Since the Supreme Court's Chevron decision has taken independent regulation powers away from government agencies, let's take this opportunity to review what happens now if Trump wins and the GOP gets to launch Project 2025.
Hint: The 2 are connected. 🧵
Abortions could be made nearly impossible nationwide, because
1. Abortion would not be subject to any safety regulation under the Dept. of Health.
2. The president would force the now-powerless FDA to rescind its approval of mifepristone and judges could declare it illegal.
3. The Office of Human Rights, also powerless, would no longer enforce any federal laws protecting LGBTQ people, racial minorities, disabled people, etc. Get ready for even more rollbacks of civil rights!
4. The EPA would be in the tank for expanded coal, oil, and gas projects.
The president would now totally control the FCC. Which means:
5. Any station that airs something Trump doesn't like could be punished. The president rules over mass media.
6. Porn is banned. Control over the FCC gives the president leeway to ban content deemed 'pornographic'.
7. The newly-powerless Dept. of Ed is dismantled. All rules protecting the rights of students are gone, all national standards to ensure a fair education in public schools are gone, all public school funding is transferred to private and religious schools via a voucher program.
8. Get ready for an immigrant Holocaust. Immigration agencies can't act independently now. The president can use the National Guard to round up immigrants in EVERY state for mass deportations and send them to concentration camps.
9. The FBI and DOJ would be totally under the president's control, so he could have them investigate his enemies and criminally punish dissenters. If he decides the army should be used to help violently break up protests, he has no federal red tape to go through.
10. And all federal employees, all civil servants, all State Department staff, etc...they're all fired and replaced by Trump loyalists. So there's NOBODY acting independently of the president or the judiciary's whims. Trump wins, fascist theocracy rules, the courts endorse it.
As I've said before, none of this is speculation or exaggeration. ALL of it is based on the actual text of Project 2025. It's publicly available. The Heritage Foundation acknowledges it. Trump supports it.
Heritage has even said there's more stuff they haven't made public.
This is the reality we're looking at if Trump and the GOP win this year.
Want to stop it?
I suggest you quit your doom-screaming and hand-wringing over Biden, make sure you and other people are registered to vote and aware of the stakes, and make damn sure Trump loses. /End
P.S. To people who tell me I don't know what I'm talking about: I read the Project 2025 playbook. It's right here:
To people telling me to stick to Australian politics, I've lived in Australia for 5 months.
P.P.S. Since a few people asked to share this on Facebook, here's a link to a public post:
The rest of my FB is private, and if you're planning on trolling me in the comments, I'll ignore you, but thanks in advance for the engagement and signal boost.facebook.com/andrew.polino/…
If you're skeptical, don't take my word for it. My background's in news writing. @GalvinAlmanza's is in law. Read her thread for a more thorough & detailed (better) breakdown of what Project 2025 will do to our lives & how Chevron opens the door for it.
Let's call #Project2025 what it is: a plan to rob Americans of their freedom.
Whether "free country" makes you think of the Bill of Rights, "life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness", or whatever else, Trump & the GOP will steal it.
Here's what we lose under Project 2025: 🧵
FREE SPEECH: Project 2025 puts the FBI and DOJ under Trump's control. Do or say something he hates, and he'll have his DOJ prosecute and penalize you. If your state's prosecutor doesn't want to charge you, Trump will have them kicked out and replaced with one of his choice. 1/
Speaking of free speech, Project 2025 bans pornography and criminally charges people involved in it.
If that's not absurd enough, remember: red states often justify banning books by falsely calling them "pornographic". They'll come for anything they can sling that label at. 2/
Let's call #Project2025 what it is: a plan to rob Americans of their freedom.
Whether "free country" makes you think of the Bill of Rights, "life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness", or whatever else, Trump & the GOP will steal it.
Here's what we lose under Project 2025: 🧵
FREE SPEECH: #Project2025 puts the FBI and DOJ under Trump's control. Do or say something he hates, and he'll have his DOJ prosecute and penalize you. If your state's prosecutor doesn't want to charge you, Trump will have them kicked out and replaced with one of his choice. 1/
Speaking of free speech, #Project2025 aims to ban porn and criminally charge people involved in it.
If that's not absurd enough, remember: red states often justify banning books by falsely calling them "pornography". They'll come for anything they can sling that charge at. 2/
Working in a newsroom in Tampa, Florida for 1 year really drove home how much horrific awfulness you learn to accept as normal life after a while. Just another week at the office.
Here are a few stories I wrote that really encapsulated Florida's utter insanity. 🧵 1/
There were a LOT of shootings. High profile mass murders, domestic violence cases, road rage with guns, and a ton of arguments or personal beefs that turned violent. Teens fired at each other in public. It really was like the wild west out there!
People were intensely antivax. As red state as FL is, none of my political articles got me as much hate as when I wrote about COVID. DeSantis made a platform out of mask and vaccine bashing. His surgeon general openly spewed debunked antivax B.S. Madness!
After 37 years as a solid American, I've left the U.S. My wife and I have been living in her home town of Melbourne, Australia since January, shortly before our baby was born.
We'd always talked about doing it someday, but something happened last year that forced our hand. 1/ 🧵
We lived in Tampa, FL where I worked for local news. My wife got pregnant. We had insurance through my job, so we thought we were golden.
We weren't. We still faced high copays for OB visits and meds for my wife, who had a brutal pregnancy. But that wasn't what drove us out. 2/
What drove us out were the OBs. They deemed my wife high-risk and an insurance liability, discharging her on the 1st pretext they could find and effectively blacklisting her from all OBs in-network.
Another group transfered her, claiming they didn't have the right specialist. 3/