evaluating project 2025
a number of my friends are longtime democratic party volunteers or supporters, so when i saw them worried about project 2025, i took a look.
i looked first at the biden administration’s summary.
purely economic points i found: none that directly affected the working class. closest to that was cutting the big corporate tax rate, which a) has been a conservative goal since there was a big corporate tax rate and b) doesn’t raise the minimum wage.
culture war points i found: a ton.
so either project 2025 is meant to keep whitey poor and focused on the real enemy — queer whitey, people of color, etc. — or the biden administration is ignoring the economic impacts because zomg can’t talk about a worse economy or people will then think about a better one.
i then looked at project 2025 itself — not to fact-check the biden summary against it, because i don’t give a shit how accurate or inaccurate any summary is, but to see how the actual document looked.
some points:
1) i’m sorry if any of this stuff is a surprise to anyone, but having been aware of conservatives’ goals for the past 30 years, i’m left wondering what’s supposed to be new and scary (as opposed to old and irritating/scaryish). the closest thing i see to a new idea in it — and i didn’t look a ton because, forgive me, page after page of “no but really queers shouldn’t be celebrated” isn’t novel or worth my time — is the argument conservatives raised after the dobbs decision was leaked: use the comstock act to ban abortions even harder. if you didn’t know about that, it’s because, frankly, you weren’t reading the news.
2) from here:
“As a result of HHS’s having lost its way, U.S. life expectancy, instead of returning to normal after the COVID-19 pandemic, continued to drop precipitously to levels not seen since 1996 with white populations alone losing 7 percent of their expected life span in just one year.”
so much to unpack here. i’ll just note that the racist focus is what it is, the cite is incomplete and misleading and the reasons cited for the quote in the cited article— “low COVID-19 vaccination rates and the general poor health of Americans,” among other things — are unrelated to the reasons asserted in the project 2025 summary:
“Under President Trump, HHS was dedicated to serving “all Americans from conception to natural death, including those individuals and families who face…economic and social well-being challenges.”1 Under President Biden, the mission has shifted to “promoting equity in everything we do” for the sake of “populations sharing a particular characteristic” including race, sexuality, gender identification, ethnicity, and a host of other categories.2"
nobody should be surprised that conservatives are ignoring their own fault in their deaths and instead blaming the people they have been demonizing for between generations and longer. these people would see a rising bread price and blame the gays and welfare queens. but this is clearly the straight white christians versus everyone else. culture war.
3) from here:
“Conducting policy analysis on the benefit of free markets, the evils of socialism and Communism, and the destructive effect of taxes and regulations on minority businesses;”
this document has been in the works for a year and a half, as you see if you check the footnotes (“(accessed February 7, 2023)” and the like). for this to be the best thought leadership they could produce constitutes rhetorical incompetence. to explain briefly: people use scary improper nouns because either they are uneducated on matters of rhetoric or they are trying to hide their true intent.
i would submit to you that a public policy document’s job is to do the opposite of hide. and indeed, in the intro, we get this:
“The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead.”
look at the verbs: reverse, restore, spearhead. compare them to the verbs in the first quote in this section: … there aren’t any. closest we get is conducting, which is a gerund. and in the “focusing on the gays is killing whites” section, “drop precipitously” could be “plummet” or “cratered.” so editing is either incomplete or atrocious. further, the massive kerning in the introduction compared to the relatively relaxed kerning in the hhs section makes clear this document is incomplete.
for this document to be this far from done upon its presentation to the public reminds me of the budget with no numbers: not a credible document, more a “we want to be leaders too!” aspirational notion.
4) again from here: “Conflicts of Interest. There was a time when the CDC could not take money from the pharmaceutical industry, but in 1992, the agency discovered a loophole in federal law that allowed it to accept pharma contributions through the nonprofit CDC Foundation. The money started flowing immediately: From 2014 through 2018, the CDC Foundation received …”
i’m going to stop here because this is like beating not a dead horse but the glue that has been made from its corpse. 1992 is the h.w. bush era, and that is not stated; 2014 is not immediately after 1992; and 2018 is years into trump’s presidency. trying to hide “our guys did a bad” isn’t the take they think it is, and they want one of the guys who did a bad to be the one to reverse things. further, the cdc foundation didn’t even exist in 1992; as the source document indicates, it began in 1995. so three years after bush-era federal employees discovered they could do a bad, a bad thing was done by clinton-era federal employees.
fixing all this would be easy, but it would also make the section less damning (which is easily fixed), and we can’t have that.
there’s more (e.g. the footnotes aren’t all linked, and the ones i clicked on didn’t link to the sources), but holy shit this is so godawful a smart high school student could rip it apart given a weekend and snacks. i mean, good fucking lord: “insensitive to the consciences of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people who objected to taking a vaccine with such a link to abortion.”
hundreds of thousand of people.
versus the entire country. 300 million.
a) let’s get some perspective.
b) this is, for those of you not keeping score at home, the opposite of their “yes, some kids will die needlessly if we force everyone back to school, but oh well” argument.
to sum up:
1) focus on the economy, since project 2025 doesn’t appear to.
2) say a nonprayer tonight for the project 2025 humans, for they are total fucking morons: they cite poorly, they lie poorly, they construct rhetoric poorly, they argue poorly, they engage in hypocrisy poorly …
p.s. i glanced at the sba section. aaaaaaaaaaaaah so so so so so bad so bad so bad get it AWAY get it AWAAAY.
<3