#oversight project

Parker Molloy at The Present Age:

On Tuesday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos sat in the Dirksen Senate Office Building to answer questions about his company’s $83 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s studios, HBO, and HBO Max. The hearing was supposed to be about antitrust. And some of it was! Sen. Mike Lee, the Republican chairing the subcommittee, called the deal “extraordinary in both scale and potential consequence” and pushed Sarandos on whether YouTube really counts as a competitor. Sen. Cory Booker raised concerns about any single company gaining that much control over American entertainment. Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked about subscription pricing. These are real questions about a merger that would reshape the entertainment industry. They deserve a hearing.

But several Republican senators had a different agenda. Sen. Eric Schmitt pulled up a Netflix social media post from June 2020, made in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. He presented it as though Netflix had issued a statement reading “To my white friends, guilt, shame, embarrassment.” In fact, the post promoted a video by Brandon Kyle Goodman, a writer on Big Mouth and co-star of Feel The Beat, that carried that title. Schmitt asked Sarandos what it meant. Sarandos, who said he was unaware of the post, didn’t correct the mischaracterization. Instead, he called it a mistake. “As I said, sir, we have no political agenda,” he told Schmitt. “Posting something like that would be quite political. Right, I would agree. Yes, and I would hope that wouldn’t happen again.” The CEO of Netflix, under pressure from a senator, publicly disavowed his own company’s social media activity from six years earlier. The post in question was a statement of solidarity with Black Americans during a period of nationwide protests against police violence. Sarandos called it a mistake and promised it wouldn’t happen again.

Schmitt wasn’t done. He accused Netflix of “promoting DEI and wokeness,” cited examples of what he called “race swapping” in Netflix shows, brought up the French film Cuties, and had an aide hold up a headline from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze reading “Netflix Merger Would Create A Woke Media Monster.” He then delivered his closing argument: “Why in the world would we give a seal of approval or a thumbs up to make you the largest behemoth on the planet related to content? It seems as though you have engaged in creating not only a monopoly of content potentially, but the wokest content in the history of the world.”

Sen. Josh Hawley took a similar approach. He asked Sarandos why Netflix content for children “promotes a transgender ideology,” then claimed that “almost half” of Netflix’s children’s programming features “highly controversial, highly sexualized material.” CNN noted that Hawley didn’t provide a source for that statistic. Sarandos called the claim “inaccurate” and said he had no idea where it came from.

The “almost half” figure traces to a December 2025 report from Concerned Women for America, a conservative advocacy organization that opposes LGBTQ rights. CWA claimed that 41% of G-rated and TV-Y7 Netflix shows contain LGBTQ content. Their methodology is opaque: no named researchers, no published classification criteria, no inter-rater reliability testing. When a show like She-Ra and the Princesses of Power gets counted because two characters kiss in the final season, and that gets lumped under “highly sexualized material aimed at children,” you’re looking at a document designed to produce the largest possible number. The point was never to withstand scrutiny. The point was to be cited. And that’s exactly what Hawley did. By the time it landed in the congressional record, it was a statistic attributed to a United States senator.

But Hawley and Schmitt weren’t freelancing. The culture-war attacks at the hearing echoed an anti-Netflix report produced by a conservative outlet originally created by the Heritage Foundation, which had been shared with allies ahead of the Tuesday hearing. Deadline reported that senators Cruz and Schmitt “seemed to be pulling directly from” the report, and that the head of the organization that produced it had pre-written questions for senators to use during the hearing. That report is called Fedflix: Netflix, The Federal Government, and the New Propaganda State. It runs 47 pages. It was produced by the Oversight Project, an investigative arm of the Heritage Foundation (though it became formally independent last year). Its central claim is that Netflix holds “an outsized role in socially engineering millions of Americans into a predisposition to accept preferred leftwing ideological dogma.”

[...] The irony is that Netflix isn't left-wing propaganda. This is the company that has made Dave Chappelle one of the highest-paid comedians in the world, defending his anti-trans specials against internal and external criticism. This is the company that won the bidding war to adapt JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, producing a prestige film about the life story of the man who is now Vice President. Netflix is a platform that hosts content across the political spectrum because that's what a streaming service with hundreds of millions of subscribers does. But the accusation was never meant to be accurate. It was meant to be useful. What to watch for: board changes, political donations, content shifts, new advisory roles for conservative figures. If the Facebook timeline is instructive, these won’t arrive all at once. They’ll come gradually, each one rationalized as a reasonable accommodation, until one day a company that features Heartstopper and Disclosure and Pose has quietly stopped platforming shows like that altogether.

[...]

What “propaganda” means in practice

The language in the Fedflix report is deliberate. The Fedflix report is part of a coordinated rhetorical project that treats the mere existence of LGBTQ people in media as an act of aggression against children. It’s not subtle about this. Section VI is titled “SOCIAL ENGINEERING: LGBTQ+/TRANS IDEOLOGY PUSHED IN CONTENT AIMED AT MINORS.” The framing is identical to what we saw in Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, in the harassment campaigns against drag performers, in the threats that caused Target to pull Pride displays from store entrances and move them to the back.

In 2023, Target had been selling Pride merchandise for a decade. Then came the coordinated backlash: viral posts making false claims about products being marketed to children, threats against employees at stores across the country. Target responded by removing merchandise, shifting displays away from high-traffic areas, and eventually announcing that its 2024 Pride collection would only appear in about half of its stores. The designers who had created that collection were left feeling, as one told the Bay Area Reporter, “angry and betrayed.” Target had asked them for their coming-out stories as part of the creative process. Then, when the pressure campaign arrived, the company folded. This is what corporate capitulation looks like from the inside. A company invites LGBTQ people to participate in something meaningful, then abandons them when a sufficiently loud group decides their existence is controversial.

Netflix sits at a different scale, but the dynamic is the same. Netflix has 177 LGBTQ characters across its streaming service, according to GLAAD’s most recent count. That’s 48% of all LGBTQ characters on the eight major streaming platforms tracked. Heartstopper is concluding with a feature-length film in 2026. The platform has been, by any measure, one of the most significant venues for LGBTQ storytelling in the history of television. The Fedflix report explicitly identifies this as a problem. So do the senators who read from Heritage Foundation talking points during the hearing.

The question is whether Netflix will respond the way Target did. The way Bud Light did after featuring trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a marketing campaign. These companies didn’t face antitrust review. They didn’t have a massive merger hanging in the balance. They capitulated under pressure that was purely reputational. Netflix faces all of that and more.

Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQ Nation:

The Oversight Project, a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation — the right-wing think tank that authored Project 2025, the blueprint for Donald Trump’s second presidency — has asked the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC Chapel Hill) to submit the syllabi and class materials for all 70 of its courses. The project seeks to identify any materials (including LGBTQ+-related ones) that contradict President Trump’s executive orders seeking to defund and persecute institutions that pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The request occurs as the Trump Administration continues to target DEI and pro-Palestinian protests on college and university campuses. Last week, Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon admitted that the administration’s persecution of schools over these issues represents “a monumental victory for conservatives” against “elite campuses” and their “far left-leaning professors” (rather than a victory in the Trump Administration’s ostensible crusade to end discrimination in higher education). Oversight Project President Mike Howell submitted his request to the university on July 2, specifically requesting any data on class materials using the following terms: “gender identity”, “queer”, “sexuality”, “microaggressions”, “implicit bias”, and numerous other terms related to social justice and DEI efforts, Inside Highed Ed reported. Howell’s request said that the university should pay for the administrative costs to pull the data because “Disclosure of these records will contribute significantly to the public’s understanding of university operations and student-facing programming, particularly considering ongoing public concern regarding institutional compliance with” the president’s anti-DEI executive orders.

[...] It’s likely that if The Oversight Project detects any DEI-related keywords in the university’s course materials, it would report the school for investigation to the Department of Education’s (DOE) Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The office has persecuted schools, threatening to revoke millions in federal funding unless they agree to remove all support for DEI initiatives and any policies allowing transgender athletes to compete in campus sports. The OCR claims that DEI and trans-inclusive policies violate federal anti-discrimination laws, but critics say the OCR has merely re-interpreted civil rights law to aid Trump’s campaign against institutes of higher education.

The war on LGBTQ+ inclusion course materials at UNC (and at other colleges as well) is being sponsored by right-wing Heritage spinoff Oversight Project.

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Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

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.

The memo’s first section lays out its definition of “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violence and Extremism,” a term it urges the FBI to adopt as official doctrine. Under its test, anyone who believes violence is justified against opponents of “transgender ideology” would qualify. But the definition doesn’t stop there. It also includes anyone who argues that stripping away transgender rights constitutes violence or an existential threat to transgender people. That second prong is sweeping: by its logic, nearly every transgender rights activist or organization—merely for pointing out the tangible harm that comes from losing rights—would fall under the label of extremist.

[....]

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.

The document takes pains to insist that the proposal would not label “all transgender individuals” as domestic terrorists. Instead, it claims it would only apply when someone is “motivated by an ideology that encourages, promotes, or condones violence” while “inciting unlawful violent action or threat.” But those qualifiers are deliberately elastic. Given the earlier definition of TIVE, even the most basic act of advocacy—like pointing out that anti-trans laws threaten transgender people’s existence—could be construed as “incitement.” The memo itself makes the danger plain: in its list of “typical characteristics” of supposed extremism, it cites a trans flag with the words “protect their right to exist.” [...] It is important to note that the policy has not yet been adopted. As Ken Klippenstein’s reporting makes clear, the FBI is still in the developmental phase, and the Heritage Foundation is still in the advocacy stage—circulating petitions and urging its allies in government to push the proposal forward.

The frightening all-out war on trans people by the GOP is something that needs more attention: The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project released a memo urging the FBI to essentially designate all forms of trans rights advocacy and allyship as “Trans Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” (TIVE), similar to how Russia has laws that label the LGBTQ+ movement as “extremist.”

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Dell Cameron and Andrew Couts at Wired:

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Republican policy apparatus went immediately to work. The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, and its spinoff, the Oversight Project, issued a call for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to designate “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” or TIVE, as a domestic terrorism threat category. The push comes as President Donald Trump just signed an executive order that seeks to mobilize federal law enforcement against vaguely defined domestic terror networks. The Heritage Foundation and Oversight Project document, which defines “transgender ideology” as “a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable," grounds its policy recommendations in a startling claim: “Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology.” When WIRED asked for the data behind this claim, the Oversight Project did not respond; the Heritage Foundation pointed to a tweet from one of its vice presidents, Roger Severino, claiming that “50% of major (non-gang) school shootings since 2015” involve a transgender shooter or trans-related motive. Severino also lays out what appears to be his entire dataset: eight shootings, four of which, he claims, involve “a trans-identifying shooter and/or a likely trans-ideology related motivation.”

The data tell a different story. Since 2015, at least four dozen shootings have taken place on school grounds, according to data from the K-12 School Shooting Database, which has tracked every incident involving a gun on school grounds since 1966. Only three perpetrators in the database—the 2019 shooter at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado and the Covenant School shooter in Nashville in 2023 among them—have been credibly identified in public reporting as transgender or undergoing gender-affirming care. Nashville police concluded the shooter there was not motivated by a clear political or ideological agenda, but prioritized notoriety and infamy. In Colorado, investigators say one of the shooters, a transgender boy, cited bullying and long-standing mental health struggles as motivations.

In an August shooting, a 23-year-old individual opened fire outside Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. The shooter had legally changed their name and written about conflict over gender identity, but there is no public evidence they consistently identified as transgender, making classification uncertain. Police say the attack was fueled by hostility toward Jews, Christians, and minorities, along with a quest for notoriety. Prosecutors added the animus was sweeping, saying the shooter “expressed hate towards almost every group imaginable.”

[...] In other words, Heritage’s “50 percent” claim is not just unsupported, it appears misleading by design, arbitrary in scope, and unscientific at its core. “A methodology that limits the pool of potential observations in this way suggests researchers have a predetermined outcome in mind,” Cravens and Carroll Rivas say. “It's a method that suggests the researchers are committing an error called selecting on the dependent variable—choosing a sample that ensures the study will produce the desired outcome. In combination with the use of ‘trans ideology,’ this suggests that the desired outcome is the further scapegoating and demonization of transgender people.” Heritage reaches its 50 percent figure by shrinking the universe of school shootings to a hand-picked few. Severino first rules out incidents rooted in crime, personal disputes, or workplace grievances. He then defines “major” school shootings as those he says are intended to “send a public message.” Applying those filters, Heritage crops down decades’ worth of incidents into fewer than 10 cases—a sample small enough that even a few shooters with one or two shared traits can be made to look like half. Broader databases, which count school shootings by more consistent criteria, show dozens of incidents each year and make clear that Heritage’s figures rest on a frame built to exaggerate, not measure—to reflect a narrative, not reality.

The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing stink tank responsible for foisting Project 2025 upon the American populace, pumped out bogus cherrypicked stats to serve up a false “trans shooter epidemic” narrative to justify classifying trans people as “extremists”.

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LGBTQ Nation: Rightwing organization twists data to claim that half of mass shooters are transgender

Hafiz Rashid at The New Republic:

Conservatives may pull all of the stops to stop Democrats if the party tries to replace Joe Biden on the November election ticket, according to a memo from a top right-wing think tank. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project began researching the laws for replacing a president in several battleground states about four months ago, putting together a report in April and releasing it before Thursday’s debate disaster, according to NOTUS.

“If the Biden family decides that President Biden will not run for re-election, the mechanisms for replacing him on ballots vary by state,” the memo states. “There is the potential for pre-election litigation in some states that would make the process difficult and perhaps unsuccessful.” When NOTUS reached out to the Oversight Project, its executive director Mike Howell didn’t mince words, saying that they believe replacing Biden would be “extraordinarily difficult,” and that “we would make it extraordinarily difficult.” “We’ve zeroed in on a few states that we think are the best case,” Howell said, refusing to elaborate on which ones. “It all depends on when and how they do it. And then what state that we’re looking at now that matches up to be the right one, going in there and working with the right people.” [...]  If Democrats think that Biden needs to be replaced, they need to decide quickly, and at the very least, they need to call upon their legal soldiers to make sure their decision holds up.

Des enregistrements audio dans lesquels Joe Biden reconnaît avoir conservé des documents classifiés après son départ de la vice-présidence ont été rendus publics par des républicains de la Chambre des représentants. L’ancien président, âgé de 83 ans, s’était longtemps opposé à leur divulgation, mais une bataille judiciaire initiée par l’Oversight Project et des élus républicains a finalement…

I found this on NewsBreak: Pic: Trump shooter’s alleged connection with FBI office exposed: Report