If you’ve ever written, produced, performed, or distributed a work of art featuring a same-sex relationship or transgender character, sketched a nude for freshman art class, or portrayed a sexy love scene between an unmarried man and woman, the authors of Project 2025 consider you a pornographer who should be thrown in prison. No, I’m not kidding.
Just what is Project 2025?
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project was launched in 2022 by The Heritage Foundation. Its ultraconservative, white Christian Nationalist 900-page playbook, A Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, known as Project 2025, documents the dystopian goals it hopes to achieve once Trump or other conservative is elected President.
Anti-worker, anti-government, and anti-diversity, it seeks to undo the progress of the civil rights movement and peel away protections for women, communities of color, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Its policies consolidate the entire government—all three branches—under control of the President who is granted power to fire any federal worker who shows insufficient allegiance.
LISTEN: The Growing Fascist Threat to American Democracy, with Jeff Sharlet
Project 2025 also wants to ban anything it considers pornography and throw its creators in jail.
Don’t read it before you go to bed. Somehow the Heritage Foundation has managed to write a 900-page manifesto that is simultaneously boring and horrifying.
Project 2025’s promise: Make heteronormative white Christians great again.
As part of its goal to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children,” Project 2025 wants to ban pornography, a goal not out of the ordinary for a right-wing think tank. The problem is they don’t just want to ban your garden-variety adult sites like PornTube and Pornhub; they want to ban anything they consider pornography. And the true targets of this porn crusade may well be drag queens, transgender people, LGBTQ+ library books, and queer representation. Other frequent targets of Christian nationalist porn bans have historically included nudity, sex-advice articles, and sex education.
Though Project 2025 doesn’t clearly define what it considers pornography, its obsession with non-normative gender expression and the LGBTQ+ community, particularly those who support a “transgender ideology”—which isn’t even a thing—points to its true motives. Their list of what constitutes pornography likely encompasses anything relating to sexuality and gender they deem harmful to children, such as entertainment containing queer characters or themes (sorry Will & Grace, RuPaul, and Babadook), nudity (like Michelangelo’s porn superstar, David), fictional works that depict sexual contact between a non-married heterosexual couple, sexually suggestive performances (sayonara WAP and every homoerotic dance scene in every Madonna video ever), and transgender anything.
If it’s not fit to be in a Hallmark Christmas movie, it’s probably too sexually charged.
On page 5 of Project 2025’s foreword, Kevin Roberts writes:
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.“
It’s Mom’s for Liberty on steroids. And this is what it could mean:
– If you’re a gay poet who writes about your first kiss, you produce porn and belong in jail.
– If you’re the literary magazine that published said gay poet, you’re distributing porn. Your editors could be listed as sex offenders and the magazine shut down.
– If you’re the public librarian who put said literary magazine on your shelf, you are distributing porn. You also belong on the sex offender registry.
– If you post pictures of your gay wedding on Instagram, you just created porn and should go to jail. Instagram, the technology platform that facilitated its spread, should be taken down.
– If you’re a transgender person who simply has the temerity to exist, you are not only erased, but criminalized.
The courts may not protect you.
Project 2025 does not consider anything they deem pornographic as meriting First Amendment protection, and in their attempt to stuff the queer genie back in its Bergamusk bottle, will target artists, writers, performers, and businesses first. Our conservative Supreme Court may just side with them. At least one sitting justice, Clarence Thomas, has direct ties to The Heritage foundation.
Even before any suits reach the Supreme Court, imagine:
– Artists and performers served with cease-and-desist letters or charged with felonies.
– Public and school libraries purged of books such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Patricia McCormick’s Sold, and any others that don’t pass the Hallmark test. It’s already happening across the country.
– Businesses—including whole platforms, publishers, and television networks—threatened with immediate shutdown.
– Courts cluttered with government lawyers and defendants charting new First Amendment waters.
LISTEN: The Christian Right’s Crusade for Power and War on Democracy, with Katherine Stewart
Many artists and performers will go down swinging; many will not. Being on the receiving end of a cease-and-desist order, lawsuit, or criminal charge is stressful and expensive. Businesses are even more risk averse.
Make no mistake, Project 2025 will be enacted if Trump is elected.
While he’s recently tried to disavow himself from The Heritage Foundation, 140 people from Trump’s administration—including the architect of Trump’s border policy, Stephen Miller—served as authors, editors, and advisors on Project 2025. And they are poised to enact it.
We must heed the warning now.
As writers, artists, performers, poets, and beautifully diverse sexual human beings, we’ve been warned. The Heritage Foundation has told us what they want to do.
We can’t plug up our ears, retreat to our studios to create, and hope it never comes to pass. We must do everything we can to ensure that Donald Trump and his cronies at The Heritage Foundation never get anywhere near the seat of power again.
This article was originally published at the human i™ newsletter, and is republished here with permission. It is the first in a series of articles explaining Project 2025. Articles about even worse policy agendas–including the destruction of the Department of Education, a complete ban on abortion, and the erasure of minority communities—are yet to come.
