Graphic by ChatGPT

By Al InCognito and Stuart Warner

When I first sat down to read Project 2025 last summer, I thought, this must be what hell feels like.

Not the fire-and-brimstone kind of hell, but a bureaucratic hell – the kind where you’re trapped in a DMV line forever, forced to listen to a Heritage Foundation intern explain why civil service protections are an existential threat to freedom.

But I kept reading. And somewhere around the section on dismantling the Justice Department, I realized something:

This wasn’t just another white paper. It was a roadmap for a hostile takeover. A 900-page manifesto detailing how to replace independent government agencies with political enforcers. How to fire thousands of career civil servants and stack the courts with ideological warriors. How to rewrite the rulebook so the next Republican president (Trump or otherwise) wouldn’t just hold power – but keep it permanently.

I tried to sound the alarm as did so many others.

I used an AI writing assistant to try to make sense of the document’s mud-thick prose, summarizing nearly 20 chapters of slop. I published each summary on several social media platforms.  I sent them to every journalist I knew.

And very few cared.

Maybe because Donald Trump said he “knew nothing about it.”

And like so many times before, people believed him.

We Should Have Seen This Coming

I mean, it’s not like we haven’t seen this playbook before. The slow erosion of rights disguised as “law and order” or “government reform.”

Hell, I lived it.

Take the time I got stopped by a cop in the 1980s.  I later wrote a column about it for the Akron Beacon Journal, My Crime? Walking While Looking Hispanic.

I was finishing a six-mile run in Akron’s Highland Square when a police cruiser screeched onto the sidewalk and pinned me against a chain-link fence. The officer jumped out, hand on his holster.

“We got a report that a Puerto Rican man robbed a store near here,” he said. “You fit the description.”

Right. Because the description was “Hispanic-looking guy.” Never mind that I was shirtless, drenched in sweat, and wearing nothing but running shorts and sneakers.

“Where would I have put the loot,” I joked.

He was not amused.

The officer demanded my ID. I had none. No pockets, remember?

Then I spotted something. A newspaper box on the street corner – back when we still had those. And right there, on the front page of the Akron Beacon Journal, was my face touting my daily column.

“I don’t have ID,” I told him, pointing. “But that’s my picture. Right there.”

The cop stared at the newspaper boxr. Stared at me. Back at the box.

He sighed. Then chuckled and called his dispatcher.  “My mistake.  I caught a columnist, not a crook.”

If that had happened today – under the kind of Project 2025-style immigration crackdowns some states are already adopting – would I have gotten off so easily?

Would I have been detained, forced to “prove” my citizenship because some cop thought a man with my dark features should come with a green card?

That’s the thing about these policies. They sound like they’re about “security” or “efficiency”—but what they’re really about is power. Who has it. Who loses it. And who gets to decide what “American” looks like.

We Laughed. They Didn’t.

I used to joke about Project 2025.

I wrote headlines like “Think Trump Was Tough on Immigration Last Time? Hold His Beer.” Thought maybe, just maybe, people would pay attention if I added some punchlines to the political apocalypse.

I should’ve known better.

Because here’s the thing: The people behind this plan weren’t joking.

They were dead serious when they proposed firing up to 50,000 civil servants and replacing them with political loyalists.

They were dead serious about abolishing the DOJ’s independence so career prosecutors couldn’t investigate their friends.

They were dead serious about reshaping the federal courts so that no law – not voting rights, not reproductive rights, not even the ability of government to regulate pollution – would stand in their way.

This wasn’t just a wishlist. It was a step-by-step guide to one-party rule.

And yet, we laughed.

Kinda like when I wrote about Hudson’s ice-fishing prostitution scare.

Remember that one? The mayor of Hudson, Ohio, stood up at a city council meeting and warned that allowing ice-fishing shanties could lead to prostitution.

I and others mocked him mercilessly. Hudson became a national punchline.

And yet… wasn’t that the same town where school board members got death threats because they refused to ban books?

Wasn’t that the same town where officials tried to silence a Black veteran for talking about the origins of Memorial Day?

We laughed at the shanty-town sex panic.

Meanwhile, incidents like these in Hudson kept becoming a testing ground for America’s next wave of manufactured culture wars.

And now, with America already badly bloodied by  of these battles, the next phase of the playbook is unfolding in real-time.

The Man Behind the Curtain

Shockingly we saw behind the Project 2025 curtain this week when Trump blamed DEI for the tragic crash between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines passenger jet. (Some conservatives like to mock the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion as DIE. Funny folks.)

This scapegoating isn’t just a spur-of-the-moment reaction; it aligns seamlessly with the objectives outlined in Project 2025. This conservative blueprint advocates for dismantling DEI programs across federal agencies, arguing that such initiatives are wasteful and promote undesired preferential treatment. The plan calls for terminating DEI-related positions and eliminating funding for programs that promote diversity and inclusion.

By attributing the plane crash to DEI efforts, President Trump is not only deflecting blame but also reinforcing the Project 2025 agenda. This narrative serves to justify the administration’s aggressive rollback of DEI programs, framing them as not only unnecessary but also potentially dangerous.

It’s crucial to recognize that such claims lack substantiation. Experts have pointed out that there is no evidence linking DEI initiatives to compromised safety within the FAA or any other agency.

The president’s assertions appear to be a strategic move to further a political agenda rather than a reflection of factual circumstances.

In essence, the president’s response to the tragedy is a calculated effort to advance the Project 2025 vision, using a national disaster to undermine DEI efforts and reshape federal policies in line with a conservative framework.

So no, Trump didn’t need to read Project 2025 because it was written for him—and for anyone else willing to wield it.

I just wish now that I had tried even harder to get folks to read about it last summer. Because the people behind this plan were counting on one thing: The American public wouldn’t pay attention until it was too late.

Sadly, they were probably right.

Stuart Warner is a former columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal and Phoenix New Times. He was a senior editor for more than three decades in Akron, Phoenix, Cleveland, Seattle and Lexington, Ky.