Project 2025: Will This Be The Last Juneteenth?

It’s Juneteenth today! That means we’re celebrating that day in 1865 when people in the Galveston, Tex., area who thought they were still held in slavery learned they had actually been free for more than two years but were never told – you know, because the Civil War was still going on and the last thing an oppressor wants you to know is that they can’t legally oppress you any more.

But there is a group of people who insist they are smarter than everyone else who also probably don’t think informing Black people about liberation is a good idea, and their anti-Black education philosophies is part of a HUGE plan to overhaul the U.S. government to their liking. And trust me, it’s fucked up, man!

Burning Crosses and Burning Books

It’s taken a couple of weeks to wrap my head around this, because it took me that long to go through a treatise called “Project 2025,” a nearly 900-page proposal authored by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation and endorsed by dozens of other right wing organizations. The intention is for a new Donald Trump administration to take office in January 2025, and immediately implement these policies. The group joins other far-right extremists in loudly advocating against Critical Race Theory in education and DEI in employment and has pretty much pushed against everything from climate change legislation to anything that has to do with the entire LGBTQ community.

So are they racist or xenophobic? Maybe some would say they aren’t, but if they were spaghetti and racism was the sauce, you’d need a spoon rather than a fork to eat it.

I’ll get to the overall premise of Project 2025 shortly, but the reason I’m discussing it along with Juneteenth is because The Heritage Foundation is part of an extreme and dangerous narrative against the use of accurate Black history education in schools, which is the point of Critical Race Theory. They insist it’s a “marxist” doctrine, but the reality is they and others like them can’t stand that the egregious, systemic practice of racism in America doesn’t leave whites looking very good because the ones exercising it over the course of hundreds of years were white people as the actual historical record clearly shows.

So eliminating Black history education as it has been taught and replacing it with a Bizarro-world version like the one in which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis described slavery as having “benefited” African Americans, would likely begin a slippery slope in which federal holidays celebrating culture and diversity like Juneteenth would be chopped (14 GOP House lawmakers voted against it). Black History Month, something that all of us have observed since we were children would probably be phased out. Books and documents would at least have everything so badly redacted that kids would believe Kanye West led the March on Washington.

Idiocracy Minus One

The reason I'm saying this is because learning for children is just one of the things that Project 2025 would attack. Part of the plan is to dismantle the Department of Education, something conservatives have hated since President Jimmy Carter signed it into law in 1979. It would also get rid of Title I, an $18 billion fund that supports students in poor areas; significantly bolster “school choice”; and decrease the federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights in public schools, according to Education Week.

But education is just the tip of the iceberg, In case you were somewhere in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2022, you probably missed the Supreme Court Thanos snap that eliminated federally protected reproductive rights and left states to determine if they would allow abortion care for women. Overwhelmingly applauded by the right, politicians and policymakers have been fighting viciously ever since to erode abortion rights everywhere, including states that allow it. Project 2025 would start by restructuring Medicaid to stop funding reproductive health service. In fact, it would eliminate the word “abortion” from anything the government is linked to.

It would also quadruple down on undocumented migrants, the people that the right wing loathe more than they did the Russians during the 80s (funny how much they love them now). Since Trump didn’t complete his stupid border wall, finding ways to pick on people who illegally cross the border is the next best strategy for conservative extremists.

So the DREAM Act would be gone, meaning teenagers who came into the country as babies and are in school studying could lose their rights and conceivably be deported instantly. Actually, hundreds of thousands of people could be cordoned off, then booted from the country because Project 2025 would effectively turn ICE from a government agency into gestapo and the Homeland Security department would disappear.

Climate change progress? Forget it. Any significant federal regulation intended to protect the environment would be eliminated and companies that use fossil fuels would be allowed to run rampant and pump carbon into the atmosphere. Global temperatures would continue to increase and the environmental issues that we are witnessing right now would become worse.

This is just part of it. Overall, what Project 2025 aims to do is give Trump essentially supreme executive power, and mock the concept of checks and balances. The most outrageous part of this scheme is its intent to make thousands of federal employees, with decades of experience, technical training and institutional knowledge fireable at will and replace them with Trump loyalists.

In other words, think of federal engineers, statisticians, air traffic controllers, physicists, oceanographers, economists, and others, all of whom got their jobs based on their actual abilities, suddenly being replaced by people who have no idea what they are doing. Those people would then be put in charge of making the country continue to function.

The country would essentially become a prequel to the 2006 comedy-turned-documentary “Idiocracy.” That was a George W. Bush-era movie that envisioned a future society that became as stupid as it could be because it allowed itself to. But many, many people – including its writer –  seem to feel it is coming true. Imagine a draconian version of it in which your life is controlled by people who really believe the world is 6,000 years old.

Media Matters for America did a great job of summarizing the main points that you need to know about Project 2025, They don’t sugarcoat it and show how dangerous it really is. If you can’t read hundreds of pages of spaghetti soaked in putrid sauce, check out the shortened version they wrote and you’ll understand what we’re being threatened with.

Here are some other summaries that will help you as well:

Project 2025: Exposing the Far-Right Assault on America (Center for American Progress)

Project 2025: The Latest Plot Against America (Washington Spectator)

The Far-Right Playbook for American Authoritarianism (Global Project Against Hate and Extremism)

Look, I know you may have your misgivings about Democrats, and they certainly deserve the criticism. But choose to vote for the alternative (or not vote at all) at your peril. We’re talking about a possibly existential threat here. The world you know could first turn into Orwell’s 1984, then his other novel, Animal Farm. Then, because you can do nothing about it, it could wind up becoming Huxley’s Brave New World in which you have to walk around high as a kite all the time just to deal with your life – and the government encourages it.

It’s Juneteenth. Celebrate being free. Celebrate being you. But don’t sleep. If you don’t make your voice heard, you could wind up celebrating this holiday wearing a wide grin and chains, if you’re allowed to at all.