AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

We turn now to a new report in The New York Times that takes a deep dive into Project Esther, a policy blueprint from the far-right Heritage Foundation, best known for creating Project 2025. Project Esther was launched October 7th, 2024, and lays out plans for surveilling, silencing and punishing pro-Palestinian activists, including deporting non-U.S. citizens.

New York Times investigative reporter Katie J.M. Baker spoke to the people behind Project Esther for her new piece, “The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement.” Katie joins us now to explain.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. What did you find?

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, so, I found that the architect behind Project Esther said that it’s no coincidence that what we’re seeing in terms of actions taken against universities and pro-Palestinian protesters on a federal, state and local level is happening months after they released their report.

AMY GOODMAN: So, The Forward had originally talked about this kind of white paper of the Heritage Foundation, but you went much further. You named names and talked to people behind Project Esther. Tell us who they are.

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Yeah, so, the woman overseeing Project Esther is Victoria Coates. She is a former national security adviser to Trump during his first administration, and she has a long history of working on Israeli matters. And then, Robert Greenway ran the Abraham Accords, and he’s one of the co-authors of Project Esther.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you can talk about what exactly their plans are? And how many Jewish groups are involved in shaping Project Esther, as they talk about — as the leaders of Project Esther talk about combating antisemitism?

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Yeah, so, Project Esther aims to rebrand all critics of Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters as providing material support for terrorism. So that means that anyone who’s ever participated in a pro-Palestinian protest at a university, for example, is potentially providing material support and should be fired or deported or otherwise ostracized from what they call open society. And there’s not very many Jewish groups involved in this project. There are a few, but the task force that inspired Project Esther was primarily Christian and right-wing organizations.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the role of Christian Zionists?

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Yeah. There are some Christian Zionists who are interested in Israel because they think that it will help bring about Christian dominion worldwide or bring about biblical end times. But there are also a lot of Christians who just see shared Judeo-Christian values and support Israel for that reason. And I think, most interestingly, Heritage incorporated a lot of arguments about antisemitism into their attacks on higher education more generally after October 7th, and they blame DEI, Black Lives Matter, those types of progressive movements for what they see as the rise of antisemitism on college campuses.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to someone you quote in the piece. Democracy Now! spoke Sunday with Stefanie Fox, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, to ask for her response to what you exposed about Project Esther.

STEFANIE FOX: You know, Project Esther was created by the ultraconservative white Christian nationalists and should be understood as an addendum to Project 2025, which is the Heritage Foundation’s plan to remake the U.S. in an ultraconservative image. It has absolutely nothing to do with Jewish safety, and it is intended solely to destroy the Palestinian liberation movement, using tools that can then be used against all communities and movements and democracy itself.

We can see clearly that Project Esther sets out a path for the Trump administration to sharpen those legal regimes that will best advance MAGA goals. So, for example, the targeting of international students, like Mahmoud Khalil, for abduction and deportation because of their political views is a terrifying attempt to expand already unjust counterterrorism and immigration laws against Palestinian rights movement, immigrant communities and civil liberties writ large. The Trump administration and groups like the Heritage Foundation think that if they target the groups they believe to be most vulnerable — so, Palestinians, anybody who will defend Palestinian human rights, immigrants, trans people — then nobody will stand up and fight back.

But this country’s fascist turn is not inevitable. If a united coalition can beat back these attacks now, we can destroy the momentum of Trump’s broader agenda. And we understand that what justifies that agenda is the same thing justifying U.S.-backed Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. We see the twin evils of the cynical use of false accusations of antisemitism, that ensure the Israeli government can’t be held accountable, and also the pervasive and constant racism and dehumanization against Palestinians. Those tactics are decades old, and frankly, they’ve had bipartisan support. The MAGA right is now consolidating and accelerating those. And so, it’s on us to remember that they rely on the weaponizing of antisemitism and the deploying of anti-Palestinian racism because they’ve lost the argument.

The very notion — take, for example, the “Hamas Support Network,” which is the term used by the Heritage Foundation to describe the Palestinian liberation movement. It’s a contrived and baseless smear that is obviously intended to vilify any and all criticism of the Israeli government. And the accusations would be laughable, they’d be — they’re outlandish, they’re baseless, if they weren’t being translated into such deadly, serious policy endangering people’s lives right now.

But there are millions of people, including the majority of Americans and a growing and massive number of Jews, who want to see a stop to the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, who are outraged that our tax dollars are being used to murder and starve tens of thousands of children, and who want the U.S. and Israeli government held accountable for their crimes against humanity. And it’s so — it’s in the face of these repressive attacks that our only option is to be bolder, clearer in defense of Palestinian life every single day and to be demanding justice, equality and freedom for all people, no exceptions.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Stefanie Fox, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the groups that Project Esther identifies, as she refers to it, as a “Hamas Support Organization,” HSO. Also, they refer to HSNs, Hamas Support Network. If you can talk more about that label?

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Yeah, so, Project Esther focuses on anti-Zionist groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, but they aim to go much more broader than that. So there’s a network, according to them, that includes not just those groups, but large nonprofits, like the Tides Foundation, George Soros as a mastermind on top of this pyramid that they showed and pitched at to potential donors. Then, of course, there’s colleges and universities that are harboring these organizations; members of Congress, senators; the media — really, anybody, like I said before, who has criticized Israel or participated in any sort of pro-Palestinian activity.

AMY GOODMAN: How has the Trump administration begun to fulfill some of the objectives outlined by the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther?

KATIE J.M. BAKER: So, I want to be clear that the Trump administration would not speak with me for this story, and Heritage says it could just be a coincidence, that they don’t know if they’re actually following the blueprint. But according to my analysis, the Trump administration and other Republicans have called for more than half of the actionable goals in Project Esther, or they appear to have called for them at least. And so I think it’s worth looking at the document in full to have an idea of what else we might see coming down the line.

AMY GOODMAN: You write in the piece, “Project Esther’s architects envisioned outcomes that at the time might have seemed far-fetched. … Now, four months after … Trump [has taken] office, Heritage Foundation leaders are taking an early victory lap.”

KATIE J.M. BAKER: Yeah, so, again, they won’t say for sure. And, you know, if you recall, last year, Project 2025 was so contentious, it became such a big talking point during the election campaign, that Trump had to distance himself from it. So, they’re very careful to keep their distance from each other. But they do say that they meet regularly with officials from the administration. And Mr. Greenway said to me that it was no coincidence that we’re seeing actions such as billions of dollars withheld to universities for federal funding. We’re seeing calls to monitor the social media of immigrants for, quote-unquote, “antisemitic” activity. We’re seeing the attempts to deport people who have criticized Israel or argued for Palestinian rights. And so, all of that is very clearly laid out in Project Esther.

AMY GOODMAN: And what Republican lawmakers are involved in formulating the objectives of Project Esther?

KATIE J.M. BAKER: I think there’s a really broad brush. You see people in the administration, Republicans in Congress. It’s really hard to just pick one or two, because it’s really widespread.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us. The response of Project Esther to your report — of the Heritage Foundation people behind it?

KATIE J.M. BAKER: I haven’t heard from them, but I think they’re very explicit that this is what they’re doing. They hadn’t commented publicly before this, and I really had to bug them for a while to get them to comment. But this is all laid out online, and it has been for months.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us. We’ll certainly link to your report in The New York Times, the report headlined “The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement.” I want to thank Katie J.M. Baker, author of that article in The New York Times.