Bad as Trump’s presidency was from 2017 to 2021, a second Trump term, coupled with Republican control of Congress, would be far worse, especially for the federal government’s treatment of the environment.
Project 2025 is the extreme right-wing’s comprehensive plan for destroying democracy and installing White Christian Nationalist doctrines as the guiding principles of our country.
If we thought anti-vaxxers behaved badly while over a million Americans died from COVID (and Trump suggested a cure could be injecting bleach), imagine when anti-scientific types control the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA regulates medicines and most foods to ensure their safety. The FDA must also approve environmental impact statements to protect us from corporate malfeasance in manufacture and preparation of their products. All those safeguards will disappear in the name of “getting the government off our backs,” as they like to say.
Add anti-environmentalists to administer the Environmental Protection Agency and we’ll have an ecological catastrophe. These terracidal terrorists will trash every EPA regulation designed to keep our air and water safe and clean. They’ll double down on drilling while they sabotage sustainable solutions. They’ll end endangered species protections. And internationally, Trump will pull the United States out of treaties, like the modestly ambitious Paris Accords, intended to mitigate the climate crisis and relieve the damage already occurring to many coastal countries.
In the rosy past of the 1970s, great progress was made on environmental issues with both parties participating. Now the Repugnicans have declared war on Mother Earth, instead of respecting and protecting Her as the nurturing creative force of the world.
It’s like treating your wife as your property instead of your partner. That’s an apt analogy about women because removing reproductive rights including contraception is, of course, the cornerstone of their plan for a theocracy.
Remember when the Supreme Court would overturn such outrageous assaults on the constitution and the country? That’s a fading memory because now the majority of Supremes have abandoned their solemn mission of wisely interpreting the constitution, to instead shape the statutes to serve the cult of conspiracy conservatives and Biblical bumpkins. These supreme sellouts have gutted environmental protections, permitted payoffs to politicians, enshrined immunity to presidents for practically any crime they commit, and ruined reproductive rights.
Is there any chance for common sense and common decency to be restored? The good news is that a majority of the population does care about their brothers and sisters of different colors. They care about taking care of the Earth. They respect science and value democracy.
As for the cultists that have taken possession of the conservative body politic: Do these people breathe air and drink water? Do they eat food and take medicine? These are fair questions but as we contemplate the answers the extreme Right is driving us to Hell in a hot rod. There is precious little time to expose their suicidal plans. The general public is not sharp or sophisticated about civics. We must wake up voters who are largely oblivious to the disasters that would befall the people and the planet if Trump and his followers re-gain power.
Get Out The Vote has never been this important. Let’s reject the project and preserve the republic.
Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote.” Email: lingofrank@gmail.com. See his website: Greenbeat.world
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2024
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