authoritarian control Archives - Milwaukee Community Journal

Republican Project 2025 (Photo by Douglas Rissing)

By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

They said it would never happen here. Yet here we are. Forty-eight percent of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s fascist playbook for dismantling American democracy, has already been put into motion. Nearly half of this regime’s roadmap to erase civil rights, gut public programs, and reimpose racial hierarchy has been realized, with Black America once again standing at the edge of the abyss.

Project 2025 was never just a “policy plan.” It was a declaration of war on pluralism itself. A promise by Donald Trump, Russell Vought, and Stephen Miller to chain the machinery of government to white nationalism, Christian dominance, and patriarchal control. The American Civil Liberties Union warned that it would replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals, reviving 19th-century bans on abortion, dismantling civil rights enforcement, and weaponizing federal agencies against immigrants and protestors. Now, the chains are tightening. The Center for Progressive Reform reports that 251 of the 532 Project 2025 actions have been executed. Entire agencies that were once meant to serve and protect have been hollowed out, their missions inverted. Within the Department of Justice, Trump’s appointees have revived the death penalty, reinstated the racist China Initiative, and authorized aggressive prosecutions of local officials who refuse to enforce his version of “law and order.” Civil rights enforcement has been stripped bare; instead of protecting citizens from discrimination, the DOJ now protects power from dissent.

At the Department of Education, Title IX protections for women and LGBTQ students have been rolled back, and the Office for Civil Rights dismantled. Public education is being replaced with privatized indoctrination, pushing “parental rights” that serve as a Trojan horse for white Christian control. Even special education programs have been gutted, leaving millions of disabled children abandoned in the name of “efficiency.” The Department of Health and Human Services, which was once a guardian of public welfare, has been turned into a moral police force. Abortion access is being criminalized, Planned Parenthood defunded, and data on gender identity erased from health surveys. The new public health priorities are “fertility awareness” and “family discipline,” language straight from the Heritage Foundation’s patriarchal gospel. In housing, Trump’s HUD has repealed fair housing protections and reintroduced policies that penalize single mothers while rewarding “marriage stability.” The echoes of Jim Crow are unmistakable. Homes and neighborhoods once opened through decades of civil rights struggle are being closed again under the pretext of “local control.”

Project 2025’s architects have already unleashed the machinery of cruelty on immigrants and communities of color. Thousands have been rounded up under ICE raids that blur the line between citizen and foreigner. It’s a calculated terror tactic meant to normalize the surveillance and detention of Black and brown bodies. Families have been separated again. Birthright citizenship is under attack. ICE, that iron emblem of modern slavery, now casts a shadow over the same soil where slave patrols once hunted the enslaved. This is not accidental. It is the vision of Russell Vought, who co-authored the 900-page “Mandate for Leadership,” the Project 2025 manifesto. As Trump’s budget director and now his ideological enforcer, Vought believes in purging the federal government of “unfaithful” employees, which means anyone who resists his religious and racial orthodoxy. Stephen Miller, the same architect of family separation and Muslim bans, is back to oversee deportations, surveillance, and the silencing of dissent. Their fingerprints are everywhere, from the federal hiring purges to the empowerment of police forces granted immunity from prosecution. Nearly half of the Project 2025 vision has already been achieved, and it is remaking America into a parody of its democratic promise. The Environmental Protection Agency has reversed greenhouse gas regulations, the Department of Agriculture has reinstated draconian work requirements for food aid, and the White House itself now dictates loyalty tests for every federal employee. This is not governance, it is occupation.

The Center for Progressive Reform notes that Trump’s government shutdown in October 2025 was not a failure of management but a strategy. A deliberate effort to dismantle public programs while blaming “big government” for their collapse. He used the shutdown, as the report states, “as an excuse to advance his goals of slashing programs that benefit millions of Americans.” In this America, cruelty has become the operating principle. The poor are starved to feed the rich, the immigrant is caged to comfort the fearful, and truth itself is outlawed. He once warned that if we do not confront the truth of who we are, we will be consumed by it. Project 2025 is the truth of America unmasked. A nation willing to trade freedom for dominance, justice for vengeance, and compassion for control. Nearly half of the chains have already been forged. They rattle in our schools, our hospitals, our courts, our homes. And while they may not yet bind every wrist, they are ready. The architects of Project 2025 have made their intention plain. To enslave the will of a free people through law, bureaucracy, and fear.

We are halfway to chains.

Close up of a woman paying contactless with smart watch during sports championship in a bar. (Photo by Drazen Zigic)

By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

The Trump administration’s economic experiment, rooted in chaos, crony capitalism, and unchecked digital surveillance, is pushing America toward a dangerous new frontier. It is a crypto-driven, cashless society that threatens to erase financial freedom for millions, particularly Black Americans and the working poor.

As the economy contracts and inflation rises, President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff regime has already sent shockwaves through every sector. According to Fortune, Trump’s reckless tariff decisions have wiped nearly seven trillion dollars in market value, decimated small business confidence, and driven consumer prices to levels not seen in decades. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii warned that Trump is ruining the economy on purpose, pointing to middle-class families now paying an average of five thousand dollars more each year for basic goods such as cars, homes, groceries, and clothing. While Americans struggle with higher prices and shrinking savings, the Trump White House has quietly advanced a sweeping new financial system that merges state power, private crypto interests, and invasive data collection. In early 2025, Trump authorized a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, incorporating the volatile cryptocurrency into official United States financial infrastructure. The Conversation reported that this hybrid model privatizes the issuance of money while keeping control of reserves under the executive branch. It undermines the Federal Reserve’s independence and centralizes power in the Oval Office. Trump described bitcoin as freedom money, but in practice, it represents state-aligned crypto dominance and an economy where wealth and access depend on government loyalty.

Behind the scenes, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, once run by Elon Musk, came under scrutiny for uploading massive federal databases containing the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans, including Social Security data, to unsecured cloud servers. A whistleblower revealed that the team requested its activities not be logged and even deleted records of access, behavior that cybersecurity experts compared to criminal hacking operations. Sensitive information tied to union members, workers’ rights cases, and corporate secrets may have been exposed, with traces of suspicious activity linking back to Russian IP addresses. By the spring of 2025, Musk left DOGE and the government under a cloud of suspicion after a public spat with Trump. He has gone mostly silent since his departure, but multiple people believe he took large volumes of data with him. The full extent of what was removed or copied remains unclear, leaving major concerns about the safety of sensitive personal and governmental information.

At the same time, Trump’s allies have opened new financial avenues for the wealthy through Erebor Bank, a cryptocurrency-focused institution backed by conservative megadonors and approved with unusual speed by Trump’s Treasury Department. Its mission is to serve ultra-high-net-worth individuals and tech firms, signaling a parallel financial system that privileges the rich while ordinary citizens are pushed into algorithmic surveillance economies. These developments align with global moves toward digital ID systems such as the United Kingdom’s One Login and digital wallets, which The Telegraph described as a real nightmare that centralizes personal data and is riddled with security flaws. In the United States, REAL ID enforcement now allows the federal government to link biometric data to digital identification across states. Officials claim it enhances security, yet many Black Americans have long viewed REAL ID with suspicion. Without it, citizens cannot board domestic flights, enter federal buildings, or access certain public facilities. Critics warn that REAL ID creates another layer of exclusion and control, particularly for those who already face bureaucratic and systemic barriers.

An expanded picture of what is happening around the world makes this moment appear even more calculated than coincidental. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s digital ID programhas been exposed as a security disaster that relied on unsecured workstations in foreign countries, leaving millions of British citizens vulnerable to data theft and foreign manipulation. In the United States, whistleblower Charles Borges revealed that the DOGE team copied and uploaded the Social Security Administration’s database containing hundreds of millions of Americans’ personal records to unmonitored cloud servers. He resigned after filing complaints, claiming he was harassed and isolated by the administration. Meanwhile, cybersecurity analysts detected data activity linked to Russia at the same time DOGE engineers were transferring files. When taken together, these events suggest a global pattern of governments and private actors concentrating power by controlling not only digital money but also personal identity and access to daily life. Globally, other nations have already begun shifting toward cashless societies. Sweden and Norway have reduced physical currency use to historic lows, and while the move is framed as progress, even their governments are now warning about the vulnerability of fully digital economies to war, cyberattacks, and authoritarian abuse. The convergence of Trump’s crypto policies, REAL ID enforcement, the global cashless push, and Musk’s suspected data exfiltration raises the specter of a coordinated effort to centralize control over citizens’ finances and personal freedoms. It suggests that the line between economic policy, surveillance, and political domination is disappearing.

As the physical dollar fades, major institutions warn of who will be left behind. Brookings predicted years ago that cash will soon be obsolete, with digital currencies becoming the new norm. While central banks promote benefits like efficiency and transparency, they also introduce total traceability, enabling governments or corporations to freeze, restrict, or program how citizens spend money. J.P. Morgan and Loughborough University both note that a cashless system risks excluding the poor, the elderly, and the unbanked, groups disproportionately represented by Black and minority Americans. Digital payments must be designed with inclusion and convenience at their core, said Loughborough economist Markos Zachariadis, warning that without oversight, we risk leaving vulnerable groups excluded. In the United States, those same groups are already being priced out of basic participation in the economy as Trump’s tariffs, inflation, and anti-worker policies strip away safety nets like Medicaid and food assistance.

For Black America, the stakes are especially high. The march toward a cashless economy threatens to replicate the structural inequalities of the old banking system under the guise of innovation. Access to digital money will depend on data verification, credit history, and digital ID compliance, areas where Black Americans have historically faced discrimination and surveillance. With tech billionaires like Musk controlling the digital rails, privacy and autonomy may soon become luxuries reserved for the elite. As Global Finance observed, nations like Sweden are reassessing their nearly cashless economies after realizing that wars, natural disasters, and crises reveal vulnerabilities in fully digital systems. In America, those vulnerabilities may soon look like total control, where the same administration that tanked the economy gains the power to decide how and where citizens can spend what little they have left. In the end, Trump’s version of economic freedom is not about liberty. It is about ownership of currency, of data, and of people. If this cashless, crypto-fueled dystopia becomes reality, Black America and the poor will once again be first in line to pay the price.