Project 666
By now we have all at least heard of Project 2025. We know it’s more than a fuzzy set of first principles behind a vague policy. It’s 900 plus pages of tightly reasoned, tediously-worded fascism, a handbook on how to systematically dismantle America’s bureaucracy and reconstitute it with rightwing extremists. It gives the whole game away and, not unlike the way Hitler’s autobiography “Mein Kampf” served as a harbinger for the people of Germany, Project 2025 serves as a warning, to any who read it, of the horrors that MAGA Republicans have in store for the American people.
With two important differences. Where “Mein Kampf” was actually written by Hitler, Trump is necessarily wholly ignorant of the details of Project 2025. Anyone who has ever read a single page of Project 2025 would instantly know that Trump is too stupid to comprehend a word of it. Trump knows about it and “approves” of it, in the sense that he doesn’t care that much as long as it gives him power.
The second difference is Project 2025 is far, far more explicit than Mein Kampf. To understand the confused mind of Hitler you would have to not only read his book but make sense of the nearly incoherent ramblings it comprises. As with Hitler’s book, Project 2025 might bore you to bloody death, but it will never confuse you. However boring it may be, it’s very, very explicit on what its creators are going to do and how they are going to do it.
Thus, you might say that Project 2025 is the opposite of a slogan. Where a slogan, like, say, Make America Great Again, might give the listener a vague idea of a general plan behind Trump’s intention to return America to the worst part of its past, Project 2025 gives the details. And the devil, as they say, is in the details.
I draw your attention, brothers and sisters, to one particular passage, deep in the interior of the Project 2025 tome. It begins thus: “Due to the nature of the Department of Commerce’s portfolio, many of its advisory committees are populated by activists from organizations openly hostile to conservative principles who use the committees to impede conservative policy.” In other words, the DOC is infested with liberals and must be purged. Okay, revolting, but hardly anything new.
Here’s where the truly horrific part comes in: “There is a growing counter-argument within the conservative movement contending that, in a world in which managed trade is the norm rather than the exception, and in which authoritarian governments, especially China, continually seek to undermine U.S. interests, the U.S. cannot unilaterally disarm.” Pay particular attention to the concluding clause of that last line, brothers and sisters: “the U.S. cannot unilaterally disarm.”
Okay, what does all this really mean? I believe it means that the authors of Project 2025 intend that America ought to be prepared to go to war with China or anyone else if our supremacy in matters of trade are not quickly acceded to. The words about the US never unilaterally disarming are jarring and unexpected, a non sequitur. I think that is precisely what the writers had in mind. They didn’t have to spell it out or explain it. China — and everybody else — had damned well better get in line. They have been given notice. Obscure notice, to be sure, but notice all the same.
Now here’s the truly chilling part, the mystical part if you will. This dry, fiscal narrative about commerce and trade and how America must remain armed, that positively slithers underneath the foreshadowings of war, begins on — I’m not making this up — page 666 of Project 2025.
No, I don’t really believe Satan is somehow involved in the authorship of this document. But I do think the writers knew exactly what they were doing when they chose that page to subtly drop that significant bombshell. It’s either an inside joke or something far sicker than that. But, given the sick minds we are dealing with, I doubt the page number was an accident.
Remember, we are dealing in part with evangelicals who think in terms of The End Times and deliberate fulfilment of prophecy as good things. I know, it’s twisted, it’s insane, it’s playing games with the lives and dreams of everyone else on earth, but that’s what you get when you’re dealing with these lunatics.
I’m frankly shocked and surprised that, as far as I know, I am the only journalist in the world to notice this. Is it craziness on my part? Maybe. It certainly would be if I thought it meant something truly end-times biblical, as opposed to sick people playing stupid and dangerous games. But I think it’s no accident, and I think it should further alert us to the kinds of disturbed minds that are arrayed against us, and remind us especially that we must never, ever let these psychopaths run the country — ever again. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.