Cold Fear Brought Me Back This Time

 

Let me begin by saying fear brought me back. The greasy and putrid fear that this country is inching ever closer to a fascist regime with strong Handmaid’s Tale leanings. I’m not being flippant in the least, all it takes to find evidence of this is a little internet searching. No, I’m not including Left-wing websites in these searches, which for me have long since become almost as obnoxious as their right-wing counterparts.

I’m speaking about hard centrist sites like the Washington Post, NPR, AP, and Reuters to name a few. What is the source of the fear that pulled me off my comfortable couch this Sunday morning?

 My terror comes from the Heritage Foundation’s wet dream called “Project 2025.” 

Boiling down the nightmare to its basic parts, the people pushing the 920 page document called Project 2025 want to restructure the federal government towards a Christian Nationalist vision. 

Starting off on day one of Trump returning to the White House his Administration would purge the federal government of as many as 50,000 apolitical civil servants. They would be replaced by a cadre of personnel specifically picked to be Trump/Conservative loyalists. 

How do you explain to the average brain dead American that the majority of civil servants are totally outside the whims and fancies of the politicians. That they perform vital jobs that keep the Federal government running. But Zaius, you say, they’re just parasitical bureaucrats sucking the life out of hard working Americans using tax dollars for lazy welfare folks or stupid projects that go nowhere and do nothing. 

Totally cool I respond, because there is waste in government, just like in business and any other human endeavor. But just to keep things simple, these government expenditures also include vital entitlements like Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. 

Shout out to all those socialism hating patriots, the Social Security and Medicare your grandparents probably depend on are the very definition of socialism. Oh yeah, numerous Republicans in the House and Senate have pushed for both of those entitlements to be drastically cut. They say we can’t afford such entitlements while constantly pushing for more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. 

But the Project 2025 restructuring that should icy chills every American is its goal to slash the Department of Justice and dismantle the FBI, ending their traditional independence and tying them to the whims of whatever Administration is in power.

Project 2025 also calls for the shutting down of things like the weather service, civil right monitoring and a whole host of agencies that are at times inconvenient to a conservative agenda. 

Then there is their plan to end all reproductive freedoms, which means no abortions even if the life of the mother is endangered. Several states with highly restrictive abortion laws have already had women who have had to flee their home state to receive the medical care to save their lives. The fact that several states are pushing to make it illegal for a woman to receive an abortion in another state is nothing less than totalitarian. The icing on that cake is legislative action allowing a third party to sue anyone who helps a woman reach a destination where she can get an abortion is something you would only expect in a dystopian book a few years ago.

Spelling it out as simply as possible, for numerous conservatives who have convinced themselves that God is on their side, after a woman becomes pregnant she is even less of a human being and more a vessel for breeding. 

Conservatives have been pulling at the strings of the modern United States at least since the Reagan Administration. They freely admit of their desire to return to the status quo to something more along the America of the Founding Fathers.

Anyone with an inkling of knowledge of history and the actual conditions that many had lived under in the 18th and 19th and the better part of the 20th century should be sickened.

Yeah, I’m voting for Biden in November. “But he’s old and losing his mind,” someone might say to me.

I’d vote for President Biden if all that was left of him were cremated remains. I don’t vote for a man but the ideas he represents. 

  Here's a link further explaining Project 2025 with other links to the full threat.