Ex-GOP lawmaker shreds Project 2025 masterminds for 'perversion' of Christian faith

Matthew Chapman
August 15, 2024 


Photo by Jim Vondruska/Getty Images


Former Rep. David Jolly (R-FL) tore into the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, and the organization's director Kevin Roberts, for their effort to reimpose Christian nationalism on the country.

Roberts and his ilk fundamentally misunderstand the American idea, said Jolly, a longtime Trump skeptic, on MSNBC's "The ReidOut" Thursday evening — and just as important, they misunderstand the religion they claim to preach.

"Roberts expresses similar disdain like, J.D. Vance, for childless Americans," said anchor Joy Reid. "He rails against public schools. He says we need to cultivate children's souls. That public schools cultivate children's souls into godless assembly lines meant to shape obedient little comrades who think morality is a construct and nature is an illusion and saying America's teachers have gone insane. He's dead-set on the notion that America is due for a second revolution ... your thoughts on the fact that they're trying to take his very loopy ideas and make them into law?"

"Yeah, in some ways the evolution of Republican ideology, from the party of less government to the party of no government, and to get to the party of no government, you have to crush it, you have to kill it so that you can rebuild it," said Jolly. "And in rebuilding it, they currently see today's government as this agnostic force that is perverting American exceptionalism and it needs to be restored to its Christian orientation, its Christian ethos."

In reality, he said, it's Roberts and his compatriots who represent the "perversion of faith in the public square."

"The greatest empowerment to any faith in America would be a government that grants the most amount of freedom to practice that faith, not to dictate it from the courthouse, but to empower the churchhouse," said Jolly. "[The Bible] does not say go and build state capitols. It says go and build churches. Plant churches. It's not a calling to change the government. It's a calling to change hearts and minds toward the faith you choose to practice. A government that suggests — and this goes back to the Muslim ban that Donald Trump declared in December of 2015 — a government that suggests we're going to prioritize certain faiths and we are going to institute the dictates of certain faiths in our government, ultimately undermines that faith and undermines all faiths, because it delegitimizes the practice of faith in the country."

"That's the perversion of faith of Project 2025 and all these leaders that have Donald Trump's ear," he added.

Watch the video below or at the link here

AMERIKAN EXCEPTIONALISM

United States remains last for life expectancy among English-speaking countries

By Dennis Thompson, HealthDay News


Americans continue to rank dead last in life expectancy among English-speaking countries, a new study finds. Photo by Adobe Stock/HealthDay News

Americans continue to rank dead last in life expectancy among English-speaking countries, a new study finds.

People in the United States more often fall prey at younger ages to accidental deaths, homicides and chronic diseases, researchers reported Tuesday in the BMJ Open journal.

On the other hand, Australians had the longest life expectancy of any English speakers, despite their country teeming with deadly sharks, spiders and snakes.

Australian life expectancy is nearly four more years longer than the United States for women and five more years longer for men.

The United States also trails Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and New Zealand in life expectancy, researchers found.

However, they said the findings should be seen as an incentive for goal-setting for Americans.

"Yes, we're doing badly, but this study shows what can we aim for," said senior researcher Jessica Ho, an associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State. "We know these gains in life expectancy are actually achievable because other large countries have already done it."

For the study, researchers compared life expectancy between English-speaking nations using data from the World Health Organization and the international Human Mortality Database.

The data showed that the United States has had the worst life expectancy among these countries since the early 1990s.

U.S. women live an average of 81.5 years, and men 76.5 years, researchers reported.

The Irish have experienced the largest gains in life expectancy, with men's lifespans increasing by about eight years and women's by more than 6.5 years.

Results show that life expectancy varies widely within the United States, depending on where a person lives.

California and Hawaii had some of the highest life expectancies, with women living 83 to 84 years and men living 77.5 to 78.4 years, researchers said.

But states in the American South had some of the lowest life expectancies observed among all the nations, with women averaging 72.6 to 80 years and men averaging 69.3 to 74.4 years.

"One of the main drivers of why American longevity is so much shorter than in other high-income countries is our younger people die at higher rates from largely preventable causes of death, like drug overdose, car accidents and homicide," Ho said in a Penn State news release.

Middle-aged Americans ages 45 to 64 also have higher rates of death from drugs, alcohol and chronic illnesses like heart disease, Ho added.

"Some of the latter could be related to sedentary lifestyle, high rates of obesity, unhealthy diet, stress and a history of smoking," Ho said. "It's likely that these patterns of unhealthy behaviors put Americans at a disadvantage in terms of their health and vitality."

Australia is a large country, and many people there use cars for transportation and own firearms, Ho noted. However, recent policies like gun control laws have helped vault Australia to the top of the life expectancy ratings, Ho said.

"What the study shows is that a peer country like Australia far outperforms the U.S. and was able to get its young adult mortality under control," Ho said. "It has really low levels of gun deaths and homicides, lower levels of drug and alcohol use and better performance on chronic diseases, the latter of which points to lifestyle factors, health behaviors and health care performance."

"Australia is a model for how Americans can do better and achieve not only a higher life expectancy but also lower geographic inequality in life expectancy," Ho concluded.

 

“What Did You Learn in School Today?”

And, Was Ms Brown Fired?

by Gary Olson / August 13th, 2024

circa 1830: A slave auction in America. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

Through the centuries, the Republic that eventuated in North America has maintained a maximum of chutzpah and minimum of awareness in forging a creation myth that sees slavery and dispossession not as foundational but as inimical to the nation now known as the United States. But, of course, to confront the ugly reality would induce sleeplessness interrupted by haunted dreams, so far this unsteadiness has prevailed.
— Dr. Gerald Horne¹

When an origin story is considered sacrosanct, any challenge to it is sacrilege.
— Prof. Abby Reisman²

In most areas of the United States, school will be starting up in a few weeks. This reminds me of the song “What Did You Learn in School Today?” which was written by Tom Paxton and then recorded and released by Pete Seeger in 1963. Paxton’s lyrics mock the misinformation and lies provided by the public school system. This prompted me to wonder what would happen if today’s school children returned home from school and responded to Paxton’s question.

You’ll need to imagine that their teacher, (let’s call her, Ms Brown) is able to recast what follows in age appropriate language, a skill that lies far beyond my limited capacity and that he adopted a creative, critical thinking approach and not rote learning. Finally, how the precocious student conveys this information to parents might take the form of a jumbled response but we can hope the essential information is intact.

Okay. How about something along the following lines: “What did you learn in school today?” We discussed the America Revolution in 1776 and Ms Brown said that when she was in school, she was taught that the American Revolution was about besieged colonists courageously standing up against British tyranny and it was all about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She said the textbook authors characterized it as a glorious confirmation of American exceptionalism.

One of countless celebratory examples that she was taught was from Joseph J. Ellis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 (New York: Liveright 2021). According to Ellis and other myth-making historians, the greatest activity of this “Revolutionary generation” was their devotion to popular sovereignty and their “common sense of purpose.”³

Ms Brown said that she later learned that this devotion excluded the majority of people in the new nation and that slavery existed in all 13 British colonies and had begun at least in 1619. And Africans weren’t the only ones aware of specious reasoning in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Hutchinson, the last colonial governor of Massachusetts, queried that if the rights were “absolutely inalienable” how could the delegates deprive so many Africans of “their right to liberty?”⁴ And this apparently included George Washington’s order for the genocidal attack on the Haudenosaunee nation in upstate New York where more than 40 villages were burned to the ground and all crops and winter provisions destroyed. Those not killed or captured fled to Canada. This event was, in truth, an example of the Founder’s “common purpose.”

We learned that in 1700, roughly 75 percent of land in colonial New York state was owned by only 12 individuals. In Virginia, 1.7 million acres was held by seven individuals.⁵ In 1760, less than five hundred men in just five colonies controlled most of the shipping, banking, mining and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard and in1767 the richest 10 percent of Boston’s taxpayers had 66 percent of Boston’s taxable income while some 30 percent had no property at all.⁶ Ms Brown said that fifty-six of these propertied men later signed the Declaration of Independence.⁷

Many of the Founders were not only slave holders but obsessive land speculators This included George Washington who began acquiring land in 1752, while still a teenager. He eventually owned more than 70,000 acres in what became seven states and the District of Colombia. Ms Brown smiled and said, “I cannot tell a lie. George Washington became the richest person in America.” We also learned that even before King George III issued his Proclamation forbidding settlements from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi, individuals and colonial land speculators were staking claims to millions of acres of and were eager to push forward into Indigenous land. Ms. Brown said that we must consider the possibility that Native dispossession and exclusion played a key role in creating the country through speculative capitalism.⁸ The patriotic fantasy or fig leaf for all of this was that America was destined by God to expand democracy and the Protestant ethos to the native inhabitants.

Ms Brown said we should always look for other sources of information and rely on evidence. She learned from her own reading — outside of school — that there’s an entirely different view of the so-called Revolutionary War of 1776 and that it was actually part of a “counter-revolution,” a conservative movement that the “Founding Fathers” — Britain’s “revolting spawn” — fought to oust London. When the colonial elites broke with the Mother Country, the world’s first-ever apartheid state came into being.⁹ We learned that in the 1770s, the British Parliament was moving toward abolition and in 1773 there was the famous Somerset case in Britain in which Lord Mansfield banned slavery — calling it “odious” —within the country but not yet in the colonies. There was a real fear that Britain would soon cease to support slavery in the thirteen colonies. Simultaneously, Alexander Hamilton, another Founding Father, bought and sold slaves for his wife’s family, owned slaves himself and called Indigenous people “savages.”

More specifically, Ms Brown told us that “…In November 1775, Lord Dunsmore in Virginia issued his famous — or infamous, in the view of the settlers — edict offering to free and arm Africans to squash an anti-colonial revolt, he entered a pre-existing maelstrom of insecurity about the fate of slavery and London’s intentions. And by speaking so bluntly, Dunsmore converted the moderates into radicals.” Indeed, another expert on the Colonial period says that Dunsmore’s edict “did more than any another measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion.”¹⁰ Our teacher said that many more Africans — some estimates run as high as 100,000 — allied with the Red Coats rather than with their masters. Of course there were risks for the Africans because if the Revolution succeeded they would be considered traitors and punished as such. It was a terrifying choice and their fears were justified because after the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War, tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people were returned to enslavement.

We learned that in 1787, after the war, James Madison made sure that the Constitution guaranteed that the government would, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” He was firmly against agrarian reform of any sort and opposed to anything akin to actual functioning democracy. Why? Because the majority — the poor and landless — might use the political power they were granted to force a redistribution of wealth.

We learned that the British were jeopardizing numerous fortunes, not only based on slavery, but the slave trade. So, the war was necessary to protect the freedom of a small white elite to maintain slavery and further, not have any interference as they went ahead with dispossessing and exterminating indigenous people. In short, British colonialism was replaced with U.S. capitalist state colonialism.¹¹

Ms Brown said there was evidence strongly suggesting that the American Revolution was, in the words of historian William Hoagland, “The first chapter in an inter-imperial war between Great Britain and its dissident elite in North America.” We learned that the Euro-American elite ‘patriots” had only contempt and fear of actual democracy which they termed “The tyranny of the majority.” One historian pointed out that “The American state, even in its earliest incarnation was more concerned with limiting popular democracy than securing and expanding it.”¹² He told us that the Declaration’s phrase “Life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” was changed in the Constitution to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property.”

In support of this revisionist history, Ms Brown shared a few excerpts from Howard Zinn’s magisterial book, A People’s History of the United States, in which he cogently explains that over a relatively short period, the colonial elite were able to:

… take over land, profits and power from the British empire. In the process they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new privileged leadership. When we look at the American Revolution in that way it was a work of genius.

The Declaration of Independence was a wonderfully useful device because the language of liberty and equality could unite just enough whites to fight for the Revolution, without ending either slavery or inequality.

…the rebellion against British rule allowed a certain group of the colonial elite to replace those loyal to England, give some benefits to small holders and leave poor white working people and tenant farmers in very much the same situation.¹³

Finally, we considered that in 1776, nascent capitalists pulled off the ultimate coup and succeeded in “convincing the deluded and otherwise naive (to this very day) that this naked grab for land, slaves and power was somehow a great leap forward for humanity.”¹⁴

Just before the bell rang, one kid in my class asked the teacher, “If what we’ve previously been taught about the American Revolution may not be true what else may not be true?” Ms Brown said that was a good question and we’d talk about it next week and also do some role playing.

ENDNOTES:

• 1
  Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in the Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018) p.191. Dr. Horne is a national treasure and I concur with those who’ve described him as the preeminent radical historian of our era. I suspect this accounts for why so few people know of his indispensable work.
• 2
  Abby Reisman, “America as it actually was: Symposium confronts American myth, complexities of teaching 1777 in light of 1619. Penn GSE News, April 1 2022.
• 3
  Book Browse, “An Interview with Joseph J. Ellis.”
• 4
  Comment, in Woody Holton, ed. Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era: A Brief History With Documents, (Boston: Bedford, 2009) 6-7 in Horne, p.238. Here it should be noted that the Reconstruction period of 1865-1877 was the sole attempt to realize interracial democracy — what W.E.B. Du Bois termed “abolition democracy — and with it, the potential for economic democracy. The best account of Reconstruction’s remarkable achievements and its ultimate defeat at the hands of racial terrorism and the withdrawal of Federal support is Manisha Sinha’s new book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic (New York: Norton, 2024). Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut.
• 5
  Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011), p.5
• 6
  Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. (New York: Harpers, 2008, 2011).
• 7
  Parenti, p.11.
• 8
  For more on this topic, see, Michael A. Blackman, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023); Colin Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); “The Founders and the Pursuit of Land,” The Lehrman Institute.
• 9
  Gerald Horne, The Counter Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p.222 and 224. This section relies on Horne’s thoroughly documented Chapter Nine “Abolition in London” with its 147 footnotes.
• 10
  Ibid, p.224.
• 11
  For a semi-autobiographical piece on U.S. capitalist state colonialism toward Native-Americans, see, Gary OIson, “Decolonizing Our Minds, Including My Own, About U.S. Capitalist State Settler Colonialism,” Left Turn, Vol 3, No. 2, Fall 2021.
• 12
  William Hoagland, “Not Our Independence Day,” Interviewed by Jonah Waters, Jacobin, 07/04/2006.
• 13
  All quotations from Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States.
• 14
  William Pettigrew, “Commercialization,” in Joseph C. Miller, ed., <em>The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History</em>, 111-116 at 115.

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Gary Olson is Professor Emeritus at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA. Contact: garyleeolson416@gmail.com. Per usual, thanks to Kathleen Kelly, my in-house ed. Read other articles by Gary.

Palestine Has Mobilized a Global Movement. For It to Last We Must Get Organized.

By James Kilgore

August 12, 2024

Source: Truthout

Image by Wolfgang Berger



In the weeks after October 7, abolitionist and civil rights activist Angela Davis offered some pointed advice to people on the left during an Al Jazeera interview: “If we are not prepared to think critically about what’s happening in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem … we will not only be unprepared to understand and address the issues emanating from the current crisis; we won’t be able to understand the world around us [and] the many struggles for justice and freedom all over the globe.” She went on to add that, “Our relation to Palestine says a great deal about our capacity to respond to complex, contemporary issues, whether we’re talking about imperialism, settler colonialism, transphobia, homophobia, the climate crisis.”

For Palestine solidarity activists in the United States, it could be useful to look more deeply at the history of international solidarity in U.S. movements, particularly in the last three decades. At various points mass mobilizations on global issues have gained a high profile: the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and beyond in 1999-2000, participation in the semi-annual World Social Forums beginning in 2001, the anti-Iraq war movement in the early 2000s, the support for the pro-democracy Arab Spring of 2010, and a series of international responses to austerity budgets and increasing inequality that eventually exploded into Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

Subsequently, the 2010s erupted in reaction to the police-perpetrated killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Samuel DuBose, and dozens of other Black people. Mobilizations in response to these murderous police actions precipitated the formation of Black Lives Matter and culminated in the global reaction to the murder of George Floyd, where 40 countries on every continent except Antarctica took to the streets.

All of this built networks of personal relationships at the grassroots level and left permanent marks in the consciousness of millions, in some cases impacting the agendas of elected officials like “The Squad.” Still, it left a remarkably small residue of organizational infrastructure on which to grow a movement informed by internationalism. Instead, without an organizational center, we face the rise of far right and fascist formations across the globe coupled with the spiritual withering of center-left parties in France, Germany, Britain and of course the Democratic Party in the U.S.

Even more disorienting has been the fall from grace of national liberation movements. The degeneration of the organized global majority countries, in particular the decline of the Non-Aligned Movement with its New International Economic Order, has left an enormous void. National movements and states that people on the left revered in the past, such as the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa have either descended into webs of corruption, eschewed progressive policies for neoliberal and repressive paradigms, or both.

But the present actions in support of Palestinian liberation have reestablished hope in the possibilities of global solidarity. The hundreds of thousands of people coming onto the streets and social media are a clearcut indicator of belief in the power of collective action and imagination to make change regardless of how overwhelming the odds. While college campuses have been on the forefront of these actions, they have also included a considerable nonstudent cohort, including many Black and Brown people. Moreover, unlike in most U.S.-based campaigns of international solidarity, those directly impacted, namely Palestinians living in the U.S., have played an important leadership role in crafting this movement.

As the struggle continues, we need to contemplate the obvious: “What next?” In doing so, several key questions emerge. The most urgent, of course, is how to bring a halt to the mass murder and, once there is a permanent ceasefire, how to rebuild Gaza, East Jerusalem, and other areas devastated by murderous Zionist offensives. But there is also a need to ask more strategic questions: What have we learned from this situation that can steer us down a liberatory path rather than simply resting until the next eruption? We need a strategy to avoid the decline of activism that has ensued after each of the previous mobilizations.

Over the past few months, I have interviewed several activists who have been involved in prior campaigns of international solidarity. The cohort was intergenerational, though the majority were involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement or the Black liberation struggle during the ‘60s and ‘70s. I asked them to focus on their own experiences and, in particular, offer explanations for the decline of international solidarity within left movements and the failure of more recent mobilizations to gain a permanent foothold.

In our discussions, organizers mentioned five main factors that affected the capacity to sustain internationalism in left movements. Perhaps most frequently noted were the organizational forms that emerged during these protests. These comments fell into two categories: the professionalization of political struggle and the lack of structure and leadership.

The movements of the 1960s and 1970s largely relied on building a grassroots political base. In some cases, members paid dues, while leaders typically received modest pay or none at all. Puerto Rican independence fighter Alfredo Lopez contended that foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, McArthur, Soros — entered the movement space, relabeled it “social justice” and put forward a more moderate agenda. In the words of Chicago activist leader and historian Barbara Ransby, “Social justice becomes a job … where people are under the surveillance of philanthropy.” According to Lopez, these foundations “steered us away from international consciousness.”

Illinois youth development practitioner Posey described this process to Truthout as a “movement capture” which stresses “navigating the 501(c)(3) bureaucracy, not looking at how we connect with others people’s battles against U.S. imperialism.”

Cory Greene is co-founder and healing justice/NTA organizer of H.O.L.L.A., a New York-based community specific and healing justice focused “grassroots youth/community” program. He professes that his organization “stands on the legacy of the Black liberation movement.” He stressed the need for “institutional memory, to know how to pull on your lineages to heal.” He argues that the state and the nonprofit industrial complex has colonized these precious legacies or seriously diluted them.

By the same token, several organizers also believed that the absence of a clear-cut structure often undermined the potential continuity of these movements. Vincent Bevins, in his overview of mass protests in the 2010s, If We Burn, argues that the model adopted by most organizations, based on nonhierarchy, consensus decision-making, spontaneity, and large meetings in public spaces such as Tahrir Square or Zuccotti Park, obstructed the pathway to creating the type of structures, relationship-building and planning required to sustain a movement. Historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz summed it up for Truthout like this: “For the last 30 years I get my hopes up that something is going to happen, and the only thing happening is a sort of anarchism but they didn’t have a program. [They] just talked about getting rid of the state.”

A second, frequently forgotten factor in the decline of international solidarity was the demise of the Soviet Union and the “communist bloc.” While the class nature and political practice of the Soviet Union were often controversial within the left, the existence of a counter pole to Western imperialism was a constant reminder that building a global political power with an anti-capitalist agenda was possible. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union and its allies included the building of a global solidarity network of nations, funding and political support for left-wing national liberation movements in southern Africa and Central America as well as backing for liberation support work in the U.S. and Europe.

Perhaps the most high-profile example of this was the continued Soviet backing of a Cuban Revolution that faced an intensive embargo by the U.S. Support from the USSR included $1.7 billion to retool Cuban industrial infrastructure from 1976-80 and military assistance of $4 billion in the mid-1980s. The Cubans themselves, with Soviet support, initiated their own solidarity efforts in southern Africa in the 1970s, sending thousands of troops to Angola to help successfully repel a major offensive of the South African military against Angolan freedom fighters.

Dunbar-Ortiz told Truthout she recalled that the fall of the Soviet Union “scared me to death.” She said some of her leftist friends were overjoyed, but she had worked in international structures like the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization where she saw the concrete assistance the Soviet Union was giving to freedom fighters in the global majority countries. In hindsight she added, “I think it had a bigger impact than any of us ever analyzed.”

Thirdly, the U.S. state restructured its domestic and international strategy. Through counterinsurgency programs like COINTELPRO, the government targeted key activists who advanced a radical internationalist agenda with a variety of tactics: assassinations such as the 1969 murder of Chicago Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, infiltration of movement organizations such as the American Indian Movement, Students for a Democratic Society and the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the “legal” framing of political activists like Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal.

They also shifted their strategy for imperialist intervention. As former political prisoner David Gilbert highlighted to Truthout, the U.S. opted for a “hybrid” model in which the U.S. supplied weapons and other hardware, but the bulk of the troops in places like Gaza or Iraq come from partner countries in the region. This reduced the extent to which the U.S. population felt the pain of war and quelled desires to protest its continuation. A byproduct of this was a shifting of the international political attention of the left away from the military-industrial complex and the quest for peace. The fall of the Soviet Union instilled false confidence among many activists that the threat of world war would disappear with the weakening of the U.S.’s main enemy.

The fourth issue mentioned was the ideological triumph of a technology driven culture of neoliberalism and individualism. We live in the age of the new robber barons — Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and private equity funds that control much of global society with capital flows, surveillance and consumerist technology. This is reinforced by narratives that encourage the worship of wealth and increased power for internationalized capitalist firms. The media and often our cultural icons promote the narratives of the rich and superrich. Collective and cooperative efforts are seen as unrealistic or futile.

Migrant rights activist Maru Mora-Villalpando stressed to Truthout that the development of free trade agreements and their institutionalization in global bodies like the World Trade Organization promoted and advanced this ideology. In Mexico, for example, the installation of a free market in land ownership via the North American Free Trade Agreement has opened up ownership of Mexican agribusiness to U.S. transnational corporations, undermining local power.

Intimately linked to the advance of the neoliberal model has been the demobilization of organized labor. While we are seeing a resurgence in quarters such as with Amazon, Starbucks and the United Auto Workers, the percent of the U.S. private sector labor force that is unionized plummeted from 20 percent in 1983 to just over 11 percent in 2023. Unions can become important vehicles of internationalism. Most belong to global federations, which in key industries can create structural links that facilitate solidarity actions around boycotts, sanctions and labor issues.

Though certainly all unions do not take such stances, these international ties were highly active during the anti-apartheid movement, with workers often refusing to unload goods coming from or going to South Africa. They also played an important role during Occupy and the general strike in Oakland, California, and even today we see the longshore unions refusing to load and unload ships connected to Israel.

Lastly, interviewees stressed the complexity of solidarity. Ransby noted the importance of asking what “a liberation movement is for, not just what it is against” as well as avoiding the liberal view that “it is their struggle.”

New York attorney and organizer Jindu Obiofuma noted the importance for activists in the U.S. to recognize their positionality. She stressed that solidarity “begins with humility.” For her, in the U.S. this means “decentering what it means to be in the belly of the beast.” She noted a tendency for folks in the West to act as if they are “telling people fighting for liberation in other countries how best to fight for their lives based on principles rooted in their own analyses and experiences.” She stressed that for Western activists, especially white people, solidarity requires setting aside notions of white supremacy and American exceptionalism and “stepping back from yourself, doing what it is that the people you’re in solidarity with tell you to do and understanding that might come with some risks.”

Ultimately, witnessing the genocide in Palestine has forced many on the left to view the global political economy through another set of lenses. Activists are connecting dots of the military-industrial and prison-industrial complex, white supremacy, U.S. imperialism, settler colonialism, patriarchy and toxic masculinity — connections that had often disappeared behind the pressure of the system to isolate struggles and sectors of the oppressed population into silos.

The powers that be strive to push all left history, including that of international solidarity, off the map and replace it with the triumphalist narrative of the “Google world.” Poet June Jordan once said that how we respond to the Palestinian struggle is a “litmus test for morality.” Learning from the past is key to passing that test.

Project 2025: Authoritarian Rule and Foreign Policy Mayhem

by Mel Gurtov

 August 12, 2024
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A Far-Right Conspiracy in the Open

Project 2025, the far-right’s ambitious policy planning guide published as Mandate for Leadership, is designed to dismantle the “Deep State” and install a president and proven loyalists who will carry out Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda. Now the Project supposedly is no more—but not really. Trump’s campaign, concerned about the bad press Project 2025 was getting, ordered that it be disconnected. But make no mistake about it: While Trump may disagree with some of the project’s recommendations, it’s designed with him and only him in mind.

Trump claims to “know nothing about Project 2025,” but his name appears in the document more than 300 times; CNN counts at least 140 people who worked on the Project 2025 document and who previously worked for the Trump administration; and Trump maintains close ties to the Heritage Foundation, which published the document. If there is another Trump presidency, the contributors to Project 2025, many from the Heritage Foundation and others from a far-right network in Washington called the Conservative Partnership Institute, will populate his administration.

In this two-part analysis, I explore those chapters of Mandate for Leadership that concern international affairs and US foreign policy. In part 1, I will note the authoritarian aspects of the document and then look at its policy proposals with regard to China and Russia. In part 2, I will examine what the paper has to say about trade, nuclear weapons and military spending, North Korea, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The Plan to Reorder America

Most of the US media and Democratic lawmakers’ attention has, rightly, been devoted to the domestic side of Project 2025’s agenda—its plans for putting the justice department at the service of the President, getting rid of the department of education as a step toward emasculating public education, making America unwelcome for immigrants of color, prohibiting abortion nationwide, giving the fossil fuel industry whatever it wants, and containing public dissent.

Ideas about foreign affairs track that agenda because they all depend for implementation on an all-powerful executive and a bureaucracy that has been purged of liberals and leftists. (“Large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda and vision,” says the document).

Project 2025 proposes three essential tasks of governance to promote its cause: reasserting the dominant role of the President in policy making, dismantling key government agencies concerned with social welfare, and replacing many civil servants who don’t pass the loyalty test (they will be reclassified as ordinary workers) with political hacks loyal to the Chief Executive. The plan seeks ways around the government’s sprawling bureaucracy, in and of itself an aim in common with all previous administrations.

But it differs dramatically in its bowing to Trump’s authoritarian impulses. Every page of the document stresses that officials and other personnel must align their views with the President’s, with the strong implication that failure to do so will result in dismissal or reassignment. It’s a formula for limiting policy debate within or between agencies to what the President has already decided.

China and Russia Policy

Project 2025 is absolutely obsessed with China. As was once true of US views of the Soviet Union, now China is believed to lurk behind every problematic situation on every continent. China gets so much attention, says the author of the section on the State Department, because it is “the defining threat.”

That’s Kiron K. Skinner, who formerly was in charge of Trump’s policy planning at the State Department and then joined the Heritage Foundation staff. Similarly, writes Christopher Miller in the section on the defense department, “Beijing presents a challenge to American interests across the domains of national power.” (Miller, a retired Special Forces colonel, was Trump’s acting defense secretary for about three months.)

Moreover, the military threat that China poses is especially acute. He portrays China as an “immediate threat” to Taiwan and US allies in the Pacific, not to mention a nuclear danger as well–all with no compelling evidence. Nevertheless, Miller urges as the highest priority “conventional force planning construct to defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan before allocating resources to other missions . . .” Those other missions probably include Ukraine.

Skinner takes Biden’s China policy to task for coddling China. She argues that some foreign policy professionals “knowingly or not parrot the Communist line. Global leaders including President Joe Biden have tried to normalize or even laud Chinese behavior.”

Actually, the opposite is true. Biden has likewise exaggerated the threat from China, and labeled Xi Jinping a “dictator.” When Skinner writes that China is a country “whose aggressive behavior can only be curbed through external pressure,” she has chosen to ignore how, under Biden, the US has lined up several countries in East Asia, including Japan, India, South Korea, and Philippines, in coalition against China–which is why Beijing accuses the US of again pursuing a containment policy.

The Project’s treatment of Russia is a far cry from its analysis of China. Russia is a threat only with respect to Ukraine’s security. There is no consideration of Vladimir Putin’s belief in Russian exceptionalism, his policy ideas, his human rights record, or his imperial ambitions. (The Project 2025 paper gives more space to the Arctic than to Russia.)

Skinner notes three strands of conservative thinking about Ukraine policy and concludes:

“Regardless of viewpoints, all sides agree that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is unjust and that the Ukrainian people have a right to defend their homeland. Furthermore, the conflict has severely weakened Putin’s military strength and provided a boost to NATO unity and its importance to European nations.”

Skinner concludes that US support of Ukraine should continue, provided it is “fully paid for; limited to military aid (while European allies address Ukraine’s economic needs); and have a clearly defined national security strategy that does not risk American lives.”

Some Trump Demurrers

Donald Trump has never spoken of Ukraine’s right of self-defense or the importance of NATO unity in the face of Russian aggression. Nor does he subscribe to fully paying for the Ukraine mission. Trump’s main concern is relations with Russia and Europe, not Ukraine’s security. He has said many times that Putin is a great friend, that Putin wouldn’t have started a war with Ukraine if Trump had been President, and that he, Trump, will arrange a peace agreement very quickly.

That may be why Ukraine is not even mentioned in the Republican Party’s platform, which refers simply to restoring “peace in Europe.” In short, Trump wants to get rid of the Ukraine problem by appeasing Russia. He’s only on the same page as Project 2025 in arguing that Europe and NATO should be treated in transactional terms—that is, insisting the Europeans pay more for defense and give more in terms of trade.

Trump may also not be entirely on board with Project 2025 when it comes to Taiwan. As he has demonstrated in the past, financial gain and vindictiveness are hallmarks of his approach to international relations, whether dealing with friends or adversaries.

Recall that Trump entered office in 2017 believing that both Japan and China had ripped off the US in trade relations. Then he distanced himself from NATO, arguing that its members either need to pay more for their defense or sacrifice US support.

So when he was asked in an interview with Bloomberg News in June 25 what his policy would be on Taiwan, his thoughts were not about defending the island, which Republicans in Congress consider the first priority, but this: “They did take about 100% of our chip business. I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything.” That doesn’t mean Trump will abandon Taiwan; he could simply be prodding it to pay more, just as he has demanded of NATO.

Cold War II

In summary, Project 2024 is less a serious, objective analysis than an ideological document. It upgrades the level of international threats to US interests, with China the central enemy; supports a huge expansion of presidential power; urges greater emphasis than under Biden on nuclear weapon modernization and expansion; leaves to allies the main responsibility for confronting Russia; pushes for major increases in the US military budget; and argues for strengthening the US defense industrial base and increasing US arms sales abroad.

Don’t look for diplomatic initiatives, human rights issues, environmental concerns, the role of international law, or discussion of poverty, autocracy, or democracy. If a Trump-Project 2025 agenda were implemented, we can expect widening crises in central Europe and the Middle East, new arms races with Russia and China, another trade war with China, and new tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

A “stable genius” will be in charge. Anyone who did not live through the first Cold War will have another opportunity.

Mel Gurtov is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Perspective, an international affairs quarterly and blogs at In the Human Interest.