A Virtual Church

Have you heard about Project 2025?

June 21, 2024

 When my daughter-in-law asked me if I had ever heard about Project 2025, I admitted I had not. She showed me a short video clip explaining what it was, then I began my own research to try to understand Project 2025 and what it means for America. I am learning about this, and the more I learn, the more alarmed I am.
 
Project 2025 is a comprehensive manifesto titled Mandate for Leadership, that outlines a 180-day de-construction of the administrative state of the United States. DOJ, and all agencies would be gutted of government appointees and hires and re-staffed with people who pledge fealty to the MAGA President, presumably Donald Trump. On January 20, 2025, a great turnover in staffing will take place. Trump has already announced he will be a dictator on day one. 
 
Project 2025 is organized to the hilt, with plans for large deportations of immigrants, plans to repeal rights of all kinds, from voting rights, women’s rights, gender rights, marriage rights and  to most all other civil rights, no matter how long they have been in the constitution and on the books of justice. All power will be located with a president who will be without impunity and adjudicated by a court system already in place to support the alt-right agenda. 
 
Names are already being plugged in for leadership in the new authoritarian structure. And some of the names are familiar to us. Besides Trump, there are Peter Navarro, Cash Patel, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Jason Miller, and Roger Stone. They will surely incorporate others who are already exercising this plan, like senators and congressmen Hawley, Cotton, Cruz, Jordan, Gaetz, Bobert, Greene, J.D.Vance, Lindsay Graham and Governors like DeSantis and Abbott. It’s a rogue’s gallery that is already supporting Trump in this effort. 
 
It is not new for seditionists and anarchists to live among us and it is not the first time a comprehensive effort to dismantle the government has been pushed in this country. The thing that is new is that today an entire political party is complicit in this effort. Either by silence, inaction, cowardice or power hunger, capitulation by the Republican Party seems to have given life to this plan. 
 
We have long known the agenda of the Federalist Society for seeing that conservative judges are placed at all levels of the judiciary. We see how this is already impacting the American system of justice with Aileen Cannon and her slow-walking style in Florida and in recent actions of SCOTUS. The ban on bump stocks has been repealed and should shock and frighten all of us. This is happening before our eyes. 
 
Project 2025 is being promoted by the Heritage Foundation, which is funded by ultra-right-wing conservatives, including most notably the Koch Brothers. The purpose statement is written on their website, “Project 2025, also known as the Presidential Transition Project, is a collection of policy proposals to reshape the US Federal government to support the agenda of the Republican President.” They are presuming Trump will be President. 
 
The goal is “to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on day one to deconstruct the Administrative State.” Their playbook is to form transition teams and draft transition plans to put into place as soon as the President utters, “So help me God.”
 
The country as we know it will be thrown into chaos. Institutional memory will be lost. This nearly 1,000-page manifesto covers every agency, every department. There are people already named to step in on day one as the plan is enacted. The broader fronts being pushed in this agenda are:
1.     Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
2.     Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the people.
3.     Defend our nation’s sovereign borders and bounty against global threats.
4.     Secure our God-given rights to live freely – what our Constitution calls the “Blessings of Liberty.”
 
While these sound fairly innocuous on the surface, what we see already happening is threats to abandon NATO, to deport about 100,000 immigrants, book-banning, climate denial, the white-washing of history, attacks on gender differences, same sex marriages, inter-racial marriages and other things. A panel of NC Justices even decided that there is no right to fair elections in our state. One of the tenets of Project 2025 is the choosing of constituencies, aka extreme gerrymandering We already see this happening in spades. 
 
There are Democrats beginning to sound the alarm; I am one of them. Do not mistake what I am writing as hate. What I am writing is shock, alarm, and fear for what this country will become when Democracy is lost. We who care about democracy need to be informed as much as possible and be prepared to respond quickly. I pray it’s not too late. 
 
Lib Campbell is a retired Methodist pastor, retreat leader, columnist and host of the blogsite www.avirtualchurch.com. She can be contacted at libcam05@gmail.com