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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 how Moms for Liberty is trading elections for lawsuits, the MAGA propagandists replacing Pentagon reporters, and how the Heritage Foundation grades America’s historic sites for ideological purity.
How Moms for Liberty Learned to Stop Losing Elections and Love the Courts
The applause had barely died when attorney and anti-LGBTQ+ activist Kimberly Hermann of the conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation delivered the new marching orders to a rapt crowd at the Moms For Liberty summit held near Orlando, October 16 through 19.
“We need people willing to stand up legally and be, you know, named plaintiffs,” she told the 800 mothers packed into the Gaylord Palms Hotel ballroom, “One offensive litigation can have this amazing ripple effect.”
The logic is simple. Win one lawsuit — or even file it — and watch entire states scramble to change their policies. No messy elections. No angry voters. Just lawyers, judges, and fear.
In 2023, voters rejected Moms for Liberty candidates in 134 school board races across the country. The group that had terrorized board meetings with accusations of “grooming” and “indoctrination” kept losing at the ballot box. So they stopped trying to win elections and started trying to win in litigation.
Matt Sharp of the anti-LGBTQ+ Alliance Defending Freedom, a strong proponent of Project 2025 policies nationally and internationally, laid out the new strategy in a breakout session, his voice rising with evangelical fervor, pointing to the Supreme Court’s June decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor — parents could now pull their children from any class discussing LGBTQ+ themes. “We need warriors,” Sharp said. “Joyful warriors to file cases.”
The grassroots branding masks a well-funded operation. Moms for Liberty has been political since its inception, fertilized by the far-right ecosystem. Tiffany Justice, who co-founded Moms for Liberty after a failed school board campaign in 2021, was named executive vice president of Heritage Action in July 2025. The Heritage Foundation — architect of Project 2025 — handed Moms for Liberty a $25,000 cash award in 2022 and has been a longtime co-sponsor of the group’s annual summits.
Within a week of receiving 501(c)(4) non-profit status, co-founder Tina Descovich was on the Rush Limbaugh Show. Multiple appearances on Fox News and Steve Bannon’s War Room quickly followed as the organization was platformed by far-right media outlets and embraced and subsidized by national conservative organizations.
The summit’s speakers revealed how deep the roots have spread.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier pitched his Office of Parental Rights as “a law firm for parents.” He’d already modeled the strategy: suing Target over rainbow merchandise, subpoenaing drag show attendance lists, and blacklisting law firms with diversity programs. “If you’re identifying one of these wrongs that’s violating your rights and then subjecting our kids to danger and evil, then we want to know about it,” Uthmeier told the crowd. “And we’re going to bring the heat in court to shut it down.”
Sharp wrapped God around the legal strategy like a flag. These lawsuits would let children “be the salt and light in those classrooms,” spreading “our message of freedom, of faith, of justice.”
The 800 attendees who left the Gaylord Palms understood their assignment. No more shouting at school board meetings. No more losing elections. File lawsuits instead.
Pentagon Falls to Project 2025’s First Assault: Truth
The authoritarian fantasy is now Pentagon policy. Project 2025’s manifesto declares: “No legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media on the White House campus,” presaging exactly what unfolded on October 14, when every major news organization refused Pentagon restrictions requiring them to clear even unclassified information before publishing. For the first time since the Pentagon opened in 1943, no credible news outlet covers America’s military from inside the building.
Sixty outlets rushed to fill the void. Gateway Pundit arrives fresh from settling defamation suits with Georgia election workers. Lindell TV, whose owner, Mike Lindell, has been found liable for defamation for making false statements to the media, sent a fitness-minded correspondent to the halls of government. The Epoch Times, affiliated with the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, brings QAnon theories. Yet Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell celebrated them all as information pioneers who “created the formula to circumvent the lies of the mainstream media.”
Among the new press corps is Wade Searle, whom Talking Points Memo identified as a prominent “groyper” — young white nationalists following Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who wrap racism in Christianity and memes. During Searle’s time working for Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), the congressman posted neo-Nazi imagery while Searle and other staffers participated in white nationalist communities. Now Searle represents Life Site News, which claims to be fighting “radical ideologies like abortion, transgenderism, and homosexuality,” which they call the “culture of death.”
Jordan Conradson brings his own baggage. In 2024, court records disclosed during the Gateway Pundit’s defamation case revealed his own colleagues “had major concerns as to the professionalism, reliability, and honesty of several contributors, including Jordan Conradson.” The Gateway Pundit correspondent regularly appears on RiftTV, whose host, Elijah Schaeffer, claims racism “makes you a better friend.”
Tim Pool’s Timcast Media qualified despite his previous employer, Tenet Media, being secretly funded by Russian state media. According to the DOJ indictment, messages from the company came time-stamped from Moscow, pushing him to create videos supporting Kremlin narratives, including claims that Ukrainians conducted terrorist attacks that ISIS actually claimed.
RedState joined the Pentagon press corps after a checkered history, including questioning whether survivor David Hogg was actually at Parkland during the notorious school shooting he filmed with his phone while crouching beneath a desk, as well as claiming “no riot” occurred at the Capitol on January 6 — both articles were later retracted.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto attacks reporters for “joining the mainstream media’s anti-U.S. chorus and denigrating the American story,” while criticizing Voice of America correspondents for posting content “highly critical of, and personally insulting to, the U.S. President.”
These demands have materialized with ruthless efficiency. Public broadcasting, dismissed as “half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion,” lost federal funding. Voice of America has been decimated under Trump acolyte and failed Arizona political candidate Kari Lake, who promised to “take a sledgehammer to the mainstream media’s lies and propaganda” — and has delivered, reducing VOA from 49 language services to four while placing 90 percent of its journalists on leave.
Behind the Pentagon’s restrictions stands Tim Parlatore, who previously defended Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth against sexual assault accusations and now serves as Navy commander on his staff. Legal experts say Parlatore’s rules constitute prior restraint — criminalizing journalism. As Mickey Osterreicher of the National Press Photographers Association points out, the policy treats basic reporting techniques like “asking questions, cultivating sources, seeking tips” as criminal acts.
Hegseth dismisses concerns with the casualness of someone who knows he’s won. “Pentagon access is a privilege, not a right,” he posted, claiming journalists would no longer be “permitted to solicit criminal acts.” His spokesperson mocked traditional journalists as “self-righteous media who chose to self-deport.”
At a recent White House briefing, a sycophantic Lindell TV correspondent asked Trump if he would share fitness secrets, gushing that he looks “healthier than eight years ago.”
Matthew Foldi of the Washington Reporter — essentially a Substack newsletter backed by Daily Caller investor Omeed Malik — celebrates what he sees as overdue change. “The former press corps disgraced itself on a more or less daily basis,” he proclaimed, eager to claim his piece of the Pentagon’s information monopoly.
When the next military crisis strikes, Americans won’t learn about it from seasoned reporters who witnessed the fall of Mosul or the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Instead, they’ll get their news from a bevy of MAGA loyalists from questionable news outlets, including one whose expertise lies in selling bedding rather than bedrock journalism.
“If people don’t believe anything they read anywhere, then they won’t be motivated to argue, to discuss, or even to engage in politics,” Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic noted. “Modern authoritarian propaganda, of the kind we are about to receive from the Pentagon and perhaps other government agencies, isn’t designed to produce true believers or mass movements. It’s designed to produce apathy.”
Extra Credit for Erasure: Inside Heritage’s Ratings of America’s Historic Sites
On October 27, 2025, the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025, unveiled the first 35 entries in a digital guide grading historic sites across America using Christian nationalist criteria. The website tracks which institutions receive federal funding and flags what Heritage calls “woke narratives” at sites mentioning slavery, racial injustice, or LGBTQ+ history.
The guide evaluates sites for “accuracy and comprehension,” “ideological bias,” “consideration for families,” and “historical significance.”
The Susan B. Anthony House in Amherst, Mass., is criticized for having too many feminist books in its gift shop. The American Civil War Museum in Richmond loses points for an exhibit that “revolves completely around slavery and does not give adequate attention to other components of the Civil War crisis.” Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is docked because “tour guides sometimes make political claims like, ‘diversity is our strength.’”
Three destinations received C grades — reserved for sites that “demonstrate a pervasive neglect of comprehensiveness, accuracy, and proportionality, or even actively distort the subject matter.”
James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia received a C. The estate has re-centered its narrative around the people Madison enslaved. He inherited more than 100 from his father in 1801. Over 300 enslaved people lived and labored across six generations at Montpelier. Madison, architect of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, called slavery a violation of republican principles, yet he worked enslaved people dawn to dusk six days a week, never freed any, and left them to his wife, Dolley, in his will. She later sold them to pay debts.
Heritage criticizes Montpelier for its “notable lack of focus on James Madison” and for having “no exhibits dedicated to James Madison and his contributions.” The materials seem “more suited to prompting children to political activism” than education.
Brenda Hafera, Assistant Director and Research Fellow for Heritage’s Simon Center for American Studies, wrote Montpelier’s review, but the site has long been in her sights. In the Daily Signal, she questioned why “Marxism — not Madison” is being taught and declared “mass incarceration is a myth.”
The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst also received a C. Tour guides “sometimes make passing references, easy to miss, that an erotic lyric of Emily Dickinson’s might have been written to another woman, her brother’s wife.” The museum’s YouTube channel which mostly shows poetry readings, troubled Heritage more, claiming that the videos “celebrate abortion, homosexuality, and a whole host of progressive causes.” Dickinson’s relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, has long interested scholars. She wrote to Susan: “If you were here —and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language.”
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford received the third C. “More attention is paid to African Americans who distinguished themselves in opposition to slavery than to Stowe herself,” Heritage’s reviewer states. The reviewer comes from far-right Hillsdale College, which sits on Project 2025’s advisory board.
Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History” directs the Smithsonian to remove “divisive, race-centered ideology.” Jonathan Butcher, a Heritage senior fellow, told NPR the orders stem from the 1776 Project. That commission’s report listed “racism and identity politics” alongside slavery and fascism as threats to American principles.
The Organization of American Historians (OAH) warns that museums are under assault. “Knowledge is power, and when that knowledge is censored or distorted, democracy itself is weakened,” OAH said in a statement responding to Trump’s executive order.
Meanwhile, Heritage plans to expand its ratings to all 50 states by Presidents Day 2026 and the 250th anniversary of America’s founding. Yet, the motive behind their guide has nothing to do with patriotism: federal funding tracked, “woke narratives” flagged, failing grades assigned to sites that center uncomfortable truths. Museums that depend on federal dollars will understand the message. Tell the approved version of American history, or tell it without federal support.
