This week in Project 2025
For Media Matters’ complete coverage of Project 2025, please visit this section of our website.
- Project 2025 proposes an extreme anti-worker agenda that would severely curtail unions’ ability to collectively bargain on behalf of their members and reverse gains organized labor has made in recent years.
- Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts agreed with Daily Wire host Michael Knowles that politics “is the medium” for achieving “supernatural ends.”
- Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller is attempting to distance himself and the organization he founded, America First Legal, from Project 2025.
- After airing footage of Vice President Kamala Harris criticizing Project 2025, Fox News rushed to distance Trump and Vance from it.
- A Project 2025 contributor is pushing tariff policies that would reignite inflation. Press coverage of his Republican National Convention speech didn’t mention it.
New reporting from ProPublica and Documented revealed that Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, praised far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones as a truth-teller during a closed-door meeting with the Project 2025 partner organization Teneo Network in 2021.
In a speech to the network, Vance said that he got backlash when he said that Jones “is a better source of information than Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC gal,” which he described as a “plainly obvious observation.” He went on to add that “the most important truths often come from people who are crazy 60 percent of the time but they’re right 40 percent of the time.”
The Teneo Network is a right-wing networking group spearheaded by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo. Vance joined the group six years ago, and it’s one of over 100 conservative partner organizations included on the Heritage Foundation’s advisory board for Project 2025, an extreme right-wing initiative to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration.
Meanwhile, on his July 16 show, Jones said he was “in a meeting with J.D. Vance a month ago,” calling him “a great guy” and adding that “he’s defended me when I was being censored.”
Donald Trump reportedly reframed the Republican National Convention on the fly around the theme of “unity” after a shooter targeted him during a rally a few days previously. But many of the featured RNC speakers, including Trump himself, have a history of encouraging political violence or downplaying it when it happens to Democrats.
Media outlets that covered the RNC should not buy the MAGA narrative that messaging has “softened” or that there is any sort of “unity” pivot.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who was given a prime-time speaking slot before Trump’s speech, has a long history of encouraging conspiracy theories that reportedly inspired multiple mass shootings throughout the country. He was also a primary validator of the lies that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Other speakers who have validated political violence include Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I invite you to read this thorough piece detailing the history many RNC speakers have of calling for and downplaying political violence.
Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13, right-wing media figures and social media users have spread baseless conspiracy theories and claims about the shooting.
- Far-right figures spread a 4chan hoax that there was a stand-down order before the shooting.
- QAnon figures revived a baseless conspiracy theory that Alex Soros had threatened Trump, apparently suggesting it was connected to the shooting.
- Far-right figures claimed a protester at a 2016 Trump rally was the shooter.
- Far-right figures baselessly suggesting the shooting could be attributed to the “intelligence agencies,” the “deep state,” foreign actors, or “an RNC/Israeli hit job.”
