Maybe you heard Project 2025 is dead.
Donald Trump says he doesn’t like the blueprint for a second Trump term developed by a bunch of his loyalists. Claims he had nothing to do with it. Sure.
The Heritage Foundation closed its Project 2025 workshop while the plans’ architects scattered, fearing Trump’s wrath.
Turns out much of Project 2025 is unpopular. It made Trump look bad. The kiss of death.
But don’t you believe it. Project 2025 isn’t dead. It’s just sleeping. If Trump wins, its ideas will make an amazing comeback. Some people will say it’s the greatest comeback ever.
And that’s because Project 2025 will give Trump extensive powers to bend our government to his political will. Trump likes power. And he’ll need more of it do very important things to radically transform America.
You know, like banning porn.
And it’s not just about naughty books or videos. It’s about transforming American culture to align with their narrow view of Christianity inflicted by an authoritarian state.
Apparently, Project 2025 backers believe this is a big issue. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, is all wound up:
“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.”
Porn has often been a target in the U.S., sometimes for good reason. But Project 2025 appears to argue human beings by their very existence can be considered pornographic. Just being transgender in the world is an offense, according to Roberts. They’re an omnipresent threat, not real people.
We’ve seen this sort of thinking in Iowa.
The Legislature and Gov. Kim Reynolds ordered “pornographic” books removed from school libraries if they depict a sex act. Teachers are forbidden to talk about LGBTQ issues or people in lower grades, even if the lessons are age appropriate.
School districts offering a supportive environment for trans kids, who often are targets of abuse, got their knuckles smacked by the schoolmarm residing in Terrace Hill.
So, we’ve tried to make LGBTQ Iowans disappear. School districts are banning books that are not pornographic. Parents are barred from approving gender affirming medical care. Persecution is good politics.
This is all being done because trans students are somehow a threat to their classmates in bathrooms. But even Iowa stopped short of charging librarians of crimes and designating a whole minority group as living, breathing “porn.” But give Republicans time.
Don’t you think it’s weird conservatives are so fixated on the existence of transgender people?
They nearly faint dead away at any mention of drag queens They believe kids learning about their LGBTQ friends and neighbors will be indoctrinated and pressured to change their gender. Fearing a kid is going to switch genders by learning about trans people is like saying teaching them about butterflies will prompt kids to wrap themselves up in cocoons.
Guys like Roberts and our Statehouse school board are the ones making this all about sex. They condemn misogyny as they force women to carry babies to term regardless of the horrible situations they face.
And this is about free speech.
During the last 50 years, it’s been cases involving the purveyors of porn that helped broaden the scope of free speech in this country. Speech everybody loves needs no protection.
The Supreme Court has ruled pornography is protected speech. But child porn and obscene materials are not protected. It defines obscenity as material that appeals to the prurient interest, describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic.
Iowa’s obscenity law basically adopts the same standards.
Most books targeted by Iowa lawmakers are not obscene under the law. So, they had to make up a new standard focusing on sex acts. Do books that depict sex discreetly and artfully deserve to be banished? School districts don’t know, so they’re better off removing too many than too few.
Teachers will think twice about teaching literature that’s on the border line. Ah, the good old chilling effect. It’s already happening.
If somehow the government can outlaw porn, label human beings as pornographic and put teachers on a sex offender registry, you wonder who conservatives will attack next. Everything in Project 2025 is an attempt to destroy conservative enemies, real or imagined. And no matter how much damage they do, it’s never enough
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently wrote about the book “Unhumans.” It was written by Joshua Lisec and Jack Posobiec, who pushed a conspiracy that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington pizza joint.
Goldberg wrote the book insists leftists “don’t deserve the status of human beings.” It says “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans.”
Fascist Fransisco Franco is a hero in the book, along with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who threw his political opponents from helicopters. And, of course, Joseph McCarthy returns. Those were the days.
What makes this screed remarkable is the book cover includes a blurb from Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance.
“In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people,” Vance wrote in the blurb. “Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”
Vance continues to reveal his true colors. He is becoming more and more creepy by the day.
So, the answer to who’s next is, apparently, anyone who disagrees with the truly fringe objectives of these nutjobs. Weirdly, we must take them seriously.
(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com
www.thegazette.com
Donald Trump says he doesn’t like the blueprint for a second Trump term developed by a bunch of his loyalists. Claims he had nothing to do with it. Sure.
The Heritage Foundation closed its Project 2025 workshop while the plans’ architects scattered, fearing Trump’s wrath.
Turns out much of Project 2025 is unpopular. It made Trump look bad. The kiss of death.
But don’t you believe it. Project 2025 isn’t dead. It’s just sleeping. If Trump wins, its ideas will make an amazing comeback. Some people will say it’s the greatest comeback ever.
And that’s because Project 2025 will give Trump extensive powers to bend our government to his political will. Trump likes power. And he’ll need more of it do very important things to radically transform America.
You know, like banning porn.
And it’s not just about naughty books or videos. It’s about transforming American culture to align with their narrow view of Christianity inflicted by an authoritarian state.
Apparently, Project 2025 backers believe this is a big issue. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, is all wound up:
“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.”
Porn has often been a target in the U.S., sometimes for good reason. But Project 2025 appears to argue human beings by their very existence can be considered pornographic. Just being transgender in the world is an offense, according to Roberts. They’re an omnipresent threat, not real people.
We’ve seen this sort of thinking in Iowa.
The Legislature and Gov. Kim Reynolds ordered “pornographic” books removed from school libraries if they depict a sex act. Teachers are forbidden to talk about LGBTQ issues or people in lower grades, even if the lessons are age appropriate.
School districts offering a supportive environment for trans kids, who often are targets of abuse, got their knuckles smacked by the schoolmarm residing in Terrace Hill.
So, we’ve tried to make LGBTQ Iowans disappear. School districts are banning books that are not pornographic. Parents are barred from approving gender affirming medical care. Persecution is good politics.
This is all being done because trans students are somehow a threat to their classmates in bathrooms. But even Iowa stopped short of charging librarians of crimes and designating a whole minority group as living, breathing “porn.” But give Republicans time.
Don’t you think it’s weird conservatives are so fixated on the existence of transgender people?
They nearly faint dead away at any mention of drag queens They believe kids learning about their LGBTQ friends and neighbors will be indoctrinated and pressured to change their gender. Fearing a kid is going to switch genders by learning about trans people is like saying teaching them about butterflies will prompt kids to wrap themselves up in cocoons.
Guys like Roberts and our Statehouse school board are the ones making this all about sex. They condemn misogyny as they force women to carry babies to term regardless of the horrible situations they face.
And this is about free speech.
During the last 50 years, it’s been cases involving the purveyors of porn that helped broaden the scope of free speech in this country. Speech everybody loves needs no protection.
The Supreme Court has ruled pornography is protected speech. But child porn and obscene materials are not protected. It defines obscenity as material that appeals to the prurient interest, describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic.
Iowa’s obscenity law basically adopts the same standards.
Most books targeted by Iowa lawmakers are not obscene under the law. So, they had to make up a new standard focusing on sex acts. Do books that depict sex discreetly and artfully deserve to be banished? School districts don’t know, so they’re better off removing too many than too few.
Teachers will think twice about teaching literature that’s on the border line. Ah, the good old chilling effect. It’s already happening.
If somehow the government can outlaw porn, label human beings as pornographic and put teachers on a sex offender registry, you wonder who conservatives will attack next. Everything in Project 2025 is an attempt to destroy conservative enemies, real or imagined. And no matter how much damage they do, it’s never enough
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently wrote about the book “Unhumans.” It was written by Joshua Lisec and Jack Posobiec, who pushed a conspiracy that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington pizza joint.
Goldberg wrote the book insists leftists “don’t deserve the status of human beings.” It says “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans.”
Fascist Fransisco Franco is a hero in the book, along with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who threw his political opponents from helicopters. And, of course, Joseph McCarthy returns. Those were the days.
What makes this screed remarkable is the book cover includes a blurb from Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance.
“In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people,” Vance wrote in the blurb. “Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”
Vance continues to reveal his true colors. He is becoming more and more creepy by the day.
So, the answer to who’s next is, apparently, anyone who disagrees with the truly fringe objectives of these nutjobs. Weirdly, we must take them seriously.
(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com
Opinion: The hope for an authoritarian America lives, and Project 2025 will never die
Project 2025 isn’t dead. It’s just sleeping.
www.thegazette.com
