The Billionaires Didn't Need to Write Project 2025

They could have just pointed to states like Missouri where we are already running the pilot...

I live in a red state, and I hope you will listen to my warning. Those who want to demolish democracy won’t stop with my state, or any of the other GOP-dominated states. They are rolling over our rights to get to yours.

I know you’ve heard of it, and may be sick of reading posts about it, but Project 2025 will introduce the entire nation to red-state rule if Trump is elected. I don’t know why they bothered to write so many pages on autocracy, theocracy, and kleptocracy. They could have just pointed a finger at GOP-dominated states like Missouri.

Copy. Paste.

Missouri has been under the boot of a GOP supermajority for 22 years. Over two decades. When I knock doors and someone blames anything Missouri-related on the Democrats, I always ask, “Who? What Democrats?”

I knock doors in Northwest Missouri — there is not one elected Democratic State Rep or State Senator in the top section of Missouri. It’s deep red. The electoral map looks like the state has been scalped.

There is no Democrat to blame for the state of this state. Not one.

So, what is Project 2025? It’s the playbook for the next Republican President, written by the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is funded primarily by Koch money. Koch money is derived from the oil and gas industry and has been doled out to “conservative” think tanks and politicians and grifters for decades. David and Charles Koch used their money to push a Libertarian agenda — taxes are their number one target. David has since died, but Charles remains and he is trying to cut the very fabric of our country while many of us stand stunned into silence.

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.”

A few of the “radical Left” ideals that this project plans: gutting environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuel production, eliminating parts of the Department of Education, and deregulating the Department of Commerce. Of course abortion, civil rights, and voting rights are all on the chopping block as well.

Let me show you just three of the pilot programs currently running in Missouri.

Abortion: Banned. We have already seen a complete abortion ban in Missouri with no exceptions for rape or incest, while “life of the mother” exemptions are tricky as there is no language for how close to death a woman needs to be before she can access care.

Missourians have gathered enough signatures to put abortion on the ballot and bring back reproductive rights to Missourians if we can get the votes in November. Here’s the deal though; our constitutional amendments have always been able to pass with a simple majority, but the Missouri Senate plans to pass a bill to strip us of one person, one vote.

Previously, we only needed a simple majority of Missourians to approve an amendment, but under new rules the GOP wants put in place, amendments would need a majority vote in a majority of House districts. That means about 25% of the electorate would make decisions for 100% of the electorate. Minority rule.

Missouri is also killing two birds with one stone…banning abortion and restricting the initiative petition process.

Public education: Segregation. The first thing that caught my attention in the Project 2025 playbook? “Elementary and secondary education policy should follow the path outlined by Milton Friedman in 1955…”

Milton Friedman? The man who invented the voucher system to create segregation academies so White kids wouldn’t attend school with Black kids? The guy who said that poor kids should be given a “rudimentary” education unless their parents could scrape up enough money to educate them past elementary school? Project 2025 is following the mandate of the guy who thinks we need segregated schools? Yes.

The voucher system has been pushed through at breakneck speed in Missouri. Our legislators created all of the infrastructure necessary behind closed doors with lobbyists to put in place a taxpayer-funded voucher to defund public schools and send funds to private religious schools.

What does the education mandate in Project 2025 look like when it’s implemented?

In Missouri, our state now pays starting teachers at 50th in the country. We are ranked 49th in the country for state funds sent to local districts. It looks like book bans, attacks on teachers and librarians, and calls to charge teachers with a felony for using a student’s preferred pronouns. It looks like schools with leaking roofs, and 20 year old textbooks. It looks like administrators fleeing in droves after harassment, and teachers delivering pizzas after school hours to be able to afford rent. It looks like students who aren’t given the opportunity to learn like their parents and grandparents.

All the while, our Republican politicians meet in secret with wealthy folks with a private school pipe dream to send taxpayer money to their fly-by-night, religious pop-up schools.

Environmental regulations: Stripped. They are all about “local control” until they’re not. This one is as personal to me as abortion and education: the loss of local control of CAFOs has created an environmental nightmare for water quality.

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CAFO is an acronym for concentrated animal feeding operation. It can be a large barn holding anything from chickens to turkeys to cows to hogs. To be considered a large CAFO, an operation holds around 2,500 hogs or 700 cows. They can hold 55,000 turkeys or 30,000 laying hens. These are massive operations and they are common in rural spaces…they also decimate said spaces.

Corporations are now dominating our food system. While nearly half of all small and medium hog operations have closed in recent decades, the number of large farms has almost doubled. In 1997, large farms accounted for nearly 40% of the swine produced in the U.S. Today, these operations produce more than 72% of U.S. hogs, according to this report.

When I speak of CAFOs, I am speaking of big Ag. I am not talking about uncle Mike farming his 60 acres and raising 50 hogs. These are corporations operating in rural states like mine in which state legislators have cut regulations to allow CAFOs to move into our communities and pollute our air and water with impunity.

What does that look like in practice? It looks like Missouri lawmakers stripping local control of rural communities back in 2019. In 2022, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld that state law prohibiting local CAFO regulations. The Missouri General Assembly passed legislation to restrict counties from imposing regulations on industrial livestock operations — CAFOs won.

When a CAFO comes to your rural town, you’ll likely smell it before you see it. Thousands of animals confined to a barn create millions of gallons of waste. This waste is often spread directly on fields or contained in a lagoon. Have you ever smelled hog manure, friends? What do you think millions of gallons smell like?

Now, imagine a lagoon holding millions of gallons of waste on a corporate farm. Surely none of that leaches into the ground and reaches a water source, right? Wrong.

Rain, runoff, or faulty storage materials can cause lagoons to overflow or leak into the water supply. Missouri has gone so far as to dispute what qualifies as a “water supply” to reduce lawsuits brought against CAFOs.

These corporate farms often employ only one person to be responsible for millions of gallons of waste. That would be like a large town employing one person to run the water system for thousands of people. You’re asking for a disaster and we see them almost daily.

So, back to the beginning…Project 2025 didn’t need to be written. The billionaires have already instituted their plans in GOP-dominated states and you can see the impact on everything to reproductive rights to education to environmental issues. They don’t plan to stop with my state — the point is to get to yours too.

The silver lining of living in a regressive state is that I have seen the damage and I can warn folks. The awful part of forced prescience? Some will say an easy fix is to move. But, that’s my entire point. There is nowhere to move. There is not one state that won’t be impacted if we don’t stop the billionaire-inspired plans that have already been implemented in Missouri.

The answer is to stand up in every state with the backing of those of you in less regressive states. Please, stand with us.

Talk back, link arms, and say to these politicians and billionaires, “we see you and we will stop you.”

~Jess

*P.S. If you’d like to learn what deregulated CAFOs can do to a state, look no further than this whistle-blowing academic who has studied Iowa Ag for decades.