Donald Trump’s VP pick JD Vance really stepped in it when he wrote the foreword to the forthcoming book by Heritage Foundation President and Project 2025 architect Kevin D. Roberts. Vance has given his imprimatur to a book by a fellow weirdo zealot who considers contraception, IVF and even dog parks to be anti-family.
In fact, Roberts’ own book is even more extreme than the 900-plus-page Project 2025 playbook for a future authoritarian Republican administration which contains multiple anti-abortion references but does not touch on contraception, IVF or dog parks.
Donald Trump is trying to run away from the toxic Project 2025, whose proposals are quite unpopular among Americans. But Vance’s close ties to Roberts and the Heritage Foundation keep pulling Trump back in.
The New Republic obtained an advance galley copy of Roberts’ book titled “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America,” due to be published next month. Vance concluded his foreword by writing:
“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”
More specifically, Vance praises Roberts for his strong emphasis on the family.
Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids. We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred—and to the extent possible, lifelong—union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families. … Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.
Media Matters for America obtained a galley copy of Roberts’ book in which he railed not only against abortion but also against birth control and in vitro fertilization.
Media Matters wrote:
He (Roberts) says that having children should not be considered an “optional individual choice” but “a social expectation or a transcendent gift.” He describes “contraceptive technologies” as “revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family.” He labels reproductive choice methods as a “snake strangling the American family.”
Roberts further writes, “In the case of contraceptives, we are a society remade according to a research agenda set by the Party of Destruction.” And he also attacked in vitro fertilization: which he wrote “seems to assist fertility but has the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes.”
Roberts writes that “a childless society becomes decadent and nostalgic … A culture of childlessness is, in the final analysis, a culture of despair.” He added: “Getting married and having kids, on the other hand, gives you skin in the game for the future of your country.”
Well at least, Roberts did not mention those miserable “childless cat ladies” whom Vance claimed are ruining America. But then Media Matters found that Roberts saw something nefarious and anti-family about dog parks.
Media Matters wrote:
On page 69, Roberts rails against the Swampoodle dog park in Washington, D.C., for having too much room for dogs to play and not enough for children, blaming this on “the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government.”
Well that certainly gives new meaning to all that talk about draining the swamp in D.C. Actually, Swampoodle was the name given to a marshy area near Capitol Hill that in the 1800s was home to working-class Irish laborers — many of whom emigrated to the U.S. after the Potato Famine.
And here’s a review of the Swampoodle Dog Park, which opened in 2018. As the reviewer highlights, there is a children’s playground right next to the dog park.
And now it’s raining cats and dogs on the GOP.
It was bad enough when 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney admitted to having put his Irish setter Seamus in a dog carrier attached to his station wagon’s roof rack. It became even worse when South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem dashed her vice presidential hopes when she admitted to killing her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer Cricket because the puppy had an “aggressive personality” and was “untrainable,.”
And then there’s Donald Trump, one of the only presidents not to have a White House pet. Trump has a long history of insulting women he doesn’t like — for example Rosie O’Donnell — by calling them dogs.
And now dog parks are anti-family according to Roberts, Well, as this video from Now This begins: “First they came for the childless cat ladies …”
And it concludes: “You know what, at the end of the day, these people are just weird.”
