ex-President Trump

Lol right, it's not about Trump replacing anyone with any power in government with his own lackeys and removing all checks and balances on his own power so he can become king at all. Apropos of nothing in particular, I have a bridge to sell you.

Spoil system is what everyone does anyway, Trump isn't special about it.

But the career bureaucrats, those outside of the spoil system, are exceptionally left-leaning. So you either include them in the spoil system, or remove all their power.

The fact that you seem not to acknowledge is that today, all agencies are basically leftist power centers. The career people are 80-90% leftists. Any leftist president is ALREADY a king, while a rightwing one has all federal agencies actively working against him.

That only looks fair to you because you like those positions. But it's anti-democratic. If a rightwing president wins, all agencies should execute rightwing policies as much as the law allows!

The checks and balances DO NOT come from WITHIN executive functions!!!! they come from the separation of power. The EPA supposedly is balanced by judges and congress. Not by having leftists career bureaucrats blocking a rightwing president from implementing rightwing policies.

If you people just admitted that you actually want fascism, instead of doing this elaborate song and dance pretending that what you want isn't actually fascism, at least it would be honest.

The idea that it would be undemocratic to have all executive functions act organically as one to implement the elected president agenda, within the limit of executive powers and the constitution, is absurd.

What is undemocratic is today state, where a rightwing president being elected is blocked from his own constitutionally affirmed powers by leftwing federal employees

It's pretty clear to everyone except you that you don't want democracy, you want a dictatorship that implements the policies you like.

And newsflash: the reason intelligent people have a left wing bias is that reality has a left wing bias. The modern right wing in the US is the party of thugs, bigots, morons and conspiracy theorists. Aka fascists.

the **** has fascism to do with telling the FED "stop giving a **** about DEI and the climate it's not your job", or telling EPA "you aren't a land use regulator you shouldn't be able to regulate land use" and so on?

we are talking doing LESS than today, REDUCING the power of federal agencies, the literal opposite to fascism.

2025 agenda has "ban the FED from buying mortgage backed securities", for you that's fascism.

Fund education but without public schools, vastly reducing the power of the state, that's fascism?

For the department of agriculture, this is the current statement (biden admin)

To serve all Americans by providing e"ective, innovative, science-based
public policy leadership in agriculture, food and nutrition, natural resource
protection and management, rural development, and related issues with a
commitment to delivering equitable and climate smart opportunities that
inspire and help America thrive.

Project 2025 wants to change it into this

To develop and disseminate agricultural information and research, identify and
address concrete public health and safety threats directly connected to food and
agriculture, and remove both unjustified foreign trade barriers for U.S. goods
and domestic government barriers that undermine access to safe and a"ordable
food absent a compelling need—all based on the importance of sound science,
personal freedom, private property, the rule of law, and service to all Americans

The **** has fascism to do with this again? it's against changing what you do with executive powers,
removing DEI and climate nonsense.

They want to eliminate disparate impact from the law (requires congress), and so on and on.

Not only there is no fascism involved, there is LESS STATE VIOLENCE, ie LESS FASCISM involved that the current state of affairs.

So if the left wins and invents this DEI nonsense and pushes it everywhere, that's democracy. If the right wins and wants to completly undo that, that's a dictatorship.

WITHIN THE LIMITS OF THE CONSTITUTION, it's democratic to allow literally anything that isn't specifically proihibited from happening, if things are in place that don't allow something constitutional to happen even if the elected representatives want that, THAT'S undemocratic.

For you it's "fascism" if someone who is very very very very different from your preferences wins and acts constitutionally to achieve somethibng you abhor.

That's literally what antidemocratic is "you either agree with me or you are a fascist".

And you think Trump is some sort of principled right winger working towards this vision? Lol you.

no, i think the people who wrote project 2025 are.

I think they know trump will delegate power to them if they play ball with his narcisism and let him play golf and claim he is crushing the libs.

Trump cares less about actual power (ie details of how agencies work and so on) except for a few things (border / trade, perhaps interest rates) than every other politician who ever tried to become president.

He has no grasp about what actual power entails, he doesn't give a **** as long as he is worshipped as a special person and praised constantly and allowed to play a lot of golf.

So back to project 2025 which you claimed would end democracy (lol), can you actually discuss the policy proposals? list to me which of them are democracy-ending? reducing the power of non elected people in the executive branch ends democracy? Removing agencies that didn't exist for 70-90% of the country history ends democracy?

Gee, I dunno, let me throw a dart at the whole proposal and see where it lands. Eliminating the independence of the DOJ oncommitant with an unprecedented expansion of executive powers seems pretty... what's the word I'm looking for... antidemocratic to me.

Anyone, left or right, who doesn't want to live in an autocracy would read the Wikipedia article on project 2025 and shudder. I would be saying the same if someone on the left were proposing such a thing.

Project 2025 is the death of the America we once knew. It removes the last bits of agency people have remaining and gives it to private (including foreign) corporations.

What is 2025? At a high level?

Are we really talking about reducing the power of federal agencies?

We're gonna need a citation for the mortgage backed security ban.

Eliminating public schools is a tragedy for the poor and a gift to private corporations. This and the effects of covid are killing our education system. This in no way benefits anyone but private corporations. Public education has made us great and some would argue it's a pillar of democracy.

Project 2025 wants to come in and change the charter of or eliminate every federal agency to benefit private interests. The scope isn't limited to the department of agriculture. It's every department they're legally allowed to touch.

The reason I see it as fascist takeover is because the funding comes from wealthy billionaires who are attempting to reshape the government to benefit themselves by reducing regulation that costs them money and adding law to make them money. All while elimination all pesky regulators, the FBI, department of justice, etc ... It's unprecedented and would totally reshape America in the vision of these wealthy fascists.

expansion of executive powers wtf? they want it reduced, several agencies/departments would be eliminated or reduced in scope.

As for the DOJ, it is not independent to this day, it is partisan , the FBI in particular has been used against rightwing people quite a couple of time for political reasons, do you know about the "misinformation" thing that happened with covid/election for example? there is a scotus court case coming up about that this term.

If you want an impartial DOJ i can't assist you. If you want an independent one i can, but you have to make it electable like states where the attorney general is distinct from the governor. Would that make sense for the feds? ye i believe it would (and better if the election is shifted vs presidential elections, like you elected the president in 2024 and the AG in 2026), but it requires a constitutional change i guess.

Aside from that, the DOJ has never been indipendent, the FBI has always been a partisan, political, unaccountable police force since inception. It was very rightwing for a couple of decades, then about neutral (doesn't mean non-political) for a while and today it's very very leftist.

Luciom will contort himself into a pretzel before he admits that fascism is what he wants, probably because the word has, deservedly, so many negative connotations, but it's blindingly obvious to anyone with half a brain cell reading any of what he posts.

Ye we are i linked the policy section of 2025, it's 30+ long articles lol.

For the fed

https://www.project2025.org/policy/ (article 24)
this is the part about MBS

Limit future balance sheet expansions to U.S. Treasuries. The Federal
Reserve should be prohibited from picking winners and losers among
asset classes. Above all, this means limiting Federal Reserve interventions
in the mortgage-backed securities market. It also means eliminating Fed
interventions in corporate and municipal debt markets.
Restricting the Fed’s open market operations to Treasuries has strong
economic support. The goal of monetary policy is to provide markets
with needed liquidity without inducing resource misallocations caused
by interfering with relative prices, including rates of return to securities.
However, Fed intervention in longer-term government debt, mortgagebacked securities, and corporate and municipal debt can distort the
pricing process. This more closely resembles credit allocation than
liquidity provision.
The Fed’s mortgage-related activities are a paradigmatic case of what
monetary policy should not do. Consider the e!ects of monetary policy on
the housing market. Between February 2020 and August 2022, home prices
increased 42 percent.16 Residential property prices in the United States
adjusted for inflation are now 5.8 percent above the prior all-time record
levels of 2006.17 The home-price-to-median-income ratio is now 7.68, far

above the prior record high of 7.0 set in 2005.18 The mortgage-payment-toincome ratio hit 43.3 percent in August 2022—breaking the highs of the prior
housing bubble in 2008.19 Mortgage payment on a median-priced home (with
a 20 percent down payment) jumped to $2,408 in the autumn of 2022 vs.
$1,404 just one year earlier as home prices continued to rise even as mortgage
rates more than doubled. Renters have not been spared: Median apartment
rental costs have jumped more than 24 percent since the start of 2021.20
Numerous cities experienced rent increases well in excess of 30 percent.
A primary driver of higher costs during the past three years has been the
Federal Reserve’s purchases of mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Since
March 2020, the Federal Reserve has driven down mortgage interest rates
and fueled a rise in housing costs by purchasing $1.3 trillion of MBSs from
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. The $2.7 trillion now owned by
the Federal Reserve is nearly double the levels of March 2020. The flood of
capital from the Federal Reserve into MBSs increased the amount of capital
available for real estate purchases while lower interest rates on mortgage
borrowing—driven down in part by the Federal Reserve’s MBS purchases—
induced and enabled borrowers to take on even larger loans.21 The Federal
Reserve should be precluded from any future purchases of MBSs and should
wind down its holdings either by selling o! the assets or by allowing them to
mature without replacement

"tragedy for the poors" (false), but anyway it's not a federal issue, rather a state one, and it's about keep the funding (lower levels because without public management things work better)
and do full charter schools as a plan.

You can disagree, still nothing to do with being "anti-democratic" lol

So now you come and claim the project is about REDUCING federal executive power, which is literally anti-fascism (fascism requires ABSOLUTE STATE POWER). You dislike it because "corporations", still not fascism.

Shitting on the state is literal anti-fascism. Can't be fascist without a powerful state that is above individuals at every step and with close to unlimited powers to execute the will of the fascists.

fascism is an omnipotent state, no individual liberties guaranteed, the individual the property of the state for the "common good" as defined by the political leaders.

We want the literal opposite, a weak state only where necessary (which is, far less than today), more power to individuals to do what they want.

You know what's literal fascism? using the FBI to check social media content and bring down "misinformation". That's fascism.

That's what the biden admin did and you guys seem to have no problem with that.

I don't know what specifically you're referring to, but you're definitely deflecting and not responding to any of the substantive points made by either me or other posters.

you made the opposite point of the other guy: you claim project 2025 is about increasing executive power, and so it's anti democratic.

The other guy correctly recognizes project 2025 is about weaking executive power a lot (especially agency powers), but then he calls that fascist because it's what rich people want and purportedly, achieving what rich people want is fascism (lol).

You only mentioned "no DOJ independence is bad and antidemocratic", and i answered to that claiming that the DOJ is *not* independent today, and has never been (the FBI in particular).

You didn't list any other policy proposal by project 2025 that would justify your wild claim that it could end democracy if implemented.

What i am referring to is an actual policy by the Biden admin, which instructed the FBI to tell social networks to bring down content on the basis it was "misinformation". No crime was involved. It's going on scotus this term.

/

The conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit last month limited that order to the White House, the surgeon general’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI.

The three-judge appeals court panel said the White House likely “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences.” The panel also found the White House “significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment.”

/

Actual fascism, at least according to that court of appeals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._...

I would agree that instructing these platforms to remove content seems like an overreach, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to what conservatives are trying to do.

The other guy quoted a passage about replacing 10,000s of federal employees with conservative zealots such as you, and how this didn't seem like reducing the size of government. You didn't address that.

Do you disagree with the claim that Washington DC based federal employees skew leftwing dramatically today?

Or you think it's bad if that gets fixed, if so why?

Ideally anyone with any actual power in any executive department should at the very least not oppose the president agenda, or you disagree with this as well? you would find that anti-democratic?

Ah, executive department. Can you list the executive departments so I can answer that question? And then can you list the departments which would become executive departments post project 2025?

Actually, I just looked it up and the DOJ is an executive department. In which case, I disagree, yes. I think the DOJ should be independent. The president in the US has way too much power as it is. Our PM in the UK has nowhere near that much power.

Lol @ the right wanting separation of power. They are doing exactly opposite of that. We now have an entire party that wants to concentrate power at the top, and a Supreme Court that is doing their part to help this. It is straight up fascism.

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together "skews left" by US standards. I am a moderate in the rest of the civilised world; in the US I would probably be considered a card carrying commie.