The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement (Project Esther)

 

from the NYT

In late April, the Heritage Foundation dispatched a team to Israel to meet with power players in Israeli politics, including the country’s foreign and defense secretaries and the U.S. ambassador, Mike Huckabee.

The conservative Washington-based think tank is best known for spearheading Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for President Trump’s second term that called for reshaping the federal government and an extreme expansion of presidential power.

Now the Heritage contingent was in Israel, in part, to discuss another contentious policy paper: Project Esther, the foundation’s proposal to rapidly dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States, along with its support at schools and universities, at progressive organizations and in Congress.

Drafted in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023 and the mounting protests against the war in Gaza, Project Esther outlined an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism by branding a broad range of critics of Israel as “effectively a terrorist support network,” so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered “open society.”

Project Esther’s architects envisioned outcomes that at the time might have seemed far-fetched. Curriculum it believed to be sympathetic to a “Hamas support” narrative would be taken out of schools and universities, and “supporting faculty” would be removed. Social media would be purged of content deemed to be antisemitic. Institutions would lose public funding. Foreign students who pushed for Palestinian rights would have their visas revoked, or be deported.

Once a sympathetic presidential administration was in place, the plan said, “We will organize rapidly, take immediate action to ‘stop the bleeding,’ and achieve all objectives within two years.”

Now, four months after Mr. Trump took office, Heritage Foundation leaders are taking an early victory lap.

Since the inauguration, the White House and other Republicans have called for actions that appear to mirror more than half of Project Esther’s proposals, a New York Times analysis shows, including threats to withhold billions in federal funding at universities and attempts to deport legal residents...

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