Project 2025

September 21, 2023 1:56 AM

Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump's vision - "Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president's return — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024." [link-heavy FPP]

With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025”[1] handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers...

Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.

White House hopeful Ramaswamy joins Trump in calling for huge government job cuts - "Vivek Ramaswamy joined a growing chorus of 2024 Republican presidential candidates vowing to radically reduce the size and function of the U.S. government if elected next year, calling on Wednesday for a 'revolution' that will hold the federal bureaucracy 'accountable.'"

Former President Donald Trump and his top rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have also pledged to fire hundreds of thousands of federal workers and to dismantle or overhaul several departments and agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Education...

Ramaswamy shares the same mistrust of the “deep state,” a term popularized by Trump that contends, without evidence, that a network of unelected federal bureaucrats works clandestinely to thwart conservative policy objectives.

Ramaswamy said his plan would ultimately slash the federal workforce by 75%, resulting in more than 1.6 million layoffs, a target more dramatic than Trump or DeSantis have proposed... Ramaswamy said the U.S. Constitution gives the president almost unlimited authority over the executive branch, but experts disagree.

'Christian patriots' are flocking from blue states to Idaho - "The event may be the closest thing yet to Greene's vision for the GOP, which she has urged to become the 'party of Christian nationalism.' The Idaho Panhandle's especially fervent embrace of the ideology may explain why Greene, who has sold T-shirts reading 'Proud Christian Nationalist,' traveled more than 2,300 miles to a county with fewer than 67,000 Republican voters to talk about biblical truth: Amid ongoing national debate over Christian nationalism, North Idaho offers a window at what actually trying to manifest a right-wing vision for a Christian America can look like — and the power it can wield in state politics."[2]

North Idaho has long been known for its hyperlibertarians, apocalyptic “preppers” and white supremacist groups who have retreated to the region’s sweeping frozen lakes and wild forests to await the collapse of American society, when they’ll assert control over what remains.

But in recent years, the state’s existing separatists have been joined by conservatives fleeing bluer Western states, opportunistic faith leaders, real estate developers and, most recently, those opposed to coronavirus restrictions and vaccines. Though few arrived carrying Christian nationalist banners, many have quickly adopted aspects of the ideology to advance conservative causes and seek strength in unity.

The origin of North Idaho’s relationship with contemporary Christian nationalism can be traced to a 2011 blog post published by survivalist author James Wesley, Rawles (the comma is his addition). Titled “The American Redoubt — Move to the Mountain States,” Rawles’s 4,000-word treatise called on conservative followers to pursue “exit strategies” from liberal states and move to “safe havens” in the American Northwest — specifically Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and eastern sections of Oregon and Washington. He dubbed the imagined region the “American Redoubt” and listed Christianity as a pillar of his society-to-be...

Rawles’s reach was magnified by outlets such as “Radio Free Redoubt,” a podcast geared toward “God-fearing, liberty-loving patriots,” and Redoubt News, an “online publication featuring the Christian conservative culture.” This loose group has a political champion in state Rep. Heather Scott, who represents the northernmost tip of Idaho’s Panhandle, wedged between Washington and Montana. (Scott was there to hear Greene speak in Kootenai County last week; Idaho’s GOP chairman, pointing her out to the congresswoman, described Scott as “the Marjorie Taylor Greene of Idaho.”)

The Redoubt is growing rapidly, bolstered by conservative flight chiefly from California. Idaho and Montana have repeatedly ranked among the U.S. Census Bureau’s top five fastest-growing states in recent years. According to a recent study overseen by Jaap Vos, a University of Idaho professor of planning and natural resources, 1 in 4 Idahoans didn’t live there 10 years ago.

Most come, Vos said, for cheaper housing and lower taxes, not Rawles’s clarion call. But Vos noted that when it comes to transplants in North Idaho, motivations go beyond finances. “They want to be around people that are like them,” he said.

The Hostile Takeover of Blue Cities by Red States - "GOP legislatures are increasingly imposing their economic and cultural priorities on left-leaning municipalities like Nashville." (538 earlier)

Highways are the next antiabortion target. One Texas town is resisting. - "A new ordinance, passed in several jurisdictions and under consideration elsewhere, aims to stop people from using local roads to drive someone out of state for an abortion."

Populists are overwhelming democracies for a reason - "Only 28% of Chileans say they are satisfied with how democracy is working in their country. And two-thirds of Chileans agree with the notion that instead of worrying so much about people's rights, what this country needs is firm government. That's more than twice the share that endorsed this statement in 2019. This kind of public sentiment can easily lead to authoritarian forms of government."

For instance, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador who has come with an iron fist to defeat crime and has been seen as a savior of this country. And you can immediately see the tendencies that he has to kind of reject the limits on his power. So he is running for reelection even though the Constitution would forbid him to do so.

These kinds of leaders will often believe that the restrictions put in place of perpetuating power are a nuisance and will act against the institutions that limit what they want to do. But Salvadorans are not really fazed by this abuse of power. Four out of five Salvadorans say their country is progressing. The highest share in Latin America by far.

This shift in thinking flows from one single fact. Three-quarters of Salvadorians think that Bukele’s policies have delivered them safety. They aren't wrong. The murder rate in El Salvador declined to under eight per 100,000 inhabitants last year, down from 52 per 100,000 in 2018. And guess what? In 2018, only 11% of Salvadorans were satisfied with how democracy worked.

But don't feel too comfortable that this is just a Latin American phenomenon. In fact, the temptation of authoritarianism is taking over electorates all over the world.

With TikToks, memes and Musk comments, Argentina election battle goes viral - "The economist and former TV pundit, who sports wild hair and leather jackets, has hit a nerve with voters angry at triple-digit inflation, rising poverty and a looming recession. That's put him ahead of Peronist economy minister Sergio Massa and conservative ex-security minister Patricia Bullrich in opinion polls and gave him a shock first-place finish in an open primary vote in August."

Is the populist right's future ... democratic socialism? - "Sohrab Ahmari explains why precarity is breaking our politics."

also btw...

• Capitalism and classical liberalism are headed for divorce - "One of liberalism's great virtues is its ability to reinvent itself while also saving capitalism. Can it do it for a third time?"
• Shoggoths amongst us - "As Cosma said, the true Singularity began two centuries ago at the commencement of the Long Industrial Revolution. That was when we saw the first 'vast, inhuman distributed systems of information processing' which had no human-like 'agenda' or 'purpose,' but instead 'an implacable drive … to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their spheres.' Those systems were the 'self-regulating market' and 'bureaucracy.'"[3,4]

Now – putting the two bits of the argument together – we can see how LLMs are shoggoths, but not because they’re resentful slaves that will rise up against us. Instead, they are another vast inhuman engine of information processing that takes our human knowledge and interactions and presents them back to us in what Lovecraft would call a “cosmic” form. In other words, it is completely true that LLMs represent something vast and utterly incomprehensible, which would break our individual minds if we were able to see it in its immenseness. But the brain destroying totality that LLMs represent is no more and no less than a condensation of the product of human minds and actions, the vast corpuses of text that LLMs have ingested. Behind the terrifying image of the shoggoth lurks what we have said and written, viewed from an alienating external vantage point.

The original fictional shoggoths were one element of a vaster mythos, motivated by Lovecraft’s anxieties about modernity and his racist fears that a deracinated white American aristocracy would be overwhelmed by immigrant masses. Today’s fears about an LLM-induced Singularity repackage old worries. Markets, bureaucracy and democracy are necessary components of modern liberal society. We could not live our lives without them. Each can present human seeming aspects and smiley faces. But each, equally may seem like an all devouring monster, when seen from underneath. Furthermore, behind each lurks an inchoate and quite literally incomprehensible bulk of human knowledge and beliefs. LLMs are no more and no less than a new kind of shoggoth, a baby waving its pseudopods at the far greater things which lurk in the historical darkness behind it.

• Americans are working harder and making less. We need a new social safety net - "Workers are right in demanding a greater share of the record wealth that their labor fuels, but in which they have not adequately shared — producing even greater inequality. Workers — union members, low-wage earners and white-collar professionals — should demand a federally supported universal basic income (UBI) of regular cash payments to all Americans."[5,6]

posted by kliuless (60 comments total)

This is an incredible job of putting together an incredibly important and incredibly scary post. Thank you, kliuless.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 2:18 AM on September 21, 2023 [23 favorites]

With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025”

"...is you takin' notes on a fuckin' criminal conspiracy?" [CW: video includes the "N" word]
posted by chavenet at 2:32 AM on September 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking.

That right there is the exact lack of self-awareness that this whole movement hinges upon.
posted by flabdablet at 2:53 AM on September 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Simply put: Americans are working harder and making less. Economic insecurity is built into the capitalistic system, maximizing profits for shareholders rather than commit to growing the economy as a whole and reducing unemployment. Meanwhile, workers and unions are disempowered. To make matters worse, since healthcare in America is generally tied to the workplace, it’s difficult to leave a job.

This behaviour is by design.
posted by flabdablet at 3:05 AM on September 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives”

There is a rat-management way of reading this that I think is probably unintended.
posted by chavenet at 3:28 AM on September 21, 2023 [14 favorites]

As an old, I can see a direct lineage running from this document all the way back to the Gingrich gang’s Contract With America. Which, not coincidentally, also originated within the Heritage Foundation.

Heritage (and others) have been fueling the breaking-apart of America over the decades, playing a long game to end liberal democracy, and they seem close to accomplishing at least part of the goal. The coming shutdown (And there will be a shutdown. A long one) is an ugly first step toward eliminating most of the federal government (and parts of state and local governments, as a knock-on effect due to the curtailment of federal money to the states.) The House is being de-facto run by a faction of zealots who just don’t care about the downstream effects of their actions. They intend to burn government down, no matter if the country itself goes up in flames in the process.

I note that Heritage and these House members have been quite careful in not outright stating their aim to bring down the government of the United States, and possibly invite treason/sedition charges. They merely state their aim to change the operation and size of the government.

This has been the plan since at least the 80s. Those of us who tried to warn others about this monster on the horizon were regularly poo-pooed as alarmists or even conspiracy nuts. At this point, I can only wish we had been nutjobs. I hate this fucking timeline.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:46 AM on September 21, 2023 [85 favorites]

Before I gave up on listening to them entirely, NPR would routinely treat the Heritage Foundation as an ordinary think tank whose policies are made in good faith and not the project to cloak unpopular Republican ideas (but I repeat myself) in a veneer of academic rigor.
posted by Gelatin at 4:16 AM on September 21, 2023 [20 favorites]

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2023/07/13/the-meticulous-ruthless-preparations-for-a-second-trump-term

The ROTW (Rest of the World) is transfixed by what is going to happen in 2024

2016 taught us that you just never know
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 4:19 AM on September 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

3/10
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 5:04 AM on September 21, 2023

The ROTW (Rest of the World) is transfixed by what is going to happen in 2024

That seems a bit like standing in the middle of a tunnel and wondering what that approaching light might mean.

A second Trump term will not be good news for anyone who calls Earth home. I mean, just in the US, look at the mess his sycophants are creating without him in office. A second term will be disastrous for much of the world, but especially Europe and especially-especially any nation under the NATO umbrella. Trump hates NATO, and tried to kneecap it the first time around. In a second term, it’s likely he’ll simply ignore treaties and pull the US out, doing a big for his pal Putin (who has openly declared his goal of reunifying the Russian states.) And, yeah, Ukraine will be toast, too, as Trump will definitely cut it loose.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:25 AM on September 21, 2023 [17 favorites]

The current economic immiseration (in North America, at least - I can’t speak as well to other parts of the world) is a direct result of conscious business choices to “punish” “arrogant” workers, while other businesses make record profits on basic human needs through questionably legal business practices. Banks and big businesses deploy a variety of economic tools to increase their political and economic power, the most well-known being capital strikes.

The US government is large enough to counter such tactics with programs such as the New Deal or this new climate conservation corps that is the subject of another FPP today, but such behind the scenes tactics have been directly tied to the rise of authoritarianism in South and Central America, as well as contributing to the overthrows of the first post-colonial democratic governments in many African countries. Reaching farther back in history, there’s also the economic hamstringing of Haiti after Haitians won their independence. The Republican assault on the administrative branch of the US government should be understood in the context of this history. Better knowledge of such economic machinations can also help keep people from falling into authoritarian, right-wing populism.
posted by eviemath at 6:10 AM on September 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=196wP

blue line, left axis, is corporate profit share of the post-tax gross corporate earnings pie

red line is real (2020 dollars) per-worker corporate profits, what the above share is on a per-worker basis.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:19 AM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Americans Are Sleepwalking Through a National Emergency, from journalist Tom Nichols, formerly a Republican Congressional staffer. I was no fan of the Republican party, or the Heritage Foundation, of 10-20 years ago, but neither supported the wholesale dismantling of our (small d) democratic governmental institutions. We are in a new, and dangerous, world.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:22 AM on September 21, 2023 [12 favorites]

Can we please stop pretending that fascist opportunist monsters like Ramaswami actually believe any of the crap they're slinging? Ramaswami will say anything to get closed to the White House. That's his entire belief system.
posted by 1adam12 at 6:39 AM on September 21, 2023 [28 favorites]

red line is real (2020 dollars) per-worker corporate profits, what the above share is on a per-worker basis.

If only employees actually received that “per employee” profit as our salaries and paychecks!
posted by eviemath at 6:40 AM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

the only precept of fascism is opportunism. the greatest opportunities come from the exploitation of tribal conflict and hatred.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 6:42 AM on September 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I stopped listening to NPR because they kept reminding me that precious precious Israel is the victim in its conflict with the Palestinians, but yeah, treating these right-wing dark-money foundations as legitimate actors pissed me off, too.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:53 AM on September 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

I've been reading Ruth Ben-Ghiat, she's a scholar of right wing fascism.

One element she talks about at length is the criminality of fascism. It's a type of structural criminality, a supportive framework of mutual transgression.

I've thought of an illustrative example of this. In the recent republican debate over the fight for second place, the candidates were asked if they would pardon Trump on their first day. All but one said yes.

This is important. They've made a public prejudicial statement, in a literal sense. Before the facts and evidence are presented, before they are examined by a jury, before a judge has made a ruling or passed a sentence. They have decided that the course of justice will be discarded. They have decided to be outlaws, this is their pact with their leader, wholly criminal in nature.

There's another example which is perhaps more farcical. Hunter Biden's gun charges. He bought a gun while he was on drugs, which is apparently illegal. I'm in agreement with this, maybe we should have drug tests and background checks before we give someone a gun. We can call it Hunter's law, and make them vote against it. I point this one out because it has to do with the hypocrisy of their criminality. They are allowed to be lawless, and they will enforce the law.

Ruth expresses the criminal paradigm inherent in fascism far better than I, I'm cribbing her work without notes. She's generous enough to share her ideas on youtube if you would like a more complete picture.
posted by adept256 at 6:59 AM on September 21, 2023 [44 favorites]

I think the United States is too far gone and we're going to have to live through a decade or more of fascist rule.

The Republican Party has been wholesale captured by anti-democratic fanatics and the opposition party is still running around treating them as normal political actors, for the most part. Their economists are too busy yelling at people for being mad that gas is $4 a gallon. There's no one on the national political stage aside from Sanders that I have any faith in to rhetorically disarm the fascists, and the DNC did all they could to stop him twice.
posted by rhymedirective at 7:21 AM on September 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

Mod note: Comment and responses about anti-carceralists and El Salvador removed. Please drop that derail, thanks.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:38 AM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

If only employees actually received that “per employee” profit as our salaries and paychecks!

And who's going to bell that cat? Government isn't going to do it for you, even though they supposedly represent you. You're there to mark a piece of paper and put it into a box, after that there's not much use for you, is there?

That lack of representation creates a vicious cycle where you can't improve your material lot but you can vote to "punish" the government over and over until there's nothing left. The fruits of your labor still aren't coming to you but it's psychologically satisfying to beat on the middle man for a while.
posted by kingdead at 7:42 AM on September 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think the United States is too far gone and we're going to have to live through a decade or more of fascist rule.

I think it's more like we're going to live through a decade or so of ongoing low-level civil disorder and right-wing terrorism. Christianity* in America is dying an astonishingly rapid death, but this is really skewed by geography and age cohort, with the rump Christians in the sections that are politically privileged. They cannot win democratically, and they're mostly past the point where they can win statewide elections, and the backlash at their trying to corrupt school boards and libraries shows how weak they really are, but they're going to go down swinging. So for the next 10-15 years, we're going to see rural areas outside of major highways be semi-seceded Jeebusland Republics that are no-go zones for most other folks, and attacks on electrical infrastructure by QAnon nutbags, and certain whole states (Idaho, notably) being something closer to Gilead. But everyone else is aware of the problem now, and we vastly outnumber them.

* by which I mean classic American Christianity of the colonialist/genocidal mindset, not the Christianity that Jimmy Carter and like six other people practice.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:46 AM on September 21, 2023 [25 favorites]

So if the state can use RICO charges against the StopCopCity movement, surely the Heritage Foundation, all the GOP candidates making statements in support/in furtherance of, and the other related orgs are all about to be paraded before a grand jury?
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 7:49 AM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Why is LARPing such big news?
posted by smcdow at 7:53 AM on September 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

I feel like globally the 400 year experiment of the Enlightenment bringing determination through the people is dying. That the willfully ignorant (manipulated by banal greed mongers) just ignore any information that doesn't please their prejudice, so they're moving back to an age of paternalistic kings in hopes of punishing "the other." Messianic figures like Trump, Modi, Putin will thrive. And the battles that will put the Bronze Age crisis, the fall of Rome, and the plague centuries to shame have already started.

Optimists, please help me with a rosier outlook.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:21 AM on September 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

I’m no optimist, but I do think the future belongs to sanity.

The fascists are as horrible to one another as they are to the rest of us, and that just isn’t a sustainable model.

They’re also 100% incapable of subtlety or satire.

I saw a trumper earlier today trying to mock Fetterman’s ‘OOOOOOH OOOGA BOOGA’ response to the Biden impeachment. He pitched Fetterman’s voice way up, added all kinds of weird video glitch effects etc but it didn’t work at all, because integrity is unmockable.

The first comment was ‘that’s not Fetterman’.

Anyway I think we’ll be ok.
posted by chronkite at 8:37 AM on September 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

I've been keeping an eye on that road story for a while. This is really scary stuff as a woman who lives in Texas (and I'm post-menopausal so there is no potential for me to need abortion care). It's good to see it framed as part of the larger anti-democratic Republican policy agenda.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 8:48 AM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Gingrich gang’s Contract With America

Contract On America
posted by kirkaracha at 9:05 AM on September 21, 2023 [19 favorites]

A second Trump term will not be good news for anyone who calls Earth home.

Saying "term" implies he would leave office after four years. I don't believe he would.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:06 AM on September 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

And the battles that will put the Bronze Age crisis, the fall of Rome, and the plague centuries to shame have already started.

damn Hitler really taking another loss in here
posted by kingdead at 9:09 AM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Saying "term" implies he would leave office after four years. I don't believe he would.

Well, he is mortal.
posted by mumimor at 9:26 AM on September 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

> Saying "term" implies he would leave office after four years. I don't believe he would.

Well, he is mortal.

On the other hand he has kids.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:29 AM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Apparently Heritage puts out a book like the one on Project 2025 for every potential term, since 1981. One talking point they have is that Trump put more of their policy points into action in 2017 than Reagan in 1981. I think they're trying to publicize this more because of the "Schedule F" plan of firing (or more likely threatening to fire) 40,000 Federal workers and replace them with political appointments, instead of the ususal 3,000. So they're spreading the word to try to get 10's of thousands of vetted people before mid-'24.

Most of the book is rather dry, explaining the various working parts of the government and specific policy points, for example which particular offices to shut down. Most of the stuff in the Foreward have policies to implement it scattered around the agencies, but I can't find any policies about this section:

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.

I'm thinking the Foreward author just threw that in and they don't actually have a plan to implement that, but maybe they're hiding in one of the obscure sections.
posted by netowl at 10:07 AM on September 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Not to tone-police, but saying "will" implies it's a foregone conclusion. And hey, maybe it is, I fear that too. But I don't think it would result in a decade of us learning hard lessons before we claw back democracy, rather it'd be the end of that possibility.

Bannon is an effective, cunning strategist with a longview, in this era of myopia and amnesia, but he's no genius and not entirely coherent, and the vast majority of the rest of them are nothing more than idiot grifters making the noisiest noise. Whatever they collectively offer is not sustainable.
posted by Claude Hoeper at 10:26 AM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

>>And the battles that will put the Bronze Age crisis, the fall of Rome, and the plague centuries to shame have already started.
>Hitler really taking another loss in here

WWII was just one of those battles, and the Nazis did not lose. IG Farben survived thanks to the US Government and persists to this day.
posted by Richard Saunders at 10:40 AM on September 21, 2023

I'm thinking the Foreward author just threw that in and they don't actually have a plan to implement that, but maybe they're hiding in one of the obscure sections.

Note that it says nothing about punishing porn consumers too. Like Dershowitz's "Punish sex workers, but decriminalize being a John" horseshit.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 10:58 AM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ima going to give you a literary interpretation of something that really happened today, to protect everyone including myself.

I'm in my office, and a rightwing populist propagandist steps in the door, on invitation.
We chit-chat about stuff we both enjoy, as one does, and I get to the "what can I do for you" part. Well, he is very frustrated with the state of our cultural heritage and the loss of historical buildings all over the place.

So I can explain that. When he was at the height of his power, and supporting a Reaganist government, that government fired the region-level people who were there to protect cultural heritage environments. Instead, the local municipalities were supposed to take over that task. But you know, if you have a limited budget (something that very same government enforced harshly), you can't prioritise employing a historian over even one social worker or school teacher. And the government knew that.

The reply, from the big populist radical: I didn't know that

I'll just let it stand there. You know the point already.
posted by mumimor at 11:48 AM on September 21, 2023 [31 favorites]

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.

I'm thinking the Foreward author just threw that in and they don't actually have a plan to implement that, but maybe they're hiding in one of the obscure sections.

They don't want a specific plan to implement that, because they know that calling something "pornography" is a highly malleable and manipulatable way to crank up the powers of the state and societal disapproval against all sorts of "undesirable" people - c.f. the current wave of anti-trans, anti-drag, and book-banning legislation and social media hot takes and "opinion pieces" washing over the US right now.
posted by soundguy99 at 12:16 PM on September 21, 2023 [15 favorites]

Have y'all simply not been paying attention to how queer books, online content, people are being redefined as pornographic?

They didn't put that in there to go after porn (though they'll probably do that too). They put it in there to go after LGBTQIA+ folks.
posted by kokaku at 1:01 PM on September 21, 2023 [37 favorites]

But everyone else is aware of the problem now, and we vastly outnumber them.

I would love to believe that, but (A) MetaFilter is a famously echoey echo chamber, and (B) the current thread about rational-seeming people being taken in by that Sound of Freedom movie seems to point in the other direction.

In other words, I wish I had a sense of just how widespread generally (not just here, and not just in online communities) the awareness you reference is.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 1:01 PM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also... this is why we lose. The left tries to fight the right according to their words not according to the underlying intention.
posted by kokaku at 1:02 PM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Their intent is already to do all that stuff to equate porn with LGBTQIA+ content. Marsha Blackburn's KOSA is ostensibly for the protection of kids (what about the children, the conservative rallying cry for censorship) but Blackburn already said it would be used to protect them from transgender content, and probably more.

If a Republican gets elected president with this platform, I'm going to be moving somewhere else faster than you can say "I know what the first book burning was and who died in it".

Project 2025 is their announcement of who gets to be chancellor after the Reichstag fire, ending with "Go ahead, dare us."
posted by mephron at 1:49 PM on September 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

And who's going to bell that cat?

My point was that the graph I was commenting on was very prone to being misinterpreted, where one could mistakenly think that the “per employee” numbers represented money actually going to employees. That is not where the increased profits in the past few decades have gone. (The graph could be used to conclude something about per worker productivity, or to note that businesses still need workers in order to make money, not the other way around.)
posted by eviemath at 2:26 PM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

I find their plan to eliminate the Department of Education to be a bit scarier than outlawing porn, to be honest. Even more frightening is the apocalyptic language all through the document, including claims of the civil service being flooded with "left wingers", which apparently equals communists, which apparently equals Marxists, with no differentiation between Democrats, Socialists and the second coming of Stalin. There is the frequent use of the phrase "take our country back", and a framing of urgency, even a panicky emergency. No time to lose! 2025 is the only chance to wipe out the leftist corruption in the government and re-right the ship of state! First thing is the sanctity of the nuclear family, and the absolute importance of fathers. After that, the most extreme wish-list of the religious anti-abortion crew, including the banning of Plan B and any research conducted with cell lines from aborted fetuses. Not to mention keeping rigorous statistics on miscarriages--taking names and running investigations just in case some woman thinks she can get away with an illegal abortion. Any university faculty members who attempt to teach the usual shibboleths (critical race theory, etc.) will find no place for them in the new America; if they don't teach American Exceptionalism, their future is dim. Also, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is going to take over all Indigenous education programs, as well as management of Indian lands (if I read correctly). It's all just a horrific mess, and the tactic of replacing the majority of government workers with party loyalists is borrowed in its entirely from the Nazi program for capturing the German government. I once used to wonder, naively, how the Nazis managed to gain control in Germany; now I know. It's an education I could do without, to be honest.

And yet the utter disregard of the reality of climate change, and the necessity of action, is perhaps the most frightening thing of all. Well, that, and making many new nuclear bombs. China is our enemy now, Russia our friend. I could go on. And remember: "[I]n real life, most of the things people “do together” have nothing to do with government. These are the mediating institutions that serve as the building blocks of any healthy society. Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering. The name real people give to the things we do together is community, not government. Note the phrase "real people" here, from the Introduction (page 36). They make it very clear who will be the enemy in their America.
posted by jokeefe at 2:56 PM on September 21, 2023 [14 favorites]

They say "take our country back" because, for three-quarters of America's history, only a certain segment of its population could lay a plausible claim to ownership.

If you possessed the wrong skin color, the wrong ancestry, the wrong genitals, the wrong sexual preference, the wrong gender identity, the wrong religious beliefs, the wrong occupation, the wrong resources, the wrong ideas about one social issue or another, you were not a full American with all relevant rights and privileges. This was enforced in many ways; sometimes indirect, sometimes blatant, sometimes via societal pressure, sometimes via violence. Some bypassed it via bending the knee to the social order and perpetuating it upon others; one of the foremost anti-feminism crusaders of our era was named Phyllis, for instance.

The last sixty years have been when real progress has been made and, arguably, a true America began to form. Laws, court rulings, increased representation, increased diversity, increased exposure to new influences and ideas has chipped away at the idea that white Anglo-Saxon Protestant cis het conservative males with proper heritage and ideas are the REAL Americans and hold the only opinions that should count.

And the steady drumbeat from conservative media and politicians over that time has been that all of that chipping away was wrong, and that America was better when non-whites and non-heteros and non-males and non-Christians and non-conservatives knew their place.

That's the battle. That's Trump's core message. He didn't invent it; he merely brought it back to the mainstream, loud and brassy.
posted by delfin at 3:32 PM on September 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

Yeah jokeefe I've been spending time skimming parts of it.
It certainly uses apocalyptic language. It would be funny if it wasn't serious.
They think the FBI is riddled with leftists.

You wonder what world they are living in.
Here's a sample;

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how catastrophic a micromanaging, misinformed, centralized, and politicized federal government can be.
Excess deaths, not due to COVID-19, skyrocketed because of forced lockdowns, isolation, vaccine-related mass firings, and colossal
disruptions of the economy and daily rhythms of life

So excess deaths skyrocketed but weren't due to Covid?

USSS should keep visitor logs for all facilities where the President works or
resides. The Biden Administration has evaded such transparency with President
Biden spending a historic amount of time for a President at his Delaware residence.
This has left the American people in the dark as to who is influencing the highest
levels of their own government

How many times did Trump go golfing?
posted by yyz at 3:45 PM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

They think the FBI is riddled with leftists.

You wonder what world they are living in.

A world in which anyone who is not fully (and I do mean FULLY) in lockstep with them is a Godless Communist.

For example, take a look at what is going on in our government right now, with a shutdown imminent because of the actions of the hardliner Freedom Kookus in the House. The following are a list of people who are currently being labeled progressives, Communists, anti-American traitors, liberals, globalists, warmongers, Uniparty Deep State operatives and traitors to the spirit of America:

* Karl Rove, noted liberal strategist
* Mitch McConnell, arguably the one man responsible for more gains by the conservative moment than any other
* John Cornyn (R-TX), one of his likely successors as Senate Minority Leader if Mitch retires
* Kevin McCarthy (House Majority Leader), for many reasons
* Dan "Voted with Trump 88.9% of the time, therefore a WEF puppet" Crenshaw
* Pretty much everyone from the Bush-Cheney administration
* Tom Cotton (R-AR), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Susan Collins (R-ME) and other Senators for supporting the Ukrainian war effort
* Chip Roy, Byron Donalds, and many others of the Freedom Caucus, for being insufficiently committed to a full and immediate shutdown
* Thomas Massie, Konstitutional Skolar, for daring to suggest that fining Adam Schiff the cost of the entire Mueller investigation was unconstitutional even while being fully on board with censure
* All of Trump's SCOTUS appointees

And who can argue with that?
posted by delfin at 4:16 PM on September 21, 2023

I just utterly fail to understand how such hatred forms. I just want to be left alone by the world, not burn it down
posted by Jacen at 6:27 PM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

So I’m just going to talk about my feelings for a bit instead of the substance of this, because if I look to closely at this bullshit, I start to panic. Because this is all really bad, right? Super bad? It feels like it’s really bad and this is terrifying? And my therapist would probably to channel my anxiety into concrete action, but this is already my work, I am already devoting most of my talents to supporting people actively working on these causes. So I guess I’m just supposed to walk around and be functional as if areas of the country aren’t slowly sliding towards a police state where women have to pee on a stick at highway checkpoints. Even people who agree with me on abortion rights don’t get it and don’t seem to understand that this is really happening. I say ‘women will die because of these laws’ and they nod and I know they are imagining teenagers getting botched abortions, and I say, ‘NO, EVEN WOMEN WHO DON’T WANT ABORTIONS will die because of these laws’ and they are shocked to hear about some poor lady in Oklahoma told to go bleed in the parking lot of the ER until her life is at risk and then the hospital will help her.

This is extremely deeply not ok.

I had actually picked out the neighborhood in Canada that I would move to before the last presidential election and I will be out of here so fast you will see a dust cloud if this next one goes the wrong way. But I can’t take everyone else with me. I’m going to have to leave them behind like the Jews who didn’t get out of Germany. My Jewish book club read some holocaust book where there was a scene where the government was gathering the local Jews at the police station and they complied with their orders and walked onto the train in an orderly line because the reality of what is happening was not concrete. The question was asked, would you, as someone who lived then instead of now, have gotten on that train? Everyone but me said they would NOT. But I’ve taken too many psychology courses I guess because I admitted I probably would. Most people do. And here I am trying to get people to wake up and it feels like I’m telling them not to get on the train.

Days like this make me feel like my deep seated anxiety is actually completely reality-based.
posted by bq at 8:51 PM on September 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

This follows on from the Unitary Executive theory.
posted by zaixfeep at 9:33 PM on September 21, 2023

I just utterly fail to understand how such hatred forms. I just want to be left alone by the world, not burn it down _{posted by Jacen}

Think of it like bonobos vs chimps. Bonobos have been taking over since the New Deal, and the chimps are thinking, "Looks like it's gotdam time to fling some poo, eat some faces, tear off some genitals and restore some gotdam chimps-first order in this jungle."
posted by zaixfeep at 9:43 PM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

I just utterly fail to understand how such hatred forms. I just want to be left alone by the world

Deep need for refuge is not only a human universal, it's a biological universal.

As the number of people in the world inexorably grows, so does our mutual impingement on each other's refuges; to steal a phrase from Mr. James O'Brien, that's not opinion, that's just counting.

Competition for resources, including refuge, is nothing new. What is new, at least for H. sapiens, is the sheer level of it. In the entire geological history of this planet there have never existed as many of us as exist right now: the present scale of competition for resources is genuinely new. In 2023 it's already very, very difficult to be left alone by the world when that's what we need from it and that pressure continues to intensify, year on year on year.

Shifting now from counting to opinion: most of us have grown up in post-colonialist cultures predicated on a view of humanity as special, unique, clever and in charge of rather than fundamentally part of this planet's web of life. We have so comprehensively othered ourselves that it should be no surprise to find othering embedded in our psyches to an almost instinctive extent and wheeled out as one of the standard personal responses to any kind of challenge.

So that's how I think such hatred forms. I think it springs from othering performed instinctively and without reflection by people who cannot bear honest self-scrutiny, in response to any challenge to their genuine and innate requirement for refuge.
posted by flabdablet at 11:23 PM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Note that it says nothing about punishing porn consumers too.

Well you can't jail everybody
posted by chavenet at 1:23 AM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well you can't jail everybody

Heritage Foundation says hold my beer
posted by mumimor at 6:30 AM on September 22, 2023 [10 favorites]

Competition for resources, including refuge, is nothing new. What is new, at least for H. sapiens, is the sheer level of it. In the entire geological history of this planet there have never existed as many of us as exist right now: the present scale of competition for resources is genuinely new. In 2023 it's already very, very difficult to be left alone by the world when that's what we need from it and that pressure continues to intensify, year on year on year.

Then it's a good thing that a radically changing climate, wild weather events, food and water shortages and fascist takeovers of various nations could never lead to mass waves of refugees seeking shelter and a new home being violently rejected by nationalists intent on keeping their culture and country completely dominated by those of a particular socio-economic-ethnic subgroup.

*checks notes*

Well... shit.
posted by delfin at 8:27 AM on September 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Heritage Foundation says hold my beer

In order to preserve the freedom of the nation it was necessary to imprison it.
posted by flabdablet at 9:07 AM on September 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Adding to delfin's list: Don't forget that crazy leftist who ranted "In our nation’s 236-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters." What a wimp. Probably wouldn't even advocate torture. (Wait, what?)
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 9:22 AM on September 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

A new Supreme Court case could trigger a second Great Depression - "America's Trumpiest court handed down a shockingly dangerous decision. The Supreme Court is likely, but not certain, to fix it."

[T]his argument would invalidate most federal spending, and it would make it impossible for benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare to even exist... Under this interpretation of the Constitution, moreover, many key federal programs simply could not exist... Nothing in Francisco’s brief even resembles a legal argument. It’s just a bunch of made-up rules that, until very recently, no court had ever taken seriously.

So, where on earth do these awful arguments even come from?

The Fifth Circuit’s opinion in Consumer Financial mostly paraphrases Judge Edith Jones’s concurring opinion, in a case called CFPB v. All American Check Cashing (2022), which argues that “for Congress’s power of the purse to meaningfully restrain the executive, appropriations to the executive must be temporally bound.” Francisco’s brief also relies heavily on Jones’s All American opinion...

And yet Jones, Francisco, and several other Fifth Circuit judges would endanger the entire nation’s economy over a theory that has no basis in any legal text, and barely any support in all of the scholarship that has ever been produced by the American legal academy since the Constitution took effect in 1789.

The day that destroyed the working class and sowed the seeds of Trump

Forty years ago, on Sept. 19, thousands of men walked into the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube along the Mahoning River before the early shift.

Like every fall morning, they were armed with lunch pails and hard hats; the only worry on their minds was the upcoming Pittsburgh Steelers game on “Monday Night Football.” The only arguing you heard was whether quarterback Terry Bradshaw had fully recovered from the dramatic hit he took from a Cleveland Browns player the season before.

It was just before 7 a.m., and the fog that had settled over the river was beginning to lift. As the sun began to streak through the mist, the men made their way into the labyrinth of buildings where they worked.

In the next hour, their lives would change forever.

From then on, this date in 1977 would be known as Black Monday in the Steel Valley, which stretches from Mahoning and Trumbull counties in Ohio eastward toward Pittsburgh. It is the date when Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly furloughed 5,000 workers in one day.

The bleeding never stopped.

Within the next 18 months, US Steel announced that the nation’s largest steel producer was also shutting down 16 plants across the nation, including their Ohio Works in Youngstown, a move that eliminated an additional 4,000 workers here. That announcement came one day before Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp. said they were cutting thousands of jobs at their facilities in the Mahoning Valley, too.

Within a decade, 40,000 jobs were gone. Within that same decade, 50,000 people had left the region, and by the next decade, that number was up to 100,000. Today the 22 miles of booming steel mills and the support industries that once lined the Mahoning River have mostly disappeared — either blown up, dismantled or reclaimed by nature...

“No one never calculated the cultural tragedy as part of the equation either,” Steinbeck said. “They didn’t just dismantle the old mills, they dismantled the societal fabric of what made Youngstown Youngstown.”

What the Founding Fathers Believed: Stock Ownership for All

Reading through the original arguments for a United States of America suggests that this level of inequality threatens not only our economy -- who will buy what the wealthy produce? -- but the health of our democracy as well. One does not have to be a modern radical to worry. Back in the 1770s, the Founding Fathers worried deeply about the dangers to the new democracy of concentration of wealth.

James Madison warned that inequality in property ownership would subvert liberty, either through opposition to wealth (a war of labor against capital) or "by an oligarchy founded on corruption" through which the wealthy dominate political decision-making (a war of capital against labor). John Adams favored distribution of public lands to the landless to create broad-based ownership of property, then the critical component of business capital in the largely agricultural U.S. Current levels and trends in inequality would almost certainly have terrified the founders, who believed that broad-based property ownership was essential to the sustenance of a republic...

posted by kliuless at 2:13 AM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

“The Conservative Plan to Take Over the Country (you need to know about this)” [36:35]—Leeja Miller, 26 September 2023
posted by ob1quixote at 8:01 AM on September 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Leeja Miller suggests that perhaps it might be amusing to overwhelm The Heritage Foundation's grifter job search databases with floods of non-grifter applications. I'm not so sure about that.

It's beyond doubt that The Heritage Foundation command structure is grifters all the way up. It's also perfectly clear to me that these are the kind of completely psychopathic grifters who would have no compunction whatsoever about grossly abusing any and all PII they managed to get their hands on.

Furthermore, over the decades they've been in business their operations have attracted significant numbers of useful idiots who actually believe in the incoherent reactionary ideology they spruik to the bottoms of their tiny deluded souls, and if there's one class of person more dangerous to tangle with than self-serving psychopaths it's fully committed zealots.

I can't see how engaging directly with them is going to result in anything but more pain and suffering than they're already causing on their own. It will be hard to beat The Heritage Foundation at its own white-anting game purely because that is its game, and they know how it's played and they're good at it.

When they go low, we need to go sideways. I think concentrating on exposing and publicising shady dealings by prominent Heritage Foundation figures - and there will be endless amounts of shady dealings, it's the nature of their business - is likely to be the most productive way forward. This method also has the security advantage of being achievable to some degree anonymously.

But however we go about it, I think it's important to keep in mind that the people in charge of building and driving this clown car shitshow are genuinely personally dangerous.
posted by flabdablet at 5:14 AM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]