Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 790: The Man Behind Project 2025’s Most Radical Plans

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

https://www.propublica.org/article/project-2025-trump-campaign-heritage-foundation-paul-dans

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Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. This is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome mad. Today is the day you're listening to this. I want to say September something. It's a Thursday. Next Thursday. What is next Thursday? I better go with around September 2nd or 3rd. 2nd or 3rd, something like that.

You know, hey, check your phone, guys. That's what day it is. It's gonna be the 4th. Yeah. I'm guessing. I'm already guessing. Let's see. I'm gonna do the fifth.

Fifth. We were both wrong. You know what? Yeah. Today is that day. The fifth. So today we're going to be covering a ProPublica article. Tom read this article for patrons.

This article is called The Man Behind Project 2025's Most Radical Plans. And this is a story about a gentleman by the name of Paul Dans. Paul Dans has a very interesting story that gets told in this article. They sort of talk about it's a biographical article, but in this article, they do the great job of explaining the dangers of Project 2025. All of that's important, but isn't it a lost opportunity from his parents not to name him Daniel Dans?

So it could be Dan Dans. Yeah, Dan Dans would be good. I think Dan Dans. How do you go with Paul Dans? It's gotta go, you gotta go Daniel Dans. Daniel Dans, and you gotta do something D in the center, so he's triple D. Oh yeah. God damn it.

That's just, I mean, like, you know he was cursed from the beginning, I guess is all I'm saying. This is a guy who is a lawyer, starts out his career as a lawyer. He initially goes to school as like a public planner and then becomes a lawyer. And then his law stuff takes him into federalist society, which is a huge, to not talk about how the federalist society

has shaped this country is to miss how the Heritage Foundation has shaped this country is to miss how the Heritage Foundation has shaped this country too. Yeah, the Federalist Society has absolutely been instrumental in dismantling a lot of what we have built up over the years in terms of protections. It's because the Federalist Society is the nut jobs who say that the only reading of the Constitution

is a perfectly historical textual reading. Originalist, yeah. And so anything that isn't that, but then they don't believe that, right? Because when it's for their own causes, they kind of punt on that shit. They immediately say, no, no.

Really, it's a living document when it's convenient. Exactly, exactly right. So, but like, this is a guy who his whole life, it sounds like his whole life, every place he went to from MIT and on to law school, everywhere he was at, he's like, man, I don't fit in, I'm too conservative to be here. This is a guy so conservative that no matter where he went,

and now granted many colleges are more liberal than other spaces in the world, but his whole life he was an outsider. And he was an outsider because of his political views, because they were too conservative. They were far more conservative than any of his peers or any of the people in his space. That I think when you start off in a place

where your views are underdog views, I think that has a really strong influence on how you see what you think of as your fight for your views. Cause this seems like it really strongly influenced like the way he sees his role as sort of like an ideological warrior. And I wonder if like constantly being in spaces

where everybody disagrees with him, but he doubles down and solidifies and concretizes his ideas as a result, rather than challenges those ideas and softens them. I wonder if that isn't part of what like sort of helped push that ideological shift for him even further, right? I wonder too, if there's like a certain type of person who when confronted with other ideas around them, considers those ideas and maybe changes their view

based on whether or not those ideas are good or bad ideas. And then there's some people who no matter what, just double down. Yeah. You know, you're in a, he's in a position of underdog that you mentioned throughout the article, but it's a position of underdog that he likes to create.

It's a myth he creates about his own life. And, you know, it's him talking about the working class. It's him talking about being a, you know, an average guy, you know, coming from a middle-class background. When he didn't come, he came from an affluent suburb. He had a parent who was a doctor, someone who taught medicine as a professor. He was, you know, he had, he lived in a nice suburb.

He grew up and was able to go to MIT. You know, it's not like he went to a cheap school. It's not like it was a JD Vance ship, you know? It's telling a story about yourself that you can buy and believe whether or not it's true. And I think there's a lot of people who try to redefine themselves, and don't get me wrong, like, I mean, sure, there's so many ways

in which you can do that, but it's rare to hear one of these people, especially this guy, because what I think he's trying to say throughout the whole thing is this whole bootstraps narrative, right? I feel like throughout the whole piece when they're talking about his,

the way in which he came up, they're leaving off the punchline, but you know for sure that the way this guy would finish that punchline is bootstraps. Yeah. Don't you think, don't you think it's interesting, Cecil, to your earlier point,

that like all of these politicians, they all want to gain access to working class credibility. And it comes from these people who do not want to be, nor respect, nor want to help the working class. They want the credibility of the working class. They recognize that the working class and the middle class have a certain kind of credibility in the world that they cannot have.

They want access to that credibility. They don't wanna help those people. They don't wanna be those people. They actually build entire arguments, economic arguments, to say, here's how you stop being those people and get rich. Right? The whole idea of getting rich is to stop being working class. And yet they want to tap right back into that working class whenever it's politically convenient

for them, despite all of their efforts being driven toward getting the fuck out of the working class. It's, you can see this play out. It's a great point, Tom. You can see this play out with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who used to be a bartender, and watch her tweets and look at her tweets and see how many people respond with, you should go back to being a bartender. You should go do this. And she never backs away from the fact that she was a bartender. And someone recently tried to post her picture. Again, you see, they do this thing where they try to call out these false narratives

in people's backgrounds, because their backgrounds are full of forced narratives and it's all projection, right? So they think everybody's lying. So I saw a post recently where someone tried to post AOC's child at home. And it's a small house. And she says, they say, don't let her lie to you.

She didn't grow up in Queens. Here's her house in some nearby suburb or whatever. And her comment to this was, I'm not ashamed of where I grew up. I grew up here because my mom knew that if I got into better schools, I would be more able to be a more successful person. So she worked two jobs and bought that house.

So I know, yes, I lived in that house, but she sacrificed a ton of her life knowing that the reason why she wants us to live in a different zip code is because of the school district. And to be able to learn and understand and be smarter was a way more important for her children was way more important to her than just working one job. And so they try to shame AOC all the time as a working class person, but at the same time call that working class a myth.

And so again, I think it's all projection, but you get a chance to see it play out just to specifically and even just one representative. You know, it's funny, just as a quick aside, that's so much the same story that like my dad had for my brother and myself. When I moved in with my dad, I was in first grade. We lived in the clearing neighborhood in Chicago,

which is right by Midway Airport. And the schools around there were not particularly good schools. And we lived there for a few years, about four or five years. And then my dad, who's a single dad, he got together enough money to move us out to the suburbs because the schools were better. It was the only reason.

He'd lived his whole life in Chicago, born in Chicago, that was his family home. I don't think he ever would have left that house. I don't think he ever wanted to leave that house. But he moved us out to the suburbs to get us to different schools, and then he got a second job. And he always worked two jobs,

and sometimes he worked three jobs. He sometimes was a janitor and a bus driver and his day job to make sure that we had access to those schools because he recognized that, well, he's not a guy who ever had an education. My dad didn't go to college. That he recognized that like, hey, this is the path that he understood to upward mobility.

And he felt that obligation. And I think it's really interesting when people on the right, it feels like a stolen valor. When they try to like- No, you're absolutely right, yeah. Right? When they're not working class and they don't know working class people

and they didn't grow up working class and they try to gain access to that credibility while deriding those actual people. Sure, no, I think that's so true. And you can also hear this gentleman say time and time again, all these people around me are too conservative, but are too, all these people around me are too liberal or too left. But when he talks about the people around him, listen to the things that he's buying into. They take great pains to say that he is, he felt very proud that he was one of the few people

in his New York subdivision or sub, like house, maybe condo that got the New York Post. They talk about how when he was, during the Obama administration, he would spend hours at the kitchen table refreshing the Drudge Report. Yeah, can we pause there? How obsessive is that?

That's pretty obsessive. Like that stuck out to me a little bit and I wanted to talk to you about it because like Project 2025 to me is an obsessive document. It's 900 pages of just like some of the most ghoulish policy proposals from such a hard and uncharitable and unempathetic worldview. And it doesn't strike me as odd that that comes from a guy

who sat obsessively, because they describe it for hours obsessively like refreshing his computer, what can I be outraged about? What can I be outraged about? Just detracts. It definitely feels like it fits right in, but it also feels like it fits right in with the conspiracy theorist mindset that runs both of those organs that we rank. I mean, the judge report, I don't even know if it's a thing anymore. I think it probably is, but it's certainly not the type of site it was at one time. It was a certain point in time. The judge report was the site for conservative news. It was

the site. It was Breitbart. It was before, before it had, before anything it was, you know, and now you have truth social and Twitter, I think are both the places where you would get most of your conservative news, I think, are both the places where you would get most of your conservative news, I think, would be where I would suggest. But these people back in the day, it's like in Drudge Report was the place. And so Drudge Report had a ton of unfiltered,

unchecked, unverified sources that would just shit stuff out. And then he would write about these unverified terrible stories. The concept of Obama's birtherism gets its start on the early internet through these places that did unverified stories, right? This is the start of this trash journalism. I mean I use journalism in the fucking loosest sense of the term here, but it's trash where nobody bothers to check, even though the answer's right in front of you,

it's just because it's salacious and it gives you one thing that you can throw darts at on a person, so you keep it up there and you keep hammering at it, you keep talking about it. And he talks about in this article, he's quoted from a podcast of basically saying he was a birther.

Yeah, right. Like none of this backstory, this is exactly the sort of like evil villain backstory. Yeah, right, yeah, like you expect him to live in a lair. I was reading this and I was like, well, when does he move into the volcano? Like at what point does he capture James Bond and saw him in half with a slow moving laser? Like I, none of this, this all feels like he pets a cat slowly while staring at a bank of monitors, you know?

I think he probably... A hairless cat. Yeah, right. He's probably got like one metal hand, you know? He's got one. And a poison tooth. Yes, yes! Yeah, this was, this is just exactly the kind of like backstory that you would expect from a guy who is going to

get into government for all the wrong reasons. But interestingly, also for very ideological reasons. Yeah. When I say all the wrong reasons, it's because I disagree with all of his ideologies, right? But like, I also want to point out that this is a guy who in some ways got into government, I hate to say this, but to make a difference

within government because of how he believed and what he believed in. And like, there's a part of me that still is like in seventh grade civics class that says like, there's like an innocent yes to that. You know, there's an innocent, like that is how we should, that is the right motivation to get into government and to work in government is to be change. But then when he gets into government, it's like he didn't just get into

government and say, look, well, here's my ideas. Let's banter and argue them back and forth and see whose ideas emerged victorious from the crucible of notions, you know, like instead he became this like Machiavellian like a guy who like rose through the ranks so that he could fire people and intimidate people and just became just the most awful operative within, honestly, a deep state. Yeah. And this is a formation of the actual real honest to God deep state.

And project 2025 is a blueprint for the creation of a deep state by a deep state operative. Which, which- That's fascinating. In some ways, again, this falls back on that projection, right? They are projecting what they think is happening. They're claiming what they think is happening and they're saying, this is a deep state and we're going to stop the deep state by making our own deep state. Yes. We are going to replace a deep state that doesn't

exist with a deep state that does exist. That follows our rules. My head is spinning right now, but seriously that's inception deep state. But that is genuinely what they're doing. And he gets involved in government. He starts out as a lawyer, basically working for the Trump campaign, early on as the Trump campaign. And then he says there's a lot of energy

in that Trump campaign. And he's right because there was a ton of energy and a ton of mobility in that Trump campaign. And he's right because there was a ton of energy and a ton of mobility in that Trump campaign. And he thought for sure that when he passed his name off and signed his name off as somebody who was a huge supporter of him and worked on his campaign as one of these people, that he was name was gonna get called.

And it wasn't, he said, applied for a job at the DOJ and they just passed him over. And his thought, what went through his mind was, I was too MAGA. But what went through my mind when I read the story was, every single person on Trump's cabinet and every single person he employed was incompetent. So the idea that they didn't find people

who agreed with them means that they weren't even trying to replace these people because they had no idea what they were doing. Yeah, and that- I think that's the real answer. I don't think that he got passed over because he was too mega, because he eventually got a fucking job in the government.

Yeah, your read is, I believe, exactly right. And I think that that is bolstered by kind of the, his explanation and his rise to power and really like everything that happens next is he recognizes that, hey, actually the entire operation, the entire bureaucratic and administrative operation that undergirds the federal government is within the Trump organization, a trash fire.

It's run by incompetence. It's run like nobody thought he was gonna win. So, you know, it's just a bunch of establishment guys that are there and like the Trump administration can't get things done and nobody knows what to do. Nobody thought this was gonna happen. They caught the car, to use your expression, right? They caught the car.

So the entire administration was in complete disarray. It was full of incompetent boobs who didn't know what the fuck they were doing. So of course they didn't find him. They couldn't find their ass with two hands. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And like, what he really is a guy who's solving for, the problem he is solving for is,

that can't ever happen again. Guys like me, if I'm him, I'd be like, guys like me don't get passed up because in a good, well-run organization, and this I agree with him, the first and biggest priority is to find talent. He is a talent within that organization, that's undeniably.

He's an evil person with bad ideas, but it doesn't make him not a talent if those ideas are the ones you wanna amplify. He has a talent. I think he recognized like, okay, one thing I can do is work the system from inside to build a better system, to better find guys like me, to better accomplish these policy positions.

I can refine the machine. It's like he's dangerous because he's a good manager. I was really thinking about that. He's dangerous because he's a really good and effective manager. He's a smart enough guy to create those devices that you were saying that could help find people like him and do it efficiently. And one of the things that you said really stuck out to me when you said, you know, the original Trump transition, he was surrounded by a few guys that were sycophants that were playing, but I don't think that none of them

had the managerial ideas that this guy had. None of them had this sort of vision, right? They, like you said, they caught the car and then they said, well, what can I milk out of it today? I'm not thinking about creating a dairy farm. I'm just looking to fill this jug. How can I fill this jug today? And I think that's how Trump has thought about politics

and his whole life is how do I fill this jug today? Not how do I create a sustainable dairy farm? And so what happened was is all these people who Trump surrounded him with all kind of had the same idea. Well, how do I fill this jug today? And they all did that stuff. They fucked up and they fucked up small scale. But then there was also just a group of people like he says

that were just career Republican guys that really were, if you look back on that time, we're really our savior. They saved America because they were in the way and got rolled over when Trump got mad. But they were, it took them too long to roll over too many of these people to get rid of them so that he could get people like this Paul Danz in there. Yeah. They could get him in there. Suddenly everything changes and he does eventually get in there and he, but it takes him till 2019 to get a there, suddenly everything changes. And he does eventually get in there,

but it takes him till 2019 to get a job, a real job. Once he's in there, he's pretty efficient as being an Axeman. He's pretty efficient in this place where he's put, where he can start moving people and changing people around, but it's too slow even for him. He's still surrounded by people who are career workers in this department that are pushing back on him.

And what he wants to do is be able to create a database. His goal now is create a database of like minds like him, what he calls a conservative LinkedIn, have those people on speed dial for the moment Trump gets elected. So he can then walk into these departments and be like, cause he, they make a great point. They say they don't have to fire 50,000 workers because that project that that it's not project F schedule F or whatever it's called.

Schedule F allows them to basically take people who've had protections for years as government workers and can them a lot easier than they could before. They used to have to go through a lot more red tape. This executive order that Trump put in place at the end of his presidency, seriously two weeks before the election, we're talking like really far at the end of his presidency and that doesn't really go anywhere because they never had an opportunity to really use it and then Biden came in and said get that thing out, get that thing out here. What are you doing?

The moment Trump becomes president again, he's going to reinstate that schedule F and then they're going to be able to walk in. And they say this really great point, which is they don't have to fire 50,000 people. They just have to make an example of a thousand people and 49,000 will fall in line. Yeah. And your point is exactly right. And then the article makes the same point, is that the bureaucratic and administrative machinery

that is the day-to-day working of government is actually how everything gets done, right? So when I think, I thought about this in relation to businesses that I've been involved in, right? Like you've got people at the top who make the big 30,000 foot view decisions, but like none of that creates any action. None of that makes changes occur.

Someone has to do all the work of all of that stuff, all the, to enact the policies. I think there's an entire machinery of people across so many different departments and divisions that are responsible for their piece of that work. And this involves appointees, political appointees, and to your point, like career employees, and those career employees and appointees

may be of one or another political stripe, but the system kind of works. It's always just kind of worked. The idea now is to break the system. The idea is to break the system so that it can be remolded to fit the partisan power structure that just got elected. That's not been the case before. Before the big bureaucratic machinery was guys who wake up and go to work.

And maybe they're Republican and maybe they're Democrat, but like these are people who just wake up and go to work. The way that they want to restructure things in order to accomplish the policy positions is to fire their way and scare their way into remolding the machinery to match the vision at the top to get those things done faster than ever before with no bureaucratic roadblocks. We were saved, you were right, we were saved by the slowdown caused by the incompetent boobs at the top and their inability to manage down to the bottom and get things done and get them done quickly.

Things didn't happen. A lot quickly. Things didn't happen. A lot of shit just didn't happen. If they fix that problem, you're looking at like Greece lightning, man. And this guy's vision is to create a lightning machine, is to create like a fucking blitzkrieg of a bureaucratic and administrative workers who will carry out the policy wishes of the administration

faster than ever before. And the other podcast that I do, the Lawful Assembly, Craig Redd, part of Project 2025, I mentioned this on last week's show, but released this last Friday. It's a show on Project 2025's Department of Homeland Security. And Project 2025, their plans for Project 2025 are to really change how we distribute visas to people who've been human trafficked. They wanna stop doing that. Oh my God.

They wanna stop, they wanna change. Of course. They wanna change how we allow people asylum in this country, we want to lock them up. They want to create a hundred thousand beds in detention to detain these people. And why do they want to do that? They want to do it because a for-profit group

is going to come in and create those beds. So you and I and every other tax paying American are going to be chipping into the kitty to pay so that we could lock people up who are asylum seekers coming across our border and we're going to pay somebody to get rich off that. Someone's going to get rich doing that. There's so many things that they can change without congressional approval. And one of the things they say very specifically in this chapter is they talk about how they need to start from day one. And their plan is to not get congressional approval for some of these big heads instead

make them acting heads. Cause if they make them acting heads, they can continue to do the work of creating the sausage of this horrible fucking machine. But they don't need to sit down in front of anybody and answer questions in front of the reporters in a congressional committee. They can just fucking do the work for a while until maybe they have to, but they can at least hit the ground running day one. That's in this project. And I know that it's not just said one time.

They say it multiple times. The guy who wrote the project, the piece that I'm talking about is the guy, is Ken Cuccinelli, who was a high level guy in Trump's Department of Homeland Security. He was a high level dude. And the people that are up higher than him, Kelly was one of those people.

Kelly's not coming back to that administration. Right. Right? So the people that were above them, I know that they keep on trying to pass this project off as not, it's not a part of our Republican strategy, but man, the people who wrote this, this is a resume to hire me for this job.

That's what this is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a resume saying, I have a plan. I have a one year, two year, three year plan. Put me in coach. I can win the game for us. Yeah. And it is most terrifying because one of the chief architects is a guy with such intimate familiarity of how the government works from the inside. Yeah. You know, like it's one thing for a guy like you or a guy like me with no knowledge of government to say, well, here's our plan.

We won't come up with anything actionable. What really is different about this is they can say, hey, you know what, like to your point before, we don't actually need to have, we can go with acting heads that's faster and that's replaceable if necessary to replace them. And they can accomplish the same things and we don't have to have this step

of getting congressional approval on that. So we can hit that. When you have that level of knowledge of how the institutions are run from the bottom, you can accomplish so much. This is why we should be scared. I was really, as I was reading this article, what really scared me the most

is how I think this could happen. I think in a lot of cases, we look at politics and if you're me, you might be guilty of saying, all right, all that's scary, but you'll never get it all done. Most of the time. And what I've told the kids for years is like, look, most of the time in the first four years, most politicians are lucky to get one big thing accomplished. Right, yeah, yeah. But I don't believe that with Project 2025, because what they're doing is setting aside a blueprint

to accomplish things outside the mainstream system of accomplishing shit. How do we build systems within our bureaucracies that will have the effect we're trying to achieve without having to take legislative action? That's terrifying. Well, think about how the Republican Party over the last four years have tried to enshrine

more voter fraud in our system. Yeah. Right? Think about what they've tried to do. Not only are they trying to take votes away through multiple means, closing ballot stations. I just saw a story this week that Governor Abbott removed a million people or something from the voter rolls, saying that they were ineligible voters, making... He made a statement saying they were out of state people or they didn't live here anymore,

and we just removed them from the voter rolls. But there were some people who were posting online saying I was removed and nothing happened. I'm just happy I just moved. So there is a possibility if you live in Texas that you need to check to see if you're actually registered to vote because they might have removed your fucking name because you live in a blue area

or you're a young person or you're known to be somebody who might be a Democrat, these are people who are trying to fix the next election and they're trying to do it from the inside. This is the deep state. This is the deep state. These are people who are working from the inside to try to fix stuff. Again, projection on their part,

there was never a push for this before the 2020 election, but the moment the 2020 election happens, they start to pretend that all this stuff is happening. They want to try to silence voices as often as they can. And now they're talking about how they want to be able to slow down the process and reject results. Yeah. You know, this is happening all over the place.

They knew that if they got these small jobs, this could make a huge impact in the next election. Project 2025 is just that writ large to a bunch of different places. Yeah, and like, you know, this is a deep state construction manual. How do we build a deep state? But even more importantly, how do we get the different pieces

of the deep state machinery to work together? So, you know, one thing that I think has often saved America in many circumstances and certainly in the last few years is that, you know, you might get somebody over here who's corrupt and is willing to take people off the voter rolls, and you might get somebody over here who's willing to, you know, not sign the fucking marriage certificate, but there was never connection

because there was never a coherent strategy. Yeah, good point. What I worry about with Project 2025 is that there is a clearly laid out vision for how to connect these fucking dots together and to build something that all the parts fucking rub together just the right way. So it's not just some fucking nut job over here

or some asshole in some fucking county or some governor who's off, but how do we, if you can get all those pieces all running together as the same piece of machinery, then they can accomplish so much more. And who's going to stop them? The systems that stop the deep state, if they're run by the deep state, fill in the blank, man.

Who watches the watchman kind of a thing? These are the watchmen. These administrative pieces of our day-to-day governmental lives, these are in many cases the watchmen. So these are the systems that we rely on at the very ground level to make sure that the I's get dotted and the T's get crossed and the fucking forms get filled out properly.

And if we change all that, so that it all is pointing in one direction, it's so much more powerful. It's like if I fire like one BB, big deal. But if I fire fucking eight pieces of buckshot, really big deal. That's a big deal. It's coalescing that matters.

Yeah. I know for sure someone's probably gonna comment on this and say, cause I've seen this comment before, people are pretending that this is, this is the laughs version of QAnon, right? This is the left's version of a conspiracy theory. This is all bullshit. None of this stuff is gonna happen.

I encourage you to read this article though, because you can see that this man did this work already kind of in his own department. So he sort of became the de facto head, pressured people to leave, forced people out, and then immediately started changing things and no one wanted to push back on him because they were afraid of losing their jobs.

He already did what they are planning. And I'm just gonna lay out one more time what they're planning, especially in this particular article, what his plans were. Get a president in who's gonna reinstate Schedule F to allow you to fire people more freely in the government, people that they consider entrenched people.

That Schedule F gets reinstated. They immediately then look for replacements for people who they see as obstacles to the things that they want to do. So they look around these places, they look around these, these places, they put acting heads in these places that can come in, look around and say, that person's a problem, that person's a problem, that person's a problem, that person's a problem. Call them in, say, yeah, thanks for all your service. Here's a bucket. We're going to scorch you up by the end of the day.

And they fire those people. And then they flip through their conservative LinkedIn Rolodex for always Trumpers, people who are very, very loyal to this idea. They instate them into these positions and then suddenly they've taken out every squeaky wheel in the department and they've terrified anybody else who could possibly be a squeaky wheel. And they've made essentially a reinforced area where they can commit whatever

kind of atrocity on the American people that they want to do, insulated by government that you can't really access because we're, this is not what we vote on. We don't vote on this stuff. These are people who are career governmental officials. So they get hired. Most of the time they get vetted. They get passed between different presidencies often, and they they don't lose their job. That's the beauty of some of this stuff is that there can be a Republican working for Biden, but still working for the government and still trying to achieve goals that are set out by the government, even if they might disagree with them. This would create a system where no one disagrees, because if you did, you're

going to lose your job and we're going to go back to that conserve the Rolodex and we're going to find exactly what the fuck we want to put in your position. Yeah. And I want to address that because that's exactly right don't want to address the idea. It's very misguided that project 2025 is the left wing conspiracy or it's a left wing version of QAnon. Here's the key. There are two key differences. One, you can look at the goddamn document. It is a plan.

You can just read it. You just read it. There's no QAnon document that has been created that we are reacting to. When you listen, it's a bunch of fucking anonymous tweets written in crypto nonsense language interpreted by idiots, right? It's a bunch of claims about what is, right?

QAnon is a series of claims about what is. It is not a plan to execute. It's a big fucking difference. QAnon are a series of truth claims about what is and who people are doing these things. It's all truth claims. Project 2025 is a plan of action. You can see who wrote it. You can just look and see who wrote it.

Their names are there and you can see who is that guy? Oh, that's a guy who was part of the previous administration. That's a person of power and influence. Then you can read what these people say about what their fucking plans are. You can see them being interviewed, talking about what their plans are. None of this is an invention from whole cloth from the left. The left isn't coming up with this 900 page document. The left isn't interviewing themselves and finding out this information. We're interviewing the guys who wrote it,

who are saying this is what we wanna do. You just have to listen to them. That's a big difference. It's a big fucking difference. It's not a conspiracy theory to say, hey, what is this plan? Oh, well, I can fucking read it. Well, I have read parts of it

and I've read numerous articles about it. And I've read numerous excerpts from it, lengthy, lengthy, contextual excerpts from it. It's full of plans, man. It's full of plans. And it dovetails. The other thing is you can look at history. We just had a Trump administration.

What did those people try to accomplish? What did this guy try to accomplish? Look at schedule F. Right. Look at that. That's not made up. He already has already done one. He already did it at the end of his presidency and they didn't know how to use it. They found Chekhov's gun.

Right. They just didn't know how to fire it before the act was over. Right? Exactly right, dude. They just didn't know how to fire it before the act was over. Yeah. Right? Exactly right, dude. They found it though. And you know what's going to go off in the next act if Trump gets elected? Fucking Schedule F, bro. Let me tell you, man.

And it's not like one of these boogie men that like, oh, look out, Schedule F. If you don't like wish two times in the right direction, it's going to get you in your sleep. Like it's a genuinely shitty way to treat people who have made their career in government. You know, I'm sure there are arguments for, yes, sometimes people get too entrenched in their jobs

and they can control too much stuff, and they can, in some ways, control things past where the politicians want them to control it. I'm sure there's arguments to be made there. Right. But there's also to open the tap and just be able to get rid of people who know how this is done, know how the sausage is made, know how all of this bureaucratic stuff works. We know people that are in government.

We know how hard their jobs were and how hard their jobs exponentially got once Trump got in office Massively, you know, so so the fact is is that in a lot of ways the American people are safeguarded By the people who are in office safeguarded both ways, man It's it goes both ways it goes because there's not this immediate flush and waterfall of new shit that happens. Everything has to take time. The time can sometimes be difficult. Like we talk about climate change. It can be difficult and suck, right?

We want to change things very quickly. But man, in order to change things, you have to go through a lot of work to do it. Yeah. And I think, you know, the people who want to come in and if Trump just wants to say, I want to do this thing and then it just doesn't get done, that's actually good for the American people. That's actually a net good for the American people that some things are slow and they take a while. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the thing is like things that are important, maybe sometimes should be slow so they can be done well and with consideration. Yeah. Right. You know, and it is not a conspiracy theory to say that the Trump administration

will destroy and dismantle the EPA and the, and the, and the department of education, and it's not a conspiracy theory because that's what he said out loud. That's what many people, not just Trump, but that's also what many Trump surrogates and others on the far right have said that they want to do. Look at that straight out of 2025. You're absolutely right. It's what's right out of there. So like when they parrot each other back and forth and I'm just have to listen not to,

I'm not interpreting a fucking crypto bullshit tweet from an asshole. I'm just listening to what this guy said out loud. And then I'm reading what they write. And then I can read what he truths. And I can see what his plans are. I mean, as far as his plans can be made. Like, there's not a conspiracy here. He has told us who he is and what he wants to do since 2015.

And people are determined not to listen to it. I don't understand that yeah, because what we keep Getting proven back to us time and time again is he already said he would do that That's who he turned out to be He's not a surprise people treat Trump and his administration Weirdly and a see slight don't understand this they treat him like he's this wild card who's making decisions. Nobody would have guessed that. But a hundred percent of the time he telegraphs it out loud and everything. A hundred percent. The only difference is he has a team of people behind him

who constantly try to gaslight us into thinking that's not what he's trying to do. Yeah, I guess maybe that's why. I mean like that's the one thing he has is that he has a team of people who double-speak gaslight us constantly Yeah, I mean he had a press secretary who said within the first four weeks that he's gonna use alternative facts That's right. I mean first four weeks that we're trying to truth. They were trying to gaslight us So I think I think at this point people don't want to believe it, right? They don't want to believe it but the one thing we have on our side is the incompetence of Trump

and the incompetence of the people that he surrounds himself with. And I want to close with a quote. If you don't mind. This is at the end of the article. They were talking to a person who served in the Bush administration. I actually, it's in this piece.

So I'll just read, I'll just actually read the attribution that's in this paragraph. Quote, the last administration was a joke and they had a real problem recruiting. A Washington attorney who served in the George W. Bush administration, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution against his firm told me, quote, who the hell would jump into this clown car driving toward a cliff? Are people really going to come forward? Quality people? Not a fucking chance. quote, who the hell would jump into this clown car driving toward a cliff? Are people really gonna come forward?

Quality people, not a fucking chance, end quote. This is a guy who knows that he's not gonna get the best people. He's gonna get people who listen to him. He's gonna get people who buy into this stuff. And as this guy says, who worked for a previous Republican administration, those aren't quality people, man.

Yeah. Those are bad people. But he's, but Trump learned the last time not to get people who will say no to him. He learned that last time. Paul Danz will never say no to Trump. That's right. So if Paul Danz is part, Paul Danz stepped down from Project 2025, but he even says in this, my work is done here. Like you said, I think in the previous podcast, earlier this podcast,

I wrote a plan. The plan is done now. I don't need to be here to be like, well, there's the plan. You can just go on. And what Trump is, what Paul Danz is hoping for is that Trump, if he gets elected will be someone he points to and says, you're going to be part of this and understand that this is the architect, one of the main architects behind this program. And if he's, if Trump's elected and this guy gets as any a modicum of power, we need to look the fuck out. All right, that's going to wrap it up for this episode of cognitive dissonance. We will be back on Monday with a full show, but we're going to leave you like we always

do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter mommy issue issue, hypno Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo quasi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water downward spiral, brain dead, pan sales pitch, late night info docutainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex,lex, Foot Massage, Death in Towers, Tarot Cards, Psychic Healing, Crystal Balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, Aliens, Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues, Temples,

Dragons, Giant Worms, Atlantis, Dolphins, Truthers, Birthers, Witches, Wizards, Nuts, can't then you can all relax because it's just a case of me being nuts shaman healers evangelists conspiracy double-speak stigmata nonsense expose your sides thrust your hands bloody evidential conclusive doubt even this thanks for tuning in if you enjoyed the show consider supporting us on patreon this. Dissonance Pod. This show is CAN-credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm on their hotline at 617-249-4255 or on their website at creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org. Thanks for watching!