Triad City Beat EDITORIAL: Project 2025 — Saying the quiet part out loud

Sometimes I forget that, as a bona fide member of the news media, I live in society’s rarefied air — or, perhaps its scabrous underbelly.

Because of my job, I stay on top of the news cycle like an old lady watching her sidewalk through the blinds of her living room window. I’m on the feeds all day, my phone pinging with alerts from news sites and texts from people with the most valuable kind of news — the stuff that other people don’t know about yet.

I realize that most people do not share this obsession.

But I thought the story of Project 2025 — the Republican plan for a new America after Trump’s re-election — had made it to the mainstream months ago. I learned about it in January, from a tweet that led me to the project’s website.

It’s a terrifying list of changes to how this country is run, to be deployed during Trump’s first six months: relegating civil-service employees from “hundreds of agencies” into political appointees; establishing partisan control over the DOJ, the FBI, the FCC and the FTC; eliminating the departments of education and homeland security; reducing and then cutting Medicaid and Medicare; abolishing abortion throughout the country; criminalizing pornography; creating internment camps for immigrants… it just goes on and on and on.

It’s a project of the Heritage Foundation, the most powerful extremist right-wing group in the country. They’re already contributing to the campaigns of virtually every Republican in the NC General Assembly, who in turn have already submitted Heritage bills to become NC law.

And I thought everyone already knew about it until last week, when it truly went mainstream.

John Oliver’s comedic dissection of Project 2025 explained the depth of its depravities better than I can in 350 words, educating the casual news viewer on this plan. And then Taraji P. Henson warned attendees and viewers of “The BET Awards” about the plan and its dire consequences for Black folks.

Now, finally, people are getting riled up about it, so much so that Trump officially denied knowing anything about it a few days later, which is a pretty huge lie, even for him.

We should all get on board. Explore the website where the Heritage Foundation spells out its plans for everyone who is not white and Christian. Blast it out on your social media channels, if you’re into that sort of thing. Tell your rightward-leaning friends that a vote for Trump is a vote for a fascist autocracy. Ask everyone on the Republican ticket why they support this plan, because they are all on board whether they want to admit it or not. We’ll be bringing it up in our election coverage every chance we get. And we’ll be writing about it more in this space as the election looms closer.

And if you’re a Trump supporter, you need to read it to know what you are signing on for.

Consider this: Last week, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said the quiet part out loud.

“[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said on Steve Bannon’s radio show, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”