Full transcript of “The Heritage Foundation’s new blueprint for American women”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:01 It's back, my Project 2025. Actually it never went away If you thought that the Heritage Foundation, the group behind the radical governing blueprint known as Project 2025, was finished dismantling American democracy, think again. Now they're turning their sights even more keenly on America's women. The same movement that drafted a plan to remake and undo much of the federal government has now unveiled a chilling new manifesto, one that is aimed at making it harder for women to work, harder for them to live into independently and easier to push them back into financial dependence on husbands or fathers. This is not hyperbole, in the same way that Project 2025 wasn't hyperbole, though plenty of critics dismissed it as such, especially as Trump himself disingenuously disavowed it. One year into Trump's second term,
0:47 groups tracking his administration say that roughly half of Project 2025 has already been implemented. That includes dismantling federal diversity and inclusion programs, dramatically expanding immigration enforcement, rolling back environmental protections, eliminating federal funding for public broadcasters like NPR and PBS and so much more. That blueprint also called for authorizing military troops to help seal the border, removing immigration enforcement protections from places like schools and churches and dramatically expanding immigration detention facilities. If there's one lesson to take from all of this, it's this. Do not underestimate the determination of this movement or its hostility toward liberal values and the expansion of democratic rights for groups that they see as outsiders.
1:34 And they see women as outsiders. Their latest document, Saving America by Saving the Family, a foundation for the next 250 years. You've got to give it to these people. They think big. It was published in January. Its purported goal is to reverse the country's declining birth rate. And you can't physically force women, if you can't physically force women to have babies, which is what abortion restrictions aim to do, you can design government policies that pressure women into having more babies. It's not exactly rocket science, at least not from the perspective of the ordinary caveman. You cut off opportunities outside the home. You make public, the public sphere hostile to women's independence. You create a system where the only viable path left for women is dependence on a man for survival. In other words, you drag the country back
2:19 to a time when women had fewer choices. If Project 2025 laid out how a conservative administration could reshape the machinery of government. This new blueprint lays out the social vision behind it, a plan for what American family life should look like. I mean, you strip away the soft language about family values. what its proposals would actually accomplish, if carried out, is the rollback of decades, decades of women's freedom. According to its authors, the reason women are having fewer children is simple, feminism. The Heritage Foundation blames the feminist movement for encouraging women to rethink their relationship to men, marriage, children and family. According to the document, quote, those two forces, big government liberalism and second wave feminism combined to radically change how men and women thought
3:06 about their roles in the home, end quote. In other words, women today have too many choices. Your daughters and granddaughters can dream too big in America and God forbid pursue opportunities outside the the home. From the perspective of the new right, those freedoms aren't progress. They are in fact the problems or the solution the right proposes is to make those choices harder for women, much, much harder, The state and federal governments should recognize the natural differences between men and women. They should also preserve this distinction between the sexes in law. Preserve this distinction between the sexes in law. Preserve this distinction between the sexes in law. The law should discriminate against women, put them back in their place. The plan goes on to discourage women
3:51 from higher education, arguing that college delays marriage and reduces fertility. And it frames contraception itself as part of the so-called crisis. Quote, as nations industrialize, several factors conspire to reduce birth rates. These include the proliferation of birth control, more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home, the delayed financial independence of young adults and the government's role in old age social security," end quote. Translation, women controlling their own fertility, women seeking higher education, women working outside the home, it's all just bad. But the agenda goes even further than that. The report calls for reshaping tax policy to reward large married families while cutting support for single mothers. This has TAKEN RIGHT FROM HUNGARY'S PLAYBOOK,
4:38 WHICH OFFERS INCOME TAX REDUCTIONS FOR EACH ADDITIONAL CHILD THAT YOU HAVE. IF YOU HAVE FIVE CHILDREN IN HUNGARY, YOU PAY NO TAX. UNSURPRISINGLY, NO ONE TOOK UP THE OFFER BECAUSE NO ONE ACTUALLY WANTS TO HAVE FIVE CHILDREN IN in 2026. So Hungary reduced it to a tax-free life for just having three children starting last year. That, too, has failed because nobody wants three children in 2026 either. So starting this year, if you have just a paltry two children in Hungary, you pay no income tax for life. And since young women getting educated and staying unmarried are the real scourge of a society, starting this year in Hungary, if you're under 30 and you bring just one single life into this world, the rest of your happy maternal Hungarian life is tax-free. But I digress, because this isn't quite Hungary yet. Here in America, this proposal,
5:24 akin to Hungary's, proposes eliminating childcare incentives that help women work outside the home. It supports legal frameworks that could effectively ban in vitro fertilization by granting legal rights to embryos from the moment of fertilization. It criticizes no-fault divorce, the laws that make it easier for women to leave abusive of marriages. Taken together, the America they envision looks very different from the one most Americans live in today, a society organized around a rigid patriarchal structure, men as providers, women as dependents. And very few ways out. Consider this line from the report, which attempts to explain the country's declining birth rate. Quote, today's adults may favor autonomy and personal development over raising children more than earlier generations did. Thus, greater opportunity cost rather
6:10 than the greater actual cost might be a better explanation. Translation, women today have opportunities their grandmothers could only dream of. They can pursue education, careers, independence, lives that extend beyond marriage and motherhood. From the perspective of the new right, that's the crisis. As the writer Jill Filipovich has warned, quote, they see women being able to control our own fertility as the root of the problem. They're right. Women being able to control our own fertility is one of the most powerful tools women have for independence. Women who cannot control their own fertility are under greater patriarchal control. The right has already succeeded in stripping the right to abortion from American women. It was never about saving babies, it was entirely about forcing women back into submission. Trust that when they identify contraception
6:56 as a tool that shoulders a large share of the blame for the present malady, they are telling you that they are coming for contraception next. Historically speaking, we've seen versions of this before. In the 1920s, Benito Mussolini launched a campaign in fascist Italy known as the Battle for Births. The goal was to increase the population and strengthen the nation. Women were pushed out of jobs, families were rewarded for having more children, motherhood was glorified while women's independence was deliberately restricted. The New Rights version is wrapped in the language of religious revival and family stability. But underlying logic is strikingly similar. If women aren't producing enough children, the answer is not to make parenthood easier with things like child care and paternal and maternal leave and education subsidies, the answer is to make
7:42 women's independence harder. And the people promoting this vision aren't even hiding their goals. Scott Jenner, a conservative political scientist recently appointed to a senior leadership role at the Heritage Foundation has described universities as the citadels of our gynecocracy, meaning a society run by women. He argues that higher education should be de-emphasized in order to advance what he calls family matters. In a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, he went even further, suggesting that women should be pushed out of large parts of the workforce. Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more
8:27 of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade. If every Nobel Prize winner is a man, that's not a failure. It's kind of a cause for celebration. Why can't our celebration of male excellence in sports be translated into all facets of life? More successful men will mean more happy citizenry and a stronger nation. Happy men equal a strong nation. Gets better, by the way, and that's it. . That's a serious speech. It's not a satire. Yenner attacked women who prioritized careers over family and revealed something else about his thinking that should frighten everyone. Listen. Such medicated, quarrelsome,
9:14 and meddlesome women gain their meaning through the seeming participation in the global project. They are agents of the new world, but not new life. Such women are now the backbone of every left-wing cosmopolitan party in the Western world, from the Greens in Germany to the Democratic Party in America. And if our ideal woman is a childless we deserve a future. Setting aside the misogyny contempt dripping from that rant, that line should send a chill down your spine
10:01 because it reveals something profound about the world view behind this movement. Who exactly is the we that he's talking about. Certainly not the meddlesome women he condemns for finding meaning outside the home. Yenner seems to believe that he and men like him are fully entitled to dictate and hold ownership over women's futures. And this isn't some fringe internet rant. This same line of thinking now sits inside the leadership ranks of the Heritage Foundation, the same group helping shape policy for the Trump administration. Yenner's comments reveal another political calculation behind this agenda. Educated women and women who make independent decisions about their lives tend to vote Democratic. Yenner seems to think that's because Democrats throw great parties, but the reality is much simpler. Many Americans, men and women who don't
10:47 believe society should be organized around patriarchy, racial superiority, or religious nationalism tend to gravitate toward the party that defends civil rights, pluralism and personal freedom. For men of the new right like Yenner policies that push women out of universities, out of the workforce and out of public life don't just force women back into the home they fundamentally reshape political women who choose. And they may think things and choose things that threaten the power structure of the new right. So their answer is to push women back into their place, to strip away their autonomy,
11:33 to push them out of public life, to narrow the futures available to them. Ultimately, this agenda is not really about solving demographic decline. If increasing the natural replacement rate was the actual goal, the proposals would actually look very different. Countries around the world face falling birth rates, and they've taken very different approaches. They expand child care. They guarantee paid paternal leave for mothers━ maternal or paternal leave for mothers and for fathers. They make housing more affordable. They support working mothers. This plan proposes none of that. Instead, it calls for shrinking the social safety net, especially the programs that allow women to live independently. If fewer women━if women have fewer options, the thinking goes they'll have more children. They'll be bound more tightly to the men in their lives, with fewer ways out.
12:18 This is about dragging the country back to a time when women had only one choice━to submit to men. Project 2025 has already shown us how quickly the far-right can move their ideas into government policy. And the architects of these plans are not fringe figures, they are inside the administration. The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, the FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, the The SEC chair, Paul Atkins, the trade advisor, Peter Navarro and Russell Vogt, one of the chief authors of Project 2025 who now runs the office that oversees the federal budget. The men behind this draconian vision are already in power, which means the stakes for America's women are very real. But history also tells us something else. As my next guest, Kathy Spiller puts it,
13:05 the United States has faced coordinated backlash. And every time, every time women have organized, they've resisted. They have reshaped the nation. The women who fought for suffrage did not stop when they were dismissed as unreasonable. The women who pushed Title IX into law did not stop when they were told girls didn't need equal opportunities. The women who built the modern reproductive rights movement did not stop when the courts narrowed their freedoms, and we will not stop now." End quote. Kathy Spiller joins me now.
