Dave Kingsley

Make no Mistake about It, Project 2025 is Powerful, it is Well-Funded, and it is Religiously Extremist, Misogynistic, and White Supremacist.

    Last August, this headline appeared in the Washington Times: “Recruiting is underway for Trump-like ‘wrecking ball’ to shrink government and fire federal workers”[1] The wrecking ball to which the article was referring is a cadre of extremist right-wing individuals who will, if Trump wins in November, see to it that their allies staff his administration.  The powerful, anti-Democratic Heritage Foundation has initiated a movement dubbed “Project 2025,” – a network of Christian Nationalist, states’ rights’, anti-choice, school censorship, and anti-constitution organizations steeped in religious zealotry and as far out on the right of the political spectrum as any movement in U.S. history.

    The Heritage Foundation is claiming that 100 organization on the hard right have signed onto their project in preparation for ending U.S. Constitutional government as we know it.[2] They are intent on scrapping the form of federalism intended by the framers and accepted by the American people as it has evolved since 1789.  The list of organizations signing on includes Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, Susan B. Anthony Pro Life America, Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, Family Research Council, and other reactionary groups.

    Most people who pay attention to politics have heard of at least one or more of these fanatical groups.  Adherents of the Moms for Liberty have been running around censoring books in school libraries. They are allied with DeSantis’s project to undermine public education and replace it with a revisionist, false history and toxic religious indoctrination.  Turning Point USA was formed and led by Charlie Kirk a rabid disseminator of disinformation and supporter of Donald Trump and his tripe about stolen elections, insurrectionists as patriots & hostages, and other dangerous nonsense.  He has successfully organized chapters on at least 400 college campuses.

    These types of anti-American organizations have moved from the unthinkable to the normal in the past few decades.  Even more diabolical and violent groups are lurking in the shadows of this cabal.  The violent, neo-Nazi Proud Boys and other Hitler sympathizing white male organizations are operating on the perimeter of the movement and tolerated at meetings of CPAC and Turning Point USA.[3]

Project 2025 is in Sync with the Ultra Conservative, Six Member Supreme Court Majority and the Republican Party

   The current six-member majority on the U.S. Supreme court is acting not as jurists but rather as idealogues with sympathies for the dominant and dogmatic religious leaders of the Republican Party and a very mentally disturbed Donald Trump.  Mainstream legal scholars are horrified by their actions and are speaking out about it[4] – to no avail.  Not only is the overtly ideological majority on the court signaling that they will seriously weaken federal agencies,[5] they are expressing a considerable amount of sympathy for reducing women to second class status,[6] and interfering with privacy rights of gay and heterosexual married couples.[7] 

It also appears that the S.C. majority has piled weight on the scales of justice for Donald Trump who is attempting to forestall his criminal trials by claiming total immunity for anything he did as president.  This is an absurd claim rejected by a unanimous three judge panel of U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.  Nevertheless, the S.C. decided to hear the case and help stall justice for the American people who need a decision prior to the November 4^th election.

    Rarely in U.S history has the Supreme Court issued rulings that retract previously granted liberties.  However, this court is intent on remaking law to reflect their favoritism toward a fundamentalist Christian theocracy with concentrated power in the hands of ultra-conservative white males.

What Project 2025 Means for the Elders of America

    Like other vulnerable groups in American society, the elderly are falling prey to economic predators.  This is consistently becoming a bigger problem, but it is happening without adequate federal regulation. This is particularly the case for elders institutionalized in “nursing homes.”  Lax oversight of the nursing home industry prior to 2020 and the spread of COVID led to 2000 patient and 200 employee deaths. This was preventable and shouldn’t have happened.  Nevertheless, the media, white-washing commissions, government agencies, and the legal system have displayed no propensity to hold the industry accountable for its neglect.

    While the scourge was killing and isolating nursing home patients, the right-wing media and politicians and pundits appearing on their networks were claiming that masking, isolating, and preventative behaviors in general weren’t necessary because as Bill O’Reilly mused on Fox News: “The [U.S. death] projections that you just mentioned are down to 60,000, I don’t think it will be that high. 13,000 dead now in the USA. Many people who are dying, both here and around the world, were on their last legs anyway.”[8]

    O’Reilly’s attitude reflects a far wider viewpoint about the value of older Americans than our government and politicians would care to admit – even beyond the confines of the radical right.  However, the strength of an underlying theological dominionist[9], government-hating religiosity – combined with grievances against liberal, women, gay, ethnic, transgender, and other non-white male outgroups – does not bode well for programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and humane care for frail elders.  Crazy religious views of the extreme right have incorporated a glorification of private corporations and privatization of government services.  This is an outgrowth of their hatred of liberal programs from the New Deal forward and the political liberalism that era implies. 

Summary

    Religious fanatics want to run America.  They have made significant inroads in doing just that (think school vouchers).  The Christian extremist alliance with violent, neo-Nazi organizations is even more disturbing.  Under the influence of the Heritage Foundation for the past fifty years and now its Project 2025, this coterie is infecting the mainstream of U.S. political discourse and jelling into a real threat to our constitutional form of government. 

    Coverage of right-wing fanaticism by the mainstream media has been problematic.  The Heritage Foundation was formed by wealthy individuals on the far right in the 1970s.  At the time, it was considered too radical for the normal American politically centered zeitgeist.  By the 1980s, representatives of the organization were invited as guests on moderate news outlets such as PBS News Hour and it became a go to entity for print media seeking what they believed to be normal conservative views.

    The MSM tends to engage in a misguided form of “fair and balanced” coverage of political groups with the chutzpa to push unthinkable views hard enough and long enough to become accepted into the Washington, D.C. establishment. The undeserved respect these entities receive inside the D.C. beltway – including by the press – creates a form of induced ambiguity in mass communication and voters’ thought processes.  The real danger and odious facets of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 are minimized in leading new outlets out of respect for their success in becoming part of the normal political establishment.

    I’m worried about the level of energy exerted by moderates in pushing back on the well-organized and aggressive organizations constituting Project 2025. Furthermore, there should be vocal opposition to the media myth about a “divided country” as if there are two equally legitimate sides in U.S. politics.  In truth, American political views can be characterized as a broad, ambivalent middle with loud minorities on the fringes.  The loudest and most effective fringe voice these days is on the right.  Is it even fringe any longer?

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[1] Lisa Mascaro – Associated Press – Tuesday, August 29, 2023, Recruiting is underway for Trump-like ‘wrecking ball’ to shrink government and fire federal workers – Washington Times

[2] Project 2025 Reaches 100 Coalition Partners, Continues to Grow in Preparation for Next President | The Heritage Foundation

[3]Nazis mingle openly at CPAC, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies (nbcnews.com).  CPAC is the acronym for Conservative Political Action Committee. CPAC is the dominant and most persuasive voice of the Republican Party.  Meetings of CPAC draw leading Republican U.S. Senators and Congresspersons as speakers.  Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker at these gatherings since 2017.  An NBC News story included this: “At the Young Republican mixer Friday evening, a group of Nazis who openly identified as national socialists mingled with mainstream conservative personalities, including some from Turning Point USA, and discussed “race science” and antisemitic conspiracy theories.” See also: Neo-Nazis gathered outside the Turning Point USA summit at Tampa Convention Center this weekend | Orlando | Orlando Weekly

[4] See, e.g.: The Public Has a Right to Trump’s Speedy Trial – The Atlantic; Stanford Law School’s Mark Lemley Argues the Supreme Court is Making an Unprecedented Power Grab – Legal Aggregate – Stanford Law School

[5] (See Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo | Oyez; Discussed on this blog: Russia & the United States:  Two Different Countries, Two Different Styles of Kleptocracy

Posted on March 30, 2024

[6] 19-1392 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (06/24/2022) (supremecourt.gov)

[7] In Dobbs v. Jackson, Clarence Thomas expressed interest in overturning the right to contraceptives – a right granted in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) – and the right of gay people to marry, which was accorded in Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015).

[8] Bill O’Reilly says people who died from coronavirus ‘were on their last legs anyway’ (cleveland.com)

[9] Along with misogyny and white supremacy, Dominionism is one of the more perverse political philosophies driving the Christian Nationalist movement.  Proponents of this weird and dangerous philosophy are increasingly successful in persuading the Republican Party to seriously consider and adopt their ideas.  Dominion theology includes a belief in a Christian nation ruled on biblical tenets – whatever those may be.  Many of the opponents of imaginary “woke education” would replace it with false teaching about the framers’ intent, which they claim was to create a “Christian Nation.”