Project 2025 October 2nd 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 track how Project 2025 policies target educators through coordinated watchlists and investigations, and examine what State Department nominee Jeremy Carl tried to hide by scrubbing 5,000 social media posts before his confirmation hearing. We also reveal how Young America’s Foundation — a Project 2025 advisory board member — employs a journalism director who explicitly calls for “blood in the streets” while training conservative reporters.

Teaching While Targeted

Kevin Parkinson lost his teaching job at Grand Canyon University after Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA placed him on their Professor Watchlist in January 2024.

“Charlie Kirk ruined my life in a sense,” Parkinson said during a September 26, 2025 webinar. “I haven’t been able to find a job in education since last year.”

Although Turning Point USA, now run by Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, positions itself as a defender of free speech on college campuses, it has long used the watchlist to silence critics — championing freedom of expression when it aligned with Kirk’s views.

The watchlist has been a valuable tool, laying the groundwork since 2016 for Project 2025’s campaign against DEI in education — providing a ready-made database of targets, establishing precedents for career consequences, and normalizing the monitoring of educators who advocate for equity programs. The TPUSA website provides names and contact information for hundreds of educators it accuses of advancing “leftist propaganda,” complete with photographs, workplace information, and excerpted statements.

Kevin Parkinson was one of those teachers. He detailed his experience in a documentary, Surviving Turning Point USA. Grand Canyon University administrators found Parkinson had not broken any policies with his film, however they asked him to re-edit the documentary, removing university references, enter into a performance enhancement plan, and sign a new statement of faith, he says. When he refused — he had already signed one when hired — they told him he was “practicing insubordination.” The choice: accept a performance improvement plan or leave. He left.

When Trump took office in January 2025, the administration’s Project 2025 anti-DEI policies aligned with TPUSA’s watchlist, and job losses have become more than just results of a right-wing pressure campaign.

The pattern extends far beyond one person. At Nevada State University, Marcela Rodriguez-Campo resigned in August 2025 after administrators, applying Trump’s Project 2025 anti-DEI policies shuttered the Office of Community, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion she directed, a closure that followed Trump’s February executive order eliminating DEI programs across federal agencies and educational institutions receiving federal funding. Faculty who built programs for a decade were “blacklisted, been forced to sign non-disparagement agreements and have essentially had their voices taken from them,” she said. Faculty were reassigned to unsuitable positions. Others were put under surveillance, required to report back on every meeting, and barred from speaking directly with students.

At the federal level, at least 55 Education Department employees were placed on paid leave in early February for attending a voluntary diversity training program in 2019 — a program that Betsy DeVos, Trump’s first-term education secretary and a longtime Heritage Foundation supporter, had encouraged. The Trump administration retroactively punished employees for doing what Trump’s own education secretary had once promoted during his first term. The affected workers included civil rights attorneys, program analysts, and employees responsible for ensuring that schools accommodate children with special needs.

“It’s very, very unsettling,” one department employee of over 20 years told ABC News. “I don’t get it. What’s my crime? What have I done?”

In Texas, teachers faced suspensions and firings for social media posts about DEI issues. Their teaching licenses — years of education, certification exams, classroom experience — could be revoked for remarks made on personal time. Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, saw the constitutional problem immediately. “What’s especially troubling is the political pressure surrounding these investigations and the demands coming from the highest officials in the state that teachers face investigation and punishment for their comments about a public figure,” he told the Texas Tribune.

Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, called it a “witch hunt.”

The cost of speaking extends beyond professional consequences. Ken Storey lost his job at the University of Tampa after Turning Point targeted him in 2017. The voicemail that followed: “Hey, Ken, you big pussy… I hope somebody beats you to goddamn death.” Another educator received this: “After I’ve killed your whole family, I’m gonna rape their dead bodies in front of you.”

Storey now takes antidepressants daily and attends counseling.

A New England administrator, who was pregnant at the time, saw someone post her home address on Twitter. “The absolute terror that gripped me was unbelievable,” she said. “When Turning Point put me on this Professor Watchlist… that was ‘go and get her’.”

In Massachusetts, 77 educators have been listed since 2016. Harvard alone accounts for 37 names.

Under Trump, the Professor Watchlist has become policy. “If you make statements that right-wing politicians don’t like, then you can lose your job. Period. That is chilling,” Isaac Kamola, director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, said. “The Professor Watchlist planted that seed.”

Students who spoke up in defense of DEI policies watched faculty disappear, spaces close, and funding vanish. While cases like Parkinson’s show how the Professor Watchlist damaged careers for years before Trump’s second presidency, the post-inauguration DEI purge gave institutional cover for universities and agencies to eliminate programs and positions en masse.

The Trump administration launched an “End DEI” portal in February, inviting parents, students, and teachers to report suspected discrimination. The department warned schools in April that diversity programs violate civil rights law and threatened to withhold Title I funding for low-income students if schools failed to comply within 10 days.

Molly Appel, a Nevada Faculty Alliance member and Nevada State professor, described the shift in tone at Board of Regents meetings. Institutional leaders who had been “direct and outspoken” about their values became cautious. “What we’re seeing is higher education being more focused on maintaining its existence than focusing on its reason for existence,” Appel said.

The cuts disproportionately affected Latinas, Rodriguez-Campo noted. “It’s been really heartbreaking, because many of us have so much love for Nevada State University,” she said. “We are witnessing it be remade in a way that does not align with the values that the institution has said it believes in.”

Parkinson’s documentary Surviving Turning Point USA was removed from Amazon Prime (it can still be seen here) on September 20, Parkinson told GPAHE. Several colleges have requested copies for their libraries, ensuring it survives as a historical record. But Parkinson has calculated the price of speaking.

“My days of activism through film are over,” he said. “I’ve paid a price and I don’t think I can afford to do it anymore.”

His exhaustion captures the strategy’s effectiveness— not just silencing individual voices, but making the cost of speaking high enough that others silence themselves.

Trump Nominee Jeremy Carl Champions ‘Anti-White Racism,’ Calls for the Death Penalty for Teachers Union Chief

In April 2023, Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Project 2025-supporting Claremont Institute, posted a message on X about Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “If the U.S. were a serious nation,” Carl wrote, “Weingarten would be tried for crimes against America’s children and would get the death penalty.” Weingarten, who is openly gay and Jewish, had become a target of conservative anger over COVID school closures.

Two years later, on June 16, 2025, the Senate received Carl’s nomination for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. The Yale graduate and senior fellow at the Claremont Institute — a key organization behind Project 2025 — would oversee U.S. policy at the United Nations if confirmed. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior during Trump’s first term.

Before the nomination became public, Carl scrubbed the Weingarten post. He also deleted roughly 5,000 tweets that summer, CNN reports.

The social media posts he attempted to erasee reveal a pattern. “American whites are victims of a cultural genocide,” Carl wrote in The American Mind.  “The great replacement is real,” he posted in 2021, “and they’re going to try to make you pay for it.” In February 2022, he became more explicit: “We must utterly defeat the Great Replacement as a political strategy, and permanently remove from power all who advance it.” The “Great Replacement” theory is a racist conspiracy theory that alleges that political elites in the United States, often Jews, are secretly conspiring to “replace” the “native” white population with a non-white, immigrant population in order to win elections, and has been a primary factor promoting white supremacist terrorism globally over the past decade

Asked on the Liz Wheeler Show in 2024 whether such rhetoric could lead to violence, Carl said: “The history of multiracial and multi-ethnic polities is not necessarily the [rosiest] one. I mean, often they do kind of end up fighting against each other in kind of some pretty brutal and bloody ways.”

On March 15, 2019, a gunman walked into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and killed 51 people. He titled his manifesto “The Great Replacement.” On May 14, 2022, an 18-year-old white supremacist drove to a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, and killed 10 Black people.  Prior to the shooting he posted a manifesto citing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. On May 6, 2023, a shooter whose writings were saturated with replacement theory rhetoric killed eight people at an Allen, Texas outlet mall.

Carl’s stance on anti-white racism resonated with conservative media and he made the rounds on far-right podcasts. Carl appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show and made multiple appearances on The Charlie Kirk Show, where he and Kirk discussed how the Civil Rights Act created a “beast” and an “anti-white weapon.”

These appearances promoted his book The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. In August 2024, he told host Liz Wheeler that “one of the most severe, even existential threats facing our country today is racial hatred, discrimination against white people.” Progressives who hate white people, he said, created a system where “more qualified white people are being passed over” and, “something like 98% of interracial rape murders” target whites. Carl’s claim has no basis in federal crime statistics. The FBI does not track a category called ‘interracial rape murders,’ and FBI statistics report that most violent crimes are intraracial.

Three months before the election, Carl published an essay in The American Mind titled “Reward Friends, Punish Enemies.” “If Trump does not concentrate first and foremost on destroying the people who tried (and failed) to destroy him, his presidency is unlikely to be a long-term success,” Carl wrote. “Trump must not be afraid to do at least some of the terrible things that demented liberals have been shrieking that he would do if elected.” Revenge, he noted, “can also be a good vehicle for public policy.”

The essay named targets. “The 51 intelligence operatives who said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation — even when the FBI knew it was legitimate — not only need to lose their security clearances on day one: they need to be subject to criminal prosecution for election interference.” He continued: “The leaders of these prosecutions must themselves be prosecuted. Those who attempted to ruin Trump’s life through their own illegal and immoral conduct must themselves face ruin.” Biden and Mayorkas “have actively enabled illegal aliens to invade America,” he argued. “There must be consequences, including prosecutions of people at the highest levels of the Biden-Harris Administration.”

The position Carl seeks coordinates U.S. engagement with the United Nations on human rights, humanitarian assistance, and refugee protection. Carl would represent America in negotiations over migration policy, religious freedom, and ethnic conflict — the same topics that appear in his warnings about white demographic decline. He would negotiate with diplomats from 193 countries, including many from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

If confirmed, he would join other Project 2025 supporters already serving in the administration. Russell Vought, who wrote the executive office chapter, directs the Office of Management and Budget. Tom Homan, listed as a Project 2025 contributor, serves as border czar. Brendan Carr, who authored the FCC chapter, chairs that agency. John Ratcliffe, another Project 2025 contributor, leads the CIA.

A Senate vote is required for confirmation. If that vote succeeds, a Project 2025 advocate who called for a union president’s execution will represent America at the United Nations, and a man who promotes conspiracy theories echoed in three mass shootings will negotiate migration and refugee policy with the world.

Trump administration spokeswoman Anna Kelly told CNN, “Jeremy Carl did great work during President Trump’s first administration, and he is highly qualified to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. The administration stands by our nominees.”

Blood in the Streets: How A Project 2025 Advisory Board Member Is Shaping Conservative Media

On September 26, 2025, Geoffrey Ingersoll published a column in the Daily Caller with the headline “Enough Is Enough… I Choose VIOLENCE!”

“Today, I choose violence,” he reiterated. “Literally.”

In the third paragraph, he asked himself a question: “Is this a call for violence?” His answer: “Yes. Explicitly it is.”

In November 2024, Young America’s Foundation (YAF) announced Ingersoll as the new director of its National Journalism Center,  where he runs the training program for the next generation of conservative journalists. Scott Walker, former Governor of Wisconsin and YAF’s president, called Ingersoll “a fearless leader ready to continue developing young journalists into truth-seeking, power-questioning, narrative-disrupting reporters.”

YAF sits on the advisory board of Project 2025. Their roster of speakers includes former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump advisor Stephen Miller, Ben Shapiro, Karl Rove, and Rick Santorum. Some demand speaking fees upwards of $30,000.

Ingersoll described a woman who assaulted a pro-life activist as “a fat [B]lack lady” and “a brutish, hulking woman.” Then he wrote his prescription: “So some activist takes the sign next to your table at a public debate…? She gets instantly clotheslined. I don’t care if police are present. Do it anyway. In fact, be wildly disproportionate.”

“Measure it in blood if necessary,” he added. “Change requires pain, and you’re either taking it or inflicting it.”

Conservatives should hire security that would have “no qualms hospitalizing” people. “I want blood in the streets,” he wrote.

He ended by calling for “Disproportionate. Violent. Action. Pain and suffering.” “The time to go as lambs to the slaughter is OVER.”

In response to immediate backlash, The Daily Caller added an editor’s note to Ingersoll’s column stating that the publication “does not condone violence in any form, especially political violence” and claiming “the examples outlined in the piece refer to hypothetical instances of self-defense, not political violence or extrajudicial mob action.”

On September 29, 2025, Ingersoll doubled down. “My Friday morning newsletter calling for a return of self-defense, violent if necessary, caused quite a stir, as I was expecting,” he wrote in a follow-up column titled “Your Boos Mean Nothing To Me. I’ve Seen What Makes You Cheer.” He claimed people had sent him death threats and “even expressed violent intent on images of my one-year-old son.”

“My case Friday and today is simple,” he wrote. “I believe that vigorous self-defense can help restore the once-assumed public compact that we do not assault people we simply disagree with.”

The National Journalism Center continues to list Ingersoll as director on its website, and Young America’s Foundation has issued no public statement distancing itself from his columns. Aspiring conservative journalists will continue to be trained by someone who explicitly calls for political violence.