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If you are not familiar with Project 2025, you should get familiar, and quickly.  Because, if you are a Republican and vote Republican you are purposefully or inadvertently supporting the agenda that makes up Project 2025.

Project 2025 is supported by the Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning think tank, the same think tank that Tullahoma’s Ray Artman likes to quote, but it is also supported by the illiberal (read:  Christian nationalist) dictator of Hungary Victor Orban, who just met with both Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and the upper echelon of the Heritage Foundation staff in Washington in his recent visit to the United States, while refusing a request by the State Department to meet with them during that same visit. 

Project 2025 is the well-planned roadmap for getting rid of democracy.  The Associated Press called Project 2025’s 887 pages “a plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision”.  Robert Reich called it “ruthlessly efficient”.  It was developed by right-wing extremists because Trump’s first administration was too inefficient to get that vision accomplished.  It will cause you and your children and grandchildren much pain as it dismantles democracy in favor of a theocratic White Christian National state whose tenants you may not really agree with.

Of course, if you do agree that we ought to have a religiously-based government that “controls” everything the country does and stands for, you will love Project 2025.  The plan calls for “the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” by a very power leader (read: dictator Trump) to dismantle the current government structure so that it loses the ability to regulate business, reduces the social safety net except for loyalists, calls for state Republicans legislators to gerrymander voting districts to permanently rig all future elections in favor of the Republicans, gets rid of civil rights as we know them now, replaces non-partisan civil-service employees with Trump loyalists (maybe as many as 2.5 million people) that will carry out Trump’s demands, takes over public media so that they become state-sponsored media and mouth only what the dictator wants you to hear, monitors your every move (just look at what is already going on in autocratic China today with a complete surveillance state that tracks everyone), puts the great majority of government functions in private hands and control (including, if you can believe this, nuclear waste), calls for defunding the FBI, denies climate change and opposes any efforts to address it, setting up deportation camps, giving larger and making permanent tax cuts for the extremely wealthy, and reverses the tenants of the Constitution that states that governments arrive their power and legitimacy “from the consent of the governed”.   The plan would end the rules-based international order establish after WWII that includes getting out of (or getting rid of) NATO and the United Nations and all agreements established through those mechanisms like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and NATO protection treaties, and would provide no further help for Ukraine so that Russia (whose dictator President Vladimir Putin both Trump and Orban absolutely love) can complete the takeover of that country by violence.          

The Project 2025 plan tries to confuse mainstream Republicans and divert attention away from itself by stating that it is the Democrats that don’t believe in equality, that Democrats do “not believe that all men are created equal-they think they are special.  They certainly don’t think all people have an unalienable right to pursue the good life.  They think only they themselves have such a right along with a moral responsibility to make decisions for everyone else”.  Hmm….the classic double-speak in George Orwell’s 1984 where Big Brother is always watching you.

Alternately, if you believe in diversity, equality, democracy, international rules-based law, consent of the governed, you should be appalled by Project 2025’s out-in-the-open plan to reverse and subvert what America has been working to achieve for 250 years – a more perfection union.  Project 2025 is the dream of a small yet powerful propaganda group dedicated to controlling the hearts and minds of otherwise decent people in order to achieve their plan of establishing a religiously-based society in America.  Most Americans just want to live in harmony and peace with each other, but Project 2025’s kleptocrats and oligarchs will determine how harmony and peace will unfold using their planned religious and political framework.  The King of England’s oppression of British subjects in the 1600’s caused them to flee to America to avoid religious persecution, and now Project 2025 wants to reestablish religious and political persecution of those that do not agree with the plan.  My writings include me in the list to be persecuted if Trump takes back POTUS:  so be it.  Most Americans want a democracy – however imperfect it may be – and if you are in that group, you cannot vote for Trump and the Republican party he has fully taken over, otherwise you will see the first King of America – Donald John Trump.  The United States has never been a true democracy, but has always strived towards that goal; a vote for Donald Trump will ensure that our fledgling democracy never matures and dies on the vine.   Some young people nowadays think we need a benevolent dictator as POTUS in order to get things done in the political stalemate that is Washington, D.C.  And even if that is true, if they, or you, think the word “benevolent” can be assigned to Donald Trump, I have some oceanside property in Arizona to sell you – cheap.

Project 2025 is the planned death-nell of American democracy:  don’t be part of it, even accidently or inadvertently.

The comments by Bob Bates are that of the citizen columnist and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Tullahoma News.