If you’re not scared yet – and even if you are, read this.

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I’m extremely alarmed about the possibility that Donald Trump may be elected President again.  Adding significant gravitas to that fear is a 920-page document called Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership – The Conservative Project.  Anyone concerned about the future of our democracy needs to be familiar with this plan.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025’s “goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One” of a new Republican Presidency. The project rests on four pillars: a detailed policy agenda, a presidential personnel database where conservatives can apply for political appointments, a Presidential Administration Academy to train those appointees to advance Project 2025’s agenda, and a “playbook” outlining “actions to be taken in the first 180 days of the new Administration to bring quick relief to Americans suffering from the Left’s devastating policies.”

Project 2025 describes the specific steps to advance an extreme right-wing agenda in every corner of the executive branch of our government.

Who is behind Project 2025?

Project 2025 is organized by The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing policy group that, in 2022, had nearly 500 employees and $420 million in assets. The co-editors of the project, its two associate directors, and 25 of the project’s 34 authors were members of the prior Trump administration, some in senior positions.

According to Professor Heather Cox Richardson, “On July 5, Trump claimed not to know anything about the extremist Project 2025, which calls for an authoritarian leader to impose Christian nationalism on the United States, despite the fact that his own appointees wrote it, his own political action committee advertised it as his plan, and his name appears in it 312 times.”

In the first year of his prior term, President Trump implemented 64% of the recommendations in the 2016 playbook.

Project 2025’s Advisory Board consists of more than 100 conservative groups, many promoting Christian nationalism, and anti-climate change, election denial, anti-abortion, anti-DEI initiatives, anti-LGBTQ equality, and other right-wing agendas.

What is Project 2025’s plan?

Here are just a few of many lowlights:

·     Ending abortion and contraception access nationwide, including reversing federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone.  Strictly monitoring pregnancies and abortions to end what it calls “abortion tourism.”

·     Ending renewable energy programs, increasing the exploration for and use of fossil fuels, and stopping efforts to fight climate change.

·     “Dismantl[ing] the administrative state:” including eliminating major federal agencies (e.g. Department of Education) and significantly downsizing others.

·     Enabling the President to fire up to 50,000 nonpartisan federal employees formerly protected by civil service laws and replace them with loyal political appointees to implement Project 2025 and Trump’s other goals.

·     Eliminating a vast swath of regulations that protect our air and water, prevent climate change, protect consumers from dangerous products and borrowers from misleading and usurious lending practices, ensure safe working conditions, prevent unsafe drugs, regulate banks and other lenders, and more.

·     Incorporating Christian identity in government actions and further weakening the separation of church and state.

·     Deleting the terms “sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

·     Weakening workers’ rights to organize unions.

·     Undertaking mass deportations of immigrants.

Last week, Heritage Foundation’s President, Kevin D. Roberts, said that our country was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”

How can we stop Project 2025?

The answer is simple: stop Donald Trump from being elected on November 5th, 116 days from today.

To make progress on any of the important philanthropic causes many of us have spent decades working to advance, and to prevent erosion of the progress we have made, we must preserve a healthy democracy with respect for the rule of law and democratic institutions.

In short, we must rise up in 2024 to prevent Project 2025 from crushing democracy next year. I hope you’ll join me in this critical fight.