By Andrew Kordik
In November 1964, amid a bitter presidential election that pitted Republican Senator Barry Goldwater against Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, Harper’s Magazine published an article that helped readers make sense of the polarizing moment. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” written by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, asserted that the extremist politics of the election of 1964 were not new in American history.
There is a long tradition of conspiratorial thinking in American political life — one in which opponents are seen not just as wrong, but as threats to core national values. From anti-Masonic attacks on President Jackson, to the Know Nothings’ nativist fears of Catholic immigrants, to the anticommunist fervor of the McCarthy era, this paranoid style, Hofstadter argued, had spanned generations and crossed party lines.
In the decades after Goldwater’s defeat, his former platform became a model for the Republican Party and its guiding intellectuals, many of whom would later work at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Since its founding in 1973, Heritage has been among the most influential public policy groups, producing its Mandate for Leadership — which guided President Ronald Reagan — and more recently Project 2025, a lodestar for the Trump administration (as The Preamble has explained).
Less well-known is Heritage’s Project Esther. Described in a report that Heritage published on October 7, 2024 — the anniversary of Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel that killed nearly 1,200 people — Project Esther says it aims to combat antisemitism in the United States. But instead of limiting itself to this praiseworthy goal, the project conflates the pro-Palestinian movement with anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment, sentiments it claims are inspired by Marxism. These ideas seek to “achieve [their] goals by taking advantage of our open society, corrupting our education system,” and “co-opting the federal government.”
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From its first pages, the report imagines a world where dubiously defined enemies are plotting to undermine our most cherished values. For some Americans, the paranoia identified by Hofstadter remains a strongly animating force, one that plays on the most motivating of human emotions: fear.
The Project Esther report correctly notes that antisemitism spiked in the United States during the year following the attack on October 7, but it fails to mention that in the same year, there was also a spike in violence against Muslims.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, there were 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2024, representing a 5% increase from 2023 and a more dramatic 344% increase over the previous five years. A similar report issued by the Council on American-Islamic Relations reports 8,658 anti-Muslim or anti-Arab incidents in 2024, a 7% increase from 2023. Both numbers are shameful. But viewing antisemitism in a bubble, as Project Esther does, hides a more sinister reality: paranoid political extremism is resulting in more hate crimes against American religious minorities overall.
Further, instead of addressing antisemitism wherever it exists, Project Esther focuses its ire exclusively on left-leaning protest groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP), as well as the Democratic Party. The report makes no mention of the rise of far right antisemitism — led by a well-documented increase in white supremecist extremism — that one would expect from an earnest examination of antisemitic rhetoric and violence as a whole. In their most recent statistics, the Anti-Defamation League reports that in 2023 there was a 12% spike in white supremecist propaganda incidents, such as rallies, and a 30% increase in antisemitic propaganda.
Project Esther classifies all pro-Palestinian views as anti-Israeli and therefore antisemitic. It does this by labeling all pro-Palestinian groups as “Hamas Supporting Organizations” (HSOs), implying that anyone who supports human rights for Palestinians must also endorse the acts of terrorism, assault, and murder perpetrated by Hamas.
It is — and must be — possible to criticize the government of Israel without being antisemitic. Israel is a nation-state. States craft and implement policy. Labeling as antisemitic everyone who disagrees with Israeli policies stifles dissent and conflates reasoned criticism with bigotry.
Project Esther uses its claims of antisemitism to call for destroying groups that it opposes ideologically. This is especially true when its criticism turns from alleged HSOs to the Democratic Party, whose progressive wing the report suggests is a Trojan horse through which HSOs are infiltrating American government.
In a style reminiscent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Project Esther says there is “an active cabal of Jew-haters, Israel-haters, and America-haters in Washington.” The report goes on to name vocally pro-Palestinian Democratic members of the House and Senate as the “Hamas Caucus,” and claims that the Biden administration was staffed with Hamas supporters.
This is parallel universe stuff. Outside of criticizing the tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza, the Biden administration maintained staunch support of Israel, sold weapons to Israel, vetoed a UN Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire and another calling for recognition of a Palestinian state, shared intelligence for Israeli use in military operations against Hamas, and called it outrageous that the International Criminal Court issued a war crimes arrest warrant for Prime Minister Netanyahu. It would have been challenging to find greater material support for Israel in any other government, and the absurdity of the report’s claim makes it hard to take Project Esther seriously.
But we must. Because the Heritage Foundation is not merely making accusations that happen to home in on its traditional ideological opponents. It is also offering a very specific strategy to eliminate their influence.
As an introduction to its plan for neutralizing HSOs, Project Esther cites the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as an example of past success in rooting out similar threats to American values. HUAC is infamous for its attacks on academic freedom, its blacklists, and its conspiratorial claims that communists were infiltrating the United States Army during the Cold War.
After what it calls a naming and shaming of individuals and groups, Project Esther proposes to “wage lawfare” and outlines a toolkit for disempowering HSOs, as well as the politicians, professors, and universities deemed their allies. It would use counterterrorism laws to deny protest permits to HSOs, disable their ability to spread information via social media, and ensure they “no longer have access to the US economy.”
With the help of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, citizens and US-based groups Heritage considers HSOs would also be forced to register with the Department of Justice as agents of foreign principals. This status must be noted in all lobbying efforts and on all informational materials, thus weakening a group’s persuasive and economic power.
Project Esther would not limit the government to targeting people and individual organizations. It calls for using the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to dismantle networks of organizations. RICO cases, which were created to combat the Mafia, allow for prosecutions of large groups. In the Heritage Foundation’s vision, HSOs could be deemed criminal organizations, and their actions treated as part of a larger criminal conspiracy. Even if such prosecutions ultimately fail, the targeted groups might have to spend ruinous sums on legal defense.
Though Project Esther voices support for academic freedom, it calls for undermining and revoking the credentials of professors who have criticized Israel. The report does not say what credentials would be revoked or how this would be done, but it references the Canary Mission, an organization known for its blacklist of academics and activists critical of Israel. This aspect of Project Esther’s tactics is already being implemented with the Trump administration’s revocation of visas from foreign students involved in pro-Palestinian protests.
Antisemitism is a real problem, and the Heritage Foundation could have provided an important service by writing a fair-minded report that demonstrated respect for civil liberties. It has instead given us a dangerously loose classification of enemies and a playbook for state suppression of political speech that targets the Heritage Foundation’s political opponents as much as it does real antisemites.
Project Esther will do more to undermine freedom of speech than it will to address antisemitism. We should demand better from the organization whose researchers and policy wonks have a direct line to the Oval Office.
Andrew Kordik is a history teacher in Valley Center, CA, and a recipient of the Above & Beyond Outstanding Teacher of America award.