How Texas and Trump Are Criminalizing Solidarity
The Heritage Foundation wrote the plan. Trump is enforcing it.
In 2017, Texas passed a law that forced businesses to choose between landing a government contract and giving up their right to boycott Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.
To work with the state, companies had to sign a pledge promising not to participate in or support any boycott of Israel. No contract unless you complied. The message was clear: align with state-approved foreign policy or lose access to public funding.
The law was authored by Rep. Phil King, championed by Sen. Brandon Creighton, signed by Governor Greg Abbott, and defended in court by Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Project Esther: The Playbook for Criminalizing Dissent
In 2024, the Heritage Foundation released Project Esther, a sweeping policy blueprint to suppress pro-Palestinian activism in the United States. It doesn’t create new laws instead, it reinterprets existing ones to make political speech punishable under federal code. The goal is to transform dissent into criminal liability.
At the heart of Project Esther is a deliberate redefinition of antisemitism. The plan reframes criticism of Israel, opposition to Zionism, and support for Palestinian rights as inherently antisemitic, and therefore dangerous, hate-based, and potentially criminal. The redefinition is the gateway. Once this new framing is accepted, a wide range of lawful activities protests, petitions, campus events, online posts, can be treated as national security threats.
From there, Project Esther lays out how to enforce that crackdown using federal statutes:
Label activists as unregistered foreign agents under FARA, carrying up to five years in prison.
Charge coalitions with racketeering and conspiracy under RICO, with penalties up to 20 years.
Treat basic organizing as material support for terrorism under counterterrorism laws.
Use immigration law to deport non-citizen students and activists for protest involvement.
Defund nonprofits and universities, revoke tax-exempt status, and open civil lawsuits to choke off dissent financially.
None of this is theoretical.
Trump Is Making It Real
Project Esther is not a formal law, but its ideas are already being put into practice. Since Trump returned to office in early 2025, at least half of the project’s recommendations have been implemented in some form:
Federal agencies are targeting universities accused of hosting pro-Palestinian speech, threatening to cut funding.
ICE is monitoring and detaining international students linked to protests.
Government watchdogs have been instructed to investigate nonprofits under foreign agent and terrorism statutes.
Executive agencies are coordinating with right-wing media to purge “antisemitic” content from public platforms where antisemitism now means any expression of Palestinian solidarity.
This is the Heritage Foundation’s plan, carried out by the executive branch not as law, but as policy by decree.
Trump doesn’t need Congress to pass Project Esther. He just needs the right appointees to enforce it, the right prosecutors to charge it, and enough fear to make it stick.
Why They’re Doing This
The Heritage Foundation and its allies aren’t trying to protect Jewish people from hate. They’re using the charge of antisemitism as a political weapon to silence opposition. This has nothing to do with fighting bigotry and everything to do with controlling the narrative around U.S. foreign policy, war, and domestic resistance.
The people behind this know exactly what they’re doing. By equating pro-Palestinian activism with terrorism, they gain sweeping authority to surveil, punish, and blacklist dissent. And with the trajectory this administration is on, it’s obvious this is just a test case.
Ask yourself: why was Luigi Mandioni prosecuted as a terrorist, while the man who assassinated Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman faces only two charges of murder?
If they succeed in stifling free speech about Palestine, they won’t stop there. Project Esther is part of a larger authoritarian project: to centralize executive power, erode protest rights, and redefine who gets to speak in America. Anti-war movements, anti-corporate campaigns, racial justice organizing, climate resistance, labor struggles… anything that challenges the status quo will be next. Project Esther is just the door. What follows is a crackdown on every form of dissent they fear.
This Is Not the Country We Were Promised
The people driving this agenda want you to believe they’re the defenders of American values. They wrap their policies in flags, call themselves patriots, and talk about restoring the Constitution.
But there is nothing patriotic about threatening students with deportation for protesting war crimes. There is nothing constitutional about criminalizing political speech with laws meant for gangsters and terrorists.
The Founders, flawed as they were, understood the danger of concentrated power. They wrote protections for speech, assembly, and dissent because they knew governments tend toward repression. James Madison warned of factions using government for private ends (hello, lobbyists and corporate interest I’m looking at you). Jefferson argued that protest was essential to liberty. They didn’t get everything right, but they built tools to challenge abuse. And they made it clear: a free society can’t function when people are afraid to speak.
What we’re seeing now is the opposite of that vision. It’s a state aligning itself with private interests, foreign agendas, and religious ideology to suppress its own people. That’s not democracy. That’s fascism.
We Do Not Back Down
The only thing that has ever stopped government oppression is mass dissent. People organizing, refusing, exposing, and pushing back together, publicly and persistently. And that is what we must do now.
Build alliances. Refuse to be divided. They want us isolated so we’re easier to erase. Make that impossible.
Educate. Expose how the definition of antisemitism is being manipulated to criminalize resistance. Show that this isn’t about hate, it’s about power. And name who benefits.
Defend your rights. Lawyers are already lining up to fight this in court, and they need public backing. So do the students and workers being surveilled, suspended, or threatened. When they come for one person, a hundred more need to show up in response.
Organize campuses. Don’t let administrations hide behind neutrality while purging dissent. Push for protections. Pass resolutions. Bring unions and senates and student governments into the fight.
Flood the platforms. Social media, podcasts, teach-ins, rallies. Break the narrative. If they control the institutions, we take the streets, the feeds, and the mic.
This isn’t a time for fear. It’s a time for strategy, courage, and refusal.
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