Project 2025 May 15th Update

Once dismissed as a fringe, right-wing broadcaster, One America News Network (OANN) now stands poised to become America’s voice to the world. This is the network whose correspondent Pearson Sharp once mused on air about executing those he deemed election “traitors.” The same outlet that deliberately broadcast a New York Times journalist’s personal phone number to its viewers in an act of targeted harassment. A channel forced to settle lawsuits over broadcasting false election claims. And as of May 7, this organization will supply content to Voice of America (VOA), reaching 350 million global viewers — displacing the global broadcaster founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda.

Failed Arizona Republican political candidate Kari Lake, handpicked by Trump to oversee the US Agency for Global Media, announced the suspension of VOA operations on March 15, placing its 1,300-person staff on indefinite administrative leave and halting all broadcasts. VOA’s website has shown no activity since the announcement was made. Lake is a former TV news anchor whose disdain for journalism led her to destroy televisions in campaign videos. “It’s time to take a sledgehammer to the mainstream media’s lies and propaganda,” she vowed as she smashed televisions with a baseball bat for the camera.

Her elevation of OANN represents the unprecedented restructuring of America’s information landscape to amplify voices favorable to the Trump administration. In the span of a single week this May, the Trump administration both installed OANN at VOA and severed federal funding for NPR and PBS — implementing two cornerstone recommendations from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, its blueprint for American authoritarianism.

The roster of OANN personalities reads like a compendium of contemporary misinformation specialists. Jack Posobiec, who served as a correspondent from 2018 to 2021, first gained notoriety for amplifying the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy. At 2024’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) he proclaimed, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”  

OANN’s Chief White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, constructed elaborate false narratives about COVID-19’s origins, including a debunked scenario that Anthony Fauci funded the development of the virus in a North Carolina lab.

And then there’s bigoted former congressman Matt Gaetz, who has reinvented himself as a media personality after his nomination for Attorney General was withdrawn by Trump. Gaetz, who has called DEI “anti-white racism” and defended January 6 insurrectionists, launched “The Matt Gaetz Show” in January 2025. Gaetz’s bigotry and close ties to white nationalists are well-documented. 

Despite Lake’s embrace of OANN, the future of VOA may ultimately be determined by Congress, which could overrule Lake and Trump. VOA’s editorial independence was established by law in 1976 under President Gerald Ford, requiring it to serve as a reliable, accurate, objective, and comprehensive source of news, further protected by subsequent laws from interference by the State Department and government officials.

In the meantime, VOA staff members are pursuing legal remedies and secured a modest victory in April 2025 that reinstated 20 of the 1,300 employees affected by the March shutdown. These countermeasures, however, advance at a glacial pace compared to the administration’s swift implementation of its propagandistic media agenda as outlined in Project 2025.

The elevation of OANN doesn’t just change who delivers America’s message, it fundamentally alters what America stands for in the global conversation about democracy at precisely the moment when that conversation has never been more consequential.

Project 2025 and Pornography: America’s First Amendment Frontline

The battle over America’s digital freedoms has entered a new phase. Senator Mike Lee’s resurrection of the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA) represents a major legislative manifestation of Project 2025’s cultural agenda, and a sweeping attempt to redefine federal obscenity laws that would effectively criminalize pornography nationwide. 

The Utah Republican’s bill, which twice failed in previous congressional sessions, now finds itself invigorated by the Trump administration’s policy priorities. Lee is betting on the embrace of Project 2025’s anti-porn stance, which maintains that pornography deserves the same legal treatment as controlled substances; producers and distributors would face criminal penalties previously reserved for drug traffickers. 

Project 2025 argues that pornography is responsible for “propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” and “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. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” 

Under Lee’s proposed legislation, even visiting mainstream adult websites could constitute a federal crime, transforming millions of Americans into potential lawbreakers overnight. To effectively police digital content consumption would require extensive government surveillance and an unprecedented digital expansion of federal authority.

Current U.S. law is regulated by the “Miller Test,” established in 1973, which requires three conditions to deem content legally obscene: it must appeal to prurient interests, offend contemporary community standards, and lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. IODA proposes defining obscene content merely as material appealing to prurient interests in nudity, sex, or excretion that depicts sexual acts with the intent to arouse. Eliminating the community standards safeguard would create a chilling effect on protected speech that extends into realms of art, health information, LGBTQ+ media and sexual education, opening up the potential for selective enforcement against disfavored groups and viewpoints. 

Lee’s bill would establish a national standard for obscene material, which the court ruled against more than 40 years ago, writing, “It is neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to read the First Amendment as requiring that the people of Maine or Mississippi accept public depiction of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas, or New York City.” 

As the legislation advances through committee hearings in the coming weeks, its implications extend far beyond the specific content it targets. The Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, with its direct lineage to Project 2025, represents a decisive moment in America’s ongoing struggle to define the limits of freedom in the digital age. 

The Sheriff’s Dilemma: How Project 2025 Transforms Local Jails into Trump’s Deportation Pipeline

Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement strategy is transforming America’s county jails into deportation staging grounds, with local sheriffs, who lack resources and proper training, caught in a crossfire of competing directives. As Trump implements policies that mirror Project 2025’s vision of mandatory compliance with immigration detainers, states are rapidly codifying either cooperation or resistance, leaving law enforcement officers as reluctant arbiters of a polarizing national policy.

In Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Sheriff Garry McFadden’s experience illuminates the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement. Despite campaigning on limiting ICE cooperation when elected in 2018, arguing that it did nothing to enhance public safety, McFadden now finds himself compelled to comply with detainer requests after state lawmakers mandated collaboration. 

When U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) included Mecklenburg in a now-retracted Facebook post accusing jurisdictions of “shielding criminal illegal immigrants,” McFadden’s frustration was evident. “You can’t say we’re a sanctuary county and have state laws that say we have to work with ICE. You can’t have both,” McFadden responded. 

The sheriff added that he’d like more choice about whether to comply with detainers, noting that a federal funding cutoff would endanger important jail programs such as rape counseling. “Everybody’s focused on immigration like that’s the biggest fire, and nobody wants to address the other things. The losers will be the prisoners who need all these services we provide,” McFadden said. 

Sheriff’s departments across rural and urban America struggle with the logistics of serving as de facto immigration agents. In addition to the extra costs incurred and the erosion of trust from immigrant communities who are less likely to report crime, local officers typically receive minimal training on the labyrinthine complexities of immigration law, increasing the likelihood of costly legal missteps that can expose counties to significant liability. Many sheriffs view ICE cooperation with trepidation, finding themselves caught between their sworn duty to local public safety and the expanding federal expectations that stretch their capacity beyond sustainable limits.

Project 2025 recommends that “Congress should require compliance with immigration detainers to the maximum extent consistent with the Tenth Amendment and set financial disincentives for jurisdictions that implement either official or unofficial sanctuary policies” — a blueprint that Trump appears to be following methodically. 

How immigration is enforced varies dramatically depending on state legislation. Florida requires sheriffs to actively help ICE write detainers. Iowa, Tennessee, and Texas are among the states that also require cooperation with detainers. Meanwhile, California, Colorado, and Massachusetts have prohibited such cooperation, operating on the principle that ICE detainers alone don’t justify extended detention when individuals would otherwise be released.

Cooperation between sheriffs and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lies at the heart of the Trump administration’s immigration detention policy, which aligns with Project 2025’s recommendations. The administration plans to punish noncooperative jurisdictions with funding cuts aligned with Project 2025’s call for “financial disincentives.” 

The legal battle over these enforcement mechanisms is underway. Jurisdictions across Connecticut, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington and California are challenging the administration’s funding threats. U.S. District Judge William Orrick recently issued a preliminary injunction preventing such financial penalties while litigation proceeds, writing that the case cannot continue with “the coercive threat to end all federal funding hanging over the Cities and Counties’ heads like the sword of Damocles.”

As state legislatures increasingly dictate whether local law enforcement must serve as extensions of federal immigration authorities, America’s patchwork enforcement system reveals fundamental tensions about federalism, local control, and the use of financial leverage to enforce political compliance. For those facing potential deportation this year under Trump’s implementation of Project 2025 policies, these abstract constitutional principles translate into immediate, life-altering consequences.