An image from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 video about “Left wing code words.” Photo: YouTube screenshot
The investigative journalism website ProPublica has published a report detailing leaked training videos from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for eroding federal agencies and civil rights under a second Donald Trump presidency. One particular video shows the Heritage Foundation’s obsession with eliminating “left-wing code words” from the speech of potential political appointees.
“The noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology should be excised from curriculum in every single public school in this country,” said Katie Sullivan, former acting assistant attorney general under Trump, in a Project 2025 video entitled, “Hidden Meanings: The Monsters in the Attic.”
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The video primarily focuses on terms used to discuss gender and climate change.
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In it, two participants—Sullivan and Bethany Kozma, conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development under Trump—compare progressive language about gender-affirming care to the rhetoric of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Sullivan and Kozma complain of “weaponized language against the American people” and claim that language is a “powerful and often controlling tool.” They offer no evidence to support their claims.
They advocate for potential political appointees to vet every single word that they say publicly to ensure that it aligns with Project 2025’s agenda and cannot be misconstrued against them. This includes a refusal to use the terms “gender,” “cisgender,” “imperialism,” or pronouns, which Sullivan says “are quite a mouthful, and it’s one America needs to spit out before we choke on it.”
They give the words used a great deal of power, claiming that they influence people on a psychological, subconscious level. This mirrors the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics, which states that words and the language we use can completely change how people view the world around them. The general consensus in linguistics and psychology is that this is mostly untrue—any effects language has on how we think are going to be largely subtle and confined to very specific areas, and are not sweeping like this video claims.
The videos also reveal another fact often lost in popular discussions of Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation is not just making policy recommendations for Trump if he wins the 2024 presidential election—it is actively training prospective conservative policymakers so they can serve in Trump’s administration on day one if he’s re-elected.
These videos provide detailed instructions on what these appointees and staffers should believe and how they should act, including having a strict allegiance to the Heritage Foundation’s policy stances—including its opposition to abortion policies and regulating fossil fuel companies to fight climate change—with repercussions for those who refuse to comply.
Project 2025 is a 900-page plan to institute far-right policies and massively change the federal governmental if Trump becomes president once again. The sweeping plan covers every aspect of policy, ranging from immigration and the environment to taxation and LGBTQ+ issues. The plan has been often criticized for its alleged authoritarian approach to governance.
Trump has repeatedly denied association with Project 2025. However, he has previously alluded to it in a 2022 speech, and his vice president pick, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), authored a foreword for its lead architect, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. Additionally, 29 of the 36 speakers in the Project 2025 training videos were previously members of the Trump administration.
ProPublica reports that the individuals pictured within these videos have declined to comment publicly on them.
