June 24, 2024 01:52 PM UTC

Will Your Name Be on the List?

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• by: Colorado Pols

We haven’t yet discussed the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” in this space, but it’s time to start talking about it given a new story today from The Associated Press.

If you’re not familiar with “Project 2025,” the short version is that it is a plan being developed by acolytes of Donald Trump to prepare for a potential second Trump administration by sketching out policy goals for a Christian Nationalist America. Some of the plans are standard right-wing nonsense, like abolishing the Department of Education. Other proposals are pretty creepy — like deploying the military for use in domestic law enforcement issues, which is the kind of thing normally reserved for dictators.

One of the main overarching goals of “Project 2025” is to systematically rid the federal government of people who are deemed to be disloyal to Trump, which is where we come to this story from Lisa Mascaro at The Associated Press:

From his home office in small-town Kentucky, a seasoned political operative is quietly investigating scores of federal employees suspected of being hostile to the policies of Republican Donald Trump, a highly unusual and potentially chilling effort that dovetails with broader conservative preparations for a new White House.

Tom Jones and his American Accountability Foundation are digging into the backgrounds, social media posts and commentary of key high-ranking government employees, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They’re relying in part on tips from his network of conservative contacts, including workers. In a move that alarms some, they’re preparing to publish the findings online.

With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.

Even if you aren’t an employee of the federal government — which includes more than two million Americans — this story should scare the hell out of you. The “American Accountability Foundation” is planning to publish a list of names online of federal employees who are judged through some opaque process to be enemies of a new Trump administration.

Pardon our language, but that’s FUCKING WEIRD.

MAGA followers always talk about the “deep state” as an ill-defined secret group working against Trump, but is there anything more “deep state” than making a list of “disloyal” federal employees? This is like 80s-movie Communist rhetoric. There was even a”Seinfeld” episode that joked about the idea of being “blacklisted” for your beliefs:

If you go back a little further, this idea is very similar to the “McCarthyism” of the 1940s and ’50s. As The AP explains:

The effort, focused on top career government officials who aren’t appointees within the political structure, has stunned democracy experts and shocked the civil service community in what they compare with the red scare of McCarthyism.

Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees, said the language being used — the Heritage Foundation’s announcement praised the group for ferreting out “anti-American bad actors” — is “shocking.” [Pols emphasis]…

…The public list-making conjures for some the era of Joseph McCarthy, the senator who conducted grueling hearings into suspected communist sympathizers during the Cold War. The hearings were orchestrated by a top staffer, Roy Cohn, who became a confidant of a younger Trump.

Skye Perryman, CEO of the advocacy group Democracy Forward, said it’s deeply disturbing and reminiscent of “the darker parts of American history.”

Publicly naming government workers is an “intimidation tactic to try to chill the work of these civil servants,” she said, and part of a broader “retribution agenda” underway this election.

“They’re seeking to undermine our democracy,” she said. “They’re seeking to undermine the way that our government works for people.”

And here it is: The point in which every accusation is actually a confession:

Heritage President Kevin Roberts said the “weaponization of the federal government” has been possible only because of the “deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats.” He said he was proud to support the work of American Accountability Foundation workers “in their fight to hold our government accountable and drain it of bad actors.”

We’ll get rid of the “deep state” with our own “deep state” is a strange argument to make, but that’s essentially what groups like “American Accountability” and the Heritage Foundation are proposing.

Words matter. Elections matter. This is very real, and very scary.