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CROW JIM: PROJECT 2025’S OBSESSION WITH REVERSE RACISM  
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Rick Perlstein
August 7, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ Blueprints for conservative rule can’t get enough of the smear
that fighting racism against Black people amounts to racism against
white people. _

Attorney Ben Crump speaks during the 60th anniversary of the March on
Washington at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Saturday, August 26,
2023, surrounded by families of people killed by police and
vigilantes., Andrew Harnik/AP Phot

 

When you split your time between writing the history of American
conservatism, and writing journalism about conservatism now, bouts of
déjà vu are an occupational hazard. Last week, one had me flashing
back to the days of disco.

Roy Cooper is the Democratic governor of North Carolina. His
lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, is one of the most terrifying
authoritarians in the Republican bestiary, the guy who recently told a
church audience that “some folks”—in context, he appeared to be
including liberals who want to “cancel you” and “kick you off
social media”—just “need killing.” Under North Carolina’s
constitution, this is the person who becomes _acting _governor any
time the governor goes out of state. That is why Cooper announced he
was withdrawing his name from consideration to be Kamala Harris’s
running mate—because every time he left the Tar Heel State to
campaign, he feared the same thing would happen that happened to Jerry
Brown after his re-election as California’s governor in 1978.

A colorful Republican record producer named Mike Curb had won the race
for lieutenant governor. He had been specifically recruited to run, he
revealed in his memoir
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precisely to make it harder for Brown, who Ronald Reagan’s advisers
believed would be harder to beat than Jimmy Carter, to run for
president while simultaneously running the state. California, you see,
had a similar provision in _its _state constitution. Just as soon as
Brown traveled to Washington to testify on the California gasoline
shortage, Curb started appointing Republican lawyers to lifetime
judicial appointments. You really must have just fallen out of the
coconut tree if you think the GOP only started hating democracy when
Donald J. Trump arrived on the scene.

I felt similar déjà vu when Republicans started calling Kamala
Harris a “DEI hire.” The charge is as old as the civil rights
movement itself. Back then, they called it “reverse racism,” or
“Crow Jim”: same thing as Jim Crow, only with the object of
oppression reversed—get it? The jargon changed, but the principle is
the same: Any effort at equity for minorities is “racism” against
whites: _affirmative discrimination_, as the title of a 1975 book by
the neoconservative Harvard social scientist Nathan Glazer put it. You
saw that last week when Elon Musk momentarily banned the jocularly
named “White Dudes for Harris” account from X, because, after all,
X doesn’t allow “racists.”

This same snot-nosed fallacy absolutely saturates Project 2025.

On page 692: The Biden administration’s “‘equity’ agenda” is
“racist.” On 342: “officials should protect educators and
students in jurisdictions under federal control from racial
discrimination by reinforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
prohibiting compelled speech.” Translated from wingnut-ese, they aim
to _compel _teachers in schools run by the Bureau of Indian
Education, or schools on military bases, not to speak about the racist
parts of the American past. To do otherwise would be racist. This
old-time religion threads its way through the chapters on the
Departments of Labor (582), Education (336, 342, 348, 358), HHS (495),
Treasury (708), State (88), Defense (103), the National Security
Council (51), USAID (279)—and, naturally, Dr. Ben “Totally Not a
DEI Hire” Carson’s chapter on the Department of Housing and Urban
Development (515). The solution, naturally, is “colorblindness.”

The same thinking is present in the document’s many attacks on
measuring “disparate impact,” the civil rights enforcement
technique of measuring discrimination by results rather than
impossible-to-discern evidence of intent. Counting how many minorities
are represented in a given institution in order to build a case that
they are being discriminated against is bad, because “crudely
categorizing employees … fails to recognize the diversity of the
American workforce.” We’ve noted that quotation before. Mark it
well. We’ll return to it.

IN LARGE PART, A REAGAN-ERA HERITAGE FOUNDATION STAFFER who fell
asleep on a Friday and woke up exactly 40 years later would be able to
return to work the following Monday. All he would need is a copy of
the Project 2025 version of _Mandate for Leadership _and a glossary.
He’d surely be delighted to read how much of the language he and his
colleagues came up with back then (“During the past 15 years there
has been a concerted nationwide effort by professional educationalists
to turn elementary school classrooms into vehicles for liberal-left
social and political change in the United States”) finds exact
echoes today (“Large swaths of the department have been captured by
an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical Left
ideologues who have embedded themselves throughout its offices and
components.”).

Other stuff, though, would require several years of Fox News highlight
reels before he could make heads or tails of it. Far more than in
1981, the date of Heritage’s first _Mandate for Leadership_, to be
a conservative in 2024 demands fluidity in an entire parallel reality.
This is no more harrowingly the case than in Project 2025’s chapter
on the Justice Department—from which our Republican Rip Van Winkle
would come away learning that one of the two or three gravest
challenges for law and order in the United States is “violent
attacks on pregnancy care centers.”

What’s a “pregnancy care center,” you—and he—might ask?
That’s one of those Potemkin women’s health care offices
pro-lifers set up to ensnare people seeking abortions and feed them
propaganda, to terrify them into forcibly giving birth instead. How
come you, as a nonresident of the right wing’s
tempered-steel-hardened information silos, haven’t heard about this
terrorism epidemic? Because it’s made up.

According to an investigation from The Intercept, not a single
pregnancy care center or its staffers suffered bodily
injury—although, after the _Dobbs _decision, several
were vandalized
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But a concerted pressure campaign on the FBI from Republican officials
against what Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) claimed was an epidemic of
“pro-abortion violent extremism” led to an almost tenfold increase
in investigations into abortion-related “domestic terrorism.” The
FBI doesn’t break down these statistics according to whether the
targets were performing abortions or preventing them. But given that,
during the same period, investigations the FBI categorizes as attacks
on “racially or ethnically motivated extremists” and
“anti-government, anti-authority” attacks _decreased _by over 50
percent, it’s safe to say that the FBI is not “ignoring” this
problem, but giving it a bear hug.

Back in January, when I interviewed journalist Jeff Sharlet about why
the transformations brought about by the Trumpian moment in American
politics are impossible to understand without knowing what happened in
countries like Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, he spoke of
fascism as a “dream politics,” an “aesthetic,” and an entire
all-encompassing “mythology.” This is what I thought back to
reading Project 2025’s chapter on the chief law enforcement module
of the federal government. The reason it is so chilling is the number
of times it precisely inverts reality, or just makes up its own
reality, in service of an argument that it is the _Biden _Justice
Department, and not Trump administrations past and potentially future,
that is guilty of “unprecedented politicization and
weaponization.” The supposed epidemic of terrorism against
“pregnancy care centers” is a perfect example.

Another thing a Rip Van Winkle might suppose is that among the gravest
problems the American justice system faces is “the department’s
use of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act to harass
pro-life demonstrators.”

The chapter singles out the supposed “harassment” visited upon one
Mark Houck, proprietor of the “unapologetically masculine”
Catholic lay ministry “The King’s Men.” The FBI “came to his
door with guns drawn to arrest the 48-year-old father of seven” due
to “a minor altercation with an activist who was harassing one of
his children in front of an abortion clinic.” This is contrasted,
without any supporting documentation, to the DOJ’s alleged
simultaneous habit of “dismissing prosecutions against radical
agents of the Left like Antifa.”

What you wouldn’t know from this account is that at his trial, which
he blogged for the faithful before riding the publicity to a failed
run for Congress, Houck _admitted_ to the assault.

ON PLANET HERITAGE, THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT is an anti-right Gestapo.
The alleged law enforcement crisis that gets the most space in the
chapter is familiar to any Fox News viewer, though you have probably
never heard of it. In 2021, at the height of the Virginia
gubernatorial race in which the Republican candidate made the supposed
ideological outrages of liberal school boards his central campaign
issue, the DOJ posted a mild letter of concern
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of violence
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liberal school board members. Project 2025 describes it as a
conspiracy of Attorney General Merrick Garland to target and harass
people who were merely exercising their “constitutional and
statutory rights,” in an effort to “chill the free speech rights
of parents” by citing “supposed ‘threats’” that, while they
were “politically convenient,” were also entirely “imaginary.”

_Imaginary_. This surely would be news to Loudoun County, Virginia,
school board members who received missives like
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people should have your [redacted] legs broken and fed to pigs” and
“A public hanging is in order.”

There is nothing on the danger to law and order represented by Donald
Trump firing an FBI director
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refusing to act as an instrument of his political will, but plenty on
how “the FBI engaged in a campaign to convince social media
companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of
Hunter Biden’s laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation
campaign.”

Not a word about the crisis for democracy represented by the harrowing
cascade of terrorism threats chasing election workers from their jobs
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(According to_ The New York Times
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this is something the current Justice Department is also largely
ignoring.) Not a _single word_ about white-collar crime, corporate
malfeasance, or securities fraud. Instead, Heritage fights the real
enemy: that Garland’s Justice Department “has consistently
threatened that any conduct not aligning with the liberal agenda
‘could’ violate federal law.”

Who, what, where, why, when? Gene Hamilton, author of the chapter and
a close associate of Stephen Miller, doesn’t say, though apparently
it has something to do with “state efforts to … prevent genital
mutilation of children,” and also lawsuits against “multiple
states regarding their efforts to enhance election integrity.”

Nothing concerning the remarkable success of the last several years
lowering the incidence of violent crime, why it happened, or how it
can be extended. This is because the Alternate States of America where
the Heritage Foundation plants its flag now suffers “catastrophic
increases in crime—particularly violent crime—nationwide.”

This invented epidemic is why “the next conservative
Administration” should seek more mandatory minimum sentences, and
“do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners
currently on federal death row.” It supports these calls by citing a
report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission on how “armed career
criminals are consistently sentenced below their minimum sentencing
guidelines.” Why? “The Biden Administration has adopted policies
that do not prevent armed career criminals, who actually commit
violent crimes, from committing those crimes.”

I checked the accompanying footnote 42. I learned that the study in
question lists data for the years from 2010 to 2019: two years before
Biden became president, but including three years when Donald Trump
was.

I WANT TO KEEP GOING, MAPPING OUT for you this fascinating parallel
world. There’s something addicting about it. I suppose this pleasure
is why people love reading Lewis Carroll, or why I end up writing
1,000-page books. I’ll rein myself in with one more, as my
exclamation mark: quite literally, a _blueprint _for how the federal
government can replace any city police force Trump decides is not
enforcing the law in the way he prefers. The section on how it might
go on in 2025 is called “Enhancing the Federal Focus on and
Resources in Jurisdictions with Rule-of-Law Deficiencies.” It is
especially terrifying given the new evidence of how close Trump came
to invoking the Insurrection Act in 2020, and Trump’s framing of the
Justice Department under his next administration as his very own
Department of Vengeance. Every municipal official in America ought to
read it—_now_.

It begins: “A disturbing number of state and local jurisdictions
have enacted policies that directly undermine public safety, leave
doubt about whether criminals will be punished, and weaken the rule of
law. While the prosecution of criminal offenses in most jurisdictions
across the country must remain the responsibility of state and local
governments, the federal government owes a special responsibility to
Americans in jurisdictions where state and local prosecutors have
abdicated this duty.”

It has a footnote to clarify whom they’re talking about: Portland
Mayor Ted Wheeler, for refusing federal law enforcement help during
the racial disturbances of 2020. Recommendations for miscreants like
him include: “Use applicable federal laws to bring federal charges
against criminals when local jurisdictions wrongfully allow them to
evade responsibility for their conduct. The department should also
increase the federal law enforcement presence in such jurisdictions
and explore innovative solutions to bring meaningful charges against
criminals and criminal organizations in such jurisdictions.”

Those affected could include elected officials: “Where warranted and
proper under federal law, initiate legal action against local
officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens
the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute
criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.”

Then it gets quite specific: “This holds true particularly for
jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based
on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be
offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.)
or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).”

Now note the oblique, chilling note on which the chapter ends: “The
National Crime Victimization Survey, which is the nation’s largest
crime survey … is of particular importance, and the department
should prioritize and sufficiently fund it. This survey provides the
only comprehensive and credible alternative to police reports for
showing who commits crimes.”

“_Who commits crimes_.” When I saw that, my body puckered. I was
back in June of 2015, and an infamous interview Donald Trump did with
CNN’s Don Lemon—that time when he bellowed, “Who’s doing the
raping? Who’s doing the raping?”

In every _other _part of Project 2025, “crudely categorizing”
Americans by racial groups is anathema. Counting people by group, in
order to prove the disparate impact of certain actions and
institutions upon Americans, “actively disrupt[s] the values that
hold communities together such as equality under the law and
colorblindness.” Except when it comes to disparate impact suffered
by victims of Crow Jim. Those Americans—_white _Americans—shall
be redeemed.

The chapter ends: “The demographic information that crime victims
provide through the survey about who commits crimes against them
enables such reports as ‘Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime
Offenders and Arrestees, 2018,’ which was published in January 2021
and finds that police are arresting those who, according to victims,
actually commit crimes.”

Leaves you hanging, right? So I looked up the survey. Right on the
first page comes Table 1:

[Infernal Triangle 080724 graphic.png]

Gene Hamilton doesn’t connect the dots. The Heritage Foundation
knows better than to state what all this means outright. “Police
reports,” you see, are controlled by cities; the National Crime
Victimization Survey, on the other hand, will be controlled by Donald
Trump’s Department of Vengeance. Should some other Democratic mayor,
during some future outbreak of social disturbance, do what
Portland’s Ted Wheeler supposedly did—let woke mobs go scot-free,
let those with the left’s “favored defining characteristics” get
away with mayhem (which in actual reality is a phantasmagoric myth
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bureaucrats will be ready to ride to the rescue. Then, they will look
at the statistics of _who commits crimes_. It certainly seems to me
that the Heritage Foundation is suggesting—someone should ask
them—that if expected arrests don’t match what the statistics say
they should, this would be a basis for federal intervention. Cities
that don’t crack enough minority heads will be violating whites’
civil rights.

That, apparently, is the sort of innovation we can apparently look
forward to, once the Department of Justice, at long last, is
“depoliticized.” Our Heritage Foundation Rip Van Winkle from 1981
might be horrified. Or he might be thrilled that things are coming
along so well.

_Rick Perlstein is the author of a four-volume series on the history
of America’s political and cultural divisions, and the rise of
conservatism, from the 1950s to the election of Ronald Reagan. He
lives in Chicago._

_Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
[[link removed]], 2024. All rights reserved. _

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