There were clues to aims of the current US administration in reams of historical writing. Distilled and finally released in the huge and now widely reported Project 2025 document.

But this has been worked on for a few decades. Below is one notable excerpt from a 2012 Texas GOP policy platform. Subject, back then, to substantial push back and considerable ridicule. How times have changed.

The release of the 900+ page Heritage Foundation playbook reflects the same. Objectives normalised through the GOP / MAGA information ecosystem. Below is background on the Heritage Foundation. Folk in the know pointed out how unusual it was to see such reporting in a usually reserved outlet like USA Today.

The plan lays out a road map for the first six months of a potential second Trump administration.

“Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” the Heritage Foundation says on its website.

Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but many of his allies and former administration officials were involved in drafting it.

According to the Associated Press, the nearly 1,000-page plan involves compiling and publicly releasing a list of government bureaucrats who may stand in the way of complete control and loyalty to Trump throughout the federal government. The foundation has granted $100,000 toward the project.

Roughly summarising: Pick the narratives, fold in pseudo-science and well researched grievance themes. Seed, pre-release, with key public and private influencers who prime the base via alternative media. Pick memeable elements. Make them go viral (handy if you have a pet social media platform owner). Wait for other media to normalise via think pieces. Enforce messaging discipline.

Counter the most concerned (and often most informed) opponents. Always play the person not the ball. Preferably with credible threats to their safety, career, and bank balance (mainly via spurious legal threats, sometimes called SLAPP suits, that don't have to stick, they just have to cost dear and maximise attrition, ignoring case dismissals and unhelpful verdicts that come out in later news cycles).

Treat credible scrutiny as an existential risk. Rinse and repeat.

Christopher Rufo is the current wunderkind on this front. The absolute peach who weaponised CRT to terrorise public schools, before he moved on to plagiarism accusations against female and Black senior university staff. Very publicly shouting about that as a repeatable playbook. Author of 'America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything'. Building means to push back on waves of progress.

In a series of 2021 tweets, for example, Rufo framed his writing about “critical race theory” as a form of political marketing.

“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” he wrote. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Woke, Trans, CRT, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), SEL (Social Emotional Learning), all things that were rarely in broader consciousness, so ideal for the GOP and Rufo to de and re-codify as catch alls for anything that prompts outrage. The below gem was from the GOP rapid response X account when Justice Katanji Brown Jackson was confirmed for SCOTUS.

The related action in and around schools before, during, and after Trump's 2016 term was also subject to a lot of reporting. One debatably grassroots movement is Moms for Liberty, with lots of questions about their funding. An exchange below that gives a peek into operationalising what that 2012 GOP platform proposed. The Southern Policy Law Centre has branded the group extremist.

The bigger picture is objection to publicly funded schooling, promotion of school voucher schemes to transfer money to more ideologically aligned schools, often privately run and linked to the administration. At the core a fundamental objection to what is called 'indoctrination'. The strategic details are in the Project 2025 education section with continued focus on taking over school boards.

Down with empathy! Why? Because it's weak

None of this is new news, but it is relevant to the latest reporting on Elon Musk. Shouting to Rogan about the need to combat empathy. You have to sort out the people who do and don't deserve empathy. Those who don't are viewed as a dangerous blob. By some reasonable yardsticks a basic definition of prejudice.

Musk pointed to California’s move to provide medical insurance even to undocumented people who qualify for its low-income Medi-Cal program.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said, borrowing the term from Gad Saad, a Canadian scholar who is also a frequent Rogan host.

While Musk said he believes in empathy and that “you should care about other people,” he also thinks it’s destroying society.

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

Empathy, he said, has been “weaponized.”

There are a number of support groups, formally and informally, for people who have to make horrific choices when resources are genuinely limited. Maybe in the case of triage during disasters or organ transplant recipient selection.

There is an altogether different kind of support for those who make horrific choices when resources are available, but funnelled away from those most in need to preferred people. It gets harder and harder to quieten the 'Are we the baddies?' voice - depending on the level of sociopathy, or psychopathy.

It can make people retreat ever further into echo chambers where aligned, morally malleable, dependent, or ambitious compadres are always available. Ready with a 'You are a genius!', 'Stay strong!', 'This is just deep state death throes', or 'They only hate you because you uncover the truth' when facts about what is happening break through. Maybe impacted people are mean to them, a specific story makes them feel bad, someone they care about calls them out, markets tank, polling goes south, or court cases evidence the illegality and scale of impact.

I think a few of the key themes are summed up in this headline. An article by a friend of Musk's from pronatalist circles. You probably noted Musk's obsession with promoting selective breeding to counter aging populations and immigration.

More on Malcolm Collins, his wife Simone, and Mr Musk

What might be screaming at you is the logical reverse of that sub-heading (see below), but in a more charitable reading, it is just a call for the right kind of people to have more children to compete with poor uneducated masses.

The poorer, more unequal, and less educated a society is, the higher its fertility rate. We must find ways to promote this trend

For background on much of this do consider a read of Ruth Ben-Ghiat's book 'Strongmen', Ann Applebaum's 'Autocracy Inc', Katherine Stewart's 'Money, Lies, and God' and Kate Conger & Ryan Mac's 'Character Limit'

It can be psychologically brutal on the people doing these kinds of things to people at home and abroad. The La La Laing has to be deafening. It can prompt reaching out for chemical salve. The overarching mission (they remind themselves), is too vital for misplaced squeamishness about some less valued human roadkill.

Both sides can be...

Actually, scrap that. Only one side is painting anyone who needs a bit of social support as a genetically inferior scrounger and anyone who works for the government as a deep state operative. Only one side is defunding life-saving research, cutting medical care for the poorest, scrapping consumer protections for people who get financially exploited, and tanking trust in vaccines.

As opposed to the richest 1% who allegedly all deserve the subsidies, tax cuts, public service privatisation opportunities, and removal of rules associated with that. They are, as some stories go, de facto the highest IQ and therefore most valuable humans, because of their success. Their wealth (acquired by any means), is a test that was passed. A conclusion maybe justified through research described in the below article, or maybe through the lens of a prosperity gospel. More on that specific faith based exceptionalism.

Woe betide them if they have an accident, or just get old. Who, we wonder, will feed them, dress them, attend to medical needs, help them explore their life choices, and mop up drool? That in turn may have a bearing on billionaires obsessed with humanoid robots and extending their life spans.

Eugenics is the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of “racial improvement” and “planned breeding,” which gained popularity during the early 20th century. Eugenicists worldwide believed that they could perfect human beings and eliminate so-called social ills through genetics and heredity. They believed the use of methods such as involuntary sterilization, segregation and social exclusion would rid society of individuals deemed by them to be unfit.

Scientific racism is an ideology that appropriates the methods and legitimacy of science to argue for the superiority of white Europeans and the inferiority of non-white people whose social and economic status have been historically marginalized. Like eugenics, scientific racism grew out of:

the misappropriation of revolutionary advances in medicine, anatomy and statistics during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through the mechanism of natural selection.

Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance.

We have all kinds of new spins on previously debunked race science and very explicit support for authoritarians. While investigative journalism, teaching, scientific research, social media content moderation, fact checking, and most other mechanisms to dig to some verifiable information are all under attack.

If evidence-backed facts are the enemy and only one side is popping off Sieg Heils on the regular, don't get bent over barrels to both sides this.

When Fact Checking is the True Nemesis