July 30: Project 2025 and the NGO Borg

IDF strikes Beirut; Iran's booming oil business; The growing gender gap in politics

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The Big Story

The White House, and now the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, have repeatedly sought to tie Donald Trump to Project 2025. For example, in his Monday evening speech touting the need for “bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the [Supreme] Court and our democracy,” President Joe Biden, in a thoroughgoing attack on the court’s legitimacy, referenced the “decadeslong effort to reshape the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, backed by shadow special interests that also support Project 2025.” Elsewhere in the speech, he warned of the “extreme movement and agenda called Project 2025” that was “planning another onslaught attacking civil rights in America,” including by rolling back “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in the federal government. 

What is Project 2025? It’s an umbrella term for a policy agenda, a would-be presidential transition road map, and a “Rolodex of those who might work in the Trump administration” (in The Wall Street Journal’s words), convened by The Heritage Foundation and featuring contributions from several other conservative think tanks and policy groups. The project’s 922-page policy paper inveighs against DEI, pushes for a major rollback of the administrative state, and includes several quixotic proposals, such as a plan to ban internet pornography.

As of today, however, Project 2025 looks to be defunct. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Project 2025 was “winding down its policy operations,” and that its director, Paul Dans, is stepping down from Heritage. The Trump campaign, which had been publicly critical of Project 2025 for attempting to misrepresent its influence with the former president, issued a statement Tuesday celebrating the news: “reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed,” it read in part.

But even if Project 2025 were involved with the Trump campaign, the critique of “shadow special interests” is rich coming from the Biden-Harris administration. As Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky notes in a Tuesday article, under Biden, “deep-pocketed nonprofit organizations aligned with the Democratic Party have earned a key seat at the policy shaping table,” often partnering directly with the federal government to craft and implement policy. At the same time, the administration has directed tens of millions of dollars in federal funding to these allied nonprofits, effectively laundering taxpayer money to para-governmental adjuncts of the Democratic Party. To cite just a few examples:

• In 2021, the president of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center bragged in a closed-door donor meeting that “many agencies in the new Biden administration” had reached out to the SPLC to “help shape the policies that the new administration is adopting to counter the domestic terrorism threat.” Under the Biden administration, federal agencies have targeted parents’ rights groups, Catholic churches, U.S. military personnel, and pro-life nonprofits as potential domestic “extremists” or “terrorists.” 

• As The Washington Free Beacon’s Joe Simonson reported earlier this year, the White House has used its Justice40 Initiative—a “whole of government” effort to use climate spending to help “underserved communities”—to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) grant money to “community-based nonprofits” for “technical assistance.” Some of these allegedly “community-based” groups are, in effect, fronts for major Democratic dark-money organizations such as the New Venture Fund, part of the Arabella Advisors network.

• Left-wing nonprofits, including Demos and Vot-ER, helped draft a March 2021 Biden executive order on “promoting access to voting,” according to records obtained by Kaminksy via a Freedom of Information Act request. Vot-ER, a nonprofit founded in February 2021 by Biden “White House fellow” Alister Martin with seed funding from Tides and Arabella, partners with local federally qualified health centers—which this year received an additional $4.4 billion from the Biden administration—to register low-income Medicare and Medicaid recipients to vote. In a 2023 interview with The Aspen Institute, Martin explained that Vot-ER was working to first deliver federal funds “directly into the pockets of low-income patients,” and “then we can have a conversation with them in six months, nine months about voter registration.”

• As Scroll senior writer Park MacDougald (i.e., yours truly) detailed in his May article for Tablet, in December 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency gave $50 million in federal grant money under the IRA to Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), a subsidiary of a larger nonprofit that has received funding from progressive dark-money groups such as Tides Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, and the Foundation for an Open Society. CJA, in turn, has fundraised for Stop Cop City, an illegal antifa-led protest in Atlanta whose leaders have been subject to a state-level RICO indictment, while several of its subsidiaries have organized illegal anti-Israel protests, including a December protest at the Capitol Rotunda in D.C., in which 50 activists were arrested.

• In our May 6 Big Story, we cited reporting from the Free Beacon that Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN)—an anti-Israel NGO funded by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Open Society Foundations, among others—has coordinated with officials in the Biden State Department to set U.S. policy vis-à-vis allegedly violent Israeli “settlers” in the West Bank. 

As Kaminsky notes in his Tuesday report, Harris herself has met one-on-one with several leaders of left-wing nonprofits and foundations, according to White House visitor logs. Her documented visitors include Alex Soros of the Open Society Foundations, Stephen B. Heintz of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation. As we’ve reported on several occasions here at The Scroll, all three of those groups are involved in bankrolling the anti-Israel protest movement. 

So, is the Trump-Vance ticket a Trojan horse for extremist MAGA donors who want to ban porn? We doubt it, but we suppose it’s possible. What we do know is that when it comes to the influence of “extreme” nongovernmental organizations on policy, the current administration isn’t in much of a position to talk. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Lee Smith on how Barack Obama remade American politics

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The Rest

→The IDF struck a building in southern Beirut on Tuesday in an airstrike targeting Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, aka Hajj Mohsin, a senior adviser to Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah and the man the IDF alleges was behind the Saturday attack on Majdal Shams. Reports conflicted as to whether Shukr was killed in the strike, although the latest reports from Arab-language media suggest that he was, according to The Times of Israel. Notably, the Israelis have defied warnings from U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein not to strike Hezbollah targets in Beirut, which we reported on in The Scroll yesterday.

→On Monday, thousands of right-wing activists stormed two IDF bases, Sde Teiman and Beit Lid, to protest the arrests of nine IDF reservists accused of abusing a Palestinian detainee. According to reporting in The Times of Israel, the protests, which devolved into riots as the activists broke into the bases and clashed with security personnel, were mobilized by several right-wing leaders, including members of the governing coalition, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and other senior Israeli civilian and military leaders were unanimous in condemning the rioting. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, however, said Monday that the protests were “justified” but called on his supporters to “follow the law and protect the integrity of the army and the people.” On Tuesday, Gallant demanded an inquiry into whether Ben-Gvir, who oversees the Israeli police, had “prevented or delayed” the police response to the riot. 

→Stat of the Day: $15.7 billion

That’s the value of Iranian oil exports from March 21 to June 22, according to a Monday announcement by Iran’s Customs Administration, reported by Adam Kredo of The Washington Free Beacon. A March report by United Against Nuclear Iran estimated that Iran had sold about $90 billion worth of sanctioned oil between January 2021 and March 2023, for a total, including the figures in this most recent report, of more than $105 billion since Biden took office. By comparison, after Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in May 2018, Iranian oil sales fell to $22.1 billion in 2019 and to $12.7 billion in 2020. 

→Image of the Day:

That’s from a Monday article in The Wall Street Journal on the growing political polarization between young men and young women. While young women remain overwhelmingly liberal, young men have shifted almost 30 points toward the Republicans since 2020, according to current polling. Issue polling also shows major gender divides in the 18-29 category, with a 35-point gender gap in support for urgent action on climate change (women more in favor), a 37-point gap in support for legal abortion (women more in favor), a 43-point gap in support for federal student loan forgiveness (women more in favor), and a 43-point gap in support for extending Trump’s tax cuts (men more in favor). 

Read the rest here. 

→Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told CNN on Sunday that if Kamala Harris is elected president, she will “work with Congress” to “create a pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants living in the United States. The prospect of granting citizenship, and therefore voting rights, to the roughly 10 million migrants who have illegally entered the United States since 2021—plus the 10 million who were already here—would seem to play into conservative accusations that the Biden administration’s border policy has been driven, at least in part, by a desire to import voters. But we read in The Washington Post on July 9 that the GOP-sponsored SAVE Act, which would have required proof of citizenship for voting, was driven by “falsehoods” such as the “great replacement theory”—i.e., the “racist” idea that “there is a deliberate effort underway to flood the country with immigrants who will vote Democratic.” How to make sense of these apparently conflicting messages? We can only assume that Warren—and WaPo columnist Philip Bump—expect at least half of the newly enfranchised illegal immigrants to vote for the MAGA Republican extremists and their sinister Project 2025 agenda. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Genius of Translation, by Blake Smith

Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody is the most original French-to-English translator of his generation and a hugely talented poet. But unlike Richard Howard, he has yet to make Baudelaire his own.

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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He the People

How Barack Obama ended normalcy in American politics

by Lee Smith

The people have spoken, and last week former President Barack Obama called Vice President Kamala Harris to tell her. His endorsement of her run for the presidency was captured in a short video documenting the candidate’s reaction. “Although you called for an open process,” said Obama, “and you know, Democrats have, have put in place an open process, it appears that people feel very strongly that you need to be our nominee.”

But without a primary, without a popular referendum, without even the open convention that Obama was rumored to favor, how did the people make their will known, and strongly? Was it social media influencers? Mass rallies across the country? Media chronicling the excitement surrounding a Harris candidacy? No, it was nothing like that. Obama is the people. The people are Obama.

The endorsement was more than five years in the making. Obama had long wanted her in that spot. Their families are old friends. Like him, Harris is progressive, multiracial, physically attractive, nominally hip, a child of academics—in other words, according to Obama-friendly media, she’s a “female Barack Obama.” He directed donors to support her 2020 presidential campaign, Capitol Hill sources told me at the time. More billionaires, 47, backed her campaign than any other candidate’s—with Obama strongholds in Hollywood (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas) and Big Tech (Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, Craig Newmark, etc.) leading the way.

Obama got her the vice presidential nod even when she was forced to drop out of the primary race after hitting just 3 percent in the polls. Jill Biden objected—Harris had called her husband a racist! The First Lady’s reported recent tantrums show that even after four years, she never fully grasped the arrangement the party had made with her husband. Biden was just an imperfect placeholder for Obama, and it was only a matter of time before the superior avatar would be slotted in.

The question is when, exactly, did it become clear to Obama that it was time for Harris to finally replace Biden? Was it after Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump? After the attempted assassination of Trump? No, it seems the countdown officially began Oct. 7. The Palestinians’ murderous assault on communities in southern Israel exposed Biden’s limited ability to represent the interests of the party he was tapped to temporarily preside over. It didn’t require an especially refined moral sensibility to be appalled and terrified by the carnivalesque depravity of Oct. 7—but to give Biden credit, he evidently was. And that was the signal his time was up.

He‘s no John Fetterman. Biden is not a particularly courageous friend of the Jewish state, nor does he appear to much value the strategic importance of an ally that lessens America’s burden in a region vital to U.S. interests. When it comes to Israel, the 81-year-old president is just a normal late-20th-century Democrat who likes the country well enough, recognizes Jews as an important albeit small voting bloc and a crucial source of campaign funds, and performs ritualistic contempt for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

But last Wednesday’s pro-Hamas riots in Washington, D.C.—in which domestic left-wing extremists linked arms with Middle East terror supporters and other foreigners to burn the American flag, deface monuments, and brawl with police, all in the name of protesting Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress—was only the latest evidence that the crux of Biden’s Oct. 7 problem was not that Michigan and Minnesota’s voter rolls are swollen with advocates of Muslim and Arab terror. The issue was not a party constituency at all, but rather the party itself and its leader. Barack Obama fundamentally reshaped the party when he struck the 2015 deal legalizing the nuclear weapons program of Hamas’ sponsor, Iran. By legitimizing the apocalyptic foreign policy aims of the world power that embodies Jew hatred, Obama sidelined the Jews and other centrists and made the progressive, anti-Israel faction the party’s new center of gravity.

The media did yeoman’s work obscuring the details and purpose of the agreement, but the fact is, by putting Iran’s bomb under a protective American umbrella, Obama was arming an American adversary to make it his own ally. The Iran deal was the first clear sign that Obama was not a normal U.S. commander in chief. When Biden extended even half-hearted, halting support to Israel’s response to Oct. 7, he crossed the only real red line Obama has ever had. Harris—who, unlike Biden, has no foreign policy beliefs or instincts of her own—never will.

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Like friends, our favored allies reflect back to us the qualities we are flattered to find in ourselves. For instance, when Netanyahu spoke of the lions of the IDF, the elected representatives of the American people were stirred not only by the thought of Israeli boys and girls on the front lines but also—in fact, primarily—by the image he implicitly evoked: the image of our best and brightest, our lions, risking their lives to serve America. When he spoke of the God of Israel, the Americans might as well have struck their chests like patriarchs and shouted, "That’s us, too, brother—America also has a covenant and with the same God!"

How did aligning with Iran, a threshold nuclear power that threatens to destroy Israel, change the Democratic Party? It means, for instance, that political analysts speak openly on TV about how Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Jewishness makes him a problematic number two pick for Harris. Nominating a Jew, the media reports, will split the party. And what partnership with an anti-American regime means for America as a whole was illustrated when violent rioters pulled down the American flag in the U.S. capital and replaced it with the banner of a terror enclave that has been holding American hostages for more than nine months.

What we saw outside Union Station is Obama’s faction. Local, state, and federal bureaucrats, as well as minorities, single women, academics, labor unions, and even Jews are all still welcome to vote Democrat. But the party’s vanguard, its true believers, its street fighters and enforcers, are allied with the terror gang that broadcast its campaign of rape, torture, and murder on Oct. 7. Mainstreaming the psychological modalities and media techniques of the Manson family is not normal in America. These are not normal times in America. But then again, as Obama’s Pulitzer-winning biographer David Garrow explained, “He’s not normal—as in not a normal politician or a normal human being.”

Proof that the mob outside Union Station is protected is that the few who were arrested were swiftly released—even those who assaulted police officers. The opposition was quick to compare law enforcement’s treatment of the death-cult auxiliaries who marched on the Capitol to Jan. 6 defendants, thousands of whom were rounded up, detained for months, charged, and convicted with sentencing enhancements that will keep some, like Proud Boys’ leader Enrique Tarrio, behind bars for two decades.

It’s a two-tier system of justice, say Trump supporters: We get jail time and they have get-out-of-jail-free cards. But that’s not accurate. A two-tier system of justice is one in which Black teenagers can’t afford the legal representation available to white kids with wealthy parents. The current system is rather one in which law is an instrument the regime uses to punish political opponents. In the current system, everything is licit for the ruling party. That is, the current system is lawless.

The end of normalcy in American politics has left Americans in a daze, unable to accurately grasp the new reality or to recognize its alien features. Some say Biden was toppled in a coup, but that’s wrong. It was never truly his presidency in the first place. He was serving in a ceremonial role on behalf of a politburo, and thus his executive authority owed less to his total 81 million votes, 58 percent of which were mail-in ballots harvested on his behalf, than to his former boss who saw him as the most plausible vehicle through which to exercise power. But Oct. 7 and the aftermath showed that Biden couldn’t be trusted to balance the appearance of normalcy with the psychopathy of the faction’s priestly warrior class. So his time was up.

It was Obama’s voice you heard when Harris spoke after her meeting with Netanyahu. One day after pro-Hamas mobs desecrated the American flag, Harris lectured Americans on the dangers of “Islamophobia.” But what does that mean? No one is going to the streets to beat up Muslims or burn Palestinian flags or celebrate the slaughter of Arab infants. “Islamophobia” is a made-up concept, designed to give cover to the terror adjuncts laying waste to American cities and college campuses. Criticize them or their historic cause—i.e., murdering Jews—and you’re Islamophobic. And that, as Obama likes to say, is not who we are as Americans.

Harris’ speech was filled with Obamaisms: pairing antisemitism with Islamophobia and “hate of any kind,” foisting responsibility for “Palestinian self-determination” on Israel, and urging Americans not to see the war in Gaza as a “binary issue.” That is, Americans should forsake the moral clarity that comes naturally to them because, as Obama said in November, we have to “admit” that “nobody's hands are clean.” Americans have to take in “the whole truth.” See, it’s nonbinary.

Harris is ridiculed for her vacuous rhetorical style, but Biden was never a good stand-in for Obama’s gaseous speechifying, and the dissonance has long unnerved the new Democratic base. Never mind the habits and ticks that stuck to the old man after nearly half a century in Washington; by 2020, he could barely string two sentences together no matter who typed his speeches into the teleprompter. With Harris, however, Obama has an ideal instrument through which he can speak directly and in his preferred prose. She’s an empty vessel. What listeners hear in her is the immediacy of Obama, which is precisely what the party—the people—crave.

The opposition, meanwhile, is struggling to recognize the contours of the new political anatomy. Those who can are often hesitant to call it what it is, for fear of being called a bigot for recognizing that normalcy in American politics came to an end with Barack Obama, who happened to also be the country’s first Black president. Discretion is laudable, up to a point. But when Obama lieutenants leak to the media that Obama is calling the shots, as they have been since the debate, it’s clear that fear of being called a racist has nothing to do with it. The failure to frankly identify the source of our political abnormality is a cause for concern.

We are now in the second decade of a phenomenon previously unknown in American politics. Instead of identifying it, dissidents have devised formulations to avoid naming it, like the deep state or wokeness or DEI, etc. But these are just the adornments of a deracinated regime, and to cast an amorphous leviathan in the role of adversary is to commit to a never-ending and ultimately unwinnable struggle. It is in this space where people lose hope, for it’s a vacuum that engenders the culture of the conspiracy theory—elaborate and colorful accounts of despair explaining that we have no control over our lives, our fate, the future of our families, communities, or our country because of hidden forces that are too big and too entrenched.

The truth is that an American political faction is employing third-world tactics—surveillance, censorship, election interference, political prosecution, and political violence—to put the United States under the thumb of a single party led by a man who in his mind has become the people.