Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 772: Project 2025 - a Breakdown

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glarehole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way, we bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical, it's political, and there is Political and there is no welcome at today is Thursday June the 12th

12th just had a double-check the old calendar because we're recording it on Wednesday June the 5th So this is our long form episode where we talk about an article of some significant length $2 patrons, of course have already heard me listen to this. Nope. You didn't hear me listen to it That would be very boring. You heard me read this article to hear me listen to this. Nope, you didn't hear me listen to it. That would be very boring. You've heard me read this article. To hear me listen to it would be the sound of silence. This is project 2025. It's the articles for media matters, a guide to project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda

for the next Republican administration. This is a distillation of a almost 900 page book. It's a page book. It's a policy book. It's made by the Heritage Foundation. I looked at and scrolled for, you know, three or four minutes, didn't get to the end of the PDF. This is a long book. And this is, what this reminds me of

is a comment section war where somebody just lists all this stuff and they don't think you're going to read it all. I think that this is a good example of giving their base something that they can hold on to as a policy, but then also saying all the quiet parts out loud. Man, it's scary. And genuinely writing in how America is going to be a Christian nationalist state. Well, like without literally without any exaggeration. It's not hyperbole. No, it's not. And the heritage foundation,

just you guys know, if you don't already know this, this, this playbook, right? This Project 2025 playbook, a lot of the people from the Heritage Foundation are former Trump officials. These are people who worked and had positions of authority in the Trump administration. These are not, so like when we say like, oh, but it's not Trump, it's the Heritage Foundation. Who are they?

They're people who are incredibly influential. They were influential before, they will be more influential again. Remember back to when we listened, when we read that Atlantic article. That Atlantic article is a series of articles from the issue about what happens if Trump wins. One of the things that we read,

one of the things that I read to you, if you're a patron at the $2 level or above, is like all the ways that things that I read to you, if you're a patron at the $2 level or above is like all the ways that things that were happening last time will happen this time, amplified tenfold because there will no longer be any adults, there'll be no governors, right? There's nobody to say no anymore. It's sycophant city everywhere you look. So project 2025 is not a fantasy, right? This is like, Hey, this is what we're gonna work to do. And if you are also like, yeah, but government doesn't accomplish shit,

I don't know, man, because you don't have Roe v. Wade anymore. Yeah. You know? Government does accomplish shit. Government does accomplish shit. It does. And I hate to say it, but when the bad guys win,

they win big and a lot of their wins are generational. Yeah. They do accomplish things. They accomplish things like putting a unbeatable majority on the Supreme Court. Yeah. They deny spots on the Supreme Court to liberal justices. They take away things like Roe v. Wade. They do things like give billionaires tax cuts and cut into tons.

Because one thing that really does happen is funding stuff. Yes. And so they give billionaires taxes and cut into all the social programs that we have. This particular Project 2025 data sheet is broken down into several sections. And I wanna just read off the names of the sections before we start.

The first section is about personnel and staffing. It's about who he's going to put on in the different places of power, the Christian nationalism that's involved in this document, reproductive rights and how they're going to handle all of that. The Department of Justice and federal law enforcement, the LGBTQ rights, climate change, immigration, education, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. And all that stuff is involved in this data sheet. And that's just a smattering of the things that they thought were worth talking about

in a 900 page book. And one thing I wanna, and I know the audience is sick of hearing this, but I got to say it one more time. Politics is a really complicated trolley problem, right? It's a really complicated trolley problem. You know, we talk about it all the time. You know, if you, if you vote for somebody, you're choosing a trolley problem on both

sides, there's bad shit that's going to happen. No matter what happens, we're not going to pull a lever and a magic politician is going to come in and they're not going to do dumb, stupid shit that you don't agree with and sometimes really dangerous shit and sometimes awful shit that kills people. Right? That can happen. Right? You're going to pull that lever and they're going to go left or right or you're not going to pull that lever, but you can't opt out of a trolley problem. That's one thing that people don't understand. You can't just look at it and say, well, I'm just not going to go left or right, or you're not going to pull that lever, but you can't opt out of a trolley problem. That's one thing that people don't understand. You can't just look at it and say,

well, I'm just not going to do it. I don't like that this trolley problem exists. I don't like that it will too bad it exists. And it's your, it's, it is your civic duty to make sure that you steer that trolley in a way that's going to harm the fewer, the less people. And I know that there's a lot of people now that are very upset with Biden

and they're saying they don't want to participate in this trolley problem because on both tracks there's Gazans. Right. There's Gazans. Absolutely true. And that's absolutely true. And I sympathize with those people. But if you don't pull the lever, there's more Gazans on this side. Yep. Okay. And they go for farther. But what's also on the side are all your LGBTQ plus friends. All these people who want reproductive rights, whether that be women or starting families. You're talking about all the young people in this country who you're gonna deprive of an education.

You're talking about all the young people in the world you're gonna deprive of a climate. They're all on this side of the tracks. They're all. So if you don't act, this trolley is going to hit all the people you don't want it to hit. And then it's going to keep going over all these other people. You can lessen that with a, with a click. And the opting out does not absolve you of your responsibility. It doesn't. It just doesn't. It's like you can't, you've got everyone on the fucking trolley has a lever. And like if we all pull the lever, it moves in that direction. If you just choose not to pull the lever, the

trolley still chooses a track. It goes one way or the other. Like I am, we've said it before, you've got to make a choice. You have to make a choice. There's no third choice. That's not real. That is not real. Maybe it will be real later. This year in November, that's not real. And this 2025 plan, it should shock you into waking you up that it's not just one thing that's on the table. Yeah. And we'll get into it in just a second, but I also want to add that like when I said that like, you know, some people are like, oh, government, they'll never get this stuff done.

Remember too, it is easier to break things than to create things. Most of this plan is about taking away, defunding and breaking. That's really what most of this plan is. And that's easy. That can be done with like executive action. It can be done through inaction, right?

You can just let shit expire. You can not fund shit. A lot of this stuff can be done with the sweep of an executive order. This is stuff we don't have to get through, like a lot of it, and this is the problem with like the liberals, right? Progressives, most of the stuff we want,

we have to get through this like vast labyrinth of legislative process. Remember that most of the shit that the Republicans want by nature of being conservative, by nature of them wanting to pull things away, they don't have to go through the same process. They will get more done than we can get done. That's just always gonna be the case.

It's easier to break than it is to build. And it's not just that. They've been doing this for years. What they do is they get an office, they defund, they don't add anything to the program. They put more work on that program. The program falters and fails and then they blame the program. Yes. And they say, this is our education program? This is trash. Well, you didn't fund it right. Right. You didn't do anything to help it. What you did was gave it more work, gave it more responsibility and didn't give it more money or you took money away. And then you expected it to exceed its expectations from before. That's right. That's what they've been doing with

with the EPA, with everything, right? All government, you have to understand that the Republicans don't want governmental institutions at all. They want a full on, full blown capitalistic hellscape. That's what they want. They want nothing regulated. They want everything market regulated until it's time to bail them out because they've failed again. Yeah, right.

That's what they want. And they will do it again and again and again because they never learn from their mistakes and they're always going for that quarterly report. They don't give a fuck about what happens two quarters from now. Fuck your face, pay me. That's what they want. And so this is, this is their MO and they've been doing it for decades. Well, and they know they will get bailed out. So this is no loss situation for them. You can't lose. You cannot lose. You can't lose. So there's no risk involved. You cannot lose. You can't lose. So there's no risk involved. You're right.

You're absolutely right. So let's get started with the very first piece here. This is, this is, I'm going to read a piece of this. It says, one of the key elements from project 2025's administrative goals is to reinstate the executive order known as schedule F, which will reclassify thousands of federal employees as at will workers and give the administration the ability to fire employees who don't agree or follow with extremist policies suggested by project 2025.

The thing is, is like, we know we don't want that. Oh yeah. They don't know that they don't want that. Yes. Right? They can't think past, again, it's this quarterly report thing. I can't look farther than my hands. I can't ever look down the road to me not being in power. So what I'll do is

I'll put together all of these things that while I'm in power, I have the most I can. But if I ever lose it, then I've got to hand all that power off to somebody who I don't agree with. And what they don't understand is that democracy is a delicate balance of power, not just hoarding as much power on one side. Whoever gets it gets it. Do you think then Cecil that what the plan is, is to gain power in order to rig the system? To never give it back?

To have power in perpetuity? I think so. To subvert the very fact of democracy through institutional trickery, right? Because that's the only thing you have to, cause I actually think that there are, these are people who went to college and like have advanced degrees in a lot of cases, right?

They're smart enough to know that exactly what you said is true. That if they give these tools of mutually assured destruction to the other party, that they are also at risk of the danger of those weapons, right? So I think that they have to say, all right, guys, this is our chance. It's worth it. If we can rig the system such that we are always in power, then we never have to worry about those tools being used against us. It has to be that that's their goal or it wouldn't actually make sense. So the subtext here is if we give them this, they will try to use this to completely dismantle

democracy itself. And the at will issue is tied up with ideological purity testing based on political values. So in other words, what they want is to have people literally taking tests. It's in here, literally taking tests to make sure that their ideological political values line up with the values required in order to be a federal official or a federal worker under this administration. They're literally talking about building a deep state. This is a blueprint for a deep state, Cecil.

The very thing they constantly are decrying. It's a big brother Scantron you have to take. You have to take a test where somebody is gonna read it and say, I'm sorry, you're not farther right than I need you to be farther right than this. You're not as far right. I have an acquaintance of mine who I know who works for the Justice Department, right?

He's a mid-level guy in the Justice Department, an acquaintance of mine that I know and see maybe every other year or so, really nice guy. I don't agree with him politically. He's a very sort of center-minded guy, libertarian type person. This is a type of person who's in Biden's government. He's a guy who works, he's like a mid-level guy

in the Department of Justice, I would never think that he would be biased in any way and that he wouldn't do his job in a way, even though he doesn't agree with this administration, I think at all. He might not even voted for this administration, right? I don't think that he's a bad person. I don't think he's a person who would do anything maliciously, right? He wouldn't be allowed in this administration or in Trump's administration. Right.

You know, he wouldn't be allowed in either one. There's plenty of people in the government that don't agree with Joe Biden. There's plenty, I mean, go to the fucking CIA. I bet there's a bunch of them. Go to the FBI. I'm sure there's a shit ton of them that don't agree with Joe Biden. Sure. Right?

There's a ton of them who don't agree with Joe Biden. Sure. Right? Yeah. There's a ton of them who don't agree with Joe Biden, but that's okay. It's okay to have dissenting voices in government because what we do is we trust the system in which they're all employed. That what they'll do is they will follow directions, follow rules. And then what I really want is somebody in that FBI that might not agree with Joe Biden that would disobey a shitty rule. Something that he's going to do that's against the rules. That's what I want. I want somebody

in there who's not just a yes person, because if they're a yes person, what they're going to do is they're going to follow everything the person in power says. I don't want that. I want somebody who's going to stand up and be an objector. Yeah, but like what you're describing, Cecil, is how bureaucracies are supposed to function as another safeguard that follows rules rather than follows people. Sure. Right? When you follow people rather than rules and laws and regulations, that's a king. Yeah.

Right? That is, that's an aristocracy. That is, it's an authoritarian state. We are talking here about a blueprint for purges. Governmental purges. It's not even like the wrong term to use here. They want to reclassify these employees to make it easier to fire them

so they can test to find the people who aren't interested in following the rule of law, who are not interested in following the rules and regulations and procedures that govern our bureaucratic bodies that help keep the machine running without personal biases being the things that determine what is right and wrong and how things function in the government. They actually want to subvert that. They want it so much. They said it out loud. Yeah. My god, that is a deep state. Yeah. That really truly is what a deep state would be and

we're looking at building one. This is a 180 day blueprint plan on how to build a right wing deep state purges first. The second piece of this is talking about weaponizing the Justice Department. Yeah, Jesus. And it's explicitly stated almost that they will weaponize the Justice Department.

We've heard Trump talk about this for a long time. We've heard his sons and the people who are stumping for him, they all say the same thing that when we get in power, it's gonna be our turn. But this isn't written in, it's like written out that they're gonna be using it. I wanna read this piece here. It says, Project 2025 is clear.

It makes it clear that the Department of Justice is not independent from the executive branch and implies the agency will be used to take legal retribution against whoever Trump decides to investigate. And they've been talking about that for a long time. This is playing right exactly into what Trump wants. Yeah, I mean, this is, we have a series in this country, we have, you know, it's, we're

taught in civics class, right? That there are these checks and balances. We're taught that there's three branches of government, right? The executive, legislative, and the judicial branch. And that the legislative branch is a bicameral branch, it's two houses. And that this whole system operates as a series of checks and balances. What we're not taught as much about are the many other checks and balances of power, which are these other departments and agencies which operate independently

from executive and legislative branches, right? So, and I'm thinking here about like the Federal Reserve, and I'm thinking here about the FBI, and I'm thinking here about the CIA, and I'm thinking here about the CIA, and I'm thinking here about the Department of Justice. These are, I mean, granted, people are appointed into these positions, but by and large, they operate outside the direct purview,

the direct discretion and direction of any of those bodies of government. And so they act as a additional series of check valves on the way that government operates. If we break that, if we damage that system, we are absolutely building again, a bulwark and a foundation that creates and allows for authoritarian fascist states to take hold.

This is like, this is actually a playbook for fascism. It really genuinely can't be thought of differently. And I bring up the Federal Reserve by the way, it's not in Project 2025, but Donald Trump has outright said that he wants to couple the Federal Reserve, which is currently decoupled, he wants to couple the Federal Reserve to the executive branch so they basically have to follow his direction on monetary policy. That would be a financial nightmare. That's an economic cataclysm worldwide. We are talking like recession, depression level shit if that happens fairly overnight.

This could be the collapse of the major economic systems that we hold dear to couple those things together. It's dangerous to a level of extremity that is difficult to put into work. Sure. There's a part of this where they're talking about how one of the people who helped write this went on Steve Bannon's War Room. Yes. And said, you should send in your application. So podcast listeners to Steve Bannon may be in the government. Could you imagine? I cannot genuinely cannot think of a less qualified and more terrifying group of people other than Trump's own family.

Yeah, right. Or other than some of the people that were already in Trump's camp. You know, I take it back. I take it all back. Yeah, it's rescinded. Here's another one. This is about LGBTQ+. Robert's forward for Project 2025, attacking the noxious tenets of gender ideology, similarly argues, these theories poison our children who are being taught to deny their very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women. I don't, I really wanna focus on creatureliness. Creatureliness. For a second, just to sort I really want to focus on creatureliness. Creatureliness.

For a second, just to sort of. Let's focus on creatureliness. Creatureliness? The fuck is, okay. I'm gonna put it in a. Is it a word? Let's look it up right now. Is creatureliness a word?

I'm gonna look it up. Creaturely is a term. Derived forms is creatureliness. Of pertaining to or of the nature of a creature. Well, I still don't know what that means. I would say use it a sentence, but I read it in a sentence and it still doesn't mean stuff. It's a word that feels like you really dug

into your thesaurus to find. I mean, creatureliness? Dude, I've been reading stuff for a long time. Never ran across creatureliness. I don't have a small vocabulary and I've never heard of it before. Feels very biblical to me. But that's the thing. All of the writing intentionally has that biblical prophetic kind of writing built into

it. This is also attacking anything that's gender related, right? They seem to forget that, you know, that they always try to talk about how they wanna take pronouns out of school, which makes me laugh. Just no pronouns at all. Can't have any pronouns. Everybody gets proper nouns only.

Where did, the, they, them, all, no, shit. Nope. Nope. Shit. Nope. Fuck, no, can't use it. But you know, this is, this is an attack on the LGBTQ plus people and they make no mistake. A Trump administration will not have any protections for any LGBTQ plus person and they're going to be admitting people into the government at this point.

There's not gonna be really as many checks like we were talking about before to stop people that are crazy from getting into government. So there will be people in the government who actively fucking hate them. There already was before, but there will be even more. And they will try to take their rights away. Mark my words, the Supreme Court is set up

to knock any domino that the LGBTQ plus people have set up in the last 20 years. The Supreme Court is ready to fucking take a fucking one wood to that, and drive that as far as they can away from us. So understand that they are set up and ready to go. And like jokes aside about creatureliness, the intention of using a word like that

is as a call to what they think of as the natural versus unnatural state of being as referred to in the Bible, right? Their intentional use of words like that is there to say that there is a given order and that order is defined by the Bible and there is a given order and that order is defined by the Bible and there is a natural order and a state of being for men and women. And so they're going to define these things for America and they're going to say, this is the lane and this is your lane and you

go in yours and you go in yours. And step one, by the way, step one is to eliminate and like Step one, by the way, step one is to eliminate and like, on exists all of the gender variable peoples that are part of the American culture, right? That to just- You better pick one they want. Look, you get man or woman, right? And it better match your phenotype, right? That's it.

That's it. That's it. And that's gonna be the rule of the day for sure. But the thing is Cecil, genuinely, step two is to say, and men, you get to be like this, and women, you get to be like this. Let me read this. It says, Servena specifically objects to

non-religious definitions of marriage and family as put forward by the recently enacted Respect for Marriage Act, claiming that all other forms of family, apart from heterosexual intact marriage, involve higher levels of instability. We are talking about people that want to get rid of divorce. They've said as much. They want to get rid of contraception.

They've said as much. They want to get rid of, you know, a gay marriage. They want to get rid of contraception. They've said as much. They want to get rid of, you know, gay marriage. They want to get... These are people who want to create by force a kind of 1950s Mayberry that never was. This is handmaid's tale shit. It is. This is because, you know, they're gonna say like there's a natural state of being for women

and it is not to be in the fucking workforce competing with men. Go home, have a thousand babies. That's all that you matter for. And it's not to be a lesbian. Yeah. You are, look, if you have a vagina, you're a woman that is supposed to be fucked. That is the only thing that matters to these people. They're not saying it out loud yet, but they're building all these substructure for it.

They have all the other words for it. Right. Tom, we're talking about very specifically contraception and reproductive rights now. Heritage president Kevin Roberts writes that pro-life administration starts by removing terms abortion, reproductive health, and reproductive and reproductive rights among others out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract grant regulation and piece of the legislation that exists. And project 2025 suggests that the conservative administration reinstate the Comstock Act to ban and track and limit mail order abortions, what they call mail order abortions.

This is also this week, they're talking about contraception on Capitol Hill because they're trying to put forth a vote for contraception. They're trying to put forth this vote that says, hey, we wanna vote on this because we want people on the record, right? And they had a person who was testifying

in front of one of these committees and they asked this woman, they said, she's one of these big wigs in this movement that's about how we need to limit contraception and one of the women senators asked them, do you think an IUD should be something that shouldn't be allowed? And she gets her to basically say,

she tries to say, well, if her doctor really recommends it, but she's like, do you think it should be allowed? And she's like, well, I think the way it works, it actually aborts, so no, I don't think so. So like, she doesn't under, first she doesn't understand it, but then she's, the way she talks about it is to say that certain forms of contraception that have nothing to do with abortion

would be on the table too. Oh, I think, I think if they have their way, there will not be contraceptive hormonal pills. I'm sure, I think that to some degree, they would take condoms, and some places they would try to be taking condoms off. I think that the radical right has an agenda here that is so powerful that if they get their way on one, they'll push

to the other and there will be no contraception available of any kind. I really do because the ultimate goal here is so obvious. The goal is that is the complete disenfranchisement of an entire sex. Project 2025 intends to undo the title X protections for reproductive healthcare, which currently provide low cost contraception, STD screenings and parental care to low income people. This is another way for them to force people

who are underemployed or don't have as much money to be in poverty forever, right? This is what they're trying to do because the people who are in poverty may think, well, maybe I don't wanna have a kid, they might get an abortion or they might be on the pill, they might be trying to do these types of things to not have kids.

And then also to stop giving them certain things that are absolutely necessary to have a healthy family, you're now dooming them to have an unhealthy family. Absolutely. These are sexual moralists, right? That's why they don't want STD testing, right? Because they're sexual moralists, even though like most, none of these people

would pass their own purity test, right? They're all liars and hypocrites and fucking pieces of shit. But the intention here again is to create a permanent underclass, a permanent economic underclass. So as long as the wealthy can have a permanent economic underclass, then there is essentially a group of people who cannot climb their way up the ladder. And so they'll have to do the work. They'll have to do the grunt work.

They'll have to live in this level of poverty and allow wealth to accumulate upward. This is intentional. It's just so, I just kind of can't believe we're writing it down. And it's funny that it's written down, but when you read it out loud, you think, no, that's, I see your plan.

It's pretty obvious. It's not unclear. Certainly not subtle. Here's another piece too about this. The policy book subtly promotes anti-syrurgency positions, writing that all children have a right to be raised by men and women who conceive them. And this to me feels like an offshoot of the IVF stuff, where they were genuinely against IVF because that feels like their principle.

And this also feels like an extension of that principle too. This feels like, you know, and it also feels this is also in my opinion too a way to make sure that no gay couple ever adopts again. Yeah, I think that's what it's aimed at for sure. The anti-surgacy stuff is weird to me. I never heard that there was like a big... I've never heard anybody freak out about that before, but it makes sense to me. It does, it makes perfect sense. I have read- It makes sense in a crazy person way.

Like I understand how their crazy logic gets there. I don't want people to think that I agree with it. I don't, but I recognize how they got there. You know, I will say though, because I think it is an interesting thing I don't know enough about, that I have read some articles which suggest that the way surrogacy is often done

is really exploitive of the bodies of poor women. That like there's a lot of situations where poor women's bodies are being exploited by wealthier people in surrogacy situations. And I'm like, yeah, that seems problematic. And like, there's gotta be some kind of thought and structural fixes put in place to try to curtail and eliminate sort of like the exploitation,

the financial exploitation and coercion of, you know, less privileged women. You know, that seems like, I read some stuff, but that's not what they're arguing about here. They're arguing about a surrogacy position to ensure that children are not born to gay couples. That's all this is. They're not thinking about like, you know,

your brother or sister who can't conceive and like how they might, that's not their worry. Their worry is about like making sure gay families don't exist. Yeah, yeah. They're also talking about pulling any kind of funding for anything that even remotely mentions abortion or that talks about fetal cells at all.

They're talking about defunding any kind of fetal cell research. Oh my God, yeah. They're talking about pulling out any kind of language whatsoever that has abortion in it and then not funding anything that can give abortions. We've heard this push and pull, this tug of war with Planned Parenthood for decades.

Right? This has been, this is a non-for-profit. That is, what they're doing is just trying to help women and all they get are attacks from the right, because what they're trying to do is is there is they're trying to say that our we don't want our tax dollars to go for abortion even though that's not true what they don't want is they don't want their tax dollars to go to a nonprofit that does abortion yes mm-hmm yeah it does

abortions or SCD or family planning of any kind or you know and like the fetal cell research Cecil I thought we were done with this when we got rid of George W. Bush but we Not using fetal cells in research programs Kills people literally it sets back our development of cures and preventatives Every year we're not working on fetal cell research is another year that if something were developed that saves lives, then all the people that died that year didn't get that.

This is murder. This is murderous. It is so fucking mean. We're switching now into the Department of Justice and Federal Law Enforcement. Project 2025 calls for a future GOP administration to immediately review all major FBI investigations and terminate any that are unlawful or contrary to national interests. Now this, I think, leans back on something we were talking about a little bit earlier. We were talking about how you would populate

those organizations with yes men and yes women. You would do your best to make sure that people, but this is an extension of that to have a group of people there that can say, well, this isn't in the government's interest, you know, wink, wink, and then be able to kill an investigation. We don't want that to happen. This would be, here's what would happen. And we kind of saw it during Trump's presidency, the Mueller report.

Yeah. You know, there was a report that was out that he tried to kill it how many times? Yeah, a bunch of times. He tried to do this a bunch of times. This is right within his lines. And even still, what happened was he got an attorney general in there to redact enough of it so it doesn't sound like anything. And then he put it out and then that was the end of it. And then

it was literally dead after that. It was dead in the water. So we have a president who already follows that methodology. He wants to have ultimate control over what the government is doing and what they're looking into and it's not going to be him. Yeah. Well, what that does is it creates a, an authority that cannot be investigated. It creates an administration that lives literally outside the purview of law. Yeah, you're absolutely right. That's a terrifying, the, the, the goal of that is to say, I never, I mean, do you think like Trump does not want this to happen again? He does not want this to happen to his cronies. He doesn't want this to happen to his family. And so he will restructure the entire fucking American government in order to create a system where he cannot be held liable for anything

that he does. As soon as he's not liable for anything he does, what are the disincentives for him to break the law? What are the disincentives for him to refuse to leave office? What are the disincentives for him to use the federal government to grift into his own pocket even more than he already has? Sure. He's going to build a system that says, I get to do what I want. Like, I mean, he took that to the Supreme Court recently.

Right. Yeah. I mean, he's, we're literally about to decide if that's allowable or not. If he comes into office and he decouples the, or he couples together the Department of Justice with his own administration's goals, then like, I'm sorry, but that's, that's like some straight up, again, the straight up fascist shit. When the cops work for the, for the guy in charge and the guy in charge can't be investigated by the cops, like that's it, man.

Who's watching the watchman? Yeah, man, this is you calling a complaint and asking a complaint about somebody and they say you complained to me. Yes, that's exactly it, that's exactly it. It's like, what do I want to lodge a complaint against? Christina, call Christina. Christina takes those States. What do I want to lodge a complaint against Christina? Call Christina. Christina takes those complaints.

How would I fuck myself instead? Project 2025 calls for the next secretary of health and human services to immediately put an end to the department's foray into woke transgender activism. That's the name of my new ska band. You can see me at the Y woke transgender activism is the name of that band. Which includes removing terms such as gender, or terms related to gender and sexual identity from the every federal rule agency regulation contract grant. And we talked about that earlier piece of legislation.

So again, this is what's funny is funny is that this is a loser nationally. Yes. We saw that this was a loser nationally because this was a surfboard that fucking DeSantis came riding in on. And then he had to fucking ride that shit back to fucking Florida on a Gator or whatever. He had to had to fuck out of here because nobody cared about it nationally. It's an absolute loser. But again,

we're not talking about what America wants. We're talking about a select group of people who are pushing for Trump what they want. And what they want is exactly what DeSantis wants. Yeah, this is a... DeSantis just miss... He misunderstood their size. That's all that happened.

DeSantis mistimed the moment. Like what the Project 2025 guys understand is that once you build all of the framework, then you can do all the culture war shit you want because you're not trying to say, hey guys, do you like my culture war? Instead, you get to just wage your culture war because there is nobody to oppose it. to oppose it? Here is climate change. Eliminating three agency offices that are crucial to energy transition, and they hate transition of all kinds, and reducing funding to different agencies related to renewable

energy. And then shrinking the EPA by firing new hires and eliminating the environmental justice department. So this is a war that Trump has been playing and he's been waging this war against the EPA since he started. They see the EPA as a hamstring to capitalism, that what it's doing is it's hampering capitalism, it's hampering growth, it's hampering bottom lines and it's hampering dividends. And what they want is more money now.

And you know, there's a there's a thing that you and I watched recently, the Fox and Friends interview with Trump, where he's talking about how he there was a big plant that was going to get put in Louisiana and he got rid of the legislation and a day it took him a day to put it in is what he claims. I don't even know if any of that's true. But the way he talked about that plant, it sounded like a really complicated plant. He's saying there's so many pipes and it's, you know,

several football fields full of pipes and they're gonna, they're gonna refine gas. And it took him a day to put it in there to install it, if you believe him. But you know, the reason why it takes time is because it's important. It's important that you get it right. Yeah.

We've not learned somehow in 2024 that we need a healthy environment for all of us to thrive for our economy to thrive. If you have any desire to have a future that is worth living in, to have air that is worth breathing. I mean, like go to fucking Beijing in the summer. It's a fucking nightmare to try to breathe. It's smog city. Like you can cut the air with a fucking knife. It's, we had this in San Francisco

before the Clean Air Act, right? It's clean, it was like a whole thing, or LA I think actually, not San Francisco, I'm sorry. LA, where the smog was so thick that it was fucking impenetrable. People die from this. It's bad for the economy to ruin the fucking earth that the economy is on.

It is bad for the people that live here. It's bad for the workers. It's bad for the rich people. There's nowhere beautiful left to visit, man. Like, Fiji's gonna be underwater and gone in a few years. Like, they're fucking themselves. They're fucking themselves. They're gonna cripple the environment.

And the damage that they will do, these are bells that cannot be unrung. No, you're absolutely right. They cannot be unrung. We can't let this happen. If this happens, there's like, there's no future to come back to at some point. Like we can't, we can't like fucking refreeze

the goddamn glaciers, man. You can't like glue the fucking ice shelves back on. We can't fix some of this. We cannot fix it. I think people still think that we can fix this Some of this can't be fixed once it happens like you cannot like cool the oceans back down You can stop heating them up as much but you can't cool the oceans back down We're gonna fucking ruin this place and they're just like yeah, we're gonna ruin this place Yeah, they don't let me write it down. Like fucking wreck it.

Yeah. The fucking all gas and no brakes. And one thing I think that might start changing their mind is I don't know if you're noticing this, but some places in the United States aren't insuring. They're not allowing you to be insured anymore. Big time problem. And that can be a huge problem, especially for rich people. Right?

If you're not insured anymore, who's going to help you out when a fucking big old hurricane comes rolling through your place and there's nowhere to get insurance ever? Well, the thing is too, and this is an even bigger problem, not just for rich people, but for insurance companies. Yeah, but if insurance companies are refusing to insure, because I actually read a whole story about homeowners insurance has become such a financial loser in now most of the country, including here in the Midwest. Insurance companies like your premiums have gone way up, way up, way up. And in most of the country, they're not making any money. And if they're

not making any money, they're either going to keep jacking up premiums to the point where it's unaffordable or they're going to just not insure in those regions. If they can't insure, you can't get a loan. You cannot have a mortgage without insurance. So that means you cannot buy or sell property, which is just how the, everybody uses a mortgage. Almost everybody uses a mortgage to buy and sell property. Is this so they could get more of their rich friends with corporations to buy up houses to rent to you?

I don't, but I mean, they're gonna want insurance on that rental property. Yeah, I know, you're right, yeah. It's like, without an insurance program that works, the thing is like, flood insurance is so expensive, it cannot be made profitable. And as a result, flood insurance is subsidized by FEMA. So your flood, if you get flood insurance,

if you're in a flood plain, you get flood insurance, your flood insurance is subsidized by FEMA, by the federal government. We may actually get to the point where the federal government has to subsidize all homeowners insurance because we've damaged the environment so much that these major wind storms, hail storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, landslides will make it impossible for us to buy and sell real estate if we don't do this. That sounds cool. We won't be able to own homes. And this will hit people who already have bought their homes.

Like, I have a home. Sounds great. I have to insure it next year or I lose my house. Yeah. I can't not insure my house or the bank takes the house. So like, it's like... So then they get an uninsured property. They get an uninsured property.

So the whole system starts to completely unravel. It's a big fucking deal, man. It's a big fucking deal. They're not able to get those. They're not able to get that insurance now. One of the things they want to do is give massive power to ICE and immigration, customs and enforcement, which is, you know, the border police is already the largest police agency in the country, right? It's the largest police force in the country,

our border control is, and you're gonna give people, not people who are, you know, in the system who understand what immigrants are going through or able to help them or able to help, you know, transition people or whatever, you're giving more power to the enforcers in that case. And it's a bad call. The whole immigration piece is terrible.

But one thing I really wanna talk to you about is this Department of Education piece. The first sentence of the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of Education simply states that the federal education policy should be limited and ultimately the federal Department of education should be eliminated. Oh my God. So, you know, we talked about earlier, that's their tactic.

Defund it until you think it's broken because you didn't help it. And then be like, this thing's fucking broken. It's terrible. And what they really want to do is, it says, here's another piece. It says, ultimately every parent should have the option to direct his or her child's share of education through funding through an education savings account funded overwhelmingly by state and local taxpayers, which would empower parents to choose a set of education options that meet their child's unique needs as a voucher thing. What they want to do is they want to give money to their church. They want to give money to their church and they want to make sure that they can give

that money to the church. They also want to make sure that they defund the fucking federal education program so that the people are stupider. You know what I mean? That makes them happy if there's a group of people, because there's a group of people that will vote for them, if that's the case. They always have a voter base that will follow them and listen to them if they just keep taking away

education money. I mean, Trump as much as said, I love the uneducated. Yeah. He said as much back in 2015. Think about what this is gonna do to, so if we defund, if you were to do a voucher system, the way that schools are funded now is they have funds from a combination of different sources, right?

So they get funds from typically like your school tax, which is part of your local property taxes, right? They get funds from the state, they get funds from the federal government. If we were to create it and then they get like, however many kids are in that school is part of this, part of the math about how much money these schools get. If we have a voucher system,

the goal of the voucher system is to put economic pressure on and to collapse public schools. If you are in a wealthy community, you'll be fine. There will be charter schools, there will be local private institutions. You can take your voucher, you're already in a wealthy community, you'll be fine. There will be charter schools, there will be local private institutions. You can take your voucher, you're already in a wealthy community, you'll be able to find options.

If you are in a marginal community, or a community of color, or a community that is impoverished, you are gonna have a collapsed public education system. You're also gonna see your property taxes fucking skyrocket, man. Property taxes are gonna go through the absolute fucking roof because they're gonna have less students, they're gonna receive less state funding, they're not gonna get any federal funding,

they're still gonna have to have teachers and janitors and pay the gas bill and the electric bill and the property. They're gonna have to do all that stuff. Your property taxes are gonna go through the fucking roof on this. And it's not just people who own homes, this is people who rent, they pay the property taxes for the rental property. And businesses pay property taxes, everybody pays property taxes, so prices for,

I mean, the downside of this is so enormous and this is a fundamental restructuring of society. That's really what this will do and not in good ways. This only benefits the wealthy, the upper middle class and above. Everybody else under this system eats shit. One of the things that happens constantly, and this is the same people who are screaming

for the voucher system, right? Who wanna pay their church to teach their kids. They're the same people who are constantly for the voucher system, right, who want to pay their church to teach their kids. They're the same people who are constantly trying to get prayer in schools. They're the same people who are constantly trying to get 10 commandments on walls, and they want to have their local fucking coach give a fucking prayer before the big game.

And they always want to do these like huddles where we're going to give grace to God and all that bullshit. What they want is, they want their kid to go to the church school and get the church education. But they also want your kid to go to the church school and get the church education. If you can't get into their school, they're going to bring the church to them.

So what they're going to do is they're going to try to indoctrinate your kid however they fucking can. And what it is is there are kids already indoctrinated because they're going to the fucking voucher school. But they're gonna bring that religion to your kid all the time. They aren't happy just taking their kid out of public school and putting them in private school.

They wanna indoctrinate your kid too. And you remember after 9-11 in 2001, 2002, 2003, at the height of this sort of like American patriotism, anti-Islamophobia, the Islamophobic world that we were living in back then. Do you remember the panic and the fear around the madrasa? Yeah. The amount of times you could hear the fucking fox commentators and the right wing panicking about fucking madrasas. It was a whole thing. It was a fucking moral panic.

The madrasa was a moral panic. Oh, it's gonna be madrasas in Dearborn, Michigan. It's gonna be madrasas around every corner. Madrasa, madrasa, madrasa. You hear this all the time. There's no difference. There's no difference between their religious school and your religious school.

A theocracy is a theocracy is a theocracy. You're absolutely right. The last piece of this is about diversity, equity and inclusion. And this is basically, if you were going to translate this, you would just basically say bubble bubble toil and trouble. That's how they translate it. Right? Is that this is a magic spell that

people cast on them. They rich, powerful white, cis, hetero men never want to know that anyone else exists. That's right. They don't want to be reminded that anybody else exists. And if they are reminded that you exist, they want to remember, they want you to remember that you are below them. And so that's what all this stuff is, this anti DEI stuff that they've been trying to do forever is they're trying to just center rich white dudes again and again and again and again. Yeah, forever. They're essentially going to eliminate anything that encourages diversity, equity, or inclusion in society. And they have the ability to do this. The federal government has an enormous amount of power

because again, the federal government has, like it's the largest employer in the country. A huge number of people work for the federal government. There are programs, opportunities, boards. Grants. Grants. Yes, absolutely grants. Thank you. There's so much, they swing such a heavy bat here. They swing such a heavy bat. They'll just eliminate that. And that will have ripple effects. There will be less diversity. There will be less equity. There will be less inclusion. We already have the dismantling of the allowance of race as a consideration for admission into

public institutions like schools and colleges. We've already dismantled that through the Supreme Court recently. We will build a world where white hegemony is even more enforced by federal power. That's the goal here. They're trying to ensconce as much power as they possibly can and put up barriers so that the next time somebody says, hey, maybe we should do this that it's not even on the table.

That there's never ever gonna even be that conversation. Because if you nip it in the bud, and then you make all these people who rely on you not be able to talk about it. Then suddenly it's never a conversation that anybody can have. And so you remove it from all the institutions, all the public institutions,

all those places that get money, all those places that use government buildings, all that shit, man, it's gone from everywhere. It's fucking erasure. It's exactly what it is. This project should scare the fuck out of you. If you just read this article, right? Just go read this article. It's sourced. Every single piece of information in here has a hyperlink that is either directly to

the document itself or to where someone has said this that is involved in this document. This document is hyper-sourced. Every single bullet is sourced. Some bullets, multiple sources. So go check this out. Don't just believe us. Right. Go read this document.

And if you have the wherewithal, read the original document. Right? Do the research that they did. Go look at all the sources they have and then read the document. If you want to understand it, I will tell you this, if they put something like this into play, this is the collapse of the United States. We talked about, this is pulling out enough Jenga blocks to pull the whole fucking thing down.

Yeah. We don't, we, like, I know that this is said so many times and probably by me and I would, I would beg your forgiveness except for that it continues to be problematically true. This is an existential moment. And I mean that literally democracy may not exist in the ways that we think about a democracy functioning if Trump is re-elected. The goal here is to dismantle democracy. The things that we are describing, they are an outline for the dismantling of a democratic system. That's what they are. You can't allow it. I don't care. I literally do not care. Joe Biden could be in a coma tomorrow, a fucking coma.

I'd be like, great, it's not Trump. We'll figure everything else out once it's not Trump. Honestly, just, it can't be this one. This is the one it can't be. This is so bad. Project 2025 outlines a world where we lose the soul of the nation. We lose the functioning of our country.

And you lose every tiny bit of progress that was crawled, the soul of the nation. We lose the functioning of our country. Yeah. And you lose every tiny bit of progress that was crawled, that got clawed out over the last 50 or 60 years. Any bit of progress gets immediately regressed. Yes. This is a, this is just for white men. That's it. It's Handmaid's Tale. ["Handmaid's Tale"]

All right, that's gonna wrap it up for this week. We'll be back on Monday with a full show. Come check it out, but we're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptics Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter mommy issue, hypno Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician double, Double Bubble, Toil and Trouble, Pseudo-Quasi-Alternative, Acupunctuating, Pressurized, Stereogram, Pyramidal, Free Energy, Healing, Water, Downward Spiral, Brain Dead, Pan, Sales Pitch, Late Night, Info-Docutainment. Leo Pisces, Cancer Cures, Detox, Reflex massage, death in towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls, bigfoot, yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, nuts, shaman healers,

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