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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31296 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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This article is relevant: PROJECT 2025 WILL KILL YOUR DOG

Choice quotes:

Project 2025 is a plan by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, for how the next Republican administration ought to govern. You can read it at project2025.org/policy. They found a bunch of conservatives to propose reforms to different parts of the federal government. Like, they got Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Elections Commission, to write about how conservatives should reform the FEC, and Roger Severino, a former high-level official at Health & Human Services, to write about reforms to HHS. In some cases, there’s clear division in the conservative movement, so they got two writers to write cases pro- and con-, like where they got Veronique de Rugy, who hates the Export-Import Bank more than anyone alive, to write “The Case Against the Export-Import Bank” and Jennifer Hazleton to write “The Case For the Export Import-Bank.”

...

However, that leaves Democrats with a second problem: Project 2025 is mostly pretty technical. It’s a hit for conservative audiences, but you can’t put a quotation like:

Congress should: Modernize the definition of commodity (which is now largely a laundry list of agricultural commodities) and clarify the treatment of digital assets. (Project 2025, p833)

…in an attack ad. Voters don’t care. And lines like that appear to be 99% of Project 2025.

Meanwhile, even on its more controversial points, Project 2025 appears to have been written by eggheads with at least a little bit of an ear to the ground, politically speaking, because they are usually pretty careful to avoid suggesting policies that are actually unpopular. So how can the Democrats get attack ads out of a mixture of overly-technical and not-particularly-unpopular policies?

Oldest trick in the political book: they make crap up.

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