Stealth

We heard inklings of it while all eyes were on Minnesota ICE raids and trans-American winter storms. Women’s rights are once again in the crosshairs. They always were. And now, a new publication from the Heritage Foundation—the same conservative think tank behind Project 2025—confirms what many suspected: the movement to subjugate women did not retreat; it recalibrated.

The document, Saving America by Saving the Family (Special Report No. 323, January 8, 2026), presents itself as anodyne—bureaucratic, bloodless, almost soothing.

It is not.

Its central premise is semantic. Here is the Heritage Foundation declaration:

“The family, as a married man and woman and their children,
is the fundamental unit—the foundation—of society.”

The declaration is not describing a social preference. It is asserting a hierarchy of legitimacy. One family form is elevated as socially productive, morally sound, and worthy of state protection. All others are rendered deviations—tolerated at best, punished at worst.

This is not run-of-the-mill MAGA-style cultural nostalgia. It is policy-driven social engineering.

Th report, published earlier this month, bears the unmistakable imprint of Roger Severino, a principal architect of Project 2025. In the original blueprint, Severino called for “biblical” gender roles and the weaponization of the Department of Health and Human Services. Families were referenced. Women were targeted. Reproductive autonomy was rolled back; sex and gender were rigidly defined, subordinating women’s economic and medical independence to marriage and childbearing.

When Severino’s blunt prescriptives proved politically radioactive in the run-up to Trump 2.0, he adapted. The objectives did not change; the method did.

Where Project 2025 dictated family structure and women’s roles, the new document conditions them. Where it banned outright, this one calibrates. The language is technocratic and clinical, but the outcome is the same.

Under this framework, women are not ordered back into the home. They are economically steered there. Autonomy is framed as “instability.” Personal choice is labelled a “civic drain.” Pluralism is recast as demographic decline. What is marketed as “support for families” functions instead as a sorting mechanism—rewarding the compliant while quietly disciplining the resistors.

The punishments are not announced as punishments. They are embedded, normalized, and administered in the fine print of policy.

Tax incentives and credits are only the surface. The document proposes federal benefits increasingly tethered to marital status and biological parenthood. Access to childcare, housing, and family leave is conditioned on a narrow domestic ideal. Workforce policy shifts to favor single-earner households, systematically penalizing women who maintain economic independence. Healthcare recommendations deprioritize contraception and reproductive autonomy under the banner of “restoring fertility” and “natural family formation.” Educational policy elevates parental authority defined through heterosexual marriage thereby marginalizing single parents, LGBTQ+ families, adoptive households, and blended families.

The coercion embedded in this report is without command. This is discipline without decree—punishment by policy.

And it draws from an old authoritarian playbook. The emphasis on fertility, bloodline continuity, and a singular “natural” family echoes the concept of Volk—the idea that a nation derives legitimacy from biological reproduction and cultural homogeneity. The language is Americanized as “white supremacy,” but the logic is familiar: social belonging is earned through conformity to an approved reproductive and domestic order. “Blood and soil”—Blut und Boden—need not be named to be operative. When citizenship is morally graded by family structure, democracy quietly yields to ethnonational hierarchy.

Notably, abortion is not foregrounded in this Heritage report. Severino knows that outright abortion bans don’t poll well. They provoke backlash. Voters recoil when coercion is explicit as recent elections have reaffirmed. “Family,” by contrast, polls well across the ideological spectrum.

“Supporting parents.”
“Saving the family.”
Addressing demographic decline.”

This framing lowers resistance and broadens the coalition. Abortion-restrictive outcomes are achieved indirectly—through healthcare policy, medication regulation, contraception access, administrative fetal personhood, and economic penalties—without ever using the word abortion.

This strategy was on full display at the 53rd annual March for Life rally in Washington, D.C., on January 23, 2026. Vice President JD Vance tied the very meaning of life to child-rearing. He dismissed the workplace “cubicle” as a site of emptiness compared to the moral virtue of the cradle.

“You will find great meaning if you dedicate yourself
to the creation and sustenance of human life.”

He underscored the point by announcing his wife’s pregnancy as evidence of personal virtue and ideological consistency.

I take no issue with how the Vance family chooses to live. I do take issue with JD Vance’s authoritarian impulse to convert personal life choices into national policy. And I take issue with a conservative cadre of self-appointed social engineers determined to rig the tax code, healthcare system, labor market, and cultural norms so that only one way of life is rewarded.

If this agenda is embraced during this administration or a future one, the exclusions are obvious. Single women fall outside the ideal. Childfree women—outside the ideal. LGBTQ+ families—outside the ideal. Widows, divorced women, blended families, IVF families, adoptive families—outside the ideal. The report never needs to call these lives “inferior.” By defining what is legitimate, it demotes everyone else automatically.

Resistance is rising. Across the country, a growing number of states are moving to enshrine reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy, and family pluralism into state constitutions and statutory law—building legal firewalls against federal policy overreach. These efforts are neither symbolic nor marginal. They reflect a competing democratic vision—one that recognizes many forms of family, many paths to meaning, and many ways of living a worthy life.

But federal power still matters. Administrative definitions shape markets. Incentives steer behavior. Cultural signals discipline choice. State protections are shields, not guarantees.

Before Trump’s second election, Project 2025 was publicly sidelined for its authoritarian ambitions. This new Heritage report is not a replacement. It is a refinement—a partial rewrite of its most coercive core: the family and health policy vision.

The refinement explains the report’s quiet arrival. We heard inklings of it while our attention was elsewhere. That was the point.

But for this vision of America to prevail—for women to be subjugated, families ranked, autonomy penalized—we would have to let it.

Can we live with that?

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