Public Health Policy Reviews 48:
VALKYRIES 8 – Project 2025, Betsy Devos, and Brown versus Board of Education
What makes American society, culture, and history unique from most other societies worldwide?
Some social scientists, cultural historians, and political academics claim that the United States is arguably the pinnacle of any society and culture dedicated to individual freedom, communal civil rights, freedom of speech, religious liberty, and economic justice. Furthermore, American culture—often viewed as the modern bulwark of Enlightenment-era philosophies—has not only significantly shaped global values since 1945 but continues to do so today.
Nevertheless, such “high-minded” ideals did not always dominate and guide Western culture. The protestant Christian settlers who founded the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to escape religious persecution in Europe, a testament to the resilience of the American spirit.
Protestants from England and other Western European monarchial countries were fleeing the doctrinal tyranny of Catholicism or the rigid hierarchical strictures of other Protestant faiths. Contemporary Evangelical Christians view themselves as the inheritors of the American colonial Protestant tradition.
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Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash.
Evangelical Christians passionately believe that America is “ordained” in biblical scripture to be a Christian nation.
Evangelicals and conservative Catholics think they are the modern-day crusaders in this divine prophecy. American Christians, in contrast to secular Enlightenment ideals, also consider religious liberty the cornerstone of American democracy and the foundation of Western civilization. This philosophical dispute is a significant aspect of American culture and history.
President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign and the National Democratic Party are currently experiencing a “real-time” public disintegration in the national media. Mr. Biden’s rapidly advancing senility and intransigence in removing himself from the 2024 US presidential race reinforce the certainty of a second term in the White House for Donald Trump in November. Given the different domestic program approaches of the two administrations, this potential outcome could significantly impact public health policy.
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American liberals and politically left-wing progressives are struggling to coalesce around policy issues that will save them from Mr. Trump and a Republican Party (GOP) takeover of both chambers of Congress in the fall.
Some media-savvy liberal celebrities and independent congressional Democrats have tried to ignore President Biden’s disastrous public physical degeneration and tanking poll numbers to focus on a political manifesto titled Project 2025. Project 2025 is a radical right-wing and Evangelical Christian policy platform anthology written and produced specifically as an executive branch transition plan for former US President Donald Trump’s impending return to the “Oval Office” in November.
Mr. Trump recently disavowed any knowledge of Project 2025 or a direct connection to the Heritage Foundation, which financed and drafted the 900-page policy proposal document. “I know nothing about Project 2025,” wrote Trump in a social media post about the plan on his Truth Social platform on Friday, July 5th.
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This “Project 2025” photo illustration is courtesy of Molly Butler of Media Matters and Gage Skidmore of Creative Commons.
“Project 2025 is not related to our campaign and does not reflect official campaign policy,” said Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt in a recent feature article about the program to Intelligencer reporter Alec Dent.
Karoline Dent’s problem is that she is one of the many Trump representatives who contributed content to Project 2025. Mr. Trump is now forcing Ms. Dent to attack a program she was deeply involved in helping to develop until recently. Cabinet officials and executive department heads from the Trump administration when the former president was in office from 2017 through 2021 contributed significant content or policy recommendations to Project 2025.
Everyone from current Trump political advisor Stephen Miller to former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, economic adviser Peter Navarro, and former Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office John McEntee helped craft core portions of the Project 2025 policy agenda.
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Photo by Aiden Frazier on Unsplash.
What is Project 2025’s policy agenda?
Project 2025’s official title is Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Project 2025’s primary goal is to infuse the federal government and American society with Evangelical Christian values. Constitutional law and executive branch legal experts say that Project 2025 seeks to eliminate tens of thousands of civil service workers from the federal government bureaucracy by reclassifying them as political appointees. Such a reclassification would allow Trump and his lieutenants to replace civil servants with GOP loyalists accountable to Mr. Trump for their jobs.
The Mandate for Leadership will be a complete dystopian disaster for public health policy in America if Donald Trump defeats Joe Biden on November 5th. The Heritage Foundation’s draft program does not call for eliminating the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”). But it will impose significant cuts to Medicaid, impose work requirements to receive coverage - and attack reproductive rights for women and girls from several federal administrative and judicial positions.
The term “abortion” will be removed from all federal laws and regulations. Project 2025 will reverse federal approval of abortion medications for military members and federal workers.
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Betsy DeVos and American Public Education
The official portrait of Betsy DeVos, the eleventh US Secretary of Education, appointed by former President Donald Trump. The photo image is courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
Project 2025 will also withdraw federal funding from health clinics that provide contraception services and STD testing.
The Heritage Foundation drafted Project 2025 with the help of more than one hundred right-wing partner organizations. It should be no surprise that many of the Project 2025 partner organizations have strong ties to Christian nationalism and have also leveled furious attacks on public education.
After the United States Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos as Donald Trump’s new Education Secretary on February 7th, 2017, Kellyanne Conway – the former Senior Advisor to former President Trump, told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “DeVos will get on with the business of executing on the president’s vision for education.”
“He’s made very clear throughout the campaign, and as President, he wants to repeal Common Core,” Conway said. “He doesn’t think federal standards are better than local and parental control,” Conway continued.
Conway also stated, “Children should not be restricted in terms of education opportunities just by their ZIP code, just by where they live.”
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Former Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at CPAC in 2017. The photo image is courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
“We’ve got to look at homeschooling, charter schools, and school choice and other alternatives for certain students,” Conway concluded.
Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos’s efforts to refashion the national public education system through charter schools, vouchers, and privatization were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, former Secretary DeVos and Mr. Trump helped to lay the foundation for the current state of fear and hysteria amongst White American parents over “critical race theory” (CRT) and LGBTQ+ indoctrination in the public education system’s curriculum objectives and lesson plans.
But “CRT” and gay indoctrination are simply the latest reasons right-wing and Evangelical Christian White citizens in the US are using to attack public education. The United States Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (347 US 483 [1954]) - which overturned “separate but equal” racial segregation as a constitutional doctrine, is a social and legal landmark. Brown v. Board was an extension of the US ratification of the Fourteenth (14th) Amendment in 1868.
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Public Education, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties
The photo image is courtesy of Unsplash.
The 14th Amendment officially granted African Americans citizenship.
Thus, all persons born in America gained equal protection under the United States Constitution. Congress passed an amendment ending slavery in 1865 - the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. However, the 13th Amendment only outlawed slavery. It did not provide citizenship or equal rights to Black people.
The US Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education resulted from a century-long fight for citizenship and civil rights for African Americans after the passage of the 14th Amendment. Betsy DeVos and her allies in the “school choice” movement are part of a seventy (70) year mission by Evangelical Christians to reverse Brown v. Board. Donald Trump and the GOP are collaborating with the current US Supreme Court to dissolve the Department of Education and the 14th Amendment.
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Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, established Project 2025 with the assistance of twenty-seven former Trump administration officials. The photo image is courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
The Christian nationalists who helped craft Project 2025 have long viewed Brown v. Board as a target because it is the legal framework for the dissolution of the “separate but equal” judicial ruling instituting segregation during the “Jim Crow” era of the US.
Over the past eight years, former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and their political allies in conservative media have questioned the legitimacy of funding for public education, welfare programs, federal housing, and public health.
One of the primary aims of the Trump administration from 2016 through 2020 was to replace the US public school system with “free market-based” solutions. In 2020, Mr. Trump and the Republican Party began to view COVID-19 as an opportunity to disassemble America’s public education system.
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Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash.
Critics have characterized Project 2025 as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to transform the US into an autocracy.
Legal scholars say Project 2025 will undermine the rule of law, the separation of powers, church and state, and civil liberties. Twenty-seven (27) of the thirty-seven (37) authors of Project 2025 came directly from Donald Trump’s four-year administration and activists directly attached to the administration in his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
Project 2025 even calls for the next Republican administration to use the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-vice law banning the mailing of obscene matter and articles used to facilitate criminal activity, to end legal public dissemination of abortion information.
During a June 22nd appearance on MSNBC’s The Weekend, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts underlined Project 2025’s broad ambitions, saying its framework is “going to transcend the next four years, the next ten years.”
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