What is Project 2025? The latest Hop Talks event, hosted by the Center for Social Concern (CSC) on Sept. 17, sought to address this question through a dinner discussion. Executive Director for the CSC Jasmine L. Blanks Jones underscored the importance of events like these on college campuses during an election year.
“In an election year, where there’s just so much information and misinformation that’s out there, we need opportunities for students to come together — to bring the knowledge that they do have and the questions that they have and really be able to tease some of those things out,“ she said.
The mission of the CSC’s Hop Talks Dinner Discussion regarding Project 2025 was different from that of an ordinary academic panel. Rather than luring an audience to sit while they listened to esoteric arguments and academic jargon, the CSC set out to create an interactive environment in which students and the Hopkins community could actively participate, voice their concerns and receive real-time responses from experts.
Karsonya Wise Whitehead, professor of African American Studies and Communication at Loyola Maryland University as well as host of Today with Dr. Kaye on WEAA 88.9 FM, revealed what she claimed to be the truth behind Project 2025. She stated that she believes that Project 2025 is a smokescreen.
In the first section of the event — an open-ended, 10-minute dialogue with each of three panel speakers — Whitehead explained her view of a scattered document that makes little sense..
“[Project 2025 writers] actually argue against themselves,“ she said. “One person says right, the next person says left.”
According to Whitehead, the confusing document’s real purpose is to distract Americans from paying attention to Trump’s policies that pose real and clear danger to many groups of people, including immigrants.
“We have to look beyond Project 2025 and keep our attention focused on Trump,” she elaborated. “If you look at his policies, what he’s talking about beyond dogs and cats and that foolishness is a massive appeal around deportation. On day one, he’s talking about rounding up people using guns if necessary. No one’s talking about that because, Oh, my goodness, Project 2025!”
Joel Payne, a CBS political correspondent, followed Whitehead. Addressing the content of Project 2025, Payne cautioned against the dystopian privileges the initiative would grant the president.
“It’s a giant personnel project to move people into the government who will do what Donald Trump on high command says to do,” he said. “It is essentially to take out thousands of government jobs that are supposed to be people who are experts ... and move in the partisans.”
Lester Spence, professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Hopkins, zoomed out from Project 2025 as a document and focused on the role of race in a Project 2025 society.
“They want to remake the state such that it functions primarily, if not solely, for whites of a certain ideological background,” he claimed.
He connected the overturning of Roe v. Wade to the United States’ history of limiting Black people on the census through the erasure of the term “Mulatto.”
Spence explained that with the illegalization of interracial relationships in the United States, fewer mixed-race children were born and fewer people were choosing to identify as mixed-race. They often chose to identify with the race that would socially benefit them, or “white.” Spence used this piece of history to reference what is happening today with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. He claimed that communities of color will be hit hardest by the restriction of reproductive healthcare, leaving the safest and most cost-effective manner of birth control to once again be abstinence. This, in turn, will lead to fewer children born to families of color: another way in which the United States government has limited the number of non-white people appearing on their census.
“I understand the attempt to control women’s biological reproduction as an attempt to, in part, control the United States racial population,” he concluded.
Sophomore moderator Omotara Tiamiyu ended the first section of the event and presented a question: “What do you believe the role of the media has had in shaping public opinion on Project 2025?”
Payne responded first, recognizing the distinction between media as a tool for unity as well as a tool for division.
“The positive usage of the media ecosystem is to get the word out, mass distribution, mass communication, etc.,” he said. “The negative version of it is how information metastasizes in a corrosive right-wing ecosystem that is built to sustain power for one political party.”
As a media expert, Whitehead acknowledged the difficulty in getting an audience to suspend interest, referencing a recent event in which actress Taraji P. Henson called upon her audience to research Project 2025.
“We had eight million people go to that website [Project 2025] that night, and Taraji said, ‘Go read it,’“ she explained. “Two weeks later, we did a poll. ‘Have you heard of Project 2025?’ They have no idea what it is. Even though everyone went to the site, who actually downloaded and read the 900-page document?”
Spence called on a communication as well as psychological principle: shortcuts, or the dissemination of information in a cogent, concise manner.
“People use shortcuts to make political decisions,” he offered. “What we find is that, if you actually look, shortcuts can potentially reach low-information voters who don’t have a lot of resources to dig in. If you do it right, they can take a little bit of information and make the right decisions with it.”
After the event, when asked what idea stood out most to her, junior Haruka Yamaguchi shared her revelation regarding Gen Z’s power in the political sphere in an interview with The News-Letter.
Yamaguchi highlighted the importance of younger people getting involved in the political sphere.
“When you watch politics, you see the older generation running things,” she observed. “I think that alienates Gen Z. How we get Gen Z to realize they have more power is important.”
Senior Jacquelyn Slade, an event attendee as well as Hopkins Votes student employee, wanted to emphasize what is special about political events like these at Hopkins in an interview with The News-Letter.
“This event was unique in its nature that it was academic. It brought together different academic professionals,” she said. “I think that’s really important in this upcoming election.”
