Pride & Politics in 2025

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I am here with my spouse, Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And what better way to celebrate Pride Month than talking about politics? Oh boy, I truly do not even know where to start. So if this episode feels all over the place, it’s because that’s how my brain is and how American politics are. And how my 98 open tabs are.

Royce: You opened 18 since the last episode?

Courtney: At least. [chuckles]

Royce: I never did get confirmation if 80 was literal or an exaggeration.

Courtney: Wouldn’t you like to know, weather boy? No, we almost certainly are not actually going to have time to talk about everything, so it’s going to be just a brief overview of some of the things that keep so many of us up late at night. We talked quite a bit last episode about World Pride in Washington DC, so let’s start with the parades in general in Washington DC. Because I just– I feel like we’ve got to talk about this military parade that’s supposed to happen on Trump’s birthday. I’ve been seeing estimates that just the damage to infrastructure, just streets from having large military vehicles on them, could cost as much as $16 million just to repair the damage to the streets. That is what US military officials are estimating. That’s not even transportation, all the other costs involved with security for events like this.

Royce: The amount of fuel needed.

Courtney: The amount of fuel needed.

Royce: Yeah, the Republican Party as the party of fiscal conservatives has never been true.

Courtney: No. The amount of money that they’re continuing to funnel into the Department of Defense. The amount of money they’re spending on all of these deportations, many of which are illegal and unconstitutional, but we’ll get to that. This just screams fascism. To have a military parade on our leader’s birthday. And anytime he’s asked about the immense cost associated with something like this, it’s just totally written off saying, “Oh, it’s peanuts compared to the value of doing it.” What is the value of doing it? There is literally none except feeding his ego and, I’m going to say, intimidation also. It seems like every other thing out of his mouth is about conquest, taking over other countries, the continuation of the American Empire.

Courtney: And I really just want to use this as an example of just how emboldened this administration has gotten. Because he wanted a military parade during his first presidency. This was a thing he talked about. But it got canceled. They canceled it, rejected the notion of doing it, not only because of the price tag, but because of the optics of a military parade in the nation’s capital. There were concerns that this looks a lot like Russia, this looks a lot like North Korea. Maybe we shouldn’t do this, actually. And for this to be coming just a week after not even just Washington DC Pride, it is World Pride being held in Washington DC. It’s just so sad to think about the fact that our social programs, things that are actually meant to help people in this country, are being cut while money is still being increased for border control and ICE.

Courtney: Meanwhile, World Pride, so many corporate sponsors have directly pulled out for fear of retaliation from the White House. And, like big corporate sponsors, Comcast is one I remember off the top of my head, directly pulled out of World Pride because of things like all of these executive, these– I almost said executive disorders Boy, that’s a Freudian slip if I ever heard one. But these executive orders condemning DEI. So many companies have not only discontinued Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs within their own organization, but they’re afraid to contribute to things like this for fear of it being seen as DEI. And wondering what that is going to do. Because the White House is just on a bullying campaign right now. Not only within the executive branch, which we have known for a long time coming that they are going to oust anybody who disagrees with them. They’re going to instate only people who will fall in line with their every whim. But they’re threatening to cut funding for NPR and PBS because they don’t like their political coverage.

Courtney: They’re going after universities. The administration recently said, for example, that it’s halting Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. A letter from Kristi Noem– who I really, really hoped after I moved out of South Dakota that I would never have to say her name again, and now she’s the head of Homeland Security and she is everybody’s problem. She wrote in a letter: “I’m writing to inform you that, effective immediately, Harvard University student and exchange visitor program certification is revoked. Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.” So even if Harvard said we are not listening to you, we are still going to let foreign students enroll, how is that anything but an immediate deportation threat for any of these students who are in the country studying legally?

Courtney: And we have every reason in the world to believe that they will make good on these threats, because they are illegally detaining and deporting students at other universities. Students of Columbia University, student activists participating in pro-Palestinian demonstrations are having their green cards revoked. They are being detained, they are being deported for exercising their right to free speech. And when government officials get asked about this, they’ll consistently deny that free speech is for everyone. They’ll say things like, “Oh, being in America is a privilege, being American is a privilege. This isn’t a right, it’s a privilege. And if you aren’t an American citizen, you don’t get this privilege.” Which is not how the Constitution is supposed to work. But they don’t care. And they’re arresting people who are trying to uphold the Constitution, and due process, and the laws.

Courtney: A judge in Wisconsin has been arrested for not complying with ICE when they were attempting to arrest and detain a man whose case she was presiding over. She was trying to give this man the due process that he is entitled to and she got arrested for it. And judges all over the country are calling this an egregious overreach of the executive branch. Over 130 retired judges have filed a brief urging the federal court to drop all charges against this judge. And they’ve even arrested the mayor of Newark and candidate for New Jersey governor, accusing him of trespassing at an immigration detention facility in Newark. Which is new. This is a new President Trump installation toward their deportation efforts. And there has been video release showing that this mayor was invited past the gates before he was then arrested. Which certainly seems to contradict the “he was trespassing” claims.

Courtney: And, outside of arresting other government officials, there have just been so many threats to cut any and all federal help or funding to any states or cities that are behaving in a way that the administration does not like. They’re targeting sanctuary cities, just to name one example. And just literally using not only money but the outright threat of incarceration for anyone who is not going to bend the knee and comply with them. Which is, once again, very rich for the party who always argues states rights. States rights. States should be able to decide. One thing that I do think is going to be really interesting as a result of this, I’m quite confident that the parties are going to do a direct flip on that, because, given the way things are now, what can Democrats do except go small and go to local levels and try to enact change at that rate? Because when we have judges, we have lawyers, we have governors and mayors, we have lawsuits against this administration, we have Supreme Court orders, in some cases, that the White House has just directly refused to comply with and seemingly nobody knows what to do about that. And just nobody’s doing anything.

Courtney: They’re also going after the media, and they always have been. I mean, talking about fake news, undercutting, trying to undermine the media has been a huge tactic of theirs for quite some time. But they’re actually revoking access, removing NPR, Politico, the New York Times, simply because they don’t like the way they’re covering news stories. And citing reasons as petty as, “Oh well, they aren’t calling it the Gulf of America, and that’s what it’s called now. If they still insist on calling it the Gulf of Mexico, then they don’t get access to the White House press conferences, they don’t get to come into the Oval Office.” And, as a result, so much of the news coverage we actually get feels like a fever dream. Because all of these important issues are arising in the country and oftentimes very bipartisan issues like tornadoes, massive storms causing damage, destroying homes, killing people, and instead of asking about those issues, we’ll have people just smiling and saying, “Oh, Mr President, how was your golf game?” Or people just sucking up in a way that is so dictator coded like, “Oh, Mr President, you are clearly in great shape. What is your exercise routine? Like you’ve never looked better.”

Courtney: Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?! These are– And he’ll praise these people who just suck up to him and oftentimes aren’t even asking questions, or if they’re asking a question, it’s really just a compliment disguised as a question. And he’ll gush and say, “Oh, I love these people, I love this guy, oh, I love her.”

Courtney: So we just do not seem to have freedom of the press in the same way that we once did. And, given all of these retaliatory efforts, it’s so hard not to then think to all of the other threats that have been made. Threats to pull birthright citizenship, threats to even deport American citizens who engage with what they deem to be terrorist activities or anti-semitic activities. A lot of these have to do either with Tesla protests or pro-Palestinian protests. And so they’re not only using fear to try to suppress people, but they’re using the tactic that we warned about before the election of weaponizing language.

Courtney: And not only defining words on their own terms, but mandating that that is the way those terms are to be used in the form of executive orders. They’ll point at these college students who are in the country legally, who have not committed any criminal activity, and they’ll say they deserve to be deported because of their anti-semitic bigotry. And yet there are high up White House officials that have been proven to have genuine ties to anti-semitic extremists. They have installed a man who was described by federal prosecutors as a Nazi sympathizer and prominent Holocaust denier, who is now in our government. The White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security is an Andrew Tate fanboy. So, yes, we need to address the dangers of labeling standing up for Palestinians’ rights as antisemitism when we have prominent antisemites in the White House.

Courtney: We have Elon Musk, who literally did a Nazi salute on Inauguration Day in front of an enormous crowd on television twice. And we have people trying to tell us that that is not what everybody saw. And because Elon Musk has been so buddy-buddy with Trump, we’ve had the White House turned into a sales lot for Tesla. We have Trump out here espousing false claims that there is a white genocide happening in South Africa. And while we are illegally arresting and deporting people who have a right to be here, and they’re trying to restrict immigration for most groups, Trump’s now saying they want to take in more white South Africans. You know, because of that white genocide that’s totally happening over there.

Courtney: And the White House’s official social media account has been terrifying when it comes to these deportations and these meme posts and these–

Courtney: It’s so reminiscent of dictatorships that we know and recognize and have seen in other parts of the world. They’re posting artwork of Donald Trump with massive muscles. They’re posting him with a crown and calling him a king, posting him as the Pope. It’s not even Donald Trump’s personal social media. That is the official White House social media who is doing these kind of things constantly.

Courtney: They posted a video of what deportation to the El Salvador mega prison looks like. Which does definitionally fall under the terms of a concentration camp, where people are being forced onto planes, forced off of planes, video of them getting off the plane and immediately having their head shaved, and they’re posting these videos calling it ASMR.

Courtney: And we quite literally have a situation where a man was illegally deported, sent to a concentration camp in another country, to which the Supreme Court actually said that the administration needs to facilitate his release, and we have the White House now saying that they aren’t going to do anything about it. And they don’t have to do anything about it. That just means that they’ll have to admit him back into the country if El Salvador’s government chooses to release him from the mega prison that they brag about people never being able to leave from. And they’ll say that their attorneys have said, oh, those requested orders involve interactions with a foreign sovereign and potential violations of that sovereignty. They’re saying it would be a violation of El Salvador’s sovereignty to try to facilitate the release of a man who got sent there illegally. And I’m sorry, forgive me for not believing that they give a damn about the sovereignty of other nations.

Royce: I think that’s one of the most frustrating things, and also the thing that everyone who is opposed to all this really needs to understand, is that you can’t take anything that they say at face value. This is not about truth, it’s not about honesty, it’s not about justice, it’s about power and control. And they will say and do anything to further that. So there is no high road in this game.

Courtney: There really is not. And we see that in other areas of their own correspondent. How many times now have we seen Donald Trump out here saying that Canada needs to become the 51st state in America? He said this on a number of occasions. And of course, Canada has been like, uh fuck off. As they should, as they should. But Canadian leaders now have shown interest in the Golden Dome project and Trump’s response to this is, “I told Canada, who is eager to join our fabulous Golden Dome system, that it will cost them $61 billion if they stay a separate but unequal nation. But it will cost them nothing if they become our beloved 51st state. They’re considering the offer.” I’m pretty sure they aren’t considering the offer. If I had to go out on a ledge, I’d venture to say they’re not considering that offer. But this is the Golden Dome is a missile defense system, mind you, for intercepting missiles.

Royce: It’s interesting that I didn’t hear anything about the Golden Dome from our internal news. The first time I heard about it was people in China laughing about how ineffective it would be.

Courtney: Well, I gotta say I have not done my research on how effective it is alleged to be, but it really kind of feels like– let’s say it works perfectly, it is effective and there is a missile heading right for Canada. We have a president who’s like, “We could stop it, if you pay up or if you let us overthrow you, then we will offer you this protection.” This is like literally a protection racket, but at national levels. This feels like an organized crime scheme. And goes right back to the fact that this is all about power, it is all about conquest. It’s about consuming more money, land, resources, governments...

Courtney: This, like, fully– So many things feel like they could be Onion articles, but they aren’t so they’re not actually funny. But we have King Charles out here giving speeches about how Canada deserves its sovereignty from the United States. We have England going, “Yeah, America, maybe that’s a little much.” And here’s another one of those moments where I hate to be proven true, but can we revisit for just half a second the aces invading denmark meme? Can– can we please? Some of you may recall we did an episode about why that joke is not always in good taste.

Royce: Particularly not when there is a worldwide rise in nationalism?

Courtney: Yes, that. When we had people calling it the Fourth Reich and putting iron crosses on asexual pride flags? It was not a good look. But now we have the leader of a fascist world power literally trying to take Greenland, which is a semi-autonomous Danish territory, and they, for the most part, don’t even want to be part of Denmark. Greenland wants to be its own country. But we have had Donald Trump, who has refused to rule out military force as a means of acquiring Greenland. The head of the US Space Force based in Greenland was fired, and the statement about her firing said: “Commanders are expected to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, especially as it relates to remaining nonpartisan in the performance of their duties.” And the spokesman for the Pentagon, when commenting on this firing, said: “Actions to undermine the chain of command or subvert President Trump’s agenda will not be tolerated at the Department of Defense.”

Courtney: So there it is. The president’s agenda. Where did we hear that? All the time? It was in the Project 2025 training videos. The president’s agenda, the president’s agenda. So people who are voicing their concerns or attempting to push back against this are just getting fired. And that’s in addition to all of the people who have been fired or basically forced to retire because of all the nonsense DOGE has been pulling.

Courtney: And we’re starting to see leaders within the executive branch turn against people who are in their own party. Time and time again. Justice John Roberts made a statement rebuking the GOP calls to impeach a federal judge who, by the way, was ordering illegal deportation flights to turn around because they were not done legally. And the GOP was trying to impeach this judge. How dare they interfere with us? We’re going to go after them.

Courtney: John Roberts actually defended that judge, saying that it is actually within the role of the court to check the excesses of the executive branch. And we have Vice President JD Vance saying, “That is a profoundly wrong statement.” We have the vice president of our country saying no, it’s not the judicial branch’s job to check and balance the powers of the federal government. It’s not as if that’s the first thing we learn in any government class in this country is that we’re built on a system of checks and balances. And even when there is dissent amongst Republican leaders, it’s often not enough to actually do anything about it. For example, in confirming RFK Jr as the head of the Health and Human Services Department, Mitch McConnell, of all people, voted no.

Courtney: And he had a very reasonable reason. He was a survivor of childhood polio. And he’s like, “No. Vaccines are good, actually. I have seen in my lifetime, because I am 82 years old, that vaccines do work and you all are too young to remember what it was like before vaccines. But I remember.” And he said: “I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.” But guess what? We have RFK Jr anyway.

Courtney: And obviously, in addition to anti-vaccine propaganda, he is just an incredible conspiracy theo– therori– theorist. It’s getting late, my words are getting bad. But the fact that we talked a little bit in our last episode about this autism registry where he’s trying to amass private medical records for a federal database. Even his comments about sending mentally ill or neurodivergent people to these wellness farms that is disability segregation, if not outright incarceration.

Courtney: His ideas of autism are obviously incredibly skewed and wildly offensive, saying things like, “Oh, people with autism will never write a poem, they’ll never get married, they’ll never–” You know all of these things that are just not true. But, aside from the clear misinformation and ableism present there, this is not an administration that we can trust to keep records on any marginalized group. And he is now trying to remove the COVID-19 vaccines from the vaccination schedule for not only children but also pregnant women. And as of now, that is not a policy where they cannot get it. And in fact, some of what the CDC has said coming off of these statements actually contradicts what RFK Jr himself has said, and I hope that there are still people within the organization that are fighting that. But anything that comes to pregnancy or potential pregnancy we need to be very careful about under this administration.

Courtney: Not only did we talk about the eugenic ideology of the pronatalists who are working with this government very recently in a recent episode, but we’re seeing this continuously aggressive stripping away of rights for people who are pregnant and also children, taking away avenues for medical care for trans minors. We’ve seen calls to restrict other life-saving medications such as antidepressants for minors. We’ve made a very clear step in taking away bodily autonomy in the case of pregnancy with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, with the criminalization of abortion in so many places in this country already. And now they’re dropping guidance for pregnant women to get vaccinated, which is very troubling. And we’ve already seen the government and healthcare providers just absolutely usurp a woman’s body in the instance of pregnancy. There’s a case happening right now in Georgia of a woman who is dead and yet being kept on life support because she is pregnant. And the doctors have every intention of keeping her on life support until they think they can deliver this baby via C-section.

Courtney: Now there’s a lot that is wrong about this case because, first of all, Adriana Smith, the woman in question, went to the hospital in February with horrible headaches and did not get proper care or diagnosis and was sent home only to then have symptoms escalate. And by the time she returned to the hospital, it was too late to save her because of the blood clots in her brain that they did not catch the first time. This is a really common story in American healthcare, especially for women, especially for Black women. And, mind you, this was February. The hospital intends to keep her on life support until August, when they think they can perform the C-section. And this woman’s family, although they are saying that they are going to, you know, want and love this child should he be born safely, they’re speaking out saying they didn’t have any choice about this. They said the hospital just did this, this was not our choice, and that the decision should have been left to them. The decision should not be left up to the state. And I agree with that wholeheartedly.

Courtney: And in fact, now there is a new lawsuit in Kansas, where we live, challenging the constitutionality of a very similar state law that would nullify end-of-life choices for Kansas citizens in the event of a pregnancy. Where state law basically says oh, even if you have an advanced medical directive, even if you have outlined what you want done or not done with your body, if you cannot make your own decisions, even if you have told us who you want to make decisions on your behalf, if you cannot, if you’re pregnant might as well just shred it, because we’re gonna do what we want to do with your body in that case. One of the women in this lawsuit says, “Because I’m currently pregnant, I don’t get the peace of mind a living will is meant to provide. I shouldn’t have to fear that my pregnancy could cost me my dignity and autonomy. I am no less capable of planning my medical care simply because I am pregnant, I know what is best for me.”

Courtney: And this is like a very grim parallel to the Teri Schiavo case that seems like it was forever ago at this point, where a woman was being kept alive on artificial life support and her husband said she would not want this, but her parents wanted to keep her on life support. So the entire court case that ensued was who gets the right to make this decision, her parents or her husband? And it became an incredible controversy pertaining to end of life discussions. But I also want to know, and I’m not actually sure, who’s paying for this life support in this hospital room? Are they gonna make the family pay for this or, because the state decided to make this decision, the hospital decided to make this decision based on what the state has legislated, are they gonna foot the bill for this? Because, mind you, this article I found is from 2016. So, mind you, inflation exists. That was– Oh my gosh, that was almost a decade ago. I was about to say that was just a few years ago. That was almost a decade ago.

Royce: That was a full global pandemic ago.

Courtney: That was a whole global pandemic ago. This article says that medical costs can be up to $217,784 for just a few weeks. Just a few weeks. So six months of that plus inflation? If they try to come after the family for this bill, that’s like a medical bankruptcy waiting to happen.

Royce: Yeah, that’s several million dollars.

Courtney: Yes! Are they gonna charge them for the C-section? Are they going to give them the five thousand dollar baby bonus if the mother’s dead? So, yes, certainly not outside of the realm of possibility to think that they may take it a step further than just removing vaccinations from recommendations in the case of pregnancy. I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to argue that it just should not be legal.

Courtney: They’re, of course, trying to make it harder for a variety of people to vote. The SAVE Act has been described by Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota as a voter suppression bill that will disenfranchise millions of voters, especially married women. Because they’re trying to require additional documentation for proof of citizenship, including birth certificates. And, of course, they’re going to want the birth certificate to match the name on your current ID, which a lot of people aren’t going to have. And, yes, people who change their name when they get married, people who change their name because they are trans, people who change their name for whatever the hell reason they want to. And it is a hassle to get a copy of your birth certificate if, for some reason, you don’t have one. It can take time, it can take money.

Royce: And a lot of states still have voting registration cutoff times, where if you don’t plan far enough ahead, you don’t get to vote.

Courtney: And in fact I have here a survey of 500 political scientists who believe that the US is very rapidly heading towards authoritarianism. The survey is known as Bright Line Watch, where US-based professors rate the performance of American democracy on a scale from 0 to 100. 0 is complete dictatorship, 100 is perfect democracy. After President Trump’s election in November, scholars gave American democracy a rating of 67. Still not great.

Royce: Well, yeah, if you’ve looked at sort of historical lists of democracy indexes across the world in past decades, the US has always been in this weird place. Basically right after the bulk of Europe, and you know some other notable democratic countries around the world where it’s like it’s not technically a democracy, it’s a constitutional republic with democratically elected officials, and also there’s just a lot of nonsense going around all over the place. Long history of voter rights issues like–

Courtney: Yeah voter suppression. Like this isn’t new, the SAVE act and things like it isn’t new. So, like, yeah, 67, still not great. But a few weeks into this new term, that figure dropped to 55. And this was the biggest drop in this survey in its history. Which they started the survey in 2017, which again, apparently was almost a decade ago. But the democratic performance indicators follow things such as whether the government interferes with the press – hmm – whether the government punishes political opponents – hmm – and whether the legislator and judiciary can check executive authority – hmm! I’d like to see what this survey says now, if they redid it, because it’s certainly not going up. Professor of Government at Harvard says, “We’ve slid into some form of authoritarianism. We are no longer living in a liberal democracy.” A Princeton sociologist says, “We are on a very fast slide into what’s called competitive authoritarianism.” Which is the kind of authoritarianism that we observe from countries like Turkey and Hungary.

Courtney: So when I started keeping notes about, like, a political update kind of a podcast, since we talked about so many of these concerns pre-election, of course it made sense to do a follow up at some point, but a lot of the notes I had or things I was going to read were direct executive orders. But I think I’m gonna skip that because again, like I said last episode, it’s gonna be a lot of, “Yep called it, told you so. Yep, we warned about that.” But I do want to talk about the state of Project 2025. And even though I’m not going to read through all of the executive disorders, I do want to point out that, paralleling how terrifying the White House social media account is, the actual White House website is terrifying right now. When you go to it, it says, “America is back. View the list of private and foreign investments fueling American jobs and innovation.” And when you click on that, it says: The Trump Effect. In– like, it’s pulsing out of the screen at you. There’s like an animation for the Trump Effect.

Courtney: And when you go to this page, it says: “Major investment announcements made possible by President Trump’s leadership. The US has seen a surge of private and foreign investments that are fueling job growth, innovation and opportunity.” And then they just list it. There is no concern for safety, there is no concern for corruption, there is no shame. Very first one United Arab Emirates foreign investment $1.4 trillion. Qatar foreign investment $1.2 trillion. Saudi Arabia foreign investment $600 billion. And then, under each of those, we have a whole slew of, like, Open AI, Apple investing $500 billion in AI, AI infrastructure, followed by a variety of pharmaceutical companies. And it’s– Again you– I mean, they say you can’t shame the shameless, and you really can’t.

Courtney: There’s been all of this talk lately about Cutter offering this private jet to be the new Air Force One for President Trump, and President Trump only, that it’ll be outfitted for him and then, after he’s no longer president, it will be transferred to his presidential library. And, like, I’m not a lawyer, but a lot of people who are lawyers are saying that is just outright not legal. Sounds like it’s probably going to happen anyway. Because there’s full disregard for the law. All of the January 6th insurrectionists have been pardoned. People who literally broke into and vandalized the White House are walking free just because they’re loyal to Donald Trump.

Courtney: So to end us off, let’s take it back to Project 2025. We saw it coming. We certainly weren’t the only ones, but so much of what has been done in just five months time is directly out of the Project 2025 playbook. And, in fact, there is this fabulous website who has done all of the work and is tracking it so that you do not have to. And so I do not have to start going through legislation and executive orders and cross referencing it, even though I did read Project 2025 and it was enormous and horrifying. This website, project 2025.observer, has a progress bar on how far along they have gotten to implementing the entirety of Project 2025. Have you seen this yet, Royce?

Royce: No, I haven’t.

Courtney: Do you want–? Do you want to make a– Make a guess how far along they are right now?

Royce: What was the original scope of Project 2025? Like, what was their estimate for how long it would take them?

Courtney: I don’t recall if they had estimates on how long they thought it would be. I mean, the entire book was like nearly a thousand pages. It was like over 900.

Royce: Yeah, I just thought that there were some things that they were like, “Well, clearly there’s an order of operations here. It’s going to take this much time.” Let’s say 15%.

Courtney: Audience. Take your guesses now.

Royce: My first inclination to say was to say 20, with no real bearing, and then I dialed it back a little.

Courtney: 42%.

Royce: Oh, okay.

Courtney: 42%, and that is in under half a year of a four-year term. Hopefully a four-year term. Hopefully less than a four-year term. Let’s dream big. Why don’t we? 42%. And they break it out by progress by agency, and some agencies they are like done, we did everything. The USAID, for instance, Project 2025 had six objectives, all of them done. So any of the news articles you’ve been reading or listening to that have talked about the defunding of USAID. All of this is like cutting the budget of USAID is right out of Project 2025. Rescinding policies that address climate change, right out of Project 2025. Prohibiting them from funding sexual reproductive health and reproductive rights and gender equality programs, right out of Project 2025. And all of these are done. Implemented. They did it.

Courtney: They’re also 100% finished with their objective – probably only because there was one objective on this one, some of these have a lot more objectives they’re working on – but the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for reducing the regulations on cryptocurrency, done. They did it. And the White House itself had 13 agencies– Or the White House itself had 13 objectives, and a lot of these are going to sound really familiar if you listen to our Project 2025 training video reviews, because a lot of these things are like giving additional power to political appointees to review and authorize appropriated funding. That is like the entirety of what DOGE has been doing. And funding like that is legally the job of Congress, not unelected political appointees. And the thing is, the political appointees within DOGE weren’t even affirmed by the Senate like they were supposed to be. Like RFK Jr, despite Mitch McConnell’s protestations, was affirmed. Nobody in DOGE was. Elon Musk was not.

Courtney: Things like removing the words sexual orientation and gender identity, removing Diversity Equity and Inclusion, removing gender equality all of these things have been implemented. All of these things were right out of Project 2025. But you think back to those training videos and, for how unconstitutional their plan was, they are right that nobody is stopping them. Giving all these powers to political appointees, I recall one of these training episodes that was saying don’t listen to any lawyer or judge who isn’t on our side and only get lawyers on our side. Get lawyers who are political appointees that are going to stop at nothing to enact the president’s agenda. And now we literally do see that between the lines of many of the articles that I cited today, including the Supreme Court saying, “Hey, you should facilitate the release of that guy that was illegally sent to that concentration camp.” And they’re like, “Well, you know, our lawyers actually say, no, we don’t, so we’re just not gonna.”

Courtney: They told us all that this is what was gonna happen. They told us. We knew. We said it, and now we’re seeing it. But yeah, it looks like of the agencies being tracked here, there are 34 agencies with their own individual progress bars. Only seven of those agencies are at 0%. Only seven of them have not been touched yet. Most of them have. A lot of them are halfway completed or more so. The actual number of items done is 98. But it also does note that there are 66 in progress right now. So not done and completed, but they are working on it. So we are very likely going to see this progress bar at 42% as the time of recording start to, or continue to, creep up, unfortunately.

Courtney: So I do hate to say it, but if you haven’t listened to our previous Project 2025 video or our reviews of all of their training content, it’s still incredibly relevant. I wish it was out of date and I wish I could just tell you don’t listen to those, it didn’t happen, we were wrong, I’m glad we were. But no, it’s here. It’s still very much relevant. If you want a further peek behind the curtain of why we foresaw all of this coming and why a lot of these things are happening now in the way that they are. So that, I think, is going to be all for today. I believe, last week Royce promised you an episode of about an hour and I think I made Royce a liar.

Courtney: But in solidarity with Canada’s sovereignty, I think today we are going to shout out a Canadian ace MarketplACE vendor, that’s right. One who draws both cute creatures and terrible puns. You know we love our cute creatures and terrible puns here in the Ace Community, so we are giving a huge shout out to Kylah H. The very first terrible pun we see when we go to their shop is a little cowboy Kermit the Frog that says: “You’ve Kermited your last crime.” I’d like to think he’s standing off against Donald Trump. But in addition to that, we have some very cute creatures. We’ve got some bunnies, we’ve got some snails, we’ve got some duckies. And, of course, we’ve got a little Pride merch too. It is still Pride month, so treat yourself to some Pride merch. We’ve got some ace rainbow stickers, we’ve got NB rainbow stickers, pan Pride stickers. We’ve even got disability pride patterns here, which we always love to see.

Courtney: Personally, for me, my favorite pride design in this shop is the rainbow jellyfish, because jellyfish are very near and dear to my soul and it’s pretty. So that has been added to my ever-growing sticker collection that I often just use as bookmarks. So definitely check this shop out. As always, links to the shop, as well as all of the sources for what we talked about today, are going to be in the show notes on our website and in the description box on YouTube. And I hope everyone out there does find your own way to fight back while staying as safe as possible. And although we will never stop talking about politics, I know politics are a bummer, so we will certainly have a lighter topic for you all next week and we will talk to you all then. Goodbye.