New far-right “vision board” outlaws trans people and imprisons all pornographers

In a jaw-dropping display of ignorance and hate, the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank and longtime source for Republican policy positions, has issued a set of proposals that conflate “transgender ideology” with pornography, and would imprison and classify as sex offenders, anybody associated with either part of the “psychologically destructive,” and unfounded, combination.

After defining pornography as a manifestation of the “omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” the authors propose it should be outlawed.

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“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,” reads an excerpt from the think tank’s so-called “Mandate for Leadership.”

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The far-right wish list is part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, laying out policy positions for the next Republican president, and led by a cadre of former Trump administration officials.

Right wing thinkers are circulating a chilling 920 page blueprint for the next President to declare the mere existence of trans people pornographic. These are not cranks, this is the Republican policy establishment. pic.twitter.com/ZU1jqCKIgC

— Ari Drennen (@AriDrennen) September 7, 2023

Philip Wallach of the American Enterprise Institute called the visioning effort an “authoritarian fantasy.”

“Some of these visions, they do start to just bleed into some kind of authoritarian fantasies where the president won the election, so he’s in charge, so everyone has to do what he says,” Wallach told the AP.

Conflating LGBTQ+ identity with pornography is a well-worn tactic among the far-right, and the source of slurs like “groomer” and “pedophile” and accusations around the “sexualization” of children. The past few years have seen a dramatic increase in efforts to ban books featuring LGBTQ+ characters or themes, which conservative advocates of the so-called “parental rights” movement have characterized as “pornographic.”

Project 2025 director Paul Dans, one of those former Trump administration officials putting the “government in waiting” effort together, told the AP the mandate is a “clarion call” for the far-right.

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” Dans said. “People need to lay down their tools, and step aside from their professional life and say, ‘This is my lifetime to serve.’”

Like the feeble response to Trump’s call for massive protests at his four indictments in New York, Florida, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, the response to the report’s release in August has only produced sighs.

“That’s just not the system of government we live under,” said the American Enterprise Institute’s Wallach.