Call to Action Project 2025

Dear Friends,

Michele Obama’s speech at the DNC nomination of Kamala Harris for president and Tim Walz for vice president struck home.

Don’t complain.

Do something.

So here is my something – vote in this election and vote Democratic. Project 2025 is terrifying in its scope and intent. It would end or minimize all Federal subsidy programs that support citizens in their lives. Some of the big ones are social security, medicare, medicaid, and farms. It would eliminate Head Start and Title 1, change our public educational system structure, and install universal Christ-based curriculum. It would dismantle our national protective systems and create an allegiance to the office of president instead of to the Constitution. The Four Pillars of Project 2025 provide a blueprint for authoritarian government and autocratic leadership “to deconstruct the Administrative State”.

While the publishing of Project 2025 is recent, the beliefs and agendas have long roots starting with the founding of this Nation, the installation of the Constitution as a governing document, and the crafting of the Bill of Rights. Democracy was for white, property-owning men. The rest of us have won inclusion in governance ideals and extension of those rights through hard and continuous work. The most familiar examples are the Women’s Suffrage and Civil Rights movements. The precursors of the current Project 2025 and Trump’s Republican agenda are evident in the campaign rhetoric leading to the presidencies of Regan, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. They are evident in recent Supreme Court rulings against race-conscious affirmative action college admission programs, for corporations as persons and citizens, against Roe v Wade, and for presidential immunity. They are evident in the unpassed voting rights legislation pending in Congress. The main lessons of COVID are how fragile and complicated supporting systems are. The 60% of families living paycheck to paycheck cannot afford Project 2025’s tax and health care changes. In Lane County, the 47% of families meeting ALICE (Asset Limited Income Constricted Employed) criteria cannot survive Project 2025’s dismantling of training and safety net programs.

The DNC state roll call was spectacular from the standpoint of who were first ever state leaders in combination with representation from all demographic sectors. And I do not want our diversity as leaders and representative citizens to go back to white, male dominance. When I asked about scholarships, the vice-principal wondered why I wanted to go to college since I would just get married and have children. The fact that I was the outstanding scholar all four years of high school and valedictorian did not matter. When buying my first home, the paperwork listed Darby Giannone, unmarried male, as the applicant. My first year as a principal, I walked into a statewide meeting – all white men. In concert with others, I went to work. When I left education 30 years later, 4J had more women administrators than men and the kids in my school knew everyone could lead and succeed.

Created by Darby Giannone

Our work for freedom and equality and inclusion in “We” is not done. We must support the nation’s leaders and workers who keep “We the People” as their guiding principle. We need to defeat Project 2025 – over and over again - so we can actualize our pledge of “with liberty and justice for all” and realize the promise of “WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Please vote.

Encourage your friends to vote.

I’m voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

I hope you join me but, if you have reasons for supporting the Trump Vance 2025 ticket, I would appreciate a conversation.

- Darby