The Man Behind Project 2025’s Most Radical Plans

08/05/2024

The Man Behind Project 2025’s Most Radical Plans

AUGUST 5, 2024

by Alex MacGills-ProPublic

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In January 2023, a group of about 15 people gathered for three days at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank a few blocks from the Capitol. Their aim was ambitious and farsighted: to start building the next Republican administration, two years before a Republican president might again take office.

The group’s leaders originally cast the initiative as candidate-agnostic, intended to assist the 2024 Republican nominee, whoever that might be But there was no real doubt who the envisioned beneficiary was. The team included several former members of the Trump administration, and the whole effort was geared to address a perceived shortcoming of the White House: its failure to fill enough key government positions with Trump loyalists. So few had expected Trump to win in 2016 that hiring had been left mostly to GOP veterans, who brought in establishment figures and never managed to fill some slots at all, leaving the president exposed to the bureaucratic resistance that his acolytes believe undermined him at every step: the dreaded “deep state.”

They were determined not to let this happen again. This time, Trump would take office with a fully staffed, carefully selected administration ready to roll. Thus the name of this new effort at Heritage, is Project 2025. It would consist of four “pillars”: an 887-page policy plan, a database of conservatives willing to serve in the administration, training seminars for potential new appointees on the functions of government and a battle plan for each agency.

In recent months, Project 2025 has gotten attention for some of the more radical proposals in its policy plan — such as reinstating more stringent rules for the use of the abortion pill mifepristone and abolishing some federal agencies. On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris made the project the centerpiece of their case against a Trump restoration. Their attacks were so effective that Trump has publicly disavowed the effort (while selecting a running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who is closely allied with Heritage).

The most important pillar of Project 2025 has always been about personnel, not policy. Or rather, the whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs. To that end, the plan’s most pertinent proposal is reinstating Schedule F — a provision unveiled near the very end of Trump’s term, then repealed by the Biden administration — which would shift as many as 50,000 career employees in policy-shaping positions into a new job category that would make them much easier to fire.

This was the mission that brought people together at Heritage for those three days, with the task of designing the personnel database that would populate the next administration, all under the supervision of Dans, a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a slow, jut-chinned way of speaking and traces of a Baltimore accent.

Not long ago, Dans, 55, would have seemed an unlikely person for the role. The son of a liberal Johns Hopkins University professor, Dans was a New York lawyer who before Trump’s election had never served in government. For years following that election, he had tried and failed to find a place in the administration, seemingly in spite of a celebrity connection: His wife was a fitness coach for Karlie Kloss, the supermodel sister-in-law of Jared Kushner. Finally, in 2019, Dans got in the door, at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Some four years later, here he was, hoping to build the next administration. Dans envisioned the personnel database that he wanted to create as a “conservative LinkedIn.” To help explain it, he displayed sketches he had made. They depicted the online file for a sample applicant — “Betsy Ross.” One page would show her occupation, which of the conservative organizations supporting Project 2025 had suggested her and which agencies she was being considered for. Another would show the findings of an internal review of her application, her progress on the training sessions (one of which Dans called “Deep State 101”) and any “red flags.” Yet another would show additional vetting: a “webcrawl” report; her performance on the Project 2025 questionnaire, which would ask detailed questions about ideological and policy beliefs; and more. The database would allow administration officials to search for candidates of a certain profile to fit a certain role.

This was what Dans wanted the Heritage staffers gathered in the room and the tech engineers they’d contracted from Oracle to build: the engine of Trump 2.0. It would be a personnel machine not only far beyond what the first Trump administration had at its disposal but beyond what any other administration had enjoyed, either. According to one person in attendance, the database would take several months to build and would cost upward of $2 million. It would reach outside the usual channels to draw in MAGA believers from across the country. And Dans was at the helm. “There was no one who had a better idea of it than he did,” the person in attendance told me. “He was driving the whole thing.”

As the database development progressed in the months that followed, Dans stressed a detail that made it even more far-reaching. He did not want the positions being filled to be limited to the 4,000 or so slots that are reserved for political appointments. He also wanted it to suggest people for roles that are currently assigned to career employees, in keeping with the plans for Schedule F.

Propelling the project has been a worldview that can be easily overlooked amid Trump’s talk about restoring the halcyon days of his first term. The people preparing for his return to the White House emphatically do not view his first term as a success. Rather, they view it as a missed opportunity to implement the MAGA vision. For Dans, Trump’s first term was an object lesson in how difficult it could be to reach Trump’s goals without a captive bureaucracy.

The former president’s supporters are determined that a second Trump administration would be much more organized than the first, stocked with foot soldiers who are both loyal and capable of moving policy forward. Dans declined to be interviewed for this article or to respond on the record to a detailed list of questions, but he has been laying out his thinking in interviews with conservative media outlets. “We’re going to get this done right on the next go-round,” he told Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, on her podcast last winter. And in essence, that will mean cleaning house, he said. “If a person can’t get in and fire people right away, what good is political management?”

Dans in his office at the Heritage Foundation Credit: Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images

Paul Dans was raised, in the 1970s and ’80s, in a family that embodied liberal idealism. Peter Dans was a professor of medicine who had enlisted in the Public Health Service; started an STD clinic and a migrant health clinic while on faculty at the University of Colorado; and served in the office of Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin Democrat who founded Earth Day. Paul’s mom, Colette Lizotte, was a French teacher who had previously worked as a chemist at the National Institutes of Health.

The family lived in a hilly, verdant stretch north of Baltimore. Paul and his twin brother, Tom, hung out with the other smart kids at Dulaney High School; they played sports and were on the debate team. “Both were very bright kids, very well behaved,” recalled Phil Sporer, who attended school with them from early on. “The Dans boys were everybody’s perfect child.”

The first hints of Dans’ political orientation emerged in college. He went to MIT, where he majored in economics, joined a frat, played on the lacrosse team and, as classmate Juan Latasa told me, stood apart from the “political correctness” that was rising at elite campuses around 1990. “It wasn’t always easy for such students. It was a very liberal place,” Latasa said. “It was tough.”

Dans stayed on at MIT to get his master’s in city planning. His thesis on the redevelopment of industrial parks, like the Brooklyn Navy Yard, showed him still wrestling with competing impulses. There was Reagan-style optimism: “The myriad crises which America must grapple with in coming years pale in magnitude to the nation’s gifted legacy.” But there was also a hint of resigned declinism, with Dans addressing an “age of diminished expectations.”

At the University of Virginia School of Law, which Dans attended next, his transformation became explicit: He joined the campus branch of the Federalist Society, the conservative network founded by law students at Yale and the University of Chicago in the 1980s, and he rose to become chapter president. “I was always attracted with the Federalist Society message about how some daring students stood up at Yale Law School and challenged the hegemony there and really was trying to speak truth to power,” he told hosts Saurabh Sharma and Nick Solheim last year on “Moment of Truth,” a podcast produced by American Moment, a conservative organization now aligned with Project 2025.

Still, Dans left little mark on his law school classmates, perhaps partly because he took a year off to study in Paris. I reached out to a couple dozen of his peers, and an email from a lawyer in Dallas was representative: “I wish I could help but I do not remember any details about Paul Dans.”

Dan’s fixation on the federal bureaucracy began at home. The idealism of the 1960s brought his parents to Washington, where they met while working at the National Institutes of Health. “They had basically come up through the JFK, Kennedy-esque, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’” era, he told Sharma and Solheim.

Dans didn’t seriously consider following his parents into public service — law school debt precluded that option, he said — but he would ultimately become wrapped up in a debate that had first inspired them. They went to Washington during the federal government’s great post-World War II expansion, when the ranks of career employees began swelling and when more job protections started accruing to them, sparking a decadeslong argument that has carried on to this day. To federal employee unions and other defenders of the bureaucracy, such protections were in the spirit of the Pendleton Act, the 1883 law that created the modern federal workforce, along with mechanisms for employment based on merit. But to many conservative critics, and some good-government liberals, the job protections that federal workers gained in the 1960s undermined the “merit based” nature of the civil service by making it difficult to remove ineffectual workers.

After law school, Dans chose a different meritocracy, joining a wave of young attorneys in the New York corporate legal world in the late ’90s. But Dans stood out. He was much more conservative than most of his colleagues. He prided himself on being one of very few in his Upper West Side building to get the New York Post. He admired Donald Trump for bringing a “can-do spirit back … building on the skyline again.”

Some colleagues kept their distance, but not Julio Ramos, a fellow junior associate at the law firm LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae. Dans kidded Ramos about his lefty politics and regaled him with talk of supply-side economics and Reagan. It was all very civil. “Even though he was from the right,” Ramos told me, “he didn’t have any hatred toward the left.”

Dans left after three years to become an associate at another large firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, and after two years there eventually landed at a less prestigious firm, where his cases included a lawsuit between Yves Saint Laurent’s beauty line and Costco over perfume labeling. By 2009, having not made partner anywhere, and two years into his marriage to Mary Helen Bowers, a former New York City Ballet dancer, Dans went into solo practice.

Dans has criticized the legal field for what he perceives to be anti-conservative discrimination. “We are, as a profession, really getting snowed under right now,” he said on the “Moment of Truth” podcast. “Republicans and conservatives have not stood up in the face of, kind of, cancel culture, and [these] Marxist, Saul Alinsky attacks.”

Even the moment he has often framed as his biggest triumph affirmed Dans’ alienation from liberal lawyers. In 2009, he was one of hundreds of attorneys hired to defend Chevron and its employees against a multibillion-dollar lawsuit for oil pollution in Ecuador. According to the journalist Michael Goldhaber, Dans was hired at $100 an hour — less than 5% of the top rate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which was leading Chevron’s defense.

As Dans later told Goldhaber, he had an epiphany: While watching the documentary film “Crude,” an exposé of Chevron in Ecuador that was done in collaboration with the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer on the case, Steven Donziger, Dans realized that the outtakes from the film should be subpoenaed, to see if the filmmaker captured any legal malfeasance by Donziger. Dans put the suggestion in a memo.

As it turned out, the subpoenaed outtakes did prove to be damning. Chevron sued Donziger in U.S. federal court, ultimately resulting in a ruling that the company did not have to pay the $9.5 billion judgment. Dans took full credit: “I came up with a theory that we could get documentary film outtakes, basically caught them doing their nefarious acts on video,” he told Martin on her podcast.

According to other lawyers on the case, the story is more complicated: Although Dans wrote a memo suggesting the outtakes be targeted, others started the push for subpoenas — and came up with the necessary legal basis for seeking the crucial outtakes — independently of Dans raising the idea.

When the Chevron case was over, Dans was back on his own, handling motley litigation, including a patent fight between two manufacturers of sheet-pile wall systems and a class action against Frito-Lay regarding its claims that some of its products were made with all-natural ingredients. The address for Dan’s solo practice was a mail drop at the New York City Bar Association.

Toward the end of the aughts, as President Barack Obama’s first term wore on, Dans’ conservatism began to take on a new shape. He spent a lot of time online. “I’m one of the people sitting at his kitchen counter, you know, on the bench there, on the stool kind of going, How can that be? That’s crazy,” he told Martin. “You’re clicking … you know, refreshing the Drudge Report like 100 times a day.”

One thing he clicked on was Trump’s conspiracist claims about Obama’s origins: “I had some serious academic questioning about the birthplace of a former president, if you will,” he told Sharma and Solheim. Dans got excited when rumors spread in 2011 that Trump would be going to New Hampshire to announce a run for president. Alas, it didn’t happen.

Early in the 2016 primary season, Dans attended a dinner of the steering committee for the New York City Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society. As he later recalled to Sharma and Solheim, someone asked whom people were supporting for president, and around the table it went: “I like Jeb.” “I like Marco.” “I like Jeb.”

Dans watched in bewilderment. Here were all these New York Republicans, and no one had yet mentioned the man who lived a few blocks away, who had decided to run for president this time. Finally, it was Dans’ turn. “Well, I like Trump, and I think he’s going to win,” he later told Sharma and Solheim. “I like him because I’m sick of losing.”

That fall, Dans headed to the Pittsburgh area to volunteer for Trump. He had worked on other campaigns, but none had ever felt like this. “There was no passion,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “We were hungry for a candidate who could really speak to Americans. … Donald Trump delivered.”

Trump’s appeal to Dans verged on the tribal: He came to see himself as “a pure-blooded deplorable mix,” as he told Sharma and Solheim, citing the working-class, ethnic Catholic roots of his ancestors — his paternal grandfather was born to Spanish immigrant parents and had been a merchant mariner, and his mother hailed from French Canadian mill workers in Rhode Island. Never mind that his father was a medical professor who had raised Dans in an affluent suburb.

When Trump won, Dans eagerly sent off his resume. “Next stop, you know, Department of Justice, right?” he said to Martin years later, recalling his confidence. But no. As he also told Sharma and Solheim, the response was “crickets.”

His explanation? He was too MAGA. “There were so many people getting sandbagged because somebody thought that they were too ‘America First’-y or too Trumpist,” he told Martin. He was advised to instead slip in “under the radar” as “just your milquetoast Republican appointee.” Watching his accounts of this disappointment, it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Dans, whose affect in interviews can come off as both genial and awkward, like the chatty, perhaps too chatty, guy at the airport bar.

Finally, late in 2018, Dans came to Washington for a Federalist Society meeting and connected with James Bacon, a college student who was working as confidential assistant to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. With Bacon’s help, and with the benefit of his master’s in city planning, Dans finally broke in, in July 2019, as a senior adviser in HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development.

Career staff at HUD didn’t know what to make of Dans. “We tried to figure out what his role was,” one of them told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “He kind of wandered in,” the career employee said. “He was fairly disdainful of the career staff and did not have a lot of respect for why things were the way they were.” For Dans, his arrival was a “real baptism” in how the government actually works. “You don’t realize that the federal government is just an avalanche of money shooting out of various agencies,” he told Sharma and Solheim. “It’s trying to tame this spew of money and direct in the right way, is what you’re doing when you get to an agency.”

The ultimate example of perceived perfidy came in December 2019, when the House used the testimony of federal employees to approve two articles of impeachment against Trump: for using the levers of powers to pressure Ukraine into discrediting Biden and for obstructing Congress. This gave Trump and his remaining White House coterie new resolve to take more control of hiring.

Trump turned the Presidential Personnel Office over to John McEntee, his 29-year-old former personal assistant who had left the White House in 2018 after a background check found that he posed a security risk due to his frequent gambling. (McEntee, now an adviser for Project 2025, has declined to comment about the background check in the past.) McEntee recruited Bacon, the college student, to assist him in overhauling personnel, and, looking for someone to join in the effort, they settled on Paul Dans. The person who had barely made it into the administration had impressed them with his critiques of the status quo.

In February 2020, the White House installed Dans at Office of Personnel Management as “White House liaison and senior adviser to the director” — its eyes and ears there.

Dans, encouraged by McEntee, wasted no time. He quickly ordered the removal of the agency’s chief of staff, Jonathan Blyth, and asserted so much authority across the agency that its director, Dale Cabaniss, who had spent years as a Republican staff member in the Senate, decided to leave as well. Cabaniss was replaced by an interim director, Michael Rigas, but people at the agency told me that Dans was the de facto director for the remainder of the year; late in 2020, he was named chief of staff. (Rigas and Blyth did not respond to requests for comment; Cabaniss declined to comment on the record.) So total was the takeover of the personnel process that Dans’ colleagues took to referring to him, McEntee and their allies as “the coup group.”

One of Dans’ first assertions of authority came at a senior staff meeting after Cabaniss’ departure, amid the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. According to another Trump appointee, some 20 people were present in the conference room at OPM’s headquarters near the National Mall when the agency’s then-chief information officer, Clare Martorana, said that, like most other agencies, it would use Zoom for online meetings.

Dans erupted, declaring that Zoom, which was founded by a Chinese immigrant to the U.S., posed the risk of spying by China. Martorana took in his outburst with “a combination of anger, amusement, and just dumbstruck awe,” the Trump appointee recalled. She then tried to explain that Zoom was on the government’s approved list of vendors and that many other agencies were using it. This did not mollify Dan’s.

As 2020 went on, Dans’ colleagues became accustomed to his insistent demands, which, coupled with his large frame, could make him an intimidating presence. Dans wanted to hire as many appointees as possible in the final year of Trump’s term in office, and he wanted the agency’s processes to move faster. “He would just throw bombs into senior staff meetings,” said the appointee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, “and they would say: ‘What are we supposed to do with this? He can’t be serious with this.’”

In October 2020, less than two weeks before the election, Trump signed an executive order creating Schedule F, the new category of career employees in key positions who would now be easier to remove.

Over at OPM, Dans was busy with a related effort, seeking to recategorize positions in the Senior Executive Service — higher-ranking managerial slots across the government that are mostly filled with career employees — into a general category that would allow the president to appoint more of them. He was also engaged in another aspect of the administration’s new emphasis on personnel: making sure that OPM appointees answered long ideological questionnaires and met for interviews with staffers to assess their fitness for staying on in a second Trump term.

Those who dealt with Dans at OPM told me that they tried to respond to his demands as best they could, but that he often grew agitated when told that OPM could not do what he wanted. He seemed to take such explanations as a personal affront. “He questioned everything from the point of view that there was a conspiracy against him and the president,” the appointee said.

Colleagues chalked up his outbursts to insecurity born of his not understanding how the government worked and being broadly out of his depth. “He reminded me of some of the people who show up at Republican conventions,” said a second Republican appointee at the agency, who, like the first, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “Those people usually show up and then go home. They show up and are vocal, but they’re not like, ‘Now I’m going to go do the boring work of the sausage-making of government.’”

Donald Devine, who led OPM during the Reagan administration and whom the Trump administration had brought on as an adviser during this period, scoffs at such critiques. “If you do anything, people aren’t going to like it, and that’s why he’s so different,” Devine told me. “Most of the other people in the executive office of OPM weren’t doing much, so people didn’t care about them. He’s a serious person trying to do a serious job. You don’t see a lot of that, and that’s why I like him so much.”

Dans’ only problem, Devine said, was that he ran out of time. “The major things were going to be done the next term,” he said. “It was too late to do anything before they figured out how to run personnel.”

After the election, Dans stayed hard at work at OPM, even as other appointees started to vanish in the final weeks of the Trump administration. Since then, Dans has criticized prosecutions of those involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “The unfortunate thing is it does send a message to people that you shouldn’t criticize the government,” he said in a C-SPAN interview last year.

A year and a half after arriving in Washington, Dans left for his new home in South Carolina, near his wife’s hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, while she was expecting their fourth child. “I went home kind of in this Cincinnatus sort of spirit: return to the farm. Our farm being in Fort Mill, South Carolina, in a subdivision,” he quipped to Sharma and Solheim.

But then he turned serious: “We’re ‘God, country and family.’ And now is the time to go put a little more emphasis on the God and family part of that. But we’ll be back for the country thing.”

With the 2024 election approaching, with Trump leading Biden and then Harris in most national polls and with Dans’ vision of reshaping the bureaucracy heavily influencing the Trump campaign, it finally seemed like Dans’ moment might actually be arriving. On Tuesday’s episode of the “War Room” podcast — founded by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who is now in prison — Dans sometimes sounded triumphant. “In order to take this back, the swamp isn’t going to drain itself,” he said. “We need outsiders coming in committed to doing this. … With Project 2025, we built a pathway to encourage folks to do this.”

But in that same “War Room” episode on Tuesday, Dans decried the “great disinformation campaign” underway against Project 2025, “almost a hoax.” He listed some of the mistruths that Democrats had voiced about the project’s proposals, including a claim by Harris that it would eliminate Social Security. “Just completely fallacious stuff,” he said. “It’s just one big bald-faced lie.”

It was plain that he was taking the attacks very personally, and with good reason. The Democrats’ campaign to turn Project 2025 into an albatross around Trump’s neck was succeeding, to the point where some sort of dramatic break was needed. Just hours after that episode aired came word that Dan would be stepping down. “We are extremely grateful for [Dans’] and everyone’s work on Project 2025 and dedication to saving America,” Heritage President Kevin Roberts said.

In a note to Heritage staff, obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Dans himself suggested that his mission was, essentially, complete. “The work of this project was due to wrap up with the nominating conventions of the political parties,” he wrote. “Our work is presently winding down, and I plan to later in August to leave Heritage.”

It was face-saving, but it was also largely true. The database was built; the training seminars were taught. This time, the foot soldiers were ready to go, just waiting to be called on. “From the president’s lips to God’s ears that change is going to happen? It happens below” the president, Dans said on “War Room.” “That’s the importance of recognizing: Personnel is really the cornerstone of the change.”

Disavowals or not, the logic of Project 2025 is embedded in the DNA of Trump’s plan to overhaul the government. Reinstating Schedule F is still a top-level agenda item. Jacqueline Simon, the public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, told me that the agencies could end up defining the new employment category so broadly that it could encompass far more than 50,000 positions. “It will be a purge,” she said.

Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at Georgetown University, does not expect Trump to fire tens of thousands. Jettisoning just a couple of thousand, to make an example of them, may be enough. “They can fire 1,000 and put their heads on pikes, and then everyone else quickly falls into line,” he told me. “That way you have a terrified bureaucracy that still has institutional knowledge. That’s the more strategic way to use Schedule F, to scare the bejesus out of 49,000 people and force them into line.” Sherk, the author of Schedule F, suggested as much to me. “The notion we’re going to can 50,000 people is just insane,” he said. “Why would you do that? That would kneecap the ability to implement your agenda. You use it to go after bad actors and rank incompetents.”

That would still leave the challenge of finding people to fill the 4,000 slots for appointees and however many hundreds or thousands of openings are created by firings. Many Republicans who served in the first Trump administration are leery of serving in a second. “The last administration was a joke, and they had a real problem recruiting,” a Washington attorney who served in the George W. Bush administration, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution against his firm, told me. “Who the hell would jump into this clown car driving toward a cliff? Are people going to come forward, quality people? Not a fucking chance.”

This was precisely Dan’s mission with Project 2025: to find a whole new corps of people willing to come to the capital and do the work of implementing the Trump agenda that the usual D.C. fixtures refuse to do. How many will be suited to the task? “We have to recruit the talent to get to Washington,” Dans told Martin. “Ultimately, what Project 2025 is is a call to action for patriots to come to serve in Washington.”

Will Dans himself be among that number? As Devine sees it, Dans’ current defenestration is political and temporary. “Paul is too bright and intelligent not to,” he said. “They’ll pick him up somewhere,” Devine said that he’s spoken with Dans since his decision to resign. “He’s doing well,” Devine said. “He’s ready to go on to fight. The memorandum he sent [to Heritage colleagues] ends with that: ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’” Dans still sees himself as a field general for a new class of Trump bureaucrats, one that will come to power if Trump wins, whether the effort is called Project 2025 or not.

There is a paradox at the core of this. Dans was never looking for the proverbial farmers with pitchforks, because he is aware of how complex the work of the federal government is. Dans was looking for people who are both angry enough about the state of the country to want to commit four years to serving Donald Trump in Washington to fix it, and yet sufficiently versed in the mechanisms of government to be able to restrain it. “We need many more eyes and ears, many more technicians on the ground,” he told Sharma and Solheim.

It is idealistic, in its way, the conception of an aggrieved, underappreciated elite that is ready to be summoned to Washington. It sounds a lot like, well, Paul Dans. The question is, how many others like him have been out there all along, just waiting for this? Alec MacGillis

FOOTNOTES

Alec MacGillis is a reporter for ProPublica. In recent years, his coverage has focused on gun violence, economic inequality and the pandemic-era schools crisis.

The City-County Observer posted this article without bias, editing or opinion

LINK OF THE AUGUST 2024 CITY-COUNTY OBSERVER PRINTED PAPER 5, 2024

08/05/2024

LINK OF THE AUGUST 2024 CITY-COUNTY OBSERVER PRINTED PAPER

July 6, 2024

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Aug. CCO Final

FREAKNIK: The Ultimate Spring Break Festival

08/05/2024

FREAKNIK: The Ultimate Spring Break Festival

written by Johnny Kincaid

AUGUST 5, 2024

In a recent IS IT TRUE, the City-County Observer described an event marketed as a “Freaknik Hoedown.” The night of the event was marked by mayhem that ended in the tragic shooting of three people. Many have asked about Freaknic, how it started, and why it’s an issue for Evansville.

What is Freaknik?

The name “Freaknik” is a derivative of “Freaky” and “Picnic”

Freaknik is a legendary spring break festival that began in the 1980s in Atlanta, Georgia. Originally conceived as a small picnic for students of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) located in Atlanta who couldn’t go home or to the beach for spring break.

The event grew every year to become a massive festival that took over the streets of downtown Atlanta. What was meant to be a service to students who would stay on campus became an event that attracted people from all over.

Who Attended Freaknik?

Freaknik attracted a diverse crowd, primarily composed of college students and young adults, though its appeal extends to anyone seeking a vibrant and energetic party atmosphere. Attendees come from all over the United States, drawn by the event’s reputation for being one of the wildest and most unforgettable parties of the year. The festival has been trendy among African American communities but welcomes people from various ethnic backgrounds.

Economic Impact on the Host Community

For Atlanta, Freaknik was a significant economic boon. The influx of visitors generated revenue for local businesses, particularly those in the hospitality, food, and entertainment sectors. Additionally, Freaknik provided temporary employment opportunities for residents, from event staff and security personnel to vendors and performers.

Challenges and Controversies

As the event grew, so did the problems, including massive traffic congestion, public safety concerns, and lewd behavior. During the 90s, Freaknik became associated with crime, including assaults and shootings. These issues led to a decline in community support and increased law enforcement presence.

The 1996 Atlanta Olympics had a significant impact on Freaknik. As Atlanta prepared to host the Olympics, city officials were keen on improving the city’s image and infrastructure. This led to increased pressure to control or shut down events like Freaknik. The need for a positive global image and the focus on Olympic preparations contributed to stricter law enforcement and restrictions on Freaknik, leading to its decline in the late 1990s.

Ultimately the city decided to shut it down in its original form.

Attempts To Revive The Freaknic party

In recent years there has been interest in reviving Freaknik. A documentary producer created an hour-long film about the history of the event currently streaming on HULU. The documentary focuses on the great party that was Freaknik while glossing over the allegations of lewd behavior, sexual assaults, and other alleged crimes.

The nostalgia for the wild party has led people in communities around the nation to create their own “Freaknik”. The parties are often “organic” in nature, arranged with minimal planning, and lacking in permits or notification to local authorities.

Violence associated with Freaknik events include:

Saginaw, Michigan: two died and 13 were injured in a shooting at a Freaknik event in 2023.

Sandersville, Georgia: two died when violence broke out in 2022.

Selma, Alabama: the police chief was suspended after a shootout between rivals attending a Freaknik event in 2024.

Louisville, Alabama: a small town of 600 people had over 900 people descend on the community for a Freaknik party in 2024. One young girl was shot and killed.

Evansville, Indiana: Three people were shot at a local gas station after a June 29 Freaknik event.

CCO Podcast-Law And Order Luncheon

08/05/2024

On August 1, the CCO held a luncheon with a panel discussion about law and order in Vanderburgh County. The discussion was led by former state representative Ryan Hatfield, and the panelists included Vanderburgh County Sheriff Noah Robinson, Judge Les Shively, and Chief Deputy Prosecutor Winston Lin.

The conversation covers a variety of topics and deserves a listen.

LETTER TO THE EDITORL: Head-to-Head Competition: Biological Males vs. Biological Females at Elite Levels

08/05/2024

LETTER TO EDITOR: Head-to-Head Competition: Biological Males vs. Biological Females at Elite Levels

submitted by JOE J. WALLACE

AUGUST 5, 2024

The debate surrounding the inclusion of transgender athletes in elite sports has gained significant attention, especially with the recent unprecedented event at the 2024 Olympics, where a biological male competed in women’s boxing. The bout ended swiftly and dramatically, with the female boxer suffering severe injuries, sparking widespread debate about fairness in sports. This incident underscores the critical need to understand the physiological differences between biological males and females and how these differences manifest in elite athletic performance.

Physiological Differences

Biological males and females have distinct physiological differences that affect athletic performance. These differences are largely due to variations in hormone levels, muscle mass, bone density, and cardiovascular capacity. For instance, males typically have higher levels of testosterone, which contributes to greater muscle mass, strength, and endurance. They also generally have larger lung and heart capacities, allowing for more efficient oxygen delivery during intense physical activity.

Comparative Performance in Sports

Historically, male athletes have consistently outperformed their female counterparts in most sports. This performance gap is evident in various metrics, such as speed, strength, and endurance. For example, the world records in track and field events show that men’s records are significantly faster than women’s. In the 100 meters sprint, the men’s world record stands at 9.58 seconds, set by Usain Bolt, while the women’s record is 10.49 seconds, held by Florence Griffith-Joyner—a difference of approximately 10%.

In endurance events, the gap persists. The men’s marathon world record is 2:01:39, set by Eliud Kipchoge, while the women’s record is 2:14:04, held by Brigid Kosgei. This represents a performance difference of about 10.3%. These disparities highlight the inherent advantages that biological males possess due to their physiological makeup.

Head-to-Head Competition

Instances of direct competition between biological males and females are rare, particularly at the elite level. However, the existing examples often reinforce the significant performance gap. In mixed-gender sports like equestrian events or mixed doubles in tennis, skill and strategy can sometimes mitigate physical differences, but these are exceptions rather than the norm.

In combat sports, the differences are even more pronounced. The recent Olympic boxing match serves as a stark example, where the physical advantages of the biological male were overwhelmingly evident. Combat sports demand not only skill but also raw physical power, which is where the physiological differences become critical.

Historical and Contemporary Comparisons

There are no recorded instances of a female Olympian or NCAA champion beating a male in the same event under comparable conditions. Even in sports where women have achieved remarkable success, such as gymnastics or figure skating, direct competition with males would likely yield significant performance disparities due to differences in strength and physical dynamics. physical dynamics.

Percentage Differences

On average, studies indicate that men outperform women by approximately 10-12% in most athletic endeavors. This percentage can vary depending on the sport and specific event. In weightlifting, the difference can be more pronounced, with men lifting significantly heavier weights than women. For instance, in the snatch event, the men’s world record is 220 kg, while the women’s is 155 kg, a difference of around 29.5%.

Case Study: Katie Ledecky

Katie Ledecky is a prime example of an extraordinary female athlete who dominates her field. She holds the 20 fastest times ever recorded in the 1500-meter freestyle. Her recent gold medal at the 2024 Olympics was won with a time of 15 minutes and 30 seconds. While this time is exceptional in women’s swimming, it would place her outside the top ranks in men’s competition.

The men’s world record in the 1500-meter freestyle is 14 minutes and 31.02 seconds, set by Sun Yang. Comparing Ledecky’s time to the top male performances, her best would rank her roughly 38th among men, based on historical data. This comparison illustrates the significant performance gap, even among the most elite athletes.

Conclusion

The incident at the 2024 Olympics has reignited the debate over the inclusion of transgender athletes in women’s sports. While the goal of inclusivity is commendable, it is essential to consider the physiological differences that can lead to significant advantages in competition. The performance gap between biological males and females is well-documented and substantial, typically ranging from 10% to 30% depending on the sport.

The dream of fair competition must balance inclusivity with fairness. Ensuring that all athletes have the opportunity to compete on a level playing field is crucial for the integrity of sports. The recent events highlight the need for ongoing dialogue and research to develop policies that honor both inclusivity and fairness, safeguarding the dreams and safety of all athletes.

FOOTNOTE: The City-County Observer posted this article without basis, opinion or editing.

100 Guys Who Care Awards $10,000 to Chemo Buddies

08/05/2024

456483756_800423568920730_337861660810438441_n — Chemo Buddies is presented with $10,000 by 100 Guys Who Care.

At their quarterly meeting, 100 Guys Who Care gifted Chemo Buddies with $10,310, bringing the total philanthropy for the group to over $250,000.

The group comes together quarterly to support local charities. Each man in attendance donates $100 either in cash or in a check with the pay to the order line blank. 100 Guys Who Care don’t have a bank account or by-laws; they are just a group of men who collectively make large donations to provide a major boost to local non-profits.Death List Report.

Three non-profit groups are invited to their quarterly meeting to present about their financial needs. The 100 Guys vote on the charity they want to support, and the charity with the most votes gets the entire $10,000 donation.

Field and Main Bank donates $500 to the other two charities and pays for food every quarter.

The $10,000 donation to Chemo Buddies will go a long way toward covering the cost of providing blankets and wigs and supporting the organization’s mission of providing hope to area cancer patients. Chemo Buddies founder Jill Kincaid promised the 100 Guys Who Care that every dollar will be utilized in the local community.

The two non-profits that received $500 from Field and Main were Warrick Humane Society and Granted.

Granted makes a presentation about their new building plans.

King Closes Olympic Career with Relay Gold, World Record

08/05/2024

King Closes Olympic Career with Relay Gold, World Record

By CCO Staff

Locals had plenty to cheer about while watching Lilly King take to the water in her final Olympic competition.

Evansville’s King ended her career on a high note when she and Team USA struck gold in the Women’s 4×100-Meter Medley and set a world record with a time of 3:49.63.

The Reitz graduate has won a medal at all three Olympics she has competed in, including three gold medals.

While watching Team USA and cheering them on to victory is a fun way to spend a summer day, it’s even more special when you know you could encounter that gold medalist on the street someday. We are all proud of Lilly King and want to congratulate her on her latest Olympic gold medal.

Franklin artist in residence helps bring Hollywood to Hoosiers, proving ‘dreams aren’t dumb’

08/05/2024

Franklin artist in residence helps bring Hollywood to Hoosiers, proving ‘dreams aren’t dumb’

By Arianna Hunt and Ashlyn Myers, TheStatehouseFile.com
Aug 5, 2024 0

The Soldiers and Sailors Monument served as the backdrop for the world premiere of “The Duel” at Hilbert Circle Theatre in Indianapolis Sunday. A brass band, Swing Shift Indy, played for the line of people that stretched around the block—but of course, some in attendance didn’t need to wait in line. They used the red carpet, where cameras flashed and fans whooped for the celebrities walking inside.

Gordon Strain, co-owner of Pigasus Pictures and a key figure behind “The Duel,” wore a jacket with “Dreams Aren’t Dumb” in rhinestones on the back. He has been a theatre professor and an artist in residence at Franklin College since 2006 and lives in Franklin with his wife, Dianne Moneypenny, and their 14-year-old daughter, Josephine; he also has a 26-year-old daughter, Darian.

“The Duel” is a feature-length movie about best friends Colin (Dylan Sprouse, “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody”) and Woody (Callan McAuliffe, “The Walking Dead”). After Colin sleeps with Woody’s girlfriend, Woody challenges Colin to a classic—albeit recently unconventional way of settling differences—a duel. Their adventure leads them to an antique/dueling emporium owned by a man named Christof (Patrick Warburton, “The Emperor’s New Groove”) and all the way to a drug baron’s estate in Mexico.

In 2016, Strain joined Pigasus Pictures when his former Indiana University peer, Zachary Spicer, was in need of a talented scene designer and asked Strain to help on a movie.

“Pretty quickly in that process, we figured out that I was more useful and doing more than just designing,” Strain said.

In 2020, many years—and films—Strain and Spicer began production on “The Duel”—another opportunity for the two Indiana natives to bring a film production to their home state.

The work begins

Filming began in Indiana during the pandemic, which had its challenges. Strain said they administered around 1,500 COVID-19 tests with no positive cases. Even so, the challenges of quarantine may have helped the chemistry between actors.

“They left us in a house together to quarantine, and [Dylan Sprouse] brought Super Smash Brothers,” said Callan McAuliffe during the after-premiere Q and A. “So maintaining the chemistry was pretty easy because I have a burning hatred for him—because he would beat me every single time,” he joked.

Because of the pandemic, Strain’s daughter was in e-learning, which meant he could bring her to set, which he loved.

“One night [Patrick Warburton,] spent hours playing a game with Josephine,” Strain said. “And you know, she could care less who he is, she just knew that this nice guy was willing to play games with her while she was sitting around so, you know, I just have a lot of little memories like that, that it was like, oh yeah, this was just a good fun time where everything sort of clicked.”

Strain said the cast and crew made the entire experience enjoyable, but it was still not without some unforeseen hiccups.

He got a call one day that they needed a 400-pound pig for filming, which he thought was impossible, but he eventually landed on Bashi, a pig from Spotted Pig Farm in Franklin. Only one problem, they didn’t have permission to have pig at their filming location.

“You know, we would rather ask forgiveness than permission for this one. So we snuck the pig into the catacombs under [Indianapolis] City Market, and we sort of had a little makeshift-like pen for him,” Strain said.

Local mission

Part of Strain and Spicer’s mission as an Indiana film company is to show that movies like this can be produced in the state. If you look closely, you may spot a few Indianapolis favorites in “The Duel,” like Fountain Square’s Inferno Room tiki bar, the catacombs beneath City Market, Midland Arts & Antiques, and Asherwood, the former estate of Mel and Bren Simon in Carmel.

“Zach is from Greencastle originally, and I’m from Indianapolis originally. So part of our mission is to get people to not leave the state, to prove that we can do this kind of work here,” Strain said, “and to make it exciting for other people. … So like, [to show] kids who are going to Franklin or IU or wherever they’re going, if they care about filmmaking, hey, it can happen here.”

One of the reasons other film production companies have struggled to make films in Indiana has to do with taxes. Until 2022, when the Indiana General Assembly passed Senate Enrolled Act 361, filmmakers were fighting for tax credits for media production in Indiana that many other states already had. Still, the credit needs work and has issues with outside investors that are still limiting filmmakers’ budgets.

Part of filming in Indiana on a small budget meant being creative in choosing locations, like the Blue Springs Cavern posing as an underground waterway to Mexico.

“My favorite part [of the movie] was definitely when we filmed on the underground river. You know, it’s probably like 10 or 15 seconds in the film. But we have a small budget, we don’t have tons of money on these, and it was the first time that I really felt like we had a huge budget,” Strain said.

“We’re in an underground river, and we have all the camera equipment on these boats, and we’re doing all this stuff, and I was like, man, this is like an Indiana Jones movie right now. It really felt like we were much bigger than we actually are at that moment.”

Students on and off-screen

Strain’s dual role in the film industry and Franklin College, allows him to give students opportunities, like Katy Thompson, a 2021 graduate who served on the art team and is now house manager for the Indiana Repertory Theater.

As a senior taking a full course load, Thompson couldn’t be part of every day of filming, but she tried her best, staying up all night on some shoots and still making it to class the next morning.

“I thought the overnight shoots were a lot of fun,” she said. “We did several overnight shoots, and so I would go to my classes during the day, and then as soon as those were over, I would drive up to set, and then I would be there all night long, just hanging out with people, learning things about the film that I’d never known before. And then get home maybe 4 or 6 a.m. take a little nap and go to my classes the next day.

“My team was very understanding of the fact that I was still in school,” she added. “So they definitely gave me the time that I needed to work on my classwork because that had to come first. But I was, I was able to manage it pretty well … It was very much worth it.”

Thompson even played as an extra in her favorite scene of the film—though moviegoers might only see her ponytail.

“I enjoyed the Peppy’s Grill scene because I think it’s very funny and also because the entire art department was extras for that scene,” she said. “We didn’t have any extras that day, so the entire art department just decided to be the extras. You can see my ponytail just barely over [an actor’s] shoulder.”

Ticket of a lifetime

Other Franklin College students were also given the chance to be involved as attendees of the premiere. They ditched their college sweatshirts for suits and floor-length gowns.

“The premiere was so much fun. I love theatrics, and this whole event was just built around theatrics, and I wish that I could do something like this every day of my life,” said Erin Bruce, a junior at Franklin College and co-news editor of The Franklin.

“I am honestly still in disbelief. I got pictures with Patrick [Warburton]. My sister got pictures with Cole [Sprouse]. It was pretty amazing, like shook hands and everything,” said Trinity Whitted, a sophomore at Franklin College. “ It was spectacular. Like definitely, definitely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for sure.”

During a reshoot, a small scene was filmed at Franklin College between the President’s House and Dietz Center for a nighttime shot that was originally at another location. “Movie magic” makes it nearly impossible to identify which scene it was, says Strain.

“I think we’re providing great experiences for our students. And you know, Franklin has given me a lot of opportunities to experiment and push myself in my own work, I think because I’m willing and eager to involve students in it,” Strain said.

“The Duel” premiered nationwide July 31, at over 500 theaters, and will continue to play at select theaters for the next two weeks.

FOOTNOTE: Arianna Hunt and Ashlyn Myers are reporters for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

This article was first published in Franklin College’s campus newspaper, The Franklin, for which Myers is outgoing and Hunt is the incoming editor-in-chief.

Comptroller Nieshalla and Treasurer Elliott Applaud Pension Plan’s Fast Action to Divest Assets from China

08/05/2024

Comptroller Nieshalla and Treasurer Elliott Applaud Pension Plan’s Fast Action to Divest Assets from China

AUGUST 3, 2024

STATEHOUSE – Indiana State Comptroller Elise Nieshalla and Treasurer Daniel Elliott offer their praise for the speedy action taken by the Indiana Public Retirement System (INPRS) to divest assets from China. Both Comptroller Nieshalla and Treasurer Elliot are INPRS board members.

In 2023, Indiana became the first state to enact a law, Senate Enrolled Act 268, requiring the public pension system to divest within five years from “any investment that is domiciled, issued, incorporated or listed in the People’s Republic of China or the Chinese Communist Party.” The law passed both chambers with unanimous, bipartisan support. As of July 1, 2024, just one year later, the pension plan has divested 100 percent of the $1.2 billion investments in Chinese entities.

“China is one of the foremost threats against our country’s national security, and INPRS has nobly exceeding the parameters set forth in the law by divesting Hoosier’s pension dollars from China ASAP,” Comptroller Nieshalla said.

“By divesting from China and focusing on investments in countries that value the principles of democracy, capitalism and freedom, we are safeguarding the best financial interest of Hoosiers and our nation,” said Treasurer Elliott.

Both Comptroller Nieshalla and Treasurer Elliott commend Senators Chris Garten, Aaron Freeman and Travis Holdman who authored SEA 268, and the Indiana General Assembly for passing this necessary common-sense legislation.

Lincoln Clark Douglass Alumni Reunion Returns to Evansville August 9-11

08/05/2024

Evansville, IN – August 6, 2024 — The Lincoln Clark Douglass Alumni Reunion will return to Evansville from August 9 to August 11. This event promises a memorable experience for alumni as they reconnect, celebrate, and create new memories in the heart of Evansville.

The Lincoln Clark Douglass Alumni Reunion is more than just a gathering; it celebrates shared history, accomplishments, and lifelong bonds. This year, we are honored to welcome Reuben Norris as a notable attendee. Reuben Norris, affectionately known around the state as “The Godfather of Basketball Officials,” has been a pivotal figure in basketball officiating, mentoring countless officials and raising the profession’s standards. A Lincoln Clark Douglass alum and graduate of George Williams College of Aurora University, Reuben quickly found his career officiating basketball and rubbing elbows with the likes of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, and Former President Barack Obama to name a few. His presence at the reunion will undoubtedly inspire current and future generations.

The Lincoln Clark Douglass Alumni Association has a storied legacy, rooted in the history of Lincoln High School, Clark High School, and Douglass High School. These institutions played a pivotal role in the education and empowerment of African American students in Evansville before integration. Now, the association also includes community partners known as the Reunion Collective, which comprises Ebone’66, Essence of the 70s, Light of the 80s, and Spirit of the 90s. This Collective represents four decades of African American high school graduates, further fostering a sense of unity and pride among its members.

Over the years, the Lincoln Clark Douglass Alumni Association has been dedicated to preserving the legacy of these historic schools through various initiatives, including scholarship programs, community outreach, and cultural preservation efforts. The addition of the Reunion Collective enriches these efforts, bringing together graduates across generations. Their commitment to education and community service remains a cornerstone of the association’s mission.

Lincoln Clark Douglass invites all alumni to join us for this special occasion. Whether it’s your first reunion or a cherished tradition, the Lincoln Clark Douglass Alumni Reunion promises to be an unforgettable experience.

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