WASHINGTON—A team of journalists from the United Kingdom-based nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting captured a senior official of Project 2025 on hidden camera espousing the group's aims to target pornography when the journalists posed last month as potential donors to the far-right network led by the Heritage Foundation.
AVN has reported on Project 2025 and the network's culture war policy proposals like banning pornography and imprisoning so-called "pornographers."
“I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation,” said Russell Vought, an outspoken Christian nationalist and the president of the Center for Renewing America, via CNN.
Vought, one of the co-authors of Project 2025's various policy proposals outlined in their policy treatise Mandate for Leadership, was caught on the hidden camera explaining the many outlandish political positions of the group.
"We’ve been too focused on religious liberty, which we all support, but we’ve lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation,” Vought said. “Our laws are built on the Judeo-Christian worldview value system. ... And my viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian 'nation-ism.'
"That’s pretty close to Christian nationalism because I also believe in nationalism," Vought told the undercover journalists. To prop up efforts on building a so-called "Christian nation," he said that "pornography" should be targeted by "doing it from the back door."
Vought explained that instead of introducing an unpopular law that would ban all pornography in the United States, his group and their fellow members of Project 2025 would push for policies that place liability on the parent companies of the pornography sites.
This could lead some to stop doing business in places with those sorts of laws, such as in the case of Pornhub's parent company Aylo geo-blocking U.S. states that have adopted age verification statutes.
Project 2025's organizations have individually and collectively lobbied for age verification laws that specifically target pornography websites. Vought's Center for Renewing America has circulated model age verification legislation among Republican state lawmakers in dozens of states.
AVN reported on how California Assembly Bill (AB) 3080, when it was first presented, was model legislation introduced by Asm. Juan Alanis, R-Modesto, from the center. However, Free Speech Coalition lobbyists managed to amend AB 3080 to its current form which includes the "RTA" provision.
Heritage Foundation has openly lobbied in support of age verification laws and aggressive laws that could censor online pornography and social media.
Heritage supports measures like the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act (formerly Kids Online Safety Act) in efforts to censor LGBTQ+ speech.
AVN reached out to the Centre for Climate Reporting for transcripts of the undercover video it obtained. The group went undercover in a bid to further link former President Donald Trump to the extreme proposals of Project 2025.
Vought is an ally of former President Trump. He served in leadership positions at the Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
OMB is the largest office in the Executive Office of the President of the United States which oversees the federal budget request and evaluates agency programs, policies and procedures. Vought is also considered a frontrunner as chief of staff if Trump is reelected to the White House in November.
Trump has openly disavowed Project 2025 and has proposed his version, Agenda 47.
There is mounting evidence of his connection to the Project 2025 team, including Vought and public officials who served in the Trump administration. ProPublica and Documented published hours of internal training videos circulated among Project 2025 would-be staffers in the Trump White House. Of the 36 individuals who appeared in the internal videos, 29 have worked for Trump as a campaign staffer, White House staffer, or member of the 2017 transition team.
