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: