← Flipping Tables
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Ugh. You said you were over him, but his hoodie's still in your rotation. It's time. Grab your phone, snap a few pics, and sell it on depop. Listed in minutes with no selling fees. And just like that, a guy 500 miles away just paid full price for your closure. And right on cue. Hey. Still got my hoodie? Nope. But I've got tonight's dinner paid for. Start selling on depop. Where taste recognizes taste list. Now with no selling fees, payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details. In 2024, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage foundation, said, we are in the process of a second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. No violence, they insist, as long as you don't cross us or try to stop us. Just comply and everything will be just fine. If you do what I tell you, nobody gets hurt. It's abuser language. It's rapist language. It's not a plea for peace. It's a warning. That's a threat that this phrase comes from the Heritage foundation, and it's been used in the Foundation's desire to seize as much power as possible through donations, law, language, deceit, and policy, all thinly veiled with conservativism and religion. And when there is resistance, when the floor falls out and people are subjugated by their narrow conservatism, the violence that ensues the Heritage foundation promises will solely be the faults of the left or the Democrats for not listening to the desperate whisper of sh. Don't scream and I won't hurt you. That is the first move in this political movement to turn violence into a conditional clause and shift moral blame from those who are remaking the system onto those who refuse to be crushed by it. Within that framing, harm is not treated as a breakdown of order. It becomes the cost of restoring it. Recently I saw a tweet that said, well, we're going to have to do some things that make women sad to save the country. And what they meant by that was, well, we're just going to have to subjugate people a little bit, make them uncomfortable, force them to do what we want, because forced is being recast as response rather than domination. Think of how Pam Bondi sent an ultimatum to Minnesota. Give us the private voter data we have no right to, and we'll take out our ICE Federal armed force. Protesters exercising rights guaranteed and protected by the Constitution are called agitators and domestic terrorists so that they the ICE force is justified, coercion cloaks itself in the language of self defense. Beneath that phrase lies an older architecture. And this rests on the theology of authority that presents hierarchy as the natural, divinely arranged and morally necessary order. It tells a story in which certain people stand closer to God, closer to truth, and closer to the levers of power. Everyone else occupies a lower rung, and it's your job to submit to the people that God has put in power over you, their rights. The people lower on this ladder are contingent, subject to trial, and revocable at will. But the power of the elite is not to be questioned. To make sense of Project 2025 at the Heritage foundation and of this talk around revolutions and restoration, we have to see the architecture clearly. We have to understand the history of the Heritage Foundation. What is emerging is not new. It has been an updated operating system for an ancient conviction that authority should flow downward from on high. It should not be up to the people, the family remember us talking about them. Christian fundamentalists, Christian nationalists, the Fall, right, the Moral majority. Movements throughout history have been working on this plan, but it's been in the United States specifically for over a hundred years. It never changes. It just rebrands itself. It makes itself more palatable for the time. Democracy is only tolerable when it yields the right outcome for this particular group of people, specifically the right outcome for conservative men. Consent is negotiable. Hierarchy is not. So let's map out how this theology of inequality has traveled from the churches and religious institutions into our offices, our federal agencies, and ultimately the White House, and how it has traveled into the bodies and lives of people that are least able to absorb the damage. Project 2025, the Heritage foundation, today on flipping tables. All right, everybody, just a couple quick announcements before we get deep diving into this. First, I want to just, like, do a little check in with you and say, are you okay? I hope you're taking deep breaths. I hope you're drinking water. I hope you're caring for yourself. I know that January was a really brutal month and the stress has not alleviated itself, really, at all. And I. I don't know how anyone else is feeling, but with the release of the next batch of the Epstein files, I have just felt completely crushed and overwhelmed. I had to actually take a break reading them every day. I was trying to go through all of them, and it was just so horrific. And the insult to injury being that there's no investigations happening in the United States around the men that are implicated has been really tough. So, no, no real big announcements. Today, other than a special thanks to Patreon supporters for making the show possible again. If you want ad free podcast episodes, you want bonus content, you want access to all of the live popups. I do. As well as the upcoming merch. You can sign up for for any of those tiers@patreon.com montymater but most of all, before jumping into this, I just wanna say I hope you're okay. I hope you're taking care of yourself. I'm learning in my own practice of working so much every day of how do I take small breaks to enjoy things, how do I take little bits of time to have fun and remember what it feels like to be a human being instead of a human doing and remembering that there are good things in the world, even though the evil is so present and at the front right now. So I hope that you are also taking those little moments for yourself. It's really important that we stay vigilant and it's really important that we keep doing the right thing and resisting the wrong things. It's also really important that sometimes we take a breath. But today we're going to dive into what really built Project 2025. In January, the Heritage foundation released another update about saving the family in America. It's 168 page kind of addition to their plans that were listed in the Project 2025, including sending people to marriage camps if they're single and forcing them to get married after a short period of time. So that's fun. To really understand where Project 2025 came from, we have to really dive into the Heritage foundation and the belief system that's the foundation of this. Not what they say, but what they do. So long before Project 2025 had a label, this was a core idea. This was an ideology. Again, the world is arranged like a ladder. God is at the top, the chosen few are just beneath, and everyone else is descending in orderly rows. If you remember our episode on the Family, this was a core tenant of AB variety and the reason that he sought to minister to the elite in the assumption that it was the elite God wanted to service and not the poor. In this story, it's not merely a description of how power happens to be distributed, but it's preached how power ought to be distributed. And again, the argument is, well, if I'm wealthy and I'm successful, then that means God has approved of me. And if you're not wealthy and not successful, well, that's because you said you deserve it and you don't deserve protections and you don't deserve safety. Which is why this movement as an example, has been so anti union since its inception. They don't believe that workers should have protection, that those workers should simply submit to their earthly masters. In this account, hierarchy is not the problem to be solved. It's offered as proof that the moral universe remains intact. This very specific strict hierarchy is not a bug, it's a feature. Authority moves downward. Rights do not belong to you. They are lent to you by those who are in power above you. If you push back, if you insist that rights are inherent rather than conditional, you are cast as a rebel against the natural order rather than a citizen asking for what you were promised and asking for equality. Over time, this theology learned to speak the language of law and economics. It sounds really pretty a lot of the time, doesn't it? Inequality stopped being described as exploitation and started being sold as an incentive. Poverty was reframed as a test of your character. Right, Work harder. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Rather than a failure of policy, rather than a system failing people, material advantage shifted into evidence of virtue. Success equals God given power. Right support for those living in poverty became acceptable as charity, something the powerful might choose to offer on their own terms when it was convenient, with strings attached, of course. But any effort to describe economic security as a right or to attempt redistribution or structural reform was denounced as an assault on the order itself, a defiance against God. The message was plain. Mercy is optional. Hierarchy is absolutely mandatory. By the early 20th century, distinct strands of this thinking have braided themselves into this universal kind of talking point. Moral truth in this view stand above and beyond any vote. Whether democracy contradicts those truth, democracy ought to lose. So when you, when you take these ideologies and you create this idea that, well, this is God's, God's plan, this is how God wants things. When you use God as your vessel, democracy becomes secondary because, well, if the masses don't agree with what I think God says, then the masses are wrong and should be defeated. Christian nationalism at its core is a theocracy. Democracy is not. They don't care about that. It's not the point. There's no, there's no Christian nationalist outcry about the attempts to sabotage the midterms or stealing voter rolls or voting information, because that doesn't matter to them, because they think democracy is misplaced if democracy does not align with their view of theocracy participation. Consent and majorities are tolerated only as long as they ratify a moral script that has already been assumed to be true and fixed when those. When democracy does not adhere to that story. The problem is not the script. The problem is the people. And therefore power should be taken away from the people. The political expression of these ideas emerged in response to rapid social change and expansion of democratic authority, specifically in response to the Great Depression and. And the civil rights movement. As explicit appeals to older hierarchies grew less acceptable in public discourse, such as white supremacy, they were gradually repackaged in a language of shared values, traditional family values, constitutional principles, and legal frameworks. This is a synthesis of religion and political authority that suggested that the nation's founding principles were inherently religious. They weren't. And that a secular government marked the deviation from the country's true roots, which when the founding fathers were so completely explicit that this was founded on the freedom of religion. It was Jefferson and Madison and Ben Franklin's fears that religious people would try to institute their religion as a form of law. Which is why when Madison wrote the Bill of Rights that he didn't want to include, he was worried that other rights would be excluded if they weren't listed. But the first one he did was freedom of religion, speech, and the press. For that reason, within this narrative, diverse moral perspectives are treated as merely relative, While attempts to enforce or expand certain rights were cast as oppressive interventions for the benefit of marginalized communities. Or the poor are portrayed as threats to liberty of those who are positioned at the top. How much do we go through knowing we have the money to pay for health care and housing and do all these things to make life a lot more livable, but instead it's deferred to tax cuts for the rich? This ideology, again, does not fundamentally oppose state power. What it resisted was the restraint placed on that power by democratic checks. It's. It's about consolidating power as long as that power aligns with your values. We, I think we see this most clearly with Alex Preddy's death. We've had all these people who will not budge an inch on the second amendment when it comes to kids dying in a school. But when a legal gun owner is concealed carrying that, he never pulls, he never draws, he never misuses fully within his legal right, but it's against the state power that this conservative force supports. Now it's, well, you shouldn't. You shouldn't have a gun there. Well, now it's, well, you shouldn't, you shouldn't. The first time they ever WaveRed on the Second Amendment was not for first graders. It was for a man that was murdered by ice. The issue is not the existence, again of coercion itself, but which actor should wield it. As long as it's my guy on my side, abuse of power is fine. If it's your guy, then it's absolutely a downfall of democracy. The translation of these convictions into policy has been made possible by organizations like the Heritage foundation that were built expressly to turn theological and philosophical claims into governing practice. In 1973, the Heritage foundation was not founded as a neutral think tank. It was not about open ended inquiry. This is a conservative policy driven think tank. It was constructed as a machine. And its founders did not see American politics as healthy democracy in need of minor adjustments. They saw a system that was letting the wrong people in. This was in direct response to the passage of the Civil Rights act and the Civil Rights Voting Act. Civil rights enforcement was expanding. Feminist lawyers were winning cases. Women were gaining rights. The hierarchy that is built into this very conservative ideology, that white conservative men should be at the top of the ladder and God said so, was in danger. Social movements were forcing open doors that had been shut for generations. They could no longer discriminate people at work or at school or fire women when they were pregnant. Which religious institutions, by the way, can still do that because they can claim it's part of their religion, but in general practice you can't. To the founders of the Heritage foundation, this was not progress. This was a drift. We were falling away from the hierarchy that God has ordained from us and therefore falling away from the moral order. They set out to build something strong enough to pull the country back to its calling, according to them. Now, Paul Weyrich brought this theology. He was formed by Catholic natural law and convinced that moral truth sits above any vote. He had already begun to circulate a devastating and straightforward claim claim that democracy is only legitimate when it delivers the correct results. When it does not deliver the correct results. The problem is not the moral script, but the people in the electorate. He wanted politics grounded in shared non negotiable values. And he was willing to narrow the circle of those he considered proper members of that community. Paul Weyrich was the voice behind making abortion a voting topic. Remember that prior to the passage of Roe, evangelicals were pretty neutral on the idea. And Christianity Today released a survey of top theologians across the country who all agreed that abortion should be allowed in all or some circumstances. That these theologians believed it should be a woman's choice. When Roe was passed, the Southern Baptist Convention and the Dallas Theological Seminary both released churchwide edicts saying they supported the choice that a woman's autonomy was supreme. They celebrated it. It wasn't until the passage of the Civil Rights act started to be enforced when, when the IRS said, hey, you can't keep discriminating against black students. You can't keep these segregation academies open if you want to keep your tax exempt status. That Paul Weyrich said, hey, segregation is not going to get votes anymore, but abortion will. And he rallied with the Catholic church that evangelicals don't even believe are actual Christians to be able to make abortion this new evangelical topic, even taking verses from scripture that had never been used in the abortion argument before to back up their claim. Edwin Fulner also was part of the institution. He was trained at elite universities, fluent in the language of policy, and understood that sermons and opinion pieces would not be enough to alter the state. To bring about this order that they wanted, you needed binders, position papers, you needed to be able to draft legislation, and you needed an office in Washington that could slide those documents right across the desk at the right moment. Under his leadership, the Heritage foundation was never only a place for conservatives to think out loud. It became a factory for prepackaged governance. The that's what Project 2025 is. Joseph Coors, yes, the Coors beer guy brought the funding and he brought it a signal. He let other wealthy conservatives know that the Heritage foundation was not a high risk experiment, but a vehicle for a particular moral and economic order and a place that they could find deregul, deregulation, tax cuts, attacks on organized labor like unions, which were a pain in the ass for people like Coors. They could also fight against welfare. They could have a renewed emphasis on family values as a code for patri patriarchal control that could all be laundered through the idiom of research and expertise and then stamped with the authority of serious Washington institution. This was a way for conservatives to really be able to buy their way into buy influence. These unions I don't like, deal with them. I want tax cuts. Give it to me. Here's the money I can give you. And unfortunately, we see that now more than ever. From the outset, the Heritage Foundation's central purpose was not to deepen the academic debate. It was to change what seemed possible inside the government by clothing a hierarchy first in theology, you know, costumes of policy analysis and constitutional concern. Wyrick, Fullner and Coors and their allies built a platform that could present reaction, that could present government takeover as, quote, restoration of American views. Restoration of America to its founding. Their goal was stark and direct Ensure that when the state moves, it moved in a singular direction, back towards a world in which order flows from the top down and everyone else lives underneath it. And as a reminder in the the Treaty of Tripoli, which is one of the United States first official founding documents, it says explicitly that the government of the United States is in no way founded on the Christian religion. And when that passed through Senate, it passed unanimously and without argument. The founding fathers were very clear that this was not a Christian nation, but one in which, like our markets of capitalism, the religious market was free as well and could not be restricted, nor could someone else's religious belie be imposed on someone else. Since 1981, Conservative governance has evolved through a series of carefully crafted policy blueprints. We're seeing these all the time. They're updated regularly. The last one was in January. And they offer very specific, actionable instructions for reshaping government and advance advancing conservative priorities. And the conservative priorities again in this instance are tax cuts for the wealthy, making sure that the elite maintain power because God has ordained this ladder of authority. The language in these documents is deliberate. There's key terms that are defined with great care to support these proposed policies. And again, you hear a lot of terms that are not bad. Concepts such as family and liberty are articulated in ways to align closely with the organization's mission, but make them sound that instead of fighting for the elite, the Heritage foundation is fighting for the common man, which they're not. Appeals to religious freedom appear throughout as justification for exemptions from providing services, recognizing certain rights whenever they conflict with a particular moral vision. Using religious freedom as a way to not give people their civil rights, wanting to go back to a time where they didn't have to honor civil rights in the first place. The careful use of language does more than describe this policy shift. It casts changes, unnecessary correction. Think of how they word this. You know, America's going to hell in a handbasket. America is in decline. America needs saving. So then they can frame their policies as a way to see save the Nation protections become special privileges. How many times have we heard civil rights, basic civil rights, referred to as special privileges that disrupt social harmony. Rolling them back is framed not as a loss of rights for black people and queer people and women, but as a restoration of an earlier, healthier order. An order where men are always at the top and everyone else is at the bottom. At their leisure, the documents put forward a compelling vision of far reaching change, grounded in ideology that have adapted over time and within framework. Again, democracy is treated as kind of like civil rights, this shared privilege rather than an equal right, that it shouldn't be an equal right of everyone to have a say in their government. And we see that now because conservative groups are talking about repealing the 19th because women don't really need to vote and blaming women for the state of the country, even though men have been in power this entire time. And if you don't like where the nation is, it is, and men have been in power this entire time, maybe it's time for new leadership. Again, this hierarchy is embraced as a guiding God given principle. And it's something to be respected rather than questioned. Because if you question the hierarchy, you're questioning God. And for many of you that grew up in high control environments, that sounds very familiar, doesn't it? In this telling, the project is again, it's not a new direction just for government. It's offered as an embodiment of this inherited wisdom and a commitment to a more stable future. When we've talked about the Nazi programming in the past, what did they offer? They offered, we're going to take, we're going to roll system back to quote, traditional family values. And what they're doing is they're promising stability, but what they're actually giving you is control and dominance in a cage. So these institutions, and the Heritage foundation is no exception, reflect the people who design, staff and lead them. Their influence extends beyond the structure and the formal ideologies into everyday decisions that shape the policy we see. Now, the Heritage foundation is steered by individuals who believe in this faux theology, they believe in this hierarchy, and they're trying to work it into the fabric of how we are governed. And we're going to examine that a little bit more closely, looking specifically at the five central figures and their, their impact on the Heritage Foundation's reach and how that impacts us. Now, again, we're going to go back to Paul Weyrich, who is really one of the smartest political strategists that has ever lived. And it's unfortunate that he's so good at it because his ideas are extremely harmful. He was, he was an anti democratic theorist. Now, Paul Reyrich did not despise government. Again, what he distrusted was a government that ordinary people could steer. He wanted a government that only the elite could, only the special circles could. Only the conservative people that I agree with can steer this government. His life's work aimed to ensure that democracy never blocked what he called moral order. His interpretation of moral order superseded democracy and the ability of the people to determine their government. Weyrich was born in 1942 and ended up becoming one of the most influential conservative strategists of his generation. I mean, even till now. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin and was profoundly shaped by Catholic natural law theory, which is a framework that emphasizes a higher moral order that stands above human law and custom. This approach resonated with his vision of a properly ordered society. For Wyrick, the value of democracy lay in its capacity to uphold this specific, predetermined moral order. It is. In a Now well known 1980 speech, he argued that the central crisis facing conservative politics was not too little voter participation, but too much voter participation. Republicans love it when there is a low voter turnout. There's a reason that they tried to gerrymander or get rid of mail in voting or, you know, you look at segregation times, getting people away from the polls, creating issues like the SAVE Act. People being able to register higher turnout, he observed, rarely helped with conservatives win. It often had the opposite effect. Conservatives don't win when there's higher voting turnout because most people and, and take. Take this as encouragement. Most people want civil rights. Most people do want people to be treated equally. Most people do want everyone to have the opportunity to go to the doctor and go. To go to school and get a job. Most people want that, but a very select few don't. So legitimacy, in Wyrick's opinion, did not arise from broad participation. It flowed from a shared moral commitment. He believed that only people that embodied that commitment should have the right to participate in governance and voting. In 1973, Weyrich helped to found the Heritage foundation, again this institution. To translate his moral vision into institutional design, he drew consistently from Christian doctrine. He argued that for a political hierarchy that mirrored what he took as divine order, he hated civil rights enforcement, feminist legal victories, and other egalitarian gains. They were not marks of progress. They were evidence that the state was defying God. He saw the role of government not as arbitrating among competing interests, but promoting and enforcing fixed moral truths that just so happen to be Wyrick's personal opinions. Wyrick's ideas remained evident in the Heritage foundation suspicion of universal suffrage and its expansive social welfare agenda. The caution, the qualifications, the fear that democracy will usher in the wrong people and the wrong outcomes are all Wyrick's thinking. If you've heard any of these things, they come from Paul Weyrich. He left behind a worldview in which democracy is legitimate only when it confirms the script, only when it follows this Christian moral order. His Legacy forces a difficult question into view, which is when democracy diverges from his moral map. Ought we to revise policy or begin shrinking democracy until you like the result? Edwin Fulner was not a thunderous preacher of his movement. He was an architect who made sure that theology centered on this hierarchy. Again, remember that the core of this movement is hierarchy and power and money. And if you have not read Power Worshipers by Katherine Stewart, or I Believe It's. It's Money Lies in God by Katherine Stewart. Excellent books that dive into this further and it will. It will blow your mind. He was the architect. Excuse me, going back to this, Edwin, Fiona was the architect who made sure that theology was centered on that hierarchy. He was born in 1941 and served for more than three decades as the president of the Heritage Foundation. Under his leadership, the organization developed from an ambitious project into one of the most influential policy institutions in the United States. He had degrees from Georgetown University and the University of Edinburgh. Fullner combined his academic credentials with deep administrative experience, giving him the tools to turn ideology into infrastructure. And for as much as the conservatives demonize education, they are highly educated because they know that that's how you get power and leverage. They just don't want other people to have that power and leverage. And they also understand that when you can access new information, your worldview expands and they can't have their followers. Worldview expanding. Foreigner's core conviction was blunt. Ideas alone are not sufficient. It has to make its way into policy. You have to be able to give a policy blueprint to people in Washington. He placed heavy emphasis on organizational structure, arguing that the future of conservatism depended on a durable foundation capable of providing detailed recommendations for successive governments. This is, this is the strength of the conservative movement. If they have been so organized, they have been so diligent, and they understood that they had to have those things in order to create what we're seeing now. Dillner rejected the claims of scholarly neutrality. Research should not pretend to float above conflict. It should land decisively on the side, again, of moral narrative, not on the side of evidence. Policy papers were not only analysis. They became moral arguments that were wrapped in technocratic language. This is, this is really when someone, like, finds a very remote, specific study that's been debunked, but it aligns with what they already think. So that's the study they always reference. This is exactly what Fuller believed. He did not believe that science should try to be objective, that it should align with the evidence, that it should align with, you know, whatever they're studying, but it should always align with moral narrative. And if it doesn't align with that moral narrative, it doesn't make the cut. He understood that financial support as a theological instrument. Don't we all know that? Haven't we seen what money can do lately? During his tenure, the foundation drew primarily backing from donors such as the Coors family, yes, the beer company, because they were conservatives who wanted those beautiful tax breaks and wanted unions to go away. And the Scaife families, whose wealth and politics favor deregulation. Of course, because deregulation does not benefit the worker, it does not benefit the citizen. It benefits the elite. It benefits the large business owner and the corporations, damages the environment and often does not lead to any kind of reasonable improvement in life, in the workforce. They also. These families also shared the value of hostility to organized labor and a lean on the public sector. Their investments did more than keep operations going. They enabled the Heritage foundation to spread its vision throughout agencies, courts, and legislatures. Fjlner's rhetoric often sounded more pragmatic than Wyricks. He was a very data driven, kind of rational guy. But his work rested on the same underlying assumption about this natural hierarchical order that places white men at the top, that is a God ordained system. Inequality was not a moral failing, but a structural feature that could be motivating government efforts to redistribute resources or shield the marginalized were portrayed as moral overreach and signs that the state had forgotten its proper limits. His institutional craftsmanship supplied the scaffolding that we now use for aggressive projects like 2025. And this is where you can see things where they. People will be like, well, I'm, I'm not opposed to civil rights, but I, I think, you know, business owners should be able to like, not hire someone if they're black, if they want to. You know, that's just the government. The government shouldn't tell you that you can't do that. Yes, the government should. The government's job is to protect its citizens. It absolutely should be like protecting their civil rights. And let's get to Kevin Roberts that we opened our episode with with his quote. He represents what happens when the think tank grows dissatisfied with influencing policy from the margins and begins to speak openly in the language of regime change. Roberts holds degrees from the University of Texas and the University of Oxford, again blending this academic training with explicit religious conviction. They know that education is power, which is why they want to be able to determine who has it. That's why they demonize universities as you know, bastions of liberal doctrine. No, they're just bastions of knowledge. And the more you know, the bigger your worldview gets. It's why they're, they're huge supporters of the school voucher scams across the country that are shutting down public schools and functionally reopening segregation academies where only the wealthy have guaranteed access to higher education. Because that's what they want. They want to be able to filter who can get into that education and essentially functionally re institute their segregation academies. Before becoming president of the Heritage foundation, he led the Texas Public Policy foundation, where he advanced policies concerning reproductive rights, as in the removal of them, LGBTQ rights, and religious exemptions in public institutions. This work honed his skill as turning rigid moral positions into state level policy. In public remarks, Roberts rarely portrays governance as a neutral process. For him, it is a moral calling that demands direction, discipline, and a willingness to distinguish good from evil in the law itself. His invocation of the Second American Revolution is not an offhand flourish. It reveals his belief that the current democratic order has strayed from its proper purpose and must be corrected. Under his leadership, the Heritage foundation has primarily has moved from primarily shaping individual policy debates to now orchestrating these comprehensive remaking of specifically the executive branch. That shift crystallized in Project 2025. I mean the clearest, well thought out, 900 pages, edited it, printed it, letting people know exactly what their vision for America was. And make no mistake that whenever a conservative leader is in the seat the Heritage foundation is driving. Rather than merely advising the future administration, the Heritage foundation now aims to pre populate federal agencies with loyalists that are properly vetted personnel prepared to dismantle the very agencies from within. It's not subtle. This is a regime level transformation. This is a regime change that also removes the checks and balances that are built into American government. Robert's rhetoric combines apocalyptic urgency with uncompromising moral claims. Disagreement again is not framed as the standard feature of pluralism. Right? Where people get to make their own decisions. It's cast as evidence of existential danger and rebellion against God. Compromise is labeled as betrayal rather than prudent. History becomes a struggle between holiness and sin. Right? And. And these people, they're always on God's side, right? And public policy is another arena of that cosmic conflict. Under Robert's direction, the foundation gains a leader willing to state plainly that democracy is negotiable, while their theological vision of America is not. So if Project 2025 is a script, then Paul Dan's is the casting director, deciding who remains inside the state and who gets ushered out. As the Director of Project 2025, Dan's operates the operational center of the Heritage Foundation's current ambitions. His background is bureaucratic more than pastoral. He previously held key positions at the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, focusing on restructuring federal hiring practices and firing practices. That experience exposed him to the ways personnel rules can either restrain or accelerate the ideological project. So remember that he worked for Trump in Trump's first administration. This Trump has been in bed with the Heritage foundation for a very long time, long before Project 2025 came out. So he was. Dance has been trained in law and public administration and approaches government as a challenge of control and alignment. In his account, a disciplined bureaucracy is essential for realizing conservative goals. Career civil servants who see their duty as serving the public and the law rather than a particular person or ideology are recast as obstacles and traitors and must be getting rid of. His proposed solution is direct. Remove them, reclassify them, and replace them and the entire administration, as well as the entirety of the federal government with loyalists. Dan's treats the state as a theoretically neutral but in practice, in need of moral correction from above. Again, their excuse is always God. This is. This is about power and it's about controlling people. It's about making people do what you want. And the guise is God. Administrative agencies that enforce protections for marginalized communities are depicted as illegitimate usurpers of authority, interfering with what he calls, again, the natural hierarchy of winners and losers. That's, that's, that's actually what has been said. It is a. It is an interruption of the natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Within that logic, an agency that upholds civil rights is not fulfilling its mission. It's undermining it. This is why now we've got the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division looking at reverse racism. What? That's not a real thing. That doesn't exist. That's not real. But that's. The whole purpose of this is to re. Establish the hierarchy that they want. When they say make America great, they want white people at the top. They want people to be able to discriminate if they want to. They want to be able to segregate their schools if they want to, because they consider desegregation an overreach of the government. Under dan's direction, Project 2025 calls for reclassifying large numbers of civil servant positions to allow for mass dismissals as policy. This is happening right now. The Trump administration at this moment is trying to reclassify 50,000 federal workers to make them easier to fire, to remove them from the protections that their job gives them. Efficiency becomes public justification. Ideological purification, of course, is the underlying intent. It's the same thing that Hitler did with the Nazi Party. Anyone who was not a loyalist was removed or killed. People who were Jewish or weren't part of the Nazi Party weren't allowed to work in civil servants service. It's, it's very much a copy and paste. The aim is a federal workforce shaped to reflect this narrow, conservative moral framework rather than pluralistic public internal dissent ceases to be a healthy safeguard. Right? A healthy safeguard to say, hey, should we really be doing this? And is treated instead as insubordination. Dan's seldom. Dan doesn't use a lot of, like, overtly theological language. His a lot more subtle. But his designs still presume the same moral hierarchy supported by the Heritage foundation itself. Now let's get to Roger Severino. And this is where the Heritage Foundation's worldview stops sounding theoretical and starts appearing and showing up in our world as denied care, closed clinic doors, and empty hospital beds. He's a graduate of Harvard Law School. Severino has built a career at the intersection of health policy and civil rights law. His most consequential position as the Director of the Office of Civil Rights for the Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration, the first one where he wielded substantial authority over who would be protected and who would be excluded within the health system. Before joining the hss, hss, the hhs, Severino served as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Wouldn't you know it? Wouldn't you know it? Oh, look, all these people that worked for the Heritage foundation worked in the administration's first term, but they didn't know anything about Project 2025. We were just fear mongering. It was at the Heritage foundation where he argued for a model of religious liberty that treats abortion access and protections for LGBTQ people as threats rather than safeguards. That period at the Heritage foundation was not an intellectual exercise. It laid the doctrinal groundwork for the policies he would later implement as the OCR director. His core move remained consistent. Cast civil rights protections as intrusions on religious freedom and then use that reframing to justify cutting them back. This is literally. That's. That's their default excuse. Well, God says, I can do this. Well, God says, no, he doesn't. We've got out of this. This is, this is your desire for power. Don't. Don't pull God into the chat. HHS. Severino oversaw the efforts to dismantle non discrimination protections for transgender patients, weaken enforcement around reproductive health access, which we're all paying for now, and expand conscience based exemptions allowing providers to refuse care on religious or moral grounds. Here in Tennessee, a doctor can refuse to treat you on religious or philosophical grounds. And it happened to a woman here who's been with her partner for 15 years and she's pregnant. They have kids together, they've been together forever. They're just not legally married. And a doctor refused to give her prenatal care because he doesn't agree with her lifestyle. She's now having to travel out of Tennessee into Virginia to get care. So each of these changes was marked as defense of religious freedom or alignment with natural law. Again, neither of which are true. The Bible doesn't justify this at all, but that's what they say in practice. These actions stripped already vulnerable communities, especially women, the LGBTQ community, and low income patients, of crucial protections because they don't care about who's at the bottom. They care about protecting who's at the top. Severino's approach inverted the usual logic of civil rights. Those seeking protection from discrimination were portrayed as the aggressors against a fragile moral order. They're the problem. How dare you come sit at the Woolworth counter and say, we can't segregate this restaurant against you or can't refuse you service. You're an agitator. How dare you. Influential organizations such as hospitals, insurers, and religiously affiliated providers were presented as the real victims. A Christian should be able to turn you away if you're gay or black or if you're a woman, because that's their religion. And how dare you say they have to treat everybody? The result, as documented by numerous health policy and civil rights changes, includes reduced access to care, heightened discrimination, and increased harm to those that are already at the margins. And just as a reminder that Jesus always stood for the people in the margins, Jesus always fought for the marginalized. Jesus always fought for the poor, the sick, the hungry, the outcast. He didn't demonize them. He stood for them. He Jesus was never advocating for the elite. In fact, he told the rich man, sell everything you own and give it to the poor. And when the rich man didn't want to do this and walked away, Jesus said, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven. Severino's career illustrates how the Heritage Foundation's ideas Travel from all these papers and all these ideas in these, in these conference rooms. And how the theology of natural order that was once translated, once it was translated into concrete policy, determined whose suffering is acceptable as collateral damage. To have the system in place that you want this, and that's really what it is, these people's suffering is fine as long as I get the moral order on this side that I want. Under Severino's leadership, the question of who counts as fully human before the law became a matter of regulatory interpretation. And often the answer is you don't. No, you don't count as fully human under the law. Not if you're a woman, not if you're not white, not if you're queer, certainly not if you're poor, not if you're disabled. None of those counts. We're seeing a huge loss of disabled rights right now, too. Impact assessments make it clear that the consequences of these policies are happening right now. It falls heaviest on women and the LGBTQ community and those facing economic hardship. We've seen with these policies that access to essential health care contracts goes down, discrimination rises, and the data is not hypothetical. It's happening right now. And the Heritage Foundation's ideology has not remained confined to its publications or its circles. It has now become something that not only doesn't serve you anymore, but is now influencing national policy without your consent. These policy debates determine who receives life gave life saving care, who qualifies for legal protection, and who is effectively written out of the category of people the state acknowledges as deserving help. This fake theology of natural order doesn't really kind of inspire the work of the individuals who wrote these policies. It's the framework they use to wire those policies into the fabric of American society. They are embedding it in everything that happens to us. And it's showing up in your hospital, in your schools, in our federal agencies, in the corners, courts, in law enforcement. Project 2025 is just the logical extension of this trajectory. Now let's talk about Project 2025 itself. Now that we kind of have a basis of who led the Heritage foundation, what it's used for. Now let's talk about what Project 2025 is. After our first of two Mid show sponsor breaks, if you would like to have ad free episodes, you can sign up on patreon.com Monty Mater starting at just $4 a month. Month. This episode is brought to you by Ground News. As of today, Ghislaine Maxwell has invoked her Fifth Amendment right and declined to answer any questions at a deposition to Congress about the Epstein files. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Maxwell last year and pressed for a deposition, despite her attorneys resisting that. They have said, however, that she will speak and clear President Trump if she's granted clemency. The FBI just announced a couple days ago that there was no trafficking ring related to Epstein, even though Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for being part of and participating in human trafficking with Epstein. If this ring doesn't exist, then why is she in jail for the first in the first place? And the FBI may be laying the groundwork to grant her that clemency. Now we know what happened in the files with this most recent release. We've seen the names of co conspirators, we've seen the names of people who participated. And it is expansive. And those files are very hard to read. Read so graphic and so explicit and so brutally, brutally clear. It absolutely is shocking that clemency could even possibly be on the table for someone who's already been convicted of their participation, much less what we see around us. That there are no investigations happening in the United States against the men who are implicated, even in photos and videos in the Epstein files. This is going to be a story that a lot of media is going to move on from really fast. The. The headlines change every single day. But one of most important things we can focus on is the Epstein files, making sure the victims get justice and making sure the men involved are also in jail along with Ghislaine. And you can follow this story by going to ground news.com tables and subscribe to their vantage plan. For 40% off, it comes to about $5 a month. But you can flag this story so that on your for you page every time the Epstein files comes up in news, you will see the articles, you will see what's going on, and we can demand justice for those victims. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started@redfin.com own the dream how old were you when you realized you were the son of a president? I don't think anyone's ever asked me that before. NFX's love story John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette I didn't think I could love someone like this until you. From executive producer Ryan Murphy. It's not a question of if I want to spend the rest of my life with you. It's if I'm cut out to be Mrs. JFK Jr. FX's love story John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette watch now on FX, Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus for bundle subscribers. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond. Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into Sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com SpecialOffer thank you for listening to those ads. And we're back. We're going to deep dive into Project 2025. So Project 2025 is a plan for capture. This is not some kind of neutral transition manual or some. Well, this is what we'd like to see in government. This represents an escalation in this long running effort to remold American government from within. In it's not about it's not about helping the new administration settle in. It's about making sure that from the first day in office, a future conservative White House has the blueprints, the personnel list, the playbook to seize and consolidate control of the federal government as described in the Heritage Foundation's 2023 overview. That's where they talked about we have to consolidate power in the executive branch so that we can implement all of these moral and theological ideals that we have. Have earlier transition projects largely stayed at the level of kind of broad priorities. Project 2025 got much more specific. I mean, there are dense lists that demands that go far beyond staffing advice or general policy guidance. It reads like a a little bit less like a policy for governance than preparing to dismantle a government. And the implications are far reaching. Project 2025 again targets the executive branch itself, its structure, its safeguard checks and balances. It seeks to weaken the role of career civil servants and redefine the basic purp agencies. This is not a minor adjustment. This is a strategy for undoing the norms and protections, even imperfectly, that have insulated democratic governance in the United States. And the heart of this effort stands the newest edition of the Mandate for Leadership and even now they're, they're adding updates again. They released another 168 page kind of update to this this January. But Project 2025 functions as the expansive manifesto for remaking Americans governance in the eyes and in the model and in the goals of this very select few group of people that are led by white men. Beneath the technical phrasing and the flowery language, Project 2025 rests on three premises that should be given, that should give any supporter of democratic institution pause. They say first that the state belongs to the President. The federal government's legitimacy is treated as flowing almost entirely from presidential control. Checks and balances, independent agencies and civil service protections are recast as defects to be corrected rather than safeguards to be preserved. Number two, Civil rights are rebranded as bias. Civil rights protections are not portrayed as hard won guarantees meant to shield everyone from discrimination. Reminder that DEI applies to white people too, right? We can't be turned away from a job because we're white. Even and white women benefited the most from DEI policies. But in this, the second key tenant of Project 2025 is that civil rights are rebranded as bias. They are framed as ideological distortions that favor the wrong people. In this story, cutting back protections does not count as discrimination. It counts as neutral. By giving privilege back to especially white men, that's neutral. Equality is not neutral. And that is, I have never seen a clearer testament of when you are used to being the position of oppressor, equality feels like being oppressed. And number three, moral authority outruns democratic consent. The project assumes that the existence of a higher moral order that stands above any election, court decision or political coalition. When democratic processes produce outcomes that conflict with that order, the fault lies with democracy. The answer is to confine democracy, remove it and establish the moral order at at any cost, no matter if people get to vote for it or not. Now these are not these three premises that are the core of Project 2025 are not introduced as controversial claims. They are written as self evidence, evident truth. It's very presumptuous. It's very, very confident. Build a government on these foundations and the result is not a democratic reform, but democratic erosion. Authority is concentrated in ways that threaten the idea of shared rule, which is the whole reason we're here. So this is the crossroads that's now in front of us. Project 2025 again is not this abject thought experiment. It's a manual. We can choose to name its trajectory and resist it, or we can dismiss it and we can just keep going with the lie. Of like, well, I mean, he didn't know about Project 25. Well, if he did, they're not going to implement it. And I mean, if they implement it, they won't implement all of it. And if they implement all of it, I'm sure it won't be that bad. We can't, we can't keep going down that pathway. We have to make a decision if representative government means something to us. And before anybody listening says, we're not a democracy, we are a constitutional republic. A constitutional republic is a representative democracy that is governed by a constitution. I hope that clears that up. The real choice is not between left and right. Right now, this is a top and bottom issue. This is a choice between a system which power must periodically answer to the many, and one in which power answers upward to a president and a few institutions. If we fail to understand that now, we may live in a world where we don't get to have a say in our governance. Project 2025 and the Heritage foundation are so good at using familiar, uplifting language to make their doctrines and, and their policies sound good again. Words like family, liberty, freedom, religious rights to work. But they quietly alter what they mean. Let's look at this careful strategy and what this actually ends up meaning in the context of the Heritage foundation and Project 2025. Again, this is. This allows this document to function as a legal and moral shield that they can run behind and change and take power away from people while making it sound really good on the outside. And the thing is that a lot of conservatives really do care about having, like a safe place to work and having successful work. They care about family and freedom and liberty. We all do. But what's happening with these conservative groups is they're manipulating your belief in that things to actually take things away from you. They're convincing you that they're going to take things from other people, but they're actually going to take it from you. Let's start with family. So everyday usage, this can refer to single parents, blended households, queer families, chosen family, people rebuilding their lives after domestic violence, your parents, who your nieces and nephews. The mandate for leadership rejects that variety. And family is reduced to one definition. It is a heterosexual marriage with a male authority figure, strict gender roles and children. And this was presented as the only model that family can exist in. Once that narrowing is in place, the rest follow as the policies are designed to support. The policies that we have now that support single families or queer families or survivors of abuse are no longer recognized as safeguards. They are Recognized as, as saboteurs of this very narrow definition of family. Many conservative think tank leaders would rather have a woman stay in a physically abusive relationship because it aligns with their belief about male authority and a heterosexual marriage than they would have for her to have safeguards that help her get out. They are reframed. So these, these protections for single moms, for abuse victims are reframed as assaults on Christian family values, as if domestic violence is a Christian family value. I don't, I don't think Jesus would be on board with that, do you? You sure don't. The removal of these protections for those at the margins is again not cast as discrimination, but as repair. Harm becomes framed as healing. Erasure masquerades as restoration. It doesn't matter if women suffer or queer people can't get married. It doesn't matter because now I have my narrow definition of family. And as long as this definition of family is benefiting the small group of people, I want to have privilege and access and a live in mother bang mate, then it's fine. The same logic operates in the use of their phrase religious freedom. Rather than served as a shared principle that protects everyone's conscience, it is recast as a nearly unlimited right to disregard laws that conflict with any particular strand of Christian doctrine. Only the Mandate for leadership repeatedly asserts that individuals and institutions should be free to deny services whenever compliance would contradict their religious beliefs. And again, this, this reads his conviction on paper, but in practice it means people can be turned away from health care, housing, work, or told that they are not. What they are experiencing is not prejudice, but piety. Well, you should just suffer in silence. Bear your burdens, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work a little harder. The burden shifts because the definition has changed. The person denied care is no longer cast as the victim. The institution that denies care is the victim if they're not able to give that denial. And then there's liberty. In this narrative, liberty doesn't mean shared freedom from domination. It is almost always defined as freedom from regulation. Freedom for major corporations and the wealthy to not have to care for the environment, to not be accountable, to not care for their workers. Think of how many major corporations we have bailed out. But we can't talk about forgiving student debt. Think of how many, many billions of dollars we spend in corporate subsidies. $700 billion a year. Your tax money is subsidizing corporations and wealthy men. But we can't talk about giving people health care. But because they they've changed the definition of Freedom. It doesn't mean the freedom to choose how to live your life and wear what you want to wear and do what you want, as long as you aren't bothering people. The freedom to be safe at work and have access to health care and education. And no, it means deregulation. So efforts to protect workers, women, immigrants. Immigrants. Immigrants and queer and trans people or people living in poverty from exploitation, from abuse are labeled as coercion. Government steps taken in the name of fairness are repackaged as tyranny. And at the same time, the state's enforcement of a particular moral code is celebrated as the highest expression of common good. And obviously none of this is accidental. Language is engineered and language is a tool rule. They redefine family in exclusionary ways, expand religious freedom into justification for discrimination, redefine liberty as the absence of rules for the already robust and wealthy and powerful mandate for leadership covers sweeping policy that changes what appears to be simple self defense into an assault on rights. Ultimately, again, this is the strategy. Again. Make the hierarchy sound like it's virtue. Make it sound like it's the natural moral order, that, that the loss of protections is simply a return to sanity. This is not. Language is very, very intentional. And understand that the people behind this machine are so intelligent and they are so well trained. It constructs this moral universe in which the agenda begins to feel like the only acceptable answer, an inevitable example. And the people who end up bearing the cost of these ideals are single parents and queer families and trans people and workers and women and the poor and the disabled are told that they're not losing protections, but they're surrendering UNF advantages they never deserved. Because don't you know, God wants the wealthy and the business owners to be able to do whatever they want. That's God's order. Again, this reshapes political landscape. It reshapes how we see civil rights, how we see humanity, how we see protection. So let's talk about immigration within Project 2025, especially because of how impactful this has already been this year, year and last year. So Project 2025 doesn't talk about immigration as if it were describing like your neighbors, your co workers, your families. It speaks of it like it's a problem, almost like it's a disease. The plan endorses, and we've already seen this put into practice strategies including expanded interior raids. Remember, the Border Patrol is supposed to be patrolling the border. They're not supposed to be in the middle of the country. It's also a supports elimination of key humanitarian parole Programs. The use of local police is extension to federal, Federal immigration authority. Again, rally all the to issue these violent attacks, these violent raids on paper. Again, this is wrapped in the language of order and security. We're making America safe again. We're getting rid of all these criminals. They're not. According to ICE's own numbers, less than 14% of people that they have arrested have been convicted of a violent crime. Less than 14%. And that's their numbers. That's not someone else's numbers. That is their numbers on the ground. We've seen it. This is more traffic stops that lead to deportations, knocking on doors without warrants, kidnapping people out of their cars, sweeping up US Citizens in the raids because they were brown or they spoke Spanish. And also taking legal immigrants and refusing to let them out of detention because there aren't enough immigration lawyers to file writs of habeas corpus. And how many children are missing? We have over 1200 people missing from Alligator Alcatraz alone. And we already know what follows. We're seeing what's happening in Minneapolis now. It's spreading to Portland. We've seen US Citizens get shot and killed. And this intensified enforcement is intended to be violent and cruel and to throw immigrant families into turmoil. You can't, you can't be making the statements that immigrants are stealing all our jobs, but they're also stealing all your welfare and buying all your houses. They can't be far less violent than US Citizens, which they are, but also be this trove of violent criminals. They can't be taking advantage of the system and getting benefits they don't pay for while you're using their tax records to find them because they're paying $98 billion in taxes every year for benefits they can't get back. You can't be taking, you can't be claiming their leeches on the system when you're kidnapping them from their jobs. And you can't claim that it's about coming here legally when you're taking them from their immigration hearings. Insane. We've already seen what happens here. Child poverty goes up. Children in mixed status households lose stable access to, to schooling, to medical care, basic services. And of course, officials of the Heritage foundation call this law and order for the children involved. The floor has disappeared. And again, it doesn't matter who's here legally or not. They're just taking everybody because they're brown or because they don't like them or because they said something they didn't like. There's so many constitutional violations happening under ICE that nobody cares. Because following the law was never the point. Point. Restoring the desired order is the point. The language of criminality is used to justify policies in practice that target vulnerability. The focus is not this wave of dangerous offenders. We know that. It's the people whose only violation is lacking the documents that someone else decided they have to have, even if they're in the process of trying to get those documents. The stakes of Project 2025 reach well beyond immigration statutes or any single agency procedure. They shape a fundamental question. Question of who is allowed to feel safe in their own home or go to their job or move through a city without fearing removal. Who will be treated fairly when applying for a job or a mortgage or a ballot? Because now, even if you are a born and raised u. S. Citizen, if you look hispanic, all of that is up for grabs, and that should never happen in the United States. And if words like equity and justice and human dignity are going to mean anything, then we cannot accept an agenda that treats families as acceptable losses in the pursuit of someone else's sense of order. We need policies that begin with compassion, expand access to opportunity, an immigration system that actually makes sense and actually works and doesn't take 20 years, and protection of civil rights of everyone who's in this country because the constitution guarantees due process to every single person who has their foot on American soil. And again, the same agenda in Project 2025 targets limited tools that are available for addressing structural racism. It urges the weakening of the DOJ civil rights division, which we've already seen. They're going over out. They're now going after reverse racism, racism against white people, which is not a real thing, literally, that is people losing privilege and not being happy about it. And this is, this is happening in real time. But we're seeing central methods for identifying discrimination in housing, employment, lending and voting being used to increase that discrimination and saying that being able to discriminate is a right that is part of the natural order. Border studies of race and law show that when such analytical tools are removed, like these protections are removed, communities of color break down. In practice, racism is recognized only when a slur is uttered in public, right? Like, oh, well, we've made it harder for you to get a job and a house. But we're not racist. We don't use the n word. Then patterns that block black and brown communities from housing, jobs, loans, ballots can be ignored. Gerrymandering. We're not racist. We just gerrymandered the state of Texas so that you lost two democratic seats that's that's systemic racism. Understand that racism is not the same as racial bigotry. Anyone can be racially bigoted. Racism is racial bigotry. With power, with a system, you have to be able to impose it on another group of people to be able to disenfranchise them. Without that power and without that system, it's not racism, it's just bigotry. At bottom, this agenda attempts to redefine racism so narrowly, again, only if you use slurs, only if you use a hate crime, that structural inequality disappears from legal view. If they change the definition of what racism means, well, then we don't need civil rights anymore. We already achieved it. Box checked. Because as long as we're not using slurs, I mean, which they are now, as long as we're not doing that, we're not racist. Project 2025 does not approach homelessness as a housing crisis either. It frames it as a moral failing. Again, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you know you must have done something wrong to be poor in this telling, people living outside are not evidence of a broken system, rigged labor markets, unaffordable housing, no safety nets, untreated trauma and mental health. They are depicted as proof of broken character. Remember, this ideology is built on the premise that if you're wealthy and successful, God approves of you. God has anointed you. It's prosperity gospel in economic terms. But if you're poor or homeless, well then that is a moral failing and God is punishing you and you just need to buck up and deal with with it. Once that story is accepted, the policy responses follow. Criminalize encampments, criminalize people being freaking homeless, clear people out of public spaces, and cut funding for approaches that demonstrate success, including Housing first programs. Housing first programs that put people in homes so that they have a shower and they have a place to eat and then they can go apply for jobs are proven to keep them out of homelessness. It's proven to work, but we refuse to fund it because of ideals like this. And again, we have we all of the outcomes of this type of strategy are documented. Research shows that criminalizing homelessness does not reduce the number of people without housing. It deepens their instability. It pushes them further from services. It raises costs for communities through repeated cycles of policing, court involvement, emergency care. And also, when you can criminalize homelessness and you put them in jail, your private jails can profit off them because you filled in a third their bed Housing first, by contrast, it's just such a different result Provide housing first. There's no moral test, no requirements for people to fix fix everything in their lives before they're granted a door that locks. Study after study shows that when people obtain stable housing without preconditions, their health improves, their reliance on crisis services decrease, saving the economy money and their long term public expenditures fall, fall, and they are actually overwhelmingly successful to get back on their feet. So the fact that Project 2025 challenges that model, doesn't want to fund, it, doesn't want anything to do, that leads me to ask, what exactly is the goal being pursued here? Once we frame homelessness as a personal sin instead of systemic injury, accountability shifts away from the government, from the state, from policy, and onto the people that are sleeping on the ground ground. The message becomes, you are here because you failed, you sinned you up, it's your fault. Rather than because wages do not cover rent, mental health care is inaccessible, or housing treat. Housing is treated as an investment vehicle rather than a human need. The fact that people can't afford their medications half the time, even if they did get health treatment, they sometimes can't afford to get the medications they need. And so but instead of looking at the system and saying the system needs to change to help these people people, the Project 2025 reframes it as no, that's their problem, that's their sin and they should be punished, they deserve it. It completely removes any moral accountability to help, which is again a core tenet of the Bible. Jesus is so explicit about taking care of the poor and feeding the, feeding the hungry and, and taking care of the sick and clothing those who need clothes. This is the exact opposite. And it's such further proof that the religion part of it is just a cloak. And policies rooted in that moral framing do not repair, they punish people, people who are outside of the structure. Recognizing homelessness is a structural crisis instead of a personal defect is the first break in this narrative that homelessness is somehow a sin. And it requires that we look at zoning laws, eviction practices, wage policies, our access to health care, and racial discrimination in the housing markets. It calls for robust support of services and affordable housing rather than citations and further displacing people. If the word dignity is to have any kind of substance, our response to homelessness cannot be to treat human beings as is trash that needs to be relocated or thrown into the bin. A serious response starts with housing support, not treating them as if they failed. And then here's a big one, women in reproductive rights. It seeks to alter the legal ground behind women's bodies. And it has. It already has. I live in Tennessee. That is a no exception. State and women are dying here. Like maternity wards are clothing, hospitals are clothing closing, clinics are closing. And now a doctor can look at you and if you got pregnant outside of marriage, he can decide not to treat you. That's what Tennessee is doing right now. And let me tell you, I am really glad that I can't have children. Really glad in this climate. But Project 2025, the center of the plan around women's reproduction, lies in a push for fetal personhood, treating embryos and fetuses as full legal persons that are given the same civil rights protections they want to take away from other people. An embryo that cannot survive on its own has no consciousness, no autonomy, gets more protections than a black or brown person. This single move reshapes the question of who counts. Again, it's about narrowing the definition so that you can change the rules. It shifts attention away from the person who is pregnant toward a legally constructed entity the state claims to represent. We saw this happen with Adriana Smith where she was dead, dead. But the state required her to be on life support until she gave birth. Her son has not left the nicu. That was over eight months ago because it turns out that when a fetus develops in a dead body, it doesn't go well. Because her life, Adriana Smith's life, had less civil rights, less values, less protections than the fetus inside of her that could not survive without her help. And no person should be forced to save any life at the cost of their own body. That's autonomy. The plan calls for expanding what's called conscience based exemptions for healthcare providers. Again, makes it easier for doctors, nurses, pharmacists and entire institutions to refuse reproductive care, specifically including abortion, contraception, miscarriage management or any related form of care. Whether they claim a con, if they claim, claim a conflict with their beliefs. It further seeks to withdraw funding from reproductive health providers, including clinics that people rely on for cancer screenings, contraception, STI testing and prenatal care. Note that this really only applies to reproductive care. They don't get to deny you treatment for your heart condition, but they do get to say they're not going to treat you for your pregnancy. And these changes, again, they don't fall evenly. According to the the Gut Maker Institute, the most significant harm will fall on low income women and women of color who already face significant barriers to care. They're much more likely to die in pregnancy. When access to reproductive care shrinks, the results are predictable. Obviously Unintended pregnancies increased. Maternal mortality rises. Infant mortality rises. Economic instability deepens. A missed appointment can mean a missed paycheck. A forced birth can reshape your life path. It can derail your education, your long term employment. It can make you homeless. We're back into the homelessness chapter. There are all these negative impacts and these are not abstract trade offs. It's important that we say plainly that these outcomes are not side effects. These follow from a theology of control, because this is about control. Again, they did not waver on the Second Amendment when it came to trying to protect first graders. They don't give two shits when a kid gets here about whether they're fed or educated or have access to a home. They don't care about any of that. They don't want to fund any of that. Because advocating for the unborn is such a moral lazy position to have. Because as soon as they're born, you get to stop giving a. And that's how we know they don't care about kids. They care about controlling women. Because a lot of this, again, think about their definition of family. Their definition, family is the strict gender roles where it's a mother and father, the woman stays home with the kids, preferably homeschools the children and is a homemaker. How do you do that? You keep women barefoot and pregnant, get them pregnant young, make sure that it prevents them from getting higher education. It prevents them from growing in the workforce and having their own resources. Therefore, she's less likely to leave her marriage because she doesn't have any stable footing to get out, even if it's abusive. And the goal of that. This is the reason for the rollback of reproductive rights. It's not to protect anyone because more women are dying, right? Their lives haven't been brought into the equation. It's not about protection, it's about control and making sure that you can force women into the system that you have decided they need to live in. And when policy is anchored in this vision, we're not talking about the structure of healthcare. We are debating whether a state may claim authority over someone's bloodstream, their uterus, their home and their future. And their lawmakers moral convictions entitle them to override the most intimate decisions that a person can make about their lives in a freedom. Again, if we want, if we want these words to actually mean something and not mean what the Heritage foundation says they mean, we have to decide. We have to let people have the freedom to decide whether and whether or not and under what circumstances to continue a pregnancy. That requires defending the right to choose. It requires ensuring comprehensive reproductive healthcare that is covered by insurance. Insurance? You're telling me that Viagra should be covered by insurance, but birth control shouldn't be? Give me a break. And we have to center the experiences of the people that are most at risk, which is low income women and women of color. That's the reality. Anything short of this isn't balanced. It's just acquiescing to this power structure. And Project 2025 also approaches poverty, like homelessness as a personal failure. Again, not reflecting on policy choices or the unaffordability of the United States States. And that's one thing that amazes me about people that align themselves with billionaires is people need to realize that almost all of us are much closer to being homeless than we are to being a billionaire. Some of us are one or two paychecks away. And all that would take was a loss of your job, being fired, unfairly getting hurt at work if you don't have paid time off, or workers comp. If you get hurt at work, you're. You're out. Do some research on what happened to people prior to labor rights rights. It's not good. It's great for the people at the top. They get to dispose of people like cogs in a machine. It is not great for anyone who's part of the machine. But poverty is treated like this moral failing. But we're not talking about wages don't cover the cost of housing. People are working multiple jobs and they can't afford to live. Public schools are underfunded. And then we're wondering why they're not performing well, or that essential health care is locked behind unmanageable deductibles and co payments. Again, again, when we narrow the definition of poverty to some kind of moral failing, the policy response is predictable. Access is narrowed, more conditions are attached. Well, if you were doing things right and you were working harder, you wouldn't be poor, would you? Instead of stepping back and say, hey, wait a minute, this system isn't working. How can we fix the system to help people? If this was truly a Christian institution with Christian principles, that's what they'd be doing. And if you've ever known someone or have been on on SNAP or you've ever been on unemployment benefits, you know how many hoops you have to jump through to qualify for those? I recently had a friend who had to be on on unemployment briefly and he was working this like as a private contractor, but there just Wasn't enough contracts coming through at the time. So every single week, even if he did a job like a construction job as a favor to a friend, he had to report that income and he'd be kicked off unemployment and then he'd have to reapply again to get the employment benefits, prove he wasn't making anything. If a contract came through that he could do, he would get booted off again and he'd have to reapply and submit like it was so extensive. There's no way this, this whole idea of people are abusing it. No, that's what rich people want you to believe because they don't want you to have workers protections. They want more money for them. And if they can cut funding from the government that goes to you. If, if less money goes to the American people people, more of it can go to the elites, more of it can go to corporate subsidies, more of it can go to tax breaks for the wealthy. The United States has more than enough money for people to be excessively rich and for United States citizens to have access to free education and free healthcare. We have more than enough money. It's just being centered on a few people. And one of the ways that this gets restricted is shown to us by the research from the budget and Policy priorities finds that work requirements to getting this career care cuts people off from food assistance, cash support, health coverage with no corresponding rise in stable employment. It doesn't help them go get jobs or get longer lasting work. It just keeps booting them out of the system, making it harder for them to get food, making it harder for them to get stability. They actually constrict the lifeline, leaving more people exposed. But again, when, when poverty is framed as this, this matter of individual behavior, you know, don't buy the avocados toast. The actual landscape that people inhabit is ignored. People live in neighborhoods without jobs that pay enough to live on or they attend schools that don't have resources, their childcare costs exceed their wages, a help they don't have public transit. Without looking at those things, you're not being honest about the systems that are creating this. And by adding really insane requirements for people to get help is actually making it harder for them to get a job. Because why would they go out and really try to find stable work work if they can't find a job that pays enough. And if they're not getting a job that pays enough, they get booted off the only help they are getting. How are you, how do you navigate that decision? Especially when you have Children, policies that are grounded in this narrative don't take people out of hardship. They deepen the hardship. They turn safety nets into monitor monitoring systems and they convert temporary crisis into long term precarity. The systems that we have with these work requirements and this constant reapplication and this constant booting off without addressing our system is of out actually making people more dependent for longer periods of time. If we would address the system, people wouldn't need these services anymore. And in the long term, it would save us billions and trillions of dollars over time because they wouldn't need it anymore. But we're not being serious about treating poverty. We're being serious with this type of policy from the Heritage foundation about punishing the impoverished. That's a very different thing. We have to name poverty as a systemic failure year. We have to provide real material that supports food, housing, health care, child care, and, and like, look at Zoan Momdani, within the first month, was able to get free child care for. Sorry, free. Yeah, free child care for two year olds, I believe it was like where it's. It's not the full thing yet. It's not the free child care. But he's getting there. It was something. He was able to do it because the money's there. We have to invest in structural reforms that include living wages. Wages. Living wages. Real estate has gone up so much since the 1980s and our minimum wage has stagnated. We need stronger labor protections to protect people from being unfairly fired, which makes them be homeless, which makes them impoverished. We need affordable housing. We need to treat people experiencing poverty as human beings and treat the system that put them there in the first place. And it's no surprise that of course in Project 2025, they do not treat LGBTQ people as members of the public that the state is obligated to protect. Remember, protection is conditional in this hierarchy based on your race, your level on the ladder, and if you will adhere to the strict moral coupling that they've designed. Project 2025 treats the LGBTQ community as a problem to be solved, especially trans people, reserving its most punitive tools for trans and gender non conforming people. And keep in mind again, trans people and gender non conforming people have existing existed forever. They've always been around. They've always been here. Throughout the mandate for leadership, gender identity is not acknowledged as a fundamental aspect of human experience. It's dismissed as ideological fiction. And let's be clear, gender is something we made up. If we raised girls to play with trucks, and boys to wear pink. That would be the gender norm. We made it up. We. We made it up. This is not some natural thing, as in, like, I take my breath naturally because my body needs oxygen to survive. This is something we decide. Remember that high heels were originally made for men, okay? We make that up. And they dismiss this. As we learn more about humanity and about the sexual experience, we learn more about sex and gender thing changes. That's. That's how evolution happens. That's how the human race grows. But right now, conservatives who resist progress are like ideological fiction. They dismiss it and it underpins their entire approach. Because if gender identity is declared unreal, only their gender definitions are true, then trans people become administratively optional. Either you adhere to our standard or you don't exist. Which is ironic coming from the people who advocate for small government. But they're sitting here saying that the government should be able to tell you how you can dress, how you can identify in public whether or not you choose to go through a gender transfer transition. Those should all be your choices. Like, the government should be like, I don't care. I don't care. You can, you can cover all of your house in fur, like wall to ceiling with little furry costumes if you want to. I don't care. I don't care. As long as you're not breaking the law, I don't care. That should be the government stance. But here, the people of small government are telling women how they should live their lives, telling them when they should get pregnant, how many babies they should have by not allowing them to control how many they have, telling who gets civil rights and who doesn't, who gets privilege and who doesn't, and how you can dress and who you can love. That is the exact opposite of small government. That is a punitive, very large, very invasive government. They want small government for the rich and for the corporations, and really big invasive government for all of us. Because all of us are going to have to work 10 times as hard to prove that we're worthy. So the Project 2025 document calls for sweeping cuts to federal non discrimination protections. We've seen this with the rollbacks of DEI protections for the LGBTQ community in healthcare, education, housing, employment. It does this by insisting, insisting that sex can be defined strictly as biological, which we also know is not true. That's not true either, because we have people that don't fit those norms. And again, we know that gender is a construct that we've made up in society. Agencies can now classify gender affirming care as cosmetic. And therefore discretionary, which saves a lot of trans people's lives, by the way. And by the way, gender affirming care is also Viagra is also Boob jobs is also Nose jobs is also. So you know, testosterone replacement, like all of that, is gender affirming care. And the doctor, the doctor, the government shouldn't be able to tell you what, which one of those you can take. You should be able to take whichever one you want. Doesn't matter if you agree with it or not. Like, leave people alone, mind your business. Anyways, the consequences, of course, of this are well studied. Research on trans health shows that when gender affirming care is withheld, the rates of depression, anxiety and suicide shockingly increase. These don't, these don't arise from nowhere. They are predictable as a result of telling an entire group of people that their identity is at best a phase and at worst a threat. Again, trans people have always been in the bathroom. You just didn't know they were there. They have always existed. Project 2025 also broadens the use again of religious exemptions, allowing for institutions to deny services and care to LGBTQ people with very little oversight. Again, the. The Heritage foundation wants to be able to determine, determine who is worthy of rights and protections and who isn't. And LGBTQ people and liberal women and single moms and black people don't pay make the cut. Studies indicate that these exceptions fall heavily on trans people who already face higher rates of housing instability, joblessness and medical discrimination. Discrimination in this case is reframed as a fidelity to faith, which is insane because the Bible doesn't talk about trans people. And I won't get into the whole homosexuality debate right now, but know that the word homosexual didn't exist in the Bible until 1946. They did not have an understanding of homosexuality like we did. That word didn't exist until the 1860s when people started to understand that like sexuality, that it wasn't just a pre programmed thing that was standard in every person. We started to understand that when that started to change in psychology. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible translated homosexuality into First Corinthians 6, 9, which was translated as boy lover by Martin Luther. And then they started applying that to other verses. But we'll get. I'll do another episode on that. So sometime. But the. To be able to say that the Bible is the reason for this is, is absolutely zero, zero backing on that for trans people and real shaky ground when it comes to the LGBTQ community as a whole. So these policies do more than complicate everyday life. They build a system of organized disappearance and discrimination. And that's the goal. Again, the goal is to establish this hierarchy that they claim is God is God's intended higher order. And the effects ripple outward like it affects everybody's families, their friendships, their workpl classrooms. Again, if you advocate for small government, any adult should be able to marry any other adult. If you don't like gay marriage, don't get one. Like that's something you can easily avoid. But your religious belief should not limit the civil rights of other people. Religion determine. Your religion determines what you can or cannot do, not what someone else can or cannot do. You don't get to go over to your neighbor's yard and put a fence up for them. You put a fence up on your lawn. And like we have to be able to talk about this sincerely and really look at Project 2025 and the Heritage foundation for what it is. And it's really a way of re. Re consolidating executive power, but re implementing discrimination as a form of moral high ground because of your personal held beliefs in what the hierarchy of the world should be. And again, I want to point out Jesus was not a white dude. So for all the Christians advocating that white dudes should be the top of the pyramid, you might want to reevaluate, evaluate that. But let's talk about how Project 2025 also targets Indigenous people, specifically their land, water and communities that have been defended by both indigenous groups and treaties for generations. Environmental research shows that when indigenous nations exercise complete authority over their territories, those lands are healthier because indigenous people spiritually have a greater connection to the land, a greater connection and understanding of stewardship. And they do a much better job job preserving their lands. When indigenous people groups can exercise sovereignty over their lands, their forests are more resilient, their watersheds are cleaner, their ecological degradation is slower. This is not incidental. It's again, when indigenous sovereignty is respected and not exploited, their ecosystems and cultures persist very well together. The opposite is also true. When protections are weakened and Indigenous communities are pushed into harm's way, pollution increases, increases, water sources become contaminated, the fish, game and plants that sustain traditional food ways and cultural practices decline. Policies described in official language as streamlining or development show up on the ground as asthma, cancer and empty fishing nets. Indigenous people groups are very good at taking care of the land. And when their sovereignty is taken away, that land suffers, as do the people. We see it. We see indigenous people now trying to find documentation so that they can prove they belong wrong Here they're Native Americans and they're being swept up by ice. I'll say it again. They're Native Americans that are being swept up by ice. And this is again, this, this very familiar colonial script of extraction. First take everything you can, greed, hoard, consume, and then consent later, if at all. We'll deal with the consequences later in like this. This colonial ideology treats land and sovereignty and consultation not as legal oblig treaties, but obstacles to be cleared, ways to get rid of them. Some of the, in, in Minnesota, some of the Native Americans that were kidnapped was to coerce the chief to give ICE access that he refuses to give. Which is great, I'm glad that he's standing his ground. But they literally kidnap people to try to coerce him into giving up some of his sovereignty. No. And again, this colonial idea, this greed, this consumption, this hunger that just never ends, calls for expanding resource extraction without any talk about conservativism, about, sorry, not conservatism without conservation, without no stewardship, softening environmental regulations, which is going to hurt all of us. If there's no planet to live on, we're going to have a problem speeding up project approvals, even if they're harmful. These moves are not new. I mean, if you know anything about indigenous rights, this has been going on for hundreds of years. They're just doing it again. The goal is to exploit and to take because the rich and the powerful deserve, deserve it, according to this worldview, which is really insane, again, especially coming from a religion that so deeply advocated for helping the poor. Deregulation, especially for on indigenous land that are healthier than our lands. But deregulation in the speed, in the name of speed and growth has already been linked to higher rates of respiratory illness. We see this in Tennessee with Elon's AI machine. There's more respiratory illness, more cancer, more food insecurity. And it's not just indigenous communities. That happens everywhere, everywhere that deregulation happens. Facing all of these things, and this doesn't even cover all of Project 2025. But facing all of these things requires acknowledging that Project 2025 and the Heritage foundation, these conservative policies are not neutral. It's it. We are deciding whose lives and whose land and whose ability to live in the world will be compromised and, and what people are worthy of equality and what people are worthy of protection and valuing people's lives, lives on a scale of who gets protection and who gets access and who gets resources and who gets the choice of how to live their own freaking life. And as we evaluate that, the resistance to these policies become important. And I'm going to talk about that resistance after my second of two MID show sponsor breaks. Toogood and Co Coffee Creamers are made with farm fresh cream, real milk and contain 3 grams of sugar per serving. That's 40% less than the 5 grams per serving in leading traditional coffee creamers. Creamers for a rich, delicious experience. Whether you enjoy your coffee hot, cold, bold or frothy, two good coffee creamers make every sip a good one. Two good coffee creamers Real goodness in every sip. Find them at your local Kroger in the creamer aisle. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying. Today, while I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class, I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts New Year, new me. Cute, but how about New Year, Year, New Money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're going to crush Start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on FICO scoring model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check, which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details. Experian Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with evglis, a once monthly treatment treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four month or longer dosing phase. About four in ten people taking EPGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Emplis Lebricizumab LBKZ a 250mg 2ml injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals, or who cannot use topical. Therapies Ebglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Ebglis before starting Ebglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about eglis and visit ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY are 1-800-545-5979. Now let's talk about Reverend William Barber II. So he stands in a position that, you know the project 25 would prefer he be a little more quiet. And this is the intersection of faith and justice on the side of the poor. He's the co chair of the Poor People's Campaign. Barber rejects the narrative that poverty and inequality stem mainly from individual failure. In his preaching and his organizing, the sin resides not in bad character at the bottom, but in destructive policy at the top. Top. That shift in focus is so important, and it moves the attention away from what's wrong with those people onto the laws, budgets, wages and theologies that make certain lives disposable. Barbara draws from a long biblical tradition that does not idealize hierarchy but idealizes helping the poor and the outcast and the widow and the orphan and the sick and the stranger. He foregrounds texts about jubilee debt, forgiveness, widows and orphans and strangers at the the gate, immigrants, passages that call for redistribution and repair rather than punishment. In his view, genuine faith does not hover above politics as a private feeling. It compels engagement with systems that keep people sick, poor and excluded. For Barber, Christian nationalism is not only a theological dispute it is a distortion that selectively uses scripture to justify harshness, cruelty and greed. He names the way that it blesses tax cuts, voter suppression and cuts to social programs while calling that God's order. In such a world, domination can be represented. Sorry, domination can be misrepresented as obedience. That's not the same thing. Barber's response is unapologetically theological. He says, if a religious vision props up injustice, it is not the gospel. His invitation is not just for believers to speak more kindly about the poor, but it's a call for congregations and faith communities to treat policy as moral terrain. Budgets become moral documents, laws become claims about whose life matters, and that as someone of faith, if you are a person of faith, then it is your job to advocate for those same groups of People because Jesus's ministry called for people to stand for those in the margin. Another major resistor of the Heritage foundation and things like Project 2025 is the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU exists on a simple principle that the Constitution is binding. It is not aspirational. The ACLU looks past the branding of Project 2025 as this efficiency or reform. And it follows the mechanisms of widespread reclassification of civilization, civil servants, the weakening of civil rights enforcement offices and the accumulation of authority and political appointees. And it sees them for what it is. The ACLU sets aside the jargon and the outline is stark. A government that answers upward rather than outward. This is dangerous in two ways. ACLU recognizes that people will be mistreated and have fewer tools to seek redress. They'll have fewer ways to sue or be compensated or be protected. Checks and balances designed to prevent any one faction from capturing the state will be hollowed out. Independent civil rights enforcement is not optional enhancement. It is. It is the one of the few paths by which ordinary people can compel institutions to honor the promises written in law. I think we see this distinction where the ACLU provides itself as a really primary enemy to the Heritage foundation. And Project 2025 is in this conflict over religious freedom. So the ACLU agrees that people are free to believe in worship, but that freedom cannot become a blanket of license to disregard anti discrimination rules. I couldn't agree more. More. Your religion tells you how to live. It does not give you the right to discriminate against anyone who believes differently than you. If my religion becomes a trump card, no pun intended, allowing the denial of housing, health care, education and other basic services because of who someone is, then equal protection is just a slogan. It's no longer part of the law. The Constitution is not being adhered to. Law ceases to be a neutral ground and it turns into a vehicle for one group's the other. The ACLU's position is not rooted in hostility towards faith. I know they get depicted a lot that way. They very much advocate for the protection of faith, no matter whose faith it is. The ACLU opposes a system in which rights in which access to rights depends on whether an individual happens to match the moral preferences of those that are running the institution. Another big fighter in this project 2025 fight against it is the National Women's Law Center. So this is viewed from the perspective of women's lived experience. Project 20 appears as a dense network of risks. The National Women's Law center research demonstrates that policies that cut Reproductive health care undermine workplace protections for women or shrink economic supports rarely distribute harm evenly. That harm solidly falls on women. The most significant burdens fall on women of color, low wage workers, caregivers, and women in precarious jobs and unsafe workplaces. It gives women very little avenues to protect protect themselves. When lawmakers restrict access to abortion and contraception, they are not making a marginal policy change. They are rearranging the timeline of women women's lives. They're rearranging the opportunity of women's lives. They're delaying their education. If they're able to get educated at all. They're damaging or changing their career trajectories. Their lifetime earnings are dramatically reduced. The number one predictor of elder poverty in women is being a stay at home wife and mother. Because you don't have that career and if something, God forbid happens to your husband, you have very little ways to get back into a field that will pay you enough. When protections against harassment, sexual discrimination, pay discrimination are weakened, the cost of speaking up increases. Because now if you lose your job and your boss has absolutely no accountability to not fire you unfairly or to not fire you because you rejected his sexual advances, you are now likely to be out of a job and closer to the homelessness that's also demonized in the these projects. This law center's response to the Heritage foundation and Project 2025 is not just to ask women to be protected, but it argues that robust support for women's rights is the precondition for healthy communities. When women control their bodies and hold stable work and can rely on protection from abuse, families are more secure, local economies grow stronger and make more money and the foundation of daily life becomes more stable for every everyone. Choice makes everyone safer. And these are not individual incidental benefits and these are not anecdotes. These are provable data driven results. Another big leader in the opposition to Project 2025 is the leaders resisting for people of color, specifically Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. And if Project 2025 can imagine a state that shrinks democracy in order to preserve hierarchy, leaders like Congress Congresswoman Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley are working to expand democracy precisely so that people of color can no longer be treated as afterthoughts. She was elected to represent Massachusetts 7th congressional district, the state's first majority minority district. Presley was framed her work as an explicit rebuke to policies that normalize racial inequality. She speaks on those most harmed by injustice, not as the marginalized, but the marginalized made majority, insisting that black and Brown communities, immigrants, disabled people, survivors of violence, and those in PO poverty should be centered and helped rather than managed. Presley's legislative and organizing priorities run directly counter to Project 2025's core assumptions. The project seeks to weaken federal civil rights enforcement, narrow what counts as discrimination. She has championed for stronger voting rights protections, support for restoring and expanding the Voting Rights act, automatic voter registration, and measures to end partisan and racial gerrit. In her view, democracy is not a privilege for the morally fit or for the few, but a right. It is a right for everyone in this country. Presley embodies a counter theology of governance, one in which the measure of policy is not whether it restores a lost quote order, but whether it expands safety, agency and joy to those who've been denied all three. Her work makes it clear that the struggle over Project 2025 is not about stopping harm. It's about advancing a radically different vision of who democracy is, is for, and also against Project 2025. There's tons of allied scholars, faith leaders, people who are standing up who are saying, this is not right. This is not in alignment with my beliefs and, and multiple religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, coming forward and saying these are not in alignment with our values. But there's a special group of allied forces in the Christian community that are standing up and saying, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Jesus said that we needed to take care of the poor. He said we needed to clothe people and feed them and advocate for them. Why would I not advocate for policy? Who does exactly that thing? It goes against the Heritage foundation and the Christian nationalist claim that we are in fact a Christian nation and we're trying to get back to being that Christian nation. If that were true, a Christian nation would, would fight tooth and nail on a systemic level to feed the poor and make sure the sick can go to the doctor and make sure that kids can go to school and keep people safe and make sure that there's equal opportunity. That would be how Christian government would operate. And it is one of the clearest indicators that those who parrot that belief have absolutely no intention of following following Christ's call in Matthew 25. Now we're in Project 2025 now. And when you live it, it becomes so much bigger. It's not hypothetical anymore. It is a big cloud. It is a threat to what we know and understand as our rights. I have less rights now than my mother did because she had access to RO during her birthing years. I have less rights in the state of Tennessee than she did. And it, it changes our Medical appointments, our rent notices, where your child goes to school, if they can go to school, your immigration hearings. Authoritarian projects depend on more than law and policies, though. They depend on exhaustion. The goal of this is to keep you so overwhelmed and so exhausted, so worn down, so isolated, so. So hopeless, that you just get quiet, you just give up. I can't do it anymore. Steve Bannon calls it flooding the zone, flooding the system. And this is why, reminding yourself that you're a human being, not a human doing, and keeping hope alive is not some sentimental fake it so you make it joy false positivity thing. It is absolutely critical to win. And I know I've said before, but one of my favorite quotes is by Dan Savage where he says, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and at night we danced because it was the dance that we were fighting for. And he was speaking about the height of the AIDS epidemic. And it is so true that if you forget the dance in these moments, if you let them overwhelm you, if you let it crush you, you'll get silent and inert. It will become too much. Hope in this context is not. Again, it's not this nice, naive optimism that everything's going to work out. It's the stubborn practice of believing that your life and the lives of those that you love are worth fighting for. And it is this, this refusal to relinquish the belief in a better world, in something better, something where everybody belongs. And it's the decision to keep reaching out to each other, reaching out to joy, reaching out to play, reaching out to. Reaching out to taking your breath when those in power profit from our separation. And I work on social media and I understand the powers of social media to get word out and get news out. And in that way it's great. But it also has this negative impact of convincing us that we're connected while it separates us. Make sure right now that you're connecting with real human beings who believe in you, who love you, that you believe in and that you love in, because that reconnection in a world that wants us to be separated and isolated and alone and hopeless, that reconnection is what, what saves us. And if you're a trans person watching your health care come under attack, your very existence is contested in hearings by people who will never meet you. And I just. I'm not gonna get emotional, but I might. I remember when my platform first took off, that I got a message from a 14 year old trans student who said, thank you for helping me not end my life because my parents keep telling me I'm an abomination. And I thought my only choice in were to live a lie, which I can't do, or to end my life. And I want the trans people listening to this podcast to know that you're not a problem to be solved. You're a human being. And your joy and your safety and your relationships are also sacred. And I'm sorry that you are put in this position where you are being scapegoated for the greed and power of very few people and for those of us that grew up in these high control environments and bought into these systems. This is where we make our repentance by standing for people that we used to demonize. Because there should never be a reason that a 14 year old is sending me a message like that there are people here for you. And I, I specifically wanted to say that to the people here that are trans or you have trans family members because you are the group being singled out more than anyone else. And if you are someone who is undocumented or you lived in a mixed status family or you're going through the immigration process and you're waking up every day knowing that when you leave your house, you might not come home, I first want to say that your right to belong does not hinge on a piece of paper. And nobody is illegal on stolen land. And with a system that doesn't work and is specifically built to make people fail and cost them thousands of dollars, you are not less valuable than that stupid paperwork. And you don't deserve to be demonized and ostracized and brutalized because of where you are, were born. And I want to tell you that I'm sorry that you're experiencing that. And if you're someone who is black or brown and you have learned in a way that I could never understand to navigate every single public space with this layer of vigilance around police, around your schools, what you're wearing and you've learned to not be cared for in hospitals or you, when you speak out, you're being too sensitive. I just, I want you to know that you mentioned matter, that you matter and that your suffering matters because so many. This is something that drives me crazy in my own life, is that so many people dismiss slavery and civil rights as if it was centuries ago. It's not. It's very recent history. People whose parents threw rocks at black children are still alive. People whose grandparents couldn't vote are still alive. And we have to remember how close that is. And if, and if you're listening to this and you have just given up trying to talk to people or trying to get people to understand, I'm. I'm glad that you're in this space. And I want you to know that you matter. Even though the system has consistently told you you matter less. That's not true. And I know that you know that, but I want you to hear me say it. And for everyone else, we. We all fall in these categories somewhere. Whether you've been homeless before. I have. I've been homeless twice. And the second time was, was by choice. I lived in my car during coven hiking, state parks. The first one wasn't if you've lived in poverty, if you're a woman, if you. All of these things know that you matter. And there is a system telling you that there is one path for you. There is not one path path for you. Your path is whatever you decide it should be. But that also means that in the overwhelm of the system, keeping hope alive is a series of community decisions, being with real people in real time. And it's a series of. Of small and very unglamorous acts. It means showing up to a local meeting and making your voice heard and meeting people around you that believe the same things you do. It means checking on your neighbor, delivering groceries to your neighbor who maybe feels unsafe leaving the house. It means sharing information and resources and skills. It also means letting yourself feel grief and anger and fury without letting them numb you. It means taking an extra long shower when you need it. It means crying in the car if you need it. And sometimes it means making art and telling stories and holding rituals that remind you of who you are as a person. Sometimes it means tattoos. That's my personal favorite. It also looks like allowing yourself to rest. In the United States, we've been programmed into such an extreme form of capitalist society, where our value is our. The equivalent of our production and our work, that we work ourselves into exhaustion. One of the reasons for pushing women back into the home is that a woman who is working a job and at the home or working 247 in the home and never has rest. A woman like that is too exhausted to find fight back. She's too exhausted to march. Exhaustion is one of their tools. Don't give it to them. These systems were not built in a year or a decade. They will not be undone in one season of outrage. This is a long, long fight. And you're allowed to step back and you're allowed to breathe. And I'm learning This too. I'm learning this, too. This weekend I had a special event that was a vampire themed fantasy ball that I wanted to go to. And I almost canceled because I felt like I shouldn't go. I should be working, I should be doing this. And I went, and I'm so glad I did. I walked out, out of there feeling like a person instead of a zombie for the first time in three months. Those things matter. And I don't want that to become an excuse for escapism, especially if you're a white person. This is not the time to take your ball and go home. This is not the time to blend into the wall because you can kind of fly under the radar. That's not what that means. Because we have to advocate even harder. Because we have a level of protection and privilege that black and brown people and the queer community and trans people don't have. We have that level of protection that can protect them. It's us that has to be on the front line shielding them. But that does mean sometimes you're like, man, I need a break. I need to go sit with my family. I need to kiss my cat. I need to. Whatever that is, do it. Do not let them use exhaustion to get you to give up. And I hope that you know that, like, our fear is valid, your anger is justified, but your presence is also needed. And the fact that you're here on this podcast and you're listening and you're thinking and you're feeling your way through this and you're learning these histories, especially for those of you that are breaking out of high control environments or breaking away from Christian fundamentalism, and you're looking at what your faith looks like now. You're doing the right things by learning now. And. And it happens everywhere we are. And it doesn't matter if you're on a bus or you're in a break room or you're washing dishes late at night, you are part of a much larger we than Project 2025 accounts for, than the Heritage foundation accounts for. The thing about authoritarian regimes and plans is that they get power drunk. They think that everyone agrees with them because they've gained power, because they've gained ground. They haven't. And that we, that we're all a part of, that's. That bigger group has overturned bad laws before. We've pushed them back before. It has expanded the circle who came counts again and again and again. That same we is the same we that has fought every century of human history to make sure that people belong a little more. And it's often starts really small. You don't have to carry this alone. I know it's scary, but we're not alone. And we're invited in whatever way we can to stay hopeful and stay in the fight. And because you're not alone, when you take a break, break, someone else is there working with and for you. Because unlike the Heritage foundation and Project 2025, life does not have to be so small and it doesn't have to be full of suffering and pain and regulation on how people show up in the world. There can be a freer and a more fair world. I grew up with this idea of American acceptance, exceptionalism, that America was the best country ever, that we were this Christian nation, that we were blessed by God, we were part of God's calling. And that's not true. But that doesn't mean that the America I thought existed can't exist. We can be more free and more loving and more accepting and have happier people and more joyful people and less exhausted people. And we can finally, we can use this time to finally understand that the wealthy and the privileged do not have our best interests at heart. And the only person that's going to effectively care for your best interests and the interests of your children are your nieces and nephews is you. And you are strong enough. Because right now you have won a hundred percent victories against the hard things that have come across you. You, it hasn't gotten you yet. You've won all of them up to this point and you have a huge army of people who are standing with you for this one. So I hope that in the midst of, of everything that's going on and how hard the last 14 months have been, I hope this was encouraging. I hope it was informative, gave you a little bit more insight into the structure and the foundation of both the Heritage foundation and why their policies function the way they do. But I also want it to be a reminder that we are not done yet and that we is a lot bigger than these small minded people are. And I'll see you next week on Flipping Tables. Foreign. This podcast is brought to you by Carvana. Selling your car shouldn't feel like a second job. It should feel easy. With Carvana, it is. Just visit Carvana.com, enter your license plate or VIN, answer a few quick questions and get an offer in minutes. Like what you see. We'll pick it up right now from your door and hand you your check. No haggling, no hassle, no problem. Car selling made easy on car pickup fees may apply.