“Project 2025 has its eyes on a prize and it won’t involve celebrating any of Erik Loomis’ invaluable unsung heroes.”

Some of you are good humans and have purchased Organizing America. Many of you are sinners who need to repent and buy Organizing America. Here’s a new review that will help you make the right choice for once in your sinful life.

“From the workplace to the household,” writes Loomis, “Clara Lemlich is one of the great American heroes.”

At some point, I wondered if Loomis was shrewdly cherry-picking his entries in order to tout pre-established points about the specific characterological traits which, intersecting with ripe social conditions, can lead a person to the forefront of mass organizing. Then I realized: yes, of course. That’s the project. This is history intended for the pro-democracy crowd (spoiler alert: the other side has other ideas.)

It’s impossible to read this laudable work without considering the relentless campaign being waged by Team Trump to re-write – can we use the term “cancel”? – precisely the kind of history Loomis aims to illuminate.

In highlighting the struggles of Maggie Walker, a late nineteenth and early twentieth century advocate of Black economic self-sufficiency and minority business development, Loomis, in a wistful kind of grace note, points out that her Richmond, VA home has been turned into a National Park Service site. Sign of progress?

Walker was an active Republican, and that fact just might help preserve the NPS designation against the onslaught. On the other hand, her fierce opposition to racism and the kind of discrimination practiced by financial institutions might, you know, put the property on the endangered list.

Clearly a war is being waged over how the American story should be told. Zinn’s best-selling People’s History of the United States and other such progressive revisionist works had a good run, studied in high school and college classrooms, made available in public libraries, and featured in DEI forums and commemorative events throughout the country.

The right wing rollback is now fully underway. It’s armed with political muscle, bolstered by something approaching state control of mainstream media, and enabled by a grotesque amount of influence over federal entities like the Department of Education, Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Project 2025 has its eyes on a prize and it won’t involve celebrating any of Erik Loomis’ invaluable unsung heroes.

Goddamn right.

Either buy the book and learn about these people or just accept Chris Rufo as your personal lord and savior. There is no other choice.