Tag Archives: school shootings

Project 2025 – The Republican Doomsday Scenario – Part 2

Leave a reply

The core premise of Project 2025 is that the federal government is the enemy of the American people:

The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead.

The authors of these concepts are very bright people with impressive credentials, but they are wedded to the idea that since the Great Depression, the population has lost its moorings by electing federal political leaders who have betrayed the country’s original values, at least the values they fantasize were the founding principles.

Curiously, the manifesto declares that the situation is so fraught that:

Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.” And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.

The first expressed goal of Project 2025 is thus to “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children,” defined by the Project as “the true priority of politics.” Based on the conduct of the Republican Party, they consider Donald Trump and his family of entitled grifters the model for the American family. I am not making this up.

The Project’s hyperventilation over the “carnage” that Trump referenced in his 2016 inauguration speech continues with this pithy observation:

In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatu­ral ones.

I have observed in other writings the curious condition that permits Republicans to keep multiple inconsistent ideas actively working in their minds at the same time without experiencing devastating cognitive dissonance. Here is another example from Project 2025 wherein it observes that Republicans have had long-terms goals of “eliminating marriage penalties in federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements for food stamps.” Then,

 But we must go further. It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family. [emphasis added for … emphasis]

Sooo, it seems that big government is evil BUT we should use government power to reshape society by establishing government-enforced cultural rules that control the private behavior of adults.

The Republicans’ concern for the welfare of the American family is touching, until you recall this:

Shooting Deaths Shooting Injuries Elementary Schools Middle/Jr High High schools Other2
2000-01 1,676 515 1,305 320 162 777
thru 2021-22
2000-01 47 18 30 4 3 23
2001-02 18 5 17 2 1 14
2002-03 29 13 24 2 6 16
2003-04 45 16 34 5 3 26
2004-05 63 22 44 9 1 32
2005-06 55 13 50 5 6 39
2006-07 91 28 64 9 12 42
2007-08 23 10 16 2 2 11
2008-09 61 19 52 11 6 31
2009-10 15 5 15 1 2 12
2010-11 32 8 18 4 2 12
2011-12 21 9 16 3 3 9
2012-13 55 42 26 7 5 13
2013-14 55 19 46 7 3 32
2014-15 65 20 43 13 4 24
2015-16 45 9 38 7 4 25
2016-17 61 14 48 8 9 31
2017-18 185 52 89 14 8 64
2018-19 116 34 113 35 14 60
2019-20 126 32 116 33 11 70
2020-21 118 46 145 59 21 57
2021-22 350 81 319 82 37 189

And this:

It seems that Republicans are fine with the “acceptable losses” of children due to school shootings, since they resist virtually every attempt to limit access to guns. And we have just learned that the Supreme Court, ruled by a “conservative majority” of six (half appointed by Trump), thinks automatic weapons, or their functional equivalent, are just fine too. Garland v Cargill decided June 14, 2024.

Project 2025 provides many examples of what it would change by government edict. I will address many of them in subsequent posts.

Meanwhile, women of America and everyone who believes in science and the principles of individual liberty, separation of church and state, among others, try on for size these pieces of Project 2025 about the American “family”:

The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi­tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument for universal school choice—a goal all conservatives and con­servative Presidents must pursue. But even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, princi­pals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.

Every threat to family stability must be confronted. This resolve should color each of our policies. Consider our approach to Big Tech. The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them addicted to their mobile apps. Many Silicon Valley executives famously don’t let their own kids have smart phones.2 They nevertheless make billions of dollars addicting other people’s children to theirs. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child abuse to continue.

In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. Conservatives should ardently pursue these pro-life and pro-family policies while recognizing the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations and the hero­ism of every choice to become a mother. Alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.

Recall that this part is just about the first prong of Project 2025. These people are deadly serious about using the power of the federal government to reshape the United States into a Christian Nationalist version of Gilead.

Acceptable Losses – How Many?

Leave a reply

Acceptable Losses — a military euphemism for casualties or destruction inflicted by the enemy that are considered minor or tolerable.

That is where we are. Supported by the money from the National Rifle Association, the Republican Party has decided that the losses of hundreds of children at the hands of gun-wielding men with grievances is acceptable. It has happened again – this time in Texas. So far, 19 dead children and two dead teachers. So far.

This year – 27 school shootings. https://n.pr/3MPgqaS But it’s only May. Plenty of time to slaughter more kids. Thoughts and prayers. The NRA/Republican Party mantra – thoughts and prayers – but our guns, come and take ‘em. Just try. Nineteen dead children – acceptable losses.

The Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection organization, has counted 212 mass shootings that have occurred so far this year…. It defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people were shot or killed, excluding the shooter.

Data on the mass shootings that have occurred so far this year can be found here.

The U.S. ended 2021 with 693 mass shootings, per the Gun Violence Archive. The year before saw 611. And 2019 had 417.

That’s the trend. A few weeks ago, another shooter killed ten people in a supermarket. The most “civilized/advanced country in the world,” we like to say, has more mass shootings, more children slaughtered by guns than any other country in the entire world.

How many would be enough? One hundred? A thousand? Think of it. A thousand dead children at the hands of angry men with guns. Would that be enough to move Republicans to moral action? How many? When do acceptable losses become unacceptable? Five thousand?

The ritualistic political reactions have, of course, already begun. Republican politicians holding press conferences, tweeting “thoughts and prayers.” I wonder what those “thoughts” actually are. And “prayers?  They comfort some people, I suppose. I wonder, though, if politicians’ prayers will comfort a parent or sibling devastated by yet another preventable massacre. It all seems just like ritual at this point.

Angry kid buys guns and slaughters helpless children in school. Police and others rush to the scene, usually killing the gunman. It’s always a gun man. But it’s always too late. The dead kids pile up and the Republican politicians head for the microphones to repeat the ritual. Thoughts and prayers. But no action.

I read now that Democratic political leaders are going to try yet again to negotiate some gun law improvements, anything at all that Republicans might accept. https://wapo.st/3NEE3CH But the past is almost certainly prologue. There is no reason at all to think Republican politicians will agree to anything meaningful. And if that’s true, the only point is to show the public, yet again, who the politicians are that resist all efforts to stop the massacres. Will it matter?

Consider that Republicans in Georgia have renominated Marjorie Taylor Greene to occupy a seat in the House of Representatives. The same one who embraced QAnon conspiracy theories and now said about the Texas massacre that the solution is to “embrace God.” Ritual. She really means, do nothing. Pray for help that will not come.

Consider that Republican voters in Georgia nominated Herschel Walker, a former football player, to occupy one of the 100 Senate seats. Walker seems to have trouble stringing two coherent sentences together. Republicans want him to represent them in the Senate, where he will be expected to think about and vote on complex budget and international policy issues, among many other subjects about which he has zero experience and likely even less knowledge.

Walker is running to displace the sitting Senator Raphael Warnock. Reverend Warnock grew up in public housing in Savannah. His mother grew up in Waycross where she spent summers picking tobacco and cotton. The Senator graduated from Morehouse College, earned a PhD, and was ordained in the ministry. For over 15 years, Senator Warnock has served as Senior Pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the former pulpit of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He is an exceptional orator and the youngest pastor selected to serve in that leadership role at the historic church.

Consider that multiple leading Republican politicians are going to attend the National Rifle Association conference in Houston this weekend. There they will engage in the ritual obeisance to the God of Guns and Ammo that funnels campaign contributions to willing recipients completely ready to do vote for the NRA’s agenda: keep the guns and to Hell with the children.

Yes, the ritual will go on. And on. Until the American public finally says: ENOUGH! There is no reason to think we’re there now. I would, of course, love to be wrong about that, but the rational part of my mind says, don’t be a fool. Republican politicians across the country have continued to embrace Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. Republican voters for the most part are fine with the fantasy. Is there any reason to think such people are going to care about a bunch of children they don’t know? Not very likely.

So, what to do? Complaining isn’t going to change anything. Only voting will. Along with many others, I have continued to note that “we” outnumber “them” by a substantial margin. Yet the future of the country literally depends on an issue on which the nation’s record is far from reassuring. It’s all about turnout. Will enough people who understand what is at stake actually vote in the next elections? Or will the Republicans regain control of one or both Houses of Congress and end, once and for all, any chance of protecting and advancing democracy in America? That is literally what is at stake. Because as sure as you are reading this, nothing is going to change until the supporters of violence against children are removed from office. Nothing.

Democrats could, of course, accomplish a lot by removing the filibuster. But they won’t. They’re apparently concerned about what would happen if Republicans get control of Congress. But if Republicans get control (more than they already have now), they will exercise their power mercilessly. It’s time to act while action is possible.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Democracy is under challenge around the globe. It will not save itself. Imagine what your life and the lives of your children and grandchildren will be like under a Republican managed government. Imagine.