The Right’s Most Influential Art Historian Helped Shape Project 2025

Project Esther takes its name from the Old Testament queen who saved the Jews from being massacred by her husband, a Persian king. It is one of many efforts complementing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the 922-page blueprint for the Trump administration’s efforts to take complete control of the US government and destroy the parts billionaires don’t want. Project Esther is designed to take over US higher education and target progressive organizations that might support Palestinians and oppose extreme Christian nationalism; it is being run by the art historian Victoria Coates. Though not involving almost any actual Jews, Project Esther’s main tactic is accusing institutions, faculty, and students of anti-Semitism, and has described broad range of critics of Israel as “effectively a terrorist support network.” Here, the biblical Esther doubles as an end-times role model for ruling class conservatives whom God has saved “for a time such as this”—the Second Coming of Donald Trump—when they’re supposed to seize power and cleanse the country of evil, so to speak.

Coates rose to be Deputy National Security Advisor for Middle East and North African Affairs in Trump’s first National Security Council, but was removed after the administration had accused her of being the anonymous author and inconveniently principled Republican mole behind a New York Times op-ed, as well as a whole book critical of Trump. (She denied it; eventually, another appointee, much less well-connected, took the blame.) But Coates’s great claim to fame is as the right’s most influential art historian; she’s been attacking the academy for decades, starting from the inside, as the anonymous blogger behind Elephants in Academia. Her posts began with earnest pleas for space for conservatives within academia, but quickly turned viscous.

John Adams once declared that he must be a soldier so his son could be a banker, so his son could be a poet. Coates’s life story follows a similar arc. Her grandfather co-founded DeWalt Tools, and merged it with AMF: the bowling pin, bicycle wheel, and weapons conglomerate which provided cover in the 1950s for Israel’s nuclear weapons development program, a rather literal manifestation of the Military Industrial Complex. So that her father could work with Warren Buffett’s partner and found an investment management firm that enabled him to, among other things, amass one of the world’s largest private coin collections. So that Coates could study Italian Renaissance art history at Williams College and the University of Pennsylvania; pivot from anonymous mole infiltrating the liberal academy to George W. Bush & Donald Rumsfeld fangirl liveblogging the Global War on Terror; become a researcher for Rumsfeld’s memoirs, and then a security advisor to three descending circles of Republican presidential candidate hell: Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump. She was deep in the 2016 GOP primary cycle when she brought all her messianic, conservative, artistic, historical, and political threads together in one book, David’s Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art (2016).

This book holds a key to Coates’s larger religio-political mission, of which Project Esther is only the latest chapter. Democracy, Coates proposes, is like the sling David used to kill Goliath: an instance of divinely appointed human ingenuity. And since “Democracies have demonstrated a special capacity to inspire extraordinary works of art,” she tries to argue, she identifies ten artworks that “highlight the synergy between liberty and creativity.” Technically, two are buildings, and one of those, the Parthenon, gets counted twice: once when it was built, and once when it was looted. Nevertheless, Coates’ list speeds through Western Civ’s more-or-less democratic governments, from Athens and Rome to Venice and Florence, from France to England and France again, and to the United States, which intervened in two European wars to save the free world twice.

Coates gives democracy credit for the greatness of Phidias’s Parthenon (fifth century BCE) and Michelangelo’s David (1501–4), while conceding that empires regularly delivered bangers, too—like Apollodorus’s Pantheon (118–28 CE), or Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656). In fact she barely explores the connection between art and free society beyond ex post facto symbolism. Instead, she conjures the historical moment of each work’s creation, combining accounts from canonical historians like Livy and Plutarch with hilariously invented dialogue (“Tell me about it! I’ve been to a banquet only once since Ephialtes died,” she imagines Pericles, the greatest orator in Athens, complaining to Phidias.) Each art-producing democracy is linked into a growing chain of foreordained liberty that culminates, of course, in the birth of a nation—the United States of America—that spreads freedom from coast to coast and around the world.

In every case, though, art and democracy’s relationship status is complicated at best. Athenian democracy collapsed soon after the Parthenon was finished. The Medici dynasty, upon returning to power in Florence, promptly co-opted both David and Michelangelo. The Venetian Republic built Saint Mark’s Basilica with wealth from their vast trade networks—and with the relics, gold, porphyry, and ancient bronze sculptures plundered from Constantinople. (“The Sack of Constantinople in 1204 had been a high water mark for Venice,” is an actual sentence Coates wrote.) England’s parliamentary monarchy won the crown as “A New Athens on the Thames” when Lord Elgin stripped the frieze off the Parthenon before the French could get to it. Alfred Bierstadt’s paradisiacal depiction of the Rocky Mountains promoted white America’s manifest destiny to displace the Indigenous societies decorating the wilderness. And Picasso’s Guernica (1937), a visceral protest against fascist violence, hung at MoMA, in exile, while the US spent the Cold War palling around with the dictator who crushed the Spanish Republic, Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

Artworks are introduced as embodiments of freedom then pressed into the service of imperialism, colonialism, and authoritarianism so regularly it starts to feel like Coates’s actual point. Like the so-called free speech activists who stop complaining when the censors come for their political opponents, Coates’s idea of liberty seems ready to accommodate a lot of tyranny to get things done. No one captures that dynamic better than her problematic fave, Jacques-Louis David, that flip-flopping hero of the French Revolution. In early 1789, David had received his first royal commission from Louis XVI to paint Lucius Junius Brutus, a founder of the Roman Republic. By the time he finished it, his neoclassical depiction of Brutus mourning his treasonous sons became an icon of the Revolution that placed the law above everyone, even the king. David’s Death of Marat (1793) turned the fiery propagandist who’d fomented mob violence and revenge in the name of democracy into a serene martyr. After Robespierre’s tyranny, conspiracy, and execution, David transferred his hope for French democracy to Napoleon. Surely the military genius who’d just conquered Rome and ended the Venetian Republic would bring peace back to France: Peace and enough artworks to fill the Louvre. David helped guide Napoleon’s looting of Italy, and not only did he request the seizure of a classical bronze bust believed to be a portrait of Brutus, but he helped Napoleon display it for maximum republican advantage. Then, when Napoleon declared himself emperor, David painted his coronation.

This ancient Roman bronze is a dubious fulcrum on which Coates’s entire narrative shifts. All three modern Western empires she puts forward—France, England, and the US—claim their origins in the republics of Athens and Rome. To tell the story of Lucius Junius Brutus and the founding of the Roman Republic, Coates draws primarily from Livy’s The History of Rome, which was written 500 years later, in the first century BCE, for the purpose of establishing the legitimacy of Octavian as the founder of the Roman Empire. Coates mentions—but does not cite—5th century BCE references to a bronze statue of Brutus. Combining these inferences with her extensive imagined dialogues between actual historical figures in Renaissance Rome, Coates makes it sound like this bronze definitely depicts Brutus without citing real evidence. In fact, there is no trace of the sculpture before it surfaced in the 1550s, and no record of where it was found. Contemporary scholarship suggests the bronze actually dates from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE, making its association with Brutus a 16th century fabulation. Coates elides this, instead presenting the portrait’s naturalistic style as an innovation made possible by the freedoms of the new republic. Like David and Napoleon before her, Coates deploys a symbolically potent artwork to push a political narrative unsupported by facts. It’s fake art historical news.

Coates ends her book with a disturbing lament: “How much easier David’s Sling would have been to write if freedom were the default setting for governance, and if human beings had the sense and the will to guard their achievement of liberty as a prize above all others. But as the many disappointments and setbacks chronicled in these pages attest, the opposite case might be easier to argue.” Indeed, her misdirections, omissions, and speculative fabrications collude to subsume art into authoritarianism with remarkable consistency. Nine years later, here she is, with Project Esther, subsuming even more. Such was the fate of her titular artwork: in 2023, a Florida principal was fired for allowing 6th graders to see pictures of Michelangelo’s David, that supposed symbol of freedom conveniently cropped on Coates’s cover.

Suddenly the bizarre coda of Coates’s introduction snaps into new focus: “In a coincidence, albeit a significant one, this book shares its name with the new generation of Israeli missile defense,” she writes, a reference to the code name of a mid-range missile developed by Raytheon as part of Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system. The missiles were first deployed in 2017. Coates continues: “While there are obvious differences between a missile defense program and a study in art history, both versions of David’s sling demonstrate how liberty inspires human ingenuity. The exceptional works examined here serve to illustrate what is at stake as we safeguard and celebrate freedom in our own time.”

Here Coates attributed human ingenuity to liberty, while earlier in the introduction it was the result of “faith in the divine.” Maybe to Coates, there’s not a difference. Maybe the real David’s sling are the faith-based authoritarian empires we armed and propped up along the way.