Why I’m voting
Democracy may or may not be real, but Project 2025 sure is
This blog was never meant to be a political pulpit. But I had to get some stuff off my chest and this is one of the few things I have that I can best post this on. Don’t worry, after this I’ll get back to the business of telling you my opinions about movies and stuff.
Anyway. I’m not someone who really believes in democracy, partially on philosophical grounds (I think it’s self-contradictory and coercive) and partially because I think it’s a liability: it’s basically a permanently open door for illiberal elements to seize power, the demonstration of which we’re seeing happen right now. I’m also not 100% convinced that the US electoral system functions as advertised.
So believe me when i say that I’m still going to vote, because on the off-chance that our votes actually matter, I don’t want anyone to hold me responsible for Trump getting back into power.
See, it’s not really about Trump. We know who he is, we know what he’s like: a power-hungry loser who can’t fathom that other people exist, views the world purely in transactional terms (in other words, he can’t understand that people would do anything they don’t personally get some benefit out of,) has utter contempt for the concepts of service or sacrifice or altruism, and is increasingly openly racist and authoritarian in ways that it’s getting harder for his supporters to deny or downplay. [1] (All of this is demonstrable just in things the man has said publicly, and he’s said so much more privately.)
But you can’t really convince anyone of anything based on just Trump. he’s a known quantity and a lot of folks like what he’s selling, unaware (and uncaring) that it’s a bill of goods. They just want him to stick it to the libs.
No, what really concerns me are all the freaks and weirdos around him. Last time Trump was in office, he was surrounded by a mixture of incompetent yes men who encouraged Trump’s more illiberal leanings but didn’t really know how to wield that effectively, and craven careerists who backed Trump on the basis that he’d pass all their stuff but realized they’d sworn fealty to a man they didn’t fully understand. Those people are all gone. Project 2025 and the Trump campaign’s own version of it, Agenda 47, shows that Trump is surrounded by people who do know how to work the controls of government and they’re going to use it to make this country a demonstrably shittier place.
This isn’t just about sticking it to LGBTQ people or immigrants, or “protecting children,” or destroying “the woke/DEI agenda.” It’s a comprehensive plan to strip out everything that makes this country actually function and replace it with a parasitic entity that eats liberty and shits out wealth for the 1%. Everyone will be affected: from LGBTQ people [2025 p. 1, 5, 462, 485, 495, 584] to middle-class boomers who don’t realize they’re voting away their own healthcare [2025 p. 465], forcing them to find work (even if they’re retired) just to receive Medicaid [2025, p 468]. Taxes on groceries and gas will go up [2025 p. 698.] You could go to jail for listening to the wrong kind of music [2025 p. 5]. Even weather reports won’t be free — companies like Accuweather have been trying to kill the NOAA for years and Project 2025 is a dream come true for them [2025 p. 674]. And of course, the authors are big fans of dictators like Viktor Orban — Heritage Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts and Orban are tight and Hungary has its own version of the Heritage Foundation that’s state funded. They’re already laying the groundwork to ensure that once they’ve squeezed themselves into every nook and cranny of government, [2][3] It’ll be damn near impossible to get them out short of some methods I’m not allowed to talk about on social media (but they are! [4])
And sure, you might dismiss all this as a wishlist for cartoon supervillains and our democracy would protect against it. Except as I said, democracy is designed to be an open door for this shit. We have no real protections against it — in part because what few protections we did have were stripped away the last time Trump was in office.
I need to be up front and say that this isn’t a Democrat vs Republican problem. The Dems are actually perfectly fine with all of this so long as they get that sweet, sweet lobbying and lecture circuit money. tThey’re perfectly happy to piss away all the money they promised to forgive student loans and rebuild infrastructure with by giving it to Israel. [5] Dems ain’t yo friend, and just because they’re right when they say Trump is an existential threat to liberty doesn’t mean it isn’t utterly cynical and hollow coming from them, and I think everyone has noticed that except the most die-hard shitlibs. I’m not endorsing Harris, I’m endorsing the end of Trump’s political career (and with any luck his freedom.) Aren’t we all sick of this guy anyway?
You might say that Trump has nothing to do with any of this. Let’s say for the sake of argument that Trump isn’t full of shit when he says he has no connection to Project 2025 and doesn’t even know what it is — ignoring the fact that well over half of the 307 contributors to Project 2025 have been in his administration, campaigns, and/or transition teams, often in high-ranking positions such as deputy chief of staff,[6] ignoring that his own campaign’s Agenda 47 has a lot of overlap with Project 2025. [7] So once again let’s leave Trump himself out of the conversation. The man is ultimately a figurehead for the people behind Project 2025. His brain is in an active state of fermentation — they don’t need him to lead, they just need him to rubberstamp their stuff. Let’s be real, a monkey could do his job if enough people voted for it.
So who even are these people? They’re weirdos and freaks. I’m not saying this to insult them. I’m saying that the world they want, the attitudes they possess, are so far from what normal, every day people want, that they become impossible for the average person to understand. We’re talking some deep, esoteric stuff that sounds like absolute lunacy to outsiders but makes perfect sense within their own ecosystem. [8]
They’re people like Lance Wallnau, the founder of the New Apostolic Reformation. He’s the one who said Trump was a modern-day King Cyrus. [9] He’s pretty much the face of Christian nationalism, the ideology that’s driving all of this. [10]
They’re people like Elon Musk, the most divorced man on earth. Have you seen the guy? he’s openly weird,[11] anyone who’s paid attention to him knows how much of a dipshit he is — and how he’s turned Twitter from a “free speech zone” into a right-wing hellhole[12] that silences progressives, just like conservatives have always imagined happened to them.[13] Not even Trump likes him.[14]
These people are weird beyond weird. We’re talking the kind of people who believe in phrenology, who openly hate cats because they think they trick women into not having children[15], who became adult converts to Catholicism not because they’re in it for Jesus but because they’re neo-monarchists[16], who view children as property,[17] who think Halloween is a satanic ritual (hi, mom!), who think women accused of false rape accusations — which, let’s be real, includes most actual rape victims — should be executed[18], who are absolutely fucking obsessed with the genitals of trans people (and by extension, children, because they’ve all got it in their head that the children are being transed and want to examine kids to make sure it’s not happening,)[19] who think people who don’t have children shouldn’t be allowed to vote[20], who think that LGBTQ people have some “agenda” to destroy the nuclear family and execute Christians (hi, mom!), who have thought for the last four years that Trump is really president secretly giving orders from Mar-a-Lago and Biden’s entire presidency is a carefully-orchestrated trap for the Democrats[21], who think that they’re literally in warfare with literal, actual demons from hell,[22] who so happen to be liberals, insufficiently-loyal conservatives, LGBTQ people, any brown person who doesn’t toe the line, the list goes on (hi mom!) and think Israel needs to exist to fulfill their end-times theology derived from the book of revelations, but don’t actually give a hot shit about the Jewish people living there except insofar that they’re supposed to accept Christ as their savior[23] (and, again, hi mom!)
Why is all this shit familiar to me? Because — as you might have guessed — I grew up in this world. My mom was an evangelical. She was preyed on in the late 70s/early 80s by an evangelical cult in the Lansing, MI area during a time of very bad mental health (including suicidal ideation) and she dove into their ideology head-first. (This was just as the modern-day religious right was really coming into its own, having moved past agitating for Bob Jones University’s segregationist policies to instead focus on the more publicly palatable abortion issue.[24]) She was a paranoid conspiracy theorist who talked about things like the Illuminati, how the UN was a Satanic plot to take over the world, how Obama was the Antichrist, how the National Endowment for the Arts was a plot to undermine Christianity, and so on. And she surrounded herself with people who believed like she did. I was constantly getting dragged to churches full of weirdos. I remember getting screamed at by a couple of mom’s friends — with mom watching and agreeing with everything they said — because I had a Jurassic Park shirt on. I was maybe 11 or 12.
When mom died I felt like I’d finally escaped a cult. I’d left Christianity in college, but I still suffered from financial, emotional and religious abuse into my thirties as my mom controlled my money and what kind of media I could enjoy, forcing me to lie, and sneak, and hide things. My relationship with my mom was and remains complicated — I loved her and I miss her every day, but every day I curse the people who preyed on her and turned her into a paranoid, fearful weirdo who was always struggling with the tension between her extreme beliefs with her seemingly-bottomless natural empathy.
So give yourself the greatest gift of all: a world my mom wouldn’t want.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327/
[2] https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-creating-schedule-f-excepted-service/
[3] https://kettering.org/the-schedule-f-threat-to-democracy-a-project-2025-explainer/
[4] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/social-medias-role-in-fueling-extremism-and-misinformation-in-a-divided-political-climate
[5] https://www.timesofisrael.com/biden-signs-95-billion-war-aid-measure-with-relief-for-ukraine-israel-and-taiwan/
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/22/us/politics/project-2025-trump-heritage-foundation.html
[7] https://racinecountyeye.com/2024/09/16/project-2025-agenda-47-trump/
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs
[9] https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/5/354
[10] https://projects.propublica.org/christian-nationalism-origins/
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4uZUb3GFpI
[12] https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/06/13/elon-musks-x-attracts-more-right-leaning-users-since-twitter-takeover-new-research-finds
[13] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/01/the-twitter-files-should-disturb-liberal-critics-of-elon-musk-and-heres-why
[14] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-elon-musk-boring-weird-1235088023/
[15] https://x.com/HanaMichels/status/967873922812198913
[16] https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/how-catholic-integralism-became-just
[17] https://dominickb.substack.com/p/meet-the-body-okanogan-countys-sovereign
[18] https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/joel-webbon-wants-publicly-execute-few-women-who-have-lied
[19] https://ohiohouse.gov/news/democrat/ohio-republicans-want-to-force-children-to-undergo-genital-exams-to-play-high-school-sports-110422
[20] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/jd-vance-allotting-votes-people-children-thought-experiment-rcna166140
[21] https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-qanon.html
[22] https://www.npr.org/2024/02/29/1234843874/tracing-the-rise-of-christian-nationalism-from-trump-to-the-ala-supreme-court
[23] https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/truth-many-evangelical-christians-support-israel-rcna121481
[24] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
All Project 2025 citations are directly from the document itself and written as [2025, p. xxx]
https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
