Impeding Black Progress, the threat of Project 2025

By now, I’m sure you’ve at least heard of Project 2025.

In my view, it’s the conservative party’s final transformation from a long-time movement for limited federal government to a full-long commitment to federal authoritarianism.

At 920 pages, this is not a read for the casually interested or the faint-hearted. It is an extensive slog (I’ve only gotten through parts of it myself). Led by the Heritage Foundation, long one of the arch-conservative think tanks in the nation, it has involved more than 100 organizations in its creation, including former Trump Cabinet members, White House aides, and senior officials and policy advisors throughout his administration, including from the Office of Personnel Administration, the office of the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the U.S. Attorney General’s office, and from the Defense Department, the Office of Homeland Security, and various U.S. intelligence agencies, among many others.

More than thirty officials who served then-President Trump are involved with the project. Click HERE to find the list Newsweek has compiled.

The project received such significant press over the summer that former President Trump now claims not to know about the project or who is behind it.

Much ink has spilled to document the extremist vision for America—and for the federal government—the document lays out, so I’ll spare you most of those details (the Center for American Progress (CAP) has an excellent summary (CAP's summary).

In sum, CAP details how Project 2025 proposes to weaponize the DOJ for political purposes, end the independence of all independent agencies, replace expert civil servants with political loyalists, circumvent Congress’ power to decide how to spend federal funds, misuse the Insurrection Act against Americans to stifle dissent and neutralize the Senate’s role of confirming executive branch nominees.[1]

What could go wrong when fundamentally eliminating so many of the checks and balances our founders built into the Constitution????

The project proposes elevating the president and executive branch above the law and out of the?reach of federal legislators. It’s a breakaway path toward quasi-authoritarianism that we see in places like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and the Philippines.

But in tonight’s newsletter, I don’t plan to focus on the existential threat that Project 2025 poses to our nation and the Constitution.

Instead, I want to explore the damage that Project 2025, if implemented, would bring to the African American community and other communities we’ve marginalized historically.

In Chapter 7 of my book,?It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field, I explore the myth: “The Days of Restricting the Rights and Progress of Blacks are Long Gone.”

I explain how, for the longest time in America, Whites perceived Blacks as a threat, particularly in response to Black progress, whether during Reconstruction or the Great Migration or in the aftermath of Civil Rights victories. Various forms of critical resistance

Despite primarily positive shifts in societal attitudes about race since the 1960s, essential elements of racial resentment persist, often manifesting now in more subtle forms. ?

You may know that throughout the twentieth century, Black families encountered various forms of violence, intimidation, and legal obstacles as they sought to move into predominantly White neighborhoods.

And despite the Fair Housing Act enacted in 1968 to combat such violence, attacks on Black individuals attempting to integrate neighborhoods continued well into the 1990s. This might help explain why African Americans still may shy away from moving into predominantly White neighborhoods. For almost all our history, they have never felt welcomed or wanted.

Chapter 7 also delves into the extensive surveillance and disruption efforts carried out by the FBI against Black power, liberation, and civil rights groups from the early 1920s through the 1980s and, to a lesser extent, to the present day (e.g., the Black Lives Matter movement was perceived by some in recent Justice departments as forms of ‘Black extremism’[2]).

Don’t believe me? Read here.

Despite the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the significant increases in Black voter turnout that resulted (primarily from the protections the Act provided), the U.S. Supreme Court fundamentally dismantled critical parts of the Act aimed at protecting minority voting rights in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder.

Since then, states previously covered by the Act have enacted numerous voting law changes that seek, among other targets, to limit voting by Black and Brown voters, particularly after the 2020 presidential election. These changes, often driven by false claims of widespread voter fraud, include restrictions on polling places, mail-in voting, and voter registration, disproportionately impacting Black voters. Very targeted and enormous voter purges, rampant since 2013, have further suppressed Black turnout. As you’d probably expect, this has happened throughout the South but also in places like Ohio. Ohio Voter Purge disproportionately targets voters of color.[3]

I could tackle here many other recent activities like the faux-war against critical race theory or the resistance to taking down Confederate war memorials. But I need to get back to Project 2025 (P-2025).

The Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI) at the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) recently published its report, “Attack on Our Power and Dignity: What Project 2025 Means for Black Communities.”

For the remainder of this post, I draw from this excellent report.

TMI identifies seven broad ways that P-2025 if enacted, would bring great harm to Black communities and four specific ways the project would severely limit civil rights.

The seven broad ways are[4]:

• Weakening anti-discrimination laws and cutting essential worker protections. The proposal looks to eliminate the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ability to collect race and ethnicity data that can be used to support a charge of discrimination.
• Limiting access to quality education for Black students. By proposing to eliminate the Department of Education, the federal agency that ensures civil rights protections for students of color in public schools, especially as a way of combating ongoing discriminatory discipline practices that disproportionately impact Black students. Further, privatizing student loans and eliminating loan forgiveness programs?will also harm aspiring Black college students. ?
• Undermining Black political power. A part of this is to continue to use the U.S. Census as a tool to undercount Black and Brown people (as the 2020 Census did), to find ways to continue to limit the African American vote (beyond the dozens of state-level laws already passed to do precisely that) and to eliminate affirmative action, diversity-equity-and-inclusion, and any teachings that suggest system racism continues to exist.
• Promoting punitive criminal legal policies. If P-2025 is implemented, we will see increases in the use of the death penalty (which has always been highly racially discriminatory) and intentionally ignoring police misconduct by abolishing federal consent decrees. (These decrees have been used to try to right the ship in Ferguson and Baltimore police forces, to mention a few.)
• Jeopardizing Black families’ access to affordable housing. P-2025 proposes to change the rules that allow people to access housing vouchers, such as limiting the length of time they’re eligible for these benefits and strengthening work requirements. Amid a nationwide affordable housing crisis, in which half of renters are cost-burdened or severely cost-burdened and in which African Americans are disproportionately impacted, this is a massive threat to their housing stability.
• Threatening reproductive rights and the health of Black people. An author of Project 2025 brought the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Center case to the U.S. Supreme Court that, ultimately ended Roe v. Wade, severely curtailing women’s right to make their own choices about their bodies. As a result, P-2025 proposes eliminating medicine and contraceptives to be deemed obscene (per the Comstock Act), which would mean that mifepristone (and even condoms) could not be delivered by mail in states that have significant bans on abortion. Mifepristone can end a pregnancy that is up to 10 weeks along.
• Exacerbating health disparities caused by environmental racism. The project proposes to shut down the newly established Office of Environmental Justice, which has existed for?only three years. After a century of governments at every level disproportionately siting and exposing hazardous waste and other polluting facilities adjacent to countless Black neighborhoods, causing chronic and severe health conditions in Black communities, this will leave these neighborhoods as vulnerable as ever and with little hope for restitution or repair. Read more here from the Center for American Progress.

Voting for Donald Trump is not just a vote for a single, highly deficient, and ill-tempered man who has trafficked in racial tropes throughout all three of his campaigns.

I hope, in your own unique ways, you will join me in the next 30 days to ensure that this does not happen.

For further reading:

For a comprehensive review of the impact of Project 2025, the Center for American Progress has produced a series of analyses to unpack all the blueprint components they’ve titling: “Exposing the Far-Right Assault on America.” Find it here - https://www.americanprogress.org/series/project-2025-exposing-the-far-right-assault-on-america/.

To dig into the actual Project 2025 document, you can find the complete version here: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Michael Sozan and Ben Olinsky, “Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency,” Center for American Progress, October 1, 2024, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025-would-destroy-the-u-s-system-of-checks-and-balances-and-create-an-imperial-presidency/

[2] Michael German, “The FBI Targets a New Generation of Black Activists,” Brennan Center for Justice, June 26, 2020, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/fbi-targets-new-generation-black-activists

[3] Megan Henry, “Ohio’s voter purge ‘disproportionately targets voters of color,’ civil rights organizations say,” Ohio Capital Journal, July 25, 2024, https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2024/07/25/ohios-voter-purge-disproportionately-targets-voters-of-color-civil-rights-organizations-say/

[4] “Attack on Our Power and Dignity: What Project 2025 Means for Black Communities,” Thurgood Marshall Institute of the Legal Defense Fund, September 2024, https://tminstituteldf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/10.03.24_FINAL-Attack-on-Our-Power-and-Dignity_PDF.pdf.

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