More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Project 2025 is a wishlist of rightwing policy goals for the next conservative president.
I took a dive into the Project 2025 cesspool and fished out some of the choicest morsels, which I’ve organized into several categories: rebuilding the patriarchal family; ending sex discrimination … against men; reproductive rights and wrongs; demonizing our enemies; oil and gas will save the country; and eliminating government as we know it. Enjoy!
President Joe Biden’s decision to not seek a second term—and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him—gives Democrats the opportunity to elevate an eager and consistent messenger on abortion rights heading into the first presidential election since the fall of Roe v. Wade.
Harris had already become the administration’s leading voice on the importance of abortion rights, one of the Democratic Party’s top issues, at the federal and state level. She has spent the last year using rallies and interviews to make a clear-eyed case to voters on how a second Donald Trump presidency and Republican majorities in Congress could restrict abortion access.
Four antiabortion extremists, Dennis Green, Paul Vaughn, Coleman Boyd and Cal Zastrow, were sentenced last week following their convictions for felony conspiracy and violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. These charges stemmed from their involvement in a 2021 blockade of the carafem Health Center in Nashville, a reproductive health clinic that offered abortion care.
On March 5, 2021, the four defendants and the seven other indicted individuals blockaded the entrance to the Carafem Nashville Health Center. Patients were unable to enter the clinic, and staff members were unable to leave. In Coleman Boyd’s live stream of the blockade, he can be heard harassing and intimidating a patient, calling her a “mom coming to kill her baby.” Boyd also encouraged one of his children—a minor—to do the same. A patient and employee of the clinic testified at the trial, saying they felt fear and anxiety during the clinic blockade. Court documents described the blockade as “borne out of the defendant’s lack of respect for the law,” meant to “train and encourage others to carry out additional unlawful blockades.”
The DuPont Clinic, a critical provider of complex abortion care in Washington, D.C, was targeted as the site of protests and harassment two times within five days by prominent antiabortion extremist groups: the Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust (SAH) and Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU).
Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the next Republican president, maps out the permanent reversal of more than 50 years of gains for American women and LGBTQ+ people. The authors of Project 2025—80 percent of whom served in the first Trump administration—paint a picture of a nation where women are fundamentally second class citizens.
Project 2025 contains an 887-page policy agenda. We read the whole thing, so you don’t have to. Here are the most terrifying things we found.
Former President Donald Trump has selected as his running mate Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who has opposed abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights in his time in political office.
Vance, who ran as staunchly anti-abortion in his Senate campaign and in 2021 compared abortion to slavery, has somewhat shifted his public stance on the issue. Trump has reportedly viewed a hardline stance on abortion as a negative for a running mate.
On the campaign trail in 2021, Vance defended the lack of exceptions for rape and incest in a Texas abortion ban known as S.B. 8, saying in an interview that “two wrongs don’t make a right.” In a July 2021 interview with Fox News, he criticized “the childless left,” saying, “Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children?” In June, Vance voted against a Democratic-led bill to enshrine access to in vitro fertilization (IVF).
It’s not that Donald Trump is secretly pro-choice; it’s that he truly does not care at all about abortion rights either way, and anti-abortion groups were useful in getting him elected.
Now, though, those same groups are putting his candidacy at risk. 2024 is not 2016. Trump is adjusting accordingly. And one big adjustment is on abortion, which he wants Republicans to just quit talking about—for now. Once he’s in office, though, the calculus is different.
The Supreme Court handed down its decision on EMTALA last week and vacated the case. This conclusion—at least temporarily—protected a small sliver of the safety net that pregnant patients can count on for care. For the time being, this means that patients in need of emergency abortion care will no longer need to be airlifted out of Idaho, which has been happening since the start of 2024. You would think this decision would be comforting.
It is not.
Instead of doing what it should have done, which was affirm that pregnant people have the same protections as anyone else, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower courts and left the door open for other extremists to bring this argument again.
From June 15-25, the Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust hosted their 27th annual antiabortion extremist training program. This 10-day long program in Washington, D.C., was led by violent, extremist leaders intent on radicalizing young adults into the antiabortion movement and training them in harassment and intimidation schemes.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the number of out-of-state patients I’ve seen as an abortion provider in Maryland has skyrocketed. Many of the individuals who were able to get the abortion they sought had to navigate costly barriers. However, the patients I see are the ones who have overcome all of these obstacles to get the basic healthcare they need.
It pains me to think about all the patients who do not make it to the health center, the ones who cannot navigate the myriad barriers to get the abortion care they need out-of-state.
