A ray of sunshine has broken out. Trump has won the presidential election convincingly, both in terms of electoral college votes and the popular vote. His Republican Party has also taken control of the US upper house, the Senate. The lower, legislative chamber, the House of Representatives has not yet declared and is looking tight. If the Democrats win this, the House will, no doubt, be hostile to anything Trump does, so let’s hope the Republicans hold on to it – and that Republican representatives are genuine conservatives, unlike the last time Trump was elected. Then he also faced hostility from many in his own party, but American correspondents tell me that Trump has a tighter grip on the Republican Party this time. Let’s hope they are right.
And it does seem that, although the composition of his cabinet has not yet been announced, Trump has a decent team behind him, including Robert Kennedy Jnr and Elon Musk. The appointments he made last time were often pretty awful, but the experience of being betrayed by those he chose should result in a far more rigorous approach this time.
Further, the hate-filled vindictiveness of the Democrats during his last spell in office, the ceaseless efforts to have him destroyed by lawfare when out of it, the attempts on his life and the endless repetition of the woke curses of racists, misogynist and fascist against him should have left him with no illusion of the virulence of the hatred that comes with infection by the woke globalist virus. It should be personal this time, and let us hope he pays them back in kind for, there is no compromise to be had with these fanatics.
And that, of course, is what this election was all about: the battle between the fantasy of a borderless world ruled by a necessarily totalitarian Global Government, laid waste by mass immigration and the net zero lunacy, against those who maintain that the nation state is the best basic unit to ensure individual freedom and democracy, with free debate and progress through technology being the best way to solve the world’s problems.
But we should make no mistake, four years in office is precious little time to eradicate the woke infection, a disease that has been carefully and meticulously spread for decades now, the infamous slow march through the institutions, to the point where almost every public body, in the US as much as here, from education to defence, is infected.
And fighting the woke pandemic will be far from easy, as it is now endemic and considered the norm in many areas of public life, especially in academia, the law and the mainstream media. Trump might be able to have some effect on the law, but it remains to be seen how much he can change the prevailing attitudes in the other two. Last time around he didn’t even scratch the surface.
Now I’m no expert on the structure of US society, but I do have some familiarity with it, having been there many times and once spending six months in Arkansas, and it seems to me that the woke infection, while originating with Marcuse in the 1960s and 70s, really got going with the rapid expansion of US higher education (like Blair’s disastrous experiment here) and the development of regulatory regimes to police equality of outcome, made much worse by the repression of open public debate.
Regulatory over-reach is an important driver of today’s illiberal shift in our culture. Targeting counter-productive rules like affirmative action and quotas based on race, sex and all the other Woke totems, and stopping more ill-advised, illiberal regulation (like the Online Safety Bill and Hate Crime Laws, for example) is a practical way to fight back, but culture wars are long wars and the extremely well-entrenched woke culture, even though it is based on an ultimately sinister and destructive anti-human fantasy, has been so long in development it will not be reversed overnight.
Personally, I think that the fight back must be based on a set of principles best set out by Friedrich Hayek, whose belief in personal liberty and that the power of free market capitalism is the best long-term answer. But it seems that there is a Plan, ready to go, that many think Trump is likely to adopt, and that plan is Project 2025, as formulated by the Heritage Foundation, which although it does not set out its intellectual heritage, its stated mission “to formulate and promote public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense” is close enough to Hayek’s core beliefs to give us some hope – if in fact Trump does adopt it.
Project 2025 featured in the US election, with Harris ludicrously saying that it was Trump’s blueprint for fascism, and Trump saying the he knew nothing about it, but the Heritage Foundation produces these ideas regularly, and much of Ronald Reagan’s campaign to reduce the size of the State had him adopting or attempting almost two-thirds of its 2,000 policy recommendations in his first "mandate" document. And Trump has reportedly said that five of the eleven judges he considered for appointment to the Supreme Court were Heritage Foundation's picks.
A large number of the authors and editors that worked on Project 2025 – 31 out of 38 – have connections to Trump or his previous administration, including Chris Miller, Trump's former acting defence secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, his acting deputy homeland security secretary, and Peter Navarro, his former White House aide, who served prison time for defying subpoenas from one of the committees set up to destroy Trump by lawfare.
While I have not yet read all of Project 2025’s 900-odd pages, and while it might not go as afar as I would like in refuting, for example, that key dogma of the Woke Cult, man-made climate change, it’s practical recommendations are exactly what is required, so let’s give the final word to Project 2025’s plan for energy, a critical area of the fight against totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening”:
“American Energy Dominance. Access to affordable, reliable, and abundant energy is vital to America’s economy, national security, and quality of life. Yet ideologically driven government policies have thrust the United States into a new energy crisis just a few short years after America’s energy renaissance, which began in the first decade of the 2000s, transformed the United States from a net energy importer (oil and natural gas) to energy independence and then energy dominance.
Americans now face energy scarcity, an electric grid that is less reliable, and artificial shortages of natural gas and oil despite massive reserves within the United States—all of which has led to higher prices that burden both the American people and the economy.
The new energy crisis is caused not by a lack of resources, but by extreme “green” policies. Under the rubrics of “combating climate change” and “ESG” (environmental, social, and governance), the Biden Administration, Congress, and various states, as well as Wall Street investors, international corporations, and progressive special-interest groups, are changing America’s energy landscape. These ideologically driven policies are also directing huge amounts of money to favored interests and making America dependent on adversaries like China for energy. In the name of combating climate change, policies have been used to create an artificial energy scarcity that will require trillions of dollars in new investment, supported with taxpayer subsidies, to address a “problem” that government and special interests themselves created. The result has been increased energy costs that:
Hurt individuals and families, especially low-income Americans and seniors on fixed incomes;
Make businesses that create the jobs that drive our economy and quality of life less competitive; and Make America less energy secure.
Moreover, increased energy scarcity will allow government, either directly or through access to banks and Wall Street investors, to decide who is “worthy” to receive funding for energy projects. In the end, government control of energy is control of people and the economy. This is one reason why the trend toward nationalization of our energy industry through government mandates, bans on the production and use of oil and natural gas, and nationalization of the electric grid is so dangerous.”
All that sound good to me, and what I’ve read so far of Project 2025 is of a similar flavour, so let us hope that Trump does plan to implement it, as it would go a very long way to kill off the woke virus once and for all.
I’ll be back with more about Project 2025, after digesting it, as maybe it can be the basis for the fightback here.