One of the primary goals of this site is to serve as a lens through which the events of the day may be viewed from a National Socialist perspective. I confess that I lose sight of this at times, instead seeing the issues of the day in more relativistic terms: black-and-white, good-and-bad, desirable vs reprehensible.

The previous administration—we’ll call it the Biden Administration even though it is clear he had little to do with it—made this oversight easy: DEI? Bad. Border invasion? Bad. Foreign policy? Incoherent.

The new administration—we’ll call it the Trump Administration even though it is unclear who is actually making the decisions—lends itself to this same problem: Shutting down the border? Good. Ending federally funded DEI? Good. An “America First” attitude? Good. Pro-Israeli foreign policy? Bad, but no one is perfect, right?

Without using that National Socialist lens to filter the rhetoric coming from Washington, it would be easy to assume the country is on the right track, moving down a road, that in at least some regards, parallels the one down which National Socialism would take us. It’s all words at the moment—the chaps blowing the leaves down the street likely still don’t have their green-cards, the price of eggs and gasoline has not come down, and we are still funding never-ending wars and limitless defense spending, even if the focus has shifted from Ukraine and Europe to Israel and the Pacific— but at least they are nice, patriotic, feel-good words. Right?

And yet…there is a disturbance in the Force. As if a million voices suddenly cried out… and were ignored. What is going on? Then it occurred to me: there’s the old story about how when Hitler came to power he had the backing of some elites and their industrialist power-brokers, as they were convinced that once given the trappings of power, he could be controlled. Of course, that turned out to be radically untrue, as it was predicated on the assumption that what Hitler wanted, like most other politicians then and now wanted, was power. He didn’t. He wanted to fundamentally change society, and power was the means, not the goal. But with Trump, I think they finally have their man.

I started to suspect this was the case when I heard Trump promise farmers and middle-class America that they are “going to have a field day”, thanks to his tariffs and other economic measures, after a period of “economic disturbance”, sacrifice, and discomfort. It is to be, according the Trump administration, a classic case of short-term pain for long-term gain.

Really? How many of the dozen billionaires in his cabinet are going to experience short-term pain? In a desperate effort to make ends meet, will they be forced to sell one of their beach houses? Maybe cut back on flying their private jets out of state for lunch date? No, what he was really saying was that the tariffs and other “adjustments” are going to be painful to the people who can least afford them- you and me. And farmers? Oh, they’ll be happy alright, if Tyson Foods and the Cargill group pay them a fair price when they swoop in to buy their family farm that is in danger of being foreclosed. He says he wants to “make America affordable again”, but to whom? Elite investors looking to purchase businesses, farms, and other assets on the cheap?

The other night my wife made an interesting comment, and the last piece fell into place. She said, “Have you noticed that you never see Trump alone?” And you know what, she’s right. No matter what he does or where he goes, there is someone holding his hand and whispering in his ear. Which, in turn, reminded me of a previous post where we looked at some of the key figures in his cabinet, and one of the things that stood out there was the number of people he has surrounded himself with who were part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

Unlike Hitler and the industrialists, I guess The Project 2025 got their man. And that explains the disturbance in the Force, because Project 2025 is very deceptive. Ostensibly a “guide”—called the “Mandate for Leadership”— formulated by right-wing think tanks to help the new administrations chart a conservative course, it is a play-by-play instruction book on how to craft a conservative capitalist government.

It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. On the surface, a large part of what if advocates for is surprisingly similar to what National Socialists call for, and, frankly, sounds pretty good. For example, it calls for greater fiscal accountability, improved government efficiency, dismantling the DEI backbone of many bureaucratic initiatives, eliminating critical race theory in education, indeed, doing away with the Department of Education altogether, tightening asylum requirements, reducing the number of refugees, and reinstating Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the Remain in Mexico program, which required immigrants to wait in Mexico during their immigration proceedings. And, critically, Project 2025 pays lip service to strengthening the traditional American family.

If one stopped there… Heck, our work here would be close to done. Right?

But the Project 2025 agenda is a behemoth, a beast unto itself. We’ll leave aside for a moment that the driving force behind the project, and president of the Heritage Foundation that produced it, is Kevin Roberts, who has close ties to and receives regular spiritual guidance from the Catholic Information Center, led by an Opus Dei priest and incorporated by the archdiocese of Washington, D.C. And we’ll skip over the fact that in 2022 Trump spoke at the Heritage Foundation annual conference and said:

“This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming.”

Then, once Project 2025 was examined more closely and the American people could read the writing on the wall, he disavowed it in 2024, saying:

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

And we’ll skip over how, now elected and in office, 9 of his cabinet members and close advisors were co-authors of Project 2025.

No, we’ll skip that. After all, the devil is in the details. Project 2025 talks a good game, but as I read page after page of their 897-page manifesto (I confess, I skimmed some of it), I started to notice what it didn’t say, and then how all of these wonderful goals were to be achieved. Spoiler: you’re going to pay for it.

First, unless in the context of doing away with critical race theory or DEI initiatives, there is no mention or distinction made as regards race. Project 2025 is color-blind. Whites and Blacks, Jews and non-Jews, Hispanics and Asians are all exactly the same as far as they are concerned. Scientific biological considerations need not be taken into account, to say nothing of historical precedence and race relations.

For public institutions to use taxpayer dollars to declare the superiority or inferiority of certain races, sexes, and religions is a violation of the Constitution and civil rights law and cannot be tolerated by any government anywhere in the country… Crudely categorizing employees by race or ethnicity fails to recognize the diversity of the American workforce and forces individuals into categories that do not fully reflect their racial and ethnic heritage.” Project 2025

To them, the happy American is one who goes to work, pays his bills, pays his taxes, then goes shopping for whatever he wants. Spend baby spend. It is a consumer driven society, and the only color that matters is the color green.

Second, they don’t want to “make America great again”, they want to make American business great again. In not so many words, they are promoting the economic agenda of their hero, Ronald Reagan: trickle-down economics. Anything that is good for business is good for America. Page after page talks about strengthening the family by improving economic opportunity for businesses, the implication being that surely, out of the kindness of their heart, big business will graciously offer a fair-day’s pay for a fair-day’s work, benefits because that is the right thing to do, and share in the wealth they are sure to accumulate. They want to make “Better Capital Markets” by doing such things as repealing the Dodd–Frank mandated disclosures relating to conflict minerals, mine safety, resource extraction, and CEO pay ratios.

No mention is made of the fact that a fast majority of large businesses in America are primarily owned by three investment firms: BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. In fact, they aren’t mentioned at all. Likewise, for all the love they profess for the American farmer, no mention is of the fact that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers, only 1.3% of the population is involved in farming, and the single largest company in the United States is a privately owned farm company: Cargill.

And then, with language tucked in the middle of Project 2025, the bottom falls out.

According to Project 2025 “The United States of America is the world’s dominant superpower and remains the world’s arsenal of democracy. To maintain that global positioning—and thereby best protect the homeland and our own democratic institutions—it is critical that the United States strengthen its manufacturing and defense industrial base and at the same time that it increases the reliability and resilience of its globally dispersed supply chains. That will necessarily require the onshoring of a significant portion of production currently offshored by American multinational corporations.” That cheering you hear in the background? Those are the shareholders of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamic, and Boeing- the largest institutional investors of which are…wait for it…all together now: BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. But they recognize this will be a balancing act: “Yet it is equally true that open borders and offshoring also help American multinational corporations to maximize their profits by minimizing their labor and environmental protection costs.” Always a concern. So, somehow they are going to eat their cake and have it to.

How? You are going to pay for it. Starting on page 695, they lay it out in their tax policy. The plan is to simplify the tax code: there will be two tax brackets: 15% for those who make less than the Social Security wage base (about $130,000 per year) and 30% for those that make more. Corporate taxes, capital gains, and qualified dividends would be taxed at somewhere between the two rates. Again, it sounds good, but it is actually a bait-and-switch: for that tax-code simplification, you will no longer have any deductions, credits, or exclusions. Benefits (health, dental, etc) paid by the employer will no longer be deductible to the employer, eliminating one incentive or, in the case of small business, aid, in providing benefits in the first place. Their thinking is either naive, or disingenuous: they claim this will “reduce the tax bias against wages”- in other words, what money the employers don’t spend on benefits to their employees they will surely use to provide higher wages. Right? Right? They would never keep the money to improve the bottom line.

And then the kicker:

“The public finance literature is clear that a consumption tax would minimize government’s distortion of private economic decisions and thus be the least economically harmful way to raise federal tax revenues. There are several forms that a consumption tax could take, including a national sales tax, a business transfer tax, a flat tax, or a cash flow tax.”

Yes, you read that right: a Federal Sales Tax. Take that American Worker! We’re going increase your taxes (the average American worker currently pays less than 15%, once deductions are taken into account), deincentivize your employer from offering benefits, and, just to make sure you get it good and hard, slap you with a Federal Sales Tax- all to improve American Business.

Welcome to capitalism on steroids: I give you, the Project 2025. This time next year, when Mr. American Worker is doing his taxes, he is going to realize that we traded a brain-addled neo-Marxist administration for the poster child of rape-and-pillage capitalism.

It’s time to reprint the red hats. Going forward, they should say, “Make America…Bend Over.”

Amerika Erwache!

SUBSCRIBE