People are always assuming that I regret having kids.
This is my fault. Most of my content is about the horrors of parenthood, and while I am joking 99% of the time— or at least exaggerating—it’s not always apparent to everyone. Plus, parenting is a drag a lot of the time!
Not that I need to explain myself to anyone, especially not to the majority of my audience, who are on my wavelength and can identify when I’m joking even if they don’t think it’s funny, but I promise you I don’t hate my children and have never regretted having them.
Until recently, that is.
This isn’t about my kids. They’re great! (Well, my 8yo is great. My 13yo is a teenager and you know how that goes. Thoughts and prayers that high school is better than middle school!) It’s about all kids. And all parents. Because if I were a younger man contemplating parenthood in 2024, the current landscape of my country would give me a lot of pause.
With Project 2025, I’ve finally found something scarier than parenthood.
You’re already aware of most of the issues: the ongoing gun problem, the ongoing healthcare problem, the ongoing climate change problem, the ongoing bigotry and racism problems, the ongoing misogyny problem, the ongoing MAGA problem (which encapsulates a lot of those, tbh). Things aren’t going so great here in the land of the free. And there’s a terrifying plausibility to the idea that things are going to get worse.
Not everyone agrees, of course. The billionaires are having fun, Trump and his corrupt cohort are definitely feeling pretty good right now, along with the gun nuts, religious zealots, anti-abortionists, white supremacists, bigots, climate change deniers, James Woods, Kirk Cameron, the guy who played Hercules on the WB, the guy who played the goat on SNL, the guy who made copies on SNL, and Kanye West. Most MAGA supporters are so hoodwinked and/or reprehensible that they’re literally cheering on the very things they think they’re against, like, say, the constitution, and small government, and freedom, and crime, and Russia. Oh, and kings.
Last week, just before we celebrated America’s independence day, the Supreme Court ruled that the President is above the law. It’s on a case by case basis, sure, but the gist is that ‘official’ acts are above reproach, and there is plenty of wiggle room for any potentially unofficial acts to be retrofitted as “official,” which is easy pickings for any corrupt leader with no scruples and a self-professed admiration for dictators (sound like anyone we know?).
That is some king shit right there, of the exact kind that we fought a war to break free from some 250 years ago.
That ruling is just the cherry on top of what’s been an increasingly large waffle cone of shit over the past decade or so. And with Project 2025 looming, should Trump be re-elected in November— and, short of that, it will simply be renamed Project 2029, or Project 2034, or Project Whenever We Are Idiotic Enough To Put the Christian Nationalist Party in the White House— things aren’t exactly looking up.
Over on my Instagram I’ve shared my concerns about Trump and MAGA and Project 2025 itself a few times (the only thing that loses me more followers is my posts in favor of LQBTQ rights, i.e., when I post against bigotry). The Trump cultists’ primary rebuttals are “stop listening to MSM, you sheep, read it yourself!” or “Trump could have done this last time he was in office and he didn’t!” or “he’s disavowed it, you libtard cuck, stop fear-mongering!”
First of all, I actually have been reading my way through the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook. Have you?
Second of all, Trump may not have accomplished everything he wanted to during his first term, but that was largely due to inexperience, public outcry and the system’s built-in constraints meant to protect the country from people like him, and a fractured Republican party that wasn’t yet entirely aligned with the MAGA lunatic fringe. That fringe is now running things on that side of the aisle, and much of Project 2025 is designed to eliminate the rest of those obstacles and allow King Trump—and the Christian Nationalists hellbent on transforming America—to push the conservative agenda with as little friction and pushback as possible.
Oh, and you say the man who would be king has disavowed Project 2025 once the alarm sounded? And he said he doesn’t even know who developed it? That’s really cool. Except nearly 150 members of his previous administration contributed to the document, including several of his cabinet members and ambassadors, and a former chief of staff, and it echoes plenty of his own ideas.
Also, help me out for a second: has Trump ever lied before? I can’t remember.
Finally, leaving aside the fact that the entire Republican playbook is built around scaring the hell out of their constituents until their so blinded by it they can’t separate reality from Fox News (e.g., immigrant caravans, the Woke mob, blood-drinking, baby-eating lizard people, post-birth abortions, Pizzagate, etc.), Project 2025 should be scary to anyone who truly values freedom and democracy and the stuff America was founded on. Sure, the reporting on it features some necessary condensing and editorializing, because that’s how this shit works (as if anyone who watches and believes FoxNews is gonna read 900 pages of anything), but even without those Cliffs Notes, it’s all laid out, clearly and brazenly.
It’s not subtle and they’re not hiding it. Well, they are hiding it, mostly behind bullshit language about streamlining and consolidating and making the federal government more efficient and fiscally responsible (never mind the reality of every recent Republican administration making the economy worse and every recent Democratic administration, including the current one, making it better). That mostly just means cutting and gutting entire departments (Education, the EPA, Justice, etc.) that provide countless benefits to the various pockets of the population, the elimination of which will greatly complicate and reduce those benefits, and running everything through the president. Did I mention that whomever takes office next has just been emboldened by the Supreme Court to do whatever he wants with no fear of consequences?
The Heritage Foundation’s plan, which has been in motion for decades and which the Supreme Court just helped fast-track, is to eliminate anything and everything that might put constraints on presidential power, all but eliminating the checks and balances that have been an integral, if not THE integral, element of the Constitution—you know, that foundational document that these extremists love to pretend they are loyal to—since day one. The only thing they, and Trump, are loyal to is power.
Ironically, the Project 2025 document is littered with countless promises to remove political agendas from government by doing the exact opposite: imposing blatantly Christian-based values into government policy; removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity; removing protections for minorities and LGBTQ people; cutting federal funding for low-income education programs and targeting schools that teach DEI/CRT/gender ideology; further reducing any possible access to abortion, including mail-order options; getting rid of Medicaid and Medicare; reducing and restricting veterans’ benefits; rolling back (again) environmental protections and Climate Change initiatives in favor of fossil fuel (and its purveyors, of course); cutting corporate tax rates (again); replacing qualified government employees with MAGA loyalists; and on and on and on. (There is plenty more at stake aside from what I’ve listed.)
Project 2025 is entirely driven by the exclusionary and intolerant Christian Nationalist political and religious viewpoint. This is not freedom. It’s fascism.
Bye bye woke, hello choke.
So yeah, if I were thinking about having kids in 2024, I would be thinking twice. The loud, fanatical conservative minority (they haven’t won the popular vote in 20 years) aims to undo—has already begun to undo—decades of hard-fought social progress, making the country more dangerous for marginalized groups including women, LGBTQ, minorities, and children, while continuing to ignore climate change, making the world more dangerous to everyone. (The ongoing environmental crisis is an even bigger threat to future generations than homegrown religious extremism. Like I said: things are going great!)
I love my kids, and I love having them around (I sometimes prefer when they’re around in the other room, but still), but this isn’t the world I thought I was bringing, or wanted to bring, children into. We’re supposed to be moving forward, not backwards!
So get out and vote—and keep voting! Because even if Trump loses in November (hope hope!) and/or the Heritage Foundation finds some other figurehead to put into power (RITTENHOUSE 2028) and enact this terrifying program, America will become totally unrecognizable.
If it even still exists.
SOURCES:
I’ve lost track of what news sources the MAGA heads trust, other than the ones that tell them what they want to hear, but here’s a breakdown of Project 2025 from The Guardian and one from the BBC, another from the Wall Street Journal and one from Wikipedia. Or just read the whole thing.
Social Media Round-Up
Summer Schedule
You may have noticed that I haven’t published a newsletter in a few weeks. Sorry about that, summer is tricky! Between work, and managing the kids, and traveling, and a vacation or two, and a hangover or two, occasionally a week is gonna get missed. I apologize.
Next week, I’ll be on Cape Cod with the fam. I went to school in Boston and got familiar with the Cape thanks to my friends’ who brought me to visit places like Chatham and Wellfleet. We go back almost every year, and while there are more convenient beach getaways, i.e., places where you can walk out to the ocean rather than have to drive to a parking lot, Cape Cod has a ton of character and all-around great vibes. Plus there’s a drive-in movie theater, and Tree House Brewing Company is on the way!
Seeing as I’ll be sitting on the beach, there probably won’t be a newsletter next week, but I’ll try to keep things as regular as I can as we soldier through the rest of this summer’s hellish heat. And please send me topic suggestions for future editions, in the comments or via DM or email. God knows you don’t want me to talk politics every week!
God knows I wish I didn’t have to.
I appreciate very much your political rants. Of course, they align with my own. But as I commented on Instagram, Project 2025 scares the crap out of me. I'm grateful more people are finally realizing it even exists! Have a great summer doing all the things!! Hopefully, we will continue to have those opportunities next year.
I just finished donating to Joe when your email dropped in my box. If I live to be 100 (and I'm way out of your demographic) I'll not understand how tfg has all those people fooled into thinking he will "make America great again" when he failed so abysmally the first time. And if Joe drops out we can kiss our freedoms goodbye because no one else has a chance against him. So infuriating.