There was a moment in time after Taraji P. Henson called out Project 2025 during the BET Awards when it felt like you couldn't turn anywhere without hearing someone talk about the sinister right-wing plan. And yet somewhere it seemingly got lost in the shuffle.
Despite her and hundreds of other folks' warnings today we find ourselves facing the very real reality that this may indeed become the law of the land. So what exactly does that mean? While no one can guarantee what the future looks like, here's what we do know.
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Project 2025 is a manifesto written in 2023 that consists of a 900-page — I repeat, a nine-hundred-page — document entitled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” that details everything the Republicans would do if they regain control in November.
Mind you, this is not meant specifically for Donald Trump, although he’s the current face of the Republican party. This is meant for any Republican leader who’s taking over, and it effectively eliminates every ounce of progress we’ve made since the Constitution was signed in 1776.
In case this doesn’t land with you just yet, this is not a drill.
They would eliminate the entire Department of Education.
The Department of Justice already has all of their targets lined up.
They would not only ban books, but they would also ban certain words from being used that they would delete from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, and piece of legislation that exists." Some of those words include diversity, gender, reproductive health, and abortion.
And this is barely a sampling of what they would do if they could.
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In the manifesto, the “LGBT” acronym makes twelve appearances (and only six of them include the “Q”). In its first mention, Kiron K. Skinner says the U.S. “should focus on core security, economic, and human rights,” but that “divisive symbols such as the rainbow flag or the Black Lives Matter flag have no place next to the Stars and Stripes at our embassies.”
The third mention called the people who support the queer agenda bullies. The fourth that “the next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administration’s focus on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,” and suggests that each of these policies should be replaced with those that encourage “marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.” This is repeated later as the third goal for the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Project 2025 couldn’t make its anti-LGBTQ+ agenda any more clear,” Caroline Ciccone, President of Accountable.US, told The Advocate. “With far-right extremists at the helm, the project is a power grab by conservatives attempting to turn back the clock on hard-fought progress and fundamental rights. Project 2025 doesn’t just pose an existential threat to our democracy but seriously threatens the rights and freedoms of LGBTQ+ communities across the country.”
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The uber conservative Heritage Foundationis at fault for all of this. Former Trump administration official Paul Dans is the project director, but he’s far from the only person we have to fear if this all comes to fruition.
Other people who pose threats in this regard include Roger Severino, the famously anti-LGBTQ+ official fromthe Department of Human Services, as well as Stephen Miller, who served as a senior advisor during Trump’s presidency. If you don't remember who Miller is, some of his greatest hits while working in the White House included: the travel ban, the wall, and the child separation policy at the border.
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If all of this isn’t scary enough as it is, it’s also just a small scratch at the surface of what the Republicans have planned. It may be 900 pages of utter inhumanity, but it’s still well crafted and has every ounce of fear-mongering practices written all over it.
Should the Republicans win in November, the next president intends to essentially ignore the 2020 Supreme Court decision regarding Bostock v. Clayton County, wherein the court agreed that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also includes discrimination against sexual orientation and gender identity.
Kevin D. Roberts, one of the writers in the manifesto, also says “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” This has also led to a call to reverse policies that allow transgender people to serve in the military, as well as the removal of any gender-affirming care.
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A lot of people had put a lot of faith in the hopes that Donald Trump's felony convictions would impede him from running again and have assumed those would "take care of the problem."
Well, those who believe that had their hearts broken when the Supreme Court declared on July 1 that former presidents have immunity for their official actions, which renders the entire case against him null and void. So, yes, you can be charged with nearly 100 felonies and convicted of almost a third of them, but you can still run the country with no questions asked (but don't even think about getting a job.)
What's scarier than this is who Trump will replace z-. In October 2020, right before the most recent election, the Republicans released their Schedule F executive order, with "Schedule F" being a new employment category the order created. If re-elected, Trump will aim to remove anybody who doesn't blatantly support him from their federal jobs and replace them with somebody who does.
Since Trump wasn't re-elected in 2020, it's unclear exactly who he'd replace. In 2022, a Trump insider told Axios that tens of thousands of civil servants "deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as 'Schedule F' employees," which could apply to nearly 50,000 federal workers.
Long story short: There wouldn't be anybody anywhere in the White House or any other governmental branch or section that would be able to tell Donald Trump no.
According to AP News, Schedule F has already been endorsed by 27 advocacy organizations as of February 2024.
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Are you?
Good.
You should be.
Again, this project isn’t exactly new, it’s just finally getting the public attention it so despearately needs.
In case you’ve scrolled to the end for a TL;DR experience, here’s a quick recap of a very basic outline of what they want:
And in all of this, one of their goals is also to institute “greater transparency, accountability, and oversight.”
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This is big — overwhelmingly big — so the only thing to do is go small. By that we mean start looking around in your community for places to take action. Organize locally, and join your local nonprofit groups. Run for local office, join your local school board. Go small to go big and impact your community. Find solidarity with people in your community so that you can begin amassing collective power to create a bulwark against the storms to come. Also, now is a time to start donating to your trusted civil rights groups who are about to be on the forefront of fighting back. The HRC, Lambda Legal, ACLU, and the National LGBTQ+ Task Force are great places to get started.
Also, take a breath. This is a marathon, not a sprint, so make sure not to burn yourself out. We are in this together.
