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Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation flounders in the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes fever swamps.
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Opinion | The New Right’s New Antisemites
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Highlights From The Heritage Foundation’s ‘Project 2025’
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Several high-ranking members of Donald Trump’s former administration recently released a stunning, highly detailed document outlining how they would overhaul the federal government should he be reelected president. The following are the biggest takeaways from the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page political playbook designed to bolster Trump’s power.
Immigration through Ticketmaster: By privatizing immigration, it ensures all immigrants pay the service fee, order processing fee, and the occasional surge pricing fees.
Dog militia: Every dog will receive a firearm to defend their country from tyrannical oppression.
A must-try pesto recipe: Included on page 635 of the manifesto is a step-by-step guide for recreating Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’ irresistible family pasta sauce.
Official designation of the president as “America’s dad”: Project 2025 includes a chart showing the proposed family tree of the country, which would make Donald Trump the dad and all Americans his kids.
Replace 30,000 federal employees with Eric Trump: He’ll run the Departments of Energy, Interior, and Labor while the Defense and the Joint Chiefs will be replaced by Tiffany.
Mandatory embassy status for every McDonald’s: All franchises would be extraterritorial, sovereign lands of the United States of America, regardless of location.
Bring back Gulags: But with a more American sounding name.[ad_2]
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Trump seeks to distance himself from pro-Trump Project 2025
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(CNN) — Former President Donald Trump on Friday sought to distance himself from a closely aligned conservative group’s plans to radically reshape the federal government and American life should the former president win a second term.
In a post to his social media site, Trump claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025,” the name given to a playbook crafted by the Heritage Foundation to fill the executive branch with thousands of Trump loyalists and reorient its many agencies’ missions around conservative ideals.
“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump continued on Truth Social. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
The post comes days after the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, drew widespread backlash from Democrats for saying in an interview that the country was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Project 2025 — widely viewed by conservatives as a blueprint for Trump’s second term transition — is run by several former Trump administration officials and includes many policy priorities that are aligned with those of the former president, especially as they relate to cracking down on immigration and purging the federal bureaucracy by making it easier to dismiss civil servants and career officials.
But it also includes controversial proposals Trump has not discussed, including banning pornography, reversing federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, excluding the morning-after pill and men’s contraceptives from coverage mandated under the Affordable Care Act, and making it harder for transgender adults to transition.
Among the chief objectives of Project 2025, its authors wrote, is: “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”
Trump’s campaign has sought for months to make clear that Project 2025 is not its official policy platform amid an intensifying effort by President Joe Biden and Democrats to tie Trump to its more controversial policies.
Yet those efforts are complicated by Trump’s extremely close relationship with many of the people who launched Project 2025 or helped contribute to it. Paul Dans, the head of Project 2025, was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, and the group’s roadmap for the next administration includes contributions from others who have worked for the former president, including his former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, former acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli and former deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn. John McEntee, Trump’s former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office and one of his closest aides while in office, is also a senior adviser for the project.
Trump himself told a gathering of religious broadcasters in February that Roberts was “doing an unbelievable job” and “bringing (Heritage) back to levels never seen.”
The remarks came at a Nashville conference shortly after Roberts and Dans both addressed the same crowd. Dans shared with the audience it was his intention to serve in a second Trump administration should the former president win in November. Speaking before Trump about Project 2025 that night, Roberts said, “We want no credit” for the groundwork it is laying, and instead wanted “President Trump and his administration to take credit for that.”
The group has long stated its transition project is a template they hope will be adopted by the next Republican president, something a Project 2025 spokeswoman reiterated in a statement to CNN.
“As we’ve been saying for more than two years now, Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign. We are a coalition of more than 110 conservative groups advocating policy and personnel recommendations for the next conservative president. But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement,” the statement reads.
A senior Trump campaign adviser told CNN that Trump’s post disavowing the group stemmed from a series of factors, most notably the Biden campaign’s recent messaging campaign tying Trump to the project.
Project 2025 has long frustrated Trump and his top advisers, who have been annoyed with the amount of coverage its policy platforms have received and the perception that the group is working in tandem with the campaign — despite Project 2025 partnering with a series of top Trump allies.
The group’s partners include several leading conservative groups with close ties to Trump’s campaign, including those who have been tapped by Trump’s advisers to serve as part of their 2024 ground game strategy in key battleground states, such as Turning Points USA.
Other high-profile organizations partnered with Project 2025 include the Center for Renewing America, run by Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, who is viewed by many in Trump’s orbit as a likely contender for another Cabinet position in a second administration and is helping to lead the GOP platform committee ahead of the Republican National Convention later this month. The Conservative Partnership Institute, run in part by Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Sen. Jim Demint, and America Legal First, founded by his immigration adviser Stephen Miller, are also partners.
The Biden campaign on Friday quickly dismissed Trump’s attempts to keep Project 2025 at arm’s length.
“Project 2025 is the extreme policy and personnel playbook for Trump’s second term that should scare the hell out of the American people,” Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said in a statement. “Project 2025 staff and leadership routinely tout their connections to Trump’s team, and are the same people leading the RNC policy platform and Trump’s debate prep, campaign, and inner circle.”
The Trump campaign has previously pushed back on reports about plans Trump’s allies are looking to implement if Trump wins reelection. Trump’s campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita issued a statement in November arguing that “reports about personnel and policies that are specific to a second Trump Administration are purely speculative and theoretical” and that no outside groups have the authority to speak on behalf of Trump or the campaign.
LaCivita doubled down further on Friday, tweeting: “Poke the Bear you are going to be bit” while sharing an article titled: “Trump torches Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.”
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Analysis: Supreme Court grants Trump ‘absolute’ immunity, raising concerns about potential dictatorship
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Happy Independence Day! Where’s the potato salad and the ribs?
July 2, 1776 was the day that the Continental Congress actually voted for independence. John Adams noted that July 2 would be remembered in the annals of American history. 248 years later, the United States Supreme Court extended sweeping powers to the executive branch in a way that would make King George III blush.
The Supreme Court in TRUMP vs. United States, the high court granted the executive branch “absolute” presidential immunity for “his core constitutional powers.” Additionally, the president “enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does if official.” The six conservatives voted for and the three liberal-minded justices dissented.
In layman’s terms, the executive branch has a greater level of immunity than police officers. Police officers can be charged with murder. However, the President is cloaked by the separation of powers as outlined in Article II of the United States Constitution, according to the Supreme Court decision.
So, what does that mean for the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump? It means he can fulfill his promise of being a dictator on ‘day one.’
One historical figure compares to Trump in this moment
Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger meets with President Mobutu of Zaire in his Pentagon office in 1983. In 1960, Mobutu Sese Seko was the second in command in the Congolese Army. In November 1965, Mobutu led two successful coups, with the backing of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). And in 1971, Mobutu Sese Seko consolidated power unto himself. He launched a ‘national authenticity’ program in Congo, previously known as the Democratic Republic of Zaire. He rid his country of all colonial influence and re-established a national identity.
In a speech in Dakar, Mobutu described his plan as, “an experience drawn from the anarchy caused by the plurality of political parties and by the ascendancy of imported ideologies, spread through empty slogans. We have had to wipe the slate clean of all previously existing parties.”
Essentially, Mobutu Sese Seko established a unitarian government. He had the backing of Chairman Mao and the support from Apartheid South Africa. He was a major cult of personality, an overseer of a bereft kleptocracy, while his government was full of corruption. His friends, family members, and benefactors ran government agencies. Mobutu embodied big man rule. What he said was law.
During his thirty-two year rule, Mobutu plundered nearly $5 billion of his country’s wealth and resources. He would take himself shopping in Paris, fly the famed Concorde supersonic jet, and entertain the world’s best and brightest. Meanwhile, his country was crumbling. The paved roads his country had in the sixties, devolved into bush in less than twenty years. In the mid-1990s, the AIDS epidemic and famine ravaged his nation. In a country that did not have clean drinking water, affordable medical infrastructure, and lacked security, the disease brought the country and Mobutu to its collective knees. According to UNAIDS, an estimated 410,000 Congolese children have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS.
Mobutu’s government fell in 1997 when he was forced into exile. He was suffering from prostate cancer and he died from his illness on September 7, 1997.
Mobutu and Donald Trump love what the government could do for them. Both men had an insatiable desire for power and established autocracies. And both men were willing to destroy the economic prospects of their countries in the name of putting their pursuits first.
Project 2025 is happening right now
Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025, said this on national television:
“The reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”
Project 2025 will destroy women’s rights, civil rights, voting rights, plus LGBTQ+ rights and protections. It will slice and dice environmental protections and regulations. And it does not stop there. The Family Research Council is leading a new initiative called the “Platform Integrity Project.” It calls on the public to pressure the Republican Party to adopting a hardline anti-abortion, anti-LGBT stance ahead of the election.
Donald Trump, after the Supreme Court handed immunity over to him, amplified calls for mass violence directed at his enemies. He also “ReTruthed” a post using the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.” Trump’s MAGA movement believes African-Americans, women, and ethnic minorities, will “replace” White people in society.
This goes on while the corporate and mainstream media continue to shake their hands and whine about how President Biden is too old to be president. And yes, the corporate and mainstream media is still whining over the President’s poor debate performance. Why? They need a two-horse race in order to drive ratings and ad sales while ignoring what will be the most nakedly obvious power grab in the history of western civilization.
What’s Next?
Here is the good news: The choice will be yours on November 5, 2024. It may be the last chance for Americans to exercise that right at the ballot box.
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