WASHINGTON — Heritage Foundation and current Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts appeared on Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier on Wednesday to defend the controversial conservative initiative, which includes a call to criminalize the production and distribution of pornography.
As XBIZ reported, Roberts assumed full leadership of his foundation’s Project 2025 in July, after its first director, Paul Dans, announced his departure following mounting attention to the initiative’s most extreme proposals.
Over the last two months, the Trump campaign issued several statements attempting to distance itself from Project 2025 and echoed the Republican presidential nominee’s repeated claims denying that he was familiar with the initiative or even knows the many former Trump staffers directly associated with it.
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ campaign has insisted that Project 2025 echoes Trump’s policy statements and that “hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real — in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.”
During a short segment during Wednesday’s show, Fox News anchor Baier lobbed softball questions at Roberts, aimed at allowing the Heritage Foundation leader to double down on claims that Project 2025 is not necessarily connected to a particular party or candidate, and that criticisms of it are merely a distraction ploy “by the Left.”
Roberts also denied that the fact that Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance authored the introduction to his upcoming political book indicates any proximity between himself and Heritage and the Republican presidential campaign.
It only “suggests a linkage between two friends,” Roberts claimed.
Echoing previous violent language — where he stated, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be" — Roberts told Baier that “when the Left continues to mischaracterize, figuratively, we are going to punch them back.”
Outlawing All Pornography, Even if 'Through the Back Door'
Project 2025’s blueprint document for a 2025 conservative administration — which the group repeatedly claimed until July’s controversies that it was planning to staff in the event of a Trump victory — states that pornography “has no claim to First Amendment protection.”
“Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women,” the document asserts. “Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
Last month, CNN disclosed that one of Roberts’ closest colleagues, former Donald Trump staffer and Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought, told undercover reporters that the Heritage Foundation-led initiative has entered its second, more secretive phase with different tactics, including banning pornography “from the back door” through age verification legislation.
