Today in Project 2025: Policing the thoughtcrimes of NOAA

While much of Project 2025's "Mandate for Leadership" document focuses on enshrining a hard-right state with the authority to ban or criminalize non-conservative speech and imprisoning supposed transgressors, you can't write a 922 page political manifesto without going into some detail about who and what should fall under the broad definition of "transgressors."

On page 674, for example, we learn that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is on the project's hit list. "Break Up NOAA," the document demands. And that means shuttering much of it entirely.

NOAA consists of six main offices:
• The National Weather Service (NWS);
• The National Ocean Service (NOS);
• The Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR);
• The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS);
• The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS); and
• The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and NOAA Corps.

Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.

What's "unplannable?" Whatever the Heritage Foundation and their donors want it to be. There's no doubt that sea levels are rising and that we have both good measurements and good models for which parts of the United States are likely to see the most damage the soonest, but if party-installed monitors say the scientists are wrong then the scientists are wrong.

In addition to retooling the National Weather Service to focus on providing its data to private weather forecasting companies (part of the conservative insistence that as much of government be placed into the hands of for-profit companies as possible, prioritized by whichever of those companies has sent the most lobbyists and campaign dollars to their offices), transferring agency ships and planes to other departments, and severely curtailing the ability of the NMFS to enforce fishery restrictions and marine mammal protections, the primary target of conservatism's ire is, as we see, acknowledgements of climate change.

The solution is the same one proposed in every other section of the document: If it conflicts with the premises of the fascist movement, it must be rooted out.

Downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. OAR provides theoretical science, as opposed to the applied science of the National Hurricane Center. OAR is, however, the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded. OAR is a large network of research laboratories, an undersea research center, and several joint research institutes with universities. These operations should be reviewed with an aim of consolidation and reduction of bloat. [...]

Ensure Appointees Agree with Administration Aims. Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area.

It's not just personal freedom that's in fascism's crosshairs. Project 2025 is vigorous in its assertions that all those other classic enemies of fascist movements, from artists to publishers to educators to scientists, must be routed using the usual fascist tools of criminalizing their work, barring distribution of their work, and putting strict party-loyal overseers to the task of monitoring those agencies where internal opposition is seen as most likely to appear.

Just because they're lunatics doesn't mean they're not dangerous. All fascist movements are made up of fringe figures who insist that their nation will fall unless an unending stream of figures and ideas they don't like are purged from society. Fascism is always, always a movement of conspiracy-minded cranks who have crossed into the belief that non-movement approved ideas must be eliminated either through laws, through violence, or both; Project 2025 brings no new twists on that formula.