Project 2025 is pure electoral poison, as everyone except the goons at the Heritage Foundation are becoming aware. Kevin Roberts, the guy behind it all, has authored a book to promote it titled Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, but its release has been delayed to 12 November 2024 — gosh, that’s after the election! I wonder why. I don’t suppose it has anything to do with the fact that Kevin Roberts is fucking weird, would it?
Media Matters got their grubby progressive hands on a copy.
A review found Roberts rails against birth control, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and dog parks.
Dog parks? What’s wrong with dog parks?
On page 69, Roberts targets the Swampoodle dog park in Washington, D.C., for having too much room for dogs to play and not enough for children, blaming this on
the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.
Roberts is a Catholic who is obsessed with reproduction. Ultimately, his opinions seem to be driven by a pathological need to compel everyone else to get pregnant.
He says that having children should not be considered an
optional individual choicebuta social expectation or a transcendent gift,and describescontraceptive technologiesasrevolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family.He labels reproductive choice methods as asnake strangling the American family.
You’d think that with that insistence on baby-making he’d approve of IVF, but no. You see, IVF gives women the option to not be pregnant at inconvenient times — they’ll waste their god-given fertility by going to college or working outside the home, instead.
Once you understand this pattern (individual choice masking cultural upheaval), you will see it everywhere. In vitro fertilization (IVF) seems to assist fertility but has the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes.
So it’s really about controlling women. Abortion and birth control are bad because once upon a time not being able to end an unwanted pregnancy or avoiding pregnancy in the first place protected women, and also kept the men in line.
As other kinds of contraceptive technologies spread, abortion rates went up, not down. Why? Because technological change made having a child seem like an optional and not natural result of having sex and destroyed a whole series of institutions and cultural norms that had protected women and forced men to take responsibility for their actions.
I think you can see why the Republicans want to keep their nefarious agenda in the dark while they’re trying to get elected to office. After they have convinced the citizenry to give them power, then they can reveal the iron boot.
The New Republic has also lucked into getting a copy. They find some nuance in what they’ll do after they’ve got everyone pumping out babies: prayer.
This repopulation will take time, of course. In the meantime, what weapons do we have at our disposal to fight China?
I don’t think we will succeed without the return of a practice absolutely antithetical to everything CCP and its Uniparty sympathizers stand for: widespread prominent public prayer.Yes, that’s right: Prayer is going to be an essential factor in fighting globalization. For Roberts, the path back to economic independence involves putting public prayer
in a place of prominence—to take a moment for prayer before football games, to have prominent leaders including our president not just issuing the occasional prayer proclamation but actually publicly taking a knee before almighty God (as Washington did), to begin school days again with prayer (enabled by school choice legislation)—would be to once again properly acknowledge our gratitude to God and humbly seek His assistance in our struggle to restore vitality to our nation.
This appears to be the best strategic policy advice Roberts has to offer, a literal Hail Mary against China.
Again, it’s all about sex, procreation, babies. Everything boils down to banning birth control and abortion, and making everyone get pregnant if they want to have sex. It’s an attitude I associate with a certain kind of creepy, regressive Catholic, the kind of weirdo that Kevin Roberts, and JD Vance (who wrote the foreword to the book) are. They think the only reason someone might oppose their primitive beliefs is if there is some conspiracy theory driving misinformation about their plans. If that’s the case, why hide the book away? Please do announce it everywhere.
Childless societies, Roberts claims, are
decadent and nostalgic,but of course it is Roberts who is decadent, with his $675,000 D.C. think-tank salary, and nostalgic, with his beliefs that globalization can be undone if enough people read Xenophon and take Sunday off. He seems to be arguing that it’s possible to undo the twentieth century and recapture the time of Benjamin Franklin and the Boston Tea Party (without all that violence against Catholics, presumably)—a time when the U.S. had a frontier and it was violent and lawless, a time when having many children was a necessity because several would likely die young from poverty or inadequate health care.But Roberts is convinced that the broad unpopularity of many of his proposals is due to conspiracy. The decadent tone and posturing of Dawn’s Early Light, with its refusal to understand what Americans want and what gives them value in life, leads him straight to paranoia. Having watched culture slip away from his draconian values, Roberts fishes for an endless series of shadowy cabals to explain this state of affairs. He opens his book hinting at
a trillion-dollar conspiracy against nature; he decries birth control as a eugenicist plot and claimsour current educational environment is … the result of a hundred years of plotting by progressives who want to create generations of obedient drones.Surprising literally no one, George Soros is repeatedly invoked, usually as the puppet master behindsoft on crimeCalifornia district attorneys like George Gascón and Chesa Boudin.
I think the Democrats are on the right track. These people are out of touch, bizarrely ideological, and just plain weird. Not amusingly idiosyncratically weird, but nasty creepy weird.
So they want everyone to be as the hypocrites. No shock there. And no rewards in Heaven for them.
We have the Democratic election poster:
“Project 2025 – having children should not be considered an optional individual choice but a social expectation, reproductive choice merhods are a snake strangling the American family”
I found a link to this at Youtube this morning and I have forwarded it widely to American friends and acquintances.
This guy is both the maker of Project 2025 and the president of the Heritage Foundation think tank.
.
And 150 of Trump’s former or current flunkies contributed to the making of project 2025.
Let Trump and Vance try to distance themselves from this.
I don’t suppose it has anything to do with the fact that Kevin Roberts is fucking weird, would it?
That’s Kevin Roberts, PhD, to you, fella! Says so right on the cover. Right above the ‘President of the Heritage Foundation’, which had to be there, because otherwise nobody would know who the fuck this idiot is.
He is a Trad Catholic.
They are a minority of 5.6% of the US population.
They aren’t even most of the Catholics, many of whom really don’t like Trad Catholics.
Kevin Roberts is a female slaver and forced birther.
What these sick in the head weird men (it’s always men) want to do is make the US population into breeder slaves for the Catholic church.
Just say no.
Kevin Roberts and the GOP are living in a delusional fantasy land.
This is the Good Old Days that never existed.
There were never institutions and cultural norms that “protected women and forced men to take responsibility for their actions.” Up until the start of the 20th century, families had many children because some of them would inevitably die, usually from infectious diseases. The average lifespan a century ago was 48 years. We’ve gained 30 years in life span thanks to antibiotics and vaccines.
Women weren’t even considered capable of or worthy enough to go to college until the mid 1800s. Today, the majority of college graduates in the USA are…women. They didn’t get the right to vote until 1920.
The Good Old Days never existed.
Compared to today they were bleak times with most of the population living as second class citizens.
Our society has changed the way it has to make it better for most of the people who live in it.
Xenophon? When I saw that my initial thought was “what spurious moral lessons is he trying to wring out of the anabasis here?” But my guess is he is referring to chapter 7 of the oikonomikos (Book of Household Management) where Xenophon sets up a dialogue between Socrates and a man called Ischomachus (“hold back the fighting”) about how best to train a wife so your life as an Athenian citizen goes as smoothly as possible.
The irony, of course, is that many scholars today believe Xenophon was parodying Ischomachus’s old-fashioned, patriarchal ideas about having a well-trained and subservient wife to keep your house in order. It certainly fits with the genre conventions of the Socratic dialogue. Ischomachus was a traditional aristocratic farmer, a representative of a class not much in favour in democratic Athens, and his “advice” seems rather inappropriate and old-fashioned for the modern, urban Athenian masses.
Kevin Roberts lives in a delusiona la-la land that never existed.
Humans were never the mindless breeders he wants to turn Americans into. We have always had ways and reasons to limit the number of children we have. In medieval Europe, an agrarian society, the first born male was the one who inherited the land. Later sons often didn’t marry and became monks in the many monasteries.
Extended breast feeding led to reduced fertility.
Non reproductive sexual activities, still common today.
Even back to the Paleolithic, there were herbal means of birth control some of which worked. A lot of plants have phytoestrogens, similar to what are in…birth control pills.
“Silphium In the 6th century CE, the ancient Greeks and Romans at the colony Cyrene in Libya were quick to adopt its use for another vital purpose: contraception.”
Silphiuim was widely popular in Roman times. It was thought to be a giant fennel.
A lot of plants can be used as abortion pills.
Just about every culture had a recipe for abortion tea. A common one from Roman times up until recently was Pennyroyal. I’ve got some growing in my backyard.
Infanticide. Still occasionally done today.
This subject could go on for pages but it is getting off topic.
The Romanian dictator Ceausescu tried what Kevin Roberts is advocating.
It did have a happy ending for everyone but Nicolae Ceausescu though.
Forced birthing was a disaster and the not so happy breeders of Romania overthrew Ceausescu and executed him by firing squad.
The one interesting fact from Xenophon’s Anabasis I recall is, a hill tribe had bows powerful enough to shoot arrows that penetrated the shields of the greek mercenaries.
If you want a well-rounded edication read Three Men In A Boat, and the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
“…..widespread prominent public prayer.”
No. no.no. Jesus commanded no public praying. Matthew 6:5-6.
6:6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
Jesus command it, the bible proves it, that settles it. The Council of Trent – Forth session tells us God authored the Bible. Reiterated in 1965 in Dei Verbum.
“…the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author..”
I recall reading a small stand of herbs in Turkey has been identified as the species used during antiquity for avoiding childbirth- it had been assumed to be extinct by over-exploitation.
It would be interesting to know what kind of ceremonial activities happen in Chinese schools. I’m sure the anthem gets played every morning. Do the kids recite an equivalent of the US Pledge of Allegiance? Or some excerpt from the writings of Marx or Mao? Probably not the latter these days, but you never know. Whatever they do those activities will be like the kind of prayer Roberts advocates, meaningful to only a few students, largely boring ceremony to others, and to a few a major problem given what they or their parents believe, but they have no choice but to comply with.
Roberts being a fringe Catholic would be a problem for him sooner or later if he did get his way. Because the right wing Protestant types still have the idea of the evil Papacy floating around their history, no matter how suppressed it might be these days. Not to mention that traditional Catholic theology doesn’t support the Rapture concepts common in right wing Protestantism.
Cheerfulcharlie @ 10
Also, if a man suspects his wife of cheating on him, he may force her to drink a herbal extract to induce miscarriage (Old Testament).
The rapture is a surprisingly young heresy.
Papa Emeritus- the one Pope I can tolerate.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=d8RH8RO0eR0
This is factually false.
I wanted to find national numbers for 1973 – 2023, but I didn’t see them easily. here, have the numbers for most of that span, 1981 – 2021:
https://www.mdch.state.mi.us/osr/abortion/Tab_US.asp
Yes, access to birth control and assistive reproductive technologies went up over the course of those 41 years.
One interesting thing is that you will find a jump in the abortion statistics right around when Roe v. Wade was decided, but that’s because people were getting illegal abortions and not mentioning them. Post RvW medical providers were doing legal abortions and accurately reporting statistics on them, so abortions that would previously have gone unrecorded, join the stats.
That’s a reporting artifact, not an increase in abortion. And you’ll see the same thing in, say, Ireland with the repeal of Amendment 8 (I think it was 8). Yes, Ireland’s doctors were performing more abortions. No, that doesn’t mean that there is suddenly a “trend” toward an increase in abortion in Ireland or towards thinking of abortion the same as mere birth control in the sense of pregnancy prevention methods.
Anyway, he’s lying about abortion increasing with birth control access.
Somebody remind me: How well did “widespread prominent public prayer” work during the Black Death?
nomaduk @ #4 — Just to ice the cake, that’s a Ph.D. in American history from University of Texas at Austin. Difficult to imagine how someone can go through that process and end up so benighted. Here’s his thesis: “Slaves and slavery in Louisiana: the evolution of Atlantic world identities, 1791-1831”. It opens with this:
I’ve read that the Haitian Revolution scared the crap out of Thomas Jefferson which set the tone for US relations with Haiti to this day. Perhaps Roberts had a similar reaction.
This is the bit I always find weird… I’m a Scot, and we’re basically still fighting over the Reformation – particularly every Saturday afternoon during the football season.* The idea that Catholics and Protestants could make common cause about pretty much anything is entirely alien to me.
As Frankie Boyle once put it: “Islamic terrorists think they’re going to bring religiously-motivated violence to Scotland? They’re 400 years too late – and they don’t even have a football team!”
@17 ahcyah
prayer worked very well! the Black Death ended!
prayer works, if you give it enough time for natural processes and vaccines to kick in…
Mitch McConnell says Kamala Harris-Tim Walz win would be ‘our worst nightmare’
Worse than a creepy sex cult taking over our dog parks? Mitch McConnell is weird.
Of all the parks to pick on! Swampoodle should be a case-study in turning a small awkward urban plot into a over-functional public space. Kids and their parents go there to play on the equipment AND play with the dogs. Heck, I’m not the only adult who has gone there to solely to watch the whole semi-chaotic circus (and putting aside my own less-than-sober exploration of the playground side of things at 2am). If he wants to find signs that there are threats to healthy families and happy children he’d do a lot better starting in his own backyard…
Ugh! This shit is brings up bad memories of my own obnoxious, anti-sex/anti-abortion, right-wing, Catholic youth.
But will his prayers stop Chinese tanks from rolling over him?
Ya know, I generally keep this kind of opinion to myself for obvious safety/convenience reasons, but as an antinatalist I can’t help but wonder why, if these shitwads are so infatuated with the sanctity of life, then why do they never treat the creation of human beings with as much gravity as they do with their deaths (well, the death of human fetuses specifically, but you get my point)?
I never knew Project 2025. It might have gotten me coffee once or twice.
His organization has explicitly stated, publicly, on (ex-)Twitter, that they want to put an end to recreational sex. So, fuck yes, they’re weird.
Good luck enforcing this one, Roberts, you fucking freak. A MAGA cop in every bedroom?
^ Dennis K : If they had their way yes.
Plus a return to the days of the Inquistion and Gilead from The Handmaids Tale made real.
Oh & if old man Trump finally keels over, well Vance becoems POTUS.. How weird is that?
The first part of that is certainly true (I suspect the second is also). I’m currently rereading Alan Taylors American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850. Jefferson was president when Napoleon Bonaparte tried to reverse the only successful uprising of enslaved people in history, which took place in 1790s Haiti. The attempt failed, as yellow fever and guerilla warfare killed most of the invading French troops. This was key to Napoleon’s decision to sell “Louisiana” (an area much larger than the state of that name) to the USA – Jefferson had originally wanted only New Orleans, in order to secure the ability of white settlers along the Mississippi to export agricultural produce, but also to prevent them setting up an independent state in alliance with France. Jefferson refused to recognise Haiti, and embargoed trade with it, crippling the Haitian economy (sound familiar?).
@20. Robbo : For certain vague value of “works” I guess
@muttpupdad – 12 August 2024 at 11:07 am : “But will his prayers stop Chinese tanks from rolling over him?”
Why would the Chinese do that? He’s helping them win and tanks are so passe when it comes to modern weapons of war – esp if we do end up in a probly breif and world-as-we-know-it ending WWIII.
@26. larpar : “I never knew Project 2025. It might have gotten me coffee once or twice.”
Nah, I don’t think it would – that’d be it doing something actually nice and helpful for someone without obvs reward for itself. Gawd / Gawd Empyroar Trump would never do that.
The GOP/Trump campaign should have some balls and make Kevin Roberts the head strategist. The man is a lunatic but he’s exactly where the Republicans want to take us.
@8: In Japan, there was a thing called “mabiki”. Infanticide was extremely common worldwide, it appears.
Also,
Legal Eagle (actually one of his associates, Chaos Lawyer Liz Dye) did a bit on Project 2025 recently. One of the things pointed out was that ‘they really want to ban porn’. But, between comments about charging school librarians with distributing porn, and comments about ‘gender ideology’ being one of the things destroying modern America, the people behind Project 2025 make it quite clear that ‘porn’ in their minds includes ‘anything that admits non-cis/hetero people actually exist’.
And different sections of the book were written by different people, but a rather large number of them were previous Trump staffers and can be safely assumed to be tagged for any future Trump administration. Especially since one part of the plan is to treat ‘attended a DEI session without objecting on First Amendment grounds’ as being a prima facie reason for firing a staffer, they’re quite blatantly planning on gutting the civil service and re-staffing it all with complete political loyalists.
in a place of prominence—to take a moment for prayer before football games, to have prominent leaders including our president not just issuing the occasional prayer proclamation but actually publicly taking a knee before almighty God (as Washington did), to begin school days again with prayer (enabled by school choice legislation)—would be to once again properly acknowledge our gratitude to God and humbly seek His assistance in our struggle to restore vitality to our nation.
Let’s just save a bunch time and dispense with the football games and public schools all together?
I suspect that this railing against IVF will backfire. My aunt and uncle, who are very conservative, used IVF to have their first child. (The second one happened naturally–I’d be fascinated to learn about the biology behind that! I suspect the reason they were having trouble is that my aunt has epilepsy. This was during her reproductive years. She didn’t put it off. Things just worked out that way. I imagine there are many more conservative couples out there having the same troubles, and this is just an insult.
ProPublica received many leaked hours of secret Project 2025 training videos. Especially fascinating is this video, which outlines disqualifying traits in Project 2025 applicants. Traits such as criminality, bankruptcy, substance abuse, and hiding your personal life information.
asclepias @ #37 — The anti-IVF thing already backfired in Alabama.
A ban on porn is likely to be about as effective as the prohibition of alcohol. It will probably spawn a huge amount of profit for mobsters who will deliver porn to your internet portal while extracting your PII to extort money from you. Of course, the rich guys will have plenty of their porn available in their hide-away bunkers.
My grandparents’ generation was born sometime between 1890-1910. They came from families that had about 10 kids born on average. When this generation (well, those of them that survived to adulthood) had kids, around 1920-1950, they ended up having 0-3 kids, with 1 being the most common. I don’t know what means of family planning were available in eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, I’m guessing it was mostly behavioral means. It looks like if people want to, they are capable of limiting their reproduction to a great extent (though not necessarily as much as they want). It is easier and better with means that are better controlled. And it is important that both partners agree on their reproductive plan (especially if they are limited to low-tech and no-tech means, but agreement on this point is a good idea in any case, because it is important for the relationship).
All their policies are going to do is: slightly increase the birthrate, mostly cause pregnancies to happen at less desirable times, interfere in people’s (mostly, but not only, women) educations and career paths, and kill women and other birthing people, or at least mess up their health.
Another thought: I saw a claim that college education is the best predictor for voting D vs R these days. So making higher education more difficult to obtain is likely seen as a political boon for these creeps.
J.D. Vance’s Team Won’t Comment on His Viral Drag Photo
#SofaLoren – That’s funny. The hashtag, I mean.
But wait, what? Who wants to create generations of obedient what? Really? I swear, every accusation as an admission with these guys.
@42, 43: I hope he lets it fester a while. That’s the worst thing he could do.
Presuming the photo is real, and I think it is, the explanations could be simple enough.
1) It was a Halloween costume.
2) Remember that Vance claims to have been an atheist while in law school.
Vance does not seem capable of straightforward logic though. He always has to come up with some reason why it’s OK for him to do what he is criticizing other people for doing that reeks of special pleading.
I’ve got a few photos I could dig up of me in “drag”. There were several years where my mother prioritized making nice costumes at halloween for my brothers and sisters, and then I was always the last minute choice (I was the oldest), and throwing a dress on me was easy. I think also she was playing on the fact that I was the nerdy anti-jock type. Next time at my mother’s house — we have to clean it out this fall — I’ll have to find the old photo of me in a dress and scan it in.
@45: Yes, but you haven’t built a political career on regulating other people’s sexual behavior and said nasty things about the LGBTQ community.
PZ @ #45 — A dress at halloween? That’s nothing. I wore a bright yellow muumuu with large red polkadots and a highboy collar at the plaza in front of the World Trade Center…the old one. I was a big hit. I also wore it on Melrose Avenue in LA where I accosted Robin Williams. Can I run for president now?
If Trump gets in, every school period will start with a Trump-chosen reading from TWO Corinthians 😜
I don’t want to shame anybody for doing something as harmless as that.
@ ^ Erlend Meyer : I wouldn’t shame him for dressing in drag. I would, however, shame him for being such a stinking hypocrite about it and being so bigoted against others now.
@41. anat : “Another thought: I saw a claim that college education is the best predictor for voting D vs R these days. So making higher education more difficult to obtain is likely seen as a political boon for these creeps.”
Eaxctly . Trump famously loves the poorly educated – they are much more likely to fall for his bullshit.
@35. jenorafeuer : “Legal Eagle (actually one of his associates, Chaos Lawyer Liz Dye) did a bit on Project 2025 recently.”
This clip here I think? – ‘Project 2025: A Hellish Legal Vision For America ft. Liz Dye lasting half an hour. Watching now. Thanks.
@birgerjohansson #2
The poster should be:
Project 2025: forcing you to have babies, now!
And that, right there, exposes the true agenda: their real problem is with women making independent choices rather than being subservient to men. This also explains the venom behind Vance’s “cat ladies” remarks: Cat ladies are women who are living for themselves or have other purposes unrelated to serving some man.
All of this anti-abortion and “family values” stuff is a stalking horse for their real, extremely misogynistic agenda: the mass enslavement of women.
When they talk about IVF, or reproductive choice, or family values, think Handmaid’s Tale; when they talk about mass deportation, think Auschwitz.
They aren’t joking. They fully intend to turn America into a cross between the Republic of Gilead and Nazi Germany, in a no holds barred fashion. If they are not stopped, which includes as necessary (but not sufficient) voting them down in November, then hundreds of millions of people will be enslaved and tens of millions will die, at a minimum. Change the latter number to hundreds of millions if there are large scale shooting wars, and to billions if someone unlimbers the nukes.
That is not alarmism. That is fact.
Taking Back Washington, eh? I don’t recall the USA being founded as a Catholic theocracy.
@53: Maryland began as a Catholic colony.
Province of Maryland
The endorsement JD Vance was waiting for:
George Santos is defending J.D. Vance as he faces allegations of dressing up like a woman when he was in law school … George says one thing is clear, it’s definitely NOT drag.
Where are the diatribes against vasectomies?
It is almost like they have something against women rather than simply against birth control.