Project2025 SCOTUS Launch an Insurrection

And for good reason.

Canada has its own skein of would-be insurrectionists taking their cues (and suspected financial incentives) from American sources, with even exiled Fox right wing nut job Tucker Carlson showing up on stages and gatherings exhorting Canadians to “wake up” and “fight”.

Driving the far-right religious fundamentalist agenda is the Heritage Foundation, a sizeable and well capitalized coalition of right wing organizations and individuals who appear determined to overtly take control of the Executive Branch of the US government upon the election of a conservative candidate in the November 2024 federal election, and through the use of the Supreme Court of the United States.

The Project 2025 manifesto that appears to be the playbook to which they closely hew is a study in authoritarian insurrection that, at this point, looks poised to succeed. Or at least the possibility of success has just become much higher, thanks to the blatant allegiance the SCOTUS conservative majority has to the former president, now a convicted felon.

Paul Dans, director of both the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 manifesto, “served in the Trump Administration as Chief of Staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management where he managed the federal agency in charge of human resources policy for the more than two million federal workers. He also served as OPM’s White House liaison and worked integrally with the White House Office of Presidential Personnel to staff the approximately 4000 presidential appointees across the federal government. In January 2021, President Trump appointed Dans to serve as Chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission.”

So to describe Dans as a Trump loyalist is no stretch. And to read the Project 2025 manifesto closely is to understand that the intention of the Heritage group of far-right and somewhat extremist affiliated organizations is the hijacking of the democracy called the United States,. and end to that democracy, and the installation of their preferred dictator, Donald Trump.

This is a 920 page manual on how to take over every branch of the US government. That this is coup d’etat in progress is confirmed by the words of Heritage Foundation kingpin Kevin Roberts, who said “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

The first time I read the Project 2025 manifesto, I concluded that though dangerous as an ideologically extreme document masquerading as a benign political platform, the checks and balances as represented by the Supreme Court and the Constitution of the United States would prevail against the success of such a coup. The detailed interference in government processes outlined in the manifesto reveal a presumption that the election of Trump is a given, and that he will of course provide the access to all the branches of government into which the Heritage Foundation insurrectionists would have their operatives installed.

The patterns evident in the recent major domestic political events – the debate, the apparent subordination of the law to the designs of Trump in Amy Coney Barrett’s, the extent of Justice Clarence Thomas’ bribes by republican industrialist Harlan Meade, the overt bigotry of Justice Samuel Alito and his wife, and the utter failure of the US Justice system to achieve any meaningful convictions against the most leacherous and larcenous president in American history – all point to an insurrection in progress and nearing its objective.

And now, that insurrection has been sanctioned by the Supreme Court of the United States, which opens the door to potential impeachment of the six conservative justices who voted in favour of the immunity for presidents, and even potentially imprisonment for treason.

The most insidious byproduct of all this erosion of the rule of law is the destruction of faith in the younger generation of Americans who are either apathetic to the concept of democracy at this point, or else prepared to join the extremist camps in the hinterlands to bring about whatever version of a Great America they have cobbled together.

Meanwhile, the democratic agenda is being ground into dust by the insistence of its party leaders to maintain Joe Biden in the presidential post, despite the obvious better choices out there of Jill Stein or Gavin Newsom, and the absolute compromise and subordination of both Congress and the Senate by AIPAC money. The perception that Israel and the United States government are partners in the annihilation of Palestine by genocide appears to be the most accurate description of the status of the so-called war in the Middle East. And now Lebanon is in the cross-hairs.

So while I appreciate that it is an American tradition to completely ignore voices that don’t originate from within its own media apparatus, we in Canada nonetheless have a rather obvious vested interest in the political landscape in the United States. Our own domestic social stability is to varying degree a reflection of that in the US.

If the far-right extremists in both Canada under Pierre Pollievre and in the US under Trump are the “evil” axis, then the “good” exists in the potential for Gavin Newsom to be elected in November 2024 and Mark Carney, who will replace Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, to be elected in October 2025.

That would nip the Project 2025 agenda in the bud, and diffuse the decaying influence of those policies in Canada. For now.

But this rise of facism along theocratic lines is an infection in the social order of North America, and we must all be vigilant and ready to defend against future attempts to undermine the ever-vulnerable democratic standard we abhor but nonetheless acknowledge as better than the alternative.

Let me just close by stating that I do not purport to represent all Canadians in this exhortation; only the ones with cerebral firepower and humanity.