While we are distracted by troubling events across the sea and the paucity of acceptable candidates, it’s important to remember that it may not be who gets into high office, but who drives policy. Joe Biden has been somewhat of a disappointment, fawning over Israel while it erases Palestinians, championing his economics while all of us slide deeper into debt and chafe under skyrocketing prices, and generally not gripping the wheel of the ship of state all that tightly. That’s biting him in the ass at the polls, where he trails that stupid orange gorilla by two to three points. It’s not because Trump is popular-he’s not, according to media who tell us he is “underperforming”. All of this suggests that this election will be the opposite of 2020, where people turned out in force. Enthusiasm may be hard to find this time, with people not giving a shit which dodderer holds the White House. Believe me, I am a member of my local Democratic party, a ranking chair, and I am not looking forward to sticking a Biden sign in my yard or waving a placard on a street corner for him.
However, I am reminded from time to time of Trump’s most dangerous pronunciamentos- those of dictatorship, Christian supremacy, nativism, and these ridiculous anti-“Marxist” and “radical leftist” purges he keeps alluding to, as if those ilk are of any threat to the nation. I hope, but do not trust, that he does not mean you and me, those of us who believe in classical liberal values of equality and social justice. Trump, thankfully, is an illiterate imbecile, but that may be what is so worrisome about his return. What he may do is farm his policy out to conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation. Once a group of pigs like that get in Trump’s pea-sized noggin, it’s a hard rain that may fall. He’s already larded the Supreme Court with conservative waterheads for the next 40 years. The imagination reels as to who he may place in his administration to whisper policy to him because he doesn’t have the political acumen or intelligence to create his own.
In that case, we must peek behind the curtain and take a looksee at the creeps who will likely animate Trump, and there is a lot of them. This election season, they’ve all gathered under one umbrella to create a monster of a manifesto called Project 2025. Clocking in at nearly 900 pages, it wants to usher in a new era for the Right. I’m gonna regret this, but I’d like to attempt to page through it with you and relate some of its most onerous aspects. Criticism of the tome is scarce, as is any attempt to boil the paperweight down by its authors. I have tried and failed to find this “180 Day Playbook” for the next righty president that they say exists, which perhaps would be easier to whale on, but alas, the only thing to be done is to look at the whole damn thing because it is nowhere to be found. In several cases, there will be topics I know nothing about, and I may skirt those unless I see something truly nefarious.
Let’s skip the foreword and look at parts of the first “promise”:
RESTORE THE FAMILY AS THE CENTERPIECE OF AMERICAN LIFE AND PROTECT OUR CHILDREN.
The next conservative President must get to work pursuing the true priority of politics—the well-being of the American family. In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones.
Single people-you’re screwed!
It’s a ridiculous myth that liberals have some overweening need to “centralize” things. Put simply, it’s meaningless, conceived in paranoia. Sure, where there’s unfairness, a government should work to balance things. But I’m sure you have already heard that we lefties are on some “totalitarian” trip, which has been standard conservative bullshit for a generation. Do you want to subvert the family, fellow libs? Of course the fuck not. Do you care if someone has a nontraditional one, or if an individual is content being on their own? No, you definitely don’t. So far as natural and unnatural loves, who the fuck are these people who want to tell you what exactly that is? That’s anti-freedom, and I thought that freedom was a conservative trip. To wrap this up, I don’t know who wants to centralize power in this regard-politicians who treasure the family unit to the point of fetishism, or ones that would like you to live your life as you see fit. Someone wants to tell you how to behave here. I’ll leave it up to you to decide who that is.
What do they want you to do and to prioritize, specifically?
Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering.
Zzzzz. Kill me now. If you don’t want to do it, don’t. How boring that this is the extent of what they think you should limit yourself to. Get hitched, spit some babies out(be sure you can afford them first!), work until near-death, genuflect to a non-existent God, sit up straight in class, and well, I’m good with volunteering of course but you are not a bad citizen if you have no time for that shit and would rather sit in front of Hulu every night. Leave people alone. Once again, I cannot emphasize what a volte-face or outright lie that conservatism is about “freedom”. Being a good little serf is more fucking authoritarian than anything I can think of right now. Leave your box, and get raspberried by your government and your fellow busybodies.
Moving on…Jesus, this may take my entire productive life to get through. I am stuck on page four of this piece of shit. Still, we must slog through all this high-minded rhetoric.
Today, the American family is in crisis. Forty percent of all children are born to unmarried mothers, including more than 70 percent of black children. There is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father. Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts. So many of the problems government programs are designed to solve—but can’t—are ultimately problems created by the crisis of marriage and the family.
Don’t be fooled by what looks like concern here. They just don’t want to help you when you are struggling because your life may not be going the way you planned. If you would just do what they insist you do, things wouldn’t be this way. What kind of a half-formed soul doesn’t realize that relationships are exceedingly complicated and people fuck, drift apart and split up? These are the same people who tell you that you will not be getting an abortion because you can’t provide for an actual child. I’m not sure what the prescription is here-are we going to criminalize divorce? Force a man or a woman stay in a situation they don’t want to be in? Chastity belts? Oh, that’s right, get square with the Lord and all will be well. Fuck you. Besides, it’s not fatherlessness that’s on the hook for the societal problems listed above. There’s deep woven inequality in our society. Sometimes it’s race, sometimes it’s the absence of good jobs, the unavailability of healthcare, I’m sure a sociologist could come up with more. These are human beings with human problems, and we err. You don’t finger wag at them and shut your purse. You help balance things. It’s what a civil, merciful society does. Conservatism shows its true colors in this area-it’s ultimately a cruel philosophy, which leaves you on your own if you don’t listen to them. Talk about fucking totalitarianism. They don’t even have the decency to hit you with a truncheon to make you behave-they want you to brainwash yourself.
Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent.
That’s not happening. All in your imagination, you right wing fucks. As much as I think churches should pay up, it’s not a big priority for “the left”. Most of us can’t really get worked up about it. I think that ministers should not be exempt from taxation on religious grounds, but churches in a lot of cases are a lifeline when the government is not. Were I in politics, I would not even bring this issue to the fore. And I’m a pretty strident atheist.
I also would like to put my hands around the neck of whoever coined the term “woke” and caused conservatives to strangle language and grammar to fit it in their everyday utterances. You hipsters shit the bed on that one.
The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), 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.
Holy shit! These prudes want to completely control sexuality. You can’t even be gay under this project? What?
Equity and diversity “hard targets”? The fuck you say?
What part of human sexual behavior has ANYTHING to do with the First Amendment? Merely because it says that you can exercise your right to believe in whatever you want does not mean you can tell other folks who don’t believe what you are selling what they must do. It’s that simple. All this gobbledygook is just a front for Christian extremism. You don’t like trans people? Drag queens weird you out? Fine. Be a bigot. But don’t hide behind the Constitution’s skirt to be a bigger one.
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
Word salad, of course. These people are the John Ashcrofts of the world who insist on covering nude statues. They’d chisel off the dick of David if you let them. A while ago, I wrote about hysterical conservative mothers who insisted that a naked cartoon goblin butt in a children’s book was “sexual” to the point where the school library drew pants on him. OK, ladies-go back to your fucking sewing circle. Find something to do. It’s a real stretch to call that porn. Only if you haven’t seen real pornography can you judge that sexual. Kids can handle a goddamn cartoon. And within that mess of a paragraph is the insinuation that they’d like to dismantle the pornography industry entirely. Too much porn can be bad for you-I have struggled with it, but I don’t see it as a societal cancer. Women who are successful at it by and large are confident in their sexuality and making way more in porn than they did swinging around a pole. The bottom line is, adults can handle sex in their own way. Hands off our porn, you hypocritical Christian fucks. Did the male author of this go through puberty? Coming is fun, most people dig it. But shame is the order of the day in conservative land.
In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.
No. Schools educate children. Or, in some cases, babysit them for you while you slog at your meaningless job. Don’t give schools a heavy for doing what you cannot. “Choice” here is just a veiled term for the destruction of public education. They’d love it if every kid went to church schools and have Sister Mary-Margaret rap your student’s knuckles for carving bad words into their desk while it was time for bible study. And let’s do away with this notion that parents are primary educators, shall we? Parents are already stretched to the max in a lot of cases. They only have enough energy to tell you to do your damn homework. They can’t help you with Algebra III. They’ve forgotten it. They don’t know shit about the Krebs cycle anymore. None of us know correct history. Spanish? No recuerdo. We can try to translate their monolithic textbooks when they are stuck, be we can’t teach. We didn’t go to school to be professionals. Let’s preserve the public education system to ensure access for all.
The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.
I’d like to point out here that this person has a doctorate. My blog editor does not recognize some of these words, and I won’t either. This guy writes worse than I do. Yes, they are still hung up on critical race theory. No, they haven’t read any, as evidenced by his definition. What’s with them affixing “ideology” to everything they don’t like anyway? Is conservative thought exempt?
Almost done. Here’s their view on tiny tech:
Many Silicon Valley executives famously don’t let their own kids have smart phones. They nevertheless make billions of dollars addicting other people’s children to theirs. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child abuse to continue.
If I was a pushy conservative asshole that wanted to regulate people’s lives in every nook and cranny, I’d choose this as my focus. We are way beyond the looking glass in our addiction to our phones. But what does one do when a tiny computer fits in your pocket? You go a little buggy. You do stupid shit like look at cat videos and post pictures that no one wants to look at. Mostly harmless, but we need to put the fuckers down once in a while. It’s probably blunting our attention span, which is bad enough already in this world of information we cannot possibly assimilate. They bring good things, of course, but it’s a mixed bag. But we see the mailed fist here again; they don’t want anyone to use the federal government but THEM. They can’t walk the walk of limited government at all.
Now the author started talking about family but that’s clearly not important anymore- he chooses to end his portion of the book with a little abortion screed:
Finally, conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. Conservatives should ardently pursue these pro-life and pro-family policies while recognizing the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations and the heroism of every choice to become a mother. Alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.
Yup, take it to term ladies, no matter what the situation, even if the vaunted father is no longer around and your job is on the line for getting knocked up. I can hardly imagine how much psychological damage could be done to a woman who is bound to be pregnant by law but knows she has to make the choice of giving that baby away. It’s happening right now in states with heartbeat bills. This is not heroism. This is slavery, straight from the pages of your favorite dystopian novel.
Whew! We made it. That’s one promise down. I hope it scared you. I know I’m terrified and a great deal of this will not affect me. In fact, I’d be scared of families if this horrid shit was what it would take to protect them. In the final analysis, the one thing that differentiates a conservative from a liberal is that liberals tend to think of others when forming an opinion. We’re reticent to tell people in need tough shit, and we don’t have a taste for telling people what to do. Those are good things. Maybe we should write our own mandate, but I cannot fathom any of us wanting to write 900 pages of policy proposals that even the hardiest pol would be challenged to read. I know for fucking sure Trump will have to have this spoon-fed to him.
The Illogical Seminary 