Democracy is on the ballot, thanks to project 2025

Last week, Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat , author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” commented that “one of the most alarming things” about “Project 2025” is the blatant admission that Donald Trump did not accomplish everything he intended to in his first administration.

“They got a slow start […] so their codeword is ‘day one,’” Ben-Ghiat told MSNBC’s Katie Phang of the think-tank’s proposal document, which is assumed to represent a considerable percentage of Trump’s policies should he be successful in earning a second term. “Already, politically vetted people are in place and will immediately implement the plans if Trump wins.”

Earlier this year, I wrote a column mentioning Project 2025 and the alarming agenda it intends to enact. Fortunately, it appears more Americans have become aware of this treatise,  an almost 900-page document vowing to rework every department, agency, and office within the executive branch if Trump returns to the White House.

Project 2025 has four agendas to advance conservative influence throughout the government, starting with a long roadmap. Alongside the document, the organization is developing a database of possible staff for an incoming Trump administration and, as part of a “Presidential Administration Academy,” is teaching new hires about how the government should function.

The penultimate step consists of a presidential transition playbook that seeks to help the next president hit the ground running in his effort to gain total control over the executive branch.

The intended actions of the organization includes redefining the way society functions, dismantling the social safety net, cutting wages for working people, undermining our economy, and reversing decades of civil rights progress.

Predictably, Donald Trump claimed to “know nothing” about Project 2025 or who authored it. Anyone that believes Trump is as gullible as they come.

Not surprisingly, many conservative organizations are behind the effort. Part of the plan includes terminating federal employees that conservatives believe are prohibiting right-wing policies from being implemented and replacing them with their own choices, as several news outlets have reported . The handbook describes “a top-to-bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice and puts an end to the FBI’s efforts to curb the spread of misinformation. The handbook also said “the FBI have absolutely no business policing speech.”

Reproductive rights are also targeted. The plan wants the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to cease promoting abortion as health care and urges the Federal Drug Administration to stop promoting and approving requests for creating abortion pills, referring to them as “the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.”

Not surprisingly, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-diversity policies are also mentioned throughout the education recommendations sections in Project 2025 and in Trump’s platform. The project proposes ridding education programs of any “gender ideology and critical race theory,” such as a “non-binary” category in data collection or the ability of trans youth to participate in sports aligned with their gender. It also calls for parental approval for the use of names or pronouns other than those on their children’s birth certificates. And it wants to abolish protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The mandate targets anything the project considers to be “critical race theory.” Notably, these include “mandatory affinity groups,” training programs for teachers that require them to “confess their privilege,” and assignments in which “students must defend the false idea that America is systemically racist.”

Many other critics besides Ben-Ghiat have labeled Project 2025 as “authoritarian.” In fact, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation stated the project’s mandate “would be implemented smoothly without bloodshed, if liberals and progressives do not challenge it.” Really?! Talk about arrogance unbridled arrogance!,

To paraphrase renowned legal attorney Sherrilynn Ifill, former head of the NAACP legal defense fund and more recently, the Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University. “If Mr. Roberts and his band of right wing acolytes believe that most American women , people of color, LGBTQIA+ and other historically marginalized groups are going to passively stand by and allow their hard earned rights to be revoked by a band of a right wingers with a fascist agenda, they have another thing coming!”

The language in Project 2025 presents an unmistakably ominous, threatening, declarative and dangerous agenda. It is an alarming ultimatum that must be taken very, very seriously. Democracy is on the ballot!

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.