Will Project 2025 Take Centerstage During Walz-Vance Debate?
Vance is Project 2025's Posterboy
Are you watching the vice presidential debate tonight? I am.
I’m in that tenuous stage of life where finishing my workday, getting my daughter off the bus, making it to my son’s middle school football game on time, getting dinner ready, and having people over for a debate watch party will probably collide into a messy, tardy catastrophe, but I don’t care. Hearing what the vice presidential candidates have to say is too important to miss.
I’m hoping Republican VP candidate JD Vance is asked about his affiliation with Project 2025, the far right’s twisted wishlist for a Trump presidency. Vance’s close ties with Project 2025’s agenda have made it difficult for Trump to distance himself from the 920-page dystopian document.
But Tim Walz, a longtime football coach, understands playbooks.
“If you’re going to take the time to draw up a playbook, you’re damn sure going to use it,” said Walz at the Democratic National Convention, not letting the Trump or Vance block their affiliation with the deeply unpopular Project 2025.
Project 2025 was authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that wants women to return to traditional roles inside the home, abortion to be abolished, DEI initiatives in the public and private sector to be erased, LGBTQ+ people to disappear, and poor people to pull themselves up by their nonexistent bootstraps. Project 2025’s authors long for the halcyon days of children working in coal mines, Whites Only signs, and abuse staying between a wife, her husband, and their priest.
The organization openly endorsed Vance for Trump’s VP pick, telling Politico in March that Vance is their star.
He “is absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement,” said Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation.
The glowing praise between Vance and Roberts doesn’t end there.
Vance used language like “load the muskets” as he penned the foreword to Roberts’ new book, Dawn’s Early Light, in which Roberts fantasizes about a second Revolutionary War (yes, he actually said that). Vance also said the Heritage Foundation is “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”
It’s easy to see how in the publishing universe, Vance and Roberts are in bed together (metaphorically, probably). But what about the policies Project 2025 actually proposes?
While Trump has made a haphazard attempt to put distance between himself and the playbook, Vance has been less careful, saying “there are some good ideas” in its policy proposals. And though he hasn’t specified what those are when asked, we know what Project 2025 stands for and the way Vance has spoken glowingly about its ideas.
Project 2025 AND Vance want to rollback women’s right to privacy, opening the door to pregnancy monitoring and reproductive surveillance.
It would threaten doctor’s with jail time for providing basic pregnancy care.
Project 2025 wants to end DEI initiatives, something Vance has also decried.
It would eliminate the Department of Education and all of its Title XI protections.
Ironically, Project 2025 would remove the worker protections that most likely helped Vance’s lower-class family of origin be paid at a fair and equitable rate.
Project 2025 wants to fire career civil servants and replace them with Trump loyalists.
Project 2025 would make LGBTQ+ Americans second-class citizens with fewer rights and even less visibility. Vance objected counting them in the U.S. Census.
Project 2025 is too dangerous to let JD Vance gaslight us. In fact, I hope Tim Walz holds his feet so close to the fire, it makes his eyeliner run.
Onward, Democracy Defenders!
Project 2025 would be a horror show for every American! Even Trump supporters will get burned and burned very badly by Project 2025! All the while Trump is making them blind to what is coming for them. No one will escape (except Trump, his billionaire buddies, and corporations) the massive destruction that will descend upon America under Project 2025. It is vital to keep hammering away at the SPECIFICS of how Project 2025 will impact individual Americans. Like workers, farmers, mothers, teachers, children, seniors, families, small businesses, towns and cities, income, Social Security, taxes, healthcare, education, safety, freedom, rights, liberty, democracy..............