Hightower was under the weather and unable to record new commentaries for this week, so we wanted just to quickly let our podcast listeners know that you can check out new written content being posted to our Substack all week, at jimhightower.substack.com.

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My instant feeling upon hearing that President Biden was stepping down was not political anxiety (aw jeez, another earthquake!), and certainly not any joy in seeing Joe deposed—but pure relief. Suddenly, the deck was shuffled, and now (not a moment too soon), we have a good hand, allowing us to focus squarely on Donald’s dangerous dementia, Project 2025, and the assault on America’s democracy by the combined forces of authoritarian elites and Christian nationalist theocrats.

Kamala Harris is our logical political choice to head up job number one: Discombobulate and defeat Trumpism. An accomplished woman, a woman of color, and a child of immigrants, she’s an experienced and forceful former prosecutor with the smarts to nail the convicted criminal opposing her… and us. Sure, her policies are not as progressive as I want them to be, but neither were Biden’s, and her views are something we can continue to work on. If Trump wins in November, we won’t have even a slight chance to shape the future of an America that stands for, and with, everyone.

While the urgent need in the next 104 (!) days is to focus on the November election, I can’t stress enough that we are in this for the long haul. Campaigns end, movements don’t. We must continue to invest in the local, grassroots organizing that actually bends that long arc of justice, building the capacity to have policies and people that represent the real values of America: fairness, equity and opportunity for all.

Jon Stewart said it best at the end of a recent episode of The Daily Show:

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“Summertime, and the living is easy, fish are jumping, and”… wait a minute, what the hell is this?

A summer camp for kids – but with a disturbing corporate twist. Some outlets of Chick-fil-A, the fast food chicken chain, are promoting a summer camp where children as young as 5 can learn “how to be a Chick-fil-A worker.”

Isn’t this fun? The corporation says that while the chickadees won’t actually be doing the work of regular employees, they will learn how to “take orders, deliver orders, make drinks, and be a hostess.”

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Of course, the little campers don’t get paid – indeed their families must pay to let the company give them an early dose of the good ol’ American work ethic and a “behind-the-scenes look” inside the hierarchal corporate order. You can’t start ‘em too young on these life lessons! The kiddos do get compensated, sort of, with their very own Chick-fil-A nametag and t-shirt.

Okay, this is not the Dickensian dystopia of 19th century England – but is that our modern standard? There is nothing wrong with young kids working… but 5-year-olds? And – as was the case in the pre-teen tasks I had in my father’s small business and on my Aunt Eula’s farm – the objective ought not be indoctrination into the corporate culture of low-wage franchises. Rather, I was learning to help the family and how to contribute to the larger community. My reward was not merely a token stipend, but a recognition that I belonged – that I had a role and was valued as part of that community.  People didn’t need a corporate name tag to know who I was.

This is Jim Hightower saying… There’s so much more that an $11 billion nationwide giant like Chick-fil-A could do for the communities that provide its profits. Can’t they think of anything less selfish than promoting a fast-food future for children.

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What’s wrong with Neil Gorsuch? His soul, I mean.

As one of the domineering right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court, Gorsuch routinely supports enthroning plutocracy, autocracy, and his own brand of Christian theocracy over people’s democratic rights. But he also uses his unelected, unchecked judicial position to take power and justice away from America’s least powerful, most vulnerable people – including the homeless.

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For example, he ruled last month that an Oregon city’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors was NOT cruel and unusual punishment. Never mind that the city provided nowhere else for homeless individuals and families to bed down, Gorsuch saw no problem with penalizing people who have to sleep or camp out in parks, on the street, etc. After all, he blithely explained, it was not a ban on homelessness, but merely on sleeping outdoors.

“It makes no difference,” exclaimed His Supremeness, whether the violator is homeless… or “a backpacker on vacation.” Or, I suppose he’d say, a Supreme Court justice sleeping under a bridge. To punctuate his cluelessness, Gorsuch actually asserted that the law applied equally to everyone. Except, of course, that the homeless can’t just go home after being kicked out from under the bridge.

This is Jim Hightower saying… It’s rank injustice for Gorsuch – a child of a politically-powerful and rich family, product of Ivy League schools and high-dollar law firms, possessor of enormous personal wealth and multiple homes – to dictate “let-them-eat-cake” rules for homeless people he’ll never know or understand. Yes, homelessness is a complex social scourge, but cavalierly criminalizing its victims is itself a judicial crime that solves nothing. Neil is not morally fit to judge poor people – so how about replacing him with a homeless person who actually knows something about real life.

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You may remember that we wrote a new post on Saturday about Project 2025 and the dictatorial implications for American democracy:

As soon as we posted it here, we started sharing it to our social media platforms to help get the word out. Within minutes, we got a notification from Facebook saying, “We removed your post. It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way. This goes against our Community Standards on spam.”

Um, excuse me, what? This has never happened to us before, with any link to anything we’ve ever posted since 2008.

There was a button to ask Facebook to review this removal, so I clicked on it, and within a few minutes, it was reinstated. Soon, our comments and inbox were flooded with reports from other people that the same thing was happening to them. I also tried posting it to my personal Facebook page, same results—the post was removed within minutes, and then reinstated after review. Then, another 24 hours later, the posts were gone from Facebook again altogether, sometimes without even being notified! Fascinatingly enough, other platforms—even Elon Musk’s platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter hellhole—had no problem with our post.

Facebook (and their parent company, Meta) are removing posts containing links to left-leaning information about Project 2025.

I started asking colleagues who work in progressive communications and technology if they’d heard about things like this happening. We’ve now found out that this has been a pattern happening to other organizations publicizing the harm that Project 2025 (“P25”) could do to the country. Here’s what we know so far:

• Facebook uses a network of media “partners” to fact-check news being shared on their site. Some of those are reasonably reputable, and others… not so much. One Facebook partner that’s been called out in discussions about the removal of P25 posts is The Dispatch, a right-wing media outlet. The Dispatch has an article on its own site outright saying that most social media posts about P25 are false.

• We’ve also been told that so-called fact-checkers for Facebook are using very niggling excuses to claim a post has misinformation. For example, the P25 section on banking regulations calls for the elimination of those regulations, which would eliminate the FDIC. But, since the document doesn’t explicitly say “eliminate the FDIC,” any statement about that is being flagged as false.

• Other links about Project 2025 that have been removed from Facebook include some from Just Security, an online publication based at the NYU School of Law. A user named dandle on Reddit says: “UPDATE: I tried again to post the same Just Security piece to my personal Facebook page, using different text in my post. The privacy settings were again set to friends only. I weakened the suggestion that my friends read it, but I did include ‘Project 2025’ in the text. Facebook again flagged and blocked the post as spam.” Another website having problems is Democracy Docket.

We’re working with partners and friends who take on Big Tech with their madness regularly to find out what’s going on, and what we can all do. We’re big fans of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and we hope they’ll look more into this. If you’re interested in the freedom of anything technological, they deserve your support!

Facebook quietly implemented a feature this year to show users very little political content unless they choose to see it, and now it seems to be censoring valid information about the consequences of this election. This is not just Orwellian in its conception, but also an extreme escalation of the censorship that corporate media have been engaging in for decades. Their claims of being purely unbiased have long fallen flat, and now we see Meta/Facebook following in their footsteps.

It’s a good reminder that Facebook (and other social media platforms) are not free public squares or even public utilities, but for-profit corporate conglomerates, with key shareholders like, in Meta’s case, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, as well as BlackRock and JP Morgan.

We’ll keep you updated as we learn about what’s happening, but for now, perhaps it’s finally time to get off Facebook and find other ways to stay in touch with the friends and family we all have there. Stay tuned.

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We’ve seen a ton of social media posts and emails in the last week or so about Project 2025, and although we’re still working on a fuller analysis to give you the lowdown on what it means to you, as well as tools to fight it, we felt it was urgent to get some solid info into Lowdowner’s hands as soon as we could. Y’all are quite the army of activists (we see the results when you take action!) and we know that if we offer up the goods, you can take them and run with them.

Here’s our brief primer on what this mess is, what’s at stake, and what you can start to do.

If you don’t know what Project 2025 is, or would like a brief summary to use to alert others about it, here you go:

It’s a painstakingly detailed, 922-page step-by-step plan to impose an American dictatorship of moneyed authoritarians and Christian nationalists, removing your and my democratic rights. Yes, this is an actual coup.

It sounds insane, yet there it is—a document written and being loudly promoted by a power-mad cluster of Trump bosses, Putin-esque despots, Reagan-loving economists and Ayn Rand-ian academics, moneyed corporate donors, and general far-right quacks and media blowhards. It’s innocuously coded “Project 2025” because the intent is to launch their full assault on the democratic fabric and structure of our national government next January, on Day 1 of another Trump presidency.

This scheme has been devised by The Heritage Foundation, a DC think tank set up in 1973 to promote the elitist economic and cultural doctrines of its über-rich founding funders, Joseph Coors (yes, that Coors) and Richard Mellon Scaife (yes, that Mellon). In recent years, Heritage has gone from merely being right-wing zealots to off-the-charts Trumpists… and now they’re going deep into the distant extremist cosmos. Thus, the head cosmonaut, Kevin Roberts, has megalomaniacally exulted that Project 2025 is “the second American revolution.” Unfortunately, it’s a dangerous devolution, with little tin-hat Kevin acting out what he pretends is a heroic coup.

This would be silly and inconsequential, except the Trump Party has become alarmingly treacherous. Ominously referencing the January 6th violent assault on democratic rule, Kevin said that his coup “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Of course, “the left”—i.e., sane democracy fighters like you and me—do not acquiesce to tyrannical wannabes.

But his ace is that The Donald, despite his denials, has hailed Heritage’s authoritarian agenda as his own and has cheered its plan to fire thousands of public employees on Day 1, replacing them with a lockstep army of enforcers that Heritage and others say they’ve already recruited to seize and Trump-ize every federal agency. This, combined with Trump’s own pledge to use the US military to enforce his political will, is where Project 2025’s subversive coup gets real.

Here are just a few of the steps we’ve learned so far that Heritage autocrats intend to implement:

• Nearly eliminating abortion access altogether at the national level.

• Cutting Social Security benefits.

• Giving ever-more tax breaks to corporations and gabillionaires.

• Selling off national parklands, wetlands, wildlife sanctuaries and other public properties

• Eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR, PBS).

• Imposing a “biblically-based” definition of marriage and families.

• Eliminating the Department of Education.

• Preventing LGBTQ+ couples from adopting children.

• Eliminating the food stamp program (SNAP) and the free school lunch program.

• Putting the Department of Justice and other independent agencies under the direct political control of the President.

• Eliminating organic food promotion, conservation programs, and most climate policies of the Agriculture Department

For more in depth reading, check out this series from the Center for American Progress.

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One, they were piecemeal proposals, like Bush the Second’s failed attack on Social Security, or they were just sloganeering war whoops, like Grover Norquist’s empty call to make government small enough to drown it in a bathtub.

Two, Project 2025 is a comprehensive, all-in-one blueprint for a radical plutocratic and theocratic takeover of our government, surreptitiously advanced by many of the same anti-democracy corporate supremacists and billionaires who’ve already seized control of the judicial branch.

Three, the Republican Party is perfectly willing to submit to and grovel at the feet of moneyed extremists, media demagoguery, and political thuggery—even in support of stupid, poisonous policies the American people overwhelmingly reject.

Four: Donald.

Right now, the most important thing you can do is to tell your friends and family about this terrifying agenda. Right-wingers are currently attacking the media reporting on this, calling progressives and even moderates who oppose the coup “Chicken Little”-types, trying to minimize this elitist assault on America itself. We cannot let them.

The most important people to share it with are not your super conservative relatives that drive you nuts, but rather people who may be feeling ambiguous about voting for a Democrat (whoever that is ends up being) for President. You’re not going to change the people who’ve already gone over to the crazies, but you have a chance at inspiring more undecided voters to at least vote against an explicitly un-American, Christian Nationalist, fascist ideology.

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If the six right-wing dogmatists who now literally rule the Supreme Court wonder why 70 percent of the American people consider them somewhere between politically corrupt and grotesque, they might re-read their Kafkasesque decision last month perverting the meaning of bribery.

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Appropriately enough, the case involved garbage trucks. A smalltown mayor had funneled a million-dollar contract for new garbage trucks to a local seller, which then made a $13,000 payoff to the mayor. Obvious graft. But no, the six supremes decreed that the payoff was not illegal, because it was given to the mayor after the garbage truck contract was issued. Taking money before would be a bribe, they babbled, but money given afterwards is an innocent “gratuity” – like tipping a waiter for good service.

The court’s distortion of kindergarten-level ethics was written by Brett Kavanaugh, infamous for his own frat-boy moral contortions. In his formal opinion, Brett rhetorically asked if such after-the-fact kickbacks should be considered bribes. “The answer.” he proclaimed,” is no.”

Of course, as any reasonable person would tell the black-robed fabricator, the obvious answer is: “Hell yes!”

Kavanaugh even tried to trivialize such official bribery, calling it no more sinister than parents sending a gift basket to thank their child’s teacher for a job well done. Hello, Mr. Clueless, this was a $13,000 gift basket!! The truck dealer was obviously rewarding the mayor for handing out a million taxpayer dollars to it!

We’re collaborating with friends to build out fresh actions you can take, and in the meantime, check these out:

• Share the Justice Can’t Wait updated website.

• Share Stand Up America’s Supreme Court Voter website, which aims to educate and mobilize voters on the impact the next president will have on the future of the U.S. Supreme Court.

• Join United for Democracy in calling on Congress to rein in the out-of-control Supreme Court.

• Demand Justice has been advocating for the Judiciary Act, which would expand the court by four seats. They’re asking people to call their representatives, and to join their rapid response team. 

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What is a SCOTUS? Sounds like a prehistoric critter scuttling along some seabed. But, no, it is the acronym for our Supreme Court of the United States.

SCOTUS is meant to be the impartial arbiter of legal disputes over what our laws mean. Yet, who are these arbiters, how are they elected, why don’t we even know their names, and if they go rogue, imposing their personal autocratic beliefs on our nation’s democratic ideals… what then?

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Well, structurally, SCOTUS is undemocratic, a relic of monarchial rule. Unlike the 535 members of the legislative branch, who are elected from diverse districts across America, there are only nine supremes, and none of the current bunch have ever faced the people, even in an election for dogcatcher. They are hand-picked by political and moneyed elites, and most blatantly lie to win approval for their lifetime appointments. Once enthroned, they have no accountability to us commoners, who are expected to blindly obey their edicts.

Today, out of 330 million Americans, six right-wing SCOTUS members have seized control of the court… and our government. They claim supremacy over the People, the President, and the Congress – arbitrarily dictating what is “legal” for elected officials and the public to do. Indeed, they are now making up laws on abortion, presidential power, voting rights, environmental protection, and much more to suit their personal political and religious biases. Moreover, they operate behind closed doors, with no disclosure of their conflicts of interest.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Call this what it is: A right-wing extremist power grab. And it is fast supplanting our people’s historic democratic progress with a kleptocracy of autocratic, plutocratic, theocratic rule. The only remedy is a head-on people’s rebellion to democratize this totally unAmerican court.

We’re collaborating with friends to build out fresh actions you can take, and in the meantime, check these out:

• Share the Justice Can’t Wait updated website.

• Share Stand Up America’s Supreme Court Voter website, which aims to educate and mobilize voters on the impact the next president will have on the future of the U.S. Supreme Court.

• Join United for Democracy in calling on Congress to rein in the out-of-control Supreme Court.

• Demand Justice has been advocating for the Judiciary Act, which would expand the court by four seats. They’re asking people to call their representatives, and to join their rapid response team. 

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Being a lifelong Texan, I’m used to hot summers. But what the hell – 99 degrees in June! Last year, we had 80 days of 100-plus temperatures, and we’re looking at 90 days this year. I can’t moan in self-pity, though, for the globally-warming furnace is now searing the whole country, even in northern climes where people are used to having days in August when they need “summer sweaters.”

As we crank up our air-conditioners, however, let’s pause for a moment to consider some 50 million workers in your and my communities who are exposed throughout the day to the full intensity of the sun’s power. They are roofers and landscapers, warehouse workers and farm laborers, street pavers and letter carriers. These have always been hot jobs, but now they’re deadly—heat kills more Americans today than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.

So surely there are basic workplace rules assuring that these exposed people get water, shade breaks, etc. No…. and when such humanitarian codes are proposed, industry bosses coldly reject them. For example, after several Texas cities began enacting worker protections, corporate lobbyists rushed to their hireling, Gov. Greg Abbott, who obediently snuck a state pre-emption into law, banning local officials from setting their own heat standards. That year, a record 450 people died of heat exposure in Texas, but Abbott just snarled that his preemption “increases economic liberty.”

Mercifully, President Biden is pushing national heat rules. Of course, industry lobbyists are out to kill his anti-killing reforms, calling them “unreasonably complicated.” Really? Providing water and shade is too perplexing for our corporate geniuses? Why don’t we put them on roofing jobs in August – and let them think about it?

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For us Texans, there’s nothing new about Bible-thumping politicians bedevilling us with the foolishness of their dogmatic Christian piety. A century ago, for example, a proposal was made to offer bilingual education to Spanish-speaking school kids. But it was quashed by the governor, who solemnly declared: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.”

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But suddenly, Louisiana’s demagogic Christian officials have surged past Texas on the far right. The Pelican State’s governor, an Elmer Gantry wannabe, has decreed that every single public school classroom must henceforth prominently display the Ten Commandments to indoctrinate the tykes in his religion. That way, babbled a legislative backer of the state edict, students can “look up and see what God says is right and what he says is wrong.”

Actually, the Christian bible itself is a little wobbly on that, offering three different versions of holy commandments, including this: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in it is mother’s milk.”

Wobbliest of all, though, is the moral authority of depraved politicians hypocritically preaching to school kids about such sins of adultery, stealing, and (hello MAGA zealots!) worshiping false gods. Plus, their piousness doesn’t work. Young people are not so dull and docile that they’ll mindlessly obey what some self-serving, immoral politicos put on a poster.

Louisiana could have consulted Texas on this. For some 60 years, a 6-foot-tall granite slab engraved with the Ten Commandments has stood outside our State Capitol building. Yet, those inside, the Capitol – including our governor – routinely violate those engraved moral sentiments.

If so-called “leaders” don’t give a damn about honoring the values they put on classrooms posters, why should students?

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