Delayed publication of Heritage president's book reflects Project 2025 shell game

Media Matters has obtained a galley copy of Dawn's Early Light, which decries IVF, abortion, childlessness, and dog parks

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ book will be published after the November elections, according to a report from Real Clear Politics.

This comes after backlash against the Heritage-led initiative Project 2025, which aims to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration and is backed by an advisory board of more than 100 conservative groups. Project 2025 has deep ties to former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). Vance wrote the foreword to the now-delayed Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, calling Roberts’ ideas an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay ahead.”

The effort to hide the ball is futile, as Media Matters has obtained a galley copy of the book.

A review found Roberts rails against birth control, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and dog parks. He says that having children should not be considered an “optional individual choice” but “a social expectation or a transcendent gift,” and 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.”

From page 63:

We need to understand what could be called contraceptive technologies—revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family—in the same vein. They shift norms, incentives, and choices, often invisibly and involuntarily. Conservatives inveigh against no-fault divorce, the Sexual Revolution, and the destruction of a culture of hope without recognizing that these cultural changes are all downstream of technological ones.

“If you change a culture on a profound level, you can break the most basic functioning elements of civilization,” Roberts continues. “In the case of contraceptives, we are a society remade according to a research agenda set by the Party of Destruction."

Roberts also attacks in vitro fertilization. From page 64:

Once you understand this pattern (individual choice masking cultural upheaval), you will see it everywhere. In vitro fertilization (IVF) 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 blames contraception for a rise in abortion rates. Also from page 64:

As other kinds of contraceptive technologies spread, abortion rates went up, not down. Why? Because technological change made having a child seem like an optional and not natural result of having sex and destroyed a whole series of institutions and cultural norms that had protected women and forced men to take responsibility for their actions.

He condemns childlessness as well, recalling the broader political problem sparked by Vance’s unearthed comments attacking “childless cat ladies."

A culture of childlessness is, in the final analysis, a culture of despair.

Getting married and having kids, on the other hand, gives you skin in the game for the future of your country. It forces you to grow up, give up childish things, and live in the real world. It grounds you, gives you a sense of purpose in life, and helps generate community, gratitude, and joy. A culture of children is a culture of hope.

On page 69, Roberts targets 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."

The publication delay reflects a political crisis in the MAGA movement, as the worldview outlined by Roberts and Vance in Dawn’s Early Light has proven to be deeply unpopular with the public. Trump has attempted to distance himself from Heritage and Project 2025, especially after Kevin Roberts appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and declared that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

But as the Trump campaign has deliberately refused to provide a detailed policy platform, instead putting forth only a barebones platform both on his campaign site and through the Republican National Committee, Project 2025 has effectively filled in the blanks of what a second Trump term might look like. The initiative includes a more than 900-page policy book titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which outlines extreme positions on virtually every major political issue and includes plans to restrict abortion access, eviscerate tools to fight climate change, and turn the Department of Justice into an unaccountable weapon for Trump to enact his retribution agenda against political enemies, among others. An analysis by CNN found “nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump,” and many of its authors and contributors worked directly in his administration.

Project 2025 has also recently attempted to downplay its own significance after years of aggrandizement. Trump administration alum Paul Dans recently resigned from his position as president of Project 2025, and now Roberts’ book is delayed. But it’s proving impossible to wash Project 2025’s stench off the campaign.

Roberts himself has admitted that the artificial attempt to shield Trump from Project 2025 backlash is disingenuous. “No hard feelings from any of us at Project 2025,” he told conservative radio host Vince Coglianese in July, “We understand Trump is the standard bearer and he's making a political tactical decision there.”