What Christian Nationalism Is And Why It Matters

The pattern repeating from Franco’s Spain to Trump’s America isn’t accidental, Christian nationalism is a specific ideology and political movement that demands that the government enforce one narrow interpretation of Christianity on everyone — believers and non-believers alike, that is rooted in bigotry, not the Bible.

Adherents believe that America should be a Christian nation with laws that reflect Christian values, and deviation from Christian foundations threatens national and spiritual survival. About 30 percent of Americans buy into this vision as adherents or sympathizers — roughly 100 million people who think democracy should be subordinate to their particular interpretation of God’s will.

Research has shown that Christian nationalists favor powerful leaders who can act without democratic constraints. They’re more likely to agree that “we need a strong leader who is willing to break the rules” and that “compromise is really just selling out on one’s principles.” There’s no place for democratic deliberation when enacting divine commands.

Harvard scholars studying Christian nationalism globally found it consistently linked to “misogyny, authoritarianism, opposition to vaccines, anti-science views and pro-violence” — and this pattern holds true across every country examined. Everywhere Christian nationalism takes hold, it “undermines democracy and promotes authoritarianism.”

Christian Nationalism in Action: Tactics and Implementation

Political scientists who study authoritarian movements recognize what Christian nationalism is doing because they’ve seen it before. The first move is always information control — shrink the universe of trusted sources down to pastors, approved media figures, and movement leaders, then train followers to dismiss everything outside that circle as “fake news.” Once the shared basis for truth is gone, the movement can define reality on its own terms.

The second tactic is manufacturing persecution out of thin air. Christian nationalists treat secularism as a spiritual attack on their way of life. They describe immigration using the language of holy war — borders overrun by invading hordes. They accuse LGBTQ+ people of persecuting Christians and perverting children. What a functioning democracy would process as policy disagreements, the movement processes as battles between good and evil.

Then comes the contradiction that holds the whole thing together. America is simultaneously God’s chosen nation and a country under demonic occupation. That paradox does real work — if the nation is both divinely ordained and besieged by Satan, then grabbing power by any means stops being subversion and starts being obedience.

“When we say ‘taking the mountain of government,’ we don’t just mean influencing policy,” explains key movement figure Lance Wallnau. “Christians with our worldview need to be the ones writing legislation, making decisions, and determining policy.”

When God’s law supersedes human law, someone has to interpret what God wants. Whoever claims that authority holds absolute power with no democratic check. Compromise becomes collaboration with evil. Political opponents aren’t fellow citizens — they’re enemies of God requiring elimination.

Christian nationalism expert Kristin Kobes Du Mez describes where this ends: “There will be no meaningful religious liberty. There will be essentially a two-tier society between the ‘real Americans’ — those who buy into this, or pretend to — and then the rest of Americans. The laws will be rewritten across the board. Rights as we understand them will cease to exist and instead, we’ll have the framework of biblical law.”

Project 2025’s theology draws from Genesis 1:26-28, which commands humanity to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over” all living things. Christian nationalists view “dominion” as a divine mandate to seize control of all societal institutions. Project 2025 reads it as marching orders.

This connects to the “Seven Mountain Mandate” — the belief that before Christ returns, believers must conquer seven mountains: government, education, media, family, religion, arts, and business.

Under this worldview, gender equality is rebellion against divine order. Laws protecting minorities are persecution of the faithful. Pluralism gets in God’s way. And anyone who disagrees isn’t just wrong — they’re doing Satan’s work.

Project 2025 took that theology and built a governing agenda out of it. More than 100 organizations, coordinated by the Heritage Foundation, wrote the playbook — groups with long track records of pushing hate and Christian nationalism into the policy mainstream.

Trump called Project 2025 “abysmal” during the campaign. GPAHE research proved otherwise. Project 2025 has become the source for Trump’s anti-democratic policies. Since January 20, 2025, the United States has enacted policies that are designed to quash democracy.

Religious Liberty Redefined: In Project 2025, religious freedom is used as a license to discriminate. A Christian employer who refuses to hire a gay person isn’t discriminating — but is exercising religious liberty. A healthcare provider who denies treatment to a transgender patient isn’t violating rights — they are following God’s law as they see it. This inverts religious freedom from protecting individual conscience to protecting religious supremacy over others.

Family Structure Mandates: Project 2025 mandates that the government “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.” In practice, that means one arrangement qualifies: a married man and woman raising children together. Everyone else — single parents, unmarried couples, same-sex families — falls outside the framework entirely.

Reproductive Control: On reproduction, the document treats the idea that life begins at conception as a settled fact. Its authors propose rebranding Health and Human Services as the “Department of Life,” criminalizing abortion, restricting IVF, and limiting access to contraception, all built on a “personhood” doctrine that would grant embryos constitutional rights.

LGBTQ+ Targeting: Project 2025 explicitly targets LGBTQ+ communities domestically and internationally, demanding dismantling of programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Harmful programs like conversion therapy could be promoted in the future, rather than banned, as the Christian nationalist movement views “transgenderism” and homosexuality as an unholy scourge. “Pornography,” Project 2025 writes, is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology,” which is “poisoning our children.”

Global Implementation and Impact

Schedule F arrived on Trump’s first day back in office — January 20, 2025. It reclassifies tens of thousands of career civil servants as political appointees who can be fired without cause.

Russell Vought wrote Project 2025’s chapter on dismantling the administrative state. Now he runs the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), implementing his own blueprint.

Vought stated his goal openly: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains…We want to put them in trauma.”

This personnel purge directly enables the global Christian nationalist agenda. At the State Department, career diplomats who negotiated international human rights agreements for decades are being replaced with political appointees. Their main qualification? Loyalty to Christian nationalist ideology and the cruel Project 2025 agenda.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) assisted countries suffering from disasters, poverty, and in fostering democracy. USAID’s development professionals, who coordinated life-saving health programs, disaster response, and food security, have been fired or reassigned. The institutional knowledge needed to implement international treaties, manage pandemic responses, coordinate humanitarian aid, maintain diplomatic relationships — is being systematically destroyed. In its place: ideological enforcers committed to imposing Christian nationalist doctrine on U.S. foreign policy.

Project 2025 extends its Christian nationalist agenda far beyond American borders. The document demands that USAID purge the words “gender,” “abortion,” “reproductive health,” and “sexual and reproductive rights” from every program, contract, and policy document and cease the “promotion of the DEI agenda, including the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda.”

Project 2025 called for pulling U.S. support from international organizations that promote gender equality or reproductive autonomy. That has happened. Trump signed a presidential memorandum on January 7, 2026, yanking the United States out of 66 international organizations — 31 UN entities and 35 non-UN bodies. The State Department blamed “DEI mandates,” “gender equity” campaigns, and “climate orthodoxy,” and tied the move to USAID’s closure. The WHO, UNESCO, the UN Human Rights Council, and $380 million in UN Population Fund grants were already gone. The World Bank and IMF survived — but the IMF folded its climate and gender units into one office, and the World Bank dropped its ban on nuclear energy funding. Washington shaved $800 million from its World Bank pledge while keeping the veto.

Project 2025 also seeks to revive the Geneva Consensus Declaration, which we’ll take a closer look at later in the report, a Trump-era initiative that redefines human rights to exclude LGBTQ+ protections and reproductive freedom. Under this framework, all U.S. diplomatic engagements must align with “natural law” and promote “traditional family values” — code for opposing abortion access, contraception programs, and any recognition of LGBTQ+ rights abroad.

Project 2025’s discussion of Africa explicitly calls for ending LGBTQ+ equality initiatives in Africa, where 31 countries criminalize same-sex sexual activity, and Uganda imposes the death penalty for so-called “aggravated homosexuality.”

Project 2025 rails against “progressives, who view local NGOs — especially faith-based NGOs prominent in Africa and Latin America — as obstacles to promoting abortion, gender radicalism, climate extremism, and other woke ideas.”

The Pathway to Religious Authoritarianism

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the NYU historian who studies democratic collapse, described Project 2025  in a 2024 essay as, “a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States that goes by a deceptively neutral name,” designed to “destroy the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy and create new bureaucratic structures, staffed by new politically vetted cadres, to support autocratic rule.”

Trump denied any knowledge of Project 2025 on the campaign trail and now publicly calls Russell Vought his colleague “of Project 2025 fame.”

The transformation of the United States from constitutional republic to theocratic state is now well underway, and the revolution Kevin Roberts of Heritage promised is happening. On the frontlines, it targets women’s autonomy, LGBTQ+ existence, freedom of expression, and genuine religious freedom — the right of all people to believe or not believe as conscience dictates. And it’s coordinating internationally, expanding its front to restructure multiple nations simultaneously outside of the borders of the United States.

GPAHE’s warning from November 2023 turned out to be prescient. Religious authoritarianism has moved from abstract threat to concrete reality, in the U.S. and abroad — this report documents that transformation.

The domestic story is just the start. Before examining how this is spreading internationally, we need to understand how thoroughly and rapidly Project 2025 has reshaped American life. We’ll look at that transformation — the first year of implementation on U.S. soil, traced through executive orders, closed cases, canceled appointments, and lives fundamentally altered.

Then we’ll expand outward to examine how Trump’s administration is taking apart the entire post-World War II framework, piece by piece. These are the institutions built specifically to stop authoritarian power around the globe from consolidating the way it is now.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a key Project 2025 supporter, alone has operations in six European countries, across Latin America, and throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The country-by-country analysis that follows documents where those operations are, who runs them, what money funds them, and what’s happened to democratic institutions and human rights on the ground since they arrived. The final section examines what’s working to push back.

Destroying Diversity

On January 21, Trump signed “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives were now “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.” The effects of this Executive Order on women, LGBTQ+ communities, and minorities have been devastating as strength in diversity is subjugated by the falsehood of rampant “anti-white” racism, a core belief of Project 2025’s creators, who seek to place straight, white, Christian men at the helm of power.

The marginalization began quickly. The Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) acting director, Charles Ezell, ordered all DEI office employees on paid administrative leave by January 23. Security escorted them from their buildings. Agencies had eight days to submit mass layoff plans.

The directive included an email address where employees could report colleagues who might be using “coded or imprecise language” to disguise DEI programs. The administration was establishing an informant system.

Multiple reporting mechanisms went operational. Federal employees could report through agency channels. Contractors had separate portals. The public could submit complaints through a federal website. OPM created hotlines for reporting employees suspected of continuing DEI work under different names.

Employee resource groups that had existed for decades faced investigation, including groups for women, minorities, LGBTQ+ workers, veterans, and people with disabilities.

The order reversed Executive Order 11246 from 1965, ending affirmative action requirements for federal contractors, and eliminating 59 years of civil rights law. Now federal contractors were also required to certify that they weren’t engaged in DEI activities. Anonymous reporting allowed competitors to weaponize the process.

Corporate America fell in line. Major companies began dismantling DEI programs preemptively. Chief diversity officers were laid off and employee resource groups disbanded as federal policies created a framework that permitted private discrimination.

The psychological toll extended beyond direct targets. Federal employees stopped mentioning diversity even when it was relevant to their work. Managers avoided discussing racial or gender disparities. Training programs on unconscious bias disappeared. The appearance of supporting inclusion became career-ending.

Healthcare Shrivels

On January 24, 2025, Trump signed the “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment” executive order, revoking two Biden-era orders protecting access to abortion clinics and contraception.

That day, a Justice Department memo instructed federal prosecutors to limit enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a law that prohibits obstructing access to reproductive healthcare clinics and houses of religion which stemmed from a wave of violence against abortion clinics and providers in the ’90s, only in “extraordinary circumstances.” Three pending FACE Act cases were immediately dismissed.

Trump had already pardoned 23 people convicted under the FACE Act on January 23, including protesters who blocked clinic entrances and injured staff. Within weeks, clinic blockades resumed. In July, six anti-abortion activists — including two of whom Trump had just pardoned — entered a Pennsylvania abortion clinic pretending to be patients, then ushered in other protesters who sprinkled holy water and salt throughout the facility while attempting to block services. The National Abortion Federation reported six clinic “invasions” and three blockades in the first nine months of 2025, compared with five invasions and one blockade in all of 2024.

The administration withheld more than $65 million in Title X family planning grants from organizations serving 842,000 patients across 865 health centers. Although this is being challenged in the courts, seven states lost all Title X services: California, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, and Utah. The Guttmacher Institute estimated that at least 834,000 people would lose access to critical care. During Trump’s first term, similar cuts caused Title X patient numbers to plummet from 3.9 million to 1.5 million — or 61 percent.

The Mexico City Policy was reinstated on January 23, covering all U.S. global health assistance. Organizations providing reproductive healthcare in developing countries had to choose: stop providing abortion services or counseling, or lose all American funding — including for HIV prevention, contraception, maternal health, and malaria treatment.

Black women bear a disproportionate burden, as they are 31 percent more likely to rely on Medicaid for reproductive healthcare than white women. In New York State, Black women suffer five times as many deaths during childbirth as white women. The administration’s cuts to the CDC eliminated the team collecting pregnancy data, monitoring why Black women have worse maternal health outcomes. Research on contraceptive guidelines for patients with sickle cell disease was terminated.

Higher Education Crackdown

The Trump administration turned federal research funding into a weapon for ideological compliance as it attacked the heart of free speech in America, the higher education system, which received blow after blow in the battle for authoritarian compliance.

By early May, the National Institutes of Health had terminated over $800 million in grants; nearly half of them, 323 of 669 canceled projects, focused on LGBTQ+ health. Florida State lost $41 million in HIV prevention research targeting adolescents and young adults, who experience a fifth of new infections annually. Cancer studies at Ohio State and the University of Alabama examining elevated rates in sexual minority populations ended abruptly. Labs that had been preparing to expand started firing staff instead. Simon Rosser, a University of Minnesota professor whose lab was studying cancer in LGBTQ+ people before significant funding was pulled, called it what it was: “Certain people in the United States shouldn’t be getting treated as second-class research subjects. That, I think, is anyone’s definition of bigotry. Bigotry in science.”

Columbia University fell first to a broader crackdown. In March 2025, the administration paused over $400 million in federal funding. The demands: suspend students who participated in 2024 pro-Palestinian campus occupations, implement new antisemitism policies, and overhaul admissions to eliminate diversity considerations. After months of pressure, Columbia capitulated in July.

The settlement cost $221 million and imposed three years of federal oversight. Columbia had to prohibit “illegal” DEI programs, hire new faculty to supervise Middle Eastern studies (subject to federal approval), install campus police officers with arrest powers, and accept an independent monitor. The university insisted it made “no admission of guilt.” But it had surrendered autonomy to federal overseers.

Harvard chose resistance, holding out hope that First Amendment rights would trump Trump. When the administration made similar demands in April 2025, Harvard refused and filed suit, calling the demands “an illegal overreach of government authority.”

The administration froze more than $2.2 billion in research funding — the largest single action stripping academic funding in modern U.S. history. Cancer trials stopped mid-study. Climate research that had operated for 40 years came to a halt. Particle physics experiments at CERN went dark.

The attack escalated, with Trump threatening to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status and ban international students, who comprise 27 percent of the student body. A federal judge temporarily blocked the international student ban, calling it “punitive and arbitrary.”

Harvard law professor Nikolas Bowie described what was happening: “Trump is violating the First Amendment rights of universities and faculty by demanding that if universities want to keep this money, they have to suppress our speech and change what we teach and how we study.”

In September, a federal judge declared the funding freeze illegal, commenting that it is “difficult to conclude anything other than that [the Trump administration] used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of [federal law].” The funds were, in most cases, released.

The Trump administration launched investigations targeting UCLA, Duke, and George Mason. Over 150 university presidents signed a statement condemning “unprecedented government overreach.” Nothing changed.

Faculty members began self-censoring research and teaching. Universities canceled controversial speakers. Professors removed readings that might trigger investigation. A former Columbia professor described “a climate of confusion, fear, and lack of safety” where universities could no longer function as spaces for free inquiry.

Response and Resistance

Courtrooms became battlegrounds for democracy almost overnight. By October 2025, lawyers had filed 190 active cases against the Trump administration — including 18 separate lawsuits targeting just the “Gender Ideology” executive order. Six transgender service members took their fight to federal court, challenging the military ban that stripped them of their careers and healthcare. A federal judge in California stepped in, temporarily blocking portions of the gender-affirming care restrictions.

These victories, though, kept proving frustratingly incomplete. Injunctions protected specific plaintiffs, sometimes just those in particular jurisdictions, while leaving everyone else exposed. Appeals dragged cases out for months. And the real damage happened through administrative maneuvers — funding cuts, data purges, agency directives — that were far trickier to challenge in court. Appeals are ongoing.

Uncertainty achieved what policies intended. Providers stopped offering services. Communities lived in fear, and that fear became its own enforcement mechanism. Rainbow Railroad, a global non-profit which helps LGBTQ+ people escape state-sponsored violence and persecution, reported that by October 2025, the United States had become the organization’s number one source of help requests for the first time in its nearly two-decade history, with two-thirds coming from transgender people. The country that was once the premier destination for LGBTQ+ migrants and asylum seekers, the U.S. under Trump has become a place people are trying to flee.

Just over a year in, the domestic implementation of Project 2025 has proven its efficacy in dismantling civil rights protections. It outlined how to eliminate communities from federal recognition through data collection changes, how to destroy healthcare infrastructure through strategic funding cuts, how to transform universities into ideologically compliant institutions through funding freezes, and how to build an informant system, making citizens police each other.

These tactics weren’t invented in Washington. Viktor Orbán spent over a decade methodically building Hungary’s authoritarian apparatus — gerrymandering parliamentary districts, forcing hundreds of judges into early retirement to install loyalists, banning gender studies from universities, and eventually shutting down the Central European University entirely, creating a “electoral autocracy” according to the European Parliament.

What required years of patient work in Budapest happened in months in Washington.

The Remigration Doctrine

“Remigration” isn’t bureaucratic jargon. The term originates with Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner, who once belonged to an openly neo-Nazi group called “Stolz und Frei” (Proud and Free). Sellner was mentored by Gottfried Küssel, imprisoned twice in Austria for “Nazi revivalism.” As a young man, Sellner stuck a swastika poster onto a synagogue in Baden bei Wien, Austria.

Sellner describes remigration as “a decades-long project” toward making countries “European again” and devoid of “multiculturalism.” In plain terms: it’s an ethnic cleansing, the forced deportation of non-white migrants en masse, regardless of citizenship status. He clarifies the concept targets not just undocumented immigrants but “those who harm our society economically, criminally or culturally, form parallel societies and undermine democracy through ethnic voting” — a definition so expansive it could justify removing virtually any immigrant or ethnic minority.

The Christchurch mosque attacker, who killed 51 people and injured 89 in New Zealand in 2019, donated 1,500 euros (about $1,700) to Sellner’s Identitarian movement and exchanged emails with him before the attack. The shooter was inspired by the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory — the idea that white populations are being systematically replaced by non-white immigrants through deliberate policy.

In November 2023, Sellner delivered a lecture on remigration to high-ranking members of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party at a secret meeting in Potsdam. When German media exposed the gathering, protests erupted in cities across Germany. The AfD — which Germany’s intelligence services have at times classified as a far-right extremist threat — has since made remigration official party policy.

Sellner has credited Trump with “exploding” the term internationally. Trump has used “remigration” in social media posts. His administration’s deportation policies, spelled out in Project 2025, mirror Sellner’s framework: mass removals targeting not just undocumented immigrants but anyone deemed culturally incompatible, including citizens.

The State Department now has an office named after this concept. Critics call it ethnic cleansing by another name. The office’s mandate — coordinating deportation policy with other agencies — suggests the criticism is accurate.

Dismantling USAID

On July 1, 2025, America’s largest humanitarian agency shut down after 64 years. The dismantling began months earlier. Secretary Rubio announced on social media: “After a 6-week review we are officially canceling 83% of the programs at USAID.” Internal documents revealed he’d terminated 92 percent of grants. Billions in active programs halted mid-implementation.

UCLA health policy researcher James Macinko broke down the investment: “The average taxpayer has contributed about 18 cents per day to USAID. For that small amount, we’ve been able to translate that into saving up to 90 million deaths around the world.”

In Uganda, HIV treatment programs serving 250,000 people faced sudden funding gaps. In Bangladesh, nutrition programs reaching two million pregnant women and young children shut down. In Yemen, where USAID provided 70 percent of humanitarian assistance, food distribution networks collapsed.

Silencing Voice of America

For 83 years, Voice of America (VOA) broadcast independent news into countries where governments censored information. Founded during World War II to counter Nazi propaganda, VOA reached 354 million people worldwide in nearly 50 languages.

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order eliminating VOA’s parent agency. About 1,000 journalists were placed on indefinite leave and VOA stopped broadcasting for the first time in its history.

Trump appointee Kari Lake, a failed politician who campaigned with the slogan, “It’s time to take a sledgehammer to the mainstream media’s lies and propaganda,” announced in June she’d reduced VOA to 81 staffers — from 1,300. As former White House bureau chief Patsy Widakuswara put it, “We are abandoning the 360 million people around the world who depend on us weekly for independent news and abdicating the United States’ voice and influence in the world.”

Federal Judge Royce Lamberth blocked complete shutdown in April 2025, ruling Trump must restore programming to statutory levels. The agency remains crippled, and the soft power and good will that came from promoting democracy and human rights around the globe has evaporated. Funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia was terminated and the VOA website has not been updated since March 2025.

The Realignment

Western European countries that anchored democratic alliances for 75 years are now cast as ideological adversaries while authoritarian governments united by opposition to LGBTQ+ rights, women’s reproductive freedom, and secular democracy have become preferred partners.

The 40-nation Geneva Consensus coalition represents this shift in concrete terms. Russia — which invaded Ukraine in 2022 — is now a treaty partner with the United States. Belarus, staging ground for Russian military operations, is a signatory. Saudi Arabia, which murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, is a partner. Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq — all allies despite documented human rights abuses.

That entire post-WWII system is being dismantled. Human rights protections defined by international consensus are being replaced with “natural rights” defined by religious doctrine. Democracy promotion is being replaced with “natural family” advocacy. Humanitarian assistance is being replaced with ideological compliance.

The New Infrastructure

The Maria Kopp Institute in Hungary now serves as Secretariat for the Geneva Consensus Declaration — coordinating family policy for 40 countries out of an office funded by Orbán’s government. American diplomats who once worked through the UN or WHO on these issues now work through there.

The State Department’s Office of Natural Rights is tasked with developing frameworks for challenging European human rights standards. The proposed Office of Remigration would coordinate deportation policy with authoritarian governments — sharing the language and tactics of European far-right movements that explicitly call for ethnic cleansing.

USAID’s termination eliminates humanitarian leverage that might conflict with Geneva Consensus priorities. VOA’s dismantling removes a platform that might broadcast information about these changes to global audiences.

Institutions that promoted human rights, democratic governance, and humanitarian assistance are being eliminated or restructured. They’re being replaced with institutions that promote “natural family” ideology, coordinate with authoritarian governments, and reject multilateral frameworks.

When the United States withdrew from multilateral institutions that set international standards for human rights, it abandoned allies that share democratic values. It formed alliances with authoritarian governments united by opposition to abortion rights, LGBTQ+ equality, and secular governance.

This is a systematic demolition of the postwar institutional architecture and its replacement with foreign policy built on religious nationalism, aligned with authoritarian governments, hostile to human rights frameworks that protect marginalized communities. These are the mechanisms through which Project 2025 has restructured American foreign policy.

That reordering extends beyond Washington. Project 2025 organizations now operate in capital cities across Europe, Latin America, and Africa. They’re exporting ideology and infrastructure: model legislation, litigation strategies, and funding networks. Where U.S. government institutions once promoted human rights, private organizations now advance Christian nationalism — often with greater reach and less accountability.

Project 2025 is global. How far it spreads depends on which communities can mobilize resistance before the infrastructure becomes permanent.

Undermining LGBTQ+ Rights Worldwide

Three years after signing, Uganda passed highly repressive anti-LGBTQ+ laws, introducing the death penalty for cases of “aggravated homosexuality.” Russia labeled the LGBTQ+ movement as an extremist organization. In Egypt, Human Rights Watch and the media reported that authorities monitor social media platforms and dating applications to identify, harass, arrest, and abuse LGBTQ+ individuals.

Similar patterns of repression are evident among U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, where the State Department’s 2024 Human Rights Report — issued under the Trump administration — acknowledged that there were “numerous reports” that the “government [of Saudi Arabia] or its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings during the year.”

Across Europe, Hungary has become one of the leading examples of the anti-rights backlash. The so-called “fetal heartbeat” concept has also become central to abortion laws promoted by conservative politicians and anti-woman groups worldwide. Under this framework, women seeking an abortion are required to listen to the alleged “heartbeat” before the procedure. Initially introduced in several southern U.S. states, such as Texas and Kentucky, it was later adopted by the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Under his administration, same-sex couples have been excluded from marriage, adoption rights for LGBTQ+ families have been restricted, and homosexuality has been equated with pedophilia, advancing the dehumanization of the LGBTQ+ community. Hungary has banned the “promotion and portrayal of homosexuality” and gender diversity for people under 18 in sex education, films or advertisements. Other countries, such as Georgia and Bulgaria, have enacted similar laws targeting LGBTQ+ people.

In April 2025, Orbán’s regime limited the right of LGBTQ+ groups to organize public events and amended the Constitution to define gender strictly as male or female. It banned Pride parades. This reform came only three months after Trump signed a similar executive order in the U.S. Its influence soon extended beyond Hungary’s borders, as Slovakia followed with a similar measure limiting gender recognition and restricting adoption to married heterosexual couples. Some of these anti-LGBTQ+ policies are now being challenged in court.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has already ruled on anti-LGBTQ+ laws, mainly those adopted by Russia. In 2017, it concluded that the so-called “gay propaganda” law — which prohibited the dissemination of information about LGBTQ+ issues in the proximity of children and was used to ban Pride marches — was applied by the authorities to “reinforce stigma and prejudice, and encourage homophobia.” The Court found that this legislation violated the European Convention on Human Rights.

Meanwhile, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is currently examining an infringement case against Hungary over its 2021 anti-LGBT “propaganda” law, which claims to protect minors but, in practice, prohibits or restricts access to LGBTQ+ content. The Advocate General, Tamara Ćapeta, has already indicated that the measure violates fundamental human rights and the freedom of expression. Her opinion is nonbinding but often gives an indication of how the Court may rule.

Redefining Family to Legitimize Discrimination

Human rights groups denounced Orbán’s justification for these rollbacks as “under the banner of ‘family values.'” This framing echoes with the narrative of GCD and aligns with the Christian nationalist agenda outlined in Trump’s Project 2025, which excludes the LGBTQ+ community from the concept of family. The text states that “families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society.”

The overall quality of life for women and girls in many GCD co-signatory countries remains well below that of the U.S. and its traditional democratic allies, with significantly higher health risks. According to UNICEF‘s most recent global database (2020), the average maternal mortality ratio among GCD signatories was 262 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with 21.1 per 100,000 in the United States.

Regarding Uganda, the 2024 U.S. Human Rights Report found that child marriage persisted and that authorities did not enforce the law setting 18 as the minimum age.

Project 2025 further argues that U.S. health policies promoting “LGBTQ+ equity” should be “repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families.” It also calls for eliminating any reference to sexual orientation, gender identity, diversity, or inclusion in all American federal laws, policies and regulations.

Erasing Transgender People from Public Service Roles

Project 2025 especially demonizes the transgender community, equating “transgenderism” and “transgender ideology” with “pornography.” In its playbook for the Trump administration, the architects of the authoritarian plan called for the reversal of policies that allow transgender people to serve in the armed forces. The president acted on this request as soon as he took office, leading to the removal of around 1,000 transgender service members.

The Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded Project 2025, claims that “gender dysphoria” is incompatible with military service, and that “the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for service members should be ended.” Reflecting the same ideological stance, the Defense Department rescinded a Biden-era policy that reimbursed service members for out-of-state travel to seek reproductive health care, including abortions and fertility services.

Recently, attacks against transgender people have intensified within the Heritage Foundation’s orbit. The Oversight Project, a conservative initiative that originated within the Foundation, has urged the FBI to classify what it calls “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” (TIVE) as a category of domestic terrorism.

In Guatemala, Uganda, and other countries that have signed the GCD, the implementation of the declaration’s policies reveals Project 2025’s growing influence abroad. This international expansion has been driven in part by the Institute for Women’s Health (IWH), led by the GCD’s Valerie Huber.

Huber has become a key international figure in the campaign against sexual and reproductive rights. According to Ipas, a global nonprofit that expands access to safe abortion and reproductive rights, she “is not a public health professional yet she presents her work and organization as experts in the field of women’s health.” She continually claims falsely that the U.N. promotes “extreme ideology” and that it infringes upon “the sovereign right of nations to determine their own laws.”

The IWH is one of the key organizations behind Project 2025, as it sits on the initiative’s Advisory Board. Both Huber and Alma Golden, IWH’s Chief Operating Officer, are listed as contributors to Project 2025, which laid out in detail the project’s policy plans. This clearly illustrates the organization’s influence, as the text contains multiple references to the GCD.

Internationalizing Project 2025 through the GCD Network

After the U.S. withdrew from the GCD under the Biden administration, Huber and her organization worked on the declaration’s international outreach, seeking to attract new members. Huber herself attended Guatemala’s ratification of the GCD in October 2021. The small ceremony, held during the pandemic, was presided over by then-President Alejandro Giammattei, who was later barred from entering the U.S. by the Biden administration due to “significant corruption.” Also joining the event virtually was Damares Alves, a former minister under far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who in 2025 was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup and seeking to “annihilate” the country’s democracy.

Guatemala became the testing ground for turning the GCD from abstract principles into concrete public policies. The country’s government was the first to promote a prototype of the Protego project, described by Huber’s organization as “the IWH model for implementing public policy consistent with the values” of the GCD. The program aims to advance the anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ agenda of the Declaration through policies targeting education and public health in signatory countries.

According to Ipas, “Protego is clearly attempting to replace existing work on adolescent pregnancies, comprehensive sexuality education, and other vital and scientifically sound health programs led by United Nations agencies.” These include initiatives promoted by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which are “frequently targeted by anti-rights groups.”

In Guatemala, the partnership between IWH and the government began with the development of training guides for parents and teachers in collaboration with the Ministry of Education. These materials were “promoted through schools, other ministries, NGOs, and faith-based organizations.” Ministry staff received training from IWH on how to implement the materials. The content reflects GCD ideology, stating that “marriage is a lifelong commitment between a man and a woman.”

The material produced by Guatemala and IWH promotes abstinence, stating that “the only 100% effective way to avoid teenage pregnancy is to wait until marriage to have sex.” It also claims that “most” birth control methods “have no effect on preventing infections or sexually transmitted diseases.” The American Academy of Pediatrics acknowledges that abstaining from sex is the most effective way to prevent sexually transmitted infections (STIs). However, it also emphasizes that “when adolescents and young adults use barrier methods consistently and correctly, these methods are an excellent means to reduce the risk of many STIs, including HIV, and prevent pregnancy.”

According to academic research, “abstinence-only programs are ineffective at reducing teen birth rates.” In contrast, promoting comprehensive sex education has been shown to lower the overall birth rate among adolescents in the U.S.

In 2024, Uganda also joined the Protego initiative. The IWH cooperates with the country’s government, despite its stance against the LGBTQ+ community imposing the death penalty or life imprisonment for them. In 2025, the initiative added a new ally to its list, bringing Burundi into Protego.

The Role of Aid and Diplomacy in Promoting Anti-Rights Agendas

The GCD’s anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ agenda has spread across Africa, with around 20 countries now subscribing to the Geneva Declaration. According to the organization Justice for Prosperity (JfP), the adoption of this initiative to dismantle rights did not occur organically, “it was engineered by forces far outside of the continent.” Two of the main actors behind this push are American organizations: IWH and Family Watch International, led by the American Sharon Slater.

Both Huber and Slater took part in the Transatlantic Summit held in Spain in September 2024, organized by the Political Network for Values. The event brought together anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ activists from Europe, the Americas, and Africa. A new edition of the summit took place in February 2026 at the European Parliament in Brussels, with attendees including representatives of the Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI), and Slater.

JfP’s investigation found that “foreign aid and diplomacy, especially from the U.S. (and others like Hungary and some Gulf states), were used to pressure countries into signing the GCD.” In some cases, such as Sudan, the signature of the Declaration “coincided with U.S. terror list removal and increased aid or trade.” In other cases, there is possibly “evidence” of “diplomatic vote-swapping” at the United Nations “in exchange for signing the GCD.”

After joining the Declaration, some of these countries “gain access to exclusive meetings” and “appeal to conservative donors.” JfP identified cases of mutual cooperation within this network, including a $295 million loan to Uganda from Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Development Bank “after Western donors pulled out over Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ+ law.”

Echoing the same narrative promoted by the GCD and IWH in Africa, Project 2025 also calls to “reject the promotion of divisive policies that hurt the deepening of shared goals between the U.S. and its African partners,” referring to “social policies such as abortion and pro-LGBT initiatives,” which it describes as “policies birthed in the American culture wars.”

Another policy implemented by the Trump administration and mentioned in Project 2025, is the anti-abortion “Mexico City Rule.” This measure bars federal funding for foreign NGOs that perform or counsel for abortion services. First introduced by President Ronald Reagan in 1984, the rule has consistently been reinstated by Republican administrations and revoked by Democratic ones.

The Human Impact of Project 2025’s Attacks on USAID

Project 2025 also states that it “is paramount to create a healthy culture of respect for life, the family, sovereignty, and authentic human rights in international organizations and agencies.” Even before Trump dismantled USAID, the document had already condemned the agency’s funding of programs promoting “sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights,” “gender equality,” “women’s empowerment,” as well as those that advocate “for those who claim minority status or vulnerability.”

A study by The Lancet found that USAID’s economic interventions and programs have had a greater impact for women, particularly during their reproductive years. The report warns that “if the cuts continue, more than 14 million additional deaths could occur by 2030, including over 4.5 million among children under five.” Since Trump’s decision to shut down USAID, Africa alone has lost more than $8 billion in funding.

The researchers analyzed data from 133 countries from 2001 to 2021. They estimate that USAID programs helped prevent more than 91 million deaths during that period. “In countries receiving high levels of support, the strongest impact was seen in priority disease areas: mortality from HIV/AIDS was reduced by 74%, malaria by 53%, and neglected tropical diseases by 51%, compared to countries with low or no USAID funding,” the report states.

The Trump administration has systematically followed the path laid out by Project 2025. The United Nations has become one of its primary international targets. The administration cut $1 billion from previously approved UN funding, stopped financing the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and withdrew from the WHO. As a result of these cuts, the UN has announced it will reduce a quarter of the peacekeepers staff in nine operations around the world, including in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, Kosovo, and the demilitarized zone of the Golan Heights between Israel and Syria.

As in his first term, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council just days after returning to the White House. The U.S. also stepped back from the UN’s regular review of its human rights record, known as the Universal Periodic Review.

The Trump administration has also redefined the concept of human rights in the State Department’s 2024 Human Rights Report, issued during Trump’s second term. The report takes an approach that departs from international human rights standards and reflects the ideas of Project 2025. It omits references to discrimination against LGBTQ+ people or violence against women.

The Washington Post reported that Samuel Samson, senior advisor for the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), wrote the internal directive to remove references to human rights, violence against LGBTQ+ people and government corruption. Echoing Project 2025’s call for new global alliances, Samson published a post on the department’s website titled The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe. In it, he accused European countries of having “devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and other assaults on democratic self-governance.”

The report claims that in countries such as Hungary and El Salvador, “there were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses.” However, Amnesty International‘s 2024 annual review described “arbitrary detentions and human rights violations” under El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele.

The 2024 Human Rights Report from the Trump administration also makes no reference to the situation of LGBTQ+ people in Uganda, despite the fact that a law imposing the death penalty or life imprisonment for them was enacted a year earlier.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)*
Scottsdale, Arizona

Founded in 1994 by 35 Christian Right leaders, ADF has spent decades working to roll back the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people in the U.S. and abroad. Through its global branch, ADF International (ADFI), the organization operates across every continent. It lobbies policymakers and governments to advance its Christian nationalist agenda, builds networks with anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ organizations worldwide, engages in strategic litigation before international courts, such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), and runs online campaigns to publicize its flagship cases. ADF also holds consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), allowing them to lobby within the UN and its various subsidiaries.

Behind its “pro-family” facade, ADF and ADFI have pushed to eliminate access to contraception and abortion, the domestic branch has promoted the criminalization of sexual acts among consenting LGBTQ+ individuals, and spread conspiracy theories about a so-called “homosexual agenda” that allegedly threatens society. The organization has falsely claimed that LGBTQ+ people are more likely to be pedophiles and has worked to deny rights to transgender people (see GPAHE’s previous reporting on ADF here).

ADF gained global notoriety in 2022 for its pivotal role behind the campaign that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, ending the U.S. Constitutional right to abortion. However, ADF had also long been active internationally, working to undermine women’s and LGBTQ+ rights around the world.

In 2013, ADF lobbied in Belize to prevent the repeal of a draconian law that punished “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” with up to ten years in prison. In 2016, ADFI pushed for a referendum in Romania to oppose same-sex civil unions. Extending its efforts to Latin America, ADFI in 2018 sent a representative to the Argentine Parliament to oppose the legalization of abortion.

As part of its global campaign to roll back rights and freedoms, ADF intervened in 2011 in the first LGBTQ+ case heard by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). In the case of Karen Atala Riffo v. Chile, a Chilean court had ruled that Atala’s lesbian relationship threatened her children’s development and ordered her to relinquish custody. She then filed a discrimination complaint before IACHR. ADF submitted an amicus brief — a filing by an outside party seeking to influence the court — arguing that sexual orientation should not be a category of non-discrimination. In 2012, the IACHR ruled in Atala’s favor and ordered Chile to pay her compensation.

Nearly a decade later, ADFI took part in another case: Beatriz et al. v. El Salvador before the IACHR. The case addressed the consequences of El Salvador’s absolute criminalization of abortion (see Chapter 6).

In 2024, the IACHR ruled that El Salvador was responsible for obstetric violence and for violating Beatriz’s right to health. ADFI argued for “the need to respect the democratic principle of states,” as well as the “need for a state to protect the life of the unborn child.” ADFI has had a strong focus on Europe as it pursues its international expansion. In 2010, it was accepted into the EU Transparency Register under the name ADF International Belgium, which allows the organization to influence policies of EU institutions. Across the continent, it operates through independent branches registered in the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

As documented by GPAHE‘s report analyzing far-right conferences as vehicles for networking and promoting an anti-rights agenda, ADF and ADFI have been recurring participants at events such as CPAC, Pan-African Conference on Family Values, the World Congress of Families and the Political Network for Values (PNfV) Transatlantic Summits. Between 2000 and 2024, ADF representatives participated in more than 10 percent of the 302 events analyzed by GPAHE.

In Poland, ADFI worked closely with Polish hard-right groups who drove advocacy to restrict abortion rights. In 2020, the Polish Constitutional Court, which was filled with judges loyal to the far-right and populist PiS (Law and Justice) party, ruled that a law authorizing abortion in cases of fetal malformation was unconstitutional. The decision effectively created a near-total ban on abortion in the country.

ADFI later intervened as a third party to defend the ruling before the European Court of Human Rights. Three years later, the Court found that Poland had violated the right to respect for the private and family life of a woman who was forced to travel abroad to terminate a pregnancy with severe fetal anomalies.

Recently, ADFI staffers have also aligned with Italy’s far-right government led by Giorgia Meloni. In October, they participated in a side event at the United Nations headquarters with the Italian Minister for Family, Eugenia Roccella, that framed assisted reproductive technologies, such as surrogacy, as “a form of violence against women and girls.” This discourse echoes the position of the Heritage Foundation, which through Emma Waters, a senior research associate at the organization, argued that surrogacy and IVF amount to “concubinage” and “a form of slavery.”

These positions reflect an increasingly coordinated effort by conservative groups to restrict assisted reproductive technologies, largely because they are used by LGBTQ+ families. In recent years, ADFI has also been involved in several cases before the ECHR concerning surrogacy and in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Switzerland and France.

In recent months, the growing presence of ADF and ADFI in Europe has also become evident in the United Kingdom. In October 2025, a New York Times investigation revealed the group’s political involvement due to its links to Reform UK, the far-right party led by Brexit figure Nigel Farage. The report found that ADF’s expansion in Britain coincided with a notable shift in Farage’s political positions. After avoiding the abortion debate for over 30 years, he began, in late 2024, to question the country’s legal abortion limit.

In the U.K., the organization has been involved in several cases concerning individuals who prayed outside abortion clinics or offered what they called “charitable help” in areas legally protected to prevent the harassment of women seeking abortion care.

One case that drew U.S. attention involved anti-abortion activist Livia Tossici-Bolt, who was convicted in April for breaching a legally protected “buffer zone” outside an abortion clinic. She received a two-year conditional discharge and a £20,000 fine.

ADFI has sought to reframe these cases, downplaying the harassment and presenting them as a “legal turning point of immense proportions” that allegedly endangers “freedom of free speech.” In the U.S. Senate, ADF is lobbying on matters “relating to free speech in Europe.”

In June, the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., Warren Stephens, met with the organization, praising its role in defending “freedom of speech” and encouraging it to continue “the good work.” From Washington, the Trump administration has echoed this rhetoric, publicly supporting ADFI’s cases in the U.K. and claiming to be “concerned about freedom of expression” in the country.

The international branch of ADF considers the EU’s efforts to moderate online content, including measures against hate speech, disinformation, and other harmful content, as a form of “censorship.”

Paul B. Coleman, the executive director of ADFI, has criticized the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The regulation requires social media platforms to remove content that infringes the laws of EU member states and makes social media algorithms more transparent to reduce the potential for spreading disinformation. Coleman has compared these measures to censorship in authoritarian regimes, claiming that “free speech is again under threat on this continent in a way it hasn’t been since the nightmare of Europe’s authoritarian regimes just a few decades ago.”

American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ)*
Virginia Beach, Virginia

An anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman organization led by longtime Trump attorney Jay Sekulow was originally established by Pat Robertson, one of the founders of America’s Christian Right. Through its regional affiliates, such as the East African Center for Law and Justice (EACLJ) and the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), ACLJ works to advance conservative Christian laws and policies across Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

The European branch of the ACLJ has launched a campaign against the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), questioning the court’s independence. The organization published several reports linking ECHR judges to George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, a common bogeyman for the far- right. According to Neil Datta, executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights and author of The Next Wave report, ECLJ also actively campaigned against including the right to abortion in the French constitution.

In its Christian nationalist crusade, the ECLJ took part in the proceedings before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), supporting Italy’s position against same-sex marriage. Among its arguments to the Court, the organization even questioned “why homosexuality was more acceptable than polygamy.”

The ECLJ participated in strategic litigation in Latin America, supporting El Salvador in the “Manuela” case. Manuela was sentenced to 30 years in prison after an obstetric emergency that resulted in the loss of her pregnancy. Two years later, she died of cancer in prison after receiving inadequate medical treatment. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights found El Salvador responsible for Manuela’s death and for violating, among other rights, her rights to life, health, and freedom from discrimination.

Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam)*
New York, New York

C-Fam was founded in 1997 to “monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions,” according to its website. Its president, Austin Ruse, is a fierce opponent of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Ruse backed Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law – which criminalizes free speech on LGBTQ+ issues–calling it a noble quest for “human rights,” and signed a joint statement in support of it.

For years, Ruse and his organization have lobbied against sexual and reproductive health rights and equality for LGBTQ+ people at the UN, where C-Fam holds consultative status. In 2012, they even helped block a UN treaty protecting the rights of people with disabilities because, the group claimed, it was “pro-abortion.”

Ruse is part of Vision Network (formerly called Agenda Europe), a transnational alliance that promotes anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ policies throughout Europe. The network’s leaked manifesto, “Restoring the Natural Order,” contained arguments and ideas similar to the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming white Europeans are being “replaced” intentionally by non-white mass immigration and those with increasingly secular, progressive values.

An investigation by GPAHE identified Ruse as one of the main figures in the global anti-LGBTQ+ movement. Ruse acts as a bridge between anti-LGBTQ+ groups, Russian Christian nationalists, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s network. Ruse participated in several World Congress of Families events, including those held in Warsaw (2007), Amsterdam (2009), and Madrid (2012). In 2023, he also took part in a pro-Orbán Danube Institute conference event titled, “Why Hungary Should Break the EU Consensus on Sexual Issues at the U.N.,” and in the Transatlantic Summit organized by the Political Network for Values at the UN headquarters in New York. 

Family Research Council (FRC)* 
Washington, D.C.

One of the most influential organizations affiliated with Project 2025, FRC maintains close ties to far-right groups in the U.S. Led by Tony Perkins –who has compared LGBTQ+ people to pedophiles and once spoke to the American white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens– the organization is connected to anti-gender movements in Europe and Africa. According to GPAHE research, the FRC is among the U.S. groups that frequently push “conversion therapy,” the discredited and dangerous practice, banned in many countries, that seeks to change a person’s orientation or identity.

FRC has played a role in African politics. In 2010, the group lobbied against a U.S. congressional resolution (H. Res. 1064) proposed to condemn Uganda’s Anti-Gay Bill. Perkins aimed “to remove sweeping and inaccurate assertions that homosexual conduct is internationally recognized as a fundamental human right.”

Seven years later, it took part in a meeting in Cairo with other U.S. evangelical leaders and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who implemented repressive policies that led to the arrest of LGBTQ+ individuals. According to the Dutch human rights group Justice for Prosperity, Perkins has visited Nigeria and Ghana to meet with lawmakers and advocate for religious freedom and “pro-family” policies.

The FRC is also one of four American organizations that sponsored the African Christian Professionals Forum (ACPF), alongside the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Women’s Health, and Family Watch International.

In May 2025, the ACPF organized the second Pan-African Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, focused on the “protection of the family in Africa.” Participants identified the “promotion of Comprehensive Sexuality Education” and the “advocacy of Gender Identity ideologies” as “areas of grave concern.” Some of the speakers were outspoken opponents of queer rights, including Kenyan MP Peter Kaluma, who has supported life imprisonment for LGBTQ+ people.

Representing the FRC, Travis Weber, the organization’s vice president for policy and government affairs, addressed the conference. Other speakers from U.S.-based anti-rights groups included Sharon Slater, president of Family Watch International; Bettina Roska from ADF International; Valerie Huber from the Institute for Women’s Health; and Austin Ruse from the Center for Family and Human Rights.

Family Watch International (FWI)
Gilbert, Arizona

FWI is an anti-LGBTQ+ organization that seeks to influence international policy, particularly at the UN and across Africa. The group holds consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN, a designation that allows it to lobby within the institution.

FWI’s president, Sharon Slater, is a member of the board of directors of the Political Network of Values, alongside Brian Brown of World Congress of Families. The president of FWI holds openly homophobic views and has promoted conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ people. She has written false statements portraying LGBTQ+ individuals as disease-prone, “significantly more promiscuous,” and “significantly more likely to engage in pedophilia.”

Slater was deeply involved in the political organizing behind the infamous Uganda law that criminalized LGBTQ+ people. Although Slater denies any connection with it, CNN reported that her organization assisted members of parliament in pushing the legislation and shaping its wording. Two weeks after the Ugandan parliament passed a law introducing the death penalty for cases of “aggravated homosexuality,” Janet K. Museveni, the Ugandan first lady, met with Slater and her team. Photos of the meeting were shared on Museveni’s X account. In the same thread, the First Lady wrote: “I commend the Ugandan Parliament for passing the Anti-homosexuality bill, which empowers Ugandans to resist such evils imposed on our children.”

Heritage Foundation*
Washington, D.C.

The far-right think tank Heritage Foundation sprearheaded Project 2025. Founded in 1973, the organization gained prominence during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and remains an influential organization in the far-right movement. In recent years, the Heritage Foundation has moved further and further to the right, leaving its Reaganite history behind during the Trump years for more extremist politics.

In a 2024 interview with the New York Times, Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts stated that the Heritage’s role is “Institutionalizing Trumpism” via Project 2025. At least 66 of its employees and alumni served in Trump’s first administration. An analysis by GPAHE published in April 2025 found that the Project 2025 network has at least 40 ties to the new Trump administration.

Roberts has praised Orbán’s regime, an anti-democratic, anti-civil rights, and anti-human rights government. The Heritage Foundation has openly endorsed Orbán’s Christian nationalist agenda. Its president has described Hungary as “the model” for conservative “statecraft,” saying that everyone “should learn from it,” and has positioned his organization as a “major advocate of it on both sides of the Atlantic.”

As part of a growing transatlantic alliance, Heritage, Orbán’s government, and institutions linked to the Hungarian authoritarian leader — such as the Danube Institute, the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, and the Center for Fundamental Rights — have strengthened their collaboration with one another, and with other far-right, anti-woman, and anti-LGBTQ+ organizations, through international events across Europe, Africa and the Americas.

As GPAHE has documented, the connections between the Heritage Foundation and Orbán’s regime run very deep, and they continue to strengthen. In March 2023, Heritage and the Danube Institute, a think tank funded by Hungary’s government, signed a formal agreement allowing Heritage researchers to work in Budapest as visiting fellows and to co-host joint events.

Two years later, in September 2025, the Heritage Foundation hosted the 5th Geopolitical Summit in Budapest, in collaboration with Danube Institute. Heritage staff members — including James Jay Carafano, and Eugene Kontorovich — addressed topics such as energy policy, the “irrelevance” of international institutions, and migration, under the question, “Can Nations Choose Their Members?”.

Heritage’s activity in the European Parliament has surged. In the past 12 months alone, the group held seven meetings with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), compared to just one in the previous five years, according to records obtained by Politico.

Roberts’ organization has also promoted its pro-natalist agenda in Europe. In October 2025, the group took part in a conference in Italy that focused on Europe’s demographic crisis and the idea that declining birthrates threaten Western civilization. Among the speakers was Italy’s family minister, Eugenia Roccella, from the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni.

Beyond Europe, the Heritage Foundation has also expanded its international outreach across Africa. The organization co-sponsored the African Christian Professionals Forum (ACPF). In 2025, ACPF held its second Pan-African Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, bringing together far-right politicians and organizations from Africa, the U.S., and Europe to denounce sexuality education, attack reproductive rights, and promote a conservative vision of the family.

Four years before, also in Kenya, Heritage facilitated a side event during the United Nations Population Fund’s Nairobi Summit to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development. The panel, called “Protecting Life in Global Health Policies,” included representatives of the U.S., Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Kenya, and the Holy See. Heritage, now led by Roberts, criticized the “efforts” of “international think tanks” to “promote abortion.”

In Latin America, Heritage has backed Argentina’s far-right president Javier Milei and El Salvador’s authoritarian leader Nayib Bukele. Milei’s rhetoric mirrors the anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ agenda that defines Project 2025. He has repeatedly opposed equality for women in the country and has even compared homosexuality to having sex with animals.

Roberts met with Milei in Buenos Aires in March 2025, and after the president’s party won the midterm elections in October 2025, the Heritage leader celebrated the result, calling it “a golden age for everyday people in America, Argentina, and an increasing number of countries in Europe.”

The conservative think tank has also praised Bukele’s authoritarian security policies in El Salvador, which were launched under the pretext of fighting gang crime. In an article on its website, senior policy analyst Andrés Martínez-Fernández, lauded Bukele’s police and military campaigns, stating that “the results have been striking.” He made no mention, however, of the mass arbitrary detentions and systematic human rights violations reported by human rights groups.

Institute for Women’s Health (IWH)*
Washington, D.C.

The organization’s mission is to preserve and expand the international reach of the anti-women’s rights and anti-LGBTQ+ Geneva Consensus Declaration (GCD). The declaration asserts that “there is no international right to abortion” and was endorsed by the Trump administration in its first term. Several authoritarian regimes have ratified the GCD, including Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Sudan.

Founded in 2021 by Valerie Huber, the IWH has played a central role in promoting the GCD’s global expansion. Prior to establishing the organization, Huber served as the U.S. Special Representative for Global Women’s Health during the first Trump presidency. Under her leadership, the Institute has recruited new signatory countries even after the Biden administration withdrew from the declaration.

She has become a leading international voice in the campaign to roll back reproductive rights worldwide. Through the Institute, she has promoted the implementation of the GCD’s ideology in some signatory nations. In Uganda, Burundi, and Guatemala, her organization partnered with the governments to implement the Protego program, which advances the declaration’s agenda through education and public health initiatives.

Leadership Institute (LI)*
Arlington, Virginia

Founded in 1979 by Morton C. Blackwell, the organization describes its mission as “to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders in the public policy process.” Aligned with Project 2025’s international ambitions, the LI has partnered with extremist groups abroad, collaborating with anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman organizations. In Europe, it has worked with CitizenGO on fundraising training, and CitizenGO’s president, Ignacio Arsuaga, took part in a LI session in Jerusalem in 2023.

The Institute’s training programs have also involved Samuel Ángel, a Colombian anti-reproductive rights activist. In 2021, Ángel incited online harassment against the justices of Colombia’s Constitutional Court, who were deliberating the complete decriminalization of abortion, though no charges were brought. Ultimately, the court approved the ruling.

LI members have also taken part in international far-right events alongside representatives of ADF, when it was named Alliance Defense Fund. Their participation in the World Congress of Families (WCF), one of the most influential events promoting anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ agendas worldwide, illustrates the transnational connections among anti-rights organizations globally.

At the 2012 WCF conference in Spain, Miguel Moreno, who was then the LI’s director of International Training, spoke out against diverse and same-sex families. He argued that “children are in tremendous danger if they are adopted by families that do not fit what we understand as the natural family.”

Turning Point USA (TPUSA)
Indianapolis, Indiana

TPUSA was founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, a Christian nationalist commentator and fervent supporter of Project 2025, who was assassinated on September 10, 2025. He repeatedly made racist, sexist, and extremist claims to his audience.

His views were often marked by overt bigotry. According to Kirk, “DEI is institutionalized racism,” and “women’s role is to support men.” Even civil rights icons were not exempt from his extremist rhetoric. He called Martin Luther King Jr., “awful” and “not a good person.” Regarding race, he promoted hate speech: “Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He also questioned the competence of Black professionals, remarking: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.””

Following Kirk’s assassination, his widow, Erika Kirk, took over the organization. TPUSA has been described as the “MAGA youth wing” of the conservative movement. It trains young conservatives in an ideological framework that portrays democracy as spiritual warfare.

Over time, Kirk transitioned from being a secular conservative activist to becoming a theological advocate of Christian dominance. He embraced the New Apostolic Reformation’s (NAR) Seven Mountain Mandate, which calls for Christian control over seven domains of society: government, education, religion, family, business, media, and entertainment. Under his leadership, TPUSA grew into an influential network based on these principles. It also drew allegations of grift from former employees who watched say they watched prominent NAR figures line their pockets on TPUSA stages.

Before his death, Kirk began expanding his influence abroad by taking part in events in Japan and South Korea. In 2019, the organization launched an international branch, Turning Point UK (TPUK), which aimed to “challenge the left leaning bias in our institutions and wider society.” Similar to its U.S. counterpart, TPUK has urged students to report lecturers for alleged “political bias.” Such tactics in the U.S. have resulted in death and rape threats against academics and their families.

TPUK was launched with the financial support of John Mappin, a Scientologist and millionaire hotel owner. Mappin reportedly supports the antisemitic, far-right conspiracy theory QAnon, which claims that the so-called “deep state,” Democrats, and well-known Jewish figures such as philanthropist George Soros, are involved in secret child trafficking operations.

World Congress of Families (WCF) / International Organization for the Family (IOF)
Rockford, Illinois

WCF is a forum that has long served as one of the largest gatherings of anti-LGBTQ+, anti-abortion, and Christian nationalists activists worldwide. The WCF is a project of the anti-LGBTQ+ International Organization for the Family (IOF) and was founded during a meeting held in Russia in 1997 by two Russian sociologists at Moscow State University, Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, along with former Reagan administration official, Allan Carlson.

Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the event regularly featured speakers with close ties to pro-Kremlin groups. It has also drawn anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ speakers from the Americas, Africa, and Europe, as well as far-right political figures like France’s far-right MEP Marion Maréchal Le Pen; Italy’s Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-immigrant Lega party; Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni; and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Brian Brown, current president of the International Organization for the Family, is a supporter of Putin’s persecution of LGBTQ+ people in Russia, and regularly compares homosexuality to pedophilia. Brown travels widely lobbying against LGBTQ+ rights. In recent months, he has emerged as one of the key promoters of the opaque ‘Make Europe Great Again’ (MEGA) conferences, attending meetings in Romania, Croatia, and Moldova. In the latter, Moldovan authorities initially denied him entry, but he was later allowed to participate reportedly following U.S. intervention. The country’s Information and Security Service (SIS) warned that MEGA was “part of a broader spectrum of hybrid actions undertaken by Russia on the territory of the Republic of Moldova.”

In December 2024, U.S. authorities formally indicted the WCF’s Russian representative, Alexey Komov, on charges of  “conspiracy” for his role “in a multi-faceted scheme to violate and evade U.S. sanctions imposed on a significant financier [Konstantin Malofeev] of Russian aggression in Ukraine.”

Africa Christian Professionals Forum (ACPF)
Nairobi, Kenya

ACPF is an anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ rights organization that presents itself as a platform of “christian professionals from different christian denominations who share common values on life, family, good governance, values-based education and religious freedom.” Founded in 2020, ACPF is the regional branch of its parent organization, the Kenya Christian Professional Forum.

ACPF organized the Pan-African Conference on Family Values in Nairobi in May 2025, which brought together some of the most influential anti-rights organizations from the U.S., Africa and Europe. At the event’s conclusion, the group issued a shared declaration identifying the “promotion of Comprehensive Sexuality Education” and the “advocacy of Gender Identity ideologies” as “areas of grave concern.”

At the last edition of the Pan-African Conference, speakers included representatives from major U.S. organizations such as the Family Research Council, Family Watch International, the Center for Family and Human Rights, Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI), and the Institute for Women’s Health (IWH). European participation came from groups like Ordo Iuris (Poland) and Christian Council International (the Netherlands).

The program also featured prominent local opponents of LGBTQ+ rights, including Kenyan MP Peter Kaluma, who has advocated jail and life sentences for LGBTQ+ individuals. During the event, Kaluma celebrated Donald Trump’s election as president of the U.S. “We hope to see more Republicans win in future elections,” he said.

Despite its efforts to present itself as a locally rooted platform, ACPF’s website lists four partner organizations, all of which are based in the United States: the Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Women’s Health, and Family Watch International. The first three are on the Project 2025 advisory board. The next Pan-African Conference is scheduled to take place in South Africa in 2027.

Alapjogokért Központ – Center for Fundamental Rights (CFR)
Budapest, Hungary; Madrid, Spain

The CFR, founded in Budapest in 2013, functions as a propaganda organization for the regime of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and operates under the motto “God, Homeland, Family.” Since 2022, its flagship project has been hosting the first-ever Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Europe.

The organization has been working to expand its network and strengthen ties with international far-right organizations by hosting visits, meetings, and workshops with allied entities. In 2024, CFR opened an office in Madrid to strengthen its network in Latin America. Politicians and activists from the U.S., Peru, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia have visited Orbán’s far-right think tank offices in Madrid and Budapest.

Just days after the Spanish office was inaugurated in March 2024, CFR representatives took part in a panel discussion in Madrid about the future of the Atlantic community, meaning European, North American, and Latin American countries. The event was co-hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the American group that spearheaded the authoritarian Project 2025 plan that Trump is now enacting.

In line with a broader realignment of priorities to follow Trump’s foreign policy agenda, including the closure of USAID, CFR released a report in July 2025 that attacked European Union development aid and its funding for Latin American NGOs. The document claimed that “far-left activist groups” had received “multimillion sums” under thematic areas including LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, sexual and reproductive health, indigenism, migration, and “antidisinformation.” It accused Brussels of funding “woke” non-profit organizations.

Asociación la Familia Importa (Family Matters Association, AFI)
Guatemala City, Guatemala

Founded in 2013, AFI is a Guatemalan organization that opposes sexual and reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights. Although it operates only in Guatemala, it collaborates with transnational anti-rights actors such as Political Network for Values, ADFI and the IWH.

Guatemala is one of the three countries in the region that adopted the Geneva Consensus Declaration promoted by Valerie Huber, an anti-woman’s rights activist and former member of the Trump administration. She attended the country’s ratification in October 2021, under then-President Alejandro Giammattei, who was later barred from entering the U.S. for “significant corruption.” One of AFI’s founding members, Sandy Recinos, served in the Giammattei administration at the time the GCD was ratified.

Huber and AFI’s executive director, Ligia Briz, have appeared together on several occasions, including at the fifth anniversary of the GCD in Washington in October of 2025. Just a month earlier, they participated in a conference organized by AFI and PNfV in Guatemala’s national Congress, where speakers included Julio Pohl, legal advisor to ADFI in Latin America, and Rodrigo Iván Cortés, PNfV vice president and founder of Mexico’s National Front for the Family. Briz had also taken part in the fourth GCD anniversary in Washington in 2024, where she met with Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation and one of the authors of Project 2025.

The AFI is a lobbying force in Guatemala. In 2017, it opposed a bill designed to address sexual violence against girls by guaranteeing care, compensation, and access to abortion. According to UNICEF data published in 2016, Guatemala recorded 23 cases of sexual abuse against girls and adolescents daily. AFI rejected the proposal, claiming it threatened the “fundamental right to life.” The bill was ultimately shelved.

In 2020, AFI pressured the government to prevent Planned Parenthood, an American organization that promotes sexual and reproductive health, from opening an office in Guatemala. Although the government had approved the office, former President Giammattei ultimately revoked the decision.

CitizenGO / HazteOir
Madrid, Spain; Na, Kenya; Arlington, Virginia, U.S.

CitizenGO is an anti-LGBTQ+ organization founded in 2013 as the international extension of HazteOir, a similar Spanish platform some of whose “members” have been linked to the secret Mexican fascist sect El Yunque, a connection confirmed by a Spanish court ruling.

The organization operates mainly through online petitions, but also runs aggressive offline campaigns. They have staged protests outside abortion clinics in Madrid, organized prayer vigils, and sent toy fetuses covered in red liquid to simulate blood to lawmakers.

CitizenGO has also promoted so-called “conversion therapies,” the dangerous practice of attempting to change sexual orientation or identity that has been described as akin to torture by a UN special rapporteur and banned in dozens of countries. To justify these practices, they use “data” from the American anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman Family Research Council, one of the organizations behind Project 2025, claiming that sexual orientation change “is not only possible, but also very natural among LGBT people.”

CitizenGO’s anti-trans rhetoric has been particularly aggressive, gaining notoriety for buses covered with transphobic messages. In Africa, it has led campaigns against reproductive health. Between 2020 and 2021, the Mozilla Foundation uncovered CitizenGO’s involvement in a disinformation campaign on X (formerly known as Twitter) against two Kenyan laws: the Reproductive Health Bill 2019 and the Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill 2019. These bills aimed to ban coercive sterilization, provide free prenatal and postnatal services to all women, and create guidelines for assisted reproduction.

Ann Kioko, who led CitizenGO’s African campaigns until September 2025, participated alongside Valerie Huber (IWH), and Rebeca Oas, director of research at the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), also a Project 2025 advisor, in a Heritage Foundation panel in 2020 on “Failures of Radical Feminism at the United Nations.”

Founded by the Spaniard Ignacio Arsuaga, who hosted the World Congress of Families in Madrid in 2012, CitizenGO remains deeply connected to the International Organization for the Family (IOF), the umbrella organization behind the World Congress of Families, where Arsuaga serves as a board member.

CitizenGO has operated a U.S. branch since 2022, registered in Arlington, Virginia. Tax records show that Arsuaga serves as president of the American entity and received $112,620 in compensation for this role in tax year 2024. That year, the organization reported running “20 separate campaigns to promote human rights, family values, and similar issues.” In practice, these campaigns included online petitions targeting the rights of transgender minors, pressuring Netflix to remove LGBTQ+ characters from children’s shows, and supporting anti-abortion positions at the Republican National Convention.

Danube Institute
Budapest, Hungary

The institute is part of the Orbán regime’s propaganda arm abroad. Founded in 2013 by the Hungarian state through the Batthyány Lajos Foundation, its mission promotes –in its own words– “classical liberal tradition” in economics, “realistic Atlanticism,” and advocating conservatism.

In practice, it operates as a think tank pushing Orbán’s anti-rights and anti-woman agenda and builds ties with international allies, including through a cooperation agreement with the Heritage Foundation signed in 2023. Since then, both institutions have co-hosted the Geopolitical Summit in Budapest.

At the most recent edition, held in September 2025, Robert Palladino, the Chargé d’Affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Hungary, took part in the event and reaffirmed the bond between Washington and Budapest, stating: “We are allies because we share a conviction: sovereignty, faith, family, and culture are not outdated — they are oxygen.”

By hosting U.S. far-right figures as visiting fellows, the institute has positioned itself as a conduit between Trumpist and Orbánist ideas. In 2024, it hosted Melissa Ford, at the time a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation — a group linked to Project 2025 — who now leads the Western Hemisphere Initiative at the America First Policy Institute. It also welcomed Arthur Milikh, executive director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, another promoter of Project 2025. The institute additionally employs American right-wing blogger Rod Dreher, director of the Network Project at the Danube Institute, who is known to be an early friend and advisor to U.S. Vice President JD Vance.

Frente Nacional por la Familia (National Front for the Family, FNF)
Mexico; Chicago, Illinois

FNF is a far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ Catholic civil association founded in Mexico and active nationwide, with an additional branch in Chicago (U.S.). It was established in 2016 in response to former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s initiative to legalize same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex married couples.

The group’s founder and leader, Rodrigo Iván Cortés Jiménez, is the vice president of the transnational anti-LGBTQ+ Political Network for Values and a prominent actor within the broader ecosystem of anti-rights organizations and events. He has participated in several editions of the World Congress of Families, including the 2022 meeting held in Mexico and the 2015 event in Salt Lake City (U.S.).

Cortés Jiménez has also benefited from ADFI’s support in a legal case. After being convicted for committing gender-based political violence against Mexican transgender Congresswoman Salma Luévano, ADFI represented him in his unsuccessful appeal and later brought the case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on his behalf. The case is pending as of this writing.

FNF endorses access to the widely discredited practice of conversion therapy, the process of changing one’s sexual orientation or identity, described as akin to torture by a UN special rapporteur. When conversion therapy was outlawed in Mexico City in 2020, the group denounced the measure. “Today is a regrettable day for the State of Mexico, since a law was approved that will seek to stigmatize and prevent people who want to treat gender dysphoria, also seeking to disqualify the natural biological sexual dimension, even opening the door to imprison parents, religious ministers and experts who apply therapy or counseling in this matter,” FNF argued.

Global Center for Human Rights (GCHR)
Washington, D.C.; Geneva, Switzerland

Founded in 2021 and based in Washington, D.C., GCHR operates primarily in Latin America, where it promotes a Christian nationalist and anti-woman agenda. The organization seeks to “build and consolidate a new generation of leaders committed to defending life, family, religious freedom, and democracy,” and is also active in strategic litigation before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). In March 2026, the group announced plans to open a new office in Geneva, Switzerland, to lobby at the United Nations headquarters.

GCHR is led by Sebastian Schuff, an Argentinian lawyer who founded Prodeci in 2010, an organization similar to the American Alliance Defending Freedom, and dedicated to “defending the right to life, religious freedom, and family rights” that engaged in strategic litigation in Argentina. Schuff is a supporter of Argentina’s far-right president Javier Milei, and in 2024, GCHR organized an event in the Chamber of Deputies attended by members of Milei’s political party.

Schuff’s wife, Neydy Casillas, a Mexican lawyer, serves as vice president for international affairs. Casillas previously held the same role at Concerned Women for America, an American anti-rights organization and Project 2025 supporter, that wants to bring biblical values to government policies, and as senior legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom International, a U.S. organization at the heart of a powerful international network dedicated to rolling back women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.

GCHR was involved in the significant regional case of Beatriz et al. v. El Salvador. In 2024, the IACHR ruled that El Salvador was responsible for obstetric violence and for violating Beatriz’s right to health.

In 2013, Beatriz, a young Salvadoran woman, had a pregnancy that not only posed a severe risk to her own life, but her fetus was also non-viable. She requested an abortion at twelve weeks, but El Salvador’s total abortion ban caused months of delay as doctors feared prosecution. At 26 weeks of pregnancy, a cesarean section was finally performed. The baby died five hours after birth. Beatriz died in 2017 from complications after a traffic accident. The court found no link between her death and her pregnancy.

GCHR advised the government of El Salvador during the hearings held in March 2023 at the IACHR’s headquarters in San José, Costa Rica. According to local reporting, Schuff and María Anne Quiroga, GCHR’s director of research, were present in the courtroom as part of the El Salvadoran State’s advisory legal team.

Seeking to sway both the Court’s decision and public opinion, GCHR launched a website aimed at discrediting the case, the judges, and the organizations supporting Beatriz and her family. The site listed several reproductive rights organizations and philanthropic foundations as alleged donors to the IACHR, suggesting that the Court lacked independence. The Court’s president, Judge Nancy Hernández, rejected those claims.

In December 2022, GCHR launched the “No Next Roe” campaign, claiming that the Beatriz v. El Salvador case “could become the Roe v. Wade for all of Latin America” — a reference to the landmark U.S. ruling that guaranteed abortion access from 1973 until it was overturned by the American Supreme Court in 2022. The campaign also appealed for a “generous gift” to the organization to help “stop the next Roe.”

Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture (OI)
Warsaw, Poland; Brussels, Belgium; New York, U.S.; Zagreb, Croatia; Arusha, Tanzania

Founded in Poland in 2013, OI is a far-right legal and advocacy think tank that attempts to spread its anti-LGBTQ+ positions and anti-woman policies through the courts. In Eastern Europe, the organization has become a key hub for promoting anti-rights strategic litigation.

OI has strong ties to the far-right and populist Polish PiS (Law and Justice) party, and also has links to the even more extreme-right Confederation Liberty and Independence Party (Konfederacja Wolność i Niepodległość), described by the University of Oslo’s Center on Extremism as “an amalgam of diverse far-right actors” whose beliefs include transforming Poland into an “ethnocracy embodying a mythicized, culturally homogenous nation built around traditionalist-Catholic principles.”

Its influence has been visible at the local and national level. Since 2019, dozens of municipalities, counties and regions in Poland have promoted what they call areas “free from LGBTQ+ ideology.” Many of these resolutions follow a template created by Ordo Iuris, known as the Charter of the Rights of the Family. The document’s main aim is “the protection” of marriage and family, both defined in ways that exclude LGBTQ+ people. Family is framed as a union rooted in “motherhood and parenthood.” This initiative has received support from international anti-rights groups such as CitizenGO and the International Organization of the Family.

In response to these measures, the European Union warned through the European Commission that local governments applying such discriminatory declarations risked losing EU funds. The resolutions were gradually repealed, and by 2025, the last remaining declarations had been withdrawn.

OI has also played a central role in efforts to restrict reproductive rights. In 2016, its lawyers drafted a bill that sought to ban abortion in Poland in almost all circumstances, extending the ban to cases of rape and incest and introducing prison sentences of up to five years. Parliament eventually withdrew the proposal after a nationwide strike and mass protests. However, in 2020, the Polish Constitutional Court –filled with judges loyal to the PiS– overturned the legal grounds for abortion in cases of fetal malformation, resulting in a near-total ban on the procedure.

Building on its influence in Poland, the organization has expanded its presence across Eastern Europe, including activities in Croatia. OI has also developed a broader international footprint, opening an office in Brussels to influence EU institutions and establishing a non-profit entity in New York under the name Ordo Iuris International Foundation. Following similar recent moves by U.S. anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ groups, OI announced in May 2025 the creation of a new branch in Arusha, Tanzania, where the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AFCHPR) is based. According to the organization, this office aims to “support African NGOs” in their work before “supranational organizations such as the UN, WHO, and the AFCHPR.”

Political Network for Values (PNfV)
Madrid, Spain; Frisco, Texas, (U.S.)

PNfV is a transnational lobbying platform that connects far-right actors and organizations worldwide. It promotes a conservative Christian agenda opposing LGBTQ+ rights, women’s bodily autonomy, and euthanasia, while defending a traditional family model.

The organization is fiercely anti-abortion. In its ideological manifesto, it states that “euthanasia, like abortion, cannot be considered a right.” As part of its broader anti-rights agenda, PNfV also rejects same-sex marriage, asserting that “marriage is an institution between a man and a woman, where each contributes differently yet complementarily to the process of forming a family.”

At its 2024 Transatlantic Summit in Madrid, the group invited Kenyan MP Peter Kaluma, known for supporting life imprisonment for LGBTQ+ people. His name was later removed from the program after a backlash.

The PNfV’s current president is Stephen Bartulica, a Croatian MEP from the far-right party Dom i Nacionalno Okupljanje (Home and National Rally, DOMiNO) and a member of the far-right Catholic movement Opus Dei. The network’s vice president, Rodrigo Iván Cortés, founder of Mexico’s Frente Nacional por la Familia (National Front for the Family), was convicted for gender-based political violence against Mexican transgender Congresswoman Salma Luévano.

PNfV maintains close ties to Hungary’s authoritarian regime. In 2019, the Orbán government made a donation to the organization. Former Hungarian Minister for Families Katalin Novák chaired the network until 2022, when she became Hungary’s president. She was later ousted in 2024, following a scandal involving a pardon linked to alleged pedophilia cases. From 2022 and 2024, PNfV was led by José Antonio Kast, the newly elected Chilean president and a far-right politician who openly defended the legacy of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

The platform, led by Bartulica, brings together on its board several organizations that have advanced the Project 2025 agenda internationally, including Sharon Slater (president of Family Watch International), and Brian Brown (president of the International Organization for the Family/World Congress of Families). Valerie Huber, head of the Institute for Women’s Health, is also a regular speaker at PNfV events. Partners for its gathering in the European Parliament in February 2026 included the Heritage Foundation and ADFI.

The Bukele Model: Security, Spectacle, and Repression

Since taking office in 2019, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has consolidated power through a security-driven model that weakens democratic institutions, undermines pluralism, and restricts fundamental rights. This authoritarian approach, framed as an efficient response to crime, has earned him admiration within the Trump Administration and the broader MAGA ecosystem, including the U.S.-based Heritage Foundation, which spearheaded Project 2025.

In parallel, Bukele has echoed policy priorities associated with Project 2025, including opposition to diversity initiatives, restrictions on LGBTQ+ rights, and the preservation of a total abortion ban.

These dynamics have taken concrete form under El Salvador’s state of emergency, which was implemented in March 2022. This extraordinary measure was introduced in response to a surge in gang violence. According to Freedom House’s 2025 Index, the country is classified as “partially free,” earning a score of 53 out of 100 for political rights and civil liberties.

The emergency decree allows authorities to make arrests, bypassing due process, a framework that has enabled the detention of more than 83,000 people, thousands of them arbitrarily, according to Amnesty International data. As a result, over one percent of El Salvador’s population has been arrested, the highest proportion of any country in the world, according to the World Prison Brief.

By September 2024, the Inter-American Comission of Human Rights warned in a report that the continuation of emergency powers was no longer justified, citing the “statistics provided by the State on improvements to citizen security.” Nevertheless, Bukele’s administration ignored the call. In December 2025, the country approved the 46th extension of the state of exception, establishing emergency rule as a governing tool.

A growing alliance between Trump and Bukele

As Bukele consolidated emergency rule at home, the U.S. shifted its stance on El Salvador under Trump’s leadership. State Department human rights reports moved from acknowledging “significant human rights issues” in 2023 to claiming that “there were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” under Bukele’s government in 2024. This reversal contradicts findings by human rights organizations.

Only three days after his inauguration in January 2025, Trump publicly praised Bukele’s “leadership in the region,” presenting the Salvadoran president as an “example” for “other nations in the Western Hemisphere.”

As part of this broader partnership, the U.S. and El Salvador signed a controversial agreement in March 2025. Under the deal, Bukele’s government received roughly $5 million in exchange for detaining more than 200 migrants deported from the U.S. in El Salvador’s maximum-security prison, the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT). Most of those transferred were Venezuelans, labeled by U.S. authorities as gang members and terrorists to justify their deportation under the Alien Enemies Act, invoked for the first time since World War II by Trump, despite many deportees having no criminal record in the U.S. or Latin America.

Exporting an anti-women’s rights agenda through deportation policies

The influence of Project 2025 appeared in the El Salvador agreement. The deal barred the use of U.S. funds for abortion-related services and prohibited programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, echoing Project 2025’s push to remove references to sexual orientation, gender identity, diversity, and inclusion from U.S. federal laws and regulations. At the same time, the agreement did not impose any binding safeguards to protect the rights of those detained.

Human rights organizations have documented the consequences of the U.S. partnership with El Salvador. After interviewing dozens of Venezuelans who were deported from the U.S. and held at the CECOT prison, investigators recorded repeated beatings, sexual violence, prolonged incommunicado detention, and inadequate food. According to Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a Salvadoran human rights organization, several of these practices constitute torture under international human rights law.

Despite well-documented evidence of human rights abuses in El Salvador’s prisons, Trump praised the country’s detention system during his Oval Office meeting with Bukele, describing the facilities as “great.”

Bukele’s Regime and the MAGA Ecosystem

Following his first presidential electoral victory, Bukele moved swiftly to signal the direction of his international alliances. After winning the election in El Salvador in February 2019, he delivered his first speech not domestically, but in Washington, D.C., where he addressed the Heritage Foundation, the convener of Project 2025.

Praising the institution, Bukele described it as “the most influential think tank in the world,” arguing that El Salvador required its support. The move highlighted the importance his government placed on MAGA-aligned networks and the groups behind Project 2025.

By openly praising his repressive policies, authoritarian approach, and disinformation-driven messaging, Bukele has positioned himself as a figure admired by key MAGA leaders. Elon Musk has called him an “amazing leader” and has amplified Bukele’s announcements on X. Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited El Salvador in 2023 while serving as a U.S. senator from Florida. Rubio later published an article praising Bukele’s campaign against gang violence.

Bukele’s appeal has also extended into far-right media ecosystems. American podcaster and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has interviewed him on several occasions, most recently in June 2024, when the far-right podcast host claimed that Bukele had “saved El Salvador” and suggested he “may have the blueprint for saving the world.”

Ties with Donald Trump’s political orbit and the broader MAGA movement have continued to deepen. Bukele’s second inauguration as president, held in June 2024, was attended by several U.S. conservative figures, including Tucker Carlson, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump Jr., Matt Schlapp, the chairman of CPAC, as well as Trump campaign advisers Kimberly Guilfoyle and Alex Bruesewitz.

El Salvador’s authoritarian president has become not only a figure admired within the Trump administration but also among the MAGA movement’s grassroots. Leaked materials obtained by The Guardian from the Heritage Foundation show that applicants to a Project 2025–branded initiative designed to build a talent pool for a potential Trump administration explicitly cited their admiration for Bukele.

From CPAC to the classroom: exporting the anti-rights playbook

Bukele shared a stage with several MAGA-aligned influencers at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held in Maryland. It was there that he announced plans to remove what he referred to as “gender ideology” from El Salvador’s public school system, a term widely used by Project 2025 supporters to oppose policies aimed at advancing gender equality and protecting the rights of girls and women and LGBTQ+ people.

The announcement was not made from the main stage or during a formal press conference. Instead, it came in response to a question during a brief interview conducted by Moms for Liberty director Catalina Stubbe. Moms for Liberty is a U.S.-based far-right advocacy group that has consistently opposed protections for LGBTQ+ students. The group is known for promoting book bans and is an organizational supporter of Project 2025. During the conversation, Bukele justified the decision by arguing that what he labels as gender ideology promotes ideas that are “unnatural,” “anti-God,” and “anti-family.”

This announcement happened at the same time as a series of similar actions against LGBTQ+ policies. In February 2024, the government of El Salvador ordered the removal of materials related to sexual diversity, as well as forms that had allowed individuals to specify their gender identity, from public health units and HIV clinics. The aim of these questionnaires was to improve the accuracy of epidemiological analyses.

In October 2025, one year later, the authoritarian government of Bukele announced a ban on inclusive language in public schools and across all institutions linked to the Ministry of Education. Gender-inclusive language, including gender-neutral Spanish forms such as compañere, alumn@, jovenxs, and nosotrxs (gender-neutral alternatives to “classmate,” “students,” “young,” and “we”), was no longer permitted in educational settings, including official communications, administrative documents, and textbooks. Education Minister Karla Edith Trigueros justified the decision, claiming that it would prevent “ideological or globalist interference that could harm the comprehensive development of students.”

Turning Diversity Into a Threat

This offensive against diversity education — which fails to prioritize the fight against discrimination in its curriculum and instead seeks to render LGBTQ+ communities invisible — draws directly from the principles of Project 2025. Designed for the administration that took control of the White House in January 2025, the blueprint called for removing any references to sexual orientation, gender identity, diversity, equity, inclusion, and gender from every federal rule, and piece of legislation.

Similar to what Bukele has done in El Salvador, Project 2025 also calls for the removal of terms such as “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” from all public school curricula.

Bukele began his political career by positioning himself as an ally of the LGBTQ+ community. In 2014, while running for mayor of San Salvador, he reaffirmed that stance during a meeting with LGBTQ+ activists. “I believe the civil rights struggle of our time is the LGBTI community, and I want to be on the right side of history. I will not stand with those who discriminate,” said the future president of El Salvador. He distanced himself from those statements shortly after taking office.

Following his victory in the 2019 general election, Bukele dismantled the Directorate of Sexual Diversity. In Congress, where his party holds a majority, lawmakers shelved several bills introduced by the previous administration in 2021, including the proposed Gender Identity Law and the Special Law for Equality and Non-Discrimination. The latter was an initiative aimed at reducing discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals in El Salvador.

The U.S. State Department‘s 2023 Human Rights Report noted that violence against LGBTQ+ persons remained a problem in El Salvador. These patterns of discrimination occur in a legal context that offers little protection for LGBTQ+ individuals. El Salvador does not recognize same-sex marriage or provide legal gender recognition for transgender individuals.

According to data cited in the State Department’s report from COMCAVIS TRANS, a domestic NGO promoting LGBTQ+ rights, 43 percent of transgender women, 42 percent of cisgender men, and 14 percent of cisgender women reported having encountered problems with law enforcement officials.

In a more recent report, based on a survey of 201 LGBTQ+ individuals conducted between 2022 and the first half of 2024, COMCAVIS TRANS estimated that 70 percent of LGBTQ+ people in the country had experienced some form of violence due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Discrimination against LGBTQ+ communities

Human rights organizations warned that LGBTQ+ people continued to be targets of homophobic and transphobic violence and discrimination by police, gangs, and members of the general public. In many cases, they reported, LGBTQ+ individuals were forced to flee in search of safety abroad, often to the U.S.

According to the U.S. State Department’s 2023 Human Rights Report, some transgender persons also reported difficulties registering to vote and voting because their gender identities did not match the gender stated on their identification cards.

The case of Camila Díaz Córdova, a Salvadoran transgender woman, illustrates the consequences of the hardline immigration policies under the Donald Trump administration for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers. Díaz sought humanitarian asylum in the U.S. in August 2017 but was deported in November of that year, during Trump’s first term. She had spent over three months in immigration detention.

Back in El Salvador, Díaz was killed at the age of 29. On January 31, 2019, three police officers forced her into the back of a pickup truck, beat her, and threw her from the moving vehicle. She died days later. In July 2020, a Salvadoran court convicted the three officers for her murder, the first time anyone was sentenced for the killing of a transgender person in the country. However, the judge dismissed hate-crime charges, citing insufficient evidence.

Human rights organizations criticized U.S. immigration authorities for deporting Díaz to a country “where her life was at risk.”

El Salvador’s Abortion Ban

As El Salvador was promoted as a model for its hardline security and diversity policies, its total abortion ban has likewise been elevated by anti-rights actors as an exportable blueprint.

El Salvador has one of the most restrictive abortion regimes in the world. Since 1997, abortion has been criminalized without exceptions. United Nations human rights experts have denounced this legal framework, stressing that “for more than 20 years [El Salvador] has criminalized abortion in all circumstances, even when necessary to save a woman’s life.”

Under this system, abortion can be punished by up to eight years in prison. Women who have abortions or experience obstetric emergencies may even be charged with aggravated homicide, an offense which carries a sentence of up to 50 years in prison. This legal approach is grounded in the Salvadoran Constitution, which has recognized “every human being as a human person from the moment of conception” since 1999.

The enforcement of this framework has resulted in the criminal prosecution and incarceration of women. According to data released in December 2024 by the Center for Reproductive Rights, nine women were being prosecuted at the time for abortion-related crimes, two of whom were deprived of their liberty. Between 2000 and 2019, at least 181 women in El Salvador were criminalized for obstetric emergencies or abortions.

For anti–woman rights organizations, this legal regime has become a model to import. They portray El Salvador’s abortion ban as a playbook to emulate, claiming that “human rights, including the right to life from conception, are non-negotiable.” Given the regional significance of such a restrictive legal framework, U.S.-based anti-rights organizations have actively sought to influence El Salvador’s legal framework and to block efforts aimed at decriminalizing abortion.

Groups including Alliance Defending Freedom International, the European Center for Law and Justice — an affiliate of the American Center for Law & Justice — and the Global Center for Human Rights have intervened in high-profile proceedings before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), lobbying in cases assessing whether the country’s total abortion ban violated women’s rights to life, health, and freedom from discrimination.

Over the past five years, the Court has issued two landmark rulings on abortion in El Salvador — Manuela v. El Salvador and Beatriz v. El Salvador — both of which attracted the involvement of U.S.-based organizations seeking to uphold the country’s complete abortion ban.

Manuela v. El Salvador

Manuela was sentenced to 30 years in prison by a Salvadoran court after an obstetric emergency in 2008 that resulted in the loss of her pregnancy. She was accused of “aggravated homicide” and, while still at the hospital, was handcuffed to her bed. Two years later, she died of cancer in prison at the age of 33, after receiving inadequate medical care. The treatment she received while incarcerated was delayed and irregular. Manuela left behind two orphaned children.

In 2021, the IACHR issued a landmark judgment finding El Salvador responsible for violating Manuela’s presumption of innocence, as well as her rights to life, personal integrity, equality before the law, and health.

Several U.S.-based anti-woman organizations participated in the litigation through amicus curiae briefs, a filing by an outside party seeking to influence the court. The European Center for Law and Justice, an affiliate of the American Center for Law & Justice, part of the broader Project 2025 network, filed an amicus brief in support of El Salvador.

Additional amicus briefs backing El Salvador were submitted by several organizations linked to the Project 2025 ecosystem in the U.S., including the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), Family Watch International (FWI), the International Organization for the Family (IOF), and the World Youth Alliance, as well as by Ordo Iuris (Poland).

In their amicus submissions, the groups argued that international human rights law does not permit impunity for crimes against newborn children. They also urged the Court not to require El Salvador to reform its criminal law in ways that would, in their view, “prevent prosecution of homicidal crimes against children as a vehicle to legalize abortion in the country.”

The Court rejected the arguments raised by anti-woman organizations. Instead, it determined that “Manuela was pregnant, gave birth, and suffered from preeclampsia, a pregnancy-related complication which, because it posed a serious risk to her health, must be classified as an obstetric emergency.” It emphasized that obstetric emergencies are medical conditions and, as such, cannot automatically give rise to criminal liability.

Beyond the medical circumstances, the Court found that Manuela’s conviction was shaped by “various structural disadvantages that compounded her victimization.” These included the fact that she was “a woman with limited economic resources, illiterate, and living in a rural area.” The ruling further emphasized that these factors “are consistent with the profile of most women prosecuted in El Salvador for abortion or aggravated homicide, who tend to have little or no income, come from rural areas or marginalized urban communities, and have low levels of education.”

A Landmark Ruling, Still Unfulfilled

The ruling had consequences for the government of El Salvador. The State was required to implement protocols to guarantee health care in obstetric emergencies. However, according to an observatory monitoring the implementation of the judgment — led by feminist organizations and funded by the European Union — most of these measures have been only partially implemented or have not been implemented at all.

According to the observatory, El Salvador has failed to take the necessary steps to ensure proper medical care for women facing obstetric emergencies. The State has also failed to comply with the ruling’s requirements on education, particularly the inclusion of comprehensive content on sexuality and reproduction rights in school programs.

Organizations behind the observatory note that the Ministry of Education said it implemented a Sexuality Education course for teachers in 2021 and 2022. However, they argue that enforcing the Court’s ruling on sexual education conflicts with President Bukele’s 2024 order banning any school content related to what he calls “gender ideology.”

Another measure ordered by the IACHR that has only been partially implemented is the regulation of medical confidentiality, especially in cases involving women suspected of having abortions. Regarding this issue, the observatory questions whether the new strategy promoted by the Ministry of Health adequately protects women who have terminated their pregnancies.

Implementation gaps also extend to training and capacity building. Organizations monitoring the IACHR ruling have questioned El Salvador’s training of public officials on obstetric emergencies. These feminist groups point to limited staff and resources, a lack of evaluation mechanisms, and the fact that the protocols are not mandatory for judicial personnel handling abortion-related cases.

Beatriz v. El Salvador

The IACHR ruled in December 2024 that El Salvador had committed obstetric violence and violated Beatriz’s right to health. More than a decade earlier, in 2013, Beatriz, a 22-year-old Salvadoran woman, experienced a pregnancy that endangered her own life. The fetus had anencephaly, a developmental birth defect of the brain and skull that meant it would not survive outside the uterus.

Beatriz requested an abortion at 12 weeks, but El Salvador’s total abortion ban caused months of delay as medical staff feared prosecution. At 26 weeks, doctors performed a cesarean section, and the newborn died within hours. Beatriz later died in 2017 from complications following a traffic accident. The court found no link between her death and her pregnancy.

The Court concluded that the absence of legal certainty and clear protocols for managing high-risk pregnancies resulted in the bureaucratization and judicialization of Beatriz’s case, as medical personnel feared criminal liability. According to the ruling, the prolonged waiting periods and hospitalization required to determine the appropriate course of treatment, due to the lack of adequate care protocols, resulted in dehumanizing treatment and obstetric violence.

Based on these findings, the Court held the State responsible and ordered reparations. To prevent similar cases in the future, it required clear guidelines and protocols for medical and judicial authorities when a pregnancy threatens the life or health of the pregnant woman. El Salvador had one year, until December 2025, to report on its compliance with the ruling. However, it remains unclear whether the ordered measures have been implemented.

ADFI amicus brief

The case mobilized dozens of feminist organizations across the region, as well as anti-abortion actors, resulting in the submission of 109 amicus briefs, amid the possibility that the IACHR would address the core issue: the absolute criminalization of abortion in El Salvador.

Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI), the international branch of leading Project 2025 supporter, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), took part in the case through an amicus brief. The group has pushed to eliminate access to contraception and abortion, and promoted the criminalization of sexual acts among consenting LGBTQ+ individuals, among other far-right policies,

In their submission, ADFI’s lawyers argued for what they described as the legitimacy of the State’s duty to protect the life of the unborn, as well as the need to guarantee the right to life, including in cases of severe disabilities or life-limiting conditions.

Promoting a “Next Roe” Narrative

Another U.S.-based anti–women’s rights organization was also highly active in the proceedings, seeking to prevent a favorable outcome for Beatriz’s family. The Global Center for Human Rights (GCHR) advised the government of El Salvador during the hearings held in March 2023 at the IACHR’s headquarters in Costa Rica. According to local reporting, Sebastian Schuff, president of GCHR, and María Anne Quiroga, director of research, were present in the courtroom as part of the El Salvador State’s advisory legal team.

Schuff’s wife, Neydy Casillas, a Mexican lawyer who serves as vice president for international affairs at GCHR, previously worked for ten years as a senior legal counsel at ADFI.

In December 2022, GCHR launched the “No Next Roe” campaign, warning that the Beatriz v. El Salvador case “could become the Roe v. Wade for all of Latin America,” referring to the U.S. Supreme Court decision that recognized a woman’s constitutional right to abortion.

Seeking to influence both the Court’s decision and public opinion, GCHR also launched a website aimed at discrediting the case, the judges, and the organizations supporting Beatriz and her family. The site listed several reproductive-rights organizations and philanthropic foundations as alleged donors to the IACHR, suggesting that the Court lacked independence. The Court’s president, Nancy Hernández, rejected those claims.

Despite rulings by the IACHR in the cases of Beatriz and Manuela, El Salvador has maintained its total abortion ban, continuing to criminalize women. This resistance to change aligns with the broader agenda of the Bukele administration, which includes repressive, gender-discriminatory, and anti-diversity policies. This framework has also enabled Bukele to strengthen his international profile as a figure admired within the MAGA movement.

Paraguay, a Hub for Anti-Rights Influence

Despite having one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the region, Paraguay has positioned itself as a testing ground for anti-women’s rights policies in Latin America. Over the years, successive governments have adopted policies closely mirroring the agenda outlined in Project 2025. These initiatives include banning gender perspectives in educational institutions, opposing same-sex marriage, and publicly portraying the country as an “island of conservatism.”

As in El Salvador, Paraguay maintains a highly restrictive abortion policy, amounting to a near-total ban. Abortion is not permitted even in cases of rape, with the only legal exception being when the life of the pregnant woman is at imminent risk.

The influence of U.S.-based anti-rights actors on these policies has become increasingly prominent. The government and lawmakers of Paraguay have consistently aligned themselves with initiatives promoted by the Trump administration and U.S.-based organizations such as Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI) and the Institute for Women’s Health (IWH).

Paraguay is one of only three Latin American countries –alongside Haiti and Guatemala– to have signed the GCD on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family, an anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ document launched by the Trump administration in 2020, during its first term.

The declaration asserts that “there is no international right to abortion” and has also been supported by several authoritarian regimes, including Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Sudan. The GCD is not an official UN agreement and holds no legal authority.

Paraguay ratified the declaration in 2021. That same year, following Joe Biden’s inauguration, the U.S. withdrew from the GCD. In 2025, when the Trump administration returned to the White House, the U.S. rejoined the agreement.

Project 2025 explicitly promotes the declaration, describing it as an “effort” led by Trump administration “to forge a consensus among like-minded countries in support of human life, women’s health, support of the family as the basic unit of human society, and defense of national sovereignty.”

The U.S.-based Institute for Women’s Health (IWH), an organization affiliated with Project 2025, operates as a vehicle to preserve and expand the GCD’s international reach. After the U.S. withdrew from the GCD under the Biden administration, the organization worked on the declaration’s international outreach, seeking to attract new members.

Paraguay and the Geneva Consensus Declaration

In December 2025, the president of IWH, Valerie Huber, and other members of the organization met with Paraguay’s ambassador to the U.S., Gustavo Leite. Following the meeting, the Paraguayan Embassy stated that the parties had agreed to “explore the possibility of implementing a pilot program in Paraguay, with advice and support from IWH, as well as other useful measures to advance the rights of women and girls in our country.”

The statement released by the Paraguay’s embassy was vague and did not clarify what type of pilot program IWH would implement in the Latin American country. The text also failed to specify whether the proposal referred to the Protego project, which was piloted in Guatemala in 2023 by IWH. The organization described the project as its “model for implementing public policy consistent with the values” of the GCD. The program aims to advance the anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ agenda of the declaration through policies targeting education and public health in signatory countries.

Paraguayan lawmakers have long supported the influence of U.S.-based anti-woman organizations in the region. In 2017, 22 lawmakers from Paraguay were among approximately 700 parliamentarians from more than 16 Latin American countries who endorsed the Declaration of Mexico. According to journalistic investigations, the financial lobbying effort behind the declaration was supported by ADF.

Challenging the authority of the OAS

The GCD emerged in response to a series of rulings issued in 2012 by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) in support of equality and sexual and reproductive rights in Chile and Costa Rica, when anti-woman organizations began mobilizing against these international bodies.

The Declaration of Mexico opposed resolutions adopted by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that required states to amend their domestic laws on abortion-related issues, as well as those concerning “the right to life, the family, and freedom of expression.”

This anti-rights stance was not just rhetoric. It had already manifested as concrete lobbying efforts within multilateral institutions. This was evident in 2014 when Paraguay hosted the OAS General Assembly in Asunción. During the assembly, Paraguay’s Chamber of Deputies adopted a declaration urging government representatives to oppose LGBTQ+ rights.

The lobbying effort launched in 2017 to challenge inter-American human rights bodies through the Declaration of Mexico brought together political figures who would later become prominent Latin American far-right leaders. Signatories included former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who in 2025 was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup and seeking to “annihilate” the country’s democracy.

Far-right leaders backing the Declaration of Mexico

The declaration was launched by the Hemispheric Parliamentary Congress (Congreso Hemisférico de Parlamentarios), held in Mexico in 2017. The gathering brought together conservative lawmakers from Colombia, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador, among other countries. The group was led by José Antonio Kast, Chile’s newly elected president and a prominent anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman’s rights politician.

Among the supporters was Raúl Latorre, a Paraguayan politician who is active in international anti-woman gatherings. Latorre is currently the president of Paraguay’s Chamber of Deputies and a member of the ruling conservative Colorado Party.

In the declaration, lawmakers accused the OAS and the IACHR of promoting interpretations of Inter-American treaties that “constitute a blow to representative democracy in the region, as they seek to impose on member states supposed rights that have not been endorsed by them.” Specifically, the lobbying effort opposed the promotion of abortion, restrictions on the right to conscientious objection, and the recognition of same-sex marriage.

Despite being a gathering of elected officials, the Hemispheric Parliamentary Congress also featured a speech by the Mexican lawyer Neydy Casillas, who at the time was a senior legal counsel at ADFI. She is currently the vice president for international affairs at Global Center of for Human Rights, a U.S.-based organization that promotes anti-abortion policies across Latin America.

U.S. lawmakers targeting inter-American institutions

U.S. Republican Senator Mike Lee (Utah) virtually addressed the congress to criticize international institutions. Lee accused the OAS of moving away from its founding principles by interfering in the domestic affairs of its member states and promoting social policies driven by a “progressive elite.” According to Lee, this agenda has undermined what he called “pillars,” including the right to life from conception, marriage, and gender.

In their efforts to influence decision-making within the inter-American human rights bodies, conservative, anti-woman, and anti-LGBTQ+ organizations, and political actors in the region found a key ally in the Trump administration and the Republican Party.

During Trump’s first term, pressure from Republican lawmakers intensified to threaten inter-American human rights bodies. In December 2018, nine Republican senators urged then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to reduce or stop U.S. funding for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission of Women. In March 2019, Pompeo cut funding to the OAS over its alleged advocacy of abortion.

The push to defund and publicly challenge international bodies that recognize women’s sexual and reproductive rights closely mirrors the arguments in the Project 2025 blueprint. This agenda calls on the U.S. government to hold multilateral organizations more accountable financially and programmatically. The playbook states that “international organizations should not be used to promote radical social policies as if they were human rights priorities.”

How Paraguay became a hub for anti-gender policies

Since 2017, it has been forbidden to discuss gender in classrooms in Paraguay. Some media outlets reported that Paraguay was the first country to ban gender perspective in educational institutions. The government justified the decision by arguing that the Constitution defines the family and marriage as being formed by a man and a woman, and that the mission of the Ministry of Education is to “strengthen the family as the natural environment of education.”

Years later, these same principles were echoed and internationalized. Project 2025 explicitly calls for the removal of terms such as “sexual orientation and gender identity,” “gender,” “gender equality,” “gender equity,” “gender awareness,” and “gender-sensitive” from all federal rules, advancing a broader cultural offensive against principles of equality and diversity.

Education has been a key front for the Paraguayan government’s anti-woman agenda. In 2025, authorities removed references to “equality,” “gender equity,” and “gender perspective” from educational materials.

In Paraguay, the decision to remove a gender perspective from schools was criticized by international organizations, including Amnesty International and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Amnesty International warned that comprehensive sexuality education is “a key element in preventing early pregnancies.” This warning is particularly relevant in Paraguay, where adolescent pregnancy rates have remained high. In 2023, 70 out of every 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19 gave birth in the country, one of the highest rates in the region, well above the regional average of 50.

Researchers and human rights organizations have repeatedly warned that adolescent pregnancy is often closely linked to situations of sexual violence. In this context, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned in 2022 that Paraguay’s abortion law, which allows abortion only when it is necessary to save the woman’s life, “is not sufficient to protect lives, let alone the health or dignity of girls.”

“Women and girls are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, even in cases of rape or incest; pregnancies that pose a serious risk to their health (though not necessarily to their lives); and pregnancies in which the fetus is not viable outside the womb. This is one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Latin America,” HRW explained.

In response to the backlash following the ban on gender perspectives in educational institutions, Neydy Casillas intervened on behalf of Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI) by sending a document to the evangelical organization Somos Muchos Más. According to openDemocracy, the document set out legal arguments defending the measures adopted by the Paraguayan government.

Among other claims, Casillas argued that the UN General Assembly-adopted Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and similar international instruments are not legally binding on states. Therefore, according to Casillas, Paraguay is under no obligation to implement them.

Amnesty International rejected this argument, stating that Paraguay is internationally obligated to promote equality and non-discrimination because it has signed and ratified multiple international commitments, including CEDAW and the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights likewise warned that prohibiting discussions about gender in classrooms represented a “setback for the rights of women, people with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, and for the right of children to receive an education free from stereotypes based on ideas of inferiority or subordination.”

Paraguay was presented as a hub and a pilot country for policies that anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ organizations wanted to expand to other places. On the ground, ultra-conservative groups had already built ties with the government to keep advancing their agenda.

In 2016, Casillas took part in a conference about the “unborn person” at the Supreme Court of Paraguay. According to openDemocracy, Casillas, who at the time served as senior legal counsel at ADFI, met with then-lawmaker Olga Ferreira, during that trip. Days later, Ferreira introduced a bill in Congress to create a civil registry of “unborn children.”

ADFI has also sought to engage the Paraguayan government through one of its core advocacy campaigns: promoting bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports. In the U.S., ADF brought this issue before the U.S. Supreme Court in January 2026. At the international level, in 2024, the Permanent Mission of Paraguay to the United Nations and ADFI co-organized an event urging the UN to “protect safety and fairness for women in sports.”

In an effort to strengthen the legal framework against abortion, the Chamber of Deputies approved in 2017 the creation of a civil registry for “conceived but not live-born children.” According to the Paraguayan government, the country thus became the first in Latin America to promote such a measure. The initiative sought to establish that “a child who dies during gestation, regardless of the stage, weight, or cause of death, has the right to be registered with a first and last name.”

Human rights organizations denounced the project as “the introduction of an almost absolute protection of the fetus, which could take precedence over the rights to life, physical integrity, and health of women and girls.”

Reinforcing this narrative of positioning Paraguay as a testing ground for policies hostile to women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, lawmakers approved a declaration in 2018 proclaiming the Chamber of Deputies “pro-life” and “pro-family,” with the stated aim of “preserving the values that sustain the family as a fundamental institution.” Through this declaration, one of the country’s legislative bodies explicitly positioned itself against abortion and same-sex marriage.

Over time, this framing has spread across different branches of the state. In 2024, the government of President Santiago Peña declared itself “pro-life” and “pro-family” at the OAS Summit, reaffirming its anti-abortion agenda and asserting that “the right to life is inherent to the human person, guaranteeing its protection, in general, from conception.”

Opposition to gender equality has resulted in legislative setbacks. For instance, the Democratic Parity Law, which aimed to implement a 50 percent quota for female candidates, ultimately failed. In 2018, the Chamber of Deputies approved a watered-down version of the bill, removing all references to parity and lowering the gender quota to 20 percent.

Courting Trump

The Paraguayan government has sought to court Donald Trump during his second term by embracing some of the most recognizable symbols of the MAGA movement. In September 2025, Paraguay’s ambassador to the U.S., Gustavo Leite, attended the welcoming ceremony for new ambassadors at the White House wearing a trademark “Make America Great Again” cap. He later described the meeting with the U.S. president as “exciting and unforgettable.”

Beyond its political framing, this diplomatic positioning may also reflect the personal and political interests of Horacio Cartes, one of the most powerful figures in Paraguayan politics. Cartes is a former president, the country’s wealthiest individual, the main financier of the ruling Colorado Party, and widely regarded as the political mentor of President Santiago Peña.

Cartes’ relationship with Washington has been shaped by recent developments in U.S.–Paraguay relations. In July 2022, during Joe Biden’s administration, the U.S. State Department designated Cartes a “significantly corrupt person,” citing alleged involvement in “significant corruption.” In October 2025, however, after Trump returned to the White House, the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control lifted the sanctions previously imposed on him, marking a notable shift in his international standing.

In seeking to position itself within Trump-aligned and international far-right networks, Paraguay has increasingly emerged as a convening space for these actors. In 2025, the country became a gathering place for the international far-right ecosystem. That year, the country hosted the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and Foro Madrid, a transnational advocacy network that brings together far-right political parties and organizations from across Latin America.

This position began to be consolidated in June 2025, when representatives of the far-right from 17 countries gathered in Asunción for the Fourth Regional Meeting of Foro Madrid. The event was presented as a turning point for Latin American conservatism ahead of the 2025–2026 electoral cycle in the region. Among the attendees was Chilean politician José Antonio Kast, months before winning the presidential election and becoming president-elect. U.S. participants included Melissa Ford of the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump far-right think tank known for its anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman positions.

Launched by the Spanish far-right political party Vox in 2020, Foro Madrid presents itself as “a great international alliance of leaders, entities, and parties that defend freedom, democracy, and the rule of law against the advance of communism in countries on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Vox and its allies, including Paraguayan President Santiago Peña, promote the network as a conservative counterweight to the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group, two political platforms that bring together Latin American left-wing parties and leaders — ranging from social democrats to communists — such as Brazil’s Lula da Silva, and former Bolivian president Evo Morales.

Paraguay in the Global Trumpist Network 

The arrival of CPAC in Paraguay in 2025 marked a new phase in the country’s efforts to position itself within Trump-aligned and international far-right networks, extending its role beyond regional platforms such as Foro Madrid.

In September 2025, U.S. figures, including the organizers of CPAC Matthew and Mercedes Schlapp, took the stage at the event, alongside Richard Grenell, U.S. presidential envoy for special missions.

Grenell has recently become a key figure in the Trump administration in the region. Prior to President Trump’s decision to capture Venezuela’s president, Grenell maintained contact with Nicolás Maduro and his government. Grenell addressed this issue during CPAC Paraguay, acknowledging that he had met with Maduro and expressing hope that a “deal” could be reached.

On January 3, 2026, the U.S. military arrested Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in an operation in Caracas (Venezuela). Since then, the couple has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, and Maduro is facing charges of narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine-importation conspiracy, and weapons charges.

As is often the case, prominent figures from the region’s far-right political spectrum attended CPAC Paraguay. Argentine President Javier Milei praised his Paraguayan counterpart, saying that the Colorado Party’s management is “an example of what should be done in economic policy.”

For his part, Paraguayan President Santiago Peña said that his government would work alongside “brother countries” whose governments “fight for the values and ideals of the West,” citing the Argentina of Javier Milei, the Italy of Giorgia Meloni, and the U.S. of his “friend” Donald Trump, as examples of such countries. According to Peña, these leaders “understand that in these times: our very civilization is at stake.”

Peña also acknowledged that his “heart was filled with joy” when he learned that CPAC would be held in Paraguay, which he described as the conference’s “true home.” Speaking from the stage, the Paraguayan president declared that “as long as Paraguay exists, there will be people who say, loudly and clearly to the world: no to free abortion, no to alternative ideas of the family, and no to radical social experiments,” a reference, without naming them directly, to LGBTQ+ rights.

These developments illustrate how Paraguay has sought to gain political relevance by aligning itself ideologically with Trumpism and its conservative allies. This alignment became more visible in 2025, when the country began hosting events linked to the international far-right.

Prior to that shift, the Paraguayan government and the Colorado Party pursued a more indirect strategy. Rather than acting as hosts, they focused on building alliances with anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ organizations and sent representatives to key forums for coordination and networking within the global anti-rights ecosystem.

In this context, Paraguayan representatives attended several Political Network for Values transatlantic summits, including those held in Colombia (2019), Hungary (2022), New York (2023), and Madrid (2024), as well as CPAC Hungary in 2024.

Through the promotion of an anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, opposition to diversity education, restrictions on women’s reproductive rights, and the reaffirmation of its commitment to the GCD, Paraguay has established itself as a pivotal hub within the global anti-rights network aligned with Trumpism and as an inspirational reference for the Project 2025 narrative.

Project 2025 Organizations in Africa

In Kenya, the anti-rights agenda has been driven by Western organizations with a long history in Africa, such as Opus Dei (established in Kenya in 1958), and more recently established far-right American groups like Family Watch International (FWI) and the World Congress of Families (WCF), which are anti-reproductive freedom and LGBTQ+ rights. In May 2025, FWI partnered with the Kenya Christian Professionals Forum (KCPF) and the Ministry of Labour to host the Second Pan-African Conference on Family Values in Nairobi (see Chapter 5). This conference was a strategic launchpad where African leaders were trained to frame the rejection of reproductive freedom and LGBTQ+ rights as a heroic act of decolonization, rebranded as a defense of indigenous traditional family values. Sharon Slater (FWI), Austin Ruse (C-Fam), and Bettina Roska (ADFI) were among the prominent Western conservatives headlining the event, which resulted in the Nairobi Declaration on Family Values. By adopting the language of traditional values, they effectively rebranded an American culture war as an indigenous grassroots movement to bypass the skepticism typically directed at Western interference.

In 2023, Uganda hosted an Inter-Parliamentary Conference on family values and sovereignty in Entebbe, bringing together a coalition that included the Ugandan Parliament, the African Bar Association, and the Nigerian-based Foundation for African Cultural Heritage (FACH), with participation and promotional support from the U.S. evangelical group FWI, whose president, Sharon Slater, also spoke at the event. This served as the ideological launchpad for the Kenya Family Protection Bill (2023), popularly known as Kaluma Bill, that emphasizes the biblical definition of marriage and restricts LGBTQ+ rights under the guise of protecting traditional values.

It mirrored the language of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 (AHA), which calls for the death penalty for aggravated homosexuality. Critics such as the Center for Reproductive Rights argue that while Kenya’s Kaluma bill claims to protect African values, its text, which targets sex education and criminalizes LGBTQ+ advocacy, is heavily influenced by American fundamentalists, including that from the Project 2025 advisory committee such as the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam).

These groups have been making inroads across East Africa to implement and strengthen anti-LGBTQ+ laws. Reports from the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC) and Amnesty International confirm that FWI provided the training and framing for the Nairobi Declaration on Family Values, which was adopted at the conclusion of the Second Pan-African Conference on Family Values event. The Nairobi Declaration on Family Values (2025) advocates for a nuclear ‘natural family’ consisting of a father, mother, and children. Scholars from the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC) point out this singular definition is itself a Western import that ignores traditional African communal structures, where children are raised by grandparents, aunts, and the wider community.

In Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Kenya the framing of LGBTQ+ rights as “un-African” or Western elitism is a central argument used to conceptualize human rights as foreign interference or neocolonialism, thus justifying repression. Ghana passed legislation similar to the Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill through the Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill in February 2024, which criminalizes people who identify as LGBTQ+ and who advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, carrying severe prison penalties. DRC has similar legislation, the Mutamba Bill, introduced in 2024.

Online Freedom and Media

The African digital landscape has also been transformed under U.S. pressure. For decades, USAID served as the primary financial pillar for independent media and digital literacy initiatives across the continent. However, the Trump administration’s shift away from democratic norms provided a moral cover that enabled African autocrats to accelerate the implementation of digital surveillance and internet shutdowns. This geopolitical pivot signaled to regional leaders that the management of their domestic digital spheres was an internal matter, effectively removing the pressure that once constrained state-sponsored repression both online and off.

African political leaders have utilized Trump’s rhetoric of “fake news” to discredit unfavorable reporting. Research has identified that this linguistic shift often precedes the passage of restrictive cybercrime laws. These legal frameworks are frequently characterized by overly broad definitions, which allow states to target citizens’ freedom of expression under the guise of maintaining national security. Consequently, the digital space has become increasingly difficult for users to navigate, as the line between factual information and state-sponsored propaganda is intentionally blurred.

The withdrawal of U.S. support for independent media has created an institutional vacuum that is rapidly being filled by digital authoritarianism. In 2025, prominent media outlets such as South Sudan’s Eye Radio and various community stations in the DRC and Zambia reported significant staff reductions due to USAID related aid cuts. Gerald Businge, a Ugandan multimedia consultant, observes that the absence of these watchdogs leaves the digital ecosystem vulnerable to state-sponsored narratives and the influence of foreign actors, particularly Russia and China.

Furthermore, the erosion of content moderation standards online has exacerbated the risks for marginalized groups. Trump’s rallying cry for free speech online has led to reductions in content moderation of hate and disinformation, including in African markets, which were already severely under-moderated. Research from CIPIT at Strathmore University Kenya emphasizes that African languages remain severely under-moderated, leaving a void that local governments fill with their own restrictive laws that provide a convenient logic for African leaders to justify the suppression of digital dissent. The result is a digital environment that is not only difficult to traverse but actively hostile to those who operate outside of state-sanctioned narratives.

The institutional withdrawal of support for independent media and the adoption of fake news rhetoric create an information vacuum that allows for the implementation of invasive, value-based technological frameworks. In Kenya, this digital authoritarianism is operationalized through far-right American activist Valerie Huber’s Protego Women’s Optimal Health Framework (WOHF) that serves as an alternative to existing international human rights frameworks. The project has gained significant traction in East Africa, with Uganda becoming an early adopter in February 2024 and Burundi joining in October 2025. The WOHF excludes modern contraceptive methods and marginalized communities, including people living with HIV and sexual minorities, while promoting abstinence-centered messaging and the reclamation of femininity.

The Project 2025 framework has effectively replaced a diplomacy rooted in democratic values and human rights with America’s culture wars. For Kenya, the price of financial support and domestic non-interference is total ideological and economic alignment with a conservative U.S. agenda. This shift is a change in policy, and a structural redesign that utilizes trade reciprocity, technological surveillance, and legislative bypasses to erode the foundations of the 2010 Constitution. This realignment is fundamentally a struggle over the definition of sovereignty. While the state seeks to trade sovereignty as a commodity to secure elite survival, the judiciary and civil society remain the final defenders of a sovereignty rooted in constitutional integrity and human rights. Washington’s silence is conditional, and the price of non-payment is economic and humanitarian liquidation.

Free Speech vs. Hate Speech

One particular bone of contention for Trump with Europeans is their view of free speech. Many European countries, especially Germany, ban certain forms of hate speech as threats to their democracies. This position, which significantly differs from America’s First Amendment, arose from the ashes of the Holocaust, where antisemitism and other forms of hate speech helped bring Hitler to power and justified genocide. The DSA codifies these rules for large tech platforms doing business in the union.

But for Project 2025 and Trump, these laws are unacceptable attacks on Americans’ rights to free speech, and of course the right to publish hateful material online targeting immigrants and others, which supports the far-right agenda. Project 2025 has sections that demand that the federal government no longer weigh in on hate speech or disinformation issues. It tasks the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to look into “the department’s work [under President Biden], in coordination with social media outlets, to censor or otherwise change or affect Americans’ speech” and argues the left weaponized some of DHS’s functions to “censor speech.” The American Intelligence Community is further warned not to examine “so-called domestic disinformation.” The Department of Justice (DOJ) is not to police speech on the internet.

It is within this context that the Trump administration has repeatedly attacked European laws and worked to protect far-right parties that often run afoul of European hate speech norms when it comes to their directing hate speech at immigrants and other marginalized communities. Tech policy and culture wars over content moderation on social media platforms are key to Trump’s effort to undermine Europe.

In May 2025, Vice President JD Vance lashed out on this issue at the Munich Security Conference. Rather than address actual security threats, the bulk of Vance’s speech focused on European hate speech laws, which apparently are a bigger threat to the U.S. than Russia or China. “In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” Vance complained, while also focusing on the evils of mass migration.

The U.S. State Department is obsessed with Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which regulates large online platforms including Meta, X, YouTube and TikTok. The DSA requires platforms to submit regular transparency reports, engage in risk audits, and act quickly to remove illegal content, including hate speech. Proponents of the law say it contains reasonable safeguards for free expression and that content moderation is essential to maintain a digital public square in which people feel safe enough to speak freely. Opponents, particularly far-right figures, accuse the DSA of enabling government censorship. Weighing in on these issues allows the Trump administration to attack the EU while simultaneously allowing the far-right to engage in hate speech uncensored online.

Vance’s comments were followed on May 28, 2025, with an outrageous order from Secretary of State Marco Rubio placing visa restrictions on “foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States.” It went on, “It is unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil.” “It is similarly unacceptable for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States. We will not tolerate encroachments upon American sovereignty, especially when such encroachments undermine the exercise of our fundamental right to free speech,” Rubio warned.

While the State Department has become fixated on speech issues in Europe, it doesn’t seem to care at all about countries like Russia, China, and others that clearly interfere with their citizens’ free speech, claiming they are no longer the priority. It is only in the European context, and the Union’s efforts against hate speech and disinformation online, that the State Department cares about this issue.

The day before Rubio’s announcement, the State Department foreshadowed the change in a Substack essay by Sam Samson on “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe.” In it, Samson, a 2021 college graduate who serves as a senior advisor to the department, wrote, “Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage.” Samson described Europe as a hotbed of “digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.” His claims were backed up by misleading examples of this supposed oppression.

Samson has been a key agitator in the EU space for the Trump administration, advocating on behalf of Project 2025 policies and working with its advisory organizations. In April 2025, Samson met in the UK with an individual who was a client of Project 2025 advisor, Alliance Defending Freedom’s international branch (ADFI). At the time, this person was facing a criminal trial for harassing an abortion clinic. After the meeting, State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) posted on Twitter that they were “concerned about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom.” Tech Policy Press reported that State Department staff were tasked with investigating cases of censorship alleged by the ADFI. In February 2026, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing, “Europe’s Threat to American Speech and Innovation,” featuring longtime ADFI client and Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen, who has been involved in a long running hate speech case in her home country. The committee’s majority report claimed, “the European Commission successfully pressured major social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules, directly harming American online speech in the United States.”

The U.S. has even tried to interfere in other countries’ judicial processes on behalf of their far-right allies. Magali Lafourcade, a French magistrate, said that in May 2025 Samson and Christopher J. Anderson — both advisers to the DRL — approached her in an attempt to get her to lobby against an election ban imposed by a court order on far-right French politician Marine Le Pen. Lafourcade is the secretary-general of France’s National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH), an independent body that advises the government. She is not involved in the Le Pen case.

Penalizing Hate Speech Researchers

Just before Christmas, the administration announced visa bans on specific individuals: Imran Ahmed, a permanent U.S. resident married to an American and head of the American-based Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, who worked on the DSA and serves on the board of Bank of America, and three other Europeans who have lobbied tech companies to remove hate speech and disinformation (A judge stayed the action against Ahmed on Christmas Day). The administration accused them of working to censor freedom of speech or unfairly target U.S. tech giants with burdensome regulation. Rubio said the five people targeted “have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.” “These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states — in each case targeting American speakers and American companies,” Rubio inveighed. Anti-hate researchers apparently are now deserving of the same sanctions as international cartel leaders and terrorists.

The move sparked an outcry from European governments who argue regulations and the work of monitoring groups made the internet safer by highlighting false information and compelling tech giants to do more to tackle illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material. For the administration, working to reduce the amount of hate speech online — which it believes impacts anti-immigrant, anti-Christian, and other far-right messaging — is worthy of targeting, and serves to protect its allies like Elon Musk, whose X has largely abandoned content moderation and become a hotbed of neo-Nazism and other forms of hatred. It is likely no coincidence that Musk sued CCDH in 2023, a case that was later thrown out.

Musk’s X is currently facing a $140 million fine “due to the platform’s misleading use of a blue check mark to identify verified users, a poorly functioning advertising repository, and a failure to provide effective data access for researchers.” The Trump administration has come out swinging in favor of Musk. “Rumors swirling that the EU commission will fine X hundreds of millions of dollars for not engaging in censorship,” Vance wrote on X in December. “The EU should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage.” Disclosures in January that X was flooded with sexualized photos of women and minors doesn’t seem to bother the administration, which continues to consider Musk a victim of EU over-regulation.

The Trump administration’s ambitions are not really about safeguarding free expression from tyranny. Instead, they are using tech policy as a tool in their project to reshape the post-war international order in Project 2025’s and Trump’s images — at the expense of the transatlantic alliance and communities that are targeted with hate speech.

Project 2025 Advisory Groups Increase European Lobbying

The groups backing Project 2025 have greatly increased their presence in the EU in recent years with the climate-denying Heartland Institute opening its first European office in 2025. In February, during a speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts made explicit that the foundation would be supporting his “friends from Europe” to “reclaim” their institutions, including the EU. The Heritage Foundation held at least seven meetings with MEPs in 2025, who came from a range of mainstream parties, but also from the far-right.

Roberts, in particular, serves as an unofficial envoy for a major objective of Trump’s second term: weaving a network with “civilizational allies in Europe,” as the U.S. State Department put it, part of the Trump team’s goal to promote their vision of a “shared cultural heritage.” Heritage has of late built tight ties to the Hungarian regime and its various think tanks, such as the Danube Institute and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC). Since 2022, Heritage officials have repeatedly met with and interacted with the Hungarian regime. In the New York Times, Roberts praised Orbán as a “very impressive leader” whose efforts to “cause a conservative Christian political turn” in Hungary “should be celebrated.”

Indeed, one could argue that Project 2025 lays out a vision of America based on Orbánism, a country that the European Union views as an “electoral autocracy,” not a democracy, that has stripped rights from LGBTQ+ people, immigrants and women and that has deep ties to Russia. Orbán also celebrates Christian nationalism, calling himself a “defender of Christianity,” and advocating that Christian nationalists in the U.S. and Europe “unite forces.”

Other Project 2025 advisors have similarly upped their European activities in recent years, working to export their anti-rights agenda into the continent. The Center for Immigration Studies has forged links with the MCC. ADF has worked with Hungarian and other far-right think tanks across the Union. In May 2025, ADF’s international branch, Alliance Defending Freedom International (ADFI), organized an event titled “The Digital Services Act and Threats to Freedom of Expression” that included a panel discussing the “EU online censorship law.” ADF has publicly aligned itself with Musk against the DSA, echoing Musk’s narrative that EU content moderation rules constitute an assault on “freedom of speech.” It is also representing him in these matters.

The ADF has also received support from the Trump administration in these efforts. In June, America’s ambassador to the UK met with ADF staffers to discuss the “concerning state of free speech in the UK.” Meetings in 2025 include one with Italian government officials to discuss surrogacy, which the ADFI is against, and meetings with MEP’s about free speech issues. ADFI has offices in multiple European countries.

In February 2026, the Trump and Project 2025 agendas fused in an event that took place in the European Parliament. Held under the banner of “Free speech vs regulated speech. Strengthening the pillars of democracy,” the conference was supported by Heritage and Alliance Defending Freedom International, and put on by the Political Network for Values, an anti-rights organization functioning primarily in Europe and Latin America. It featured EU politicians from the far- right grouping Patriots for Europe. Its supposed goal: “promoting and protecting life, family, and freedoms are too often considered positions that must be silenced, sometimes with censorship disguised as regulation, other times with violence.”

Threatening European Territory

Trump’s threats go much further than ridding Europe of its woke policies and undermining the EU. He is also threatening to invade European territory, with repeated comments regarding seizing Greenland from NATO partner Denmark. In December, he appointed Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as a special envoy to the island nation whose focus would be to “make Greenland a part of the U.S.” Greenland is specifically mentioned in Project 2025, which also emphasizes increased U.S. military actions in the Arctic region. The document reads, “the next administration should embrace the view that NATO must acknowledge that it is, in part, an Arctic alliance.” Project 2025 advocates for more U.S. military engagement in the region to open and protect shipping lanes.

It does not advocate for a takeover of Greenland, but it does have a few paragraphs about the need to enhance “economic ties” between the U.S. and the island. Trump has clearly taken this idea further, and this effort is more threatening than any of the rest of Trump’s anti-Europe agenda, as it has the potential to implode NATO. Like Trump, Project 2025 is disdainful of NATO, arguing that Europeans should carry more of the NATO defense burden and should be solely responsible for Ukraine.

Trump has also worked to drive a wedge between EU countries by attempting to split off trade negotiations from the bloc and instead handle them bilaterally. All of this has left Europe to decide whether it has a future with the U.S., or not. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has declared the “Pax Americana” to be dead and that it’s become “quite obvious” that Trump “cannot relate” to the EU. These calls for direct American intervention in Europe represent a distinct historical departure in the transatlantic relationship.

Though the relationship between Europe and the U.S. has always favored the latter, with the U.S. long dominating NATO, Europeans have lived comfortably under the American security umbrella for decades. They have also voluntarily played by the rules of a U.S.-led international order. That may now be at an end. Leonard Schuette, an International Security Program Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, concludes, “The second Trump administration is pursuing a fundamentally different [world] order vision compared to essentially all previous U.S. presidents since 1945.”

This has caused Europeans to question whether the U.S. can be trusted. According to polling by the French company Institut Elabe, nearly three quarters of French people now think that the United States is no longer the country’s ally. A majority in Britain, and a very large majority in Denmark, both historically pro-American countries, now have unfavorable views of the United States as well.