Project 2025 November 6th Update

Project 2025 Is Here.

With Trump’s return to the presidency, Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for authoritarianism in the U.S., spearheaded by the powerful and extreme far-right Heritage Foundation, is becoming a reality, affecting all Americans and people around the globe.

More than 100 far-right organizations support this plan for autocracy, which is proving to be the source for Trump’s anti-democratic policies, despite his repeated disavowal of Project 2025 during his campaign. Dozens of members of the new administration have direct ties to the effort.

Project 2025’s stated goal is to create an “ideal” America that would see women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, people of color, and others deprived of their hard-won constitutional rights and the erosion of environmental and education protections. It also advocates for a frightening centralization of power in the executive branch, something Trump is keen to achieve. Read GPAHE’s full analysis of Project 2025 and the groups behind it.

GPAHE monitors how Project 2025 is becoming a reality and reports on the ties between the project and the administration, and its impact on the American people and democracy. We track Project 2025 activities at the federal, state, and local levels, and their plans for an authoritarian and Christian Nationalist America.

This week we look at Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts defending a Holocaust denier, ICE agents shooting pastors in the face, and the Heritage Foundation targeting birth control.

The Project 2025 Architect Just Defended a Holocaust Denier

The Heritage Foundation president’s defense of Tucker Carlson last week wasn’t a mistake — it was a calculated gambit that backfired catastrophically.

Kevin Roberts has spent years reshaping the venerable think tank into an engine for authoritarian policy. When Carlson lobbed softballs at Nick Fuentes in his latest interview, Roberts made his choice: stand by his “close friend.”

The calculation was striking given Fuentes’s record. At 27, the Holocaust denier doesn’t bother with dog whistles: “I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don’t hate Hitler. I think there’s a Jewish conspiracy,” he has stated openly.

Within days, Roberts lost his chief of staff, at least five members of Heritage’s own antisemitism task force, and distinguished fellow Chris DeMut, and drew rare condemnation from The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board, which warned Sunday that “an old political poison is growing on the new right.”

The figure at the center of this controversy attended both the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Fuentes leads the “Groyper” movement — young white nationalists who cloak racism in Christianity and memes. Following the 2024 election, his post to women, declaring “your body, my choice,” sparked a 5,150 percent surge in similar threats online. He has encouraged his followers to “get involved” with Project 2025.

Roberts released a Thursday video framing critics of Carlson’s interview with Fuentes as a “venomous coalition” engaged in divisive cancellation. Carlson remained a “close friend” of Heritage, and Fuentes — despite everything — deserved debate rather than dismissal. “Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government,” Roberts said, deploying language that echoes isolationist and antisemitic talking points about Israel.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board identified what Roberts had actually done. “His video framed the issue not as antisemitism, but as Christian freedom of conscience in the face of a hostile attempt to impose loyalty to Israel on Americans,” the board wrote in their Sunday piece titled “The New Right’s New Antisemites.”

The response from other quarters arrived swiftly. Ben Shapiro called Carlson “the most virulent superspreader of vile ideas in America” by Monday. Senator Ted Cruz, speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s summit in Las Vegas, called the moment a test. “It’s a handful of voices that are spreading this garbage, and it is giving every one of us a time for choosing,” he said. “I choose to stand with Israel, and I choose to stand with America.”

The Combat Antisemitism Movement also suspended its participation in Heritage’s antisemitism task force. In their letter to Roberts, CAM questioned whether “Holocaust survivors, their families, and the American Jewish community at large have a home at Heritage,” noting that Roberts’ defense of treating “Holocaust denial as legitimate political discourse” raised fundamental concerns about Heritage’s moral leadership.

The damage extended beyond public condemnation. Ian Speir and Mark Goldfeder both resigned from Heritage’s National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, citing Roberts’ defense of Carlson as the deciding factor. Several organizations pulled out of the task force entirely, including the Zionist Organization of America, Young Jewish Conservatives, the Coalition for Jewish Values and Combat Antisemitism Movement.

Speir pointed to Roberts’ Tuesday remarks at Hillsdale College, where the Heritage president told his audience, “Sometimes you can make a mistake with the best of intentions.” Speir called this a “strategic non-apology that doubles down on ‘loyalty’ to Tucker Carlson, muses about welcoming groypers and the groyper-curious into the movement, and continues to gaslight everyone about ‘cancelation’ when that clearly isn’t the issue.”

“It is the elevation of blind loyalty and a thirst for power above principle—the very opposite of historical American conservatism,” Speir wrote Tuesday on X. “I cannot tread this path with you. The stakes for our country and for our Jewish friends are simply too high, too existential.”

Goldfeder was equally direct in his Sunday resignation letter. “The recent decision by Heritage leadership to defend and even celebrate Tucker Carlson’s decision to platform Nick Fuentes — a figure whose record of overt racism, sexism, and antisemitism is beyond dispute — makes continued participation impossible. Elevating him, and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal, in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog-whistles no less, is not the protection of free speech: It is moral collapse disguised as courage.”

By Tuesday, the task force’s remaining co-chairs — who had played a major role in drafting Project Esther, a controversial antisemitism plan published by Heritage last year — demanded concrete reforms from Roberts. Their ultimatum included removing his video, apologizing to “those Christians and Jews who are steadfast members of the conservative movement,” condemning Carlson’s antisemitic content, hosting a conference about conservative boundaries, hiring a visiting fellow “who shares mainstream conservative views on Israel, Jews and Christian Zionists,” and organizing Shabbat dinners with Heritage staff.

“If the terms aren’t met, we will take the NTFCA elsewhere,” Luke Moon, one of the task force co-chairs and executive director of the National Taskforce to Combat Antisemitism, told Jewish Insider Tuesday. The email warned that without agreement, their relationship with Heritage “will be irrevocably harmed.”

Ryan Neuhaus, Roberts’ chief of staff, also resigned Monday, though for opposite reasons. Neuhaus had amplified Roberts’ position on social media, sharing posts suggesting Heritage employees “virtue signaling” about the interview should resign — calling it “addition by subtraction.”

Roberts attempted damage control Friday. Fuentes, he wrote, “is fomenting Jew hatred, and his incitements are not only immoral and un-Christian, they risk violence.” The WSJ editorial board was unimpressed. “Amid criticism on Friday, Mr. Roberts scrambled to list Mr. Fuentes’s odiousness, but his initial contribution was to join in the Jew-baiting,” they wrote.

The board also dismantled Roberts’ “cancel culture” defense. “Mr. Fuentes has free speech and uses it to fantasize about killing and deporting Jews. Is it now ‘cancel culture’ to criticize Mr. Carlson for treating Mr. Fuentes like a political truth-teller and feeding him softball questions?”

In a Monday night speech, Roberts said Heritage “will never, ever, ever stop fighting against antisemitism in all its forms.” He offered an apology to his “Jewish friends” without addressing the Carlson controversy directly.

By Wednesday afternoon, Roberts stood before Heritage staff and admitted what had become undeniable. “I made a mistake and I let you down and I let down this institution. Period. Full Stop,” he told staff in remarks obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Roberts claimed he still “didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy” when he recorded the video and said Neuhaus had written the script and deceived him into believing colleagues had approved the message. “This is an explanation, not an excuse,” Roberts said, adding that he told Heritage’s board he was willing to resign but felt a “moral obligation” to repair the damage.

Mitch McConnell threw Roberts’ words back at him. “Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats,” he wrote. “But maybe I just don’t know what time it is.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition summit became a stage for parsing where lines still exist. Lindsey Graham announced membership in the “‘Hitler sucks’ wing of the Republican Party” — remarkable because such declarations now require articulation. Rep. Randy Fine called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America” leading a “modern-day Hitler Youth.”

Matt Brooks, who runs the Republican Jewish Coalition, identified Carlson’s actual failure: approaching Fuentes without challenging him on “why he admires Adolf Hitler, why he’s a Holocaust denier and hates Jews, why he is pro-Putin and pro-Stalin.”

The distinction matters in a party that loves to mock progressive “cancel culture.” When antisemitic texts among Republican operatives surfaced recently, JD Vance dismissed outrage as “pearl clutching.” But polling explains the current scramble. February Gallup numbers showed 83 percent of Republicans viewing Israel favorably, with Brookings finding 63 percent maintaining positive opinions despite rising criticism.

Rick Scott articulated the political calculation directly. “There’s already the Democratic Party that is anti-Israel, and is OK with antisemitism,” the Florida senator said. “We’ve got to be very clear we don’t support antisemitism and we do support Israel.”

Extremist elements in Republican ranks weren’t new. The party fought David Duke in the 1990s and Pat Buchanan’s antisemitic ideology before that. The WSJ editorial board invoked that history, calling Roberts an “apologist” who violated core conservative principles established by Heritage founder Ed Feulner and William Buckley, who famously expelled antisemites from the conservative movement.

McConnell has blamed Carlson for collapsing Republican support for Ukraine. The host previously described Volodymyr Zelensky — who is Jewish — as “sweaty and rat-like,” “shifty,” “dead-eyed,” a “persecutor of Christians,” and a “friend of BlackRock.”

Roberts initially announced Friday that Neuhaus would become a senior adviser at Heritage’s B. Kenneth Simon Center working on housing policy. By Monday, that arrangement had dissolved into resignation.

The episode exposed Heritage’s transformation under Roberts’ Christian nationalist leadership. The organization that created Project 2025 — the authoritarian blueprint now steering Trump administration policy — attempted to provide intellectual cover for platforming a figure who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and found refuge on Rumble after mainstream platforms banned him. Notably, Vice President JD Vance is an investor in Rumble, the platform where Fuentes now broadcasts his antisemitic content without oversight.

The WSJ closed with a stark warning: “If conservatives — and Republicans — don’t call out this poison in their own ranks before it corrupts more young minds, the right and America are entering dangerous territory.”

Pastors Shot in the Head, Shoppers Interrogated in Parking Lots: Project 2025’s Deportation Machine Takes Shape

Seven chemical irritant rounds struck Rev. David Black’s body as he prayed outside an Illinois immigration facility on September 19. Two hit his head directly. “As I was praying for them, they opened fire on me,” Black told Newsweek.

Six weeks later, another pastor felt burning pain explode across his face as a pepper round struck his chin. Between September and early November, federal agents shot at least three clergy members in the face and head during peaceful protests. But the violence against religious leaders represents just one facet of Project 2025’s deportation apparatus now taking shape across American cities.

What’s unfolding looks less like immigration enforcement and more like occupation. Federal agents in horror movie masks. Parking lot interrogations. Teenagers slammed to the pavement. Pastors beaten with batons while praying. All enabled by a September Supreme Court decision that fundamentally changed the rules.

The Court lifted restrictions on immigration stops in Los Angeles. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion suggesting it’s reasonable to question someone leaving a construction site or speaking with an accent. If they’re legitimate citizens, he reasoned, you let them go.

That legal framework now plays out in parking lots across the country. At 9:30 one morning, ICE agents cornered a woman outside the Walmart in Cicero, Illinois. Two masked agents blocked her path. “Are you from here? Where’s here? What country? Were you born here?”

The startled woman was deemed a citizen and released. But two other shoppers were detained that morning under “Operation Midway Blitz”  — increased ICE activity targeting neighborhoods with large immigrant populations.

“They’re grabbing people off the street who speak with an accent or might be brown or Black and disappearing them,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker told NPR. “I did not think that we lived in a country like that.”

In mid-October, 18-year-old Evelyn was thrown to the ground in Hoffman Estates, Ill. Video shows her pulled from a car, slammed face-down on pavement, an officer’s knee on her back. “I’m not resisting,” she keeps saying.

Evelyn is a U.S. citizen. She and two friends had been monitoring ICE activity when agents detained all three for hours before releasing them without charges. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin initially denied involvement, claiming the video showed an old burglary arrest. Hoffman Estates police confirmed ICE agents were present.

Illinois Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi said the incident embodied “everything that’s wrong with the Trump Administration’s militarized ICE raids: cruelty without accountability, secrecy without oversight, and power without restraint.”

Then came Halloween. Community monitors in Los Angeles documented federal agents leaving Terminal Island wearing horror movie masks like Chucky and Momo, headed out for enforcement operations.

One monitor told  LA Taco an agent deliberately slowed down, rolled down the window, and stared directly into cameras while wearing the Chucky mask. The encounter “reaffirmed that they really have fun doing this type of work, terrorizing our communities.”

When asked for comment, McLaughlin’s response was two words: “Happy Halloween!”

Deborah Fleischaker, former Acting ICE Chief of Staff, told LA Taco she’d never seen anything like this in her decade at DHS. “Federal law enforcement officers are entrusted with the authority and power of the government, which is like a really sacred responsibility,” she said. “It’s one that should be taken seriously and shouldn’t be made light of.”

Religious leaders positioning themselves as moral obstacles have faced systematic violence. Rev. Jorge Bautista was struck during an October 23 vigil near Oakland where more than 100 Border Patrol agents were staging. As agents fired stun grenades into the crowd, Bautista moved closer to calm the situation. A masked agent raised his weapon. “We come in peace!” Bautista recalled saying. The agent fired from feet away, coating his face in orange pepper spray powder.

“I immediately felt burning pain,” Bautista said. “I was in shock, disoriented, and terrified that I might stop breathing altogether.”

Back in Chicago, Rev. Black stood outside the Broadview ICE facility with hands stretched in prayer. “I stepped up toward the building, didn’t cross any lines, didn’t block any cars,” he told Newsweek. Agents opened fire, striking him seven times.

Two weeks later, United Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested at the same facility. She was beaten with a baton while she prayed, then handcuffed. “If they are willing to do that to a clergy in broad daylight, imagine what they are doing to detainees in the dark,” Kardon said.

Rev. Michael Woolf described how an ICE agent grabbed his neck and twisted his nipple while State Police pushed him with truncheons — all while he wore his clerical collar. He called the facility “a ‘black hole'” where detainees receive minimal food, cannot contact families, and are denied medical treatment.

In Illinois, on October 9 a federal judge blocked agents from using certain crowd-control measures. Rev. Black joined an ACLU lawsuit challenging the tactics.

“What ICE is doing in Chicago is absolute viciousness,” Black told Newsweek. “They’re testing out tactics. They’re seeing what they can get away with.”

“When people see faith leaders standing in the line of fire, I hope they understand that it’s not because we seek confrontation,” Bautista said. “Our presence is meant to be a moral mirror. It reminds the world that this is not normal.”

Rev. Black offered forgiveness alongside demands for accountability. “As a Christian, I forgive these ICE officers,” he said. “And as an American citizen, I need them to be held to account.”

The Heritage Foundation Goes After Birth Control

The Heritage Foundation wants Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to study whether birth control pills hurt women. The request landed this week in a commentary that frames decades-old contraception as a threat to American families.

Scott Yenor and Jennifer Galardi wrote October 29 that oral contraceptives have created “hook-up culture, delayed marriage, and the destruction of the nuclear family.” Their solution? Kennedy should direct the National Institutes of Health to conduct what they call “gold standard science” on hormonal birth control.

The pill has been FDA-approved since the 1960s. Roughly 14 percent of American women between 15 and 49 currently use it, (54 percent use some kind of contraception) according to CDC data. But the Heritage Foundation argues women deserve to know about long-term consequences — claiming that users feel emotionally numb, moving through life in a haze.

This isn’t just conservative think tank posturing. It’s a part of Project 2025’s broader strategy to restrict contraceptive access across multiple federal programs in order to encourage larger, “natural families.” The USAID cuts have globally denied more than 37 million women and girls access to contraception, the Guttmacher Institute reports.

The 900-page policy blueprint targets Title X, the national family planning program that serves low-income patients. Project 2025 proposes cutting all federal funding from providers that offer abortion services or referrals. When Trump officials imposed a similar rule in 2019, clinics serving 2.4 million patients dropped out of the program within a year.

The Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage guarantee faces elimination too. Project 2025 wants expanded religious and moral exemptions that would let any employer — including large corporations — drop birth control from employee health plans. Women who’ve had no-cost access to their preferred contraceptive method for over a decade could suddenly face financial barriers.

As an advocate for reproductive rights, Nourbese Flint sees the pattern clearly. The All* Above All president told Newsweek that attacks on birth control and abortion access serve a single purpose: “controlling people’s bodies — not the latest science or patient’s safety.” She noted Project 2025 simultaneously cuts nutrition assistance and healthcare while restricting reproductive autonomy.

The Heritage Foundation admits their position “would likely cause a frenzy.” Yet Yenor and Galardi insist they’re championing informed consent as a health priority. It’s a curious argument for medications with six decades of FDA approval and extensive safety data.

Kennedy told senators during confirmation hearings he would “follow the law regarding access to birth control.” The Health and Human Services Department hasn’t responded to questions about whether he’ll launch the Heritage Foundation’s requested investigation.

What makes the Heritage Foundation commentary particularly striking is its framing. The authors position themselves as advocates for women’s wellbeing while arguing that birth control has destroyed families and enabled casual sex. They cite research on hormonal effects but ignore the reasons millions of women choose contraception — whether for family planning, treating medical conditions, or managing their own reproductive lives.

Kennedy hasn’t said whether he’ll take up the Heritage Foundation’s call to investigate birth control. Health and Human Services declined to comment. But the campaign itself tells you where this is headed.

Anti-abortion activists spent 50 years trying to overturn Roe v. Wade. They succeeded. Heritage is turning their attention to contraception, building the same kind of arguments they once used against abortion access. Birth control harms women, they say. Women deserve better information.

It’s a familiar playbook. The pill has been on the market since 1960. Project 2025 wants to treat it like it just showed up yesterday — and the 14 percent of American women who use it are watching to see if the Trump administration will  play along.