Project 2025 Expert on How We Are Headed to a Constitutional Crisis & Why We Needed to Take Project 2025 Seriously from the Beginning
01:31:20 Share

Project 2025. That's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it. It feels like we're living in a science fiction novel. The plans for what we're seeing now started in the first term.

Project 2025. Most of us, and I hold myself accountable for this, just didn't read it. We didn't take it seriously. This is an attempt to transform so many things about the government and about society. You have contributors to the project all over the administration. They are accruing all this power and they're taking over these bodies that the president hasn't traditionally had control over. They want to use all of these things to support his political ambition. Trump wants to have all these powers for his own reasons.

And they want to have all these powers for these sort of ideological reasons of both constitutional law and also the Christian worldview. And so they found a way to work together because they have a shared interest. It feels like it's only a matter of time before we see the executive branch try to defy a judicial order. And if we get there, that's a really dangerous moment. Suddenly you have an authoritarian government. I worry about people getting violent in the streets because they no longer see another way to express themselves or another way to check power.

Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. Today we're going to be breaking down a little more about the state that we find ourselves in in this country. No matter which side of the political aisle you're on, America is being reshaped. There are things happening

right now that are being implemented that many say have never been implemented before, whether you call it a constitutional crisis, whether you call it reducing the government, whether you are pro the things that are happening or against them, it's really important to know what's happening. We're going to be doing a deep dive into Project 2025.

Many of us heard about it during the last campaigns, before the last election. Many of us brushed it off. David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and he wrote this sweet little book called The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America. Guess what, people? It's really happening. It's a thing, and it is being implemented. The president does know about it, and there's some really interesting things for us to learn about.

about what it means, how we got here, and why it should be important, no matter who you voted for, what it means for the future of America and for the future of your family. So we're very excited to welcome David A. Graham to The Breakdown. He won the Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting for his coverage of the 2020 presidential election. He's written for a bunch of places. As I said, his new book is The Project.

Please welcome David A. Graham. ♪ Break it down ♪ - Okay, David Graham, welcome to The Breakdown. - Thank you for having me. - We respect so much the writing that you do, the thinking that you do, and the contributions that you make to really everything coming out of the Atlantic.

surrounding politics, what's happening in 2025, all these things. Before we do a deep dive into your book, the project, give us some good news. And I don't just mean like tell me, you know, what smoothie went right when you tried to blend it this morning. Give us some good news to start with so that we can start this conversation from a place of building on stories

some aspect of understanding hope in this context. Yeah. I mean, I think that the, um, the last few months have been really bleak and, uh, the current moment can feel really bleak. Uh, but I think people are, um, tuning in after some time of tuning out. I think people are paying attention. I think there's real engagement, um,

And, you know, I think there is a conversation about the country that is helpful. For a long time, I think a lot of Americans have sort of assumed that things are the way they are and they will stay that way. And there's maybe more of an understanding now that we have to work for that and we have to sort of push for the vision that we want. I'm not yet convinced. I'll think about it. No, I mean, like, and I think, no, and I'm not saying your good news is bad news, but I think that

Look, I think that that speaks to the place that a lot of us are at. And I think what I'd love for you to also kind of frame for us is,

many people didn't want to know as much about what's going on in the government as we now have to. And for many of us, we were raised with a consciousness of the civil rights movement being not long ago. Uh, the, the equal rights amendment being not that long ago, you know, for those of us who are my age, like we lived through my parents sweating and crying through Carter and Reagan and, you know, like,

Many of us knew things, but most of us got it. I mean, my dad read the newspaper every day. He read the New York Times every day. But for many of us, what the first Trump administration looked like was we all of a sudden knew what the president was thinking and doing at all times. So-

Where is that balance between being aware, right? Like I knew all about apartheid. I knew all about, you know, all of those things, all the protests. Like I knew about movements that were happening globally.

It just feels like name a country and I could tell you something that the current administration has said, done or thought. And I'm sure that it was like that with every president. They were always doing things. Why do I know about it so much? And is there a line between we know too many things and it's good that we know all these things? Yeah, I think we know the wrong things a lot of the time.

Or, you know, the government is acting so erratically that we learn about something that they haven't thought through and then they change their mind about it. You know, tariffs is the most obvious example. So you're trying to keep track of things that are changing so quickly. There's no deliberate process.

seemingly. And, you know, I think one of the things that is important for me about the book is there is this chaotic level coming from the president himself. And then I also think there is something going on below the surface that is more systematic. But I mean, I feel like I am too informed about politics and I am a political reporter. I don't know how other people possibly deal with it. It seems like every

opposition party says that there's a drastic remaking of the government and that this side is way offside and they're changing things for the worst and it's a catastrophe. How do we balance the regular partisan objection to what's going on with the actions that are being taken right now and the changes that are happening that we should be aware of? I think one way is to separate out policy and sort of procedure.

So there's a lot of things. And I think when we talked about Project 2025 during the 2024 campaign, it was often on the level of sort of some of the policies. And, you know, Democrats would talk about certain policies that they thought were unpopular. But I think what sets this apart is the way that they have a plan and methods and are executing on reshaping the government, like the way the executive branch works and the way people interact with

And I think that makes it important to understand and that makes it a little bit different from just the sort of back and forth, like they want to do this and it's bad kind of talk that we get. One of the things that's fascinating to me about people's fascination with President Trump is

is that, well, obviously a lot of people really like him. So I also want to be clear about that. And I understand, to the best of my ability, mostly with the help of The Atlantic, I understand why Kamala Harris did not win. So I'm okay there. I'm not trying to rewrite history, as it were. But one of the things that's very surprising to me is you mentioned the word chaos. And

You know, it's not unlike, you know, when you go to have a tooth removed, right?

You want to be numb, right? And you don't want to know the intricate details of the needles, the saws. You don't want to know. And there's a certain confidence you have when you go to the dentist's office that you know that if something intense needs to happen, you're going to be shielded from, for lack of a better word, chaos, right? So there's something about the transparency and understanding

you know, I would say almost like this perverse embrace of chaos that is not only a feature, in my opinion, of this president. Every president's got their thing, and I could complain about all of them if you give me, you know, enough time.

But there's something about, you know, the getting behind this kind of chaos that I find very dysregulating. Meaning I wanted to believe that even if you like Trump or, you know, support his fiscal decisions or whatever, you think the government should be run like a business, a bad business, whatever.

I was willing to sort of like put that aside. The place that's really confusing for me is why are some people digging the chaos that's coming out of Washington? I think there's so many people who have reached a point of, um,

just jaundice with government. And they think that it's working so poorly that this is no real, you know, it's either, this isn't any different or that it's just so bad that they're happy for it to work poorly. It's a little bit of a, like almost like a Leninist, like heighten the contradiction sort of thing.

And, you know, there are these people who just want to burn it all down and they think that the, you know, the government needs major changes. And so if you say to them, look, this is breaking the government, they say, yeah, and like, that's what I want. This is a good thing. And, you know, I think that's a really blunt way to approach it because a lot of these change, you know, some changes are good and some changes are bad. And I think to simply say change, I like change is not, not

Not a very thoughtful approach, but I do think it is the way a lot of people feel. They're just like, screw it. And the question is, if we are changing things, what is the alternative plan? Because especially when you have Silicon Valley model approach, which is move fast, break things, if there is nothing to replace it, like if there's no childcare and we're removing...

quick start, fast start, head start, sorry. What are we replacing it with? And are we just leaving this next generation to not be educated? And you can argue whether or not that's a great program, whether it has corruption in it, if it's the most effective way to spend tax dollars. But we do know that without some form of early childhood education,

People don't return to the workforce. There's a drop in productivity. You don't have a two-income family. It becomes harder to make ends meet. There doesn't seem to be a plan in place for the next vision, but perhaps Project 2025 is that vision. Talk to us a little bit about that.

both the breaking things without a plan to replace them, and maybe we'll move on next to what are the things that we should be most concerned that are being implemented? I think like Project 2025 is interesting because often the diagnoses are convincing or like bipartisan, and then the prescriptions are I think much less convincing.

Yeah, you know, they argue that Congress is really broken and that's something, you know, I think you would be hard pressed to find a political scientist of any stripe who didn't agree that Congress has been in really bad shape for a long time now, but is making the president more powerful and giving him all the power going to solve that problem. I'm skeptical. You know, another example would be civil servants like

You don't find a lot of people who just love the federal bureaucracy and just praise it. But if you replace that with a lot of people who are chosen on the basis of loyalty to one person, is that going to make services better? Is that going to solve the problems that people have? I'm skeptical of that. That's a great point. And I think that leads to sort of my next question. You kind of named it already.

What I seem to hear most from people is, well, it was this messed up before and you just didn't know about it. They all lie. They're all assholes. They're all, you know, philanderers. They're all like fill in the blank. What's wrong as just from an intellectual perspective, what's wrong with that argument? I mean, there's a certain truth to it. And I think it's important to acknowledge that there are a lot of problems. But I...

I think there's a lot of things that are going right. There are things that people depend on all the time. Social Security is a really valuable tool for a lot of people. A lot of people depend on Medicaid. They depend on Medicare. They love going to national parks. Their child goes to a school, and their child needs special services, and that's paid for by money from the Department of Education. So I think it just paints with a really broad brush to say, well, it's all broken, and they're all bad people.

The federal government is a lot of things. And I would hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There's something you can be in control of, and that's restoring your sense of balance amidst outside chaos. Calm can help with the big three, anxiety, stress, and sleep problems. I think you can probably relate. Meditations can help untangle the day's chaos in your brain. Breath has a direct link to your anxiety, and you can feel more at ease and in your body with easy and helpful breathing exercises. Calm's the number one app for sleep and meditation, giving you the power to calm your mind and change your life.

Everyone faces unique challenges in their daily lives and mental health cannot be using a cookie cutter approach anymore. Calm offers a wide range of content and programs to help you navigate whatever's going on in your life. There are meditations to help you through anxiety and stress, boost your focus, build healthier habits, take better care of your physical well-being. There are sleep stories, which actually Jonathan and I both love, sleep meditations and calming music that can help you

drift off to restful sleep quickly and naturally. Also grounding exercises. Maybe you're hearing more about these. These are guided sessions that use sensation and movement and breath work to help you relax and reset. There's also fantastic expert led talks that help you handle grief or improve self-esteem, care for yourself and relationships so much more. Calm puts the tools you need right in your pocket and can help you dedicate just a few minutes each day to live a happier, healthier life.

Stress less, sleep more, and live better with Calm. For listeners of our show, Calm is offering an exclusive 40% off a Calm premium subscription at calm.com slash break. That's calm.com slash break. ♪

For those of us who, you know, chose to study this stuff in whatever level we've chosen to study it or live it, for me, I have a minor in Hebrew and Jewish studies, which means a lot of World War II and a lot of, you know, the politics and the climate, you know, really from the 1800s, you know, on leading into World War II. You know, there's a lot of things that feel really uncomfortable, right?

about many of the changes that are happening right now. Can you explain for people who may not remember, you know, also kind of middle school social studies is what we used to call it,

What is beautiful about the United States system, in particular, the three branches that we have? Why are they beautiful and important, especially by virtue of the fact that they were founded in opposition to a monarchy? Right. They were founded in opposition to a monarchy and designed in opposition to some extent to each other.

You know, it was laid out that Congress would pass the laws and the executive branch would enforce the laws and the judiciary would interpret the laws. And that is, you know, the balance of power has shifted a little bit over time. The president has become steadily more powerful, you know, since the founding, but especially in the last 150 years or so.

But this has meant that it's very hard for anyone to take total control. It's very hard for them to abuse power too far before something comes back and checks them.

And it's also hard for them to sort of corrupt services that are there and things that people depend on. Any president has only so long. You know, they have four years or they have eight years. And their power is limited. And that has worked not flawlessly, but I think generally fairly well. There's a reason, you know, the U.S. has been so resilient for so long. And the idea is, you know, we have the opportunity to...

change leadership, if we don't like the way things are going, often the economy is what determines a change in leadership or a change in party. We have the ability to advocate on state levels, right? And have representatives then who, in theory, are representing each of the states. You know, you brought it up first. Is there really a possibility for a third term? Boy, I don't know.

I think, well, I have been surprised so many times in the Trump era that I hate to say, no, of course not. I mean, the Constitution is very clear, but a lot of things that seem clear, I think this is one that more than a lot of places, it's very hard to imagine. Is it that hard to imagine, David Graham? Like, think of all the things. I never imagined I would know when the president was on the toilet. That's true. Well, that's not in the Constitution.

No, but just in terms of things that I could not imagine, like, I mean, unprecedented things occur. And he has this genius for finding places where, you know, it seems like the rules are clear and he just does it and nobody stops him. What is going on? Like, how much can I protest and hold up a sign that.

and believe that I'm doing something. Is that the way to do something? What are people supposed to do if they feel that constitutionally something is going wrong? What are we supposed to do? Protesting is actually surprisingly effective. I mean, the political science shows that mass protest really does change people's opinions and it changes politics.

But it's scary when you have people who are aware of the power protest and who are aware of the short time they have before there is potential backlash and are determined to make as much of that as they can. And, you know, with the understanding there will be backlash. They want to move the ball forward as far as they can before that happens. And so there's like certain imperviousness to public opinion. And I think that's really daunting. Let's just touch back on the third term for a moment. Yeah.

In order to do that, they have to change the Constitution, which they can present an amendment. What is the process of changing that and how many people need to agree? I don't think I'm going to be wrong about this, but I'm not sure that an amendment has been approved this fast ever, and certainly not recently. We've two-thirds of the states. Now I'm going to reveal myself as being an unqualified political reporter. But

But you need, I think, two thirds of the states and three quarters of Congress to approve an amendment. The numbers aren't there. I mean, I don't think there's any chance of amending the Constitution. And what they claim is they have figured out legal workarounds for how well because he didn't serve the terms continuously. Actually, it's OK for him to serve a third one.

And what they hope is that if they go to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court will ratify that. And I don't know, you would think they wouldn't, but as you said, you could imagine there's lots of things that you couldn't have imagined. I mean, look, in the first term of Trump's presidency, there was already...

conversation, which I thought was preposterous at first about really just the distribution of justices and the distribution of justice as it were. And, you know, indeed, and I think this, this leads into a little bit of the project and your book and the conversation around Project 2025. This isn't like a haphazard, whoops, let's figure it out as we go.

The plans for what we're seeing now indeed started in the first term and were, you know, really explicitly kind of rumored to be laid out in something called Project 2025. The thing that really, you know, gets my goat is how much, you know, when people would bring this up,

Trump and sort of all the people around him, you know, were adamant that like, this is not a thing. We're not affiliated with it. Ignore it. Blah, blah, blah. I've never heard of it before. I don't know what you're talking about. Right. Like we have no idea what you're talking about. And so happens, as we say in my family, so happens that this is a thing. And I do really get annoyed when, you know, even when Signalgate happened,

Like, don't tell me that I didn't see what I saw. Like, just don't do that because we're going to find out. And like, you know, when the explicit transcript was published, it's like, I don't know, that bothers me that, that JD Vance and everybody was like, this didn't happen. There was no information. It's a lie. It's like, no, but it did. Like, why would I have to live like this? So, um,

Can you talk a little bit about what happened with Project 2025? What happened with sort of when it started circulating, the distance that was created from it and what we are now seeing? And like, and I'm just going to say this, like, it's OK, meaning this is what they wanted to do and they're doing it. So like we're just like kind of living it. The ridiculousness of that distancing. I wonder if you can sort of speak to how this sort of came into your orbit and, you know, really made you want to

to write about it and really help people understand it. So I had read bits and pieces of the mandate for leadership, which is the main document during the campaign, but not the whole thing. And I thought I had an idea. And then I sat down after the election to read through the full 922 pages. And I was just struck by what a complete vision it was and how different it was from the little bits and pieces I had heard.

There's a list of contributors to the project, 70-some people. Of those, about a quarter served in the first Trump administration. Some of them were members of the cabinet. Russell Vogt, who's kind of the prime architect, was the head of the Office of Management and Budget at the end of Trump's term. He's back in that role now. Even as Trump was saying that he didn't know anything about the project, Vogt was serving as the chair of the platform committee for the Republican National Convention.

He probably knew. I think he knew. I bet he didn't read it. I believe that. When he said he didn't read it, I think that could be true. I think he doesn't read a lot of things, though. But, you know, it wasn't credible. I mean, I think one of the strange things about this is even as you had Trump saying, I don't know anything about it, you know, here we have this big plan, and they put it on the Internet in 2023, 18 months before the election, for anyone to read. And, you know, most of us, and I hold my—

myself accountable for this as one of the people just didn't read it. We didn't take it seriously. And so I'm trying to make up for that now, I guess. Let's go through some of the most surprising things as you started to read it. What stood out to you the most? I think the scale of their scheme for taking over the government was the thing that stuck out first. I mean, the

They have a lot of things they want to do. Every administration has things they want to do, but they have thought really hard about how to do it. So laying off tens of thousands of civil servants or converting them to political appointees, these are things that are hard to do, but they had thought about how they were going to do it, and they had a process. They thought about how to use the Justice Department as a tool of these things, how to take sort of the little-known offices like OMB or like the Office of Presidential Personnel and turn them into the engines of really executive power growth.

And then from there, the way that they see this as a way to remake all of society. I think their ambitions are really broad and they have thought about the mechanisms and the way they can use the government to kind of coerce people along those lines. So I think it's more radical, perhaps even than some of the impressions we got of it were in 2024.

It just, you know, they thought about how every department could contribute to this broader whole and how to change the way we interact with the government and how, you know, that means like the way we live our lives, what we're learning and what our children are learning, how we're getting our health care, all these really direct things that are not just like what happens in Washington, but they're what happens in our lives. I'm always struck by the delta between seemingly very smart people, often very

in the tech world, but in the business world who are very supportive of this administration and the phrase, let them cook. Let's see how this goes. There are some things that are actually... And then the other side, which is adamantly opposed to it. And I really struggle to understand how credible people...

don't see eye to eye and not only do they not see eye to eye, but they're so vastly apart from one another. So when you like, I'll steel man for a second, reshaping the government. Well, government is too big. It hasn't had a massive restructuring in a long time. Yes, there's some issue of doing it too quickly and not knowing what you're cutting. But like,

Tell me why I'm wrong about the government needing to be downsized and restructured. I don't think you're necessarily wrong about government needing to be downsized and restructured. But I think to think of it from that point of view is to put the cart before the horse a little bit. I think the question is, what do you want the government to achieve?

And what are the best means to do that? And you'll get civil servants and you'll get Democrats admitting, well, maybe there is some blow. Maybe there are some places where we could reshape this. I think there's something to that. And I think a lot of the diagnoses, like I say, they point to things that are real problems and they want to deal with them. And they have some, in some cases, ideas that I think have wide appeal. In other cases, ones where I think they will not help.

You know, they're right to say that there are places where the government is politicized. I don't think that politicizing it in the opposite direction is really a good solution to that. It's just a little bit of a spoil system. Well, they did it, so we're going to do it too, you know? What's an example of a place where you think...

Right idea, wrong execution. I mean, I was going to talk about social security. I could talk about that for forever and a day. No, because that's one of the programs that I have had direct interface with because my father passed away 10 years ago. And so my mother gets, you know, social security and like, because of that can't get health insurance. Like, I mean, it's nuts. Like I live in a bureaucratic mess as the child of, you know, someone who's receiving social security benefits and like

Even I'm just going to be super honest, and I have tremendous respect for anyone who has to work for any government office like or has had to deal with things like Social Security and dealing with the American public and the questions that we ask when we call them. But the the level of bureaucratic nonsense involved in me just trying to figure out what.

are the benefits? What does she like? There's just not. And I'm thinking like, this is just me. I'm one person just trying to, to interface with a system. Everything's going to AI now. I can't even get a human being like, forget about to make a return to like pottery barn, you know, just to like try and speak to someone about my mother's health insurance. Right. So to me, like this is a level of bureaucratic nonsense, which

I was just raised, you know, as the child of liberals as like, that's just the government. It sucks. Socialism is the answer, but it doesn't work either, you know?

Yeah, I think there's a way to rethink those rules and to restructure them. I mean, Social Security is an interesting example because it's like the big elephant in the room that I think Project 2025 doesn't really grapple with. And I think that's because people, they understand that it's something that is so important to so many people that they're afraid to touch it. But it's very hard to think about how you're going to solve the federal budget if you're not

thinking about social security. There are these places where the rules need reform or where, again, you can talk to people in the system and they'll say, yeah, we're handcuffed by whatever paper requirement. We're handcuffed by the rules and the way they've sort of accreted over time.

Getting rid of them, though, if you fire those people, there's no one to work through at all, and that's kind of the situation I'm worried we may be in if a lot of these federal employees are simply just laid off without a replacement. Veterans Affairs is mimicking that experience, too. Right, exactly. One of the things that I like to do is watch documentaries, and there's a documentary called The Family, and I watched it several years ago, and it really freaked me out because it was about...

You know, it was about a... At that time, what I assumed was a very paranoid, you know, dramatized...

explanation of an infiltration of a very, very specific kind of right-wing Christianity that was influencing the government. And the documentary makes a very, very strong case for it. You see it with the breakfasts and over the years, the various evangelical movements that have moved into the White House in ways that I think make a lot of Christians uncomfortable as well.

But there's an aspect to Project 2025, which I think disturbs me the most. And that is this sort of notion that there is an authority and there is an authoritative perspective on what constitutes family and family values. And this is a place where, you know,

Publications like The Atlantic understand that you don't have to agree with something to support its right to exist and to be appreciated, right? Meaning we're not looking to all be the same. True liberal values mean that you tolerate beliefs that are different than yours. And that's the definition of liberal, right? Of a true ideological liberal. What you read when you look at Project 2025 is a very explicit approach to

that seeks to define family, family values in a very specific way that, you know, as someone who's 2% of the United States population, definitely doesn't speak to me in a lot of ways. And I find it really distasteful, you know, any notion of

religion coming into my government. And I know that it's there. I understand it was an extremely important component of the founding of this country. I understand that. And I understand that that's the value of many people in this country. I understand I'm a minority here, literally. But can you talk a little bit about some of these kind of like family values issues and where these are seeking to challenge

what we hold true about being free in America. - Yeah, so Kevin Roberts, who's the head of the Heritage Foundation which convened this, says that liberty is not doing what we want, but what we ought.

which seems a little Orwellian to me. And when his idea of what we ought is very much based in Christianity. Russell Vogt says like this was founded as a Christian nation. We need to bring it back to that. And he says, you know, liberals describe me as a Christian nationalist and unlike many pejoratives, I think that's right. I am a Christian. I'm a nationalist. This is very much the view I have of the world.

They want a, they say a biblically based vision of the family. And that means generally a father who's the breadwinner. That's not in the Bible. And like, sorry. Yeah. They see this. I mean, they describe that as a biblically based family. They want fathers, the breadwinner. So no feminists allowed. Right. Women are, it doesn't say women shouldn't work necessarily, but the focus should be on motherhood. Families should have lots of children. The children should be gender conforming.

You know, LGBT people are pushed to the side, pushed in the shadows. I mean, in this case, they literally want to write trans people out of the language of the government so they can't sort of officially exist.

They would like social services to be provided through churches. They advocate, I mean, an interesting idea, they talk about wanting workers to have a Sabbath available to them. You know, they say people should have time to spend with their family, and that means they should either have a day off or get paid time and a half. But it's interesting they phrase that as a Sabbath, and they say, of course, the default for this would be Sunday.

So funny how that works. Well, and all the Seventh-day Adventists are like, wait a second. They think schools should ideally be, well, parents should have a lot of say in schools, but they would like the system to be more focused on private schools and particularly religious schools.

They think the federal government can fund these things, but there should be vouchers. The state should be able to design the system as they want. If they want to instill biblical values, biblical values, Christian values in the school systems, that's just fine. So it's all focused around, I think, this very Christian approach. It feels like we're living in a science fiction novel when you describe it this way. Like, it sounds so cuckoo pants crazy, like to use technical terms, just because like these are things that

you know, that I, again, as a minority in this country, like these are things that I hold so sacred. And I always have understood that most of the country is Christian. That's just true. And I'm like, I'm okay with that. Like, I get it. We think holidays at Christmas and Easter, everything's closed. Like we work around, you know, but the notion that there is some sort of moral,

righteousness or that there is really a role for the government in telling me what my family should look like.

That's outrageous to me. Right. And I think, you know, we've seen conservatives who have pushed some of these same ideas. You know, Reagan did this. Of course. Bush did this. But I think there's a willingness to, I mean, combined with a sort of grab of executive power, there's a willingness to use the coercive authority of the federal government to make people live this way and to push things in that direction that is a step beyond what we've seen from any other sort of past social conservatives who've had any power. I have a couple of questions that come up just in terms of like,

Let's think through this logically. So you want it to be a single family household in terms of the breadwinner. The male should be the primary breadwinner. But currently, two family households are struggling to survive.

They're not making enough money. So how does that transition work? Bringing back manufacturing and manufacturing jobs is not going to solve that problem, even if it was possible, which we don't know that it is. Most people say it's not. So you go ahead and you remove child care.

likely as an attempt to keep women in the home to raise the children. Is that what we're seeing? Unhappy women who don't want to be raising their children is not the people you want raising those children. If they want to be out, let them be free. There are places where they move towards something like childcare. So they say, there's different visions. I mean, there's interesting places where you get debate within the text. So some people say, well, we should be providing sort of stipends to family members to care for children. Now,

We can guess what that means. That's going to be mothers or grandmothers probably. But they say, you know, it should be in the home or failing that, you could have childcare at work. Now they say, you know, that you'd be in the workplace, not at a third site so that people can be closer to their children. That's an idea that I think might have widespread appeal. But if you're saying, you know, we will not have childcare, we're going to cut things like Head Start, that's where you start to see a conflict.

I mean, you know, they talk about the idea that we should restore jobs where one breadwinner can feed the family and have sort of dignity of work. But I think they're kind of hand-wavy about how to achieve that. And it's a, you know, there's a hollowness at some of the economic ideas where they want to, they offer some ways to give workers more dignity or maybe even more power in the workplace. Not quite on the level of labor unions, but moving in that direction. But if you don't

solve exactly the question you're talking about, about how do you feed people into incomes, which they don't. I'm not sure how it works. What are those steps? Because what struck me during the interview between Musk and Trump was Trump's praise of Musk as such a fantastic job cutter. Yeah, they talk about...

sort of workers councils, which is the sort of European idea where you have workers who have a voice in the workplace. They say, you know, major labor unions are corrupt, but we should give workers the opportunity to organize, to have a voice in the workplace. So there are like these steps, you know, we've heard about the idea that GOP is becoming a workers party. And I think that is often not convincing as seen in the case of Musk. But I do think there's like a sincere grappling with like, okay, how can we rebalance things to give workers more of a say? But if you're also, for example, you know,

cutting taxes drastically, especially on the wealthiest earners, it's hard to figure out how you're going to really rebalance the economy in a holistic way.

I think there's also an element here, you know, as a female person, you know, there's an element here of you don't get to put the genie back in the bottle. Once you have given me my rights and once you've given me the option to control when I have a baby, I'm not going back.

And you may not like what the feminist movement has evolved into, meaning you're welcome, you, not you, David. But anyone is welcome to say, here are the things that I think work well in traditional families, quote, traditional families, right? Here are the things that women need support in if they're going to leave the home to work. Here are the ways that we can make staying home not difficult.

difficult for women who would like to, but who think they don't have the skills, right? All of these things are possible, but you cannot, and this is sort of my challenge in general with Project 2085, you can't go back. We're not going to. And the people united will never be defeated. Like, that's just true. You will not, like, you cannot stop that.

So what we have now is this kind of breaking point. And that's what it feels like where you can't even talk to people in your own family who are on the other side of this, right? Like it's gotten to a point of a civil crisis. And that's, you know, I think also the kind of chaos that...

many in this administration kind of think is going to like push us to some like breaking point. But you know what? That only happened in the old Testament. Like that happened 5,000 years ago. Things would get so bad that there'd be a war and like a hole would open up and God would swallow up all the bad people. That's not happening anymore. You don't have to push it to that point. Yeah. Well, there's a sense of nostalgia among a lot of people for like the way things used to be at some indeterminate moment.

But it's really hard to translate nostalgia into policy. And I think that's exactly what you're pointing to. The nostalgia is that of men who would like to control women's behavior in many cases. And the next level, and I learned this in Women's Studies 10, it always, for me, will fall to race, class, and gender, right? So-

The the other sort of like the elephant in the room that like nobody wants to talk about is is the issue of class. And and I'm not arguing, you know, I'm not arguing for socialism, although I'm happy to argue for socialism if given the opportunity. But but the notion of what to do about.

people who do not have means is this other sort of like thing that we don't talk about. And, you know, I was sort of when I was raised, like this was one of these points that was made very clear to me that like it was like one of my dad's favorite examples. It's not that Republicans don't like poor people. It's not that they hate poor people, you know, constitutionally. But the Republican Party in general has a different way to approach dealing with people who are poor.

And the Democratic Party has its own way of dealing with people. So I was raised that like Democrats are like, give money to poor people and help them. Give them food stamps, give them support, give them, you know, educational opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't have. And by those means, they will be able to help themselves.

And I was taught that the Republican Party believes like, oh, create more jobs, more possibility, and they'll just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And if they don't, it just means they weren't made to succeed. And I was not raised to believe that, meaning I was raised by public school teachers who said that there are miracles...

in every single school, not just the wealthy schools, right? There are children who, if given the right resources, love, support, education, and someone believing in them can achieve and become whatever they want to be, right? That to me was the American dream. So can you also give us an example of where the poor...

And this issue of, you know, kind of economic stratification fits into this nostalgic Project 2025 vision. There's so many ways in which it feels like they think that American society took a bad turn around the New Deal.

And, you know, that is involved in, like, the growth of the government in general, but it's involved in all kinds of social safety net programs. Can you frame the New Deal for people who, again, don't remember high school history class? You know, so starting with Franklin Roosevelt in the wake of the Great Depression, you have, you know, the idea that government should help people out on certain things. And this grows again in the 1960s with great society programs, Medicare, Medicaid. So you start with Social Security, you add Medicare, you add Medicaid, you create things like Head Start.

You have housing assistance for people, public housing through the federal government. All of these things have gradually grown. And there is this sense that these things are making people dependent on the system. You're creating a culture of dependency. And so I think the authors of Project 2025 agree that there are miracles, but they're not interested in creating a safety net for the people who are not the miracles.

So if you are those high, you know, just those amazing students, you're going to do fine. But if you're not, your Medicaid is going to be slashed. You might not get your housing assistance. All of these things that people depend on are going to be reduced. And so you're kind of on your own. I was just listening today. NPR was doing a piece about, you know, what happens when you green people.

in low-income neighborhoods, right? And there's a big study that just came out. And what happens is, first of all, it reduces the carbon imprint because literally the trees are sucking up badness, right? It also lowers the actual temperature

So you have people, I mean, for lack of a better word, people can be more comfortable, right? Meaning even if you don't have air conditioning, you can be more comfortable. You have more access to outdoor spaces, which Jonathan and I talk a lot about, you know, even simple ways to be in touch with nature, being able to look up at the sky, being able to be in connection with something greater than yourself is positive for your immune system, for your mental health, right? And all these things and just these kind of simple things. And I was thinking like, gosh,

That's the country I want to live in. The country that says, here are the simple solutions to help people live better, make better choices, feel better, achieve better for themselves. Like, those are the things that I would love to see a government tackling.

What are some things that you feel like people on both sides of the aisle can and should be supporting in light of, you know, all of the sort of discord that we're seeing? Wow, that's a really powerful one. I love that. I mean, I think that there are, you know, child care is a place where if you are pronatalist, as many of these people on the right are, you should be making it easy for easier for people to get child care.

I think it's a no-brainer. I think it's really popular. I think people agree that there should be clean air and clean water. I think people agree that we should restrict pollution.

even as I say that, like, you know, Project 2025 wants to cut a lot of these regulations. So it's hard for me. I mean, maybe the consensus is not as strong as I think. But I think there's a core of desire for certain things, even within this sort of extreme right, that does correspond with things that a lot of people want. But some of them don't. I mean, it's just hard to reconcile an idea that we should be living a sort of Christian-based life with the kind of

pluralism that exists in this country. Let's talk about clean air and water for a second, because is the idea that we just need to remove regulation to increase economic viability and drilling and there's too much red tape to get oil out of the ground and natural gas out of the ground? It seems like that's a slippery slope to

we don't care what's in the water in the cities. We're not worried about air pollution and that, you know, that affects everyone, no matter what party you're associated with. I find it very hard to like, to even understand the environmental approach in project 2025. And it takes, tell the story that, you know, in the seventies, the air was bad. There was a lot of smog. The rivers were burning and we clean those things up and now things are good.

And we should not be restricting industry now. We need to let people have progress. We need to grow the economy. Growing the economy is the best way to improve people's well-being. And we should focus on things that are measurable. And things like greenhouse gases, they're a little bit vague. Climate change, we don't know how much is caused by people, so we shouldn't focus on that. And what we need to do is just extract as much oil and gas as possible, and that means cutting all the regulations.

It's what they say. Well, I ask again because I think a lot of people hear some of this stuff and say these people, they use expletives. They attack their character. They attack their intelligence. But it doesn't seem like it's totally not thought through given that they wrote it all down. They've made this plan. So I really do try and get underneath the psychological justification and the rational justification.

If it is about increasing access to industry and the unfettered capitalism that will make everyone really successful, okay, I can understand that. But there should be guardrails to protect water systems. Like, yes, the rivers were burning. That was a bad thing. I think we can all agree to that.

So why take away the guardrails if the goal is to get more capitalism? Let's do that, but why throw it all away? Yeah, I mean, it's a weird triumphalism as though like, well, once you've solved the problem, you don't need to keep those solutions in place.

But I think if you take those guardrails away, what you're going to get is the same kind of pollution you had before. And we know companies are not going to police themselves. Sure. We've seen that. So they can't believe that. But then the same would be true of the FDA. We know that food companies are not going to just decide not to put toxic chemicals in food unless they're forced to do so. So-

They're also removing the FDA supervisors. I mean, FDA is a great one. Maybe we can hone in on that a little bit. You know, RFK Jr. is this incredibly polarizing personality. And...

you know, there are, there are, there are many things that he says that it's the wrong messenger, but the message is actually right on. Like it should not be considered normal to consume chemicals that Europe for decades has been like, what are you crazy? You know, like we should not be eating products that contain fragments of DNA that seems to possibly be changing the way our immune systems and physiology functions. Right. Like these are just

And in addition, we should be very, very curious about an increase in autism, ADHD. We should be extremely curious about what's going on and what we can possibly understand better about autism.

that does not change in one generation, right? It might take longer than three months to find the solution, but the questions are on the right track. He's a Kennedy. He's super ambitious. Nobody knows what's going to happen. He's got to get it done quick. But this is an interesting place, you know, maybe to sort of poke around a little bit because, you

I was actually surprised when I first heard about Project 2025 and before I kind of read your book and dug in more deeply, I thought it was just like a bunch of like rambling things of like, we're going to blah, blah, blah. But like, it's outlined. There's this section on the environment. Like it's...

it is categorically sound in that it's really trying to be like, we're going to figure all this out. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what are the biblical values of the FDA? The FDA is actually, I sort of thought of this earlier when we were talking about places where there are consensus. You know, you get a real concern for revolving door between regulators and industry. And they're concerned about those places where you have undue influence from industry.

I think it's inconsistent. They're concerned about, because each of these chapters, there's a kind of overarching ethos, but there are places where individual chapters have slightly different approaches. So there's a real concern for the revolving door in the drug industry and in a lot of medical stuff. I think a lot of people agree about that. It's missing, to our discussion a moment ago, in the discussion of the environment.

So some contributors seem to be more aware of that than others. But they do, you know, they see drug companies having far too much influence. I think a lot of people agree with that. I don't know why I have to have drug commercials. I was trying to explain to my kids, like, this is kind of weird that, and I happen to watch shows that have a lot of drug commercials because I watch Family Feud, and I

I watch game shows. So, you know, it's a little bit about the demo. But it's very bizarre that they are selling me. I mean, it's like an episode of The Twilight Zone. They're selling me the persona that I should have with this drug that I know is...

like somebody is getting paid for, you know, me to believe that. And I was actually talking with my, my 16 year old about this and he's like, well, if the SSRI is not working, maybe you do need a booster. Right. Like, you know, he's like, and I was like, yeah, but like, this is the, it's, they're,

it's a brainwashing, you know, in terms of how we've even come to understand drugs, which I think we saw. And, you know, the Atlantic reported this very, very consistently. Like we saw this with COVID people lost their effing minds about where to get information, what to do with it, who to believe and why. And a little bit, you know, we kind of have set ourselves up for,

a complete lack of trust and faith. Where do you see Project 2025 in terms of, you know, a general trust issue that we're having? Is it believe people when they tell you who they are?

Is it, it's never too late to try and tackle this, but don't trust the government. Trust your own side unless they start seeming strange. Like, how do we trust? I think one of the things that's amazing about this is that they have, as you said, it's sound. They've laid these things out. And so I think a good place to start is to like take people seriously.

read what they wrote and try to understand what they want to do. I think during the campaign, Democrats did not always do that. They took it as a great campaign talking point, but they didn't really try to understand what was going on and to their detriment. I think they could have had more effective political messaging by really understanding what was in there. But they just wanted to sort of hit something on the stump and move on.

What would that have looked like? I think talking about the way that this is an attempt to transform so many things about the government and about society. Like when we talk about the biblically based family and structures they want, like people should understand that. And maybe that's something people would vote for anyway, but I'm not sure. And in the campaign, there were fascinating polls where, you know, people knew what Project 2025 was. They didn't like it. And they just didn't believe that Trump was going to do it. They thought he's not going to do that. So I don't need to worry about that.

And I think that's because people didn't understand that it is a full program and not just a bunch of cobbled together, you know, a list of a wishlist of ideas. But that's a symptom beyond just project 2025. When he talked about the tariffs, their side was like, you don't take them literally. Right. And when he talked about mass deportations, well, you don't take them literally. He's just giving an example of something that we should look into and we'll figure out how to realistically solve the problem once we get into office. So that's,

His own party is downplaying him where it seems evident now that you actually have to believe everything he says as true.

and that's something that he's going to follow through. Well, I think it's really tough because there are things that he says and people don't believe it and they are very much what he wants to do. And then as Mayim, you were saying earlier, you know, there's cases where like with Signalgate, they tell you that something, you can see it in front of your eyes. And so it's hard to, I have struggled with like, what is the rubric for when you know something, when you should take it seriously and when you should treat it as hogwash? And I don't know how you explain that. It's a little bit of a like, you have to know it when you see it. But clearly a lot of us don't know it when we see it.

We have been wrong about things over and over again, including me. Let's do a very, very fun and fast rapid fire, which we don't normally do in the middle of the episode. Things that we should take seriously on invading Canada. I don't know. I don't like that you don't know. I don't like that you don't know. It was just like, I mean, you know, what is he talking about? But he keeps bringing it up. All right.

Uh, I don't... Big maybe. Sorry, I'm bad at lightning round. Greenland. I think that's more likely than Canada, at least. Taking back the Panama Canal. Uh, he seems to have dropped that one. I think that's on the back burner. This is ridiculous already. The level of deportation. What was the initial goal? They wanted how many million people out? Um, they wanted, I think, a million in the first month or something. Um, not possible.

Like, even if they wanted to, the numbers aren't there. Continuation of tariffs at this level? I think they're serious about that. And the risk to the global economy? Are they willing to face the recession slash depression that may happen if China calls back the debt? I think Trump maybe is. I mean, Trump feels so strongly about tariffs and has for so long. The question is whether he can be sort of strong-armed by people around him, I guess. The risk of a third term? Um...

I think people can't ignore it. It's something to keep paying attention to. Possibility of deporting national citizens. A very, very big risk. Moving on. Well, actually, I wanted to ask, you know, I couldn't help but see, you know, some of the, you know, the president's sort of like...

Well, I believe it was what was supposed to be a joyful Easter greeting that was, you know, I think really disgusting and disrespectful to people who actually do celebrate Easter. There's this sort of notion which I do. I don't know if this is me being a bad person.

There's a, there's a perspective about bad people that seems to be consistent with what you describe as this sort of like biblical based quote, traditional, this notion that like, I'm just going to say it, that bad people don't deserve rights. And I'm, I'm speaking in particular about, you know, like conversations about people's possibly previous gang affiliation, um,

You know, using domestic violence against women, which is a heinous act, but using domestic violence as a reason that someone should be denied rights. This is, again, a place where if you'd like to know the definition of a liberal, you know, people deserve rights and rights.

In a state that we are living in, I don't trust anybody at this point, meaning I don't trust what you tell me about anyone that you have deported and put in a prison. I don't trust you. And I understand nobody can trust anyone, but I'm not taking the president's word in a tweet to justify denying someone due process, right? For me, there's a lot more to be said about...

some of the deportations going on at college levels. It's a different conversation. And due process is always the overarching rule. It is not illegal to protest. It is not illegal to hate this country. It is not illegal to burn the flag. So I wonder if you can speak, though, to this general notion that

What does it mean if the executive branch is deciding who is good and who is bad? Yeah, I mean, I think you're exactly right about due process. And the point of due process is not that everybody is innocent. It's that everybody needs to have a fair way to be tested on that. And, you know, by the way, Trump was very happy to use the system of due process when he was charged in court. He thought it was important that those protections be in place.

this goes back to the conversation we were having earlier about the checks and balances. Like we don't vest all that authority in one person or in one branch, in the executive branch to accuse, try and convict somebody. We have, we have,

we have judges, we have an adversarial system. And they're trying to take those things out of the process. You know, they're saying that people can't challenge their detention because they're challenging the wrong place or because, you know, their lawyers don't know where they are. And so they can't challenge it in the right venue. They're saying they can't challenge their detention because they've already been sent somewhere else and we no longer have authority over them.

that's putting all the power in a single branch and often in a single person. This question goes back to the relationship between the branches, and it ties into the third term that we were talking about earlier, which is, let's say the courts don't uphold the right for someone to serve more than two terms. If the power has been

organized in the executive branch and they control the enforcement of rule and law in the country, what is to stop him from putting himself on the ballot anyway and just moving forward? Yeah, see, I think that's a greater risk than the Supreme Court or than any sort of third term amendment is simply saying, I'm going to do it and see what happens. And I think not that long ago, that would have seemed to me to sound really conspiratorial.

And I think for me, January 6th was a moment when I had to like...

consider more broadly what was possible and what someone could get away with. And they are accruing all this power and they're taking over these bodies that they haven't traditionally, the president hasn't traditionally had control over. And, you know, they want to use all of these things to support his political ambitions. They think that's, you know, I think for Trump, it's a personal thing. Trump wants to have all these powers for his own reasons. And they want to have all these powers for these sort of ideological reasons of both

constitutional law and also the Christian worldview. And so they found a way to work together because they have a shared interest.

You can imagine him starting a media campaign saying the people want this. Right. The people want this. They're taking it away from you. You have to protest in the streets and say that this is what we want and forget about anyone telling you that it shouldn't happen because they don't want America to succeed. Right. And they'd frame it as democratic, too. You know, look, this is a populist movement. This is what people actually want. Don't let the system stand in the way of what the people want.

The system is corrupt. It's filled with the deep state. These are the actors trying to ruin the country. And before I got here, we were absolutely in ruins. And now all these ways that America is becoming healthy again and great again and lighting the rivers on fire. If we don't have our populace, if you don't allow me to run again, like how is this going to continue? Right, exactly. If you let them back in, they'll ruin it like Biden did.

And it will be World War III and all of the terror will continue. Speaking of which, the White House just announced that they're encouraging people to marry and have children, offering baby bonuses of up to $5,000 when you give birth.

The program also offers to teach women about their menstrual cycles so they know when they're most fertile, and Trump has recently coined himself as the fertilization president. There's some interesting components of this. One is that France issued a similar medal in 1920, and

And then it also picked up steam when Hitler introduced it for mothers of eight people or more in 1939. Stalin offered it to women who had nine or more children in 1944. Any thoughts on if we should be offering baby bonuses and if the world is really at risk, especially the United States, is at risk of population decline? I don't understand where the idea of population decline comes in. I mean, you do have societies that have birth rates that are very low, and it is a challenge. You know, Elon Musk discovering that

Social Security depends on people paying in when they're younger. Was it interesting? It's maybe troubling that that person is reworking our government. You know, having birth is important, but is this the way to do it? Are these precedents we really want to follow and does it need to be on this level?

I think you, I think that, you know, the parallels speak for themselves a little bit. I mean, I would use that money to have childcare, go back to work. Well, there's another interesting, interesting, I say in air quotes here, where they're restricting the voting rights for people's

whose ID doesn't match their birth certificate, which mainly impacts women who have taken their husband's name. This one is a little, a little, uh, fuzzier. Um, and, and maybe David, maybe you can help us sort of parse this out. This is a place where like I would, I mean, by the time this airs, maybe I'll be proven wrong. Um,

I would find it very hard to believe that there's an active campaign to stop married women from voting. It's hard to believe that that is the intent. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't think that's actually what's going on. Like, there's other things going on that are... They're thinking about trans people, and they don't want people to be changing their identity on their birth certificate, changing their name on their birth certificate. But often they haven't thought very carefully about what the secondary effect is, and one effect is women who change their names. But when they realize that,

and it's potentially impacting 69 million women, does it not get walked back to someone not say, "Hey, there might be an unintended consequence here." It's interesting to see when they have to walk things back and when they don't. I'm thinking about Kilmire Obrego Garcia, where he was detained and deported, apparently in error. And now they decided, "No, we're just going to push on this. We're going to make this our thing. We're going to die on this hill or ideally not die on this hill."

69 million women voters seems like a hill that they would probably blanch at, but who knows? I mean, who has time to vote when you're having so many babies? Does it feel like hands made to tail to you? It's a little bit less...

It's a little bit less dramatic. I mean, it's so looking backwards. It's not this new society. It's to put things the way they were. And I think you're right that it's hard to put things back, but I don't want to think of it too much as a futuristic thing.

I'm sort of trying to think about what we can materially grab onto from the past and understand it that way. Do you have concerns about being the voice of an opposition in a time period where press is being targeted? I don't know. I mean, I think it's really important to tell people what's going on. And I... You know, that's what I've chosen to do, and I feel like that's what...

what we need. And if people don't like that, that is, you know, I think it's their right to dissent from it. I think the First Amendment is really important. The press has to use that or we're going to lose it. And so I intend to exercise those rights. Is there one or two top lines of Project 2025 that you're watching most closely? I am really curious to see what happens on abortion.

which is something that I think is very important to a lot of the people involved in Project 2025, and not something that Trump cares as much about.

but they're working to get staff into these low-level positions that we don't necessarily see a core company pushing on these things. So I think that's really important and could be transformative. We've already seen the shift from Roe v. Wade being overturned. You can imagine a national abortion ban or even steps short of that would be really transformative. The other thing that I'm thinking about is and watching for is how they slash or illuminate climate change

So that's, you know, privatizing NOAA is one of the goals, closing a lot of the climate research in the government. And I think that's something that is really hard to put back and can be destroyed relatively quickly with really important impact. There's made me think of one thing in terms of the research. And this goes back to the divide between equally intelligent people seeing things very differently. When you hear about the attacks on research institutions,

no matter who they are, Columbia, Harvard, where they're removing research dollars. I heard someone recently say, well, one of these institutions had 69% earmarked for administrative costs, which could justify, oh, the money's not even going to research anyway. But can you talk about the risk of not being at the forefront of research globally and what the impact could be to slow the advancement of

disease cures or other breakthroughs? Yeah. I mean, we have had this sort of social compact where universities do these things for the good of the country and they, you know, we, we pay them for it on the basis that they're, you know, it's kind of, it's a little bit of a conservative idea. Like the government is not the best place to do all of these things. There are people who are really good at this and we want to fund it because everyone benefits from it.

If you let other countries take charge of that, I think it puts America behind. I mean, I see this even in the example of things like electric cars. They want to cut down on electric cars and cut down subsidies for that. Well, do we want Chinese industry to be leading the world on electric cars or do we want Americans to be building those cars and making a profit from it? Do we want other countries to have leadership on medicines or do we want to be able to make those things internally?

You know, if you're talking about sort of American greatness, it seems like you would want America at the forefront of research. And if you want that, you have to pay for it. And if there are renegotiations to happen, then have those, but don't cancel it outright. Right, exactly. You can't make these vast decisions so quickly. It has to be done in a more deliberate fashion. I want to touch a little bit on education because I remember during the Black Lives Matter campaign,

you know, protests. There was this conversation about defunding the police. And at first I was like, what was happening? I thought we need them. And then I learned a little bit more about what it means to redistribute resources, to make sure that there's appropriate care and attention to keep communities safe. And I was like, oh, okay. Weird, weird phrasing didn't make sense to me at first, but like now I know more. Okay, cool.

I tried to apply that same logic to let's eliminate the Department of Education. And I was like, maybe I just don't understand because I didn't understand what defund the police meant. And like, maybe there's just like a different definition of this word. Then I learned more about like literally not having a Department of Education

I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what that means and how that fits into Project 2025. The Department of Education does a few things. What it doesn't control is curriculum, although you get politicians occasionally sort of trying to talk that way. But important things it does, one, it

It funds a ton of schooling. So we get federal tax dollars that are passed to states to fund a lot of programs, some low-income districts, special education programs, a lot of really important programs. It deals with student loans, which traditionally have gone back and forth between sort of a private and a public model. But since 2010, that's something that the federal government has made loans and guaranteed loans.

And then they also enforce Title IX, the equality in education policy.

rules that cover athletics and they cover classroom instruction, a lot of other things. So, you know, they want to get rid of the Department of Education and the way they want to handle that is they want to send the student loans back to the private sector. Okay. Maybe that would work. Maybe it didn't. But the reason that we, that the federal government took it over is that the private education loans were becoming predatory. They were sending a lot of money to, you know, federally guaranteed loans would end up going to people and sort of

for-profit schools that were profiteering. They want to change a lot of the Title IX enforcement, send it to the Department of Justice, for example, so just move it somewhere else. And then they want to take all the funding and just block grant it to the states on the basis that the states can decide what they want to do with it. So they say they want to eliminate the Department of Education, but it's really more of an administrative change, except that suddenly you have people who are not necessarily experts in these things dealing with them. Like why the Justice Department is better dealing with education than the Education Department, I think is an open question.

Once you black grant things to the states, the states have a lot, you know, say it should be anything that's legal under state law. And what I think that means is you're pushing towards a system of vouchers of religious schools of other kinds of private schools and diminishing the role of public education. I suspect what you'd end up with with is blue states with public education largely as we see it now and red states with a much more religious and voucher based setup.

And you would have things like, you know, the Bible being taught in schools and have really strict rules about LGBT students. You would have libraries that were really restricted and let they get loaned to students. And you have parents with a lot more involvement in the curriculum than we've had, which is something that's been a big conservative cause, obviously, for the last few years. I mean, to me, that just sounds like and this is just sort of like Mayim's Project 2025. I

I think at some point people are going to start grouping by states in more significant ways. The same way that we have seen people leaving for Europe or leaving for Canada. I know those are not huge numbers, but...

I feel like there's going to be, that's one of the solutions is that you'll see this further segregation, essentially. That's just my, it's one of my predictions. I think you're right. I mean, if you look at the outcomes already, even before some of these things were in place, the differences in so many indicators by state based on who controls the state, you just get wildly different

outcomes and income, life expectancy, health statistics. So that's already happening. I think this would make it more...

You would exaggerate it. I wanted to touch on one more thing regarding education because it's been in the news lately. And, you know, for me, it's one of these, you know, sort of areas that gets a little muddy and gets a little gray. And I wonder if you can sort of help us, you know, parse it out. There's there's

in Montana is where, you know, the Supreme Court heard about parents in Montana who, in many cases, may respect people being trans. It doesn't necessarily say anything about how they feel about trans people, but the notion that public schools are...

introducing to in many cases first graders second graders to storybooks about trans children meaning it's being kind of part of the curriculum and many parents are saying this is something we would rather decide when our children learn about this right rather than the school using it as curriculum I don't want to live in a society where those people go to private school and

And the only people left in public school are people who are like, yes, teach about trans kids in first grade. And honestly, I don't I'm not weighing in on this, but I do understand that for some parents, that may be something they prefer to talk about in what they determine to be, let's say, an age appropriate level. Right. So where does this fall? Because.

these parents might be accused of falling in line with this sort of like biblically based, you know, conservative. How do we stop from, you know, having such black and white distinctions between who's on which side and who do we support? Yeah, I mean, I think I can see two levels where it's important. One is, you know, so much for all of American history, basically, we have treated education as largely a local issue. And so that sense, you know, the federal government does fund a lot of things.

things, but doesn't determine what the curriculum is. And we've decided that people at the local level can set the standards for how they want their schools to operate. And I think that remains a really good rule. There's just the federal government isn't going to know as much about what's going on in the community as anybody in that community is. I don't want them to. Right. I also think that there's ways to structure the system so that people can opt out of things.

If people are uncomfortable with something, that's one thing, but that doesn't mean that we need to, for example, expose librarians to prosecution for putting these books on the shelves. You just need to give people an opportunity to introduce their children to those things in the way they want.

So many places, and I think this is true across the board, there's a sense that government needs to have a really heavy-handed approach. And sometimes the answer is, in fact, we don't need to have a whole lot of heavy-handed approach. We can let people make these decisions without the government being involved. Are we becoming libertarians? Is that what just happened?

I mean, I think that there are places where libertarianism is really strong. I think it's really effective. And I think education is a place that a more localist, I'd say, approach has been very effective.

Well, I think, yeah, I think what's going on is really driving a lot of people out of traditional, you know, kind of buckets, meaning, you know, a lot of people are saying, like, I don't identify with a lot of the super, super left, you know, components of the Democratic Party. And where do I fit? Am I now an independent? You know, I am hearing a lot more people leaning libertarian than I did before, you know, kind of from from both ends of this spectrum.

So it really feels like something is being shaken up. - Yeah. - Do you think we're in a constitutional crisis? - I really resist the constitutional crisis label 'cause I think people don't know what it means.

or I think it's really an overwhelming thing to take to understand. Someone made an interesting point to me, which is that the crisis frame favors executive action. And I think the problem here is too much power for the executive. When people are in a crisis, they want a strong leader to solve that problem. And here we have an issue of an executive leader who's taking too much power. But I think when you have conflicts between the White House and the

the courts like we're seeing, it is really, it's really touchy. And I'm not sure if we're in a, we're at the point of breaking, but we seem to be edging closer to that. It feels like it's only a matter of time before we see the indicative branch try to defy a judicial order. And if we get there, that's a really dangerous moment. But I don't know when and if we'll get there. When you say breaking, what do you mean? You know, if, if some, if the government or the white house rather,

discovers that it can simply defy a judicial order, that it doesn't have to do something on one thing. I don't know what's to stop it from doing that on any number of things. And suddenly you have basically an authoritarian government.

without any effective check on it. If you do that, then I worry about things like civil unrest. I worry about people getting violent in the streets because they no longer see another way to express themselves or another way to check power. And that's why the balance of powers has been so effective in keeping the U.S. stable for so long, which is not to say, obviously, that the U.S. is flawless or that we have not had serious flaws in our government.

But that overall balance has been very effective and it would be a shame to throw that out. The irony is that in the foreword for Project 2025, it quotes Ronald Reagan's 1967 inaugural address as governor of California, freedom is a fragile thing and it's never more than one generation away from extinction. It's really poignant that they chose that quote. And their idea of freedom, I think, is very different from the one that a lot of Americans have. And I think...

people will be troubled by the vision of freedom that they try to lay out here. It's less than a generation. It's potentially one term away. Not to be an alarmist.

The book is The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America. Highly recommend you have this as a resource. Unfortunately, you will need it probably a lot over the next several years. It's really, really helpful. So David Graham, thank you for the work that you do and thank you for breaking it down with us. We really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. I really enjoyed thinking through it with you. All right. Rapid fire. Mind be Alex, Project 2025. I don't know.

You haven't written the 900-page draft yet. I mean, I wanted to ask him about many things that I know he can't fix for me, but I think what really bothers me, one of the things that really bothers me is that during the campaigns for the elections, there were people who were like, he's going to do this thing. I even mentioned it to my ex-husband, who studied political science and has an advanced degree in it. And I was like, this is a thing. And ex-husband aside...

Many people did not want to hear this.

They didn't believe it. They said it was hysterical. They said it was paranoid. They said, Oh, it's just like Kamala to bring this up. It's so hysterical. You know, it's women wringing their hands about something that's not going to happen. Like we were told how many people, this is the, like, if I could go back in time, if I could understand an alternate reality, I want to know how many people, if we had told you for reals, yo, this is what's happening. Would they have said, Oh,

oh, it's worth it to not vote for him. Unfortunately, I think people couldn't even imagine that this would be a thing that we'd be talking about biblically based values. You know, like the Bible has so much, it's got so many values that you don't want, like throwing rocks at people to kill them if they literally, you know, like speak gossip. I mean, I'm just like, that's just synagogue this past week.

So like you can't just paint with this broad brush of like biblically based values. It has no place in our government. It's not a thing. If you want to say like traditional, I'm sorry, like the statistics for women in particular, not so great in many aspects historically. Many women were addicted to painkillers in the 1950s because it was incredibly depressing to be stationed in your home with a generation that had just experienced trauma.

Right? Like the answer is not keep women at home. Like I promise. Every menopause expert we've ever had on here, when I have said to them, is it possible that for all human history, women have just been miserable and no one cared? The answer is yes. That was the reality. And it wasn't just because of their hormones.

I promise. I blame trad wives. I blame social media with your sourdough starters and your custom goat cheese that you're squeezing through a cheesecloth while looking sexy in an apron. That's what I think is the problem. What I also think is the problem is that they are addressing things that have...

a basis as a real concern, but fixing the problem in a way that maybe has unintended consequences and not even maybe it does have unintended consequences. And tariffs is a great example. Elon Musk is a great example. Things that someone thought was a great idea. And it's not working that way.

When I was first introduced to the idea of America, I was told that there was a separation between church and state. What happened to that? That was a fallacy. That's something that we're told that in many cases I think was protected. But this country was founded on Christian principles. You know, the notion of one nation under God, like that is a thing. But it's always been whatever God you want, not...

Ish. Ish. And now we're just done with that? It's just only my God? I think that whatever illusions we were under, that you could have a different concept of God than the Christian God, yeah, I think that there's a lot less protection about that. It's like a little bit the gloves are off. And yeah, it feels a little bit like...

you know, we have a story that we told, but ultimately the goal of this administration and the policies of this administration is to affirm that if you are Hindu, if you are Muslim, if you are Jewish, which I know, you know, gets a different kind of, you know, classification with a lot of the conversations, but like, yeah, the message that you get is that you're not like us. Yeah.

In the name of a great American orator. I'm going to mash up two different people from somewhat opposite ends of the spectrum. Ben Shapiro, Scott Galloway. Both of them agree that family values, having two parents in the home, children have higher levels of success, having male role models, especially for men,

is extremely important that boys, young boys are often physically stronger, but more emotionally weak than their female counterparts. And that not having a role model in the house tends to have poor grades, higher addiction, more delinquency, more propensity towards crime. So like,

Is that the only way that family should exist? Absolutely not. It's impossible to mandate that or legislate that. But can there be structures in place that encourage those people who that's their propensity on how they want to procreate to increase family values? Like, that doesn't sound crazy. Yeah, I mean, the government can stop denigrating people of color and bringing drugs in and blaming them for selling them. That's a starting point.

And I think addressing the quality of life and the hardship and being able to make a living, I think, of course, is a key component to that. How to do that is a point of great debate and a lot of discussion. Yeah. And there's a lot of things in place already that are trying to shift that narrative. I mean, but yeah, I think that in many cases...

people have been living in a state of ignorant bliss and believing, I'm not saying you, but many people have kind of believed that the country's operating a certain way. And I think this is really clear that...

A, it hasn't been operating that way. And I think there is. There's a much more concerted effort to move it. You know, I think of my grandparents who fled Eastern Europe to come to this country. Like the only reason was because of the values that America has.

you know, stood by, which was, you know, bring us your poor and huddled masses. Like if you, um, if you are different, you are welcome here. Um, you know, I, I grew up in Los Angeles, right? I've talked about going to public school where everybody was different shapes, sizes, colors, and, you know, in many cases, economic backgrounds like, uh, that to me, like that was America, whatever this like biblically based, uh,

thing is I don't recognize it. I was watching a news program where they were doing sort of a man on the street interview style and they were asking people, how much do you think undocumented immigrants pay into Social Security?

And they were like, nothing, everyone says nothing. And it turned out to be over $900 billion because they're paying into a system, but they're not able to collect from. And I don't really think we understand what will happen to our economy when you remove the number of people who are doing the jobs that help the economy grow.

Yeah. And one of the elements that I kind of see throughout the conversation around Project 2025 is there's there's a level of punitiveness regarding these differences, meaning it's not just we don't like poor people. It's that you will be punished for being poor.

It's not that we don't like trans people. It's beyond that. It's we will punish you, right, for the things that you do to assert your identity, even if it wouldn't be the identity I would choose, right? Or that, you know, that they would choose. There's this notion of...

you know, as Americans that were being punished, you know, for being on, quote, the wrong side of this. So, you know, anyone I know who was raised without a dad would say, yeah, I understand why, you know, the statistics are in

our favor to be raised with a dad for all these reasons. But if I don't have that situation, why should I be punished? Why should I be denigrated? Why should I be denied resources? Why should my mother be denied the ability to raise us to the best of her ability if she's a single mom? So for me, there's like this like very, very mean punitive component to Project 2025 that does not feel like it is elevating Americans at all.

Sometimes when we have these conversations, you turn to me and you say, it's too much. Why are we talking about it? It feels hopeless. But the message that I would encourage people to take away from this episode is that it is important to know what's going on and to be aware. Don't be hyper vigilant about it. Checking your news feeds regularly.

for some multiple times a day, for some even daily can have an overwhelming impact. It can feel stressful. We can get into despair spirals. But while maintaining your physical health, your emotional health, your ability to regulate and to calm down and get the rest you need,

It's important to know what's happening because, as David said, public protest and public outrage does have an impact. And to know you are an active participant in the country and in the world that you want to create, having awareness about what's happening is a step towards that.

And we're all players here in this. Take seriously what people say because it's not hyperbole. The likelihood is they aren't joking. Believe people when they tell you who they are. Yes, well said. And beyond that, all people who love America should want a balance between the executive, the judicial, and the legislative branches, period.

Those three things were established for a reason. None is supposed to be able to overpower any of the others. There's a system of checks and balances. It's what distinguished this country from the monarchy that we were rebelling against when we fought in a bloody war to gain our independence from a country that was trying to control us.

and tell us how much we should be taxing people, how much revenue that country should be gaining from us, right? We were trying to assert for ourselves rights so that we could be a land of the free and a home of the brave. Yes, this country was also built on oppression and suffering and tremendous injustice that continues to this day.

And we have material here of a country that still doesn't have to give up. We don't have to give up. We don't have to throw in the towel. And for me, this conversation should not be about which president you would like next, who you voted for, who you didn't vote for, what you believe in should happen with Elon Musk or shouldn't. This is about the principles of this country that we should always

all value. And the executive branch cannot and should not have a disproportionate amount of power. It makes us threatened and threatening to have an authoritarian government. Maybe when you guys invade Canada, you'll figure out the parliamentary system and that will help you guys balance your government. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

It's my B.R.L.X. breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience Ph.D. or now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.