(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . I'm reading Project 2025 so you don't have to [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-25 I didn’t want to spend my summer reading 900 pages of conservative drivel, but I have time, and I read fast, and I figured YOU, dear reader, wanted to do that even less than I did...so I decided to break it down for folks who are busy and/or daunted by the length and the horrific nature of the material. I’m hoping you’ll share it far and wide. People need to be scared by this. What is it? Tons of policy recommendations made by conservative think tanks. What is their goal? They want to take complete control of the government, making it one party, marginalizing everyone who isn’t conservative. It also leads to the question of whether those who aren’t part of the extreme conservative movement have an equivalent plan made of policy recommendations and issued in a thousand-page tome. Because if we don’t, we are in trouble, because they so clearly want to erase us from participation in public life, and they are poised to do so. To my mind, they are putting us in the position that we have no choice but to hamstring them before they hamstring us. They have four core promises to the American people. It is implied that anyone who isn’t conservative isn’t really American, simply by the fact that their 900+-page document ignores the millions of people who vote in favor of policies they don’t agree with. They’re acting like we don’t exist or only exist as a threat to “real Americans.” Their threats, I mean promises, are as follows: 1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. 2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people. 3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats. 4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.” I’ll take them one at a time. First, for Number One, I’ll copy and paste from the document itself, and just highlight the points that should scare us all into doing whatever it takes to make sure their plan doesn’t happen. Before you read their words, I’d like to point out that whoever wrote this took a defensive DARVO stance (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) calling liberals “totalitarians” and saying we are imposing things that are in reality simply ways in which our culture has evolved over the years. It is a time-honored technique that abusers use to make their victims feel powerless and destroy their credibility. After accusing us of totalitarianism, they go on to highlight one of the most totalitarian plans I’ve ever read, complete with lies about what liberals believe as well as our motivation. From the text: PROMISE #1: RESTORE THE FAMILY AS THE CENTERPIECE OF AMERICAN LIFE AND PROTECT OUR CHILDREN. The next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics—the well-being of the American family. In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones. You see this in the popular left-wing aphorism, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” But in real life, most of the things people “do together” have nothing to do with government. These are the mediating institutions that serve as the building blocks of any healthy society. Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering. The name real people give to the things we do together is community, not government. Our lives are full of interwoven, overlapping communities, and our individual and collective happiness depends upon them. But the most important community in each of our lives—and the life of the nation—is the family. Furthermore, the next conservative President must understand that using government alone to respond to symptoms of the family crisis is a dead end. Federal power must instead be wielded to reverse the crisis and rescue America’s kids from familial breakdown. The Conservative Promise includes dozens of specific policies to accomplish this existential task. Some are obvious and long-standing goals like eliminating marriage penalties in federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements for food stamps. But we must go further. It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family. Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent. The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, 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. Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. [Whatever you think of porn, what they are going to do here is fabricate pornography charges against educators]. In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds. [Parents already have such rights. They are going to use the claim that they don’t to fabricate reasons to punish educators]. The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women. [These concepts aren’t being taught in public schools, but they’re going to take things that are, and claim they are something else, and use that claim to punish educators]. Allowing parents or physicians to “reassign” the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end. For public institutions to use taxpayer dollars to declare the superiority or inferiority of certain races, sexes, and religions is a violation of the Constitution and civil rights law and cannot be tolerated by any government anywhere in the country. [If you support your trans kid, you will be punished.] [Another lie: No one is declaring superiority or inferiority…EXCEPT THEM.] But the pro-family promises expressed in this book, and central to the next conservative President’s agenda, must go much further than the traditional, narrow definition of “family issues.” Every threat to family stability must be confronted. This resolve should color each of our policies. Consider our approach to Big Tech. The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them addicted to their mobile apps. Many Silicon Valley executives famously don’t let their own kids have smart phones.2 They nevertheless make billions of dollars addicting other people’s children to theirs. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child abuse to continue. Finally, conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. Conservatives should ardently pursue these pro-life and pro-family policies while recognizing the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations and the heroism of every choice to become a mother. Alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support. [We’re already seeing the horrific effects of anti-abortion laws in states like Texas. They want it everywhere.] [No mention of rape, or the horrific hypocrisy of forcing a 10-year-old to carry their rapist’s child and then accusing US of being “groomers.”] [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/25/2248594/-I-m-reading-Project-2025-so-you-don-t-have-to?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/