Former President Donald Trump claimed in early July he knows “nothing about Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation’s 920-page manifesto for his second administration. By the end of the month, the project was reportedly shuttered due to Trump’s “sustained criticism.” Creating that distance may be strategic on his part. But the plan’s architects are so embedded in Trump’s political networks—and in the networks of J.D. Vance, his running mate—that it’s hard to believe Trump pulling away from Heritage’s demon spawn is anything more substantial than a “rebrand.”
In fact, many of the policy ideas from Project 2025 are already in place or are rolling out in red states such as Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Florida. One policy area from Project 2025 that is particularly pernicious is its plan for schools, which includes criminally prosecuting teachers and librarians and replacing public education with for-profit schools, homeschooling, and Christian nationalist indoctrination.
Consider the book ban campaign led by Heritage ally group Moms for Liberty. It takes aim at books with LGBTQ+ themes or that teach accurate American history. Project 2025 is taking things further with a plan to criminalize teachers and librarians.
In the document’s forward, Heritage president Kevin Roberts wrote: “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
What does the Heritage Foundation mean by “pornography?”
While it may not be clear to most of us, writer Andra Watkins immediately understood what Roberts meant due to her Christian nationalist upbringing and her fluency in “Evangelicalese.” In her analysis of Roberts’s language, Watkins describes how U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson regards homosexuality as pornography; how an Oklahoma Republican politician views transgenderism as pornography; and how a Florida school banned images of Michaelangelo’s David because some parents saw it as pornographic. Another Florida school board recently banned Alan Gratz’s Ban This Book—not because there is any pornography in it, but because it is about other books banned by narrow-minded censors.
READ: According to the Folks at Project 2025, You Might Be a Pornographer
An analysis of book challenges by The Washington Post in the 2021-2022 school year found that nearly half “targeted titles with LGBTQ+ characters or themes.” PEN America reports that the book banning movement grew rapidly during the 2022-2023 school year with a focus on claims that books are “pornographic” or “indecent” even though they do not actually meet legal standards for pornography. Under Project 2025 proposals, teachers and librarians could presumably face criminal liability for assigning books like the Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus or And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book based on the true story of how two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo raised an orphaned baby penguin. Both books have been banned in some school districts due to complaints from Moms for Liberty.
Project 2025 talks about “parents’ rights,” but a handful of narrow-minded crusaders are robbing all parents’ children of their freedom to explore their imaginations through literature. Of the more than 1,000 book challenges analyzed by The Washington Post, the majority “were filed by just eleven people.” The woman who successfully got Ban This Book censored has filed 245 book challenges in her county. One Wisconsin woman, Melissa Bollinger, got 444 books removed from bookshelves in the Elkhorn Area School District.
But surely the right would never actually carry out their plans to slap the cuffs on teachers and librarians, right?
Think again—it already has.
Acting on an anonymous individual’s complaint, a police officer in Massachusetts entered an eighth grade classroom to search for a copy of Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. An Arkansas law passed in 2023 subjects librarians to up to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine for checking out books deemed obscene or harmful. Eight states have passed comparable laws, and seventeen other states were considering similar legislation as of April 2024.
Roberts is also on the board of governors of the Council for National Policy (CNP) which outlined the right’s education goals in a 2017 memo to President Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to end public education in favor of “free-market private schools, church schools, and home schools as the normative American practice” (emphasis in original).
That’s what “school choice” means: Pay to send your kids to for-profit corporate schools, indoctrinate them at Christian nationalist schools, or you’re on your own.
In the 2017 memo to Trump, the CNP recommended the nation “Restore Ten Commandments posters to all K-12 public schools.” In June of this year, the pro-MAGA Oklahoma state superintendent ordered public school curriculums in grades five through twelve to include Bible instruction. Trump later endorsed the display of the Ten Commandments in all public schools.
But despite these swift actions to put Project 2025 policies into place, they remain enormously unpopular. As many 2023 school board races demonstrated, organized opposition beats the book banners at the ballot box. The Moms for Liberty label became electorally toxic.
In Virgina, Schuyler VanValkenburg defeated a Republican state senator who had sponsored the state’s book ban law. VanValkenburg campaigned on the idea that, as a high school teacher, he understands “the difference one book can make for a child.”
Small wonder Trump is dissembling when he says, “I have no idea who is behind [Project 2025].”
Don’t let Roberts, the Heritage Foundation, and Trump rule our children’s lives.
This article was originally published in The Progressive and is reprinted here with permission.
