Donald Trump denies knowing anything about Project 2025, or the author, Kevin Roberts. “Have no idea who is in charge of it,” he says.
Here he is sharing a private flight with him in 2022. They were on their way to a Heritage Foundation conference on their policies, where Trump delivered (no doubt in a rambling incoherent way) the keynote speech. What do you think? Are Trump’s memory and general cognitive facilities gone, or is he lying, or both?
If you think Project 2025 is bad, it’s only the first step in a rising fundamentalist movement. NPR had a journalist follow a Christian nationalist organization for a year, and it’s as horrifying as you can imagine. Even worse, their journalist was Jewish — he had to listen to joyful, polite hatred for all that time.
The reporter opens the story with a conversation with Gabe Rench, Idaho fundamentalist.
“You said it would probably take a long time, but that you would like to see only Christians be able to run for office. So if you’re Jewish, you’re Muslim, you’re atheist, certainly if I had you right, you said that yes, you would support eventually them not being allowed to run for office.”
That’s right, I did say that. I think that the Christian faith is the ideal moral doctrine for a thriving society, and the farther you get from that the more in chaos we descend. The only way to maintain that, one of the ways to maintain that, is you have to have people running for office who believe that, or you’re going to get back in that chaotic decline.
“I tell you straight up, as a Jewish American, I hear that, that I can’t run for office, other non-Christians can’t, I have to admit that’s a little terrifying to me, because to me that means a fundamental freedom of mind, in this theoretical world, is gone.”
I mean, you’re saying that in a country where you’re experiencing all these immense freedoms that was built on the Christian faith, so…
“But where I can’t run for office!”
Um, yeah, because your worldview is not good for society. You’re unique in the sense that your problem is just that you refuse to believe that Jesus is Messiah. Whereas you get a lot right, but you get the key thing wrong.
The interview was at the Fight Laugh Feast conference, held at the Ark Encounter, of course. If you’ve noticed that Ken Ham has become increasingly politically strident, this is where his heinous worldview is being fed, among a community of the most regressive, most hateful (but joyful about it) people in the country. They want to repeal the 19th amendment. It’s not just atheists and Jews and Muslims who will lose rights, they want to deny women any rights, while teaching that the world was created in six days.
Creation in six days. A gigantic floating zoo, with giraffes sticking their heads out the windows, burning bushes, talking donkeys, dragons, unicorns, resurrection from the dead, yeah, we believe all of it. We are not embarrassed by any of it,
says Toby Sumpter.
They want total theocratic control, in the name of a gemisch of stupid religious myths. Another speaker, Stephen Wolfe, says Atheists would be less free, because you wouldn’t want an atheist to be in charge of an institution, they would be suppressed. Government institution or public school or even like you may not want your CEO of a business to be an atheist. We do this all the time with social dogma. If someone has a view that’s against social dogma, we tend to think that should be suppressed, often with social harms to that person. I think atheism should be one of those things.
Stephen Wolfe is the author of The Case for Christian Nationalism (it’s free on Kindle Unlimited. I guess I’m going to have to read it — know your enemy and all that.)
Yeah, the odious Doug Wilson was also at this conference.
If we have another Trump presidency, these are the people who would be running the government, you know. If you already have a nebulous dread of the consequences of Republican control, know this: it would be far, far worse than you dream.
They’re fascists. They’re outright fascists. O_O
I take it the answer to the rhetorical title is, “worse than you could possibly imagine”.
Nothing they believe or claim is true.
The time when xians had control of the government was known as the Dark Ages. This was not a good time in our history.
And it took centuries and many brave people to break the power of the Catholic church with the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
Even today, the most religious states in the USA are also the most dysfunctional. They always rate higher in any social problem you name and lower in positive social measures such as education.
This would of course, be the Red states in the South and midwest.
Xian morality is an oxymoron.
There isn’t anything worthwhile in xian morality that isn’t found in other ethical systems.
There is a lot that is just terrible and obsolete.
Democracy isn’t mentioned in the bible despite the fact that it was a known concept at the time.
There isn’t even any agreement among xians about what xian morality is.
These are protestant evangelicals? Where do Catholics fit into their scheme? Episcopalians? Ignorance of history, particularly European history after the 15th century, might help them understand why we have the First Amendment.
Xian morality is an oxymoron.
Xians never agree on what their xian morality is.
And it changes all the time any way.
The Catholic church condemns birth control for arbitrary reasons having nothing to do with the bible while Mainstream Protestants condemn the Catholic church for…condemning birth control.
Some of the fundies prohibit women from being ministers.
Then again, in my former Mainstream church, half the ministers are women.
The former head of the Episcopal church in the USA was a Ph.D. oceanographer named…Katherine.
This power grab by the fundie xians has nothing to do with xian moraltiy any way.
That is just their excuse.
What they want is what any authoritarians want.
More power and money for themselves.
Oops…too much multitasking: Knowledge of history might help them understand.
What would happen, of course, is an immediate descent into vicious factional warfare as all the different strands of Republicans and fundamentalists and arseholes try to make it their version of pandemonium that takes hold. You’d get the tech CEO ultra-capitalists attacking the forced birth anti-women people when the latter try to prevent them from getting sexual healthcare, you’d get the gun nuts turning on the racists when the latter try to prevent black people owning weapons, you’d get the Catholics and the Evangelicals and the Mormons and who knows what other sects engaged in vicious sectarian conflict over minor details of their fan fiction. The whole edifice would descend into a re-run of the Thirty Years War, except without the cool slashed clothing and codpieces.
That’s one thing that gets me. There’s a hell of a lot of religiously motivated or manipulated wars in history, and they seem to look at those war-torn regions and eras as a goal.
@4: I took my first trip down south, to North Carolina, when I was college age. I remember a Southern Baptist explaining to me the difference between Christians and Catholics.
“ Atheists would be less free… they would be suppressed.”
Come and and try to suppress me, you white trash, Bible-fucking, hillbilly! Unlike most here, I don’t have a problem with guns and violence.
I’m working on a round-up of what this means for science for various agencies should this happen (the write-up of each will be on my blog). I started with the CDC and NIH. Wow. Just wow. There are few things that make me angrier than willful misrepresentation of science, but that is what Roger Severino and anyone who has written anything against masks (I’ve delved into opposition research) has done. There’s a claim in there that people of faith want to be vaccinated, but can’t or won’t because of how the vaccines were manufactured. Apparently, the Biden Administration blocked them from ordering “ethically sourced” vaccines from Japan. I’ve been looking for whatever I can find to see where they would get info they could manipulate like that, but I suspect it was made up out of thin air since viruses need cellular machinery to replicate.
…but with added thermonuclear weapons!
Trump announces news conference as Harris soars
Will he fire J.D. Vance? Will he drop out of the race himself? Will he publicly renew his lust for his own daughter?
Rachel Madow’s podcast series Ultra is a chilling account of the rise of fascism in the US in the 40s and 50s. We have been here before.
Worse than you can imagine but not as bad as…the Republicans hope it will be.
We can get an idea by looking at the last two GOP rulers.
.1. The George Bush administration was a disaster.
We had 9/11 which resulted in two wars.
The larger one in Iraq, had nothing to do with 9/11, cost two trillion dollars, killed over 100,000 people, and was pointless and accomplished nothing.
It personally cost me two friends, both killed in Iraq.
Then there was the housing/banking collapse that led to the Great Recession.
Which cost us all money here and there.
.2. The Trump maladminstration was recent enough that I don’t have to say much.
His chaotic and ineffective handling of the Black Swan event, the Covid-19 virus pandemic resulted in 1.4 million dead Americans with many millions more suffering from Long Covid syndromes.
Sure, no matter who was president, we still would have had hundreds of thousands of dead people. But the dead and sick totals could have been a lot lower.
This also cost me personally a lot.
Several friends dead from the Covid-19 virus. Most of them died later from Long Covid medical problems.
Several friends are suffering from Long Covid syndromes, still.
The GOP is 0 for 2 right now.
They are desperately trying to make it 0 for 3, 3 massive failures in a row.
Just say no. Don’t vote for these guys.
EVERYBODY needs to Google “Project 2025,” go to the website and read the PDF or, at least, parts of it.
A short section is on getting rid of NPR and PBS. Why? Because it’s not deemed “conservative.”
Read the longer section about disbanding NOAA – yes, you read that correctly! The same section describes privatizing the National Weather Service and ending climate research.
The section on HHS renaming it the Department of Life is almost too stupid to get through but their view of public health is hounding women, controlling women and persecuting women. Might as well be the Department of Handmaids.
You only have to read the sections that interest you, but any section you read from the Justice Department to the fate of government employees is beyond dystopian. Although, in short, you can boil it down to this simple concept: Christians and rich people can do whatever they want with impunity, and the rest of the country will pay for it.
This is the really interesting thing about Project 2025… Much smarter and more patient people than me have gone through it, and pointed out that it’s actually a mess of internal contradictions, because it’s trying to simultaneously pander to a whole bunch of wildy different flavours of right-wing craziness – and that this points us to fracture lines which could be exploited to break their increasingly fragile coalition apart. You’ve got libertarians, protectionists, radical free marketeers, supply-siders, theocrats of at least half a dozen different and incompatible flavours… It’s a sackful of rabid weasels. (With apologies to weasels.)
See, for example The true, tactical significance of Project 2025 from Cory Doctorow, or Project 2025 … and 1921, and 1973, and 1981 from Rick Perlstein.
I’ve read the science parts, and yes, they want to get rid of climate science entirely. When I read the section on the USDA, it outright said that climate has nothing to do with farming. This is what happens when you send a lawyer to do a scientist’s job.
And yeah, I read the sections on NPR and PBS. It seems they wouldn’t mind so much if they stayed where they were as long as the government didn’t have to chip in, but they’d prefer it be gone altogether.
As for NOAA, when I go for bike rides, I confirm wind direction with the National Weather Service before I choose a direction. Sure, the weather apps tell me where the wind is coming from at that moment, but I want to know if it’s going to turn on me. That’s generally what I go by, and more often than not, it’s right. (If I’m headed southwest, I generally ride right past the local branch of NWS.)
What will happen with Project 2025 is obvious and simple.
.1. The fundie xians will be the front men (of course they will all be men) and get to persecute the vast majority of the US population.
White evangelicals only make up 14% of the population and half of those are women.
Trad Catholics, make up another 5.6%.
They will be in charge of culture war stuff, persecute women, scientists, atheists, Muslims etc.
Creationism, antivaxxers, etc..
.2. The real rulers will be the .1% oligarchies. The ultra rich.
They are almost the real rulers now any way.
They are just using the fundie xians just like the fundie xians are just using them.
They rich oligarchy doesn’t care about the culture war stuff. They can ignore it.
The fundies want to outlaw divorce. Their hero Trump has been divorced twice.
Creationism? They don’t care. It doesn’t effect them.
Abortion? Not their problem.
They can just put their mistress or daughter on their private jet and fly to London.
What the rich oligarchies care about is power and money. They have lots of both, but it is never enough and they always want more.
The biggest problem is that the drooling masses will NOT pay any real attention or become educated on the xtian terror that is project 2025. They will just nod, drool and say, ‘they seem nice’ and ignore the inquisition as long as it doesn’t threaten their ability to watch sports.
There are already activities that are stealthily implementing this bigoted, hateful xtian terrorist policy.
The idea of ‘an informed electorate’ is a sad hoped-for fantasy that never existed and never will.
The previous comments had some great insights and ideas. However, Everyone with a rational mind and a sens of honesty must find every way possible to negate this ‘jebus abomination’ from hijacking what is left of society.
As Trump-Themed Shitcoin Tanks, the Trump Boys Tease Their Own Crypto Nonsense
Well, they’ve already told us what it would be like:
https://warhornmedia.com/2024/07/10/christian-nationalist-party-a-simple-biblical-platform/
‘Donald Trump Is A Scab’ Who ‘Doesn’t Know Sh*t About The Auto Industry,’ Shawn Fain Says In Fiery Detroit Speech
As if Republican control vs. Democratic control are the only two viable option.
Wake up, sheeple!
Um, nevermind.
raven @ # 3: The time when xians had control of the government was known as the Dark Ages.
Historians have mostly abandoned the “Classical”/”Dark Ages”/”Medieval” division of European history (very roughly assigned to -200-400/400-800/800-1400 respectively in the modern calendar). But if we stick with that anyway, let’s also note that The Church™ had relatively little control in most places during the “Dark” period, and maximal power during the “Middle Ages” (largely due to Charlemagne, a very Catholic emperor).
Akira MacKenzie @ # 10: Unlike most here, I don’t have a problem with guns and violence.
Yabbut do you have training, experience, organization, and equipment? (Many of) the neofascisti do…
asclepias @ # 11: …the write-up of each will be on my blog…
Link, please?
@Doc Bill (and others):
One of the interesting things I thought of when I heard about the ‘disband the NOAA&NWS’ part of Project 2025 is something I haven’t heard anybody talk about yet.
One of the biggest users and supporters of the NOAA is… the U.S. military. One would think that the people having to figure out where to put aircraft carriers would have a few things to say about anybody who wants to restrict access to weather information.
Way to ruin my morning PZ…
@26 jenorafeuer
Yeah, the document doesn’t make sense because it’s totally ideological. They want to get rid of NOAA because it does research on climate change. NPR because it’s educational, that is, left wing. Department of Education because it is educational, that is, left wing. What is interesting about closing the Dept. of Ed. is that they don’t actually do that. Much of the department is split up to become parts of other agencies. Makes no sense and is highly inefficient, but the ideological goal is met.
There are a couple of instances where a political flunky has had a real effect on an agency. George W. appointed some doofus to be the communications director at NASA with a goal to stop all mention of “big bang” and, basically, evolution and an old earth. He was having a real (bad) effect until it was publicized that he lied on his resume about his college degree. Also, during COVID a flunky was put in charge of communications at NIH with the job of squashing research results. Fortunately, he was bounced but not before he did some real damage. This is serious stuff that affects us all, even if it is a twerp here and a twerp there.
Pierce R. Butler @ 25 The address is sciencefornonscientistsblog.wordpress.com. It will probably be another couple of days before I have the first post up. The first one is on NIH and CDC.
Maybe this one will actually link:
https://sciencefornonscientistsblog.wordpress.com/
Well to be fair, Donald Trump is really old and senile; he might not remember that plane flight? Also, he doesn’t actually recognise the existence of other human beings who are not Donald Trump, so he might not have noticed the guy was there.
Trump Team Says Trainwreck Press Conference Is a Sign of Discipline
It seems some of the commenters believe that if the republicans win we will have a shooting war, like the Thirty Years War. I wonder if anyone read the articles by Cory Doctorow and Rick Perlstein linked @17 Dunc. It seems as if much of this rhetoric is old news -has happened several times over the last century. I find it hard to believe that things would be nearly as bad as some here think. I don’t think are are enough extremists who would also be active.
But how to ensure that? Maybe some sort of council to vet the candidates?
@13 Reginald Selkirk
There is an insane irony, and its almost certainly a good thing for us, in that once a VP is picked, since it is a) an endorsed position, not a “hire”, and b) he has already been accepted as the “party candidate” for the position, Trump literally can’t “fire him”. There is no legal grounds to do so. Now, in theory, the “party” as a whole might be able to do such, but the party loves creeps like him, and will likely keep trying to spin negative press about him as “leftist fake news”, right up until its too late to change candidates, or he commits some scandal so bad they are forced to try to get rid of him. And, even then, its likely he could refuse, since, based on what I have heard, a VP pick can voluntarily drop out, but, not be removed, once on the ballot. Its one of those endless, “Damn, wish we had passed laws to deal with this situation…”, things that keep freaking coming up – like with all the insane crap happening with SCOTUS, which any sensible person for the last 250 years should have been able to predict would happen, or the madness of “minority rule”, via things like filibustering, in the Senate, which one of the founders absolutely predicted, but no one bothered to listen to.
To answer the title question :
Apocalyptically World-endingly bad.
In Climate terms.
Thinking long term.
Also just VERY beyond words.
@ 25
The asshole wants to oppress me, perhaps even kill me, because I don’t believe in his filthy ancient superstitions. Can you blame me for being a defiant?
But to fair, you’re right. While I know how to shoot and have some basic hand-to-hand knowledge from my teenage years, at 49, I’m not exactly freedom fighter material.
Edit: …a little defiant?
Christ. I can barely string a sentence together anymore.
Akira MacKenzie @ # 37 – Do you want to vent, or to win?
@ ^ Pierce R. Butler ; guessing both?
@ 39. Akira MacKenzie : You think you’ve got probs? I can’t even get words spelled / spelt* right.. Swear the computer switches letters around on me..
.* Spelt? Ain’t that a grain?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelt
“Fight Laugh Feast” conference? Sounds weird, don’t you think?
Also, if the Project ends up seeing the light of day and gets implemented, there’s going to be a ton of infighting going on among the Christian Fundies, including creationists, who takes advantage of the freedom and rights people of all faiths have enjoyed for almost 250 years in this nation, sees what the Project will do and be entirely offended and put off by it so much that they will revolt and overthrow the Project and the clowns behind it.