Project 2025 authoritarians think a dumber populace is easier to control
If you thought George W. Bush sending inexperienced, 20-something, quasi-libertarian loyalists to run the Iraq occupation worked out well, imagine what a second Trump administration would do to our own country.
The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent spoke with Dave Roberts, a.k.a. Dr. Volts, this week not about the environment but about fascist plans to burn the U.S. government to the ground. The occasion was the Twitter thread below that Roberts posted on Wednesday. Do yourselves a favor and spend 25 minutes with it.
That, of course, is the goal of the strongman: to destroy independent sources of information. It was the goal of Orwell’s Big Brother, to operate a totalitarian state with the power to define and redefine reality at will. There is no truth but what Dear Leader says it is. People who once decried the left as holding squishy morals will under Project 2025 swear themselves to whatever Dear Leader says is true today and to the opposite tomorrow if Dear Leader wills it.
I’m reminded of the choose-you-own-reality nature of the New Age Movement that I found so amusing and mostly harmless in the 1990s. Soundprint’s Larry Massett observed in “A Night on Mt. Shasta” (recorded during the1980s Harmonic Convergence), how many New Agers he met began sentences with “for me.” He began to think of it as a “universal prepositional solvent, making conflict impossible, dissolving external reality.” Project 2025 means to dissolve external reality for purposes of making opposition to the MAGA movement impossible. Under Trump, its authors will have all the powers of the executive branch behind them.
What we take for granted is the culture of public service behind the kind of government experts who predict our weather and collect our crop data and archive history and objective facts.
Michael Lewis in his book “The Fifth Risk” wrote that government manages a portfolio of risks that requires “mission-driven” careerists, experts with a dedication to the work, not to making big money from it. Donald Trump’s administration came to Washington to upend that system. Not to improve it, but to exploit it for profit. They abandoned data collection on anything Trumpers opposed, the New York Times review explained, “like climate change or food safety regulations, or that they didn’t care about, like poverty, or stuff that they assumed were government boondoggles, which was most everything not involving the Pentagon.”
Project 2025 means to destroy that public service culture to secure control. If information is power, authoritarians want it. All of it. This is more than the usual ref-gaming from the right, Sargent observes. They want the power to declare what reality is. Trump believes he can do that by repeating his falsehoods until they take on lives of their own. Others repeating his baseless lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him is a mark of loyalty and will be prerequisite for hiring. “The lie is the point.” Competence just gets in the way.
When conservatives are out of power, they express concern for fairness and complain that measuring their statements against objective reality is unfair, Roberts replies. “But the more power they get, the less thay have to put on that mask.”
The truth comes out. Fact-checking them “is in their minds, a power move. Everything, in their minds, is a power move.” Stephen Colbert once parodied the right as claiming that reality has a left-wing bias. But that’s what they believe.
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