Today in Project 2025: Putting the screws to the Office of Science and Technology Policy

It's difficult to properly explain just how much of Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership document revolves around hand-waving declarations about the supposed enemy within.

(Page 43) The President must set and enforce a plan for the executive branch. Sadly, however, a President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly “woke” faction of the country.

And:

(Page 60) Finally, the next Administration will face a significant challenge in unwinding policies and procedures that are used to advance radical gender, racial, and equity initiatives under the banner of science. Similarly, the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding. As with other federal departments and agencies, the Biden Administration’s leveraging of the federal government’s resources to further the woke agenda should be reversed and scrubbed from all policy manuals, guidance documents, and agendas, and scientific excellence and innovation should be restored as the OSTP’s top priority.

Both of those from the chapter written by ex-Trump Administration Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought, who is definitely a serious thinker and not a raving crackpot who imagines that it's "radical equality" and/or the "woke agenda" at work whenever he trips over a shoelace. Vought's mini-bio at the beginning of the document consists almost entirely of his credentials in the movement, with the only policy call-out it is the claim that he led "a landmark effort to eliminate critical race theory and other radical ideologies in executive agencies."

It was a landmark effort, mind you. To you it may seem an entirely illusory battle against a foe that, happily for conservatives, sprang into existence because one particular far-right propagandist with unusual allies intentionally manufactured it to encompass a wide range of conservative paranoias. To Vought, however, it was a landmark snipe hunt.

We see this throughout the document. It's one thing to focus on all the little details about what Donald Trump's allies intend to do or cut or prohibit if they and their fellow coup supporters manage a return to power, but the real danger of the document lies in the evasive hand-waving that is inserted whenever the authoring crackpot in question needs to describe the movement's enemies but knows they cannot put the details in writing. Who's the "woke" faction of the country, in the language above? What makes them "radical?" What constitutes "radical gender, racial, and equity initiatives?"

The answer, of course, is that the movement has declared that it alone is in charge of deciding what those things are and who is responsible for them. The movement's enemies are whoever it says they are; it demands the right to criminalize ideas it declares to be deviant and to imprison those who produce such works.

It's impossible to even skim through Project 2025's work without seeing references to its obsession with rooting out anyone inside government who does not fully share the ideology of, and is unquestionably loyal to, the Dear Leader version of the presidency that they envision. That's not a surprise. Not only is it a response to the most grievous wound the movement has yet suffered, the foiling of an attempted coup due to the unwillingness of key members of Trump's then-inner-circle refusing to commit sedition for the man, it's a defining characteristic of all anti-democratic, authoritarian movements. That compulsive focus on of an unseen and undefinable foe that must be rooted from a nation's government and populace so that the nation can be reborn—made "great again"—turns the movement into an explicitly fascist one.

It's equally telling that the Trump allies who are loudest in demanding their enemies be purged from government are, universally, the ones who rant about woke agendas and critical race theory and all these other impossibly vague, intentionally undefined terms—that is, the people who see invisible enemies everywhere.

Russ Vought's babbling about "climate fanaticism" and "the woke agenda" may seem—and are—the rantings of a crackpot, but a demand to remove anyone in government who is not fully devoted to the cause of Dear Leader is a crackpot notion to begin with. It of necessity requires the "enemy" to be so abstract and ill-defined a group that anyone might fall into it, if they at some point have the audacity to disagree with Dear Leader about even the tiniest little thing.