People Magazine’s writeup on Project 2025/Mandate for Leadership

People Magazine’s writeup on Trump’s Project 2025 / Mandate for Leadership isn’t bad, and is worth being shown around to your Trump-leaning family and friends, maybe as an explainer.

It’s written more accessibly than most, which is good. People magazine have an audience and they know how to talk to them, and a lot of them are the kind of low-info white voter who need to understand what’s at stake this time.

The first response of far too many people – particularly low-info voters who think they’re immune to all this – is to say that “this is Trump being Trump” and “he doesn’t mean it” and “he won’t do it.” This article points out that a much less ambitious Mandate writeup happened in 2016, and Trump implemented two-thirds of it in his first year. That should be a pretty good start on the whole “yes, he fucking will” response.

It also points out how many advisors and others on the Trump campaign staff were directly involved in this project, helping blunt the strength of Trump’s denials. Sadly, I think it was written too early to include references to Trump’s specific and enthusiastic endorsement of it while speaking before its primary driver, the Heritage Foundation, as recorded on video and audio, at the Heritage Foundation annual assembly which kicked the project off.

That should be included as well, as you talk to your Trumpy family and friends. We have to get through to them – as many as we can – and we have to activate as many other normally “neutral” or “uninvolved” people as we can, and we need to do it right now.

Maybe that includes you. If you’re normally uninvolved, you need to be involved, because you really can’t sit this one out. None of us can. Not if you ever want to be able to sit another one out again, because one of the rules of authoritarian societies is that literally everything you do has to be measured for political compliance to the Great Leader.

Everything you do, everything you say, will have to involve calculations about its politics. Everything.

It will be unavoidable, if you want to survive.

I should probably write that up as a separate article, shouldn’t I? Because it’s all too horrifically true. If you want to be able to ignore politics and ignore elections, you have to get into this one and fight with all you’ve got, now, to keep Trump out of power.

Tell your friends, tell your family, particularly the Trumpy ones. We win this, if we fight – but we absolutely have to fight.

114 days remain.

Good hunting.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Stay calm and don’t post stupid shit

Okay, everything just got worse. How much worse depends upon what actually happened. The conspiracy theorists will declare it an assassination attempt by [insert slur of your choice] and there will be more violence as a result. They will stick to this no matter what facts come out, so that damage is done.

[ETA: Yes, I am aware the shooter’s location is now known, eliminating the following hypothesis. It was not released information at the time of original writing. The rest of the post remains valid and important.]

The least bad reasonable explanation I can think of is that it was a dispute between two rally attendees and one of them pulled a pistol to shoot it out and everyone in the world got very unlucky.

Since most people are looking in one direction – the Dear Leader – this means a high percentage of shots are going to be in that direction in this scenario.

(Something like 40%, let’s say. 40% chance of getting into an argument with someone in front of you, 40% chance someone behind you, 20% left or right, less because those are more likely to be people you came with. These are example numbers only, not real statistics, intended solely to give you the idea, do not quote as valid, etc.)

Regardless of how it turns out – and as I type right now they appear to have the body of the shooter, so identification will be forthcoming – for the time being, here’s what you do:

• stay calm, and
• DO NOT POST STUPID SHIT

Do not get your admins in trouble, do not get yourself in trouble. If you have violence fantasies of your own, keep them to your goddamn self right now, I fucking mean it.

The mods, by which I mean the FBI and the Secret Service, are not asleep.

114 days remain, and our job just got harder.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.