Have you heard about Project 2025?

And yes, I'm back weekly over the summer

If you thought my emails weren’t getting to you these past few months, well—they weren’t, but that’s because I was trying really hard not to fail Quantitative Research Methods. :) My finals are almost all in, and I wanted to let you know that over the next six months, you’ll be getting an email from me each week that parallels the social media I’m creating leading up to the 2024 election. The emails will be on democracy, Christian Nationalism, dog whistles, education, and this month, on Project 2025. (More below.)

I’m posting videos six days a week and would love if you’d check out my content (and even share it when you like it) on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok (had to start from scratch so help me get above 5 followers if you’re on it), and Twitter (also started from scratch so I’d love to reconnect there). I’ll also be posting videos here in “notes,” which is kinda like substack’s twitter. Like I said, the weekly emails here will be based on content from those videos, so in some ways this is the redux (minus the meditation and snark videos). Thanks for staying with me and bearing with me as I find my stride in school and in the world. I hope you like this content even if it’s a departure from my DEI-in-the-workplace content of the past.

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TODAY:

You may have heard of an initiative called “Project 2025.” It’s spearheaded by extreme right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation along with dozens of other organizations with a goal of making sure a second Trump presidency is much more right-wing than the previous administration. Here’s a quote from the Associated Press’s coverage of Project 2025: “There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.” All of that is scary, but I want to focus on the independence of the DOJ—the reason that matters is that DOJ independence protects against the department having to ignore illegal activities within the administration. It can turn the DOJ into a division that provides free legal support as a favor to friends of the administration. It can remove the DOJ’s ability to go after people and companies breaking the law if the administration likes those people and companies. The Trump administration tried to fully implement this prior to the 2021 coup, and it has taken years to undo a lot of the damage done during that time. Project 2025 has millions of dollars and thousands of supporters getting ready to roll it out come November. I wanted to make sure this is on your radar.

We’ve seen this Before:

If you’re like me, you got a paragraph about the Teapot Dome Scandal back in sixth grade and know the term but not what it means. Well, it’s another time the President tried to coopt the DOJ, almost successfully. People in Warren Harding’s administration back in the 1920s had leased naval oil reserves to private oil firms, bringing a whole new meaning to the term “robber baron.” When the Attorney General didn’t want to actually do his job because of his loyalty to Harding, President Coolidge appointed a bipartisan pair of special counsels approved by Congress to make sure justice was served. This process served as a model for how the US should navigate the Watergate scandal when Nixon attempted to interfere with the DOJ and fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox. We’ve been here before. I think it’s worth lifting up that history so we learn from it and stay aware of where it might be repeating itself.

Our ancestors fought back and so can we:

I learned about Stetson Kennedy in a book I don’t want to recommend here because it’s lowkey racist and uses statistics badly (but I will say it was the first book featured in the podcast If Books Could Kill if you’re dying to know which one it is).

Kennedy was a guy from the South who throughout the 1930s-1950s infiltrated the KKK. In his New York Times obituary, they said of him, “As an agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Kennedy, by his own account, infiltrated the Klavern in Stone Mountain and worked as a Klavalier, or Klan strong-arm man. He leaked his findings to, among others, the Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson, the Anti-Defamation League and the producers of the radio show “Superman,” who used information about the Klan’s rituals and code words in a multi-episode story titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross.””

Kennedy also helped the state of Georgia revoke the Klan’s national corporate charter in 1947. Because apparently the Klan still had a national charter in 1947, and also in 1947, the state of Georgia wanted to repeal it, both things worth noting. It turns out Stetson Kennedy cribbed a lot of his notes from a guy who went by John Doe, who had been in the Klan and then saw the light and went undercover to bring their evil to the public light. So shout out to ancestor Stetson Kennedy for using his position of power to fight for justice even when some people in power didn’t want them to come to justice, and also big shout out to that unsung John Doe for having a conversion experience and risking his life and safety so the world would know how the Klan actually operated. Another reason we need to keep our systems of justice independent of people with lots of power.

Who’s working on this stuff now:

If you’d like to delve more deeply into this particular issue, I like the work of Project Democracy. Follow their work to learn more. And if there are others you like, drop them in the comments!

I want to note that our justice system is a messy one and throughout history has sometimes prioritized the wellbeing of some at the expense of others. No US institution is free of our origins in enslavement and theft of land. And many US governmental institutions have somewhere in their core the possibility of actual democracy, of actual justice. At a time where democracy itself is at risk, I hope we can pay attention to what’s at risk, why, and what we can learn from our past to equip us for the future.

Thanks for staying connected as we work to preserve democracy as a tool in our work for diversity, equity, and inclusion.