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 choice but a social expectation or a transcendent gift, and describes contraceptive technologies as revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family. He labels reproductive choice methods as a snake 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 claims our 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 behind soft on crime California 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.

This is quite possibly the dumbest anti-Walz meme* yet.

They’re calling him that because he…signed legislation to supply free feminine hygiene products in public schools.

Sure, present that as a terrible crime if you really want to lose more women’s support.

*The campaign is young. I expect even worse memes to emerge soon.

Here’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders signing an Arkansas bill to make more kids eligible for child labor.

Look at those kids!

Here’s Tim Walz signing a Minnesota bill to provide free school lunches to kids.

Look at those kids.

Which one is the party of family again?

To underscore the point, here’s some news from Tex-ass.

Lawyers for the State of Texas on Monday tried to convince a U.S. appeals court that it should not be fined for failures in investigations of abuse and neglect of intellectually disabled children.

I’d show you photos of the children’s response, but it’s hard to smile with a broken jaw.

One investigation into a child called “Child C” was delayed a year. The same child was once dropped off at a hospital by staff of C3 Academy, where she lived, with a broken jaw. That was just one of several incidents that the child endured, according to court documents.

If nothing else, the selection of Tim Walz for VP should teach us that the political pundit class sucks. They know nothing — they want to claim that they’re objective, neutral observers, but they’ve all got an agenda that they lie about. For instance, Jonathan Chait has the worst take. He wants the Democrats to move to the right.

When Kamala Harris emerged as the Democratic presidential nominee, I expressed cautious optimism that she had learned from her disastrous 2020 campaign, which revolved around placating left-wing activists by adopting highly unpopular issue positions. The data point that seemed most compelling was her rumored slate of vice-presidential selections, which consisted of Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and Andy Beshear of Kentucky — the three most moderate governors in the party. “What this leak indicates,” I wrote, “is that Harris understands the assignment.”

But … does she? Her decision to pick Tim Walz, while not completely irrational, makes me much more cautious and less optimistic that Harris does understand the assignment.

The assignment, to be clear, is to win over voters who don’t like Donald Trump but worry Harris is too liberal.

Gosh. The Democrats need to be more Republican. Democrats embracing their principles is bad.

This is possibly the most idiotic take yet. Ask a Minnesotan: Walz is not the radical socialist some of us would like to see. He was elected to congress in a rural, southern Minnesota congressional district, where he had to be a conservative public servant, and he was selected to run for governor because he could appeal to both the urban Minneapolis/St Paul electorate and to the rural shitkicker vote. As governor, he’s been both pro-business and pro-civil liberties, a combination that might once have been natural for Republicans before Reagan, when they chose instead to follow the path of hating the poor.

He could be more liberal. The alternatives Chait favors are all consistently more conservatives. Screw that. It’s long past time Democrats moved to favor unions and schools and the social safety net, and that’s what Walz does, to the chagrin of the Chaits of the country.

And then there’s the awful Nate Silver, who favors the same candidates that Chait does, but for confusingly different reasons (that’s Silver all over the place, making counter-intuitive arguments for confusingly wrong-headed reasons). He thinks Walz is the risky product of triangulation.

If you surveyed Democratic members of Congress, he’d probably be who they’d choose. But I believe he’s probably the wrong choice, a step back toward the Democratic Party’s instincts to triangulate instead of the boldness the Harris campaign has displayed so far.

You’re just making it overly complex and twisting everything around. Walz is an advocate for politically popular choices, like childcare and free school lunches and abortion, and he’s an avuncular, friendly voice. That sounds like a good choice — true, making a smart decision is way off brand for the Democrats. Silver would rather see a radical, alienating weirdo in the position, a Democratic complement to JD Vance.

Nate Silver will always favor seeing the party don a handicap to keep the horserace close, because that’s where he makes his money and notoriety.

You know, these are the kinds of political pundits who get favored by the conservative media. Don’t trust them.

The next vice president of the USA will be Tim Walz, currently the governor of Minnesota.

It’s a good choice, in part because I had reservations about him, which is OK because I’m not representative and I want this ticket to win. He was perfect for Minnesota because he was the pro hunting and fishing candidate (not my thing), but was also a former liberal school teacher (that’s my thing). I think he’ll be a solid complement to Harris and will get her a few more votes. He has accomplished a lot with narrow margins in the Minnesota congress.

After my initial misgivings, I’ve been happy with him as governor. I think you’ll all be happy with him as VP.

Idaho Republicans have taken a different tack in their approach to limit access to books they don’t like. They now require the ‘bad’ books in library to be sequestered into a special section that requires special permission to access, and that requires children to be accompanied by an adult. They have to sign in every time they enter the Forbidden Room, so they’ve got a record of who wants to access the naughty books. One woman named Carly took her 11 year old child into the Den of Sin to get a specific book.

Carly explains, “The sign says that if you are under 18, you’re not allowed up there unless you have an unrestricted library card or your parent that is over 18 signs an affidavit for you.” So Carly shows her ID and her daughter’s library card, thinking she’s in the clear. But the librarians still don’t allow her to enter the adult section.

“But no, why don’t they let me? Because I’m holding a baby, my 1-year-old.” Yep, you read that right. Even a literal baby now needs the proper documents to be in Carly’s library. “They said that because I had a baby there (who can’t read), I’m not allowed in the library with her unless she has a library card or I signed an affidavit. So me and Daphne just watched from the edge while Scarlett goes in to find her book. The librarian ended up helping her.” Carly’s clear in her video that she doesn’t blame the librarians, saying, “They were being so nice and patient… I felt like the librarians are sick of it. They feel so bad turning kids away from going into the library.”

The wicked book? The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien.

This is a lovely example of how Republicans are weird — this is a silly law against a non-existent problem promoted by lawmakers who are completely out of touch with their constituency.

Most Idahoans — 69% — trust library staff with book selection, while 23% of Idahoans do not, according to this year’s Idaho Public Policy Survey. More than half of Idaho librarians are considering leaving library work as a result of library-related legislation, according to an informal survey conducted by the Idaho Library Association.

This is not new. When I was a young kid, my local library put all the science books in an adult section and would shoo kids away if they tried to enter — I had to call my parents to get permission to read books about dinosaurs. By the time I was in high school, they’d so thoroughly loosened that stupid policy to the point that they openly displayed copies of Playboy on the periodicals rack. I wasn’t interested in Playboy, but much appreciated free access to all the other books in the library.

We’ve got to be careful about the whole “weird” thing. I saw this story about a
man in Oklahoma who raises spiders and felt a moment of self concern.

His life’s mission is to save spiders for a greater purpose. Edmond resident Nick Krueger said spiders are important to the environment and science.

He sends the spiders he collects to researchers worldwide to help solve problems. Inside Krueger’s home, people would discover a whole new world.

“There’s always something new to learn,” said Krueger, inside his “spider room. “Most people hear that you do that, and they say, ‘What? Why?’”

He uses the words “weird and enthusiastic” to describe his hobby, but Krueger loves being unique.

“It’s fun to be weird,” Krueger said. “Being normal is boring.”

Some people might think I am weird, and I really don’t mind. Maybe I would if I were running for high office. I still think it’s a good tactic to label this current crop of Republicans as weird, though. I remember the Republicans way back, when their schtick was that they were staid, sober, strait-laced, boring conservatives who wanted no nonsense and just wanted to get the job done…the job of making money. They were bankers and shop-keepers. They didn’t like Communists. That was their whole image, and they rode that reputation into office, promising stability and restraint.

Now they’ve morphed into creeps who obsess over bathrooms and want to ban books and are upset about non-white people having civil rights. Their whole rep rests on being the boring guys wearing suits, and it’s fair to point out that no, they’re not that any more at all, they’re fanatical freaks who are trying to control other people’s lives.

And they’re not cool enough to raise spiders in their living room.

It’s worth pointing out that where, once upon a time, the Republican agenda was mainstream and entirely comfortable for the typical middle-class family, they have evolved into this weird alien anti-American freak show that is “at odds with the average American’s life”.

They have become the party of the wealthy elites, out of touch with the day-to-day reality of the people. Thomas Paine wrote about what happened to the French nobility, and it’s exactly how to make them hurt.

The more aristocracy appeared, the more it was despised; there was a visible imbecility and want of intellects in the majority, a sort of je ne sais quoi, that while it affected to be more than citizen, was less than man. It lost ground from contempt more than from hatred; and was rather jeered at as an ass, than dreaded as a lion. This is the general character of aristocracy, or what are called Nobles or Nobility, or rather No-ability, in all countries.

We know this. Mel Brooks spelled it out.

You know that Trump hates being made to look like a fool. Keep it up.