By Kindler
Look, I know it’s hard to keep track of all the insanity that the MAGA GOP throws in our faces every day. And some of it, quite honestly, is just clickbait that’s better left unclicked. But mixed in with the meaningless bluster are some genuine threats to US democracy. And one that chilled my bones, while flying under most of the media’s radar, popped up just the other day.
The story – thanks to AP News for covering it – is that the Heritage Foundation, guardians of the openly fascist second Trump term plan Project 2025, is sponsoring the creation of a list of Federal employees who may be too progressive for right-wingers’ tastes:
“With a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, the goal is to post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.”
As the story notes, such tactics harken back to Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare campaigns of the 1950s and have not been seen since. And the idea of publicly posting the names of Federal workers is particularly disturbing when you consider all the terrorist violence that MAGA rhetoric has inspired for years now – from the January 6th attack to multiple mass shootings of immigrants to the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
Dictatorship and terrorism are methods to control the public through fear, and that is a big part of Trump’s modus operandi – to get everyone from the media to corporations to members of the public to avoid challenging him or risk attack from his crazed mobs of supporters. Way too often, the tactic works, as people and institutions chicken out and choose personal safety over truth and democracy.
Purges of government employees deemed disloyal are also a big part of the totalitarian playbook. Josef Stalin was notorious for his purges of hundreds of thousands of “undesirables” from the Soviet government and Communist party. Such mass actions sow not only terror but deep mistrust as individuals are pressured and rewarded for turning their fellow workers, neighbors, relatives, etc. in to the authorities.
It’s just one more example of how the MAGA Republican party is determined to split us apart rather than bringing America together. Their brand of politics requires scapegoats to be sacrificed on the altar of their followers’ frustrations, anger and lust for what Trump calls “revenge and retribution.”
The Heritage Foundation refers to the Federal employees it will be targeting as “anti-American bad actors” constituting a “deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats”. And no, we’re not talking here about the 4,000 or so political appointees at the top of the government, who every president gets the right to replace, or even just the Senior Executive Service that defines the top tier of the civil service. According to Tom Jones, the Trump thug put in charge of this effort, they are also focused on employees down to the GS-13 level. To put that in perspective, according to the Federal Office of Personnel Management, if you were to average out all the GS (General Schedule) career levels in the government, the average grade nationwide would be GS-10.38 – and in the Washington, DC-MD-VA-WV area specifically, GS-12.53.
So, of the more than 2.2 million Federal employees, a witch hunt going all the way down to the GS-13 level could involve investigating hundreds of thousands of people –whose only crime is serving the public as a government employee who just maybe expresses his or her First Amendment-protected opinions in their spare time.
Keep in mind that Heritage is spending $100,000 on this effort and the right-wing group they hired to do it is employing six full time researchers. So this is not some small effort being run out of a blogger’s mother’s basement – these people are planning a serious large scale reactionary campaign with a lot of potential victims.
I’m no lawyer, but a conspiracy to smear hundreds if not thousands of innocent people sounds like fine grounds for lawsuits, and I encourage legal, labor and civil liberties groups to look deeply into this foul plan and do all they can to fight it.
And I implore everyone reading this right now to let everyone you know that it’s not intended as a mere insult when people like me call today’s Republican party fascist. These guys are dead serious about their plans and are forming them before our very eyes, in the open through campaigns like Project 2025. It’s not just about Trump – he’s their lunatic figurehead but a lot of truly malevolent actors are working to make sure that this time he succeeds in turning our beautiful country into the ugliest possible version of Putin’s Russia.
Please don’t wait until you see your neighbors or co-workers being dragged away in the street, because by then it will be way too late. Get involved and sound the alarm today to your list of friends because – hey, we’re not the ones who do enemies’ lists.
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