I have been systematically reading through the Heritage Foundation’s almost 900-page blueprint for a future “conservative” [sic] MAGA-GOP administration. Pretty scary stuff from start to finish.
Phillip Bump, writing recently in The Washington Post, called this “project” nothing more than a plan to undermine pluralistic democracy in this country. The presumed MAGA-GOP candidate has claimed he knows nothing about it even though most, if not all, of its authors were employed by his first disastrous administration. One more instance of this pathological liar speaking and no one calling him on it. And what a shame that a once respected conservative think tank has drunk the MAGA-GOP kool-aid. This whole MAGA thing is like a national psychotic episode. America meets Jonestown. Make America great again??? But for whom? And will it really be better? Not if you read this tripe.
Where do they come up with the idea that the Left has taken over our institutions? The moderate-centrist Biden White House? I hardly think so. The Senate and House where progressives find themselves more and more isolated in their own party? Not anywhere close. The Supreme Court? Are they on drugs? Where in this country is the Left taking over our institutions? What I find most troubling is Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, stating that we are in the midst of a second American Revolution “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” That comes pretty close to pledging a violent civil conflict if the Left has the audacity to get in their way. You can’t get much more undemocratic than that!! I am reminded of the scene in the film “Civil War,” where the Jesse Plemmons character is filling in a mass grave of those who got in his way. Doesn’t the MAGA-GOP folks remember the actual Civil War? It was in all the papers. Tons of books. It is one of the most important benchmarks of our country’s history. We have not fully healed from it so why would anyone want to foist another one on us? Over 750,000 Americans - both sides were Americans - died in that conflict. Does the Heritage Foundation envision mass graves in our future? I am beginning to wonder. The former president fiddled while over a million Americans died in the Covid 19 pandemic. Obviously, life means nothing to him if he gets what he wants. And Project 2025 wants to deliver it to him on a silver platter.
The Left is not “apoplectic” because the Far Right, as Roberts claims, is winning. It’s because it is stunned that so many want to take this country on a belly flop into fascism, a political, social, and cultural system proven false by history, a system which millions of American men and women like our parents and grandparents fought (and hundreds of thousands died) in a war that defeated fascism and left it on the ash heap of history. Or so we thought.
One does not have to read very far into Project 2025 to come to the quick realization that it is nothing more than a 21st century American Mein Kampf . . . nothing less. Its underlying message clearly underlines its aggressive intent. Originally entitled Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit [Four and a Half Years [of Struggle] Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice], Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf [My Struggle] was written while he was serving a prison sentence for fomenting his ill-fated Beer Hall Putsch in Munich (another convicted felon) in November 1923. First published in 1925, it was a massive two-volume tome containing 12 and 15 chapter each. Blaming the Left for the failure of Germany’s postwar World War I Weimar Republic, as well as the Jews, Slav and other non-Aryans for Germany’s fate, this book is a German “Project 1925," describing in some detail the process by which Hitler became antisemitic while outlining his political ideology and future plans for a fascist Third Reich and the Holocaust.
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If more people in Germany had read Mein Kampf when it was first published in 1925, perhaps those who opposed Hitler and his National Socialist goons and thug would have taken the necessary steps to ensure that they never came to power. Oh, if it were only so. It seems to me that most people prefer to live their lives free of concerns for politics save when it comes time to vote. And even then, they don’t think too much about it. The German American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) said it perhaps best in Men in Dark Times (1969). “More and more people in countries of the Western world, which since the decline of the ancient world have regarded freedom from politics as one of the basic freedoms, make use of this freedom and have retreated from the world and their obligation with in it.”
This being the case, Arendt, who has warned us of the “banality of evil” of fascism, believed that there should be a community of thinkers responsible for putting politics into their proper context and order; not to accept what we are told, but to fact check it and communicate this to the citizen voters. Now would be a good time. One of the major problems is that a vast (VERY vast) majority of people who plan to vote MAGA-GOP in November will not bother to read the Heritage Foundation’s program before they vote. If they did, they might think twice. But probably not. It’s like lemmings jumping off a cliff. The authors of Project 2025 are counting on people not reading it. The MAGA-GOP is like the Khmer Rouge in many ways . . . deathly afraid of “intellectuals” who read, think and question.
I suggest you read as much of Project 2025 as you can stomach. It should make you think twice . . . more than that I hope . . . before you cast your vote in November. Is this what you really want for America? I hardly think so.
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