You should email someone this

John Oliver’s Project 2025 explainer is the kind of thing you should share directly with loved ones.

This is a big one for Project 2024, our effort to expose the right’s plan to hand the government over to the MAGA mafia.

Last Sunday, John Oliver did a whole episode about Project 2025 that dug into the plan to gut our country of the expertise that comes from a professional, non-partisan civil service. In addition to being funny, it’s smart and deep, thanks to the input from Don Moynihan, the Sultan of Schedule F and the McCourt Chair of Public Policy at Georgetown University.

It’s hugely important, and it’s funny. It’s something normal people, not just oddballs like us who have been thinking about this election since January 7th, 2021, will get.

And for many voters, it’s the first time they’ll get any sense of how prepared Republicans are to use a second Trump regime to enact their radical rollback of the 21st and 20th centuries.

We wanted to share it with you because it’s starring on our ever-evolving Project2024.info page. It’s an excellent way to contrast, as Mellisa Ryan advised on this week’s podcast, “the America that we get under Joe Biden versus the America we'd get under a second Trump administration.”

And this is also a nice time to make a point that we think matters a lot this election season: 

You should email this (or message it directly) to anyone you know who you think might spread it or be swayed by it.

Yes, email. Isn’t email kludgey and annoying? Aren’t our inboxes overwhelmed to the point of being haunted? 

Yes, yes, yes. And yes.

Email and SMS suck; they’re overwhelmed with crap and spam and pleas for any candidate who has ever sniffed your contact details. But they’re also way better than any other means of digital communication, especially social media. The algorithms (along with the growing number of things we follow) make it so we see a tiny percentage of what comes through our social feeds. 

And the algorithms are not on the side of democracy. And many of the people we need to reach may be getting nothing but sicko crap in their social media feeds because of a few bad months they had in 2022.

Direct communication remains the best possible way to reach people. 

Campaigns know this. We know this from our professional lives. You know this from reality. If thinking about emailing people makes you a little nervous, it’s because you know it, too. 

Posting on social media is fine and good for us earlyworms. It keeps us engaged and regulated. But it won’t change much. Stepping out of our comfort to share things like this video or a plea to join our targeted effort to flip both statehouses in Arizona could make a real difference.

We’re just trying to get out of 2024 with as little regret as possible; email is one big way to do that.