Project 2025 Organizations Attack Judges and Reject The Rule Of Law

[Celerity]

https://globalextremism.org/post/project-2025-organizations-attack-judges/



The United States is in the midst of a judicial crisis. Donald Trump and his close allies have been spearheading a campaign to discredit and impeach members of the judiciary questioning and rejecting his recent executive orders. This week, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson issued a chilling threat to these judges, saying “We do have authority over the federal courts… We can eliminate an entire district court.” This smear campaign against the judiciary isn’t being driven solely by the executive branch and online fringe, but also by those organizations affiliated with Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the United States that Trump is now carrying out after having said he knew nothing of it during the campaign.

Spearheaded by the far-right Heritage Foundation, and supported by more than 100 other far-right organizations, Project 2025 aims to create an “ideal” America that would see women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, people of color, and others deprived of their hard-won constitutional rights and the erosion of environmental and education protections. It also advocates for a frightening centralization of power in the executive branch, something Trump is already demonstrating through his repeated attacks against the judiciary. Threats of violence and impeachment against the judiciary have risen considerably on fringe platforms over the past couple months, including a 54 percent increase from January to February, with some of the largest volumes of attacks occurring in March on Gab.

Supporters of Project 2025 are targeting many of the same judges as these online extremists in their social media and blog posts, potentially stoking the flames of violence even further against America’s last line of defence against authoritarianism. The Heritage Foundation, which masterminded Project 2025, has been setting the stage for these attacks for months. In May 2024, when Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts in his hush money trial, Heritage’s Twitter account posted that Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over the case, “is not acting as a judge. He’s acting as an activist agent.” Around the same time, Trump labelled Merchan as “a devil.”

More recently, Heritage has been launching attacks against any judge defying Trump’s executive orders. Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, wrote an article for The Daily Signal chastizing a ruling by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson that extends a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) that would keep Hampton Dellinger in his role at the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency responsible for investigating whistleblower claims, after Trump attempted to fire him. Von Spakovsky agreed with acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris’ comments that the decision represents an “unprecedented assault on the separation of powers,” and warned against “federal judges being emboldened to enter injudicious and unconstitutional orders.” A previous investigation by the Global Project Against Hate And Extremism (GPAHE) revealed that users on fringe sites, such as Gab, responded to articles mentioning Berman Jackson by calling for “every activist judge” to be fired.

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