Here he goes again. Again. Trump did it. He’s in it to win it. Or rather ‘win’ it. Again. In 2024. Surprise.
But while Trump’s announcement was barely a surprise, it’s worth keeping in mind that a second Trump presidency really would be full of surprises. This wouldn’t be a boring sequel. Trump would be WAY crazier this time around. He’s had practice. And so has the whole MAGA movement.
But there’s another reason we can fully expect a second Trump term to be absolutely bonkers beyond anything we saw in the first administrations: they’re telling us about their plans to be absolutely bonkers right out of the gate this time and spending tens of millions of dollars setting up a constellation of new right-wing entities to execute this bonkers plan. No fumbling around. They’re going to do a ‘clean sweep’ this time immediately. Cleansing the federal government of non-MAGA loyalists.
It’s not a secret plot to purge the federal government of its career staffers and replace them with partisan hacks. It was a secret when then-President Trump set the plot in motion 13 days before the 2020 election with an executive order. The “Schedule F” executive order plot — centered around a bureaucratic loophole discovered in January of 2019 by an obscure Trump administration official on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council — opened the floodgates. And while the mass firings never actually took place in the final months of the Trump administration, those floodgates remain open along with the plot. That’s the explosive revelation from a pair of massive articles put out by Axios back in July: The Schedule F plot continues. The Trump administration isn’t wasting any time next time. A mass purge of the federal government will be one of the first moves of a second Trump administration. It’s not a secret this time. Quite the stop opposite. The plan has evolved. Schedule F is going to something Trump will be campaigning on during his presumed 2024 run. At least that’s what a number of figures involved with the ongoing plot openly talked about with Axios. Donald Trump is planning on making Schedule F a campaign theme. All part of his war on the Deep State. A war where those who have yet to pass a Trumpian loyalty test are deemed enemies of the Trumpian state.
Yes. there’s a loyalty test component to this plot. It was already implemented by the Trump administration but it sounds like the plan is for a much wider implementation. Basically, the more you indicate your dislike for the Deep State, the likelier you are to get the job. Professional qualifications are beside the point. After the planed mass firings across the federal government there’s going to be a lot of positions to fill an that point. And a lot of loyalty tests to administer. And it will all be portrayed as Trump simply keeping his campaign promises.
Or maybe not Trump’s campaign promises. The Schedule F plot may have started with the Trump administration but it’s not a Trump team project. At least not exclusively. This is a group effort. A ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ group effort. In other words, a Council for National Policy (CNP) effort. As we should expect by this point. And it’s not contingent on Donald Trump’s reelection. Schedule F is the plan for any future Republican administration.
There’s already an army right-wing lawyers working on it. Yes, this army of operatives has a distinctly Trumpian flair. They aren’t hiding that aspect of the Schedule F plot at this point. Trump is planning on campaigning on it after all. But it has a far more CNP-ish flair and that CNP flair means this plot is going to have a lot of momentum behind it whether Trump runs again or not. Schedule F is the right-wing mega-donor’s project too and they’re not going anywhere whether of not Trump loses the primary and/or goes to jail. That CNP hand in the Schedule F plot is what we’re going to be covering in this post.
Oh, and it turns out Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug — one of the central figures in the Dark Enlightenment — has been advocating a plot that starts with a candidate campaigning on their plans to implement the ‘Schedule F’ plot and then proceed with an aggressive purge of leftists and non-loyalists out of the government. He’s pretty confident this will all be quite popular as people are sick of politics and want someone who can get things done. And as we’re going to see, Yarvin’s ideas have been getting eerily ‘respectable’ in conservative circles in recent years. For example, during an interview on a conservative podcast last fall, JD Vance — who was is now a newly elected Senator for Ohio — advocated Trump implement Schedule F and just ignore the courts if they protest. Vance credited Yarvin with the idea. That’s what’s happening in high level conservative circles in the post-insurrection environment. They’re planning like a ‘Jan 6’ of mass federal firings right out of the gate next time. And the Dark Enlightenment’s muse is guiding this.
It’s a large cast of characters. But all working as part of a coordinated effort. And as should be entirely unsurprising by now, this effort is bristling with Council for National Policy (CNP) members and entities. Yep, the same network of theocratic powerbrokers who helped bring us the January 6 Capitol insurrection are working on bringing us the ‘Jan 6’ of mass ideological purges of the federal workforce. But this ‘Jan 6’ will come right at the beginning of the next president’s terms instead of the very end. And pave the way for more insanity to come. And maybe outright fascism. Or a monarchy, if Yarvin gets his way. However it plays out, it’s the death of what’s left of the US’s democratic institutions.
Figures involved in the Schedule F plot include:
* James Sherk: The aspiring ideologue on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council who spent more than a decade working on public policy at the Heritage Foundation, James Sherk was looking for a way to fire career officials he felt were blocking Trump’s agenda back in January of 2019 when he stumbled upon some historical fun facts about federal labor laws that became the kernel of the Schedule F plot. Sherk found his loophole in the Pendleton Act of 1883, a law ironically passed to break the system of political patronage that existed at the time. The act was a historic start to the vision of a professional class of federal bureaucrats who served regardless of administration and developed expertise in the ways of government. Sherk’s loophole was in Section 7511 of Title 5 of US Code, which exempts certain employees from the Pendleton Act’s firing protects. The exempt employees were those “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character by the President for a position that the President has excepted from the competitive service.” Sherk’s ‘aha’ moment was to realize that this language arguably exempted a large number of career federal employees. It was just a matter of declaring them to be working in a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” capacity and therefore exempt from firing privileges. Sherk shared his discovery with the White House Counsel’s Office. Within months the plan was one of the Trump administration’s most closely held secrets.
* John McEntee: Trump’s bodyman before becoming the very MAGA head of Trump’s personnel office who ‘Red-pilled’ the office with fellow Trump loyalists, John McEntee was an obvious choice for a participant in a secret plot to carry out a purge of the federal work force. The Schedule F plot was supposed to be a plan McEntee implemented soon after Trump’s reelection. By late 2020, McEntee and Mark Meadows — reportedly working hand in glove — had org charts for the second term. Along with a ‘fire list’ that could use the claimed powers of the Schedule F plot to carry out. McEntee is reportedly continuing his oversight role on the ongoing plot through the newly formed Personnel Policy Organization (PPO).
* Andrew Kloster: A senior government lawyer previously at the Heritage Foundation, Andrew Kloster was recruited by McEntee to the office of personnel where he worked with McEntee’s deputy, James Bacon, to develop a questionnaire for federal employees. A questionnaire filled with the kind of questions that made clear that loyalty to Trump and the MAGA agenda is the primary qualification. Along with a sense that one had been personally wronged by “the system”. The bigger the chip on their shoulder, the better.
* Kash Patel: As we’ve seen, Kash Patel was a central figure in the plots to keep Trump in office. A central figure who was being actively elevated inside the national security bureaucracy after Trump lost: First, Trump replaces Mark Esper with counterterrorism chief Chris Miller as Defense Secretary on November 9, 2020, days after the election. But it was Trump’s decision to appoint partisan hack Kash Patel as Miller’s Chief of Staff that really raised eyebrows. Then, shortly after Trump’s pardoning of Michael Flynn on November 20, both Flynn and Sidney Powell contacted the then-deputy undersecretary of intelligence Ezra Cohen-Watnick — who had also just been appointed to that position by Trump days after the election — imploring Trump to take extreme measures involving the election. Flynn wanted him to issue orders to have the military seize ballots. But it’s the request made by Powell to Cohen-Watnick shortly after Flynn’s call that is so interesting here: Powell wanted Cohen-Watnick to order some sort of military special forces raid to capture Gina Haspel who had allegedly been injured during a secret mission in Germany to destroy the servers used to steal the election from Trump. It was two week later that Trump literally ordered the replacement of Haspel’s deputy director with Patel, only to be dissuaded at the very last minute, after the order had already been given. And that move to make Patel the acting deputy director of the CIA appears to have been part of a move that could have seen Patel replace Haspel herself as the head of the CIA. To top it all, Kash Patel’s text messages on his government phone during the post-election period around Jan 6 were among the texts messages that ended up lost during the botched phone archiving fiasco that ended up resulting in lost Secret Service texts too. Kash Patel was a key figure in the Trump administration’s plot to steal the election. And as we’re going to see, Patel has been telling conservative audiences to expect a massive Schedule F purge when Trump retakes the White House in 2025. Trump will — as a matter of top priority — go after the national security apparatus, “clean house” in the intelligence community and the State Department, target the “woke generals” at the Defense Department, and remove the top layers of the Justice Department and FBI. According to Axios’s sources, if Patel could survive Senate confirmation, there is a good chance Trump would make him CIA or FBI director. And if not, Patel would likely serve in a senior role in the White House. Patel is now reportedly working with the CRA on it’s ongoing Schedule F work.
* Mark Poaletta: A close family friend of Clarence and Ginni Thomas, Mark Poaletta has been joining Kash Patel in informing conservative audiences about the plans to implement Schedule F as soon as possible.
* Stephen Miller: Trump’s senior advisor, Miller’s AFLF — formed months after he left the Trump administration in 2021 — is reportedly generating lists of potential individuals filled with a “MAGA” fervor who can fill general counsel jobs across the government.
* Jeffrey Clark: Of all the figures involved with the January 6 Capitol insurrection plot, few were more eager than Jeffrey Clark, then a Trump appointee in the Department of Justice. Recall how Clark tried to get his boss fired at the DOJ so he could take their place and block the certification of the electoral vote. He was ready and willing to do it, And is seen as a top contender for Attorney General should Trump win re-election. Clark proved his loyalty and a willingness to do whatever it takes. Clark is reportedly now working with the CRA on its ongoing Schedule F work.
Two other figures who were deeply involved in the plotting leading up to Jan 6 and then jumped over to the CPI were Cleta Mitchell and Mark Meadows. And while they don’t show up in the reporting as being directly involved with ongoing Schedule F plotting, their roles at the CPI suggest they will at least have some sort of behind the scenes role given the CPI’s focus on this project:
* Cleta Mitchell: A Republican lawyer who has long operated as one of the GOP’s long-standing go-to conservative for justifying the worst kind of gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics. Recall how Mitchell was sitting in on the now notorious Jan 2, 2021 phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensburger demanding that they “find” the votes he needed to win the state, resulting in Mitchell’s law firm effectively kicking her out of the firm. Mitchell’s involvement in overturning the 2020 election arguably goes back to August of 2019, when she co-chaired a high-level working group that ended up advocating for radical reading of the constitution that would enable state legislatures to override the popular vote. After the election, Mitchell joined the Conservative Policy Institute (CPI) in March of 2021 to lead the organization’s ‘election integrity’ efforts. And while Mitchell herself is reportedly going to be focused on the CPI’s ‘election integrity’ efforts (making false voter fraud claims), the CPI is playing a central role in the Schedule F efforts and it’s hard to imagine she’s not going to be involved that key CPI focus.
* Mark Meadows: As Donald Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows was operating at the heart of the post-election efforts to overturn the 2020 election inside the Trump White House. Recall how Meadows was charged with contempt of congress back in December of 2021 over his refusal to answer congressional investigators’ questions, citing executive privilege. And while the Department of Justice did ultimately decide to not prosecute Meadows on those contempt charges, that doesn’t mean Meadows isn’t an active figure of interest in the ongoing investigation. In fact, in mid-September, Meadows ended up handing over to the DOJ the same documents he previously gave to the congressional Jan 6 investigation as part of the DOJ’s own subpoena of Meadows. Meadows joined the CPI on January 27, 2021, one week after the dark end of the Trump administration. The CPI was the ‘first refuge of the scoundrel’ in this case.
The plot also involves a number of CNP organizations, some now familiar for their role in the plot to overturn the 2020 election:
* The Conservative Policy Institute (CPI): The Conservative Policy Institute hired CNP-member Cleta Mitchell in March of 2021, where she proceeded to help lead the creation of the next generation of the CNP’s ‘election integrity’ efforts centered around amplifying the now mainstream conservative claims of widespread Democratic voter fraud. The CPI was keeping the Jan 6 torch alight. And as we’re going to see, the CPI is keeping the Schedule F torch alight too. It is deeply involved with Schedule F project. And much like how the CPI spawned Mitchell’s ‘Election Integrity Network’ to execute those ‘election integrity’ efforts, we find the CPI ultimately spawned in 2021 many of the other entities involved with Schedule F too. Specifically, the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the America First Legal Foundation (AFLF), and American Moment. 2021 was also the year Trump himself blessed the CPI in a fundraising letter as “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” The CPI’s fundraising exploded to $20 million with large contributions from the conservative mega-donor networks.
* The Center for Renewing America (CRA): Founded by Trump Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russ Vought — but really one of the CPI’s many spinoffs — the Center for Renewing America (CRA) appears to be dedicated to waging culture wars. But the CRA has another major project: Schedule F. It’s no surprise. As Trump’s final OMB director, Vought was the one agency head to put Schedule F into effect in the waning months of the Trump administration. The mass firings never materialized, but only because there wasn’t a second Trump administration. Vought proposed reassigning 88% of the agency workforce as Schedule F employees. Note that Russ Vought’s Wife, Mary Vought, shows up on the leaked CNP member list as an ‘assumed member’. So whether or not she’s actually a member, she apparently works so closely with the CNP that everyone just assumes she’s one. Other CRA senior fellows involved with the Schedule F efforts include Jeffrey Clark, Kash Patel, Ken Cuccinelli and Mark Paoletta. Jeffrey Clark landed a position at the CRA after leaving the Trump administration and is working on Schedule F efforts.
* The America First Policy Institute (AFPI): Another “America First” branded Trumpian entity, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) is already involved with the GOP’s various ‘election integrity’ efforts. The AFPI, similarly, has its own Center for Election Integrity chaired by CNP member Kenneth Blackwell. The AFPI is run by Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director Brooke Rollins and is filled with former Trump staffers. Michael Rigas — who ran Trump’s Office of Personnel Management — was chosen to lead AFPI’s 2025 personnel project. Trump’s PAC gave the group $1 million in June 2021.
* The America First Legal Foundation (AFLF): Founded by senior advisor Trump Stephen Miller months after Trump left office (but actually another CPI spinoff), the role the AFLF appears to playing in the Schedule F effort is focused on identifying figures who can fill general counsel jobs across the government. Specifically, general counsels who will aggressively implement Trump’s agenda.
* American Moment: Another CPI spinoff, American Moment was founded by Saurabh Sharma, the 24-year-old former head of the Young Conservatives of Texas. And yes, Sharma is a reported member of the CNP. American Moment is dedicated to the idea of ‘restaffing the government’. Ohio Senator-elect JD Vance serves on its board. Dozens of informal talent scouts teams have been sent out to college campuses — from “certain Ivies with reactionary subcultures” to “normal conservative schools” like Hillsdale College to “religiously affiliated liberal arts schools.” — looking for potential candidates to fill those government slots after the Schedule F mass firings.
* The Personnel Policy Organization (PPO): A ‘nonprofit’ led by John McEntee’s former staff including Troup Hemenway and staffed with other former members of Trump’s OPM under McEntee, the PPO started by John McEntee is reportedly playing a leading role in the vetting of lists of potential hires. It doesn’t sound like the PPO is going to be generating lists of potential hires on its own but instead will be playing a ‘quality control’ role in the vetting of lists generated by other groups working on the Schedule F effort. In other words, John McEntee is still leading the Schedule F efforts but it’s a more indirect leading role now.
* The Heritage Foundation: The long-standing icon of the Conservative ‘establishment’, the Heritage Foundation has moved in a decided ‘America First’ direction in recent years, even more so under the new leadership of CNP-member Kevin Roberts. Recall how Roberts is also a member of the “National Association of Scholars” (NAS) and the CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). Also recall how the NAS and Roberts have been working on the “American Birthright” school curriculum project that is filled with CNP members. Finally, recall how the TPPF was found to be running the “79 Days report” election simulations in the final weeks of the 2020 election in coordination with the Claremont Institute. The Claremont Institute happens to have John Eastman, one of the central figures in developing legal justifications for the events that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Plus, the Heritage Foundation was a “meeting sponsor” of CNP’s 2022 annual conference. CNP-member Kevin Roberts appears to be committed to keeping the Heritage Foundation closely aligned with the Trump agenda. And that includes its ongoing efforts to help fill the staffing lists of whichever Republican administration is next occupying the White House. While the Heritage Foundation’s staffing project isn’t formally part of the ongoing Trump-aligned Schedule F planning efforts, it’s clearly coordinating with the overall effort. Because of course it is. The Heritage Foundation isn’t the type of entity that’s going to pass up the enormous opportunity to influence a mass purging of the federal workforce. As we’re going to see, Andrew Kloster, a senior government lawyer previously at the Heritage Foundation, was a key figure in the Trump White House’s Schedule F planning.
These are just some of the figures involved with a plot that was put into effect and poised to explode had Trump remained in office. He tried to stay in office. Boy did he try. And boy did he have help. Extensive Council for National Policy help. One CNP member after another. The January 6 Capitol insurrection was as much a CNP operation as it was a Trump-world scheme. The Schedule F plot is no different. It’s one Trump world figure after another and one CNP figure after another helping to birth the plot and keep it alive and ready to put into action when the next Republican administration comes into office. It’s that story of an ongoing Trump-world/CNP plot that we’re going to cover in this post. A plot birthed in secret in that Trump administration, partially put into effect in Trump’s final months, and continuing to evolve today in preparation for a Schedule F mass firing blitzkrieg right out of the gates at the beginning of the next Republican administration.
Here’s a quick review of the articles we’re going to be reviewing in this post:
* July 22, 2022: A radical plan for Trump’s second term
The first of Jonathan Swan’s pair of giant Axios exposés on the Schedule F plot, the piece lays out the origins of the plot and the key figures involved. And as makes clear, while the groups behind the Schedule F effort clearly have an “America First” MAGA orientation, this is far from a MAGA-exclusive movement with the CNP’s fingerprints all over it. And that broader conservative movement’s participation in the effort — ongoing participation — underscore how the Schedule F plot isn’t just the plan for the next Trump administration. It’s the plan for the next Republican president, whoever that ends up being. Three groups appear to be leading that ongoing effort: the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). Other groups involved include the Heritage Foundation and Stephen Miller’s AFLF, which will both be involved with the generation of candidate lists, and American Moment, which will be focusing on finding conservative job candidates on campuses across America. Expect the incoming army of loyalists to be a little wet behind the ears. And then there’s John McEntee’s PPO, which will be conducting quality control on those lists. It’s sprawling multi-institution effort but the PPO will ensure it’s not too sprawling.
* July 23, 2022: Trump’s revenge
As Jonathan Swan’s giant follow up piece on the Schedule F plot makes clear, while the ongoing planning around Schedule F is being carried out in a manner that could be put into action for whichever Republican next finds their way into the White House, there’s going to be another dimension to Schedule F’s rollout should that next Republican be Donald Trump. A dimension of seething revenge against Trump’s list of enemies. Which is obviously a very long list. Much revenge is called for. So much revenge. Schedule F is going to need an army of loyal people ready to not just fill posts but also loyal people willing to fire all the current employees in the first place. It was in early 2020, shortly after his impeachment acquittal in the Senate, when Trump made the stunning decision to hire McEntee — his former bodyman who was fired in 2018 by then-chief of staff John Kelly — to lead the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. And serving up revenge against Trump’s institutional enemies, real and perceived, was exactly what Trump hired him to do. As the article also describes, the Schedule F plot was already almost a year old by that point. It was January of 2019 when James Sherk — a former Heritage Foundation ideologue working on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council — found the legal loophole he and many others in the Trump had long been looking for: a bureaucratic loophole that would allow the administration to fire federal career employees. In particular those career employees who refuse to go along with the MAGA agenda, damn the law and regulations. Trump wanted to fill the federal bureaucracy with an army of loyal MAGA diehards and after Sherk provided him with the legal tools he needed to pull it off he picked a favorite bodyman to make it happen. Trump wanted a revenge purge after his impeachment trial and Schedule F was the weapon of choice. Which is exactly what McEntee did, hiring figures like Andrew Kloster who went on to develop a questionnaire to vet government employees for their ‘MAGA’ attitude. Schedule F became a top administration secret before Trump signed it into effect on Oct. 21, 2020, two weeks before the election. It doesn’t sound like many agency heads took Trump’s Schedule F order seriously, with one noteable exception: Russ Vought, who was then the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director before moving on to found the Center for Renewing America (CRA), which is helping to carry on the Schedule F work into 2025. And that’s really the take-home message of this important piece: Schedule F may have started as a Trump revenge plot, but it’s going to be ready for any Republican administration, Trump or not.
* July 10, 2022: Conservative Partnership Institute: The Trump-aligned $19.7M Institution Creating “America First” Political Infrastructure:
An important report by Documented.net covering two major new developments at the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI): 1. An explosion of mega-donor donations to the CPI, including an highly unusual $1 million from Trump’s notoriously stingy Save America PAC. And 2. The large number of MAGA-oriented CPI spinoff groups that have already been created. Eight new groups launched in 2021, including a number of groups involved with the ongoing Schedule F plot. Groups like Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America (CRA), Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation (AFLF), and Saurabh Sharma’s American Moment. The CNP’s CPI was having a banner year, and much of that was in preparation for a big Schedule F surprise in 2025.
* June 24, 2022: How Mark Meadows’ nonprofit benefited from Trump’s ‘Big Ripoff’
This report piece by Facing South puts that $1 million donation to the CPI by Trump’s Save America PAC and the eight new spinoff CPI groups in an important context: The nearly $20 million the CPI brought in in 2021 was fueled by Trump’s personal endorsement in a fundraising letter, in which he said CPI is “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” Trump is personally giving the CPI — a thoroughly CNP-dominated entity — the “American First” patina, and it resulted in a flood of mega-donor cash dedicated to building the infrastructure. Which will presumably be infrastructure dedicated to purging the government and stacking it with loyalists. But also infrastructure like the Election Integrity Institute, one of the CPI’s 2021 spinoffs founded by CNP member — and central Jan 6 figure — Cleta Mitchell. And with both Mitchell and Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — another central figure in the Jan 6 plot — both joining the CPI in early 2021 it’s looking like the CPI is positioned to be a kind of MAGA-mothership for Trump should he run in 2024. A CNP-dominated MAGA-mothership that’s been investing a lot of time and money into getting better at claiming election fraud. But the election fraud is just step 1. Step 2 is a mass purge of the federal bureaucracy that the Trump movement didn’t know how to do in 2017. But they know how they’ll do it now. The ability to foment election denialism is a major piece of the ‘America First infrastructure’ heading into 2025. But implementing that Schedule F federal blitzkrieg on non-loyalists in the federal workforce is the other big new piece of America First infrastructure.
* October 24, 2022: Curtis Yarvin wants American democracy toppled. He has some prominent Republican fans
The US political system was already looking like it was poised for an anti-democratic disaster just two weeks before the recent 2022 US midterms. And then Vox published an interview that makes clear how much more ominous the situation really is. Because as the interview of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug — the godfather of the Dark Enlightenment — reminds us, any plot to purge the federal government of non-MAGA loyalists is really just an opening plot. The revolution will only accelerate at that point. A revolution that Yarvin has spent A LOT of time thinking about. A talking about. And writing about. As we’ve seen, in addition to Yarvin’s role as a kind of ideological fellow traveler of Peter Thiel and an influence on the Seasteading movement, Yarvin is also reportedly close to CNP-member Steve Bannon, creating a backchannel between Yarvin and the Trump White House. Yarvin and Bannon even worked together to turn Brietbart into a mainstreaming vehicle for the ‘Alt Right’. As the piece describes, after the Claremont Institute started publishing Yarvin’s writings in 2019, all of that thinking and writing about how to end democracy started going mainstream. At least mainstream in the kind of elite conservative circles at places like the Claremont Institute where the future of the conservative movement is formulated. Yarvin has fans. Prominent fans including Senator-elect JD Vance, who was one of the two GOP Senate candidates heavily backed by ‘Alt Right’ sugar-daddy — and a growing GOP sugar-daddy — Peter Thiel. Recall how Vance serves on the board of American Moment, one of the CPI spinoff groups involved with the ongoing Schedule F efforts. It turns out Vance is VERY interested Schedule F. Curtis Yarvin-style Schedule F that effectively ends what’s left of the US’s democratic checks and balances. Yes, during a September 2021 appearance on a conservative podcast, Vance started talking about how, should Donald Trump win a second term, he should “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, “replace them with our people,” and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him. Vance then told the audience that he got these ideas from Yarvin. So Vance was basically calling for the full blown implementation of Schedule F, but with the added twist that the courts should just be ignored if they get in the way. Now, given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, it’s not hard to imagine that Trump would find rather tepid resistance from the Supreme Court for much of this plot. But let’s not assuming that the people behind this scheme aren’t planning something so extreme that even a majority of the Supreme Court opposes it. There’s a plan for that scenario. Ignore the courts. That was one of the ideas Vance took from Curtis Yarvin’s plans for implementing a kind of super Schedule F that formally ends democracy altogether. Someone should just declare control over all US institutions, fire all non-loyalists, and just take over. State and local governments — where Democrats will often be in power — should just be dissolved. Just a formal end to democracy in the form of takeover blitzkrieg. Elite media and academic institutions could just be shut down. If the courts get in the way they will be demoted to an advisory status. And to circumvent Congress, Yarvin says the new Caesar can install their allies at the Federal Reserve and fund the government via the Fed. Yarvin is convinced this whole scenario be a popular move. People are just sick of democracy not working and they’re ready for something new. The new dictator could even direct street mobs of supports with things like phone apps. He even suggests someone should run for office on the platform, perhaps as early as 2024. And while Yarvin doesn’t actually refer to Schedule F in the Vox interview, it’s pretty clear that the scenarios he’s talking about would at least start with the aggressive implementation of a Schedule F mass purge across the federal government. The full blown ending of democracy and authoritarian takeover wouldn’t necessarily have to happen after you purge the government of all non-loyalists. But it will be a lot easier.
Those are the five article excerpts we’re going to be looking at in this post.
The Plan to Go ‘Jan 6’ on the Federal Labor Laws
Ok, Let’s start off with Jonathan Swan’s enormous first report detailing the array of institutions and figures who have at this point spent years working on this plan. It’s a remarkable report for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most surprising part is that so many of the figures involved with the ongoing Schedule F scheming are openly talking about their big plans to an Axios reporter at all. They’re so open about their plans that Swan had to break it down into two mammoth reports. This whole Axios series was like a Schedule F coming out party. Or, rather, the Coming Out party: Part One. It was a long party.
And while it’s at clear that the Schedule F plot started in the MAGA world and remains a MAGA project, it’s not just a MAGA effort. As we’re going to see, it’s one CNP figure after another after another, making Schedule F a vehicle for the ongoing fusion of Trumpism with the Republican party’s theocratic power base. When the purge comes it’s going to be a MAGA-CNP group effort:
Axios
Inside Trump ’25A radical plan for Trump’s second term
Jonathan Swan
Jul 22, 2022 — Politics & PolicyFormer President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his “America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios.
The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say.
During his presidency, Trump often complained about what he called “the deep state.”
The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election.
The reporting for this series draws on extensive interviews over a period of more than three months with more than two dozen people close to the former president, and others who have firsthand knowledge of the work underway to prepare for a potential second term. Most spoke on condition of anonymity to describe sensitive planning and avoid Trump’s ire.
*****
As Trump publicly flirts with a 2024 comeback campaign, this planning is quietly flourishing from Mar-a-Lago to Washington — with his blessing but without the knowledge of some people in his orbit.
Trump remains distracted by his obsession with contesting the 2020 election results. But he has endorsed the work of several groups to prime an administration-in-waiting. Personnel and action plans would be executed in the first 100 days of a second term starting on Jan. 20, 2025.
Their work could accelerate controversial policy and enforcement changes, but also enable revenge tours against real or perceived enemies, and potentially insulate the president and allies from investigation or prosecution.
They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.
The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.
These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6–3 Supreme Court.
*****
The centerpiece
Trump signed an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” in October 2020, which established a new employment category for federal employees. It received wide media coverage for a short period, then was largely forgotten in the mayhem and aftermath of Jan. 6 — and quickly was rescinded by President Biden.
Sources close to Trump say that if he were elected to a second term, he would immediately reimpose it.
Tens of thousands of civil servants who serve in roles deemed to have some influence over policy would be reassigned as “Schedule F” employees. Upon reassignment, they would lose their employment protections.
New presidents typically get to replace more than 4,000 so-called “political” appointees to oversee the running of their administrations. But below this rotating layer of political appointees sits a mass of government workers who enjoy strong employment protections — and typically continue their service from one administration to the next, regardless of the president’s party affiliation.
An initial estimate by the Trump official who came up with Schedule F found it could apply to as many as 50,000 federal workers — a fraction of a workforce of more than 2 million, but a segment with a profound role in shaping American life.
Trump, in theory, could fire tens of thousands of career government officials with no recourse for appeals. He could replace them with people he believes are more loyal to him and to his “America First” agenda.
Even if Trump did not deploy Schedule F to this extent, the very fact that such power exists could create a significant chilling effect on government employees.
It would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy. The next president might then move to gut those pro-Trump ranks — and face the question of whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy.
Such pendulum swings and politicization could threaten the continuity and quality of service to taxpayers, the regulatory protections, the checks on executive power, and other aspects of American democracy.
Trump’s allies claim such pendulum swings will not happen because they will not have to fire anything close to 50,000 federal workers to achieve the result, as one source put it, of “behavior change.” Firing a smaller segment of “bad apples” among the career officials at each agency would have the desired chilling effect on others tempted to obstruct Trump’s orders.
They say Schedule F will finally end the “farce” of a nonpartisan civil service that they say has been filled with activist liberals who have been undermining GOP presidents for decades.
Unions and Democrats would be expected to immediately fight a Schedule F order. But Trump’s advisers like their chances in a judicial system now dominated at its highest levels by conservatives.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D‑Va.), who chairs the subcommittee that oversees the federal civil service, is among a small group of lawmakers who never stopped worrying about Schedule F, even after Biden rescinded the order. Connolly has been so alarmed that he attached an amendment to this year’s defense bill to prevent a future president from resurrecting Schedule F. The House passed Connolly’s amendment but Republicans hope to block it in the Senate.
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Machine-in-waiting
No operation of this scale is possible without the machinery to implement it. To that end, Trump has blessed a string of conservative organizations linked to advisers he currently trusts and calls on. Most of these conservative groups host senior figures from the Trump administration on their payroll, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
The names are a mix of familiar and new. They include Jeffrey Clark, the controversial lawyer Trump had wanted to install as attorney general in the end days of his presidency. Clark, who advocated a plan to contest the 2020 election results, is now in the crosshairs of the Jan. 6 committee and the FBI. Clark is working at the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the group founded by Russ Vought, the former head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.
Former Trump administration and transition officials working on personnel, legal or policy projects for a potential 2025 government include names like Vought, Meadows, Stephen Miller, Ed Corrigan, Wesley Denton, Brooke Rollins, James Sherk, Andrew Kloster and Troup Hemenway.
Others, who remain close to Trump and would be in contention for the most senior roles in a second-term administration, include Dan Scavino, John McEntee, Richard Grenell, Kash Patel, Robert O’Brien, David Bernhardt, John Ratcliffe, Peter Navarro and Pam Bondi.
Following splits from some of his past swathe of loyal advisers, Trump has tightened his circle. The Florida-based strategist Susie Wiles is Trump’s top political adviser. She runs his personal office and his political action committee. When he contemplates endorsements, Trump has often attached weight to the views of his former White House political director Brian Jack, pollster Tony Fabrizio, and his son Donald Trump Jr. He often consults another GOP pollster, John McLaughlin. For communications and press inquiries Trump calls on Taylor Budowich and Liz Harrington. Jason Miller remains in the mix.
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The advocacy groups who have effectively become extensions of the Trump infrastructure include the CRA, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).
Other groups — while not formally connected to Trump’s operation — have hired key lieutenants and are effectively serving his ends. The Heritage Foundation, the legacy conservative group, has moved closer to Trump under its new president, Kevin Roberts, and is building links to other parts of the “America First” movement.
Sources who spoke to Axios paint a vivid picture of how the backroom plans are taking shape, starting with a series of interactions in Florida earlier this year, on April 28.
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Trump’s new targets
On that warm spring night in April, an armada of black Escalades drove through the rain from a West Palm Beach hotel to Donald Trump’s Mediterranean-style private club.
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Inside, near the bar past the patio, a balding man with dramatically arched eyebrows was the center of attention at a cocktail table. He was discussing the top-level staffing of the Justice Department if Trump were to regain the presidency in 2025.
With a background as an environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, a veteran of George W. Bush’s administration, was unknown to the public until early 2021. By the end of the Trump administration, he was serving as the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division — although other DOJ leaders paid him little attention. But Trump, desperate to overturn the election, welcomed Clark, the only senior official willing to apply the full weight of the Justice Department to contesting Joe Biden’s victory, into his inner circle.
In February of this year, Clark repeatedly asserted his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination during a deposition with the Jan. 6 committee. And in the early hours of June 22, federal agents with an electronics-sniffing dog in tow arrived at Clark’s Virginia home to execute a search warrant and seize his devices.
But back in April, as Clark circulated at Mar-a-Lago wearing a loose-fitting black suit and blue shirt, any troubles related to the Jan. 6 investigation seemed a world away. Clark sounded optimistic. Half a dozen or so donors and Trump allies surrounded him at the high-top table.
One of the donors asked Clark what he thought would happen with the Justice Department if Trump won the 2024 election. Conveying the air of a deep confidant, Clark responded that he thought Trump had learned his lesson.
In a second term, Clark predicted, Trump would never appoint an attorney general who was not completely on board with his agenda.
There was a buzz around Clark. Given Trump wanted to make him attorney general in the final days of his first term, it is likely that Clark would be a serious contender for the top job in a second term.
By this stage in the evening, more than a hundred people were crammed onto the Mar-a-Lago patio. They were a mix of wealthy political donors and allies of the former president and they had come to see Trump himself bless Russ Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America.
Vought was a policy wonk who became one of Trump’s most trusted officials. Before joining the Trump administration in 2017 as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget — and ultimately going on to run the agency — Vought had a long career in conservative policy circles.
That included a stint as executive director and budget director of the Republican Study Committee — the largest bloc of House conservatives — and as the policy director for the House Republican Conference.
Trump was helping raise money for Vought’s CRA, which has been busily developing many of the policy and administrative plans that would likely form the foundation for a second-term Trump administration.
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In those closed-door sessions, Trump confidants, including former senior administration officials, discussed the mistakes they had made in the first term that would need to be corrected if they regained power.
They agreed it was not just the “deep state” career bureaucrats who needed to be replaced. Often, the former Trump officials said, their biggest problems were with the political people that Trump himself had regrettably appointed. Never again should Trump hire people like his former chief of staff John Kelly, his former defense secretaries, James Mattis and Mark Esper, his CIA director Gina Haspel, and virtually the entire leadership of every iteration of Trump’s Justice Department.
Shortly after noon, Kash Patel entered The Ben’s ballroom. Donors and Trump allies sat classroom-style at long rectangular tables in a room with beautiful views of the Atlantic Ocean.
The group was treated to a conversation between Patel and Mark Paoletta, a former senior Trump administration lawyer with a reputation for finding lateral ways to accomplish Trump’s goals. The Patel-Paoletta panel discussion was titled, “Battling the Deep State.”
Paoletta was a close family friend and prominent public defender of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas. Throughout the Trump administration, Ginni Thomas had taken a strong interest in administration personnel. She complained to White House officials, including Trump himself, that Trump’s people were obstructing “MAGA” officials from being appointed to key roles in the administration.
As Axios previously reported, Ginni Thomas had assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them.
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Patel had enjoyed an extraordinary rise from obscurity to power during the Trump era. Over the course of only a few years, he went from being a little-known Capitol Hill staffer to one of the most powerful figures in the U.S. national security apparatus.
He found favor with Trump by working for Devin Nunes when he played a central role in the GOP’s scrutiny of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Patel was the key author of a memo in which Nunes accused the Justice Department and the FBI of abusing surveillance laws as part of a politically motivated effort to take down Trump.
Some of Nunes’ and Patel’s criticisms of the DOJ’s actions were later validated by an inspector general, and Trump came to view Patel as one of his most loyal agents. He put him on his National Security Council and made him the Pentagon chief of staff.
In one astonishing but ill-fated plan, Trump had wanted to install Patel as either the deputy director of the CIA or the FBI late in his administration. He abandoned this only after vehement opposition and warnings from senior officials including Haspel and former Attorney General Bill Barr, who wrote in his own memoir that he told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that Patel becoming deputy FBI director would happen “over my dead body.”
Never again would Trump acquiesce to such warnings. Patel has only grown closer to the former president since he left office. Over the past year, Patel has displayed enough confidence to leverage his fame as a Trump insider — establishing an online store selling self-branded merchandise with “K$H” baseball caps and “Fight With Kash” zip-up fleeces.
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He also set up the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust to raise money to sue journalists. He recently authored an illustrated children’s book about the Russia investigation in which “King Donald” is a character persecuted by “Hillary Queenton and her shifty knight.” Trump characteristically gave it his imprimatur, declaring he wanted to “put this amazing book in every school in America.”
During that April 28 discussion at The Ben, Patel portrayed the national security establishment in Washington, D.C., as malevolently corrupt. He claimed the intelligence community had deliberately withheld important national security information from Trump.
According to two people in the room, Patel told the audience he had advised Trump to fire senior officials in the Justice Department and he lamented the appointments of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI director Christopher Wray. Paoletta also recounted to the audience instances in which Trump officials refused or slow-walked lawful directives because they disagreed with the former president’s policies.
Patel’s message to the audience was that things would be different next time. A source in the room said later the takeaway from the session was that if Trump took office in 2025, he would target agencies that conservatives have not traditionally viewed as adversarial.
Sources close to the former president said that he will — as a matter of top priority — go after the national security apparatus, “clean house” in the intelligence community and the State Department, target the “woke generals” at the Defense Department, and remove the top layers of the Justice Department and FBI.
A spokesperson for Patel, Erica Knight, did not dispute details from this scene at The Ben in West Palm Beach when Axios reached out for comment.
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Trump saved his kindest words that night for two individuals: Mark Meadows and Russ Vought. He praised their organizations and the important work they were doing.
During the past year, Vought’s group has been developing plans that would benefit from Schedule F. And while the power rests largely on the fear factor to stifle civil service opposition to Trump, sources close to the former president said they still anticipate needing an alternate labor force of unprecedented scale — of perhaps as many as 10,000 vetted personnel — to give them the capacity to quickly replace “obstructionist” government officials with people committed to Trump and his “America First” agenda.
In other words, a new army of political partisans planted throughout the federal bureaucracy.
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The new inner circle
The most important lesson Trump took from his first term relates to who he hires and to whom he listens.
Trump has reduced his circle of advisers and expunged nearly every former aide who refused to embrace his view that the 2020 election was “stolen.”
He spends significant amounts of his time talking to luminaries of the “Stop the Steal” movement, including attorney Boris Epshteyn and the pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell, who has spent at least $25 million of his own money sowing doubts about the 2020 election result.
Daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner are no longer involved in Trump’s political operation. Trump still talks to Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy but their relationship is not what it once was. The former president is no longer in close contact with a variety of former officials and GOP operatives who once had his ear. This group includes former senior adviser Hope Hicks, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and former campaign manager Bill Stepien.
Though Stepien has limited personal contact with Trump these days, he is still a part of Trumpworld. He participates in a weekly call that involves close advisers to the former president including his son, Donald Trump Jr. And Stepien is running the campaigns of several Trump-endorsed candidates.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, however, is in a different category altogether: now labeled enemy.
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Trump has doubled down with a small group he views as loyal and courageous. The group includes his former senior White House officials, Dan Scavino, Stephen Miller and John McEntee. It also includes his fourth chief of staff, Mark Meadows, though their relationship was strained when Meadows recounted in his memoir private details of Trump’s hospitalization with COVID-19.
Trump trusts only a few of his former Cabinet secretaries and senior government officials, sources close to him said. He still talks casually to many others, and is seldom off his phone, but former aides who felt they could occasionally persuade Trump to change course say he is quick to shut down advice he does not want to hear.
He remains fixated on the “stolen” 2020 election. He cannot stop talking about it, no matter how many allies advise him it would serve his political interests to move on. Most have stopped trying.
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Seeking “courage”
In a second term, Trump would install a different cohort at the top than in 2017. He has said what he wants, above all, is people with “courage.”
Under the courage criteria, he has singled out Jeffrey Clark for particular praise. Trump has also praised Patel, who would likely be installed in a senior national security role in a second term, people close to the former president said. If Patel could survive Senate confirmation, there is a good chance Trump would make him CIA or FBI director, these sources said. If not, Patel would likely serve in a senior role in the White House.
People close to the former president said Richard Grenell has better odds than most of being nominated as Trump’s secretary of state. Grenell was one of Trump’s favorite officials at the tail end of his first term. As Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, he declassified copious materials related to the Trump-Russia investigation.
Grenell currently works as an executive and on-air analyst for the pro-Trump television network Newsmax. Grenell told Newsmax earlier this year: “I’m not going to stop until we prosecute [Trump’s former FBI director] Jim Comey.”
Speculation about the futures of these high-profile MAGA personalities obscures the detailed footwork going on in preparation for 2025.
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Crowdsourcing power
One important hub of 2025 preparations is the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), an organization whose nonprofit status under the tax code allows it to conceal its donors’ identities. CPI is a who’s‑who of Trump’s former administration and the “America First” movement.
Founded by former firebrand GOP South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint — the bane of Mitch McConnell’s existence when he served in Congress — CPI has become the hub of the hard right in Washington.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows joined CPI last year. The group’s senior staff includes Edward Corrigan, who worked on the Trump transition team’s personnel operation; Wesley Denton, who served in Trump’s Office of Management and Budget; Rachel Bovard, one of the conservative movement’s sharpest parliamentary tacticians; and attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was a key player in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The group runs its operations out of a brownstone a short walk from the Capitol building and the Supreme Court. They recruit, train and promote ideologically vetted staff for GOP offices on Capitol Hill and the next Republican administration. The ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus meets at CPI headquarters.
CPI has become a fundraising powerhouse over the past few years, raising $19.7 million last year. The group has been buying up D.C. real estate. It leases out Capitol Hill office space to conservative groups it is helping to incubate and has even bought a farm and homestead in eastern Maryland that it uses for training retreats and policy fellowships.
In March, the Federal Election Commission released data showing Trump’s political action committee, “Save America,” had more cash on hand than the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee combined. This is partly because of the strength of Trump’s online fundraising machine. It is also partly because Trump does not like to share his PAC’s money.
It was, therefore, a meaningful act when Trump authorized a $1 million donation to the CPI. This was by far the Trump committee’s largest donation to political allies in the second half of 2021.
CPI will wield substantial influence on the makeup of a potential second-term Trump administration. It has a team working on a database of vetted staff that could be fed immediately to the next GOP presidential nominee’s transition team.
CPI is not, however, spending much time thinking about Cabinet-level appointments. CPI staff know Trump well enough to understand nobody will have much influence over his splashy Cabinet picks. Their focus is on the crucial mass of jobs below.
CPI’s immediate priority is preparing to put its vetted people in new GOP congressional offices at the start of 2023. Over the past five years since CPI’s founding, the group has been adding personnel to a database that now contains thousands of names.
The CPI team is reckoning on Republicans likely winning back the House and possibly the Senate in the November midterms. That would deliver a tremendous staffing opportunity. These anticipated victories could open hundreds of new staff jobs on Capitol Hill next year — from congressional offices to key committees.
CPI’s goal is to have at least 300 fully vetted “America First” staffers to supply GOP congressional offices after the midterms. These new staffers would theoretically gain valuable experience to use on Capitol Hill but also incubate for a Trump administration in 2025.
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Another influential group is Vought’s Center for Renewing America — designed to keep alive and build upon Trump’s “America First” agenda during his exile.
Vought kept a relatively low media profile through much of the Trump administration but by the end Trump trusted him as somebody who would rebuff career officials and find edge-of-the-envelope methods to achieve Trump’s ends.
When Congress blocked Trump from getting the funds he needed to build the southern border wall, Vought and his team at the Office of Management and Budget came up with the idea of redirecting money from the Pentagon budget to build the wall.
In the final week of the Trump administration, Vought met with the former president in the Oval Office and shared with him his plans to start CRA. Trump gave Vought his blessing. CRA’s team now includes Jeffrey Clark and Kash Patel as well as other Trump allies including Mark Paoletta and Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security.
Vought plans to release a series of policy papers, beginning this year, detailing various aspects of their plans to dismantle the “administrative state.”
Vought has other far-reaching intentions. He has told associates it was too onerous in the past for Trump officials to receive security clearances, so he plans to recommend reforms to the security clearance system. He also wants to change the system that determines how government documents become classified.
“We are consciously bringing on the toughest and most courageous fighters with the know-how and credibility to crush the deep state,” Vought told Axios.
America First Legal was launched by Trump’s influential senior adviser Stephen Miller less than three months after Trump left office. Its primary purpose was to file lawsuits to block President Biden’s policies — mirroring a well-funded legal infrastructure on the left.
But Miller has also been doing another job in preparation for 2025 that has not previously been reported. He has been identifying and assembling a list of lawyers who would be ready to fill the key general counsel jobs across government in a second-term Trump administration.
Trump’s close allies are intently focused on the recruitment of lawyers. Trump frequently complained that he did not have the “right” lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office.
He grumbled that they were “weak” — that they always and reflexively told him his demands were illegal and could not be implemented. Trump would occasionally compare his White House lawyers unfavorably to his late New York attorney — the notorious mob lawyer Roy Cohn. Yet he deferred removing them.
Other senior officials, including Miller, believed the federal agencies were clotted with cowardly general counsels too worried about their Washington reputations to risk throwing their support behind Trump’s policies. Instead, the Trump team suspected, these general counsels allowed the career attorneys to steamroll them.
Miller has his eye out for general counsels who will aggressively implement Trump’s orders and skeptically interrogate any career government attorney who tells them their plans are unlawful or cannot be done.
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One model of such a lawyer is Chad Mizelle, who served as the acting general counsel at Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Miller formed a close working partnership with Mizelle and spoke glowingly of him to colleagues. Together they helped execute the most hardline immigration and border security policies in recent history.
In his new role, Miller has been working with Republican state attorneys general and closely watching Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his staff. The lawyers in Paxton’s office are a useful proxy for the type of attorneys Trump would likely recruit to fill a second-term administration.
Paxton has over the past few years filed some of the right’s most aggressive and controversial lawsuits, including a federal suit to overturn elections in battleground states Trump lost. His effort failed when the Supreme Court ruled Texas had no standing to sue. On May 25, the Texas State Bar filed a professional misconduct lawsuit against Paxton related to his efforts to help Trump subvert the 2020 election.
Paxton’s office has been using the legal equivalent of a blitzkrieg in the Biden era — suing fast and often to obstruct Biden’s agenda at multiple points — most frequently immigration, the environment, and COVID-19 measures.
As of July 17, Texas had filed 33 lawsuits against the Biden administration, by far the most lawsuits of all the Republican attorneys general during the Biden administration, according to Paul Nolette, an associate professor of political science at Marquette University who tracks state attorneys general.
A senior member of Paxton’s team, Aaron Reitz, outlined their mentality and strategy on the conservative “Moment of Truth” podcast in November. It is a blueprint for the mindset that would likely pervade a second Trump term.
“Just blitzing in every front where you can,” Reitz said, describing the Texas attorney general’s approach. While he said they do not want to file bad lawsuits against Biden, “the sort of hyper-caution that I think too often Republicans demonstrate, not just in the legal space but political and elsewhere, the time for that is over. We need to understand what time it is and … fight our war accordingly.”
Reitz said what animates himself and Paxton is “an abiding belief that we, as a movement, are at war with the forces that want to destroy the American order, root and branch.”
At the Texas attorney general’s office, “our soldiers are lawyers and our weapons are lawsuits and our tactic is lawfare,” Reitz added.
A large portion of the broader conservative movement infrastructure has also shifted to benefit Trump’s 2025 administration-in-waiting.
Most conservative groups take pains to claim they are neutral between prospective GOP presidential candidates. But these same groups are increasingly hiring people for key roles who are loyal to the former president or who support his “America First” views on trade, immigration and foreign policy.
Subtle shifts inside the vaunted Heritage Foundation provide an instructive example. For decades, Heritage was the conservative movement’s intellectual North Star, playing a significant role in shaping the personnel and policies of GOP presidents dating back to the Reagan administration.
When Trump emerged in 2016 with his “America First” ideology, he tore up the GOP’s playbook, especially on foreign policy and trade. Some inside Heritage at the time recoiled at these apostasies.
During the Trump administration, many conservatives perceived the group as sliding into irrelevance as they were detached from Trump and his movement. Recently though, some former Heritage allies watched in horror when the group broke with GOP hawks and opposed Congress’ $40 billion aid package to Ukraine for its fight against Russia.
Jessica Anderson, head of Heritage’s lobbying operation, released a statement explaining the controversial decision. Its title: “Ukraine Aid Package Puts America Last.”
Heritage is not institutionally tied to Trump. But under its new president, Kevin Roberts, the organization appears to be moving closer than any previous iteration of Heritage in allying itself with the Trumpian “America First” wing of the Republican Party.
Roberts has developed a closer personal relationship with Trump than his predecessor did. Trump even visited Amelia Island in Florida to speak to Heritage’s annual leadership conference in April. In addition to courting Trump, Roberts has also opened his door to the “New Right” — individuals and organizations whose views differ dramatically from many of the Bush era conservative policies Heritage has traditionally supported.
Roberts said in an interview to Axios he plans to spend at least $10 million collaborating with at least 15 conservative groups to build a database of personnel for the next Republican administration. He was careful to say the list is intended to support whoever is the GOP nominee, but he has appointed a former top Trump personnel official, Paul Dans, to run the operation, and a glance down the list of allied organizations shows it is heavy on stalwart Trump allies.
Roberts said these allied groups will be able to edit the personnel document with their own notes — a Wikipedia-like process. Tellingly, the Conservative Partnership Institute has signed onto the Heritage effort.
The Trump-blessed think tank America First Policy Institute did not sign onto the Heritage initiative, preferring instead to promote its standalone personnel project. This, too, will have a strong Trumpian flavor.
AFPI is run by Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director Brooke Rollins. More than half a dozen Trump Cabinet officials are affiliated with AFPI and Trump loyalists fill the group from top to bottom.
Rollins brought in Michael Rigas to lead AFPI’s 2025 personnel project. Rigas ran Trump’s Office of Personnel Management — the federal government’s HR department. AFPI’s official position is that the group is developing their personnel database for whichever Republican wins the nomination. Such is Trump’s appreciation for AFPI that his PAC wired $1 million to the group in June 2021.
Even the billionaire-funded Koch network is playing a friendly behind-the-scenes role. While the Koch network overall has often been at odds with Trump, the network’s anti-interventionist foreign policy aligns neatly with Trump’s “America First” ideology.
In this narrow field of alignment, connections have been forged between Trumpworld and Kochworld, especially via the head of Koch’s foreign policy program, Dan Caldwell.
During the last year of the Trump administration, the Koch network built close ties with Trump’s personnel office. Trump’s final nominee for the ambassador to Afghanistan, Will Ruger, was a Koch candidate. The Koch talent pipeline — on foreign policy if nothing else — would likely get a serious hearing in a second-term Trump administration.
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Startups including American Moment have sprung up to develop lists of thousands of younger “America First” personnel for the next GOP administration. Founded by Saurabh Sharma, the 24-year-old former head of the Young Conservatives of Texas, American Moment is dedicated to the idea of restaffing the government. Trump-endorsed Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance serves on its board.
Sharma said in an interview that he and his team have dozens of informal talent scouts on college campuses — from “certain Ivies with reactionary subcultures” to “normal conservative schools” like Hillsdale College to “religiously affiliated liberal arts schools.”
They have plugged into the younger staff populating hard-right offices on Capitol Hill and seek to attract a steady flow of young ideologues through events and a podcast.
American Moment says it has, so far, around 700 “fully vetted” personnel to potentially serve in the next administration. Sharma’s goal is to have 2,000 to 3,000 “America First” would-be government staffers in his database by the summer of 2024.
By then, the next Republican presidential nominee will be standing up their transition team and looking for staff to occupy not just senior jobs but the junior and mid-level positions American Moment wants to specialize in filling.
Sharma is prescriptive about what gets a person on his list. He wants applicants who want to cut not just illegal but also legal immigration into the United States. He favors people who are protectionist on trade and anti-interventionist on foreign policy. They must be eager to fight the “culture war.” Credentials are almost irrelevant.
“Reagan hired young, he hired ideological, and he hired underqualified,” Sharma said. “That gave him an enormous amount of soft power in the conservative movement for 40 years since, and many of those people are still in charge today.”
In the background, the former staff members of Trump’s final personnel director John McEntee have stayed in touch and are working loosely together across a number of groups in preparation for 2025.
One of these new organizations, “Personnel Policy Organization” or “PPO” — an homage to McEntee’s PPO — is a nonprofit led by McEntee’s former staff including Troup Hemenway. PPO says its mission is to “educate and defend conservative, America First civil servants and their advisors.”
A person familiar with the group’s work told Axios the group is helping to do “quality control” on other groups’ personnel lists and is “developing plans to provide a suite of policies and services to conservative officials and outside advisors to ensure that they are able to stand firm against attacks by the media or left-wing governmental actors, and offensive steps to take against left-wing officials.”
All of this amounts to a giant crowdsourcing effort for 2025.
CPI’s Edward Corrigan worked at Heritage during the 2016 presidential election cycle. After Trump’s surprise victory, he moved into an office at Trump Tower to join the transition team frantically sourcing and vetting personnel.
Heritage had assembled personnel lists starting in 2015, as it does for every election cycle, but Corrigan said the challenge for Heritage back then was that no one knew which candidate they were recruiting for.
“Back then most people assumed it was going to be Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, but it ends up being Trump,” Corrigan told Axios in an interview. “And so that creates a challenge because you don’t actually know” what is needed for the person to fit in.
“And so in 2024 if Trump is the nominee,” Corrigan added, “it gives you a huge advantage in that you know the kind of people that Trump’s going to want to pick.”
One uniting theme connects all of these disparate groups: fealty, to Trump himself or his “America First” ideology.
Now, they are functioning as a series of task forces for a possible Trump administration. They are rookeries for former Trump staff. They are breeding grounds for a new wave of right-wing personnel to run the U.S. government.
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“A radical plan for Trump’s second term” by Jonathan Swan; Axios; 07/22/2022
“One uniting theme connects all of these disparate groups: fealty, to Trump himself or his “America First” ideology.”
Yes, one uniting theme connects all of these disparate groups: fealty, to Trump himself or his “America First” ideology. But as we’ve repeatedly seen, that’s not the only recurring theme here. Scratch the surface, and we find the Council for National Policy. In this case, it’s the CNP-affiliated Conservative Partnership Institute that appears to be playing a central role in the scheme. A scheme devised around the “Schedule F”. A scheme the Trump administration was already secretly working on and put into action 13 days before the 2020 election. We don’t need to ask if a Republican administration would be willing to implement a plan this radical. They already did. They just didn’t have enough time to finish:
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The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election....
As Trump publicly flirts with a 2024 comeback campaign, this planning is quietly flourishing from Mar-a-Lago to Washington — with his blessing but without the knowledge of some people in his orbit.
Their work could accelerate controversial policy and enforcement changes, but also enable revenge tours against real or perceived enemies, and potentially insulate the president and allies from investigation or prosecution.
They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.
The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.
These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6–3 Supreme Court.
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And Trump isn’t going to wait until the end of his next term again to implement it. The plan is for an immediate purge of the federal workforce shortly after Trump takes office. Trump or any other Republican administration in 2025 presumably. And a plan to create the kind of precedent that could lead to a mass purging of the federal workforce every time there’s a party switch in the White House:
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Trump signed an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” in October 2020, which established a new employment category for federal employees. It received wide media coverage for a short period, then was largely forgotten in the mayhem and aftermath of Jan. 6 — and quickly was rescinded by President Biden.Sources close to Trump say that if he were elected to a second term, he would immediately reimpose it.
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Even if Trump did not deploy Schedule F to this extent, the very fact that such power exists could create a significant chilling effect on government employees.
It would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy. The next president might then move to gut those pro-Trump ranks — and face the question of whether to replace them with her or his own loyalists, or revert to a traditional bureaucracy.
Such pendulum swings and politicization could threaten the continuity and quality of service to taxpayers, the regulatory protections, the checks on executive power, and other aspects of American democracy.
Trump’s allies claim such pendulum swings will not happen because they will not have to fire anything close to 50,000 federal workers to achieve the result, as one source put it, of “behavior change.” Firing a smaller segment of “bad apples” among the career officials at each agency would have the desired chilling effect on others tempted to obstruct Trump’s orders.
They say Schedule F will finally end the “farce” of a nonpartisan civil service that they say has been filled with activist liberals who have been undermining GOP presidents for decades.
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But while the Schedule F plan was largely a product of the Trump administration at first, it sounds like three conservative groups are now working on that effort: the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). As we’ve seen, the CPI is one of the central players in the GOP’s ‘Election Integrity’ efforts, with members like CNP member Cleta Mitchell. The AFPI, similarly, has its own Center for Election Integrity chaired by CNP member Kenneth Blackwell. Then there’s the CRA, founded by Russ Vought, the former head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. And who do we find newly employed at the CRA? None other than Jeffrey Clark, the DOJ official who literally tried to get his boss fired at the DOJ so he could take their place and block the certification of the electoral vote. So the conservative groups working on continuing the “Schedule F” plans aren’t just deeply intertwined with the CNP. They’re also closely aligned with the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Efforts that have now morphed into a plot to overturn the 2024 election results:
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No operation of this scale is possible without the machinery to implement it. To that end, Trump has blessed a string of conservative organizations linked to advisers he currently trusts and calls on. Most of these conservative groups host senior figures from the Trump administration on their payroll, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows.The names are a mix of familiar and new. They include Jeffrey Clark, the controversial lawyer Trump had wanted to install as attorney general in the end days of his presidency. Clark, who advocated a plan to contest the 2020 election results, is now in the crosshairs of the Jan. 6 committee and the FBI. Clark is working at the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the group founded by Russ Vought, the former head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.
Former Trump administration and transition officials working on personnel, legal or policy projects for a potential 2025 government include names like Vought, Meadows, Stephen Miller, Ed Corrigan, Wesley Denton, Brooke Rollins, James Sherk, Andrew Kloster and Troup Hemenway.
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The advocacy groups who have effectively become extensions of the Trump infrastructure include the CRA, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).
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There’s another important detail to keep in mind when we learn that Jeffrey Clark is a part of this project: as the DOJ official who was willing to go the furthest to keep Trump in office, Clark is now viewed as leading candidate to be Attorney General in any future Trump administration. In other words, should “Schedule F” get put into action in 2025 following a GOP victory, expect the new attorney general to be fully on board with the scheme:
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Sources who spoke to Axios paint a vivid picture of how the backroom plans are taking shape, starting with a series of interactions in Florida earlier this year, on April 28....
Inside, near the bar past the patio, a balding man with dramatically arched eyebrows was the center of attention at a cocktail table. He was discussing the top-level staffing of the Justice Department if Trump were to regain the presidency in 2025.
With a background as an environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, a veteran of George W. Bush’s administration, was unknown to the public until early 2021. By the end of the Trump administration, he was serving as the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division — although other DOJ leaders paid him little attention. But Trump, desperate to overturn the election, welcomed Clark, the only senior official willing to apply the full weight of the Justice Department to contesting Joe Biden’s victory, into his inner circle.
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One of the donors asked Clark what he thought would happen with the Justice Department if Trump won the 2024 election. Conveying the air of a deep confidant, Clark responded that he thought Trump had learned his lesson.
In a second term, Clark predicted, Trump would never appoint an attorney general who was not completely on board with his agenda.
There was a buzz around Clark. Given Trump wanted to make him attorney general in the final days of his first term, it is likely that Clark would be a serious contender for the top job in a second term.
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But CRA’s highly troubling recent hires aren’t limited to Clark. Kash Patel — the partisan hack Trump installed as acting Chief of Staff for then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller after Trump lost the election — is also working at the CRA along with figures like Ken Cuccinelli, who was the acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security during Jan 6. Recall how both Patel and Cuccinnelli were two of the senior Pentagon officials whose texts in the period around Jan 6 have mysteriously gone missing. So the CRA appears to have an abundance of figures who weren’t just Trump administration alums, but were part of the Trump administration during that crucial Jan 6 period. There’s quite of bit of experience on these kinds of election-overturning efforts between the whole group. Interestingly, the CRA also appears to have ambitions on making it easier for government employees to clear security clearances. You have to wonder how much of that is in anticipation of these figures who were directly involved in Jan 6 being blocked from future appointments due to security clearance concerns related to Jan 6:
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In the final week of the Trump administration, Vought met with the former president in the Oval Office and shared with him his plans to start CRA. Trump gave Vought his blessing. CRA’s team now includes Jeffrey Clark and Kash Patel as well as other Trump allies including Mark Paoletta and Ken Cuccinelli, former acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security.Vought plans to release a series of policy papers, beginning this year, detailing various aspects of their plans to dismantle the “administrative state.”
Vought has other far-reaching intentions. He has told associates it was too onerous in the past for Trump officials to receive security clearances, so he plans to recommend reforms to the security clearance system. He also wants to change the system that determines how government documents become classified.
“We are consciously bringing on the toughest and most courageous fighters with the know-how and credibility to crush the deep state,” Vought told Axios.
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In one astonishing but ill-fated plan, Trump had wanted to install Patel as either the deputy director of the CIA or the FBI late in his administration. He abandoned this only after vehement opposition and warnings from senior officials including Haspel and former Attorney General Bill Barr, who wrote in his own memoir that he told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that Patel becoming deputy FBI director would happen “over my dead body.”
Never again would Trump acquiesce to such warnings. Patel has only grown closer to the former president since he left office. Over the past year, Patel has displayed enough confidence to leverage his fame as a Trump insider — establishing an online store selling self-branded merchandise with “K$H” baseball caps and “Fight With Kash” zip-up fleeces.
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And note the affiliations of Mark Paoletta, one of the speakers at that CRA closed-door sessions: he’s a close family friend of Clarence and Ginni Thomas. As we’ve seen, it’s hard to find a figure who was working more feverishly on convincing state legislator to overturn the election results than key CNP operative Ginni Thomas. Paoletta went on to act as the spokesperson for Thomas, asserting to reporters that she played no organizational role at all in that state-level lobbying campaign and that her group’s Dec 8, 2020 invitation to John Eastman to discuss that exact strategy was not an endorsement of the strategy. In other words, Paoletta is so close to the Thomases that he’s acting as their public representative.
Also recall how Ginni Thomas co-founded the Groundswell Group meetings with fellow CNP member Steve Bannon back in 2013 as a competitor to Grover Norquist’s influential ‘Wednesday Morning Meetings’. Groundswell went on to play a major role in making staffing decisions for the Trump White House. So when we read about Paoletta’s involvement in the Schedule F plot, keep in mind his ties to Ginni Thomas and the central role her Groundswell network already played in making staffing decisions for the Trump administration:
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The group was treated to a conversation between Patel and Mark Paoletta, a former senior Trump administration lawyer with a reputation for finding lateral ways to accomplish Trump’s goals. The Patel-Paoletta panel discussion was titled, “Battling the Deep State.”Paoletta was a close family friend and prominent public defender of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas. Throughout the Trump administration, Ginni Thomas had taken a strong interest in administration personnel. She complained to White House officials, including Trump himself, that Trump’s people were obstructing “MAGA” officials from being appointed to key roles in the administration.
As Axios previously reported, Ginni Thomas had assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them.
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The CPI appears to be carrying out a general organizational role like it does on so many other CNP efforts. And that includes hiring key Trump White House figures like Mark Meadows. And in addition to CNP member Cleta Mitchell, we also find CNP members Ed Corrigan as President of the CPI and Rachel A. Bovard as CPI Senior Director of Policy. The CPI is a CNP extension, and its immediate goals include preparing staff lists for the GOP to use in 2023. It’s a reminder that this vast staffing operation isn’t going to have to wait until 2024 to really get up and running:
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One important hub of 2025 preparations is the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), an organization whose nonprofit status under the tax code allows it to conceal its donors’ identities. CPI is a who’s‑who of Trump’s former administration and the “America First” movement.Founded by former firebrand GOP South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint — the bane of Mitch McConnell’s existence when he served in Congress — CPI has become the hub of the hard right in Washington.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows joined CPI last year. The group’s senior staff includes Edward Corrigan, who worked on the Trump transition team’s personnel operation; Wesley Denton, who served in Trump’s Office of Management and Budget; Rachel Bovard, one of the conservative movement’s sharpest parliamentary tacticians; and attorney Cleta Mitchell, who was a key player in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The group runs its operations out of a brownstone a short walk from the Capitol building and the Supreme Court. They recruit, train and promote ideologically vetted staff for GOP offices on Capitol Hill and the next Republican administration. The ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus meets at CPI headquarters.
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CPI’s immediate priority is preparing to put its vetted people in new GOP congressional offices at the start of 2023. Over the past five years since CPI’s founding, the group has been adding personnel to a database that now contains thousands of names.
The CPI team is reckoning on Republicans likely winning back the House and possibly the Senate in the November midterms. That would deliver a tremendous staffing opportunity. These anticipated victories could open hundreds of new staff jobs on Capitol Hill next year — from congressional offices to key committees.
CPI’s goal is to have at least 300 fully vetted “America First” staffers to supply GOP congressional offices after the midterms. These new staffers would theoretically gain valuable experience to use on Capitol Hill but also incubate for a Trump administration in 2025.
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Also note how the CPI is a dark money powerhouse that leases out Capitol Hill office space to conservative groups. It’s the CNP’s incubator organization that exists to create spinoffs right-wing organizations:
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CPI has become a fundraising powerhouse over the past few years, raising $19.7 million last year. The group has been buying up D.C. real estate. It leases out Capitol Hill office space to conservative groups it is helping to incubate and has even bought a farm and homestead in eastern Maryland that it uses for training retreats and policy fellowships.In March, the Federal Election Commission released data showing Trump’s political action committee, “Save America,” had more cash on hand than the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee combined. This is partly because of the strength of Trump’s online fundraising machine. It is also partly because Trump does not like to share his PAC’s money.
It was, therefore, a meaningful act when Trump authorized a $1 million donation to the CPI. This was by far the Trump committee’s largest donation to political allies in the second half of 2021.
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Stephen Miller’s role in this effort appears to be coming up with lists of figures who can fill general counsel jobs across the government. Specifically, general counsels who will aggressively implement Trump’s agenda. That and waging nuisance lawsuits against the Biden administration through his America First Legal group.
And note that the lawyer cited as an example of the kind of person Miller is looking for, Chad Mizelle, was appointed acting general counsel of DHS in February of 2020 and stayed in the job throughout the rest of Trump’s term, including the period leading up to Jan 6. So as the investigation into missing texts and possible plots swirling inside the Pentagon and DHS during that post-election period when figures like Patel and Cuccinelli were ominously appointed to leading positions inside the Pentagon and DHS, keep in mind that Mizelle had been appointed acting general counsel of DHS nine months earlier.
And when we see that Miller is working closely with Ken Paxton in this recruitment efforts, recall how we’ve already seen Paxton playing a supportive role in the legal by key conservative lawyer Jonathan Mitchell to overturn all court-won rights of the 20th and 21st centuries. An effort that was clearly part of a much broader CNP-backed radical legal agenda. Seeing Paxton show up in relation to Miller’s efforts is exactly what we should expect at this point:
America First Legal was launched by Trump’s influential senior adviser Stephen Miller less than three months after Trump left office. Its primary purpose was to file lawsuits to block President Biden’s policies — mirroring a well-funded legal infrastructure on the left.
But Miller has also been doing another job in preparation for 2025 that has not previously been reported. He has been identifying and assembling a list of lawyers who would be ready to fill the key general counsel jobs across government in a second-term Trump administration.
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One model of such a lawyer is Chad Mizelle, who served as the acting general counsel at Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. Miller formed a close working partnership with Mizelle and spoke glowingly of him to colleagues. Together they helped execute the most hardline immigration and border security policies in recent history.
In his new role, Miller has been working with Republican state attorneys general and closely watching Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his staff. The lawyers in Paxton’s office are a useful proxy for the type of attorneys Trump would likely recruit to fill a second-term administration.
Paxton has over the past few years filed some of the right’s most aggressive and controversial lawsuits, including a federal suit to overturn elections in battleground states Trump lost. His effort failed when the Supreme Court ruled Texas had no standing to sue. On May 25, the Texas State Bar filed a professional misconduct lawsuit against Paxton related to his efforts to help Trump subvert the 2020 election.
Paxton’s office has been using the legal equivalent of a blitzkrieg in the Biden era — suing fast and often to obstruct Biden’s agenda at multiple points — most frequently immigration, the environment, and COVID-19 measures.
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Another completely expected addition to this network is the Heritage Foundation. Because of course the Heritage Foundation would be involved with something like this. The Heritage Foundation and CNP are almost like the public/private faces of the same broader There probably isn’t an organization that has more overlap with the CNP than the Heritage Foundation, including its founder Ed Feulner. Also recall how CNP member and CPI chairman Jim DeMint was the President of Heritage from 2013–2016. Also note that the President of the CPI, Ed Corrigan, is also a CNP member in addition to being a former VP for Policy Promotion at the Heritage Foundation. Even Heritage’s new president, Kevin Roberts is a CNP member. Recall how Roberts is also a member of the “National Association of Scholars” (NAS) and the CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). Also recall how the NAS and Roberts have been working on the “American Birthright” school curriculum project that is filled with CNP members. Finally, recall how the TPPF was found to be running the “79 Days report” election simulations in the final weeks of the 2020 election in coordination with the Claremont Institute. The Claremont Institute happens to have John Eastman, one of the central figures in developing legal justifications for the events that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Kevin Roberts has been busy:
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A large portion of the broader conservative movement infrastructure has also shifted to benefit Trump’s 2025 administration-in-waiting....
Heritage is not institutionally tied to Trump. But under its new president, Kevin Roberts, the organization appears to be moving closer than any previous iteration of Heritage in allying itself with the Trumpian “America First” wing of the Republican Party.
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Roberts said in an interview to Axios he plans to spend at least $10 million collaborating with at least 15 conservative groups to build a database of personnel for the next Republican administration. He was careful to say the list is intended to support whoever is the GOP nominee, but he has appointed a former top Trump personnel official, Paul Dans, to run the operation, and a glance down the list of allied organizations shows it is heavy on stalwart Trump allies.
Roberts said these allied groups will be able to edit the personnel document with their own notes — a Wikipedia-like process. Tellingly, the Conservative Partnership Institute has signed onto the Heritage effort.
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CPI’s Edward Corrigan worked at Heritage during the 2016 presidential election cycle. After Trump’s surprise victory, he moved into an office at Trump Tower to join the transition team frantically sourcing and vetting personnel.
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And when we read that Roberts has opened his door to the “New Right”, don’t forget that the “New Right” is just the new term for “Alt Right”, which was a new term for Nazi. “New Right” is just what you call Nazis in polite company. At least polite reactionary company:
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Roberts has developed a closer personal relationship with Trump than his predecessor did. Trump even visited Amelia Island in Florida to speak to Heritage’s annual leadership conference in April. In addition to courting Trump, Roberts has also opened his door to the “New Right” — individuals and organizations whose views differ dramatically from many of the Bush era conservative policies Heritage has traditionally supported.
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Then we get to the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) initiative, which is described as separate from the Heritage Institute’s staffing initiative. And yet, when we look at the people involved with the AFPI we see how small a world this is: Brooke Rollins, Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director, is leading the AFPI. It turns out Roberts succeeded Rollins as the head of the TPPF after Rollins left to join the Trump administration in 2018. Rollins returned to the TPPF in 2021 as a Senior Advisor and member of the Board of Directors. So the heads of the Heritage and the TPPF appear to have a very close ongoing working relationship. Keep that in mind when we’re told that the AFPI and Heritage initiatives are somehow separate:
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The Trump-blessed think tank America First Policy Institute did not sign onto the Heritage initiative, preferring instead to promote its standalone personnel project. This, too, will have a strong Trumpian flavor.AFPI is run by Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director Brooke Rollins. More than half a dozen Trump Cabinet officials are affiliated with AFPI and Trump loyalists fill the group from top to bottom.
Rollins brought in Michael Rigas to lead AFPI’s 2025 personnel project. Rigas ran Trump’s Office of Personnel Management — the federal government’s HR department. AFPI’s official position is that the group is developing their personnel database for whichever Republican wins the nomination. Such is Trump’s appreciation for AFPI that his PAC wired $1 million to the group in June 2021.
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Similarly, when we read that the Koch network is planning on using its connections to this Schedule F initiative to help fill these staff roles, of course the Koch network is going to be filling these positions. These networks are all heavily overlapping. Increasingly so as the MAGA-ification of the GOP continues. It’s one big fascist family:
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Even the billionaire-funded Koch network is playing a friendly behind-the-scenes role. While the Koch network overall has often been at odds with Trump, the network’s anti-interventionist foreign policy aligns neatly with Trump’s “America First” ideology.In this narrow field of alignment, connections have been forged between Trumpworld and Kochworld, especially via the head of Koch’s foreign policy program, Dan Caldwell.
During the last year of the Trump administration, the Koch network built close ties with Trump’s personnel office. Trump’s final nominee for the ambassador to Afghanistan, Will Ruger, was a Koch candidate. The Koch talent pipeline — on foreign policy if nothing else — would likely get a serious hearing in a second-term Trump administration.
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One big fascist network with the CNP acting as a kind of connective tissue. For example, the founder of American Moment, Saurabh Sharma, is also a CNP member. So when we see Sharma’s American Moment described as just some group that popped up keep in mind that CNP connective tissue:
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Startups including American Moment have sprung up to develop lists of thousands of younger “America First” personnel for the next GOP administration. Founded by Saurabh Sharma, the 24-year-old former head of the Young Conservatives of Texas, American Moment is dedicated to the idea of restaffing the government. Trump-endorsed Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance serves on its board.Sharma said in an interview that he and his team have dozens of informal talent scouts on college campuses — from “certain Ivies with reactionary subcultures” to “normal conservative schools” like Hillsdale College to “religiously affiliated liberal arts schools.”
They have plugged into the younger staff populating hard-right offices on Capitol Hill and seek to attract a steady flow of young ideologues through events and a podcast.
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But while the CNP may be playing a key organizing role in the background of this effort, it’s John McEntee — Trump’s former bodyman-turned-director of the Presidential Personelle Office (PPO) — who appears to be tasked with overseeing the whole operation. An organization named after the PPO was started by McEntee’s former PPO staff to carry out quality control on the lists generated by the various groups involved with the effort:
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In the background, the former staff members of Trump’s final personnel director John McEntee have stayed in touch and are working loosely together across a number of groups in preparation for 2025.One of these new organizations, “Personnel Policy Organization” or “PPO” — an homage to McEntee’s PPO — is a nonprofit led by McEntee’s former staff including Troup Hemenway. PPO says its mission is to “educate and defend conservative, America First civil servants and their advisors.”
A person familiar with the group’s work told Axios the group is helping to do “quality control” on other groups’ personnel lists and is “developing plans to provide a suite of policies and services to conservative officials and outside advisors to ensure that they are able to stand firm against attacks by the media or left-wing governmental actors, and offensive steps to take against left-wing officials.”
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John McEntee may have left the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, but he hasn’t abandoned the mission of purging the federal government of non-loyalists.
Schedule F’s Origins: A Longstanding Conservative Desire to Purge the Federal Bureaucracy Meets Trump’s Post-Impeachment Plans for Revenge. Ongoing Plans for Revenge
It’s a mission to purge the federal government of non-loyalists. The next Trump administration is going to be Trumpian through and through. At least after the planned purge. But as we see in Jonathan Swan’s second giant Schedule F Axios piece, the desire to stuff the government full of MAGA loyalists and sycophants is only part of the motive here. At when it comes to Trump’s desire. Revenge is the other big animating force here. When Trump tapped his former bodyman, John McEntee, to become the new head of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel in January of 2020, it was right after Trump’s impeachment acquittal in the Senate. Trump was in the mood for revenge and McEntee was the man he chose to make that revenge happen. And Trump already had a revenge plan in mind to make it happen thanks to the work of James Sherk — an ideologue working on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council — a year earlier and his work researching the federal labor laws looking for a loophole. The kind of loophole that would become the focus of Trump’s revenge plot: all non-loyalists are going to have to go. Schedule F became a top administration secret before Trump signed it into effect on Oct. 21, 2020, two weeks before the election. It doesn’t sound like many agency heads took Trump’s Schedule F order seriously, with one noteable exception: Russ Vought, who was then the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director before moving on to found the Center for Renewing America (CRA), which is helping to carry on the Schedule F work into 2025. Because while Schedule F may have started as a Trump revenge plot, it’s going to be ready for any Republican administration, Trump or not:
Axios
Inside Trump ’25Trump’s revenge
Jonathan Swan
Jul 23, 2022President Donald Trump was attending the National Prayer Breakfast, but showing no sign of grace. Lips pursed, face alternating between anger and frustration, he lashed out at enemies who had brought him to the doors of impeachment. He brandished the day’s newspapers, waving them above his head. The first headline: “ACQUITTED.” The next: “Trump Acquitted.” It was Feb. 6, 2020.
Close aides believed Trump had crossed a psychological line during his Senate trial. He now wanted to get even; he wanted to fire every single last “snake” inside his government. To activate the plan for revenge, Trump turned to a young take-no-prisoners loyalist with chutzpah: his former aide John McEntee.
By the end of that year, Trump also had a second tool in his armory, a secret weapon with the innocuous title, “Schedule F.” The intention of this obscure legal instrument was to empower the president to wipe out employment protections for tens of thousands of civil servants across the federal government.
The mission for McEntee and the power of Schedule F dovetailed in the lead-up to the 2020 election as Trump planned (but lost) a second term and fumed over perceived foes.
If former President Trump runs again in 2024 and wins back the White House, people close to him say, he would turn to both levers again. It is Schedule F, combined with the willpower of top lieutenants like McEntee, that could bring Trump closer to his dream of gutting the federal bureaucracy and installing thousands devoted to him or his “America First” platform.
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Trump’s move in early 2020 to bring back McEntee, the then 29-year-old former presidential body man abruptly fired in 2018 by then-chief of staff John Kelly, would become one of his more consequential decisions. McEntee had been one of his favorite aides and Trump had long regretted allowing Kelly, whom he had grown to despise, to have his way.
After Trump’s Senate acquittal, he gave McEntee an astonishing promotion to run the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. McEntee had no experience running any kind of personnel operation, much less such a significant post in the U.S. government. But Trump did not care.
He gave McEntee his blessing to start ridding the federal government of his enemies and replacing them with Trump people. McEntee was to ignore the “RINOs” who would try to dissuade him. He was to press ahead with urgency and ruthlessness.
At the president’s direction, McEntee weeded out administration officials deemed to be disloyal or obstructionist. With Trump’s unequivocal backing, he became more powerful than any personnel director in recent history. Trump had decided to ignore his more traditional advisers and to take an aggressive stance against anyone in his way — an approach he would surely replicate in any second term.
McEntee had the authority to overrule Trump’s own Cabinet secretaries. He was able to hire and fire in many cases without their sign-off — and in at least one instance, without even the Cabinet secretary’s prior knowledge.
In their place, McEntee and his colleagues in the personnel office recruited die-hard Trump supporters from outside Washington to serve in important government positions. Some had barely graduated from college and had few, if any, of the credentials usually expected for such positions.
They tested job seekers’ commitment to Trump in informal conversations and they formalized this emphasis in a “research questionnaire” for government officials. One question on the form asked: “What part of Candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?” Answers to such questions were prioritized over professional qualifications and experience.
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“Red pills” and “blue pills”
McEntee brought a different mentality to the personnel office. He brought in “America First” conservatives who thought of themselves as having been “red-pilled” about the evils of the Left.
This was a reference to the 1999 dystopian sci-fi film “The Matrix,” where the main character was offered a choice between two colored pills — a red one to learn the dangerous truth of the world or a blue one to remain in ignorance.
McEntee’s new recruits to the personnel office were ardently loyal to Trump and committed to his nationalist ideology — with especially hardline views on trade, immigration and foreign policy.
They believed, by and large, that the American republic needed saving from a range of domestic enemies and an embedded “deep state” sabotaging Trump from within.
A key recruit to McEntee’s office was Andrew Kloster, a senior government lawyer previously at the Heritage Foundation. Kloster helped McEntee’s deputy, James Bacon, develop his questionnaire to vet government employees and overhaul the government’s hiring process.
Kloster described their approach in an interview last November on the “Moment of Truth” podcast — a podcast run by American Moment, a group developing an “America First” personnel pipeline for the next GOP administration.
“I think the first thing you need to hire for is loyalty,” Kloster said on the podcast. “The funny thing is, you can learn policy. You can’t learn loyalty.”
Loyalty — to Trump and the “America First” ideology — was only part of the formula McEntee and his team wanted. They deliberately sought recruits not chasing a long-term career in Washington. They screened out anyone who seemed merely interested in maintaining a good reputation with the business community, K Street, or GOP leaders on Capitol Hill.
Kloster spent hours, sometimes over multiple days, conducting interviews and designing methodology to identify “someone who’s not on the team.”
A revealing question was to ask prospects where they ideally wanted to be promoted to in the government. If a job candidate wanted to work in “international finance” it set off alarm bells. “You hear about what jobs come with perks; and traveling a lot and networking with the ‘Davos set’ is not something someone genuinely civic-minded would angle for,” Kloster told Axios.
A red flag went up if a prospective employee answered “deregulation and judges” when asked to name their favorite Trump policies. Kloster described this as “a shell of an answer.” It was a sure sign the applicant could be a weak-kneed member of the establishment.
“This kind of answer isn’t always a dealbreaker, but you want someone to take a risk and be honest with you about what problems they see as facing America,” Kloster said. “A lowest-common denominator answer is the sign of an operator, a careerist.”
Kloster wanted people harboring angst — who felt they had been personally wronged by “the system.” The bigger the chip on their shoulder, the better. And if someone felt mugged, that was even better, as it would help drive their desire to break up the system.
“It’s not just that being ‘canceled’ motivates a person; it’s also that being canceled indicates a person knows the kind of heat that is brought to bear by the media, by institutions, and the public, and is probably better able to fight when the time comes,” Kloster told Axios.
By late 2020, McEntee and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — working hand in glove — had org charts to plan a second term. They had a chart for each federal agency and they had them printed on large boards for review. One set of boards was in McEntee’s office and another in Meadows’ office.
They looked at positions further down in the bureaucracy in a second term — not just secretaries, but undersecretaries and assistant secretaries. They were thinking about people willing to break a little china.
One source on the edge of this work at the time said the plan was to bring tenacity and resolve to the first 45 days of a second term, by contrast to the missed opportunities of Trump’s first term. They had four years of experience to know what the pitfalls were.
McEntee also had explicit lists of top officials to fire and hire in a Trump second term. This was his road map for the future.
According to a source with direct knowledge of the lists, prominent names on McEntee’s second-term “fire” list included the White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins.
But the “fire” list was just the start. To respond to Trump’s demand to clean out the “deep state,” McEntee would need far-reaching powers and a legal rationale to supply them.
He heard about something that might help him in the summer of 2020. There were low whispers in corridors by then that options were being developed to change the status quo in the civil service.
*****
Origins of Schedule F
What was being quietly worked on — by a more technocratic group of Trump officials — was a novel legal theory. It would give the president the authority to terminate and replace an estimated 50,000 career civil servants across the federal government.
Its genesis was back in early 2017. Senior Trump officials had talked about the need to expand the hiring category typically reserved for political appointees so that they could fire — and replace — a much larger number of career government officials. But their early discussions were bogged down by bureaucratic and legal delays for two years.
The idea for Schedule F was hatched in January 2019 by a little-known official working inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, an extravagant building in the Second Empire style across the street from the White House.
James Sherk, an enterprising conservative ideologue on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, had been fuming for months about career officials across various agencies whom he believed were deliberately sabotaging Trump’s agenda. He had heard stories from his colleagues and encountered elements of the resistance firsthand. The pushback included an uprising within the State Department against Trump’s hardline refugee policies.
The revolt was so intense that only 11 days after Trump took office, The Washington Post published a story that detailed “a growing wave of opposition from the federal workers” who were charged with implementing Trump’s agenda.
From his standing desk inside the EEOB, Sherk began reading through federal statutes on Cornell Law School’s website. He undertook a close reading of Title 5, the section of the U.S. Code that governed federal employees and agency procedures. He was searching for any openings in the law that might allow a president to fire career government officials who had protections that made it difficult and time-consuming to get rid of them.
Sherk researched the history of federal employment protections. Congress had passed the Pendleton Act in 1883 to reform the government. The goal of this law was to replace the patronage system with a nonpartisan civil service that would work across administrations, no matter which political party controlled the White House. The objective was to create a professional civil service. The idea was that over long careers, these government officials would accumulate invaluable institutional knowledge and experience that would benefit Republican and Democratic presidents alike.
What Sherk discovered, however, was that the Pendleton Act did not introduce the extensive removal protections that have made it so onerous for modern presidents to fire civil servants. Sherk learned through his research that those appeals rights were introduced much later, in a series of laws and executive orders passed between the 1940s and the 1970s.
Sherk shared the view of many conservatives that the “nonpartisan” system was a farce that helped Democratic presidents and stymied Republicans.
He could point to campaign donations — skewing Democratic among federal government workers — to argue that the federal bureaucracy, far from being nonpartisan, had too many embedded Democrats working to thwart Republican administrations.
*****
A weapon to aim
Trump wanted a weapon to aim at these civil servants — to threaten them with their jobs if they stepped out of line. He wanted to be able to fire and replace them if they were disloyal or obstructed his agenda. Sherk was searching for the legal instrument to support Trump’s aim.
In January 2019, Sherk found Trump his weapon, in Section 7511 of Title 5 of the U.S. Code. This section exempts from firing protections employees “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character by the President for a position that the President has excepted from the competitive service.”
It struck Sherk. The language in the Code was not limited to political appointees. The wording was “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating.”
Nothing, Sherk thought, stops us from putting career employees into this bucket.
Conservatives had long dreamed of applying these criteria to career staff as well as political appointees. Sherk’s relatively untrained eyes saw a fresh path in the statute.
He was not a lawyer, but he had spent more than a decade working on public policy at the Heritage Foundation. He had also worked on more than a dozen executive orders for Trump, including a controversial decree that classical architecture be the default for federal buildings in Washington, D.C.
Sherk sent his idea to a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office. Over the next few months, Sherk worked in secrecy with a small group of Trump political appointees and government lawyers to prepare what became the “Schedule F” order.
The final order would command agency leaders to compile lists of their staff who served in roles that influenced policy. These employees would then be reassigned to a new employment category, Schedule F, which would promptly eliminate most of their employment protections. The head of the federal government’s HR division — the Office of Personnel Management — would have to sign off on the lists. And then these career civil servants could easily be fired and replaced.
Career officials across the government had no idea about the development of this extraordinary proposal to threaten their job security. Members of Congress tasked with overseeing the civil service were also in the dark. So were the federal workers’ unions. Schedule F became one of the Trump administration’s most closely held secrets.
Sherk and a small group of Trump political appointees worked quickly. They completed a draft of the order by late spring of 2019. They sent paper copies to senior political appointees at a few agencies to get their feedback. They gave these officials firm instructions not to share any details of the order with the career staff at their agencies.
Trump’s top officials who were read into the planning were struck by the vast implications of Schedule F. But during the closely held policy process, several expressed concerns about the timing of the order. Trump’s agencies had a huge workload coming up. Some officials thought it would be a bad idea to unveil the order and foment staff unrest.
The team decided to wait until 2020 to implement Schedule F. Then came COVID-19, which overtook the Trump administration and further delayed the order.
It took until Oct. 21, 2020, two weeks before the election, for Trump to finally sign the Schedule F order. The announcement was immediately drowned out by the noise of the final stretch of campaigning.
Few people had the bandwidth to pay attention to a new order with an anodyne title during the most chaotic election in recent history. Most Americans have never heard of Schedule F, let alone absorbed its vast implications.
The Washington Post published a detailed insider account of the evolution of Schedule F and the risks to the civil service within two days of the executive order.
But leaders in Washington were only barely awake to what Trump had done. Some of Trump’s own agency leaders made no serious attempt to follow the Schedule F order. Trump had lost the election; his senior officials predicted incoming President Biden would immediately rescind the order. Some felt there was no point ruffling feathers on behalf of a doomed order.
However, one of Trump’s hard-edged and most ideological agency heads — Russ Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget — wanted to lay down a marker. Regardless of the election result, Vought wanted to show what Schedule F could accomplish inside his own agency. Vought proposed reassigning 88% of OMB’s workforce as Schedule F employees, with just two months left of Trump’s presidency.
*****
Sounding the alarm
Some on the left did immediately grasp the significance of what Trump was doing and tried to sound the alarm.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D‑Va.) chairman of the House subcommittee overseeing government operations, was one of them. He and other Democrats on the House Oversight Committee wrote a letter to Michael Rigas, head of Trump’s Office of Personnel Management, describing what they viewed as the “grave” implications of the Schedule F order.
“The executive order is a harmful attack on the integrity of our government because it will permit the replacement of non-partisan civil servants with partisan Trump loyalists,” the lawmakers wrote.
...
Trump was delighted. He sent Sherk a signed copy of the 2020 Washington Post front-page story, headlined “Assault on feds years in making.” Sherk was also given the Sharpie that Trump used on Air Force One to sign the order. The newspaper, the executive order and the presidential Sharpie are now hanging framed on the walls of Sherk’s office at the Trump-allied think tank, the America First Policy Institute. AFPI is one of the key groups — detailed in part one of this series — developing plans and personnel lists for a Trump second term.
President Biden struck back, rescinding the Schedule F executive order on his third day in office.
But if Trump returns to office in 2025, his plans to upend the civil service could realize the worst fears of the relatively few Democrats who grasp Schedule F’s significance.
*****
The fine print
Even if Schedule F is not reimposed — or if it comes back but is then limited by Congress or the courts — experts say there are already so many existing exemptions across the federal bureaucracy that a future president determined to pursue mass firings would have plenty to work with. Someone with Trump’s willpower will find a new methodology if Schedule F falls.
The system has become Balkanized over a matter of decades, with a hand from Democrats as well as Republicans, to the point where experts say there are effectively dozens of civil services — not one — all covered by separate authorities with different rules and protections.
Broadly speaking, the U.S. Intelligence Community is not covered by the so-called competitive service jobs appointed under Title 5. Thus, Schedule F wouldn’t have the same impact because intelligence employees are already exempt from most protections.
Intelligence Community posts do have some due process rights — but those are typically developed within individual agencies, and they do not get to appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board. So presidents already have wide latitude to purge intelligence positions, so long as the agency head goes along and voters or Congress do not punish them.
Schedule F does not affect a category called the Senior Executive Service, which includes some of the most senior career government officials.
But agency heads could target those protected SES officials in other ways, sources close to Trump said. They could reassign them to backwater jobs or install political appointees and sympathetic career officials on pperformance review boards who could deliver adverse reviews that could lead to termination.
Some in conservative legal circles say that the major civil service laws dating to the 1800s are all arguably unconstitutional and that it should be up to a president who stays and goes on their watch. Testing the limits of that theory would put the question before the courts.
Trump’s closest confidant in Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan (R‑Ohio), is excited about the prospects of mass firings in the second term of a Trump administration. He said in an interview with Axios that he had talked about it with another person close to Trump and that “the line that we talked about was, ‘Fire everyone you’re allowed to fire. And [then] fire a few people you’re not supposed to, so that they have to sue you and you send the message.’ That’s the way to do it.”
...
McEntee now lives in California and is working on building a dating app for conservatives — funded by billionaire GOP megadonor Peter Thiel. But he maintains strong ties to key people working in an array of outside groups on 2025 personnel projects, some of whom had worked for him in the Trump administration.
*****
Signs and signals
Trump is alert to any signs of squishiness, especially on his signature issue: contesting the outcome of the 2020 election. He will likely bar hiring anyone who believes Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president of the United States. And he may declare ahead of time whom he will, and will not, pick.
Earlier this year, Patel joined Charlie Kirk’s podcast to discuss what they both saw as the biggest failure of Trump’s first term. Kirk is a Trump ally with substantial influence. He runs the college campus activist network “Turning Point USA,” which regularly convenes thousands of “America First” students to watch speeches from Trump, his son Don Jr., and top GOP elected officials.
It is part of the wingspan of Trump’s most active loyalists to conduct communications and signaling through podcasts with like-minded conservative media or former staffers from the Trump administration.
“So you think, the second term, one of the things has to be kind of a promise that Trump is going to make different personnel choices,” Kirk said to Patel.
“Yeah,” Patel replied. “And you know how you solve that? You build the book now. And I believe that that’s in process and that’s going.”
“Not only do you build the book now of who you’re going to put in the Cabinet and deputies and undersecretaries, but then you make announcements on the campaign trail: ‘If I win, this person is going to be head of FBI, this person is going to take CIA, this person is going to DOD,’ ” Patel added. “Show the voters that that is the individual you have identified to lead your Cabinet.”
“I think that’s terrific,” Kirk said. “The same way he did the Supreme Court picks.”
...
————
“Close aides believed Trump had crossed a psychological line during his Senate trial. He now wanted to get even; he wanted to fire every single last “snake” inside his government. To activate the plan for revenge, Trump turned to a young take-no-prisoners loyalist with chutzpah: his former aide John McEntee.”
This isn’t just a fascist ideological purge. It’s revenge. Trump’s revenge. A revenge plot that Trump already put into motion in early 2020 with the appointment of John McEntee, his former bodyman who was fired by then-chief of staff John Kelly in 2018. Kelly was already out of the White House and on the disloyal list by the time McEntee was invited back into the administration. McEntee was quite the symbolic choice for the role. A role that gave McEntee the power to overrule Cabinet secretaries:
...
Trump’s move in early 2020 to bring back McEntee, the then 29-year-old former presidential body man abruptly fired in 2018 by then-chief of staff John Kelly, would become one of his more consequential decisions. McEntee had been one of his favorite aides and Trump had long regretted allowing Kelly, whom he had grown to despise, to have his way.After Trump’s Senate acquittal, he gave McEntee an astonishing promotion to run the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. McEntee had no experience running any kind of personnel operation, much less such a significant post in the U.S. government. But Trump did not care.
He gave McEntee his blessing to start ridding the federal government of his enemies and replacing them with Trump people. McEntee was to ignore the “RINOs” who would try to dissuade him. He was to press ahead with urgency and ruthlessness.
...
McEntee had the authority to overrule Trump’s own Cabinet secretaries. He was able to hire and fire in many cases without their sign-off — and in at least one instance, without even the Cabinet secretary’s prior knowledge.
...
There was really just one qualification for applicants: loyalty to Trump. Overt loyalty to Trump and the MAGA agenda. An agenda that, at that point in Trump’s presidency, was focused on Trump’s declared battle with the ‘deep state’:
...
In their place, McEntee and his colleagues in the personnel office recruited die-hard Trump supporters from outside Washington to serve in important government positions. Some had barely graduated from college and had few, if any, of the credentials usually expected for such positions.They tested job seekers’ commitment to Trump in informal conversations and they formalized this emphasis in a “research questionnaire” for government officials. One question on the form asked: “What part of Candidate Trump’s campaign message most appealed to you and why?” Answers to such questions were prioritized over professional qualifications and experience.
...
McEntee’s new recruits to the personnel office were ardently loyal to Trump and committed to his nationalist ideology — with especially hardline views on trade, immigration and foreign policy.
They believed, by and large, that the American republic needed saving from a range of domestic enemies and an embedded “deep state” sabotaging Trump from within.
...
And recall how the Heritage Foundation, under its new president (and CNP member) Kevin Roberts, was described as making its own separate contribution to the Schedule F project. Similarly, we learned about the efforts by a new group, American Moment, founded by CNP member Saurabh Sharma. Here we see one of the key recruits for John McEntee’s operation, Andrew Kloster, was recruited from Heritage and Kloster was talking about their overall strategy on a podcast for American Moment last November. This network hasn’t stopped working since its start in early 2020 when Trump brought McEntee back into the White House. They’ve even been podcasting about it:
...
A key recruit to McEntee’s office was Andrew Kloster, a senior government lawyer previously at the Heritage Foundation. Kloster helped McEntee’s deputy, James Bacon, develop his questionnaire to vet government employees and overhaul the government’s hiring process.Kloster described their approach in an interview last November on the “Moment of Truth” podcast — a podcast run by American Moment, a group developing an “America First” personnel pipeline for the next GOP administration.
“I think the first thing you need to hire for is loyalty,” Kloster said on the podcast. “The funny thing is, you can learn policy. You can’t learn loyalty.”
...
Kloster wanted people harboring angst — who felt they had been personally wronged by “the system.” The bigger the chip on their shoulder, the better. And if someone felt mugged, that was even better, as it would help drive their desire to break up the system.
“It’s not just that being ‘canceled’ motivates a person; it’s also that being canceled indicates a person knows the kind of heat that is brought to bear by the media, by institutions, and the public, and is probably better able to fight when the time comes,” Kloster told Axios.
...
Note that when we see that Mark Meadows was working with McEntee in the fall of 2020 on the loyalty purge, don’t forget that Meadows joined the CPI after leaving the Trump administration. And as we’re going to see, the CPI is playing a major role in the Schedule F loyalty purge. In other words, Mark Meadows never stopped working on Schedule F either:
...
By late 2020, McEntee and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — working hand in glove — had org charts to plan a second term. They had a chart for each federal agency and they had them printed on large boards for review. One set of boards was in McEntee’s office and another in Meadows’ office.
...
Also note how the individual who actually came up with the bureaucratic ‘aha’ — the idea that the rules about the firing of political appointees — was someone who previously spent over a decade working at the Heritage Foundation was working at the Trump White House’s Domestic Policy Council at the time. Recall how the AFPI is run by Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director Brooke Rollins. It’s the same larger network:
...
What was being quietly worked on — by a more technocratic group of Trump officials — was a novel legal theory. It would give the president the authority to terminate and replace an estimated 50,000 career civil servants across the federal government....
James Sherk, an enterprising conservative ideologue on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, had been fuming for months about career officials across various agencies whom he believed were deliberately sabotaging Trump’s agenda. He had heard stories from his colleagues and encountered elements of the resistance firsthand. The pushback included an uprising within the State Department against Trump’s hardline refugee policies.
...
In January 2019, Sherk found Trump his weapon, in Section 7511 of Title 5 of the U.S. Code. This section exempts from firing protections employees “whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character by the President for a position that the President has excepted from the competitive service.”
It struck Sherk. The language in the Code was not limited to political appointees. The wording was “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating.”
Nothing, Sherk thought, stops us from putting career employees into this bucket.
Conservatives had long dreamed of applying these criteria to career staff as well as political appointees. Sherk’s relatively untrained eyes saw a fresh path in the statute.
He was not a lawyer, but he had spent more than a decade working on public policy at the Heritage Foundation. He had also worked on more than a dozen executive orders for Trump, including a controversial decree that classical architecture be the default for federal buildings in Washington, D.C.
...
Another noteworthy detail in the plot involves the fact that the head of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had to sign off on it. So it’s noteworthy that Trump tried to replace the then-acting head of the OPM, Michael Rigas, with John Gibbs, then the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in July of 2020 three months before Schedule F was order into effect just two weeks before the election, although that nomination was never confirmed. So Rigas was still the head of the OPM when Trump issued the October 2020 Schedule F order:
...
Sherk sent his idea to a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office. Over the next few months, Sherk worked in secrecy with a small group of Trump political appointees and government lawyers to prepare what became the “Schedule F” order.The final order would command agency leaders to compile lists of their staff who served in roles that influenced policy. These employees would then be reassigned to a new employment category, Schedule F, which would promptly eliminate most of their employment protections. The head of the federal government’s HR division — the Office of Personnel Management — would have to sign off on the lists. And then these career civil servants could easily be fired and replaced.
Career officials across the government had no idea about the development of this extraordinary proposal to threaten their job security. Members of Congress tasked with overseeing the civil service were also in the dark. So were the federal workers’ unions. Schedule F became one of the Trump administration’s most closely held secrets.
...
It took until Oct. 21, 2020, two weeks before the election, for Trump to finally sign the Schedule F order. The announcement was immediately drowned out by the noise of the final stretch of campaigning.
...
Now, when it came to actually implementing Schedule F, it doesn’t appear that many agency heads took the order seriously. But there was one very notable exception: Russ Vought, then the head of the Office of Management and Budget, proposed reassigning 88% of the agency workforce as Schedule F employees. Note that Russ Vought’s Wife, Mary Vought, shows up on the leaked CNP member list as an ‘assumed member’. So whether or not she’s actually a member, she apparently works so closely with the CNP that everyone just assumes she’s one. Once again, the CNP network is just beneath the surface:
...
But leaders in Washington were only barely awake to what Trump had done. Some of Trump’s own agency leaders made no serious attempt to follow the Schedule F order. Trump had lost the election; his senior officials predicted incoming President Biden would immediately rescind the order. Some felt there was no point ruffling feathers on behalf of a doomed order.However, one of Trump’s hard-edged and most ideological agency heads — Russ Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget — wanted to lay down a marker. Regardless of the election result, Vought wanted to show what Schedule F could accomplish inside his own agency. Vought proposed reassigning 88% of OMB’s workforce as Schedule F employees, with just two months left of Trump’s presidency.
...
President Biden struck back, rescinding the Schedule F executive order on his third day in office.
But if Trump returns to office in 2025, his plans to upend the civil service could realize the worst fears of the relatively few Democrats who grasp Schedule F’s significance.
...
Also note how many parallels there are between the legal theory that presidents should have complete control over the executive branch’s workforce regardless of laws or court rulings and the ‘independent-state-legislature’ theory that was at the core of the legal strategy behind the plot to overturn the election. It’s all of a piece:
...
Some in conservative legal circles say that the major civil service laws dating to the 1800s are all arguably unconstitutional and that it should be up to a president who stays and goes on their watch. Testing the limits of that theory would put the question before the courts.
...
Also note the ties between McEntee and Peter Thiel. Recall the important role Thiel played in Trump transition through his close working relationship with transition team member Charles Johnson. So when we hear that McEntee still maintains strong ties to the people working on this Schedule F project in anticipation of 2025, keep in mind those ties To Thiel and Thiel’s longstanding interest in White House staffing decisions:
...
McEntee now lives in California and is working on building a dating app for conservatives — funded by billionaire GOP megadonor Peter Thiel. But he maintains strong ties to key people working in an array of outside groups on 2025 personnel projects, some of whom had worked for him in the Trump administration.
...
And then we get to a particularly disturbing part of this whole story: The plan isn’t simply to implement Schedule F immediately upon the next Republican administration. They are also talking about putting together lists of names of the people who will be filling the roles and campaigning on it. So is this why the whole plan got leaked to Axios? It’s hard to keep this a secret if Trump plans on campaign on his planned government purge. Also note that Charlie Kirk’s podcast was an appropriate venue for Kash Patel to discussed this idea. Charlie Kirk is a member of the CNP, after all. Everywhere we look with this Schedule F plot we find members of the CNP:
...
Earlier this year, Patel joined Charlie Kirk’s podcast to discuss what they both saw as the biggest failure of Trump’s first term. Kirk is a Trump ally with substantial influence. He runs the college campus activist network “Turning Point USA,” which regularly convenes thousands of “America First” students to watch speeches from Trump, his son Don Jr., and top GOP elected officials.It is part of the wingspan of Trump’s most active loyalists to conduct communications and signaling through podcasts with like-minded conservative media or former staffers from the Trump administration.
“So you think, the second term, one of the things has to be kind of a promise that Trump is going to make different personnel choices,” Kirk said to Patel.
“Yeah,” Patel replied. “And you know how you solve that? You build the book now. And I believe that that’s in process and that’s going.”
“Not only do you build the book now of who you’re going to put in the Cabinet and deputies and undersecretaries, but then you make announcements on the campaign trail: ‘If I win, this person is going to be head of FBI, this person is going to take CIA, this person is going to DOD,’ ” Patel added. “Show the voters that that is the individual you have identified to lead your Cabinet.”
“I think that’s terrific,” Kirk said. “The same way he did the Supreme Court picks.”
...
And that concludes our look at Jonathan Swan’s Schedule F reports that sort of blew the whole story open. Sure, there were reports about Schedule F before this. But nothing that made clear just how far-reaching the efforts were in developing a plot or that the plot is still fully ongoing and bigger than ever. Don’t forget, all those CPI spin-offs didn’t exist in 2019 and 2020 when the plot was still getting hatched in the Trump White House. There’s a lot more man power behind it now. And they aren’t hiding it anymore. We won’t be able to say they didn’t warn us.
The CPI’s Brood of MAGA Spinoffs Working to Get Schedule F Ready for 2024
As those twin Axios pieces describe, the Schedule F plot is clearly a MAGA-world enterprise. But also clearly a CNP-backed initiative. And as the following Documented.net piece lays out, it’s the CNP-dominated CPI where these two worlds converge. It’s a convergence that is reflected by the record nearly $20 million raised by the CPI in 2021 for Republican mega-donors, including a $1 million donation for Trump’s own Save America PAC. And the CPI hasn’t been just sitting on all that cash. Eight new CPI spinoffs were created in 2021. One of those spinoffs, Cleta Mitchell’s ‘Election Integrity Network’, is focused on continuing the now-standard claims of widespread Democratic voter fraud that were at the core of the justifications for the January 6 Capitol insurrection. But then there’s the spinoffs we’ve already seen as part of the Schedule F plot: the Center for Renewing America (CRA), America First Legal Foundation (AFLF), and American Moment. Yes, while it’s not always clear in the coverage of these groups that they’re actually CPI spinoffs, that’s what they are. Which is reminder that, while it might seem like there’s large number of different groups working of this project, they all operating from the same playbook because they’re all ultimately part of the same network. A network now financed by large numbers of GOP mega-donors who on board with the agenda:
Documented
Conservative Partnership Institute: The Trump-aligned $19.7M Institution Creating “America First” Political Infrastructure
Trump: “CPI is helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.”
Published On JUL 10, 2022The Conservative Partnership Institute (“CPI”) is a $19.7 million “America First” institution boosted with a $1 million donation from former President Trump’s PAC. Led by former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint, CPI is creating the MAGA-oriented political infrastructure that the Trump administration lacked.
CPI is recruiting America First staffers and providing in-depth training for Hill offices, as well as creating legal institutions, opposition research firms, think tanks, and other groups helmed by former Trump officials and allies, including Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, and Cleta Mitchell.
The group’s ambitions are sprawling, from amplifying conspiracies around stolen elections and “critical race theory,” to tanking Democratic nominees and filing lawsuits against the Biden administration. CPI’s president, Ed Corrigan, helped lead Trump’s 2016 transition team, and the group is positioned to staff and support the next MAGA administration.
CPI is located blocks from the U.S. Capitol, and serves as a hub for the America First movement. The House Freedom Caucus holds weekly meetings at CPI, and texts obtained by the January 6 committee show lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Mike Lee referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period following the 2020 election. Nearly two dozen individuals tied to the January 6 attempted coup are connected to CPI, according to Grid’s analysis.
Nerve Center for the MAGA Movement
CPI’s Washington D.C. headquarters serve as a hub for the far-right conservative movement. According to CPI, in 2021 the “House Freedom Caucus, the Senate Steering Committee, Congressional Chiefs of Staff, Congressional Communicators, Congressional Legislative Directors, and numerous conservative organizations and activists coalesced regularly at [CPI’s headquarters] to plan their methods and means of attack against the Left to save this country.”
CPI boasted of holding 600 meetings or events in 2021, served as a “strategy center” to oppose President Biden’s vaccine requirements, and hosted multiple “war rooms” during Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination. CPI is also expanding, and says that it is “in the process of acquiring multiple properties adjacent to our D.C. headquarters in order to create a culture of collaboration and victory for the movement.”
According to CPI, members like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sen. Rand Paul, Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Andy Biggs, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, and Rep. Byron Donalds have made the CPI headquarters “their home away from home.” A dozen members of Congress have disclosed paying membership dues to CPI/CPC using campaign or leadership PAC funds.
Ties to Trump’s 2020 Coup Attempt
CPI and its affiliate groups “employ or assist at least 20 key operatives reportedly involved in Trump’s failed effort to subvert the 2020 election,” according to Grid, including Cleta Mitchell., the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and joined the infamous call when the president urged Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” 11,700 votes; Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff who was in communication with alleged Jan. 6 plotters and at least tolerated Trump’s attempted coup; and Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department lawyer who supported Trump’s desire for DOJ to declare the result fraudulent, and whose home was raided by the FBI in June of 2022.
Texts obtained by the January 6 committee also show Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Mike Lee referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period after the 2020 election.
Mike Lee to Mark Meadows, Nov. 9 2020:
We had steering executive meeting at CPI tonight, with Sidney Powell as our guest speaker. My purpose in having the meeting was to socialize with Republican senators the fact that POTUS needs to pursue his legal remedies. You have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him, but I fear this could prove short-lived unless you hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.
Marjorie Taylor Greene to Mark Meadows, Dec. 31, 2020:
Good morning Mark, I’m here in DC. We have to get organized for the 6th. I would like to meet with Rudy Giuliani again. We didn’t get to speak with him long. Also anyone who can help. We are getting a lot of members on board. And we need to lay out the best case for each state. I’ll be over at CPI this afternoon.
...
“America First” Staffing
CPI boasts of recruiting, recommending, and training Congressional staffers who are committed to advancing an America First agenda. In 2021, CPI claims to have trained 49 members of Congress and 246 Congressional staffers, and to have made 200 Congressional staffing recommendations.
“We gave conservatives on Capitol Hill the right skills, the right people, and the right connections—all for the purpose of making America great again,” CPI described in its annual report. For example, in 2021 CPI held “5‑week-long legislative boot camps” taught by Ed Corrigan and Rachel Bovard, where “they armed conservative staffers with every tactic the House and Senate rules gave them: how to force amendment votes, how to work outside the Establishment- dominated committee process, and how to leverage nominations to wage policy fights:”
“You may have seen that conservatives defeated Biden’s gun-grabbing pick to lead the ATF and stopped a communist- sympathizing economist from becoming comptroller of the currency. That didn’t happen by accident.”
According to CPI, “our trainings have become so respected that conservative congressional offices and grassroots advocacy organizations now come to us when they have job openings to fill. They know that we maintain a database of current and prospective congressional staffers who have been through our trainings and are up to the task of putting America first.”
CPI-Launched Projects, Many Led by former Trump Officials
In 2021, CPI launched eight new projects, as well as entities to provide legal compliance and administrative support for those groups:
* Election Integrity Network: Cleta Mitchell, the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, joined CPI and launched the Election Integrity Network (EIN) in early 2021, after resigning as a partner with the international law firm Foley and Lardner. As described in reports by the New York Times and ABC News, CPI’s EIN is working with groups like Tea Party Patriots to create “permanent election integrity coalitions in eight target states.”
* Center for Renewing America: Trump Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russ Vought leads the culture war-oriented Center for Renewing America (CRA). “CRA’s strategy is to initiate planned confrontations on major national cultural issues, win those confrontations, and let the resulting political momentum fuel legislative activity at the federal, state, and local levels.” CRA has created anti-CRT model legislation, opposed making women eligible for the draft, and opposed Afghan refugee migration. Jeffrey Clark, who Trump wanted to install as Attorney General after the 2020 election and who supported Trump’s desire for the Justice Department to declare the results fraudulent, joined CRA as Senior Fellow in June 2022. Other senior fellows include Ken Cuccinelli and Mark Paoletta.
* America First Legal Foundation: Trump’s hardline immigration advisor Stephen Miller co-created the America First Legal Foundation (AFLF) with Mark Meadows, which claims to give “the 234 new federal judges appointed by Donald Trump the chance to finally hold Washington accountable to the rule of law.” AFLF has supported lawsuits challenging Biden administration policies around immigration, equity, and vaccines, and has urged the Supreme Court to strike down affirmative action.
* American Accountability Foundation: Tom Jones, Ted Cruz’s 2016 oppo research director, leads the group described as the “Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees” by the New Yorker. AAF has taken credit for knocking out President Biden’s Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms nominee David Chipman, comptroller nominee Saule Omarova, and Federal Reserve nominee Sarah Bloom Raskin.
* American Cornerstone Institute: former Trump cabinet member Ben Carson is founder and chair of American Cornerstone Institute (ACI), where Carson hosts a podcast and creates YouTube videos, and which created the anti-woke “Little Patriots” platform “to teach children about our founding principles.”
* American Moment: “American Moment’s mission is to identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,” according to CPI’s annual report. In 2021, American Moment claims to have placed ten fellows at aligned organizations and congressional offices and, according to CPI, paid them “a living wage of $3,000 a month.” CPI plans to quadruple the program to 40 fellows in 2022.
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CPI’s Fundraising
Since forming in 2017, CPI’s fundraising has increased dramatically—most recently, jumping from $7.3 million in 2020 to $19.7 million in 2021.
CPI held a fundraiser at Mar al Lago in April 2021, with former President Trump as the keynote speaker, shortly after Trump’s Save America PAC disclosed giving $1 million to the group.
As a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, CPI does not publicly disclose its donors.
However, an analysis by Grid identified more than 40 foundations, charities and other organizations that have funded CPI, including $1.25 million from GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein’s foundation in 2020, $500,000 from the late gaming machine mogul Stanley E. Fulton’s private foundation, and $200,000 from the Chicago Community Trust.
CPI has also identified some financial supporters in its 2021 annual report.
David and Brenda Frecka: CPI thanked the pair for their financial support in its 2021 annual report, and named a “David and Brenda Frecka Boardroom” at CPC. In 2021, David Frecka gave $1M to Jim Jordan’s House Freedom Action, and Brenda Frecka gave $1.15M to Debbi Meadows’s Right on Women PAC
Mike Rydin: According to CPI’s annual report, Ryden “made a generous gift” so that CPI could purchase a townhouse next door to its headquarters “for additional meeting and event space as well as space to host out-of-town guests.” The property sold for $1.5M in 2020.
Dr. William Amos Jr.: The son of the AFLAC founder “has generously supported the Conservative Partnership Institute. For his incredible contributions to CPI’s growth and mission, in 2021, CPI honored Dr. Amos with CPI’s Lifetime Achievement Award.”
Foster Friess “supported many groups in the movement, including CPI. Foster will always be an important part of the CPI story. With love and purpose, Lynn carries on her late husband’s legacy of helping those in need.”
Doug and Charlotte Waikart “made the ultimate commitment to sending American values into the future by supporting CPI in their estate plans.”
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“The Conservative Partnership Institute (“CPI”) is a $19.7 million “America First” institution boosted with a $1 million donation from former President Trump’s PAC. Led by former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint, CPI is creating the MAGA-oriented political infrastructure that the Trump administration lacked.”
If the CNP is like the parent network for this movement, the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) is the organizational manifestation of that role. It exists to spawn new entities, including many of the organizations directly involved with the Schedule F plot. And employing many of the people involved with the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Nearly two dozen such people, including key figures like Cleta Mitchell and Mark Meadows:
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CPI is located blocks from the U.S. Capitol, and serves as a hub for the America First movement. The House Freedom Caucus holds weekly meetings at CPI, and texts obtained by the January 6 committee show lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Mike Lee referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period following the 2020 election. Nearly two dozen individuals tied to the January 6 attempted coup are connected to CPI, according to Grid’s analysis....
CPI and its affiliate groups “employ or assist at least 20 key operatives reportedly involved in Trump’s failed effort to subvert the 2020 election,” according to Grid, including Cleta Mitchell., the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and joined the infamous call when the president urged Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” 11,700 votes; Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff who was in communication with alleged Jan. 6 plotters and at least tolerated Trump’s attempted coup; and Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department lawyer who supported Trump’s desire for DOJ to declare the result fraudulent, and whose home was raided by the FBI in June of 2022.
Texts obtained by the January 6 committee also show Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Mike Lee referencing meetings at CPI in the tumultuous period after the 2020 election.
Mike Lee to Mark Meadows, Nov. 9 2020:
We had steering executive meeting at CPI tonight, with Sidney Powell as our guest speaker. My purpose in having the meeting was to socialize with Republican senators the fact that POTUS needs to pursue his legal remedies. You have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him, but I fear this could prove short-lived unless you hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.
Marjorie Taylor Greene to Mark Meadows, Dec. 31, 2020:
Good morning Mark, I’m here in DC. We have to get organized for the 6th. I would like to meet with Rudy Giuliani again. We didn’t get to speak with him long. Also anyone who can help. We are getting a lot of members on board. And we need to lay out the best case for each state. I’ll be over at CPI this afternoon.
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And when we see “5‑week-long legislative boot camps” taught by Ed Corrigan and Rachel Bovard, try not to be surprised to learn that CPI President Ed Corrigan — the Former V.P. for Policy Promotion at the Heritage Foundation — is a CNP member along with Bovard. The CPI really is a CNP operation:
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CPI boasts of recruiting, recommending, and training Congressional staffers who are committed to advancing an America First agenda. In 2021, CPI claims to have trained 49 members of Congress and 246 Congressional staffers, and to have made 200 Congressional staffing recommendations.“We gave conservatives on Capitol Hill the right skills, the right people, and the right connections—all for the purpose of making America great again,” CPI described in its annual report. For example, in 2021 CPI held “5‑week-long legislative boot camps” taught by Ed Corrigan and Rachel Bovard, where “they armed conservative staffers with every tactic the House and Senate rules gave them: how to force amendment votes, how to work outside the Establishment- dominated committee process, and how to leverage nominations to wage policy fights:”
...
Then we get to the string of organizations set up in 2021 alone: Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network, and two of the groups we’ve seen in the Schedule F efforts: Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America and American Moment founded by founded by CNP member Saurabh Sharma. The CPI is ramping up the parrallel efforts to steal the next election and then immediately fire as many federal workers as possible. Also recall how the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) was set to run sleazy smear operations. So the AAF will presumably be deeply involved in the public relations operations for any future insurrections or mass loyalty purges:
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In 2021, CPI launched eight new projects, as well as entities to provide legal compliance and administrative support for those groups:* Election Integrity Network: Cleta Mitchell, the veteran lawyer who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, joined CPI and launched the Election Integrity Network (EIN) in early 2021, after resigning as a partner with the international law firm Foley and Lardner. As described in reports by the New York Times and ABC News, CPI’s EIN is working with groups like Tea Party Patriots to create “permanent election integrity coalitions in eight target states.”
* Center for Renewing America: Trump Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russ Vought leads the culture war-oriented Center for Renewing America (CRA). “CRA’s strategy is to initiate planned confrontations on major national cultural issues, win those confrontations, and let the resulting political momentum fuel legislative activity at the federal, state, and local levels.” CRA has created anti-CRT model legislation, opposed making women eligible for the draft, and opposed Afghan refugee migration. Jeffrey Clark, who Trump wanted to install as Attorney General after the 2020 election and who supported Trump’s desire for the Justice Department to declare the results fraudulent, joined CRA as Senior Fellow in June 2022. Other senior fellows include Ken Cuccinelli and Mark Paoletta.
* America First Legal Foundation: Trump’s hardline immigration advisor Stephen Miller co-created the America First Legal Foundation (AFLF) with Mark Meadows, which claims to give “the 234 new federal judges appointed by Donald Trump the chance to finally hold Washington accountable to the rule of law.” AFLF has supported lawsuits challenging Biden administration policies around immigration, equity, and vaccines, and has urged the Supreme Court to strike down affirmative action.
* American Accountability Foundation: Tom Jones, Ted Cruz’s 2016 oppo research director, leads the group described as the “Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees” by the New Yorker. AAF has taken credit for knocking out President Biden’s Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms nominee David Chipman, comptroller nominee Saule Omarova, and Federal Reserve nominee Sarah Bloom Raskin.
* American Cornerstone Institute: former Trump cabinet member Ben Carson is founder and chair of American Cornerstone Institute (ACI), where Carson hosts a podcast and creates YouTube videos, and which created the anti-woke “Little Patriots” platform “to teach children about our founding principles.”
* American Moment: “American Moment’s mission is to identify, educate, and credential young Americans who will implement public policy that supports strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all,” according to CPI’s annual report. In 2021, American Moment claims to have placed ten fellows at aligned organizations and congressional offices and, according to CPI, paid them “a living wage of $3,000 a month.” CPI plans to quadruple the program to 40 fellows in 2022.
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Finally, note how the CPI’s funding exploded in 2021, in concert with all these new ‘election integrity’ and ‘Schedule F’ efforts. And it exploded thanks to the generous donations from GOP mega-donors like Richard Uihlein. Over 40 organizations by one count. The CPI is becoming like the election dirty-tricks vehicle of choice for the GOP mega-donor mainstream:
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Since forming in 2017, CPI’s fundraising has increased dramatically—most recently, jumping from $7.3 million in 2020 to $19.7 million in 2021.CPI held a fundraiser at Mar al Lago in April 2021, with former President Trump as the keynote speaker, shortly after Trump’s Save America PAC disclosed giving $1 million to the group.
As a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, CPI does not publicly disclose its donors.
However, an analysis by Grid identified more than 40 foundations, charities and other organizations that have funded CPI, including $1.25 million from GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein’s foundation in 2020, $500,000 from the late gaming machine mogul Stanley E. Fulton’s private foundation, and $200,000 from the Chicago Community Trust.
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The future may be looking rather dim for American democracy these days, but the future is bright for the CPI. How many tens of millions of dollars in mega-donor donations did the group receive in 2022 from this same mega-donor network? We’ll see.
The CPI: “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” So Said Trump in His Plea to the GOP’s Mega-Donors
But as the following piece by Facing South points out, the explosive growth in fundraising for the CPI last year wasn’t simply due to the spontaneous generosity of the GOP mega-donor class. Donald Trump declared exhorted donors to give to the CPI went declared in a June 2021 fundraising letter that the CPI was “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” This was months after both Mark Meadows and Cleta Mitchell — two of the central figures in the post-2020 election scheming that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection — joined the group. Again, don’t forget that Cleta Mitchell’s ‘Election Integrity Network’ was also formed by the CPI in 2021. 2021 was the year the CPI become part of the MAGA movement, whether that future is lead by Trump or not, as reflected by that massive haul of mega-donor cash.
But as the article also notes, the CPI wasn’t the only entity involved with the ongoing Schedule F plot to receive some generous donations last year from Trump’s Save America PAC. The American First Policy Institute (AFPI) also received $1 million from Trump’s PAC in June 2021. And while that money undoubtedly went towards the Schedule F plot, don’t forget that AFPI’s launched its own Center for Election Integrity chaired by CNP member Kenneth Blackwell. Like the CPI, AFPI is working on a variety of ‘MAGA infrastructure’ too.
And as the large Republican establishment cash flows into these groups makes clear, the CPI and AFPI aren’t just building the infrastructure that will propell the ‘MAGA’ movement ti ‘new heights’. This is the about building the infrastructure for the future of the Republican Party. Again, whether that future is led by Trump or not. Overturning elections and stuffing the federal government with loyalists is part of the GOP’s current Trumpian agenda. Also the GOP’s future post-Trumpian agenda. It’s the future:
Facing South
How Mark Meadows’ nonprofit benefited from Trump’s ‘Big Ripoff’
By Sue Sturgis
June 24, 2022(Update: On June 28, four days after this story was published, the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed that Mark Meadows himself, along with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, also requested pardons after the attack.)
Among the matters discussed at the ongoing congressional hearings into Donald Trump’s supporters’ attack on the U.S. Capitol and the presidential election certification process on Jan. 6. 2021, is how the former president’s campaign used what it knew to be false claims of fraud to raise money — lots of money.
As Amanda Wick, a senior investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 committee, testified in a video, after election night Trump began to “barrage” small-dollar donors with emails containing disinformation, “sometimes as many as 25 a day,” and continued to do so until 30 minutes before the Capitol breach. The emails asked for contributions to something called an Official Election Defense Fund, but the committee revealed that such a fund did not exist. Instead, most of the $250 million Trump raised from his false claims went to an entity he created in November 2020 called the “Save America PAC,” which in turn paid millions of dollars to Trump-connected organizations.
“Not only was there the Big Lie, there was the Big Ripoff,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat and member of the bipartisan select committee investigating the Capitol attack, during the second hearing held on June 13.
The Jan. 6 committee showed that the Save America PAC sent $5 million to Event Strategies, the company that organized the rally preceding the Capitol riot. It paid $204,857 to Trump’s hotel business. And it donated $1 million each to the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank led in part by former Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow and former Small Business Administration head Linda McMahon, and the Washington, D.C.-based Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).
CPI is a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit founded in 2017 and chaired by Jim DeMint, who represented South Carolina in the U.S. House from 1999 to 2005 and the U.S. Senate from 2005 to 2013. A leading figure in the far-right tea party movement that opposed President Obama, DeMint went on to serve as president of the Heritage Foundation but resigned from the conservative think tank in 2017 at the unanimous request of the board, which cited “significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation.” Mickey Edwards, one of Heritage’s founding trustees and a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, told Politico at the time that DeMint changed Heritage “from a highly respected think tank to just a partisan tool and more ideological — more of a tea party organization than a think tank.”
At CPI, DeMint is free to embrace his fringe leanings. The stated mission of the group, which has a staff of 20, is “to serve and support the conservative movement on Capitol Hill.” According to its 2021 annual report, CPI trained 49 members of Congress last year as well as 246 staff members from 132 congressional offices. It offers broadcast studios and spaces for meetings and events, convenes coalitions of conservative organizations, and vets, trains, and places congressional staff. Among the members of Congress it cites as using its services are far-right Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, outspoken election deniers who were among the 147 House Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race after the Capitol attack. Greene is also among the six Republican House members that the Jan. 6 committee has identified as having sought pardons from President Trump in the riot’s aftermath.
Many of CPI’s key players came from the Trump administration. For example, its president and CEO is Ed Corrigan, who led the Trump transition team’s personnel selection process for domestic policy departments. In January 2021, CPI hired Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who played a central role in Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 presidential race and who — after coming under fire for her role in baselessly challenging the results in Georgia — quit her job at the prestigious Foley & Lardner firm, where she had represented the National Rifle Association, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee. She now leads CPI’s “Election Integrity Network,” which aims to train conservative poll watchers as part of a broader effort to create enough disputes to justify intervention in the election by Republican-controlled state legislatures. CPI’s Election Integrity Network also fought federal legislation to expand voting rights, including the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Freedom to Vote Act. Last November, Mitchell was appointed to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s board of advisors, which has no rule making authority but offers recommendations; she was nominated by the commission’s Republican-appointed members and approved by a majority vote.
Two months after hiring Mitchell, CPI brought on as senior partner Mark Meadows, Trump’s fourth and final White House chief of staff. The former real estate developer and North Carolina congressman was a founding member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus and played an important role in the 2013 federal government shutdown that tried but ultimately failed to kill funding for the Affordable Care Act. The Jan. 6 committee has put Meadows at the center of the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, thanks in part to the 9,000 pages of documents he turned over to the committee’s investigators. For example, Meadows and Mitchell were both part of Trump’s phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urging him to “find 11,780 votes” — the minimum needed to overcome Biden’s edge in the state. Meadows also discussed sending Georgia election investigators what an aide called “a shitload of POTUS stuff,” including coins and autographed MAGA hats. A Georgia grand jury is now looking into potential charges related to Trump’s rebuffed request.
Though the House recommended Meadows be held in contempt for refusing to comply with a committee’s subpoena, the U.S. Department of Justice announced on June 3 that it would not prosecute him. CPI, for its part, has dismissed the Jan. 6 committee as “desperate primetime theater.” Indeed, among those CPI named in its latest report as its “Heroes of 2021” was none other than Meadows, who’s currently under investigation for registering to vote simultaneously in three states — Virginia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, where the owner of a mobile home in rural Macon County whose address appeared on his registration form told the New Yorker that Meadows “never spent a night.”
But none of that matters to CPI, which takes an “own the libs” approach to its work. “As President Trump’s most loyal and effective chief of staff, Meadows steered Trump’s White House through some of its toughest fights against the Left,” it says in the annual report. “When Mark left government service in January 2021, he wanted to keep up the fight. That made CPI his obvious landing spot.”
Building a poll watcher cavalry
Trump’s major investment in CPI and Meadows’ arrival there in 2021 coincided with a financial boom for the nonprofit. Between its founding in 2017 and 2020, the group’s revenue increased steadily from $1.8 million to $7.3 million, according to its latest annual report. But in 2021, CPI’s revenue soared almost 170% to $19.7 million — helped in no small part by Trump’s personal endorsement in a fundraising letter, in which he said CPI is “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” The nonprofit is currently working to buy more buildings surrounding its headquarters, the Conservative Partnership Center, a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
As a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, CPI is not allowed to get directly involved in elections, nor is it legally required to disclose its donors. But the Center for Media and Democracy’s (CMD) Sourcewatch.org website has compiled some funding data for the organization by scouring foundation reports. One of CPI’s biggest donors, giving $2.25 million from 2018 to 2020, is the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation controlled by right-wing mega-donor Richard Uihlein, founder of the Wisconsin-based shipping and business supply company Uline. In addition, CPI has received significant funding — at least $732,500 — from DonorsTrust, a nonprofit fund that exists to protect the identity of individual conservative donors.
Also among CPI’s major donors, giving it at least $300,000, according to Sourcewatch.org, is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, one of the largest conservative foundations in the United States. CPI’s Cleta Mitchell currently sits on Bradley’s board. In 2017, CMD published a series of stories on the Milwaukee-based foundation that exposed a highly political agenda, including efforts to dismantle and defund unions in order to impact state elections. Bradley’s current president is Art Pope of North Carolina, the millionaire owner of the Variety Wholesalers discount retail chain; a former state legislator, state budget director, and current member of UNC’s Board of Governors; and a leading conservative donor in his own right through his family’s John William Pope Foundation.
Among CPI’s Election Integrity Network’s top spending priorities this year is a series of election summits it held in seven key swing states, three of them in the South: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. According to the summit websites, the other groups sponsoring the events included Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate, Heritage Action for America; Tea Party Patriots Action, part of a network of related groups that took part in the rally before the Jan. 6 Capitol attack; and FreedomWorks, a leading tea party organization now aligned with Trump. Another sponsor was the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which promotes voter roll purges; its board is chaired by Mitchell and includes attorney John Eastman, who has emerged as another key figure in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election by promoting the baseless theory that the vice president has the authority to block certification of an election.
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Another speaker at CPI’s elections summits was Lynn Taylor, president and co-founder of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, a think tank that belongs to the conservative State Policy Network. CPI says Taylor worked closely with Mitchell to build a grassroots team of poll watchers and election workers heading into Virginia’s elections last fall. The group says it saw Virginia, where off-year elections decided party control of the governor’s office and both legislative chambers, as a “test case for the election integrity movement.” In August 2021, CPI brought nearly 300 conservative activists together in Richmond to learn about voter rolls, voter registration, and how to set up local and state task forces to monitor elections. And perhaps not coincidentally, local elections officials in Virginia reported seeing more poll watchers than in previous years, with Republicans far outnumbering Democrats. Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe by a 51–49 margin, seized on the disinformation-driven concerns about fraud by inviting Virginia voters to join his “election integrity task force” and to get involved in poll watching.
The Election Integrity Network is an in-house project for CPI, but the group also launches spinoff organizations that provide jobs for Trump loyalists. They include the American Accountability Foundation led by Tom Jones, a former opposition research director for Trump ally U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, which targets President Biden’s judicial nominees; America First Legal, a right-wing counterpart to the ACLU led by former Trump advisor and anti-immigration hardliner Stephen Miller; the Center for Renewing America, which creates model legislation to ban the teaching of critical race theory and is led by former Trump Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, with former Trump Homeland Security official and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli serving as a senior fellow along with Jeffrey Clark, the former DOJ lawyer who Trump sought to install as attorney general in the days before the Capitol riot; the American Cornerstone Institute, a think tank led by former Trump Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson that launched a learning platform and app called the Little Patriots Program to provide children with an alternative to what it calls “woke” history; American Moment, which identifies and educates young people to get involved in conservative politics; Compass Legal Services and Compass Professional Services, which provide basic support to both new and established conservative groups; and the State Freedom Caucus Network, which supports conservative state elected officials and connects them with the U.S. House Freedom Caucus. CPI reports that it plans to launch a separate political action committee, State Freedom Caucus Action, to defend legislators facing tough reelections. And even with the Jan. 6 committee closing in on one of its principals, the group sounds optimistic about the possibilities.
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“The Jan. 6 committee showed that the Save America PAC sent $5 million to Event Strategies, the company that organized the rally preceding the Capitol riot. It paid $204,857 to Trump’s hotel business. And it donated $1 million each to the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank led in part by former Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow and former Small Business Administration head Linda McMahon, and the Washington, D.C.-based Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).”
$1 million dollars to the Conservative Policy Institute and another million to the AFPI, both from the Save America PAC, Donald Trump’s super PAC. The same super PAC that was scamming small donors right up to the last moment before the January 6 Capitol insurrection, Recall how the AFPI is described as playing a key role in the Schedule F effort. Brooke Rollins, Trump’s former Domestic Policy Council director, is leading the AFPI. It was like a $1 million donation to keep Schedule F going.
And then there’s the $1 million to the CPI. It was clearly an investment. Trump doesn’t give away that kind of money as a gift. And as we’re going to see, there’s plenty of ways the CPI yields returns on that investment. From hiring key figures involved in the plot to steal the 2020 election like Mark Meadows the Cleta Mitchell, both hired shortly after the Trump administration’s ignominious end. And both participants in the now notorious phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urging him to “find 11,780 votes”. The CPI was both the last first of the scoundrels behind the January 6 Capitol insurrection and the home base for plotting the overturning of the next election:
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Many of CPI’s key players came from the Trump administration. For example, its president and CEO is Ed Corrigan, who led the Trump transition team’s personnel selection process for domestic policy departments. In January 2021, CPI hired Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who played a central role in Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 presidential race and who — after coming under fire for her role in baselessly challenging the results in Georgia — quit her job at the prestigious Foley & Lardner firm where she had represented the National Rifle Association, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee. She now leads CPI’s “Election Integrity Network,” which aims to train conservative poll watchers as part of a broader effort to create enough disputes to justify intervention in the election by Republican-controlled state legislatures. CPI’s Election Integrity Network also fought federal legislation to expand voting rights, including the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the Freedom to Vote Act. Last November, Mitchell was appointed to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s board of advisors, which has no rule making authority but offers recommendations; she was nominated by the commission’s Republican-appointed members and approved by a majority vote.Two months after hiring Mitchell, CPI brought on as senior partner Mark Meadows, Trump’s fourth and final White House chief of staff. The former real estate developer and North Carolina congressman was a founding member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus and played an important role in the 2013 federal government shutdown that tried but ultimately failed to kill funding for the Affordable Care Act. The Jan. 6 committee has put Meadows at the center of the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, thanks in part to the 9,000 pages of documents he turned over to the committee’s investigators. For example, Meadows and Mitchell were both part of Trump’s phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urging him to “find 11,780 votes” — the minimum needed to overcome Biden’s edge in the state. Meadows also discussed sending Georgia election investigators what an aide called “a shitload of POTUS stuff,” including coins and autographed MAGA hats. A Georgia grand jury is now looking into potential charges related to Trump’s rebuffed request.
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The fact that the CPI is chaired by Jim DeMint is consistent with the CPI’s radical overall agenda. He was hired to chair the CPI following his stint as the guy who turned the Heritage Foundation into a hack Tea Party organization that dropped any pretense of respectability. So of course the CPI has become the stomping ground for figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. Figures who played their own role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Recall the early reports of “reconnaissance tours” of insurrectionists in the halls of the Capitol by Republican members of Congress days before Jan 6. Boebert is a named suspect in those tours. Also recall the networking around planning the ‘wild’ Jan 6 rally that Ali Alexander was doing with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Andy Biggs, and Louie Gohmert and the allegations the members of congress were peddling blanket pardon offers on behalf of the White House. These are the CPI’s fellow travelers:
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CPI is a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit founded in 2017 and chaired by Jim DeMint, who represented South Carolina in the U.S. House from 1999 to 2005 and the U.S. Senate from 2005 to 2013. A leading figure in the far-right tea party movement that opposed President Obama, DeMint went on to serve as president of the Heritage Foundation but resigned from the conservative think tank in 2017 at the unanimous request of the board, which cited “significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation.” Mickey Edwards, one of Heritage’s founding trustees and a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, told Politico at the time that DeMint changed Heritage “from a highly respected think tank to just a partisan tool and more ideological — more of a tea party organization than a think tank.”At CPI, DeMint is free to embrace his fringe leanings. The stated mission of the group, which has a staff of 20, is “to serve and support the conservative movement on Capitol Hill.” According to its 2021 annual report, CPI trained 49 members of Congress last year as well as 246 staff members from 132 congressional offices. It offers broadcast studios and spaces for meetings and events, convenes coalitions of conservative organizations, and vets, trains, and places congressional staff. Among the members of Congress it cites as using its services are far-right Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, outspoken election deniers who were among the 147 House Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race after the Capitol attack. Greene is also among the six Republican House members that the Jan. 6 committee has identified as having sought pardons from President Trump in the riot’s aftermath.
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Trump’s $1 million donation though his super PAC was just part of the support gives to the CPI, Trump personally endorsed the group in a 2021 fundraising letter, a year when the group’s fundraising exploded. The CNP’s CPI is completely dedicated to Trump’s agenda. Because of course it is. Trump’s agenda is the CNP’s agenda:
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Trump’s major investment in CPI and Meadows’ arrival there in 2021 coincided with a financial boom for the nonprofit. Between its founding in 2017 and 2020, the group’s revenue increased steadily from $1.8 million to $7.3 million, according to its latest annual report. But in 2021, CPI’s revenue soared almost 170% to $19.7 million — helped in no small part by Trump’s personal endorsement in a fundraising letter, in which he said CPI is “helping to build out the vital infrastructure we need to lead the America First movement to new heights.” The nonprofit is currently working to buy more buildings surrounding its headquarters, the Conservative Partnership Center, a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
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But, of course, Trump’s agenda is the agenda of this broader mega-donor network. Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised to see significant contributions to the CPI from anonymous mega-donors using the Koch network’s DonorsTrust ‘nonprofit’ to make those anonymous contributions. The $300,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation — which has Cleta Mitchell sitting on its board — is another example of the mainstream nature of the CPI’s funding. At least the mainstream for right-wing mega-donors:
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As a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit, CPI is not allowed to get directly involved in elections, nor is it legally required to disclose its donors. But the Center for Media and Democracy’s (CMD) Sourcewatch.org website has compiled some funding data for the organization by scouring foundation reports. One of CPI’s biggest donors, giving $2.25 million from 2018 to 2020, is the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation controlled by right-wing mega-donor Richard Uihlein, founder of the Wisconsin-based shipping and business supply company Uline. In addition, CPI has received significant funding — at least $732,500 — from DonorsTrust, a nonprofit fund that exists to protect the identity of individual conservative donors.Also among CPI’s major donors, giving it at least $300,000, according to Sourcewatch.org, is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, one of the largest conservative foundations in the United States. CPI’s Cleta Mitchell currently sits on Bradley’s board. In 2017, CMD published a series of stories on the Milwaukee-based foundation that exposed a highly political agenda, including efforts to dismantle and defund unions in order to impact state elections. Bradley’s current president is Art Pope of North Carolina, the millionaire owner of the Variety Wholesalers discount retail chain; a former state legislator, state budget director, and current member of UNC’s Board of Governors; and a leading conservative donor in his own right through his family’s John William Pope Foundation.
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Also note the relationship between Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman — one of the central players in orchestrating the efforts to steal the election — via the CPI’s “Election Integrity Network”: The series of ‘election integrity summits’ held by the group were sponsored by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Both Mitchell and Eastman sit on the Public Interest Legal Foundation board. Recall the other figures deeply involved with the CNP’s ‘election integrity’ efforts who are members of this organization. As we saw, both CNP-member J Christian Adams and Heritage Foundation member Hans von Spakovsky — two of the GOP’s leading ‘election integrity’ ‘experts’ — have been trotted out in front of Congress to make unsubstantiated wild claims about mass voter fraud. In addition to sitting on the Public Interest Legal Foundation board, Spakovksy continues to head the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Both the Public Interest Legal Foundation and the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative are funded by the Bradley Foundation. Again, the CPI’s ‘MAGA’ agenda is the agenda of this broader right-wing mega-donor network. We know this because they’re paying for it:
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Among CPI’s Election Integrity Network’s top spending priorities this year is a series of election summits it held in seven key swing states, three of them in the South: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. According to the summit websites, the other groups sponsoring the events included Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate, Heritage Action for America; Tea Party Patriots Action, part of a network of related groups that took part in the rally before the Jan. 6 Capitol attack; and FreedomWorks, a leading tea party organization now aligned with Trump. Another sponsor was the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which promotes voter roll purges; its board is chaired by Mitchell and includes attorney John Eastman, who has emerged as another key figure in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election by promoting the baseless theory that the vice president has the authority to block certification of an election.
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Finally, it’s worth noting the extensive CNP connections to the State Policy Network, another right-wing ‘think tank’ that’s involved with these ‘election integrity’ efforts. The President of the State Policy Network is CNP member Tracy Sharp. Lynn Taylor — the president and co-founder of the State Policy Network’s offshoot, the Virginia Institute for Public Policy — is the widow of former State Policy Network CEO John Taylor, who also shows up on the CNP membership list. And as we’ve seen, the State Policy Network has received significant funding from the Koch network of mega-donors. As we’ve also seen, one of the State Policy Network’s offshoots, Federalism in Action, was involved with promoting the Bundy clan’s attempts to takeover federal lands. Extremism is mainstream in the realm of dark money. Because this is all one big extremist network:
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Another speaker at CPI’s elections summits was Lynn Taylor, president and co-founder of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, a think tank that belongs to the conservative State Policy Network. CPI says Taylor worked closely with Mitchell to build a grassroots team of poll watchers and election workers heading into Virginia’s elections last fall. The group says it saw Virginia, where off-year elections decided party control of the governor’s office and both legislative chambers, as a “test case for the election integrity movement.” In August 2021, CPI brought nearly 300 conservative activists together in Richmond to learn about voter rolls, voter registration, and how to set up local and state task forces to monitor elections. And perhaps not coincidentally, local elections officials in Virginia reported seeing more poll watchers than in previous years, with Republicans far outnumbering Democrats. Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe by a 51–49 margin, seized on the disinformation-driven concerns about fraud by inviting Virginia voters to join his “election integrity task force” and to get involved in poll watching.
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Big extreme plans are in the works. Schedule F is just the big extreme starting plan to get the fascist ball rolling.
The Dark Enlightenment’s Schedule F Purge Plans: Curtis Yarvin, J.D. Vance, and the Plans to Purge Every Institution in the US
So what can we expect after the big Schedule F blitzkrieg at the beginning of the next Republican administration? That presumably depends on how of a ‘Caesar’ mood the new Republican president is feeling. But it won’t just be up that president. The broader right-wing mega-donor powerbroker establishment will presumably want to have its say. And that brings us to the following profoundly disturbing interview published in Vox just two weeks before the 2022 midterms. An interview of a figure whose ideas were long described as ‘outside the mainstream’. But not so outside the mainstream anymore: Curtis Yarbin a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug.
As we’ve seen, in addition to Yarvin’s role as a kind of ideological fellow traveler of Peter Thiel and an influence on Seasteading movement, Yarvin is also reportedly close to CNP-member Steve Bannon, creating a backchannel between Yarvin and the Trump White House. Yarvin and Bannon even worked together to turn Brietbart into a mainstreaming vehicle for the ‘Alt Right’. And as we’re going to see in the following Vox piece, Yarvin’s influence with conservative circles has only blossomed in recent years following the Claremont Institute’s publication of his writings. He’s apparently mainstream enough that Senator-elect JD Vance felt comfortable crediting Yarvin with an idea Vance had about what Trump should do should he win a second term. And idea that could be described as ‘Schedule F+’: Vance wanted to see a full aggressive implementation of Schedule F across government. As he put it, Trump should “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, and “replace them with our people.” In other words, Schedule F. But Vance had an addition proposal for Trump: ignore the courts if they get in the way, including the Supreme Court. Just ignore them. That was the idea Vance credited to Yarvin a year before getting elected to the Senate to represent Ohio in a campaign initially bankrolled by Peter Thiel.
Yarvin got an opportunity to share those views that Vance was all excited about with the world in the following Vox interview published two weeks before the elections. And while Yarvin doesn’t explicitly talk about “Schedule F”, it’s clear that’s what he was talking about just as it was clear that’s what Vance was proposing. And as Yarvin makes clear, any plot to purge the federal government of non-MAGA loyalists is really just an opening plot. The revolution will only accelerate at that point. A revolution that Yarvin has spent A LOT of time thinking about. A talking about. And writing about. And Yarvin has fans. Mainstream conservative establishment fans thanks, in part, to the Claremont Institute’s to publish Yarvin’s writings in 2019 as a topic of discussion. Fans like JD Vance, who has apparently heard Yarvin advocating for the aggressive use of something sounding a lot like Schedule F. Recall how Vance serves on the board of American Moment, one of the CPI spinoff groups involved with recruiting young college conservatives to fill government roles as part of the Schedule F planning. Vance isn’t just talking about putting Schedule F into effect. He’s actively preparing.
And Yarvin’s idea’s go way beyond ignoring the courts in the following interview. Yarvin advocated that Someone should just declare control over all US institutions, fire all non-loyalists, and just take over. State and local governments — where Democrats will often be in power — should just be dissolved. Just a formal end to democracy in the form of takeover blitzkrieg. Elite media and academic institutions could just be shut down. If the courts get in the way they will be demoted to an advisory status. Yarvin is convinced this will be a popular move. People are just sick of democracy not working and they’re ready for something new. He even suggests someone should run for office on the platform, perhaps as early as 2024. And while Yarvin doesn’t actually refer to Schedule F in the Vox interview, it’s pretty clear that the scenarios he’s talking about would at least start with the aggressive implementation of a Schedule F mass purge across the federal government. The full blown ending of democracy and authoritarian takeover wouldn’t necessarily have to happen after you purge the government of all non-loyalists. But it will be a lot easier:
Vox
Curtis Yarvin wants American democracy toppled. He has some prominent Republican fans.
The New Right blogger has been cited by Blake Masters and J.D. Vance. What exactly is he advocating?
By Andrew Prokop
Oct 24, 2022, 5:00am EDTIn September 2021, J.D. Vance, a GOP candidate for Senate in Ohio, appeared on a conservative podcast to discuss what is to be done with the United States, and his proposals were dramatic. He urged Donald Trump, should he win another term, to “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, “replace them with our people,” and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him.
To the uninitiated, all that might seem stunning. But Vance acknowledged he had an intellectual inspiration. “So there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things...”
Nearly a decade earlier, a Stanford law student named Blake Masters, asked by a friend for reading recommendations for a book club, emailed a link to a set of blog posts. These posts made an argument that was quite unusual in the American context, asserting that the democratically elected US government should be abolished and replaced with a monarchy. Its author, then writing pseudonymously, was Yarvin.
Masters is now the GOP Senate nominee in Arizona. At a campaign event last year, according to Vanity Fair’s James Pogue, he was asked how he’d actually drain the swamp in Washington. “One of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE — Retire All Government Employees,” Masters answered. You’ve probably guessed who the friend is.
In many thousand words’ worth of blog posts over the past 15 years, computer programmer and tech startup founder Curtis Yarvin has laid out a critique of American democracy: arguing that it’s liberals in elite academic institutions, media outlets, and the permanent bureaucracy who hold true power in this declining country, while the US executive branch has become weak, incompetent, and captured.
But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.
To Yarvin, incremental reforms and half-measures are necessarily doomed. The only way to achieve what he wants is to assume “absolute power,” and the game is all about getting to a place where you can pull that off. Critics have called his ideas “fascist” — a term he disputes, arguing that centralizing power under one ruler long predates fascism, and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting a class war as fascists do. “Autocratic” fits as a descriptor, though his preferred term is “monarchist.” You won’t find many on the right saying they wholly support Yarvin’s program — especially the “monarchy” thing — but his critique of the status quo and some of his ideas for changing it have influenced several increasingly prominent figures.
Besides Vance and Masters (whose campaigns declined to comment for this story), Yarvin has had a decade-long association with billionaire Peter Thiel, who is similarly disillusioned with democracy and American government. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009, and earlier this year, he declared that Republican members of Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 attacks were “traitorous.” Fox host Tucker Carlson is another fan, interviewing Yarvin with some fascination for his streaming program last year. He’s even influenced online discourse — Yarvin was the first to popularize the analogy from The Matrix of being “redpilled” or “-pilled,” suddenly losing your illusions and seeing the supposed reality of the world more clearly, as applied to politics.
Overall, Yarvin is arguably the leading intellectual figure on the New Right — a movement of thinkers and activists critical of the traditional Republican establishment who argue that an elite left “ruling class” has captured and is ruining America, and that drastic measures are necessary to fight back against them. And New Right ideas are getting more influential among Republican staffers and politicians. Trump’s advisers are already brainstorming Yarvinite — or at least Yarvin-lite — ideas for the second term, such as firing thousands of federal civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists. With hundreds of “election deniers” on the ballot this year, another disputed presidential election could happen soon — and Yarvin has written a playbook for the power grab he hopes will then unfold.
So these ideas are no longer entirely just abstract musings — it’s unclear how many powerful people may take Yarvin entirely literally, but many do take him seriously. And after the 2020 election crisis, the fall of American democracy seems rather more plausible than it used to. To better understand the ideas influencing a growing number of conservative elites now, and the battles that may lie ahead, then, I reviewed much of Yarvin’s sizable body of work, and I interviewed him.
During our lengthy conversation, Yarvin argued that the eventual fall of US democracy could be “fundamentally joyous and peaceful.” Yet the steps President Trump took in that direction after the 2020 election were not particularly joyous or peaceful, and it was hard for me to see why further movement down that road would be.
From obscure “anti-democracy” blogger to New Right influencer
In Yarvin’s telling, his political awakening occurred during the 2004 election. A computer programmer living in Silicon Valley, he was then an avid reader of political blogs, following the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” scandal about whether Democratic nominee John Kerry had lied about aspects of his military service. Yarvin thought it was clear Kerry had lied, and felt the media went to stunning lengths to protect him and smear his accusers. But he also became disillusioned with the conservative response, which he thought amounted to ineffectively complaining about “media bias” and continuing with politics as usual. The problem, he felt, was far deeper.
An intense period of reading old books on political theory and history to contemplate how systems work followed. Eventually, he (as he later put it) “stopped believing in democracy,” comparing this realization to how formerly religious people feel when they stop believing in God. Soon, he began posting blog comments, and then writing a self-described “anti-democracy blog” beginning in 2007, under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” In these writings — discursive, filled with historical references, wry, and often gleefully offensive — he laid out a sort of grand theory of why America is broken, and how it can be fixed:
* The US government is a sclerotic, decaying institution that can no longer achieve great or even competent things and, as he now puts it, “just sucks.” Constrained by the separation of powers and Congress, the president has “negligible power” to achieve his agenda in contrast to the “deep state” bureaucracy and the nonprofits that are permanent fixtures of Washington’s governing class.
* True power in the US is held by “the Cathedral” — elite academic and media institutions that, in Yarvin’s telling, set the bounds of acceptable political discourse and distort reality to fit their preferred ideological frames. This does not unfold as a centralized conspiracy, but rather through a shared worldview and culture, and it’s his explanation for why society keeps moving to the left through the decades.
* It’s not just the current government that sucks — democracy sucks, too. Sometimes he denounces democracy entirely, calling it a “dangerous, malignant form of government.” Sometimes he says democracy doesn’t even practically exist in the US, because voters don’t have true power over the government as compared to those other interests, which function as an oligarchy. Sometimes he argues that organizations in which leadership is shared or divided simply aren’t effective.
* Far preferable, in his view, would be a government run like most corporations — with one leader holding absolute power over those below, though perhaps accountable to a “board of directors” of sorts (he admits that “an unaccountable autocracy is a real problem”). This monarch/CEO would have the ability to actually run things, unbothered by pesky civil servants, judges, voters, the public, or the separation of powers. “How do we achieve effective management? We know one simple way: find the right person, and put him or her in charge,” he writes.For years, Yarvin was something of an odd internet curiosity, with his ideas far from most political conservatives’ radar. He gained one prominent reader — Thiel, who had written about his own disillusionment with democracy, became a Yarvin friend, and funded his startup. “He’s fully enlightened,” Yarvin later wrote of Thiel in an email, “just plays it very carefully.” (Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.) Beyond that, ideas bloggers like Robin Hanson and Scott Alexander argued with him, and he gradually got more attention for being a leading figure in the “neoreactionary” movement.
Though his blog was pseudonymous, he had not made a particularly extensive effort to keep his identity secret, appearing in person as Moldbug to give a talk at a conference in 2012. In the following years, journalists began to write about him by name, and though he soon put his blog on hiatus to focus on his startup, outrage over some of his writings continued to follow him. Yarvin was disinvited from one tech conference in 2015 after protests, and his appearance at another in 2016 led several sponsors and speakers to withdraw.
The sticking points commonly cited by his critics included one Moldbug post on historical thought about slavery, which was seized on as proof that he was “pro-slavery” and racist. In a response, he said he believes in the biological roots of intelligence and does not believe that all populations (or racial groups) are equally intelligent, on average. But he insisted racism was “despicable” and said he did not believe Europeans have any inherent or “moral superiority” over other races. Another post that spurred outrage discussed far-right Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik — Yarvin argued that the political organizations of left heroes like Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela also murdered civilians, and they should face condemnation, too.
Yarvin was out of the blogging game for the early Trump years (though he did attend Thiel’s watch party for the 2016 election). But in his time away, his influence grew. To some on the right, Yarvin’s longtime obsessions seemed both prescient and clarifying. The “Cathedral” anticipated the “Great Awokening” and the social justice wars, as Jacob Siegel has written. Presidential powerlessness before the “deep state” predicted Trump’s struggles in getting his agenda done.
Additionally, Trump himself proved a filter of sorts to the conservative intellectual class. As the president disdained the norms of classically liberal democracy, conservatives who were attached to those norms either self-selected out of the party or got purged. The pro-Trump intellectual space was taken by the New Right, thinkers arguing the left’s control of culture, society, and government have gotten so bad that extreme measures were necessary to reverse it — and that previous GOP leaders were too hesitant to fully recognize they’re in a war and need to fight back.
Take, for instance, Vance. In explaining to podcast host Jack Murphy why he became a Trump supporter after initially disdaining him, Vance said, “I saw and realized something about the American elite, and about my role in the American elite, that took me just a while to figure out. I was redpilled” — using the reference Yarvin helped popularize. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance told Murphy. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
After Yarvin stepped away from his startup (the company behind the open source software project Urbit) in 2019, The American Mind, the online publication of the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute, began publishing his essays, effectively welcoming him into the now-mainstream discourse on the right. He became a frequent guest on New Right podcasts, and in 2020 he started a Substack, at first using it to post excerpts from an in-progress book but eventually returning to his blogging roots. Then, when Trump tried and failed to overturn that year’s election result, Yarvin’s longtime interest in “regime change” suddenly became far more relevant.
How to win absolute power in Washington
Talk of an American coup may sound bizarre, but coups are not that weird. They happen in other countries, and in Yarvin’s telling, they’ve even happened in the US, sort of. He argues that Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt each so sweepingly expanded presidential power, centralizing authority and establishing new departments, that they can be said to have founded new regimes.
But Yarvin wants to see something even more dramatic. In posts such as “Reflections on the late election” and “The butterfly revolution,” and podcast appearances such as those with former Trump official Michael Anton and writer Brian Chau, Yarvin has laid out many specific ideas about how the system could really be fully toppled and replaced with something like a centralized monarchy. Sometimes he frames this as what Trump should have done in 2020, what he should (but won’t) do in 2024, or what some other candidate should do in the future, if they want to seize power. “Trump will never do anything like this,” Yarvin wrote. “But I won’t disguise my belief that someone should. Someone worthy of the task, of course.”
It is basically a set of thought experiments about how to dismantle US democracy and its current system of government. Writer John Ganz, reviewing some of Yarvin’s proposals, concluded, “If that’s not the product of a fascist imagination, I don’t know what possibly could be.” Many of these are similar to events preceding the fall of democracies elsewhere in the world. Again, Yarvin’s prominent fans like Vance and Masters wouldn’t fully endorse this program — Masters told NBC that he would have “a different prescription” of what to do than Yarvin, and that he believes in the Constitution — but some aspects of it have caught their interest.
Campaign on it, and win: First off, the would-be dictator should seek a mandate from the people, by running for president and openly campaigning on the platform of, as he put it to Chau, “If I’m elected, I’m gonna assume absolute power in Washington and rebuild the government.”
The idea here would be not to frame this as destroying the American system, but rather as improving a broken system that so many are frustrated with. Congress is unpopular, the courts are unpopular, the federal government is unpopular. Why not just promise to govern as president as you see fit, without their interference? And see if people like that idea?
“You’re not that far from a world in which you can have a candidate in 2024, even, maybe,” making that pledge, Yarvin continued. “I think you could get away with it. That’s sort of what people already thought was happening with Trump,” he said. “To do it for real does not make them much more hysterical, and” — he laughed — “it’s actually much more effective!”
It no longer seems clear that voters would reject such a pitch. Trump’s ascendancy already proves that many American voters are no longer so enamored of niceties about the rule of law and civics class pieties about the greatness of the American separated powers system. Political messaging about “threats to democracy” has polled poorly this year, with voters not particularly engaged by it.
Another piece of advice Yarvin has in this vein is that the would-be dictator should try to prevent blue America from feeling so terrified about the new regime that they take to the streets and make it all fall apart. Instead, ideally, liberals and leftists should feel so disillusioned with the status quo that they’re ready for something new. (He thought things were on a promising trajectory on this front during the early Biden administration, but has griped that the Dobbs decision may have scuttled this by firing up blue America.)
Purge the federal bureaucracy and create a new one: Once the new president/would-be monarch is elected, Yarvin thinks time is of the essence. “The speed that this happens with has to take everyone’s breath away,” he told Chau. “It should just execute at a rate that totally baffles its enemies.”
Yarvin says the transition period before inauguration should be used to intensively study what’s essential for the federal government to do, determine a structure for the new government, and hire many of its future employees. Then, once in power, it’s time to “Retire All Government Employees” of the old regime, sending them off with nice pensions so they won’t make too much of a fuss. To circumvent Congress, the president should have his appointees take over the Federal Reserve, and direct the Fed on how to fund the new regime.
Talk of firing vast swaths of federal workers is now common on the right. In late 2020, Trump issued an executive order called “Schedule F” that would reclassify as many as 50,000 civil servants in middle management as political appointees who could be fired and replaced by the new president. Nothing came of it, and Biden quickly revoked it, but Trump’s regime-in-exile is brainstorming what could be done with it in a second term, as Axios’s Jonathan Swan has reported.
To Yarvin, even that is a doomed half-measure. “You should be executing executive power from day one in a totally emergency fashion,” he told Anton. “You don’t want to take control of these agencies through appointments, you want to defund them. You want them to totally cease to exist.” This would of course involve some amount of chaos, but Yarvin hopes that will be brief, and the actually essential work of government would quickly be taken over by newly created bodies that could be under the autocrat’s control.
Ignore the courts: The rule of law in America is based on shared beliefs and behaviors among many actors throughout the system, but it has no magical power. The courts have no mechanism to actually force a president to abide by their wishes should he defy their rulings. Yet, with certain notable exceptions, they have had an extraordinary track record at getting presidents to stay in line. Defying the Supreme Court means ending the rule of law in the US as it has long been understood.
Yarvin has suggested just that — that a new president should simply say he has concluded Marbury v. Madison — the early ruling in which the Supreme Court greatly expanded its own powers — was wrongly decided. He’s also said the new president should declare a state of emergency and say he would view Supreme Court rulings as merely advisory.
Would politicians back this? J.D. Vance, in the podcast mentioned above, said part of his advice for Trump in his second term would involve firing vast swaths of federal employees, “and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Co-opt Congress: One reason past presidents may have been reluctant to defy the Supreme Court is that there is one body that can keep them in check — Congress, which can impeach and actually remove a president from office, and ban him from running again.
Now, congressional majorities have been gradually getting more deferential to their party’s presidents. Yet the threat of impeachment and removal hung over much of Trump’s decision-making and likely prevented him from going further in several key moments. For instance, he didn’t fire special counsel Robert Mueller, and he backed down and left office after January 6 (while Mitch McConnell’s allies were leaking that the GOP Senate leader might support impeachment, in an apparent threat to Trump). Congress also frequently cut Trump out of policymaking, ignoring his veto threats.
Yarvin’s idea here is that Trump (or insert future would-be autocrat here) should create an app — “the Trump app” — and get his supporters to sign up for it. Trump should then handpick candidates for every congressional and Senate seat whose sole purpose would be to fully support him and his agenda, and use the app to get his voters to vote for them in primaries. Trump has been picking primary favorites and had some success in open seat contests, but this would be a far more large-scale, strategic, and systematic effort.
The goal would be to create a personalistic majority that nullifies the impeachment and removal threat, and that gives the president the numbers to pass whatever legislation he wants. If you can win majorities in this way, then “congratulations, you’ve turned the US into a parliamentary dictatorship,” Yarvin told Chau. Effectively, the US’s Madisonian separation of powers will have been made moot.
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Centralize police and government powers: Moving forward in the state of emergency, Yarvin told Anton the new government should then take “direct control over all law enforcement authorities,” federalize the National Guard, and effectively create a national police force that absorbs local bodies. This amounts to establishing a centralized police state to back the power grab — as autocrats typically do.
Whether this is at all plausible in the US anytime soon — well, you’ll have to ask the National Guard and police officers. “You have to be willing to say, okay, when we have this regime change, we have a period of temporary uncertainty which has to be resolved in an extremely peaceful way,” he says.
Yarvin also wants his new monarch’s absolute power to be truly absolute, which can’t really happen so long as there are so many independently elected government power centers in (especially blue) states and cities. So they’ll have to be abolished in “almost” all cases. This would surely be a towering logistical challenge and create a great deal of resistance, to put it mildly.
Shut down elite media and academic institutions: Now, recall that, according to Yarvin’s theories, true power is held by “the Cathedral,” so they have to go, too. The new monarch/dictator should order them dissolved. “You can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past the start of April,” he told Anton. After that, he says, people should be allowed to form new associations and institutions if they want, but the existing Cathedral power bases must be torn down.
Turn out your people: Finally, throughout this process, Yarvin wants to be able to get the new ruler’s supporters to take to the streets. “You don’t really need an armed force, you need the maximum capacity to summon democratic power that you can find,” he told Anton. He pointed to the “Trump app” idea again, which he said could collect 80 million cell numbers and notify people to tell them where to go and protest (“peacefully”) — for instance, they could go to an agency that’s defying the new leader’s instructions, to tell them, “support the lawful orders of this new lawful authority.”
He points to the post-Soviet revolutions in Eastern Europe as a model, saying the enormous mass of people “shouldn’t be menacing in this January 6 sense, it should have this joyous sense that you’re actually winning and winning forever and the world is being completely remade.” And he says that though many police officers follow orders during their day jobs, many of them also support Trump — so perhaps they could signal that by putting on “a special armband.”
“If the institutions deny the President the Constitutional position he has legally won in the election, the voters will have to act directly,” Yarvin wrote. “Trump will call his people into the streets—not at the end of his term, when he is most powerless; at the start, when he is most powerful. No one wants to see this nuclear option happen. Preparing for it and demonstrating the capacity to execute it will prevent it from having to happen.”
Sowing seeds of doubt in democracy
Yarvin and I spoke for nearly two and a half hours recently. He peppered his comments with hundreds of historical references, and, as he often does with left interlocutors, he focused on areas where he appeared to believe he could find common ground. He was at pains to reassure me that he didn’t believe the US regime was going to fall anytime soon, saying this was a “generational, not immediate” process.
“Part of my project now is to say let’s make this a little less of an abstraction, let’s imagine what it might look like in a way that it doesn’t scare anyone,” he said. “It is dangerous! Any kind of serious political change is dangerous. And where we are is also dangerous,” he said. He named specifically the possibility of nuclear war in Ukraine, which does seem quite dangerous, though it cannot be laid solely at the feet of democracy. And while saying he was not exactly a fan of FDR, he sang the praises of New Deal Washington as a time when the US government could actually achieve impressive things, bemoaning that it no longer can.
All this is more politic than Mencius Moldbug’s old approach of throwing rhetorical bombs at the left, and he’s given an explanation of this shift. On his Substack, he has used a Lord of the Rings metaphor in which red-staters are “hobbits,” battling the elite blue-stater “elves,” but with “dark elf” allies — elite blue-staters like him. “The first job of the dark elves is to seduce the high elves — to sow acorns of dark doubt in their high golden minds,” he wrote. Then perhaps they’ll change sides, or at least their “conviction and energy” may flag. “Today’s global elites are invulnerable to any external coercive power and can coerce any internal coercive power,” he continued. “Like the USSR, they can only overthrow themselves.”
That is: He wants to convince elite liberals and leftists to lose faith in the system, believing that when enough of them no longer want to defend it, it will be easier to topple. In his thinking, that’s the prerequisite for regime change. “??When you see cultural elites developing a sense of possibility in a broader sense which is outside the sort of matrix of conventional belief, then you’re like, okay, something interesting is starting to happen,” he told me.
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But of course Yarvin’s villains (the media, academia, the “deep state”) are different from the villains in the progressive story (moneyed interests, bigotry or systemic bias, religious extremists, ignorant red-staters). And what he’d want his monarch to do with all that power is different, too: He’s written about his idea to deter crime by putting an ankle monitor on anyone who’s not rich or employed, and to create “relocation centers” for “decivilized subpopulations.”
So if you’re trying to increase left-right agreement that the current system is fatally flawed, I asked him, is it really possible to please both sides about what the new system will offer? Might you be trying to sell the left a bill of goods, claiming this future monarchy will be better, when it will actually be far worse for them?
“Neither side should be sold a bill of goods,” he answered. “This is not a homogeneous country; it’s never been. There’s a lot of people in this country who have to share the same land. That’s a solvable problem.” He referenced the long-running conflict between plebeians and patricians in the Roman Republic, which he said was made irrelevant by Julius Caesar and his successor Augustus’s centralization of power. “Imagine in America if this red state/blue state, race war, class war, all this shit, it’s just gone,” he said.
The picture was so rosy that the music of John Lennon began playing in my head. It is certainly possible to imagine a much more effective government under one-man rule than the one we have now. Perhaps if we picked out the perfect brilliant, ingenious, compassionate king (with a wise board of directors he’d respect rather than supplant), it all would work out well. It could also, of course, work out very poorly.
Even if the darkest scenarios don’t come about, sclerosis and decay are hardly problems unique to democratic systems — they’ve affected autocracies throughout history, up to today. It is difficult to ensure the leader’s incentives are focused on good governance rather than on entrenching himself in power. The corporate model, which Yarvin praises, also often leads to dysfunctional bureaucracy, not to mention that governing a country might simply be a different sort of problem than running a company.
But in a practical sense, Yarvin’s long-term ambitions for the new regime matter less than his ideas about how the old one could fall. Yarvin’s popularity among rising Republicans and New Right intellectuals reveals this cohort is more and more willing to entertain ideas that are out of the mainstream. Some ambitious figure, or even Trump himself, could well try to follow his playbook in a future crisis.
If they do, despite Yarvin’s urging that the revolution should be “absolutely bloodless,” there’s no telling how messy things could get. All the declarations that America is currently falling apart could look quaint by comparison to what comes, if the rule of law is shredded and the current order is toppled. “If you yank out a tooth, you cannot automatically expect a new and better tooth to grow back,” the economist Tyler Cowen recently wrote, in a critique of the New Right. The best-laid plans of revolutionaries very often go awry.
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“But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced — “rebooted” or “reset,” as he likes to say — with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader — a “startup guy,” like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was — should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.”
A lot has changed for Curtis Yarvin over the years. He isn’t just focused on promoting the Dark Enlightenment philosophy. He has a more actionable goal: gaming out the collapse of the US democracy. And as should be clear by now, he’s no longer some obscure blogger ranting into the wilderness. His ideas for how to carry out a government coup are basically mainstream ideas within the contemporary Trumpified conservative movement. He’s even has his writings published by the Claremont Institute starting in 2019. Again, recall how the Claremont Institute was running the “79 Days report” election simulations in the final weeks of the 2020 election that ironically envisioned all sorts of scenarios involving leftist mobs occupying capitols. The Claremont Institute happens to have John Eastman, one of the central figures in developing legal justifications for the events that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Also recall how John Eastman is working for the CRA, which has Schedule F as one of its main focuses. You can’t really make sense of the insurrectionary fervor of the GOP without accounting for the growing influence and mainstreaming of Yarvin’s ideas. When John Eastman was making up BS legal excuses for Trump to oppose the election results that even ne knew were BS, he was channeling Yarvin. Just Do It. That’s Yarvin’s slogan. Just go ahead and grab the power and declare your instituational enemies invalid.
And while Yarvin may not be using the phrase ‘Schedule F’ when he issues these calls for a mass purge of institutions across the US, it’s pretty obvious that he’s very much talking about Schedule F. He’s just doing it using the hyperbolic revolutionary language of the ‘Alt-Right’ aka the ‘New Right’ where they just come out and admit their plans to end democracy. And despite that open talk of ending democracy and purging institutions across the US of any and all ‘leftists’, Yarvin’s essays started getting openly promoted by the Claremont Institute back in 2019, “effectively welcoming him into the now-mainstream discourse on the right.” That’s part of the disturbing context of Yarvin willingness to talk so openly about what sounds like Schedule F on steroids. He’s not fighting for acceptance. This is post-Jan 6. Curtis Yarvin is leading followers with an interview like that:
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To Yarvin, incremental reforms and half-measures are necessarily doomed. The only way to achieve what he wants is to assume “absolute power,” and the game is all about getting to a place where you can pull that off. Critics have called his ideas “fascist” — a term he disputes, arguing that centralizing power under one ruler long predates fascism, and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting a class war as fascists do. “Autocratic” fits as a descriptor, though his preferred term is “monarchist.” You won’t find many on the right saying they wholly support Yarvin’s program — especially the “monarchy” thing — but his critique of the status quo and some of his ideas for changing it have influenced several increasingly prominent figures....
Overall, Yarvin is arguably the leading intellectual figure on the New Right — a movement of thinkers and activists critical of the traditional Republican establishment who argue that an elite left “ruling class” has captured and is ruining America, and that drastic measures are necessary to fight back against them. And New Right ideas are getting more influential among Republican staffers and politicians. Trump’s advisers are already brainstorming Yarvinite — or at least Yarvin-lite — ideas for the second term, such as firing thousands of federal civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists. With hundreds of “election deniers” on the ballot this year, another disputed presidential election could happen soon — and Yarvin has written a playbook for the power grab he hopes will then unfold.
So these ideas are no longer entirely just abstract musings — it’s unclear how many powerful people may take Yarvin entirely literally, but many do take him seriously. And after the 2020 election crisis, the fall of American democracy seems rather more plausible than it used to. To better understand the ideas influencing a growing number of conservative elites now, and the battles that may lie ahead, then, I reviewed much of Yarvin’s sizable body of work, and I interviewed him.
During our lengthy conversation, Yarvin argued that the eventual fall of US democracy could be “fundamentally joyous and peaceful.” Yet the steps President Trump took in that direction after the 2020 election were not particularly joyous or peaceful, and it was hard for me to see why further movement down that road would be.
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Yarvin was out of the blogging game for the early Trump years (though he did attend Thiel’s watch party for the 2016 election). But in his time away, his influence grew. To some on the right, Yarvin’s longtime obsessions seemed both prescient and clarifying. The “Cathedral” anticipated the “Great Awokening” and the social justice wars, as Jacob Siegel has written. Presidential powerlessness before the “deep state” predicted Trump’s struggles in getting his agenda done.
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After Yarvin stepped away from his startup (the company behind the open source software project Urbit) in 2019, The American Mind, the online publication of the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute, began publishing his essays, effectively welcoming him into the now-mainstream discourse on the right. He became a frequent guest on New Right podcasts, and in 2020 he started a Substack, at first using it to post excerpts from an in-progress book but eventually returning to his blogging roots. Then, when Trump tried and failed to overturn that year’s election result, Yarvin’s longtime interest in “regime change” suddenly became far more relevant.
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And as Yarvin has observed, his ideas for overthrowing democracy are already so mainstream within the conservative movement that he now advocates that someone run for the presidency on a platform of ending democracy and seizing power. It would be a popular platform, as Yarvin sees it. He could even imagine a candidate running on that platform in 2024. It’s also worth noting the keen interest of figures like Peter Thiel, Steven Bannon, and Robert Mercer in the growing field of psychedelic medicine and the evidence showing that psychedelics can help people resist authoritarian worldviews. It should be pretty clear by now that a population gripped by authoritarian mindsets is absolutely central to the futures envisioned by these fascist networks:
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Talk of an American coup may sound bizarre, but coups are not that weird. They happen in other countries, and in Yarvin’s telling, they’ve even happened in the US, sort of. He argues that Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt each so sweepingly expanded presidential power, centralizing authority and establishing new departments, that they can be said to have founded new regimes.But Yarvin wants to see something even more dramatic. In posts such as “Reflections on the late election” and “The butterfly revolution,” and podcast appearances such as those with former Trump official Michael Anton and writer Brian Chau, Yarvin has laid out many specific ideas about how the system could really be fully toppled and replaced with something like a centralized monarchy. Sometimes he frames this as what Trump should have done in 2020, what he should (but won’t) do in 2024, or what some other candidate should do in the future, if they want to seize power. “Trump will never do anything like this,” Yarvin wrote. “But I won’t disguise my belief that someone should. Someone worthy of the task, of course.”
It is basically a set of thought experiments about how to dismantle US democracy and its current system of government. Writer John Ganz, reviewing some of Yarvin’s proposals, concluded, “If that’s not the product of a fascist imagination, I don’t know what possibly could be.” Many of these are similar to events preceding the fall of democracies elsewhere in the world. Again, Yarvin’s prominent fans like Vance and Masters wouldn’t fully endorse this program — Masters told NBC that he would have “a different prescription” of what to do than Yarvin, and that he believes in the Constitution — but some aspects of it have caught their interest.
Campaign on it, and win: First off, the would-be dictator should seek a mandate from the people, by running for president and openly campaigning on the platform of, as he put it to Chau, “If I’m elected, I’m gonna assume absolute power in Washington and rebuild the government.”
The idea here would be not to frame this as destroying the American system, but rather as improving a broken system that so many are frustrated with. Congress is unpopular, the courts are unpopular, the federal government is unpopular. Why not just promise to govern as president as you see fit, without their interference? And see if people like that idea?
“You’re not that far from a world in which you can have a candidate in 2024, even, maybe,” making that pledge, Yarvin continued. “I think you could get away with it. That’s sort of what people already thought was happening with Trump,” he said. “To do it for real does not make them much more hysterical, and” — he laughed — “it’s actually much more effective!”
It no longer seems clear that voters would reject such a pitch. Trump’s ascendancy already proves that many American voters are no longer so enamored of niceties about the rule of law and civics class pieties about the greatness of the American separated powers system. Political messaging about “threats to democracy” has polled poorly this year, with voters not particularly engaged by it.
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And then we get to the Schedule F part of Yarvin’s 2024 Fascist Dream campaign scenario: after running and winning on a platform of consolidating power as a new Caesar, Yarvin recommends a bureaucratic blitzkrieg. Mass firings of federal workers under the ‘Schedule F’ plot would happen immediately, with new entities and agencies replacing them. It’s a recipe for a mass privatization of the government. And to pay for it all, the new Caesar should have his appointees take over the Federal Reserve:
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Purge the federal bureaucracy and create a new one: Once the new president/would-be monarch is elected, Yarvin thinks time is of the essence. “The speed that this happens with has to take everyone’s breath away,” he told Chau. “It should just execute at a rate that totally baffles its enemies.”Yarvin says the transition period before inauguration should be used to intensively study what’s essential for the federal government to do, determine a structure for the new government, and hire many of its future employees. Then, once in power, it’s time to “Retire All Government Employees” of the old regime, sending them off with nice pensions so they won’t make too much of a fuss. To circumvent Congress, the president should have his appointees take over the Federal Reserve, and direct the Fed on how to fund the new regime.
Talk of firing vast swaths of federal workers is now common on the right. In late 2020, Trump issued an executive order called “Schedule F” that would reclassify as many as 50,000 civil servants in middle management as political appointees who could be fired and replaced by the new president. Nothing came of it, and Biden quickly revoked it, but Trump’s regime-in-exile is brainstorming what could be done with it in a second term, as Axios’s Jonathan Swan has reported.
To Yarvin, even that is a doomed half-measure. “You should be executing executive power from day one in a totally emergency fashion,” he told Anton. “You don’t want to take control of these agencies through appointments, you want to defund them. You want them to totally cease to exist.” This would of course involve some amount of chaos, but Yarvin hopes that will be brief, and the actually essential work of government would quickly be taken over by newly created bodies that could be under the autocrat’s control.
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The courts would then be demoted to an “advisory” branch of government and ignored. How believable is such a scenario? And, don’t forget that Thiel-backed Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance — who won his race — actually advocated that exact approach for a Trump second term. Just demote and ignore the courts. That’s apparently a mainstream conservative idea now:
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Ignore the courts: The rule of law in America is based on shared beliefs and behaviors among many actors throughout the system, but it has no magical power. The courts have no mechanism to actually force a president to abide by their wishes should he defy their rulings. Yet, with certain notable exceptions, they have had an extraordinary track record at getting presidents to stay in line. Defying the Supreme Court means ending the rule of law in the US as it has long been understood.Yarvin has suggested just that — that a new president should simply say he has concluded Marbury v. Madison — the early ruling in which the Supreme Court greatly expanded its own powers — was wrongly decided. He’s also said the new president should declare a state of emergency and say he would view Supreme Court rulings as merely advisory.
Would politicians back this? J.D. Vance, in the podcast mentioned above, said part of his advice for Trump in his second term would involve firing vast swaths of federal employees, “and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
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Then we get to the plan to get around the threat of an impeachment: stacking the GOP with authoritarian loyalists who will back the new Caesar in everything he does. That’s already the status quo, as Jan 6 and the resulting enduring support for Donald Trump amply demonstrates. So we can check off that part of the power-grab ‘to-do’ list:
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Co-opt Congress: One reason past presidents may have been reluctant to defy the Supreme Court is that there is one body that can keep them in check — Congress, which can impeach and actually remove a president from office, and ban him from running again....
Yarvin’s idea here is that Trump (or insert future would-be autocrat here) should create an app — “the Trump app” — and get his supporters to sign up for it. Trump should then handpick candidates for every congressional and Senate seat whose sole purpose would be to fully support him and his agenda, and use the app to get his voters to vote for them in primaries. Trump has been picking primary favorites and had some success in open seat contests, but this would be a far more large-scale, strategic, and systematic effort.
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What about state and local governments, which will frequently be under Democratic control? Oh, they’ll have to be dissolved, along with all major universities. Poof. Gone. This will presumably all fall under the plan of creating a sense of ‘shock and awe’ in the opening rounds of this coup plot:
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Centralize police and government powers: Moving forward in the state of emergency, Yarvin told Anton the new government should then take “direct control over all law enforcement authorities,” federalize the National Guard, and effectively create a national police force that absorbs local bodies. This amounts to establishing a centralized police state to back the power grab — as autocrats typically do.Whether this is at all plausible in the US anytime soon — well, you’ll have to ask the National Guard and police officers. “You have to be willing to say, okay, when we have this regime change, we have a period of temporary uncertainty which has to be resolved in an extremely peaceful way,” he says.
Yarvin also wants his new monarch’s absolute power to be truly absolute, which can’t really happen so long as there are so many independently elected government power centers in (especially blue) states and cities. So they’ll have to be abolished in “almost” all cases. This would surely be a towering logistical challenge and create a great deal of resistance, to put it mildly.
Shut down elite media and academic institutions: Now, recall that, according to Yarvin’s theories, true power is held by “the Cathedral,” so they have to go, too. The new monarch/dictator should order them dissolved. “You can’t continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past the start of April,” he told Anton. After that, he says, people should be allowed to form new associations and institutions if they want, but the existing Cathedral power bases must be torn down.
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So what should this aspiring Caesar do in the face of the inevitable popular resistance to this plot? Organize vigilante mobs in support for the new regime. Something like a “Trump App” that allows the president to issue orders to his supporters is potentially all that would be required. The mob would take care of the rest:
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Turn out your people: Finally, throughout this process, Yarvin wants to be able to get the new ruler’s supporters to take to the streets. “You don’t really need an armed force, you need the maximum capacity to summon democratic power that you can find,” he told Anton. He pointed to the “Trump app” idea again, which he said could collect 80 million cell numbers and notify people to tell them where to go and protest (“peacefully”) — for instance, they could go to an agency that’s defying the new leader’s instructions, to tell them, “support the lawful orders of this new lawful authority.”...
“If the institutions deny the President the Constitutional position he has legally won in the election, the voters will have to act directly,” Yarvin wrote. “Trump will call his people into the streets—not at the end of his term, when he is most powerless; at the start, when he is most powerful. No one wants to see this nuclear option happen. Preparing for it and demonstrating the capacity to execute it will prevent it from having to happen.”
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It’s worth noting that Trump’s “Truth Social” app just got added to the Google app store back in October. Will Truth Social be the app-of-choice for organizing Trumpian street mobs to ‘keep the peace’ after the bureaucratic blitzkrieg gets underway in early 2025? That remains to be seen. But at this point it’s pretty obvious that the right-wing social media ecosystem is only going to grow heading into 2024. It’s also worth noting that none other than John McEntee has reportedly gotten into the app-making business with Peter Thiel, to make a conservative dating app. These are the kinds of details that could because salient when the Schedule F blitzkrieg is actually put into action. A lot of people are going to have to be recruited into the government all of a sudden. Or recruited into the vigilante street mobs if it comes to that.
Will it come to that? Roving mobs of supporters getting directed around the streets by a president-turned-dictator’s social media apps? Let’s hope not, but there’s no denying that such thoughts are in the air. From Curtis Yarvin’s lips to JD Vance’s ears. And Vance obviously isn’t the only high-level Republican who has been drinking Yarvin’s Kool-Aid. The Republican Party is in a decidedly revolutionary mood and in no mood to run into the same bureaucratic obstacle Trump faced during his first term. But with the prospects of a Trump-rerun now on the table following Trump’s 2024 campaign announcement, it isn’t just revolution in the air. Revenge is on the agenda. The kind of revenge that will make all of Trump’s enemies rue the day they ever thought about crossing him. That cauldron of rage of grievance is poised to become the animating force in US politics. The erratic chaos of Trump’s first term replaced with a more refined and vengeful chaos of a second term. A revenge term. And a term defined by all the planned chaos. It’s easy to forget when reading all of these conservative sources describing their plans for reordering the nature of the federal workforce just how wildly chaotic that whole process would actually be if implemented. You can’t actually mix-and-max expertise and skill sets the way these Schedule F plotters are planning and expecting things to run smoothly. But smooth running isn’t what they are planning on. Revolutionary chaos is the plan. Controlled chaos, but chaos. A bureaucratic blitzkrieg so sweeping and all encompassing that the public can barely wrap its head around what’s going on. Domestic shock and awe. Exciting and enthralling shock and awe, at least for much of the public if Curtis Yarvin’s predictions on the popularity of plots is at all accurate.
That’s the plan, Trump or not. It’s not a secret. It was a secret. One of the Trump administration’s most closely held secrets in 2020, as we saw. But not anymore. Those twin giant Axios articles were the Schedule F coming out party. This is the plan for 2024 and the GOP is openly owning it. Will Schedule F manage to actually make it into the party’s 2024 platform? Who knows. That’s assuming there’s even a platform at all. But as we’ve seen in this post, the conservative establishment is thoroughly committed to this project, whether or not the GOP officially declares a mass purge of the federal bureaucracy in the party platform. And whether that 2024 nominee is Trump or not. This isn’t just Trump’s revenge anymore. The mega-donors want this too. The Empire is planning on Striking Back. You don’t find this many CNP members working on something without full buy-in from the GOP establishment. Just as you wouldn’t have found one CNP-member after another working on overturning the 2020 election results if that strategy didn’t have the thorough backing of the CNP network and mega-donor class. Schedule F is the plan for the next Republican adminstration. And tens of millions more dollars are going to be spent getting that massive plan ready to spring into action when the opportunity strikes. The only real question at this point is when they’ll get a chance to implement. Along with the general question of just how much more popular will Curtis Yarvin’s worldview get between now and then. Is Yarvin correct that an army of average Americans are ready and willing to toss away democracy for the excitement of a Caesar? Trump or not, we are on track to getting an answer that question. Again.
Can anything be done to stop the next Republican administration from implementing the Schedule F plot? It’s a question that’s become all the more acute With Trump’s 2024 announcement and the GOP’s recapture of the House. And as we’re going to see in the following articles, it’s a question the Democrats have been wresting with over the past couple of years since Trump left office and they do have options. Option to impede the ability of a GOP president to unilaterally implement Schedule F on their own. But as we’re also going to see, those options are limited to stopping presidents from implementing Schedule F on their own. A Republican president with a Republican controlled congress is another story.
So with only a few months left for the Democrats to pass laws, the question of what they are going to do about Schedule F while the opportunity is there looms large. And set to loom ever larger the closer we get to 2024 no matter what the Democrats do because as we’re also going to see, the rest of the GOP appears to be fully on board with Schedule F. Which means the next GOP president presiding over a GOP-controlled congress isn’t going to have any trouble finding support for their Schedule F impulses. And that’s why the Schedule F plot is going to remain a looming inevitability no matter what Democrats do:
“With the House likely to flip to Republican control in 2023, the window for lawmakers to pass a law preventing the return of Schedule F is closing. But Senate Democrats told Government Executive in recent weeks that they are optimistic that they will be able to include the measure as part of either the annual National Defense Authorization Act or an omnibus spending package to fund the government through next September.”
The window is closing. And as Trump made clear during a fundraising rally in July when he called for a purge of the civil service of “rogue bureaucrats”, the threat remains. Trump wants his purge and wants to continue preparations for Schedule F’s implementation as soon as he’s reelected. Hence the fundraiser in July at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), which, as we’ve seen, is one of the groups already working towards that goal. Trump’s fundraising pitch was effectively a call to donate to the AFPI so in can continue its Schedule F preparations:
So what are the Democrats in congress going to do? For starters, the House passed a bill back in September that effective forces future presidents to go to Congress for approval before implementing Schedule F. That bill has yet to be passed by the senate and signed into law but it sounds likely that this will happen in the final months of this lame duck congress. So it’s something, but the problem is that’s more or less the only thing the Democrats can do to prevent this. As long as one of the two major parties is intent on implementing Schedule F there isn’t a lot the Democrats can do other than winning enough elections to prevent a repeat of 2017’s complete GOP sweep of the White House and Congress. And that ‘winning strategy’ of blocking Republicans from getting a lock on the White House and Congress by winning election has to happen indefinitely. It’s not a great long-term strategy given the back-and-forth ‘throw the bums out’ reactionary patterns of US politics:
“The House on Thursday voted 225–204 to pass legislation barring future presidents from unilaterally stripping federal workers of their civil service protections as former President Trump tried to do with his abortive establishment of Schedule F. Six Republican members voted in favor of the bill.”
It wasn’t a party-line vote. But it almost was. A whole six Republicans voted for the bill. It’s a big clue as to what to expect the next time Republicans have control of congress. And that’s why the question of whether or not this bill passes in the Senate and is signed into law is certainly an important question but even if it happens the the Schedule F threat doesn’t go away. It just requires GOP controls of congress in addition to the White House. Yes, the barrier is higher, but it’s also a barrier pretty routinely overcome in US politics as was the case in 2017 following Trump’s big win. As long as the GOP congressional caucus is on board with the Schedule F plot it’s just a matter of time.
And as the following story from back in July about the GOP’s big plans for Schedule F makes clear, Schedule F has the backing of the GOP caucus. They’ve already proposed a bill to implement the Schedule F plot. A bill with the added effect of neutering the existing federal whistleblower laws:
“Although the bill stands nearly zero chance of passing in the current Congress, experts say that it, combined with recent news that conservative political operatives with Trump’s endorsement have devised plans to revive Schedule F, a proposal to strip the civil service protections from tens of thousands of federal employees in “policy-related” positions, indicates the civil service system as we have known it for the last 150 years will be under attack under the next Republican administration.”
Yes, while the proposed legislation has no chance of becoming law any time soon, it’s a strong indication of what to expect at the next opportunity. Chip Roy, one of the legislation’s co-sponsors, made clear the underlying narrative the GOP is planning on using: “there are still too many federal employees actively undermining America through their blatant contempt for our nation, the rule of law, and the American people” and “there needs to be a reckoning.” That’s the narrative they’re going with:
And note the now-familiar groups helping the GOP craft this legislation: Heritage Action for America and Citizens for Renewing America (CRA). Along with another “American First” group and the Koch-backed FreedomWorks:
Finally, there’s the erosion of existing whistleblower protections that comes with this legislative ‘reckoning’. Because if you’re going to engage in a mass ideological purge you had better prepare for whistleblowers:
And let’s not forget the the whole point of the Schedule F plot is to get people put in place who will implement the next Republican president’s agenda regardless of the agenda’s legality or constitutionality. In other words, the post-Schedule F plot is a a recipe for widespread whistleblowing. Whistleblowing that will come with the risk of lost retirement funds once the GOP purge is inevitably executed. It’s just more glaring detail warning us about the obvious reality that the whole Schedule F plot is really just the opening act.
It looks like Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign is getting off to a fitting start. The former president is already having to explain away a dinner party he hosted at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye “Ye” West and open white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Even Steve Bannon is decrying the dinner, calling it a “trolling operation” that was intended to “insult Trump,” “put Trump in his place,” and make it seem as though the former president “lacks judgment.” In other words, Bannon is characterizing Trump as the victim here. A victim of a far right plot to discredit Trump that through his far right associations.
What is Trump’s excuse for the meeting? Well, he has already attempted to claim that Fuentes was just one of West’s guests who Trump didn’t know. Of course, as we’ve seen, this was far from the only time Nick Fuentes has popped up in Trump’s orbit. Recall how Fuentes had been popularizing the idea during Trump’s term that if the GOP doesn’t do everything possible to keep Trump in office, the pro-Trump supporters are going to “destroy the GOP”. It was at the December 12 rally, where Fuentes declared, “In the first Million MAGA march we promised that if the GOP did not do everything in their power to keep Trump in office, then we would destroy the GOP...As we gather here in Washington, D.C. for a second Million MAGA March, we’re done making promises. It has to happen now. We are going to destroy the GOP.” The crowd followed Fuentes’s lead and started chanting: “Destroy the GOP! Destroy the GOP!” This was the same rally that include multiple flyovers by Trump in Marine One. And in the period following the 2020 election, Fuentes was publicly ruminating about killing state legislators who don’t support efforts to overturn the election for Trump. Finally, recall how, four days before the December 12, 2020, “Destroy the GOP!” rally, Fuentes received hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin donations from a slew of far right groups during this same post-2020 election period. So beyond being a major white supremacist online personality, Fuentes was also a key far right organizational figure in the pro-Trump movement that culminated in the January 6 storming of the Capitol.
And as we’re going to see in the following Axios article, Trump reportedly “seemed very taken” with Fuentes, and was impressed Fuentes’s ability to rattle off statistics and recall speeches dating back to his 2016 campaign. Fuentes also counseled Trump about the importance of seeming “authentic”, warning Trump that his 2024 reelection campaign speech didn’t have the same authentic feel. Trump responded, “You like it better when I just speak off the cuff,” according to an unnamed source. Fuentes agreed, calling Trump an “amazing” president when he was unrestrained. “There was a lot of fawning back and forth,” according to the source. Mutual fawning. That’s what was actually happening. So when Steve Bannon tries to dismiss Trump’s Mar-a-Lago dinner party with Fuentes as a “trolling operation”, that may have been an ironically accurate label. Holding this mutual fawning session, letting it come out in public, and then passing it all off as an ‘oopsy’ really is an epic troll. With Trump and Fuentes as co-troll masters, and Bannon playing a supporting role. At least we have an answer to the question of whether or not Trump is planning on running as a Nazi-friendly candidate again. He’s friendly and fawning. And already trolling the world about it.
But was mutual fawning and trolling the only purpose for the dinner party? Perhaps, but with the Schedule F plot looming large as part of Trump’s second term agenda, it’s worth noting that Nick Fuentes isn’t very far removed from that exact Schedule F plot. As we already saw, the two key GOP Senate candidates heavily backed by Peter Thiel — JD Vance and Blake Masters — both have a history of talking favorably of Curtis Yarvin, the pro-monarchy chief intellectual architect of the ‘neoreactionary’ movement that blossomed into the ‘Alt Right’. That includes talking favorably of Yarvin’s schemes that involve mass firing all federal government employees. Yarvin even coined a term for his version of Schedule F back in 2012: Retire All Government Employees (RAGE). It was Step 1 in Yarvin’s guide to overthrowing the government and installing a monarchy. And as Vanity Fair reported back in April, Masters made a reference to Yarvin’s “RAGE” acronym — when asked how he was planning on ‘draining the swamp’ during a campaign event. Vance and Masters both can’t stop making references to Yarvin.
And Yarvin obviously isn’t the only far right extremist these guys are acquainted with. As the Vanity Fair article excerpt from August describes, Blake Masters has another Nazi problem: they just won’t stop endorsing him. Like Andrew Anglin, who gave Masters a gushing endorsement. Or Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab who endorsed Masters only to have Masters claim he didn’t know him and Torba was a nobody, causing Torba to release an audio file of a conversation between the two. Or Nick Fuentes, who declared, “Today is the big day—Vote for…Blake Masters in AZ!” and implored his followers to “turn out in large numbers for America First, Christian Nationalist candidates,” on the August 2 primaries.
So when we see Trump playing footsie with a prominent Nazi social media influencer days after launching his campaign that has a Schedule F mass purge as the already declared ‘Step 1’ for the start of his second term, it’s worth asking: is Nick Fuentes — who knows A LOT of Nazis and fellow travelers — going to be playing a staffing role in the next Trummp administration? Trump doesn’t just want anyone to fill all government jobs. He wants loyalist with no boundaries or qualms. Tens of that that thousands or more.
And don’t forget about Yarvin’s next steps in the plan to overthrow democracy and install a popular dictator: have the new president/dictator direct street mobs of followers around with phone apps to help maintain order. It’s hard to think of someone more useful for that than Nick Fuentes, an literal neo-Nazi social media star with a daily following. Trump is clearly planning on once again campaigning as an outsider ready to storm into DC again and ‘drain the swamp’ for real this time. He’ll cross lines that people say shouldn’t be crossed, again. And this time he’s not going to leave any lines uncrossed. That’s what Trump appears to be planning on campaigning on for the next two years. And he’s going to need a lot of muscle willing to play a Brown Shirts role. That’s part of the context of the highly conspicuous dinner with with Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. Schedule F+ needs Nazi muscle and Nick Fuentes can provide a lot of it:
“Fuentes told Trump that he represented a side of Trump’s base that was disappointed with his newly cautious approach, especially with what some far-right activists view as a lack of support for those charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.”
It was a one-man Nazi focus group. Nick Fuentes was there representing “a side of Trump’s base”. And it sounds like this side includes a lot of people facing legal consequences over Jan 6. But while it sounds like Fuentes was there delivering criticism, it sounds like that criticism was drowned out by all the mutual fawning:
And note the Truth Social story from February of this year that Trump should know Fuentes from: Truth Social was getting slammed in the press for verifying Fuentes’s account, which is still active:
What else did they discuss at that dinner? Will there be more such semi-secret dinners? We’ll see, maybe. But whether or not we hear about another such dinner, we can be pretty confident this channel of communication will remain open going into 2024. And not just open with Trump. As the following article about Blake Masters and his die hard Alt Right fan base who claim him as one of their own, Nick Fuentes and other ‘Alt Right’ figures are still very keen on making further inroads into the GOP ‘mainstream’ and that impulse is only going to surge as the primaries play out
“On the morning of the August 2 primary, Nick Fuentes, a well-known white nationalist livestreamer who attended the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017, issued the following reminder to his Telegram followers: “Today is the big day—Vote for…Blake Masters in AZ!” Fuentes previously endorsed Masters while encouraging his fans to “turn out in large numbers for America First, Christian Nationalist candidates.” Likewise, Scott Greer, a former Daily Caller editor who has written for a white supremacist website, signaled his support for Masters during the primary, tweeting, “blaKEYED masters”—“KEYED” being a synonym for “based,” the far right’s favorite term of endearment—in response to an attack ad portraying Masters as anti-Semitic.”
And that, right there, is Nick Fuentes’s ‘influence’ in action. A GOP primary-day endorsement. Fuentes has followers and Nazi votes count too. Although it may not have been as helpful to Masters as Ander Anglin’s call, back in June, for his followers to contact the Masters campaign and find out what help it needs:
How many Nazis did the Masters campaign take on as a result of that call to action? We don’t know, but with Trump’s Schedule F plot requiring an army of loyal extremists right out the gates if Trump wins again, it’s not hard to imagine that the kind of people who answered Anglin’s call to help Masters’s campaign are the kind of people Trump is going to be looking for in large numbers. Nazis clean enough to join a campaign. And then join the government and where they’ll proceed to ‘drain the swamp’.
Calls to terminate the US Constitution. That’s where we are. Donald Trump wasn’t mincing words, or hiding his intent, when he openly called for the termination of the US Constitution’s rules on elections and his reinstallment as president in response to the story about the ‘Hunter Biden Twitter Files’. It’s also the latest example of Trump making clear that he’s not simply running to be president again. He’s running to overthrow the government and become some sort of new God King. A revolution that’s going to start with a mass Schedule F purge of government employees, but presumably won’t end there. At least not if that opening purge is successful.
On one level, Trump’s calls to be reinstated was another predictable escalation from Trump. Provocations like that are going be coming almost daily from Trump for the next two years. But there’s the other context to this: it was barely a week ago that Trump had the now-notorious Mar-a-Lago dinner with Kanye West and neo-Nazi youth leader Nick Fuentes. As we saw, while Trump claimed to have no idea who Fuentes was during the dinner, that’s a rather implausible claim. And either way, Trump was reportedly enamored with Fuentes. It was the kind of report that raised the question: is Trump planning the much larger ‘Schedule F+’-style society-wide purge and suspension of democracy that Curtis Yarvin has written about? And if so, is he looking at groups like Fuentes’s thousands of ‘groyper’ followers to play a kind of Brownshirts role in executing that coup? Signs keep pointing towards some sort of giant power grab right out of the gates designed to preemptively squash any future opposition to what comes next. Signs being sent by Trump himself. Trump’s call to terminate the Constitution’s rules on elections is just the latest of those signs.
So with Trump sounding increasingly fascist with each passing week, here’s a set of articles describing the growing alliances being formed between Fuentes’s ‘groyper’ following and some particularly reactionary quarters of the Catholic community. Specifically, the St. Michael’s Media group, commonly known as “Church Militant”. As we saw, while the phrase “church militant” has traditionally been used to describe a benign spiritual struggle within one’s own soul, the phrase has taken on a very different meaning inside the theocratic community found at St Michael’s ChurchMilitant.com. It was back in December of 2016 when the NY Times reported on how ChurchMilitant.com, founded by Michael Voris, was using the term “church militant” as a highly politicized cry for Christians to rise up and wage ‘spiritual warfare’ against all non-Christians aspects of society. It was an application of the ‘church militant’ concept that was aligned with Steve Bannon’s use of the term “church militant” to call for a global war on “Islamic fascism” and international financial elites. And as we also saw, Bannon’s relationship with Voris and the Church Militant movement was on display again last November when Bannon, Voris, and Milo Yiannopoulos held a rally in Balitmore over the objection of city officials who feared the event was going to be used to provoke political violence.
As we’re going to see, CNP-member Steve Bannon is far from the only American fascist interested in cultivating a politically weaponized “church militant” movement. It turns out Nick Fuentes’s groypers have become exceptionally close to the Voris’s Church Militant movement. So close that one of the ‘reporters’/producers at ChurchMilitant.com, Joseph Enders, is a himself a full-fledged groyper. Enders is described as a fixture on the Church Militant Evening News and a regular contributor to churchmilitant.com.
Another groyper who has managed to get a lot of positive Church Militant media coverage is Dalton Clodfelter. As we’re going see, Clodfelter went on the far right Stew Peters show back in August and made a declaration that sounded was awfully close to the kind of full-scale purge Curtis Yarvin has envisioned. Clodfelter called for the establishment of a “far-right authoritarian government” that will imprison its political enemies, establish Christianity as the national religion, and outlaw all secular education. “Once we take control, we will identify our enemies, and we will stomp them into the dirt. They will not be able to return to power. We will rip them from their offices. We will rip them from their homes for being degenerate liars, degenerate treasonous domestic terrorists because that is what they are.” That sure sounds a lot like Curts Yarvin’s fantasy scenario for a popular authoritarian movement. And that’s the group Michael Voris’s Church Militant community of reactionary Catholics is now targeting for recruitment. Nick Fuentes already couched his Nazi movement in Christian nationalist terms and now Fuentes’s groypers have become the recruits-of-choice for the same group of Catholic reactionaries already aligned with Steve Bannon.
There’s another reactionary Catholic who, like Bannon, played an important role in the planning that led up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection and who also has a close working relationship with this Church Militant/Groyper nexus of Catholic fascism: CNP-member Ali Alexander. As we’ve seen, it was Alexander’s planned “Stop the Steal” rally outside the Capitol that actually devolved into the insurrectionary mob. And that was just the last of a string of ‘wild’ “Stop the Steal” rallies Alexander held, including one in Lansing, Michigan, led by none other than Fuentes. As we’re going to see, Church Militant celebrated the Lansing rally at the time and Michael Voris later fondly recounted attending that rally during an interview he did with Alexander a week after Jan 6. Alexander told Voris he had come to realize there was a “war between the church and the people who have infiltrated the church”, echoing the war on the Catholic Church’s progressive wing that Bannon has been waging for years.
And that Lansing rally was one of many ‘Stop the Steal’ rallies Fuentes spoke at in that post-election period. There was also the December 2020 rally in DC where Fuentes led the crowd in chants of “Destroy the GOP.” As Fuentes declared, “In the first Million MAGA march we promised that if the GOP did not do everything in their power to keep Trump in office, then we would destroy the GOP...As we gather here in Washington, D.C. for a second Million MAGA March, we’re done making promises. It has to happen now. We are going to destroy the GOP...Destroy the GOP! Destroy the GOP!” Michael Flynn also spoke at the rally, And at one point, then-president Trump did a flyover of the crowd in the Marine One helicopter three times. That’s part of the absurdity of Trump’s claims that he didn’t know Fuentes. Trump literally did three flyovers at the rally where Fuentes led the crowd in ‘Destroy the GOP!’ chants as a show of their loyalty to him. Of course Trump remembers him.
And if Trump somehow genuinely didn’t remember Fuentes from that triple-flyover, surely he would remember Fuentes from the February 2021 “American First PAC” (AFPAC) conference held by Fuentes right down the street from CPAC. As we saw, AFPAC was basically a super-pro-MAGA taunt against CPAC. And, again, a giant public display of love and loyalty for Trump. Fuentes just keeps making the news for public displays of love and loyalty for Trump.
That’s all part of the context of the Trump’s public lurch towards authoritarian figures and ideas in just the last couple of weeks since announcing his reelection bid. Dinner with Nick Fuentes wasn’t some silly slip up. It was a meeting between Trump and the American fascist with a huge online following best positioned to provide Trump with the street muscle he’s going need. Street muscle that will include a nationwide network of radicalized Catholics by the time Fuentes and Voris have completed the creation of a MAGA-fied Nazi-Catholic marriage of movements made in hell.
Ok, first, here’s Part 1 of a two-part Salon series from back in May about this growing alliance between Fuentes’s groypers, the ‘Alt Right’, and the ‘trad-Cath’ reactionaries at Michael Voris’s ChurchMilitant.com. An alliance forged in the shared goal of imposing an authoritarian form of Christian nationalism at the earliest opportunity:
“All of this is part of a broader pattern of increasing overlap between the far right, including overtly white nationalist movements and leaders, with the extreme right-wing fringe of the Roman Catholic Church. This emerging coalition includes such figures as Milo Yiannopoulos, who was effectively expelled from the MAGA movement in 2017 over his remarks about child sex abuse; Canadian white nationalist Faith Goldy, similarly disgraced after appearing on a podcast of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer; onetime “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander; and “Kent State gun girl” Kaitlin Bennett.”
A fusion of neo-Nazis and hard-right Catholics. Figures including CNP-member Ali Alexander who played a central role in organizing the violence the unfolded on January 6. That’s the disturbing trend we’re seeing play out. The “trad-Cath” identity is becoming a tool for the further mainstreaming of white nationalist ideas. With mainstream Catholics being the target audience:
It was that fusion of Nazis and “Trad-Caths” the was put on display following the initial news of the impending overturning of Roe, when a ‘groyper’ caught on video publicly taunting women passing by on the streets with threats that they were going to be forced to have his babies with the celebration was ultimately celebrated by fellow groyper Dalton Clodfelter on his show. As we’re going to see, Clodfelter is a welcome figure inside the “Trad-Cath” movement, and is particularly close to St. Michael’s Media group, aka the “Church Militant” media outlet, which joined Clodfelter in celebrating the message delivered to the women of America by the ‘groyper’ on the street corner. As we saw back in November, Church Militant has become a leading voice in articulating the theological view that and CNP-member Steve Bannon has been pushing for years: The idea that the traditional Catholic concept of the “church militant” wrestling against sin should be translated into a call for spiritual warfare waged as political warfare and the political capture of society by traditional Christians for the purpose of imposing religion the rest of society. A call for a political coup in the form of a national spiritual revival. Bannon and Church Militant have been developing this for years now. That’s part of the context of the open alliance between Church Militant and Fuentes’s ‘Groypers’. It’s the culmination of one of Steve Bannon’s ongoing political projects:
And note how the niche Nick Fuentes and his fellow groypers are attempting to fill is a kind of more pious version of the ‘Alt Right’, draped in the flag and carrying the cross. A movement where ‘White genocide’ and ‘Christ is King’ are paired slogans. Parallel to the is the movement inside Catholicism by groups like Church Militant to push the Catholic church in an ‘Alt Right’ direction. Nick Fuente’s groypers and Church Militant’s audience are two sides of the same Bannon-inspired movement:
And regarding Church Militant’s focus on the Catholic Church itself, recall how this is also part of Steve Bannon’s long-standing push to build an international network of reactionary Catholics focused on purging the Vatican of anything resembling progressive teachings. So when we read about how Church Militant targets figures within the Church’s hierarchy, keep in mind it’s part of that same ongoing effort:
It’s that years-long zeal for the capture of both church and state that should be kept in mind when we learn about the ties between Church Militant, Fuentes, and figures directly involved in the planning around January 6 like recent-Catholic-convert, and CNP-member, Ali Alexander. January 6 — and all of the CNP organizing that went into it — was effectively a manifestation of what Bannon and Church Militant have been cultivating for years:
And as Part 2 in that Salon series describes, Church Militant’s founder, Michael Voris, isn’t just an open fan of Nick Fuentes’s “groypers”. The activist wing of Church Militant, the Resistance network, has been rebranding itself specifically to attract those groypers and build a youth movement. That includes hiring a full-fledged groyper, Joseph Enders, as a reporter, senior producer and associate producer at Church Militant. Enders is described as a fixture on Church Militant Evening News and a regular contributor to churchmilitant.com. As observers describe, it’s “Catholic LARPing”, or a way for the ‘Alt Right’ to pretend they’re “Knights Templar fighting the forces of darkness in the deep state”:
“Now the Resistance network is looking to recruit directly from the groypers, the largely young far-right followers of white nationalist Nick Fuentes. On May 2, Gallagher interviewed Dalton Clodfelter — the same groyper leader who celebrated the Catholic counter-protester at New York’s Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral last weekend — introducing Resistance viewers to Fuentes’ website, CozyTV, as a “new streaming platform for a lot of awesome younger conservatives.” Gallagher hyped the reported 1,200 attendees at Fuentes’ AFPAC III gathering, saying that “obviously [America First] is booming, you guys have gotten huge…You guys go for the jugular every single time.” He continued, “[You go for] the truth, you’re not afraid to hide it at all, and that’s one of the most respectable aspects of America First, is you guys don’t really care. And that’s cool.””
Church Militant’s activist wing — the Resistance network — is recruiting. Specifically, recruiting groypers, hence the fawning interview of groyper figures like Dalton Clodfelter back in May. An interview where Clodfelter pitched the message of the ‘America First’ movement representing a spiritual battle against Satan. A spiritual battle being simultaneously waged in both the church and the Republican Party. Which, we’ll recall, is awfully similar to the message Nick Fuentes claimed he delivered directly to Donald Trump during that now infamous dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West. In other words, Nick Fuentes was at that dinner to sell Trump on the idea of turning his reelection bid and the MAGA movement into a holy war. The same holy war Steve Bannon and the Church Militant network have been working on starting for years now:
It’s both a movement-building exercise, but also a rebranding exercise. A rebranding of the ‘Alt Right’ as a religious movement but also a rebranding opportunity for figures like Milo Yiannapoulos and Ali Alexander, who both appear to have ‘found religion’ fairly recently after spending years in the public eye as far right trolls:
And as the article reminds us, this is a two-way street. At the same time the America First movement is being infused with this religious zeal, the church is experiencing a flood of already-radicalized groypers and fellow travelers:
That’s all part of the context of the infamous ‘I didn’t know him’ dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Nick Fuentes arrived at that dinner as one of the leading figures in a movement designed to turn Trump into the divinely ordained figure who should have a religious war fought to return him to power. Which, of course, fits in quite nicely with the ongoing Trump/CNP Schedule F‑related plotting. Executing a full-scale purge of government and society of all people deemed to be disloyal will be a lot easier to pull off if it’s part of a broader Christian nationalist capture of society. And as Dalton Clodfelter made clear back in August — three months after that two-part Salon series — an immediate full-scale purge of society is exactly what this movement has in mind. In other words, this theocratic movement’s open goals directly overlap with the opening stages of the Schedule F plot, when the great purge across government and society has to rapidly play out for the plot to succeed:
“Last Thursday, Clodfelter used his show to call for the establishment of a “far-right authoritarian government” in this nation that will imprison its political enemies, establish Christianity as the national religion, and outlaw all secular education.”
A theocratic coup and the establishment of a “far-right authoritarian government” that will imprison all of those deemed to be ‘enemies’ of that new state and charged with domestic terrorism. That was the message shared by groyper Dalton Clodfelter back in August. Keep in mind that this was three months after Salon published the above two-part series laying out the fascist authoritarian ambitions of this groyper/Church Militant alliance. They aren’t even trying to hide these goals:
The groyper movement wants the world to know what they are planning. And that’s a plan to execute a fascist coup that will install Trump as some sort of divinely ordained God King. What are the odds Trump wasn’t aware of these open ‘Trump as God King’ plans during that dinner? And even if Trump was somehow actually unaware of who Fuentes is and what he represents during that dinner, what are the odds Trump hasn’t subsequently learned about how that Nazi everyone is upset about him having dinner with wants to impose a fascist authoritarian theocratic regime with Trump as its divinely ordained head? Do you think maybe Trump has learned about that yet? What do you think Trump’s response was when he first learned about Fuentes’s grand vision? And that’s all why the biggest question raised by the reports about Trump’s dinner with Fuentes isn’t whether or not Trump knew who Fuentes was during that dinner. Trump is obviously a very Nazi-friendly figure who doesn’t have a problem with having dinner with a Nazi. The major question at this point is how effectively will Trump keep secret his future coordination with this loyal army of fascists who will be invaluable during any upcoming ‘Schedule F+’ mega-purges. Along with the question of whether or not they go with an on-brand MAGA-red, or stick with the traditional brown shirts.
Welp, they tried. Sort of: The last opportunity for the Democratically-controlled congress to add additional protections against future presidents unilaterally reinstituting the same Schedule F scheme initiated by Donald Trump in the final months of his administration just came and went. Without those protections.
As we saw, the Democratic-controlled House passed a bill back in September that would bar future presidents from unilaterally stripping federal workers of their civil service protections. Only 6 Republicans supported the bill, which wasn’t particularly surprising given the Republican-backed bill put forward in July that at would make the federal government an at-will employer. And as the following article notes, Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Tim Kaine filed an amendment to the must-pass 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) two weeks later. As a result, all hopes for some sort of action on Schedule F protections were coming down to the final compromise version of the NDAA hammered out by the House and Senate. But in the end, the Schedule F protections were apparently compromised out of the final version of the bill. Better luck next year:
“The current version of the NDAA contains no language that prevents the return of Schedule F or an equivalent to the dismay of some federal employee groups.”
This was effectively the last chance to protect against future presidents from unilaterally purging the federal workforce of non-loyalist stooges and now it appears that chance was passed by:
At this point we don’t really know which Senators played a role in preventing this from making it into the Senate’s version of the NDAA. But the fact that it was left out is the latest sign of just how serious the entire GOP is about eventually implementing some sort of Schedule F purge. At least that’s what we can reasonably infer. Because as the following article describes, 20 GOP Senators have been threatening to hold up the bill unless there’s a full Senate vote on repealing the Pentagon’s COVID vaccine mandates for armed forces. It’s a reflection of the fact that the passage of the NDAA still requires buy in from both parties despite the Democrats controlling both chambers:
“There’s also been several, last-minute Republican efforts to stall, including a group of 20 GOP senators who this week demanded a full chamber vote on their proposal to end the Pentagon’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.”
As we can see, the GOP does has power in these negotiations and 20 GOP Senators had formed a negotiating block. And while it wasn’t clear if GOP leaders in either chamber were on board with their demands, it’s still a reflection of the negotiating power that GOP had going into this last-minute haggling:
And as the following article describes, the GOP leaders clearly signed onto the idea of demanding a lifting of the Pentagon COVID vaccine mandates because that was one of the provisions left out of the final compromise version. It was something House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy — who is still trying to secure that support he needs to become House Speaker next month — was very publicly crowing about after the dust had settled. And while we aren’t hearing any public crowing from the GOP about the dropping of the Schedule F provision in the bill, the fact that it was ultimately dropped tells us what we need to know about the priority the while GOP is giving to the Schedule F plot:
“The final bill came together after months of negotiations between lawmakers of both parties and chambers, which bore victories for those on the left and right.”
Yes, the NDAA was a thoroughly bipartisan affair. Each side had leverage. And as we can see, the GOP managed to extract a number of last-minute concessions, including the repeal of the Pentagon COVID-vaccine mandate:
The repeal of the Pentagon COVID vaccine mandate was a high-profile win for Kevin McCarthy. But it obviously wasn’t the GOP’s only win. It’s hard to imagine the disappearance of Schedule F at the end of these negotiations wasn’t being quietly celebrated too. Including quiet celebrations from the entire CNP network actively working on this growing ongoing plot. And presumably Nick Fuente’s ‘Groyper’ army and the thousands of the other aspiring fascists who are getting ready to goosestep into the government on a Schedule F red carpet one of these years.
The warnings keep coming. They aren’t hiding it. Well, ok, in this case they’re kind of hiding it: Axios just published another piece describing the ongoing Schedule F efforts in anticipation of 2025 and a new Republican administration. And yet, curiously, there’s no actual mention of the term “Schedule F” anywhere in the piece. It’s completely obvious that it’s the Schedule F plot that the article is describing, but the term “Schedule F” is completely absent. Instead, their goals are described more vaguely as simply ‘being prepared this time’ and avoiding the disorganization and party divisions that shaped the early months of Trump’s presidency in 2017.
That’s what makes this article so interesting. It’s the latest article to make clear that the Schedule F plot is going to be part of the next 2024 GOP president’s early agenda whether that’s Donald Trump, Ron Desantis, or someone else. Schedule F is the party establishment’s plan now. And yet the article simultaneously feels like a foggy rebranding of the Schedule F plot as simply ‘preparations to avoid the chaos and party disunity of 2017.’ So it’s worth noting that at the same time the GOP appears to be doubling and tripling down on the Schedule F plot, it’s also building up a Schedule F cover story:
“Together, the groups are pouring tens of millions of dollars into what effectively amounts to an administration-in-waiting”
An administration-in-waiting. That’s what’s being built in anticipation of 2025. The lessons of Trump’s tumultuous 2017 opening year have been learned.
And while the term “Schedule F” never appears in this piece, the fact that it’s the same figures talking about the same entities, like AFPI president Brooke Rollins and Michael Rigas — who Rollins brought in to run AFPI’s “2025 personnel project” - that makes it abundantly clear that the Schedule F plot is at the center of this elaborate organizing effort all those people are talking about in this piece. And all of those key figures are willing to talk about it to the press. But for whatever reason, they are avoiding any direct reference to “Schedule F”. It’s not a particularly surprising from of apparent self-censorship. Everything we’ve learned about the Schedule F plot so far indicate a vastly ambitious plan to purge the federal workforce of any non-MAGA loyalists. That may not be something this group wants the public to be fully aware of heading into the 2024 election:
And then the article goes on to list the same group of CPI spinoffs involved with this like American Moment and ‘legacy’ groups like the Heritage Foundation. This article is describing the same overall Schedule F effort. just without any references to Schedule F for some reason:
An “administration-in-waiting” staffed with “properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them.” That’s the new spin we’re getting. Schedule F isn’t a plan to chaotically purge of the federal government of its professional workforce and replace them with loyalist cronies who will implement any policy no matter how illegal or unconstitutional. No, no, it’s a plan to avoid chaos. Which, in fairness, is at least partly true. When you’re overall plan involves implementing a government purge in anticipation of implementing a radical agenda with minimal bureaucratic resistance, purging the government of non-loyalist who might stand in the way of that radical agenda will indeed avoid some chaos. At least help avoid the bureaucratic chaos we can otherwise expect from this radical agenda. Not so much the socioeconomic chaotic fallout part of the agenda.
He did it: Kevin McCarthy has achieved his long-held ambition. He finally managed to live the dream late Friday night and become the newly elected Speaker of the House. All it took was 14 failed votes. Along with all the concessions McCarthy had to make to the ‘Freedom Caucus’ group of GOP holdouts. Concessions that, as the following article describes, could end up making a default on the US debt a near inevitability when the debt ceiling comes up for renewal later this year. Or handing the Freedom Caucus the power to trigger a new speakership vote, leaving McCarthy with a perpetual ‘Never Kevin’ Sword of Damacles hanging over his every decision as speaker.
Kevin won his speakership, but it’s obvious to all observers who actually won the great Never Kevin intra-GOP showdown of the last week and it wasn’t Kevin McCarthy. At this point the Freedom Caucus is being treated less like a segment of the GOP House caucus and more like a European-style parliamentary coalition partner. Which, as we’ll see, was exactly the plan. The CNP’s plan.
Yep, as we should now expect, the CNP’s hands were all over the events that played out last week and left the US House captive in the hands of a radical caucus that is demanding a ‘default before more debt’ stance on the national debt. As we’re going to see, not only was the ‘Never Kevin’ group of House Republicans spotted meeting at the CNP’s Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) DC headquarters on Friday morning — the day when the ‘Never Kevin’ caucus effectively won showdown — but this same group has been regularly holding meetings there for months.
And it turns out this same ‘Never Kevin’ group of House Republicans held a meeting with a four-person panel just one week after the election where they were effectively told to pursue this exact strategy of forcing McCarthy to grant them enormous concessions for their support. That panel, organized by Rep. Andy Biggs, consisted of Paul Teller, Ed Corrigan, Rachel Bovard, and Mark Meadows.
Beyond being a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus in 2015, Mark Meadows infamously went on to join the CPI as a senior fellow almost immediately after leaving the Trump administration in 2021. And as we saw with the release of a trove of Jan 6 text-messages, Meadows had help with his pre-insurrection coordinating. CPI help, which was serving as something of a headquarters for members of congress who were trying to overturn the election results.
Ed Corrigan worked at the Heritage Foundation and was a member of Trump’s 2016 transition team before becoming the CPI’s CEO. As we’ve seen, Corrigan’s experience working on staffing the Trump White House is now getting applied to the CPI’s ongoing Schedule F schemes. Corrigan also reportedly held 5‑week-long legislative boot camps in 2021, co-taught with CPI Senior Policy Director Rachel Bovard. So Meadows, Corrigan, and Bovard are all CPI senior officers.
Paul Tellers doesn’t appear to be CPI senior officer, but he’s a fan. The former director of the influential Republican Study Committee and the executive director of an advocacy group that serves as Mike Pence’s political operation “Americans Advancing Freedom” (AAF), Teller has publicly gushed about another ‘AAF’ entity, the American Accountability Foundation, which happens to be another CPI offshoot. And here Teller was as the only non-CPI member of four-person panel advising the House Freedom caucus ‘Never Kevin’ holdouts to do exactly what they just did.
And as we should expect, at least three of those four panelists at that November 14 event are CNP members: Teller, Bovard, and Corrigan.
But these weren’t the only senior CNP/CPI figures pushing this same ‘Never Kevin’ strategy last week. As the Yahoo News article excerpt below notes, a letter published on Jan 4 last week with 72 signatures calling on House Republicans to join the ‘Never Kevin’ caucus was co-signed by CPI-cofounder Jim DeMint, Cleta Mitchell, Russ Vought, and Ginni Thomas. Mitchell heads the CPI’s ‘election integrity’ efforts to justify overturning elections while Vought is leading the CPI ongoing Schedule F work through the Center for Renewing America (CRA) CPI spinoff. And Ginni Thomas, as a member of the board of CNP Action, the CNP’s lobbying arm, remains a key organizer in DC for CNP priorities. And, of course, Mitchell, Thomas, and DeMint are on the leaked CNP membership list, along with Vought’s wife Mary Vought. And that’s just a sample of the CNP/CPI figures who signed the letter. Roughly 50 CNP/CPI signatures in all. That’s who was telling the House Republicans to hold out and refuse to stand with Kevin McCarthy, at the same time their fellow CPI members were advising them to hold out for special powers.
And it worked. The CNP/CPI strategy laid out at that November 14 panel discussion worked. They got the power to trigger a debt default if they don’t get what they want in the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations. They have the power to hold the economy hostage. It’s either going to be massive cuts to government programs they hate or they’ll blow it all up. That’s what the future promises. And if you don’t think this group is insane enough to blow it all up, think about Jan 6 and ask if they were crazy enough to do that. Because it’s the same group:
“Economists, Wall Street analysts and political observers are warning that the concessions he made to fiscal conservatives could make it very difficult for Mr. McCarthy to muster the votes to raise the debt limit — or even put such a measure to a vote. That could prevent Congress from doing the basic tasks of keeping the government open, paying the country’s bills and avoiding default on America’s trillions of dollars in debt.”
Oh are we ever f#$%ed this time: Kevin McCarthy made so many promises to the radicals in the ‘Freedom Caucus’ that there’s a good chance he’s may even going to have the opportunity to bring the annual debt ceiling legislation to the House floor. That’s how much he had to give up. Unless he wants to court an ouster vote. In other words, the full faith and credit of the US government is kind of up to Kevin McCarthy’s willingness to get ousted:
Also, when you see Ralph Norman listed among those demanding that McCarthy show a willingness to “shut the government down rather than raise the debt ceiling”, recall how we learned last month that Norman was texting Mark Meadows on January 17, 2021 imploring then-President Trump to declare martial law. Flash forward two years and we find Norman among the big winners in the ‘pro-default’ caucus that just won the showdown over the House speakership. It’s a reminder that we’re likely going to find heavy overlap between the pro-insurrection crowd and the pro-debt-default crowd. It’s the same crowd, out to break the system one way or another.
So as the US careens toward a debt default crisis later this year, it’s going to be important to keep in mind that what just transpired wasn’t simply a production of that small group of GOP hold-outs. It was a CNP production channeled through the CPI. Yep, the entities that played a still-underappreciated role in fomenting the events of January 6 are behind the ‘Never Kevin’ showdown.
That’s the picture laid out in the following Grid News article describing a November 14, 2022, meeting organized by Rep. Andy Biggs and attended by a number of the same House Freedom Caucus members who joined Biggs in forming the ‘Never Kevin’ caucus last week. They were there to here the advice of a four-person panel consisting of three senior CPI figures — Ed Corrigan, Mark Meadows, and Rachel Bovard — along with Paul Teller, the former director of the Republican Study Committee.
As we should expect, three out of the four panelists show up on the leaked CNP membership lists: Teller, Corrigan, and Bovard. If Meadows isn’t a CNP member by now he’s effectively one in spirit. And while Teller may not be an official CPI member, he’s certainly a close affiliate with an interesting background as the executive director of an advocacy group that serves as Mike Pence’s political operation “Americans Advancing Freedom” (AAF). As we’ve seen, Teller has publicly gushed about another ‘AAF’ entity, the American Accountability Foundation, which happens to be another CPI offshoot.
And as we’ll see, this panel basically told this group of Freedom Caucus to treat the House like a ‘European-style parliament’, with three parties: the Democrats, Republicans, and Freedom Caucus, with the latter two parties forming the coalition government...but only after the Freedom Caucus is granted a number of special powers. Like the power to call for a new speakership vote.
There’s one more CNP/CPI figure worth mentioning here: CPI co-founder, and CNP-member, Jim DeMint. DeMint was one of several Republican figure to sign a letter last week calling on other House Republicans to join the anti-McCarthy effort. An effort that was literally being organized out of the CPI’s DC office, which happens to be the location of regular House Freedom Caucus meetings. Don’t forget that the House Freedom Caucus was co-founded by Mark Meadows in 2015.
That’s all part of the significance of that November 14, 2022, meeting: it was basically the House Freedom Caucus’s primary sponsors at the CPI telling them how to proceed. Which is exactly what they did, to great effect. And now the US is poised for a debt crisis. A planned debt crisis orchestrated by the CNP’s operatives at the CPI:
“The strategy outlined by Corrigan went beyond just extracting concessions from House leaders — it amounted to a game plan for the House Freedom Caucus to operate as a third party in a de facto parliamentary system, essentially co-governing the chamber with mainstream Republicans. As lawmakers prepared for a seventh round of voting on Thursday, House Republicans appeared to be on the precipice of allowing that to happen.”
This wasn’t just plan for extracting concessions. It was a plan for turning the ‘Freedom Caucus’ into a kind of separate party entitle to a slew of special powers and privileges that we might expect for parliamentary coalition government. Ed Corrigan didn’t mince words at the November 14, 2022, forum held a week after the election. He told the Freedom Caucus to strive to set up a “European-style coalition government”, with the Freedom Caucus as a kind of third party. One of two parties that comprise the governing coalition. Not a caucus of the GOP but a separate party. That’s what the CPI’s president Ed Corrigan advised for the Freedom Caucus at that meeting: operate like a third party that needs to be courted and won over with substantial power-sharing offers. Powers like changes to the “motion to vacate” rule that would empower the Freedom Caucus to force a new speakership vote at any moment. Powers that effectively give the Freedom Caucus power to tell Kevin McCarthy what to do. That was the advice delivered by CPI President Ed Corrigan to the House Freedom Caucus a week after the elections and it’s pretty obvious at this point that they took his advice:
And note how Corrigan wasn’t the only senior CPI figure to encourage the House Freedom Caucus to take a hard line on McCarthy’s speakership. CPI chairman Jim DeMint signed a statement formally calling on the House to pick someone other than McCarthy. The whole fiasco we just witnessed was a CPI-orchestrated event:
Nor is it surprising to see the key figures leading the ‘never-Kevin’ faction last week — Gaetz, Boebert, Roy, and Donalds — were all featured in a CPI testimonial video last year. The CPI is like a fusion center for the ‘anti-establishment’ factions of the conservative establishment, where MAGA fervor meets mega-donor dollars and the House Freedom Caucus is effectively a CPI subsidiary in congress. That’s a key part of the story here: when Ed Corrigan was advocating for the creation of a European-style parliamentary coalition-style government where the Freedom Caucus is given a range of special coalition-partner powers, those would effectively be the CPI’s powers too:
And, of course, we can’t forget the CNP angle to this story. Because it wasn’t just Ed Corrigan pushing this strategy at that November 14 meeting. It was a four-person panel consisting of former Republican Study Committee director Paul Teller and senior CPI officials, Corrigan, Mark Meadows and Rachel Bovard. And while it’s unclear at this point whether or not Meadows — who co-founded House Freedom Caucus in 2015 — is a formal member of the CNP, it should come as no surprise to find Teller, Bovard, and Corrigan on the leaked CNP membership lists. Along with Jim DeMint. This behind-the-scenes push to get the House Freedom Caucus to do exactly what it did last week wasn’t just a CPI initiative. It was a CNP power-play. That worked:
And as the following Yahoo News article from Friday morning points out, the letter signed by Jim DeMint calling for House Republicans to join the ‘Never Kevin’ caucus had some co-signers who should sound familiar at this point: Cleta Mitchell, Russ Vought, and Ginni Thomas. Three of the most prominent conservative activists in DC. This was their ‘Never Kevin’ power grab too:
“A little before 8:30 a.m. on Friday, Yahoo News observed several House Republicans who are leading the effort to block McCarthy, a California Republican, walking into the CPI offices a few blocks from the Capitol.”
A morning huddle at the CPI’s offices. That’s how the group of ‘Never Kevin’ hold outs started the day on Friday. Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Ralph Norman, Scott Perry, and Chip Roy were all spotted by Yahoo News at the CPI office Friday morning. And most of them have been gathering there for months:
And it’s not like the CNP and CPI are hiding their roles in leading the ‘Never Kevin’ showdown. Joining Jim DeMint in signing the letter calling on other House Republicans to join that in opposing McCarthy was none other than Cleta Mitchell, Russ Vought, and Ginni Thomas. As we’ve seen, Mitchell and Thomas are both prominent CNP members with Thomas sitting on the board of CNP Action, the CNP’s lobbying arm. And while Vought himself doesn’t show up on the leaked CNP membership lists, his wife Mary does. With Vought and Mitchell leading the CPI’s ongoing ‘Schedule F’ and ‘Election Integrity’ efforts, respectively, that was effectively a letter from the CPI leadership to the Republican House caucus, with Ginni Thomas there to remind everyone that the CPI is just an extension of the CNP:
These weren’t just random conservative activists. The guidance of the people who signed that letter carries enormous weight in Republican DC circles.
But it’s also important to note that it wasn’t just DeMint, Vought, Meadows, and Thomas who signed that letter last week calling on House Republicans to stand with the ‘Never Kevins’. Over two dozen conservative leaders signed the opinion. With just one CNP member after another. Let’s see...when we look at that list of 72 signatures that was publicly sent out in that at Jan 4 letter to the House Republicans, we find nearly 50 signatures for CNP members or people involved with the CPI or CPI spinoffs. This was a message from the CNP
* (CNP member) The Honorable J. Kenneth Blackwell
Chairman, Conservative Action Project
Chairman, CNP Action, Inc.
* (CNP member) Jenny Beth Martin
Chairman
Tea Party Patriots Citizen Fund
* (CNP member) L. Brent Bozell III
Founder and President
Media Research Center
* (CNP member) The Honorable Jim DeMint
Chairman, Conservative Partnership Institute
Member, US Senate (SC 2005–2013)
* (CNP member) David N. Bossie
President
Citizens United
* (CNP member) Lori Roman
President
ACRU Action Fund
* (CNP member) Kelly J. Shackelford, Esq.
President and CEO
First Liberty Institute
* Andrew Roth
President
State Freedom Caucus Network
* (CNP member) Ed Corrigan
Vice Chairman, Conservative Action Project
President & CEO, Conservative Partnership Institute
* (CNP member) Cleta Mitchell, Esq.
Senior Legal Fellow
Conservative Partnership Institute
* (CNP member) The Honorable Becky Norton Dunlop
White House Advisor
President Ronald Reagan (1981–1985)
* (co-founded the CPI spinoff the America Accountability Foundation and a former staffer for Jim DeMint) Tom Jones
Co-Founder
American Accountability Foundation
* (CNP member) The Honorable Edwin Meese III
Attorney General
President Ronald Reagan (1985–1988)
* (CNP executive director and president of CNP Action) The Honorable Bob McEwen
U.S. House of Representatives
Former Member, Ohio
* Thomas E. McClusky
Principal
Greenlight Strategies, LLC
* (CNP member) The Honorable Morton C. Blackwell
President
The Leadership Institute
* (wife Mary is a CNP member)The Honorable Russ Vought
Director
Office of Management and Budget (2020–2021)
* Noah Wall
Executive Vice President
FreedomWorks
* (CNP member) William L. Walton
The Bill Walton Show
Resolute Protector Foundation
* Myron Ebell
* (CNP member) David Bozell
President
ForAmerica
* (CNP member) Ginni Thomas
President
Liberty Consulting
* Terry Schilling
President
American Principles Project
* (CNP member) Alfred S. Regnery
President
Republic Book Publishers
* (CNP member) Chad Connelly
Founder and President
Faith Wins
* (CNP member) Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
Executive Chairman
Center for Security Policy
* (CNP member) The Honorable David McIntosh
President
Club for Growth
* (CNP member) Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin (Ret.)
Executive Vice President
Family Research Council
* Scott T. Parkinson
Vice President for Government Affairs
Club for Growth
* (the CPI’s COO) Wesley Denton
Chief Operating Officer
Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI)
* (assumed CNP member) Seton Motley
President
Less Government
* (CNP member) Khadine Ritter
Chair
Eagle Forum of Ohio
* Kristen A. Ullman
President
Eagle Forum
* Dr. Virginia Armstrong
Nat’l. Chrm., Law & Worldview Program
Eagle Forum
* (CNP member) Karen England
President
Capitol Resource Institute
* (CNP member) The Honorable Gary L. Bauer
President
American Values
* (CNP member) The Honorable George K. Rasley Jr.
Managing Editor
ConservativeHQ.com
* Mike Davis
Founder and President
Article III Project (A3P) and Internet Accountability Project (IAP)
* (CNP member) Allen J. Hebert
Chairman
American-Chinese Fellowship of Houston
* Ralph Rebandt
Former 2022 Gubernatorial candidate
Ralph Rebandt for Michigan Governor
* The Honorable Louis F. Terhar
Ohio State Senator (Ret.)
CNP, Board of Governors
* (CNP member) C. Preston Noell III
President
Tradition, Family, Property, Inc.
* Melvin Adams
President
Noah Webster Educational Foundation
* Carol Rebandt
Chief of Staff
2022 Campaign to elect Ralph Rebandt for Michigan Governor
* (CNP member) Floyd Brown
Founder
The Western Journal
* (CNP member) Debbie Georgatos
Host, America Can We Talk?
CWT Publications, LLC
* (CNP member) Rob Gluskin
Managing Partner
Gluskin Investment Partners
* (CNP member) Richard Rounsavelle
Trustee
MRC
* (CNP member) The Honorable Mike Hill
Former Member
Florida State House
* (CNP member) Robert K. Fischer
Meeting Coordinator
Conservatives of Faith
* (key architect of the insurrection) Dr. John C. Eastman
Partner
Constitutional Counsel Group
* (CNP member) Debbie Wuthnow
President
IVoterGuide
* (wife Becky is a CNP member) The Honorable George Dunlop
Senior Policy Advisor Trump Transition 2017
Trump Transition 2017
* Sheryl Kaufman
Board Member
Americans for Limited Government
* Ron Armstrong
President
Stand Up Michigan Inc
* Ned Jones
Deputy Director
Election Integrity Network
* The Honorable Steve King
Member, U.S. Congress (Ret.)
* (CNP member) The Honorable Jake Hoffman
President & CEO
1TEN | A Creative Agency
* The Honorable Laurin Hendrix
Representative Elect
AZ Legislature
* The Honorable Anthony Kern
Member
Arizona State Senate
* (CNP member) Brigitte Gabriel
CEO, ACT For America
ACT For America
* The Honorable Jacqueline Parker
Member
AZ State House of Representatives
* Jessie Jane Duff
Gunnery Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps (ret)
2020 Campaign Co-Chair Veterans for Trump
* (CNP member) Dr. Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.
Founders and CEO
Corstet LLC
* (CNP member) E.C. Sykes
General Partner
Aslan Ventures
* The Honorable Joseph Chaplik
Arizona State Representative
Arizona House of Representatives
* (assumed CNP member) Eunie Smith
President Emeritus
Eagle Forum
* (CNP member) Amy Kremer
Chairwoman
Women for America First
* (CNP member) John Stemberger
President
Florida Family Action
* (CNP member) Tim Macy
Chairman
Gun Owners of America
* (CNP member) The Honorable T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr.
Chief Domestic Advisor
President Ronald Reagan (1987–1988)
* Jim Hoft
Founder Editor
The Gateway Pundit
———-
They weren’t all CNP members. But the vast majority sure were. Because that’s who sent this message. A network inside in US conservative movement so powerful that elected Republicans can’t possibly ignore them. And that message was indeed received. The holdouts got their special powers to blow up the government and economy. Presumably along with special orders for how to use those powers at the right opportunity. The CNP’s insurrection on Jan 6 may not have succeeded but its hostile takeover of the GOP appears to have worked.
It’s pretty clear that Ron DeSantis is running for the White House in 2024. And it’s abundantly clear that ‘anti-wokeism’ will be a central theme for any future DeSantis campaigns. And as we learned last week, Ron DeSantis is planning on building a very real symbol for his anti-woke crusade. Specifically, a “Hillsdale College for the south,” as Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz put it. Yep, Ron DeSantis is planning on building an ideologically cleansed college as part of Florida’s public university system. It’s “Project Blitz” for Florida public universities. Surprise.
But Ron DeSantis isn’t planning on building this new Hillsdale from scratch. No, DeSantis just enacted a hostile takeover of the small New College of Florida public university, known for its academic excellence and largely progressive student body. New College is going to be turned into Hillsdale, with none other than Christopher Rufo — the architect of the cynical anti-Critical Race Theory manufactured hysteria — leading the way as one of the new members of the New College board. A new conservative ‘classical’ curriculum is to be crafted with new conservative faculty slated to be brought on board to teach it. That’s the plan and Florida’s GOP appears to be fully on board.
New College of Florida is going to become a showcase for DeSantis’s anti-woke political crusade and this is going to be playing out during his 2024 run. So while the ‘new’ New College may not be ready to showcase to the nation in 2024, the ideological ‘anti-woke’ purge that has to happen firest will be in full swing. And the purge is the point, at least politically speaking.
Yes, roiling New College and trolling the liberal student body with anti-wokeism is part of Ron DeSantis’s planned 2024 campaign strategy. Keep in mind that this is the same man who played with the lives of migrant refugees for poliical fun. What kind of sadistic hazing does he have in mind for the LGBTQ-friendly New College student body? We’ll find out. They are indeed ‘woke’. All of the ingredients for epic trolling by DeSantis is there. It’s hard to see how he’ll be able to resist.
But as we also have to keep in mind, when we’re talking about the ideological purge of academic institutions that’s not just an example of the ongoing Schedule F plot in action, but also an example of the broader institutional purge called for by in Curtis Yarvin’s vision for a right-wing capture of America’s institutions. A capture that goes beyond the purge of government workforces and includes a mass purge of the media and academia. As we’ve seen, it’s a vision that’s been getting awfully popular in right-wing circles in recent years with followers that include Steve Bannon and JD Vance. And now it’s looking like Ron DeSantis is preparing to make Curtis Yarvin’s mass purge vision part of his 2024 presidential campaign. DeSantis and the GOP won’t admit this is pure Yarvin, but we’re looking at Yarvin’s vision come alive in Florida, as a template for the nation.
It should also come as no surprise that Florida’s GOP is opening talking about turning New College specifically into a “Hillsdale of the south”. As we’ve seen, Hillsdale College is effectively the template institution for the CNP’s “Project Blitz” Christian nationalist agenda. In particular, the “Civic Alliance” project pushing the “American Birthright” curriculum ‘template’ on state legislatures and governors. As we saw, the “American Birthright” curriculum was launched by the CNP-affiliated National Association of Scholars (NAS) and assembled by a kind of institutional who’s-who of the right-wing US think-tanks, including the Claremont Institute, the Family Research Council (FRC) and the Discovery Institute (all with CNP members in their leadership), along with a number of other CNP members like CNP co-founder Richard Viguerie. Other coauthors, consultants, and board members involved with the creation of the “American Birthright” curriculum include multiple staffers associated with Hillsdale and Mari Barke, whose husband runs one of Hillsdale College’s charter school. The “American Birthright” curriculum cites Hillsdale’s “1776 Curriculum.” And when Florida governor Ron DeSantis unveiled the new Florida educational standards focused on fighting ‘wokeness’ in public schools, it was none other than Hillsdale College that his administration consulted with in creating the new standards. Hillsdale’s “1776 Curriculum” is the template for the imposition of a strict Christian nationalist worldview on every public school student in America.
We got another example of the role the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum is playing in this effort back in 2021 when a cabal of CNP members took over the school board of Woodland Park, Colorado, back in 2021, it was the “1776 Curriculum” crafted by Hillsdale for use in public schools they ended up forcing onto the district’s schools. Similarly, when Tennessee governor Bill Lee attempted to set up a network of 50 privately operated publicly funded charter schools, it was Hillsdale’s 1776 Curriculum that we was intending they teach. Hillsdale’s 1776 Curriculum is the CNP’s template for the Christian nationalist capture of the US public schools.
Or “recapture” of public education, as Christopher Rufo recently put it in an opinion piece we’re going to examine below. Rufo celebrates the mission he’s been given to transform New College as DeSantis initiating the first pushback against a decades long march across the institutions by a New Left cabal intent on destroying society. And as Rufo put it in his piece, “Governor DeSantis has tasked us with something that has never been done: institutional recapture. If we are successful, the effort can serve as a model for other states.” A “recapture” of the US’s public institutions from the forces of ‘wokeness’. Those are the ambitions Rufo is describing and they aren’t just his own. This is Project Blitz — the Christian nationalist takeover of public education in American — in action. Hillsdale is the template for that “recapture”. A template they want to take nationwide.
Joining Rufo is five other conservatives tasked with the same “recapture” mission. In addition, the state Board of Governors — which oversees the university system and is filled with DeSantis allies — gets five more appointees to the board, meaning the New College board is poised to become majority-ruled by a cabal tasked with turning it into the ‘Hillsdale of the South’. It’s happening.
Other DeSantis appointees joining Rufo include Matthew Spalding and Charles Kesler. Spalding is a professor of constitutional government at Hillsdale College and the dean of Hillsdale’s graduate school of government in DC. Spalding also previously served as vice president of American studies at the Heritage Foundation. Kesler is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a senior fellow at The Claremont Institute. This is a good time to recall how Dr. Larry P. Arnn — the President of Hillsdale College, Heritage Foundation trustee, and co-founder of the Claremont Institute — is on the CNP membership list. In addition, Douglas A. Jeffrey — VP for External Affairs and Hillsdale College, and former executive Vice President of the Claremont Institute — is also on the CNP membership list.
It’s also worth recalling how it was the Claremont Institute’s John Eastman who played a key role in formulating a number of different legal justifications for overturning the 2020 election results. And CNP-member Ginni Thomas — who played a significant role of her own in the post-2020 election scheming that led up to the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection including arranging meetings between Eastman and conservative activists — ran a DC-based constitutional studies center at Hillsdale following her five year stint at the Heritage Foundation. It’s the same overarching network of people and movement populating all and these institutions. That’s why we keep seeing them working hand-in-hand on one major project after another. This is ‘the vast right-wing conspiracy’ in action.
And as we’ve also seen, that broader ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ agenda now includes the ongoing Schedule F plot, in which Hillsdale plays a role. Recall how the CPI-spinoff, American Moment — founded by CNP-member Saurabh Sharma — is focused on recruiting from the campuses of conservative religious colleges in their hunt for potential candidates to fill all the government positions that will have to be filled after mass firings, with Sharma specifically naming Hillsdale as the type of school his group is targeting. As we should expect, Rufo is promising to hire a slew of new professors for New College. It’s going to be interesting to see how many Hillsdale professors, or new graduates, the new board ultimately imposes on New College.
It appears to be a very serious plan, which is why this is going to be grimly fascinating to watch play out. Because while they do appear to be very serious about imposing a top-down ideological flip on New College’s curriculum and faculty, it doesn’t actually appear to be serious in terms of the likelihood of success. At least if success is defined as creating a college that students want to attend and degrees people respect. After all, New College is slated to get “DeSantis U” as its new public brand. What is that kind of academic reputation going to be worth outside of conservative activist circles?
That challenge in realistically transforming New College under a hyper-political agenda without destroying gets at one of the meta-angles to this story: the far right is really good at destroying things, but not so great at building. ‘Burning it all down’ is the easy part. It’s what comes next where right-wing regimes consistently fail unless the only thing the populace is seeking is some sort of authoritarian law and order, which is why whipping up a state of public hysteria is always such an important part of far right politics. Public hysteria that triggers a hunger for a strong-man as a replacement for effective policies. What DeSantis and his CNP allies are trying to do here in building a credible right-wing academic institution really isn’t in their wheelhouse. Yes, destroying New College as a center for educational excellence is something they can do. But reshaping it into a respected conservative version of itself is a far greater challenge. A challenge without an existing template. Sure, Hillsdale College is being treated as the template, but there’s no template for transforming a respected liberal arts public university into a respected right-wing ‘college of the classics’. This is a new project for the political right, and it’s the same crew that brought us the current freakout over ‘critical race theory’ and ‘transgendered kids’ who are going to be leading this political effort.
We’ll see how much success they have but, again, this is just the start. The start of the full spectrum institutional purge envisioned by Curtis Yarvin, someone who just keeps growing in popularity on right. That’s part of what makes Ron DeSantis’s ideological purge of New College such a big deal: it’s the trial run for a much, much bigger, probably coming in 2024:
““It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south,” Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz said in a statement.”
They aren’t hiding it. Florida’s GOP wants to turn this highly regarded left-leaning college into a “Hillsdale of the south.” It’s effectively an institutional hostile takeover:
And as we should expect, Christopher Rufo — the person who has formulated the manufactured outrage campaigns for everything from ‘CRT’ to ‘trans kids’ in recent years — was chosen by DeSantis to lead this effort as a new member of New College board. One of six chosen by DeSantis. As Rufo wrote, “Gov. DeSantis is going to lay siege to university ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ programs.” Ominous words from the person DeSantis chose to carry out this institutional “siege”:
And of course we find a professor of constitutional government at Hillsdale College and the dean of Hillsdale’s graduate school of government in DC, Mathew Spalding, also joining the board. It was an expected choice given the ‘consultant’ role Hillsdale played in crafting DeSantis’s new ‘anti-woke’ education law:
Then there’s Charles Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a senior fellow at The Claremont Institute. Recall how Dr. Larry P. Arnn — the President of Hillsdale College, Heritage Foundation trustee, and co-founder of the Claremont Institute — is on the CNP membership list. In addition, Douglas A. Jeffrey — VP for External Affairs and Hillsdale College, and former executive Vice President of the Claremont Institute — is also on the CNP membership list. Also recall how it was the Claremont Institute’s John Eastman who played a key role in formulating a number of different legal justifications for overturning the 2020 election results. And CNP-member Ginni Thomas — who played a significant role of her own in the post-2020 election scheming that led up to the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection including arranging meetings between Eastman and conservative activists — ran a DC-based constitutional studies center at Hillsdale following her five year stint at the Heritage Foundation. So when we see a Claremont Institute senior fellow involved with the New College purge it’s important to keep in mind how deeply intertwined the Claremont Institute is with this broader CNP-directed network that includes Hillsdale College:
It’s not just the six new board members DeSantis gets to appoint. There’s also the five seats selected by DeSantis’s allies at the state Board of Governors. New College’s leadership is slated to become a collection of political cronies:
And that brings us to the observations from Andrew Gothard, president of the United Faculty of Florida union: it’s hard to see who is going to want to enroll in a school where the board has decided to turn the school into a right-wing political project. Who wants that as a leading force in their college experience? Up and coming right-wing political operatives, maybe, but that’s about it. New College is known for being a somewhat selective school that attracts talented students. What are the odds that’s going to be maintained after the school switches over to some sort of Hillsdale template? Again, this is the test case for a much bigger agenda. That’s part of what makes the questions about the viability of this plot so grimly fascinating: they need this to work because they have very big plans:
If you’re a high school senior looking for a future as a conservative operative, a four stint as a student rabble rouser at New College could be an effective way to punch your right-wing loyalty card. But if you’re just a regular student looking for a quality education, why would you want to go to ‘DeSantis U’ and get a politicized education? Or if you’re just a regular Christian conservative student looking for a Christian conservative college education. Why choose New College based solely on the governor’s pledge to turn it into a new Hillsdale? It’s quite a gamble with your education. This whole ‘flip the institution’ seems like a crazy gambit. Then again, with a student body of just around 700, it may not be that difficult to find enough budding conservative operatives to fill in the gap. Either way, as Christopher Rufo makes clear in the following piece celebrating his new role at New College, he is going there with the intention of executing nothing less than a complete ideological revolution. Or, rather, a counter-revolution against the New Left forces intent on tearing down society:
“Ours is a project of recapture and reinvention. Conservatives have the opportunity finally to demonstrate an effective countermeasure against the long march through the institutions. The Left’s permanent bureaucracy will be dead-set against this gambit, but if it succeeds, a new era for higher education—and for the country—is possible.”
A project of recapture and reinvention. Christopher Rufo sure has a knack for saying the quiet part out loud. In fact, that’s his core framing of the whole project. He’s putting the right-wing fantasies about a vast left-wing domination of society via the capture of universities front and center in his description of the agenda he’s going to impose on behalf of DeSantis. They are going to reverse the left’s “long march through the institutions, beginning with what Marcuse believed was the initial revolutionary institution: the university.” Rufo is framing this is counter-revolutionary terms:
Also note the apocalyptic language used to describe what they are dismantling: a New Left “who rejected the ideals of the American Founding and sought to tear down society.” It’s a warning to any aspiring New College history major that the American history component of their upcoming curriculum is likely going to be taken from David Barton’s warped Christian fundamentalist version of American history. Or whatever Hillsdale is teaching, which is presumably based on Barton’s ‘teachings’ anyway:
Christopher Rufo’s anti-woke crusade just keeps picking up steam. But as Rufo’s apocalyptic language — the recapture of institutions from the forced of societal destruction — reminds us, there’s a different individual who should really be seen as the original author of the political script we’re watching play out right now: Curtis “Mencious Moldbug” Yarvin. As author Elizabeth Sandifer describes in the following Current Affairs interview from back in May, what Ron DeSantis has been doing to Florida’s education system and his larger attack on ‘wokeism’ is like the channeling of Moldbug. A fixation on the ‘liberal media’ and ‘woke academia’ has been at the core of Moldbug’s writings for years. Along with a long for sweeping institutional purges. Purges that, as Rufo pointed out above, are finally happening in Florida. And that’s the bigger story here: Ron DeSantis is getting the Moldbug mass purge ball rolling with big plans for much bigger purges nationally:
“When you look at what actually happens—you look at the way in which the education system is of paramount importance in Yarvin’s conspiracy theory, there is a direct line from that to using groomer panic and critical race theory to stage a fascist takeover of the entire Florida educational system, which just happened. It just happened. Florida’s education system has literally banned most of the stuff that Curtis Yarvin thinks is secretly running the world. So these ideas are having a huge impact. There were many, many steps between Curtis Yarvin and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But those steps existed and can be linearly traced.”
It just happened. Curtis Yarvin’s vision of an ideological institutional purge of ‘the left’ already happened in Florida earlier this year with DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. At the K‑12 level at least. And now it’s happening at Florida’s colleges, with plans on taking it nationwide. This is Curtis Yarvin’s purge, playing out as Ron DeSantis’s right-wing ‘populism’. Media, academia, and the civil service end of government are the big three all-powerful institutions and completely dominated by the left in Yarvin’s version of reality, with anti-wokeism and fears about cancel culture and critical race theory operating as the tip of the spear. A tip of a spear intended to whip the public into the kind of frenzy that will have them calling for Rufo’s ‘counter-revolutionary’ measures across the nation:
That’s the ominous context of Christian Rufo’s declared plans to ‘recapture’ New College. It’s a showcase initiative intended to normalize Curtis Yarvin’s dream of the right-wing ‘recapture’ of American’s institutions. Or at least what used to be Curtis Yarvin’s dream. It’s a much more widely shared dream by now. And presumably even more widely shared after Ron DeSantis makes institutional purges a centerpiece of his 2024.
In the mean time, if you’re in high school and are considering a major in journalism with an interesting in in-depth investigations intothe hijacking of institutions by powerful subversive forces, New College could be a very interesting choice.
With the US once again forced to face the realities of policy brutality and the broader issues of systemic racism still haunting US institutions following the release a video footage of the lethal beating of Tyre Nichols by an elite Memphis police unit, it’s worth noting an other story from this week related to the ongoing ‘Schedule F’ agenda of preparing of a mass purge of all left-wing thought or individuals from US society. A purge carried out under the pretext of dealing with a declared emergency threat posed by ‘the communist woke Democrats and antifa and Black Lives Matter.’
The branding of ‘the Left’ in the US as a bunch of subversive communists of an ‘enemy within’ is a long-standing right-wing trope in America politics. But as we’ve seen, it’s a trope that’s been ‘fleshed out’ quite a bit in recent years with the conservative establishment’s dedication to the Schedule F project. Mass ideological purges are the plan. A plan already put in motion with Ron DeSantis’s ideological purge of New College, which sure looks a lot like the kind of pass purges of higher education long advocated by Curtis Yarvin. Put in motion but still just beginning. It’s the kind of situation that screams to ask the question of “what’s next?”
And that brings us to the the rantings of nationally syndicated right-wing talk radio host Jesse Kelly. Rantings that, as we’ll see, are being routinely amplified by none other than Tucker Carlson, host of the highest rated show on Fox News. It turns out Kelly is a pretty regular guest on Carlson’s various Fox shows, whether it’s his top rated “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show on Fox New or the newer “Tucker Carlson Today” streaming show which tends to veer even further into the realm of fascist thought.
It was just last week in response to the suggestion by Senator Rand Paul that the top 10% of the FBI should be fired and replaced in response to the alleged persecution of conservatives by the FBI. As Kelly saw it, 10% wasn’t enough. 100% of FBI employees need to be fired. And then sent to camps in the desert where they’ll be investigated for any instances of politicizing the FBI on behalf of Democrats. Those found guilty will be given life sentences at a federal prison.
That was the “reasonable outcome”, as Kelly put it. But he was also sure to emphasize how he didn’t want this to happen. It simply has to happen as the only “realistic” option conservatives have left to deal with a government that has become capture by the subversive communist forces inside the Democratic Party that represent an existential threat to America. Or as Kelly put it, “We don’t want to be radical. We don’t want to be. We really don’t want to be. I don’t want to be an extremist, okay? Because I’m not an extremist. I won’t say all the things that should be done.”
In other words, the ‘communist Left’ is forcing the fascism. That’s not just a reasonable interpretation of Kelly’s comments. As we’re going to see in the first article below, Kelly made made that exact same argument back in March of 2021, just two months after the January 6 Capitol insurrection. As Kelly put it at the time, “I’ve said this before and I’m telling you, I’m worried that I’m right: The right is going to pick a fascist within 10 to 20… years because they’re not going to be the only ones on the outs...There’s 60, 70 million of us. We’re not a tiny minority, and if we’re going to be all treated like criminals and all subject to every single law, while antifa Black Lives Matter guys go free and Hunter Biden goes free, then the right’s going to take drastic measures.” That was Kelly’s ‘warning’, delivered on Tucker Carlson’s top rated Fox News shows, with Carlson wholeheartedly agreeing. They both agreed that ‘the woke Left’ was going to force conservatives into embracing a fascist response.
A few months later, Carlson invited Kelly for an interview on his “Tucker Carlson Today” streamed show on Fox Nation, where Kelly lamented the lack of patriotism in America’s children which he blamed in woke education. As Kelly saw it, the only solution left was to raise the public education system and rebuild it anew. And Kelly apparently wasn’t being the metaphorical when he suggested the razing of the US education system. He went on to suggest that, “There would be nothing better you could do to help the advancement of the United States of America than take the top 10 universities in this country and fire every employee and raze the buildings to the ground and pee on the ashes when you’re done..” Book burning is so yesterday. Real conservatives burn down entire universities. But don’t call them fascist. Or at least don’t blame them for their fascism. Blame ‘the communist Left’ and antifa and Black Lives Matters. That’s who will ultimately be at fault. That’s the message Jesse Kelly trotted out this week on his nationally syndicated radio show. And same message he’s been promoting for the past two years. Promoting and amplifying on the most popular program on cable news. We can’t say we weren’t warned:
“One such example comes to us from The American Mind, a publication of the once-mainstream conservative Claremont Institute. In a recent piece that garnered some buzz, senior fellow Glenn Ellmers argues that “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” His level of despair can be felt when he writes that, “Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve” and concludes that we should “give up on the idea that ‘conservatives’ have anything useful to say. Accept the fact that what we need is a counter-revolution.” Oh yeah, he also takes a shot at Joe Biden’s Inaugural poet, saying, “If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity, then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman.””
The majority of Americans aren’t real Americans at this point, leaving counter-revolution as the only remaining option for conservatives. That was the argument put forward in a piece published in the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind, back in March of 2021, just two months after the January 6 Capitol insurrection. An event that came about in no small part thanks to the ‘legal reasoning’ pushed by the Claremont Institute’s John Eastman (who is currently facing disbarment in the state of California over that role). Senior fellow Glenn Ellmers didn’t see any other way. The minority of real Americans are going to have to ‘do something’ about the un-American majority.
So what exactly will that “counter-revolution” involve? Well, we got a clue a around that same time from right-wing talk radio host Jesse Kelly, who got an opportunity to share his counter-revolution ideas on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, the most popular show on cable news. As Kelly put it, “I’ve said this before and I’m telling you, I’m worried that I’m right: The right is going to pick a fascist within 10 to 20… years because they’re not going to be the only ones on the outs...There’s 60, 70 million of us. We’re not a tiny minority, and if we’re going to be all treated like criminals and all subject to every single law, while antifa Black Lives Matter guys go free and Hunter Biden goes free, then the right’s going to take drastic measures.” Yep, the “right is going to pick a fascist within 10 to 20” as a consequence of all the persecution of conservatives and the lack of a crackdown on antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other ‘communists’ who pose a mortal threat to the nation. It was a reiteration of a message he tweeted out a month earlier about how, “We will see a monster rise on the Right in response to the Left’s violence and censorship. It will be awful. But it is coming. I promise you that.” He wasn’t not mincing words:
That was the kind of idea that was getting mainstreamed on Tucker Carlson’s show in the months following the insurrection. Ideas that Carlson fully endorsed on his. The left is going to force the coming right-wing fascist “counter-revolution”. The ground is being laid:
But Tucker Carlson wasn’t done promoting Kelly’s post-insurrection message of ‘counter-revolution’ to deal with the majority of non-‘real Americans’ that inhabit the country. As the following Fox News piece from June, 2021, makes clear, Jesse Kelly’s message of counter-revolution is a message Fox News wants to go mainstream. It was that month that Carlson invited Kelly back onto his “Tucker Carlson Today” show on the Fox Nation streaming service where Kelly made the case that the lack of patriotism could be traced back to the schools. Therefore, the solution is “completely carpet-bombing the American education system and remaking it from the bottom up.” Not just metaphorically. Kelly went on to suggest the actual razing the top 10 universities in the US. It’s Curtis Yarvin’s mass institutional purge, getting mainstreamed by Jesse Kelly and Tucker Carlson:
“Kelly told host Tucker Carlson that America as-founded is deteriorating due to the ongoing attack on its institutions and the country itself.”
When Jesse Kelly warned about the coming right-wing fascism, he wasn’t giving specifics. But we got those specifics from Kelly just a few months later. Specific plans with a distinct Schedule F echo. Curtis Yarvin’s expanded Schedule F plan that included a mass purge of all institutions in America, public and private: in order to deal with the lack of patriotism in the majority of non-‘real Americans’, the solution is to raze the US education system, including literally burning the top 10 US universities to the ground:
Now, it would be tempting to assume that this was all just hyperbole and that Jesse Kelly wasn’t being literally serious when he called for the razing of American universities as part of an ‘anti-communist’ patriotic purge. And that brings us to the following Jesse Kelly rant delivered on his nationally syndicated radio show just last week. A rant in response to calls from Senator Rand Paul to replace the top 10% of the agency. As Kelly put it, 10% is 10-times too little. The figure should be 100% of FBI agents.
But they shouldn’t just fired. No, all of the FBI’s employees should be taken to a camp in the desert where they will face an extensive investigation into whether or not they’ve ever done anything on behalf of the Democratic Party. Those found guilty should be given life sentences in federal prison.
And, echoing his warnings about how right-wing fascism will come only as a response to ‘all the communism on the Left’, Kelly starts of the rant with assurances about how, “We don’t want to be radical. We don’t want to be. We really don’t want to be. I don’t want to be an extremist, okay? Because I’m not an extremist. I won’t say all the things that should be done.” It’s the same underlying message heartily endorsed by Tucker Carlson back in March of 2021: fascism is the only response remaining. They don’t want to be fascists but ‘the communist Left’ forced them to do it:
“I will simply say the realistic, frankly, the only acceptable outcome for all this is we take 100% of the employees at the FBI. We fire every single one of them. Then we take them all and we put them in a camp, a large camp we have set up out in the desert. All the former FBI employees will be removed and sent to this camp. We’ll get back to the camp in a moment.”
Send every single FBI employee to a camp in the desert where they were face extensive investigations to determine whether or not they acted in any way seen as ‘on behalf of the Democratic Party’. Those found guilty will be given life sentences at federal prisons. That is the only “realistic” and “reasonable” outcome according to Jesse Kelly on his radio show last week. Again, it’s basically echoing Curtis Yarvin’s calls for an institution mass purge. A purge guided by the conviction that Democrats, and liberals in general, are non-Americans who must be expelled from society all together:
So what’s going to happen to the FBI employees who committed the cardinal sin of registering as Democrats or, even worse, donating to Democratic candidates? Leavenworth? We’ll see, but it’s hard to imagine all registered Democrats won’t be ultimately fired for one excuse or another when this gets underway.
Not if this gets underway. When this gets underway. And that’s really the larger story here. Jesse Kelly is just a random right-wing talk radio host. But he’s not ranting in a vacuum pushing a random message. He’s pushing a message that is mainstreaming the idea of mass ideological purges of all institutions in the US as a kind of emergency response to the declared existential threat from the ‘communist Left’. A message that serves as both a warning and a next step in the ongoing purge preparations. Again, we can’t say we weren’t warned. The warnings are part of the plan.
Statue controversies are nothing new for the US. Especially in recent years. But that doesn’t mean there’s no room for innovation. There’s a new kind of statue controversy in town. Maybe, assuming the Georgia GOP succeeds in its push to place a statue of Supreme Court Justice, and Georgia native, Clarence Thomas at the state capitol. The move, which has been opposed by Georgia’s black lawmakers since it was first pushed by Georgia’s Republicans a year ago, was reignited this week by a group of powerful Republicans in the Georgia Senate.
It remains to be seen if Georgia’s GOP will succeed this time in enshrining Justice Thomas’s irrefutable legacy of accomplishment for the conservative movement. But it’s still a good time to note another of Justice Thomas’s major accomplishments that also has yet to receive the formal recognition they deserves. An accomplishments that can be shared with his wife Ginni: the Thomases were basically left out of the January 6 congressional report released back in December, days before Christmas. No mention of Clarence Thomas’s refusal to recuse himself from Jan 6 cases that could potentially involve Ginni in the report. In fact, Ginni isn’t mentioned in the report at all. Nothing at all.
As Dahlia Lithwick noted at the time, it’s part of a broader pattern we’ve seen emerge during the Trump years when it comes to DC’s response to the extremism normalized by Trump’s MAGA movement: it’s fine for even ‘establishment’ Republicans to criticize Trump. But no one dares mention the rogue actions of the Thomases. Even when it comes to Jan 6. Or the Schedule F plot. As we’ve seen, Ginni Thomas and her CNP-dominated Groundswell network played an important role in creating lists of ‘disloyal’ government employees. Lists handed by Thomas personally to Trump back in January of 2019. And as we’ve also seen, a close family friend of the Thomases — Mark Paoletta — remains involved with the ongoing Schedule F scheming by informing conservative audiences of the need to implement the Schedule F purge as soon as possible.
And then there’s the general fact that Ginni Thomas is seen as the ‘not-so-secret-weapon’ of the Council for National Policy (CNP) and the Schedule F effort is completely infused with CNP figures, and the evidence is clear that we should view Ginni Thomas as a central Schedule F plot organizer. It’s a fun fact generally worth recall, but now seems like a particularly good time.
And that brings us to another fun fact about the congressional Jan 6 report: no mention of the CNP at all. None. That’s part of this story. It’s not just the Thomas getting expunged from Jan 6 history. The absolutely central role played by a large network of CNP members wasn’t mentioned at all. Just as we should have expected. Because that part of the broader story about the CNP: we can’t talk about it. It’s not clear why, but the CNP is almost never talked about despite slews of CNP members showing up playing organizing roles in one story about right-wing schemes after another. And so we have to ask: is the extreme hesitancy in ever addressing the wild and growing conflicts of interest posed by Ginni Thomas’s role as a leading conservative organizer and Justice Thomas’s role on the court primarily due to a deference to the Thomases? Or a deference to the CNP? Who knows, but it’s hard not to view Ginni Thomas as one of the most powerful and untouchable figures in the US at that is point.
Ok, first, here’s a look at the lack of any official scrutiny of the Thomases at all in the Jan 6 congressional report. It doesn’t look great for Clarence. Worse for Ginni. And yet the investigation officially looked the other way:
“Clarence and Ginni Thomas were ultimately untouchable for the Jan. 6 investigators for the same reason they are untouchable for purposes of Supreme Court ethics reform: When you’re a justice, they let you do it. And when you are delivering long-sought victories, even ethical Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney will let you do whatever it takes to deliver the goods.”
It’s the Teflon Thomases. As long as Clarence Thomas continues to play a key role in delivering one historic conservative judicial victory after another, the law is for the little people. As we’ve seen, Ginni Thomas was a pivotal behind-the-scenes player in the right-wing organizing efforts to overturn the 2020 election results that culminated in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. And yet somehow she escaped even a mention in the congressional Jan 6 report released back on December 22, 2022. It was, in all likelihood, the price of making that report bipartisan.
But Ginni wasn’t the only theocrat to escape any mention in the report. The CNP isn’t mentioned at all in the report. No mention of the profoundly important role CNP members — like Ginni — played in organizing the efforts that led up to the insurrection. None. For whatever reason, the CNP’s invisibility cloak remains intact. Even after the insurrection. That’s part of the story here. This isn’t just about the untouchability of the Thomases. It’s another story about the untouchability of the broader CNP. Untouchability rooted in unmentionableness:
So this the untouchability of the Thomases set to become enshrined with a statue in Georgia, it’s worth recalling one of the other extreme organizing efforts Ginni was involved with during the Trump years: Schedule F. A key organizing role, it turns out. As we’ve seen, not only was the CNP-dominated Groundswell group — founded by Thomas and Steve Bannon in 2013 — feeding the Trump White House lists of ‘disloyal’ employees back in January of 2019, but Ginni herself was feeding these lists directly to Trump. And as the following Axios from Feb 2020 reminds us, those early ’ ”Deep State” hit lists’ being fed to the Trump White House has an early major target: Sean Doocey, then the head of presidential personnel. Sure enough, Doocey was replaced with John McEntee, who helped initiate the Schedule F plot and continues to work on it to this day. That was all part of who Ginni Thomas was putting into place all the way beck in January of 2019, the same month James Sherk discovered the Schedule F loophole in the federal laws. Just as you can’t really talk about the organizing that went into the January 6 Capitol insurrection without mentioning Ginni Thomas’s key behind-the-scenes role, there’s a key behind-the-scenes Schedule F role for Ginni Thomas too:
“What we’re hearing: These memos created tension inside the White House, as people close to the president constantly told him his own staff, especially those running personnel, were undermining him — and White House staff countered they were being smeared.”
On one level, this story from Jonathan Swan about chaos in the White House was barely news. Chaos and staff infighting had been a feature of the Trump White House from the beginning. But as we can see in this February 2020 report, we’re basically seeing the early contours of what became the Schedule F plot. And at the heart of this early effort to organize a mass purge of non-loyalists we find the CNP-dominated Groundswell network, founded by Ginni Thomas and Steve Bannon in 2013 and which proved highly influential in the Trump administration in influencing staffing decisions. Yep, Ginni Thomas and her fellow Groundswell members were apparently the original figures whispering in Trump’s ears about the treachery around him and the need for mass firings. Because of course. The Schedule F plot is a CNP plot as much as it’s a MAGA plot. And as we’ve also, seen Mark Paoletta, a close friend of the Thomases, remains involved with the ongoing Schedule F scheming by informing conservative audiences of the need to implement the Schedule F purge as soon as possible. Schedule F is very much a Thomas-endorsed plot. And was so from the beginning, when it was Ginni and fellow Groundswell-member Barbara Ledeen who were delivering the Trump White House lists of disloyal staff back in January of 2019. Recall how it was January of 2019 when James Sherk — an ideologue working on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council — discovered the apparent Schedule F loophole that might allow for the mass rescheduling of large swathes of the federal workforce. So it’s quite interesting to learn that the Groundswell lists of ‘disloyal’ employees first started getting delivered to the Trump White House that same month. And it was Ginni who handed the list of employees to fire, compiled by Groundswell, directly to Trump:
Also, regarding the interesting fact that the Groundswell group that was putting together these lists of disloyal employees were meeting regularly at the DC offices of Judicial Watch, don’t forget that Judicial Watch president Thomas Fitton is not just a CNP member but also a member of the CNP’s Conservative Action Project. Again, all signs point towards Schedule F having the full backing of the CNP network. Along with Jan 6.
And then there’s the interesting ties between Groundswell become er Barbara Ledeen and Tom Fitton: Recall how one of the most mysterious ‘opposition research’ activities during 2015–2016 was all the different GOP-affiliated teams searching for Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails. We were told they believed the emails had already been hacked and were floating around on the dark web, although it was never clear if that was just a pretext for hiring someone to do the hacking. It turns out one of those teams searching for Hillary’s emails included Barbara Ledeen, Newt Gingrich, and Judicial Watch. That still-unexplored dark web adventure from the 2016 campaign is worth keeping in mind when we see Barbara Ledeen playing an early role alongside Ginni Thomas in getting the staff purges underway in early 2019, laying the groundwork for the Schedule F plot still underway:
And when we see how one of these memos sent in early 2019 casting doubt on the loyalty of various staffers was apparently done as a kind of attack on Sean Doocey, then the head of presidential personnel who was replaced by Trump’s former body man John McEntee, don’t forget how McEntee was the figure Trump tapped to initiative the Schedule F plot in 2020 and is continuing to play a key role in the ongoing work of vetting future hires in anticipation of a future Schedule F purge. So that Groundswell memo back in January 2019 seemingly designed to undermine Doocey appears to be an early effort to put McEntee in place with Schedule F in mind. In other words, Ginni Thomas and the CNP’s Groundswell network already had some sort of mass purge in mind back in 2019 when they were putting those lists together and they knew they needed someone more pliable as the head of presidential personnel to carry it out:
Finally, regarding the statements by Rich Higgins praising the then-ongoing early-2020 efforts to purge the Trump administration of non-loyalists, recall how Higgins was apparently exactly the kind of arch-loyalist Trump was repeatedly trying to get installed into top positions in places like the Pentagon along with Anthony Tata. Higgins — the ‘Alt Right’ author of the 2017 ‘Higgins Memo’ during his time on the NSC that warned Trump that his administration was under siege by the forces of “cultural Marxism” that aim to drive him from office and who appears to see Chinese communist spies wherever he looks — is exactly the kind of loyalist Trump wanted to fill the government with. Keep that in mind when you read his comments at the time about the White House staff infighting being a “positive development”. It most certainly was a positive development for Higgins and any other far right extremists looking for a government job:
Will Rich Higgins return to DC for a role in a future Republican administration? Time will tell. But if he does, odds are it will be due in no small part to the effort of the network of CNP operatives with Ginni Thomas playing a leading role.
So if you thought the idea of a statue of Clarence Thomas was an outrage, don’t be shocked to one day year about the controversies over a monument to Ginni and the remarkable behind-the-scenes organizing roles she’s played in advancing the far right’s capture of American government and society. She’s earned it. Along with earning a number of major criminal investigations. We’ll see which comes first.
Is it news when Steve Bannon sounds like a fascist? That’s one of the questions raised the recent comments by Bannon on his War Room podcast extolling the virtues of Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. As Bannon sees it, McCarthy wasn’t only right but he’s been proven correct and should have gone further.
So is that news? Well, on one level, that’s just Bannon being Bannon. The guy is a fascist. But, of course, Bannon’s not just a fascist. He’s a conservative thought leader. And he made those comments at a time when some sort of ‘Schedule F+’ fueled mass government purge remains one of the GOP’s biggest ongoing plots. That wasn’t just idle fascist chit chat.
Now, as we’re also going to see, the particular ahistorical narrative Bannon was basing his comments on — the notion that the Venona files released back in 1995 about the US’s VENONA post-war counter-intelligence program somehow vindicated McCarthy’s Red Scare — appears to have its origins not in historical scholarship but instead in the 2003 Ann Coulter book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. In fact, none other than David Barton, the key ‘historian’ behind must of the contemporary right-wing culture war over education, was promoting this idea back in 2009 during a push by Texas state Republicans to get ‘McCarthy was right’ content inserted into Texas’s public school curriculum.
From Ann’s lips in 2003 to Steve’s ears. And then the ears of all his War Room podcast listeners 20 years later. “McCarthy was Right!” is back. Because it ever really left. But now it’s poised to get bigger than ever as claims of ‘communist infiltration’ become central to the upcoming purges. It’s as reminder that the planned mass Schedule F firings aren’t just a diabolical far right plot. It’s Joe McCarthy’s revenge too:
“As the House Republicans’ Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government moves forward, plenty of political observers are comparing the partisan effort to McCarthy and his panel on “un-American activities.””
Yes, this wasn’t just a random commentary from Steve Bannon about the virtues of Joseph McCarthy’s ‘Red Scare’. These comments were made as the House GOP ramps up its “Weaponization of the Federal Government” subcommittee. A subcommittee that clearly has enormous potential synergy with the ongoing Schedule F plot preparing for future mass purges of the federal government. That’s a big part of the context here: Bannon is laying the groundwork of ‘Red Scare 2.0’. Potentially a much larger and more consequential Red Scare than the original:
And as the following Media Matters report points out, Bannon made a specific reference when making these pro-McCarthy comments: the Venona Papers, publicly released in 1995, describing a US post-WAR anti-communist counterintelligence program. Papers that vindicated the Red Scare. At least that’s the story Bannon was peddling a couple of weeks ago:
“...The McCarthy hearings were extremely, extremely helpful, as we now know from the Venona, what is it, documents and tapes, that came out in the 1990s”
So did the Venona papers actually validate McCarthy’s gross violations of civil liberties? Was there actually a vast communist infiltration of of the US government that McCarthy was exposing? Of course not. But that didn’t stop Steven Bannon from making those claims, just as it didn’t stop conservatives from making those claims back in 2009 when Texas state lawmaker Don McLeroy tried to convince the Texas State Board of Education to “Read the latest on McCarthy.” The “latest” update was an apparent reference to the Venona Papers. An ahistorical reference that, as Harvey Klehr, a professor of politics and history at Emory University who is considered one of the top experts on the papers, describes, ignores the reality that none of the people fingered as communist agents by McCarthy were actually identified as communists in the Venona Papers.
Yep, the Venona Papers are in reality a validation of how wrong McCarthy was. But that didn’t stop Rep McLeroy. Or the other conservatives making the same claim at the time, including conservative ‘historian’ David Barton. Recall how Barton has played a central role in the development of ‘patriotic’ ahistorical school curriculum that has been systematically thrust on US school as part of the ‘Project Blitz’ effort to hyper-politicize school curriculum. Surprise.
Nor should we be surprised to learn that the claims about the Venona Papers somehow vindicating McCarthy were likely percolating through conservative echo-chambers thanks to Ann Coulter’s 2003 book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. Claims that are now percolating on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. And that’s part of the relevance of this story from 2009: that the ‘Venona vindication’ claims are bogus is beside the point. Which is why we are still hearing these claims today and why we should expect to hear a lot more calls for a Red Scare 2.0 at the next available opportunity:
“As we reported last week, board member Don McLeroy, R‑College Station, earlier this month told curriculum writers in a memo: “Read the latest on McCarthy — He was basically vindicated.” One of the high school U.S. history curriculum writers — a political activist and non-educator appointed to the writing team by McLeroy — has also insisted that the standards point out that McCarthy was “exonerated” by revelations in the “Venona papers.” Peter Marshall, a conservative evangelical preacher appointed by the state board to a panel of social studies “experts,” backed that perspective in his review of the writing team’s first drafts of the proposed new standards. Marshall wrote that he “emphatically agrees” that the “Verona Papers … confirm as truth many of Senator McCarthy’s accusations about Soviet spying in the U.S.” David Barton, a Republican Party activist and another supposed “expert,” also agrees. Barton wrote in his review (same link as for Marshall’s) that the curriculum writer’s insistence about McCarthy “is quite proper and reflects a commitment to accuracy and truth in history.” State board chair Gail Lowe, R‑Lampasas, and board member Barbara Cargill, R‑The Woodlands, have also asked the curriculum writers to include information about the “Verona papers” in the standards.”
Don McLeroy and David Barton both had a bee in their bonnets back in 2009. The same bee about Joseph McCarthy’s historical vindication. Or ashistorical fantasy vindication as the case may be:
And that ahistorical fantasy vindication of Joseph McCarthy came from none other then Ann Coulter in her 2003 book decrying ‘liberal treason’. Yes, it was nonsense. Exactly the kind of nonsense taken very seriously by conservative leaders:
Getting Ann Coulter’s ahistorical nonsense put into the public schools was the ultimate goal during this 2009 ‘McCarthy was right!’ episode. Which raises the question of how long before we start hearing the same calls today. Overhauling history curriculum is one of the Right’s biggest fetishes right now, after all. Ron DeSantis is effectively defining his political future on this collection of wedge issues.
And that’s all why we should probably expect to hear a lot more voices echoing Steve Bannon’s ‘McCarthy was right!’ sentiments. Those sentiments never left and are only going to get louder the closer they get to the big ‘Schedule F+’ Red Scare 2.0.
Credit where credit’s due: ‘Meatball Ron’ was a pretty good nickname. But, alas, Donald Trump has reportedly moved on from meatball references. He’s got a new line of attack planned for his presumably primary threat: ‘Ron the Granny Starver.’
Yep, in a classic faux-populist manner, Trump has adopted a line of attack that one normally expects to come from a Democrat. A line of attack that portrays Ron DeSantis as the evil classic Republican — a Republican in the mold of Paul Ryan or Karl Rove — who only wants to cut your Social Security and Medicare. Trump is effectively arguing that the nomination of DeSantis a recipe for a 2012 do-over.
As observers not, Trump isn’t just trying to frame DeSantis as a weak candidate. He’s effectively portraying all other Republicans are mortally wounded due to the party’s long-standing reputation for trying to cut entitlements at every opportunity. Only Trump can withstand in inevitable ‘granny starver’ Democratic attacks. It’s an intriguing development in evolving 2024 Republican primary dynamics: Trump is going to run against the classic unpopular Republican agenda in order to win the primary. How’s that going to play out?
But as we’re going to see, there’s another twist afoot. A twist with a Schedule F angle:. It turns out Trump isn’t the only Republican who appears to have learned the lessons of 2012 and 2016. Lessons that demonstrated just how fundamentally unpopular Republican policies ultimately are with the general electorate. There’s another figure quietly pushing a ‘stop cutting Social Security & Medicare’ message to the House Republican. A rather surprising messenger, all things considered: Russ Vought.
As we’ve seen, Vought isn’t a former budget director for Trump. He’s a long-standing conservative ideologue who is continuing to play a major role in the ongoing Schedule F scheming. Recall how it was Vought — husband of ‘assumed CNP member’ Mary Vought’ — who actually attempted to implement Trump’s Schedule F directive issued weeks before the 2020 election. Vought went on to found the Center for Renewing America (CRA) think tank, one of the many spinoffs created in 2021 by the CNP’s Council for National Policy (CPI). It’s at the CRA where Vought’s ongoing Schedule F planning is being channeled, thanks to generous donations from Trump’s PAC and Republican mega-donors.
That’s all part of what makes Vought’s advice so ironic: he’s telling Republicans to ignore cuts to Social Security and Medicare entirely when issuing their demands to Democrats in the upcoming budget shutdown showdown ‘negotiations’ fiasco. Instead, Vought advises the GOP demand cuts to virtually everything other than Social Security and Medicare. That’s the plan. It’s scorched earth, with a pair of exceptions.
That’s the strategy Vought is reportedly advising directly to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in weekly meetings. Keep in mind part of the context here: McCarthy’s Speakership only happened after a standoff with the House Freedom Caucus that resulted in a number of major concessions including a pledge to engage in some sort of major shutdown showdown later this year. And as we also saw, that standoff with McCarthy was heavily backed and orchestrated by the CNP. So first the CNP orchestrates a standoff that forced McCarthy to basically agree to engage in a new round of shutdown showdown standoffs, and then we get reports that key CNP operative Russ Vought is advising McCarthy to demand massive cuts to everything but Social Security and Medicare.
So has the GOP finally abandoned its decades-long quest to undo Social Security and Medicare? Of course not. It’s just given up on prioritizing the cutting Social Security and Medicare first. The gutting of the rest of the federal government is simply seen as more politically viable. We’re told that Vought is convinced that cutting ‘Washington’ first will be powerful symbolism that will make the eventual cutting of Social Security and Medicare more palatable. As they put it, “He’s taken this very interesting position that: Yeah, we need to get entitlement spending under control. But Washington — the agencies — need to take a haircut first...The agencies are a fairly small amount of money, but the symbolism of it — I think he’ll be successful with that message. He and Trump have tapped into that it’s offensive to most of America that Washington would be immune to cuts.”
Of course, what Vought is demanding isn’t really all that new. In fact, it sounds like a rehashing of the 2011 ‘Sequester’ concessions the GOP won from the Obama administration in 2011, hamstringing President Obama’s options for the rest of time in office. But, presumably, a sequester on a much larger scale this time. And that’s all why we should probably expect the GOP’s upcoming budget extortion comes in the form of some sort of new some mega-sequester. An ‘anti-woke’ sequester this time. Demands that happen to be especially convenient for any 2024 Republican presidential nominees who won’t have to explain whether or not they agree with the House GOP’s demanded entitlement cuts.
And that brings us to the another angle at work here: demands for some sort of super-sequester and large cuts to everything other than Social Security and Medicare doubles as a recipe for mass federal firings. In other words, Schedule F. Or at least part of Schedule F. The mass firings part. And here was have Russ Vought — one of the central figures behind the ongoing Schedule F scheming — whispering in Kevin McCarthy’s ear about the need to demand a plan that, if implemented, would result in mass federal firings. That some awful synergy at work right there.
Will gutting everything but Social Security and Medicare be a political winner? That remains to be seen. But that’s the pitch the CNP appears to be counseling Kevin McCarthy and the House GOP to use in the lead up to 2024. Deep cuts will be demanded. But hopefully, for the GOP, not deeply unpopular cuts. Does the US actually public care about cuts to federal programs like Medicaid or federal student aid? We’ll find out.
That’s part of what makes Donald Trump’s ‘Ron the Granny Starver’ attacks so grimly fascinating: Trump hasn’t been hiding his plans to implement a new round of Schedule F if reelection. Mass firings of federal workers as part of his ‘war on the Deep State’ are going to a major element of his reelection pitch. And at the same time he’s planning a mass federal purge, Trump is attacking his primary opponents as ‘Granny Starvers’ pushing a classic Republican agenda of just shrinking government for the rich. It points to the central role ‘attacking the Deep State’ is going to play in Trump’s reelection bid. It’s not a classic Republican agenda of slashing the government to cut taxes on the rich. No, no, it’s an attack on the Deep State. Yeah, that’s the ticket. You can see the framing at work here. In other words, the more we hear Trump attack his rivals as ‘Granny Starvers’, the more mass firings we should probably expect. There’s strategic projection at work here. The kind of strategic projection that makes ‘Ron the Granny Starver’ even more appetizing than ‘Meatball Ron’:
“Repetitively linking DeSantis to both members of the failed 2012 Republican presidential ticket (who had uniform GOP support when DeSantis was running for his first House term) is not only an effective reminder of unhappy GOP history, it’s also an implicit reminder that anyone with DeSantis’s background will be torn limb from limb by President Joe Biden, who is already depicting Republicans as “wheelchair off the cliff” kind of people. The not-so-subtle message is that only the 45th president can protect Republicans from those kind of Democratic assaults, which helped both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama win second terms after much worse midterm elections than Biden endured in 2022.”
Donald Trump isn’t like those other Republicans. Old School classic Republicans like Karl Rove, Paul Ryan, or George W. Bush who didn’t hide their long-standing enthusiasm for gutting Social Security the Mediare. Or “RINO” globalist granny starver Ron DeSantis. That’s the line of attack Trump appears to have determined is going to be the most effective against a primary challenge by Ron DeSantis. And not just DeSantis. It’s a line of attack that will presumably work against virtually all of Trump’s GOP primary opponents. Gutting entitles is a broadly held Republican goal, after all. At least when it comes to the party’s true stakeholders of Republican mega-donors. It’s part of what makes Trump’s strategy a potentially potent one: it’s an attack that works against virtually the entire GOP primary field. Of course, that also points towards the implicit risk of this strategy: Trump isn’t just attacking Ron DeSantis when he calls DeSantis a RINO globalist granny starver. He’s attacking the Republican Party’s reason for being. Starving grannies is a major element of the authentic Republican agenda:
And that brings us to the following fascinating piece describing an emerging plan for making the Republican agenda of massive cuts in federal spending more politically palatable. A plan that has as its champion someone who should sound familiar in the context of the ongoing Schedule F plot: Trump’s former head of the OMB Russ Vought, who went on to found the new Center for Renewing America think tank where the Schedule F work continues. Of course, as we’ve also seen, the CRA is basically a spinoff of the CPI, itself a CNP entity. And as became clear in the days following Kevin McCarthy’s strained attempts to secure the House Speakership, it was the CNP that was effectively orchestrating the House Freedom Caucus’s successful attempts to extract major concessions from McCarthy in return for their support. Major concessions that included setting the state for another round of budget shutdown showdowns later this year. And now, here we are, learning that key CNP operative Russ Vought is reportedly acting as a kind of Kevin McCarthy-whisperer shaping the House GOP’s budget showdown strategy.
It’s not the fact that Vought is playing this behind the scenes role that’s the surprising part. The surprise is the particular political strategy Vought is pushing. A strategy that synergizes well with Trump’s new ‘Ron the granny starver’ line of attack: instead of demanding cuts to Social Security and Medicare, Vought is counseling the House GOP to demand cuts to virtually everything but Social Security and Medicare. It seems the GOP has learned its lesson about the political viability of
its agenda.
We’re told that Vought is holding weekly meetings with McCarthy at this point. So it appears that we should expect demands for massive federal cuts to everything but Social Security of Medicare from the House Republicans. But don’t interpret this as a sign that the GOP has abandoned its longstanding goals. Quite the opposite. Instead, it sounds like Vought’s thinking is that cuts to Social Security and Medicare will be more politically viable after the public first sees massive cuts to almost everything else. As one figure close to Vought puts it, “He’s taken this very interesting position that: Yeah, we need to get entitlement spending under control. But Washington — the agencies — need to take a haircut first...The agencies are a fairly small amount of money, but the symbolism of it — I think he’ll be successful with that message. He and Trump have tapped into that it’s offensive to most of America that Washington would be immune to cuts.” That appears to be the political logic at work here.
Now, it’s not entirely clear why exactly the US public is going to suddenly embrace Social Security of Medicare cuts after witnessing the evisceration of the rest of the federal government. If anything, it seems like witnessing the resulting chaos caused by such policies will make the public even more resistant to the idea. But that’s the apparent plan getting pushed on Kevin McCarthy. A plan pushed by one of the key figures behind the CNP’s ongoing Schedule F scheme:
“The president of a new pro-Trump think tank called the Center for Renewing America, Vought, 46, has emerged as one of the central voices shaping the looming showdown over federal spending and the national debt. As Republicans struggle to craft a strategy for confronting the Biden administration over the debt ceiling, which limits how much the government can borrow to pay for spending Congress has already approved, Vought has supplied them with a seemingly inexhaustible stream of advice: suggestions for negotiating with the White House, briefings about dealing with the media, a 104-page memo that proposes specific spending levels for every federal agency.”
Surprise surprise: the figure who as emerged as one of the central voices in shaping GOP’s budget-showdown strategy is none other than Russ Vought. As we’ve seen, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget was the only Trump official to actually attempt to implement Trump’s Schedule F executive order weeks before the 2020 election and remains of the central figures in the ongoing Schedule F scheming. And now here he is operating as the Kevin McCarthy-whisperer representing “the GOP’s conservative flank” (it’s a big flank), holding weekly meetings with Republican lawmakers and staffers. Russ Vought has major conservative clout:
But, of course, Vought doesn’t have this kind of clout solely due to his charming personality. As the president and founder of the Center for Renewing America (CRA) think tank, Vought is representing powerful interests. In particular, the powerful interests who donated $1.1 million to the CRA in 2021. We don’t get to know who the identities of the anonymous donors who made that $1.1 million donation to a brand new ‘think tank’ in 2021, but Vought insists they are merely “grass-roots donors across the country.” LOL! This is a good time to recall how Vought’s wife, Mary Vought, shows up on the leaked CNP member list as an ‘assumed member’. It’s pretty obvious that when Vought claims the CRA was financed by “grass-roots”, it’s the CNP’s ‘grass-roots’ he’s alluding to:
And if Vought’s status as a conservative establishment stalwart wasn’t obvious, his roles a budget guru for the Republican Study Committee — an entity long focused on slashing entitlements — and later as Trump’s budget director — where he fruitlessly pushed for those entitlement cuts — should make those establishment bona fides clear. Russ Vought has a mission. The same mission shared by the GOP’s mega-donor establishment for the paste half a century of massive tax cuts for the wealthy and the gutting of entitlements. So when we read about Russ Vought taking on this role as a kind of ‘Shadow OMB’ figure shaping the House GOP’s strategy heading into the latest iteration of the big budget shutdown showdown, it’s important to keep in mind that we’ve seen this story before. It’s the same old shtick, albeit with a new level of zeal:
And that brings us to the apparent major deviation from the standard Republican budget antics. Instead of demanding that the Democrats agree to massive entitlement cuts under the threat of a debt default, Vought is counseling a different approach: In order to avoid cutting Social Security and Medicare, gut everything else instead. Especially programs that help the poor. $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid; more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act; more than $400 billion in cuts to food stamps; and hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to educational subsidies. It’s the latest twist in an otherwise stale play book:
And as experts point out, this latest iteration of the same old tired ‘balanced budget in a decade’ scheme is just as unrealistic as all the previous version: even with all the proposed cuts, there’s no feasible way to balance the federal budget without cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Or, of course, hiking taxes. It’s just the latest scam:
And that budget reality — that a balanced budget simply isn’t possible without cuts to Social Security and Medicare — brings us to the admission from Casey Mulligan, who appears to have inside knowledge about Vought’s broader plans: according to Mulligan, Vought isn’t actually proposing all of these cuts in order to avoid having to cut Social Security and Medicare. These cuts are intended to be a kind of appetizer for Social Security and Medicare cuts. As Mulligan describes it, “He’s taken this very interesting position that: Yeah, we need to get entitlement spending under control. But Washington — the agencies — need to take a haircut first...The agencies are a fairly small amount of money, but the symbolism of it — I think he’ll be successful with that message. He and Trump have tapped into that it’s offensive to most of America that Washington would be immune to cuts.” Yes, according to this demented logic, the American people will be more likely to accept cuts to Social Security and Medicare if they first see that ‘Washington’ is going to be cut too. And by ‘Washington’, they mean almost all of the federal programs for the poor:
So as we can see, the plan getting pushed onto House Speaker Kevin McCarthy by Russ Vought isn’t actually a plan to cut everything but Social Security and Medicare. It’s a plan prioritizing the cutting of everything else before gutting Social Security of Medicare. That’s it. The Medicare and Social Security cuts will be coming.
Plus, gutting almost all federal spending would be a great way to fire almost all federal employees. Much more so than Social Security and Medicare cuts, which don’t actually involve large numbers of federal workers. The shutdown showdown budget standoff schemes and the Schedule F schemes are all part of the same scheme. The same fascist ‘capturing society’ scheme. A new take on a classic, but still a classic.
Also keep in mind that if the massive Medicaid and food stamp cuts Vought is counseling Kevin McCarthy to demand look anything like the massive cuts proposed by the GOP back in 2017 when ‘Trumpcare’ was first getting envisions, that’s a plan to grannies.
Here’s a quick update on the growing influence and mainstreaming of the figure that could be considered the God Father of the contemporary Schedule F plot: Curtis “Mencious Moldbug” Yarvin, founder of the “Dark Enlightenment” and long-standing advocate for the kind of society-wide institutional purges of liberals that has become the core of Ron DeSantis’s political agenda.
As we’ve seen, Yarvin’s words carry a lot of weight in the conservative movement these days. So much weight that Christopher Rufo — the figure leading Ron DeSantis’s ‘anti-woke’ overhaul of New College — felt the need to respond to a post on Yarvin’s Substack page criticizing DeSantis’s academic purge agenda. Basically, Yarvin was arguing that it was doomed to fail and that it would be better to wait for academic institutions to crumble and rebuild them instead of trying to reform ‘The Cathedral’. You can’t reform the Cathedral. Instead, burn it down and build something new.
That was the argument Rufo was responding to. And while there’s some interesting tidbits found in his response that help to flesh out the scale of the ambitions at work here, the content of Rufo’s rebuttal isn’t really all that interesting. What’s interesting is that he felt the need to respond in the first place, using language that demonstrates in just how high a regard Rufo holds Yarvin’s opinions. That’s the significance of this piece. It’s an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that the ‘anti-Woke’ war being waged by Ron DeSantis’s administration is rooted in the ‘liberal Cathedral runs everything’ fantasy worldview Yarvin has been developing for years now:
“He’s a really unique figure, someone with whom I don’t agree on everything, but I’ve met Curtis. I have kind of a personal affection for Curtis. I think he’s a very smart person that always has a unique opinion, even if it’s one that is somewhat transgressive. And so Curtis’s argument in this Substack post called “Acorns for the Culture War” says that our campaign to turn New College into a classical liberal arts institution is doomed to fail, and is actually more likely to reinforce progressive cultural power or left-wing hegemony.”
“I think he’s a very smart person that always has a unique opinion, even if it’s one that is somewhat transgressive.” That was Christopher Rufo’s overall characterization of the guy best known for creating the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ ideology: just a very smart person with just somewhat transgressive opinions. Mencius Moldbug is a mainstream conservative.
Because of course Yarvin is treated like a mainstream conservative. His narrative about a “Cathedral” of left-wing dominated institutions that run society to the exclusion of conservatives is absolutely fundamental to the narrative Rufo and Ron DeSantis are relying on to justify the takeover of New College. Rufo never actually disagrees with Yarvin’s ‘Cathedral’ narrative. The only quibble is whether or not it’s a fruitless struggle:
And if it wasn’t already obviously, Rufo doesn’t hide the fact that the capture and New College is intended to be a proof-of-concept experiment to be replicated at public universities in every Republican-run state in the US. It’s all part of moving society “toward a transcendent ideal, towards the greater good, towards the true, the good, and the beautiful.” It’s the kind of language one tends to find in a cult, although definitely not a Doomsday Cult if we take Rufo’s optimism at face value:
It’s worth noting at this point that notion that the focused transformation underway at New College could be easily replicated at much larger public universities across the US neglects one of the core dynamics that’s going to be in play at New College: it’s a tiny school with fewer than 1000 students. As such, there won’t need to be that many ideologically motivated new students and professors signing up for New College to fill in for all the left-leaning prospective students who will now presumably be looking elsewhere for a higher education. But that’s not going to be easy to replicate at larger universities. For this to become a real template, a substantial percentage of the total prospective student body across the US will have to be willing to submit themselves to a hyper-politicized ‘anti-woke’ educational experiences. Not to mention finding enough ideologically compliant professors. Don’t forget the template institution here: tiny Christian conservative college Hillsdale, which had an enrollment of just over 1,500 students in 2021. It’s not like that there’s massive demand for a conservative fundamentalist college education in the US.
And yet that massive demand for an ‘anti-woke’ education is what the Rufo/DeSantis plan is predicated on. A Hillsdale education for all! It’s what the people want. At least that’s the assumption. An assumption Curtis Yarvin clearly doesn’t share. Time will tell. This is going to take a while to play out. Maybe we’re going to see a flowering of new New Colleges all around the US in one GOP-run state after another. Maybe. But if not, it’s worth keeping in mind the underlying strategy Yarvin is counseling instead: burn it all to the ground, and only then build your transcendent idealized society atop the ashes. Which is a reminder that, while Ron DeSantis no doubt would love to see his New College ‘anti-woke’ gambit succeed at creating a vibrant new conservative academic environment that is politically correct in all the proper ‘anti-woke’ ways, there’s a Plan B should that gambit fail. A Plan B predicated on the idea that the only plan that won’t fail is one that starts with burning it all to the ground.
The ideological capture of New College of Florida is clearly one of Ron DeSantis’s flagship initiatives in anticipation of of 2024 presidential run. A symbolic opening shot in DeSantis’s ‘war on woke.’ But, of course, this isn’t just Ron DeStantis’s ‘war on wokism’. As we’ve seen, DeSantis’s war on New College is basically an extension of the ongoing Schedule F scheming underway. Scheming led largely by the Council for National Policy (CNP). And as we’re going to see in the following post from the Victims of Communism Substack, it’s an agenda that goes back to the origins of the networks of international fascists who formed the ‘New Right’ decades ago.
It’s a historical relationship with a perhaps surprising direct tie to the New College takeover: it turns out Matthew Spalding — professor of constitutional government at Hillsdale College and the dean of Hillsdale’s graduate school of government in DC — is married to the daughter of Lee Edwards.
Who is Lee Edwards? First, recall how Edwards ended up working closely with spook-connected ‘human rights lawyer’ Luis Kutner during Kutner’s many interactions with groups like the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). But Edwards did a lot more than that: a co-founder of Barry Goldwater’s Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), Edwards went on to found the American branch of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), the American Council for World Freedom (ACWF). In 1974, the ACWF hosted WACL’s conference in DC, which included OUN‑B leader Yaroslav Stetsko as a special guest. Edwards was made the Secretary General of WACL that year.
Flash forward to 1994, and we find Edwards and key Stetsko operative Lev Dobrianksy forming the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC). Edwards sat at the head of the VOC board until 2022, at which point his daughter Elizabeth replaced him.
So how does all of this relate to DeSantis’s ‘war on woke’ at New College? Well, as Lee Edwards wrote in 2019, the U.S. suffers from “the tyranny of minorities—the feminist minority, the welfare-rights minority, the homosexual minority, the animal-rights minority.”
Flash forward again to June of 2022, during the grand opening of the VOC Museum in DC when we hear sentiments expressed by a member of the VOC Speakers Bureau that sound like they were taken from a Ron DeSantis interview. As this VOC member explained to reporters, “Marxism has gained a foothold in the American education system through the rise of cancel culture, revisionist history lessons, critical race theory, and divisive gender ideology…
As Lee Edwards said during a National Review interview at the time, Edwards views the opening the museum as “the cornerstone of our global educational campaign about the manifold victims and crimes of communism.” As Edwards puts it, “Nazism was exposed and convicted at the Nuremburg trials. VOC intends to put communism on trial in Washington, D.C.” It’s that broader “we’re putting Communism on trial” narrative — a narrative the New Right as been nursing and developing for decades — that’s going to be crucial to keep in mind as we watch the ‘war on woke’ and broader Schedule F institutional purge agenda play out.
Yes, the fact that Matthew Spalding is married to Elizabeth Edwards is indeed quite interesting. But even if they weren’t, that wouldn’t change the fact that the ‘war on woke’ is little more than a rehashing of the kind of ‘Red Scare’ mentality figured like Lee Edwards have been keeping alive and fostering ever since Joe McCarthy. An agenda kept alive in concert with the international fascist networks like the ABN and WACL that Lee Edwards also helped to organize.
It’s all part of the same shared agenda. An international agenda a creating an environment where everything the far right dislikes is simply labeled ‘Communist’ and declared a subversive threat that must be extinguished entirely. Ron DeSanti’s ‘War on Woke’ is operating from an old playbook. The Red Scare playbook Lee Edwards helped to write:
“As part of DeSantis’ “war on woke,” and his trial run for a national(ist) assault on higher education, the Trumpian governor has appointed half a dozen right-wing trustees at New College of Florida, a public liberal arts school. Among them is Matthew Spalding, the former executive director of Trump’s 1776 Commission.”
It was no surprise that Mathew Spalding was tapped by Ron DeSantis to help lead the ‘war on woke’ at New College. As the former executive director of Trump’s 1776 Commission and a Hillsdale College professor, Spalding was a natural choice for a task like imposing an ideological overhaul of New College. But as this piece makes clear, Spalding has another affiliation that makes him a particularly well-suited individual for this agenda: his wife, Elizabeth, is the daughter of one of the central figures in the creation of the New Right networks starting back in the 1960s: Lee Edwards:
Lee Edwards wasn’t just a founder of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). He was “a stalwart of the emergent New Right in American politics, and brought his own questionable background and motives into the World Anti-Communist League [WACL] as a professional fund-raiser,” and was the principal co-found of the first US WACL chapter, the American Council for World Freedom (ACWF). As an example of the kind of fascist networking Edwards was engaged in, in 1974, the ACWF organized the WACL conference in DC. Special guests for the event included included Yaroslav Stetsko, the postwar leader of the OUN/B. This is a good time to recall the CIA’s long-standing relationship with Stetsko going back to WWII. Edwards was reportedly named Secretary General of WACL during that event. It’s hard to think of better fascist credentials than that: Secretary General for what was one of the world’s leading international fascist networking entities:
But Lee Edwards’s fascist credentials don’t end there. Nor does his networking with Ukrainian fascists: the ACWF included both the National Captive Nations Committee and the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA). Both entities were chaired by Lev Dobriansky, father of Paula Dobriansky who served on Reagan’s national security council. Recall the apparent role Lev played in fomenting disinformation about Lee Harvey Oswald in the wake of the JFK assassination. Lee Edwards became executive secretary of the National Captive Nations Committee the even got a regular column in the pro-OUN/B Ukrainian Weekly. It’s another example of how you can’t really understand contemporary American fascism without also recognizing the profound influence of Ukrainian post-war fascist international networks. Contemporary American fascism is an international phenomena:
Flash forward to 1993, and we find Edwards and Dobriansky co-founding the VOC, which Edwards led until 2022, at which point his daughter took over the role:
Finally, note how this ‘anti-Communist’ fascist ideology animating these networks has now evolved into contemporary absurdities, like the notion that “You cannot understand Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine unless you understand that he is a Marxist-Leninist.” Or the idea that “Marxism has gained a foothold in the American education system through the rise of cancel culture, revisionist history lessons, critical race theory, and divisive gender ideology.” In other words, what we are seeing play out at New College is an extension of the ‘anti-Communist’ agenda embodied by Lee Edwards’s lifetime of far right activism. Activism shaped by Edwards’s lifetime of networking with international fascists:
So given that Lee Edwards’s step-son is one of the people tapped to lead the New College liberal institutional purge, something Edwards has spent decades working towards, we have to ask: What role might Lee Edwards be playing in the New College ‘war on woke’? Who knows, but at this point he doesn’t really need to do much more than allow the Red Scare 2.0 he’s spent decades building towards to keep playing out. It’s Lee Edwards’s and WACL’s ‘War on Woke’ too.
The end of America is just around the corner. True patriots have their backs against the wall and now is the time to fight. A mass national protest to fight the collapse of the United States and freedom at the hands of the America-hating elites. That was the core of former President Trump’s rally cry publicly issued over the weekend in apparent anticipation of an indictment and arrest that Trump expects clearly could arrive as soon as tomorrow from New York prosecutors over his ‘Stormy Daniels hush money’-related campaign finance crimes.
It wasn’t a particularly surprising message from Trump. Somewhat more surprising is the fact that Trump’s next big public rally is scheduled for March 25, in Waco, TX. As many have noted, March 25 just happens to be the 30th anniversary of the Waco federal standoff. It’s not exactly subtle.
But beyond being a kind of preemptive call to arms to his supporters and the implicitly framing ‘Red America’ as a new Branch Davidian compound facing off with a hostile federal government, there’s also no denying that it was a message that has immense synergy with the ongoing Schedule F scheming and the extensive preparations underway for a mass government purge of all non-GOP loyalists. And the more legal heat Trump experiences, the more amped up his rhetoric gets about the downfall of America, the greater that Schedule F synergy.
So while we are likely in store for some potentially wild events if the indictment of Trump does indeed happen, it’s going to be important to keep in mind that Trump isn’t just fomenting another potential ‘Jan 6’ with his rhetoric. He’s also making the future implementation of a Schedule F government mass purge of all non-GOP-loyalists all but inevitable. Maybe it will be a reelected Trump implementing that purge. Perhaps a future President Ron DeSantis. It hardly matters which particular Republican ends up in the White House next in terms of whether or not Schedule F is going to be part of the agenda. Schedule F is the GOP’s agenda at this point. It’s not just a Trump scheme. And the more Trump — and potentially other GOP 2024 candidates — rouse the rabble over the impending downfall of America at the hands of America-hating Marxists, the greater the eventual Schedule F fervor:
“In a later post that went beyond simply exhorting loyalists to protest about his legal peril, the 2024 presidential candidate directed his overarching ire in all capital letters at the Biden administration and raised the prospect of civil unrest: “IT’S TIME!!!” he wrote. “WE JUST CAN’T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE. THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA!PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!””
America is being killed and only mass protests by Trump’s supporters can save it. That was the apparent preemptive public defense issued by the former president on his social media platform over the weekend. A message we’ve heard from Trump before. Repeatedly, whether it was his call to mass protest in the lead up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection or his cries of persecution following the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago last summer. It’s an established tactic. With an established track record that includes an insurrection. That’s a big part of the context of Trump’s rabble rousing posts over the weekend: He’s roused the rabble like this before, to devastating effect in the case of Jan 6:
It’s also worth noting that Trump issued these inflammatory posts despite a lack of any confirmation that an indictment is indeed about to be issued by the NY District Attorney in the hush money case. It’s like consciousness of guilt manifesting in a particularly Trumpian manner:
And then there’s the fact that the NY hush money case is merely one of several legal inquiries that could plausibly result in some sort of indictment. Which raises the obvious question of what sort of response we should expect from Trump should we actually see multiple indictments issued against the former president. This is just a warm up act, after all:
That Georgia indictment could be just around the corner too. What’s Trump’s response going to be to that? It’s quite a backdrop from a presidential campaign.
And yet, as Philip Bump of the Washington Post points out, Trump isn’t just rallying his base to his legal defense with these warnings about the collapse of Western civilization. He’s also informing his base about what a second Trump administration will look like. In other words, he’s feeding his supporters the delightful image of implementing a ‘Schedule F+’ mass society-wide purge of all the ‘America-hating Marxists’ as a tantalizing appetizer for a second Trump term:
“Not only are his political opponents undermining the country, but they’re undermining all of “Western civilization” by weakening the United States.”
Western civilization is being destroyed by Trump’s political enemies. It’s not Trump who faces the existential threat here. All of Western civilization is facing this threat. A threat from within from all the Marxist “USA-hating people that represent us.” The US either reelects Trump or descends into a “godless nation worshiping at the altar of race and gender and environment.” One one level, it’s a replay of his greatest hits. But there’s no denying that Trump is taking this rhetoric to a new level:
“This is a policy Trump wants voters to know that he will enact.”
Yep. It’s not just a political threat. It’s a campaign promise. He may not be explicitly promising a “Schedule F” purge, but that’s clearly the message. It’s one of the warped dynamics of the upcoming 2024 campaign that is going to be increasingly important to keep in mind as Trump’s political bluster gets louder and more dangerous: Trump doesn’t have to overtly campaign on the ‘Schedule F’ platform. Howling about America-hating Marxists who must be destroyed before they destroy America first has that covered.
They did it again. The Council for National Policy (CNP) just had another one of its networks exposed as a highly coordinated and well-financed operation. And yet there’s basically no acknowledgement in the media’s coverage of this story of the CNP sinew connecting it all. They did it again.
So what is this latest CNP network working on? The topic of the day in GOP circles: anti-trans demonization and hysteria and the anti-trans legislation that follows. As we’ve seen, the GOP’s scapegoating the trans community as a threat to public safety — the ‘bathroom bills’ of the past decade — have morphed into the fixation on ‘trans kids’ and the perils of drag queens. And as the following Mother Jones report makes clear, that current fixation on the trans community is thanks in large part to the years-long efforts of a network of activists who have spent the last decade trying to create an anti-trans panic in the US and pass legislation that would effectively outlaw the trans community. In other words, the contemporary US political zeitgeist is, to some extent, the fruits of this network’s labors. Which, again, is a CNP network at its core.
The new report is, like so many CNP-related reports, based on leaked information. In this case, it’s a leaked trove of emails sent to a former anti-trans activist Elisa Rae Shupe, a retired US Army soldier who became an anti-trans activist after detransitioning before retransitioning again. Shupe, in turn, was recruited by South Dakota lawmaker Fred Deutsch back in 2019 to join what became ‘the team’, a euphemism for the group of operatives working together to promote anti-trans model legislation across the US. So Shupe, the person who leaked this, wasn’t just some hacker or some another outsider who somehow got their hands on the emails. This was someone who knows this group from the inside. And as Shupe informs us, religious-right rhetoric about wanting to help children with gender dysphoria is “just a front for what they do behind the scenes...It’s like they want to do as much damage to the trans community as they can.” That’s a big part of the story here: the more we learn about the folks behind this anti-trans movement, the more apparent it becomes that the underlying motive here is using the trans community as an easy scapegoat for not just scoring political points but justifying a deeply theocratic reactionary agenda. The trans panic is a required ingredient for the scale of public reaction they are trying a catalyze. A public reaction that, of course, goes well beyond banning all things trans. This is the CNP we’re talking about, after all. The same network behind the overturning of Roe and ongoing pushes to effectively role back the sexual revolution.
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is the entity that appears to be playing a key organizing role in this network. Described as a Christian legal powerhouse, the ADF was founded by CNP member Alan Sears — who sits on the CNP board and wrote the book The Homosexual Agenda, that falsely links pedophilia to homosexuality. But Sears is far from the only ADF associate who shows up on the CNP’s membership list. For example, the leaked CNP membership lists up through 2020 include the following current or former ADF members:
* Michael “Mike” Baller
* Benjamin W. Bull, former Chief Counsel of ADF and Executive Director of ADF International
* Gregory Logan Chafuen
* Marjorie Dannenfelser
* Dr. Michael P. Farris, the President & CEO of ADF
* Catherine Glenn Foster
* Douglas H. Napier
* Kristen K. Waggoner, General Counsel of ADF
* Former ADF chief executive, Paul E. Weber, who is now President & CEO of the Family Policy Alliance, which also figured into this report.
The ADF is a CNP front. One we’ve seen in proximity to brutal anti-LGBTQ movements around the world. For example, in 2016, the ADF supported a law in Belize making gay sex punishable with 10 years in jail. The group also tripled its spending in Europe between 2012 and 2016 and in 2019 co-hosted an event with the French group La Manif Pour Tous that has been previously been linked to the far right Front National. Also in 2019, the ADF showed up as the second biggest spender on Facebook ads among a group of 38 hate groups tracked by the SPLC. The ADF spent at least $391,669 that year on Facebook ads pushing for the criminalization of “sodomy”. Finally, recall how the ADF provided the model template legislation for Religious Freedom Restoration Act allowing for the legal discrimination against LGBT people in Mississippi. The ADF has been very busy in organizing anti-LGBTQ laws over the last decade. But not just anti-trans work. It was the ADF that crafted the model legislation passed by Mississippi to overturn Roe v. Wade.
But the ADF is also just one of the CNP-connected entities deeply involved with this behind-the-scenes agenda to effectively outlaw the LGBTQ community. There’s the Eagle Forum, founded by now-deceased CNP member Phyllis Schlafly. Recall how now-deceased Eagle Forum President and founder, Phyllis Schafly, was on the CNP members list, along with her daughter Anne Cori, and Ed Martin of the Eagle Forum Fund. Other Eagle Forum associates who showed upon the CNP members lists include Eunie Smith and LaNeil W. Spivy. The Eagle Forum is deeply in the CNP’s orbit. Also involved in the Liberty Counsel, whose founder and chairman is CNP member Matt Staver. Recall that 2016 report about the leaked 2014 CNP membership list that listed Staver and Alan Sears as CNP board members, alongside fellow CNP board lmembers like the League of the South’s Mike Peroutka who is an open advocate of the theocratic imposition of the Old Testament.
Another group involved with the effort is a fringe pediatrics groups call the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), which broke away from the American Academy of Pediatrics due to its support of LGBTQ parents. More publicly, the AFD, ACPeds, and Eagle Forum have joined with groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Family Policy Alliance (led by former ADF CEO and CNP member Paul Weber) under the umbrella of a “Promise to America’s Children” campaign.
It’s that network of powerful extremely well-organized and well-financed anti-trans activists that just experienced a relatively rare degree of public exposure following Elisa Rae Shupe’s release of those emails. And yet, despite that exposure, the CNP angle to this story remains virtually unacknowledged. But at least the CNP’s anti-trans network is getting some much needed exposure. The kind of exposure that makes it clear that when Shupe warns that “It’s like they want to do as much damage to the trans community as they can”, the level of damage to the trans community this network is aspiring towards is the complete erasure of that community from society. It’s another ‘Schedule F+’-style society-wide purge the CNP is actively working on. Specifically a societal purge of all the trans people. That’s not hyperbole. It’s in the emails:
“The message was one in a trove of emails obtained by Mother Jones between Deutsch and representatives of a network of activists and organizations at the forefront of the anti-trans movement. They show the degree to which these activists shaped Deutsch’s repressive legislation, a version of which was signed into law in February, and the tactics, alliances, and goals of a movement that has sought to foist their agenda on a national scale.”
A trove of leaked email from a network of activists and organizations at the forefront of the anti-trans movement. That’s what was just leaked to Mother Jones. A network that is involved in a far broader push to role back the laws in human sexuality to role back virtually all LGBTQ rights.
And, of course, it’s another network filled with CNP members and affiliated entities, with the Christian legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) playing a central role. Founded by CNP member Alan Sears — who sits on the CNP board and wrote the book The Homosexual Agenda, that falsely links pedophilia to homosexuality — the ADF is filled with CNP members. For example, the leaked CNP membership lists include the following current or former ADF members:
* Michael “Mike” Baller
* Benjamin W. Bull, former Chief Counsel of ADF and Executive Director of ADF International
* Gregory Logan Chafuen
* Marjorie Dannenfelser
* Dr. Michael P. Farris, the President & CEO of ADF
* Catherine Glenn Foster
* Douglas H. Napier
* Kristen K. Waggoner, General Counsel of ADF
* Former ADF executive, Paul E. Weber, who is now President & CEO of the Family Policy Alliance, which also figured into this report.
And the ADF is a CNP entity with a global reach. Recall how in 2016, the ADF supported a law in Belize making gay sex punishable with 10 years in jail. The group also tripled its spending in Europe between 2012 and 2016 and in 2019 co-hosted an event with the French group La Manif Pour Tous that has been previously been linked to the far right Front National.
But the AFD’s largest influence is in the US, where it promotes what can only be described as an Old Testament theocracy. For example, in 2019, the ADF showed up as the second biggest spender on Facebook ads among a group of 38 hate groups tracked by the SPLC. The ADF spent at least $391,669 that year on Facebook ads pushing for the criminalization of “sodomy”. Similarly, the ADF provided the model template legislation for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act allowing for the legal discrimination against LGBT people in Mississippi. The ADF has been very busy in organizing anti-LGBTQ laws over the last decade.
But the ADF is also just one of the CNP-connected entities deeply involved with this behind-the-scenes agenda to effectively outlaw the LGBTQ community. For example, there’s the Eagle Forum, founded by now-deceased CNP member Phyllis Schlafly. Recall how now-deceased Eagle Forum President and founder, Phyllis Schafly, was on the CNP members list, along with her daughter Anne Cori, and Ed Martin of the Eagle Forum Fund. Other Eagle Forum associates who showed upon the CNP members lists include Eunie Smith and LaNeil W. Spivy. The Eagle Forum is deeply in the CNP’s orbit.
And then there’s fringe groups like the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), a group that broke away from the American Academy of Pediatrics due to its support of LGBTQ parents. It’s a group effort, with the CNP standing in the background as usual:
And, of course, this same network isn’t focused just on persecuting the LGBTQ community. The ADF drafted the Mississippi abortion ban that overturned Roe and is currently working with ACPeds to get the abortion pill banned in the US nationally. This is a network that has had enormous success in recent years. That enormous success is also part of the context of this story. This is a network that gets things done while always remaining behind the scenes. And sure enough, Fred Deutsch already won South Dakota early this year with the passage of a law that is expected to forced trans youth in South Dakota to destransition by the end of 2023:
And note how groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Family Policy Alliance are working with the AFD, ACPeds, and Eagle Forum under the umbrella of the “Promise to America’s Children”. It’s a reflection of the deep institutional buy in on this agenda. The kind of deep institutional buy in that only the CNP can really provide. And again, don’t forget that the former executive of the ADF, Paul E. Weber, is also the President and CEO of the Family Policy Alliance. It’s a tight network, that includes the Heritage Foundation:
Another CNP affiliate involved is Liberty Counsel, whose founder and chairman is CNP member Matt Staver. Recall that 2016 report about the leaked 2014 CNP membership list that listed Staver and Alan Sears as CNP board members, alongside fellow CNP board members like the League of the South’s Mike Peroutka. The anti-trans agenda is a something the CNP leadership is keenly interested in:
Notably, it turns out that the source for all of these emails was a member of the ‘team’ that Fred Deutsch assembled in 2019: Elisa Rae Shupe, a retired US Army soldier who became an anti-trans activist after detransitioning before retransitioning again. So the person who leaked this wasn’t just some hacker or some another outsider who somehow got thier hands on the emails. This was someone who knows this group from the inside. And as Shupe informs us, religious-right rhetoric about wanting to help children with gender dysphoria is “just a front for what they do behind the scenes...It’s like they want to do as much damage to the trans community as they can”:
How much damage will this network ultimately inflict upon the trans community? As much as they are allowed to inflict, it would seem. We don’t need to take Shupe’s word on that. The emails she leaked make that all abundantly clear. This is a movement literally dedicated to the purging from society of an entire group of people. That’s the ultimate agenda at work here: demonize, then purge.
But it’s also just a tiny fraction of the full scope of the CNP agenda at work here. That’s another factor to keep in mind here: as villainous as this movement’s agenda may be, it’s also just one part of a much larger theocratic fascist agenda. An extremely important part of that much larger agenda: the scapegoated part. There’s a reason authoritarians always seek out the most vulnerable groups in society, demonize them, and try to extinguish them. If you’re going to impose a theocracy, you have to start somewhere. And this network got started a while ago.
“Defund the FBI and DOJ!” That was the rallying cry chosen by Donald Trump in the wake of his not guilty plea in the case brought against the former president by New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg on Tuesday. As Trump put it on social, “REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS SHOULD DEFUND THE DOJ AND FBI UNTIL THEY COME TO THEIR SENSES”. And while all of these proclamations are obviously part of Trump’s strategy for winning the 2024 GOP primary and muddying up an potential prosecutions with presidential politics, it’s also going to be increasingly important to recognize that the persecution complex Trump is going to be milking for the foreseeable future is very much part of a broader ongoing GOP culture war. A culture war predicated on the notion that white Christian conservatives are being systemically persecuted by ‘woke’ ‘cultural Marxist’ elites in league with the Deep State. It’s the kind of culture war designed to generate a genuine state of fear and panic in the target audience. The kind of fear and panic that can make targeted populations conclude democratic institutions and elections pose a mortal threat to their existence.
It’s that broader culture war that was the focus of the latest round of Ginni Thomas-related revelations. As the following Washington Post piece describes, Thomas founded a group in 2019, Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty, with the stated mission of waging conservative culture wars. And that’s about all we know about the group. That and the fact that Crowdsourcers was apparently set up in a way that allows for complete secrecy around who donates to it, who works for it, and what the group even does with the money it receives.
But this isn’t just another story about another right-wing darkmoney group up to no good. It’s worse and sleazier: part of the reason so little is know about Crowdsourcers is because it was never even registered with the IRS as an independent non-profit. Instead, a different group, right-wing think tank, the Capital Research Center (CRC), agreed to play a “fiscal sponsorship” role for Crowdsourcers, taking in $596k in donations in 2019 alone designated for Crowdsourcers. As a result of that arrangement, Crowdsourcers has so few disclosure requirements that we have no idea what Ginni was paid for her work or even what position she held.
Here’s the extra sleazy part: it also turns out that the CRC did something very atypical for the group in 2019 and petitioned the Supreme Court to hear a specific case. Now, the Supreme Court didn’t ultimately agree to hear the case, but we don’t know how the individual justices voted. Did Clarence Thomas vote to hear the case? We have no idea. A lack of transparency is a prevailing theme in this story. So the same year the CRC agreed to play this fiscal sponsorship for Ginni Thomas’s new Crowdsourcers group — allowing Ginni to avoid disclosing whatever she may have received for her work at Crowdsourcers — the CRC was lobbying Ginni’s Supreme Court Justice husband to get a hearing for a case.
It’s not a great look for the Thomases. But not exactly an unfamiliar look for them either. As the article notes, this isn’t the first time people have raised questions about Ginni’s political activism and how that might get mixed up with her husband’s rulings. In 2010, Ginni founded the nonprofit group Liberty Central to help shape the tea party movement with an anonymous donation of $500,000, prompting conflict of interest questions. Ginni stepped away from the group in November of 2010, but went on to start Liberty Consulting, a for-profit consulting firm which has fewer reporting requirements than a non-profit.
But while we have minimal transparency from Ginni on the sources of her income, we have gotten a clue from Clarence: Since 2018, Clarence Thomas has listed Liberty Consulting as his wife’s sole source of income. Which translates to no income from Crowdsourcers. Or else Clarence was lying on his disclosures.
So if Ginni wasn’t getting paid by Crowdsourcers, how was she getting compensated for that work? Well, as the following article notes, a conflict a interest from the CRC’s ‘fiscal sponsorship’ role wouldn’t just arise from the money Ginni directly may have received for Crowdsourcers. Indirect payments, like consulting payments related to Crowdsourcers, would also constitute a conflict of interest.
Did Ginni’s Liberty Consulting do any Crowdsourcerswork? Well, as we’re also going to see, in Feb 2019, a month after Crowdsourcers’s first meeting, Ginni’s assistant emailed a private Google group being used for Crowdsourcers communications to announce three new members to the group: Charlie Kirk, Breitbart CEO Larry Solov, and former congressman Allen West. Thomas replied with a “WELCOME new leaders!!!” email. Both Thomas and her assistant used their Liberty Consulting email addresses. So while we don’t know if Liberty Consulting officially did work and got paid for Crowdsourcers-related work, we do know Ginni and her assistant both used their Liberty Consulting email addresses to conduct Crowdsourcers-related activity. That’s a clue.
Finally, we have to address the ever-present Council for National Policy (CNP) angle. Because of course there’s a CNP angle. And, of course, it relates to the CNP’s extensive efforts to rig the 2020 election. As always, this story is filled with CNP members, with prominent CNP member Ginni Thomas being an obvious example. Joining Ginni is another CNP member who arguably played an even larger role in the CNP’s election-rigging efforts: Cleta Mitchell. In fact, it was at a May 2019 CNP meeting where Thomas and Mitchell jointly pitched Crowdsourcers to the broader CNP community as a new group worth supporting. The same May 2019 meeting referenced in Anne Nelson’s piece describing how the CNP stoked the January 6 Capitol insurrection. And as the article noted, it was at that meeting where Ginni and Cleta laid out their 2020 election strategy. It’s an important detail in this story. Because while we don’t know what Crowdsourcers ultimately did with the $596k it raised in 2019, we do know that the fundraising was happening inside the CNP network in relation to the group’s 2020 election plans.
Two people were cited as key leaders of the Crowdsourcers effort at this May 2019 CNP meeting: James O’Keefe — recently forced out of Project Veritas — and Richard Viguerie. Recall how Viguerie isn’t just a prominent CNP member. He’s one of its co-founders. And don’t forget that Charlie Kirk — who became a Crowdsourcers “leader” in February of 2019 — is himself a CNP member.
But the CNP ties to this story don’t end there. It also turns out CRC’s president Scott Walter and trustee Ed Meese III are both CNP members too.
Oh, and it turns out $400k of that $596k donated to Crowdsourcers through the CRC in 2019 was donated through dark money ‘charity’ Donors Trust, adding another layer of secrecy to the affair. It’s worth recall how 2019 was the year Donors Trust was used to donate $1.5 million in ‘charitable contributions’ to VDARE so it could purchase a historic castle near DC.
So we have a story about a CNP members Ginni Thomas, Cleta Mitchell, Richard Viguerie, and Charlie Kirk setting up Crowdsourcers in 2019 and pitching it to CNP members at the now infamous May 2019 CNP strategy meeting. And despite raising $596k that year, almost everything Crowdsourcers has done with that money is wrapped in secrecy, thanks to the CRC — led by CNP members Scott Walter and Ed Meese — and its decision to play the role of fiscal sponsor. A decision made right around the time the CRC decided to petition the Supreme Court very uncharacteristically. And $400k of that $596 money was donated through Donors Trust, a favorite entity for conservative mega-donors who want to keep their donations a secret. While we don’t know what Crowdsourcers did with that money, we know whoever gave it REALLY wanted to remain anonymous.
That’s the larger story here. The role played by Ginni Thomas and all of the serious, yet sordid, questions about conflicts of interest swirling around her are just part of the story. There’s a much larger unresolved CNP story here. A much larger unresolved story related to what the CNP was doing during the 2020 election that will presumably remain unresolved as all CNP-related stories seem to remain:
“The previously unreported donations to the fledgling group Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty were channeled through a right-wing think tank in Washington that agreed to serve as a funding conduit from 2019 until the start of last year, according to documents and interviews. The arrangement, known as a “fiscal sponsorship,” effectively shielded from public view details about Crowdsourcers’ activities and spending, information it would have had to disclose publicly if it operated as a separate nonprofit organization, experts said.”
Nearly $600k in anonymous made to Ginni Thomas’s Crowdsourcers for Liberty group but funneled through through an obscure right-wing ‘think tank’, the Capital Research Center (CRC), that was performing a “fiscal sponsorship” role. A role that shields from the public details about not only who made the donations but even details about how the money was being spent or what Crowdsourcers was up to at all. Layers of secrecy were created around Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty. That’s the crux of this story.
But the secrecy wasn’t limited to the use of the CRC as a fiscal sponsor. There’s also the fact that $400k of that $596k was donated to the CRC via Donors Trust, the Koch-backed 501c3 ‘charity’ that’s been dubbed the “Dark Money ATM of the Conservative Movement”. As we’ve seen, the donors to DonorsTrust give money to ‘charity’ with instructions on how DonorsTrust should re-donate the money to various groups, thus shielding the identities of the original donors while simultaneously allowing them to write the donations off their taxes as a charitable contribution. And as we also saw, it was 2019 when Donors Trust was just to make large anonymous donations to both American Renaissance and VDARE, including a $1.5 million donation to VDARE that was apparently used to purchase a historic castle near DC. So for all we know, the same people who donated that $1.5 million to VDARE were the same ones who donated $400k in 2019 mystery donations from Donors Trust to the CRC. That’s part of the context of the anonymous CRC donations: we don’t know who made the donations, but we do know they used an entity known for shielding big money donors:
And note when you see how the CRC has Edwin Meese III as a trustee and Scott Walter as its president, note that both Meese and Walter show up on the CNP membership list.
And then there’s this other part of the context of the CRC role as a fiscal sponsor of donations to Ginni Thomas’s group: around the same time the CRC made the decision to serve as Crowdsourcers fiscal sponsor, the CRC was lobbying the Supreme Court to hear a case. Notably, this was the sole instance of the CRC filing a brief with the court in recent decades. The timing sure is interesting. Did Ginni happen to mention the CRC’s kindness to her Supreme Court justice husband at the time? She’s obviously going to deny that any such thing happened which points towards one of the big questions raised by this overall story: can we take Ginni Thomas as her word?
Also note how this isn’t just a question of whether or not Ginni was paid by Crowdsourcers for her work. Indirect payments for consulting work could also constitute a conflict of interest.
So given that the CRC was both playing the role of a fiscal sponsor of Ginni Thomas’s group at the same time it was lobbying her husband on the Supreme Court to hear a case, we have to ask: how much was Ginni paid for this Crowdsourcers work? And that brings us to one of the other benefits of the CRC’s fiscal sponsorship: Crowdsourcers never even had to be established as an independent nonprofit group. As such, almost nothing about its staff, how much they were paid, or what roles they served is required to be publicly disclosed. We don’t get to know whether or not Ginni was getting paid or how much. But we know that both Ginni and her assistant were using their email addresses for Liberty Consulting — Ginni’s for-profit consulting business — when communicating with the Crowdsourcers members (including CNP member Charlie Kirk). It’s a reminder that there were many different avenues for someone to pay off the Thomases. If some entity hired Liberty Consulting while also making large donations to the CRC and/or Crowdsourcers, we wouldn’t get to know. But Ginni and Clarence would definitely know:
Adding to the intrigue around who paid Ginni what, it turns out that Clarence Thomas reported that Liberty Consulting was Ginni’s sole source of income since 2018, implying that was the case in 2019 too. In other words, either Clarence lied on that disclosure or Ginni wasn’t getting directly paid by Crowdsourcers. And if Ginni wasn’t getting paid by Crowdsourcers for all the work she was doing for the group, how exactly was she getting compensated? More questions we’ll presumably never get answered:
But just because we don’t get to know precisely who gave what to these groups, that doesn’t mean we can’t make some educated guesses. For example, that May, 2019, gathering where Ginni touted Crowdsourcers as a new group dedicated to fighting culture war battles wasn’t just some random group. It was a CNP strategy meeting. One we’ve read about before. Recall how this May 2019 CNP gather was referenced in Anne Nelson’s piece describing how the CNP stoked the January 6 Capitol insurrection. And as the article noted, it was at that meeting where Ginni and fellow CNP-member Cleta Mitchell laid out their 2020 election strategy. So the CNP meeting where Ginni Thomas was touting Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty as a new group worth of the CNP’s support was the same May 2019 meeting where Ginni and Cleta paid the groundwork of the CNP’s 2020 election strategies. Strategies that we now know included fomenting widespread claims of voter fraud and all of the various post-election attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. And note how the Crowdsourcers “partners” cited by Ginni at this meeting included Mitchell, as well as James O’Keefe and Richard Viguerie. Recall how Richard Viguerie isn’t just a CNP member. He’s one of its co-founders. And, again, don’t forget that the CRC leadership includes CNP members Edwin Meese III and Scott Water. So key CNP members Ginni Thomas and Cleta Mitchell pitched the Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty group to the broader CNP membership at a May 2019 gathering where the CNP was developing its 2020 election strategy, and CNP co-found Richard Viguerie was on already on board. And the group playing the “fiscal sponsorship” role that helped shield the identities of Crowdsourcers donors was the CRC, itself led by CNP members Meese and Walter. It gives us a big clue as to who was ultimately making these anonymous donations to the group and what the ultimate intent was:
It’s hard to think of a more connected political ‘elite’ in DC today than Ginni Thomas. The CNP is as elite a power network as you’re going to find in DC. It’s part of what makes the persecution complex at the root of the whole ‘culture warriors’ narrative such a cynical strategy. A cynical strategy that was at the core of the GOP’s plans for winning the 2020 election. Plans to wage a culture war focused on the idea that white Christian conservatives are being systematically persecuted by a cultural Marxist ‘woke’ elites in league with the Deep State. In other words, there’s no contradiction between Crowdsourcers having an ostensible focus on culture wars and the CNP’s goal of getting Trump reelected through any means necessary. The GOP’s contemporary ‘culture war’ isn’t just an updated version of the political cudgel of the past. Today’s ‘culture war’ is a cover story too. A cover story that fueled the Jan 6 insurrection and continues to fuel the GOP’s ongoing curtailing of democracy at seemingly every opportunity. An ongoing cover story.
So as we watch the coverup of Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty proceed under veils of darkmoney secrecy, it’s going to be worth keeping in mind that we’re looking at a coverup surrounding a group dedicated to developing the cover story for the overturning the 2020 election and future elections to come. They’re crafting a ‘culture war’ designed to win back power and keep it for good. Not save democracy.
That didn’t take long: Fresh on the heels of the report about the conflict-of-interest questions swirling around the $600k in anonymous donations to Ginni Thomas’s Crowdsourcers of Culture and Liberty and the extra layers of dark money secrecy around the donations and the activities of the group, there’s a new ProPublica report on another set of Thomas family-related conflicts of interest. This time it’s conflicts of interest centered around Clarence Thomas, although there are some questions about Ginni too. It’s a family affair.
At the forefront of this story is a kind of flip-side version of conflict-of-interest questions: can a friend can be too generous? Because, boy, is Harlan Crow a generous guy. At least he was to his apparently very good friend Clarence Thomas, who has enjoy annual luxury week long vacations at Crow’s invitation for over two decades. Luxury vacations we are only now just learning about thanks to a complete lack of any code of ethics for the Supreme Court and virtually no reporting requirements. And also thanks to Justice Thomas’s decision not to disclose the trips.
But these annual trips, estimated at being worth over $500k each, aren’t the extent of Crow’s generosity to the Thomases. Crow — a conservative mega-donor who has long focused on pushing the courts to the right — has been lavishing the Thomases with gifts ever since he first met them three decades ago. Notable, this first meeting was after Thomas ascended to the Supreme Court. The gifts include a $19k Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass — which Thomas did choose to disclose — and a portrait of Clarence and Ginni. There was even a $105k gift to Yale Law School, Thomas’ alma mater, for the “Justice Thomas Portrait Fund”. Crow likes portraits it seems.
Tellingly, the featured portrait in great hall of the Crow’s private lakeside resort, Camp Topridge, depicts Crow and Thomas smoking cigars outside, surrounded by a circle of conservative figures including Leonard Leo, the person who has arguably had more influence over the shape of the Supreme Court than anyone ever. Again, the featured portrait depicts Crow, Thomas, and Leonard Leo smoking cigars. It’s like a shrine to judicial corruption in the great hall of his private compound. A very trollish shrine.
But Crow’s generosity to the Thomases isn’t limited to annual trips and lavish gifts. As we saw, when Ginni Thomas first set up her Liberty Central nonprofit in 2010, it received an anonymous $500k donation that ultimately raised so many conflict of interest questions of Ginni that she stepped away from the group and started the for-profit Liberty Consulting, which has fewer reporting requirements. That $500k back in 2010 came from Harlan Crow.
Alarmingly, following this ProPublica report, old reports about Crow’s collection of unusual historical pieces. Pieces like a signed copy of Mein Kampf, one of Hitler’s paintings, and other Nazi memorabilia. It sounds like there’s a whole room filled with Nazi historical pieces. Plus a garden full of statues of the 20th century’s worst despots. As Crow describes it, he has the mementos because he hates communism and fascism.
Now, in fairness, he owns a much larger collection of historic pieces. He’s not exclusively a collector of authoritarianism. But as we’re also going to see, it sounds like Crow has a history of creeping out visitors to his home with the prominence given to the Nazi stuff on display. Collectors can end up owning Nazi memorabilia for a variety of reasons, but having a room that creeps out visitors with your Nazi stuff is a bit of a red flag.
So that’s the update on the ongoing saga of the Thomas family’s adventures in judicial ethics: Clarence and Ginni have an extremely generous family friend with an extremely provocative collection. Is it a problem that this extremely generous friend has spent decades trying to reshape the courts while lavishing the Thomases to gifts and trips? Ginni and Clarence clearly don’t see the problem. And aren’t required to report one whether they see it or not, which is part of the obvious problem:
“If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.”
Yes, it sure was ‘fortunate’ for Justice Thomas how he didn’t have to pay over $500k for the chartered plane and trip on a 162-foot yacht owned by a conservative mega donor who has long pushed to make US courts further to the right. Even more fortunate that Thomas has apparently taken these trips every year for over two decades. So very fortunate. The only unfortunate part of this whole story is the fact that these secret luxury trips were finally revealed. At least unfortunate for Justice Thomas. There’s plenty in this story that’s obviously very unfortunate for the public. At least the members of the public who don’t share the priorities of this right-wing billionaire heir to a real estate fortune:
But these annual luxury trips aren’t the only eyebrow-raising ‘gifts’ from Harlow Crow to his ‘old friend’ Clarence Thomas. Flight records indicate Thomas has used Crow’s private jets to make trips as short as a few hours to Crow’s Dallas properties. Private jet trips that would have cost $70k if Thomas was paying:
As bad as this picture looks, it gets trollishly worse when we see the painting featured in the great hall of Camp Topridge: a painting depicting Crow and Thomas smoking cigar alongside a circle of conservative political operatives including Leonard Leo, the figure who has probably done more to move the federal courts to the far right than anyone else on the planet. As Crow puts it, “These are gatherings of friends.” The most influential friends one can find at shaping the courts alongside Justice Thomas. This is trolling:
Adding to the trollish nature of the situation is the fact Crow didn’t actually meet Thomas until after Thomas was a Supreme Court justice. And it was shortly after that meeting that Crow started showing the Thomases with gifts. Including half a million dollars to Ginni Thomas’s Tea Party group that paid her a $120k salary. Recall how we saw this group, Liberty Central, come up in the recent story about Ginni Thomas’s own conflicts of interest via her ‘charity’ Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty and her for-profit consulting firm Liberty Consulting. Ginni first set up Liberty Central in 2010 as a “nonpartisan” group, but quickly abandoned it in 2011 after Crow’s large donation raised questions about potential conflicts of interesting. It was then that Ginni set up Liberty Consulting as a for-profit entity. A for-profit entity that is now potentially involved with Ginni’s current conflict-of-interest questions. We don’t know very much about the Thomases relationship with Crow. But virtually everything of the little that we do know just screams of a relationship that only exists because of Thomas’s proximity to power. Or to put it another way, what are the odds that Clarence Thomas would have made these luxury trips every year for over two decades if he wasn’t a Supreme Court justice but remained an appeals court judge:
It’s also noteworthy that we’re seeing close Thomas-family friend Mark Paoletta attending these same retreats during the period when Paoletta was the general counsel of the OMB. Recall how Paoletta is one of the figures involved with the ongoing Schedule F scheming. But when it came to that trip while serving at the OMB, Paoletta reimbursed the costs. Because not doing so would obviously violate ethics rules. Rules that exist for every branch of the federal judiciary except the Supreme Court:
But also note how, despite there not being an explicit code of ethics overseeing Supreme Court justices, Thomas still violated long-standing norms. In other words, even if he technically could do what he did, no one actually expected him to be this sleazy. Now we know better. Not that knowing about it seems to matter:
Finally, keep in mind this one last aspect of the situation described in this investigation: while these luxury trips were a secret to the public at large for the last two decades, they weren’t entirely a secret. That’s evidenced by the fact that the investigation was based in part on interviews with dozens employees providing these luxury services, from Crow’s superyacht staff and tour guides to an Indonesian scuba diving instructor. People knew about this. Not many, but some. Which raises the obvious question as to who else knew this whole time? More specifically, who else knew who was also trying to influence the court. It’s a reminder that this isn’t just a story about the secret corrupt relationship between the Thomases and Harlan Crow. It’s also about the potential for blackmail created by this secret relationship. Crow wasn’t necessarily the only person who gained leverage over Justice Thomas as a result of this highly generous ‘friendship’:
Who knows what all happens on these luxury vacations and what could make for good blackmail material. But at a minimum, it’s not a a great look. Especially after the 2014 reports in the Dallas Morning News about the room of Nazi mememtos on display in Crow’s Dallas home and the garden of 20th century dictators in the backyard. In the hands of a history buff it would be an interesting collection of pieces. But in the hands of an oligarch who has been bankrolling the US’s decades-long lurch to the far right, it’s the kind of collection that feels less like the collection of a history buff and more the collection of fascism buff. Again, it’s, at a minimum, not a great look. For Crow or the Thomases:
“In 2014, when Crow’s house was included in a public tour of historic homes, a reporter from the Dallas Morning News visited. Apparently, Crow was visibly uncomfortable with questions about his dictator statues and Hitler memorabilia, preferring to discuss his other historical collections: documents signed by the likes of Christopher Columbus and George Washington; paintings by Renoir and Monet; statues of two of Crow’s heroes, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.”
It was kind of an accidental public peak into the private collection of one of Dallas’s oligarchs. In 2014, the Crow’s home was included in a public tour of historic homes, prompting a Dallas Morning News reporter to show up and get a tour. But as the anonymous attendees of events as the home describe, this was a collection guests at the home were regularly exposed to, including a painting by Hitler next to a painting by Norman Rockwell next to a painting by George W. Bush. It is a genuinely fascinating collection of works. But darkly fascinating for darkmoney oligarch:
We haven’t heard about Crow gifting any Nazi memorebilia to the Thomases, we can be pretty confident they toured that home and seen the collection. Many, many times. After flying there on Crow’s private jet. Without any public disclosure.
But don’t call it a conflict of interest. It’s just a man lavishing his powerful friend with gifts and asking nothing in return. A really generous man. The kind of man you want to befriend. Which just might happen. Right after Leonard Leo selects you to ascend to the Supreme Court.
It’s good to be Harlan Crow’s friend. That’s become abundantly clear following the recent Pro Publica report on the lavish gifts and vacations Crow has been showering Clarence and Ginni Thomas for decades. Largely undisclosed lavish vacations and gifts. Harlan Crow’s generosity knows no bound when it comes to his friends.
Nor does it hurt to be his friends’ moms, apparently. That’s one of the many fun facts we learned in the latest Pro Publica report on Harlan Crow’s remarkable friendship with the Thomases. A friendship that extends beyond Ginni and Clarence and includes Clarence’s mom and also includes a landlord role. A very generous landlord, of course. Yes, it turns out Harlan Crow purchased Clarence Thomas’s childhood home in 2014, with the provision that she be allowed to live in it rent free for the rest of her life. So at this point, Harlan Crow really is Clarence Thomas’s mom’s landlord.
And that landlord generosity goes beyond the free rent and includes the extensive upgrades he immediately invested in the property after making the purchase. Investments that are presumably in part in anticipation for Crows declared future plans for the home: making it into a public museum dedicated to Clarence Thomas and his legacy.
All of that alone would make this the kind of story that raises all sorts of obvious conflict of interest questions for Justice Thomas. But it’s of course worse. Because just like the lavish vacations, none of this was disclosed on Thomas’s federal disclosure forms.
As we’re going to see in the CNN piece below, an anonymous source close to Thomas gives two explanations — both somewhat mutually exclusive — for the lack disclosure: first, an aide normally helps him with these disclosures and the source suggests the aide somehow messed up. But then this same source also asserts that Thomas didn’t think he needed to disclose the purchase because he lost money on the deal. Now, according to various ethics experts, the requirements for the disclosure of transactions isn’t dependent on whether or not they are profitable. But that’s the excuse Thomas is apparently going with according to this source.
So how it is it that Thomas net lost money? Well, we are told he and Ginni spent $50–70k on capital investments on the home before the sale to Crow for $133k. A sale that netted Thomas $44k in net proceeds. So with $44k in net proceeds following $50–70k in investments, it was a loss and therefore not required for disclosure. That appears to be the logic Thomas went with. And, who knows, while the net-loss calculations may be accurate, it raises the question of why sell to Crow at a net loss. But we have our answer: free rent for mom for life and then after she dies the place gets turned into a Clarence Thomas museum. It’s a pretty huge payment. But not part of that $133k sale. In other words, the ‘net-loss’ disclosure loophole Thomas relied on to avoid disclosing the sale to Crow itself relied on another kind of loophole: not disclosing the value of the sale came in the form of free rent for mom for life followed by turning the place into a Clarence Thomas museum. It’s not clear how to put a market value on that.
Oh, according to the anonymous source in the CNN piece, while Thomas’s mom gets to live rent free for life as part of the 2014 deal, she still has to pay property taxes and insurance. But Crow quickly assumed the property taxes, which Ginni and Clarence had previously been paying.
All in all it’s not a great look. Which is presumably the real reason Thomas didn’t disclose it in the first place:
“The purchase put Crow in an unusual position: He now owned the house where the justice’s elderly mother was living. Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements on the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The renovations included a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints.”
Yeah, that is indeed an unusual position to purchase the home of a Supreme Court justice’s elderly mother and continue having her live their. Even more awkward when you’ve already been caught lavishing this same Supreme Court justice and his wife with annual luxury trips. But it’s the fact that Thomas never disclose the 2014 sale of three family homes to Crow that puts Crow in an especially awkward position. All the more awkward now that we’re learning Clarence Thomas didn’t ever disclose this sale despite the fact that he previously used to list the property. It’s the kind of awkward situation that has ethnics experts asking whether or not Crow has been effectively subsidizing the Thomases’ lifestyle. In secret:
Adding to the awkward nature of the situation is the fact that Crow reportedly purchased two other lots on the same block for far less than the $133k paid for the Thomas family properties. And while Crow seems to be relying on the explanation of plans to turn the into a Thomas-family museum, it’s hard to see how promising to open a museum dedicated to Thomas doesn’t still constitute a major contribution to a Supreme Court justice:
Also note how Thomas’s own signature on 2014 sale was notarized by an administrator at the Supreme Court. And that same year, his financial disclosure was so detailed it included a “stained glass medallion” from Yale. Somehow the sale of the three family properties to Crow, which was notarized by a Supreme Court administrator, got left off the disclosure that year. Somehow:
And then there’s this bizarre side-note: as part of Crow’s explanation for purchasing the house immediately next door to the Thomas family home and tearing it down, Crow explained how his company built a new house on the block “and made it available to a local police officer.” What exactly does he mean by making the home “available” to a local police officer? Is there a cop living for free next to Thomas’s mom? It’s a strange situation:
But as we can see, it’s not just that 2014 purchase of those three Thomas family properties that is raising conflict of interest questions. Crow has been paying the roughly $1,500 in property taxes, which had previously been covered by Clarence and Ginni, at the same time Crow began a series to major renovations on the home. And Thomas’s mom remained living there the whole time. So is she at least paying rent? Crow wouldn’t say when directly pressed:
And as we’re going to see in the following CNN piece, there’s a pretty obvious reason Crow probably didn’t want to disclose the rent paid by Thomas’ mother: she’s been living there rent free ever since the 2014 purchase. And yet, according to one source, while that 2014 agreement allows her to live there rent free for the rest of her life, it still included the provision that she is responsible for paying the property taxes and insurance. And yet, as we just saw, Crow has been paying the $1,500 in annual property taxes — which had previously been paid by Clarence and Ginni — since shortly after the 2014 purchase. More awkwardness. Likely illegal awkwardness centered around their billionaire’s relationship with a Supreme Court justice:
“The source said Thomas has always filled out his forms with the help of aides, and that it was an oversight not to report the real estate transaction. Thomas believed he didn’t have to disclose because he lost money on the deal, according to the source.”
Blame the aide. That’s part of the message from this anonymous source close to the Thomases. But then there’s the other half of that denial: the claim that Thomas didn’t disclose the 2014 deal because he somehow lost money on the deal. It’s a highly suspect explanation for a number of reasons. For starters, whether or not it was a loss is beside the point. It was a transaction Thomas was obligated to report according to the law.
But then there’s the claim they net lost money on the sale, with Clarence and Ginni spending $50k to $70k on capital improvements, more than the $44k in net proceeds they apparently got from the $133k sale. If that’s true, what does that tell us about the nature of this transaction? Was Crow given a deal on the property in exchange for letting Thomas’s mom live there rent free for the rest of her life and then turning the home into a museum celebrating Thomas? It’s an arrangement that perhaps made business at the time of sale but it would have also obviously created an ongoing arrangement between the Thomases and Crow going forward, year after year. And, importantly, it would be an ongoing arrangement that would justify the relatively cheap sale price that ended up resulting in the net loss Thomas thought would shield him from disclosure obligations. How awkwardly convenient.
In other words, that 2014 sale to Crow wasn’t a single simple transaction but, rather, the deepening of an ongoing relationship. A relationship that already included lavish annual vacations around the globe. It’s the kind of relationship that just might lead to Thomas ‘accidentally’ forgetting to disclose the sale — which he now blames on the aide — while also ‘accidentally’ confusing the law and concluding that he didn’t have to disclose the sale because he lost money. Lost money on the sale of the house that came with the provision that his mom could live there free for the rest of her life:
But it’s not just that the 2014 deal granted Thomas’s mom the right to live their for the rest of her life rent free, according to this anonymous source. That agreement came with the obligation that she still pay the property taxes of insurance. And yet, as we saw in the ProPublica report above, Crow started paying the property taxes shortly after the sale the Clarence and Ginni had previously been covering. We don’t know who’s paying for the insurance at this but it’s hard to imagine it’s not a similar arrangement. It’s a reminder that we aren’t just looking at an ethically questionable 2014 deal. We’re also looking at the even more ethically questionable implementation of that deal:
So we have a picture emerging of Crow being sold a home for a bargain price that had already $50–70k in capital improvements put into it, causing Thomas to claim he net-lost money on the sale and therefore didn’t have to disclose the deal. But that bargain price came with the notable strings attached of allowing Thomas’s mom to live their rent free for the rest of her life. Despite that, Crow insists he made the purchases at the “market rate based on many factors including the size, quality, and livability of the dwellings.” It sure would be interesting to get more clarity on those many factors that went into that $133k price:
And it’s not like any of this is really new. Including the “inadvertent omission” part. Clarence Thomas has been flouting disclosure rules for years. Flouting and occasionally getting caught:
It’s a pattern of non-disclosure going back almost as far as Thomas’s relationship with Crow. Arguably illegal non-disclosure according to experts. But we’ll probably never really get this cleared out because Thomas is a Supreme Court justice operating outside any apparent ethical guidelines. We just have to trust Clarence. He’s a Supreme Court Justice, after all. That’s part of what makes this such a fascinating story: the only thing dissuading these kinds of backroom deals with a billionaire like Crow is public exposure. It’s not like Thomas is going to face any actual professional repercussions beyond the embarrassment of these questions. Because as Clarence Thomas keeps demonstrating, the Supreme Court is an ironically placed legal gray zone. A place where it’s not the crime, or the coverup. It’s just a relationship with a really generous friends and that’s all we need to know until the next embarrassing belated disclosure.
Why has Clarence Thomas been so consistently inaccurate in his federal disclosures for the past two decades? Is it just bad advice? Incompetence? Or some sort of active corruption? These aren’t the kinds of painful questions we have to ask. Painful because it doesn’t really seem to matter what the answer is since there’s seemingly no means for meaningfully addressing the situation. Justice Thomas can flout disclosure laws all he wants and there’s no real recourse other than to point it out and hopefully shame him into amending his disclosure.
And that brings us to the latest ‘oopsy’ story involving Justice Thomas’s annual federal disclosures. As we’ve seen, a number of questions have already been raised about the lavish all-expenses-paid trips the Thomases have taken for years thanks to conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow. And then there was the revelations that Crow’s relationship with the Thomas’s was even closer to previously known after we learned that Crow purchased Thomas’s mother’s home in an 2014 real estate transaction. A rather odd 2014 transaction that saw Thomas sell Crow his family home for $133k, which was apparently a net-loss for the Thomases, but with a provision that his mother can live there rent free for the rest of her life. That ‘net-loss’ sale price was, in turn, used by Thomas as an excuse to not disclose the deal since he apparently thought, incorrectly, that only profitable transactions needed to be reported.
So what’s the latest disclosure debacle? It’s another real estate-related situation, in part: for whatever strange reason, Clarence Thomas has been listing a family real estate management company on his annual disclosure forms that’s been defunct since 2006 and replaced with a different firm. Yes, Ginger, Ltd., Partnership, a firm founded in 1982 by Ginni’s family, went defunct in 2006 ant the same time Ginger Holdings, LLC was formed. And yet, Thomas has been listing Ginger, Ltd., Partnership on his disclosure forms every year since. Thomas has reported receiving between $270k-$750k in income from the real estate over that 2006–2021 period
But using the wrong name is just part of where this gets weird. It also turns out that Ginni Thomas’s name doesn’t show up at all on the documents for Ginger Holdings, LLC, despite this being her family’s real estate company.
But there’s another anomaly in Thomas’s disclosures involving Ginni: from 2003–2009, Thomas didn’t list any income at all for Ginni. This, despite the fact that she earned $686k from the Heritage Foundation from 2003 to 2007 and worked for Hillsdale College from 2008–2009. Thomas only corrected the error in 2011, citing a misunderstanding of the filing instructions, after the group Common Cause flagged the issue, despite Thomas correctly listing her employment in previous years. It’s worth recalling at this point how Ginni founded the non-profit Liberty Central in 2010 to shape the nascent Tea Party movement with a $500k anonymous donation, prompting conflict of interest questions. Ginni stepped away from Liberty Central in November of 2010 and founded the for-profit Liberty Consulting.
Would Thomas have voluntarily reported Ginni’s Liberty Consulting income had Common Cause not raised the issue in 2011? We have no idea. Well, we sort of have an idea. Because the disclosure issues continued. For starters, there was the 2014 sale of his mother’s home to to Harlan Crow that Thomas didn’t disclose citing that ‘no net-profit’ loophole that doesn’t exist. Beyond that, Thomas continued to claim ownership of the home in 2015.
And then in 2018, the nonprofit Fix the Court flagged Thomas for not reporting reimbursement for transportation, meals, and lodging while teaching at the universities of Kansas and Georgia that year. Thomas ended up amending that year’s disclosure along with his 2017 disclosure which also left out similar reimbursements.
So, at best, Clarence Thomas doesn’t seem capable of correctly interpreting federal disclosure guidelines. That’s the best explanation. What are the less-than-best explanations? Those are just some of the troubling questions we have to ask. And will presumably still have to ask after the next story about Justice Thomas’s improper disclosures:
“The previously unreported misstatement might be dismissed as a paperwork error. But it is among a series of errors and omissions that Thomas has made on required annual financial disclosure forms over the past several decades, a review of those records shows. Together, they have raised questions about how seriously Thomas views his responsibility to accurately report details about his finances to the public.”
The ‘innocent paperwork error’ strikes again! Every year for nearly two decades. This time, the ‘innocent mistake’ involves Thomas’s repeated listing of a defunct real estate company — Ginger, Ltd., Partnership, formed in 1982 by Ginni’s family — that was dissolved in 2006 and replaced with Ginger Holdings, LLC. For some reason, Clarence has been reporting Ginger, Ltd., Partnership on his financial disclosure forms every year since 2006:
Now, on one level, this seems like a potentially innocent and irrelevant mistake. As long as Thomas was correctly reporting the income from the real estate firm, of course. And that brings us to the scale of the disclosed real estate income here. We’re told that Thomas reported receiving between $270k to $750k from the real estate firm since 2006, so that 270–750k range is for 15 years (presumably ending in 2021) which would translate to $18k to $50k average annual income range. We’re also told that in his most recent disclosure, for 2021, Thomas reported receiving an income between $50–100k. So it looks like his income from the rental properties has been above average in recent years:
Another wrinkle in this story is how Ginni Thomas’s name doesn’t show up at all in the incorporation records for Ginger Holdings, LLC, the firm that replaced Ginger Limited Partnership in 2006. And that omission of her name overlaps with a period of 2003–2007 when she earned more than $686k from the Heritage Foundation and yet Clarence Thomas checked a box labeled “none” for her income and did the same in 2008 and 2009 while she was earning an income at Hillsdale College (which has now become the GOP’s template college for the party’s ‘anti-woke’ crusade). So we have to ask: did Ginni receive any income from these real estate firms during this period? If so, was it even reported?
It was only in 2011 after Common Cause raised these disclosure issues that Thomas revised the previous years to include Ginni’s employment details. This is a good time to recall how Ginni founded the non-profit Liberty Central in 2010 to shape the nascent Tea Party movement with a $500k anonymous donation, prompting conflict of interest questions. Ginni stepped away from Liberty Central in November of 2010 and founded the for-profit Liberty Consulting. So when we see these employment details for Ginni mysteriously left out Clarence’s annual disclosures in the years leading up to 2011, keep in mind there are some other unsolved mysteries regarding her actual income during this period:
And then there’s the truly bizarre disclosure issue that pops up in relation to the highly irregular 2014 sale of his mother’s home to conservative mega-donor Harlan Crow in a deal that allows Thomas’s mother to live there rent-free for the rest of her life. It appears that Thomas not only failed to report the sale of the home but continued to report ownership of that property as late as 2015. In addition, he was apparently incorrectly reporting the location of the properties since 2010. Thomas sure has a hard time with real estate-related disclosures!
And then we get the additional disclosure violations from 2017 and 2018 where he left off various teaching reimbursements. It’s like he’s views every year’s disclosure as an opportunity to innovate new ways to do it wrong:
So has Thomas just been increasingly careless with his federal disclosures for the last two decades? Or has he been actively trying to hide something? We don’t know, but there’s not denying the pattern. The kind of pattern that judicial ethics expert Stephen Gillers calling for an investigation. An investigation that, importantly, should take place among all three branches of government. In other words, this can’t be another instance of the Supreme Court policing itself, which obviously hasn’t worked so far:
But, of course, there’s likely going to be no such investigation. At least there’s no reason to expect one any time soon. Things will have to get worse for that to happen. How much worse? Who knows. But at the rates these stories are accruing, we won’t have to wait long for things to get worse. In fact, they already got worse. Probably not worse enough to prompt real investigations. But still worse:
“The justices maintain their own lists of names and companies that get checked for conflicts as new cases come in. They typically don’t read all of the initial briefs if they reject a case based on a summary drafted by a law clerk, a system used by most of the justices. Although there were multiple parties in the 2004 case, the corporate entity listed first didn’t have “Trammell Crow” in its name.”
Yes, the justices get to maintain their own lists of names and companies that get checked for conflicts of interest. What could possibly go wrong?
Now, in the case of Harlan Crow’s direct financial interests in Trammell Crow Residential, we have no idea if Justice Thomas was being sincere in his failure to identify the obvious conflict of interest here. But that’s kind of the larger story here: the stench of corruption is so strong at this point it’s hard to confer the benefit of doubt. What looks like a potentially innocent mistake when considered alone looks a lot less innocent in the larger context of one disclosure ‘oopsy’ after another. Especially when this ‘oopsy’ was to the potential benefit of someone like Crow who has their own secret history of showering Thomas with lavish trips and mysterious real estate transactions. As judicial ethics expert Stephen Gillers puts it, Thomas should have been “hypervigilant to the prospect of a Crow interest showing up on the Court’s docket.” Instead, he’s apparently been hypervigilant about hiding his relationship with Crow. The benefit of the doubt dissipated a few ‘oopsies’ ago:
It sure would be interesting to see Thomas’s personally maintained list of conflicts of interest. We can be pretty confident Ginger Holdings, LLC never made it onto the list, but how about Ginger, Ltd., Partnership?
You also have to wonder if Ginni’s employment at Heritage and Hillsdale would have been seen as a reason for recusal from any cases involving those two entities. Just put “Heritage Foundation v.” or “Hillsdale College v.” into a search engine and see all the legal cases they’ve waged. Was Justice Thomas perhaps avoiding any such potential recusal situations involving those two important conservative entities by leaving Ginni’s names off those forms? Again, we don’t know and we’ll presumably never know. And to a large extent the particulars of Clarence Thomas’s chronic disclosure violations are beside the point. The blatant corruption of the high court isn’t the primary issue here. It’s the fact that there’s seemingly nothing that’s going to be done about the blatant corruption that’s the big issue here. That said, the blatant corruption is certainly an important secondary issue. And not at all just a Justice Thomas issue.
Ali Alexander’s political career is either over or unstoppable. We don’t know which yet, but we’re probably going to find out in coming months now that a salacious gay child grooming scandal that has been swirling around in right-wing circles for years has finally bubbled up into mainstream. It’s so out in the open that Marjorie Taylor Greene was calling for the FBI to investigate both Ali Alexander and Nick Fuentes. Yes, this child grooming scandal is really both an Ali Alexander and Nick Fuentes scandal, with Council for National Policy (CNP) member Alexander doing the grooming and Fuentes doing the covering up. Grooming that goes back at least as far back as 2017 and involved a kind of quid pro quo transactional nature, where underage aspiring conservative boys would be offered access to Alexander’s personal network in exchange for sexual favors that appear to range from sending sexually explicit pictures to serving as ‘arm candy’ at conservative events.
Not Ali Alexander’s arm candy. Milo Yiannopoulos’s arm candy. Keep in mind that this would have been well before Yiannopoulos’s March 2021 ‘conversion’ to being a straight Catholic who supports ‘conversion therapy’. Recall how Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, and Voris held a Church Militant rally in Baltimore in November 2021 accusing the Catholic Church leadership of covering up systemic child sex abuse. The same brand or radical Catholicism that Nick Fuentes claims to subscribe. Also note that Alexander, himself a recent Catholic convert, did an interview with Church Militant on Jan 10, 2021, four days after Jan 6, to discuss his role in the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement. Alexander, Yiannopoulos, and Fuentes are all recent converts to the same brand of far right Catholicism. And that brings us to one of the more remarkable aspects of this story: Milo Yiannopoulos is the primary source. This story is an intra-radical Catholic ‘groomer’ fight that has spilled into the mainstream. As we’re going to see, Yiannopoulos was texting Fuentes warning Alexander was using Fuentes’s events to groom teenage boys and at this point he’s publicly denouncing both.
There’s another direct ties to Nick Fuentes’s “America First” organization in this story: both of the young men who have come forward describing this grooming behavior are part of Fuentes’s America First movement. First, the then-15-year old who was groomed by Alexander starting in 2017 is Aidan Duncan, aka “Smiley”, who went on to become a relatively high profile member of Nick Fuentes. A grooming period that went into 2019 and included Alexander inviting Duncan to Texas for a one week “internship”. Duncan’s status within the American First movement is presumably in question at this point given that Duncan now claims that Fuentes was “100 percent aware” of Alexander’s grooming at his events.
Claims that are backed up by the other young conservative who has also come forward describing Alexander’s grooming behavior: then-17-year-old TikTok star Lance Johnston describes being approached by Alexander in what seemed like initially innocent political-oriented conversation but quickly turned to requests for sexually explicit pics. And here’s where we get to one of the details in this story that suggests there’s a much bigger story here. When Johnston was first approached by Alexander, a friend warned him that Alexander had a history of requesting sexually explicit pics. It was shortly after that warning that Alexander sent Johnston the first of the ‘eggplant emoji’ requests. Johnston also now claims that Fuentes personally asked him to not speak about the whole thing, even making vague job offers if Johnston complied. As Johnston put it, “Basically they wanted me to lie, apologize to Ali, and then they said they would try to get me a job.”
Oh, and there’s one more source for these allegations: Ali Alexander himself, who basically hasn’t really denied any of this but instead explains that he is a bisexual who struggles with same sex attraction. Alexander also defends his interactions with Johnston by insisting that, “You can have any conversation you want with someone who’s 17.”
Fuentes has disavowed Alexander’s behavior, calling it gross. But he also alleges that Duncan and Johnston were both flirting with Alexander to further their political careers. And that’s all why we’re about to find out if Ali Alexander has real political Teflon or is about to enter the political wilderness. So far he’s still wearing Teflon, despite MTG’s calls for an FBI investigation. This is a good time to recall the networking around planning the ‘wild’ Jan 6 rally that Ali Alexander was doing with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Andy Biggs, and Louie Gohmert and the allegations the members of congress were peddling blanket pardon offers on behalf of the White House.
And that networking with that far right caucus of GOP members of congress was just one element of Alexander’s key role in the organizing that went into Jan 6. Organizing and planning that appears to include last minute planning for the violence that unfolded. As we’ve seen, it was Alexander’s planned “Stop the Steal” rally outside the Capitol that actually devolved into the insurrectionary mob. Amy Kremer of “Women for America First” was reportedly working closely with the Trump White House in the lead up to Jan 6 planning the Ellipse rally, and had become concerned about possible violence coming from the second ‘Wild’ rally being planned by Alexander. Kremer claims she expressed these concerns to the Trump White House and got Alexander to agree that the Ellipse really would be the only major rally that day. And yet Kremer became concerned when she learned that Alexander was going ahead with plans a second rally after their agreement. Kremer apparently became aware on December 31 of the possible violence emanating from Alexander’s Jan 6 rally. As we also saw, Both Ali Alexander and Kylie Kremer, Amy Kremer’s daughter, knew Trump was going to make the last minute call to march to the Capitol at the Jan 6 crowd at the end of his speech at the ellipse, with one Jan 5 Alexander text saying “Trump is supposed to order us to the capitol at the end of his speech but we will see.”
Further hints of Alexander’s fingerprints on the violence that unfolded are seen with the Jan 6 actions of Caroline Wren — the former deputy to Don Jr.‘s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle — who had been raising money for the rally at the Ellipse specifically from Publix heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli. Fancelli’s financing was reportedly facilitated by Alex Jones. And in the week leading up to the rally, there were a number of changes in the plans. Changes pushed by Wren. We later learned Wren and Guilfoyle unsuccessfully pushed for last minute changes to the schedule of speakers at the Ellipse rally in order to get figures like Roger Stone, Alex Jones and Ali Alexander added to the speakers list. When Jones and Alexander left the rally early (to begin the march to the “Wild Protest”), it was Wren who escorted them away as they prepared to lead the march on the Capitol.
And when Ali Alexander’s text messages from Jan 5–6th were released, the very first of the released text messages, from midnight on Jan 5, was from Nick Fuentes. This whole scandal around Alexander and Fuentes points directly towards January 6th and their leadership roles played in the lead up to January 6. Especially the fact that neither has faced any legal repercussions. Remember what Nick Fuentes said back in February when asked about the lack of federal prosecution and the charges of ‘fed asset’ that followed: “Trump may be charged, Don Jr. may be charged, Alex Jones, Ali [Alexander] may be charged, I may be charged, but nobody in that category has been seen charged,” he continued. “My suspicion is that they are building a conspiracy case against these types.” That’s a huge part of this scandal and the conservative mixed freakout of simultaneously decrying and ignoring the whole thing. This isn’t just a GOP grooming scandal right when the party has spent months whipping up a national ‘anti-grooming’ hysteria. It’s also a the kind of scandal that can draw attention to a range of other scandals, including the general scandal of how closely Nick Fuentes’s neo-Nazi American First organization is working with Trump World and the CNP. It’s all one big scandalously happy family. And, so far, it’s unclear if this scandal is going to succeed at tearing that big scandalous happy family apart:
“The budding online scandal has also roiled the pro-Trump and white supremacist “America First” movement, just months after it reached new levels of notoriety after its leader, Nick Fuentes, dined with Donald Trump and rapper Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago. Now Fuentes is facing backlash from his own supporters over whether he ignored warnings that Alexander, his friend and ally, was allegedly soliciting nude pictures from young men within Fuentes’s movement.”
How will the overtly neo-Nazi branch of the America First movement respond to the festering gay teen-grooming crisis created by Ali Alexander’s repeated attempts to extort sexual pics and acts from conservative teenage boys? It’s not exactly an ‘on brand’ scandal for MAGA-world. Especially now when hysteria over ‘grooming’ has been turned into a major plank of the GOP’s platform. Well, ok, it’s kind of on brand for Nick Fuentes, who declared sex with women to be ‘gay’ last year because all sexual activity is ‘gay’. Yep. But for the most part, this is a very inconvenient story, as evidenced by Marjorie Taylor Greene’s calls for the FBI to investigate both Ali Alexander and Nick Fuentes. Again, don’t forget that MTG was one of the GOP members of congress peddling blanket pardon offers on behalf of the White House as part of their planning for the ‘wild’ Jan 6 rally that Ali Alexander was organizing. So when MTG tries to put distance between herself and Ali Alexander, her direct proximity to his Jan 6 activities is part of the reason.
But it’s not just MTG. As the article notes, Trump himself tried to get Alexander a speaker’s slot for the Jan 6 rally at the Ellipse. Don’t forget how Caroline Wren — the former deputy to Don Jr.‘s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle — had been raising money for the rally specifically from Publix heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli. Fancelli’s financing was reportedly facilitated by Alex Jones. And in the week leading up to the rally, there were a number of changes in the plans. Changes pushed by Wren. We later learned Wren and Guilfoyle unsuccessfully pushed for last minute changes to the schedule of speakers at the Ellipse rally in order to get figures like Roger Stone, Alex Jones and Ali Alexander added to the speakers list. When Jones and Alexander left the rally early (to begin the march to the “Wild Protest”), it was Wren who escorted them away as they prepared to lead the march on the Capitol. So while Alexander may not have ultimately spoken at the Ellipse, he was in reality playing a much bigger role: getting the march to the Capitol started where the second ‘Wild’ rally was to be held.
But it’s also the fact that Alexander isn’t really denying any of this. Instead, he’s declaring his ‘battle with same sex attraction’ as a kind of explanation:
And we still have no idea how much more content like this Milo Yiannopoulos is planning on releasing. Again, don’t forget that Yiannopoulos declared himself ‘ex-gay’ in March of 2021, seemingly in response to a challenge to renounce his homosexuality from Church Militant’s Michael Voris. Also recall how Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, and Voris held a Church Militant rally in Baltimore in November 2021 accusing the Catholic Church leadership of covering up systemic child sex abuse. It’s a reminder that this whole thing is, in part, a consequence of the popularity of radical Catholicism among Alt Right circles in recent years. Fuentes, Yianoppoulos, and Alexander are all self-declared radical Catholics:
But it’s also the fact that this has apparently been going on for years. Since at least 2017, if Aidan Duncan’s account is accurate. And Milo Yiannopoulos was directly involved. That’s the scenario depicted in the text messages released by Duncan, with Alexander laying down ‘arm candy’ guidelines that describe a quid quo pro arrangement: if Duncan ‘entertains’ Milo and keeps it secret, he’ll be introduced into Ali’s entire political network:
And notice how Alexander’s courtship of Duncan continued into 2019, with Alexander at one point complaining that “You don’t even send me videos anymore,” implying that videos were indeed sent earlier. Interestingly, Duncan, who now goes by “Smiley” and went on to become a relatively high-profile member of Fuentes’s group, has gone on to assert that Fuentes is “100 percent aware” of this kind of behavior on Alexander’s part. It’s part of what makes this scandal so potentially explosive for the “America First” movement and Trump world:
And then we get to these details that hint at many more scandalous revelations to come: there have been rumors about Ali Alexander’s grooming of teenage boys for years. That’s what we learned from the other young conservative who has also come forward to share his grooming experiences: Lance Johnston, then a 17 year old TikTok star when Alexander first messaged him. As Johnston describes it, a friend warned him early on that Alexander has a history of asking for sexually explicit pictures, which is exactly what Alexander proceeded to do with Johnston. How many other people has he attempted to groom? We still have no idea:
And then we get to Johnston’s claims about the direct role Nick Fuentes is playing in helping to cover up Alexander’s behavior. According to Johnston, “Nick personally asked me to apologize to Ali for supposedly faking the messages,” and “Basically they wanted me to lie, apologize to Ali, and then they said they would try to get me a job”. Again, this isn’t just an Ali Alexander scandal. It’s very much a Nick Fuentes scandal too. One that synergizes well with the ‘Nick Fuentes is gay’ rumors he’s been dealing with for years:
Also note how, while Fuentes has “disavowed” Alexander’s actions, he also blamed Duncan and Johnston for “flirting” with Alexander to advance their careers. In other words, Fuentes isn’t really backing down or truly abandoning Alexander. This situation is poised to continue festering:
Will Fuentes continue supporting Alexander now that this story finally broke into the mainstream? Time will tell. But when we see how Alexander’s rise was fueled, in part, with financing from Robert Mercer, it’s a reminder that Ali Alexander’s rise in conservative circles was a sponsored rise with institutional backing in conservatives circles. Nick Fuentes isn’t the only conservative leader who should be answering questions about whether or not they continue to support Ali Alexander’s political activism:
Is Robert Mercer still financing Alexander’s political ‘activism’?
And, of course, we can’t forget the biggest conservative institution that has embraced and elevated Ali Alexander’s rise: the CNP. Ali Alexander was somehow allowed into the CNP according to the leaked membership lists. Is he still a member? Either way, shouldn’t the CNP be asked to issue a statement? Or at least get asked a question about it? We’ll see if that ever happens. And hopefully a few questions about the still unresolved CNP roll in Jan 6 can get asked in the process.
But also keep in mind that Ali Alexander probably has blackmail material are all sorts of people inside the conservative movement by now. Milo isn’t the only one who can play the scandal-at-will game. So while there’s undoubtedly a number of conservative figures who would probably prefer to see Alexander just quietly fade away at this point, there are alternative scenarios. Don’t forget Alexander’s mentor: Roger Stone. Ali Alexander is a rising conservative dirty trick specialist trained by a master. And if anyone knows who the fellow eggplant emoji fans are in the conservative movement, it’s Ali Alexander. He’s got the goods. Probably. Don’t expect him to go down quietly. And that’s what we’re about to find out whether or not Ali Alexander’s rising political career as a conservative dirty tricks operative is coming to an end or established as untouchable. And so far he’s untouchable, MTG’s lonely protest aside.
Once is a story. Twice is a scandal. Three times is a huge scandal. And then after a certain point it’s a depressing reminder of our collective helplessness, we all get desensitized, and it’s no long a story. It’s long how chronic crises play out in America. And it’s what’s going to happen again if the pace of new revelations about ethical lapses at the Supreme Court keep coming at this pace. Every week now, we get at least one new revelation about the kind of ethical conflict of interest that would have other federal employees writing resignation letters. But not Supreme Court justices, who don’t have an actually code of ethics. They’re above that kind of stuff. It’s a situation that’s both outrageous and desensitizing. An out of control status quo that no one can do anything about.
So get ready for the latest desensitizing new round of revelations regarding Clarence Thomas’s remarkable ‘friendship’ with billionaire Harlan Crow. As we’ve seen, it’s a friendship that includes:
* Lavish annual vacations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars
* A 2011 $500k anonymous donation to Ginni Thomas’s Liberty Central Tea Party group
* Crow’s 2014 purchase of Clarence Thomas’s childhood home that came with the provision that his mother would be allowed to live there for the rest of her life. And after her death, the home would be turned into a museum dedicated to celebrated Clarence Thomas’s life and legacy.
It’s that kind of friendship. A friendship that started in 1996, after Thomas was already on the court. As Crow recently told the Dallas Morning News, they met during what he characterized as a chance encounter when Thomas was traveling to an anti-regulations think tank and Crow decided to offer him a lift there on his private jet. That was the beginning of a deep friendship. The kind of deep friendship that involves the seemingly routine transfer of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ‘gifts’ and ‘donations’.
And that brings us to the latest round remarkable ‘gift-giving’ on part of Harland Crow: it turns out Crow paid nearly the entire cost of some very expensive private schooling for Mark Martin, Clarence Thomas’s grandnephew up until his high school graduation in 2010. Clarence and Ginni took custody of Martin in 1998 when he was 6 years old and raised him like a son. It’s not clear when exactly Crow started paying for Martin’s private school, but we do know that Martin spent his junior year at Hidden Lake academy, which at the time, had a tuition of roughly $73,000 a year, plus fees. His freshman, sophomore, and senior years were spent at Randolph-Macon Academy, a private military boarding school that charged between $25–30k per year. So assuming Crow covered all four years that would translate to over $150k in additional ‘gifts’ from 2007–2010.
But we can’t necessarily assume the gift-giving started in 2007. That’s because we’ve also learned that Thomas accepted $5k from someone else in 2002 to help pay for Martin’s education. Interestingly, Thomas disclosed that $5k. And yet, for some reason, he chose not to disclose those much larger donations from Crow. This is a good time to recall how one of the common themes of all of Clarence Thomas’s various ‘ethical oopsies’ stories is a lack of disclosure, including his strange decision to list “none” for Ginni’s income from 2003–2009 despite the substantial income she made from groups like the Heritage Foundation. So during the same period that Thomas was inexplicable leaving Ginni’s income off his federal disclosures, he was the couple was having Martin’s expensive tuition covered by Crow.
As we’ve also seen, there’s also been excuses for the lack of disclosure, which usually comes down to Thomas claiming confusion. In the case of the undisclosed real estate transactions, we got both the explanation that some aides misinformed him about the need to disclose and the explanation that he thought he didn’t need to disclose because he net lost money on the deal (which conveniently ignored the value of his mom living there rent free and Crow then turning it into a museum dedicated to glorifying Thomas’s legacy). So what’s the explanation for the lack of disclosure for the tuition? Well, as ethics experts point out, the only technically legal excuse Thomas could possibly rely on is making the case that donations weren’t to a direct family member like a spouse or child since Martin was technically not their child making them a donation to Martin personally. And sure enough, that’s the explanation Thomas family friend Mark Paoletta gave in response to this report. Again, don’t forget that Thomas disclosed the $5k he got for Martin’s education in 2002. And then, in 2003, his disclosure practices changed suddenly changed. What’s the real story there? We still don’t know. Although at this point it’s pretty obvious Harlan Crow’s exceptional friendly is at least part of what changed.
There’s another interesting detail that emerges from all this: according to Martin, the Thomases did cover his private school at least one year. He recalls this because he also recalls how Clarence sold his prized Corvette to pay for the tuition. Again, keep in mind that he gets a Supreme Court Justice’s salary and his wife is a high paid conservative activist. Why do they need to sell a prized Corvette to cover these costs? It’s the kind of detail that, if true, raises the fascinating possibility that Thomas has some sort of hidden debt problem. We’ve seen no direct sign of money problems. Quite the opposite given how many of their expenses are getting covered by ‘family friends’.
But still, this is a very wealthy couple we’re talking about. What made them so ready and willing to accept so much from a single billionaire? Was it need or greed? It’s the question we are continually forced to asked with each new revelation. Until something is done. Or, more likely, no one cares anymore:
“ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.”
We can just throw that $150k in tuition payments onto the ever-growing pile of ‘friendly gifts’ from Harlan Crow to his good friends the Thomases.
So what’s the timeframe from these tuition gifts? That’s not entirely clear. We’re told about a July 2009 billion from Hidden Lake school that Martin attended for his junior year of high school. He attended Randolph-Macon Academy prior to that junior year, as well as for his senior year, graduating in 2010. So it appears we’re looking at a period starting at some point in the 2000s and ending in 2010:
Interestingly, these massive ‘gifts’ that the Thomases chose to never disclose are juxtaposed against the disclosure of a $5,000 gift they accepted in 2002 from a different friend to help with the cost of Martin’s education. So they were accepting gifts for his education since at least 2002:
It’s an arrangement that is “way outside the norm”, as ethics experts put it. But still an arrangement with a loophole: the Thomases aren’t technically Martin’s parents, just his guardians. As such, federal disclosure laws that mandate the disclosure of gifts to children may not technically apply to a legal dependent who is not a child. Instead, the gifts could be deemed to be given directly to Martin. That’s the best-case defense for this arrangement. And sure enough, we find Thomas family-friend Mark Paoletta defending the Thomases by making that exact claim: they didn’t have to disclose the gifts because Martin was technically only a dependent and not a child:
Another detail that we have yet to fill in is just how many other “at-risk youth” Harlan Crow and his wife have supported like this over the years. Because they are now claiming to have “supported many young Americans” at a “variety of schools, including his alma mater.” And who knows, maybe that’s true. They are billionaires and could certainly afford to support the expensive private educations for many at-risk youth. But it sure would help to get a more exact number of that kind of giving:
Interestingly, it was 1997, the year after Thomas and Crow first met — when Crow just happened to offer Thomas a trip to an anti-regulation think tank on his private jet — when the Thomases first considered taking custody of Martin and gained custody in January of 1998. So given that we are continually learning about new previously unknown instances of Crow’s ‘friendly gifts’ to the Thomases, it’s worth keeping in mind that the Thomases extra Martin-related-expenses began in 1998, two years after the start of their financially intense friendship with Crow:
Finally, we get to this very interesting detail provided by Martin: At one point, the Thomases were paying for his private schooling themselves, which apparently required the sale of a prized Corvette to pay for just one year’s tuition. And while we don’t know the exact year of this sale, we do know he was making a very comfortable Supreme Court Justice’s salary at the time. And that’s not including Ginni’s salary which, when combined, had them making more than $500k in 2006 and more than $850k in 2007. This is a good time to recall how Thomas was inexplicably listing “none” for Ginni’s income on his federal disclosure forms from 2003–2009. So we can add large undisclosed ‘tuition gifts’ from Harlow Crow to the list of income sources during this period:
Again, what kind of debts were the Thomases incurring during this period if the prized Corvette had to be sold to cover the tuition? They were a very wealthy couple objectively speaking and had been so for years. We know they enjoy lavish trips. How about the rest of the time? How lavish a lifestyle were they living? Is this like a secret gambling debt situation or something? We have to ask. Well, we don’t have to ask. We can just not care and forget about it. Stranger things have happened.
It’s got a new name: Project 2025. That’s the new title for the conservative movement’s ongoing Schedule F scheming, with the Heritage Foundation leading the way. That was the message last month from Heritage Foundation President — and CNP member — Kevin Roberts, who announced Project 2025’s goal of assembling a list of up to 20,000 people who will be available to fill positions in 2025 should a Republican win the White House. That unprecedented staffing effort is 5 times the 4,000 positions normally seen as “political appointees”.
And yet, as the following New York Times article notes, then-President Trump’s team estimated that there were up to 50,000 positions that could be rescheduled as “political”, back when his administration was first formulating its Schedule F scheming. So while the Heritage Foundation’s declared 20,000 goal is indeed unprecedented, it’s also less than half of what Trump’s Schedule F schemers previously had in mind.
It also turns out that one of the original schemers, James Bacon, is leading Heritage’s Project 2025 efforts. Recall how the questionnaire Bacon helped develop as part of the Trump administration’s initial Schedule F efforts prioritized a sense of grievance against the federal government over actual qualifications for the position. It’s a reminder that the loyalists who are going to be selected for Project 2025 aren’t just intended to loyally follow Trump’s every desire. They are also selected to wage their own own personal vendettas and just foment general chaos. Disruption of the federal government’s ability to enforce policy is a big part of the agenda here, and not just Trump’s agenda. That’s how the institutional chaos is going to be delegated.
And then we get to this intriguing detail: Oracle is apparently contracted to build Project 2025’s database. Now, on the surface, it might make sense to hire a database company like Oracle to build a database of potential hires. But unless the plan is to create a highly detailed database on every potential voter in the US, it’s hard to imagine why Oracle’s services are actually needed for this project. Why is Oracle involved at all? And that brings us to one of that e underappreciated aspects of the planning that at went into the events that led up to January 6: it turns out Oracle founder and former CEO Larry Ellison isn’t just a major GOP mega-donor and huge Trump supporter. Ellison also participated in a November 14, 2020, conference call with figures like include Sean Hannity, Trump attorney (and CNP member) Jay Sekulow, and attorney (and CNP member) James Bopp, Jr. In addition to being one of the key legal architects of the successful push to overturn Roe v Wade, Bopp is also the lead attorney for True the Vote, one of the main conservative entities pushing mass voter fraud claims.
Recall how True the Vote emerged from the Tea Party movement in 2012 for its attempts to assemble an army of poll watchers for the 2012 election amidst conservative allegations of mass voter fraud. Also recall how both Catherine Engelbrecht and Anita MonCrief of True the Vote were early members of the Groundswell Group founded in 2013 by CNP members Ginni Thomas and Steve Bannon. We also saw how True the Vote’s legal counsel during the 2020 election was none other than key election-denying strategist and CNP member Cleta Mitchell. Finally, note that it was True the Vote that of co-produced Dinesh D’Souza’s notoriously ungrounded “2000 Mules” documentary ostensibly proving massive 2020 election fraud.
What was Larry Ellison doing on that November 14, 2020, conference call? Interestingly, one anonymous source claims Ellison may have been brought in to help vet Sydney Powell’s mass voter fraud claims. If true, it’s not hard to see why Ellison would want that kept a secret. Bizarrely, we are told that even True the Vote’s main financial backer, Fred Eshelman, wasn’t ever able to get an explanation for what Ellison was going on the call. What was Ellison’s reason for being there? We still don’t know. But it sure would be nice to get an answer now that we’re learning that Oracle is playing some sort of database-building role for the ongoing “Project 2025” Schedule F plot:
“Think of it as a right-wing LinkedIn. This so-called Project 2025 — part of a $22 million presidential transition operation at a scale never attempted before in conservative politics — is being led by the Heritage Foundation, a group that has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era.”
Project 2025, the right-wing LinkedIn for the next Republican administration. And while the creation of databases of people in anticipation of an upcoming White House victory is entirely routine, the scale of this initiative is anything but normal. It’s unprecedented, with Heritage president Kevin Roberts declaring a goal of having up to 20,000 administration candidates ready by the end of 2024. It’s 5 times 4,000 positions normally treated as “political appointees”. And yet that’s still less than half of the 50,000 positions Trump reportedly had in mind for firing when he first implemented Schedule F back in October of 2020, which is a reminder that Roberts’s boasting could be masking even larger goals.
And then we get to one of genuine mysteries in this story: Oracle is apparently contracted to construct the database. A database of like 20,000 people, which is absolutely trivial. A Microsoft Excel document could arguably get the job done. It’s the kind of detail that raises a question as to whether or not we’re seeing a reflection of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s GOP mega-donor status:
And regarding the leading role James Bacon is playing in the Project 2025 effort, recall how the questionnaire Bacon helped develop as part of the Trump administration’s initial Schedule F efforts prioritized a sense of grievance against the federal government over actual qualifications for the position. It’s a reminder that the loyalists that are going to be selected for Project 2025 aren’t just intended to loyally follow Trump’s every desire. They are also selected to wage their own own personal vendettas and just foment general chaos. Disruption of the federal government’s ability to enforce policy is a big part of the agenda here, and not just Trump’s agenda:
And that’s the update we got on the ongoing Schedule F scheming. Overall, it’s not a particularly surprising update, with the exception of that detail about Oracle’s involvement in creation of the Project 2025 database of potential hires. Again, why on earth would Oracle’s services be needed for what sounds like a tiny trivial database of people? Is Project 2025’s database actually much larger than it sounds? Or is this a reflection of deepening ties between Ellison, Oracle, and the Republican Party? Hopefully we’ll eventually get more details on the nature of these databasing services. But those unanswered questions just underscore how Ellison hasn’t simply proven himself to be a dedicated conservative mega-donor in recent years. As was first revealed in May of 2022, Ellison was directly involved in at least one post-2020 election strategizing conference call taking place among the then-Trump White House legal team and conservative groups scrambling to challenge the election results.
It was a November 14, 2020, call that Ellison sat in on along with Senator Lindsey Graham, Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump attorney — and CNP member — Jay Sekulow. Also on the call was CNP member James Bopp Jr., wh was serving as an attorney for True the Vote. Recall how True the Vote emerged from the Tea Party movement in 2012 for its attempts to assemble an army of poll watchers for the 2012 election amidst conservative allegations of mass voter fraud. Also recall how both Catherine Engelbrecht and Anita MonCrief of True the Vote were early members of the Groundswell Group founded in 2013 by CNP members Ginni Thomas and Steve Bannon. We also saw how True the Vote’s legal counsel during the 2020 election was none other than key election-denying strategist and CNP member Cleta Mitchell. Finally, note that it was True the Vote that of co-produced Dinesh D’Souza’s notoriously laughably fallacious “2000 Mules” documentary ostensibly proving massive 2020 election fraud.
True the Vote is an extremely well-financed bad faith actor in the area of election fraud claims. So what was Larry Ellison doing on that November 14, 2020, conference call with Trump attorney Jay Sekulow and True the Vote attorney James Bopp, Jr? We’ve never gotten an answer. Interestingly, neither did True the Votes major donor, Fred Eshelman, who reportedly never received a clarification when he asked about Ellison’s involvement. But according to an anonymous source who participated in the call, Ellison may have been enlisted to assess the wild claims about voting machines made by Sidney Powell. If true, it’s not hard to imagine whey Ellison would want any role involving vetting of Powell’s claims to be covered up entirely given the extremely low quality of Powell’s accusations.
That’s all part of the ongoing mystery about Oracle’s Project 2025 services: Oracle’s Project 2025 involvement is only the latest example of Larry Ellison getting involved with the GOP’s efforts to effectively capture what’s left of the US’s democracy:
“Ellison’s participation in the call was confirmed by a participant, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. This person said Ellison, as a technology executive, may have been enlisted to assess claims about voting machines made by Sidney Powell, a onetime member of Trump’s legal team. And the person said the GOP megadonor was probably looped in by Graham, as part of a discussion about whether the Trump campaign had assembled an effective legal team.”
What was the purpose of Larry Ellison’s participation in an phone call days after the 2020 election that included Trump attorney Jay Sekulow and True the Vote attorney James Bopp? We’ve never learned that purpose. And neither did major True the Vote donor Fred Eshelman ever learn, despite his requests for clarity. What’s up with the secrecy?
Regardless of the purpose of that conference call, it’s obvious that Ellison remains a major conservative mega-donor with an interest in shaping the next Republican administration. And that’s why it’s so interesting to find Oracle’s contract to build the Project 2025 database. It’s hard to imagine Project 2025 actually needs Oracles database services for what sounds like a trivial database. Unless, of course, there’s some sort of undisclosed Big Data side-project that involves the creation of mass databases on, for example, all US voters. But barring something like that, it’s not at all clear what could legitimately require Oracle’s expertise.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that if Larry Ellison is keenly interested in shaping the Republican Party and influencing US elections, it stands to reason that Ellison might also have an interest in influencing who actually gets hired for the thousands of federal jobs at risk of being reassigned as “political appointees” under the Schedule F scheme. So while it’s entirely possible that Oracle’s Project 2025 efforts are simply the next step in Larry Ellison’s influence-peddling inside the Republican Party, don’t forget that Trump may not be the only American oligarch with a keen interest in stacking the government with as many loyalist cronies as possible.
The political theatrics over the House GOP January 6 ‘investigations’ had an unexpected twists this week: House Republicans had a pair of FBI ‘whistleblowers’ — agents Marcus Allen and Stephen Friend — scheduled to testify before Congress about the “weaponization” of the federal government against conservatives. Weaponization against Trump and Trump supporters in particular. A day before their testimonies, the FBI sent a letter informing Congress that the security clearances for three FBI agents who either took part in Jan 6 or later expressed views that questioned their “allegiance to the United States.” The three agents were Allen, Friend, and agent Brett Gloss, who was actually at the Capitol among the rioters. So two of the GOP’s FBI whistleblowers had their security clearances revoked after questions were raised about their loyalty to the United States.
So what did Friend and Allen say to elicit these questions about loyalty? In Allen’s case, it sounds like he actually sent an email from his bureau account to several colleagues just months after Jan 6 urging them to “exercise extreme caution and discretion in pursuit of any investigative inquiries or leads pertaining to the events of” Jan. 6. That’s on top of reports that Allen “expressed sympathy for persons or organizations that advocate, threaten or use force or violence.”
Agent Friend straight up refused to participate in the arrest of Jan 6 participant, and Three-Percenter, Tyler Bensch. In case it’s not clear why authorities might have been interested in Bensch, he posted a video of himself outside the Capitol wearing body armor and a gas mask and carrying an AR-15-style rifle. Despite that, Friend refused to participate in his August 24, 2022, arrest. We’re also told that Friend downloaded documents to an unauthorized flash drive in September 2022. And yet, despite all that, the revocation of his security clearance only happened on Tuesday of this week. That’s part of the context of this story about the revoking of these three FBI agents’ security clearances: it wasn’t necessarily timely revocations and rather belated in the case of Agent Friend. A belated revocation that almost seems like an attempt to avoid the inevitable question of why Friend hadn’t had his security clearance revoked despite all the red flags Friend had raised over the last year.
And while this story is obviously directly related to the January 6 Capitol insurrection, it’s also important to keep in mind the implicit Schedule F‑related angle to this story. Because when it comes to the upcoming GOP Schedule F mass purge of federal employees, it’s going to be the existing employees like Agents Friend, Allen, and Gloss who are most likely to be tapped for high level agency positions under the next Republican White House. They’re the ones demonstrating loyalty to MAGA-land. Holding the view that the US government as being hopefully corrupted by ‘wokeness’ and at war with conservatives is going to be one of the chief qualifications for federal employees when Schedule F becomes reality. And we know the lists of potential job candidates are already being generated, with the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” operating with the goal of 20,000 candidates by Jan 2025. What are the odds these three agents aren’t already in Project 2025’s rolodex? So as the House GOP’s Jan 6‑related antics play out, it’s going to be important to keep in mind that we aren’t just watching an attempt to re-write history. We’re also watching a preview of Project 2025’s ideal Schedule F candidates to fill key federal rolls under the next Republican administration.
At the same time, it’s also worth noting that the story of these three FBI agents is the most alarming recent story about extremist sympathies in US national security agencies. That award goes to the story of Hatchet Speed, a Naval reservist with top secret clearance who managed to maintain that clearance for 18 months following Jan 6 despite being a genocidal admirer of Hitler who was planning on carrying out a campaign of kidnapping and mass murder with the goal of wiping out all the Jews in the United States. Yes, Hatchet Speed, a member of the Proud Boys who was at the Capitol on Jan 6, managed to keep his job in the US Navy as a a petty officer first class in the U.S. Naval Reserves and was assigned to the Naval Warfare Space Field Activity at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). A Navy reservist for more than 20 years, Speed is the longest-serving official in the intelligence community to be charged with Jan 6‑related crimes so far. In addition to his role as a Navy reservist, Speed also had a job at Novetta, a defense contractor in the US intelligence community.
Why did Speed lose his top secret security clearances? Not Jan 6. No, it was Speed’s refusal to take a COVID vaccine — making him deemed unable to perform his duties — that reportedly resulted in him getting his access to classified information cut off in August of 2021. We are told that Speed was given a “dead end” job with no access to classified information at the NRO was with the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command in October of 2021, and his enlistment contract expired in November 2022.
How do we know Speed was plotting genocidal kidnapping and murder campaigns? Because that’s what he told an undercover FBI agent during multiple meetings in 2022, in addition to making clear to the agent that he felt the US government was controlled by Jews and liberals and making clear that he wanted to enlist Christians who would join him in a campaign of violence to rid the US of these enemies. The forthrightness with which Speed shared these view reportedly led the FBI agent to wonder how someone with such views managed to keep a position with top secret clearances.
Speed was ultimately sentenced to four years in prison for Jan 6‑related charges, more or less in line with the convictions given to the other low-level insurrectionists there that day. He also got three additional years in a separate conviction related to weapons charges over the three silencers he purchased post-Jan 6 as part of a larger arsenal Speed was building at this time. Those charges over the silencers are virtually the only charges in relation to the kidnapping/genocide plot Speed discussed with the undercover FBI agent last year.
And this is all, of course, happening at the same time we’re still learning about Jack Teixeira’s top secret clearances as he plotted for a race war and mass shootings. It was only 2019 when we learned about Christopher Hasson, lieutenant in the US Coast Guard plotting Nazi-inspired genocidal mass violence. As the GOP rolls out its narrative about a “woke” federal government at war with constitution-loving conservatives, it’s going to be important to not forget about the regularity with which we get these stories about an unaddressed crisis of far right extremists in the military and law enforcement. An under-addressed crisis that will presumably become a Schedule F‑fueled existential threat as soon as Jan 2025.
Ok, first, here’s a NY Times piece looking on the FBI’s surprise letter informing Congress that two of the FBI whistleblowers the GOP invited to discuss the “weaponization” of federal agencies against Trump supporters had their security clearances revoked over concerns about their loyalty to the United States. Exactly the kind of loyalty concerns that will undoubtedly have future GOP administrations enamored:
“The letter, written by a top official at the F.B.I., came one day before at least two of the agents — Marcus Allen and Stephen Friend — were set to testify in front of a House Judiciary subcommittee investigating what Republicans contend is the “weaponization” of the federal government against conservatives.”
All three FBI ‘whistleblowers’ had their security clearances revoked pending investigations. That was the surprise notice delivered to congress a day before the agents were scheduled to testify as part of the Republican Party’s ongoing efforts to portray January 6 as a government plot targeting conservatives. Brett Gloss lied about being in the Capitol on Jan 6. Marcus Allen sent letters to agents encouraging them to “exercise extreme caution and discretion in pursuit of any investigative inquiries or leads pertaining to the events of” Jan. 6. And Stephen Friend not only refused to participate in the arrest of a Jan 6 participant last summer but he also apparently downloaded a number of documents to “an unauthorized removable flash drive” months later in September 2022. Those all seem like pretty reasonable reasons to suspend their security clearances considering the circumstances:
So assuming these charges pan out, it appears the FBI had reason for suspending their security clearances. The still-unanswered question is when exactly did these clearances ultimately get revoked? Was it shortly after the FBI discovered these violations? Or shortly before the three agents were scheduled to testify? In the case of Agent Friend, it sounds like the revocation took place just a couple of days ago. Better late than never, assuming there was a real security issue. Still, the fact that Friend only had his security clearance revoked this week for refusing to participate in a raid last summer and later downloading files to an unauthorized flash drive further raises the question of why did the FBI allow Friend to keep his clearances at all?
And that brings us to the investigation of another Jan 6 figure who managed to maintain a top secret security clearance for 18 months following Jan 6 despite being a genocidal admirer of Hitler who was planning on carrying out a campaign of kidnapping and mass murder with the goal of wiping out all the Jews in the United States. Yes, Hatchet Speed, a member of the Proud Boys who was at the Capitol on Jan 6, managed to keep his job in the US Navy as a a petty officer first class in the U.S. Naval Reserves and was assigned to the Naval Warfare Space Field Activity at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). A Navy reservist for more than 20 years, Speed is the longest-serving official in the intelligence community to be charged with Jan 6‑related crimes so far. In addition to his role as a Navy reservist, Speed also had a job at Novetta, a defense contractor in the US intelligence community.
So why did Speed lose his top secret security clearances? Not Jan 6. No, it was Speed’s refusal to take a COVID vaccine — making him deemed unable to perform his duties — that reportedly resulted in him getting his access to classified information cut off in August of 2021. We are told that Speed was given a “dead end” job with no access to classified information at the NRO was with the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command in October of 2021, and his enlistment contract expired in November 2022.
So how do know Speed was plotting genocidal kidnapping and murder campaigns? Because that’s what he told an undercover FBI agent during multiple meetings in 2022, in addition to making clear to the agent that he felt the US government was controlled by Jews and liberals and making clear that he wanted to enlist Christians who would join him in a campaign of violence to rid the US of these enemies. The forthrightness with which Speed shared these view reportedly led the FBI agent to wonder how someone with such views managed to keep a position with top secret clearances.
Speed was ultimately sentenced to four years in prison for Jan 6‑related charges, more or less in line with the convictions given to the other low-level insurrectionists there that day. He also got three additional years in a separate conviction related to weapons charges over the three silencers he purchased post-Jan 6 as part of a larger arsenal Speed was building at this time. Those charges over the silencers are virtually the only charges in relation to the kidnapping/genocide plot Speed discussed with the undercover FBI agent last year.
So as the political fighting over the three FBI Jan 6 ‘whistleblowers’ continues to play out, it’s going to be worth keeping in mind that the longest-serving official in the intelligence community to be charged with Jan 6‑related crimes so far managed to keep his top secret security clearances for 18 months following Jan 6 and didn’t even ultimately lose that clearance over Jan 6 but instead the COVID vaccine. A despite being a Nazi:
“Speed’s conduct on Jan. 6 ”was one step on a disturbing path toward racially motivated criminal conduct — that ultimately featured plans for the kidnapping and mass murder of civilians,” prosecutors wrote.”
Kidnappings and mass murders of his perceived political opponents. Those were the plans Hatchet Speed was developing after January 6. Plans he was making while still serving as a petty officer first class in the US Navy and after getting assigned to the Naval Warfare Space Field Activity at the National Reconnaissance Office:
Speed even kept his position at the NRO despite the FBI opening an undercover investigation into Speed where he expressed his desire to wipe out the entire US Jewish population:
And as we’re going to see in the following Intercept piece by James Risen from back in March — weeks before the Jack Teixeira leaks made the news — it’s not simply the case that Speed managed to keep his Naval intelligence job despite being a genocidal Nazi. It turns out that the undercover FBI agent’s investigation into Speed that documented all of this genocidal intent and ties to the Proud Boys didn’t actually change the charges Speed faces in relation to Jan 6. Instead, he’s facing charges in Virginia over his illegal purchase of silencers. That appears to be the extent of the additional charges brought as a result of the undercover FBI investigation that revealed Speed’s genocidal plans:
“In fact, Hatchet Speed was a self-described member of the Proud Boys working deep inside the U.S. intelligence community. He joined other Proud Boys members to storm the Capitol on January 6, but he got away undetected and continued to work in sensitive jobs in the months after the insurrection, even as he amassed a huge arsenal of weapons and began to think about kidnapping Jewish leaders and others he considered an existential threat. He wasn’t arrested until 18 months after the insurrection, and no investigation has been conducted to determine whether he compromised classified information, a Navy spokesperson said. Officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on any possible damage to U.S. intelligence resulting from Speed’s decadeslong access to classified information.”
He wasn’t just plotting the kidnappings and mass murder of Jewish leaders and others Speed considered an existential threat. He was amassing an arsenal too. And, again, this was all after January 6. It was only 18 months after the insurrection that Speed was finally arrested. And yet, is sounds like no investigation had been conducted — as of March — to determine whether or not Speed compromised classified information. It’s worth keeping in mind that this article was written several weeks before the story of Jack Teixeira’s Discord leaks and far right ideology became public.
We are told that the Navy did indeed respond to the FBI’s investigation into Speed in March of 2022 by assigning Speed to what amounted to a fake job with the Naval Warfare Space Field Activity at the National Reconnaissance Office in a position that didn’t give Speed access to the NRO’s classified systems. That denial of access to classified data apparently came despite the fact that Speed previously held a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance. That NRO assignment in March of 2022 wasn’t the first reassignment Speed got after Jan 6. He was assign to the Naval Information Warfare systems command in October 2021 in a position that is not described as a dead end role and yet the Navy still tells us that Speed was cut off from access to classified information in August of 2021 after refusing to comply with the military’s COVID vaccine mandate. So while Speed did eventually lose his top secret clearance 18 months after Jan 6, it wasn’t even for anything related to Jan 6. Interestingly, it sounds like he was assigned to a role at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service headquarters in DC at this time:
And while questions about how a Naval intelligence officer could have managed to keep his top secret clearance after attending the January 6 riots loom large over this story, perhaps a bigger question is how someone who was so open with their extremism managed to become a Naval intelligence officer in the first place. According to the undercover FBI agent, Speed expressed such virulent genocidal views that it’s difficult to understood how he could have remained in the intelligence community for so long without drawing more scrutiny. Keep in mind that Speed is the longest-serving official in the intelligence community to be charged so far in connection with January 6. In other words, the intelligence community has had plenty of opportunity to be exposed to Speed’s ideology:
Finally, there’s the fact that no additional charges appear to have been brought against Speed despite the undercover FBI agent recording his plans that included kidnapping, mass murder, and genocide:
Speed presumably won’t be returning to any government-related jobs after he gets out of prison, although who knows these days. Perhaps more charges for Speed are on the way. If not, it sounds like he’s going to be out of prison in seven years or less. At which point he’ll have little trouble rebuilding his illegal arsenal while preparing for mass violence and genocide. While also presumably networking with his Proud Boy buddies. And their buddies.
Ye 2024! It’s happening. Well, ok, we’ll see if anything ever comes of Kanye West’s star-crossed 2024 presidential campaign that was declared all but dead back in April amid reports of internecine fighting between campaign figures like Ali Alexander and Milo Yiannopoulos. And as we saw, those reports about the quiet death of West’s campaign happened right around the same time the scandal over Ali Alexander’s alleged grooming of teenage boys was erupting into the media.
That’s all part of context that made the following report about the rekindling of West’s campaign all the more remarkable. But let’s not forget the most remarkable, in infamous, chapter of West’s 2024 campaign: the November 22, 2022, dinner at Mar-a-Lago between Donald Trump, West, and Nick Fuentes. It was the defining event of West’s campaign to date. An event that more or less defined West as a self-declared Hitler lover suffering from profound mental health issues.
And, until recently, it seemed like the dinner was also the nail in the coffin of this campaign. But nope. It’s back. At least those were the claims made last month by Alt Right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who was basically pushed out of the West campaign back in January as part of that internecine fighting with Fuentes and Alexander. As we saw, it was Yiannopoulos who was one of main sources of the allegations about Alexander’s teen grooming. So a couple weeks after the Alexander grooming allegations hit the news we get reports that Milo Yiannopoulos is back in charge of West’s 2024 campaign while Alexander and Fuentes are out.
But what about the reports that West himself has lost all interest in the campaign? Well, he’s once again interested in politics, according to two sources close to West’s political operation.
So is that it? The West 2024 campaign is back on with Yiannopoulos’s return? Not necessarily. The rival crew isn’t leaving without taking a few shots. In particular, the treasurer of the West 2024 campaign, Patrick Krason, resigned shortly after those reports of Yiannopoulos’s return. And then Krason informed federal regulators about possible campaign finance violations committed by Yiannopoulos as part of his prior work for the West 2024 campaign back in November. Specifically, Krason cites an unusually $10k payment made to Yiannopoulos by the Kanye 2020 campaign for “domain transfers” services. What were those services? Well, Yiannopoulos oversaw the purchasing of the ye24.com web domain from GoDaddy.com from almost $7k. So he was apparently paid $10k for a $7k purchase. But it gets worse, because it turns out Yiannopoulos made that purchase using the campaign credit card of Marjorie Taylor-Greene (MTG)‘s congressional office. So MTG’s office buys the ye24.com web domain for $7k and Yiannopoulos gets paid by the Kanye 2020 campaign for transfering that domain to the West camapaign. It’s more than a little suspicious.
So how did MTG’s office get involved with West’s web domains? Well, Yiannopoulos did indeed intern in MTG’s office for six months in 2022, so it’s possible this was part of that work. But Yiannopoulos also claims to have done contracting work for her office too last year. And while one source claims that Yiannopoulos oversaw the purchase of ye24.com using the campaign credit card, the source didn’t know if MTG’s office was itself aware the credit card was being used for these purposes. We’re also told that it was someone working for Yiannopoulos personally who made the transaction with MTG campaign credit card. In other words, it’s possible Yiannopoulos was effectively just stealing campaign funds. At the same time, as ethics experts point out, even if MTG’s campaign was aware of the purchase, it could still represent an illegal use of campaign funds for the facilitation of personal enrichment. That’s the ethical mess Krason is raising with regulators on his way out of the campaign.
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Patrick Krason’s name pop up in relation to what appears to be a conservative astroturfing campaign targeting black voters: Recall how Krason, a longtime political consultant from West Virginia, appears to have been one of the figures behind the Black Conservatives Fund PAC, a PAC that was promoting the same ‘Stop the Steal’ January 6 pro-Trump rally that morphed into what appears to be a planned insurrection. While it’s not known who exactly is behind the funding of this group, records show Robert Mercer donated $150k to the group in 2014. And while Krason was listed as the treasurer for the group, he denied to reporters that he was involved with running the group. Krason similarly denied having any involvement with setting up a Stop the Steal PAC that records show he started in in November 2020 following the election. And as we also saw, it appears Ali Alexander was the person actually running both PACs. Krason knows a thing or two about the dark side of politics.
But then there’s the remarkable timing of all of this that should raise all sorts of additional questions about the nature of these Yiannopoulos-enriching transactions: the purchase of the ye24.com domain on GoDaddy and transference of the domain to the Kanye 2020 campaign all happened on November 22, 2022, the same date as the infamous Mar-a-Lago dinner. A dinner that Yiannopoulos ultimately took credit for arranging in the first place. In fact, Yiannopoulos told reporters that he orchestrated the dinner “to make Trump’s life miserable”, although the fuller quote from Yiannopoulos at the time was “I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with...I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end.” Those comments were apparently the basis for West letting Yiannopoulos go at the time. But now he’s back, along with a new slew of campaign finance allegations that raise the question of whether or not he was effectively getting paid off for arranging that infamous dinner at Mar-a-Lago:
“But now two sources close to West’s political operation tell The Daily Beast that he’s once again interested in politics, and is bringing Yiannopoulos back into his orbit while pushing two other far-right leaders out.”
Ye 2024 is back! At least that’s according to two anonymous sources reportedly close to West’s campaign. And it appears Milo Yiannopolous is back too as part of this reinvigorated operation, after being seemingly forced out in December and replaced with none other than Ali Alexander:
And that brings us to the very interesting timing of this news: it came less than a month after all of the reports about Ali Alexander being charged with grooming conservative teenage boys while he was working for Nick Fuentes’s America First organization. Allegations that were originally leveled by Milo Yiannopoulos after Fuentes and Alexander got Yiannopoulous pushed out of Ye’s 2024 campaign back in December. It’s hard to believe the timing is just a coincidence:
But that’s not the only coincidental timing in this story. As the following article describes, Yiannopoulos is already facing accusations of fraudulent campaign finance transaction. Accusations coming from the person who replaced Yiannopoulos on the Ye 2024 campaign back in December: Patrick Krason.
Recall how Patrick Krason, a longtime political consultant from West Virginia, appears to have been one of the figures behind the Black Conservatives Fund PAC, a PAC that was promoting the same ‘Stop the Steal’ January 6 pro-Trump rally that morphed into what appears to be a planned insurrection. While it’s not known who exactly is behind the funding of this group, records show Robert Mercer donated $150k to the group in 2014. And while Krason was listed as the treasurer for the group, he denied to reporters that he was involved with running the group. Krason similarly denied having any involvement with setting up a Stop the Steal PAC that records show he started in in November 2020 following the election. And as we also saw, it appears Ali Alexander was the person actually running both PACs. In other words, Krason is an experienced practictioner of the political dark arts. But that doesn’t mean his accusations against Yiannopoulos aren’t true. Accusations about a possible illegal campaign finance violation involving the Kanye 2020 campaign going back to November of 2022, when MTG’s campaign office paid almost $7k for the ye24.com domain and the Kanye 2020 campaign then paid Yiannopoulos nearly $10k the “domain transfer”. Yes, MTG’s campaign bought the web domain but Yiannopoulos was the person paid for it. That’s the shady transaction Krason informed federal regulators about:
“The change signals a broader political shakeup for the rapper, also known as Ye, who has floated running for president again in 2024, although he has not filed a formal statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission. The Daily Beast reported last week that Yiannopoulos had returned to lead. Yiannopoulos, a longtime far-right provocateur, had previously worked with Ye’s campaign but departed in December, shortly before Krason was hired.”
It’s not just that Milo Yiannopoulous has returned to the Ye 2024 campaign. It’s all part of a broader shakeup that includes the departure of various Ali Alexander-affiliates like Patrick Krason. So we shouldn’t be too surprised to learn about these ‘parting gifts’ from Krason directed at Yiannopoulos:
So is this is a simple campaign finance fraud story that’s only belatedly coming to light as a result of this far right in-fighting? Nope. It’s messier. Because as the following article points out, there are a couple of interesting coincidences with that November 22, 2022, ye24.com web domain purchase, where MTG’s campaign credit card pay $7k for the domain and then the Kanye 2020 committee paid Yiannopoulos $10k for “domain transfer”. For starters, there’s the question of whether or not the MTG campaign even knew if Yiannopoulos was using its credit card to make that purchase in the first place. While Yiannopoulos was indeed an intern in MTG’s office for six months in 2022, we’re also told he was working as a paid contractor. Plus, the person who actually made the purchase was reportedly someone working directly under Yiannopoulos and not working for MTG. So it’s possible Krason is pointing to a grossly illegal scenario where Yiannopoulos just engaged in outright fraud. But as experts point out, even if MTG’s campaign was aware that its credit card was being used for these purposes that’s still a potentially illegal use of campaign funds to facilitate personal gain.
But then there’s the remarkable timing of that November 22 web domain purchase: that’s the same day of the now infamous Mar-a-Lago dinner between Donald Trump, West, and Fuentes. A dinner that Milo Yiannopoulous took credit for arranging. And that’s why we have to ask: was Yiannopoulos paid in this seemingly illicit transaction for setting up the ye24.com domain, or paid for arranging that infamous dinner:
“The receipts match Federal Election Commission filings from both campaigns. Those filings show that on Nov. 22, the Greene campaign reported a $7,020.16 expense to the GoDaddy hosting service for “domain registration and hosting.” That same day, the Kanye 2020 committee reported paying Yiannopoulos $9,955 for “domain transfer.””
Yes, the anomalous details surrounding the November 22, 2022, purchase of the ye24.com web domain start with the fact that Milo Yiannopoulos appears to get paid nearly $10k by the Yaye 2020 campaign for a web domain purchased with the MTG campaign credit card. And it’s hard not to notice this came on the 59th Anniversary of the JFK assassination.
But then there’s the fact that the payment happened on the same day Nick Fuentes and West dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, something Yiannopoulos has taken credit for arranging. Notably, Yiannopoulous was ultimately fired by West for setting up this meeting, which Yiannopoulos told reporters that he orchestrated the dinner “to make Trump’s life miserable”, although the fuller quote from Yiannopoulos at the time was “I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with...I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end” While Yiannopoulos was apparently paid for setting up the ye24.com web domain, we have to ask if that was actually the big ‘service’ he was paid for at that time. Setting up the dinner with Trump is a much bigger deal:
It’s also worth noting that someone appears to be going through a lot of effort to ensure the media picks up this story about Yiannopoulos filing potentially fraudulent campaign transactions. Because while the receipts for these transactions were first published on Twitter by far right activist Laura Loomer, the Daily Beast also received them from a different unnamed source:
So given that Yiannopoulos used MTG’s campaign credit card for the purchase of the ye24.com domain on the same day the dinner happened, we have to ask: was the arranging of the Mar-a-Lago dinner with Fuentes and Ye a goal of MTG’s office? The fact that Yiannopoulous served six months an MTG intern while also providing some sort of paid vendor work only adds to those questions:
Finally, given the questions of whether or the MTG campaign even knew its credit card was being used at all for these purposes, note who executed the purchase: someone working under Yiannopoulos personally:
It was all just an innocent mistake by a “junior staffer” working directly under him personally. Who is the mystery vendor that was used by MTG’s office to pay Yiannopoulos for his political work and who was this junior staff? FEC filings yield no clues. So let’s hope the federal regulators who received Patrick Krason’s tip are trying to come up with answers. You also have to wonder if West himself is even familiar with how exactly Yiannopoulous pulled this off given that we’re talking about the use of campaign funds for self-enrichment. There’s presumably going to be a lot more payments for vague ‘services’ billed to the ‘Ye 24’ campaign now that Milo is back in charge of Kanye’s weird ongoing adventure in far right politics that’s poised only to get weirder the closer we get to the 2024 election.
Pat Robertson died. Yep, the televangelist. Of course, the former candidate for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination was a lot more than just a televangelist. He was a leader of the ‘Christian Coalition’ that was behind the explosion of politicized conservative Christianity in America and was even the Council on National Policy (CNP)‘s president from 1985–1986. Recall how he even predicted god was going to steal the election for Trump in December of 2020. He was that kind of television preacher. And as the following TPM Cafe piece written by Sarah Posner reminds us, Pat Robertson was one of the key architects behind the creation of the whole ‘biblical worldview’ legal movement that animates the form of politicized Christianity that has effectively captured the US Supreme Court. The same Christian Nationalist worldview expressed by figures like David Barton, where the US is a constitutionally-enshrined Christian nation with a god-given mandate to impose biblical law.
While Leonard Leo gets a lot of the attention for leading the conservative movement’s judicial nomination strategies, it’s a movement that Pat Robertson spent the last four decades building. Pat Robertson wasn’t just a theocrat. He built the kinds of institutions that could make that theocratic vision — the CNP’s shared vision — come to fruition.
Importantly, Pat Robertson built the Regents University law school, whose notable graduates include Michelle Bachmann. And while Bachmann may be kind of a joke, the movement behind her is no joke. They are very serious. Again, they captured the Supreme Court.
A Regents graduate who went on to play a very significant role in the the CNP’s contemporary agenda is Kristen Waggoner, who now serves as the president and CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) (formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund), the group behind the recent push to outlaw mifepristone and effectively remove national access to abortion pills. Recall how the ADF has received millions of dollars in donations from Erik Prince and Betsy DeVoss, helping to finance the group’s extensive spending promoting nationalist Christianity in Europe in recent decades. But its international work isn’t limited to Europe and includes supporting a 2016 law in Belize that punishes homosexual sex with 10 years of jail time. Also recall how Waggoner is just one of a number of CNP members involved with the ADF, which has played a key role in formulating the current ‘anti-trans kids’ far right manufactured panic. So when we see a Regents graduate/CNP member leading an institution like the ADF, it’s a reminder that the fights the ADF are fighting and winning today were the same fights they planned on waging back when Pat Robertson was setting up his “biblical worldview” law school four decades ago.
Another Regents graduate of note was Monica Goodling, who was caught up in the 2007 scandal over quizzing putative Justice Department employees over their political beliefs, resulting in her reprimand by the Virginia state bar in 2011. This kind of ideological quizzing of federal employees was, of course, the exact same kind of political ideology screening questionnaire developed as part of the Trump administration’s Schedule F scheming. Also recall how James Bacon, who developed that questionnaire alongside Andrew Kloster, went on to play a leading role in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” ongoing Schedule F scheming. Ideological questionnaires are the plan going forward the Republican Party. The CNP is behind. The MAGA movement is behind it. It’s the plan now and was the plan back in 2007 when the Bush administration was trying to do it in the Justice Department. It’s a reminder that Schedule F is highly compatible with Domionionist ambitions. Stacking the government with those who pass a theological litmus test is a lot easier to do with the Schedule F scheme in place.
But as we’re also going to see, Pat Robertson didn’t simply create a law school that promoted a “biblical worldview” theocratic interpretation of the law. He based it on a fundamentally neo-Confederate inspired biblical worldview. The same Christian Reconstructionist worldview articulated by the godfather of contemporary Christian Reconstructionism, RJ Rushdoony. Yes, Rushdoony is a CNP member in good standing. Or rather was, while he was still alive.
And as we’re going to see in a 2011 piece by Sarah Posner below, Rushdoony’s Christian Reconstructionism was influenced by the teachings of 19th century clergyman Robert Lewis Dabney, who wrote a theological dissertation on the meaning of the Civil war, in which he used passages from the Bible to defend slavery, claiming it was “a necessary good for what he called the ‘depraved’ lower classes.” Rushdoony applauded Dabney’s defense of slavery and believed that the Union victory was a “defeat for Christian orthodoxy and paved the way for the rise of an unorthodox Social Gospel in the postbellum United States.”
And that theology wasn’t just shared between Dabney and Rushdoony. It was the theology of the Confederacy, which had the kind of theocratic constitution that met Rushdoony’s approval. It’s all points to one of the most important dimensions of the broader CNP agenda that continues to be ascendant in corridors of power: the CNP’s theocratic agenda is fundamentally neo-Confederate in nature.
And Pat Robertson played a key role 40 years ago in the building of the legal wing of that neo-Confederate theocratic movement. It’s an often glossed over chapter of his biography, but in terms of long-term impact it might be the most lasting part of Pat Robertson’s legacy. A fundamentally theocratic un-American legacy that successfully weaponized large swathes of Christianity for political purposes in what was ultimately a Dominionist vision of church and state:
“Less well understood, though, was Robertson’s significant contribution to the Christianization of the legal profession, and the development of a Christian nationalist legal brigade that has set its sights on ending the separation of church and state, abortion and LGBTQ rights. In 1986, he came to the rescue of a fledgling Christian law school, over the years turning it into the powerhouse Regent University School of Law that has produced lawyers who have gone on to become state court judges, appellate litigators, Republican lawmakers, and political appointees in Republican administrations.”
The patron saint of the Christian nationalist capture of the US legal system. It’s one of Pat Robertson’s lesser known accomplishments. But, of course, he can’t take all the credit. as the President of the CNP from 1985–1986, Pat Robertson wasn’t working alone. The idea for of creating a law school from a “biblical worldview” came from Herb Titus, a Harvard-trained lawyer and acolyte of arch-theocrat R.J. Rushdoony. Both Titus and Rushdoony show up alongside Robertson on the CNP membership list, because of course:
And it was 1985, the year Robertson became CNP President, when Oral Roberts University transferred its tiny flailing biblical law school to Robertson’s CBN University (new Regents), placing Pat Robertson at the center of a Christian nationalist movement that was still in the early phases of institution building:
Four decades later, and we find the Regents graduates playing leading roles in the ascendant Christian Nationalist movement that has now effectively captured the Supreme Court. For example, there’s Regents graduation Kristen Waggoner who now serves as the president and CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) (formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund), the group behind the recent push to outlaw mifepristone and effectively remove national access to abortion pills. Recall how the ADF has received millions of dollars in donations from Erik Prince and Betsy DeVoss, helping to finance the group’s extensive spending promoting nationalist Christianity in Europe in recent decades. But its international work isn’t limited to Europe and includes supporting a 2016 law in Belize that punishes homosexual sex with 10 years of jail time. Also recall how Waggoner is just one of a number of CNP members involved with the ADF, which has played a key role in formulating the current ‘anti-trans kids’ far right manufactured panic. So when we see a Regents graduation/CNP member leading an institution like the ADF, it’s a reminder that the fights the ADF are fighting and winning today were the same fights they planned on waging back when Pat Robertson was setting up his “biblical worldview” law school four decades ago:
And when we see how Regent grad Monica Goodling was caught up in the 2007 scandal over quizzing putative Justice Department employees over their political beliefs, resulting in her reprimand by the Virginia state bar in 2011, keep in mind that Goodling was simply implementing the exact same kind of political ideology screening questionnaire developed as part of the Trump administration’s Schedule F scheming. Also recall how James Bacon, who developed that questionnaire alongside Andrew Kloster, went on to play a leading role in the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” ongoing Schedule F scheming. In other words, from the perspective of this Christian nationalist movement, Monica Goodling’s only real transgression was getting caught:
Pat Robertson and his fellow CNP activists built an enduring theocratic conservative legal movement. Tragically.
But as we’re going to see in the following pair of article excerpts, he didn’t simply build a theocratic conservative legal movement. It was a theocratic conservative movement built on the same theocratic biblical worldview that underpinned the Confederacy. It’s something to keep in mind when we see the CNP’s fingerprints all over things like the January 6 Capitol insurrection:
“Indeed, the “Christian nation” theme was even more prominent in the South than it was in the North. Southerners were convinced that the Confederate States of America was a Christian nation. They viewed the Confederacy as a refuge for the godly amid the “infidelity” of the Union to which they once belonged. One hundred fifty years ago this month, Southerners prepared to engage in a war that would prove God was on their side. This mentality is clear in the Confederacy’s decision to adopt the Latin phrase Deo Vindice (“With God as our defender”) as its national motto.”
It’s no surprise that both sides of the Civil War claimed God was on their side. But these invocations of God’s favor weren’t two sides of same coin. The Confederacy was a constitutional theocracy enshrined in the kind of language that sounds awfully similar to the biblical worldviews of figures like RJ Rushdoony:
And in case it’s not clear that RJ Rushdoony was an overt neo-Confederate defender of slavery, here’s a 2011 piece by Sarah Posner that should leave no doubt. The piece describes the important findings in an essay, “The US Civil War as a Theological War: Confederate Christian Nationalism and the League of the South,” authored by Edward Sebesta — co-editor of two books on neo-confederates, Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” About the “Lost Cause” — Euan Hague and published in the Canadian Review of American Studies. The essay basically points out the direct connections between the Confederate theocracy described in the above piece with the conservative legal movement championed by Pat Robertson. In particular, it happens to be the case that the godfather of this conservative “biblical worldview” legal movement, RJ Rushdoony, the Union victory was a “defeat for Christian orthodoxy and paved the way for the rise of an unorthodox Social Gospel in the postbellum United States.” As Sebesta and Hague write, “Rushdoony has condemned public education and contended that the Civil War was not about slavery, but the consolidation and centralization of federal government power.” Beyond that, Rushdoony even “applauded” the theological defense of slavery made by Robert Lewis Dabney, a 19th century clergyman who published a theological dissertation on the meaning of the Civil war, in which he used passages from the Bible to defend slavery, claiming it was “a necessary good for what he called the ‘depraved’ lower classes.” Again, Rushdoony, CNP member, was the godfather of the ‘biblical worldview’ legal movement Pat Robertson built at CBN/Regents University over the past 40 years. It hasn’t just a theocratic legal movement. It’s been a neo-Confederate theocratic legal movement:
As I discuss in my Bachmann piece, the Christian Reconstructionists behind the Institute on the Constitution as well as the framework for teaching “biblical law” at Christian law schools like the one Bachmann attended at Oral Roberts University, have ties to the neo-confederate group League of the South. At Salon, Justin Elliott has a story, also based in part on Sebesta’s research, about the ties between Rick Perry, who has advocated for secession, and the LOS (which endorsed his 1998 run for lieutenant governor) and the neo-confederate group Sons of Confederate Veterans (of which he was a member).”
As Sarah Posner was writing back in 2011, the Christian Reconstructionism that underpinned the legal education of Dominionists like Michelle Bachmann — who graduated from Oral Roberts University in 1986, right when that law school was being handed over to Pat Robertson’s CBN University — was itself underpinned by the same “theological war” claimed by the Confederacy. When RJ Rushdoony brought that 19th century concept of a theological war into late 20th century conservative, he was operating as a neo-Confederate. An unambiguous neo-Confederate who defended slavery on theological grounds and argued that defeat of the Confederacy was a “defeat for Christian orthodoxy and paved the way for the rise of an unorthodox Social Gospel in the postbellum United States.” The theocratic theology that unifies the CNP is fundamentally neo-confederate in nature. The CNP’s end vision is basically a 21s century version of America modeled on the Confederacy’s theocracy:
And as Posner reminds us, this is the same theology behind David Barton’s Christian Nationalist version of American History that the CNP has been fighting to inject into US classrooms through initiatives like Project Blitz. When groups like the AFD foment hysterics around trans kids, it’s this neo-Confederate movement that is ultimately behind it and poised to exploit it:
Finally, when we see these 2011 warnings about former Texas governor Rick Perry’s ties to neo-Confederate theocratic groups like League of the South, keep in mind that we are getting reports that Rick Perry is considering a seemingly insane 2024 run for the White House. We’ll see if that happens, but if it does, keep in mind his neo-Confederate fellow travelers who are probably going to influencing these kinds of decisions:
How much talk of secession should we expect from presidential candidate Rick Perry this time around. It’s easy to see how such threats might be especially popular right now with the GOP primary electorate in the post-Trump indictment political environment. Distinguishing between Rick Perry’s genuine lunacy and genuine Christian neo-Confederacy sympathies is once again sadly necessary. But if he does run, he’s undoubtedly going to be seen by Dominionist and neo-Confederate groups as a fellow traveler. One of many fellow travelers of a Christian nationalist movement that now basically control the Republican Party and the Supreme Court. A movement Pat Robertson played a leading role in building for decades, including the building of the institutional home base for a legal education from a that neo-Confederate theocratic ‘biblical worldview’. When he wasn’t fleecing audiences on TV.
It was inevitable, awful, and now it happened. It’s an overarching theme of stories coming out of the Supreme Court this year. Because it just keeps happening exactly as reasonably predicted: the Roberts conservative super-majority is planning on rolling the US back to the early 20th century and maybe the 19th century. A rollback of civil rights but also a rollback of any real curbs on the power of the American oligarchy. The Roberts Court is an ‘end game’ kind of court. Total victory is at hand. Total victory by the network of dark money mega-donors and their political patrons who installed — and pampered — the current Supreme Court majority and know exactly what they are going to get in return. That kind of total victory.
And that promise of total victory by the Supreme Court majority’s oligarch patrons — wrapped in a bow in the form of one precedent-reversing historic ruling after another — is a big piece of context to keep in mind when hearing about the end of affirmative action at all public and private universities as a result of Thursday’s Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College ruling. The ending of affirmative action in college admissions is a very big deal on its own. And also just one of step in the oligarchy’s path to total victory. A total victory that includes not just the near complete capture of the US’s economic wealth but a near complete institutional capture too. With colleges and universities clearly on the front lines of this institutional takeover. Not exclusively on the front lines, obviously. All sorts of institutions are under assault, most notably democratic institutions, whether it’s the legal drowning of US politics in dark money thanks to Roberts Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling or the out-of-control sanctioned partisan gerrymandering thanks to the court’s 2019 Rucho v Common Cause ruling. And then there’s the planned ideological purging of the federal workforce with the ongoing Schedule F plot. Or Ron DeSantis’s ideological purge at liberal New College. And, of course, there was January 6, a shockingly direct institutional assault brought to us by the same network of politicians and oligarchs and theocrats behind the rest of these institutional assaults. The ending of affirmative action didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened as part of a highly-organized decades-long society-wide institutional assault backed by the same political that has capture most of the rest of the US government.
An ongoing capture that isn’t stopping with affirmative action. Or colleges. As we’ve seen with the Schedule F plot — ostensibly focused on purging just government institutions but clearly in line with Curtis Yarvin’s broader vision of a public/private institutional purge — the goal of this network isn’t just to purge the government of anyone who isn’t a fellow traveler. All institutions of influence are to be purged, from colleges to large private employers.
And that brings us to the following set of articles that, taken together, add some interesting additional context to accelerating right-wing institutional takeover and purge agenda. For starters, as experts warn, Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling isn’t just going to have a chilling effect on the recruiting of diverse student bodies. It’s implicitly going to amplify the ongoing push to purge all US institutions of Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. And especially US corporations, where DEI initiatives have drawn the ire of conservative politicians looking to pick a ‘populist’ fight by picking a fight with ‘woke corporations’ over their DEI policies.
But as the following USA Today article also notes, the new ruling is going to implicitly have a chilling effect on corporate DEI policies in another very important way: there’s simply going to be fewer minorities graduating from Ivy League institutions. And in a world where who you know is often more important than what you can do in terms of career advancement and an Ivy League education is one of the few available tickets into that elite world, draining elite US colleges of minority graduates is obviously going to be draining corporate America of minority executives too. It’s a foreseeable downstream effect. And it’s going to be happening at the same time the US is on track to become a ‘majority minority’ nation by 2043. Twenty years isn’t that long when it comes to a society, but it’s a very long time when it comes to an oligarchy in a position to purge every major institution in the US. It’s a massive tension at work in this dynamic. The kind of tension that makes further curtailment of democratic institutions and democracy in general another foreseeable outcome on the path to total victory.
And as we’re going to be reminded of in the second article below, published in the Atlantic on January 5, 2022 — the anniversary eve of the January 6 Capitol insurrection- the network behind Jan 6 and this larger institutional purge agenda is, itself, a product of America’s elite institutions. And in particular the elite networks formed at Americas Ivy League schools, which in turn serve as invitations into America’s executive and managerial class. That’s another part of the context of the Supreme Court’s gutting of affirmative action: this ruling didn’t simply dramatically curtail access to elite college educations to historically disadvantaged minority communities. It also cut off access to those invitations into America’s managerial and executive class that comes with such educations. America’s unofficial aristocracy runs through the Ivy Leagues, which is something that makes the Supreme Court’s ruling all the more bitter when we consider the fact that the ruling didn’t rule out legacy admissions. The children of oligarchs can still access those invitations to the corridors of power. Poor minorities can take a hike.
Finally, as we’re going to see in the third article excerpt below — an interview of complexity science researcher Peter Turchin in the conservative UnHerd published a few weeks ago — there was a fascinating set of findings by Turchin’s research team that are worth keeping in relation to this ruling and the large ongoing right-wing institutional purge. As Turchin describes, his team built a database of the events leading up to over 200 societal collapses over the past 5,000 years. Turchin’s team found the same pattern playing out over and over: societies go through a golden age period when societal gains are broadly shared by the population, but then a kind of elite rot seems to set in and the rot comes from the top. The “iron law of oligarchy”, as Turchin puts it, seems to kick in and a rot ensures. Elites in a position to direct more and more of society’s wealth to themselves unchecked begin to do so, resulting in a “wealthy pump” effect that inevitably distorts the economy and impoverishes the working class. This cycle of oligarchic greed and self-destruction just keeps happening, across space and time.
But it’s not a discontented working class that ultimately brings about society crisis and collapses, according to Turchin’s analysis. It’s feuding elites who do it. In particular, a dynamic created by a process Turchin dubs “elite overproduction” — the creation of too many aspiring elites for the number of positions of power and influence — ultimately brings about the kinds of factional schisms and zero-sum scheming that can result in civil wars, coups, and of course days like January 6. In other words, January 6 was a manifestation, in part, of this ‘elite overproduction’ phenomena Turchin sees popping up throughout history. But it’s not an over production of elites caused by the invitation of too many ‘non-elite’ students into these elite circles of power. And an elite overproduction caused by the existence of a highly organized power network of mega-donor billionaires who grew fabulously wealthy from the ‘wealth pump’ turned on by Reagan and have turned that fabulous wealth into a successful capture of most of the US’s institutions. The iron law of the oligarchy playing out over the last generation in the US. There’s a group playing for total victory and total victory is at hand now that they’ve got the Supreme Court for the next generation. That’s the source the ‘elite overproduction’ at work here. Total power grabs tend to produce a supply and demand imbalance for available positions of influence. So while there’s obviously a backlash to the welcoming of traditionally marginalized communities into the halls of power going on here, it’s also important to realize that there’s a raw power grab going on too. Ending affirmative action is just one more box to be checked for the groups behind this.
But it’s Turchin’s final analysis — that all societies that go down this path ultimately collapse — that makes the obvious success of this power network so grim for the future of the US. Because if Turchin is correct, we shouldn’t expect America’s elites to reign themselves in. Quite the opposite, we should expect oligarchs to grab as much as they possibly can. And that means a largely white male oligarchy is poised to be reclaiming a greater and greater share of positions of power and influence for decades to come, at the same time the US is becoming more diverse and non-white than ever. What will a far right institutional power grab that includes everything from schools, to employers, to democracy itself mean for the perceived legitimacy of not just the US government but basically all US institutional for future generations? Because this doesn’t just feel like a perfect storm for a right-wing power grab. This also feels like the perfect storm for the general public loss of faith in US institutions in general. And a loss of faith directly related to this Supreme Court-blessed right-wing power grab that we’re all witnessing. It’s a remarkable dynamic unfolding. The decades-long oligarchic power grab of America’s conservative ‘Old Guard’ using white Christian nationalist populism is coming to fruition and playing out at the same the country is on track to become a ‘majority minority’ society in terms of both race and religion. It’s hard to see how that isn’t going to be deeply destabilizing.
Then again, societal destabilization is kind of the theme here too for this power network. Or at least one of the themes. Destabilization in the forms of faux populist raging against ‘woke elites’, carried out in the pursuit of the capture and consolidation of more power. Those are twin themes that we’re seeing play out. And while they aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, an anti-elitist power grab carried out by a network of billionaires is a tricky line to walk. But walking that line isn’t really an option if you’re a right-wing billionaire intent on having it all. Total victory awaits.
Ok, first, here’s that USA Today piece that points out that Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling isn’t just an attack on diversity on elite campuses and the educations offered by those campuses. It’s an attack on the tickets to the corridors of power that such educations brings thanks to the unofficial reality that America runs on who you know, not what you can do. An ongoing attack that includes now-emboldened lawsuits targeting corporate DEI policies. And while many corporations are currently vowing to ‘stick to their values’ and remain committed to DEI policies, the whole point of this campaign is to ultimately create a larger environment so hostile to DEI policies that they are deemed too costly and unpalatable to maintain. It’s a strategy predicated on the assumption that profit maximization is the one true corporate value; everything else is just public relations. A strategy that, if correct, suggests corporate America’s the good ol’ boy golden age is yet to come, as the US is more diverse than ever:
“The decision is limited to higher education and won’t directly affect employers like Salesforce, which are governed by a different statute. But the ripple effects from the ruling could come quickly, starting with a decline in college graduates from underrepresented backgrounds, meaning the loss of “a pipeline of highly qualified future workers and business leaders,” companies from Google to General Electric warned the Supreme Court.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling striking down affirmative action programs didn’t include the corporate hiring affirmative action. But as experts warn, the impact is inevitable. You can’t systematically roll back college diversity programs without that translating into a less diverse pool of candidates for corporate America. So at the same time the US is on facing long-term demographic shifts towards a less and less white populace, corporate America’s pool of college educated candidates — especially candidates from Ivy League universities — is poised to collapse. But as experts also warn, this ruling isn’t just going to lead to a dwindling pool of diverse college graduates. It’s also an invitation for direct legal challenges against corporate DEI hiring programs:
And note the big prize conservative think tanks are already eying: federal contracing DEI policies. It’s hard to imagine those policies are going to withstand a carefully crafted Supreme Court challenges:
And that brings us to the following article published right on the eve of the one year anniversary of the January 6 Capitol insurrection that makes the observation that almost all of the figures around then-President Donald Trump who were instrumental in organizing and justifying the insurrection and have assumed in politics of right-wing populist ‘anti-elitism’ — figures like Senators Josh Hawley, Mike Pompeo, and Ted Cruz — are, themselves, Ivy League educated and some of the biggest elites in the country. Figures who are all presumably highly supportive of the ongoing Schedule F plot to mass purge progressives out of as many institutions as possible. It’s an important part of the context of the Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College ruling: the anti-elitism culture war politics that undergird this ruling are being championed by one of the most powerful network of elites in the world. An Ivy League-educated network of powerful elites intent on grabbing a lot more power and keeping it for themselves:
“In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon could not decide on the ultimate cause of the empire’s destruction. Was it the result of individual failures, such as those of Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Caligula? Or were trends beyond anyone’s control, such as the rise of Christianity and the geographical limitations of expansion, to blame? In the case of the United States, the deeper trends are clear—the hyper-partisanship rendering the country ungovernable on a federal level, the high levels of vertical and horizontal inequality, the environmental degradation. But the truth is that no country can survive when the leaders of its institutions actively work toward the destruction of those institutions. Mike Pompeo graduated first in his class from West Point and served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. When a man of those advantages oversees the hollowing out of the State Department, allows the president to fire inspectors general who displease him by their inspection, uses his position to cultivate donors for his party, and consistently bends the norms and destroys the traditions that have lifted him to power, what hope can there be for his country? If he cannot manage to keep faith with the system, who can?”
It’s both ironic and more or less what we should expect: the greatest threat facing the US’s institutions is posed by the elites generated by those institutions. It’s like a kind of intra-institutional elite civil war, with the complete capture of the US’s democratic institutions as the spoils. That’s all part of the context of the January 6th Capitol insurrection. But not just the insurrection. With the Supreme Court captured by conservatives for the next generational or longer, this institutional civil war is poised to be extended to effectively every major institution in the US, public or private. An institutional insurrection being waged by powerful conservative networks of graduates from the same elite Ivy League institutions that were the key targets of this Supreme Court ruling:
And this attempt to institutionally purge America’s top universities of demographically diverse student bodies is happening at the same time legacy admissions are left in place. A system that effectively allows the ultra-wealthy to purchase admission for their children, as was done for Jared Kushner’s admission into Harvard. And that’s why it’s important to keep in mind that this institutional purge is coinciding with the ongoing decades-long trend of more and more wealthy being systematically channeled into the hands of the wealthiest. In other words, we shouldn’t be surprised if the future Ivy League classes aren’t not just less diverse but also a lot wealthier and less qualified overall. There’s simply a lot more children of the ultra-wealthy these days:
And that surge in ultra-wealthy elites over the past four decades — and resulting surge their ultra wealthy children who will all need spots in elite Ivy League universities someday — and the resulting capture of the US’s democratic institutions like the Supreme Court brings us to the fascinating findings by complexity scientist Peter Turchin. As Turchin describes in the following interview with the conservative UnHerd, his team has built a large historical database of when past societies got into a state of crisis. Based on their findings, all complex societies over the past 5,000 years have gone through phases of peace and prosperity followed by crisis. A crisis invariably created by the society’s elites themselves. A kind of civil war among the elites that can tear a society apart. That’s what Turchin’s team found over and over in one society after another.
But these elite civil wars didn’t develop at random. Instead, Turchin’s team found an apparent driver of this phenomena: elite overproduction. That’s the term Turchin used to describe the process of too many ‘aspiring elites’ scrambling for too few positions of power and influence. As Turchin puts it, it’s a phenomena that inevitably results in disgruntled elites and disgruntled elite-wannabes are far more threatening to societal stability than disgruntled workers.
We shouldn’t be surprised to find that Turchin very much sees the political dysfunction and malaise in contemporary America as a consequence of elite overproductions. But it’s notable in terms of what he views as the driving force of that elite overproduction. Because while Turchin’s definition of a society’s ‘elite’ is a way of describing the ‘top 1%’ in American that would obviously include the students of Ivy League schools, Turchin doesn’t point towards the growing diversity of student bodies at Ivy League schools over the past four decades as being the source of this abundance of aspiring elite. No, Turchin instead points to the ‘wealth pump’ started under Ronald Reagan that fundamentally dismantled the New Deal economy paradigm of shared society wealth. A wealth pump that upended a relatively labor-friendly worker/employer relationship and ensured that almost all of the wealth generated by the US economy flowed to very top. In other words, trick-down economics, with all of the new mega-millionaires and billionaires, has been the underlying factor driving America’s “elite overproduction”. And it’s been going on for so long now, there’s a network of elites now ready to effectively take it all for themselves. And this network runs installed the Supreme Court’s conservative majority:
“I hope that, with all this information, eventually we will make it possible for society to escape this cycle. But why do these end times happen at all? One common theme that we see over and over again, in all of the different routes to crisis, is a condition that we call “elite overproduction”.”
Are the growing number of institutional crises facing the US the result of some sort of human pattern of behavior that’s been manifesting throughout history, over and over like a demented suicidal instinct? Yes, according to the findings of Peter Turchin’s team. In over 200 cases of society collapse studied by Turchin’s team, “elite overproduction” kept predictably happening with predictable results:
But, of course, ‘elite overproduction’ is a somewhat subjective metric inherently tied to the scope of the aspiring elite ambitions. And that brings us to the underlying shift in the US that Turchin sees as fundamentally driving an overproduction of elites: the ‘wealth pump’ created by Reaganomics over the past four decades. The social contract of shared benefits between elite and everyone else that defined the New Deal economy of the post-war period was flipped on its head, with almost all of the economic gains captured by a tiny sliver of the population. The sliver that was already at the top. As Turchin describes, the creation of the ‘wealth pump’ also put in place the ‘iron law of oligarchy’: when elites are allowed to convert their power into wealth with nothing stopping them, they will inevitably do exactly that. And that’s why it’s important to keep in mind that the dynamics Turchin describes — a trend of of fewer and fewer positions of power and influence relatively to the population of ‘aspiring elites’ — is a dynamic being created by an ever greater concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Which makes sense if you think about it: the easier it is for individuals to achieve massive pools of wealth, the fewer positions of power and influence there are overall because it’s just going to be a relative handful of people with almost all the real economic influence. Let that process keep playing out decade after decade and eventually you’ll end up with a country like the modern US which is effectively run by networks of political mega-donors:
And if it’s tempting to viewing this in a ‘elite from both sides’ framework, note Turchin’s idea of the contemporary left-wing elite: Antifa members, which Turchin acknowledges are largely powerless:
Also note Turchin’s interesting assertion regarding a possible solution to the seeming inevitability of warning elites: large complex societies require ‘elites’ simply to function. But these elites don’t actually have to be economic elites who are allowed to use their influence to accrue greater personal wealth. That’s a societal choice and there’s nothing stopping societies from separating the managerial parts of the elites from their accumulating huge wealth and unfettered power. What the US has done to itself has been a choice. A profoundly stupid and greedy choice that threatens the basic integrity of the institutions this society runs on. But it really doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to be prole suckers forever. It’s perhaps the most important aspect of Turchin’s analysis: the collapses of human societies isn’t inevitable. It’s human societies allow for the mass concentrations wealth and power that will inevitably collapse:
So is there any hope that the elites seemingly intent on completely institutional capture and ‘total victory’ over their fellow citizens will pull back from playing out Turchin’s doomsday scenario? Well, note the kinds of scenarios Turchin identified as adequate putting the ‘fear of God’ into the elites and forcing them to restrain themselves before they tore everything apart: the growing very real threat of a communist revolution. That’s what it takes to get the oligarchy to take note of the rest of the populace. Torches and pitchforks:
It’s worth keeping mind the last time there was anything even remotely approaching a ‘torches and pitchforks’ moment: Occupy Wall Street. Which didn’t seem to leave a lasting impression on America’s aspiring elites. In particular, the elites who aspire to more less control all of the wealth, power, and social influence across institutions and society at large. The same elite networks that plotted the Jan 6 insurrection, got away with it, and continue to plot their Schedule F mass institutional purge at the earliest opportunity. Or, who knows, maybe the increasingly radicalized elite actions of the last decade was itself a response to Occupy Wall Street. A plan to go ‘torches and pitchforks’ before the rabble could finally figure out how to do it themselves. Either way, less than a decade later we get the Trumpification of the GOP, the far right capture of the Supreme Court, and then Jan 6, with the GOP’s Ivy League education elites almost entirely adopting the radical faux-populist anti-democratic ‘anti-elite’ politics of the period. It’s Turchins elite factionalism playing out, except in contemporary America the power imbalance is so skewed that the left wing ‘elites’ are comprised of groups like the powerless Antifa. Because America in 2023 is an oligarchy about erupt into factional civil war. It’s an oligarchy that erupted into that war decades ago in response to the New Deal and other progressive victories. An ‘elite civil war’ that was largely won by right-wing billionaires decades ago, with Reagan’s ‘wealth pump’ getting turbo charged in 2017. It’s that history of decades of oligarchs working towards this moment of near total victory, total victory playing out one Supreme Court ruling at a time these days, that points towards one of most depressing aspects of Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling: while Trump’s 2016 victory and subsequent sleazy capture of the Supreme Court did indeed solidify this network’s near total capture of the levers of political and economic power in the US, the institutional sacking is really more like a crowning capstone on an economic sacking that took place a long time ago. The kind of economic sacking that could create a nasty destabilizing aspiring elite supply and demand imbalance.
It happened again. We got another update on the ongoing Schedule F scheming. And another confirmation that the schemes go well beyond just purging the federal government of non-loyalists. The ‘Schedule F+’ society-wide purge long-advocated by Curtis Yarvin is the goal, and there are already plans in place to make it happen. Plans that could be described as a maximalist vision of the unitary executive theory. Yep, remember the ‘Unitary Executive’ theories of the Bush administration? Well, they’re back and reportedly undergirding this new expanded vision of a mass purge that goes far beyond purging the government.
As the following NY Times report describes, the expanded vision of presidential powers being developing by Project 2025 — the rebranded expanded Schedule F plot that is now being directed by the Heritage Foundation, and includes key Schedule F players John McEntee and Russ Vought — now includes the idea that there are no regulatory agencies cannot be established in a manner that leaves them relatively independent of presidential oversight. As such, federal regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission will fall under direct presidential control. That, in turn, means that all of the business regulated by these agencies will also fall under direct presidential regulatory control too. Just imagine the kind of ‘war on work’ that could be waged with those kinds of powers. Every single business in the US would suddenly have to follow the daily whims of a reelected President Trump.
As we’re going to see, the big plans for the use of this expanded presidential power appears to be gutting of federal business regulations. But if you’re assuming these powers will be used in a highly ‘pro-business’ manner, also note that it appears the plans include direct presidential management of the Federal Reserve. As Russ Vought put it, “It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution.” Yep, the US business cycle is set to become highly synchronized with its electoral cycle. It’s one of the many dramatic changes Trump and his Project 2025 allies have in mind. That’s, of course, assuming there are going to still be elections after this is all put in place:
“Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.”
It just keeps growing. As expected. The plan isn’t just a mass purge of the civil service. We’re looking at a maximalist version of unitary executive theory. A vision of the US constitution that enshrines the US president with unchecked powers over all aspects of the executive branch. Including complete power over how the executive branch enforces laws and regulations passed by Congress. In other words, the Schedule F plot is turning into the ultimate deregulation plot. The purge is just a warm up:
And as part of that complete capture and gutting of federal regulations, the independence of federal agencies will end too. Agencies that regulate private business like the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. In other words, this is a huge step towards Curtis Yarvin’s ‘Schedule F+’ society-wide purge that goes far beyond government. Private enterprise will fall under the president’s direct oversight. Just imagine the kind of ‘war on woke’ that will be possible at that point:
And note how even the Federal Reserve’s independence is targeted under these evolving schemes. It’s a reminder that fascism isn’t actually as interested in ‘free-markets’ as corporatists like to claim. It’s about power and always has been:
And, of course, there’s the ongoing Schedule F scheming to strip federal employees of employment protections. Plans that are presumably only going to keep growing given that Trump continues to vow to immediately reinstitute his Schedule F decree:
And, of course, we find key Schedule F operatives John McEntee and Russ Vought playing a leadership role in this whole ongoing, ever growing, effort. The ongoing effort that merged with the Heritage Foundation and was recently renamed ‘Project 2025’. Recall how Oracle is reportedly playing some sort of database-building role for Project 2025. It’s a big project that only seems to keep growing:
Finally, note this ominous warning about how the inevitable legal challenges to this agenda will play out: The regrettable reality is that this is a Supreme Court that appears to be ready to play ball with Project 2025:
Will the Supreme Court surprise the cynics and act as the ultimate ‘check’ in this push to effectively eliminate federal checks and balances? LOL. We’re well past that.
So that’s the latest update on the ever growing Schedule F/Project 2025 plot. And plot designed to enshrine a future President Trump with the kind of unchecked power and craved but also designed to achieve the corporations long-held dream of eliminating virtually all federal regulations. This goes way beyond ‘Trump’.
But let’s also keep in mind that, in making these changes, the stakes associated with winning and losing the White House are only going to explode. Voters won’t be electing a president. They’ll effectively be electing a kind of king-like figure. A figure with the kind of immense powers that can make or break vast economic fortunes. The kind of figure who could potentially implement their own New Deal and utterly crush the kind of economic forces behind Project 2025 and this clear power grab. In other words, future presidents are going to have the kinds of powers that the Powers that Be can’t leave up to elections. Which is a reminder that this ever-evolving power grab is going to have a lot more grabbing to do after Project 2025 becomes a reality.
Is Ron DeSantis’s 2024 run already over? It’s the big question hanging over the Florida governor’s once optimistic campaign that recently found itself nearly tied with long-shot Rivek Ramaswamy at 12% while Trump dominates 48%. And then the persistent reports about top donors abandoning DeSantis campaign. And to top it all off, he’s forced to fend off questions about the surprisingly slavery-positive new Florida educational guidelines that are a product of his signature anti-woke state agenda. An anti-woke agenda that is at the center of his political brand at this point and that his campaign was seemingly ‘leaning into’ when DeSantis defended a bizarre homoerotic attack ad targeting Trump that seemed to portray him as too LGBTQ-friendly. And to top that off, the campaign just had to fire Nate Hochman, a young conservative rising star, for producing a video with fascist imagery including the Sonnenrad.
But putting aside Ron DeSantis’s personal political career, what about those underlying ‘anti-woke’ politics? What does DeSantis’s lack of traction after defining himself as the most ‘anti-woke’ candidate say about the brand of politics he’s now best known for? Because as the following Vice article from back in March reminds us, Ron DeSantis’s politics of anti-wokeism isn’t just a personal branding decision. It’s the manifestation of the deeply ‘anti-woke’ worldview of the conservative mega-donor class. A worldview made manifest through groups like the Claremont Institute. Yes, the same Claremont Institute deeply involved with creating the various justifications and scheming that led up to January 6.
As the article reminds us, DeSantis’s anti-woke crusade in Florida’s colleges has already been heavily outsourced to the Claremont Insitute, with Claremont figures Matthew Spalding and Charles Kesler, and Chris Rufo joining the board of New College to lead the anti-woke institutional purge. In fact, in turns out that the Claremont Institute recently opened up its first even state-level outpost in Florida.
And as the article also reminded us, the Claremont Institute alums in DeSantis’s orbit include the recently fired campaign staffer Nate Hochman. It’s a disturbing reflection of our times that the campaign staffer behind the fascistic campaign video wasn’t just a rising conservative media star. He was a rising institutional star. But these are our times.
There’s another really remarkable detail in this Vice article that shows just how rapidly DeSantis’s political star has fallen in four months: a number of these Claremont Institue figures who have cozied up to DeSantis were willing to cross a line that one does not cross today. That would be crossing Trump. In particular, openly endorsing DeSantis over Trump. And sure, on one level that’s to be expected given that DeSantis has outsourced much of his educational anti-woke purge to Claremont Institute affiliates. But this is still the era of Donald Trump’s GOP. It’s kind of an institutional deathwish in contemporary GOP politics to defy Trump like that. But that’s how high DeSantis’s expectations were just four months ago, at least in the views of these institutional players. Deeply ‘anti-woke’ institutional players who are dedicated to executing the vision of their deeply ‘anti-woke’ mega-donors. Because, again, Ron DeSantis’s anti-woke campaign is much more than just a series of DeSantis’s personal political brand. His brand is the will of reactionary theocratic mega-donors:
“The think tank’s scholars played a crucial role in normalizing former President Donald Trump, shaping his administration and aiding his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss—but in DeSantis they appear to have found a better match: an actual conservative ideologue who sees things in the same existential terms they do, but has a level of competence that Trump sorely lacked.”
The Claremont Institute was clearly more than willing to work with Donald Trump to accomplish their shared goals. But they never loved Trump. They love Ron DeSantis. And aren’t afraid to say it, which itself is rather remarkable given Trump’s tendency to viciously attack Republicans who don’t demonstrate complete loyalty. It really was as if the Claremont Institute was fully expecting Ron DeSantis to win the GOP primary when they made all these comments to Vice back in March. But as we can also see, it’s clear the Claremont Institute was fully behind DeSantis’s strategy of winning the primary by furiously waging a ‘war on woke’ too. DeSantis’s political strategy for winning the GOP nomination was the Claremont Institute’s strategy too:
And notice how the Claremont Institute’s commitment to DeSantis is so deep that the group set up its first state-level outpost in the its four-decade history in Florida. So when we see Claremont Institute affiliates flocking to various DeSantis appointments as he carries out his anti-woke purge, it’s important to keep in mind that the Claremont Institute is literally setting up infrastructure and providing manpower in support of DeSantis’s purge. It’s a joint effort:
And don’t forget that none other than Christopher Rufo — the strategic architect behind the ‘war on woke’ back when it was the ‘war on CRT’ — served as a Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow. So when we see Rufo taking a direct role in DeSanti’s anti-woke purge of New College along with other Claremont Institute figures like Charles Kesler, it’s another big hint as to why the Claremont Institute is willing to openly endorse DeSantis in over Trump. DeSantis is more or less operating from the Claremont Institute’s playbook. A playbook they are now directly writing as the appointees executing DeSantis’s war on woke:
Finally, note who else happens to be a former Claremont Institute fellow to join the DeSantis 2024 campaign: Nate Hochman, the DeSantis staffer fired this week after he was outed as the creator of a campaign video filled with fascist imagery, including an ending that has an image of DeSantis with a Sonnenrad behind him and soldiers marching. Hochman wasn’t just a closet Nazi conservative rising star. He was also a closet-Nazi Claremont Institute member who openly palled around with Nick Fuentes. In other words, he was kind of already an open Nazi. And then Ron DeSantis hired him:
So is Ron DeSantis campaign’s strategy finally backfiring? The strategy of distinguishing himself from the rest of the primary pack with thinly-veiled fascist messages designed to frame his anti-woke brand as part of some sort of coming societal fascist purge just didn’t stick? Let’s hope so. But don’t kid yourself. The fascists ultimately behind that video are mega-donor-funded institutional fascists like Nate Hochman. Their political relevance and power doesn’t depend on primary voter. Ron DeSantis’s 2024 bid may or may not implode. Time will tell. But the institutional fascism he’s channeling and placating with his anti-woke brand of politics is very patient and has plans that go well past Ron DeSantis’s political shelf life.
It was just a technical quibble, really. A misunderstanding at worst. The kind of minor infraction, if an infraction at all, that doesn’t normally face any sort of criminal prosecution. If Trump violated anything, it was merely a technical violation of constitutional procedures. No criminal violations happened, especially since Trump genuinely believed the election was stolen. A belief he continues to hold. A belief that fundamentally justified his actions. That was the preview we got from Donald Trump’s lawyer, John Lauro, in response to last week’s criminal indictment over Trump’s attempts to illegally overturn the election. As such, argued Lauro, the indictment is a violation of Trump’s First Amendment rights to express that opinion that the election was stolen.
Keep in mind that this ‘free speech’ framing came at the same time the Trump campaign is defending threatening Truth Social posts — like ““IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”” — as free speech too. Trump is doubling down on escalation. Which is a hint that escalating the situation is also going to be part of the defense strategy.
But that wasn’t the only preview we got this week. The Claremont Institute made the remarkable decision to release an interview of institute fellow John Eastman, the figure who arguably lead the way in crafting the legal theories justifying extraordinary actions rejecting state electors. An interview that was actually held before Jack Smith’s indictment. But what makes its release so remarkable is what Eastman openly admits in the interview: the Trump administration really was engaged in what amount to revolutionary actions. Revolutionary actions that he framed as being in keeping with same underlying fight for freedom and democracy that animated the Founding Fathers’ 1776 Declaration of Independence. A fight against a tyrannical government that every populace inherently possesses.
Keep in mind that Trump was in fact in charge of the executive branch of the federal government at the time of all these events, which raises the question as to who exactly is the source of the tyranny in Eastman’s view? Well, as he put it in his interview, the modern day left wing is the source of the tyranny. Revolutionary actions against ‘the left’ are now justified in John Eastman’s mind. He laid it all out in an interview just released by the Claremont Institute. This is a good time to recall how the Claremont Institute appears to be the institutional force behind much of Ron DeSantis’s increasingly radical ‘anti-woke’ brand of politics, with Claremont Institute fellows like Christopher Rufo playing a direct role in the progressive purge of New College. A New College purge that serves as a warning that the ongoing Schedule F scheming (rebranded ‘Project 2025’) goes well beyond the a purge of the federal workforce of left-wing and includes using the force of government to trigger a broader broader private sector purge that impacts corporation and private institutions.
So given that the Claremont Institute decided to release this interview — an interview of one of the unindicted co-conspirators in Trump’s case, conducted by Claremont’s Chairman Tom Klingenstein — just days after Jack Smith’s indictment where Eastman is more or less openly endorsing and retroactively justifying not just the scheming to overturn the election but the full blown use of revolutionary force, at the same time Trump’s legal team is signalling a legally strategy that centers around ‘Trump thought the election was stolen and still thinks that’, we have to ask whether or not the prosecution of Donald Trump is poised to be turned into the almost-open call for the next insurrection. Because they already seem to have adopted a ‘right wing insurrections are justifiable these days given all the Democratic cheating’ legal defense:
“Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd about Trump’s alleged pressure campaign to get former Vice President Mike Pence to reverse the election, Lauro claimed that Trump and Pence had merely disagreed over whether a vice president could constitutionally take actions that could lead to a presidential election’s being overturned.”
It was merely a technical disagreement over whether or not Mike Pence had the constitutional authority to reject electoral votes. Nothing criminal about it. That was the argument trotted out by Trump’s attorney John Lauro, in a preview of Trump defense. A preview that indicates that his defense is going to hedge on the assertion that Trump truly believed the election was stolen and truly believe that Mike Pence had the authority to address it. That’s the legal spin Trump’s team is going with. It was all just an honest disagreement:
Of course, as none other than Bill Barr pointed out, the charges aren’t that Trump had a misunderstanding of the Constitution’s technical details. The charges are that he engaged in a flat out deceptive scheme to negate the votes that had been validly certified by the states. That’s a crime that goes way beyond just speech:
And that scheming that Barr referred brings us to the ‘free speech’ Trump was apparently engaging in when he was repeatedly telling Pence that Pence had the authority to reject electoral votes. But, of course, Trump wasn’t only telling Pence that Pence had this authority. He was telling his supporters Pence had this power too. Including right before the insurrection, when Trump told the crowd at the Ellipse that Pence had these powers and that will be “very disappointed” with Pence if he doesn’t use those powers. It underscores how the ‘free speech’ defense operates as both a shield for the behind-the-scenes scheming but also the out-in-the-open fomenting:
So with ‘free speech’ apparently the slated as the overarching theme of Trump’s legal defense, it’s worth noting the absolutely incredible comments made by Claremont Institute lawyer John Eastman about his own thoughts on the legality of Trump’s post-election activities. Well, not just Trump’s actions. Eastman was, of course, one of the central figures working on the legal theories the whole scheme was based on. He was very much defending himself too, even if he’s merely an unindicted co-conspirator at this point. A defense that amounted to, ‘yes, we were trying to overthrow the government, in keeping with the proud American tradition of opposing tyranny’:
“January 6th conspirators have spent more than two years claiming either that nothing really happened at all in the weeks leading up to January 6th or that it was just a peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just making a good faith effort to follow the legal process. Eastman cuts through all of this and makes clear they were trying to overthrow (“abolish”) the government; they were justified in doing so; and the warrant for their actions is none other than the Declaration of Independence itself.”
Yes, it was an insurrection, but a legal insurrection grounded in the Declaration of Independence. That was more or less the argument laid out by John Eastman, who was arguably the key legal architect behind the scheme to overturn the election results. It was in effect a second Declaration of Independence, declared in response to the apparent intolerable abuses of government power. Deep state power, implicitly, since Trump was obviously in control of the executive branch.
It points to how this legal theory synergizes with the ongoing Schedule F scheme to purge the government of any non-MAGA loyalists. The idea being that if a president can’t get the entire executive branch to bend to their will, no matter how illegal that will may be, it represents a rebellious deep state and an intolerable abuse of power that, in turn, justify a new ‘Declaration of Independence’ with all the insurrectionary activity that may entail:
And as Josh Marshall points out, while the US’s civic fabric is stitched together, in part, with the claims and principles found in the Declaration of Independence which do indeed include an inherent right for a populace to overthrow a tyrannical government, the actual constitutional law is also quite clear that the government has a right to quell an insurrection. Including the implicit right to punish those who engage in an insurrection for treason. So, yes, in a sense, the Trump administration had an implicit right to wage an insurrection. The same right any group has to do so if it genuinely feels it’s being oppressed and living under tyranny. But that’s paired with the right of the government to suppress an insurrection and punish the perpetrators with treason. You can’t claim one without the other. Well, you can claim the right to an insurrection without the threat of facing an repercussions should that insurrection fail, as John Eastman appears to be doing. Free speech and all. But it’s still a nonsense claim:
So what exactly was the tyranny that Eastman was citing as a justification for what he admits was a revolution? Well, as the following describes, beyond claims that the election was stolen, Eastman repeatedly seemed to insinuate in his interview with the Claremont Institute’s Board of Directors Tom Klingenstein that “the modern left” poses a kind of existential threat to America with its apparent attempts to “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles.” In other words, this wasn’t a ‘declaration of independence’ declared simply in response to an election stolen by deep state bureaucrats. It was intended to a ‘declaration of independence’ from ‘the left’, which gives some big clues as to the plans for Trump’s second term. Plans that would presumably look a lot like the ongoing Schedule F scheme to purge the government, and eventually every major institution, of anyone still willing to identify with ‘the left’:
“Eastman made the stunning remarks, which appear to repeat the suggestion that overthrowing the government is a legitimate means to stop what Eastman described as “the modern left wing,” in the last of a series of interviews with Klingenstein. Part one, published in June, addresses Eastman’s belief that the election was stolen. Part two covers what Eastman saw as the legal remedy, while part three asks, as Klingenstein put it, “should you and the president have pursued that legal remedy?””
Yes, it was “the modern left wing” that needed to be overthrown. The oppressive modern left wing that presents an “existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world.” A left wing that is attempting to to “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles.” That’s how Eastman decided to frame the insurrection: as a second declaration of independence, this time independence from ‘the modern left wing’ which has been threatening the very idea of democracy with its complete repudiation of nation’s founding principles:
Revolutionary force was justifiable in 2020 according to John Eastman. Which obviously means it’s still justifiable, right? It’s the kind of legal defense that many will find offensive. And yet it’s hard to ignore how this defense serves as a call for offensive action in the form of the next insurrection. An insurrection presumably slated for 2024 should Trump not win the election outright.
And offensive action that will then translate into the ‘Schedule F+’ mass purges that they also keep getting warning is being planned. It’s part of why, as the trial of Donald Trump plays out, the ever-developing Schedule F/Project 2025 is potentially going to increasingly become part of the story. Because we appear to be looking at a legal defense for the upcoming 2024 insurrection as well as the subsequent mass purges after it succeeds.
It’s also presumably all a preemptive legal defense for any jailbreaks, should that become necessary.
The mug shots are trickling in. The while the lighting wasn’t particularly great for John Eastman’s mug shot at the Fulton County jail during his arraigned over the latest round of Jan 6‑related indictments, there’s still something remarkable in seeing the people who actually planned and organized the Jan 6 plot actually get booked at all in the first place. This isn’t how it normally works in modern America.
Except, of course, that’s how justice does actually continue to work for the vast majority of the people who were involved with the January 6 scheming. We’re still only seeing the most prominent figures face any sort of prosecution. It’s progress, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the scale of that plot. A LOT of very powerful people were keenly interested in seeing Trump remain in office through any means necessary.
And that brings us to a very interesting, and timely, report in The Guardian about one of those ‘plot-adjacent’ figures. A figure who we’ve already seen pop in in connection to Jan 6 reporting and who isn’t hiding his desire to see something much bigger than Jan 6 in the future: Charles Haywood.
As we’ve seen, Haywood was one of the figures who showed in in connection with one of the more incriminating stories about what the Claremont Institute was up to during this period. That would be the “79 Days to Inauguration” report jointly prepared by the Claremont Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s (TPPF) in mid-October 2020. A report that gamed out different scenarios for how the 2020 election might play out, including a scenario without a clear victory that involved large street protests by ‘antifa’ and other left-wing groups trying to disrupt the certification of the vote on Jan 6, and a resulting mass crackdown on ‘the left’ by the government in response. A response that included deputizing groups like the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters so they could assist in the leftwing crackdown. Haywood’s presence in this milieu was notable since he was known for calling for an “American Caesar”. It was basically a right-wing fascist crackdown fantasy report. Jointly produced by the Claremont Institute and the TPPF. With Charles Haywood playing a role, for some reason.
But also recall how it was Kevin Roberts of the TPPF who was specifically participating in this report. As we saw, Roberts — a member of the Council for National Policy (CNP) — went on to become the president of the Heritage Foundation. And as we’ve also seen, the Heritage Foundation’s interest in these kinds of ‘revolutionary’ agendas hasn’t exactly dissipated. In fact, it was back in April when Roberts announced that Heritage was leading “Project 2025”, the newly rebranded version of the ongoing “Schedule F” plot. A plot that goes well beyond purging the federal government of non-MAGA-loyalists and includes private institutional purges done under government pressure.
So the now-president of the Heritage Foundation was participating in this disturbing exercise with the Claremont Institute and Charles “American Caesar” Haywood weeks before the 2020 election. That’s all part of the context of the following report about Haywood’s other club. A private club that he’s created with a private membership list and a simple goal: getting ready for the collapse of the US government. Or rather, a collapse of a central authority.
A collapse of a central authority that apparently includes Haywood waging an armed conflict against the US federal government. Or as Haywood put it, he would like to emerge as a “warlord” who will lead an “armed patronage network” or “APN”, defined as an “organizing device in conditions where central authority has broken down” in which the warlord’s responsibility is “the short- and long-term protection, military and otherwise, of those who recognize his authority and act, in part, at his behest”. Haywood adds that the “possibilities involving violence” that APNs might face include “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government, or some subset or remnant of it”.
How did an open wannabe warlord end up as one of the participants in that “79 Days to Inauguration” report? Well, he’s quite simply very chummy with the Claremont Institute. In fact, it appears that the ‘non-profit’ Haywood had created dedicated to a ‘national rebirth’ is both a donor to the Claremont Institute and recipient of Claremont Institute money.
So while it’s great to see figures like John Eastman actually booked for fomenting an insurrection, it’s important to keep in mind that it really does appear that a much larger network of very wealthy and powerful figures were fully behind that effort to subvert the election through any means necessary. And, importantly, they had plans for the national chaos and potential civil war that could have erupted had they succeeded. And presumably still have those plans, based on Charles Haywood’s ongoing warlord dreams:
“Heidi Beirich is co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism and an expert of the far right. She characterized the rhetoric on the website as “palingenetic ultranationalism”, a feature of fascism that proposes a revolution as a means of national rebirth.”
Palingenetic ultranationalism. Promises of a ‘national rebirth’. With Charles Haywood — the founder of the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR) — playing a Caesar-like role. It’s a brand of fascism that has obvious popoular appeal these days. That is, after all, kind of the ideological core of the whole ‘MAGA’ brand. A brand that continues to dominate and define contemporary conservative politics.
But unlike much of the rest of the ‘MAGA’-stye politics of this time filled with populist fervor and appeals to the downtrodden everyman, the SACR is an overtly elitist invitation-only organization with a private membership list. And based on the membership we can infer, it appears to be a private club of affluent professionals:
And Charles Haywood isn’t waging his fascist crusade on his own. He’s partnering with apparently like-minded groups. Like the Claremont Institute. As we’ve seen, Haywood was one of the figures working with the now-indicted John Eastman in developing the “79 Days Report” in 2020, where scenarios involving mass political violence that prevented the certification of the vote on January 6 were gamed out. Other participants in this ‘exercise’ included Kevin Roberts, now the head of the Heritage Foundation. Yes, in the months before the 2020 election, Charles Haywood was collaborating with these mainstream conservative institutions and figures in gaming out Jan 6‑like scenarios:
And note that it’s not just that Haywood founded the SACR and also happens to work with the Claremont Institute. The relationship is deeper, with some sort of ‘mutually supportive relationship’ between the Claremont Institute and SACR involve mutual donations. Beyond raising questions about the nature of the relationship between these two groups, the mutual donations also raise some rather interesting questions about what kind of dark money laundering is going on? Why the mutual donations on the same years:
And, finally, we get to the overt calls for a period of ‘warlordism’ as part of this palingenetic ultranationalistic rebirth. As Haywood puts it, he’s ready to serve as the “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network” that will be serve as an “organizing device in conditions where central authority has broken down”, including “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government, or some subset or remnant of it.” He’s not mincing words here:
It sure sounds like he’s still actively building some sort of doomsday “APN” headquarters. Is that happening? Is he still preparing to house loyal “shooters” to protect his compound during the anticipated civil war?
And how has the booking of John Eastman impacted these plans? Are the ongoing Jan 6 prosecutions slowing down Haywood’s ‘American warlord’ plans? Or speeding them up in anticipation for the next election?
It might be theocratic, but it’s ‘pro-worker’ too. At least that’s the apparent intended spin planned from the still developing “Project 2025” rebranded version of the Schedule F plot. Yes, we got a new Project 2025 update. In one sense, it’s a surprisingly detailed update in the form of a book published by the group laying out its planned agenda. The book itself was actually published months ago. Surprising, in part, because it doesn’t really hide the theocratic inspiration for the document. It’s right there in the language, with references to Americas Judeo-Christian foundations and alarmist cries about left-wing plots to attack christian institutions. And that theocratic language and agenda is getting noticed. The fact that Project 2025 is all heavily orchestrated by Council for National Policy (CNP) members remains unacknowledged. But at least the CNP’s theocracy is getting noticed.
Much of the theocratic agenda is focused on what we should expect at this point. Some with the kind of ‘populism’ that may not sell easily. For example, in the Forward written by Heritage Foundation President (and CNP member) Kevin Roberts, Roberts conflate pornography with the ‘transgender ideology and the sexualization of children’. He goes on to call for the outlawing of all pornography and jailing of those who produce it. Educators and librarians who ‘purvey’ it should be registered as sex offenders. As Roberts puts it in the Forward:
Banning all pornography. That’s not exactly popular. Unless you’re a theocrat. And here we’re seeing it spun as part of ‘protecting the children from the trans pedo threat’. Project 2025 is as much about giving this agenda an image makeover as it is about purging the government and society of ‘the left’. An image makeover in the form of a righteous purge saving the public from a diabolical left-wing plot to subvert families and destroy society. It’s not theocracy. It’s salvation. Or as Roberts puts it:
Every threat to family stability must be confronted. That’s pretty expansive. So we shouldn’t be surprised to find that Roberts takes a similarly expansive view when it comes to the politics of abortion and calling for the next president to pass whatever federal abortion ban congress is willing to allow:
This is a good time to recall how Heritage’s Vice President of Domestic Policy, Roger Severino, declaring last October that he wants to see “heartbeat or better for the next presidential candidate that is conservative.”, which is effectively a call for a 6‑weeks (or less) national abortion ban from the next GOP candidate. Severino was effectively speaking for the Heritage Foundation in making that statement. Also recall how Severino’s wife, Carrie Severino, is a CNP member too. He’s effectively married into the group at this point. And while Roberts was as explicit about those goals in the above passage, he was pretty clear the policy was ‘was many abortion restrictions as they can managed to pass into law’. That’s the Project 2025 platform on abortion. A maximalist position, in keeping with the project’s theocratic CNP roots.
And then there’s the rather interesting ‘populist’ theocracy angle we find in Chapter 18 the Project 2025 book. It’s the chapter on the Department of Labor, authored by conservative lawyer Jonathan Berry. On top of a slew of predictable union-busting proposals, the chapter contains a number of ‘pro-family’ labor proposals like protecting the Sabbath by mandating that time and a half be paid on Sundays. The ostensible idea is to discourage employment on Sundays so more people will go to church.
As we’re going to see, Berry actually borrowed a number of his ideas from American Compass, a group founded by conservative economist Oren Cass, and even thanks Cass in a footnote for all his contributions to the chapter. Faux populism appears to be part of Cass’s own agent, having started American Compass with the goal of moving conservatism away from libertarianism and toward a more ‘communitarian conservatism’. It’s the kind of ‘new conservatism’ that has obvious potential synergy with Project 2025, and sure enough there it is in their book.
And that all brings us to another ‘feature’ of Project 2025 and the CNP’s upcoming purge plans: Oren Cass has another big idea that he’s been promoting to Republicans and it appears to have some very important fans. Ideas about how the US can fight Chinese influence over US companies. Especially Hollywood. Cass recently called for congressional show trials for America’s CEOs where they can make clear to everyone what they think of China. The idea is to have congress — specifically, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party that was formed in January — subpoena CEOs to come to the special hearings and explain their views and policies on China and the CCP. As Cass put it, the idea is to transform the committee into a platform where those who are honest “earn widespread praise” and those who stay silent or lie would face “higher reputational costs.” Business leaders would be asked or subpoenaed to testify under oath about their experiences with the CCP and what they really think about China. Congressional testimonies under oath about what you really think about the Chinese government.
And not just one hearing. Lots of them. “We’re going to have a Hollywood hearing. We’re going to have a sports hearing. We’re going to have a finance hearing. And we’re going to kind of move our way consistently through different sectors,” Cass told Reason Magazine in a July interview we’re going to look at below. “The only peril you’re in is if you have really dumb and indefensible ideas, which is exactly how a democracy is supposed to work,” he claimed. “It’s not like some kind of witch hunt project to try to embarrass people. It’s, in a sense, quite the opposite. All you have to do to have a triumphant appearance is show up and say what you think.” LOL, yes, this is all the opposite of a witch hunt, according to Cass.
That’s Cass’s big plan, and it sounds like the current chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wis.), is on tentatively board, having issued a warning back in May that companies should be prepared to defend their policies regarding China.
So if you were wondering if the upcoming Project 2025 theocratic purge was going to include McCarthy-style hysterical anti-communist witch hunts, the answer is probably yeah, those are coming. At least when it comes to China. The anti-China show trials may not be formally part of Project 2025 but it would presumably be all happening while the rest of Project 2025 is going on. One big planned purge. And there’s no reason to assume so show trials would be limited to China. It’s a template that could be applied to all sorts of topics. McCarthy-style show trials over China and maybe more of a Salem witch trial themed even for the LGBTQ/trans kid issues. The scripts write themselves at this point. A point where the theocratic far right that has been quietly accruing power for decades is finally ready to openly flex those muscles its been building and bend society to its will. For the children, of course:
“However, the plan’s theocratic elements have gone unscrutinized.”
Yeah, like virtually all the of the CNP’s projects, the theocratic element has gone unscrutinized. In part because any mention of the CNP’s role in these matter is almost always glossed over or ignored entirely. Despite all the reminders that this is a CNP-guided agenda with the ultimate goal of making the CNP’s theocratic agenda law, like the fact that Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts is a member of the CNP, along with Roger Severino’s wife Carrie Severino. Finding out that Project 2025 has theocratic agenda behind is kind of like discovering that water is wet at this point. So it should come as no surprise to discover that the newly published Project 2025 policy book advocates for creating a legal distinction between “religious” and “nonreligious” parts of the law. Conflating religious doctrine with the law is a part of the long-term agenda:
But it’s in the chapter on the U.S. Department of Labor, authored by Jonathan Berry, where we find this very interesting early indication of how this theocratic agenda is going to be sold to the broader public: Berry called for paid time and a half specifically on Sundays, ostensibly to discourage employment on Sundays and more people going to church. It’s like a sugar-coated first step towards reorientation US towards specially biblically-based laws:
A formal governmental embrace of the Sabbath spun as ‘pro-God and pro-worker.’ That’s the spin on the Project 2025 union-busting labor agenda that Jonathan Berry appears to have worked out. Spin that, as the following Mother Jones article points out, Berry appears to have borrowed from a particular source: American Compass, a think-tank formed in 2020 by conservative economist Oren Cass, with a goal of reorienting the GOP away from libertarianism and toward a more communitarian conservatism. A supposedly more worker friendly communitarian conservatism. So when we find someone like Cass — a figure already pushing a kind of ‘kinder, gentler’ communitarian conservatism political brand — behind the Project 2025 labor proposal, it’s a hint that we should probably expect a broader ‘anti-libertarian/pro-communities-of-faith’ patina used in the selling of this theocratic agenda:
“If Donald Trump wins the White House in 2024, loyalists have written a battle plan for how to change labor laws and regulations: make it harder for workers to form unions, make it easier for companies to classify employees as independent contractors, and ban the government from collecting race-based employment data in the name of stopping anti-discrimination lawsuits. These policies would be combined with a grab bag of culture war items—like a push for companies to close on the Sabbath—so that Republicans could portray themselves as a traditionalist, but still pro-worker alternative to Democrats.”
Culture war to cover for the oligarchic power grab. It’s not a new strategy. But with the proposal to push companies to close on the Sabbath, we’re seeing how the GOP’s long-standing reliance on conservative Christian-themed culture war topics is being retooled for the planned Project 2025 political blitzkrieg. Or as Paul Dans puts it, “We are not tinkering at the edges. We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces.” Spinning theocracy as ‘pro-worker’ is part of that battle plan:
Yes, it’s going to be a ‘pro-labor’ battle plan that focuses declaring enemies of a “massive administrative state” that is imposing a left-wing agenda that favors “human resources bureaucracies, climate-change activists, and union bosses” over ordinary workers. And also busts unions:
And then we get to the figure who has inspired many of these ‘pro-labor’ proposals: Oren Cass, founder of American Compass. Berry even thanks Cass in a footnote (at the bottom of page 36) of his Project 2025 chapter on labor:
So the founder of American Compass — a group set up to reorient the Republican party away from libertarianism and toward a more communitarian conservatism — is the inspiration for at least part of the Project 2025 agenda. It’s the kind of detail that raises a broader question given: is Project 2025 intended to purge the Republican Party of its non-theocratic libertarian wing too? It’s clearly a very ambitious project. But is it that ambitious? It’s the kind of question that underscores the often contradictory relationship between libertarians and authoritarianism.
And that brings us to the following excerpt from a rather interesting Reason Magazine opinion piece published back in July. A piece criticizing another big plan Oren Cass has in mind with a distinctly non-libertarian bent. A battle plan to wage war on China’s influence over US companies. In particular, influence over Hollywood. What’s the big plan? McCarthy-style congressional hearings, powered by subpoenas. The idea being that US CEO will be subpoenaed to appear before Congress and explain their policies towards China, with a focus on public ridicule for the CEOs who don’t give an adequately anti-China stance. Or as Cass put it, a solution to “re-normalize free speech,” is to “raise the reputational stakes by creating a high-profile forum that embarrasses people who toe the CCP line.” New McCarthy Hearings. That’s Cass’s big plan.
And while we haven’t yet heard about Hollywood-style congressional hearings as part of the Project 2025 agenda, it’s hard to ignore the obvious synergy. Project 2025 is all about creating a kind of systemic shock to both government and society. To purge certain elements out of polite society. An agenda that almost screams for congressional show trials. So with Cass already influence Project 2025’s big plans, we have to ask: are those big plans going to include congressional show trials too?:
“The consistent self-censorship U.S. companies and public figures engage in to appease an authoritarian regime led Oren Cass, founder and executive director of the conservative think tank American Compass, to argue that Congress should intervene. Cass sees China’s economic influence as undermining the American tradition of free speech.”
A government anti-self-censorship mandate. That appears to be what Cass is calling for under a slogan of ‘protecting free speech.’ Get subpoenaed, trash China, or get trashed yourself. That’s the plan Cass is pitching. A plan that Rep. Mike Gallagher, head of the newly formed House Select Committee on the CCP, hinted CEOs should prepare for back in May:
“My goal is not to have some sort of bomb-throwing viral moment.” LOL! That’s about as believable as Cass’s denials that this is all the opposite of a witch hunt.
While the question of “how long before the first ‘have you no shame?’ moment?” looms large, it’s really more a question of how many ‘have you no shame?’ moments are we in store for and will they have any effect? This is an era where political shamelessness and gaslighting continue to animate the masses, the . And that’s a big part of what what makes these open plans so ominous. It’s not just that the CNP and its allies are openly planning a big spectacle to sell the public on their coming purge. It’s also the giant audience that can’t get enough spectacle. The more dangerously shameless, the better. Fascist shameless spectacle all for God’s greater glory and the creation of a pious God-fearing nation, of course.
It’s pretty obvious that Oren Cass’s American Compass is running some sort of astroturfing scam in its push for the creation of a new ‘pro-worker’ Republican labor policy. But just how big of a scam is this, really? That’s the question raised in the following set of articles describing not only the creation of Cass’s American Compass but many of its fellow travelers too. Fellow travelers in what is being portrayed as some sort of allies in a deepening ideological struggle inside the Republican Party. A struggle between the old neoliberals and a ‘kinder, gentler’ New Right that isn’t so afraid of using government intervention to improve the lot of working class.
Fellow travelers that just happen to be many of the very same Council for National Policy (CNP)-backed institutions created post-2020 as part of the ongoing Schedule F/Project 2025 plot to blow up society. Institutions like the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), American Moment, and the Center for Renewing America (CRA). Along with the Claremont Institute. As The Economist described it last year, American Compass is working to turn these ‘New Right’ ideologies into policy.
And while all of this is more or less what we should expect at this point, there’s a very important twist. Because it appears that these groups all have another thing in common: They’ve been funded by two entities generally though of ‘progressive’. The Hewlett Foundation and the Omidyar Network.
Yes, it appears that Pierre Omidyar’s ‘charity’ has been funding a number of these ‘New Right’ entities in recent years. The spooked up oligarch is funding this far right national takeover plot. A plot that is increasingly adopting a ‘progressive’ veneer. Surprise!
Keep in mind that the Omidyar Network announced a vision for a ‘new version of capitalism’ in September of 2020, so it appears that the new vision is now being developed in coordination with the CNP and the GOP.
Beyond that, it sounds like figures like Senators Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and even Ted Cruz are getting in on the ‘pro-labor’ act, echoing the kind of rhetoric Cass’s American Compass has been putting out about the need to help American labor. Not through empowering labor unions, mind you. As we’ll see when we take a look at the kind of proposals Cass is putting forward, there’s a variety of alternative labor relation models he’s open to. For example, there’s the “Ghent System” used in Europe where the labor unions themselves provide social-safety-net services for members, instead of the government. Cass sees this as a nice free-market alternative to “Medicare-for-all”. Another idea Cass suggested was the kind of “sectoral bargaining” seen in places like France where the unions are negotiating wages for union and non-union members alike for a given industry. Both interesting proposals on their own.
But as Cass then asserts:
And that right there gives it away: it’s a plan to promise something better than labor unions...but only AFTER we get rid of the current system.
So with the allegedly progressive Omidyar Network financing both Cass’s American Compass AND a number of Schedule F/Project 2025 entities still openly working on a mass purge of American government and society at the earliest opportunity, try not to be surprised if this upcoming plot ends up getting a lot of “well, maybe it’s not so bad since the Omidyar Network supports it?” press when this all plays out.
Ok, first, here’s an August 2021 National Review piece raising conservative alarms over Cass’s American Compass and its surprisingly ‘progressive’ financial backers. Now, as we’ll see, it’s really more of a cause of right-wing celebration if we look closely at what’s going on here. Because it’s pretty obvious that the Omidyar Network is now working to give progressive cover for Oren Cass’s big plans for a ‘pro-worker’ conservative platform:
“But peeking behind the curtain of American Compass’s funding raises concerns as to what that compass holds as its north. Two major liberal funding networks, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Omidyar Network, have provided major grants to American Compass as part of projects to “reimagine” capitalism. The foundation funders’ rhetoric and the fellow travelers they fund alongside American Compass raise questions about what these foundations are hoping to achieve with their funding.”
A ‘reimagining’ of capitalism. That’s how the National Review decided to characterize the goal of American Compass back in 2021, just a year after the think tank’s founding. And as this piece insinuated, it’s a decidedly non-conservative vision for the future of capitalism, citing the generous donations from ostensibly ‘left-wing’ institutions like the Omidyar Network and Hewlett Foundation. Strange bedfellows indeed. Or at least that’s the spin:
And note the evidence for the supposed sudden left-wing shift of American Compass founder Oren Cass: Case one called for worker cooperatives that not only replace unions but also replace government social-safety-net programs. A plan to gut unions and social security at the same time. But now, we’re told, Cass has completely flipped and endorsed the kind of “sectoral bargain” found in France:
So did Cass, fellow of the libertarian Manhattan Institute until he suddenly quit in 2019 and started American Compass, experience some sort of ideological epiphany? What’s going on here?
Well, to get a better idea of what Cass is actually pushing, let’s take a closer look at that opinion piece Cass authored back in April of 2021 where he laid out the case for “sectoral bargaining” or having labor unions provide safety-net functions instead of the government. As we’re going to see, while Cass did indeed make those suggestions, the reforms themselves weren’t his top objective. Instead, it was the dismantling of existing labor laws that were the top objective, ostensibly so new ‘innovations’ in labor relations can be experimented with. In other words, we’re looking at the contours of a major bait-and-switch gambit:
“The most important first step to finding a better system is simply allowing innovation to occur. Currently, the National Labor Relations Act bars formal cooperation between management and workers, such as works councils, outside the confines of traditional unions; Congress should revise the law to eliminate that provision. Likewise, the NLRA is famously aggressive in preempting states from departing from its national framework, while antitrust law makes industry coordination suspect, and employment law leaves too few issues open for the parties to resolve. Congress should create exemptions.”
Yep, as Oren Cass lays out, the particulars of which labor ‘reform’ gets adopted isn’t the most important part of this plan. The most important part is “simply allowing innovation to occur”. Which is another way is saying existing labor laws need to be dismantled. What will be built in their place? Who knows? Maybe it will be a “Ghent System” where the union assume responsibility for healthcare benefit. Or perhaps sectoral bargaining could be used. Either way, the important part is that the current system get dismantled first:
And how does Cass envision the replacement of US labor laws will actually happen? Well, a single governor could set it in motion. But not without some ‘help’ in the form of new labor laws from congress and state legislatures. It’s like a plan to just dismantle the existing system and see what happens:
So can we really expect meaningful labor reform to start on the right? Well, if meaningful labor reform is defined as the kind of legislation that conservative politicians like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio support, sure, that could happen. Because as the following article describes, those are some of Cass’s big allies in congress on his quest to devise a ‘post-neo-liberal’ strain of economics. Allies with long track records of anti-labor positions. It’s a reminder that virtually all of the figures leading this ‘pro-labor’ movement were ardently anti-labor until this song and dance got underway:
“It’s easy to attribute these moves to the Trumpification of the GOP — and that is part of the explanation. But there’s more to it than that. While most of the ink spilled on the divides within the contemporary Republican Party focuses on its pro-Trump and anti-Trump wings, a stark ideological divide on economic issues is also emerging over how to chart a post-Trump future for the GOP.”
A a stark ideological divide on economic issues. A stark ideological divide on economic issues with American Compass leading the way on the creation of this ‘pro-worker’ faction of the Republican Party. A faction that allegedly includes figures like Josh Hawley, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio, with politicians like Nikki Haley on the other side of this ideological divide. That the narrative we were seeing get pushed over two years ago. The American Compass agenda isn’t simply work of Oren Cass. Instead, he’s speaking for this ‘pro-Trump’ faction of elected officials. That’s the utterly absurd narrative about the American Compass agenda that was already being developed back in August of 2021:
And notice how Cass’s critics characterize his work: They also cast his agenda as part of some sort of Trumpian conservative re-think on economics. A cynical re-think, perhaps, but one still Trumpian in its essence. Cass, in turn, declared Nikki Haley to be his chief adversary in this ideological fight. It’s like pro-wrestling fake fighting theatrics for Republican politics:
Finally, note the commentary from “political scientist Richard Hanania” in this August 2021 article. This was, of course, two years before Hanania’s earlier life as an anonymous Nazi blogger was exposed. It’s another reminder of the layers of deception often at work when we’re talking about the movers and shakers in America’s political class:
But as we’re going to see, it’s not just senators like Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio who are now portrayed as fellow travelers of Cass and his ‘kinder, gentler’ form of conservatism. The same network of CNP-backed entities that we’ve seen behind the Schedule F/Project 2025 plot — The America First Policy Institute, the Center for Renewing America, American Moment, and the Claremont Institute — are all seen as fellow ‘New Right’ entities working in concert to develop this new ‘populist’ form of conservatism. With American Compass tasked with turning those ideas into policies. And the Omidyar Network and Hewlett Foundation helping to finance it all. Yes, it appears that the Omidyar Network and Hewlett Foundation aren’t just financing American Compass. Groups like American Moment are getting Omidyar and Hewlett funding too. That was how The Economist described this constellation of ‘New Right’ entities in the following July 2022 piece. All working together towards a shared goal. Which is rather big hint that we probably shouldn’t separate Oren Cass’s vision for blowing up US labor laws with the broader Schedule F/Project 2025 plot to blow up the rest of society:
“A clutch of journals now promotes the new right’s ideas. First published in 2017, the quarterly American Affairs defends industrial policy and rejects the laissez-faire of conservatives past; it exemplifies the new right’s interest in using state power to reshape the economy and society. First Things and the American Conservative are older but represent the salience of religious and nationalist thinking. First Things has published essays in favour of a pro-family welfare state to complement abortion bans. The American Conservative has argued for limits on American support for the war in Ukraine. Their tiny circulation belies their significance in stirring debate and giving new-right thinkers a chance to burnish their reputations.”
American Compass isn’t some outlier. No, it’s part of the growing number of ‘New Right’ entities that have been sprouting up in recent years as ‘Trumpian’ politics took center stage. So who are the other new entities seen as fellow travelers of American Compass? The Claremont Institute. Recall how the funders behind the Claremont Institute are like a ‘Who’s Who’ of right-wing oligarchs. Also recall how it was the Claremont Review of Books where Michael Anton published his “Flight 93 Election” essay in 2016, arguing that any means necessary to keep Democrats out of office were justified. A sentiment echoed in the recent Claremont Institute interview of John Eastman where he justified the January 6 Capitol insurrection as a fight against left-wing tyranny. So when we find figures like Anton and organizations like the Claremont Institute being described as operating under the same ‘New Right’ umbrellas as Cass’s American Compass, it’s clue as to just how ‘new’ all of this really is:
Similarly, the other ‘New Right’ entities listed in the article — the American First Policy Institute, the Center for Renewing America, and American Moment — are the very same CNP-backed we’ve seen behind the ongoing Schedule F/Project 2025 plot. Cass’s actual fellow travelers are the Schedule F plotters. It’s a rather important detail:
Also note how American Compass is described as a think-tank set up to translate these ‘New Right’ ideas into policy. Ideas like setting up workers’ councils in place of labor unions. Ideas already getting adopted by politicians like Marco Rubio:
Finally, if it wasn’t totally obviously how not ‘new’ this ‘New Right’ actually is, note how the money for these ‘New Right’ initiatives is coming from sources like the Bradley, DeVos and Scaife foundations. It’s hard to get much more ‘establishment’ than that. Even the Heritage Foundation is getting cast as some sort of ‘New Right’ wannabe entity under the leadership of its new president. That would, of course, be CNP member Kevin Roberts. And there, among groups like the Scaife foundation, we find the ostensibly ‘progressive’ Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network. Something is not adding up in this picture:
It just doesn’t add up. At least taken at face value. But when taken as just another instance of deceptive Machiavellian political theater, it makes a lot of sense. Much too much sense for comfort.
Government shutdown threats are nothing new for the US. They never work and are almost always a failed political spectacle. But is this time different? It’s one of the many disturbing questions we get to ask as the going shutdown showdown plays out. And as we’re going to see, while much of what we’re hearing should sound very familiar, this time really is different. Different and stupid. But dangerously stupid in ways that should also now sound very familiar:
It’s war on the ‘weaponization’ of the federal government. The federal government is doing the “politicians’ work, not the peoples’ work,” and they have a plan to change that. At least that’s the spin we’re getting. Spin that has coalesced into a kind of united messaging front for both congressional Republicans and the Trump reelection campaign. Trump wages his crusade against the ‘weaponization’ of government against him personally, while the rest of the GOP warns conservative voters in general that the threats facing Trump are facing them too. All conservatives are under threat from a weaponized federal government out to get them and destroy them all. The only defense is a powerful offense in the form of getting Trump elected and purging the federal government of all disloyal bureaucrats. That is now the dominant Republican message heading into the 2024 election cycle. Oh, and Trump just declared that Comcast — the owner of MSNBC — “should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason’”. He’s doubling and tripling down on the crazy and it’s still not even 2024 yet.
And, of course, this is all a messaging strategy that implicitly puts the Schedule F/Project 2025 plot to purge the government (and society) of all things ‘leftist’. A plot that, as we’ve seen, is designed to more or less deliver every single item on the right-wing mega-donors’ wish list, including a mass gutting of regulations.
So given that the Schedule F/Project 2025 scheme is becoming increasingly central to the entire GOP’s 2024 electoral strategy (and presumably central to their post-2024 governing strategy), it’s worth noting how the emerging rhetoric centered around this growing Schedule F plot is playing into the ‘shutdown showdown’ fiasco currently playing out as the GOP-controlled House negotiates with the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House in working out some sort of budget agreement. A fiasco primarily playing out inside the GOP House caucus, with ‘Freedom Caucus’ hold outs framing the current threat to shutdown the government until their demands are met as a means of waging a war on the ‘weaponization’ and ‘politicization’ of the federal government.
As we’re going to see in the following article by the right-wing ‘Just the News’ media outlet, one Republican congressman after another is explaining their support for a government shutdown in terms of using the shutdown to ‘fight the weaponization and politicization’ of the federal government and the ‘two tiers of justice’. One tier for Trump and all conservatives and another tier for Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Democrats. That really is the rhetoric they are using now. The investigations of Trump foretell a mass legal crackdown on conservatives for being conservative.
Or as Senator Marsha Blackburn put it, “People look at this, and they say, ‘Two tiers of justice,’...Why is it that you have two tiers of access, two tiers of enforcement, two tiers of compliance, two tiers of justice? And you see this from all your federal agencies, whether it’s the EPA, the IRS, DOJ, FBI.” Yes, the federal agencies like the IRS and EPA are part of this ‘two tiers’ of justice too. Blackburn goes on to lament how small business owners are concerned that the federal government is picking which businesses survive based on this ‘two tiers of justice’, asserting that, “it concerns small business owners” because if the government bureaucracy “get[s] their way, they can manipulate what businesses survive and which businesses sink, what people are held to account for wrongdoing and what people are not.”
Similarly, as Rep Eli Crane described the sentiments he was hearing from constituents regarding the shutdown threats, “they fear what this government is turning into, and that’s why they want a reckoning...And they know the only way that happens is if we exercise the power of the purse and say, ‘No, we’re not going to pay for that anymore. We’re actually going to make some cuts in this town, we’re going to start turning this thing around.’”
So as we can see, this increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric coming out of the GOP about a weaponized government and the need to fight that weaponization is synergizing remarkably well with the threats to just blow up the economy under a shutdown threat. These are members of congress from extremely conservative states and districts operating in a political environment extremely divorced from reality. A political environment where, according to Republican officials, the US is on the verge of some sort of LGBTQ+ dictatorship of trans-children led by Hunter Biden and a cabal of pedo-democrats or something. In other words, this is a political environment where one party is already openly planning on ‘burning it all down’ should they win! It’s part of their platform at this point! And their constituents are fully on board with this agenda. So when ‘burn is all down’ is basically what they’re campaign on, what are the odds they’re not going to burn it all down now that they have to chance to do so in a manner that can potentially be blamed on ‘everyone’?
But who knows, maybe this shutdown showdown will end like they always do, with a last minute capitulation by the hold outs under a bunch of rhetorical cover and bluster. But either way, the weaponization of “weaponization” rhetoric isn’t going away. It’s what the GOP stands for now: an existential ‘all of nothing’ winner-take-all culture war that has become so aggressive it’s become a planned fascist purge of society. A purge that is now planned out in the open. Again, they are openly campaigning on this now.
And when you have a fascist movement openly planning on burning it all down and capturing society once and for all, it’s also important to keep in mind that this is a plan that will obviously include a lot of spectacle. Incredible spectacle designed to keep the masses entranced and enthralled with what is unfolding.
And that’s why it’s also important to keep in mind that when Trump laid out his ’10 point plan to dismantle the deep state’ back in March, that plan include a lot of spectacle. Spectacle like a ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ commission for the deep state, which sure sounds a lot like Oren Cass’s calls for Joe McCarthy-style congressional hearings.
The point being that, while ‘shutting down the government’ over these budget negotiations has never been a very plausible threat in the past, it’s a lot more plausible today, thanks largely to the fact that ‘shutting down the government’ is kind of what the GOP is now openly campaigning on under the guise of ‘fighting the weaponization of the federal government’. The mega-donors who have spent decades trying to come up with a politically palatable excuse for breaking the federal government have finally found their excuse: ending the ‘weaponization of the federal government’ against conservatives. Sure, it’s a nonsense narrative, but its the nonsense narrative guiding the party at this point and they are all in:
“Rep. Bryan Steil (R‑Wis.), chairman of the Administration Committee, told the “ Just the News, No Noise ” TV show on Monday that he believes the appropriations bills can be used to limit the politicization of the federal government.”
Yes, as Rep Bryan Steil put it, the leverage House Republicans have in this shutdown showdown can be used to ‘limit the politicization of the federal government.’ That was the framing he used to tout the “conservative policies at the helm to make sure that our federal agencies are doing the people’s work, not politicians’ work.” Democratic policies are, in this framing, designed solely for what we can presume are the deep state cabal of pedophiles protecting corrupt Joe Biden and related special interest groups like transgender minority children, while the conservative policies Steil is pushing will ensure the government ‘works for the people’. It’s like the decades of intellectual degradation in US politics getting distilled into a talking point. This is where we are:
And as we can see, the same conservative mega-donor wish-list of priorities that’s part of every shutdown showdown: massive spending cuts. In this case, an 8% cut across the board except for Defense and Veterans. Which are, at the end of the, massive cuts that will never possibly happen. But those are the demands, framed as cuts that will prevent the Deep State from doing the ‘politicians’ work’ instead of the people’s work:
Similarly, Senator Blackburn is taking the ‘two-tiers of justice’ narrative focused around the alleged selective government persecution of Donald Trump and extend it to a general perceived threat to all small business emanating from agencies like the EPA and IRS. And that’s how the classic mega-donor wish list items like the gutting of the IRS and EPA gets spun into the ‘two-tiered justice’ narrative. And it’s a very flexible, adaptive narrative. As all make-is-up-as-you-go narratives tend to be. It may not be coherent, but it’s flexible:
And, of course, we find the nebulous demand of ‘securing the US-Mexican border’ among the list of fear-of-the-federal-goverment demands. Or as Rep Jim Jordan puts it, the main issue. Or at least the main issue with regards to the immediate continuing resolution. It’s all part of the bizarre maximalist chest thumping coming from the ‘Freedom Caucus’ right now as the deadlines grow closer. Maximalist chest thumping in the form of demands for sweeping conservative policies across the board in the name of ‘fighting the politicization of government’:
And then there’s the calls for party unity from House Rep Brian Babin, whose warning that “we’re headed to a shutdown here unless we can get something together and hold these Democrats’ feet to the fire” appeared to be directed at Republicans not on board with the Freedom Caucus’s arch-conservative budget proposal. A proposal that has zero chance of passage since it would require Democrats to agree and could only possibly work if Democrats ‘blinked’ under duress of an endless shutdown that destroys the economy even more than the budget cuts would have.
It’s the kind of scenario that, on its face, makes so little sense you have to wonder what Babin and his faction is really hoping to pull off here. So it’s worth noting that Babin was one of the members of congress whose text messages to Mark Meadows in the weeks leading up to January 6 was rather, shall we say, supportive of an ‘any means necessary’ approach to avoiding a Biden president. As TPM discovered, Babin implored Meadows — a figure long seen as central to the Trump White House’s post-election strategy coordination and communication among the many involved parties — days after the 2020 election to, “Fight like hell and find a way. We’re with you down here in Texas and refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship. Liberty!” In late December 2020, he texted Meadows about an “objector meeting” he was planning on attending at the CNP’s Conservative Policy Institute (CPI) and hoped Meadows would also attend. So Babin was playing a kind of middleman role between the CPI — which operates as a kind of mothership for CNP-backed MAGA-aligned groups — and the Trump White White. It’s a reminder that there’s no shortage of members of congress who took what could probably now be seen as a treasonous turn post-2020 and, as such, may be extra eager to participate in the upcoming ‘Project 2025’ defanging of the Justice Department against Republicans. There’s a lot of potential constitutional subversion that has yet to be fully covered up or exonerated and that keep congress members who sent lots of incriminating texts like Brian Babin up at night:
So with ‘fighting the weaponization of the government’ now the theme that both Trump and the rest of the MAGA-oriented GOP has decided to rally around, it’s worth taking a look at the ’10 point’ plant to ‘dismantle the deep state’ that was shared by the Trump campaign back in March delivered via Twitter video. It was both a typical Trumpian unhinged rant about the deep state and a very real warning of what’s to come when Trump returns to office. Because as we’re going to see, Trump’s ’10 point plan’ to ‘dismantle the deep state’ is really a plan to ‘clean house’ of anyone inclined to push back again illegal orders, staff the bureaucracy with cronies, and ensure it can never be ‘cleaned’ again:
““I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” Trump said in the video on Tuesday. “And I will wield that power very aggressively.””
Immediate Schedule F. It’s Step 1 in Trump’s “10-point plan to dismantle the deep state” shared from the “Trump War Room” back in March. And of course its step 1. Schedule F is all about initiating the power grab:
And right after the Schedule F ruling, we get to the purge. The ‘faceless bureaucrats’ who are currently ‘persecuting conservatives and Christians’ will be gone and presumably replaced with MAGA loyalists. And it’s not just Trump’s rhetoric. The House GOP’s “weaponization of the federal government” committee set up back in January was created to basically amplify this message:
Now, when we get to the ‘cleaning up’ of the FISA courts, it’s worth keeping in mind that this basically entails stacking the FISA courts with Trump lackeys who won’t just shield conservatives from valid wiretaps. Those judges are going to be a rubber stamp too for any Trump administration wiretap requests. There’s going to be a field day of illegal spying on Trump’s enemies. So when we also see a call for ‘continual auditing of the intelligence agencies’ as one of the other ‘points’, keep in mind how those ‘continual audits’ will also act as cover for the rampant abuses of FISA court warrants they are no doubt planning:
And then we get to the ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ about the deep state. It would be fun to think that this would include truth and reconciliation about real deep state scandals like the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK. But we can be pretty confident it will be Trump and reconciliation about Trump and any Trump-related investigation. It’s also a reminder that a serious acknowledgement of the deep state political assassination crimes of the 60s and the many other related crimes by the US intelligence community (virtually all directed against the left domestically and globally) is a massive lost opportunity by mainstream leftwing media. The ‘deep state’ is very real. And it really hates ‘the left’. Somehow everyone forgot that. And regardless of how that happen, Trump is preying on that collective lapse in historical memory:
LOL! Following a declaration for a ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ commission about the ‘deep state’ we get a crackdown on government leakers. The only ideological coherency here is a Trump First ideology:
And then we get to another LOL with Trump’s calls to make every federal Inspector General “physically separated from the departments they oversee so they do not become the protectors of the deep state.” The deep state corruption is like COVID apparently. Just stay out of direct proximity of the infected in your day to day work environment and you’re fine. It’s the kind of nonsense that synergizes well with the plan to move agencies away from the ‘Washington Swamp’. With all the federal agencies getting sent off to different cities in the ‘Heartland’ while inspectors General are mandated to be in different locations from their agencies, It raises the question as to whether or not all the inspectors general will be relocated to a particular city or scattered to independent locations. These are the stupid questions we have to ask:
The ban on the ‘revolving door’ is another one of those propositions that sound great on paper but will realistically probably just be used to further punish fired bureaucrats forced to hunt for work in industries related to what they built their now-finished government careers around:
And finally, the plank about amending the Constitution to limit congressional terms, don’t forget that executing a right-wing ‘runaway convention’ under Article V of the Constitution is one of the right-wing mega-donors’ biggest wish list item of all and they are perilously close to being able to pull that off. Term limits, on their own, are a provision worth considering but don’t kid yourself about the scope of what is at play here. Just wait for Trump to start chattering about Article V. It’s just a matter of time:
And that’s all why we probably shouldn’t assume that this shutdown showdown is going to go the way they always go. The entire GOP has basically nationalizing the ‘we need to shut down and purge the federal government to protect conservatives from the evil trans-Democrat assaults on conservatives’ narrative. Shutting down the government ‘to protect conservatives’ is the open plan now. It’s all they are talking about at this point. And unlike 2025, when the GOP is hoping to having full control, any shutdowns that happen now can at least be partially blamed on Biden and Democrats, fairly or not. Sure, it would be a political gamble. But nominating Trump so he can wage a fascist vengeance campaign is a pretty big political gamble too. So the question this ‘shutdown showdown’ shouldn’t simply be, “does it make political sense to shutdown the government right now?” Because it’s really a question of whether or not it makes political sense to shutdown the government given the reality that Trump’s campaign has already framed the federal government as the ‘enemy of the people’ and the entire GOP is already on board.
Check out the new trend in conservative US politics: age verification laws for adult websites. Yep, it’s happening. At least at the state-level, with Tennessee Republican lawmakers reportedly now considering such a law, following the states of Louisiana, Utah, and Texas.
It’s not clear if Tennessee will follow through on the idea. For starters, such laws based on individual states aren’t exactly difficult to get around. A simple virtual private network (VPN) will do the trick. Beyond that, it’s not even clear such laws are constitutional, with a judge striking down Texas’s law as a privacy violation last month.
But as we’re also going to see, we shouldn’t assume that the logistics of enforcing the law or even its constitutionality are really major concerns here. Because the push to ‘protect the children’ from online pornography isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening in the middle of broader political climate where ‘protecting the children’ has been merged with traditional anti-LGBTQ sentiments and weaponized as a ‘protecting kids from the perverted trans ideology’ manufactured national freak out. Political theatrics designed to equate the mere exposure of children to the very existence of members of the LGBTQ community as a form of child abuse. In other words, try not to be shocked if the ‘age verification for adult websites’ trend is soon applied to any LGBTQ content online.
Beyond that, we also shouldn’t assume that these trends are going to be limited to deep ‘red states’. Because as the second article below points out, the Schedule F/Project2025 is already publishing content hinting at how they are planning on dealing with ‘blue state’ local governments that aren’t willing to play ball on the planned purges. Because Schedule F/Project2025 isn’t just about a federal purge: as we find in the “The Mandate for Leadership” book recently published by the Heritage Foundation describing Project2025’s plans, those plans include using the Department of Justice to threaten local officials who refuse to enforce the range of new rules they are planning on imposing at the local level. DOJ staff who refuse to go along with this enforcement scheme will, of course, be ‘Schedule F’-ed themselves and replaced with someone who will.
And that’s all why we probably shouldn’t assume that the Tennessee GOP just has a random plan to ‘protect the children from pornography’. There are much larger plans afoot:
“A person has to use a verification system that checks their government ID or transactional data to confirm they are at least 18 years old. Stabile believes this is unconstitutional and invades someone’s privacy.”
Legal ID verification will be required for any site deemed to host pornography. That’s the law Tennessee Republicans are reportedly considering, following Republican state lawmakers in states like Louisiana, Utah, and Texas:
And while it’s possible that this law really is intended to reduce the volumes of pornographic content that kids are now routinely exposed to via the internet, here’s a reminder that when the GOP talks about ‘protecting the children’ these days, it’s probably the wind up for a new law attacking the LGBTQ community. Likely an attack on the trans community these days. In other words, try not to be super surprised if the trend of ‘protecting the children’ by putting ID checks on pornographic websites is soon followed by a push to classify all things LGBTQ as inherently pornographic:
“The result of these actions will be perhaps the biggest power play against states rights in American history, and the threat is clear. If blue states refuse to turn on their own transgender citizens, then the federal government will do everything in its power to decapitate the leadership of those states using the Department of Justice. Conservatives are making the bet that individual district attorneys will not risk prosecution, and prison, on behalf of a tiny, despised minority. They’re betting that state governors will not be willing to risk both prosecution and a constitutional crisis over transgender people.”
A giant power grab by the federal government against states. It’s just one of the many planned features of Project2025. As we’ve seen, the plan laid out in Project2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” includes a call for a distinction between “religious” and “nonreligious” parts of the law. And as the article points out, the social conservative wish list laid out in “The Mandate for Leadership” appears to include a declaration of all things LGBTQ as inherently pornographic in nature. And therefore criminally pornographic in nature:
And that brings us to the part of this power grab that could end up as an internet battle: state and local officials who refuse to enforce the various dictates that will be coming from the Schedule F‑empowered White House will face a Department of Justice ready to threaten prosecution. And if the staff at the DOJ refuse to go along with this power play, they can be ‘Schedule F’-ed away:
Keep in mind that many websites facing public officials demanding they put up an age paywall or remove LGBTQ content will just take the easiest path of removing that content. Or maybe making a special 18+ version of their site where offending content can be hosted separately. And the more chaotic it all gets at the state level, the more calls there will be for some sort of federal solution. The kind of federal solution the Project 2025 network is no doubt already crafting.
There’s undoubtedly going to be a surge of ‘sanctuary Blue state’ announcements should Donald Trump return to office. A fall back to the federalism and the separation of powers as a last resort. And as we can see, there’s a plan for that too. Sanctuary states and cities will not be allowed. This is going to be a national purge.
And in related news, digital fake ID technology is presumably going to experience some sort of innovation bonanza in coming years.
It’s one of those lessons one would rather not learn several centuries into a governing system: it turns out the US system of government doesn’t actually work when there’s no party with a clear majority and one of the parties is filled with enough bad faith actors put in positions of power. It’s a voluntarily breakable system at that point. If one of the parties simply can’t get its house in order, it can break everything. It’s the kind of lesson one doesn’t expect to have to learn. Parties tend to want to throw a gear in the works when they’re out of power, not in it. But as we keep learning with this year’s House Republican caucus, it’s possible for the party in power to self-immolate for no clear reason. Repeatedly.
Or at least seemingly almost self-immolate. The group of hold outs can threaten to bring everything to a halt unless they get their way, and the rest of the caucus is just forced to make the determination of whether or not its worth giving in to the extortion this time in the hopes of just moving past the crisis. Along with the hopes that it’s the last time but with the recognition that it’s only fueling a next time. Rule via the political suicide vest: give in to our demands or we blow it all up. A credible threat of self-immolation is required for this ‘minority rule’ tactic to work.
And here we are, for the second time in 2023, watching a group of House GOP hold outs triggering an intra-party crisis that is predicated on a credible threat of being willing to burn it all down. A group of hold outs that appears to have quite a bit of overlap with the same group of ‘Freedom Caucus’ hold outs who waged the first round of chaotic concessions from Kevin McCarthy in exchange for their support back in January. Who knows why exactly Rep Matt Gaetz decided to trigger the vote of confidence on Kevin McCarthy, resulting in the first no-confidence ouster of Speaker in US history. But he did it. And now the same ‘Freedom Caucus’ faction that raked McCarthy over the coals back in January is at it again.
Recall how Kevin McCarthy’s 15-round vote/concession-o-rama to this largely same group of ‘Freedom Caucus’ Republican holdouts back in January was clearly a CNP-orchestrated affair once we looked at the players involved with planning it and whipping up support for it. As we saw, it was the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) — a kind of CNP front-group organizational mothership — that literally hosted the many of strategy meetings held by the ‘Never Kevin’ House Republican caucus at the CPI’s DC headquarters. Meetings that had been regularly held there by this group for months. The CPI even held a four-person panel meeting a week after the 2022 mid-terms where the panel (of four CNP members) basically told the ‘Never Kevin’ caucus to pursue the hold out strategy against McCarthy hey ultimately pursued. Concessions that empowered a single House Republican to triggered a vote of confidence. And here we are, after Matt Gaetz decided for whatever reason to trigger more or less the same political crisis. A crisis that has once again resulted in a handful of holdouts wielding outsized power in negotiations over who will wield the power of the Speaker. And, maybe, prominent ‘Freedom Caucus’ member Jim Jordan as the next Speaker.
But while we don’t know how the current House Speaker crisis will pan out, we can be confident the CNP is feverishly working in the background to determine that outcome. An outcome that will somehow result in someone winning the Speakership who couldn’t otherwise win it without such a crisis. It’s a key detail to keep in mind: these ‘minorities rule’ crises are excellent excuses for caucus members to ultimately vote for a politically unpalatable figure to become House Speaker because that’s what was required to resolve the crisis. Perhaps Jim Jordan is the figure the CNP has in mind, or maybe it’s someone else. But whoever it is wouldn’t have had a chance were it not for this crisis. The kind of crisis the CNP has a proven track record of successfully exploiting as they demonstrated back in January. It’s the underlying logic to chaos: creating and exploiting this kind of political chaos is a CNP specialty:
“All these minority-rule moments turn the tables on a GOP conference that used to assert the “Hastert rule,” an unofficial standard often imposed by J. Dennis Hastert (R‑Ill.), the House speaker from 1999 into 2007. It said legislation that did not have the support of “the majority of the majority” would not get a vote on the House floor.”
It’s Minority Rule, achieved through the exploitation of every technicality and loophole available coupled with an ability to project a willingness to burn the system down if you don’t get your way. Governing by one game of ‘Chicken’ after another. We didn’t really know the US system was set up to work this way until now. But now we know it: a minority of the House majority can rule through a credible threat of letting it all burn down. That was the credible threat that got the House Republican ‘hold outs’ all their concessions — like the one-vote trigger for a vote a confidence — when Kevin McCarthy was forced to go through the CNP-directed 15 humiliating rounds of failed votes back in January as part of the plan that was hatched at the CPI’s DC headquarters months earlier. They keep doing it because it works. As long as the current dynamic holds — the dynamic being the GOP controlling the House — this group of CNP-directed House Republicans can effectively rule through credible threat. Flash forward to now, and it’s largely the same group of hold outs responsible for Steve Scalise’s failed bid and who are now putting forward Jim Jordan as the only remaining option:
And as we can see, it’s not simply that Steve Scalise failed in his attempt to get enough caucus support, leaving Jordan as the next nominee in line. There was reportedly a demand by Jordan-ally Chip Roy that the eventual nominee go through a secret grilling and more rounds of secret ballots before a final vote. Which sure sounds like an attempt to extract another round of extreme concessions from whomever is ultimately chosen. And when Roy’s proposals were shot down, and Scalise beat Jordan in the first round of voting 113–99, Roy led a delegation of a dozen Jordan supporters who declared they won’t support Scalise, more than enough to sink Scalise’s chances. Half a dozen ‘moderates’ even joined them for ‘reasons’. It was a strange outcome for a strange situation, and at the end of it all, Jim Jordan is being presented to the caucus as the last hope. It’s Freedom Caucus Jim or chaos:
And now, it appears that the pro-Scalise ‘moderates’ are planning on ‘turning the tables’ and using this same ‘minority rule’ tactic against the pro-Jordan caucus. At least that’s the narrative we’re getting. And who knows, perhaps they really are planning on doing exactly that. But given the reality that the CNP holds sway over the entire Republican House caucus and there doesn’t really exist a caucus willing to stand up against the CNP’s wishes, it’s hard to view all this as much more than theatrics. The kind of theatrics designed to give the House GOP political cover to ultimately support whoever it is the CNP wants as speaker. Maybe that’s Jim Jordan. Or maybe they have the real candidate waiting in the wings. But one thing is clear by now: the CNP is orchestrating the strategy behind the scenes and its minions in the House will dutifully execute whatever the CNP comes up with. Of that we can be sure:
Will the ‘moderates’ truly give the Freedom Caucus a ‘taste of its own medicine’? We’ll see. But if so, that only ratchets up the pressure and focuses the crisis on the underlying gambit: who has the most credible threat to burn it all down if they don’t get their way?
And it’s that underlying gambit of a credible threat that only underscores the importance of understanding the role the CNP is playing in all of this. Because think about: who as the most credible threat in these negotiations? The GOP faction with the backing of the far right GOP’s shadow overlords at the CNP who were willing to go as far as backing the insurrection and are currently plotting the Schedule F/Project 2025 purge of the government? Or the faction that doesn’t have that shadow lord support? In other words, we aren’t seeing a real showdown unless we’re seeing a faction of the GOP willing to stare down the CNP. And there’s no indication we’re seeing that. Which suggests we’re seeing a whole lot of chaotic theatrics, presumably to give the House GOP caucus the political cover it needs to install a new speaker. Someone desired by the CNP, and almost no one else. Hence all the chaotic cover.
Because if there’s one thing minority rule uses more than scheming, it’s strategic theatrics. The more chaotic the theatrics, the better the results, typically. At least that’s the lesson the CNP keeps learning. And no one else. Rinse and repeat.
Following up on the ongoing story of fight for House Speakership and the role played by Council for National Policy (CNP) in both organizing the first ‘Never Kevin’ caucus back in January and now the ‘Never Steve’ caucus speakership caucus that appears to be dedicated to derailing Steve Scalise’s bid and turning the far right Freedom Caucus leader Jim Jordan into the next Speaker of the House, here’s a report underscoring how the CNP is playing the same role it played back in January.
As the following NY Times article describes, a pressure campaign is already underway by Jim Jordan’s allies, targeting the roughly 55 Republican hold outs in the ‘Never Jim’ caucus. Allies that include some now familiar names: CNP member Amy Kremer and Russ Vought (married to CNP member Mary Vought). Kremer’s office is reportedly listing the phone numbers of ‘Never Jim’ Republicans and urging her followers to call them. Russ Vought, described as ‘close to Jordan’, is urging Republicans to call a floor vote on the speakership and, “take it to the floor & call their bluff.”
As we’ve seen, both Kremer and Vought have been very active is executing the CNP’s agenda in recent years. It was Amy and her daughter Kylie who organized the ‘Women for America First’ January 6 rally at the Ellipse that eventually devolved into the January 6 Capitol insurrection. A role that put the Kremers in a kind of collaborative role with Ali Alexander’s parallel ‘Wild’ rally planning. And Russ Vought not only played a direct role in the original Schedule F plotting, but he’s extended that role as the head of the Center for Renewing America (CRA), one of the Conservative Partnership Institute’s (CPI) many spinoffs. Recall how the planning for the initial ‘Never Kevin’ speakership showdown was conducted at the CPI’s DC headquarters for months following the November 2022 election.
And as we saw back in January, both Kremer and Vought were two of the nearly 50 CNP members (or member spouses) who signed an open letter in support of the ‘Never Kevin’ caucus’s actions. And they’re at it again, presumably along with the rest of their CNP brethren.
Also of interest is one of the areas of policy disagreement between the pro- and anti-Jordan caucuses: funding for Ukraine, with the pro-Jordan caucus taking a strong stance against more funding for Ukraine and the anti-Jordan caucus taking the opposite stance. Which raises the intriguing question: what is the CNP’s stance on not just the war in Ukraine but the prospect of war in places like Taiwan and the Middle East? Is the pro-Jordan caucus’s opposition to more Ukraine funding purely political theatrics (very possible)? Or could there be a real CNP-backed opposition to more funding? And if so, how should we interpret that opposition, given the growing prospects of wars elsewhere? The CNP isn’t exactly a force for peace and stability in the world. What’s the plan here?
It’s all part of why we can’t really make sense of the current GOP civil war until we recognize that this is a CNP-driven political crisis. The latest in a long string of CNP-driven political crises that, somehow, are never recognized as CNP created fiascos. It’s just part of the presumed joy of being a powerful secret society that no one talks about for some reason:
“The strategy is reminiscent of the bullying tactics that Mr. Jordan and his allies have used over the past decade to pull the G.O.P. further to the right, and borrows a page from former President Donald J. Trump, who is backing Mr. Jordan.”
He’s got Trump’s support. Will that be enough to push Jim Jordan over the finish line? Trump is the party’s presumptive 2024 nominee after all. But as we can see, Jordan has a lot more than just Trump’s open support. CNP stalwarts are rallying to his cause too, like Amy Kremer and Russel Vought. Recall how both Kremer and Vought played a similar role back in January when they signed that open letter — along with nearly 50 other CNP members — 8in support of the hard line that was being taken against Kevin McCarthy. And as this article makes clear, that same CNP network has been been activated to wage a new public pressure campaign:
And then we have Republicans like Anna Paulina Luna rallying around Jordan. Recall how Luna was actually targeted in a murder plot orchestrated by her GOP primary opponent, William Braddock, who was recording telling another local Republican to stay away from Luna because Braddock was going to have his ‘Russian Ukrainian’ mafia friends assassinate Luna. Why did Luna need to be assassinated? Luna didn’t stand a chance of winning in the highly competitive district, according to Braddock. It’s a reminder that when we’re talking about the kinds of persuasion tactics deployed by the contemporary GOP, we’re basically talking about an organization with the morality of the mafia. Which is also a reminder that the behind-the-scenes persuading going on right now on behalf of Jim Jordan is probably a lot more intense than anything we’re seeing in public:
Finally, note this interesting point of division between the pro- and anti-Jordan factions: funding for Ukraine, with Jordan and his “America First” allied being vehemently opposed to more Ukrainian funding. Given the CNP-backing for Jordan’s speakership, we have to ask: what kind of war plans does the CNP have in mind? Is opposition to more funding for Ukraine purely theatrics? Because there’s no reason to assume an opposition to more funding for Ukraine is representative of an opposition to war. It’s not like there’s a shortage of alternative conflicts for the US to get involved in right now:
It’s also worth keeping in mind that, with the ‘counter-offensive’ in Ukraine thoroughly stalled at this point and the prospects for Ukraine actually winning the war dwindling by the day, we could be seeing some sort of preemptive GOP political ass-covering for another failed foreign adventure going on as part of this push to get an ardently anti-Ukraine-funding Speaker installed. Either way, the CNP has a plan and it’s executing it. It’s the CNP’s world and we’re just living in it. Too bad no one seems to notice this.
Thoughts and prayers. And nothing more. It’s more or less what we could expect from the newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson in the wake of the devastating mass shootings in Lewiston, Maine. Far more expected than the fact that Johnson, a backbencher with no experience in party leadership roles, was elected speaker in the first place. With unanimous support from his fractious caucus, no less. In fact, it was none other than Rep Matt Gaetz, who triggered the whole leadership crisis in the first place, who was crowing about Johnson’s victory, declaring “If you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention,” on Steve Bannon’s podcost.
How did an obscure backbencher end up resolving a leadership crisis that, until recently, showed now signs of waning? Is it simply that the GOP House caucus ‘got tired’ of all the turmoil and spontaneously decided to rally around whoever was next in line? Is it really the case that Johnson won by virtue of being an obscure backbencher who hasn’t yet had an opportunity to ruffle feathers? Because those are the explanations we’re hearing. Johnson simply won as a result of all the exhaustion and frustration, as the narrative goes.
And while all that exhaustion and frustration no doubt played a role in how this process played out, it’s important to keep in mind the major behind-the-scenes role played by the same group that’s routinely plays behind-the-scenes roles and gets away with it: the Council for National Policy (CNP). As we saw, it was the CNP-backed Freedom Caucus that orchestrated the giant intra-party showdown over Kevin McCarthy’s speakership nomination back in January with extensive CNP support. And once again, it was the Freedom Caucus leading ‘anti-establishment’ opposition in the latest round of voting, with CNP affiliates like Amy Kremer and Russ Vought again playing a supporting role. So it should come as no surprise to find that, at the end of all this chaos, we have a new CNP-backed speaker. One who calls Jim Jordan a mentor. Funny how that happens.
Yes, Mike Johnson isn’t just a blatant theocrat. He’s a CNP-backed theocrat who previously worked as an attorney and spokesperson for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Recall how the ADF received large donations from the Betsy DeVos and Erik Prince and funneled that money into supporting Christian nationalist movements in Europe and backed a 2016 Belize law that punished homosexual sex with 10 years in prison. Also recall how the ADF has been playing a major behind the scenes roll in shaping the current manufactured anti-trans panic. At the same time, the ADF shows up on the list of organizations involved with the Schedule F/Project 2025. CNP member Michael Farris has served as the President and CEO of the ADF.
And then there’s a Youtube video of a roughly 30 minute speech Johnson gave at one of the CNP’s conferences back in October 2019. And not only to Johnson heap praise on the CNP for all the support it’s given him, but at approximately 19:30 in the video he actually refers to another mentor of his who just happened to become the CNP’s Vice President in 2020: Kelly Shackelford. Recall how Shackelford was also one of the signees of that long list of conservative luminaries (most of whom were CNP members) who came out in support of the hard line taken by the Freedom Caucus over Kevin McCarthy’s speakership nomination back in January.
Following Johnson’s speech, the CNP event ends with some closing comments by CNP Executive Committee member Millie Hallow, who also happened to be personal assistant of Wayne LaPierre at the NRA. This is a good time to recall the number of known NRA leaders who happen to be members of the CNP:
* Carolyn D. Meadows: President of the NRA
* Michael “Mike” Baller
* Joseph P. DeBergalis, Jr.
* Sandra S. Froman: Board Member & Former President
* Millie Hallow: NRA liaison to The White House, Republican National Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee
* Wayne LaPierre: Executive VP & CEO
* Willes K. Lee
So while many are pointing out the ill-timed tweet Johnson sent out last week of his meeting with the Women for Gun Rights leadership, it’s important to keep in mind that, as a creature of the CNP, the new House Speaker is an extremely loyal footsoldier of the gun manufacturers lobby, itself a key component of the theocratic hard right:
“Mr. Johnson, the evangelical Christian who won the speakership on Wednesday with the unanimous support of House Republicans, has also spoken out sharply against homosexuality, calling it “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle” and linking it to bestiality, according to opinion essays unearthed on Wednesday by CNN.”
Who knows what entity Mike Johnson ultimately prayed to in his quest to gain the speakership, but those prayers delivered. He got unanimous support from a House Republican caucus that didn’t appear capable of anything approaching unanimity for weeks. Rep Matt Gaetz, who triggered the whole leadership crisis, was even crowing about what a great win this was to see ‘MAGA Mike Johnson’ ascend to the speakership. A ‘backbencher’ with no previous experience in any House leadership positions. And it never would have happened had it not been for the whole speakership fiasco dragging on for weeks. A fiasco that included the failed speakership big by Freedom Caucus leader Jim Jordan, someone Johnson has described as a mentor. In other words, while Jim Jordan may not have won the speakership, his Freedom Caucus faction was the ultimate winner here. The fiasco worked:
And as we can see Johnson, not only was Johnson one of the many supporters of the CNP-orchestrated attempts to overturn the 2020 election, but his political career are largely defined by his association with the theocratic far right, including his work as an attorney and spokesperson for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Recall how the ADF received large donations from the Betsy DeVos and Erik Prince and funneled that money into supporting Christian nationalist movements in Europe and backed a 2016 Belize law that punished homosexual sex with 10 years in prison. Also recall how the ADF has been playing a major behind the scenes roll in shaping the current manufactured anti-trans panic. At the same time, the ADF shows up on the list of organizations involved with the Schedule F/Project 2025. CNP member Michael Farris has served as the President and CEO of the ADF. And in case Johnson’s CNP ties aren’t completely obvious, there’s even a Youtube video from a roughly 30 minute speech Johnson gave at one of the CNP’s conferences back in October 2019:
And, again, in case it’s still not clear that Mike Johnson is a creature of the CNP, it’s worth taking a closer look at that October 2019 speech. Because in addition to the effusive praise he delivers to the CNP audience along with acknowledgments of how much he owes to the group, at 19:30 in the speech, Johnson name drops Kelly Shackelford as a personal mentor. Shackelford became the Vice President of the CNP in 2020. Recall how Shackelford was also one of the signees of that long list of conservative luminaries (most of whom were CNP members) who came out in support of the hard line taken by the Freedom Caucus over Kevin McCarthy’s speakership nomination back in January. Following Johnson’s speech, the video ends with some closing comments by CNP Executive Committee member Millie Hallow, who also happened to be personal assistant of Wayne LaPierre at the NRA.
So that’s how this speakership crisis appears to have panned out. We didn’t know who would eventually win that position. But we could be very confident about who they would ultimately serve.
The new House Speaker is a theocrat. It’s not exactly shocking news in the context of contemporary US politics, but it’s news. Mike Johnson is a creature of the Council for National Policy (CNP). And while it’s obvious that implications of having a theocrat in such a position of power isn’t good, the specific implications may not be so obvious. Like an increased chance for some sort of apocalyptic conflagration in the Middle East. For example, it may not be obvious that the consequences of installing a nut job like Mike Johnson in that position could include a religious-fueled regional war. And yet, as we’re going to see, the implications of Johnson’s speakership just might include an exacerbation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
How so? Well, that brings us to one of facets of the evangelical movement that has only become more and more prominent in recent decades: Christian Zionism. In particular, the very US-centric form of Christian Zionism championed by prominent theocrats like John Hagee, making it a kind of Christian Nationalist Zionism. Recall Hagee’s open embrace of insurrection leaders like Mike Flynn and Flynn’s calls for an overtly Christian US government during one of Hagee’s religious events less than a year after the CNP-orchestrated January 6 Capitol insurrection. As Hagee has long espoused, the US’s support for Israel is a God-ordained enterprise, all leading up to a series of End Times apocalyptic events that will usher in the return of Jesus. With the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people in the process. That’s the Biblical prophecy Hagee and other Christian Zionist leaders have long promoted, alongside their professed support for Israel and the Jewish people. It’s more than a little warped.
And as we should expect, CNP-backed Mike Johnson is very much a part of this Christian Zionist movement. Notably, Johnson took a trip to Israel back in February of 2020 sponsored by a group called the 12Tribe Film Foundation. The group’s CEO, Avi Abelow, has become a supporting figure in Israel’s far right. Johnson’s first stop on this trip was to the Kohelet Policy Forum, a far right think tank that is now closely aligned with the Netanyahu government and helping to formulate many of its most controversial policies including the highly divisive judicial ‘reforms’. And as we’re going to see, the Kohelet Policy Forum finances another think tank, the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, which is already devising policy with truly ominous implications: the mass ethnic cleansing of all the Palestinians from the Palestinian territories. The plans are in place and the opportunity is, arguably, here with the onset of this conflict.
Johnson later described his Israeli trip visit as “the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy.” He also blamed “the radical left” for the Temple Mount’s current non-rebuilt status. And that, right there, is how Mike Johnson’s elevation to the Speakership is threatening to make a very bad situation in the Middle East much worse. Because the reality is that the more you have open Christian Zionist champions like Johnson in positions of authority in the US government who can make clear their complete backing for anything the Netanyahu government does, the more likely we are to see something transpire that is so horrific it shocks the conscience of the world and utterly erodes what is left of Israel’s international support. Even more so should support for Israeli military excesses be turned into a kind of political football for the upcoming 2024 US electoral season. This is a conflict that could go on for a long time and get a lot bloodier. Having someone like Mike Johnson in position where he can speak on behalf of the US government is an inherently destabilizing situation. Johnson wants an apocalypse, along with his powerful CNP allies. And it’s hard to imagine a quicker catalyst for some sort of apocalyptic conflagration than an Israeli far right government that concludes now is the window of opportunity to deal with the Palestinians once and for all.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that when we are taking about the CNP-backed Mike Johnson, we’re talking about the same network behind the Schedule F/Project 2025 planned purge of America. It’s part of the grim context of this whole state of affairs: at the same time the CNP is planning its metaphorical purge of all progressives out of positions of power and influence in the US, the CNP’s far right Israeli allies are planning a very literal physical purge of the Palestinians. Which is also a reminder that when you’re dealing with apocalypse-focused cults, you’re typically also dealing with a group of people out to purge the world of large swathes of humanity. It’s a package deal.
Ok, first, here’s a Haaretz article looking at that interesting February 2020 trip Mike Johnson made to Israel that included a first stop at the Kohelet Policy Forum. Or as Johnson later put it, a trip that was “the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy”:
“Louisiana Rep. Johnson traveled to Israel in February 2020 with an under-the-radar group called the 12Tribe Films Foundation. The organization’s CEO is a social media activist named Avi Abelow, who emigrated from New York more than 30 years ago at age 18 and lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat.”
A trip to Israel sponsored by a far right Zionist group. Mike Johnson was able to take trips like that without anyone noticing back in February of 2020 when he was a House backbencher. But it’s a lot harder to ignore these kinds of Christian Zionist relationships now that he’s the newly elected House Speaker at the same time the Middle East is embroiled in a deepening conflict. Especially when that conflict appears to be driven heavily by the aggressive actions of a Netanyahu government that includes these same far right groups as coalition partners and threatens to tear the Israeli civil society apart. And that’s why it’s hard not to notice that the first stop on Johnson’s Feb 2020 visit was to the Kohelet Policy Forum. As we’re going to see, the Kohelet Forum isn’t just a far right think tank. It’s also the funder of the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, which is already floating a proposal that amounts to the complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians out of both Gaza and the West Bank:
And as the article reminds us, Mike Johnson enthusiasm for Christian Zionism isn’t an anomaly within evangelical circles. Top evangelical leaders like John Hagee have been making Christian Zionist-themed End Times predictions about staunch for years. Recall Hagee’s open embrace of insurrection leaders like Mike Flynn and Flynn’s calls for an overtly Christian US government during one of Hagee’s religious events. So when we see Johnson refer to his trip to the Temple Mount as “the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy,” it’s important to recognize that Johnson is referring to a particular Christian Zionist End Times prophecy that entails the complete destruction of the Jewish people:
And that brings us to the following Tikun Olam Blog entry by Richard Silverstein that describes a plot that, if executed, could very well usher in the end or Israel. Or rather, could be such a grossly immoral act that even Israel’s staunch allies would no longer be able to maintain their support. A plan for the mass ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and the West Bank of all the Palestinian populations, using the current conflict as the pretext for the mass expulsion. It’s a plan devised by Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, itself funded by the Kohelet Forum, which is now closer to the Israeli government than ever before. So when we see the fervent support for Israel’s far right from Christian Zionists like John Hagee or Mike Johnson, its important to keep in mind that these Christian Zionists are specifically supporting the Israeli movements that, themselves, are so extreme they are precipitating the destruction of Israel’s international support amidst the orgy of bloodshed and ethnic cleansing they are facilitating:
“The Israeli security think tank, Misgav (the Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy or INSZL) is funded by the far-right Kohelet Forum. Its director is Meir Ben Shabbat, a former national security advisor and 25 year veteran of the Shin Bet. Misgav has answered the question. Its proposes an Israeli form of the Final Solution of the the “Gaza Problem”: expulsion. The think tank produced a paper, written by Ari Vaitman entitled, A plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza: economic aspects. The full paper (pdf in Hebrew) is here.”
As Richard Silverstein points out, the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy is a Kohelet Forum spinoff. And it’s now wildly influential with a Netanyahu far right coalition government. So in case it’s not clear that the Netanyahu government already had plans for a mass ethnic cleansing, the explicit road maps created by these groups for a ‘Nakba 2.0’ and the ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and the West Bank should make it very clear:
And as Silverstein also reminds us, this is an insane, bloody plan that is likely to turn Israel into an international pariah and more or less confirm the views of Israel’s worst critics. Mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territories is an absolutely insane idea, and yet it current seems more plausible now than ever:
And this insanely bloody agenda is fully backed by Israel’s ‘close allies’ in the Christian Zionist community. Allies who, of course, fully intend on seeing the destruction of Israel and Jewish people sooner rather than later. And as the following June 2020, Washington Post excerpt reminds us, when Mike Johnson referred to his 2020 visit to the Temple Mount as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, he wasn’t just using the same language embraced by Christian Zionist leader John Hagee. He was also using the same language about biblical prophecy and US foreign policy now embraced by a number of Christian Zionist figures in Republican Party including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Vice President Mike Pence. In other words, the contemporary Republican Party is a Christian Zionist party, at least when it comes to its political leadership. In that sense, Mike Johnson’s Christian Zionism isn’t an anomaly. The embrace of a Biblical prophecy centered on the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people is actually very ‘on brand’ for today’s theocratically dominated GOP:
“Hagee believes that his movement is a fulfillment of Bible prophecy. His rhetoric is often nationalistic, claiming that America plays a God-ordained role in Israel’s politics.”
Yes, Mike Johnson isn’t the only political figure seeing signs of Biblical prophecy all over the US’s support for Israel. That’s kind of at the core of John Hagee’s brand of Christian Zionism. It’s a US-centric Christian Nationalist Zionism that assumes the support of US evangelicals for Israel is part of some sort of God ordained sequence of events. Events that, again, will lead to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people:
So will Mike Johnson, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, and any of the other Christian Zionists US politicians get their big wish? Time will tell, but it’s a good time to recall that triggering an apocalypse and triggering the apocalypse that ushers in the Second Coming are not necessarily the same thing. Flaming a giant horrendous conflict in the hopes of catalyzing the Rapture and actually catalyzing the Rapture are two very different things. Which also makes this a good time to start pondering just what these apocalyptic cults will do once they get their giant conflagration without the desire fulfillment of their desired prophecies. Because you can always plan for bigger conflict. Well, until you can’t.
Christian Zionism is obviously a problematic theology. It’s not the alleged affinity for Israel and the Jewish people that’s the problematic part, but rather the reality that it’s a theology predicated on bringing about the prophesied end of Israel and the Jewish people. And, as we’re going to see, the destruction of pretty much everyone else. Christian Zionism is an End Times theology, after all. It really is focused on the end. And in particular, ushering in those End Times as soon as possible through the fulfillment of those prophesied events. Major trigger point events like the rebuilding of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
But while it’s obvious that Christian Zionism is a dangerous theological movement, it may not be obvious just how deeply intertwined Christian Zionism is with the entire history and founding of Council for National Policy (CNP). That’s what we’re going to take a look at in the following 2007 Vanity Fair piece by Craig Unger. A history of the origins of Christian Zionism in the US that cannot be separated from the founding of the CNP and the rise of the Likud Party as a force in Israeli politics. As we’re going to see, It was 1977 when Menachem Begin became the first Likud Party Israeli prime minister and immediately began reaching out to American Evangelicals, in particular Jerry Falwell. In 1979, Falwell launched the Moral Majority, injecting a powerful theocratically-driven political force in American politics. By 1980, not only had Falwell received the Jabotinsky Award but Begin even gave his ministry a private jet. Their relationship was so close Begin warned Falwell about the upcoming bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear rector in June of 1981.
1981 also happens to be the year of the founding of the CNP, which included major Christians ministers like Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Tim LaHaye as founders, along with LaHaye’s wife Beverly. LaHaye, the author of wildly popular “Left Behind” series, served as the CNPs first President from 1981–82. Robertson served the same role from 85–86. All espoused the same kind of Christian Zionist End Times theology. Because as the following piece makes clear, the theology behind the CNP is the same theology animating these co-founding ministers. An End Times theology that puts Israel and the Jewish people at the center of the story...at least until Jesus returns and the Jews are destroyed along with the rest of the world.
And that brings us to another important angle to this story: the ongoing CNP-driven Schedule F/Project 2025 plot to purge the government of all ‘secular humanists’ (who are seen as the most evil force in the world according to this theology) is very much aligned with this same End Times theology. As LaHaye argued in his book, The Battle for the Mind, “We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders.” It’s important context for understanding just how serious these groups are about their planned purges. The Schedule F/Project 2024 plot is End Times-compatible.
So with the CNP-backed openly theocratic Mike Johnson serving as the new Speaker of the House at the same time Israel and Palestine are literally going up in flames, it’s going to be worth keeping in mind that Mike Johnson is far from the only person with profound influence over the US government who also happens to be a theocrat dedicated to the fulfillment of an End Times prophecy and the destruction of the Jewish people and almost everyone else. It’s a shockingly popular theology in the halls of power and has been for over four decades:
“As befits the manifesto of a counterculture, the “Left Behind” series is a revenge fantasy, in which right-wing Christians win out over the rational, scientific, modern, post-Enlightenment world. The books represent the apotheosis of a culture that is waging war against liberals, gays, Muslims, Arabs, the U.N., and “militant secularists” of all stripes—whom it accuses of destroying Christian America, murdering millions of unborn children, assaulting the Christian family by promoting promiscuity and homosexuality, and driving Christ out of the public square.”
They aren’t just fun biblically inspired stories. The Left Behind series is a far right revenge fantasy. One where God purges virtually all of the groups perceived as enemies of right-wing Christianity. And at the heart of this revenge fantasy is violent conflagration that will take place in Israel, but only after the Temple on the Mount is rebuilt. A battle that will consume the entire Middle East as a “Greater Israel” comprised of all or parts of Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria is established. It’s a religious revenge fantasy with potentially massive real-world implications:
Nor is it a hypothetical as to whether or not the powerful Evangelical lobby would play a spoiler role in any attempts to arrive at a peace settlement that might avoid this revenge fantasy scenario. Evangelical leaders like prominent Christian Zionist John Hagee and Jerry Falwell helped rally support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1998 opposition to the peace plan. And then again, in 2004, we have delegation from the Apostolic Congress — a Christian Zionist group that believes in the Rapture — met with Elliott Abrams to express express its concern that Israel’s disengagement from Gaza would violate God’s covenant with Israel:
Importantly, this relationship between the right-wig Christian leadership in the US and the Israel hard right goes back to the 1970s, right around the same time the US Evangelical community was becoming a highly politically active demographic. In other words, you can’t really separate the contemporary politically charged conservative Christian community in the US from this special relationship with the Israeli hard right. A special relationship predicated on the fulfillment of the End Times and the ultimate destruction of the Jewish people. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Tim LeHaye were key founders of this movement and all deeply devoted to the same End Times-centric Christian Zionist theology. A theology that doesn’t just assume the Jewish people will be destroyed during the End Times but tasks Christians with helping to bring these events to fruition:
And then we get to the formal christening of the hyper-politicization of this growing Christian movement: the creation of the Council for National Policy in 1981, where theocrats, business titans, and politicians can quietly get together and formulate a joint strategy. A joint strategy that includes some sort of End Times conflagration, as evidenced by the inclusion of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Tim and Beverly LaHaye as founding members. In fact, Tim LaHaye served as the CNP’s first president from 1981–82, and Robertson served as President from 1985–86. It’s worth nothing other CNP members with ties to this network of extremist ministers includes Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse (Executive Director, Beverly LaHaye Institute), Elizabeth R. Waller (Research Fellow, Beverly LaHaye Institute). So when we comments from Falwell about how he was part of the CNP’s elite “Arlington Group” that was regularly meeting with the George W. Bush White House, it’s important to keep in mind that these End Times ministers have been playing key leadership roles in the CNP from its very conception:
Finally, note how this all ties back into the ongoing CNP-directed Schedule F/Project 2025 plans to execute mass purges of all suspected liberals from government positions and eventually even private institutions. The Schedule F plot may have formally emerged out of the Trump White House in 2019, but the idea behind it goes back to Tim LaHaye’s theocratic revenge fantasy. The purging of all “secular humanists” from public office is a biblical mandate according to this theology. Which happens to be the theology animating one of the most powerful networks in the world:
“We must remove all humanists from public office and replace them with pro-moral political leaders.” Those were the words of Tim LaHaye in a book published back in 1980, who went on to become the first CNP president the following year. And here we are in 2023, with the CNP furiously leading a major organizing effort to turn the Schedule F/Project 2025 plot into a reality at the earliest opportunity. At the same time Israel is on the verge of moving a few steps closer to the long-awaited End Times conflagration as we wait to see whether or not the current conflict ends up diminishing the Israeli hard right or instead making it more powerful than ever. More powerful and therefore more able to engage in major provocations like the rebuilding of the Temple Mount. The pieces are falling into place. They may not be the pieces for the actually End Times biblical prophecy. But the pieces for a major escalation of global turmoil are indeed falling into place, thanks in no small part to the CNP’s network of leading theocrats and their decades-long mission to bring to spark a conflict big enough to end the world.
They aren’t wasting any time. And aren’t planning on wasting any time either. That’s the predictably disturbing update we got from the Washington Post about the ongoing Schedule F/Project 2025 mass purges planned for the next Republican White House. Plans for how to remove all obstacles to the planned purges are already underway, with Jeffrey Clark playing a leading role in the obstacle-removing efforts. Efforts that will include an invocation of the Insurrection Act, potentially on Inauguration Day. In fact, we are told the Insurrection Act proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority.
As the article notes, Clark already showed an openness to the Insurrection Act back when he was working in Trump White House Justice Department on the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. According to a federal indictment, a deputy White House counsel warned Clark that Trump’s refusing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark responded Recall how Trump tried to make Clark the acting Attorney General in late December of 2020.
Amusingly, Project 2025 director Paul Dans put out a statement standing by Clark’s involvement in Project 2025, declaring “We are grateful for Jeff Clark’s willingness to share his insights from having worked at high levels in government during trying times.” But then after the publication of the story, a Heritage Foundation spokesman put out a the denial that, “There are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.” Don’t forget that Project 2025 is being organized by the Heritage Foundation.
So it appears that Project 2025 is working on an immediate implementation of the Insurrection Act once Trump takes office. And while the Heritage Foundation is putting out belated denials, we can’t say we haven’t been warned. Which, of course, is presumably part of the whole point about the extensive warnings and updates we’ve been getting for years now. Updates and warnings that just keep getting more ominous as it becomes clearer and clearer how Trump is planning on running and winning with this national purge as his campaign pledge to the voters. And the full GOP establishment is in on it, whether they are ready to publicly admit it or not:
“Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.”
Yes, discussions of the Insurrection Act are reportedly an immediate priority for the “Project 2025” collaborators, with none other than Jeffrey Clark leading that work. Clark, of course, was the then-obscure Justice Department figure who advocated a number of extreme steps that could be taken to overturn the 2020 election results and whom Trump tried to make the acting Attorney General in late December of 2020. That’s the guy leading the efforts to explore how Trump might use the Insurrection Act during his second term. But Clark is just the guy leading the effort. It’s not Jeffrey Clark’s priority. It’s a Project 2025 priority, which includes all the 75 groups involved with the Project 2025 collaboration:
And then there’s the plans for the open politicization of the Justice Department, which will apparently be explicitly justified as a kind of revenge move for all the investigations into Trump. Or as Trump put it, “This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’ And that means I can do that, too.” And according to key Schedule F/Project 2025 operative Russ Vought, the political independence of the Justice Department isn’t actually covered by the Constitution or law already today. No statutory changes would be required:
And then we get to the rather hilarious theatrics at work. Ominously hilarious: there’s some sort of ‘the Federalist Society is a bunch of squishes who won’t go full MAGA’ memeing going on here. Again, as stated in this same article, Project 2025 is a massive collaborative effort involving 75 organizations and led by the Heritage Foundation. Trying to separate the Federalist Society from this network is just silly theatrics. But it’s the kind of theatrics that will be exceptionally useful should the hard right conservative majority on the Supreme Court — which is basically a product of the Federalist Society’s decades of efforts — end up making key rulings validating the planned purges. And it will obviously be useful to create some distance between the MAGA world and the Federalist Society should the planned purges go horribly awry and end up generating a new round of investigations. They are planning on effectively ending what’s left of the US democratic institutions, after all. That’s a real gamble, as January 6 made clear:
Similarly, note the belated denials by the Heritage Foundation about the reports on Jeffrey Clark’s Project 2025 work on the Insurrection Act. Heritage insists “There are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.” That’s despite the fact that Project 2025 direct Paul Dans put out a statement defending Jeffrey Clark’s role in the project. So, much like the CNP’s behind-the-scenes organizing role behind the January 6 Capitol insurrection, it appears that the massive conservative establishment institutional involvement with Project 2025 is going to remain hidden too. It’ll be an ‘all MAGA’ affair, despite the massive collaborative effort involving 75 different groups being organized by the Heritage Foundation:
And let’s not forget: this is a GOP establishment plan to be implemented by the next Republican administration, whoever that may be. If Trump ends up going to prison next year there’s still going to be a Republican nominee. Arguably someone with an even better shot of winning the general election. Project 2025 — and any Insurrection Act plans that go along with it — is the Republican establishment’s plan, despite all the preemptive MAGA-branding.
Donald Trump didn’t have a platform when he ran for reelection in 2020. The whole GOP ditched a platform that year. And while there isn’t any sort of policy platform that’s emerging from the Trump 2024 campaign, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there is going to be a platform for 2024: the impending Trumpian purges of the ‘deep state’ and ‘the left’ in government. That’s the platform. Policy is kind of a side note when that’s your platform. The plan is to break and capture government, not use it to do stuff.
Disturbingly, it’s also becoming increasing clear that the provoking of ‘liberal tears’ through the threat of those purges is going to be a big part of how the 2024 Trump campaign, as recently evidenced from MAGA surrogates like conservative lawyer Mike Davis. Davis has been making news this year for his gleeful anticipation of the mass jailings he would execute after President Trump makes him attorney general. As Davis recently put it, he’d toss political opponents in “the gulag,” called caging migrant kids “glorious,” and told his followers to “arm up” against “the violent black underclass.”
And while it would be nice to think that Mike Davis is just a right-wing talking head who wouldn’t actually be chosen to be Trump’s next attorney general, especially after saying stuff like that in public, that’s unfortunately not the case. Donald Trump Jr. just cited Davis as the kind of person his father would be tapping to execute his 2025 vision. A vision of retribution, purges, and capture.
But as the following Philadelphia Inquirer article excerpt points out, there’s another reason Davis could be the next Republican AG: he has an exquisite pedigree. At least on paper. Davis is a Federal Society member, worked as a consultant to boost the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and later clerked for him, then became chief counsel for nominations to the GOP chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley during the Brett Kavanugh hearings. It sounds great if ignore the extremism of Gorsuch and the fact that he was filling a seat stolen from Barack President Obama. And ignore the many still valid questions about Brett Kavanaugh’s character including his deep ties to the corrupt antics of George W. Bush’s administration, like questions about whether or not Kavanaugh lied to Congress over the role he may have played in a 2002 GOP scandal over the theft of Democratic documents from a congressional server the ‘Senate hacking scandal’). And then you would have to ignore the Federal Society’s successful capture of the US judiciary on behalf of predatory billionaires. Along with ignoring how Chuck Grassley appears to have been far more involved with the efforts to overturn the 2020 election than is generally recognized. Recall how it wasn’t obvious that Mike Pence was going to refuse to go along with the plan until the evening of Jan 5. It was only then that some sort of ‘Plan B’ to get Pence out of the way was needed. And that Plan B appeared to center around getting Chuck Grassley to replace Pence in the electoral count proceedings. A role Grassley even hinted at with reporters on Jan 5. And that Plan B appeared to center around getting Chuck Grassley to replace Pence in the electoral count proceedings. A role Grassley even hinted at with reporters on Jan 5. Mike Davis’s resume looks great on paper. ‘MAGA’ Mike Davis is conservative establishment Mike Davis too. They are the same person because the conservative establishment is fully on board platform of purges, retribution, and capture.
So given Davis’s conservative pedigree and fascist political activism, we have to ask if he’s a CNP member. Well, Mike Davis’s name doesn’t show up on available leaked CNP membership lists, but Davis was one of signatories of that letter of conservative leaders back in January of 2023 during the House speakership intra-GOP squabbles over Kevin McCarthy’s nomination. Squabbles that, as we saw, were very much orchestrated and supported by the CNP as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of the dozens of signatories of that letter were CNP members. Mike Davis may not be officially CNP, but he’s obviously a close fellow traveler. And that gleefully fascist rhetoric about what he’ll do as Trump’s AG has probably got him on the short-list to be Trump’s next AG:
“The first you might call “resumé Mike Davis,” with the Des Moines, Iowa, native hitting all the right marks for rapid advancement in today’s conservative legal movement. A member of the Federalist Society, Davis worked as a consultant to boost the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, then became chief counsel for nominations to the GOP chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, fellow Iowan Chuck Grassley. He served Grassley during the contentious hearings over eventual Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the push by Trump and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to pack the judiciary with right-wing judges. He now heads two ultraconservative efforts, the Article III Project and the internet Accountability Project.”
Even on paper his resume is troubling. Sure, it’s officially impressive, but contextually troubling: Mike Davis, Federal Society member, worked as a consultant to boost the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and later clerked for him, then became chief counsel for nominations to the GOP chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley during the Brett Kavanugh hearings. It sounds great if ignore the the stolen seat Gorsuch was filling. And if you ignore the questions about whether or not Kavanaugh lied to Congress over the role he may have played in a 2002 GOP scandal over the theft of Democratic documents from a congressional server the ‘Senate hacking scandal’). Mike Davis’s resume looks great on paper despite being a clear and present danger to American democracy because that’s how rotten the conservative legal establishment has become over decades of Davis’s legal and political career. It’s not like the Federalist Society has kicked him out for these comments. Mike Davis is just willing to be loud and clear that he’s ready to go to that next step in authoritarianism, which is why this is his moment to shine:
And in case it’s not clear that Mike Davis could seriously become Trump’s attorney general, Don Jr. just put Davis in the group of people his dad would be interested in trusting to execute his vision, along with maybe Kash Patel and Laura Loomer. Recall how Kash Patel was a key player in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and remains a key player in the growing Schedule F/Project2025 effort. Patel and Davis are clearly that enthusiastic about fascistically breaking the system in order to capture it:
And that looming threat of “gulags” from Mike Davis is why we have to unfortunately take seriously the kind of messaging coming out of Davis’s Article III Project. Started no-holds-barred advocacy group for conservative judicial nominees under Trump, it’s now a no-holds-barred advocacy group for making the case that Trump’s legal threats are part of some sort of deep state plot. The kind of deep state plot narrative that will be trotted out over and over by a future Trump administration as a justification for the purge Davis might oversee as attorney general:
“Led by Mike Davis, Article III Project was founded in an effort to press for conservative judicial and other key nominees but evolved into an attack vector targeting Democratic nominations after Biden took office. It took a bare-knuckle approach to the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson over her sentencing record in child porn cases. ”
The Article III Project started off under Trump as a no-holds-barred outfit for getting conservative judges appointed. And now it’s ‘evolved’ into a no-holds-barred outfit for smearing Democratic nominees and portraying any attempts to hold Trump legally accountable as part of a deep state plot to prevent Trump from winning a second term. Because Trump’s legal defense now appears to primarily consist of plans to win a second term through any means necessary and then tap people like Mike Davis to enthusiastically carry out his ‘deep’ purge of society’s institutions. There won’t be a legal system left that isn’t under the thumb of Trump and his Federalist Society fellow travelers of which Mike Davis is just one. An increasingly prominent Federalist fellow traveler, but just one of many. The upcoming purge is a MAGA/Conservative establishment joint project:
And again, don’t forget that, while Mike Davis’s name doesn’t show up on available leaked CNP membership lists, Davis was one of signatories of that letter of conservative leaders back in January of 2023 during the House speakership intra-GOP squabbles over Kevin McCarthy’s nomination. Squabbles that, as we saw, were very much orchestrated and supported by the CNP as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of the dozens of signatories of that letter were CNP members. Mike Davis may not be officially CNP, but he’s obviously a close fellow traveler. MAGA, CNP, Federalist Society ‘establishment’ Republicans. The modern GOP is fascist gumbo. There’s a lot of fellow traveling in fascist gumbo. Mike Davis is a particularly vocal piece of this gumbo but he’s certainly not the only one planning on needing a pardon.
Credit where credit’s due: Chris Rufo did it again. This time, he managed to compel Harvard president Claudine Gay into a resignation. Just six months after Gay became the first female black president of Harvard. Granted, this is credit for the kind of achievement only a cynical propagandist would be proud of. But this is Chris Rufo we’re talking about. He’s undoubtedly extremely proud.
Not that Rufo didn’t have help. He had extensive help, starting with the appallingly poor answer Gay — along with the presidents of MIT and Penn — gave during a congressional testimony to a question about calls for genocide against the Jews on campus. There wasn’t too much more fuel needed after that PR debacle to keep that fire growing. But Rufo found that fuel in the form of a plagiarism charge against Gay that ended with her resignation less than a month after Rufo first published the allegations.
Now, when it comes to the plagiarism allegations themselves, it does appear there are some instances that could be considered plagiarism found in Gay’s PhD thesis. Although, as D. Stephen Voss- an associate professor of political science at the University of Kentucky who is one of the people whose works were plagiarized by Gay — pointed out, the kinds of plagiarism Gay engaged in are the academic equivalent of speeding. In other words, this was a borderline case of plagiarism. But in the context of all the uproar of Gay’s tone deaf congressional testimony, a borderline case was all that was required.
Chris Rufo isn’t hiding the fact that he set out to bring about Gay’s resignation. Interestingly, he’s also not hiding the fact that he was leading a well organized and coordinated media campaign that “shows a successful strategy for the political right...How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful.” Rufo actually bragged to Politico in a recent interview that, “I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues.” Rufo went on to express how he now is seeking new experimentation “on how we can cycle up some of these campaigns very quickly”, describing his end goal as the elimination of “the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.”
Now, should we now expect a wave of new plagiarism allegations brought against the top academics in the US? Well, on the one hand, that kind of depends on how much real plagiarism there actually is going on. But as we’re going to see in a fascinating article excerpt from The Atlantic, one author decided to run his own PhD thesis through the iThenticate plagiarism software, considered by experts to be the best plagiarism detection software on the market today. The software returned a score of 74, implying that 74 percent of the thesis was plagiarized. But then the author started manually reviewing all of the various instances flagged by the software and discovered an array of false positives. They even discovered that papers are penalized in the iThenticate algorithm for similar language found in work published after the paper’s publication date. Finally, by the take they filtered out all the false positives, their score dropped to 0. Again, iThenticate is considered the best of this software, costing roughly $300 to run a thesis through it.
So we have Christopher Rufo publicly engaged in media victory laps about his big score and predicting more such stories to come, at the same time we’re learning that plagiarism allegations are apparently going to be incredibly easy to generate on just about anyone Rufo decides to target. They may not be credible plagiarism allegations, but it doesn’t sound like it will be difficult for Rufo and his allies to generate alarming iThenticate scores about basically anyone with a publication. What are the odds Rufo and his allies can resist the temptation to go public with garbage plagiarism scores? It’s a part of this story to keep an eye on.
But as we’re going to also see, there’s another key piece of context to keep in mind as we’re watching Rufo’s attack on academia unfold: This is all happening in the wake of the apparent implosion of another one of Rufo’s big ideas from yesteryear. That would be Moms for Liberty, the ‘grassroots’ astroturf group of ‘concerned parents’ that has been bombarding school boards across the US with protests about ‘Critical Race Theory’ (CRT) in American public schools. As we’ve seen, CRT hysteria started popping up in 2021, with extensive Council for National Policy (CNP) support. And fomenting of that at anti-CRT hysteria, with a focus on trans kids, is more or less what Moms for Liberty (M4L) exists to do and has done for a couple of years now. But if the 2023 off year election results are any indication of the durability of this strategy, the strategy of whipping of anti-CRT hysteria among parents for political gain has already run its course. Almost all of the Moms for Liberty backed candidates lost their races for school board in 2023.
The strategy was a bust. A strategy that Rufo played a major role in advocating and advancing over the last few years. In fact, Rufo first saw this strategy of focusing on CRT picked up by then-President Trump in the final months of the Trump administration. Interestingly, it was only the November and December of 2020, after it was clear that Trump had lost, that was saw Rufo begin advocating that state and local governments take up the charge of fighting these CRT battles. It was December of 2020 when Moms for Liberty was first incorporated. By the summer of 2021, Moms for Liberty battles were popping up across the US at local school boards.
Keep in mind that Rufo hasn’t exactly been shy about the intent of this anti-CRT backed campaign. As Rufo put it in a speech at Hillsdale College in 2021, “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” And that right there is the grand prize: the privatization of public schools. That’s the goal. A goal that appeared to be moving further and further away with Moms for Liberty’s 2023 electoral bust.
At the same time, despite that electoral wipe out, Moms for Liberty isn’t going anywhere. It still has a message that animates the Republican base and it still has the extensive dark money mega-donor support needed to field new ‘grassroots’ campaigns designed to whip up parental panic. And with the overturning of Roe v Wade, the need for some sort of counter narrative that can animate young female voters especially is absolutely crucial for the GOP’s 2024 prospects. Quite simply, Chris Rufo and his fellow travelers at the CNP need a narrative about the horrible perils of progressivism that sticks and resonates with voters. And they need that narrative now, in a presidential election year.
That’s all part of the fascinatingly cynical context of the leadership fiasco that just transpired. Rufo and his allies received a political gift in the form of that debacle of congressional testimony and they used that gift to great effect. And now they face the temptation of trying work the same model again, and again, and again, as Rufo is so keen on pointing out. Are plagiarism charges going to be gift that keeps on giving? Or will it go the way of Moms for Liberty and the anti-CRT hysterics of yesteryear that just don’t play like they used to? Time will tell, but keep in mind that whatever scheme Rufo has in mind doesn’t need to remain effective forever. Just until November of 2024. Try not to be super surprised of we see waves of plagiarism accusations dominating the headlines in 2024, just as we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that the plagiarism accusations lose steam after being revealed to largely be trumped up hoaxes. But nor should we be surprised of those accusations don’t lose steam until after the 2024 election, when it will potentially be too late to matter. Don’t forget: the whole ‘Moms for Liberty’ focus on state and local school boards was only deemed necessary by Rufo after Trump lost the White House.
So let’s hope academia is ready for an extremely well organized dark-money financed smear campaign intent on convincing American voters that colleges represent some sort of existential threat to society that only Donald Trump can fix. Because that well coordinated media campaign coming, as Chris Rufo loves telling journalists for some reason:
“None of that happened by accident. As Rufo acknowledged to me, Gay’s resignation was the result of a coordinated and highly organized conservative campaign. “It shows a successful strategy for the political right,” he told me. “How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful.””
A highly organized and coordinated campaign. That’s how Chris Rufo characterized this effort. Three key elements — narrative, financial, and political pressure — were needed to get it done. And it worked. So well that Rufo is now enthusiastically predicting that this is a “universal strategy” that can used to ultimately unwind DEI departments at universities and other institutions across the US. But not just for DEI. The three pronged strategy can be applied by the right to most issues, according to Rufo:
And note how Rufo appears to be admitting that hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman was an active participant in this organized push. Rufo is coy about the degree of coordination, but he seems to be admitting that this was a joint effort:
There’s also the rather comical Rufo gives for his very public depictions of this strategy in action. Rufo describes it as educational truth telling. But it’s hard to ignore the reality that Rufo’s public narrative basically amounts to portraying this highly coordinated media campaign — a campaign that included members of congress and a billionaire who was organizing CEOs to threaten the job prospects of students — as some sort of principled righteous struggle of truth and light against an oppressive all-powerful liberal bureaucracy intent on imposing liberal fascism on society. When that’s your narrative, it’s not hard to see why you’re so vocal about it:
Also note Rufo’s anticipation about “more experimentation on how we can cycle up some of these campaigns very quickly.” In other words, we should expect the resignations of a lot more college presidents by the time this is over:
And as the following piece in The Atlantic warns, the plagiarism accusations may not be limited to people who arguably engaged in real plagiarism, even edge cases as appears to be the case with Gay. Thanks to modern plagiarism detection tools, virtually anyone can earn a plagiarism accusation. At least that was the apparent experience by Ian Bogost, who decided to test out the leading iThenicate plagiarism detection software on his own PhD thesis, written back in 2002–2004. Bogost’s score? A 74, which is the equivalent of accusing Bogost of plagiarizing around 74% of his thesis. Upon closer inspection of the individual instances of alleged plagiarism, Bogost discovered a variety of differnt forms of false positive hits, including being penalized for publications with similar language that were published after his thesis. After filtering out all the bogus hits, Bogost’s score dropped to 0.
It was just one example, but a pretty compelling one. Almost anyone with any published academic work can be accused of plagiarism using today’s plagiarism detection tools. Or rather, a bad-faithed application of those plagiarism detection tools.
Will Chris Rufo and his many fellow travelers be able to resist the temptation to start leveling plagiarism accusations to every ‘woke’ academic they can find? We’ll see, but the temptation has go to be there. Because as the article warns, this iThenticate plagiarism detection software is considered the best plagiarism detection tool available today:
“After a couple of hours of work, I still had 60 individual entries to review, each requiring precision mousing to assess and exclude. Determined to see if I’d copied any original work according to the software, I persisted—after all, some of the instances of plagiarism that had sunk Claudine Gay were measured in the tens of words. But not one single match that iThenticate had found amounted to illegitimate copying. In the end, my dissertation’s fraud factor had dropped from 74 percent to zero.”
Well look at that: when Ian Bogost put his 2004 dissertation through the iThenticate plagiarism detection too, it gave him a score of 74, implying that 74 percent of his thesis was plagiarized. And yet, after sifting through all the false positives, the score was reduced to 0. It’s the kind of example that suggests is going to be exceedingly easy to generate alarming plagiarism scores. Generating authentically alarming cases of plagiarism might not be that easy, but creating new headlines based on specious plagiarism accusations is going to be like a walk in the park. And this iThenticate software is apparently the best in the field, costing $300 just to use for a dissertation. But also note this incredible detail about how iThenticate’s algorithm works: you get penalized for works published after your work that have similar verbiage. So the plagiarism of your own work by others could end up elevating your own plagiarism score:
Now, when Rufo initially published his allegations against Gay, he didn’t simply list an iThenticate score. Rufo cited actually instances where paragraphs from Gay’s thesis appeared to be using language without attribution. They were fairly trivial violations by any reasonable standard, but it was enough to keep the flames fanned and Gay’s eventual resignation. Which is part of what makes this new enthusiasm by Rufo over repeating this whole fiasco so grimly interesting. It’s not actually clear that the plagiarism Gay is accused of is very widespread. But it’s abundantly clear that tools like iThenticate will be it exceedingly easy to level such accusations. Almost every academic is potentially vulnerable to an unfiltered iThenticate score:
Can Rufo and the rest of his highly organized network resist what must be an enormous temptation to unleash these plagiarism accusations across academia? It’s a political cudgel just sitting right there, waiting for someone to pick it up and start thumping their enemies. Time will tell, but it’s not like Rufo doesn’t have extensive experience waging high profile propaganda campaigns predicated on disinformation and deception. That’s kind of what his career is based on at this point. It’s Rufo, after all, who helped to develop the Right’s fixation on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and transgender children. Strategically whipping up multi-spectrum faux populist hysterics is kind of Rufo’s specialty at this point.
But, of course, as Rufo repeatedly reminds us, he isn’t working alone. He’s part of a well organized network. And that network includes a lot more people than billionaire Bill Ackman. Rufo’s working is part of the larger CNP culture war playbook. A playbook that includes the aggressive use of ‘populist’ groups like Moms for Liberty focused on whipping up parental outcry over anything they can think of in public education.
As we should expect, Rufo was integral figure in the development of Moms for Liberty. Which brings us to an interesting aspect of this whole story about the take down of Claudine Gay that we should keep in mind as Rufo public plots his next move: Moms for Liberty, which first appeared in 2021, started off strong but has turned out to be a political bust. At least that appears to be the case so far, based on the 2023 off year elections...elections that typically work against the party in the White House. Almost all — 12 out of 13 — of the Moms for Liberty school board candidates in the state of Virginia lost, which was reflective of the group’s nation electoral results. 2023 was not a year Chris Rufo can really brag about as a proof of concept success.
And yet, as the following article also notes, there’s not indication the deep-pocketed backers for the group have any plans of withdrawing support. For starters, the group’s message still plays very well in GOP primaries even if it doesn’t resonate with the general electorate. But also because the goals of the group aren’t just about winning school board elections. It’s also about eroding support for public schools in general, with an eye on the core long-term prize the deep-pocketed backers are ultimately playing for: the privatization of schools.
We don’t have to read between the lines to infer those grand privatization plans. One of the architects of this plan laid it all out in April of 2022 during a speech at Hillsdale College when he simply stated that “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” And that speaker was, of course, Chris Rufo. And that’s why Moms for Liberty isn’t going anywhere despite its poor electoral performance in 2023. The oligarchs behind Moms for Liberty that Rufo was speaking for are playing a long game:
“Virtually everywhere the group fielded candidates for a school board last month, they lost. In Iowa, 12 of 13 Moms for Liberty–endorsed candidates lost their races. In Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Virginia, and Kansas, the story was much the same. As it turns out, projects like banning books and targeting transgender students aren’t the galvanizing issues that the GOP had presumed.”
There’s no denying it. Moms for Liberty crashed and burned in 2023. Despite all the efforts on the part of the backers of this movement. Backers include Christopher Rufo, who summed up the Moms for Liberty strategy at a Hillsdale College even in 2021 as follows which his signature ‘saying the quiet part out loud’ flair. According to Rufo, “To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.” And that, right there, gives the game away. At least the Moms for Liberty CRT hysteria game. It’s about on ongoing push to privatize the public school system. Rufo wasn’t mincing his words. Saying the quiet part out loud is his thing:
And that brings us to the following October 2022 New Yorker article describing the origins of Moms for Liberty. Origins that, as we should expect, start with Chris Rufo and his quest to turn “Critical Race Theory” into a generic boogeyman that can be used as an umbrella term for anything that annoys voters. As the article describes, Rufo actually had the ear of then-President Trump in 2020, who became an enthusiastic backer of Rufo’s proposals to turn CRT hysteria into a national issue that the Trump White House could directly tackle. But by December of 2020 it was clear that Trump may not have a second term (despite all their efforts). ALEC held a webinar earlier that month about “reclaiming education and the American dream,” where Rufo made the case that states and local governments need to take up the cause. Moms for Liberty was incorporated later that month.
Rufo early 2021 continuing to make the case that an anti-CRT campaign could bear fruit. As Rufo put it in a March 15, 2021, Twitter thread, “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” Rufo added, “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ ”
On March 22, 2021, one week after Rufo’s tweets, Robin Steenman made her first appearance at a school board meeting complaining about the dangers of Critical Race Theory in places like North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The Wit & Wisdom curriculum posed a similar danger, according to Steenman. Several weeks later, Steenman formed the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty. It turns out Steenman doesn’t actually have any children in the Williamson County public schools or any public schools for that matter. But that didn’t stop the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty from growing and leading a number of high-profile and well-financed protests.
In the end, Williamson County’s school board reviewed the decision to adopt in Wit & Wisdom curriculum and concluded that the content was indeed appropriate. Beyond that, they investigated whether or not Critical Race Theory was a factor in adopting the curriculum and found no indication that CRT played any role at all in the decision. Nonetheless, the school board decided to impose various “guardrails” on some of the new content seemingly intended to placate their critics.
The story of Williamson County’s Moms for Liberty experience is just one local example of national movement. A movement designed by Chris Rufo in the waning months of the Trump administration with the backing of the Republican mega-donor class. Don’t forget the number of CNP-members backing Moms for Liberty’s campaign. Or as one Moms for Liberty spokesperson told The New Yorker — seemingly channeling Rufo’s propensity for saying the quiet part out loud — the organization—ostensibly a charity—is a “media company”:
“In May, 2021, as the district finished its first academic year with Wit & Wisdom, women wearing “Moms for Liberty” T‑shirts began appearing at school-board meetings. They brought large placards that contained images and text from thirty-one books that they didn’t want students to read. In public comments and in written complaints, the women claimed that Wit & Wisdom was teaching children to hate themselves, one another, their families, and America. “Rap a Tap Tap,” an illustrated story about the vaudeville-era tap dancer Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, by the Caldecott medalists Leo and Diane Dillon, harped on “skin color differences.” A picture book about seahorses, which touched on everything from their ability to change color to the independent movement of their eyes, threatened to “normalize that males can get pregnant” by explaining that male seahorses give birth; the Moms suspected a covert endorsement of “gender fluidity.” Greco-Roman myths: nudity, cannibalism. (Venus emerges naked from the sea; Tantalus cooks his son.)”
By May of 2021, Moms for Liberty activists seemed to have popped out of nowhere in Williamson County, TN, ready for a big political fight over local schools. The Wit & Wisdom curriculum adopted in August of 2020 was the source of their ire. Williamson County was the latest front in the growing ‘CRT’ wars. The county ordered a review of the new curriculum:
That review didn’t find a problem, but the flag had been planted. Moms for Liberty wasn’t going anywhere in this newly energized culture war front and the school board responded as if it was on notice and imposed various “guardrails” over some content. But one thing the review committee didn’t find was any indication that ‘CRT’ came up at all during the curriculum selection process, despite Moms for Liberty accusing the district of pushing a CRT agenda. As Nancy Garrett, the board’s chair, put it, in response to the deluge of anti-CRT email she received, “I guess I’m wondering what happened.”
And as we can see, Chris Rufo happened. Rufo was already talking about the existential threat of CRT on rightwing media outlets like Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show during the 2020 election cycle. Rufo even described CRT as “the perfect villain”—a term that “connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American views.” What happened in Williamson County in 2021 was the application of the strategy of going after that “perfect villain” that Rufo was pushing nationally a year earlier during the final months of the Trump administration. Rufo had Trump’s ear. He just didn’t have enough time to get big things done at the federal level, which is part of the reason local school boards became major battlegrounds in 2021 after Trump was out of the White House. Moms for Liberty was formed in December of 2020, days after an ALEC webinar about “reclaiming education and the American dream”. The group was obviously created by the CNP and the rest of the right-wing mega-donor establishment for the school board fights they know were. Williamson County was just one of those fights in the national anti-CRT campaign Chris Rufo was calling for:
And by March of 2021, just two months before all the uproar started in Williamson County, Rufo was, true to form, openly describing on Twitter his plans for turning ‘Critical Race Theory’ into a generic catch all term for “various cultural insanities”. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ ” It was part of Rufo’s curious habit of being shockingly honest about his dishonest schemes. The guy knows how to troll:
On March 22, 2021 — one week after Rufo’s March 15, 2021, tweet thread describing this “evolving strategy” — we see Robin Steenman making her first appearance before the Williamson County school board. Steenman wasn’t just complaining about Williamson County’s curriculum. Instead, it was a rant about Critical Race Theory in places like North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Several weeks later, Steenman started the Williamson County chapter of Moms for Liberty:
And when we see a Moms for Liberty co-founder crowing about how the group has helped get twenty- and thirty-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, it’s a reminder that Moms for Liberty’s strategic value has only grown in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade and the GOPs increasingly political toxic stance on abortion. Manufactured hysteria over public schools is exactly what the party needed. Also, yes, that co-founder was Bridget Ziegler, now known for her secret three-way romance between Bridget, her husband Christian, and a third woman that ended in a rape allegation against Christian. It’s not clear how that whole story is going to play out with the young female demographic Ziegler has been focused on:
Finally, as just a final look at the gross dishonesty at the core of the whole astroturfed Moms for Liberty campaign, note how the woman who initiated the complaints in Williamson County back in May of 2021 over the Wit & Wisdom curriculum, Robin Steenman, didn’t even have children in the public schools. She was basically an actor. Because that’s what this is: political theater. Specifically, the theater of ‘local concerned parents’ paid for by the billionaire-financed right-wing dark money:
Robin Steenman was basically operating as a kind of right-wing actor in a kind of real-life theater production. The fact that acted like she had children in the public schools was really the most benign of her lies. The whole thing was a fabrication. A theatrical production brought to us by the same folks currently working on an education hysterics sequel. It’ll be higher education hysterics in the sequel, but otherwise the plot will more or less be the same.
It’s no secret that networks of billionaires wield enormous influence over the US government and society. They don’t really hide that, despite all the dark money. But just because Americans know they’ve long lived in a society run by and for billionaires, that doesn’t necessarily mean the public is actually aware of the vision these billionaires have for the future. Or aware of just how extreme that vision truly is, which brings us to the following New York Times report about the network of billionaires behind the current campaign to expunge all vestiges of ‘DEI’ (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) from US college campuses. A campaign that’s scored some notable wins with the recent resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay.
As we’ve seen, the architect behind Gay’s downfall is exactly who we should have expected: Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, the same figure behind the ‘anti-CRT’ hysteria associated with groups like Moms for Liberty. It all happened rather quickly, with the October 7 attacks in Israel and ensuing conflict triggering waves of protests on US campuses, along with a well-funded public backlash lead by billionaire Bill Ackman. But as the following report describes, the anti-DEI organizing by the billionaires behind Rufo began long before. It was in early 2021 when the Claremont Institute began scouring around for a new issue to champion. College DEI programs became the new scapegoat of choice.
Early 2023 was, of course, months after the January 6 Capitol insurrection, an event which the Claremont Institute was intimately involved with. As we saw, the Claremont Institute was deeply involved with creating the various justifications and scheming that led up to January 6, with the Claremont Institute’s John Eastman playing a key role in formulating the Trump White House’s strategy for overturning the 2020 election results. We shouldn’t be surprised the Claremont Institute was keenly interested in picking up a new cause to crusade in early 2021.
Nor should we be at all surprised to find Claremont Institute as the entity leading this anti-DEI effort. Recall how Ron DeSantis’s ‘anti-woke’ takeover of New College included bringing Claremont figures Matthew Spalding and Charles Kesler onto the New College board, along with Rufo, in order to execute the anti-woke institutional purge. The Claremont Institute has been very public in recent years about its desire to execute this institutional purge, and at a lot more institutions than just New College.
But as we’re going to see in the following report, the extremists funding and executing this movement still have plenty ambitions that have largely remained hidden. Sort of. It’s not actually any more extreme than the kind of extremism we often see with conservative mega-donors and activists. For example, there’s Texas mega-donor Tim Dunn, who has almost captured control of the Texas GOP. Dunn is the kind of Christian nationalist doesn’t believe Jews should hold office, and he wasn’t afraid to tell that to Jewish then-Speaker of the Texas House, Robert Strauss. Dunn is apparently also the kind of Christian nationalist who doesn’t mind cozy up to Nazis like Nick Fuentes. Or CNP member and internet personality Tim Wildmon who routinely host guests calling for the outlawing of homosexuality. There is plenty of evidence of genuinely held extremist views on the part of the mega-donor and activist class. But it’s not noticed very often. That’s part of the value of the article, based on thousands on documents of conversations, grant proposals, and other communications among a network of right-wing activists and mega-donors who planned and financed the ‘anti-DEI’ public relations crusade we are seeing playing out today. Communications the authors obviously never expected to be released to the public in many cases, like when they shared views like a desire to ban homosexuality or return to times of hierarchy of overt patriarchy.
So how did the NY Times get all these communications? It’s not entirely clear other than public-record requests somehow got them turned over. Which may be due to the fact that one of the members of this network — Dr. Scott Yenor — is a professor at Boise State University in Idaho, making his emails and other communications potentially subject to public-record laws. Yenor made national news in 2021 over his arguments that feminism had made women “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.”
Regardless of where exactly the documents came from, the NY Times got them, and published a story depicting an early 2021 world of cranky elderly billionaires concerned about what ‘wokeism’ will do to their grandchildren and reeling from the reality of the 2020 election loss and the shock of the George Floyd protests. A powerful network of wealthy extremists in desperate need of a message that would win over voters and energize the conservative base. Claremont’s chairman, Thomas D. Klingenstein — who is also a New York investor and major Republican donor — decried how, “rhetorically, our side is getting absolutely murdered...We have not even come up with an agreed-on name for the enemy.”
As Yenor warned Klingenstein, terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” tend to be pretty well receive by the public. Still, they found a name for “the enemy”, thanks to Chris Rufo’s “critical race theory” rhetoric.
But despite having ‘named the enemy’ and launching an anti-CRT crusade, Yenor still warned this network that purging ‘CRT’ out of the schools isn’t enough. The DEI offices of universities need to be defunded entirely and DEI policies need to be reversed. Only then can the ‘social justice’ genie be put back in the bottle. A new, broader strategy emerged: partnering with state think-tanks and its many former fellows scattered across the conservative establishment and on Capitol Hill, the Claremont Institute was going to lead a lobbying effort designed to activate state legislatures and lead to the passage of anti-DEI legislation. The legal purging of DEI from public institutions under the force of state law. That was the plan put in place and it’s already yielding results, with states like Texas and Florida, having already passed laws banning ‘DEI’ from all public universities.
But as we’re also going to see revealed in the communications, the ultimate goal of this network goes beyond banning all traces of DEI from education. The goal is basically the purging of ‘liberal’ professors out of public universities and the mandating a specific form of education with specific ‘patriotic’ lessons. An example of these plans were revealed in communications between Yenor and Hillsdale College professor David Azerrad and that were strategizing a public relations strategy for defending conservative professor Amy Way over the outcry over her comments about how the US would be “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration,” and that Black people felt “resentment and shame and envy” over the “Western peoples’ outsized achievements and contributions.” Yenor encouraged Azerrad to appeal to liberal audiences against the firing of Wax by cautioning that such a precedent could allow red state legislatures to demand the firing of professors they deem to be too liberal. Azerrad replied, “But don’t we want this to happen?” “Yes,” Yenor admitted. “But your audience doesn’t want it to happen.”
Similarly, in August 2021 communication, Klingenstein wrote, “In support of ridding schools of C.R.T., the Right argues that we want nonpolitical education...No we don’t. We want our politics. All education is political.” Dr. Yenor replied that an “alternative vision of education must replace the current vision of education. In the short-term, state legislatures could get out of the business of banning and get into the business of demanding — demanding the certain conclusions about American history be delivered.
Despite all these anti-DEI efforts and the successes at the state level, the ‘anti-DEI’ narrative didn’t seem to really take hold with the public. At least that’s what we might infer from the GOP’s relatively poor electoral results in 2022 and 2023 compared to historic expectation. Similarly, the stunning burnout of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign — a campaign seemingly defined by DeSantis’s commitment to this anti-DEI/CRT narrative — suggests this narrative may not have the broader appeal they were hoping to find. And then October 7 happened, along with the hamfisted congressional testimonies of college presidents like Claudine Gay that, along with the plagiarism charges, gave enough fuel to reignite this issue. And here we are, with billionaire Bill Ackman now seemingly part of this anti-DEI network intent on purging any semblance of DEI programs from higher education.
Also keep in mind that they aren’t just interested in changing the content of higher education’s curriculum. Changing the makeup of the student bodies is also part of the agenda. As Yenor wrote an in exchange, “My big worry in these things is that we do not make ‘the good of minorities’ the standard by which we judge public policy or the effects of public policy...Whites will be overrepresented in some spheres. Blacks in others. Asians in others. We cannot see this as some moral failing on our part.”
So as we watch the current October 7‑fueled anti-DEI crusade continue to march along as it picks its next target, it’s important to keep in mind that the figures behind this effort have been working on selling this anti-DEI crusade to the public for a number of years now. And it’s more important to realize that the groups and funders behind this are, themselves, exactly the kinds of extremists intent on reverting US higher education back to a period of overt racial hierarchies and patriarchy. It’s in their own words. But they don’t just have these ambitions. They have a plan that’s already seeing success in states like Florida. Or Texas, where a single Christian Nationalist billionaire — Tim Dunn — has nearly captured complete control of the state’s Republican Party. And it’s a plan that doesn’t require broad public approval or Republican control at the federal level. Captured gerrymandered state legislatures will do the dirty work. It’s a plan we know can work because it’s already working:
“Thousands of documents obtained by The New York Times cast light on the playbook and the thinking underpinning one nexus of the anti‑D.E.I. movement — the activists and intellectuals who helped shape Texas’ new law, along with measures in at least three other states. The material, which includes casual correspondence with like-minded allies around the country, also reveals unvarnished views on race, sexuality and gender roles. And despite the movement’s marked success in some Republican-dominated states, the documents chart the activists’ struggle to gain traction with broader swaths of voters and officials.”
Thousands of messages from a nexus of the anti-DEI movement. Frank messages revealing unvarnished views on race, sexuality and gender roles. Views like a desire to return to a time where openly gay people were put into prison and ‘the patriarchy’ was again overtly embraced. Extremely conservative billionaires anxious to turn back the clock on society and willing to spend what it takes.
Amazingly, it sounds like these thousands of documents — grant proposals, budgets, draft reports and correspondence — containing all this frank conversation were obtained through public-record requests, which is a sign of just how many of the people involved with this network were at public institutions. Figures like professor Scott Yenor at Boise State University, a public institution . And as these documents make clear, the organizing for this anti-DEI movement appears to have started in early 2021, shortly after Trump grudingly left office. It was Thomas Klingenstein — Republican mega-donor and the Claremont Institute’s chairman — who sought out a means or reframing terms like “diversity”, which tends to be pretty popular, in a negative way that would resonate with the public. So, of course, they turned to Christopher Rufo, who provided them with the new definitions for DEI that the public could more easily learn to hate and fear. Terms like “critical social justice” or “critical social justice education”:
Also note the irony of this campaign given that it started in the wake of the George Floyd protests characterized by calls for “defunding the police”: This anti-DEI effort is literally an attempt to ‘defund DEI’. In their own words:
But the irony of this ‘defunding’ effort pales in comparison to the gross deception and hypocrisy the organizers were engaging in when they used calls for “academic freedom” at the same time they were plotting to purge not just left-wing politics but also professors out of academia:
And then there’s the depths of the extremism at work here: as Professor Yenor described in 2021 email, Yenor confirmed his views like “Our sexual culture will not heal until ‘faggot’ replaces ‘bigot’ as the slur of choice,” or “Our sexual culture will not be healed until we once again agree that homosexuality belongs in the closet and that a healthy society requires patriarchy.” And as Yenor replied to one email exchange with Heather Mac Donald, “not tons of asian countries have [same sex marriage]” but rather “more wholesome policies like prison” for gays. It was just one of many ‘colorful’ exchanges between Yenor and Mac Donald, including her comments about “The low IQ 3rd world”. Prison for gays and “the lw IQ 3rd world” may not be the public slogan they are going with at this point, but this is who they are:
Related to this intense hatred of gays is the palpable loathing of GOP mega-donor Peter Thiel over his sexual orientation. The fact that Thiel’s ‘boyfriend’ committed suicide last year didn’t help. And Thiel surely knows his political allies viscerally hate his guts and would prefer to punish open homosexuality with prison. Which raises the question: are Thiel’s ‘doomsday’ bunkers in places like New Zealand partly in anticipation of his political allies effectively outlaying his lifestyle in the US? Again, he has to know the outlawing of homosexuality will be a consequence if his political allies ever manage to usher in US-style fascism. Because US-style fascism is obviously going to be deeply evangelical in nature. Wrapped in flag and carrying a cross and all that:
But while this was an effort organized by the Claremont Institute, it’s ultimately the mega-donors paying for it. And as we can see, those mega-donors appear to be elderly billionaires disturbed at the prospect of ‘wokeism’ impacting their grandchildren’s lives. In other words, there’s a ‘pity the poor billionaires’ sentiment driving much of this, in addition to all the open bigotry:
Notably, one of those mega-donor groups funding a closely related Claremont effort is the Searle Freedom Trust, whose president is Kimberly O. Dennis. Dennis also happens to be the president of Donors Trust, the primary mega-donor dark money outfit for the Koch donor network. It’s reminder that the thousands of documents detailing the activities of this network is really just a peek behind the curtain as a much larger political machine at work:
Finally, we find how this effort that started in 2021 was fully embraced by Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid. DeSantis was supposed to be the political vehicle to bring these politics into the White House. Until his presidential campaign sputtered out. And then October 7 happened, with all the anti-Israeli college protests and the incredibly tone deaf congressional testimony of several Ivy League college presidents. In short order, a coalition of activists managed to get Harvard president Claudine Gay to resign. A new opportunity to repackage the anti-DEI crusade arrived:
How will the anti-DEI crusade play into the 2024 presidential race? Time will tell, but it’s hard to imagine the Trump campaign is going to ignore an issue so animating to his conservative base.
But beyond the potential electoral utility of this issue for Trump, let’s not forget that the whole Schedule F/Project 2025 plans for a national liberal purge started in the Trump administration and remains one of the signature elements of his campaign platform. If Trump wins a second term, it will be a win achieved after campaigning on a platform of mass institutional purges.
And that’s all why it’s going to be increasingly important to recognize that Trump’s 2024 campaign pledges of revenge and purges aren’t just going to be Donald Trump’s revenge purges. The billionaire Christian nationalist extremists behind him — the base Trump truly served during his first term — have revenge purge plans of their own. Yes, those purge plans are already underway, but they’re just warming up.
It keeps happening. For whatever reason, individuals closely aligned with the ongoing Schedule F/Project 2025 far right plot to purge the federal government — and eventually the rest of society — of anyone not deemed loyal enough to the movement keep talking to the press, laying out their plans. Increasingly extreme plans. It started with the pair of giant Axios pieces from July of 2022 laying out, with details provided by insiders, who was leading the plot and its eventual goals. And here we are again, with a new chilling update thanks to a pair of anonymous insiders happy to share this new with Politico.
What’s the update? Well, it’s focused on Russell Vought and his Center for Renewing America (CRA). Recall how Vought, serving as the head of the Office of Budget and Management (OMB) under Donald Trump, was the only head of a federal agency who really attempted to start implementing the Schedule F executive order Trump issued several weeks before the 2020 election. Vought obviously still has big Schedule F plans for 2025. But as these two anonymous sources warn, Vought’s plans now include an overt Christian nationalist agenda that entails creating a new social joint agreement that Christianity should be the ultimate force shaping American society, for Christians and non-Christians alike.
On one level, none of this is really news. Vought penned a piece back in March of 2021 where he openly defended Christian nationalism as a misunderstood concept that was being smeared by critics. But, again, the news is that Vought’s allies are now telling the press that Vought is very serious about putting that vision into action under the next Trump administration. Who knows why these anonymous sources are feeding these reports but it keeps happening.
As we’re also warned in the Politico report, Vought has a close affiliation with William Wolfe, a former Trump administration official who, like Vought, has taken up the cause of promoting open Christian nationalism as the political path forward for American conservatives. And as we’re going to see, one of the messages Wolfe has been sharing with audiences has been the need to get ready for a Christian “call to arms”. It’s not a metaphorical call to arms. He’s talking about political violence.
Finally, let’s not forget how Vought’s wife, Mary Vought, is one of the assumed members of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP), which, as we’ve seen, operates as the Christian Nationalist mothership behind the larger Schedule F plot. In other words, we shouldn’t view this report as simply Russell Vought’s plans to use the next Trump administration to formally impose Christian Nationalism on society. Vought is just one of many CNP-connected individuals and entities working on this agenda:
“Christian nationalists in America believe that the country was founded as a Christian nation and that Christian values should be prioritized throughout government and public life. As the country has become less religious and more diverse, Vought has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault and has spoken of policies he might pursue in response.”
The drop in religiosity in the US is an assault on Christians that needs to be countered with Christian Nationalist government policies. Those aren’t warnings coming from observers of these movements. It’s the plan emanating from Russel Vought’s Center for Renewing America (CRA), one of the many groups that’s spent the last few workings developing the ongoing Schedule F/Project 2025 plot. Interestingly, like so much of the reporting on this plot, we have people speaking directly to the press about it. Two anonymous individuals in this case. People involved or familiar with the plot keep talking to the press about it. And now they’re talking to the press about the Christian Nationalism shaping this plot. And long with the plans to invoke the Insurrection Act to squash any protests. It’s a remarkable pattern:
And in case it’s not clear that Trump himself and more than happy to embrace a Christian Nationalist agenda, all we have to do is look at his recent behavior. Or past behavior. Trump has been engaged in Christian Nationalist dog-whistling for years:
And in case it’s also not obvious that the type of Christianity Vought is planning on imposing on society is going to be the kind of utterly heartless Christianity we should expect from far right movements, all we have to do is look at Vought’s stances on issues like separating migrant parents from children. Or the fact that he’s heavily influenced by William Wolfe. As we’re going to see below, Wolfe recently warned that Christians are going to have to “heed the call to arms” soon:
And in case it’s not clear that Trump and this larger movement is keeping a “call to arms” in its back pocket as an option should the need arise, note how Michael Flynn is continuing to recruit an “Army of God” for Trump and Christian nationalism:
And as the following RightWingWatch piece from back in October describes, Flynn isn’t the only leading figure in this movement already engaging in militant rhetoric. As William Wolfe implored an audience at a “Jesus And Politics” conference “If we have ever lived in a point in time in American history since then that we could argue that now is the time to arms again, I think we are getting close”:
““If we have ever lived in a point in time in American history since then that we could argue that now is the time to arms again, I think we are getting close,” Wolfe then proclaimed. “Even though as Christians we seek peace, when the enemy is pressed upon us, if we fail to heed the call to arms, then we are acting as cowards.””
William Wolfe in his own words. Seemingly insurrectionary words. Wolfe is itching to declare war on, well, basically American who isn’t already a Christian nationalist. To do otherwise would apparently be an act of cowardice.
We’ve been warned. Again. We definitely can’t say we weren’t warned at this point. Which might be the point of all these preemptive warnings.