Project Esther Is a McCarthy-Era Blueprint for Crushing the American Left

Project Esther isn’t just about Palestine. Crafted by the Heritage Foundation — the same far right organization behind Project 2025 — the playbook purports to provide a “national strategy to combat antisemitism.” First published and reported on last year, the document has seen new life in recent days following a New York Times investigation into Trump administration policies that mirror the plan. But Project Esther’s authors make clear that their war on the Gaza solidarity movement is just a Trojan horse for a far more ambitious project: destroying the American left.

Mainstream coverage of Project Esther has largely framed the document as an effort to crush the pro-Palestinian movement. It’s important to emphasize, however, that the threat Project Esther poses to the left more broadly is not a byproduct — it’s part of the plan’s core design. The text lays bare the McCarthyist nature of this political moment and underscores the urgent need for the left to mount a multipronged, coalitional defense.

At the center of Project Esther’s crosshairs are the people and organizations it dubs the “Hamas Support Network,” or HSN, though there’s no evidence that the entities it’s targeting actually support Hamas, or that they are even organized in any sort of a network. The playbook proposes a slew of recommendations for dismantling this fictional network, including deporting international students, purging pro-Palestine faculty from educational institutions, defunding organizations, increasing criminalization and promoting social ostracization of people that speak out in support of Palestinian rights. “Within the United States, the HSN receives the indispensable support of a vast network of activists and funders with a much more ambitious, insidious goal — the destruction of capitalism and democracy,” Project Esther claims.

This is, of course, pure projection. There is no “vast network” of funders behind the grassroots uprising for Palestine — unlike Project 2025, which was crafted by 100 conservative organizations and, as DeSmog reported, bankrolled by six billionaire families. By attempting to frame the Gaza solidarity movement as a well-funded and cohesive network, Project Esther clearly aims to implicate any and all organizations on the left — a target that includes, but is not limited to, people and organizations that have spoken out in defense of Palestine.

That goal is demonstrated in Project Esther’s repeated claim that the so-called HSN is seeking to destroy capitalism, which carries clear echoes of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunts of the 1950s. The project goes so far as to ludicrously equate Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Soviet agitprop and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. (The Soviets, you might recall, fought against the Nazis in World War II.)

The proposals offered up by Project Esther can also be traced back to these witch hunts. One of Project Esther’s suggested tools for quashing pro-Palestine activism is the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law enacted in 1938 to combat Nazi propaganda, which requires that agents of foreign countries register with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and periodically disclose their political activities, and creates criminal and civil penalties for noncompliance. Although FARA was intended to provide transparency around foreign lobbying, it was coopted for McCarthyist suppression in the ‘50s to paint left activists as agents of communist regimes. In one egregious abuse of power, the DOJ used FARA to prosecute renowned civil rights leader and historian W.E.B. Du Bois for his perceived communist sympathies. That case was dismissed, but Project Esther is now urging federal leadership to pull from the same playbook, painting leftist activists and groups as “Hamas supporters” to tee up its own weaponization of FARA.

And Republicans have already expanded their use of the “foreign agent” rhetoric beyond Hamas: Last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) accused The People’s Forum, a New York-based community center, and CODEPINK, an antiwar group, of ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and urged the DOJ to investigate the groups for FARA violations. The Trump administration levied similar allegations against Harvard University in a May 22 post on X, claiming that the school has coordinated with the CCP and fostered antisemitism on campus. Citing a “pro-Hamas” campus environment, an accompanying letter from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that the administration is barring Harvard from enrolling international students.

Many on the left have highlighted how the government’s crackdown on pro-Palestine groups is itself in service of the Israeli state and its foreign lobbyists in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. But pointing out Project Esther’s hypocrisy does little to undermine its mission, which hinges on equating anti-Zionism with anti-Americanism. This sleight of hand is how Project Esther widens its scope of attack. Pointing out that Zionist lobbyists are the “real” foreign agents ultimately obfuscates the deeper root of the problem — the deployment of money and imperial power, regardless of where they originate, in support of policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing — while also capitulating to Project Esther’s framing of Palestinian liberation as having anything to do with being pro- or anti-American.

Even more concerning than FARA, however, is Project Esther’s recommendation that the government use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to prosecute activists. By weaponizing RICO against the pro-Palestine movement, the Trump administration could ensnare people and groups across the left in a massive policing dragnet, attempting to paint everyone from anti-capitalists to Black Lives Matter activists as Hamas supporters. We have already seen RICO weaponized in Georgia against the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement, where Attorney General Chris Carr indicted 61 protesters on flimsy racketeering charges. Prosecutors claimed in legal filings that the fight to stop a massive police training center began during the nationwide protests against George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020. Project Esther’s authors also invoke George Floyd’s name, making clear they perceive all mass mobilizations against injustice as threats: The document claims that the pro-Palestine movement is using Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel as a “George Floyd-style event to spring onto center stage and grab a giant microphone.”

Crucially, while Project Esther claims to be about combating antisemitism, no major Jewish organizations participated in its drafting, and the blueprint targets progressive Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. Only one of the four people on the project’s leadership task force is Jewish, while two are evangelical Christian Zionists, and the document, notably, does not make any mention of right-wing antisemitism. Ironically, Project Esther claims that the pro-Palestine movement is “a threat to the foundations of the United States and the fabric of our society.” But the glaring lack of Jewish voices that went into crafting the document, coupled with the draconian, far-reaching tactics it proposes, should dispel any lingering doubt about the project’s true aims: an assault on democracy and the overall suppression of the left.