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EXTREME RIGHT - The Far-Right takeover of the Republican Party has readied a battle plan for 2025 that will crucify commitments to fight global heat, namely: Project 2025 / Presidential Transition Project, a 920-page formal proposal to take over and reconstruct government via abandonment and/or defunding of federal agencies that protect the nation’s health and environment.
Project 2025’s call to arms: “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.” (Source: The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, A Note on “Project 2025” Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise) Cultural Marxism?
“That ‘cultural Marxism’ is a crude slander, referring to something that does not exist, unfortunately does not mean actual people are not being set up to pay the price, as scapegoats to appease a rising sense of anger and anxiety. And for that reason, ‘cultural Marxism’ is not only a sad diversion from framing legitimate grievances but also a dangerous lure in an increasingly unhinged moment.” (Source: Samuel Moyn, professor law and history Yale, The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme is 100 Years Old, The New York Times, November 18, 2018)
Project 2025 wants to “save the country” by marshalling forces on “day-one” of a newly elected Republican administration, pulling the plug, deconstructing/destroying the administrative state. The Heritage Foundation, which compiled the plan, intends to speak for the people of the nation via enactment of Project 2025 hitting the ground running on the day of the swearing-in of the next Republican president, anticipated January 2025 in a hopeful repeat of the Republican idealized presidency of 1981-89 when Ronald Reagan served as “the embodiment of the ideas and principles Heritage holds dear.” (Source: Reagan and Heritage: A Unique Partnership, The Heritage Foundation, June 7, 2004)
Heritage Foundation’s enduring influence strikes hard, but at times subtly, hidden, secretively far and wide throughout America’s political landscape, like a sponge soaking up and spewing out agenda for all of America, school boards, local, state, and federal positions of influence over lives of Americans, often times, whether they know it or not. So therefore, is Heritage positive or negative for the country? Hmm. Regardless, no other NGO’s clout compares, as Heritage buys, with hard (and dark) dollars, governmental policy as easily as shopping at Costco.
Therefore, as a result, and certainly inclusive of Heritage, America harks back to the feudal vassal socio-economic system of a 1,000 years ago, a simplistic lifestyle with the monarch providing defense for vassals that, in turn, obey the monarch’s every wish/command, rugged individualism reigns supreme, overlaying governmental functionaries not required. Grin and bear it, you’re on your own, buster!
Project 2025 has its sights set on the Biden Inflation Reduction Act with massive volleys of canon fire loaded, cocked, and directly aimed at Biden’s plans to reduce emissions and fund clean energy. “More than 350 right-wing thinkers” (hmm, really?) contributed to Project 2025 tactics designed to (1) block wind and solar power from the electrical grid (2) gut the EPA (3) eliminate the Dept. of Energy’s renewable energy offices (4) prohibit universal adoption of California’s tailpipe standards (5) transfer federal environmental duties to states (6) increase fossil fuel infrastructure.
Project 2025 is the consummate antithesis of Paris ’15, and so much more by taking a baseball bat to the federal bureaucracy and shifting very tenuous authority to individual states. In Project 2025’s own words: “If enacted, it could decimate the federal government’s climate work, stymie the transition to clean energy and shift agencies toward nurturing the fossil fuel industry rather than regulating it.” (Source: Project2025@Prjct2025. Jul 28) Once again, repeating the obvious, it’s the primo absolute perfect antidote to Paris ’15.
Essentially, Project 2025 is a major fundamental shift in government, moving federal agencies away from public health protection and environmental regulations that interfere with free market capitalism, under a manifest plan: Why should government dictate policy to the free market? With Project 2025, this impediment of federal government regulation over free enterprise is severely reduced or removed, for example, gutting the Dept. of Energy via huge cuts in key divisions that pertain to clean renewable energy and cuts to the DOE’s Grid Development Office, stopping grid expansion of renewable resources; meanwhile, natural gas infrastructure will be expanded???
But if renewables are evil (no federal support) and natural gas is good (gobs of federal support) then where and how is a distinction drawn between governmental influence “hands on” versus “hands off” don’t tread on me? So then, is Project 2025 a case study in contradictions?
Moreover, the plan adheres to a long-standing feudalistic practice of snitching to gain favor with the mighty monarch. One proposed snitch idea offers incentives to untrained non-professional vassals that “identify scientific flaws and research misconduct.” This incentivizes opponents of governmental regulations to target research. For example, challenging EPA regulations about risks to public health from industrial pollution. Proposal 2025 will turn the screws ever harder by requiring scientific studies to be “transparent and reproducible,” making it nearly impossible to produce credible analyses of public health issues that require private data that cannot legally be disclosed to the public. Ipso facto, critical scientific studies that could/should protect the public are hog-tied and tossed into a humongous dust bin.
Already, Project 2025 is assembling thousands upon thousands of vassals that will dependably follow orders, with razor-sharp salutes, starting day-one. This is a powerful overwhelming surprising departure from the leadup to the 2016 presidency election: “Project 2025 is not a white paper. We are not tinkering at the edges. We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshalling our forces,” Ibid. A battle plan including 20,000+ combatant black shirts.
In tacit support of Project 2025, GOP presidential candidates, when queried about global warming, express indifference: The World is Burning from a Record Heat Wave. GOP Presidential Candidates are Shrugging, The Hill, July 19, 2023. No guts, no opinion.
While in office, Trump unwound more than 100 existing environmental regulations, setting a record for dismantling federal agencies. Project 2025 is perfectly sculpted for his return with sledgehammer in hand to pummel federal agencies with much more gusto than before!
Still, a hard question remains whether Americans will vote to goose-up global heat.
Will they?
(Robert Hunziker, MA, economic history DePaul University, awarded membership in Pi Gamma Mu International Academic Honor Society in Social Sciences is a freelance writer and environmental journalist who has over 200 published articles appearing in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide.)
