LOS ANGELES – Tech news site Mashable published an article Tuesday exploring the differing opinions on Project 2025 – the conservative presidential transition initiative that includes a call to criminalize the production and distribution of pornography – among adult performers from across the political spectrum .
Conservative artist Richelle Ryan told Mashable’s Andy Hirschfeld says Project 2025 is only “representative of the fringe” of the Republican Party and therefore has “no chance of becoming actual policy.”
“I think it’s a scare tactic that the Democrats are trying to use,” Ryan said.
However, the majority of artists consulted disagreed with Ryan.
“Most artists Mashable spoke to saw Trump’s distancing from Project 2025 as a farce,” Hirschfeld wrote. “According to The Washington Post, Trump has lied more than 30,000 times during his presidential term alone.”
Allie Awesome told Mashable: “I think we need to look at Project 2025 and recognize that this is a clear and present danger to the sex worker community. We need to raise awareness about it. We need to take it very seriously and educate people .”
As XBIZ reported, Russell Vought, former Donald Trump staffer and co-author of Project 2025, told undercover reporters in July that the Heritage Foundation-led initiative has entered its second, more secretive phase with various tactics, including banning pornography “through the back door” through age verification legislation.
CNN noted at the time that Vought recently served as policy director for the Republican National Convention committee that formulated the party’s new official platform, calling that job “a sign of how central he is to Republicans’ policy goals.”
In the video, CNN reports, Vought also complains that conservatives have “lacked the ability to claim that we are a Christian nation” and stated that he wants to ensure “that we can say that we are a Christian nation, and my position mainly is that I would probably be Christian nationalism – that’s pretty close to Christian nationalism, because I also believe in nationalism.”
According to CNN, Vought “argued that it was important to pursue some of the culturally conservative policy goals outlined in the Project 2025 blueprint — including abortion restrictions and making pornography illegal.”
Hirschfeld’s Mashable article also explained that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has in the past “supported stiff anti-sex worker policies. As attorney general of California, she helped take down Backpage, which was accused of promoting sex trafficking and faced a multi-year investigation led by her office. This led to the federal bills FOSTA/SESTA (which Harris co-sponsored as a senator). In addition to making sex workers’ jobs less safe, FOSTA/SESTA also affected their incomes and access to bank accounts, loans and lines of credit. Sex workers also said Backpage’s closure made them less safe.”
“I’ve always been uncomfortable with her being the vice president in that sense. And it’s a bit of a hard pill to swallow,” Jessica Ryan — who considers herself a centrist politically and has no relation to Richelle Ryan — told Mashable.
Jessica Ryan noted that the 2024 election offers only two choices for adult performers and other sex workers: “One that historically has not been an ally to sex workers, and another whose closest confidantes would like to see porn cease to exist completely.” and its makers in prison.”
The article concludes that all artists consulted “shared one common perspective: politics should stay out of the set. But the question of whether the authors of Project 2025 get their way is: will there even be sets in a few years?