The Left spent years screaming that Project 2025 was a blueprint for tyranny.
Now they have their own blueprint – and the first thing out of it is a surveillance program dressed up as child protection.
Democrats just launched "Kids Over Clicks" – and what it actually does to adults is the part they buried in the fine print.
Kids Over Clicks and the Age Verification Nobody Is Talking About
Project 2029 – the Democrat answer to Project 2025, run by Biden and Cory Booker operative Chad Maisel – dropped its opening policy salvo this week.
The pitch is simple: ban anyone under 16 from social media, gut Section 230's liability shield for platforms, cap data collection on minors, and outlaw targeted advertising aimed at kids.
Cory Booker – the radical New Jersey senator angling for the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination – rushed to endorse it.
Teachers union boss Randi Weingarten signed on too – promising the union will use a candidate's embrace of the plan as a litmus test for 2028 endorsements.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of the proposal's boosters, supplied the closing argument: "We are at the 'tobacco moment' for social media. The science is in, the lawsuits are succeeding, and public support is overwhelming."
There is just one problem with the child safety framing.
To keep children off a platform, every adult who shows up has to prove who they are.
A birth year typed into a box proves nothing – so the check hardens into a government ID, a face scan, or a digital credential tied to a real person.
The under-16 rule, sold as a wall around children, becomes a turnstile that adults have to badge through too.
Once a platform must verify ages, the anonymous account is finished.
The pseudonymous handle that lets someone post without surrendering their legal name becomes a verified record sitting in a database – available to any government agency with a subpoena and any hacker with a motive.
The countries already running age verification offer a preview.
Australia switched on its under-16 social media ban in December 2025 – and research from the British Medical Journal found 85% of Australian teens had accessed social media in the previous seven days anyway.
The kids found the workaround inside a week.
The ID requirement stayed.
Britain's Online Safety Act now requires a passport or face scan before users can reach ordinary content on platforms like Reddit and X – a regime so sweeping that the Wikimedia Foundation went to court arguing it could force identity checks onto the anonymous volunteers who edit Wikipedia.
The European Union is folding age verification into a continent-wide Digital Identity Wallet, set to roll out across member states in 2027.
The United Arab Emirates bars under-15s outright and enforces it with digital identity checks.
Saudi Arabia – which already runs one of the most heavily policed internets on earth – shows where this road terminates.
In that country, the link between a citizen and every word they post is permanent and state-held.
Democrat operatives are now writing the American version of that architecture.
The Biden and Booker Operatives Behind Project 2029
The proposal itself was written by a former Booker tech policy staffer who also ran children's online safety policy for New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill.
The man running Project 2029 itself is Chad Maisel, who served in the Biden White House's Domestic Policy Council and advised Booker's Senate office.
Weingarten handed Project 2029 a political enforcement operation and labeled it child safety.
The House passed a related bipartisan kids safety package Monday night under fast-track rules – and even that more modest bill drew warnings from digital rights groups about government overreach and expanded online surveillance.
How Section 230 Repeal Would Let Big Tech Ban Conservatives From the Internet
Gutting Section 230 is the part of this proposal that the press is largely waving past.
Section 230 is the 1996 law that says platforms are not legally responsible for what users post.
Strip it away, and platforms face a simple choice: moderate everything aggressively to avoid lawsuits, or open the floodgates and dare the government to sue.
Legal experts say the first option is inevitable.
That means the same Silicon Valley companies that spent years silencing conservatives will be legally incentivized to scrub anything that carries litigation risk – political speech, medical debate, dissent of any kind.
Tie a verified digital identity to platform access and the logic goes one step further: a government agency or a platform's legal team can revoke that credential and lock someone off the internet entirely.
No credential, no access.
Conservatives spent two years fighting back against the media's Project 2025 hysteria.
Project 2029 just launched its first offensive – and anonymous speech in America is what it is designed to end.
Sources:
- Semafor, "Democrats' 'Project 2029' goes after tech companies with online safety plan," Semafor, June 28, 2026.
- Greta Reich, "Rising Democrats back new Big Tech proposal for Project 2029," Washington Examiner, June 29, 2026.
- Christina Maas, "Democrats Pick Up the Global Digital ID Agenda in Project 2029," Reclaim The Net, June 30, 2026.
- Reason, "Democrats' first 'Project 2029' proposal: More government control over social media," Reason, June 30, 2026.
- The Hill, "Democratic Project 2029 calls for child social media ban, strict kids safety rules on tech," The Hill, June 30, 2026.
