On October 3, Historians for Peace and Democracy (HPAD), in partnership with Convergence and a wide range of other organizations, will host a National Teach-in on “MAGA and Project 2025: Historical Precedents and Current Dangers.”
Although it is open to everyone, this teach-in will focus on educating students and youth around the extreme threat MAGA authoritarianism poses to the deeply flawed but hard-won democracy we have. The event will be virtual. We are urging professors to host live-streams or show it later to their classes (and offer “extra credit”); to that purpose it will be widely available via YouTube through November 5.
The teach-in will be moderated by Convergence Advisory Board member Bill Fletcher, Jr. and features three top historians: Carol Anderson, Nancy MacLean and Paul Ortiz.
HPAD members have been thinking through what it will take to mobilize young people at a time of widespread disillusionment with conventional politics, intensified by the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza. As it happens, we already had a roundtable scheduled for the January 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in New York City, with the title “The 2024 Presidential Election: Where Do We Go From Here?,” featuring the three historians listed above plus Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor of Princeton University. As the proposal for that panel states:
The November 5, 2024 election is an inflection point in US history. One candidate denies the prior election’s legitimacy, endorses the January 6, 2021 attack, and proposes to purge the entire federal civil service. He may win. And if he loses again, his supporters may seek to violently disrupt democratic functioning. Our roundtable will respond to all of these dangerous possibilities, examining relevant historical comparisons of anti-democratic mobilizations, and how to resist that trend.
We are excited to be working with distinguished historians whose work has contributed so significantly to our understanding of the present moment. Carol Anderson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (Myrna Bernath Book Award and Gustavus Myers Book Award); Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960; White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York Times Bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award); One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy (long-listed for the National Book Award in Non-Fiction and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Book Award in Non-Fiction); and The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (New York Times Editor’s Pick).
Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and a past president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). She is the author of several award-winning books, most recently, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Booklist called it “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” The Guardian said: “It’s the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century.” A New York Times bestseller, it was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Current Affairs and the Lillian Smith Book Award for outstanding writing about the U.S. South. The Nation named it the “Most Valuable Book” of the year.
Paul Ortiz is Professor of Labor History at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. A PEN Award-winning author, Paul’s book An African American and Latinx History of the United States was identified in 2020 by Bustle as one of “Ten Books About Race to Read Instead of Asking a Person of Color to Explain Things to You.” Fortune Magazine listed it as one of the “10 books on American history that actually reflect the United States.”
We urge Convergence supporters not only to tune in next Thursday (at 5 pm Eastern) but to publicize widely, especially on campuses or anywhere that young people gather, and to set up informal viewing with friends and comrades. RSVP here!
Full Transcript
Bill Fletcher Jr: Greetings. My name is Bill Fletcher. I’m with Standing for Democracy and also Convergence Magazine. Convergence Magazine is one of the sponsors of this event this afternoon and evening. I want to welcome all of you to this program on MAGA and Project 2025 and the present, the clear and present danger.
And I want to ask those of you joining us if you would put your location in the chat. You don’t have to put your name, but put where you’re located, what state, what city, if you’d like. We’re going to have a great program and I want to just begin by offering a few comments.
For about the last 20 years around presidential election time, most of us have heard in one way or another that this is the most important election in our lifetime. And each election cycle, we hear this and some people become cynical and tired of hearing it. But the problem is that it’s actually true that each of these elections has been up until that point. the most important election of our lifetime because we’re living in a period of a cold civil war and we’re in a situation where contradictions are heightening between forces and in each election the stakes are rising.
And in this election, in a few weeks, the stakes are greater than probably at any time since 1876. The situation is something that we’re going to be talking about today in the program. And we have three guests who are going to be addressing this. Now let me just outline the format. So each of the guests will begin by addressing a particular question for somewhere between eight and ten minutes.
And then I’m going to proceed to offer a little follow up. If you have questions that you want posed, please put them in the chat. Not guaranteeing you that we’ll be able to get to them, but we’ll make every effort to try to do that. So with no further ado, we have joining us Nancy MacLean, who is the William H. Chafee Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. Also joining us is Nancy McLean. Carol Anderson, the Robert F. Woodruff Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.
And finally, Paul Ortiz is a professor of labor history at Cornell University and the author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States. And I want to welcome each of you to the program. So I want to start with a question to you, Nancy. You’ve written a great deal about the history of the US Right. How do you see the MAGA movement in light of that history, and how do you explain the Right’s urgency around Project 2025 and constitutional change?
Nancy MacLean: Thanks, Bill, and thanks to Van Gosse and Margaret Power and the team at Historians for Peace and Democracy and the other sponsors of this important conversation.
As some of I’ve spent much of my career researching and writing on different components of the American Right. So it is surreal to witness them coming together as they are in this moment to pose a truly existential threat to human rights and democracy. My first book was on the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, which we can see in hindsight was America’s first Christian nationalist movement.
My second included the so-called mainstream Right’s fight against the mid 20th century civil rights movement and the women’s movement. And my most recent book told the story of how the corporate libertarian donor network led by Charles Koch weaponized a set of academic ideas to shackle democracy, not least so as to protect multinational fossil fuel corporations, like Koch Industries, from government action to stop the horrific climate collapse that’s now unfolding in states like my own North Carolina this week.
And this year I’m touring battleground states with the documentary, Bad Faith, Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy, which connects all of these elements. So how do I see these various streams of the Right merging like those in Western North Carolina this past weekend to form a new and massively destructive river?
Arch-Right billionaire donors like Charles Koch, Peter Thiel, Leonard Leo, and their allies are capitalizing on white racial revanchism of the kind Carol will be describing, and they are sacralizing it with militant Christian nationalism, which they have helped to cultivate through organizations like the Council for National Policy and the Orwellianly named Alliance Defending Freedom.
Why do they do this? Because this compound has made it possible to capture the Republican Party, first through the Tea Party and now through its Frankenstein successor, MAGA, and turn that party against the factual universe and the Constitution. The next step is to attempt to subvert the will of the people through litigation that is already underway to challenge the certification of an election that is now only 32 days away, and yet there are over a hundred lawsuits already filed.
We know that this combined radical Right is laying siege to our institutions because we have watched that happen with escalating force and because Christopher Ruffo bragged of it to his backers using those very words, “laying siege to our institutions.” For those who don’t know Christopher Ruffo, he is the one who set off the panic against Critical Race Theory, really against any kind of anti racism or honest teaching about Black history. He’s also the person who drove Claudine Gay from her position as president of Harvard. And lately he’s been pushing the Springfield lies about Haitian immigrants. So we have watched the siege unfold on our institutions in attacks on climate science, on public health during the pandemic on K-12 public schooling in Republican-dominated states and now in higher education administration nationwide and most perilously election administration in 2020 and continuing on today.
Ruffo says it out loud. And again, I’m quoting, “conservatives have for too long been resistant to attacking the credibility of our institutions.” So that is, they are systematically disrupting institutions that were previously beyond their control and that might obstruct their ultimate victory.
Why discredit and undermine institutions? Because these institutions uphold democracy. So the strategy the Right’s generals have followed has focused on changing the rules on many fronts since 2010, especially in states run by this radicalized, captured Republican Party. And now, with the donors impatient for transformation before they completely lose the electorate, and I’ll say more about that, the operatives are going full bore reactionary populist, behaving ever more fascistically since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and incited a criminal attack on our country on January 6th, a criminal attack that is ongoing and now escalating.
We know from comparative political scientists that the best predictor of a successful coup is a failed coup without legal accountability for the coup leaders. So if MAGA forces manage to win the Presidency in November, they plan to go for the gold. Lasting change that cannot be reversed because it will be locked in. Project 2025 is the centerpiece of their plan. Its creation was led by the Heritage Foundation and backed by over a hundred other groups funded by such donors. And for those who are less familiar with Heritage from its founding in 1973, Heritage has labored to combine the religious right, which is now full on Christian nationalist, with the neoliberal corporate right of the Mont Pelerin Society.
Project 2025 fuses their goals in a 900 page plus how-to manual for the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. Its recommendations would transform the federal government permanently, so as to enshrine the domination of this fossil fuel plutocrat and theocrat alliance over us. Project 2025 is a very long and detailed document with dozens of chapters and hundreds of specific recommendations.
But here are some of the headline items. A plan to purge as many as 50,000 committed career federal civil servants and replace them with vetted political loyalists so that there will be no obstruction coming from those committed to the missions of their agencies and departments as there was in that first chaotic Trump presidency. Project 2025 would also dismantle nearly all environmental regulations and stop any action on the climate. It would revoke long established civil rights for people of color, women, and LGBTQ Americans. It would make educational censorship the law of the land: all of America would be subject to the kind of “don’t say race” and “don’t say gay” and anti-DEI laws enacted in Florida and other Republican run states.
Also, it would abolish the Department of Education and send federal tax dollars to fund Christian nationalist private schools. And the centerpiece of all of this is that it would grant a President Trump hitherto unheard-of powers, including control over the Department of Justice and the FBI.
That would enable rapid, unhindered action of the kind that the dictator Viktor Orban, their model, now practices in Hungary. The architects of Project 2025 are not hiding this purpose. In March of this year, Heritage’s CEO, Kevin Roberts, hosted Viktor Orban for a long in person meeting with US allies. And then Roberts said, after this meeting, he called this dictator, and I quote, “not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.” So why is Orban their model? Because Orban has used the electoral process to undermine democracy, to ensure perpetual power for him and his backers.
Those backers are malevolent corporations and Christian nationalist voters, the same alliance we see here. How has he done this? He has purged the civil service in his country and refilled it with obedient loyalists and altered the law and constitution. And this is precisely what Heritage and its allies want to see happen in the United States.
Why do they view all of this as necessary now? This is really important. Because they are desperate. Although they have vast money behind them, they know they are losing the country, they are losing the majority of voters because their agenda is so unpopular and that has been proven to them again and again since 1980.
So this is their Hail Mary pass. In effect, a coup without tanks. A coup that would work through rules change and litigation to a Supreme Court they have captured. So in short, this is real, people. We are seeing once-separated forces on the Right merging for mutual benefit. The power grab they envision is breathtaking in scope and its cruelties would be catastrophic.
But, here’s the good news. The perverse silver lining of all of this is that we can jiu jitsu this. We can use the Right’s awful audacity against them, flipping the script to awaken and activate volunteers and the millions of voters who aren’t yet paying close attention. We know that the road to victory this November, and after, lies in helping voters to understand that this is not just another two party contest. This election is existential. It is a contest between democracy and authoritarianism. If we defeat the authoritarians who will ruin all our lives if they win, then we can reform democracy to end such authoritarian rule rigging. We know now, from top notch polling and focus groups, that when voters learn about Project 2025 – to say nothing about how the next president may be nominating as many as three new Supreme Court justices – when voters learn that, it changes their understanding of this election’s stakes, and it gives them new urgency.
So in short, Project 2025 can be a wake-up call for the endangered majority of voters. to mobilize over the next four weeks. The time is tight, but we do have another month to stop MAGA and end this desperate, crazy abuse of power that seeks to take away all of our freedoms and our rights to decide our fates. And that I think is an ideal segue back to Bill and to Carol Anderson and Paul Ortiz, who will share with you their takes on these things. And Paul in particular will talk more about what we can do and what we need to do.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Thank you, Nancy. And so let’s go to Carol and Paul. Maybe you can bring this together. So Carol, what does Project 2025 expose about the racism and anti-Blackness that undergirds the MAGA movement?
Carol Anderson: Thank you so much. And I want to thank Van Gosse and Historians for Peace for pulling this together.
If we understand MAGA, we understand the role of race and racism in fueling this movement. One of the things that if you understand that when Trump came to power, he came to power on what I call a kilo of pure uncut white supremacy. He threw it on the table with birtherism, which denied the legitimacy of Barack Obama. Then he threw another kilo on the table with “Mexicans are rapists and criminals.” Then he threw another kilo on the table with “Muslims are terrorists.” Then he threw another kilo on the table with “Kung flu.” So you’re seeing the way that racism works in terms of fueling his movement. It is the anger, it is the grievances that they pull upon in order for their strength. And in order to strengthen their movement. What they’re going after are the changing demographics in America. So Nancy was laying out how once folks understand what Project 2025 is, they’re repulsed by it. A recent poll showed that once people understood what it was, only 4% approved. Only 4% approved. That is how hated this policy is.
So let me talk about the racism that undergirds this policy. It’s going after the kinds of changes, the kinds of improvements we have made in this society and it’s going after them in ways that are subtle and not so subtle. One of the not so subtle ways is to remove one of the key tools that the government has used in order to get at the systemic racism in this society, which has been the language of disparate impact and what disparate impact does is it says, We don’t have to prove intent racist intent, we just have to look at the data. And so if we see a policy that looks race neutral on its surface, but what we see is this massive disparity, racial disparity in the outcomes of that policy, we know that something wicked has happened underneath there. Something fundamentally wrong has happened underneath there. Something fundamentally unequal has happened underneath there. Something totally undemocratic has happened underneath that policy. And that is a policy that must be examined and that must be dismantled. Or that must be reformed.
And so by going after the language of disparate impact, it is working to remove the ability of the federal government to assess those kinds of inequalities, those kinds of inequities. And one of the ways that it’s doing it, for instance, is through the Census Bureau. And so it wants to align the Census Bureau with conservative principles. And so you’re taking a Bureau that is overwhelmingly statistically based. So the Census is just looking at the statistics: who has what, where; who has what, where; who has what where? And just doing that kind of counting and running those numbers. When it’s aligning with conservative principles, that is what they did when they were trying to rig the Census back for gerrymandering in Texas. And Thomas Hofeller, who was the king of the gerrymandered maps, the extreme partisan gerrymandered maps, that we have, what he laid out is that if we add a US citizenship question to the Census, then we can rig power to the benefit of non Hispanic whites and the Republicans for a generation or for a decade.
So this is what you’re seeing in terms of trying to rig the Census for conservative principles. And also what it is designed to do is it is designed to get rid of the ability of these organizations, of these agencies to be able to do the assessment because when you get rid of disparate impact, and when you basically whitewash the issue of race in the United States, you make it very difficult for agencies to figure out what’s going on, to have the data that scholars and policymakers need in order to assess inequity. So the kinds of inequities that the U. S. Sentencing Commission did to show that African Americans receive longer and tougher sentences than white men for the same crime, or that the office of the Department of Education Civil Rights Office that black students are punished at a higher level. Or for the EEOC handling discrimination in the workplace, and the claims against discrimination and harassment, that would not be able to be assessed. And we also know that the kind of environmental harms that the EPA’s office has worked out in terms of that African Americans are more likely to be in these areas where you have toxic pollution coming in, like Cancer Alley in Louisiana. So when you don’t have racial data, then what that does is it makes it really easy for policymakers to say, we’re all equal here. All you have to do is pick yourself up by your bootstraps. There’s no problem here. It’s really easy to whitewash the problems when you don’t have the data in order to make the policy work.
The other thing that they’re trying to do in Project 2025, there are all of these guidelines that they’re going after. One is to shrink the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and to privatize the National Weather Service. Now, we have just dealt with Hurricane Helene. If NOAA was not there and the National Weather Service wasn’t there to alert folks that this massive hurricane is coming, that would have been disastrous.
And what we know from climate change, because they have a massive antipathy to climate change, is that African Americans and folks of color are most at risk because of the dangers of climate change. And so if we don’t have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, if we don’t have the National Weather Service, and if we don’t have the kind of racialized data that can tell us these things, then it means that we aren’t able to act upon it.
We also see that one of the other things that is racialized here are these mass deportations where they want to bring in the National Guard to go into what they call these “Democrat-run cities” and remove 11 to 20 million immigrants. Now, how are they going to identify who these immigrants are?
And yesterday, Trump made clear that he’s not just talking about undocumented immigrants. He also means those who are here legally and deport them to put them in these huge concentration camps. And how are they going to tell? I believe it’s going to be like Joe Arpaio’s “driving while brown.” So it’s going to be really racialized on how they’re going to determine who is an immigrant.
How can they tell? They’re going to go into what they call “Democrat-run cities” and identify folks who are Black and brown, and then pull them out of their jobs, pull them out of their homes, pull them out of their schools, demand to see their papers. And if you don’t have your papers on you then you’re going to be ripped away from your home, put in an internment camp somewhere as they figure out how to process you, and get you to what they think is your “home country,” even though that country may not even know who you are or may not want you, or you are a naturalized citizen here in the United States, so you are an American citizen. This is about that great replacement theory, the fear of America losing its whiteness, becoming more brown, more Black, more minority.
They also want to dismantle, as Nancy said, the Department of Education. What that will do is it will end the Head Start program. It will also end funding for special ed and it will end the kind of Title I funding that goes to poor schools, which are overwhelmingly Black, because we use property taxes in order to fund schools. And so you’re going to see a massive disparity, further disparity in terms of education. And it’s going to go after what they call “area studies,” things like African American studies, women’s studies, and those are going to be defunded.
So much of this program is designed to basically undercut the advances that African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans have made in this country, to basically erase those, eradicate those, so that you don’t have the power of the federal government underneath, providing the documentation, providing the data, helping to fund the policy, helping to fund the organizations that are trying to make change, trying to make improvement. And it is a way to get again to deal with the demographic shift in the United States and to deal with the kind of policy shift that is happening in the United States, where the ways of 1850, of 1950 are not the ways that we think about the United States today. And so Project 2025 is fundamentally dangerous to African Americans, to Native Americans, to Asian Americans, and to Latinos.
We have to be able to understand the danger of Project 2025 and know that we have the power to stop it. The power we have to stop it is to see to it that Trump does not get in power because if he gets in power, this becomes the blueprint for the federal government. Thank you.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Thank you very much. And finally, we have Paul Ortiz. Paul, you’re on.
Paul Ortiz: All right. Thank you so much, Bill. And thank you to Van Gosse, to Margaret Power, to H-PAD, to everyone who really brought us together this evening. And the question that I want us to really grapple with, is the question: given the ongoing assaults on freedom of speech and organizing on campuses and in workplaces, what are the ways that we can build solidarity and support for each other in the face of Project 2025 and other threats?
And I want to emphasize at the beginning, Bill, that Project 2025 is not a possible dystopian future. It is not a wait until November scenario. Because any educator, librarian, worker, whether they are US citizens or immigrants, especially in the former states of the Confederacy, like Florida, but increasingly throughout the entire nation, we have all been living with Project 2025, or elements of it, for years and even decades. In Florida, where I taught for 16 years and where I was president of the United Faculty of Florida Faculty Union at University of Florida, we experienced Governor Ron Desantis, Governor Rick Scott. In many ways, Florida was a laboratory, a testing ground for the elements of repression that Carol and Nancy have so wonderfully laid out for us and been teaching us about.
In Florida and in this country as a whole, immigrant workers, some of them who have had temporary protected status for nearly three decades as war refugees from wars that this nation promoted in Central America, in which I, as a soldier in US Special Forces participated, many of these workers have been here for more than three decades. They are still not citizens. More workers who are currently undocumented in the deep South, in New York, out West, form the foundation of this nation’s economy. What’s happening right now, what’s happening even as we speak is that workers and students and anyone who speaks against the rigid status quo, anyone who’s speaking against endless war, anyone who’s challenging employer power is in dire straits. Right now on campuses like Cornell, where I teach, the University of Florida, Northwestern, faculty, students, and staff are being suspended. They’re being expelled. They’re being fired for speaking out against genocide in Gaza. They’re being fired for speaking up in favor of each other, in support of each other’s rights.
So the moment we’re in now is not a don’t wait until November to join the freedom movement moment. It’s like, join now. I know I’m speaking to the choir to a certain extent. I’ll talk about recruitment in a moment.
Project 2025 is the destruction of democracy, but the destruction of democracy, as I’ve already mentioned, and as you’ve heard Carol and Nancy speak about this, the destruction of democracy is already happening. It is happening in universities, it’s happening in workplaces, it’s happening in town halls, it’s the crackdown, it’s happening in the ramping up of police power, the police sweeps of people who dissent against the status quo. And if you are at a university, I’ll take one example. That’s where I work. I’ve taught at university for about 25 years. If you’re at a university and you’re expelling pro union, pro Palestinian student activists, if you’re engaging in constant surveillance of faculty, staff, and students, if you’re inviting police sweeps of your campus, or remaining silent while these things happen, how are you different from MAGA?
And we must remember that fascism triumphs when too many people disengage from the struggle. And again, I am speaking to the choir, I realize, but right now I have to say this: there are too few activists and too few organizers, vis a vis the disengaged, vis a vis the power structure. We must make recruitment the central element of a revived progressive or radical politics. We must make our organizations fun and joyous, with space for people to exercise their creativity. I consult and I work with organizers all over the country and on too many occasions I see new organizations which are very promising, but asking people to come to meetings at 6pm where they’re essentially replicating the hierarchies that people face during the day at their jobs. Why would they attend a meeting after 8, 10, 12 hours of hard work where you go into an environment which is hierarchical and not fun? We must remember what the great SNCC organizers like Hollis Watkins taught us in the 1960s, and which the band Sweet Honey In the Rock continued to teach us: when we learn to sing together, we learn to organize together.
As a historian, Project 2025 to me is not a left or right thing. It hearkens back to the original class, racial, and gender conflicts in this nation’s founding. Remember, the so-called Founding Fathers and their adversaries in the anti-slavery movement and the workers’ movement in the antebellum period referred to the main political struggles as occurring between the many and the few. This is what is happening now in this country. For example, all of us here know people on the so-called left who are what we call PEPs, progressive except for Palestine. As a labor organizer, I’ve known PUs my entire labor organizing career, progressive except for unions. That’s why I say this is not necessarily a left-right struggle; it opens up the possibility to build new alliances. If you go back to the debates on the federal constitution, there’s a reason why Project 2025 – to echo points that Nancy and Carol both made – there’s a reason why Project 2025 circumvents Congress and relies so heavily on the federal executive and the Supreme Court.
As Gustavus Myers taught us, over a century ago, the Supreme Court is an institution primarily designed to support the ruling class of this country. Alexander Hamilton wanted a lifetime president, almost like the British monarch. He didn’t get it, but he got a Supreme Court with lifetime elected justices.
And so these conflicts are not brand new. It isn’t just that Donald Trump is sabotaging our democracy. We’ve never really had a democracy. We could have a democracy. We could have a society based on liberation, of worker empowerment, of anti-racism, of Black Lives Matter. We haven’t got there yet, but we can struggle to get there.
As historians, we must ask, why now? Why at this juncture is Project 2025 happening? And again, Carol and Nancy have done a wonderful job in essentially teaching us why now, and just to echo what they said, in a positive sense, we live in a very hopeful time. Union organizing is exploding across almost every industry. Younger people, more than ever, are questioning the economic and racial oppressive structures of the society through new understandings of history and politics. Now, even as we speak, more inclusive coalitions between people of color, environmentalists, workers – many of whom are in the same category, by the way, they’re not exclusive – and students are being formed.
Local coalitions of these groups are passing living wage and wage theft ordinances. They’re demanding ramped up environmental protection laws. They’re passing anti-war resolutions, even today I read about one. They’re demanding accountability of police and politicians. Project 2025 seeks to turn back the progress that new social movements like Black Lives Matter have brought. And that’s one of the things we need to pat ourselves on the back and say, Hey, we’ve had some victories here and Project 2025 is seeking to dismantle those.
What are some of the more perilous aspects of Project 2025? And then I’m gonna wrap up again to the “where we go from here” thing. You can drill down in so many different places. Eliminating card check recognition for union organizing would have a devastating impact in union organizing. The fascists know that unions and organizations of working class people are the first line of defense against fascism. And so that’s what Project 2025 is seeking to do.
Project 2025 seeks to ramp up the new Cold War against China and continue the bipartisan era of endless war. The people that promote this new cold war know that war keeps us divided. It keeps us fearful. It keeps us passive and cowering in the face of police and state power, destroying the ability to test objectively, this is what Carol mentioned, where we stand in building a more equitable society. Essentially Project 2025 directs to dismantle the EEOC, so we’ll never be able to have what Carol calls racial data to measure how far we’ve come and how far we need to go. Finally dehumanizing immigrants and refugees and continuing racial capitalism’s long practice of creating a permanent, radically underpaid workforce defined by their race. Yes, race is a social construction and their national origin background, whether it’s Haitian, Mexican, Venezuelan.
So, where do we go from here? To try to bring it home at this point, although everyone else has wonderful ideas. First of all, read Carol’s book. Read White Rage. Read Nancy’s book, Democracy in Chains. Read Bill Fletcher’s Solidarity Divided. Study books in groups. To paraphrase Frantz Fanon, Oh my body make of me a person who always asks questions.
Second, refuse endless war, refuse the bipartisan cold war against China, refuse the bipartisan push to villainize nations like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba. There’s a reason our government uses endless war and there’s a reason endless war is baked into the very body of Project 2025. Choose solidarity, remember the great slogans of the antislavery movement, the labor movement, and other great movements: an injury to one is an injury to all. This is not just flowery rhetoric. It should become a way of life. An injury to one is an injury to all. What that means is if you know of a fellow worker, a neighbor, a student, a librarian, an activist who’s being targeted because of who they are or for their activist work, step up to defend them. Reach out to them, let them know you support them, write a letter to the editor, attend a rally, bake something for a friend, bring food to them. We need to have each other’s backs. Organize, organize, organize.
The fascists know that a divided populace is a fearful populace. We can’t fight this all alone, folks. It’s too big. What Nancy and Carol laid out to us is terrifying. Project 2025 is, I admit, it’s terrifying. I could never face Project 2025 as an individual. It’s got to be faced collectively by getting together. Get together in unions, cooperatives, town halls, senior drop in centers, microbreweries, any place you can.
Finally, do not despair. Yes, the November elections are pivotal, locally, regionally, nationally, but whatever happens in November, we cannot afford a letdown of organizing.
Let me repeat this. No matter what happens in November, we cannot afford a letdown of organizing. And I hope to open the papers the day after, or a week after, and be joyous and everything like that. But it may not happen, folks. And we have to be prepared for that. So between now and then, get out there, knock on doors, be active, organize.
But again, regardless of what happens, we have each other. We have the people power. Never forget that. The other side has the money, yes. They have the Supreme Court, they have Wall Street, but we have the people. We are the people.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Thank you very much for that, Paul. So what we’re going to do now, I’m going to ask a few questions. And I want to ask one question for each of you to respond to. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I read an article today that was talking about union members who have deserted the Democratic Party. Because they see it as a party of elites and have gone to the Republicans. And I find this very difficult to understand. And I’d like the three of you to get beneath that, because when I’m thinking about, among other things, just things that have taken place under Biden in terms of pro-labor, job creation, things like that, and compare that with what happened under Trump, just taking these two administrations, including and perhaps most especially Trump’s tax cuts to the rich that screwed the rest of us – how does that relate? How is it that the Democrats are the party of the elite when it’s the Republicans who are the elitists?
So whoever wants to, let me just start with you, Carol.
Carol Anderson: I really thought that was a Nancy question!
Bill Fletcher Jr: It’s for all of you.
Carol Anderson: Okay. So what to me, what I see, I think about old labor and the way that labor used to be fractured along racial lines. And then how the CIO came in and realized how big companies were using race as a way to keep labor divided. So they would hire Black men when there was a strike and as a way to tick off white men and to weaken organized labor. And I think about that, so part of what we’re seeing – and I’m hypothesizing here – is that you have this language that is being put out in the universe by the right wing about about culture being taken away, about America losing itself, about our value system being overrun by all of these people who are being brought into this country.
All of these brown people, all of these Black people. So as Trump was talking about, they’re coming in from Congo, they’re coming in from Venezuela, and they’re opening up their prisons, they’re opening up their asylums and they’re letting them in and then they’re going to take over and they’re, and the Democrats are giving them the right to vote so they can take over our country.
And so it is playing on that fear, and you run to the place that says, “Hey, I’ve got your back.” And so I think that’s part of what we’re seeing. When you think about it in the 2016 election, the only racial group that voted in the majority for Trump were white people.
In the 2020 election, the only racial or ethnic group that voted in the majority, this is after COVID, after seeing the huge tax increase for working class folks and the benefits for the uber-rich, the majority were white, who voted for Trump. And I think that’s part of what we’re seeing in this language, it helps provide cover. You don’t wanna say, “Hey, I don’t like that this party is so diverse. I don’t like the fact that their policies are really helping everybody.” And so it’s a way of saying, “Hey, I’m going to go to the one that is not elitist.” Even though it is. It is a very elitist party. So that’s what I’m seeing.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Thank you. Nancy?
Nancy MacLean: Yeah, I would say that the democratic embrace of neoliberal policies, particularly in the Bill Clinton administration, did have devastating effect. When you look across the South, there were so many jobs that were lost as a result of NAFTA and places that were historically Democratic voting, blue collar communities turned against that when their communities were devastated by these policies and then No Child Left Behind of the Bush administration, et cetera. There’s been a lot of hard hits that many communities, particularly, formerly manufacturing communities have taken. On the other hand, I think there’s also a lot of politics to this. I know from Mike Podhorzer at the research collaborative, who really runs a lot of data analysis, that actually blue collar workers in blue states tend to vote like other people in blue states, right? You don’t see the kind of gulfs that you see in some of these states in the former Confederacy and elsewhere.
So I think, what we’re seeing also is the impact of Fox, right? Of the destruction of mainstream media and the feeling of that vacuum by a very self interested news media on the political right, like Fox, like Rush Limbaugh and all the talk radio on the Right that followed, like Sinclair Broadcasting, which is Christian nationalist.
And so there’s whole communities where people live that are not well served by national media. And all they get is this steady barrage of what Carol’s talking about: this kind of identity, white identity, politics provocation. This notion that you’re under threat, you’re being attacked, they don’t respect you, they’re taking your jobs, and it’s all bogus. But it is very effective when people are feeling embattled and they don’t have alternative sources of connection or communication. So it’s part of a larger puzzle, but it is interesting that the Biden administration has done so much to change that and to promote more fairness, to promote more action on the climate to do all these other things, and it just doesn’t get the credit, I think, because some positions have been frozen in. But I think for us too, I think, especially with one month to go, there are so many reachable people who haven’t been engaged about this election, right? Or how huge the stakes are. Like, there is so much work to do, even from people on this call, get off the Zoom, get off and think of five or 10 people, who aren’t paying attention or who feel discouraged or who feel hopeless that you can connect with and reach and engage in conversation and make sure they’re registered and they know what the top line issues are. I worry less about converting people who have already gone over to MAGA, which is a huge task, than as Paul was suggesting, getting people off the couch and into engagement with others in a way that can make them feel their own power and also could have a really important impact over this next month.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Paul, same question here
Paul Ortiz: Can never forget, we live in a capitalist economy and capitalism is premised upon inequality. It is from the beginning. There may be other capitalisms possible. I speak to a broad group of people and groups, I give talks to unions, to student organizations to Fortune 100 corporations. and this question comes up all the time: Professor Ortiz, can we build an equitable society under capitalism? And that’s still an open question that hasn’t really been resolved yet. Because under racial capitalism, we know that there are many victims or many people who will be paid less money than anyone that we know to do very hard work. We know that there are going to be disenfranchised workers who are going to be kept in an almost permanent state of disenfranchisement. We know that there are going to be regions of the country that thrive, while other regions are literally driven underground by public policies.
Nancy alluded to deindustrialization in this country, and deindustrialization did not happen because of quote unquote market forces. It was public policy. Decisions were made to put resources, tax incentives, and political benefits to the financial sector and to take them away from the industrial sector. And at the same time, that sector decided to outsource – and again, the federal government was there to help them outsource – we mentioned earlier, NAFTA. These are the things that I think are really are pissing people off.
And yes, on the one hand, thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, thanks to all these popular movements we’ve been alluding to, the Biden administration responded very differently to the COVID crisis than, say, the Obama administration responded to the banking crisis over a decade ago. Because of the strength of the popular movement, there were many more broadly shared economic policies that benefited working class communities during the Biden administration. But it wasn’t because Joe Biden is a better person than Barack Obama. He is not. It was because he felt a kind of pressure that we put on him to make those policies more progressive. And of course, don’t forget the terrible global pandemic. But I think in wrapping up my response to the question, I would say that unions have got to do a better educational job. And I look at myself in the mirror about this, why is engagement critical? Yes, we suffer from a lack of choices.
And my students in my labor history course right now, many people on this call will sympathize with this, we’re talking about the 19th century, when in some cases there was a much richer menu of political sources or political choices for people to make. There were Black independent political parties, there were interracial political parties, there were socialist parties, there were working people’s parties, et cetera, et cetera.
At a certain point we’ve got to get beyond just the Democrat and Republican choice because for a lot of people, that’s not a choice at all. I think for now, I know what choice I’m making in November, but I do have to recognize that there is a reason why people are upset with the federal government. There’s a reason why people understand that the Supreme Court has always been against us. Let’s stop referring to one decision, Brown v. Board was a wonderful historic decision, but in general, the Supreme Court has been against us from day one.
And so how are we going to fix that? How are we going to challenge it? And until we deal with some of those fundamental problems, Bill, I think that we’re going to continue to have a lot of people who are just turned off and tuned out.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Nancy, let’s play this out. Let’s play out a dystopian timeline and Trump wins and begins the implementation of Project 2025. What would be your recommendations, in terms of response, by grassroots people who are in opposition to that, what should they do?
Nancy MacLean: Really important question. I think that there are many great organizations already out there, some of which supported this effort, including the AAUP for university professors, that is doing much more organizing these days. And in almost all of our communities, there are pro democracy groups, there are civil rights groups, there are immigrant defenders, there are women’s groups. So we have people out there who care about these things, and they have staffs and resources. I think our problem is on the progressive side, we have been siloed for a very long time where people working in particular lanes are not so connected with people working in lanes that share the same values, that have the same needs, that all need a democratic, better, responsive democracy.
And I think that ironically, Trump’s victory in 2016 went a long way to helping create such bridges. They exist now often most robustly in localities and at the state level, maybe more so than at the national level. But I think as we go into this election and then go into the complicated period between November 5th and certification on January 6th, we’ve got to all be connecting with the groups who are doing good work in our communities, seeing what they need in the way of resources, seeing if they’re informing people of the challenges that are coming up and doing everything that we can to be bridge builders between these organizations and efforts so that when there are emergencies, we can respond.
I think of things like, when Trump did the Muslim ban and so many people showed up at the airports. Or when they were separating parents and children and putting kids in cages at the border, there was a spontaneous response to that, but there were also groups who work in that area who can alert people. So I think the main thing to do, and by the way, this is really good for your mental health as well, is don’t endure this crazy time of what Bill rightly described as a kind of cold civil war on your own. Instead, find good organizations in your community where you can connect to people face to face and engage in the kind of community building efforts that Paul was talking about. But also those groups would be ready. We have to hope for the best, as a friend recently said, but also prepare for the possible worst. And I think the best way to do that is in community and conversation and solidarity.
Bill Fletcher Jr: We have a couple of questions that have been posed to us, and I’m going to ask this, whoever wishes to respond. But in the interest of time, because we have about 15 minutes, if you could give very concise responses, there’s a question that I’ve heard from people that want to vote third party and they’ve said when we, when I or other people have raised the danger of Project 2025, they say, “Oh, Bill. You’re just fear mongering. The Heritage Foundation has been doing this for years, putting out these different recommendations, and this is no different.” How is Project 2025 different or similar to prior efforts on the part of the Heritage Foundation? I’m going to start with you, Carol, because yeah, I’m just gonna start with you first.
Carol Anderson: So part of what is what Paul talked about, we’ve had these laboratories where we’ve had pieces of the project of Project 2025 already in operation, basically a beta test in Florida, a beta test in Tennessee, what they’re in turn taking over universities in terms of denying denying pieces of curriculum so that you can’t teach African American studies, you can’t teach women’s studies. We’ve had elements of that. The problem with Project 2025 is that it puts it on a national scale with the power, the incredible power, of the federal government behind it. And when you begin to think about that power is a game changer. It is a shapeshifter, because it deals with all of the agencies that touch our lives in ways that allow us to grow or that are designed to destroy us. So when Project 2025 talks about sending in the US military to the border or sending the US military into our cities, to go after us, that is fundamentally different. So think about when the Black Lives Matter protest in DC in 2020, Trump wanted to use the US military to shoot the nonviolent protester. He had a Secretary of Defense who told him no. The difference would be that he would have a Secretary of Defense around him now, who’s like, “yeah, we can do that, because we have complete immunity according to the US Supreme Court. We can do that. So we can use the power of the US military against American citizens. No problem.”
And so that’s part of what we have to understand is that what it does is it ratchets it up to an inordinate level and it makes it nationwide so that our ability to hop from state to state, to think that we can find a sanctuary state in the United States, that won’t happen under project 2025.
Nancy MacLean: I would just add to this that the foundation has been putting out these what they call Mandate For Leadership doorstoppers since 1980 with Reagan’s first election, and that in the Reagan administration, he implemented more than 50 percent of their recommendations, then under Trump, it was over 60%. And then this version is so radical and so encompassing in its destructive repurposing of the federal government, as Carol was just describing, that they anticipate having much more impact. So will it be 100%? Probably not. But do they want to be 75 or 80%? Absolutely. And that 75 or 80% could be crucial.
I want to just note here too. I’ve been following the chat and it’s nice to see some of our Republican MAGA friends with us having a chance to hear a different point of view, but it’s very amusing that they keep saying that Project 2025 is a lie, it’s not connected to Trump, it’s not his project. And I would just, as a professor, urge them maybe to go and do their homework, because in fact, the same people who were designing his platform, the Agenda 47 are some of the same people who are involved in Project 2025. And the head of Project 2025 was caught in a sting operation on tape. Just saying that Trump is, of course, denying this now because it’s impolitic to be supporting it, but he totally supports it. He’s worked with them. He knows what it is. He’s taken private flights with the head of the Heritage Foundation. So he’s in this up to his eyeballs. And so if you believe him on this or anything else, including that he won the election, including that there’s not a problem with climate and all the other, what is it, more than 30,000 lies that journalists have counted have come from that man’s mouth, you’re going to have a hell of a future as a lot of good people in Western North Carolina who trusted him are now finding out because they stopped action on the climate. They stopped all this environmental protection. As Carol said, they’d make it worse with what they’re going to do to the weather administration. And now people’s whole lives have been destroyed.
Also, over 200,000 unnecessary deaths from vaccine denial. I, as a historian, have never seen a cause in history that would sacrifice its own members, the people it relies on, the people that trust it, as part of its dogma and its efforts to undermine government, to serve its billionaire backers.
So I urge the people who are putting all this stuff in the chat to go out and maybe go with an open mind and start checking on some of these connections. And I think you’d be surprised how connected this entire Project 2025 and its authors are to Donald Trump.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Thank you for that.
There was an earlier question that was raised that struck me as quite interesting where someone was asking about what are the parallels between the Ku Klux Klan and MAGA and specifically what can be learned from the 1920s failure of the KKK to broaden their political power beyond local government.
Who wants to take a crack at that question?
Paul Ortiz: I’d be happy to. I’m just enjoying listening so much. I guess I need to step up now, take my own medicine. But yeah, it’s an excellent question. All these questions that we’re receiving right now are just really powerful questions.
And the 1920s is a great parallel to where we are now because it was a decade where there were huge economic gains made by members of the American ruling class. At the same time there were devastating setbacks, economic setbacks that working class people were facing in the 20s that were so severe. I’m just old enough to have interviewed many African Americans, Mexican Americans, Anglo Americans who lived through the Great Depression and they told me, “We didn’t even know what the Great Depression meant because for us, it was always hard times, times were always depressed, and so we just read one day that the Wall Street people were taking it now.”
And this is a key lesson to learn from the 1920s. What we were able to do in Florida, going back about eight or nine years, was to create the kind of coalitions that undermine, to a certain extent, the MAGA movement, and I know some of the people are in the comment bar now, but this is how we did it.
So the 1920s reactionary politics thrived by anti-immigrant and anti-Black racism, right? That’s how they built their coalition. So much so they deluded themselves the way that some of our MAGA colleagues are deluding themselves even to this day. Even at this minute. So much so that people in Herbert Hoover’s presidential administration blamed the Great Depression on who? Not wall street, but Mexicans, and deported us by the hundreds of thousands, including Mexican American citizens, some people – actually my ancestors. This is how we have defeated them to a certain extent in Florida. We put together coalitions to pass statewide referendums on reenfranchising people who have been convicted of felonies or even charged with felonies. And we got over a million signatures by reaching beyond the usual suspects, by going into the heart of MAGA country and talking to people and saying, look, not just Democrats go to jail, Republicans go to jail also and get convicted of felonies all the time. And we were able to get over a million signatures to reenfranchise people who have been convicted of nonviolent felonies.
Many of those signatures, believe me, we’re not by the usual suspects. We couldn’t, you couldn’t just go to a union hall and get those signatures. You had to go to a Miami Dolphins football game. My gosh, imagine trying to get people to sign a petition there! At the same time that right wing reactionaries were taking over Florida state politics, we were passing a statewide referendum on raising the living wage.
We have just got a million signatures to support women’s reproductive freedom. Now, of course, the MAGA movement has now become the state. Let’s face it. The MAGA movement is Ron DeSantis. It’s Governor Abbott. It’s people who’ve already captured the heights of power, especially state legislatures.
But we’ve done things to undermine their power, especially on the local level, and they’re pissed off about it. The MAGA movement and Project 2025 essentially says, we’re fed up with local democracy. We hate the fact that these local municipalities have passed living wage ordinances. We hate local movements for democracy. We hate that local municipalities have passed rules to ramp up and protect the environment. So we’re going to use state authority the way that Ron DeSantis has used preemptive laws to build this fascism, essentially. But it’s really about crushing democracy.
The last thing I’ll say about this, when I was a kid, there were Republicans and we grew up around a lot of Republicans who were honest enough to tell us, look, America is not a democracy, never has been. We don’t want a democracy. America is a constitutional order, or it’s a constitutional republic. And so when we talk about democracy, it’s important for us to understand that we’re trying to promote freedom and equality and justice for all people. And the MAGA movement is trying to ramp up the power of the rich and the ruling class.
It is the many against the few all over again.
Carol Anderson: And let me just add in there that one of the things that did the Klan in the 1920s was its moral corruption. My mother would say it began to smell itself. And it began to think that it was absolutely immune from basically morals and mores and norms. You had a rape happening. You had villainy happening, just absolute corruption. And as that thing started spilling out, because it was giving itself the aura that it was on the moral high ground, except when you pulled back the layer, you saw all of that nastiness.
And so think about Mark Robinson in North Carolina, think about the adjudicated rapist that is Donald Trump. And so it is that kind of moral repugnancy that did in the Klan. And I think that is also part of what we’re seeing right now in terms of MAGA because it gives itself the aura of being a Christian moral entity, but in fact, there is just so much villainy underneath it that it is absolutely repugnant to the vast majority of Americans.
Bill Fletcher Jr: So there’s two questions and one I’m going to actually answer. And then the last I’ll ask the three of you very briefly to answer. So someone says, aren’t hawk Biden and the Dems responsible for the closeness of this election, given $215 billion US spent on death and destruction in Ukraine and Palestine and Lebanon, when Trump poses as a peace candidate.
I don’t think that has anything to do with why the election is close. But also let’s be very clear on Trump. Trump is the man who has lit fuses around the world and then walked away and waited for those fuses to connect with the explosives and blow up. So for example, the Abraham accords were not invented by a Democratic administration. They were invented under Trump to strangle the Palestinians. That’s clear. Connected to that was Trump’s love affair with Netanyahu, where he recognized the annexation of Golan and the changing of the embassy. So in order to understand what happened on October 7th, 2023, you actually need to look at the entire history of the Palestinians, but also look at what happened in the Trump administration.
The Abraham Accords have also contributed to the renewed armed conflict in Western Sahara between the Sarawakians and the Moroccans. Or Ukraine. The Ukraine war would never have happened had Trump not been playing patty cake with Putin. And everyone is very clear on this.
I’m surprised by the question. Or the anti-China rhetoric under the administration including in connection with the breakout of the COVID vaccine and the absolutely racist language. So peace candidate? I think it’s important to really rethink some of these terms. The tightening of restrictions on Cuba and Venezuela that obviously have contributed to increased immigration? And then Trump has the audacity to suggest that we’ve got to stop people that are coming here because the United States is screwing up their countries.
So a peace candidate? Writer, I’d say rethink the language. The closing question really quickly to each of you is, how can we make the dangers of Project 2025 understandable at the gut level for the average voter?
I’m going to start with you, Nancy, and Paul, and then Carol.
Nancy MacLean: That is a crucial question, Bill, the crucial question. And all that I have learned from people who are doing, messaging and focus groups and polling, et cetera, about this is that this thing is so far reaching. And there’s so much in it that it’s just too much for a person to take in all of it. So I think a good strategy is to think about your audience and who you’re trying to communicate with and pick out the pieces that really matter to that person’s concerns. And I want to say here that there have been a couple of questions in the chat about the implications of Project 2025 for reproductive freedom, for LGBTQ Americans, for others. And I regret that we didn’t get into that. It was just like the cast of characters that we had and the things that some of us have been more focused on lately, but that’s absolutely at the center of Project 2025, this Christian nationalist male supremacist desire to basically reverse all the gains of the women’s movement and to push women back into the places they held before that. Worse places for black women and other women of color, but subordinate places for others, and that’s all over Project 2025, as is a complete frontal attack on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Americans.
So I’m really glad that was raised from here, and I would just say by way of wrapping that up about how we communicate with ordinary people, which is crucial on all of this: there’s some really good resources online that I just want to alert people to there’s a great suburban women’s group, a multiracial suburban women’s group called Red Wine and Blue that has a great project, Red Wine, not Red White, Red Wine and Blue, a great Project 2025 explainer up on their website. So if you Google “Red Wine and Blue” and “Project 2025,” you’ll find that it’s terrific and you can share it. You might want to learn more about them. There’s also a group called Accountable US, same thing. Google Accountable US and you’ll get all the different elements of this.
And from those resources, you can figure out what are the crucial pieces to highlight with the people that you’re in communication with, because different people have different experiences and pressing needs and concerns. So I think personalizing it to the person you’re talking to is the best thing to do.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Thank you. Paul, briefly.
Paul Ortiz: Yeah, I think that phrase, personalizing it and sharing aspects of the project, there’s a reason why the MAGA supporters have tried to distance their man, Donald Trump, from this document, because they know that this is an anti-democratic document. They know that it will take the Supreme Court and the executive to circumvent Congress to implement this. They know that there will be popular outrage. And so there’s only one way to implement Project 2025. That’s through fascism. That’s through authoritarianism.
And so yeah, share elements of Project 2025, what you know about. I’m sharing the anti-union, the profound anti-union and pro corporate aspects. Project 2025 is going to give so much more power to corporations in the society, you’re not even going to be able to turn around and say anything. It’s going to give more power to the surveillance state.
So yeah, pick those aspects that you feel comfortable in talking about and get people together. And say, let’s have a chat group about this. Okay. Do you think that Trump is the best candidate? Show me. And the first passages you get about China then the peace candidate will disappear very quickly.
Bill Fletcher Jr: Thank you, Carol.
Carol Anderson: And so what I would say is be specific. So I keep hearing it’s going to eliminate the Department of Education, and then it just moves on to something else. What does that mean? What does eliminating the Department of Education mean? So it means the funding that goes to special education, gone. It means Head Start, gone. It means Title I funding to poor, impoverished schools, gone. It means student loans, gone. So make it clear, what does this mean? So that’s how I would communicate. So we get this kind of broad thing, eliminate the Department of Education. What are the implications of that?
And yes, it is targeting to the group. But it’s also being very specific about what each one of those things mean, because a lot of it is written in bureaucratese, in that kind of governmentese, where there’s an opacity there. And also Nancy’s right, getting through these organizations that have done the work, gone through all 900 and some pages of it and digested it and put it into really nice, clear, legible blocks of information.
Bill Fletcher Jr: I want to thank Carol Anderson, Paul Ortiz, and Nancy MacLean for this program. I encourage people to subscribe to Convergence Magazine and join Historians for Peace and Democracy. I want to thank all of you for spending your precious time with us and have a good evening. Take care.
Nancy MacLean: And thank you, Bill, for moderating. It’s been great to be in conversation with all of you and the listeners.
Carol Anderson: Yes, this has been wonderful.
Paul Ortiz: Bill, thank you so much. Have a good evening.