The over 900-page document, commissioned by the people expected to run another Trump White House, is a laundry list of the far-right’s most politically toxic ideas, from banning abortion nationwide to mass firing federal officials who believe in protecting public health and safety. One would think that Trump and his allies would try to keep their sinister plans out of public view. Instead, Team Trump published their fascistic blueprint on a website for anyone to read,. They even proudly display the menacing “Project 2025” label on the front page.
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On Sunday, actress Taraji P. Henson took a break during the BET Awards, which she was hosting, to speak out about Project 2025. “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!” she told viewers. “I’m talking to all the mad people that don’t want to vote. You’re going to be mad about a lot of things if you don’t vote.”
The clip went viral, amplified by other celebrities like Mark Ruffalo. So the MAGA forces swung into action on social media, accusing Henson and Ruffalo and other progressives of making it all up. “Is Project 2025 in the room with you?” a blue-checked user sneered under Ruffalo’s tweet. These efforts at gaslighting people run against a real problem, however: The drafters of Project 2025 seek to promote their authoritarian playbook. Thus, a simple Google search generates a slew of explainers from various news organizations, with even more coming out rapidly, as a response to the rising number of people asking, “What’s Project 2025?”
“We received a flood of reader inquiries asking if Project 2025 was a real effort,” the fact-checking team at Snopes wrote in their lengthy explainer published Tuesday. Google Trends confirms that the number of searches for “project 2025” has grown dramatically in recent days.
What this story reveals is the stunning level of ignorance amongst Americans at large. This is a bona fide fascist manifesto, published by the handlers of the current leading presidential candidate, over a year ago. Nothing rattles me to my core quite like being confronted by the harsh reality that a lot of people out there are just going about their lives like everything is fine.
These are the people we need to organize with in order to ― at this point ― basically survive, so I’m very glad something was able to spur them into some level of action before election day.
That said, and please excuse the momentary lapse into doomerism, but if we have to rely on Hollywood and celebrity culture to bring something of this magnitude into public awareness, we might be more thoroughly cooked than it was previously thought to be possible.
I have been spreading this to people I know since it was published. Every single one with an R tag on their ear took it to the face and said it wasn’t serious or he wouldnt actually do it. Or that it was fucken good.
Edit: should probably mention its anecdotal, but extremely frustrating experience.
Germans under the Nazis mostly went about their lives like everything was fine until quite late in the war when it became impossible to do so. By that time Hitler had been in power for more than a decade, terrorized Europe, run the Holocaust, and started a world war. There’s no guarantee that most Americans will notice what’s happening even after they start living under a fascist dictatorship. America is almost Russian in the way the general population simply avoids politics and considers it not their problem, even as they suffer directly as a result of their leaders’ politics. In that sense they’re pretty well primed to live under a dictator already.