The process of going through all of our stories from the past 25 years of Yellow Scene Magazine (YS) to find the 25 stories best suited for a sort of “Where are they now?” segment proved to be a little more overwhelming than I expected. That’s even when you consider the fact that our first several years aren’t well documented on our website, with the earliest being 2007, which is itself incomplete, and all the rest of YS’ early years only exist in physical form, collecting dust somewhere in the home of our publisher and founder, Shavonne Blades. Even if you take away those years, that’s still a mountain of articles to go through.

While some were absolutely fascinating, did all of them reflect the time that had passed and demonstrate something significant that changed over time? In the past 25 years, our coverage area of East Boulder County and the surrounding metro area has gone through significant changes. So has Colorado as a whole. So has the country, with Colorado often along for the ride while the country has bounced from one right-wing extremist presidency, to eight years of Obama, to another right-wing extremist presidency. In fact, what I found was that seemingly insignificant stories look very different through the lens of history.

Take, for example, “Bare Necessities” — which we’ll count as the first of our 25 stories — a strange 2012 story about North Boulder nudist couple Bob and Cathy Pierce who attempted to sue the city for harassing them but found it difficult when Cathy tried to enter the county courthouse topless. The unusual story raised some interesting issues at the time about personal freedom and the ability of police to enforce laws they don’t understand, considering that baring breasts is actually legal in Boulder. We didn’t follow up on the Pierces afterwards — it’s hard to imagine that story having an interesting follow-up, but boy would you be wrong. The following year, the couple was arrested in Marblehead, Ohio after a waitress overheard what she thought was Bob threatening then-President Barack Obama. Bob insisted he was talking about killing Obama in a debate and that he wanted to go to Washington to set the politician straight. The Pierces once again made headlines in the Daily Camera in 2016 after Cathy was convicted of felony theft and criminal exploitation of an at-risk elder for allegedly tricking a 73-year-old, half-blind man into signing away his trailer home for $1.

While the Pierces’ sordid exploits weren’t something we wanted to make front page news, it demonstrates that almost every story, no matter how inconsequential it may seem at the time, could have an interesting follow-up if you take the time to look into it. So how could I narrow it down to just 25 stories that demonstrate the inevitable passage of time? In some ways, the articles I chose were somewhat arbitrary, as almost any article could have fit this piece. But I think I found a series of articles that truly do reflect the important changes in local history.

Fighting Words (2008)

Riding the blue wave that the 2008 election brought, Colorado’s first all-Democratic leadership in the legislature looked to use their newfound majority status to get affordable healthcare passed in the state, with one phrase on everyone’s lips: “single payer.” As the article pointed out, “single payer” is the other term for one of the most terrifying concepts in American politics: universal healthcare. Why it remains such a divisive issue when most other countries in the First World have long since instituted a single-payer healthcare system is somewhat of a mystery, but for whatever reason, there’s always a completely unjustified pushback on the topic in American legislatures. But at this unique moment in 2008, Democrats finally thought they could get it pushed through. Spoiler alert: They didn’t.

Single-payer healthcare in Colorado is much like the proverbial football that Lucy always holds out for Charlie Brown, promising she won’t pull it away at the last moment, only for poor Chuck to land flat on his back when Lucy inevitably does so anyway. In 2017, Colorado attempted to pass a single-payer healthcare system by ballot initiative, but there was a problem: Colorado’s constitution bans public funding for abortion, so the ballot initiative, the way it was worded, would have meant that everyone who currently has abortions covered by private insurance would be forced to pay out of pocket, a situation that drew opposition from major abortion advocates. As recently as February of this year, a new bill was proposed to study the potential impact of single-payer healthcare, a bill that’s similar to one that failed in the last few years, but this version of the bill wouldn’t be funded by taxpayers, giving it a fighting chance of getting passed. Still, a lot has changed since 2008 when Democrats thought they could get single payer passed. Now they’re fighting just to explore the possibility.

An Education in Luring Top Minds (2008)

In 2008, Colorado State Sen. Brandon Shaffer was trying to get more people to go into teaching, particularly in districts and subject areas that are significantly understaffed, by instituting a $500,000 scholarship fund to get kids to go to Colorado public colleges and take teacher prep courses. Well, it seems he succeeded and created what became known as the Teach Colorado Grant, and in 2009 he introduced the “Troops to Teachers” bill which sought to bring more military veterans into the program.

Well, Schaffer went on to become President of the Colorado State Senate from 2009-2013, and, even though he’s no longer involved in politics, his dream of scholarships for teaching lives on. Today, the Educator Recruitment and Retention Program (ERR) offers up to $10,000 in one-time assistance to towards teacher prep courses, as long as the recipient signs on to work for three years in a “shortage area” for Colorado Public Schools. Still, education has a long way to go in Colorado, a state that was recently ranked 45th in the nation for education by USA Today, with teachers making less than the state median salary. It seems like we need more than just scholarships, we need to pay teachers more to incentivize better performance.

The Most Expensive Seat in the Country (2008)

In 2008, YS stopped in to a fundraiser for a “non-descript” man self-financing his campaign for the second U.S. Congressional District seat in what was being called the most expensive seat in the country (or at least one of the most expensive), predicting at the time that it would take $10 million or more to settle the seat. That non-descript man was none other than Jared Polis who, in 2019, was sworn in as Colorado’s first openly gay governor as well as our first Jewish governor.

Polis not only made CD2 one of the most expensive in the country, ten years later, he helped make that election the most expensive in Colorado history up to that point, with more than $200 million spent on Colorado campaigns and with Polis pumping more than $23 million into his own campaign. In 2022, he won re-election with a bit less of his own money financing campaign but still pumped $12.6 million into his own campaign that year. And, while we had a hard time picking Polis as our endorsement for the CD2 election in 2008, we had a little bit of an easier time in 2022 picking him for governor against the too-extreme Trump supporter Heidi Ganahl.

Far From the Party: A Republican Fights for Her Political Life (2008)

In 2008, we checked in on Betsy Markey, the Democratic challenger for Colorado’s 4th Congressional District against incumbent Marilyn Musgrave. The seat had traditionally been held by Republicans in this district, but Musgrave saw her lead in each election dwindling more and more, making it seem possible that, in 2008, Markey might overtake the Republican and win the seat.

Well, she did. In the 2008 election, Markey’s 11-point win was more than even her own staff had hoped for. The victory was short-lived, though, as Republican Cory Gardner won the seat back for his party in 2010, which he kept until 2015 when he moved from the House to the Senate. Markey’s political career didn’t end there, though, as she was then appointed to be secretary for intergovernmental affairs in the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration, a post she held until 2013.

Who Killed The Rocky (2009)

The closure of Rocky Mountain News, one of Colorado’s major newspapers, in February 2009 was a seismic shift in the local news industry that we look at in more depth in this issue titled, “The History of Independent Media in Boulder County,” which discusses how the 300 reporters at Rocky Mountain News (nicknamed “The Rocky”) competed with the same number of reporters from The Denver Post, resulting in too much competition for the same leads. In our 2009 piece, former Rocky writer Dave Flomberg explained the flaws of The Rocky’s parent corporation, E.W. Scripps Company, and how they failed to let The Rocky find a niche by focusing on local news while also failing to grow their digital content to reduce print costs.

Nearly 10 years later, in 2018, The Rocky’s biggest competitor, The Denver Post, nearly met the same demise. Learning lessons from the past, the staff of The Post launched what became known as The Denver Post Rebellion where its writers printed a series of articles protesting against the leadership of its hedge fund owners, Alden Global Capital, with the headline “News Matters” and the subheading “Colo. should demand the newspaper it deserves.” While Alden Global kept to their gameplan rather than following The Post’s call for them sell to better owners, Coloradans demonstrated that local news mattered to them, and The Denver Post Rebellion is often cited as part of the reason the newspaper didn’t fall the way The Rocky did.

Graduation: Now What? (2015)

In 2015, we examined how difficult it was for college students to find jobs in the wake of the then-recent recession. At the time, 44% of college graduates were underemployed, meaning they took jobs that didn’t require their college degree. According to an article in Forbes last year, the situation hasn’t improved in the past decade. 52% of college graduates — more than half — are now working in jobs that don’t require higher education and 75% of them remain in this situation for a full decade after college.

Down the Road: Ten Transportation Issues Impacting You in the Next 10 Years (2011) and Derailed (2016)

In this 2011 article, writer James Burrus talked about the transportation issues that would define the next decade. Now that it’s 14 years later, how much of what Burrus talked about has been realized? The Boulder BCycle bike-sharing program that he mentioned continues to this day, but now it competes with e-scooters from Lime, Lyft, and other major companies. Still, other transportation options that Burrus talked about in 2011, like FasTracks, have not fared as well over the years. In our 2016 article “Derailed” talked about a modified FasTracks proposal that was being put to voters.

The 2004 FasTracks program ran into funding difficulties in the 2010s that pushed their projection to build a commuter rail between Denver and Boulder/Longmont to the 2040s. As recently as February 2025, RTD has been talking about a revised plan to have a train from Denver to Fort. Collins with stops in between, such as Boulder and Longmont, by January 1, 2029. At this point, we’ll believe it when we see it.

Frack Attack (2012)

The concept of “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing is a familiar one in 2025, especially for those living in the oil-rich areas of Colorado such as Erie. But, in 2012, the concept was still somewhat of a new one to our readers, enough so that we had to explain what it was. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, fracking dates back to an idea from 1862, although the modern concept of hydraulic fracturing started in the 1940s. Still, the boom in fracking is largely a 21st century phenomenon and, of the approximately 1 million wells that have been fracked from 1940 to 2014, about one-third of them were fracked after the year 2000.

In 2025, fracking and horizontal drilling have become more commonplace, and the results are becoming more and more catastrophic. EnvironmentAmerica estimates that 57,000 acres of land in Colorado have already been damaged by fracking, a number it says is equivalent to one-third of the acres of land in the state’s park system. Our latest fracking controversy happened just last year when the Draco Oil and Gas Development Plan proposed by Extraction Oil & Gas Inc./Civitas Resources was set to start drilling underneath residential areas and schools in Erie but was halted by a unanimous vote of the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission. The Draco Pad has sparked significant controversy due to its plan to drill 26 horizontal wells extending five miles beneath residential areas and schools in Erie. This would mark the longest lateral drilling ever attempted in Colorado, surpassing the previous maximum of four miles. Initially, the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) unanimously halted the project. However, on March 26, 2025, the ECMC reversed its decision, approving the plan with a 4–1 vote.

Notables: The New Guy (2012)

In 2012, we sat down with Longmont’s “New Guy,” the new city manager Harold Dominguez who had just uprooted himself from San Angelo, Texas to manage the Boulder County city. “Considering we had over 100 days of over 100-degree weather in San Angelo, I think we will enjoy it,” he said at the time about making the move from the sweltering Texas heat to the more temperate climate in Colorado. Well, he seems to enjoy it pretty well, because Dominguez isn’t the new guy anymore. He continues to serve as Longmont’s city manager to this day. In 2023, his base salary was raised to $305,620 by a unanimous vote  from Longmont City Council due to his exceptional competency at the job and the council’s desire to hold onto him in that position.

Breaking out of the cubicle (2012) and The Rise of Flexible Jobs (2012)

In 2012’s “Breaking out of the cubicle,” we checked in with Avery Brewing Company and explained how they’re considered one of the most fun places to work in Colorado, largely because of the fact that they let employees grab a free beer from the taproom at any time, even during work hours. We also dipped into some other fun workplaces such as Louisville’s Natural Habitat Adventures, which was sending employees on annual trips and holding ping-pong tournaments, and Training Peaks in Lafayette which gave employees a $600 per year stipend to spend on fitness. In “The Rise of Flexible Jobs,” we talked to Sara Sutton, who started FlexJobs to help people in the then-difficult task of finding flexible jobs that allowed work from home.

Of course, we all know how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the standard workplace, forcing companies to allow more employees to work from home. At the height of the pandemic, 61.5% of all work in the U.S. was remote. Today, hybrid and remote work is still popular, with the average American worker spending 1.4 days of the week working from home. So getting a free beer during work hours doesn’t quite hold a candle to being able to work out of your own home.

Kiss the Ring (2012) and Lucky Stars (2012)

We did two articles on Brad Feld in 2012, the man who was one of the pioneers of Boulder becoming a hub for tech start up companies. As managing director of venture capital firm Foundry Group and founder of Techstars, Feld was quickly becoming one of the rockstars of the venture capital field.

13 years later, and Feld still lives in Boulder with his wife, Amy Batchelor, who he started the Anchor Point Foundation. Foundry Group and Techstars are still up and running. Meanwhile, Feld spends his time writing books about venture capital and startups, running marathons, and sponsoring documentaries about topics he’s passionate about. Meanwhile, Boulder is still listed amongst the top cities in the U.S. for tech startups, recently making the lists from Crowdspring and Yahoo! Finance.

Smoke Signals: Q&A with Mason Tvert (2012)

Anyone who enjoys cannabis legally in Colorado has Mason Tvert to thank for it. He led successful campaigns to decriminalize cannabis possession on CU and CSU campuses, passed an initiative to legalize the possession of small amounts of cannabis for adults in Denver and, in 2012, we interviewed him about his efforts to pass Amendment 64: The Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act, which, at the time, looked likely to pass.

It’s little secret what happened after that. About a month after our article ran, Colorado voters approved Amendment 64 and Colorado and Washington became the first two states to legalize recreational cannabis use. Other states caught on, and recreational cannabis use is now fully legal in 25 states as well as the District of Columbia. Taking it a step further, Colorado has just started issuing licenses for “healing centers” where people can ingest psychedelic mushrooms under supervision.

Small Space, Big Idea (2013) and Resurrecting a Village: Tiny Homes for the Homeless (2016)

In 2013, we profiled Jay Shafer, founder of Tumbleweed Tiny House Co. and the movement to live more simply in homes built to be under 150 square feet. In 2016, we looked into how tiny homes could be a better solution for solving homelessness than jail-like temporary shelters which are undignified for the people living in them as well as more expensive in a comparative analysis of costs compared to Dignity Village, (a Tiny Home community in Portland, OR). Flash forward to 2025, and the tiny home market is expanding very rapidly. Yahoo Finance! Predicts that the size of the tiny homes market is estimated to grow by $3.71 billion from 2025-2029.

The Privatization of Colorado’s Public Education (2014)

If we thought that education was overly privatized in 2014, we had no idea what we were in for in the years to come. In our 2014 article, we looked at the increasing use of private corporations to dictate standardized tests in an attempt to cut costs and, by adopting a consistent, objective measure of student knowledge and skills, qualify for No Child Left Behind funding. Over reliance on companies such as Pearson went hand in hand with the introduction of Common Core State Standards.

In the years since this story ran, public education has become even more privatized nationwide with the sudden boom in charter schools, independently managed schools that somehow still qualify as a public school option for kids. According to pro-charter school advocacy group National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the five years from 2019 to 2024 saw an increase in enrollment in charter schools of 400,000 students nationwide in the 46 states that allow charter schools. Colorado is, of course, one of those 46 states. So, while the use of private companies to handle day-to-day operations in a public school was problematic, the move to make public education more privatized has become a sort of horrifying mutation of the existing problem.

Net Neutrality (2015)

In 2015, we looked at the decision by the FCC to classify the Internet under Title II of the 1996 Telecommunications act to ensure that service providers would treat every website equally and not charge fees to certain sites, like Netflix, to ensure the fastest possible speeds. The issue has gone back and forth over the years, being repealed during the Trump administration, then reinstated last year under the Biden administration. But then, in January of this year, a federal appeals court struck down the FCC’s net neutrality rules, arguing that the FCC did not have the legal authority to enact such rules. Interestingly enough, our article predicted that the net neutrality rules would make the Time Warner/Comcast merger more likely, but that merger never happened.

Hard-partying brothers Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave (Zac Efron) plan to turn their sister’s wedding into a wild getaway. Photo Credit: Gemma LaMana.

Spotlight on Adam Devine (2016)

In 2016, we got a chance to sit down with actor Adam Devine to talk about his new comedy Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, a movie you might not have heard of before despite its all-star cast featuring Zac Efron, Anna Kendrick, and Aubrey Plaza. That might have something to do with the abysmal reviews of the movie, which currently holds a score of 38% on Rotten Tomatoes with the critic’s consensus reading “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates benefits from the screwball premise and the efforts of a game cast, even if the sporadically hilarious results don’t quite live up to either.”

Meanwhile, Devine’s family has had a new addition, as last year he and his wife Chloe Bridges welcomed their son Beau into the world. Devine said of the experience of being a new dad that “Every day is like a new adventure.” Fatherhood seems to suit him pretty well.

Graphic image by De La Vaca

The ORR v. Abortion | Duly Noted (2019)

In this 2019 piece, we looked at Scott Lloyd, the Trump appointee who was then running the Office of Refugee Resettlement and denied a refugee the right to an abortion, even going so far as to say that he has never granted permission for a detainee to receive an abortion for any reason. Thankfully, the refugee sued through the ACLU and won her right to an abortion, but the incident demonstrated the Trump administration’s real agenda on abortion: They wanted to end it at all costs.

Sadly, we all know where this story goes: In 2022, the Supreme Court, in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson, overturned the landmark case of Roe v. Wade which declared a legal right to abortion. The decision reversing Roe v. Wade, spearheaded by all three of Trump’s Supreme Court appointees — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — found that “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” setting the battle for reproductive freedom back decades. The result has been that the decision on abortion rights was thrown back to the states, with many now finding their access to abortion to be severely restricted. Make no mistake, the Trump administration always wanted its appointees to stand in the way of any and all rights to abortion.

Time After Time… (2019)

Sadly, our 2019 article entitled “Time After Time…” was not a tribute to longtime pop star and LGBTQ+ advocate Cyndi Lauper. Instead, it talked about how time after time Donald Trump chose the dishonorable, disreputable, and immoral path and asked if the Republican Party had the fortitude to break ranks and vote to impeach one of their own amidst the strict party-line votes that are so common for Congress in the 21st century.

As we now know, Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2019 brought forth charges against him  for improperly seeking help from a foreign power to boost his chances of re-election. In fact, in 2021, Trump became the first president to be impeached twice, having faced another impeachment over his role in the January 6 insurrection. But he was acquitted of all charges in both cases by the Senate, keeping him from being removed from office and being barred from running again. Thus, he ran again in 2024 and became the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms as well as the first convicted felon to be elected to the Presidency.

“…Unmarried, straight white dudes who couldn’t get laid.” (2019)

In 2019, we discussed the Newsweek interview by Tareq Haddad with Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie that explained that Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist, targeted incels and other insecure white men with a message of xenophobia and racism because of how easy they are to manipulate. In essence, we learned that Bannon knew exactly what he was doing the entire time, using hatred and frustration as fuel for the fire that skyrocketed Trump into an unlikely presidency in 2016.

When Trump was re-elected in 2024, Bannon was no longer a member of the inner circle, and yet he still communicates with Trump and his team from time to time. However, Bannon recently told Chris Cuomo on NewsNation that he is part of an effort to win Trump a third term in 2028, despite the fact that presidents are term limited by the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. Short of a violent overthrow of the government, a third Trump term seems unlikely.

Fatal police shooting in Boulder over the weekend (2023)

Despite being one of the most recent stories on our list, this might be the story with the most significant developments in the time since the original article was posted. In 2023, we reported on the erratic behavior of a then-unidentified woman, who was later identified as 51-year-old Jeannette Alatorre. After officers responded to reports of a woman at the North Boulder Recreation Center refusing to leave the bathroom, less than an hour later they received another call about the same woman pointing a gun at the people trying to exit the recreation center. The gun was later determined to be an airsoft gun with the orange tip removed, but officers say they were unaware of that at the time. The police claim to have taken the proper steps necessary to de-escalate the situation non-violently before ultimately using lethal force, resulting in Alatorre’s death.

It’s possible that the police used every means available to them to avoid the death of Alatorre, but in the wake of officer-related shootings that could have been easily prevented, it was important to make absolutely certain that the right actions were taken in Alatorre’s case. This is where YS entered the story. When YS requested the officer’s body-worn camera (BWC) footage, Boulder Police Department demanded an exorbitant fee of $2,857.50 for locating and redacting the footage. YS, attorney Dan Williams, and Alatorre’s daughter entered into a lawsuit alleging that the fee violated Colorado’s Law Enforcement Integrity and Transparency Act of 2020, which restricts such fees. The city of Boulder argued that the broader Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act allowed them to charge reasonable fees of requesters. A district court ruled in YS’ favor in April 2024, but the City of Boulder filed an appeal in January of this year that has yet to be heard by a court. So, while the tragic story of Jeannette Alatorre is heartbreaking, it may change the way police are held accountable for such incidents in the future.

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The post 25 Stories Then and Now appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

Early in former President Trump’s term, he had a big idea to prevent undocumented immigrants from crossing the southern border, and it was not a wall.

“I want a big, deep moat!” He exclaimed to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson. According to Miles Taylor, Nielson’s Chief of Staff, Trump explained that he wanted this moat filled with snakes and alligators to, as Taylor put it, “eat people alive if they fell into it.”

This bizarre exchange was described by Taylor in his book Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump, a book I have read and highly recommend. But be warned– it is horrifying.

The snake and alligator-infested moat would be one of Trump’s many “bad idea bonfires,” and Taylor and his colleagues would find themselves repeatedly trying to extinguish them using various tactics of distraction, delay, or compromise.

In another disturbing example, according to Taylor, Trump frequently expressed confusion over why he could not simply order federal law enforcement officers to use violence against migrants or Black Lives Matter protesters. This account has been corroborated by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who quoted Trump as saying, “can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something.”

Distracting Trump from doing horrible things to people was exhausting work that would ultimately lead to Trump’s Chief of Staff, John Kelly, describing Trump in this way:

John Kelly during his time in the white house. Photo credit: Boston Globe

“He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” – former Trump Administration Chief of Staff John Kelly

Like his colleagues, Miles Taylor joined the Trump Administration as a believer—a Trump supporter willing to go to political war for this unconventional firebrand. Trump was shaking up the American political landscape in ways that engendered a fanatical following among a large swath of the conservative American electorate, and Taylor was eager to be a part of the movement.

But, like many of his colleagues, Taylor experienced on the inside a funhouse mirrored terror mansion of chaos led by an aspiring strongman with no regard for democratic principles, governing standards, or basic human decency. As a result of this experience, Taylor did something extraordinarily bold.

Photo Credit: New York Times

In 2018 he wrote an anonymous New York Times op-ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” The subtitle of this shocking article read: “I work for the president, but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

The op-ed sent President Trump into a rage as he vowed to root out the mole in his midst. The hunt was unsuccessful. Taylor revealed himself as “Anonymous” when he resigned his position in the Trump Administration more than two years later, in October 2020. For months afterward, Taylor endured relentless death threats and harassment.

One may read into Taylor’s action an act of treason. A White House insider actively working against the will of the President and Commander in Chief? And therein lies the heart of exactly why a demagogue like Donald Trump is so incredibly dangerous for the future of American democracy. It reveals that the strength of our democracy lies purely in the hearts and minds of the men and women whom we entrust to lead our nation as elected representatives.

We may have a constitution, but the reality is that it isn’t worth anything unless our elected representatives carry out their democratic duties in good faith and in alignment with constitutional principles.  Our democracy rests on a foundation, not of a document, but of a set of unwritten principles and traditions voluntarily adhered to by those who we, the people, entrust with enormous power and responsibility.

George Washington, our first president, set the standard for one of those principles—respect for the peaceful transfer of power. It is a sacred obligation that, after almost two and a half centuries, was shattered by Donald Trump’s failure to concede a lost election and his systematic attempts to unconstitutionally overturn its results to keep himself in power, including the incitement of a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

This historical context brings us to the reason why Project 2025 presents a profound danger to the future of America. While the media has mainly focused on the many draconian policy ideas within the document, they are largely failing to articulate that the greater danger is that Project 2025 is a playbook for removing the guardrails from a second Trump presidency—one that he has already stated will be driven by retribution in a second term of vengeance and political targeting.

The first three words in the 930-page Project 2025 document are “We want you!!”

Published in early 2023 voluntarily by the Heritage Foundation, a long-standing conservative political think tank, Project 2025 is a call to arms. It is a recruitment tool to create a standing army-in-waiting of MAGA loyalists who will be ready, eager, and specifically trained to fill the ranks of the civil service (what Trump calls the “deep state”) to carry out the orders of the next Trump presidency without question or hesitation. These institutions harbor great powers within them that, if used against the American people at the behest of a vengeful president, can destroy our republic and our democracy as we know it from within.

The primary objective of Project 2025, therefore, is not about draconian policy ideas like abolishing the Department of Education. It is about turning the management of the traditionally non-partisan civil service into a cabal of MAGA loyalists who will act on political rather than professional directives.

The Project 2025 document explicitly states that the “next conservative president” must be willing to grab extraordinary executive powers so that he can then “hand the power back to the people” once the federal government has been overhauled to match the vision of MAGA.

This is an egregiously dangerous perspective when their favored candidate already tried once to overthrow the American government after losing an election. Do they really think that, once power is grabbed through their playbook, Trump would behave like Washington and not like Orban or Mussolini?

The authors of Project 2025 must know that Trump is no Washington, which is why the document is so sinister in nature. The logical conclusion is that the Project 2025 authors want an authoritarian Trump who will steamroll over our democracy to achieve their objectives of “making America great again” by their definition only.

After all, the current Heritage Foundation President, Kevin Roberts, recently stated on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that “we are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it.”

The main mechanism of this so-called “revolution” is the planned overhauling of the administrative state, replacing career civil servants with political loyalists. This goal is explicitly stated on pages 20 and 21 of Project 2025:

“…the new administration must fill its ranks with political appointees.”

“When it comes to ensuring that freedom can flourish, nothing is more important than deconstructing the centralized administrative state. Political appointees who are answerable to the President and have decision-making authority in the executive branch are key to this essential task. The next Administration must not cede such authority to non-partisan “experts.”

This recruitment drive for loyalists is so core to the Project 2025 agenda that it is represented as one of its four main pillars, specifically stated in the document as “a personnel database.”

Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, has claimed “We are building a pipeline of conservative talent that is ready to step into key roles and implement our vision for America.”

Former head of Project 2025 Paul Dans claimed “We have a database with over 10,000 people from all walks of life entering into this, aspiring to serve. We want people who’ve been canceled, who’ve figuratively given blood for the movement. These are mums who’ve challenged school boards. These are people who’ve stood up in their companies and said, ‘Enough with [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and the whole woke agenda.’”

Many of these recruits are people who have filled out the vetting questionnaire on Project2025.org — political loyalists rather than the non-partisan experts who have traditionally filled the ranks of the civil service since the late 1800s.

The century-and-a-half long tradition of filling federal government positions with non-partisan experts is one of those unwritten foundational principles that has kept our democracy intact. Past presidents going back at least to Grover Cleveland have understood and largely adhered to the necessity of keeping political influence out of the day-to-day responsibilities of civil servants ranging from EPA environmental scientists to FBI investigators.

Project 2025’s brazen call to reverse this tradition and suggest that these career positions be qualified, not by experience and training in their field, but by a loyalty test to the MAGA movement, is dangerous. It becomes profoundly alarming if the occupant of the oval office has already stated and demonstrated anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies, and has already tried once before to overturn the will of the people.

Overhauling the civil service (i.e., “deep state”) with political loyalists would require firing and replacing tens of thousands of federal government employees. Most of these jobs typically carry over from one administration to the next. So how would the next Trump carry out this hostile takeover?

There is a plan for that, and it was already enacted once by Trump at the end of his last term. In October 2020, anticipating re-election the next month, Trump signed an executive order instituting “Schedule F,” which created a new employment category for federal employees that gives the president the authority to directly hire and fire vastly larger numbers of federal employees to the tune of many tens of thousands.

This order was immediately rescinded by President Biden upon his taking office in 2021, like putting a risen demon back into the earth. But there is no question that Trump would re-institute this order probably on day one of his presidency—one of the many “dictator-for-a-day” orders he may sign on January 21, 2025.

Trump would likely use the power of the executive order to push through an agenda that would have no chance in the legislative chambers. This possible landslide of executive orders would need to be implemented by the thousands of civil servants in the various federal agencies involved. Schedule F creates the mechanism for the next MAGA president to stuff the executive branch with loyalists who, rather than preventing the president from doing horrible things, would likely carry out his vengeful orders.

And this is where the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity comes in, supercharging this danger to alarming levels. Prior to this decision, Project 2025’s playbook for MAGA authoritarianism was still a road full of rocks and potholes. The conservative super-majority Supreme Court just paved that road over with a red carpeted conveyor belt for the first American dictator to ride into unchecked power.

Photo credit: Adam Szuscik via Unsplash

For almost two hundred and fifty years, the American people lived under the belief that no American, even the president, was above the law. The U.S. Supreme Court in Trump vs. The United States changed that overnight in what many legal scholars have called one of the most misguided and dangerous rulings in its entire history. Their ruling largely grants the U.S. president broad immunity from prosecution for anything arbitrarily deemed an “official act.”

While this ruling caused a prosecutorial delay in the January 6th-related cases against Trump (Federal and State of Georgia), it may not insulate him from conviction in those cases as federal prosecutors argue that his actions were undertaken as a candidate for office, not as president, and therefore cannot be considered “official acts” of the president. The merits of that argument, however, are untested under the new presidential immunity powers granted by the Supreme Court.

The danger, however, lies in a future President Trump who may seek to legally insulate his directives by declaring them official presidential acts. Furthermore, the Supreme Court explicitly protected the president from prosecution over any interaction between the president and the Department of Justice, opening the door wide open for targeted prosecution of political opponents or extrajudicial crackdowns on U.S. Citizens under easily fabricated emergency powers such as the Insurrection Act

The Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity arguably throws a wet blanket on any future Trump Administration insiders who may still be left trying to hold up the now rickety guardrails against his criminality if for no other reason than to protect their own skin.

Combine that with a president’s broad power of the pardon, including the preemptive pardon, and you have a wide-open path for the next (and even current) president to do almost whatever he or she wants with little fear or threat of future prosecution.

When Trump distances himself from Project 2025, he is playing a game the media is buying into by focusing on the policy proposals in the document. Trump does not care about those policy ideas. He can refute and disown them for political cover. What Trump is interested in from Project 2025 is the playbook for a power grab and its pre-vetted loyalist political army-in-waiting so that he can punish his political enemies and carry out his often horrible and immoral ideas without obstruction (i.e., “just shoot them in the legs or something.”)

Make no mistake; if Trump is re-elected, he absolutely has a clear path to dictatorship, cut wide open by the playbook that is Project 2025 and the legal cover that this conservative Supreme Court just unleashed.

Many frustrated Americans may relish the idea of a Trump dictatorship to relieve their problems and perceived grievances. For almost a decade the MAGA movement has stoked and reinforced the fear and anger of their followers. They are angry because they are told they should be. They are fearful because they are told they need to be. They are hateful because they are told it’s okay to be.

But modern history is fraught with examples of this foolishness. When democracy is undermined by a vengeful demagogue who plays on the people’s fear, anger, and hatred, it ends badly for everyone. Only a few decades ago authoritarian regimes, whether fascist or communist, in Europe and elsewhere promised grand authoritarian solutions (and retribution for trumped up grievances), but ended in the horrific destruction of whole societies, genocides, and wars of annihilation.

It would be hyperbolic to conclude with certainty that a second Trump Administration will lead us into such horrific turmoil. But it would be equally naive to assume that we can take another giant step onto that slippery slide of fascism and assume we will be able to arrest our accelerating descent towards its terrifying destinations.

Project 2025 is a playbook that gives extraordinary powers to the presidency in the foolish expectation that the president who benefits from that power would then voluntarily dilute it again. That is the dangerous plan.

The reality is that a vengeful and aging President Trump will likely use those powers, newly unhindered through the installation of an army of pre-vetted political loyalists operating under the cover of a preemptive pardon and the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, to potentially unleash an American presidential fury that could send the nation into a dark vault of political chaos and even violence.

Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor was not speaking in hyperbolic terms in her rebuttal to the catastrophic presidential immunity decision when she wrote, “with fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

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The post Project 2025: Red Carpet to American Autocracy appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

As seen on Post.news, reprinted with permission from author Mick Massicotte.

• The Matt Gaetz underage sex scandal
• Jared Kushner just randomly receiving $2,000,000,000 from the Saudis, for… all his good work or something?
• The 5 to 15 (can’t recall the exact number) actual members of Congress who literally asked for pardons after Jan 6!
• The conveniently-erased Secret Service text messages
• Speaking of Secret Service, the dozens or even hundreds of times Trump made them stay at his own properties, and charging the government/taxpayers an insane amount for it, which went right into his pocket. Feels a tad illegal to me.
• Ginni Thomas (for too many things to keep track of)
• Lauren Boebert tweeting out all of Nancy Pelosi’s movements on Jan 6 (I guess she’s just a big fan?)
• Barry Loudermilk and everyone else who gave “private tours” of the random entrance/exits of the Capitol (because that’s normal) a few days before Jan 6
• Steve Bannon somehow still not in jail and still allowed to travel and do his crazy show
• Speaking of crazy show, Alex Jones apparently still allowed to have business as usual
• Ali Alexander literally announced he planned the “stop the steal” stuff with Biggs, Gosar, and Brooks… nothing
• Multiple Fox News hosts just having normal texts with the White House (Meadows) before, during, and after Jan 6 (imagine Fox discovering that Rachel Maddow is in constant contact with Ron Klain about Biden’s policy decisions and campaign strategies, their heads would explode)
• I thought Justice Roberts (and all the right wing media) was SO intent on finding who leaked the plan to overturn Roe. “Oh it was actually Alito who leaked it himself? Okay nevermind, we’ll sweep it under the rug like everything else and never mention it again, even though we were all so pretend-angry about it back then!”
• Ted Cruz, Gosar, Peter Navarro, Boris Epstein (unsure on spelling), and anyone else who literally admitted to the coup attempt, and even came up with a name for it! (The Green Bay Sweep. Navarro and Boris were even on live TV basically confessing their crimes multiple times to Ari Melber.)
• Charlie Kirk even organized buses in advance (and tweeted all about it) for people to travel to the insurrection
• Ron DeSantis committing obvious crimes using federal funding for his multiple immigrant-kidnapping stunts
• The ACTUAL voter fraud committed by Republicans, most notably in The Villages in Florida.
• The Stormy Daniels affair and payoff (at the very least, you’d think Melania would care, but nah of course not. After all, Trump cheated on his previous wives too, so I guess it’s cool?)

The sad part is, I know I’m still forgetting things myself. But sure, please go on and on about “Hunter Biden.”

Mick Massicotte is self-described as “just a normal guy with gripes against zero-consequence Republicans and would say the same about Democrats too if they were as blatantly evil, but they’re not. And if they do happen to stray, Democrats actually do strive for accountability (see: Andrew Cuomo as an example).

The general American public, like myself just has very little faith that any accountability is coming from the higher-ups. Really really hoping to be proven wrong… but nothing has happened whatsoever to make us too hopeful?”

https://post.news/@mick41

The post Things that magically went away with zero consequences because they’re rich white people appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.

There it is. The admission of guilt, in print. The architect of the Trumpian era, Steve Bannon, knew exactly what he was doing all along. Bannon reached into the deep, dark fears of the weak-minded, white, male, incel psyche, and twisted it with the help of Cambridge Analytica and a library’s-worth of false conspiracies and racist rhetoric, according to a Newsweek article published on Oct. 29, 2019. Reporter Tareq Haddad interviewed Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who revealed the details of Bannon’s strategy leading up to Trump’s election in 2016 in his book, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America (Random House, Oct. 2019).

It really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to most of us. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of 20th Century history could see the strings Bannon was pulling as he drove Trump into an Electoral College win over a popular vote landslide loss. It was a steady drumbeat of xenophobia, racism, and unbridled nationalism — with just enough evangelical Christianity mixed with a subtle undercurrent of anti-semitism — to put the Malignant Narcissist In Chief into the most powerful office in the world. The playbook he used is one we’ve all seen before.

And yet, we know this admission won’t matter to his rabid, foaming-at-the mouth base — even people who might otherwise demonstrate a reasonable amount of logic and intelligence — because, to them, Trump has become a foundational identity. To part ways with him would require too much self-awareness. It would require a sense of empathy they do not possess. It would require the ability to admit they hitched their wagons to the most racist, hateful train this nation’s seen in the Oval Office in our lifetimes.

Meanwhile, Bannon’s “success” didn’t stop at the steps of the White House. A sinister domino effect rippled throughout the darkest recesses of identity cults in white America. And the result manifest itself in blood.

From San Diego, to El Paso, to Charlottesville, to Pittsburgh, to Parkland, the white-right has become the most prolific perpetrator of extremist terrorism on U.S. soil — eclipsing Jihadi acts on an exponential scale. To quote the Nov. 7, 2018 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Rise of Far-Right Extremism in the United States, “The number of terrorist attacks by far-right perpetrators rose over the past decade, more than quadrupling between 2016 and 2017” (emphasis mine).

In short, Trump didn’t need to set the National Guard loose on U.S. citizens, or employ the efforts of some new, underground, dark-of-night secretive branch of the military. In this case, the disenfranchised, involuntarily celibate, white, male, lone gunman, has become Trump’s own, autonomously operating Schutzstaffel.

Bannon may have been cut loose by this administration more than a year ago, but the damage is done. We remain in a cold civil war, and the current impeachment process is fanning the flames. The closer we get to holding this administration accountable for its criminal actions, the more the Trump faithful see it as an attack on their very identity. And, emboldened by a figurehead whose entire administration has been a case study of lawlessness and corruption, our populace is imperiled in a way we haven’t witnessed in a generation at least.

Our very union is being torn asunder from within. And all it took was one man’s clever manipulation of the most suggestible among us — and one sideshow barker with a knack for self-promotion to capitalize on it. When the dust finally settles, the question remains: Just how fragile were we all along?

I only hope there’s a future where this question is answered and prevented from being exploited again. 

The post “…Unmarried, straight white dudes who couldn’t get laid.” appeared first on Yellow Scene Magazine.