Sex Workers Are Trying to Warn Us About Project 2025

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In 2023, the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation published its “ 2025 Presidential Transition Project,” a 922-page document outlining, in painstaking detail, how the conservative movement intended to shape the policies, personnel, and power dynamics in the next Republican administration. It initially flew under the radar, but over this past summer its rabidly autocratic vision for the country attracted a significant amount of attention—and a snappier name.

Now, despite his strenuous efforts to distance himself from the deeply controversial document, Project 2025 has become synonymous with former president Donald Trump’s campaign. If Trump were to win the election, his supporters, advisers, and enablers would have free rein to inflict their draconian Christian nationalist policies upon the public, from banning abortion pills and brutalizing protesters to decimating trans rights, eliminating the Department of Education, and enacting mass deportations. The authors of Project 2025 seek to sink their claws into nearly every single aspect of American life—including peoples’ most private moments. That’s right: Under a Trump administration, not even your porn is safe.

That’s the message that a group of adult performers and activists for sex workers’ rights are trying to hammer home in the days leading up to the election. “In my experience, the best way to fight back against the stigmatization and devaluation of our labor is to speak out consistently about things that affect our health, livelihoods, and working conditions,” Siri Dahl, an adult performer and sex workers’ rights activist, told The Nation, “whether that’s shitty talent agents committing labor violations, pirates stealing from us, online censorship, or the threat of government overreach, as in the case of Project 2025’s proposal to ban porn.”

Dahl isn’t exaggerating. In the foreword to Project 2025, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts writes:

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.

“The goal seems to be to cripple the legitimate companies in the adult industry by passing and enforcing burdensome, draconian laws—so that inevitably when the legitimate, legally compliant adult sites lose the majority of their traffic to noncompliant, overseas-based sites that are willing to host any content (even illegal, abusive content), then it will just add more fuel to the conservative argument that all porn is exploitative,” Dahl said. “In my view, they’re doing more to enable sexual exploitation than anybody in the modern porn industry has.”

Roberts also characterizes those who consume porn as “child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women,” which Dahl finds especially rich. “This kind of language is 100 percent coming from the religious fundamentalist anti-porn playbook,” she said. “The ‘child predator’ rhetoric is really rich, considering that this is the same political ideology whose followers would happily force an underage rape victim to carry a pregnancy to term. For the record, I want to say that porn must be produced consensually, and only by adults. Otherwise, it’s not porn, it’s evidence of a crime. And in the adult industry, when we produce a film, there is an incredible amount of effort and paperwork that goes into documenting consent and establishing boundaries at every stage of the production.”

In the document, Roberts (a man who has proven that he cannot even be trusted to care for dogs, let alone humans) also makes confusing claims about porn’s alleged connections to two other conservative obsessions. “Pornography is manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” he writes, while providing no sourcing whatsoever for his claim. That wording is very intentional, as Kim Fuentes, the director of research and services for Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOP LA), breaks down. “Project 2025 explicitly refers to any efforts that support gender equality, gender equity, abortion, reproductive rights, and federal welfare programs as direct threats to American well-being that need to be exterminated,” she told The Nation. ”It exacerbates existing inequalities that are literally killing the most marginalized groups within the sex work industry, including queer and transgender workers, low-income workers, undocumented folks, and Black and brown folks.”

As journalist Melissa Gira Grant wrote in The New Republic, “Project 2025 is not targeting ‘pornography’ as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography.” Meanwhile, data procured by Mashable has shown that the vast majority of adult-content creators are worried about conservative attacks on their industry, with trans performers (93 percent), creators of color (94 percent), and gay and lesbian creators (100 percent) expressing the most concern.

Roberts also writes that pornography “has no claim to First Amendment protection,” despite the multiple Supreme Court rulings to that effect. As a US district court said when it struck down two provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), “The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The Government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation.”

Yet Roberts and his cronies want to stop that conversation entirely. That’s why Siri Dahl got involved with the Hands Off My Porn campaign. The $500,000 effort featured Dahl and nearly 20 other performers appearing in ads run on adult-content websites in swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada to warn viewers about the dangers of Project 2025. The campaign’s website includes a helpful rundown of conservatives’ long-running efforts to ban pornography and punish its creators and consumers, warning potential voters, “While there are a lot of jerk-offs in Washington DC, the ones you should worry about are the right wing conservatives working to end the porn industry.”