On Thursday evening, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that the FBI is developing tools to identify transgender suspects and classify them as “nihilistic violent extremists.” Within hours, the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation—the same outfit driving Project 2025’s blueprint now being implemented inside the federal government—released a four-page memo urging the bureau to go even further. Its proposal: formally designate all transgender activism as “Trans Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” a new category of domestic terror threat. It’s important to note that the Heritage Foundation is not itself the federal government, and to our knowledge, its proposals are not yet in place. But the group’s influence is vast, especially in the wake of a Trump administration openly committed to implementing Project 2025. That makes its latest push far more than just a think-tank memo—it’s a roadmap for policy. Here’s what you need to know about the proposal.
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We’ve seen this playbook before. The U.S. government has a long record of turning surveillance tools against civil rights movements. COINTELPRO, the infamous FBI program from 1956 to 1971, targeted Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and countless others in an effort to disrupt the civil rights movement. The same tactics were deployed against Vietnam War protestors and the gay rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s. After 9/11, Muslim communities bore the brunt of an expanded national security state, subjected to dragnet monitoring and infiltration. Now, under this proposal, those same techniques could be repurposed against transgender rights leaders and organizations—casting constitutionally protected advocacy as extremism to be neutralized.