

As for subverting, surely millions of all-too-real families are actually subverted by the pay gap between male and female workers, by the lack of affordable childcare, by inflated drug prices for everything parents need to combat childhood disease, by the continuing conservative attack on vaccination, by cuts in Head Start, by the lack of affordable housing, by existing housing discrimination, by job discrimination, by the lack of affordable public transportation to get to and from work, and on and on and on.

Meanwhile, only the blind and privileged imagine they can survive without the critical infrastructure and support of the government. And, of course, the benefactors of Project 2025 are precisely the people who benefit from the governmental aid and corporate welfare voted on by the politicians they have purchased with their campaign contributions. Then you can add the obscene Trump tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

You don’t have to dig to discover the bias here; it is proudly displayed. With terms like low-income communities drowning in addiction and government dependence, Project 2025 reeks of racism. How come we never hear about the rich white guys who always manage to afford their coke? It is always the others who threaten the great American moral foundation.

Now, permit me to posit a countervailing theory: Pretty much everything about Trump and his family, like his businesses, Trump University, the Trump Organization, reeks of immorality and a complete lack of accountability. As CNN reported on December 7, 2022:

You might say the corruption was successfully passed down from father to son, from Fred’s gifting Donald with a job mis-managing middle-income housing in Queens, projects that discriminated against Black people, to giving him a get-out-of-serving-in-Vietnam card from a chiropractor to whom Fred offered reduced rent, then later bailing him out of multiple casino bankruptcies to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

All of this led to Donald’s own full-blown financial criminality. As The Washington Post put it:

Former president Donald Trump has been fined or penalized to the tune of more than $440 million in New York courthouses in the past nine months — the result of two civil lawsuits brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, two fines for violating gag orders in a separate civil suit alleging business fraud by the Trump Organization, and penalties in a business fraud trial that dwarfs what Trump has been ordered to pay so far.

If, as Project 2025 asserts, the most important community in our lives is the family, well, the problems continue with Donald’s propping up his barely competent sons, Don Jr. and Eric, and his positively creepy infatuation with his daughter Ivanka, followed by his seemingly borderline abandonment of Barron. In pretty much every respect, Melania and Donald have created a completely transactional forgery of the kind of mythical marriage and family that Project 2025 seeks to celebrate.

So maybe we can forget about the Marxists for a while. Really, truly, isn’t it Donald who is doing the subverting of the American family all on his own? Meanwhile, it seems pretty clear that MAGA and Project 2025 won’t ask Donald Trump to change his immoral behavior. And so, in reality, doesn’t it make more sense to demand that others change their behavior? Project 2025 tells us:

The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term 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. Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

Whoa! Somehow the man who slept with a real-life—not-rhetorical—porn star while his wife was recovering from giving birth to his son is going to be assigned the task of protecting us from “misogynistic exploiters of women.” They might have disappeared Stormy. But did they all miss the unanimous verdict of the jury in the E. Jean Carroll case?

A New York jury found former President Donald Trump liable Tuesday for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s but not liable for her alleged rape.

The jury awarded her $5 million in damages for her battery and defamation claims.

Asked on its verdict sheet whether Carroll, 79, had proven ‘by a preponderance of the evidence’ that ‘Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll,’ the nine-person jury checked the box that said ‘no.’ Asked whether Carroll had proven ‘by a preponderance of the evidence’ that ‘Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll,’ the jury checked the box that said “yes.” Both allegations were elements of Carroll’s battery claim.

The six men and three women also found Trump had defamed Carroll by calling her claims a ‘hoax’ and a ‘con job.’ The jury deliberated for only about three hours. It awarded Carroll just over $2 million on the battery claim and just under $3 million on the defamation claims.

Trump’s criminal and morally reprehensible behavior seems not to matter at all to MAGA, but diversity, inclusion, reproductive health, and especially abortion need to be eradicated. And Dobbs—and its overturning of Roe v. Wade—deserves to be celebrated:

Many of us grew up in a world where words had meaning, where dictionaries were important, and we all pretty much agreed to accept traditional definitions. Up was up and down was down, and in definitely wasn’t out, and so we began discussion, debate, and argument with at least an agreement of what we meant. Well, the next excerpt is about as perfect an example of what MAGA is doing to twist and distort our language to suit its right-wing political agenda:

Somewhere along the way, appreciation turned into blame. Public servants like those who risk their lives and patrol our borders are held responsible for the often completely understandable failures of an over-stressed asylum policy. Even community-minded volunteers at voting centers were blamed for Donald Trump’s failure to win enough votes to defeat Joe Biden.

As I was driving into Great Barrington to Fuel this morning, I was listening as National Public Radio (NPR) reported on those thousands of folks who lost their homes and everything they owned as Iowa flood waters breached their flood-control system. NPR routinely reported that President Biden was sending emergency funds to help with the cleanup and to help get the local economy back on its feet. We had floods in rural Republican Iowa, which voted 53.2 percent for Trump and 45 percent for Biden in 2020, and yet naturally the government is there to help.

So despite the mockery of Project 2025, the administrative state mobilized to help innocent victims deal with the undeniable ravages of the very climate crisis Project 2025 refuses to acknowledge. Seems hard to believe, but here we’ve got woke bureaucrats poised to help.

Even worse, Project 2025 intends to bend our federal workforce into a servants’ corps for their president, making them as dependent and fearful as those who work for Vladimir Putin or Chairman Xi Jinping or Kim Jong Un. So let me ask you: Do you want a federal air traffic controller who has spent years learning his or her job or some untrained nephew of a big Trump donor keeping you safe in the skies? Some MAGA sycophant?

In order to carry out the President’s desires, political appointees must be given the tools, knowledge, and support to overcome the federal government’s obstructionist Human Resources departments. More fundamentally, the new Administration must fill its ranks with political appointees …

What the heck do political appointees know about environmental science and protecting your drinking water from toxic chemicals? “Empowering political appointees across the Administration is crucial to a President’s success,” Project 2025 declares.

When exactly did hard-earned experience become bad? Perhaps the last time around when career State Department employees suggested to the president and his political team that shaking down the president of Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden in exchange for missiles to fight a Russian invasion was a bad idea?

Make no mistake, Project 2025 is committed to replacing independent, non-political federal employees with reliable White House loyalists:

Progressives designed a merit system to promote expertise and shield bureaucrats from partisan political pressure, but it soon began to insulate civil servants from accountability. The modern merit system increasingly made it almost impossible to fire all but the most incompetent civil servants. Complying with arcane rules regarding recruiting, rating, hiring, and firing simply replaced the goal of cultivating competence and expertise.

During his presidency, Trump began the process of weakening worker protections for government employees, but Biden undid that erosion; however, Project 2025 is determined to get back at it:

In 2018, President Trump issued Executive Order 1383916 requiring agencies to reduce the time for employees to improve performance before corrective action could be taken; to initiate disciplinary actions against poorly performing employees more expeditiously; to reiterate that agencies are obligated to make employees improve; to reduce the time for employees to respond to allegations of poor performance; to mandate that agencies remind supervisors of expiring employee probationary periods; to prohibit agencies from entering into settlement agreements that modify an employee’s personnel record; and to reevaluate procedures for agencies to discipline supervisors who retaliate against whistleblowers. Unfortunately, the order was overturned by the Biden Administration, so it will need to be reintroduced in 2025.

Not surprisingly, they are committed to limiting the ability of unionized government workers to protect their interests:

How is this for upside down? Somehow Project 2025 imagines those who work for our government and serve in government are the elite, confusing them with the most powerful, wealthiest Americans, those who run the most successful, influential corporations:

Properly considered, restoring fiscal limits and constitutional accountability to the federal government is a continuation of restoring national sovereignty to the American people. In foreign affairs, global strategy, federal budgeting and policymaking, the same pattern emerges again and again. Ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them. They centralize power up and away from the American people: to supra-national treaties and organizations, to left-wing ‘experts,’ to sight-unseen all-or-nothing legislating, to the unelected career bureaucrats of the Administrative State.

Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans insisted on the gigantic tax cuts for the most prosperous corporations and the wealthiest of Americans, massively increasing our debt and robbing the Treasury of billions of dollars that could have been used for education, for affordable healthcare, and on and on. In truth, left-wing experts have scarce influence on Congress; it is those who pour countless billions into campaign contributions who prevail upon representatives and senators to weaken tax enforcement, curb environmental regulations, prevent meaningful cost-savings for prescription drugs, and undermine safer labor laws. Look to the ever-increasing gap between the one percent and the rest of us; look to the top not the middle, not to the bottom, and you will more clearly see the ruling elite and those who will do anything to avoid true accountability.

According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve:

Wealth—what a family owns less what they owe—is distributed unequally in the United States. Why does wealth matter? Wealth is important for upward economic mobility, allowing families to invest in their futures and their children’s futures, and to deal with financial bumps in the road.

In 2022, 13.2 million Americans owned 74 percent of our wealth, while 118 million Americans only owned 26 percent of our wealth.

Project 2025 is quite clear about who and what they need to oppose:

America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution. The former believe that America is—and always has been— ‘systemically racist’ and that it is not worth celebrating and must be fundamentally transformed, largely through a centralized administrative state. The latter believe in America’s history and heroes, its principles and promise, and in everyday Americans and the American way of life. They believe in the Constitution and republican government. Conservatives—the Americanists in this battle—must fight for the soul of America, which is very much at stake.

Biden thought he was fighting for the soul of America, but not so, say the authors. And because MAGA is on the side of “everyday Americans and the American way of life,” the woke can’t possibly be. Clear as day.

Speaking of the woke, Dr. Fauci and all those epidemiologists and emergency-room physicians and pediatricians who tell us they want to keep us safe from air-born epidemics like COVID-19, well they obviously don’t know as much as the Heritage Foundation:

The authors manage to combine the anger over masks and vaccinations with the need to criticize Biden’s defense policies:

[T]he Department of Defense ‘is a deeply troubled institution.’ It has emphasized leftist politics over military readiness, ‘Recruiting was the worst in 2022 that it has been in two generations,’ and ‘the Biden Administration’s profoundly unserious equity agenda and vaccine mandates have taken a serious toll.’ … Moreover, our military has adopted a risk-averse culture—think of masked soldiers, sailors, and airmen—rather than instilling and rewarding courage in thought and action.

Not sure how this equates with ex-President Trump’s hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, though they desperately want to blame Biden for honoring the agreement Trump signed with the Taliban. And you can add Trump’s abandonment of our Kurdish allies in Syria.

More unfounded criticism of our State Department:

An effective diplomatic corps is central to defending our interests and influencing world events. Whereas most military personnel have had leftist priorities imposed from above, the problem at State comes largely from within. Former State Department director of policy planning Kiron Skinner writes in Chapter 6, ‘[L]arge swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda and vision.’

Perhaps, they disagreed because they watched ex-President Trump confuse his desire for unfounded gossip to tarnish Joe Biden rather than support our ally Ukraine against Russian war crimes.

Interestingly, Project 2025 breaks from ex-President Trump’s oft-expressed willingness to deny military aid and force Ukraine to accept a peace agreement that cedes significant Ukrainian territory to Russia:

The United States and its allies also face real threats from Russia, as evidenced by Vladimir Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine …

I am guessing this will be forgotten if Trump actually wins.

Project 2025 has plans for how we educate our children and use energy:

I hope this introduction to Project 2025 provokes you to take a look for yourself.

John Oliver offers this succinct summary:

And for anyone tempted to think well we survived Trump’s first term – first not everyone did. And it should hopefully be very clear by now a second Trump term really does promise to be far, far worse because if Trump’ s first term was defined by chaos, his second could be defined by ruthless efficiency. And that should be troubling to absolutely everyone because Project 2025 is a movement whose members joke about wanting a white homeland and insist women have to have more babies to uphold Western society and its work could be about to be funneled through a man who happily calls his fellow Americans ‘vermin.’ It is not subtle. It’s hard to miss and once you see it, you cannot un-see it.

The more I read of Project 2025, the more concerned I become. Having grown up with a Jewish father and Catholic mother, both of whom had childhoods that eroded faith in a benevolent higher being, my religious education was lacking. But I know enough to appreciate that following Project 2025, unlike surrendering to my early Garmin, will without fail lead me to Purgatory.