By CHRISTINE MARIE

As the Trump administration unrolls a new imperialist war, working women must be prepared to fight a brutal gendered assault in the offing. In military actions like the war on Iran, the government daily burns up millions of dollars in fuel and destroyed weaponry, and moves quickly to get rid of non-military costs deemed expendable. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill set the pattern. Even before Washington had launched the war on Iran, the government had budgeted $1 trillion for war, while simultaneously cutting $1 trillion from funds previously won by working people for health, education, and housing support.

Now, with the cost of the Iran war approaching $1 billion a day, the MAGA forces are preparing to offload the costs of any social welfare benefits still intact onto the backs of individual working-class households.

How do the right-wing capitalist think tanks advise the government to do this? A deeply reactionary Jan. 8, 2026, Heritage Foundation report, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” lays it out in painful detail. This policy document, a pendant to Project 2025, suggests that, for the MAGA crowd, the recent restriction of access to abortion and the bans on gender-affirming care for the trans community are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to their patriarchal goals.

“Saving the Family” argues that the Second Wave of women’s liberation and the 1964 War on Poverty were the beginning of the destruction of America. The women’s liberation movement, by legitimizing the desire of women to go to college and develop skills for the kind of employment that would give them financial independence from the family, is here deemed a monstrous perversion. Because of that movement, they argue, women were less likely to get married early, and more likely to delay childbearing. The struggle for basic support for poor women, the authors claim, with obvious racist bias, was equally destructive, leading to families without fathers and dire social decay.

The solution, “Saving the Family” argues, is the restoration of a society anchored by a nuclear family, composed of one cis-gender man and one cis-gender woman. This patriarchal unit must function as a patriotic core of society, training wives and children to respect authority, imbuing a work ethic that will reduce the need for government social support, and producing warriors. To “save” this “family,” the report proposes “Manhattan Project” scale social engineering that includes cutting almost all supports going to unmarried women, eliminating student loans for college, providing cash stipends to women who bear children while in their 20s, delegitimizing “unmarried coupling” and no-fault divorce, and getting rid of surrogacy and gay marriage.

“Saving the Family” signals the opening of the most massive assault on the rights of women and the LGBTQI community since the Nazi era. Working women and their allies must be ready to create a fightback anchored by mass demonstrations in the streets, concerted labor action at points of production where it really hurts the bosses, and a decision to stay independent of the electoral machinations of the big business parties.

(Photo) Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

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