Project 2025 is every conservative fascistic dream rolled into one. Under the rubric of liberty and freedom, the 886-page totalitarian manifesto proposes a government structured to protect the interests of rich white men. A government designed to promote profit over people. A government of plantation owners, for plantation owners, by plantation owners. Its proposals are so extreme that even the man the plan was crafted for, Trump, has distanced himself from this reactionary fever dream. And right-wing media’s talking heads have remained mum on the subject.
On the political left, commentators have explained its intent and warned of its excess. Liberals, centrists, and even some old-school Reagan/Bush-style Republicans are horrified by its Orwellian strategy for government by Big Brother.
However, most of the conversation around Project 2025 has been commentary at a remove. We all know its intent to downsize and politicize the administrative state. But what does it actually say? What is the vocabulary of 21st-century American Nazis?
To get a handle on those questions let’s look at how it proposes to reduce women to handmaids through forced birth.
The manifesto’s authors are zealots, who fancy themselves academics and are well aware their extremism has limited appeal. As a result, their work product is a weighty tome, well-formatted, extensively footnoted, whose dystopian goals are disguised by anodyne section headings. You will not find a chapter that states “Here’s how we plan to subjugate women“. So the reader will have to guess where the authors have hidden their misogyny
I found it. It starts on page 449, in the section titled ‘Department of Health and Human Services.’ The author starts the lies by contrasting Saint Donald’s immaculate stewardship with Biden’s satanic machinations.
Under President Trump, HHS was dedicated to serving “all Americans from conception to natural death, including those individuals and families who face...economic and social well-being challenges.”
Under President Biden, the mission has shifted to “promoting equity in everything we do” for the sake of “populations sharing a particular characteristic” including race, sexuality, gender identification, ethnicity, and a host of other categories.
Let’s note that the actual mission statement of the U.S. DHS is:
"To enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services."
Gratuitous language about ‘conception’ and ‘natural death’ is nowhere to be found. However, this misrepresentation is just throat-clearing for these woman-hating crusaders.
Next, we get to the dissonant “War is Peace” philosophy of the religious fanatic.
A robust respect for the sacred rights of conscience, both at HHS and among governments and institutions funded by it, increases choices for patients and program beneficiaries and furthers pluralism and tolerance. The Secretary must protect Americans’ civil rights by ensuring that HHS programs and activities follow the letter and spirit of religious freedom and conscience-protection laws.
It is world-class chutzpah
- for anti-choice warriors to argue their goal “increases choices for patients and program beneficiaries.”
- to claim a fundamentalist religious diktat, farcically characterized as “religious freedom” will protect the civil rights of people who think differently.
Then comes the Gestapo proposal.
Data Collection.
The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate. CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all. Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.
“Abortion surveillance”? That’s the language of a police state. “Abortion survivors.”? How many women who have exercised their reproductive rights would call themselves that? “Public health and policy analysis”? What is that a euphemism for?
As for “abortion-related maternal deaths,” here are the stats. Women are 80 times more likely to die giving birth (32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births) than they are to die from an abortion (0.41 deaths per 100,000 legal abortions).
The difference is so stark that if women’s longevity was a true concern for religious fundamentalists, they would encourage all pregnant women get abortions.
There’s more:
Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.
There are quite sensible federal requirements for medical facilities and states to report cases of infectious diseases. But abortion is not a communicable condition. There is no more societal health benefit to reporting abortions than there is to reporting ACL surgeries. However, Project 2025 is silent on requirements for orthopedic surgeons to share data on their patients.
As bad as this is, it is safe to say that while the authors of Project 2025 were confident enough to put this on paper, they discuss far more repressive goals off the record.