By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Much of Project 2025, the sweeping MAGA program that’s set to roll out nationally next year if Donald Trump assumes the presidency again, should be familiar to Floridians living under the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Screening lawmakers, judges and civil servants for loyalty and obedience so they march in lockstep with a sovereign chief executive? Check.
Working toward a new social order built on fundamentalist Christian values, including purging diversity from public education and the legal system? Check.
Policy-making that demonizes “the other,” be they LGBTQ, non-white, ex-convict, homeless or immigrant? Check, check, check.
“Project 2025’s manifesto brought to my mind the often-claimed lament of those in Nazi Germany that, quote, ‘I had no idea that they would do such terrible things,’” Harry Lee Anstead, a former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, told Florida Bulldog.
“Project 2025’s report makes it perfectly clear as to the terrible things the authors have in mind. It’s there in bold type,” he said. Anstead, 86, served on the state’s highest court from 1994 to January 2009.
“This is something that is horrible and sounds very drastic,” he said. “I guess I would never have believed, no matter how extreme politics has become, something like that would be proposed in the United States.”
A DESANTIS FACSIMILE
The Heritage Foundation’s 922-page Project 2025, a practical guide to fascism, is the stuff dystopian nightmares are made of. Close observers say DeSantis’s administration honors the spirit and furthers the aims of this master plan for a post-democratic America.
DeSantis was ahead of his time in joining forces with Heritage, a think tank of hard-right activists. They have worked intensively for decades to rid America of liberalism; now they see victory on the horizon.
“I guess I would never have believed, no matter how extreme politics has become, something like that would be proposed in the United States” – Harry Lee Anstead, retired Florida Supreme Court justice
Since taking office in 2019, the Republican governor has proceeded as if it’s springtime in a Heritage-designed, Christian nationalist state. DeSantis even allowed himself to be called “God’s protector” in a 2022 reelection campaign ad.
Developments on DeSantis’s watch “directly reflect positions and plans outlined in Project 2025 and make Florida a forerunner in implementing the goals of Project 2025,” said state Sen. Geraldine Thompson, D-Windermere. She provided examples in a statement to Florida Bulldog.
“His administration attacked unions and made it more difficult to pay dues, thus weakening these organizations,” Thompson wrote.
“The Legislature in the last session prohibited municipalities from putting in place ordinances that would provide safeguards for outdoor workers who are exposed to extreme heat and need water, shade and rest breaks.” Many of the outdoor workers are brown-skinned migrants from Mexico and Central America.
“Florida is experiencing a brain drain of faculty and students due to prohibitions against DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and civil rights activities within our learning institutions,” Thompson wrote.
“The state Board of Education adopted teaching standards that advance the idea that enslaved people benefitted from enslavement because they developed skills which could be used for their personal benefit.”
Thompson, 75, is an African-American former educator whose family worked in agriculture and construction in Perrine, Miami-Dade County.
COURT-PACKING AND ABORTION
Also, she wrote, the governor “took deliberate steps to pack the Florida Supreme Court with ideologues and members of the Federalist Society.” In 2020 Thompson filed a lawsuit that wound up postponing DeSantis’s promotion of one of them, Justice Renatha Francis.
The Federalists who curate DeSantis’s judicial selections are as reactionary as the Heritage crowd.
Their influence is obvious in the Florida Supreme Court’s 6-1 ruling that reversed long-settled privacy law in order to approve one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans. Justice Jorge Labarga, the court’s only moderate, dissented.
Still, the court didn’t go far enough to suit DeSantis. On April 1 the justices also narrowly approved, with a 4-3 vote, Amendment 4, a ballot measure that would add reproductive rights to the Florida Constitution if it wins 60 percent of the vote.
DeSantis called Amendment 4 “very, very extreme” and said the court “dropped the ball” by putting it on the November ballot. He’s collecting money for a marketing campaign to convince voters they should reject this attempt to restore the Roe v. Wade abortion standard.
Notably, Project 2025 lays out a scheme to end access to abortion nationwide – with or without an act of Congress.
DESANTIS’S HERITAGE TIES
Reacting to national polls that show Project 2025 is unpopular, Trump has tried in his own inimitable way to distance himself from it.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” he posted on his social media website, adding, “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
However, “Trump’s own appointees wrote Project 2025, his own political action committee advertised it as his plan, and his name appears in it 312 times,” historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her online newsletter.
DeSantis has a similar problem: too many Project 2025 and Heritage connections to be coincidental.
In June 2023, when DeSantis was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, his senior advisor David Dewhirst joined Project 2025, also called the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. At that point DeSantis must have been counting on Dewhirst and Heritage to facilitate his transition from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C.
MOMS FOR PROJECT 2025
DeSantis has retreated from the national stage, but Heritage people remain supporters and players in his administration. Florida-based Moms for Liberty, the book-banning squad of foot soldiers in the governor’s war on so-called “woke,” is one of about 100 groups on the Project 2025 advisory board.
Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College in Michigan, is a member of the Heritage board of trustees. He’s also a big fan of DeSantis, who has been a guest on Arnn’s radio show.
The Republican-led Florida House is paying Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow at Heritage’s Roe Institute, $75 an hour to represent its interests to an ongoing panel, the Tallahassee Democrat reported. The Financial Impact Estimating Conference is assessing the fiscal footprint of Amendment 4, the abortion ballot measure.
And Heritage Action, the foundation’s advocacy arm, has two registered lobbyists in Florida, Karen Jaroch and Catherine Gunsalus. Last year they worked to push through a bill that eliminated ESG (environmental, social and governance) issues from consideration in awarding state contracts.
“We turn ideas into bills and bills into law,” Heritage Action boasts on the Heritage.com website.
Florida Bulldog wanted to report on DeSantis’s public position on Project 2025, but a request for comment emailed to his media office went unanswered.
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