Kevin Roberts, president of the far-right-wing Heritage Foundation, the organization responsible for the equally far-right-wing “Project 2025” announced last week on Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast (after Bannon was finally sent off to jail) that “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Let’s put his thinly veiled threat of violence aside for the moment and focus instead on his twisted version of a ”second American Revolution.”
It may be hard to believe (you can believe this former Confederate officer, because I was there to see it!), but the “slavocracy” that took eleven Southern states into the Confederacy in 1861 also fancied itself to be fighting a second American Revolution. The tyranny they were fighting wasn’t the English crown, but the prospect of losing what they considered their God-given right to enslave other human beings for wealth and power. To their way of thinking, freedom and liberty meant their freedom and liberty to own other human beings; their chattel slaves had no human rights they were bound to respect.
Project 2025’s “Second American Revolution” is Really the Third. The Confederacy Already Claimed its Fight to Preserve Slavery was the Second.
And don’t forget, the Confederate revolution of 1861 had its willing and coerced foot soldiers, poor whites who made up the bulk of the Southern Army and died like flies in “hallowed” places like Gettysburg, Antietam, and Shiloh for a cause they mistakenly thought was their own. Despite the popular mythology, they were not “rebs” fighting for their independence; they were pawns fighting to preserve the wealth and power of a small minority of very wealthy slaveholders, the lords of the “Cotton Kingdom” (If there was anything I hated, it was the Cotton Kingdom!). The poor white soldiers of whom I speak were the forebearers of Trump’s loyal MAGAs, people willing to fight passionately for a cause they think is their own but is nothing but misplaced loyalty to someone else’s wealth and power.
The Slaveocracy’s Confederacy Proved that Every “American Revolution” Isn’t a Fight for Freedom.
Which brings us back to Mr. Roberts’s veiled threats of violence. I may have some empathy for those who joined the Confederacy because they were duped into fighting a war they didn’t understand, but this humble spirit has no sympathy for people like Roberts who are happy to risk years of American progress and the future of our democracy to promote of their own right-wing cottage industries (Roberts admits the Heritage Foundation is now dedicated to “institutionalizing Trumpism”!)
Now Even Donald Trump is Disowning “Project 2025”
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump’s social media post reads. Despite this absurd disavowal of any knowledge, he continued: “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.” (If the things they’re saying are so “abysmal,” why would he “wish them luck”?)
Why would Trump attack the proposed agenda for his own administration, despite overwhelming evidence that many of his closest allies and advisors have been intricately involved in its development? Well, as former Republican strategist Rick Wilson put it, Trump may have been trying to distance himself from Project 2025 because “most of it polls about like Ebola,” the deadly virus that causes severe bleeding and organ failure and has a mortality rate of 80 to 90%.