Betty Firth

Our national politics are certainly providing entertainment recently. No sooner does Trump name a vice president than President Biden steps down and endorses Kamala Harris, who steps right in and names our excellent governor as her choice for V.P. While I think a Harris/Walz ticket is outstanding, my head is still spinning from the information about J.D. Vance and Project 2025. His bizarre quotes have claimed a lot of headlines recently. In a series of emails, he called Democratic leaders “childless sociopaths” who “don’t have a direct stake in this country.” He condemned Harris and other Democrats as “childless cat ladies who want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
In November 2020, Vance said on a conservative podcast that childless Americans, especially those in the country’s “leadership class,” were “more sociopathic” than those with children and made the country “less mentally stable.” Vance added that the “most deranged” and “most psychotic” commentators on Twitter – now known as X - were typically childless.
In May of 2019, he said, “We should be concerned about declining fertility, not just because it’s bad for the economy, but because babies are good because we’re not sociopaths.” You figure that one out. His comments about declining fertility seem to indicate he is unaware of the challenges to our planet from overpopulation and the demand on limited resources.
As usual, the rhetoric is inspired by and promotes fear and lies. The right-wing Republicans, generally white men and the women who support them and are supported by them, are terrified by strong women and the prospect of being in the minority as the ethnicity and color of American changes forever. Vance is the poster child advocate for this viewpoint, in spite of the fact that his children are mixed ethnicity. His opinions have been labeled “weird” by those who find these attitudes just that. Many are found scratching their heads as he advocates for rewarding people for having more children–even giving them more voting power– and warning against the dangers of those who don’t.
As a card-carrying cat lover who has chosen childlessness, I take offense, but only to the extent that anyone would give credibility to one more ridiculous, embarrassing Republican spewing their anti-democratic views. Eight years ago, Vance called Trump an idiot, saying he was a reprehensible, moral disaster. He said, “His promises are the needle in America’s collective arm. He is cultural heroin. He makes something better for a bit, but he cannot fix what ails them.” Privately, he compared him to Adolf Hitler. How does anyone come back from statements like that with even the tiniest bit of credibility? He claims that everyone has a right to change their mind, and that he was impressed by what Trump accomplished as president. Really? What, exactly?
However, in one of those chameleon-like transformations that some politicians are so good at, from a self-described “never Trumper,” he started defending Trump’s actions and was then rewarded during his run for Senate in 2022 with Trump’s endorsement, moving on to become a stalwart loyalist. One of his most nauseating defenses was saying that January 6 was definitely not a constitutional crisis, but the opposite, that of trying to challenge an election through constitutional means. Hearing these meaningless words spewed out always makes me wonder who in the world is believing any of this? Are any of these supporters even listening? And then he and Trump have the temerity to accuse Harris of chameleon-like behavior.
If any of you readers should think for a minute that this is just one more deluded dude who belongs in the funny papers, you need to familiarize yourself with “Project 2025 - A Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” to which Vance was closely connected.
The introduction to this 920-page document, claims that the “late 1970s were a historic low point for America, but proved to be the moment when the political Right unified itself and the country and led the United States to historic political, economic, and global victories. In 1979, the Heritage Foundation launched the Mandate for Leadership project and brought together a team of hundreds of conservative scholars and academics, which created a 20-volume, 3,000-page governing handbook to reform the federal government and rescue the American people from Washington dysfunction.” Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981, and they claimed that more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy in Reagan’s first year, reviving American confidence and prosperity
The introduction also claims that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline, but that conservatives should have confidence that they “can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, rescue our kids, and defeat the anti-American Left––at home and abroad. We did it before and we can do it again.”
Ronald Reagan warned, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” I would say that those of us on the Left should take those words very seriously.
The Project 2025 document aims to eliminate any progressive improvements made over the last few decades. DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion – are treated as dangerous concepts that must be stamped out. The tax system would be simplified to a two-tier system, which would put more of the tax burden on middle income earners and benefit higher earners, once again. Here are some direct quotes from the plan about specific changes:
 p. 582: The President should direct agencies to rescind regulations interpreting sex discrimination provisions as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, sex characteristics, etc.
 p. 482: Eliminate the Head Start Program, claiming there has been rampant abuse and no positive outcomes.
 p. 481: Protect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically-based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family.
If you find those hard to believe, you do need to dig into this document. Trump has attempted to distance himself from it, claiming he knows nothing, and that Agenda 47 is the plan for his administration, which also aims to deconstruct education, immigration reforms, and social programs. However, his April 2022 speech at the Heritage Foundation, thanking them for their work, shows the truth: Trump acknowledged exactly the kind of work they’re doing and applauded them: “They’re going to lay the groundwork and pave the way for Trump’s next administration “with detailed plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Go to this site for the complete Project 2025 document: https://archive.org/details/project-2025-mandate-for-leadership-full_202309-manifesto/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL/.