To the Editor:
I have finally worked my way through all 922 pages of Project 2025, every word, line, and terrifying paragraph of it. Because of its radicalism and unpopularity, Trump tried to distance himself from it during the campaign; now he is appointing its authors to carry out an agenda he is sure to claim for himself. I strongly recommend that everyone who is proud of “doing their own research” do what historians in the future will surely have to do: READ IT!
Its message can be summed up in three words: purge, privatize, and politicize, all with the purpose of establishing a government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires. After all, their right-wing think tanks wrote it.
Step 1, the purge, depends on demonizing any opposition to the Project’s agenda. For example, climate scientists are dismissed as part of a dangerous left-wing conspiracy that must be eliminated from all federal agencies. As these billionaires know, data-driven studies can only limit their concentration of wealth and power. Likewise, all efforts to support diversity, equity, and inclusion or to give serious consideration to the causes and consequences of racism in American society must be purged. Such efforts threaten the authors’ social control and thus must be portrayed as the “enemy within.” Those who seek power always know how to mobilize fear of the “other” to divide and destroy opposition. This Project is truly a masterpiece in that long line of literature.
Step 2, privatize, is simply the continuation of a long-standing determination to redirect public funds into the pocketbooks of the super-rich. We have seen the failure of this approach with such public functions as prisons and social services. But this Project’s primary focus is even more dangerous than past efforts: Their vicious attack on public education threatens to destroy an essential foundation of democracy itself. Not only do they propose abolishing the Department of Education, but they also put forth a nationwide plan for vouchers to undermine publicly-funded schools and empower the billionaires themselves to direct all learning. They attack higher education as part of the left-wing conspiracy they blame for disrupting their power. Instead, the Project defends private, for-profit colleges that dispense “degrees” without actually educating anyone. According to the Project, these for-profit systems should be able to create their own accrediting agencies and establish their own standards without oversight. As they know, perpetuating ignorance makes people more susceptible to fear and thus easier to control.
Step 3, politicize, involves their plan to essentially repeal the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883 and return to the infamous 19th century “spoils system” (“To the victor belong the spoils”, i.e. government jobs). That system was a great way to create a powerful political party, but an inefficient and corrupt way to run a government. Now it seems the billionaires once again prefer a corrupt system where government jobs depend on political loyalty, rather than merit or expertise. The intent of the Project’s proposals is to create a “unitary” executive, a president with near monarchical, unchecked power. All significant government jobs (the so-called “deep state”) are to be appointed based on their loyalty to the president’s agenda. Note that demonizing government workers as the leftist “other” has become yet another way to mobilize fear in order to aggrandize and concentrate power.
In 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt declared, “All we have to fear is fear itself,” he was offering advice that remains relevant to every democracy in every age.
