The Cracks Begin To Show Within Project 2025

About the executive orders Trump has given since his first day in office (1/21 through 2/2), as well as an admission of gratitude for our new friends on Substack

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Before we get into the doom and gloom of what’s happening in the news, I have something really important I need to get out of the way:

I absolutely don’t know what I’d do without all of you.

It’s no secret that things have been a little coocoo bananapants in the world, even aside from *gestures wildly* all of THIS. The reason most of you are here right now is because you likely found me on TikTok, an app with a very uncertain future given the way that most of its problems were created by a man who now has to deal with them as soon as possible. With the possibility that TikTok COULD be on its way out (even though I still have hope), I made a conscious effort to expand where you can continue supporting the work we do with Under the Desk News.

The most obvious place you’ll find what I do is on Instagram right now, where we’re able to have the casual vertical videos of me reporting the news from under a desk every night. We’ve also set up a bigger operation over on YouTube, where I do deeper dives into the topics I cover from the news. There’s, of course, the American Fever Dream podcast that I host with my BFF Sami, which is a hoot and/or a holler at all times. But then we have Substack.

Substack is sort of a one-stop shop for everything I love about online communication. If you’re subscribed here, whether you’re a paid sub or not, you get access to the newsletters. There’s a feature on the creator’s side where you can sync posts up with YouTube. There’s a livestream feature. There’s a podcast feature. There’s a funny little voice that reads my words to you if you hit the Play button on mobile, so you can listen to these Substacks AS a podcast! Pee pee poo poo, I am a funny little British man (that’s a fun one for those of you listening and not reading).

Of all the platforms I’ve ventured to over the course of the last few months, Substack is the one that had the smallest audience. And I mean, I get it - many of you didn’t even KNOW what Substack was before you came over here. My Substack feels like a hidden gem in a landscape of plastic rocks - but once you find that gem, you’re wealthier than you ever could have imagined.

And boy oh boy did a lot of you find the hidden gem.

HARD DATA ALERT HARD DATA ALERT, just a warning that the next paragraph is a lot of numbers!!!

Because when I posted the last Project 2025 piece on January 27, we had just over 29,000 subscribers on here. The next day? That number almost doubled, to over 50,000 subscribers. As of me writing these words on February 2?

We’re sitting pretty at over SIXTY-SIX THOUSAND SUBSCRIBERS.

Of the 29,000 of you subscribing before, 511 of you were paid subscribers.

That number has now ALMOST TRIPLED - to 1,300 paid subscribers.

Like… WHAT? You’re here… for ME? To read me yap?

Receiving this level of support on any of the platforms you can find me on is wonderful. But it’s just a little bit different over here, on a website that, again, many of you didn’t even know existed!

There’s so much amazing stuff to find on Substack, whether you’re a Taylor Lorenz fan, or a Charlotte Clymer fan, or a Ken Klippenstein fan, or even if you’re a fan of more niche topics, like Sara Petersen’s In Pursuit of Clean Countertops, which covers the “harmful conservative” ways that mainstream media whitewashes “tradlife, gender, idealized womanhood, and motherhood-at-all-costs” related issues. Linked below is an amazing free interview she did about the untold story of Sylvia Plath with Emily Van Duyne, author of Loving Sylvia Plath.

Everything You Thought You Knew About Sylvia Plath Is Wrong

But you came along for the ride here with me, whether you were already here or not, and all I really have to say is: thanks, dust bunnies. I really can’t do it without you, and I’m honored you trust me enough to go on this journey with me. Substack is a bit of a work in progress for me, and we’re working out a solid release schedule now for bigger and better writing over here. For the time being, while we wait on those announcements, we’ve lifted the paywall off of one of the older articles because it touches upon something I think everybody should know about: the archival of forgotten queer history.

Hopefully I don’t sound like a broken record here, but seriously: thank you for being here. 2025 is going to be… a year, but hopefully it won’t be the worst year as long as we have each other.

-

I’m currently staring at a toolbar on my web browser that consists of Substack, the Google doc I’m writing these words in, and an unfathomably large amount of tiny Federal Register logos constituting the text of the many executive orders passed by Donald Trump in just two weeks.

not my screenshot, but just to paint a picture for you…

Last week on Substack, we covered all of his Day 1 orders and pointed out which ones were informed by the language of Project 2025, and which ones weren’t. Sometime within the next week or two, a video will go live on my YouTube channel that PAINSTAKINGLY breaks down the parallels in the language between the text of Project 2025 and the text of Trump’s Day 1 orders.

Today, I’m going to do that for the orders that came between January 21 and now, February 2. If you like this article, please consider giving the YouTube page a follow, since that video is… hoo boy, it’s a doozy. But unlike what I cover in that video, what you’ll discover here is that… Trump seems to have already deviated from Project 2025 in a massive way. At least in regards to his executive orders. The past two weeks have seen a lot of expansions of orders he already cast, but we’ve also seen a lot of… shall we say, “Trump Trumping it up.”

fuck, he looks rough

Let’s start with the first order Trump passed on January 21:

“Revocation of Certain Executive Orders.”

(photo by Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images)

I’ve been calling these kinds of orders “Fuck You Biden” orders, but this specific action as president can more accurately be called a “Yes Father” order. You see, within the 922 pages of Project 2025, the word “COVID” appears 122 times, usually within the context of COVID safety protocols being far too “restrictive.” So when Trump decided to revoke the following orders:

(a) Executive Order 14042 of September 9, 2021 (Ensuring Adequate COVID Safety Protocols for Federal Contractors); and

(b) Executive Order 14043 of September 9, 2021 (Requiring Coronavirus Disease 2019 Vaccination for Federal Employees)

…what he was really doing was giving a little nod and a wink to the authors of Project 2025, who make demands such as

“Reinstate servicemembers to active duty who were discharged for not receiving the COVID vaccine, restore their appropriate rank, and provide back pay” (103).

But most importantly, on page 475, within Roger Severino’s massive (and unhinged) plans to reform the Department of Health and Human Services, we see this:

“Health care workers were praised for their self-sacrifice in caring for sick patients at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, but then they were fired if they objected to receiving COVID19 vaccines with or without complying with onerous masking requirements and regardless of whether they already had the virus and had gained natural immunity. With the disease being endemic and constantly mutating, vaccines and universal masking in health care facilities do not have appreciable benefits in reducing COVID-19 transmission throughout the community. Moreover, more recent COVID strains pose fewer health risks than the earlier strains, and the pandemic has been declared to be at an end. CMS should:

• Announce nonenforcement of the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate on Medicaid and Medicare hospitals.

• Revoke corresponding guidance and regulations.

• Refrain from imposing general COVID-19 mask mandates on health care facilities or personnel.”

Despite the fact that this executive order is specifically focused on federal employees, this is likely just the beginning of the parallels between Project 2025’s draconian outlook on a pandemic (that hasn’t technically ended) and the orders that Trump is putting out into the world. This was just a “partial mirror,” but later in the week, Trump passed “Reinstating Service Members Discharged Under the Military's COVID-19 Vaccination Mandate” - literally the language of Project 2025.

“Designation of Ansar Allah as a Foreign Terrorist Organization”

(Photo by MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP via Getty Images)

More commonly known as Yemen’s Houthis, this is an order that’s seen a bit of controversy from folks across both sides of the aisle due to Trump’s choice of language seeming to imply that economic penalties will be applied not only to Ansar Allah, but any groups supporting them (including aid organizations). In fact, the direct language of the order calls out anyone who:

(i) made payments to members of, or governmental entities controlled by, Ansar Allah; or

(ii) criticized international efforts to counter Ansar Allah while failing to document Ansar Allah's abuses sufficiently.

(d) The Administrator of USAID shall take all appropriate action to terminate the projects, grants, or contracts identified under subsection (c) of this section as appropriate.

Now, this isn’t actually a part of the Project 2025 platform… entirely. As we covered last week, there is a lot of language within Project 2025 regarding classifying foreign adversaries as terrorists, but in regards to Ansar Allah, we see a pair of passages in the text discussing the Houthis. This one on page 267 may answer why this was seen as an urgent week 1 order for Trump:

“Yemen, once the breadbasket of the Arabian Peninsula, is now dependent on billions of dollars of aid as formerly productive Yemeni farmers cannot compete against “free food” while irrigation systems remain in disrepair, leaving the country to suffer from water shortages during long summer droughts and flooding during its rainy season. Iran-backed Houthi rebels divert substantial amounts of aid to support their war efforts.”

In a statement to Reuters, British charity Oxfam expressed concern for Trump’s order, stating it would not only lead to worse suffering for the Yemeni, it would disrupt imports of food, medicine, and fuel, saying,

"The Trump administration is aware of these consequences but chose to move forward anyway, and will bear responsibility for the hunger and disease that will follow.”

“Declassification of Records Concerning the Assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

This one may have gotten lost in the sauce a little bit with all the other fires being started, but did you know that Trump has declassified the investigation documents regarding the assassinations of the Kennedys and Dr. King?

Except, he hasn’t really.

For those of us who remember Trump 1.0, you may remember this is nothing new. He’s been promising to declassify these bad boys for over a decade, especially JFK’s. Yet in 2017, he fumbled the bag due to him caving to pressure from the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon and other agencies on the grounds of “national security.” And as Philip Shenon at Politico puts it, that’s likely to happen again this time:

“A close reading of the new order — especially given what is known about the contents of the still-secret JFK documents, which appear to contain no “smoking guns” that would point away from Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman in Dallas — suggests that Americans who hope they are now only days away from the full truth about Kennedy’s death face disappointment.

The order contains loopholes that could delay the release of any documents indefinitely. And as in his first term, loyal, Trump-named political appointees at the CIA, FBI and elsewhere — not the “deep state” career civil servants he often denounces — will almost certainly try to persuade him to continue to withhold some material on national security grounds.”

And as Olivia B. Waxman puts it for Time,

“The “truth” in these files, however, will likely be anticlimactic, scholars tell TIME…99% of the JFK assassination files have been made public, after nine investigations and the definitive account of what happened the day of the assassination produced by the Warren Commission in 1964. But the quicker files are made available, the quicker conspiracy theories could be quelled. There are conspiracy theorists who think that because the files haven’t been released yet, the government is hiding some evidence of larger conspiracies to kill these figures. “I actually think Trump did the right thing in opening these files,” says Burt Griffin, assistant counsel on the Warren Commission, arguing that it will hopefully dispel any notions that “something is being concealed.””

A bit of irony, innit.

Anyway, this isn’t part of Project 2025. This is all Trump, baby!

“President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology”

(Photo by Frank Rumpenhorst/picture alliance via Getty Images)

At first glance, this seems like the rare and pleasant order from Trump. A council dedicated to studying SCIENCE? For Donald TRUMP? What’s the catch? And as you read on in the order, it initially seems like there isn’t one.

“The American story is one of boundless creativity and bold ambition, driven by an indomitable pioneering spirit that propels exploration and discovery,” allegedly writes Trump himself. “It is this spirit that illuminated the world with Edison's lightbulb, carried the Wright brothers into the skies, and sent Armstrong to the moon.”

A very pleasant sentiment. And then the next line:

“Today, a new frontier of scientific discovery lies before us, defined by transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced biotechnology.”

Okay, so it’s an order to expand funding and research into AI, which historically has seen more “bad” and “scary” than actually practical or good application. This actually makes this section of the article a two-for-one with Trump’s “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” order.

But would you believe me if I told you THIS is straight out of Project 2025?

Page 106: “[We need to] better exploit publicly available information (PAI) data and foster innovation to improve collection and analysis. We must end the practice of multiple DIE organizations paying to acquire the same PAI data and invest more in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to exploit open-source and classified intelligence data.”

Page 224: “The Administration will also need to transition to using technology, including tools and services for managing Big Data…; artificial intelligence/machine learning…and expansion of Commercial Cloud services.”

Page 393: “Ensure that successful advances, with a focus on new natural resource development technologies, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and space, are transferred swiftly to American interests in the private sector.”

And on page 852: “Stop aiding the CCP’s authoritarian approach to artificial intelligence.”

Which leads me to believe that the Trump administration is focused “hugely” on replacing all of us with machines, while also trying to kneecap other countries from doing the same. USA! USA! USA! USA…I?

“Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology”

(Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

AKA the Crypto executive order.

The Trump administration wants “to support the responsible growth and use of digital assets, blockchain technology, and related technologies across all sectors of the economy.” It calls for public blockchain networks to be used “without persecution,” while “providing regulatory clarity” for cryptocurrency. This is definitely not a part of Project 2025, which doesn’t at all seem concerned with the future of cryptocurrency… but it IS an interesting choice considering the allegations that Trump recently took part in the “biggest pump-and-dump ever.”

“Council To Assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency”

(Photo by J. David Ake/Getty Images)

Spoiler alert: this one is straight out of Project 2025, which mentions FEMA at LEAST 20 times. Following Hurricane Helene, this order claims that FEMA needs to be “drastically improve[d]” due to “bureaucracy” and “political bias.” Thus, this order calls for the

• Establishment of a Federal Emergency Management Agency Review Council (“Council”) with the Secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense as members (so Kristi Noem and Pete Hegseth lol)

• To address and/or LEAD FEMA for one year

This is yet another action from Project 2025 that looks to undermine and possibly dismantle FEMA, with calls in the text to move FEMA to the Department of the Interior or Department of Transportation (134), reform and possibly privatize portions of FEMA (135), and, oh yes, REVIEW FEMA (137).

In fact, beginning on page 153, there’s an entire section specifically outlining how to “improve” FEMA that looks to eliminate funding and grants to FEMA that would be replaced with… private insurance. In case you want an idea of what this “FEMA council” is likely to attempt.

“Emergency Measures To Provide Water Resources in California and Improve Disaster Response in Certain Areas”

Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

This is an expansion of Trump’s “people over fish” order I covered last week, also not in Project 2025 so I’ll just let a Gavin Newsom spokeperson who spoke to Politico speak for me here:

“The premise of this executive order is false,” said spokesperson Tara Gallegos. “Attempts to connect water management in Northern California to local wildfire fighting in Los Angeles have zero factual basis. California continues to pump as much water as it did under the Trump administration’s policies, and water operations to move water south through the Delta have absolutely nothing to do with the local fire response in Los Angeles.”

It’s at this particular point in covering the executive orders that I realized something. Without Project 2025, Trump’s own ideas are incredibly stupid, and downright impossible. This is the man who wants to build a wall. This is the man that wants flags flown at full-staff on HIS big day, even when it’s disrespectful to do so. This is the man who wants to simply move water from one place to another that already has water. Project 2025’s ideas are absolutely freaking insane… but they’re crafted the way they are for a reason. They’re scary because, in the right hands, they are a roadmap to fascism.

I’m not always convinced Trump has big enough hands……………………………to handle Project 2025. Though to be fair, his hands ARE small, anyway.

Call me foolish, call me naive, don’t call me late for dinner, but that alone is the reason why no matter how scary any of the orders are, you absolutely cannot underestimate Trump’s own ability to get in his own way.

“Enforcing the Hyde Amendment”

“For nearly five decades, the Congress has annually enacted the Hyde Amendment and similar laws that prevent Federal funding of elective abortion, reflecting a longstanding consensus that American taxpayers should not be forced to pay for that practice. However, the previous administration disregarded this established, commonsense policy by embedding forced taxpayer funding of elective abortions in a wide variety of Federal programs. It is the policy of the United States, consistent with the Hyde Amendment, to end the forced use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion.”

Despite the fact that there is no evidence Trump actually gives a shit about abortion and may in fact privately support it, his public stance on abortion has been an existential nightmare for women for a decade now. And with this act, he is essentially plagiarizing Project 2025’s own stance for his own benefit.

Page 284: “HHS also pushes abortion as a form of “health care,” skirting and sometimes blatantly defying the Hyde Amendment in the process. Severino writes that the “FDA should…reverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the politicized approval process was illegal from the start.” In addition, HHS programs often violate the spirit, and sometimes the letter, of conscience-protection laws. Severino writes that the HHS “Secretary should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.””

Page 471: “Prohibit abortion travel funding. Providing funding for abortions increases the number of abortions and violates the conscience and religious freedom rights of Americans who object to subsidizing the taking of life. The Hyde Amendment has long prohibited the use of HHS funds for elective abortions, but an August 2022 Biden executive order pressed the HHS Secretary to use his authority under Section 1115 demonstrations to waive certain provisions of the law in order to use taxpayer funds to achieve the Administration’s goal of helping women to travel out of state to obtain abortions. Moreover, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (DOJ OLC) issued a politicized legal opinion declaring, for the first time in the history of Hyde, that this action did not violate the Hyde Amendment and that Hyde applies only to the performance of the abortion itself in violation of the plainly broad language that Congress used. Two of the first actions of a pro-life Administration should be for HHS to withdraw the Medicaid guidance (and any Section 1115 waivers issued thereunder) and for DOJ OLC to withdraw and disavow its interpretation of the Hyde Amendment.”

Page 473: “Audit Hyde Amendment compliance. HHS should undertake a full audit to determine compliance or noncompliance with the Hyde amendment and similar funding restrictions in HHS programs. This audit should include a full review of the Biden Administration’s post-Dobbs executive actions to promote abortion. It should also encompass a review of Medicaid managed care plans in pro-abortion states.”

Page 474: “Permanently codify both the Hyde family of amendments and the protections provided by the Weldon Amendment. Congress can accomplish this through legislation such as the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act56 (Hyde) and the Conscience Protection Act.”

“Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness”

Source

“Recently…the Armed Forces have been afflicted with radical gender ideology to appease activists unconcerned with the requirements of military service like physical and mental health, selflessness, and unit cohesion.”

It’s an expansion of last week’s transphobic “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” order, but under the lens of demonizing trans service members! This is a bafflingly huge part of Project 2025, and when the YouTube video drops, all of the references for THAT order apply to this order as well. But I do think it’s worth noting that Project 2025’s foreword sets the tone early and often, referring to an “Awokening” that needs to be extinguished, before immediately painting the picture that trans identity… is pornography.

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered” (5).

This is why words matter. If this is our new definition of pornography, consider me a complete deviant because are you out of your fucking mind? Identity is NOT pornographic, get the fuck out of here.

See also “Restoring America's Fighting Force,” an executive order directly referencing both this order and that order, which has the added bonus of eliminating DEI programs from the U.S. military - another Project 2025 classic we cover at length in the YouTube video.

See also “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” an order calling for an end to the idea that “innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics. In other instances, young men and women are made to question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed.”

SEE ALSO “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” another transphobic order that makes the claim that “medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child's sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions,” while looking to outlaw “gender affirming care.”

“The Iron Dome for America”

Unhappy simply with building a wall along the southern border, Donald Jambalaya Trump has decided to plagiarize The Simpsons and build a dome over America.

“The threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks, remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States,” he allegedly writes. “President Ronald Reagan endeavored to build an effective defense against nuclear attacks, and while this program resulted in many technological advances, it was canceled before its goal could be realized…To further the goal of peace through strength, it is the policy of the United States that: The United States will provide for the common defense of its citizens and the Nation by deploying and maintaining a next-generation missile defense shield; The United States will deter—and defend its citizens and critical infrastructure against—any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland; and The United States will guarantee its secure second-strike capability.”

Believe it or not, a similar project has begun in Guam… where the dome is “at least a decade” away from being completed, according to CNN. It is incredibly likely that this project, if it comes to fruition, will arrive when many of us, including Trump, are long dead and gone with the “hundreds of billions of dollars” and “decades” it would take to finish. Much like all of the other baffling orders I’m covering this week, this seems to be a Trump original and is not in Project 2025, though there are countless plans to prioritizing missile defense, including a multi-page outline on page 125 that Trump seems to have ignored.

“Additional Measures To Combat Anti-Semitism”

This is an expansion of Executive Order 13899, “Combating Anti-Semitism.” As always, orders like these seem morally solid for Trump to make AT FIRST… until you notice that the order requires people to “report activities by alien students.” And in a fact-sheet Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones reported on, Trump bluntly outlines what that terminology means:

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

So to put it simply: Trump is trying to bully schools into reporting any and all people who support Palestine. There is no precedent for this in Project 2025.

“Celebrating America's 250th Birthday”

Trump wants to throw the United States a cute little birthday party. This is not in Project 2025.

“Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families”

Maybe the biggest single executive order Trump has passed yet, this one calls for any discretionary grant spending from the Department of Education to instead funnel away from public schools into private or religious schools. There’s also an emphasis on the controversial school voucher program, particularly for children of military families going to school on a military base, and any kids attending schools funded by the Bureau of Indian Education located on reservations.

TLDR on the order: less funding for public schools. More funding for private schools. Don’t just take it from me, though. According to the Economic Policy Institute,

“Following the EO’s directives would require executive branch agencies to illegally redirect dollars from programs where both funding levels and disbursement rules are assigned by Congress. Legality aside, this EO effectively redirects taxpayer money away from students attending public schools towards relatively well-off families who send their kids to private schools. Around 90 percent of students attend public schools — and this is particularly true in the low-income communities where private schools may be financially out of reach, and rural communities where private schools may not exist. These school districts rely on federal funds to provide high quality education.”

Where do I begin on how much of this is from Project 2025? Do we start with the need for education outside of “the woke-dominated system of public schools” (15)? Maybe the demand that military families deserve preferential treatment for schools for their kids (104)? Maybe the pleas for an ESA (education savings account) claiming “Arizona… provides families roughly 90 percent of what the state would have spent on that child in public school to be used instead on education options such as private school tuition, online courses, and tutoring (319)?

Personally, the place I think Trump cribbed from the most is on page 347, within the section titled “Provide Education Choice for Populations Under the Jurisdiction of Congress,” which ALSO calls for ESAs for, you guessed it… “active-duty military families.”

CONCLUSION:

As the weeks go by, and Congress begins to actually vote on legislation brought on down from the top, we’ll get a clearer picture of how truly effective ANY of this will be. Thus far, everything Trump has brought to the table is reversible and can be challenged. Look no further than Trump’s about-face on freezing federal program grants, which saw an IMMEDIATE backlash and threat of lawsuits. We are not even close to out of the rain yet, folks, but off on the horizon, there is a little bit of sunlight.

As long as Trump keeps contradicting Project 2025, or even misunderstanding the legislation proposed, there will not be a consistent enough voice at the helm to enact an authoritarian, fascistic rule of law. There will simply be a loud, boisterous man screaming about “The Awokening” whose most effective ideas were written for him by someone else.