Welcome to the Inaugural Issue of Stop The Coup 2025’s Newsletter
December 17, 2023
We’re here to provide news, updates, progressive analysis, intersectional voices, and strategic responses to Project 2025, the conservative movement’s radical electoral blueprint to regain power in 2025 – and dismantle our democracy.
Who are we? Stop the Coup 2025 is a new grassroots nonprofit initiative developed by a NY journalist working with seasoned New York City LGBTQ+ activists and community organizers. We are not affiliated with any political parties.
Queries: stopthecoup2025@gmail.com
Information and Resources: www.stopthecoup2025.org
Facebook / Instagram / TikTok: StopTheCoup2025
What’s our mission? Stop the Coup 2025 launched in October 2023 to sound the alarm about Project 2025 and to mobilize progressive responses to counter its extremist rightwing agenda, including its goal of eliminating or reversing all gender and LGBTQ+ identity protections. Our aim is to be a consolidating, aggregating online platform for reporting, community education, and mobilization, and to centralize information, strategy, and tools that support community and intersectional action to fight Project 2025.
What is Project 2025? Project 2025 is the Christian conservative movement’s 920-page presidential transition plan, made public in late summer 2023. It openly calls for systematically dismantling the federal government – the Administrative State – and giving unprecedented “supreme” powers to the next president – an autocracy. Donald Trump is their candidate. Project 2025 was developed by 75 Conservative groups, backed by Koch family money, and published by the Heritage Foundation. Some 400 Conservative leaders and thinkers contributed to the “presidential transition” plan. Project 2025 advances an ideological agenda that reflects Christian conservative values, and calls for aligning US laws and policies to reflect those values.
Gender. Critical Race Theory. Immigration. Reproductive rights. Education…are all targets.
Project 2025 advances a fervent anti-gender, anti-democracy agenda, taking aim at liberal democracy. It calls for total erasure of any mentions of gender and LGBTQ+ identity in all federal rules and regulations, and reversing of major protections such as marriage equality. It equates transgender identity with pornography. It also targets diversity and racial equality – “wokeness” and critical race theory. It outlines a sweeping plan to target, arrest, detain, and expel tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, and seal the US border. It would monitor and crack down on people and groups who don’t agree with the extreme right’s agenda. Project 2025 opposes reproductive rights, and criminalizes abortion. In public education, it calls for shifting away from secular education to Christian Bible-based curricula.
In short, Project 2025 plans to stamp out dissent, with expanded “legal” tools, led by a president with supreme powers, to radically alter America’s system of government and Constitution. And it plans to do that quickly -- starting on ‘Day One’ of a new administration. Project 2025 includes a 180-day “playbook” for implementing its plan on January 20, 2025. It calls for recruiting and training a corps of 20,000 conservatives to step into government, tasked with revising policy and making new rules. As of November, 5000 resumes had been collected by Project 2025’s team. They are setting up expert advisory teams to train future staff. By Day One, they want a skeletal government ready to go.
Project 2025 is an unprecedented blueprint for authoritarianism – a clear effort to gut out democracy and Constitution rights. All Americans should be alarmed about its agenda, especially targeted groups: LGBTQ, racial minorities, immigrants, educators, and all those who disagree with Project 2025’s extremist ideology.
Our focus: To tackle the burning question many people ask when they learn about Project 2025: what can we do to fight back? We aim to bring forward concrete ideas, analysis, field lessons, and effective strategies, and to solicit the views of issue experts, progressive leaders, activists, and community voices from across sectors and grassroots organizing movements. We want to systematically examine —agency-by-agency — Project 2025’s granular plans to restructure the government and chains of command, and ask legal and policy experts: how might we proactively prevent this? What are steps to be taken before Day One? We’ll focus on the voices of progressive analysts and thinkers across sectors to reflect upon what can be tried now, what has been worked in the past, and what must be done now to counter Project 2025, and bring that conversation to you here.
You’re invited. America is big, diverse, with so many brilliant progressives and ordinary folks who have a critical role to play now in helping to sound the alarm about Project 2025 and mobilize others in their backyard, at work, in their community and family — everywhere. The election of our next president is in a year. We have 12 months to do as much as we can, together – every person, every voice, every vote – to stop this assault on our pluralistic society and democracy and Constitution and American system of government.
We hope you’ll join us. We need you. America needs you. It needs you to speak up, to step up. We want to hear from you. Please share our newsletter with others, and jump on board.
In solidarity,
Stop the Coup 2025!