Porn stars launch campaign against Project 2025 targeting swing states

Concerned with provisions of Project 2025 that could criminalize pornography, a group of porn stars is jumping into the 2024 election, launching “Hands Off My Porn” and purchasing $100,000 in ads in swing states to spread their message. 

“We must fight back against this ultra-conservative agenda that is rooted in religious conservatism, fearmongering, and the suppression of women’s rights,” Casey Calvert, one of the porn stars involved with the effort, wrote alongside the announcement of the ads. 

Twenty porn stars came together to found Hands Off My Porn, and they are placing the ads on sites that show explicit content in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Michigan, warning users about Project 2025’s drive to criminalize porn.

The ads will direct people to the Hands Off My Porn website, where they can watch testimonials about Project 2025’s dangers. 

“This ‘180-day playbook’ for the next Trump Administration puts the anti-porn agenda front and center – on page 5 of this nearly 1000-page document that’s endorsed by The Heritage Foundation, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Koch Brothers, and hundreds of conservative organizations,” the group writes online.

Hands Off My Porn is referencing the foreword written by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who calls for pornography to be “outlawed.” 

“It has no claim to First Amendment protection,” he writes. “Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned…telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” 

According to the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Supreme Court has found that people have the right to produce and consume pornography as long as it does not include underage minors. 

Per researchers at Brigham Young University, 69 percent of men and 40 percent of women in the U.S. view porn every year.

Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, saying he had “nothing to do with it.” However, many of the authors of Project 2025’s blueprint for a conservative administration in 2025 are former Trump appointees or allies. 

Democrats have turned the document into a cudgel against Trump and Republicans, and it has been at the center of many of their attacks on Trump and congressional Republicans in the final sprint before the election. 

The push appears to be working, with 70 to 80 percent of Americans saying they have heard of Project 2025, and the overwhelming majority of those who have heard about it disapprove of what the blueprint calls for. 

Some Democrats, like Liz Plank, who co-founded Hotties for Harris, believe that Vice President Harris and Democrats should spend more time talking about Project 2025’s push to ban porn. 

“One of the most insane parts of Project 2025 and their anti-sex agenda is this drive to criminalize porn,” Plank said. “Democrats should be talking to young men about this.”

“Democrats should be asking young men ‘Do you want the government to look at your search history?” she added. “They should be asking ‘Do you want to be put in jail for consuming porn?’” 

According to Plank, Democrats must improve their outreach to younger men in the run-up to the election. This belief is backed by polls of young voters, which show a widening support gap for Harris between younger male and female voters.