The Daily - Project 2025’s Other Project

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

During a congressional hearing yesterday, Republican lawmakers accused university leaders of failing to do enough to combat antisemitism on their campuses. That’s a claim that the university officials strongly rejected.The hearing was the latest attempt by Republicans to use what they see as the growing threat against Jews to their political advantage. And it reflects a plan that was first laid out by the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank that produced Project 2025.That plan, known as Project Esther, may have once seemed far-fetched. Katie J.M. Baker explains how it has become a reality.Guest: Katie J.M. Baker, a national investigative correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Even before President Trump was re-elected, the Heritage Foundation, best known for Project 2025, set out to destroy pro-Palestinian activism in the United States. University leaders rejected Republican attacks, saying they were working to protect Jewish students but also free speech on their campuses.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Jared Soares for The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. Today's hearing marks the next phase of the committee's work, an effort to understand why this wave of anti-Semitism was able so easily to consume the nation's universities in the first place. During a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Republican lawmakers once again accused university leaders of failing to do enough to combat anti-Semitism on their campuses, a claim that the university officials strongly rejected. It is time for clear action on your campuses that can be quantified and can be exemplified to watching worlds around. The hearing was the latest attempt by Republicans to use what they see as the growing threat against Jews to their

political advantage and it's a plan that was first laid out by the same conservative think tank that authored Project 2025. That plan may have once seemed far-fetched, but today I speak to my colleague Katie J.M. Baker about how it's become a reality. It's Wednesday, July 16th. Kati, I think by now we're probably all familiar with Project 2025. It was the Heritage Foundation's agenda for a second Trump term. A lot of it has already come to pass. But in the background, there was this entirely unrelated project from the Heritage Foundation

that I think a lot of people might still be totally unfamiliar with. And so we wanted to talk to you about today both what it is and also how it may have been influencing our politics and our campuses in ways that a lot of people may not have even realized. Yeah, so last October, I saw that the Heritage Foundation had published this mysterious long policy paper called Project Esther Online that it said was a national strategy to combat anti-Semitism in the US. But when you read it, it becomes clear very quickly

that what it really is, is a plan to dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement in the U.S. so that, as critics say, it can crush progressive movements more generally. Project Esther didn't get a lot of mainstream coverage at the time. Biden was still president and I think a lot of it maybe seemed far-fetched to people. Then fast forward a few months later, Trump gets elected and very quickly his administration starts taking actions that they say are in the name of combating anti-Semitism. And especially after they arrested Mahmoud Khalil, who was the recent Columbia graduate who had been really active in pro-Palestinian organizing on campus, that's when I really

started to feel like we should be tracking all of the similarities between Project Esther and the actions the Trump administration was taking. So tell me about how you started your investigation and what did you learn about who's behind Project Esther and how it came together? So the origins of this document really begin immediately after October 7th, 2023, soon after the Hamas attack in Israel and then Israel's retaliatory war campaign. Free, free Palestine, never turn the city. Palestine will be free. Palestine will be free. Some college campuses really quickly got very chaotic with protests and counter protests. Start to push them.

Out of the camp. There's students out there protesting against Israel's actions and the very large number of Palestinians, including so many women and children who were being killed. Peacefully protesting to end the genocide in Palestine. No more? No more? No more?

No more? No more? And then there were Jewish students saying that Israel has the right to defend itself and that these students are being harassed just for being Jewish by other students on campus. One of the protesters was brandishing a Hamas flag as a Jewish student that's deeply upsetting. So it was a really tense time and there's a lot of concern over what's happening on these campuses. It seems like every day is getting worse

and worse. Jewish people are being harassed, being called names. And for Heritage and some of its allies, that's what they're worried about. They're worried about what they see as anti-semitism against the Jewish students on these campuses. Do you feel safe on campus? No, not at all. I didn't want to be here. And it's in that context that four really well-connected conservative supporters of Israel meet virtually to come up with a plan.

And they decide that they're going to create this task force to combat anti-Semitism. And eventually that turns into Project Esther, which is overseen by this woman at Heritage, Vice President named Victoria Coats. Nicole So tell me about Victoria Coats. Ashley She is a fascinating figure. Victoria Coats Because, you know, this kind of goes back to my first book, which is called David Sling, A History of Democracy and 10 Works of Art.

She has a really unorthodox background for a national security advisor. Which ties in the art history piece. She has three degrees all in Renaissance art history. And she was planning on being an academic. When I was getting my PhD in the 90s, sure, there was a weight toward liberals in academia, but at the same time, the focus was on your work. Some people thought it was kind of exotic to have a conservative running around and that was all fine.

And she was conservative and she'd always been conservative, but she really started to feel like it wasn't a space for her and she felt really uncomfortable there. That was when the kind of the children or the descendants rather of the 1960s radicals were really taking hold. All of whom share this, this, what I consider very noxious anti-Western worldview. She became what she says is increasingly uncomfortable with, I think she called it a noxious anti-Western worldview that she felt she was seeing on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania where she was getting her PhD. And I've always been fascinated with missile defense. And so she started blogging about missile defense under a pseudonym for a conservative website.

That blogging leads her to working for Donald Rumsfeld and other Republican politicians before ending up in Trump's first administration as a deputy national security advisor. So how does she go from that to being the leader of this effort at Heritage. Yeah, so she's a vice president at Heritage, working on a variety of national security related issues. And she told me that her interest in Israel really comes from a national security perspective. That in the Iranian view of the world, America is the big Satan and Israel is the little Satan. The

critical point being that we are both Satan and that if we allow the little Satan to be destroyed they will hardly stop in their pursuit of the big Satan. She's a really devout Christian and religious person and she's had an interest in Israel specifically for a really long time. She has like figurines of Israeli prime ministers in her office and she recently wrote a book about the importance of supporting and defending Israel. The inescapable conclusion I reached was that even if the US was to abandon Israel to its fate alone and retreat behind our oceans, it wouldn't save us. So at some point last year, Heritage just decides

that they're going to write an actual blueprint, the one that becomes Project Esther, and Coats will oversee it. So once Coats is actually put in charge of leading this thing, what is the next step? So dozens of groups joined this task force, and interesting fact about it as one of the heritage employees said himself was that most of them were conservative organizations or

Christian organizations, and there were a few Jewish groups, but the majority of them were not Jewish. Is it notable that most of these groups aren't Jewish, as you said, especially given the fact that anti-Semitism isn't really what the Heritage Foundation typically cares about. Like, I think they're generally associated with issues such as abortion, immigration, culture wars. Yeah, well, when I interviewed members of the task force and Heritage, they said that they felt that legacy Jewish groups had not done enough to combat anti-Semitism. And Project Esther accuses American Jews of complacency, and they're saying, we're going

to take over from here. That is fascinating that not only is this not being done in collaboration with these legacy Jewish groups, but both very separate from them, and in some cases, Heritage is even condemning some of them. What is it that the heritage group feels should be done to fight anti-Semitism that they feel that these Jewish groups have not been doing? Like, what is their strategy?

Well, their strategy is to brand a very, very wide group of critics of Israel and pro-Palestinian supporters as being a risk to the very foundations of the United States and the fabric of our society. So these people and groups aren't just anti-Semitic, but they're anti-capitalist, anti-Western, and anti what Heritage calls the shared Judeo-Christian values they believe are so integral to America. So in other words, the sudden interest in anti-Semitism, it's not just about threats against Jewish people.

For the Heritage Foundation, they're seeing what's happening on campuses and they're reframing the debate as kind of a homegrown threat against America. Yes, exactly. So let's go back to the document itself and the recommendations. Well, actually, why the name? Why Esther? So the easiest explanation here is that Esther is a famous figure from the Hebrew Bible. She's a queen, Jewish herself, who is celebrated for saving the Jewish people from destruction.

Got it. So what's actually in the document? So Project Esther is this really long, unwieldy document. It has some errors in it. As many Jewish people pointed out after it was released, it says that Queen Esther is a figure from the Torah, which she is not. And it's divided into a few parts. It starts out by defining who the enemy is. So Project Esther defines the enemy by branding a really broad range of critics of Israel and supporters of the pro-Palestinian

movement as what it says is effectively a terrorist support network. So they use phrases like Hamas Support Organization or HSO and Hamas Support Network or HSN. And the goal they say in Project Esther is that in the same way that Americans think of the KKK as bad or after 9-11 thought of Al-Qaeda as bad, they want people to hear or think of these terms when they think of the pro-Palestinian movement or critics of Israel and go, these are bad people. And I'm assuming that it's labeling people who support the Palestinian cause as connected to Hamas because it would make the whole movement seem a lot more threatening, right? Like by connecting protesters on college campuses to the actual terror group operating in the Gaza Strip. Yes, completely. Their goal was to get the public to perceive the pro-Palestinian movement

as not just as they believe a threat to Jews, but to America itself. So who exactly is in the so-called Hamas Support Network, as the authors of the report describe it? So they describe it as a network where at its core there are these well-known pro-Palestinian groups such as National Students for Justice in Palestine and then also anti-Zionist groups that many Jewish people are a part of such as Jewish Voice for Peace. And these groups were all active in the protests on college campuses, and they strongly deny being Hamas support organizations, to be clear. Got it.

And then outside of this core of the, quote, Hamas support network, unquote, there's a network of alleged supporters, and it's a very broad network. It includes progressive philanthropic groups and progressive members of Congress like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib who they call the Hamas Caucus and even Bernie Sanders gets a mention as someone who is aligned with this network. I was able to review pitch materials for potential donors in which Heritage presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by what they called progressive elites leading the way. And it included Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Soros and Governor Pritzker of Illinois.

So even being Jewish doesn't mean you couldn't be part of the Hamas Support Network. It seems like as long as you are on the left of this particular cause, this could get you that label. Yeah. Project Esther exclusively focuses on groups on the left and Democratic politicians and for Coats and the other people behind Project Esther. Once they define these groups as supporting terrorism, the natural next step is to go after them. And to be clear, is this so-called Hamas support network a literal label or is it more of a metaphor? Like, is the Heritage Foundation arguing that members of this so-called Hamas support network, which could include college protesters, members of the American government,

are they arguing that this is literal, like these people are actually connected to Hamas? Yeah, they are arguing that. And there is some historical context here. There have long been bipartisan efforts to counter criticism of Israel by labeling a range of speech and organizing in support of Palestinian rights as support for terrorism. Project Esther, though, aims to go further because it equates action such as participating in these pro-Palestinian campus protests with providing material support for terrorism, which is a broad legal construct that has really serious consequences. Right. Because just to state the obvious here, once you are labeled a terrorist as opposed to a protester exercising your right to free speech, that suddenly the government has a lot of other options to go after you.

Yeah, exactly. And Project Esther has lots of ideas of punitive actions that you can take once you deem people part of this Hamas support network. So once they're effectively part of this network, they can be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized, and otherwise excluded from what Project Esther calls open society. And what I think that means is that heritage's goal is to make it so that nobody wants to associate in any way with somebody who is critical of Israel or supportive of the pro-Palestinian movement. Do Victoria Coats actually say that to you? Like, I'm just sort of wondering whether the

people behind Project Esther have made what you just said explicit. Yes, essentially. I think there's a reason they all wear masks. They want to participate in this activity without there being any ramifications. And I think both clarifying, as I said, with whom they are associating and then revealing your identity when you participate in this kind of activity, there can be consequences. And I would be hopeful that that would have a chilling effect on it. She was not shy about the way that this reclassification of student protesters as effectively part of a terrorist support network can also allow heritage to not just go after pro-Palestinian

supporters and critics of Israel, but other progressive movements on college campuses that they deem dangerous in a related way, such as DEI and Black Lives Matter and that type of thing. You know, how did we get here as the United States, you know, the folks who defeated the Nazis? How did we get from that to what we're seeing on our campuses now? And that's an American problem. And that's why we wanted something like Project Esther so Heritage could take direct action to counter it.

So it sounds like this project is laying out a step-by-step strategy to define a network of targets, a network of people, and then systematically eliminate or exclude them from the American system. And all of this is being done in the name of anti-Semitism. Yes. And they say in Project Esther that they want to dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement and this so-called Hamas network within 12 to 24 months, and that as soon as a willing administration takes over, they're ready to go. And I think when Project Esther first came out, people thought it seemed far-fetched. But then just a few months later, when Trump took office, his administration and other

Republicans started calling for actions that made it look like these proposals weren't coming to life. We'll be right back. Katie, one person I've been thinking about, as you've been talking, is Mahmood Khalil, who you mentioned. He's the man with the green card who was arrested by immigration authorities because of his protest activity at Columbia University. And his situation seems to fit kind of perfectly the description of what you said that Project Esther was trying to accomplish. And I'm wondering whether there were other examples that you saw that really indicated to you

that this project was coming to life. Yeah, so based on our own analysis, the Trump administration and other Republicans have called for actions that appear to mirror over half of the goals outlined in Project Esther. Over half, wow. We have breaking news. The Trump administration canceling $400 million worth of grants and contracts for Columbia

University. It says it's freezing more than $2 billion in grants to Harvard University. Citing what they call consistent inaction in the face of quote, persistent harassment of Jewish students. So Project Esther says that HSOs, which means Hamas support organizations, should not be eligible for public funds. And the administration has withheld billions of dollars in grants to some of the country's top research universities saying that they haven't done enough to get these

sorts of groups off their campuses or that they haven't kept Jewish students safe. If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you're coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus. We're not going to give you a visa. In Project Esther, it says that members of HSOs should be found in violation of student visa requirements. Video shows Columbia University student Mohsin Madhawi in handcuffs, the Palestinian-born

green card holder taken into custody Monday by federal immigration agents. The threat with deportation is a doctoral student at Tufts University. Homeland Security officials accused her of being pro-Hamas. And we've seen administration officials move to revoke student visas and deport activists who have criticized Israel. Administration ordering embassies to stop interviews for student visas as the State Department prepares for an expanded social media screening for applicants. Project Esther says that social media should no longer allow the spread of what they deem

to be anti-semitic content, and we've seen the administration begin monitoring immigrants and visa applicants' social media. And once you've lost your visa, you're no longer legally in the United States, and we have a right, like every country in the world has a right, to remove you from our country. So it's just that simple. That is certainly a compelling argument for how the actions mirror what's in the report. But just to be really clear about this, did your reporting reveal a direct connection

between the project and the White House? Like, can we say definitively that the White House is actually using this as a blueprint for its policies? No, we can't say that there's a direct connection because White House officials would not talk to me about this. And the Heritage Foundation employees I spoke to acknowledged that they meet regularly with the administration and members of Congress, but they just won't comment on those closed-door meetings. And they insisted they didn't know if the White House had used their document or simply

came to the same conclusions. But one of the co-authors of Project Esther, who I interviewed, said it's no coincidence to look at the changing landscape since Esther came out and to see the actions that it calls for taking place months later. And he said that it's no coincidence on a federal level, on a state level, and even on behalf of private groups such as law firms who have filed lawsuits accusing certain groups of supporting KMAS. So basically, whether or not we can actually tie the administration to the proposal in

some way directly, it seems pretty clear, as you mentioned, that the proposals in the project are becoming reality. And all of this is making me wonder, since Project Esther was published, has there been much of a reaction from Jewish groups? So yeah, there have been a range of responses. Most legacy Jewish groups haven't said anything specifically about Project Esther. They're not celebrating Project Esther and thinking heritage for solving anti-Semitism, but they're also not criticizing it either.

But there has been a lot of pushback from some other Jewish groups. And one interesting thing I found is that a few groups that Heritage assumed would be aligned with their mission didn't actually want to be involved at all. Why is that? Well, one big reason is because this document is supposed to be about combating anti-Semitism in America, and yet it exclusively focuses on anti-Semitism on the left, which is a problem for some of these groups I talked to because they saw Project Esther as something that would make this a partisan issue instead of a nonpartisan issue that everybody should

get behind, not just one side or another. And then the other big reason that some Jewish groups do not want to associate with Project Esther is because of a concern that Heritage is exploiting real concerns about anti-Semitism to execute its own agenda. To your point, it really does feel like if this effort to fight anti-Semitism was mostly endorsed by non-Jews, many prominent Jewish groups at the very least said nothing, did not endorse it, or actively disavowed this effort. It does make me feel like there's

something else on the agenda here. Yeah, the document is really about a fundamental distrust of higher education in particular. Victoria Coats has long spoken about why she left higher education and how there's this noxious anti-Western worldview that's pervasive within it. And most of their suggestions have to do with college campuses. And for years, Heritage has been railing against college campuses and saying that there are hotbeds of progressivism. So they were able to fold this fight against anti-Semitism into this larger worldview that they have. I mean, to put it another way, it feels like this document is about Jews, but it's not

actually for the benefit of Jews. I think it was best stated in an open letter from three dozen former leaders of major Jewish establishment groups. I'm just going to read from the letter. So they warn that, and I quote, a range of actors are using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech, and the press. And the letter called on Jewish leaders and organizations to, quote, resist the exploitation

of Jewish fears and publicly join with other organizations that are battling to preserve the guardrails of democracy. In other words, what Project Esther has done is take a real concern about anti-Semitism and then figure out a way to take that concern and achieve many other goals that Heritage has. I feel like, Katie, your story really filled in some blanks that I had just watching some of the actions from the administration that were being done in the name of combating anti-Semitism, whether it's arresting students, cutting funding, cracking down on pro-Palestinian speech.

Like, it just felt like a lot of this had to do with something other than combating anti-Semitism. And until your story came out, I wasn't really sure what to do with that skepticism or exactly how warranted it was. You know, there are surely people who are part of this effort who genuinely care about violence against Jewish people. And there have been examples of violence in the U.S. targeting Jewish people, some of them deadly. But Project Esther isn't just talking about eliminating threats of or acts of

violence against Jews, which do happen. They're going much further than that. And antisemitism is being used as a tool here by the Trump administration to demonize an entire movement and execute a much, much broader agenda that has very little to do with protecting Jewish people. Katie, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, President Trump released about half of the California National Guard troops

deployed to Los Angeles to quell protests against immigration raids. The decision ends the mobilization of about 2,000 troops and marks a victory for local officials who vigorously opposed deploying the troops in LA in the first place. They said that it was an illegal act by the president. And in a rare break from President Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson said the president should release the government files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased financier charged with the sex trafficking of minors. I'm for transparency.

We're intellectually consistent in this. Look, Reagan used to tell us we should trust the American people. I believe in that principle. In an interview with a conservative podcaster, Johnson said that the Trump administration owed it to their supporters to disclose as much as possible. It's a very delicate subject,

but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it. The decision not to release the Epstein files has infuriated many of Trump's supporters, who want to see for themselves what is in the documents. Today's episode was produced by Ricky Nowetzki, Michael Simon-Johnson, and Moodge Sadie, with help from Nina Feldman. It was edited by MJ Davis-Lynn and fact-checked by Susan Lee. Contains original music by Dan Powell and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for the daily.

I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.