Like many “liberals,” I’ve been hearing horror stories about Project 2025. As a big believer in looking at the source material, I downloaded the whole sloggy 922 pages of it. It’s a straight, white man’s dream.
Ah . . . Project 2025. What a lovely, utopian world: almost no Federal Government, locals handle all educational decisions, households all based on the nuclear family, daddy out to work to earn money, mommy taking care of the household, and the children happily studying and frolicking in their safe neighborhoods.
I did download the whole sloggy 922 pages of it. I’ve skimmed a fair amount of it but have not read the entire thing word by word.
Of course, it is full of legalese, references to various legislative bills, government agencies, and acronyms, and interestingly littered with specialized hatred, particularly for Dr. Anthony Fauci. My goodness, do they go after that guy!
It is also a straight white man’s dream, especially for a man who wants to be known and recognized as the undisputed head of his household, preferably the only wage earner and with his business functions as unregulated as possible.
He longs for a clean, orderly world, one without the messiness of abortion, unwed mothers, gay marriages, gender confusion, or impoverished mothers and children needing food supplements. On that last one, a few are OK, but his horror at possibly accidentally making free lunches available to middle or upper-class children leaps off the page.
He wants hiring to be on merit only, which, of course, very much favors the white male who tends to be the most financially and educationally advantaged. He longs for an efficient government with no bureaucrats, overlaps or wasted money. OK, that would be nice.
Let’s ponder the idea: All educational decisions are local, not national.
The Department of Education is to be eliminated in the name of freedom to choose for all parents. Fortunately, they are still willing to use public funds for education, but with all decisions made locally, none nationally.
OK, let’s stop there and ponder that idea. All educational decisions are made by the parents who direct their children’s education using public funds. So a group of parents who know little or nothing about the educational process, most of whom themselves are already stretched beyond belief with their own responsibilities, are supposed to come together and agree on how to educate their children, hire and vet teachers, and build facilities?
Well, not really. Here’s the real story: educational bureaucracy is acceptable as long as the state, not national, bureaucrats make all the academic decisions.
So, we could have a science curriculum in one state that teaches only a literal six 24-hour day creation, a 6000-year-old earth, and a static set of stars that neither are born nor die. There will be no books in their libraries that might teach contrary thoughts, any potentially confused students will receive strict remedial education, all left-handers will be turned into right-handers (OK, I just tossed that in there in the name of keeping things neat and orderly–we left-handers cause all sorts of classroom issues and chaos), and all Internet content available within those state lines will be so carefully guarded by a cadre of, dare I say it, “bureaucrats,” that no old earth, big bang, infinite or multi-verse ideas, suggestions of gender diversity, the contributions of left-handed people (and we may as well take out any contributions by Jews, Muslims, atheists, Blacks, Hispanics, Hindus or African Traditional Healers, or, to be non-politically correct, Witch Doctors), ever contaminate those little ears, eyes and brains.
However, there will be no federal bureaucracy or national standards, and thus, the writers of Project 2025 will feel safe and proud of their many accomplishments in the pursuit of an educated populace.
Yeah, this is probably not the best of ideas.
Project 2025: The longing for a clean, orderly world
Even so, I admit when I skimmed this document, stopping to do close readings of some parts, I understood the longing for a clean, orderly world, with little government interference, populated only by nuclear families (this is the only acceptable family arrangement possible), the men off to work, the women taking care of things at home, information carefully vetted to make sure nothing that would disturb this system ever makes its way in . . . and I think I just described the movie “Pleasantville.” If you have not seen it, you need to watch it.
Here’s one great scene:
I wish life were neat: my personal Project 2025 wants and desires
I wish life were so neat. I wish the weeds would not invade my garden, that the rains would come just at the right time, followed by gentle sunshine, and that there were no sweeping famines, droughts, genocides, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and grinding poverty.
I wish all in public service were honorable and not on the take, and all businesses were honest and respectful of their employees. I wish things didn’t break all the time and all bodies were healthy, and all babies were born without incident and into waiting and loving arms, none conceived by violence or by underage victims of incest, none marred by congenital, terminal diseases, none destroying the life of the woman whose body has done its best to nurture that which is growing within her.
I wish . . . yes, I wish. I wish all these men who want to be fully in charge of their households didn’t abuse their trapped wives and rage at their children at the slightest provocation.
Yes, a clean, orderly world. However, the only way we see that is to have a set of masters and slaves with unbendable rules. And that will stay clean and orderly only until one of the masters needs to exercise even more power over the other masters and slowly eliminate any who disagree with him—and yes, it will be a “him.” And it will stay that way only until the enslaved people get totally fed up and find a way to rebel, and the blood will flow. Yet again, messiness will rule.
Project 2025 is a utopian hope for a group of white, straight, privileged men who speak their special language, limited to the elite few. Sadly, their utopia means an extraordinary lack of freedom for others and an invitation to yet another form of chaos when most or all government oversight has been dismantled and the guardrails removed from society.
I understand the pull of it. However, Project 2025 is written without considering human nature and the reality of chaos and the unexpected. If implemented, we are heading into a far, far greater disaster than the framers of this document can ever imagine.
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