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      Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a dog with a shovel

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      The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian.Kevin Roberts, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, is alleged to have told colleagues and dinner guests that he killed a neighbor’s pit bull around 2004 while he was working as a still relatively unknown history professor at New Mexico State University.View image in fullscreen“My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” said Kenneth Hammond, who was chair of the university’s history department at the time.Two other people – a professor and her spouse – recall hearing a similar account directly from Roberts at a dinner at his home. Three other professors also said they heard the account at that time from the colleagues who said they had heard it directly from Roberts.None recall Roberts – who worked at the university as an assistant professor from 2003 to 2005 – ever saying that the dog he allegedly said he killed was actively threatening him or his family.In a statement to the Guardian, Roberts denied ever killing a dog with a shovel. He did not answer questions about why several people say he told them that he had.“This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence. In 2004, a neighbor’s chained pit bull attempted to jump a fence into my backyard as I was gardening with my young daughter. Thankfully, the owner arrived in time to restrain the animal before it could get loose and attack us.”The people who say they heard Roberts talk about killing a dog at the time said they found the apparent admission to be unsettling and said they did not ask Roberts – who as a conservative Republican was already seen as something of an outsider among the university’s mostly liberal academic staff – to provide any more detail about the incident.“I think that probably people were not eager to engage with him over this. It sounded like a pretty crazy thing to do and people didn’t want to get into it at that point,” Hammond said.News of Roberts’s alleged comments to colleagues comes as Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and his running mate, JD Vance, have engaged in a racist and false propaganda campaign to demonize Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, by claiming that they have been killing and eating people’s pets. The xenophobic claims, which are probably meant to strengthen support among white, racist and anti-immigrant voters, have incited multiple bomb threats that have disrupted the Springfield community.Project 2025, which was written by the Heritage Foundation under Roberts’s watch, has become a focal point of the 2024 presidential election as Democrats warn that its radical policy prescriptions – such as the eradication of the Department of Education and imposing further restrictions on abortion – will serve as a blueprint for Trump’s administration if he is elected. Both Trump and Vance have sought to distance themselves from the 900-page report, with Trump claiming he had not read it. But in a foreword to Roberts’s book written by Vance, the vice-presidential nominee praises Roberts’s “depth and stature within the American Right” and says that, “in the fights that [lie] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon”.Roberts is one of the most prominent rightwing voices in Washington. He has close ties to Opus Dei, the Catholic group, and has spoken openly about how he considers the outlawing of birth control to be one of the “hardest” political battles facing conservatives in the future.Twenty years ago, Roberts – now a staunch supporter of Trump – was an academic who may have been uneasy among fellow professors who were not politically aligned with him. Yet, Hammond said, colleagues treated him with respect and kindness – including bringing food to his home after his wife had a baby – and were happy to have him working at the university.One former colleague remembers being reprimanded by Roberts after she used her university email account to tell colleagues she was going to help campaign for John Kerry, the then Democratic nominee for president, because she recalled him saying – rightly, she now admits – that it was inappropriate. But relations were generally good.Marsha Weisiger, a colleague of Roberts at the time who is now an environmental history professor at the University of Oregon, recalled being invited to dinner at Roberts’s home with her husband, and Roberts telling both of them the story about how he had hit a neighbor’s pit bull with a shovel and killed it.“My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it. If I did something horrific, I would not be telling my colleagues about it,” she said.To make matters worse, she recalled Roberts saying that the neighbor in question also had puppies and that he had considered killing them, too. Weisiger’s husband, who asked not to be named, recalled Roberts saying he had complained about the dog to the police, who were not responsive, and that the dog sometimes got into his yard.Roberts, public records confirm, was living with his wife and young family in a modest and mostly immigrant community in Las Cruces at the time, in a historic neighborhood lined with traditional adobe homes and chain-link fences.In his statement, Roberts claimed that the city later arrived and removed “more than ten dogs” from his neighbor’s property, citing animal abuse. He said he was “incredibly grateful” to animal control for rescuing the “abused animals” and was grateful that he and his daughter did not have physical contact with the dog.Roberts also identified the man who he called the “animal owner”: a native of Las Cruces named Daniel Aran who, a spokesperson for Roberts pointed out in an email, was sentenced to 78 months in prison for cocaine trafficking in 2017, more than a decade after the alleged incident occurred.Public records and the Guardian’s reporting confirm that Aran and his mother lived nextdoor to Roberts at the time that Roberts lived there.The Guardian could not independently verify whether Roberts actually killed a dog or whether Roberts’s account of his interactions with his neighbor’s dog was accurate. The Guardian has repeatedly sought out public records to try to verify the alleged accounts. The city of Las Cruces, the police and animal control authorities said public records were not available for the time frame in which the alleged incident occurred.But the Guardian did track down Daniel Aran, whose mother Norma Noriega still lives in the adobe home next to where Roberts previously lived in Las Cruces.Noriega’s family moved into their home in about 2002 with her husband and children – Denise Aran, who was about seven at the time, and Daniel, who was about 16.Daniel Aran, who has been released from prison and is now the owner of a small construction company, spoke to the Guardian from the front yard of the small stone house. Aran is lean and muscular, with a chiseled face and hardened stare.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When I was younger, I was wild. But I gave respect to get respect. Now I’m more about work and family,” he said, dusting off his clothes from a day of construction. “And I’ve always been a dog lover, an animal lover, since I was a little kid. I’ve always had dogs.”Aran said he was diligent about watching his dogs – small pit bulls – which he bred, selling the pups as a way of making money for his family’s household.When asked if he had a dog disappear around 2004, he said: “Yes, definitely, my dog, Loca, my little female”. She had been his favorite, he said.“I had one female, and that was her. She was a little, little thing like this,” he said, holding up his hands in an affectionate gesture. “She was a tiny, cute little thing.”“She went missing, and we never could find her,” he said.When he was asked by the Guardian about comments Roberts allegedly made to colleagues about killing a neighborhood pit bull with a shovel, he grimaced. “Man, you never know what’s inside someone’s head.”“I’m not here to make up stories or to say he did it,” he said. “But it was right around 2004 when all that happened, that Loca was missing,” he said. “I wish I could say, yeah, I know this fool did that. But I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that my dog went missing, and we never found her. She wasn’t at the dog catchers.”Aran also denied Roberts’s claim that dogs had been taken away from the property.“We had three dogs that we kept, and then there were puppies occasionally that I would sell,” he said.His mother, 53-year-old Norma Noriega, sitting out in the front yard, also disputed Roberts’s account.“That never happened,” she said in Spanish. “[Animal services] never came and took dogs. Sure, [the dogs] would get out on occasion, and we’d go find them and bring them back. But there was never an incident where our dogs were taken, for abuse or whatever, that is simply not true.“It was only with Loca that we could never figure out what happened. She disappeared, and we always knew it was strange that we simply never saw her again. [Daniel] went out looking for her, but she was never found,” said Noriega.The family has had a number of pit bulls over the years – Brownie and Casper were their longtime pets – but it was the disappearance of Loca that had always distressed the family.“She’s the one that disappeared. We went out looking for her, we went out to the dog catchers, and we never found her,” Aran said quietly. “And I know the dog catchers never got her.”Asked about his recollection of Roberts, Aran said: “Well, it’s been more than 20 years,” and he did acknowledge that his dogs could be noisy.“I’m pretty sure he had to have some patience,” said Aran. “But, as far as I can remember, he never came across as disrespectful,” he said.Additional reporting by Melissa Segura More

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      Biden’s green policies will save 200,000 lives and have boosted clean energy jobs, data shows

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      The environmental policies of Joe Biden’s administration will save approximately 200,000 Americans’ lives from dangerous pollution in the coming decades and have spurred a surge in clean energy jobs, two independent reports outlining the stakes of the upcoming US presidential election have found.The first full year of the Inflation Reduction Act, the sprawling climate bill passed by Democratic votes in Congress in 2022, saw nearly 150,000 clean energy jobs added, according to a new report by nonpartisan business group E2.Nearly 3.5 million people now work in these fields in the US, more than the total number of nurses nationwide, with 1m of these jobs centered in the US south, a region politically dominated by Republicans.Clean energy jobs grew by 4.5% last year, nearly twice as fast as overall US employment growth, and account for one in 16 new jobs nationally, the report found. New roles in energy efficiency led the way, followed by an increase in jobs in renewable energy, such as wind and solar, electric car manufacturing and battery and electric grid upgrades.But the future of the IRA, which provides tax credits and grants for new clean energy activity, is a flashpoint in the election campaign, with Donald Trump vowing to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds”.The former president and Republican nominee has accused Harris, his Democratic opponent, of waging a “war on American energy” and called for an end to incentives encouraging Americans to drive electric cars.Harris, who has promised in unspecified ways to build upon the IRA, has attacked Trump for “surrendering” on the climate crisis as well as in the US’s attempts to compete with China, the world’s clean energy manufacturing powerhouse.Bob O’Keefe, executive director of E2, said the IRA has helped lead “an American economic revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations”.“But we’re just getting started,” Keefe added. “The biggest threats to this unprecedented progress are misguided efforts to repeal or roll back parts of the IRA, despite the law’s clear benefits both to American workers and the communities where they live.”Should Trump return to the White House, he will need congressional approval to completely repeal the IRA, although his administration could slow down and even claw back funding allocated but not yet released for clean energy projects, such as the $500m pledged for a green overhaul of a steel mill in JD Vance’s home town of Middletown, Ohio.A new Trump administration would have more discretion, though, over the future of air pollution regulations set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Biden. “One of the things that is so bad for us is the environmental agencies, they make it impossible to do anything,” Trump has complained while on the campaign trail.Any major rollbacks will have a heavy toll upon public health, however, with a new analysis of 16 regulations passed by the EPA since Biden’s term started in 2021 finding that they are on track to save 200,000 lives and prevent more than 100m asthma attacks by 2050.The analysis, conducted by the Environmental Protection Network, a group founded by retired EPA staff, calculated the public health benefits of the suite of new rules that aim to limit pollution flowing from cars, power plants and oil and gas operations.Jeremy Symons, a former climate policy adviser at the EPA and a co-author of the report, said the findings were “jaw-dropping”. He added: “The EPA’s accomplishments have been nothing short of lifesaving over the last four years. These are real people who wouldn’t be alive if not for the non-partisan work of the EPA to start doing its job again after the last administration.”It’s unclear what Trump’s exact plan for the EPA would be should he regain power but he attempted to radically cut the agency’s budget when he was president, only to be rebuffed by Congress, and oversaw the elimination and weakening of a host of pollution rules.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has directly promised oil and gas industry executives a fresh wave of deregulation should he return to the White House, in return for $1bn in campaign contributions.Project 2025, a conservative blueprint authored by many former Trump officials but disavowed by the Trump campaign, demands the dismantling of parts of the agency, a rollback of environmental rules and a politicization of decision making.“This would put polluters in charge of air regulations and put millions of Americans at needless risk of cancer, heart disease and asthma,” said Symons.“Several of the authors of Project 2025 used the years of working at the EPA under Trump as a training ground for more reckless plans should they get their hands on the agency again. This plan would be a wrecking ball to the EPA.”Asked to comment, the Trump campaign criticized the Biden-Harris administration on inflation and what it called its “war on energy”.“Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which actually created the worst inflation crisis in a generation. She proudly helped Joe Biden implement all of his disastrous policies including his war on American energy that is driving up prices astronomically for American consumers,” said Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary.“President Trump is the only candidate who will make America energy dominant again, protect our energy jobs, and bring down the cost of living for all Americans,” Leavitt added.An EPA spokesperson said: “We appreciate the work of the Environmental Protection Network and look forward to reviewing their report. EPA remains committed to protecting public health and the environment by implementing science-based pollution standards that address climate change and improve air quality for all Americans.” More

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      I read the full 900-page Project 2025 manifesto – here’s why it matters

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      I printed out all 900-plus pages of Project 2025 in February on my home printer, stacking the unwieldy chapters on my desk. Bit by bit, each evening, I read my way through the plans that seek to dramatically alter each federal agency.Most Americans who know about Project 2025 consume it in bite-size pieces, like Instagram infographics, or see the name on billboards. They hear politicians, like Vice-President Kamala Harris, mention it on stage – or former president Donald Trump disavow it in TV interviews. These attempt to neatly distill all the ways the document could upend the US government. For Democrats, Project 2025 has become a buzzword for the 2024 election, a shorthand way to warn voters what could be ahead if Trump wins again in November.My own consumption of the project was not as piecemeal – I read the full conservative manifesto by the Heritage Foundation and its many rightwing allies. Here’s what I learned from the document and all the controversy surrounding it.Project 2025’s policy guidebook, Mandate for Leadership, describes an America poisoned by “wokeness” and overtaken by lawlessness and chaos, where conservatives need to seize power immediately – and for as long as possible – to right a sinking ship.The guide is just one part of the broader plan Project 2025 and Heritage had in mind to dismantle the government, recruit thousands of politically aligned people to staff an incoming Trump administration, and quickly guide the next president into the steps needed to accomplish their preferred policy changes.Trump has claimed he does not know what it is or who is involved, though he does indeed know many of the people involved. Perhaps more importantly, his policy plans often align with what’s in the project.By seeking to influence Trump, the project – which counts more than 100 conservative groups as supporters and contributors – probably poisoned Heritage and its allies’ chances of forming part of Trump’s inner circle and potential next administration by claiming it could influence a man who hates to see himself as influenced by others. Other thinktanks that kept their hands clean of the power struggle could instead become more influential, though it would be difficult, or impossible, to staff thousands of political jobs with people who have no ties to Heritage or Project 2025.In an ironic turn, given the toxicity of the project to voters, it could cost Trump the election in November.Could it actually happen?Outside groups always hope to influence presidents. Heritage has put together and released a version of the Mandate for Leadership every four years since Ronald Reagan’s first term. Why did this one catch such fire? For one, they wrote it all down and released it publicly, with a splashy online presence and media appearances. They also recruited tons of other conservative groups to sign on as allies. They publicly called it a plan for “institutionalizing Trumpism”.Democrats seized on it, seeking to tie Trump directly to the plan by plastering the project on billboards and mentioning it in speeches as much as possible. They have been successful – though the plan was released in 2023, the public’s knowledge of it has increased dramatically in the last two months because of this negative attention.Could the ideas in Project 2025 actually happen? Not all of them, and not overnight. But a movement amasses power that then can lead to massive social change piece by piece. Some of the plans, like dismantling the Department of Education, have been on conservative wishlists since the department began. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t happen – it just means there is an eventual tipping point where they could. Take the fall of Roe, for instance.One way the plan seeks to create more tipping points is by adding in more political appointees, a change Trump has tried in the past in what’s known as Schedule F. It would classify thousands more positions in the federal government as political instead of neutral career civil servants. And the recent US supreme court ruling that made accountability difficult if a president’s official acts break the law certainly helps with amassing power in the executive branch, too.Dismantling government and elevating religionAs I have watched and covered the project and the backlash to it from Democrats and Trump’s circle, it has become clear that few have read the document itself. It is at times less aggressive than its detractors would have you believe and at others far more wide-reaching and consequential than a simplistic infographic.It doesn’t say to defund social security, for instance, despite what some TikToks claim. But it does say a whole lot else that would affect the daily lives of people in the US and beyond.Across multiple agencies, it would make access to abortion infinitely more difficult. It would change the name of the federal health and human services department to the “Department of Life”. It would criminalize pornography. There would be mass deportations and curtailments of legal immigration programs, including Daca. It would dismantle the Department of Education.Throughout the manifesto, authors also recommend ways to increase funding for religious organizations by giving them more access to government programs – largely through increased use of school vouchers that could go to religious schools or by modifying programs like Small Business Administration loans to make religious groups eligible for funding.In some parts, the project takes a more explicit Christian worldview. In the chapter about the Department of Labor, the manifesto suggests a communal day of rest for society because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest”. One way to enforce this idea would be for Congress to require paid time-and-a-half for anyone who works on Sundays, which the project calls the default day of Sabbath “except for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time”.In nearly all chapters, there is a mention of driving out any forces that seek to increase diversity in the federal government. And whenever LGBTQ+ rights are mentioned, it is to say there should be fewer of them.Project 2025 is also steeped in the culture wars: the document characterizes so many elements of governance as woke – the woke treasury department, woke weather reports – that the term is rendered meaningless. It also describes the country as run by “elites” – though not, apparently, the elites that run heavyweight Washington thinktanks.Trump’s policy positions are typically much less detailed than what’s in Project 2025. We have at times referred to Project 2025 as the meat on the bones of a Trump presidency. To figure out where Trump and the project’s policy goals align, I also looked up what Trump has said – or not said – on the issues the project covers.How to remake a governmentSchedule F, the wonkily named plan to create a government more beholden to its executive, is perhaps the biggest change that the project seeks, and it’s one Trump is aligned on.In each agency chapter, there are suggestions for how more non-partisan, civic employees in the federal government could be turned into political appointees who would be beholden to the Trump agenda and less likely to push back on policy changes.In that sense, we shouldn’t think of Project 2025 as solely aimed at Trump: it is instead a vision for conservatives for Trump and far beyond, a rightwing wishlist aimed at generational change in how the government operates and the chief executive’s role within it.I will use what the project suggests for the US census – the huge count that the government carries out every 10 years – as an example.The census helps decide how federal resources should be allocated to communities, but, for our purposes here, it’s most relevant that census data is used to decide how to divvy up seats in the US House and make electoral maps during decennial redistricting done by states. The census can alter the balance of power in statehouses and in Congress.Given its influence, the project suggests an incoming conservative president needs to install more political appointees to the census bureau and ensure ideologically aligned career employees are “immediately put in place to execute a conservative agenda”. The next census isn’t until 2030, but plans for it are already under way.That conservative agenda includes adding a citizenship question, something Trump tried to do for the 2020 census but was blocked by the US supreme court. The project says “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census”.The project also suggests reviewing and possibly curtailing plans to broaden the race and ethnicity categories because “there are concerns among conservatives that the data under Biden Administration proposals could be skewed to bolster progressive political agendas”. And a program that uses partnerships with trusted community groups to increase responsiveness to the census should make sure to “actively engage with conservative groups and voices to promote response to the decennial census.“In 2020, lack of conservative participation was one factor in an undercount in some areas of the country, affecting representation of certain states,” the project claims, echoing a sentiment Heritage has elevated before.Why it mattersMany of the project’s ideas are more or less conservative consensus – they align with what Trump has said and done in the past on the topic and they represent what could happen if he wins again.But some parts of it go beyond Trump’s stated plans, like broader restrictions on abortion access, or they are more blunt about exactly what could happen if a conservative wins.And many other parts still are not issues Trump has weighed in on, where he may default to what the conservative movement wants. Some of its ideas are pie-in-the-sky: we are probably not making a return to the gold standard, at least not anytime soon.For liberals, Project 2025 has become a boogeyman. For conservatives, it’s a weight around them as they seek electoral wins – and a sign that liberals will do whatever they can to malign Trump for his associations.Though Trump would love few things more than never hearing the term “Project 2025” again, there’s a case to be made for paying close attention to what Heritage and the project do this election and beyond. If you’re liberal, you should work to understand what the other side is doing. If you’re conservative, you should know what’s being said in your name.The final chapter of the manifesto makes clear the groups involved view their goals as an ongoing existential battle for America.“In Washington, there are no permanent victories,” wrote Edwin J Feulner, a Heritage co-founder. “But neither are there permanent defeats. Rather, there are permanent battles throughout the policy arena. The other side is never standing still.“While we may achieve tremendous successes under conservative leaders, the Left is always working to chip away at them, which is why we must constantly be prepared for the next fight.” More

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      Project 2025 ex-director accuses Trump campaign advisers of ‘malpractice’

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      The former head of Project 2025, a rightwing blueprint for remaking the US government that was created by many of Donald Trump’s former officials, has urged the former president to replace his two campaign managers if he wants to win November’s presidential election.Paul Dans, who stepped down as the project’s director in July after Trump dissociated himself from it, turned his fire on Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, blaming the advisers for a series of errors that he claims have jeopardised the Republican nominee’s chances of beating Kamala Harris.Dans accused them of being guilty of overconfidence and of failing to adequately prepare Trump for the possibility that Harris would replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. That development changed the race, which polls suggested Trump had previously been leading.“Trump should be running like Secretariat at the Belmont, but instead it’s a race to the wire,” Dans told the New York Times.He also accused Trump’s campaign advisers of “malpractice”, and said their misjudgments led to an embarrassing public about-face, in which Trump finally claimed to disown the Project 2025 document.Rightwing criticism of Trump’s campaign staff has grown in recent weeks as the former president has sought to at least appear to moderate his position on some policy proposals and issues, including reproductive rights.While there has been little direct criticism of Trump himself, a #FireLaCivita hashtag trended briefly on social media.Dans, who served for two years in the White House under Trump, spearheaded work at the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank that produced Project 2025. The 922-page tome proposes an array of radical plans to reshape government – such as replacing tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trump loyalists, abolishing the education department and drastically restricting abortion and contraception.The document has been described as a manifesto for Trump’s presidency, and Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, said in a podcast that the project would herald “a second revolution that would be bloodless if the left allows it to be”.As criticism grew, Trump eventually responded by claiming to disown the plan, falsely stating he did not know its architects – even though most used to work for him and he gave the keynote address to their annual conference – and calling its suggestions “ridiculous and abysmal”.LaCivita described the project as “a pain in the ass” at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee.A New York Times/CNN poll found 75% of American voters had heard of Project 2025, while 63% strongly opposed its contents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen Dans stepped down in July, LaCivita and Wiles issued a statement strongly denouncing the project and bluntly warning anyone associated with it against trying to advertise their supposed links to Trump.“Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or in any way,” they said.“Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign. It will not end well for you.”Responding on CNN on Tuesday, Dans said: “With apologies, Mark Twain, I’d say the reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”Asked if he thought Trump’s campaign managers were doing a good job, he pointedly avoided referring to LaCivita and Wiles, but praised the recent return of Corey Lewandowski, the pugnacious former manager of the 2016 campaign, and the appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jr, who recently suspended his own independent campaign to endorse Trump.In a statement to the Times, responding to Dans’ comments, Trump said: “Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita are doing a great job. I could not be more happy with them.” More

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      Here is what will happen on day one of Trump’s presidency, according to Project 2025 | Daniel Martinez HoSang

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      It’s a cold day in Washington DC in late January 2025. Though Donald Trump has lost the popular vote for a third consecutive election, his narrow capture of the electoral college has delivered the presidency.During the campaign, Trump offered some symbolic gestures to distance himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led policy blueprint for the next Republican administration, matched with a database of conservative personnel to execute those plans. “Personnel is politics,” they explain.But with Republicans now holding bare majorities in both chambers of Congress, the gloves come off. As Trump utters the last phrase of the oath of office – “so help me God” – the first phase of what Project 2025’s authors call “the playbook” begins.First come the firings. Thousands of federal, non-partisan civil servants –environmental and food safety regulators; authorities in disaster relief coordination; attorneys overseeing anti-discrimination policies in housing, education and employment; medical and scientific researchers – receive immediate layoff notices. Many will not be replaced, as entire federal programs and agencies are shuttered. The new personnel that do arrive come from conservative thinktanks, or are rightwing activists who applied through the Project 2025 application database. Political cronyism is now the official hiring policy of the US federal government.Next come the roundups. As drafted by the Maga nativist-in-chief Stephen Miller, a broad range of law enforcement, from the national guard to state and local police are deputized for a new deportation army. Sweeps of neighborhoods and businesses take aim at blue states and cities, but general terror is their intended goal. Detention centers are established on military bases and federal facilities with quick access to airfields to execute mass removals. Nearly a million lawfully present immigrants are stripped of their legal protections, subjecting them to immediate deportation. An end to Daca and a return of the Muslim ban follow.In the following months other parts of the agenda unfold. Cuts in corporate taxes so generous they would make the robber barons blush. An end to federal funding for public television and radio that forces many local stations to shutter. The termination of Head Start programs leaves hundreds of thousands of parents and guardians without preschool or childcare. The elimination of the Department of Education and programs like Title I halt funding and many protections for students with disabilities, English learners and students from low-income households.Pornography is criminalized. Ditto for abortion rights, emergency contraception and many reproductive health programs. Adiós also to most public sector unions, labor organizing rights and anti-poverty programs.It can be difficult at times to distinguish the hyperbole of Trump and the Maga movement from actual governing plans. “Build the wall” was always more of a campaign performance and fundraising stunt then a policy blueprint. But after attending several rightwing conferences and rallies for research in the last year, I have little reason to doubt their intentions this time around.I’ve heard Miller at CPAC describe the deportation plans in chilling detail. I heard speaker after speaker at a Turning Point USA conference promise violence and retribution against political opponents, the dismantling of nearly all public goods, and plans to bring a shrill Christian nationalism to the center of governance and civic life. I’ve listened to unapologetic defenses of eugenics and scientific racism on rightwing media channels with millions of followers.And perhaps most frighteningly, I’ve observed growing numbers of young people, people of color and others outside of the traditional conservative base join the Maga faithful and embrace the cynicism and demonization that is the heartbeat of the contemporary right.Conservatives often celebrate the unity of their governing philosophy, rooted in small government, entrepreneurship, faith and family. But there is nothing coherent or rational about these policies. Plunder is the prevailing principle.And these ideas are not limited to the Heritage Foundation or Trump alone. They have been embraced across a network of rightwing formations, some with agendas even more extreme than Project 2025.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNor can this agenda be described as populist. Polls show large majorities of the US public deeply opposed to the Project 2025 agenda. Corporate giveaways, drastic cuts to public services and legalized discrimination against queer people won’t alleviate any of the very real crises faced by masses of people in the US and around the world.In the face of this threatened calamity, what can be done? To be sure, the material consequences of this agenda must be exposed. Maga supporters often suggest Trump should be taken “seriously but not literally”. Project 2025’s 920-page policy document is not political theater, and its threat to the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people must be laid out in stark terms. These fissures must be exposed.At the same time, we must not succumb to a fatalism. Rightwing tacticians like Christopher Rufo have explained that they publicize their strategies to intentionally demoralize their opposition. If we only warn against the threat of fascism, we risk leaving people even more fearful and isolated, cynical towards the prospect of any collective change or resistance.And if the only alternative offered is a call to defend a decaying liberalism, one that is itself saturated in violence, precarity and premature death, the reactionary threat will surely quicken.Instead, warnings about the authoritarian menace of Project 2025 and its ilk must be wedded to clear ambitions to rebuild our emaciated public institutions, to protect people from the predations of a rigged economy. The fascist threat collapses when ordinary people have meaningful opportunities for social connection and purpose, the groundwork of human dignity.

      Daniel Martinez HoSang is an associate professor of ethnicity, race and migration at Yale University. He is author of Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California and co-author of Producers, Parasites, Parasites: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity More

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      What’s at stake in the US election? The climate for the next million years | Bill McKibben

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      This is the first part of the standfirst This is the second part of the standfirst Headline what’s at stake?
      View image in fullscreenHere is the biggest thing happening on our planet as we head into the autumn of 2024: the Earth is continuing to heat dramatically. Scientists have said that there’s a better than 90% chance that this year will top 2023 as the warmest ever recorded. And paleoclimatologists were pretty sure last year was the hottest in the last 125,000 years. The result is an almost-cliched run of disasters: open Twitter/X anytime for pictures of floods pushing cars through streets somewhere. It is starting to make life on this planet very difficult, and in some places impossible. And it’s on target to get far, far worse.Here’s the second-biggest thing happening on our planet right now: finally, finally, renewable energy, mostly from the sun and wind, seems to be reaching some sort of takeoff point. By some calculations, we’re now putting up a nuclear plant’s worth of solar panels every day. In California, there are now enough solar farms and wind turbines that day after day this spring and summer they supplied more than 100% of the state’s electric needs for long stretches; there are now enough batteries on the grid that they become the biggest source of power after dark. In China it looks as if carbon emissions may have peaked – they’re six years ahead of schedule on the effort to build out renewables.And here’s the third biggest thing in the months ahead: the American presidential election, which looks as if it is going down to the wire – and which may have the power to determine how high the temperature goes and how fast we turn to clean power.Donald Trump gave an interview last week, in which he laid out his understanding of climate change:
      “You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that any more, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said – it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming … These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.”
      I’ve quoted this at length because this could again be the most important man on the planet, talking about the most important issue the planet has ever faced. And he’s gotten every word of it wrong. It’s gibberish.View image in fullscreenBut it’s gibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition, in America and around the world. His friends at Project 2025 have laid out in considerable detail how you translate that gibberish into policy. It lays out in loving detail many of the steps his administration would use to bolster oil, gas and coal while sidetracking sun and wind. These include ending the effort to spur EV production in Detroit; ending support for renewables (Trump has promised to “kill wind”, whatever that means); and reversing a crucial 2009 finding from the EPA that carbon dioxide causes harm, a position that undergirds much of the federal effort to rein in climate pollution. He has also – chef’s kiss – promised to close down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, otherwise known as the people who measure how much the temperature is rising. That’s on the grounds that those measurements are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”.‘Drill, baby, drill’In return for this endless largesse (beginning on day one, Trump said, he would become a dictator in order to “drill, baby, drill”), he has asked the industry for only (Austin Powers moment here) “one billion dollars” in campaign contributions. Big oil is doing its best. As the Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago, Harold Hamm, one of the country’s most prominent frackers, is working the phones to come up with as much cash as possible. Hamm is working “incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the energy sector”, said a Trump campaign aide. “We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.”Can Trump reverse the tide towards renewable energy? No, not entirely – it’s too strong, based on the ever-falling cost of sun, wind and batteries. Even in Texas, HQ of the hydrocarbon cartel where the state legislature has tried to pass laws limiting renewables, the undeniable economics of clean power continue to surge. The Lone Star state is now leading the nation in installing batteries on its grid, a good thing given the ongoing spate of climate disasters that strain and stress the state’s system.But he can slow it down considerably. America’s buildout of renewables is dependent, among other things, on overcoming the bewildering array of permitting requirements that make every transmission line a harrowing bureaucratic battle. At the moment, the Biden-Harris White House has a dedicated team at work, with senior officials assigned to senior projects, constantly bird-dogging them to make sure that they get built on schedule. That would disappear, replaced with a new set of bureaucrats deeply invested in making sure these projects didn’t happen.At least as bad would be the effect around the world. Last time, Trump withdrew America from the Paris climate accords, badly denting the momentum those talks had produced. This time he’d do the same and more – he’s promised, for instance, to end Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas export terminals. These are designed to take huge volumes of US gas and ship it to Asia, where it will undercut the move to renewables. It is the last real growth strategy the oil industry has, and it is the biggest greenhouse gas bomb on the planet.View image in fullscreenIn essence, Trump would give every other oligarch in the world – Vladimir Putin, the king of Saudi Arabia, and on down the list – license to keep pumping away. If the biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases is not going to play a role, why should anyone else feel any pressure? As Project 2025 quite clearly declares, Trump would “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs” and “cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world”. (Though Trump has claimed not to know anything about Project 2025.) The global climate talks in Brazil next year and the 2026 version in Australia – currently shaping up to be the last huge chance for global cooperation – would be turned on their heads.There are ways to calculate the meaning of all this. The UK-based NGO Carbon Brief, for instance, said earlier this year that “a victory for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election could lead to an additional 4bn tonnes of US emissions by 2030 compared with Joe Biden’s plans”. Just for perspective, that’s a lot: “This extra 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030 would cause global climate damages worth more than $900bn, based on the latest US government valuations. For context, 4GtCO2e is equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries.” It’s like finding an extra continent full of greenhouse gases.But worse than the totals is the timing. If a Trump administration was merely going to be a four-year interregnum, it would be annoying. But in fact it comes at precisely the moment when we need, desperately, acceleration. We’re on the edge of breaking the planet’s climate system – we can see it cracking in the poles (the Thwaites glacier now undermined by warm seawater), in the Atlantic (the great currents now starting to slow) and in the Amazon (where savannafication seems to be gathering speed). The earth’s hydrological system – how water moves around the earth – has already gone kaflooey, as warm air holds far more water vapor than cold.The world’s climate scientists have done their best to set out a timetable: cut emissions in half by 2030 or see the possibilities of anything like the Paris pathway, holding temperature increases to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, disappear. That cut is on the bleeding edge of the technically possible, but only if everyone is acting in good faith. And the next presidential term will end in January of 2029, which is 11 months before 2030.If we elect Donald Trump, we may feel the effects not for years, and not for a generation. We may read our mistake in the geological record a million years hence. This one really counts. More

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      in US Politics

      Project 2025 started a half century ago. A Trump win could solidify it forever | David Sirota

      by

      You can be forgiven for thinking Vice-President Kamala Harris’s first attack ad against Donald Trump seems a little far-fetched. Launched this week, the television spot has all the hallmarks of a YouTube video promoting an internet conspiracy theory. There’s the obligatory scary music and the baritone narrator warning about a mysterious manifesto with the kind of cartoonish name that a Bond villain would label his blueprint for global conquest: Project 2025.And yet, this isn’t a Dr Evil send-up: Project 2025 is very real, it is absolutely Trump’s agenda and it wasn’t some slapdash screed that came out of nowhere. It is the culmination of the 50-year plot that our reporters at the Lever have uncovered in our new audio series Master Plan – a scheme first envisioned by the US supreme court justice who created the foundation for Citizens United and the modern era of corporate politics.Project 2025 touts itself as “the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025” – a grandiose and self-important billing, but no overstatement. The 922-page manifesto is a plug-and-play agenda of detailed policies designed to immediately empower the conservative movement, billionaires and Republican donors the moment Trump is sworn in for a second term.Highlights include plans to kill off climate regulations; eviscerate pollution laws; terminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that protects Americans from Wall Street scams; raise taxes on the middle class to finance billionaire and corporate tax cuts; empower the White House to replace civil servants with ideological loyalists; and limit the government’s authority to enforce campaign finance laws designed to deter pay-to-play corruption.The blueprint’s provenance means that it isn’t some fanciful pie-in-the-sky wishlist – it is a meticulously constructed action plan designed to be implemented, just as an earlier version of it was in Trump’s first term.Project 2025 was built with the involvement of at least 140 former Trump administration officials, it is endorsed by a constellation of oligarch-funded conservative groups, and it is published by the powerful Heritage Foundation, which Trump himself lauded as “a great group” that is “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America”.This connection to the Heritage Foundation isn’t incidental. It tells us that conservatives see a Trump presidency as the final stage of their grand half-century scheme to destroy the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society – a scheme first outlined a half-century ago.Heritage was originally launched in the early 1970s with seed funding from the beer magnate Joseph Coors. He told a historian that his political activism at the time was specifically “stirred” by a 1971 memo authored by the soon-to-be supreme court justice Lewis Powell. That memo written for the US Chamber of Commerce implored corporations and oligarchs to be “far more aggressive” in influencing the political system, which he feared was becoming far too responsive to popular demands for the regulation of business.“It is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise system – at all levels and at every opportunity – be far more aggressive than in the past,” wrote Powell, who would soon after author a landmark supreme court ruling giving corporations new rights to spend money influencing elections. “There should be not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.”According to documents unearthed in Master Plan, the chamber established a taskforce on the Powell memorandum composed of executives from some of the country’s most powerful corporations including General Electric, Phillips Petroleum, Amway and United States Steel.At a series of secret meetings in the 1970s, those powerbrokers formulated ways corporate groups could build out their political, legal and communications apparatus. The resulting political infrastructure – conservative thinktanks, law firms and advocacy groups – aimed to weaken campaign finance laws so that corporations could wield more power, and then use that power to tilt the courts and legislative systems in their favor.With Powell’s memo inspiring Coors’s lavish funding, Heritage carved out a special role for itself in all this nascent organizing: it focused intently on public policy.“Around the vortex of Heritage have spun projects, individuals and organizations devoted to Coors’ ambition to rescue the United States from the gloom and despair he believes it to be in,” the Washington Post reported in 1975. “Weyrich and Coors agree that the liberalizing trend must be halted or the United States will become, in effect, another version of godless communism.”In a White House memo just before that story was published, President Gerald Ford’s deputy chief of staff, Dick Cheney, told his boss, Donald Rumsfeld: “Coors may have problems by using this tax exempt foundation to support political activities.”But as the Powell memo movement’s conservative legal groups secured supreme court victories gutting campaign finance laws and ushering in the era of dark money, such groups faced little scrutiny in how they blurred the legal distinction between dispassionate charity and political machine.Heritage was most certainly the latter, and within a few years of its launch, it was focused on influencing presidential administrations with the original version of Project 2025 – Mandate for Leadership, described in the press at the time as “a blueprint for grabbing the government by its frayed New Deal lapels and shaking out 48 years of liberal policy”.“Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981 – the same month Ronald Reagan was sworn into his presidency,” Heritage gushes in the foreword of Project 2025, which is officially the ninth installment of the Mandate for Leadership series. “By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy.”Underscoring that success, Reagan delivered a speech at Heritage lauding “the importance of the Heritage Foundation, the remarkable work of Ed Feulner, Joe and Holly Coors [and] so many of you in this room in bringing to Washington the political revolution.”Fast forward through the neoliberal rampage of tax cuts and deregulation that defined Reagan’s term and three more Republican presidencies, and the question now is: would that same political revolution inspired by the Powell memo’s master plan continue if Trump wins again?The recent past offers clues: during the first year of Trump’s first term, Heritage boasted that two-thirds of its 2016 Mandate for Leadership recommendations were championed by the Republican president.Will Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s agenda find the same receptive audience in a second Trump administration? Or should we trust Trump when now – under assault by Harris’s criticism – he insists he doesn’t even know what Project 2025 is?The answer to that can be found in the words of Trump’s own running mate.“The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill,” wrote the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance. “It is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign speechwriter More

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      Project 2025: Democrats warn convention extreme plan is no joke

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      The Saturday Night Live cast member Kenan Thompson carted out a massive version of the Project 2025 book onto the main stage at the Democratic national convention on Wednesday night. Despite the comedian’s involvement with the prop, which has been used throughout the convention, Democrats want voters to know that the conservative manifesto for a second Trump administration is no joke.Democrats have sprinkled the words “Project 2025” into speech after speech for months, culminating in the big book’s spot on the big stage – a sign of the toxicity that the mere mention of the project has with voters of multiple political persuasions.The project would dismantle much of what Democrats have done in the federal government under Joe Biden’s administration. The 900-plus-page policy outline, the Mandate for Leadership, is just one piece of the plan, which also involves assembling a roster of potential political appointees for jobs if Donald Trump wins, training those allies on how it thinks the government should work and coming up with a playbook to swiftly put those plans into place if Trump wins in November.A poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst released earlier this month showed that more than half of respondents had heard of Project 2025, and the majority of those surveyed did not agree with many of its aims.Trump and his campaign have worked to distance the candidate from the project, which was put together by the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation. But many of the authors and groups behind the project have Trump ties, and the policy goals often align with things Trump has said he intends to do if he wins again. Trump’s team cheered when a Project 2025 leader announced he was stepping down from his role after pressure from the campaign.After the Minnesota governor and vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, mentioned Project 2025 in his speech on Wednesday night, Trump called into Fox & Friends on Thursday morning to say it was “disgraceful” that Democrats keep tying him to it.“They know I have nothing to do with it,” he said. “I had no idea what it was. A group of people got together, they drew up some conservative values, very conservative values, and in some cases perhaps they went over the line, perhaps they didn’t, but I have no idea what Project 25 is.”Each night at the convention, an elected official has lugged the book back on to the stage to cite an exact page number for a policy that should concern Democrats. The Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow talked about plans to weaponize the Department of Justice. The Pennsylvania state representative Malcolm Kenyatta talked about its plans to stop Medicare from negotiating drug prices. The Colorado governor, Jared Polis, pointed to plans to limit abortions and promote “traditional” families.“Usually Republicans want to ban books but now they’re trying to shove this down our throats,” Kenyatta said.The bit with SNL’s Thompson involved video appearances by a handful of Democrats from around the country who would be affected by policy changes the project suggests, including a teacher, a federal employee and a doctor.“What do you do for a living?” Thompson asks an OB-GYN. “An OB-GYN that delivers babies? Uh-oh.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s bad news, isn’t it?” the OB-GYN responds.“It sure is. On page 459, Project 2025 resurrects a law from the 1800s called the Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide and throw healthcare providers in jail,” Thompson replies.The speakers, including Thompson, reference a webpage put up by the Harris campaign to highlight parts of the project that are most egregious for Democrats.“Just remember, everything that we just talked about is very real. It is in this book,” Thompson said. “You can stop it from ever happening by electing Kamala Harris as the president of the United States.” More