You’re Fired!
The last issue of “Sentinel” documented Project 2025’s dystopian plans for women.
They are frightening.
Project 2025’s nearly 1,000-page blueprint book “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise” reveals a stark reality. A cadre of [mostly] men would criminalize reproductive health, rights, and justice because they believe that life begins at conception. For Project 2025 this is not up for debate. This is fact.
Shortly after the February issue of “Sentinel” was released, the Alabama Supreme Court added to the turmoil bringing “life at conception” to the fore by confirming “fetal personhood.” If this ruling becomes the national standard regarding life, as is the design of Project 2025, it forecloses any further expectation of reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. These plans of Project 2025 for women run up against a large legislative priorities portfolio and advocacy of the League of Women Voters.
This month we dig further into Project 2025’s plan to enhance its extremist agenda by firing career civil servants and replacing them with a loyal workforce.
Project 2025’s plans are not wrapped in notions of fiscal responsibility or the virtues of smaller government. In fact, Project 2025 turns away from small government to big government imposing a raft of bible-based rules on the populace across the land as we have seen in its blueprint for the Department of Health and Human Services. Far from protecting equality before the law, Project 2025 openly discriminates against LGBTQ+ individuals, racial and ethnic minorities, and women.
Background
The idea of creating the likes of a Project 2025 was first conceived in 1979. Those were the days when policy debates were considered part of the political process—the lifeblood of democracy. Now political debate is stifled and scorned. Project 2025 leaves no room for debate, offering instead policy dictates. These dictates range widely defining who is a normal citizen, what is an acceptable lifestyle, what should be taught in classrooms, and who has control of our bodies. It is an authoritarian plan prepared to impose its values and ideals on the entire nation.
In his Forward to Project 2025 “Mandate,” Kevin Roberts offers a unique mix of ideology with so-called good government practices including:
“… how to fire supposedly “un-fireable” federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of government; how to restore the American people’s constitutional authority over the Administrative State; and how to save untold taxpayer dollars in the process.” [p. 9]
You don’t have to look far to find the “own the libs” tropes in this document. “Woke propaganda” has vexed the far right for years. Attacks on “woke” appear on page after page. They attack vulnerable minorities and women. They attack race, ethnicity, gender. They attack the very ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
More Background
A few years back journalist Jonathan Swan landed a story about “Schedule F” for Axios that continues to attract attention on the periphery of political pundits. We can ignore it now, but we do so at our own peril. It’s time to open our eyes to the enormous impact of Schedule F.
In the bullseye of the 2 million plus federal workforce, there are estimated to be as many as 50,000 career civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have influence over “policy-determining, policymaking or policy-advocating." These tens of thousands of civil servants are considered career employees and are protected by federal law and regulations from the winds of political change. They provide continuity of expertise to a government that would otherwise be remaking itself from scratch after every presidential election or two. If Schedule F is reinstated, this workforce would lose employment protections and be vulnerable to dismissal if they are deemed “disloyal” to an incoming administration. Currently about 4,000 civil servant jobs are political appointees selected by the president to run the administration. Under Schedule F, the number of presidential appointees would grow to tens of thousands. With numbers like that the presidential levers of power would be amped up. The American presidency would begin to mirror an absolute monarchy.
Who’s getting hired?
On the Project 2025 website, recruiting has already begun.
“Want to be considered for positions in a presidential Administration? Submit your resume today to be included in the personnel database.”
Among the more than 100 partners of Project 2025, Hillsdale College in Michigan has developed a “National Survey on the Department of Justice.” The bias of these questions is evident:
The ruling class is doing everything possible to cover up its corruption and criminal behavior. Do you agree or disagree with this statement?
Do you believe the far Left uses the Department of Justice to target constitutional conservatives because they threaten its radical agenda?
How concerned are you by documented reports that parents who speak out against indoctrination in schools are targeted as “domestic terrorists” by the Justice Department and singled out for investigation and intimidation?
Which of Hillsdale’s free online courses on behalf of liberty do you think are most influential and important?
- Constitution 101: The Meaning and History of the Constitution
- The Federalist Papers
- The American Left: From Liberalism to Despotism
In her recent Substack,Lucid, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and Holocaust expert, warns us to resist the perversion of language and the destruction of meaning. She writes:
“As autocracy comes into being, meaning is inverted (democracy=tyranny) and hate speech is elevated into state dogma. Authoritarians turn language into a weapon, as well as emptying key words in the political life of a nation such as patriotism, honor, and freedom of meaning. We are well on our way in America to what I call the "upside-down world of authoritarianism," where the rule of law gives way to rule by the lawless; where those who take our rights away and jail us pose as protectors of freedom; where the thugs who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6 are turned into patriots.”
Who’s getting fired?
Perhaps the most vulnerable of all career civil servants are those in the Department of Justice. Hillsdale College and Project 2025 use similar language to vilify this area of government. To them, the DOJ is not dedicated to the rule of law. It is weaponized against the right. Here we glimpse the “upside down-world of authoritarianism.” According to Project 2025 “Mandate”:
"The DOJ’s “unprecedented politicization and weaponization resulting in politically motivated and viewpoint-based prosecutions of political enemies and indifference to the crimes of political allies, has made the department a threat to the Republic.” [p. 285]
Equally, the FBI is considered a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization that should be trimmed and pressed into urgent service to enforce existing federal law that prohibits mailing abortifacients, rather than harassing pro-life demonstrators.” [p. 285]
Here Project 2025 is referring to the 1873 Comstock Act, once considered a relic, but now at the forefront of the legal battles over mifepristone, the “abortion pill.” Since Project 2025 dictates that life begins at conception, any abortifacient such as mifepristone would be considered obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy, vile, and therefore punishable by law.
To prevail, Project 2025 need not convince the electorate. It would simply begin issuing its mandates once its agenda is deployed by a future administration with a bent toward authoritarianism.
- “Project 2025 is not a white paper. We are not tinkering at the edges. We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” said Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, which compiled the plan as a road map.
- “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power day one and deconstruct the administrative state.”—Scott Waldman, Politico, July 28, 2023
Waldman’s article was written in 2023. We have known of these threats since then. We have known that Paul Dans wants to make unilateral decisions about the world we live in…or the world he demands we live in.
It is startling how far Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” is willing to go in pursuit of its policy agenda; how willing it is to ignore current law, power, and governance in pursuit of its unitary vision of the country.
For now, some will comfort themselves into believing that authoritarian rhetoric is merely empty rhetoric. Others believe that the rhetoric expresses precisely what is intended. Either way, the rhetoric of Project 2025 raises alarms on how fluidly the levers of power can be turned away from democracy and toward autocracy. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Likewise, ignorance is no excuse in the face of impending authoritarianism. Ignorance, denial, and silence is a toxic mix.
What can we afford to ignore? What do we heed? Maya Angelou provides essential guidance:
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Final Note
We have all heard it. The electorate is exhausted. Fatigued. Bored with politics. On a recent Primary Day, a young man at the University of Michigan said, “a lot of people are turned off from politics because they don’t want to get engaged in it.”
Comments like that are music to the authoritarian’s ear. We don’t get to disengage from politics. We have a messy democracy to work at improving. Or we have a tidy autocracy.
Democracy demands engagement. Autocracy craves indifference.
The League of Women Voters defends democracy. It empowers voters. It demands that we ensure that Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” is never given a mandate to control our bodies and our lives by enforcing their vision of selective civil and human rights.
There is no time to be exhausted. No time for fatigue. We have no choice. We have been informed by Project 2025. We can’t say we didn’t know. The fight against authoritarianism is on. |