Democrats and the Harris campaign need you to fear Project 2025

At Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz claimed that “Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies.”

He had already made this claim — and been fact-checked on it. On Sept. 14 at a campaign event in Wisconsin, Walz told the crowd that Project 2025 includes a “national pregnancy coordinator” that would track all pregnancies in the country.

“Think about what they’re saying in Project 2025,” he said. “You’re going to have to register with a new federal agency when you get pregnant.”

Wrong.

“Walz is describing a policy that doesn’t exist,” wrote Samantha Putterman for PolitiFact on Sept. 17.

Right after Tuesday night’s debate, CNN reiterated the same: FALSE. That should be enough for most to believe Walz’s claim is actually false. But I’m a conservative, and if I let CNN do my dirty work for me, I risk being haunted by the ghost of Rush Limbaugh. So I looked it up myself.

“CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all,” reads the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership book. “Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.”

That’s all true, and not controversial. Most states already collect and submit abortion statistics to the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the same reason the CDC collects detailed data on hip and knee replacement procedures: data helps tell the policymakers what they should know so that they can make better decisions for the sake of public health.

Especially now that the number of abortion procedures varies widely state by state after the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court ruling, Project 2025 calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to “use every available tool” to ensure that states report abortion statistics of various categories, including enforcement in the same manner as Title IX.

Those statistics would provide a more consistent and uniform set of data for crafting public health policy not just for a Republican administration, but a Democratic one, too. It would benefit not just policy related to abortion, but pregnancy complications and maternal mortality as well.

Of course, none of that is as scary as what Tiananmen Tim tells us. Pregnancy registry? Yikes. We should be glad that’s false.

If Democrats were to draw their purported concerns with Project 2025 from the actual source — the Project 2025 book, which is available to read online for free — it wouldn’t be so terrifying. It would be mostly boring policy conversation you’d probably never hear about.

Boring, however, doesn’t attract voters. Fear does. Democrats need for Project 2025 to be terrifying in order to rally support. And they need its allegedly terrifying prospects to be synonymous with Donald Trump so that voters act to keep him out of office.

This reminds me of a tactic from the late Saul Alinsky of Chicago, the leftist author of “Rules for Radicals” remembered as “the father of community organizing.”

In the 1960s, Alinsky organized a coalition representing a struggling, predominantly Black urban neighborhood trying to force the City of Chicago to honor commitments made to the neighborhood on which the city administration had since reneged. Alinsky’s coalition targeted the city’s crown jewel, O’Hare International Airport, for headline-grabbing humiliation that would reflect poorly on the city administration.

It was to be — please pardon Alinsky’s language — the “world’s first ‘sh**-in.’” (Think “sit-in,” only with bodily functions described using an expletives censored by the print equivalent of a “bleep.”)

The coalition did reconnaissance work to ascertain the total number of toilets and urinals inside the airport’s restrooms. They also organized enough people who were willing to go into the airport (this was long before the TSA was created) with a book and either crowd every urinal or occupy every toilet all day (hence the book — to help pass the time) so that airport patrons needing to relieve themselves after a long flight would have, shall we say … nowhere to “go.”

“ … the laughter and the ridicule would be nationwide,” wrote Alinsky. “It would be a source of great mortification and embarrassment to the city administration. It might even create the kind of emergency in which planes would have to be held up while passengers got back aboard to use the plane’s toilet facilities.”

Though plans were in place if needed, Alinsky’s intent wasn’t necessarily to go through with the “sh**-in.” The true intent was merely to convince city leaders that they would. A detailed plan indicating that they’d readied 2,500 people to occupy every restroom and urinal was strategically leaked, and city leaders took the bait. Fearing “great mortification and embarrassment to the city administration” that would surely hit news wires, the city reaffirmed the commitments on which the mayor had reneged.

The “sh**-in” never happened because the mere threat of it — and all the ridicule that would follow — was terrifying enough to the city that it didn’t dare chance calling the coalition’s bluff. It exemplified Alinsky’s ninth rule of organizing to leverage political power against one’s adversaries: the threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

That’s what the Democratic Party, the Harris campaign, and the affiliated leftist special interests want: for voters to be so terrified of Project 2025 that voters don’t dare call their bluff on whether what they’re claiming about it is actually true.

I don’t hate or fear Project 2025 and its contents. I also don’t endorse it for multiple reasons. One: there is plenty in it with which I disagree. Two: Not all of it intrigues me. The parts I actually find appealing — restructuring executive agencies so they can work more efficiently and regulatory reform to minimize that awful government red tape — are the parts boring enough that even most on the left aren’t interested in catastrophizing them.

Unless, that is, they can morph those seemingly non-controversial parts into something that embodies the end of American life as we know it. At that, they’ve succeeded many times over.

That’s another reason I don’t endorse Project 2025. Even if I was on board with most or all of its proposals, the left has twisted it into something so horrific that the public will never be able to examine it through a rational lens. There’s no point in promoting a plan on its merits when public perception of it is incurably distorted.

At times, the active distortion by the left is just blatant. Here is one example:

Last week, after I wrote an analysis of several false or misleading claims shared by a local politician and a retired college professor professing expert knowledge of Project 2025, a presumably miffed reader from Robins tagged my account on social media site X, formerly Twitter, with no fewer than 12 posts, all of them alluding to the scary evils of Project 2025.

I’m a good sport. I read a few of them, including one about a Project 2025 proposal to reform some of the practices of Small Business Administration due to rampant waste and fraud.

According to the Project 2025 text, the SBA Inspector General identified over $78 billion in potentially fraudulent loans and grants from its Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) Advance program during the COVID-19 pandemic. The more-recognizable Paycheck Protection Program was estimated by the IG to have given out “at least 77,000 loans that were potentially fraudulent.”

That’s not the result of one-off mistakes. The Inspector General has described the SBA’s issues of waste and fraud as “systemic.”

The SBA’s disaster loan program already “suffers from problems of coordination with … FEMA disaster assistance.” Meanwhile, “systemic problems within this lending program undermine the SBA’s work,” which encompasses far more than giving out money for disaster relief.

Project 2025’s proposes addressing that gargantuan problem by working with Congress to see if its direct lending program would function better if offered by a different federal agency or a private-sector company.

In short, as stated in the Project 2025 manuscript: Take this lending program and put it somewhere where it can better serve by being better run.

The left-leaning Center for American Progress, which was founded by John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, produced a write-up on that proposal. The article seemed to forget that the proposal does call for the direct lending program to actually land somewhere and keep operating after it’s discontinued by the SBA.

Its gloriously frightening headline: “Project 2025 Proposes Eliminating Aid for Families and Businesses Rebuilding After Storms.”

A photo of that headline was shared on X (“the Twitter”) by a well-known Democrat political activist in Missouri named Jess Piper. Piper’s screenshot was one of the flurry of posts tagged to my account by the presumably miffed reader from Robins who would do well to spend far less time on social media. (That sentence can double as advice — good advice.)

Piper had added her own interpretation of the proposal to that same post, however: “Trump’s Project 2025 will end FEMA if he is elected.”

That refers to a completely different agency than the one in the proposal.

From “take this program and put it where it can be better” to “SBA will eliminate disaster aid after storms” to “Trump’s gonna end FEMA.” One proposal, three different claims. One from the source, one filleted to avoid context and one blatantly, patently false.

Alinsky’s playbook was once used by community organizers against the people who were standing in their way.

Today, the left is using it against you.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com