Project 2025 is more than a playbook for Trumpism, it’s the Christian Nationalist manifesto Salon, 3/1/2024
Mainstream media outlets have begun to expose Project 2025’s radical vision: A gutted federal government; immigrants rounded up in work camps and deported; a military response to peaceful demonstrations; oppression of women, minorities, the poor and the disadvantaged. For the media, it is simply an extreme conservative plan.
When I read Project 2025, I recognized immediately that it is a 1,000-page Christo-fascist screed.
I knew that Project 2025 was terrible, and I knew about creeping Christian Nationalism in mainstream conservative thought. But I didn’t make this connection until reading this piece by an author who was literally indoctrinated into a Christian Nationalist worldview as a child.
I don’t think there is hyperbole in any of this. This is the endgame for conservatives decades after the Republican party was co-opted by evangelicals. In that time they have played the long game - they packed the courts, gerrymandered dozens of states where democracy is a sham, finally did way with Roe v. Wade, and they demonize groups of people, painting anyone other than white Christians as subhuman.
I do not think Trump gives a whit about Christianity but he likes power and adulation. Others will settle in and have no problem letting Trump take credit for their undercover work. They don’t care about the credit, they just want to imagine an America that looks like Project 2025. With Trump in the White House, they likely will get it.
I posted this comment in another thread, but, one big reason for this is that a huge portion of the Bible is all about the “good guys” imposing religion by force - a lot of the Old Testament, for instance. The good guys are leaders such as David, Josiah, Hezekiah, Asa, etc. who don’t give any sort of “religious freedom” but simply impose. Such kings are praised and the leaders who just let the people do what they want (ie…, NOT worship God) are criticized.
You’re not wrong, but you’re assuming the majority will blindly go along and re-elect Trump, which is not a forgone conclusion. You have to have faith in the silent majority.
Wow, hyperbole much? Why don’t you tell us what specific sections of Project 2025 have you shaking in your boots. Anything conservative is often automatically labelled as hateful, racist, and extreme. I saw none of that in my brief review of the document. It reads as a well thought out conservative playbook that has long been missing from the right.
Yeah. Well, the “silent majority” haven’t come through for me since the Reagan years. They’d need to get off their butts and stop being silent.
You must be a White, conservative, Christian man, then. With long-term roots in the US.
I don’t have time at the moment to go through the entire agenda point by point because I have to work for a living and need to get to my job this morning, but a few highlights:
Such draconian anti-abortion laws that wind up outlawing contraception as well, alongside laws that we have already seen enacted that require a woman to be actively dying before a hopeless or life-threatening pregnancy can be terminated. Along with proposed laws that would have the effect of restricting the movement of all women of childbearing age (having to prove they’re NOT pregnant before leaving a state, for example).
The whole Christian Nationalism aspect of the document(s), given that I am not a Christian and have no desire to be one. A lot of what they’re proposing would regulate people such as myself to second-class citizen status.
Their anti-climate change stance which at this point is a blatant denial of reality. They want to abolish NOAA - the people who do things like warm folks about impending hurricanes (maybe Project 2025 thinks hurricanes are alarmist fallacies, too?)
Their tax structure, which reduces taxes for corporations that make billions, thereby forcing the slack to be taken up by individuals earning, much, much less. Yet another instance of take from the poor and middle class and give to the rich.
Using the US military internally to enforce laws. Do you really want to see US troops opening up on unarmed demonstrators? That’s not the nation I want but maybe you’ll be OK with it, after all, it’s somebody else getting shot not you, right?
Anti-LGBTQ+ stances - I’m a supporter of all those “weird people” and genuinely do not care who is doing what to whom in the bedroom provided all parties are legally old enough to consent and are consenting. Government should not be regulating private life including sexual intercourse and gender expression.
Proposals to round people up like cattle, imprison them in concentration camps, and mass deportations. That’s flat out inhumane. (How about a mass round up of employers illegally hiring/using immigrants and a decade in jail for them? Funny how the rich people contributing to the problem are never punished.) Nevermind that such actions will inevitably sweep up people who are NOT illegal immigrants, I guess they’ll just have to accept being collateral damage.
Trump threw in rounding up homeless people and throwing them into concentration camps, too, but I’m not sure if anyone with Project 2025 endorses that or if it’s just Trump being Trump.
Outlawing of pornography. While I agree certain types of pornography should be illegal - child porn, snuff films, etc - note the “not old enough to consent” and “not consenting aspects” there - I have no problem with the rest of it.
Just a sampling. Of course you, @Uncommon_Sense, might be on board with all that. I’m not. I find it repugnant and threatening to myself, personally, being a woman who isn’t a Christian, wealthy, or powerful.
Having “faith” in this situation has about as much reassurance as a skydiving instructor telling us that a particular parachute has only failed about 30% of the time.
None of what you claim is in that document. Please feel free to quote the sections you allege refer to your claims. You’re projecting and regurgitating anti conservative hyperbole. Part of the hyper political segregation we have these days is due to the instant rejection and vilification of anything coming from the other side. (Plus, you forgot to call me racist and bigoted.)
This quote from the link in the OP - something occured to me. The author claims to have IMMEDIATELY realised that a 1000 page document was X. That tells me they didn’t read the whole thing to make this claim. You can’t get the gist of a 1000 page document “immediately”. I am likely to discredit the critic as a left wing partisan hack who has no interest in offering a fair or even slightly unbiased review.
The MAGA crowd is loud and boisterous, and you might think they are in the majority, but they aren’t.
Most people know what Trump wants, which is presidential power and immunity from federal prosecution. He wants to run the country again like he ran his company, and fire anyone who disagrees with him. We also know he will do or say anything to get what he wants.
Could Trump win again? Of course he could, nothing is impossible, but when it comes down to chaos and autocracy versus stability and democracy, I think stability and democracy wins every time. This time around we know exactly who he is and why he wants to win so badly.
But then again a huge number of people either want the country run that way or will ask “so what the hell is wrong with running it that way”. Because they wholeheartedly believe everyone else has been trying to take over the country for their own advantage subtly, and he’s just doing it bluntly..
The 2025ers happen to believe he gives them their best chance to finally get to the endgame to extirpate liberal influence from the bodies public and politic NOW instead of keeping it incremental for another decade or so. And that his showmanship will be the tool for keeping the MAGA Base “governable” as that happens. Which can come bite them in the ass if at some point Trump or the MAGA Base feels (or is told…) their goals and 2025’s are not aligned.
I have to wonder what today’s Republicans would think if Project 2025 was, instead, the manifesto of the far left, and their anointed one, to be the face of it all, was either Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, or Rashida Tlaib.
It’s a fundamental gut-remodel of the three branches of government and an unprecedented move toward the unitary executive.
And that’s ignoring, for the moment, the Christian Nationalism piece.
I believe the 2025ers are in the minority, and when push comes to shove, the majority will shoot them down at the ballot box. If the current SCOTUS wasn’t so right-leaning they would have been shot down long ago. If the 2025ers are patient, and continue to do it incrementally leveraging SCOTUS, they will achieve more than blindly following Trump.
The problem with following Trump is you never know what he is going to do to achieve HIS aims. I have faith that the majority will see through Trump’s transparent attempt to leverage 2025ers to get what he wants. Trump would be willing to support ANY group that guaranteed him the votes he needed to win. He is ultimately only in it for himself, and nobody else.
The actual document is being sold on the Project 2025 website as a paperback for $35 (plus shipping and handling of course), and I will not link the page to do so here as I find their cause distasteful and don’t want to encourage anyone to give them money.
It would be against the law and against board rules to instruct you on any alternative ways to access the contents of the “book”.
Fair enough. And no I’m not going to go there, and certainly not going to pay them $35.
But it does make it difficult to discuss the subject, when what we have in this thread is basically people saying ‘it says x’ and somebody saying ‘no it doesn’t’. Maybe people could at least post short quotes – though it’s quite possible that the only person on these boards willing to pay that site $35 plus shipping and handling is the one saying ‘it doesn’t say that’; and it’s difficult if not impossible to cite that a document doesn’t say something by quoting short bits, because it could always say the thing in question someplace else.
OK, thanks. Can you, with short quotes within the usual fair use standards, back some or all of the statements in the Salon article?