TITLE: Project 2025 decried as racist. Some contributors have trail of racist writings, activity
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/07/29/project-2025-racist-writing/74567007007/
EXCERPTS: [F]or months commentators and academics have been sounding the alarm on Project 2025. The effort, they say, is a deeply racist endeavor that actually is aimed at dismantling many protections and aid programs for Americans of color.
“Really, it's kind of a white supremacist manifesto,” said Michael Harriot, a writer and historian who wrote an article earlier this month titled: “I read the entire Project 2025. Here are the top 10 ways it would harm Black America.”
And a closer look at the named contributors to Project 2025 adds to the concern: A USA TODAY analysis found at least five of them have a history of racist writing or statements, or white supremacist activity.
Project 2025 contributor wrote for white supremacist websites
[Richard] Hanania is a right-wing author and pundit who has built a reputation among Republicans as an “anti-woke crusader.”
Before he became a favorite of prominent conservatives – including Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, who is now Trump’s pick for vice president – Hanania was pushing a far more extreme version of his right-wing views.
An investigation last year by the Huffington Post unmasked Hanania as having written under a pseudonym for websites connected to the “alt-right,” the white supremacist movement that flared up before and during the first Trump presidency.
In the early 2010s, writing under the pen name “Richard Hoste,” Hanania “identified himself as a ‘race realist.’” Huffington Post reported last August. “He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of ‘low IQ’ people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed ‘miscegenation’ and ‘race-mixing.’ And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of ‘The Turner Diaries,’ the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.”
Hanania acknowledged writing the posts under a pseudonym and, since then, has only partly renounced his past. Two days after the Huffington Post exposé, in a post on his website titled “Why I Used to Suck, and (Hopefully) No Longer Do,” Hanania wrote “When I was writing anonymously, there was no connection between the flesh and blood human being who would smile at a cashier or honk at someone in traffic, and the internet ‘personality’ who could just grow more rabid over time.”
Vance’s connection to Hanania was documented in a 2021 interview with conservative talk show host David Rubin — two years before Hanania began denouncing his racist past — when Vance described Hanania as a “friend” and a “really interesting thinker.”
Vance and Hanania have also interacted several times on X, formerly known as Twitter, liking and commenting on each other’s posts.
Richard Spencer, a white supremacist credited with creating the alt-right moniker, published several of Hanania’s articles on the website AlternativeRight.com, including one in which Hanania wrote “If the races are equal, why do whites always end up near the top and blacks at the bottom, everywhere and always?”
In an interview this month, Spencer told USA TODAY that while Hanania may have moderated some of his views, “I think it’s very clear that Richard is a race realist and eugenicist.” The term eugenicist refers to proponents of eugenics, the belief that the genetic quality of the human race can be improved through certain practices — practices viewed by many as scientific racism.
Hanania did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
A Confederate cheerleader and promoting the ‘Great Replacement’ theory
In a 2017 speech at the “Old South Ball” in Danville, Va., [Corey] Stewart, an attorney who would become the 2018 Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, told the assembled crowd he was proud to stand next to a Confederate flag:
“That flag is not about racism, folks, it’s not about hatred, it’s not about slavery, it is about our heritage,” Stewart said. At the same event, he called Virginia “the state of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.”
According to a 2018 New York Times profile of Stewart, white supremacists volunteered on the then-Senate candidate’s campaign. “Several of his aides and advisers have used racist or anti-Muslim language, or maintained links to outspoken racists like Jason Kessler” – who helped organize the white supremacist Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia – the Times reported.
Stewart did not respond to an email seeking comment. Kessler did not respond to a phone call.
At least three contributors to Project 2025 have supported the racist “Great Replacement” theory, which contends that powerful Democrats and leftists are conspiring to change the demographics of the United States by turning a blind eye to, or even encouraging, illegal immigration.
Michael Anton, a former senior national security official in the Trump administration, wrote in a pseudonymous essay published in 2016 that “The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle. As does, of course, the U.S. population.”
Anton has also written several essays, including one for USA TODAY, arguing to end birthright citizenship. His arguments have been widely criticized as factually incorrect and misleading. In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, Tufts University politics professor Daniel Drezner called them “very racist.”
Anton did not respond to a request for comment.
Another contributor is Stephen Moore, who in 2019 withdrew his name for consideration for the Federal Reserve Board amid scrutiny for his misogynistic and racist jokes and commentary.
Moore, who had made a joke about Trump removing the Obamas from public housing when he took office, was widely mocked when he later tried to clear up the joke in a television interview. The fallout, combined with concerns about Moore’s history of writing articles viewed as disparaging toward women, led him to withdraw his name for consideration.
Moore did not respond to a request for comment.
The 2009 PhD thesis of Project 2025 contributor Jason Richwine was titled, “IQ and Immigration Policy.” The thesis includes statements such as: “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”
Richwine resigned from his position at the Heritage Foundation in 2013 amid controversy over his research. He now works at the Center For Immigration Studies. The paper, and Richwine’s defense of it, were widely decried as racist, bigoted and scientifically incorrect.
It didn’t help Richwine that his thesis was uncovered in the midst of controversy over an immigration study he co-authored that was roundly criticized by liberals and conservatives alike.
“Had he not just argued, in an extremely tendentious fashion, that Hispanic immigrants are, on the whole, parasites, he might have endured public criticism of his dissertation,” read an analysis in The Economist. “Had he not in his dissertation argued that Hispanic immigration ought to be limited on grounds of inferior Hispanic intelligence, he would have endured the firestorm over the risible Heritage immigration study.”
Richwine did not respond to a request for comment.
TITLE: Project 2025’s dangerous policy buffet includes a bit of Hungary | Editorial
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/project-2025-trump-hungary-19596256.php
EXCERPTS: The now-notorious policy agenda is a product of the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank founded in 1973. The organization is headed by Kevin Roberts, former CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the hard-right political organization that exerts a powerful influence on Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton and other GOP elected officials across the state. A hefty portion of TPPF’s funding comes from its vice-chairman, Tim Dunn, the West Texas oil and gas billionaire and ardent Christian nationalist who’s the force behind Abbott’s relentless school-voucher crusade. The authoritarian national agenda Roberts now shepherds at Heritage looks a lot like TPPF’s policy goals as it lays out in disturbing detail what a second Trump administration might look like.
Make no mistake, though; hard-right ideologues at the Heritage Foundation and more than a hundred conservative organizations that helped produce the buffet of policy options — officially the 2025 Presidential Transition Project — are ready to shape Trump’s ill-considered inclinations and self-serving impulses into a dramatic makeover of the nation.
As Roberts assured Steve Bannon, Trump’s favorite foul-mouthed anarchist, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Bannon, by the way, told ABC News in late June, shortly before reporting to federal prison to begin a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress, that Project 2025 would “take apart the administrative state brick by brick.”
Relying on the “unitary executive” theory of governance — meaning an all-powerful chief executive — Project 2025 authors seem to presume that Trump or one of his MAGA acolytes will reign in perpetuity.
Those who want to see how the theory works in practice might look to Hungary under its autocratic prime minister. A Vladimir Putin comrade who has visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago twice this year, Orban endorsed Trump’s presidential bid in March. The former president has called Orban a “great man” and promised to work closely with him. Trump’s running mate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, has said that Orban has made some "smart decisions" that America could learn from, including a regulatory crackdown on what universities teach.
Presiding since 2010 over what political scientists call an “electoral autocracy,” Orban has taken control of the courts, hobbled mass media, asserted absolute control over the country’s education system and restructured elections so that it’s almost impossible for the opposition to win. Orban proudly calls his government an “illiberal Christian democracy.”
In a 2022 interview, Heritage CEO Roberts said that “modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model." After meeting with Orban in March, Roberts announced that he was “especially proud of our relationship with Prime Minister Orban, whose leadership in Hungary on immigration, family policy and the importance of the nation-state is a model for conservative governance.”
TITLE: 'Lab rats?' GOP's Project 2025 looks to have been test-marketed in Florida
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2024/07/25/project-2025-florida-test-site-republican-trump-plan/74520097007/
EXCERPT: Among other things, the document also calls for ending diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the workplace and across education, limiting worker rights to organize through unions, and promotes book restrictions, all reflective of laws enacted in Florida by DeSantis.
Florida’s expansive private school voucher program, which may lead to the closure of dozens of public schools across the state, is cited by Project 2025 as one that should be mirrored nationally.
Florida under DeSantis also is praised by the authors for the state’s “parents bill of rights.” The measure first enacted in 2021 during the COVID-19 era has been enhanced to restrict classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender.
As the governor said in his second inaugural address, Florida is where “woke goes to die.”
Project 2025 proposes that the “next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke cultural warriors.” Trump in a second term also would be urged through the document to eliminate from laws and regulations such terms as “sexual orientation,” “gender equality,” “abortion,” and “reproductive rights.”
DeSantis earlier this year struck the term “climate change” from Florida law.
Republicans dismiss any Trump attachment to Project 2025. They argue the conservative wish list document is now just being used by Democrats to fire up support for Harris as she steps in to replace President Joe Biden as their party’s nominee.
“I’m not an extremist at all,” Trump said, labeling Project 2025’s authors as part of the far right, although he remains deeply connected to several of them.
Republican Party of Florida chair Evan Power also said the document’s primary role now is as a weapon used by Democrats.
“Project 2025 is an idea of a think tank that is being pushed in an organized manner by the left to distract from the disastrous administration of Biden and Harris,” Power said.
SEE ALSO:
DCCC seeks to tie House Republicans to Project 2025 with 100 days left until election day
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/07/28/dccc-memo-project-2025-house-republicans/74561947007/
Media ramped up effort to tie Trump to Project 2025 following Biden debate disaster, Harris embraces attack
https://www.foxnews.com/media/media-ramped-effort-tie-trump-project-2025-following-biden-debate-disaster-harris-embraces-attack
JD Vance and Project 2025 Are Literally the Same Thing
https://betches.com/jd-vance-and-project-2025-are-literally-the-same-thing/