Project 2025 Is Terrifying

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:52 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1009. I'm your host Thomas Smith and over there is your other host Matt Cameron. How you doing Matt?

0:01:00 Matt: Thomas, I'm feeling unusually positive, even for everything we're going to be talking about. I've been in a good mood.

0:01:04 Thomas: How is that possible?

0:01:06 Matt: That's just how I am. I just built this way.

0:01:07 Thomas: Take us on that ride Matt. Cameron is of course a real lawyer.

0:01:13 Matt: Am a practicing immigration and criminal defense attorney, and I'm here to talk about the future of the United States.

0:01:15 Thomas: Love it. This is very worrisome. I know there's like a document. There's, people are talking outright just like we're done with democracy. They're not even hiding it anymore. Really worried, Matt. So I'm very excited to learn more and find out how worried I should be and what we can do about it.

0:01:32 Matt: I want to keep it realistic. I mean, I think it's okay to ring the alarm when we need to be alarmist, and we should be alarmed about some of these things. But I want to make a deal with the audience here that we are not doomers. We're not here to just inundate you with bad news once in a while.

0:01:47 Matt: But anytime that we bring you bad news, I want to try to balance it out with hope and with things you can actually do. And I think I want to get beyond donating and voting, both of which are great, but specific concrete things that you can actually doing as a person to stop some of those things, because none of this is inevitable. I really believe that. And want to make sure before we say anything else, because I'm going to get into some dark stuff here. We're going to make some dark historical comparisons, but I think that it's important to understand that we're in a place right now that none of it is inevitable.

0:01:44 Thomas: Speak for yourself. No. Yeah, for sure.

0:02:15 Thomas: Yeah.

0:02:15 Matt: So let's start actually with the clip you just mentioned.

0:02:17 Clip: Here is far -right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec at CPAC in a panel hosted by Steve Bannon. Just wanted to say welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn't get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here. We'll replace it right here with this. All right. Amen. Amen.

0:02:40 Matt: When he said we'll replace it with this, he raised his fist in a classic sort of fascist iron fist movement. Is at CPAC, which as you might know, of course, the Conservative Political Action Conference used to be a pretty staid, straightforward sort of conservative event in our lifetimes, at least when I remember.

0:02:44 Thomas: Hmm, cool.

0:02:54 Thomas: Win. Yeah, as long as I've been paying attention, it's not been great, but it's gotten worse every single time also. So

0:02:58 Matt: It's certainly gone off the rails since Trump, like everything else. It used to Be where you could actually line up and see the conservative, conservative... I guess I'll call them thinkers because the movement used to have some of those. We've got people like Jack Posobiec. Do you know about Jack?

0:03:10 Thomas: A little bit here and there. Yeah,

0:03:15 Matt: He's not really worth knowing about, but he's just one of those absolute wingnuts that has become kind of central to these things. Charlie Kirk, those kinds of people that have kind of drifted to the mainstream of the Republican Party.

0:03:24 Thomas: Yeah, I will say this. It is as much as we all wanted to believe that like, oh, demographics destiny here. And it's all it's like there is a weird young crop of, you know, because he's really young. Right. And so is the other guy you mentioned. So it's, you Know, it's not as though universal that if you're younger, you're like more liberal. Some of the worst fascists seem to be quite young.

0:03:35 Matt: Yeah. Yeah, not at all. No. That's one of the things we want to talk about out today because this plan, this Project 2025, very much relies on a new generation of people to carry out what they want.

0:03:46 Thomas: Yeah. Just I want to ask just in case, because it matters that much because important is what was said, but was he trying to do some ironic thing or is he, are they finally, because for a while that's already bad enough when they're doing the ironic fascism, but they actually, they mean it. But part of problem the, part was like, well, you can say you're joking when you weren't or, you know, but are they to the point where they're not even doing that anymore and they're just saying it, or was this still some sort of joke so that they can try to catch liberals in a trap and be like, oh, look at them overreacting to to what I said.

0:04:20 Matt: You may know, there's been this idea for a long time of hiding your power level, right? Going out in public and trying to pretend and making jokes and pretending these things are funny. But, got I to tell you, you can only make so jokes about sending journalists to death camps before it's not not really a joke anymore. Ironic.

0:04:23 Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. My question was not whether or not it matters if it's a joke, because I've, talked I've about that a lot. And I think, I think most of the audience hopefully is, privy is to that, but just am curious if they've gotten to the point where they're not even doing the joke part anymore. That's all I'm wondering. Like, are they, have they moved on from that?

0:04:36 Matt: Sure. Hope so. I mean, obviously there's some polite laughter when he said this is the end of democracy, but he on to talk about how it's time to free the January 6th defendants and about how God is king and we take our law from God. This is, of course, the particularly American brand of authoritarianism we're working with right now, Christofascism.

But I wanted to get back up and talk about out the law of authoritarianism generally before we get going on this, because I've seen a lot of headlines about Project 2025 as being, and rightfully, this is all true, as being a very disturbing roadmap for the future of this country and for being something that's going to get some of the worst elements on the right what they want. That's all true. But I think we need to really put this in some kind of context.

And I want to be clear up front, I'm not saying that the Republican Party are the Nazi Party, that they're the fascist party, that this is the USSR. None of those things, we're not there yet. But that's the whole point. The entire point of what I want want to talk about is that this is how you get there.

And I just wanted to very quickly take you through, for those who may not know, or even if you do know, I think it's worth setting the stage a little, about how you get there and how democracies become dictatorships, because you don't just wake up in Nazi Germany one day.

0:04:53 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:05:42 Matt: You have a nice, long, slow burn before you get there. So I can recommend William Shire's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Benjamin Carter Hett's Death of Democracy, both books I'm drawing from here on this little bit I'm going to be be talking about. Did a lot of reading about fascism and the rise of fascism around 2016, just for some reason.

0:05:43 Thomas: Why?

0:06:01 Matt: Just spontaneous.

0:06:01 Thomas: Yeah, just a hobby thing. I got into woodworking. Just hobbies.

0:06:06 Matt: Real into fascism. I was a lot of fun at parties. That I went to, I was talking about fascismo. I still do. I can't help myself. But I think we all understand, just talking about the Third Reich in particular, that understand the basics, right? That they were able to consolidate power after the Reichstag Reichstagfeuer.

0:06:07 Thomas: Yeah.

0:06:19 Thomas: Didn't see Rikes 1 and 2, but I filled it in based on context clues.

0:06:21 Matt: Yeah, Third Reich was able to consolidate power after the Reichstag feuer. And I think maybe a lot of people have a general sort of fuzzy idea that suddenly after that, it was a dictatorship. But I want to talk about sort of the legal process that got it there, because I'm fascinated as a lawyer, and especially as a employer who deals deals with the federal government. That's a big part of my job, is working with federal systems, trying to understand how they're put together and the sort of the civil structure that keeps everything going. The way that Hitler and the Nazis were able to consolidate their power within these civil structures is what got us to the worse parts of What We Know about World War II and the Holocaust. Started, of course, with the Enabling Act of 1933. That is what put Germany on the path to hell, because Hitler was allowed to make law through executive order. He could skip the legislature. Again, we're not there yet, necessarily, but there are some things that could put us there. But it's not as if it was a fast forward from 1933 to death camps.

0:06:30 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:07:11 Matt: The mass extermination of Jews and other enemies of the state didn't begin until 1941. began, and I think this is something that I didn't really appreciate until I read these books, small steps, right? So the Enabling Act is a big deal, but in 1933, they know, isn't that perfect? Literally enabled.

0:07:14 Thomas: Wow. It's actually called the Enabling Act? I That's not like a historical label on it? Like, historically, this is looked at as the Enabling Act. It's like, no, we want to enable. Able, let's vote on that, okay, yeah.

0:07:32 Matt: No, welcome Nazis. Yeah. 1933, around the same time, also passed something called the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. And that has a lot to do with what we're talking about today. Again, to be clear, I'm not saying there's a direct parallel. I'm nicht sagen, dass Trump ist Hitler und Republicans or Nazis. Don't take this away from what I'm saying. What I'm saying is this is how democracies get to the places that we think of when we think of the third rank.

0:07:34 Thomas: Okay.

0:07:55 Thomas: I'm saying like some of them are Nazis, so, and that there's there's they're Nazi -esque, they're, they're comparisons, maybe I'm a little more willing to make that comparison, but sure, which

0:07:58 Matt: Of them are, no doubt. Some of them are openly. Yeah. Might remember that Godwin's law, the idea that inevitably any internet discussion, if you let it go long enough, somebody's going to get compared to Nazis. And the actual guy, Godwin, at some point, pretty soon after Trump was elected, was like, yeah, you can start using that word.

0:08:11 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:08:21 Matt: There's something going on here. There are actual Nazis around now. So maybe it's okay to start using comparisons to Nazis, which I appreciated. Law that I want to talk about, this very small, underappreciated little piece of the third rank, excluded Jews and politically unreliable, that's a direct quote, politically unreliabel civil servants and employees from state service. Not just state service, but it wouldn't let them become licensed lawyers. So same year as the Enabling Act, the

0:08:27 Thomas: What Was this? You're '33 So And And This isn't something that's, you know, it's not called the Enabling Act, it's something that could sound like just kind of run-of-the-mill legislation. It seems like to me, yeah.

0:08:56 Matt: For the restoration of the professional civil service. What's wrong with that? Who wouldn't want that? That.

0:08:59 Thomas: We Have passed laws more evil named than that. I'm

0:09:03 Matt: And for Trump, it's called Schedule F, as we're going to talk about in a minute. But making the point here that this was the first time, this little dinky law about the civil service that probably not that many people cared about if you weren't a Jewish lawyer or judge. This was the third time the Third Reich used the Aryan paragraph, which became central. And it's something that unfortunately, Germany had had for decades before that. But the Third Reich began to institutionalize this little clause, this

0:09:19 Thomas: Hmm. Is this something where I know how many words are in it? Is that a different thing?

0:09:31 Matt: It is along those lines. It is those, that kind of 14

0:09:33 Thomas: Actually wasn't sure if it was literally that.

0:09:35 Matt: Words.

0:09:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:35 Matt: No.

0:09:36 Thomas: Okay. It's not literally that one.

0:09:37 Matt: It does exclude non -Aryans from organizations, professions, and public life, basically. And at this point, you had legal academics jumping in to do their part to purge the law of Jewish influence, right? So it takes a lot of people. It doesn't just take one guy at the top. It takes a lots of people to come together and agree that they're going to enable literally what's going on here. And I want to tell you very briefly about one of my all -time legal heroes, somebody who's like a true inspiration. Know if you've heard the story of Hans Lytton.

0:09:53 Thomas: Yeah? Hmm.

0:10:04 Matt: He lawyer. He wasn't Jewish.

0:10:05 Thomas: I don't think so. Hmm.

0:10:07 Matt: It's an important part of the story. Was one of the very first people to be sent to a concentration camp. And they did that because he was uno of the Nazis' worst enemies for three or four years before they took power. He was a labor lawyer, and his entire job was fighting the Nazis in court. That's what he did. He just took them to court over and over again, and he spent a lot of time litigating police violence and trying to protect labor unions from encroaching violence. As you might know, labor unions were also outlawed and the of all kinds of violence under Hitler. He actually, at one point, called Hitler as a witness in 1931 in a trial and cross -examined him for about three hours.

0:10:41 Matt: And if you can imagine cross -examining Adolf Hitler in 1931. so Hitler knew who this guy was. He hated him so much that he would not let anybody say his name in his presence. And Hans Lytton was one of the very first people arrested after the Reichstag fire, like that night, they were ready to go. He was tortured, interrogated for years, and he took his life in Dachau.

0:10:11 Thomas: Wow. Wow, geez. Geez.

0:11:01 Matt: So I think that's, I mean, again, I don't want to have the point be hear that lawyers were the true victims of the Nazis. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that the people who stand in the way of these kinds of plans are going to be the first to go. And that's how it goes in these systems. And I think there is a reason that lawyers the subject of this 1933 act, because they know that lawyers can hold you back. And certainly lawyers and judges during the Trump administration were some of the only reason that some of the worst policies never made it were reversed.

It's a little bit of a tangent, but not really, because I'm trying to make the point here, the Holocaust didn't come out of nowhere. It wasn't just the Third Reich that came in and said, this is how it is now. They had to pass a series of laws to make it possible. You've probably heard of the Nuremberg Laws, right? Which legalized discrimination. Then something like Kristallnacht in 1938. I thought Kristallnak, when I first learned about it, before I read these books, was a spontaneous event. I guess maybe that's, is that your understanding of how it worked?

0:11:11 Thomas: Yeah, mm hmm. Yeah Yeah, I mean, I would have thought it was kind people just hating Jews in a way that's like, you over and, all you this happened.

0:11:59 Matt: Right. And that's... mean, obviously, they were channeling something that had been building for many years, thanks to the Nazis. But Reinhard Heydrich sent out a memo. This is what's really chilling to me. And it's actually in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the memo. And to see something like this, that's one of the things about the Rise and Fallout of the Three Reich, The Book, that really got me is all the way through, Schirer is using primary sources.

0:12:18 Thomas: Yeah.

0:12:18 Matt: He's using memos. He isn't using letters. He is using all these things that are very bland administrative documents to show you how they they did everything. And that is of interest to me as an administrative lawyer, who's somebody inside the system here who sees the way that memos can be used. And literally, this memo sent out to police chiefs all over the third rank. And it included things like, such measures are to be taken as to not endanger German lives or property, i.e. synagogues are to being burned down only where there is no danger of fire to neighboring buildings, buildings literally telling you how and where to burn down Jewish property, places of business and apartments belonging to Jews may be destroyed but not looted, i- it's just, it goes on and on. And of course, most chilling, as soon as in the course of events during the night, night permits the release of the officials required, as many Jews in all districts, especially the riches, can be accommodated in existing prisons, are to be arrested. So again, just going straight from here's how you destroy Jewish property, protect German property, arrest the Jews.

And this is all in a memo. I call this administrative violence, right? The people who just sit there at their typewriters and organize what's going to be carried out because somebody has to do it in these systems. The reason that I'm most concerned about Project 2025 is because that's what they're trying to do here, is organize as many people ahead of time to get these people into the right places. But I have to add this before I say anything about that. The first Nazi book burning was, was held at the Berlin Institute of Sexology, which was the leading academic authority on trans people in the world

0:12:28 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

0:13:44 Matt: At the time. And, you maybe the people know this, but it's really important, I think, to emphasize, given what's in this document and given the state of the right right now, how much Nazis resented the Weimar Republic's treatment of trans people, that they were giving them special ID cards, that there were giving those special rights and recognizing thing in a way that no other country, as far as I know, was at the time, another Western country.

0:14:04 Thomas: Sure when to jump in, but I've been so worried about this, you- comparison to what conservatives are doing around trans people for the last however many years it's been. I don't know, 10 years, it seems like. Don't think you can be too alarmist about that. Because the- of being not alarmist enough are so high that I'm not interested in worrying about like, oh, am I being too worried about like mass killing of trans people coming? Think you- you can be too worried about that.

0:14:28 Matt: You might remember last year at CPAC, Michael Knowles gave a speech in which he said that transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.

0:14:35 Thomas: Oh, but you see, he definitely didn't mean that any trans person would be harmed or anything. Thing so no sort

0:14:40 Matt: Didn't mean the people. He just meant the idea, the idea of the people, right?

0:14:43 Thomas: Of like if you said Judaism needed to be eradicated, no one would think you meant like actual Jews, right? Yeah.

0:14:49 Matt: Let's not have that thing anymore. He at CPAC this year, I mentioned it because he came back just a few days ago and said they stood by what he said and that it was just a kerfuffle. That's what he called it, a kerffuffle. We're quickly normalizing so many of these things. And that's the context here, because keep thinking about how nine years ago, in 2015, Donald Trump started his campaign by telling us that Mexicans are rapists and murderers and they bring crime. And that was shocking. At least I remember it being shocking. I remember people talking about it. And it was so shocking that people treated him like a joke and said there was no way he could win because he had just started a speech with that.

0:14:51 Thomas: Yeah yeah we

0:15:22 Matt: And, that is now a standard talking point about my clients.

0:15:26 Thomas: Don't- media doesn't even report on his speeches anymore where he says stuff worse like that than that, it's not even news.

0:15:31 Matt: Worse. Worse, but I think we should. So, I've got a few clips lined up and I just want to, just so we can set the context of why all this matters so much.

0:15:31 Thomas: Yeah is

0:15:36 Clip: Thank you, Monica. Thank you very much. And if you put me back in the White House, their reign is over. Their reign will be over. And they know it. And America will be a free nation once again. We're not a free nation right now. We don't have free press. We don't have free anything. In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today, I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who who have been wronged and betrayed. I am your retribution. I am you retribution, not going to let this happen.

0:16:12 Matt: So that is last year at CPAC, and I know that people probably heard these things, but I really think it is worth playing the next one,

0:16:18 Clip: We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible. They'll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream. The

0:16:45 Matt: There is Vermin about the interior threat from what he calls the deep state, from the people inside the government. And now, of course, we have to go to the outside. And that's the final clip here, the

0:16:53 Clip: Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from. And we know they come from prisons. We know they've come from mental institutions, insane asylum. We know their terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country, it's so bad. And people are come in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you can have.

0:17:19 Matt: That is literal Hitler talk. And I'm sure you remember when he said that, but that's literally something that was taken from Mein Kampf. And he denied that he had ever read Mein Kampf, which isn't really very helpful when you're, yeah.

0:17:21 Thomas: Yeah. I believe that, yeah. I don't

0:17:29 Matt: Yeah, certainly.

0:17:30 Thomas: Think he cracked open a book, had his reading glasses, let me check out this, uh, this fellow has to say, oh.

0:17:31 Matt: Absolutely. But think about what that means. It means he coincidentally came up with something that Hitler said. That's what he's trying to say.

0:17:41 Thomas: Well, he has speech writers. Yeah. Yeah.

0:17:43 Matt: Yeah, sure. Of course. But

0:17:44 Thomas: I I believe that Steve Miller or whatever, I believe that he's read Mein Kampf.

0:17:48 Matt: No doubt. No dot. And I think we to take this language for what it is. So my point with all of this, obviously, is this is the context. This is what What we're coming into as we're talking about a second Trump term, and we have the difference now, the reason that I'm so concerned is because in 2016, Donald Trump did not expect to win. Nobody thought he was going to win, he didn't think he was gonna win, he fired Chris Christie in the middle of it, who was supposed to be doing his transition planning, remember, said it was a waste of money, said that Christie wasn't doing anything, there's really no reason to have a transition plan. So, you know, 2016, they catch the car, are. That's what happens sometimes.

0:17:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:18:19 Thomas: It's been a few years, but I read, a you ton of the Trump books until it got boring, because there are so many, but that pretty much universally, that was the consensus, like he did not really expect to win.

0:18:24 Matt: Me too. Yeah. And And that means he wasn't planning a transition. And of course, nobody really expected him to win. So they didn't have the kind of backing that you would usually have when you're coming into office. There are any number of think tanks and organizations and Republican sort of systems in place, just as there are for Democrats, that can help you get started when you are transitioning into the presidency. And none of that was really there. So January 27th, just as an example of how poorly prepared they were, we all remember Executive Order 13769, which is popularly known as the Muslim ban.

0:18:35 Thomas: Yeah? Mm hmm.

0:18:59 Matt: Order was dashed out by Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, group of off -duty congressional staffers who were just kind of moonlighting. It was not run by DHS or DOJ or Department of State, that should have known about this order. Was basically just drafted up and released in the middle of the night and total chaos. I'm sure we all remember at the airports, there was all kinds of things happening that never should have happened. People were losing their green cards on the spot. We saw it everywhere, but

0:19:08 Thomas: Yeah yeah.

0:19:22 Thomas: We covered it on OA and it was so badly written that, didn't you work the first, what, one or two times. And then they finally got it right. They finally got the Supreme Court kind of signaled like, hey, if you want to do evil, you know, you got to write it this way. And eventually they got it, right.

0:19:25 Matt: Sure. Right. Yep.

0:19:37 Matt: And think about how much worse it would have been if they had pre -planned staff, If they had people that could write this, if they had people to go, go into DHS and DOJ and State ready to go on tap from day one, that whole thing could have been so much worse. And that's the thing, I kept thinking that all the way through Trump, as I was doing my work, of how much worse everything could have ben if these people knew what they were doing. If any of these people had any experience, had the first knowledge of how to actually be in the government.

So many of the people that ended up running the immigration agencies had no previous experience with actually running anything or being in immigration law. The that we're talking about this today, after all that preamble, is that Project 2025 is essentially a complete, comprehensive plan. It's not only a playbook, a 920-page playbook. But it's also, that's way too many pages, trust me. Is also a staffing effort. It with the playbook they re actually trying to make sure they can get people into place to replace up to 50 ,000 federal employees. And they're going to make that much easier to do.

0:19:41 Thomas: Mm hmm. Mm-hmm, yeah.

0:20:21 Thomas: That's a lot of pages, Chase. Yeah.

0:20:35 Thomas: You saying they're going to restore the professional civil service, Matt? Is that what you're saying?

0:20:39 Matt: That's what it seems like. That is the plan, I think, because the real mistake that they made was never thinking that Trump was going to win before and not supporting him. And

0:20:40 Thomas: Yeah. And there's another ingredient that was, there were a lot of mainstream Republicans that were willing to kind of, see you what was going to happen. There were some that even, you Know, I don't know how much I believe this, but there were some that were like, well, I'm going to be there because it's better to have somebody in the room than not. And maybe we can control Trump a little bit. And actually they did a little You know, like you got to give some of them credit for they did some amount of controlling that's zero there now. Like nobody has any illusions. Nobody is pretending that he's going to be a normal None of those things are true and you filtered and sorted. So now it's like, nope, we're all on the same page here as to what's going to happen. What's going to happen is evil. Everyone who's, you with evil sign up and we have a plan.

0:21:05 Matt: Little.

0:21:28 Matt: Yeah.

0:21:28 Thomas: You scary how much different that will be.

0:21:31 Matt: This Project 2025, to be clear, is not written for Trump. It was written for whoever the Republican nominee was going to be. And I have no doubt that the people putting this together would have preferred DeSantis because they know he's predictable, he's controllable in exactly the ways you're talking about. He's a Harvard guy that they could get in there and he was ready to be a fascist. He just needs somebody to tell him how, right?

0:21:36 Thomas: Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. Some pudding cups on hand and they got them, you Know?

0:21:51 Matt: That's right. Just keep him in the room. Document, to being clear, I want to be very clear about this. It's very very important, not a product of the Trump campaign. It's a product of the Heritage Foundation, which you might know as a think tank that goes back to the 70s. And the Heritage Foundation used to be pretty reasonable as Republican think tanks go. Actually was responsible for helping develop what we call here in Massachusetts Romney care, which was the sort of first draft of Obamacare. And they were very involved in the idea of a health care mandate. That was something the Heritage foundation thought was a really good way to balance balance the health care compromise. Completely disavowed that now, and acting like that never happened. But even 15, 12, 15 years ago, the Heritage Foundation was pretty middle -of -the -road mainstream, and to say that it wasn't pretty far right for the global sense of the right, as things are in this country, but they were not what they are today.

0:21:52 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:03 Thomas: Yeah, I, I honestly didn't know they had gone this far full Trump I actually wouldn't have known that necessarily.

0:22:43 Matt: See where the wind is blowing, and their following it, and

0:22:44 Thomas: Yeah. It's some combination of that. And like, they've always been interested in what they could get away with. And it's like what they Could Get Away With changes. That's a question that we have some amount of control over, or at least, you the public has some amount Of control over.

0:22:50 Matt: Oh, sure. That's a a great point because this playbook I was telling you about, this is the ninth edition. This didn't come out of nowhere. First The one was released in 1981. It was 2 ,000 pages and it was for the Reagan administration and they took it seriously. The Reagan administration used it extensively in their own decision -making and they just kept publishing new editions. And I believe it was the sixth edition was only 165 pages.

And the reason for that was because so many of the things they'd been talking about for years and years had become mainstream policy. That's how successful they were. They took it down from 2 ,000 pages to 165 pages in 2005 because George W. Bush was doing most of what they wanted. About that, because that's how you win. Saw that, of course, with Roe v. Wade and so many other things.

You just come in with your ideas and you just keep year after year putting them out there. And you just get people on board. And this is my point, of course. This is a slow burn. This has a long developing plan. Not just the the Heritage Foundation in this case. There's a number of different organizations, kind of an axis of evil here for the current conservative.

Got 54 organizations on the advisory board for this project, billions of dollars accounted for here, some of them not accounted for. But things like the Family Research Council, you might recognize as being anti

0:24:05 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:06 Matt: The Center for Immigration Studies, my old friends who are some of the most openly xenophobic policymakers out there. The Eagle Forum, the Moms for Liberty, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Family Association, the Independent Women's Forum, which was actually created just to fight back against the Clarence Thomas allegations. They're on board for this. So yeah, I mean, it's just, it goes on. I don't have to, but everybody in charge of this thing has experience with the Trump administration. And you'll see MAGA people talking about Project 2025 like it's not far enough, making fun of the Heritage Foundation and saying it's still So Rhino isn't right. Yeah. I mean, what we're going to be talking about is still not enough for them, but there's a lot of dark money behind all of this. Leonard Leo's fingerprints are on this, right? The chairman of the Federalist Society, I think we all know is responsible for a lot of, they do have some nice fonts. You know, I was going to get into that, but yeah, got

0:24:06 Thomas: Cool. Okay.

0:24:48 Thomas: What's What's the money going into typography? Photography. Oh. That's how they get mad, everybody. They get the right font and Matt all of a sudden he's, uh, he's marching right along with him. He's got, why are you wearing a polo today? Oh, shit.

0:25:04 Matt: The best fonts. Yeah, no, but you been openly playing the dark money game. They know what they're doing. And, you know, they've made up the story about how George Soros is overtaking the world with his dark money.

0:25:15 Thomas: Of course.

0:25:16 Matt: So they get to do it, too. You might remember the I don't know how to say his name, but Barre Seed. Have you heard that name? That's a name that's worth looking up. It's B -A -R -R E -S -E -I -D. And he put in a one point six billion dollar donation, a massive amount of money into something called the Marble Freedom Trust. And that is quietly supplying dark money to many of these organizations.

And again, just following the money in all of this, this is something that clearly a lot of people care about. You've also, of course, got the America First Legal Foundation, which is Stephen Miller's joint, any and number of other organizations. So this is not some far out think tank that's just kind of putting out policy documents that nobody's ever going to read. This is the MAGA movement. This isthe far right. These are the people that want to run the country. And their stated goal is that it's not enough for conservatives to win elections. We're going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration. Gives four pillars that will collectively pave the way for an effective conservative administration, a training, and a 180 -day playbook, none of which, of course, the first Trump administration had to any degree.

0:25:16 Thomas: Yeah. Right. God.

0:26:22 Thomas: No, yeah.

0:26:23 Matt: A lot of focus here up front on culture war type stuff that's going to get people excited.

0:26:28 Thomas: Why?

0:26:28 Matt: Just want to read a part here. Next conservative president must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. Starts with deleting the term sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of of legislation that exists. That's quite a statement.

0:27:03 Thomas: It your First Amendment right to be like a bigot, kind of thing? Okay.

0:27:05 Matt: You're being denied your First Amendment right to say things about, You know, right. Yeah. What's really disturbing to me in light of what we're just talking about is this goes straight on from talking about how they're going to go to war with the woke, and they're gonna remove all this stuff from every federal regulation, statute. And they go straight into pornography, which is a little kind of a weird, hard turn. This sentence here, pornography manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, right? So the direct equivalent between pornography and trans issues and grooming, right, this is, they've been playing this game for a long time. And it has no claim to First Amendment protection. So the before, they're saying Americans are being deprived of their First Amendment rights because they can't say racist stuff. And now they're saying that anything that they can call pornography is denied First Amendment protection. So you is extreme stuff.

This is not the kind of thing you would expect to see in a transitional document, a presidential transitional document, but here we are. Again, just kind of setting the stage. I want to get into some of the policy proposals and what the ideas that they're coming up with, but this is who they are. This is what they want. I could read many more excerpts from all the way through this, and I will, a few other places, but just some really extreme language. Reason but that I'm talking about any of this is because I think they can actually pull it off in

0:27:09 Thomas: Racism, yeah.

0:27:32 Thomas: Yeah.

0:28:21 Matt: Way that they couldn't in 2016. Because when Trump talks about the deep state, he's talking about, obviously, the entrenched civil servants who are doing their jobs within the agencies that they're stationed in.

0:28:30 Thomas: Well, He's also talking, talking about something that doesn't exist, but yeah, yeah.

0:28:32 Matt: Well, I mean, it does kind of. I will say there is an immigration deep state. But it's not evil. It's just career bureaucrats who know how to run the system, right? And if you had those people being replaced every four years, it would be complete chaos. But it doesn't mean that they're getting together in smoke -filled back rooms and talking about how to run the government.

0:28:43 Thomas: That's What? I mean they don't have one, like dark, will, that's like, a you know, there's no deep state meeting room where it's just, something he wants to happen doesn't happen, it's because of the deep state kind.

0:28:52 Matt: Right. Yeah. Would be quite a group chat. That's a lot of people. His war with these civil servants, because, again, he did get a lot lot of internal resistance on a lot of these policies for very good reason, obviously. Were so many things that civil servants who were responsible, who want to actually carry out the mandates of their agencies, recognized as being contrary to those mandates. And a lot of things were just not popular. In 2020, there was an executive order that that didn't get a lot of attention that I want to focus on for a second.

Order 13839, October 31st, 2020, the last few weeks of the Trump administration, nobody's really noticing or cares because it has to do with federal hiring, which is not A very exciting subject. Created a new schedule of federal employees who are not protected in the way that other federal employees are protected. And there already was Schedule A through E. And those are essentially different hiring exceptions that are not in the sort of the usual competitive federal hiring process. And the purpose of that is that they can make sure the agencies can do their own internal internal hiring process for really important jobs, like immigration judges, lawyers, a lot of policy positions.

And so, within this exempt group of people, he creates a Schedule F, completely new exempt group. And it exempts from civil service protections any federal employees whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating character. Yeah. So we're suddenly removing protections from civil servants who are responsible for coming up with federal policy.

0:29:34 Thomas: So Okay, I think this is important to get back to, like, kind of OA, because talk about the interactions here. You one might think, all right, as shitty as this Supreme Court is, and it is, they're not a Mega court, like, they're not a full, they just aren't. There's, like, not five votes for full MAGA. People might argue with me on that, but I think they're wrong. I think there's five votes für really bad shit. Don't get me wrong. But I don't believe there's 5 votes for ful MAGA. What do you think about that, man?

0:30:30 Matt: Yeah, no,

0:30:55 Thomas: Of people might think, okay, sure, Trump wants to do all this stuff. And by the way, I don't even think it's Trump. I don't think Trump matters very much. I think it's entirely the people who know who Trump is and the fact that he cares about what he cares about, and what he cares about is attention and power and being and the guy. Um, I don't think he gives a shit about policy at all. I are certain things I think he's more comfortable railing on about for sure. But like, I don't, when it comes to actual like legislation, he's, he doesn't have preferences on like, you know, the tax rate. Well, okay. That might be a bad example. He might have preferences. I'm not financial stuff, but like, uh, the point is, this is what's so I think dangerous about all of this is because this is all they've solved all this. Like people doing this have solved all this. They know, okay, here's what we need to do. Honestly, for them, I bet you they want as little hubbub about the actual policy measures as possible. And I

0:30:54 Matt: No. Not necessarily. But exactly. Yep.

0:31:43 Thomas: Think you at the beginning, they do want those cultural flare -ups, those cultural battles so that they can keep people angry, keep people distracted. And then in the background, they can do all this stuff. Now, that's my interpretation of what's going on. Let me know if you disagree.

0:31:57 Matt: No, I'm with you.

0:31:59 Thomas: So one might wonder if, we protected somewhat by the court? Because a lot of this stuff, protections for trans people. We even had Gorsuch, you Know, with that textualist ruling where he upheld protections some based on gender identity, right? Right. I Bostock. Yeah. Bostock. You might think, OK, there's going to be some amount of protection here. There's pretty established law on a lot of this stuff. So what are we talking about? If he wants to discriminate against trans people or whoever, if these people want to discriminate against certain groups of people, won't they be protected to some extent? But is that where whatever the Schedule F comes in? I mean, is there some way that they get around that, at least with regard to like federal hiring? How does this work?

0:32:13 Matt: Bostock.

0:32:38 Matt: This gives gives them their best shot at an end run around the courts, because these positions are lawyers and policymakers. So you're going to get, I hesitate to say the best and brightest of the MAGA movement. I'm not sure if that's possible. But the people who have been doing the most thinking, I guess I'll say about this, instead of just slotting in the kinds of people that kind of threw the Muslim ban together, you're gonna get the very best they have who are ready to take these jobs. And so you're to have the best possible setup to the courts. And remember, remember, of course, that we're going to get a bunch of federal appointments.

Certainly, we're gonna get a bunch of new Trump judges, and we've already got plenty in there. They're gonna know where to to strategically do a lot of this. He's talking about trying to break up the Ninth Circuit. Remember, that was an obsession of his, and that could certainly make some difference, things like that. But, you know, the courts, no doubt, are still going to be our last line of defense. There are all kinds of ways to undermine the courts. And these people in these places will set these policies up in ways that they were not able to be set up for for the best chance of success.

0:32:50 Thomas: Yeah.

0:33:31 Thomas: But What does the schedule F do exactly?

0:33:33 Matt: The point is to make sure that you can fire people as easily as possible. This makes all of these people who were previously protected into at -will employees.

0:33:37 Thomas: Okay. I see. So it's not about like, oh, we can fire trans people exactly. Is it? Or is it more like, hey, this is how we're going to as quickly as possible, because this is a massive workforce, right? So this is How we're Going to Filter Out Anyone Who Knows What They're Doing and Is Possibly Good and Filter In The Evil People As Fast As We Can.

0:33:59 Matt: It's ideology. You're just going to be hiring for ideology. Now, you can actually go and take, and I have this pulled up. Let me make sure I've got it somewhere. If you want a job right now in the Trump administration, you could apply on the Project 2025 website. And I'm going to read you a little bit from that application once application is pretty much what you'd expect. Starts with, select the option that best describes your political philosophy. And, it ranges from traditional conservative to paleo -conservative. Those are the options. Yeah, those are like the really unreconstructed Pat Buchanan types, I think. But there's also, in there, they do helpfully throw in moderate, liberal, and progressive. That's as far left as they can possibly imagine being progressive.

0:34:00 Thomas: Okay.

0:34:24 Thomas: Paleo conservative?

0:34:36 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:36 Matt: And obviously, you're not getting an interview if you select one of those. But I mean, this is like traditional conservative, fiscal conservative, social conservative, neoconservative, paleoconserve. Those are your other options, besides the three you shouldn't pick. Next question is, briefly explain your choice of philosophy. Name one person, past or present, who has most influenced the development of your political philosophy? Put Karl Marx and see what happens. Name a book that has most significantly shaped your political philosophy, and please explain its influence on your thinking. Name one living public policy figure whom you greatly admire and why, right? So this is all obviously oriented at getting the most extreme ideologues they can. And if you want to go to the website and fill it out yourself, you're certainly welcome to have some fun with that.

0:35:13 Thomas: Yeah, I might do that.

0:35:14 Matt: Just don't use your actual email address And don't give them your phone number.

0:35:19 Thomas: No. Then I might get calls that are worthless so

0:35:23 Matt: But from the worst people on earth. Know, my point is obviously that Project 2025 is ready to hand the Trump administration a bunch of people along with a playbook. And the Trump administration has said that obviously this is not their policy. They don't want people to confuse what 2025 is doing with what the Trump administration will do. But this is going to be very influential because it's a lot of the same people that will end up working in this administration.

It's a lot of people that already did work in this administration. America First Policy Institute, which is Stephen Miller's, more in the Stephen Miller side of things, have some plans to which are pretty evil and bad as well well, but I'm focusing on 2025 because it seems to be the best organized and has the most direct money behind it and has ideas that probably have the most chance of succeeding.

The Trump administration specifically said these reports about personnel and policies that are specific to a second Trump administration are purely speculative and theoretical. They're just merely suggestions, right? They just want you to think that for now. But they're putting a lot of work into this, and I can't think that it doesn't go somewhere. That, be clear, before we talk about any of these policies, that to me is the really scary part about this.

Because we already saw during the Trump administration, the way that he abused the Federal Vacancies Act, which again, the stuff, Federal Schedule F and the Federal Vacancies Act. None of this is very sexy. This isn't child separation, right? This is how you get to child separation.

0:36:36 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:37 Matt: Is how you get the people that will do the worst things.

0:36:38 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, the more boring it is, the more I'm scared of it because I know how our public works and I don't even blame them. It is an effective fascist tool that I never, like, as a kid kind of learning about this stuff vaguely in school, I truly never would have guessed that this is how it works. A combination, like, of it being so ridiculous that you don't take it seriously sometimes, and then also you're so overwhelmed with just the horrors that you're like, "Yeah, I guess we don't have the bandwidth to care about this particular evil at this time." Like, that happens so often.

0:36:42 Matt: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

0:37:12 Thomas: And I don't even know what the solution for it is because you truly can't be be as alarmed as you need to be all the time about this. It's like physically impossible.

0:37:21 Matt: You can just be be informed. The best thing you can be, I think, is just to know what they're doing and to tell people about what they'RE doing.

0:37:26 Thomas: Thing we can do that I'm really looking forward to trying to be able to help with as a show is really point the light, shine that flashlight where it needs to be, maybe at a certain time, you know, and triage properly, uh, what, what think is getting missed, so I'm glad we're doing this, you know,

0:37:37 Matt: That'S right. Exactly. The thing. I want to go beyond the headlines on this issue because digging into this document, which again, I could probably do three or four more episodes just on this document. Some of these ideas, some of these policies go deep on them. Yeah, it has 920 pages. Let's talk about Ken Cuccinelli for just a second because he fits into a lot of this. Do you remember that name? Used to call I don't let me read you just from his Wikipedia, because this is very telling the way they describe him. An American lawyer and politician who served as the senior official performing the duties of the deputy secretary of Homeland Security from 2019 to 2021. He also served as the principal deputy and senior official performing the duties of the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Notice the phrasing there. There.

0:37:50 Thomas: Long enough uh Who's that again? I can't remember what he did now.

0:38:24 Thomas: Yeah, because, uh, the appointments thing where it's they not have one because they couldn't get Senate confirmation or something, yeah.

0:38:30 Matt: Knew they couldn't. He wasn't a very unpopular person. And all the people that Trump was more putting in for these were unpopular. And so Trump was playing games with appointing them to a position that didn't need senator approval, and then just kind of maneuvering the puzzle pieces around.

0:38:31 Thomas: Yeah.

0:38:42 Thomas: Having them do the duties, that's right, oh,

0:38:44 Matt: Then moving up the chain and basically trying to use these vacancies to do emergency appointments and move people up to the point that you had. Here's an interesting fact that is still true. ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has not had a congressionally vetted and approved director since January 20th, 2017.

0:39:00 Thomas: Yeah, who?

0:39:01 Matt: Seven years. Four out of 18 ICE directors were ever confirmed by Congress. I just confirmed that with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. Good immigration follow. Made this point. I just need to get the numbers from him because I certainly knew that, but it's been seven years. And the same with these other agencies where they just kept slotting in people and not going through the process. There's a reason that these positions need to be confirmed by Congress. We really need these people to be vetted. We need to know who they are. I'm just making the point about Cuccinelli because he figures into this Project 2025, of course, as well.

This is how he was doing it before Schedule F. This was how he was getting his people in, people with unpopular ideologies, people who would never pass these tests otherwise, by just playing games with the Federal Vacancies Act and seeing if anybody noticed. At one point, a judge did notice about Cuccinelli, and he issued a 55-page decision that Cuccinelli not be considered to be the actual director of Homeland Security no, a lot of his stuff got undone. Think more than once, but they just completely messed it up. Even their attempt to get around the Federal Vacancies Act was wrong. Actually, that whole thing, the Federal Vacancies Act could probably be another episode. I won't go on too

0:39:15 Thomas: Yeah.

0:39:25 Thomas: I Vaguely remember this, did it work? Yeah.

0:40:05 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:05 Matt: Much more about it right now. But that's my point is that Trump has been playing these games the whole time. But

0:40:09 Thomas: Well, one of the first ones, I mean, it's not exactly the same, but kind of. Of the first things on the show was clear as Kushner, where we talked about like, hey, Jared Kushner can't be doing what he's doing. He's not supposed to be doing What he's Doing. Said, they well, if he takes a salary of zero dollars, I think they're like, that's good enough. And then, you know, Andrew would always point out like, no, it's Not. But somehow that's fine. Like nothing happens. It's a lot of that. Like the law doesn't law itself, I guess. I

0:40:19 Matt: Yeah.

0:40:32 Matt: Just Just no. And I mean, ironically, of course, they're talking about having these agencies be vetting agencies and be very strict about security and about all this stuff. But yeah, no, they can just choose apparently not to do things like make sure you have a security clearance before you take these these things. It's astonishing, but less and less so because these exemptions keep getting made. Talk about some of the policies in here. I'm not going to go through all of them today, maybe but I Ken Cuccinelli wrote the immigration section. That's kind of a fun thing about this document is every one of these chapters and sections is written by some heavy hitter in the Trump administration.

0:41:03 Thomas: Oh, cool.

0:41:03 Matt: If you get the whole, yeah, I know. Great. Some of our old favorites are back. Off the bat, Cuccinelli Cuccinelli starts by saying that it's time to combine CBP, ICE, USCIS, DHS, Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Department of Justice, Immigration Courts, the Office for Immigration Litigation. These are all very important agencies that are all separate right now. Wants to combine them into a standalone border and immigration agency at the cabinet level. So basically just supercharging DHS and filling it with all of these other departments. Advisor who had specialized in Nazi German history and said, you cannot put your immigration courts in the same department as the Immigration Enforcement Agency. You've got to have some separation because then we're pretty much getting to the Nazis. That's what Ken Cuccinelli is now doing.

0:41:51 Thomas: And you're saying that back person didn't want to be like the Nazis. Okay. Important clarification.

0:41:54 Matt: Bush didn't actually want to go that far. So DHS was separate from the immigration courts and remains, even though they're both in the executive branches. We're going to talk about someday, not too far from now. But idea the of combining all of these things into one thing, this is very indicative of the entire document. This is the kind of stuff they're talking about. The stuff that makes you just glaze over when you hear about combining five different agencies and how you're going to restructure them and which deputy is going to be in charge of which sub-agency, stuff really matters. It matters a lot. Just for fun, he also wants to put CBP back on horseback. I don't know why that's in here, but yeah.

0:41:55 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:42:23 Matt: You might remember the picture of the Haitian migrant.

0:42:11 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Oh. Oh right. Yeah yeah. I was just gonna say that. Yeah wasn't that? Okay. So is that one of those, in response to like getting some resistance or pushback to that image, they're like leaning into it or something, like would trigger us, yeah?

0:42:27 Matt: Yeah. Yeah, too apparently. So put them back on horses. It's not really subtle, but he does suggest, he knows, I think, that this is an overreach. This is way too much, but He suggests that maybe an appropriate third alternative would be just to consolidate ICE and CBP, two of our worst law enforcement agencies to form a combined border security agency. USCIS, which Cuccinelli used to kind of run illegally, wants to retrain that into a vetting agency to make it purely... Right now, USCIS is the legal immigration arm of DHS. It's the part that processes visas immigration applications.

There was a move under Trump to try to turn it into a national security organization, basically. Instead of seeing immigration as a net good, as something that we need to do and make sure it's done right, to see it as a defensive measure that we're keeping people out. That was a big change for USCIS because they're not ICE, they're not CBP. They're supposed to be the civil servants that just process immigration applications. And I was very concerned during the Trump years about the politicization of USCIS, because is what authoritarian governments do. They start to politicize not only their executive agencies, but their immigration agencies specifically. So that's a problem.

Um, to essentially cut funding to, uh, that's processing DACA applications and TPS applications and some of these other refugee applications he doesn't like, so not necessarily to eliminate these programs, but the easiest thing to do is just like a soft ending, and there's nobody actually processing the applications even though you can technically file them. So I don't know if that would survive litigation, but that's something they can do.

Uh, wants to slash, uh, visas and visas for victims of crime, uh, repeal temporary protected status, pretty much all the things I would expect that they'd want to do. Uh, has been a policy in place for many years that ICE can't make arrests in sensitive places like schools and doctor's offices and courthouses, so let's do away with that. Obviously, uh, you interesting point about the immigration section, he doesn't even really talk about deportation, about mass deportation,

0:42:38 Thomas: Hmm. Huh. Yeah.

0:44:20 Matt: The way that Trump is. Really just about the bureaucrats and the violence of it all. That's, that's a phrase you're going to hear me use a lot, of Education will deny loan access to non-citizens and permanent residents and any other students. This is really bad. I hadn't heard a proposal like this before. Any schools that provide in-state tuition to undocumented people, you no longer get a Department of Education loan if you go to that school. So that's, yeah, that's just the nuclear option, obviously, for this. You know, there's a number of other things in these proposals that are just things they've been kicking around for a long time that didn't surprise me that much, the citizenship question. Of course, that's coming back, even though the Supreme Court said they shouldn't or can't. But, you know, let's just give another try.

0:44:21 Thomas: Yeah.

0:44:55 Thomas: At least that doesn't come in until 2030, right? Or wait, do they use it in many, I guess there's many, since, since, I, right?

0:45:02 Matt: But one. Maybe they will find a way to just shove it into these other ones. I don't know.

0:45:06 Matt: As you might expect, they don't have one. There's a lot of complaining about climate fanaticism and how we have to get it out of the government. The woke agenda has to be reversed and scrubbed, et cetera, et cetera. One kind of weird thing is having the National Security Council check for the expression of climate concerns when considering promotions for people in the military. Completely unrelated to military service, I would think, but you don't want people who have previously expressed any concerns about global warming. Of my favorite phrases in here was that under the next president, the Department of Energy should end the Biden administration's unprovoked war on fossil fuels.

0:45:37 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:37 Matt: The dinosaurs

0:45:37 Thomas: What, what fossil fuels ever do to us, wait?

0:45:40 Matt: I just thought that was really funny. Oppose eyesore windmills built at taxpayer expense and respect the right of Americans to buy and drive cars of their own choosing, rather than trying to force them into electric vehicles and eventually out of the driver's seat altogether in favor of self-driving robots. Very concerned about the self -driven robots.

0:45:57 Thomas: Is that Oh. That's, oh, okay, I wasn't

0:45:59 Matt: Direct quote.

0:45:59 Thomas: So that's The bad thing is the self-driving Why would that be Bad, we By their logic, we could still have self-driving gas guzzlers, couldn't we? Yeah.

0:46:01 Matt: Yes, we, yeah, apparently, I would love a self -drive car personally, but I just really want Americans to be able to drive. So the economic policy is pretty much what you'd expect. They want to basically turn taxes into a two -tax bracket tier. 30 % for the higher earners, 15 % for others. Others. But of course, corporate corporate tax, the most important tax, the one that they call the most damaging tax in the U.S. tax system, tax gets slashed down to 18%. Trump got it to 21%. It was originally at 35 % before the Trump tax bill.

0:46:11 Thomas: And All none of that matters, relative to, like, if we just need a minimum tax, you, effective tax rate is so much different than what is actually on paper So we shouldn't get hung up on like that number, it's more, yeah.

0:46:40 Matt: Yes, that's what you pay. Very true. Very true, very true. You're

0:46:45 Thomas: We need a maximum tax, yeah.

0:46:45 Matt: Right. Gains and qualified dividends at 15%, because of course capital gains, we have to protect those. Very important. The thing you work the least to get. You know, just to give you the idea of what they think is important here. They also call for legislation that would require a three -fifths supermajority to raise taxes at all. So basically just lock in that corporate tax break and it's going anywhere.

0:47:05 Thomas: I've Can they do that?

0:47:08 Matt: I don't know. I mean, it's a good question. Find out. Or not. Let's not find out, just other basic stuff that you would expect. The FDA should reverse, first, the approval of Mephepristone, which I'm sure you know is the subject of a lot of litigation right now. CDC should be broken up into separate agencies, and they want to basically make it as hard as possible for the CDC to do anything like they did during the pandemic to protect us. Department of Justice chapter is my favorite. It's written by Gene Hamilton, one of the most extreme people in the Trump administration responsible for family separation, the revocation of DACA, everything else. Right -hand guy for Stephen Miller, is a Fox News chapter that he's just going through and talking about, you know, again, pretty much what you'd expect, that, you know, how dare you prosecute people who protest abortion clinics, but not prosecute Antifa, right? That kind of thing.

0:47:09 Thomas: They Prosecute Antifa, but

0:47:50 Matt: Do, yeah, for sure. Literally gets into oppression of Hunter Biden's laptop in this document, right. I mean, this is how, because they're talking about how the FBI is completely out of control and it's time to rein in the FBI. Now, I don't have a problem with reining in the FBI. Yeah. The wokest guys in government. Yep. I'm okay with reigning in the FBI, but this is pretty extreme what they're talking about. And the reasons they're talking about doing it are concerning.

0:47:55 Thomas: My god. Oh. Yeah. Those wokest Yeah. I For one, think Molder is given way too much leeway in his investigations.

0:48:11 Matt: It's true.

0:48:14 Thomas: Other than that, that's my only issue there. Yeah. Pretty much.

0:48:16 Matt: He's just never told no, ever. He just gets to go and do whatever. Yeah.

0:48:19 Thomas: Oh.

0:48:23 Matt: And of course, all the way through this, there are multiple, the word abortion appears in this document 198, so of course all kinds of restrictions on reproductive freedom that you'd expect. Lots of references to genital mutilation of children and transgender hate all the way through this thing, um, he back an idea that Bill Barr had proposed near the end of the Trump administration, that the federal government should prosecute prosecutors, should prosecute local DA's who are refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions. Now of course, yep, yep, and, uh, and also I don't know where this is coming from, but particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to to force the law against criminals based on the left's favorite defining characteristics of the would-be offender, race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, et cetera. You know that policy.

0:48:49 Thomas: It's like sanctuary cities Hey. Tell you what, fine, you know what, you can have that one because that doesn't exist, so sure. A bunch of woke prosecutors saying, hey, if you're black, no crime, no crime was committed, yeah, that, that's real, yeah.

0:49:10 Matt: Yeah. And trans people have a license to kill, well -known in Boston. Right. This is all the stuff you'd expect, but it's stuff that in the the past, you might have expected from a much more fringe source than the Heritage Foundation. Institute, getting the idea here. We're talking about finding a whole bunch of ideologues, tens of thousands of them, to carry out extreme policies that are some of the the worst things you can imagine being proposed. And there's plenty more. And like I said, I think we could just go into another episode worth, but it's way too many pages.

0:49:18 Thomas: Yeah.

0:49:41 Thomas: It's a lot of pages, Matt, I don't know how you could ever Is there an audiobook, book read by Satan chapter, five, we think, yeah.

0:49:50 Matt: I did actually find a Satanist analysis. Yeah. Whole thing really comes down to what's always been called the unitary executive theory, right? The idea that the executive branch is the most important part of government. I'm sure you've talked about it before or heard about it before, but really leading with it. So I do want to end some hope and some things that I think we should take away from all of this, a great book called Democracy in Chains by Nancy McLean. If you're not familiar, really good read, absolutely recommend everybody listening. And she gets into a lot of how we got here with the right and with the conservative movements, and what happens when you have movements that recognize economic liberty is the only kind of liberty. It's just, that's it. That's the only kind they care about, because generally these policies are written by people who have all the other kinds of liberty already. So, right, they're doing fine.

0:50:01 Thomas: Yeah.

0:50:33 Thomas: And They have economic liberty, by the way, as well, quite a bit of it, but they're like but I could have more money

0:50:38 Matt: Quite a lot, quite a lot. And she quotes Louis Brandeis, who of course had plenty of money himself, Court justice, who said, we may have democracy or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. Point that she she makes all the way through this book, the real takeaway from her book, is that these people are well aware that if we knew what their policies would result in, we would not vote for them, even some of the most extreme people. If they actually knew that this was going to lead to economic immiseration, Tyler Cowen in the book is quoted as saying that partial shanty towns are the inevitable future under his policies, right? The libertarian economist, that we should just accept that under these policies that some parts of America will not have clean drinking. And that's fine because they could just, it's already true, but much more so. And we're going to have something that you can call shantytowns, you know, you'd see in lots of other countries in this country because that's the cost.

0:51:19 Thomas: That's already true. Yeah, we're like Amazon will own entire towns, it's already, we're already close, like, it's not, not that far away. It's not, it's I'm just, my only point is, like, it's not alarmist, it's already kind of here. Oh.

0:51:32 Matt: Right? Yeah. It's here. It'S definitely. And you've got people like Paul Ryan saying that free school lunches. And again, Paul Ryan at this point looks like a moderate, right? But

0:51:43 Thomas: Yeah, he's AOC at this point, what

0:51:43 Matt: Right. He ran with Romney, right. Right. So but said that free school lunches leave children with a full stomach and an empty soul. Stupid kids. Empty souls.

0:51:55 Thomas: An idiot, what, yeah. Hunger is really what feeds the soul or something, I

0:51:56 Matt: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Or you could have an empty stomach and An empty soul that's an option. You know, there's something that she quotes somebody in Democracy in Chains. And I've been thinking a lot about this quote since I read it. I actually, tell you who said it, but it was actually somebody on the right who said at it. Our studies and what we have seen is that 10% % of any country in the world can change that country if they have the right strategies, if they put their differences aside and come together. And I got to tell you, I believe that. It's certainly true for the right.

They have their plans, but it's true for everybody else too, for people of conscience who don't want to see these things happen and do not want to the government taken over by the most extreme people around. So I will double down on what you're saying about not just complaining about Trump. I think I'm done complaining about Donald Trump. We've got plenty of Trump to talk about. We're going to have to to follow Trump because it's happening, because we're seeing unprecedented criminal prosecutions that we've never seen before, unprecedented civil judgments that we'd never seen against a former president. But this is just so much bigger, obviously, than Trump.

0:52:01 Thomas: Yeah. Well.

0:52:21 Thomas: Not Not Only that, I for nothing, if Trump for some reason can't run, I worry that Republicans have a better chance of winning. And they're going to do this no matter who the Republican is.

0:52:58 Matt: So Absolutely. That's right. And because they're a nonprofit, they've been very careful to say this is for whoever the nominee is. We don't support Trump. But no, thing, is I think DeSantis would have a much better chance with this, not that he's in the running anymore. But I've been saying for years, they just need need a younger, more charming family guy, you know, that they can step up and say the right things, especially a good Christian guy. I think they'll go a long way. Again, do want to leave with some hope here. I do believe that all of this can be reversed, that it could be stopped. We're not there yet. Haven't reached enabling act territory, and I don't think we need to. Would really encourage everybody listening to just talk to other people about this stuff, not just complain about Trump, where we're past that point. About how we got here, what this actually looks like, what these plans are, what these people are trying to do in detail so people understand what it actually is. And you yourself, I would strongly advise, not you, well, maybe you too.

0:53:42 Thomas: Who, me? He's talking to me, everybody.

0:53:46 Matt: Yeah, no, Thomas, you know what? You can do it too. I think that you'd be a great candidate for office. I don't see any reason that you couldn't run for, well you probably couldn't actually, that is a good reason not to vote for Thomas Smith because because we'd lose the podcast, but other than that. We're going to be talking pretty soon to my good friend, Megan Coleman, who's a state senator in Rhode Island. And she's one of my heroes, personally. She's very inspirational to me. And She's a regular person who ran for Senate and is doing amazing work in Rhode island, just doing what she does, living modestly and working very, very hard. And I got to tell you that a state Senator that we elect this year in 2024, 2024, that could be your federal senator in 2028.

0:53:50 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Got nothing but time. What am I doing? I just twiddling my thumbs all day. Shit. I should run for something.

0:54:18 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:54:29 Matt: There's no reason it couldn't be. You know, a a promising promising young city councilor elected in 2024, could Be the best governor your state ever had by 2028

0:54:36 Thomas: We've Overworked podcaster Master could be your next president.

0:54:40 Matt: That's right. Yeah, a voice you trust. There's really no reason at all that the president of your

0:54:43 Thomas: No, there absolutely isn't. There's know, we got that lesson all through ever since 2016, at least me, you so true. These aren't special people. They're not at all. They're the opposite, actually. Oftentimes, they're not special. You can do it. If you're listening, you can actually do it, and some Some have, like you've heard of the AOC. I mean, she's pretty extraordinary, but like she was a bartender, you don't have to be, uh, wealthy, you generation Kennedy or something like you, you can, you can, you can do it and you can start local and you can start small and it matters. They're probably more than anything, actually.

0:54:57 Matt: More of them I've met, I'll tell you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:55:22 Matt: Sure. Absolutely. I mean, the president of your local school board right now that you elect in 2024, there's no reason that person couldn't be president of the United States by the end of your lifetime. No reason at all. They just need to get a start. What we're facing down right now, the thing that everybody is complaining about, the fact that we have two very elderly men running for president, that does not have to be our world. Just need to generate this new crop of people. New generations need to rise up. It can be done. I And just want to leave on that bit of hope, because if you don't want to run yourself, and I certainly understand that, there's somebody in your neighborhood who wants to run. There's somebody near you that you can help to support with your money and your time. And federal politics matter, but you're much more likely to make a difference at that level. And I really want to encourage people to do that.

0:56:02 Thomas: Absolutely. Let us know if you do, you us your success stories or your, yeah, I mean, seriously, shoot us a message or something if this is something you've gone through. I know a lot of people have. Yeah.

0:56:05 Matt: Yeah, we're here for you. On the show. We'll talk about you. Maybe we can help you out, if you're in one of those areas that really needs better representation. We're here for you.

0:56:18 Thomas: All right, Matt. Well, gosh, this whole thing really sucks. It's almost like we can't mess around with this whatsoever. We can't, we can'T do it. I could yell for hours about this, but I don'T think it's fruitful because the same thing over and over. We cannot let this happen. Amount of complaints about like, well, but shouldn't we get a better candidate? Yeah, no, we should. Absolutely. All that's true. Doesn't matter. There's one way, uh, at a time at a given time, there's one way to not let this happen. And whatever that is, you need to do it. It's just as simple as that. Whatever stage we're at.

0:56:48 Matt: Even talk about Agenda 47, which is the Trump administration's actual plans, because I don't think they're worth talking about because they don't have anywhere near the level of detail. But again, none of this is inevitable. It just doesn't have to happen and you can stop it.

0:56:56 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Well, thanks so much for listening. I'm Um, looking forward to more. I I'm sure you have, you know, about 700 pages you didn't get to of this, but we'll see if we want to cover this again sometime. But support the show, patreon.com/law, and forward to T3B on Wednesday, everybody. Play along where you can, and been a lot of fun. So, all right, Matt, thanks for your time here, and we'll see everyone really soon.

0:57:06 Matt: For sure.

0:57:21 Clip: This podcast is a production of Opening Arguments Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved. It is produced and edited by Thomas Smith, who also provided the fabulous intro and outro music used with permission.

0:57:38 Matt: You then. Going to say it's the godfather three of Reichs, but that doesn't quite work.