WASHINGTON — MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes included Project 2025’s proposed pornography ban among the “unhinged wish list” he lambasted during his “All In” show last week.
The liberal-leaning commentator listed some of the most controversial proposals of the conservative initiative, which its leaders have claimed aims to staff a potential Donald Trump White House in January 2025. Project 2025 is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and many of its leaders are former Trump staffers.
As XBIZ reported, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in a post on his social media platform Truth Social later in the week, attempted to distance himself from Project 2025.
“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump wrote. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Last month, Free Speech Coalition (FSC) warned the adult industry and sex workers about Project 2025, calling it “an aggressive and dangerous right-wing policy proposal that could have severe implications for our industry and community.”
Hayes’ inclusion of the proposed porn ban is newsworthy because many of the liberal and Democratic politicians and commentators criticizing Project 2025’s proposals notably have left it out of their lists of things they object to.
After listing Project 2025’s proposed crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights and visibility, access to sexual health, supposedly “woke” activism and abortion rights, Hayes added, “And, get this, I don’t know people know this, but people should, ‘Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.”
Hayes then stared at the camera and blinked in disbelief, adding “America, 2024.”
MSNBC foregrounded the porn ban denunciation in their episode caption, quoting Hayes’ description of Project 2025 as “the wish list of a bunch of fringe, far-right policy proposals that I think many voters would be really horrified to learn about.”
Sex workers, members of the adult industry and XBIZ have been warning about Project 2025’s sweeping censorship proposals since August of last year, when Dame magazine’s Brynn Tannehill first reported on Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint.
The Washington Post published an article in November stating that much of the planning for a second Trump term “has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed ‘Project 2025,’ the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act,” according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by the paper.
