Grasping the Problem: Project 2025
I am writing this for the Hopium community specifically but publishing it on my substack because of the limitations of the comment format. It is long.
I am seeing a lot of conflict here in our community and believe it’s about more than just a bad habit of pessimism. It comes from grasping that we are in a different, very dangerous situation and time is of the essence.
The normal procedure for having elected the wrong people is to organize and vote them out in the next election. We don’t have that time. This is a coup, not an administration, and part of the plan for this coup known as Project 2025 is there won’t be a next election. As Trump said during his campaign, words to the effect of “My Christians, you have to get out and vote just this one time. Then we’ll get it all fixed so you won’t have to vote anymore.”
No one has the right to elect a dictatorship which wants to literally strip most of us of our citizenship, kill some of us, remove some us from the country and enslave those who remain while looting the treasury and dismantling our country for parts. More to the point, we have the right to refuse to accept this mistreatment. This tyranny.
The issue is not rights. It is, and always has been, power. The reality that underlies every government is consent of the governed, or as it would be more accurate to say, the willingness to submit. No government can stand if a sufficient number of people refuse to submit.
In our own history, freedoms were won when a sufficient number of people refused to submit to the situation, so the laws had to change in order for the law to remain legitimate. That’s not what they taught me in Civics but it is what actually happens. I’m 69 and I saw that’s how it happened.
I was born, a female, in 1956 into a tyranny despite widespread proclamations that I lived in a free country. So were gay people, Black people, and all kinds other people who lived in a condition of tyranny in certain situations. Only the person who is tyrannized gets to define what that is. Comparing relative tyrannies is worse than useless because it undermines solidarity that is necessary to build the power to end the tyranny. Political action of whatever form is always rooted in mass action.
Tyranny takes two forms: tyranny imposed by government, and tyranny imposed by others where the government fails to restrain the imposer. Females experienced both. Women with help from allies freed ourselves by refusing to submit. The methods for defeating tyranny depend upon the specific conditions.
Voting and the courts are supposed to be vehicles for that, but they’re insufficient, wildly so, when the remedy isn’t on the ballot and a lot has to happen to get it on there. You can’t seek redress in the courts if the legal framework does not exist. The way to create the legal framework is to elect lawmakers who will make it happen.
Therefore, there is a field of political action that is “pre-law” or “outside the law” that is the path to obtaining relief from tyranny and which may finally result in the ability to get redress in the courts or the ballot box. These are the tools needed when:
elections fail or don’t exist
the harm is so imminent that you can’t wait until the next election
when bad actors are private parties who weren’t voted in and therefore can’t be voted out
It is also designed for situations out of the reach of law for various reasons such as when the goal is to change attitudes in society. This could also ultimately result in new law, as happened with marriage equality.
I have done political activism most of my adult life and it has rarely involved, until joining Hopium, the work of electing candidates to office. Therefore I feel unqualified to dispute with Simon, who is an expert in this sort of political action. I would not claim to know which specific races are winnable.
My activism has mainly involved the area I just mentioned above, and I have done just about every form of it except for engaging in actions normally the province of a military, which I know nothing about and are a last resort because of the extreme requirements and the potential for horrible unintended consequences. I have have not yet been in a situation where that was the best response – and I hope to never be in a situation where that is the only response left. No one wants that but it happens to them anyway as history shows.
I know the purpose of this group is a specific kind of political action but I think we are in the conditions where other types of action are also required. All of these forms are also exercising democracy, but in its purest sense, directly. This not a matter of either/or but of a diversity of tactics.
Using the courts in their intended way is not possible when part of the chain is broken, namely those who are supposed to enforce an injunction are the ones enjoined, and refuse to do so. That doesn’t invalidate the use of going to court; it means going to court has a different function, such as demonstrating the legitimacy of one’s claims because they have been ratified as valid by a recognized, respected social institution intended to determine what is legal.
I am no expert in Congressional processes but it seems to me they are set up so that a minority has limited options to use the form for its intended purpose: passing laws. Thus it changes its function to either obstruction or to be a venue for advocacy that, because of its legitimacy is society, commands attention that can be used to spur the populace to act in various ways in support.
It is both unfair and fruitless to expect a minority in Congress to bear all the weight while we yell at them. It is essential that they grasp that their role is now different and push that in ways that they have never had to do before, so that we as the public can support them by various means.
For example, I mean introducing a law not because you believe it can actually pass, but in order to demonstrate something else – using your legitimacy to focus public attention.
I’d like to see, in this vein, the Congress Dems metaphorically shove a box of eggs down the GOP’s throat on the floor of Congress. By that I mean putting in a bill controlling the price of eggs, due to the national egg emergency. I mean, it is a fucking emergency, right? All I heard about was eggs. The people are crying out for help with their eggs, and we are Dems, servants of the people. No, I am not kidding. Because the GOP will scream bloody murder denouncing it as radical left Marxism and the people will see that the GOP does not give a fuck about their egg problem.
This where we come in, calling our GOP reps to demand they explain why they are not supporting the bill since they told us if we elected them they’d fix the egg problem. We may gather in front of their offices exercising our right of petition with signs and chants. A few of us may show up in random public places that we are legally allowed to occupy: a park, a subway platform, a sidewalk near a store or a place where people are walking into a concert with a sign that says words to the effect: If your store is charging more than (whatever price was in the bill) for eggs don’t buy them.
If the egg sales drop it may have consequences on the stock market which is super. The idea is to non-violently cause a ruckus to such an extent, to be so visible that TV cannot resist covering all this with a headline: The Great Egg War… thereby increasing the visibility with a wider public.
The target of this bill in Congress is the public and the purpose of it is to make:
those who do not realize the GOP/Trump are NOT the champions of the people, but quite the opposite
that those who already know that, feel inspired to action, to move them from freeze to fight.
The goal of all this sort of activity, I believe, must be to flip the House before 2026 because that is the best hope to actually have a free and fair election in 2026. The means to this end are to create enough pressure so the GOP reps that are now complying only because they literally fear for their lives or the lives of loved ones can be induced to become Independents and caucus with Democrats to make Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker.
I do not know who these reps are, nor how many there are, I know only the number required: one more vote than the enemy has. These are not fine people or brave people. Those are the folks we call “ex-Republicans” or “former members of Congress.”
But Project 2025 is so horrible, so batshit crazy, so Un-American that there might be conservatives, as opposed to radical reactionaries, who may think this has all gone too far. That is the only thing they need to agree with us on. Or maybe it is just to honor the oath they took to support and defend the Constitution. They did take that oath.
People can be made to submit by death threats. Put yourself just for a moment in their shoes and you’ll see how scary that would be. But submission is not the same as support. Being forced to submit creates hatred, resentment, a person who is just waiting for the chance to escape or even fight back when they don’t have to fight alone. If you’re a GOP rep in this position you may not even dare to tell another GOP rep lest they betray you. They too are under tyranny.
Our mission is to defeat Project 2025 and it must be defeated by any means necessary if we don’t want to live in a dictatorship.
I think we should consider our own oath. It’s one we make to ourselves. It is to orient our thinking.
Under no circumstances will I submit to Project 2025
The task becomes exercising the means to reduce Project 2025 to rubble so that it blows away in the wind. It is easy to write this but hard to do. We have to do it no matter how hard because living in a dictatorship is not an option. I chose the metaphor reducing it rubble for a reason. You can reduce something to rubble one brick at a time. Everyone takes a brick.
Though I know nothing about elections, I did participate in a movement that non-violently and relentlessly using a diversity of tactics, got people already in office to do something they were opposed to doing: banning fracking in New York State.
Of all the movements I was ever a part of, none meant so much to me as that, because I was literally fighting in my back yard to save the place I love from being turned into an industrial sacrifice zone. I was not the one that did it. I was one of about ten thousand people from all walks of life and all political stripes, most who’d never done activism before, who were actively engaged in various ways toward this outcome.
I mention this activism specifically because in many ways we face a similar problem: we cannot wait for the next election because irreparable and immediate harm is in progress. We face a similar situation: the imposition on us of a life we do not want by people who hold the reins of power. We face a similar atmosphere: people who tell us there is nothing we can do about it because it is too late, they had passed a bill etc. The scale was smaller but for we who had everything we loved on the line, it felt utterly desperate. Failure was not an option.
And success involved transcending parties which was easy because the people opposing us were from both parties. We started out with a small group and raised the alarm. Most people didn’t even know what fracking was. We brought victims from other places to tell their story, showed films of people lighting their tap water on fire in Pennsylvania, presented what fracking does to the landscape – turns it in to a hellscape—not the kind of place at all to co-exist with the New York Wine Trail that people had spent decades working to create and all the other things that went with a collective decision to have an economy that did not destroy the beauty that was the reason we lived here in the first place. Once people knew the truth, their first question was, “How can I help stop this?”
I feel this is analogous to the situation we are in with Project 2025, which is really Project 1825.
Even before the election, those who knew what it was were overwhelmingly opposed, and I reckon had they realized their vote would have resulted in its implementation, they would have voted otherwise. Same for many of those who didn’t vote. Many don’t vote not out of apathy, but because their experience is that elections don’t meaningfully impact their lives, whether for good or ill. I think if they knew this was going happen, they might have voted to stop it because in no way do they want this.
There are some issues that I think are particularly well-suited to engaging a coalition transcending partisanship. One of those is cutting Medicaid and CHIP. Every Congressional district has recipients. Below is a link to charts for every district.
https://acasignups.net/25/01/29/how-many-people-have-medicaidchip-coverage-your-congressional-district
25-30% percent is common but these numbers under count those impacted. Did you know that Medicare ( for seniors over 65) charges a “premium” that is automatically deducted from your social security payment that is at best roughly equivalent to a person working full time at minimum wage? Medicaid pays the premium for someone’s elderly parents, and it provides insurance for adults who work low paying jobs. Even if a person has a job where they get insurance, they have loved ones who rely on these programs. Even if they’re Republicans I daresay they did not vote for the suffering and death of those who mean the most to them.
Like fracking was for us, this issue hits people in a profoundly personal way, and in my experience, those movements are the easiest to organize because real passion and real fear are there. And, anyone can understand this issue immediately in one sentence. The enemy has already given us a boost by that funding shutdown that had to be enjoined by a court.
People already tried to use their cards so to speak, and they weren’t working. They felt the panic, and when we reach out they will know we’re not lying about the threat.
OUR JOB IS TO RAISE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO DEFIANCE. WE’RE ALL PAUL REVERE TODAY SO SADDLE UP. PROJECT 2025 UPON US. (There’s a good graphic in there somewhere)
Thanks for your attention. I have many action ideas but this post is already long when we all have so much to read.