The Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump 2.0, announced its new Legal Action Center July 8. In its first case, the center will help conservative Christian groups defend a Colorado school district that enacted a book ban and was sued by the ACLU.
In fall 2024, the board of the Elizabeth School District, located 50 miles east of Colorado Springs, banned 19 books, most on LGBTQ themes and race. The district restricted 100 titles on a “Sensitive Book” list, including George Orwell’s 1984, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and books on the Holocaust.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado sued the district in December 2024 on behalf of students and a local NAACP chapter, claiming the book policies are “politically motivated censorship” that limit student freedoms.
The district claimed its own freedom, saying its “curation decisions are government speech immune from First Amendment scrutiny.”
A judge ruled in March 2025 that the books must remain on school library shelves as the legal battle plays out.
Jeff Hunt
Heritage’s work on the case was announced July 20 by conservative talk radio host Jeff Hunt, who is half of a Colorado GOP power couple. His wife, Nicole, is an attorney who was elected to the Elizabeth School District board last year after campaigning on “parental rights.” She works for Focus on the Family and interned with Heritage.
The couple live on a ranch in rural Elizabeth. Their four children do not attend school in the Elizabeth School District but attend a charter school in the next county. Nicole also serves on the Elbert County Planning Commission and Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee, where she fights against affordable housing in the county.
Legal costs from the case have contributed to the current “financial crisis” and layoffs for the school district, which serves about 2,500 students. The previous superintendent was forced out and replaced.
Jeff Hunt, who formerly led the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University, cohosted a June Freedom Festival event featuring convicted — and recently released — felon Tina Peters and other “election integrity champions” who say the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Hunt uses his radio show to promote the book ban case and raise funds for the district’s legal fees. He said the legal support by Heritage was part of “a major legal partnership between two national conservative organizations to support a Colorado case that could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court — and affect every public school in America!” reported The Parker Chronicle.
Heritage confirmed it was joining the case July 21. Jeff Hunt claimed conservative legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom also is joining the case, but ADF has not confirmed that.
The district claims the help from out-of-state conservative legal groups will help safeguard “local control” from an out-of-state liberal legal group that could “take away local control” and “start dictating what school boards can do.”
Nicole Hunt
The Elizabeth School District board also quit doing book fairs with Scholastic Book Fairs and started working with SkyTree Book Fairs, which is connected to Kirk Cameron’s Brave Books, a “Christian publishing company that makes books for kids that reinforce biblically based, foundational values,” reported Colorado Community Media.
School board meetings in conservative Elizabeth were “calm and business-like” before a 2021 election brought a board focused on divisive ideological and religious issues. Such takeovers were inspired by Transform Colorado, Andrew Wommack’s campaign to replace “groomers” and “pedophiles” on school boards with “godly” members and replace transgender ideology with “biblical values.”
In recent years, board meetings have devolved into debates about Critical Race Theory, which Focus on the Family claims promotes “lies perpetuated by spiritual darkness” and “wokeness.”
In a 2024 article for Focus on the Family, Nicole Hunt warned parents to be on the lookout for signs their kids had been “victimized by trans ideology.” Among the red flags for parents to monitor closely were artistic interests, interest in anime, participating in video game chats, unrestricted use of a smartphone, unmonitored access to the internet, reading Warrior Cat, reading Wings of Fire, and interest in any kind of anthropomorphic art — which is animals with human-like qualities.
Her campaign for school board was controversial. Her campaign banners were vandalized, some with Nazi symbols. She claimed the attacks were in response to her “standing for biblical truth and a Christian worldview.”
The ACLU cited the 19 books in the case, and one later addition:
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
- The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
- Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson
- #Pride: Championing LGBTQ Rights by Rebecca Felix
- It’s Your World — If You Don’t Like It, Change It by Mikki Halpin
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
- Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
- Looking for Alaska by John Green
- Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
- Crank by Ellen Hopkins
- Glass by Ellen Hopkins
- Fallout by Ellen Hopkins
- Identical by Ellen Hopkins
- Burned by Ellen Hopkins
- Smoke by Ellen Hopkins
- Melissa by Alex Gino
- Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
- Redwood and Ponytail by K.A. Holt