Suffering through Project 2025 training videos (Part 4)

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone, welcome back. We are finally in the homestretch. We are at part four and hopefully part last, of our suffering through Project 2025 training videos. Hopefully you’re all caught up on our previous three episodes, as we round out this final installment, because the talking points that get repeated and the patterns in their rhetoric become so incredibly obvious the further and further you go on. And so, to kick things off, we’re going to be starting at video 16, the Art of Professionalism.

Courtney: This one was quite interesting and I took a couple of quotes of exact things that they said, because they were kind of in direct opposition to things that have been said in other previous videos. For example: [reading] “There’s no such thing as a good professional who can’t do their job. You should be an expert at your own job.” When they have, time and time again, told us that you don’t need to be an expert, you don’t need experience, you don’t need education, you just need to be loyal to the President, and probably also work with Heritage Foundation. But here they say, “Competence is the most important thing.”

Courtney: And this quote I took because it seemed like a slip of the tongue that they didn’t try to re-record or edit in any way. Because they go on to talk about how important bosses are and they say, “You have a boss, but your boss always has a boss.”

Courtney: So this is a direct quote: [reading] “Your boss always has a boss, even the President. Theoretically the American people, but mostly their own deadlines, the things they want to get done.” It’s like he wasn’t even going to say the American people at all and then realized, “Oh, I should probably say that,” but he also couldn’t help himself. He had to put, “Theoretically, the American people are the president’s boss,” so that’s fun.

Courtney: So they go on to talk about how important it is to manage up. And this concept of managing up. And what that means is: your only job is to make your boss look good and feel good. Because then they’ll make their own boss look good and feel good, which will keep going all the way up the chain, which will eventually make the President look good and feel good, which will then make the American people look good and feel good. And I am just dying to find out how this managing up concept fits with this party’s ideology of trickle-down economics.

Royce: So I almost popped in when you introduced this video, because the Art of Professionalism sounds like one of those derivative, copy-paste, like entrepreneurial advice books, and hearing that this video is all about just like how to play the corporate ladder game to make it seem like you’re doing your job well.

Courtney: You’ve just gotta make your boss look good. That’s all. That’s your entire job.

Royce: If everyone feels like things are going well and no institutions are allowed to actually collect data to prove that things are not going well…?

Courtney: Well, then it also gets really interesting because from that point they start talking about the concept of being a servant leader, which is also kind of the opposite of something that was said in previous videos. Because within the first few videos they were talking about coming in, day one, ruling with an iron fist. At one point, just talking about, like, time management and things. They were talking about, like, blocking their calendar off to people and making sure that people who are going to take up too much of your time aren’t going to have access to it at all. And making sure that nothing at all whatsoever in your entire department can get done without going through you first. And to continue naming examples, to also make sure that the Democrats and Republicans in Congress fight each other. Make sure they never get along on anything. And again, that’s only to name a few.

Courtney: So now they’re like, “But to be a good leader, you need to be a good servant.” But they also aren’t talking about being a servant to the public, to the American people. They’re talking about being a servant to the President, who – I’m beginning to think – his boss is the Heritage Foundation. And then, to round that out– Since this video especially, it’s like every single thing was some kind of contradiction. Here again is a quote: [reading] “Everyone you meet will help you get to another place one day, so it will bring you to the next stage in your career.” Which is also the exact opposite of the previous video, where they said don’t come into this expecting future jobs. You’re not going to get future jobs based on this.

Courtney: And then we roll along to video 17, the Administrative State, where the host of this episode talks about how agencies are bad in a number of ways, a couple of different ways, and he somehow managed to compare no taxation without representation to all current unelected government officials. Which is funny, because he’s like: we were founded on no taxation without representation, and yet we have all these career government employees who are unelected. And it’s like all of the political appointees are unelected. All of them. All of them are unelected. But then he has the audacity to say that factionalism should be avoided at all costs, because avoiding factionalism was a primary concern of the Founding Fathers. As if they aren’t literally admitting to trying to drive a wedge further between governmental factions with this entire scheme. Royce, what did you call it when they were talking about making sure that Congress never works together?

Royce: Oh, it was something like training people to be sentient wrenches in the gears of the congressional machine.

Courtney: Yes! And they’re literally saying, “Don’t ever let Congress cooperate because you can have so much more power if they don’t.” And yet here he is complaining about unelected government officials and also warning about factionalism. Okay. But I did have to take a note about this. I don’t even remember how he followed it up, but it was something about like, “Oh, all the good leaders out there,” just because this group of people– This is a quote: [reading] “The people we admire most Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, and our own parents.” I just found that grouping of people to be utterly ridiculous, because just all the assumptions you have to have about the audience you’re speaking to to just lump all of those people together and be like, “Yes, this is a universal truth that these are the people we admire the most.”

Courtney: So the next video is on passing new regulations, and this is the same guy who was at the US Department of Civil Rights who, from our previous episode, was taking credit for things like authorizing telehealth, which what that actually means is ignoring HIPAA regulations, or making sure people with disabilities aren’t denied ventilators, which really just means saying, “Hey, hospitals, doctors, states, remember that legislation from the 70s still applies now.”

Courtney: So actually doing very, very little. I’m sure there are plenty of actual regulations that his department did in his tenure there, but those are the ones he bragged about. Those are the ones he was holding up as, “These are the wonderful things we did.”

Courtney: But he starts out by giving again a very simplified overview of regulations. In a way that almost assumes the person watching the video doesn’t know how many things are regulated. Which is absurd because he goes on to list things. He’s like, “Regulations touch everything and every aspect of our life, right down to the width hallways can be and the height of outlets in your house. It’s all regulated.” And he goes on to say, “They regulate everything, often for the worse.” And then has to, uh, throw in our face that, “This is not what the Founders imagined.”

Royce: I think I can say with reasonable certainty that the Founders were not imagining the regulations of electrical outlets in modern day homes.

Courtney: Probably not. They probably did not imagine that, no. And he goes on to talk again in very vague terms about his own experience. And being in the Department of Civil Rights, he says, “This was a controversial department because we dealt with things like gender identity, abortion and health care.” And he goes on to say, like, “Now, being in this agency, I expected scrutiny, but what I didn’t expect were all of the lobbyists.” And without anything specific about who these lobbyists were, what specifically they wanted, he’s like, “There were always lobbyists in my office who wanted something. And this is not what the Founders imagined.” He says that again. But whatever it was that these– these vague lobbyists in his office wanted, he says he was not persuaded, “Because you have to answer to the Constitution, the law and the President. Because it is the President’s authority that you are implementing,” in just all the things you do as a political appointee.

Courtney: And he does double down as well and says that because he was a HIPAA regulator, he alone was given immense power over what happened in hospitals. And it’s very fascinating because he’s halfway complaining about one person being given that much power and also halfway bragging about how good he was with that power and how he used it for good, because he said no to the lobbyists. And I just couldn’t help but remember as he was talking about, “I was given immense power. Me, a single person, had tremendous authority over this very important aspect of society.” And all the times they’ve said you don’t need any experience. But then of course, it wouldn’t be a conservative post-2020 complaining about government agencies without a mention of Dr Fauci.

Courtney: And he says, “Think back about what happened with COVID. You had guidance, not even regulatory action, from Fauci that was used to impose the lockdowns and the mask mandates. And that was followed up with regulations that were going to be used for a mandatory vaccination regime on the American worker. Imagine that! Congress never spoke of any of these things, but it was through regulation that they issued a mandatory vax mandate for a majority of Americans.” And first of all– First of all, there were hardly any lockdowns. There wasn’t a true lockdown. If they’re talking about the sheltering in place orders, they weren’t even everywhere. A lot of them were few and far between and did not last as long as they should have. Mask mandates as well not as iron tight as a lot of conservatives lead you to believe and were also dropped way earlier than they should have been. But I’m also– Before– Before we even get to the rest of the issue with this most of the actual shelter in place orders, mass guidance, social distancing recommendations most of that was in 2020. Most of it was gone by 2021.

Courtney: So that was during the Trump presidency, when, theoretically, this guy was a political appointee. So he’s just complaining about Fauci, and all these guidances, when much of what he’s complaining about was while he was also serving. But also, what mandatory vaccination mandate? Show it to me. By the way, the new vaccine that accommodates the new variants that are going around is now available as of this autumn. So that hasn’t even been very widely publicized. So get your vaccines friends. I mean, latest estimates I’ve seen say that only about 81% of the population in the US have even received one vaccine. And I’ve seen the numbers for each new batch of vaccines that come out, that percentage just goes down and down and down. So I truly have no idea what the heck he’s talking about, about mandatory vaccines. That has never been a thing.

Courtney: But he continues his rant and ramble with: “Our system has moved away from lawmaking to where Congress issues the rules and regulations– Our system has moved away from lawmaking to where Congress issues the rules, to regulators that issue the rules. So for those of you interested in serving in the next conservative administration, I highly recommend you come familiar with the regulatory process. That is where the action is. That is how we are governed, often for the worse, today. So it behooves us as conservatives to learn this process because this is how we can have the biggest impact on the biggest number of people.” Which– I was trying to figure this guy out, because he very clearly does have disdain for regulators and this regulatory system. Because he couldn’t help himself but to multiple times say like, oh, these regulations are for the worse. Like he hates them. But he’s saying, well, our system’s moving away from lawmaking, it’s moving away from Congress and we’re moving toward regulators. Yeah, that’s what your entire training has been saying you’re trying to do, that’s part of your plan.

Courtney: And then using COVID era regulations as an example was just infinitely so baffling. Because now that I’m thinking about it, to the stay at home orders or the shelter in place orders, that wasn’t even coming from the federal government, that was individual states or sometimes counties or cities. It was all smaller governments issuing those for the most part. And this guidance that they say is practically law, people are going to treat it like law, even though it’s not, I recall actually being extraordinarily vague and public health officials being really concerned that it was too vague and too early and too much on, like, the honor system. Like who remembers the: oh, if you’re vaccinated you don’t have to wear a mask in public anymore, but if you aren’t vaccinated you should wear a mask in public. And everyone being like, “Uh, but no one’s checking that.” And there is a certain branch of people that just have been protesting masks this entire time and they’re also the ones who are least likely to be vaccinated and everyone’s like, “Well, what are you gonna do? That’s our guidance.” So does the guidance actually matter or does it not?

Courtney: And even when the Biden administration came into office, the mandates I recall there were also very specifically federally controlled environments, like federal office buildings and aviation on planes. There were mask mandates on planes. But that is all, you know, there is oversight by the federal government in those situations. There was never a federally, “Every single state has to do this. Every single restaurant, grocery store.” That was never a thing at the federal level. And certainly not by the time the Biden administration came in, in 2021. And now, what are we seeing in these smaller governments, again, across the country? We’re seeing, at least attempts, if not a couple successes started to trickle in, of conservatives banning not only mask mandates for future pandemics, but just banning masks and facial coverings in public at all. Period. So are they really going to throw a fuss about saying, “Yeah, we advise you to wear a mask if you’re not vaccinated, but if you’re vaccinated then you can probably take it off”?

Courtney: When they’re actually passing the laws at local levels saying you cannot wear a mask even if you want to, whether you’re vaccinated or not, whether you’re high risk or not. And this is the guy also who claims to be such a champion for disabled people, as if the pandemic hasn’t disabled many new people as a result of guidelines that were too lax. Yeah, I know in Kansas there was someone who was trying to get a ban on mask mandates in the future, But I thought I saw an article recently and I just pulled it up here on the Guardian. The Mask Transparency Act, signed into law in a New York County, makes it a misdemeanor for anyone to wear a facial covering to hide their identity in public. People who defy this law could be sentenced up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Which tells me not only is that a public health and a disability concern, but that is also a protest concern. That is also– That is also absolutely targeting pro-Palestinian protesters. Because we’ve seen a whole new wave of rhetoric around that.

Royce: Yeah, you could extend that to any number of personal privacy concerns, especially as places are trying to use facial recognition on cameras increasingly often.

Courtney: Yeah, that’s a concern. So he goes on to give sort of a very once again simplified overview of what regulations kind of are and how they work together with legislation from Congress. One example he gives is if Congress says you can’t discriminate based on gender, then it’s kind of up to the regulators to decide what does gender mean, how do we fill the gaps, how do we specify all of the gray area that could be in any given piece of legislation. Which, if you had the right people with the right expertise, is theoretically a good thing, because there is a lot of gray area in all legislation and there are different interpretations, even amongst learned legal professionals and judges. They all have their own viewpoints on how to read things.

Courtney: But he uses this as a point to complain about the fact that it’s regulators who are redefining male and female to include a whole panoply of gender identities. And his gripe is that Congress, in their mind, when they say you can’t discriminate, they think that male and female is binary under anti-discrimination law. But it’s the agencies and the regulators who have now reinterpreted that to mean, “No, we think it’s something absolutely subjective and not at all related to biology.” So, under that very obviously transphobic example that he provides, he uses this to explain, well, it’s bureaucrats who are filling in the gaps and addressing that ambiguity, but it’s all in a way that Congress never intended, because now we care about Congress. Now we care about Congress. We should be deferring to Congress because that’s what they originally intended, right? So we’re really just picking and choosing here. Whatever serves our agenda, that is the right answer.

Courtney: So he then goes on to give a very basic overview of how to actually issue these things. But he says it with the caveat that you should time your actions in a way so that, once it gets challenged, you can litigate it all the way to the Supreme Court. Which we know who’s on the Supreme Court right now and who they’re working for. He names an example, one example being the Little Sisters of the Poor case, which their concern was that Obamacare was going to force nuns to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives for fellow nuns. And so when the Trump administration came in, Trump issued an executive order mentioning the Little Sisters of the Poor case, and the proper agency then issued a regulation as a result of that executive order, and they did it early on in the presidency so that they had time to litigate it all the way to the Supreme Court, where they won.

Courtney: And he explains this as a success story that needs to be replicated. Because their goals, he said, are to get those permanent regulatory victories. So they’re not even that concerned about regulations, because those can be repealed in a future administration. They want the regulations that are so controversial that they get sued over it, so that that case can be put in front of their crooked conservative judges. So then, now it becomes a Supreme Court precedence, which is so much harder to overturn than an actual regulation. So that is their process here. And are you telling me that Donald J Trump personally was just, like, really passionate about the Little Sisters of the Poor case? Do you think he knew of this exact case on his own? And he was like, “Oh, those poor nuns who have to buy insurance that would cover contraceptive for those other nuns. I’m so personally invested in this case that I am going to have my own volition, sign an executive order saying, hey, we should reevaluate that.” Absolutely not. That did not happen.

Courtney: The Little Sisters of the Poor case is something that the Heritage Foundation and others like it have written about extensively over the years. This is something they were watching, this was something they were waiting to get someone to put their foot in the door so that they could continue to pursue this legally. And the thing that bothers me the most about this particular case– because also, you know, put this in context of the religious Christian nationalist organizations that are constantly using our judicial system to just slowly integrate their ideologies into law. Think, you know, really common case. The, you know, gay wedding cake case, things like that. It always has to be legislated, and they hope and try to get it to the Supreme Court to make it a precedence. The Little Sisters of the Poor case – I also kind of think these are obviously nuns, very, very strictly religious – but anytime you talk about religious liberties and like employment and benefits, another big one that comes to mind is like Hobby Lobby being one of the major employers that was trying to fight insurance regulations like this.

Courtney: But what bothers me the most about this case in particular is that, yes, the Affordable Care Act did seek to make sure that contraception would be available to everyone. They did give exemptions to this. They said that churches and the religious organizations most closely integrated with the church itself are exempt. However, even though the employer is exempt from needing to pay for this coverage – because we also live in a system where our health insurance is so heavily tied to our employment, so that’s already an issue right from the get go – but since this is the reality we live in, if the employer refuses to cover contraception for their religious freedom reasons, the insurance company itself is then required by the government to provide the free contraception separately.

Courtney: And that is with segregated funds and segregated communications to employees. So that’s sort of like a separate system that has to go up. Like it– I don’t know realistically how that works, if that actually makes it like a little more of a pain in the ass to actually navigate that system once you’re in it, since it seems like a separate channel has opened that sort of skirts around the employer itself to go to the insurance agency. But they basically said, “Fine, you say your religion says you can’t cover contraception, you don’t have to cover contraception.” But insurance agencies that are po– for profit agencies, that provide necessary health insurance to the public, they aren’t exempt. If they’re a health insurance company, they have to cover contraception. I think that’s perfectly fair. And in fact some religious organizations were like, “All right, cool, as long as I don’t have to pay for it, fine.”

Courtney: But then the Little Sisters of the Poor, and I’m sure, no doubt other religious entities fighting this battle, some of them still took issue with this by saying, “Well, we’d still be complicit in the administration of contraceptive if we have to provide the government with contact information for the insurers.” Because they basically had to tell the government, “We’re not going to cover this.” So they’d have to claim that so then the government could then make sure that the insurance agency was doing its job without the employer being the middleman there. And they were like, “No, no, no, we aren’t even going to claim this to you, we can’t talk to you, we can’t tell you which insurer we’re using, because then we’d be complicit.” Or they’d even take it a step further and say that, “Well, it’s still the same infrastructure. If any of our employees try to get contraception, it’s still, technically, the insurance plans that we’re providing to them. Even if we’re not paying for it, they still have insurance because they’re employed with us. So if the insurance agency is still providing them contraception, well, they’re using our infrastructure. And they can’t use our infrastructure because that’s against our religious liberties.”

Royce: Well then, you should have voted for a single payer government-run health care system. You didn’t do that, so too bad, this is what you get.

Courtney: And they 1000% do not want that either.

Royce: Too bad.

Courtney: Which– This also makes it so much more of an overstep. This is no longer about my personal religious liberties anymore, right? Because now the actual concern is not we’re required to provide this for our employees, it’s this insurance agency – which is a for-profit, secular, government-regulated entity – they’re required to provide contraception, and we don’t like that they’re required to provide contraception. We don’t like that if they aren’t getting it through us, they can go somewhere else.

Royce: Yeah, they’re intentionally blocking their employees from being able to access healthcare.

Courtney: That’s what they’re– what they were trying to do with these arguments. Yes, absolutely. And so the really interesting thing is too – and I’ll link this in the show notes – there was an article about this by Douglas Laycock, called: How the Little Sisters of the Poor case puts religious liberty at risk. And this is a guy who is very pro religious liberty exemptions. He testified in favor of the Religious Liberty Protection Act of 1998. This is his area of expertise as a professor of the University of Virginia Law School, and he thinks this is bad. He’s saying that everything they’re arguing and fighting all the way up to the Supreme Court means that if they’re saying, “Hey, this is a substantial burden on the exercise of religion,” then the courts technically should have to just take their word for it. But he’s kind of using the slippery slope argument in his article. He’s saying that would give rise to even more extreme claims which would ultimately, over time, discredit the cause of religious liberty.

Royce: Yeah, that makes sense, because this, this isn’t actually religious liberty and that’s something that we see from the Christian nationalists very frequently. Is they– They say religious liberty is as long as they can continue to have it stick. But in this case, the organization does not have religious liberty. Each individual person within the organization has their own religious liberty. And in this case, it was being argued that the organization can dictate what happens to the people underneath it based off of what its leaders believe. Which again is a violation of the religious liberties of the people underneath. But yes, those arguments are used very frequently anytime someone wants to discriminate against someone and get away with it.

Courtney: Exactly. And this case here too says like only a religious observer can say what is a substantial burden on them. But it’s still up to the courts to have kind of the final say on what a substantial burden means legally in our legal framework. And as someone who’s very in favor of exemptions like this, he says believers should get substantial deference on that question, but they cannot get absolute deference and they never have. Courts decide the cases and set the outer boundaries. And he goes on to conclude: “This argument is a moral threat to an essential and widespread source of protection for religious liberty. There are thousands of specific religious exemptions in U.S. law. If legislators and administrative agencies cannot enact a narrow religious exemption without it being expanded to become all-inclusive, many of them will not enact any religious exemptions at all. And they will start repealing the exemptions they have already enacted.”

Courtney: Which does make sense because they’re using a very foot-in-the-door strategy. They’re taking small wins and they’re amplifying it. They’re taking older regulations and they’re repealing it. They’re litigating it. They’re putting it before the Supreme Court when they know the Supreme Court will be in favor of them. So there are legal scholars in favor of this that are like, “Yeah, we can’t keep playing this game because religious liberties are important, but the way you’re playing this game is you’re trying to expand it and expand it and expand it to the point where there are no boundaries, and that’s bad actually.”

Courtney: So, following in line with let’s get regulating early and often and let’s litigate it right to the Supreme Court, we roll on to video 19, Oversight and Investigations. And this is how they open the video: [reading] “You took the course. You applied for the job. You got the job. You moved to DC. You’re excited. You started. Boom, you’re under investigation. Front page of the New York Times. What do you do?” They’re like, “Well, don’t worry too much, because everything you do, whether those things are legal or not, they’re going to come after you.”

Royce: Were they like, “If you followed this course, you have already scrubbed all of your internet data”?

Courtney: [laughs] They literally tell you to do that again shortly after this. They’re like, “Clean this up and get ahead of it.” But the guy who gave that– that gave us that super fun intro? Um, he– he’s interviewing a couple other guys and this is how he poses a question, this is how he starts it. And this is under the topic of “They’re gonna come after you. No matter what you do, they’re coming after you.” He says, [reading] “As someone who’s laid these traps for the other side before, what do we need to know?” And this guy just, like, outright admits like, “Yeah, it was my job to just kind of go after an attack and investigate our opposition and try to slander them.” This same guy also complains about witch hunts against his party when they target political adversaries. And this is all a quote. This is how he explains it.

Courtney: [reading] “Opposition research guys like me, our responsibility is not to tell both sides of the story. Our job is to aggressively and thoroughly tell the story we want to tell. We look to pull facts and information from a person’s history that tells a story that helps flesh out what we think we already know about this person – that they’re a radical leftist, that they don’t share our values – and we pull information and put it together in a story that is persuasive and difficult for them to rebut. So we create an indelible understanding to the public about who this person is and make it difficult for them to act within the political sphere, because they’ve been shaped by us in the narrative of who they are. So, fundamentally, it’s about telling a story about someone else without their support.” He’s like yep, that was my whole job, was to do that to the liberals. So when you get in office, expect that they’re going to do it to you.

Courtney: But yeah, also along the lines of, like, scrub your social media. Now they tell you: “Don’t be a chucklehead – I like the official jargon they use there – because you don’t want to be caught having said something years ago in a college paper, something that’s out of step with the President’s current agenda.” And I’m like, JD Vance is right there! He famously hated Trump just a couple years ago. JD Vance is the chucklehead. In this video you get another good dose of don’t write anything down, don’t leave a paper trail. They outright say: “You always hear this meeting could have been an email, but no. In the federal government this email should have been a meeting, because of the Freedom of Information Act. Don’t create a thread that accountable.us can find.” And also when it comes to investigating your political opposition, they also say, “What’s the point of doing a hearing if there’s no media coverage?” So them just admitting out in the open that they’re just wasting time trying to slander people.

Royce: And money. I feel like the money part of that is not mentioned often enough for the side of the political schism that says, at least, that they are for less taxes and smaller government and budgeting. And what is the common refrain of every conservative that doesn’t want to be associated with conservative– I’m a fiscal conservative.

Courtney: Ah… Well, I’m socially liberal.

Royce: Yeah, the intentional obstruction of our government wastes so much taxpayer money.

Courtney: Yeah. And I’m so glad that you talk about negligent spending, because then they go on to make the case that the next conservative administration should hire their own inspector generals. They should have their own guys doing the oversights and investigations. And here’s where it gets more frightening, because he justifies being able to hire your own investigators, your own oversight. Because he’s a strong believer in a unitary executive, which shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise based on everything else we’ve heard in these videos. However, if we zoom out and see what that actually could mean for America’s future and what that has meant for other dictatorships – I’ll, of course, link some of these articles in the show notes as well – but here’s an article from the American Constitution Society called ‘The Specter of Dictatorship and the Supreme Court’s Embrace of the Unitary Executive Theory’. Because the Unitary Executive Theory is a legal school of thought that, in its simplest form, is expanding presidential power.

Courtney: They want to centralize government control at that executive branch. It’s become increasingly more popular amongst Republicans since the Reagan administration, especially in these Christian nationalist organizations. This article explains the Unitary Executive Theory as embracing presidential removal of agency heads for political reasons, and that that provides a pathway to autocracy. And there are legal scholars who have pointed out that there is a pattern of elected authoritarians around the globe who have utilized this Unitary Executive Theory by centralizing the Chief Executive’s Office and using this ever expansion of that power to then destroy democratic governments. Some case studies they cite are Turkey, Hungary, and Poland. Which is– I mean, fits perfectly with the things we’ve been seeing. Like the Supreme Court decision giving Presidents absolute immunity.

Courtney: The immunity ruling, there’s a New York Times article here that is literally entitled ‘Immunity Ruling Escalates Long Rise of Presidential Power’. So for all of the articles and op-eds around the time of this ruling saying, “Oh, they’re gonna try to make Trump a king there, he wants to be a dictator on day one.” Because that’s the thing he said. He wants to be dictator on day one. In the context of these videos and what they’re saying and what they’re advocating for in their processes, it’s not hyperbole. They are a strong believer in a unitary executive. It is by design that they are trying to expand the President’s power and limit the power of the other branches of government.

Courtney: The next video is about staffing and office. It’s boring. It mostly just boils down to kiss your boss’s ass, which we’ve already kind of been over. Next video on federal regulatory process, we get this lovely quote: “Not all Republicans, remember, unfortunately, are particularly conservative, so we need a conservative majority.” And given everything we’ve seen, I don’t know any other way to read that except extremist. We need the extremists.

Royce: Yeah, that’s the only meaning there. They have their own definitions of terms that are relative.

Royce: I think we’ve said similar things before, where someone will claim to be somewhat liberal or even centrist, but when you look at them on a chart, they’re conservative. This is from the other perspective. If you’re not far right you’re a liberal.

Royce: Courtney

Royce: He goes on to once again say that conservatives are a minority amongst the Careers, and therefore they must adopt something akin to Trump’s Schedule F almost immediately once they get into office. And that Schedule F in question was an executive order from October 2020, that would have basically gutted any protections of Career employees who could just theoretically be fired for not being loyal enough to the President. This article on protectdemocracy.org says, “Because Trump did not remain in office, it is unknown how many federal employees his administration would have swept into Schedule F or how many would have been fired and replaced. Experts have put the possible numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands.” And that some Trump allies said, “It would not be necessary to fire that many workers because just firing a few would produce the desired behavior change.” So again, full dictatorship! If you don’t agree with me, you are out of here.

Royce: This video, by the way, was also just like– He was going over rules and the difference between a rule and guidance. And it was just an ungodly slog. I fell asleep three times trying to watch it. But he also mentioned offhanded – and by this point I wanted to look into this further because a couple other people had mentioned it very offhanded – the Chevron Doctrine, which the Supreme Court has very recently abolished. Given the fact it was mentioned offhanded a couple times in these trainings, I imagine they anticipated that that was on the horizon when they filmed this. But the removal of this is going to make agencies, especially ones pertaining to the environment, it’s going to make it a lot harder for them to do their job.

Royce: The original Supreme Court decision from ’84 was Chevron versus Natural Resources Defense Council. And that court decision said, yeah, if we have federal legislation that has gray area, that has gaps, it’s then up to the agency responsible for implementing that to fill in those gaps and define things a little better. Which is very in line with what we heard in a previous training here that that is the point of some of these regulatory agencies. The original decision basically said the courts have to defer to the regulatory agencies. They’re the ones who have the final say. But now the Supreme Court abolished that because they think the courts should decide all relevant questions of the law. So the court gave themselves more power and took that power away from the agencies. And some of the things that are likely to be heavily impacted are environmental things. Like I said, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act.

Royce: Things that we’re always going to be scientifically developing our understanding, and new technologies, and it’s very important in fields like this– Even public health fields. I mean talk again of the of COVID-19 and how little we knew early on and how long it took them to even publicly state that COVID is airborne, like, let alone developing vaccines. Things that are developing situations and developing understanding need to have well respected agencies with highly educated people in these fields, who have their finger on the pulse of the latest research, who are going to be able to update regulations to coincide with our developing knowledge. But now, if a court doesn’t like that – and we know for a fact these conservative judges don’t like that because they think climate change is not real and that’s one of the things they want to abolish any and all statements about in government – now the courts can be like, “Mh, No. I don’t think you have the authority to do that.”

Royce: Yeah, I don’t think a lot of high up conservatives actually believe that, because there are, what now, is it like 40 solid years of research that was done by the Big Oil companies themselves that proved it definitively? I think they just like the money. And so it’s very intentional that they’re trying to peel back those regulations right now, at a pivotal– at a pivotal point in, you know, pollution and climate change.

Courtney: Yeah, well, that’s the thing. They’re trying to expand the executive branch, they’re trying to maintain absolute control over the Supreme Court, while meanwhile trying to actively sabotage Congress. So much for a system of checks and balances. That’s what I learned when I had a government course.

Courtney: So next video 22 is called Navigating Policymaking. The guy hosting it quotes Tucker Carlson within like the first two minutes of the video. So you know it’s gonna be good. This is also, I realized, one of the guys in control of that awful right wing dating app. Have you heard about this? It’s hilarious. It’s called The Right Stuff. And this guy, Daniel Huff, he’s one of the founders.

Courtney: I had to double check because I did see some absolutely insufferable tiktoks advertising this dating app, where a guy would just say, like, the most smug, deeply conservative, often sexist, racist things, while, like, eating a meal in a restaurant as if you were the point of view of someone he was on a date with. And he’s not that guy. He’s a different guy. But I had to double check and, just for funsies, since I know these episodes are doozy, I’m gonna go ahead and put a link to some parody. Well, I don’t even– investigative tiktoks. There is a– a liberal woman who went undercover on this dating app, and often posts tiktoks about just showing the profiles that come up and the wild things they say.

Courtney: Now this particular dating app came under fire because– you know how a lot of dating apps have a prompt that you can, like, fill in the blank for? One of these prompts on this app for conservatives starts with, “January 6 was–” Oh my god. And so yeah, as you can imagine, you see horrible things on there. You see people saying climate change isn’t real. You see people bragging about not being vaccinated. You see horribly sexist things. You see horribly transphobic things. But at least seeing some of this, as an outsider going in undercover, some of it it’s pretty funny. But I’ve also heard it’s flopped really bad, because there’s a–

Royce: That’s not surprising.

Courtney: There’s a notable lack of women on the profile.

Royce: Yep.

Courtney: [ironically] I wonder why! Which is fascinating too, because this guy in– in an article, uh, talking about his app, talks about how, when he was in DC and when he was working for the Trump administration, it was so hard to date as a conservative man because everyone around him was liberal. But then they’re talking about being the silent majority, and the will of the people, and so it’s like, okay, are there actually so many of you, or are you really the minority? And you just– Or are there plenty of conservatives and you just, in particular, suck? Even the conservative women don’t want you. But then, of course, in a lot of these articles talking about how this is a safe haven for conservatives to finally date. And people who have traditionally family values can finally meet each other. They talk about the mainstream dating apps as if the mainstream dating apps are like personally persecuting them also. They’re like, “I have to hide my political views on the mainstream apps because the vitriol against us is just so strong.” So that’s– that’s mostly unrelated to the video, but I thought that might be fun to keep in mind going in.

Courtney: So he says that, “Democrats are brainwashing our next generation with a dangerous fiction that America is systemically racist. And that if the next Republican president doesn’t execute a dramatic course correction, there may never be another chance.” So he says, “In order to counteract this dangerous fiction that America is racist – imagine… imagine that! – the first target is DEI.” The example he gives is HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He said, “Under these DEI regulations a landlord might be found liable for running criminal background checks on prospective tenants because it disproportionately affects minorities.” So he says that’s the first target, because that can be removed without notice or comment. Department of Education as well. He says, “Oh, what if when they’re disciplining students in the classrooms, what if they’re found to violate civil rights laws because they’re disproportionately disciplining minority students?”

Royce: So his argument is America can’t be racist if we don’t acknowledge any of the racism.

Courtney: Yeah, yeah. He says, and I quote, [reading] “Let nothing live.” When talking about all Biden era regulations, anything pertaining to DEI. But he also said – and this was very interesting – quote: “Create confusion, eliminate it all at once.” So he’s like, day one, the things you’re able to just eliminate without any oversight, you can just remove it. He said do all of it at once early on, because the media isn’t going to be able to focus on this one thing that you did to try to put out a hit piece. Because what are they going to do if you’re eliminating 20 things at once? So he literally said create confusion.

Courtney: And he goes on to talk about grants, federal grant money. And he absolutely scoffs that an agency at one point said they strongly encourage applicants to eliminate college degree requirements. And he said that was done under the guise of diversity. But can you imagine not getting the most educated, most qualified people? No, I can’t imagine that in this training course… And he just goes on to list, like with acid on his tongue, a million things that are at least positive intentions. He doesn’t get specific enough for me to be like, yeah, that legislation worked or that regulation didn’t, but he talks literally about anti discrimination and homelessness and health. And can you believe there are all these regulations for things like that?

Courtney: And when it comes to housing too, he specifically mentioned Obama era grants for increasing low income housing in suburban areas. and he guesses as to why that’s a bad thing. He says, oh, it’s because they’re trying to turn red areas blue. He talks about some obscure exception that’s somewhere on the books that apparently gives them quick and sweeping authority to issue regulations for anything pertaining to federal grants. So he drills in on the grant idea for a bit and he’s like, “This is such an obscure line too that most people have never heard of it, so people are going to try to push back.” So he actually says like the name of the statute. And he’s like, “Keep that– keep that number memorized for that statute, because that’s what you’re going to pull out when people get confused.”

Courtney: But he believes that not only should we eliminate any bit of attempts at diversity and equity in these grant programs, but he believes that grant recipients should be required to have meritocracy officers who will sniff out any hint of circumvention on the ban on race-based decision making. And so they want these new meritocracy officers to submit quarterly reports on all these grant recipients, just to make sure that they’re not intentionally trying to be diverse. If we think they’re trying to be diverse, we’re gonna take their grant money away. I can’t possibly see how that could backfire! And he even mentions what to do about grants in the Department of Education. And he says, “I know we want to eliminate the Department of Education altogether, but first, before we do, let’s use the billions allocated to it to undo all of the left’s brainwashing.” So yeah, they don’t just want to abolish these agencies, they want to use up all of the money before they do.

Royce: Well, ‘undo the left’s brainwashing’ is like ‘rewrite American history as the Lost Cause of the South’.

Courtney: Mm-mmh.

Royce: Like it’s not just ‘use up all the money’, it’s indoctrination.

Courtney: Yes. I mean even meritocracy as a concept – and I know this episode has already been long so I’m not going to go into a full blown tangent about meritocracy as an ideology – but, aside from very rigid officers that they want to fill very specific jobs, like, there are documented social cases of, like, in– in schools or in employment, like, on the whole, people tend to be more willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt – or better grades, more time on an assignment – if a student sort of has like, “This is an internal flaw that I have, this is a flaw I have that I’m trying to work through,” as opposed to environmental factors. So, in a very, like, non-scientific example, the difference between, like, “I’m just really bad at math, but I’m trying,” is going to be a lot better accepted than, you know, “My parents are going through a divorce and they’re shouting at home and I have a bad situation at home right now,” or, “I don’t have enough food to think long enough to do my homework.”

Courtney: Like people don’t respond as well when you say there are environmental factors that are keeping me down. And that can be extended to more solid and even more abstract situations of the systemic racism that is actually present in our society. So it’s a very– it’s a very bootstrappy kind of an ideology, which makes sense for the conservatives, but when in theory it’s supposed to be, “Yeah, pick yourself up by the bootstraps, we all have shit going on and some of us rose above it anyway.” Like, in reality, this is going to come down to a lot of nepotism, internal bias in not only schools but also in employment.

Courtney: He also then goes on to remind you not to be light in your policy methods, because they will sue you regardless of what you do. And goes on to kind of explain, they have their own internal strategy for winning lawsuits early and therefore setting a precedence that it’s going to be very difficult and very costly to litigate against us.

Courtney: So they have a mindset of sort of: overstep your bounds right away so that we can win a lawsuit, and then they’ll eventually just give up. That was the vibes it was given. And in addition to “They are going to sue you, you are going to get negative articles,” again, but this time he was talking about how he was speaking to someone who was so happy because it had been like three months since the last time he had a negative article and he just gets furious. He explodes, and he’s like, “When I heard that I wanted to fire this person! If you aren’t getting negative articles, you aren’t doing your job!” Which is just so interesting because they really are setting each and every one of these prospective appointees up to try to break the law, try to overstep the bounds of their own agencies, be very unpopular with the media and the public. And I wonder why they’d need to prepare them for that.

Courtney: So we finally made it! Last video. 23, Coalition Building. They tell you to build a coalition with the pro-life movement, the Second Amendment folks, and our first freedoms religious liberty. So that’s fun. And in talking about this being a coalition, and in previous videos talking about partnering with the Heritage Foundation and their partner organizations, it’s baffling that they explain these coalitions– they define them as: “They are average, everyday people who are going to be the reason why you win or lose in the future.” But I thought you weren’t going to get any jobs in the future if you go into a conservative administration. That’s what the priest told us. And they view building these coalitions as: “Engaging people outside of government to influence policy and to help give you good ideas about what to do.” They say this is where 90% of our good ideas came from in the Trump and Pence administration. It was from coalitions like these.

Courtney: Why? Well, “because God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason. You need to listen to people twice as often as you speak.”

Courtney: So that means reaching out to the pro-life movement and inviting them for a tour of the White House once you get there. And then, while you’re regaling them with a tour or a dinner, just ask, “By the way, what should I do in this agency? What Biden administration thing should I repeal? What do you think I should do? And probably listen to them.” They remind you again not to put anything in an email that you don’t want to read on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. And then they just sort of talk about networking with people in your coalition. And it very much gave me the vibes of like toxic networking business bros. It was very like: go to networking events, collect the cards, have one on one coffees with people. One guy specifically said he would collect cards at these coalition events, and then he’d keep a spreadsheet, and he’d come home and like put– or he’d come back to the office and put the information from the business cards into his spreadsheet. So that he could keep track of who he knew that could influence what areas and who had what experience.

Courtney: And it’s just– You know, the political appointees they’re putting there just aren’t enough. They still need more people from these organizations, continuing to influence them throughout. And that is finally the end. We made it through the entire playlist of Project 2025 training videos.

Courtney: I’d like to ask what we learned today, but I’d also like to forget all of it. So, thankfully, next week we will be able to move on to a different, fun, new topic. Can’t wait to find out what that’s going to be, but before then, I would like to direct all of your attentions to this week’s featured MarketplACE vendor: Agnessines. Agnes is an ace illustrator and comic artist living in Valencia. As always, links are going to be in the show notes so you can check our featured vendor out.

Courtney: But just giving a glance through the shop, you can get comics, you can get postcards, you can peruse their lovely character art design. And, if you’re feeling generous, you can even give a tip over on Ko-fi. And who knows, maybe next week we’re going to talk about gay Abraham Lincoln. What was that list of people? It was Abraham Lincoln, Billy Graham, the Pope, parents and Winston Churchill. What if they’re all gay? Every single one of them. [laughs] All of your faves are gay. No, I actually have some thoughts about that, so we will be talking about that actually. So hopefully that’ll be more fun than Heritage Foundation. So don’t forget to vote. Check your voter registration. Okay, bye!