Project 2025’s co-author is anti-drag, unless his friend is doing it

Mike Howell, director of the Heritage Foundation’s opposition research group and a co-author of the controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration, has been identified in a photo posing with a friend in drag.

The party pic uncovered by The Advocate shows Howell — an unrepentant opponent of LGBTQ+ rights and people, whom he’s called “degenerate perverts” — mugging for the camera with a man dressed as a woman in lipstick, pearls, a blue-tinted wig, and an embroidered pink jacket.

Related:

Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025—the far right’s playbook for a second term

Biden recently condemned the plan, which has deep connections to several former Trump officials

Howell sucks on a pipe and leers at the camera.

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The surprising picture was uncovered on a Yelp account that Howell started years ago under the pseudonym “Fern M.” In it, Howell appraises nightspots popular with conservative colleagues — including a well-known strip club — using the suggestive moniker “the Good Doctor.”

The weird “reviews” feature the now thirtysomething MAGA-bro’s abortive attempt at humor.

“Finally a place in this charming American city where the Good Doctor can enjoy the company of those near his age during the dwindling twilight hours,” Howell wrote of Atlanta gentleman’s club Clermont Lounge. “The dancers move with an exotic and instinctive precision that reminds me of my many travels to the remote villages of the Pacific Islands.”

The drag pic is at odds with Howell’s stated hostility to men dressing as women.

In 2023, Howell conducted an “investigation” in his role as a columnist for the Heritage Foundation’s online mouthpiece The Daily Signal into drag queen story hours, in which he asserts there is a “high degree of transmissibility of transgenderism among young children” attending the events.

In the same story, he describes the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) as a “radical” LGBTQ+ group that promotes the chemical mutilation of minors. While the HRC and every major medical and psychological association support the use of puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy as safe, effective, essential, and reversible treatments for transgender youth, these medications have been used for decades on other children and do not constitute “chemical mutilation.”

Earlier this year, Howell threatened a gay furry hacker group in a series of unhinged texts after the group hacked the Heritage Foundation in protest of Project 2025. Project 2025 would ban transgender service members in the U.S. military, bar trans athletes from sports competitions, and roll back LGBTQ+ rights and protections across the federal government.

In chat logs released by the gay hackers, Howell called them “degenerate perverts” and warned them, “You cannot hide. Your means are minuscule compared to mine.”

“Are you aware that you won’t be able to wear a furry tiger costume when you’re getting pounded in the a** in the federal prison I put you in next year?” he asked the group’s leaders.

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