As the election looms, we want to raise an important political question: what are the conditions we organize under?

As we go to the ballot, we are rarely voting for a true avatar for our values. Instead, we are voting for somebody who will make political decisions based on a combination of their own personal values, the coalitions they form with other governing officials, the realities of the political power they hold, and ultimately, the demands of those they represent.

It is often that fourth piece which goes ignored: the making of demands. At its core, organizing is just that: making demands. But what happens when the people you make demands of just don’t care?

Organizing gets a lot harder.

As a Black American whose mother was born in 1949, and whose great-uncle was a lifelong organizer, I grew up on the stories of the 1960s. But the era of the 1960s did not spring from nowhere, it arose from decades of organizing against segregation, after a century of Jim Crow laws intended to suppress Black Americans’ participation in public life.

When Black Americans protested Jim Crow laws, they were protesting against violent, sadistic racists. Put bluntly, they stood no chance of changing the minds of the people they organized directly against.

After all, segregationists loved segregation. Nowhere is this made more clear than in the despicable words of George Wallace: “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

And so Civil Rights organizing was DIFFICULT. Why?

Their goal was not to exert a powerful demand against an ultimately human and empathetic government.

Instead, civil rights organizers faced off against an authoritarian, proto-fascist system of segregation that reduced them to second-class citizens.

And so these organizers sought to have their humanity recognized not by their representatives, but by the federal government that contained those states, by publicly highlighting the brutal response to their assertion of their human rights.

Part of the reason that modern organizers have such an extensive playbook available to them is that the Civil Rights organizers of the 1950s and 1960s had to work hard to innovate, had to make deep personal sacrifices, and ultimately, chose organizing tactics many of us might flinch at today, including allowing young students to protest directly in the sights of violent Southern police departments’ hoses, batons, and dogs.

One of the core tools we retain is an appeal to federal regulators.

Project 2025 would dismantle those tools.

Project 2025 looks to bring back these brutal organizing conditions, and establish them on a federal level. Under Project 2025, every liberal non-profit you know, every leftist political movement, we all get most of our basic organizing tools completely dismantled.

There is no way to actually summarize the entire mandate of Project 2025 in an email, so let’s focus on one key aspect: Project 2025 aims to entirely dismantle the administrative state, a system of government employees who interpret, implement, and enforce everything from corporate regulations to civil rights laws.

As we organize for better funding and more inclusion in schools, Project 2025 looks to dismantle the Department of Education, dramatically scale back “the federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools”, and immediately move to end Title IX protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

As we organize for better conditions, affordability, and protections for renters, Project 2025 would “end the use of ‘disparate impact’, a key tool for enforcing the Fair Housing Act and other civil rights laws”, and transform the office of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) from one that prioritizes public housing, first-time homebuyer assistance, and other programs that assist working class families and prevent racial discrimination into one that instead prioritizes contracts and profits for private developers.

As we organize for better working conditions for laborers like performers, Project 2025 would roll back regulations on businesses, eliminate antitrust enforcement, and all-but eliminate the National Labor Relations Board, the government agency responsible for protecting workers and unions and punishing corporate abuse.

As we organize for universal childcare, Project 2025 looks to cut or dismantle programs like Head Start that fund childcare and other educational resources for children across the nation.

And while we have voiced our disagreement with the Biden administration’s lack of action against Israel for its ongoing genocide in Gaza, while we have stood in solidarity with student protesters, Project 2025 has promised to further concentrate the power of the federal government in the hands of a president who has threatened to deport foreign students who join pro-Palestine protests, and who has - over the last 8 years - celebrated, valorized, and even encouraged violence against protesters.

4. TakeAction Roundup

Project 2025 isn’t just a slate of bad policy that impacts every issue we organize on and countless more. It is a dismantling of the powerful federal systems that we can appeal to to intercede on our behalf against the powerful corporate interests that seek to transform our society and our lives into profit machines to feed their mountains of gold.

Our fight for better regulations and protections shifts dramatically against us if the federal agencies responsible for those regulations and protections are dismantled.

Project 2025 is an existential threat not just to our rights, but to the systems that protect them, not just to the funding of our public infrastructure and programs but to their right to exist, not just to the regulations that hold back corporate power but to the very idea that corporate power CAN be regulated.

In solidarity,

Mattias Lehman (he/him)
Narrative and Communications Director