Tag: project 2025
Kevin Roberts

New York Times Invites Project 2025 Chief To Speak At 'Climate Week' Event

The New York Timesannounced the speakers for its September 25 “Climate Week NYC” discussion, an annual event coinciding with the United Nations General Assembly session in New York City that promises to “bring together some of the world’s most engaged climate voices as part of a community focused on change.” The event’s lineup notably includes Kevin Roberts, the president of right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation who has led the Project 2025 initiative — the controversial conservative transition plan of policy and staffing proposals for a potential second Trump presidency.

As detailed in its nearly 900-page policy book, titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Project 2025 rejects climate science and dismisses efforts to reduce planet-warming pollution and transition to a clean energy economy in favor of serving the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Overseen by Roberts, who wrote the book’s foreword, the Heritage plan for a future GOP administration seeks to gut or hamstring federal agencies working on renewable energy deployment, climate science, and environmental safeguards while opening up state and federal public lands for oil and gas extraction.

In Project 2025’s policy book, Roberts attacked environmentalists, the U.N., and the Environmental Protection Agency, calling for the unfettered use of oil and gas

In the foreword of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership policy book, Roberts sets the tone for the plan's hostility toward climate action and wholesale endorsement of fully extracting our oil and gas reserves, a path scientists have warned would be catastrophic.

  • Roberts calls environmentalism a “pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.” He claims that those who suffer most from environmental policies are the “aged, poor, and vulnerable.” Roberts continues, “At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human” because it promotes “population control and economic regression” by “regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
  • Roberts attacks global elites and calls for abandoning international organizations like the United Nations. Claiming that “global elites” and organizations like the United Nations are making decisions on climate change that are insulated “from the sovereignty of national electorates,” Roberts argues, “International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed: They should be abandoned.” Additionally, Project 2025 demands that “the next conservative Administration should withdraw the U.S. from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]
  • Roberts claims the EPA “quietly strangles domestic energy production,” later adding, “The next conservative President should go beyond merely defending America’s energy interests but go on offense, asserting them around the world.” Roberts goes on to claim that “America’s vast reserves of oil and natural gas are not an environmental problem; they are the lifeblood of economic growth. American dominance of the global energy market would be a good thing: for the world, and, more importantly, for ‘we the people.’” Under Roberts’ leadership, Project 2025’s section on energy production was reportedly written by the oil and gas industry and provides a blueprint for how the next president can turn “drill, baby, drill” into federal policy. Notably, the industry is already producing record amounts of oil and gas under the Biden-Harris administration, all while holding thousands of unused drilling permits. [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023; Media Matters, 8/8/24; Vox, 3/13/24; PolitiFact, 3/29/22]

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Former President Donald Trump

Trump Says He May Ban Abortion Pill (As Urged By Project 2025)

When a reporter asked Donald Trump on Thursday whether he would consider banning abortion pills, his response was predictably garbled. But the key words in the Republican presidential nominee’s reply were, “Sure, you could,” and “absolutely.”

The question came during a press conference held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, his first public appearance since Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.

“Sure, you could—you could do things that will be, would supplement,” Trump said when asked if he would use regulations to ban mifepristone, commonly known as the abortion pill. “Absolutely ... But you have to be able to have a vote, and all I want to do is give everybody a vote.”

Mifepristone is one part of a two-drug regimen to end a pregnancy during the first 10 weeks of gestation. It’s now used for 63% of clinician-provided abortions in the states where abortion is still legal. The percentage is likely higher, because self-managed abortions and abortions in states with total bans can’t be tracked. In 2023, the Food and Drug Administration expanded access to the drug, allowing it to be dispensed by pharmacies and through the mail.

The Supreme Court declined to overturn the FDA’s actions in a widely watched case this term, a decision that Trump agreed with during the June debate with President Joe Biden. At the time, Trump claimed he wouldn’t ban the drug.

“First of all, the Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill. And I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it,” Trump said then. Now, not so much.

What the reporter was asking about Thursday was whether Trump would use the archaic Comstock Act to ban the distribution of the pills. The 1873 law banned the mailing of contraceptives, “lewd” writings, and any “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” that could be used in an abortion. It’s been superseded by Supreme Court decisions and new laws during the past 150 years, but it remains on the books and on the minds of the Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices.

Using this law to ban abortion pills is exactly what the conservative Heritage Foundation suggests in its extremist Project 2025 blueprint for the next Republican president. You know, the group and the plan that Trump has tried to disavow.

Now that Trump seems to be open to the idea of banning mifepristone again, it’s more evidence he’s in deep with the creators of the governing plan. But we basically knew that already, and The Washington Post had more proof of it this week: a 2022 picture of Trump on a private plane with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts (who Trump said he doesn’t know) on their way to a Heritage Foundation conference.

“They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do,” Trump said in his keynote speech at that conference. Those plans include a national abortion ban.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Kevin Roberts

Under Fire Over Project 2025, Heritage Chief Delays Book (Details Revealed Here)

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ book will be published after the November elections, according to a report from Real Clear Politics.

This comes after backlash against the Heritage-led initiative Project 2025, which aims to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration and is backed by an advisory board of more than 100 conservative groups. Project 2025 has deep ties to former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). Vance wrote the foreword to the now-delayed Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, calling Roberts’ ideas an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay ahead.”

The effort to hide the ball is futile, as Media Matters has obtained a galley copy of the book.

A review found Roberts rails against birth control, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and dog parks. He says that having children should not be considered an “optional individual choice” but “a social expectation or a transcendent gift,” and describes “contraceptive technologies” as “revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family.” He labels reproductive choice methods as a “snake strangling the American family.”

From page 63:

We need to understand what could be called contraceptive technologies—revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family—in the same vein. They shift norms, incentives, and choices, often invisibly and involuntarily. Conservatives inveigh against no-fault divorce, the Sexual Revolution, and the destruction of a culture of hope without recognizing that these cultural changes are all downstream of technological ones.

“If you change a culture on a profound level, you can break the most basic functioning elements of civilization,” Roberts continues. “In the case of contraceptives, we are a society remade according to a research agenda set by the Party of Destruction."

Roberts also attacks in vitro fertilization. From page 64:

Once you understand this pattern (individual choice masking cultural upheaval), you will see it everywhere. In vitro fertilization (IVF) seems to assist fertility but has the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes.

Roberts blames contraception for a rise in abortion rates. Also from page 64:

As other kinds of contraceptive technologies spread, abortion rates went up, not down. Why? Because technological change made having a child seem like an optional and not natural result of having sex and destroyed a whole series of institutions and cultural norms that had protected women and forced men to take responsibility for their actions.

He condemns childlessness as well, recalling the broader political problem sparked by Vance’s unearthed comments attacking “childless cat ladies."

A culture of childlessness is, in the final analysis, a culture of despair.
Getting married and having kids, on the other hand, gives you skin in the game for the future of your country. It forces you to grow up, give up childish things, and live in the real world. It grounds you, gives you a sense of purpose in life, and helps generate community, gratitude, and joy. A culture of children is a culture of hope.

On page 69, Roberts targets the Swampoodle dog park in Washington, D.C., for having too much room for dogs to play and not enough for children, blaming this on “the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government."

The publication delay reflects a political crisis in the MAGA movement, as the worldview outlined by Roberts and Vance in Dawn’s Early Light has proven to be deeply unpopular with the public. Trump has attempted to distance himself from Heritage and Project 2025, especially after Kevin Roberts appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and declared that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

But as the Trump campaign has deliberately refused to provide a detailed policy platform, instead putting forth only a barebones platform both on his campaign site and through the Republican National Committee, Project 2025 has effectively filled in the blanks of what a second Trump term might look like. The initiative includes a more than 900-page policy book titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which outlines extreme positions on virtually every major political issue and includes plans to restrict abortion access, eviscerate tools to fight climate change, and turn the Department of Justice into an unaccountable weapon for Trump to enact his retribution agenda against political enemies, among others. An analysis by CNN found “nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump,” and many of its authors and contributors worked directly in his administration.

Project 2025 has also recently attempted to downplay its own significance after years of aggrandizement. Trump administration alum Paul Dans recently resigned from his position as president of Project 2025, and now Roberts’ book is delayed. But it’s proving impossible to wash Project 2025’s stench off the campaign.

Roberts himself has admitted that the artificial attempt to shield Trump from Project 2025 backlash is disingenuous. “No hard feelings from any of us at Project 2025,” he told conservative radio host Vince Coglianese in July, “We understand Trump is the standard bearer and he's making a political tactical decision there.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Heritage Chief: Vance Pick Is 'Very Connected To The Aims Of Project 2025'

Heritage Chief: Vance Pick Is 'Very Connected To The Aims Of Project 2025'

Shortly after former President Donald Trump picked Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, Project 2025 leader and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts called Vance “a great friend of mine and Heritage” and suggested a Trump-Vance administration would have a goal “that's very connected to the aims of Project 2025.”

Project 2025, which is led by the right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, is an extremist plan to guide staffing and policy priorities for the next Republican administration. The project has become so toxic that Paul Dans, the former Project 2025 director, recently stepped down.

Trump and his campaign have attempted to put distance between the former president and Project 2025. But there are numerous documented connections between the Trump campaign and the project. The latest and perhaps one of the strongest connections between Trump and the initiative is Vance himself, who wrote a foreword to Roberts’ book and has lavished both Heritage and Roberts with praise.

Just days after Vance was introduced as Trump’s vice presidential pick, Roberts told radio host Rich Zeoli that he and Vance have “become very good friends” and that “as a friend of Senator Vance and as someone who admires his policies, I couldn't be happier.” He also said: “His being on the ticket isn't even so much about policy, as it is President Trump saying, that's the future of the country, what we're gonna do as a Trump-Vance administration is give American people hope again. Actually, that's very connected to the aims of Project 2025.”

KEVIN ROBERTS (HERITAGE FOUNDATION PRESIDENT): JD is one of the most authentic people I've ever met. He may be — he is one of the most authentic elected officials I've ever met. We've become very good friends because we had similar upbringings. Tens of millions of Americans had hard childhoods. And I, I think therefore he personifies the moment we're in in America, which is that a majority of Americans, lamentably, as we sit here talking, Rich, don't believe the American dream is possible tomorrow. JD Vance's life proves that it is. It doesn't matter if you're white, if you're Black, if you're Asian American, Hispanic.

His being on the ticket isn't even so much about policy, as it is President Trump saying, that's the future of the country, what we're gonna do as a Trump-Vance administration is give American people hope again. Actually, that's very connected to the aims of Project 2025. So both as a friend of Senator Vance and as someone who admires his policies, I couldn't be happier.

During a July 19, appearance on The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, Roberts also said of Vance: “The left is apoplectic because Trump remains popular, his vice presidential pick is terrific, a great friend of mine and Heritage.”

KEVIN ROBERTS (HERITAGE FOUNDATION PRESIDENT): This is the key point: The left is apoplectic because Trump remains popular, his vice presidential pick is terrific, a great friend of mine and Heritage. But most importantly, this is the thing guys, as y'all talk about every day. America knows that we've got one more chance to restore the American dream. What the radical left is saying is the exact opposite, and they're ready to be part of this change, which is why when they go to Project 2025 and learn about it, they say, what’s in here to hate? This is what I believe.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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