QOTD -- "Project 2025 Comes True"

 

"...While Trump lacks the ability to formally close the Department of Education, he can shrink it to the point of irrelevance and ask Congress to deliver the coup de grace. The 44 pages in the Education Chapter of Project 2025 contain precisely that suggestion. Dismantle the department into a hollow shell that does nothing more than gather statistics.

"My conclusion tonight is the same as it was when I first wrote about Project 2025 and Trump’s plan for public education:

"Trump and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 authors are afraid of an open marketplace of ideas where kids learn to think for themselves. Kids can learn about—and learn from—the history of slavery in this country. The idea that it must be suppressed because it might make white kids feel bad is ridiculous. The more we know of our history, events like the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II, or the treatment of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other immigrants as they came to country, the better we can become. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. That seems to be the plan here..." -- Joyce Vance, in "Civil Discourse" on Substack, on the white nationalists' long-term plan to control public education.   Our simpleton "president," whose lack of basic knowledge can't be laid to public education (he attended private schools his whole life), lied during the 2024 campaign about his awareness of Project 2025.  He's since staffed his regime with acolytes of that fascistic blueprint, beginning with one of its authors, now-Director of OMB Russell Vought.  Make no mistake:  from education, to foreign policy, to health and social security, the Malignant Fascist's regime is re-making America into a dystopian image best viewed through a white nationalist filter.

Project 2025: Blueprint For American Fascism

Now that more information is being disseminated about the far-right Heritage Foundation's blueprint for Trump's authoritarian rule, "Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership," master con man and felon the Malignant Loser has been playing the role of Sgt. Schultz from "Hogan's Heroes":  he knows noth-ing! This despite the fact that the document has been circulated and discussed in MAGA circles for six months, and that many of his close associates from his first term were involved in its preparation: former Trump "body man" John McEntee, Ben "Sleepy" Carlson, Ken "Transvaginal Probe" Cuccinelli, and Stephen "Deportation Trains" Miller to name some. As word gets out about what this ugly, anti-democratic, Christofascist document contains, the Dems are trying to make sure it's not a secret to the Malignant Loser. From the WaPo:

"President Biden and other Democrats are increasingly focusing their attacks on an aggressive right-wing agenda called Project 2025 that is being pushed by allies of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump — prompting Trump and his team to lash out in recent days at supporters of the effort.

Many Democrats have assessed that the best message for their candidate — whether it is Biden, who is trailing in the polls and facing calls to drop out after a damaging debate performance, or another candidate — is to home in on what Trump might do in a second term, particularly as it relates to abortion rights, retribution against his enemies, mass deportations and the environment.

They hope to make a household phrase of Project 2025, which is designed as a policy and personnel platform for a Republican administration, Democrats close to Biden say. The group’s website, anchored by the Heritage Foundation, includes 30 chapters — written by more than a dozen former Trump appointees and others — that come from dozens of leading conservative groups." (our emphasis)

Now that he has the dead ender MAGA base under his control, the Malignant Loser is cynically and dishonestly trying to appear more "moderate" to swing voters by disavowing the extremism of "Project 2025," likely while signaling the authors privately that he'll implement it, but to be quiet for now while he cons the voters. He ridiculously claimed to know nothing about the document, while saying in the same statement that he disagreed with some things in it. As one advisor to the Malignant Loser said:

“It makes no sense to put all the crazy things you’ll be attacked for down on paper while you’re running,” a Trump adviser said. “Who thinks, let’s put it all down on paper so we can get attacked in advance, even though we haven’t run it by the president?”

President Biden and Dem surrogates have begun discussing the "crazy" blueprint in speeches and social media, hoping to get the public's attention about what the Malignant Loser's allies are planning for a second administration. It's time for everyone wanting to turn back the fascist plans represented by "Project 2025" to be familiar with it, and to spread the word about its authoritarian menace to democracy.

(illustration: Molly Butler/Media Matters | Trump photo: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons)

 

The Radical Right's Plans For Health Care Under Another Trump Regime

 

The Christofascist MAGAts from the Heritage Foundation have their policy roadmap ("Project 2025") laid out for the convicted felon buffoon Malignant Loser to follow should he be elected.  It covers all elements of government and proposes radical (almost too bland a descriptor) changes.  Here's what Joan Walsh says would be in store for health care should the convicted felon buffoon find himself in the Oval Office again:

Roger Severino, a prominent attorney for the Christian right, led the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights during the Trump administration. In 2017, The Atlantic called him “the man behind Trump’s religious-freedom agenda for health care.” The profile contrasted Severino’s sparsely decorated office—adorned with a crucifix and a Clarence Thomas bobblehead—with his elaborate domestic agenda.

During Severino’s time there, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services weakened the Affordable Care Act; strengthened the ability of healthcare providers to claim religious exemptions from providing all kinds of medical care, from abortion to birth control to vasectomies to gender-affirming care; and created a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in his office. Under Severino’s legal counsel, HHS cut teen-pregnancy prevention programs and prioritized abstinence in its Title X family-planning grants. Backing Severino’s crusade was his boss, HHS secretary and former Eli Lilly president Alex Azar, best known for helping Trump botch his Covid response and presiding over his border policy of separating migrant children from their parents. Azar came to call his department “the Department of Life.”

In his chapter of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, Severino promises to make HHS the “Department of Life” again—and to go even farther than Azar did. The plan outlines how HHS would use its power as a federal agency to dramatically curtail access to reproductive health services. Severino pledges that HHS will restrict access to birth control, rescind the FDA’s approval of medication abortion, and abolish what he calls “mail-order abortion”—the latter by using the long-dormant Comstock Act to prosecute anyone who provides such medication by mail. HHS will also focus on weeding out programs geared to the rights of LGBT people, especially anyone who is transgender. It would direct subsidies for childcare facilities to parents themselves—all in a punitive, misguided effort to shore up the nuclear family. This isn’t a public health document; it’s a theocratic manifesto, an attempt at ensuring public health through ultra-orthodox Christianity...

There's much more detail at the link, including repealing the provisions for Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, end the Head Start program, neuter the Centers for Disease Control (except to have them collect data in order to police abortions), and more dystopia.  Walsh sums up:

So that’s what HHS will do under Trump: Ban abortion. Police marriage. Force women to give birth, even if they don’t want to. Force women to marry men, and vice versa, even if they don’t want to. Privatize Medicare. Tighten restrictions on Medicaid. And if you feel like you’d rather not live this way? Severino wants to criminalize “euthanasia,” too.

There's a way to avoid this nightmare, at least for now.  It comes on Tuesday, November 5.  FFS, spread the word.

BONUS:  The "devout Catholic" Severino is quite a piece of work, as is his wife Carrie, who runs the "Judicial Crisis Network."  A real Clarence/ Ginny Thomas Christofascist power couple.

(Photo:  Severino, the architect of an American "Handmaid's Tale" / via YouTube)