I am posting this with the intent of soliciting help. The following is from pages 13 and 14 from Project 2025. I'm reading it in an attempt to understand what is coming for me as an American. As an Atheist, I have many thoughts on and disagreements but I also see in this (and this whole 2025 book) how the right is hooking the religious.
I'm interested in anyone willing to read the following's take or opinion on any or all of it. Help me parse this. We (Americans) need all ideas we can get to counter this type of nonsense. The whole pdf is linked if you want to read it all (it's 900 pages and I will get through it, Spaghetti Monster Damn It).
Without poisoning the well further, see below from the pdf (linked above). Cranakis
PROMISE #4 SECURE OUR GOD-GIVEN INDIVIDUAL RIGHT TO ENJOY “THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY.”
The Declaration of Independence famously asserted the belief of America’s Founders that “all men are created equal” and endowed with God-given rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It’s the last—“the pursuit of Happiness”—that is central to America’s heroic experiment in self-government.
When the Founders spoke of “pursuit of Happiness,” what they meant might be understood today as in essence “pursuit of blessedness.” That is, an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners,and the like. Many find happiness through their work. Think of dedicated teachers or health care professionals you know, entrepreneurs or plumbers throwing themselves into their businesses—anyone who sees a job well done as a personal reward. Religious devotion and spirituality are the greatest sources of happiness
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around the world. Still others find themselves happiest in their local voluntary communities of friends, their neighbors, their civic or charitable work.
The American Republic was founded on principles prioritizing and maximizing individuals’ rights to live their best life or to enjoy what the Framers called “the Blessings of Liberty.” It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good— that the ruling class disdains.
With the Declaration and Constitution, our nation’s Founders handed to us the means with which to preserve this right. Abraham Lincoln wrote of the Declaration as an “apple of gold” in a silver frame, the Constitution. So must the next conservative President look to these documents when the elites mount their next assault on liberty.
Left to our own devices, the American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women, mercantilism, socialism, Wilsonian globalism, Fascism, Communism, and (today) wokeism. To the Left, these assertions of patriotic self-assurance are just so many signs of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority—proof that, in fact, we need a ruling elite making decisions for us.
But the next conservative President should be proud, not ashamed of Americans’ unique culture of social equality and ordered Liberty. After all, the countries where Marxist elites have won political and economic power are all weaker, poorer, and less free for it.
The United States remains the most innovative and upwardly mobile society in the world. Government should stop trying to substitute its own preferences for those of the people. And the next conservative President should champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-di-rected socialism.