Defending our Future | A Guide for Communities to Resist Project 2025
“Project 2025 represents a profound and immediate threat to the rights and well-being of our communities, driven by a dangerous White Christian Nationalist agenda. This agenda seeks to undermine the progressive victories achieved through the exploitation of racial, religious, and gender-based animus. To counter this assault, we must build and invest in working-class power, provide economic models that address material needs, and lead with affirmative visions that challenge the racist narratives of Project 2025. Solidarity across communities and movements is paramount. We must address right-wing influences, build cross-sectoral power, and advocate for policies that prioritize justice over militarism, and the expansion of criminalization. Our approach must remain principled, inclusive, and strategically visionary, ensuring our messaging and strategies are accessible to all. By forging transnational connections and recognizing the global dimensions of these threats, we can effectively resist White Christian Nationalism and build a future grounded in collective power, justice, equity, and solidarity.”
October 16, 2024
Muslims for Just Futures (MJF), in collaboration with Detention Watch Network and Armenian-American Action Network, has released a crucial report addressing Project 2025 and White Christian Nationalism. Project 2025 is an ideological, narrative, and governance strategy focused on institutionalizing and deepening conservative White Christian Nationalist power across society with a particular focus on controlling and remaking government institutions. It is a counter-movement against the most formidable progressive wins of our time and anyone committed to the project of building a radical democracy. Project 2025 poses a severe and imminent threat to the rights, belonging, and well-being of Black, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, South Asian (BAMEMSA), and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) communities. White Christian Nationalists have gained significant political power and mobilized popular support by weaponizing anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant racism, patriarchy, and Islamophobia.
As highlighted in MJF’s structural Islamophobia framework, White Christian Nationalism is deeply rooted in Islamophobic ideologies that have existed since its inception. Project 2025’s racist vision threatens to permeate every sphere of life, leading to mass surveillance, increased immigration enforcement, expansion of militarism, and a dangerous rollback of civil rights protections.
Key Takeaways from the Report:
Overview of Project 2025: This guide provides an analysis of the project’s goals and the policies proposed to advance its agenda.
Impact on BAMEMSA and SWANA Communities: Specific focus is placed on how these policies will disproportionately harm BAMEMSA and SWANA communities, leading to heightened criminalization and surveillance.
Call to Action: The community guide offers ten key recommendations for community groups and broader movements to counter this dangerous agenda and build long-term power.
Although Project 2025 may have a new name, its underlying narratives and policy proposals are not innovative. As we witness the rise of the multiracial Right, our communities must build long-term power given the level of coherence among right-wing forces that are anchoring and pushing the entire political sphere further to the Right. To counter this assault, we must build and invest in working-class power, provide economic models that address material needs, and lead with affirmative visions that challenge the racist narratives of Project 2025. Solidarity across communities and movements is paramount. We must address right-wing influences, build cross-sectoral power, and advocate for policies that prioritize justice over militarism, and the expansion of criminalization. Our approach must remain principled, inclusive, and strategically visionary, ensuring our messaging and strategies are accessible to all. By forging transnational connections and recognizing the global dimensions of these threats, we can effectively resist White Christian Nationalism and build a future grounded in collective power, justice, equity, and solidarity.