Today in Project 2025: Oh lordy, there are tapes

ProPublica continues to run circles around this nation's for-profit media companies when it comes to political and issue journalism, not through any great feats on their part but through the novel concept of investigating the politically powerful rather than simply quoting them. When the New York Times, for all its cash, gets caught systemically using local Republican activists as the just folks they present as supposed independent or pro-Trump-but-Democratic voters—when they aren't being taken in in even more comical ways—you can see how journalists who know how to Google things already have the upper hand in that battle.

The latest ProPublica scoop is their publication of the "vast majority" of Project 2025's "Presidential Administration Academy" videos. Before we go any farther, let's have a look at one. As Sarah Posner notes: "Weird? Judge for yourself."

Oh you're gonna want to watch that one. I know you don't want to but just see if you can make it through ten minutes, that's all I ask. Think of it as a drinking game without the drinking.

Other than the set dressing, which is clearly Normie Legal Office Filming Location Epsilon-12, this probably doesn't scan much different from any number of other far-right conspiracy influencer (conspirfluencer?) videos. It's all about identifying the supposed code words that you can use to determine if someone in your orbit is secretly a trans-supportive reverse vampire communist; if one of your office coworkers ever comes up to you and says one of these code words, you can immediately drop what you're doing, point at them, and let out an unholy insectoid screech like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

It's unabashedly loony stuff, to be sure—but here's the thing. Remember the premise of this and the other videos: this is the Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025, and these are the (hang on, let me copy-paste this) Presidential Administration Academy training videos. These are premised as being the information new hires in Project 2025's database of vetted, ready-to-go loyal foot soldiers will need to know in order to take over the government positions they'll be granted when Dear Leader purges the government of his ideological enemies.

We've talked at length about that central-to-everything-else goal of the Project 2025 agenda, as written out by a broad assortment of furious ex-Trump administration officials who staffed Donald Trump's first administration. Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership repeatedly emphasizes the need to quickly purge government of anyone who isn't a proven movement loyalist. That's seen as necessary in order to allow the next "conservative" government to more boldly take the illegal and quasi-legal actions they were previously blocked from taking by lawyers and department officials across government who rightly pointed out they weren't allowed to do those things.

It culminated in what many Republicans see as the central crime of the non-loyal government officials, the foiling of the Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt in which Republican lawmakers, Donald Trump, a pre-organized collection of violent militia members and a group of officials and lawyers now facing prison time, disbarment or both hatched a plan to simply declare Trump's election loss invalid, blocking his opponent from taking the reins of power. That is why the movement is now consumed with rooting out those who would block a future Dear Leader's wishes, whether it be Department of Justice officials or the scientists at NOAA.

Last time around we described how any such government purge would necessarily require the new administration to find the potentially tens of thousands of vetted and ultra-loyal needed to replace all the workers being rooted out, and how that was in fact a conundrum faced by all authoritarian movements after seizing power. Extremist movements are not staffed by the sorts of people who have—or can even tolerate—deep expertise in the many, many obscure niches of government tasked with making the day-to-day operations of public life simply work. Fascism, especially, is premised on contempt for knowledge and expertise, asserting instead that government should be run through strict adherence to movement ideologies rather than with facts and figures.

On seizing power, authoritarian movements must either tolerate the existence of career civil servants who they previously declared to be among the movement's worst enemies or they must purge those enemies while scrambling to staff their new government with whatever loyal-but-grossly-unknowledgeable toadies can be scraped up. The authoritarians always choose option two, and that requires the movement to institute at least some bare level of training so that these new leaders of government have at least some basic premise of what their new job entails.

So pamphlets are written. Notebooks are distributed. "Schools" are opened to train loyalists in What They Need To Know. And, since we are in the modern age, videos are produced.

Once you watch the tapes, you can be Certified as someone capable of taking on a government role. The tapes will teach you how to Government, even if you have never done so before.

So then, what does Project 2025 consider to be the knowledge most necessary to staff up a newly purged government?

So there you go. If you're heading in to take on a new job in the State Department or Department of Justice you don't need to know the particulars of the job. You do, however, need to know that would-be immigrants to America are part of an "orchestrated invasion" led by Joe Biden working in partnership with Mexican drug cartels and that the word "gender" signifies membership in a leftist cult. Presumably, you need to know these things so that you can say them out loud in your new office and do the Invasion of the Body Snatchers screech if any government workers look at you like you're a half-insane freak; the screech will alert the new Dear Leader Thought Police that there's someone else that needs purging, upon which another new Dear Leader acolyte can take on that position, too.

Once again, this is all playing out precisely as it does in other fascist movements. First, knowledge-holders are singled out as special enemies of the movement, whether they be in government, in science, or in education. Vows are made to purge those enemies using the full force of government. The movement then fills the emptied-out government with its own acolytes, people who were specifically attracted to the movement because they have contempt for that sort of expertise and diligence. The movement attempts to train their new loyalists in what they need to know, but it turns out "what you need to know" in a fascist administration consists of nothing but the same paranoias and conspiracy theories that drove the movement all along.

The end result is rampant criminality and corruption, an oligarchy in which praise for Dear Leader is the main currency, and increasingly bleak public conditions as the authoritarian government botches everything from economic policy to social policy, resulting in shortages of goods and services, which leads to further unrest and either new rounds of violence inflicted on the "ungrateful" population or a nice, distracting war in which the government's many screw-ups are quickly attributed to some new outside conspirator, requiring the mobilization of troops in order to crush that new enemy, and so on.

That's what happens next, if the now completely loony-tunes Republican Party actually succeeds in scrubbing the government of its enemies. We know it for a fact; it's what happens every other time a fascist movement seizes power. Extremist movements premised on contempt for expertise do not suddenly find it, when it comes time to make training videos teaching their acolytes know How To Run A Government.