Project '25: Trump's blueprint for eurocentric Christian Nationalism
Get the Point!
Refocusing our energies to the 2024 election, I draw your attention to the man pictured below with former President Donald Trump, Russell Vought, one who served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during the 45th president’s single term in the Oval Office. Today, Vought lends his talents part-time to the Heritage Foundation's much maligned Project 2025.
Russell Vought, a Christian Nationalist lawyer, speaks at the presidential lectern while then President Trump looks on circa 2019
I begin with the above picture because the former president has a penchant for pretending (lying) as if he doesn't know what the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 is, what it would mean if he is elected to a second term, and who the chief architects are behind this audacious right wing scheme to radically restructure the functions of the federal government.
Nota Bene: Mr. Vought, one of THE chief architects of Project 2025, is an unabashed eurocentric Christian Nationalist who is one of THE loudest voices calling for the fusion—not separation—of church and state, and is considered THE top prospect to serve as Donald Trump's Chief of Staff should the 45th president defeat President Joe Biden this November.
It is critically important to remind that just because someone or some group calls themselves "Christian" does not mean that they are following the teachings of Jesus Christ; history is replete with examples of so-called Christians committing wholly satanic acts in the name of Jesus, from the Crusades around the turn of the first millennia to the post Renaissance Inquisition; from European Colonial rapes of Africa to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade; from the genocide of Natives in the Western Hemisphere per "Manifest Destiny" all the way through two World Wars and the Holocaust in the 20th Century and yes, Jim Crow segregation and lynchings across the American South and Midwest! Indeed, pick a misery over the past 2,000 years, and Hobbs the Historian can show you where the perpetrators of such evils "claimed" to be followers of Jesus Christ!
That said, even as a Christian myself, I am VERY wary anytime anyone—or any group—seeks to force Christianity on others, especially since the Framers of the Constitution went to GREAT lengths to ensure that the United States would NOT establish a state religion—or prevent anyone from freely exercising their personal religious (or agnostic) to beliefs!
Such is why Project 2025 is an extremely dangerous manifesto and why its designers, like Russell Vought, and its primary adherent, one Donald Trump, would be extremely dangerous should they regain the keys to the White House.
Vought, an attorney by trade, penned an editorial in 2022 entitled "Truth is Not Hate Speech" and in making the case for conservatives who had been suspended from social media for speaking out in harsh tones against transgender rights, called upon the same to continue expressing their views without fear of being censored. Vought wrote, "A commitment to speak the truth, come what may, is the only path ahead—a refusal to let the mortar harden in the suffocating and ever-enclosing wall of secular, coercive narratives that envelop us in our current age. Because, thanks be to God, the truth cannot be silenced forever."
Then President Trump, holding a Bible upside down no less, at a photo op in front of St. John's Church during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Transgender and LGBTQ rights are far from Vought's only disdain, as he uses his pen and platform as head of the Center for Renewing America, a Trump aligned advocacy group, to paint Critical Race Theory (racial equality), abortion rights, and immigration as being anathema to his version of God. On the last point, immigration, Vought, the author of the Project 2025 chapter on reshaping the presidency in a second Trump term, has opined that "a person’s background doesn’t define who can enter the U.S., but whether that person 'accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and understanding of history.'”
Somewhere, President James Madison is rolling in his grave when considering that as the writer of the Constitution—and its First Amendment proscription against a formal state religion—that Vought and his ilk would do the exact OPPOSITE of what was intended by the signers of that document!
Vought's ilk includes Mr. Trump, a man that will never be confused as a devout Christian, but one who has masterfully exploited white Christian Nationalism by pandering to their culture war (racial/religious) grievances against immigrants, "The Blacks" and other racial minorities, and non-Christians who have every right to practice their religions as they see fit under the Constitution—at least for now!
Last December in Iowa, Trump noted during a campaign speech that “Marxists and fascists are going hard against Catholics. Upon taking office, I will create a new federal task force on fighting anti-Christian bias to be led by a fully reformed Department of Justice that’s fair and equitable and that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination.”
Sigh…
One of the most diabolical aspects of modern Christian Nationalism is the sophistry that whites, still very much in the numerical majority, are the real victims of discrimination—while griping and moaning about a "war on Christianity" that's about as real as Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny!
I raise these issues not to just point out the potential culture war redresses contained within Project 2025, but to remind that these conservative ideologues also are fully prepared to push back against measures to assist the working poor with higher wages, utility assistance, prescription drugs, and Head Start; removing federal involvement in state level public education, launching a new nuclear arms race with calls for more modern weapons, all the while fighting to gut the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and the Violence Against Women Act. If any one of these issues is important to you or those you love, then a vote for Donald Trump—and his minions among the Project 2025 elite like Russell Vought—is entirely against your self interests and the will of the majority of Americans who do NOT want to wake up in a repressive religious regime come 2025!
And now I believe the judge in Florida has dismissed the documents case? The SCOTUS has truly failed the country with their immunity stance. The Florida judge, Alito, and Thomas should have stepped back. I’m still going to remind everyone I know to vote Blue. It’s our only hope.
The reason I refer to myself as a Believer vs Christian is the many hateful and racist individuals aligned with these fascist groups called themselves Christian. And yes indeed, it can be, in detailed traced back to those very origins. Selah. The fact that Vought's truth wants to erase any history that shows the vile, disgusting, and in human treatment of people of color is down right disgusting. Help me understand that "Israel's God" and the "going hard against Catholics," part. Nonetheless, I feel like the stage play on Saturday was like Dave Chappelle's "Gotcha!" and thankfully you have bought our attention back to Project 2025 aka Agenda 47 aka The Guide for Dictator TrumptacularDumbass.