My response to the baffling assumption just lodged against me concerning Project 2025
It takes a lot to make me angry, but I’m there today. Over the last few days, I’ve been publicly called out TWICE for not “doing enough” to warn people about Project 2025. Someone had the audacity to ask me, “Have you even heard about this?”
I left the Russian Orthodox Church in 2013 in no small part to warn people about what was coming (you can read about that here). Shortly after, I spoke out about Obama taking a soft approach with Putin on Ukraine and was mocked for not toting the party line. In 2015, I was called an alarmist for saying Trump might win and that fascism was on the rise. Over the years, my posts warning about what’s coming have been my least viewed, least shared, and they have largely been met with comments like, “Is Russia in the room with us now?” type snark.
As a final attempt, in 2022, I abandoned writing a book that was sure to be successful to instead warn the world about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is linked to the intentional destabilization of America and the rise of a far-right neo-fascism movement like Project 2025.
That book Russian Sleeper Call is my least successful novel to date.
I knew it would be.
I was so certain the book wouldn’t be a success that I placed multiple jokes about it in the book.
The book is a present-day spy novel centered around three organizations attempting to bring about a global conflict. The Krest is a Russian paramilitary organization infiltrating the US to bring about destabilization and civil war. The Krest links arms with a Christian Nationalist group called The Brotherhood, which is an Apocalyptic death cult trying to use the Middle East to bring about the second coming of Jesus. Ultimately, The Brotherhood and The Krest work together to deploy a new “bloodless” weapon to destroy us from the inside.
I have spent the last eleven years of my life saying that this was coming. I’ve been called a conspiracy theorist and alarmist. Now, four months ahead of the election, I’m being yelled at for not doing enough now that the rain is falling as the doors of the Ark are closing.
I have deeply cared about this issue. My stance has cost me my career, my priesthood, my income, my credibility, and I’ve lost the relationship with one of my siblings.
July of 2013, upon leaving the Russian Orthodox Church, my family fled in the middle of the night under fear of death while my wife was pregnant with our third child. We left everything behind in our home, taking only what could fit in our car. We had two options: flee the country and live out the rest of our days in relative peace while the world burned, or stay and fight.
I chose to stay.
When I published Russian Sleeper Cell, I told Tashina, “I don’t know if people will read it now or as a retroactive, but at least I tried.”
Sadly, I have been afflicted with a terminal condition known as hope. It has been my greatest weakness. Despite all that I have seen and everything I know is coming, should we not avoid the iceberg in front of us, I still have hope for a brighter future.
It’s why I wrote this book.
It’s why I am still here.
It’s why I’m still trying now.
But it’s also why I’m really, really annoyed today that I’m being accused of not caring enough because so many chose to care too late. This began with them going after the most vulnerable in our communities, and I told everyone then that it was coming for them. Now, it’s knocking on the doors of the suburbs, and everyone is freaking out.
It didn’t begin with Trump.
It didn’t begin with book bans.
It didn’t begin with overturning Roe.
It didn’t begin with Presidential Immunity.
It didn’t begin when you started finally paying attention.
It has been here, affecting your neighbors, for a very long time.
Blanket bans were also fascism. Anti-camping laws for the homeless were fascism. Trayvon Martin’s murder was fascism. George Floyd’s public execution by the cops was fascism. This didn’t spring up in this news cycle; fascism has been here. The boots are just finally marching down the streets of White American and you are scared. You should be, but please don’t act shocked.
It’s been a slow burn to here, but I still have hope for an off-ramp. It will not be easy; it’s going to take finally confronting a lot of systematic intersectional injustices that have been ignored and making bold choices to save our Republic. Project 2025 did not begin in 2022; that’s just when the memos became public. They have slowly been placing Christian Nationalists in small positions of power on the local level for a long time. This problem is bigger than just the presidency, which is still of grave concern, but it’s also about the slow creep of taking control as these folks have continued to make gains on your school boards, city councils, state house, Congress, and the Supreme Court.
The presidency is the final solution.
The missing puzzle piece.
The knot that ties it all together.
I’ve been saying this all along.
Now, I’m glad more of you are.
My foolish hope is that we can still avoid the worst of this.
Just make no mistake, Project 2025 isn’t something that’s coming; it’s already here.
Now, I want to say that I am not mad that it’s taken until now for so many folks to realize what’s happening. I understand that you’ve been flooded with intentional misinformation and algorithmic suppression so that you WOULDN’T see much of these warnings. I realize, that for so many, in a post-pandemic world picking up a book about Russia attempting to destabilize our country wasn’t a priority. I do get it. What I do not comprehend, and will not accept, is a malignant of my character that I haven’t tried. I have devoted my life to the cause of stopping the rise of fascism, Russification, and Christian Nationalism.
And I will continue, as long as there is breath in my lungs, until all are free.
Nathan Monk is a former Russian Orthodox priest and author of Russian Sleeper Cell.
I am a former Evangelical. I left the church because, much like you, I could no longer abide the disgraceful way it treated those it closed its doors to.
But I grew up in the nineties, and I watched the church become an instrument of political power, and I was of the first generation they indoctrinated to try and sieze that power from the inside out. And they were going to use us to do it. They did everything they could to convince us of the danger the 'world' presented and the justice and righteousness of our cause.
They taught us to feel guilty about every natural impulse through purity culture so we always felt there was something we had to be in active atonement and sacrifice for, and that we were always striving to meet an unobtainable goal. They normalized fascism by telling us about backmasking and that Dungeons and Dragons was an instrument of Satan to lead us astray, encouraging us to burn our 'secular' CDs and books. I heard all the rhetoric of the Satanic Panic, sat through the curriculum on Spiritual Warfare, read the Peretti books about how there was supposedly a New Age Movement working in league with the Satanists to infiltrate government and the public schools. I wasn't surprised when I heard the gift that QAnon was pushing, because I'd heard it before. It was the same story they told us back then. We were told the books were fiction but the threat was real. They encouraged us to work toward careers in politics so we could be in these higher places, influencing policy and law. So we could stop this present darkness from taking over the world.
But they were the ones who wanted to take over the world. Thirty years later, the church managed to get one of the kids who heard all that same bullshit I did on the Supreme Court. And look where we are now.
Project 2025 is the culmination of work that began in the seventies with the Moral Majority and was solidified by the indoctrination of Generation X and Millennials. Anyone who thinks it's some theoretical fancy and not a real and present threat is gravely mistaken.
People thought I was bitter and an alarmist too. Some still do. But they'd best get concerned and get concerned fast because these people are not playing. They've had this power grab in process for a lifetime.
I've read my history and frankly, I'm frightened. If Biden wins, even in a blowout, I expect another January 6 or worse.