LOS ANGELES — Tech news site Mashable published an article Tuesday surveying opinions among adult performers across the political spectrum regarding Project 2025, the conservative initiative for a presidential transition that includes a call to criminalize the production and distribution of pornography.
Conservative performer Richelle Ryan told Mashable’s Andy Hirschfeld that 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 Democrats are trying to use,” Ryan said.
The majority of performers consulted, however, disagreed with Ryan.
Hirschfeld wrote, “Most of the performers Mashable spoke to see Trump distancing himself from Project 2025 as a farce. Trump lied more than 30,000 times during his presidential term alone according to The Washington Post.”
Allie Awesome told Mashable, “I think that we need to look at Project 2025 and recognize that this is a clear and present danger for the sex worker community. We have to call it out. We have to take it very seriously and educate people.”
As XBIZ reported, former Donald Trump staffer and Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought told undercover reporters in July that the Heritage Foundation-led initiative has entered its second, more secretive phase with different tactics, including banning pornography “from the back door” through age verification legislation.
As CNN noted at the time, Vought served as policy director for the Republican National Convention committee that formulated the party’s new official platform. CNN called that task “a sign of how central he is to Republicans’ policy goals.”
In the undercover video, CNN reported, Vought also complains that conservatives have “lacked the ability to argue we are a Christian nation.”
“My viewpoint is mostly that I would probably be Christian nation-ism,” Vought says in the video. “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 listed in the Project 2025 blueprint — including abortion restrictions and making pornography illegal.”
Hirschfeld’s Mashable article also explains that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has in the past “supported stiff anti-sex worker policies. As California attorney general, she helped take down Backpage, which was accused of promoting sex trafficking and faced a multi-year investigation led by her office. That led to federal bills FOSTA/SESTA (the latter of which Harris co-sponsored as senator). In addition to making sex workers’ jobs less safe, FOSTA/SESTA also impacted their incomes and access to bank accounts, loans, and lines of credit. Sex workers also said the shutdown of Backpage made them less safe.”
Jessica Ryan, who identifies as a centrist politically and is unrelated to Richelle Ryan, told Mashable, “I’ve always been uncomfortable with her being the VP in that sense. And it’s a little bit of a hard pill to swallow.”
Jessica Ryan opined that the 2024 election provides only two choices for adult performers and other sex workers: “One that hasn’t historically been an ally to sex workers, and another whose closest confidants would like to see porn cease to exist entirely and put its creators in jail.”
The article concludes that all the performers consulted “shared one common perspective: politics should stay off the set. But the question if Project 2025’s authors get their way is: in a few years, will there even be sets?”
