Project 2025 is a Road Map to a Conservative United States. Here’s What You Need to Know.

Politicizing independent institutions, spreading misinformation, aggrandizing and consolidating executive power, weakening checks and balances, quashing criticism and dissent, marginalizing and restricting rights of specific communities, corrupting election, and stoking violence are patterns right out of authoritarian playbook. These patterns are written all over Project 2025, an initiative out of the Heritage Foundation. Beirne Roose-Snyder, Senior Policy Fellow at the Council for Global Equality, sits down to talk with us about Project 2025—what is it, how it seeks to shape America, and what it means for LGBTQI+ rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Project 2025 is a broad vision about the future of the United States led by the Heritage Foundation. The project includes a 950-page map to achieving the project, which is centered on obtaining and ultimately, continuing a conservative United States of America.  Approximately 80 organizations have signed on to this project, and the targeting and restricting of LGBTQI+ rights and sexual and reproductive health and rights is overrepresented throughout the project and roadmap.

Links from this episode

Beirne Roose-Snyder on Twitter
Council for Global Equality on Twitter
Council for Global Equality on Facebook
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism
Project 2025

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. [music intro]

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Hi, rePROs! How's everybody doing? I'm your host Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So y'all, I have some really big news to share, and I am very overwhelmed and very excited, and just so freaking proud of our team. So, I told you late last year that we were up for consideration for some awards under the Anthem Awards, and everybody had to go out and vote. And so, I thought we were only up for those community choice awards where we needed people to vote for us to win. And so imagine my surprise when we got an email earlier this month in January, saying that rePROs Fight Back actually won two awards separate from that. I, yeah, I cried. Completely honest, I cried. I did not see it coming. I was just so overwhelmed by the thought of just this amazing recognition of our work. So, all that is to say re Fight Back won two Anthem Awards. We won, first, a Bronze Award for a national awareness campaign in the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion category. And we won a silver for, again, a national awareness campaign for the Human and Civil Rights Category. And I can't believe it. I still can't believe it. It's had a while for it to settle in with me because we knew a little while in advance. We just couldn't tell you until now. I'm just so happy and just so proud of our team for all of the amazing work that they do. So, just huge, huge, huge thank you to the amazing Rachel, the amazing Elena, our editor, Meg, I just- thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your hard work. I know I may be the voice and the face but it is not just me doing all of the things and this podcast would not be what it is without the amazing team behind me. So, yeah, very grateful to our editor, Meg. Elena, who does all of our amazing social media. Rachel, who has been with me from the very beginning, helping me, you know, find my way through tricky episodes, but I'm not sure how the outline that I should follow, or she did our social media for a long time, our website, like she has done so much, and I am just so grateful for every one of the six years she has been with me and making this a better and stronger podcast. I am so thankful to the Population Institute for letting me start this podcast, or my old boss Bob, pushing me to start this podcast. We wouldn't be around six years later without their support and the freedom to run the podcast the way that we would like and to make the product that we would like and to talk about the issues I would like. I'm just so grateful for all of that, and I am so thankful to all of you who have been with us from the very beginning, who have joined us along the way, who joined us today. I just thank you all so much and just thank you to the Anthem Awards. I am just, again, so overwhelmed and grateful and just so excited. It just means so, so much to have our work just to get that kind of approval. And it just means a lot to me. You know, sometimes you just feel like you record these things and put them out into the void, and so to get that kind of validation, it just- it meant a lot to me, and I am just so overwhelmed with it all and grateful and so excited. So, I can't wait to get the award and be able to hold it in my hand, get the awards, and hold them in my hand and be able to share pictures with y'all. I am very, very excited and I am, again, just so grateful for my team and proud of my team. And just thank you all. Yeah, it was so hard. Y'all, you have no idea how hard it has been to not tell everybody, like shout it from the mountaintops as soon as I got it because I was so excited and again, cried, so overwhelmed. And it took so much not to just like, tell everybody, oh my God, you, you guys, we won an award. Oh my God. But embargoes, y'all, I had to hold onto it. Y'all, I had to hold onto it for like three weeks. It was so hard. But I'm so excited that we can finally tell you all I am just really, really happy. And I celebrated at Disney because that is where I was when we could finally be public about it. And again, this is all prerecorded. So, I'll tell you about my trip in our next episode because, while I am back in the office now, I had to re-record or I had to record this before I left. So, yeah, just so much excitement. So, just thank you all! With that, let's turn to this week's episode, or I'll keep rambling on and on about how happy and excited I am. And y'all don't wanna hear that for another like 20 minutes. That would be silly. So, let's turn to the always amazing Beirne Roose-Snyder with the Council for Global Equality to talk to us about...so, we did the blueprint episode, right? Looking at the hope and the excitement for what the sexual reproductive health rights and justice community wants in the next four years. So I couldn't think of a better person to do the flip side and talk about the doom of what we have seen from the anti right side of what their asks are for the next four years. So honestly, there's not a better person to talk to about all of the terrible things the anti-rights side wants than Beirne. So I am so excited to talk to her about this and let's just go to make a conversation with Beirne. Hi Beirne, thank you for being here!

Beirne: Hi, Jennie. It's wonderful to be back with you.

Jennie: So, before we get into this, like, really happy and upbeat episode, can you maybe introduce yourself and include your pronouns?

Beirne: I would love to. I'm Beirne Roose-Snyder. I use she/her pronouns. I'm the senior policy fellow at the Council for Global Equality which is a coalition of 35 member organizations that work on LGBTQ rights in US foreign policy. And I've also worked sort of across sexual and reproductive health and rights in the law and in policy over the last 15 years or so.

Jennie: So, at the end of the year, really the beginning of this one, again, I dunno time. I have no idea what day it is. Like, whatever. I had on a wonderful colleague, Caitlin from Planned Parenthood and Candace, who was at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice at the time, to talk about this hopeful document called the Blueprint and looking ahead about what we want for SRHR. So, I'm really happy to have you come on and talk about, right, like, real happy, uplifting…oh, wait, shoot!

Beirne: [laughs]

Jennie: That's right. Beirne here to basically talk about the opposite. And honestly, there's nobody I would rather talk about just like the terrible, horrible with than you. So, thanks for being here to do that.

Beirne: Thank you? I guess. You know, good company at the end of the world. You know, so I'm so glad that Caitlyn and Candace got a chance to talk about the blueprint, but I wanna start off right off the bat by distinguishing this, because the blueprint is a public policy document that it's, that's putting forward the ways in which we can work within our system to promote sexual and reproductive health and rights and justice and sort of encourage proactive policy that's enshrining and systematizing more of the health rights and the bodily autonomy rights that we think are the right direction for public policy. What I'm gonna talk about today is something that is outside of just the partisan sphere, and it's outside of simply a public policy document. It's really a vision for the future of the United States that is profoundly undemocratic. And so, while I think it's easy to sort of say, well, we did a roadmap, here's theirs, I wanna make sure I'll take a lot of pauses to really distinguish how this isn't actually just sort of like two different policy visions. It's a systemic vision that does not fit within democracy and, and quite intentionally. So, I'm here to talk about Project 2025. I think probably not a lot of your listeners have actually heard of it before. It's an incredibly broad vision and project for the future of the United States. It includes a lot of staffing plans as well, and then also has something called the Mandate for Leadership, which is a 950 page roadmap for this Project 2025. It's the plan for the next conservative president. I really wanna acknowledge in the beginning, the incredible work, a lot of sort of democracy folks and extremism folks have done around analyzing Project 2025 and trying to drag it out into light in the last couple months. It's 950 pages and, and they're hate-filled 950 pages. So, having people go through the whole thing is a pretty big deal. I particularly wanna just acknowledge and thank the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism who have done really invaluable work on this. And their description is, Project 2025 is an authoritarian roadmap to dismantling a thriving, inclusive democracy for all. And as I talk about it, and particularly pull out the parts around abortion rights and reproductive rights and LGBTQI+ rights, like they're not overstating it. If anything, they're being quite restrained in how they're describing Project 2025. So, Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation. They are the lead on it. There's about 80 organizations that have signed on and in and contributed as well. This includes Steven Miller's new legal organization. It includes Concerned Women for America, CFAM, Talking Points America, is that their acronym? It includes a lot of sort of isolationist anti-immigration groups. It includes Tea Party. It's, I think, really valuable to see all 80 organizations together and understand the depths in which they're working together to create a very, very different vision of what the United States should be. And this isn't a dream project. This is a 2025 project. This is a one year from now project. Project 2025 is much broader than sexual and reproductive health and rights and LGBTQI rights, which is what I'm gonna talk about mostly today. But I think it's really important, start with that structure and start really continuing to reiterate that this is the Heritage Foundation. This is like not some quacky off, like, on the side folks. This is like a big building in Capitol Hill and they are not your grandparents Heritage Foundation as harmful as that may have been. And so, we have to understand this as sort of...this is the mainstream vision of what a next conservative president should and will do. The Project 2025, the document, I'm gonna mostly call it the project, just so I don't like fall all over my words. There's a really massive framework for dismantling the federal government, removing a political civil service and putting in far right political partisans across all federal agencies. This is like an incredible reproductive health rights and justice issue. So, I continue to want us to have this broad understanding that all 950 pages are anti- sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice, anti-LGBTQI. Every page is this incredibly undemocratic vision of the United States. And like the anti-gender movement globally and most authoritarian movements restricting reproductive rights and LGBTQI plus rights and really targeting them is immediately overrepresented throughout Project 2025 and the roadmap. I don't wanna dwell too much on the sort of inherent authoritarian vision, but I do really just want readers to understand that, like, there's some really concrete dismantling that I'm gonna talk about around reproductive rights and around LGBTQI rights, but it's inseparable from the framework, which is really right out of the authoritarian playbook. It's around politicizing independent institutions, spreading disinformation, aggrandizing and really consolidating executive power, weakening all checks and balances, quashing criticism and dissent, marginalizing and restricting the rights of specific communities—that's us, we're specific communities—corrupting elections and faith in elections and stoking violence. And that's the sort of definition of promoting authoritarianism, defined by Project Democracy. I mean, this is a real core set of plays and you see them spread throughout Project 2025. You know, as I said, we're those specific communities and we're seeing it all already. Project 2025 is really detailed and it's a really detailed map, but to a journey that's already underway. We've seen it in Ohio in just the last two months, where even with extensive gerrymandering and the partisan takeover of the judicial system, it was still overcome in the fall by a statewide ballot initiative, which resoundingly passed the Abortion Rights Amendment, right? And Republican elected officials now are explicitly seeking to ignore and overturn and delay that democratically demanded action. They're saying what we want is more important than what the people want, and that's just blatantly anti-democratic. And is what we see sort of written all over Project 2025. When I think about LGBTQI rights and I think about reproductive health rights, and justice, authoritarian states almost always—maybe always—position themselves as standing against or being the protection from these grievous or mortal threats. The project defines those threats globally, internationally as China. That's the "other'' that they're geared against. And then domestically, it's the LGBTQ community. And then more broadly, the left immigrants and people working for racial and social justice aka DEI, they've really smashed those into one, a couple other broad things to know about the project. It’s pro-withdrawing from the UN fully, and I'm gonna talk about multilaterals in sort of the sexual reproductive health rights and justice sphere, but it's important to know that that is all coming as secondary to just thinking we should from the international system. And I also really think it's important to just state that Project 2025 is explicitly Christian nationalist to a point that almost takes my breath away, which is where some of the particular vitriol against LGBTQI people and abortion come from. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has written a lot more about this, which I really do strongly encourage people to read and really drill down into a lot of the, what, what we see reflected in the project that is so Christian nationalist and why that's so anti-democratic. I know that I'm going to really great pains here to make sure people understand that project 2025 fits really profoundly within historic and global patterns of authoritarianism. It's being presented here under the cloak of legitimacy of the Heritage Foundation, which has spent decades in the United States as a conservative, but not anti-democratic force. So, adding in American exceptionalism, that makes it really hard for people to take Project 2025 at their word, which is an explicit promise and plan to end inclusive democracy in the United States. So, from there...

Jennie: I just wanna say this is like- one, Heritage Foundation, like, back when I was going into the office, I had to walk by them every day on my way to work. But two, this is like perfect timing and fitting for this episode because as y'all are hearing this, last week's episode, I recorded the same morning that I'm talking to Beirne with Garnet Henderson talking about her reporting trip to Idaho, talking about Christian nationalism in Idaho, and how we're seeing it spreading in that state in a new and profound way. So, this is just like a continuation of one day long conversation for me, but it feels fitting that they'll be back-to-back episodes.

Beirne: I hope people maybe take a break between episodes, do a long walk in the woods, stretch, drink really cold, fresh water, do something that recharges you because this is- it's serious stuff and it's stuff that we need to take seriously and bring our best selves to, unfortunately.

Jennie: So, are we ready to switch?

Beirne: Let's dive in.

Jennie: Okay. Let's dive into, as, as you said, this is this huge framework. We're not gonna be able to talk about all of it, so we're just gonna pick out a couple bits. So, let's start with the repro section. So, what are some of the repro things we are seeing in here? Because luckily, I have not read the whole thing. I've read the highlights, but I have not read the whole thing, so I am dreading, excited...I'm ready to hear what you have to say.

Beirne: So, I know you have a really smart set of listeners. I'm not gonna be able to deeply unpack all of their proposals and expectations of the next executive, because there's so many.

Jennie: It's a lot, y'all.

Beirne: I'll start off with a quote, which is, "the next conservative president should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support." So, that's their top line. The project includes deploying existing federal powers to protect "innocent life" and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. So, increased compliance, and when they say federal powers, they mean the FBI, they mean all of the apparatus of the state. The project calls for a ban on abortion pills and tasks the Department of Justice to criminally prosecute providers and distributors of the medication. It calls for new legislation, the Protecting Life and Taxpayers Act, which is incredibly broad and includes most of what you'd think. I will say there's a lot of things that to me read as gobbledygook. So, I think it's probably inside language that we're not necessarily…

Jennie: Yeah. Yeah.

Beirne: Ready- like, doesn't totally make sense to me. Like, there's a ban on abortion travel funding. I'm not sure which travel funding that is. Maybe they're talking about, maybe, maybe they're talking about refugees, like underage refugees. Maybe they're talking about the Department of Defense. I'm not sure. I'm not gonna do their work for them. But I'm sure they mean something very concrete by it and that...

Jennie: Probably that and then some.

Beirne: Yeah. And we should take it seriously. The project explicitly names abolishing the Gender Policy Council which according to them would eliminate the central promotion of abortion health services, comprehensive sexuality education, "education"—I'm sorry, I'm doing scare quotes here, which I realize is not helpful to folks—and the new “woke gender ideology,” which has, as a principal tenant quote "gender affirming care" and quote "sex change surgeries for minors" internationally, there's a huge amount of emphasis on the Geneva Consensus Declaration.

Jennie: Oh, they may go away, but they never die.

Beirne: No, not even a little bit. I would say [chuckles] for long time listeners, there are certain parts of this that—and the 950 pages was- different pieces were written by different organizations and different people with different expertise—I'll say there are sections that you can tell or written by Valerie Huber. So, a lot of emphasis on the Geneva Consensus Declaration as the international future. They certainly- they put a huge amount of emphasis on it as something that should have the weight of law. It targets USAID and sort of talks in great detail about all its current failings. They would like to rename USAID Senior Gender Coordinator role as the senior coordinator of the Office of Women, Children and Families. They intend to eliminate more than 80 gender advisors and points of contact which are folks that we have fought very hard and long to have a point of contact in all the USAID missions in the world who have some additional training and expertise and eye on gender issues. They, the project—again, this is the nine 50 page document—includes stating that USAID should remove all references, examples, definitions, photos, and language on any USAID website in publications and policies and in all agency contracts and grants that include the following terms, "gender," "gender equality," "gender equity," "gender diverse individuals," "gender aware," "gender sensitive," and also remove all references to abortion and reproductive health and sexual and reproductive rights and quote, "controversial sexual education materials."

Jennie: Just one or two things that are not at all important.

Beirne: And certainly not many people's life work.

Jennie: Yeah.

Beirne: To help the agencies’* program in relation to need and articulated needs of communities. And then the big bah-boom. Obviously, I'm talking about Project 2025, which is massive and covers all domestic and foreign policy, but my expertise is foreign policy. And I've been on the podcast several times to talk about the expanded Global Gag Rule under the Trump administration and its myriad harms. So, it's really hard to be here to share their further vision and beyond vision, I would say it’s expectation. And while some of the things I have listed off, we can think about how it will...what the court challenges might look like. One of the challenges with foreign policy is there's many fewer checks and balances already. So, when I talk about their section on protecting life and foreign assistance, I don't think we realistically can expect that any incoming conservative president isn't going to implement it as written. There's no political reason for them not to. And it's gonna be up to us to challenge legally where we can. But a lot of the places they intend to go, we're not gonna have that opportunity. In addition to a lot of language around increased compliance and monitoring and some really nasty language about the WHO and the WHO's work in COVID around essential services and the inclusion of medication, abortion and abortion and essential services in certain contexts. The project intends for the next conservative president to expand the GGR in four ways. And I've been talking about them in these really four discreet ways, because the people that it harms, the people who need to be alerted now are different for each of these four, they intend to expand it to all of US foreign assistance. So, that includes all of our humanitarian assistance, it includes development assistance far beyond the global health assistance that the Trump administration attached it to. They intend to expand it to US-based groups, a set of organizations that up until this year there has been- that hasn't been an expansion because of the fear of court challenge. And they intend to expand it to what they call "public international organizations," which are multilaterals. So, they intend to expand it with US funding to poison the full activities of multilaterals. And then they also intend to expand it to government funds—so, funding that goes directly from the US government to other governments. Not all of these are legal, and I wanna be really clear about that, but when you pair it with political and monetary power, they're gonna be super destructive beyond any of my current articulation abilities. It's a vision of US power and US interference in the health services available around the world and the advocacy that's able to be done around the world that's really...it's striking and there is every reason to take them at their word. So, those are the big top lines of what Project 2025 includes on sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. I'll say, I mean, I'm not even really delving into the reproductive justice aspects. I mean, their vision in incarceration, their vision in child safety and wellbeing, their vision in immigration—all of it is really horrific. And that could take a whole 'nother two or three shows. So even just sort of abortion rights, that's sort of the top lines, but they weave culture of life, protecting the family, throughout all 950 pages.

Jennie: So, it's even worse than I thought. And I thought it was really terrible before I talked to you. Like, the parts that I had had time to take and digest. I think the expansion of GGR is even worse than I had initially understood, which is was already terrible. So, that's great. Again, Beirne, bringing me down man and I don't know it's gonna get better.

Beirne: It's gonna get worse, Jennie. Gonna get worse. [laughs]

Jennie: I guess while I'm down, like, go ahead, kick me. Let's do LGBTQ rights. Like, what is in there?

Beirne: In some ways, if you had to have a thesis about this project? It's the dehumanization of LGBTQI people. It is not an accident. The dehumanization and exclusion of LGBTQI people throughout the project isn't an accident. My colleagues at the Williams Institute recently released this really excellent report and, and research on the strong correlation between attacking LGBTQI+ rights and democratic backsliding. This is, this is a move, it's a move that authoritarians make, and they do it because it works when they need to create the "other," it is a handy other to use. The data is there, and, and now we're seeing it here. We see it a lot globally from Hungary to Uganda, but we also see it in Florida, and it's a hallmark of the anti-gender movement is using this entry point wedge. In Project 2025, frankly, they're incredibly blunt about it. LGBTQI+ people are positioned as the deviance throughout the document, not as Americans, not as stakeholders in the government, but as the "other." The project especially, and I don't think this is gonna surprise anyone, it especially goes so far in demonizing the transgender community, equating quote, "transgenderism" and "transgender ideology" with pornography. I wanna take this pause to remind us that this is a Heritage Foundation document. This is a mainstream plan for next year. We need to take them at their word. They want to use government power. And we see this already in the states. And I imagine that's a lot of what Garnet was talking about. Like, there are states that they have already made huge, huge strides at the state and local government level, and they want to use government power—in this case, at the federal level—to demonize and penalize all non-traditional families and are almost entirely throughout the document, citing entirely false data about the harm and the failings of LGBTQI families and single parent households.

Jennie: I mean, when have they ever let facts get in the way of a, I mean, good story? I mean, not a good story, a terrible story.

Beirne: Yeah. I mean, this is a quote from the document: "Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden's HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on LGBTQ+ equity, subsidizing single motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable married nuclear families." So, some of the top lines on LGBTQI rights include deleting the terms "sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their first amendment rights out of every federal rule agency regulation, contract, grant regulation, and piece of legislation that exists." That is an extraordinary statement. It is eliminationist and it's about language right now in their project, but it's about erasing sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as all those other things from government, from public life, from social protections, from democracy. It calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to never conflate sex with gender identity or sexual orientation. It changes Title IX. I don't think that'll surprise many of your listeners. And rescinds any regulations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics. It calls on the Secretary of HHS to quote "proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care, and that married men and women are the ideal natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them." The project attacks the DOJ for undermining girls' sports, and it also gets into foreign policy. It calls for the State department to stop pro-LGBTQ initiatives and funding, including sort of to stop LGBTQ promotion and funding and support in countries like Uganda, where the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act has targeted and brutalized the queer community there. So again, these are just the top lines. It's an incredibly detailed document that includes a level of specifics about offices, about language changes. But again, you're talking...a lot of the sort of worst-case scenarios and rhetoric that we've seen oftentimes, you know, clips go viral of state representatives saying things because we just go, wow, they're so crazy. This is a 950-page mainstream conservative document, enshrining all of that into a document that undermines the rule of law, politicizes the civil service, and gets rid of large swaths of the federal government in favor of consolidating executive power.

Jennie: Okay, Beirne, seriously, that was so much worse than I thought. Like, I really thought I was ready, but not gonna lie, the HHS language that they want was pretty shocking. Oof!

Beirne: Yeah, it's a lot and it's so detailed and, you know, preparing for this, I put a lot of stuff in bullet points, but even thinking about what the framework for those bullet points are becomes even more overwhelming because it is not a project that is meant to be unable to be undone. It's not a project that is meant to be "and in the next election, we'll reintroduce a career civil service." There is, that is not intended to ever happen next. So, the frame for these really explicit attacks on abortion and LGBTQI rights as the entry points for this Christian nationalist federal government, it's pretty startling in its bleakness.

Jennie: Okay, because it is so big and, like, so heavy. And like, I'm sure you have an easy silver bullet, like, how you can fix it. No, no, no. Like, I know this is gonna be one of those where it's like, Beirne, what can the audience do? And, like, there's not easy answers, but I'm still gonna make you answer it. I know I'm terrible. So, what can the audience do?

Beirne: So, I have a lot to say on this, but none of it is easy or a single link that they can click.

Jennie: There's not just, like, the one...I can send this tweet or, like, donate to this one place, like, a reasonable amount and, like, everything's fixed?

Beirne: Unfortunately, no, and I wanna start again by acknowledging that there's- I think and work a lot on the anti-gender movement, and that in the last year has meant thinking so much more and working so much more with people working on global extremism and rule of law and democratic protections than in the rest of my career combined. We are not in the same moment we were five years ago or four years ago. And starting with acknowledging that means that we have to try new things and do things differently. I think when we talk about what can people do, I wanna lead off with: don't lose hope. This is really- this is bleak, and I think we all have our own senses of electoral politics right now that maybe don't feel good, but you have to start from a place of hope. It's not a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I think it's really important to not act too cool for school or, like, you knew this would happen. You've been talking about how it was gonna happen. That's what authoritarianism and anti-democratic forces thrive on.

Jennie: Right? The hopelessness they need us is a tool of oppression.

Beirne: Yes, yes. They need us to be tired and to treat all of this as inevitable and past the point of return. So, don't do that. On the flip side of not losing hope, I do wanna reiterate that this isn't fringe, right? This is the Heritage Foundation—many members of the previous administration, 80 organizations and counting, and a whole lot of money. So, it means taking this very seriously and not losing hope together. But I believe in us that we can do that. Organizing locally tomorrow, this evening, now, is an incredibly powerful thing that you can do. Presidential elections are not the only elections, and organizing around judicial campaigns, school boards, local election officials, and especially the integrity of those local elections, the protection of those election officials and those school boards is so unbelievably important right now. That increased violence in the political space is pushing good people, people who are not in it for partisanship but are in it for the rule of law. It's pushing them out of those spaces because of the threats to themselves and their families. That's not normal, and it's not something we need to accept, and it is something we can be organizing around, including the attacks on public libraries that is part and parcel of the same attacks. That's stuff we can be organizing around this week that dramatically changes the environment that we're working and organizing in. I'll say the Brennan Center's done a lot of great work on this. And it is explicitly this judicial safety and the courts, the safety of the courts and the rule of law, almost always. The places that we're gonna see the most risk and violence in the coming year are the states in which the judiciary has overturned state abortion restrictions. So, abortion sort of is gonna be the focal point of a lot of that judicial threat and threat to the rule of law too. So, even if your organizations are repro organizations, thinking about these electoral safety, judicial safety questions and integrity is a really important thing that we can start doing and incorporating into how we talk and think about ourselves and our work. Two books that I recommend, one of which is shorter, one of which is longer, is How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley. You know, it's a pretty slight volume but it's handy to getting your brain around some of the things you're seeing and experiencing, especially at the state level and How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Nobel Prize winner, Maria Ressa. She's a Filipino journalist. And there's some incredibly good lessons also about tech, misuse of tech, and authentic activity online, which I think people in the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements really have been the cutting edge for in the US and there is also a lot to learn from her. I would also say in terms of what we can do is call it what it's, when you're noticing the patterns, this is not normal partisanship. This is not, "oh, I have different politics from people in my family." This is really different. And being equipped to talk to your family and friends about why this is not a policy platform, but a roadmap for the end of inclusive democracy in the United States. Being equipped to have those conversations is really important. I think one of the most basic things that people can do is talk about Project 2025. Name it, drag it out into the light of day in your work, in your home, in your faith communities. Like, talk about it. They're telling us who they are, what they think of us, and what they think of representative democracy, and we need to believe them. So, if you're in a union or a faith community or a mutual aid society or your job, do a brown bag on Project 2025. Pull out specifically what their intentions are for your work or your community. Make sure everyone understands the stakes. They're not being secret about it. So, we have the chance to really raise it up and say, okay, what is it that they're saying about labor? What is it that they are saying about interstate travel? What is it that they are saying about the federal civil service? Most of us have family members who are civil servants some way or another in the United States. Pull that out, be ready to talk about it. See if your organization, if you work for an organization, can put out a public statement. Even if you're a C3, there are ways to speak out now, and we don't have to sit around and sort of just wait for them to destroy us and our ability to speak out. If you have questions about what your organization can do or say about Project 2025, reach out. Reach out to organizations like Alliance for Justice, which can really help C3 organizations figure out how they can still talk about big threats, big policy and partisan platforms, without crossing the C4 line into electioneering. When your boss tells you that you can't say or do anything about Project 2025 because you're a 501C3, talk to an organization like Alliances for Justice or people who are really more aware of what the actual sort of parameters are. I think one of the other things we can all do is demand more from the press, both the local press and the national press. Protect Democracy has a really amazing authoritarian handbook for reporters on how to contextualize and cover authoritarian threats. It's a really amazing resource. If you have friends or favorite reporters, send it to them. It's a really good resource. When reporters get it wrong, send letters to the editor. Talk about it on social media. I think people, particularly our age, Jennie, tend to think things begin and end with social media, but I actually wanna really encourage people to write traditional letters to the editor and op-eds in your local papers. They have a huge impact on the sort of people who vote in every election. And right now we're oftentimes ceding that space to older generations. We have the opportunity to tell people about Project 2025, about how profoundly anti-democratic it is and we have to think about how we go to spaces that we've oftentimes ceded to older voters or older generations. And then I think my last sort of what can we do is to trust each other and build together even if it needs to be kind of quickly. 2024 is a really big year for democracy globally. A huge portion of the world will be voting this year, so we have to behave differently. So, even doing things that have been outside our bailiwick before—joining the meeting that you think you might be too tired to join, dropping off signs, building relationships with your neighbors, all of it matters. I want folks to kind of remember what those first months of 2017 felt like, when the norms...like, before the norms had changed really dramatically in those first couple months of 2017, when everything still felt very shocking. Remember what it felt like when Trump announced the Muslim ban. But then remember what it was like to have hundreds of lawyers and translators and helpers and activists all surge to the airports. That's the energy that we need now and not a year from now. So, we still have the opportunity to do that. We don't have to treat it as inevitable. We can drag it out into the light of day, we can talk about how it harms us, our communities, our values, and we can do it in spaces across our lives. And it will make a really profound difference.

Jennie: Oh my God, Beirne, that was like the perfect ending, and thank you. Like, as I said, I couldn't imagine a better person to talk to about end times. And yeah.

Beirne: They don't have to be end times. What they envision is the end-times for an inclusive democracy, but we don't have to go along with it.

Jennie: Nope. Beirne, as always, thank you so much for being here.

Beirne: It's an absolute pleasure to be here with you, Jennie. Someday I will be here to talk about something joy-filled and light and just a litany of winds. And I hope maybe that will be this time next year.

Jennie: Oh my God, I can't wait.

Beirne: It's still a pleasure to be here with you and talk about some of the hard stuff.

Jennie: Okay, y'allI had a wonderful time talking about terrible, terrible things with Beirne. Honestly, I feel like that's just, like, trademarked for our conversations because I always have fun talking to her, but honestly, it's almost always terrible, terrible things. But yeah, it was great talking to Beirne and I hope you enjoyed our conversation. And again, thank you all. I am just, again, so excited and again, just so proud of my team. Rachel and Elena also, Meg, our editor, just thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And we'll see you all next week for another episode of this award-winning podcast! [music outro] If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com or you can find us on social media. We're at @RePROsFightBack on Facebook and Twitter or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and wanna make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you wanna make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprofightback.com. Thanks all!