Donald Trump’s upcoming appearance at the 2024 Moms for Liberty (M4L) national summit presents clear evidence of the tight relationship among Trump, M4L, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. A Saturday piece from Politico about Trump and M4L omits any mention of Heritage, which raises doubts that the mainstream media can see what is right in front of their eyes.
Politico recognizes that M4L and Trump enjoy a “symbiotic relationship” and a Trump spokesperson admits “a lot of mutual consensus.” M4L is on the Project 2025 Advisory Board and has endorsed Heritage’s radical Project 2025 which would destroy public education in America. M4L’s positions overlap with Project 2025 education chapter and Trump’s 2024 GOP Platform: Make America Great Again. So-called Parents Rights;” anti-Critical Race Theory, anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion); shredding the separation of church and state to put Christian Nationalism into schools; universal school choice that will decimate public schools; defunding schools that teach accurate racial history; and closing the Department of Education to return education to the states are all positions shared by M4L, Trump, and Project 2025.
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M4L is a dependent of Heritage. At an April 9 forum at the Heritage Foundation, M4L co-founder Tiffany Justice gushed (1:12) about how President Kevin Roberts and Heritage had been “amazing partners since we started Moms for Liberty.” Roberts spoke at the 2023 summit. A Strategy Session titled “The 10 Laws of Fundraising” at the 2024 summit will be led by Heritage. A Strategy Session called “What does it mean to abolish the Department of Education” will be led by Lindsay Burke, author of the Project 2025 chapter on education and director of the Center for Education Policy at Heritage. The session “Writing for the Local Media” will be taught by Mary Vought, vice-president of Strategic Communications at Heritage. Her husband Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and a co-author of Project 2025, was recently recorded explaining that Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 was insincere “graduate level politics.” In truth, Trump “blessed” his organization (Center for Renewing America) and “he’s very supportive of what we do.”
Trump has said he has “nothing to do with” Project 2025 and sure, why wouldn’t his word be good, Politico? But as NPR has reported, Project 2025 is clearly “a Heritage Foundation blueprint for a second Trump term.” It is a sincere and detailed expression of the radical Right’s plans to, as the extremist Council for National Policy puts it, abolish public schools in favor of “free-market private schools, church schools and home schools as the normative American practice” (emphasis in original). There’s your “choice” which Trump, M4L, and Heritage all endorse.
The problem for Trump is that Project 2025 is wildly unpopular. Heritage President Roberts proposed in his Foreword to Project 2025 that the next Trump administration prosecute educators and librarians for distributing “pornography.” What Roberts means by “pornography” is any mention of LGBTQ+ individuals or families. As a guide, think about what M4L and its allies have already banned as pornography: the real hard-core stuff like And Tango Makes Three, a book about two male penguins that adopt an orphan penguin at the Central Park Zoo; the Pulitzer Prize winning Maus; or the image of Michelangelo’s David.
To protect the Trump campaign Roberts even had to pre-ban his own book from September publication, but Media Matters got a galley proof where Roberts says, “Right now, parents’ rights must be jealously guarded because America’s teachers have gone insane.”
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It’s not working. Project 2025 is specifically designed for a second Trump administration, with many from his previous administration helping draw up this authoritarian playbook. Implementing it would be enforcing Trump’s own MAGA 2025 platform.
Watch the mainstream media coverage of the Moms for Liberty summit and Trump’s appearance carefully. This is not detective work; these documents are all available. The question is, will the media read them and connect the dots?
