WAS: What Adults are Saying About Project 2025
Is America toying with apartheid? A glance at the GOP supported Project 2025 invites some unusual (er, frightening considerations) that its implementation might put us on a path where that unthinkable prospect is likely.
For those unknowing, apartheid is the political ruling of the majority by a minority. The South Africans developed it back in the 1960s when the legacy Whites of Colonialism politically oppressed majority Blacks and brutally imposed it for decades. In so doing, it gave us Nelson Mandella (a true political prisoner) and Bishop Desmond Tutu among others. Only with heavy international pressure was that practice crushed in the 1980s. In an astounding move, the formerly imprisoned Mandella (for over 20 years) rose to become the political leader of South Africa by the end of the 1980s.
Project 2025 seems to literally yearn for an America where time is turned back to when women, minorities, non-heterosexuals and others were expected to live in very narrow lanes of life. It further calls for the government of “We the People” to be dismantled in large part and no longer concerns itself with such “frivolous” matters as education, the environment, international standing in the world and other matters. Taken at face value, Project 2025 is racist, misogynistic, a death knell to the hard earned rights won by groups with previously oppressed sexual identities and on and on and on. It also undercuts the most basic premise of American life, that we, are the government.
Above all else its proponents seek to restore a form of the “family” where expanded birthrates are considered the cornerstone of a “new” America. It does this without nary a word about universal parental leave, a national childcare policy, Head Start programming (how could it the Education department would be dismantled?), affordable housing for young families and other forms of family support. In other words the growing difficulty of starting and raising a new or larger family is urged with few pathways to make that more practical. The project is a manifest blue-print of when moneyed, elite Whites where the predominant influencers in American culture and business and seeks a return to those salad-days. But there is a problem.
Here, where we adults learn and listen, latest census projections suggest “Whites” as a demographic segment of the US population will stop being a “majority” group as soon as 2045. Even more recent data suggest the plummeting American birthrate will further accelerate that trend. That means we will be a country without a majority. It seems that has mortified the elite-White authors of project 2025. In turn they have issued an Orwellian treatise that in many instances is too much to believe. Its success ensures what will soon be a minority ethnic group will be America’s ruling class.
All of this is lunacy and denies complicating factors that has brought into question the basic concept of “race” as a means of self-identity. For example, one-in-eight Americans are now multi-racial (one-in-seven under the age of 30). But facts be damned the project author’s must ensure their position as cultural elites must never be threatened. This has occurred for two reasons:
We have become much better at understanding that in the heady days of Father Knows Best and 2.2 children per household America was as never lily-white or a monolithic culture as the 2025 authors might think. Our impression of majority/minority was never correct (simply kept under the rug) and as that rug has been pulled back we are sometimes jarred by what it reveals and what it implies for White majority status, and
since the end of the Vietnam War, emigration into the US has come largely from non-white parts of the world including Far and South Central Asia, the Americas and Africa.
This suggests the aim of the Project 2025 is for something that never was, isn’t now and has very small chance to become. The flood of European Whites to the country’s shores from the mid 19th to 20th centuries had a long, overarching impact of what we have long considered the “look” of an immigrant. Those Whites largely assimilated out of pure economic necessity, buoyed by heavy ignorance, making leaders here appear more correct in their vision of an overly “White” America. Ironically, White or not, all the major immigrant groups were oppressed—some for a generation, some for two—but all had to run the gauntlet of other immigrants who had landed before and strode to be part of the cultural establishment. This included the Polish, Irish, Serbs, Slovaks, Greeks, Italians and dozens more.
Immigrants over the last 50 years have endured similar fates—but in their collective, deepening hues they have also illustrated what America is to become. A multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi religion melting pot (just as we have long been) where White is not the default color. This is as sure to happen as climate change, taxes and the Arizona Cardinals finishing last in the NFC West. No amount of apartheid (or whatever it may be called in some more sanitized form) can derail this. But if project 2025 has its way it will toy with great folly, wrongly an selfishly thinking this inevitability can be rerouted. If so, it will unleash a social and cultural conflict the likes of which have not been witnessed on these shores by any living American.