Mayday Mayday! …and other updates
April 30, 2024
Mayday for Democracy Campaign
New Reports, Charts, and Allies
Dear CoupStoppers,
Happy month of May! It’s been an extremely busy few weeks for our campaign since our last newsletter. We’re closely following major political events and legal trials of our day that are related to conservative Project 2025. This month, we’re launching a biweekly news digest of key news stories and developments -- victories and setbacks – related to stopping Project 2025. See our Newsroom for more.
May 1 #MAYDAYforDEMOCRACY Social Media Campaign: On May 1, join us in issuing a MAYDAY call across all social media platforms! Our democracy is under assault from Project 2025.
We’ve launched a package of #MAYDAYforDEMOCRACY graphics about Project 2025’s many threats. Please help the campaign by sharing these new graphics, our pre-existing graphics, news articles, and links to our various reports on your social media platforms, blogs, list-serves, and anywhere else you communicate; by tagging and reposting our messages on Instagram, Facebook, You Tube, Twitter/X, Threads, and Linked In (@stopthecoup2025); and by using #MAYDAYforDEMOCRACY and #StopProject2025 on every post and repost.
Please also share these with journalists, bloggers and groups you follow and direct them to our campaign. Thank you!
Growing public coverage: On a positive note, we’re seeing increased public awareness and media coverage of Project 2025, and more initiatives by progressive allies and government leaders. But many people still remain unaware of the threat, so our campaign is working hard to amplify our education and mobilization efforts. We are developing new resources for taking action, including activist training tools and toolkits for communities, to talk about Project 2025 to different audiences.
New reports: We have uploaded several new reports, including our Reproductive Rights Special Advisory about the Comstock Act, an 1873 law being resurrected to ban postal delivery of mifepristone, the abortion pill; conservatives hope to apply the Act to ban promotion of LGBTQIA+ content, too.
We’ve also got a special report about the Christian Nationalist movement that discusses how Project 2025 reflects the theocratic goals of “dominionism” and a belief in the “Seven Mountains Mandate” that calls for Christians to take control of all aspects of US law and society – in preparation for the return of Christ. A growing coalition of Christian and other faith groups are fighting Christian nationalism and defending religious freedom, so read about them, and their resources, too. We also have new reports on how Project 2025 affects LGBTQIA+ people.
New Maps! We’re excited to present two new maps that illustrate our Follow The Money stories about the complex funding and religious connections of Catholic militant and lawyer Leonard Leo and other billionaires like Charles Koch to Project 2025’s conservative Christian advisory groups. While polls show US Protestant groups make up the bulk of Christian nationalist voters, Catholic activists connected to the Opus Dei network are helping to organize, fund and advance Project 2025’s agenda.
Outreach and Media: Our campaign continues active outreach to allies and media, and we discussed Project 2025 on several radio and podcasts in April. See these links in our Newsroom - Press About Us.
Taking Action - Ally Survey and Resources: We recently sent out an Ally Survey to grassroots groups to inform them about our campaign and resources and to learn what they may be doing in response to Project 2025. Please consider filling out our survey so we can exchange materials and our coming toolkits with organizations you may work with, and include their materials in our Resources page.
New allies: We have a growing community, including allies engaged in outreach, messaging and organizing to mobilize communities around Project 2025. At The Democracy Labs, Deepak Puri continues to help amplify our research via social media infographics and interactive content. Our partners at Students for Voting Justice are developing youth-oriented social media content about Project 2025.
We’re excited to partner with Chromatic Black, an Atlanta-led nonprofit that is hosting a monthly webinar on Project 2025, and with scriptwriter Ellen Gavin and colleagues at The Writer’s Brigade who are developing television commercials about Project 2025, to be distributed by The Lincoln Project.
We also allied with the federal labor union, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), to educate and mobilize people against Project 2025’s plan to mass-fire tens of thousands of apolitical federal workers and replace them with Christian partisans.
Another new ally, the Center for Progressive Reform, is launching an administrative law project to analyze Project 2025’s possible impact on federal regulations – and what priority legislative steps might be taken to protect federal regulatory agencies targeted by Project 2025. We plan to expand our outreach to labor groups as we mobilize.
We’re excited to see the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), True North Research and Accountable.US, among ally right-wing watchdog groups and media projects who have launched blogs about aspects of Project 2025. We will be featuring these as well as a dozen Substack blogs and podcasts focused on Project 2025 in our expanding resources section, and we work to amplify ally content.
Coming Up: Pride LGBTQIA+ campaign & Activists Toolkit: In April, we began developing our Activist Toolkit to Fight Project 2025, and our Pride LGBTQIA+ sub-campaign. We are doing outreach to Pride event, Pride march, and LGBTQIA+ Center organizers and directors across the US to invite them to mobilize together against Project 2025 and share strategy and tools. We’ve just started out reach out to organizers in Chicago and Milwaukee who are prepping for the GOP and Democratic conventions this summer. We plan a monthly LGBQTIA+ activist call with co-sponsor the Center for Popular Democracy and other allies for later May. Details coming soon.
Jump onboard! Our community is growing fast – we had 5,000 new unique visitors to our campaign website in April – for 22,000 so far this year! We could also really use your help. Please consider filling out our volunteer form to get more directly involved. We welcome your skills, resources, and great ideas, especially translators for Spanish and Arabic, graphic designers, writers, researchers, audio and video editors and producers, comms experts, and fundraising gurus. Gracias a todos!
In solidarity,
Anne-christine d’Adesky and the team
