The over 900-page document, commissioned by the people expected to run another Trump White House, is a laundry list of the far-right’s most politically toxic ideas, from banning abortion nationwide to mass firing federal officials who believe in protecting public health and safety. One would think that Trump and his allies would try to keep their sinister plans out of public view. Instead, Team Trump published their fascistic blueprint on a website for anyone to read,. They even proudly display the menacing “Project 2025” label on the front page.
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On Sunday, actress Taraji P. Henson took a break during the BET Awards, which she was hosting, to speak out about Project 2025. “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!” she told viewers. “I’m talking to all the mad people that don’t want to vote. You’re going to be mad about a lot of things if you don’t vote.”
The clip went viral, amplified by other celebrities like Mark Ruffalo. So the MAGA forces swung into action on social media, accusing Henson and Ruffalo and other progressives of making it all up. “Is Project 2025 in the room with you?” a blue-checked user sneered under Ruffalo’s tweet. These efforts at gaslighting people run against a real problem, however: The drafters of Project 2025 seek to promote their authoritarian playbook. Thus, a simple Google search generates a slew of explainers from various news organizations, with even more coming out rapidly, as a response to the rising number of people asking, “What’s Project 2025?”
“We received a flood of reader inquiries asking if Project 2025 was a real effort,” the fact-checking team at Snopes wrote in their lengthy explainer published Tuesday. Google Trends confirms that the number of searches for “project 2025” has grown dramatically in recent days.
The whole “Nazis are leftists” thing really blows my mind but I’ve seen people saying it unironically.
It’s because in their mind Nazi = bad guy.
They cannot see themselves as “bad guys,” so the association is immediately dismissed without further consideration. The leftists are the bad guys, so obviously Nazi maps onto those people.
But it’s not really about truth, it’s about “winning” the argument.
Also National Socialism means they were socialists, much like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a democratic republic.
It just shows a total lack of understanding of what the NSDAP platform was. Nazi Germany was a corporatist (in the political science sense) and authoritarian capitalist country, and they eg. specifically privatized a lot of functions that had been public before, absolutely loathed the idea of welfare or supporting “unworthy” people in any way, and were quite enthusiastically supported by business interests starting from their early years. Socialism, ie. social ownership of the means of production and strong public services, is about as opposite as can be to what the economics of fascism are, not to mention the social side. Fascists literally murdered sick or infirm people rather than support them, because weakness has to be weeded out of society.
Like this contemporary caricature puts it, the NSDAP – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – presented itself as the “Socialist Workers’ Party” when appealing to workers, and as the “National German Party” when appealing to “financially solvent circles”.
All of this is just completely beyond many conservatives’ capability to internalize – understanding any of that would mean they’d have to think some very uncomfortable thoughts about their own ideology, and the vast majority of them are fundamentally incapable of that sort of self-reflection.
Wait till you find out that the servatives rebrand/redefine all the leftie concepts. For example they have redefined what Critical Race Theory means.
It’s not because they are stupid and can’t understand the original meaning. It’s because the servatives know that the true meaning of the concept they don’t like will be popular and widely agreed with, so they deliberately butcher the original meaning on purpose. It’s a war tactic.
Put another way, the servatives use words not for what those words mean, but for the effect they want those words to create inside the minds of their listeners.
So if the servative calls Biden a socialist they want Biden’s latent fear of socialism to push him right. That Biden is not actually a socialist doesn’t matter. What matters is that Biden is a self-professed capitalist who fears socialism, and the effect of being branded “socialist” on Biden’s psyche is to create pressure inside his mind to move Biden’s policy comfort zone to the right. And once this is aired on TV it doesn’t just push Biden alone, but most of the viewers who even remotely see anything of themselves in Biden are also affected.
It doesn’t help that Nazi is a truncation of National Socialist. Anybody with a lick of sense would know that they weren’t socialists in any way, shape or form, but a lot of people don’t have a lick of sense.
Authoritarian leftists have a lot more in common with fascists than liberal leftists, that’s for sure.
If you go far enough right, you buffer overflow around to the left.
If you go far enough left, you buffer underflow around to the right