Culture War Crusaders
Key Right-Wing Lawyers and Think Tanks
A number of Project 2025 organizations and advisory groups are leading the judicial attack, led by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, where many conservative legal scholars and lawyers cut their teeth, alongside the antigay group Alliance Defending Freedom and the Leonard Leo-led Judicial Crisis Network, among others. They are busy filing lawsuits to create new precedents and overturn rulings such as Roe v. Wade that most people thought were settled.
Other right-wing groups are working with state legislatures, the courts, and GOP officials to strategically advance anti-voting legislation. They include Project 2025 advisory groups Judicial Watch, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, that provides model anti-voting templates for state legislatures. A range of other groups focus on restricting voting rights, including the American Constitutional Rights Union, Foundation for Government Accountability, Lawyers Democracy Fund, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, Restoring Integrity, and Trust in Elections, along with groups pushing anti-democratic efforts including the Election Integrity Network and True the Vote. Scratch other Project 2025 advisory groups and chances are you will find them working with some of these groups, too.
Chief among legal Crusaders are former Trump officials Russell Vought, director of the Center for Renewing America, and Stephen Miller, head of America First Legal (see boxes). Vought authored the chapter on the Executive Branch, which backs giving the president unprecedented powers, and has been heavily involved, by his own admission, in the recruitment and training of Christian loyalists to join the next hoped-for GOP administration under Trump. Miller is the notorious architect of Trump’s draconian immigration plan, which will be resurrected and expand with Project 2025. Recently, Miller removed AFL from the official list of Project 2025 advisory groups, telling reports the media coverage of the extremist plan had become too toxic.
Vought, who served as Budget chief for Trump, remains a personnel-is-policy strategist. Both are also key architects of the still-secret “Fourth Pillar” of Project 2025: its “180-Day Playbook” of detailed instructions for carrying out the rehaul of “the deep state” in the first 6 months of a new administration. Both have led their organizations to file hundreds of legal briefs to advance this agenda as preliminary steps to Project 2025. They are also expected to play key top cabinet roles in a second Trump administration.
Vought is a crusading Christian, aiming to infuse US government policy with biblical precepts; Miller is a border crusader aiming to destroy anything that makes Americans more equal; Rollins and McMahon are crusaders for purging the voter rolls.
Right behind the legal duo are Brooke Rollins and Linda McMahon, also former Trump officials and top women MAGA heavyweights at America First Policy Institute who are helping to fun and lead conservative multipronged efforts to purge voter rolls (see AFPI box). Rollins was a chief Trump domestic policy strategist; McMahon was Administrator for Trump’s Small Business Administration agency. She’s also AFPI’s Board Chair, chair of the sister America First Action Superpac, and former president and CEO of World Wresting Entertainment.
-- Sally O’Driscoll
Christian Crusader: Russell Vought
Center for Renewing America
The Center for Renewing America (CRA), founded by lawyer Russell Vought, an unabashed Chrisian nationalist, proudly so. Vought set his CRA up in 2021 after serving as Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Its mission is “to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending that flow from its people, institutions, and history, where individuals’ enjoyment of freedom is predicated on just laws and healthy communities.” It is focused on waging a modern culture war, defending Christians in particular against gender, liberalism, and ‘wokeness’ – while advancing conservative positions on staples like tax policy, federal regulation, abortion, and welfare.
For Vought, the term crusade is particularly apt: he is associated with militant Christian groups such as New Apostolic Reformation who believe members are personally chosen by God to fight – literally – to bring society back to Christian. They call it a “theology of Christian warfare.” On the CRA website, Vought identifies his crusade as an existential fight for America’s future:
“The threat of radical philosophies, rooted in Marxism, such as critical race theory, is vast, real, and increasingly existential… This framework views all of society through a racialized prism of identity groups, with minorities being the oppressed and white people serving as the oppressors. […] The Center for Renewing America knows that in order to revitalize the American spirit and restore our great nation, this far-left ideology must be defeated….”
CRA has produced a handbook to train parents in how to attack Critical Race Theory. Vought is also virulently opposed to reproductive freedom for women: he successfully blocked funds from Planned Parenthood during his Trump tenure, and supported the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case in a failed Supreme Court case seeking to to ban FDA’s approval of the abortion pill, mifepristone. (SCOTUS judges rejected the case in June 2024, citing a lack of standing).
Looking to November, Vought has parroted his former boss Trump by arguing that the Biden administration is actively subverting elections, an unfounded allegation that lays the groundwork for challenging the election results if Trump loses again – shades of January 6th.
CRA has also filed several complaints and amicus briefs to try to legal impugn Biden and other top Democrats. The attacks allege ethical violations, versus substantive policy ones. Other targets: Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), SCOTUS Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Mark Zukerberg, and groups promoting US civic education and voter access: Center for Tech & Civic Life, National Vote at Home Institute, and Center for Election Innovation & Research. CRA also filed an amicus brief in a January 2024 case where Texas asserted its right to “repel an invasion” across its southern border. CRA has also prepared “hundreds” of Executive Orders, directives, and other instructions for a dreamed-of “Day One” execution of Project 2025. –SO’D
Border Pugilist: Stephen Miller
America First Legal (AFL)
Stephen Miller quickly emerged as one of Enemy No. 2 – after Trump - for hatching Trump’s notorious immigration policies, including family separation and locking children up in huge cages, the Muslim ban, and ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. A lawyer and key Trump advisor, Miller remains a GOP attack dog, and champions Project 2025’s Christian Nationalist agenda -- despite being Jewish. In 2022, America First Legal received about $27 million from the Bradley Fund, which has board members linked to militant Catholic Opus Dei.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center article, “In response to seeing photos of children being separated from their parents at the US border with Mexico as a result of the zero-tolerance policy, an external White House adviser, in a Vanity Fair report, said, “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border.”
American First Legal states that its mission is “fighting back against lawless executive actions” – which is richly ironic because Miller is a key legal architect with Vought of Project 2025’s still-secret “180-Day Playbook” that will test the limits of the law – an open goal.
The SPLC labels Miller an extremist who goes after “woke corporations, intent on overturning DEI programs and policies. The AFL’s track record reflects culture-war issues Miller most cares about: dismantling DEI policies (because he claims they discriminate against white men); censoring books in schools that mention LGBTQIA+ issues; and denying transgender and nonbinary identity. (See our briefings “DEI & CRT” and “Sex and Gender”). In the countdown to the election, the CRA is focusing on election interference, pushing to ensure that undocumented immigrants can’t vote.
Fact Check: The nonpartisan League of Women Voters says “there is absolutely no evidence of widespread non-citizen voting in federal or state elections.”
Notable AFL Lawsuits:
DEI: AFL has filed multiple suits (ongoing) for allegedly discriminating against white men due to “woke” policies. Targets include: Northwestern School of Law, CBS; Expedia; Red Hat (a subsidiary of IBM); Ally Financial; Meta Platforms; and Progressive Insurance. AFL also sued Northern Ohio University for firing a professor who complained about DEI hiring policies. It also sued New York University Law Review for selecting editors based on race and sex. In 2021, it scored a victory against the Dept. of Agriculture for allegedly prioritizing minority applicants for loan forgiveness programs. The same year, it won a case against the Business Association for allegedly prioritizing minority applicants for COVID-19 relief funds.
Anti-LGBTQIA+/anti-trans cases: The AFL has filed several lawsuits challenging LGBTQIA+ and transgender rights and identity, including Texas et. al. v. U.S. (ongoing) against the Biden Administration’s interpretation of Title IX. AFL says the administration is “attempting to redefine ‘sex’ to encompass `gender identity.’ This means that in order to receive federal funding, schools must allow men pretending to be women [emphasis added] to enter women-only spaces, such as bathrooms and locker rooms.” In 2023, AFL won a religious waiver case (Braidwood v. EEOC) that allowed employers to require employees to use bathrooms based on biological sex assigned at birth. Judge Jerry E. Smith of the Fifth Circuit, a court known for conservative judicial advocacy, made the ruling.
AFL also filed a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) (ongoing) request to Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Rachel Levine, who is transgender, demanding information about gender-affirming medical care, which AFL calls “advancing experimental transgender medical procedures on children.” The lawsuit refers to Levine as “‘Rachel’ Levine,” – a refuse to acknowledge Levin’s identity as a transwoman. Other AFL lawsuits seek to defend a Catholic school right to instruct students to not use a person’s preferred pronouns, and “parental rights” cases that accuse school districts of “hiding” students’ gender transitions from parents and a case challenging a child’s access to gender-affirming care. AFL’s cases closely mirror Project 2025 culture war goals. -- SO’D.
The Court Whisperer
Leonard Leo’s Dark Money Influence
“After decades of influence peddling, Leonard Leo is intimately involved in nearly every major decision coming out of this Supreme Court. Leo’s manipulation of the of the judiciary has led to a systematic roll-back of rights, a full-blown corruption crisis, and ultimately, a rapid decline in public trust in our Court.” – Accountable US
Myriad media exposes have documented Leonard Leo’s billion-dollar donations to conservative organizations – a complex web of dark money and personal connections, including among radical Catholics behind Project 2025. (see our Special Report, Follow the Dark Money). Leo is widely credited with leveraging donations to hand-pick the six conservative justices who now sit on the Supreme Court – including names he reportedly handed Donald Trump to replace Justice Alito when he suddenly died. Leo continues to use money to influence the next generation of conservative lawyers who promote a stream of radical arguments.
For example, he’s made major donations to several law schools, including the newly renamed Antonin Scalia School at George Mason University. He gave $1 million for an endowed chair for Professor Josh Blackman at South Texas College of Law. As The Intercept noted, Blackman contributed to Project 2025 and “argued […] that former President Donald Trump could not be disqualified from this year’s ballot over his role in the January 6 insurrection based on the original meaning of the word ‘officer’ in the Constitution. In March, the Supreme Court ruled for Trump without addressing Blackman’s argument.” – SO’D
The ‘other’ Project 2025
AFPI’s “Biblical Mandate”
American First Policy Institute, a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, has spent the last three years preparing a policy plan that’s even more specific that Project 2025 – also ready for “Day One” implementation. Led by Brooke Rollins and Linda McMahon, AFPI’s mission is “to advance policies that put the American people first. Their stated guiding principles are “liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities in all we do.” Rather than filing lawsuits, AFPI financially supports a number of initiatives, including “election integrity” efforts. That calls for putting political partisans in charge on precinct committees that decide which votes are legitimate.
In July, when Trump began loudly disavowing any knowledge of Project 2025, conservative attention focused on the disavowing AFPI’s alternate policy mandate: Biblical Foundations: Ten Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God. It is produced by an apostle of the New Apostolic Reformation movement, and Trump’s ‘spiritual advisor,’ Paula White-Cain and her team. The AFPI booklet is an undisguised call for Christian nationalism that promotes its belief that the US can only be a Judeo-Christian society, led by Christians, with the Bible as the foundation of all law and policy. States the AFPI mandate:
“The Church in the U.S. must play a significant role in standing for the values and freedoms that have made America the most prosperous nation on Earth… America was founded as a self-governing nation on biblical principles. The Ten Commandments and Christian teachings have been the foundation that created the American legal system.”
Compared to Project 2025’s 920 pages, 4-pillar opus, the AFPI booklet is a slimmer volume covering its ten “pillars” or major ideas, proposing useful Christian language to link policy, law, and the Bible when discussing major policy ideas. Each section includes a selection of Bible verses and discussion points for pastors to help to persuade the faithful.
Other initiatives: On Election integrity – the MAGA buzzword – AFPI pushes for state legislatures to have the right and responsibility to decide how their states will conduct elections and pushed for restrictive voter ID laws. They’ve also drafted a model Executive Order for governors to take control of voting eligibility processes, while accusing the Biden administration of actively promoting voter registration of non-citizens.
Fact Check: That is no evidence of any meaningful number of non-citizens voting in US elections, according to the League of Women Voters. —S’OD