Hello, fellow Bluestockings! Good to be back. I hope today's post on Project 2025 was worth the wait. Before I dive into this segment of Project 2025, I want to welcome my newest paid subscriber John Tessieri .
I also want to let you know of some plans for Bluestocking Bombshells. First, all my subscribers will receive occasional Saturday posts starting this week. These posts published at noon will either be book reviews, personal essays or my published short fiction. After publication, my published short stories will then be moved to a new section on Bluestocking Bombshells titled “Published Short Fiction.”
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With the New York Times photograph of his menacing Big Brother head lit in half shadow, Kevin D. Roberts, the failed Texas U.S. Congressional candidate and current president of The Heritage Foundation, crowed. “People [federal workers] will lose their jobs.”
On January 21, The New York Times published an interview with the unelected Roberts conducted by Lulu Garcia-Narvarro. As with all access journalism, Garcia-Navarro did not challenge the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Roberts nor his answers to her questions.
While her interview did not go as far as it should have, at least Garcia-Navarro did declare the awful truth: Roberts and his Project 2025 minions will “consolidate power in the executive branch, dismantle federal agencies and recruit and vet government employees to free the next Republican president” to fulfill “Heritage’s role today as ‘institutionalizing Trumpism.’” A major part of “institutionalizing Trumpism” is releasing this vile and deplorable propaganda around the world.
As I mentioned last week, Voice of America (VOA) under the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) is one of the agencies Project 2025 will disembowel. After failing to dismantle the VOA during inmate number P01135809’s administration, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 will destroy VOA if he or another Republican is elected president.
After former USAGM CEO Michael Pack’s confirmation during inmate number P01135809’s administration, The New York Times editorial board wrote in 2020:
Four months later, according to The New York Times, “Five officials suspended from the government’s global media agency sued its chief executive and top aides . . . , claiming they broke the law in repeatedly seeking to turn a news service under its purview into a mouthpiece for pro-Trump propaganda.” The chief executive was Michael Pack and one of his many underlings who violated the law and legal ethics was Morvared Namdarkahn. She also is one of Project 2025’s authors for Mandate for Leadership’s Media Agencies chapter.
In total, six USAGM officials were illegally suspended but the results of a federal inquiry reinstated them. Keep in mind though. If Project 2025goes into effect on Monday January 20, 2025, there will no longer be any federal investigations to rectify injustices like these.
Established in 1942, VOA, according to Brittanica, VOA began under the United States Information Agency (USIA) to “to counter Nazi propaganda among the German people.” Now part of the USAGM, VOA follows the following mission:
Also on its web page, VOA explains the purpose of its “firewall” that prevents any Federal official or office influencing or pressuring VOA and its journalists:
You can watch VOA’s firewall training video and explanation of the editorial firewall here.
Project 2025 though does not want that firewall because it prohibits its goal to make VOA a propaganda arm. In the VOA section in Mandate for Leadership’s chapter, it states:
As noted earlier and a few weeks ago, the only “mismangement” came from Pack and Namdarkhan. That “mismangement” will continue by targeting and dismantling the firewall:
Because Roberts and Project 2025 did not like that VOA covered the shambles, shoddiness and shadiness of inmate number P01135809 and his administration, P01135809’s vengeful venom swallowed by MAGA underlings and followers fuels this section’s rhetoric, words, sentences and paragraphs.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny discusses the importance of protecting institutions like the media because they “do not protect themselves. They fall one after another other unless each is defended from the beginning.” Snyder also devotes a chapter on truth and says “[it] dies in four modes”: Hostility to verifiable facts, “endless repetition . . . to make the fictional plausible,” magical thinking and “misplaced faith.”
Its bone chilling that we are seeing truth not only die in real time withing the United States but around the world in countries like Argentina, The Netherlands, Italy, Russia and Hungary. VOA if Project 2025 gets its insidious way will broadcast The Heritage Foundation and MAGA’s propaganda to other countries, including ones that do not have first amendment liberties the United States — for now.
The irony that VOA once fought Nazi propaganda but may be used to spread The Heritage Foundation and MAGA propaganda is indeed a tragic one.
Next week: Critical Analysis of Mandate for Leadership’s chapter on Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, The Open Technology Fund and short wave radios.