This issue’s “Quote” of the Week is from a new (November 13 2023) publication from a group known as the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) called “Project 2025: The Far-Right Playbook for American Authoritarianism.” On the front page of the website we read this:

The far right has made public its plans for an ‘ideal’ America if one of their allies wins the 2024 presidential election in its 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Project 2025 is spearheaded by the far-right think tank Heritage Foundation and supported by more than 80 organizations, many well-known for their extreme positions, and for pushing hate and Christian nationalism. The authors and supporters of Project 2025 claim this plan will ‘rescue the country’ from ‘elite rule and woke cultural warriors.’

Their aims include ‘bringing together conservative allies with a common goal: to take back our country from the radical Left by developing a robust governing agenda and the right people to implement it.’ And it has been reported, though denied, that internal Project 2025 discussions have centered around the next conservative president invoking the Insurrection Act on the first day in office to allow the military to quell civil unrest.

Even if a Project 2025 favorite doesn’t win in 2024, this plan will continue to drive the thinking of the far right into the future and they will continue to push for these changes wherever possible.

As a country, we can — and we must – reject the far right’s efforts to lead us down the dark path away from an inclusive, vibrant democracy and toward authoritarianism.”

You can read the full (94-page) report online HERE

Or you can read this issue of Nygaard Notes, which is much shorter.

On August 8th a reporter from the New Hampshire Bulletin spoke to some attendees at that day’s campaign rally for Donald Trump. The reporter, Amanda Pirani, spoke with Trump supporters Robin Martyn and Donna Kloczewski, who “described ‘critical race theory’ and issues in education as some of their top concerns heading into the 2024 election.” Said Kloczewski, “The school system and what they’re teaching, critical race theory, the whole gender pronouns, all that stuff [concerns me].”

Martyn and Kloczewski were no doubt reassured to hear Trump proclaim that “On Day One [of my Presidency], I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children.”

This focus on Critical Race Theory is not new. Addressing a rally in Florence, South Carolina on March 10, 2022, Trump told the crowd, “As President I was proud to issue the world’s first ban on critical race theory. . . and as soon as we retake Congress, Republicans will ban critical race theory once and for all. They will also defund the racist equity mandates across the entire federal government. No more illegal discrimination in anything.

Trump continued: “Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival. We have no choice. The fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down—and they must do this, lay down—their very lives to defend their country. If we allow the Marxists and communists and socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom.”

The Threat We Are Facing

The massive pillar upon which the current (maybe any) rise of right-wing authoritarianism rests is the phenomenon known as Othering. Othering is defined as a complex set of “dynamics, processes, and structures” that work together to mark some people as belonging and others as not belonging to a group.

In Issue #1 of a publication called “The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging,” scholar/activists john a. powell and Stephen Menendian state that “The most important good we distribute to each other in society is membership. The right to belong is prior to all other distributive decisions since it is members who make those decisions. Belongingness entails an unwavering commitment to not simply tolerating and respecting difference but to ensuring that all people are welcome and feel that they belong in the society.”

Donald Trump is very good at Othering. His recent references to his opponents as “vermin” and to immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country” are good examples of Othering. So good, in fact, that I will reproduce them here.

On Veterans Day, November 11 2023, Trump posted on his social media account some remarks he made that day at a campaign rally in New Hampshire. He said:

“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, who lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and who will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

One month later, at a campaign rally in a different town in New Hampshire, Trump spoke about immigrants, who are ‘pouring in” to the United States from “Africa, from Asia, from all over the world.” And the leader of the Republican Party then explained why “We’ve got a lot of work to do” in dealing with these people, whom he places in the same category of Others that includes the “vermin” mentioned above. Speaking of the millions of immigrants that “they” have “let into our country,” he said “They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world—not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about but all over the world. They’re coming into our country.”

One obvious form of Othering is the practice known as Scapegoating, in which one or more identifiable groups are seen to be the NOT US who are somehow responsible for the core problems that have been designated as such by those who are seen as US. Not surprisingly, perhaps, two of the most common markers used to assign “US” and “THEM” status are the old standby markers: Race and Sex.

The two main essays in this issue of the Notes focus on Race and Sex. I could have included immigration status here, but it’s clearly secondary to race as an Othering tool, as a 2018 report by the Associated Press (and many others) reveals. Reporting on an “extraordinary Oval Office conversation,” the AP story led off like this:

“In bluntly vulgar language, President Donald Trump questioned Thursday why the U.S. would accept more immigrants from Haiti and ‘shithole countries’ in Africa rather than places like Norway.”

The AP proceeded to add that, “Trump’s contemptuous description of an entire continent startled lawmakers in the meeting and immediately revived charges that the president is racist. The White House did not deny his remark but issued a statement saying Trump supports immigration policies that welcome ‘those who can contribute to our society.’” Apparently that means white people.

The focus of this issue of Nygaard Notes is a remarkable 1,000-page book called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. I don’t know what the authors mean by “Conservative,” but it’s more dangerous than that word implies. If only we can keep Trump or a kindred spirit (who is a kindred spirit to Trump? One wonders) out of the White House, many think, the slide toward authoritarianism will recede. Not so. As this issue’s “Quote” of the Week cautions us, “Even if a Project 2025 favorite doesn’t win in 2024, this plan will continue to drive the thinking of the far right into the future and they will continue to push for these changes wherever possible.”

For weeks now I’ve been consumed by Project 25 and its core document, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. In its 920 pages there are 30 chapters, divided between five sections. In this issue of Nygaard Notes I will focus on just a few chapters. That’s all I can do, but I made a tactical choice in doing so.

While some of you may think that there is too much repetition in this issue, that’s actually the point. While the authors of the Mandate offer a wide variety (hundreds!) of policy prescriptions and system changes, what unites them all is the overarching call to Make America Great Again. You’ll see that the Mandate calls on “Us” to outlaw, rescind, prohibit, eliminate, oppose, and reverse any policy, system, or idea that is or has been promoted by “Them.”

The slide toward authoritarianism, or fascism, has in recent years been personified by Donald Trump. But it doesn’t depend on him, by any means. As the Mandate tells us, “The entirety of this effort is to support the next conservative President, whoever he or she may be.”

And here is the very first, chilling, paragraph in the Mandate for Leadership:

“We want you! The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025. Welcome to the mission. By opening this book, you are now a part of it. Indeed, one set of eyes reading these passages will be those of the 47th President of the United States, and we hope every other reader will join in making the incoming Administration a success.”

This is an extra-long and repetitive issue of Nygaard Notes. I hope that will be enough to give you a visceral, felt sense of the nature of this beast. It must be stopped. Here we go.

Back in May I quoted from an interview with Jason Stanley, a scholar who studies fascism. The interviewer asked, “What is the link between anti-fascism and transgender rights?” Stanley said,

So fascism operates by scapegoating… Fascism centers the supposed threat of various minority groups and that’s the way it builds a coalition, because you can’t think of a fascist social and political movement as made up just of people who are fascists… The group that supports a fascist social and political movement is made up of lots of people who themselves are not fascistic in their ideology. So the focus on trans as scapegoats, which we’re seeing very much right now, is meant to bring in, say, minorities who otherwise would not join a fascist grouping. But enough people hate trans persons that you can get African-Americans, Latinos, etc., into the grouping by scapegoating trans people. If you’re continually scapegoating, say, Black people, then you’re not going to get enough Black supporters. So you need to find a scapegoat that is small enough in size that it won’t threaten your voting population; will instead broaden your voting population.

Scapegoating is a category of “Othering,” and Othering is one of the foundations of fascism. Maybe THE foundation. So keep that thought in mind as look at a few excerpts from The Mandate on the subject of transgender identity.

The Foreword of Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise is entitled A PROMISE TO AMERICA, and the author is the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin D. Roberts. On Page One, in the second paragraph, we read this:

Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.

In the world of the movement conservatives behind the Mandate, “pornography” has a peculiar meaning, as we learn on Page 5: Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.

And not only that… The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.

The target for many years has been what the Right calls “The Administrative State” by which they mean the workers who adjudicate and enforce—that is, “administer”—the laws of the land. Far-right culture warriors often prefer the scarier term “The Deep State.” And what kinds of things, according to the Mandate, do the minions of The Administrative State do?

Well, for one thing: Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists.

The Mandate calls on the Defense Department to “Eliminate politicization, reestablish trust and accountability, and restore faith to the force.” In pursuit of these goals, the DOD must:

Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.

In an (unsigned) preface to Section Three—THE GENERAL WELFARE—we read that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) “has long been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” It goes on: “The next Health and Human Services secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism. HHS also pushes abortion as a form of ‘health care,’ skirting and sometimes blatantly defying the Hyde Amendment in the process…. The next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administration’s focus on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,” replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.

In the Department of Labor section we see the heading “Sex Discrimination,” with one of the “Needed Reforms” demanding that the Department:

“Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics. The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.”

On page 5 of the Foreword to this massive document we see that there are two sides in this struggle, one based on “ideology” and “theories,” and the other based on “the givenness of our nature.”

“The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.”

As that last excerpt reveals, it’s not “transgenderism” alone that is targeted as “toxic.” Race is frequently invoked throughout The Mandate, often in some peculiar ways. Let’s have a look.

The Browning of America—that is, the not-too-distant moment when white people cease to be the absolute majority in the United States—has given rise to a deep anxiety among so-called Conservatives. The anxiety is easy to see in the racial language of The Mandate for Leadership. Two of the most common symbols of an ever-increasing racial Othering in the United States—too obvious to be labeled “dog-whistles”—are Critical Race Theory, or CRT, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI.

In my quest to illustrate the degree of anxiety about race that animates The Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, we could start anywhere in the 920-page Mandate. For no particular reason, I’ll start with the chapter on the Department of Education, which begins on page 319.

In the Department of Education chapter (Chapter 11), written by Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation’s Education Director, the very first sentence says that “the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”

That’s on page 319. Three pages later we read a discussion of the “right thinking” for educators that is being promoted. It reads like this:

“As the next Administration executes its work, it should be guided by a few core principles, including . . . Safeguarding civil rights. Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of [civil rights] laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.”

If we skip ahead to page 342, we find this:

“By its very design, critical race theory has an ‘applied’ dimension, as its founders state in their essays that define the theory. Those who subscribe to the theory believe that racism (in this case, treating individuals differently based on race) is appropriate—necessary, even—making the theory more than merely an analytical tool to describe race in public and private life. The theory disrupts America’s Founding ideals of freedom and opportunity. So, when critical race theory is used as part of school activities such as mandatory affinity groups, teacher training programs in which educators are required to confess their privilege, or school assignments in which students must defend the false idea that America is systemically racist, the theory is actively disrupting the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.”

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agenda is discussed in Chapter 14. The author, Roger Severino, was director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS under Trump, and is now Vice President of Domestic Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

Discussing the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the Mandate states on page 496 that, “Specifically, it should … Issue a general statement of policy announcing that it plans to enforce discrimination bans [under the Civil Rights Act] by refocusing on serious cases of race, sex, and disability discrimination.”

Says the Mandate, “OCR should also coordinate with the Department of Education on a public education and civil rights enforcement campaign to ensure [that the two departments would] pursue race discrimination claims against entities that adopt or impose racially discriminatory policies such as those based on critical race theory…”

Chapter 18, on the Department of Labor, was put together by one Jonathan Berry, who served as Chief Counsel to the President-Elect Trump Transition, advising on ethics and legal policy. [Editor’s note: Advising Donald Trump on ethics has got to be a challenging job!]

But, before we look at the Dept of Labor, a quick word about DEI:

DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and is the current buzzword for corporations and non-profits who want to appear to be doing something to make their workplaces more, well, diverse, equitable, and inclusive. So-called Conservatives see it differently. Speaking about DEI on college campuses, a commentary published by the Heritage Foundation in June described DEI as “instruction in the type of sordid thinking that sees all of life in terms of group power dynamics, cancels opposing views, preaches color consciousness, and discourages merit.” With that in mind, we go back to the Labor Department:

One of the ‘needed reforms’ at the Department of Labor, according to Berry, would be to: “Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy. Under the Obama and Biden Administrations, labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution. Under this managerialist left-wing race and gender ideology, every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views. The next Administration should eliminate every one of these wrongful and burdensome ideological projects.”

The next “needed reform” at Labor is to “Eliminate Racial Classifications and Critical Race Theory Trainings.” Berry explains that “The Biden Administration has pushed ‘racial equity’ in every area of our national life, including in employment, and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race. Nondiscrimination and equality are the law; DEI is not. Title VII flatly prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, and national origin. [Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.] The President should: Issue an executive order banning, and Congress should pass a law prohibiting the federal government from using taxpayer dollars to fund, all critical race theory training (CRT).”

Chapter 22: The Department of the Treasury

Right off the bat (in paragraph #3), this chapter spells out what “The primary subject matter focus of the incoming Administration’s Treasury Department should be.” What it should be is then summarized in a list of seven “major policy changes.” The sixth change on that list is: “Reversal of the racist ‘equity’ agenda of the Biden Administration.” Here’s what they mean:

“Under the Biden Administration, the Treasury Department has appointed a Counselor for Racial Equity, established an Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, and created an office for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility. All these should be eliminated. Treasury has created several new offices to promote ‘equity’ and has made this its first of five strategic goals in its Fiscal Year 2022–2226 Strategic Plan. ‘Equity’ is identified as a cross-cutting theme in 15 of 19 of the plan’s objectives. The avowed purpose of these initiatives is to implement policies that deliberately favor some races or ethnicities over others. The casual acceptance and rapid spread of racist policymaking in the federal government must be forcefully opposed and reversed. The next conservative Administration should take affirmative steps to expose and eradicate the practice of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) throughout the Treasury Department.”

We’ll leave aside, for the moment, the fact that achieving “equity” under capitalism is a cruel chimera, and have a look at what the authors of The Conservative Promise mean by “take affirmative steps.”

Here’s what “These steps will include,” in their own words:

1. Identify every Treasury official who participated in DEI initiatives and interview him or her for the purpose of determining the scope and nature of these initiatives and to ensure that such initiatives are completely ended.

2. Make public immediately all communications relating to the work of the Treasury’s critical race theory and DEI initiatives.

3. Treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment.

4. Expose and make public all training materials and initiatives designed to single out any race, ethnicity, or sex for special treatment.”

All of that will take some time, one would think, but as soon as possible, says the Mandate, “The Administration should eliminate the 25-member Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity.”

In the Mandate’s preface we learn that “In 2023, the game has changed. The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass.” Therefore, a “Needed Reform” for the Department of Defense must be to “Eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.”

And the National Security Council, operating from the office of the President “should rigorously review all [senior] officer promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense matters, including climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed forces and discourage our nation’s finest men and women from enlisting to serve in defense of our liberty.’

There’s so much more! After all, the document is almost 1,000 pages long. But I’ll stop here, and go to this issue’s concluding essay.

On page 14 of the Foreword to Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation says:

The United States remains the most innovative and upwardly mobile society in the world. [Ed. Note: This is not true.] Government should stop trying to substitute its own preferences for those of the people. And the next conservative President should champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-directed socialism. The promise of socialism—Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, whatever name it chooses—is simple: Government control of the economy can ensure equal outcomes for all people. The problem is that it has never done so.

There is no such thing as “the government.” There are just people who work for the government and wield its power and who—at almost every opportunity—wield it to serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second. This is not a failing of one nation or socialist party, but inherent in human nature.

In response to that statement I’ll offer something I said ‘way back in NN #650:

U.S. society, like the capitalist system at its core, is based on the principle of Everyone for Themselves, with the market/society being composed of individuals competing with others, each one trying to get ahead. Individuals acting with nothing but their own self interest in mind is defined by capitalist economists as “rational” behavior.

What Conservatives like Roberts and the hundreds who contributed to the Mandate want to conserve is a society based on the bleak vision of “human nature” that is so glaringly revealed in the above quote, and which animates nearly every page of Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.

And that vision is articulated in an Individualistic and Competitive philosophy that I have worked so hard to explain and expose for so many years in these pages and elsewhere. The movement that produced the Mandate sees a world of winners and losers, of Us and Them.

Everything that Trump and his allies do is aimed at defining, protecting, and serving an ever-shrinking number of winners, and defining, targeting and excluding an ever-growing number of those to be excluded, the people they identify as losers. Or threats.

That’s why we can say that the fundamental dynamic of the far-right movement symbolized and led by Donald Trump is Othering.

Another world, a world based not on Othering but on Belonging, is possible. We just have to see it. And build it.