I mean I do care about it in the sense that I care about not wanting the US to become even more of a white supremacist Christian fascist imperialist genocidal autocracy than it already is. But I don’t see anything I can do about it that would be even remotely effective. And more than that I just don’t see anyone else who actually cares about it enough to even try to do something about it so what good is me “caring” even supposed to do?
Now I do see a lot of white liberals (and “progressives”, and even some white people who consider themselves leftists) panicking about it. But then when pressed about what is to be done to stop it, their solution is always, always, ALWAYS just “vote for (Genocide) Joe”, which tells me they don’t actually care about Project 2025, they just want to use it as a cudgel to get me to vote for the same ghouls who are blowing up Palestinians and who have let the spooky scary Republican Party get this powerful. But when I point out to them that they obviously don’t really care because they aren’t interested in addressing the roots of fascism or doing anything real to stop fascism, they get all indignant and upset at me, call my takes “disturbing”, “monstrous”, “privileged”, “psychotic”, and after getting that a bunch I do have to wonder if maybe I just have some massive blind spot and am getting this wrong. But they won’t tell me what is actually factually wrong about what I say.
Besides, what do they want me to do about it? They can’t seriously expect me to back a party that loves genocide, but they won’t suggest anything else.
Idk I just feel like the majority of people I see raising a fuss about Project 2025 and the threat of a “Trump dictatorship” are comfortable, privileged white liberals, usually white queer liberals, who have never had to worry about the government targeting their demographics until the last few years. I and every other queer poc I know is like, “oh, they’re going to go after me for another thing? Sure whatever, put it on the pile of other shit they throw at us, what’s one more? Now let’s get back to trying to stop the fascist Democratic Party from stealing money from our paychecks to bankroll a genocide against some of the actual most vulnerable and oppressed people in the world. If Project 2025 actually lands here we’ll fight that too, but we will NEVER throw away our solidarity with the wretched of the earth to preserve what comfort we do have.”
Please Hexbearians, tell it to me straight: Is Project 2025 something we actually need to pay attention to and if so what can we actually do about it? Or is the furor over it just a bunch of fragile white people panicking because they might finally be lumped in with the rest of us and finally get targeted for oppression too?
As someone familiar with government bureaucracy, both personally and from a historical perspective, I don’t think Project 2025 is all that feasible, at least in the short/medium term.
These government bureaucracies are massive. There is no way you can hire some wine mom from Palm Beach be an environmental scientist at the EPA just because she loves Trump. Government jobs usually require things like interview panels to score people. These jobs have minimum requirements, etc that you can’t actually just bypass. And there so many layers of management. Sure, Trump can staff these agencies with his people at the very top, but that’s something GOP presidents have always done (and Democrats put industry-friendly people in there anyway).
But more importantly, these bureaucracies have their own “immune systems” that prevent attempts to subvert their power. Put it this way: let’s say we got a commie elected to president. The first thing we would want to do is “project 2025” the CIA, right? Just imagine how hard that would actually be, and how effective the CIA would be in largely thwarting this attempt.
I agree with you but the CIA is a bad example. I hate how the term has been coopted, but the deep state is real. The CIA is immune to being reformed from the outside because it has no responsibilities to the public, it functions as a state within the state, with none of the oversight nor accountability. This has been the case since Kennedy’s assassination.
The way liberals are talking you’d think they’re 2009 era conservatives who think they’ll all be thrown into FEMA camps. They grossly overestimate the ability or desire of the feds to coordinate anything of that scale domestically. America is a lazy oaf. We’re drone strikes and bombing runs, we’re not coordinated crackdowns. Local police departments are full of murderous pinheads and the feds aren’t much better.
America will probably keep doing oppression like it always has unless something sincerely threatening happens, and white suburban liberals are not the threat they believe they are.
I see what you’re saying but also I don’t see why the Fascist American government would want to have an immune system response against getting even more fascist.