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shrinkrants · 9 days ago

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Read the whole thing. It details the carnage. We must resist.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 30, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 30, 2025

On July 2, 2024, just about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast: “[W]e are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” Roberts pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States the day before giving the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts.

“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the left has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts was the man who organized Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by a right-wing strongman. Creating that new government would require a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues.

When Americans learned about Project 2025, they hated it. An NBC News poll from September 2024 showed that only 4% of Americans saw the project favorably. Even among Republicans, that number climbed only to 7%. For those identifying as MAGA Republicans, the number rose to just 9%.

So Trump and his campaign advisors denied that he had anything to do with the plan. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he wrote on social media in July. “I have no idea who is behind it.”

And yet six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.

From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.

It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.

But while it shrank government programs that helped ordinary people—programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—as part of their claim to be returning power to the states, the administration did not shrink the government itself. Instead, it dramatically expanded the government’s capacity to arrest and detain undocumented migrants.

The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities for alleged antisemitism.

Last week, in order to obtain the Federal Communications Commission's approval of an $8 billion merger between CBS parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, Skydance agreed not to set up programs related to civil rights, or “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and to produce “unbiased” journalism. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr approved the merger, then bragged on right-wing media shows that CBS has agreed to put in place an internal political “bias monitor” who will report to the president of Paramount to make sure the channel’s news coverage is favorable to Trump and the right wing.

Last week, after Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million and to promise it will not use “race, color, sex, or national origin” in hiring decisions in exchange for the government’s restoring the $1.3 billion in funding the administration had withheld over charges of antisemitism, Trump’s education secretary Linda McMahon told Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel: “[T]his is a monumental victory for conservatives who’ve wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far left leaning professors.”

On Monday the Office of Personnel Management issued a memo allowing federal employees to pray publicly at work, as well as to try to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views.”

The administration has worked to dismantle the regulations that protect Americans by using artificial intelligence to slash regulations in half by next January. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Trump has claimed the power to fire the heads of independent agencies, effectively giving him power over agencies created by Congress.

Yesterday the administration took its fight against public protections a leap further when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that would get rid of a rule in place since 2009 establishing, on the basis of scientific evidence, that the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane warms the planet and thus endangers human life. Most of the vehicle, factory, and power plant emissions standards currently in place come from this “endangerment finding.”

EPA officials told Lisa Friedman of the New York Times they intend to argue that it is climate regulations, rather than greenhouse gas emissions, that cause the real harm to human health because they lead to higher prices and less consumer choice.

As Roberts said, the Supreme Court’s decision giving Trump immunity was important because destroying the country’s institutions would require lawbreaking. In nothing has that been so clear as in the administration’s handling of the rendering of undocumented migrants to third countries. Whistleblowers from the Department of Justice claim that DOJ official Emil Bove told DOJ attorneys they could ignore court orders stopping migrant flights, saying they should consider telling the courts “f*ck you.”

Last night, the Senate confirmed Bove to a federal judgeship, with 50 Republicans voting in favor. Forty-seven Democrats voted no. They were joined by Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who said: “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench.”

But Thom Tillis (R-NC) voted in favor of Bove’s confirmation, illustrating that even those Republicans who have put distance between themselves and Trump are enabling the revolution in our government.

Republicans in Congress have enabled the dismantling of the country’s social safety net with dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program while also extending significant tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and pouring money into purges of undocumented migrants. Today Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at an event for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart that the new “Trump accounts” established by the budget reconciliation bill are “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security.”

Congress’s unwillingness to stand against Trump shows most dramatically in its reluctance to reassert the power the Constitution gives to it—and only to it—over tariffs. Trump has fought his tariff war only by asserting emergency power, but he has used that power to change world trade and to punish countries like Brazil for its prosecution of Trump’s political ally, former president Jair Bolsonaro. Tomorrow, the day before the August 1 deadline on which most of Trump’s tariffs will go into effect, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will weigh in on whether those tariffs are legal.

When Kevin Roberts announced a year ago that the radical right was launching a second American revolution, he was telling the truth. But the new world they want to bring to life seems no more popular now than it was then.

And now the growing scandal around President Donald J. Trump’s connections to late convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein shows that the MAGA movement is apparently willing to accept the sexual abuse of children in order to cement their worldview.

Yesterday Trump tried to cast himself as a sort of protector when he claimed that he turned against Epstein because Epstein “stole people that worked for me.” When asked if those employees were young women, Trump answered “yes” and that they were hired “out of the spa” he ran. He said one of those girls was Virginia Giuffre, who was sex trafficked as a teenager by Ghislaine Maxwell and died by suicide earlier this year. Although Trump’s timeline did not add up—Guiffre left her job at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 and the friendship between the two men continued for several more years—the story itself suggests what’s on his mind. Today, a reporter asked Trump about those girls: “What did you think Epstein was stealing those women for?”

Today Dan Ruetenik of CBS News issued a detailed report on the video from outside Epstein’s jail cell that the DOJ has released as proof he died by suicide. A government source told Ruetenik that the released video is not raw footage—confirming a report by Dhruv Mehrotra of Wired on July 15—and that it is two videos stitched together. Ruetenik reported that the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the DOJ inspector general all possess the longer video.

And perhaps there is also a story about Project 2025’s staying power in the fact that this damning report dropped less than a week after Trump officials celebrated their control over CBS.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#project 2025 #letters from an american #heather cox richardson #corruption #authoritarianism #medicare #medicaid #safety net #bullying #kleptocracy

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shrinkrants · 10 days ago

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More wisdom from James B. Greenberg. The whole piece extends and supports the spirit of the NYT piece I posted earlier today. In the words of Sly Stone, We got to live together.

Why Connection—Not Control—is Our Greatest Source of Power

What if our greatest strength isn’t control, but connection? In a time of crisis, even the smallest acts carry forward—through memory, resistance, and deep time.

James B. Greenberg

Jul 30, 2025

We are living through a moment in which authoritarianism is no longer merely a threat. It is an organizing principle, a mode of governance that normalizes cruelty, criminalizes dissent, and hollows out the very institutions built to protect the public. The executive orders and legislative measures being pushed today are not bureaucratic accidents. They are acts of political redesign.

What replaces democratic law doesn’t need new institutions. It rewires the ones we already have to serve a different purpose. Law is not discarded; it is weaponized—not to defend the public, but to protect power.

To resist this is not only a political act. It is a historical one. We are shaping the memory of what was accepted, what was contested, and what was possible. Each refusal to comply, each protest, legal challenge, policy safeguard, or act of moral courage becomes part of the long record that future generations will study when they ask what we did in the face of creeping tyranny.

Authoritarianism doesn’t only rely on repression. It thrives on resignation. It tells us nothing can be done, that resistance is futile, that hope is naïve. But history does not support this. The fall of every repressive system—from the plantation economy to apartheid to the Berlin Wall—was not the result of inevitability but of struggle. Accumulated over time. Advanced at great cost. But sustained.

Standing up now may not mean defeating a regime in a single act. It may mean refusing collaboration, protecting a threatened colleague, exposing corruption, or showing up for a neighbor. These acts may seem small. They are not. They are part of the infrastructure of resistance: the human infrastructure on which every democratic revival has depended.

The same perspective holds when we confront climate collapse. The atmosphere, like history, records everything. Carbon released in 1850 is still warming the Earth. The emissions we generate today will linger for centuries. And the ecological systems we’ve disrupted—ice sheets, ocean currents, forests—are shifting in response on timescales far longer than those of our institutions.

We are told it’s too late. That the damage is done. That nothing we do matters. But that defeatism only makes collapse more likely. The truth is: every tenth of a degree we prevent, every ecosystem we protect, every just policy we implement shapes the conditions of life for generations. These are not gestures. They are boundaries: of habitability, of hope, of survival.

This isn’t just an environmental issue. It’s a civilizational one. Climate change magnifies inequality, accelerates displacement, and exposes every crack in the systems meant to mediate power. Its effects fall heaviest on those least responsible. It is not a problem of carbon alone, but of political economy—of systems that reward extraction, commodify nature, and externalize harm.

But not all futures are lost. The choices we make now matter, not only for their immediate effects but for the pathways they open or foreclose. Resistance and renewal are not separate acts. They are part of the same long arc of care. That arc is held up by relationships: between people and place, between generations, between those who came before and those who are not yet born.

We are the inheritors of choices others made. And we are now the ones who must choose what to defend, what to dismantle, what to remember, and what to become.

This all matters because the dominant systems we live under are designed to make us forget. Authoritarianism relies not only on force but on erasure: of memory, of alternative ways of being, of solidarity, of history itself. Political repression and climate denial function in similar ways. Both depend on distraction and disconnection. They thrive on making the unacceptable seem inevitable.

But memory is a form of resistance. And attention is a form of care. Choosing what to remember, what to notice, teach, preserve, and defend is one way we stay human under systems that seek to render us fungible.

None of this guarantees an outcome. But it guarantees that nothing we do is meaningless. Every action, every refusal, every effort to repair is a form of presence that extends beyond the self. We are not spectators. We are participants in a long and tangled chain of causality. That brings with it responsibility, but also the extraordinary potential for transformation.

With what’s going on, we often feel powerless, as if history is something done to us rather than something we participate in. But that sense of smallness obscures a deeper truth: each of us shapes history, not only in our own time but for generations to come. Every action has consequences. Some are immediate, visible, and measurable. Most ripple outward in ways we rarely see, accumulating like sediment in a riverbed, altering the course of things long after we’re gone.

Our very existence is the product of such accumulations. The atoms in our bodies were forged in stars that exploded billions of years ago. We are composed of particles born in the Big Bang, shaped by cosmic events we’ll never witness. Our biological inheritance stretches back through eons, through the first self-replicating molecules in a primeval sea, through ancestors who endured, adapted, resisted.

What we call the present is only a cross-section of that deeper continuity: of energy, matter, and meaning moving forward. And we too are part of that movement. Our choices today, even the smallest ones, carry forward into futures we cannot predict. The same is true for information and practice. Knowledge accumulates, adapts, and corrects itself—but it doesn’t vanish. What we record, teach, preserve, or refuse becomes part of an ongoing inheritance. It enters the world as something real, with the potential to grow, resist, or transform.

A deep time ethic demands more than imagination. It requires commitment—to act not only for today’s outcomes, but for consequences that unfold over decades, centuries, or longer. Most of our systems, political, economic, even academic, are built around short-term returns. But the crises we face now—ecological collapse, democratic erosion, systemic dispossession—unfold on long and uneven timelines. Meeting them requires a horizon of responsibility that stretches far beyond our own comfort or lifespan.

From an anthropological view, agency is not only personal; it is always social. It emerges through relationship, memory, and the accumulation of shared action. Movements arise not from singular events but from networks of care, refusal, and solidarity. They rarely move in straight lines. They advance by persistence, retreat, reconfiguration. And over time, they reshape what is possible.

No authoritarian regime, no extractive order, no imperial system has lasted forever. All have eventually been undone by the patient force of collective will. But that will must be cultivated and remembered.

Indigenous traditions remind us of this differently. In many of these worldviews, we do not stand apart from time—we are woven into it. We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our grandchildren. Responsibility is not heroic. It is relational. It lives in ritual, stewardship, kinship, and story. Time is not a line but a cycle. Consequence is not isolated to individuals; it moves through communities, watersheds, ecosystems, and generations. These are not abstractions. They are living systems of accountability that challenge the extractive worldview and offer an alternative rooted in endurance rather than domination.

Remember this: we are all powerful, not in theory but in action. Our voices and relationships matter. When we remember this, we reclaim the future from the logic of inevitability and become ancestors worth remembering.