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Project 2025, the Felon, and the Great Resegregation

If one wades through the 900 pages of Project 2025 it quickly becomes apparent that the document and the agenda it pushes is one of white supremacy and special privilege for evangelicals and other wrongly labeled "conservative Christians" -  both groups that are decidedly not Christian when measured by Christ's gospel message. Selectively cherry picking Old Testament passages to condemn others and establishing "Christian academies" to avoid desegregation do not make one Christian.  In June 2016, the Felon met with leading evangelicals and promised them political power and dispensation for non-discrimination laws if they supported him.  In their thirst for power these false Christians threw past feigned morality out the window and embraced the Felon. Now, back in office, the Felon is striving to make good on his promise and is seeking to undo the gains of the Civil Rights movement and grant special privileges to whites - especially white males - and targeting those who fail to conform to Christofascist dogma.  All of this is being done under the false claim of furthering a color blind meritocracy whereas in reality the exact opposite is the goal. White males are deemed automatically competent, qualified, and superior to anyone  who is nonwhite and/or not heterosexual.  A long piece in The Atlantic  looks at the insidious agenda to take the nation back in time to the 1950's.  Here are highlights:

The nostalgia behind the slogan “Make America great again” has always provoked the obvious questions of just when America was great, and for whom. Early in the second Trump administration, we are getting the answer.

In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”

Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms. During her confirmation hearing, Trump’s education-secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, said she did not know if schools could lose funding for teaching Black-history classes under the order.

Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.

Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. . . . . they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.

The battles of the Great Resegregation are now taking place in at least three overlapping arenas. The first is politics, where right-wing legal organizations have succeeded in rolling back many civil-rights-era voting protections; they want to now fully destroy the remaining shreds. The second is education and employment, particularly at elite institutions, such as the media and academia; right-wing legal strategies have been similarly fruitful here in attacking diversity, thanks to the conservative capture of the Supreme Court. The third is popular culture, where conservatives have sought to leverage anger and nostalgia against movies, television, books, and other creative media brought to life by artists of color.

The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. . . . . some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.

As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” This analysis is perceptive in the sense that the exact reverse is true . . . . and the effect it had on the fragile self-esteem of people like Beattie.

In 2020, the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell published a book arguing that. . . . . Because of the Civil Rights Act, white people had fallen “asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

Caldwell’s assessment has grown in popularity among prominent conservatives. The right-wing activist Charlie Kirk has described the Civil Rights Act as having “created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon,” . . . . On his social network, X, the South African–born Musk, who is playing a key role in the Trump administration, regularly promotes scientific racism, the pseudoscientific ideology that holds that race determines individual potential.

The problem conservatives trying to undermine anti-discrimination law seem to have with an “official hierarchy of races” is not that one exists but that, in their warped conception, white people are not on top, as they should be.

The contention, overt or implied, is always that unlike white men, whose competence can be assumed, the non-white people with desirable jobs are undeserving. The irony, of course, is that many of the white men making these assumptions are themselves unqualified. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is best-known for being a reality-television star.

Even so, the Great Resegregation seeks not a return to the explicit racial separation of Jim Crow, but rather an embrace of ostensibly “color-blind” policies intended to sustain a de facto segregation that is more durable and less overt, one in which Black access to the middle and elite strata of American life will be ever more rare and fleeting. The numbers of Black doctors, lawyers, scientists, architects, showrunners, and generals would no longer rise. . . . . Most Black people would be confined to, as Trump memorably put it, the menial “Black jobs” they were meant for, save for those willing to sustain the self-serving fiction that they are among the good ones.

The demolition of multiracial democracy began a dozen years ago, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rolled back voting-rights protections adopted in the 1960s to enforce the rights enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment. Those protections made America, for the first time, a democracy for all its citizens.

The Roberts Court has steadily eroded those protections, insisting that they are no longer necessary, even as racist ideas once considered beyond the pale return to the mainstream. These changes have had the predictable outcome of increasing racial disparities in voting.

The Roberts Court has treated policies meant to rectify racial discrimination as themselves racist. The Court shut down what remained of public-school integration efforts. It overturned affirmative action in higher education. These decisions have eroded diversity in the classroom. But they’re just the beginning for the resegregators, who intend to ensure that America’s traditional racial hierarchies are persistent and stable.

Instead of individual meritocracy, they seem to be advocating a racial meritocracy, in which the merit of an individual hire or admission can be assessed not by their individual accomplishments but by how well the group they are associated with fits a particular role. In this way, the Great Resegregation seeks firmer moral ground than the racial apartheid of the past. Racial disparities can be framed not as the result of discrimination, but as a fact: that white people are just better and more qualified.

Notably, Trump officials are not willing to state their aims explicitly; they feel obligated to pay lip service to ideals of color-blind meritocracy and mislead about their intentions. . . . . Trumpists seek to not just repeal protections against discrimination, but reverse the “diversity ethos” that has enabled America’s tenuous strides toward equality.

And that progress is not only fragile but remarkably incomplete. Neither schools nor workplaces have ever been particularly integrated.  . . . . Occupational segregation has remained stagnant since the ’90s. Black workers with or without college degrees are concentrated in professions that pay less than those of their white counterparts, despite a rise in Black people obtaining college degrees.

There are perhaps two exceptions. One is the federal government, where until now, anti-discrimination laws have been strictly enforced. Trump’s cronies have tried to discredit the federal workforce precisely because it is often more meritocratic, and therefore more integrated than the private sector. . . . . That is why Trumpists are so focused on “ending DEI” in the federal workforce. They see anti-discrimination and inclusion as a ladder of upward mobility for people they do not believe should have one.

The second place where America has grown more integrated is media and entertainment, arenas highly visible to the public. This has depreciated the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “psychological wage” of white racial identity—making those who once held an unquestioned hegemony over American culture feel like something has been stolen from them. And this shift helped fuel the nationwide backlash to diversity efforts that Trump rode to office.

An integrated cast, writers’ room, or development team is deemed “woke,” by which critics simply mean integrated, and therefore suspect. A woman, LGBTQ person, or person of color in a leading role is deemed unqualified, or worthy of rejection just because of who they are. What may seem like silly internet controversies are in fact demands for a resegregation of creative workplaces.

Asked to provide a real example of lowered standards in the military during his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was unable to. The U.S. military has long led the way in demonstrating how a diverse workforce yields American excellence—one reason some conservatives are fixated on its relative egalitarianism, which they deride as “wokeness.” . . . Of course he himself is an illustration of lowered standards—Hegseth has no demonstrable expertise for the job he was given—but because he is a white man, his qualifications for the job are assumed, as a result of the Trumpist concept of racial meritocracy.

For all the big talk about putting an end to “social engineering,” the Great Resegregation is itself a radical attempt to socially engineer America to be poorer, whiter, less equal, and less democratic. Much as the old Jim Crow measures kept many southern white people impoverished and disenfranchised alongside the Black southerners they targeted, the Great Resegregation will leave wealthy white elites with a firmer grip on power and the working classes with fewer opportunities and a weakened social safety net. The only people left with more will be those who already had more than they needed to begin with.

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Musk/Trump: Laying the Foundations For the Next Financial Crisis

Since Reagan many on the political right have demonized government regulation and sought to reduce or eliminate regulations that benefit the majority of Americans. Much of corporate America is only too happy to jump on this bandwagon and would love to return to the robber baron area that ran wild during the late 1800's and first years of the 20th century.  Regulations impede unfettered profits and the GOP at the state and federal level have been only too happy to grant the wishes of their corporate donors.  Hence the erosion of child labor laws in some red states, attacks on clean air and clean water regulations, and efforts to reduce labor safety standards.  Now, Musk/the Felon are out to cut financial regulations - even as they push to shred the social safety net for everyday Americans - and are setting the stage for future financial crisis as greed runs amuck. Learning from the past is seemingly an unknown concept and maximizing short term profits is more important than anything else.  A piece by a Nobel Prize winning economist looks at the dangerous measures the Felon and his co-president are taking in the financial markets realm.  Here are highlights:

Sometimes — actually, quite often — it seems as if the Musk/Trump [regime] administration tries to undermine successful government policies precisely because they’ve been successful.

It’s hard, for example, to see whose interests Trump is serving by trying to kill New York’s congestion pricing scheme, which is already showing clear positive results, including a noticeable decline in traffic accidents.

This behavior may in part reflect the right-wing insistence, going back to Reagan, that government can never be a force for good, a doctrine right-wingers try to validate when they’re in power. Part of it may reflect jealousy: Trump, and only Trump, is allowed to have policy successes.

But it’s also surely part of the effort to flood the zone — to do so many bad things at the same time that it’s hard to focus on any one outrage. And I’m sorry to say that this strategy often works. In a week in which Trump has firmly allied himself with Russian aggression while falsely claiming that millions of dead people receive Social Security, how many people noticed Tuesday’s executive order that appears to be an effort to strip the Federal Reserve of its ability to oversee and regulate Wall Street?

This is, however, important. The Musk/Trump administration has been weakening financial regulation across the board. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which aims to shield Americans from fraud, has been shut down. All of the agencies that try to supervise and regulate financial institutions, other than the Fed, are now being run by people hostile to the very idea of regulation.

And all of this couldn’t be happening at a worse moment. MAGA may well be laying the foundations for the next financial crisis.

Economists have known for a long time — more than 250 years — that financial institutions should be regulated. Libertarians often invoke Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for its advocacy of laissez-faire economic policies. But even Smith, who had witnessed the Panic of 1772 that hit Scotland, London and Amsterdam — arguably the first modern banking crisis — called for significant restrictions on banks,

The 21^st-century financial system is, of course, far more complex than that of the 18^th century, although there are some echoes.

Did I mention that Howard Lutnick is now the Commerce Secretary? Lutnick has had close financial ties to Tether, which Bloomberg describes as “the stablecoin used by drug traffickers, terrorists and scammers to move money around the world.”

And crypto aside, the complexity of modern finance makes it even harder for both consumers and investors to assess banking risks, so we need effective financial regulation to avoid or at least limit financial crises.

Yet the Musk/Trump administration is moving to loosen if not eviscerate financial regulation. And it’s doing so at an especially dangerous time.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis I, like many economists, became a fan of Hyman Minsky’s “financial instability hypothesis.” At a time when many economists were arguing that financial markets are generally efficient in the sense that asset prices reflect the best information available, Minsky argued instead that they are driven by cycles of greed and fear.

In the aftermath of a financial crisis, investors are well aware that markets can go down as well as up. They are cautious about taking risks, and especially about leveraging up — investing with borrowed money. And as a result of this caution, financial markets are calm with relatively few crises.

Over time, however, memories of past disasters fade, in part because those who remember bad things retire or move on, replaced by younger traders who have never experienced a major crisis. This eventually produces markets in which prices seem to go in only one direction — up — and whoever is most willing to take leveraged risks wins.

This manic phase doesn’t just induce many people to take on risks they don’t understand. It also creates what the famed investor James Chanos calls a “golden age of fraud.”

When it seems as if fortune favors the brave, con men or, sometimes, con women find it especially easy to attract suckers, especially if they can hang their promises on a narrative — say, the wonders of crypto or the limitless potential of AI.

The New York Times recently ran a heartbreaking story about how the president of a community-owned bank in Elkhart, Kansas fell for a crypto scam, destroying the bank and quite a few people’s life savings in the process. You can be sure that we’ll hear many more such stories once we reach the final stage of the cycle — the Minsky moment, when euphoria-driven asset price surges give way to fire sales as highly leveraged investors desperately try to raise cash.

Where do regulators fit into all of this? They can’t completely eliminate the Minsky cycle, which is deeply rooted in human psychology. But they can dampen it and limit the damage when the Minsky moment arrives.

[T]he extensive financial regulations introduced in the 1930s produced a 50-year “quiet period” in which there were plenty of stock market ups and downs — notably the “go-go years” of the 1960s followed by the very depressed market of the 1970s — but there weren’t any serious banking crises.

But politicians are subject to the same mood swings as investors, so they tend to push regulators to loosen up precisely when they should be trying to rein in irrational exuberance. . . . . now the Trump [regime] administration wants to cut the Fed out of the loop.

Most observers believe that when — not if — the reckoning comes, it won’t be as bad as 2008. That’s probably true. It doesn’t look as if banks and quasi-banks are as exposed as they were back then, so there may be less disruption to the financial system. But one lesson from 2008 is that an ever-changing financial system sometimes creates risks that nobody realized were there until things fall apart.

Furthermore, a crisis doesn’t have to be as bad as 2008 to be very bad indeed.

And let’s not ignore the fact that if a crisis comes any time in the next few years, the Musk/Trump Administration will be in charge of handling the response. If that thought makes you feel confident, maybe you want to buy some more Melania coins

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MAGA Has Found a New Frightening Model

Project 2025 which the Felon is rapidly implementing is a white "Christian" nationalist/white supremacist agenda aimed at taking America back to the 1950's when nonwhites in may parts of the nation still lived under Jim Crow, gays remained hidden in the shadows and white males reigned supreme.  The felon's regime is rapidly scrubbing references to racial minorities and LGBT individuals from government agency web sites and the senior leadership of the nation's military is being purged of women and blacks.  The Felon's promises of lowering prices are long forgotten and the stock market is falling over concerns of the negative impacts of the Felon's tariffs on inflation and the economy not to mention the shredding of past trade alliances. On the international stage, the Felon is acting as a Russian asset and he and his spineless minions are insulting long time allies and parroting Russian propaganda. Equally disturbing is the embrace of the far right party in Germany that in many ways is trying to rewrite history and rehabilitate aspects of Hitler's Nazi regime,  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the new MAGA model that ought to frighten thinking and moral Americans.  Here are excerpts:

LAST MONTH, upwards of 1 million people flooded the streets of Germany to express their opposition to the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany. In Berlin, more than 100,000 people gathered on the Bundestag lawn under a banner reading Defend democracy: Together against the right.

The message Germans were sending was clear, Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based journalist, wrote in Foreign Policy: “The AfD’s stripe of right-wing radicalism is out of place in democratic Germany.” But not, apparently, in democratic America.

In January, Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers, appeared via video at a campaign event in Halle on behalf of the AfD, urging those in attendance not to be ashamed of its nation’s history. . . . in an obvious reference to the Nazi era, Musk said there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

“I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Musk told the 4,000 AfD supporters. Musk also published an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag, urging Germans to vote for the AfD. The paper’s Opinion editor resigned in protest.

But that was just the start of the Trump administration’s embrace of the AfD. Last week, Vice President J. D. Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that the German media called a “campaign gift” to the AfD prior to the German elections tomorrow.

In an extraordinary act of intervention into the internal affairs of an ally, Vance essentially urged the next German government to include the AfD, which has so far been treated as a pariah party, in the governing coalition. The Trump administration wants to destroy the firewall that has been built around the AfD. It’s worth understanding why it was erected in the first place.

GERMANY’S DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE AGENCY has classified part of the AfD, founded in 2013, as extremist, warning that it is a “danger to democracy.” (In 2017, the AfD became the first far-right party to enter the German Parliament since World War II.)

Much of the attention has focused on Björn Höcke, a history teacher who heads a faction of the AfD, known as “The Wing” (Der Flügel ), in the state of Thuringia. Höcke has“used metaphors reminiscent of Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist,” The New York Times reported, “saying that Germans need to be wolves rather than sheep.” He has talked about racial suicide and “cultural Bolshevism.” At a 2017 rally in Dresden, Höcke called on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history. . . . Höcke wants to revive the word Lebensraum—a term used by the Nazis that means “living space.” And he seems offended that Adolf Hitler has been described as “absolutely evil.” (“The world has—man has—shades of gray,” Höcke said when asked about Hitler.

The AfD, which has most of its support in the formerly Communist eastern part of Germany, was defined at its outset by opposition to the common European currency; within a couple of years, it has become pro-Russian and embraced xenophobia, and now defines itself as committed to preserving German identity and nationalism. It has ties to neo-Nazi activists and the extremist Identitarian Movement, including discussing a “re-migration” plan which, according to Hockenos, would “forcibly repatriate millions of people.”

THE TRUMP [REGIME] ADMINISTRATION’S embrace of the AfD is the latest example of it casting its lot with right-wing European movements. It not only wants to destroy the transatlantic alliance; it is supporting parties that are extreme and enemies of classical liberalism. But there’s an additional twist in what we’re witnessing.

For Vance and Musk to go so far out of their way to support not just any rising radical movement, but this particular party, in this particular country, with its deep historical experiences with fascism, is quite telling. They are not just “trolling the libs”; they are giving their public backing to a movement that represents the core convictions of MAGA world. They see in the AfD an undiluted version of MAGA. What we’re now witnessing from Trump & Company, as alarming as it is now, is only a way station.

And before you know it, virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. Trump always changes them; they never change him. The AfD’s approach to politics—nihilism with a touch of Nazi sympathizing—is the model.

However the AfD does in the German elections tomorrow, it has already won the hearts and minds of the most powerful men in America.

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