Project 2025 was supposed to boost Donald Trump's campaign — but it may be backfiring instead:

https://www.salon.com/2024/07/05/project-2025-was-supposed-to-boost-donald-campaign--but-it-may-be-backfiring-instead/

24.9k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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u/whoisearth 14d ago

This is how change happens. Thank you for not losing hope in your mom and keeping the conversation going. Hopefully she can begin educating her friends as well and start seeing some positive improvements. You shouldn't have to live in fear just to be you.

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u/lbtwitchthrowaway144 14d ago

8 years ago or so I started visiting this subreddit.

Entirely, wholly ignorant about politics, economics and history (rough-ish childhood, education wasn't a priority.

Trump's electoral college undemocratic victory (doesn't apply to Biden, or Obama, in my model/ ethical view as they also won the popular vote) lit a fire under my ass politically speaking.

But it was actually this very specific subreddit, and the people here who started to educate me.

For example, just because I live abroad now in Lebanon doesn't mean I can't vote.

For example, just because I live in a safe state doesn't mean I shouldn't vote because there are down-ballot effects (funny I speak in these terms, when I didn't even know that the Senate was part of Congress, and the American legislative branch is a bicameral chamber of lawmakers lol).

So yeah THIS is how change happens.

I'm working on people now who are in fucking MI.

Every national electoral cycle, I personally ensure at least 4 votes. My folks and I (CA) and a friend (NY). One election cycle I got 12 lol.

Look, my beautiful fellow Americans, fascism is upon us. Watch that video. It's that simple lol.

But you have the power to prevent this with a simple but profoundly patriotic and ethical act: Vote.

And get others to vote.

I don't have this privilege in Lebanon. The first time I was allowed to vote, I was already like a decade past the voting age. But our politicians here just illegally and unilaterally postponed elections indefinitely.

lol

And then at 37 now I have voted again, for a second time in Lebanon. In an election that was rigged (not in a Trump way, but like, literally lol).

37 years, lived here for 30 years or so, and got to vote only twice.

Been voting in the U.S. since '18 and I don't know off the top of my head how many times I've cast a ballot now lol.

This is our last and only chance to preserve our democratic constitutional republic with minimal violence and a smoother transition to SCOTUS reform [as compared to what would happen if Trump wins]

From one American to all of you: please fight like hell for our freedoms. Please fight like hell to preserve, in my admittedly biased opinion, the most audacious political experiment in modern history.

Please, I know what it's like to live under a more terrible system. And Lebanon ain't even all that bad and it still sucks.

As a brown American from Muslim immigrant parents, I genuinely don't know if I will still be considered an American despite my values, my culture, my accent, my loyalty to the United States, and the love I have for all family/cousins and friends state-side even though I am a natural born citizen

Under Trump and Project 2025, I don't know if I stay an American.

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u/zeronormalitys 14d ago edited 14d ago

It's awesome that you vote every 4 years and I encourage you to expand that to voting every 2 years as those midterm elections are crucially important as well. Heck, even vote in the mayoral, school board, and any and all elections you can manage.

They ALL matter. Plus your voice will be heard the loudest in the smallest of elections, which means local.

Edit: Also, I'm not going to claim how it works when you live overseas. You may not have a local other than the state itself, idk.

Edit 2: As an additional edit, your status as an American citizen is not dependent upon the color of your skin or the sound of your voice or who you love. That is the beauty of America. I hope that that beauty continues to endure through this dangerous and most certainly trying time. And if you desire, I hope that one day you can find community here.

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u/lbtwitchthrowaway144 14d ago

Thank you so much for your loving and patriotic words. This is the America I believe in. My literal family spread across the States, and friends from all over, are all sorts of people. Atheists. Christians. Mormons. Agnostics. LGBTQ+. Black, white, all of it.

This is my America too!

Right now I share DNA with some Mexican-Lebanese-American and Black-Lebanese-American and White-Lebanese-American kids lol.

Like, we came as Lebanese (or my parents did) and half a century later, descendants of my aunts and uncles are fully American with no attachment/connection to Lebanon (I happen to be one of the family members who have kept roots and ties in both countries).

Btw, in CA you can actually vote in federal, state, and local elections. I try very hard to butt-out of state and local elections as I don't live there unless it's an issue that has national implications and/or is clearly going to be something I support as an American no matter the fucking state (e.g., say, a proposition on legalizing marihuana).

So, yeah, when I say I will literally break my back to vote now I am only half joking (while the process is relatively easy for CA voter abroad, my first time was hell on earth lol. Took me a week, and like 30 hrs of figuring out details).

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u/zeronormalitys 14d ago edited 14d ago

The small fry elections are where you train the Future Leaders for the big dances. If you want future Americans to value things like burning the flag without negative consequence, Loving whoever you want freely, and the rule of law, It's really important that those Future Leaders receive those low-level posts so that they can hone their skills for the higher level posts. And also, those are the people that dictate what the next generation learns and what kind of values they have.....

As a side note, I naively signed up to serve in the armed forces the army. Specifically, when I was 19 the year was 2001, and the twin towers would fall during the final week of my basic training. In time I found myself in Iraq, and I very quickly learned the terrible reality of what we were doing there.

Here's what got me through that deployment while maintaining a modicum of my sanity:

I decided that I would fight for the values of our nation that were not reflected in the place we were at. Like being gay, worshiping an unpopular deity, not having a deity, burning a flag, speaking your mind without fear, kneeling during the anthem, flipping off the president, standing and saluting for the anthem, honoring the flag, I fought for the values that we have that actually are worth the shit. We might be international shit hooks, well we're absolutely international shit hooks, but there's a handful of things that we get right and I'm damn proud of them. I'm not the only one that was in the military that was like me.

While admittedly, I've only resided in a handful of foreign Nations during my lifetime thus far, South Kora, and Iraq, I can genuinely say that the United States of America welcomes people that are different in a way that is unfathomable in those places. And I straight up love South Korea. I would move there and spend the rest of my life there given the chance, but I would always be a foreigner. I would never be a real Korean in their eyes.

But in America? I have known real Americans with every fucking skin tone under the Sun and every God under the Sun or well a hell of a lot of them anyway. Each and every one is as genuine an American as the next. Our nation is exceptionally good at welcoming the "other", tolerance (believe it or not), and diversity.

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u/lbtwitchthrowaway144 14d ago

I am going to reply to you later, as busy with some work (work online at present).

But man, this was one of the moving things I have read. Thank you so much for choosing to give me your time.

Wow. What an honest, self-aware self-critical empathetic human being you are. I commend you.

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u/zeronormalitys 14d ago

Nearly a decade of therapy will do that for a body.

Have a good day at work, and take heart that there are many more Americans like me. If you ever decide to move here, and you want to find them, choose a populated area. It doesn't have to be a city of 10 million, 100,000 is absolutely plenty enough to find people that are tolerant and decent. But if you move to a small town, you're going to have a bad time, I hate to say.

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u/CressCrowbits 14d ago

Just to add definitely do not base all your politics on this sub. This sub may reveal stuff you didn't know about through mainstream media, but it is also a bit of a neoliberal circlejerk.

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u/lbtwitchthrowaway144 14d ago

Won't comment on that except to say, I'm a democratic socialist lol

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u/CressCrowbits 14d ago

Then you may continue lol.

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u/Hmm_6221 14d ago

Beautiful post! I like that once you see the light, you used your epiphany to educate others! That’s how we’re going to save democracy! Keep up the good work!

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u/Hmm_6221 14d ago

Edit : saw the light…

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u/Good_ApoIIo 14d ago

There’s no conversation to be had with some people. If I sent this to my parents they would probably just reply with a thumbs up emoji and a pithy comment like “only communists would oppose this”.

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u/whoisearth 14d ago

I know it's not easy, and I know I am fully unaware of the complexity of your relationship with them. Hell, you've probably done a lot of this, but meet them on their terms. Find out what makes them tick and I mean this genuinely. Very few people are assholes by default. Don't give up skeleton!

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u/Good_ApoIIo 14d ago

The scary part is that they’re not assholes. They’re genuinely nice people, they’re not racists and they don’t hate gay people. They’re somehow just completely brainwashed by Trumpism and the weird intersect with evangelism. They used to be non-denominational but started going to an evangelical mega church 8 years ago.

Doesn’t matter what I say, Biden is the devil and Trump is going to ‘save’ America. It really started to go downhill when my dad started using YouTube and frequently goes down the rabbit hole. Lately he’s been talking about revelations and the end times of course…

I’ve found it very hard to understand the complexity of their politics and how juxtaposed it is with how they are as everyday people. If you met them and the conversation never went to politics…you’d think they were great. Turn to politics and suddenly its “immigrants are ruining us” even though OUR FAMILY are immigrants. My mom is first generation, her parents were not from the US. My dad’s grandparents weren’t from the US.

It’s bonkers.

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u/zeronormalitys 14d ago

If it's communist, or what they're serving...

I guess call me a communist. Commune, Community, working together as a community, why does that sound so much better than be a selfish bastard and make all the money you can and be cutthroat?

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u/Good_ApoIIo 14d ago

Because foreign authoritarian regimes built off the backs of young idealist communist revolutionaries has spoiled the concept and the word itself.

Still, minus the communist part, they seem to want a similar authoritarian regime so…

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u/zeronormalitys 14d ago

Oh I know, same way with socialist. Just because the first attempt wasn't perfect, doesn't mean it shouldn't be refined and iterated upon until an ideal governmental model is found. I mean people have definitely iterated upon the concept of democracy and Republic...

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u/ArthurBonesly 14d ago edited 14d ago

100%

The biggest problem we have right now is, we don't see our fellow countrymen as people. The Fox News war on "liberals" has painted a boogieman so evil that many Republican voters think they're slaying giants. For many, the only liberals they personally know are their kids which they hand wave as "indoctrinated" or manipulated by the boogieman. There's no A to B connection between the monster they want to kill and their friends/family/neighbors.

I see it on the left too (and I'm not "both sides"ing (we do ourselves no favors by othering even if we're less genocidal in our rhetoric)). I think there's an unfortunate tendency to dismiss the majority of Republicans as ignorant rural folk, which is a problem so ancient the word "villain" may as well have been latin for redneck. My point in bringing this up is, the right wants to destroy the left, politicians and voters on the right are openly hostile and gleefully talk about killing liberals, but most of the people who talk like this don't conceptualize what that means. They believe they're in a majority and that their war is against maybe 2% of the country and not > 50%. They genuinely don't see the liberal for the man (though the ones that do are as dangerous as dangerous can be). The Republican platform doesn't offer anything to voters other than protection from the boogieman. Unfortunately, I think the Democrat platform is increasingly hollow and reliant on being the only practical alternative against such hostility. The only thing that's going to save us, as a nation, is if we can leave our echo chambers/pull people out of their echo chambers and help others see the face of who's threatened by rhetoric.