S8E05: How to Do Social Justice This Election Season Without Being a Jackass: The Role of Project 2025, with Andra Watkins, author of How Project 2025 Will Ruin Your Life.

One of the biggest sources of stress this election season has been the publication of Project 2025. As we continue our series How to Do Social Justice This Election Season Without Being a Jackass, we recognize that many of the policies in Project 2025 are dehumanizing, as well as unwise.

While the content inside Project 2025 is infuriating, it's nonetheless imperative that we familiarize ourselves with it, while also taking care to communicate effectively about its dangers. To help us, we invite Andra Watkins, author of the Substack How Project 2025 Will Ruin Your Life. Andra is one of the leading experts on Project 2025, and she talks with us about:

• Jackass-dom in Liberal Spaces (2:30): Jeremiah kicks us off, “One of the themes that we've talked about in this podcast is moral superiority and virtue signaling, and this episode could easily kind of move into virtue signaling and moral superiority because one of the ways that liberal groups and progressive groups move into those kind of jackass spaces is through the specific way that knowledge and information gets communicated.”

• Weaponizing Education (5:00): Julia notes, “In this episode and in all episodes of this series, we are trying to walk that really difficult line between the importance and power of education and knowledge without weaponizing that as a tool to further create harm.”

• Undaunted Courage (21:00): Andra talks about, “I was really fortunate in the first book that I picked up, Undaunted Courage. It's just one of the best books I've ever read, and it presented this very different picture of that expedition [Lewis & Clark]. I was like, if I could have learned all this when I was 13, I would have majored in history because this is fascinating because the youngest guy that went on the expedition was just 15 years old.”

• Pushback in Deconstruction (23:00): Jeremiah notes, “So often the experiences of deconstruction, the pushbacks happen in relationships. And Andra, you were talking about the relationship that you have with your mom, some of the pushback that you have. And we want to keep that in mind throughout this episode and name that, but also know that there is a mutually reciprocal relationship between education and pushing back against the family relationships, pushing back against the mythology.”

• Withholding Information (26:00): Julia says, “When we think about sex education, we think about it in more explicit terms around sexuality or relationships. But I think that the sex education the church didn't want you to have can now expand into the Lewis and Clark expedition and, and all the other parts of history that point to facets of our humanity, including relationships, including sexuality that are intentionally withheld from teenagers and adolescents who are learning.”

• Project 2025 (31:00): In detailing her inspiration for the substack Andra says, “I was reading along. And I said, this is a Bible verse that I'm reading. It's not presented that way, but this is almost verbatim, a Bible verse.”

• God’s Law Because God is Perfect (34:00): Andra says, “They all use this same lens though, to say America is a Christian nation. America is a white Christian nation. We need to use the Bible as the basis of our laws. That's what the founders meant for the Bible to be our law, not man's law. And we have to override anything that violates God's law like abortion, even though abortion is not in the Bible. That's how they justify all of those stances to themselves … I was taught you never compromise because it's God's law and God is perfect. God knows all we can't ever give an inch.”

• Expertise (37:00): Andra shares, “Expertise by life experience and that's really what gives me my expertise.  Americans don't respect that as much. It's not uncommon for me in left leaning circles to be introduced as a self proclaimed survivor of Christian nationalism. Like there's some reason to question whether I really am."

• Indoctrination (40:00): Andra says, “I don't think a lot of Americans realize that when you sit in a pew and listen to this for 40 or 50 years, many of you are very, very radicalized in their thinking. So having had adult experience with watching people that I knew who were still in that world and how they had morphed and changed over time because of this dogma. All of that experience  and study of Project 2025 and the groups involved  I felt like that was enough to claim to be an expert. And so many people who write about Christian nationalism have no pain or trauma or suffering from it. They didn't grow up in it. They just became curious about it.”

• Dog Whistles (45:00): Jeremiah says, “That's good information about considering Colleen Hoover. First of all, considering it quote "pornography". Second of all, what Project 2025 says about pornography. And third of all the dog whistle for pornography that this is actually about domestic abuse and at what point does that then get into like the banned books and get thrown in like the critical race theory?”

• Dealing with Trolls (51:00): Andra says, “I got some trolling commentary in the past couple of weeks and they were upset that I was calling Republicans, fascist Republicans, because they were Republican.  So they took issue with my name calling. And so I explained to them what fascism is and what it looks like. And gave examples in the United States of where it's happening.  And said, if it hurts your feelings that I'm calling Republicans fascists,  then, you know, I'd encourage you to educate yourself a little better about what fascism is.”

• Staying Grounded (54:00): Julia notes, “What I'm hearing and learning from you is that education can also keep you grounded when the understandable and justified emotions that you're feeling might threaten to hijack you. You're not ignoring those emotions, which is equally dangerous. You're allowing them to be present.  You're sitting with them. You're honoring them. I think anger is a highly important emotion to respect, especially in terms of advocacy. And when you wait those 24 hours, when you can bring your work back to the education that you do, that can be helpful personally, but ultimately that's what. It has the power to, to change conversations and ultimately to change policy."