Women and Children First

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Welcome to my series on JD Vance and Pro-Slavery New Right.

So far we’ve established the New Right is a billionaire-financed extremist movement intent on imposing one-man rule in America. We know that JD Vance is the latest New Man chosen to lead the New Right. We understand that the New Right is an explicitly pro-slavery movement. We know that tech billionaires are using Trump to legitimize their power so that they can have the authority to make us obey.  And we can see JD Vance's liberty requires our subjugation.

We know these guys’ endgame: An absolute sovereign ruling over a society ordered through subjugation and a formal system of slavery. Project 2025 is their plan to get from where we are to where they want us to be. Today I am going to touch on a few ways Project 2025 removes the right to survive from women and children.

The Architect and the Candidate

Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 architect, has a book coming out that frames how Project 2025 will assist in the overthrow of the US government. He says this overthrow will be a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” 

This forking guy.

 1. He’s calling for the end of democracy and the installation of a monarch - so it’s only related to the American Revolution in that it’s trying to reverse it - and then keep reversing for another 1700 years or so. 2. It’s not just “the left” that is opposed to an overthrow of the government or the things the Trump and Vance-led GOP are trying to get done in the meantime like a national abortion ban, tossing civil rights protections, and defunding public schools in rural America.   3. All overthrows would be pretty bloodless if the people being subjugated didn’t fight back.

In his book, he wrote that the nation “must be destroyed and replaced” and then listed lots of institutions that must be destroyed too - like universities, the FBI, the Boy Scouts and specific public school districts. (Does he think the Boy Scouts went woke when they started taking Boy Scout leaders committing child sex abuse seriously?*)

Roberts had been very, very excited about promoting his book. Originally titled, Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America. But then the public began learning what was actually in Project 2025. And - despite all the obfuscation in the document - many people recognized the inherent extremism of Project 2025. 

Roberts seems to have realized that the masses aren’t super receptive to his vision for their future. He softened the title, toned down the rhetoric, and then postponed the book. I guess releasing the toned-down book before the election would have hurt Trump/Vance’s chance to win and implement Project 2025. 

So I can’t read the book! But I know Vance read the book because he wrote the forward! Vance tells readers they might find “the pages that follow…surprising - even jarring.” And then goes on to say, “It’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets“ in service of a new “offensive conservatism.”

Offensive conservatism which makes no damn sense. Conservatism seeks to adapt to progress through the preservation of existing institutions. Conservativism is defensive. (Offensive conservatism isn't a thing but I do find conservatism offensive. SEE WHAT I DID THERE.) But reactionary movements? They do try to overturn the current order and return to a never-past where men conquered the world manfully while women served in the home woman fully. 

So “offensive conservatism” is Vance using familiar terms to try to trick traditional conservatives into aligning with a reactionary ideology. He's also trying to get his opponents to use “conservative” when describing him. DO NOT FALL FOR IT. Vance is a reactionary. That’s why conservatives like Jon Kelly, Liz Cheney, and even Mike Pence are also like, “Hey! This is not it." Which like...if Mike Pence thinks this guy is extreme then....yikes!

Where will this offensive conservatism point its muskets first? Women and children!

The billionaires need to be de-billionized

Peter Thiel, the billionaire who funded JD Vance’s political rise, has declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Wow! That’s rough! When exactly did freedom and democracy become incompatible? He says when women got the right to vote, I am not joking!

“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women - two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians - have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” - Peter Thiel, who is only super rich because he games Roth IRAs and gets lots of government handouts

I am not going to pick this statement apart piece by piece - because that would be a book’s worth of writing. But I will just say:

• Women getting the vote only hurts capitalism if you think capitalism requires the coerced unpaid labor of legally subjugated women. And like, Thiel does think that! And like thank you Thiel, for continuing to prove the work I’ve been doing for years.

• The ‘vast increase in welfare beneficiaries’ is such a telling line. First of all, America is not transforming into a huge welfare state. It's the opposite! We are living in the most privatized, financialized era of American history! But also, he’s not just talking about people who receive SNAP or WIC. He's also talking about children who attend public schools and single mothers who get first-time home-buyer grants.
• Peter Thiel has no problem with a welfare state. All billionaires in America became billionaires because of government handouts - subsidies, lower effective tax rates, and government-awarded research and development contracts! Thiel is no different. His spy-and-destroy surveillance company, Palantir, has gotten hundreds of millions in government R+D contracts this year alone! Thiel is using government handouts to fund the end of democracy and impose a monarchy. Does that make him a welfare king?

Project 2025 is fundamentally a document of dispossession, designed to remove our right to survive.

There’s too much to cover in one email to you. So I will focus on a few ways Project 2025 dispossesses women and children. Unsurprisingly, JD Vance and the Pro-Slavery New Right have drawn inspiration from the worst parts of Ancient Rome.

Women will lose the right to prevent pregnancy and the right to survive preventable maternal deaths. 

Project 2025 wants to take over the FDA and revoke its approval of mifepristone - the pill that is used for safe, early abortions. If that doesn’t work, they plan to use presidential power to enforce the Comstock Act - a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bans mailing anything “intended for producing abortion.” This would be a total abortion ban in practice, if not in name. And the extremist-majority Supreme Court would not stand in its way. 

I suppose the best way to survive Project 2025 would be to never get pregnant, but Project 2025 also wants to severely restrict access to birth control. Huh! It's almost like it's not about preventing abortions and all about controlling women!

The impact won’t just be felt by our daughters - Project 2025 plans to defund global human rights efforts that include reproductive healthcare.

Pregnant people have already lost the federal right to life-saving interventions. Vance and his merry band of Christian Nationalists will impose a federal abortion ban through the Comstock Act or an actual outright ban. Our daughters will die in hospital beds, begging for the healthcare we once took for granted. And we will just have to hold their hands while we scream at the doctors, begging them to obey their healing oath instead of the desolate law. They will not. We know they will not, because they are not. 

In states with abortion bans, women and teenage girls are dying of sepsis. And God! I wrote about this two years ago! I said the sepsis deaths would begin as soon as the abortion bans were triggered.  And I had family members - women who held me when I was a baby! - accuse me of fearmongering, of exploiting politics for personal gain, of using my own grandmother’s abortion for profit! 

As if a woman ever gained a single damn thing from being honest about the condition of American womanhood. Where is the fucking profit in advocating for a woman’s right to life? Truly! Where is it? I would fucking love to know. Because right now, I am not sure how I will pay my upcoming website hosting bill. 

The children of mothers who survived and mothers who died will have fewer rights than we did as children.

In Ancient Rome, babies were often “exposed” on local rubbish heaps. They were left to die because they were unwanted, or their mother died in childbirth, or their mother could not feed them because she could not feed herself and her other children.

The elites liked to claim that the system of slavery saved some of these children. Sometimes an infant was plucked out of the heap to fill in the ranks of the enslaved.  But mostly, the babies died. They had no right to life in Rome, they had no portion of liberty. 

Project 2025 calls for the mass exposure of America’s children. 

They begin in infancy. Project 2025 plans to gut SNAP and WIC, removing milk, cheese, vegetables, fruit, and infant formula from the mouths of actual babies. 

And no, their mothers will not be able to “go to work” to earn enough to pay for the milk and cheese. Project 2025 ensures childcare will become even more scarce!

Project 2025 seeks to end Head Start, a program that has provided care and education for 40 million children since 1965. This program has overwhelming support from both Democrats and Republicans. And rural, traditionally conservative areas will be hit the hardest by the end of the program. Vance and his people know this! And they don’t care! Because their liberty requires our subjugation! 

Significantly cutting child care supply will have ripple effects across the entire economy. Roughly 68 percent of children under age 6 in the United States have all available parents in the workforce, meaning access to child care is both critical for child well-being and the economy. Lack of access to reliable and affordable infant and toddler care currently costs the U.S. economy $122 billion every year due to lost earnings, productivity, and tax revenue. This would only increase with the elimination of the Head Start program.

Additionally, eliminating Head Start would upend the progress states and localities have made on universal pre-K. The District of Columbia, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, and West Virginia—top states in pre-K access for 4-year-olds—each have integrated Head Start programs into their state pre-K programs. For instance, in West Virginia, where pre-K is available for all 4-year-olds, 68 percent of the state’s preschool classrooms were in Head Start programs in the 2020 school year. Without Head Start, states would have to take on a larger share of funding to reach universal pre-K access.

A July 2023 poll by the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies on behalf of the First Five Years Fund, a child care advocacy group, found widespread support for Head Start across party lines. When asked whether funding for Head Start and Early Head Start should increase, 71% of Republicans and 89% of Democrats said yes. - Source

In Ancient Rome, only children of the elite got an education. The original meaning of liberal arts in Latin is ‘the intellectual pursuits suited to the free.' Vance does not believe your children are born free. They are not owed an education.

Project 2025 lays out a plan to tear apart the public school system. Among many other ‘end education’ line items: they plan to end Title 1, the program providing federal funding to schools serving low-income children. This will disproportionately impact children in rural, historically conservative areas. They plan to subjugate their base along with everyone else. 

This also helps us understand their commitment to school shootings! Routine mass school shootings are a recent trend, directly tied to the lapsed semi-automatic weapons band, the Right’s post-90s investment in the production of militia machismo and a flailing mental healthcare system. Yet JD Vance calls school shootings “a fact of life.” Because under the Right’s regime, it will be. Children do not get protections because they have no right to liberty.

Project 2025 makes that super clear when it argues that 16 year olds should be able to work “dangerous jobs.” So the kids who do not access to “the intellectual pursuits suited to the free” get to work “inherently dangerous jobs!"

“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people … from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job…” - Project 2025

This totally aligns with these guys' obsession with ancient Rome, where the children of the non-elite were destroyed by the production of the empire. 

“Skeletons of the very young have been discovered in excavations with clear signs in their bones and joints of hard physical labor; one particular cemetery just outside Rome, near an ancient laundry and textile works, contains the remains of young people who obviously had years of heavy work behind them (showing the effects of the stamping and the treading needed in the treatment of cloth, rather than of skipping and ball games.)”  - Mary Beard, SPQR

The Ancient Romans were very into child marriage. Girls as young as 11 and 12 were married and impregnated by men in their mid to late twenties. Impregnating a child is a great way to assure she’s completely dependent even once she becomes an adult.

So unsurprisingly, The GOP is FOR child marriage but against gender-affirming care for minors. That seems weird, right? Like…if a child can consent to marriage they can’t consent to healthcare? How does that make sense? It all comes back to the New Right's definition of liberty!

Child marriage is a way to remove a child’s freedom - and to keep her from gaining freedom as she reaches adulthood. But gender-affirming care protects a child’s freedom. And JD Vance and the Pro-Slavery New Right can't have that, can they? Every single child receiving gender affirming care is a child outside of JD Vance's dominion.

Girls who survive their childhood and go on to have children safely will be dispossessed by Project 2025 too. 

We know that Project 2025 plans to dismantle the civil rights laws that protect marginalized people everywhere - including the workplace. But I haven’t seen as much coverage about how Project 2025’s “protections” will drive women out of the workplace. 

For example:

“Congress should pass a law requiring that to the extent an employer provides employee benefits for abortion, it must provide equal or greater benefits for pregnancy, childbirth, maternity, and adoption. That law should also clarify that no employer is required to provide any accommodations or benefits for abortion.” - Project 2025

This won’t lead to more companies offering maternity benefits! It will lead to more companies offering fewer reproductive benefits, full stop! Because guess what? America’s version of capitalism is anti-woman, anti-child and anti-family. And so American companies are anti-woman, anti-child and anti-family! All of them! (Except maybe Patagonia? Call me guys, I’d love to sell out for you.)

Companies love to cut employee benefits! And they just got the justification! They’ll cut abortion benefits because they don’t want to shell out for maternity benefits. And yes, this will ultimately mean maternity benefits become even rarer! It’ll be a race to the bottom! 

AND! Even if a woman decides to continue working through the postpartum bleeding, she may not even get the chance! Because Project 2025 will have removed the protections that kept her from being fired for being pregnant.

Project 2025 also calls for Congress to “incentivize on-site childcare.” Which sounds kind of great, right? But guess what will happen when a company decides it doesn’t want to pay for expensive on-site childcare? It just won’t hire women in the first place. Because Project 2025 has given them the right to discriminate from hiring to firing.

Within five years of Project 2025 being implemented, there will be fewer women in the labor force. And that has always, always been the point. Because once women do not have access to their own wages, they’ve truly lost all meaningful power in our capital-driven society. 

Every single thing designed to hurt women and children was designed to hurt some women and children worse: Black women and children, Indigenous women and children, disabled women and children, Latine women and children, queer women and children. 

How long do you think women get to hold onto the vote in a society where they have no right to survive? How long do you think children get to have childhoods under a regime that believes they have no right to survive? 

Please Consider

As the United States enters the final stretch of the 2024 election season, anxieties about our nation’s future are at an all-time high. When I get anxious like this, I often turn to the people who make it their business to wrestle with the hard questions facing us, the activists who work on issues no matter who is in office. I don’t go much for blanket statements about hope or light or justice, but I do find inspiration in hearing from the people who have done the work even through times of despair. Below, four activists and leaders working on four key issues in this election—the environment, immigration, trans rights, and reproductive justice—remind us there will be work to be done on Wednesday, November 6, regardless of whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins the presidency. It’s just a question of what kind. - What Comes After Election Day, Kaitlin Greenidge

What Comes After Election Day?

Activists and longtime advocates for the environment, immigration reform, reproductive justice, and trans rights talk about what comes next, no matter who wins.

Harper's BAZAARKaitlyn Greenidge

White and Black women have joined together to power progressive causes — from abolition to civil rights — but it’s a tenuous alliance. - How Will White Women Vote? It's a Question With a Fraught History, Nikole Hannah-Jones

..a lot of women are voting to regulate other women - Tressie McMillan Cottom