Summary
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Trump’s Project 2025, employs intense fire-related rhetoric in his upcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, advocating for a “controlled burn” of institutions he deems corrupt or antithetical to conservative goals.
Roberts calls for dismantling entities like the FBI, Ivy League schools, and the New York Times, framing it as necessary to “renew” America.
His incendiary language has sparked controversy, with critics alarmed by the violent imagery and its implications for Trump’s second term.
What? How?
This kind of ignorance is what is most upsetting to me… People just do not seem to be able to grasp the totality of authoritarian rule. I understand why, there is nothing in recent memory even close to this to compare.
But we have really failed our students by not drilling home just how insidious fascism is. Under fascism, corporations become another arm of the government to be used however the singular leader sees fit. Or they get eliminated.
I’m asking, practically speaking, how will the Trumpers dismantle BlackRock inside of 1 month?
Executions? In ~2 months, we will be giving one singular man the power to wield the federal government as a weapon against anyone who doesn’t bend the knee (or really for any, or no, reason whatsoever. And this is a very petty man). I don’t know if it’s going to be in under a month, but we have historical examples to look to. This has happened before.
BlackRock is the largest hedge fund in the world, and in history, by market cap. What are the historical examples in which a financial firm or institution has been “dismantled”, by a government inside of one month?
Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers don’t count because they declared bankruptcy, which means they “dismantled” themselves.
Your language is very vague.
There are multiple ways that can happen.
For example, if you look at recent history in China, Jack Ma, the executive chairman of the Alibaba group, gave a speech on October 24, 2020. The IPO of his current venture was then blocked by regulators a few weeks later, he stepped down from the board of Alibaba, and he was not seen again for four months. He denied the state had anything to do with his disappearance, but ever since he lived a quiet life and never criticised the Chinese leadership again.
If you look at Russia, in the October Revolution, the largest Russian bank was occupied by an armed Bolshevik detachment on day one. The bank was nationalized the same day, and it then ceased to exist altogether. No banks existed in the country for five-ish years after that.
Or Cuba, when Castro nationalized all assets of United Fruit when he took power.
Point is, since they own the justice system, they can do sham trials against the CEO and get someone like Jared Kushner elected by the board if they don’t also want to go to jail on trumped-up charges (pun intended). Or since they own the legislative, they can just nationalize the whole thing, wipe out shareholders without compensating them at all.
Almost all of these would result in a lot of economic damage, but the question is whether Trump or the Project 2025 people care. I mean, look at Twitter. Trump can at the very least make the federal government do to Blackrock what Musk did to Twitter.