PROJECT 2025 WILL KILL YOUR DOG

IT WILL REACH THROUGH THE TV SCREEN AND BEAT HIM TO DEATH

A friend of mine told me recently that I seemed “saltier than usual,” and he’s right. In my defense, I was provoked. Right after yesterday’s piece on lies and the lying liars who tell them, I watched Kenan Thompson’s presentation to the Democratic National Convention about Project 2025.

If you don’t have time to read this whole thing, I’ll summarize for you at the top: You should assume every single word that the Harris campaign and its supporters say about Project 2025 is a lie. When they cite a page number and invite you to look it up, that goes double: they are definitely lying, because they are sure you are too lazy to actually look it up.

The United States of Kenan

Kenan Thompson is the reason I keep coming back to SNL. For my parents, SNL was the institution. For me, it’s Kenan Thompson, personally. Here he is in a sketch that was all the rage a decade ago, which (like all pre-2015 political sketches) now feels like it was broadcast from some alien planet:

Hosting Black Jeopardy early in the Trump Years:

Just three months ago, during the Israel protests in NYC:

…annnnd the rule of three says I really should stop there, having drawn the political evolution of our nation through the character arc of Kenan Thompson, but I just can’t resist Meet Your Second Wife:

So obviously the one and only part of the Democratic National Convention that I watched¹ was the part where Kenan Thompson came out on stage to talk about Project 2025.

Remember Policy Debates?

It’s a little weird how the Democrats have fixated on Project 2025, but not that weird when you think about it. Democrats have a pretty solid political play they run in every election:

• Identify some unpopular part of the Republican platform.

• Remind people about it, loudly and often.

That’s it. That’s the play. In 2006, they ran against President Bush’s proposed reforms to Social Security. They succeeded, which is why Social Security will have to cut benefits by 25% in about 7 years. In 2012, Romney’s top-down tax cuts. In 2018, the planned Obamacare repeal. In 2022, pro-life laws.

This is good, obvious, policy-based campaign strategy. It works especially well for Democrats because the media lies for them.

For the same reason, Republicans don’t pull this off very often. For instance, when Donald Trump says, accurately, that the consensus position among Democratic officials is that abortion should be allowed up to,² during,³ and slightly after birth,⁴ the media calls him a liar. Since they do that every time a Republican points to an unpopular part of the Democratic platform (as demanded by Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility), it’s very difficult for Republicans to run this particular play.

Still, “pointing out your opponent’s unpopular ideas” is a very reasonable play, it’s one of the few things in our politics that is actually about policy, and it works very nicely for the Dems.

The problem for the Dems in 2024 is that, this year, Donald Trump did something that has never occurred to a Republican candidate before: he decided not to run on any unpopular policies.

Donald Trump seized control of the Republican Party platform this year—by all accounts, through a brutal abuse of the rules of order—and simply deleted everything in it that wasn’t popular. A lot of what’s left is stupid, like his promise to “END INFLATION” by, um… slightly increasing energy production and somehow settling foreign wars? It also has punctuation and capitalization that will make your eyes bleed. But it’s all popular. Pro-lifers are gutted because he ripped the heart out of the GOP’s decades-old affirmation of the fetal right to life… but fiscal conservatives must be feeling even worse, because he quite openly cut off every possible path to a balanced budget by promising tax cuts and no cuts to Social Security or Medicare. GOP opposition to gay marriage? Gone, too! Just about everything in the 2024 GOP platform now is something most Americans actually want!

Trump himself is a sloppy mess of contradictory rambles and he flip-flops like John Kerry’s penis,⁵ but, unfortunately, everybody knows it. Worse, the media has lied about the “shocking thing Trump said” one too many times.⁶ Voters therefore mostly just ignore everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth, so the Democrats can’t just find damning quotes from Trump and run against them. So what are the Democrats going to run against?

Enter Project 2025

Project 2025 is a plan⁷ by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, for how the next Republican administration ought to govern. You can read it at project2025.org/policy. They found a bunch of conservatives to propose reforms to different parts of the federal government. Like, they got Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Elections Commission, to write about how conservatives should reform the FEC, and Roger Severino, a former high-level official at Health & Human Services, to write about reforms to HHS. In some cases, there’s clear division in the conservative movement, so they got two writers to write cases pro- and con-, like where they got Veronique de Rugy, who hates the Export-Import Bank more than anyone alive, to write “The Case Against the Export-Import Bank” and Jennifer Hazleton to write “The Case For the Export Import-Bank.”

Like all 900-page documents, there are hits and misses, and goodness gracious no I haven’t read all of it. (Has any living human? I doubt even the editor has read all of it.) I haven’t even read most of it. I haven’t even truly skimmed it. I read a few bits.

I’m gonna get on the level with you, though: it’s pretty good. Most of what I saw in Project 2025 would be good for America. I won’t highlight my favorite parts today, firstly because this article is already running long, and secondly because I think you’d actually be better off opening up Project 2025, flipping to a completely random page, reading it, and deciding for yourself if you like what you see. From what I saw, I would be thrilled to have a presidential candidate running on it. However, because it is a 900-page conservative policy document that (unlike the 2024 Republican Party Platform or Kamala Harris’s Policy Page) is actually attempting to represent something like a coherent vision grounded in something resembling reality, there’s plenty of unpopular things in it, too.

Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025 repeatedly. I believe him, because Trump is neither conservative nor interested in being associated with unpopular things. That was the whole point of his rewriting the GOP platform to be less conservative and more popular! Even if he were committed to it, Donald Trump does not have the attention span or the discipline or the ideological priors necessary to carry out Project 2025, or even its basic points. I wish he did! I wanted Ron DeSantis to be the nominee, because I thought it might be nice to win the election by 20 points for once! Ron knows how to execute a big plan like this, and we’ve seen from the great work he’s done in Florida what that can look like!

But, alas, Republican voters picked the world’s least popular populist, so here we are. Democrats need to attach Project 2025 to Trump so they have something to run against. They have nothing else, and they can count on the fact that the media won’t call them out for running against a straw man.

That’s why Kamala Harris’s attack page on Project 2025 is more than four times longer than her own policy page.

The Memeification of Project 2025

However, that leaves Democrats with a second problem: Project 2025 is mostly pretty technical. It’s a hit for conservative audiences, but you can’t put a quotation like:

Congress should: Modernize the definition of commodity (which is now largely a laundry list of agricultural commodities) and clarify the treatment of digital assets. (Project 2025, p833)

…in an attack ad. Voters don’t care. And lines like that appear to be 99% of Project 2025.

Meanwhile, even on its more controversial points, Project 2025 appears to have been written by eggheads with at least a little bit of an ear to the ground, politically speaking, because they are usually pretty careful to avoid suggesting policies that are actually unpopular. So how can the Democrats get attack ads out of a mixture of overly-technical and not-particularly-unpopular policies?

Oldest trick in the political book: they make crap up.

My first direct encounter with Project 2025 (that I recall) was on Twitter, via someone named James Bretzke, who posted this:

This is a lie. Perhaps Fr. (?) Bretzke was merely uncritically parroting someone else’s lie. Either way, somebody lied.

What first twigged me was the use of the word “valid” as a synonym for “healthy.” Conservatives currently don’t use “valid” that way.⁸ It’s an insufferable habit of the social-justice Tumblrsphere to call everything “valid” instead of referring to more concrete, traditional, and, yes, judgmental terms like “good” or “acceptable.”⁹ I thought, “What 67-year-old at the Heritage Foundation would refer to family structures as ‘valid,’ but ALSO believe that all moms should stay at home?” So I looked up page 451. Here it is:

Maybe you disagree with this. I can certainly imagine reasons to dispute this framing of family policy in the United States, although I personally agree with it. Project 2025 does clearly value “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children” as normative and essential. Yet Fr. Bretzke’s extraordinary quotation simply doesn’t appear.

Moreover, there is no suggestion that other families are “invalid,” whatever Tumblr means by that. There is certainly no suggestion that mothers should stay at home with their children while only Dad goes out to work. If anything, this passage criticizes fathers for failing to be sufficiently present in the family home.

A more accurate memeification here would be:

Note the lack of quotation marks on that paraphrase!

I kinda thought that the DNC had better oppo research than Random Angry Twitter Priest. But maybe not. I only read the first part of Kamala’s Project 2025 page, but I noticed right away that the first extended quote from P2025 on the page (under, “Then, they’d replace them with politically appointed Trump loyalists”) is a butchery of what pages 43-44 of P2025 actually say. Still, you’d think they’d at least give Kenan Thompson the best bits.

Well, maybe they made Kenan Thompson do his own work. Maybe Kenan Thompson is now the only man in America who has actually read Project 2025 cover to cover. That would explain the quality of this presentation. Let’s go through his claims about the project:

This is Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.

This is a fair claim. It really should be labeled “a” Republican blueprint for a second Trump term, since there are competitors. For example, the Trump-authored, Trump-dominated 2024 Republican Platform? Maybe? However, the Heritage Foundation is definitely Republican, and this is definitely their blueprint for a second Trump term.

(If only Trump would listen to them!)

It is a real document

Fact check: true.

You ever seen a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?

This joke is what convinced me to watch the whole presentation. It’s not fair, but humor rarely is, and I like to laugh. Unfortunately, this is the last joke.

You know how when you download an app and there are hundreds of pages there that you don't read? It's just the terms and conditions, and you just click agree? Right. Well, these are the terms and conditions of a second Trump presidency! You vote for him you vote for all of this.

As previously discussed, this is certainly false as far as Trump goes. I am quite sure that any staffer in the Trump White House who says, “Mr. Trump, I think we should try what Project 2025 recommended on page 228…” would be cut off and dressed down before getting to the proposal.¹⁰

It’s not totally unfair, because a second Trump Administration would very likely have some meaningful percentage of Heritage and Heritage-aligned staffers in it. They might try to implement parts of this agenda without Trump’s knowledge or consent, or they might try to convince Trump to adopt certain proposals from it without telling him that the ideas came from Project 2025. But those conservatives will be in fierce competition with the many other flavors of conservative jockeying for power and status in the White House, as in any White House. They will certainly succeed occasionally, but I wouldn’t bet on it happening very often.

LGBTQ+ Protections

Kenan: Becky, you're married, correct?

Becky: I am! Me and my wife have been together for about eight years

Kenan: Oh, that's amazing! Very, very cute!

Becky: Thanks

Kenan: But I have got some bad news for you! On page 584, Project 2025 calls for the elimination of protections for LGBTQ+ Americans! So yeah, right back to the Stone Age.

The implication here seems to be that Republicans are planning to overturn same-sex civil marriage. Kinda weird, since Trump went to great lengths to delete everything against gay marriage from the 2024 Republican Platform, but, okay, this is the Heritage Foundation, so maybe they’ve got some stalwarts who are still holding out against…

nope.

Page 584 is buried in the Project 2025 section on reforming the Department of Labor, of all things. We’re looking at employment law here, not marriage law. The part Kenan is talking about is at the bottom:

Now, what Kenan said is, strictly speaking, true. This was deceptive, not an outright lie. Project 2025 does call for “the elimination of [certain] protections for LGBTQ+ Americans.” Specifically, the Biden Administration put in place regulations that appear to make it illegal for employers to maintain separate male and female restrooms, or male and female dress codes. The Biden Labor Department also required federal contractors to explicitly include “sexual orientation and gender identity” as protected classes, which the Biden Administration believed was required because of its broad interpretation of the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision—but Heritage thinks Bostock should be read narrowly, and therefore thinks these regulations go beyond what Congress has allowed.

Moreover, the Biden Department of Labor eliminated¹¹ religious exemptions from its implementation of the Equal Opportunity Clause, narrowing its scope substantially, making it more likely that religious schools exercising their constitutional right not to hire people who publicly flout that religion’s precepts (especially on homosexual activity) will have to fight the Department of Labor in court to have their rights vindicated. (They will win, because the Supreme Court has made clear that the “ministerial exception” under the First Amendment is very broad, as is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act—but winning will be expensive and slow.)

There may be other Biden Labor Department regulations surrounding sexual orientation and gender identity of which I am unaware.

But, yes, both these Biden Administration actions helped some LGBTQ+ Americans in their demands against employers. I can certainly understand why some Americans would support those changes. Although I am not at all confident that they are popular with a majority of the American public, obviously the Democrats won’t be happy about losing them.

Still, is repealing those Labor Department executive actions the same as going “right back to the Stone Age”? If you consider 2021 the Stone Age, then I suppose so! However, page 584 of the Project 2025 blueprint doesn’t propose rolling back any further than that.

Helping Big Pharma Make More Money

Kenan: Nirvana, I understand that you are on insulin to manage your diabetes?

Nirvana: Yes! Yes, and, thanks to President Biden and Vice-President Harris, I only pay $35 a month for my insulin.

Kenan: That is great! That is great! But on page 465, Project 2025 calls for millions of people like yourself to pay more for prescription drugs like insulin.

Nirvana: Why?

Kenan: Why? Well, I guess maybe to help Big Pharma make more money that they can donate to Republican politicians.

I actually don’t know where he got this one. Here’s page 465:

This is a Medicare reform page, and Nirvana did not look old enough to be on Medicare to me. It certainly doesn’t say anything about making consumers spend more money on health care. (Trump is so devoted to not making consumers spend more on health care that he killed the last attempt at Obamacare repeal over it.) Is Kenan basing this whole insulin scare story on the call to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act?

Now that I look around, that’s probably it. The Inflation Reduction Act imposed a Medicare price cap on insulin: $35/month. That matches what Nirvana said. After the government imposed the cap for Medicare, several drug companies lowered their list prices to match the cap, which affected other, non-Medicare consumers, perhaps including Nirvana. According to the government’s estimate, prior to the imposition of the price cap, the average ensured person with diabetes was paying $38/month for insulin. This cap, then, has indeed lowered the average price!

It is a dishonest abuse of the text, though, to translate, “Repeal harmful health care policies such as… the Inflation Reduction Act” (a 273-page bill that imposed an insulin price cap on page 87) to “Calling for millions of pay more for prescription drugs.”

Project 2025 does oppose the government directly negotiating Medicare pricing with insurers, something the Inflation Reduction Act authorized generally. The government has historically not been allowed to do these negotiations, because its pricing power could distort the market and drive price hikes and supply shortages elsewhere in the medical system (it definitely will). The Heritage Foundation professes to believe, apparently sincerely, that free-market reforms will ultimately lower the price of ever-more-effective prescription drugs and increase their availability. It is possible that they are wrong and Subtitle B of the Inflation Reduction Act will in fact lower prices of prescription drugs over the long term. But Heritage is not calling for price hikes.

Also, Big Pharma donates more to Democrats than Republicans.

The Comstock Act

Kenan: Anita, what do you do for a living?

Anita: I'm an OBGYN who delivers babies and does surgery.

Kenan: An OBGYN! She is an OBGYN! That delivers babies! Uh-oh. …On page 459, Project 2025 resurrects a law from the 1800s called the Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide and throw healthcare providers in jail!

Oh, man, if there is one thing I want the next Republican Administration to do, it’s obey the Comstock Act.

You don’t have to “resurrect” the Comstock Act. It’s the law. It was passed by Congress. It was enforced through most of the 20th century. The most recent Comstock Act conviction was a child-porn conviction in 2021. The Comstock Act remains in force today, unless repealed by Congress. You can read it yourself, on the website with all our laws.

President Biden is ignoring its plain text, and then getting mad that anyone would dare call him on violating his oath of office (“take care that all the laws be faithfully executed”) since this law is somehow older than Joe Biden is. Comstock’s not even that old. Originally passed in the late 1800s, Congress has repeatedly amended the Comstock Act. The pivotal section received a technical amendment in 1994 and its most recent substantive amendment in 1971, when Congress removed its restrictions on contraception. Other sections have been substantively amended as recently as 1996. It is not possible to claim that you oppose Donald Trump because he is a threat to our democratic system if you also intend to disobey the laws created by our democratic system. Trump’s attempted violent coup against the Twelfth Amendment was an attack on our democracy, and the Biden-Harris Administration’s successful bloodless coup against the Comstock Act is also an attack on our democracy.

(Guys, do you know how many of our current laws, currently enforced, were passed in the 1700’s? Lots! Our very first law remains partially in force. These old laws remain on the books because they’re mostly good laws that the American People haven’t chosen to repeal. If you ever hear a Democrat cite the Logan Act with respect to President Trump, that one passed in 1799 and has never been successfully enforced.)

The Comstock Act provides, among other things, that:

Every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion…¹² is declared nonmailable matter.

…Whoever knowing uses the mails for the mailing… of anything declared by this section… to be nonmailable… shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years.

In other words, it’s illegal to ship abortion drugs or equipment through the mail. You also can’t deliver them by hand, according to another provision. Since the pandemic, abortion drugs have been the cause of more than half of abortions in the United States, outstripping surgical abortions for the first time in our history.

The law that outlaws shipping them is therefore a big deal—worth a lot of money—to abortion providers. In particular, abortionists depend on President Biden’s non-enforcement of the Comstock Act to ship illegal abortion drugs into pro-life states without fear of getting caught or prosecuted. This vitiates the Trump campaign’s core principle that abortion should be decided by the states, on a state-by-state basis, since federal refusal to obey federal law means no state can actually do anything about pharmaceutical abortions, which makes all state-level abortion prohibitions ineffective.

Project 2025 calls for only a narrow use of the Comstock Act, to prevent exactly this subversion of states’ authority over fetal rights.

The Democrats fear that Republicans would go further than this, using the rule against shipping any item “intended” for use in an abortion to prevent all abortion-related medical equipment from being shipped to abortionists, driving them out of business, and thereby imposing a “national abortion ban” through the back door. That’s the (thin) reasoning Kenan uses to justify his line about “ban abortion nationwide and throw healthcare providers [abortionists] in jail.”

Suffice to say that it’s unclear to me how this plan is supposed to work. What do they expect Republicans to do, exactly, to achieve this national abortion ban? Forbid surgical gloves from being shipped across state lines because one of them might be used in an abortion? Forbid curettes? Intercept forceps? None of these are “designed, adapted, or intended,” generally speaking, to produce an abortion. Abortion drugs are. Democrats raising the alarm about Republican plans have never specified, and, as far as I can tell, not a single Republican has actually mooted this, not even Jonathan Mitchell, our most radical major advocate.¹³ Democrats always cite to Project 2025 itself, but, as we’ve seen, all Project 2025 says is that the federal government ought to do the thing the law actually says, the thing the law was designed to do: outlaw mail-order abortions. Democrats are arguing against a “Republican” policy that no Republican has suggested, which doesn’t appear authorized by the law, and which every Republican who has been asked about it emphatically rejects.

I, personally, am one of the precious few Americans who actually no-joking favors a national abortion ban, but even I don’t think that’s Comstock. We will have to pass our ban someday through Congress and have the states ratify, just like the 13th Amendment. Or, perhaps, someday, if we can secure courtroom standing for unborn children, we can make a case under the 14th Amendment.

Obviously, Democrats don’t want to lose the mail-order abortion business, though, so they have called for repealing the Comstock Act altogether. That is their right! Until then, they need to obey the law like everyone else, and should stop lying about “Project 2025 [using] the Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide.”

Also, since the Comstock Act also includes provisions used to prosecute child pornographers, Democrats who call for it to be discarded are actually calling for the decriminalization of child pornography. Of course, it would be grossly unfair to say that Democrats want to decriminalize child pornography, but that’s exactly what Kenan did with the Inflation Reduction Act just a few paragraphs ago.

Don’t actually share this one. We should not lie, even (maybe especially) when they do. Live not by lies!

UPDATE: During the final editing process on this piece, news broke that Donald Trump has promised not to use the Comstock Act to prevent mail-order abortions in general. He seems to leave the door open to “details” like preventing mail-order abortions in pro-life states, but, let’s be honest, Donald Trump has no idea what the Comstock Act says or does, and doesn’t care about following the rule of law any more than the Democrats or the press do. We do not live under the rule of law, and perhaps have not for some time. Anyway, back to Kenan Thompson.

The Purge: Civil Service Edition

Shariah: I'm in the United States Department of Education, I'm a proud civil servant, and a proud Union president.

Kenan: She works with the Department of Education and she's a proud civil servant. Unfortunately for you, on page 78, Project 2025 calls for President Trump to purge the Civil Service of everyone who isn't a MAGA loyalist. Are you a MAGA loyalist?

Shariah: Now, Keenan! Absolutely not!

Kenan: I'm just asking! I mean you might as well be, because, also, page 319 calls for the complete elimination of the Department of Education.

Let’s start with the Department of Education claim, because this one is actually fair. It’s right there in the first sentence:

This is both one of the things in Project 2025 that is genuinely unpopular, and one of the things in Project 2025 I really like. As I explained in 2017, the Secretary of Education is not Queen of Schools. It’s a weird federal bureaucracy that does a number of different things, very few of which have anything directly to do with educating the nation’s children. More than 90% of national funding for the K-12 school system is from the states, not the federal government. If you overview section of the Project 2025 chapter on the Dept. of Ed. (starting on p319), it makes a pretty decent case that most of Ed.’s responsibilities would make more sense under other federal departments, that its remaining bureaucracy should be simplified so schools have easier access to funds, and that some of what it does is just wasteful and should be cut. I think it’s a sensible case.

Shariah would likely still have a job if this actually happened (which, again, it won’t, because Trump hates Project 2025). She just might work for a different federal department, doing the same work.

But, yeah, it’s true, Project 2025 calls for the elimination of the Department of Education. Fact check: true! That’s one so far, Mr. Thompson!

Now what about this, uh, checks notes “purge the civil service of everyone who isn’t a MAGA loyalist”? That’s apparently on page 78. Maybe you can help me find it:

This is weird, because I’m pretty sure the one thing Donald Trump does really want to do is purge the federal bureaucracy of his enemies. I therefore expected Project 2025 to offer some tools to an incoming Republican Administration to identify ideological opponents in the civil service and then terminate them. There probably is something about that somewhere in this document!

But it sure isn’t on page 78! This is certainly about downsizing the federal civil service, which (I thought?) everyone agreed was bloated, expensive, and inefficient. It’s very budgetary. It talks about previous attempts by previous presidents of both parties to do the same thing, and talks about why those efforts failed (which is why we still have the problem today). The next page champions proposed legislation that would increase the weight performance reviews carry in hiring-and-firing decisions. (Right now, the strongest factor in layoffs is length of service, not performance.) That could be used to purge ideological enemies, but not easily or efficiently, since performance reviews are mostly managed by other civil servants, not political appointees. (To be fair, on page 74, Project 2025 exhorts political appointees to “take an active role in supervising performance appraisals,” so that could change, but, again, slowly and not very efficiently.)

What Kenan said was, “On page 78, Project 2025 calls for President Trump to purge the Civil Service of everyone who isn't a MAGA loyalist.” That was a lie.

And Your Little Dog, Too!

I’ve entertained writing something about Project 2025 for a while, because I’ve seen a lot of memes about it, and I’ve been asked about it directly by worried left-wing friends. (One friend even got the idea somewhere that Project 2025 called for the abolition of the Federal Communications Commission. It does not.)

Yet very close to every single claim I have looked into has turned out to be either a gross distortion or an out-and-out lie.¹⁴

Indeed, Kenan Thompson, with the full force of the DNC’s oppo researchers behind him, turned out to have very little more to throw at Project 2025 than the lying tweets of Fr. James Bretzke. If there were real unpopular things in the document that he could quote, I expect he would have just, y’know… quoted them! Instead, Kenan lied.

I suppose this is to be expected in politics. But I do hope the American people see through it. I am glad to have it off my chest, and even gladder that I can now just link people to this post instead of personally doing the work to debunk whatever meme they swallowed wholesale.

Until then, I’ve decided to make my own Project 2025 memes, which are approximately as honest as the ones I’ve seen online and here in Kenan’s presentation:

I think I saw this idea in a tweet.

You shouldn’t share these, either, because you should be better than this.

People shouldn’t lie, not even for power.

(Goes for you, too, Donald.)

TOMORROW: A Bye-Ku for Joe Biden! Our 2020 series is revived, in honor of the new nominee!

1. The only part of the RNC I watched was Trump’s speech, and only because he got shot. Otherwise, I have not watched a national convention since the Republican roll call vote in 2016, after which I turned in my resignation from my (extremely minor) party office.

2. Gov. Tim Walz, my governor and now the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate, has been especially vigorous in making third-trimester abortion—which had been effectively illegal in Minnesota for many years—absolutely legal again, with no term limits, no restrictions, and no alternatives. (Pregnancy resource centers to provide alternatives previously received state funding, under a bipartisan bill from the early 2000s.) In this, Walz has only followed every other elected Democrat in the country.

3. Democrats fought vigorously against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 throughout the Clinton Administration, fought it at the Supreme Court, and have now started repealing state-level partial-birth abortion bans, including in Michigan. They have done so with great fanfare… although without much talk about how they’ve reintroduced a form of abortion where the baby—the proper term here is actually baby, since he’s partially born—is birthed halfway so the legs are out and then stabbed through the back of the head, brains scrambled, head crushed, then removed as a corpse.

They want you to call this an “intact dilation and extraction,” a typically bloodless name, and they want to pretend it is only performed in cases where there are severe medical problems with the fetus, which is simply false. All the evidence we have (there isn’t much) indicates that a large proportion of them are elective. Difficult, of course—no healthy woman is happy to get an abortion, and feel coerced into doing so by circumstances or the people close to them—but the baby is healthy and could be given up for adoption. Narrative interviews with late-term abortionists are always sympathetic and therefore always emphasize the “hard cases,” but, even there, there’s always an admission that the hard cases aren’t the entire clientele. (If you read that second article, you’ll notice that, even among the hard cases, babies born with the birth defects listed very often go on to lead relatively normal, healthy, adult lives.)

Late-term abortions are rarer than other forms of abortion. However, at the same time, there are more late-term abortions per year in the United States than gun fatalities.

In a country with an actual press corps, this would be well known, and reporting would use the legally-defined term for the procedure without scare quotes, but, alas.

4. Remember when Candidate Obama lied about trying to repeal the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act in Illinois? I remember. Democrats hate born-alive infant protection bills, because they prevent the victims of failed abortions from being killed by deliberate medical neglect—even if those infants are handicapped or deformed! How dare we keep handicapped and deformed people alive?! That’s why they keep fighting to destroy them.

Abortion providers need infanticide to be legal. It is very important to them. Remember? We have them on tape. Democratic governors, too.

5. Don’t worry! This joke is okay now! Former President of the United States Barack Obama made a joke about Donald Trump’s penis last night on national television!

6. For example, there was a recent massive freakout when Trump told a crowd, “Get out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it any more.” Vice-President Harris and ex-Republican Adam Schiff both told audiences that Trump was announcing the permanent end of democracy if he won, which is just dishonest partisan paintball, but then a bunch of “respectable” media sources followed suit. They were grossly distorting the comments, and either they were doing so deliberately, or they were too grossly irresponsible to watch the 90 seconds of surrounding footage to get the context. I watched the tape, so I’ll tell you the context.

Trump was talking, for the minute leading up to this, about how the Democrats "cheat," how they engage in massive voter fraud to run up the score, and how they fight voter ID because they want to facilitate that fraud. He says this means that he can only win if his victory is so big that it's "too big to rig." So he has to get absolutely everybody to vote, it has to be an absolute landslide so the Democrats can't cheat. Once in office, he promises to fix the cheating so that Republicans no longer need to win by such massive margins and low-propensity voters can go back to staying home most times. Therefore "you won't have to vote again."

This is not, in any way, a promise to abolish democratic governance in the United States, and it only sounds remotely like that because most media outlets are deleting all that context! The Guardian article, instead of explaining this, is 100% reactions from other people who very obviously did not watch the 90 seconds leading up to the quote!

The most mind-boggling part of all this is that what Trump actually said is still really really bad! In reality, although some Democrats cheat (and some Republicans cheat), they very rarely cheat in the way Trump describes here, and the impact on the final result is nothing like what Trump suggests. He is, once again, setting up his followers to refuse to accept the democratic legitimacy of a free and fair election that they will very plausibly lose, with predictably terrible consequences for democracy!

But, instead of telling that true story about what Trump said, media has somehow transmuted it into a more sensational yet completely and obviously false story about what Trump said!

This happens all the dang time with Trump. I was already complaining about it on De Civ in 2017. Voters have wised up. They no longer believe what the media reports about Trump, and they are wise not to.

That’s unfortunate, though, because Trump is actually a bad dude, and, when he does actual bad things, like January 6, voters no longer believe it’s real.

7. The plan itself is technically called Mandate for Leadership, produced by the Project 2025 team, but nobody cares.

8. I am sure you can find exceptions to this. I am generalizing.

9. I apologize to my friends who have done this around me without my complaining it’s a pet peeve, and who are therefore surprised right now! Now you know!

10. In case you were wondering, page 228 of Project 2025 details the proposed duties of the head of IT for the Intelligence Community. He would be required to prioritize transparent accounting, 5G/6G data transmission and network interoperability, and quantum cryptography.

Very spicy stuff.

(As an IT person, I actually don’t like this page. It’s too heavy on buzzwords, too light on substance, process, and structure.)

11. That link only says they were trying to eliminate it, but, rest assured, they succeeded.

12. I have omitted the part of this clause that outlaws “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for… any indecent or immoral use,” because that provision is almost certainly unconstitutionally vague and therefore unenforceable.

13. The one partial exception I found was pro-life activists in the city of Pueblo, Colorado. Abortionists planned to build a clinic in Pueblo, and pro-lifers sought to outlaw it. Under Colorado state law, which offers unlimited protection to abortionists, they could not limit the construction of the clinic. So the Pueblans appealed to the federal Comstock Act, arguing that (1) the clinic violated the Comstock Act by receiving “abortion-related paraphernalia”, (2) cities have the right to comply with federal law, and (3) federal law trumps state law. This was an interesting argument that I don’t think ultimately would have been successful in court, but they never got the chance to make it, because they lost the city council vote and the ordinance was not made law.

As you can see, though, even if it had been completely successful, this strategy could not have been credibly extended into a “national abortion ban.” It worked only as a method of resistance for a red city in a blue state.

14. Since my friend Jon May has recently written about Project 2025 himself, and since I know we share some readers, and since Jon and I are not shy about our appreciation for one another, I need to clarify that this is not a backended swipe at Jon’s Project 2025 post, which you can read for yourself here:

A Deep Dive Into Project 2025’s Plan to Subvert the Rule of Law and Use the Department of Justice as an Instrument for Political Oppression

I disagree strenuously with Jon’s apparent belief that enforcing the Comstock Act (18 USC 1861-62) is, or could be, optional. I made that clear to him in an email when he posted his article. I also strongly disagree with him about the rights of unborn people in general. I also think he has much misunderstood the implications of p559-560.

However, Jon is passing the test Democrats keep failing: he is telling the truth about what’s actually in this section Project 2025. Jon correctly asserts that Project 2025 recommends the enforcement of the Comstock Act to outlaw mail-order abortions, while leaving in-person abortions (surgical or pharmaceutical) as a lawful option. That’s all I’m asking for, here: honesty, so we can at least honestly debate proposed policies.

Of course, there is still the problem that no actual presidential candidate today is likely to endorse Project 2025, or follow it if elected. Jon notes that “Reporters, columnists, and pundits almost unanimously agree that Project 2025 describes Trump’s plans,” but that’s because, as we saw clearly in late June, reporters, columnists, and pundits are almost unanimously housebroken puppies owned by the Democratic National Committee, not because they are actually telling anything like the truth about Project 2025 and Donald Trump. The policies we are debating are a conservative wish list, which a faction of the GOP will try to push for in the next White House, nothing more. The policies Trump is actually running on, good and bad, are in the 2024 Republican Party Platform. Again, you can tell from the deranged capitalization.

As for the rest of what Jon said, I have not checked through the rest of his claims, because I have not read the Project 2025 section on the Justice Department, which is the focus of his piece. I do trust Jon to act in good faith, even when I think he’s mistaken. The fact that he appears to be actually quoting full blocks of text from Project 2025 without expurgation—unlike Vice President Harris, Kenan Thompson, or the thousand internet memesters against Project 2025—makes me suspect that my trust in him is well-placed.