Anonymous parties have put together a Project 2025 Tracker. They pulled out and listed all the individual policy recommendations in the document, and are trying to track which are complete, in progress, or not started. As I write, they put the agenda at 42% complete.
I would break the recommendations down into three categories: (1) Christian/White Nationalism, (2) Homophobia, and (3) Rich and Powerful/Big Business Giveaways.
I could probably spend a few posts on this one, but basically I don’t think there is a coherent ideology here. But of course, when it comes to politics, that doesn’t really matter. What matters much more is who is motivated by a set of loosely related, sometimes contradictory semi-ideas, how powerful the motivated people are, and what actions they choose to take. And as you may see if I really get into it, some of the people potentially motivated by this mess of ideas include Elon Musk and J.D. Vance.
Let’s start with Curtis Yarvin, aka “Mencius Moldbug”. Here is how a July 2024 Politico article describes him:
Yarvin doesn’t hold any official title or office — he is an ex-computer programmer turned blogger, having first risen to prominence on the online right in the 2010s while blogging under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” But he’s often cited as the “house philosopher” of the New Right, chiefly for his promotion of the “neo-reactionary” (or “NRx”) movement…
Like Deneen, Yarvin and his NRx followers reject the quest for “progress” as the core of political life. As Yarvin told Vanity Fair in 2022, “The fundamental premise of liberalism is that there is this inexorable march toward progress. I disagree with that premise.” Instead, Yarvin believes that American democracy has denigrated into a corrupt oligarchy, run by elites who strive to consolidate their power rather than serve the public interest. The solution, Yarvin argues, is for the American oligarchy to give way to a monarchical leader styled after a start-up CEO — a “national CEO,” [or] what’s called a dictator,” as Yarvin has put it — who can de-bug the American political order like a computer programmer de-bugging some bad code…
Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration.
But get into the Wikipedia entry on Yarvin and there is some darker stuff.
Yarvin has been described as a “neo-reactionary”, “neo-monarchist” and “neo-feudalist” who “sees liberalism as creating a Matrix-like totalitarian system, and who wants to replace American democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy”.[11][12][13][14] He has defended the institution of slavery, and has suggested that certain races may be more naturally inclined toward servitude than others.[3][15] He has claimed that whites have higher IQs than black people, and opposes US civil rights programs.
Yarvin has influenced some prominent Silicon Valley investors and Republican politicians, with venture capitalist Peter Thiel described as his “most important connection”.[16] Political strategist Steve Bannon has read and admired his work.[17] U.S. Vice President JD Vance “has cited Yarvin as an influence himself”.[18][19][20] Michael Anton, the State Department Director of Policy Planning during Trump’s second presidency, has also discussed Yarvin’s ideas.[2] In January 2025, Yarvin attended a Trump inaugural gala in Washington; Politico reported he was “an informal guest of honor” due to his “outsize[d] influence over the Trumpian right”.,,[21]
Yarvin argues for a “neo-cameralist” philosophy based on Frederick the Great of Prussia’s cameralism.[43] In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose “shareholders” (large owners) elect an executive with total power, but who must serve at their pleasure.[40] The executive, unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, could rule efficiently much like a CEO-monarch.[40] Yarvin admires Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism, and the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime. He sees the US as soft on crime, dominated by economic and democratic delusions.[39]
The guy doesn’t seem like a nice guy to me, but I will at least say on his behalf that he has publicly renounced racism and anti-Semitism.
It’s not too hard to imagine the so-called “tech bros” thinking that an artificial intelligence could serve as a benevolent dictator. But even if we had a robot dictator, some human or group of humans would have to initially decide the ground rules for “benevolence”.
Here is an interactive chart of greenhouse gas concentrations from the World Meteorological Organization. It does look to me like there has been an acceleration in methane concentrations since around 2020.
ChatGPT, Co-Pilot, and Claude may have helped me speed up some computer-based work tasks over the past year or so, but they still can’t clean my bathroom. This is what I really want to see to believe the robot era has really arrived. This article reads like a press release, but Nvidia says it has an “open-source, pretrained but customizable foundation model that’s designed to expedite the development and capabilities of humanoid robots”. So that’s something, but I am not hopeful it will be cleaning my bathroom or doing my dishes in 2025.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. might be headed for recession. Recessions happen, but this would be the first one where the U.S. government obviously and counter to all competent advice throws a monkey wrench in a perfectly healthy economy, that I know of anyway. Lest we think GDP growth is only a statistic that does not affect real people, the U.S. poverty rate among children was 5% in 2021 and rose to over 13% in 2023, when the economy was doing relatively well as measured by GDP growth and employment, but Congress forced the end of Biden’s tax credits for parents. So pop quiz: force a completely unnecessary recession by choice and will more or less children suffer? Shame shame shame on the Trump administration and Congress you stupid assholes.
Most hopeful story: Trump seems to have some anti-nuclear (weapons) instincts. We will see if his actions bear any relation to his words.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Prospera is a weird quasi-autonomous city-state nominally inside Honduras run by crypto-currency weirdos.
This (paywalled) Financial Times article compares survey results in the World Values Survey by political party. What is really striking to me is that the U.S. right is off the scale compared to the German, French, or Italian “far right” parties we are hearing about in the news. I didn’t dig into all the details but if this is a survey of the public based on their stated party affiliations, it is possible the right-wing politicians in Europe are much farther right than their respective publics. It is also interesting that this result shows the German right as left of center, while the Australian, French and UK left are right of center. So I am taking all this with somewhat of a grain of salt without understanding all the details, but still it shows that survey responses of the U.S. public identifying with MAGA are way out there.
Zillow has some data on how much above average home prices are by month of the year and by US city. In general, prices are higher by about 1-3% in March-June. I assume this has something to do with the U.S. school year. It may be somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy though. Last time I was in the home buying market, which was almost exactly 10 years ago, I started looking for listings in January, but there really was nothing to look at until March. So people in my city (Philadelphia) don’t start listing until March, and by the time you go through the process it seems like most closings are going to be in the May-June time frame (precisely when mine was). I wonder if refinancings show up as home sales in this data though, or if they have some way of knowing when the properties actually change hands. That could skew the data because people can refinance any time of year, and they are likely to refinance when interest rates are relatively low and prices therefore relatively high.
Rutgers has some facts and figures on defensive gun use in the United States. It is worth noting that “use” includes simply showing or telling someone you find threatening that you have a gun.
The article doesn’t really come out and say it, but the gist is really that people who own guns are at greater risk of being harmed by guns than people who do not. This is counterintuitive and very few people are swayed by evidence these days, of course. The policy prescription: “Of primary importance will be efforts to shift the narrative around firearms to deemphasize DGU as a common outcome. In doing so, policy efforts can be decoupled from efforts to prioritize safety through a lens of self-defense and instead center on efforts to reduce the risk of injury and death associated with firearm access.”
Here I will risk covering a fast moving current event. If I am right, I get to say I told you so as the world goes down in flames. Here is a scenario envisioned in one random blog post:
It’s not mentioned in this article, but I have seen elsewhere, suggestions that Trump might consider low-yield nuclear weapons. I can also imagine a scenario where, in the fog of war, Israel initiates a nuclear attack and claims it is pre-empting an Iranian nuclear attack.
Let’s hope none of this comes to pass. It would result in enormous loss of life, possibly cause a world-wide recession, and unleash the nuclear genie that has been successfully bottled up since 1945.
This article in the blog Urbanomics has some ideas on what can be done to combat rising inequality. The blog is India focused, but the suggestions are more or less general.
All this seems…complicated…to me. But maybe these are politically feasible policies. Simple but maybe politically infeasible policies would be to just raise taxes on the rich and powerful and redistribute the proceeds to the masses, as cash, services directly provided by the government, or services indirectly subsidized by the government. In the U.S., perhaps taxes wouldn’t have to be raised as much as we think if we shifted away from some of the massive hidden subsidies we already have – low capital gains tax rates, the cap on social security payroll taxes, deduction of mortgage interest, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage, gas taxes that support highways but not public transportation, and many others. All of this would be politically difficult, of course. But with the Democrats seemingly having become the party of no big ideas, perhaps there is not so much to lose if somebody were to start proposing some.