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    Oklahoma high schools to teach 2020 election conspiracy theories as fact

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    As part of the latest Republican push in red states to promote ideologies sympathetic to Donald Trump, Oklahoma’s new social studies curriculum will ask high school students to identify “discrepancies” in the 2020 election results.The previous standard for studying the 2020 election merely said: “Examine issues related to the election of 2020 and its outcome.” The new version is more expansive: “Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”The revised curriculum standard comes at the behest of Ryan Walters, the state school superintendent, who has publicly voiced his support for Trump. In October, Walters lauded Trump in an interview, saying that “Trump’s won the argument on education”.Walters, who has also advocated for ending “wokeness” in public schools, went on to say: “We have education bureaucrats that are left-wing, elitist, that think they know best for families, and they have become so radicalized that our families are going: ‘What is going on here?’”Oklahoma’s new social studies standards for K-12 public school students, already infused with references to the Bible and national pride, were revised at Walters’ direction. The Republican official has spent much of his first term in office not only lauding Trump but also feuding with teachers’ unions and local school superintendents.“The left has been pushing left-wing indoctrination in the classroom,” Walters said. “We’re moving it back to actually understanding history … and I’m unapologetic about that.”As part of his revisions, Walters also proposed removing education about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd’s murder, Tulsa’s NBC affiliate KJRH reports.The outlet further reported that the revisions were expected to cost the state’s taxpayers $33m in new textbooks and related material.Other efforts by Walters includepromoting Trump-endorsed Bibles across classrooms, as well as supporting an attempt to establish the US’s first public religious charter school – a case the conservative-majority supreme court seems open to siding with.The new standard raised red flags even among Walters’ fellow Republicans, including the governor and legislative leaders. They were concerned that several last-minute changes, including the language about the 2020 election and a provision stating the source of the Covid-19 virus was a Chinese lab, were added just hours before the state school board voted on them.A group of parents and educators have filed a lawsuit asking a judge to reject the standards, arguing they were not reviewed properly and that they “represent a distorted view of social studies that intentionally favors an outdated and blatantly biased perspective”.While many Oklahoma teachers have expressed outrage at the change in the standards, others say they leave plenty of room for an effective teacher to instruct students about the results of the 2020 election without misinforming them.Aaron Baker, who has taught US government in high schools in Oklahoma City for more than a decade, said he’s most concerned about teachers in rural, conservative parts of the state who might feel encouraged to impose their own beliefs on students.“If someone is welcoming the influence of these far-right organizations in our standards and is interested in inserting more of Christianity into our practices as teachers, then they’ve become emboldened,” Baker said. “For me, that is the major concern.”Leaders in the Republican-led Oklahoma legislature introduced a resolution to reject the standards, but there wasn’t enough GOP support to pass it.Part of that hesitation likely stemmed from a flurry of last-minute opposition organized by pro-Trump conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, which has a large presence in Oklahoma and threatened lawmakers who reject the standards with a primary opponent.“In the last few election cycles, grassroots conservative organizations have flipped seats across Oklahoma by holding weak Republicans accountable,” the group wrote in a letter signed by several other conservative groups and GOP activists. “If you choose to side with the liberal media and make backroom deals with Democrats to block conservative reform, you will be next.”After a group of parents, educators and other Oklahoma school officials worked to develop the new social studies standards, Walters assembled an executive committee consisting mostly of out-of-state pundits from conservative thinktanks to revise them. He said he wanted to focus more on American exceptionalism and incorporate the Bible as an instructional resource.Among those Walters appointed to the review committee were Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a key figure in its Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative presidential administration, and Dennis Prager, a radio talkshow host who founded Prager U, a conservative non-profit that offers “pro-American” educational materials for children that some critics say are not accurate or objective.In a statement to the Associated Press, Walters defended teaching students about “unprecedented and historically significant” elements of the 2020 presidential election.Recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states where Trump contested his loss all confirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, and Trump lost dozens of court cases challenging the results.In addition to the curriculum revisions, a proposed rule approved by the state board of education in January mandates that parents enrolling their children in the state’s public schools show proof of immigration status.Describing the rule, which has been met with widespread outrage among parents, students and immigration advocates, Walters said: “Our rule around illegal immigration accounting is simply that … It is to account for how many students of illegal immigrants are in our schools.” More

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      Trump 100 days: White House action plan makes Project 2025 look mild

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      When Donald Trump chose a Project 2025 author to lead a key federal agency that would carry out the underpinnings of the conservative manifesto’s aims, he solidified the project’s role in his second term.Shortly after he won re-election, the US president nominated Russ Vought to lead the office of management and budget. Vought wrote a chapter for Project 2025 about consolidating power in the executive branch and advances a theory that allows the president to withhold funds from agencies, even if Congress has allocated them. Consolidating power, in part through firing a supposed “deep state” and hiring loyalists, is a major plank of the project – and of Trump’s first 100 days.Trump tried, repeatedly, to distance himself from the project, led by the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, on the campaign trail after the left used it as shorthand for the dismantling of government that would take place if he won. Since he’s taken office, the illusion that his ideas were drastically different from the project has fallen.“The whole distancing themselves from Project 2025 may have pulled some voters,” said Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, but “my sense is that they’re going to try and push all the items within Project 2025 as much as they can.”Many of Trump’s moves in his first 100 days come directly from Project 2025, which involved more than 100 conservative organizations and represented a sort of consensus among the Trumpist right about what he should do in a second term. In some instances, he has gone beyond the project’s suggestions. And in other cases, because the project was written in 2023, subsequent policy ideas from the Heritage Foundation have shaped his actions and goals.For instance, the project predated Elon Musk’s outsized role in the election and then in the Trump administration, but the goal to slash government programs using the so-called “department of government efficiency” fits the spirit of the project. It also predates the war in Gaza and the crackdown on speech in the US in the name of antisemitism, but Heritage’s Project Esther laid out a strategy to crack down on civil society groups that support Palestinian rights.Trump’s campaign once said people associated with the project wouldn’t get jobs in his administration. Instead, several hold prominent roles, in some cases now carrying out the plans they wrote about in the project.He chose Peter Navarro as a trade adviser; Navarro wrote a chapter for the project that advocates for increased tariffs and a restructuring of US trade, which Trump is now working on. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, appeared in training videos for Project 2025. Brendan Carr, Trump’s nominee to chair the Federal Communications Commission, wrote the chapter on the FCC.The former director of the project, Paul Dans, stepped down from his role amid concerns that the project was derailing Trump’s re-election effort. Dans told Politico in March that Trump’s second term was “actually way beyond my wildest dreams”.“What we had hoped would happen has happened. So I can’t imagine how anything could end really any better,” Dans said.Will Dobbs-Allsopp, policy director of Governing for Impact, and James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, have publicly tracked the executive actions suggested for 20 different agencies in Project 2025 as Trump has carried some of them out. Of the 532 proposals in the project that fall under these actions, Trump has already proposed, attempted or completed 153 of them – about 29%.The belief that Trump was not fully prepared, and the broader conservative ecosystem was not aligned completely with his agenda, underpinned his first term. For his second term, conservative donors put major money into efforts to get the right on the same page and to come up with plans and personnel who would stand ready to implement these plans immediately if Trump won.While thinktanks often seek to influence policymakers, the project stands out for its focus on Trump.“Really, it was written for Trump or Trumpism,” Goodwin said. “There really was an audience of one in mind … Trump had as much gravitational pull on Project 2025 as Project 2025 hopes to have on Trump. It’s just a very unusual thinktank-policymaker relationship.”Where Trump has used the projectThe threads of Project 2025 are visible across the federal government in Trump’s second term.He is in the process of firing people disloyal to the Trump agenda, a first step in creating a government more beholden to him. An executive order signed in April called for tens of thousands more roles being listed as political appointments rather than career civil servants, a move Project 2025 promoted as a way to drive out the kinds of people who stood in the way of success in his first term.Project 2025 called for dismantling the Department of Education, which would require congressional action. Trump signed an executive order calling on the education secretary to start the dismantling process by shutting down major parts of the department’s work.The project wanted to scale back the US Agency for International Development. Trump axed it.“Libs are realizing that Project 2025 was the watered down version of this White House action plan,” Tyler Bowyer, a leader with conservative youth group Turning Point, said on X in early February.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe project said that programs related to climate change should be ended; Trump has ended a host of climate programs and has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement.The Department of Justice should be reconfigured, ending a host of policies and enforcement that came during the Biden years, the project says. Trump has weaponized the department to achieve his goals and to go after his enemies.In nearly all agency recommendations, the project suggested scrapping any diversity efforts. Trump ended diversity, equity and inclusion programs government-wide. He has taken actions to prohibit transgender people in sports and in the military and limited access to gender-affirming care, which aligns with ideas in the project that seek to reinforce binary genders.The project recommended a host of ways to deport undocumented immigrants, end visa programs for people to come to the US legally, and restrict border crossings – a key part of Trump’s first 100 days, though the project didn’t suggest using the Alien Enemies Act, as Trump has, or going after birthright citizenship.Trump signed an executive order that would make states carry more of a burden for disaster relief, another idea suggested by Project 2025, which also said withholding disaster funds was one way to enforce immigration laws.The FCC, now led by a Project 2025 author appointed by Trump, is investigating National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System and will potentially defund them, which Carr wrote about in the project.What could happen nextThe first wave of Project 2025-aligned actions has been conducted largely by executive orders. A second wave of recommendations requires the rulemaking process at agencies and others would require congressional action.“They’re only just now starting their kind of policy, deregulatory effort, rescinding regulations in earnest. They haven’t even really gotten there yet. They’ve been so focused on agency operations and personnel for the past few months,” Dobbs-Allsopp said. “We would expect that at six months or a year, they will be even further along.”Sinha predicted that the full-scale dismantling of the administrative state, if successful, could bring the US “back to the era of tainted meat and lead in hot water”.Project 2025 represented the extreme version of what the Republican party has been selling since the Nixon and Reagan years, she said. It mixes the anti-government rhetoric with demonizing immigrants, poor people and people of color. “The Republicans have trafficked on this for a very long time,” she said.“The people who hate government basically are running government,” she said. More

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      ‘100-year timeframe’: how Project 2025 is guiding Trump’s attack on government

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      David A Graham doesn’t say he read Project 2025 so you don’t have to, but it might be inferred.The Atlantic staff writer’s new book, The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America, is a swift but thorough overview of the vast far-right plan for a second Trump administration that achieved notoriety last year. Over just 138 pages, a passing dream next to the Heritage Foundation’s 922-page doorstop, Graham considers the origins of Project 2025, its aims and effects so far.There’s a reason Project 2025 came out so long.“They’re looking at a 100-year timeframe,” Graham said. “They’re looking at things from the New Deal and saying, ‘This is where the government went wrong, and we need to fix these things. We need to change them permanently and reframe what the government does and what its relationship with every American is.’”The New Deal is the name given to the vast expansion of the federal government under Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s, in response to the Great Depression and laying the foundation of the modern US state.Project 2025 was published in 2023. As the 2024 election loomed, Democrats raised alarms about its hardline policy recommendations on issues including climate, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive healthcare and more. Incendiary rhetoric raised awareness too. Kevin Roberts, Heritage president and author of the Project 2025 foreword, said he and his allies were “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be”, then peppered his own book with images of fire and destruction. In praise of Roberts, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, said it was time to “load the muskets”.To Graham, such bellicose rhetoric was “terrifying” but also, in retrospect, a clear signpost to things to come. “To say that publicly before the election is really a strange public relations choice. It’s such a chilling thing to say. But you know, it told us what they wanted.”Amid controversy, Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and its authors. But then he won the election. At the outset of his second term, he duly unleashed slashing cuts to federal staffing and budgets and a barrage of executive orders advancing policies directly linked to Project 2025 or firmly in its spirit.Graham is an award-winning reporter, used to working fast. He started writing The Project “at the very end of November”, weeks after Trump defeated Kamala Harris, “and turned the book in in mid-January”.He wrote the book, he said, because “we the press, we the American public, had talked a lot about Project 2025 during the election, and it felt like it had kind of gone away – but it remained really relevant. And I felt like there was a lot in it that I didn’t understand, and a lot that had been missed.”During the 2024 election, experts did indeed advise that such policy plans for possible administrations have existed for decades but have rarely been enacted. The sheer size of Project 2025 might also have lulled some into a false sense of security. Like many reporters, Graham “had dabbled in parts of it”. Unlike many, he found “it was a different experience to read the whole thing altogether.“I think it is both more radical in some ways than it came across – like, when you’re just reading atomized policies, you don’t get what a social program it is – [but] one of the other things that I think is interesting is how there are ideas that I think are either [only] fairly objectionable or might have widespread appeal, right next to ones that are totally out in right field. You’ll be in the same paragraph or in the same chapter.“And the third thing I think is interesting is the way there are disagreements within the text, either between the authors or between the authors and Donald Trump. Those cleavages within the right I think are worth paying attention to now.”Trump opponents looking for cleavages will not find them in the influential office of management and budget, now directed by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist, advocate of “traumatizing” political enemies, and Project 2025 co-author. The original director of Project 2025, Paul Dans, fell victim to political necessity in 2024, forced out of the Heritage Foundation as Trump came under pressure – but remains a true believer, recently declaring Trump’s actions in office to be beyond his “wildest dreams”.But there is also Elon Musk. The world’s richest man has led Trump’s so-called department of government efficiency, or Doge, in attacking federal agencies and departments with startling speed and recklessness.“This is one of the places I have been most surprised,” Graham said, “because I think the methods that they lay out [in Project 2025] are really important. I thought that an important part of this was going to be how deeply people like Russ Vought had thought about, ‘OK, how can we work within the bounds of the law to achieve these things? How can we rework the bureaucracy?’ And in fact, Musk came in and just blasted right through it and made it a lot easier for them, and a lot faster. I certainly didn’t expect that. It’s not contemplated in the book or in the original document.”Nor are Trump’s beloved tariffs much loved by Project 2025 and its free-trade-loving authors.Graham said: “There are these big differences within Project 2025. The most obvious place is the chapters on tariffs … they [also] disagree with Trump on Ukraine. They’re much more hawkish on Ukraine, and anti-Russia. You have this sort of standard, ‘We stand up for Israel, We oppose Iran,’ sort of thing, but foreign policy is barely mentioned. It’s all about China. And Trump talks the talk on China, but then many of the things he’s doing, like tariffs, which are discussed in Project 2025 but not as a major priority, are alienating the rest of the world, which makes it very hard to take on China.“But then, even something as small as how to handle childcare, you have different people having different views [within Project 2025]. One of the things that jumps out at me is they did a really good job of figuring out how to meld these longstanding social and religious conservative priorities on to Maga. They find places where they can work with Trump.Trump is very interested in talking about trans rights and Democrats, and men are very interested in fighting back much more broadly on gender norms, LGBTQ+ rights, and so … Project 2025 becomes sort of like a tip of the spear to get Trump’s attention. They care about “wokeness”, and DEI, maybe for different reasons than he does, but they’ll attack that, and it gets him onboard.On another key issue of Trump’s second term, Graham sees the White House and the ideologues of Project 2025 much more closely aligned.Project 2025 is “very focused on illegal immigration, but also on legal immigration. Overall, the point is to have fewer people who are born overseas in the US, by whatever means necessary. And so they talk about mass deportation, and they talk about detention centers, but they also talk about reducing the number of visas that people get and trying to … find people who have lied on their citizenship applications, to revoke citizenship, denaturalization.“There are things where you see maybe not a direct correlation but the same spirit. So we see in Project 2025 an argument that we need to crack down on student visas from quote, unquote, unfriendly countries, and use student visas as a sort of tool of political warfare.”Trump may not be implementing Project 2025 word for word but its authors have much to delight them. Conversely, Graham’s book is sprinkled with lines that prompt grim laughter.Consider the case of James Sherk, a Trump adviser on civil service and labor issues in the first term who drafted “Schedule F”, a proposal to reclassify about 50,000 civil service jobs as political, thereby allowing a president to fire such people at will. Under Joe Biden, Schedule F was shelved. Ahead of Trump’s second term, Project 2025 advocated putting it swiftly to use.Last year, Sherk spoke to ProPublica. “The notion we’re going to can 50,000 people is just insane,” he said. “Why would you do that? That would kneecap your ability to implement your agenda.”Under Trump, more than 260,000 government workers have been fired, taken buyouts or retired early.

      The Project is published in the US by Random House More

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      White House ends funding for key US climate body: ‘No coming back from this’

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      The White House is ending funding for the body that produces the federal government’s pre-eminent climate report, which summarizes the impacts of rising global temperatures on the United States.Every four years, the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is required by Congress to release a new national climate assessment to ensure leaders understand the drivers of – and threats posed by – global warming. It is the most comprehensive, far-reaching and up-to-date analysis of the climate crisis, playing a key role in local and national decision making about agriculture, energy production, and land and water use.The next assessment is due by 2027. But now, Nasa has ended its contract with the consulting firm ICF International, which convened the USGCRP and coordinated the federal agencies that contribute to the quadrennial report.“There’s really no coming back from this, and it means we are all less informed about climate impacts, and won’t have the most up-to-date information on risks and threats,” said one federal staffer who was engaged in USGCRP activities, and who requested anonymity to avoid retribution. “USGCRP helped me to leverage resources from other agencies for use in my own work. But without these networks, I’m left without a support system and the latest science on climate change.”The end of the contract, first reported by Politico and confirmed by multiple sources to the Guardian, imperils the federal government’s climate research, say experts.“The firing of USGCRP staff guts the entire climate research and services ecosystem leaving teetering silos of climate teams, already reeling from federal cuts due to Doge,” the anonymous staffer said.Another federal worker with knowledge of the program, who was also granted anonymity, said the contract’s cancellation will mean “the Sixth National Climate Assessment is effectively destroyed.”USGCRP staff who hailed from the 15 federal agencies had all been told to abandon the body; its only remaining staff were from ICF and have now been fired, the second worker said. “Climate research as a whole will be hobbled because USGCRP’s interagency working groups are essential coordinating bodies across the entire government, including and beyond the 15 USGCRP member agencies.”The move came one day after the rightwing outlet the Daily Wire published an article attacking ICF International saying the firm was “raking in millions to spread climate doom”. Since its publication, the second worker said they had had a “pit in their stomach”.The attack on the USGCRP and national climate assessment did not come as a surprise. In the Heritage Foundation’s far-right policy blueprint Project 2025, Russ Vought – now Trump’s head of the office and management and budget – called to end the USGCRP or fill it with pro-oil industry members.Since Trump’s second term began in January, the monthly meetings of delegates to the body from federal agencies have been cancelled, the anonymous worker said. “We were waiting for new principles to be sent from each agency, which never happened, so that could have been a sign in retrospect,” they added.Andrew Rosenberg, a former Noaa official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire, called the end of the contract “very foolish” and “thoughtless”. National climate assessments provide an important synthesis of “science across fields” – and are not particularly expensive to produce because the authors are all volunteers, he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn February, Trump officials also denied US scientists permission to attend a meeting of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading climate science entity. The federal government also cancelled its contract with ICF International to maintain US support for and involvement in the body.“Extreme weather disasters displaced millions of people and caused billions of dollars in damage in 2024 alone,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University climate scientist who has served as lead author on three national climate assessments. “Given the accelerating pace and scale of climate impacts today, a sustained and more comprehensive national climate assessment process is so essential,” Hayhoe said. “We need it today, to build a better future tomorrow.”The move is a sign of the Trump administration’s fealty to the fossil fuel industry, said Michael Mann, an eminent US climate scientist. The sector donated in record levels to Trump’s re-election campaign.“It is pure villainy,” said Mann. “A crime against the planet – arguably, the most profound of all crimes.” More

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      Two visions within Trump world are battling for primacy. Which will win? | Ben Davis

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      The start of the second Trump administration has been chaotic, to put it mildly. It is difficult for Americans to understand what exactly the administration is trying to do and how it will affect them. It has been simultaneously a colossal remaking of the US state and the entire global order, but also seemingly haphazard, with significant policy decisions such as spending cuts and tariff rates clearly made with little thought or preparation. Analysts and commentators of all stripes have speculated on the motives and strategy behind the Trump administration’s huge overhaul of society. But what is the Trump administration’s plan for the US?The primary moves the administration has made are major cuts to federal government capacity through the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and now an unprecedented tariff regime that has sent financial markets into a free fall. Some view these changes as part of a grand overarching strategy to rebuild some version of an imagined past America: globally hegemonic and able to exercise power nakedly over other countries, economically self-sufficient with a large manufacturing base, and a reassertion of the previous social norms and order around gender, race, and sexuality. But a deeper dive into the Trump administration’s explanation of their policies and vision reveals that rather than a single, coherent ideological project, the Trump administration is sclerotic and being used as a vehicle for more than one competing ideological project.While the first Trump administration had no real ideological project, with Donald Trump’s surprise win being based on a personalist coalition without the backing of an organized movement, and different factions within the administration battling for control over policy and favor from the president, the second Trump administration was backed and is staffed by two major ideological projects, representing different segments of capital: the oft-discussed “national conservatism” of the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025, and tech capital, which has used Trump as a vehicle for its own priorities.These two overarching political projects and visions both see Trump as able to advance their goals, but these projects are competing with each other. Both have accepted that Republicans will lose the midterms in 2026, as the president’s party nearly always does, and are thus trying to radically reshape society in that time in ways that can’t easily be reversed. They have deeply different visions for the future, and whether one wins out or both of their incompatible sets of policies are carried out will have enormous implications for the lives of Americans and people around the globe.On tariffs, the administration has offered multiple, mutually exclusive visions: with some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to rebuild US manufacturing by incentivizing producers to build in the US; some viewing tariffs as primarily a way to raise revenue, cut the deficit, and in the long-term replace the income tax entirely; and some viewing tariffs primarily as a negotiating tool to force countries to make concessions to the US on a variety of issues.Trump personally has suggested that the US become an autarky, with no trade of any kind with the outside world. It’s unclear which of these will be the plan because they each have dramatically different implications for how the tariffs are structured in the long-term, how long they will last, and their effects on US workers.In the first two views, the tariffs are a part of the national conservative project of returning the US to a previous social order. They view the nation-state as the primary actor in a zero-sum anarchic global order of competing nation-states seeking to dominate each other. Tariffs are then a way of reasserting US national power relative to other states. This fits in with Trump’s rhetoric about the US, taking the country back and reasserting American nationhood, and is the primary way analysts and commentators have viewed the administration.The tech capital that oversees Doge, however, has a different project entirely. Elon Musk, who has personally overseen the large-scale slashing of the federal government, rejects tariffs entirely. The Doge project and the tariff project are at odds. The Doge project is cloaked in the rhetoric of retro America First nationalism that would seem on its face (and is understood as by its supporters) to be precisely the opposite of what it is in practice: the outmoding of the nation-state entirely.It’s notable that the first target for Doge’s cuts were not the New Deal programs conservatives have long wanted to cut, but instead the cold war-era nodes of American state power: scientific research, funding for education and the arts, foreign aid, and other programs that were created to allow the US to outcompete the Soviet Union and other countries. Musk does not care about American great power competition, such as with China, as Trump does. Indeed, Musk has close ties with the Chinese state.For Musk and his cohorts, the US must progress past the nation state model – where the state exist to project power against other nation states and part of this bargain is keeping a certain social compact of living standard with citizens – to the vendor state model where international firms are paramount and states exist instead to compete for their favor. The Doge project of Silicon Valley technolibertarianism aims to sublimate the state to capital entirely and to outsource state capacity to transnational tech firms. This is, rather than an end of globalization as the national conservatives want, the final conclusion of globalization, where international capital exists above and beyond the bounds of the nation-state.This is the reason large swathes of tech capital reversed course on Trump during the Biden administration and became his biggest financial backers. For them, Trump exists as a vehicle for their overall project.Both of these projects are disastrous for the American people on their own, but both being partially implemented in opposing ways is even worse and will lead to disaster for US workers and our society’s basic capacity to function.While the tariffs by themselves are devastating to US consumers and could lead to a major economic crisis, the Doge cuts strip state capacity that would be needed to implement the most positive vision of tariffs returning manufacturing jobs. While tariffs drive up prices on things like semiconductors or electric vehicles, the government is simultaneously slashing the programs designed to encourage these goods to be manufactured domestically. And while the Doge cuts have slashed the state and led to the direct capture of swathes of the state by tech capital, their overall project of global tech hegemony cannot progress in a world where international trade has broken down completely.Trump and the national conservative’s dream of a return to a pre-financialization manufacturing-based economy, where the US has security through economic self-reliance, and the tech right’s commitment to creating shareholder value at all costs, and whose entire model is based entirely on the result of financialization, are incompatible and on a collision course. Different sections of capital – tech on the one hand, and the revanchist small capital class who form national conservatism’s base on the other – have different and competing interests and control of different sections of administration policy. The consequences of this intranecine competition are enormous, but either way, the next four years look dire for the American working class. The damage may take generations to fix.

      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign More

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      Organizers accuse Trump of trying to silence federal workers with union order

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      Union leaders have accused Donald Trump of union-busting in a “blatant” attempt to silence them after the president stepped up his attacks on government unions on Thursday, signing an executive order that attempts to eliminate collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.The order limits the departments and classifications of federal workers who can organize a union and instructs the government to stop engaging in any collective bargaining.The office of personnel management issued a memo following the directive, providing guidance to the departments and subdivisions on the order, which includes terminating their collective bargaining agreements and ending voluntary union dues collection through payrolls.Following the order the Trump administration filed a lawsuit in a Texas court to support its move to end collective bargaining, claiming collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) “significantly constrain” the executive branch.“Plaintiffs wish to rescind or repudiate those CBAs, including so they can protect national security by developing personnel policies that otherwise would be precluded or hindered by the CBAs. But to ensure legal certainty and avoid unnecessary labor strife, they first seek declaratory relief to confirm that they are legally entitled to proceed with doing so,” the lawsuit states.Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, said the move was “straight out of Project 2025”, the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s manifesto to remake the federal government.“This executive order is the very definition of union-busting. It strips the fundamental right to unionize and collectively bargain from workers across the federal government at more than 30 agencies,” said Shuler. “It’s clear that this order is punishment for unions who are leading the fight against the administration’s illegal actions in court – and a blatant attempt to silence us.”According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 29.9% of federal employees are union members as of 2024, representing more than 1.2 million workers.Unions representing federal workers have criticized the order and vowed to take immediate legal action.“President Trump’s latest executive order is a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants – nearly one-third of whom are veterans – simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies,” said Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest union representing federal workers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“These threats will not work. Americans will not be intimidated or silenced. AFGE isn’t going anywhere. Our members have bravely served this nation, often putting themselves in harm’s way, and they deserve far better than this blatant attempt at political punishment.”Kelley added: “AFGE is preparing immediate legal action and will fight relentlessly to protect our rights, our members, and all working Americans from these unprecedented attacks.”The union held a press conference with Democratic lawmakers on Friday afternoon at the US Capitol, during which Kelley criticized the invocation of national security to strip federal workers of their union rights and called for support from the public.“This isn’t about safety or security. It’s about silencing workers who are courageously standing up to this non integrity, non accountability in the government,” said Kelley. “We won’t be silenced.”The congressman Jamie Raskin said the Trump order was an attempt to bring “chaos and retaliation” against the US labor movement.“It’s clear as day that they are retaliating against the labor movement for standing up for the rights of workers,” said Raskin. “When rightwing coups and authoritarian takeovers happen all over the world, the first thing they do is they attack the civil service, and then they attack the labor movement.”Unions representing federal workers can only bargain over conditions of employment, with wages, benefits, and classifications set by law and Congress. Bargaining is governed by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. Federal workers are also barred from conducting strikes.“President Trump’s attempt to unlawfully eliminate the right to collectively bargain for hundreds of thousands of federal workers is blatant retribution,” said Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). “This attack is meant to silence their voices, so Elon Musk and his minions can shred the services that working people depend on the federal government to do.”Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, warned Trump’s executive order was a warning for more attacks on workers and labor unions to come from this administration.“If we allow this administration to tear up federal union contracts, fire federal workers who stand up for our legal rights and target federal unions and union activists, they won’t stop there,” Nelson said. “An injury to one is an injury to all. It is time for the labor movement and the American workforce to rise up for our rights and fight for our country – whatever it takes.” More

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      Trump signs executive order to dismantle US Department of Education

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      Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that instructs the US education secretary, Linda McMahon, to start dismantling the Department of Education, seemingly attempting to circumvent the need to obtain congressional approval to formally close a federal department.The administration may eventually pursue an effort to get Congress to shut down the agency, Trump said at a signing ceremony at the White House on Thursday, because its budget had more than doubled in size in recent years but national test scores had not improved.The federal government does not mandate curriculum in schools; that has been the responsibility of state and local governments, which provide 90% of the funding to schools. Nevertheless, at the White House, Trump repeated his campaign promise to “send education back to the states”.The executive order targeting the education department, which has been expected for weeks, directed McMahon to take all necessary steps to shut down key functionalities. Trump added at the signing ceremony that he hoped McMahon would be the last education secretary.“My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department. We’re going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible. It’s doing us no good,” Trump said.McMahon appeared to smile in acknowledgment as she sat in the front row at the signing event in the East Room. Trump spoke from a stage in front of a row of state flags, and flanked on each side by a group of schoolchildren sitting at small desks.The bulk of the education department’s budget is made up of federal grant and loan programs, including the $18.4bn Title I program that provides funding to high-poverty K-12 schools and the $15.5bn Idea program that helps cover the education costs for students with disabilities.The White House said those programs, as well as the $1.6tn federal student loan program, would not be affected by the order. It was not immediately clear what spending cuts the administration would be able to achieve without cutting those initiatives.The move comes after the administration has already taken steps to undercut the department’s authority by instituting a round of layoffs that has reduced its workforce by nearly half and cancelled dozens of grants and contracts.The idea of shutting down the education department dates back to efforts by Republicans in the 1980s. But the push has become increasingly mainstream in recent years as pro-Trump grassroots activists took aim at agendas that promoted education standards and more inclusive policies.Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, has separately introduced a one-sentence bill on Friday that would terminate the education department at the end of 2026. Similar efforts have failed to get enough votes to pass in previous years.The Trump administration’s efforts to shutter the education department have largely followed the playbook in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s rightwing manifesto to remake the federal government, which envisions the department as a “statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states”.Democrats on Capitol Hill denounced the executive order and warned it could leave in jeopardy millions of low-income families, who rely on federal funding in schools.“Shutting down the Department of Education will harm millions of children in our nation’s public schools, their families and hardworking teachers. Class sizes will soar, educators will be fired, special education programs will be cut and college will get even more expensive,” Hakeem Jeffries, the US House minority leader, said in a statement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe progressive wing of the House Democratic caucus also denounced Trump’s order as an unconstitutional attempt to evade seeking congressional approval to implement his political agenda.“The reality is that the Trump administration does not have the constitutional power to eliminate the Department of Education without the approval of Congress – however, what they will do is defund and destabilize the agency to manufacture chaos and push their extremist agenda,” said the Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost.But without cutting out the department itself, the incoming Trump administration, buoyed by a rightwing backlash to public schools that intensified after the Covid-19 pandemic, could alter key parts of the department’s budget and policies in ways that would be felt in schools nationwide.Some Republicans support the idea of sending block grants to states that aren’t earmarked for specific programs, letting states decide whether to fund low-income students or students with disabilities instead of requiring them to fund the programs for those students. Programs that don’t affect students directly, such as those that go toward teacher training, could also be on the chopping block. Expanding the use and promotion of school vouchers and installing “parents’ rights” policies are also likely.In late January, Trump signed executive orders to promote school choice, or the use of public dollars for private education, and to remove funding from schools accused of “radical indoctrination”. Trump also revived a “1776 commission” to “promote patriotic education”.The education department boasted that in the first week of the Trump administration it had “dismantled” diversity, equity and inclusion programs.Soon after Trump took over, the department was loaded with key staffers tied to a rightwing thinktank, the America First Policy Institute, often referred to as a “White House in waiting”. The thinktank has supported driving out diversity programs and banning books, which the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism documented in a report on the institute’s ties to the education department. The policy institute has promoted installing Christianity in government, including in schools.The department ended investigations into book banning and got rid of a book-ban coordinator position last month in a move announced by Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, who previously held a role at the thinktank. More

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      While our eyes are on the welfare state’s destruction, Trump is building a police state | Judith Levine

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      Last week, the federal human resources department sent out a seven-page memo ordering agencies to submit detailed plans on how they will work with the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to slash their payrolls. To do this, they were to eliminate whole job categories – except one. Untouchable were positions “necessary to meet law enforcement, border security, national security, immigration enforcement, or public safety responsibilities”.While we’ve had our eyes on the wrecking ball–Doge pulverizing social services, environmental protection and scientific research, we’ve hardly taken notice of what is being constructed. In the footprint of the already shabby, now half-demolished US welfare state, the Trump administration is building a police state.In spite of Doge’s cuts to the FBI, the agency’s director, Kash Patel, is gearing up to turn the agency – whose job has always been to spy on US citizens, including enemies of the state as identified by the government in power – into Donald Trump’s personal secret police. At the state level, lawmakers are compiling their own enemies lists and filing bills to reward those who snitch on abortion seekers, transgender people, undocumented immigrants and school librarians suspected of harboring the wrong books.The Republican House budget includes $300bn in new funding for defense and border control. Among the Senate budget committee’s announced priorities are finishing the border wall, increasing the number of immigrant detention “beds”, hiring more border patrol agents, and investing in state and local law enforcement to assist in “immigration enforcement and removal efforts”. While no figures are provided in the attached budget, the Senate budget committee assures Americans that any new spending will be offset by reductions.Some of those reductions involve firing immigration judges and cutting federal supports to local police. Clearly, the right hand doesn’t know what the other right hand is doing. Still, cuts are not always cuts. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has instructed senior staff to shave 8% off the department’s $850bn annual expenditures. Programs addressing the climate crisis and “excessive bureaucracy” are high on the list, of course. But, as the Intercept points out, savings will be repurposed for the president’s pet projects. For instance: the Iron Dome, an enormously complex, costly – and, critics say, unfeasible, unnecessary and even futile – space-based missile-defense and “warfighting” system that has been a fantasy of tech-drunk Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan. In keeping with Trumpian décor and his “golden age of America”, the Iron Dome has recently been rechristened the Golden Dome.The Golden Dome might also be a symbol of what a state devoted to protecting itself from enemies real and imagined offers corporate America. Because as the civil service shrinks, private industry – particularly the overlapping defense and tech sectors – will fill in the blanks. Project 2025, which is essentially being cut and pasted into Trump’s executive orders, calls on the administration to “strengthen the defense industrial base”, stockpile ammunition and “modernize” the nukes, while streamlining procurement from private contractors and involving them in decisions about what to produce. With Tesla and SpaceX contracts worth $38bn and of course, control of Doge, Elon Musk is already at the table. SpaceX practically owns Nasa’s rocket launch and space travel programs, freaking out engineers familiar with its bargain-basement manufacturing practices – and failures. Next up: artificial intelligence to replace human expertise.Trump’s war on immigrants also promises a windfall. During his first term, and Joe Biden’s as well, the creation and operation of a “smart” border wall – comprising mobile towers, autonomous drones, thermal imaging, biometric data collection and artificial intelligence – funneled billions of taxpayer dollars to Silicon Valley and Wall Street. A 2022 report by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights on border militarization and corporate outsourcing called border security a “for-profit industry”, which perpetuates itself by lobbying for ever more draconian crackdowns on migrants.Those profits are about to explode. “The border security market is projected to reach $34.4 billion by 2029, from $26.8 billion in 2024,” with Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics the biggest beneficiaries, according to the market research firm MarketsandMarkets.Private prison companies – the two largest contractors are GEO Group and CoreCivic – anticipate unprecedented revenues too. Implementation of the Laken Riley Act, which mandates locking up undocumented people charged not just with violent crimes but with offenses as trivial as shoplifting, will require a huge buildout of detention facilities; Project 2025 recommends 100,000 available beds daily. Flying deportees to their home countries could generate $40m to $50m of business, according to GEO’s executive chairperson. “We believe the scale of the opportunity before our company is unlike any we’ve previously experienced,” crowed the chief executive officer, J David Donahue, on the company’s quarterly earnings call.The removal of millions of migrants will necessitate more than software, planes and prisons. It will need personnel. And wouldn’t you know it, an enterprising group of military contractors including the CEO of Blackwater has submitted a proposal to the Trump administration to deputize a mercenary border patrol of 10,000 private citizens. The plan also recommends payments to bounty hunters. Estimated cost: $25bn.These surveillance technologies and tactics are not targeted solely at foreign and extraterrestrial invaders, however. Government drones kept watch over the Black Lives Matter protests of 2017; at a protest against Israel’s war on Gaza at New York University, a student called my attention to a police drone circling above. In 2021 SpaceX signed a $1.8bn contract with the Pentagon’s National Reconnaissance Office for a network of low-orbiting spy satellites called Starshield. “A US government database of objects in orbit shows several SpaceX missions having deployed satellites that neither the company nor the government have ever acknowledged” but were identified by experts as Starshield prototypes, Reuters reported. It is unclear whether the network will be used for military or domestic spying, but its reach is vast. Said one Reuters source: “No one can hide.”The transformation of the US government is not just a matter of replacing an accountable civil service with self-interested private contractors. “It seems like they are using [Doge] to reshape the purpose of the government rather than execute it more efficiently,” Max Stier, president of the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service, told the Washington Post.That purpose, Trump tells us, is public safety from threats without and within. But a capitalist police state redefines public safety. Safety does not include housing or food security, disease prevention or disaster relief. The state protects companies, not workers, consumers or the environment. The “public” in “public safety” also attains new meaning: it embraces only native-born practitioners of the state religion, political loyalists and favored profiteers.As this inner circle shrinks, the outside expands. There are citizens and what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “margizens”, those who live in a country but do not benefit from its rights or protections. Not only are the margizens denied safety; they are deemed dangerous. To keep the nation “proud and prosperous and free”, as Trump described his America, the state will need to humiliate, impoverish, pursue, imprison and punish almost everyone.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist and the author of five books. Her Substack is Poli Psy More

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      Civil servants are leading the American resistance – with GameStop as a guide | Virginia Heffernan

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      The most ferocious response to Elon Musk’s coup in the US is also the most disciplined. It’s a sustained act of civil disobedience by the civil service. Amid the malignant lies of the current regime, federal workers are steadily telling the truth.This strategy is more methodical than it at first seems. Yes, the distress and anger among federal workers is palpable. But the more anarchy Donald Trump’s executive orders and Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) operation loose upon the world, the firmer the federal employees are standing. Their protest might even be seen as a political short squeeze.Starting on 28 January, federal employees refused to leave their posts in spite of Musk’s campaign to bully them out. On the subreddit for federal employees, they exhorted each other not to quit. Their rallying cry soon became: “Hold the line, don’t resign.” Although 2 million workers were pressured to quit, only 75,000 of them took what looked like a sketchy “buyout” deal.Then, this past week, when on the job mass firings started, staying at work became impossible. Thousands of employees, many of them with excellent performance reviews, were terminated on the hollow pretext that their “performance has not been adequate to justify further employment”.But as these employees cleared out their desks, a vocal group refused to vacate their faith in the civil service’s excellence. They have, in short, opposed the lie that they and their colleagues are being fired for cause. In this way, they’ve converged on the policy that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident, called “personal non-participation in lies”.On Reddit, one poster encouraged federal employees to think with a view to the public record. They should write letters, the poster urged, on behalf of the “trashed colleagues”. It was imperative to put on paper that these colleagues “did indeed have good performance despite the firing”.The poster offered a list of reasons to write these letters, among them that references help workers get new jobs. But the biggest reason to praise colleagues who have been fired under false pretenses is that, as the poster wrote, “it’s the truth.”This campaign to tell the truth is not the work of to-the-barricades types. Those being harassed, demonized and fired are middle-class workers in agencies established by elected officials in Congress. Their remit includes conducting cancer research, preventing fires and supporting veterans. By refusing to let Doge distort their service as wasteful or inadequate, they have taken a stand that the rest of us should emulate.Solzhenitsyn believed ideology itself was built of lies – the delusion that human society can be remade, from the top down, by social engineers serving an autocrat. This is exactly the kind of program spelled out in Project 2025 and being enacted by Trump’s increasingly totalitarian executive orders.“Our path is not to give conscious support to lies about anything whatsoever,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in a 1974 essay called Live Not by Lies. “Though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me.”In more 2025 terms, the civil service appears to be initiating a kind of short squeeze on the broligarchy. This is a maneuver akin to the so-called Gamestop affair of 2021, in which tiny-dollar investors banded together to put the screws to major hedge funds.During the pandemic, funds like Melvin and White Square were selling GameStop short – betting on it to fail. Keith Gill, a young financial educator, believed they were wrong, and he put his money on the company. Others wanted in. Not only was the video game store a fan favorite, but, in bleak Covid days, there was something inspiring about being believers in solidarity as opposed to friendless fatalists.Sound familiar? To stand with the US’s civil service today – to continue to believe in a government of, by, and for the people – is a risk. Not only will your wise-guy friends sneer at you, but you could miss out. If the big payouts are in nihilistic plays like crypto or Maga or Project 2025, you’ll feel like a jerk for putting your chips on dippy stuff like making roads and helping the poor.View image in fullscreenBut keeping faith is not as stodgy a project as you might think. With the GameStop short squeeze, everyman investors developed a boisterous lexicon of populist solidarity and above all tenacity. They enjoined one another to hodl the GameStop stonk with diamond hands.Their dominant slogan was just like that of the federal workers: “Hold the line.” And it worked. When they held, they kept the price of GameStop high and the hedge funds couldn’t afford to cover their short bets. Melvin Capital broke down, as did White Square.But back to the federal employees. The second they received the 28 January “Fork in the Road” email trying to drive them out, thousands did what the GameStop apes had done four years earlier: went to Reddit. It was electric. A campaign to save America from Trump-Musk crystallized. “When Tyranny becomes Law, Rebellion becomes Duty,” posted one anonymous federal worker.“Who knew that the fight against tyranny was me looking at some spreadsheets and trying to make Americans healthier?” another said. It was on. “They just created the imaginary deep state they convinced everyone they were fighting against.”And then it came: “Diamond. Fucking. Hands.”The GameStop words. “You made me double check which sub I was in,” someone said, with laughing-crying emoji. Here was the ethic of holding fast to something you believe in, even while tyrants conspire to destroy it.The feds held on. And even now, even among the jobless, they are refusing to lose faith in the American project. “Take up space, put a face to the stories,” said a recent poster to the fednews subreddit. “Make it uncomfortable for them. Let them know the human toll it takes.”Right now, it’s hard to imagine Musk or Trump will ever go bust. But emperors rise and fall. Those two have now bet against America. If the rest of us stay steadfast, they very well might, like those hedge funds, hit a bruising kind of margin call.Musk could have to answer for Tesla’s recent precipitous losses. There have been international boycotts of Tesla and creative, energized and widespread campaigns against it. Steve Bannon, one of the marquee Maga influencers, recently savaged Musk as anti-Maga, calling him “a parasitic illegal immigrant” who “wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions”.Trump, for his part, may have to face his 34 felonies one day, and pay the more than $500m he owes. Axios recently reported on a mounting revolt against Doge among Republicans in Congress. Then there are the people.In icy temperatures on Monday, thousands took to the streets, shouting: “No Kings on Presidents Day.” The goal of the organizers was to protest against “anti-democratic and illegal actions of the Trump administration and its plutocratic allies”. And the legal actions against the Trump administration are piling up – more than 75 opposing his executive orders, with more being filed every day.Even people without conscience can be brought up short by realities like the erosion of their fortunes, their standing and their bases of support. The GameStop apes used to say: “I like the stock” when people asked them why they wouldn’t sell. If you like the civil service, hold the line. Keep the faith. The Trump-Musk administration wants the American people to shut up, pack up our desks and resign our roles as citizens. Don’t take the deal. More