Those "Project 2025" Training Videos

 

ProPublica has 23 of the training videos that were created to facilitate the implementation of the deeply unpopular "Project 2025" plan for the Christofascist re- making of America under a second Trump regime.  You needn't see all of them to get the flavor of the radical, un- American nature of the movement to install a permanent Christofascist regime in America;  some descriptive text should do for the moment:

Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.

One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.

The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.

In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”

“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says...

Here's a clip from that Kozma vid:

Lest there be any doubt these are MAGAt Trumpers:

A review of the training videos shows that 29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration or on his 2024 reelection campaign. The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation two weeks ago of Paul Dans, the leader of the 2025 project, and they are referenced on the project’s website. The Heritage Foundation said in a statement at the time of Dans’ resignation that it would end Project 2025’s policy-related work, but that its “collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue.”...

All of the vids can be seen here, interspersed with commentary.

We have to end with this screenshot of Trump Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security Alexei Woltornist, no doubt fresh from his morning flagellation, in one of the videos telling us how they plan to only focus on feeding propaganda to right- wing media to facilitate their Christofascist agenda:

"Rasputin called.  He wants his cassock and cross back."

These are some of the bizarre, key people who plan to impose their dystopian vision of culture, religion, and politics on our country should their Golden Calf Trump be returned to office.  Believe them when they tell you who they are, and vote accordingly.

Sunday Reflection: Taking Your Eyes Off The Ball of Democracy

 

"... However poorly Biden performed at that debate (and he was embarrassing), debates are theater. However ill equipped the Democratic Party is to provide an heir apparent — and they are embarrassingly unprepared for this predictable eventuality — their dysfunction is not the clear and present danger. The Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity is a harbinger of not just the court’s growing power but of Democrats’ inability to mount a populist defense. This conservative bloc on the court reflects years of undemocratic political maneuvering, from Mitch McConnell stealing a seat to the political activism of Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas. Their decisions are not only codifying minority interests, they are a show of strength for a Republican Party that has no intention of ever ceding power to majority will again.

"If you take your eye off the ball of democracy for any length of time, no amount of history will save you..." -- Tressie McMillan Cottom, writing in the New York effing Times about the precarious state of American democracy, and the clear and present danger posed by the Christofascist MAGAt Republican Party/ cult, its leader, and the anti- democratic Republican Supreme Court.  Elections matter, part infinity.

(Image:  the Christofascist MAGAt Republican Supreme Court)

It's Who They Are (UPDATED)

 

Yesterday, the deranged, twice- indicted sex assaulter Malignant Loser appeared at the North Carolina Republican Convention (he also showed up at Georgia's Republican klavern, er, convention).  On the same day, as yet another sign of how extreme these Christofascists have become, the North Carolina party took a look at its conservative Republican Senator, Thom Tillis, and did this:

Republican delegates in North Carolina voted Saturday at their annual convention to censure Thom Tillis, the state’s senior U.S. senator, for backing LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and gun violence policies.

As Sen. Tillis has gained influence in Congress for his willingness to work across the aisle, his record of supporting some key policies has raised concerns among some state Republicans that the senator has strayed from conservative values.

Several delegates in Greensboro criticized Tillis, who has held his seat in the Senate since 2015, for his work last year on the Respect For Marriage Act, which enshrined protections for same-sex and interracial marriages in federal law.

Both the state and national GOP platforms oppose same-sex marriage. But Tillis, who had opposed it earlier in his political career, was among the early supporters of the law who lobbied his GOP colleagues in Congress to vote in favor of it.

Others criticized him for challenging former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and for supporting a measure that provided funds for red flag laws, which allow state courts to authorize the temporary removal of firearms from people who they believe might pose a danger to themselves or others...

This is the same bunch of bigoted rubes that ate up the deranged, twice- indicted, sex assaulter Malignant Loser's hateful, meandering rants, including this revealing beauty:

TRUMP: Boy, what a bunch of easily manipulated rubes you people are, it's amazing, even after all this time I still can't believe how stupid you are
AUDIENCE: Woo hoo! You tell 'em, Trump! Yeah! https://t.co/SO4fWJDJaT

— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) June 11, 2023

 

 What a shame to have to share a country with these things.

UPDATED:  Hate words have consequences --

Several Target stores throughout Oklahoma City along with other areas in Central Oklahoma were evacuated late Saturday according to Oklahoma City Police.

Moments before the evacuations an email was sent out to several newsrooms including KFOR’s and state lawmakers threatening a detonation of a bomb.  

The email starts by writing, “We are going to play a game” and includes the date of April 19, 1995, which is the same date as the deadly Oklahoma City bombing.

It then goes on to say “2 of these Target locations have bombs in them. We hid the bombs inside some product items. The bombs will detonate in several hours, guess which ones have the bombs. Time is ticking.”  [snip]

The event comes just days after Target was slammed on social media for its LGBTQ+ children’s merchandise being sold in several stores, which has since been taken off shelves.

Again, that we have to share a country with these blocks, these stones, these worse than senseless things...

Marital Rape Fundie Preaches In Idaho Town

Moscow's the home of an authoritarian misogynist that rules over his realm. So is Moscow, Russia, but this story is about a bizarre, reactionary "church" / cult which has put down roots in Moscow, Idaho, according to a fascinating and chilling report from VICE:

"Depending upon whom you ask, the town either hosts a Calvinist utopia or a patriarchal cult in which women must submit or face discipline at home and at church. At the center of it all is notoriously controversial Douglas Wilson, the firebrand pastor who has been presiding over his Mother Kirk fiefdom for more than 40 years. 

To learn about Christ Church’s culture of abuse and social control, VICE has interviewed 12 former and current church members and Logos students, and reviewed court and medical documents, church correspondence, and business filings. Ex-kirkers describe a punitive community in which women are told they must defer to church leaders and cannot say 'no' to their husbands, men are taught to strictly control their homes, and those who speak out can be isolated and harassed." (our emphasis)

The story of former church cult member "Jean" and the coerced sex (i.e., rape) in her married life is horrific, replete with a drunken husband demanding and forcing sex on his petrified wife. Here's one depraved example of what this hyper-fundamentalist, Christofascist "church" has produced:

"One night, after their first was born, her husband came home drunk after she was asleep. He pulled her over, lifted her nightgown. She told him 'not tonight,' that she was tired. He got angry. She tried clawing away, then pushing him away with her arms. He pinned her down, so she used her legs to kick him. That’s when he unbuttoned his pants. 'When he was done, he passed out drunk and I locked myself in the bathroom and cried.'  She was bruised and her insides bled.

She called a kirker friend about it the next day. The friend attended a Christ Church plant—a seedling congregation based in Christ Church’s doctrine and culture—and 'she said the same thing was going on in her marriage.' Marital rape, it seemed, was normal. So, Jean didn’t report it. Jean’s husband raped her over and again a couple of times a week for about a decade, either with violence or by waiting until after she took a prescription sleeping pill."  (our emphasis)

It's no wonder that the male monsters in his congregation are out of control: Douglas Wilson is quite the clerical criminal:

"...pastor Doug Wilson is a radical provocateur, even among outspoken Christian conservatives, and appears to relish Twitter wars and blog battles. In the 1970s, he became pastor of Christ Church, which is now influential within the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denomination Wilson helped found that includes more than 100 churches nationally. In 2003, 94 ecclesiastical charges were brought against Wilson by his denomination—from improperly using church funds to pay off students’ casino debts to “carnal threatening” of others—but the charges were ultimately dropped. Last year, Wilson published a novel called Ride, Sally, Ride about a Christian man who runs his neighbor’s sexbot 'wife' named Sally through a trash compactor, and YouTube recently removed Wilson’s video making a moral argument for fake vaccine passports.  (our emphasis)

Sounds completely wholesome to us. You can be assured that in the past couple of decades at a minimum, Wilson and his flaky flock fulminated against fundamentalist Islamic groups like the Taliban and al Qaeda without the faintest sense of irony or hypocrisy. Add hate speech about the LGBTQ community and you get the picture. Cracks in the cult are widening, as more women resist and report the abuse they've been subjected as a result of the sexual exploitation philosophy of Douglas Wilson, who would already be in the slammer in a just world.

(photo: We can suggest a place to put that lit cigar)