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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 a bigoted Project 2025 coauthor is urging the FBI to classify trans people as terrorists, Project 2025’s media plan put in practice in violation of the First Amendment, and Linda McMahon’s assault on education, backed by a slew of extremist, Project 2025-supporting organizations.
From Gay Furry Rants to Terror Lists: Project 2025’s Howell Targets LGBTQ+ Americans
The Project 2025 contributor who fantasized about LGBTQ+ Americans being raped in prison now wants the FBI to classify transgender people as domestic terrorists.
Project 2025 contributor Mike Howell’s trajectory from crude sexual threats to federal terrorism designations began in July 2024. When SiegedSec, a covert group calling themselves “gay furry hackers” breached Heritage Foundation data to protest Project 2025, Howell responded through private messages that quickly devolved into graphic threats. “Closeted Furries will be presented to the world for the degenerate perverts they are,” he wrote to one hacker while in full temper tantrum mode. “I hope the word spreads as fast as the STDs do in your degenerate furry community.”
When the hacker explained they were protesting policies harmful to human rights, Howell invoked biblical authority: “God created nature, and nature’s laws are vicious. It is why you have put on a perverted animal costume to satisfy your sexual deviances.” He then threatened them directly: “Are you aware that you won’t be able to wear a furry tiger costume when you’re getting pounded in the ass in the federal prison I put you in next year?”
On September 18, 2025, Howell took his bigotry a step further when his organization launched a public petition encouraging the FBI to designate what he calls “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” (TIVE) as domestic terrorism. The petition claims “TIVE is based on the belief that violence is justified against those who do not share radical views of transgender ideology. It has led to an increasing trend of TIVE domestic terrorist events across the country.”
Howell is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation while directing the Oversight Project, which was incorporated as a separate entity after being incubated at Heritage beginning in 2022. Both organizations share the same anti-LGBTQ+, anti-immigrant missions, though the Oversight Project pursues significantly more aggressive tactics.
The petition represents the culmination of policies already set in motion as the federal bureaucracy is being restructured to eliminate recognition of transgender and gender-nonconforming Americans, per Project 2025 recommendations that reflect Christian nationalist views of family and society. These views are being fast-tracked as the Trump administration seeks to erase LGBTQ+ people from America.
Executive Order 14168, signed hours after Trump’s inauguration, declares federal recognition of only two genders. The language mirrors Project 2025’s directive that “sex is properly understood as a fixed biological fact.” Another order stripped legal recognition of transgender and non-binary people.
Military service became the first arena of implementation. Executive Order 14183 prohibited transgender and non-binary Americans from enlisting, claiming gender identity inconsistent with biological sex “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” The same order halted gender-affirming care for active service members and veterans.
Educational institutions felt immediate impact. The administration restored 2020 Title IX interpretations that exclude LGBTQ+ identities from sex discrimination protections. The “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order followed, barring transgender students from athletics based on gender identity.
Healthcare protections disappeared through regulatory changes. Trump removed sexual orientation and gender identity from Health and Human Services’ Section 1557 discrimination protections, fulfilling Project 2025’s instruction to reverse “the redefinition of sex to cover gender identity and sexual orientation.”
Federal agencies instituted sweeping word bans covering “transgender,” “gender identity,” “LGBTQ,” “non-binary,” “pronouns,” and dozens more terms.
International policy shifted too. Project 2025 called for ending federal funding for “pro-LGBT initiatives” abroad. The document frames LGBTQ+ rights as American cultural exports that should be curtailed globally.
Adoption and foster care policies prioritize faith-based organizations through Executive Order 13279. This potentially undermines protections against discrimination by adoption agencies serving LGBTQ+ families.
Project 2025 functions as an operational blueprint. What seemed theoretical is becoming concrete federal action affecting millions of Americans across education, healthcare, employment, military service, and civil rights. The Oversight Project wants to complete the transformation: from policy targets to terrorism suspects. From Howell’s crude threats against LGBTQ+ Americans to federal terrorism lists — the progression reveals Project 2025’s true agenda.
Project 2025: Press Delete
“Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
America currently holds a journalist behind bars for the “crime” of reporting. Legal immigrant Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning reporter in Georgia has spent over 100 days in detention for live streaming a protest and filming ICE. He has no criminal charges. Guevara’s deportation to El Salvador — where persecution awaits — could happen at any time. “In a healthy democracy, a free press is essential. That freedom is under threat in the United States today,” says a coalition of press organizations advocating for his release.
Democracy in America is not healthy and it’s not just Guevara feeling the heat. Two thousand miles west, Jimmy Kimmel returned to his ABC studio this week after the network buckled under government pressure. His late-night show had been suspended for comments about conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s death — comments that triggered threats from Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr himself.
The Supreme Court anticipated exactly this scenario more than 60 years ago in New York Times v. Sullivan, which established that the First Amendment requires “breathing space” for criticism of public officials. The Court warned that government officials using their regulatory power to punish critical speech — precisely what Carr did — creates a chilling effect that “dampens the vigor and limits the variety of public debate.”
The connection between these events demonstrates the power of Project 2025 under Trump. The authoritarian manifesto didn’t just predict Trump’s war on the media — it provided the battle plan.
“Under Project 2025, a president with antimedia impulses could fuse the conservative policy agenda with the strengthening of executive power to produce a triple threat for media freedom,” observed Joel Simon of the Journalism Protection Initiative at CUNY. That threat now stalks every newsroom in America.
At the Pentagon, reporters have been asked to sign loyalty pledges. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demands journalists must pledge not to gather any information without government approval. Violators lose their press credentials, banished from the largest department in the U.S. government. “The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon — the people do,” Hegseth declared.
This wasn’t improvisation. Project 2025 explicitly demanded “reconsidering the accommodations given to journalists.”
Project 2025’s most brazen target was public broadcasting. “Every Republican President since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting of taxpayer funding,” Project 2025 stated. “The next conservative President must finally get this done and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary.”
In July, Trump signed legislation canceling $1.1 billion in federal funding for the CPB. The corporation announced its shutdown shortly after. Local public stations now face extinction — some already silenced forever. Project 2025 envisioned forcing NPR stations off prime 88-92 FM frequencies, handing them to religious programming.
The Guevara case reveals Project 2025’s darkest ambition of criminalizing journalism itself, calling on the Justice Department to “use all of the tools at its disposal” to investigate leaks and prosecute sources.
“The government’s prolonged detention of Guevara sends a chilling message to all journalists, citizens and residents who record law enforcement,” said Nora Benavidez, Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice & Civil Rights at Free Press and former ACLU civil rights litigator. “This is a blatant attack on the First Amendment.”
The Kimmel suspension exposed corporate media’s innate weakness. Disney, Nexstar, and Sinclair, who control thousands of journalists, abandoned one of television’s biggest stars at the first government threat. Though public outcry forced Kimmel’s reinstatement, the precedent was set: criticize conservatives, face consequences.
“Even conservatives such as Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul said bluntly that Carr had overreached,” reported The New Republic. Yet the damage was done. Every host now knows the price of defiance.
The purge extends beyond celebrity targets like comedian Stephen Colbert who saw his nightly talk show canceled. The Washington Post expelled liberal opinion writers. CBS ejected longtime news executives. MSNBC fired Matthew Dowd for comments about Kirk. The message resonates through every newsroom: conform or disappear.
Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin once explained, “There is freedom of speech but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” Benavidez observed that “Trump embodies this ethos.”
Today’s authoritarians have learned subtlety. Better to defund libraries, pressure newspaper owners, and imprison journalists than create martyrs. Project 2025’s architects grasped this evolution completely. As Russian economist Sergei Guriev and political scientist Daniel Treisman documented in their book Spin Dictators, today’s autocrats maintain power “by repressing any opposition, controlling all communications, punishing critics, (often) imposing an ideology, attacking the ideal of pluralist democracy, and blocking most cross-border flows of people and information.” Project 2025 provides the manual.
Resistance persists. More than two-dozen press freedom groups demand Mario Guevara’s immediate release. National Press Club President Mike Balsamo called it “a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the U.S. military.”
The Kimmel protests worked — proving resistance can succeed. But that victory came easier than most. Kimmel is a wealthy white male host with celebrity allies and corporate backing. The harder fight involves protecting vulnerable journalists like Guevara, local reporters losing funding, and immigrant writers facing deportation.
The architects of Project 2025 understood a fundamental truth: democracies don’t collapse overnight. They hemorrhage slowly, one detained reporter at a time, one defunded station at a time, one self-censored story at a time. Until one day, Americans wake up in a country where only approved voices survive — and by then, there are no independent journalists left to sound the alarm, and what remains is the hollow theater of democracy.
Project 2025’s Main Event: Linda McMahon is Scripting America’s Education Takedown
Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon spent decades in sports entertainment, building WWE into a global empire where outlandish storylines are as important as athleticism. Now that she’s in the White House heading the Department of Education, McMahon’s applying those same skills to a different kind of performance: overhauling how American kids learn about their country.
McMahon launched the America 250 Civics Education Coalition on September 17, pulling together 40 organizations for what she called a patriotic education push ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary next year. The timing was notable. It was Constitution day and just a week after Charlie Kirk’s assassination had left the conservative movement reeling and searching for unity.
The coalition includes familiar names from conservative politics: the Heritage Foundation, PragerU, Hillsdale College, Turning Point USA, and dozens of others. What’s less obvious is how many of these groups share another connection. Twelve of McMahon’s partners sit on the advisory board of Project 2025.
Project 2025 doesn’t hide its feelings about American schools. The 900-page document calls classroom instruction “woke propaganda” and describes public schools as a convenient “one-stop shop” for what it calls the “woke education cartel.” The plan’s education section reads like a total rethink of federal involvement in schooling.
Here’s who McMahon is working with and what skills they could bring: The Heritage Foundation provides policy framework. Hillsdale College runs teacher training programs. The American Legislative Exchange Council writes model bills for state legislators. The Alliance Defending Freedom takes on court cases fighting against LGBTQ+ and women’s reproductive rights. The Claremont Institute, which has published bigoted writers and has connections to white nationalism, likes to weigh in on academic standards. Russell Vought‘s Center for Renewing America pushes Christian nationalism into federal policy. The 1776 Project Foundation opposes teaching about systemic racism. The Independent Women’s Forum promotes traditional gender roles in curricula and is virulently anti-trans and anti-feminism.
McMahon can’t mandate curriculum — that’s been illegal since 1970 under federal law. Instead, she’s offering incentives. Schools that adopt coalition materials get funding preferences. Schools that don’t can still access other programs, but the message is clear.
Take Project 2025 board member PragerU, whose founder Dennis Prager has said outright that his videos are meant to influence kids’ thinking. The organization, not actually an accredited school, now supplies curriculum in Alaska, Florida, Arizona, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Texas. Historians have criticized these videos for downplaying slavery’s economic impact and glossing over Native American displacement.
The result, if McMahon succeeds, would be a generation of students learning a different version of American history—one that emphasizes success over struggle, consensus over conflict. Whether that’s good or bad depends on your view of what education should accomplish.
