Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 907: Project 2025 Tracker

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

Articles Tracking how much of Project 2025 the Trump administration achieved this year | PBS News From Venezuela to immigration crackdown, Project 2025 provided Trump's roadmap Trump Executive Orders Follow Project 2025 Instructions - Fullerton Observer Trump enacted dozens of Project 2025 goals. Here's what's left https://archive.is/20260101155507/https://www.axios.com/2026/01/01/trump-project-2025-remaining-goals Did Project 2025 get done in Trump's first term in office? | Vox https://archive.is/20260120154114/https://www.vox.com/today-explained-newsletter/475753/project-2025-2026-trump-administration The Plan That Foretold Trump's 2025 - The Atlantic A Podcast How Project 2025 Is Reshaping Our Country – Mother Jones Trackers Project 2025 Tracker Project 2025 Executive Action Tracker - Center for Progressive Reform One Year of Project 2025: 53 Percent of Authoritarian Agenda's Domestic Policy Recommendations Completed or Underway - Center for Progressive Reform

This episode of Cognitive Dissidence 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 Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is Cognitive Dissence. Every episode to be blasted anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence.

To any topic that makes me. the news makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at. You are listening to this on the 30th. Monday. Monday, the 30th. Or maybe a little earlier. Or earlier if you're probably Sunday. Yeah. The 29th. Here's what I know. You're listening to this. Yeah. Thank you. We got a message from somebody. And they said, hey, you know, you guys talked a lot about Project 2025 before the election. Uh, then the election happened. and everything spiraled into shit. Right.

But obviously they have been following the playbook for Project 2025 because you bring it up on your show multiple times. So how far have they gotten? What are they doing? What are they planning? And so this week we went to the internet to start to search up different articles that would help us understand Project 2025,

where it is now, where it's going, where it's been. And we put together a bunch of links So anybody who is listening to this, if you want to do the research on your own, there's a couple of trackers that we're going to link very specifically in the show notes that track all the different things, all the different executive orders, any of the bills. So not only is it in executive orders, but it's also in some of the bills that they passed. Very specifically, the big beautiful bill has multiple sections that are related to Project 2025, but it's all in these two trackers that we're going to link in this week's show notes.

If you want to do any of that work on your own, go peruse these trackers. there be in the show notes. But we're going to do a show today that talks about sort of where it was, how it's going, and what we can expect in the future.

And so to get started, I thought maybe we could do a little refresher course on what Project 2020 actually is. Sure. So what is, what was Project 2025?

So Project 2025 was a document created by the Heritage Foundation. Heritage Foundation is a Christian nationalist organization. They embraced that term. It's not just me being a, it's not a pejorative to

This is a thing that they actually embrace. Their founder and leaders wanted to have a document that is not only a document about their beliefs, but a document of action, things that they could do. And it was partially put together by a man named Paul Danz. I don't know if you remember we did a whole show on Paul Danz. We did a whole show. You can go search for it in the back catalog.

This was before the election, but we did a whole long-form episode, specifically on Paul Danz, who was part of the administration the first time around. So Trump's administration the first time around, he was in the office of personnel management. And he saw firsthand that when Trump passed down some sort of bullshit thing that he wanted to have done,

it would run into roadblocks with all the people who work there because they were all like, I'm not going to change the entire function of this entire system, just kind of the whims of one guy. This whole thing has been thought up for years and years and years and refined by Congress. we're not just going to be like, oh, Trump wants everything change, let's just change it. Because that's not how it should work.

It certainly shouldn't be at the whims of one person. But Paul Danz thought differently. He thought, no, that's not how it should absolutely work that way. Executive power is the only power. Feed me daddy. So basically, he went off, worked with the Heritage Foundation to create this document. And this document basically is a blueprint for them to come into office and change things dramatically break the government in ways that it cannot be fixed and manipulate the government

to get all the things that they have wanted for a long time. Now, those things include Christian nationalist beliefs. So taking certain portions of the government out of your life, meaning where can I send my kid to school and the government pay and my tax dollars pay for it? Well, they want vouchers. They want Christian schooling. They want these things to be paid for through your tax dollars. They want no reproduction. freedom. They want America as an isolationist country when it comes to trade.

They want America as a major power when it comes to warfare. They want America to be white. That means mass immigration deportation for immigrants. So those are some of the big broad strokes of it, but there's a lot of minutia

in it. They want to destroy the Department of Education. They want to do all kinds of things like that. Is there anything else you want to add that you think that They definitely wanted to gut and destroy the EPA. EPA is perfect as much as possible. Absolutely. They were first to take aid at USAid, CFPB.

They, and I would emphasize one of the things you said, which was that a major structural goal was a mass consolidation of power in the executive branch. This is about breaking a bunch of stuff, but then also making sure that the power that rest in the executive branch, not only continues to creep up, but explodes upward. And that the ability for bureaucrats at the sort of ground level to hold any kind of checks and balances through like personnel, as you were saying, is gutted, is completely gutted. This is a deep state process. Yeah.

This is the construction of a deep state. You called this out very rightly when we did the Paul Dan's episode. You said, this is a conservative deep state. Right. There was no deep state before. Deep state was only there just to check the power of the president. It was, I mean, in sense, the deep state existed. It was state department people or people who worked for the U.S. government, not state

department necessarily, but people who worked for the United States government saying, we can't do that. That's not how this sort of thing runs. Instead, it's creating a deep state to try to manipulate all the different levers of government. And really, what we saw happen was one of the things that was that was, that was promoted a lot in that document. I remember seeing it in multiple chapters was, we're not going to be able to get this done with an actual director in there. What we need is an acting director because the

acting director doesn't have to report to Congress to get appointed. So if we do some acting directors, we can somehow skirt the rules around getting vetted by Congress. That's what they did with Doge, right? So a perfect example is Elon Musk and Doge. Elon Musk never had to sit in front of Congress and answer a bunch of questions, right? What happens when you go to appoint someone for a big position in our government, many of these positions get vetted, and they get vetted in open hearings

in our congressional halls. So either in the senator or in the Congress, well, it's the Senate, I think is the one who confirms them. So the Senate, they go to the Senate, they sit there, and then they get asked questions by dozens of people, sometimes on the same side as that person, but oftentimes on the opposite side as that person.

And they ask very pointed, difficult questions, and they are supposed to come up with answers that you can then hold them to, so if they break those promises, you might be able to impeach them. That never happens, by the way. But I just want to say like there's a, there's some sort of mechanism.

It's a nice idea, it makes people feel good. Yeah. It also makes people have to squirm in a seat for a little while. And like actually do a real interview for a very, very, very, very, very important job. They didn't have to do that with some of these people. No, and like that, that, it's, This is a funny, a quick aside, but, you know, one of the ways that they use these, like,

special appointments, like, to your point, like, Musk was a special appointment. So he was not fully a government employee. Corey Lewandowski, funny enough, who was Trump's campaign advisor on his first campaign and then was sleeping with Christy Noem and was, like, traveling with her. He was also a special appointment. And you only get 100-whatever days, but it's 100-whatever days of, like, actively working. so this is legitimate reporting. He would follow behind other people to get in the building without using his key card

so that they didn't count as a day. He would do all kinds of stuff to keep like showing up for work and have him still be in the halls of power without that counting as a day. This is nothing to do with 2025. But it is funny how they can abuse that system of having like these special appointments. And there's like checks and balances on them. And they're just like, yeah, but I'll just like have somebody hold the door open for me. Literally hold the door open.

Do you remember the movie Casino? Yeah. And in Casino, Robert De Niro plays a guy named Sam Ace Rostin. And Sam Ace Rostin can't run the casino on his own. But he can have high level positions at the casino for a certain amount of time until they have to hire him for a different one. So sometimes he's the food and beverage manager. Yes. Sometimes he's the entertainment director.

And sometimes he's the whatever it is. But they can't actually hide. hire him, but they can hire him for a certain amount. And that's basically what this is. Like, it's like, you can hire a guy for a certain amount of time, but he has to be the food and beverage business a little while. But they basically, they basically did what, you know, what, what a shady organization would do. Right. To get around to skirt around rules. Like, this is, this is shady business practice 101. This is something that you would do. And here's a thing, everybody. They literally wrote it down. Like, this isn't a secret. This isn't like Bible code. I have to run it

through a scanner to find this secret message they put in there. There's no numerology. They literally wrote it down and said, this is what we're going to do. We're going to, the rule clearly has a corner case. That corner case is something we are going to exploit the fuck out of. And we're going to do it to put the worst people you've ever known in the history of mankind like Elon Musk in charge of things. Yeah.

Well, and this is represented with how many of the authors from the Project 2025 playbook. have high-level positions in Trump's organization. Trump walked around for all of the campaign being like, I don't know anything about 2025. 2025 isn't even a year. I don't know anything about projects. Like what? Like denied the whole thing.

And then immediately, you know, like Brendan Carr, who's the head of the FCC, well, fucking Project 2025 has a lot to say about what the FCC should be doing. Well, I mean, Trump has even said, he's come out and said, yeah, I've used it. Yeah. So, yeah, they've said other people, People have said, like, pundits after the election said 20, 25 was the plan the whole time. Yeah.

You guys are idiots. You guys just got fooled because you're fucking stupid. You guys got fooled because we said it wasn't. Yeah. And then you believed us. That was the whole stuff. Like, here's the thing about the Trump grift. The Trump grift is, what if I just tell you no?

And then they're like, well, that's what I wanted to hear. It's all just like, here's what I wanted to hear. He still says both things. Yeah. It fucking makes me sick. But so many of these people from the Heritage Foundation. from the Project 2025 playbook, they've got jobs now. Like they are now in positions of power and they are leading the charge to completely dismantle

this country. They're literally taking this country apart from the inside. And it's large swast of people that are getting fired. That's one of the main things they want to do was just cut down on the number of people. Because like I said, Paul Danz was in the office was in the office of personnel management before. and for him to see the sort of roadblocks anybody was putting up, he thought, well, I'll just get rid of all the baffles.

There's not going to be anything in here to stop this next time because I'll just get rid of it. And so that was written into most of the chapters is like, come in, do a purge. Hire back people who are essentially a loyal, right? So what they did was they purged based on DEI because they knew that they could get the base behind them if they purged based on DEI.

So if they went out and they cut all the funding for anything that was DEI related, if they destroyed entire offices of DEI in all these major places, that's dozens of workers, maybe hundreds of workers from certain places that have to get cut, then once they do that, then they start going in and cutting all the people that they think are disloyal. It's funny that, you know, like, they don't think you should be giving anybody any sort of inclusion. based on traits. Yet what they'll do is they'll go out of their way to be like, well, the one trait that I think

we should value is loyalty. Yeah, right. The loyalty to this particular person, not even loyalty to the country, but like loyalty to this guy. So it's kind of like DEI for Trump, right? Right, yeah. It's like, you know, I don't even know, like DET or whatever.

I don't know, DDT. It's just IT, include Trump. Yeah, it's all it is, right? It's like, it's like if you, the most important thing about you is that you like Trump. Because if you like Trump, then you have a place

in this administration. And it turns out, even if you did like Trump, because there was plenty of people who were complaining about it, they still got caught. So they came in, they thought that they would be safe.

They might even saw Project 2025 some of these government workers and thought, well, I'm part of the group. I'm on the good guy team. I'm on the inside. Yeah. And they wound up getting caught from it. So go ahead.

One thing I want to bring up too is like one of the things they also outlined and then did. And it's like they wanted to gut the Department of Education. Yes. But they knew that they could not without an act of Congress, just get rid of the Department of Education. But what Project 2025 as a playbook told them that they could do

and which they've done is they said, okay, well, you can't get rid of the whole department. You need an act of Congress, that's not going to happen. But what you can do is you can just ruin it. So you can take all of the things that it's responsible for and reassign them some. place else. You can reduce or eliminate all of the funding for something. You can fire all the key people that are in charge of something. You can cancel all of the external contracts. So here are the

levers of power you do have. If you can't actually eliminate an entire department, what we can do is just ruin it. And that's what they've done. They looked at all the soft spots, man. Like, they looked at all of the things. They said, where are the soft spots? And how can I jab a fucking knife into them. And like, they want to get rid of things in the Department of Education, like, you know, Title IX. Like, Title IX guarantees, you know, that everybody, regardless of sex, has the same access to the same educational experience. That's essentially what Title IX is. I mean, and other things other than sex, too, but, like, that everybody has access to the same educational opportunities and experiences. And it's like, no, that's fucking DEI. We're going to get

rid of that. We're just going to just destroy that. What the Department of Education mostly was tasked with was making sure that education was equitably, or as equitably as possible, delivered to America's students. And that focus on the equitable distribution of education, they take exception to. They don't want it to exist. And they've essentially like gutted the Department of Education. It's a horror show. The other thing that they did was they weapon departments. So they went out of their way to make sure that certain departments, which tried to be more independent in the past, they tried to cut that independence out very specifically with like the FBI and the Justice Department and things like that. And that plays perfectly into what Trump

wanted, right? If you can control these things, you can then manipulate the entire system because now you're, you know, if they're independent bodies, they may or may not pick up certain things. But when they see a truth social tweet that says you should charge this person, now they charge them. That's absolutely manipulated by the person in office. That is literally weaponizing the Justice Department. The thing that they accused the Democrats of, that is literally doing the, like, weaponizing the Justice Department, but they're happy if they could do it. They wanted that to happen. They wanted the FBI to be less independent and more focused on protecting the interests of the executive branch. They wanted that to happen. Because this whole thing is a consolidation

of power. So it needs, and we talked about this on a recent episode where you had brought up one of the reasons why, you know, one of the reasons why President Trump's, the things that he's doing are actually working is because he has controls over the enforcement arm of our country. This was part of Project 2025. Get those things in place. Right. Yeah. Yeah, you know, the only check that the Supreme Court put on Trump controlling those previously uncontrolled and independent agencies was the Federal Reserve. Because they recognized that, like, if it would basically destabilize our currency, it would destroy the economy overnight if all of a sudden the world was like, wait a minute, that's not an independent body any longer. And so they said, okay, that's extraordinary. and they marked it out as extraordinary

and carved out a sort of exception that has no legal basis at all and they said, but everything else, basically everything else, all of these agencies, they can all report up to President Trump and he can take control of them and he can appoint whoever he wants,

he can fire whoever he wants, and he can like direct them up, down and sideways. And like we have had for such a long time, we have had this idea that these agencies should be independent because they should be independent. But that was nothing more than a value that we all held. And I think that that's something that I've been thinking about with Project 2025,

is that what this does is it seeks fundamentally to uproot our common values and to replace them with new values. And we held, we all used to hold a common value that these independent agencies were an essential part of how the government was supposed to run because their independence made sure that despotism and autocrats and, you know, fascism did not take root here in the great, you know, United States of America, but that's no longer a shared value. That idea is no longer a shared value.

And Project 2025 said, no, no, no, here are our actual values. Here are the Christian nationalist, you know, literally defining family for us. They literally, in Project 25, they literally define for us what a family should look like and be and who's in it. So they're coming in and saying these are values, and we will impose these values by force. Another thing, this plays off the EPA thing that you mentioned. Another thing that they didn't want was funding of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Yeah. And they very specifically didn't want that because they are climate change deniers.

So what they don't want, and it's so funny, right, it's so amazing to watch what they do is if they don't like the things that the science that is coming out of a certain place, they'll just get rid of it. They just pretend it doesn't exist. It's like there was a creature in Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy, and the creature, you would have to carry a towel with you wherever you went, because if you ran into this creature, what you would do is you would wrap the towel around your own eyes. Right.

And if the creature didn't think you could see it, then it didn't think you existed. Right. So it would be like, well, it can't see me, so I can't see it essentially. Right. And that's how it would, that's basically what they're doing is they're wrapping a towel around their own eyes and being like, it doesn't exist. It's not a thing that exists anymore. And so they will cut these, they want to cut, and they did cut the funding for these types

of things because they recognize that what it's doing is undermining the point that they've been trying to make forever that climate change isn't a real thing. Yeah. Imagine if your counter argument was simply to turn the volume all the way down on the person making the argument. Because that's essentially what they're doing here. They're saying like, oh, the science. Well, we don't want to refute the science. Obviously, that would be ridiculous.

We can't do it. There is no refutation. In fact, multiple times organizations as conservative as the Koch brothers have hired climate skeptics to build out models to disprove climate change. is human caused, and they've come back and said, actually, it's not. This has happened multiple times. So they know they can't refute the science. So what they've decided to do instead is to not let anybody hear it. Just turn the volume all the way down.

And now there is no argument to even bother to counter. The only narrative is the narrative from the administration. And again, that is just fucking fascism. Yeah. Like when there is no ability for the country to operate with any independence whatsoever, any at all, look at the administration's attack, which is also in Project 2025, the attack on institutions of higher learning to try to control how and what they teach. They understand very clearly that they don't have to convince us of a narrative if the only

narrative were allowed is the narrative they deliver. that's new. We've never done that before in America. We've not done that before. The people on the right for the longest time, especially like the free speech absolutist lunatics, would always say like, you know, it's sunlight. It's to get a shit. I put sunlight on these bad ideas, and that will expose them. And the only antidote for bad speech is more speech and good speech. But that's not what they're doing. They're walking around just putting everybody on mute. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We, we, we sort of covered what it was.

Now let's sort of cover what it did. So they had a whole year to put some things into place. Much of the things that they did started on day one with executive orders. So within the first week, they had already completed. I think it was something like 35% of it because what they did was they just created a ton of executive orders based on this document. So they knew what they were going to do coming in to try to change the way in which government worked to fit this document. And so that's what they did. Right. And then they use the levers

of government in different ways, specifically through funding legislation. We're talking about the, that big beautiful bill or whatever. There was provisions in there that we'll mention that happened that were specifically put in based on, like, ideas based in Project 2025. But a lot of stuff comes from executive order. Some stuff you can't change without it, but you can't change in an executive order, but they did spend a lot of executive orders. So we're going to start, let's start with reproductive health. So within the first couple days, they rescinded the Biden-era guidance requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortion care.

So we saw this pop up specifically in Montana was one of the places, I think, or Wyoming is one of those up-top states. One of the ones that's the top of the thing. It's a cow state. But in any case, they were saying we're anti-abortion. Whatever state it was said, we're anti-abortion. and they said, okay, that's cool. We get it.

You don't want to have abortions. But if somebody comes in and needs a medical procedure and you can't perform it, we're just not going to give you Medicare dollars. You're just not going to get Medicare dollars. You have to perform these procedures. And they created an executive order. And then they had to.

So instead of being like hella lifted from a fucking like a cow town in the middle of shithole fucking Montana to a place, a civilized place that actually does women's health, care, they would then have to do that women's health care without fear of being attacked and persecuted by the government. Because that's why, that's the big fear. It's not like these places are staffed with a bunch of anti-abortion people. No. It's that they know that if they do it,

they will get arrested. So they rescinded that immediately. Yeah. And so like, that's based on like, so there's a law, it's like, umtella or something along those lines. And it's like, it basically says if you go to the emergency room, they have to treat you. and they have to treat you no matter what, you go to the emergency room, if it qualifies for treatment, they have to treat you,

and if they don't, they can't have any of this federal money. And they just carved out reproductive care. Now it's like if you go to the emergency room and you need care and it's reproductive, potentially reproductive care,

now they may or may not treat you. They have the option now. That's fucking horrifying. That's disgusting. And we know that that is going to lead to death and suffering. There's no way that that is not going to lead to death and suffering because it already has. People have like...

Yeah, we know that it's that's what happens. It's already occurred. Yeah. Yeah. They also went after Planned Parenthood. So, GOP tax law upheld in September, bars Planned Parenthood from Medicaid funding, even for non-abortion services, potentially closing 200 clinics and cutting health care access for 1.1 million people. So specifically win after Planned Parenthood, because this is.

like if the two, you know, avatars are fighting, it's Planned Parenthood versus Project 2020. Right, yeah. So you need cap Planned Parenthood however you can. Right. Because they're going to be the bulwark for our specific reproductive health for women. That's what they're going to be. And they knew that if they go after them and they can cut their funding, they could cripple them.

Yeah. And they've really done a lot of damage to that organization financially. No federal dollars prior to this were ever allowed to go to fund abortion. It was never there. It was never a thing. So that was already written into law. What this was was to make sure that, like, the organization itself was, like, to use that hand, like, kneecapped.

Yeah. So, but like Planned Parenthood does a lot of stuff that's not abortion. They do STI testing. They do all kinds of, like, women's reproductive care, health care. My way, we lived across from Planned Parenthood. So when we were, we were at the time we were either engaged or just dating and she would go across the street and she would go in and get a monthly checkup for a pittance, a nothing money, right?

Money a college student could afford. Right. And then she would buy, physically go to the counter after her exam and buy birth control pills. And she would pay, you know, a co-pay of like nothing. It was like cheap, five bucks or something like that for the birth control pills because people funded Planned Parenthood. And we never experienced any abortions. Right. Sarah and I never experienced having to get an abortion during our most reproductive years.

Right. Because we were using, she was using very specifically, birth control provided to her by this place that never had to do an abortion. Right. Because she was preventing that from happening. Yeah. A lot of Planned Parenthood facilities and offices don't do abortions at all. Yeah. They're just not available at that particular facility.

They do a lot of work. a lot of stuff. Yeah, a lot of work for these communities. And like, I think it's important to note that if they go away, there's nothing to back them up. Yeah. It's just that all of those services are now gone. Yeah. That's why it's, that's why, you know, a lot of people when they say, well, we don't want the government involved in this is just adding a bunch of bureaucracy. It's adding all this stuff. That's why charities are bad in some ways, right? Because, like, if a charity gets defunded or they don't wind up getting the money that they need, then get gone. And then that sector or that area is completely uncovered by any protection.

They're more fragile. You know, sure, does the government cost more money? Is it maybe it does? Maybe it doesn't. But like, is the government more bureaucracy? Ken, is there ways in which that it can be fucked up? Sure. Absolutely.

But if you take that away and you say, well, now we're just going to rely on charity and then charity fucks up and goes away. Now you just stuck with a problem you can't fix because you don't have any way to fix it. Yeah. There's a lot of people on the right seem to think charity is the, is the stopgap. And it's not. It's not. It's not. It should be the government that should be the social safety net for people. So people with low income should be able to go to a government facility like Planned Parenthood and decide for themselves that they don't want to shit out any kids and get free medical care to not do that. That's absolutely what we should have. And we should have. And We've never had anything like that.

We have never had government-run facilities that do that work at a federalized level. Because people think that's a sin. Right. Like there's high-level people in our government, people who wrote this fucking document, who are like, that's a sin. You're not allowed to like, like, when God's, God is hands on your hips and he's pushing you to fuck. You can't be like, hey, man, I got this. I'm going to pull out at the end.

God will push you in at the end. and make you come inside. Well, and there's also like... God is a god of cream pies. God is a god of cream pies, man. And like Project 2025 is super pro cream pies. Yeah, absolutely. Because like one of the things that is like built into the documents like founding like

principles is this pro natalist stance. Yes. And so like it is not hard to look at the way that all of these like decisions sort of like come together, sort of come together to create an environment that like keeps women. out of the workplace. Yes. Make sure women are pregnant. Reduces access to contraceptive care, reduces access to reproductive rights care, and, you know,

creates an environment where women are, you know, less educated, less able to access educational resources at the same level as a, get rid of Title IX. Yeah. You know, like all of this is, is part of the rights ongoing, longstanding war on women. There's nothing secretive about this, I don't think. And it's a war on any minority. Yes. Right?

It's a... Women are part of this snowball. Yep. They pack everything in and then they eventually crush everyone with it. Yeah. Let's start with... Now, there's a lot more about women, but those are the big ones that popped up. Let's talk about the LGBT QIA groups.

Yeah. Right? Because one of the things that you heard, specifically from people who were like gay Republicans or, you know, those types of people who were on-trans. Trump sides. You know, some trans people, et cetera, were speaking out very specifically saying they were pro-Trump. And they were saying he's not going to come after the gayer lesbian, the trans people. He's not going to do that. He was, he was, this isn't going to happen. Trump has been really open about, you know, accepting gay people, accepting trans people, et cetera, et cetera, from his first administration. We know that's bullshit, but that's the message that they were saying. So some of the things that happen, federal. health agencies purged LGBTQ plus data from websites under a house or executive order banning gender ideology through a, though a federal judge ordered pages reinstated, but basically what they did.

And they did this for people of color too, where they just looked at the website and said, I just don't want that as part of our history anymore. And they just started cutting LGBTQ plus people out of the picture. Yep. I'm saying, you don't belong here. Yeah, literally erasing it. Your history isn't useful to us. It's a literal erasure from the national narrative.

In January, the president signed an executive order signaling his administration's opposition to gender diversity and trans identity as a whole. So he just wrote, he just wrote a thing that said, I don't like you. Check yes. And then he checked yes. He wrote a thing that was like, I don't like you. And then he fucking framed it next to his picture of Joe Biden's autopet. Jesus Christ. By spring, the National Institutes of Health

had canceled over 800 million in research grants to understand LGBTQ plus health, including studies about cancer and HIV prevention. Most of those cuts were upheld by the Supreme Court. So 800 million, just to try to understand health based on sexuality and gender ideology, sorry, we're not going to do that anymore. That's not something we're researching.

We don't care about you! Yeah. I think two things about that. Like, first of all, it smacks and it reeks of like when the HIV epidemic first began. Absolutely. And it was like, well, that's a gay disease so we don't care about it. So like this also feels like it feels very much reminiscent of that. Like, well, why would we want to research things that would protect this community when we actually actively wish them harm?

Yeah. And the other part is like, again, let's not learn. Let's turn the volume down because what we might learn will contradict our sincerely held beliefs. We have these sincerely held beliefs, but if the science contradicts those things, I would have to contend with that. Now, I could contend with it with other science or rationales, or I could make sure nobody hears it in the first place. Volume all the way down. And in this next one, it's volume up, but volume to science we only want to hear. So what they decided to do was they ordered the NIH to study the regret rates of trans people who receive gender affirming care,

which the Trump administration inaccurately describes as surgical mutilation. So they very specifically define this order as surgical mutilation, and then they said, find out the people who regret it. Right. And then we'll amplify those voices. We'll turn the volume down on all the people who are very, very happy now that they've transitioned, and we'll only turn the volume up on the two or three, you know, the small amount of percentage of people who may be feeling like this or may just be.

fucking grifters. Well, you know, I wonder too, though, is like, if they do a bunch of work and discover that the regret rate or whatever is low, I bet those studies never come out. They won't even bring, they won't show them to anybody. Right. Yeah, they'll be like, oh, well, what fell under the bed here? What is this? Yep. A dog ate my homework. Or they'll just redefine, like regret. Yeah. You know, so there's a lot of ways to manipulate this stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, like, like, RFK said he was going to find the reason why autism. existed. Right. He was going to, even though people were like, hey, man, that's like a blanket term for a lot of different things. And you know, you're not going to just necessarily, but he's like,

I will find it. Yeah. Right. Because RFK had a vested interest for most of his life to prove these things exist so he could win a lot of money for a lot of people. Yep. Because he was a lawyer. And that's what he did. So yeah, absolutely. Here's another one. Trump administration has restricted trans Americans access to passports that reflect their gender and eliminated the choice to use an X marker instead of male and female. So very specifically attacking nine binary people, then going after all the people who might have changed. Another thing, too, is the the attack on the Pentagon to transgender people. So Pentagon swiftly reversed transgender protections and access to health care. And some of those were,

We will cover a little bit later. Here's one of them. I'll just jump to the military right now, but the Pentagon halted new hormone treatments for surgeries for transgender service members. Trump's January executive order listed gender dysphoria as a disqualifying medical condition, affecting nearly 2,000 active personnel.

And then they also rescinded a Biden-era-era policy granting service members leave and take. travel stipends for out-of-state abortion services. Yeah, they're just, they have decided, Pete Hagseth and his Department of War has decided to fully embrace the idea of what a American soldier looks like. And like, what he's decided is is antithetical to what all of the research shows that we need. All of the research has been very clear that a diverse fighting force, a diverse military is a better, more active, more present,

more effective military. But he wants a World War II style military because he's a World War II style fucking ye oldie in the past thinker. He's a guy who watches full metal jacket and roots for the sergeant. Yes. He wakes his kids up every morning

by beating him with bars of soap and a fucking sock. Christ. Also, Trump ended all DEI military. programs by executive order in the first 100 days, senior women and people of color were fired. Academies dropped race, conscious admissions, diversity commemorations were eliminated, and a new task force was created to enforce colorblind promotion policies. And we saw this happen with multiple women that were high level that got immediately just shit on by this administration. And I want to

seize on that idea that they are colorblind. Right. Like there is nothing colorblind about specifically hiring a bunch of fucking doge nerds to walk into a building and find every time somebody says black or Jewish or woman or, you know, gay or whatever. Like that's not being color. You're literally searching for the rainbow, man. You're literally searching for the fucking rainbow. You're not wrong. You're not wrong. And I think what you see is when they say colorblind, what they, what they're, what they.

mean is they mean to say we need to re-center white voices as often as possible and ignore other people and then be able to say, but I'm not doing it by race. Right. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. How can we re-center white men the fucking document? So here's some education ones. We should talk about a little bit of an education once. The administration announced plans to transfer the education department's core functions to other agencies and critics argue that the move would harm children with disabilities, low-income students, and student loan borrowers, but essentially what you said earlier, which is we can just got this entire department by moving all the shit that they do to another department.

Yeah. And then once it's in another department, they can decide whether or not they want to fund it, how much they want to fund it, how they want to like administrate it because it's no longer in the original department. It would fall under a different set of rules, leadership, rule brick, et cetera, rubric, et cetera. Like, as a parent, I have four kids that are going through, have gone through or are in the public education sector. And all of them have what they call 504 or IEP plans.

So they all have some kind of like accommodations or other needs that the school fills. The fact that the school is required by law to fill those is a direct result of the action of the the Department of Education. Because it used to be that if a student was expensive to educate, they simply didn't educate them. That's what they did. Until the Department of Education got involved. Seems like a really great system you got there.

What they did, and this is like I'm not even exaggerating. What they did is instead of for students with disabilities, for students with special needs, for students with extraordinary needs, for students with accommodative requirements, what they did instead of accommodating any of that is they said, that's excessive. expensive. We're not going to do that. Your kid just doesn't get an education. And that's how it was for most of time until the Department of Education came along and was like, hey, that's awful. We should do something different. So rolling that back is going to, like, I'm interested to see if we roll this back fully, how many people on the MAGA side get burned. Because it is not unusual at all

now to have kids that need some kind of educational accommodation. And the only thing ensuring by law that your kid gets those accommodations is the Department of Education. Your state may also have guidelines, and they probably do. But like, all of that is buttressed underneath by a foundation from the Department of Education and is funded in part by that. There are so many people who would vote against their own interests, though, if they could have a white Christian America. Yeah, man. They're not wrong. They don't see it any other way. They're like, well, all these assholes are a homeschool. Yeah, if I suffer, that's okay as long as the whole is white and Christian.

And then that's cool. Another one here. Trump signed an order directing federal monitoring of K through 12 curriculum, threatening funding cuts for schools promoting gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology. That's very clever. DEI there. discriminatory equity ideology and requiring schools to grant

parents full access to children's educational records. So very specifically it's not just higher education. Right. So like when we're talking earlier like Trump wanted to go into these higher education places and force their hand, he had to do it differently. What he had to do is he had to go in and say, I will cut off your funding. I'll make sure you don't get grants.

I'll make things really hard for you. I will make your life difficult. and we saw many of these higher education institutions buckle and capitulate immediately. Right? It's like, oh, I need that money. We got to have that money. We're going to do it. I mean, even stalwart institutions, some stalwart institutions that were well funded,

still were like, yeah, no, we'll fucking bend over, whatever you need. So understand that those institutions were never here to help any of the common people at all, right? That's not a thing that was happening. Many of these things are state institutions. So, like, I know a lot of people who got state educations. And state educations were actually cheaper to get. So like if you live in state and you go to ISU or whatever, that's a cheaper education than going to a private institution like we went to. For sure.

We went to a private institution specifically because they helped me get money, right? They helped me get enough money where I could go to a private institution and have a much smaller class, specific class experience and pay about the same amount that I was going to at a state university. So that's why I decided to go to a private institution. I'm sure that's why you decided to go to a private institution. So you make those decisions. But a state institution, they have to take their marching orders from the state that they're in. So some states are buttresses against it like you suggest, right? So Illinois might not change their curriculum based on this.

But they all still do kind of get money from the federal government. So they might do some shifting. But a lot of these private institutions have to capitulate. But with the Department of Education, he can just be like, hey, K through 12, we're going to do this thing. Yeah. And then they have to do it if they want to get money from certain things. So now they're cutting out, you know, certain things you can disclose, ways in which, you know, like all this stuff, they think for some reason that every single day your kid goes to first grade and a drag queen twerks in their face. That's what they think happens at school.

And what they don't get is that like once in a while someone will mention a gender ideology that doesn't match exactly what their family has and they consider it a match. massive affront to their child's development. Yeah, well, they also are convinced, insanely convinced, that exposure to these ideas will create these kinds of people, right? That, like, if I'm exposed to the idea of homosexuality, suddenly I am going to become homosexual, which is just patently insane, right? That's not how any of this works top to bottom.

I've known about homosexuality since I was about six because my cousin was gay. Sure. I have never been gay It's not how it works Because look Homosexuals know about heterosexuality They don't change And they're not like

Oh you know what I actually nobody mentioned that That's not how any of it works And they but like they're afraid Because what they're afraid is that like I want this and I don't want to say anything Because they're all a bunch of fucking weird Closet

Whatever And one of the things that I've seen people say on the right Is they're saying Look at the explosion in numbers of LGBT people and trans people, they are, we are seeing that it's actually manipulating how they live their life. And my answer to that is,

we're just more comfortable with those people existing in our presence now. That number of those people probably always existed. They just did it in secret. Yeah. Well, like how many of those people are there going to be out loud if you're going to get like dragged behind a pickup truck and killed?

Probably not going to want to advertise that. Right? Yeah. So, like shut the fuck up on that. Like there's that is just insane. Like that's just insane. Like nobody decides that they

like have a different sexual or gender reality just because like they saw it on TV or they like in a book or fucking something in the library they read. The Project 2025 people too are laser

focused on the idea of parental rights and education. They laser focus on this idea. They want, they very much want to promote school vouchers. They did. They did. So let me read the next one. Yeah, yeah.

So you can go off on it. GOP's one big beautiful bill signed in July created a national school voucher program funding private school scholarships. Yeah. This is a way, this is a backdoor way for the federal government to give money to Christian schools. That's what this is. That's what this always was.

And if you siphon off a bunch of the money that was going into one bucket, and that was the public sector, public education bucket. And now you disperse it into these disparate buckets. You've diluted the amount of money that the public education gets. So those kids are going to get a shittier, less than experience. They're going to have less overall dollars in that machine. Now we're going to move that money into these for-profit. And they are for-profit, even though they're going to say they're fucking charities,

these fucking for-profit church schools. Because like, if I was a church, I'd be like, hell yeah. Hell yeah, this is a money machine. Thank you for the fucking giant federal ATM. I'm going to stand up in front of my flock, right? And I'm going to say, you should send your kids to my school, not the evil school of the fucking secular atheist assholes. Send your kids to my school. My school conveniently will cost just a little bit more than you'll get for the voucher anyway.

I've got a captive audience and a repetitive audience of kids. They're all going to be quiverful, so the fucking shit out a million of them too. and then I have no educational standards I have to meet. So I don't even have to do a good job. It's an ATM for churches, man. If I was going to be president next, vote for me and president, if there's nobody else to vote for, by the way.

I'll vote for you, Cecil. If it's Gavin Newsom or me, give me a vote. But here's what I want to say, I would do. First thing I would do is I would remove the rule that churches don't have to pay taxes. I would 100% to be the first thing I do in office. be like, no, you're all going to have to pay taxes now. And then the second thing I would do is say,

any church funded anything that is masquerading as helping other people has to be regulated the same way all the other things are. So if you're going to run a daycare, you have to be regulated the same way as every other daycare that's not religious. We're cutting out any of those exempts. No exemptions for that across the board.

That's educational. That's daycare. That's all that stuff. And then I would replace it and say, you can, like the churches can try to run that at a loss, which is what they're going to do, because if they have to hire regular people that are actually qualified,

they will have to run it at a loss from what they're charging, or do state funded. That's exactly what you got to do, man. I would get them, I would run every church out of business if I was the president. If I was the president,

like you guys want to see how this is done? Do you guys want to see how this is? Because I'll do it. I'll show you how it's done because that's what you should do, right? Because I'll tell you what, every single one of these people that are involved in these churches, especially these high up guys,

they love this project 22. Oh, so hard for this. Every day, if you took their copy of it, it would be stuck together. It would be like, you'd have to like break. The pages would be brittle. They love it. So hard for this.

So what you do is you just ruin them. Yeah. Because they're not doing anything for anyone in this country, except for trying to siphon your tax dollars and trying to brainwash more kids. That's all they're doing. That's it, man. That's it. So if you cut all that out, what do you have?

You have a more diverse, better culture that's not a Christian nationalist culture. You could easily do it in two different things. Dude, I vote for Cecil. I vote hard Cecil. Get me in there. President. I'm saying, I won't run twice. I'll run once.

And I will fuck their face so hard. They would want me never to be in. I would have to have the largest security around me for the rest of my life. I fucking love it. I would fucking make them gag on it. Good, good. I'm voting for you twice. I'm going to cheat. I'm going to vote for you twice. All right. So we talked about where it's been. I mean, we didn't cover all of it, but you guys can look it up. Like I see, those trackers are available. So go check those trackers out. But let's talk about some future things. What are some things that they're going to do in the future?

And some of them that seem like they might be soon rescinding approval of abortion pills and ban on sending them through the posts. So that's one. Yeah, I'm worried about this one. They keep trying. And so far, they've not been successful. They've tried a couple of different routes. They're going to keep trying until they get a win on it. If there's fuckery with the midterms, expect this in the second part of it. 100%.

If there's fuckery with the midterms, this is going to be a... I mean, like, you are just basically at that point, when women go to vote, they should turn them away and just give them their red cape and their little bonnet. Yeah. Yeah, you're not... Because you're going to be in the handmaids. Yeah. You're not wrong, man.

Yeah. The other one is classification of teachers and librarians who discuss transgender ideology with children as sex offenders. That's fucking awful. That is absolutely an abhorrent thing to do. I'm reading these aloud and I'm like, yeah, I could see that being something that they would create an executive. The thing is, if they could have created an executive order for it, it probably would have done it already. Sure, right. So the ones that I'm going to mention are things that they have to push through the levers of government because they might have tried

or they just don't think it's going to fly. It's going to immediately just get rejected by the courts. So they have to do it differently. And so the ones that I'm mentioning now are not executive. I don't think these are executive order based, although there is some pushback between Trump and Project 2025, because Trump doesn't like the idea that Project 2025 is the one who seems like they're calling the shots. And he's a narcissist, so he doesn't like that.

And there's also some stuff that he's just a fucking wildest. ban. So he'll just do some shit that you're like, well, what the fuck was that? What the fuck was that? And that doesn't matter to him because he's, he's not beholden to this organization. They just give him his marching orders and he's too stupid to realize it. You know, like, if there was like, if there was a law or an executive order, whatever, that made any discussion of gender ideology or sexuality or whatever turns you into a registered sex offender, no one's going to become a teacher. We're going to be out of teachers. Who the fuck would be a teacher? That is so vague. That is so open-ended.

Why the hell would anybody run that risk? It's already, like, from a risk-reward standpoint, being a teacher is already not like a great reward system, right? It's not like you make a ton of money being a teacher. You're not getting rich being a teacher. You got to have to go get an education. You usually have to get an advanced education to keep your jobs. So a lot of teachers have, you know, master's education or higher.

You're working oftentimes like all day. Then you have oftentimes have to do clubs or sports or other things. again in order to keep your job, get tenure. And now you're going to maybe become a sex offender because you said reality out loud? Holy shit. Who's signing up for that? Why wouldn't I just go get my

master's degree in finance? And, you know, like, the amount of work that you have to do is not, it's not like it's easy. It's not like it's easy work. It's shitty work for low pay. Yeah. Because you love it. And now you throw in a barb that says, if you talk about

something, I can ruin your life. Because, man, being a sex offender is going to ruin your life. Yeah, and there's no way that you can be a teacher. You're also fired. So you're fired. You're a sex offender. You're like, all of this. Why?

Because you were passionate about like how reality works and loving, you know, taking care of children. So another piece, an addition of citizenship questions on the U.S. census. So I don't, I think this is actually a backfire for them. I think that they are, they misunderstand. that there are a lot of people who are undocumented that live in red states. And they don't recognize that that will lose them votes. I think they're too stupid to realize this. Texas especially.

Texas is set to gain four votes next time around. In 2030, Texas and Florida are set to gain four votes apiece. Jesus. So they're set to be even bigger than they already are in 2030. This was a study by Carnegie, Mellon that's projecting these things out. It's pretty easy to see. California, New York, and Illinois,

will all lose votes. So we're going to become weaker in our state. California will be weaker. New York will be weaker. A few other blue states are going to get weaker. A few red states might lose one, but they were already won like threes and fours anyway. So it's nothing.

It's essentially a nothing. But gaining four votes, this is counter-narrative to what they think is happening. Oh, 100%. What they think is happening is that anybody who's undocumented is getting shipped to a blue state, and then they're pumping the numbers there. But that's just not the case.

No. What you're seeing is it's not as affordable here. So they go to places where the work is cheap, but living is cheap too. And that's where they go. And so they go to places like Florida and Texas, and they stay there and they work. And then they want people who are undocumented

to work for them in those places because they're very specifically want to pay people under the table. So undocumented people are great for that. They're going to pay into the system and they're going to have to pay them less wages. It's awesome for them. Well, we've already seen that Trump administration is very happy to just have another census whenever it wants.

Yeah. You're supposed to have a census every 10 years. And instead, Trump was like, oh, we just had a census, but I don't like it. We'll have another census. I refuse to do it. I know you're not allowed to refuse to do it, but I just throw it away.

Yeah. I won't do it. I object to it in principle. I won't do it. We found out, we listened to a podcast, which we will link in this show to that is very specifically about Project 2025 and about its effects. And it's a good podcast, about 30 minutes long.

It's about a guy who wrote a book about it. And one of the things that he says that really stuck with me was the people who get in office next, if there is another office, they're just going to have to learn to use government the way it is now. Because you're not going to just be able to fix what you have when it comes time for the next administration. Yeah, that's something that we've talked about on the show. This was a great point from the podcast.

like there's no just turn the system back on again. It's like I was laughing because I was thinking of the analogy. Remember the movie Ghostbusters? When like the guy shows up and he turns off the containment unit and then all the fucking ghosts get out and it's fucking chaos now. And it's like, well, that's just chaos now. Some things when you break them, they're broken. And they cannot be repaired.

And that has been a worry from day one for people who understands how these things work. It's like there are a lot of things that once you break them, they cannot be unbroken. There's no switch you flip to make USAID turn back on. There's no switch you flip to like fix the damage you do at the Department of Education overnight. These things take decades to build in their current iterations.

There's people, there's expertise, there's contracts, there's contacts out in the world. There's trust with partners internationally on how these things operate. There's congressional will to accomplish these things. There's no switch to turn it back on. That's not how it works. Also, the accumulation of power at the executive level, that's just here to stay.

From a practical perspective, it would be wonderful if we had a president, you've brought this up so many times, whose main priority was restoring a functioning checks and balances democracy. I just... That's nobody's going to do that. Right. Nobody who gets up to that level is going to do it. Right. Yeah. So now this is what we have now. What we have is a playbook for the destruction of democracy. And everybody gets to use it. Everybody.

One of the other pieces that this person wrote about was they were very explicit in Project 2025. They had a plan and they had their ideology out there and it worked. And it got them exactly what they wanted. A lot of what they wanted. Right? We're talking at this point, it's over 50% completed. So his suggestion was do this. the other way with, you know, liberal policies, with leftist and liberal policies, you put together a list of things that you want and ways in which to achieve those things. The one thing I would say about that is we've seen so many different people on the left fight over the tiniest minutia

that I just don't see that as a possible way in which to move forward. You've seen so many people literally throw out entire swaths of political spectrum because they don't agree with them on every single point. So I think that that might actually be bad for everybody to write this stuff down.

You almost want a more loosey-goosey policy when it comes to the left because the nitpickers will literally reject you and then yell and scream about it and basically bring down your brand the entire time. Well, and look at the way that the right has shown how effective they are at seizing on things like the Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal, in some ways, was a sort of like visual, not anywhere near as like a hyper-focused as project 2025, but it was certainly a vision. And like they're still on the right talking about the Green New Deal. Anything that happens that has like a grass near it is the Green New Deal. Like they are, they still, it's just they, because they're very good at labeling and using those labels in ways that scare the shit

out of their base and scare the shit out of the uninformed. Look at that, like they did a good job. renaming the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare, as a way to sort of appeal to the racist. It's a pejorative. Yeah. It was a pejorative. Romney came up with it specifically because he wanted to.

And it's funny because I say this on a recent podcast that I do, another show I do, I was basically like, yeah, Romney uses it as a majority, but Trump thinks it's a badge of honor. He wants to call it Trump RX. Right, yeah. Like he thinks it's a badge honor. He thinks it's a good thing because he's too stupid to realize that somebody made it as a joke. Yep.

Like they chose it as a joke because it was a bad to. the Ameri Affordable Care Act, and they're like, well, that sounds too good. Yeah, and like now, I think, like, people love the Affordable Care Act. People fucking love it. If you walk around and say, what do you think of these and you tell them specifically what it is, they're like, yeah, that's fucking great. We just need that. You're like, yeah, that's Obama care.

They're like, I hate Obama. Do you guys know he was black and he wore a tan suit? All right. Well, that's going to wrap it up for our Project 2025 review. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll be back on Monday with another full show. We're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue.

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