WASHINGTON — Heritage Foundation president and Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts published on Wednesday the text of a speech in which he persists with his past claim that “predatory Big Tech corporations” are “deliberately fueling pornography addiction” among young men.
Roberts is one of the architects of Project 2025, which prominently includes a call to criminalize all porn. He assumed leadership of Project 2025 in July after its first director, Paul Dans, departed following mounting attention to the initiative’s most extreme proposals and Donald Trump’s questionable disavowal of the initiative.
Until that controversy, Roberts and other Heritage Foundation figures repeatedly claimed that the Project 2025 initiative included a plan to staff the next presidential administration in the event of a Trump victory.
Though its republication Wednesday comes only days before the 2024 presidential election, the speech — adapted from an anti-abortion address delivered by Roberts at the John Paul II Life Center annual gala in Austin, Texas — was first published last week in First Things, the official organ of New York’s Institute of Religion and Public Life.
Billionaire conservative activist, Big Tech entrepreneur and J.D. Vance backer Peter Thiel is a longtime supporter of and contributor to First Things. In 2014, the journal published a panegyric to the businessman entitled “The Wisdom of Peter Thiel.”
Roberts includes his accusation about “predatory Big Tech corporations that are deliberately fueling pornography addiction among our sons and a mental health crisis among our daughters” among a slew of other conservative talking points involving abortion and “woke indoctrination” in schools.
As the solution, Roberts endorses Trump, Vance and other conservative leaders like “Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Ted Cruz and Chip Roy, organizations like the John Paul II Life Center, and policy ideas like those the Heritage Foundation helps develop.” These policies, Roberts has repeatedly stated, are those summarized in the Project 2025 blueprint, which includes the total criminalization of adult content producers and distributors.
To anyone afraid of these individuals, groups and ideas, Roberts warns, “They should be.”
Main Image: Heritage Foundation President and Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Trump’s private jet in 2022.
