Scared outta my mind about Project 2025, especially as a cancer patient.

July 16, 2024 6:29 PM

I'm extremely scared; to the point where I have nightmares. Can you please give me reassurance that everything will be okay?

My employment could very well be affected by Project 2025, as I am a federal employee. I worked extremely hard to get this job, and I have trauma from being laid off unexpected at a private sector job a while ago. It's very hard to find employment as a Deaf person as well, which is adding to this angst.

I am also scared—if I get laid off/let go as part of Project 2025, what would happen to my health insurance, finances? My cancer treatment? My life is on the line here, seriously. All this stress isn't making things any easier at all, too—I'm concerned that all this worrying and worrying will just make me sicker and sicker because my immune system is weak/immunocompromised. What would happen to my social life? I'm here because of my job and friends, but without my job, I might have to go back home with my parents, which I would dread, and do not want.

This feels so unfair and scary. What did I do wrong? I've always been more neutral/centrist—I always tried to understand both sides and be accepting of differences in opinions. But this time around, I just can't. How can they even contemplate Project 2025? That would have a dire effect on the economy and the USA. How can they do this, in 2025? We're supposed to be living in MODERN times, not the 1800s.

I also don't understand why this is happening. In the 2000s, when I was in college, things seemed to be going very well—we were in a progressive society, it seemed like. Gay people were more accepted—my friends were completely accepting of me, for example. Things seemed to be flourishing. Now, it seems like everything is going backward—and has been for a while now. I often feel hesitant to share my sexuality because I'm afraid people will look down on me or treat me differently. There seems to be a lot more insults, especially on social media. People just overall seem like somewhat worse version of themselves, especially with public insults and whatnot. I don't know how to explain it exactly—I just feel like we have taken a big backslide since the 2000s and even early 2010s. What happened? I thought technology would make us better, more progressive, but it seems like everything is taking a step back. How did that happen? I just don't get it. I feel like it's became extremely divided—whatever happened to the middle ground, to agreeing to disagree/compromise? Can somebody please enlighten me?

I'm just worried—will Project 2025 really happen, and will I wake up with a pink slip and unceremoniously dumped from my job? I do not deserve this, especially as a cancer patient, and after all the HARD work I have put in everyday and fighting for my life, literally. I am so angry and worried and scared and upset, I can barely think straight. Nobody deserves this, seriously.

Can you please reassure me that I'll be okay? Will P2025 really happen? Is this a nightmare? What can I do on my level (without violating the Hatch Act) to help? I feel SO powerless and scared, especially with my trauma as a Deaf person hard to find jobs and laid off unexpectedly.

posted by dubious_dude to Law & Government (14 answers total)

Best answer: No one can say what will happen with Project 2025. But one thing is certain -- love will still be there. Your friends and the people who love you will still love you. The internet strangers at places like Metafilter will still be here. I'm so sorry you are scared -- I am too, for different reasons. But I keep reminding myself that love is the answer. Here's a great big hug from me.
posted by OrangeDisk at 7:07 PM on July 16 [16 favorites]

Best answer: The proposal would apply only to the relatively few employees deemed to have influence over policy making. That is unlikely to be you. Even for those potentially affected, it's not a sure thing, as the unions and the Democrats in Congress will be fighting this politically, as well as legally, and legal battles will last for years.

I know it's far easier said than done, but avoiding social media, or at least limiting your contacts to good people like OrangeDisk, is something that would be good for all of our mental health.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:16 PM on July 16 [3 favorites]

Best answer: will Project 2025 really happen

In all its glory? Very unlikely.

Every single time a new president is elected a whole slew of different organizations with their own agendas have lists of people ready to go. Trump is sucking up to all of them. There is nothing in Trump’s history to suggest that he would actually live up to any agreements he’s made with any of them.

The left has (reasonably) given up on any direct assault on Trump at this point. Anyone who is going to change their mind about him already has. So instead we describe his absolute adoption of Project 2025 to scare all those centrists and non-voters into the polling booth to vote against him.

It’s a page right out of the right wing handbook. Don’t motivate based on hope, fear gets the job done.

That doesn’t mean there won’t end up being some victories for the Heritage Foundation, but the idea that Trump will be a fanatically loyal puppet is obvious propaganda.

Anyway, as someone on the left you are dutifully terrified of Project 2025 and hopefully will spread that terror to all of your friends and family. Just keep in mind that the idea that Trump is on board with any agenda other than his own is pretty unlikely.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:19 PM on July 16 [9 favorites]

Best answer: I wish I could say, "it won't really happen" but in goodish news, I think that it will happen only partially and won't happen right away. Project 2025 is extremely unpopular, and despite Trump's posturing and the Moral Majority and so on, it is unusual to try to do extremely wide-ranging unpopular things by fiat right out of the gate. And politics takes a long time - it's easy to say that you'll do something in your first 100 days, but remember how easy it is to say that, like, self-driving cars will be everywhere by 2020, and then 2021 and then 2022 etc.

If you're not in a part of the federal government that Trump considers "woke", you have more lead time. If you're not a higher-up, you have more lead time. It is extremely unlikely that Trump is going to go through the federal bureaucracy with a fine tooth comb and get rid of lower-level people, and it's very difficult to abolish federal programs, because huge swathes of industry (making rich people more money) have built up around the federal government and its operations. For every right-wing corporate loon who'd like to drown the federal government in the bathtub, there are several corporate loons who understand full well that they have big procurement or services contracts from the feds.

It is difficult to hire and train people to run complex processes. I think the idea that Trump is getting elected and then in January 2025 the federal government just evaporates is - well, that's what those maniacs would like to envision, but consider how long it took to do Brexit. Many, many extremely important financial processes are overseen at the federal level, and many of those are overseen at the federal level because Joe PharmaBro doesn't want to make a bunch of pharma only to discover that it is illegal in California, or that if he wants to make something for California then it's illegal in Texas. Joe PharmaBro has invested a lot of time and money in adjusting to federal regulation, and if that just goes away, he faces a lot of uncertainty. You might think he'd be thinking "oh hooray I'll just sell snake oil and no one can sue" but doing that is going to shut him out of a lot of markets - if the feds won't regulate, at least some of the states will.

I think there are some relatively small federal processes which really will be shut down almost immediately, and I think that will have some significant ripple effects in industry and academia, but if you just have a regular-degular job in a relatively ordinary part of the government, you should have very substantial lead time even in a worst case situation.

There really still is a lot of ruin left in this nation, despite appearances.
posted by Frowner at 7:21 PM on July 16 [8 favorites]

Response by poster: What also disturbs me greatly is seeing otherwise decent people shrug and vote for Trump because "Democrats never get anything done" or "sleepy Joe" or the old classic, "buuuuut her emails!". It also disturbs me to see previously decent people become mean or supportive of Trump/spew anti-gay or racist messages. I don't seem to remember some of those people acting that way in the 2000s. What happened? It feels like a cult or something. I just don't get it. How and why is it changing people in such a bad way? Why do people feel so emboldened today? It's scary and creepy to see. It's almost like cruelty is now encouraged, even slowly becoming normalized.
posted by dubious_dude at 7:57 PM on July 16 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Now you know they aren’t decent people.
posted by Violet Hour at 8:35 PM on July 16 [19 favorites]

Best answer: What also disturbs me greatly is seeing otherwise decent people shrug and vote for Trump

One thing to remember here is that the national media are... very bad at their jobs. Even a person who pays a reasonable amount of attention to the news could have *no idea* what the stakes are, unless they go digging.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 9:06 PM on July 16 [6 favorites]

Best answer: Iirc you’re in the DC area, right? I spent my formative years there, my dad worked for the FDIC most of my life, and I cannot overstate how completely out of proportion the fervor of politics there completely overwhelms daily life. Like, there are plenty of bright spots in DC that have very little to do with national politics, there are some wonderful cultural niches (like the Deaf community!) but holy moly, it’s like the whole DMV is on a four year cycle of sanity. I mean, contextually it makes sense, so many people there work for the government or in politics or are directly affected by small policy changes, there’s a huge influx of new people with every political campaign and a bunch of tumult. But for the average person who just wants to enjoy their government funded health insurance and do their part in the bureaucracy, it’s intense and exhausting, even during the hopeful days of the late 90s and early oughts.

So, I think you are entirely justified to be scared but also you are probably inundated with this terrifying political drama at a level other mefites in different regions can’t quite understand. It would probably be wise to reach out to people farther afield, who can share some of their distanced equilibrium with you. It would also probably be wise to consider contingencies that would get you to a part of the country that doesn’t so negatively impact your mental and subsequently physical health. There is balance to be found.

Also, depending on your job, the hatch act is very wishy washy, and you might get some energy and connections from actively skirting it, or you might be able to participate politically and make a difference without testing the boundaries at all! Here’s the site about it, what kind of employee are you? Because unless you are a big muckity muck grand poobah, you can probably get up to a bunch of activism as long as it’s not on the government dime.
posted by Mizu at 10:38 PM on July 16 [6 favorites]

Best answer: I don't seem to remember some of those people acting that way in the 2000s.

I was eight years old in 1970, and I can tell you for a fact that the late 60s and early 70s were worse on that front; the naked bigotry that you see proudly on display only amongst "anti-woke" fuckwits today was pretty much mainstream then and very rarely questioned.

But the 70s was also when the feminist movement whose seeds got planted in the late 60s started to get seriously organized and the notion that "the personal is political" began to spread at speed. For a while there, social conditions were getting better really fast for marginalized people.

What happened?

Standard conservative backlash. Thatcher and Reagan, both huge fans of neoliberal economics, got elected in the UK and the US and both their administrations spent the 80s systematically looting public institutions and selling them off to the rich on the spurious basis that this would make them more "efficient", with neoliberal economics providing the intellectual covering fire.

Once the predicted and predictable effects of this naked assets grab had started to bite hard enough to make even the historically politically apathetic middle classes uncomfortable, Rupert Murdoch opened Fox News in 1996 to try to make a buck off both stoking public discontent and channelling it in the direction most conducive to keeping the asset stripping process going. This plan worked spectacularly well, as the ongoing debasement of US media since then attests.

By the time decades of unconscionable US foreign policy eventually blew back in the form of a major terrorist attack inside the US's own borders in 2001, Fox was perfectly positioned to amplify the resulting Islamophobia to genuinely dangerous levels. That phobia rapidly metastasised into a malignant fear of The Other in general that persists to this day and which self-styled "conservatives" continue to use to great effect.

It feels like a cult or something.

Oh, it absolutely is. The tenets of the cult are these:

• The rich is Us and the poor are Other
• We are rich because we worked hard for our success
• The Other only stay poor because they're dirty and lazy
• You too can be rich like Us if you just copy Our style convincingly enough
• Anybody who has anything bad to say about any rich person, even if they're not visibly Other, is a wrecker and a traitor.

I just don't get it.

That will be because you have an actual moral compass, as opposed to a mere terror of bucking the norms espoused by the most visibly powerful old rich white men in your community.

How and why is it changing people in such a bad way?

Stupidity is contagious because most people prefer fast and facile answers to the kind of understandings that might demand some actual fact-finding and thinking-through. Following the mob is just less work. And the more people can be forced to live in social conditions that require them to push the limits of how much work they can do just to survive, the fewer will find the time to do the additional work required to understand the actual causes of their own misery.

Why do people feel so emboldened today?

In my opinion this is largely due to self-reinforcing stupidity facilitated by the algorithmically curated outrage-bubble builders we've been gulled into referring to as "social" media. Antisocial media, more like.

It's scary and creepy to see.

Yes it is.

It's almost like cruelty is now encouraged, even slowly becoming normalized.

It's not almost like like that, it's exactly that. In the words of the Prophet Wilhoit:

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

I thought technology would make us better, more progressive

Technology amplifies personal power, but it does nothing to amplify the responsibility with which power is wielded. And the simple and ugly fact is that those who are already wealthy and powerful are those best positioned to have technology amplify their power even further. Which is why every tiny zephyr of messaging from people with actual functioning consciences is so easily lost in the hurricane of horseshit that is the modern advertising industry.

whatever happened to the middle ground, to agreeing to disagree/compromise?

The rich bought up the middle ground, walled it off, now charge unconscionable amounts for access to it, and have made serious disagreement attract the death penalty. And they will continue to get away with this until the general public comes around to calling time on it.

The best defence that any of us have against the present rising tide of glurge involves building networks of personal face-to-face relationships with people who are genuinely kind, and the only way to stay in such networks is to be kind. So I'm sorry I had nothing much to offer you here in the way of immediate soothing for what strike me as completely justified fears on your part, but I hope that digging into at least some of this historical background will leave you feeling a little more oriented, accompanied and seen, and that that might be of some help to you.
posted by flabdablet at 10:58 PM on July 16 [27 favorites]

Best answer: Bear in mind that NONE of this will come to pass if 45 doesn't become 47! On the theory that action is a healthy antidote to anxiety, talk to anyone who'll listen, not just about the evils of Project 2025 and the threat it poses to democracy, but the solid accomplishments of the Biden/Harris administration. You could start boning up here.
posted by kate4914 at 4:32 AM on July 17 [7 favorites]

Response by poster: I feel better, more reassured now. I'll talk with my supervisor when time allows and I've had time to process this, and get feelers for how much at-risk my job really is, if all this even comes to fruition. Of course, I'll also vote blue (have always been a blue voter, centrist but more left-leaning).

Flabdablet, your answer was extremely helpful and very detailed—cannot say how much I appreciate it.
posted by dubious_dude at 6:39 AM on July 17 [5 favorites]

This is not foolproof, but this year the Biden administration issued a rule baring career civil servants from being re-classified as political appointees - who are more easily dismissed.
posted by catquas at 8:31 AM on July 17 [1 favorite]

The wealthy/ powerful are smart and effective at shaping the public discourse using media and technology and money. They have a lot of control over politics and politicians, because politicians have to raise money to get elected, and because powerful people hang out and humans are social and power changes people. They own the media.

Humans are status driven, and it gets out of control. Read Isabelle Wilkerson's Caste for an introduction. Trump does power displays, is a celebrity, and right now, it's driving a following. Yes, it's similar to the early 30s and the rise of Hitler. The Right is good at propaganda.

Bad things happened when he was president before. As you can tell from reading Ask.me, lots of decent people are aware and will resist. Look for the helpers, here and online and in life. People want to be decent and the bad stuff will burn itself out. Be supportive of decent people, don't endorse or pass on cynicism or hate, though it's not easy. Here you are, asking for help, and receiving it.
posted by theora55 at 2:33 PM on July 18

To expand on one of flabdablet's themes, there is a sizable group of people were always shitty excuses for human beings but hid it well in polite company. Social norms were such that you just weren't supposed to be an asshole if you wanted to have friends, a job, and so on. TFG, with his atrocious behavior and almost complete lack of consequences for it, bears substantial responsibility for the coarsening of public behavior. If Trump can talk about grabbing women by the pussy and still be elected President, what's holding anyone back anymore? And then if your neighbor is saying the quiet part out loud, what's keeping you from doing it too? People who were already deplorable were emboldened first by Trump, then by the exponentially growing echo chamber of like-minded individuals they found themselves in and the media they consumed. It's okay now to be openly bigoted in that circle.

To people who aren't assholes and have a generally good opinion of humans, who charitably assume that other people are basically decent like them, it is almost unthinkable that so many of their fellows could turn out to br assholes, and even more shocking to learn that they were assholes all along and were just waiting for an excuse to let their jerk flag fly, but as far as I can tell, that is exactly the case.
posted by kindall at 5:12 PM on July 18 [1 favorite]