Recently, a far-right plan to transform the U.S. into an authoritarian regime, known as Project 2025, has gone viral on social media. What is this project all about?
First, the project is a nearly 1,000-page manual on how to establish a strong conservative government with the next conservative president. The project was spearheaded by the far-right think tank, the Heritage Foundation, with the help of former President Donald Trump officials.
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections,” Project 2025 said on its website. “If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. That is the goal of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.”
Some of the goals of the project are to fire as many as 50,000 federal employees and replace all federal employees with people loyal to the conservative cause. Many conservatives believe that federal employees are allied with liberals and must be fired.
Other goals include reducing the power of Congress by appointing allies to key administrative positions, giving the president more freedom to act.
A former Trump official said that the next administration can “play hardball a little more than we did with Congress.”
The plan also calls for a complete ban on abortion-inducing drugs, such as mifepristone and misoprostol. Recently, the U.S. rejected a challenge to mifepristone, allowing the drug to remain on the market.
The project aims to ban almost all abortion care and restrict natural family planning methods, this would increase the number of deaths related to pregnancy and would affect women and children alike.
Among other things, the project aims to eliminate the Department of Education, dismantle the Department of Homeland Security, and deploy the military as law enforcement.
The project has been called authoritarian by many experts and politicians.
“Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says — and that’s just not the system the government we live under,” Philip Wallach, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute told the Associated Press.
Current authoritarian regimes, where the executive has extraordinary power, include Russia, North Korea, China, and Venezuela.
If you want to read the whole hand-book, you can do it on its website.
