2025 is the new 1984
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
The threat, and make no mistake that’s what it is, comes from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, during in an interview on Steve Bannon’s “The War Room.” A guest host was filling in for Bannon, who is a guest of the Danbury, Connecticut Federal Correctional Institution for four months for his contempt of Congress conviction.
The Roberts story appeared on Page A20 of the New York Times on July 4. Want to guess what dominated Page One? Actually how about three guesses? The Washington Post ran an excellent analysis of the remarks a day earlier, but left it to the Associated Press to spell out the details.
It appears America’s elite political media is incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time when it comes to threats to democracy.
What’s it all about anyway? Heritage’s Project 2025, which they describe as a “Mandate for Leadership” and which historian Heather Cox Richardson describes as “a blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by Trump or a Trump-like figure.”
“Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace: the U.S. must “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; “[d]ismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”; “[d]efend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”; and “[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”
Voter preference? Nah. That’s not in keeping with the view of the Radical Right’s true icon — Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, who Roberts sees “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”
A model that includes gerrymandered elections so that only his party wins working majorities. Oh, and no pesky media to keep track of them.
Hoping to avoid the kind of incompetence Donald Trump displayed when he held the reins of power for the first time, Project 2025 lays out specific details on how each federal department should operate. Of course, that requires getting rid of career civil service employees whose loyalty is to the country and not a party.
Key players in all of this are the other branches of government. The Republican-led House of Representatives hasn’t exactly pulled its weight in its inept Inspector Clouseau-like pursuit of “the Biden Crime Family.”
But that’s been more than made up for by the Supreme Court of the United States, which has already delivered on the Christian Right’s No. 1 goal of attacking women’s reproductive rights and is well on its way to achieving Bannon’s avowed goal of the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
American conservatives hopped into bed with Orbán awhile ago. Tucker Carlson devoted Fox Propaganda Channel resources to a Hungary trip and the Conservative Political Action Conference now hosts an annual Budapest session and Orbán returned the favor in Dallas in 2021.
Did I mention that at the 2022 Dallas session, conference-goers displayed a banner that read:
"We Are All Domestic Terrorists."
By the way, did you notice who owns the majority of weapons in the United States and which side staged an insurrection that killed five people on January 6, 2021?
The ongoing media feeding frenzy that’s followed Joe Biden’s horrific debate performance seems a particularly bad exercise in journalistic judgment given what Project 2025 has in mind for a free press.
“A chapter on public broadcasting proposes to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of a larger plan to upend NPR, PBS, and “other public broadcasters that benefit from CPB funding … More destabilizing than the total funding cut that Project 2025 entertains is a parallel plan to end the status of NPR and Pacifica radio stations as “noncommercial education stations.”
That’s the part the federal government can control. We already know Trump and his allies consider journalists “the enemy of the people.”
It’s all part of a project I’m working on to document a slow-motion coup, launched by the right decades ago to destroy faith in journalism — and which Trump has expanded to include the legal system.
We can only hope that once the media effort to push Biden out of the race concludes we see the same zeal in documenting not just Trump’s own mental instability but this open effort to make sure the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence bears no similarity to those that came before it.