Radical Visions: Where Is Our “Project 2029”?
The sane majority needs to paint a vision, to tell a story—a story of good and evil.
The United States is experiencing a reckoning. The complex system defined by the rule of law governed by checks and balances—and built out through 250 years of expanding bureaucracy—is being laughed at, spit on, and occupied by an authoritarian personalist dictatorship.
The norms and institutions so jealously guarded by the political establishment have either been turned against the American people—or eliminated entirely. The U.S. government is being converted into a white supremacist, terrorist state.
At the end of his Cabinet meeting today, in which he repeatedly seemed to drowse off, Trump spewed the single most racist, dystopian diatribe I’ve heard from him or any other government official—and I’ve heard most of them. Somalians in Minnesota are his latest, racist scapegoat:
“Somalia which is barely a country, you know, they have no anything. They just run around killing each other. There’s no structure. And when I see somebody like Ilhan Omar who I don’t know at all, but I always watch a few years have watched her complain about our constitution… Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions, every year, billions of dollars, and they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%. They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you… You know, our country is at a tipping point. We can go bad. We’re at a tipping point… Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage… These are people that do nothing but complain… And they said, this isn’t paradise. But when they come from hell and they complain and do nothing, but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it. Thank you. “
Needless to say, none of what he alleges about the Somalian population in Minnesota is true. Moreover, the “88% welfare” statistic is completely made up and signals, as he so often does, to neo-Nazis: “88” means “Heil Hitler.” This rhetoric is way beyond “very fine people on both sides.” This is taking sides—the wrong side—through malicious stories.
By the time Trump is done, the American government will be an even more hollowed out husk than it has already become. Metaphorically, the United States is a forest that became overgrown and dried out—and is now 25% of the way through a second major fire, after barely escaping the first one. If we’re lucky, there will be a few living tree trunks remaining by 2029—a semi-functional judiciary, and a Democratic House. Maybe.
Whether we survive this second fire as a constitutional democracy long enough to get to another free and fair presidential election is an open question, but let’s assume we will somehow get there. Then what?
The majority will either slip back into the long pattern of abuse perpetrated by an elite white minority who cheat to win elections, and then steal our labor and resources when they do; or, we will swing the pendulum back much harder and break the back of the machine enforcing the grip a small few have on the rest of us.
It is disheartening to me that there are no politicians—with the notable exception of Zohran Mamdani at a local scale—who have a plan beyond: “Let’s fix things to be like they were.”
Where is the vision? What are the goals? Who is developing an actual strategy to not just fix the symptoms of this calamity—but to ensure it never happens again.
The way to deliver a message in this new hyperconnected world is not to present policies; it is to create an alternate reality for people to imagine themselves in. You don’t give people numbers to ponder—you give them visions to experience.
It’s not about politics; it’s about stories.
Imagine an America where we don’t have to be afraid all the time.
The coalition of evil that formed around Donald Trump to propel him to the White House, twice, understands very well how this works. The majority of us must find a way to compete with the dystopian alternate reality presented by MAGA, QAnon, Trump, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk.
We need to tell the story of good versus evil; a story of redemption and justice played out on the biggest stage in the world—a story with a happy ending. We need to tell better stories than Donald Trump.
One of the chief mistakes made by most politicians is that they still talk in political terms—all the time. But we can’t win that way. Because that’s not the playing field.
The playing field is that Trump’s grip on a plurality of the population is primarily through their amygdala—the fear center of the brain. Trump’s speeches oscillate between grandiose delusions, and painting a vision of various threats. This pattern works because a perceived threat can short-circuit the prefrontal cortex, making everything near the threat in his speech—including his delusions—go straight to the limbic system.
Politicians have to understand this psychological trick and address it by offering a competing threat to Trump and his allies. To be blunt, we need to speak directly to the amygdala like the adversary does. Just as Trump tells stories about phantom threats, Democrats need to tell stories about real ones.
Imagine a small group of deviant, white supremacist billionaires who plotted to take down America.
The threat Democrats or others opposing the American coup should present in their vision, their stories, is that an elite class of white supremacist billionaires and their proxies conspired with our foreign adversaries to capture the Republican Party—and to weaponize the media to create a cult around Donald Trump. They did this to steal trillions from the American people—to deprive us of our power, labor, and resources, to enrich themselves and create an underclass of peasants.
The good news about our story is that it’s completely true. We don’t have to keep track of it, because it’s based on objective reality. This gives us a structural advantage on the playing field—as long as we’re playing on it.
Moreover, our story must have a happy ending, a vision for what we plan to do to defeat the threat and put ourselves back on track. Right now, we have no perceivable vision or plan for what we would do if we take back the reins of power. This is also territory the enemy occupies by itself.
We need our own vision for how we will not just fix the system, but rebuild it to prevent this from repeating anytime in the foreseeable future. For example, if I were going to tell a story about 2029 it would include the following goals:
Purge and expand SCOTUS
Put 8-year term limits on Justices; make them retroactive.
Reestablish trust in the Judicial Branch.
Prosecute, and where applicable, seize the assets and/or deport the PayPal Mafia
Their fraud, criminality, and conspiracy against the United States warrants total legal war against Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks and their coterie.
Dismantle or nationalize Palantir, SpaceX, and other government-subsidized parasitical companies.
Prosecute all crimes committed by the Trump regime
Every “drug boat” murder, brutality by ICE/CBP, J6 pardon, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy against rights, fraudulent crypto deal, bribe, and collaboration with enemy nation-states must be prosecuted.
Tax billionaires to death
The conspiracy of the ultra-wealthy in the United States to create a feudalist state with themselves as royalty is a symptom of an economy that must be restructured. We either tax billionaires out of existence—or they will enslave us.
Redistribute wealth back to the people. Say it.
Kill cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency is a project by the techno-fascist broligarchy to undermine the financial system and provide a way for criminals to get paid for crime. It is a ticking time bomb that has attached itself to the federal government. It must be regulated into irrelevance or outright banned.
Defeat the corrupt GOP
The last six “victories” by Republican presidents were the result of cheating—Nixon, Reagan, Bush, W, Trump, Trump 2. The GOP is not a political party; it is an organized criminal cult in league with our foreign enemies. If it cannot reform, it must be shut down and replaced by a party committed to American democracy.
Regulate social media
Neither of Trump’s electoral victories would have been possible without the assistance of weaponized, harmful social media. This has created a class of people who are more devoted to a foreign-backed cult than they are to America.
We must regulate social media like a utility. We need clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and a non-polluted digital environment to live in.
New New Deal
Trump and the GOP’s regime has decimated the New Deal’s social safety net and aims to destroy more of it before it’s through. We must create a Better Deal through a system that respects all humans, not just a few.
Universal health care is a human right.
Reorganize government
Just as FDR reorganized the United States Government, we must do the same. The intelligence and federal law enforcement communities are essentially destroyed. Our Justice Department is a sad joke; the judiciary is infested with MAGA cult members. And DHS is the totalitarian mistake everyone feared it would be.
We must tear down the bureaucracy that allowed all of this to happen, and create a new system that functions in the 21st century.
Quite a story, I know. But it’s the kind of incredible story that MAGA was told about what Trump would do—before it happened. Project 2025, QAnon, and the Dark Enlightenment all pre-sold a version of the same alternate reality. And now we are all living in it.
Say what you want about the other side; they certainly have an imagination.
We can’t defeat a psychological, neurological attraction to a cult leader and his alternate reality with policies and devotion to the establishment that once was. We must build a better vision, a radical vision, that competes with the one currently ripping down our humanity.
Imagine a world NOT controlled by psychopathic billionaires.
If you are able to help me continue my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. It really means a lot. Thank you!
Here are a few benefits to upgrading:
Live Zoom call each Sunday
Ability to comment and access all content
Wonderful, supportive community
Helping independent journalism fill in the gaps for our failing media
Thank you for reading and sharing my work. Grateful for your support.
If you’d like to help with my legal fees: DefendSpeechNow.org.
My podcast is @radicalizedpod & YouTube — Livestream is Fridays at 1PM PT.
Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson
Threads: jimstewartson
Yes, tax billionaires to death. But remember. The money they are sitting on is money paid by every person who ever lived. They are holding the national debt, every penny of it. We gave it to them in dollars and labor. So it's OUR money we recover through taxation, not theirs. Remember that when you talk about taxes. Unless people understand this, we will get nowhere.
Those are all fabulous ideas, but first we should do stuff like get dark money out of politics and perhaps even go all the way to make elections publicly funded. If we the people want to own government, we need to pay for it. Big money corrupts too easily. We also have to fix the news media with regulations too, as well as regulate social media. We can not operate on lies. I think news media and journalists should have to be licensed and pledge integrity, which is similar to what we do with lawyers and doctors. A professional journalist is under strict rules of integrity, but you still have to let the nuts talk, so we would have to make the title professional journalist mean something. So damned many things. I bet if we knew everything guys like Musk, Zuck, and Thiel etc., have done, we would demand their heads.