One of the Lunatics Behind Project 2025 Wants to Punish Liberal State Capitals

Back in 2011, Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder had a big idea. The city of Benton Harbor was having severe budgetary problems. So Snyder decided to use a state law that allowed him to appoint an Emergency Financial Manager to run the city, a man named Joseph Harris, who’d been appointed by Snyder’s predecessor, Jennifer Granholm. Snyder activated the office. Harris took over with virtually dictatorial powers.

The result was that Benton Harbor found itself thick with corporate and development vultures, particularly the Whirlpool Corporation. Nevertheless—or, more likely, because of that—the idea stayed alive in conservative circles, particularly at places like the Heritage Foundation where, on Tuesday, it sprang back to vivid life. From Right Wing Watch:

In a speech to a gathering of the American Legislative Exchange Council in Indianapolis, [Heritage Foundation president Kevin] Roberts asserted, “We are in the second American Revolution,” which he explained by saying “we are renewing sovereignty and self-governance and faith in fellow man.” Roberts showed no apparent recognition of the glaring inconsistency between his declared support for “sovereignty and self-governance” and his demonstrated contempt for the democratic choices made by voters in cities who disagree with Heritage’s agenda.

“When we have cities like Austin, or Nashville, or other capital cities whose local government is not representative of the will of the people, de-charter them and establish them as state municipal districts in the name of common sense,” he urged. American conservatives used to be discreet about the anti-democratic strain of thought. One result the alliance with the current president is that the expression of that element of American conservatism is now discussed in crude and obvious terms. It’s all pure power play, leveraging their advantages in hopelessly gerrymandered state legislatures against what we used to call “home rule.” Thus do 40 years of conservative gospel about how the best government is the one closest to the people blow away on the breeze. Roberts’ recommendation was part of a ten-point policy agenda he urged the state legislators to adopt. Among his other recommendations:

Roll back environmental regulations—“nonsense from the Green New Scam”—that he said are contributing to a crisis in affordable housing;

End subsidies and preferential treatment for “fickle energy resources.” (He said nothing about the subsidies enjoyed by fossil-fuel industries);

Force every local law enforcement agency to sign cooperation agreements with ICE’s 287 (g) program;

Replace SAT and ACT tests with the Classic Learning Test, which is promoted by right-wing culture warriors like Christopher Rufo and favored by conservative Christian schools and homeschoolers; the test was approved for statewide use in Florida in 2023.

Roberts, it should be noted, is not an expert at any of this. He’s a political huckster, a professional front man, and a well-enumerated one, trained up through the wingnut welfare network with considerable work with conservative American Catholicism, which is certainly a collision of two of the worst possible universes. He was a chronic election denier in 2020 before setting out to help design and sell Project 2025, the conservative game plan of which the current president, of course, knew nothing.

In September of 2024, Roberts was scheduled to release a book of his ideas for this Second American Revolution of his, but the heat rising around Project 2025 caused him to delay publication until after the election. And, whoo doggies, the book was a doozy. It proposed to “burn down” any institutions that inconvenienced the country’s rising conservative oligarchy, including 80 percent of all Catholic universities. Colin Dickey teed up Roberts and his book in The New Republic, at the same time reckoning with the danger of propping up its authoritarian ideas with gobs of private money:

Even though it now seems likely Roberts’s book itself is being pushed to the side, he and his allies are still annoyingly dangerous. Not least because people who are within striking distance of power have endorsed their message: Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, wrote the book’s foreword. That message, Dawn’s Early Light nakedly reveals, is how the right plans to use paranoid, Stalinist tactics to remake the country in its preferred image.

The country, it seems, is going all to hell, and Roberts has a good idea who’s been fashioning the handbasket:

“...pantsuited girlboss advertising executives, Skittle-haired they/them activists, soy-faced pajama-clad work-from-home HR apparatchiks, Adderall-addicted dog mom diversity consultants, nasally voiced Ivy League regulatory lawyers, obese George Soros-funded police abolitionist district attorneys, [and] hipster trust fund socialists.”

As George Washington learned at Valley Forge, a revolution depends on a good stockpile of adjectives.

“The frontier is dangerous,” he tells us. “It is majestic yet simple. It is imposing yet liberating. It is, in short, the most American thing there is.” Having given up on most American institutions, believing them incapable of reform, he advocates the breakdown of our contemporary American society in the hopes that the nuclear family, the church, and Smith & Wesson will rise up in its place. “Americans are inherently dangerous,” he crows, “and violent to tyrants relative to our sister civilizations. … A European, even an Australian, may be civilized, but an American is a dangerous creature."

Guy makes almost $700,000 a year at a desk in Washington and he thinks he’s Ethan Edwards. We are truly in the hands of the madmen.