a lil' Project 2025 wrap-up

I figured four weeks was all you could stand of it :/

This is the fourth in my series on Project 2025, but I hope you will keep tracking it and engaging it with groups doing good work on this issue. And if there are people in your life who don’t know about it, maybe share with them articles one, two, and three in this series? Next month I’ll be looking at Christian nationalism.

As a quick aside: I’ve been posting reels on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Twitter as well as on Notes here, and that’s required me to think more seriously about who my audience is and how that shapes my content. I really believe many people in this country are by and large thoughtful and compassionate people who are dealing with too many pressures of working and taking care of family and paying bills and trying to stay connected to people they love and like to spend tons of time researching issues related to making our democracy work. But I do think they (you/we) care about democracy. So I hope my content digests some of the issues that you may not have the time to dig around for, and that if you have friends who might care about the same things you do, the videos and newsletters might be useful to share or to inform your conversations with them. Because right now a lot of media doesn’t know how to talk about these things and doesn’t get to dive deeply into nuances…or they assume Americans aren’t capable of understanding complicated issues, when my whole life has told me that a lot of Americans are capable of thinking about big things deeply. Thanks for thinking through these things with me, and sharing them in your conversations (or on your socials if that works for you).

OK, now back to Project 2025:

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The issue today:

This is week four of focusing on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s initiative to dismantle many federal protections and use the government to punish its perceived enemies, protecting corporations and imposing anti-democratic governance models. If I wrote about this in a movie script, I’d be told “you’re making your villain into a caricature; no one will believe this.” (For more on Project 2025, here’s a 4.5-minute interview Katie Couric did on it with staff from Axios and here’s an article from the PBS NewsHour.)

Since this is the last week on Project 2025, I wanted to let you know there are SO MANY folks standing against this and trying to preserve democracy. Plug in with ANY of them that fit with your values:

• Pretty much every environmental group from Sierra Club to EarthJustice want a clean planet.

• The Union of Concerned Scientists want…well, good science guiding policies.

• Human Rights Watch and the NAACP and Amnesty International and all the national LGBTQ+ organizations want to protect human rights.

• The ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights and PEN America want to protect freedom of speech.

• Every labor union wants to preserve workers’ rights.

• Common Cause and Public Citizen want consumer protections and governmental transparency.

Every organization I listed AND MORE want everyone to know about what Project 2025 really means for those issues. Take a moment to reach out to any organization working on any issue you care about and find out how you can amplify their message on Project 2025. Thank you for fighting the good fight.

Also, here’s another substack featuring an interview with scholar Thomas Zimmer, to get…well, the big picture, as it were.

The Right Has A Terrifying Second Trump Term Plan Called Project 2025

How this connects to our history:

So I wanted on this last week to share a time in history when people overcame efforts to replace democracy with authoritarianism. My research pointed me to a LOT of examples of temporary success before the authoritarians won (Boneparte, Hitler, Franco, Peron, etc.) So here’s one resistance to authoritarianism that really took (although the threat of authoritarianism has re-emerged there in recent years): The Carnation Revolution. In 1974 in Portugal, a group of mid-level military leaders were fed up fighting wars to protect colonialism and, with overwhelming support from the public, overthrew a 50-year dictatorship. There were several efforts to stage coups over the next few years, but here’s what caused Portugal to resist those coups: 1) the moderate left and radical left stayed aligned on foundational issues instead of getting fractured. 2) The country as a whole remained passionately committed to democracy. 3) The military remained loyal to the people of the country and to the existing administration. 4) The world supported their path to democracy so they could join what is now called the EU. Also, as part of their work of democracy, they drafted a brand new constitution in 1976 to guide their path forward. I wanted you to know resistance to authoritarianism has happened before…successfully! LMK in the comments what you think about that new constitution idea!

Ancestral Wisdom:

It’s funny; I was reminded when reading Kristen DuMez’s book Jesus and John Wayne that a lot of the right wing loves Teddy Roosevelt, mostly, it seems, because he knew how to handle a gun. But Roosevelt inherited a federal government rampant with corruption and exploitation of national resources, and he put together an administration that protected wilderness from unchecked resource extraction. He regulated the railroads so the robber barons could no longer exploit farmers and customers and bribe Congress in order to do so. He put food and drug standards into place. He broke up monopolies and oligopolies that cheated customers and destroyed small businesses. And most of it he did because the public demanded it, journalists brought attention to the problems, and because he spent time in the wilderness and noticed what was happening to it. I needed this reminder that during the Gilded Age where unelected robber barons ran the country, the people chose a leader who would reorient the country’s laws towards the wellbeing of the people and of the land.

A next step you can take:

Last week I mentioned that journalist Anne-christine d’Ardesky lifted up a great resource, the Not On Our Watch app tracking ongoing initiatives related to Project 2025. Anne-christine also shared an additional resource on the same subject:

“Our nonpartisan campaign, Stop The Coup 2025, launched last fall, is focused on public education and mobilization to fight Project 2025. Very comprehensive. We have complete easy-to-grasp summary and chapter breakdowns of each Project 2025 federal dept chapter, take home bullet-pt summaries of proposed reforms/ attacks, briefs on how the plan may affect you in diff sectors, resources and are consolidating strategies to fight back. We actively amplify ally info, too. We will be adding a slew of new tools to fight back shortly. In Spanish too. We offer a newsletter for campaign updates. — www.stopthecoup2025.org”

I love how many people are engaging this so seriously and am grateful to have these additional resources myself. Thanks to all of you for keeping the buzz going. See you next week with a new series on Christian nationalism (a term which keeps getting my twitter account frozen, even though twitter’s ceo shares Christian nationalist content. Go figure.)

-Sandhya