Rally Against Project 2025

In the past, I’ve written about the importance of standing up against book bans and recently joined the organization Authors Against Book Bans. With the upcoming election and the unveiling of Project 2025, this work has taken on increased urgency.

What is Project 2025? Created by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, it’s a far-reaching plan, over 900 pages long, to reshape American life along the lines of a Christian nationalist regime. In contrast to small government conservatives of the past, this plan seeks to empower the state to police the morality of its citizens. For instance, the project seeks a new agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (rebranded in Orwellian fashion as the Department of Life), staffed with ideologically-vetted appointees, to “maintain a biblically-based, social science-reinforced, definition of marriage and family” (p. 513) that prohibits child-rearing by same-sex couples. The report goes on to define the only acceptable family structure: “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.” (p. 451) The report’s obsession with LGBTQ+ families and their evils, and specifically with the small group of transgender individuals, hints at the swift removal of children whose families do not conform to the norm.

From that perspective, the Project 2025 call to ban pornography, broaden the definition of pornography, and imprison authors, publishers, educators and librarians feels especially ominous. Those of us who write for kids and teens have often included LGBTQ+ characters in our books. Even if its presentation is not explicit, our teenage characters think about sex because that’s what teens do. In many books, like Laurie Halse Anderson’s classic YA novel Speak, the teen protagonist experiences sexual violence and learns to speak out against it. Talking those books away and threatening their authors with imprisonment will make girls more vulnerable to exploitation and violence. And it will fill up the jails and internment camps with writers, editors, teachers, and librarians who the far right sees as political enemies.

On Saturday, July 27 at 7 pm, New Yorkers will rally against Project 2025 in Times Square. I hope we get a solid turnout and these rallies will spread and grow. Most people in the U.S. don’t want to live in a police state where our lives and lifestyles are monitored by the government, neighbors are enlisted to inform on us, and we’re punished for any perceived infraction. But we’re not a country that regularly turns out for rallies and demonstrations, because the media rarely cover them and it feels like they do no good.

Compare the relative passivity of people in the U.S. with the demonstrations in France before the recent election. While pundits predicted a big win for the far-right National Rally, the other parties across the political spectrum united, and the fascists lost. Voters saw the huge demonstrations, with signs that read, “Nobody Likes the Fascists,” and it turned out to be the truth.

Last night my son and I attended a discussion between Anne Applebaum and Ruth Ben-Ghiat on the eve of Applebaum’s latest book launch. Her Autocracy, Inc. talks about the unholy alliance of dictators around the world — Putin in Russia, Lukashenko in Belarus, Xi in China, Kim in North Korea, Maduro in Venezuela, Erdogan in Türkiye, the mullahs in Iran. And Trump, the wannabe who wishes to join them and has accepted help from some of them, notably Russia and China. She talked about the ways they have helped each other, such as Iran, China, and North Korea arming Russia against Ukraine, and Putin sending forces to help Lukashenko put down protests against the election the Belarusian dictator stole in 2020.

In the Q&A, people asked Applebaum for advice on resisting this unholy alliance, and she had one key idea drawn from her experience living in Poland and married to a Polish diplomat. In October 2023, the Polish people, defying the odds, voted out the right-wing Law and Justice party that had banned abortion, taken over the courts, and rigged the electoral system against opposition parties. (I saw the lead-up to the election in Poland and can testify that the ruling party dominated the airwaves and on-the-ground publicity, so much so that in many areas of the country it was hard to tell if anyone was actually running against them.) Applebaum said that widespread demonstrations across the country played a major role in the unexpected opposition victory. She observed that it’s important to hold the huge demonstrations ahead of the election rather than waiting until after the election when the autocrats have already won. As shown in Poland and France, large demonstrations give voters hope and raise the important issues even when the media won’t. In the case of Project 2025, large demonstrations can let people know how extremist, backward, and harmful the proposal is, how much the Trump/Vance ticket is connected to it, and how nobody wants fascists telling the rest of us that we no longer enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”