Project 2025 Super Special
Project 2025: A name so boring it must be sinister!
Gaslit Nation was early warning about Project 2025. Now people are finally starting to pay attention. Another early warning system is journalist Anne Nelson, the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Nelson covered the conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala, and won the Livingston Award for best international reporting from the Philippines. She served as the director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, and became the director of the international program at the Columbia School of Journalism, where she created the first curriculum in human rights reporting. This is Nelson’s second time on the show. The excellent must-watch documentary Bad Faith, featured on the show in April, was based on her book.
We created this special episode that tells you everything you need to know about Project 2025–the decades-long rise of Christian nationalism, backed by Big Oil & Coal to prevent and rollback regulations and turn America into a dictatorship to protect record profits. “The shadow network” has been looking for a strongman for decades, and Trump is their long-awaited strongman to finish the job.
This week’s bonus show explores the making of Vladimir Putin, featuring Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman and European analyst Monique Camarra of the Kremlin File podcast. Comments from our listeners at the Democracy Defender tier and higher are also shared in the context of the latest on Israel, Palestine, Iran, and more! To submit your questions, subscribe to the show at the Democracy Defender tier ($10/month) or higher, and get bonus shows, all episodes ad free, invites to exclusive events, and more! Thank you to everyone who supports the show–we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!
June 25th is George Orwell’s birthday! Come celebrate with us at a live taping of Gaslit Nation, featuring another fearless journalist, Craig Unger, the author of several bestselling books: House of Trump, House of Putin; House of Bush, House of Saud; and American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery (which features his reporting on Jeffrey Epstein's pedophile global crime syndicate) is going to join the live taping of Gaslit Nation on Tuesday June 25, at 12pm ET with Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman and European analyst Monique Camarra of Kremlin File. The live taping will be exclusive to our Patreon community that keeps the show going, so be sure to subscribe at Patreon.com/Gaslit at the Truth-teller tier ($5/month) or higher to get your ticket. A zoom link will be sent out the morning of the event. Thank you to everyone who supports the show!
Join Us for Our First Phonebank Party of 2024! Plant Seeds of Change at the Indivisible With Gaslit Nation Phonebank Party! – June 20th 6-8pm ET
https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/628701/
Show Notes
Anne Nelson, author and journalist website
https://anne-nelson.com/about/
Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right https://bookshop.org/p/books/shadow-network-media-money-and-the-secret-hub-of-the radical-right-anne-nelson/8555395?ean=9781635575828
Opening Clip: Jasmine Crockett CONFRONTS Trumper, Project 2025 Contributor Gene Hamilton: Playbook For A Dictator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2IF5CJARP8
Are Our Oligarchs Going to Drag Us Into Civil War? The billionaires who own the GOP are now actively promoting the same sort of revisionist history the Confederacy did. That did not go very well.
https://newrepublic.com/article/181698/american-billionaire-oligarchs-drag-us-civil-war? utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Twitter
The Saudi Prince, The Mosque And Fox News
https://www.npr.org/2010/09/01/129584557/the-saudi-prince-the-mosque-and-fox-news
Longtime Murdoch Ally, Saudi Prince Dumps $1.5B Worth of Fox Shares With Prince Alwaleed’s assets likely to have been frozen after the arrest, it’s unclear who performed the trading and when.
https://observer.com/2017/11/longtime-murdoch-ally-saudi-prince-dumps-1-5b-worth-of-f ox-shares/
Jasmine Crockett:
Mr. Hamilton, I don't want you to feel left out of this conversation, so I'm going to make sure I ask you some questions. Let me know if you're having problems answering because they really should be yes or no. Let's see. You are the Executive Director for the America First Legal, correct?
Gene Hamilton:
That's correct.
Jasmine Crockett:
All right, and America First Legal is a member of Project 2025, which is dedicated to creating the playbook for the next conservative administration in what it calls the Project Pillars, correct?
Gene Hamilton:
We are proud contributors to Project 2025.
Jasmine Crockett:
Okay. And are you familiar with Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership?
Gene Hamilton:
In fact, I am.
Jasmine Crockett:
Okay. And in fact, you wrote some of the sections of this mandate related to the DOJ, correct?
Gene Hamilton:
Sure did.
Jasmine Crockett:
And the mandate outlines policy priorities for the next conservative president, is that correct?
Gene Hamilton:
It does.
Jasmine Crockett:
You've done a great job. I just wanted to let you know. All right, so let's walk through some of the provisions of the mandate. It calls for eliminating the Department of Education, eliminating the Department of Commerce, deploying the military for the use of domestic law enforcement against protesters under the Insurrection Act of 1807. It also has the repealing of Schedule F status for thousands of federal employees to allow a president to replace career civil servants with unqualified partisan loyalists. That's probably my favorite of it. It also prohibits the FBI from combating the spread of misinformation and disinformation, like Russia and China who are actively trying to interfere with American elections. I don't know why or how anybody can support Project 2025, and I know that there was allegedly a joke about dictators and whether or not that's funny, but in the United States of America, dictatorships are never funny and Project 2025 is giving the playbook for authoritarianism as well as the next dictator to come in.
Andrea Chalupa:
Hey everyone, I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. The film The Kremlin doesn't want you to see because they are carrying out the same genocide now. All eyes on Kharkiv, Ukraine, which is a major, traditionally a major tech university young hub of Ukraine. It is heartbreaking to see the Russians trying to destroy it, and we need to give Ukraine more aid right now to end this genocide. Thank you all who raise your voices for Ukraine. I love you. Our opening clip was Representative Jasmine Crockett destroying Gene Hamilton, who works with Stephen Miller at Trump's America first Legal, "Legal." He was with the DOJ and Homeland Security under Trump and was instrumental in Trump's zero tolerance family separation policy. Welcome to the Gaslit Nation Project 2025 super special. We made this episode for you to share with your family and friends, to share with them everything there is to know about Project 2025, the long held plan of white Christian nationalists to overthrow American democracy through a long awaited strong man like Donald Trump. It's all paid for by fossil fuel money, Wall Street money, including 50 billionaire families who have given a combined billion dollars so far in this election to mostly Republican races and Trump. And they're doing that of course, because they want to pay even less in taxes and they're doing this in the hopes of more tax cuts and more deregulation. So yes, just like in the rise of Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, the business elite, the ruling oligarchs will choose fascism. Fascism if it means hoarding their already astronomical wealth, which is why we need to start treating greed like a mental illness. If sex addiction can be a mental illness, so can the greed that is destroying the world, same sickness. All right, so what can we do about this? In a gaslit nation first, we're starting our phone banks, not in the fall, not in the summer, but in the spring. You heard that right. This spring, June 20th, a Thursday evening from 6:00 to 8:00 PM Eastern, we will have the first Gaslit Nation phone bank of the 2024 election.
We're joining forces with our friends at Indivisible for a phone bank party to kick off election season. We're calling into, so-called Red States Republican hostage states like Montana and Missouri to speak with voters in their states about the ways they can get involved in the local elections on the ground and all of this... I know it may seem hopeless in those states given how ruthless and authoritarian Republicans have been ignoring referendums and so on it goes, but the whole point is to be like water, as Bruce Lee says. To chip away, to chip away to a road and plant sees a change. All of us have to be very humble with the power that our small acts can have. And collectively, all of that adds up. I refuse to give into any despair. Just look at the progress that has been made in Kansas in recent years as we've covered in previous episodes. So leave no one behind. We are going to stay the United States of America. We are going to go into the so-called Red States and show them that we care and have conversations and just do what we can to plant these seeds of change. Join us for that. Again, it's June 20th, the evening of. I know you've got nothing better to do, but join me in saving our democracy. Join us by signing up at the RSVP link in the show notes for this week's episode. And if you show up, I'm going to share a ridiculous story that just happened to me as the George Costanza of the resistance. You need to hear this story. My husband could not stop laughing. So if you come to that event, I will share with you some exclusive Andrea Chalupa [inaudible 00:06:44] exclusively for those who come to the Indivisible Gasoline Nation phone bank on June 20th. Don't miss it. And then June 25th is George Orwell's birthday. Come celebrate with us at a live taping of Gasoline Nation featuring another fearless journalist, Craig Unger, the author of several bestselling books. Want to know how Saudi, Arabia, Russia and Epstein's Global operation, along with the Trump crime machine infiltrated our democracy? Well, Craig has all of the books on this. He is the author of House of Trump, House of Putin, House of Bush, House of Saad, and a book that was blacklisted by mainstream media I witnessed in MSNBC news anchor even refused to say the name of the book. It was weird. Somebody was trying to talk about it and she was like, "No." And that book is American Compromise, how the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump and Related Tales of Sex, Greed Power and Treachery, which features Craig's reporting on Jeffrey Epstein's pedophile crime syndicate, that's global of course, and all of the links of the Kremlin developing Donald Trump as an asset.
We know from what's publicly available that Trump's own idiot sons, Don and Eric have said that the Trump businesses are dependent on Russian money. So this book, American Compromise really pulls all of that together and it was such a scary book for the establishment and that is why we at Gaslight Nation are of course going to have Craig on the show and celebrate all his brave work. Russian Mafia expert, Olga Lautman of the KREMLIN FILE Podcast was a tenacious researcher that helped Craig with his books. So that's going to be a wonderful conversation you don't want to miss. The European analyst, Monique Kamara, who is the co-host of KREMLIN FILEs, she'll be there too. All of us will be in conversation.
And again, that's Orwell's birthday, June 25th at 12:00 P.M. Eastern. The live taping will be exclusive to our Patreon community that keeps the show going. So be sure to subscribe at patreon.com/gaslit at the truth teller level or higher to get your ticket. A zoom link will be sent the morning of the event. Thank you to everyone who supports the show and keeps our wonderful production team going. And obviously if you have a question for us at any time, support the show at the Democracy Defender level or hire to join our regular Q&A discussions. You shape the show. I always love hearing from you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It's been raining news and raining helicopters of sadistic butchers like Iran's Sadistic President who is now hanging out with Kissinger. So for an analysis of the latest big headlines and it's been a lot in these last few days, look out for this Saturday's bonus show of Gaslit Nation, which also features letters from our listeners at the Democracy Defender level or higher on Patreon. You can get access to that by subscribing at the show. And to submit your own questions, just go to patreon.com/Gaslit and sign up at the Democracy Defender level or higher. Thank you to everyone who supports the show. We could not make Gaslit Nation without you. All right, so Gaslit Nation has been telling you about Project 2025 since last fall. Early fall. Now people are finally starting to pay attention. One of the early warning systems was journalist Anne Nelson, the author of Shadow Network: Media Money and the Secret Hub of the radical right. As a journalist, she's covered the conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala, and won the Livingston Award for best international reporting from the Philippines. She served as the director of the Committee to protect Journalists. In 1995, she became the director of the international program at the Columbia School of Journalism, where she created the first curriculum in human rights reporting. This is Anne's second time on the show. We created this special episode that tells you everything you need to know about Project 2025, the decades-long rise of Christian nationalism backed by big oil and coal to block progress of weaning our economy off fossil fuels, roll back regulations and turn America into a dictatorship to protect record profits. The Shadow Network has been looking for a strongman for decades to complete their plan, and Donald Trump is their long-awaited strongman to finish the job. Welcome back to Gaslight Nation, Anne Nelson, author of the must-read book, this Shadow Network, which explains how we got to this terrifying moment in America. Now you are here to explain to us the crisis to our democracy that is Project 2025. What is Project 2025?
Anne Nelson:
Project 2025 is a document that was released under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation a few months ago in late 2023. And it is a blueprint for the way that the radical right wing of the Republican Party plans to transform American flawed but functional democracy into a complete dictatorship. That's the short answer, but it goes into 900 pages of detailed information about exactly how they're going to do that throughout virtually every possible branch of the government.
Andrea Chalupa:
And what are some ways they plan to do this?
Anne Nelson:
Well, some of them are old favorites of the Heritage Foundation and the extreme right wing, the climate policy elimination is disastrous. Withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accords and every other environmental international agreement. Eliminate emissions controls because we need to burn as many fossil fuels as quickly as possible because the priority is the profit or the profit stream for the fossil fuels industry. Remove even energy ratings on your air conditioner and your refrigerator so you can just keep burning that fuel. So the environmental areas are egregious. And also remove things like the Migratory Bird Act to protect disappearing species and so on. Then you will have the taxation end, where they still think that the wealthy pay too many taxes, although they pay very few. So they want to continue to lower every possible tax for the ultra wealthy in corporation.
Then you've got the social elements, which are what they use to engage fundamentalists and people who want the United States to be a theocracy. So they have this wording that says every child has a right to be raised by the biological male and female who conceive them, which is pretty extreme. And obviously this is trying to reverse marriage equality, but along the way, I guess they want to reverse adoption and foster care and everything else because it's this blind family policy. Draconian measures against trans people, but also measures against the entire LGBTQ population. They want to remove all of their civil and political rights so that a person can be fired from a job simply for being gay. Talk about throwing us back into like 100 years or so. Reverse not just abortion, but they're starting to challenge various forms of birth control so that we can keep women in the kitchen.
Well, as I said, there are 900 pages, and I guess the final area that I should stress is that it is saying that regardless of whether Trump wins the election in the fall or if any Republican candidate, they want a concentration of government powers in the White House, so the President has personal control over things like the FBI. So we can have a
secret police state. That the president has control over the State Department and new- [inaudible 00:15:18]
Andrea Chalupa:
The DOJ, the DOJ?
Anne Nelson:
Both.
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, both. Okay.
Anne Nelson:
No, yeah. FBI and DOJ are one silo, but also the State Department so that you forget about career diplomats and you install cronies in significant positions, including the ambassadorship so that you can just cut deals with foreign countries at will. A generalized purge of something like 40,000 federal employees to be replaced by people that they are recruiting and training now on an ideological basis. So they're recruiting their own right-wing ideologues and training them to take the place in government of our professional civil service.
Andrea Chalupa:
Can they find 40,000 people to do this?
Anne Nelson:
Well, given that they have no educational other requirements, they probably can. Competence and preparation and qualifications have nothing to do with it. It's just whether you'll follow the leader or not.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's what it comes down to?
Anne Nelson:
Yeah, they have online training underway for these people and they're already organizing the staffing. And it's important to remember that a lot of this movement, which has been coordinated through organizations with the Council for National Policy in the past, so they have worked through the Leadership Institute, which is a core organization and is involved in this recruitment and training. And they claim that they've already trained over 270,000 people to be candidates, campaign workers, and other related functions. So they've already got a core there.
Andrea Chalupa:
So basically the Trump campaign, which Gabe Sherman and Vanity Fair recently wrote is extremely well organized this time around, would roll into Project 2025 presumably, and be part of carrying all this out.
Anne Nelson:
Well, I don't think that Trump can win without the support of 100-plus organizations who signed on to Project 2025-
Andrea Chalupa:
100?
Anne Nelson:
Over 100.
Andrea Chalupa:
Over 100?
Anne Nelson:
Over 100. And you have to remember that these are a lot of the same organizations that got behind Trump and pushed in 2016. These organizations, again, many of them are affiliated with the Council for National Policy like the anti-abortion Susan B, Anthony Pro-Life America, like the Heritage Foundation and so on. And these are the groups, as I described in my book, that met with Trump in June 2016 and made this deal with him where they would give him money and personnel and strategists in return for him giving them the court that they wanted. Which he indeed had not just at the Supreme Court level, but all the way down through the federal judiciary. Now, of these 100 organizations, roughly half have received funding from the Koch network representing the fossil fuel of interest and the anti-environmental interest, and roughly half have received funding from the Leonard Leo funding operation, which is connected with extreme-right Catholics and Koch [inaudible 00:18:34]. And there's some overlap. So you're talking about an operation that has literally billions of dollars behind it.
Andrea Chalupa:
Dear Lord. Okay, so the Koch Brothers political network, their dark-money political network, they're signed on to Project 2025?
Anne Nelson:
They're funding a large number of the 100 organizations that are listed as its supporters.
Andrea Chalupa:
Is the Federalist Society officially signed on to Project 2025?
Anne Nelson:
I believe so, but I'd have to check.
Andrea Chalupa:
What about the RNC under Laura Trump?
Anne Nelson:
Yeah, I don't have the 100 groups- [inaudible 00:19:11]
Andrea Chalupa:
We'll link to it in the show notes. So everyone can just take a look at that giant phone book of a fascist directory.
Anne Nelson:
Yes. And one thing to remember is that for whatever reason, the Heritage Foundation posted this document and there's a website and a guide and recruitment form so people could sign up for accessing one of these positions. And then as I was researching the piece I did for The Washington Spectator, which goes into some detail about what's actually in it, it's kind of the Cliff notes for Project 2025. I found that it was on and off the Heritage Foundation website, so sometimes it couldn't be accessed. So there is something in Document Cloud that has been posted where people can actually read the original.
Andrea Chalupa:
How did Project 2025 come about? Who was the ringleader saying, "Let's do this."
Anne Nelson:
It actually, I learned in writing my Washington Spectator piece has been... It's the latest iteration of the document that's been evolving for 40 years. So there was this document that was prepared by kind of the same core group of organizations, including the Heritage Foundation at the beginning of the Reagan Administration called Mandate for Leadership. And it was much shorter, it was less ambitious because they were just in their early phase, but they had boasted that they achieved maybe half of their objectives. I haven't been able to go through the rating record and confirm that, but they felt it was progress and then they felt that they made more progress. They would update it every four years and then push Republican presidents for implementation.
So they claim that they got over 60% with Trump's 2016 administration. But what's different now in going through Project 2025 is that many of the chapters are written by authors who were in the Trump administration. So they were inside the bureaucracy and they know how the mechanics work. They're not throwing rocks from the outside in the [inaudible 00:21:26]. They know how to pull believers of government. They know what needs to be done to fire civil servants and replace them with ideal law. So in my view, it's a much more dangerous document now because if there were a Republican victory in November, it would be much more possible to implement.
Andrea Chalupa:
What do they ultimately want?
Anne Nelson:
Well, I am the opinion that it's about follow the money, old time journalism. So you've got these fossil fuel interests like the Koch, and you have other plutocrats like the DeVos family of Michigan where they don't want to pay taxes. They don't want any regulation of their abusive business activity. And they also don't think that ordinary people should have things like public schools and public health programs that need to be paid for with taxes.
So they're just interested in eliminating the entire network of public life in the United States. And some years ago, they joined forces with fundamentalists and Pentecostal Christians partially because they could bring in the vote, especially in Battleground states. You run on a straight libertarian platform and your platform is, "We don't want to pay any taxes, so we don't want you to have any benefit." And you don't win a lot of votes. And they found their way to the fundamentalists where they could deal with hot button issues like abortion, like marriage equality, and indoctrinate these voters, many of whom were unengaged and mobilize them through their churches. So Project 2025 also seeks to impose what you can call a theocracy on the rest of it, no abortion and probably no birth control, but lots of capital punishment and no civil or political rights for LGBTQ people, et cetera, et cetera.
Andrea Chalupa:
What about taking away a woman's right to vote? Is that on the agenda?
Anne Nelson:
I don't think that's on Project 2025 that I recall, but in general, I do not think women fare well in their vision.
Andrea Chalupa:
Is there anyone on the Supreme Court or connected to the Supreme Court like Ginni Thomas, Clarence Thomas's wife, who famously supported the violent attempted coup on January 6th? Is she connected to all this?
Anne Nelson:
Absolutely. So again, the Heritage Foundation and the Leadership Institute and other core organizations like the Family Research Council are part of an umbrella group called the Council for National Policy, which is the subject of my book, Shadow Network. Council for National Policy has an activist branch called CNP Action, and Ginni Thomas has been on the executive committee. So she's tied into it very closely. And of course, these organizations were also active in organizing the protest on January 6th.
Andrea Chalupa:
So if Trump, God forbid, becomes president and states and other groups are suing the federal government trying to slow down and stop their mass purge of our government and everything else they're implementing for Project 2025 to turn America into a gas station dictatorship like Russia, Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court clearly isn't going to recuse himself because he hasn't at all on these cases that his wife's related to around January 6th. These issues could very well come up before the Supreme Court. How do you think the Supreme Court would rule when faced with Project 2025 maleficence?
Anne Nelson:
Yeah, I think, again, 900 pages and among the fingers that would be very destructive of our lives in the United States, there's a lot of bureaucratic pros and crossing T's and dotting I's. So maybe here and there, there's a regulation that you might change. It depends on what is challenged where, and in terms of what makes it way to the Supreme Court, I would not expect Thomas... As you say, he doesn't recuse himself. He has not just his position, he has incredibly well-documented financial interests in remaining the advocate of these organizations on the Supreme Court. That's been established by ProPublica and Jay Mayer and other people. I'm not in a position to guess what will make its way through the courts the fastest. But I do think that this project 2025 or the blueprint that presents so many challenges to government as we know it, that you would have a lot of governmental functions grind to a halt because of these legal processes and this chaos it would create.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, if they're trying to mass purge, you said 40,000 non-political government roles, I read it's been around 50,000, if they were to go after those jobs, that would be chaos. We're talking services stopped, basic functions stopped. And that's ultimately what these Koch Libertarians, the Koch political network of Libertarians, what they ultimately want, they want government to be so small, they can drown it in a bathtub. The dysfunction of government is the point.
Anne Nelson:
They want to shift the protection of citizens and consumers from government oversight to, let's say, fair corporate policy. So that is in every area of life. So for example, the USDA, the US Department of Agriculture, some people don't know this, but they have a lot of activities that are involved with food inspection and food safety, which prevented uncountable numbers of salmonella cases from... United States has a relatively safe food supply. Well, they want to eliminate the scientific branches and the research branches of not just the USDA, but also the Environmental Protection Agency. All of these people who are trying to look at the hazards in our environment, some of which are created by corporate action and protect consumers and citizens, including our children from these abusers. So you eliminate the research, you eliminate the science, and therefore you don't have the protection, that the corporations can do as they please.
Andrea Chalupa:
Is Trump committed to carrying out Project 2025?
Anne Nelson:
Well, as I said, he can't win without these organizations because they really are his ground game, and there are a lot of his money as well, in terms of his war chat. But I don't think that any Republican at this point could win without the support of these organizations. Now the thing... Again, the Mandate for Leadership in its earlier forms was presented to every Republican president upon election, but various presidents did not follow through, including George Bush the first and George Bush the second. So they may have paid lip service for these organizations, but they weren't fully compliant. What was interesting for them about Donald Trump is that he was entirely transactional. So he didn't have relationships in government. He didn't have any interest in working across the aisle. If they said, "We'll get you elected in return for these services." He would say, "Fine. It's the art of the deal." And he followed through and he boasts that he not only gave them everything they wanted, he gave them more than they asked for.
Andrea Chalupa:
He overturned Roe V. Wade, he papped 30% of the courts, including the Supreme Court.
Anne Nelson:
There's a very interesting interview that came out with Tony Perkins, who was the president of the Council for National Policy during the Trump administration and has been the head of the Family Research Council for a while. And Trump had just made this statement about Arizona saying, "Well, perhaps abortion should be an issue for the state." Perkins was asked about it, and he said, "Well, Trump may have said that, but I've had many conversations with him and I'm very clear that he will ban abortion nationally."
Andrea Chalupa:
Of course he will. If Trump becomes president, is there any way to prevent Project 2025 from being implemented?
Anne Nelson:
My guess is, and I've spoken to some experts in different branches in government, and there's some of the items in it that are just so far-reaching and some of them that are just so generalized. Every child has a right to be raised by the biological male and female that can feed them, they don't know how you would implement that. Another item of interest is that it talked about having security relationship with, "The Russia region."
Andrea Chalupa:
So out of all the countries in the world, it singles out Russia?
Anne Nelson:
Well, it actually says, "Europe, Eurasia and Russia region is made up a relatively wealthy and technology-advanced societies that should be expected to bear a fair share of both security needs and global security architecture." Now, right now, as you know better than anyone, Russia as a state is conducting a criminal war policy. How you share global security architecture with Russia and the United States is something that I cannot imagine.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly. And that's what Trump was pushing as president.
Anne Nelson:
Yeah, and of course, this document also makes the case that NATO is obsolete and the United States should consider withdrawing.
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, wow. Okay. Of course, it's all in there.
Anne Nelson:
Yeah, it's a different vision. We've experienced bits and pieces that they've managed to whittle away at during Trump's administration, but this is the whole tamale. And the thing is, as we should have learned in high school Civic, the three branches of government that is supposed to achieve checks and balances. Executive, administration, legislative, which is Congress and the judiciary, and the idea is that if an extremist somehow over one or two of these branches, you have the third that will counter it and keep us in a zone of moderation. So what happened under Trump was that he managed to carry out a number of appointments, as I said, to the judiciary, including the Supreme Court. So that is not working as an agency of checks and balances. Now we have the Democrats barely controlling the Senate and the Republicans controlling the house. And if you lose both Congress and the presidency, there will be no guardrail. You'll have all three of these controlled by extremist elements, which will give them an open door for transforming this country as we know it.
Andrea Chalupa:
Do you think US democracy could survive a second Trump term?
Anne Nelson:
Well, I think it would be transformed. I've spent most of my career studying international relations, and I've lived under dictatorships, El Salvador in Guatemala and Chile. So usually they're not transformed as quickly. Even if there's a pool, sometimes there are legal mechanisms that remain. And even with the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, it took several years to really transform every element of society. Now, again, I think if Trump won, but he lost Congress somehow there would be some break that would be put on this system. But if you had the extremists going three for three with the presidency, the Congress and the judiciary, then it's game over for democracy.
Andrea Chalupa:
Absolutely. And have you picked up on any Kremlin disinformation or Kremlin state media promoting Project 2025? Is it on their radar? Do you know?
Anne Nelson:
I am sure it's on their radar. I haven't seen them referring to Project 2025. But it is really extraordinary how many of the talking points are present in the document. So let's just say they're staying in harmony.
Andrea Chalupa:
Why do you think that is? Do you think there was... Well, we know from the Mueller report, we know from the Senate Intelligence report that Trump and his campaign, and many of the people around Trump, Trump himself have very deep Kremlin links. Do you think that the Kremlin was somehow involved with this larger coalition in shaping this or influencing it in any way? Not that these libertarians really need it because they've had their own long-term plan against our democracy.
Anne Nelson:
Well, I do feel that when you had the transition from the Soviet Union, the end of the Soviet Union, you had leading figures from this movement reach out to Russia, travel to Russia, establish branch offices in Moscow. So these relationships go back a good 30 year. And I don't think that they've been heavily publicized in very recent period. They just surface periodically. So for example, in the Mueller report, there are various references to people who were involved later with the Trump campaign who are actively working with Russia in 2014 around the period of the first Ukrainian crisis. And I think that it's very pertinent because that's when Russia really needed something from the United States, which is abstaining from involvement, abstaining from countering their aggression against Ukraine. And you also have various individuals from the United States who are showing up on Russia today and on Russia's state television repeating these talking points and assuring the Russian public that the majority of Americans really support the Russian aggression.
Hen you look at interviews on Russian television it's really shameful. There are various connections. One of them is something called the World Congress family that had deep rerouted relationships with Russians going back decades. You have somebody like Paul Weyrich, who was one of the founders of the Council for National Policy, who was commuting to Moscow in the early 1990s. And from what I can tell so far, and this is ongoing research, a lot of the relationship was built on anti-LGBTQ ideology that was connecting to the patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Russian Orthodox Church was historically used by the Kremlin having KGB agents as priests to spy domestically, to spy internationally.
Anne Nelson:
Well, and they also have people based in Ukraine, who are serving Russian interest. But again, I think that given that you're talking about Russia as a plutocracy and Putin as Plutocrat number one, the vision in the United States is related to that. Let's have a plutocracy. Let's have everyone dominated by people of immense wealth, who can reshape society to their liking and the rest of us be damned. That's the idea. That again, is not the easiest idea to sell to the public. So they find again, a social whipping boy, whoever they're able to organize hate campaigns again.
So we saw in Nazi Germany, but we also saw in Soviet Russia anti-Semitic campaign that claimed that Jews were to blame for all of society's problem. And if you organize popular sentiment against the Jews, that was an organizing principle. Well, now they've substituted for the Jews, the LGBTQ people. They're the source of all the problems. And the opposite of that community is the family as though gay people can't have family, which is ridiculous, but that is how they operate. And in the United States, it's taken the form of this incredible persecution of trans people, which is just so counter to anything that would respect civil and political rights as citizens. So they are trying to spread this ideology, not just through Russia, but also other countries. There are movements in Western Europe, and particularly in Eastern Europe, certainly include Hungary, but to some extent Poland as well, where they're trying to use this in conjunction with radical right wing religion, whether Russian, Orthodox or Catholic, to mobilize the population in favor of an authoritarian government.
Andrea Chalupa:
The documentary Bad Faith, which you're featured in. The documentary Bad Faith chronicles the history, the 40-year rise of Christian nationalism that brought Trump to power in 2016 with Russia's help. And in that I interviewed Stephen Ujlaki
Anne Nelson:
Ujlaki
Andrea Chalupa:
I interviewed the filmmaker behind Bad Faith and I asked him, I'm like, "Did you see any Russia connection in your research?" And he said how the Republicans were sniffing around the Soviet Union and as well as the post-Soviet states, as you pointed out, because they were looking for a strong man. They were fascinated by the dictator of Hungary who died in power after a brutal dictatorship that he enjoyed for decades. So they were just searching for their strong man for years. Then along comes Trump, and Trump served their interest. Trump serves Russia's interests, and so here you have this unholy trinity that just became aligned Trump, American Christian nationalists and Russia, and that's what weakened our democracy starting in 2016. And that's what's been chipping away at it ever since. And is hijacking blocking aid to Ukraine in the house, as we speak, as we're recording this and on April 17, and it's just we know now by now, thanks to a lot of incredible reporting. And as I mentioned, the Mueller report and the Senate Intelligence report that Trump has a long history, with the Russians, but what needs to come out more and more is how the far right in America, the Christian Nationalist America had their own relationship with the Russians and how aligned this plan has been for so long.
Anne Nelson:
And it's not easy to research. So various people have picked up bits and pieces and meetings where Putin invites leading figures to Moscow and they photograph having dinner. But as you know, investigative journalism is a very dogged profession, and it's really important to get it right. So we've got some of the pieces of the puzzle, we need to get more. One of the areas that really deserves examination is the whole area of disinformation on social media platform.
So we have a lot of documentation of the role of the internet research agency in St. Petersburg in sending disinformation on American social media platform who are in favor of Trump in the 2016 election. That has been fully documented. We know that there's an ongoing effort to do this. It may not necessarily be on the same platforms, but you also see the indifference of Republican mean, and people need to look at what servers those are coming through on because the digital components of this is very important, and the American public is just being deluged with disinformation, out right lied. And we know some of them are generated by the Russian. Putin has a large, no a small army of people who are engaged in creating this disinformation and sending it over the internet into the United States. We have to become, first of all, a lot more aware that it's happening, and second of all, we have to set up safeguards to keep people from being [inaudible 00:43:42] by it.
Andrea Chalupa:
Absolutely. I want to ask you specifically about Paul Weyrich, a name that you brought up earlier as one of the co-founders of CNP. He is a major node in all this. He was also a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, which is the core driving force of Project 2025. He was also the co-founder of the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell and Alec, which is featured in Ava DuVernay's brilliant film 13th as mass-producing all of this anti-democratic legislation on the state level that gets spread across laboratories of autocracy like Wisconsin, Ohio and Missouri and so on. Paul Weyrich is a major architect of where we are now, and it's pretty amazing to dig old articles about his trips to the Soviet Union, his trips in 1989 and then the early nineties where he's setting up shop across Russia, sharing all of this invaluable intelligence with the Russians on how our government functions, all the intricacies of it, how power is built in the United States, all of it. Could you speak a bit about that and what sort of impact he had, especially when it comes to his dealings with the Russians?
Anne Nelson:
Yeah. He had come from a conservative Catholic background, I believe in Wisconsin. And then he found that the Catholic Church was even too little for him, so he joined an Orthodox sect. So the Orthodox Church may have been the connector there for him, and he went and forged these relationships in Moscow, and you can just trace a direct line from the Russian Orthodox Church into Putin's office. Putin has basically adopted this line that is entirely consonant, even though Putin himself, as you know, was a KGB agent. And I think you're talking about people with no real convictions of any kind other than the self-serving one, their lust for power. Is Putin religious? I don't think so, but he stands there with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch and quotes the lines just the way that Trump does with the Evangelical. And if they didn't serve their purposes, I'm sure they'd quote the opposite lines that it serves quite willingly. You have this alliance. Another area that I'm very interested in that deserves more examination is oil. Because as we know, Russia is an oil producing nation and the United States has awful fuel companies. You even look at the Koch network, there's only one Koch brother still living, but the network is still operational. Well, Koch's father had oil refineries in the Soviet Union as well as Nazi Germany because it was all about money. So those relationships go back, and as we've seen with Ukraine, there are measures that could be taken regarding Russian oil that have not been taken. That could help you Ukraine considerably, and you have economic forces behind the scenes that are preventing that from happening.
I'm from Oklahoma, I grew up among evangelicals and fundamentalists. They were not people who were about taking over the national government and bringing it down. I don't feel that that's part of the core identity of the everyday people. I feel that there's been a lot of manipulation and a lot of powerful economic interests that have seen ways to manipulate and use them as a [inaudible 00:47:29] power. So I think until we see the economic part of the picture as well as the election operational part, you have put these mechanics together to figure out how to challenge them.
Andrea Chalupa:
Without question. What do you want our listeners to know about Project 2025 that we haven't touched on already?
Anne Nelson:
So I just want to back up a bit and say that you also have the Russia connection surfacing again through Maria Butina. She shows up in the United States as a Russian agent, a Russian intelligence agent. She is a young woman who likes to pose with guns. She makes friends with the National Rifle Association. They invite her to the Council for National Policy Meetings. There's various correspondence that's come to light that shows that she's woven into these circles. So here you have people who are influencing government who are consorting with this Russian intelligence agents. I'm sorry, but if
that had been a Democrat, that would've been emblazoned across the sky. But somehow people are neglecting this relationship and the role it's played in cementing their relation.
So in terms of Project 2025, what I want people to understand is first of all, they made it an unreadable 900 pages for a reason because they guessed correctly that most people would not read it. I can tell you it was in a major effort, which is why I boiled it down to the Cliff Notes on The Washington Spectator. Okay, here's one thing you need to know, and here's some direct quotes that I pulled out, and it's like three or four pages. You can do that, and you should do that because it will show you how it can affect your life. It'll affect all the ways that they remove protection for the public, whether it's food safety, whether it's pure air, pure water, whether it's being able to hold a job as a gay person because that is your civil right. Whether it's about basic issues around contraception. About language, in the opening chapter, they talk about all the terms they want to ban from every government document, whether it's legislation or regulation. One of those terms is reproductive health. Health. We should not be able to use the words reproductive health.
Now, of course, that's about women. That's [inaudible 00:50:19] basic. The basic concepts of health, just because they bury anything in their 900 pages, doesn't mean that we shouldn't outline them in red and put them in front of people saying, "Is this what you want for your communities and your families?" Something else that they state in so many words is that they don't want the Centers for Disease Control officials to be able to advise that school children get vaccinated, not even to advise vaccination. I'm old enough that I have friends who had polio. It's a horrible thing to impose on a person. Right now there's 17 states that have outbreaks of measles and one to two children out of every thousand die of measles. These are diseases where the miracles of science have gifted us vaccination, and they want to withhold them from our children, and they would have the power to that. They would have the power to close down government research and development of life-saving approaches.
So there's so much on the line, and unfortunately the way our media works and the way our culture works is that people pick out little culture war issues and inflame them and get everybody talking about things that are barely in existence, like critical race theory. And these areas that are about whether our children survive childhood diseases or not are buried in the destruction. So that's what I'd like your listeners to know. And I think that they need to inform themselves. They need to reach out to friends and families. They need to learn about how battleground states function on the electrical college. They need to rouse themselves to defend the democracy we have because at least under the current electoral system, whatever your issues with it, you have the means to address it and possibly improve it. Under a dictatorship, no. You're locked down. There's no room for improvement because you don't get a voice. That's how that works. So if they can't read the project 2025, read my Cliff Notes or somebody else's, I don't care. They could read my book. But if they don't want to read a book, they can watch the documentary Bad Faith, which is based on my book. They can listen to you and follow your advice, but my motto is, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something.
Andrea Chalupa:
Excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much Anne Nelson, the author of the must read book, the Shadow Network, which is featured in the excellent documentary Bad Faith. You can find those two things, the book and the documentary in the show notes, as well as the Gaslit Nation 2024 Survival Guide with the list of things that you can do now to help to protect our democracy from Project 2025, which is a 900-page blueprint for turning our democracy into a dictatorship. Thank you so much, Anne Nelson.
Anne Nelson:
Thank you.
Andrea Chalupa:
This election is here and it's happening, and it's bigger than Biden. We have the chance to hack away at corruption at the root by building our power at the all important state level where crucial quality of life issues from voting rights, to environmental protections, to LGBTQ plus rights and more are decided. Karl Rove ran the same strategy for the GOP during the Obama years laying the groundwork for Trump to come to power in 2016. Now, we're reversing this dangerous trend, securing key victories in swing states to protect our elections and advance progressive laws in states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Yes, even Wisconsin. Another world is possible when we unite and build together. Here's how.
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Number four, write letters to voters in swing districts with a Vote Forward. Check out any of their easy letter writing campaigns that have already started and write letters as you listen to Gaslit Nation. We'll be keeping you company. Most importantly, number five, check your own voter registration now at electionprotectionsitevote.org. Make sure you're registered and check in with your family and friends to confirm their voter registration too. Commit to helping five people in your life make a plan to vote and bring them along to a Gaslit Nation phone bank this fall, because the only ones coming to save us is us. Grassroots power is the most reliable power we have left. Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by standing up on our Patreon at the Truth-Teller level or higher. The US has the highest rate of maternal mortality than any other developed country. That's shameful. Christian Nationalists backed by the oil and coal lobbies worsened this crisis with their authoritarian abortion bans. Donate to the Women's Reproductive Rights Assistance Project that provides support to those who need an abortion or emergency contraceptives donate at wrrap.org. That's wrrap.org. To help get Ukraine urgently needed humanitarian aid, join me in donating to Razom for Ukraine at razomforukraine.org. To help civilians and refugees in war zones like Gaza, donate to Doctors without Borders at doctorswithoutborders.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to the Orangutan Project at the orangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Andrea Chalupa. Our production manager is Nicholas Torres, and our associate producer is Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres, and our Patreon-exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners and check out our Patreon, it keeps us going. Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nik Farr, Demien Arriaga, and Karlyn Daigle. Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the new York-based firm, Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.