The next Republican administration, as dictated by the ex-president in waiting, is actively seeking “a few good men” from the extreme right of American politics, all of whom share a singular vision: To decimate the United States government and reduce it to an administrative state designed to take from the poor, give to the rich, and allow billionaires to run amok in their perfect Libertarian paradise. For more: https://www.petersacks-author.com/petersacks-author
They call their fever-dream, innocuously, Project 2025. In the real world, their rich man’s Libertarian paradise would be monstrous for almost everyone else. Or, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote in his 1651 masterwork, Leviathan.
So, what’s Project 2025’s real agenda? They say it’s to dismantle the “deep state.” In fact, Project 2025 doesn’t really want the so-called deep state to disappear but to make it deeper and murkier.
Presently, the United States government employs no political litmus test for civil servants. Federal employees come from all walks of life and their political beliefs are their own. That venerable aspect of America will disappear if Trump is elected to a second term.
Indeed, quite contrary to its stated purpose of reforming the civil service, Project 2025’s Alt-Army would politicize it. Once the alt-Army is fully staffed, tens of thousands of federal employees, without civil service protections, would all be speaking from the same pre-authorized political playbook. The right-wing one.
And their only job protection comes not from due process but from faithfully executing the dictates of the dictator. The deep state then becomes the fear state.
Defy Trump and you are jailed. As president, he would never risk another embarrassing display of refusal from good people who care about the U.S. Constitution. No more “wimps” like Mike Pence who would refuse to alter the electoral count for the sake of a fraudulent victory. No more generals like Mark A. Milley to stop Trump from deploying the actual U.S. Army to put down Black Lives Matter protests or any First Amendment expressions that the dictator doesn’t like.
Should an employee in this far-right state say or do something contrary to the regime’s dictates, his or her proverbial head is removed. “You’re fired!” would be the innocent version.
But how far would the litmus test go in this Orwellian vision? Look to Putin to understand the slippery slope Trumps Alt-Army would occupy. Jailing enemies. Defying court decisions. Rendering the Supreme Court itself an afterthought. Imprisoning freedom-lovers for being disloyal.
And what would be deemed disloyal? We can imagine one example: Failing to suborn a Red-shirt mob storming the Capitol so the leader could order the U.S. military to put down the mob and enforce Martial Law, suspending all Constitutional rights in the United States.
Forget the very notion of civil servants, the employees who work in the U.S. government as hard-working, no nonsense, even boring, employees. In contrast, the Alt-Army will staff the government with fellow Libertarians, Donald Trump cultists, and anyone with a decent resume who will commit to the decimation of the U.S. Constitution.
In fact, civil servants’ only job is to carry out the laws passed by the American people via its representatives in Congress. That’s all. The Civil Service isn’t a state, nor is it deep. The Civil Service is all out in the open. Nothing is secret.
That’s how team normal works, despite all manner of desperate attempts to paint a dark conspiratorial picture for conspiracy-minded people who were too busy smoking pot in the parking lot to pass their civics class.
But please don’t take my word for it. The Alt-army has a book, a comprehensive guide for what is the undoing of the U.S. government and replacing it with a set of administrative rules, procedures, and personnel whose primary mission is to execute a right-wing agenda for the next Republican government of the United States.
Project 2025 is being overseen by the Heritage Foundation., which is among the richest and most influential of the right-wing agenda setters, whose collective objective is to shape the future of the United States as a arch-conservative, quasi-religious enterprise.
While the Founders tried to ensure freedom of religion in the First Amendment, the alt-right agenda is to establish a state religion known as Christian Nationalism, which has been endorsed the likes of the new Speaker of the House, that boy wonder, Mike Johnson.
Heritage’s recent IRS Form 990 tells the story.
With assets of more than $330 million, according to its latest IRS filing, Heritage reported revenue of more than $140 million — all of it tax exempt. In short, American taxpayers are subsidizing the Libertarian foundation’s aggressive efforts to eliminate broad swaths of the social safety net and engineer politics and public policy in the favor of its donors — many of whom are themselves foundations launched by the nation’s wealthiest individuals.
The agenda that Heritage reports to the IRS (i.e., American taxpayers):
TO FORMULATE AND PROMOTE CONSERVATIVE PUBLIC POLICIES BASED ON THE PRINCIPLES OF FREE ENTERPRISE*, LIMITED GOVERNMENT*, INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM,* TRADITIONAL AMERICAN VALUES* AND A STRONG NATIONAL DEFENSE*
I’ve placed the little stars in the text as a reminder that Libertarian ideals are typically riddled with exceptions because, as a philosophy, Libertarianism exists in a theoretical vacuum — some say science fiction — and not the actual world of real people with real problems. You know, stuff like poverty, lack of health care, and bad or no housing.
Still, with the little people in mind, Heritage calls its book, “an invitation for you the reader — Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith — to come to Washington or support those who can. Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”
In this light, of course, the alt-Army employs an actual litmus test (https://www.project2025.org/) for true believers. Click on it and find out if you have the right stuff. The extreme right stuff.