Topic: Fascism
“Left to our own devices, the American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women, mercantilism, socialism, Wilsonian globalism, Fascism, Communism, and (today) wokeism. To the Left, these assertions of patriotic self-assurance are just so many signs of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority—proof that, in fact, we need a ruling elite making decisions for us.”
He seems to be saying that the Left supports women being second-class citizens. Which is ironic, given that the Right’s policies on women more or less afford them the same rights over their own bodies as livestock (and less bodily autonomy than we actually afford corpses in this country.)
Full contextual analysis of the foreword here.
“Codify language to instruct senior military officers (three and four stars) to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda. This direction should be reinforced during the Senate confirmation process. Orders and direction motivated by purely partisan motives should be identified as threats to readiness.”
This amounts to halting any promotions for military personnel unless they are loyal to the Project 2025 agenda. In fact, Miller is explicitly stating that disloyalty would be seen as a threat to the United States. Russ Vought touches on the same in Section 1.2 (Project 2025, Section 1.2: Executive Office of the President of the United States, Russ Vought, page 84, paragraph 2). This is textbook fascism.
Full contextual analysis of Section 2.1: Department of Defense here.
“While Senate confirmation is a constitutionally necessary requirement for appointing agency leadership, the next Administration may need to take a novel approach to the confirmations process to ensure an adequate and rapid transition. For example, the next Administration arguably should place its nominees for key positions into similar positions as “actings” (for example, putting in a person to serve as the Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner of CBP while that person is going through the confirmation process to direct ICE or become the Secretary). This approach would both guarantee implementation of the Day One agenda and equip the department for potential emergency situations while still honoring the confirmation requirement.”
This is more of Project 2025’s core tenet – staff the government completely with loyalists to their agenda, bypassing Congressional approval, and simply installing them as “acting” in their official capacities. Trump did this a LOT. If elected to another term, this practice would become the rule.
Full contextual analysis of Section 2.2: Department of Homeland Security here.
“The Secretary should direct FEMA to ensure that all FEMA-issued grant funding for states, localities, and private organizations is going to recipients who are lawful actors, can demonstrate that they are in compliance with federal law, and can show that their mission and actions support the broader homeland security mission.”
That’s a recommendation that the federal government deny disaster aid to states that don’t support their regime (in this case, blue states.) There’s not another way to see that statement. It gets freakier. One of the compliance requirements he suggests is, “If the applicant is a state or locality, commitment by that state or locality to total information-sharing in the context of both federal law enforcement and immigration enforcement. This would include access to department of motor vehicles and voter registration databases.” (Project 2025, Section 2.2: Department of Homeland Security, Ken Cuccinelli, page 170, paragraph 2.) Read that last part again. Access to the department of motor vehicles and voter registration databases.
Full contextual analysis of Section 2.2: Department of Homeland Security here.
“Even content that went well beyond fair and accurate reporting on U.S. domestic and political problems could not be reined in by front office leadership under the Firewall Regulation. Soon, VOA’s White House correspondent was posting content highly critical of, and personally insulting to, the U.S. President—in contradiction of VOA’s own journalistic standards, policies, and procedures.”
Namdar gives no examples of these critical and “personally insulting” news stories, but I feel it’s necessary to point out that when a President commits crimes, or says something disgusting about women or veterans, or tells any of the literally more than thirty thousand documented lies Trump told during his presidency, that’s newsworthy and something we the people (and the press) SHOULD be critical about, regardless of whether or not the president finds it “personally insulting.”
Namdar is arguing for a system where nobody is allowed to criticize Dear Leader. This is fascism. She goes on for several paragraphs, outraged that the media would dare criticize Trump or his staff. In fact, Vice President Pence’s office threatened reporter Steve Herman with retaliation for accurately reporting that Pence visited the Mayo clinic without wearing a mask, which was explicitly against their rules at the time (there is photographic evidence of this.)
Full contextual analysis of Section 2.5: Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media & Corporation for Public Broadcasting here.
Share this quote from Project 2025:
“The VOA firewall is meant to protect broadcasters from government interference with content; however, USAGM staff have abused the firewall and used it as an offensive measure to block oversight.”
Namdar is arguing here for government oversight (and of course manipulation of) the USAGM here (and explicitly states it in the previous paragraph.)
Full contextual analysis of Section 2.5: Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media & Corporation for Public Broadcasting here.
Share this quote from Project 2025:
“Left-wing authoritarian kleptocracies in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela deny their people basic freedoms, violently and ruthlessly suppress any dissent, repress communities of faith, and generate such misery that hundreds of thousands of their citizens have attempted to cross our southern border over the past two years.”
Excuse me, what? LEFT-wing? This is a BLISTERING lie, intended to inflame people who are primed to 1) believe anything Republicans say, no matter how ridiculous, and 2) primed to hate anything with the word “Left” in it.
Left-wing is a thing. Authoritarian kleptocracies are a thing. The idea of a “left-wing authoritarian kleptocracy” is paradoxical and impossible to reconcile with traditional left-wing ideology. The two concepts are fundamentally at odds. A true left-wing authoritarian kleptocracy is an oxymoron because kleptocracy and leftist ideals of equity and anti-corruption are fundamentally incompatible. While regimes can claim leftist origins or use leftist rhetoric, once they devolve into authoritarianism and kleptocracy, they have diverged from the principles that define left-wing governance. He’s describing fascism. And, given that he mentions Nicaragua – which is one of the only four countries INCLUDING THE UNITED STATES to go backwards in terms of human rights (see above), this shameful statement rates somewhere between “out to lunch” and “completely batshit.”
Full contextual analysis of Section 2.6: Agency for International Development here.
“Despite finding that the Trump Administration’s addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census violated the Administrative Procedures Act, the Supreme Court held that the Secretary of Commerce does have broad authority to add a citizenship question to the decennial census. Any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census.”
Historically (prior to 1950), we’ve asked questions like this on the census. But historically, we didn’t have a candidate running who was promising to deport all immigrants, so this feels nefarious. The Constitution requires that the census taken every ten years must be a total “enumeration” and that has long been understood as counting everyone living in America at the time the census is performed – citizens and non-citizens, legal residents and immigrant residents living in the United States without legal permission.
“Critics say it’s a virtual lock that in the current political climate that non-citizens would think twice about taking part in the Census if they had to openly declare their citizenship status. That would exacerbate already significant issues with undercounting minorities that has an impact on funding and representation in past Census efforts.” [Source]
Trump failed to do this in 2020, but won’t again, with our current Supreme Court.
“The Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 ruling last Thursday had not barred the government from asking the question, but did order it to reconsider the plan after concluding that the reason given for it was “contrived” and “pretextual.”
The rationale that Secretary Ross and his aides had given repeatedly, especially in filings in the court cases brought by challengers, was that data gathered by asking the citizenship question would help the Justice Department in enforcing federal voting rights laws. The evidence in the case that went to the Supreme Court, the majority of Justices found, did not support that claim. [Source]
The source continues:
“It is not entirely clear where the idea to add the question originated in the Trump Administration, but there was evidence in the court cases that former White House aide Steve Bannon and a former outside adviser to the President, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, had pressed Secretary Ross to take the step.”
Yes, I’m sure Steve Bannon wanted all of this information about immigrants for perfectly innocent reasons.
The undercounting also benefits conservatives in other ways – if immigrants are too afraid to report, conservatives get to juice the House of Representatives:
“One of the principal claims of the challengers was that the presence of the citizenship question on census forms would discourage Hispanic households and those of non-citizens from responding, for fear that the disclosures would lead to the deportation of relatives or friends. The argument was that this refusal to respond would result in an “under-count” that might leave out 6 million or more people.
Since Hispanics and non-citizens are concentrated in larger states and larger cities, a significant under-count would probably lead to the loss of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives for states such as California, Florida and New York. Allocation of seats in the House is based, under the Constitution, on each state’s total population as counted in each census.”
Fewer seats in the house = fewer votes in the electoral college as well. This isn’t just me figuring it out – this was 100% the reason they wanted to do this.
Trump’s White House had internal memos circulating that detailed their plans. The House Oversight Committee released them with a report:
“Today’s Committee memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful conduct and shows clearly how the Trump Administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their goals,” says Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York, who chairs the House oversight committee and introduced the bill, in a statement. “It is clear that legislative reforms are needed to prevent any future illegal or unconstitutional efforts to interfere with the census and chip away at our democracy.”
Full contextual analysis of Section 4.1: Department of Commerce here.