#Project 2025, if allowed, will cement #America as a #rightwing #authoritarian state
BARRINGTON SALMON
JANUARY 16, 2024
..."Project 2025 is a sweeping rightwing blueprint for the next #Republican #president, Trump or not, to run the country for the foreseeable future. Funded by The Heritage Foundation, Koch Brothers and a vast and secretive dark money network, the project has recruited at least 80 far-right organizations and entities to the cause.
Conservative warriors’ plan “to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce,” the 30-chapter, 920-page tome says.
The president would have “complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the FCC, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years. And they want to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative — not just for the next president but for a long time to come — and that the White House maintains total control of it.”
Project 2025 offers proposals to deregulate targeted industries, privatize government functions and help American corporations to make more money at the expense of American workers, the middle class and everyone except the oligarchs and the 1%.
Meyerson, editor-at-large at The American Prospect, said far-right conservatives and The Heritage Foundation have an extensive enemies’ list that includes “welfare recipients, lazy and liberal civil servants, anti-business regulators, environmentalists, and union bosses, “scientists, woke bureaucrats, woke educators, woke diplomats, woke generals and admirals, woke G-men, and anyone who doesn’t indulge the next Republican president’s every whim (an adaptation to the likelihood of a Trump nomination),” in the commentary titled, “The Far Right Has a Plan to Remake America. They Even Wrote It Down.”
Those in charge in the incoming administration are prepared to purge those deemed disloyal after identifying and interviewing “every Treasury Department official who participated in its DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) activities and programs, and make such activity ‘“per se grounds for termination of employment.”’
Leonard Leo, a major right-wing donor who significantly influenced and shaped the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority under Trump, has been a major fundraiser for Project 2025. (On Nov. 30, the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary voted to subpoena Leo “as part of an ethics probe into undisclosed financial ties to U.S. Supreme Court justices.”)
According to a press release from the nonprofit Accountable.US, recent reporting from NBC shows that “The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, stepped up efforts to boost its Project 2025 initiative by ramping up grants to the venture aimed at creating a ‘government-in-waiting’ for the next Republican presidential administration, according to a new tax filing.
“The foundation distributed over $1.67 million in grants in 2022 — including a total of $965,000 to organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, tax records show. These donations accounted for 58% of Heritage’s total grant-making in 2022.
“Project 2025’s board of more than 80 conservative organizations includes nearly 40 that have received funding from dark-money groups linked to Leonard Leo … a prolific fundraiser, Leo is affiliated with an extensive network of tax-exempt groups, including DonorsTrust, a donor-advised nonprofit that directs money to other organizations and groups seeking to influence policy.”...
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