The Revolutionary Column is a radical space for liberatory politics.
I’m back, revolutionaries.
Before I get into the specific topic at hand, let’s unpack a few things going on during this heightened political moment.
The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) foolishly hosted former President Donald Trump in Chicago for their annual convening on July 31.
Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the nomination to lead the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago in August.
And it’s been nearly a year since the start of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Although Chicago was the first major U.S. city to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire, Chicago’s law department has pursued charges against some pro-Palestine organizers. Amplifying growing demands for an arms embargo on Israel and a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank, the Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine has consistently organized massive weekly demonstrations of critical resistance and civil disobedience since October 2023, and led thousands— including myself— in protests of the DNC’s active role in the genocide.
Even with so much national attention on Chicago, no one has really been listening to Chicagoans.
I’m annoyed, and compelled to add something of value to the political discourse coming out of our city. Bear with me. This is the longest column I’ve ever written and I’m only just beginning to scratch the surface of things we need to talk about before the 2024 presidential election in November.
This piece is about Project 2025.
First of all, Project 2025 is longer than a J.K. Rowling novel. I know most people won’t read all that so I’m really trying to just give you the cliff notes. All I kept thinking as I read Project 2025 was, wow, Donald Trump and the Conservative Party want to be dictator Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party so bad.
On the campaign trail, when Trump says shit like, “In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote,” you have to believe him and you have to tell him no! There’s not a stimulus check, PPP loan or tax break in the world that should be big enough to make you vote yourself into a dictatorial regime that’s just as anti-Black as it is anti-immigrant and transphobic.
Allies, you’re not safe either. We know white supremacists also killed Germans who were helping Jews during the Holocaust. They killed queer people and disabled people, and sterilized “mulatto” children during that time, too. They also killed Jews who were helping Black Americans during the Jim Crow Era. Nazi Germany’s legal codification of racism and white supremacy was actually inspired by Jim Crow America.
Let me put y’all on game.
What is Project 2025 exactly?
Also known as the Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise and “The Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project,” Project 2025 is a 30-chapter, nearly 900-page governing handbook launched in 2022 by “more than 400 scholars and policy experts from around the country. These conservatives banded together in their efforts to elect and dogmatically support the next conservative president by “[assembling] an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” and “to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.” By the way, “Day One” is January 20, 2025, which is inauguration day.
The extensive amount of forethought, research and overall attention to detail that went into crafting Project 2025’s policy recommendations for White House offices, Cabinet departments and Congress, as well as all government agencies, commissions and boards, would be wholly impressive were it not for the fact that every single policy and personnel recommendation is intended to conserve racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, the police state, and the very worst of America’s white supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture.
The work to compose Project 2025 was led by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that, according to The Guardian, spent more than $5 million in 2021 on lobbying “to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states.” Some of former President Ronald Reagan’s repressive and anti-Black policies came from the inaugural Mandate for Leadership that they handed to him in 1980. The Heritage Foundation proudly boasts that at least 60 percent of his policies came from them.
The Conservative Party is fully aware that the president alone cannot ensure that all their goals are actualized because of the way government checks and balances are set up. So they have taken the stance that “the modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people.” In a first-step attempt to reform the federal government to be more like a dictatorship, they literally list out every single agency and job position — along with their functions — while stressing the importance of firing ideological adversaries and filling the ranks with like-minded political appointees who are above-all loyal to the president. Credentials and expertise be damned.
Although most public schools only teach a very sanitized version of Black history during the month of February, Project 2025 argues that the “bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms,” and that the whole agency should be abolished.
Project 2025 even claims that the Department of Justice — of all agencies — has become too woke and leftist, and therefore “the next conservative Administration must make every effort to obtain the resources to support a vast expansion of the number of political appointees in every office and component across the department– especially in the Civil Rights Division, the FBI and the EOIR [Executive Office for Immigration Review]”
The strategy of firing and silencing political adversaries comes straight out of Hitler’s fascist playbook to consolidate power. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “In the first two years of his chancellorship, Hitler followed a concerted policy of ‘co-ordination’ (Gleichschaltung) by which political parties, state governments, and cultural and professional organizations were brought in line with Nazi goals. Culture, the economy, education and law all came under Nazi control.”
After Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, it took less than six months for the Nazi Party to complete their transformation of Germany from a democratic state to a one-party dictatorship using existing laws to manipulate and destroy the democratic political system.
Project 2025 sets out to accomplish most of the Conservative Party’s co-ordination efforts on Day One, declaring that “no one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day,” and “as many political appointees as possible should be in place at the start of a new Administration.”
It blows my mind that conservatives believe that they are “so near defeat.” Because let’s be for real, the fact that Trump is still a widely popular presidential candidate in 2024, despite inciting a failed coup attempt led by white supremacists and neo-fascists at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to keep him in power after losing the election, tells us everything we need to know about America’s unapologetic commitment to racism and authoritarianism.
Conservatives see today’s Progressive Movement the way many of us on the Left may imagine ourselves 50 years from now — with the power, influence and capacity to actualize our most ambitious goals, such as electing a socialist president and congress, redistributing the country’s wealth to end worker exploitation and class inequality, dismantling the carceral state, and institutionalizing anti-racism.
Given that we’ve all watched, in real time, a genocide against Palestinians unfold in Gaza with billions of dollars in weapons and unwavering support from Democratic President Joe Biden and a Congress full of Christian Zionists, despite persistent and growing demands from progressives for a ceasefire and an end to Israeli occupation, many members of our movement feel more powerless and estranged from the Democratic Party than ever.
Many more on the Left point to recent Supreme Court rulings that overturned Roe v. Wade, banned affirmative action in higher education, and granted presidents broad immunity from prosecution for criminal acts committed in office as evidence that fascism and Nazism aren’t just near — they’re already here.
Connecting the dots between European fascism and American racism
There’s a long history of Black revolutionary activists and scholars sounding the alarm about American modalities of authoritarianism and organizing against fascism in the United States. In 1969, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense hosted a national United Front Against Fascism conference that convened thousands of progressives — including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Communist Party USA, and Chicago’s own Young Lords and Young Patriots — in Oakland, California to strategize against fascist policies, state violence and political repression.
A generation before the Panthers, and several years before the U.S. officially entered World War II, world renowned poet and author Langston Hughes, a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance, traveled to Spain for five months in 1937 as a war correspondent for the Baltimore Afro American. While covering the Spanish Civil War and the Black American soldiers who bravely volunteered to fight against the conservative fascists that staged a military revolt against the democratically elected leftist Spanish Republicans, Hughes drew critical comparisons connecting America’s white supremacist democracy to the looming threat of fascism spreading across Europe.
“We are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism — for the American attitude towards us has always been one of economic and social discrimination,” Hughes said while speaking in Paris at the Second International Writers Conference in 1937. “We know Jim Crow cars, race riots, lynchings. We know the sorrows of the nine Scottsboro boys — innocent young negroes imprisoned some six years now for a crime that even the trial judge declared them not guilty of having committed, and for which some of them have not yet come to trial,” Hughes continued. “Yes, we negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”
The periodic recurrence of analogical comparisons between the lived experiences of Black people in America and Europeans in war torn fascist empires speaks to the insidious nature of politically motivated counterrevolutionary racial repression and democratic backsliding in the United States.
Conservatives have been weakening the institutions meant to protect political freedoms and civil liberties since the enactment of Black Codes during the Reconstruction Era of the late 1800s. Racial fascism didn’t start with Trump and it certainly won’t end with a 2024 election of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Resistance is necessary no matter who sits in the Oval Office.
Because Black, poor and especially incarcerated people have suffered and survived under authoritarian-like conditions for so long, less seems at stake for many of us during this 2024 presidential election cycle. On the other hand, everything seems at stake for white supremacists who believe “woke culture warriors” are threatening their way of life and are willing to combat progressive demands for diversity, equity and inclusion by any means necessary. Before introducing Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance at a campaign rally in Ohio on July 22, State Sen. George Lang (OH-R) told attendees that if they lose the election “it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved.”
A civil war between whom exactly? According to the Project 2025 agenda, “America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution.”
The mandate continues, “The former believe that America is — and always has been — ‘systemically racist’ and that it is not worth celebrating and must be fundamentally transformed, largely through a centralized administrative state. The latter believe in America’s history and heroes, its principles and promise, and in everyday Americans and the American way of life. They believe in the Constitution and republican government. Conservatives — the Americanists in this battle — must fight for the soul of America, which is very much at stake.”
So we are the woke revolutionaries and woke culture warriors who the Americanists must defeat.
They’re speaking about those of us who understand that America was founded by white Christian supremacists who stole this land from its indigenous populations through acts of terrorism and genocide much like the Zionist European Jews occupying Palestine today.
Those of us who dare not disrespect the lives and legacies of the Africans who survived the transatlantic slave trade and their descendants who built this nation’s economy with their blood, sweat and tears by saying America has never been a racist country.
Those of us who reject the notion of colorblindness today in favor of equity, accountability, reparations and truth.
Those of us who know that Sonya Massey would still be alive today were she not a Black woman.
Those of us who take the streets screaming Black Lives Matter! Defund the police! Free all political prisoners! Free Palestine! From the river to the sea! My body, my choice! No pride in genocide! Protect trans people! Stop harming intersex children! Stop banning books! Save our planet!
Those of us considered to be the progressive Left are the expressed enemies of American democracy in the eyes of the Conservative Movement that has mobilized behind former President Donald J Trump like a cult.
We can’t help anyone anywhere if we’re all dead or imprisoned here.
White supremacy is an urgent threat to us all
Project 2025 states that its number one priority, or number one conservative promise, is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” Sounds like a pretty noble aspiration until you recall that what began as a conservative project for protecting German youth and raising healthy families in the 1930s quickly became a mechanism for genocide under Hitler.
American Conservatives believe protecting American children means stripping women of their reproductive rights and shielding youth from critical conversations about race, gender, sex, sexuality, class and any other social constructs and how they function in our society to privilege certain groups of people and oppress others —hence their obsession with discrediting and even criminalizing “the woke agenda.”
Attacks against “wokeism,” anti-racism, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and women’s reproductive rights don’t go over nearly as well within progressive communities as attacks against “the gay agenda” and trans rights do. But if they come for them today, they’ll come for us tonight.
Trump’s anti-trans stance and fight to keep trans women and girls from competing in womens and girls sports may be his greatest appeal to otherwise “woke” or progressive community members. Although the conservatives’ anti-abortion, anti-woke and anti-trans sentiments are all inextricably linked to the desire to conserve white supremacy and reproduce more white supremacists, transphobia in Black communities and communities of color runs so deep that it may be just enough for some community members to cut off their noses to spite their faces.
One of the first and largest book burnings in Nazi Germany was an attack on the world’s first trans clinic, the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, where the first modern gender-affirming surgeries in the world were performed. Magnus Hirschfield, the founder and director of the Institute, was a German Jewish queer activist and physician who coined the term “transvestite” (it wasn’t derogatory then), studied gender fluidity and spearheaded a committee to decriminalize homosexuality in Germany.
Similarly, conservative-led attacks on the LGBTQ+ community today in the U.S. are already underway in the form of surging book bans and efforts to censor reading and educational materials written by and about members of the LGBTQ+ community across the country.
Many states are also enacting laws prohibiting in-school instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity like the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill passed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida.
Book bans targeting Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) authors and writings about race are also on the rise and it’s only a matter of time until “Don’t Say Race” laws are enacted as well.
According to Project 2025, both conversations about gender and race are threats to family stability, and therefore “the noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country.” And still, the worst is yet to come. Project 2025 foretells of a future wherein authors, educators, librarians and even parents who discuss sexual orientation and gender identity “should be classed as registered sex offenders” and imprisoned.
The conservative promise to protect American children asserts that “allowing parents or physicians to ‘reassign’ the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end,” and that everyone must accept “the givenness of our nature as men or women.” However, this country has a long history of performing dangerous and medically unnecessary “normalizing” surgeries on intersex infants who are born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit the typical binary definitions of male or female.
According to Human Rights Watch, “as many as 1.7 percent of babies are different from what is typically called a boy or a girl,” and “around 1 in 2,000 babies is different enough that doctors may recommend surgical intervention to make the body appear more in line with [social] expectations.” Conservatives have fiercely rejected the position from intersex advocates that those surgeries are equivalent to child abuse. The hypocrisy is loud and clear.
Another point of hypocrisy that elicits broad bipartisan appeal is Trump’s hyper-nationalist anti-immigration stance. There’s no evidence to support Trump’s repeated claim that millions of recently arrived immigrants came from prisons, jails, mental institutions and insane asylums in South America.
Contrastingly, it’s a well-documented fact that prior to the American Revolution, thousands of convicted and mentally ill Englishmen were banished from Great Britain and sold in the American colonies as indentured laborers to alleviate England’s large criminal population in lieu of capital punishment under the 1717 Transportation Act. A “Founding Father” and the first president of the United States George Washington himself purchased English convicts in 1774 to work alongside the enslaved Africans he owned at his Mount Vernon plantation.
The sordid practice of exiling and exploiting people convicted of crimes is protected by the U.S. Constitution. The 13th Amendment states that, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Mass emancipation of the formerly enslaved gave way to mass incarceration today, and now our country is home to 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population. Trying to shade other countries by suggesting their populace is full of criminals, when we have the largest prison population in the world and Trump himself is a 34-time convicted felon, is just crazy.
And although Trump can still run for president, felony convictions have been taking job opportunities from Black people long before Venezuelans started seeking asylum here.
Furthermore, as much as American capitalists and employers like to pit workers against each other, they are the ones who’ve devastated American jobs by offshoring their manufacturing, production and even customer service operations to countries with the lowest labor costs and least federal regulations like Mexico, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, Indonesia and China for generations. Adding artificial intelligence (AI), and automation in the form of self checkouts, cashier-less grocery stores and driverless ride shares, to the mix has further devastated the job market. Placing blame on asylum seekers and the working poor instead of the ruling capitalists is completely nonproductive.
Trump knew during his first presidential term, when he dramatically expanded harsh economic sanctions on Venezuela and its state-owned oil company in an overt effort to unseat their democratically elected Left-wing President Nicolás Maduro, that it would exacerbate the humanitarian crisis there and result in mass migration.
In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Thomas Shannon, who served under Trump as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, is quoted saying, “This is the point I made at the time: I said the sanctions were going to grind the Venezuelan economy into dust and have huge human consequences, one of which would be out-migration.” But, of course, now if you let Trump tell it, the crisis at the border is all VP Kamala Harris’ fault
We ought to be very careful how we talk about the Venezuelan people lest we soon find ourselves in a similar predicament, scrounging for refuge from economic crisis and political repression.
Project 2025 promises to impose sanctions against or block federal funding of any and all institutions and initiatives that promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) or seek to advance “interventions against perceived systemic racism.” It vows to not only defund but to dismantle and criminalize racial equity and anti-discrimination policies within the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Labor to name a few.
Whether you identify as “woke” or not, it’s in your best interest to not sleep on Project 2025.
