Project 2025, Six Months Later

Transcript

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

0:00:02 Jenessa: You're not supposed to get complimented for not doing things that are blatantly illegal. Am I out of my mind?

0:00:18 Matt: It's estimated that by the end of the year that Elon Musk might go down as one of the biggest killers in world history.

0:00:26 Matt: We're making government run like a business, folks. Firing everybody.

0:00:32 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1181. I am your introducer. Yeah, that's a good question. What should I call myself on these ones? Well, I'm Thomas, still on sabbatical for Mondays and Fridays for the time being, but I want to be able to introduce Matt and Jenessa occasionally and tell you what we're going to talk about. So you might remember Project 2025. You know that thing that didn't exist, and if it did, it had nothing to do with Trump, and what are we all complaining about and I don't get what we're all so hysterical about and won't we shut up and Trump said he wasn't part of it so why don't we believe him? What's wrong with us? Remember that? Remember that! Well, how's that going? Well, I mean, according to who, I guess, but according to you and I, perhaps not great, but Matt wanted to check out just how not great. Matt wanted the progress of all the things, of all of the things they wanted to do in Project 2025. How's it going? Where are they at? That's what Matt and Jenessa are here to talk about today. So we'll do the usual thing where we take a little break, which you can avoid by going to patreon .com slash law, supporting the show, supporting the growing team. If you like what we're doing here, if you want to help fight back against things like Project 2025, we'd be honored if you'd support the show. All right, after this break, Matt and Jenessa will be here to talk about Project 2025.

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0:01:50 Matt: Jenessa, what's up?

0:01:51 Jenessa: Hey, Matt, how you doing?

0:01:52 Matt: We're going to hang out and talk about our favorite subject, which is the creeping fascism that's taking over the United States.

0:01:55 Jenessa: So fun.

0:01:59 Matt: I keep saying creeping, but we're six months in here, and it's pretty well here. It's in view.

0:02:03 Jenessa: Sprinting? Forward rolling?

0:02:04 Matt: Yeah, yeah. It's not crawling anymore. It's on two legs. I wanted to check in. We're recording this six months exactly after the Trump administration got started, after a whole pile of executive orders were signed. And I want to check in on how the first six months have been going in terms of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, colon, The Conservative Promise, a document produced by the Heritage Foundation. Now, Project 2025, we were aware of it for about a year and a half before the election, but it really started to take off summer and fall around the time of the election as people started to realize that they actually did have an evil plan to take over the United States. They have this long -ass 920 -page PDF document that anybody can read that tells you you exactly what they're going to do. So we did an episode on it back before Trump was elected, warning people, some of the general policy stuff that was in there as well as what they were going to do, and I think this is a great time to kind of check in and see where it's at. How's it going? Because the thing that's different about this, this is published by the Heritage Foundation, which of course, as we know, is one of the far -right organizations that is running America.

0:02:05 Jenessa: Cartwheeling? No. Yeah,

0:03:03 Matt: What do you know about the Heritage Foundation?

0:03:04 Jenessa: It's interesting. They came up in my classroom when I was teaching about IQ testing in white supremacy, that they fund a lot of that research. So they are connected to the Pioneer Fund, which funds that research, my initial exposure to them was as obliquely connected to white supremacist organizations, then they ended up in the news quite a bit. So it was interesting for me.

0:03:18 Matt: Surprise. Yeah, Yeah, the Heritage Foundation is associated with all kinds of nasty stuff, and they are significantly funded by our friends at ExxonMobil and Walmart. The thing is, they've been advising conservatives since, I think, the 70s, and I went back and looked. The original Mandate for Leadership is a document they've released every year, and it's not been that exceptional, because it's basically just like a set of policy ideas for the president when they come in. The original one was actually 1980 for Reagan.

0:03:53 Matt: They accomplished about 60 % of the things they recommended to Reagan. The difference this time is that the people behind Project 2025 were very frustrated with the first Trump administration because there weren't enough loyalists, there were too many things in the way, too much law and regulation, too many non -Trump people. So when we talk about Project 2025, we're going to be going through some of this document and talking about the ideas they had that are being implemented. Project 2025 is actually four things.

0:04:17 Matt: There's a personnel database. They started putting together resumes and getting people ready to slot into places. This has never been done before. They've never done anything like this with a new conservative administration. It was the playbook itself, and it was a series of training courses. And then there's the secret playbook, which has been referenced multiple times, but has never been released in public. So we don't even know what's in the secret playbook. Yes.

0:04:37 Matt: Good times. Russ Vought has mentioned it. There was this hidden camera meeting where he talked about the secret playbook that's the one that they're using to really get things done. So far as we know, I know this all sounds like conspiracy theories, but you can hear them tell us about it.

0:04:48 Jenessa: And that's never leaked with everything else leaking out. Wow.

0:04:50 Matt: Yeah. You'd think the giant document labeled secret playbook.pdf would have come out by now, But no, they do have some operational security, apparently, over at Heritage Foundation. They made fun of us back before the election, before the inauguration. And, you know, Project 2025, you think it's some kind of evil right -wing octopus conspiracy. It's going to take over the government. Trump said specifically he'd never read it, which I believe. No doubt he didn't read it. But he also disclaimed knowing any of the people involved in it or anything else. Meanwhile, Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation who's responsible for Project 2025 wrote a pretty extreme Christian fascist type book that J .D. Vance wrote the foreword for with some scary language in it. All kinds of hooks between Heritage Foundation and Trump administration. It's hard to miss.

0:05:31 Matt: And it became pretty clear pretty quickly when the first round of executive orders came out that this is happening. We're going to be working today from a tracker, which I found to be very helpful. And I want to, I'm going to throw them a few bucks because I appreciate what they're doing here. It said project2025 .observer is tracking project 2025. And It's a nice little app that you can customize your view and figure out what different things are happening in different agencies. They're estimating, now this is pretty rough because there's a lot of stuff in this document.

0:05:55 Matt: They're estimating 46 % progress on Judgement 2025, and they're trying to keep track of things that have happened, things that are in progress, things that haven't started yet. And I did find more than some of these things, and we'll talk about some of them.

0:06:07 Jenessa: Mm hum.

0:06:07 Matt: But overall, I think it's a pretty accurate tracker. So I think it's worth checking in on some of those big things.

0:06:11 Jenessa: That seems fast. We're six months in and we're like almost halfway into this. Jeez.

0:06:18 Matt: Well, it doesn't help that the Supreme Court has pretty much signed off on everything that they've tried to do. Black was saying as of April, they're 15 for 15 on shadow docket emergency stuff. So not the kind of breaks I was hoping for. Overall, I mean, there's a lot of culture war and stuff in this. Obviously, Heritage Foundation has always been very conservative Christian. I don't know if you know this, but Heritage Foundation actually came up with the idea of the health care mandate.

0:06:34 Jenessa: In The ACA, the Affordable Care Act.

0:06:41 Matt: It was actually originally introduced in Massachusetts as Romneycare. And so Mitt Romney was all about it. But the idea that the taxpayers should have to have a buy -in in the health care system, they should be required to purchase health care, that original idea.

0:06:53 Jenessa: That seems like more on the moderate. Like it's something I expect from like your typical Republican. Well, I guess you mentioned that this started in the 80s under Reagan. It seems like Like there's been a serious qualitative shift in their approach here.

0:07:08 Matt: Yeah, they've gone all in for Trump. That was not necessarily inevitable. There are plenty of Christian organizations that did not want anything to do with Trump. But Heritage likes power. They're funded by ExxonMobil. They got to make those dollars count. Somewhere in here, they talk about criminalizing porn. They talk about using the Comstock Act to stop abortion pills. They talked about transgenderism all the way through. There's so much trans stuff in here just like you'd expect. And DEI, obsessed with DEI and the idea of criminalizing DEI to the point that it no longer exists. And of course that is happening.

0:07:35 Jenessa: This sounds like Clarence Thomas read this. This is word for word what's coming out of his mouth.

0:07:40 Matt: Yeah, and this is very much his line of conservatism. Very governmental hands off. These are the people who define freedom by economic freedom. There's a great book called Democracy in Chains I always recommend. And they make the point that the George Mason types, and there's a lot of them that are responsible for this document. When they did a review of the most economically free countries in the 80s, Chile under Pinochet was at the top. Yep. Because he'd privatized everything and that's all they cared about.

0:08:05 Jenessa: Yeah. If people aren't familiar, a super cool and chill dictator at the time. Lots of human rights abuses. That's pretty shocking. Wow. Wow.

0:08:16 Matt: Well, you know, you got to throw a few people out of helicopters to achieve economic freedom. Strapped generals to car batteries. That's an important part of economic freedom." Yeah, no, they were supporting. In Democracy in Change, she establishes that there was communication between these George Mason libertarian types and the Pinochet government. And like, they were very excited about their policies. That's what these people will do for economic freedom. Economic freedom ain't free, you know?

0:08:40 Jenessa: Right.

0:08:40 Matt: We've talked on this program quite a bit about Russell Vought. I think you're probably familiar. Director of the Office of Management and Budget, which previously was not a particularly exciting or controversial organization.

0:08:49 Matt: But Vought was of the opinion that OMB should be the air traffic control for the administration. Familiar with kind of how they've been doing that?

0:08:57 Jenessa: Not really. Who would have had that role in like normal times? Well, it wouldn't have been centralized, right? Congress would pass a bill saying who gets what under what budget, and then the agency would make more discretionary choices. Like there was not a centralized decision about all of this financial stuff, right.

0:09:14 Matt: Because that's been illegal since 1974.

0:09:16 Jenessa: Oh okay, okay. Okay. Hmm.

0:09:17 Matt: Technically, one of the things that Heritage is recommending is that they go after the idea of impoundment. Under Nixon in 1974, because they didn't like the way that Nixon was handling money, Congress created the Impoundment Control Act, which said essentially that the White House can't withhold funds. So when funds are designated, when they have to be spent, that's where they go. Russell Vought doesn't think so. Heritage doesn't thinks so. They think the president should get to decide where the money goes. So OMB, for the most part, is just like administering where the checks go and managing the different spigots. Not very controversial. It was never really a political office.

0:09:45 Matt: Russell Vought was director of OMB as of 2020, and he came back as now the director again. And he's had some time to think about it, and they should be the air traffic controller. He said that basically we can use OMB to identify pockets of independence and seize them, because this is all part of the unitary executive.

0:10:00 Matt: The idea that top to bottom, the government should be run by the president. Sounds good in theory, until you start getting to some of these independent agencies.

0:10:06 Jenessa: So normally they would be writing the checks and dispersing, but they would not have much discretion about where and why, right?

0:10:14 Matt: So for example, Department of Education is withholding $6 billion from the states. It's just like, we're not paying for any of this, right?

0:10:22 Jenessa: Right.

0:10:22 Matt: We're just going to stop paying for it. And there's a big lawsuit over the DOE stuff. We'll get to DOE pretty soon here. Deciding, just like with USAID, where they get to review every single contract, every single thing, and they're going to decide at the end of the day what's appropriate. There was just a showdown where Russell Vought was in front of Congress. And I don't know if you caught this, because the President was shoving through a rescission bill to take back certain funds that had already been passed. This is pretty unusual. Republicans are fighting this, and not enough, of course, but they were actually not happy about it.

0:10:38 Jenessa: I didn't. Huh.

0:10:48 Matt: It's one of the few Trump things I've heard republicans actually complain about and they were saying these are things we already passed you're coming back and asking us to undo them and vought's point was basically like well we could just impound it but we're asking you to take it back to rescind it unfortunately that includes public broadcasting which is a big thing in heritage foundation here all republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake conservatives will thus reward a president who eliminates this tyrannical situation the tyranny of big bird pbs and npr don't even bother to run programming that would attract conservatives.

0:11:19 Jenessa: Like conservative babies? I don't think that's a thing. I think they just kind of come out into Elmo.

0:11:23 Matt: Now I'm almost woke now.

0:11:26 Jenessa: Oh God. I love that rewriting of history too, when they say like, Republican presidents recognize this.

0:11:33 Matt: So yeah, you're right.

0:11:34 Jenessa: We've had one in the last 12 years who is the same person, and I don't know how, like, the Bushes felt about Big Bird.

0:11:43 Matt: Do you listen to NPR much? I don't listen to it much at all anymore.

0:11:45 Jenessa: I used to. I was really into Radiolab for a while there, and then my brain got overwhelmed, and I listen to, like four things now.

0:11:52 Matt: NPR news is really annoying, honestly, these days. It's just laughable to me when I see what they're saying about NPR in here, because I remember listening to the train strike that Biden narrowly averted. They covered it directly from the perspective of management and didn't even talk about at all a single thing that the people were looking for or why they were on strike. Because there were some really good reasons that railway workers were looking for benefits and pay raises. They didn't talk to anybody from the union. They didn't talk to any railway worker, they talked to people representing the railway companies. And they were explaining about why it was gonna be so bad for America if they the strike went forward. Yeah, I know. You can't call that leftist broadcast. Yeah.

0:12:26 Jenessa: You know, I hate to be that, like both sides, like fair and balanced person, but that just seems like irresponsible reporting.

0:12:33 Matt: Right. I guess, though, what they should have done was a whole election special about why the election might have been stolen. You got to cover both sides of that. This whole idea of what is conservative anymore. I mean, it doesn't even mean anything. So the good news, to some degree, is there's a lot of stuff in here that has not happened and may never happen, but there is quite a lot that has happened.

0:12:50 Matt: And I should talk about how they actually intend to do it. Because the interesting thing to me about it, that makes Project 2025 different, is that it's not just a set of ideas. It's a whole new approach to government and how we're going to do the ideas and how we're going to basically create government in our image. You might have heard, of course, a big part of that was the civil service. Schedule F, which Trump attempted to implement and Biden immediately canceled, he put it in pretty late. But Schedule F is just turning a bunch of people that work with policy into at -will workers. And And it's estimated about 50 ,000 people. Russell Vaught was basically saying, look, we're not trying to fire all these people. We just want to scare them. He used the word trauma a lot. Traumatized.

0:13:25 Matt: He just wants to bring them into line because he knows he can't replace them all. As of this month, I just found out that Trump has also created Schedules G, which is a whole new category. Non-career federal workers who will leave office when the president does.

0:13:38 Jenessa: So political, not appointees.

0:13:40 Matt: Loyalists, I think would be the word. People who are coming in with you and will leave with you, whose only job is to do your stuff. And think about how many things in government are supposed to be neutral and need to be neutral and not politicized, including all the stuff that I care about. Certainly all the stuff you care about, voting rights and disability rights.

0:13:57 Matt: That's what you need to do if you want unitary executive.

0:14:00 Jenessa: And when we're talking about moving them at will, really what that means is getting rid of their union, right? Because the union is what creates due process for their hiring and firing, or is that coming from somewhere else?

0:14:06 Matt: Following the law is obviously not the point of this and respecting labor. Labor law is not the part of this. So I know that there have been a lot of challenges. We're talking about where some of those are going and some of these agencies, but for the most part, so far, the Supreme Court has allowed them to fire whoever they want to. And that's generally been working.

0:14:24 Jenessa: I was really surprised by that. The recent order, murder they stayed an injunction that had stayed the firing so that meant that unstopped the stop of the firing. So people got fired and the idea that that's temporary is like what do you so they're just unemployed and you're gonna oh if we find that that was illegal we'll rehire you two years from now. Like no this is obviously unfixable if you fire them. It's just been done now no yeah

0:14:53 Matt: Most recently, half the Department of Education. You can't put that toothpaste -based path into. In the application for stay, I was just reading through the DOE step. Let's talk about education now, that they're actually saying that the irreparable harm to services is going to be minimal from hiring half the Department of Education. I don't know what they think these people are doing. So Trump is claiming that he's reorganizing the Department of Education, which he does have a statutory right to do.

0:15:15 Matt: And the Supreme Court took him up on that joke. So I looked at 20 U .S .C. 3473, and that allows the Secretary of Education to consolidate or reallocate resources and even to close agencies if she lets Congress know within 90 days. And of course, she didn't do that. Just to remind everybody, the current CEO, excuse me, CEO, for current Secretary of Education is Linda McMahon. Of course, the wrestling magnate, previously in charge of the Small Business Administration under Trump, and the last small business that she ran made her a billionaire. So I don't really know how that counts as a small business, the World Wrestling Federation, but she is an actual billionaire. DeVos probably was too.

0:15:54 Matt: Who better to run our public schools than actual billionaires? People who did not go to public schools and will never send their children to public school. Calls.

0:15:53 Jenessa: Oh, I'm sure right no of course not

0:16:01 Matt: In his appointment, Trump said that he was appointing her so that she'd put herself out of a job. It's an interesting theme with all the stuff with Project 2025, is you're putting people in charge of these agencies that hate them. Sonia Sotomayor wrote a very long dissent in the Supreme Court. And again, this is a shadow docket case. Like you said, it's an injunction. So this is not an actual merits thing. They're just deciding for now that they can go ahead and fire everybody. They didn't explain themselves as is their want these days. They just had a one paragraph kind of thing that didn't have much to say.

0:16:25 Matt: Very much like a lot of these other shadow docket cases, they're just cowards. They have absolutely no explanation. And then you get 19 pages of a brilliant set of minority dissent, naturally. And it begins when the executive publicly announces his intent to break the law and then executes on that promise. It is the judiciary's duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it. Good start. This is a Project 2025 favorite. This has been a conservative favorite for a long time, killing the Department of Education. As we know, Trump loves the poorly educated, and that was one of his campaign promises. She announced on March 11th that she was going to be reducing the department by 50%. It was at 4 ,133 staff members was January that was cut down to 2 ,183 by the time she was done. The big ones, Sotomayor points out the English language acquisition, because who needs to learn English? Institute of Education Science, Civil Rights Division, because he needs that, and Federal Student Aid. They closed seven of the 12 regional branch offices. They fired these people and locked them out, so they couldn't even pass on their assignments. They were just immediately locked out of everything, and anything they were working on was basically dead, which again seems like a huge waste of government resources. The 21 states were filing under 5 U .S .C. 702. I meant to talk about this, and we're just talking about it now because I already had it together here.

0:17:31 Matt: Using the Administrative Procedures Act to challenge, because you can do that not just for regulations as usually we use it in immigration, but you can do it for any kind of agency decision or executive decisions. I'm going to read you from the executive order. This is so dystopian. Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them.

0:17:50 Jenessa: What? Escape? I mean, I suppose one escapes school by not going

0:17:57 Matt: If we kill the Department of Education, you won't have to go to good schools anymore. Now, the idea, of course, is they're trying to send this money to the states, but now they're not sending it to the state. They're not even doing that, the $6 billion that they're withholding. As Sotomayor points out, and the lower court pointed out, of course, Congress gave the secretary a lot of power over this department, but not to just close it. She can modestly restructure it, is the phrase there.

0:18:00 Jenessa: Great right this doesn't sound modest to me. This sounds drastic and fantastic yeah sure

0:18:19 Matt: No, it's exactly what they wanted for many years, which is just to kill the whole thing. But DOE is a good one to start with, because that's an actual cabinet level agency created by Congress that Trump has just decided shouldn't exist. A lot of these other things we're going to talk about are just sort of sub-agencies still created by Congress. Many of them should not have been shut down or reduced.

0:18:38 Matt: This one is really something. Yeah, there's a separate suit about the funds.

0:18:54 Jenessa: And so you're saying this lawsuit it's the states arguing she should not have been able to take these actions firing all these people withholding the funds that kind of thing. Oh, okay

0:18:55 Matt: The one about the firing was actually just an APA claim that was brought pretty early on right after they fired everybody. That's what ended up in front of Supreme Court recently. As you said, it is completely moot because school is going to start in the fall and the first circuit is still looking at this. They may still take cert on it. We might end up having a full discussion of it, but this is pretty extreme.

0:19:12 Matt: To overturn this injunction, this 88-page order from Judge Myung Joon, I hope I'm saying his name right, in Massachusetts, a really great guy. I was looking him up because we've got so many great federal judges here. His motto is to be a human first and a lawyer second, which is very much the way that I do things.

0:19:26 Matt: During law school, he worked as the regional manager for a dollar store chain. Like, this is a real guy. Indeed, prior to the reduction in force, the department was already struggling to meet its goals, so it was only reasonable to expect that a reduction in force of this magnitude would very likely cripple the department. The idea that defendant's actions are merely a reorganization is plainly not true. I control F the word harm in his decision. It comes up 91 times.

0:19:45 Matt: There is so much harm going on here. But this is exactly what Project 2025 wants. This is a big one. So speaking of other things Project 2025 doesn't like, on the tracker, there is exactly one goal for the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Want to check that out?

0:19:59 Jenessa: Oh, no. Okay, our one goal for the cfpb it's listed as in progress uh abolish Oh, fun, cool

0:20:10 Matt: Yeah, kill it. You might know that the Trump administration is at war with the concept of independent agencies and the executive. And of course, this is their bugbear. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, Elizabeth Warren's pet project they really don't like I'm just going to read you from Project 2025 its status as a quote-unquote independent agency with no congressional oversight has been questioned in multiple court cases the agency has been assailed by critics by critics not us just critics as a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist non-profits politically aligned with those who spearheaded its creation this again is an agency that regulates payday loans and bad credit card deals and unconscionable car loans and things like that that, right? A .k .a. a highly politicized, damaging, and utterly unaccountable federal agency. It is unconstitutional. So you might remember the Supreme Court did actually find earlier this year that the CFPB is constitutional. They actually found that at originalist grounds. We had an entire episode about it.

0:20:58 Matt: Because they can't actually kill the agency, Trump tried to lay off 90 % of it. It's one way to go. That's been blocked so far. I think that's probably accelerating now. Found an AP report from not that long ago. They were talking anonymously to some employees about what CFPBA's been getting up to recently, and nothing. They're not doing anything. Employees are reporting they're basically just sitting around. The only time that they actually do any work is when the White House tells them to reverse sanctions or to close investigations of financial companies.

0:21:28 Matt: That's like the only thing they have to do anymore.

0:21:29 Jenessa: So there's supposed supposed to be an independent agency, which you would think would mean it doesn't matter what Trump says, do this, do that. They should just be able to go do things. Right. So like I can understand for the agencies that are not independent when they say, well, these are our executive priorities. Here's what we think is important to protect about the environment. And they make a bunch of bullshit. But when it's supposed to Be independent, like how is he even been getting this control.

0:21:57 Matt: Well, do you know who's running the CFPB right now?

0:21:59 Jenessa: Oh God.

0:22:01 Matt: Well, it's Russell Vought. So yeah,

0:22:01 Jenessa: I probably did once upon a time. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. So he's got OMB and CFPB.

0:22:09 Matt: I remember how Marco Rubio took over USAID because they were also doing the same thing to USAID, right? Just killing it.

0:22:15 Jenessa: So if your boss says don't do anything, then I guess like, what do you do?

0:22:19 Matt: Yeah, their fund, I just remind everybody funded by the federal reserve through a sort of an elaborate system that is not directly from Congress it's from federal reserve fees that was upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court but the recent funding bill signed on July 4th did slash some more of its ability to be funded you know they're just going after every direction they can for now what they can do is just tell the people who work there not to do anything ultimately project 2025 understands that it's going to have to be congress that abolishes it but they're recommending that it do as little as possible in the meantime and so far mission accomplished that's a win unfortunately for them

0:22:34 Jenessa: Great. No.

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0:24:45 Matt: So we got to talk about the Department of Justice. The section of the Department of Justice was written by Gene Hamilton. I don't know if that's a name that's familiar to you. Very familiar to me because he is one of Stephen Miller's right -hand guys for immigration. He actually was responsible, one of the architects of the family separation policy. He has a lot to say about the Department of Justice and the Project 2025 mandate for leadership. Third in the tracker, he's got 18 goals, nine are done with foreign progress. You've got stuff like rescinding the policy for DOJ's ability to subpoena journalists during legal investigations. They were not subpoening journalists, now they're going to again.

0:25:16 Matt: It's small but meaningful. Obviously, withdrawing from lawsuits that are seeking to uphold EMTALA, abortion rights, ending prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, 18 U .S .C. 248. They were calling all those politically motivated. And then, of course, there's the Pam Bondi memo, with which I'm very familiar, in which she basically said what DOJ does now is immigration. And that's actually something that Project 2025 wanted to do, to emphasize the importance of prosecuting immigration offenses. Simultaneously, Project 2025 wants more violent crime prosecuted. I'm not sure how you can full on go after both. Those are completely different priorities.

0:25:48 Matt: And they also want more death penalty, bloodthirsty people.

0:25:51 Jenessa: There's one in here that the significance of this sometimes gets overlooked, but it jumped out to me very early in the administration, reassign enforcement of voting rights from the civil rights division to the criminal division.

0:26:06 Matt: I was going to ask you about that.

0:26:07 Jenessa: So that serves two purposes. I utilize that sometimes in my job to say, hey, we're really struggling to get enforcement of voting rates for this person. We're not worried about money damages or whatever. All we want is for this polling place to be accessible, that kind of thing, and it's not happening. Help us out here. Let's report a systemic problem, that kind of things. And that would go to the civil rights division because that's your civil rights. If you move that to criminal, there's a very clear implication that the purpose is to prosecute election crimes, which are like none. And I think there is probably a tie in here with immigration that the implication is we have people voting illegally. Anytime they bring that up, they are always bringing up this myth of the immigrant coming in here and voting and they're all voting for Democrats and it's like fraud crime wave. Not only is there zero evidence for this, there is strong evidence this is not happening. This would basically make it impossible for me to turn to federal resources to enforce your federal voting rights. It's just going to have to happen on the state level.

0:27:21 Matt: The only federal voting rights that matter are prosecuting people that they don't think should be voting, which happens, you know, like a dozen times a year or something.

0:27:25 Jenessa: Apparently. Yeah. Yeah.

0:27:28 Matt: Quite a few high profile Republicans have been prosecuted for voter fraud recently. No.

0:27:32 Jenessa: This is not a partisan issue.

0:27:35 Matt: And of course the civil rights division, since you mentioned it, of Department of Justice is going into bizarro land, obviously. And this is recommended that they started prosecuting DEI, right? Very important to prosecute, not just to to find, but to try to prosecute people who are doing DEI, I guess, to find crimes.

0:27:40 Jenessa: What would that mean?

0:27:50 Matt: That's a great question. As I was reading that, it just kind of was one of those things that I'm reading, and I'm just like, that doesn't make any sense. I'm just going to keep reading.

0:27:58 Jenessa: Okay. Yeah, I don't blame you.

0:28:00 Matt: But it's a good question. Let's just find out what it says. Ensure the assignment of sufficient political appointees throughout the department. It's very important that we have it politicized as possible. The document is very clear about this, that DOJ should be a political appointment, like it should be a political office, and it should work for the president, that we should bring the FBI directly into line, not under the deputy attorney general, which they've typically reported to, but under the criminal division and under the national security division so they can be more closely monitored because their position was that the deputy Attorney General had too much other things to do. I mentioned that because they specifically say we need more political appointees in the civil rights division.

0:28:33 Jenessa: No, their status as an independent organization. I understand that from a like that's philosophically like supposed to be true. Is that official that they are like legally supposed to be independent? Is there a way to enforce that normally?

0:28:48 Matt: No, it's a norm.

0:28:49 Jenessa: Okay, it's just a norm that's broken here.

0:28:51 Matt: Yeah. I mean, in the same way that Kash Patel, you might remember from March, the FBI director was requesting a direct line to the president be installed on his desk. We specifically changed the law after J. Edgar Hoover to keep that kind of thing from from happening. The FBI director gets a 10 -year term, which is one thing that they want to try to overturn. That hasn't been proposed yet, but they do want to remove the 10 - year term and have it be another political appointee for the FBI, which was a really bad idea. We already learned that was a bad idea from J. Edgar Hoover, decades worth of J. Edward Hoover. The Civil Rights Division, since you mentioned it, reorganized and refocused the Civil Rights Division to serve as the vanguard for this return to lawfulness. The resources and moral support, using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education corporations and private employers were engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements so you know what that means discrimination against straight white people they

0:29:39 Jenessa: What do they think the word prosecute means? There's criminal where you prosecute people for crimes, and then there's civil where you sue people to enforce. Is that just a misuse or like what are they? What are they talking about?

0:29:53 Matt: Are going to use civil stuff too

0:29:55 Jenessa: Right, for enforcement. Is this just prosecute in the vague sense that Pam Bondi uses it? Okay.

0:30:00 Matt: Yeah that's right it might be but I think there was also some talk of prosecuting dei type stuff the fbi as you might know uh right now is about a third assigned immigration enforcement along with a lot of other agencies and bondi released a memo pretty early on saying that our job now is immigration that's what we're going to do. There's also the very concerning stuff that I've been following pretty closely, and this is recommended by Project 2025. This is something they've been obsessed with for quite a while. We're warranted and proper under federal law, initiate legal action against the local officials, including district attorneys, who deny American citizens the equal protection of the laws by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions. So they mean basically sanctuary policies.

0:30:38 Matt: And again, one of the directives is to withhold, and that's suggested with Project 2025 as well, to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities. That was blocked immediately under Trump. It was now blocked yet again by the same judge with almost exactly the same language saying I meant it the first time. We'll see how that goes when it gets up to Supreme Court.

0:30:53 Jenessa: That language of, like, denying equal protection, are they making an argument that the 14th Amendment bars sanctuary policies?

0:31:03 Matt: It's such a stretch. I've never understood this.

0:31:05 Jenessa: I mean, it doesn't make sense, but is that what they're going for?

0:31:08 Matt: That's what prosecutors do.

0:31:10 Jenessa: Yeah, they have discretion.

0:31:10 Matt: They choose whether or not to prosecute. I don't want to live in a country where they prosecute everything all of the time.

0:31:13 Jenessa: No, we'd all be in jail for dumb stuff all the time. Sure

0:31:20 Matt: I think they're trying to say that sometimes they refuse to prosecue things that are deportable or they treat people differently because they make it deported, which certainly does happen. I'm been saying for a while, I won't be surprised to see a prosecutor in Massachusetts, some of the blue state put up with charges sometime soon if they can prove that they're doing something to further sanctuary policies or police chief or a mayor I mean it's it's coming this is a pretty heavy spear they've got they put a memo back in march about preventing abuses of the immigration system which was targeted pretty directly at us uh immigration attorneys and project 2025 is asking for more vigorous anti -fraud program within the immigration courts to go after immigration attorneys who advance completely marital arguments in exchange for exorbitant fees I do know of attorneys who charge quite a lot of money to do not very much but that's attorneys in every field.

0:32:03 Matt: We do actually charge reasonable fees to make meritorious arguments. Immigration attorneys I know do not bring meritless arguments. That's just not a thing we do. But their idea about meritless is pretty scary. And I think that as they continue to chip away at asylum and everything else, we're going to see a lot of allegations about that. Wouldn't be surprised to start seeing bar complaints filed against attorneys just for doing their jobs. Project 2025 is recommending that they eliminate consent decrees against state and local police departments. These are things that have been in place for decades in some cases.

0:32:28 Jenessa: You remind me what a consent degree is

0:32:31 Matt: It's basically a court order that that requires DOJ monitoring of state and local law enforcement. Yeah, places like St. Louis. Yeah, we don't need those anymore. They're going to withdraw from those and no longer be monitoring law enforcement because we can trust them. Project 2025 wants DOJ to end brazenly partisan and ideologically driven prosecution of perceived political enemies. Who was it who said, to my friends, anything, to my enemies, the law.

0:32:56 Matt: That is their idea of politicization. Because obviously, you know, we saw with Eric Adams, they have no trouble politicizing this stuff. They are going to be pardoning all kinds of corruption. Corruption basically is like the front of the the line for pardons right now. This is its own kind of politicization, but they're obsessed with the Russia stuff, with anybody involved with Mueller, anything else that has to do with prosecuting Trump, even though it was for cause. We've already seen Pam Bondi fire quite a lot of the January 6th prosecutors. Recently this month, we've seen her fire the prosecutors working on Jeffrey Epstein's case.

0:33:22 Matt: Project 2025 was recommending that the US government stop doing anything to combat the spread of misinformation and disinformation. And that's a mission accomplished. That's already been done by the DOJ. They've ended those programs. We're talking about the independent agencies. That's a big one. So there's a case called Humphrey's Executor from 1933. So Humphreys was actually, kind of ironically, it was somebody that FDR was trying to fire who was keeping the New Deal from going into place. Humphreys Executor is about the FTC, which is actually back up in front of the Supreme Court pretty soon now and the same kind of thing. The FTC was pretty important for the New deal. And this guy was refusing to play along with the New Deal. FDR Was trying to Fire him and Supreme Court found that this was an independent agency on purpose and he couldn't be fired. This is something that they've been very concerned about getting overruled. In May, we talked about this a bit on the show, the National Labor Relations Board, I think it was the first time ever they fired all the Democrats on it.

0:34:08 Matt: The Supreme Court said there's like a certain sort of carve out for agencies that don't just have one head. I thought it was interesting, though, in that order in May, they specifically said you can't fire the chair of the Federal Reserve, just kind of like FYI. And now in July, we're hearing some noise about him trying to fire the Fed chair, Jerome Powell. So we'll see if they revisit that. The Federal Trade Commission is saying that's pending right now. These are agencies where you're only supposed to be fired for cause for actual malfeasance. These are agencies like the FBI, where it's a term that's supposed to outlast the presidency. It's a seven-year term for FTC. This is a really important part of the unitary executive, is they actually do talk about how there are no independent agencies. It's not a thing. It doesn't exist.

0:34:45 Jenessa: It's interesting because I'm used to new york state where the way we have have handled a lot of things, rather than having things be nonpartisan, is explicitly bipartisan, where there's a lot organizations, state agencies, where there is a requirement that a certain number of Republicans and Democrats be on it. And so you couldn't just do that. If you fired the Democrats, you'd have to replace them with other Democrats.

0:35:10 Jenessa: But it sounds like here you could fire all the Democrats and replace them your own people, or is he not going to replace them or wow right

0:35:18 Matt: I I don't think there's anything like that for these agencies we're talking about. So by law, this is not how it's supposed to work, but they're just going to argue this law is unconstitutional and that there can't be any actual independent agencies because they're all executive agencies. But these are intentionally hybrid agencies. As you're supposed to be. It's the point is you have to have some things that the president can't control, like the FTC and the NLRB. It's really bad if you have the executive in control of the Labor Relations Board. Generally, just like it's very bad if you haven't been in charge of the FBI, historically. We've learned that lesson.

0:35:47 Matt: I don't think they're gonna get too far with the sanctuary jurisdiction stuff, just based on how that went last time. But that actually didn't make it to the Supreme Court in time last time, so who knows? Who knows what happens this time? Stuff they haven't gotten going with yet includes, we talked about the Comstock Act. They want to eliminate pretty much every part of the FBI that they can eliminate that isn't actually part of The Statute. It includes the Office of General Counsel, because who needs that? The FBI doesn't need lawyers telling them what to do. We've seen what's been going on with DOJ. It's not good. Never been worse. And we talked recently on OA about how the branch of DOJ that's responsible just for defending the president's policies in court, about two -thirds of those people have quit now because they just can't find people to do it. And that requires as really good lawyers.

0:35:56 Jenessa: Yeah

0:36:30 Matt: Anything that other than a top -to -bottom overhaul, this is from Project 2025, will only further erode the trust of significant portions of the American people and harm the very fabric that holds together our constitutional republic. At a practical level, not reforming the Department of Justice will also guarantee the failure of that conservative administration's agenda in countless other ways. That's the real part. That is the quiet part you are saying there. It is the only way to get things done, is to destroy the DOJ.

0:36:51 Jenessa: They're saying something short of a complete overhaul that's going to destroy all of our trust but apparently if you just throw the whole thing in the garbage then the american people will trust you and love you like I don't where is

0:36:58 Matt: More importantly, we will be able to guarantee the conservative administration agenda. Yeah, but no, this stuff is all just dystopian doublespeak. I mean, that's why I think it's important. I've got a bunch of quotes here from the actual document, because it's kind of hard to believe how dystopic it really is.

0:37:10 Jenessa: I mean yeah that's the the obvious right where yeah mm

0:37:25 Matt: So okay, let's talk about DHS. Obviously, I've got plenty to say about DHS. This is all stuff that we predicted. It's all stuff they tried to do last time. And as with last time, the courts are actually blocking some of this. They wanted to get ICE funding for 100 ,000 detention beds. They've now made it 125 ,000 beds, so they've exceeded that one. Increasing USCIS fees. For the first time ever, they're going to have a fee for asylum applications, which is disgusting.

0:37:21 Jenessa: -hmm yeah yeah I feel like you don't usually like flee violence and show up with a bunch of money in your pocket like call me crazy

0:37:54 Matt: And it's $100. And then $100 a year to maintain your application.

0:37:57 Jenessa: What doesn't it take years normally

0:38:00 Matt: It does. It's been taking about nine years to get to an asylum interview. If you're not in court, they'll try to take all these cases out of court.

0:38:06 Jenessa: Can you work when you're here with

0:38:09 Matt: So they make it hard, but you can, especially if you have a lawyer, you can get a work permit. But it's, you know, they don't make it easy. Repealing temporary protected status. They've pretty much done that for every temporary protected status category. So we've created a whole lot of undocumented people in the last six months. Getting more 247G agreements with ICE. So that's a big one. And we've talked about how that's huge force multiplier. That's why we're seeing so many. And also getting different federal agencies more involved. Budget 2025 specifically recommended that we use large numbers of temporary facilities, such as tents. More tent cities for immigrants in the desert.

0:38:38 Jenessa: Right she's gonna have like Fyre Festival of immigration.

0:38:44 Matt: This document is evil. Like, it's actually evil. Eliminate the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in DHS, because who needs it? Eliminated the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman. That was done done in March. So the place where you complain about detention problems and eliminate the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. Same thing for complaining about how slow everything's going with CIS.

0:39:03 Matt: Ken Cuccinelli wrote the chapter. He was big in DHS. He was actually illegally appointed to DHS in a very funny way that ended up killing a lot of stuff he was trying to do. But he wrote the Chapter for Project 2025. And I really did appreciate, we talked about this at the time, that what he was recommending at the time was to basically break up DHS and I was like, yes. First sentence, I'm with you. But But what he's talking about is breaking it up so that you can form a super agency with ICE and CBP.

0:39:25 Jenessa: Know, I've never really understood. So ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement. CBP is Customs and Border Protection. They're not the same thing.

0:39:36 Matt: They're getting to be more and more, but they're not.

0:39:38 Jenessa: Okay. Customs and Border protection, we've always had. Those are the people when you go through the border are stopping some people and checking things. I don't know anything about this. ICE is not them and they're the ones away from the border who are detaining people is that correct okay really

0:39:55 Matt: Interior enforcement, which is a pretty new idea. Most of the interior enforcement in the United States has basically happened in our lifetimes. It's a pretty neat thing. To the degree that we've been seeing, it really is like an 80s, 90s thing. The idea of undocumented immigration being a problem that we have to have interior immigration forces stop. The idea that a border patrol force goes back for more than 100 years.

0:40:16 Matt: But now you're seeing CBP on the streets of L.A., right? Which is not historically where they've been. They're reinforcing using CBP in the streets of Portland during the George Floyd protests. This is not good. They're both massive police forces that are accountable only to the president, and we're massively growing them. Plenty of other big swings they want to take, like ending chain migration, which is basically most family-based immigration. They want to repeal the diversity lottery. It's only like 60 ,000 visas a year, but they're obsessed with it. They wantto revive the public charge rule so that poor people can't get visas. And potentially, one thing that Stephen Miller was proposing that I'm sure is going to come up at some point was actually deporting people for being poor.

0:40:46 Jenessa: How would you what I don't understand okay wait so you're gonna be here legally and then they're gonna say you don't make enough money so you're deported

0:40:59 Matt: If you take benefits, and again, not even illegally take benefits or take benefits you're not supposed to, within five years of admission, you technically could be deported as a public charge. And that includes if you, by the way, you pick up a disability or you are out of work for regular reasons, or you have to take care of a sick parent or something, right? There's a great book, Super Sad, Super True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, a great author. And he actually, it's kind of a near future dystopian, kind of funny, like it's supposed to be funny, but there's a whole section where he's talking about how people are getting deported for bad credit, which is where this goes, right. Right? And that at the time, when the novel was published about 20 years ago, I read that. I was like, oh, that's kind of funny.

0:41:34 Matt: But I could totally see that, because that's where we're going. DHS, obviously, it's coming along. That's a very important part of the whole picture. So not the big swings that Ken Cuccinelli wants, necessarily. But according to the tracker, we've got 14 down out of 35, and with seven in progress. And I think there's lots of little sub ones you could identify as well.

0:41:55 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:41:55 Matt: Let's turn to USAID real quickly. Obviously, that was one of the first victims of the Doge. They're pretty much gone. Officially, it is no longer doing anything as of July 1st. And that's another one that they basically have been given permission to destroy. There were a number of different priorities with USAID within the State Department, and the tracker says that all six of those have been completed. They've slashed the budget, they've prioritized faith -based organizations for whatever's left, specifically cutting disaster assistance for Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan. That was specifically in Project 125. Let's just really make Afghanistan worse. Ending support for reproductive health programs, and rescinding all policies relating to climate change.

0:42:31 Jenessa: So it's basically just proselytizing now. Cool.

0:42:33 Matt: Yeah. The agency though, officially it's folded into the state department and state departments. I mean, it always was kind of, it's always a weird hybrid thing. That's like kind of state department, kind of independent created that way by Congress. It is folded back in most of the stuff it used to do. And it has killed quite a few people already. It's estimated that by the end of the year that Elon Musk might go down as one of the biggest killers in world history because we unexpectedly slashed all these programs that people were depending on. So that's bleak.

0:42:55 Jenessa: It'll make the cars look less dangerous. Comparison, at least.

0:42:58 Matt: It's true. There's just a whole bunch of, you want to pick an agency?

0:43:01 Jenessa: Well, the one that is deeply attempting to fire me is the Department of Health and Human Services. Also attempting to make me lose my mind the most as RFK Jr. just declares everything's a toxin except actual toxins. So that's been great.

0:43:04 Matt: Say I'm sorry he's giving us Mexican Coke, what's your problem?

0:43:21 Jenessa: Wait what what what happened no

0:43:23 Matt: Yes he's very excited that real sugar is coming back he actually no no I think that I don't think they should be giving us uppers hs should be sending us all free weed is what they should being doing

0:43:28 Jenessa: Oh my God, I thought you meant cocaine okay wait oh my God

0:43:42 Matt: Opioids by the end of this I mean he actually tweeted that this was part of the MAHA agenda, the Make America Healthy agenda was to bring back Mexican Coke, steak and shake is going to be featuring it within months again right yeah I mean, I do love Mexican Coke, cane sugar it's so good and it probably is better for you maybe I don't know I mean it's still sugar

0:43:50 Jenessa: If that was the only thing he did it'd be fine but he's also like and don't get vaccinated while you're there God sure it tastes different fine yeah maybe yeah I mean you're drinking your calories, but, you know, life's full of mysteries and things to enjoy. So moderation soda.

0:44:14 Matt: Little weird to see the guy who's supposed to be in charge of health promoting Coke, but more soda, please. So you don't think you're going to get fired

0:44:20 Jenessa: Oh, I have no idea. Our funding is in desperate jeopardy right now. I was under the ACS. It's like American Community Service or something like that. And they have totally disbanded that. Supposedly, my division will either be reallocated, specifically the Division of Voting Rights. It'll either end up under a different agency or just be gone. I'm the only person on the voting rights team for disability rights for the entire state of New York, and that's just too much money.

0:44:55 Jenessa: We'll find out soon -ish whether they just don't think voting rights for people with disabilities is important. Totally nonpartisan organization. I register anybody and I don't care what your party is, and I will fight for your right to an accessible polling place, and I don't ask who you voted for.

0:45:14 Matt: We're supposed to believe that

0:45:15 Jenessa: Apparently, I'm a big fat liar.

0:45:16 Matt: Okay yeah well it's more important that hhs do things like um withdraw the Biden-era rules that made HIPAA stronger, right? That's we can't have more HIPAA. And all kinds of gender identity and abortion stuff, of course, like anything they can possibly do. Moral exemptions to contraception, coming after the people that tried to protect vaccines and protect COVID vaccines. Let's see if there's another agency or two. I mean, the big thing is really, so far, the Supreme Court seems to be willing to go along with firing federal workers. That's the thing that is hanging over all of this, because they can do quite a lot if they can wipe these agencies out and replace them with their people, or just wipe them out. Same with CDC, by the way, as with HHS, a lot of social culture war type stuff, making sure they take down all their information about contraception so they can promote fertility awareness-based methods.

0:46:03 Jenessa: Is that the Catholic thing?

0:46:04 Matt: Yes. Yep.

0:46:04 Jenessa: Is that just the rhythm

0:46:06 Matt: Just timing. Yep. Fertility awareness-based methods. Yeah.

0:46:07 Jenessa: Method? Cool. And notoriously, Catholics don't have tons of children because this method works so well.

0:46:16 Matt: Right. Yep. Ending access to contraception in every way. And of course, access to all other reproductive rights and promoting fertility awareness. This is just a quick tour, but I think 46%, just kind of reading through, and I didn't have time to reread the 922-page document, obviously, but just rereading the general tone and tenor of Project 2025's mandate for leadership and just looking at the major top line goals, I'd say they've come along pretty well for six months. There's a lot of stuff that the court has stopped. Something like Remain in Mexico or the Sanctuary City funding stop, right? Just off the bat, again, courts have stopped it. We'll see how much is actually stopped, but there's still a lot about stuff getting through.

0:46:51 Matt: And who knows, another six months, another couple of years, how this is all going to look.

0:46:54 Jenessa: Do you think we see any pattern in things that have either not been attempted or have been actually successfully stopped is there any pattern to it or is it just their priorities are some things harder than others okay

0:47:09 Matt: Even Project 2025 acknowledges that there are quite a few things that will actually require Congress. We are not to the stage yet where they're just completely ignoring Congress. They're just badgering them into doing things. The New York Times, one of our favorite activities here on this program is ragging on the daily. I don't know if you're a daily listener.

0:47:19 Jenessa: I have avoided it.

0:47:28 Matt: I actually listened to the one about Russell Vought coming in front of Congress about the rescission bill to get this funding pulled. And the way that they were defending this was basically like, well, isn't it nice? They're letting Congress have a chance instead of just impounding the money. They've given Congress a chance to participate by strong -arming them.

0:47:45 Jenessa: No acknowledgement that that impoundment is illegal.

0:47:49 Matt: Though they're saying that instead of doing it the illegal way, they're just strong-arming Congress and they're pulling back funds instead of just refusing to spend them. But they're also refusing to spend them, to be clear, right?

0:47:58 Jenessa: You're not supposed to get complimented for not doing things that are blatantly illegal. Am I out of my mind? Like, what are

0:48:05 Matt: Well, it's very important the New York Times make sure that they continue to keep Trump happy. They had to give him full credit for going back to Congress and demanding that they do this instead of just doing it.

0:48:14 Jenessa: They getting credit for? Like, what class are they Getting grades in? I don't understand what they think they're gonna get out of this? Yes nobody

0:48:20 Matt: They're going to get sued into oblivion eventually anyway. That's what happens with everybody. Generally speaking, Project 2025, the mandate for leadership is, there are a lot of big swing things like completely reorganizing DHS and abolishing entire parts of the government.

0:48:25 Jenessa: Wins here

0:48:35 Matt: They know the big swing things and they're saying we need to continue to work with Congress to do all of this stuff. But there's quite a lot they're recommending happen by executive orders. And there's no coincidence that the first round of executive orders and certainly every executive order since then is you can pretty much tie it back to some recommendation of the mandate for leadership. It's happening. We are living through it and we'll continue to watch it. But that's where we're at six months in. I'd say that they are not going to say you got to hand it to them, but they're getting some things done. Then I will say, though, one conversation I keep having is about the people that are actually required to do this.

0:48:35 Jenessa: Yeah yeah yeah

0:49:05 Matt: Even with Schedule G, with everything they're doing to politicize all these different agencies, you still have to find people that are willing to be fascist. I'm somewhat optimistic, just even based on what's going with ICE. They have so much trouble right now. I don't know if you saw, they're trying to pull people out of retirement for ICE by offering their pension and their salary at the same time somehow, plus $10,000 bonuses because they can't get enough people and they're trying to hire 10,000 more. The DOJ leadership is completely decimated. It's fresh out of law school to run DOJ, that's not going to go well for you. Yeah.

0:49:34 Jenessa: Agree. I mean there's a lot to be not very excited or optimistic about but I know we're all in our bubbles to an extent what I have not seen is some grand excitement from a huge portion of the population about this obviously there are people who are very upset. And then there's people who are really uncomfortable. And there are, of course, people who this is exactly what they were hoping for and it's their favorite thing. But I think there's more a lot of people who are disengaged, who are seeing it with their own eyes. There was a lot that happened in the background in the past that was easier to ignore. Some of this is really in your face now.

0:50:15 Jenessa: I'm hopeful it's pretty late, but I don't think it's too late for things to turn around during the campaign right

0:50:15 Matt: When people were told about Project 2025, nearly half of Americans viewed it unfavorably.

0:50:27 Matt: Yeah, so before the election, when people knew about Project 2025, 12% favored it. 12%. 47% said that it was unfavorable, and 41% just didn't know. And I think the more that they know, the less they like it. And that's a big problem that was identified actually in Democracy and Chance, the book I was telling you about, is that they're very aware that the more people learn about things like privatizing Social Security and Medicaid, the less they like it, the more they find out about things that are actually in that bill, the less they like it, right? I think there are quite a few people in Congress that are rightfully going to lose their jobs because they voted for things that people are going to start to see play out. And I think if we can continue to hammer the fact that killing Medicaid and privatizing as much as possible, that was all in Project 125. That's stuff Heritage wants, right, that's all economic freedom, that what we're all about. Heritage Foundation, in public, one of their directors said that we need to curb recreational sex in America. That something something that people should know.

0:51:12 Jenessa: Yeah what what is non -rec oh okay

0:51:17 Matt: Oh yeah. It should be reproductive. That's why we're doing it.

0:51:19 Jenessa: Yeah that took me a minute what

0:51:22 Matt: That's not in Project 2025, but it might as well be because like, it's so sex negative all the way across. They want to criminalize porn. Some genius was running political ads on Pornhub to let people know that. It's a really good idea. If you come at stuff like that and you tell them like at the end of the day, these people, if they could, they would criminalize weed, right? They would criminalized porn. They would criminalise stuff you like. They don't want you to have access to contraception or reproductive rights. They don't want you to enjoy anything really. That's what all this is about. Yeah. In Democracy and Change, she quotes Tyler Cohen, who's been a really big libertarian. He's one of those George Mason types. And he says, look, if our policies go forward the way that they should, there will be tent cities and shanties in American towns. That's just what's going to happen because we're deregulating. That's what happens. You're going to have more flints. That'S just inevitable. Traditionally, people up until very recently have voted for the people they think will make their lives better. But Trump promised to be their vengeance, to be their sword. And I think that if we can show people what happens, that that sort of gets turned back around on

0:52:17 Jenessa: God

0:52:17 Matt: Them and cuts off their services, not to get too poetic about it. The more we can do to tell people, this is what these people are about. This is what they want to do. And they are accomplishing a lot of it. People are going to start to see it. And I think that we can tie this back to Project 2025 and Heritage. The more, we talk about it, the better off we are.

0:52:31 Jenessa: I think the more it affects people and their neighbors it's easy to have that thing of the like nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires we're all going to be I'm going gonna be rich someday don't worry about it, and it's nah, you're gonna be the guy in the tent that's most of us so when you end up there it's a different story I hope we don't hit the point where it takes being in a tent to realize we've made a mistake we'll see what it takes for some people

0:52:45 Matt: Great. Yeah. I'll just have to keep watching it and keep talking about it as best we can. Do tell everybody, you know, this is Project 2025 in action. If the stuff you don't like is happening, if you don't like the way that things are going in this country, there was literally a 920-page document and a secret playbook that we may still someday see and an entire database of people that have been installed to make this stuff happen that you don't like. There's very little in here that I think most people would actually like if they knew about it.

0:53:19 Jenessa: I struggle to imagine oh

0:53:22 Matt: The limits of my imagination do not include fascism for the most part. The end of fascism, I should say. I can't think like these people, but they can't think like us either. I've come to learn that is actually an advantage. They don't really understand being motivated by anything but power and money. And I find you can get quite a lot done if you don't care about making money.

0:53:24 Jenessa: Yeah usually true yeah it's

0:53:39 Matt: Free life advice. So this is fun. Maybe we'll do a happier topic next time, but maybe not. I'll say any other thoughts yeah

0:53:39 Jenessa: True yay maybe no, well it was good talking to you and I feel informed even if I don't feel happy but I learned today sure

0:53:56 Matt: That's what we're here for there's so much more I could have gotten to. There are so many other agencies and things that are happening but top line again being mass firings mass reorganization unitary executive politicization of everything they can possibly politicize as recommended by the Heritage Foundation in its mandate for

0:54:09 Jenessa: Fingers crossed as they politicize it they will continue to hire They're incompetent people who gum up the works and can't get anything done. Hooray. I

0:54:19 Matt: Leadership here's hoping they hate big bird they hate him so much this big britain boy I actually don't know

0:55:10 Jenessa: Don't, huh. Oh my God, I thought you meant cocaine.

0:55:14 Matt: No, I'm gonna make sure I get that. I don't want to slander the wrong person