It includes enabling the president to have much more power than the constitution allows.
Here’s your problem: trying to tell all your friends about Stop Project 2025 and why they should care. It’s difficult because the plan is dense, vaguely incomprehensible, and perhaps a little bit boring. I point to this great page, which is quite thorough.
It includes a 38-minute video, a quiz, and lots of words—important words, to be sure, but still. It does direct you to that four-and-a-half-minute song I’ve linked to before.
Several people created the Stop Project 2025 Comic, which you should share. Why did they make this?
“We’ve made comics to explain some of that agenda, and move you to vote against it.
“We did this because you shouldn’t have to read this monstrosity. After all, it’s more than fifty times as long as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution…combined.
“Our two founding documents are short because it doesn’t take a lot of words to say, ‘You matter, and you have a voice.’
“Project 2025 is longer because it’s a detailed plan to shut you up and shut you out.
Is immigration something you do or something you are?
When Trump Rants, This Is What I Hear from Carlos Lozado, a NY Times writer who came to the United States at age three, is touching. The article is probably behind a firewall, but here are a few paragraphs.
“When Trump told four Democratic women in Congress to ‘go back’ to their countries, he unknowingly trivialized how often I’ve gone back in my mind, wondering what that other life, that other person, might have been like.
“When he mocked immigrants for not speaking English, he ignored the interplay between native tongues and new ones and how demanding purity in language — and in people — is utterly self-defeating.
“How can immigrants ‘poison the blood’ of the nation when we have always been its lifeblood? With his accusations, Trump is administering his own brand of venom, one whose cumulative effect is to disfigure a nation, not exalt it.”
You don’t need to read about the 900-page Project 2025. “Here’s a look at Project 2025 as it might be explained if Schoolhouse Rock was still around.”
“Delete the terms sexual orientation, gender equality, awareness and sensitivity, diversity, equity, inclusion, abortion, reproductive health, and reproductive rights out of every rule, regulation, contract, grant, and piece of federal legislation that exists…” and that’s an actual quote.
Immigration
“Project 2025 proposes to severely roll back both legal and unauthorized immigration through a number of untested, novel approaches that extend far beyond the policies of Trump’s first term. The plan would potentially make hundreds of thousands of people vulnerable to deportation through the loss of temporary protected status, and could ensnare their families, those they live with, and other members of their communities. Extreme anti-immigration organization the Center for Immigration Studies has partnered with Project 2025 in supporting these radical immigration policy ideas.”
But you don’t have to wait until 2025. djt put the kibosh on the admittedly imperfect bipartisan bill this year.
Worse, JD Vance was on the Sunday morning talk shows on 9/15, admitting on CNN the stories he and djt spewed regarding Haitian immigrants were bogus. He defended his lies, “If I have to create stories to get the media to pay attention then that’s what I’ll do!” Vance says he and his running mate have to “create stories” about migrants eating cats and dogs “so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.”
WHAT? The real-world consequences of these unfounded, unhinged rantings are substantial.
As the Guardian noted, Vance was saying, “‘Basically, if I have to lie and demonize innocent people and they are then targeted for violence by my hateful unhinged followers, I will. Collateral damage. So what? Because that’s what it takes to scare Republicans into voting for me.’ I don’t care how you slice it; that’s right out of the Josef Goebbels Reich Minister of Propaganda playbook.”
Community asset
Meanwhile, the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH, are a boon to the industry in town.
Weekly Sift guy writes: “How racism manifests. To begin with, the Haitian Fright of 2024 provides a teaching opportunity about racism. I am constantly seeing accounts from White people online and on television, who believe they are not racist because they don’t internally experience what they imagine racism to be: a blind and senseless hatred of other races. ‘I don’t hate anyone,’they claim, and believe that they are telling the truth.But the Haitian Fright points out a more subtle and widespread kind of racism: a propensity to believe (and even pass on) negative stories about other races without requiring evidence.”
Another important point: “Many Americans claim that they don’t object to immigrants per se, but only to illegal immigrants. If people would only come to America ‘the right way, as my ancestors did,’ they would be welcomed…
“You know who else is here the right way? The Haitians in Springfield. They qualify for a program known as ‘temporary protected status,’ which provides legal status to people from countries that (because of either natural disaster or political unrest) are not safe to return to. Others came ‘as part of a parole program that allows citizens and lawful residents to apply to have their family members from Haiti come to the United States.'”
While Phillips said she doesn’t begrudge people “having fun online,” she warned that liberals who think they’re cutting Trump down to size risk giving oxygen to a trope that ultimately plays into his hands — and endangers the Haitians who were its original targets.
“When you’re making a joke using the frame” of immigrants as cultural invaders, she said, even if you’re pushing back on it, “the frame is still amplified.”
The Sunday Stealing this week, again from Swap Bot, asks where love comes from.
1. Does love come from the brain, the heart, or elsewhere?
Just this weekend, I saw a story from late June on about the importance of compassion. In Davis, CA “is a gathering place known as the compassion bench. David Breaux often sat there and dedicated his life to studying and talking about compassion.”
Perhaps one must be intentional about being compassionate, which will change the [metaphoric] heart. Also, check out this video, which says I Hypothalamus You.
2. Have you ever given a shot?
Sure. Usually whisky. Occasionally, rum, vodka, or a liqueur. Unless this is about an injection, in which case I had to stick my daughter’s Epipen into her leg once.
3. Can you lick your elbow? (Come on, didja try?)
No, and I probably attempted it as a kid. But on the July 25, 2023, episode of the game show JEOPARDY, a contestant did, to the annoyance of some TV audience members.
Where did I come from?
4. If I was going to be talking to you for 10 minutes, what would be something really interesting you know a little bit about but would like to know more??
My ancestry. I can go back to the 15th century on one line, but can’t find my great-great-grandparents on two others.
5. What do you think of The Sopranos?
I have a Leontyne Price CD. Joan Sutherland and Renée Fleming probably appear on albums I own. Oh, wait, you mean The Sopranos TV show? Except for clips during the Emmys, I never saw it except for the last five minutes.
6. Have you ever had a crush on your teacher? How about your boss?
A high school English teacher was less than a decade older than I was; I think her name was Miss Greene. Definite crush. Boss? No.
7. Have you ever seen a movie in 3D?
One or two, probably most recently The Lorax in 2012. I don’t enjoy it much.
Migration
8. How difficult do you think it is for immigrants to enter your country?
Immigration is fraught in the United States. This 2021 article from “Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute [a libertarian think tank with which I often disagree] offers nonpartisan facts in response to common myths about immigration.”
MYTH #9: “The United States has the most open immigration policy in the world.” FACT: The annual inflow of immigrants to the United States, as a percentage of our population, is below that of most other rich countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
9. Do you have what it takes to go live in another country, maybe for years, where you don’t speak the language as your first language?
No. And I don’t learn languages easily. Though the French I took a half-century ago was surprisingly useful when I went to France in May.
Nightmare
10. Have you ever died in your dreams?
I’ve usually been in the back seat of a car falling into a river (often the Chenango River in Binghamton, NY). Water is rushing in through an open window. But dying, I don’t recall happening.
11. What book should our political leaders read and why?
I spent several minutes perusing my bookshelves and yet didn’t pick one. But my wife recommends Listening Is An Act Of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project, edited and with an introduction by Dave Isay.
12. What is your favorite glass object?
My Willie Mays drinking glass that I’m pretty sure I got from McDonald’s decades ago. The Say Hey Kid is my all-time favorite baseball player.
13. Do you like to window shop?
Not especially.
14. Are you more likely to buy one really nice expensive outfit or a couple of cheap outfits?
the new Statue of liberty museumThe regime seemed focused on having a “merit-based” immigration system. The proposed plan would increase “skills-based” immigration in the U.S. from 12% to 57%.
Yet in touting employment and skills over relatives and diversity, this approach is harsher than the countries such as Canada touted as shining examples. Canada has more immigrants in the economic stream, but it also brings in more family members, and more folks on humanitarian grounds.
Check out Freedom Is Why Immigrants Come to America in AIER. “They did not find a perfect paradise or immediate acceptance in the United States. Native-born Americans whose ancestors had arrived in the United States much earlier often looked down upon [them].”
The “them” could be the Irish, the Germans, the Jews. “So why have so many come? The reason is that in America, far more than in most other lands in the past and in many cases even now, the political is separated from the economic, the government from the marketplace.”
Richard M. Ebeling writes: “If we could go back in a time machine fifty years or a hundred years, the same kinds of work had to be done in the various corners of the marketplace, only we’d see different faces from different parts of the world, speaking different languages, and practicing some other faiths.
“Where are those who did these jobs in those earlier times? They and certainly their children and grandchildren moved up the socio-economic ladder to other professions, occupations and businesses, just like earlier generations of immigrants had done before them.”
I often watch those genealogy shows such as Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates. Almost invariably, he discovers the guests’ ancestors were people who came to the United States with nothing. They created something.
They became those shop owners. Or workers who learned English slowly, but their kids picked it up right away and helped their parents translate. Formerly enslaved people who, once freed, managed to own property and even served in government.
The new Statue of Liberty museum opened on May 16. “The 26,000-square-foot museum on Liberty Island… is the new home for the statue’s original torch and other artifacts that had previously been in a smaller museum space inside the statue’s pedestal, which is accessible only to the fraction of the more than 4 million annual visitors who manage to get limited-availability statue entry tickets.”
There’s a market for that “give me your tired” narrative.
And, a purely pragmatic consideration: the U.S. birth rate is dropping. The country isn’t “full”. Not only do we need more immigrants for economic reasons, we become a better people.
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