This article provides a pretty terrifying vision of what the Heritage Foundation has in store for the US if Trump re-takes the presidency. ALT LINK in case the main one is paywalled. On Schedule...
This article provides a pretty terrifying vision of what the Heritage Foundation has in store for the US if Trump re-takes the presidency. ALT LINK in case the main one is paywalled.
With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.
The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office, when the Republican president’s team was ill-prepared, his Cabinet nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation and policies were met with resistance — by lawmakers, government workers and even Trump’s own appointees who refused to bend or break protocol, or in some cases violate laws, to achieve his goals.
While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are being echoed by GOP rivals Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans.
“The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort who is now president at the conservative Center for Renewing America.
Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.
On Schedule F...
“It frightens me,” said Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado Denver, who warns the idea would bring a return to a political spoils system.
The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee-table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of long-standing conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.
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.
There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
As the article states, it is not clear a president has the authority to unilaterally impose all the plans described. But as Trump's previous and less well-organized presidency demonstrated, respect for norms and conventions is no safeguard.
The problem is, who will stop him? Congress will very likely be split (GOP are likely to take the Senate and maybe Dems will get the House). Federal courts, including SCOTUS, could rule against...
it is not clear a president has the authority to unilaterally impose all the plans described
The problem is, who will stop him? Congress will very likely be split (GOP are likely to take the Senate and maybe Dems will get the House). Federal courts, including SCOTUS, could rule against him for particularly on cases but who knows how that would go. And they have no enforcement, so if Trump's willing to ignore them then what's to do?
The whole system is set up in a way that requires everyone to respect what everyone else does. When Trump's DHS-appointed head (Wolf) was ruled to be unlawfully appointed and his orders overturned, everything only continues to function because people did what was ordered. If the bureaucracy is replaced with "yes men" (as proposed here) who don't care what a court decides, then what?
So odd to recall this is describing a "conservative" movement.
As the article states, it is not clear a president has the authority to unilaterally impose all the plans described. But as Trump's previous and less well-organized presidency demonstrated, respect for norms and conventions is no safeguard.
So odd to recall this is describing a "conservative" movement.
What I notice is the author of this article -- the Associated Press. This is not MSNBC or some left-leaning organization. This is the center-of-the-road Associated Press. Reuters has also written...
What I notice is the author of this article -- the Associated Press. This is not MSNBC or some left-leaning organization. This is the center-of-the-road Associated Press. Reuters has also written about it a little.
Very cool, very normal. How is this not viewed as sedition by the government? Its a group of organizations led by millionaires actively saying that they will disrupt the government through...
Very cool, very normal. How is this not viewed as sedition by the government? Its a group of organizations led by millionaires actively saying that they will disrupt the government through terrorism/intimidation and likely violence. Isnt this essentially an admission that theyll raid the capital again but this time it'll be with the blessing of the president?
My take is that a conservative think tank wants to avoid the complete chaos and inefficiency of the first Trump administration, so they wrote a playbook that the next Republican administration can...
My take is that a conservative think tank wants to avoid the complete chaos and inefficiency of the first Trump administration, so they wrote a playbook that the next Republican administration can follow to more efficiently implement their policies. The most radical proposal mentioned in the article is replacing tens of thousand of federal employees with Republicans. I'm guessing that's the sedition part countchocula read from the article, but that's not actually sedition. And unlike them, I didn't find a single mention (literal or implied) of terrorism/intimidation or violence, and even trying to read between the lines I can't in any way connect this to a raid on the capital.
Yea it's a hateful call to action, full of doublespeek and bad rhetoric with 0 justifications. How exactly is work requirements for food stamps pro-family? If you have a job you shouldn't need...
Yea it's a hateful call to action, full of doublespeek and bad rhetoric with 0 justifications.
How exactly is work requirements for food stamps pro-family? If you have a job you shouldn't need food stamps, and if that's not the case then minimum wages need raised.
They spin a long yarn about American exceptionalism Freedom, then say thats the reason we need closed borders. I'm sorry, closed borders are antithical to freedom no matter how you dice it.
It reeks of fascism and anyone who rejects this better be prepared to do so at the highest cost. Or it's gonna be reality. Going to the voting booth and pushing a button and protesting peacefully in "free speech zones" ain't gonna cut it.
How exactly is this not fascist rhetoric? Here is the manifesto which is the topic of the news article. While not every warning sign in isolation is an indicator of fascism, eventually you need to...
Here's a handy checklist of warning signs, from Laurence W Britt, a historian whom studies fascist regimes:
Powerful and continuing Nationalism (check)
Disdain for human rights (check)
Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause (check: The Radical Left)
Supremacy of the military (check)
Rampant sexism (check)
Controlled Mass Media (check)
Obsession with National Security (check)
Religion and Government are Intertwined (check)
Corporate Power is protected (check, via deregulation)
Labor Power is suppressed (check)
Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts (check)
Obsession with crime and punishment (check)
Rampant cronyism and corruption (check)
Fraudulent Elections (check)
I'm about 15 pages in and we've checked every box. The project itself is calling for conservative volunteers to come replace all the federal employees whom will be fired when they're re-declared as at-will. If this book isn't (yet another) sign of an attempt by the Republican Party to overthrow democracy, I don't know what is.
Edit: I just realized that you may have meant that this isn't a case of just casually tossing around "fascism". Sorry if that's what you intended.
The problem was that your reflexive pronoun "that" could be referring to either fascism, or the state of being tossed around a lot. It's an ambiguous construction. If you'd used a semicolon...
The problem was that your reflexive pronoun "that" could be referring to either fascism, or the state of being tossed around a lot. It's an ambiguous construction.
If you'd used a semicolon between "... tossed around a lot" and "this ain't that," you'd have strengthened the connection between the clauses and it would've been easier for the reader to interpret your intent correctly.
Some people have an unreasonable distaste for semicolons, perhaps taking a cue from Kurt Vonnegut, who said of them:
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
I'm a big fan of Mr. Vonnegut, but in this matter we differ sharply.
It gets used a lot because the GOP is fascist. Conservativism is, at its core, the defense of aristocracy and the monarchy. It always has been a philosophy to defend the ruling few. Hopefully...
It gets used a lot because the GOP is fascist.
Conservativism is, at its core, the defense of aristocracy and the monarchy. It always has been a philosophy to defend the ruling few. Hopefully people start to realize this before it's too late, there is no real merit to conservative political philosophy and there is no way to tolerate it in a democracy before it eventually tries to supplant that democracy.
I want to push back against this just a touch. I think there are two kinds of conservatism that are loosely related: the Big-C Conservatism that's exactly as you say. I don't think it necessarily...
I want to push back against this just a touch.
I think there are two kinds of conservatism that are loosely related: the Big-C Conservatism that's exactly as you say. I don't think it necessarily arises from a considered support of the ruling few, but rather from the unexamined belief in the correctness of social hierarchy as being ordained by God or nature. That's why things like theories of racial supremacy and Prosperity Gospel overlap so much with fascistic thought. Big-C Conservatism would be opposed by liberalism (the belief in the human ability of rational self-governance) or anarchism (the rejection of social hierarchy and privilege).
I believe there's also small-c conservatism, which is a more relative stance that favors status quo rather than any particular hierarchical arrangement. I'd classify the Democratic Party as generally being this today. The opposite of this would be radicalism, which is the belief that sweeping changes are necessary to improve the social order. It's this definition that gives both types of conservatism their name, but I believe that fundamentally they are different.
I do agree Democrats are largely conservative, but still disagree that means conservativism has anything to offer. The Democratic establishment's commitment to the status quo means favor towards...
I do agree Democrats are largely conservative, but still disagree that means conservativism has anything to offer.
The Democratic establishment's commitment to the status quo means favor towards the corporate aristocracy, it means waiting an entire generation just to maybe have a functioning healthcare system for our grand kids.
We know, right now, that the healthcare system is broken, we know how to fix it, we know that the climate has reached a crucial tipping point and that it requires urgent action, not "once in a generation" half-measures and placating of the fossil fuel industry, not "reaching across the aisle". We know all that, but Democrats still talk about slow progress as people literally die and live out their lives struggling with perfectly solvable problems, as our planet undergoes a mass extinction event that fossil fuel companies caused.
Conservativism has no real value because it's merely the idea that we should continue to apply old, failed ideas to contemporary problems even as we understand those problems more and find better ways to solve them. We should always be reexamining what we know and finding better ways to address issues, conservatism is the irrational commitment to ignorance over the pursuit of understanding.
That's OK, as I don't think I ever said that it did. Change is inevitable, and dogmatic resistance to it doesn't much help anything, except maybe those who do alright the way things are. The best...
...but still disagree that means conservativism has anything to offer.
That's OK, as I don't think I ever said that it did.
Change is inevitable, and dogmatic resistance to it doesn't much help anything, except maybe those who do alright the way things are. The best conservatism of any type can do is temper the pace of change and allow for consideration; it's just a damn shame that that's never really what conservatives or Conservatives want.
Since the right refuses to do so, has the media or left just started defining "woke" as referring to any was action meant to help or support a non white, straight man?
Since the right refuses to do so, has the media or left just started defining "woke" as referring to any was action meant to help or support a non white, straight man?
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader...
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and LGBT rights.
This is terrifying, or at least it would be if I thought Republicans had a chance of winning. The problem they face in 2024 is that they can't win without Trump (DeSantis was their attempt at...
This is terrifying, or at least it would be if I thought Republicans had a chance of winning.
The problem they face in 2024 is that they can't win without Trump (DeSantis was their attempt at supplanting Trump's populism with more-controllable populism and it failed miserably), and they probably can't win with Trump due to all his crime and incompetence (if he's even legally permitted to run for president now).
Everyone thought Hillary had it in the bag... I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm not sure that kind of confidence is called for, or particularly helpful.
Everyone thought Hillary had it in the bag... I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm not sure that kind of confidence is called for, or particularly helpful.
They shouldn't have. Neither party is able to win 3 presidential elections in a row. Career politicians know this, which is why there were so many serious republican candidates and so few serious...
They shouldn't have. Neither party is able to win 3 presidential elections in a row. Career politicians know this, which is why there were so many serious republican candidates and so few serious democratic candidates in 2016. They all knew the next president would be a republican.
But many people didn't think Trump was a serious candidate and expected him to lose, not so much for Hillary to win. My point is just that I don't think it's possible to be confident about any...
But many people didn't think Trump was a serious candidate and expected him to lose, not so much for Hillary to win. My point is just that I don't think it's possible to be confident about any presidential election outcome at the moment.
Exactly. 2 Democrats in a row haven't been elected into office (several VPs ascended due to death of POTUS prior to reelection) since before the Civil War. And on top of that the Dems ran a...
Exactly. 2 Democrats in a row haven't been elected into office (several VPs ascended due to death of POTUS prior to reelection) since before the Civil War.
And on top of that the Dems ran a candidate the GOP had been demonizing for a quarter-century.
I'm honestly not trying to be a Debby Downer but I remember when his whole campaign started it was considered a joke and many memes were made. Then he won. I remember when, once upon a time, we...
I'm honestly not trying to be a Debby Downer but I remember when his whole campaign started it was considered a joke and many memes were made. Then he won.
I remember when, once upon a time, we collectively decided that someone who misspelt "potato" was unfit for government yet Trump's multiple impeachments and his multiple cases against him are seen as a bonus by a huge portion of the population. If he didn't respect the norms and mores of the system when he was president what makes you think pesky things like "legally permitted to run" are stopping him?
I don't think there is anything left to further sway people one way or another on him and he still has a huge percentage of the population hoodwinked into blindly following him. If he can use it to scam raise campaign funds he will. And yes, I fully expect him to still try to run for office even if he's convicted before then. McConnell, McCarthy and the rest of the "leaders" of the Republican party have every bit of the blame too. In fact, in my mind, anyone still in the party of "law and order" is just as culpable.
This is the most I've ever wanted to be wrong in my entire life.
The electoral map is so fucked that, despite being deeply unpopular, Trump can still squeak by. Here is the current state of likely electoral votes. Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia are all being...
The electoral map is so fucked that, despite being deeply unpopular, Trump can still squeak by. Here is the current state of likely electoral votes. Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia are all being heavily worked by conservative activists to compromise the integrity of their elections. Campaigns of voter intimidation and other suppression tactics will also, almost certainly, be prominent there and I honestly wouldn't even rule out acts of terrorism aimed at disrupting the electoral count in targeted majority minority districts.
Successfully ratfucking all three of those states, or even ratfucking 2 and legitimately winning in Pennsylvania, is a Trump win.
I will add that here in WI we have a State Supreme Court case regarding electoral maps upcoming. The GOP are trying to impeach the newly elected judge that is expected to sway the bench left, just...
I will add that here in WI we have a State Supreme Court case regarding electoral maps upcoming. The GOP are trying to impeach the newly elected judge that is expected to sway the bench left, just so that their gerrymandering remains intact. They are trying to circumvent the system in any way possible.
This article provides a pretty terrifying vision of what the Heritage Foundation has in store for the US if Trump re-takes the presidency. ALT LINK in case the main one is paywalled.
On Schedule F...
As the article states, it is not clear a president has the authority to unilaterally impose all the plans described. But as Trump's previous and less well-organized presidency demonstrated, respect for norms and conventions is no safeguard.
The problem is, who will stop him? Congress will very likely be split (GOP are likely to take the Senate and maybe Dems will get the House). Federal courts, including SCOTUS, could rule against him for particularly on cases but who knows how that would go. And they have no enforcement, so if Trump's willing to ignore them then what's to do?
The whole system is set up in a way that requires everyone to respect what everyone else does. When Trump's DHS-appointed head (Wolf) was ruled to be unlawfully appointed and his orders overturned, everything only continues to function because people did what was ordered. If the bureaucracy is replaced with "yes men" (as proposed here) who don't care what a court decides, then what?
So odd to recall this is describing a "conservative" movement.
What I notice is the author of this article -- the Associated Press. This is not MSNBC or some left-leaning organization. This is the center-of-the-road Associated Press. Reuters has also written about it a little.
Associated Press is still a great source, but they have gone the way of a traditional news site and have been editorializing a bit more recently.
Very cool, very normal. How is this not viewed as sedition by the government? Its a group of organizations led by millionaires actively saying that they will disrupt the government through terrorism/intimidation and likely violence. Isnt this essentially an admission that theyll raid the capital again but this time it'll be with the blessing of the president?
There's precedent for rich people facing no consequences for plotting sedition.
You and me seem to have read two entirely different articles.
If you don't mind my asking, what was your take on the article, and what do you believe his was?
My take is that a conservative think tank wants to avoid the complete chaos and inefficiency of the first Trump administration, so they wrote a playbook that the next Republican administration can follow to more efficiently implement their policies. The most radical proposal mentioned in the article is replacing tens of thousand of federal employees with Republicans. I'm guessing that's the sedition part countchocula read from the article, but that's not actually sedition. And unlike them, I didn't find a single mention (literal or implied) of terrorism/intimidation or violence, and even trying to read between the lines I can't in any way connect this to a raid on the capital.
Yea it's a hateful call to action, full of doublespeek and bad rhetoric with 0 justifications.
How exactly is work requirements for food stamps pro-family? If you have a job you shouldn't need food stamps, and if that's not the case then minimum wages need raised.
They spin a long yarn about American exceptionalism Freedom, then say thats the reason we need closed borders. I'm sorry, closed borders are antithical to freedom no matter how you dice it.
It reeks of fascism and anyone who rejects this better be prepared to do so at the highest cost. Or it's gonna be reality. Going to the voting booth and pushing a button and protesting peacefully in "free speech zones" ain't gonna cut it.
How exactly is this not fascist rhetoric? Here is the manifesto which is the topic of the news article. While not every warning sign in isolation is an indicator of fascism, eventually you need to call a spade a spade.
Here's a handy checklist of warning signs, from Laurence W Britt, a historian whom studies fascist regimes:
I'm about 15 pages in and we've checked every box. The project itself is calling for conservative volunteers to come replace all the federal employees whom will be fired when they're re-declared as at-will. If this book isn't (yet another) sign of an attempt by the Republican Party to overthrow democracy, I don't know what is.
Edit: I just realized that you may have meant that this isn't a case of just casually tossing around "fascism". Sorry if that's what you intended.
Ah! I read “this isn’t that” as “this isn’t fascism”, not “this isn’t hyperbole” - thank you for the clarification!
You are not alone in being confused by the way @SeeNipplesAndDo phrased that.
The problem was that your reflexive pronoun "that" could be referring to either fascism, or the state of being tossed around a lot. It's an ambiguous construction.
If you'd used a semicolon between "... tossed around a lot" and "this ain't that," you'd have strengthened the connection between the clauses and it would've been easier for the reader to interpret your intent correctly.
Some people have an unreasonable distaste for semicolons, perhaps taking a cue from Kurt Vonnegut, who said of them:
I'm a big fan of Mr. Vonnegut, but in this matter we differ sharply.
It gets used a lot because the GOP is fascist.
Conservativism is, at its core, the defense of aristocracy and the monarchy. It always has been a philosophy to defend the ruling few. Hopefully people start to realize this before it's too late, there is no real merit to conservative political philosophy and there is no way to tolerate it in a democracy before it eventually tries to supplant that democracy.
I want to push back against this just a touch.
I think there are two kinds of conservatism that are loosely related: the Big-C Conservatism that's exactly as you say. I don't think it necessarily arises from a considered support of the ruling few, but rather from the unexamined belief in the correctness of social hierarchy as being ordained by God or nature. That's why things like theories of racial supremacy and Prosperity Gospel overlap so much with fascistic thought. Big-C Conservatism would be opposed by liberalism (the belief in the human ability of rational self-governance) or anarchism (the rejection of social hierarchy and privilege).
I believe there's also small-c conservatism, which is a more relative stance that favors status quo rather than any particular hierarchical arrangement. I'd classify the Democratic Party as generally being this today. The opposite of this would be radicalism, which is the belief that sweeping changes are necessary to improve the social order. It's this definition that gives both types of conservatism their name, but I believe that fundamentally they are different.
I do agree Democrats are largely conservative, but still disagree that means conservativism has anything to offer.
The Democratic establishment's commitment to the status quo means favor towards the corporate aristocracy, it means waiting an entire generation just to maybe have a functioning healthcare system for our grand kids.
We know, right now, that the healthcare system is broken, we know how to fix it, we know that the climate has reached a crucial tipping point and that it requires urgent action, not "once in a generation" half-measures and placating of the fossil fuel industry, not "reaching across the aisle". We know all that, but Democrats still talk about slow progress as people literally die and live out their lives struggling with perfectly solvable problems, as our planet undergoes a mass extinction event that fossil fuel companies caused.
Conservativism has no real value because it's merely the idea that we should continue to apply old, failed ideas to contemporary problems even as we understand those problems more and find better ways to solve them. We should always be reexamining what we know and finding better ways to address issues, conservatism is the irrational commitment to ignorance over the pursuit of understanding.
That's OK, as I don't think I ever said that it did.
Change is inevitable, and dogmatic resistance to it doesn't much help anything, except maybe those who do alright the way things are. The best conservatism of any type can do is temper the pace of change and allow for consideration; it's just a damn shame that that's never really what conservatives or Conservatives want.
Since the right refuses to do so, has the media or left just started defining "woke" as referring to any was action meant to help or support a non white, straight man?
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and LGBT rights.
This is terrifying, or at least it would be if I thought Republicans had a chance of winning.
The problem they face in 2024 is that they can't win without Trump (DeSantis was their attempt at supplanting Trump's populism with more-controllable populism and it failed miserably), and they probably can't win with Trump due to all his crime and incompetence (if he's even legally permitted to run for president now).
Everyone thought Hillary had it in the bag... I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm not sure that kind of confidence is called for, or particularly helpful.
They shouldn't have. Neither party is able to win 3 presidential elections in a row. Career politicians know this, which is why there were so many serious republican candidates and so few serious democratic candidates in 2016. They all knew the next president would be a republican.
But many people didn't think Trump was a serious candidate and expected him to lose, not so much for Hillary to win. My point is just that I don't think it's possible to be confident about any presidential election outcome at the moment.
Exactly. 2 Democrats in a row haven't been elected into office (several VPs ascended due to death of POTUS prior to reelection) since before the Civil War.
And on top of that the Dems ran a candidate the GOP had been demonizing for a quarter-century.
I'm honestly not trying to be a Debby Downer but I remember when his whole campaign started it was considered a joke and many memes were made. Then he won.
I remember when, once upon a time, we collectively decided that someone who misspelt "potato" was unfit for government yet Trump's multiple impeachments and his multiple cases against him are seen as a bonus by a huge portion of the population. If he didn't respect the norms and mores of the system when he was president what makes you think pesky things like "legally permitted to run" are stopping him?
I don't think there is anything left to further sway people one way or another on him and he still has a huge percentage of the population hoodwinked into blindly following him. If he can use it to
scamraise campaign funds he will. And yes, I fully expect him to still try to run for office even if he's convicted before then. McConnell, McCarthy and the rest of the "leaders" of the Republican party have every bit of the blame too. In fact, in my mind, anyone still in the party of "law and order" is just as culpable.This is the most I've ever wanted to be wrong in my entire life.
The electoral map is so fucked that, despite being deeply unpopular, Trump can still squeak by. Here is the current state of likely electoral votes. Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia are all being heavily worked by conservative activists to compromise the integrity of their elections. Campaigns of voter intimidation and other suppression tactics will also, almost certainly, be prominent there and I honestly wouldn't even rule out acts of terrorism aimed at disrupting the electoral count in targeted majority minority districts.
Successfully ratfucking all three of those states, or even ratfucking 2 and legitimately winning in Pennsylvania, is a Trump win.
I will add that here in WI we have a State Supreme Court case regarding electoral maps upcoming. The GOP are trying to impeach the newly elected judge that is expected to sway the bench left, just so that their gerrymandering remains intact. They are trying to circumvent the system in any way possible.
I'm not sure why you think he can't win. His base thinks his crimes either aren't real or they're cool with them.
It comes across as a plan to re-elect Joe Biden.