We have to discuss extra about Challenge 2025, the terrifyingly right-wing blueprint crafted by right-wing assume tank The Heritage Basis that’s meant to information the subsequent Republican administration. For those who aren’t very acquainted with Challenge 2025, it is time to faculty your self and begin spreading the phrase. Fortunately, Media Issues for America simply launched a terrific, accessible overview to assist educate the general public.
Media Issues offers this abstract of Challenge 2025, which it calls an “excessive agenda” that “represents a risk to democracy, civil rights, the local weather, and extra”:
The plan goals to reinstate Schedule F, a Trump-era govt order that makes federal staff fireable at-will, stripping tens of 1000’s of staff of civil service protections. Each Trump and others within the conservative motion have stated they’ll filter the federal authorities if he’s reelected. The undertaking has even arrange on-line trainings and loyalty checks to slim down potential hires to those that will decide to observe Trump with out query. As Challenge 2025 senior adviser John McEntee has stated, “The primary factor you are on the lookout for is individuals which can be aligned with the agenda.”
The Heritage Basis’s almost 900-page coverage e book, titled Mandate for Management: A Conservative Promise, describes Challenge 2025’s priorities and the way they might be applied, damaged down by departments within the federal forms and arranged round “4 pillars that may, collectively, pave the way in which for an efficient conservative administration: a coverage agenda, personnel, coaching, and a 180-day playbook.” Written primarily by former Trump officers and conservative commentators related to The Heritage Basis, these proposals would severely inhibit the federal authorities’s protections round reproductive rights, LGBTQ and civil rights, local weather change efforts, and immigration.
The initiative is backed by a coalition of over 100 organizations and people, no less than two-thirds of which obtain funding from the Koch community or conservative philanthropist Leonard Leo. The undertaking can also be closely promoted by MAGA-connected media figures reminiscent of Steve Bannon, who has known as it the “blueprint” for Trump’s second time period on his Warfare Room podcast.
Within the information, Media Issues outlines among the most important priorities of the plan:
Personnel and Staffing: “Challenge 2025’s objectives for staffing the subsequent GOP presidency mirror Trump’s concept to intestine civil service employees and change them with probably tens of 1000’s of MAGA loyalists. The New York Instances describes this plot for a second Trump administration as an ‘growth of presidential energy over the equipment of presidency’ that will reshape ‘the construction of the chief department to pay attention far better authority immediately in his arms.'”
Christian Nationalism: “Challenge 2025 goals to place Christianity on the middle of American authorities and society by turning a biblical worldview into federal regulation, typically using Christian nationalist speaking factors and narratives to assist its right-wing coverage proposals. In his foreword to the e book, for example, Heritage Basis President Kevin Roberts claims that ‘the Left is threatening the tax-exempt standing of church buildings and charities that reject woke progressivism,’ including that ‘they’ll quickly flip to Christian faculties and golf equipment with the identical totalitarian intent.’ Challenge 2025 is partnered with the Heart for Renewing America, the major Christian nationalist political group within the U.S., led by former Trump official and Heritage alumnus Russ Vought.”
Reproductive Rights: “Challenge 2025 goals for the subsequent conservative administration to assault reproductive rights from a number of angles, together with by eradicating the time period ‘abortion’ from all federal legal guidelines and laws, reversing abortion tablet approval, punishing suppliers by withdrawing federal well being funding, and proscribing clinics that present contraception and STD testing. Challenge 2025 has collaborated with extremist anti-abortion teams reminiscent of Susan B. Anthony Professional-Life America, College students for Lifetime of America, and the American Affiliation of Professional-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.”
Division of Justice and Federal Regulation Enforcement: “Within the eyes of pro-Trump Republicans and their right-wing media allies, the Division of Justice and the FBI have lengthy been corrupted by left-wing ideology and the bureaucratic ‘deep state.’ Now, Challenge 2025 seeks to radically reshape federal regulation enforcement for the advantage of a conservative strongman; its chapter by former Trump DOJ official Gene Hamilton states that ‘something apart from a top-to-bottom overhaul will solely additional erode the belief of serious parts of the American individuals and hurt the very material that holds collectively our constitutional republic.’ These views mirror the varied conservative authorized organizations which have partnered with Challenge 2025, reminiscent of former Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Authorized (the place Hamilton at present works as vp and normal counsel), Carrie Severino’s Judicial Disaster Community, and the American Heart for Regulation and Justice.”
LGBTQ Rights: “Challenge 2025 takes excessive positions in opposition to LGBTQ rights, searching for to get rid of federal protections for queer individuals and pursue analysis into conversion therapies as a way to encourage gender and sexuality conformity. The coverage e book additionally lays out plans to criminalize being transgender and prohibit federal packages from supporting queer individuals by way of numerous insurance policies. The undertaking partnered with anti-LGBTQ teams the Household Coverage Alliance, the Heart for Household and Human Rights, and the Household Analysis Council.”
Local weather Change: “Challenge 2025 would get rid of environmental protections and additional delay local weather motion. Within the foreword, Heritage President Kevin Roberts calls environmentalism a ‘pseudo-religion,’ claiming ‘environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human’ as a result of it promotes ‘inhabitants management and financial regression’ by ‘concerning human exercise itself as basically a risk to be sacrificed to the god of nature.’ Challenge 2025 is supported by local weather change-denying organizations The Heartland Institute and the Institute for Power Analysis.”
Immigration: “Challenge 2025 proposes to severely roll again each authorized and unauthorized immigration by way of a variety of untested, novel approaches that stretch far past the insurance policies of Trump’s first time period. The plan would probably make lots of of 1000’s of individuals weak to deportation by way of the lack of momentary protected standing, and will ensnare their households, these they reside with, and different members of their communities. Excessive anti-immigration group the Heart for Immigration Research has partnered with Challenge 2025 in supporting these radical immigration coverage concepts.”
Schooling: “Challenge 2025’s proposal for America’s training system can be one of the excessive plans but, calling for eliminating the Division of Schooling, eliminating all lecturers unions, and tearing down laws on training spending. Far-right ‘parental rights’ group Mothers for Liberty and the anti-union Institute for Schooling Reform have partnered with Challenge 2025 to create these proposals.”
Media Issues for America describes its mission:
Media Issues for America is a web-based, not-for-profit, 501 (c)(3) progressive analysis and data middle devoted to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation within the U.S. media.
Launched in Could 2004, Media Issues for America put in place, for the primary time, the means to systematically monitor a cross part of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Web media shops for conservative misinformation – information or commentary that’s not correct, dependable, or credible and that forwards the conservative agenda – day-after-day, in actual time.
Utilizing the web site mediamatters.org because the principal car for disseminating analysis and data, Media Issues posts rapid-response gadgets in addition to longer analysis and analytic stories documenting conservative misinformation all through the media. Moreover, Media Issues works every day to inform activists, journalists, pundits, and most people about situations of misinformation, offering them with the assets to rebut false claims and to take direct motion in opposition to offending media establishments.
Learn your complete information to Challenge 2025 right here, and join the Media Issues e-newsletter right here.