American’s are taking matters into their own hands and learning about Project 2025 on their own through Google searching.
On the 27th of June, US president, Joe Biden, and convicted felon, Donald Trump, held their first presidential debate. Being that it was so far away from the US elections, it was difficult to see how it would even come close to having any kind of impact politically. Yet, during the debate, Biden’s performance was less than perfect. He stuttered a couple of times and his delivery on answers weren’t all perfect.
Perhaps the unexpected takeaway politically was the fact that there was two different standards set for the candidates. Biden apparently needed to deliver a perfect performance while Trump could, well, do whatever the heck he liked. In the lead up to the debate, there were apparently promises of real time fact checking on the part of the hosting broadcaster, CNN. That live fact checking didn’t happen and Trump was pretty much free to make up as many lies as he liked unchecked by the moderators. For many American’s, this was a frustrating element in the whole process.
While it was a frustrating affair all around, what was even more frustrating is the media’s reaction to it all in the weeks after. Major media outlets battered Biden with a constant barrage of reminding audiences of his age. They constantly questioned his stamina, his mental fitness, and anyone within the party ranks questioning the idea of Biden for another term was immediately propelled to the headline news of the day. For many American’s, to say that the coverage has been over the top is an understatement.
What’s more, the fact checking of Trump either never really materialized or was relegated to a mere footnote in all of this.
In fact, I happened to watch the more recent NATO summit speech by Biden and the speech itself went off with no real problems. The question and answer section was bordering on ridiculous. Despite the many issues facing the world, the media fixated on Biden and his ability to lead America. You really can’t help but throw your hands up in despair over the media’s bizarre focus as of late. While Biden did deliver great answer such as not being focused on his legacy, that apparently didn’t even come close to satisfying the media.
In the days since, the mainstream media’s focus continued to be on Biden’s mental and physical health. With clever editing, the media did whatever they could to portray Biden as someone who is not mentally there and continued the narrative that he really ought to step down. It really hammered down the point that it really didn’t matter how well Biden did during the NATO press conference, the media was going to continue to push the narrative long after they beat that horse to death.
Beneath all of the headlines is a particularly disturbing development with the Trump campaign, however. This month, word surfaced of something called “Project 2025”. It’s an initiative pushed by right wing organization, the Heritage Foundation. While Trump denied his involvement and support of the initiative, key staffers for Trump are known to be key architects of the scheme.
In recent days, there has been the odd article here and there about it. Unfortunately, the media’s focus continues to be on the tired story of Biden’s mental health. It appears, however, American’s have caught wind of the story and have been wanting more details of this story. The mainstream media, however, hasn’t been delivering it. So, it appears that American’s have taken matters into their own hands and have turned to Google to find out more about what this whole “Project 2025” business is about. Apparently, American’s are doing that so much, the search term is spiking on Google trends. From Daily Kos:
Despite what the media might have you believe is the most important thing to have you pay attention to (that Biden is old), it seems that the general public is more interested in learning about something else:
Project 2025.
Not that many appear to be looking up stuff on Biden’s age — but lot of people are paying attention to Project 2025 and Trump. It seems that people are already aware that Biden is damned old, and their response to the media’s cries have been, “No sh#t, Sherlock, but what’s this 2025 thing?”
Perhaps we at DailyKos who have been trying to stop the Biden-panic are not so few as others would lead us to believe.
Indeed, people are turning in droves to figure out what this is all about. The Google trends chart really tells the story:
So, for those who don’t know, Project 2025 is a plan by the Heritage Foundation put together in the event Trump wins the next presidential election. It is extremely comprehensive and touches on huge aspects of how America functions. A Wikipedia page goes into great deal of the different aspects of the plan.
A few of the broad strokes of what the plan is pushing for a Christian nationalism state (as opposed to their being a separation of the church and the state). There’s parts that call for the repealing of efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. It also proposes abolishing the Federal Reserve and the Department of Education. It also proposes eliminating funds for low income students. Further, it proposes the elimination of the independence of the DOJ, FBI, the FCC, the FTC, and others and places it all directly under the control of the US president. It also suggests that the military should be deployed for the enforcement of domestic and immigration laws, re-implementing elements of the Insurrection Act of 1807 in the process. Tens of thousands of civil employees would be reclassified as political appointees as well. It also apparently calls for a dramatic increase of the stockpiling of nuclear arms, the denial of gender affirming care, cutting funding to Medicaid, and attacking social media platforms for being “addicting”.
There’s also suggestions of ending same-sex marriage, ending protections of discrimination, denying disaster relief from FEMA for states that they think aren’t doing enough on immigration, placing immigrants in internment camps before deporting them, defunding publicly funded journalism organizations like NPR and PBS. It also calls for the combating of “anti-white racism”, banning TikTok, criminally prosecuting any person or organization of producing pornography, and the rejection of abortion as being considered health care.
All of this is by no means a comprehensive look even though it looks like it. The reaction I’ve seen is that this is basically a precursor to authoritarianism.
Yet, despite this massive controversy, I personally have yet to see broadcast media even mention this. Large media companies could easily spend a month diving into the details of this and asking why so many close supporters of Donald Trump are basically architects of this. Yet, somehow, this combined with the Supreme Court ruling that says that “official acts” of the president is immune from prosecution for criminal acts, is somehow a silly little side story.
I honestly can’t blame the American public for having to resort to Google to find things like this out. Over and over again, I see the same themes of why trust in the media has fallen. While conspiracy theories floating around play a part in it, it’s also the poor quality of journalism people get these days. This can be thrown onto the pile of how large media outlets have been falling down on the job. So much for the narrative that Google “steals” news.
