(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . It's not about Trump: Project 2025 has a life of its own [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-27 Kossack fam, I just have to say that I had very poor sleep last night after reading parts of this document and watching some of the recent coverage of it. I had to pop a couple of Benadryl just so I could get enough sleep to slog through it again for Part Three of my breakdown of its 900 pages. It’s that disturbing. ICYMI, here’s Part One and Part Two. One important thing I’ve learned while reading Project 2025 is that it’s a far worse threat to us than Trump. Our focus on Trump, and the assumption that once he’s gone, so are the existential threats to us, is muddying the waters. Project 2025 will not go away with Trump. It’s not his idea. It’s the brainchild of about 110 ultraconservative think tanks hell-bent on Christian Nationalism. He is just their useful idiot. Trump will leave a legacy of Trumpism, and other fascist Americans will take his place to try to implement these policies. They’ve been working on this since at least 1980, though its toxic roots go much further back. Today I’m taking on Project2025’s third promise to the American people. Here it is, in all its warmongering glory: PROMISE #3: DEFEND OUR NATION’S SOVEREIGNTY, BORDERS, AND BOUNTY AGAINST GLOBAL THREATS. Simply put, their foreign policy recommendations are isolationist, except for extreme aggression against countries with socialist or communist governments. My mind was going to dark places last night as I tossed and turned. Military aggression against China. Reinstatement of the draft. My nephews possibly being forced to fight in Asia. It’s like 1965 all over again. I’m scared, and you should be too. How did this plan to take over the country gain so much momentum? I think it’s fairly simple. In more prosperous times, the common person is comfortable, and the ability of cultic fascists to hijack their attention is muted. These are not prosperous times, despite outward indicators of economic success, and haven’t been for decades. Wealth inequality is on the rise, and this has allowed these ideas to catch on like the wildfires of climate change. It has led to a populist sentiment shared by people on both the Left and the Right. The Right knows this and is exploiting it well. In the text of Project 2025, they present their militaristic agenda as a populist one, starting out by talking about globalism and tying it to “wokeness.” They “other” American academics by putting forth the idea that they’re against the common person. “Elitists” (which I fear means anyone with a college education or anyone involved in helping others seek knowledge and learn) see the average working-class American as inferior, according to them. Divide and conquer at its finest. This is the way they’re working up to the argument that the United States should leave NATO. They say that international governmental coalitions, with peacekeeping agreements and treaties, exist solely to consolidate the power of the Left. They move swiftly to repeat the lie about liberals wanting “open borders.” They tie the universal phenomenon of human migration, hundreds of thousands of years old, to “woke globalism.” Then, so fast it makes your head spin, they’re on to environmentalism, accusing all liberals of environmental extremism and a lack of concern with stewardship and conservation, enacting environmental policies to the detriment of prosperity. I lived through an environmental disaster. Very little was done about it except after citizens raised an outcry. The environmental disaster was caused by Republicans in charge desiring to cut corners economically. The Right’s cleverness at twisting the truth persuasively should not be underestimated. Nor should the receptivity of the people who feel they’ve been ignored. This third section is where their argument moves to capture the working class and make them believe conservatives have their back. And this is especially dangerous because the working class has long been liberal and independent. The gutting of labor protection laws and the free trade of neoliberalism has left these people bereft. They are understandably angry and looking for a scapegoat. The Right is giving them one. It’s us. Even though many factors too complex to deal with here have converged over decades to displace American manufacturing, the Right has created a simplistic narrative that the working class believes: Liberals did this because we are elitists who have more in common with European heads of state than with everyday working people. We don’t care if Americans can feed their families because we’d rather hobnob with the jet set. The Right’s isolationist game plan is to convince American workers that climate change is a lie rooted in global elitism, and promise them jobs in the traditional energy sector, rather than what President Biden is doing with the creation of renewable energy jobs. It’s true that globalization, which the authors of Project 2025 admit is the fault of both parties, has hurt American workers. But what the working-class Right doesn’t realize is that President Biden is aligned with decoupling from China as well. This is a bipartisan issue. Just because their talking heads parrot that we aren’t the party of the working class doesn’t make it true. The conservatives plan to cut off Beijing like a ghosting OKCupid date, rather than decouple in a saner way that preserves stability. I’ll leave you with this question: What’s the likelihood of them using China’s reaction to being cut off as an excuse to wage war, or a provocation to Xi to declare it? 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