Not that long ago I went and read the Republican National Platform in the hopes that doing so would provide a deep insight into the exact policy goals that would define a second Trump administration. That video mostly turned into me moaning and whining about how little policy is in the policy document and about how absolutely terribly written it is. The platform mostly turned out to be a rhetorical plea for populism. To put it in other words, the platform exists to hatemonger.
The Republican Platform, at time of writing, has only been out for a few weeks. Before that, the main focus for depressed political dorks with too much time on our hands and a penchant for seeking out psychic damage like myself were concerned with Project 2025. As it picked up steam, the Trump campaign and the felon pumpkin himself both tried to distance themselves from it. Trump has his 47 Plan apparently, and there’s the RNC platform.
An article in NPR says, “While Trump has sought to deny a connection, there is plenty of overlap between Project 2025 and his agenda. It proposes mass deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants. So does Trump. Trump has called for cuts to the federal agencies like the Department of Education. Project 2025 calls for its elimination.” The GOP’s platform also calls for its eventual elimination. So there’s reported overlap between the various plans. Hate group The Heritage Foundation, the main organizers of Project 2025, have claimed there’s been a lot of misinformation about how radical it is. So to figure out what’s true, and because I hate myself, I couldn’t leave it at simply accepting people freaking out over the project. I read the entire Mandate for Leadership. It’s nearly a thousand pages long. Combine that with other policy reports, legislation, and news items around what I read, the math is… Well, I went to school for theatre, not math. Isn’t that a fun little self-depricating joke artsy types make? I’ve spend too much time on this.
Because I’m a malevolent spirit, literally a jar of corona if you want to put any meaning in my name, I’m going to inflict that same psychic damage on all of you by turning over a thousand pages into a hopefully less time-consuming video. Are you ready? I’m not. My throat’s not. I know, a gay man whose throat gets tired. Crazy. Let’s go.
ONE - ABORTION
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of generalized Republican extremism, it’s their positions on abortion. The further to the right you go, the further the extremism gets. Some are straight up against contraception. But because unfortunately no one swang around to abort any of us, we have to deal with conservatives pushing their nonsense on the rest of us. So what exactly does Project 2025 have to say about abortion and reproductive rights?
In the foreword, they celebrate the overturning of Roe v Wade which is expected. Despite what some men in my comments might think, I’m not a teenager. They thought they were demeaning me but it was a nice compliment. I am ancient. If you’re also do decrepit as to remember the days before the Biden administration, you probably recall conservatives pushing against Roe with the idea that this is an issue best left to the states. Of course they were being disingenuous. No one cares about State’s Rights. You can tell the Mandate for Leadership doesn’t. I’m going to reference page numbers via the PDF page simply because that makes it easier for anyone who wants to find what I’m referencing. On page 39, they discuss how they would like the strictest federal abortion restrictions and bans they can manage to pass in Congress. Wow. They didn’t want to leave it to the states. I’m so shocked.
On page 293, they say the US Agency for Internation Development should “help protect and propel all members of society–women, children, and men–from conception to natural death.” That phrase, from conception to natural death, is language I’m familiar with from interacting with a bunch of Catholics when I was in college. Normally, this is paired with an opposition to things such as euthanasia, murder, unsafe conditions, and the death penalty. Project 2025 calls for more executions. You know, the natural way end of life: the US government injecting poison into your veins. It’s the way humans have been going out for years. In ancient Greece, everyone knew that when Thanatos was coming around to collect your soul, he wore a MAGA hat and a t-shirt with an eagle shitting out crude oil.
On page 317, they deny that abortion is health care and they would like to revoke FDA approval for Mifepristone. Brief tangent one. Abortion is health care. What happens if a fetus dies in the womb and the body doesn’t naturally flush it out? An article from the Kaiser Family Foundation says, “The Medical interventions used to manage pregnancy losses are often the same medicines and procedures used in abortions.” The chemical abortion drugs Project 2025 hates? Well, guess what’s used to help deal with miscarriages? Exactly, misoprostol and mifepristone. Page 491 includes a long complaint about the FDA ever approving the two drugs. It “should withdraw this drug that is proven to be dangerous to women and *by definition* fatally unsafe for unborn children.” No, they don’t care that it’s used to treat miscarriages either because they clearly don’t care about medical reality. Have a miscarriage and want help? Get fucked, says Project 2025, nevermind that that’s likely how you ended up here in the first place.
Most abortion banners don’t turn into the hulk and smash up abortion clinics. They do talk about the exceptions to bans, those being in the cases of incest, rape, or endangerment to the mother’s life. You don’t typically get people going, “We’re for exceptions! For instance, if the fetus will be survive for only seconds out of the womb, likely in intense pain.” Let’s talk about the mother though. What do they mean by cases where the mother’s life is at risk? Doctors aren’t sure because the lawmakers who write the laws aren’t medical professionals and tend not to know what the hell they’re saying. Dr. Leilah Zahedi told ABC news, “(A) lost of the time they have a risk of a major cardiac event of up to 15 percent to 25 percent, even up to 50 percent. At the moment they’re find. But as they get further into pregnancy, that’s going to put their life more and more at risk. So do I have to wait until they’re on death’s doorstep or can I intervene at that point to prevent more harm and more damage to them?” The article goes on to question intervention in the case of pregnant women with cancer. Chemo with a baby? That’s a no-go. So, can you abort so as to attack the cancer or is her life not at risk enough?
In an interview with NPR, Dr. Lisa Harris said, after giving statistics in difficult cases of pregnancy complications that can easily lead to the death of the mother but aren’t 100 percent certain, “I’m afraid that physicians will hesitate to act and that women will suffer the consequences of that, including even dying.”
But who cares if women die? Not Project 2025. Denying that abortion can ever be healthcare denies the idea that there is treatment for women whom pregnancy will kill. It says that is simply their fate and there’s nothing to be done about it. So protecting people from conception to natural death apparently means the state can murder people, but medical intervention to save a woman’s life? That’s unnatural and can’t be allowed. We have to let diseases and conditions kill people. Interfering is messing with nature! That explains their views on COVID. We’ll get there.
On page 482 it once again iterates that abortion is not healthcare. It gives no exception. Right before that it says, ”From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race of ability.” Cool. On page 506 they say that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act “explicitly protects unborn children” and implies violation of this could result in providers losing all funding. Save a woman? Uh-oh, no more money for you.They’re presented with a Trolly Problem that says, “Hey. You have to pick. Mom or baby, who dies?” and they shrugged and went, “Who gives a shit? The train goes where it goes. Shoot anyone who approaches the lever.”
On page 504, they continue to lie about abortion and abortion providers. Or, at least, they lie by implication. “Planned Parenthood affiliates face … allegations of profiting from the sale of organs from aborted babies.” They do go then, yes, to imply that abortion is never health care, never save the lives of pregant women who need them. Here’s NPR about those “allegations,” “Despite all the worry, state investigations have yet to find any evidence that Planned Parenthood was selling or profiting off fetal tissue.”
So they lie about what healthcare is, they lie about Planned Parenthood, what else do they do? On page 618 they talk about anti-life benefit programs. So obviously we know they mean abortion. They mean a woman’s life from a fatal pregnancy. And, apparently, surrogacy? Nothing quite says anti-life like… willingly carrying a child? Wow, I’m starting to suspect this has absolutely nothing to do with pregnancy or fetuses. It’s all about controlling women. I’m not a dominant type. You could probably tell that from the everything about me. A man calling me a good boy will… Well, lower my walls, let’s say. So I’m not inclined to control women.
Speaking of.
On page 225, they start talking about the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Women’s Health and Protection of the Family. It brings it up again on page 293. So. What’s that? Well, Amnesty International says that it, “Tramples on every person’s right to choose,” is “willingly endangering people’s lives,” and “flies in the face of human rights and decades of health research.” I read the Geneva Consensus. It’s an anti-abortion document talking about how it wants people to prioritize and increase women’s health. We’re looking for “the highest attainable standard of health, without including abortion.” In other words, yes, women will die. Yay! As Elyssa Koren of hate group the Alliance Defending Freedom puts it, “There is no human right to abortion.” Women don’t have the right to be saved from preventable deaths! Yay! Oh wait that’s a bad thing. That ADF article also quotes Senator Hyde-Smith as saying “Our rights come from God, not from the Government.” Whatever, have your beliefs, but that makes it seem like this is religious in nature.
Obviously that means I had to see what the Christian Post had to say about it. According to them, it’s bad to care about rights if a culture has a tradition of wanting to deny people their rights. So loving of them. It’s via their article that I got to go over a list of countries that had signed on. Now surely all of these countries have committed to the health and wellbeing of women and girls and aren’t merely using this as a means to control women, right?
Ahem.
Bahrain treats women as the property of their husbands and discriminates against them in marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Cameroon went and killed some women and an 18-month-old in a military operation. If you’re a woman who happens to be a lesbian or gender noncomforming? Your ass is going to jail. In Egypt, “Egyptian security forces and prison staff were found to employ systemic sexual violence to degrade and torture detainees including men, women, transmen, and transwomen.” If there’s one thing that screams caring about the medical health of women, it’s torturing them. Indonesia upholds women’s health by causing “deep psychological distress” via heavy dress codes that can not obeying can cause girls to not get an education. If we know there’s one place that’s going to uphold women’s rights, it’s Iraq. What’s that? The morality police beat a woman to death over clothes? “Some survivors of human trafficking are tried and convicted for prostitution”? You can sexually assault a woman and get away with it if you marry her? Now that’s what I call pro-life! Man, we only made sure to sign this bad boy with the countries who know best about how to treat women, like Kenya where being a lesbian will get you sent to jail. Or Kuwait where you can kill a female relative and get a lighter sentence if you say it’s because she was being a whore. Heck, you can even abduct her for whatever reason you want so long as you marry her. Why only kill women in one country for having sex? Go to Libya and kill women. Don’t actually do that. It’s another place where you can marry your assault victim to get off scot free, where the government discriminate against women, and where it’s illegal to be a lesbian. In Pakistan, “Roughly 1000 women are killed in so-called honor killings each year.” But hey, at least they have child marriage where pedophiles impregnate girls in a country with “One of the highest maternal mortality ratios in South Asia.” But hey, Qatar signed on, where you can institutionalize a woman against he will, women are the property of their husbands, the government discriminates against them, and authorities might arrest and flog you if you’re unmarried and report an assault because they might not believe you. Fun! Then there’s Russia, so concerned with women’s health while they’re committing attrocities in Ukraine and torturing prisoners. Then there’s Saudi Arabia where the law “can facilitate and excuse domestic violence including sexual abuse,” marital rape is fine, lesbians can’t be themselves, the government discriminates against women, and women need men’s consent to do a whole lot. At least we know Sudan signed on in good faith. After all, their security forces have killed children when suppressing protests, lesbians face prison, unmarried pregnant people do too so they don’t always get healthcare, and the “UN reported receiving at least 13 reports of cases of rape and gang rape of female protesters by security forces.” The United Arab Emirates is one of our great allies in human rights where its bad to be gender noncomforming, “unmarried pregnant women face difficulties accessing prenatal health care,” looks at reconciliation as the solution to domestic violence, and women are practically forced to put out for their husbands.
With a list of such countries so obviously committed to the health and rights of women and girls, it’s so super clear that the Geneva Consesus doesn’t care at all about women or children. It doesn’t care about pregnancy. I’d go so far as to say it doesn’t care about abortion. It’s a promise to restrict the rights of its female citizens and exert control over them.
TWO - EDUCATION
Speaking of a right girls are systemically denied in parts of the world, let’s talk about education. On page 38, during their freakout about pornography, put a pin it, that say, “Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” In that same paragraph, they make clear that their idea of porn includes “transgender ideology.” So any teacher who supplies any knowledge of trans people should go on the sex offenders list. That means no trans people in education. It means if you use a student’s preferred pronouns, Project 2025 thinks you’re a sex offender. If you cover any news item about trans people, on the list you go. Sure, not extreme at all. We’ll get to their ideas about trans people in the next section.
“In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children’s education is a simple one: Schools serve parents, not the other way around.” Incorrect. Schools serve students. The job of a school is not to hike up their pants and bend over for parents. A school’s job is to educate its students. Their duty is to their students. It talks about “parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable.” They’re correct that it’s non-negotiable because it doesn’t exist. Parents are not the primary educators. Parents do not have a right to control school curriculum. Parents should not have the ability to opt their children out of any lesson. But apparently if you think schools serve its pupils and aren’t subservient to the whims of parents who have not studied education and who probably know little about pedagogy, you’re going to lose federal funding.
I’ll reuse a quote Suzanne Nossel I put in my video over the GOP’s platform. “A movement that for years … sought to prevent the government from controlling how they educated their own children now seeks to decree what entire student bodies and school districts can and cannot learn and read. The rhetoric of parents’ rights has morphed from a movement aimed at constraining the power of government over education to one that is mobilizing politicians and legislatures to extend the heavy hand of the government into the classroom.” Parental rights is just a euphemism for making sure conservative evangelicals get to restrict the worlds and education of every child, not simply their own. It means trampling on the rights of students and on other parents who would like their kids to receive quality education regardless of conservative evangelical objections.
Who does know, broadly, how education works? Teachers. Pages 374 and 75, they would like bust the teacher’s unions. They don’t like teachers pointing out the dangers of their beloved charter programs and attempts to do away with public education in favor of charter school privatization. How dare they want more spending on education. How dare they have been concerned with the health of students during COVID. But they want to do away with the teachers’ unions because they want to do away with unions. We’ll get there.
Speaking of things they want to do away with… Page 352 starts an entire section about the Department of Education. First things first, they want to eliminate the Department of Education. The GOP platform calls for the same elimination. Wanting that destruction is why they back school choice. What’s the choice? To destroy public education. Charter schools siphon money out of public schools, are often subject to less regulation, can often be for-profit entities, teach religion as factual, and so forth. Of course, you could believe they simply have a disagreement with me on what leads to healthy education for children and might be acting out of good faith. You could. It’d be a bit dumb of you, but still.
Well, no, because, like the GOP Platform, Project 2025 misunderstands what education is for. I’ll ask the same question I did in that video. What is the purpose of education? There is a wrong answer. If you answered “to get jobs,” congrats, you also don’t understand education. Page 353 says, “Federal postsecondary education policy should prepare students for jobs in the dynamic economy, nurture institutional diversity, and expose schools to greater market forces.” None of those are the point of education. They continue this misunderstanding on 629 when they call for shifting higher education funding to job training. On the same page they discuss a “glut of college degrees.” They don’t like higher education, in part because college teaches you more than how to have a job in a field. And they don’t like that education has a reason to exist beyond employment. Education exists to enrich and enlarged the human soul, to give you more options, more ways of seeing, more choices. As with the platform, Project 2025 wants to narrow the world. Conservatives wants to make the worlds of our children smaller. Disgusting.
Let’s talk about narrowing worlds. On page 359, it suggests the majority of funding that comes from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act “should be converted into a no-strings focumla block grant targeted at students with disabilities.” What strings are we concerned with here? At her confirmation hearing, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was asked if anyone who receives federal funding should be required to meet federal standards over accessibility and education for students with disabilities. She said states should decide. Are these the strings? “DeVos Began speaking about a Florida voucher program for students with disabilities that requires students to sign away their IDEA due process rights.” DeVos was positively discussing a charter system that decided not to care for its disabled students. Are those the strings? A Salon article from 2017 details that DeVos “quietly rescinded 72 policy guidelines on the rights of students with disabilities”, including ‘(t)he document that explained students’ rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Rehabalitation Act.”
It’s easier to point out how much they don’t care about education in this document when they continuously rail against accreditation. You see this on pages 353, 356, 384 through 88, and 391. On 385 they specifically say, “Protect the sovereignty of states to decide governance and leadership issues for their state-supported colleges and universities by prohibiting accreditation agencies from intruding upon the governance of state-supported educational institutions.” What is this about? By state sovereignty, they probably mean the whim of specific governors to do whatever the hell they want. Well, when I was going to college in Kentucky, professional five-head model Matt Bevin tried to take over the University of Louisville by firing the board of trustees and sticking in his own people.As an article in Inside Higher Ed notes, the accreditation agency UofL uses said the action “appeared to put th euniversity out of compliance with the agency’s standards.” I remember talking to friends who went there who were worried if they’d have to transfer and whether any of their class credits would count if the school lost its accreditation. Ultimately, Bevins moves got slapped down by a judge who reminded him he didn’t have the power to do any of that. Bevin was notoriously anti-education. It’s a big reason he lost to Daddy Beshear. When I read this section of Project 2025, it reads as if an argument that governors should be able to avoid state law and directly control any state schools however they see fit and remove any academic independence and integrity without any pushback.
And, of course, they’re upset that accreditors don’t like religious schools doing discrimination.
Title IX reads as follows, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Page 390 of the Mandate for Leadership reads, “Educational institutions can claim a religious exemption … from the strictures of Title IX.” It says that the Obama administration put out a list of these colleges who wanted to use religious as an excuse to discriminate based on sex. Project 2025 is upset about this list. They want the archived list to be destroyed and for any potential list of the same to not be allowed. If you’re a school who wants federal funding and wants to use religion as an excuse for your discrimination, Project 2025 wants to make sure the public doesn’t know it.
Who do religious conservatives tend to want to discriminate against? LGBT people. On pages 365 and 366, they complain about interpretations that Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination means you can’t discriminate on sexual orientation or gender identity. To quote the Department of Education’s website again, “A recipient institution that receives Department funds must operate its education program or activity in a nondiscriminatory manner free of discrimination based on sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity.” Project 2025 hates that idea. They want schools to be able to discriminate against LGBT kids. They claim that interpreting sex to include gender identity and sexual orientation misunderstand Bostock, a SCOTUS case that said… discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and expression are clearly sex discrimination. That’s correct. If you discriminate against a man for being in a relationship with a man, you are punishment him for actions you would not if he were a woman. That is sex discrimination. Conservatives are just dumb. That’s why they love populism. No need to think under a political ideology whose only constant is finding someone to hate.
And they love to hate queer people.
On page 378 they talk about how they want a federal parental rights bill similar to the one passed in Florida. That Florida bill is better known as the Don’t Say Gay bill, a bill whose crafting was admitted by one of its creators to be to keep children in the closet. They call being trans a “social contagion” which, fun fact, is Nazi language so hey, good job Project 2025. Way to prove you’re not extremists by… comparing queerness to a disease, implying it can therefore be cured, and must be eradicated. Good job. Page 379 talks about how teachers must be allowed to bully trans kids. Speaking of bullying, when I read through the Don’t Say Gay bill it was pretty clear that the bill would curtail anti-bullying efforts. You couldn’t tell students not to bully a gay student for being gay or for having gay family members. You could say it’s wrong to bully, but if they assert they’re just talking about the facts of morality, well then stopping them is a statement of opinion on queer existence. You can’t defend children who exist outside gender norms. You can’t protect trans kids. In fact, the bottom of page 377 suggests school employees MUST out children to their parents. Fun fact, that’s happens. Fun fact, parents aren’t entitled to the information. Why? Because no one is.
THREE - LGBT RIGHTS
That’s a good way to transition into how Project 2025 talks about LGBT folks in general. An article in Vox says that the head of the Heritage Foundation, creators of the project, “may view any attempt to explain or teach about trans people as worthy of outlawing and imprisonment.” That tracks with the idea that so-called “transgender ideology” is itself pornography whose discussion is worthy of sticking teachers and librarians on the sex offenders registry. It says that it doesn’t call for the end of gay marriage, but, well. I think we need to look at the implications of its overall conversation on queer people. Thank god its an overall conversation. We gays love overalls.
On page 38, they talk about how being trans denies “the very creatureliness that inhere in being human” which sort of implies to be trans is to reject humanity. In the paragraph after that, they write, “allowing parents or physicians to ‘reassign’ the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end.” Given elsewhere the dislike expressed for social transition and pronoun usage, how they advocate for discrimination, I have to wonder, does that mean social transition is child abuse? So then, does that mean any affirmation of a trans child is child abuse that would get you thrown in jail and your child ripped away from you?
I’m mostly sticking to the document, but I find it important here to point out who the Heritage Foundation is. An article on their site from February 2020 by Andrea Jones insists that conversion therapy bans are bad in part because they take choice away from parents and physicians. Uh-oh, conversion therapy doesn’t work. It never has. It never will. Uh-oh, conversion therapy is torture. But the Heritage Foundation is okay with that. Pro-torture bigoted assholes Simon Hankinson and Grace Melton wrote in June of 2023 for the Heritage Foundation about it’s terrible to be against conversion torture and pretend like spiritual and mental torture in the guise of religion don’t exist. Texas Republicans, in their state platform, explicitly support Reintegrative Therapy, an attempted rebrand of conversion therapy by professional grifting bigot, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi Jr., the son of notorious pro-torture-the-gays dude Dr. Joseph Nicolosi. Advisory board hate group for Project 2025, the Alliance Defending Freedom, take to the courts to attempt to defend debunked conversion torture. Fellow hate group and advisors, The Family Research Council have an article on their website that blatantly lies and pretends conversion therapy works. Again, it doesn’t. Never has. Never will. I’m positive that other groups party to this document are in favor of conversion therapy.
So this supposed concern that trans affirmation is child abuse, coming from a collection of groups that explicitly endorse child abuse? That’s real fuckin’ rich. So rich, it might have taken Clarence Thomas on vacation.
They continuously imply gender-affirming surgery for trans people “genital mutilation,” like on page 579. When Georgia went with its ban on trans care for minors, they specifically included a carve-out for cosmetic surgery on the genitals of intersex infants. I remembered reading that bill before attending a march in Savannah for trans rights. It confused me for a moment, because I like to assume people operate out of good faith. However, with that law it was clear that is not the case. There is no medical reason for the majority of cosmetic genital surgeries on intersex children. For some reason, I doubt that’s what they mean when they talk about preventing genital mutilation. I took a human sexuality course in college as an elective. During it, I did some research into circumcision. In the vast majority of cases, that is also a cosmetic surgery on a child’s genitals. The health benefits are also wildly overstated.
Page 136: “Those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service.” 137. “Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service.” They then decry using any money for trans service members receiving surgeries. On 136 they make it seem as if their objection is to constant medical needs. So, for instance, hormone replacement therapy. On 137 however that is not part of this. It’s the state of having gender dysphoria that is disqualifying for them. The state of being trans. Not all trans people seek to transition. Some do manage to control their dysphoria without hormones or surgery. 136 would seem to allow those individuals to serve. 137 though calls them unfit because they are trans and this document considers the existence of trans people to be a pathology.
What are contagions? Well, they can start a pandemic. And pandemics can hurt society. Page 292 implies that the acceptance of trans women will utterly destroy society. ContraPoints’ Tabby-Chan is apparently exactly as powerful as she thinks she is, nyaa. At the bottom of the same page they claim “gender radicalism … produces unnecessary consternation and confusion among and even outright bias against men.” So reverse sexism is happening because trans people exist and trans people existing makes society discriminate against cis men somehow in some unspecified way. But that’s just what we do, you know? As they point out on page 291, we gays are just such bullies with out “bullying LGBTQ+ agenda.” You know what they say, it’s okay to force gay kids in the closet and attempt to mentally and spiritually abuse it out of them, but queer people wanting rights is bullying.
Gay bulls. Very popular PornHub search.
Page 484 claims that healthy societies are ones where families are “a married mother, father, and their children.” Childless people suck. Single parents suck. And gay people threaten it all. Hm. I think Vox might have missed an implicit call for the end of gay marriage. Their section on fatherlessness not only denigrates single mothers, but it basically says lesbian couples are precluded from raising safe children. It also says that Health and Human Services “should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them.” That’s cut and clear, gay people shouldn’t be parents.
Page 495 urges the National Institute of Health to fund studies into how likely it is people stop expressing their trans identity if you give them non-affirming therapy. Huh. Are they saying we should be funding conversion therapy studies? Shocking.
Page 507 lies about the effectiveness of gender affirming surgeries in an attempt to say those on government healthcare shouldn’t be able to get them. Turn the page to 508 and they continue to pretend to not understand Bostock. They’re really upset that people understand sex discrimination logically and necessarily includes discrimination against sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. So much so that they really want those in health care ot be able to discriminate against us however they want. They also say preventing discrimination against LGBT people is somehow sexualizing children. Does that make any sense? No, not at all. Isn’t that great?
I guess I’m made out of cheese, ‘cause this document is grating me.
Page 510 says that children are hurting because religious adoption agencies want federal dollars while discriminating against federal law, and the fed says no. Hm. Maybe the problem is the discrimination. Don’t ask for federal dollars if you refuse to follow federal rules. But they make clear on the next page this isn’t merely for religious adoption agencies. You can discriminate against gay people just for a belief about marriage. Well, bigoted hatred is a belief.
Page 514 lies about research into queer families. It says, “Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability …; financial stress of poverty or poorer behavioral, psychological, or education outcomes.” This is a lie. The literature clearly states that outcomes for children raised by a mother and father, two mothers, and two fathers are practically the same. “For the sake of child well-being, programs should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.” They don’t. Partially, because that biological essentialism about the gendered role of a parent is just sexist nonsense. It is not objective reality. They’re simply lying here because they love lying because they don’t care about the truth. If they care about the truth, they wouldn’t the Heritage Foundation. What is their heritage? Dairy farms, because they’ve got a bunch of bullshit.
In that same paragraph of lies, they talk about religious homophobes “who affirm that marriage is between not just any two adults, but one man and one unrelated woman.” That language seems to imply they think gay marriage is invalid. Which they do. Sorry, Vox, you got it wrong. They want gay families dismantled. On page 522, they say the Secretary for HHS should be explicitly transphobic and say “that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure,” denouncing all queer familes and calling them unnatural.
They’re consistent in their statements longing to remove protections for LGBT people from discrimination across departments. Page 617 flatout says a Republican administration should “rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”
Like the Geneva Consensus signed by a bunch of homophobic and sexist countries, Project 2025 also pushes for the next administration to pursue the suggestions for the Trump Administration’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, commissioned by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The ACLU warned, “Its state purpose is to provide ‘fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights. We know that references to ‘natural law and natural rights’ are code words used by the religious right and social conservatives to advance anti-LGBTQ and anti-women’s rights agendas.”
I’ll reuse another quote from my video on the homophobia of the GOP. In his paper arguing against natural law theorists and their homophobic legal theories, Dr. Brent L. Pickett writes in “Natural Law and the Regulation of Sexuality: A Critique” for the Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest, “Today, natural law theory offers the most common intellectual defense for the differential treatment of gays and lesbians. Leading natural law theorists, such as John Finnis, Robert George, and Richard Duncan, have eagerly inserted themselves into debates about law and sexuality. If their arguments are sound, it is permissible to treat gay and lesbians differentially as a matter of law. Natural law theorists defend a range of policies in this regard, from anti-sodomy laws, to allowing persons to discriminate against gays and lesbians in employment and housing, to a fierce opposition to same-sex unions or, in their watered-down version, civil unions. In general, natural law theorists believe that it is rational for the state to ‘discourage’ homosexuality through such policies.”
Okay, cool, so it was likely established to push anti-queer bigotry while pretending to have a secular basis that doesn’t exist. But I was already too deep into this and I can’t swim so I sank and read the commission’s report.
The main focus of the report is to attempt to distinguish between human rights, which they say are unalienable, and positive rights, those which aren’t necessarily human rights but can still be good. It says, “There is good reason to worry that the prodigious expansion of human rights has weakened rather than strengthened the claims of human rights and left the most disadvantaged more vulnerable.” This expansion or rights, the document claims, can amount to cultural imperialism. That’s a term I’ve seen used by conservatives on the right and conservatives who pretend they’re on the left. It was used when people brought up issues with Qatar’s anti-queerness in relationship to the World Cup. People who chat about cultural imperialism when it comes to human rights tend to mean they think it’s fine for queer people to be imprisoned and killed for being queer and how dare we bring it up as a point of critique that must change. The Calla Walsh types who don’t want any criticism of China’s homophobia and sexism and the Communist Party of Britain types who twist theory to pretend trans people are bourgeois decadence and the height of individualism. Yes, I am connecting Project 2025 to the most idiotic people who call themselves leftists because both of those kinds of reactionary assholes will absolutely hate it.
The document decries human rights organizations and wonders if certain human rights are reallllly human rights or just fun little bonuses governments can get rid of and still be meeting the minimum of care and freedom for their citizens. Those “maybe they shouldn’t count” rights include: marriage likely cause they hate gay people; movement which is concerning given their usage of the word seal over the border, put a pin in it, and dislike of women crossing state lines for abortions; privacy which is the basis for a lot of rights here in America including destroying bans on contraceptives; work which explains their stances on labor which we’ll get to; education because they want to destroy education, and a standard of living because they hate government safety net programs and don’t think homeless people should have shelter.
Near the end of the commission’s report, they say, “The tendency to fight policial battles with vocabulary of human rights risks stifling the kind of robust discussion on which a vibrant democracy depends. The effort to shut down legitimate debate by recasting contestable policy preferences as fixed and unquestionable human rights imperatives promotes intolerance, impedes reconciliation, devalues core rights, and denies rights in the name of rights.” This is the exact sort of stance conservatives took following Obergefell. How dare you give the queers rights is basically their stance. Gay people love Beyonce, so they should be given things to the left, to the left.
Let’s look at how some human rights organizations responded. As Amnesty International’s Americas director Erika Guevara Rosas put it, “The Department of State’s effort to cherry-pick human rights - in order to unlawfully deny the rights of women, LGBTI people and others - is a dangerous political stunt that could spark a race to the bottom by human rights-abusing governments around the world.” Or, as Human Rights Watch says, “The commission seems to favor an a la carte approach to rights. The US government will pick the rights that it wants to observe. That’s not a system of human rights. It’s an excuse for repression, discrimination, and abuse.” The American Civil Liberties Union says the commission itself was “intended to redefine universal human rights and roll back decades of progress.” That makes sense given that, as an article in the Coumbia Human Rights Law Review points out, the commission was staffed by people “with well-known and extreme positions opposing reproductive and LGBTQI rights.” That includes Secretary Pompeo who declared that some of the rights we enjoy here in the US aren’t worth defending. Kenneth Roth was called to testify for the committee. According to him, the committee didn’t seem concerned with the rights of disabled people, but they really wanted to talk about queer rights and reproductive rights.
Commision for Unalienble Rights. C-U-R. More like C-U-N-....
FOUR - CRIMINAL JUSTICE
In my research over the Commision for Unalienable Rights, I found that Columbia article which states, “The US voted against the resolution condemning the use of the death penalty for same-sex relationships, blasphemy, and adultery.” That seems like a good jumping off point to talk about what Project 2025 has to say about the criminal justice system.
On page 587 Project 2025 talks about the death penalty. Apparently it’s needed to deter crime. What’s that little fly buzzing around my head? You were just snacking on that claim because it’s a bunch of shit? The death penalty does not deter crime. Like, at all. The document does this sort of thing all the time. They pretend a lie of theirs is accepted fact and therefore we should make policy around their lie. It also suggests that the death penalty brings justice to a victim’s family. That only makes sense if your conception of justice is getting to enact your bloodlust and sadism on another person. That tracks with the Republican Platform, not in that they mention the death penalty, but in the whole conception being centered around sating personal hatreds as the supposed priority of government. Populism is a disease.
They want the next administration, over the course of its 4 years, to “obtain finality for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.” That sounds like killing as many of them as possible while rushing the courts and appeals processes meant to make sure we don’t kill innocents.
At the end of the “yay killing people” paragraph, they say, “It should also pursue the death penalty for applicable crimes–particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children.” Now of course, I disagree because the death penalty holds no position in a proper civilized society. But we need to contextualize this statement with the rest of the platform. Recall the last section. On 507 they said including sexuality and gender identity in nondiscrimination policies is the sexualization of children. At the start of the document, they called “transgender ideology” pornography. They explicitly call trans affirming medical treatment child abuse, and given their attitudes towards social transition, likely consider any affirmation to be child abuse. So then. We’re expanding the list of people Project 2025 is willing to kill. Pregnant women are joining up with any trans person who exists around children, any person who discusses trans people around children, any person who affirms a trans child’s identity, and any person who distributes information about trans people and gender identity to children. You can’t forget either that they consider fetuses to be full humans from the moment of conception. Murder is sort of the ultimate violence against children, so we have to make sure to include anyone who gets an abortion, any doctor who performs an abortion, and pharmacist who dispenses abortifacients, all those who make, distribute, and purchase Plan B bills, and those who drive pregnant people to get an abortion in jurisdictions where abortion is legal.
Project 2025 isn’t actually named after the year the next administration would come into office. It’s the goal for the minimum amount of people it wants the federal government to commit to murdering annually. Is that charitable? No. Luckily for me, I’m not a charity.
As with most departments, Project 2025 wants the DOJ to become more entangled with the politics of the White House. You’ve likely heard that one of the major goals of the document is to reclassify civil servant positions as political appointments. That limits the independence of any brance of the executive, including giving the President more power over investigations and charges brought by officials at the DOJ, including the FBI. To quote the AP, “Critics warn this may leave the Justice Department and other investigative agencies vulnerable to a president who might pressure them to punish or probe a political foe. Trump, who has faced four separate prosecutions, has threatened retribution against Biden and other perceived enemies.” That’s ironic given that page 318 talks about how supposedly the DOJ under Biden is engaging in political prosecutions that constitute “a threat to the Republic.”
In its section on the DOJ it suggests that the department interfered in the elections in 2016 and 2020 and have therefore lost the trust of the American people while at no point mentioning the concerted effort by GOP operatives including the former president to overturn the 2020 election. It’s likely because they care about neither election integrity nor democracy.
FIVE - SPEECH & CENSORSHIP
They do, supposedly, care about speech. After all, on page 228 they decry Russian and Chinese government censorship and control over the internet.
Unfortunately, it seems like what they’re concerned with is Making America Great at Censorship Again. That’s right, we’re going back to their proposed blanket ban on pornography. Quoting from their foreword, “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricable 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 misogynist 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.”
I have a three hour video about censorship, NSFW content, art, and how people misunderstand desire. I also suggest you go watch the ContraPoints video over Twilight that also stands as an examination of the concept of desire in fiction. I won’t rehash three hours for you, but I can hit some highlights.
Shocking no one, because electro far too kinky for these people when they’re not torturing gay people, they lied in that paragraph. Did you catch their lies?
First, pornography, erotica, and NSFW art and content in general are protected by the First Amendment. That is a matter of law. They are incorrect. I’d personally go so far as saying obscenity laws and the Miller Test are vague, censorious, anti-freedom, anti-free speech, nonsensical restrictions including that the third prong of the Miller Test implies there is such a thing as NSFW art that does not qualify as art. That is patently absurd. Pornography is film. The act of sex constitutes a plot. All NSFW material makes an argument over what is erotic and that argument automatically qualifies it as serious artistic work with value regardless of intent. But of course, people who want to restrict NSFW content have no understanding of art. It is my opinion that that all obscenity laws must be overturned and a free society that cares about speech must vociferously defend porn.
Second, porn addiction is not real. It simply does not exist. Conservatives and anti-sex people made it up. Behavioral addictions at large are not real. Beyond that, conservative talk about “addiction” to NSFW often means any consumption of NSFW, a claim that stretches the meaning of “addiction” beyond any recognition.
Third point on that paragraph, though not about them lying, gay porn exists. You know. A dude going at a dude. No woman or children involved and therefore can’t be exploited. The way that paragraph is written, it seems as if the only pornography Project 2025 finds acceptable would be hot and heavy sweat gay porn when men can be MEN.
Fourth, their conception of obscenity and pornography laws necessarily include communications between people of sexually explicit material. So this isn’t merely banning pornstars. It would be illegal for a woman to send her husband a picture of herself topless. Married couples would be banned from sexting because sexting would likely qualify as the distribution of micro-erotica. Keeping explicit letters in the home would be possession of obscene materials. Writing it would be illegal. Yes, this is assuming the worst of them. But yes, it will be that bad because quite literally the erotic is one of the strongest pillars of freedom and free speech that must be protected.
Fifth, in regards to their statement about the destructiveness of pornography on the mind. While there have been reports of certain pornography in effect to misogynistic attitudes in young men, it entirely ignores the benefits of fantasy. Non-con can be a way to deal with one’s sexual trauma. Vore can be a way of dealing with suicidality. Pup play can be a way to confront stress and anxiety. Sex is an important part of human pscyhology and the sublimation of negative desires, traumas, self-concepts, and more into sexuality can be incredibly healthy.
This isn’t Jenny Nicholson. I can’t do numbered list inside numbered list inception, though I do sometimes have Joseph Gordon Lovett floating through my brain. In my video over censorship, I talk about Amazon’s censorious and kinda idiotic content limits around erotica. I’ll be a bit briefer in the overview here and send you over to that video. So this is a bit of a tangent, but I promise it’s important.
Where is the line between erotica and romance? ContraPoints makes a joke about it in her film on Twilight, saying, “Romance is for good girls and erotica is for sluts.” Some claim erotica is when intercourse is the primary plot. Others claim it becomes erotica when a sex scene is written for titillation. Think about horror novels. Say someone writes an assault scene, detailed enough to bring about terror. That amount of detail can also be taken as titillation because there is no such thing as objectivity in art and authorial intent is not the only valid form of analysis. So, which is it? Is it bannable erotica or is it allowable horror? A horror writer posted on the KDP forum confused and scared as to why his books were getting flagged and miscategorized as erotica by Amazon. He was not intending to write erotica at all. A romance author posted about when Amazon decided to recategorize her novel as erotica because it had explicit scenes… even though that’s not what defines the difference between romance and erotica, and her work was not erotica. If Amazon is occasionally too dumb to understand the difference, and they aren’t necessarily anti-sex, how do you think an anti-porn crusade would look at it?
Well, I think we get our answer earlier in the paragraph where they call transgender ideology pornography. They have removed “for titillation” entirely from their definition. Erotic intent isn’t what defines erotic art for Project 2025. They don’t care about the distinction between erotica and romance. This also likely means they don’t care about the difference between explicit sexual film and erotic film. Nudity itself might be considered pornographic material. So, here’s a nonexhaustive list of art Project 2025 might consider pornography and criminalize the creation, prouction, disctirbution, and posession of, including placing teachers and librarians who show them on sex offender registries: the musical Hair, Into the Woods, Avenue Q, Hand to God, Game of Thrones, Westworld, X, Pearl, Call Me By Your Name, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, Gone Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, All of Us Strangers, Gantz, Shin Sekai Yori, Boogia Nights, any Sarah J. Maas series, Cathleen Hoover’s books, The Boys, How to Get Away with Murder, Salo, Poor Things, Men, every Fifty Shades book and film, Brokeback Mountain, Code Geass, and clinical images used in sexual education classes.
Given their definition of pornography includes “transgender ideiology,” under Project 2025 the following non-exhaustive list of projects would be banned and their creators, producers, presenters, actors, directors, writers, electricians, gaffers, sound egineers, and many more would be arrested and imprisoned if made today, new content is put out, or continued to be distributed: RuPaul’s Drag Race, Looney Tunes, Naruto, Cowboy Bebop, The Danish Girl, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, I Saw the TV Glow, Bones, Criminal Minds, Glee, The Umbrella Academy, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Rocky Horror, North Sea Texas, One Piece, Dragon Age, Head Over Heels, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Invincible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Sims, Gen V, Fire Punch, Dr. Who, Steven Universe, the YouTube programs of ContraPoints, Gigi Gorgeous, PhilosophyTube and any other trans person who has discussed being trans as well as any that discuss trans politics and philosophy like Lindsay Ellis, any non-closeted trans teacher or educational worker who affirms the identity of trans students, most of the media content of, by, or for drag queens and kings such as Give it to Me Straight, Race Chasers, Sibling Rivalry, and I-M-H-O. As I said, that was entirely non-exhaustive.
They praise the Florida Don’t Say Gay Bill and think it’s something to model. When DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw called opponents of the bill groomers, the idea was that thinking gay people shouldn’t be hidden from children is pedophilia. Though they don’t call gay people existing pornography, I have a sneaking suspicion that, as with trans people, they consider we gays inherently pornographic. And OMG thank you so much for finding me so sexy you can’t help but imagine me as a good boy serving you. Compliment accepted.
But on that note, 378 calls for a national Don’t Say Gay Bill. That censorship is meant to remove LGBT people entirely from education, removing all library books with gay and trans characters, restricting the speech of teachers to prevent them from mentioning if they’re married to the same-sex, restricts their ability to effectively respond to bullying and the anxieties that comes with being in the closet, and erases queer rights and figures from the history books.
Remember back to the abortion section? They want to strike the ability to talk about abortion as health care. Remember when they called for the banning of trans-affirming healthcare? That would, of course, include affirming talk therapy. That obviously doesn’t mesh with conservative arguments for gay conversion therapy, something that hinges on how apparently therapy isn’t medical so you can’t compel speech which also apparently means you can’t restrict speech. So if you must be allowed to mentally abuse gay people but you aren’t allowed to affirm trans people, it sounds like their concern has nothing to do with free speech and is entirely about enforcing and protecting their ability to force their hateful worldview on others.
On page 49, they really let us know about their complete lack of understanding or care about what free speech is. In talking about instances of First Amendment violations, they includes “speakers at universities shouted down.” According to this document, freedom of speech isn’t merely the freedom to put out your communications. It’s the right to force silence so you must be heard. It’s anti-protest. Why? Because they don’t care about the rights of others. They want absolute freedom for themselves and absolute freedom to restrict everyone else.
SIX - FOREIGN POLICY
When you’re viewing the world, you’re bound to notice there’s more countries out there than just the US. What?! I know. That’s crazy. Whole continents even? Sounds like a lie.
Quick overview of what we’ve already been over here: they want to join anti-woman countries in pushing for anti-abortion policies. They consider pushing for queer rights to be cultural imperialism, which I assume includes the right to not get killed for being gay or trans. As pushed for on page 293, they want to export anti-abortion activism by tying any foreign NGO donations to anti-abortion policy, specifically that agencies recieving funds could neither perform or promote abortion nor donate themselves to other agencies that do do either of those things. On page 295 it wants to focus on religious freedom in other countries specifically when it comes to people being anti-queer. So they want to push back against other countries enforcing non-discrimination laws.
They approve of pulling out of the UN Human Rights Council amongst other organizations on page 224. Given their conclusion in the Commission on Unalienable Rights, it might partially be because the UN has accepted human rights that conservatives would rather deny. In fact, they say “radical social policies” don’t count as “actual human rights.” Queer rights aren’t human rights. Our abilities to exist in society don’t and shouldn’t matter which makes sense when you recall they consider LGBT people to be walking pornography.
On page 218 they call for “ensuring Israel has both the military means and the political support and flexibility to take what it deems to be appropriate measures to defend itself against the Iranian regime and its regional proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” The Mandate was published in April 2023 so before the atrocities of both October 7th and the months that have followed. The writer who wrote that, Kai-ren Skinner, on December 28th denounced calls for a ceasefire and calls for Israel to follow human rights and restrain their response as best they could. On a Fox News appearance uploaded to their YouTube on May 14, 2024, Skinner decried data showing more young people sympathized with Palestinians over the state of Israel, as Fox presented it, it was not Palestinians vs Israelis or Israel vs Hamas in this pole. She blamed this on poor education in public schools and universities. She immediately pivoted to calling this support for Hamas. I have been and will continue to be critical of leftists. The Starbucks Boycott over Palestine, for instance, was dumb as hell. The red triangle adoptions and the DSA caucuses supporting Hamas and those who celebrated October 7 are fucked in the head. However. I would suspect the data she was shown in this segment was based on the continuing civilian death of Palestinians. Quite possibly images of children killed and harmed. You can be anti-Hamas and pro-Palestinian. You can support peace, be horrified by October 7, and find your soul torn to little pieces over the suffering of the Palestinian people. What extremists don’t seem to understand is that it is entirely possible and reasonable to be upset over death, over murder, over any civilian being harmed or killed, no matter the side doing the killing.
Page 215, at least, condemns the Russian invasion and attempted destruction of Ukraine. This is my attempt to seem balanced, praising one of the few things in the document I agree with.
One interesting point of difference between Project 2025 and the GOP Platform is that Project 2025 is almost less extreme on the border and immigration. That isn’t to say it isn’t troubling. For instance, on page 175, they want ICE to be able to operate anywhere in the country, often without needing a warrant, which seems like a continual desire by conservatives to lessen standards for law enforcement and prosecution. But the GOP platform calls for an illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants regardless of legal status in a way that completely moves past the need to prove any wrong doing.
On page 216, they claim Mexico is currently ruled by drug cartels and the US must return it its sovereignty. Or, well, call for it and take whatever steps can result in Mexican sovereignty as quick as possible. What exactly does this entail? Is it pouring aid into Mexico earmarked for its security forces and law enforcement? Is it heavy sanctions on the cartels? Or… would it be invading Mexico and fighting the cartels ourself?
SEVEN - LABOR
Doing something ourselves? Well that sounds like work! So let’s talk about labor. We already know that they’re not fans of the teachers unions. The Mandate continuously calls for mass layoffs of public servants and other government workers so they can be replaced with loyalist party goons because we want a goon government. America the Gooning Rule and Edge all day and niiiiight~ Yes, I am a very cringeworthy individual and my sense of humor tends to mostly humor myself. Speaking of humoring myself, back to the goon government. These guys don’t qualify as gay twitter goons who are goofy and weird but fun. They’re stereotypical minions of the bad guy type goons. You can tell this from their bullying cruelty on page 53. “Only in the federal government could an applicant in the hiring process be sent to the front of the line because of a ‘history of drug addiction’ or ‘alcoholism,’ or due to ‘morbid obesity,’ ‘irritable bowel syndrome,’ or a ‘psychiatric disorder.’ The next Administration should insist that the federal government’s hiring, evaluation, retention, and compensation practices benefit taxpayers, rather than benefiting the lowest rung of the federal workforce.” Now the overall idea here is that hiring practices should ignore all traits of applicants. It’s part of their overall hatred of affirmative action and anything comparable to it. But that’s not necessarily why I’m comparing them to the moronic grunts on an evil pokemon gang. Team Maga has decided people with those traits make up the lowest rung of the workforce. According to Project 2025, being fat makes you a worse worker. Having a mental illness puts you on the lowest rung of the workforce. Having struggled in the past with an addiction makes you lesser. IBS doesn’t just make bottoming more difficult. Project 2025 says it makes you a shit applicant, pun intended. So. What is this? This isn’t merely an ask to stop considering an applicant’s history. It is passing heavy judgment. I’m assuming the IBS comment is a jab making fun of the other categories but in case it isn’t, John Hopkins says that “up to 15 percent of the United States population” has IBS. Are we claiming that 15 percent is the bottom 15 of the workforce because they have a medical condition? This sentence goes beyond annoyance at hiring policy and turns into simple schoolyard bullying.
What is the actual bottom rung of a workforce? Those who refuse to care about the health of their fellow workers and thereby endanger them. People who violate federal safety standards, operate dangerous machinery while intoxicated, push for child labor, sexually harass their fellow workers or those who work for them. But the Mandate doesn’t care about endangering people’s lives. You can tell because of their hatred for actions taken to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. Unfortunately, we coronas are contagious and deadly. On page 136, they call for all service members “who were discharged for not receiving the COVID vaccine” to be reinstated with backpay. Trans people being in the military is bad. Those who reject health science and refuse to care about the health of their fellow service members? They’re the best.
This document does not like workers. On page 187 it calls for the destruction of the TSA union. That’s actually because they want no unions in the public sector. Page 115. “Congress should also consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place. The bipartisan consensus up until the middle of the 20th century held that these unions were not compatible with constitutional government. After more than half a century of experience with public-secotr union frustrations of good government management, it is hard to avoid reaching the same conclusion.” Wow, look at that, Project 2025 and the Red Star Caucus of the DSA agreeing: union busting is good when we do it. So bye-bye unions for teachers and other public school workers, postal workers, staffers, judges, firefighters, and more. Oh hey, that would also get rid of the Fraternal Order of Police. Hi back the blue, thin blue line, adamantly pro-cop people: Project 2025 would like to get rid of police unions.
Speaking of unions, for a document that is relatively dismissive of unions as a whole, it is interesting in giving them some odd power. Or, they pretend to. On page 636 they want unions to be allowed to negotiate regulations and employment law. The other side of that coin is that employers can start trying to loosen safety standards and other regulations by forcing them as conditions for contracts. The example they use is a union increasing the amount of workhours before overtime pay must happen in exchange for predictable scheduling. Yes, that does sound unequal and awful. It does sound like employers will start saying they’ll only give ground on certain demands if unions agree to lessen what is currently the minimum standard employers must obey.
Speaking of what one must obey, on page 622, the Mandate half-heartedly suggests that the government should “require that workers be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sabbath.” They say this should be Sundays by default but can change based on religious views. Whose religious views? Well, not the workers. It’s “for employers with a sincere religious observance of a Sabbath at a different time.” So whether or not you get paid more for working has nothing to do with your religion. If you observe the Sabbath on Saturday, you can be required to work it without extra pay if your employer does not observe it on that day. Uh-oh, that sounds like enforcing not only religion on the workforce but a claim that your beliefs don’t matter, it’s the beliefs of politicians, CEOs, and managers that matter.
I called this half-hearted because this is one of the cases where the Mandate offers a different view conservatives might have that they could theoretically be fine with. Before getting into that viewpoint, they say, “Some conservatives believe that the government should encourage certain religious observance by making it more expensive for employers and consumers to not partake in those observances.” Hi. Those conservatives don’t believe in the Constitution. They don’t believe in Freedom of Religion. As is obvious throughout the document, they believe in forcing everyone else to comply with their beliefs, in forcing their version of conservative Christianity on the populace, objections and Constitutional roadblocks be damned. So in case it isn’t obvious: that desire is unconstitutional. That desire destroys freedom of religion. This suggested policy gives a middle finger to secular democracy and to democracy as a whole.
They also give a middle finger, yet again, to our children. Not only do they want to gut and destroy education, not only do they despise LGBT children and the children of LGBT people, not only do they want to deny life saving medical operations and prescriptions to girls, not only to they fail to mention in either way the scourge of gun violence in our schools or of child marriage, they want kids to work hazardous jobs. The Department of Labor, they say on page 628, “should amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs.” This will inevitably lead to teenagers getting injured, maimed, and killed working in hazardous conditions they’re currently protected from. Nothing quite says caring about kids like giving a thumbs up to them losing limbs. But hey, who cares about that if it makes a few bucks?
EIGHT - THE ECONOMY
Let’s talk about making a few bucks. Or, well, somewhat entirely destroying the way the country works in regards to non-profits and charities. On page 729, the Mandate calls for tax reform that “eliminates most deductions, credits, and exclusions.” Charitable donations typically count as tax deductions for those who file itemized deductions. Nonprofits throughout the country rely on funding through grants and donations. Speaking as someone in the theatre industry, the majority of nonprofit theatres rely heavily on donations and grants to stay afloat. A report on how nonprofit arts affect the economy, Arts And Economic Prosperity Six, finds that every attendee to spent about 38 dollars 46 cents in the local economy, with a little over a third being spent on local food and drink. So mathematically one show with one hundred audience members would pump three thousand eight hundred forty six dollars into the local economy. They quote Ken Fergeson as saying, “There is a visible difference in places with a vibrant arts community. I see people looking for places to park, stores staying open late, and restaurants packed with diners. The business day is extended and the cash registers are ringing.” The Theatre Communications Group put out a report for 2022 that says, of total income, 67 percent came from contribution, the combination of grants and donations. According to their report, the industry added 2 point 3 billion to the economy. If we combine its estimation of 10 point 4 million attendees with the AEP Six estimation, you’re looking at approximately 401 million, 856 thousand dollars into local economies. Removing the ability to count charitable donations as deductions will drastically lower the amount of donations placed into all nonprofits. I started doing math, but I can almost guarantee you, it wouldn’t just result in theatres being able to do less. It will result in some theatres completely shuttering. Beyond the damage done to American and local culture, that will have hardcore negative economic effects.
Speaking of negative effects, they would like to “simplify” the tax brackets so there are only two: one of fifteen percent and one of thirty. As CBS puts it, “Millions of U.S. households earning less than $168,000 would likely face higher taxes with a 15 percent rate.” They point out this change, along with the deletion of deductions, would effectively triple taxes on the bottom half of US taxpayers. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a dramatic increase in taxes on the least wealthy Americans.
You know who likes wealth? Banks. As Forbes puts it, Project 2025 suggests “getting rid of the government’s control over the nation’s money entirely–instead leaving it up to banks–or returning to the gold standard.” This comes up on pages 769 and 770. They first suggest instituting free banking where the government largely pulls entirely out of regulating the economy and supply money. My understanding is they’re putting all their ducks into a libertarian belief that if you remove all regulation, the free market will eventually stabilize the banks and stop them from screwing over everyone who uses them. It becomes the duty of the consumer to make sure they’re using the right banks. They then go, “Maybe this wouldn’t paaaass so maybe do the gold standard instead?”
An economist at Iowa State University points out my instinctual objection to the gold standard, “that the domestic money supply is subject to capricious changes due to new discoveries of gold, or the depletion of gold stocks through industrial or personal use.” The same article goes on to point out an issue with both the gold standard and free banking or any other state of the economy where the government can’t issue fiscal policy by pointing to the economic disaster that is Greece.
Jerome Powell argued that a return to the gold standard would prevent the fed from doing anything about unemployment or stabilizing prices in the economy. An ABC News article says it’s sort of impossible in today’s world anyway. “On a practical level, there’s not enough gold in the world to return to a gold standard – and no one else in the world is on the gold standard.”
If we return to the gold standard… does it suddenly become bad practice to use gold in manufacturing?
NINE - HEALTH
Lots of medical instruments use gold plating, so this is my tenuous way of connecting the last section to this one. We already know their views on reproductive healthcare will lead to pregnant people dying preventable deaths as well as further pain for those who have miscarried. We also know they despise any affirming trans healthcare and consider it child abuse. The organizations behind Project 2025 don’t view the actual child abuse of conversion therapy to be abuse and instead perfectly acceptable medical practice. Their view on health is pretty much, hey, it’s okay to harm people we don’t like.
When they cast surrogacy as anti-life, though that makes absolutely no sense, you can draw the conclusion they would like to ban that practice as well. And they’ve got their own anti-life, anti-health stance in being pro-letting the government murder people. They think your sex determines your personality and role in family which is illogical and sexist. They’re more than willing to lie, as seen when they claimed kids raised by gay people have worse outcomes despite the data entirely disagreeing with them.
But hey, at least they suggest adding “lifetime caps on benefits” for Medicaid on page 501. So hey, if you’re on government insurance and happen to be a sickly person or a disabled person whose disability requires constant medical attention, Project 2025 wants to eventually kick you in the ass.
On page 508 they call for Health and Human Services to rescind its guidance that you shouldn’t discriminate against LGBT people. They then start going on about hating COVID mitigation. They don’t like the vaccine. They don’t like masks. They, again, want to bow down and say sorry to everyone in the healthcare industry that was fired for putting the lives of their patients at risk by not caring about a deadly global pandemic. Speaking of, on page 316 they insist that masks are ineffective at dealing with COVID. The Mayo Clinic disagrees. So does an article put out by the University of California San Francisco. And well, the government of Delaware. Amongst many others because mask wearing does help and did help and they’re simply lying because they’re little babies who hate ever getting asked to do anything instead of having all orders and asks coming from them and them alone.
On page 317, they claim that children shouldn’t be vaccinated against COVID because they’re at little risk but apparently “at great risk from public health officials.” To me that sounds like implying the vaccine is dangerous. It isn’t. Also, well, they’re lying by implication. Comparatively, yes, children are at little risk. But, as CNN points out, “it’s rare for children to die for any reason.” They quote Dr. Sean O’Leary as saying, “Just because the numbers are so much lower in children doesn’t mean that they’re not impactful.” A study by the University of Oxford underscores that but saying between August of 2021 and June 2022 it was the eighth leading cause of death in children overall and the fifth for the upper teens. It was deadlier than the flu and pneumonia. But their study only looked at cases where COVID itself caused death “rather than those were COVID-19 was a contributing case. Therefore, it is likely that these results understate the true burden of COVID-19 related deaths in this age group.” Associate Professor Seth Flaxman is quoted as saying, “Covid-19 is now the leading underlying cause of death from infectious disease for this age group.” Regardless, here’s a question. We have a vaccine to minimize the risks of our children dying. Why would we risk their lives? My guess is that Project 2025 doesn’t care about children. If they cared about children, they would have had to talk about school shootings at some point.
Around page 335 they start talking about how much they hate the idea of universal free lunch because they cannot comprehend the idea of parental abuse or neglect where a child is not properly cared for in a wealthy or middle class family or that a forgetful child shouldn’t be forced to go hungry.
Here’s a question. What’s probably the number one driver of health issues in people experiencing homelessness? If you guessed “lack of adequate shelter,” ding ding ding. Correct. Page 544 though doesn’t agree because they want to NIMBY it up. NIMBY’s are the “no don’t build affordable housing here” people. They’re also a handful leftists who are like “no increasing supply won’t drive down costs, we don’t know how economics work!” People need places to live. It’s easier to find a place to live when costs are down. Costs go down when there’s more housing. It’s easier to build more housing when you’re not restricted by single-home zoning laws. That isn’t to say the single home shouldn’t exist. I live in one. Heck, increase the supply of that too.
Buuuuut on the topic of homelessness: page 542 says they need to put limits on how long you can live in assisted housing. Hey, struggling? For whatever reasons you may be struggling? Project 2025 says you can only struggle for a bit, then you can get fucked.
Speaking of. They seem to be against comprehensive sex education. If you pay attention to education debates, the two main strains of thought when it comes to education are we should teach abstinence only or we should teach comprehensive sex education. If you look at the data, only one of those has positive outcomes. Guess which it is? It’s not abstinence only. Guess which one conservatives tend to push while clutching their pearls? Maybe out of concern for pearl necklaces, on page 510 they seem to imply comprehensive sex ed textbooks are “sex-promotion books.” Earlier on the page they push the idea that certain sex education programs should make sure not to promote sex, prostitution, abortion, or high-risk sexual behavior. Abstinence only people view any teaching about sex in general to be promoting sex and risk. They likely view non-vaginal sex as risk. In restricting sex education, they actually increase risk and lower health.
TEN - CLIMATE
On the subject of screwing, what about screwing over the entire world? Let’s talk about climate.
The Mandate dislikes windmills. Why? Impact on birds, general dislike of green energy, taking up land, some lie about windmill cancer, are they secretly followers of Don Quixote? No. Page 319. They’re eyesores. It’s about aesthetics.
On page 323 they act as if climate change has nothing to do with agriculture and the future of producing efficient and sufficient amounts of food.
As Forbes says, the Mandate aims to curtail research into climate change. Over and over throughout the document, Project 2025 talks about how the government shouldn’t focus on climate change and climate policies, we should invest more and more into oil and gas, and we should think less about green energy. The Platform does similar things. Both blind themselves to the possibility of the US becoming the leading inventor, manufacturer, and exporter of green energy and technology both as an economic plan of dominance and as a way of cutting off reliance on the reserves of US enemies and rivals.
ELEVEN - DOES IT MATTER?
When people talk about Project 2025 now, it’s quickly dismissed because it isn’t the plan put out by Trump, Trump has distanced himself from it, and the Heritage Foundation is a far-right and supposedly fringe organization. It’s pushed similar ideas ever since it first started putting out its Mandate for Leadership and our country still mostly functions free from their idiotic ideas for reform. So… does it matter?
Let’s read page 218. “The 2016 edition was one of particular note. It earned significant attention from the Trump Administration … Soon after President Donald Trump was sworn in, his Administration began to implement major parts of the 2016 Mandate. After his first year in office, the Administration had implemented 64 percent of its policy recommendations.”
The BBC notes, “Russell Vought, another former Trump administration official, wrote a key chapter in the document and also serves as the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform policy director.” That’s a clear link between Project 2024 and the GOP’s platform.
CNN’s investigations found “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025 … including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors, and contributors to ‘Mandate for Leadership’ … Dozens more who staffed Trump’s government hold positions with conservative groups advising Project 2025, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and longtime adviser Stephen Miller. They also point out how editor for Project 2025, “Paul Dans was a top official in Trump’s White House.”
Vox reports that “John McEntee, the White House personnel director who purged officials viewed as disloyal to Trump, has a key role in collecting staff recommendations for the project.” They point out that in his last go at the White House, Trump appointed a lot of Heritage recommended people. As well, in April 2022, he claimed the Heritage Foundation would “lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” Well. Project 2025 is their detailed plan. “...(T)here are good reasons to believe he’d reward his loyal allies once he’d no longer be punished for that at the polls. Which means some of the most extreme Project 2025 ideas could well come to pass if he wins.”
ABC News and NPR point out its similarities to Trump’s Agenda47 and Trump’s general rhetoric respectively.
President of hate group The Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts wrote the foreword for Project 2025. CNN quotes him as saying we’re “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” That sounds like he’s willing to commit violence to enact this. I say sounds because I bet he’s completely unwillingly to actually support a revolution. These guys are all just talk. He wrote a book going on about that idea whose foreword was written byyyyy that’s right, GOP VP nominee JD Vance.
So it seems like notorious liar Donald Just Kidding Trump might be lying about his connections to and support for Project 2025. If nothing else, plenty of his past and likely future appointees have aligned with it. Even if he fully denounces it, that doesn’t make discussion over it invalid. This is a massive piece of policy work by an influential conservative political group in partnership with many big names and other influential groups in conservative politics.
So we should talk about all of them. The orgs, the authors, the contributors. But… that is a massive undertaking that should probably be its own video.
So for now… don’t go and read it if you value your time and sanity. If, like me, you don’t particularly care about those things, go give a whirl, girl. It sucks. It’s not fun. It’s a lot of reading job descriptions. So many job descriptions. But I went and read it because I didn’t want to be merely take the concerns I’ve seen on social media. I wanted to get into the weeds, especially because the 2024 GOP platform was empty, incompetent, terribly written nonsense. So I was hoping to get details on policy and details there were. I very much did not even go over everything. There’s constant talk about DEI and CRT so you can guess that it’s racist, yes. They want to close the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They think factchecking is somehow a violation of free speech. So on and so forth.
Please vote this year for as many Democrats and progressives as you can. And hi, look, if you’re going to comment random rude stuff, I am going to probably ignore whatever you’re attempting to say and just have fun in my response to you like a cat playing with a ball of yarn. Well. See you next time.
SOURCES:
“The Mandate for Leadership” | Project 2025
“Project 2025: A wish list for a Trump presidency, explained” - Mike Wendling | The BBC
“Trump claims not to know who is behind Project 2025. A CNN review found at least 140 people who worked for him are involved” - Steve Contorno | CNN
“Project 2025 leader postpones launch of his book with Vance foreword until after the election” - Lisa Mascaro | The Associated Press, via PBS
“Project 2025: The myths and the facts” - Andrew Prokop | Vox
“Takeaways: A Project 2025 author makes plans, rallies loyalists as Trump aims for 2nd term” - Richard Lardner | The Associated Press
“Democrats call for answers on Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation” - Kiara Alfonseca | ABC News
“It seems like Project 2025 is everywhere. But what is it?” - Franco Ordonez | NPR
“Geneva Consensus Declaration On Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family”
“Geneva Consensus Declaration Tramples on Every Person’s Right to Choose” | Amnesty International
“‘Life begins at conception and should be protected’: Global Coalition of 36 Governments Recommits to Preserving Pro-Life Women’s Health Policy” | The Alliance Defending Freedom
The following “Evenets of 2022” World Reports from the Human Rights Watch:
Bahrain
Cameroon
Egypt
Indonesia
Iraq
Kuwait
Libya
Pakistan
Qatar
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Sudan
United Arab Emirates
Uganda
“37 countries sign pledge to uphold pro-life, pro-family policies 2 years after Geneva Consensus Declaration” - Ryan Foley | Christian Post
“Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights” | The U.S. State Department
“Commission on Unalienable Rights” | Amnesty International
“USA State Department’s flawed ‘unalienable rights’ report undermines international law” | Amnesty International
“Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights Will Endanger Everyone’s Human Rights” - Kenneth Roth | Foreign Policy, via Human Rights Watch
“Commission on Unalienable Rights and the Effort to Erase Reproductive Rights as Human Rights” - Risa E. Kaufman | Columbia Human Rights Law Review
“Pompeo says more rights don’t mean more justice as he unveils human rights report” - Jennifer Hansler & Nicole Gaouette | CNN
“Pompeo’s New ‘Human Rights’ Commission is Up To No Good” - Jamil Dakwar & Sonia GIll | The American Civil Liberties Union
“Dobbs-era Abortion Bans and Restrictions: Early Insights about Implications for Pregnancy Loss” - Usga Ranji, Alina Salganicoff, & Laurie Sobel | Kaiser Family Foundation
“Why doctors say the ‘save the mother’s life’ exception of abortion bans is medically risky” - Mary Kekatos | ABC News
“Some abortions are necessary to save the life of a patient” - Melissa Block | NPR
“Planned Parenthood Investigations Find No Fetal Tissue Sales” - Danielle Kurtzleben | NPR
“Parents Should Have a Voice in Their Kids’ Education But We’ve Gone Too Far” - Suzanne Nossel | Time Magazine
“Louisville Board Overhaul Blocked” - Rick Seltzer | Inside Higher Ed
“Title IX and Sex Discrimination” | U.S. Department of Education
“Betsy DeVos apparently ‘confused’ about federal law protecting students with disabilities” - Valerie Strauss | The Washington Post
“Betsy DeVos was ‘confused’ about protections for students with disabilities – so she scrapped dozens” - Taylor Link | Salon
“How ‘Conversion Therapy’ Bans Hurt Kids” - Andrea Jones | The Heritage Foundation
“State Department Pushes ‘Conversion Therapy’” - Simon Hankinson & Grace Melton | The Heritage Foundation
“Supreme Court rejects challenge to Washington state ‘conversion therapy’ ban” - Lawrence Hurley | NBC News
“The Hidden Truth About Changing Sexual Orientation” - Peter Sprigg | The Family Research Council
“Natural Law and the Regulation fo Sexuality: A Critique” - Dr. Brent L. Pickett | Richmond Journal of Lw and the Public Interest
“Evidence Does Not Support the Use of the Death Penalty” | Scientific American
“Does the Death Penalty Deter Crime?” | Amnesty International
“Hamas’ attack put the world in a new ‘geopolitical landscape’: Kiron Skinner” | Fox Business
“United Nations appears to revise Gaza death toll” Fox News | YouTube
“Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)” | Johns Hopkins Medicine
“Arts & Economic Prosperity 6” | Americans for the Arts
“Theatre Facts 2022” | The Theatre Communications Group
“Project 2025 would overhaul the U.S. tax system. Here’s how it could impact you.” - Aimee Picchi | CBS News
“Project 2025 Explained: What To Know About The Controversial Right-Wing Policy Map For Trump–As Director Steps Down” - Alison Durkee | Forbes
“What would be the costs and benefits of returning to the gold standard?” - Harvey Lapan | Iowa State University Department of Economics
“Fed’s Powell explains why a return to the gold standard would be so damaging to the economy” - Thomas Franck | CNBC
“Should we return to the gold standard?” | ABC News
“How well do face masks protect against COVID-19?” | The Mayo Clinic
“COVID-19 Masks: Expert Tips for What You Should (and Shouldn’t) Do” - Laura Lopez Gonzalez | University of California San Francisco
“Myth or Fact - Masks are effective against COVID-19” | Delaware.gov
“Covid-19 is a leading cause of death for children in the US, despite relatively low mortality rate” - Deidre McPhillips | CNN
“COVID-19 is a leading cause of death in children and young people in the US” | University of Oxford
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