Crow Jim: Project 2025’s Obsession With Reverse Racism
When you split your time between writing the history of American conservatism, and writing journalism about conservatism now, bouts of déjà vu are an occupational hazard. Last week, one had me flashing back to the days of disco.
Roy Cooper is the Democratic governor of North Carolina. His lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, is one of the most terrifying authoritarians in the Republican bestiary, the guy who recently told a church audience that “some folks”—in context, he appeared to be including liberals who want to “cancel you” and “kick you off social media”—just “need killing.” Under North Carolina’s constitution, this is the person who becomes acting governor any time the governor goes out of state. That is why Cooper announced he was withdrawing his name from consideration to be Kamala Harris’s running mate—because every time he left the Tar Heel State to campaign, he feared the same thing would happen that happened to Jerry Brown after his re-election as California’s governor in 1978.
A colorful Republican record producer named Mike Curb had won the race for lieutenant governor. He had been specifically recruited to run, he revealed in his memoir, precisely to make it harder for Brown, who Ronald Reagan’s advisers believed would be harder to beat than Jimmy Carter, to run for president while simultaneously running the state. California, you see, had a similar provision in its state constitution. Just as soon as Brown traveled to Washington to testify on the California gasoline shortage, Curb started appointing Republican lawyers to lifetime judicial appointments. You really must have just fallen out of the coconut tree if you think the GOP only started hating democracy when Donald J. Trump arrived on the scene.
I felt similar déjà vu when Republicans started calling Kamala Harris a “DEI hire.” The charge is as old as the civil rights movement itself. Back then, they called it “reverse racism,” or “Crow Jim”: same thing as Jim Crow, only with the object of oppression reversed—get it? The jargon changed, but the principle is the same: Any effort at equity for minorities is “racism” against whites: affirmative discrimination, as the title of a 1975 book by the neoconservative Harvard social scientist Nathan Glazer put it. You saw that last week when Elon Musk momentarily banned the jocularly named “White Dudes for Harris” account from X, because, after all, X doesn’t allow “racists.”
This same snot-nosed fallacy absolutely saturates Project 2025.
On page 692: The Biden administration’s “‘equity’ agenda” is “racist.” On 342: “officials should protect educators and students in jurisdictions under federal control from racial discrimination by reinforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and prohibiting compelled speech.” Translated from wingnut-ese, they aim to compel teachers in schools run by the Bureau of Indian Education, or schools on military bases, not to speak about the racist parts of the American past. To do otherwise would be racist. This old-time religion threads its way through the chapters on the Departments of Labor (582), Education (336, 342, 348, 358), HHS (495), Treasury (708), State (88), Defense (103), the National Security Council (51), USAID (279)—and, naturally, Dr. Ben “Totally Not a DEI Hire” Carson’s chapter on the Department of Housing and Urban Development (515). The solution, naturally, is “colorblindness.”
The same thinking is present in the document’s many attacks on measuring “disparate impact,” the civil rights enforcement technique of measuring discrimination by results rather than impossible-to-discern evidence of intent. Counting how many minorities are represented in a given institution in order to build a case that they are being discriminated against is bad, because “crudely categorizing employees … fails to recognize the diversity of the American workforce.” We’ve noted that quotation before. Mark it well. We’ll return to it.
IN LARGE PART, A REAGAN-ERA HERITAGE FOUNDATION STAFFER who fell asleep on a Friday and woke up exactly 40 years later would be able to return to work the following Monday. All he would need is a copy of the Project 2025 version of Mandate for Leadership and a glossary. He’d surely be delighted to read how much of the language he and his colleagues came up with back then (“During the past 15 years there has been a concerted nationwide effort by professional educationalists to turn elementary school classrooms into vehicles for liberal-left social and political change in the United States”) finds exact echoes today (“Large swaths of the department have been captured by an unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical Left ideologues who have embedded themselves throughout its offices and components.”).
Other stuff, though, would require several years of Fox News highlight reels before he could make heads or tails of it. Far more than in 1981, the date of Heritage’s first Mandate for Leadership, to be a conservative in 2024 demands fluidity in an entire parallel reality. This is no more harrowingly the case than in Project 2025’s chapter on the Justice Department—from which our Republican Rip Van Winkle would come away learning that one of the two or three gravest challenges for law and order in the United States is “violent attacks on pregnancy care centers.”
What’s a “pregnancy care center,” you—and he—might ask? That’s one of those Potemkin women’s health care offices pro-lifers set up to ensnare people seeking abortions and feed them propaganda, to terrify them into forcibly giving birth instead. How come you, as a nonresident of the right wing’s tempered-steel-hardened information silos, haven’t heard about this terrorism epidemic? Because it’s made up.
According to an investigation from The Intercept, not a single pregnancy care center or its staffers suffered bodily injury—although, after the Dobbs decision, several were vandalized. But a concerted pressure campaign on the FBI from Republican officials against what Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) claimed was an epidemic of “pro-abortion violent extremism” led to an almost tenfold increase in investigations into abortion-related “domestic terrorism.” The FBI doesn’t break down these statistics according to whether the targets were performing abortions or preventing them. But given that, during the same period, investigations the FBI categorizes as attacks on “racially or ethnically motivated extremists” and “anti-government, anti-authority” attacks decreased by over 50 percent, it’s safe to say that the FBI is not “ignoring” this problem, but giving it a bear hug.
Back in January, when I interviewed journalist Jeff Sharlet about why the transformations brought about by the Trumpian moment in American politics are impossible to understand without knowing what happened in countries like Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, he spoke of fascism as a “dream politics,” an “aesthetic,” and an entire all-encompassing “mythology.” This is what I thought back to reading Project 2025’s chapter on the chief law enforcement module of the federal government. The reason it is so chilling is the number of times it precisely inverts reality, or just makes up its own reality, in service of an argument that it is the Biden Justice Department, and not Trump administrations past and potentially future, that is guilty of “unprecedented politicization and weaponization.” The supposed epidemic of terrorism against “pregnancy care centers” is a perfect example.
Another thing a Rip Van Winkle might suppose is that among the gravest problems the American justice system faces is “the department’s use of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act to harass pro-life demonstrators.”
The chapter singles out the supposed “harassment” visited upon one Mark Houck, proprietor of the “unapologetically masculine” Catholic lay ministry “The King’s Men.” The FBI “came to his door with guns drawn to arrest the 48-year-old father of seven” due to “a minor altercation with an activist who was harassing one of his children in front of an abortion clinic.” This is contrasted, without any supporting documentation, to the DOJ’s alleged simultaneous habit of “dismissing prosecutions against radical agents of the Left like Antifa.”
What you wouldn’t know from this account is that at his trial, which he blogged for the faithful before riding the publicity to a failed run for Congress, Houck admitted to the assault.
ON PLANET HERITAGE, THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT is an anti-right Gestapo. The alleged law enforcement crisis that gets the most space in the chapter is familiar to any Fox News viewer, though you have probably never heard of it. In 2021, at the height of the Virginia gubernatorial race in which the Republican candidate made the supposed ideological outrages of liberal school boards his central campaign issue, the DOJ posted a mild letter of concern about violence and threats of violence against liberal school board members. Project 2025 describes it as a conspiracy of Attorney General Merrick Garland to target and harass people who were merely exercising their “constitutional and statutory rights,” in an effort to “chill the free speech rights of parents” by citing “supposed ‘threats’” that, while they were “politically convenient,” were also entirely “imaginary.”
Imaginary. This surely would be news to Loudoun County, Virginia, school board members who received missives like “You people should have your [redacted] legs broken and fed to pigs” and “A public hanging is in order.”
There is nothing on the danger to law and order represented by Donald Trump firing an FBI director for refusing to act as an instrument of his political will, but plenty on how “the FBI engaged in a campaign to convince social media companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation campaign.”
Not a word about the crisis for democracy represented by the harrowing cascade of terrorism threats chasing election workers from their jobs. (According to The New York Times, this is something the current Justice Department is also largely ignoring.) Not a single word about white-collar crime, corporate malfeasance, or securities fraud. Instead, Heritage fights the real enemy: that Garland’s Justice Department “has consistently threatened that any conduct not aligning with the liberal agenda ‘could’ violate federal law.”
Who, what, where, why, when? Gene Hamilton, author of the chapter and a close associate of Stephen Miller, doesn’t say, though apparently it has something to do with “state efforts to … prevent genital mutilation of children,” and also lawsuits against “multiple states regarding their efforts to enhance election integrity.”
Nothing concerning the remarkable success of the last several years lowering the incidence of violent crime, why it happened, or how it can be extended. This is because the Alternate States of America where the Heritage Foundation plants its flag now suffers “catastrophic increases in crime—particularly violent crime—nationwide.”
This invented epidemic is why “the next conservative Administration” should seek more mandatory minimum sentences, and “do everything possible to obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.” It supports these calls by citing a report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission on how “armed career criminals are consistently sentenced below their minimum sentencing guidelines.” Why? “The Biden Administration has adopted policies that do not prevent armed career criminals, who actually commit violent crimes, from committing those crimes.”
I checked the accompanying footnote 42. I learned that the study in question lists data for the years from 2010 to 2019: two years before Biden became president, but including three years when Donald Trump was.
I WANT TO KEEP GOING, MAPPING OUT for you this fascinating parallel world. There’s something addicting about it. I suppose this pleasure is why people love reading Lewis Carroll, or why I end up writing 1,000-page books. I’ll rein myself in with one more, as my exclamation mark: quite literally, a blueprint for how the federal government can replace any city police force Trump decides is not enforcing the law in the way he prefers. The section on how it might go on in 2025 is called “Enhancing the Federal Focus on and Resources in Jurisdictions with Rule-of-Law Deficiencies.” It is especially terrifying given the new evidence of how close Trump came to invoking the Insurrection Act in 2020, and Trump’s framing of the Justice Department under his next administration as his very own Department of Vengeance. Every municipal official in America ought to read it—now.
It begins: “A disturbing number of state and local jurisdictions have enacted policies that directly undermine public safety, leave doubt about whether criminals will be punished, and weaken the rule of law. While the prosecution of criminal offenses in most jurisdictions across the country must remain the responsibility of state and local governments, the federal government owes a special responsibility to Americans in jurisdictions where state and local prosecutors have abdicated this duty.”
It has a footnote to clarify whom they’re talking about: Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, for refusing federal law enforcement help during the racial disturbances of 2020. Recommendations for miscreants like him include: “Use applicable federal laws to bring federal charges against criminals when local jurisdictions wrongfully allow them to evade responsibility for their conduct. The department should also increase the federal law enforcement presence in such jurisdictions and explore innovative solutions to bring meaningful charges against criminals and criminal organizations in such jurisdictions.”
Those affected could include elected officials: “Where warranted and proper under federal law, initiate legal action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the ‘equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions.”
Then it gets quite specific: “This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).”
Now note the oblique, chilling note on which the chapter ends: “The National Crime Victimization Survey, which is the nation’s largest crime survey … is of particular importance, and the department should prioritize and sufficiently fund it. This survey provides the only comprehensive and credible alternative to police reports for showing who commits crimes.”
“Who commits crimes.” When I saw that, my body puckered. I was back in June of 2015, and an infamous interview Donald Trump did with CNN’s Don Lemon—that time when he bellowed, “Who’s doing the raping? Who’s doing the raping?”
In every other part of Project 2025, “crudely categorizing” Americans by racial groups is anathema. Counting people by group, in order to prove the disparate impact of certain actions and institutions upon Americans, “actively disrupt[s] the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.” Except when it comes to disparate impact suffered by victims of Crow Jim. Those Americans—white Americans—shall be redeemed.
The chapter ends: “The demographic information that crime victims provide through the survey about who commits crimes against them enables such reports as ‘Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018,’ which was published in January 2021 and finds that police are arresting those who, according to victims, actually commit crimes.”
Leaves you hanging, right? So I looked up the survey. Right on the first page comes Table 1:
Gene Hamilton doesn’t connect the dots. The Heritage Foundation knows better than to state what all this means outright. “Police reports,” you see, are controlled by cities; the National Crime Victimization Survey, on the other hand, will be controlled by Donald Trump’s Department of Vengeance. Should some other Democratic mayor, during some future outbreak of social disturbance, do what Portland’s Ted Wheeler supposedly did—let woke mobs go scot-free, let those with the left’s “favored defining characteristics” get away with mayhem (which in actual reality is a phantasmagoric myth)—and federal bureaucrats will be ready to ride to the rescue. Then, they will look at the statistics of who commits crimes. It certainly seems to me that the Heritage Foundation is suggesting—someone should ask them—that if expected arrests don’t match what the statistics say they should, this would be a basis for federal intervention. Cities that don’t crack enough minority heads will be violating whites’ civil rights.
That, apparently, is the sort of innovation we can apparently look forward to, once the Department of Justice, at long last, is “depoliticized.” Our Heritage Foundation Rip Van Winkle from 1981 might be horrified. Or he might be thrilled that things are coming along so well.
Rick Perlstein is the author of a four-volume series on the history of America’s political and cultural divisions, and the rise of conservatism, from the 1950s to the election of Ronald Reagan. He lives in Chicago.
Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024. All rights reserved.
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