• ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      Nah thats been Mitch McConnel’s strategy for the past two decades. McConnel’s faction basically have everything they want already, so his strategy is to obstruct the executive and legislative branches while packing the judicial branches with conservatives to lock the status quo down.

  • Diuretic_Materialism [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    I think the argument is during his first term the Republicans thought Trump would actually be their leader and do stuff, but really he just bumbled around and ate McDonalds. Now the savvier far righters realize he’s better as a figurehead and will now leverage his next term by having a bunch of ghouls run around behind the scenes while Trump is out golfing.

    That’s the logic anyway.

  • dead [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    The Unite the Right Rally happened in 2017. Qanon began in 2017. There was still infighting in the republican party in 2017. They were still trying to solidify support behind their movement. Now they have more support. Before 2017, the heritage foundation helped Ronald Reagan get elected. The simple answer to your question is that things progress over time.

    Unite the Right was a very bad thing. They chanted “Blood and Soil” and “Jews Will Not Replace Us”. I watched it as it happened. The counter-protestors at the rally were Socialist groups. If you watch the video of the attack on Heather Heyer, the counter-protestors were carrying IWW banners. The media never talked about that. Then Trump very famously said “There were very fine people on both sides”

    There is a similarity between Project 2025 and Unite the Right. Both things have been co-opted by the Democratic party. Joe Biden claims that he was inspired to run for president because of Unite the Right, which is bull shit. He even said this again at his most recent debate with Donald Trump. Biden is taking actual threat from the right wing and using them as a threat so that he can be elected and then he’s not going to do anything about it.

    Republicans do actually want to do Project 2025, just as they supported Unite the Right. You should not be saying “Project 2025 isn’t a real threat”. You should be saying “Joe Biden is not going to do anything to stop Project 2025.” Just as Joe Biden did nothing to stop the overturning of Roe V Wade or countless other rulings of the supreme court during his presidency. Just as the Democrats didn’t hold a real primary. Just as Joe Biden has no political policies even listed on his website.

  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    On the other hand, if it’s so dangerous you’d think Biden, his DOJ, the FBI etc would all be doing something about it right? Hes the current president, its not like he isnt allowed to do anything in the year running up to the election. It’s like saying this is a 50/50 shot at being the last American election but then running Biden and pretending you can’t get him out as if he’s a dug in tick you’re not allowed to burn. It’s a joke.

    Obviously this stuff does work on some people, the nagging scolding probably works really well on soft squishy libs, but I doubt it’s gonna help y’all yanks

    • TemutheeChallahmet [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      That’s not how it works, nothing outlined in Project 2025 is illegal, it was designed by Ivy League lawyers to bob and weave and withstand legal challenges, and the current Democratic party does not have a politics that involves breaking decorum or doing anything they fear might be done back to them like say investigate Heritage for tax fraud or outright say the US is not a Christian nation. I wish the default position on the left wasn’t that anything the Democrats are hysterical about is therefore fake.

      Their screeching is the absolutely most they can do because their terms of engagement is predicated upon going by procedure. If you are a pushover and I never return the money I borrow from you, it doesn’t mean you don’t actually want it back or that I am not stealing, it means you haven’t the mettle or precedent or actionable vision for how you’d stand up to me, which is the actual issue with Project 2025 being rammed through, not that it is fake.

  • motherofmonsters [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 they didn’t think they could go so far so fast until trump

    2 project 2025 explicitly comes as a result of them not being able to do it in 2017. They tried to through executive fiat but the administrative state stood in the way

    P25 will do away with everyone who is not a loyalist. They have a list of the goodest thumb headed chuds who have taken a loyalty oath

      • FLAMING_AUBURN_LOCKS [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        The major thing that separates Project 2025 from previous conservative platforms is that it ditches the entire administrative state right away, replacing the entrenched bureaucrats who make up the ‘deep state’ (not in the QAnon boogeyman sense) with a pre-selected roster of vetted conservatives who Heritage Foundation deems more loyal to Trump than to the liberal order

        The administrative state can’t oppose its own deletion…unless, as you suggested, the military gets involved. If there isn’t an immediate and direct rebuke by the Armed Forces of that deep state replacement phase of the project, then Trump will probably get away with it

        What can I say? interesting times await us all…

    • nohaybanda [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      I’m not going to try and downplay the potential harm of P25, but it’s also ridiculously optimistic and kinda reminds me of those McDojo moves where you disarm 5 guys and kung foo flip them across the room.

      At its heart P25 is a jobs programme for the lamest bowtie republican nerds. They better plan how to control who Trump meets every second of every day, cause it takes only a couple of fast talking skidoo dealership owners to shove them in a locker and jumpy the queue.

      And that’s before the deep state actually pushes back on their bullshit. Planning for the most bloodless ghouls running the torment nexus to just roll over for them is peak Krav Maga mindset.

      • motherofmonsters [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        Depends on the office I’d wager.

        People in sciences and policy shit most likely will roll over. I know someone who has been in state department for 20+ years and he’s said a lot of people would straight up leave because they can’t take another 4 years of trump for their own health

    • ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      They have a list of the goodest thumb headed chuds who have taken a loyalty oath

      Have they actually been recruiting for government worker replacements? Because that’s been the most glaring flaw to me. They’re talking about replacing tens of thousands of government workers. I don’t think they have enough bow tie dorks.

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    Project 2025 is a repackaging of the same shit they have been pushing for decades now. It’s just the latest strategy and it’s taken the form it has because Trump’s incompetence genuinely impacted his ability to pull the trigger on the agenda during his first term. His team hadn’t been focusing on preparing candidates for political appointments, for example. This is a direct response to the shortcomings of his first term. They’re adapting.

  • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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    because they could be slowed down by court challenges and eat shit in the next election for doing wildly unpopular legislation in 2017

    this is literally what we talk about when imagining how the democrats could be more successful, the republicans did it they packed the courts and are getting ready to shove through their agenda more efficiently this go-round

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    Incompetence? Lack of will? Kinda hard to say

    The truth of the matter is the executive, the president, can just fire a ton of “non political” “career” federal workers from agencies that they wish to cripple. Surely Trump was informed of this within weeks it not months of being in office and from there it’s not like it takes much to have someone provide him the biggest list possible from all the agencies he wants to fuck over and then proceed with the firings.

    It kinda suggests to me either even Trump recognizes this is an absolute, top tier, gun in the mouth situation if he did it or like maybe the less absolute ideologically psychotic right wingers (like Jared who seems to be all about enriching himself, building up imperial power and stuff and not so much about just bulldozing the entire infrastructure of the country he’s robbing blind with his father in law) blocked the stuff from getting to Trump’s desk. Or blocked him from taking it seriously, something like that. Because ultimately the fact can’t be avoided that Trump could have just done it last time and yet he didn’t for some reason and the “why not?” and “will he this time?” are legitimate questions.

    This has been a goal of the republicans for like 40-50 years though so I’m sick of democrats calling it project 2025. It’s like project 1970 or some shit

    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netM
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      I forget where I was listening to it (perhaps the Chapo interview with Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill), but they brought up a very good point. The US federal bureaucracy is an absolutely leviathan and sprawling beast, encompassing many extremely specialized disciplines. Assuming executive power and firing everybody is easy. If you wish to debilitate an agency, this is good enough. But if you wish to effectively wield an agency as an ideological instrument, the pool of Steve Bannon-like figures you can staff it with is rather small, lacks the myriad of specific skills, and is completely insufficient.

      These agencies are incapable of being effective without buy-in from the rank and file. You cannot simply fire all 35,000 employees of the FBI (for instance) and find suitable, ideologically pristine replacements on the street corner. You can give a lot of dumb guys guns and batons and run an effective police terror regime, but things like data analysis, resource management, logistics, public relations, maintenance of infrastructure, process improvement, research and development, etc. will all deteriorate. Such a regime is incapable of retaining global hegemony (or even significance) for long.

      • Justice@lemmygrad.ml
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        Yes, that’s correct, however my counter or whatever is “they don’t care.” Like legitimately a ton of right wingers do not see the scheme you’re describing. They’re ideologically driven by “WE DUN WANT NO GUBBMINT!”

        It’s sort of an interesting source of infighting between the elite right wingers who want to milk shit vs the base right wingers who want to burn it all down. Well, it’s less interesting when you consider that they want to cut all the good parts of the government (regulations, social security) or yeah fully openly weaponizing things like the FBI.

        I have to just assume someone somewhere like maybe a Bannon or maybe a Jared is saying “no, no do not burn this down. We have to just change who is in charge.” And yeah finding a “competent” guy to head the FDA but in a pure evil way is hard- I’d sort of argue though that the FDA, EPA, etc. are already totally captured and run in an evil way which raises questions of “what the fuck else more do you guys want?” besides the total destruction strategy.

        It just seems like they got everything they wanted from back in the 1980s and now to justify their eternal war on “the libs” they’re just cranking the insanity meter up but the people who have been enriched by the gutting of regulations are like “hello? No. We don’t want this totally gone. We are milking the cow, dumbass!”

        I hope I explained that well enough in my rambling

        • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netM
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          It just seems like they got everything they wanted from back in the 1980s and now to justify their eternal war on “the libs” they’re just cranking the insanity meter up but the people who have been enriched by the gutting of regulations are like “hello? No. We don’t want this totally gone. We are milking the cow, dumbass!”

          100%. The cow analogy is very apt. Milkers and Slaughterers. The majority of the big bourgeoisie are happy to milk the cow, but the consolidation of wealth and power is leaving a growing segment of the small bourgeoisie out in the cold. A class of small business tyrants, petty landlords, and entreprenerds have been sucking at the teat of empire for generations, while not truly understanding or caring how any of it works as long as they can sunbathe and drink a cold beer in their back yards next to their in-ground pool. The teat is drying up though. Less and less milk is coming out, despite all efforts, and there is not enough cream for everyone who feels entitled to it. Even if a handful of people are still getting cream, it is only a matter of time until the mob slaughters the cow. (We, the proletariat, are the cow in this analogy).

          (This could be workshopped a bit more)

  • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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    Every election the rhetoric must be increased to illicit the same level of fervor from the base.

    Kinda like the concept of diminishing returns or the tendency for the rate of profit to fall over time.

    I’m unsure if a federal, top down, program is actually what the whole of the Republican party cares about, but they absolutely care about engaged voters and campaign donations.

  • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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    Project 2025 is more than just the “Mandate for Leadership” playbook. It’s also a comprehensive, searchable personnel database of all the most extreme right-wing fascist ghouls who are totally on board with all the stuff in Mandate for Leadership who they will cram into the judiciary at all levels, every agency they don’t destroy, and all other appointed gov’t positions. It took a lot of work and required people to build and maintain it. It didn’t happen in 2017 because it didn’t exist yet.

    Trump doesn’t have to be the one to implement it. It could be any Republican politician. Once it is implemented, executive power will be expanded massively, the courts will be fully captured, all important gov’t agencies will be under direct executive branch control, etc, etc. Full fascist state in 180 days.

    • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      executive power will be expanded massively

      This part is odd to mention since every single president has expanded the power of the presidency

      Full fascist state in 180 days.

      bad news, we’re already a full fascist state

      • aaro [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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        as bad as the US is, we are far from as bad as we could ever get, and project 2025 is a clearly stated intention to take one of the single biggest steps towards “as bad as we could ever get” in US history

            • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              That’s just a single example. Have you noticed that Biden campaigned against Trump’s horrific border and immigration policies, and now is doing the exact same shit but worse? Same thing with the trade war against China. The democrats are constantly demonstrating to anybody willing to open their eyes that they are the exact same as the republicans except for their rhetoric. That’s the only difference. Biden would do project 2025 bipartisanly and talk about how important it is to reach across the aisle.

              Biden is also doing absolutely nothing to prevent project 2025, despite having just been handed a license to do literally anything as long as it’s “official”. Project 2025 is just the newest cudgel for the dems to beat down any dissent and drive people to the polls to vote for them. If they actually cared to stop it they would be doing it today.

              • aaro [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.net
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                its so. fucking. annoying when I talk about american politics in a discussion about american politics and I make literally any value judgment of a difference between the democratic party and the republican party and people come along to patronizingly tell me “Ackshually, both sides are bad and do bad things! You should get educated.” bestie if we’re opening discussion up like that then my real vote is for Stalin to come alive and beat Sleepy Joe to death with a bat televised over the national alert system and assume leadership but we’re not because we have to limit ourselves to the scope of what is plausible. All that is relevant in US executive politics is the Democrats and the Republicans. Biden is not firing 95% of federal employees. Biden is not criminalizing being transgender in public. Biden is not governing by executive order. The 2025 ghouls have said that they will. They’re both shit sandwiches and they both have cyanide in them but the shit sandwiches are materially different from each other. the party in charge has implications in trans rights, foreign policy, medical care, disability rights, and economics - even if it’s not always even in favor of the dems, which it is often not. I’ll genuflect to the supreme Hitlerian nature of Biden if that’s the toll I have to pay to talk about US party politics but please let’s not pretend that Republicans and Democrats are identical.

                • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  Either the administration doesn’t believe the shit they’re saying about the EnD oF dEmOcRaCy, or they’re perfectly fine with whatever they say Trump will do. There is no other explanation for their total lack of tangible action to prevent Trump from winning.

                  “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”

                  These are not the words of someone who fears the end of democracy in America.

                  And just to say, if you vote for Biden there is no way to silo off your vote from genocide. If you vote for Biden, you vote for genocide.

      • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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        Yeah, but like expanded all the way. Full executive control of all agencies (including FBI and CIA and state department) and also (essentially) the judiciary.

        Not as fascist as it could be.

          • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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            Yep. He could send SCOTUS and Trump to Gitmo or seal team 6 them. Some might call that shortsighted, but he could do it - the fallout and precedent would just be… complicated

            • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              Either the administration does not believe their own rhetoric about the end of democracy, or they’re perfectly fine with allowing it to happen. Those are the only two explanations for all this bleating about project 2025 with absolutely zero action to prevent it.

              • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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                Well, there is some (very liberal) action being taken to prevent it. Basically, there is a large congressional task force trying to figure out how to prevent Project 2025 from being implemented and also another focused on trying to prevent/challenge the sweeping presidential immunity granted by the supreme court 2 weeks ago. They’ve proposed a constitutional amendment to specifically state that the president does not have criminal immunity and have plans to prevent actions being taken/generally be obstructionist.

                Now, the obvious problems are 1) you have to keep “stopping project 2025” every 4 years, and as soon as a Republican gets into office - boom, it’s done. 2) constitutional amendments require 2/3 majority votes in the House and Senate to pass - and Dems will never have a 2/3 majority, and the vote will be on party lines. 3) as soon as it is implemented, the changes will all be made legal - the fascists will shape the gov’t around them as soon as they gain power, that’s the whole point of what project 2025 is.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      executive power will be expanded massively

      I don’t think there’s any expansion of power left. The POTUS can legally kill anyone he wants now for any reason.

      the courts will be fully captured

      the courts are already fully captured.

      all important gov’t agencies will be under direct executive branch control

      They already are. That’s what the executive is.

      We’re already there, it’s just that no one has really flexed it in ways that most people can see or care about.

    • SovietyWoomy [any]@hexbear.net
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      The supreme court just gave a democratic president the power to do whatever the fuck he wants. This demonstrates that the supporters of project 2025 consider democrats to be their allies rather than their enemies. The democrats have used this newfound power to continue to do absolutely nothing to stop their supposed enemies.

      If you want to stop project 2025, supporting democrats has proven to be the wrong approach

      • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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        They have, and they haven’t. Intentionally. Basically, they defined what counts as Official acts but not Unofficial acts. POTUS only has immunity for official acts.

        So, say Biden drone strikes Trump and claims immunity for protecting the constitution or whatever. He immediately gets taken to court for murder, sedition, etc. The DC district court finds “yep he’s immune alright”. The ruling will get brought before the Supreme Court at which point they’ll say “oh actually, the president is immune from everything except drone striking political rivals - obviously the FoUnDiNg fAtHeRs wanted the president to be able to do anything EXCEPT drone strike white people. Biden, you’re guilty of murder and sedition now and will be summarily executed”.

        Then what. Civil war, I guess? All the “moderates” and “undecided” voters would make up their minds pretty quick and vote in whatever ghoul republicans put on the ticket. They’d probably use Biden’s action as pretext to crack down on all ideologies left of fascism. Say “trans ideology” is to blame and use the FBI and CIA (which they’ll then have complete control over) to imprison LGBT people en masse, then academics, political rivals, “the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” as Trump said, etc.

        Who knows what would happen, because the entire political landscape would radically change and SCOTUS would never give Biden immunity to do jack shit - they left the ruling sufficiently detailed to stop all prosecution of Trump and grant him immunity for Jan 6, but sufficiently vague that as soon as Biden provides them ammo, they’ll immediately use it against the entire Dem establishment.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      Trump doesn’t have to be the one to implement it. It could be any Republican politician.

      Unless the Democrats basically ban the GOP from existing by purging them from political life, then Project $Year is inevitable because as you said, it could be any Republican politician. Or do you expect the Democrats to continuously control the White House?

      • ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml
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        Yep, that is the primary issue. Without making it impossible for the republicans to gain the presidency again, it will happen eventually.