Project 2025: A blueprint for fascism and a dystopian American future.
The document is confused, self-conflicting, intentionally forgets a lot of GOP history, and is mired in authoritarian fever dreams.
I ran across a doozy of a policy document. It is called Project 2025, a far-right, multi-far-far-far-and-away-right think tank policy paper that is a whopping 920 pages long. It identifies all of America’s problems (read: we are not all Corporatist Socialists who suddenly became fascist hardliners seeking a white Christian ethnostate and want to eliminate Social Security so we can increase DHS and military spending. Oh, but the military sucks, so let’s fire a lot of generals while calling for two more wars. Yeah, not kidding, this is seriously self-conflicting.) and lays the blame solely at the feet of “the Left” (or at the feet of “woke”, like a lot of times without actually identifying what their base gripe really is and how it should be addressed or repaired.)
The policy doc reeks of The Left-Right Orthodoxy where they claim one side in the orthodoxy is always 100% correct, “your side” has never done even the most minor wrong, and it is the other side’s total fault across the board, and without exception. Both sides seem to forget how they held hands and sang Kumbaya then proceeded to fuck every American who is not a banker, hedge fund manager, multinational CEO, politician, or lobbyist. Both claim they haven’t, but I remember pretty clearly the bank bailouts and the joint vote to invade Iraq based on bunk intelligence and political bullshit. Then I watched as both sides sat dumbfounded when the FDIC bailed out astronomically wealthy venture capital corporations while pretending it was a small business bailout at Silicon Valley Bank. That’s after watching both parties sign on to corporate welfare schemes, a tax system that openly penalizes earning a paycheck, police tanks at every police department, and a legalized system of bribery called “campaign donations.”
Today’s Nationalists have hijacked a major political party, the GOP, and turned it into something without any acumen, direction, reasonableness, compassion, and frankly, a lick of commonsense. Now this document is supposed to be that written-in-concrete “conservative” (bullshit, there are no conservatives left with any say in the GOP; Mitt Romney was one of the last and he gave up recently…) playbook that is supposed to be executed like an operational runbook (a manual used in engineering to detail a workflow step-by-step). That Nationalist runbook is to be prosecuted in a lockstep order of the hive-minders in the various right-wing think tanks. A hivemind that has gone full-on Dear Leader acolyte. Dear Leader and his policies (or an even more right-wing policy, even better!) are the only acceptable answer, and the answer is already decided (by the way, answered by the right-wing elites when they claim to hate elites). There will be no negotiations with the plebs nor anyone who dares to disagree with the right-wing elites.
Look at the delirium spreading through the nutters running for either the GOP Presidential nomination or for the House of Representatives (or the Speaker debacle, WTAFO). Does the campaign rhetoric, threats, and enemy-making line up with the document?!? Here is a great example:
How do you move services and duties to the FBI when the lion’s share of Nationalists are calling for the disbanding of the FBI, if not flushing the entire DOJ system (except for DHS, I will get to that later…)? The House GOP Committee about weaponized government led by Jim “Gym, the protector of the real groomers in the showers” Jordon wants to eliminate all of the DOJ system because Dear Leader caught some charges. The beginning of this policy doc exclaims this policy doc was the product of some huge meeting of the minds of the far right-wing via think tank confab. So, what the fuck is it?? Is Vivek, Moron Taylor Greene, Matt “Nazi taint licker” Gaetz, or Dear Leader going to shut down the federal government and fire the entire FBI or are you moving federal services over to the FBI?!? You can only pick one, you fucking self-conflicted morons.
The Nationalists do love the DHS though. They probably start beating off every time they hear the acronym. Hate the federal government with 75% of the government to be fired for gross incompetence and spreading “woke” on ‘Mericans, but absolutely massive spending increases to DHS, Border Patrol, and DEA. The left hand of the nationalists does not know what the right hand is doing, obviously. If the federal government is too big and damaging ‘Mericans’ “FREEDOM!!!”, of course expanding the American Stasi is clearly the answer to all of our collective problems. FFS.
Remember how Dear Leader fashioned himself as the savior of the working man. Without Dear Leader, workers would be faced with having to learn Mandarin while they lose their jobs to immigrants bussed into the factory directly by Biden and Hunter (yeah, listening to their version of reality, Hunter is the lead bus driver for all the immigrants entering the country). The Manifesto of Nationalism bans all union workers from the federal government. I am totally serious: “removing all unions in the department for national security purposes.” Being represented by a collective bargaining unit is the destruction of ‘Merica, but notice how the collective bargaining of the bank, oil, chemical, corp ag, and pharma lobbyists are completely unmentioned. If collective negotiation is bad, then ban all collective negotiations including the lobbying racket that makes Congress run basically on bribes and graft.
Here is a little fun fact: Federal and state workers are among the few non-tech labor segments to stay at least on par with inflation post-1978 and The Conservative Revolution. So of course, federal jobs need to be knocked down to the level of a minimum-wage Amazon warehouse job or the Nationalists won’t be happy. Seriously, look at virtually every one of the Nationalist candidates for President, led by Senator Tim “Token” Scott who, because he is so much like Reagen (like the white Nationalists give a fuck about Reagan or Scott right now) would fire all the striking workers (writers, actors, meat packers, autoworkers, etc.) right now. Why?!? “FREEDOM!!!!” and that striking workers are “woke.” Of course… [insert eye roll here.] Are the Nationalists or Dear Leader actually friends to labor?!? GTFOH. [insert LOL here] Dear Leader does not know where he stands. He thinks all car manufacturing is being moved to China by two people (Joe and Hunter Biden) while he conveniently forgets the mega car factories for Telsa in Fremont, California, and Austin, TX or the fact that chip fabrication plants are being built in the US. Oh, Nimarata Randhawa aka Nikki Haley thinks Biden is leading a union takeover of ‘Merica. Funny, last month it was the gender studies department being bolstered to take over ‘Merica. Almost all of the Nationalist feedback is “labor is harmful to the economy,” yet bank bailouts, corporate welfare, and expensive littoral ships that can’t fight are total wins for ‘Merica.
Within the “white Christian Nationalist Right is always right,” they are taking some meticulous culling of the data available. The Nationalists have an axe to grind not with government spending per se. They love tax cuts for Dear Leader and Friends that caused a $7+T debt increase, that’s spending when you don’t fucking pay for it and start having the Treusary issue continuously more debt. They are angered by federal employees who have not been thrown under the inflation bus since The Corporatist Revolution of 1978. They are livid that federal employees can afford to own a home or send their child to an affordable college without the usury of student loans. That is really, really upsetting to them, except when you point out the elected clowns are government employees too with gracious pay and benefits in Congress. They ignore that the Freedom Caucus and their staffers are bringing home those fat federal paychecks, Cadillac-grade employer-paid health insurance, and those over-the-top retirement benefits. Name another job in the country that vests retirement benefits after only five years of service, less than a Senate term.
Do you want to know the real difference according to the CBO between federal and private employees? It all depends on the education level of the employee. Here is the breakdown from the Comparing the Compensation of Federal and Private-Sector Employees report:
If you have a high school diploma or less, in a federal government job you will make (drum roll please) a whopping lottery win of (…wait for it…) $4/hour or $8320/year differential (based on a standardized 2080 hour work-year). $8320/year causes meltdowns in the affluent right-wing elite circles. After taxes, that is about $480/month more take-home pay in the federal job arena compared to a private employer. What a crime, eh?? Oh, just in 2022 according to Rent.com, the average rent went up $215/month. Food inflation in 2022 (US Dept of Ag) was 9.9%. How dare they! Do those high school graduates make a little more chump change than the private sector? Yes. But how exactly is that a problem?!? Seriously, WTF.
If you have a Baccalaureate, the compensation is about the same private-to-public. But if you have an advanced degree or Doctorate, being employed by the federal government means a -$16/hour in your compensation.
So essentially, the mad hatters of the Corporatist-Nationalist Right want the federal government to literally create more working poor who struggle paycheck-to-paycheck and can never save for retirement.
If you frame the federal government workforce as a percentage of the total US pollution, the federal payroll has dropped overall since the early 1970s:
[Source: PolitiFact] “Specifically, with the exception of some brief upticks, the percentage of the nation’s population working for the federal government has declined by almost half since about 1970. That’s occurred under both Republican presidents (in red) and Democratic presidents (blue).”
So this grand pronouncement of fascist wet dreams is NOT about spending per se (the same way their angst about abortion has little to nothing to do with the actual medical procedure) because [Source: USA Today], the crazed spending is bi-partisan (albeit not spent on the same things…)
”President George W. Bush was the first president to add a multi-trillion-dollar amount to the debt to finance the war on terror, and Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump followed suit, the former primarily to combat the Great Recession and the latter mostly to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.”
According to CNN-Politic fact checkers, President Biden is making wild claims he reduced the debt (conflating the debt versus the annual deficit), when in fact, the debt continues to grow uncontrollably.
The right wing only cares about the debt and deficits when their party does not occupy The White House. But to claim that the debt or deficit was created and grown because we have too many FBI agents and analysts that make too much money is freaking absurd. That’s not where the debts or the deficits came from (hint: it wasn’t Social Security either…) Defund the FBI is not about the budget to the right-wing cranks, it is (again) that Dear Leader Porn Star Humper and his cronies caught some criminal charges. Gang members hate catching criminal charges.
This Project 2025 manifesto throws every awful part the far-right loonies wanted since ‘78 into one document and declares war (again) against the federal government and liberal democracy that was created by our Founding Fathers. This is just a blueprint for American Fascism that declares their hatred for the liberal democracy (as in liberal versus illiberal in the classic sense) and declares jihad against the federalist system that for decades the Right has claimed as their own. This is every last one of the authoritarian grievances against America. This is their battle plan against every American who is not a complete Corporatist-Nationalist-Theocratic basketcase. They have rigged the federal courts and packed SCOTUS with their ideologues ready to tip the scale in the Nationalists’ favor.
Beware America.
Beware.
Think about it.