Dick Hubert’s Worldview: A ‘hair on fire’ moment for me and the majority of Americans

March 6, 2024 at 11:41 p.m.

By DICK HUBERT | Comments: 0 | Leave a comment
Columnist

Have you heard of Project 2025?

I try to keep up with news and events and political developments, but I confess Project 2025 (www.project2025.org) was not on my list of news alerts until last week, when a rather alarmed friend e-mailed me to get my take on it.

That was before New York Times Opinion columnist Carlos Lazorda wrote a lengthy description and analysis Feb. 29 which you may or may not have read (“What I Learned When I Read 887 Pages of Plans for Trump’s Second Term.”)

I more than read Lazorda’s column but also perused the Project 2025 website. Like Trump, the Project 25 leaders and backers say out loud what saboteurs and conspiracy theorists used to mumble quietly, write in disappearing ink, or in code.

Don’t take my word for it. Read it yourself.

You’ll find that devoted followers and true believers of the lies Donald Trump has fomented since losing the Presidential election in 2020 have created a plan to make sure Trump’s hoped for second term is ready from day one to staff the appointed and even the civil service jobs with those who are prepared to make sure that every whim he has, and they have, has the people in place in the executive branch to carry them out.

You’ll remember all those he appointed in his first term who concluded that Trump was insane, dangerous, possibly an unwitting agent for Russian malevolence, or worse, and did their best to stop him. They included his Secretaries of Defense and State, National Security advisers, Chief of Staff, Press Secretaries, communications chiefs, and even the wife of the soon to be ex-minority Senate leader Mitch McConnell (Elaine Chao). And of course, most famously, Mark Milley, Trump’s now retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Trump has said he would “execute” if returned to office.

Project 2025 is determined that no such people with souls, respect for the Constitution, consciences, belief in strategic alliances like NATO and those we have in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond get anywhere near a potential job. They’re looking for resumes right now and are vetting applicants for every conceivable job.

As they put it, “The 2025 Presidential Transition Project paves the way for an effective conservative Administration based on fours pillars: a policy agenda, Presidential Personnel Database, Presidential Administration Academy, and playbook for the first 180 days of the next Administration.”

Check out Project 2025’s “Advisory Board” for what they call “100 conservative organizations” that have come together “to form the project pillars.” You’ll find familiar names like the Heritage Foundation and Hillsdale College, along with a long list that includes everyone from Moms for Liberty to Susan B. Anthony Pro Life America.

The Project 2025 team is taking a cue from the Federalist Society, which in 2016 famously prepared a list of prospective Supreme Court nominees for then Presidential candidate Donald Trump, who, upon election, followed it to the letter.

Those appointees have helped bring a right wing bent to the judiciary, starting from the top down, which will have a profound effect on American life for decades.

The three Trump appointees to the Supreme Court are the ones now helping to slow walk any federal felony trials that would get in the way of Trump’s election campaign should they be held and decided before the November election.

Project 2025 plans to hand a hoped-for victorious Trump a strategic plan for revolutionizing the executive branch the way the Federalist Society prepared a nominee list for turning the Federal judiciary into an unelected right-wing branch of the Federal government.

This is what happens when extreme activists are successful.

This is no time for my fellow minded citizens to be lazy and assume that all will be well in the future. To put it in the best dramatic terms possible, right now your hair should be on fire. Inaction is concession. It’s what happens when good people look the other way and do nothing.

Aid to Gaza

As I write this column on Mar. 2, U.S. Air Force cargo planes are air dropping humanitarian aid to Gazans. That the aid is being air dropped instead of being trucked in is being interpreted widely as because Israel, presumably one of our closest allies, is otherwise blockading it.

Friends of Israel, including all those locally who have put up signs on their lawns saying “We Support Israel,” have to ask themselves how the U.S. support for Israel in its war against Hamas brought the U.S. to the point that as a nation we’re having to deal with mass starvation in Gaza and defend in the UN Security Council a nation that has so far caused the death of a reported 12,500 children.

Was there a better way for the Netanyahu right wing government in Israel to respond to the horrid Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis and the capture and torture of about 250 Israelis and foreigners (of whom 134 are still believed alive and being held), with a military blitz and bombing of the Gaza Strip which has played into the hands of Hamas and Israel’s enemies in the Middle East and anti-Semites worldwide?

That this blitz is being masterminded by a right-wing government led by Benjamin Netanyahu that prior to the Hamas invasion was bitterly opposed by hundreds of thousands of Israelis including large numbers of the 300,000 Israeli army reservists now fighting this war (while some 66,000 ultra-Orthodox young men among Netanyahu’s political allies are exempted from service) only corrodes Israel’s society.

It’s also an Israeli right-wing government that opposes a two-state solution.

The spillover here in the U.S. can be seen locally in the increasingly ugly back and forth between Democratic Congressional primary candidates Jamaal Bowman and George Latimer.

It’s an ideological split that as I pointed out last week has nationwide implications and endangers President Biden’s re-election chances as it wears away his support in the key swing state of Michigan.

As Thomas Friedman pointed out in his New York Times column Feb. 27:

“…I believe Israel is imperiling decades of diplomacy to get the world to recognize the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination and self-defense in their historic homeland. It is also relieving Palestinians of the burden and depriving them of the opportunity of recognizing two nation-states for two people and building the necessary institutions and compromises to make that happen. And, I repeat, it is going to put the Biden administration in an increasingly untenable position.

And make Iran’s day.”

Chaos at home. Chaos overseas.

Nothing good will come out of all of this.


Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.

 

Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.




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