heritage foundation & project 2025

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  • #151330
    zn
    Moderator

    #151339
    Zooey
    Moderator

    We iz fukked.

    #151377
    zn
    Moderator

    #151398
    zn
    Moderator

    from quora: https://ripgop.quora.com/?__ni__=0&__tiids__=164174644&__filter__=all&__nsrc__=notif_page&__sncid__=54370001840&__snid3__=72966584673#anchor


    Here’s my own list of highlights from Project 2025. It’s hard to pick just a few.

    Project 2025 plans to:

    • Cut funding for Medicare and Medicaid
    • Legislate that ‘life begins at conception’ and ban all emergency contraception.
    • Eliminate the Department of Education
    • Put Christianity at the center of government and society; remake federal laws based on a biblical worldview as interpreted by Christian nationalists
    • Reinstate Schedule F, a Trump executive order which removed protections for civil service employees against firing for partisan reasons; then replace tens of 1000s of civil service employees with MAGA loyalists.
    • Remove legal restraints from large corporations; dismantle safety and environmental regulations
    • Cause public schools to fail through changes in funding and laws such as forcing students at public schools to take a military entrance exam. Private school students don’t have to take the test.
    • Repeal a lot of healthcare legislation, decommision the CDC and the National Institute of Health.
    • Give the president dictator-like powers. Place the federal government’s entire executive branch under direct presidential control, eliminating the independence of the DOJ, the FBI, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and other agencies. Eliminate protections that prevent abuse of power by the president.
    • Reverse policies that address climate change; prohibit regulations on greenhouse gases; eliminate regulations on the fossil-fuel industry; abolish the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
    • Remove LGBTQ+ protections
    • Eliminate any programs or projects in federal agencies that are deemed pro-abortion, including at the VA.
    • Reverse protections against discrimination in housing.
    • Wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; repeal the Corporate Transparency Act.
    • Arrest, detain, and remove immigration violators anywhere in the United States. Deputize the National Guard in red states as immigration enforcement officers under Trump’s command; these forces would then be deployed in blue states. Arrestees would be taken to “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas” to be held in internment camps before deportation. Trump has also spoken of rounding up homeless people in blue cities and detaining them in camps.
    • Sources:

    A guide to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration (Media Matters)

    The Facts About Project 2025: The Pro-Trump Proposal To ‘Reshape America’ (Snopes)

    Project 2025 – Wikipedia

    ‘Moms for Liberty on steroids’: Project 2025’s brutal plan to blow up public schools (MSNBC)

    Also, thank you to Dr. Jo. I started with her post and borrowed a few phrases.

    Dr Jo’s answer to Why did Trump tweet that he knows nothing about Project 2025?

    You can download the whole file from the Heritage Foundation’s website. I wouldn’t be surprised if they took it down soon.

     

    #151407
    canadaram
    Participant

    That’s some scary stuff!

    #151414
    Zooey
    Moderator

    https://x.com/michaelharriot/status/1812959915582824948

    Michael Harriot@michaelharriot
    Although there have been discussions & articles about Project 2025, VERY FEW focus specifically on Trump’s plans for Black Americans

    That’s why I read all 922 pages of #Project2025 as well as #Agenda47

    Here are the top 10 things I found:

    First of all, when Trump said he had nothing to do with Project 2025, he wasn’t lying.

    Technically, it was written by 200+ pro-Trump policy “experts,” many of whom served in the Trump administration. Trump’s official plan is called “Agenda47.”

    Think of it this way:

    Project 2025 is the MAGA employee manual for people who will work in the Trump Administration.

    Agenda47 is a campaign document (Well, a series of videos). It’s essentially a Cliff’s Notes version of Project 2025 on YouTube for MAGAs who don’t like all that reading BS.

    . https://thegrio.com/2024/07/15/i-read-the-entire-project-2025-here-are-the-top-10-ways-it-would-harm-black-america/

    I read the entire Project 2025. Here are the top 10 ways it would harm Black America

    We read every page of Project 2025 and compared it to Trump’s Agenda47 to see what a second Trump administration has in store for Black America.

    MICHAEL HARRIOT

    few people have read it in its entirety.

    I did.

    To address the rumors, fears and anxiety over the GOP’s latest project, I read all 922 pages of Project 2025 and all the Agenda47 transcripts, the official policy agenda for Trump 2024. Instead of summarizing the entire blueprint for an America with less “economic anxiety,” we specifically looked at the policies and plans that would affect Black Americans.

    Here’s what we found:

    What is Project 2025?

    Project 2025 is Donald Trump’s blueprint for how to make the conservative culture wars a permanent part of the federal government.

    Officially, Donald Trump has nothing to do with the 900-plus page “mandate for leadership” known as Project 2025. Technically, the “Conservative Promise” is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, a 50-year-old think tank known for engineering bright ideas like the enduring myth of “welfare queens,” Reagan’s CIA crack cocaine project, and George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts is a pro-Trump culture warrior whose only goal is “institutionalizing Trumpism.” To achieve his objective, he assembled policymakers and MAGA extremists from the first Trump administration. The advisory board is comprised of right-wing organizations like the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, the “anti-woke” 1792 Exchange and Liberty University, “the most conservative college in America.”

    The Trump-approved architects divided the Trumpian document into 30 different chapters. They used Trump-affiliated experts to address every part of the federal government and strategize what a Trump presidency would look like. But, to be clear, the 200 Trump-connected policymakers’ blueprint for a Trump presidency has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

    If Project 2025 is not Trump’s agenda, does he have one? Technically, he has some videos.

    Because Trump is not a fan of reading or writing, he filmed a series of videos outlining his official plans for a second term. While Trump’s “Agenda47” is a remedial Cliffs Notes version of Project 2025, there are some minor differences.

    Project 2025 is a MAGA employee guide for people who will work in the alleged Trump administration. Agenda47, on the other hand, is a political platform aimed at people who will vote for Trump. The former is a policy agenda; the latter is a campaign document for people who get their politics off YouTube.

    Think of Project 2025 as the instruction manual for Trump’s Agenda47.

    Here are the top 10 scariest things Trump has planned for Black America:

    10. Make the government white again.

    Every Black person has a cousin or aunt who works in the federal government. While the civilian federal workforce is disproportionately white at the highest levels, in March 2021, nearly half (46.7%) of low-level government employees were non-white. In fact, African-American government workers are overrepresented in the federal government.

    This is the “swamp” that Trump wants to drain.

    The “fundamental principle” guiding this pro-white project is a plan to embed conservative-minded political appointees (pronounced “white pee pull”) throughout the federal government. However, it is illegal to discriminate based on race, ethnicity or political affiliation. Trump’s deputy secretaries can’t ask prospective workers if they have accepted Donald J. Christ as their lord and savior. So, how do they plan to draft a minion of MAGA workers into the federal workforce?

    Currently, about 4,000 presidential appointees work in federal agencies, including 1,212 senior officials, cabinet secretaries and deputies that require Senate confirmation. In most cases, the agencies’ deputy secretaries work with the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) office to fill these leadership positions. In contrast, the rest of the agencies are filled with career-level government employees. Using their “personnel is policy” theme, a second Trump administration will essentially make every government employee a political appointee by using Project 2025 to train all president-appointed, Senate-confirmed leaders. Those leaders will use the MAGA handbook to fill lower-level career positions.

    Not only will this employee guide whitewash the entire federal government, but, if you recall, many of Trump’s presidential scandals, including his first impeachment and his mishandling of COVID-19, were sparked by career government workers-turned-whistleblowers.

    If you’re not interested in Project 2025’s level of specificity, you can also read Agenda47’s plan to “Dismantle the Deep State.”

    9. They will fight racism — against white people.

    According to Caucasian race theory, racism against white people is destroying America.

    While the federal government has little to do with local school curriculums, Project 2025 alleges that “Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms,” which is why the so-called “small government conservatives” plan to defund Black history. Both plans vow to get rid of anti-white indoctrination, affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion and especially the dreaded critical race theory. “Those who subscribe to the theory believe that racism (in this case, treating individuals differently based on race) is appropriate—necessary, even—making the theory more than merely an analytical tool to describe race in public and private life,” explains Project 2025’s chapter on Education. Ultimately, this is how the MAGA government will fulfill Agenda47’s pledge that “President Trump will cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”

    For years, Caucasian Americans have also lamented the decrease in white soldiers signing up for the U.S. military, partly because of efforts to increase diversity among military officers. Project 2025’s section on the Department of Defense includes a section titled: “Stop using the Army as a test bed for social evolution.” But instead of saying: “The U.S. Army wants more white people,” they use more subtle language:

    “The Army no longer reflects national demographics to the degree that it did before 1974 when the draft was eliminated,” it explains whitely. “Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend ‘training’ seminars about ‘white privilege.’ Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about ‘intersectionality’ and abortion.”

    Agenda47 calls it: “Rebuilding America’s depleted military.”

    8. They actually have a plan to stop anti-Black racism.

    To be fair, Trump and his allies do have a comprehensive plan to address white supremacy homophobia and transgender discrimination. As much as it pains me to admit it, their strategy to erase racism throughout America is pretty brilliant.

    They are going to officially erase races.

    Nearly every federal agency collects demographic data to examine racial and gender disparities. We know Black men get longer sentences than white men who commit the same crimes because of the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s racial data. The numbers from the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office show that Black students are punished at higher rates. Racial prejudice, harassment and retaliation are the most frequently filed workplace discrimination claims, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

    A Trump administration would ban many government agencies from collecting racial or demographic data. Not only do they want to discontinue the practice on mortgage applications, government hiring and business loans, but at least 15 of their proposals suggest they “start with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity.” They also want to eliminate nearly every division that fights against discrimination, including the civil rights offices in the Departments of Education, Labor, and Housing and Urban Development.

    “The next Administration should work with Congress to amend Title VII to prohibit the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from collecting EEO-1 data and any other racial classifications in employment for both private and public workplaces.”

    Perhaps the most alarming part of the project is the strategy to eradicate the principle of disparate impact.

    According to the principle, if the effect of a policy or practice negatively affects a protected group, it is discriminatory. That’s why proving racial bias doesn’t necessarily require intent. For years, conservative groups wanted to repeal an official letter from the Obama administration threatening to withhold funds from any school district that disproportionately punished Black students. Trump’s Department of Education wouldn’t just repeal Obama’s disparate impact threat; it would “eliminate disparate impact as a valid theory of discrimination for race and other bases.”

    Trump’s literal policy plan is to stop talking about race.

    7. Get tough on (Black) crime, go easy on white cops.

    If you’re a person who exists in America, you’ve undoubtedly heard a person who owns a pair of wraparound sunglasses use FBI data to explain why Black people commit more crimes.

    While I’ve written extensively about how white supremacists love to misinterpret these FBI statistics (You can read it here, here and here), this is the only agency in the entire federal government where Trump’s policy team wants to collect more racial data. “The National Crime Victimization Survey … is of particular importance,” explains Project 2025. “The demographic information that crime victims provide…enables such reports as Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018’ and finds that police are arresting those who, according to victims, actually commit crimes.”

    Yet somehow, they also want to “prohibit the FBI from engaging … in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation.” They will stop the Justice Department’s civil rights division from investigating voter suppression and election interference. Parents of children who commit crimes like mass shootings won’t be subject to prosecution. But Trump’s Agenda47 pledges to wipe out gangs and investigate progressive prosecutors in “Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and every other city where these maniacs have taken over.” Meanwhile, Project 2025 wants to use the federal government to “target violent crime and career criminals” and “use the death penalty” as often as possible, or “until Congress says otherwise through legislation.” And on his first day in office, Trump will terminate every “unnecessary or outdated consent decree” in America – effectively eliminating the most effective tool for monitoring and overseeing corrupt and abusive law enforcement agencies.

    The DOJ will re-evaluate whether social media threats, online disinformation and white supremacy should be considered forms of domestic terrorism. I wasn’t dismayed to read that Agenda47 would impose the death penalty on drug dealers. Then I remembered that white people are more likely to sell drugs, but Black people are more likely to get arrested for drugs. I was still happy to read Trump’s promise for a “complete investigation into the use of police state tactics” until I read the rest of the sentence:

    “… to arrest conservatives and Christians.”

    6. Make Jesus white again.

    Much of Project 2025 and Agenda47 policies are based on what they call America’s “Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis.”

    While you’re figuring out how American tradition stretches back to biblical times, check out a few of their Jesus-based policies:

    They will pass a law stating: “The only genders recognized by the U.S. government are male and female—and they are assigned at birth.”
    The Department of Labor will recognize that “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest.”
    Trump will delete the terms sexual orientation, gender, diversity, equity, inclusion, equality, equity, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and “any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”
    Make abortion impossible (we’ll get to that).

    Allow Christian schools to use federal education funds with no oversight or curriculum regulation.
    Protect churches’ tax-exempt status of churches, even if they engage in discrimination or partisan political activity.
    Exempt Christian colleges, employers and health care facilities from anti-discrimination policies and government regulations.
    Agenda47 also insists that Trump will ”be a champion for the fundamental right to pray in school.”
    The Muslim ban will be reinstated.

    5. Put men in control of women’s bodies.

    Trump wasn’t lying when he said he wouldn’t pass a nationwide abortion ban. According to Agenda47 and Project 2025, he won’t have to.

    While there are 199 mentions of abortion in Project 2025, none of them are about legislation. Instead, they found a loophole that will make it nearly force pregnant women to carry children to term. Not only would they “eliminate the promotion of abortion,” they would essentially cut federal funding from any agency, company or non-government entity that provides access to reproductive health services. They’d defund Planned Parenthood offices that don’t offer abortions. They want to stop government workers and military servicemembers from using their insurance to terminate pregnancies. They want to end international aid to countries that allow them.

    Although they claim they want to “leave it up to the states,” they plan to sue states that require employee insurance plans to cover abortions. Not only would they prosecute doctors who terminate abortions, but they plan to sue companies that produce abortion drugs, indict people who get abortion-inducing medication through the mail and “reverse [the FDA] approval of chemical abortion drugs.” In fact, Trump would prohibit the Department of Health and Human Services from referring to abortions as “health care.”

    Meanwhile, both projects vow to revoke all vaccine mandates and stop requiring agencies to report the racial statistics for COVID-19 deaths, maternal mortality and infant mortality.

    5. Welfare for white people, poverty for the Blacks.

    While conservatives claim they want to reduce government spending, their budget cuts will not disrupt the government handouts for white people.

    Perhaps their most significant push for white welfare is disguised as “school choice.” Under their plan, people can pay to send their children to disproportionately white private and Christian schools with taxpayers’ dollars. Parents who send children and college students to these schools will also receive tax credits and have access to tax-exempt Education Savings Accounts. Agenda47 will also force education accreditation organizations to certify unaccredited right-wing Christian institutions that can’t meet educational standards. However, Agenda47 will “reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left and Marxist maniacs” by stripping liberal colleges of their academic credentials. As they dismantle the “left-wing social-engineering agenda,” they will also provide subsidies for cops, truckers, farmers and real estate developers.

    When it comes to Black people, here is a quick list of programs that will be cut or reduced:

    Food stamps: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Women’s and Infant Care and the Summer Food Service Program will be cut. The program will include work requirements.
    NPR: They will defund National Public Radio, Public Broadcast System (PBS) and grants for media outlets whose audiences are “mostly liberal.” (They actually say this)

    School lunches: There’s a whole section on rich kids eating free lunch. People who attend schools in poor districts would still have to qualify individually.
    Student loans: A Trump administration would cut or privatize all federal loan programs. Not only would this end “the fetish of forgiving student loans,” but it would also eliminate income-driven repayment plans.
    Black homeowners: While nearly three out of four white Americans own a home, there has never been a nanosecond in America’s history when the Black homeownership rate reached 50%. A second Trump administration will continue this trend by dismantling programs designed to increase Black homeownership and ending “other uses of special-purpose credit authorities to further equity.” They will also end rental assistance programs.
    Black-owned businesses: Trump”s project 2025 and Agenda 47 would dismantle nearly every federal programs dedicatied to building and strengthening Black owned businesses. It would eliminate a 60-year old program that requires federal contractors to comply with anti-discrimination laws and overhaul the Minority Business Development Agency into a program focused on “the benefit of free markets, the evils of socialism and Communism, and the destructive effect of taxes and regulations on minority businesses.”
    “MBDA has the appearance, on its face, of perpetuating racial bias by focusing on minority advancement rather than economic need or other criteria. This is why the Trump Administration proposed eliminating funding for the agency in 2017. Many conservatives ask why the government is funding this activity.”

    4. Black schools will be worse.

    Most Black children attend majority-Black schools that are underfunded, even when compared to the poorest white school districts. Part of this disparity is made up by the Department of Education’s Title 1 Program, which “provides supplemental financial assistance to school districts for children from low-income families.”

    Not under a Trump administration.

    Not only would Trump’s government totally eliminate the Education Department, but it would also make states responsible for funding impoverished school districts. That’s right, they expect the people responsible for unequal school funding to fund them equally. Not to mention how the repeated emphasis on “school choice” will increase these funding disparities.

    It’s not just K-12 schools and majority Black institutions. With no Department of Education, no one can monitor states that underfund HBCUs. And Trump’s slimmed-down Department of Agriculture wouldn’t be able to enforce federal funding for already-underfunded Black land-grant institutions. Project 2025 will cut federal funding for institutions — including HBCUs — that offer minority-based scholarships, grants or any program based on their definition of diversity, equity and inclusion. Agenda47, on the other hand, will punish “schools that persist in explicit, unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity” with fines that equal their endowment. Under a Trump administration, “area studies” programs — majors like African American studies, women’s studies, etc., would also be defunded. In contrast, “programs that teach about free markets and economics” would continue to promote capitalism.

    “President Trump will veto any effort to weaponize or nationalize civics education,” Agenda47 explains. “And he will create a credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values and support the American Way of Life.”

    To be fair, racism is the most “American Way of Life.”

    3. They want to go backward.

    Project 2025 and Agenda47 don’t just plan to advance a new conservative agenda, they also want to reverse any gains toward equality and justice.

    Aside from eliminating agency-level civil rights offices, they will repeal policies on LGBTQ rights, gender-affirming care and racial discrimination. They will rescind the data collection provision that creates access to capital for Black-owned businesses. The “diversity visa lottery” will also be repealed, as will nearly every environmental regulation. Every loan program in the Department of Education will be abolished, not modified. Medicare policies that benefit individual users instead of corporations will be reversed. Federal contractors will no longer have to pay “fair market wages.”

    They will “immediately end the Biden Administration’s Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity (PAVE) policies” that prevent real estate appraisers from discriminating against Black home sellers. The HUD regulations that address housing inequality in segregated suburbs will be reversed because, according to Agenda47, it is just another “‘equity’ plan to impose the left’s Marxist housing agenda on your communities.” Trump will also repeal provisions that protect Black schoolchildren from the school-to-prison pipeline.

    “President Trump will end the leftist takeover of school discipline and the juvenile system. He will order the Departments of Justice and Education to overhaul federal standards on disciplining minors to get violent thugs out of our children’s classrooms so they can get the professional help they need. When troubled youth are out of control, the consequences must be ‘swift, certain, and strong.’

    Interestingly, neither project included a plan to strengthen the dismantled portions of the Voting Rights Act or any other civil rights legislation.

    2. The quiet part, loudly.

    Because disguising racism is sometimes impractical, Agenda47 and Project 2025 don’t try to hide all of the racism with dog whistles.

    For instance, an entire section labeled “The Equity Agenda” accused the Biden administration of a dastardly plan to “create several new offices to promote ‘equity.”

    “These policies “must be forcefully opposed and reversed,” reads Project 2025. “The next conservative administration should take affirmative steps to expose and eradicate the practice of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).” But Trump’s MAGAmuffins wouldn’t just end DEI initiatives. Instead, they would “treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative…as per se grounds for termination of employment.”

    And apparently, there are places where the “homeless, drug addicts and the dangerously deranged” are being housed in “luxury hotels.” Fortunately, Agenda47 includes a plan to relocate them into tent cities, which are definitely not internment camps.

    Trump’s approach to Black protesters is even more straightforward. Like Daniel Perry, who was pardoned after being convicted of killing a protester, Trump proposes that murdering members of Black Lives Matter should be considered an act of self-defense.

    “I will also appoint 100 U.S. Attorneys who will be the polar opposite of the Soros District Attorneys who are destroying the rule of law in America,” he explained. “As part of this effort, there should be a federal inquiry into the Soros prosecutor in Austin, Texas, who charged a veteran with murder for defending himself against a threat by a heavily armed member of a radical left mob … I will order the Department of Justice to establish a task force on protecting the right to self-defense, which is under siege nationwide.”

    The best part of Agenda47 is how many variations of the n-word Trump uses, including “barbarians,” “Marxists,” “gangbangers,” “violent thugs in classrooms,” “unhinged maniacs” on street corners, “lunatics” and “wild maniacs.” And, while Trump’s plan to create regulation-free “Freedom Cities” where white people and corporations can do as they please, this plan is not that unique.

    I just call it “America.”

    1. Project 2025 is not Trump-dependent.

    One of the underreported aspects of Project 2025 is that it is not just dependent on Trump’s election; many of the provisions require Republican majorities in the Senate and House.

    He can’t appoint his acolytes inside the federal government without Senate approval. Even if he could, cabinet appointees and deputy secretaries can’t repeal already-existing laws. And because the House of Representatives controls the country’s pursestrings, any defunding strategy requires congressional approval. Conversely, a Republican legislative majority can legislate many of the parts of this pro-white agenda into reality. But of course, stopping the GOP from achieving the ultimate act of caucasity would require a less cowardly group of progressive Democrats.

    Project 2025 and Agenda47 are not four-year plans but guidebooks for making elections inconsequential. This is why down-ballot voting is just as important as a presidential choice and why voting in primaries is crucial to intraparty politics. It disproves the idiotic notion that “both parties are the same.” More importantly, how we turn out against the effort to reverse the progress we’ve made will ultimately reveal more about our ability to organize and fight than Trump’s MAGA agenda.

    But if we f*ck around …

    We will definitely find out.

     

    #151422
    zn
    Moderator

    Although there have been discussions & articles about Project 2025, VERY FEW focus specifically on Trump’s plans for Black Americans

    Our twitchy spam software wants to hide the article in the last post. Rather than constantly “approving” it, I put in a place-holder empty reply (ie. this post) that ought to keep it in place.

    #151728
    zn
    Moderator

    #151739
    zn
    Moderator

    Hidden-camera video shows Project 2025 co-author discussing his secret work preparing for a second Trump term

    By Curt Devine, Casey Tolan, Audrey Ash and Kyung Lah, CNN

    https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/15/politics/russ-vought-project-2025-trump-secret-recording-invs/index.html


    Last month, Russell Vought sat in a five-star Washington, DC, hotel suite, bowing his head in prayer with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.

    Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for a second Trump term, expected the meeting would help his think tank secure a substantial contribution. For nearly two hours, he talked candidly about his behind-the-scenes work to prepare policy for former President Donald Trump, his expansive views on presidential power, his plans to restrict pornography and immigration, and his complaints that the GOP was too focused on “religious liberty” instead of “Christian nation-ism.”

    But the men Vought was talking to actually worked for a British journalism nonprofit and were secretly recording him the entire time.

    The nonprofit, the Centre for Climate Reporting, published a video of the meeting on Thursday – offering a window into the thinking of one of the top policy minds of the MAGA movement, who’s been floated as a possible White House chief of staff.

    Trump has publicly rejected Project 2025 as Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has sought to tie him to some of the plan’s most extreme proposals. But in private, Vought said that those disavowals were merely “graduate-level politics.”

    Vought said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations, and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump’s plans if he wins, describing his work as creating “shadow” agencies. He claimed that Trump has “blessed” his organization and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”

    “Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence … whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.”

    In discussing Trump’s plan to carry out the largest deportation in US history – which the former president has called for publicly – Vought said the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants could help “save the country.”

    Once deportations begin, “you’re really going to be winning a debate along the way about what that looks like,” Vought said. “And so that’s going to cause us to get us off of multiculturalism, just to be able to sustain and defend the deportation, right?”

    The video is the latest example of secret recordings exposing political figures’ private comments. The tactics used by the Centre – which created fake websites and a fake LinkedIn profile to deceive Vought – are typically rejected by mainstream American news outlets.

    But using hidden cameras and deceptive practices in reporting is more common in the UK, where the Centre is based, and it’s been on the rise on the fringe of the US media as well. The conservative group Project Veritas has long conducted sting operations and published selectively edited videos, and earlier this year, a liberal activist released audio recordings of conversations she had with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts.

    In an email, Lawrence Carter, the Centre’s co-founder and director, defended the group’s tactics, saying that there was a public interest in revealing Vought’s private comments about his relationship with Trump and work on Project 2025.

    “We broadly follow the UK’s press regulator guidelines on this, which say that it is justified if it is in the public interest and not obtainable via other means,” Carter said. “We therefore weigh the subject’s reasonable expectation of privacy with the public interest.”

    The Centre posted clips of its secretly recorded conversation with Vought online. It provided CNN what it said was a complete, unedited version of its video on the condition that CNN blurred footage showing its employees’ faces, in order to protect their ability to go undercover in the future.

    In a statement Thursday, Vought’s nonprofit downplayed the video, saying it did not reveal any new comments from him.

    “It would have been easier to just do a google search to ‘uncover’ what is already on our website and said in countless national media interviews,” said Rachel Cauley, a spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America. “But thank you for airing our perfect conversation emphasizing our policy work is totally separate from the Trump campaign, as we have been saying.”

    A Trump spokesperson declined to comment on the video, but his campaign has stressed that he sets his own agenda and that Project 2025 and other outside conservative groups don’t speak for him.

    “President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior advisor to the campaign, said in a statement. “President Trump personally led the effort to establish 20 promises made to the forgotten men and women across our nation, as well as RNC Platform – these are the only policies endorsed by President Trump for a second term.”

     

    An elaborate ruse

    Vought served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, where he made a name for himself as a policy wonk committed to the MAGA movement. In public, Trump repeatedly praised Vought for doing an “incredible” and “fantastic” job at OMB.

    After Trump left office, Vought started the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit that describes itself as the “tip of the America First spear.” CRA was one of many right-leaning groups that partnered on Project 2025, a more than 900-page blueprint for Trump’s second term that was led by the Heritage Foundation. Vought personally authored the project’s chapter on the executive office of the president, and his group contributed to several other chapters of the plan as well.

    Vought also served as the policy director of the Republican National Convention committee that rewrote the GOP’s official platform this year – a sign of how central he is to Republicans’ policy goals.

    Last month, Vought’s team was approached by employees with the Centre for Climate Reporting, which has previously published investigations into climate negotiations and Saudi Arabia’s energy policy.

    The Centre spun an elaborate fiction, with a journalist and a paid actor posing as the brother and son-in-law of a reclusive New Mexico investor. The nonexistent patriarch had watched Vought’s appearances on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” show while recuperating from an illness – and wanted to make a seven-figure contribution to CRA after previously focusing his philanthropy on classical music, they claimed.

    The meeting took place on July 24, the week after the Republican convention, at the presidential suite of the Rosewood hotel in DC, where the Centre had placed several hidden cameras and microphones, Carter said. After the Centre’s employees suggested starting the meeting with a prayer, they peppered Vought with questions about his work and views, the video shows.

    Sitting on a couch in the hotel suite, Vought seemed relaxed and comfortable discussing a wide range of topics, from the history of the conservative movement to European politics to his relationship with the former president.

    Vought said he was unfazed by Trump’s repeated denials of any connection with Project 2025, dismissing such public statements as politics.

    “I see what he’s doing is just very, very conscious distancing himself from a brand,” Vought said. “It’s interesting, he’s in fact not even opposing himself to a particular policy.”

    About a week after the conversation, the director of Project 2025 stepped down, and Trump’s campaign managers said in a statement that “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”

    Vought said he had personally talked to Trump in recent months and received at least one personal “assignment” from him after he left office. He noted that the former president has “been at our organization, he’s raised money for our organization, he’s blessed it … he’s very supportive of what we do.”

    That wasn’t just bluster to try to land a big check, according to others in the MAGA movement. Trump and Vought have spoken at various times since leaving office, and the former president has adopted some of Vought’s ideas, two sources familiar with their relationship told CNN.

    In preparation for Trump’s potential return to the White House, Vought said in the meeting that he had a team of staffers working to draft regulations and executive orders that would translate Trump’s campaign speeches into government policy.

    “We’ve got about 350 different documents that are regulations and things of that nature that are, we’re planning for the next administration,” he said.

    For example, “you may say, ‘OK, all right, DHS, we want to have the largest deportation,’” Vought said. “What are your actual memos that a secretary sends out to do it? Like, there’s an executive order, regulations, secretarial memos. Those are the types of things that need to be thought through so you’re not, you’re not having to scramble or do that later on.”

    Those plans will not be made public, Vought said, but instead will be “very, very close hold.”

    A Centre for Climate Reporting journalist, under the guise of the fake donor’s relative, also secretly recorded a separate conversation with one of Vought’s aides, who went into more detail about the process. Micah Meadowcroft, the research director for CRA, said the drafts the group was preparing would be provided to an incoming Trump administration in a way that would protect them from ever being publicly disclosed.

    “It’s a big, fat stack of papers that will be distributed during the transition period,” Meadowcroft said in the video – while noting that “you don’t actually, like, send them to their work emails,” in order to avoid disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

    He described Vought’s work preparing executive orders and policy playbooks as “the second phase” of Project 2025.

    The work of drafting policies is happening months ahead of the election in part because “President Trump will want to spend literally zero amount of time thinking or contemplating what a transition will look like,” Vought said. “It’s not how he thinks.”

    Vought’s guiding principle, he said, was simple: What would Donald do?

    “We were always going off of, if Donald Trump was head of this agency, what would he do with it?” Vought said.

    The Washington Post and Associated Press previously reported that Vought was drafting a playbook for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.

    More broadly, during Trump’s first term in office, Vought said, “we had people, appointees, that were not on board with the president’s viewpoint – leaking, destabilizing the policy process.”

    “I don’t think that will be the occurrence again,” Vought said. “I think he will find people that share his political views are bought in, and that will be a much more healthy White House process as a result.”

    Some have speculated that Vought himself could be one of those people, with others in the MAGA movement floating him as a potential White House chief of staff. Asked if he had been offered a job in a second Trump administration, Vought said no, but added, “I think there’s an expectation that I would go in.”

    “I don’t know what that would be,” he said. “I don’t know what the President would want me to do.”

    Religion and race

    Elsewhere in the conversation, Vought outlined views on religion and race that seem more extreme than those Trump has publicly articulated – including criticism of the right for what he described as an excessive focus on religious freedom.

    In the conservative movement, “we’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,” Vought argued – an idea he’s also talked about publicly. “Our laws are built on the Judeo-Christian worldview value system.”

    He said that conservatives should push to have debates over whether to allow mosques to be built in America’s downtowns, and whether Christian immigrants should be prioritized over those of other faiths – ideas that run contrary to First Amendment protections.

    “I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” Vought added later. “And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism. That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism.”

    Vought argued that it was important to pursue some of the culturally conservative policy goals listed in the Project 2025 blueprint – including abortion restrictions and making pornography illegal – while taking into account political realities.

    Instead of an unpopular new law banning all pornography, for example, Vought said that his group would propose “doing it from the back door” by making pornography websites legally liable if minors use them. That could lead pornography companies to stop doing business in states with those kind of laws, he suggested.

    And in discussing the protests and riots around the US in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Vought said that the president had the ability to use the military to restore order. He argued that the commander-in-chief wasn’t limited by the Posse Comitatus Act, a nearly 150-year-old law that prevents federal troops from conducting civilian law enforcement except when authorized by law.

    “The President has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military,” Vought said. “And that’s something that, you know, it’s going to be important for, for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm.”

    Trump wanted to deploy thousands of active duty troops on the streets of major cities to quell protesters in 2020, but defense officials pushed back, a senior official told CNN at the time.

    Vought added that the unrest following Floyd’s death “obviously was not about race.”

    “It was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” he claimed.

    #151799
    Zooey
    Moderator

    #151806
    zn
    Moderator
    Karl Josef Co@KarlJosefCo
    Favorite @PeteButtigieg quote on @colbertlateshow live from Chicago : “The biggest scandal, the one that actually has the Republicans the most afraid, the one that has the president doing damage control… it’s the simple fact that they wrote down their own policies! THAT is the thing that they might not recover from!”
    #152217
    zn
    Moderator

    Project 2025 Staffer’s Viral Video on Abortion Massively Backfires

    John McEntee accidentally made the strongest argument possible for abortion rights

    John McEntee, former director of White House personnel in the Trump Administration, and a key member of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 team, has gone viral with a video that could not be more helpful to Kamala Harris and the movement for abortion rights in a post-Roe United States.

    McEntee has a large following on TikTok where he makes videos under the name of his MAGA-only dating app he founded with start up capital from Peter Thiel, called “Date Right Stuff.”

    McEntee’s videos always feature the Project 2025 chief of HR sitting down at a table in a restaurant eating while making pithy racist and offensive observations, typically about gender ideology and diversity equity and inclusion, that Trump supporters can’t help but enthusiastically devour.

    In his latest viral take, McEntee poses a question about abortion access in red states that came up during Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

    “Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned?” he asks. “Don’t hold your breath.”

    McEntee asked, and women answered. Many made video responses to McEntee telling their own stories. One particularly powerful video from Carmen Broesder with account name @geekynerdbitchcarmen was shared by WordClown and AGirlHasNoPresident on Instagram and received nearly five million views:

    McEntee received over 11,000 comments on his video, mostly from women describing their own stories, or stories from relatives or friends, of brutal and horrific medical complications that have resulted from providers refusing to provide medically necessary abortion in red states for fear of prosecution.

    Some examples of the heartbreaking comments included: (WARNING: graphic)

    “Almost lost my ovaries at 21 while begging for a D&C they wouldn’t give me until I was screaming at the drs..finally agreed because I was measuring behind.”

    “My water suddenly broke and I went to the er, they sent me home. Started cramping and went back to the ER. I miscarried at 17 weeks in the restroom at the ER because I wasn’t deemed an emergency.”

    “One of my friends who bled for three days in a hospital room while her baby died inside her and the hospital wanted to help her but couldn’t do anything”

    “I was told when I had a possible ectopic pregnancy that I would have to wait until it made me septic to get the surgery to save my life.”

    “My daughter had to drive 12 hours from Texas with an ectopic that nearly killed her. She couldn’t get a pill that would have saved her but ended up needing surgery because of the delay in care.”

    “Had a cyst burst inside my uterus while pregnant causing a mc [miscarriage]. The on call doc said it’s best to wait a week to see if it comes out naturally. Now I can have 0 children bc my uterus is gone.”

    “I was so excited to find out I was pregnant with my second child, after miscarrying 5 times. In my 11th week, I started to spot and then gush blood. I was filling a super maxi pad every 15 min.”

    “It almost happened to my wife this year, it’s called a uterine dehiscence and we were 22 weeks and one day pregnant she began to rupture…she pretty much became a vessel in the state of Kansas.”

    “Hi, I had to beg for help during my miscarriage and had to get a blood transfusion and stay in a hospital for over a week.”

    McEntee unintentionally provided a forum for the literally tens of thousands of woman who are being harmed by Republican anti-choice extremism to speak up and let everyone know the consequences of Donald Trump’s abortion bans, and there are certainly many more that we don’t know about and haven’t come forward.

    All it took was for someone to ask.

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