Project 2025 aims to break US government and ignore climate crisis if Trump is elected

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Clean air in the United States comes from strong air and water quality policies enforced by the U.S. government. The progress we have seen in renewable energy and electric vehicles is based on U.S. government support in various forms. One of the best education systems in the world depends on U.S. government support. A more open democracy than most requires U.S. government employees to obey the law and do their jobs.

This is all basic, right? No one would want to harm such progress and break these government agencies and policies, right?

Well, that's not good, of course. Some people do. And the threat of that actually happening has become more extreme than ever before. That's one reason why a former longtime Republican and occasional CleanTechnica writer sent a letter to the CEO (to me) ask that we not only allow political reporting, but also go above politics to protect our democracy and society.

The underlying framework and program I am referring to is “Project 2025.” The goal, in short, is to disrupt and dismantle the U.S. government as much as possible. There are leaked recruitment videos of this and at one point they basically tell people that if they are not willing to go to extremes and risk their careers and social connections, they should not seek to join the Trump administration if Trump is re-elected.

In a leaked training video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the first Trump administration, says, “If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references everywhere.” The Project 2025 staff includes many former and current Trump associates and connections. “A review of the training videos shows that 29 of the 36 speakers worked for Trump in some way — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration, or in his 2024 reelection campaign,” ProPublica writes. The leader of the project until recently, Kevin Roberts flew with Trump on a private jetand Trump has reiterated many of the goals of the plan. There are also connections to J.D. Vance. Apparently, J.D. Vance, Trump's choice to run alongside him as vice presidential candidate, is even deeper in this way of thinking.

In a right-wing podcast in 2021, when J.D. Vance was running for Congress, he was even clearer about how a new Trump administration should behave. “He urged Donald Trump, should he win another term, to ‘take over the institutions of the left,’ fire ‘every mid-level official’ in the U.S. government, ‘replace them with our people,’ and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him.”

Not surprisingly, one of the flames beneath this policy fire is a disaffected, right-wing blogger who has inspired some of our newest and most extreme politicians. Here is an extended quote from the article cited above: “To the uninitiated, all of this may seem baffling. But Vance acknowledged that he had an intellectual inspiration. 'So there's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of this stuff…'

“Nearly a decade earlier, a Stanford law student friend, Blake Masters, asked for reading suggestions for a book club, emailed a link to a series of blog posts. These posts contained an argument that was quite unusual in the American context, namely that the democratically elected American government should be abolished and replaced by a monarchy. The author, then writing under a pseudonym, was Yarvin.

“Masters is now the GOP candidate for Senate in Arizona. At a campaign event last year, according to James Pogue from Vanity Fairhe was asked how he would actually drain the swamp in Washington. “One of my friends has an acronym he calls RAGE — Retire All Government Employees,” Masters replied. You can probably guess who that friend is.

“But he stands out among right-wing commentators because he is probably the one person who has spent the most time figuring out exactly how the American government could be overthrown and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to call it — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like Napoleon or Lenin, he says — would seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.

“For Yarvin, incremental reforms and half-measures are doomed to failure by definition. The only way to achieve what he wants is to assume that 'absolute power,' and the game is about getting to a place where you can make that happen. Critics have called his ideas 'fascist' — a term he disputesarguing that centralizing power under one ruler predates fascism, and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting class warfare as fascists do. “Autocratic” is a fitting description, though his preferred term is “monarchist.”

If you want to freak out even more, or basically know how he lays out the plans for a coup and a new “monarchy” (or authoritarian) government in the United States, you can read all the way to the end of this article. that article.

Yarvin is of course closely connected to Peter Thiel, who is closely connected to both Elon Musk (they are both co-founders of PayPal) and Donald Trump. In 2009, Peter Thiel wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Yarvin believes that the fall of American democracy could be “fundamentally joyful and peaceful.” My shock level at this point is about zero.

Okay, let's get back to the recently released Project 2025 training videos.

As Jennifer Sensiba recently wrote: they even want to disband the National Weather ServiceComing back to climate change, you can see it for yourself here or via the embedded video above, but one of the people who is guiding others on what to think and say about this claims, “When I think of climate change now, I immediately think of population control, don’t you?” This person also laments that the topic of climate change has “infiltrated every part of the federal government.” Almost as if global warming is some really dangerous, society-threatening crisis. The topics they discuss here often go down a deep rabbit hole and sound a bit confusing to average people, because the topics they obsess over are not common concerns for most of us, and often aren’t even things that the vast majority of Democrats think about, talk about, or propose.

The 887-page The 'Mandate for Leadership' document explains a wide range of policy and administration proposals, including abolishing the Department of Education, drastically cutting Medicaid, reclassifying tens of thousands of government employees so they can be more easily fired and replaced, giving the president more power to oversee the Justice Department, and further restricting access to abortion.”

There are also tips for avoiding public accountability. To solve a problem or make a plan with someone, Tom Jones, who directs the American Accountability Foundation and was a former Senate investigator, recommends, “go to the break room, get a cup of coffee, talk it over and make the decision, rather than sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups will come back to and look up.”

“Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 have been disingenuous throughout,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The discovery that the vast majority of speakers in Project 2025 training videos are Trump administration alumni or have other close ties to Trump’s political operation is not a surprising testament to the close ties there.”