I know, I know, again?! Yes. In my last post, I gave a breakdown of Project 2025. This week, I want to provide yet even more background to the project, who wrote it, how it is indeed connected to Trump despite many arguments to the contrary, and how the impact will hurt all of us - especially those of us in the arts. There is so much to cover about this issue, really it can’t all be touched on in just two posts, but I’m going to try to wrap it up in this one. Here’s one last little push in favor of voting in this election. I promise this is the last one… for now. I just can’t stress enough how important it is to participate. I promise that if you sit this one out, you’ll come to regret it.

The first thing to better understand is the organization that dreamed up Project 2025: The Heritage Foundation

​The Heritage Foundation is a non-profit and self-described “think tank” which works to:

Initially not overtly sinister, just a bit odd in word choice. However, If you’ve taken a gander at the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, you know exactly what these policies actually mean for people on the ground. If you want a breakdown on Project 2025, you can find the one I did here. 

This organization has been behind much of the backward sliding we’ve been seeing in American politics as of late, most notably in regards to their influence over major political figures. They receive major funding from billionaires and then advocate on their behalf to ensure that they can retain as much of their wealth as possible. If you look through the policies listed on their website and in Project 2025, you’ll realize that this is exactly the main motivation of their work. They proclaim loudly about their love and championing of freedom, but ultimately they are talking about the freedom to oppress and exploit.
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Another proud bullet point on their list of accomplishments is, “recommending candidates for vacant seats that ultimately shaped the future of the Supreme Court that delivered the landmark decision overturning Roe v. Wade.” (heritage.org) Yeah. That was on them.

Image source: heritageaction.com

Their website even offers a score card feature which breaks down how aligned different politicians are with the Heritage Foundation agenda. They even offer blueprints and tools for people to get in touch with their representatives and push for these deeply damaging policies. It’s the kind of thing that I wish was more accessible to progressives! We need to be organized like this! This is terrifyingly efficient.

Kevin Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation, signs off on the website’s about page by stating, “the stakes are high, and the battle lines are drawn. But neither are daunting—or unfamiliar. For they are the same today as they were at Bunker Hill and Gettysburg, at the Bulge and at Brandenburg Gate, at Independence Hall and on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. History is once again calling America—the last, best hope of Earth—to defy the privileged and powerful and defend our Revolution, our Constitution, and our Heritage. Join us in this second American Revolution, and once again, together, we will win.” (heritage.org) ​Whether you were aware or not, the Heritage Foundation has been at war with you and your interests for quite some time now.

​This is a wonderful video that goes over even more shocking information about this organization. You can watch it through the link above.
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Trump has stated repeatedly that he has nothing to do with the project, however his actions during his presidency, and the people that he lifted into positions of power contradict this claim. “At least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, a CNN review found, including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.” (cnn.com)

Don’t believe me or CNN? Then believe The Heritage Foundation. In listing off their “most notable achievements” they brag about “The Trump administration’s embrace of 64% of Heritage policy prescriptions through its annual budget, regulatory guidance, or other actions.” (heritage.org) 64% of policies that would ruin the U.S. economy, devastate children’s education, and deny medical care to a vast majority of the American population. Yikes.

Still no? How about Trump himself? At a 2022 dinner organized by The Heritage Foundation, the former president stated, “Heritage does such an incredible job.” He continued, “this is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” (nbcnews.com) Yeah, it totally sounds like he knows nothing about them, right?

​If Trump wins, Project 2025 is “exactly what [his] movement will do.”

As discussed in the previous blog, just the impact of these policies on education alone would be devastating. Public schools are already underfunded. For people looking for an impact on the arts specifically, a policy to further strip that money away to give to charter schools would increasingly reduce accessibility to the arts, especially for marginalized communities. The fact that not every school has a music program is already a travesty and a failure of our society, to push further in that direction is unacceptable. 

However, as I stated in the previous post, this threat goes beyond the arts. People will die if Project 2025 is implemented, and that is not an exaggeration. We can not allow it to become the policy blueprint for our country.
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Image source: vote.org

The most sure-fire way to prevent this plan from being carried out, is to prevent the election of Donald Trump. Vote on November 5th. If you can’t bring yourself to vote for any of the presented options, I understand, but I urge you to at least not vote for the man that could make this nightmare into a reality. Vote locally, get folks into positions of power who can help to (worst case) combat the installation of this plan even if you won’t vote for the leading presidential ticket as well. I fully sympathize with not wanting to continue playing into the short-comings and inefficacy of the current system. However, if Trump wins, we may lose our chance to turn things around. Project 2025 is designed specifically to deny us that opportunity. As much as it seems impossible, things can still get worse, much worse.

The fact that Trump and his party are likely going to try and prove the illegitimacy of the outcome should he lose, is even more cause to cast your vote. The greater the margin of defeat for Trump, the more difficult it will be for him to obscure the outcome and fudge numbers. The popular vote actually matters for once in this election, we need to make it count.

A majority of state deadlines to register have passed, but not all of them. You can see all deadlines for every state here. If you have any questions about getting registered, or how the voting process works, I have covered it in a previous blog that I’ll link here. That’s all for now. I’ll see you all on the other side of November 5th. Until then, thank you for reading, and happy jamming/voting!

​One of the most discussed elements of the upcoming election has been the conservative “mandate for leadership” included in their Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project. In discussing with my friends and colleagues, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s not really a lot of clarity about what exactly this initiative would mean for the average person in the U.S. This makes sense as a convoluted 922-page document is quite intimidating to dive into. Good thing I’ve for some reason decided this is how I’d like to spend my free time now… I should really get that looked into. Hopefully I can give you a much abbreviated run down of the document so you don’t have to read this whole thing. This post will serve as a summary and commentary on the document itself. I’ll try to touch on everything I can, but feel free to comment and let me know if I missed anything super important. I’ll go over the exact impact of these policies on the arts, and the history and background in the creation of this document in a future post.

I’ll be including direct quotes from the full Project 2025 PDF. It is available through a simple “project 2025” google search. The page numbers cited by each quote I use refers to the page number in this PDF.

​The document is broken down into five sections each covering a different area of focus in the government. I’ll go through each one and discuss its goals. The most notable takeaway from a lot of this is just how much this document contradicts itself. The opening forward goes on about grandiose statements about how beneficial this program will be for the country, then goes on to detail exactly how to strip away rights from us and deny us a say in our government. I guess they expect you to stop reading after the first 50 torturous pages.
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Yeah. These are their titles, not mine. It sounds like an evil villain’s plan right from the onset. Essentially, this section discusses the Presidential Cabinet. It walks through carefully defining each position and its responsibilities. As we continue through the section, it becomes clear that stripping away administrative checks on a president is of utmost importance. “A President today assumes
office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.” (p. 75) Apparently all these “experts” in the field that we spent the last 20 pages rambling about are completely useless. Interesting… The goal is to streamline the executive capabilities of a single president, surround them with yes-men, and embolden them to make sweeping actions without the troublesome opinions of experts.

A good portion of this streamlining involves cutting departments. “Abolishing the Gender Policy Council would eliminate central promotion of abortion (‘health services’); comprehensive sexuality education (‘education’); and the new woke gender ideology, which has as a principal tenet ‘gender affirming care’ and ‘sex-change' surgeries on minors. In addition to eliminating the council, developing new structures and positions will have the dual effect of demonstrating that promoting life and strengthening the family is a priority while also facilitating more seamless coordination and consistency across the U.S. government.” - (p. 95) As you can see, the departments chosen for cutting are very specifically ones that establish protections for underrepresented communities, and offer resistance to executive power.
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​This section focuses primarily on the U.S. Military and how badly it has been run recently. Of course, this is by their own skewed standards. Either way, I’m not going to waste much time on this other than saying that increased militarization is good for no one except weapons manufacturers and those invested in them. I’m all for better transparency of the military budget, but that seems like an afterthought in the laundry list presented here.
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This one is a doozy. There are so many things wrong with the statements made in this section, but in the interest of keeping this as digestible as I can, I will focus on the ones that caught my attention most. Something that is so puzzling is how many of these instructions are addressing problems that don’t exist. More than an actual policy handbook, this document comes across as a way of trying to brainwash whoever reads it. Considering this is intended to be handed to Trump, they picked a pretty easy target for brainwashing… unfortunately they wrote it down, and we all know how the orange man feels about reading.

Despite “welfare” being in the title of this section, its writers place crosshairs on Medicaid and Medicare. They make the claim that we have no way of paying for these two programs, that abortion and gender affirming-care are not considered healthcare, and stating that “the next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administration’s focus on ‘LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage, replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.” (p. 316) Taking away these fundamental rights and basic needs is not only deplorable, but would also deeply damage the wellbeing of a majority of Americans. Regardless of how you feel about abortion, the steps to prevent it violate basic human rights and put barriers in front of life-saving care. Beyond the wellbeing of the arts industry, policy proposals like this threaten people's lives. It is terrifying to see things like this written out.

The section also touches on education. : ) “The Secretary of Education should insist that the department serve parents and American ideals, not advocates whose message is that children can choose their own sex, that America is ‘systemically racist,’ that math itself is racist, and that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideal of a colorblind society should be rejected in favor of reinstating a color-conscious society.” (page 318) Oh boy. Beyond blatantly misrepresenting Martin Luther King, I’d be curious what their definition of “American ideals” are. If they knew what MLK really stood for, we’d need to call an ambulance.

Another thing to point out is that the writers love to make assertions about problems that don’t exist. They do this as a way of strengthening their own position by presenting a laughable opposing position. For example, the statement “that children can choose their own sex” is not an actual position anyone believes in. This statement demonstrates a severe lack of comprehension of this issue. First of all, these people are just obsessed with talking about children and sex, weird. Second of all, nobody is teaching anyone that. Also nobody believes that “math is racist”, that is, believe it or not, preposterous. What this is misrepresenting is how teachers are working to find ways to reach students that are often neglected and stereotyped against in the classroom setting. That is a great thing! These are all examples of what is known as “the straw man fallacy” - you exaggerate the opposing argument to make your own seem more logical. I used to use this method of argumentation all the time, when I was SIX YEARS OLD. I can’t believe people in positions of prominence in our government wrote this crap.

For those of you with school loans like myself, Project 2025 is not going to be a good time. “The new Administration must end the practice of acting like the federal student loan portfolio is a campaign fund to curry political support and votes. The new Administration must end abuses in the loan forgiveness programs. Borrowers should be expected to repay their loans.” (p. 354) Forcing immediate repayment upon people who can not afford it is not the incredible economic policy decision they think it is. “Growing student loan debt has long been a drag on the U.S. economy. Some 43.6 million borrowers collectively owe an estimated $1.77 trillion and account for 1 in 4 of the country’s more than 129 million privately employed workers.” (adpresearch.com) To suddenly demand payment on these loans could be catastrophic to the economy. Meanwhile, forgiving this debt (see my post on student loans here) would immediately free up 32 million workers to spend more freely and invest in their futures. I know which option I would pick. I know which option would actually benefit the economy. In addition to screwing over borrowers, programs that make higher ed accessible to those with financial need would be cut. “The PLUS loan program, which provides graduate student loans and loans to the parents of undergraduate students, should be eliminated. This would generate an estimated $2.3 billion in savings.” (p. 393) $2.3 billion in savings and higher education reserved for the wealthiest?! Sign me up. Keeping education out of the hands of the working class is a common trend throughout this deplorable document.

​Many policies listed here focus on strengthening the influence and funding of charter schools instead of public schools. This would make education increasingly privatized, offering even greater barriers to those with financial need than are already present, and giving the ultra rich yet another avenue of influence over our lives: children’s education. By funneling public school funding into charter schools, they can point to the inefficacy of underfunded public schooling, and ensure that education is kept under control and dolled out sparingly.

​This approach of reducing accessibility to education is absolutely necessary if a policy plan like theirs is going to succeed. A workforce unaware of union organization, media literacy, and pressing social issues is easy to manage. By keeping education restricted, they can keep the tools for change out of reach from those who need them most. “To restore state and local control of education and reduce the bureaucratic and compliance burden, Congress should allow states to opt out of the dozens of federal K–12 education programs authorized under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and instead allow states to put their share of federal funding toward any lawful education purpose under state law.” (p. 383) Are there Disney writers back there? This script is too cheesy…

“Stop the war on oil and natural gas.” (p. 397) Nice. Increasing our dependence on fossil fuels… We can just play our instruments under water, it’s fine! There’s a few other notable issues in regards to the Justice Department but this section is getting too long and I’m getting a headache. I’ll just include two phrases that will give you a vibe for the section: “Russia hoax” and “suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop”. They really know how to speak Trump’s language, don’t they? Like talking to a baby. Okay, I’m done here.

One last place I do want to stop is their section on labor. There’s a whole heap of anti-labor policies that riddle this section. betterinaunion.org has done an amazing job of organizing this massive list of threats. I urge you to take a look there for a detailed breakdown. A few gems from this are: 1. Giving employers tools they can use to intimidate and prevent workers from forming unions, 2. Making it illegal for employers to voluntarily recognize unions, 3. Weakening overtime and minimum wage laws, and adding taxes on worker benefits. Learn more on the It's Better in a Union site here.
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​​This section misrepresents the word “elites” as if this document wasn’t written by and for them. The previous sections actually touched a bit on their brilliant economic policies, but I’ll briefly touch on a few more gems here as they pop up.

​Project 2025 has a plan for taxation too! Spoiler alert: you’re not going to like it. The proposed tax reform would implement “a simple two-rate individual tax system of 15 percent and 30 percent that eliminates most deductions, credits and exclusions. The 30 percent bracket should begin at or near the Social Security wage base to ensure the combined income and payroll tax structure acts as a nearly flat tax on wage income beyond the standard deduction. The corporate income tax rate should be reduced to 18 percent. The corporate income tax is the most damaging tax in the U.S. tax system, and its primary economic burden falls on workers because capital is more mobile than labor.” (p. 728) This is wild. Cutting taxes on the wealthy and taxing the working class more, and if you’re self-employed like myself, cutting most deductions will make my business exponentially more difficult. I don’t even need to translate anything or fact-check. It just comes out and says it.

​When it comes to worker wages and benefits, the cognitive malfunction worsens. “To reduce this tax bias against wages (as opposed to employee benefits), the next Administration should set a meaningful cap (no higher than $12,000 per year per full-time equivalent employee—and preferably lower) on untaxed benefits that employers can claim as deductions.” (p.729) The thought process here is that workers should receive higher wages instead of just benefits. However, the incorrect assumption being made is that the business would not just reduce benefits and stop there. By setting a cap, there is no incentive for a company to provide more than that cap in benefits to its employees. Considering companies are solely motivated by profit, this is a recipe for disaster.
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In a discussion of small business administration, some of the most blatant hypocrisy in this document comes to light. “Some SBA programs are effective; others are not. The largest program in SBA’s history, the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), has been credited with saving millions of jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. A conservative Administration would rightly focus on saving small businesses during such a crisis.” (p. 778) These PPP loans were famously the ones that many of our representatives benefitted from and then had forgiven. So these officials are adamantly against loan forgiveness for workers trying to better themselves through educational pursuits, but perfectly fine with it for wealthy representatives further enriching themselves. If you’d like to learn more about this particular bit of hypocrisy, I did a post on it here.

Project 2025 also stresses the importance of securing favorable presidential nominees to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). To those who are unaware, the FEC is a regulatory agency that monitors campaign contributions to ensure that corporate interest through donations do not outweigh voter interest. However, the power of this agency was stripped in 2010 by the supreme court decision: Citizens United vs. The FEC. That’s why we’re now hurtling towards climate change and advocating for increased fossil fuel production…

​It seems the writers of Project 2025 are fans of this situation, and actually want to make things worse. Not only do they want to ensure that the Republican nominees remain steadfast in their reluctance to investigate campaign contributions, but “to the extent that the President has the ability to negotiate with the Democratic Party leader in the Senate, he should try to temper any choice of the opposition party to ensure that this individual does not have extreme views on aggressive overenforcement that would severely restrict political speech and protected party, campaign, and associational activities.” (p. 895) In other words, the goal is to nominate people who are going to turn a blind eye to corporate interest influencing our politics. WILD.
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​This final section continues the babbling we heard in the opening sections about the beauty of the Reagan presidency and all the wonderful things this project has in store for us.

So! Do you want to pay more in taxes? Do you want people to be denied care and die? Do you want to live under an autocracy? Do you want more unchecked corruption in our politics? Do you want widespread conflict and worsening violence overseas? Vote for Trump.

If not, get registered at vote.org and prevent this man from taking office. If you want a walk through of how to do this, check out my blog on voting here. I’ll do a blog touching on how this monstrosity of a plan came to be soon. Until then, thank you for reading, go vote, and happy jamming!

Image source: headcount.org

The coming election is looking like it’s going to be the same as every one that’s come before it: the most important one in history. Election Day is approaching fast and some state deadlines for registration are as early as this Sunday! As a result, I figured I’d do my part by offering up resources for anyone who would like to double check their registration or get registered to vote. As musicians, it is absolutely integral to our craft that we be involved and active politically. What we do is informed by our surroundings, surroundings that are heavily influenced by the political happenings of the country. Our ability to continue pursuing careers in the arts is directly tied to the results of elections. There are many who don’t see intrinsic value in the arts, and sometimes argue why so much money is being wasted on it… The bare minimum way to preserve your livelihood and the livelihood of your colleagues, is to vote. 

Now I realize you’re busy, and it can seem like a lot at times to add one more thing to the pile, but I promise that this process is quick and painless, and you’ll be thankful that you did it! You deserve to have a say in your future. Besides, I’ll get all the links you need together for you below, so all you’ll have to do is click a few times and input your information. The first step, checking your registration, takes literally 30 seconds!

The place I’ll be sourcing throughout this blog is vote.org. They have a super organized website which lists out everything you’ll need. I’ll link the home page here if you’d rather just go ahead and do this on your own: (vote.org) Otherwise, I’ll walk you through step by step below.
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The first step is to double check if you’re registered. Simply head over to vote.org to do this. I’ll link directly to the form to check registration here. If you’re registered, you’re all set! The only thing you might want to set up is mail in voting or early voting. These options are super handy if you are busy and want to vote on your own time, have something going on on election day, or won’t be in your registered state during the election. I’ll include how to do both of those things in the next two steps.

If you are not registered, you should be prompted with the form to get registered. If not, I’ll link it here. ​The registration process should take about two minutes.
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This option is wonderful for students going to college away from home, and anyone else who simply would rather just vote on their own time. I utilized this option throughout college because it let me vote in my local home elections while I was away.

You need to request an absentee ballot in advance of the election. Every state has a different deadline for requesting one of these ballots. You can find all deadlines for every state at this link here.

Voting by mail means that your state will mail you an “absentee ballot" you can fill out and return on your own time - although I would recommend doing it as close to when you receive it as possible! Apply here.

After you send in your application, you should receive confirmation via email about when you can expect to receive your ballot. Upon receiving the ballot, simply fill it out with your choices and follow the instructions for mailing it back.
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Early Voting allows you to head over to your polling location on a day earlier than the election to cast your ballot. The requirements for early voting also differ by state, and some states don’t offer this option at all. You can see a full list of the requirements and deadlines for each state at this link here.
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In addition to getting registered, vote.org also offers a wonderful tool that lets you get a look at the ballot ahead of the election to have more time to look into and research the options that will be there. It includes clarifications on what party each candidate is a part of, and even links directly to their websites so you can get a sense of their policies. I’ll link to the form to check this here. 

While people very likely already know who they’re voting for in terms of the presidency. It’s less likely that people are aware of their options for local elections. Therefore, I highly recommend this feature! It’s a huge time-saver, and way easier than googling around the day before to get a clearer picture of who you should vote for.
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I believe that’s everything you’ll need! If you’re interested, vote.org also offers cool features like reminders to get registered, pledges for those who aren’t yet eligible to vote, etc. I’ll link here again to the general homepage: (vote.org).

​I hope this blog was helpful, if not for getting registered, then at least to give you some more options and tools in preparation for November 5th! I’ll see you at the polls. Until then, thank you for reading, and happy jamming!