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Project 2025 – From Wikipedia . Summarized and annotated with links.
Project 2025 (also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project)[3] is a political initiative to reshape the federal government of the United States and consolidate executive power in favor of right-wing policies. The plan was published in April 2023 by The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, in anticipation of Donald Trump winning the 2024 presidential election.[4][5]
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank founded in 1973, has had significant influence in U.S. public policy making. In 2019, it ranked among the most influential public policy organizations in the United States.[53][54] It coordinates with many conservative groups to build a network of allies.[9] The project’s president, Kevin Roberts, sees the organization’s current role as “institutionalizing Trumpism.”[55] Read more
Political / Social
A Great Unraveling Is Underway. By Thomas L. Freidman / NYT
If you are confused by President Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his.
What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran. Read more
Related: The Only Question Trump Asks Himself. By John Bolton / The Atlantic
The DEI crackdown is a smokescreen for something more sinister. By Olufemi O. Taiwo / Slate
The battle over diversity and inclusion has always been about labor. But Trump was able to frame it as something else.
Since the inauguration, President Donald Trump has—in the name of banning “DEI”—forced federal agencies to gut labor and antidiscrimination protections across the entire government. At the same time, his administration has elevated candidates with scant qualifications to positions of power across the federal bureaucracy. (Many of them have very active disqualifications.) And Trump has fired women and Black officers from senior positions. That this is all being done in the name of “merit-based opportunity,” as Trump’s executive order put it, is patently absurd. But it’s also a very clever political trick. Read more
Related: Trump’s Anti-DEI Directives Trample on Freedom.
Related: Colleges Have No Idea How to Comply With Trump’s Orders. By Rose Horowitch / The Atlantic
UVa abolishes DEI Office. By Demitry Martirosov / The Daily Progress
UVa’s Board of Visitors Friday voted to abolish its DEI Office, citing Trump’s executive order calling for cuts to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Friday’s resolution was prompted by a White House executive order titled, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which President Donald Trump signed Jan. 21. The order directs agencies “to enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.” Read more
Related: Banning “Enola Gay”: Pete Hegseth’s DEI paranoia knows no limits. By Amanda Marcotte / Salon
The Cruel World According to Stephen Miller. By David Klion / The Nation
If the only thing one knew about Stephen Miller was that he was a white man, it might be sufficient to explain his alignment with Donald Trump—after all, 60 percent of that demographic supported Trump against Kamala Harris last fall. But identity is complicated, and every other aspect of Miller’s points to the opposite conclusion.
Miller has the profile not of a typical Trump supporter but of a garden-variety liberal Democrat. How to make sense of Miller and his trajectory? Read more
“Impeachment Is a Remedy for a Runaway President”: Rep. Al Green on Why He Disrupted Trump’s Address. By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now
We speak with Democratic Congressmember Al Green of Texas a day after he was censured by the House of Representatives for disrupting President Donald Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday night.
“We now live in a government that is of the plutocrats, by the plutocrats, for the plutocrats,” Congressmember Green tells Democracy Now! “We have to fight to protect those who cannot protect themselves.” Green has repeatedly called to impeach Trump and says he is currently preparing another such effort, calling impeachment “a remedy for a runaway president who believes that there are no guardrails.” Read more and listen here
Mahmoud Khalil Is the First Activist to Be Disappeared by Trump. By Laura Jedeed / The Nation
The detention and attempted deportation of Khalil is a test by Trump to see how far he can go—and a test for us to see how hard we will fight back.
Khalil, who is Palestinian, was one of the leaders of Columbia University’s encampment protest against the genocide in Gaza last year. He represented the protest in negotiations with the university. He also recently obtained his green card, a fact that seemed to catch the men—plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers, it turns out—off guard. Mahmoud Khalil is the first person Trump’s administration has disappeared for political reasons. Read more
Related: Arrest of Palestinian Columbia activist divides American Jews. Yonat Shimron and Fiona André / RNS
Related: Mahmoud Khalil: ICE arrest of Palestinian activist has chilling implications. by Nicole Narea / Vox
Trump’s HUD Secretary cuts a key fair housing rule; advocates warn of deeper segregation. Natasha S. Alford / The Grio
Scott Turner has announced the rescinding of the Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule from the Obama and Biden eras to “cut red tape.” Affordable housing experts and advocates say it will harm Black communities and vulnerable minorities the most.
AFFH, which was originally introduced by the Obama administration, required any state receiving federal funding to demonstrate they were taking steps to truly implement fair housing and eliminate discrimination, by answering a series of questions and assembling planning reports that showed concrete action. Read more
World News
An Unexpected Trump Bump for the World’s Centrists. Mark Landler / NYT
As President Trump’s “shock and awe” policies radiate around the world, they are galvanizing support for moderate leaders and unifying Europe. Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, left, has reaffirmed Britain’s steadfast support for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Amid a flurry of diplomacy, his poll ratings have surged.
In Britain, a languishing prime minister is suddenly a statesman, while his up-and-coming populist rival has been thrown on his heels. In Canada, the incumbent Liberal Party has a chance to win an election long thought out of reach. In Germany, the incoming center-right chancellor is dominating the agenda after an election many feared would be a breakthrough for the hard right. Read more
The Fate of Migrants Detained at Guantánamo. Edwidge Danticat / The New Yorker
In the early nineteen-nineties, Haitian refugees and asylum seekers were held on the base in abysmal conditions. Their experience now seems like a preview of what’s to come.
Ninaj Raoul has certain images seared in her mind from her trips to the United States’ Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Raoul, the co-founder and executive director of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, a Brooklyn-based immigrant-advocacy group, served as an interpreter for Haitian asylum seekers who were imprisoned at Guantánamo in the early nineteen-nineties. During her many visits there, she recalls, the base was always scorching hot. There were no trees nearby, just rows and rows of tan and olive-green tents erected on cement and surrounded by airport hangars, porta-potties, barbed wire, and guard towers. Read more
Rubio announces that 83% of USAID contracts will be canceled. By Melody Schreiber / NPR
“The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X early Monday morning.
USAID tracks closely how many people each program helps — for example, how many children are given food and nutrition each year or bed nets or HIV medications. Based on those numbers, Enrich projected that, if the cutbacks are not restored and other donors do not step in, each year:
- 1 million starving children won’t have access to food and nutrition.
- Up to 17.9 million more people will get malaria and as many as 166,000 people will die from it — a 39% increase from current rates.
- Tuberculosis cases, including multidrug-resistant TB, will soar by 28 to 32 percent.
- As many as 28,000 people will suffer from emerging infectious diseases, like Ebola and Marburg.
- Hundreds of millions of people will be sickened by polio infections over the next decade, with an additional 200,000 people paralyzed by polio. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
At Washington installation, Cardinal McElroy calls for hope, mercy and human dignity. By Aleja Hertzler-McCain / RNS
Washington’s new archbishop, Cardinal Robert McElroy, encouraged Catholics at his installation Mass on Tuesday (March 11) to have hope and show mercy in a service that included prayers in eight languages, with multiple mentions of the well-being of migrants.
“Mercy and compassion must be our first impulse when confronted with sin and human failure,” said the cardinal, who will fill the seat vacated by Cardinal Wilton Gregory, who retired at the beginning of this year. Read more
Anti-Semitism Is Just a Pretext. By Jonathan Chait / The Atlantic
One can question the effectiveness of Columbia’s actions to combat anti-Semitism, but the allegation that it has failed to act is simply untrue. After the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks began tearing the campus apart, the school commissioned a task force on anti-Semitism.
The Trump administration, by contrast, really has done nothing about anti-Semitism in its own ranks. The administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy.
Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab. Read more
Related: Trump’s Crackdown on “Antisemitism” is Making Jews Less Safe. By Emily Tamkin / The New Republic
Suicide risk is up for Black teens. This church is tackling it. By Katia Riddle / NPR
The staff at First Corinthian Baptist Church felt they had no choice but to tackle the issue of adolescent suicide risk in their congregation.
“Just the amount of phone calls we were getting,” says Lena Green, who oversees mental wellness programs at the church in Harlem, New York. “I was probably getting almost 10 calls a week asking for services for teens.” She referred families to outside clinics and therapists, but they kept returning to her, unable to get the help and services they needed. More than one parent told her they were scared of going to sleep — fearful they would lose their child to suicide overnight. Read more
Historical / Cultural
How Harriet Tubman Became A Spy For The US Army. By Kate Clifford Larson / NewsOne
March 10 is Harriet Tubman day and today we celebrate her legacy. Harriet Tubman was barely 5 feet tall and didn’t have a dime to her name.
What she did have was a deep faith and powerful passion for justice that was fueled by a network of Black and white abolitionists determined to end slavery in America. “I had reasoned this out in my mind,” Tubman once told an interviewer. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.” Read more
The US Postal Service helped build the Black middle class. Trump could end that legacy. By Gloria Oladipo / The Guardian
Trump is expected to privatize the USPS, where Black people make up 29% of the staff, and cut down on the number of jobs
Trump’s potential plans for the USPS could threaten the agency’s rich legacy of Black employment, from which generations of Black families have secured wealth and benefits through service. “The postal service workforce is more diverse racially [and] ethnically than the labor force in this country as a whole,” said Brian Renfroe, the national president of the National Association of Letter Carriers. Read more
Alabama Reps Fight To Block Sale Of The Freedom Rides Museum. By Jeroslyn JoVonn
Rep. Terri Sewell and Rep. Shomari Figures are trying to preserve a landmark of the Civil Rights Movement.
Alabama Representatives are taking action to prevent the possible sale of the Freedom Rides Museum after it was listed among non-core federal properties. Alabama’s Freedom Rides Museum could be offloaded as a federal property after it was included in a list of 440 federal properties the Trump administration deemed as “not core to government operations.” Read more
The dark parallels between 1920s America and today’s political climate. By Alex Green / The Moderate Voice
This perspective is striking because it strongly resembles how Americans felt during a pivotal decade 100 years ago, when people’s dissatisfaction with the state of the country led to a series of discriminatory, hateful policies by the federal government. It’s a period of American history that I think offers something of a mirror of the current political situation in the U.S.
In the 1920s, the economy was good, the U.S. had won World War I, and a terrible pandemic ended. But many Americans did not see it that way. Some Americans’ concern for a U.S. in decline led to a rise in various discriminatory policies and movements that hurt vulnerable minorities. Read more
A Play About Segregation Tries to ‘Ride a Fine Line’ in Florida. Jonathan Abrams / NYT
A production partly aimed at students that highlights Tampa’s history in the civil rights movement lands at a time when the state is changing what schools teach about race and history.
Given the chance, Arthenia Joyner would have ordered a bacon and egg sandwich with a glass of orange juice. Instead, workers inside an F.W. Woolworth store in Tampa, Fla., declared their lunch counter closed to her and other high school students 65 years ago. The students refused to leave without being served. Read more
Sports
Steph Curry named Davidson basketball assistant GM, creating 8-figure fund for players. By Chris Vannini and Anthony Slater / The Athletic
Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry has been named assistant general manager for the Davidson men’s basketball program and is helping to create an eight-figure fund to support the men’s and women’s teams at his alma mater.
While Curry joins a growing list of athletes taking administrative jobs at colleges, like Stanford general manager Andrew Luck, Curry is the first active player to do so. Read more
Retired Billionaire, NBA Star Passes Away After Heart Attack During Interview. By Mathey Gibson / Athlon Sports
Former NBA player and billionaire businessman Junior Bridgeman has died after suffering a heart attack during a public event in downtown Louisville on Tuesday.
The 71-year-old was participating in an interview at a benefit luncheon for the Lincoln Heritage Council, Scouting America, when he reportedly told those around him that he felt as though he was having a heart attack, according to WLKY in Kentucky. Read more
Colorado head football coach Deion Sanders given $100 million annual value projection within next five years. By Andrew Hughes / The Sporting News
Colorado head football coach Deion Sanders already owns a mansion at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and a $5.7 million annual salary, but apparently, he could have even more in Boulder if he sticks with the Buffs.
Vice president for media rights and partnership services at Collegiate Sports Management Group (CSMG) Dan Girard told the Denver Post’s Sean Keeler that Coach Prime will eventually be worth $100 million to the University of Colorado Boulder. Read more
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