The Heritage Foundation Plan to Help Trump End Democracy in America
Just the Heritage Foundation's name for the thing, "Project 2025," sounds menacing. It's meant to. That's how NAZIs operate -- FEAR.
Unequal Justice: Trump 2024 and the Blueprint to End American Democracy
The far right Heritage Foundation created a platform for Trump that plots an authoritarian take-over of the country.
by BILL BLUM
The Progressive, Jul 27, 2023
Donald Trump nearly destroyed American democracy in his first term in office. If he is reelected, he plans to try to finish the job. This isn’t a matter of speculation; it’s a virtual certainty.
EXCERPT...
One of the project’s more disturbing aims is to bring all federal agencies under direct presidential control, ending the operational independence not only of the Department of Justice and the FBI, but also the Federal Reserve, which oversees the banking industry and regulates interest rates; the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which oversees television, radio, and the Internet; and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which enforces antitrust and consumer protection laws.
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russell Vought told The New York Times in an interview for a lengthy article published earlier this month on Trump’s plans for a second term. Vought ran the Office of Management and Budget for the Trump White House, and currently serves as the president of the Center for Renewing America, one of sixty-five ultra-right organizations that have come together to form Project 2025’s advisory board. (Others include the American Family Project, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, Susan B. Anthony Pro-life America, America First Legal, the Claremont Institute, Moms for Liberty, Freedom Works, the James Madison Institute, and ALEC.)
“The President’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” John McEntee, another former Trump White House staffer, also told the Times. “Our current executive branch,” McEntee continued, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.” McEntee joined Project 2025 in May as a senior advisor, working on the initiative’s “personnel” pillar.
SNIP...
Dismantling the New Deal-era regulatory framework of the administrative state, as McEntee advocates, has long been a goal of the radical right. The right has also long advocated a bloated view of presidential power known as the “unitary executive theory.” The doctrine was popularized in the early 1980s by Ed Meese, who served as counselor to the President in Reagan’s first term, and as attorney general in his second term, before assuming a full-time post with the Heritage Foundation in 1988. Bill Barr, Trump’s last Senate-confirmed Attorney General, is another prominent proponent of the theory.
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https://progressive.org/latest/trump-2024-and-the-blueprint-blum-20230726/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Vanderbilt and Mussolini on a Murderous Joyride:
A Synecdoche for the US Relationship to Fascism
by Ben Norton
US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler recounted, in a January 1931 speech, an incident in which American entrepreneur and “philanthropist” Cornelius Vanderbilt IV (of the same Vanderbilt family after which Vanderbilt University is named) was riding in a car with Benito Mussolini. In the anecdote, the Italian self-professed “Father of Fascism” (businessmen, as we shall see, tend to favor fascism), murdered a young child.
Historian Hans Schmidt explains, in his leading biography of Butler, Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History:
Butler related an anecdote about Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini while making the point that “mad-dog nations” could not be trusted to honor disarmament agreements. Butler recounted a story told him by an unnamed friend who had been taken by Mussolini for a high-speed automobile ride through the Italian countryside, in the course of which the dictator ran down a child and did not bother even to slow down: “My friend screamed as the child’s body was crushed under the wheels of the machine. Mussolini put a hand on my friend’s knee. ‘It was only one life,’ he told my friend. ‘What is one life in the affairs of a State.’"
The international media exploded in reaction to the story. Schmidt notes the Italian government denied that the incident ever took place; newspapers called Butler’s story “insolent and ridiculous.” Mussolini rejected the accusations (as violent, draconian dictators are wont to do when it benefits their reputation), claiming, “I have never taken an American on a motor-car trip around Italy, neither have I run over a child, man or woman.”
The US government, which, at this time, was rather friendly with the fascist Italian government, issued a formal apology for what it called “discourteous and unwarranted utterances by a commissioned officer of this government on active duty.” It went so far as to place Butler — the highest ranking official in the Marines and the most decorated Marine in his country’s history — under arrest. President Hoover even ordered a court martial for the general — the first time a US general had been court-martialed since 1862. That is how angry he was that Butler had spoken the truth about their iniquitous ally (the US has a long history of siding with inquitous allies).
Butler had stepped on some toes — some fascist-friendly ones.
Per usual, the public was much further to the left than its reactionary government. Butler’s speech “cast a shadow over the dictator’s heretofore almost immaculate image.” While Washington was trying to cover up the accusations, the average American was applauding Butler for his honesty (a most rare attribute for a member of the US government).
CONTINUES...
https://bennorton.com/vanderbilt-and-mussolini-on-a-murderous-joyride-a-synecdoche-for-the-us-relationship-to-fascism/
MORE: https://bennorton.com/vanderbilt-and-mussolini-on-a-murderous-joyride-a-synecdoche-for-the-us-relationship-to-fascism/
Democrats believe every human life is equal under law. Democrats I like also value every human life.
Serving God and Mammon
The Rise and Influence of the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society
BY PETER HAMMOND SCHWARTZ
Patheos, JULY 14, 2019
The Creation Project excavates Western history using the conceptual tools of complexity science. The contemporary story that foregrounds this archeological dig emphasizes the philosophical and political influence in the past five decades of a reactionary slice of American Catholicism. In this period, the ideas, organizations, and personalities of impresarios ranging from Antonin Scalia to Robert George to Leonard Leo to Steve Bannon have driven wedge politics and moved the political landscape decisively to the right.
This focus on “radical traditionalist” undercurrents of conservative American politics allows us to explore interesting, important, relevant, and hitherto underreported themes that inflect the conservative crusade to claim control of federal courts for the next 30 years. These themes include:
* the intellectual and organizational background to the political success of Culture War Catholics;
* the political influence of leading conservative Catholic intellectuals who use philosophies of natural law to frame their perspectives on politics and society; and
* the political meaning of the originalist and textualist philosophies of the Federalist Society and of the conservative judges whom they have worked to promote to the federal bench.
The effect of these undercurrents have been to shift American jurisprudence from a historically dominant “New England Protestant” legal culture based on traditions of English common law, commitments to legal precedent, and philosophies of positive law and legal realism to an emergent Catholic jurisprudence based on Thomist natural law and a Constitutional fundamentalism derived from the sacred text assumptions of revealed religion. The two most important bridge institutions of this shift toward a Catholic jurisprudence are The Heritage Foundation and The Federalist Society.
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https://www.patheos.com/blogs/thecreationproject/2019/07/serving-god-mammon-rise-influence-heritage-foundation-federalist-society/
Thank you for grokking, MayReasonRule. What's in a name, really?
As a youngster it stirred thoughts within me that were anathema for the cult indoctrination that I was still enduring.
The Heritage Foundation and The Federalist Society each rejected reasoned factual evidence and in it's place embraced unfounded "closely held beliefs" a.k.a. delusional constructs without facts in evidence. Indeed, the depraved and sordid history of our nation is defined by those that have rejected reason and embraced delusion.
This is what has brought us to the place that we are today with Y'all Qaeda's Spanish Inquisition running SCOTUS and the GOP.
It's okay to have closely held beliefs. It's okay to hold one's genitals closely.
It is not okay to shove either down anyone else's throat.
Enshrining delusion as the rule of law is precisely what has destroyed and continues to destroy the very freedoms for which you and I fight.
We as Democrats fight for peace, stand for justice, and live in honor.
We are the party of reason, and we will not desist, for each of us knows that in the absence of reason, our freedoms cease to exist.
Which is why I say, may reason rule!
