The Republican Platform.

I will say this: After reading all 16 pages of the Republican Party platform, it’s a streamed-down into talking points, Project 2025. There were a few things that screamed at me that most members of the media would not touch, so I will.

First, here is the full document. Trust me, it will not take long to read. It’s not that dense, either. It’s talking points, some in all caps.

The first is cryptocurrencies. Some background on crypto is needed. It’s not the libertarian heaven, independent of governments, that many crypto fans, including Elon Musk, claim. It is literally an obscure way to transfer wealth without controls; it’s a way to obscure financial crimes.

It makes the mission of the treasury department to combat illegal cash flows near impossible. Why? Crypto transfers are underwater. It also makes any sanction regime impossible for the same reasons. Worse, if I pay you in crypto, all I need is a thumb drive.

So what is the GOP committed to doing? From the platform:

Controlling our money supply and the importance of the US dollar as a reserve currency is un-American. So, who uses crypto? The cartels do. We know this. And Republicans can’t pretend they don’t because they sit in the same committees.

This advisory is from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN for short, one of those obscure agencies that Trump wants to dismantle.

It’s not just the cartels. You can also insert every terror group here. It’s also the Russian Federation. For them, it’s a way to get around sanctions. The last one has the same kind of headwinds because we still have some regulations.

What else is crypto? It’s an attack on the global financial system, including the International Monetary Fund and the dollar as reserve currency. So when you read they are all for innovation and a strong country, cryptocurrency is not the way to go.

There were a few other things on the platform that immediately jumped out. We knew Trump was committed to a deportation plan. It’s in there. It’s coded to defend Americans from invaders, but who are the invaders? We know his deportation plan will include a lot of Americans.

How do we know? It’s not like Trump has made it a secret:

“On day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan, on Wednesday. He told his adoring supporters that immigrants were coming in by the millions from foreign prisons and “insane asylums” leading to the “plunder, rape, slaughter and destruction of the American suburbs, cities and towns”.

So believe him when he tells you what the intent is. He wants to remove bad actors. Given American history, how many of these bad actors will be American citizens? Do you think all gang members are from El Salvador? I mean, for a fact, MS 13 started in Los Angeles, California, not El Salvador.

Moreover, in the past, we have deported foreign-born gang members. But I guarantee what Trump wants to do is far closer to ethnic cleansing. I mean, he has referred to the purity of the nation and talked about immigrants as “poisoning the blood of America.” So here is what’s been done:

By the mid-1990s, partly as a way to deal with the gangs and partly as a product of the get-tough immigration push toward the end of the presidency of Bill Clinton, the US government began a program of deportation of foreign-born residents convicted of a wide range of crimes. This enhanced deportation policy vastly increased the number of gang members being sent home to El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and elsewhere.

According to one estimate, 20,000 criminals returned to Central America between 2000 and 2004. The trend continued over time: US immigration authorities removed nearly 6,000 suspected gang members in 2018 alone — around 1,300 of them from the MS13.

However, alien removals—that’s the term—have rules. This is not what he wants, and he will not admit that this process started with a Democrat in the White House.

Another point caught my attention, because I know they are lying. That promise to preserve social security and Medicare is there to attract seniors. Speaker Mike Johnson has been using code to tell us what they want.

My ears really perk up when people start calling for system reforms. I know what they mean: best-case death by a thousand cuts.

Now, let me deal with housing because this really made me go, what? We do have a housing crisis, but this is creating a five-alarm fire in my mind.

Why? Opening limited sections of federal lands not only touches on delicate ecosystems…but it’s not about hugging a tree or thicket. Most of these lands are in the West. They are part of military bases and delicate ecosystems prone to significant wildfires.

Having covered enough wildfires, we have a crisis of insurance, and insurers are leaving these states, with good reasons. Building more housing in that interface seems like madness. This is just an example from California.

Yes, we need housing. But it strikes me as a really bad idea to build these homes where wildfires occur often. But that’s just me.

In closing, let me deal with abortion. There are two mentions. They are the expected. They want to remove bodily autonomy. And there is an apparent attack on LGBTQ rights.

If you really have no time for Project 2025, this provides the highlights, so I recommend reading it. It’s not that dense. It took me all of thirty minutes to go through it.

It takes far longer to get this background into some of the issues. Granted, I already knew quite a bit of it from years of reporting. And as to wildfires, it used to be a regular beat.