'Let this sink in': Org behind Project 2025 once praised Stalin for ending no-fault divorce

30 July 2024

The far-right Heritage Foundation — which is the chief group pushing the authoritarian Project 2025 initiative — once heaped praise on Russian dictator Joseph Stalin for his socially conservative policies.

On the social media platform Bluesky, journalist Faine Greenwood posted snippets from a 2022 post on Heritage's website by researcher Emma Waters. In the article, Waters — whose bio notes that she works at Heritage's "Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family" — made the argument that the totalitarian Russian leader was pro-family despite his regime killing millions of people.

"Joseph Stalin had an utter disregard for human life, and his regime claimed the lives of 9,000,000-20,000,000 of its own subjects. Yet even Stalin understood that society depended on strong, intact families," Waters wrote.

Waters noted that after Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution, which ousted Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, Russia became the first nation in the world to legalize abortion and "quickly implemented an easy, inexpensive, no-fault divorce program" in order to put men and women on equal footing. She then lamented that Russian society saw a decline in marriage rates and an increase in "fatherless children."

Citing economist Elizabeth Brainerd, Waters praised Stalin for overturning the no-fault divorce law and introducing policies that were "designed to encourage family life." Notably, one of those policies was an extra tax on "single people and married couples with fewer than three children." She also heaped praise on Stalin for outlawing abortion and making divorce so "expensive and complicated" that he effectively instituted a "prohibition on divorce."

"Let this sink in. Even the monstrous Stalin, who is responsible for millions of deaths and atrocities, saw that a society needs intact families with both mothers and fathers, if it is to flourish," Waters wrote.

This is remarkably similar to what 2024 Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) proposed in a 2021 interview with far-right activist Charlie Kirk.

"[W]e need to reward the things that we think are good and punish the things that we think are bad," Vance said. "So you talk about tax policy, let’s tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good. If you’re making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower rate than if you are making the same amount of money and you don’t have any kids. It’s that simple.”

Heritage's celebration of Stalin ending no-fault divorce and criminalizing abortion is particularly revealing given the attention surrounding Project 2025. Heritage has batted down criticism of its 920-page playbook for the next Republican administration by arguing that it doesn't directly call for a total abortion ban or an end to no-fault divorce (in which a petitioner can ask the court to dissolve a marriage without having to prove the other party violated the marital contract). But given that former President Donald Trump implemented roughly two-thirds of Heritage's policy recommendations in his first-year of office, it isn't far-fetched to assume the group could push for those policies to be put in place should Trump win a second term.

The call to tax adults without children at a higher rate is unpopular with some swaths of MAGA. Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy — who is a childless adult with a net worth in excess of $100 million — called the idea "f—ing idiotic" and sharply criticized Vance for proposing the idea.

"You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people's kids? We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron," Portnoy tweeted. "If you can't afford a big family don't have a ton of kids."

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