TODAY! 3 December 2025. Noon eastern. Substack LIVE.
and I will chat about the problem of sexual sickness in Christian Nationalism (and churches in general.) And anything else we feel like covering.
Good morning (afternoon; evening), everyone! I hope you had a peaceful holiday (if you celebrated) and took some downtime during the boycott.
Later today, I’m recording this week’s interview with . We are covering something upbeat for a change:
How far behind the regime is with Project 2025.
I’m not saying they haven’t accomplished a lot; destroyed a ton; and reshaped the federal government in ways that will not be undone in an election. Should the United States of America escape this regime’s clutches, it will take years or decades to undo the damage done so far.
Nor am I giving anyone a false sense of hope or a reason to take a deep breath and say, “Great. I don’t have to worry about this any more.” If anything, this newsletter ought to inspire more Americans to fight harder.
Project 2025 was a 180-day plan to transform the federal government.
It’s goal was to complete everything 180 days from 20 January 2025, which means they should have been finished by 20 July 2025. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, they are 48% complete as of today. Not 100%. LESS THAN 50%.
This is largely down to brave citizens – in government, the judiciary, and privately – who resist this regime daily; who document its abuses; and who weaponize its own work against it.
Here are a few things we should celebrate:
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The Department of Health and Human Services is not called the Department of Life (as called for in Project 2025.) Maybe the regime understands the bad optics of gutting vaccines, parroting quack medical theories, and ending life-saving biomedical research while calling itself the Department of Life. Nonetheless, this reticence to change the name is significant because…
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Abortion should be banned nationwide by now. Banning abortion nationwide was a central tenet of Project 2025 and one of the main reasons for a call to change HHS to the Department of Life. Abortion abolitionists are growing outraged that abortion is still happening anywhere. They took the 2024 election as a God-given directive to end abortion and proposed aggressive laws that would enshrine fetal personhood and subject women to the death penalty for pregnancy outcomes. Even in red states, these laws have galvanized citizens to oppose their cruelty. Anti-abortion extremists won’t stop trying, but we are making them work harder, spend more money, and expose more of their radicalized extremism, all hopeful things.
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DEI should be illegal. Yet numerous companies and institutions (like Costco) refuse to roll back the work of the Civil Rights Movement. While it’s frustrating to watch things go backwards, we must celebrate the millions of Americans who are saying NO.
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Tariffs should not be in danger. Tariffs were Project 2025’s holiest grail, even going so far as to offer competing viewpoints as to how they could be implemented. Instead of following that roadmap, the regime basically stuck its finger up in the air, threw spaghetti at the wall, and made up a plan from the wreckage. While we shouldn’t be misguided enough to think this set of Corrupt Supremes will rule against the regime, it could happen.
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Lower courts are holding. Don’t misunderstand. Courts will not save us from a theocratic government, especially not with this set of Corrupt Supremes at the helm. But piling on lawsuit after lawsuit is forcing the regime to work harder, expend more energy, and distract a small part of its attention from the Project 2025 wrecking ball.
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Contraception should be all-but-banned by now. Project 2025 endorsed ONE method of “contraception”: Fertility-awareness-based methods. Also known as the Catholic Rhythm Method, Temperature Method, and Cervical Mucus Method. To Project 2025’s authors, every other form of contraception is an abortifacient. They were determined to force all people who could become pregnant to use a method that results in huge Catholic families. So far, they have failed. Doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying, but their continued failures have given us more time to warn more Americans about this danger to contraception and to explain why FABMs are really tools to predict the best time to try for a pregnancy, NOT contraception.
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More people are talking about Christian Nationalism. I was excited to see Floridians use talking points that, in part, came from my work to attack the Phoenix Declaration. More corporate outlets are also covering the role Christian Nationalism, radicalized Christianity, and religious extremism are playing in the rise of theocratic fascism. It isn’t enough, but it’s more than we saw a year ago. This is a direct result of your support of independent writers like me who screech about Christian Nationalism, both financially and by sharing this work with your connections. Together, we are making a difference and forcing bigger players to cover religious extremism and Christian Nationalist radicalization.
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The First Amendment should be dead. But it is not. I’m not saying they aren’t attacking it at every turn, but we should have already seen high profile figures jailed for their speech. More people should have lost their platforms for resisting. In the regime’s plan, we would not be able to go online and find a 24/7 running documentary of police state abuses. We would already be living in a China-or-Russia-like information environment. While the regime may eventually drag us there, we aren’t there yet. We must count this as a win and use it to our advantage.
This isn’t a comprehensive list. What would you add? Please share your ideas in a comment today.
I can’t pen a newsletter like this one without issuing a few warnings:
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Setbacks don’t phase these people. They are like the evil Terminator in Terminator II and keep getting up no matter how hard we hit them. To defeat them, we have to muster the will to get up more times than they do. Celebrate wins, but don’t ever think they aren’t already getting up and devising a plan to beat us a different way.
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Every local election and meeting matters. Take it from someone whose husband was a local official for more than a decade: Local officials listen to the loudest group in every room. Show up. Be louder and more numerous than them. The WCN true believers won’t back down, but many others will. And maybe that will save another book, another program, or another life. Never forget they did this locally first; to undo it, we must start locally.
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We have to stop thinking in the past and start thinking ahead. Americans DO NOT VALUE thinking ahead (which is one reason this work stays stalled at around 25K subscribers.) We will never defeat these people by focusing on the past or doing what we’ve always done. Enough Americans must be willing to think a few steps ahead of them, consider what they might do next, and devise battle plans for each option. This space continues to provide fodder for individuals and groups to think ahead, so while it may be heavy, don’t neglect what’s here.