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The (Schedule F) Purge: Trump’s Big Revenge Plan, Brought to You By the Council for National Policy

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 elec­tionimplor­ing 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 ’25

A rad­i­cal plan for Trump’s sec­ond term

Jonathan Swan
Jul 22, 2022 — Pol­i­tics & Pol­i­cy

For­mer 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.

******

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.

...

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.

*****

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

*****

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.

...

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.

...

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

———–

“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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.

...

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.
...

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:

...
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.

...

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).
...

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:

...
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.

...

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.
...

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:

...
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.

...

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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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’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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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.

...

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.
...

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:

...
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.

...

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.

...

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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.”
...

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 ’25

Trump’s revenge

Jonathan Swan
Jul 23, 2022

Pres­i­dent 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.

...

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.

*****

“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.”

...

————

“Trump’s revenge” by Jonathan Swan; Axios; 07/23/2022

“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, 2022

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.

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.

...

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.”

———–

“Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute: The Trump-aligned $19.7M Insti­tu­tion Cre­at­ing “Amer­i­ca First” Polit­i­cal Infra­struc­ture”; Doc­u­ment­ed; 07/10/2022

“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:

...
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.

...

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:

...
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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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.

...

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.
...

———-

“How Mark Mead­ows’ non­prof­it ben­e­fit­ed from Trump’s ‘Big Ripoff’ ” by Sue Stur­gis; Fac­ing South; 06/24/2022

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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 EDT

In 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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

————

“Cur­tis Yarvin wants Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy top­pled. He has some promi­nent Repub­li­can fans.” by Andrew Prokop; Vox; 10/24/2022

“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:

...
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.

...

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.

...

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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.’”
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.
...

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:

...
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.”
...

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.

Discussion

44 comments for “The (Schedule F) Purge: Trump’s Big Revenge Plan, Brought to You By the Council for National Policy”

  1. 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:

    Gov­ern­ment Exec­u­tive

    Trump, Who Tried to Weak­en Feds’ Civ­il Ser­vice Pro­tec­tions, Announces 2024 Run
    Pri­or to Tuesday’s announce­ment, the for­mer pres­i­dent endorsed plans to reim­ple­ment Sched­ule F if he returned to the White House.

    Erich Wag­n­er | Novem­ber 16, 2022 04:25 PM ET

    For­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump—who sup­ports a plan to make may fed­er­al work­ers at-will employ­ees and as pres­i­dent signed exec­u­tive orders to make it eas­i­er to fire them and to lim­it the reach of fed­er­al unions—on Tues­day announced that he would again seek the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion for pres­i­dent in 2024 in an hour-long speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Flori­da.

    ...

    Trump’s term as pres­i­dent was a dif­fi­cult one for the fed­er­al work­force. A series of now-rescind­ed exec­u­tive orders sought to make it eas­i­er to fire fed­er­al employ­ees and reduce the role of unions at fed­er­al agen­cies, and his admin­is­tra­tion tried unsuc­cess­ful­ly to dis­band the Office of Per­son­nel Man­age­ment and send its func­tions to the Gen­er­al Ser­vices Admin­is­tra­tion and the Exec­u­tive Office of the Pres­i­dent.

    Short­ly before the 2020 elec­tion, Trump estab­lished a new job clas­si­fi­ca­tion—Sched­ule F—with­in the except­ed ser­vice and tasked agen­cies with find­ing fed­er­al work­ers in “pol­i­cy-relat­ed” posi­tions to reclas­si­fy into the new cat­e­go­ry. Had Biden not tak­en office in Jan­u­ary 2021 and quick­ly axed the plan, tens of thou­sands of fed­er­al work­ers could have effec­tive­ly become at-will employ­ees.

    Dur­ing the first two years of the Biden admin­is­tra­tion, many of Trump’s fed­er­al work­force poli­cies have been revoked, but con­ser­v­a­tive activists have con­tin­ued to work behind the scenes, lay­ing the ground­work to revive those plans in the event Trump or anoth­er Repub­li­can returns to the White House. Last sum­mer, Axios report­ed that some con­ser­v­a­tive groups are work­ing to have Sched­ule F ready to imple­ment imme­di­ate­ly upon a Republican’s inau­gu­ra­tion, and have iden­ti­fied 50,000 fed­er­al work­ers to reclas­si­fy and threat­en with fir­ing.

    Trump him­self endorsed the plan to revive Sched­ule F and purge the civ­il ser­vice of so-called “rogue bureau­crats” at a ral­ly ear­li­er this year and began fundrais­ing on the pro­pos­al short­ly there­after.

    “We need to make it much eas­i­er to fire rogue bureau­crats who are delib­er­ate­ly under­min­ing democ­ra­cy or, at a min­i­mum, just want to keep their jobs,” Trump said in July. “They want to hold onto their jobs. Con­gress should pass his­toric reforms empow­er­ing the pres­i­dent to ensure that any bureau­crat who is cor­rupt, incom­pe­tent or unnec­es­sary for the job can be told—did you ever hear this—‘You’re fired, get out, you’re fired.’ [You] have to do it. Deep state. Wash­ing­ton will be an entire­ly dif­fer­ent place.”

    How­ev­er, the threat of politi­ciz­ing the fed­er­al work­force is not unique to Trump. Since the pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion, Repub­li­can law­mak­ers have begun to embrace Sched­ule F, oppos­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic efforts to require con­gres­sion­al autho­riza­tion before a pres­i­dent insti­tutes a new job clas­si­fi­ca­tion in the except­ed ser­vice, and oth­ers have intro­duced leg­is­la­tion that would make fed­er­al work­ers at-will employ­ees.

    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.

    ———–

    “Trump, Who Tried to Weak­en Feds’ Civ­il Ser­vice Pro­tec­tions, Announces 2024 Run” by Erich Wag­n­er; Gov­ern­ment Exec­u­tive; 11/16/2022

    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:

    ...
    Trump him­self endorsed the plan to revive Sched­ule F and purge the civ­il ser­vice of so-called “rogue bureau­crats” at a ral­ly ear­li­er this year and began fundrais­ing on the pro­pos­al short­ly there­after.

    “We need to make it much eas­i­er to fire rogue bureau­crats who are delib­er­ate­ly under­min­ing democ­ra­cy or, at a min­i­mum, just want to keep their jobs,” Trump said in July. “They want to hold onto their jobs. Con­gress should pass his­toric reforms empow­er­ing the pres­i­dent to ensure that any bureau­crat who is cor­rupt, incom­pe­tent or unnec­es­sary for the job can be told—did you ever hear this—‘You’re fired, get out, you’re fired.’ [You] have to do it. Deep state. Wash­ing­ton will be an entire­ly dif­fer­ent place.”

    How­ev­er, the threat of politi­ciz­ing the fed­er­al work­force is not unique to Trump. Since the pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion, Repub­li­can law­mak­ers have begun to embrace Sched­ule F, oppos­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic efforts to require con­gres­sion­al autho­riza­tion before a pres­i­dent insti­tutes a new job clas­si­fi­ca­tion in the except­ed ser­vice, and oth­ers have intro­duced leg­is­la­tion that would make fed­er­al work­ers at-will employ­ees.
    ...

    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:

    Gov­ern­ment Exec­u­tive

    The House Has Approved a Bill to Pre­vent Future Sched­ules F
    Despite the sup­port of more than 30 good gov­ern­ment groups, Repub­li­cans remained large­ly opposed to the mea­sure.

    Erich Wag­n­er | Sep­tem­ber 15, 2022

    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.

    ...

    The Pre­vent­ing a Patron­age Sys­tem Act (H.R. 302), intro­duced by Rep. Ger­ry Con­nol­ly, D‑Va., blocks the pres­i­dent from reim­ple­ment­ing Sched­ule F, or any oth­er new except­ed sched­ule cat­e­go­ry of work­ers, with­out advanced con­gres­sion­al approval. The text of the bill already passed out of the House as part of the chamber’s ver­sion of the fis­cal 2023 Nation­al Defense Autho­riza­tion Act in July, and com­pan­ion leg­is­la­tion was intro­duced in the Sen­ate last month.

    The renewed focus on the issue by con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats comes after reports that con­ser­v­a­tive activists and ex-Trump admin­is­tra­tion staffers have plans to imme­di­ate­ly revive Sched­ule F under the next Repub­li­can pres­i­dent and have already iden­ti­fied 50,000 employ­ees to threat­en with ter­mi­na­tion. Trump, who is mulling anoth­er run at the White House, also explic­it­ly endorsed the idea dur­ing a polit­i­cal ral­ly last month.

    The bill has the sup­port of dozens of good gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tions and fed­er­al employ­ee groups, includ­ing the Nation­al Active and Retired Fed­er­al Employ­ees Asso­ci­a­tion, the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Gov­ern­ment Employ­ees, the Nation­al Trea­sury Employ­ees Union, the Senior Exec­u­tives Asso­ci­a­tion, Pro­fes­sion­al Man­agers Asso­ci­a­tion, among oth­ers.

    Dur­ing debate on the House floor, Con­nol­ly said the bill would pre­serve both the fed­er­al workforce’s cen­tu­ry-old mer­it sys­tem pro­tec­tions and reassert Con­gress’ author­i­ty as the mak­er of fed­er­al per­son­nel pol­i­cy.

    “This bill does not pre­clude the pres­i­dent request­ing to cre­ate a new job clas­si­fi­ca­tion, but it does require [a request to Con­gress],” he said. “It restores the bal­ance . . . Chang­ing the nature of the civ­il ser­vice is rare and impor­tant, and it should require express con­gres­sion­al par­tic­i­pa­tion through leg­is­la­tion.”

    Rep. James Com­er, R‑Ky., accused Democ­rats of want­i­ng to entrench “bureau­crats” who are hos­tile to Repub­li­can poli­cies and that Wash­ing­ton, D.C.-area sup­port Connolly’s leg­is­la­tion because of the large num­bers of fed­er­al employ­ees in their dis­trict.

    “This bureau­cra­cy gets big­ger every Con­gress,” he said. “I’ve noticed that with the excep­tion of one speak­er, all of the speak­ers on the oth­er side of the aisle rep­re­sent the Wash­ing­ton, D.C., fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy work­force, but the major­i­ty of Con­gress, we rep­re­sent Amer­i­ca. Amer­i­cans want to hold poor per­form­ing gov­ern­ment employ­ees, the bureau­crats who are paid with our hard earned tax dol­lars, account­able.”

    ...

    ——–

    “The House Has Approved a Bill to Pre­vent Future Sched­ules F” by Erich Wag­n­er; Gov­ern­ment Exec­u­tive; 09/15/2022

    “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:

    Gov­ern­ment Exec­u­tive

    ‘There Needs to Be a Reck­on­ing’: Repub­li­cans Intro­duce a Bill to Make Feds At-Will Employ­ees
    The leg­is­la­tion, along with recent talk of a renewed effort to imple­ment Sched­ule F, makes clear that a “major assault” on the fed­er­al civ­il ser­vice is com­ing, regard­less of who the next Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee will be.

    Erich Wag­n­er
    July 29, 2022

    A group of five con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans has intro­duced leg­is­la­tion to make the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment an at-will employ­er, evis­cer­at­ing civ­il ser­vice pro­tec­tions, chill­ing whistle­blow­er activ­i­ty and abol­ish­ing the Mer­it Sys­tems Pro­tec­tion Board.

    Reps. Chip Roy, R‑Texas, Mary Miller, R‑Ill., Troy Nehls, R‑Texas, Bob Good, R‑Va., and Lau­ren Boe­bert, R‑Colo., on Thurs­day intro­duced the Pub­lic Ser­vice Reform Act (H.R. 8550), which would make fed­er­al work­ers at-will employ­ees and strip them of many of the avenues cur­rent­ly at their dis­pos­al to appeal adverse per­son­nel actions. It would abol­ish the MSPB, send­ing all com­plaints of whistle­blow­er retal­i­a­tion to the Office of Spe­cial Coun­sel, albeit only for 14 days, after which all appeals would go direct­ly to fed­er­al appel­late courts.

    “Most career civ­il ser­vants do their jobs faith­ful­ly day in and day out, but 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,” Roy said in a state­ment. “That is because poli­cies meant to insu­late the gov­ern­ment from pol­i­tics have instead cre­at­ed a dense web of red tape that rewards lazi­ness and non­com­pli­ance and enables hos­tile par­ti­sans to entrench them­selves with­in fed­er­al agen­cies. For­mer Pres­i­dent Trump is absolute­ly right about this: there needs to be a reck­on­ing, and bureau­crats actu­al­ly need to be fire­able.”

    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.

    “This is obvi­ous­ly a huge and major change, an effort to gear up a major assault on the fed­er­al employ­ment sys­tem,” said Don Ket­tl, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus and for­mer dean of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land School of Pub­lic Pol­i­cy. “This is being helped and aid­ed unques­tion­ably by a set of groups like Amer­i­ca First Works, Her­itage Action for Amer­i­ca, Free­dom­Works and Cit­i­zens for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca, who have endorsed the bill . . . Much of the debate has large­ly been about if Trump is reelect­ed, but what this makes clear is the efforts to try to change the civ­il ser­vice aren’t just Trump nec­es­sar­i­ly, and if Repub­li­cans take con­trol of Con­gress fol­low­ing the midterms, this may very well go from idea to spe­cif­ic action.”

    Under the bill, the only way a fed­er­al employ­ee would be able to fight their ter­mi­na­tion aside from through the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­ni­ty Commission—in instances of discrimination—or OSC and the judi­cia­ry if they are whistle­blow­ers is by appeal­ing to the very man­ag­er who has pro­posed fir­ing them. Only an agency head has the pow­er to over­rule the offi­cial who has pro­posed fir­ing some­one.

    Roy said in a state­ment that his bill pre­serves pro­tec­tions against dis­crim­i­na­tion and whistle­blow­er retal­i­a­tion. But in the case of dis­crim­i­na­tion, EEOC would be required to toss all of its poli­cies regard­ing com­plaints that orig­i­nate from fed­er­al agen­cies and apply the same stan­dards it uses in pri­vate sec­tor cas­es.

    ...

    How­ev­er, the bill’s pur­port­ed whistle­blow­er pro­tec­tions sug­gest just the oppo­site, Ket­tl said. OSC only has a 14-day win­dow in which to make non­bind­ing rec­om­men­da­tions on whether an adverse per­son­nel action con­sti­tutes retal­i­a­tion. Anoth­er pro­vi­sion requires the deduc­tion of 25% of a fed­er­al employee’s retire­ment annu­ity if a court finds their appeal to be “in bad faith or friv­o­lous.”

    “This dra­mat­i­cal­ly lim­its the amount of whistle­blow­ing activ­i­ty that’s pos­si­ble,” he said. “Going to court is extreme­ly expen­sive and time con­sum­ing. In addi­tion, it cre­ates a dis­in­cen­tive to blow the whis­tle because your retire­ment ben­e­fits could be reduced. When you put it togeth­er, it’s a very big deal. It would dra­mat­i­cal­ly change the incen­tives for indi­vid­u­als who are being dis­missed because of whistle­blow­ing.”

    ————-

    “ ‘There Needs to Be a Reck­on­ing’: Repub­li­cans Intro­duce a Bill to Make Feds At-Will Employ­ees” by Erich Wag­n­er; Gov­ern­ment Exec­u­tive; 07/20/2022

    “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:

    ...
    “Most career civ­il ser­vants do their jobs faith­ful­ly day in and day out, but 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,” Roy said in a state­ment. “That is because poli­cies meant to insu­late the gov­ern­ment from pol­i­tics have instead cre­at­ed a dense web of red tape that rewards lazi­ness and non­com­pli­ance and enables hos­tile par­ti­sans to entrench them­selves with­in fed­er­al agen­cies. For­mer Pres­i­dent Trump is absolute­ly right about this: there needs to be a reck­on­ing, and bureau­crats actu­al­ly need to be fire­able.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    “This is obvi­ous­ly a huge and major change, an effort to gear up a major assault on the fed­er­al employ­ment sys­tem,” said Don Ket­tl, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus and for­mer dean of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land School of Pub­lic Pol­i­cy. “This is being helped and aid­ed unques­tion­ably by a set of groups like Amer­i­ca First Works, Her­itage Action for Amer­i­ca, Free­dom­Works and Cit­i­zens for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca, who have endorsed the bill . . . Much of the debate has large­ly been about if Trump is reelect­ed, but what this makes clear is the efforts to try to change the civ­il ser­vice aren’t just Trump nec­es­sar­i­ly, and if Repub­li­cans take con­trol of Con­gress fol­low­ing the midterms, this may very well go from idea to spe­cif­ic action.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Under the bill, the only way a fed­er­al employ­ee would be able to fight their ter­mi­na­tion aside from through the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­ni­ty Commission—in instances of discrimination—or OSC and the judi­cia­ry if they are whistle­blow­ers is by appeal­ing to the very man­ag­er who has pro­posed fir­ing them. Only an agency head has the pow­er to over­rule the offi­cial who has pro­posed fir­ing some­one.

    Roy said in a state­ment that his bill pre­serves pro­tec­tions against dis­crim­i­na­tion and whistle­blow­er retal­i­a­tion. But in the case of dis­crim­i­na­tion, EEOC would be required to toss all of its poli­cies regard­ing com­plaints that orig­i­nate from fed­er­al agen­cies and apply the same stan­dards it uses in pri­vate sec­tor cas­es.

    ...

    How­ev­er, the bill’s pur­port­ed whistle­blow­er pro­tec­tions sug­gest just the oppo­site, Ket­tl said. OSC only has a 14-day win­dow in which to make non­bind­ing rec­om­men­da­tions on whether an adverse per­son­nel action con­sti­tutes retal­i­a­tion. Anoth­er pro­vi­sion requires the deduc­tion of 25% of a fed­er­al employee’s retire­ment annu­ity if a court finds their appeal to be “in bad faith or friv­o­lous.”

    “This dra­mat­i­cal­ly lim­its the amount of whistle­blow­ing activ­i­ty that’s pos­si­ble,” he said. “Going to court is extreme­ly expen­sive and time con­sum­ing. In addi­tion, it cre­ates a dis­in­cen­tive to blow the whis­tle because your retire­ment ben­e­fits could be reduced. When you put it togeth­er, it’s a very big deal. It would dra­mat­i­cal­ly change the incen­tives for indi­vid­u­als who are being dis­missed because of whistle­blow­ing.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 20, 2022, 5:57 pm
  2. 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:

    Axios

    Trump talks with white nation­al­ist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago din­ner

    Jonathan Swan & Zachary Basu

    Nov 25, 2022
    Updat­ed Nov 26, 2022 — Pol­i­tics & Pol­i­cy

    For­mer Pres­i­dent Trump dined and con­versed with white nation­al­ist Nick Fuentes and rap­per Ye, for­mer­ly known as Kanye West, at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tues­day night, accord­ing to two sources famil­iar with the mat­ter.

    Why it mat­ters: Trump’s direct engage­ment with a man labeled a “white suprema­cist” by the Jus­tice Depart­ment, one week after declar­ing his 2024 can­di­da­cy, is like­ly to draw renewed out­rage over the for­mer pres­i­den­t’s embrace of extrem­ists.

    * Fuentes, who fre­quent­ly pro­motes racist and anti-Semit­ic con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, had been spot­ted with Ye at Mar-a-Lago, but reports erro­neous­ly sug­gest­ed he did not have din­ner with the for­mer pres­i­dent.

    What they’re say­ing: “Kanye West very much want­ed to vis­it Mar-a-Lago. Our din­ner meet­ing was intend­ed to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had nev­er met and knew noth­ing about,” Trump said in a state­ment.

    ...

    Behind the scenes: A source famil­iar with the din­ner con­ver­sa­tion told Axios that Trump “seemed very tak­en” with Fuentes, impressed that the 24-year-old was able to rat­tle off sta­tis­tics and recall speech­es dat­ing back to his 2016 cam­paign.

    * Para­phras­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, the source said Fuentes told the pres­i­dent he pre­ferred him to be “authen­tic,” and that Trump seemed script­ed and unlike him­self dur­ing his recent 2024 cam­paign announce­ment speech.
    * Trump respond­ed, “You like it bet­ter when I just speak off the cuff,” the source said. Fuentes replied that he did, call­ing Trump an “amaz­ing” pres­i­dent when he was unre­strained. “There was a lot of fawn­ing back and forth,” the source added.

    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.

    * Trump did­n’t dis­agree with Fuentes, but said he has advis­ers who want him to read off teleprompters and be more “pres­i­den­tial.” Notably, Trump referred to him­self as a politi­cian, which he has been loathe to do in the past.
    * Fuentes also told Trump that he would crush poten­tial 2024 Repub­li­can rivals in a pri­ma­ry, includ­ing Flori­da Gov. Ron DeSan­tis. Trump asked for Fuentes’ opin­ion on oth­er can­di­dates as well.

    Trump at one point turned to Ye and said, “I real­ly like this guy. He gets me,” accord­ing to the source.

    “To be hon­est, I don’t believe the pres­i­dent knew who the hell [Fuentes] was,” the source added.

    Trump asked if Fuentes was on social media such as Truth Social, the for­mer pres­i­den­t’s alter­na­tive to Twit­ter.

    * Fuentes told Trump that he was on Truth Social but had been banned from the social media plat­form Get­tr because Trump advis­er Jason Miller, the CEO of the com­pa­ny, was­n’t a fan of his.
    * Trump asked whether it was because Fuentes was on the “fringe” of his sup­port­er base, the source said. Fuentes acknowl­edged that he was, say­ing he’s “one of those peo­ple who got banned from every­thing.”

    Dri­ving the news: Ye, whose Twit­ter account was recent­ly restored after being restrict­ed for anti-Semit­ic com­ments, post­ed a video on Thurs­day night titled “Mar-a-Lago debrief.”

    * Ye claims in the video that Trump was “real­ly impressed” with Fuentes because “unlike so many of the lawyers and so many peo­ple that he was left with on his 2020 cam­paign, he’s actu­al­ly a loy­al­ist.”
    * A source famil­iar with the con­ver­sa­tion told Axios Trump took a phone call dur­ing the din­ner, and his demeanor toward Ye seemed to change when he got off the call. Trump made some nasty com­ments about Ye’s ex-wife, Kim Kar­dashi­an, and told the rap­per to pass them on.
    * Ye, who has lost major spon­sor­ships over his anti-Semi­tism and recent far-right asso­ci­a­tions, has said he wants to run for pres­i­dent in 2024. The rap­per claims Trump start­ed “scream­ing” at him at the din­ner and told him he would lose — “most per­turbed” by Ye ask­ing Trump to be his run­ning mate.

    Between the lines: The Dai­ly Beast report­ed Wednes­day that Fuentes was not present at the Mar-a-Lago din­ner with Ye, cit­ing a source famil­iar with the mat­ter.

    * Ye tweet­ed out a screen­shot of a group text with Fuentes on Thurs­day night in which a cen­sored par­tic­i­pant accus­es a Trump advis­er of being the source for the Dai­ly Beast sto­ry.
    * Dis­graced far-right com­men­ta­tor Milo Yiannopou­los, who appears with Ye in his “Mar-a-Lago debrief” video, is also in the “YE24” group chat.

    Flash­back: Truth Social, Trump’s social media plat­form, sparked back­lash by ver­i­fy­ing Fuentes’ account in Feb­ru­ary.

    ...

    ———

    “Trump talks with white nation­al­ist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago din­ner” by Jonathan Swan & Zachary Basu; Axios; 11/26/2022

    “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:

    ...
    Behind the scenes: A source famil­iar with the din­ner con­ver­sa­tion told Axios that Trump “seemed very tak­en” with Fuentes, impressed that the 24-year-old was able to rat­tle off sta­tis­tics and recall speech­es dat­ing back to his 2016 cam­paign.

    * Para­phras­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, the source said Fuentes told the pres­i­dent he pre­ferred him to be “authen­tic,” and that Trump seemed script­ed and unlike him­self dur­ing his recent 2024 cam­paign announce­ment speech.
    * Trump respond­ed, “You like it bet­ter when I just speak off the cuff,” the source said. Fuentes replied that he did, call­ing Trump an “amaz­ing” pres­i­dent when he was unre­strained. “There was a lot of fawn­ing back and forth,” the source added.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    “To be hon­est, I don’t believe the pres­i­dent knew who the hell [Fuentes] was,” the source added.

    Trump asked if Fuentes was on social media such as Truth Social, the for­mer pres­i­den­t’s alter­na­tive to Twit­ter.

    * Fuentes told Trump that he was on Truth Social but had been banned from the social media plat­form Get­tr because Trump advis­er Jason Miller, the CEO of the com­pa­ny, was­n’t a fan of his.
    * Trump asked whether it was because Fuentes was on the “fringe” of his sup­port­er base, the source said. Fuentes acknowl­edged that he was, say­ing he’s “one of those peo­ple who got banned from every­thing.”

    ...

    Flash­back: Truth Social, Trump’s social media plat­form, sparked back­lash by ver­i­fy­ing Fuentes’ account in Feb­ru­ary.
    ...

    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

    Van­i­ty Fair

    White Extrem­ists Have Found Their Guy for the Sen­ate: Blake Mas­ters

    Arizona’s Repub­li­can Sen­ate nom­i­nee, Blake Mas­ters, has been adopt­ed by far-right online cir­cles, but now that the Peter Thiel pro­tégé is in a heat­ed gen­er­al elec­tion, it looks like he’s try­ing to brush off those ties.

    By Caleb Ecar­ma
    August 16, 2022

    In Blake Mas­ters, white extrem­ists feel that they may soon have an ally in the Sen­ate. The 36-year-old ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist, who is the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee in Arizona’s key Sen­ate race, has earned sup­port from far-right fig­ures by refus­ing to shy away from con­tro­ver­sy through­out his cam­paign. He has claimed that “Black peo­ple” are to blame for America’s “gun vio­lence prob­lem”; praised the writ­ings of Ted Kaczyn­s­ki, a domes­tic ter­ror­ist who has become a cult hero among the young and very online por­tion of the far right; and embraced the rhetoric of “the great replace­ment,” a the­o­ry cham­pi­oned by white nation­al­ists who accuse Democ­rats of replac­ing white Amer­i­cans via an “inva­sion” of immi­grants from non-white coun­tries. (Though Mas­ters did con­demn the bomb­ings car­ried out by Kaczyn­s­ki, he not­ed that he sup­ports the Unabomber’s writ­ings on the neg­a­tive social effects of mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy.)

    Among the influ­en­tial white-extrem­ist fig­ures who have tak­en a lik­ing to Mas­ters is Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi Dai­ly Stormer blog. Anglin endorsed Mas­ters in a June post, writ­ing, “I can­not give a more force­ful endorse­ment, and I demand that any­one in Ari­zona (who is not some kind of known neo-Nazi or what­ev­er) get in con­tact with his cam­paign and see what kind of help he needs.” He added that the can­di­date was only “get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter.”

    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.

    Jack Poso­biec, a pro­po­nent of the Piz­za­gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry who has a track record of mak­ing anti-Semit­ic remarks, post­ed a pho­to last year from a fundrais­er held by Mas­ters and Don­ald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. His sup­port of Mas­ters has car­ried into the gen­er­al elec­tion, as Masters’s offi­cial press account on Twit­ter retweet­ed a Poso­biec post on Sun­day pro­mot­ing the candidate’s ral­ly with Ron DeSan­tis. (The Mas­ters cam­paign did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to a request for com­ment.)

    Mas­ters, for his part, has attempt­ed to dis­tance him­self from one of the more unsa­vory far-right char­ac­ters who latched on to his cam­paign dur­ing the con­tentious pri­ma­ry. Sev­er­al days after Mas­ters was endorsed by Andrew Tor­ba, the CEO of the far-right social media site Gab, he stat­ed that he was pre­vi­ous­ly unaware of Tor­ba, call­ing him a “nobody” whom “nobody cares about.” But Tor­ba, who once declared that he’d pre­fer to see Mas­ters in the White House over Trump, failed to appre­ci­ate Masters’s tac­ti­cal retreat, insist­ing that the two had com­mu­ni­cat­ed in the past. “Blake Mas­ters knows exact­ly who I am. We had a long con­ver­sa­tion on Twit­ter Spaces live a few months ago. Mega cringe cuck­ing here, but what­ev­er, I still want him to win for the great peo­ple of Ari­zona and for the right to con­trol the Sen­ate,” he wrote in a since-delet­ed Gab post ear­li­er this month. Torba’s claim was con­firmed last week after Jew­ish Insid­er pub­lished a clip of the two con­vers­ing in a Twit­ter audio chat. In the record­ing, Mas­ters can be heard telling Tor­ba that he will “check out” Gab, adding, “I mean, I’ve nev­er used [Gab]. I’m def­i­nite­ly not anti—I think I’m on Get­tr.” (A Mas­ters cam­paign advis­er reit­er­at­ed to Jew­ish Insid­er that Mas­ters “doesn’t know Tor­ba and rejects his sup­port.”)

    Among the most unortho­dox Sen­ate can­di­dates run­ning this cycle, Mas­ters lacks the polit­i­cal expe­ri­ence, celebri­ty name ID, and per­son­al wealth that are typ­i­cal­ly need­ed to run a suc­cess­ful Sen­ate cam­paign. But he spent much of his adult life work­ing for tech bil­lion­aire Peter Thiel, who has spent at least $15 mil­lion to boost a pro-Mas­ters super PAC. Masters’s oth­er allies include mem­bers of the so-called New Right, a loose move­ment made up of nation­al­ists who despise big tech and free trade, includ­ing Tuck­er Carl­son, blog­ger Cur­tis Yarvin, and J.D. Vance, anoth­er Thiel-backed Sen­ate hope­ful.

    ...

    ———–

    “White Extrem­ists Have Found Their Guy for the Sen­ate: Blake Mas­ters” By Caleb Ecar­ma; Van­i­ty Fair; 08/16/2022

    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:

    ...
    Among the influ­en­tial white-extrem­ist fig­ures who have tak­en a lik­ing to Mas­ters is Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi Dai­ly Stormer blog. Anglin endorsed Mas­ters in a June post, writ­ing, “I can­not give a more force­ful endorse­ment, and I demand that any­one in Ari­zona (who is not some kind of known neo-Nazi or what­ev­er) get in con­tact with his cam­paign and see what kind of help he needs.” He added that the can­di­date was only “get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter.”
    ...

    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’.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 28, 2022, 2:38 am
  3. 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:

    Salon

    White nation­al­ists get reli­gion: On the far-right fringe, Catholics and racists forge a move­ment

    Nick Fuentes’ racist “groyper” move­ment is build­ing a coali­tion with far-right Catholics. They have a plan

    By Kathryn Joyce — Ben Lor­ber
    Pub­lished May 12, 2022 6:30AM (EDT)

    This is the first arti­cle in a two-part series.

    Last Sun­day, as pro-choice sup­port­ers react­ed to the leaked Supreme Court draft opin­ion that will like­ly over­turn Roe v. Wade, a series of videos shot in low­er Man­hat­tan went viral. In one, a group of young men stood before an arched wood­en door­way at the Basil­i­ca of St. Patrick­’s Old Cathe­dral, recit­ing the Rosary while pro­test­ers demon­strat­ed out­side the church gates. In their cen­ter was a young man wear­ing an Amer­i­ca First hat and an FDNY fleece, clos­ing his eyes as he prayed. By that after­noon, the video had been shared on social media by far-right Repub­li­can Reps. Paul Gosar and Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene, who praised the men as “heroes” “defend­ing their church­es against the abor­tion­ist horde.” 

    In two oth­er videos tak­en the same day at the same loca­tion, the man in the Amer­i­ca First hat heck­led pro­test­ers, shout­ing from the church steps, “I am the peo­ple. The peo­ple have decid­ed, the court has decid­ed. You lose. You have no choice. Not your body, your choice. Your body is mine and you’re hav­ing my baby.”

    The man was not, as the New York City Fire Depart­ment quick­ly point­ed out, a fire­fight­er. Nor was he mere­ly a devout Catholic. Rather, he was a right-wing activist affil­i­at­ed with white nation­al­ist wun­derkind Nick Fuentes’ glee­ful­ly racist and anti­se­mit­ic Amer­i­ca First/“groyper” move­ment, which at its third annu­al Amer­i­ca First Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence (AFPAC) this Feb­ru­ary drew wide­spread con­dem­na­tion for its glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Vladimir Putin’s inva­sion of Ukraine, Fuentes’ praise of Hitler and the call by one speak­er, a state sen­a­tor from Ari­zona, to build “gal­lows” to hang polit­i­cal ene­mies.

    On a pop­u­lar groyper livestream show Sun­day night, host and move­ment leader Dal­ton Clod­fel­ter said he rec­og­nized the man in the videos and called him to join the show. As jour­nal­ist and West­ern States Cen­ter senior fel­low Nick Mar­tin report­ed, Clod­fel­ter said the man had made “a real­ly bold state­ment today and it’s going to be heard by a lot of peo­ple.” The man claimed that many of the oth­er pray­ing men who assem­bled that after­noon were also groypers, described the demon­stra­tors he’d been heck­ling as “demon­ic crea­tures” and “ani­mals” and said that one Black pro­test­er should be “enslaved” or “shot.” “What­ev­er church they’re going to attack next,” he pledged, “we’ll be there, and we’ll crush them.”

    None of that seemed to mat­ter to the right-wing politi­cians and media who held the man up as a hero of the faith. Promi­nent among those was Church Mil­i­tant, a far-right Catholic media out­let that pro­mot­ed its Mon­day night cov­er­age of the protest with a pic­ture of the groyper­’s face. That was more than acci­dent or coin­ci­dence — Church Mil­i­tant and the groypers are increas­ing­ly col­lab­o­rat­ing to mobi­lize their respec­tive audi­ences to con­front what both are call­ing “proabor­tion­ist demons” at pro-choice ral­lies across the coun­try, and, more gen­er­al­ly, to grow their move­ments on both sides. 

    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. 

    All four have rebrand­ed them­selves as “tra­di­tion­al” Catholics (or “trad-Caths,” in inter­net par­lance) and allied them­selves with an exist­ing net­work of far-right Catholics that includes Piz­za­gate provo­ca­teur-turned con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Jack Poso­biec, Trump con­fi­dant and advis­er Steve Ban­non and groyper-guru Nick Fuentes him­self. 

    At one point, Resis­tance, the activist wing of Church Mil­i­tant, began to mobi­lize sup­port­ers to counter-protest Planned Par­ent­hood march­es sched­uled for this Sat­ur­day in Chica­go, Nashville, Wash­ing­ton, San Anto­nio, Los Ange­les and oth­er cities. On Mon­day on the alter­na­tive social media site Telegram, Clod­fel­ter called on groypers to attend these ral­lies. By Wednes­day evening, more than five-dozen groypers on the site had eager­ly signed on. As of Fri­day, how­ev­er, Church Mil­i­tant seemed to have aban­doned this ini­tia­tive, though Clod­fel­ter still claims the groypers will ral­ly in Nashville.

    As we will dis­cuss in part 2 of this inves­ti­ga­tion, at least one promi­nent staff mem­ber at Church Mil­i­tant is also a groyper, and oth­er employ­ees of the right-wing Catholic group appear eager to build a unit­ed front between the two for­ma­tions. In the larg­er polit­i­cal land­scape of Trump-era Amer­i­ca, this is more evi­dence that white nation­al­ist and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ments, despite some mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ences on prin­ci­ple, strat­e­gy and tac­tics, are work­ing side by side in the right’s broad­er push to roll back abor­tion rights and enshrine white Chris­t­ian dom­i­nance in Amer­i­ca.

    “We have to push the enve­lope” 

    From its begin­nings, the groyper move­ment sought to strad­dle the gap between the white and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ments. In the lat­er years of the Trump pres­i­den­cy, as the large­ly pagan or athe­ist alt-right fell into dis­ar­ray, Fuentes sought to dis­tin­guish the most­ly Gen‑Z groyper move­ment from its dis­graced pre­de­ces­sor by gar­nish­ing its core white nation­al­ist prin­ci­ples with the flag and the cross.

    “[The alt-right] was a racial­ist, athe­ist, post-Amer­i­can, rev­o­lu­tion­ary and transna­tion­al move­ment,” Fuentes explained to fol­low­ers in Novem­ber 2019, attempt­ing to chart a new direc­tion for white nation­al­ism in the U.S. “Amer­i­ca First is a tra­di­tion­al­ist, Chris­t­ian, con­ser­v­a­tive, reformist, Amer­i­can nation­al­ist Move­ment.” While oth­er white nation­al­ists had giv­en up hope of trans­form­ing the con­ser­v­a­tive estab­lish­ment, the groypers, Fuentes argued, would redou­ble their efforts to influ­ence the main­stream Right. This project con­tin­ues today. “We have to push the enve­lope,” Fuentes told fol­low­ers in May 2021. “We are the right-wing flank of the Repub­li­can Party…we have got to be on the Right, drag­ging these peo­ple kick­ing and scream­ing into the future, into the right wing, into a tru­ly reac­tionary par­ty.”

    In today’s groyper move­ment, clas­sic white nation­al­ist themes of “white geno­cide,” white iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics and con­spir­a­to­r­i­al anti­semitism blend seam­less­ly with fer­vent appeals to Chris­t­ian piety, slo­gans like “Christ is King” and mil­i­tant calls to enshrine Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ism as state pol­i­cy. Most groypers are young and enthu­si­as­tic adher­ents of Catholic, East­ern Ortho­dox, Lat­ter-day Saints or oth­er Chris­t­ian faith tra­di­tions, and many are first drawn into the move­ment through its ubiq­ui­tous “trad” sub­cul­ture — a large­ly online aes­thet­ic cel­e­brat­ing a rejec­tion of moder­ni­ty and embrace of patri­ar­chal, anti-LGBTQ val­ues — and become “red-pilled” on the tenets of white nation­al­ism along the way. 

    For the groypers, hard-edged, tra­di­tion­al­ist oppo­si­tion to LGBTQ rights, abor­tion and fem­i­nism is root­ed in uncom­pro­mis­ing misog­y­ny and male suprema­cy, a world­view in which straight, white, Chris­t­ian Gen‑Z men are val­orized as the right­ful heirs to and guardians of the Amer­i­can nation. Today, the groypers’ strate­gic blend of white and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism has arrived right on time, help­ing the move­ment find nat­ur­al allies among hard-right Chris­t­ian groups — par­tic­u­lar­ly Catholic right groups like Church Mil­i­tant — and, from there, to build new path­ways towards main­stream accep­tance. 

    In a par­al­lel project, Church Mil­i­tant also seeks to trans­form main­stream Catholi­cism from its right­ward flank. Just two weeks ago, Church Mil­i­tant made nation­al news for its hour­long inter­view with Rep. Greene, in which the Geor­gia con­gress­woman sug­gest­ed that Satan is con­trol­ling the Catholic Church (most­ly because of Catholic sup­port for refugees at the U.S. south­ern bor­der). While it might seem odd for a Catholic media site to cel­e­brate such a charge com­ing from an evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tant — Church Mil­i­tant titled the first seg­ment of its week­long pro­mo­tion of the inter­view “Mar­jorie for Pope” — the out­let has long waged a vit­ri­olic cam­paign against the church’s cur­rent hier­ar­chy, which it derides as both mil­que­toast and lib­er­al and an “inter­na­tion­al crime syn­di­cate” run by a “laven­der mafia.” By com­par­i­son, Church Mil­i­tant presents itself as the home of authen­ti­cal­ly ortho­dox Catholi­cism (even as the Arch­dio­cese of Detroit, where Church Mil­i­tant is head­quar­tered, com­pelled the out­let more than a decade ago to stop using “Catholic” in its name and has repeat­ed­ly denounced the group). 

    Last Novem­ber, the out­let host­ed a noisy, day­long ral­ly on the Bal­ti­more water­front to protest the annu­al meet­ing of the U.S. Con­fer­ence of Catholic Bish­ops next door. Church Mil­i­tan­t’s emcee for the event, fall­en “alt-lite” star turned groyper leader Yiannopou­los — who joined Church Mil­i­tant as a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor in 2021 after declar­ing him­self “ex-gay” — direct­ed the rough­ly 1,200-person audi­ence to chant “Lock them up” at the bish­ops gath­ered near­by. It was he, in fact, who report­ed­ly arranged for Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene to speak at Fuentes’ AFPAC III in Feb­ru­ary. 

    ... 

    Many of Church Mil­i­tan­t’s tar­gets are with­in the Catholic Church itself. It has run arti­cles “expos­ing” bish­ops as reg­is­tered Democ­rats; called the first Black car­di­nal in the Amer­i­can church “African Queen”; demand­ed that Pope Fran­cis resign; and vowed to use its claimed net­work of hun­dreds of priests and church staff, as well as thou­sands of lay activists, to dig up dirt on any bish­ops who “go after a good priest.” 

    But much of the site’s writ­ing and advo­ca­cy is more direct­ly polit­i­cal, as when it com­pared the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment to fas­cism, attacked the Catholic bish­ops’ sup­port for immi­grants as a num­bers game meant to “shore up” a “shrink­ing, shriv­el­ing church,” and, in 2020, declared that “every Demo­c­ra­t­ic leader in the coun­try” should be “imme­di­ate­ly arrest­ed and impris­oned” for their role in pan­dem­ic pub­lic health restric­tions. Church Mil­i­tant was such an avid sup­port­er of Trump’s reelec­tion cam­paign that it repeat­ed­ly warned read­ers that if Joe Biden were elect­ed, Catholics would be “iden­ti­fied, hunt­ed down, declared ‘ille­gal,’ ” “gun[ned] down in the streets,” or “herd­ed onto the trains head­ing for the camps.” 

    Church Mil­i­tant is wide­ly con­sid­ered, even among many con­ser­v­a­tive Catholics, as so out­ra­geous and aggres­sive that it is best ignored. But as Com­mon­weal’s Paul Moses report­ed, that out­let and the fel­low-trav­el­ing Life­Site­News togeth­er “gar­nered near­ly 10 mil­lion vis­its to their alt-right ‘news’ web­sites dur­ing the last three months of 2020,” help­ing to “spread bogus elec­tion-con­spir­a­cy claims to a huge Catholic audi­ence.” On Jan. 6, 2021, both Church Mil­i­tant and its staff cel­e­brat­ed the riot at the U.S. Capi­tol, tweet­ing images of pro-Trump pro­test­ers car­ry­ing Catholic iconog­ra­phy and declar­ing the riot­ers “patri­ots.” 

    The out­let has made com­mon cause with many of the most con­tro­ver­sial fig­ures on the right, pro­mot­ing inter­views with Roger Stone, Joseph Fly­nn (broth­er of QAnon hero Michael Fly­nn), Gab founder and CEO Andrew Tor­ba and Steve Ban­non, who was to be the keynote speak­er at Church Mil­i­tan­t’s Bal­ti­more ral­ly, although he ulti­mate­ly did­n’t attend — because he was arrest­ed that week and charged with con­tempt of Con­gress. Beyond its Bal­ti­more ral­ly, the orga­ni­za­tion rou­tine­ly plat­forms voic­es con­nect­ed to the groyper move­ment as well. Mul­ti­ple Church Mil­i­tant arti­cles have fea­tured Tor­ba and YouTube stream­er John Doyle, who are both long­stand­ing Fuentes allies and were fea­tured as speak­er and spe­cial guest, respec­tive­ly, at AFPAC III. Church Mil­i­tant founder Michael Voris recent­ly appeared on a show host­ed by white nation­al­ist for­mer Sen­ate can­di­date Lau­ren Witzke, anoth­er promi­nent Fuentes ally. 

    Just a week after the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, Voris inter­viewed anoth­er Fuentes acolyte, Jan. 6 plan­ner Ali Alexan­der, about his then-recent con­ver­sion to Catholi­cism as well as their shared sense — in the imme­di­ate after­math of the Capi­tol riot — that “dying an hon­or­able death is an awe­some thing.” Alexan­der said he had come to real­ize there was a “war between the church and the peo­ple who have infil­trat­ed the church,” and Voris recount­ed attend­ing sev­er­al of Alexan­der’s “Stop the Steal” protests in Michi­gan, includ­ing one at the state capi­tol in Lans­ing. That ral­ly was led by Nick Fuentes and John Doyle and cel­e­brat­ed on Church Mil­i­tan­t’s Twit­ter account.

    These points of over­lap exem­pli­fy how the white nation­al­ist move­ment and the Catholic right are both draw­ing togeth­er and influ­enc­ing each oth­er. But it is in the youth move­ment, and on the streets, where the most sig­nif­i­cant col­lab­o­ra­tion is now unfold­ing. 

    “We are intense­ly try­ing to cul­ti­vate the youth,” Voris said in a Feb­ru­ary 2022 video enti­tled “CM Youth Move­ment,” claim­ing that 24 of Church Mil­i­tan­t’s 63 employ­ees are under the age of 30. “As men, it’s real­ly impor­tant that we act,” pro­fessed one young Church Mil­i­tant staffer in the video. “We can’t just sit by and watch our civ­i­liza­tion and church col­lapse into a cesspool of degen­er­a­cy.”

    Voris took note when Fuentes held AFPAC III, prais­ing the con­fer­ence as “where all the youth­ful (read: future) ener­gy is” in the “real strug­gle for the heart and soul of the [con­ser­v­a­tive] move­ment” — a strug­gle, Voris said, echo­ing Fuentes’ fram­ing, which “will dic­tate the future of the [Repub­li­can] par­ty and, to a large extent, the nation.” 

    In a sub­se­quent video enti­tled “Young Con­ser­v­a­tive Catholics,” Voris drove the point home. Bemoan­ing the “col­lapse of the Amer­i­can empire,” Voris com­pared con­tem­po­rary young Catholics to the “first young Romans” who, in the wake of the col­lapse of the Roman Empire in the 4th cen­tu­ry AD, “con­quered the bar­bar­ians” and insti­tut­ed a new Catholic civ­i­liza­tion. 

    “Just like in the days of Rome, as it col­lapsed,” Voris explained, “there was a gen­er­a­tion of 20-some­things that beheld it, so too now, here, in the U.S…in the com­ing years but begin­ning now, what must be fought for is Catholic truth. Straight up, ter­ri­ble, glo­ri­ous Catholic truth.” He went on to say that “estab­lish­ment con­ser­vatism has betrayed the cause” and “it is the young more than any­one else who must under­stand the real war here.” Fuentes and Yiannopou­los both shared Voris’ video on Telegram, with a cap­tion fram­ing it as a direct appeal to the groypers: “ ‘The cry “Christ is King” must ring loud across the land.’ Church Mil­i­tan­t’s Michael Voris on Amer­i­ca First.” 

    ———-

    “White nation­al­ists get reli­gion: On the far-right fringe, Catholics and racists forge a movement“By Kathryn Joyce and Ben Lor­ber; Salon; 05/12/2022

    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:

    ...
    All four have rebrand­ed them­selves as “tra­di­tion­al” Catholics (or “trad-Caths,” in inter­net par­lance) and allied them­selves with an exist­ing net­work of far-right Catholics that includes Piz­za­gate provo­ca­teur-turned con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Jack Poso­biec, Trump con­fi­dant and advis­er Steve Ban­non and groyper-guru Nick Fuentes him­self.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The man was not, as the New York City Fire Depart­ment quick­ly point­ed out, a fire­fight­er. Nor was he mere­ly a devout Catholic. Rather, he was a right-wing activist affil­i­at­ed with white nation­al­ist wun­derkind Nick Fuentes’ glee­ful­ly racist and anti­se­mit­ic Amer­i­ca First/“groyper” move­ment, which at its third annu­al Amer­i­ca First Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence (AFPAC) this Feb­ru­ary drew wide­spread con­dem­na­tion for its glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Vladimir Putin’s inva­sion of Ukraine, Fuentes’ praise of Hitler and the call by one speak­er, a state sen­a­tor from Ari­zona, to build “gal­lows” to hang polit­i­cal ene­mies.

    On a pop­u­lar groyper livestream show Sun­day night, host and move­ment leader Dal­ton Clod­fel­ter said he rec­og­nized the man in the videos and called him to join the show. As jour­nal­ist and West­ern States Cen­ter senior fel­low Nick Mar­tin report­ed, Clod­fel­ter said the man had made “a real­ly bold state­ment today and it’s going to be heard by a lot of peo­ple.” The man claimed that many of the oth­er pray­ing men who assem­bled that after­noon were also groypers, described the demon­stra­tors he’d been heck­ling as “demon­ic crea­tures” and “ani­mals” and said that one Black pro­test­er should be “enslaved” or “shot.” “What­ev­er church they’re going to attack next,” he pledged, “we’ll be there, and we’ll crush them.”

    None of that seemed to mat­ter to the right-wing politi­cians and media who held the man up as a hero of the faith. Promi­nent among those was Church Mil­i­tant, a far-right Catholic media out­let that pro­mot­ed its Mon­day night cov­er­age of the protest with a pic­ture of the groyper­’s face. That was more than acci­dent or coin­ci­dence — Church Mil­i­tant and the groypers are increas­ing­ly col­lab­o­rat­ing to mobi­lize their respec­tive audi­ences to con­front what both are call­ing “proabor­tion­ist demons” at pro-choice ral­lies across the coun­try, and, more gen­er­al­ly, to grow their move­ments on both sides. 
    ...

    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:

     
    ... 
    From its begin­nings, the groyper move­ment sought to strad­dle the gap between the white and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ments. In the lat­er years of the Trump pres­i­den­cy, as the large­ly pagan or athe­ist alt-right fell into dis­ar­ray, Fuentes sought to dis­tin­guish the most­ly Gen‑Z groyper move­ment from its dis­graced pre­de­ces­sor by gar­nish­ing its core white nation­al­ist prin­ci­ples with the flag and the cross.

    ...

    In today’s groyper move­ment, clas­sic white nation­al­ist themes of “white geno­cide,” white iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics and con­spir­a­to­r­i­al anti­semitism blend seam­less­ly with fer­vent appeals to Chris­t­ian piety, slo­gans like “Christ is King” and mil­i­tant calls to enshrine Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ism as state pol­i­cy. Most groypers are young and enthu­si­as­tic adher­ents of Catholic, East­ern Ortho­dox, Lat­ter-day Saints or oth­er Chris­t­ian faith tra­di­tions, and many are first drawn into the move­ment through its ubiq­ui­tous “trad” sub­cul­ture — a large­ly online aes­thet­ic cel­e­brat­ing a rejec­tion of moder­ni­ty and embrace of patri­ar­chal, anti-LGBTQ val­ues — and become “red-pilled” on the tenets of white nation­al­ism along the way. 

    ...

    In a par­al­lel project, Church Mil­i­tant also seeks to trans­form main­stream Catholi­cism from its right­ward flank. Just two weeks ago, Church Mil­i­tant made nation­al news for its hour­long inter­view with Rep. Greene, in which the Geor­gia con­gress­woman sug­gest­ed that Satan is con­trol­ling the Catholic Church (most­ly because of Catholic sup­port for refugees at the U.S. south­ern bor­der). While it might seem odd for a Catholic media site to cel­e­brate such a charge com­ing from an evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tant — Church Mil­i­tant titled the first seg­ment of its week­long pro­mo­tion of the inter­view “Mar­jorie for Pope” — the out­let has long waged a vit­ri­olic cam­paign against the church’s cur­rent hier­ar­chy, which it derides as both mil­que­toast and lib­er­al and an “inter­na­tion­al crime syn­di­cate” run by a “laven­der mafia.” By com­par­i­son, Church Mil­i­tant presents itself as the home of authen­ti­cal­ly ortho­dox Catholi­cism (even as the Arch­dio­cese of Detroit, where Church Mil­i­tant is head­quar­tered, com­pelled the out­let more than a decade ago to stop using “Catholic” in its name and has repeat­ed­ly denounced the group). 
    ...

    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:

     
    ...
    Many of Church Mil­i­tan­t’s tar­gets are with­in the Catholic Church itself. It has run arti­cles “expos­ing” bish­ops as reg­is­tered Democ­rats; called the first Black car­di­nal in the Amer­i­can church “African Queen”; demand­ed that Pope Fran­cis resign; and vowed to use its claimed net­work of hun­dreds of priests and church staff, as well as thou­sands of lay activists, to dig up dirt on any bish­ops who “go after a good priest.” 
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The out­let has made com­mon cause with many of the most con­tro­ver­sial fig­ures on the right, pro­mot­ing inter­views with Roger Stone, Joseph Fly­nn (broth­er of QAnon hero Michael Fly­nn), Gab founder and CEO Andrew Tor­ba and Steve Ban­non, who was to be the keynote speak­er at Church Mil­i­tan­t’s Bal­ti­more ral­ly, although he ulti­mate­ly did­n’t attend — because he was arrest­ed that week and charged with con­tempt of Con­gress. Beyond its Bal­ti­more ral­ly, the orga­ni­za­tion rou­tine­ly plat­forms voic­es con­nect­ed to the groyper move­ment as well. Mul­ti­ple Church Mil­i­tant arti­cles have fea­tured Tor­ba and YouTube stream­er John Doyle, who are both long­stand­ing Fuentes allies and were fea­tured as speak­er and spe­cial guest, respec­tive­ly, at AFPAC III. Church Mil­i­tant founder Michael Voris recent­ly appeared on a show host­ed by white nation­al­ist for­mer Sen­ate can­di­date Lau­ren Witzke, anoth­er promi­nent Fuentes ally. 

    Just a week after the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, Voris inter­viewed anoth­er Fuentes acolyte, Jan. 6 plan­ner Ali Alexan­der, about his then-recent con­ver­sion to Catholi­cism as well as their shared sense — in the imme­di­ate after­math of the Capi­tol riot — that “dying an hon­or­able death is an awe­some thing.” Alexan­der said he had come to real­ize there was a “war between the church and the peo­ple who have infil­trat­ed the church,” and Voris recount­ed attend­ing sev­er­al of Alexan­der’s “Stop the Steal” protests in Michi­gan, includ­ing one at the state capi­tol in Lans­ing. That ral­ly was led by Nick Fuentes and John Doyle and cel­e­brat­ed on Church Mil­i­tan­t’s Twit­ter account.

    ...

    Voris took note when Fuentes held AFPAC III, prais­ing the con­fer­ence as “where all the youth­ful (read: future) ener­gy is” in the “real strug­gle for the heart and soul of the [con­ser­v­a­tive] move­ment” — a strug­gle, Voris said, echo­ing Fuentes’ fram­ing, which “will dic­tate the future of the [Repub­li­can] par­ty and, to a large extent, the nation.” 
    ...

    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”:

    Salon

    “Tra­di­tion­al” Catholics and white nation­al­ist “groypers” forge a new far-right youth move­ment

    Activist arm of right-wing Catholic out­let Church Mil­i­tant is increas­ing­ly entwined with racist “groyper” move­ment

    By Kathryn Joyce — Ben Lor­ber
    Pub­lished May 13, 2022 6:00AM (EDT)

    This is the sec­ond in a two-part series. In our first install­ment, read about how the after­math of the leaked Supreme Court opin­ion over­turn­ing Roe v. Wade revealed exten­sive con­nec­tions between the white nation­al­ist “groyper” move­ment and the far-right Catholic net­work around the con­tro­ver­sial out­let Church Mil­i­tant.

    The activist wing of Church Mil­i­tant is called the Resis­tance net­work. As of 2020 the out­let said it boast­ed more than 5,000 mem­bers, and claimed to have launched groups in almost every dio­cese in the U.S. Last June, the group claimed that its protest of a church vac­cine dri­ve in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia forced the dri­ve to end three hours ear­ly. The same month, mem­bers of the Resis­tance net­work host­ed an “affi­davit-sign­ing dri­ve at Church Mil­i­tant head­quar­ters” out­side Detroit, join­ing with oth­er right-wing Michi­gan groups in demand­ing a foren­sic audit of the 2020 elec­tion and hold­ing a protest ral­ly on the state capi­tol steps. 

    More recent­ly, as Resis­tance leader Joe Gal­lagher out­lined at a Church Mil­i­tant ral­ly last Novem­ber, the group has pick­et­ed local bish­ops; brought “ex-gay” con­ser­v­a­tive fire­brand Milo Yiannopou­los to the Penn State cam­pus to advo­cate “pray­ing the gay away”; and protest­ed at a Dal­las memo­r­i­al for George Floyd to “bear wit­ness to a real racial injus­tice: the mass slaugh­ter of the unborn, which dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly affects minori­ties.” 

    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.” 

    Clod­fel­ter, who told Gal­lagher it was Yiannopou­los who first intro­duced him to Church Mil­i­tant, pitched Amer­i­ca First in a lan­guage that his new audi­ence was like­ly eager to hear. “It’s not like it’s the alt-right, because that is not even cool any­more, even if you want­ed it to be. And it’s also not like normie neo­con con­ser­vatism. … it’s Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist.” He went on, “The mes­sage of Amer­i­ca First is tied direct­ly to the word of God and spread­ing Chris­tian­i­ty through our nation where it’s lack­ing … every­thing we do is [a spir­i­tu­al bat­tle], we’re fight­ing demons, we’re fight­ing Satan.” Clod­fel­ter empha­sized the need to “grow the view­er base” of CozyTV, explain­ing that “a major­i­ty of white young Zoomer men would just love CozyTV — the prob­lem is, they don’t know where to go to get it.”
     
    Clod­fel­ter went on to draw a par­tic­u­lar con­nec­tion between the groyper move­ment and Catholi­cism, say­ing he’d nev­er con­sid­ered join­ing the church before get­ting involved with Amer­i­ca First. “I met peo­ple who are tru­ly devout, tru­ly liv­ing by the word and they weren’t hyp­ocrites,” he said. “They were rep­re­sent­ing Catholi­cism so well for me I was like, wow, the least I could do is go to Mass and do some research.” Now, he said, he’s study­ing for the Rite of Chris­t­ian Ini­ti­a­tion of Adults — the for­mal process by which unbap­tized adults become Catholics — and says he under­stands why Fuentes says of the groypers, “This is sort of a Catholic move­ment.”

    Since then, Resis­tance has con­tin­ued to brand itself to appeal to groypers. One adver­tise­ment for Resis­tance post­ed on Gab last week fea­tured the Amer­i­ca First and CozyTV logos as well as a style of sun­glass­es pop­u­lar­ized by Fuentes as part of last year’s “White Boy Sum­mer” groyper brand­ing cam­paign. Mean­while, as report­ed in part 1 of this series, Clod­fel­ter attempt­ed to mobi­lize groypers to attend Resis­tance coun­ter­protests of pro-choice demon­stra­tions planned for week­end in cities across the coun­try. As of Fri­day, the events appear to have been removed from Resis­tance’s web­site, while on Telegram Clod­fel­ter not­ed late Wednes­day night that most of the coun­ter­protests had been post­poned, writ­ing, “Work­ing with Church Mil­i­tant on this to make sure we are doing this in the most orga­nized and safe way.” Clod­fel­ter still claims the groypers will ral­ly in Nashville.

    Not every Church Mil­i­tant staffer appears thrilled with the grow­ing crossover, how­ev­er. In July 2021, Church Mil­i­tant exec­u­tive pro­duc­er Chris­tine Niles remarked on Twit­ter that “the Amer­i­ca First move­ment, which has great things to say, is ill-served” by Fuentes’ open anti­semitism. “This unfor­tu­nate obses­sion with the Jews will sink the Amer­i­ca First move­ment, and that’s tru­ly a shame.” Some audi­ence mem­bers have pushed back as well. “Was a sup­port­er of CM, but no more,” com­ment­ed one view­er in Feb­ru­ary 2020, after Voris ran an inter­view with Fuentes ally Michelle Malkin. “I’m all for bor­ders. I’m all for pre­serv­ing West­ern cul­ture … but I’m not down with Holo­caust denial.”

    In emailed com­ments on Wednes­day, Voris told Salon, “Church Mil­i­tant might part­ner with any­one in a par­tic­u­lar effort to achieve a lim­it­ed and shared goal. In this par­tic­u­lar case (Roe), yes. [Church Mil­i­tant] will link arms with almost any­one who decries the hor­ror of babies being hacked to death in their moth­ers’ wombs. Isn’t ‘link­ing arms’ the very thing Antifa and BLM and the Democ­rats do?”

    ...

    “Groypers are every­where” — includ­ing on Church Mil­i­tan­t’s staff

    It is coun­ter­in­tu­itive, to say the least, that an osten­si­bly faith-based orga­ni­za­tion is embrac­ing a move­ment so explic­it­ly big­ot­ed as the groypers. Fuentes has engaged in elab­o­rate jokes deny­ing the Holo­caust, praised Hitler and told view­ers on one livestream show that “frankly, I’m get­ting pret­ty sick of world Jew­ry run­ning the show,” to name just sev­er­al exam­ples of his vir­u­lent anti­semitism. Fuentes has dis­par­aged African-Amer­i­can vot­er out­reach as attempts to “flood the zone with n****r votes,” called for “total Aryan vic­to­ry,” reject­ed “race-mix­ing” because “peo­ple should stick with their own kind,” bragged that he “made misog­y­ny cool again,” cel­e­brat­ed domes­tic vio­lence against women and much more.

    On his Thurs­day night livestream show, Fuentes respond­ed to the claims made in part 1 of Salon’s inves­ti­ga­tion. “You’re damn right the groypers are form­ing an alliance with the Catholics,” he exclaimed, “and you’re right we have a plan, and we are gonna take the Repub­li­can Par­ty and we are going to drag it against its will back through the doors of the church and to the altar, and we are going to bap­tize it.” Clod­fel­ter, mean­while, extolled his audi­ence to “show our love and sup­port for Church Mil­i­tant. These guys are strong, these guys are determined…yes, we’re col­lab­o­rat­ing in this effort to com­bat Satanism in Amer­i­ca, we are. Groypers are every­where.”

    While Niles appeared ambiva­lent about Amer­i­ca First, or at least its leader, her col­league, 27-year old Joseph Enders, is a full-fledged groyper. Var­i­ous­ly named as a reporter, senior pro­duc­er and asso­ciate pro­duc­er at Church Mil­i­tant, Enders is a fix­ture on Church Mil­i­tant Evening News and a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to churchmilitant.com. 

    Enders did­n’t always sup­port white nation­al­ism. In 2018, he self-iden­ti­fied as an “Augus­tin­ian nation­al­ist,” claimed affil­i­a­tion with the Proud Boys and uploaded inter­views to YouTube where he argued with white nation­al­ist lead­ers like Richard Spencer and James All­sup. “The phi­los­o­phy of the right,” he told Spencer in June 2018, should be ani­mat­ed by “a peo­ple that focus[es] inward on pre­serv­ing the tra­di­tions of West­ern cul­ture … [but] race should not be a con­sid­er­a­tion in this. I think we should only judge peo­ple based on how they exer­cise their will.” 

    By late 2019, how­ev­er, when the groypers entered the nation­al spot­light with a series of pub­lic stunts chal­leng­ing con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers on col­lege cam­pus­es, Enders had changed his tune. “I don’t think any­body is say­ing we’re pre­serv­ing our race because our race is bet­ter,” he explained when he called in to the stream­ing show of Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes on McInnes’ Censored.TV plat­form. Defend­ing the groypers’ empha­sis on white demo­graph­ic “replace­ment” — the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that white Amer­i­cans are being “replaced” by non­white immi­gra­tion — Enders told McInnes, “You’re into fash­ion, so you’ll under­stand this anal­o­gy: When we look at a coun­try, there are peo­ple that wear the coun­try the best, and that’s usu­al­ly the found­ing stock of the coun­try.”

    Since join­ing Church Mil­i­tan­t’s staff in 2020, Enders’ embrace of the groypers has con­tin­ued apace. “Nick is a Mass-attend­ing Catholic, unheard of at his age,” Enders post­ed on Face­book in April 2021. “I can’t help but like Nick … the Right needs more of [his] troll­ish humor to root out the grifters. It’s supreme­ly enter­tain­ing.” A year lat­er, his sup­port was even more pro­nounced. “I hear this Nick Fuentes dude is pret­ty based,” he tweet­ed on April 30, 2022. “I have to say … I sup­port his efforts to put Amer­i­ca First.”

    On Gab, Telegram and oth­er social media plat­forms, Enders reg­u­lar­ly cel­e­brates Amer­i­ca First and its polit­i­cal ambi­tions; shares con­tent from groyper lead­ers like Fuentes, Vince James and Anthime Gionet, (aka “Baked Alas­ka,” who on Wednes­day under­mined his own Jan. 6 plea deal, poten­tial­ly send­ing his case to tri­al); uploads pho­tos of him­self sport­ing the blue “Amer­i­ca First” hat and oth­er move­ment para­pher­na­lia; and par­tic­i­pates in debates on move­ment strat­e­gy. Like oth­ers in the groyper orbit, he reg­u­lar­ly traf­fics in anti­semitism, includ­ing using the (((echo))) sym­bol, a meme cre­at­ed by white nation­al­ists to tar­get Jew­ish peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions. In the first days of the Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine, Enders quot­ed, with seem­ing approval, a state­ment by Vladimir Putin decry­ing Euro­pean coun­tries’ sup­posed aban­don­ment of “Chris­t­ian val­ues” and shared an arti­cle argu­ing that Putin was seek­ing to “rebuild Chris­ten­dom.”

    White nation­al­ist themes car­ry over into Enders’ work with Church Mil­i­tant, as well. On Church Mil­i­tan­t’s web­site, arti­cles writ­ten by Enders quote Fuentes, name the Jew­ish iden­ti­ty of polit­i­cal oppo­nents and claim that crit­i­cal race the­o­ry “rejects the eth­nic iden­ti­ty of White Amer­i­cans.” On the out­let’s night­ly news pro­gram, Enders has cham­pi­oned white nation­al­ist slo­gans like “it’s ok to be white,” claimed that “the Left­’s essen­tial pol­i­cy when deal­ing with race is … ‘is it going to hurt white people?’...more dead white peo­ple is the pol­i­cy of the Democ­rats,” and protest­ed the deci­sion by the flag­ship Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence to bar Fuentes from atten­dance.  

    When news broke last week that the Supreme Court was mov­ing to over­turn Roe v. Wade, Enders’ mes­sage was direct and dis­turb­ing. “Get ready witch­es,” he post­ed on May 3 on Gab and Twit­ter, “we’re com­ing for your birth con­trol next.”

    “A soul for their pol­i­tics”

    As men­tioned in our first install­ment, this is all part of a broad­er pat­tern of over­lap between the far-right, includ­ing the white nation­al­ist right, with right-wing Catholi­cism. In 2017, groyper leader Milo Yian­napou­los was drummed out of many right-wing move­ments for state­ments he made min­i­miz­ing child sex abuse, and sub­se­quent­ly used his return to Catholi­cism as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to rebrand. This March he head­lined an anti-abor­tion con­ven­tion in Ohio that was blessed by the local Catholic bish­op, and in June he will be a fea­tured speak­er at a Church Mil­i­tant Resis­tance boot­camp. Cana­di­an white nation­al­ist Faith Goldy, who was dis­graced after appear­ing on the neo-Nazi web­site Dai­ly Stormer, like­wise tout­ed her return to the church as part of her reha­bil­i­ta­tion. “Stop the Steal” orga­niz­er Ali Alexan­der found his way to a new audi­ence at the end of 2020 with a high­ly pub­lic con­ver­sion to Catholi­cism, as did “Kent State gun girl” Kaitlin Ben­nett in late 2021. They joined a core group of far-right activists who have deployed their Catholic iden­ti­ty in ser­vice of their move­ments, includ­ing Piz­za­gate provo­ca­teur-turned con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Jack Poso­biec, for­mer Trump advis­er Steve Ban­non and Fuentes him­self. 

    As the alt-right was plan­ning its 2017 march in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, one of the most pop­u­lar places where activists did their plan­ning was a Dis­cord chat forum called the “Nick Fuentes forum,” ded­i­cat­ed to explor­ing con­nec­tions between “Unite the Right” and the Catholic Church. With­in it, hun­dreds of posters dis­cussed tra­di­tion­al­ist Catholi­cism and post­ed memes alter­nat­ing, or com­bin­ing, Cru­sades-era imagery with neo-Nazi and anti­se­mit­ic con­tent. 

    As jour­nal­ist Eric Mar­tin report­ed at the lib­er­al Chris­t­ian mag­a­zine Sojourn­ers, some posters iden­ti­fied them­selves as “Charles Cough­lin Roman Catholics,” for the 1930s pro-fas­cist priest and broad­cast­er who helped pio­neer the dem­a­gog­ic media style that is frac­tur­ing our democ­ra­cy today. Fuentes him­self has waxed nos­tal­gic about fas­cist and monar­chist regimes in Europe and Latin Amer­i­ca that were ground­ed in Catholic teach­ing, and in 2018 declared on a livestream that, “in an ide­al world,” there would be “a glob­al Catholic theoc­ra­cy” and that “the state should enforce moral­i­ty that is informed by Catholic teach­ing.” 

    More broad­ly online, far-right activists online began adopt­ing phras­es like “Viva Cristo Rey” (Christ the King) or “Deus Vult” (God wills it) in their posts and tweets, and Catholic sym­bol­ism like medieval cross­es and Cru­sad­er imagery. 

    Some con­ser­v­a­tive Catholics have wel­comed this devel­op­ment. In a 2019 arti­cle pub­lished by the Catholic right mag­a­zine Cri­sis, “Kids in defense of the cul­ture,” Amer­i­can Great­ness edi­tor Pedro Gon­za­lez praised Fuentes’ groypers. “They have cho­sen to be guid­ed by a Chris­tian­i­ty ham­mered free of the dross of the mod­ern world,” Gon­za­lez wrote. “In an age of com­pro­mise and pet­ty prin­ci­ples, groypers have cho­sen to stand for some­thing, armed with lit­tle more than dig­i­tal sling­shots. That alone is rea­son enough to hear them out.”

    But mod­er­ate and lib­er­al Catholics were appalled. “It’s such a hor­ri­fy­ing appro­pri­a­tion of Catholi­cism,” not­ed writer and researcher D.W. Laf­fer­ty in a 2020 pod­cast episode pro­duced by Where Peter Is, a mod­er­ate Catholic web­site that tracks the Catholic right. Laf­fer­ty described the new far-right aes­thet­ic as “Pepe Catholi­cism,” while George­town Uni­ver­si­ty the­olo­gian Adam Ras­mussen called it “Catholic LARP­ing”: a way for the alt-right to pre­tend they were “Knights Tem­plar fight­ing the forces of dark­ness in the deep state.”

    As Vat­i­can cor­re­spon­dent Christo­pher Lamb, author of the papal biog­ra­phy “The Out­sider: Pope Fran­cis and His Bat­tle to Reform the Church,” explained dur­ing the 2020 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, the far right’s adop­tion of Catholic sym­bol­ism was a means for the move­ment to infuse itself with deep­er spir­i­tu­al mean­ing. “The pop­ulists and nation­al­ists were look­ing for some kind of soul for their pol­i­tics. And they found it in some sym­bols of the faith,” Lamb said. “And they’re pow­er­ful sym­bols. Quite often they make the whole case that the past has been lost.” 

    “In a sense, you emp­ty the con­tent of the reli­gious,” Lamb not­ed ear­li­er this year, “and use the exter­nals — the rosary beads, the cru­ci­fix, some words, per­haps some prayers — but you use it as an iden­ti­ty mark­er to give your move­ment a sense that it has a soul or deep­er inten­si­ty at a moral lev­el.” 

    But that influ­ence goes both ways, and as Lamb not­ed in 2020, as more and more right-wing Catholics iden­ti­fied them­selves with Trump’s re-elec­tion cam­paign, “Trump­ism,” in turn, “got into the church.” 

    As Laf­fer­ty said at the time, “What’s hap­pen­ing on the right, I think, is unprece­dent­ed,” except for the his­tor­i­cal exam­ples of ultra­na­tion­al­ist fas­cist groups before World War II, such as Action Française in France or the Falangist move­ment in Spain. “But fas­cism isn’t new and the Catholic Church was often com­plic­it in fas­cism,” he added. “So it’s not total­ly shock­ing that peo­ple can come in and do this.” 

    The rev­e­la­tion that some high­ly enthu­si­as­tic and vis­i­ble ele­ments of the Catholic right are now part­ner­ing with a group whose rep­u­ta­tion is based on snarky dis­plays of over-the-top big­otry just marks an esca­la­tion of that trend. 

    “This is a con­tin­u­a­tion of a pat­tern that’s been hap­pen­ing for years,” said Laf­fer­ty, “and it’s only going to become more intense now that we’re look­ing at the pos­si­bil­i­ty of Roe v. Wade being over­turned.” As a faith­ful Catholic, he agrees with the Church’s stance against abor­tion, he said, but he also sees the immi­nent SCOTUS rever­sal as one more “pil­lar of what we call ‘nor­mal’ falling.” 

    I wor­ry when­ev­er you see anti-abor­tion rhetoric mixed with anti-immi­grant rhetoric or iso­la­tion­ist for­eign pol­i­cy,” said Laf­fer­ty. “It feeds into this spread­ing pan­ic that West­ern cul­ture is dis­ap­pear­ing and immi­gra­tion is killing Chris­tian­i­ty and white hege­mo­ny. Ordi­nary Catholics who may have good inten­tions need to wake up to this — the bish­ops includ­ed. Because if we look at what’s hap­pened in the Repub­li­can Par­ty, a fringe pop­ulist ele­ment even­tu­al­ly took over. We could see the same thing in the church.” 

    ...

    ———-
    ““Tra­di­tion­al” Catholics and white nation­al­ist “groypers” forge a new far-right youth move­ment” By Kathryn Joyce and Ben Lor­ber; Salon; 05/13/2022

    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:

    ...
    Clod­fel­ter, who told Gal­lagher it was Yiannopou­los who first intro­duced him to Church Mil­i­tant, pitched Amer­i­ca First in a lan­guage that his new audi­ence was like­ly eager to hear. “It’s not like it’s the alt-right, because that is not even cool any­more, even if you want­ed it to be. And it’s also not like normie neo­con con­ser­vatism. … it’s Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist.” He went on, “The mes­sage of Amer­i­ca First is tied direct­ly to the word of God and spread­ing Chris­tian­i­ty through our nation where it’s lack­ing … every­thing we do is [a spir­i­tu­al bat­tle], we’re fight­ing demons, we’re fight­ing Satan.” Clod­fel­ter empha­sized the need to “grow the view­er base” of CozyTV, explain­ing that “a major­i­ty of white young Zoomer men would just love CozyTV — the prob­lem is, they don’t know where to go to get it.”
     
    Clod­fel­ter went on to draw a par­tic­u­lar con­nec­tion between the groyper move­ment and Catholi­cism, say­ing he’d nev­er con­sid­ered join­ing the church before get­ting involved with Amer­i­ca First. “I met peo­ple who are tru­ly devout, tru­ly liv­ing by the word and they weren’t hyp­ocrites,” he said. “They were rep­re­sent­ing Catholi­cism so well for me I was like, wow, the least I could do is go to Mass and do some research.” Now, he said, he’s study­ing for the Rite of Chris­t­ian Ini­ti­a­tion of Adults — the for­mal process by which unbap­tized adults become Catholics — and says he under­stands why Fuentes says of the groypers, “This is sort of a Catholic move­ment.”

    ...

    On his Thurs­day night livestream show, Fuentes respond­ed to the claims made in part 1 of Salon’s inves­ti­ga­tion. “You’re damn right the groypers are form­ing an alliance with the Catholics,” he exclaimed, “and you’re right we have a plan, and we are gonna take the Repub­li­can Par­ty and we are going to drag it against its will back through the doors of the church and to the altar, and we are going to bap­tize it.” Clod­fel­ter, mean­while, extolled his audi­ence to “show our love and sup­port for Church Mil­i­tant. These guys are strong, these guys are determined…yes, we’re col­lab­o­rat­ing in this effort to com­bat Satanism in Amer­i­ca, we are. Groypers are every­where.”

    ...

    As the alt-right was plan­ning its 2017 march in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, one of the most pop­u­lar places where activists did their plan­ning was a Dis­cord chat forum called the “Nick Fuentes forum,” ded­i­cat­ed to explor­ing con­nec­tions between “Unite the Right” and the Catholic Church. With­in it, hun­dreds of posters dis­cussed tra­di­tion­al­ist Catholi­cism and post­ed memes alter­nat­ing, or com­bin­ing, Cru­sades-era imagery with neo-Nazi and anti­se­mit­ic con­tent. 

    ...

    As jour­nal­ist Eric Mar­tin report­ed at the lib­er­al Chris­t­ian mag­a­zine Sojourn­ers, some posters iden­ti­fied them­selves as “Charles Cough­lin Roman Catholics,” for the 1930s pro-fas­cist priest and broad­cast­er who helped pio­neer the dem­a­gog­ic media style that is frac­tur­ing our democ­ra­cy today. Fuentes him­self has waxed nos­tal­gic about fas­cist and monar­chist regimes in Europe and Latin Amer­i­ca that were ground­ed in Catholic teach­ing, and in 2018 declared on a livestream that, “in an ide­al world,” there would be “a glob­al Catholic theoc­ra­cy” and that “the state should enforce moral­i­ty that is informed by Catholic teach­ing.” 

    ...

    But mod­er­ate and lib­er­al Catholics were appalled. “It’s such a hor­ri­fy­ing appro­pri­a­tion of Catholi­cism,” not­ed writer and researcher D.W. Laf­fer­ty in a 2020 pod­cast episode pro­duced by Where Peter Is, a mod­er­ate Catholic web­site that tracks the Catholic right. Laf­fer­ty described the new far-right aes­thet­ic as “Pepe Catholi­cism,” while George­town Uni­ver­si­ty the­olo­gian Adam Ras­mussen called it “Catholic LARP­ing”: a way for the alt-right to pre­tend they were “Knights Tem­plar fight­ing the forces of dark­ness in the deep state.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    As men­tioned in our first install­ment, this is all part of a broad­er pat­tern of over­lap between the far-right, includ­ing the white nation­al­ist right, with right-wing Catholi­cism. In 2017, groyper leader Milo Yian­napou­los was drummed out of many right-wing move­ments for state­ments he made min­i­miz­ing child sex abuse, and sub­se­quent­ly used his return to Catholi­cism as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to rebrand. This March he head­lined an anti-abor­tion con­ven­tion in Ohio that was blessed by the local Catholic bish­op, and in June he will be a fea­tured speak­er at a Church Mil­i­tant Resis­tance boot­camp. Cana­di­an white nation­al­ist Faith Goldy, who was dis­graced after appear­ing on the neo-Nazi web­site Dai­ly Stormer, like­wise tout­ed her return to the church as part of her reha­bil­i­ta­tion. “Stop the Steal” orga­niz­er Ali Alexan­der found his way to a new audi­ence at the end of 2020 with a high­ly pub­lic con­ver­sion to Catholi­cism, as did “Kent State gun girl” Kaitlin Ben­nett in late 2021. They joined a core group of far-right activists who have deployed their Catholic iden­ti­ty in ser­vice of their move­ments, includ­ing Piz­za­gate provo­ca­teur-turned con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Jack Poso­biec, for­mer Trump advis­er Steve Ban­non and Fuentes him­self. 
    ...

    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:

    ... 
    But that influ­ence goes both ways, and as Lamb not­ed in 2020, as more and more right-wing Catholics iden­ti­fied them­selves with Trump’s re-elec­tion cam­paign, “Trump­ism,” in turn, “got into the church.”

    ...

    I wor­ry when­ev­er you see anti-abor­tion rhetoric mixed with anti-immi­grant rhetoric or iso­la­tion­ist for­eign pol­i­cy,” said Laf­fer­ty. “It feeds into this spread­ing pan­ic that West­ern cul­ture is dis­ap­pear­ing and immi­gra­tion is killing Chris­tian­i­ty and white hege­mo­ny. Ordi­nary Catholics who may have good inten­tions need to wake up to this — the bish­ops includ­ed. Because if we look at what’s hap­pened in the Repub­li­can Par­ty, a fringe pop­ulist ele­ment even­tu­al­ly took over. We could see the same thing in the church.” 
    ...

    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:

    Right Wing Watch

    ‘Once We Take Con­trol’: Dal­ton Clod­fel­ter Lays Out His Chris­t­ian Fas­cist Agen­da

    By Kyle Manty­la | August 22, 2022 12:30 pm

    Ear­li­er this year, far-right con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist Stew Peters gave white nation­al­ist, Chris­t­ian fas­cist Dal­ton Clod­fel­ter a night­ly pro­gram on his Stew Peters Net­work called “The Right Dis­si­dent.”

    Peters is a white nation­al­ist-pro­mot­ing broad­cast­er who, despite using his night­ly pro­gram to spread wild con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and calls for vio­lence, has man­aged to build close ties to var­i­ous far-right polit­i­cal can­di­dates and to inter­view sev­er­al elect­ed offi­cials, GOP can­di­dates, and for­mer mem­bers of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Peters clear­ly saw some­thing he liked in Clodfelter’s brand of rad­i­cal right-wing, Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, and anti­se­mit­ic fas­cism, all of which Clod­fel­ter has open­ly pro­mot­ed five nights a week on Peters’ plat­form.

    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.

    Once we take our coun­try back, we will have fed­er­al agents kick­ing down the doors of every trea­so­nous Demo­c­rat, every trea­so­nous glob­al­ist, every homo­sex­u­al cou­ple that has molest­ed a child, and they will be arrest­ed, and they will be sen­tenced to prison,” Clod­fel­ter declared. “I believe in a far right-author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment. No, I am not a fas­cist. No, I am not a white suprema­cist. No, I am not a Nazi. But I do believe that hier­ar­chy, struc­ture, and author­i­ty are very impor­tant. I do believe that our soci­ety needs these things in order to progress and main­tain its cul­tur­al frame­work.”

    “I believe that our soci­ety needs this in order to rid itself of the sex­u­al immoral­i­ty and bla­tant degen­er­a­cy run­ning ram­pant all through­out the coun­try,” he con­tin­ued. “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.”

    “We want to take back the coun­try and reestab­lish a Christ-like nation,” Clod­fel­ter assert­ed. “A nation where the nation­al reli­gion is Chris­t­ian. A nation where the nation­al lan­guage is Eng­lish. A nation where pornog­ra­phy is banned, homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is banned, and trans­gen­derism is banned. Where you will nev­er see a col­lege that isn’t a Chris­t­ian col­lege. The only col­lege accept­able that you are able to go to is a Chris­t­ian school because every school in these Unit­ed States should teach Chris­t­ian val­ues. Every school should teach the 10 Com­mand­ments in ele­men­tary school. Every school should pro­mote what it means to be a Chris­t­ian to the youth of Amer­i­ca. It can­not be any oth­er way. There should be no sec­u­lar teach­ing in the schools.”

    ...

    ———-

    “‘Once We Take Con­trol’: Dal­ton Clod­fel­ter Lays Out His Chris­t­ian Fas­cist Agen­da” By Kyle Manty­la; Right Wing Watch; 08/22/2022

    “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:

    ...
    Once we take our coun­try back, we will have fed­er­al agents kick­ing down the doors of every trea­so­nous Demo­c­rat, every trea­so­nous glob­al­ist, every homo­sex­u­al cou­ple that has molest­ed a child, and they will be arrest­ed, and they will be sen­tenced to prison,” Clod­fel­ter declared. “I believe in a far right-author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment. No, I am not a fas­cist. No, I am not a white suprema­cist. No, I am not a Nazi. But I do believe that hier­ar­chy, struc­ture, and author­i­ty are very impor­tant. I do believe that our soci­ety needs these things in order to progress and main­tain its cul­tur­al frame­work.”

    “I believe that our soci­ety needs this in order to rid itself of the sex­u­al immoral­i­ty and bla­tant degen­er­a­cy run­ning ram­pant all through­out the coun­try,” he con­tin­ued. “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.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 4, 2022, 11:54 pm
  4. 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:

    Fed­er­al Times

    NDAA omits ban on Sched­ule F, rais­ing specter of its return

    By Mol­ly Weis­ner
    Dec 8, 2022 10:43 AM

    The lat­est ver­sion of the 2023 Nation­al Defense Autho­riza­tion Act is pend­ing final approvals with­out lan­guage ban­ning future attempts at cre­at­ing Sched­ule F, an except­ed class of civ­il ser­vants who would lack cer­tain employ­ment pro­tec­tions.

    For­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump made this idea infa­mous in fed­er­al gov­ern­ment cir­cles through exec­u­tive order in 2020 estab­lish­ing the Sched­ule F sys­tem, which would trans­form most wide swaths of the mer­it-based civ­il ser­vice into polit­i­cal appointees. Pres­i­dent Joe Biden can­celed the order short­ly after tak­ing office.

    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.

    “The prospect of a return of Sched­ule F in a future admin­is­tra­tion remains very much alive,” said Ken Thomas, nation­al pres­i­dent of Nation­al Active and Retired Fed­er­al Employ­ees Asso­ci­a­tion, in a state­ment Thurs­day. “Reports indi­cate that pres­i­den­tial hope­fuls would rein­sti­tute it upon tak­ing office, or at least sup­port the pol­i­cy. Con­gress must act in the new year to head off this wor­ri­some poten­tial out­come.”

    ...

    The Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Gov­ern­ment Employ­ees, one of the largest fed­er­al unions, sent a let­ter to the Sen­ate urg­ing lead­ers to sup­port an amend­ment spon­sored by Sen. Dianne Fein­stein of Cal­i­for­nia that would’ve lim­it­ed fed­er­al employ­ee reclas­si­fi­ca­tions to the five except­ed ser­vice sched­ules in use pri­or to 2021.

    In Sep­tem­ber, Fein­stein, along with Sen. Tim Kaine of Vir­ginia, both Democ­rats, ini­tial­ly filed an amend­ment to the 2023 NDAA that would ban Sched­ule F.

    Two weeks before, the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives passed the amendment’s under­ly­ing leg­is­la­tion, Pre­vent­ing a Patron­age Sys­tem Act, spon­sored by Rep. Ger­ry Con­nol­ly, (D‑Va.).

    Ulti­mate­ly, the lan­guage was includ­ed in the House-passed bill, but left out of the final final com­pro­mise Tues­day.

    Crit­ics of Sched­ule F have said there are already sim­i­lar­ly pur­posed clas­si­fi­ca­tions avail­able for the gov­ern­ment to adjust rules for employ­ees who have pol­i­cy-deter­min­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties or work con­fi­den­tial­ly with an offi­cial. One such exam­ple is Sched­ule C.

    In con­trast, the broad­ness of Sched­ule F con­cerned groups who said it would cov­er too much of the fed­er­al work­force.

    So, what hap­pens now?

    With­out for­mal laws snuff­ing out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a Sched­ule F in the future, a pres­i­dent could rein­state such an except­ed ser­vice.

    ...

    ———-

    “NDAA omits ban on Sched­ule F, rais­ing specter of its return” By Mol­ly Weis­ner; Fed­er­al Times; 12/08/2022

    “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:

    ...
    “The prospect of a return of Sched­ule F in a future admin­is­tra­tion remains very much alive,” said Ken Thomas, nation­al pres­i­dent of Nation­al Active and Retired Fed­er­al Employ­ees Asso­ci­a­tion, in a state­ment Thurs­day. “Reports indi­cate that pres­i­den­tial hope­fuls would rein­sti­tute it upon tak­ing office, or at least sup­port the pol­i­cy. Con­gress must act in the new year to head off this wor­ri­some poten­tial out­come.”

    ...

    Ulti­mate­ly, the lan­guage was includ­ed in the House-passed bill, but left out of the final final com­pro­mise Tues­day.

    ...

    With­out for­mal laws snuff­ing out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a Sched­ule F in the future, a pres­i­dent could rein­state such an except­ed ser­vice.
    ...

    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:

    The Hill

    GOP seeks to play hard­ball on annu­al defense bill

    by Ellen Mitchell — 12/04/22 5:00 PM ET

    Repub­li­cans are look­ing to play hard­ball with the annu­al defense autho­riza­tion bill to com­bat what they are call­ing “woke” mil­i­tary poli­cies, threat­en­ing to throw a wrench into efforts to pass the bill by the end of the year.  

    The GOP law­mak­ers want to insert lan­guage into the Nation­al Defense Autho­riza­tion Act (NDAA) to counter poli­cies rang­ing from the military’s vac­cine man­date to efforts to bring diver­si­ty and inclu­sion to the ranks — which they argue are weak­en­ing the mil­i­tary.

    But Demo­c­rat law­mak­ers see the GOP gam­bit as pos­tur­ing meant to whip up sup­port ahead of a new Con­gress, in which Repub­li­cans will hold a slim major­i­ty in the House, and say it won’t dis­rupt their efforts to advance the NDAA in the days ahead.  

    What’s more, House lead­ers say the bill is mov­ing ahead and soon, with a draft of nego­ti­at­ed leg­is­la­tion expect­ed to be brought to the House floor ear­ly next week. 

    “That’s been a bit overblown,” House Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee Chair­man Adam Smith (D‑Wash.), said of the NDAA dra­ma when asked by The Hill. 

    He added that he and the oth­er lead­ers of the two defense com­mit­tees — includ­ing his rank­ing mem­ber Rep. Mike Rogers (R‑Ala.) and Sen­ate Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee Chair­man and rank­ing mem­ber Sen. Jack Reed (D‑R.I), and Sen. James Inhofe (R‑Okla.), respec­tive­ly — have “all been work­ing towards get­ting it done and we’re going to do it next week.” 

    Rogers sep­a­rate­ly told The Hill that a draft of the nego­ti­at­ed bill should be brought to the floor by the House by Tues­day.  

    Asked Thurs­day about some of his GOP col­leagues’ attempts to push the bill to next year, Rogers replied: “That’s not gonna hap­pen.” 

    The NDAA, a mea­sure seen as a must-pass for Con­gress every year, lays down a wide array of spend­ing pri­or­i­ties and pol­i­cy for the Defense Depart­ment. The mam­moth leg­is­la­tion includes every­thing from the military’s annu­al pay raise to the fund­ing of tanks, planes and ships to new pro­grams and per­son­nel poli­cies, and has passed every year for six decades.  

    The House and Sen­ate both passed its ver­sions of the leg­is­la­tion ear­li­er this year, and law­mak­ers from both cham­bers have since been rec­on­cil­ing the two dif­fer­ent doc­u­ments, this week strik­ing a deal to set the bud­get top line of the fis­cal 2023 NDAA at $847 bil­lion. The fig­ure jumps to $858 bil­lion when includ­ing nuclear-relat­ed pro­grams that fall under the Ener­gy Depart­ment. 

    The bill is now in the hands of par­ty lead­ers, with House Major­i­ty Leader Ste­ny Hoy­er (D‑Md.), ear­li­er this week telling reporters he was “opti­mistic” the NDAA would be passed before Christ­mas. He added, how­ev­er, there are issues in the bill that are “not nec­es­sar­i­ly nation­al secu­ri­ty relat­ed,” that may hold up the process.  

    On Fri­day Hoy­er said there were still some “out­stand­ing issues” in the leg­is­la­tion which pre­vent­ed it from being filed as of this week, Politi­co report­ed.  

    Those issues may very well be tied to decid­ing which unre­lat­ed bills could be tacked onto the leg­is­la­tion. 

    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. 

    The sen­a­tors on Wednes­day threat­ened to with­hold their votes to advance the NDAA if the cham­ber doesn’t vote on whether to end the shot order for ser­vice mem­bers, rein­state troops kicked out of the mil­i­tary for refus­ing the vac­cine and award­ing back pay to those dis­missed. 

    It’s unclear whether law­mak­ers oppos­ing the man­date will have enough mem­bers to effec­tive­ly block the NDAA in the Sen­ate, as no senior GOP lead­ers in the cham­ber have signed onto the idea as of Fri­day.  

    In the House, mean­while, House Minor­i­ty Leader Kevin McCarthy (R‑Calif.), in late Novem­ber urged his col­leagues to delay the NDAA until next year when the GOP con­trols the House. The shift would give Repub­li­cans more lever­age to address what they say is a “woke” cul­ture with­in the Pen­ta­gon.  

    “I’ve watched what the Democ­rats have done on many of these things, espe­cial­ly in the NDAA — the ‘wokeism’ that they want to bring in there,” McCarthy said at Nov. 22 press con­fer­ence. “I actu­al­ly believe the NDAA should hold up until the first of the year, and let’s get it right.” 

    McCarthy didn’t spec­i­fy which pro­vi­sions in the bill he con­sid­ers to be at issue, though Repub­li­cans on sev­er­al occa­sions have promised to ban­ish mil­i­tary poli­cies decried as “woke” once their major­i­ty in Con­gress is regained.  

    The areas under fire include diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion pro­grams in the mil­i­tary ser­vices and recent pol­i­cy changes to allow dif­fer­ent uni­forms to accom­mo­date preg­nant ser­vice mem­bers or allow more hair style options for female troops and those of col­or, among oth­er changes.  

    Also attacked are ini­tia­tives inac­cu­rate­ly labeled as push­ing “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” and efforts to root out extrem­ists in the ranks.  

    Democ­rats have since accused McCarthy of stir­ring the pot only as a stunt meant to win him sup­port for the Speaker’s gav­el.  

    McCarthy hopes to win the House speak­er­ship in the upcom­ing Jan. 3 vote on the posi­tion and needs all but three or four mem­bers of his con­fer­ence to cast their bal­lot for him.  

    ...

    ———-

    “GOP seeks to play hard­ball on annu­al defense bill” by Ellen Mitchell; The Hill; 12/04/2022

    “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:

    ...
    On Fri­day Hoy­er said there were still some “out­stand­ing issues” in the leg­is­la­tion which pre­vent­ed it from being filed as of this week, Politi­co report­ed.

    Those issues may very well be tied to decid­ing which unre­lat­ed bills could be tacked onto the leg­is­la­tion. 

    ...

    The sen­a­tors on Wednes­day threat­ened to with­hold their votes to advance the NDAA if the cham­ber doesn’t vote on whether to end the shot order for ser­vice mem­bers, rein­state troops kicked out of the mil­i­tary for refus­ing the vac­cine and award­ing back pay to those dis­missed.

    It’s unclear whether law­mak­ers oppos­ing the man­date will have enough mem­bers to effec­tive­ly block the NDAA in the Sen­ate, as no senior GOP lead­ers in the cham­ber have signed onto the idea as of Fri­day.
    ...

    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 Hill

    House pass­es annu­al defense fund­ing bill

    by Ellen Mitchell and Mychael Schnell — 12/08/22 1:43 PM ET

    The House on Thurs­day passed the annu­al defense autho­riza­tion bill, send­ing the mam­moth, $847 bil­lion mea­sure to the Sen­ate for con­sid­er­a­tion ahead of the year-end dead­line.

    The Nation­al Defense Autho­riza­tion Act (NDAA) passed in a bipar­ti­san 350–80 vote. It was approved under sus­pen­sion of the rules, an expe­dit­ed process to pass leg­is­la­tion in the House that requires a two-thirds major­i­ty.

    “I can’t go through every sin­gle item that is in this bill, but I can tell you that just about every mem­ber of this House has some­thing in this bill that is impor­tant for pol­i­cy, impor­tant in their dis­trict,” House Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee Chair­man Adam Smith (D‑Wash.) said ahead of the vote. “This is impor­tant pol­i­cy that makes a huge dif­fer­ence for the peo­ple in this body and the peo­ple in this coun­try, and I’ve urged us to sup­port it.”

    The NDAA, leg­is­la­tion seen as a must-pass for Con­gress annu­al­ly, includes an $817 bil­lion top line for the Defense Depart­ment and about $30 bil­lion to fund nuclear activ­i­ties in the Depart­ment of Ener­gy.

    The bill lays out the blue­print for how the bil­lions of dol­lars will be allo­cat­ed at the Pen­ta­gon, includ­ing a 4.6 per­cent pay raise for both ser­vice mem­bers and the agency’s civil­ian work­force, new weapons pro­grams and equip­ment upgrades, and new pro­grams and per­son­nel poli­cies.

    ... 

    House lead­ers decid­ed to use the fast-track process after a last-minute push from the Con­gres­sion­al Black Cau­cus (CBC) Wednes­day night to set an accom­pa­ny­ing vote on a bill bol­ster­ing the 1965 Vot­ing Rights Act, which had pre­vi­ous­ly passed through the House but stalled in the Sen­ate. The cham­ber was ini­tial­ly sched­uled to pass the defense bill on Wednes­day but punt­ed action to Thurs­day because of the CBC holdup.

    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.

    In a win for Repub­li­cans, the mea­sure includes lan­guage that repeals the COVID-19 vac­cine man­date for U.S. ser­vice mem­bers, which has been in place since August 2021.

    The con­ces­sion was seen as a sur­prise by many. The White House and Pen­ta­gon spoke out against it and sim­i­lar mea­sures to sig­nif­i­cant­ly lim­it the vac­cine man­date were vot­ed down in the House Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee dur­ing the bill’s markup ear­li­er this year. 

    But GOP law­mak­ers for months have spo­ken out against the pol­i­cy, argu­ing that it was a gov­ern­ment over­reach to force ser­vice mem­bers to receive the jab and claim­ing that the pol­i­cy was hurt­ing mil­i­tary recruit­ment and reten­tion. 

    Thou­sands of active-duty troops have been dis­charged since the pol­i­cy went into effect.

    House Minor­i­ty Leader Kevin McCarthy (R‑Calif.) threat­ened to hold up the leg­is­la­tion if it did not include a roll­back of the man­date. McCarthy over the week­end told “Fox News Sun­day” that “the bill will not move” if the pol­i­cy was not lift­ed. He said he relayed the same mes­sage to Pres­i­dent Biden dur­ing a meet­ing at the White House last week with the four con­gres­sion­al lead­ers.

    ...

    ———–

    “House pass­es annu­al defense fund­ing bill” by Ellen Mitchell and Mychael Schnell; The Hill; 12/08/2022

    “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 Nation­al Defense Autho­riza­tion Act (NDAA) passed in a bipar­ti­san 350–80 vote. It was approved under sus­pen­sion of the rules, an expe­dit­ed process to pass leg­is­la­tion in the House that requires a two-thirds major­i­ty.

    ... 

    In a win for Repub­li­cans, the mea­sure includes lan­guage that repeals the COVID-19 vac­cine man­date for U.S. ser­vice mem­bers, which has been in place since August 2021.

    The con­ces­sion was seen as a sur­prise by many. The White House and Pen­ta­gon spoke out against it and sim­i­lar mea­sures to sig­nif­i­cant­ly lim­it the vac­cine man­date were vot­ed down in the House Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee dur­ing the bill’s markup ear­li­er this year. 

    ...

    House Minor­i­ty Leader Kevin McCarthy (R‑Calif.) threat­ened to hold up the leg­is­la­tion if it did not include a roll­back of the man­date. McCarthy over the week­end told “Fox News Sun­day” that “the bill will not move” if the pol­i­cy was not lift­ed. He said he relayed the same mes­sage to Pres­i­dent Biden dur­ing a meet­ing at the White House last week with the four con­gres­sion­al lead­ers.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 8, 2022, 11:27 pm
  5. 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:

    Axios

    D.C.‘s emerg­ing MAGA machine

    Lach­lan Markay
    Dec 21, 2022 — Pol­i­tics & Pol­i­cy

    If Don­ald Trump is once again elect­ed pres­i­dent, he will enjoy a key asset absent from his 2017 White House tran­si­tion: a sprawl­ing infra­struc­ture already prepar­ing to staff a new admin­is­tra­tion and imme­di­ate­ly enact major poli­cies.

    Why it mat­ters: No such appa­ra­tus devot­ed to Trump’s polit­i­cal brand exist­ed in 2017. The frac­tious con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment of the time — split among Trump loy­al­ists, reluc­tant hang­ers-on and out­spo­ken oppo­nents — fueled the inter­nal dys­func­tion that plagued his ear­ly admin­is­tra­tion.

    * Few such divi­sions would exist in a sec­ond Trump term — or a first for a like-mind­ed Repub­li­can such as Flori­da Gov. Ron DeSan­tis.

    * If an “Amer­i­ca First” can­di­date pre­vails in 2024, a con­stel­la­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive groups — many cre­at­ed since Trump left office — hopes to cement that ide­o­log­i­cal brand in the pol­i­cy and per­son­nel make­up of the new admin­is­tra­tion.

    What they’re say­ing:There was none of that [in 2017]. None of it,” says Brooke Rollins, Trump’s for­mer Domes­tic Pol­i­cy Coun­cil chief and the pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­ca First Pol­i­cy Insti­tute. “The next time around ... there will be a whole new game in town that will be pre­pared for that pres­i­den­cy.”

    * “A big part of that is hav­ing the per­son­nel ready, the pol­i­cy ready and the process under­stood so that on Day 1 of a new admin­is­tra­tion, no mat­ter who the pres­i­dent is, we will have 2,500 peo­ple ready to report to work to begin to imple­ment that agen­da,” Rollins told Axios in an inter­view.

    What’s hap­pen­ing: Annu­al tax fil­ings for AFPI and oth­er groups in the net­work have trick­led in since last month, pro­vid­ing the first glimpses at the struc­tures and finances of D.C.‘s MAGA infra­struc­ture.

    * Togeth­er, the groups are pour­ing tens of mil­lions of dol­lars into what effec­tive­ly amounts to an admin­is­tra­tion-in-wait­ing.

    * Many of the groups are inte­gral to bur­geon­ing efforts by Trump allies to remake the fed­er­al civ­il ser­vice to align with an “Amer­i­ca First” pol­i­cy agen­da — includ­ing by purg­ing thou­sands of bureau­crats and replac­ing them with loy­al­ists

    The big pic­ture: The orga­ni­za­tions gen­er­al­ly fall into three camps. Some sprout­ed from the rem­nants of an explic­it­ly pro-Trump appa­ra­tus cre­at­ed dur­ing his term.

    * AFPI is the new non­prof­it pol­i­cy arm of Amer­i­ca First Works, an advo­ca­cy group that pre­vi­ous­ly backed Trump under the moniker Amer­i­ca First Poli­cies. It’s staffed by dozens of his for­mer Cab­i­net sec­re­taries and senior aides.

    * In June, AFPI unveiled an effort, the Amer­i­can Lead­er­ship Ini­tia­tive, to devel­op strate­gies for a future pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion. It’s led by Michael Rigas, the for­mer act­ing head of Trump’s Office of Per­son­nel Man­age­ment.

    * AFPI brought in near­ly $15 mil­lion in 2021, tax fil­ings show. Rollins told Axios that the group now employs about 160 peo­ple and is oper­at­ing on a $27 mil­lion bud­get this year.

    Oth­ers are pur­su­ing a broad­er ide­o­log­i­cal but also have deep ties to Trump­world and are aligned with his polit­i­cal brand.

    * The Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, led by for­mer Sen. Jim DeMint (R‑S.C.) and ex-Trump chief of staff Mark Mead­ows, has incu­bat­ed and finan­cial­ly sup­port­ed a net­work of allied groups.

    * They include orga­ni­za­tions found­ed by for­mer Trump bud­get chief Russ Vought, for­mer top pol­i­cy aide Stephen Miller and for­mer Hous­ing and Urban Devel­op­ment sec­re­tary Ben Car­son.

    * Amer­i­can Moment, a new CPI-backed non­prof­it, is explic­it­ly devot­ed to cul­ti­vat­ing “Amer­i­ca First” tal­ent, in part to staff a future admin­is­tra­tion.

    * CPI’s bud­get grew sub­stan­tial­ly in 2021, tax fil­ings show: Dona­tions to the group shot up from $7.1 mil­lion in 2020 to more than $45 mil­lion last year — boost­ed by a $1 mil­lion con­tri­bu­tion from Trump’s lead­er­ship PAC.

    Lega­cy con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions such as the Her­itage Foun­da­tion are also seen as key to a future GOP pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion.

    * Her­itage heav­i­ly influ­enced the ear­ly Trump admin­is­tra­tion, and Trump allies say they expect the group, led by new pres­i­dent Kevin Roberts, to play a larg­er role in a sec­ond Trump term — or that of anoth­er “Amer­i­ca First” Repub­li­can.

    * Her­itage is lead­ing the new 2025 Pres­i­den­tial Tran­si­tion Project, an effort, orga­nized with dozens of oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive groups, “to ensure a suc­cess­ful admin­is­tra­tion begins in Jan­u­ary 2025 ... [w]ith the right con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­cy rec­om­men­da­tions and prop­er­ly vet­ted and trained per­son­nel to imple­ment them.”

    * Her­itage plans to pub­lish the ninth edi­tion of its “Man­date for Lead­er­ship” series next spring, geared not just toward influ­enc­ing the pol­i­cy tenor of the GOP pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry, but also sketch­ing out a mod­el for an effec­tive tran­si­tion.

    Between the lines: Under­gird­ing the larg­er con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment prepa­ra­tions for 2025 is a recog­ni­tion that the lack of this sort of infra­struc­ture sub­stan­tial­ly hob­bled the Trump admin­is­tra­tion from the start.

    ...

    ————

    “D.C.‘s emerg­ing MAGA machine” by Lach­lan Markay; Axios; 12/21/2022

    “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:

    ...
    What they’re say­ing: “There was none of that [in 2017]. None of it,” says Brooke Rollins, Trump’s for­mer Domes­tic Pol­i­cy Coun­cil chief and the pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­ca First Pol­i­cy Insti­tute. “The next time around ... there will be a whole new game in town that will be pre­pared for that pres­i­den­cy.”

    * “A big part of that is hav­ing the per­son­nel ready, the pol­i­cy ready and the process under­stood so that on Day 1 of a new admin­is­tra­tion, no mat­ter who the pres­i­dent is, we will have 2,500 peo­ple ready to report to work to begin to imple­ment that agen­da,” Rollins told Axios in an inter­view.

    What’s hap­pen­ing: Annu­al tax fil­ings for AFPI and oth­er groups in the net­work have trick­led in since last month, pro­vid­ing the first glimpses at the struc­tures and finances of D.C.‘s MAGA infra­struc­ture.

    ...

    * AFPI is the new non­prof­it pol­i­cy arm of Amer­i­ca First Works, an advo­ca­cy group that pre­vi­ous­ly backed Trump under the moniker Amer­i­ca First Poli­cies. It’s staffed by dozens of his for­mer Cab­i­net sec­re­taries and senior aides.

    * In June, AFPI unveiled an effort, the Amer­i­can Lead­er­ship Ini­tia­tive, to devel­op strate­gies for a future pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion. It’s led by Michael Rigas, the for­mer act­ing head of Trump’s Office of Per­son­nel Man­age­ment.

    * AFPI brought in near­ly $15 mil­lion in 2021, tax fil­ings show. Rollins told Axios that the group now employs about 160 peo­ple and is oper­at­ing on a $27 mil­lion bud­get this year.

    ...

    Between the lines: Under­gird­ing the larg­er con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment prepa­ra­tions for 2025 is a recog­ni­tion that the lack of this sort of infra­struc­ture sub­stan­tial­ly hob­bled the Trump admin­is­tra­tion from the start.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Oth­ers are pur­su­ing a broad­er ide­o­log­i­cal but also have deep ties to Trump­world and are aligned with his polit­i­cal brand.

    * The Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, led by for­mer Sen. Jim DeMint (R‑S.C.) and ex-Trump chief of staff Mark Mead­ows, has incu­bat­ed and finan­cial­ly sup­port­ed a net­work of allied groups.

    * They include orga­ni­za­tions found­ed by for­mer Trump bud­get chief Russ Vought, for­mer top pol­i­cy aide Stephen Miller and for­mer Hous­ing and Urban Devel­op­ment sec­re­tary Ben Car­son.

    * Amer­i­can Moment, a new CPI-backed non­prof­it, is explic­it­ly devot­ed to cul­ti­vat­ing “Amer­i­ca First” tal­ent, in part to staff a future admin­is­tra­tion.

    ...

    Lega­cy con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions such as the Her­itage Foun­da­tion are also seen as key to a future GOP pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion.

    * Her­itage heav­i­ly influ­enced the ear­ly Trump admin­is­tra­tion, and Trump allies say they expect the group, led by new pres­i­dent Kevin Roberts, to play a larg­er role in a sec­ond Trump term — or that of anoth­er “Amer­i­ca First” Repub­li­can.

    * Her­itage is lead­ing the new 2025 Pres­i­den­tial Tran­si­tion Project, an effort, orga­nized with dozens of oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive groups, “to ensure a suc­cess­ful admin­is­tra­tion begins in Jan­u­ary 2025 ... [w]ith the right con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­cy rec­om­men­da­tions and prop­er­ly vet­ted and trained per­son­nel to imple­ment them.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 25, 2022, 6:32 pm
  6. 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:

    The New York Times

    Speak­er Dra­ma Rais­es New Fears on Debt Lim­it

    An embold­ened con­ser­v­a­tive flank and con­ces­sions made to win votes could lead to a pro­tract­ed stand­off on crit­i­cal fis­cal issues, risk­ing eco­nom­ic pain.

    By Jim Tanker­s­ley
    Jan. 7, 2023 Updat­ed 2:56 p.m. ET

    WASHINGTON — Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Kevin McCarthy of Cal­i­for­nia final­ly secured the House speak­er­ship in a dra­mat­ic vote end­ing around 12:30 a.m. Sat­ur­day, but the dys­func­tion in his par­ty and the deal he struck to win over hold­out Repub­li­cans also raised the risks of per­sis­tent polit­i­cal grid­lock that could desta­bi­lize the Amer­i­can finan­cial sys­tem.

    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.

    The speak­er­ship bat­tle that spanned more than four days and 15 rounds of votes sug­gest­ed Pres­i­dent Biden and Con­gress could be on track lat­er this year for the most per­ilous debt-lim­it debate since 2011, when for­mer Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma and a new Repub­li­can major­i­ty in the House near­ly default­ed on the nation’s debt before cut­ting an 11th-hour deal.

    “If every­thing we’re see­ing is a symp­tom of a total­ly splin­tered House Repub­li­can con­fer­ence that is going to be unable to come togeth­er with 218 votes on vir­tu­al­ly any issue, it tells you that the odds of get­ting to the 11th hour or the last minute or what­ev­er are very high,” Alec Phillips, the chief polit­i­cal econ­o­mist for Gold­man Sachs Research, said in an inter­view Fri­day.

    The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment spends far more mon­ey each year than it receives in rev­enues, pro­duc­ing a bud­get deficit that is pro­ject­ed to aver­age in excess of $1 tril­lion a year for the next decade. Those deficits will add to a nation­al debt that topped $31 tril­lion last year.

    Fed­er­al law puts a lim­it on how much the gov­ern­ment can bor­row. But it does not require the gov­ern­ment to bal­ance its bud­get. That means law­mak­ers must peri­od­i­cal­ly pass laws to raise the bor­row­ing lim­it to avoid a sit­u­a­tion in which the gov­ern­ment is unable to pay all of its bills, jeop­ar­diz­ing pay­ments includ­ing mil­i­tary salaries, Social Secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits and debts to hold­ers of gov­ern­ment bonds. Gold­man Sachs researchers esti­mate Con­gress will like­ly need to raise the debt lim­it some­time around August to stave off such a sce­nario.

    Rais­ing the lim­it was once rou­tine but has become become increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult over the past few decades, with Repub­li­cans using the cap as a cud­gel to force spend­ing reduc­tions. Their lever­age stems from the poten­tial dam­age to the econ­o­my if the lim­it is not increased. Lift­ing the debt lim­it does not autho­rize any new spend­ing; it just allows the Unit­ed States to finance exist­ing oblig­a­tions. If that cap is not lift­ed, the gov­ern­ment would be unable to pay all of its bills, which include salaries for mil­i­tary mem­bers and Social Secu­ri­ty pay­ments.

    The excep­tion to the debt-lim­it dra­ma was the four years of Don­ald J. Trump’s pres­i­den­cy, when Repub­li­cans large­ly aban­doned their push to tie increas­es in the lim­it to cuts in fed­er­al spend­ing. In 2021, Sen­ate Repub­li­cans clashed with Mr. Biden as the dead­line for rais­ing the lim­it approached, but those law­mak­ers ulti­mate­ly helped Democ­rats pass a law increas­ing the cap.

    Some Democ­rats pushed to avoid this sce­nario last year, when it became clear that their par­ty would like­ly lose at least one cham­ber of Con­gress. They hoped to raise the lim­it again in the lame-duck ses­sion of Con­gress after the Novem­ber elec­tions that deliv­ered House con­trol to Repub­li­cans, to avoid any chance of a default before the 2024 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. But the effort nev­er gained trac­tion.

    As a result, the next round of debt-lim­it brinkman­ship could be the most fraught on record — as evi­denced by the bat­tle over the speak­er­ship. Con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans have already made clear that they would not pass a debt-lim­it increase with­out sig­nif­i­cant spend­ing curbs, like­ly includ­ing cuts to both spend­ing on the mil­i­tary and on domes­tic issues not relat­ed to nation­al defense.

    Their pow­er stems from the fact that Repub­li­cans hold a more nar­row major­i­ty than they did fol­low­ing the 2010 midterms, which empow­ered the con­ser­v­a­tive hold­outs who opposed Mr. McCarthy. Among that group’s demands were a push for steep cuts in fed­er­al spend­ing and a bal­anc­ing of the fed­er­al bud­get with­in a decade with­out rais­ing tax­es.

    “Is he will­ing to shut the gov­ern­ment down rather than raise the debt ceil­ing?” Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Ralph Nor­man of South Car­oli­na, who was one of 20 Repub­li­cans to ini­tial­ly vote against Mr. McCarthy on the House floor, recent­ly told reporters. “That’s a non-nego­tiable item.”

    Mr. McCarthy appeared to agree to those demands, pledg­ing to allow open debate on spend­ing bills and to not raise the debt lim­it with­out major cuts — includ­ing efforts to reduce spend­ing on so-called manda­to­ry pro­grams, which include Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare — in a deal that brought many hold­outs, includ­ing Mr. Nor­man, into his camp.

    If the speak­er vio­lat­ed that deal, he could risk being over­thrown by his cau­cus — a sin­gle law­mak­er could force a vote to oust Mr. McCarthy, under the terms of the agree­ment. But Mr. Biden and his party’s lead­ers in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic-con­trolled Sen­ate have vowed to fight those cuts, par­tic­u­lar­ly to social safe­ty net pro­grams. That could mean a stand­off that goes on until the gov­ern­ment runs out of mon­ey to pay its bills.

    Staunch bud­get hawks in Wash­ing­ton have long argued that the Unit­ed States needs to stop spend­ing — and bor­row­ing — so much mon­ey and that the nation can­not afford its long-term debt. They have pushed for a vari­ety of ways to reduce the growth in long-term spend­ing, includ­ing cuts to health care for the poor and for old­er Amer­i­cans. And many have called for end­ing some tax breaks while ensur­ing that the wealth­i­est and cor­po­ra­tions pay more.

    Yet many of those fis­cal hawks have called the Repub­li­can spend­ing demands reck­less and like­ly to pro­duce stale­mates on key fis­cal issues.

    “Their spe­cif­ic ask of bal­anc­ing the bud­get in 10 years is just total­ly unre­al­is­tic. It would take $11 tril­lion in sav­ings,” said Maya MacGuineas, pres­i­dent of the Com­mit­tee for a Respon­si­ble Fed­er­al Bud­get in Wash­ing­ton, which has long pushed law­mak­ers to reduce future deficits through spend­ing cuts and tax increas­es.

    “I want to save more mon­ey than a lot of peo­ple,” Ms. MacGuineas said. “But what they’re demand­ing is just not achiev­able.”

    Hurtling toward a dead­line for rais­ing the debt lim­it would sow chaos in finan­cial mar­kets, includ­ing for stocks and Trea­sury bonds, Mr. Phillips said. If Con­gress failed to raise the debt lim­it and the gov­ern­ment became unable to bor­row more mon­ey, Mr. Phillips said, Amer­i­ca would suf­fer a sud­den decrease in fed­er­al spend­ing equiv­a­lent to as much as one-tenth of all dai­ly eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty.

    “This does not feel like a false alarm,” he said.

    In 2011, Repub­li­cans and Mr. Oba­ma agreed on a deal to raise the debt lim­it that also imposed future lim­its on domes­tic spend­ing increas­es. Ms. MacGuineas, Mr. Phillips and oth­er ana­lysts expressed skep­ti­cism that nego­ti­a­tions between Mr. Biden and House Repub­li­cans would do the same this time, in part because the fac­tion that had blocked Mr. McCarthy’s ascent appeared unwill­ing to com­pro­mise for sig­nif­i­cant­ly more mod­est con­ces­sions from Democ­rats.

    Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have giv­en no indi­ca­tion that they would nego­ti­ate with Repub­li­cans over a debt-lim­it increase at all — nor that they were prepar­ing to act uni­lat­er­al­ly to bypass the debt ceil­ing, as some pro­gres­sives have pushed for, in the event of a House speak­er refus­ing to put a debt-lim­it increase to a vote with­out steep spend­ing cuts.

    ...

    Mod­er­ate law­mak­ers have already begun float­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties for how the House might raise the lim­it. One long-shot idea: a so-called dis­charge peti­tion signed by a major­i­ty of the House to force a vote on a bill. A move of that kind would pre­sum­ably rely almost entire­ly on Demo­c­ra­t­ic votes with a few Repub­li­cans join­ing in. But that out­come is far from guar­an­teed; it would require exten­sive coor­di­na­tion by both sides and expose defect­ing Repub­li­cans to pun­ish­ment and pri­ma­ry chal­lenges.

    Still, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Bri­an Fitz­patrick, Repub­li­can of Penn­syl­va­nia, embraced the pos­si­bil­i­ty of such a com­pro­mise this past week in an inter­view with CNN. “There is a num­ber of options to cir­cum­vent lead­er­ship,” he said. “There is not a ton. But there are options at our dis­pos­al.”

    ———-

    “Speak­er Dra­ma Rais­es New Fears on Debt Lim­it” by Jim Tanker­s­ley; The New York Times; 01/07/2023

    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:

    ...
    Rais­ing the lim­it was once rou­tine but has become become increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult over the past few decades, with Repub­li­cans using the cap as a cud­gel to force spend­ing reduc­tions. Their lever­age stems from the poten­tial dam­age to the econ­o­my if the lim­it is not increased. Lift­ing the debt lim­it does not autho­rize any new spend­ing; it just allows the Unit­ed States to finance exist­ing oblig­a­tions. If that cap is not lift­ed, the gov­ern­ment would be unable to pay all of its bills, which include salaries for mil­i­tary mem­bers and Social Secu­ri­ty pay­ments.

    ...

    As a result, the next round of debt-lim­it brinkman­ship could be the most fraught on record — as evi­denced by the bat­tle over the speak­er­ship. Con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans have already made clear that they would not pass a debt-lim­it increase with­out sig­nif­i­cant spend­ing curbs, like­ly includ­ing cuts to both spend­ing on the mil­i­tary and on domes­tic issues not relat­ed to nation­al defense.

    Their pow­er stems from the fact that Repub­li­cans hold a more nar­row major­i­ty than they did fol­low­ing the 2010 midterms, which empow­ered the con­ser­v­a­tive hold­outs who opposed Mr. McCarthy. Among that group’s demands were a push for steep cuts in fed­er­al spend­ing and a bal­anc­ing of the fed­er­al bud­get with­in a decade with­out rais­ing tax­es.

    Is he will­ing to shut the gov­ern­ment down rather than raise the debt ceil­ing?” Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Ralph Nor­man of South Car­oli­na, who was one of 20 Repub­li­cans to ini­tial­ly vote against Mr. McCarthy on the House floor, recent­ly told reporters. “That’s a non-nego­tiable item.”

    Mr. McCarthy appeared to agree to those demands, pledg­ing to allow open debate on spend­ing bills and to not raise the debt lim­it with­out major cuts — includ­ing efforts to reduce spend­ing on so-called manda­to­ry pro­grams, which include Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare — in a deal that brought many hold­outs, includ­ing Mr. Nor­man, into his camp.

    If the speak­er vio­lat­ed that deal, he could risk being over­thrown by his cau­cus — a sin­gle law­mak­er could force a vote to oust Mr. McCarthy, under the terms of the agree­ment. But Mr. Biden and his party’s lead­ers in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic-con­trolled Sen­ate have vowed to fight those cuts, par­tic­u­lar­ly to social safe­ty net pro­grams. That could mean a stand­off that goes on until the gov­ern­ment runs out of mon­ey to pay its bills.
    ...

    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:

    Grid

    ‘The Democ­rats, the Repub­li­cans and the Free­dom Cau­cus’: Inside the right’s plans to seize pow­er in the new Con­gress

    Con­ser­v­a­tives want the House to act like “a de fac­to Euro­pean-style coali­tion gov­ern­ment.”

    Steve Reil­ly, Inves­tiga­tive Reporter, and Mag­gie Sev­erns, Domes­tic Pol­i­cy Reporter
    Jan­u­ary 6, 2023

    A week after the midterm elec­tions in Novem­ber, a small group of far-right GOP law­mak­ers and activists gath­ered on K Street in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., to dis­cuss strate­gies to use their nar­row major­i­ty to extract pow­er in the House. The next Con­gress, influ­en­tial activist Ed Cor­ri­g­an said, could be a “Euro­pean-style coali­tion gov­ern­ment” run by three groups: “The Democ­rats, the Repub­li­cans and the Free­dom Cau­cus.”

    The forum was con­vened by Rep. Andy Big­gs, R‑Ariz., and attend­ed by sev­er­al oth­er law­mak­ers, includ­ing two oth­ers who helped block Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R‑Calif.) this week from becom­ing House speak­er: Reps. Matt Gaetz, R‑Fla., and Vic­to­ria Spartz, R‑Ind.

    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.

    “What would coali­tion gov­ern­ment look like in prac­tice?” Cor­ri­g­an asked the group, which was filmed and livestreamed but has attract­ed lit­tle notice beyond con­ser­v­a­tive media. “I would rec­om­mend the Free­dom Cau­cus would be grant­ed a spe­cif­ic num­ber of com­mit­tee assign­ments, and com­mit­tee and sub­com­mit­tee chair­man­ships,” as well as a vari­ety of oth­er new pow­ers, includ­ing putting a Free­dom Cau­cus mem­ber as chair­man of the pow­er­ful House Rules Com­mit­tee.

    This week, McCarthy has report­ed­ly been con­ced­ing to a litany of demands from the Free­dom Cau­cus — includ­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of plac­ing mem­bers of the cau­cus as chairs of com­mit­tees and adding mem­bers to the House Rules Com­mit­tee, a move that would help Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers steer how many and which amend­ments are offered for bills on the House floor, a cru­cial func­tion.

    Address­ing the law­mak­ers at the Novem­ber forum was a four-per­son pan­el includ­ing for­mer Repub­li­can Study Com­mit­tee direc­tor Paul Teller and three lead­ers of the influ­en­tial far-right non­prof­it Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute (CPI): Cor­ri­g­an, pres­i­dent of CPI and a for­mer mem­ber of Don­ald Trump’s tran­si­tion team; CPI senior part­ner Mark Mead­ows, a for­mer law­mak­er who in 2015 filed the “motion to vacate” that led to John Boehner’s removal as speak­er of the House; and CPI senior pol­i­cy direc­tor Rachel Bovard, a for­mer long­time Capi­tol Hill aide.

    The episode sug­gests that the endgame for the approx­i­mate­ly 20 hard-right House mem­bers who have vot­ed against McCarthy for speak­er of the House is more ambi­tious than mere­ly boost­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the House for Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers — it is about secur­ing the Free­dom Cau­cus a say in all deci­sion-mak­ing made by the new Repub­li­can major­i­ty.

    Rather than extract­ing con­ces­sions from McCarthy, the actions this week by the small group of break­away Repub­li­cans appear to be fol­low­ing Corrigan’s game plan to essen­tial­ly co-gov­ern the low­er cham­ber of the leg­isla­tive branch.

    Tues­day marked the first time in more than 100 years that the House failed to elect a speak­er on the first bal­lot. Because the House can­not func­tion with­out a speak­er in place, its busi­ness has essen­tial­ly been ground to a halt: pre­vent­ing the swear­ing-in of mem­bers-elect, stalling con­gres­sion­al over­sight efforts, scut­tling clas­si­fied intel­li­gence brief­in­gs and bar­ring the con­sid­er­a­tion of leg­is­la­tion.

    After the midterms, Cor­ri­g­an advised the law­mak­ers to lever­age House Repub­li­cans’ nar­row­er-than-expect­ed major­i­ty as a nego­ti­at­ing tool.

    The House Free­dom Cau­cus, Cor­ri­g­an said at the Nov. 14, 2022, meet­ing, “has extra­or­di­nary pow­er to nego­ti­ate a lead­er­ship arrange­ment” and urged them to try to extract a litany of con­ces­sions from McCarthy, some of which had been float­ed pre­vi­ous­ly by Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers as they pre­pared for Repub­li­cans to retake the House. Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers should “nego­ti­ate direct­ly with the speak­er for com­mit­tee posi­tions for Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers,” as well as “a spe­cif­ic num­ber of com­mit­tee assign­ments and full com­mit­tee and sub­com­mit­tee chair­man­ships,” he said.

    Cor­ri­g­an sug­gest­ed the Free­dom Cau­cus ask for changes to the “motion to vacate” rule, which allows mem­bers to call a vote over the speak­er­ship. As of Thurs­day, McCarthy appeared pre­pared to restore the motion to vacate in accor­dance with con­ser­v­a­tives’ demands.

    Cor­ri­g­an also made a case that the Free­dom Cau­cus should nego­ti­ate for the chair­man­ship of the pow­er­ful House Rules Com­mit­tee, “or at least three of the four mem­bers.”

    The House Rules Com­mit­tee deter­mines how many amend­ments and which amend­ments are offered on the House floor, grant­i­ng its mem­bers extra­or­di­nary pow­er to guide the busi­ness of Con­gress. The rules com­mit­tee is usu­al­ly made up of tenured law­mak­ers and allies of the speak­er.

    In recent days, McCarthy has acqui­esced to a num­ber of the Free­dom Cau­cus’ demands — and he may be pre­pared to go even fur­ther as he tries to win the speaker’s gav­el. Accord­ing to report­ing from Politi­co, he has agreed to con­ces­sions that include plac­ing more Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers on the House Rules Com­mit­tee. Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers con­tin­ue to push for seats on pow­er­ful com­mit­tee and sub­com­mit­tee chair­man­ships, which would fur­ther help them guide the direc­tion of the next Con­gress.

    At one point, Mead­ows sug­gest­ed what he admit­ted was a “rad­i­cal idea”: Law­mak­ers should “quit appro­pri­at­ing for things that are not autho­rized,” mean­ing that any gov­ern­ment pro­gram that had not been reau­tho­rized by Con­gress on time shouldn’t get fund­ing until Con­gress reap­proves it. Mead­ows cit­ed the State Depart­ment as an exam­ple: Con­gress has not updat­ed the laws gov­ern­ing the depart­ment since 2002.

    Rep. Pete Ses­sions (R‑Texas), a for­mer chair­man of the Rules Com­mit­tee who has vot­ed for McCarthy in the fight over House speak­er, was also among the law­mak­ers in atten­dance. He seemed to sug­gest at one point that some ideas being float­ed dur­ing the meet­ing would make it hard­er for the Repub­li­can major­i­ty to func­tion.

    “In going through this process, we need to make sure the sta­bil­i­ty of the major­i­ty is still there, while some­how hold­ing the lead­er­ship account­able,” Ses­sions said.

    In prac­tice, how­ev­er, “it would be implau­si­ble” for the House Free­dom Cau­cus to con­trol the House through its Rules Com­mit­tee, said Tim LaPi­ra, pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at James Madi­son Uni­ver­si­ty. The Rules Com­mit­tee rep­re­sents one small minor­i­ty fac­tion with­in the Repub­li­can Par­ty, and enact­ment of rules requires a major­i­ty vote in the House. Any oth­er small group of Repub­li­cans could join with Democ­rats to defeat a hypo­thet­i­cal Free­dom Cau­cus-led rules pack­age.

    ...

    The House Free­dom Cau­cus — an influ­en­tial, invi­ta­tion-only group of about three dozen of the most right-lean­ing mem­bers of the House, which does not make its mem­ber list pub­lic — has close ties to CPI.

    The two fundrais­ing arms of the Free­dom Cau­cus — House Free­dom Fund and House Free­dom Action — are based out of the CPI office, mak­ing month­ly office rent pay­ments total­ing $8,000 to an LLC tied to the insti­tute, accord­ing to Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion data, and the Free­dom Cau­cus holds its week­ly meet­ings at CPI’s Capi­tol Hill head­quar­ters.

    Mem­bers who have vot­ed against McCarthy this week are almost all Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers or were endorsed by the Free­dom Cau­cus’ cam­paign arm, and many have close ties to CPI. The break­away group’s choice for speak­er on Wednes­day, Rep. Byron Don­alds, R‑Fla., appeared last year in a tes­ti­mo­ni­al video for CPI along with Gaetz and Reps. Lau­ren Boe­bert, R‑Colo., and Chip Roy, R‑Texas, each of whom have sup­port­ed Don­alds’ bid for speak­er.

    Oth­er mem­bers who vot­ed against McCarthy this week include Reps. Matt Rosendale, R‑Mont., and Paul Gosar, R‑Ariz., who have paid mem­ber­ship dues to CPI, accord­ing to FEC records.

    ...

    Trump has endorsed McCarthy’s bid for speak­er, yet his polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee donat­ed $1 mil­lion last year to CPI, and the non­prof­it is led in part by Mead­ows, his for­mer chief of staff.

    On Wednes­day, anoth­er CPI leader — its chair­man, Jim DeMint — signed on to a state­ment with oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers for­mal­ly call­ing on the House to pick a speak­er oth­er than McCarthy.

    ...

    ———-

    “‘The Democ­rats, the Repub­li­cans and the Free­dom Cau­cus’: Inside the right’s plans to seize pow­er in the new Con­gress” by Steve Reil­ly and Mag­gie Sev­erns; Grid; 01/06/2023

    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:

    ...
    A week after the midterm elec­tions in Novem­ber, a small group of far-right GOP law­mak­ers and activists gath­ered on K Street in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., to dis­cuss strate­gies to use their nar­row major­i­ty to extract pow­er in the House. The next Con­gress, influ­en­tial activist Ed Cor­ri­g­an said, could be a “Euro­pean-style coali­tion gov­ern­ment” run by three groups: “The Democ­rats, the Repub­li­cans and the Free­dom Cau­cus.”

    ...

    The forum was con­vened by Rep. Andy Big­gs, R‑Ariz., and attend­ed by sev­er­al oth­er law­mak­ers, includ­ing two oth­ers who helped block Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R‑Calif.) this week from becom­ing House speak­er: Reps. Matt Gaetz, R‑Fla., and Vic­to­ria Spartz, R‑Ind.

    ...

    “What would coali­tion gov­ern­ment look like in prac­tice?” Cor­ri­g­an asked the group, which was filmed and livestreamed but has attract­ed lit­tle notice beyond con­ser­v­a­tive media. “I would rec­om­mend the Free­dom Cau­cus would be grant­ed a spe­cif­ic num­ber of com­mit­tee assign­ments, and com­mit­tee and sub­com­mit­tee chair­man­ships,” as well as a vari­ety of oth­er new pow­ers, includ­ing putting a Free­dom Cau­cus mem­ber as chair­man of the pow­er­ful House Rules Com­mit­tee.

    ...

    The episode sug­gests that the endgame for the approx­i­mate­ly 20 hard-right House mem­bers who have vot­ed against McCarthy for speak­er of the House is more ambi­tious than mere­ly boost­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the House for Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers — it is about secur­ing the Free­dom Cau­cus a say in all deci­sion-mak­ing made by the new Repub­li­can major­i­ty.

    Rather than extract­ing con­ces­sions from McCarthy, the actions this week by the small group of break­away Repub­li­cans appear to be fol­low­ing Corrigan’s game plan to essen­tial­ly co-gov­ern the low­er cham­ber of the leg­isla­tive branch.

    ...

    After the midterms, Cor­ri­g­an advised the law­mak­ers to lever­age House Repub­li­cans’ nar­row­er-than-expect­ed major­i­ty as a nego­ti­at­ing tool.

    The House Free­dom Cau­cus, Cor­ri­g­an said at the Nov. 14, 2022, meet­ing, “has extra­or­di­nary pow­er to nego­ti­ate a lead­er­ship arrange­ment” and urged them to try to extract a litany of con­ces­sions from McCarthy, some of which had been float­ed pre­vi­ous­ly by Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers as they pre­pared for Repub­li­cans to retake the House. Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers should “nego­ti­ate direct­ly with the speak­er for com­mit­tee posi­tions for Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers,” as well as “a spe­cif­ic num­ber of com­mit­tee assign­ments and full com­mit­tee and sub­com­mit­tee chair­man­ships,” he said.

    Cor­ri­g­an sug­gest­ed the Free­dom Cau­cus ask for changes to the “motion to vacate” rule, which allows mem­bers to call a vote over the speak­er­ship. As of Thurs­day, McCarthy appeared pre­pared to restore the motion to vacate in accor­dance with con­ser­v­a­tives’ demands.

    Cor­ri­g­an also made a case that the Free­dom Cau­cus should nego­ti­ate for the chair­man­ship of the pow­er­ful House Rules Com­mit­tee, “or at least three of the four mem­bers.”

    The House Rules Com­mit­tee deter­mines how many amend­ments and which amend­ments are offered on the House floor, grant­i­ng its mem­bers extra­or­di­nary pow­er to guide the busi­ness of Con­gress. The rules com­mit­tee is usu­al­ly made up of tenured law­mak­ers and allies of the speak­er.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    On Wednes­day, anoth­er CPI leader — its chair­man, Jim DeMint — signed on to a state­ment with oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers for­mal­ly call­ing on the House to pick a speak­er oth­er than McCarthy.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The House Free­dom Cau­cus — an influ­en­tial, invi­ta­tion-only group of about three dozen of the most right-lean­ing mem­bers of the House, which does not make its mem­ber list pub­lic — has close ties to CPI.

    The two fundrais­ing arms of the Free­dom Cau­cus — House Free­dom Fund and House Free­dom Action — are based out of the CPI office, mak­ing month­ly office rent pay­ments total­ing $8,000 to an LLC tied to the insti­tute, accord­ing to Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion data, and the Free­dom Cau­cus holds its week­ly meet­ings at CPI’s Capi­tol Hill head­quar­ters.

    Mem­bers who have vot­ed against McCarthy this week are almost all Free­dom Cau­cus mem­bers or were endorsed by the Free­dom Cau­cus’ cam­paign arm, and many have close ties to CPI. The break­away group’s choice for speak­er on Wednes­day, Rep. Byron Don­alds, R‑Fla., appeared last year in a tes­ti­mo­ni­al video for CPI along with Gaetz and Reps. Lau­ren Boe­bert, R‑Colo., and Chip Roy, R‑Texas, each of whom have sup­port­ed Don­alds’ bid for speak­er.

    Oth­er mem­bers who vot­ed against McCarthy this week include Reps. Matt Rosendale, R‑Mont., and Paul Gosar, R‑Ariz., who have paid mem­ber­ship dues to CPI, accord­ing to FEC records.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Address­ing the law­mak­ers at the Novem­ber forum was a four-per­son pan­el includ­ing for­mer Repub­li­can Study Com­mit­tee direc­tor Paul Teller and three lead­ers of the influ­en­tial far-right non­prof­it Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute (CPI): Cor­ri­g­an, pres­i­dent of CPI and a for­mer mem­ber of Don­ald Trump’s tran­si­tion team; CPI senior part­ner Mark Mead­ows, a for­mer law­mak­er who in 2015 filed the “motion to vacate” that led to John Boehner’s removal as speak­er of the House; and CPI senior pol­i­cy direc­tor Rachel Bovard, a for­mer long­time Capi­tol Hill aide.
    ...

    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:

    Yahoo News

    House mem­bers block­ing McCarthy speak­er bid meet at offices of ex-Trump chief Mark Mead­ows

    Jon Ward·Chief Nation­al Cor­re­spon­dent
    Fri, Jan­u­ary 6, 2023 at 10:22 AM CST

    Sev­er­al Repub­li­can House mem­bers fight­ing to stop Rep. Kevin McCarthy from becom­ing speak­er met Fri­day morn­ing at the offices of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute, an orga­ni­za­tion run by Mark Mead­ows and Jim DeMint.

    Mead­ows, a for­mer Repub­li­can con­gress­man from North Car­oli­na, was chief of staff to for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and played a cen­tral role in efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion. He joined CPI as senior part­ner in Jan­u­ary 2021, a few weeks after Trump sup­port­ers stormed the U.S. Capi­tol on Jan. 6.

    DeMint, a for­mer Repub­li­can sen­a­tor from South Car­oli­na, launched CPI in 2017. Since Trump left office in 2021, it has become a con­nec­tive hub for a host of for­mer Trump advis­ers, includ­ing Mead­ows, bud­get chief Russ Vought and advis­er Stephen Miller.

    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.

    Rep. Andy Big­gs, R‑Ariz., a leader of the anti-McCarthy dri­ve who was also deeply involved in the Trump 2020 effort, did not answer ques­tions from Yahoo News on why he was going to the CPI offices as he walked in the front door.

    Oth­er Repub­li­can mem­bers observed walk­ing into CPI includ­ed Byron Don­alds of Flori­da, Paul Gosar of Ari­zona, Ralph Nor­man of South Car­oli­na, Scott Per­ry of Penn­syl­va­nia and Matt Gaetz of Flori­da. Chip Roy of Texas was seen in the pas­sen­ger seat of a car sit­ting out­side the CPI offices and appeared ready to go in.

    ...

    Mead­ows did not respond to a text mes­sage seek­ing com­ment about the meet­ing and how per­son­al­ly involved he is in the anti-McCarthy effort. But mul­ti­ple Repub­li­can sources on Capi­tol Hill had men­tioned that Mead­ows is involved in the attempt to stop McCarthy from becom­ing speak­er — even as his for­mer boss, Trump, has endorsed McCarthy and giv­en him his sup­port.

    Most of the Repub­li­can con­gress­men at CPI on Fri­day morn­ing have been gath­er­ing there for months. CPI’s social media accounts include many pic­tures and videos show­ing these Repub­li­cans talk­ing about meet­ing there and using the organization’s facil­i­ties to do inter­views with right-wing media.

    DeMint said in a pro­mo­tion­al video that CPI is “pro­vid­ing resources, facil­i­ties and staff” to mem­bers of Con­gress whom it sup­ports.

    “When you take a stand here, you have to know some­one has your back,” Rep. Lau­ren Boe­bert, R‑Colo., says in a CPI video, strid­ing briskly out of a House office build­ing while dra­mat­ic music plays in the back­ground.

    Mead­ows is the first per­son to appear in that video. He slams “polit­i­cal horse trad­ing, par­ti­san pow­er shifts and back­door pol­i­tick­ing” and says that these things “have result­ed in grid­lock that is crush­ing the Amer­i­can peo­ple.”

    ...

    On Wednes­day, DeMint was one of sev­er­al Repub­li­can fig­ures to sign a let­ter call­ing on oth­er House Repub­li­cans to join the anti-McCarthy effort.

    Vought, who is a close ally of Mead­ows, also signed the let­ter, as did Cle­ta Mitchell and Gin­ni Thomas. Mitchell is an attor­ney who was deeply involved in Trump’s attempts to stay in pow­er, and who now works at CPI as a senior legal fel­low. Thomas, who cor­re­spond­ed with Mead­ows about efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion in the days lead­ing up to the Jan. 6 riot, is the wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas.

    Mead­ows did not sign the let­ter.

    ———–

    “House mem­bers block­ing McCarthy speak­er bid meet at offices of ex-Trump chief Mark Mead­ows” by Jon Ward; Yahoo News; 01/06/2023

    “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:

    Rep. Andy Big­gs, R‑Ariz., a leader of the anti-McCarthy dri­ve who was also deeply involved in the Trump 2020 effort, did not answer ques­tions from Yahoo News on why he was going to the CPI offices as he walked in the front door.

    Oth­er Repub­li­can mem­bers observed walk­ing into CPI includ­ed Byron Don­alds of Flori­da, Paul Gosar of Ari­zona, Ralph Nor­man of South Car­oli­na, Scott Per­ry of Penn­syl­va­nia and Matt Gaetz of Flori­da. Chip Roy of Texas was seen in the pas­sen­ger seat of a car sit­ting out­side the CPI offices and appeared ready to go in.

    ...

    Mead­ows did not respond to a text mes­sage seek­ing com­ment about the meet­ing and how per­son­al­ly involved he is in the anti-McCarthy effort. But mul­ti­ple Repub­li­can sources on Capi­tol Hill had men­tioned that Mead­ows is involved in the attempt to stop McCarthy from becom­ing speak­er — even as his for­mer boss, Trump, has endorsed McCarthy and giv­en him his sup­port.

    Most of the Repub­li­can con­gress­men at CPI on Fri­day morn­ing have been gath­er­ing there for months. CPI’s social media accounts include many pic­tures and videos show­ing these Repub­li­cans talk­ing about meet­ing there and using the organization’s facil­i­ties to do inter­views with right-wing media.

    ...

    “When you take a stand here, you have to know some­one has your back,” Rep. Lau­ren Boe­bert, R‑Colo., says in a CPI video, strid­ing briskly out of a House office build­ing while dra­mat­ic music plays in the back­ground.

    Mead­ows is the first per­son to appear in that video. He slams “polit­i­cal horse trad­ing, par­ti­san pow­er shifts and back­door pol­i­tick­ing” and says that these things “have result­ed in grid­lock that is crush­ing the Amer­i­can peo­ple.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    On Wednes­day, DeMint was one of sev­er­al Repub­li­can fig­ures to sign a let­ter call­ing on oth­er House Repub­li­cans to join the anti-McCarthy effort.

    Vought, who is a close ally of Mead­ows, also signed the let­ter, as did Cle­ta Mitchell and Gin­ni Thomas. Mitchell is an attor­ney who was deeply involved in Trump’s attempts to stay in pow­er, and who now works at CPI as a senior legal fel­low. Thomas, who cor­re­spond­ed with Mead­ows about efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion in the days lead­ing up to the Jan. 6 riot, is the wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 9, 2023, 1:11 am
  7. 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 Insti­tuteis 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 activistsran 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:

    Sara­so­ta Her­ald-Tri­bune

    DeSan­tis seeks to trans­form Sara­so­ta’s New Col­lege with con­ser­v­a­tive board takeover

    Zac Ander­son
    Pub­lished 1:29 p.m. ET | Updat­ed 11:37 a.m. ET Jan. 7, 2023

    Gov. Ron DeSan­tis began the process Fri­day of trans­form­ing Sara­so­ta’s New Col­lege of Flori­da into a more con­ser­v­a­tive insti­tu­tion, appoint­ing six new board mem­bers, includ­ing con­ser­v­a­tive activist Christo­pher Rufo, a dean at con­ser­v­a­tive Hills­dale Col­lege and a senior fel­low at The Clare­mont Insti­tute, a right-wing think tank.

    “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.

    The shake­up of the 13-mem­ber board is cer­tain to cre­ate major ten­sions at New Col­lege, an insti­tu­tion that start­ed as a pro­gres­sive pri­vate school before becom­ing the state’s lib­er­al arts hon­ors col­lege. The small school’s stu­dent body and fac­ul­ty have a rep­u­ta­tion for lean­ing left polit­i­cal­ly.

    Turn­ing New Col­lege into a Flori­da ver­sion of Hills­dale would amount to flip­ping it upside down, a whole­sale rein­ven­tion akin to a hos­tile takeover, and one that many cur­rent stu­dents and fac­ul­ty are like­ly to resist.

    DeSan­tis aides blast­ed the school Fri­day and said an over­haul is need­ed.

    “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, like so many col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties in Amer­i­ca, this insti­tu­tion has been com­plete­ly cap­tured by a polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy that puts trendy, truth-rel­a­tive con­cepts above learn­ing,” said DeSan­tis Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­tor Taryn Fenske.

    Rufo is known for his activism on trans­gen­der and racial issues, mak­ing him a leader in the new wave of con­ser­v­a­tive cul­ture wars. He joined DeSan­tis when the gov­er­nor signed HB 1557, the Parental Rights in Edu­ca­tion Act, which is derid­ed by crit­ics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

    Rufo said in a series of Twit­ter posts Fri­day that pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties have “been cor­rupt­ed by woke nihilism” and he is “ready to trans­form high­er edu­ca­tion from with­in.” He said he plans to recruit new fac­ul­ty to New Col­lege to “cre­ate an insti­tu­tion where aca­d­e­mics can thrive, with­out self-cen­sor­ship.”

    “My ambi­tion is to help the new board major­i­ty trans­form New Col­lege into a clas­si­cal lib­er­al arts insti­tu­tion. We are recap­tur­ing high­er edu­ca­tion.” Rufo said.

    Rufo recent­ly applaud­ed DeSan­tis on Twit­ter for request­ing infor­ma­tion on diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion and crit­i­cal race the­o­ry at all Flori­da col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.

    “Gov. DeSan­tis is going to lay siege to uni­ver­si­ty ‘diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion’ pro­grams,” Rufo wrote.

    Among Rufo’s goals for New Col­lege that he laid out in a tweet: Restruc­tur­ing the admin­is­tra­tion, devel­op­ing “a new core cur­ricu­lum,” elim­i­nat­ing diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion poli­cies and restruc­tur­ing aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments.

    ...

    Gov. DeSan­tis is going to lay siege to uni­ver­si­ty “diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion” pro­grams. https://t.co/cD1PdiY2Js— Christo­pher F. Rufo ?? (@realchrisrufo) Jan­u­ary 4, 2023

    Join­ing Rufo on the New Col­lege board is Matthew Spald­ing, a pro­fes­sor of con­sti­tu­tion­al gov­ern­ment at Hills­dale Col­lege and the dean of the col­lege’s grad­u­ate school of gov­ern­ment in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. Spald­ing pre­vi­ous­ly was vice pres­i­dent of Amer­i­can stud­ies at the con­ser­v­a­tive Her­itage Foun­da­tion.

    Hills­dale is a small Chris­t­ian col­lege in Michi­gan that has been active in con­ser­v­a­tive edu­ca­tion pol­i­tics. DeSan­tis spoke at Hills­dale’s Nation­al Lead­er­ship Sem­i­nar last year and has tapped the school to help reshape Flori­da’s edu­ca­tion sys­tem.

    Charles Kesler, a pro­fes­sor of gov­ern­ment at Clere­mont McKen­na Col­lege and a senior fel­low at The Clere­mont Insti­tute, also is join­ing the New Col­lege board. Among the books writ­ten by Kesler: “I Am the Change: Barack Oba­ma and the Cri­sis of Lib­er­al­ism.”

    The Clere­mont Insti­tute has gained promi­nence in the Trump era.

    “Clare­mont schol­ars have col­lab­o­rat­ed with Ron DeSan­tis and helped shape the views of Clarence Thomas, Tom Cot­ton and the con­ser­v­a­tive activist Christo­pher Rufo, and the insti­tute received the Nation­al Human­i­ties Medal from Pres­i­dent Trump in 2019,” the New York Times wrote last year..

    Trump lawyer John East­man, anoth­er senior fel­low at The Clare­mont Insti­tute, recent­ly was referred to the U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice for inves­ti­ga­tion and poten­tial pros­e­cu­tion by the con­gres­sion­al com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capi­tol. East­man wrote a memo detail­ing strate­gies for over­turn­ing the 2020 elec­tion results.

    Appoint­ing promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tives and indi­vid­u­als asso­ci­at­ed with high-pro­file right-wing insti­tu­tions to New Col­lege is an effort by DeSan­tis to com­plete­ly reori­ent the school.

    DeSan­tis touched on his goals for high­er edu­ca­tion this month in his sec­ond inau­gu­ra­tion speech.

    “We must ensure that our insti­tu­tions of high­er learn­ing are focused on aca­d­e­m­ic excel­lence and the pur­suit of truth, not the impo­si­tion of trendy ide­ol­o­gy,” he said.

    DeSan­tis spokesman Bryan Grif­fin high­light­ed the gov­er­nor’s com­ments in a state­ment that declared: “Start­ing today, the ship is turn­ing around. New Col­lege of Flori­da, under the gov­er­nor’s new appointees, will be refo­cused on its found­ing mis­sion of pro­vid­ing a world-class qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion with an excep­tion­al focus on the clas­sics.”

    The oth­er new board mem­bers are Mark Bauer­lein, who teach­es at Emory Uni­ver­si­ty, Debra Jenks, a New Col­lege alum and attor­ney, and Jason “Eddie” Speir, the co-founder, chair­man and super­in­ten­dent of Inspi­ra­tion Acad­e­my, a Chris­t­ian school in Braden­ton.

    The gov­er­nor gets six appoint­ments to each uni­ver­si­ty board, while the state Board of Gov­er­nors — which over­sees the uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem — gets five. The fac­ul­ty chair and stu­dent body pres­i­dent also serve on the board. The Board of Gov­er­nors, which is loaded with DeSan­tis allies, is poised to appoint a New Col­lege board mem­ber for a seat vacant on Jan. 7, mean­ing a major­i­ty of the board soon will con­sist of new appointees who can con­trol the direc­tion of the school.

    New Col­lege Pres­i­dent Patri­cia Okker thanked DeSan­tis “for today’s announce­ment and for the slate of new board mem­bers.”

    “I look for­ward to get­ting to know them and work­ing with them to ensure New Col­lege con­tin­ues to serve our stu­dents, com­mu­ni­ty, and state in the years to come,” Okker said in the brief state­ment.

    The gov­er­nor’s appoint­ments “fill posi­tions that were pre­vi­ous­ly vacant or expired, and I am grate­ful that New Col­lege will now have a full board,” Okker added. The board mem­bers serve five-year terms.

    Efforts to reach New Col­lege alum­ni for com­ment, as well as a foun­da­tion that sup­ports the col­lege, were unsuc­cess­ful Fri­day, and some pro­fes­sors said they did not want to com­ment.

    New Col­lege rou­tine­ly ranks well on high­er edu­ca­tion “best of” lists, hav­ing been sin­gled out as a good val­ue and among the best pub­lic lib­er­al arts col­leges. It is known for attract­ing accom­plished stu­dents to an inti­mate set­ting that blends aca­d­e­m­ic rig­or and quirky exper­i­men­tal­ism.

    How­ev­er, the school has strug­gled in recent years with low enroll­ment, low scores on a state sys­tem for rank­ing uni­ver­si­ties, con­cerns raised by state law­mak­ers about whether the col­lege is an effi­cient use of pub­lic mon­ey because of the high cost of each degree and ques­tions about the sta­bil­i­ty of its fund­ing.

    There was a push by Repub­li­can law­mak­ers in 2020 to merge New Col­lege with anoth­er high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tion. It was blocked by for­mer state Sen­ate Pres­i­dent Bill Gal­vano of Braden­ton.

    Gal­vano said at the time that he under­stood the con­cerns about New Col­lege’s cost-per-degree but argued the school “pro­vides a unique bal­ance between a tra­di­tion­al lib­er­al arts expe­ri­ence and a mod­ern, inno­v­a­tive cur­ricu­lum.”

    Gal­vano said Fri­day in a text mes­sage that he is “very sup­port­ive of these efforts and think this cre­ates a lot of pos­i­tive oppor­tu­ni­ties for the uni­ver­si­ty.”

    Oth­er Repub­li­can lead­ers in Sara­so­ta and Man­a­tee coun­ties also expressed sup­port for the gov­er­nor’s New Col­lege over­haul.

    ...

    The changes at New Col­lege come amid oth­er efforts by DeSan­tis to put his imprint on var­i­ous gov­ern­ment bod­ies, includ­ing the Palm Beach Coun­ty Com­mis­sion and Dis­ney’s Reedy Creek Improve­ment Dis­trict. Demo­c­ra­t­ic state Sen. Lori Berman said the com­bined actions make DeSan­tis look like an “auto­crat.”

    “Recent­ly, DeSan­tis installed a Repub­li­can to the PBC Com­mis­sion, announced plans to take over Dis­ney with a state-run board, and flood­ed New Col­lege’s board with con­ser­v­a­tives,” Berman wrote on Twit­ter. “There is no room for dis­sent. Not in local gov­ern­ments, not in busi­ness­es, not in schools. Auto­crat.”

    The choic­es for the New Col­lege board drew crit­i­cism from Andrew Gothard, pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed Fac­ul­ty of Flori­da union.

    “Like many Florid­i­ans who have ties to the New Col­lege com­mu­ni­ty, UFF (the Unit­ed Fac­ul­ty of Flori­da) was sur­prised and dis­turbed today to see the appoint­ment of six trustees whose only appar­ent inter­est in the insti­tu­tion is polit­i­cal­ly and ide­o­log­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed,” Gothard said in a state­ment to the News Ser­vice.

    Gothard said trustees have a “solemn duty” to act in the best inter­est of every­one on cam­pus­es.

    “Promis­es to upend pro­grams with ide­o­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven claims that could not be far­ther from the truth of what actu­al­ly occurs in a high­er edu­ca­tion class­room — these do noth­ing to improve New Col­lege, nor will they draw inter­est­ed stu­dents to a cam­pus where trustees are so at odds with the fac­ul­ty, the local admin­is­tra­tion and the truth,” Gothard said.

    ———–

    “DeSan­tis seeks to trans­form Sara­so­ta’s New Col­lege with con­ser­v­a­tive board takeover” by Zac Ander­son; Sara­so­ta Her­ald-Tri­bune; 01/07/2023

    ““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:

    ...
    The shake­up of the 13-mem­ber board is cer­tain to cre­ate major ten­sions at New Col­lege, an insti­tu­tion that start­ed as a pro­gres­sive pri­vate school before becom­ing the state’s lib­er­al arts hon­ors col­lege. The small school’s stu­dent body and fac­ul­ty have a rep­u­ta­tion for lean­ing left polit­i­cal­ly.

    Turn­ing New Col­lege into a Flori­da ver­sion of Hills­dale would amount to flip­ping it upside down, a whole­sale rein­ven­tion akin to a hos­tile takeover, and one that many cur­rent stu­dents and fac­ul­ty are like­ly to resist.

    ...

    Appoint­ing promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tives and indi­vid­u­als asso­ci­at­ed with high-pro­file right-wing insti­tu­tions to New Col­lege is an effort by DeSan­tis to com­plete­ly reori­ent the school.
    ...

    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”:

    ...
    “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, like so many col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties in Amer­i­ca, this insti­tu­tion has been com­plete­ly cap­tured by a polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy that puts trendy, truth-rel­a­tive con­cepts above learn­ing,” said DeSan­tis Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­tor Taryn Fenske.

    Rufo is known for his activism on trans­gen­der and racial issues, mak­ing him a leader in the new wave of con­ser­v­a­tive cul­ture wars. He joined DeSan­tis when the gov­er­nor signed HB 1557, the Parental Rights in Edu­ca­tion Act, which is derid­ed by crit­ics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

    Rufo said in a series of Twit­ter posts Fri­day that pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties have “been cor­rupt­ed by woke nihilism” and he is “ready to trans­form high­er edu­ca­tion from with­in.” He said he plans to recruit new fac­ul­ty to New Col­lege to “cre­ate an insti­tu­tion where aca­d­e­mics can thrive, with­out self-cen­sor­ship.”

    “My ambi­tion is to help the new board major­i­ty trans­form New Col­lege into a clas­si­cal lib­er­al arts insti­tu­tion. We are recap­tur­ing high­er edu­ca­tion.” Rufo said.

    Rufo recent­ly applaud­ed DeSan­tis on Twit­ter for request­ing infor­ma­tion on diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion and crit­i­cal race the­o­ry at all Flori­da col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.

    “Gov. DeSan­tis is going to lay siege to uni­ver­si­ty ‘diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion’ pro­grams,” Rufo wrote.

    Among Rufo’s goals for New Col­lege that he laid out in a tweet: Restruc­tur­ing the admin­is­tra­tion, devel­op­ing “a new core cur­ricu­lum,” elim­i­nat­ing diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion poli­cies and restruc­tur­ing aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Join­ing Rufo on the New Col­lege board is Matthew Spald­ing, a pro­fes­sor of con­sti­tu­tion­al gov­ern­ment at Hills­dale Col­lege and the dean of the col­lege’s grad­u­ate school of gov­ern­ment in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. Spald­ing pre­vi­ous­ly was vice pres­i­dent of Amer­i­can stud­ies at the con­ser­v­a­tive Her­itage Foun­da­tion.

    Hills­dale is a small Chris­t­ian col­lege in Michi­gan that has been active in con­ser­v­a­tive edu­ca­tion pol­i­tics. DeSan­tis spoke at Hills­dale’s Nation­al Lead­er­ship Sem­i­nar last year and has tapped the school to help reshape Flori­da’s edu­ca­tion sys­tem.
    ...

    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 Insti­tuteis 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 activistsran 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:

    ...
    Charles Kesler, a pro­fes­sor of gov­ern­ment at Clere­mont McKen­na Col­lege and a senior fel­low at The Clere­mont Insti­tute, also is join­ing the New Col­lege board. Among the books writ­ten by Kesler: “I Am the Change: Barack Oba­ma and the Cri­sis of Lib­er­al­ism.”

    The Clere­mont Insti­tute has gained promi­nence in the Trump era.

    “Clare­mont schol­ars have col­lab­o­rat­ed with Ron DeSan­tis and helped shape the views of Clarence Thomas, Tom Cot­ton and the con­ser­v­a­tive activist Christo­pher Rufo, and the insti­tute received the Nation­al Human­i­ties Medal from Pres­i­dent Trump in 2019,” the New York Times wrote last year..

    Trump lawyer John East­man, anoth­er senior fel­low at The Clare­mont Insti­tute, recent­ly was referred to the U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice for inves­ti­ga­tion and poten­tial pros­e­cu­tion by the con­gres­sion­al com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capi­tol. East­man wrote a memo detail­ing strate­gies for over­turn­ing the 2020 elec­tion results.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The oth­er new board mem­bers are Mark Bauer­lein, who teach­es at Emory Uni­ver­si­ty, Debra Jenks, a New Col­lege alum and attor­ney, and Jason “Eddie” Speir, the co-founder, chair­man and super­in­ten­dent of Inspi­ra­tion Acad­e­my, a Chris­t­ian school in Braden­ton.

    The gov­er­nor gets six appoint­ments to each uni­ver­si­ty board, while the state Board of Gov­er­nors — which over­sees the uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem — gets five. The fac­ul­ty chair and stu­dent body pres­i­dent also serve on the board. The Board of Gov­er­nors, which is loaded with DeSan­tis allies, is poised to appoint a New Col­lege board mem­ber for a seat vacant on Jan. 7, mean­ing a major­i­ty of the board soon will con­sist of new appointees who can con­trol the direc­tion of the school.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The choic­es for the New Col­lege board drew crit­i­cism from Andrew Gothard, pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed Fac­ul­ty of Flori­da union.

    “Like many Florid­i­ans who have ties to the New Col­lege com­mu­ni­ty, UFF (the Unit­ed Fac­ul­ty of Flori­da) was sur­prised and dis­turbed today to see the appoint­ment of six trustees whose only appar­ent inter­est in the insti­tu­tion is polit­i­cal­ly and ide­o­log­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed,” Gothard said in a state­ment to the News Ser­vice.

    Gothard said trustees have a “solemn duty” to act in the best inter­est of every­one on cam­pus­es.

    “Promis­es to upend pro­grams with ide­o­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven claims that could not be far­ther from the truth of what actu­al­ly occurs in a high­er edu­ca­tion class­room — these do noth­ing to improve New Col­lege, nor will they draw inter­est­ed stu­dents to a cam­pus where trustees are so at odds with the fac­ul­ty, the local admin­is­tra­tion and the truth,” Gothard said.
    ...

    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:

    City Jour­nal

    Recap­tur­ing High­er Edu­ca­tion

    On the plan to trans­form New Col­lege of Flori­da into a clas­si­cal lib­er­al arts insti­tu­tion

    Christo­pher F. Rufo
    Jan­u­ary 12, 2023

    The most sig­nif­i­cant polit­i­cal sto­ry of the past half-cen­tu­ry is the activist Left’s “long march through the insti­tu­tions.” Begin­ning in the 1960s, left-wing activists and intel­lec­tu­als, inspired by the­o­rists such as Ital­ian Com­mu­nist Anto­nio Gram­sci and New Left philoso­pher Her­bert Mar­cuse, made a con­cert­ed effort to embed their ideas in edu­ca­tion, gov­ern­ment, phil­an­thropy, media, and oth­er impor­tant sec­tors.

    This process came to spec­tac­u­lar fruition fol­low­ing the 2020 death of George Floyd, when it seemed that every pres­tige insti­tu­tion in the Unit­ed States got busy advanc­ing the same ide­o­log­i­cal line on race, gen­der, and culture—which, whether they knew it or not, mim­ic­ked the pre­cise themes that the old rad­i­cals had orig­i­nal­ly pro­posed.

    The long march through the insti­tu­tions, in oth­er words, was com­plete.

    But con­ser­v­a­tives, too, have updat­ed their play­book. They have read their Gram­sci and have begun to under­stand that ide­o­log­i­cal cap­ture pos­es a grave threat to the Amer­i­can sys­tem. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump shook con­ser­v­a­tives out of their com­pla­cen­cy with instinc­tu­al, if some­times crude, cul­tur­al coun­ter­mea­sures. Flori­da gov­er­nor Ron DeSan­tis has built on this approach, offer­ing a sophis­ti­cat­ed pol­i­cy agen­da for pro­tect­ing fam­i­lies against cap­tured bureau­cra­cies.

    Last week, DeSan­tis raised the stakes and pro­posed, for the first time, a strat­e­gy for revers­ing the long march through the insti­tu­tions, begin­ning with what Mar­cuse believed was the ini­tial rev­o­lu­tion­ary insti­tu­tion: the uni­ver­si­ty. The gov­er­nor appoint­ed a slate of new trustees to the board of the New Col­lege of Flori­da, a noto­ri­ous­ly left-wing cam­pus, sim­i­lar to that of Ever­green State in Olympia, Wash­ing­ton. DeSan­tis tasked the new board with trans­form­ing it into, to quote the governor’s chief of staff, the “Hills­dale of the South”—in oth­er words, a clas­si­cal lib­er­al arts col­lege that pro­vides a dis­tinct­ly tra­di­tion­al brand of edu­ca­tion and schol­ar­ship.

    ...

    I was hon­ored to be appoint­ed to this board, along with friends and col­leagues from the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, includ­ing Clare­mont Insti­tute schol­ar Charles Kesler, Hills­dale Col­lege vice pres­i­dent Matthew Spald­ing, for­mer Emory Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Mark Bauer­lein, and oth­ers. 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.

    The premise of this reform is sim­ple. Vot­ers in Flori­da, who char­ter and fund the pub­lic-uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem through their leg­isla­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tives, deserve to have their val­ues reflect­ed and trans­mit­ted in their pub­lic insti­tu­tions. Left-wing hege­mo­ny over pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties, in aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments and admin­is­tra­tions, is anti­thet­i­cal to free inquiry and civ­il debate. With the New Col­lege of Flori­da trans­formed into a clas­si­cal insti­tu­tion, vot­ers will have access to a wider range of voic­es, schol­ars, and oppor­tu­ni­ties for their chil­dren. At a moment when uni­ver­si­ties are merg­ing into a homoge­nous, “diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclusion”-style morass, it is essen­tial that the people’s elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives cre­ate mean­ing­ful alter­na­tives.

    This task won’t be easy. The lega­cy media has already sought to por­tray this effort as one of “bar­bar­ians at the gates of the uni­ver­si­ty.” But the truth points in the oth­er direc­tion. As esteemed his­to­ri­an Daniel Boorstin observed in 1968, the activists of the New Left—that is, the prog­en­i­tors of the “woke” ide­olo­gies that have now seized America’s institutions—were “the new bar­bar­ians” who reject­ed the ideals of the Amer­i­can Found­ing and sought to tear down soci­ety. “We must not be deceived by our own hyper­sen­si­tive lib­er­al con­sciences, nor by the famil­iar, respect­ed labels under which the New Bar­bar­ians like to trav­el,” Boorstin wrote. “If Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion is to sur­vive, if we are to resist and defeat the New Bar­barism, we must see it for what it is.”

    Con­ser­v­a­tives and old-line lib­er­als, how­ev­er, did not heed Boorstin’s warn­ing. Decade after decade, they ced­ed insti­tu­tion­al ter­ri­to­ry to the rad­i­cal Left until, a half-cen­tu­ry lat­er, the basic nar­ra­tives of the Weath­er Under­ground and the Black Pan­ther Par­ty, trans­lat­ed into the lan­guage of crit­i­cal race the­o­ry and “diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion,” had pre­vailed almost every­where.

    We hope to reverse this process, begin­ning on the Sara­so­ta cam­pus of New Col­lege. The board of trustees will assem­ble in the com­ing months, but in the inter­im, I have pro­posed var­i­ous pol­i­cy changes that will help the col­lege to begin the rein­ven­tion. My pro­pos­als include redesign­ing the cur­ricu­lum to align with the clas­si­cal mod­el; abol­ish­ing DEI pro­grams and replac­ing them with “equal­i­ty, mer­it, and col­or­blind­ness” prin­ci­ples; adopt­ing the Kal­ven state­ment on insti­tu­tion­al neu­tral­i­ty; restruc­tur­ing the admin­is­tra­tion and aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments; recruit­ing new fac­ul­ty with exper­tise in the clas­si­cal lib­er­al arts tra­di­tion; and estab­lish­ing a grad­u­ate school for train­ing teach­ers in clas­si­cal edu­ca­tion.

    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.

    ———-

    “Recap­tur­ing High­er Edu­ca­tion” by Christo­pher F. Rufo; City Jour­nal; 01/12/2023

    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:

    ...
    But con­ser­v­a­tives, too, have updat­ed their play­book. They have read their Gram­sci and have begun to under­stand that ide­o­log­i­cal cap­ture pos­es a grave threat to the Amer­i­can sys­tem. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump shook con­ser­v­a­tives out of their com­pla­cen­cy with instinc­tu­al, if some­times crude, cul­tur­al coun­ter­mea­sures. Flori­da gov­er­nor Ron DeSan­tis has built on this approach, offer­ing a sophis­ti­cat­ed pol­i­cy agen­da for pro­tect­ing fam­i­lies against cap­tured bureau­cra­cies.

    Last week, DeSan­tis raised the stakes and pro­posed, for the first time, a strat­e­gy for revers­ing the long march through the insti­tu­tions, begin­ning with what Mar­cuse believed was the ini­tial rev­o­lu­tion­ary insti­tu­tion: the uni­ver­si­ty. The gov­er­nor appoint­ed a slate of new trustees to the board of the New Col­lege of Flori­da, a noto­ri­ous­ly left-wing cam­pus, sim­i­lar to that of Ever­green State in Olympia, Wash­ing­ton. DeSan­tis tasked the new board with trans­form­ing it into, to quote the governor’s chief of staff, the “Hills­dale of the South”—in oth­er words, a clas­si­cal lib­er­al arts col­lege that pro­vides a dis­tinct­ly tra­di­tion­al brand of edu­ca­tion and schol­ar­ship.

    ...

    I was hon­ored to be appoint­ed to this board, along with friends and col­leagues from the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, includ­ing Clare­mont Insti­tute schol­ar Charles Kesler, Hills­dale Col­lege vice pres­i­dent Matthew Spald­ing, for­mer Emory Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Mark Bauer­lein, and oth­ers. 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.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The premise of this reform is sim­ple. Vot­ers in Flori­da, who char­ter and fund the pub­lic-uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem through their leg­isla­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tives, deserve to have their val­ues reflect­ed and trans­mit­ted in their pub­lic insti­tu­tions. Left-wing hege­mo­ny over pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties, in aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments and admin­is­tra­tions, is anti­thet­i­cal to free inquiry and civ­il debate. With the New Col­lege of Flori­da trans­formed into a clas­si­cal insti­tu­tion, vot­ers will have access to a wider range of voic­es, schol­ars, and oppor­tu­ni­ties for their chil­dren. At a moment when uni­ver­si­ties are merg­ing into a homoge­nous, “diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclusion”-style morass, it is essen­tial that the people’s elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives cre­ate mean­ing­ful alter­na­tives.

    This task won’t be easy. The lega­cy media has already sought to por­tray this effort as one of “bar­bar­ians at the gates of the uni­ver­si­ty.” But the truth points in the oth­er direc­tion. As esteemed his­to­ri­an Daniel Boorstin observed in 1968, the activists of the New Left—that is, the prog­en­i­tors of the “woke” ide­olo­gies that have now seized America’s institutions—were “the new bar­bar­ians” who reject­ed the ideals of the Amer­i­can Found­ing and sought to tear down soci­ety. “We must not be deceived by our own hyper­sen­si­tive lib­er­al con­sciences, nor by the famil­iar, respect­ed labels under which the New Bar­bar­ians like to trav­el,” Boorstin wrote. “If Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion is to sur­vive, if we are to resist and defeat the New Bar­barism, we must see it for what it is.”
    ...

    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:

    Cur­rent Affairs

    The Strange and Ter­ri­fy­ing Ideas of Neo­re­ac­tionar­ies

    Author Eliz­a­beth San­difer explains the dan­ger­ous ideas of the far-right neo­re­ac­tionar­ies, who have ties to Sil­i­con Val­ley and a hos­til­i­ty toward democ­ra­cy.

    Nathan J. Robin­son
    filed 30 May 2022 in Inter­views

    Eliz­a­beth San­difer is the author of Neo­re­ac­tion a Basilisk: Essays On and Around the Alt-Right. She has tak­en a deep dive into the thoughts and writ­ings of the so-called neo­re­ac­tionary move­ment, or the “new right,” a ten­den­cy high­light­ed in a recent Van­i­ty Fair arti­cle by James Pogue, who report­ed from the Nation­al Con­ser­v­a­tive Con­fer­ence. Pogue argues that there is a new ten­den­cy in right-wing thought that is influ­enc­ing some promi­nent Repub­li­can can­di­dates for office, includ­ing J.D. Vance of Ohio and Blake Mas­ters of Ari­zona, both of whom have close ties to Peter Thiel, the Pay­Pal bil­lion­aire, and also to a rather mys­te­ri­ous and less­er-known pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al by the name of Cur­tis Yarvin, a.k.a. Men­cius Mold­bug. Is this a fringe intel­lec­tu­al ten­den­cy that can be ignored, or a bud­ding move­ment? San­difer spoke with edi­tor-in-chief Nathan J. Robin­son on the Cur­rent Affairs pod­cast to sort things out. This inter­view has been edit­ed and con­densed for gram­mar and clar­i­ty.

    * Robin­son

    Eliz­a­beth San­difer, I need you to help us under­stand this neo­re­ac­tionary ten­den­cy. Can you dis­cuss what it is?

    * San­difer

    Neo­re­ac­tion is one attempt of mod­ern far right philosophy—we can just go ahead and call it fascism—to cre­ate an intel­lec­tu­al basis. It was for­mu­lat­ed by Cur­tis Yarvin, who writes under the pen name Men­cius Mold­bug, or for­mer­ly wrote.

    * Robin­son

    The artist for­mer­ly known as Mold­bug?

    * San­difer

    These days he uses his real name Cur­tis Yarvin, but I still think of him as Mold­bug because that’s what he was going by when I wrote about him. Yarvin has been quite influ­en­tial on a num­ber of key peo­ple. He has a demon­stra­bly huge influ­ence on Peter Thiel. We know he’s got influ­ence on Blake Mas­ters and J.D. Vance, as that Van­i­ty Fair arti­cle makes clear. We have very strong evi­dence that he’s had influ­ence on Steve Ban­non. He’s just a guy a lot of these peo­ple look to as kind of an intel­lec­tu­al light. He’s been on the Tuck­er Carl­son show, which did a fair bit to main­stream him. So a lot of peo­ple look up to him as some­thing of an intel­lec­tu­al light, which is inter­est­ing if you actu­al­ly read any of his work, because, well… I call him out­right stu­pid in my book, and I’m gonna large­ly stand by that.

    I think that there is a long tra­di­tion of right-wing “phi­los­o­phy” that’s real­ly pop­u­lar among right-wing nut­ters and as soon as it gets out­side that lit­tle bub­ble, it gets absolute­ly shot to hell by oth­er philoso­phers. And I think to describe Yarvin in terms he would prob­a­bly take as a compliment—and I very much mean as an insult—he’s kind of a mod­ern day Ayn Rand.

    So his broad philo­soph­i­cal idea is he’s just real­ly obsessed with order. He thinks that order is the absolute best thing that can hap­pen. Chaos, unruli­ness, rebelliousness—all these things are inher­ent­ly very, very bad.

    And so his belief, as he expressed back in his Mold­bug days—and he’s not real­ly backed down off of it in any sub­stan­tive way—is that basi­cal­ly, Cal­i­for­nia should secede, become its own nation, and sim­ply impose a CEO with monar­chic, god­like pow­ers. At the time, he sug­gest­ed Steve Jobs would be a par­tic­u­lar­ly good pick for the absolute monarch of Cal­i­for­nia and that the pur­pose of own­ing Cal­i­for­nia and run­ning it as a cor­po­rate monar­chy is explic­it­ly for prof­it. That was also a part of Yarvin’s philo­soph­i­cal vision for what the world should do.

    I don’t want to pin him too much with the slight­ly satir­i­cal and delib­er­ate­ly over-the-top clickbait‑y idea of mak­ing Steve Jobs king of California—that is him using a rhetor­i­cal device to get atten­tion. But he does very, very much believe that rich elites should be in absolute con­trol of every­thing, and peo­ple who are not landown­ers and do not have a ton of mon­ey should basi­cal­ly be thought of as the equiv­a­lent of slaves.

    * Robin­son

    The phi­los­o­phy here is explic­it­ly monar­chist, right? He open­ly believes that one per­son should have almost absolute pow­er.

    * San­difer

    The per­son should be account­able to a board of direc­tors, per­haps. But no more than that, and the board of direc­tors should just be able to fire him and replace him with a new absolute monar­chy if they feel the need. He’s very clear on that. Again, back in his more satir­i­cal Mold­bug days, he actu­al­ly advo­cat­ed for Stu­art restora­tion in the UK, the rolling back of the Glo­ri­ous Rev­o­lu­tion, and undo­ing William of Orange’s takeover and the reign of William and Mary to put it back in the hands of the Stu­art kings. He thought that the Whig­gish demo­c­ra­t­ic turn was a fun­da­men­tal mis­take of his­to­ry that should be undone. Again, this is him in his old­er satir­i­cal mode.

    * Robin­son

    Was he being satir­i­cal when he endorsed or appeared to endorse human slav­ery?

    * San­difer

    This is the prob­lem with his semi-satir­i­cal, clickbait‑y mode of writ­ing. He doesn’t seem to make a huge dis­tinc­tion between employ­ees and slaves in his philo­soph­i­cal sys­tem. He cer­tain­ly seems to believe that out­right inden­tured servi­tude and own­er­ship is an accept­able arrange­ment. And he sure did overt­ly say that Black peo­ple are genet­i­cal­ly pre­dis­posed to make good slaves. These are all things he def­i­nite­ly, lit­er­al­ly says. Was he per­haps being satir­i­cal? I guess my response to that is: do you real­ly care if he’s being satir­i­cal when he says Black peo­ple are genet­i­cal­ly pre­dis­posed to mak­ing good slaves? Per­son­al­ly, I don’t.

    * Robin­son

    I am torn as to how valu­able it is to go into the phi­los­o­phy because, as you say, it is, in many ways, extreme­ly stu­pid. I was read­ing it. This guy has a Sub­stack and it is, to me, unread­able.

    * San­difer

    He is fright­en­ing­ly ver­bose. I’ve heard peo­ple say he’s a good writer. I don’t see it at all.

    * Robin­son

    Oh, my God. I’ve nev­er read any­thing worse.

    * San­difer

    Right. As some­one who has writ­ten a num­ber of books and at least has a mod­est amount of pop­u­lar acclaim, inas­much as I am an expert on prose writ­ing, his prose is absolute­ly unread­able. It’s shit. I’m allowed to swear here, right?

    * Robin­son

    Yes.

    * San­difer

    It’s com­plete fes­ter­ing dogshit. It’s hor­ri­ble. It is ver­bose. It makes a painful lack of effort to get to the point on the occa­sion when it actu­al­ly makes a point. His argu­men­ta­tion aspires to shod­di­ness, because that would at least imply that there’s a degree of con­struc­tion there. It’s absolute­ly awful. I take it apart in some metic­u­lous detail in Neo­re­ac­tion a Basilisk because in that book, I thought it was impor­tant to pay it as much intel­lec­tu­al respect as I could before I took it out back and shot it. But it was not hard to argue against and to find the flaws. You’re real­ly play­ing on easy mode there.

    * Robin­son

    Your book does a pub­lic ser­vice. Peo­ple don’t have to comb through thou­sands of pages to try to under­stand the things you’ve read. You’ve laid it out.

    * San­difer

    I’ll make this ful­ly explic­it. I can­not encour­age you enough not to both­er read­ing this. You have some­thing bet­ter to do with your life—clipping your toe­nails, per­haps. Star­ing at a wall. Many small crimes that only do a lit­tle bit of harm. Avoid read­ing him. Lit­er­al­ly almost any­thing you can think of to do right now is a bet­ter idea than read­ing Cur­tis Yarvin.

    ...

    * Robin­son

    It was kind of shock­ing to me when I start­ed a dive into the col­lect­ed works of Mold­bug. It doesn’t real­ly make many attempts to be con­vinc­ing in a very log­i­cal way. I mean, let’s say you were to try to per­suade me that it’s a good idea to have a dic­ta­tor, which is what he believes. He believes that we should have a dic­ta­tor. He believes in a hier­ar­chy. He believes in abol­ish­ing democ­ra­cy and elec­tions and the par­tic­i­pa­tion of the gov­erned in gov­er­nance. If you were to try to con­vince me of those incred­i­bly rad­i­cal propo­si­tions that instinc­tive­ly hor­ri­fy me, you would have a pret­ty high bur­den. And he doesn’t even real­ly seem to make much of an attempt to show why this wouldn’t be hor­ri­fy­ing and dystopi­an.

    * San­difer

    It reads hell­ish­ly dystopi­an. You could write a real­ly good cyber­punk dystopia off of the ideas espoused by Cur­tis Yarvin. I may or may not be work­ing on that. There’s a pas­sage in his Men­cius Mold­bug days when he very ardent­ly and pas­sion­ate­ly describes basi­cal­ly the entire Whig­gish movement—a lot of old British rad­i­cal groups like the Lev­ellers and more broad­ly the entire kind of roman­tic, rebel­lious artis­tic tra­di­tion of British lit­er­a­ture, peo­ple like William Blake—as a bunch of freaks who he despis­es and thinks the world is worse off for exist­ing. I am some­one who is very pas­sion­ate about William Blake in par­tic­u­lar. A lot of these peo­ple that he dis­miss­es as evil freaks, I look to as out­right role mod­els.

    I have a very, very strong and basic dis­agree­ment with Yarvin/Moldbug… I’m going to be doing this [with his name] the whole pod­cast. I apol­o­gize.

    ...

    * Robin­son

    What’s inter­est­ing about read­ing far right phi­los­o­phy is that they’re very open about their attempt to make a world that would not be worth liv­ing in. I have read Mein Kampf, and every­thing Hitler lays out is a pro­gram for killing every­one I love and every­thing that I love.

    * San­difer

    I sup­pose in defense of their log­i­cal con­sis­ten­cy and intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty, I wouldn’t want to be alive in their world, but they don’t want me to be alive in their world, either.

    * Robin­son

    It’s true. They’re pret­ty clear about it. The word fas­cism is tossed about a lot. But I think one of the things that is valu­able about the works of Yarvin is that he’s very open about it. He real­ly does say: We need a dic­ta­tor­ship, and it needs to be pret­ty absolute. And I hate all of the freaks. And I believe in a world of order, and I’m not going to try to jus­ti­fy why that order is good. But I think that I, and peo­ple like me, should be at the top of the social hier­ar­chy, and every­one else should be bru­tal­ly oppressed.

    * San­difer

    He’s not a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist bil­lion­aire or any­thing. But I think he real­ly thinks peo­ple like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk should be run­ning the world. There is some­thing of a cult around these peo­ple, and Yarvin believes in it whole­heart­ed­ly. Yarvin absolute­ly believes that peo­ple who are good at mak­ing mon­ey are prob­a­bly good at every­thing else.

    * Robin­son

    So the way that we’ve talked about it so far makes it seem like it could appeal to almost nobody who wasn’t extreme­ly rich them­selves. Musk obvi­ous­ly has his cult. But there’s some­thing that you dis­cuss in the book that seems to be part of the source of the appeal of these ideas. Anti-semi­tism is often called the social­ism of fools, right? Because it uses some of the oppo­si­tion to cap­i­tal­ists and bankers, but it mis­places the vil­lain. Yarvin’s diag­no­sis of society—the things that he points out, that he’s try­ing to rec­ti­fy, he actu­al­ly match­es about 30 per­cent of things that I hear Noam Chom­sky say about the dys­func­tions of lib­er­al­ism. That gives a cer­tain truth to some of what he says in terms of his diag­no­sis, even though his pre­scrip­tion is fas­cism.

    * San­difer

    My dear friend, Jack Gra­ham, who co-wrote one of the chap­ters of Neo­re­ac­tion a Basilisk with me, gave me a phrase that I hap­pi­ly stole with­in the book, where he says that Yarvin is a failed Marx­ist in the same way that Jupiter is a failed star. Yarvin starts down this analy­sis, and if you fol­low it rea­son­ably rig­or­ous­ly, you get to a fair­ly accu­rate and use­ful diag­no­sis of every­thing that is wrong with the world. And then some­where on the way, before he gets to any of those actu­al good points, he makes just an apoc­a­lyp­tic wrong turn, and con­cludes that Steve Jobs should become king of Cal­i­for­nia.

    * Robin­son

    So per­haps you could describe the start­ing point of his analy­sis of what is wrong with soci­ety.

    * San­difer

    His start­ing point is the extreme­ly self-evi­dent asser­tion that there is an over­all con­sen­sus. He rein­vents the Over­ton win­dow from scratch. He rein­vents the idea that there is a dic­tat­ed set of opin­ions which are accept­able and pos­si­ble to dis­cuss and to take seri­ous­ly. There is this polit­i­cal cen­ter around which noth­ing can orbit too far away from with­out freez­ing to death. It’s fun­da­men­tal­ly dic­tat­ed by a num­ber of elite and pow­er­ful insti­tu­tions. So the New York Times does a whole lot to dic­tate what the polit­i­cal cen­ter is. There are many oth­er exam­ples. The ones that Yarvin is most obsessed with are basi­cal­ly the media, acad­e­mia, and the civ­il ser­vice end of gov­ern­ment. He views those as the big three insti­tu­tions that are impos­ing a kind of absolute con­sen­sus that he says is drift­ing in an ever left­ward lib­er­al direc­tion. He points to the progress of civ­il rights, takes Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s obser­va­tion about the arc of the moral uni­verse bend­ing toward jus­tice over the long run and ren­ders it a hor­ror sto­ry, actu­al­ly refer­ring to this cen­trist con­sen­sus as Cthul­hu and say­ing that “Cthul­hu always swims left.”

    The sen­si­ble thing to do is prob­a­bly to look at the role of mon­ey in this.

    * Robin­son

    Yes. I was going to point out that there’s a notable absence from that list, which is big busi­ness.

    * San­difer

    Nowhere on Yarvin’s list of things that are con­trol­ling the world and set­ting up a polit­i­cal cen­ter is finance. Where­as, in real­i­ty, finance turns out to do an awful lot, as evi­denced by the fact that, for instance, if you hap­pen to be one of the rich­est peo­ple in the world, you can meet your girl­friend on a web site, have a bit of a falling out with her, get made fun of, and decide you’re going to sud­den­ly now own one of the largest social media plat­forms in the world. That’s a thing that can hap­pen if you are a bil­lion­aire. It is not a thing that can hap­pen to most peo­ple. And so sud­den­ly, Twitter—one of these huge social media sites, some­thing that is quite cen­tral to media discourse—is get­ting tak­en over by some­one who is spout­ing a lot of far-right ideas, who ini­tial­ly made his mon­ey work­ing with Peter Thiel, who is the per­son whose is bankrolling Cur­tis Yarvin’s bull­shit, who is very clear­ly influ­enced by this orbit. I know that the Wall Street Jour­nal report­ed that Thiel was advis­ing Musk on his Twit­ter takeover. And sud­den­ly they own this mas­sive media plat­form, and the only rea­son that’s hap­pen­ing is mon­ey. There is no aca­d­e­m­ic, no civ­il ser­vice, no main­stream media com­po­nent to why Twit­ter is about to take a right-wing plunge. It is entire­ly because mon­ey has a shit­load of pow­er. To give a very, very basic analy­sis that prob­a­bly, you know, is down­right obvi­ous to a num­ber of your lis­ten­ers, but it’s some­thing that nev­er occurs to Yarvin.

    * Robin­son

    Mold­bug talks about a small class of elites con­trol­ling the dis­course, and he talks about, as you say, the bound­aries of accept­able opinion—and when he says that, he’s almost 100 per­cent over­lap­ping with Chom­sky. But as you point out, there’s this absence of Marx in his work, where Mold­bug doesn’t seem to have read or under­stood the left analy­sis of these things.

    * San­difer

    In his last big essay under the Mold­bug pen name, he cre­ates this acronym/mantra, “Amer­i­ca is a com­mu­nist coun­try,” and claims that it is true in all sorts of dif­fer­ent ways that you can inter­pret it. And one thing that lit­er­al­ly nev­er comes up any­where in that essay is whether Amer­i­ca is actu­al­ly run on com­mu­nist prin­ci­ples sim­i­lar to those explained by Karl Marx. That lit­er­al­ly nev­er occurs to Moldbug—in the course of lit­er­al­ly thou­sands of words about how Amer­i­ca is sup­pos­ed­ly a com­mu­nist country—which is some­thing of an intel­lec­tu­al over­sight, I think. I feel like there is a fail­ure of due dili­gence that went on in this essay.

    * Robin­son

    We have dwelled on the work of a some­what obscure and stu­pid per­son who’s a bad writer. But when I read that Van­i­ty Fair arti­cle, I got chills. J.D. Vance is explic­it­ly say­ing that Yarvin has a bunch of great ideas. J.D. Vance could be in the Sen­ate.

    * San­difer

    Look at the U.S. Sen­ate. You don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly see that a U.S. sen­a­tor is a lot bet­ter than a bil­lion­aire as evi­dence of intel­li­gence.

    * Robin­son

    It’s true.

    * San­difer

    There are, in fact, a lot of stu­pid peo­ple in the Unit­ed States Sen­ate. And I’m will­ing to say that as a bipar­ti­san cri­tique.

    * Robin­son

    But there are not nec­es­sar­i­ly that many peo­ple who explic­it­ly espouse a desire for a dic­ta­tor­ship. And there are some quotes from J.D. Vance in that arti­cle, where the writer says Vance sounds like he’s talk­ing about a coup. Vance says that the next pres­i­dent should fire every­one in the gov­ern­ment, replace them with ide­o­logues, and ignore the courts if they try to stop him.

    * San­difer

    Right. The flip side of that is we shouldn’t delude our­selves about the fact that there are mul­ti­ple fascists—in the U.S. gov­ern­ment right now—who want to over­throw the U.S. gov­ern­ment. Vance is com­ing in. Look at Joshua Haw­ley out of Mis­souri. He’s just as fuck­ing bad. He’s espous­ing the same lev­el of fas­cist takeover shit. And those are the more intel­lec­tu­al ones. Go into the House and sud­den­ly you get Madi­son Cawthorn and Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene and that clan of nut jobs. (I do mean clan.) There are peo­ple who are in the U.S. Con­gress who are ful­ly endors­ing these fas­cist monar­chic ideas. The Vance idea is inter­est­ing to me because the spe­cif­ic fas­cist ideas he’s espous­ing are ones I wrote a book on six years ago. But at the end of the day, we shouldn’t treat Vance as an out­lier at this point. The real­ly scary thing is, he’s not.

    * Robin­son

    Yes. Even if there aren’t that many who are tied to this weird spe­cif­ic neo­re­ac­tion thing, this neo­re­ac­tionary ide­ol­o­gy is kind of, as you say, a more explic­it and upfront state­ment of the basic right-wing world­view, which is in favor of real­ly strict social hier­ar­chies enforced by vio­lence and keep­ing down any­one who would dare to chal­lenge those hier­ar­chies.

    * San­difer

    Along with strong pop­ulist and, inevitably, in prac­tice, white dude dic­ta­tors who run this jack­boot and pony show.

    * Robin­son

    We should talk about a cou­ple of the oth­er fig­ures in your book besides Yarvin. But the book is called Neo­re­ac­tion a Basilisk. Explain what the Basilisk in the title is.

    * San­difer

    Oh, God. Okay. So, Cur­tis Yarvin came to present prominence—got his ini­tial read­er­ship before he spun off to his own blog—on a web­site called Over­com­ing Bias, a web­site loose­ly orga­nized around a com­mu­ni­ty that called them­selves “the ratio­nal­ists.” The main fig­ure in that is a guy named Eliez­er Yud­kowsky, who would describe him­self as an AI researcher. It’s impor­tant to note that he has lit­er­al­ly no com­put­er sci­ence qual­i­fi­ca­tions; cannot—to the best of my knowledge—code; has nev­er built an AI; and does not actu­al­ly under­stand any­thing about how AI works on a tech­ni­cal lev­el. But he is an AI researcher, which real­ly means he writes sci­ence fic­tion. He writes sci­ence fic­tion nov­els that he pass­es off as phi­los­o­phy and schol­ar­ship. He is hor­ri­bly obsessed with the idea that some­day an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is going to wake up, achieve sen­tience, take over the world, and destroy human­i­ty because it sees no point in human­i­ty. He writes great sci­ence fic­tion phras­es. He’s got a phrase: “The AI does not love you. The AI does not hate you. But you are made out of atoms which the AI can use for some­thing else.” That’s charm­ing and chill­ing, and throw that into a sci­ence fic­tion hor­ror book about an evil AI and you’re going to get a Hugo nom­i­na­tion for that stuff. As an analy­sis of com­put­er sci­ence and the state of play of cur­rent tech­nol­o­gy, it has noth­ing to do with any­thing that is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing in AI research, nan­otech­nol­o­gy, or any­thing else. It’s pure­ly sci­ence fic­tion. But it’s pret­ty good sci­ence fic­tion.

    And so a lot of tech bro peo­ple are real­ly, real­ly into him because he makes them feel good. He says that they’re all super log­i­cal, ratio­nal peo­ple, and they can learn to make no mis­takes if they just use his one weird trick for think­ing ratio­nal­ly. He’s just had a lot of influ­ence despite being frankly a kind of weirdo cult leader.

    But the Basilisk. What you actu­al­ly asked about. The Basilisk comes from an inci­dent that arose in Yudkowsky’s com­mu­ni­ty where this guy named Roko, who went on to be a fas­cist, came up with a thought exper­i­ment imag­in­ing a futur­is­tic, god­like AI. As I said, they’re ter­ri­fied of an evil AI. They also want to cre­ate a god AI that will rein­car­nate them on a hard dri­ve so they can live for­ev­er. And so this guy Roko imag­ined the god AI and said: Wait a minute, what if when the god AI exists, he looks back at every­one who failed to help bring him about and declares they’re evil, and should be rein­car­nat­ed on a com­put­er and tor­tured for all eter­ni­ty? He made this argu­ment that was entire­ly con­sis­tent with the many weird cult-like premis­es of Yud­kowsky and his ratio­nal­ists and cre­at­ed this idea of this god­like AI that would tor­ture them all if they didn’t give all their mon­ey to AI research to try to bring him about—which, if you look at it from a per­spec­tive of not being a weirdo AI cult mem­ber, is basi­cal­ly just rein­vent­ing Pascal’s Wager.

    * Robin­son

    Pascal’s wager being that it pays to believe in God because if you don’t, God will pun­ish you—if he exists.

    * San­difer

    Yes, good expla­na­tion. And so all of these AI cultists, broad­ly speak­ing, absolute­ly lost their shit. They had an epic melt­down-pan­ic attack. Yud­kowsky was, at one point, scream­ing in all caps about how the worst thing you can pos­si­bly do is talk about the evil god­like AI in the future that does this, because talk­ing about it brings it into exis­tence. Every­one is hav­ing a com­plete emo­tion­al melt­down over hav­ing acci­den­tal­ly invent­ed Pascal’s Wager. And the whole inci­dent even­tu­al­ly becomes a bit of pop­u­lar lore that peo­ple who are the right kind of nerd know about. Jokes about Roko’s Basilisk, which is what this whole affair became known as, were actu­al­ly what got Elon Musk and Grimes togeth­er. They both made the same pun about Roko’s Basilisk inde­pen­dent­ly and found each oth­er through it.

    * Robin­son

    Wow. I nev­er knew that.

    * San­difer

    My friend, David Ger­ard, who was the ini­tial read­er and edi­tor of Neo­re­ac­tion a Basilisk, was the one who pre­served all the tran­scripts of the melt­down and put them on Ratio­nal­Wi­ki. That’s why any­one knows about this. So he is ulti­mate­ly sin­gle-hand­ed­ly respon­si­ble for Elon Musk tak­ing over Twit­ter just by pop­u­lar­iz­ing Roko’s Basilisk. It’s hor­ri­ble. He feels ter­ri­ble about it.

    * Robin­son

    I fear that some of our lis­ten­ers, hear­ing your expla­na­tion, may have thought to them­selves at some point dur­ing…

    * San­difer

    What the fuck is going on here?

    * Robin­son

    “I don’t under­stand this. It’s bizarre.”

    * San­difer

    I should have pref­aced this with: What I am about to say is going to sound com­plete­ly insane, and that’s because it is.

    * Robin­son

    I’m glad you explained it because I think that it’s impor­tant to under­stand that even if you don’t grasp this whole thing about a god­like arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in the future and what­ev­er…

    * San­difer

    And you should feel bet­ter about your­self if you don’t. If it did make any sense, you should real­ly be wor­ried.

    * Robin­son

    First, the peo­ple who believe in this very bizarre thing con­sid­er them­selves to be extreme­ly logical—more log­i­cal than any­one else, right?

    * San­difer

    Yes. Func­tion­al­ly, they believe them­selves to be, if not infal­li­ble on an indi­vid­ual lev­el, at least infal­li­ble on a col­lec­tive lev­el.

    * Robin­son

    Sec­ond­ly, this ratio­nal­ist com­mu­ni­ty that you’re talk­ing about that drifts into extreme­ly bizarre and some­times fas­cist beliefs is quite influ­en­tial in Sil­i­con Val­ley.

    * San­difer

    Huge­ly so. If you talk not just to man­age­ment, but even many of the front­line soft­ware engineer/coder nerds, they all know who Eliez­er Yud­kowsky is. This is absolute­ly a house­hold name with­in the spe­cif­ic bub­ble and enclave of Sil­i­con Val­ley tech.

    * Robin­son

    And there’s an entire intel­lec­tu­al ecosys­tem here. You’ve writ­ten about the Slate Star Codex blog.

    * San­difer

    Ah, yes, Mr. Siskind.

    * Robin­son

    He’s this ratio­nal­ist who’s very opposed to social jus­tice pol­i­tics and is, per­haps, a lit­tle too open-mind­ed about Charles Mur­ray and…

    * San­difer

    He’s a gate­way to out­right fas­cist ideas. He has open­ly said that he is a race eugeni­cist who believes that IQ is her­i­ta­ble. He def­i­nite­ly believes this to be true. He has said as much. He plays a lit­tle coy in pub­lic, but in his per­son­al beliefs, he is a racist author­i­tar­i­an. I absolute­ly believe this.

    * Robin­son

    And he is extreme­ly pop­u­lar among some peo­ple. He has a big fol­low­ing among a lot of these Sil­i­con Val­ley types.

    * San­difer

    Absolute­ly. His blog was wide­ly con­sid­ered essen­tial read­ing among the Sil­i­con Val­ley types. And then you go to the sub­red­dit for his blog, and peo­ple are lit­er­al­ly post­ing the 14 words, which are a huge white nation­al­ist slo­gan and just not even a dog whis­tle, just a whis­tle.

    * Robin­son

    One of the rea­sons I want­ed to speak to you is that it does seem as if the things that you’ve been writ­ing about for years were curiosi­ties when you start­ed writ­ing about them, or had a cult fol­low­ing. It seems to be inch­ing clos­er and clos­er to the main­stream, both through J.D. Vance and through Elon Musk. Musk talks about the AI that’s going to destroy us all, and I’m sure is inspired by a lot of these peo­ple.

    * San­difer

    The impor­tant take­away here is that all of the peo­ple I’ve been describ­ing are very, very stu­pid. Their ideas make no sense if you look at them under any scruti­ny what­so­ev­er. And they are active­ly tak­ing over the world right now. And they are going to kill mil­lions of peo­ple. It’s fun­ny on the one hand, but on the oth­er hand, they are active­ly tak­ing over the world, and they are lit­er­al­ly going to kill peo­ple like me. I want to be dead­ly seri­ous here. These peo­ple are very, very evil, and they are active­ly gain­ing pow­er.

    * Robin­son

    I think that’s incred­i­bly impor­tant. It’s so easy—especially if you look at the writ­ings of Moldbug—to just look at it and go, this is a bunch of garbage. Who could be per­suad­ed by this?

    * San­difer

    And the answer is: lit­er­al­ly the top advis­er [Steve Ban­non] of our last pres­i­dent. That is who can be per­suad­ed.

    * Robin­son

    To hear the sto­ry of this weird Basilisk and that all these peo­ple think the Basilisk from the future is com­ing … and then to real­ize that these are peo­ple who are in posi­tions of quite high sta­tus and who have the dan­ger­ous fal­la­cious belief that they are as close to per­fect­ly log­i­cal as one can be.

    * San­difer

    I don’t want to sug­gest that Elon Musk lit­er­al­ly believes in Roko’s Basilisk, but the new own­er of one of the largest social media sites in the world def­i­nite­ly takes Roko’s Basilisk a lot more seri­ous­ly than it deserves to be tak­en. And that should def­i­nite­ly raise some red flags, espe­cial­ly when you get into the fact that he made his mon­ey with Peter Thiel and Thiel bankrolled Yarvin and bankrolled Yud­kowsky. There’s a net­work of peo­ple here who are increas­ing­ly pow­er­ful, and they are very, very scary.

    * Robin­son

    We talked about the dic­ta­to­r­i­al ten­den­cies, but we haven’t dis­cussed the extent to which a lot of this is found­ed on “anti-wok­e­ness” and the hatred of Black Lives Mat­ter and oth­er move­ments for lib­er­a­tion.

    * San­difer

    When you describe this stuff, it doesn’t sound very appeal­ing. And so, to most of the peo­ple upon whose elec­toral sup­port this move­ment relies, these aren’t the bits they describe. What they describe is: Black peo­ple are all get­ting free crack pipes from Oba­ma. What they describe is, trans peo­ple are groom­ing your kids and are going to take them away from you. What they describe is the entire pro-life argu­ment: pro life, anti-abor­tion, anti-choice, what is about to win in the U.S. Supreme Court and out­law abor­tion for more than half of the coun­try. These are the argu­ments they use to win elec­toral pow­er. But behind the scenes, when you trace the intel­lec­tu­al roots of the argu­ments of the peo­ple who are in prac­tice run­ning a site like Bre­it­bart, these are the things you find.

    Yarvin open­ly talked about how polit­i­cal alliances with white nation­al­ist are some­times odi­ous because they’re stu­pid, nasty peo­ple but prob­a­bly use­ful for achiev­ing the polit­i­cal goals he wants. Most of them are racist, trans­pho­bic, misog­y­nis­tic ass­holes them­selves. I don’t want to sug­gest that these aspects of their argu­ments are pure­ly iron­ic affec­ta­tion. Fun­da­men­tal­ly, if you give even the remotest shit about Black peo­ple, you don’t ally with white nation­al­ists. The very fact that you ally with white nation­al­ists speaks vol­umes about your racism. The active spear tip of this move­ment is anti-wokeism and fears about can­cel cul­ture and crit­i­cal race the­o­ry and all that.

    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.

    * Robin­son

    I watched the full Yarvin inter­view with Tuck­er Carl­son. Tuck­er Carl­son was total­ly fas­ci­nat­ed.

    * San­difer

    Of course he was.

    * Robin­son

    Carl­son pre­sent­ed Yarvin as this fas­ci­nat­ing intel­lec­tu­al who is silenced by the main­stream but who has real­ly, real­ly valu­able and inter­est­ing ideas. The whole hour they spent was Yarvin expound­ing this the­o­ry that there is this kind of con­spir­a­cy of elites that he calls “the cathe­dral” that con­sists of Har­vard and the New York Times and the gov­ern­ment and all that. And he was explain­ing to Tuck­er how peo­ple who put Black Lives Mat­ter signs in their yard, that the sign real­ly says, “I love pow­er and con­for­mi­ty.”

    He talked about the red pill. He said, you’re going to take the red pill, you’re gonna see things for how they real­ly are. And Tuck­er Carl­son has his mind blown by Cur­tis. But, impor­tant­ly, all of it is about the big woke con­spir­a­cy that rules the coun­try. None of it is about the solu­tion being fas­cism, even though that’s what Yarvin believes.

    * San­difer

    Right. You don’t say the fas­cism on prime­time on Fox News. You say that at your lit­tle con­ser­v­a­tive con­fer­ence where you’ve got the true believ­ers. There is very much the pro­pa­gan­da front. And if you look at the overt polit­i­cal goals of these people—which is absolute­ly monar­chic, or, at least oli­garchic dic­ta­tor­ship of the very, very rich—you can absolute­ly see why Fox News is mak­ing the polit­i­cal moves in this.

    * Robin­son

    I want to just read a lit­tle pas­sage from the end of your book that made me laugh. You write: To engage in Alt-Right think­ing is to turn one­self into a vac­u­ous skin­suit ani­mat­ed by raw stu­pid­i­ty. There is lit­er­al­ly not a sin­gle shred of non-stu­pid­i­ty in the entire thing. Men­cius Mold­bug, stu­pid. Milo Yiannopou­los, stu­pid. Don­ald Trump, Vox Day, stu­pid, stu­pid, stu­pid. MAGA and The Dai­ly Stormer are stu­pid. Every sin­gle detail of every sin­gle aspect of this entire cra­ter­ing shit­storm in which the human race seems hell bent on going extinct is absolute­ly fuck­ing stu­pid.

    * San­difer

    I stand by every word of that.

    ...

    ———–

    “The Strange and Ter­ri­fy­ing Ideas of Neo­re­ac­tionar­ies” by Nathan J. Robin­son; Cur­rent Affairs; 05/30/2022

    “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:

    ...
    * Robin­son

    So per­haps you could describe the start­ing point of his analy­sis of what is wrong with soci­ety.

    * San­difer

    His start­ing point is the extreme­ly self-evi­dent asser­tion that there is an over­all con­sen­sus. He rein­vents the Over­ton win­dow from scratch. He rein­vents the idea that there is a dic­tat­ed set of opin­ions which are accept­able and pos­si­ble to dis­cuss and to take seri­ous­ly. There is this polit­i­cal cen­ter around which noth­ing can orbit too far away from with­out freez­ing to death. It’s fun­da­men­tal­ly dic­tat­ed by a num­ber of elite and pow­er­ful insti­tu­tions. So the New York Times does a whole lot to dic­tate what the polit­i­cal cen­ter is. There are many oth­er exam­ples. The ones that Yarvin is most obsessed with are basi­cal­ly the media, acad­e­mia, and the civ­il ser­vice end of gov­ern­ment. He views those as the big three insti­tu­tions that are impos­ing a kind of absolute con­sen­sus that he says is drift­ing in an ever left­ward lib­er­al direc­tion. He points to the progress of civ­il rights, takes Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s obser­va­tion about the arc of the moral uni­verse bend­ing toward jus­tice over the long run and ren­ders it a hor­ror sto­ry, actu­al­ly refer­ring to this cen­trist con­sen­sus as Cthul­hu and say­ing that “Cthul­hu always swims left.”

    The sen­si­ble thing to do is prob­a­bly to look at the role of mon­ey in this.

    ...

    * Robin­son

    We talked about the dic­ta­to­r­i­al ten­den­cies, but we haven’t dis­cussed the extent to which a lot of this is found­ed on “anti-wok­e­ness” and the hatred of Black Lives Mat­ter and oth­er move­ments for lib­er­a­tion.

    * San­difer

    When you describe this stuff, it doesn’t sound very appeal­ing. And so, to most of the peo­ple upon whose elec­toral sup­port this move­ment relies, these aren’t the bits they describe. What they describe is: Black peo­ple are all get­ting free crack pipes from Oba­ma. What they describe is, trans peo­ple are groom­ing your kids and are going to take them away from you. What they describe is the entire pro-life argu­ment: pro life, anti-abor­tion, anti-choice, what is about to win in the U.S. Supreme Court and out­law abor­tion for more than half of the coun­try. These are the argu­ments they use to win elec­toral pow­er. But behind the scenes, when you trace the intel­lec­tu­al roots of the argu­ments of the peo­ple who are in prac­tice run­ning a site like Bre­it­bart, these are the things you find.

    Yarvin open­ly talked about how polit­i­cal alliances with white nation­al­ist are some­times odi­ous because they’re stu­pid, nasty peo­ple but prob­a­bly use­ful for achiev­ing the polit­i­cal goals he wants. Most of them are racist, trans­pho­bic, misog­y­nis­tic ass­holes them­selves. I don’t want to sug­gest that these aspects of their argu­ments are pure­ly iron­ic affec­ta­tion. Fun­da­men­tal­ly, if you give even the remotest shit about Black peo­ple, you don’t ally with white nation­al­ists. The very fact that you ally with white nation­al­ists speaks vol­umes about your racism. The active spear tip of this move­ment is anti-wokeism and fears about can­cel cul­ture and crit­i­cal race the­o­ry and all that.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 16, 2023, 2:32 am
  8. 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:

    The Dai­ly Beast

    The Right Says Sor­ry In Advance for Going Fas­cist

    And, absurd­ly, some con­ser­v­a­tives who’ve replaced opti­mism with despair are try­ing to blame Hunter Biden for “mak­ing” them to do it.

    Matt Lewis
    Senior Colum­nist
    Updat­ed Mar. 30, 2021 10:59AM ET
    Pub­lished Mar. 30, 2021 4:56AM ET

    I became a con­ser­v­a­tive because I believed the con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues I grew up with were the best way to bring about human flour­ish­ing for the most Amer­i­cans. I still do. But in recent years it has become clear that sig­nif­i­cant parts of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment no longer share this belief (if they ever did). There is a pal­pa­ble sense that not only are our val­ues inca­pable of per­suad­ing a major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans to sup­port Repub­li­can politi­cians at the bal­lot box, but that the whole project of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy is doomed.

    What had been (in the days of Ronald Rea­gan and Jack Kemp) an opti­mistic phi­los­o­phy has metas­ta­sized. We are left with a right wing that is ani­mat­ed by despair, des­per­a­tion, and an inevitable belief in Amer­i­can decline. We have been hear­ing this sort of clam­or­ing since 2016, cul­mi­nat­ing with the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion on Jan. 6. But there was always the hope it would dis­si­pate if or when Don­ald Trump left the White House.

    But sad­ly, Trump’s exit has done lit­tle to quell the incip­i­ent thirst for author­i­tar­i­an­ism from many on the right. Indeed, the fever seems to be get­ting worse.

    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.”

    Human rodent? Sick stuff. But pos­si­bly less dan­ger­ous than my oth­er exam­ple, which is Jesse Kelly’s com­ments days ago on Fox News ’ “Tuck­er Carl­son Tonight.

    “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,” Kel­ly said. “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.”.

    Kel­ly wasn’t lying when he said he’s said this before. “The inevitable counter to com­mu­nism is fas­cism,” he tweet­ed in Feb­ru­ary. “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.” Left unsaid are the illu­sions to Weimar Ger­many and the Weima­riza­tion of Amer­i­ca. In the 1930s, many Ger­mans were will­ing to give Hitler a try because they great­ly feared Com­mu­nism, saw their predica­ment as a bina­ry choice, and chose (what they thought would be) the less­er of two evils. Kel­ly seems to be warn­ing us that Amer­i­ca (which is quite dif­fer­ent from the Weimar Repub­lic) is head­ed toward a sim­i­lar fate.

    Now, respon­si­ble con­ser­v­a­tives do some­times warn the left against pur­su­ing rad­i­cal ideas about iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics, can­cel cul­ture, street vio­lence, icon­o­clasm, etc., but our warn­ings are more sin­cere and less grandiose. If you’ve seen the “This is how you get Trump” tweets, you’re famil­iar with the genre.

    Kelly’s play­book is much dif­fer­ent. When he says “the right is going to pick a fas­cist,” you have to won­der if that’s a warn­ing or a threat. And when he says he’s “wor­ried,” you have to won­der if he’s just con­cern trolling, or if he’s actu­al­ly lay­ing the ground­work for the ulti­mate “SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO” excuse.

    Carl­son con­clud­ed the seg­ment by say­ing, “That’s so well put and you’re absolute­ly right. We are mov­ing toward actu­al extrem­ism because they’re under­min­ing the sys­tem that kept extrem­ism at bay. I don’t think we can say that enough. I’m so glad that you just said it. Jesse Kel­ly, thank you.”

    Just as Don­ald Trump recent­ly told Lau­ra Ingra­ham that the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion­ists are now being “per­se­cut­ed,” these com­ments feed the right’s vic­tim men­tal­i­ty, mak­ing a wild jump from the com­plaint that one priv­i­leged, but trou­bled, politician’s son might have got­ten away with some­thing ille­gal to the view that Amer­i­can fas­cism is inevitable and (maybe even) excus­able.

    As was the case with the “Flight-93 elec­tion” (also pub­lished by Clare­mont), the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion requires accept­ing the premise that things are so doomed that rush­ing the cock­pit is your only alter­na­tive. From where I sit, that is a fan­tas­ti­cal and dark premise that only works if peo­ple like Kel­ly con­stant­ly stoke pes­simism and hope­less­ness.

    ...

    Instead of serv­ing as a warn­ing to con­ser­v­a­tives and pro­gres­sives to come togeth­er as a nation and avoid this fate, Kelly’s con­fi­dent pre­dic­tion seems more like­ly to serve as a self-fulling prophe­cy: he is intro­duc­ing us to a for­eign con­cept (the fas­cist leader in Amer­i­ca) and then cre­at­ing a per­mis­sion struc­ture to sup­port it. He’s not doing this on some fringe media out­let either. He’s spout­ing his views on a main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive network—on what hap­pens to be the most-watched cable news chan­nel in the nation.

    ...

    ————

    “The Right Says Sor­ry In Advance for Going Fas­cist by Matt Lewis; The Dai­ly Beast; 03/30/2021

    “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:

    ...
    Human rodent? Sick stuff. But pos­si­bly less dan­ger­ous than my oth­er exam­ple, which is Jesse Kelly’s com­ments days ago on Fox News ’ “Tuck­er Carl­son Tonight.

    “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,” Kel­ly said. “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.”.

    Kel­ly wasn’t lying when he said he’s said this before. “The inevitable counter to com­mu­nism is fas­cism,” he tweet­ed in Feb­ru­ary. “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.” Left unsaid are the illu­sions to Weimar Ger­many and the Weima­riza­tion of Amer­i­ca. In the 1930s, many Ger­mans were will­ing to give Hitler a try because they great­ly feared Com­mu­nism, saw their predica­ment as a bina­ry choice, and chose (what they thought would be) the less­er of two evils. Kel­ly seems to be warn­ing us that Amer­i­ca (which is quite dif­fer­ent from the Weimar Repub­lic) is head­ed toward a sim­i­lar fate.

    ...

    Kelly’s play­book is much dif­fer­ent. When he says “the right is going to pick a fas­cist,” you have to won­der if that’s a warn­ing or a threat. And when he says he’s “wor­ried,” you have to won­der if he’s just con­cern trolling, or if he’s actu­al­ly lay­ing the ground­work for the ulti­mate “SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO” excuse.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Carl­son con­clud­ed the seg­ment by say­ing, “That’s so well put and you’re absolute­ly right. We are mov­ing toward actu­al extrem­ism because they’re under­min­ing the sys­tem that kept extrem­ism at bay. I don’t think we can say that enough. I’m so glad that you just said it. Jesse Kel­ly, thank you.”

    ...

    Instead of serv­ing as a warn­ing to con­ser­v­a­tives and pro­gres­sives to come togeth­er as a nation and avoid this fate, Kelly’s con­fi­dent pre­dic­tion seems more like­ly to serve as a self-fulling prophe­cy: he is intro­duc­ing us to a for­eign con­cept (the fas­cist leader in Amer­i­ca) and then cre­at­ing a per­mis­sion struc­ture to sup­port it. He’s not doing this on some fringe media out­let either. He’s spout­ing his views on a main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive network—on what hap­pens to be the most-watched cable news chan­nel in the nation.
    ...

    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:

    Fox News

    Jesse Kel­ly calls for ‘raz­ing’ the US pub­lic edu­ca­tion sys­tem, as nation suf­fer­ing from ‘patri­o­tism prob­lem’

    ‘If 85 out of 100 peo­ple wake up every day and think this place sucks, well, then you’re in a lot of trou­ble and we’re in a lot of trou­ble’

    By Charles Cre­itz
    Pub­lished June 23, 2021 6:59pm EDT

    Radio host and for­mer Ari­zona con­gres­sion­al can­di­date Jesse Kel­ly sound­ed off Wednes­day on the “patri­o­tism prob­lem” in the Unit­ed States, telling Fox Nation’s “Tuck­er Carl­son Today” the ris­ing anti-Amer­i­can­ism can be in part attrib­uted to what the pub­lic edu­ca­tion sys­tem is teach­ing the next gen­er­a­tion.

    Kel­ly told host Tuck­er Carl­son that Amer­i­ca as-found­ed is dete­ri­o­rat­ing due to the ongo­ing attack on its insti­tu­tions and the coun­try itself.

    “It sounds hokey, but the rea­son we are in this predica­ment in this coun­try is sim­ply patri­o­tism. We have a patri­o­tism prob­lem. If you have enough a high enough per­cent­age of your pop­u­la­tion that loves their coun­try, you’re going to have a good coun­try,” said Kel­ly, a retired Marine.

    “Why? Because if you have so many peo­ple, if there are 100 peo­ple in the coun­try, and 85 of them wake up every day say­ing this is a great place. Well, why do I feed my kids? Because I love my kids. There­fore, I feel like I have a duty to do right by my kids. Same way works in a coun­try you wake up in every sin­gle day.”

    ...

    Kel­ly also took on the indoc­tri­na­tion of crit­i­cal race the­o­ry and oth­er left-wing ide­olo­gies being applied in pub­lic schools and uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try, char­ac­ter­iz­ing them as incon­gru­ous to the skills our chil­dren should be learn­ing and that past gen­er­a­tions have.

    “There is no oth­er argu­ment to be had right now oth­er than com­plete­ly car­pet-bomb­ing the Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion sys­tem and remak­ing it from the bot­tom up,” he said, adding that doing so would go a long way to fix the afore­men­tioned “patri­o­tism prob­lem.”

    “That’s where they’re learn­ing the anti-patri­o­tism. That’s where they’re learn­ing the anti-Amer­i­can­ism… What do you learn in grade school? Well, slav­ery and, of course, we slaugh­tered the Native Amer­i­cans whole­sale, and that was pret­ty much Amer­i­ca,” Kel­ly said of the his­tor­i­cal dis­tor­tions taught by some in civics edu­ca­tion.

    “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.”

    ———-

    “Jesse Kel­ly calls for ‘raz­ing’ the US pub­lic edu­ca­tion sys­tem, as nation suf­fer­ing from ‘patri­o­tism prob­lem’ ” By Charles Cre­itz; Fox News; 06/23/2021

    “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:

    ...
    Kel­ly also took on the indoc­tri­na­tion of crit­i­cal race the­o­ry and oth­er left-wing ide­olo­gies being applied in pub­lic schools and uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try, char­ac­ter­iz­ing them as incon­gru­ous to the skills our chil­dren should be learn­ing and that past gen­er­a­tions have.

    “There is no oth­er argu­ment to be had right now oth­er than com­plete­ly car­pet-bomb­ing the Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion sys­tem and remak­ing it from the bot­tom up,” he said, adding that doing so would go a long way to fix the afore­men­tioned “patri­o­tism prob­lem.”

    “That’s where they’re learn­ing the anti-patri­o­tism. That’s where they’re learn­ing the anti-Amer­i­can­ism… What do you learn in grade school? Well, slav­ery and, of course, we slaugh­tered the Native Amer­i­cans whole­sale, and that was pret­ty much Amer­i­ca,” Kel­ly said of the his­tor­i­cal dis­tor­tions taught by some in civics edu­ca­tion.

    “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.”
    ...

    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:

    Media Mat­ters

    iHeartRa­dio host Jesse Kel­ly says all FBI employ­ees should be fired and put into a camp “out in the desert”

    Kel­ly: “Let the gang­bangers out. Put the FBI agents in. I’m not even jok­ing.”

    Writ­ten by Media Mat­ters Staff
    Pub­lished 01/26/23 5:22 PM EST

    JESSE KELLY (HOST): Rand Paul says the FBI will only be reformed if we remove and replace the top 10% of the agency. Now, I should clar­i­fy that I’m actu­al­ly a Rand Paul fan. I wish we had a hun­dred of them. My good­ness, would this coun­try look dif­fer­ent­ly if we had a hun­dred Rand Pauls in the Sen­ate.

    That being said. Ten per­cent? We need to remove and replace ten per­cent of the FBI? Feel like we missed a zero in there.

    Let’s begin at 100%. I tell you what, let’s do this. Let’s – look. 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.

    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.

    The FBI build­ing itself, once it’s been emp­tied out, because we don’t want any­one to get hurt. We will not just do a con­trolled demo­li­tion on the Hoover Build­ing. We will insist that it be broad­cast nation­al­ly. Every sin­gle TV sta­tion will car­ry this live as a mes­sage to the Amer­i­can peo­ple of what hap­pens to tyrants, espe­cial­ly peo­ple who think they’re above the law in the coun­try.

    Then we go back to the camp where they’re at. Now, this is not some evil camp. We are giv­ing every­body three meals a day. They’re going to be well-treat­ed. They’re going to be fed.

    But that’s when we will begin our exten­sive inves­ti­ga­tion and inter­view process. And as we inves­ti­gate, as we inter­view these for­mer FBI per­son­nel from top to bot­tom, I mean, top to bot­tom, when­ev­er we find some­body who used his posi­tion of pow­er and influ­ence at the FBI to politi­cize in any way on behalf of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, that per­son will be removed from the camp in hand­cuffs and leg irons and moved to a jail where he will await tri­al for a life sen­tence.

    Once con­vict­ed, he will be placed in Fort Leav­en­worth or some kind of fed­er­al prison for the rest of his life. That is the rea­son­able out­come.

    Once you’ve devel­oped a secret state police agency that attacks Repub­li­cans on behalf of Democ­rats. You don’t need ten per­cent. You need a hun­dred. They all have to go. And I don’t just mean fir­ings, Like I said, not just resign­ing. It’s not just that they have to go. Peo­ple have to go to prison. Peo­ple with­in the FBI have to go to prison. Oh, Jesse, we don’t have enough pris­ons. I don’t care. Let the gang­bangers out. Put the FBI agents in. I’m not even jok­ing. They’re much more dan­ger­ous to the coun­try. Put the FBI agents in prison where they belong.

    ————-

    “iHeartRa­dio host Jesse Kel­ly says all FBI employ­ees should be fired and put into a camp “out in the desert”” by Media Mat­ters Staff; Media Mat­ters; 01/26/2023

    “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:

    ...
    The FBI build­ing itself, once it’s been emp­tied out, because we don’t want any­one to get hurt. We will not just do a con­trolled demo­li­tion on the Hoover Build­ing. We will insist that it be broad­cast nation­al­ly. Every sin­gle TV sta­tion will car­ry this live as a mes­sage to the Amer­i­can peo­ple of what hap­pens to tyrants, espe­cial­ly peo­ple who think they’re above the law in the coun­try.

    Then we go back to the camp where they’re at. Now, this is not some evil camp. We are giv­ing every­body three meals a day. They’re going to be well-treat­ed. They’re going to be fed.

    But that’s when we will begin our exten­sive inves­ti­ga­tion and inter­view process. And as we inves­ti­gate, as we inter­view these for­mer FBI per­son­nel from top to bot­tom, I mean, top to bot­tom, when­ev­er we find some­body who used his posi­tion of pow­er and influ­ence at the FBI to politi­cize in any way on behalf of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, that per­son will be removed from the camp in hand­cuffs and leg irons and moved to a jail where he will await tri­al for a life sen­tence.

    Once con­vict­ed, he will be placed in Fort Leav­en­worth or some kind of fed­er­al prison for the rest of his life. That is the rea­son­able out­come.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 29, 2023, 8:53 pm
  9. 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:

    Slate

    Why the Jan. 6 Com­mit­tee Let Gin­ni and Clarence Thomas Off the Hook

    When you’re a jus­tice, they let you do it.

    By Dahlia Lith­wick
    Dec 22, 2022 5:40 AM

    In think­ing about the vast eth­i­cal suck­ing noise that’s con­sumed vir­tu­al­ly all of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, it’s easy to feel hope­less as 2022 grinds to an end. Don­ald Trump’s tax­es, years ahead ded­i­cat­ed to Beng­hazi-style hear­ings, Supreme Court jus­tices par­ty­ing with elec­tion deniers—bah, hum­bug, rinse, repeat.

    That’s why the crim­i­nal refer­rals lobbed at Trump this week from the Jan. 6 com­mit­tee are heart­en­ing and tan­gi­ble. The committee’s deci­sion to state that Trump and his most law­less sup­port­ers have com­mit­ted actu­al crimes laid down a pow­er­ful his­tor­i­cal mark­er and put impor­tant pres­sure on the Jus­tice Depart­ment for future account­abil­i­ty.

    And yet there is some­thing that feels entire­ly unsat­is­fy­ing about cel­e­brat­ing this as a land­mark win. Two years after we watched the crime hap­pen in plain sight, and the crim­i­nals fêt­ed and enriched, we now see crim­i­nal charges humbly sug­gest­ed, for a hand­ful of peo­ple?

    It’s OK to be frus­trat­ed at the lim­its of the exec­u­tive sum­ma­ry of the committee’s final report. The report itself remains forth­com­ing. But just for starters, Monday’s release failed to take seri­ous­ly the spec­tac­u­lar fail­ures of law enforce­ment and intel­li­gence agen­cies; the lim­it­ed effi­ca­cy of ethics refer­rals for GOP House mem­bers who failed to com­ply with sub­poe­nas; and the cul­pa­bil­i­ty of so very many Repub­li­cans who have aid­ed and abet­ted Trump’s big lie for two straight years.

    For its own obvi­ous rea­sons, the com­mit­tee opt­ed to focus its gaze on Don­ald Trump and the weird­est weirdos in his orbit, thus spar­ing some of the worst denial­ists, liars, and insur­rec­tion­ists in the GOP from the prospect of seri­ous account­abil­i­ty. But Trump him­self was already slip­ping from “hot” to “not” at mete­oric speeds, which is per­haps why the focus on the for­mer (or—as the pan­el sor­did­ly referred to him Monday—the “ex”) pres­i­dent seems so painful­ly nar­row.

    It’s at least pos­si­ble to sur­mise that the biggest win­ners after the com­mit­tee fin­ished its superb work would be Ron DeSan­tis, the Mur­dochs, Liz Cheney, and all those advo­cat­ing that the GOP dump Don­ald in favor of lit­er­al­ly any­one who can push wild­ly con­ser­v­a­tive out­comes with­out the added per­il of his bot­tom­less unhinged-ness. By that token, Mon­day was a very good day for the GOP, as mea­sured by the open­ing of yet anoth­er offramp for any­one still in search of an offramp.

    Con­sid­er that Gin­ni Thomas was nowhere men­tioned in the exec­u­tive sum­ma­ry—nor, aside from an opin­ion cita­tion, was her hus­band, the sit­ting Supreme Court jus­tice who will not recuse him­self from cas­es that involve the Jan. 6 attempt­ed insur­rec­tion in which his wife had both par­tic­i­pat­ed in the efforts and a vest­ed inter­est in the out­come. Giv­en the committee’s def­er­ence to the Thomases through­out its hear­ings, no sur­pris­es there. But it is still dis­ap­point­ing, for those of us who bought into the idea that the com­mit­tee could restore some real idea of jus­tice across gov­ern­ment.

    Instead, no mat­ter what they may tell you about the rule of law and the need for con­se­quences and account­abil­i­ty, absolute­ly nobody in the GOP as it is cur­rent­ly con­sti­tut­ed has any inter­est in stop­ping the goose that has laid the con­ser­v­a­tive legal establishment’s gold­en egg. Love him or hate him, Thomas has been the sin­gle most effec­tive jurist in mod­ern his­to­ry, and even those con­ser­v­a­tives who deplore Trump’s incite­ment and vio­lence and threats will glee­ful­ly turn a blind eye to Thomas’ eth­i­cal laps­es if it means secur­ing endur­ing wins on abor­tion, guns, mas­sive dereg­u­la­tion, and ascen­dant cor­po­rate pow­er. Vir­tu­al­ly nobody who is win­ning at the Supreme Court in a decades-long con­ser­v­a­tive legal project aimed at dis­man­tling envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions, sub­vert­ing minor­i­ty vot­ing rights, and impos­ing theo­crat­ic suprema­cy is going to take seri­ous­ly the myr­i­ad eth­i­cal con­flicts and struc­tur­al fail­ings that plague the cur­rent court. Bet­ter to keep pre­tend­ing that Don­ald Trump is the prob­lem than con­cede that the prob­lem is actu­al­ly that both Trump and the Thomases oper­ate as if the law is for the lit­tle peo­ple, and the law lets them..

    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.

    I’ve been struck that in recent report­ing on eth­i­cal laps­es at the high court, con­ser­v­a­tive legal enthu­si­asts have begun to advance the claim that there is no need for bind­ing ethics rules because con­ser­v­a­tive tri­umphs are so plain­ly and self-evi­dent­ly cor­rect that there can be no oth­er out­come. Here’s a ver­sion of that argu­ment applied to Leonard Leo of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety assist­ing Kellyanne Con­way in sell­ing her polling busi­ness while she was lob­by­ing the Trump White House in its judi­cial selec­tions: “It seems bizarre to think that any pos­si­ble lob­by­ing by Kellyanne Con­way would have added to the force of [the court’s] com­mit­ment or to the influ­ence that Mitch McConnell and Don McGahn had already wield­ed,” said Ed Whe­lan, a for­mer clerk to Antonin Scalia. And here’s Mark Pao­let­ta, the for­mer Clarence Thomas clerk who worked on Thomas’ Sen­ate con­fir­ma­tion and who now rep­re­sents Gin­ni Thomas in Jan. 6 mat­ters tes­ti­fy­ing in oppo­si­tion to Supreme Court ethics reform ear­li­er this month: His argu­ment was that a cam­paign in which big donors forked over cash to the Supreme Court His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety in order to put pres­sure on jus­tices to over­turn Roe v. Wade was not an ethics prob­lem at all. Why was that? Because push­ing Ali­to, Thomas, or Scalia right­ward was laugh­able, you see, since their oppo­si­tion to Roe was already known. They’re so con­ser­v­a­tive, it’s not pos­si­ble to cor­rupt them with mon­ey.

    Wait. So the jus­tices who swore at their con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings that Roe was bind­ing prece­dent were in truth so in the tank for over­turn­ing Roe that no amount of pres­sure to do so would have made a dif­fer­ence? Since every­one knew that over­turn­ing Roe was why they were appoint­ed? Got it. No won­der Supreme Court ethics reform is a dumb idea. If a code of eth­i­cal con­duct isn’t nec­es­sary because con­ser­v­a­tive legal thinkers are imper­vi­ous to influ­ence and bribes from those with whom they are in lock­step, there’s no need for any lim­its on who they par­ty with or trav­el with or accept gifts from. Of course at that point, we should prob­a­bly stop char­ac­ter­iz­ing the place as a “court.”

    ...

    Repub­li­cans, for all their past sins, did in rel­a­tive­ly recent his­to­ry say that there were lines that peo­ple in pow­er could not cross. As a result of the con­duct of Ford’s imme­di­ate White House pre­de­ces­sor, many vot­ed to say that orches­trat­ing and cov­er­ing up the Water­gate break-in crossed a line. With Ford’s cru­sade against Dou­glas, a justice’s alleged sex­u­al impro­pri­ety had crossed a line. Today’s GOP—be it at the Supreme Court or in Con­gress or in the White House—proved once again this week (and in the months and years pre­ced­ing it) that there are no real lines between its dreams and its vic­to­ries. Judi­cial cor­rup­tion, a vio­lent coup attempt—whatever. For every work­ing Repub­li­can pow­er play­er, includ­ing the two Repub­li­can mem­bers of the Jan. 6 Com­mit­tee, account­abil­i­ty stops at the cour­t­house door.

    Pay very close atten­tion, as you read the final report, to where the bipar­ti­san­ship around the Jan. 6 Com­mit­tee rec­om­men­da­tion begins and ends. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have done yeoman’s work to shore up the rule of law and account­abil­i­ty for Don­ald Trump and the worst of his con­fed­er­ates. But the work will also pro­vide a pret­ty flaw­less map to which legal and eth­i­cal laps­es are dis­qual­i­fy­ing and which are tac­it­ly encour­aged. One branch of gov­ern­ment is checked and the oth­er is giv­en a pass. It’s clear that what­ev­er part law enforce­ment, House Repub­li­cans, MAGA elec­tion deniers still in office, and par­tic­u­lar­ly any Supreme Court jus­tice or their spouse may have played in an attack on the repub­lic in 2021 will be for­giv­en and for­got­ten. They’re still all on one team, and—law and ethics notwithstanding—that team is all in on win­ning the fights that real­ly mat­ter.

    ———–

    “Why the Jan. 6 Com­mit­tee Let Gin­ni and Clarence Thomas Off the Hook” By Dahlia Lith­wick; Slate; 12/22/2022

    “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:

    ...
    Con­sid­er that Gin­ni Thomas was nowhere men­tioned in the exec­u­tive sum­ma­ry—nor, aside from an opin­ion cita­tion, was her hus­band, the sit­ting Supreme Court jus­tice who will not recuse him­self from cas­es that involve the Jan. 6 attempt­ed insur­rec­tion in which his wife had both par­tic­i­pat­ed in the efforts and a vest­ed inter­est in the out­come. Giv­en the committee’s def­er­ence to the Thomases through­out its hear­ings, no sur­pris­es there. But it is still dis­ap­point­ing, for those of us who bought into the idea that the com­mit­tee could restore some real idea of jus­tice across gov­ern­ment.

    Instead, no mat­ter what they may tell you about the rule of law and the need for con­se­quences and account­abil­i­ty, absolute­ly nobody in the GOP as it is cur­rent­ly con­sti­tut­ed has any inter­est in stop­ping the goose that has laid the con­ser­v­a­tive legal establishment’s gold­en egg. Love him or hate him, Thomas has been the sin­gle most effec­tive jurist in mod­ern his­to­ry, and even those con­ser­v­a­tives who deplore Trump’s incite­ment and vio­lence and threats will glee­ful­ly turn a blind eye to Thomas’ eth­i­cal laps­es if it means secur­ing endur­ing wins on abor­tion, guns, mas­sive dereg­u­la­tion, and ascen­dant cor­po­rate pow­er. Vir­tu­al­ly nobody who is win­ning at the Supreme Court in a decades-long con­ser­v­a­tive legal project aimed at dis­man­tling envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions, sub­vert­ing minor­i­ty vot­ing rights, and impos­ing theo­crat­ic suprema­cy is going to take seri­ous­ly the myr­i­ad eth­i­cal con­flicts and struc­tur­al fail­ings that plague the cur­rent court. Bet­ter to keep pre­tend­ing that Don­ald Trump is the prob­lem than con­cede that the prob­lem is actu­al­ly that both Trump and the Thomases oper­ate as if the law is for the lit­tle peo­ple, and the law lets them..
    ...

    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:

    Axios

    Exclu­sive: Trump’s “Deep State” hit list

    Jonathan Swan
    Feb 23, 2020 — Pol­i­tics & Pol­i­cy

    The Trump White House and its allies, over the past 18 months, assem­bled detailed lists of dis­loy­al gov­ern­ment offi­cials to oust — and trust­ed pro-Trump peo­ple to replace them — accord­ing to more than a dozen sources famil­iar with the effort who spoke to Axios.

    Dri­ving the news: By the time Pres­i­dent Trump instruct­ed his 29-year-old for­mer body man and new head of pres­i­den­tial per­son­nel to rid his rid his gov­ern­ment of anti-Trump offi­cials, he’d gath­ered reams of mate­r­i­al to sup­port his sus­pi­cions.

    * While Trump’s dis­trust has only inten­si­fied since his impeach­ment and acquit­tal, he has long been on the hunt for “bad peo­ple” inside the White House and U.S. gov­ern­ment, and fresh “pro-Trump” options. Out­side advis­ers have been hap­py to oblige.

    ...

    The big pic­ture: Since Trump’s Sen­ate acquit­tal, aides say the pres­i­dent has crossed a psy­cho­log­i­cal line regard­ing what he calls the “Deep State.” He feels his gov­ern­ment — from Jus­tice to State to Defense to Home­land Secu­ri­ty — is filled with “snakes.” He wants them fired and replaced ASAP.

    * “I think it’s a very pos­i­tive devel­op­ment,” said Rich Hig­gins, who served on Trump’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil in 2017. H.R. McMas­ter removed Hig­gins after he wrote a memo spec­u­lat­ing that Trump’s pres­i­den­cy faced threats from Marx­ists, the “Deep State,” so-called glob­al­ists, bankers, Islamists, and estab­lish­ment Repub­li­cans. (This was long before the full scope of the FBI’s Rus­sia inves­ti­ga­tion was known to Trump and his aides.)

    * Hig­gins told me on Sun­day he stands by every­thing he wrote in his memo, but “I would prob­a­bly remove ‘bankers’ if I had to do it over and I would play up the intel com­mu­ni­ty role — which I neglect­ed.”

    Let’s get to the mem­os.

    1. The Jessie Liu memo: Short­ly before with­draw­ing the nom­i­na­tion of the for­mer D.C. U.S. attor­ney for a top Trea­sury role, the pres­i­dent reviewed a memo on Liu’s alleged mis­deeds, accord­ing to a source with direct knowl­edge.

    * Ledeen wrote the memo, and its find­ings left a strik­ing impres­sion on Trump, per sources with direct knowl­edge. Ledeen declined to com­ment.

    * A source with direct knowl­edge of the mem­o­’s con­tents said it con­tained 14 sec­tions build­ing a case for why Liu was unfit for the job for which Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Steven Mnuchin select­ed her, includ­ing:
    — Not act­ing on crim­i­nal refer­rals of some of Jus­tice Brett Kavanaugh­’s accusers.
    Sign­ing “the sen­tenc­ing fil­ing ask­ing for jail time” for Gen. Michael Fly­nn (a friend of Ledeen’s).
    — Hold­ing a lead­er­ship role in a wom­en’s lawyers net­work­ing group that Ledeen crit­i­cized as “pro-choice and anti-Ali­to.”
    — Not indict­ing for­mer deputy direc­tor of the FBI Andrew McCabe.
    — Dis­miss­ing charges against “vio­lent inau­gu­ra­tion pro­test­ers who plot­ted to dis­rupt the inau­gu­ra­tion.”

    * Nei­ther Liu nor the White House respond­ed to requests for com­ment.

    Between the lines: The Liu memo is not the first such memo to reach the pres­i­den­t’s desk — and there’s a com­mon thread in Groundswell, a con­ser­v­a­tive activist net­work that’s head­ed by Thomas and whose mem­bers include Ledeen.

    * Sources leaked me details of two oth­er mem­os from peo­ple asso­ci­at­ed with the Groundswell net­work that also caused a stir inside the White House over the past year.

    Thomas has spent a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time and ener­gy urg­ing Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials to change the per­son­nel inside his gov­ern­ment. This came to a head ear­ly last year.

    * Mem­bers of Groundswell, whose mem­bers ear­li­er led the suc­cess­ful cam­paign to remove McMas­ter as nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er, meet on Wednes­days in the D.C. offices of Judi­cial Watch, a con­ser­v­a­tive legal group that has led the fight against the Mueller probe.

    * Judi­cial Watch’s pres­i­dent is Tom Fit­ton. He’s a reg­u­lar on Fox News, and Trump reg­u­lar­ly retweets his com­men­tary on the “Deep State.”

    * Con­ser­v­a­tive activists who attend Groundswell meet­ings fun­neled names to Thomas, and she com­piled those rec­om­men­da­tions and passed them along to the pres­i­dent, accord­ing to a source close to her.

    * She hand­ed a memo of names direct­ly to the pres­i­dent in ear­ly 2019. (The New York Times report­ed on her group’s meet­ing with Trump at the time.)

    2. The Groundswell memo: The pres­i­den­tial per­son­nel office reviewed Thomas’ memo and deter­mined that some names she passed along for jobs were not appro­pri­ate can­di­dates. Trump may revis­it some giv­en his cur­rent mood.

    Poten­tial hires she offered to Trump, per sources with direct knowl­edge:

    * Sher­iff David Clarke for a senior Home­land Secu­ri­ty role.
    * Fox News reg­u­lar and for­mer Secret Ser­vice agent Dan Bongi­no for a Home­land Secu­ri­ty or coun­tert­er­ror­ism advis­er role.
    * Devin Nunes aide Derek Har­vey for the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil (where he served before McMas­ter pushed him out).
    * Radio talk show host Chris Plante for press sec­re­tary.
    * Fed­er­al­ist con­trib­u­tor Ben Wein­garten for the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil.

    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.

    3. The State Depart­ment memo: In one extra­or­di­nary inci­dent last year, Pres­i­dent Trump passed along anoth­er action memo to his then-head of pres­i­den­tial per­son­nel, Sean Doocey (since pushed to State and replaced with for­mer body man John McEn­tee). Peo­ple famil­iar with the Jan­u­ary 2019 memo say it came from con­ser­v­a­tives asso­ci­at­ed with Groundswell. Though nobody I’ve spo­ken to has claimed cred­it for it.

    * Accord­ing to sources briefed on the inci­dent, the memo was, in large part, an attack against Doocey. The memo accused him and a col­league in the State Depart­ment of obstruc­tion­ism and named sev­er­al State Depart­ment offi­cials who need­ed to be fired.
    * This list named for­mer deputy sec­re­tary John Sul­li­van, deputy under­sec­re­tary for man­age­ment Bill Todd, and under­sec­re­tary for polit­i­cal affairs David Hale, who lat­er tes­ti­fied in the impeach­ment hear­ings. (Todd and Hale are career for­eign ser­vice offi­cers, serv­ing in posi­tions typ­i­cal­ly reserved for career offi­cials.) Sul­li­van is now the U.S. Ambas­sador to Rus­sia.
    * The memo end­ed with an alle­ga­tion that Doocey had sneak­i­ly changed the name of an appoint­ment Trump had already agreed on, swap­ping out Mira Ricardel for Sean Cairn­cross to run the Mil­len­ni­um Chal­lenge Cor­po­ra­tion.
    * Sources briefed on the mat­ter say this par­tic­u­lar charge was false on its face because Cairn­cross was nom­i­nat­ed in Jan­u­ary 2018, months before Ricardel was briefly dis­cussed as an alter­na­tive, per sources with direct knowl­edge.

    The bot­tom line: As the New York Times’ Peter Bak­er wrote on Sat­ur­day, “in some of the most crit­i­cal cor­ners of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, offi­cials show up for work now nev­er entire­ly sure who will be there by the end of the evening — them­selves includ­ed.”

    * Groundswell is an influ­en­tial dri­ver of that uncer­tain­ty. Its mem­bers have been work­ing toward this moment for three years. They have lists. They have mem­os. And they have the pres­i­den­t’s ear.

    ———–

    “Exclu­sive: Trump’s “Deep State” hit list” by Jonathan Swan; Axios; 02/23/2020

    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:

    ...
    Thomas has spent a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time and ener­gy urg­ing Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials to change the per­son­nel inside his gov­ern­ment. This came to a head ear­ly last year.

    * Mem­bers of Groundswell, whose mem­bers ear­li­er led the suc­cess­ful cam­paign to remove McMas­ter as nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er, meet on Wednes­days in the D.C. offices of Judi­cial Watch, a con­ser­v­a­tive legal group that has led the fight against the Mueller probe.
    * Judi­cial Watch’s pres­i­dent is Tom Fit­ton. He’s a reg­u­lar on Fox News, and Trump reg­u­lar­ly retweets his com­men­tary on the “Deep State.”
    * Con­ser­v­a­tive activists who attend Groundswell meet­ings fun­neled names to Thomas, and she com­piled those rec­om­men­da­tions and passed them along to the pres­i­dent, accord­ing to a source close to her.
    * She hand­ed a memo of names direct­ly to the pres­i­dent in ear­ly 2019. (The New York Times report­ed on her group’s meet­ing with Trump at the time.)

    2. The Groundswell memo: The pres­i­den­tial per­son­nel office reviewed Thomas’ memo and deter­mined that some names she passed along for jobs were not appro­pri­ate can­di­dates. Trump may revis­it some giv­en his cur­rent mood.

    Poten­tial hires she offered to Trump, per sources with direct knowl­edge:

    * Sher­iff David Clarke for a senior Home­land Secu­ri­ty role.
    * Fox News reg­u­lar and for­mer Secret Ser­vice agent Dan Bongi­no for a Home­land Secu­ri­ty or coun­tert­er­ror­ism advis­er role.
    * Devin Nunes aide Derek Har­vey for the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil (where he served before McMas­ter pushed him out).
    * Radio talk show host Chris Plante for press sec­re­tary.
    * Fed­er­al­ist con­trib­u­tor Ben Wein­garten for the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    1. The Jessie Liu memo: Short­ly before with­draw­ing the nom­i­na­tion of the for­mer D.C. U.S. attor­ney for a top Trea­sury role, the pres­i­dent reviewed a memo on Liu’s alleged mis­deeds, accord­ing to a source with direct knowl­edge.

    * Ledeen wrote the memo, and its find­ings left a strik­ing impres­sion on Trump, per sources with direct knowl­edge. Ledeen declined to com­ment.
    * A source with direct knowl­edge of the mem­o­’s con­tents said it con­tained 14 sec­tions build­ing a case for why Liu was unfit for the job for which Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Steven Mnuchin select­ed her, includ­ing:
    — Not act­ing on crim­i­nal refer­rals of some of Jus­tice Brett Kavanaugh­’s accusers.
    Sign­ing “the sen­tenc­ing fil­ing ask­ing for jail time” for Gen. Michael Fly­nn (a friend of Ledeen’s).
    — Hold­ing a lead­er­ship role in a wom­en’s lawyers net­work­ing group that Ledeen crit­i­cized as “pro-choice and anti-Ali­to.”
    — Not indict­ing for­mer deputy direc­tor of the FBI Andrew McCabe.
    — Dis­miss­ing charges against “vio­lent inau­gu­ra­tion pro­test­ers who plot­ted to dis­rupt the inau­gu­ra­tion.”
    * Nei­ther Liu nor the White House respond­ed to requests for com­ment.

    Between the lines: The Liu memo is not the first such memo to reach the pres­i­den­t’s desk — and there’s a com­mon thread in Groundswell, a con­ser­v­a­tive activist net­work that’s head­ed by Thomas and whose mem­bers include Ledeen.

    * Sources leaked me details of two oth­er mem­os from peo­ple asso­ci­at­ed with the Groundswell net­work that also caused a stir inside the White House over the past year.

    ...

    The bot­tom line: As the New York Times’ Peter Bak­er wrote on Sat­ur­day, “in some of the most crit­i­cal cor­ners of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, offi­cials show up for work now nev­er entire­ly sure who will be there by the end of the evening — them­selves includ­ed.”

    * Groundswell is an influ­en­tial dri­ver of that uncer­tain­ty. Its mem­bers have been work­ing toward this moment for three years. They have lists. They have mem­os. And they have the pres­i­den­t’s ear.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    3. The State Depart­ment memo: In one extra­or­di­nary inci­dent last year, Pres­i­dent Trump passed along anoth­er action memo to his then-head of pres­i­den­tial per­son­nel, Sean Doocey (since pushed to State and replaced with for­mer body man John McEn­tee). Peo­ple famil­iar with the Jan­u­ary 2019 memo say it came from con­ser­v­a­tives asso­ci­at­ed with Groundswell. Though nobody I’ve spo­ken to has claimed cred­it for it.

    * Accord­ing to sources briefed on the inci­dent, the memo was, in large part, an attack against Doocey. The memo accused him and a col­league in the State Depart­ment of obstruc­tion­ism and named sev­er­al State Depart­ment offi­cials who need­ed to be fired.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The big pic­ture: Since Trump’s Sen­ate acquit­tal, aides say the pres­i­dent has crossed a psy­cho­log­i­cal line regard­ing what he calls the “Deep State.” He feels his gov­ern­ment — from Jus­tice to State to Defense to Home­land Secu­ri­ty — is filled with “snakes.” He wants them fired and replaced ASAP.

    * “I think it’s a very pos­i­tive devel­op­ment,” said Rich Hig­gins, who served on Trump’s Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil in 2017. H.R. McMas­ter removed Hig­gins after he wrote a memo spec­u­lat­ing that Trump’s pres­i­den­cy faced threats from Marx­ists, the “Deep State,” so-called glob­al­ists, bankers, Islamists, and estab­lish­ment Repub­li­cans. (This was long before the full scope of the FBI’s Rus­sia inves­ti­ga­tion was known to Trump and his aides.)

    * Hig­gins told me on Sun­day he stands by every­thing he wrote in his memo, but “I would prob­a­bly remove ‘bankers’ if I had to do it over and I would play up the intel com­mu­ni­ty role — which I neglect­ed.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 5, 2023, 1:52 am
  10. 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:

    MSNBC

    Some on the right still see McCarthy­ism as worth cel­e­brat­ing

    Steve Ban­non believes Joe McCarthy and his pan­el on “un-Amer­i­can activ­i­ties” were “extreme­ly, extreme­ly help­ful.” On the right, he’s not alone.

    By Steve Benen
    Feb. 14, 2023, 10:18 AM CST

    It’s not uncom­mon for Don­ald Trump to com­plain about his per­ceived foes engag­ing in “McCarthy­ism.” As the for­mer pres­i­dent sees it, to emu­late the late Sen. Joe McCarthy and his dem­a­gog­ic tac­tics is to engage in obvi­ous wrong­do­ing.

    Occa­sion­al­ly, how­ev­er, Trump’s allies have a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the Wis­con­sin Repub­li­can and his scan­dalous meth­ods. Con­sid­er Steve Bannon’s on-air com­men­tary from late last week:

    “What peo­ple for­get is that the McCarthy hear­ings and the House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties [Com­mit­tee] were quite pro­duc­tive in turf­ing out com­mu­nists, right? KGB com­mu­nists that were deeply embed­ded in the State Depart­ment and oth­er ele­ments of the gov­ern­ment, it should have gone fur­ther. ... The McCarthy hear­ings were extreme­ly, extreme­ly help­ful.”

    It was near­ly a decade ago when Ban­non com­plained about “pop cul­ture” con­tribut­ing to the idea that McCarthy was some kind of “vil­lain.” Evi­dent­ly, 10 years lat­er, he hasn’t changed his mind.

    Let’s not for­get that Ban­non isn’t alone on this. Revis­it­ing our ear­li­er cov­er­age, it was short­ly after Sen. Ted Cruz began his con­gres­sion­al career when a Dal­las Morn­ing News reporter told the Texas Repub­li­can that he’d been com­pared at times to Joe McCarthy. Cruz said that crit­i­cism “may be a sign that per­haps we’re doing some­thing right,” which seemed like a curi­ous response giv­en the con­text.

    Asked specif­i­cal­ly, “Is McCarthy some­one you admire?” Cruz wouldn’t answer. A few years lat­er, a Cruz nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er said McCarthy was “spot on” about com­mu­nists infil­trat­ing the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment in the 1950s.

    In 2014, after his failed Repub­li­can Sen­ate cam­paign in Mis­souri, then-Rep. Todd Akin com­pared him­self to McCarthy — and he meant it in a good way.

    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.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Some on the right still see McCarthy­ism as worth cel­e­brat­ing” By Steve Benen; MSNBC; 02/14/2023

    “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:

    ...
    Occa­sion­al­ly, how­ev­er, Trump’s allies have a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the Wis­con­sin Repub­li­can and his scan­dalous meth­ods. Con­sid­er Steve Bannon’s on-air com­men­tary from late last week:

    “What peo­ple for­get is that the McCarthy hear­ings and the House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties [Com­mit­tee] were quite pro­duc­tive in turf­ing out com­mu­nists, right? KGB com­mu­nists that were deeply embed­ded in the State Depart­ment and oth­er ele­ments of the gov­ern­ment, it should have gone fur­ther. ... The McCarthy hear­ings were extreme­ly, extreme­ly help­ful.”

    It was near­ly a decade ago when Ban­non com­plained about “pop cul­ture” con­tribut­ing to the idea that McCarthy was some kind of “vil­lain.” Evi­dent­ly, 10 years lat­er, he hasn’t changed his mind.

    Let’s not for­get that Ban­non isn’t alone on this. Revis­it­ing our ear­li­er cov­er­age, it was short­ly after Sen. Ted Cruz began his con­gres­sion­al career when a Dal­las Morn­ing News reporter told the Texas Repub­li­can that he’d been com­pared at times to Joe McCarthy. Cruz said that crit­i­cism “may be a sign that per­haps we’re doing some­thing right,” which seemed like a curi­ous response giv­en the con­text.
    ...

    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:

    Media Mat­ters

    Steve Ban­non says the House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties Com­mit­tee hear­ings “should have gone fur­ther” and “were extreme­ly, extreme­ly help­ful”

    Ban­non was defend­ing the com­par­i­son with the new “Weaponiza­tion of the Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment” com­mit­tee

    Writ­ten by Media Mat­ters Staff
    Pub­lished 02/10/23 10:49 AM EST

    Cita­tion From the Feb­ru­ary 10, 2023, edi­tion of Real Amer­i­ca’s Voice’s War Room

    STEVE BANNON (HOST): What peo­ple for­get is that the McCarthy hear­ings and the House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties were quite pro­duc­tive in turf­ing out com­mu­nists, right? KGB com­mu­nists that were deeply embed­ded in the State Depart­ment and oth­er ele­ments of the gov­ern­ment, it should have gone fur­ther. If it had gone fur­ther, right, we would not have law – although it came after the, the big part of it after we lost Chi­na to Mao Zedong and the com­mu­nists because of infil­tra­tion into the State Depart­ment. 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.

    ———–

    “Steve Ban­non says the House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties Com­mit­tee hear­ings “should have gone fur­ther” and “were extreme­ly, extreme­ly help­ful”” by Media Mat­ters Staff; Media Mat­ters; 02/10/2023

    “...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:

    Texas Free­dom Net­work
    Blog

    Reha­bil­i­tat­ing Joseph McCarthy?

    Octo­ber 29, 2009

    To the abun­dant evi­dence show­ing that ide­o­logues and non-his­to­ri­ans shouldn’t be decid­ing what stu­dents learn in their his­to­ry class­rooms, add anoth­er exhib­it: far-right efforts to use our kids’ class­rooms to reha­bil­i­tate the image of Joseph McCarthy and turn him into an Amer­i­can hero. Sad­ly, that’s what some mem­bers of the Texas State Board of Edu­ca­tion and peo­ple they have appoint­ed to help revise pub­lic school social stud­ies cur­ricu­lum stan­dards are now try­ing to do.

    ...

    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.

    Once again, how­ev­er, these ama­teur “his­to­ri­ans” sim­ply don’t know what they’re talk­ing about.

    First, the word is “Venona,” not the Ital­ian city of Verona. “Venona” was the name giv­en a U.S. coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence project that decod­ed thou­sands of inter­cept­ed cables between spies in the Unit­ed States and the Sovi­et Union. U.S. author­i­ties were able, over sev­er­al decades, to decode and read about 2,900 of the cabled mes­sages (a frac­tion of the total) sent between 1941 and 1946.

    Sec­ond, the claims by McLeroy, Bar­ton, Mar­shall and the oth­ers about what the Venona project actu­al­ly revealed about McCarthy’s smear cam­paign are mis­lead­ing (at best). Cur­ricu­lum writ­ers will craft bet­ter stan­dards if they lis­ten to real his­to­ri­ans instead of far-right ide­o­logues push­ing an agen­da.

    Among the most knowl­edgable experts on the Venona project is Har­vey Klehr, a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and his­to­ry at Emory Uni­ver­si­ty. Prof. Klehr trav­eled in 1992 to the for­mer Sovi­et Union, where he got access to Sovi­et spy archives. He also stud­ied the Venona cables after the U.S. gov­ern­ment declas­si­fied them in the 1990s. With John Earl Haynes, Prof. Klehr co-authored Venona: Decod­ing Sovi­et Espi­onage in Amer­i­ca, pub­lished in 1999 by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty.

    In short, when it comes to Sovi­et espi­onage in Amer­i­ca, the Venona project and Joseph McCarthy, Prof. Klehr has the cre­den­tials to show that he knows what he’s talk­ing about. In fact, he is very crit­i­cal of those who still deny the extent of that espi­onage or down­play its sig­nif­i­cance.

    But he isn’t buy­ing efforts to reha­bil­i­tate McCarthy’s image. Prof. Klehr told an audi­ence at a 2005 con­fer­ence that McCarthy may have been right about “some of the larg­er issues” — such as, that there actu­al­ly were com­mu­nist spies in Amer­i­ca — but that he was reck­less­ly wrong on much else, espe­cial­ly the details:

    [V]irtually none of the peo­ple that McCarthy claimed or alleged were Sovi­et agents turn up in Venona. He did iden­ti­fy a few small fry who we now know were spies but only a few. And there is lit­tle evi­dence that those he fin­gered were among the uniden­ti­fied spies of Venona. Many of his claims were wild­ly inac­cu­rate; his charges filled with errors of fact, mis­judg­ments of orga­ni­za­tions and innu­en­does dis­guised as evi­dence. He failed to rec­og­nize or under­stand the dif­fer­ences among gen­uine lib­er­als, fel­low-trav­el­ing lib­er­als, Com­mu­nist dupes, Com­mu­nists and spies — dis­tinc­tions that were impor­tant to make. The new infor­ma­tion from Russ­ian and Amer­i­can archives does not vin­di­cate McCarthy. He remains a dem­a­gogue, whose wild charges actu­al­ly made the fight against Com­mu­nist sub­ver­sion more dif­fi­cult. Like Gresham’s Law, McCarthy’s alle­ga­tions mar­gin­al­ized the accu­rate claims. Because his facts were so often wrong, real spies were able to hide behind the cov­er of being one of his vic­tims and even per­suade well-mean­ing but naïve peo­ple that the who le anti-com­mu­nist cause was based on inac­cu­ra­cies and hys­te­ria. [Empha­sis added.]

    So where are McLeroy and his fel­low ide­o­logues get­ting their infor­ma­tion? Clear­ly, it’s not from real his­to­ri­ans. Their like­ly source is a favorite of far-right ide­o­logues today: fringe right-wing writ­ers and com­men­ta­tors like Ann Coul­ter. In her 2003 book Trea­son: Lib­er­al Treach­ery from the Cold War to the War on Ter­ror­ism, for exam­ple, Coul­ter insist­ed that the Venona Papers exon­er­at­ed McCarthy. She charges that lib­er­als don’t love their coun­try and have under­mined its secu­ri­ty, and she points to con­ser­v­a­tives like McCarthy as the true defend­ers of Amer­i­ca and Amer­i­can val­ues.

    Prof. Klehr com­pares Coul­ter to those who excuse com­mu­nist spies for doing what they may have thought was “patri­ot­ic” because they believed their loy­al­ties were to the “mass­es” of the larg­er world rather than sim­ply to their coun­try:

    “If espi­onage on behalf of Joseph Stalin’s Rus­sia is sim­ply an untra­di­tion­al form of patri­o­tism, then words like loy­al­ty and patri­o­tism have lost any mean­ing. It is only a short step to pro­claim­ing that Joseph McCarthy’s dis­re­gard for due process and reck­less smear­ing of inno­cent peo­ple is a non-tra­di­tion­al way of affirm­ing basic Amer­i­can val­ues. Which is exact­ly the argu­ment that Ann Coul­ter makes in her unfor­tu­nate recent book, Trea­son, which seeks to reha­bil­i­tate Sen­a­tor McCarthy as a great truth-teller. Her only excuse is that she is not a his­to­ri­an but a pun­dit and there­fore can claim indif­fer­ence to fac­tu­al evi­dence.”

    But Coulter’s argu­ments are the kind of non­sense peo­ple like McLeroy, Mar­shall and Bar­ton want pub­lic schools to teach Texas stu­dents. Their inter­est is not in teach­ing real, fac­tu­al his­to­ry. They want to rewrite his­to­ry so that it aligns with their own per­son­al and polit­i­cal beliefs. (Remem­ber that Bar­ton want­ed to cen­sor dis­cus­sions of César Chavez in social stud­ies class­es because the late labor leader’s polit­i­cal asso­ci­a­tions alleged­ly made him a poor role mod­el for stu­dents: “His open affil­i­a­tion with Saul Alinsky’s move­ments cer­tain­ly makes dubi­ous that he is a praise­wor­thy to be her­ald­ed to stu­dents as some­one ‘who mod­eled active par­tic­i­pa­tion in the demo­c­ra­t­ic process.’”)

    As we have said, it would be far bet­ter if real his­to­ri­ans and social stud­ies experts were mak­ing these cur­ricu­lum deci­sions. But that’s not going to hap­pen — state law­mak­ers refused to act this spring on leg­is­la­tion requir­ing such a change in the cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment process. So we’re stuck with deci­sion-mak­ers like McLeroy. Recall what he has said in the past: “I dis­agree with these experts! Somebody’s got­ta stand up to experts!” And facts be damned.

    ————

    “Reha­bil­i­tat­ing Joseph McCarthy?”; Texas Free­dom Net­work; 10/29/2009

    “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:

    ...
    Sec­ond, the claims by McLeroy, Bar­ton, Mar­shall and the oth­ers about what the Venona project actu­al­ly revealed about McCarthy’s smear cam­paign are mis­lead­ing (at best). Cur­ricu­lum writ­ers will craft bet­ter stan­dards if they lis­ten to real his­to­ri­ans instead of far-right ide­o­logues push­ing an agen­da.

    Among the most knowl­edgable experts on the Venona project is Har­vey Klehr, a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and his­to­ry at Emory Uni­ver­si­ty. Prof. Klehr trav­eled in 1992 to the for­mer Sovi­et Union, where he got access to Sovi­et spy archives. He also stud­ied the Venona cables after the U.S. gov­ern­ment declas­si­fied them in the 1990s. With John Earl Haynes, Prof. Klehr co-authored Venona: Decod­ing Sovi­et Espi­onage in Amer­i­ca, pub­lished in 1999 by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty.

    ...

    But he isn’t buy­ing efforts to reha­bil­i­tate McCarthy’s image. Prof. Klehr told an audi­ence at a 2005 con­fer­ence that McCarthy may have been right about “some of the larg­er issues” — such as, that there actu­al­ly were com­mu­nist spies in Amer­i­ca — but that he was reck­less­ly wrong on much else, espe­cial­ly the details:

    [V]irtually none of the peo­ple that McCarthy claimed or alleged were Sovi­et agents turn up in Venona. He did iden­ti­fy a few small fry who we now know were spies but only a few. And there is lit­tle evi­dence that those he fin­gered were among the uniden­ti­fied spies of Venona. Many of his claims were wild­ly inac­cu­rate; his charges filled with errors of fact, mis­judg­ments of orga­ni­za­tions and innu­en­does dis­guised as evi­dence. He failed to rec­og­nize or under­stand the dif­fer­ences among gen­uine lib­er­als, fel­low-trav­el­ing lib­er­als, Com­mu­nist dupes, Com­mu­nists and spies — dis­tinc­tions that were impor­tant to make. The new infor­ma­tion from Russ­ian and Amer­i­can archives does not vin­di­cate McCarthy. He remains a dem­a­gogue, whose wild charges actu­al­ly made the fight against Com­mu­nist sub­ver­sion more dif­fi­cult. Like Gresham’s Law, McCarthy’s alle­ga­tions mar­gin­al­ized the accu­rate claims. Because his facts were so often wrong, real spies were able to hide behind the cov­er of being one of his vic­tims and even per­suade well-mean­ing but naïve peo­ple that the who le anti-com­mu­nist cause was based on inac­cu­ra­cies and hys­te­ria. [Empha­sis added.]

    ...

    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:

    ...
    So where are McLeroy and his fel­low ide­o­logues get­ting their infor­ma­tion? Clear­ly, it’s not from real his­to­ri­ans. Their like­ly source is a favorite of far-right ide­o­logues today: fringe right-wing writ­ers and com­men­ta­tors like Ann Coul­ter. In her 2003 book Trea­son: Lib­er­al Treach­ery from the Cold War to the War on Ter­ror­ism, for exam­ple, Coul­ter insist­ed that the Venona Papers exon­er­at­ed McCarthy. She charges that lib­er­als don’t love their coun­try and have under­mined its secu­ri­ty, and she points to con­ser­v­a­tives like McCarthy as the true defend­ers of Amer­i­ca and Amer­i­can val­ues.

    Prof. Klehr com­pares Coul­ter to those who excuse com­mu­nist spies for doing what they may have thought was “patri­ot­ic” because they believed their loy­al­ties were to the “mass­es” of the larg­er world rather than sim­ply to their coun­try:

    “If espi­onage on behalf of Joseph Stalin’s Rus­sia is sim­ply an untra­di­tion­al form of patri­o­tism, then words like loy­al­ty and patri­o­tism have lost any mean­ing. It is only a short step to pro­claim­ing that Joseph McCarthy’s dis­re­gard for due process and reck­less smear­ing of inno­cent peo­ple is a non-tra­di­tion­al way of affirm­ing basic Amer­i­can val­ues. Which is exact­ly the argu­ment that Ann Coul­ter makes in her unfor­tu­nate recent book, Trea­son, which seeks to reha­bil­i­tate Sen­a­tor McCarthy as a great truth-teller. Her only excuse is that she is not a his­to­ri­an but a pun­dit and there­fore can claim indif­fer­ence to fac­tu­al evi­dence.”

    But Coulter’s argu­ments are the kind of non­sense peo­ple like McLeroy, Mar­shall and Bar­ton want pub­lic schools to teach Texas stu­dents. Their inter­est is not in teach­ing real, fac­tu­al his­to­ry. They want to rewrite his­to­ry so that it aligns with their own per­son­al and polit­i­cal beliefs. (Remem­ber that Bar­ton want­ed to cen­sor dis­cus­sions of César Chavez in social stud­ies class­es because the late labor leader’s polit­i­cal asso­ci­a­tions alleged­ly made him a poor role mod­el for stu­dents: “His open affil­i­a­tion with Saul Alinsky’s move­ments cer­tain­ly makes dubi­ous that he is a praise­wor­thy to be her­ald­ed to stu­dents as some­one ‘who mod­eled active par­tic­i­pa­tion in the demo­c­ra­t­ic process.’”)
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 25, 2023, 8:50 pm
  11. 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’:

    New York Mag­a­zine

    Trump to Seniors: DeSan­tis Is Your Mor­tal Ene­my
    Por­trait of Ed Kil­go­re By Ed Kil­go­re, polit­i­cal colum­nist for Intel­li­gencer since 2015

    By Ed Kil­go­re
    Feb. 28, 2023

    Ear­li­er this year as Repub­li­can and con­ser­v­a­tive-media excite­ment over a prospec­tive Ron DeSan­tis 2024 pres­i­den­tial bid was grow­ing dai­ly, there were reports that Don­ald Trump and his advis­ers were plot­ting to go medieval on the Flori­da gov­er­nor for his past sup­port of ben­e­fit and eli­gi­bil­i­ty cuts to Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare. Sure enough, last week Trump explod­ed on this sub­ject in a Truth Social post:

    [see screen­shot of Truth Social post]

    Inco­her­ent and rage‑y as it sound­ed, Trump was clear­ly build­ing a por­trait of DeSan­tis as an old-school Estab­lish­ment Repub­li­can linked to fig­ures like George Bush, Paul Ryan, and Karl Rove. While serv­ing as a back-bench House mem­ber from 2013 to 2018, DeSan­tis was indeed a loy­al sup­port­er of all the stan­dard-brand Repub­li­can bud­get, trade, and defense poli­cies that Trump attacked dur­ing his semi-hos­tile takeover of the GOP. As a pre­emp­tive attack on his most dan­ger­ous 2024 rival, Trump wants to con­vince his vot­ing base that DeSan­tis is still a “RINO” glob­al­ist granny starv­er, not the sav­age anti-woke “pop­ulist” who is cur­rent­ly thrilling audi­ences on Fox News.

    And unlike the nick­name Meat­ball Ron, this line of attack clear­ly isn’t a one-off. On Truth Social, Trump is con­tin­u­ing and sharp­en­ing his bar­rage against DeSan­tis:

    Trump using tra­di­tion­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic mes­sag­ing on enti­tle­ments this morn­ing on Truth Social to attack Ron DeSan­tis pic.twitter.com/Ibtn815rvR— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) Feb­ru­ary 28, 2023

    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.

    The tricky part of this line of attack, how­ev­er, is that a lot of Trump’s friends are as vul­ner­a­ble to it as DeSan­tis, who was, after all, a found­ing mem­ber of that MAGA hotbed the House Free­dom Cau­cus. For­get about the pre-Trump past; some Free­dom Cau­cus types still seem inter­est­ed in using their lever­age over a nec­es­sary debt-lim­it mea­sure to force the very kind of cuts in retire­ment pro­grams that the for­mer pres­i­dent is accus­ing “RINOs” of pur­su­ing.

    ...

    ———-

    “Trump to Seniors: DeSan­tis Is Your Mor­tal Ene­my” By Ed Kil­go­re; New York Mag­a­zine; 02/28/2023

    “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:

    ...
    Inco­her­ent and rage‑y as it sound­ed, Trump was clear­ly build­ing a por­trait of DeSan­tis as an old-school Estab­lish­ment Repub­li­can linked to fig­ures like George Bush, Paul Ryan, and Karl Rove. While serv­ing as a back-bench House mem­ber from 2013 to 2018, DeSan­tis was indeed a loy­al sup­port­er of all the stan­dard-brand Repub­li­can bud­get, trade, and defense poli­cies that Trump attacked dur­ing his semi-hos­tile takeover of the GOP. As a pre­emp­tive attack on his most dan­ger­ous 2024 rival, Trump wants to con­vince his vot­ing base that DeSan­tis is still a “RINO” glob­al­ist granny starv­er, not the sav­age anti-woke “pop­ulist” who is cur­rent­ly thrilling audi­ences on Fox News.

    ...

    The tricky part of this line of attack, how­ev­er, is that a lot of Trump’s friends are as vul­ner­a­ble to it as DeSan­tis, who was, after all, a found­ing mem­ber of that MAGA hotbed the House Free­dom Cau­cus. For­get about the pre-Trump past; some Free­dom Cau­cus types still seem inter­est­ed in using their lever­age over a nec­es­sary debt-lim­it mea­sure to force the very kind of cuts in retire­ment pro­grams that the for­mer pres­i­dent is accus­ing “RINOs” of pur­su­ing.
    ...

    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 Wash­ing­ton Post

    The for­mer Trump aide craft­ing the House GOP’s debt ceil­ing play­book
    The nation­al debt explod­ed on Rus­sell Vought’s watch. Now he wants Repub­li­can law­mak­ers to play hard­ball.

    By Jeff Stein, Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arns­dorf
    Updat­ed Feb­ru­ary 19, 2023 at 10:28 a.m. EST|Published Feb­ru­ary 19, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST

    Last month, amid the rau­cous bat­tle to elect House Speak­er Kevin McCarthy, for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump spoke with a hard-line Repub­li­can who had been influ­en­tial in block­ing McCarthy’s path to pow­er.

    The agi­ta­tor was not a mem­ber of Con­gress, or even an elect­ed offi­cial. It was Trump’s for­mer bud­get direc­tor, Rus­sell Vought, who has qui­et­ly emerged as an intel­lec­tu­al leader of the GOP’s con­ser­v­a­tive flank.

    Vought explained his oppo­si­tion to McCarthy, cit­ing the Cal­i­for­nia Republican’s deals with Democ­rats to increase fed­er­al spend­ing. Trump, who sup­port­ed McCarthy, didn’t push back, Vought said. Con­ser­v­a­tives even­tu­al­ly extract­ed con­ces­sions from McCarthy that could empow­er them to secure spend­ing cuts.

    “He knows where I’m at,” Vought said of Trump in a recent inter­view. “He was very respect­ful of where I’m com­ing from.”

    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.

    Sev­er­al Repub­li­can law­mak­ers and staffers pri­vate­ly acknowl­edged talk­ing to Vought at least once a week. Ear­li­er this month, he briefed about four dozen GOP sen­a­tors over lunch in the Capi­tol, accord­ing to Sen. Rick Scott (R‑Fla.), who said it was at least the third time he had heard Vought’s pitch for deal­ing with the debt lim­it.

    Vought helped push for a new House pan­el led by Rep. Jim Jor­dan (R‑Ohio) to inves­ti­gate the alleged “weaponiza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment” under Pres­i­dent Biden. Stephen K. Ban­non, the for­mer Trump polit­i­cal advis­er, called Vought the “intel­lec­tu­al archi­tect” of House con­ser­v­a­tives’ rebel­lion against McCarthy. Vought is also close with Rep. Chip Roy (R‑Tex.), who spear­head­ed that fight.

    “Russ is the guy con­ser­v­a­tives go to for inti­mate knowl­edge of how the fed­er­al bud­get works,” said Newt Gin­grich, who served as House speak­er in the 1990s and remains a close advis­er to McCarthy. “He under­stands an enor­mous amount of fed­er­al bud­get­ing, and that makes him a very big play­er.”

    Vought’s agen­da rep­re­sents a major depar­ture from tra­di­tion­al con­ser­v­a­tive ideas about bal­anc­ing the fed­er­al bud­get. Once, for­mer house speak­er Paul D. Ryan (R‑Wis.) pushed cuts to Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare, the main dri­vers of fed­er­al spend­ing, as the answer. Vought argues for some­thing dif­fer­ent. A Trump acolyte, he echoes the for­mer president’s insis­tence that the pop­u­lar fed­er­al retire­ment pro­grams — which go to the mid­dle and upper class­es as well as the poor — should be walled off from cuts. Instead, Vought has sold many Repub­li­cans on the untest­ed premise that the GOP can push to oblit­er­ate almost all oth­er major forms of fed­er­al spend­ing, espe­cial­ly pro­grams that ben­e­fit low­er-income Amer­i­cans, and dare Biden to stand in the way.

    Vought’s bud­get pro­pos­al calls for cut­ting $9 tril­lion over the next decade from thou­sands of domes­tic pro­grams — slash­ing fund­ing for gov­ern­ment agen­cies, stu­dent loans, and anti-pover­ty pro­grams such as hous­ing, health care and food assis­tance — while urg­ing Repub­li­cans to attack the “woke bureau­cra­cy.” Vought even advo­cates for freez­ing mil­i­tary spend­ing, which is still anath­e­ma in many GOP cir­cles.

    “I’m tired of this focus on Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare, as if you’re climb­ing a moun­tain and can’t make any progress on that moun­tain until you go to the eagle’s nest on the top,” Vought told The Wash­ing­ton Post. “You take these cuts to the Amer­i­can peo­ple, and you win.”

    In the 10-year bud­get pro­pos­al he has cir­cu­lat­ed on Capi­tol Hill, Vought char­ac­ter­izes this approach as part of an exis­ten­tial bat­tle for the soul of the coun­try. The plan includes $2 tril­lion in cuts to Med­ic­aid, the health pro­gram for the poor; more than $600 bil­lion in cuts to the Afford­able Care Act; more than $400 bil­lion in cuts to food stamps; hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars in cuts to edu­ca­tion­al sub­si­dies; and a halv­ing of the State Depart­ment and the Labor Depart­ment, among oth­er fed­er­al agen­cies. While con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans have yet to release a bud­get plan, House GOP law­mak­ers are weigh­ing cuts to these pro­grams as a way to reduce the debt with­out touch­ing Medicare and Social Secu­ri­ty.

    “Amer­i­ca can­not be saved unless the cur­rent grip of woke and weaponized gov­ern­ment is bro­ken. That is the cen­tral and imme­di­ate threat fac­ing the coun­try — the one that all our states­men must rise tall to van­quish,” Vought writes in his bud­get pro­pos­al. “The bat­tle can­not wait.”

    ...

    Vought was a polar­iz­ing fig­ure long before the cur­rent debt lim­it fight. His tenure in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion was marked by con­tro­ver­sy over his past incen­di­ary com­ments about Mus­lims and a deci­sion to imple­ment a freeze on aid to Ukraine that put him at the cen­ter of the first Trump impeach­ment.

    His new think tank advo­cates on hot-but­ton cul­ture war issues, such as “expos­ing crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.” The group has not dis­closed its fund­ing sources, but its annu­al report says it took in $1.1 mil­lion in 2021. Vought recent­ly told C‑SPAN that the orga­ni­za­tion takes no cor­po­rate mon­ey and is sup­port­ed by grass-roots donors across the coun­try.

    Most awk­ward­ly for his cur­rent posi­tion: Vought over­saw enor­mous increas­es in the nation­al debt as Trump’s direc­tor of the Office of Man­age­ment and Bud­get. The debt bal­looned by stag­ger­ing sums on Vought’s watch: $1 tril­lion in his first year, and a whop­ping $4 tril­lion in his sec­ond, as Con­gress agreed on a bipar­ti­san basis to spend tril­lions of dol­lars in response to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. Trump repeat­ed­ly over­ruled fis­cal hawks, like Vought, in approv­ing the new spend­ing.

    Now, with a Demo­c­rat in the White House, Vought says he wants to use the lever­age of the debt ceil­ing to force Democ­rats to rein in a fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy that he views as abus­ing its pow­er against Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. For exam­ple, he said, the gov­ern­ment is spend­ing mon­ey to detain peo­ple who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the storm­ing of the Capi­tol on Jan. 6, 2021.

    “We view our role as almost act­ing like a shad­ow OMB on the out­side,” Vought told The Post.

    Even some Repub­li­cans who admire Vought’s exper­tise say his bud­get blue­print is based on unre­al­is­tic assump­tions. To make it bal­ance in 10 years, for exam­ple, Vought’s bud­get also projects that the num­ber of work­ing Amer­i­cans will increase by 14.5 mil­lion peo­ple more than Con­gres­sion­al Bud­get Office pre­dicts, which would allow the Amer­i­can econ­o­my to grow faster, reduc­ing the deficit by anoth­er $3.8 tril­lion.

    Vought argues that Amer­i­cans will pour into the job mar­ket because of cuts to fed­er­al aid pro­grams, but his fig­ures are almost cer­tain­ly unre­al­is­tic, par­tic­u­lar­ly because of the GOP’s oppo­si­tion to high­er lev­els of immi­gra­tion, said William Gal­ston, a for­mer domes­tic pol­i­cy offi­cial in Pres­i­dent Bill Clinton’s admin­is­tra­tion who is now a senior fel­low at the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion, a D.C.-based think tank.

    “Russ is an expert. He knows the details; he knows the bud­get back­wards and for­wards,” said one for­mer GOP offi­cial, speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to can­did­ly describe a for­mer col­league. “But he’s sell­ing con­ser­v­a­tives a fan­ta­sy, which is achiev­ing a bal­anced bud­get with­out cut­ting any­thing pop­u­lar.

    “We’re going to bal­ance the bud­get by ‘end­ing woke?’ Give me a break.”

    ...

    Raised about an hour north of New York City, Vought grad­u­at­ed from George Wash­ing­ton Law School and rose through the tra­di­tion­al con­ser­v­a­tive insti­tu­tions in Wash­ing­ton.

    He start­ed as a Hill staffer in 1999, work­ing for Sen. Phil Gramm (R‑Tex.) before becom­ing a pol­i­cy direc­tor for the House Repub­li­can Con­fer­ence under then-Rep. Mike Pence (R‑Ind.). By the mid-2000s, Vought had become the bud­get guru for the Repub­li­can Study Com­mit­tee, which sought to cut Medicare and Social Secu­ri­ty to rein in fed­er­al spend­ing. Vought then joined the advo­ca­cy arm of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion think tank, where he worked to solid­i­fy GOP oppo­si­tion to the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion.

    ...

    “He was ide­o­log­i­cal in the extreme,” said one of his for­mer col­leagues at Her­itage, speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to can­did­ly describe pri­vate exchanges. For instance, Vought took seri­ous­ly unfound­ed claims that the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood extrem­ist group had infil­trat­ed the U.S. gov­ern­ment, the per­son said. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.) lat­er chal­lenged Vought over a blog post in which he wrote that Mus­lims “stand con­demned” with­out Jesus Christ. (Vought is now again work­ing with Her­itage on the agen­da for the next GOP pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion.)

    When Trump burst into nation­al pol­i­tics, many GOP pol­i­cy ana­lysts recoiled at his appar­ent dis­re­gard for seri­ous pol­i­cy. Vought saw an oppor­tu­ni­ty. He joined the Trump White House as deputy bud­get direc­tor in 2017, work­ing under Mick Mul­vaney, who lat­er became Trump’s chief of staff.

    Though a for­mer mem­ber of the Free­dom Cau­cus who was known as a bomb-throw­er, Mul­vaney was seen by OMB staff as more engag­ing and agree­able than Vought, who quick­ly devel­oped a rep­u­ta­tion as fierce and antag­o­nis­tic. Even as deputy direc­tor, how­ev­er, Vought became OMB’s voice in craft­ing the administration’s bud­get pro­pos­als, and by July 2020, Vought was OMB direc­tor.

    Yet Vought’s boss often dis­re­gard­ed his views. Vought would push cuts for state-lev­el pro­grams, then a GOP sen­a­tor or gov­er­nor would per­suade Trump to reverse it, said one for­mer gov­ern­ment offi­cial, who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions. Vought was frus­trat­ed in 2020 when Trump backed a sec­ond round of stim­u­lus checks dur­ing nego­ti­a­tions with con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats, accord­ing to anoth­er for­mer gov­ern­ment offi­cial, who also spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe pri­vate talks. Vought once called this offi­cial to cel­e­brate Trump agree­ing to include spend­ing caps in their bud­get plan — a posi­tion the for­mer pres­i­dent reversed with­in days, the offi­cial said.

    “He’d take these dream bud­gets in to Trump, and Trump would say, ‘I don’t want these cuts; don’t make these cuts. I don’t want to touch social pro­grams. I don’t want to touch enti­tle­ments.’ And he’d back down,” said a third for­mer senior Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial. “It would dri­ve Russ crazy, because he want­ed to make actu­al cuts.”

    All four of Trump’s bud­gets pro­posed unprece­dent­ed cuts to domes­tic spend­ing for which Con­gress nev­er had much appetite.

    Casey Mul­li­gan, who served as chief econ­o­mist for the White House Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advis­ers under Trump, praised Vought for push­ing his cur­rent pro­pos­al to slash fund­ing for fed­er­al agen­cies while pre­serv­ing Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare. Vought has told col­leagues he is prepar­ing a blue­print for Trump for 2025, one per­son famil­iar with his remarks said, speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions.

    “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,” Mul­li­gan said. “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.”

    But ques­tions remain about whether Repub­li­cans can uni­fy behind an approach that would advance big cuts to Med­ic­aid and food stamps, pro­grams that serve many of their con­stituents. Even if they can coa­lesce behind Vought, ana­lysts say it is vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble to bal­ance the bud­get with­out touch­ing Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare — or rais­ing tax­es.

    “As a pure­ly rhetor­i­cal ploy, they may be able to get away with it,” said Gal­ston, the Brook­ings fel­low. “As a mat­ter of arith­metic, it’s ridicu­lous.”

    ———–

    “The for­mer Trump aide craft­ing the House GOP’s debt ceil­ing play­book” by Jeff Stein, Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arns­dorf; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 02/19/2023

    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:

    ...
    The agi­ta­tor was not a mem­ber of Con­gress, or even an elect­ed offi­cial. It was Trump’s for­mer bud­get direc­tor, Rus­sell Vought, who has qui­et­ly emerged as an intel­lec­tu­al leader of the GOP’s con­ser­v­a­tive flank.

    Vought explained his oppo­si­tion to McCarthy, cit­ing the Cal­i­for­nia Republican’s deals with Democ­rats to increase fed­er­al spend­ing. Trump, who sup­port­ed McCarthy, didn’t push back, Vought said. Con­ser­v­a­tives even­tu­al­ly extract­ed con­ces­sions from McCarthy that could empow­er them to secure spend­ing cuts.

    “He knows where I’m at,” Vought said of Trump in a recent inter­view. “He was very respect­ful of where I’m com­ing from.”

    ...

    Sev­er­al Repub­li­can law­mak­ers and staffers pri­vate­ly acknowl­edged talk­ing to Vought at least once a week. Ear­li­er this month, he briefed about four dozen GOP sen­a­tors over lunch in the Capi­tol, accord­ing to Sen. Rick Scott (R‑Fla.), who said it was at least the third time he had heard Vought’s pitch for deal­ing with the debt lim­it.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Vought helped push for a new House pan­el led by Rep. Jim Jor­dan (R‑Ohio) to inves­ti­gate the alleged “weaponiza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment” under Pres­i­dent Biden. Stephen K. Ban­non, the for­mer Trump polit­i­cal advis­er, called Vought the “intel­lec­tu­al archi­tect” of House con­ser­v­a­tives’ rebel­lion against McCarthy. Vought is also close with Rep. Chip Roy (R‑Tex.), who spear­head­ed that fight.

    “Russ is the guy con­ser­v­a­tives go to for inti­mate knowl­edge of how the fed­er­al bud­get works,” said Newt Gin­grich, who served as House speak­er in the 1990s and remains a close advis­er to McCarthy. “He under­stands an enor­mous amount of fed­er­al bud­get­ing, and that makes him a very big play­er.”

    ...

    His new think tank advo­cates on hot-but­ton cul­ture war issues, such as “expos­ing crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.” The group has not dis­closed its fund­ing sources, but its annu­al report says it took in $1.1 mil­lion in 2021. Vought recent­ly told C‑SPAN that the orga­ni­za­tion takes no cor­po­rate mon­ey and is sup­port­ed by grass-roots donors across the coun­try.

    Most awk­ward­ly for his cur­rent posi­tion: Vought over­saw enor­mous increas­es in the nation­al debt as Trump’s direc­tor of the Office of Man­age­ment and Bud­get. The debt bal­looned by stag­ger­ing sums on Vought’s watch: $1 tril­lion in his first year, and a whop­ping $4 tril­lion in his sec­ond, as Con­gress agreed on a bipar­ti­san basis to spend tril­lions of dol­lars in response to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. Trump repeat­ed­ly over­ruled fis­cal hawks, like Vought, in approv­ing the new spend­ing.

    Now, with a Demo­c­rat in the White House, Vought says he wants to use the lever­age of the debt ceil­ing to force Democ­rats to rein in a fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy that he views as abus­ing its pow­er against Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. For exam­ple, he said, the gov­ern­ment is spend­ing mon­ey to detain peo­ple who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the storm­ing of the Capi­tol on Jan. 6, 2021.

    “We view our role as almost act­ing like a shad­ow OMB on the out­side,” Vought told The Post.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    He start­ed as a Hill staffer in 1999, work­ing for Sen. Phil Gramm (R‑Tex.) before becom­ing a pol­i­cy direc­tor for the House Repub­li­can Con­fer­ence under then-Rep. Mike Pence (R‑Ind.). By the mid-2000s, Vought had become the bud­get guru for the Repub­li­can Study Com­mit­tee, which sought to cut Medicare and Social Secu­ri­ty to rein in fed­er­al spend­ing. Vought then joined the advo­ca­cy arm of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion think tank, where he worked to solid­i­fy GOP oppo­si­tion to the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion.

    ...

    When Trump burst into nation­al pol­i­tics, many GOP pol­i­cy ana­lysts recoiled at his appar­ent dis­re­gard for seri­ous pol­i­cy. Vought saw an oppor­tu­ni­ty. He joined the Trump White House as deputy bud­get direc­tor in 2017, work­ing under Mick Mul­vaney, who lat­er became Trump’s chief of staff.

    ...

    “He’d take these dream bud­gets in to Trump, and Trump would say, ‘I don’t want these cuts; don’t make these cuts. I don’t want to touch social pro­grams. I don’t want to touch enti­tle­ments.’ And he’d back down,” said a third for­mer senior Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial. “It would dri­ve Russ crazy, because he want­ed to make actu­al cuts.”

    All four of Trump’s bud­gets pro­posed unprece­dent­ed cuts to domes­tic spend­ing for which Con­gress nev­er had much appetite.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Vought’s agen­da rep­re­sents a major depar­ture from tra­di­tion­al con­ser­v­a­tive ideas about bal­anc­ing the fed­er­al bud­get. Once, for­mer house speak­er Paul D. Ryan (R‑Wis.) pushed cuts to Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare, the main dri­vers of fed­er­al spend­ing, as the answer. Vought argues for some­thing dif­fer­ent. A Trump acolyte, he echoes the for­mer president’s insis­tence that the pop­u­lar fed­er­al retire­ment pro­grams — which go to the mid­dle and upper class­es as well as the poor — should be walled off from cuts. Instead, Vought has sold many Repub­li­cans on the untest­ed premise that the GOP can push to oblit­er­ate almost all oth­er major forms of fed­er­al spend­ing, espe­cial­ly pro­grams that ben­e­fit low­er-income Amer­i­cans, and dare Biden to stand in the way.

    Vought’s bud­get pro­pos­al calls for cut­ting $9 tril­lion over the next decade from thou­sands of domes­tic pro­grams — slash­ing fund­ing for gov­ern­ment agen­cies, stu­dent loans, and anti-pover­ty pro­grams such as hous­ing, health care and food assis­tance — while urg­ing Repub­li­cans to attack the “woke bureau­cra­cy.” Vought even advo­cates for freez­ing mil­i­tary spend­ing, which is still anath­e­ma in many GOP cir­cles.

    “I’m tired of this focus on Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare, as if you’re climb­ing a moun­tain and can’t make any progress on that moun­tain until you go to the eagle’s nest on the top,” Vought told The Wash­ing­ton Post. “You take these cuts to the Amer­i­can peo­ple, and you win.”

    In the 10-year bud­get pro­pos­al he has cir­cu­lat­ed on Capi­tol Hill, Vought char­ac­ter­izes this approach as part of an exis­ten­tial bat­tle for the soul of the coun­try. The plan includes $2 tril­lion in cuts to Med­ic­aid, the health pro­gram for the poor; more than $600 bil­lion in cuts to the Afford­able Care Act; more than $400 bil­lion in cuts to food stamps; hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars in cuts to edu­ca­tion­al sub­si­dies; and a halv­ing of the State Depart­ment and the Labor Depart­ment, among oth­er fed­er­al agen­cies. While con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans have yet to release a bud­get plan, House GOP law­mak­ers are weigh­ing cuts to these pro­grams as a way to reduce the debt with­out touch­ing Medicare and Social Secu­ri­ty.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Even some Repub­li­cans who admire Vought’s exper­tise say his bud­get blue­print is based on unre­al­is­tic assump­tions. To make it bal­ance in 10 years, for exam­ple, Vought’s bud­get also projects that the num­ber of work­ing Amer­i­cans will increase by 14.5 mil­lion peo­ple more than Con­gres­sion­al Bud­get Office pre­dicts, which would allow the Amer­i­can econ­o­my to grow faster, reduc­ing the deficit by anoth­er $3.8 tril­lion.

    Vought argues that Amer­i­cans will pour into the job mar­ket because of cuts to fed­er­al aid pro­grams, but his fig­ures are almost cer­tain­ly unre­al­is­tic, par­tic­u­lar­ly because of the GOP’s oppo­si­tion to high­er lev­els of immi­gra­tion, said William Gal­ston, a for­mer domes­tic pol­i­cy offi­cial in Pres­i­dent Bill Clinton’s admin­is­tra­tion who is now a senior fel­low at the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion, a D.C.-based think tank.

    “Russ is an expert. He knows the details; he knows the bud­get back­wards and for­wards,” said one for­mer GOP offi­cial, speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to can­did­ly describe a for­mer col­league. “But he’s sell­ing con­ser­v­a­tives a fan­ta­sy, which is achiev­ing a bal­anced bud­get with­out cut­ting any­thing pop­u­lar.

    “We’re going to bal­ance the bud­get by ‘end­ing woke?’ Give me a break.”

    ...

    But ques­tions remain about whether Repub­li­cans can uni­fy behind an approach that would advance big cuts to Med­ic­aid and food stamps, pro­grams that serve many of their con­stituents. Even if they can coa­lesce behind Vought, ana­lysts say it is vir­tu­al­ly impos­si­ble to bal­ance the bud­get with­out touch­ing Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare — or rais­ing tax­es.

    “As a pure­ly rhetor­i­cal ploy, they may be able to get away with it,” said Gal­ston, the Brook­ings fel­low. “As a mat­ter of arith­metic, it’s ridicu­lous.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Casey Mul­li­gan, who served as chief econ­o­mist for the White House Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advis­ers under Trump, praised Vought for push­ing his cur­rent pro­pos­al to slash fund­ing for fed­er­al agen­cies while pre­serv­ing Social Secu­ri­ty and Medicare. Vought has told col­leagues he is prepar­ing a blue­print for Trump for 2025, one per­son famil­iar with his remarks said, speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions.

    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,” Mul­li­gan said. “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.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 5, 2023, 8:31 pm
  12. 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:

    Christo­pher F. Rufo Sub­stack

    A Response to Cur­tis Yarvin
    The neo­re­ac­tionary writer is too pes­simistic about the prospect for high­er edu­ca­tion reform

    Christo­pher F. Rufo
    Mar 3, 2023

    The writer Cur­tis Yarvin recent­ly post­ed a crit­i­cism of the con­ser­v­a­tive takeover of New Col­lege of Flori­da, where I serve on the board of trustees.

    Yarvin, who has built a cult fol­low­ing on the “neo­re­ac­tionary” Right and the “post-Marx­ist” Left, is best known for advanc­ing the the­sis that the pro­gres­sive-man­age­r­i­al state, which he calls the Cathe­dral, is so pow­er­ful, that any action to chal­lenge it will end up rein­forc­ing its pow­er. The bet­ter solu­tion, Yarvin coun­sels, is to adopt the pos­ture of a prey ani­mal, find sat­is­fac­tion through aes­thet­ics, and wait for the Amer­i­can Cae­sar.

    I dis­agree. Yarvin’s phi­los­o­phy is an expres­sion of self-ful­fill­ing pes­simism. To a cer­tain extent, the con­ser­v­a­tive takeover of New Col­lege has already been suc­cess­ful. We imme­di­ate­ly fired the for­mer pres­i­dent, abol­ished the DEI bureau­cra­cy, banned coer­cive and dis­crim­i­na­to­ry “diver­si­ty” pro­gram­ming, and brought in for­mer state edu­ca­tion com­mis­sion­er Richard Corcoran—a man of great tenac­i­ty and courage—to lead the turn­around effort.

    ...

    Even if one accepts Yarvin’s premise of inevitable failure—and I do not—he would be wise to remem­ber the words of Leo Strauss, who, in a cri­tique of Edmund Burke, coun­seled that prin­ci­pled action, even against immense odds, can yield unex­pect­ed results:

    “[Burke failed to under­stand] the nobil­i­ty of last-ditch resis­tance. He does not con­sid­er that, in a way which no man can fore­see, resis­tance in a for­lorn posi­tion to the ene­mies of mankind, ‘going down with guns blaz­ing and flags fly­ing,’ may con­tribute great­ly toward keep­ing awake the rec­ol­lec­tion of the immense loss sus­tained by mankind, may inspire and strength­en the desire and the hope for its recov­ery, and may become a bea­con for those who humbly car­ry on the works of human­i­ty in a seem­ing­ly end­less val­ley of dark­ness and destruc­tion.”

    Tran­script

    There has been so much media cov­er­age about our takeover of the New Col­lege of Flori­da down in Sara­so­ta, and the com­men­tary runs the gamut. Con­ser­v­a­tive out­lets have been heap­ing praise upon our ini­tia­tives there, Gov­er­nor DeSantis’s cam­paign to reform high­er edu­ca­tion. Mean­while, lib­er­al out­lets have been hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing in oppo­si­tion to this say­ing that it is ille­git­i­mate for con­ser­v­a­tives to use polit­i­cal pow­er to take over a pub­lic insti­tu­tion. They believe that pub­lic insti­tu­tions should always be lib­er­al, and should always be pro­gres­sive even in a red state such as Flori­da.

    But there was an arti­cle that came out this week that I think deserves some atten­tion because it’s some­thing that’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent, it’s a lit­tle bit more inter­est­ing, it’s a lit­tle bit more unique. It’s from a writer named Cur­tis Yarvin. And if you don’t know Cur­tis Yarvin, he is a neo­re­ac­tionary philoso­pher. He has a kind of cult fol­low­ing with­in, let’s say, the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, but actu­al­ly also peo­ple that are on the far-left or the post-Marx­ist move­ment.

    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.

    He has this metaphor, he says that there is a Cathe­dral, a decen­tral­ized oli­garchic alliance between tech com­pa­nies, gov­ern­ment agen­cies, uni­ver­si­ties, and media corporations—all of the opin­ion shapers in our coun­try are unit­ed behind a left-wing ortho­doxy that he believes is almost unbreak­able. And any attempt to break through that hege­mo­ny, such as tak­ing over a small lib­er­al arts col­lege in Sara­so­ta, Flori­da, ends up actu­al­ly rein­forc­ing the pow­er of the Cathe­dral, in his telling.

    But I think Cur­tis is com­plete­ly and total­ly wrong for a few rea­sons. The first rea­son is that this is real­ly a right-wing doomerism. It’s a form of right-wing fatal­ism. It’s an argu­ment that we don’t have agency, every­thing is arrayed against us in such a pow­er­ful way that there’s noth­ing we can pos­si­bly do. But we should drill down into the specifics, and get out of these metaphor­ic abstrac­tions about the Cathe­dral and the regime, and all of these oth­er very obscure sound­ing, but all-pow­er­ful enti­ties. Get down to the specifics of: what are we doing at New Col­lege?

    Well, we took over the board. The first thing that we did with­in our first hours of admin­is­ter­ing the col­lege, we fired the pres­i­dent. We brought in for­mer Flori­da Edu­ca­tion Com­mis­sion­er Richard Cor­co­ran who is a very strong and dynam­ic leader, he knows edu­ca­tion, he’s not afraid of a fight, and he has tak­en the man­date for reform from Gov­er­nor DeSan­tis, and he’s going to be aggres­sive­ly pur­su­ing it.

    And we’ve already changed not just the dynam­ics at New Col­lege. Even this week, we abol­ished the DEI depart­ment, we became the first uni­ver­si­ty in the Unit­ed States to do so. We said, “No more neo-racist dis­crim­i­na­tion. No more racial scape­goat­ing. No more so-called diver­si­ty state­ments that are real­ly polit­i­cal fil­ters.” And all of these actions, with­in just a month, have not only changed the dynam­ics in New Col­lege, have not only changed the dynam­ics in the state of Flori­da, but they’ve sent the entire high­er edu­ca­tion sys­tem scram­bling.

    You see this from the news cov­er­age. I mean, peo­ple are sens­ing that we have bro­ken a taboo. We have said that pub­lic insti­tu­tions are ulti­mate­ly respon­si­ble to the pub­lic. And when con­ser­v­a­tives win elec­tions, they get a man­date to reform insti­tu­tions to reflect the will of the vot­ers that put them in office. We’re not going to sim­ply dal­ly around the edges. We’re going to make sub­stan­tive, hard-hit­ting direct reforms. We’re going to do it with a speed and a deci­sive­ness that is unprece­dent­ed, but absolute­ly nec­es­sary.

    And so the left with­in high­er edu­ca­tion real­ly went into a pan­ic, you can see this from the media cov­er­age. No one had ever done a full frontal assault against left-wing ortho­doxy with­in high­er edu­ca­tion. And they’re sens­ing that they’re no longer invul­ner­a­ble, they’re no longer untouch­able, they’re no longer invin­ci­ble, and that vot­ers are no longer going to be writ­ing a blank check every year to pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties that take that mon­ey to pro­mote DEI bureau­cra­cies and to push left-wing activism against the val­ues, and will, and demo­c­ra­t­ic wish­es of the major­i­ty of cit­i­zens in those states.

    And so with this small beach­head, this small ini­tial cam­paign, we’ve already demon­strat­ed that we can shift broad­er dynam­ics. We’re work­ing on huge lever­age here. We’re actu­al­ly tak­ing this as an exam­ple, as a proof of con­cept, and as an inspi­ra­tion to oth­er lead­ers. All of a sud­den, we’ve seen a cou­ple of things hap­pen with­in the past 30 days. We’ve seen leg­is­la­tors in the state of Flori­da intro­duce leg­is­la­tion to abol­ish the DEI bureau­cra­cies in all Flori­da pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties. That’s going to be deal­ing with tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in defund­ing. It’s going to be chang­ing the game on a large scale.

    We’ve also seen Texas leg­is­la­tors sig­nal that they want to do the same. West Vir­ginia leg­is­la­tors, leg­is­la­tors in Mis­souri, leg­is­la­tors in Utah, leg­is­la­tors in all of these oth­er red states look­ing at what we’ve done at New Col­lege, look­ing at what Gov­er­nor DeSan­tis is doing in Flori­da and say­ing, “That’s a good idea. We’re going to repli­cate it. We’re going to now bring these ideas to scale, and we’re going to now lay siege to the left-wing racial­ist bureau­cra­cies that have cap­tured the pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties in an unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic fash­ion.”

    Nobody in Texas is vot­ing for DEI bureau­cra­cies to be every­where, to be racial­ly seg­re­gat­ing schol­ar­ships, and to be delib­er­ate­ly exclud­ing pro­fes­sors on the basis of race and polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty. Leg­is­la­tors are say­ing, “You know what? We’ve let this go for too long. We’re tak­ing a stand. We’re going to make changes.” And I think ulti­mate­ly Curtis’s fun­da­men­tal flaw is that he would have us adopt the posi­tion of a prey ani­mal; lean back, don’t make too much noise, kind of hide in the shad­ows, and try not to get wiped out.

    Look, that is a per­fect­ly fine, adap­tive response in maybe a state of nature in the ani­mal world, but we’re human beings, we have a human nature, but we also have the abil­i­ty to imag­ine beyond our imme­di­ate con­tin­gent cir­cum­stances. And so I can see a uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem that is far supe­ri­or to the one that we have today. And I think we have then a duty and an oblig­a­tion to fight inch by inch, foot by foot, yard by yard in order to get there.

    And then I think that Curtis’s real error is that he says, “Well, every­thing will be doomed to fail­ure. You’re just going to rein­force your enemy’s pow­er.” This is kind of an excuse to then maybe do noth­ing. And then, of course, as a neo­re­ac­tionary, he hopes that this sys­tem decays and may lead to a kind of impe­r­i­al or a monar­chi­cal sys­tem, which I oppose again. I still believe in the Amer­i­can Repub­lic. I still believe that our demo­c­ra­t­ic pow­er as a peo­ple is mean­ing­ful. I still believe that our leg­is­la­ture has the capac­i­ty to gov­ern our states and our coun­try in the best inter­ests of the Amer­i­can peo­ple.

    And so by say­ing that if we believe all of those things to be true, we have a respon­si­bil­i­ty then to take action to turn those con­cepts into a real­i­ty. And I think inac­tion val­i­dates the kind of pes­simistic idea of inevitable Amer­i­can decline and decay. Our more opti­mistic for­mu­la­tion cre­ates not the guar­an­tee of vic­to­ry, but it cer­tain­ly opens up the field of pos­si­bil­i­ty for vic­to­ry.

    And one thing that I real­ly rec­om­mend that we take seri­ous­ly is this idea that one action toward a tran­scen­dent ide­al, towards the greater good, towards the true, the good, and the beau­ti­ful can some­times yield sec­ondary results that you don’t expect, but open up new ter­rains, new pos­si­bil­i­ties, new levers of pow­er, new solu­tions, new polit­i­cal ideas. And so mere­ly by tak­ing that first action, you’re cre­at­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty for more. I real­ly believe that. I’ve always seen that in my own per­son­al expe­ri­ence.

    I think his­to­ry also shows that some­times small groups of peo­ple with a strong vision that take deci­sive action can lead to an unex­pect­ed almost Rube Gold­berg-like rip­ple effect that has unin­tend­ed con­se­quences that are not nec­es­sar­i­ly bad but are some­times very good. And so when we’re oper­at­ing from a posi­tion as con­ser­v­a­tives where we con­trol almost noth­ing with regard to elite insti­tu­tion­al pow­er, just tak­ing that first strike I think has already yield­ed already more pos­si­bil­i­ties for us.

    ...

    ————-

    “A Response to Cur­tis Yarvin” by Christo­pher F. Rufo; +Christo­pher F. Rufo Sub­stack; 03/03/2023

    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:

    ...
    There has been so much media cov­er­age about our takeover of the New Col­lege of Flori­da down in Sara­so­ta, and the com­men­tary runs the gamut. Con­ser­v­a­tive out­lets have been heap­ing praise upon our ini­tia­tives there, Gov­er­nor DeSantis’s cam­paign to reform high­er edu­ca­tion. Mean­while, lib­er­al out­lets have been hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing in oppo­si­tion to this say­ing that it is ille­git­i­mate for con­ser­v­a­tives to use polit­i­cal pow­er to take over a pub­lic insti­tu­tion. They believe that pub­lic insti­tu­tions should always be lib­er­al, and should always be pro­gres­sive even in a red state such as Flori­da.

    But there was an arti­cle that came out this week that I think deserves some atten­tion because it’s some­thing that’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent, it’s a lit­tle bit more inter­est­ing, it’s a lit­tle bit more unique. It’s from a writer named Cur­tis Yarvin. And if you don’t know Cur­tis Yarvin, he is a neo­re­ac­tionary philoso­pher. He has a kind of cult fol­low­ing with­in, let’s say, the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, but actu­al­ly also peo­ple that are on the far-left or the post-Marx­ist move­ment.

    ...

    He has this metaphor, he says that there is a Cathe­dral, a decen­tral­ized oli­garchic alliance between tech com­pa­nies, gov­ern­ment agen­cies, uni­ver­si­ties, and media corporations—all of the opin­ion shapers in our coun­try are unit­ed behind a left-wing ortho­doxy that he believes is almost unbreak­able. And any attempt to break through that hege­mo­ny, such as tak­ing over a small lib­er­al arts col­lege in Sara­so­ta, Flori­da, ends up actu­al­ly rein­forc­ing the pow­er of the Cathe­dral, in his telling.

    But I think Cur­tis is com­plete­ly and total­ly wrong for a few rea­sons. The first rea­son is that this is real­ly a right-wing doomerism. It’s a form of right-wing fatal­ism. It’s an argu­ment that we don’t have agency, every­thing is arrayed against us in such a pow­er­ful way that there’s noth­ing we can pos­si­bly do. But we should drill down into the specifics, and get out of these metaphor­ic abstrac­tions about the Cathe­dral and the regime, and all of these oth­er very obscure sound­ing, but all-pow­er­ful enti­ties. Get down to the specifics of: what are we doing at New Col­lege?

    ...

    And then I think that Curtis’s real error is that he says, “Well, every­thing will be doomed to fail­ure. You’re just going to rein­force your enemy’s pow­er.” This is kind of an excuse to then maybe do noth­ing. And then, of course, as a neo­re­ac­tionary, he hopes that this sys­tem decays and may lead to a kind of impe­r­i­al or a monar­chi­cal sys­tem, which I oppose again. I still believe in the Amer­i­can Repub­lic. I still believe that our demo­c­ra­t­ic pow­er as a peo­ple is mean­ing­ful. I still believe that our leg­is­la­ture has the capac­i­ty to gov­ern our states and our coun­try in the best inter­ests of the Amer­i­can peo­ple.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Well, we took over the board. The first thing that we did with­in our first hours of admin­is­ter­ing the col­lege, we fired the pres­i­dent. We brought in for­mer Flori­da Edu­ca­tion Com­mis­sion­er Richard Cor­co­ran who is a very strong and dynam­ic leader, he knows edu­ca­tion, he’s not afraid of a fight, and he has tak­en the man­date for reform from Gov­er­nor DeSan­tis, and he’s going to be aggres­sive­ly pur­su­ing it.

    And we’ve already changed not just the dynam­ics at New Col­lege. Even this week, we abol­ished the DEI depart­ment, we became the first uni­ver­si­ty in the Unit­ed States to do so. We said, “No more neo-racist dis­crim­i­na­tion. No more racial scape­goat­ing. No more so-called diver­si­ty state­ments that are real­ly polit­i­cal fil­ters.” And all of these actions, with­in just a month, have not only changed the dynam­ics in New Col­lege, have not only changed the dynam­ics in the state of Flori­da, but they’ve sent the entire high­er edu­ca­tion sys­tem scram­bling.

    You see this from the news cov­er­age. I mean, peo­ple are sens­ing that we have bro­ken a taboo. We have said that pub­lic insti­tu­tions are ulti­mate­ly respon­si­ble to the pub­lic. And when con­ser­v­a­tives win elec­tions, they get a man­date to reform insti­tu­tions to reflect the will of the vot­ers that put them in office. We’re not going to sim­ply dal­ly around the edges. We’re going to make sub­stan­tive, hard-hit­ting direct reforms. We’re going to do it with a speed and a deci­sive­ness that is unprece­dent­ed, but absolute­ly nec­es­sary.

    And so the left with­in high­er edu­ca­tion real­ly went into a pan­ic, you can see this from the media cov­er­age. No one had ever done a full frontal assault against left-wing ortho­doxy with­in high­er edu­ca­tion. And they’re sens­ing that they’re no longer invul­ner­a­ble, they’re no longer untouch­able, they’re no longer invin­ci­ble, and that vot­ers are no longer going to be writ­ing a blank check every year to pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties that take that mon­ey to pro­mote DEI bureau­cra­cies and to push left-wing activism against the val­ues, and will, and demo­c­ra­t­ic wish­es of the major­i­ty of cit­i­zens in those states.

    And so with this small beach­head, this small ini­tial cam­paign, we’ve already demon­strat­ed that we can shift broad­er dynam­ics. We’re work­ing on huge lever­age here. We’re actu­al­ly tak­ing this as an exam­ple, as a proof of con­cept, and as an inspi­ra­tion to oth­er lead­ers. All of a sud­den, we’ve seen a cou­ple of things hap­pen with­in the past 30 days. We’ve seen leg­is­la­tors in the state of Flori­da intro­duce leg­is­la­tion to abol­ish the DEI bureau­cra­cies in all Flori­da pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties. That’s going to be deal­ing with tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in defund­ing. It’s going to be chang­ing the game on a large scale.

    ...

    And so by say­ing that if we believe all of those things to be true, we have a respon­si­bil­i­ty then to take action to turn those con­cepts into a real­i­ty. And I think inac­tion val­i­dates the kind of pes­simistic idea of inevitable Amer­i­can decline and decay. Our more opti­mistic for­mu­la­tion cre­ates not the guar­an­tee of vic­to­ry, but it cer­tain­ly opens up the field of pos­si­bil­i­ty for vic­to­ry.

    And one thing that I real­ly rec­om­mend that we take seri­ous­ly is this idea that one action toward a tran­scen­dent ide­al, towards the greater good, towards the true, the good, and the beau­ti­ful can some­times yield sec­ondary results that you don’t expect, but open up new ter­rains, new pos­si­bil­i­ties, new levers of pow­er, new solu­tions, new polit­i­cal ideas. And so mere­ly by tak­ing that first action, you’re cre­at­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty for more. I real­ly believe that. I’ve always seen that in my own per­son­al expe­ri­ence.

    I think his­to­ry also shows that some­times small groups of peo­ple with a strong vision that take deci­sive action can lead to an unex­pect­ed almost Rube Gold­berg-like rip­ple effect that has unin­tend­ed con­se­quences that are not nec­es­sar­i­ly bad but are some­times very good. And so when we’re oper­at­ing from a posi­tion as con­ser­v­a­tives where we con­trol almost noth­ing with regard to elite insti­tu­tion­al pow­er, just tak­ing that first strike I think has already yield­ed already more pos­si­bil­i­ties for us.
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 12, 2023, 9:30 pm
  13. 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:

    Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism

    The Founders, Pt. 1
    Con­ser­v­a­tive His­to­ri­ans, Cold War­riors, Cul­ture War

    Mar 13, 2023

    Two days before Don­ald Trump left the White House, his admin­is­tra­tion released its nation­al­is­tic “1776 Report” on Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Day. This part­ing shot alleged to come “with the inten­tion of cul­ti­vat­ing a bet­ter edu­ca­tion among Amer­i­cans” about the ori­gins of the Unit­ed States, but this could hard­ly be fur­ther from the truth.

    Trump’s 1776 Com­mis­sion was estab­lished in the final months of his pres­i­den­cy to pro­mote “patri­ot­ic edu­ca­tion,” at least par­tial­ly in response to the New York Times 1619 Project, which marked “the 400th anniver­sary of the begin­ning of Amer­i­can slav­ery” by try­ing to “reframe the country’s his­to­ry by plac­ing the con­se­quences of slav­ery and the con­tri­bu­tions of black Amer­i­cans at the very cen­ter of our nation­al nar­ra­tive.”

    The “1776 Com­mis­sion” report released by Don­ald Trump just before his exit from the pres­i­den­cy is so stag­ger­ing­ly awful, trot­ting out every moldy reac­tionary trope about the his­to­ry of the Unit­ed States it can, that it has to be read to be believed. https://t.co/8KzVsg0h2I— Jacobin (@jacobin) Jan­u­ary 20, 2021

    Since then, pre­sum­ably lay­ing the ground­work for a pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, Flori­da gov­er­nor Ron DeSan­tis has led a Repub­li­can cru­sade against the “woke mind virus” (the LGBT com­mu­ni­ty, “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry,” and more) in schools. Whether or not it’s about try­ing to one-up Don­ald Trump in the state they both call home, DeSan­tis has declared war on pub­lic edu­ca­tion. “Flori­da is where woke goes to die,” he claimed after being re-elect­ed in Novem­ber.

    The text of DeSan­tis’ high­er edu­ca­tion bill has been released. It’s as ter­ri­fy­ing as the press release sug­gest­ed it would be. Flori­da HB 999 would enact the most dra­con­ian and cen­so­ri­ous restric­tions on high­er edu­ca­tion in the his­to­ry of this coun­try. https://t.co/mTsNuSryt4— Jere­my C. Young (@jeremycyoung) Feb­ru­ary 23, 2023

    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.

    Spalding’s wife chairs the Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion (VOC) and is the found­ing direc­tor of its muse­um in Wash­ing­ton. Her father, “not just a lead­ing his­to­ri­an of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment” but also said to be “an active play­er in the move­ment longer than any­one else,” is the VOC patri­arch.

    ...

    DeSan­tis’ takeover of New College’s board of trustees includ­ed the appoint­ment of Christo­pher Rufo, who has “led the fight against crit­i­cal race the­o­ry in Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions” accord­ing to the Flori­da governor’s web­site. Rufo has con­tributed to DeSan­tis’ cul­ture wars (includ­ing the anti-LGBT “groomer” pan­ic) as an advi­sor to the gov­er­nor and a senior fel­low at the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank co-found­ed by Ronald Reagan’s CIA direc­tor. Fol­low­ing the news of his appoint­ment, Christo­pher Rufo declared, “We are recap­tur­ing high­er edu­ca­tion,” and shared with Twit­ter fol­low­ers a speech he gave at Hills­dale Col­lege that “out­lined my the­o­ry of action.”

    I have a new sto­ry @VanityFair about the right-wing takeover of New Col­lege, what it means to make a “Hills­dale of the South” & how its archi­tects open­ly agree that New Col­lege is just a tri­al run. https://t.co/IUoFztlmuw— Kathryn Joyce (@kathrynajoyce) Feb­ru­ary 10, 2023

    Matthew Spald­ing is a pro­fes­sor and dean at Hills­dale College’s Cen­ter for Con­sti­tu­tion­al Stud­ies and Cit­i­zen­ship who has argued that birthright cit­i­zen­ship is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. “I have known Gov­er­nor DeSan­tis since he was a con­gress­man and have been work­ing with the Flori­da Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion on his civic lit­er­a­cy ini­tia­tive,” Spald­ing said in Feb­ru­ary.

    His wife Eliz­a­beth Spald­ing teach­es Cold War his­to­ry at Pep­per­dine University’s School of Pub­lic Pol­i­cy, and serves on the advi­so­ry coun­cil of its “Amer­i­can Project on the Future of Con­ser­vatism,” which was inspired by con­ser­v­a­tive his­to­ri­an George Nash. In a 2016 essay on “Trump­ist pop­ulism,” Nash sug­gest­ed that “by get­ting back, very delib­er­ate­ly to basics, con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­als can begin to restore some clar­i­ty and direc­tion to the debate.”

    Eliz­a­beth Edwards Spald­ing received a full-tuition schol­ar­ship to attend Hills­dale Col­lege in the 1980s, per­haps because her father, also a con­ser­v­a­tive his­to­ri­an, in his words, “played a key role in the strug­gle for free­dom.”

    I was a founder of Young Amer­i­cans for Free­dom, which pro­vid­ed the ground troops for the Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter and Ronald Rea­gan pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns. I was the direc­tor of infor­ma­tion for the Gold­wa­ter for Pres­i­dent Com­mit­tee, which secured the 1964 pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion for Sen­a­tor Gold­wa­ter and changed the course of con­ser­v­a­tive (and Amer­i­can) his­to­ry. I wrote the first polit­i­cal biog­ra­phy of Rea­gan. I was the found­ing edi­tor of Con­ser­v­a­tive Digest, which had at one time the great­est cir­cu­la­tion of any con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal. I orga­nized the largest Wash­ing­ton ral­ly for the Viet­nam War and our troops. I was denounced as a “son of a Birch” by a nation­al­ly syn­di­cat­ed colum­nist and described by the New York Times as “The ‘Voice’ of the Silent Major­i­ty.”

    Lee Edwards was also “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.” Accord­ing to Scott and Jon Lee Anderson’s 1986 exposé of the far-right WACL, an almost car­toon­ish­ly evil orga­ni­za­tion, Edwards was the prin­ci­pal co-founder of its first U.S. chap­ter, the Amer­i­can Coun­cil for World Free­dom.

    Accord­ing to Edwards, although Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy vis­it­ed his child­hood home, it wasn’t until the Sovi­et Union crushed the “Hun­gar­i­an Rev­o­lu­tion” in 1956 that his “dor­mant anti­com­mu­nism came alive,” and 23 year old Lee Edwards “resolved that for the rest of my life, wher­ev­er I was, what­ev­er I was, I would help those who resist­ed com­mu­nism how­ev­er I could.”

    Reflect­ing on the 1960s, Edwards recalled, “It was the decade when con­ser­vatism was trans­formed from a debat­ing soci­ety into a polit­i­cal move­ment, and I col­lab­o­rat­ed with almost every con­ser­v­a­tive leader who effect­ed the tran­si­tion.” That appar­ent­ly did not include Robert Welch, founder of the con­spir­acist John Birch Soci­ety, which Edwards nev­er­the­less remem­bered as being “made up of good, good Amer­i­cans ter­ri­bly frus­trat­ed by what they saw as the direc­tion of the coun­try.”

    The Tai­wan-led Asian People’s Anti-Com­mu­nist League, estab­lished in 1954, spear­head­ed a years-long effort to cre­ate the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League in 1967. Around then, Lee Edwards began to ghost­write a book for Sen­a­tor Strom Thur­mond, one of the most infa­mous seg­re­ga­tion­ists of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Thur­mond addressed the 1970 WACL con­fer­ence in Tokyo, which was spear­head­ed by “Moonies,” or cult fol­low­ers of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church, but not before Edwards found­ed the Amer­i­can Coun­cil for World Free­dom (ACWF), which he called a “Who’s Who of anti­com­mu­nists in Amer­i­ca.”

    Accord­ing to WACL his­to­ri­an Kei­th Allen Den­nis, the ACWF rep­re­sent­ed a right-wing anti-com­mu­nist coali­tion led by the Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly touched on as an influ­en­tial “Cold War­rior think tank.” By 1974, Lee Edwards became the sec­re­tary of the ACWF, which orga­nized that year’s WACL con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton. Spe­cial guests includ­ed Yaroslav Stet­sko, for­mer “Prime Min­is­ter” of a pro-Nazi gov­ern­ment in 1941 west­ern Ukraine that the Ger­mans imme­di­ate­ly squashed, and the Nicaraguan dic­ta­tor, “whose secu­ri­ty guard was only slight­ly small­er than our president’s,” recalled Edwards.

    Edwards act­ed as the mas­ter of cer­e­monies at a “WACL Free­dom Ral­ly,” and was report­ed­ly named Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League. “I am proud of that con­fer­ence,” he wrote years lat­er. “But as I trav­eled about meet­ing WACL chap­ter lead­ers and dis­cussing the pro­gram agen­da, I became uneasy. Some chap­ters were led by men who were open­ly anti-Semit­ic.” But he was main­ly refer­ring to the Mex­i­cans, instead of Stetsko’s Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations, which Scott and Jon Lee Ander­son described as the “largest and most impor­tant umbrel­la of for­mer Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors in the world.”

    The ACWF coali­tion includ­ed the Nation­al Cap­tive Nations Com­mit­tee and the Ukrain­ian Con­gress Com­mit­tee of Amer­i­ca, both chaired by Lev Dobri­an­sky, who was under the sway of Yaroslav Stet­sko as leader of the far-right Orga­ni­za­tion of Ukrain­ian Nation­al­ists (1968–86). Dobri­an­sky even­tu­al­ly co-found­ed the Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion (VOC) with Lee Edwards, but more about Dobri­an­sky in “The Founders, Pt.2.” All you need to know for now is that Edwards eulo­gized him as a “hero of the Cold War.”

    The ACWF mar­ried their milieus, so Edwards became the exec­u­tive sec­re­tary of the Nation­al Cap­tive Nations Com­mit­tee, and got a “World Out­look” col­umn in the nation­al­ist Ukrain­ian Week­ly, a news­pa­per pub­lished in Jer­sey City, to bash the for­eign pol­i­cy of the Jim­my Carter admin­is­tra­tion. (His “World Out­look” includ­ed the fol­low­ing hits: “Carter fails cap­tive nations — again,” “Get­ting back to num­ber one [mil­i­tar­i­ly in the world],” “Red star over Africa?” and “The Chi­nese-Latin Amer­i­can con­nec­tion.”)

    By 1979, the year that Wash­ing­ton cut diplo­mat­ic ties with Tai­wan, and Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al accused the US-backed mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship in Argenti­na of “dis­ap­pear­ing” thou­sands of cit­i­zens dur­ing its “Dirty War,” Lee Edwards’ pub­lic rela­tions firm reg­is­tered as a for­eign agent of both coun­tries. Accord­ing to his­to­ri­an Patrice McSh­er­ry, “The 1980 WACL meet­ing in Buenos Aires seems to have been a defin­ing event in the export­ing of the Con­dor sys­tem from the South­ern Cone.”

    In the 1980s, the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League reached the height of its influ­ence with Ronald Rea­gan in the White House, mean­while Lee Edwards & Asso­ciates con­tin­ued to work for WACL’s Chi­nese branch, which was con­trolled by the Tai­wanese gov­ern­ment. John K. Singlaub, read­ers may recall—“an anti-communist’s anti-com­mu­nist,” accord­ing to Edwards—revived the ACWF as the U.S. Coun­cil for World Free­dom (with mon­ey from Tai­wan), and lat­er took over the WACL, just in time for the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion to keep U.S. mil­i­tary aid flow­ing to the Con­tra death squads in Nicaragua after it was banned by Con­gress.

    Of course, this is extreme­ly far from a com­pre­hen­sive overview of the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League or the career of Lee Edwards, but it seems like a good place to start. Future posts will con­tin­ue to touch on the WACL as a sort of pre­de­ces­sor to the VOC, and get into Edwards’ rela­tion­ship with orga­ni­za­tions like the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church, Insti­tute of World Pol­i­tics, and the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, that are rel­e­vant to the “Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism.”

    In 1993, Lee Edwards decried a con­spir­a­cy in Wash­ing­ton to “to wipe out the record of impe­r­i­al Moscow’s expan­sion­ism,” and the fol­low­ing year co-found­ed the VOC as Dobriansky’s right-hand man on the Nation­al Cap­tive Nations Com­mit­tee (NCNC), but more about that lat­er. The 1990s turned out to be a dis­ap­point­ment for the NCNC, which set up the Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion, dream­ing of a $100 mil­lion muse­um.

    “More than once between 1994 and 1999 I almost gave up,” Edwards admit­ted. Dobri­an­sky stepped down as chair­man in 2003, and died five years lat­er, but his for­mer side­kick, deter­mined to hon­or Dobri­an­sky and Hun­gary in par­tic­u­lar, set­tled for a memo­r­i­al in 2007, and stayed at the helm of the board until 2022. At 90 years old, Edwards passed the torch (and a new muse­um) to his daugh­ter, with whom he has authored sev­er­al books.

    In the 21st cen­tu­ry, Lee Edwards may have lost touch, but he’s still got plen­ty of hatred in his heart, and that’s all that mat­ters. In 2018, he repeat­ed­ly sug­gest­ed that Ben Shapiro could be the next William F. Buck­ley. At that year’s annu­al “Roll Call of Nations” wreath-lay­ing cer­e­mo­ny at the VOC memo­r­i­al in Wash­ing­ton, Edwards declared, “In our con­flict­ed world, telling the truth about social­ism has become a rev­o­lu­tion­ary act. So, my friends, let us all join the rev­o­lu­tion!”

    In 2019, echo­ing Rus­sell Kirk, the con­ser­v­a­tive vet­er­an explained that the U.S. suf­fers from “the tyran­ny of minorities—the fem­i­nist minor­i­ty, the wel­fare-rights minor­i­ty, the homo­sex­u­al minor­i­ty, the ani­mal-rights minor­i­ty.” At the same time, Edwards warned fel­low con­ser­v­a­tives, “if we look close­ly, we can see that we are in dan­ger of becom­ing the very thing we accuse our oppo­nents of being—rigid, dog­mat­ic, in a word, ide­o­log­i­cal.”

    Last year, he advised, “You can­not under­stand Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine unless you under­stand that he is a Marx­ist-Lenin­ist.” Two days after the Nation­al Review pub­lished this laugh­able non­sense, Edwards attend­ed the grand open­ing of the Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism muse­um, which is a five minute walk from the White House.

    Just ahead of the event, almost thir­ty years in the mak­ing, the Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con inter­viewed a mem­ber of the VOC Speak­ers Bureau, who explained to the right-wing out­let, “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… The coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, [she] said, unveiled the extent of Marx­ist ide­ol­o­gy in pub­lic edu­ca­tion…”

    Two months lat­er, Edwards argued that con­ser­v­a­tive infight­ing is “a sign of vital­i­ty and proof, it seems to me, of the movement’s impor­tance and the role that it still plays.” For years, he has called for a “new fusion­ism” to “meld the dis­parate ele­ments of twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry con­ser­vatism” and “unite our divid­ed move­ment in the face of a com­mon ene­my.” Even putting aside that his son-in-law was part of the 1776 Com­mis­sion, it’s easy to imag­ine that Edwards (and the VOC lead­er­ship) is on board with the far-right “war on woke” to accom­plish this. As Ronald Rea­gan once said, “Lee Edwards has always been in the fore­front of the strug­gle to restore Amer­i­ca, to bring it back to its ancient moor­ings.”

    ———-

    “The Founders, Pt. 1”; Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism; 03/13/2023

    “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:

    ...
    Spalding’s wife chairs the Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion (VOC) and is the found­ing direc­tor of its muse­um in Wash­ing­ton. Her father, “not just a lead­ing his­to­ri­an of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment” but also said to be “an active play­er in the move­ment longer than any­one else,” is the VOC patri­arch.

    ...

    Matthew Spald­ing is a pro­fes­sor and dean at Hills­dale College’s Cen­ter for Con­sti­tu­tion­al Stud­ies and Cit­i­zen­ship who has argued that birthright cit­i­zen­ship is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. “I have known Gov­er­nor DeSan­tis since he was a con­gress­man and have been work­ing with the Flori­da Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion on his civic lit­er­a­cy ini­tia­tive,” Spald­ing said in Feb­ru­ary.

    His wife Eliz­a­beth Spald­ing teach­es Cold War his­to­ry at Pep­per­dine University’s School of Pub­lic Pol­i­cy, and serves on the advi­so­ry coun­cil of its “Amer­i­can Project on the Future of Con­ser­vatism,” which was inspired by con­ser­v­a­tive his­to­ri­an George Nash. In a 2016 essay on “Trump­ist pop­ulism,” Nash sug­gest­ed that “by get­ting back, very delib­er­ate­ly to basics, con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­als can begin to restore some clar­i­ty and direc­tion to the debate.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Eliz­a­beth Edwards Spald­ing received a full-tuition schol­ar­ship to attend Hills­dale Col­lege in the 1980s, per­haps because her father, also a con­ser­v­a­tive his­to­ri­an, in his words, “played a key role in the strug­gle for free­dom.”

    I was a founder of Young Amer­i­cans for Free­dom, which pro­vid­ed the ground troops for the Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter and Ronald Rea­gan pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns. I was the direc­tor of infor­ma­tion for the Gold­wa­ter for Pres­i­dent Com­mit­tee, which secured the 1964 pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion for Sen­a­tor Gold­wa­ter and changed the course of con­ser­v­a­tive (and Amer­i­can) his­to­ry. I wrote the first polit­i­cal biog­ra­phy of Rea­gan. I was the found­ing edi­tor of Con­ser­v­a­tive Digest, which had at one time the great­est cir­cu­la­tion of any con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal. I orga­nized the largest Wash­ing­ton ral­ly for the Viet­nam War and our troops. I was denounced as a “son of a Birch” by a nation­al­ly syn­di­cat­ed colum­nist and described by the New York Times as “The ‘Voice’ of the Silent Major­i­ty.”

    Lee Edwards was also “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.” Accord­ing to Scott and Jon Lee Anderson’s 1986 exposé of the far-right WACL, an almost car­toon­ish­ly evil orga­ni­za­tion, Edwards was the prin­ci­pal co-founder of its first U.S. chap­ter, the Amer­i­can Coun­cil for World Free­dom.

    ...

    The Tai­wan-led Asian People’s Anti-Com­mu­nist League, estab­lished in 1954, spear­head­ed a years-long effort to cre­ate the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League in 1967. Around then, Lee Edwards began to ghost­write a book for Sen­a­tor Strom Thur­mond, one of the most infa­mous seg­re­ga­tion­ists of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Thur­mond addressed the 1970 WACL con­fer­ence in Tokyo, which was spear­head­ed by “Moonies,” or cult fol­low­ers of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church, but not before Edwards found­ed the Amer­i­can Coun­cil for World Free­dom (ACWF), which he called a “Who’s Who of anti­com­mu­nists in Amer­i­ca.”

    Accord­ing to WACL his­to­ri­an Kei­th Allen Den­nis, the ACWF rep­re­sent­ed a right-wing anti-com­mu­nist coali­tion led by the Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly touched on as an influ­en­tial “Cold War­rior think tank.” By 1974, Lee Edwards became the sec­re­tary of the ACWF, which orga­nized that year’s WACL con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton. Spe­cial guests includ­ed Yaroslav Stet­sko, for­mer “Prime Min­is­ter” of a pro-Nazi gov­ern­ment in 1941 west­ern Ukraine that the Ger­mans imme­di­ate­ly squashed, and the Nicaraguan dic­ta­tor, “whose secu­ri­ty guard was only slight­ly small­er than our president’s,” recalled Edwards.

    Edwards act­ed as the mas­ter of cer­e­monies at a “WACL Free­dom Ral­ly,” and was report­ed­ly named Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League. “I am proud of that con­fer­ence,” he wrote years lat­er. “But as I trav­eled about meet­ing WACL chap­ter lead­ers and dis­cussing the pro­gram agen­da, I became uneasy. Some chap­ters were led by men who were open­ly anti-Semit­ic.” But he was main­ly refer­ring to the Mex­i­cans, instead of Stetsko’s Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations, which Scott and Jon Lee Ander­son described as the “largest and most impor­tant umbrel­la of for­mer Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors in the world.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    The ACWF coali­tion includ­ed the Nation­al Cap­tive Nations Com­mit­tee and the Ukrain­ian Con­gress Com­mit­tee of Amer­i­ca, both chaired by Lev Dobri­an­sky, who was under the sway of Yaroslav Stet­sko as leader of the far-right Orga­ni­za­tion of Ukrain­ian Nation­al­ists (1968–86). Dobri­an­sky even­tu­al­ly co-found­ed the Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion (VOC) with Lee Edwards, but more about Dobri­an­sky in “The Founders, Pt.2.” All you need to know for now is that Edwards eulo­gized him as a “hero of the Cold War.”

    The ACWF mar­ried their milieus, so Edwards became the exec­u­tive sec­re­tary of the Nation­al Cap­tive Nations Com­mit­tee, and got a “World Out­look” col­umn in the nation­al­ist Ukrain­ian Week­ly, a news­pa­per pub­lished in Jer­sey City, to bash the for­eign pol­i­cy of the Jim­my Carter admin­is­tra­tion. (His “World Out­look” includ­ed the fol­low­ing hits: “Carter fails cap­tive nations — again,” “Get­ting back to num­ber one [mil­i­tar­i­ly in the world],” “Red star over Africa?” and “The Chi­nese-Latin Amer­i­can con­nec­tion.”)

    ...

    In the 1980s, the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League reached the height of its influ­ence with Ronald Rea­gan in the White House, mean­while Lee Edwards & Asso­ciates con­tin­ued to work for WACL’s Chi­nese branch, which was con­trolled by the Tai­wanese gov­ern­ment. John K. Singlaub, read­ers may recall—“an anti-communist’s anti-com­mu­nist,” accord­ing to Edwards—revived the ACWF as the U.S. Coun­cil for World Free­dom (with mon­ey from Tai­wan), and lat­er took over the WACL, just in time for the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion to keep U.S. mil­i­tary aid flow­ing to the Con­tra death squads in Nicaragua after it was banned by Con­gress.

    Of course, this is extreme­ly far from a com­pre­hen­sive overview of the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League or the career of Lee Edwards, but it seems like a good place to start. Future posts will con­tin­ue to touch on the WACL as a sort of pre­de­ces­sor to the VOC, and get into Edwards’ rela­tion­ship with orga­ni­za­tions like the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church, Insti­tute of World Pol­i­tics, and the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, that are rel­e­vant to the “Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    In 1993, Lee Edwards decried a con­spir­a­cy in Wash­ing­ton to “to wipe out the record of impe­r­i­al Moscow’s expan­sion­ism,” and the fol­low­ing year co-found­ed the VOC as Dobriansky’s right-hand man on the Nation­al Cap­tive Nations Com­mit­tee (NCNC), but more about that lat­er. The 1990s turned out to be a dis­ap­point­ment for the NCNC, which set up the Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion, dream­ing of a $100 mil­lion muse­um.

    “More than once between 1994 and 1999 I almost gave up,” Edwards admit­ted. Dobri­an­sky stepped down as chair­man in 2003, and died five years lat­er, but his for­mer side­kick, deter­mined to hon­or Dobri­an­sky and Hun­gary in par­tic­u­lar, set­tled for a memo­r­i­al in 2007, and stayed at the helm of the board until 2022. At 90 years old, Edwards passed the torch (and a new muse­um) to his daugh­ter, with whom he has authored sev­er­al books.

    ...

    In 2019, echo­ing Rus­sell Kirk, the con­ser­v­a­tive vet­er­an explained that the U.S. suf­fers from “the tyran­ny of minorities—the fem­i­nist minor­i­ty, the wel­fare-rights minor­i­ty, the homo­sex­u­al minor­i­ty, the ani­mal-rights minor­i­ty.” At the same time, Edwards warned fel­low con­ser­v­a­tives, “if we look close­ly, we can see that we are in dan­ger of becom­ing the very thing we accuse our oppo­nents of being—rigid, dog­mat­ic, in a word, ide­o­log­i­cal.”
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Last year, he advised, “You can­not under­stand Vladimir Putin and his war against Ukraine unless you under­stand that he is a Marx­ist-Lenin­ist.” Two days after the Nation­al Review pub­lished this laugh­able non­sense, Edwards attend­ed the grand open­ing of the Vic­tims of Com­mu­nism muse­um, which is a five minute walk from the White House.

    Just ahead of the event, almost thir­ty years in the mak­ing, the Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con inter­viewed a mem­ber of the VOC Speak­ers Bureau, who explained to the right-wing out­let, “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… The coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, [she] said, unveiled the extent of Marx­ist ide­ol­o­gy in pub­lic edu­ca­tion…”

    Two months lat­er, Edwards argued that con­ser­v­a­tive infight­ing is “a sign of vital­i­ty and proof, it seems to me, of the movement’s impor­tance and the role that it still plays.” For years, he has called for a “new fusion­ism” to “meld the dis­parate ele­ments of twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry con­ser­vatism” and “unite our divid­ed move­ment in the face of a com­mon ene­my.” Even putting aside that his son-in-law was part of the 1776 Com­mis­sion, it’s easy to imag­ine that Edwards (and the VOC lead­er­ship) is on board with the far-right “war on woke” to accom­plish this. As Ronald Rea­gan once said, “Lee Edwards has always been in the fore­front of the strug­gle to restore Amer­i­ca, to bring it back to its ancient moor­ings.”
    ...

    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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 16, 2023, 10:45 pm
  14. 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:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Trump says he expects to be arrest­ed, calls for protest

    By MICHELLE L. PRICE, JILL COLVIN and ERIC TUCKER
    Sat­ur­day, March 18, 2023 18:57:29 CST

    NEW YORK (AP) — Don­ald Trump claimed on Sat­ur­day that his arrest is immi­nent and issued an extra­or­di­nary call for his sup­port­ers to protest as a New York grand jury inves­ti­gates hush mon­ey pay­ments to women who alleged sex­u­al encoun­ters with the for­mer pres­i­dent.

    Even as Trump’s lawyer and spokesper­son said there had been no com­mu­ni­ca­tion from pros­e­cu­tors, Trump declared in a post on his social media plat­form that he expects to be tak­en into cus­tody on Tues­day.

    His mes­sage seemed designed to pre­empt a for­mal announce­ment from pros­e­cu­tors and to gal­va­nize out­rage from his base of sup­port­ers in advance of wide­ly antic­i­pat­ed charges. With­in hours, his cam­paign was send­ing fundrais­ing solic­i­ta­tions to his sup­port­ers, while influ­en­tial Repub­li­cans in Con­gress and even some declared and poten­tial rival can­di­dates issued state­ments in his defense.

    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!!!”

    It all evoked, in fore­bod­ing ways, the rhetoric he used short­ly before the insur­rec­tion at the U.S. Capi­tol on Jan. 6, 2021. After hear­ing from the then-pres­i­dent at a Wash­ing­ton ral­ly that morn­ing, his sup­port­ers marched to the Capi­tol and tried to stop the con­gres­sion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Demo­c­rat Joe Biden’s White House vic­to­ry, break­ing through doors and win­dows of the build­ing and leav­ing offi­cers beat­en and blood­ied.

    Dis­trict Attor­ney Alvin Bragg is thought to be eye­ing charges in the hush mon­ey inves­ti­ga­tion, and recent­ly offered Trump a chance to tes­ti­fy before the grand jury. Local law enforce­ment offi­cials are brac­ing for the pub­lic safe­ty ram­i­fi­ca­tions of an unprece­dent­ed pros­e­cu­tion of a for­mer Amer­i­can pres­i­dent.

    But there has been no pub­lic announce­ment of any time frame for the grand jury’s secret work in the case. At least one addi­tion­al wit­ness is expect­ed to tes­ti­fy, fur­ther indi­cat­ing that no vote to indict has yet been tak­en, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with the inves­ti­ga­tion who was not autho­rized to pub­licly dis­cuss the case and spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty.

    That did not stop Trump from tak­ing to his social media plat­form to say “ille­gal leaks” from Bragg’s office indi­cate that “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK.”

    A Trump lawyer, Susan Necheles, said Trump’s post was “based on the media reports,” and a spokesper­son said there had been “no noti­fi­ca­tion” from Bragg’s office, though the ori­gin of Trump’s Tues­day ref­er­ence was unclear. The dis­trict attorney’s office declined to com­ment.

    Trump’s aides and legal team have been prepar­ing for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an indict­ment. Should that hap­pen, he would be arrest­ed only if he refused to sur­ren­der. Trump’s lawyers have pre­vi­ous­ly said he would fol­low nor­mal pro­ce­dure, mean­ing he would like­ly agree to sur­ren­der at a New York Police Depart­ment precinct or direct­ly to Bragg’s office.

    It is unclear whether Trump’s sup­port­ers would heed his protest call or if he retains the same per­sua­sive pow­er he held as pres­i­dent. Trump’s posts on Truth Social gen­er­al­ly receive far less atten­tion than he used to get on Twit­ter, but he main­tains a deeply loy­al base. The after­math of the Jan. 6 riot, in which hun­dreds of Trump loy­al­ists were arrest­ed and pros­e­cut­ed in fed­er­al court, may also have damp­ened the pas­sion among sup­port­ers for con­fronta­tion.

    ...

    Besides the hush mon­ey inquiry in New York, Trump faces sep­a­rate crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions in Atlanta and Wash­ing­ton over his efforts to undo the results of the 2020 elec­tion.

    A Jus­tice Depart­ment spe­cial coun­sel has also been pre­sent­ing evi­dence before a grand jury inves­ti­gat­ing Trump’s pos­ses­sion of hun­dreds of clas­si­fied doc­u­ments at his Flori­da estate. It is not clear when those inves­ti­ga­tions will end or whether they might result in crim­i­nal charges, but they will con­tin­ue regard­less of what hap­pens in New York, under­scor­ing the ongo­ing grav­i­ty – and broad geo­graph­ic scope – of the legal chal­lenges fac­ing the for­mer pres­i­dent.

    Trump’s post Sat­ur­day echoes one made last sum­mer when he broke the news on Truth Social that the FBI was search­ing his Flori­da home as part of an inves­ti­ga­tion into the pos­si­ble mis­han­dling of clas­si­fied doc­u­ments.

    News of that search sparked a flood of con­tri­bu­tions to Trump’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion, and on Sat­ur­day, Trump sent out a series of fundrais­ing emails to his sup­port­ers, includ­ing one that claimed, “I’m not wor­ried in the slight­est.”

    After his post, Repub­li­can House Speak­er Kevin McCarthy decried any plans to pros­e­cute Trump as an “out­ra­geous abuse of pow­er by a rad­i­cal DA” whom he claimed was pur­su­ing “polit­i­cal vengeance.” Rep. Elise Ste­fanik, the third-rank­ing House Repub­li­can, issued a state­ment with a sim­i­lar sen­ti­ment.

    The grand jury has been hear­ing from wit­ness­es, includ­ing for­mer Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who says he orches­trat­ed pay­ments in 2016 to two women to silence them about sex­u­al encoun­ters they said they had with Trump a decade ear­li­er.

    Trump denies the encoun­ters occurred, says he did noth­ing wrong and has cast the inves­ti­ga­tion as a “witch hunt” by a Demo­c­ra­t­ic pros­e­cu­tor bent on sab­o­tag­ing the Republican’s 2024 cam­paign. Trump also has labeled Bragg, who is Black, a “racist” and has accused the pros­e­cu­tor of let­ting crime in the city run amok while he has focused on Trump. New York remains one of the safest cities in the coun­try.

    Bragg’s office has appar­ent­ly been exam­in­ing whether any state laws were bro­ken in con­nec­tion with the pay­ments or the way Trump’s com­pa­ny com­pen­sat­ed Cohen for his work to keep the women’s alle­ga­tions qui­et.

    Porn actor Stormy Daniels and at least two for­mer Trump aides — one­time polit­i­cal advis­er Kellyanne Con­way and for­mer spokesper­son Hope Hicks — are among wit­ness­es who have met with pros­e­cu­tors in recent weeks.

    Cohen has said that at Trump’s direc­tion, he arranged pay­ments total­ing $280,000 to Daniels and Play­boy mod­el Karen McDou­gal. Accord­ing to Cohen, the pay­outs were to buy their silence about Trump, who was then in the thick of his first pres­i­den­tial cam­paign.

    Cohen and fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors said Trump’s com­pa­ny paid him $420,000 as reim­burse­ment for the $130,000 pay­ment to Daniels and to cov­er bonus­es and oth­er sup­posed expens­es. The com­pa­ny clas­si­fied those pay­ments inter­nal­ly as legal expens­es. The $150,000 pay­ment to McDou­gal was made by the then-pub­lish­er of the super­mar­ket tabloid Nation­al Enquir­er, which kept her sto­ry from com­ing to light.

    Fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors agreed not to pros­e­cute the Enquirer’s cor­po­rate par­ent in exchange for its coop­er­a­tion in a cam­paign finance inves­ti­ga­tion that led to charges against Cohen in 2018. Pros­e­cu­tors said the pay­ments to Daniels and McDou­gal amount­ed to imper­mis­si­ble, unrecord­ed gifts to Trump’s elec­tion effort.

    Cohen plead­ed guilty, served prison time and was dis­barred. Fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors nev­er charged Trump with any crime.

    ...

    ———-

    “Trump says he expects to be arrest­ed, calls for protest” by MICHELLE L. PRICE, JILL COLVIN and ERIC TUCKER; Asso­ci­at­ed Press; 03/18/2023

    “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:

    ...
    Even as Trump’s lawyer and spokesper­son said there had been no com­mu­ni­ca­tion from pros­e­cu­tors, Trump declared in a post on his social media plat­form that he expects to be tak­en into cus­tody on Tues­day.

    His mes­sage seemed designed to pre­empt a for­mal announce­ment from pros­e­cu­tors and to gal­va­nize out­rage from his base of sup­port­ers in advance of wide­ly antic­i­pat­ed charges. With­in hours, his cam­paign was send­ing fundrais­ing solic­i­ta­tions to his sup­port­ers, while influ­en­tial Repub­li­cans in Con­gress and even some declared and poten­tial rival can­di­dates issued state­ments in his defense.

    ...

    It all evoked, in fore­bod­ing ways, the rhetoric he used short­ly before the insur­rec­tion at the U.S. Capi­tol on Jan. 6, 2021. After hear­ing from the then-pres­i­dent at a Wash­ing­ton ral­ly that morn­ing, his sup­port­ers marched to the Capi­tol and tried to stop the con­gres­sion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Demo­c­rat Joe Biden’s White House vic­to­ry, break­ing through doors and win­dows of the build­ing and leav­ing offi­cers beat­en and blood­ied.

    ...

    Trump’s post Sat­ur­day echoes one made last sum­mer when he broke the news on Truth Social that the FBI was search­ing his Flori­da home as part of an inves­ti­ga­tion into the pos­si­ble mis­han­dling of clas­si­fied doc­u­ments.

    News of that search sparked a flood of con­tri­bu­tions to Trump’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion, and on Sat­ur­day, Trump sent out a series of fundrais­ing emails to his sup­port­ers, includ­ing one that claimed, “I’m not wor­ried in the slight­est.”

    After his post, Repub­li­can House Speak­er Kevin McCarthy decried any plans to pros­e­cute Trump as an “out­ra­geous abuse of pow­er by a rad­i­cal DA” whom he claimed was pur­su­ing “polit­i­cal vengeance.” Rep. Elise Ste­fanik, the third-rank­ing House Repub­li­can, issued a state­ment with a sim­i­lar sen­ti­ment.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Dis­trict Attor­ney Alvin Bragg is thought to be eye­ing charges in the hush mon­ey inves­ti­ga­tion, and recent­ly offered Trump a chance to tes­ti­fy before the grand jury. Local law enforce­ment offi­cials are brac­ing for the pub­lic safe­ty ram­i­fi­ca­tions of an unprece­dent­ed pros­e­cu­tion of a for­mer Amer­i­can pres­i­dent.

    But there has been no pub­lic announce­ment of any time frame for the grand jury’s secret work in the case. At least one addi­tion­al wit­ness is expect­ed to tes­ti­fy, fur­ther indi­cat­ing that no vote to indict has yet been tak­en, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with the inves­ti­ga­tion who was not autho­rized to pub­licly dis­cuss the case and spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty.

    That did not stop Trump from tak­ing to his social media plat­form to say “ille­gal leaks” from Bragg’s office indi­cate that “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK.”

    A Trump lawyer, Susan Necheles, said Trump’s post was “based on the media reports,” and a spokesper­son said there had been “no noti­fi­ca­tion” from Bragg’s office, though the ori­gin of Trump’s Tues­day ref­er­ence was unclear. The dis­trict attorney’s office declined to com­ment.

    Trump’s aides and legal team have been prepar­ing for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an indict­ment. Should that hap­pen, he would be arrest­ed only if he refused to sur­ren­der. Trump’s lawyers have pre­vi­ous­ly said he would fol­low nor­mal pro­ce­dure, mean­ing he would like­ly agree to sur­ren­der at a New York Police Depart­ment precinct or direct­ly to Bragg’s office.
    ...

    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:

    ...
    Besides the hush mon­ey inquiry in New York, Trump faces sep­a­rate crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions in Atlanta and Wash­ing­ton over his efforts to undo the results of the 2020 elec­tion.

    A Jus­tice Depart­ment spe­cial coun­sel has also been pre­sent­ing evi­dence before a grand jury inves­ti­gat­ing Trump’s pos­ses­sion of hun­dreds of clas­si­fied doc­u­ments at his Flori­da estate. It is not clear when those inves­ti­ga­tions will end or whether they might result in crim­i­nal charges, but they will con­tin­ue regard­less of what hap­pens in New York, under­scor­ing the ongo­ing grav­i­ty – and broad geo­graph­ic scope – of the legal chal­lenges fac­ing the for­mer pres­i­dent.
    ...

    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:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Trump esca­lates his white-nation­al­ist doomerism

    Analy­sis by Philip Bump
    Nation­al colum­nist
    March 17, 2023 at 10:56 a.m. EDT

    As he gears up his bid for the 2024 Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion, Don­ald Trump has released a series of videos out­lin­ing the poli­cies and pri­or­i­ties he would bring to office. It’s a very Trumpian approach to the stan­dard prac­tice of can­di­dates out­lin­ing their plat­forms; the video for­mat both replaces com­plex­i­ty with dura­tion and gives Trump a chance to adorn his bul­let points with over­heat­ed rhetoric.

    In his most recent offer­ing, pub­lished on the con­ser­v­a­tive shar­ing plat­form Rum­ble on Thurs­day, Trump explores geopol­i­tics, in his way. He picks up the right-wing argu­ment that aid­ing Ukraine in its efforts to repel the Russ­ian inva­sion is Step 1 of a neo­con­ser­v­a­tive push — here some­how includ­ing the Biden admin­is­tra­tion — to start World War III, as has been the fringe right’s argu­ment for more than a year now. But then, redi­rect­ing fair­ly abrupt­ly, he offers a nov­el argu­ment, albeit one toward which he has been head­ing for eight years.

    Not only are his polit­i­cal oppo­nents under­min­ing the coun­try, but they’re under­min­ing all of “West­ern civ­i­liza­tion” by weak­en­ing the Unit­ed States.

    Before pre­sent­ing the specifics of Trump’s com­men­tary, though, it’s use­ful to con­tex­tu­al­ize them.

    ...

    As Trump was ris­ing, so was white-nation­al­ist rhetoric, and so were white-nation­al­ist actors both in the Unit­ed States and abroad. For many of them, Trump’s nar­row elec­tion as pres­i­dent in 2016 sig­naled a moment of push­back against a strength­en­ing of plu­ral­is­tic, mul­ti­cul­tur­al democ­ra­cy. Groups like the Proud Boys, which couch oppo­si­tion to a diver­si­fy­ing cul­ture as a defense of “West­ern civ­i­liza­tion,” gained pow­er — and avoid­ed crit­i­cism from Trump.

    When Trump made his last stand to retain pow­er after los­ing the 2020 elec­tion, the Proud Boys and oth­er extreme groups bat­tled on his behalf. Trump had run his cam­paign on the argu­ment that soci­ety was col­laps­ing, that spo­radic vio­lence that fol­lowed angry protests over anoth­er police killing of a Black man was, in fact, the first step on a slip­pery slope to anar­chy. Vot­ers reject­ed the argu­ment and reject­ed Trump — but Trump and his allies were unwill­ing to accept that rejec­tion until forced to.

    So we arrive at Trump’s renewed pitch for the 2024 elec­tion. Here’s what the video pub­lished on Thurs­day said:

    “The great­est threat to West­ern civ­i­liza­tion today is not Rus­sia. It’s prob­a­bly more than any­thing else our­selves and some of the hor­ri­ble U.S.A.-hating peo­ple that rep­re­sent us. It’s the abo­li­tion of our nation­al bor­ders. It’s the fail­ure to police our own cities. It’s the destruc­tion of the rule of law from with­in. It’s the col­lapse of the nuclear fam­i­ly. And fer­til­i­ty rates like nobody can believe is hap­pen­ing. It’s the Marx­ists who would have us become a god­less nation wor­ship­ing at the altar of race and gen­der and envi­ron­ment. And it’s the glob­al­ist class that has made us total­ly depen­dent on Chi­na and oth­er for­eign coun­tries that basi­cal­ly hate us.”

    Those first few sen­tences have attract­ed a lot of atten­tion, under­stand­ably; a for­mer pres­i­dent is say­ing that Amer­i­cans them­selves con­sti­tute the threat to West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. Here, Trump is lever­ag­ing the patri­o­tism imbal­ance between Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans: The right can dis­par­age aspects of the coun­try or indi­vid­ual states with­out con­dem­na­tion because it is also more jin­go­is­tic, more super­fi­cial­ly patri­ot­ic. Since the left is framed as antag­o­nis­tic to the Unit­ed States, even valid crit­i­cisms are dis­missed as Amer­i­ca-hat­ing.

    But pick it apart. Trump is also say­ing that Rus­sia — auto­crat­ic, aggres­sive, homoge­nous — is more com­pat­i­ble with “West­ern civ­i­liza­tion” than the Unit­ed States. Then he explains why.

    Because the Unit­ed States has “abolish[ed] nation­al bor­ders.” This is a wild­ly inac­cu­rate, over­wrought con­dem­na­tion of increased appre­hen­sions at the bor­der — cor­re­lat­ed to the arrival of more immi­grants.

    Because the coun­try is fail­ing to “police our own cities.” Here, an attempt both to assert with­out uni­form evi­dence that crime is surg­ing and, bare­ly under the sur­face, sug­gest that urban areas that have a lot of Black and His­pan­ic res­i­dents are out of con­trol.

    Because of the “destruc­tion of the rule of law.” This is a ref­er­ence in part to the afore­men­tioned crime in cities, which the right has decid­ed is a func­tion of protests against police and changes in how pros­e­cu­tors charge accused crim­i­nals. It’s also a ref­er­ence to the var­i­ous charges Trump him­self might face, of course.

    Because of the “col­lapse of the nuclear fam­i­ly” and declin­ing fer­til­i­ty rates. This is as explic­it an endorse­ment of core white-nation­al­ist rhetoric as you will find. Repub­li­cans have expressed con­cern about the decline in two-par­ent fam­i­lies for some time, often because this decline does cor­re­late to low­er suc­cess for chil­dren and, at times, because it’s a way of cast­ing recip­i­ents of gov­ern­ment ser­vices (often Black or His­pan­ic) as unde­serv­ing. It’s safe to assume, giv­en the con­text, that Trump is focused more on the lat­ter.

    That “fer­til­i­ty rates” thing, though, is an expres­sion of frus­tra­tion that few­er White Amer­i­cans are hav­ing White babies. Rates are down among most racial groups, but low­est among Whites — and it’s hard to believe that Trump here is express­ing con­cern about the drop in rates among Black or His­pan­ic Amer­i­cans. After all, this is a screed about “West­ern civ­i­liza­tion,” which is under­stood as a short­hand for White cul­ture.

    Declin­ing birthrates are, in fact, a chal­lenge for the coun­try, giv­en that the pop­u­la­tion is aging. In order to main­tain the ratio between old­er and work­ing-age Amer­i­cans — impor­tant to con­sid­er giv­en that work­ing-age peo­ple pay into sys­tems that seniors use — demog­ra­phers expect that the Unit­ed States will need to increase immi­gra­tion. And that is not some­thing that Trump wants to see.

    In case you aren’t con­vinced by this pars­ing of Trump’s words, he even­tu­al­ly cops to it. “Marx­ists” want the Unit­ed States to be a “god­less nation wor­ship­ing at the altar of race and gen­der and envi­ron­ment.” As with patri­o­tism, the right likes to offer race-cen­tric rhetoric while insist­ing that it’s the left that has a tox­ic rela­tion­ship with race. To draw atten­tion to the ways in which race is present as a fac­tor in Amer­i­can sys­tems and pol­i­tics is to be an anti-Amer­i­can Marx­ist; to defend those sys­tems and espouse those pol­i­tics is to be race-blind, just as Mar­tin Luther King Jr. would have want­ed. Anoth­er corol­lary: To talk about a man being mar­ried to a man is to talk irre­ducibly about sex­u­al­i­ty; to talk about a man mar­ried to a woman is just to talk about life in these Unit­ed States.

    Trump has nev­er been sub­tle, from his archi­tec­ture to his pol­i­tics. In this video — again, an artic­u­la­tion of what he promis­es to bring to the White House should he be inau­gu­rat­ed in 2025 — he is sim­i­lar­ly unsub­tle. Trump frames his can­di­da­cy as a last-ditch back­stop against the col­lapse of White cul­ture, more threat­ened by Amer­i­cans them­selves than by Rus­sia — a nation hailed by many on the right for its unabashed aggres­sion in ser­vice to its homo­gene­ity.

    This is a pol­i­cy Trump wants vot­ers to know that he will enact.

    ———-

    “Trump esca­lates his white-nation­al­ist doomerism” by Philip Bump; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 03/17/2023

    “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:

    ...
    When Trump made his last stand to retain pow­er after los­ing the 2020 elec­tion, the Proud Boys and oth­er extreme groups bat­tled on his behalf. Trump had run his cam­paign on the argu­ment that soci­ety was col­laps­ing, that spo­radic vio­lence that fol­lowed angry protests over anoth­er police killing of a Black man was, in fact, the first step on a slip­pery slope to anar­chy. Vot­ers reject­ed the argu­ment and reject­ed Trump — but Trump and his allies were unwill­ing to accept that rejec­tion until forced to.

    So we arrive at Trump’s renewed pitch for the 2024 elec­tion. Here’s what the video pub­lished on Thurs­day said:

    “The great­est threat to West­ern civ­i­liza­tion today is not Rus­sia. It’s prob­a­bly more than any­thing else our­selves and some of the hor­ri­ble U.S.A.-hating peo­ple that rep­re­sent us. It’s the abo­li­tion of our nation­al bor­ders. It’s the fail­ure to police our own cities. It’s the destruc­tion of the rule of law from with­in. It’s the col­lapse of the nuclear fam­i­ly. And fer­til­i­ty rates like nobody can believe is hap­pen­ing. It’s the Marx­ists who would have us become a god­less nation wor­ship­ing at the altar of race and gen­der and envi­ron­ment. And it’s the glob­al­ist class that has made us total­ly depen­dent on Chi­na and oth­er for­eign coun­tries that basi­cal­ly hate us.”

    ...

    In case you aren’t con­vinced by this pars­ing of Trump’s words, he even­tu­al­ly cops to it. “Marx­ists” want the Unit­ed States to be a “god­less nation wor­ship­ing at the altar of race and gen­der and envi­ron­ment.” As with patri­o­tism, the right likes to offer race-cen­tric rhetoric while insist­ing that it’s the left that has a tox­ic rela­tion­ship with race. To draw atten­tion to the ways in which race is present as a fac­tor in Amer­i­can sys­tems and pol­i­tics is to be an anti-Amer­i­can Marx­ist; to defend those sys­tems and espouse those pol­i­tics is to be race-blind, just as Mar­tin Luther King Jr. would have want­ed. Anoth­er corol­lary: To talk about a man being mar­ried to a man is to talk irre­ducibly about sex­u­al­i­ty; to talk about a man mar­ried to a woman is just to talk about life in these Unit­ed States.

    Trump has nev­er been sub­tle, from his archi­tec­ture to his pol­i­tics. In this video — again, an artic­u­la­tion of what he promis­es to bring to the White House should he be inau­gu­rat­ed in 2025 — he is sim­i­lar­ly unsub­tle. Trump frames his can­di­da­cy as a last-ditch back­stop against the col­lapse of White cul­ture, more threat­ened by Amer­i­cans them­selves than by Rus­sia — a nation hailed by many on the right for its unabashed aggres­sion in ser­vice to its homo­gene­ity.

    This is a pol­i­cy Trump wants vot­ers to know that he will enact.
    ...

    “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.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 20, 2023, 3:55 pm
  15. 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 Searswho 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:

    Moth­er Jones

    Inside the Secret Work­ing Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Coun­try

    Leaked emails give a glimpse of the reli­gious-right net­works behind trans­gen­der health care bans.

    Madi­son Pauly
    March 8, 2023

    On a Sat­ur­day after­noon in August 2019, South Dako­ta Repub­li­can state Rep. Fred Deutsch sent an email to 18 anti-trans activists, doc­tors, and lawyers with the text of a bill he planned to intro­duce that would make it a felony for doc­tors to give trans­gen­der chil­dren under 16 gen­der-affirm­ing med­ical care. “I have no doubt this will be an uphill bat­tle when we get to ses­sion,” Deutsch warned the group. “As always, please do not share this with the media. The longer we can fly under the radar the bet­ter.”

    The mes­sage was one in a trove of emails obtained by Moth­er Jones between Deutsch and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of a net­work of activists and orga­ni­za­tions at the fore­front of the anti-trans move­ment. They show the degree to which these activists shaped Deutsch’s repres­sive leg­is­la­tion, a ver­sion of which was signed into law in Feb­ru­ary, and the tac­tics, alliances, and goals of a move­ment that has sought to foist their agen­da on a nation­al scale.

    In mes­sages back and forth, some mem­bers of the group pushed Deutsch to make the bill even more restric­tive. Ver­nadette Broyles, the pres­i­dent and gen­er­al coun­sel of a Geor­gia-based law firm called the Child & Parental Rights Cam­paign, urged him to raise the age thresh­old to 18. Broyles, who is also affil­i­at­ed with the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian legal pow­er­house Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom (ADF), warned that oth­er reli­gious-right groups might not sup­port the bill if “you start by giv­ing away 16 and 17-year olds right from the out­set.” Oth­ers, includ­ing Andre Van Mol—a mem­ber of a fringe, con­ser­v­a­tive doc­tors group that calls itself the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Pedi­a­tri­cians (ACPeds)—raised con­cerns that the bill as writ­ten might back­fire by acci­den­tal­ly block­ing health care providers from “attempt­ing to change…a child’s per­cep­tion of their sex” when kids iden­ti­fy as trans­gen­der. Deutsch agreed to rewrite the sec­tion.

    At the time, there was lit­tle prece­dent for such bills, and Deutsch’s leg­is­la­tion, called the Vul­ner­a­ble Child Pro­tec­tion Act, was killed in the Sen­ate after doc­tors showed up at the South Dako­ta state­house to argue they should not be sent to prison for fol­low­ing the med­ical con­sen­sus. “Though our ses­sion in SD is now over and our efforts to pro­tect gen­der-con­fused vul­ner­a­ble chil­dren failed, I con­tin­ue to receive ugly email and social media posts,” Deutsch com­plained to the group in March 2020.

    “Please do not say that the South Dako­ta effort failed!!” Mar­garet Clarke, gen­er­al coun­sel for the Alaba­ma branch of the Phyl­lis Schlafly–founded Eagle Forum, replied. “You suc­cess­ful­ly inspired, encour­aged and coun­seled numer­ous VCAP [sic] efforts around the coun­try. You estab­lished the ide­al wit­ness list that we are all still fol­low­ing in our indi­vid­ual states…And, most impor­tant­ly you con­nect­ed us all to each oth­er. This is just the begin­ning.”

    Indeed, Deutsch’s bill has proved influ­en­tial in the recent surge of anti-LGBTQ law­mak­ing. This leg­isla­tive ses­sion, at least 18 states have con­sid­ered bills con­tain­ing lan­guage close­ly resem­bling the text of the Vul­ner­a­ble Child Pro­tec­tion Act. The leaked emails reveal how Deutsch’s pro­pos­al helped pro­po­nents of the nation­al move­ment to restrict gen­der-affirm­ing care estab­lish a play­book for their now-com­mon attacks. “They’ve very much increased sophis­ti­ca­tion since then, but the roots are there,” says activist and writer Erin Reed, who tracks anti-trans leg­is­la­tion. Reed says that when she meets with leg­is­la­tors, they’re often sur­prised to learn of the out­side forces push­ing anti-trans bills. “This isn’t com­ing from an in-state grass­roots sup­port sys­tem,” she says.

    The emails demon­strate close col­lab­o­ra­tion between groups work­ing behind the scenes to push bills ban­ning trans­gen­der health care, includ­ing ADF—which has defend­ed state-sanc­tioned ster­il­iza­tion of trans peo­ple in Europe—and the ACPeds—which has opposed adop­tion by gay cou­ples and sup­port­ed con­ver­sion ther­a­py for LGBTQ youth. In recent years, ADF has draft­ed leg­is­la­tion ban­ning trans chil­dren from using school restrooms or play­ing on school sports teams that align with their gen­der iden­ti­ty. (Both groups are also staunch­ly anti-abor­tion; ADF, which draft­ed the Mis­sis­sip­pi abor­tion ban at the heart of the case that over­turned Roe v. Wade, is cur­rent­ly rep­re­sent­ing ACPeds in a close­ly-watched law­suit to ban an abor­tion pill, mifepri­s­tone, nation­al­ly.)

    ...

    More than half of trans­gen­der and non­bi­na­ry kids have con­sid­ered sui­cide, accord­ing to a 2021 sur­vey by the Trevor Project, and 93 per­cent say they wor­ry about state laws deny­ing trans­gen­der peo­ple access to gen­der-affirm­ing med­ical care. This treat­ment approach—which typ­i­cal­ly includes puber­ty block­ers for pubes­cent chil­dren, cross-sex hor­mones for teenagers or adults, and, almost exclu­sive­ly for adults, surgeries—represents a broad med­ical agree­ment that such care can be cru­cial for sup­port­ing trans kids’ well­be­ing. Gen­der-affirm­ing care is sup­port­ed by the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion, Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Pedi­atrics, Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Asso­ci­a­tion, the Endocrine Soci­ety, and oth­er major med­ical orga­ni­za­tions. And stud­ies have found that it is asso­ci­at­ed with bet­ter men­tal health out­comes over both short and longer-term peri­ods.

    The orga­ni­za­tions exchang­ing emails with Deutsch and his oth­er col­lab­o­ra­tors aren’t shy about their agen­da. Several—including ACPeds, Eagle Forum, and the Chris­t­ian Med­ical & Den­tal Associations—are list­ed as part­ners in a cam­paign dubbed the “Promise to America’s Chil­dren.” Co-led by ADF, the Her­itage Foun­da­tion (a major con­ser­v­a­tive think tank also rep­re­sent­ed in the emails), and the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist lob­by­ing group Fam­i­ly Pol­i­cy Alliance, the cam­paign push­es anti-LGBTQ leg­is­la­tion, claim­ing that the gov­ern­ment and media are impos­ing “explic­it, sex­u­al con­tent” on children—meaning infor­ma­tion about sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, gen­der iden­ti­ty, and abor­tion. The pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Prin­ci­ples Project, a mem­ber of the coali­tion, recent­ly told the New York Times. that his group’s goal is to elim­i­nate all tran­si­tion care, start­ing with chil­dren because that’s “where the con­sen­sus is.”

    “Law­mak­ers often seek advice from experts in law, pol­i­cy, med­i­cine and oth­er fields as they craft leg­is­la­tion,” ADF senior vice pres­i­dent of com­mu­ni­ca­tions Greg Scott said in a state­ment. “That’s a nor­mal part of a healthy democ­ra­cy.” Pri­vate­ly, Jon Uhler, a ther­a­pist who sup­ports con­ver­sion ther­a­py, urged the work­ing group to respond to ques­tions for this arti­cle by empha­siz­ing “that there is no such thing as a Trans kid”; he lat­er sent me a series of social media posts com­par­ing trans peo­ple and drag per­form­ers to sex­u­al preda­tors.

    The emails illus­trate just how long some major fig­ures in the anti-trans move­ment have been incu­bat­ing polit­i­cal attacks on trans­gen­der health care. For instance, Broyles—who today rep­re­sents Jamie Reed, the for­mer case­work­er who has made con­tro­ver­sial, high-pro­file claims against a Mis­souri gen­der clin­ic—was work­ing in 2020 with ACPeds exec­u­tive direc­tor Michelle Cretel­la and retired Amer­i­can Prin­ci­ples Project senior fel­low Jane Rob­bins to com­pile a pack­et of lob­by­ing mate­ri­als in sup­port of Vul­ner­a­ble Child Pro­tec­tion Act bills, includ­ing a guide tar­get­ed at par­ents. “Please share these with your leg­is­la­tors and feel free dis­sem­i­nate them as wide­ly as pos­si­ble with allies,” Broyles wrote on Jan­u­ary 9, 2020. “We hope they become weapons in the hands of many war­riors!”

    The 2019 bill wasn’t Deutsch’s first time push­ing anti-trans legislation—or his first time work­ing with Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom. A retired chi­ro­prac­tor and for­mer pres­i­dent of the anti-abor­tion group South Dako­ta Right to Life, Deutsch was elect­ed to the state­house in 2014, and two years lat­er intro­duced one of the ear­li­est “bath­room bills,” based on ADF mod­el leg­is­la­tion. Like North Carolina’s infa­mous HB2, the pro­pos­al attempt­ed to block trans stu­dents from using school restrooms and lock­er rooms that matched their gen­der iden­ti­ty. It passed both hous­es of the state leg­is­la­ture before it was vetoed by then-Gov. Den­nis Dau­gaard, who said that the bill “does not address any press­ing issue con­cern­ing the school dis­tricts of South Dako­ta.”

    ...

    In 2019, Deutsch tweet­ed that he would try to crim­i­nal­ize doc­tors who fol­lowed the Endocrine Society’s clin­i­cal prac­tice guide­lines for treat­ing peo­ple with gen­der dys­pho­ria. He would lat­er claim the idea for such a law had come from “chil­dren I saw on Twit­ter” who told him to read Red­dit forums about detran­si­tion­ing. By that sum­mer, Deutsch had qui­et­ly assem­bled a group of advis­ers, includ­ing peo­ple who had once iden­ti­fied as trans only to reverse course and deny that any­one is tru­ly trans­gen­der. They helped him work­shop leg­isla­tive lan­guage, sup­port­ing mate­ri­als, and pro­po­nent tes­ti­mo­ny.

    [see Fred Deutsch’s email]

    “It was like Deutsch assem­bled a team of Navy SEALs—we were all trained killers in a spe­cial­ty,” says Elisa Rae Shupe, a retired US Army sol­dier who became a vocal anti-trans advo­cate and par­tic­i­pat­ed in Deutsch’s work­ing group after detran­si­tion­ing. Shupe has since retran­si­tioned, dis­avowed much of her old activism, and shared her copies of the work­ing group’s emails with reporters. Reli­gious-right rhetoric about want­i­ng to help chil­dren with gen­der dys­pho­ria is “just a front for what they do behind the scenes,” she says. “It’s like they want to do as much dam­age to the trans com­mu­ni­ty as they can.”

    The draft bill Deutsch sent the group in August 2019 sparked a lengthy debate over lan­guage. In one email chain, par­tic­i­pants strug­gled to nar­row the word­ing of Deutsch’s bill to avoid block­ing treat­ments for trau­ma vic­tims, or legit­imiz­ing the con­cept of gen­der as one sep­a­rate from bio­log­i­cal sex. Kather­ine Cave, a founder of the anti-trans par­ent orga­ni­za­tion Kelsey Coali­tion, sug­gest­ed spec­i­fy­ing that treat­ments were only banned for patients who had an “incor­rect per­cep­tion of their sex.” A Child & Parental Rights Cam­paign lawyer pro­posed replac­ing the word “incor­rect” with “dis­so­nant.”

    Richard Mast of Lib­er­ty Coun­sel sep­a­rate­ly advised the group to avoid say­ing the words trans­gen­der, cis­gen­der, or non-bina­ry. “Using them sur­ren­ders the lan­guage,” Mast wrote. “If the oth­er side’s lan­guage frames the debate, we lose.”

    Mem­bers of the South Dako­ta “team”—as they occa­sion­al­ly referred to themselves—hammered out talk­ing points for upcom­ing bill hear­ings, where a detran­si­tion­er and a mem­ber of the Women’s Lib­er­a­tion Front would tes­ti­fy in favor of the bill along with doc­tors from both inside and out­side South Dako­ta. The group debat­ed how to respond to the ACLU’s claim that their bill was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. (“While there may be a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to refuse to car­ry a child to term (under Roe), there is no con­sti­tu­tion­al right to chem­i­cal­ly and sur­gi­cal­ly mutil­i­at­ing one’s healthy body, where there is no dis­ease to be treated—that is child abuse,” Broyles wrote.) And they brain­stormed respons­es to the argu­ment that gen­der-affirm­ing care reduces suicide—an asser­tion that is backed up by research. Peer-reviewed stud­ies have repeat­ed­ly found that trans and non­bi­na­ry youth with access to gen­der-affirm­ing care are sig­nif­i­cant­ly less like to seri­ous­ly con­sid­er sui­cide than those who did not receive such care. A larg­er analy­sis, using online sur­vey data from over 11,000 trans and non­bi­na­ry youth, found using gen­der-affirm­ing hor­mon­al ther­a­py was asso­ci­at­ed with low­er rates of both depres­sion and sui­ci­dal­i­ty. Yet one team mem­ber called the argu­ment that gen­der-affirm­ing care reduces sui­cide “abu­sive”; anoth­er argued it was a way for doc­tors to coerce par­ents to con­sent to gen­der-affirm­ing care for their child.

    Van Mol, the doc­tor, sug­gest­ed Deutsch reply to the sui­cide pre­ven­tion argu­ment with a rebut­tal pub­lished on a defunct anti-trans blog: “Why weren’t the 1950s a total blood bath for sui­cides if non-affir­ma­tion of every­thing is the fast train to off­ing one’s self?” Van Mol asked, para­phras­ing the blog post.

    Anoth­er doc­tor in the work­ing group, Cal­i­for­nia endocri­nol­o­gist Michael Laid­law, had gained atten­tion for his writ­ing against gen­der-affirm­ing care after par­ents at a char­ter school in his region raised com­plaints that they hadn’t been noti­fied before kinder­garten­ers were read a children’s book, I Am Jazz, about trans teenag­er Jazz Jen­nings. Last fall, when the state of Flori­da called on Laid­law as an expert wit­ness in a law­suit over its anti-trans Med­ic­aid pol­i­cy, a fed­er­al judge con­clud­ed that he was “far off from the accept­ed view” on how to treat gen­der dys­pho­ria, in part because Laid­law had said he would refuse to use patients’ pre­ferred pro­nouns. In his South Dako­ta tes­ti­mo­ny, Laid­law com­pared gen­der-affirm­ing care to Nazi exper­i­men­ta­tion and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In emails to Deutsch and the group, he railed against doc­tors who pre­scribe puber­ty blockers—which are used to delay unwant­ed phys­i­cal changes in gen­der-diverse kids and give them more time to explore whether or how to transition—accusing them of “will­ful­ly harm­ing” chil­dren, even if kids and their par­ents con­sent to treat­ment. “The physi­cian is the crim­i­nal in these sce­nar­ios and must be pros­e­cut­ed by the law,” he argued.

    Around the time it became clear that Deutsch’s bill would not pass, the dis­cus­sions on the email threads shift­ed from strat­e­gy to impas­sioned procla­ma­tions that trans peo­ple don’t exist. “The State is forc­ing peo­ple to par­tic­i­pate in a lie akin to 2+2=5,” Cretel­la wrote. “[A] man is NOT a woman! If this is not the def­i­n­i­tion of insane I don’t know what is!” Some par­tic­i­pants in the chains argued over whether it under­mined their cause to work with a trans activist who opposed med­ical tran­si­tion for chil­dren but not adults. “Their endorse­ments come with a hitch: they expect every­one to play make believe that they real­ly are the oppo­site sex and have com­pelled pro­nouns and all that garbage,” Shupe wrote.

    In spring 2020, the group claimed one vic­to­ry. Mast, of Lib­er­ty Coun­sel, put the team in touch with Ida­ho Rep. Julianne Young, who was work­ing on a bill to pro­hib­it trans peo­ple from chang­ing the gen­der mark­er on their birth cer­tifi­cate. Young, who had tak­en edits from ADF attor­ney Matt Sharp on the pro­pos­al, asked the group for feed­back on its lan­guage and invit­ed them to edit her press release about it. (In response to ques­tions from Moth­er Jones, Young says that con­sult­ing with experts with leg­is­la­tion is a “nor­mal part of our robust, demo­c­ra­t­ic process.”)

    On March 30, 2020, Young wrote to the group with excite­ment to announce that her bill had been signed by Ida­ho Gov. Lit­tle. “I can’t thank you enough for your help and sup­port,” she wrote.

    “Thanks for stay­ing so focused on this even through the end­less pan­dem­ic pan­de­mo­ni­um,” replied Gary McCaleb, a lawyer on ADF’s appel­late team. “Very, very well done!”

    Even as Deutsch’s orig­i­nal bill failed, vari­a­tions of the Vul­ner­a­ble Child Pro­tec­tion Act were already being intro­duced in at least 9 states beyond South Dako­ta. In part, that was thanks to the efforts of peo­ple on the team, who were push­ing the bill they’d work­shopped with Deutsch behind the scenes to oth­er Repub­li­can leg­is­la­tors.

    In Octo­ber 2019, Broyles announced to the group that she and Rob­bins had met with Geor­gia state Rep. Gin­ny Ehrhart and con­vert­ed her to their cause. “She is fil­ing our bill this leg­isla­tive ses­sion,” Broyles wrote. “Am stoked for what God is doing in Geor­gia.” Not long after their meet­ing, the Atlanta Jour­nal Con­sti­tu­tion report­ed Ehrhart as say­ing she had draft­ed the bill in response to a high-pro­file child cus­tody dis­pute in the Texas, in which par­ents dis­agreed about their child’s gen­der iden­ti­ty.

    [See Ver­nadette Broyles’ email, declar­ing that she and a col­league had per­suad­ed a Geor­gia law­mak­er to intro­duce the Vul­ner­a­ble Child Pro­tec­tion Act]

    In Flori­da, an aide for state Rep. Antho­ny Saba­ti­ni con­tact­ed Mast for rec­om­men­da­tions for experts who would speak out in sup­port of a Vul­ner­a­ble Child Pro­tec­tion Act there. Cretel­la helped col­lect names of like-mind­ed doc­tors and psy­chol­o­gists, report­ing to the group that she’d urged a lob­by­ist “to get a diver­si­ty of wit­ness­es as was achieved for [South Dako­ta].”

    Mean­while, Eagle Forum worked with a Utah law­mak­er, then-Rep. Brad Daw, who’d agreed to spon­sor a sim­i­lar bill in his state. “We’ve got lots of leg­is­la­tors work­ing on this,” a Utah Eagle Forum activist told the Salt Lake Tri­bune. Deutsch told his group he would pass work­shopped leg­isla­tive lan­guage and sup­port­ing mate­ri­als to Daw through Eagle Forum. But Daw, cit­ing push­back from col­leagues and the par­ents of trans chil­dren, lat­er changed his mind, and instead filed a bill to study the effects of puber­ty block­ers.

    And in Alaba­ma, accord­ing to an email from Eagle Forum’s Clarke, both Cretel­la and Deutsch had coached her as she led leg­is­la­tors in the state “to adopt a bill sim­i­lar to Rep. Fred Deutsch’s.” The result­ing leg­is­la­tion, dubbed the “Vul­ner­a­ble Child Com­pas­sion and Pro­tec­tion Act,” failed in 2020 and the fol­low­ing year. But an updat­ed ver­sion was signed into law in 2022, becom­ing the country’s sec­ond ban on gen­der-affirm­ing care and the first to crim­i­nal­ize doc­tors who pro­vid­ed it. (The first, in Arkansas, was passed in 2021. Today, six states total have banned gen­der-affirm­ing med­ica­tion and sur­gi­cal care for minors.)

    After Alaba­ma enact­ed its ver­sion of Deutsch’s bill, the Jus­tice Depart­ment sued the state, argu­ing that the law is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because it dis­crim­i­nates based on sex and trans­gen­der sta­tus. A fed­er­al judge agreed to block parts of the new law, explain­ing that Alaba­ma had pro­duced no cred­i­ble evi­dence to back up its claim that the med­ica­tions are exper­i­men­tal. “The uncontradicted…evidence is that at least twen­ty-two major med­ical asso­ci­a­tions in the Unit­ed States endorse tran­si­tion­ing med­ica­tions as well-estab­lished, evi­dence-based treat­ments for gen­der dys­pho­ria in minors,” Dis­trict Court Judge Liles Burke wrote in his order issu­ing a tem­po­rary injunc­tion.

    That case, along with a chal­lenge to the Arkansas ban, is still play­ing out in court. Last fall, Burke denied a Jus­tice Depart­ment attempt to sub­poe­na the Eagle Forum for all doc­u­ments relat­ed to its advo­ca­cy for the law. “Eagle Forum of Alaba­ma took on this issue after hear­ing from cit­i­zens in Alaba­ma, includ­ing par­ents, doc­tors, lawyers, and guid­ance coun­selors, about their con­cerns for oth­er­wise healthy chil­dren who want to tran­si­tion to the oppo­site sex,” the group claimed in a press release.

    [See Mar­garet Clarke’s email, laud­ing Deutsch’s influ­ence on anti-trans leg­is­la­tion]

    And in South Dako­ta, Deutsch final­ly won the long bat­tle this Feb­ru­ary, when Gov. Kristi Noem signed an updat­ed ver­sion of his bill. The new law strips licens­es from doc­tors who pro­vide minors with gen­der-affirm­ing care, and requires health care providers to grad­u­al­ly cut off puber­ty block­ers and hor­mones for any kids they are already treat­ing. That pro­vi­sion is expect­ed to force some South Dako­ta teens to med­ical­ly detran­si­tion by the end of 2023.

    Deutsch returned to Twit­ter in Feb­ru­ary to cel­e­brate the sign­ing of the South Dako­ta ban. “This con­cludes the effort I began three years ago,” he tweet­ed, along with a pic­ture of law­mak­ers toast­ing. “Many good peo­ple have worked to pro­tect our chil­dren.”

    ————–

    “Inside the Secret Work­ing Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Coun­try” by Madi­son Pauly; Moth­er Jones; 03/08/2023

    “The mes­sage was one in a trove of emails obtained by Moth­er Jones between Deutsch and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of a net­work of activists and orga­ni­za­tions at the fore­front of the anti-trans move­ment. They show the degree to which these activists shaped Deutsch’s repres­sive leg­is­la­tion, a ver­sion of which was signed into law in Feb­ru­ary, and the tac­tics, alliances, and goals of a move­ment that has sought to foist their agen­da on a nation­al scale.”

    A trove of leaked email from a net­work of activists and orga­ni­za­tions at the fore­front of the anti-trans move­ment. That’s what was just leaked to Moth­er Jones. A net­work that is involved in a far broad­er push to role back the laws in human sex­u­al­i­ty to role back vir­tu­al­ly all LGBTQ rights.

    And, of course, it’s anoth­er net­work filled with CNP mem­bers and affil­i­at­ed enti­ties, with the Chris­t­ian legal pow­er­house Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom (ADF) play­ing a cen­tral role. Found­ed by CNP mem­ber Alan Searswho sits on the CNP board and wrote the book The Homo­sex­u­al Agen­da, that false­ly links pedophil­ia to homo­sex­u­al­i­ty — the ADF is filled with CNP mem­bers. For exam­ple, the leaked CNP mem­ber­ship lists include the fol­low­ing cur­rent or for­mer ADF mem­bers:
    * Michael “Mike” Baller
    * Ben­jamin W. Bull, for­mer Chief Coun­sel of ADF and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of ADF Inter­na­tion­al
    * Gre­go­ry Logan Cha­fuen
    * Mar­jorie Dan­nen­felser
    * Dr. Michael P. Far­ris, the Pres­i­dent & CEO of ADF
    * Cather­ine Glenn Fos­ter
    * Dou­glas H. Napi­er
    * Kris­ten K. Wag­goner, Gen­er­al Coun­sel of ADF
    * For­mer ADF exec­u­tive, Paul E. Weber, who is now Pres­i­dent & CEO of the Fam­i­ly Pol­i­cy Alliance, which also fig­ured into this report.

    And the ADF is a CNP enti­ty with a glob­al reach. Recall how in 2016, the ADF sup­port­ed a law in Belize mak­ing gay sex pun­ish­able with 10 years in jail. The group also tripled its spend­ing in Europe between 2012 and 2016 and in 2019 co-host­ed an event with the French group La Manif Pour Tous that has been pre­vi­ous­ly been linked to the far right Front Nation­al.

    But the AFD’s largest influ­ence is in the US, where it pro­motes what can only be described as an Old Tes­ta­ment theoc­ra­cy. For exam­ple, in 2019, the ADF showed up as the sec­ond biggest spender on Face­book ads among a group of 38 hate groups tracked by the SPLC. The ADF spent at least $391,669 that year on Face­book ads push­ing for the crim­i­nal­iza­tion of “sodomy”. Sim­i­lar­ly, the ADF pro­vid­ed the mod­el tem­plate leg­is­la­tion for the Reli­gious Free­dom Restora­tion Act allow­ing for the legal dis­crim­i­na­tion against LGBT peo­ple in Mis­sis­sip­pi. The ADF has been very busy in orga­niz­ing anti-LGBTQ laws over the last decade.

    But the ADF is also just one of the CNP-con­nect­ed enti­ties deeply involved with this behind-the-scenes agen­da to effec­tive­ly out­law the LGBTQ com­mu­ni­ty. For exam­ple, there’s the Eagle Forum, found­ed by now-deceased CNP mem­ber Phyl­lis Schlafly. Recall how now-deceased Eagle Forum Pres­i­dent and founder, Phyl­lis Schafly, was on the CNP mem­bers list, along with her daugh­ter Anne Cori, and Ed Mar­tin of the Eagle Forum Fund. Oth­er Eagle Forum asso­ciates who showed upon the CNP mem­bers lists include Eunie Smith and LaNeil W. Spivy. The Eagle Forum is deeply in the CNP’s orbit.

    And then there’s fringe groups like the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Pedi­a­tri­cians (ACPeds), a group that broke away from the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Pedi­atrics due to its sup­port of LGBTQ par­ents. It’s a group effort, with the CNP stand­ing in the back­ground as usu­al:

    ...
    On a Sat­ur­day after­noon in August 2019, South Dako­ta Repub­li­can state Rep. Fred Deutsch sent an email to 18 anti-trans activists, doc­tors, and lawyers with the text of a bill he planned to intro­duce that would make it a felony for doc­tors to give trans­gen­der chil­dren under 16 gen­der-affirm­ing med­ical care. “I have no doubt this will be an uphill bat­tle when we get to ses­sion,” Deutsch warned the group. “As always, please do not share this with the media. The longer we can fly under the radar the bet­ter.”

    ...

    In mes­sages back and forth, some mem­bers of the group pushed Deutsch to make the bill even more restric­tive. Ver­nadette Broyles, the pres­i­dent and gen­er­al coun­sel of a Geor­gia-based law firm called the Child & Parental Rights Cam­paign, urged him to raise the age thresh­old to 18. Broyles, who is also affil­i­at­ed with the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian legal pow­er­house Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom (ADF), warned that oth­er reli­gious-right groups might not sup­port the bill if “you start by giv­ing away 16 and 17-year olds right from the out­set.” Oth­ers, includ­ing Andre Van Mol—a mem­ber of a fringe, con­ser­v­a­tive doc­tors group that calls itself the Amer­i­can Col­lege of Pedi­a­tri­cians (ACPeds)—raised con­cerns that the bill as writ­ten might back­fire by acci­den­tal­ly block­ing health care providers from “attempt­ing to change…a child’s per­cep­tion of their sex” when kids iden­ti­fy as trans­gen­der. Deutsch agreed to rewrite the sec­tion.

    At the time, there was lit­tle prece­dent for such bills, and Deutsch’s leg­is­la­tion, called the Vul­ner­a­ble Child Pro­tec­tion Act, was killed in the Sen­ate after doc­tors showed up at the South Dako­ta state­house to argue they should not be sent to prison for fol­low­ing the med­ical con­sen­sus. “Though our ses­sion in SD is now over and our efforts to pro­tect gen­der-con­fused vul­ner­a­ble chil­dren failed, I con­tin­ue to receive ugly email and social media posts,” Deutsch com­plained to the group in March 2020.

    “Please do not say that the South Dako­ta effort failed!!” Mar­garet Clarke, gen­er­al coun­sel for the Alaba­ma branch of the Phyl­lis Schlafly–founded Eagle Forum, replied. “You suc­cess­ful­ly inspired, encour­aged and coun­seled numer­ous VCAP [sic] efforts around the coun­try. You estab­lished the ide­al wit­ness list that we are all still fol­low­ing in our indi­vid­ual states…And, most impor­tant­ly you con­nect­ed us all to each oth­er. This is just the begin­ning.”

    Indeed, Deutsch’s bill has proved influ­en­tial in the recent surge of anti-LGBTQ law­mak­ing. This leg­isla­tive ses­sion, at least 18 states have con­sid­ered bills con­tain­ing lan­guage close­ly resem­bling the text of the Vul­ner­a­ble Child Pro­tec­tion Act. The leaked emails reveal how Deutsch’s pro­pos­al helped pro­po­nents of the nation­al move­ment to restrict gen­der-affirm­ing care estab­lish a play­book for their now-com­mon attacks. “They’ve very much increased sophis­ti­ca­tion since then, but the roots are there,” says activist and writer Erin Reed, who tracks anti-trans leg­is­la­tion. Reed says that when she meets with leg­is­la­tors, they’re often sur­prised to learn of the out­side forces push­ing anti-trans bills. “This isn’t com­ing from an in-state grass­roots sup­port sys­tem,” she says.

    ...

    The 2019 bill wasn’t Deutsch’s first time push­ing anti-trans legislation—or his first time work­ing with Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom. A retired chi­ro­prac­tor and for­mer pres­i­dent of the anti-abor­tion group South Dako­ta Right to Life, Deutsch was elect­ed to the state­house in 2014, and two years lat­er intro­duced one of the ear­li­est “bath­room bills,” based on ADF mod­el leg­is­la­tion. Like North Carolina’s infa­mous HB2, the pro­pos­al attempt­ed to block trans stu­dents from using school restrooms and lock­er rooms that matched their gen­der iden­ti­ty. It passed both hous­es of the state leg­is­la­ture before it was vetoed by then-Gov. Den­nis Dau­gaard, who said that the bill “does not address any press­ing issue con­cern­ing the school dis­tricts of South Dako­ta.”
    ...

    And, of course, this same net­work isn’t focused just on per­se­cut­ing the LGBTQ com­mu­ni­ty. The ADF draft­ed the Mis­sis­sip­pi abor­tion ban that over­turned Roe and is cur­rent­ly work­ing with ACPeds to get the abor­tion pill banned in the US nation­al­ly. This is a net­work that has had enor­mous suc­cess in recent years. That enor­mous suc­cess is also part of the con­text of this sto­ry. This is a net­work that gets things done while always remain­ing behind the scenes. And sure enough, Fred Deutsch already won South Dako­ta ear­ly this year with the pas­sage of a law that is expect­ed to forced trans youth in South Dako­ta to destran­si­tion by the end of 2023:

    ...
    The emails demon­strate close col­lab­o­ra­tion between groups work­ing behind the scenes to push bills ban­ning trans­gen­der health care, includ­ing ADF—which has defend­ed state-sanc­tioned ster­il­iza­tion of trans peo­ple in Europe—and the ACPeds—which has opposed adop­tion by gay cou­ples and sup­port­ed con­ver­sion ther­a­py for LGBTQ youth. In recent years, ADF has draft­ed leg­is­la­tion ban­ning trans chil­dren from using school restrooms or play­ing on school sports teams that align with their gen­der iden­ti­ty. (Both groups are also staunch­ly anti-abor­tion; ADF, which draft­ed the Mis­sis­sip­pi abor­tion ban at the heart of the case that over­turned Roe v. Wade, is cur­rent­ly rep­re­sent­ing ACPeds in a close­ly-watched law­suit to ban an abor­tion pill, mifepri­s­tone, nation­al­ly.)

    ...

    And in South Dako­ta, Deutsch final­ly won the long bat­tle this Feb­ru­ary, when Gov. Kristi Noem signed an updat­ed ver­sion of his bill. The new law strips licens­es from doc­tors who pro­vide minors with gen­der-affirm­ing care, and requires health care providers to grad­u­al­ly cut off puber­ty block­ers and hor­mones for any kids they are already treat­ing. That pro­vi­sion is expect­ed to force some South Dako­ta teens to med­ical­ly detran­si­tion by the end of 2023.

    Deutsch returned to Twit­ter in Feb­ru­ary to cel­e­brate the sign­ing of the South Dako­ta ban. “This con­cludes the effort I began three years ago,” he tweet­ed, along with a pic­ture of law­mak­ers toast­ing. “Many good peo­ple have worked to pro­tect our chil­dren.”
    ...

    And note how groups like the Her­itage Foun­da­tion and the Fam­i­ly Pol­i­cy Alliance are work­ing with the AFD, ACPeds, and Eagle Forum under the umbrel­la of the “Promise to Amer­i­ca’s Chil­dren”. It’s a reflec­tion of the deep insti­tu­tion­al buy in on this agen­da. The kind of deep insti­tu­tion­al buy in that only the CNP can real­ly pro­vide. And again, don’t for­get that the for­mer exec­u­tive of the ADF, Paul E. Weber, is also the Pres­i­dent and CEO of the Fam­i­ly Pol­i­cy Alliance. It’s a tight net­work, that includes the Her­itage Foun­da­tion:

    ...
    More than half of trans­gen­der and non­bi­na­ry kids have con­sid­ered sui­cide, accord­ing to a 2021 sur­vey by the Trevor Project, and 93 per­cent say they wor­ry about state laws deny­ing trans­gen­der peo­ple access to gen­der-affirm­ing med­ical care. This treat­ment approach—which typ­i­cal­ly includes puber­ty block­ers for pubes­cent chil­dren, cross-sex hor­mones for teenagers or adults, and, almost exclu­sive­ly for adults, surgeries—represents a broad med­ical agree­ment that such care can be cru­cial for sup­port­ing trans kids’ well­be­ing. Gen­der-affirm­ing care is sup­port­ed by the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion, Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Pedi­atrics, Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Asso­ci­a­tion, the Endocrine Soci­ety, and oth­er major med­ical orga­ni­za­tions. And stud­ies have found that it is asso­ci­at­ed with bet­ter men­tal health out­comes over both short and longer-term peri­ods.

    The orga­ni­za­tions exchang­ing emails with Deutsch and his oth­er col­lab­o­ra­tors aren’t shy about their agen­da. Several—including ACPeds, Eagle Forum, and the Chris­t­ian Med­ical & Den­tal Associations—are list­ed as part­ners in a cam­paign dubbed the “Promise to America’s Chil­dren.” Co-led by ADF, the Her­itage Foun­da­tion (a major con­ser­v­a­tive think tank also rep­re­sent­ed in the emails), and the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist lob­by­ing group Fam­i­ly Pol­i­cy Alliance, the cam­paign push­es anti-LGBTQ leg­is­la­tion, claim­ing that the gov­ern­ment and media are impos­ing “explic­it, sex­u­al con­tent” on children—meaning infor­ma­tion about sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, gen­der iden­ti­ty, and abor­tion. The pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Prin­ci­ples Project, a mem­ber of the coali­tion, recent­ly told the New York Times. that his group’s goal is to elim­i­nate all tran­si­tion care, start­ing with chil­dren because that’s “where the con­sen­sus is.”

    “Law­mak­ers often seek advice from experts in law, pol­i­cy, med­i­cine and oth­er fields as they craft leg­is­la­tion,” ADF senior vice pres­i­dent of com­mu­ni­ca­tions Greg Scott said in a state­ment. “That’s a nor­mal part of a healthy democ­ra­cy.” Pri­vate­ly, Jon Uhler, a ther­a­pist who sup­ports con­ver­sion ther­a­py, urged the work­ing group to respond to ques­tions for this arti­cle by empha­siz­ing “that there is no such thing as a Trans kid”; he lat­er sent me a series of social media posts com­par­ing trans peo­ple and drag per­form­ers to sex­u­al preda­tors.
    ...

    Anoth­er CNP affil­i­ate involved is Lib­er­ty Coun­sel, whose founder and chair­man is CNP mem­ber Matt Staver. Recall that 2016 report about the leaked 2014 CNP mem­ber­ship list that list­ed Staver and Alan Sears as CNP board mem­bers, along­side fel­low CNP board mem­bers like the League of the South’s Mike Per­out­ka. The anti-trans agen­da is a some­thing the CNP lead­er­ship is keen­ly inter­est­ed in:

    ...
    Richard Mast of Lib­er­ty Coun­sel sep­a­rate­ly advised the group to avoid say­ing the words trans­gen­der, cis­gen­der, or non-bina­ry. “Using them sur­ren­ders the lan­guage,” Mast wrote. “If the oth­er side’s lan­guage frames the debate, we lose.”

    ...

    In spring 2020, the group claimed one vic­to­ry. Mast, of Lib­er­ty Coun­sel, put the team in touch with Ida­ho Rep. Julianne Young, who was work­ing on a bill to pro­hib­it trans peo­ple from chang­ing the gen­der mark­er on their birth cer­tifi­cate. Young, who had tak­en edits from ADF attor­ney Matt Sharp on the pro­pos­al, asked the group for feed­back on its lan­guage and invit­ed them to edit her press release about it. (In response to ques­tions from Moth­er Jones, Young says that con­sult­ing with experts with leg­is­la­tion is a “nor­mal part of our robust, demo­c­ra­t­ic process.”)

    On March 30, 2020, Young wrote to the group with excite­ment to announce that her bill had been signed by Ida­ho Gov. Lit­tle. “I can’t thank you enough for your help and sup­port,” she wrote.

    “Thanks for stay­ing so focused on this even through the end­less pan­dem­ic pan­de­mo­ni­um,” replied Gary McCaleb, a lawyer on ADF’s appel­late team. “Very, very well done!”

    Even as Deutsch’s orig­i­nal bill failed, vari­a­tions of the Vul­ner­a­ble Child Pro­tec­tion Act were already being intro­duced in at least 9 states beyond South Dako­ta. In part, that was thanks to the efforts of peo­ple on the team, who were push­ing the bill they’d work­shopped with Deutsch behind the scenes to oth­er Repub­li­can leg­is­la­tors.
    ...

    Notably, it turns out that the source for all of these emails was a mem­ber of the ‘team’ that Fred Deutsch assem­bled in 2019: Elisa Rae Shupe, a retired US Army sol­dier who became an anti-trans activist after detran­si­tion­ing before retran­si­tion­ing again. So the per­son who leaked this was­n’t just some hack­er or some anoth­er out­sider who some­how got thi­er hands on the emails. This was some­one who knows this group from the inside. And as Shupe informs us, reli­gious-right rhetoric about want­i­ng to help chil­dren with gen­der dys­pho­ria is “just a front for what they do behind the scenes...It’s like they want to do as much dam­age to the trans com­mu­ni­ty as they can”:

    ...
    More than half of trans­gen­der and non­bi­na­ry kids have con­sid­ered sui­cide, accord­ing to a 2021 sur­vey by the Trevor Project, and 93 per­cent say they wor­ry about state laws deny­ing trans­gen­der peo­ple access to gen­der-affirm­ing med­ical care. This treat­ment approach—which typ­i­cal­ly includes puber­ty block­ers for pubes­cent chil­dren, cross-sex hor­mones for teenagers or adults, and, almost exclu­sive­ly for adults, surgeries—represents a broad med­ical agree­ment that such care can be cru­cial for sup­port­ing trans kids’ well­be­ing. Gen­der-affirm­ing care is sup­port­ed by the Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion, Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Pedi­atrics, Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Asso­ci­a­tion, the Endocrine Soci­ety, and oth­er major med­ical orga­ni­za­tions. And stud­ies have found that it is asso­ci­at­ed with bet­ter men­tal health out­comes over both short and longer-term peri­ods.

    ...

    In 2019, Deutsch tweet­ed that he would try to crim­i­nal­ize doc­tors who fol­lowed the Endocrine Society’s clin­i­cal prac­tice guide­lines for treat­ing peo­ple with gen­der dys­pho­ria. He would lat­er claim the idea for such a law had come from “chil­dren I saw on Twit­ter” who told him to read Red­dit forums about detran­si­tion­ing. By that sum­mer, Deutsch had qui­et­ly assem­bled a group of advis­ers, includ­ing peo­ple who had once iden­ti­fied as trans only to reverse course and deny that any­one is tru­ly trans­gen­der. They helped him work­shop leg­isla­tive lan­guage, sup­port­ing mate­ri­als, and pro­po­nent tes­ti­mo­ny.

    [see Fred Deutsch’s email]

    “It was like Deutsch assem­bled a team of Navy SEALs—we were all trained killers in a spe­cial­ty,” says Elisa Rae Shupe, a retired US Army sol­dier who became a vocal anti-trans advo­cate and par­tic­i­pat­ed in Deutsch’s work­ing group after detran­si­tion­ing. Shupe has since retran­si­tioned, dis­avowed much of her old activism, and shared her copies of the work­ing group’s emails with reporters. Reli­gious-right rhetoric about want­i­ng to help chil­dren with gen­der dys­pho­ria is “just a front for what they do behind the scenes,” she says. “It’s like they want to do as much dam­age to the trans com­mu­ni­ty as they can.”
    ...

    How much dam­age will this net­work ulti­mate­ly inflict upon the trans com­mu­ni­ty? As much as they are allowed to inflict, it would seem. We don’t need to take Shu­pe’s word on that. The emails she leaked make that all abun­dant­ly clear. This is a move­ment lit­er­al­ly ded­i­cat­ed to the purg­ing from soci­ety of an entire group of peo­ple. That’s the ulti­mate agen­da at work here: demo­nize, then purge.

    But it’s also just a tiny frac­tion of the full scope of the CNP agen­da at work here. That’s anoth­er fac­tor to keep in mind here: as vil­lain­ous as this move­men­t’s agen­da may be, it’s also just one part of a much larg­er theo­crat­ic fas­cist agen­da. An extreme­ly impor­tant part of that much larg­er agen­da: the scape­goat­ed part. There’s a rea­son author­i­tar­i­ans always seek out the most vul­ner­a­ble groups in soci­ety, demo­nize them, and try to extin­guish them. If you’re going to impose a theoc­ra­cy, you have to start some­where. And this net­work got start­ed a while ago.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 27, 2023, 2:00 am
  16. “Defund the FBI and DOJ!” That was the ral­ly­ing cry cho­sen by Don­ald Trump in the wake of his not guilty plea in the case brought against the for­mer pres­i­dent by New York pros­e­cu­tor Alvin Bragg on Tues­day. As Trump put it on social, “REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS SHOULD DEFUND THE DOJ AND FBI UNTIL THEY COME TO THEIR SENSES”. And while all of these procla­ma­tions are obvi­ous­ly part of Trump’s strat­e­gy for win­ning the 2024 GOP pri­ma­ry and mud­dy­ing up an poten­tial pros­e­cu­tions with pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics, it’s also going to be increas­ing­ly impor­tant to rec­og­nize that the per­se­cu­tion com­plex Trump is going to be milk­ing for the fore­see­able future is very much part of a broad­er ongo­ing GOP cul­ture war. A cul­ture war pred­i­cat­ed on the notion that white Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives are being sys­tem­i­cal­ly per­se­cut­ed by ‘woke’ ‘cul­tur­al Marx­ist’ elites in league with the Deep State. It’s the kind of cul­ture war designed to gen­er­ate a gen­uine state of fear and pan­ic in the tar­get audi­ence. The kind of fear and pan­ic that can make tar­get­ed pop­u­la­tions con­clude demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions and elec­tions pose a mor­tal threat to their exis­tence.

    It’s that broad­er cul­ture war that was the focus of the lat­est round of Gin­ni Thomas-relat­ed rev­e­la­tions. As the fol­low­ing Wash­ing­ton Post piece describes, Thomas found­ed a group in 2019, Crowd­sourcers for Cul­ture and Lib­er­ty, with the stat­ed mis­sion of wag­ing con­ser­v­a­tive cul­ture wars. And that’s about all we know about the group. That and the fact that Crowd­sourcers was appar­ent­ly set up in a way that allows for com­plete secre­cy around who donates to it, who works for it, and what the group even does with the mon­ey it receives.

    But this isn’t just anoth­er sto­ry about anoth­er right-wing dark­money group up to no good. It’s worse and sleazier: part of the rea­son so lit­tle is know about Crowd­sourcers is because it was nev­er even reg­is­tered with the IRS as an inde­pen­dent non-prof­it. Instead, a dif­fer­ent group, right-wing think tank, the Cap­i­tal Research Cen­ter (CRC), agreed to play a “fis­cal spon­sor­ship” role for Crowd­sourcers, tak­ing in $596k in dona­tions in 2019 alone des­ig­nat­ed for Crowd­sourcers. As a result of that arrange­ment, Crowd­sourcers has so few dis­clo­sure require­ments that we have no idea what Gin­ni was paid for her work or even what posi­tion she held.

    Here’s the extra sleazy part: it also turns out that the CRC did some­thing very atyp­i­cal for the group in 2019 and peti­tioned the Supreme Court to hear a spe­cif­ic case. Now, the Supreme Court did­n’t ulti­mate­ly agree to hear the case, but we don’t know how the indi­vid­ual jus­tices vot­ed. Did Clarence Thomas vote to hear the case? We have no idea. A lack of trans­paren­cy is a pre­vail­ing theme in this sto­ry. So the same year the CRC agreed to play this fis­cal spon­sor­ship for Gin­ni Thomas’s new Crowd­sourcers group — allow­ing Gin­ni to avoid dis­clos­ing what­ev­er she may have received for her work at Crowd­sourcers — the CRC was lob­by­ing Gin­ni’s Supreme Court Jus­tice hus­band to get a hear­ing for a case.

    It’s not a great look for the Thomases. But not exact­ly an unfa­mil­iar look for them either. As the arti­cle notes, this isn’t the first time peo­ple have raised ques­tions about Gin­ni’s polit­i­cal activism and how that might get mixed up with her hus­band’s rul­ings. In 2010, Gin­ni found­ed the non­prof­it group Lib­er­ty Cen­tral to help shape the tea par­ty move­ment with an anony­mous dona­tion of $500,000, prompt­ing con­flict of inter­est ques­tions. Gin­ni stepped away from the group in Novem­ber of 2010, but went on to start Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing, a for-prof­it con­sult­ing firm which has few­er report­ing require­ments than a non-prof­it.

    But while we have min­i­mal trans­paren­cy from Gin­ni on the sources of her income, we have got­ten a clue from Clarence: Since 2018, Clarence Thomas has list­ed Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing as his wife’s sole source of income. Which trans­lates to no income from Crowd­sourcers. Or else Clarence was lying on his dis­clo­sures.

    So if Gin­ni was­n’t get­ting paid by Crowd­sourcers, how was she get­ting com­pen­sat­ed for that work? Well, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, a con­flict a inter­est from the CRC’s ‘fis­cal spon­sor­ship’ role would­n’t just arise from the mon­ey Gin­ni direct­ly may have received for Crowd­sourcers. Indi­rect pay­ments, like con­sult­ing pay­ments relat­ed to Crowd­sourcers, would also con­sti­tute a con­flict of inter­est.

    Did Gin­ni’s Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing do any Crowd­sourcer­swork? Well, as we’re also going to see, in Feb 2019, a month after Crowd­sourcer­s’s first meet­ing, Gin­ni’s assis­tant emailed a pri­vate Google group being used for Crowd­sourcers com­mu­ni­ca­tions to announce three new mem­bers to the group: Char­lie Kirk, Bre­it­bart CEO Lar­ry Solov, and for­mer con­gress­man Allen West. Thomas replied with a “WELCOME new lead­ers!!!” email. Both Thomas and her assis­tant used their Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing email address­es. So while we don’t know if Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing offi­cial­ly did work and got paid for Crowd­sourcers-relat­ed work, we do know Gin­ni and her assis­tant both used their Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing email address­es to con­duct Crowd­sourcers-relat­ed activ­i­ty. That’s a clue.

    Final­ly, we have to address the ever-present Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP) angle. Because of course there’s a CNP angle. And, of course, it relates to the CNP’s exten­sive efforts to rig the 2020 elec­tion. As always, this sto­ry is filled with CNP mem­bers, with promi­nent CNP mem­ber Gin­ni Thomas being an obvi­ous exam­ple. Join­ing Gin­ni is anoth­er CNP mem­ber who arguably played an even larg­er role in the CNP’s elec­tion-rig­ging efforts: Cle­ta Mitchell. In fact, it was at a May 2019 CNP meet­ing where Thomas and Mitchell joint­ly pitched Crowd­sourcers to the broad­er CNP com­mu­ni­ty as a new group worth sup­port­ing. The same May 2019 meet­ing ref­er­enced in Anne Nel­son’s piece describ­ing how the CNP stoked the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. And as the arti­cle not­ed, it was at that meet­ing where Gin­ni and Cle­ta laid out their 2020 elec­tion strat­e­gy. It’s an impor­tant detail in this sto­ry. Because while we don’t know what Crowd­sourcers ulti­mate­ly did with the $596k it raised in 2019, we do know that the fundrais­ing was hap­pen­ing inside the CNP net­work in rela­tion to the group’s 2020 elec­tion plans.

    Two peo­ple were cit­ed as key lead­ers of the Crowd­sourcers effort at this May 2019 CNP meet­ing: James O’Keefe — recent­ly forced out of Project Ver­i­tas — and Richard Viguerie. Recall how Viguerie isn’t just a promi­nent CNP mem­ber. He’s one of its co-founders. And don’t for­get that Char­lie Kirk — who became a Crowd­sourcers “leader” in Feb­ru­ary of 2019 — is him­self a CNP mem­ber.

    But the CNP ties to this sto­ry don’t end there. It also turns out CRC’s pres­i­dent Scott Wal­ter and trustee Ed Meese III are both CNP mem­bers too.

    Oh, and it turns out $400k of that $596k donat­ed to Crowd­sourcers through the CRC in 2019 was donat­ed through dark mon­ey ‘char­i­ty’ Donors Trust, adding anoth­er lay­er of secre­cy to the affair. It’s worth recall how 2019 was the year Donors Trust was used to donate $1.5 mil­lion in ‘char­i­ta­ble con­tri­bu­tions’ to VDARE so it could pur­chase a his­toric cas­tle near DC.

    So we have a sto­ry about a CNP mem­bers Gin­ni Thomas, Cle­ta Mitchell, Richard Viguerie, and Char­lie Kirk set­ting up Crowd­sourcers in 2019 and pitch­ing it to CNP mem­bers at the now infa­mous May 2019 CNP strat­e­gy meet­ing. And despite rais­ing $596k that year, almost every­thing Crowd­sourcers has done with that mon­ey is wrapped in secre­cy, thanks to the CRC — led by CNP mem­bers Scott Wal­ter and Ed Meese — and its deci­sion to play the role of fis­cal spon­sor. A deci­sion made right around the time the CRC decid­ed to peti­tion the Supreme Court very unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly. And $400k of that $596 mon­ey was donat­ed through Donors Trust, a favorite enti­ty for con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donors who want to keep their dona­tions a secret. While we don’t know what Crowd­sourcers did with that mon­ey, we know who­ev­er gave it REALLY want­ed to remain anony­mous.

    That’s the larg­er sto­ry here. The role played by Gin­ni Thomas and all of the seri­ous, yet sor­did, ques­tions about con­flicts of inter­est swirling around her are just part of the sto­ry. There’s a much larg­er unre­solved CNP sto­ry here. A much larg­er unre­solved sto­ry relat­ed to what the CNP was doing dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion that will pre­sum­ably remain unre­solved as all CNP-relat­ed sto­ries seem to remain:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Activist group led by Gin­ni Thomas received near­ly $600,000 in anony­mous dona­tions

    Fund­ing for group that bat­tled ‘cul­tur­al Marx­ism’ was chan­neled through right-wing think tank, Post inves­ti­ga­tion finds

    By Shawn Boburg and Emma Brown
    March 28, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

    A lit­tle-known con­ser­v­a­tive activist group led by Vir­ginia “Gin­ni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas, col­lect­ed near­ly $600,000 in anony­mous dona­tions to wage a cul­tur­al bat­tle against the left over three years, a Wash­ing­ton Post inves­ti­ga­tion found.

    The pre­vi­ous­ly unre­port­ed dona­tions to the fledg­ling group Crowd­sourcers for Cul­ture and Lib­er­ty were chan­neled through a right-wing think tank in Wash­ing­ton that agreed to serve as a fund­ing con­duit from 2019 until the start of last year, accord­ing to doc­u­ments and inter­views. The arrange­ment, known as a “fis­cal spon­sor­ship,” effec­tive­ly shield­ed from pub­lic view details about Crowd­sourcers’ activ­i­ties and spend­ing, infor­ma­tion it would have had to dis­close pub­licly if it oper­at­ed as a sep­a­rate non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion, experts said.

    The Post’s inves­ti­ga­tion sheds new light on the role mon­ey from donors who are not pub­licly iden­ti­fied has played in sup­port­ing Gin­ni Thomas’s polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy, long a source of con­tro­ver­sy. The fund­ing is the first exam­ple of anony­mous donors back­ing her activism since she found­ed a con­ser­v­a­tive char­i­ty more than a decade ago. She stepped away from that char­i­ty amid con­cerns that it cre­at­ed poten­tial con­flicts for her hus­band on hot-but­ton issues before the court.

    Thomas’s activism has set her apart from oth­er spous­es of Supreme Court jus­tices. She has allied with numer­ous peo­ple and groups that have inter­ests before the court, and she has ded­i­cat­ed her­self to caus­es involv­ing some of the most polar­iz­ing issues in the coun­try.

    In 2020, she pri­vate­ly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows to pur­sue efforts to over­turn the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, and she sent emails urg­ing swing-state law­mak­ers to set aside Joe Biden’s pop­u­lar-vote vic­to­ry in award­ing elec­toral votes. When those efforts were revealed by The Post last year, they inten­si­fied ques­tions about whether her hus­band should recuse him­self from cas­es relat­ed to the elec­tion and attempts to sub­vert it.

    In recent months, the high court has faced increas­ing scruti­ny over a range of eth­i­cal issues, includ­ing the lack of trans­paren­cy sur­round­ing poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est and a whistleblower’s claim that wealthy Chris­t­ian activists sought access to jus­tices at social gath­er­ings to shore up their resolve on abor­tion and oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive pri­or­i­ties.

    In a brief state­ment to The Post, Mark Pao­let­ta, a lawyer for Gin­ni Thomas, said she was “proud of the work she did with Crowd­sourcers, which brought togeth­er con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers to dis­cuss ampli­fy­ing con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues with respect to the bat­tle over cul­ture.”

    “She believes Crowd­sourcers iden­ti­fied the Left’s dom­i­nance in most cul­tur­al lanes, while con­ser­v­a­tives were most­ly fund­ing polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions,” Pao­let­ta wrote. “In her work, she has com­plied with all report­ing and dis­clo­sure require­ments.”

    He wrote: “There is no plau­si­ble con­flict of inter­est issue with respect to Jus­tice Thomas.”

    ...

    In 2019, anony­mous donors gave the think tank Cap­i­tal Research Cen­ter, or CRC, $596,000 that was des­ig­nat­ed for Crowd­sourcers, accord­ing to tax fil­ings and audits the think tank sub­mit­ted to state reg­u­la­tors. The major­i­ty of that mon­ey, $400,000, was rout­ed through yet anoth­er non­prof­it, Donors Trust, accord­ing to that organization’s tax fil­ings. Donors Trust is a fund that receives mon­ey from wealthy donors whose iden­ti­ties are not dis­closed and steers it toward con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es.

    The doc­u­ments do not say how or whether the mon­ey was spent. It is not clear how much com­pen­sa­tion, if any, Gin­ni Thomas received.

    CRC, which bills itself as an “inves­tiga­tive think tank,” is ded­i­cat­ed to uncov­er­ing anony­mous­ly fund­ed influ­ence cam­paigns by unions, envi­ron­men­tal groups and oth­er left-lean­ing non­prof­its. Among its trustees is Edwin Meese III, the con­ser­v­a­tive elder states­man and for­mer attor­ney gen­er­al in the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion. Its pres­i­dent is Scott Wal­ter, a for­mer aide to Pres­i­dent George W. Bush.

    Around the time CRC agreed to chan­nel the anony­mous dona­tions to Crowd­sourcers, CRC signed a brief ask­ing the Supreme Court to hear a case that con­ser­v­a­tive groups hoped would rein in fuel emis­sion reg­u­la­tions in Ore­gon, records show. The court vot­ed not to take up the case. As is rou­tine, the votes of the indi­vid­ual jus­tices were not dis­closed.

    Pao­let­ta wrote that “Gin­ni Thomas had no knowl­edge of nor any con­nec­tion what­so­ev­er to an ami­cus brief CRC joined.”

    ...

    Meese said in a brief tele­phone inter­view that CRC’s trustees agreed to the arrange­ment because Crowd­sourcers “was a group that had sim­i­lar objec­tives and it was felt it would be help­ful to them.” Such arrange­ments are com­mon among oth­er non­prof­its, experts said.

    For­mer CRC chair­man Michael Franc told The Post that it was “a cour­tesy for this group so that it could get going with­out hav­ing to start up on its own, some­thing to ease the abil­i­ty of this group to raise and use their mon­ey.”

    Wal­ter pro­posed the Crowd­sourcers arrange­ment to the think tank’s board mem­bers and men­tioned Gin­ni Thomas’s involve­ment, Franc said.

    Seek­ing ‘cul­ture war­riors’

    On May 18, 2019, Thomas told influ­en­tial right-wing donors and activists about Crowd­sourcers in a pri­vate meet­ing, video from the event shows. The left, she said, was push­ing “cul­tur­al Marx­ism” and “erod­ing the pil­lars of our coun­try.”

    “We have some cul­ture war­riors, but we have a lot more to do,” Thomas said at a meet­ing of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy in North­ern Vir­ginia, accord­ing to the video, which was obtained by the non­prof­it watch­dog Doc­u­ment­ed and has been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed. “Con­ser­v­a­tives and Repub­li­cans are tired of being the oppressed minor­i­ty.”

    The con­cept for Crowd­sourcers had tak­en shape dur­ing dis­cus­sions with “35 of the best thinkers about what the left is doing,” she said.

    Thomas said part­ners in the effort includ­ed Cle­ta Mitchell, chair of the Pub­lic Inter­est Legal Foun­da­tion, a non­prof­it that sub­mits ami­cus briefs to the Supreme Court in elec­tion law cas­es. Mitchell planned to estab­lish a polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee to “pro­tect Pres­i­dent [Don­ald] Trump,” accord­ing to a slide Thomas dis­played dur­ing the closed-door meet­ing. James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Ver­i­tas — known for hid­den-cam­era stings that aim to embar­rass lib­er­als — would lead an effort to “pro­tect our heroes,” she said. And Richard Viguerie, a pio­neer in con­ser­v­a­tive direct-mail cam­paigns, would head up an effort to “brand the left,” she said.

    Mitchell said in a brief phone inter­view that she did not know any­thing about Crowd­sourcers and that noth­ing ever came of the polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee.

    “Gin­ni has asked me over the years to do a lot of dif­fer­ent things,” she said. “I always try to respond.”

    ...

    Thomas described her­self as hav­ing a key role in bring­ing Crowd­sourcers togeth­er. “I’m not the answer per­son. If any­one knows me, you know this. I’m mere­ly a con­ven­er,” she said. “I find the tal­ent and I put them in a room and I help them talk to one anoth­er.”

    She said the group was “now under” the Cap­i­tal Research Cen­ter, though she did not men­tion the fund­ing. It is not clear exact­ly when in 2019 the anony­mous dona­tions were made.

    Crowd­sourcers had held its first meet­ing four months ear­li­er at the Sala­man­der Resort & Spa in Mid­dle­burg, Va., a 340-acre bucol­ic retreat with eques­tri­an facil­i­ties. Atten­dees at the Jan­u­ary 2019 meet­ing gath­ered for din­ner and met in a con­fer­ence room the next day, split­ting into sev­er­al groups — each ded­i­cat­ed to a theme such as pol­i­tics, edu­ca­tion or fam­i­ly — to brain­storm ways to counter the left, said a per­son who attend­ed and spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe a pri­vate event.

    Mem­bers com­mu­ni­cat­ed through a pri­vate Google group, emails obtained by The Post show. The emails con­tained warn­ings not to share infor­ma­tion that would reveal the iden­ti­ties of the group’s mem­bers. “ABSOLUTELY … DO NOT FORWARD EMAILS FROM HERE WITHOUT REMOVING ALL IDENTIFYING INFORMATION FROM THIS LISTSERV,” warned one.

    In Feb­ru­ary 2019, Thomas’s assis­tant emailed the Google group announc­ing the addi­tion of new mem­bers, includ­ing Char­lie Kirk, pres­i­dent of the pro-Trump stu­dent group Turn­ing Point USA; Lar­ry Solov, chief exec­u­tive of Bre­it­bart News; and Allen B. West, a for­mer Repub­li­can con­gress­man from Flori­da. Thomas replied, “WELCOME new lead­ers!!!”

    Both Thomas and her assis­tant used email address­es belong­ing to her for-prof­it con­sult­ing busi­ness, Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing.

    In that same mes­sage, Thomas wrote that she had been try­ing to raise mon­ey for Crowd­sourcers. “We had many great meet­ings with inter­est­ed donors, but we don’t yet have spe­cif­ic fund­ing yet, so prayers still need­ed,” she wrote.

    She added that Crowd­sourcers’ next biweek­ly con­fer­ence call would include a pre­sen­ta­tion from Steve Hantler, an advis­er to Bernie Mar­cus, a Home Depot co-founder and major con­ser­v­a­tive donor. Hantler is list­ed as the “prin­ci­pal offi­cer” in a non­prof­it group called the Job Cre­ators Net­work Foun­da­tion, its tax fil­ings show. The group has in recent years asked the Supreme Court to strike down the Biden administration’s stu­dent loan for­give­ness pro­gram.

    Hantler declined to com­ment. Spokes­peo­ple for Kirk and West did not pro­vide com­ment for this sto­ry. A spokes­woman for Solov said that “some­times Bre­it­bart peo­ple get put on infor­ma­tion­al lists ... to know what peo­ple are think­ing and doing.”

    By late 2019, Crowd­sourcers had engaged Tim Clark, who spear­head­ed Trump’s 2016 cam­paign in Cal­i­for­nia, to serve as its nation­al direc­tor.

    In an email obtained by The Post, Clark issued an invi­ta­tion to a March 2020 pub­lic launch of the group. He made clear that Crowd­sourcers did not have the mon­ey to pay for mem­bers’ trav­el and lodg­ing for the event, which was to be held in Wash­ing­ton.

    The launch was sched­uled for March 6, 2020. “Cul­ture Sum­mit 2020 will focus on the Left’s esca­lat­ing war across Amer­i­can cul­ture and how we go on offense to bet­ter pre­serve America’s lib­er­ties for anoth­er gen­er­a­tion,” read the invi­ta­tion obtained by The Post.

    It’s not clear whether the meet­ing — which would have tak­en place just as the nation was begin­ning to grap­ple with the spread of the coro­n­avirus — was held as planned.

    ...

    A ‘tem­po­rary accom­mo­da­tion’

    CRC’s fund­ing rela­tion­ship with Crowd­sourcers con­tin­ued through the end of 2021, records show. The rela­tion­ship was described in CRC tax fil­ings as a “fis­cal spon­sor­ship arrange­ment.” Under such agree­ments, an exist­ing char­i­ty hous­es a start-up group with a sim­i­lar mis­sion until the small­er group gets off the ground.

    In its tax fil­ings, the think tank wrote that it pro­vid­ed “fidu­cia­ry over­sight, finan­cial man­age­ment and oth­er admin­is­tra­tive ser­vices to help build the capac­i­ty” of Crowd­sourcers. The fil­ings describe Crowd­sourcers as an “infor­mal, unin­cor­po­rat­ed non­prof­it asso­ci­a­tion which serves as an incu­ba­tor for ideas across a net­work of con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers, cul­tur­al entre­pre­neurs, and cul­tur­al influ­ences.”

    Franc, the for­mer CRC chair­man, said the idea “didn’t seem like it was par­tic­u­lar­ly con­tro­ver­sial” when it was pre­sent­ed to the board for approval. “It was maybe putting some mon­ey in one of our accounts to make it eas­i­er to access it,” he said. “It was pre­sent­ed to us as a cour­tesy, some­thing that was more of a tem­po­rary accom­mo­da­tion.”

    Franc said the think tank had no role in rais­ing the $596,000 that it chan­neled to Crowd­sourcers.

    Crowd­sourcers was nev­er estab­lished as an inde­pen­dent non­prof­it group, accord­ing to a search of an IRS data­base.

    Philip Hack­ney, a for­mer IRS attor­ney who is now an asso­ciate law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh, said such arrange­ments are not uncom­mon or improp­er. He said they do allow the start-up group to avoid hav­ing to dis­close infor­ma­tion that inde­pen­dent non­prof­its must reveal in annu­al tax fil­ings, such as its offi­cers or details about its spend­ing.

    “You would be able to keep names and salaries off of any doc­u­ments,” he said.

    Indeed, Thomas’s title in Crowd­sourcers is not a mat­ter of pub­lic record and could not be deter­mined.

    CRC’s annu­al audits show that the $596,000 ded­i­cat­ed to Crowd­sourcers was “released” from donor restric­tions over three years, mean­ing donors’ con­di­tions on how it could be spent had been sat­is­fied or lift­ed, experts said.

    About $207,000 for Crowd­sourcers was released in 2019, $85,000 in 2020 and the remain­ing $303,000 in 2021, the audits show. CRC’s most recent tax fil­ing in 2021, obtained by Doc­u­ment­ed, said it had end­ed its agree­ment with Crowd­sourcers at the close of that year.

    An inter­sec­tion with the court

    In 2019, the year the fund­ing arrange­ment began, a trade group that rep­re­sents indus­tri­al com­pa­nies, the Amer­i­can Fuel and Petro­chem­i­cal Man­u­fac­tur­ers, had unsuc­cess­ful­ly sued Ore­gon over a pro­gram that reg­u­lates how fuels are pro­duced and trans­port­ed.

    On Feb. 8 of that year, CRC joined free-mar­ket groups includ­ing the Cato Insti­tute and the Pacif­ic Legal Foun­da­tion in an ami­cus brief urg­ing the Supreme Court to recon­sid­er low­er court deci­sions uphold­ing the pro­gram.

    It was the only time CRC, found­ed in 1984, has filed a brief with the court in recent decades, accord­ing to Supreme Court records dat­ing to 2001.

    For the court to hear a case, at least four jus­tices must agree.

    On May 13, 2019, the court declined to hear the case.

    The fact that CRC filed an ami­cus brief before the Supreme Court around the same time it was sup­port­ing the work of Crowd­sourcers does not on its own present a con­flict of inter­est that would have required Clarence Thomas to recuse him­self, accord­ing to Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York Uni­ver­si­ty. If Gin­ni Thomas was paid for her work with Crowd­sourcers — either direct­ly or through her con­sult­ing firm — then there could be a recusal issue depend­ing on the size and tim­ing of the pay­ment, Gillers said.

    All fed­er­al judges, includ­ing Supreme Court jus­tices, are required to recuse them­selves in cer­tain cir­cum­stances, includ­ing when they or their spous­es have a finan­cial inter­est in a par­ty before the court or when a rea­son­able per­son might ques­tion their impar­tial­i­ty. But because the Supreme Court sits atop the judi­cia­ry, there is no high­er court to review each justice’s recusal deci­sions.

    Gillers said ordi­nary Amer­i­cans might find it puz­zling that “one half of a mar­ried cou­ple is at the ram­parts on polit­i­cal issues that then get trans­lat­ed into legal issues that her hus­band has to decide.” But there is no rule pro­hibit­ing that, he said, and it’s not clear how one could be craft­ed.

    Gin­ni Thomas has long main­tained that she and her hus­band keep their careers sep­a­rate. “I can guar­an­tee that my hus­band has nev­er spo­ken to me about pend­ing cas­es in the court. It’s an iron­clad rule in our house,” she told con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tors last year who were exam­in­ing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capi­tol. “Addi­tion­al­ly, he’s unin­ter­est­ed in pol­i­tics, and I gen­er­al­ly don’t dis­cuss with him my day-to-day work in pol­i­tics.”

    Con­tro­ver­sy over Gin­ni Thomas’s polit­i­cal activism dates back to at least 2010, after she found­ed the non­prof­it Lib­er­ty Cen­tral to har­ness the ener­gy of the then-bur­geon­ing tea par­ty move­ment. Though she described Lib­er­ty Cen­tral as “non­par­ti­san” and focused on the prin­ci­ples of the Found­ing Fathers, she spoke even then about “acti­vat­ing a com­mu­ni­ty of grass-roots patri­ots” to wage a cul­tur­al war.

    “It’s time to wake up and refo­cus. Just like in a farm set­ting we need to till the ground, plant the seeds, tend the crops and pray for rain before we can har­vest the crops,” she said that year in a speech to the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence. “The left has been tend­ing their crops, you guys. It has occurred in high schools, in K‑12 text­books, in col­leges and Hol­ly­wood and main­stream media in our church­es and in gov­ern­ment. We’ve been asleep.”

    Gin­ni Thomas launched Lib­er­ty Cen­tral with an anony­mous dona­tion of $500,000 and anoth­er of $50,000, spark­ing ques­tions about poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est for her hus­band. (Months after the launch, Politi­co report­ed that the $500,000 invest­ment had come from Har­lan Crow, a Texas real estate mag­nate and major donor to con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­dates and caus­es who had also giv­en Clarence Thomas a Bible worth $19,000 that had once belonged to Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, accord­ing to the justice’s finan­cial dis­clo­sures.)

    Amid those ques­tions, Gin­ni Thomas stepped away from Lib­er­ty Cen­tral in Novem­ber 2010. She went on to estab­lish Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing. Because Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing is a for-prof­it firm, it is sub­ject to few­er pub­lic report­ing require­ments. Lit­tle is known about the firm’s clients, besides those that have list­ed pay­ments to Lib­er­ty in required dis­clo­sures.

    A non­prof­it called the Cen­ter for Secu­ri­ty Pol­i­cy, which filed an ami­cus brief with the court in 2017 in sup­port of the Trump administration’s Mus­lim ban, report­ed in its tax fil­ings that it paid Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing a total of $236,000 in 2017 and 2018, the New York­er first report­ed last year. A polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee run by Viguerie, the Crowd­sourcers mem­ber and direct-mail pio­neer, also report­ed pay­ing Lib­er­ty $5,000 in 2018 for “video pro­duc­tion.”

    As a Supreme Court jus­tice, Clarence Thomas must list sources of his wife’s income on annu­al finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms, but not the amount. Since 2018, he has report­ed that Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing was the sole source of income for his wife, and that the firm paid her a salary and ben­e­fits.

    Clarence Thomas is not required to report the firm’s clients.

    ———–

    “Activist group led by Gin­ni Thomas received near­ly $600,000 in anony­mous dona­tions” by Shawn Boburg and Emma Brown; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 03/28/2023

    “The pre­vi­ous­ly unre­port­ed dona­tions to the fledg­ling group Crowd­sourcers for Cul­ture and Lib­er­ty were chan­neled through a right-wing think tank in Wash­ing­ton that agreed to serve as a fund­ing con­duit from 2019 until the start of last year, accord­ing to doc­u­ments and inter­views. The arrange­ment, known as a “fis­cal spon­sor­ship,” effec­tive­ly shield­ed from pub­lic view details about Crowd­sourcers’ activ­i­ties and spend­ing, infor­ma­tion it would have had to dis­close pub­licly if it oper­at­ed as a sep­a­rate non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion, experts said.

    Near­ly $600k in anony­mous made to Gin­ni Thomas’s Crowd­sourcers for Lib­er­ty group but fun­neled through through an obscure right-wing ‘think tank’, the Cap­i­tal Research Cen­ter (CRC), that was per­form­ing a “fis­cal spon­sor­ship” role. A role that shields from the pub­lic details about not only who made the dona­tions but even details about how the mon­ey was being spent or what Crowd­sourcers was up to at all. Lay­ers of secre­cy were cre­at­ed around Crowd­sourcers for Cul­ture and Lib­er­ty. That’s the crux of this sto­ry.

    But the secre­cy was­n’t lim­it­ed to the use of the CRC as a fis­cal spon­sor. There’s also the fact that $400k of that $596k was donat­ed to the CRC via Donors Trust, the Koch-backed 501c3 ‘char­i­ty’ that’s been dubbed the “Dark Mon­ey ATM of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Move­ment”. As we’ve seen, the donors to DonorsTrust give mon­ey to ‘char­i­ty’ with instruc­tions on how DonorsTrust should re-donate the mon­ey to var­i­ous groups, thus shield­ing the iden­ti­ties of the orig­i­nal donors while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly allow­ing them to write the dona­tions off their tax­es as a char­i­ta­ble con­tri­bu­tion. And as we also saw, it was 2019 when Donors Trust was just to make large anony­mous dona­tions to both Amer­i­can Renais­sance and VDARE, includ­ing a $1.5 mil­lion dona­tion to VDARE that was appar­ent­ly used to pur­chase a his­toric cas­tle near DC. So for all we know, the same peo­ple who donat­ed that $1.5 mil­lion to VDARE were the same ones who donat­ed $400k in 2019 mys­tery dona­tions from Donors Trust to the CRC. That’s part of the con­text of the anony­mous CRC dona­tions: we don’t know who made the dona­tions, but we do know they used an enti­ty known for shield­ing big mon­ey donors:

    ...
    The Post’s inves­ti­ga­tion sheds new light on the role mon­ey from donors who are not pub­licly iden­ti­fied has played in sup­port­ing Gin­ni Thomas’s polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy, long a source of con­tro­ver­sy. The fund­ing is the first exam­ple of anony­mous donors back­ing her activism since she found­ed a con­ser­v­a­tive char­i­ty more than a decade ago. She stepped away from that char­i­ty amid con­cerns that it cre­at­ed poten­tial con­flicts for her hus­band on hot-but­ton issues before the court.

    ...

    In recent months, the high court has faced increas­ing scruti­ny over a range of eth­i­cal issues, includ­ing the lack of trans­paren­cy sur­round­ing poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est and a whistleblower’s claim that wealthy Chris­t­ian activists sought access to jus­tices at social gath­er­ings to shore up their resolve on abor­tion and oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive pri­or­i­ties.

    ...

    In 2019, anony­mous donors gave the think tank Cap­i­tal Research Cen­ter, or CRC, $596,000 that was des­ig­nat­ed for Crowd­sourcers, accord­ing to tax fil­ings and audits the think tank sub­mit­ted to state reg­u­la­tors. The major­i­ty of that mon­ey, $400,000, was rout­ed through yet anoth­er non­prof­it, Donors Trust, accord­ing to that organization’s tax fil­ings. Donors Trust is a fund that receives mon­ey from wealthy donors whose iden­ti­ties are not dis­closed and steers it toward con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es.

    The doc­u­ments do not say how or whether the mon­ey was spent. It is not clear how much com­pen­sa­tion, if any, Gin­ni Thomas received.

    CRC, which bills itself as an “inves­tiga­tive think tank,” is ded­i­cat­ed to uncov­er­ing anony­mous­ly fund­ed influ­ence cam­paigns by unions, envi­ron­men­tal groups and oth­er left-lean­ing non­prof­its. Among its trustees is Edwin Meese III, the con­ser­v­a­tive elder states­man and for­mer attor­ney gen­er­al in the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion. Its pres­i­dent is Scott Wal­ter, a for­mer aide to Pres­i­dent George W. Bush.
    ...

    And note when you see how the CRC has Edwin Meese III as a trustee and Scott Wal­ter as its pres­i­dent, note that both Meese and Wal­ter show up on the CNP mem­ber­ship list.

    And then there’s this oth­er part of the con­text of the CRC role as a fis­cal spon­sor of dona­tions to Gin­ni Thomas’s group: around the same time the CRC made the deci­sion to serve as Crowd­sourcers fis­cal spon­sor, the CRC was lob­by­ing the Supreme Court to hear a case. Notably, this was the sole instance of the CRC fil­ing a brief with the court in recent decades. The tim­ing sure is inter­est­ing. Did Gin­ni hap­pen to men­tion the CRC’s kind­ness to her Supreme Court jus­tice hus­band at the time? She’s obvi­ous­ly going to deny that any such thing hap­pened which points towards one of the big ques­tions raised by this over­all sto­ry: can we take Gin­ni Thomas as her word?

    ...
    Around the time CRC agreed to chan­nel the anony­mous dona­tions to Crowd­sourcers, CRC signed a brief ask­ing the Supreme Court to hear a case that con­ser­v­a­tive groups hoped would rein in fuel emis­sion reg­u­la­tions in Ore­gon, records show. The court vot­ed not to take up the case. As is rou­tine, the votes of the indi­vid­ual jus­tices were not dis­closed.

    Pao­let­ta wrote that “Gin­ni Thomas had no knowl­edge of nor any con­nec­tion what­so­ev­er to an ami­cus brief CRC joined.”

    ...

    In 2019, the year the fund­ing arrange­ment began, a trade group that rep­re­sents indus­tri­al com­pa­nies, the Amer­i­can Fuel and Petro­chem­i­cal Man­u­fac­tur­ers, had unsuc­cess­ful­ly sued Ore­gon over a pro­gram that reg­u­lates how fuels are pro­duced and trans­port­ed.

    On Feb. 8 of that year, CRC joined free-mar­ket groups includ­ing the Cato Insti­tute and the Pacif­ic Legal Foun­da­tion in an ami­cus brief urg­ing the Supreme Court to recon­sid­er low­er court deci­sions uphold­ing the pro­gram.

    It was the only time CRC, found­ed in 1984, has filed a brief with the court in recent decades, accord­ing to Supreme Court records dat­ing to 2001.

    For the court to hear a case, at least four jus­tices must agree.

    On May 13, 2019, the court declined to hear the case.

    The fact that CRC filed an ami­cus brief before the Supreme Court around the same time it was sup­port­ing the work of Crowd­sourcers does not on its own present a con­flict of inter­est that would have required Clarence Thomas to recuse him­self, accord­ing to Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York Uni­ver­si­ty. If Gin­ni Thomas was paid for her work with Crowd­sourcers — either direct­ly or through her con­sult­ing firm — then there could be a recusal issue depend­ing on the size and tim­ing of the pay­ment, Gillers said.
    ...

    Also note how this isn’t just a ques­tion of whether or not Gin­ni was paid by Crowd­sourcers for her work. Indi­rect pay­ments for con­sult­ing work could also con­sti­tute a con­flict of inter­est.

    So giv­en that the CRC was both play­ing the role of a fis­cal spon­sor of Gin­ni Thomas’s group at the same time it was lob­by­ing her hus­band on the Supreme Court to hear a case, we have to ask: how much was Gin­ni paid for this Crowd­sourcers work? And that brings us to one of the oth­er ben­e­fits of the CRC’s fis­cal spon­sor­ship: Crowd­sourcers nev­er even had to be estab­lished as an inde­pen­dent non­prof­it group. As such, almost noth­ing about its staff, how much they were paid, or what roles they served is required to be pub­licly dis­closed. We don’t get to know whether or not Gin­ni was get­ting paid or how much. But we know that both Gin­ni and her assis­tant were using their email address­es for Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing — Gin­ni’s for-prof­it con­sult­ing busi­ness — when com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the Crowd­sourcers mem­bers (includ­ing CNP mem­ber Char­lie Kirk). It’s a reminder that there were many dif­fer­ent avenues for some­one to pay off the Thomases. If some enti­ty hired Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing while also mak­ing large dona­tions to the CRC and/or Crowd­sourcers, we would­n’t get to know. But Gin­ni and Clarence would def­i­nite­ly know:

    ...
    Crowd­sourcers had held its first meet­ing four months ear­li­er at the Sala­man­der Resort & Spa in Mid­dle­burg, Va., a 340-acre bucol­ic retreat with eques­tri­an facil­i­ties. Atten­dees at the Jan­u­ary 2019 meet­ing gath­ered for din­ner and met in a con­fer­ence room the next day, split­ting into sev­er­al groups — each ded­i­cat­ed to a theme such as pol­i­tics, edu­ca­tion or fam­i­ly — to brain­storm ways to counter the left, said a per­son who attend­ed and spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe a pri­vate event.

    Mem­bers com­mu­ni­cat­ed through a pri­vate Google group, emails obtained by The Post show. The emails con­tained warn­ings not to share infor­ma­tion that would reveal the iden­ti­ties of the group’s mem­bers. “ABSOLUTELY … DO NOT FORWARD EMAILS FROM HERE WITHOUT REMOVING ALL IDENTIFYING INFORMATION FROM THIS LISTSERV,” warned one.

    In Feb­ru­ary 2019, Thomas’s assis­tant emailed the Google group announc­ing the addi­tion of new mem­bers, includ­ing Char­lie Kirk, pres­i­dent of the pro-Trump stu­dent group Turn­ing Point USA; Lar­ry Solov, chief exec­u­tive of Bre­it­bart News; and Allen B. West, a for­mer Repub­li­can con­gress­man from Flori­da. Thomas replied, “WELCOME new lead­ers!!!”

    Both Thomas and her assis­tant used email address­es belong­ing to her for-prof­it con­sult­ing busi­ness, Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing.

    In that same mes­sage, Thomas wrote that she had been try­ing to raise mon­ey for Crowd­sourcers. “We had many great meet­ings with inter­est­ed donors, but we don’t yet have spe­cif­ic fund­ing yet, so prayers still need­ed,” she wrote.

    ...

    Crowd­sourcers was nev­er estab­lished as an inde­pen­dent non­prof­it group, accord­ing to a search of an IRS data­base.

    Philip Hack­ney, a for­mer IRS attor­ney who is now an asso­ciate law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh, said such arrange­ments are not uncom­mon or improp­er. He said they do allow the start-up group to avoid hav­ing to dis­close infor­ma­tion that inde­pen­dent non­prof­its must reveal in annu­al tax fil­ings, such as its offi­cers or details about its spend­ing.

    “You would be able to keep names and salaries off of any doc­u­ments,” he said.

    Indeed, Thomas’s title in Crowd­sourcers is not a mat­ter of pub­lic record and could not be deter­mined.
    ...

    Adding to the intrigue around who paid Gin­ni what, it turns out that Clarence Thomas report­ed that Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing was Gin­ni’s sole source of income since 2018, imply­ing that was the case in 2019 too. In oth­er words, either Clarence lied on that dis­clo­sure or Gin­ni was­n’t get­ting direct­ly paid by Crowd­sourcers. And if Gin­ni was­n’t get­ting paid by Crowd­sourcers for all the work she was doing for the group, how exact­ly was she get­ting com­pen­sat­ed? More ques­tions we’ll pre­sum­ably nev­er get answered:

    ...
    Con­tro­ver­sy over Gin­ni Thomas’s polit­i­cal activism dates back to at least 2010, after she found­ed the non­prof­it Lib­er­ty Cen­tral to har­ness the ener­gy of the then-bur­geon­ing tea par­ty move­ment. Though she described Lib­er­ty Cen­tral as “non­par­ti­san” and focused on the prin­ci­ples of the Found­ing Fathers, she spoke even then about “acti­vat­ing a com­mu­ni­ty of grass-roots patri­ots” to wage a cul­tur­al war.

    ...

    Gin­ni Thomas launched Lib­er­ty Cen­tral with an anony­mous dona­tion of $500,000 and anoth­er of $50,000, spark­ing ques­tions about poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est for her hus­band. (Months after the launch, Politi­co report­ed that the $500,000 invest­ment had come from Har­lan Crow, a Texas real estate mag­nate and major donor to con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­dates and caus­es who had also giv­en Clarence Thomas a Bible worth $19,000 that had once belonged to Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, accord­ing to the justice’s finan­cial dis­clo­sures.)

    Amid those ques­tions, Gin­ni Thomas stepped away from Lib­er­ty Cen­tral in Novem­ber 2010. She went on to estab­lish Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing. Because Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing is a for-prof­it firm, it is sub­ject to few­er pub­lic report­ing require­ments. Lit­tle is known about the firm’s clients, besides those that have list­ed pay­ments to Lib­er­ty in required dis­clo­sures.

    A non­prof­it called the Cen­ter for Secu­ri­ty Pol­i­cy, which filed an ami­cus brief with the court in 2017 in sup­port of the Trump administration’s Mus­lim ban, report­ed in its tax fil­ings that it paid Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing a total of $236,000 in 2017 and 2018, the New York­er first report­ed last year. A polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee run by Viguerie, the Crowd­sourcers mem­ber and direct-mail pio­neer, also report­ed pay­ing Lib­er­ty $5,000 in 2018 for “video pro­duc­tion.”

    As a Supreme Court jus­tice, Clarence Thomas must list sources of his wife’s income on annu­al finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms, but not the amount. Since 2018, he has report­ed that Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing was the sole source of income for his wife, and that the firm paid her a salary and ben­e­fits.
    ...

    But just because we don’t get to know pre­cise­ly who gave what to these groups, that does­n’t mean we can’t make some edu­cat­ed guess­es. For exam­ple, that May, 2019, gath­er­ing where Gin­ni tout­ed Crowd­sourcers as a new group ded­i­cat­ed to fight­ing cul­ture war bat­tles was­n’t just some ran­dom group. It was a CNP strat­e­gy meet­ing. One we’ve read about before. Recall how this May 2019 CNP gath­er was ref­er­enced in Anne Nel­son’s piece describ­ing how the CNP stoked the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. And as the arti­cle not­ed, it was at that meet­ing where Gin­ni and fel­low CNP-mem­ber Cle­ta Mitchell laid out their 2020 elec­tion strat­e­gy. So the CNP meet­ing where Gin­ni Thomas was tout­ing Crowd­sourcers for Cul­ture and Lib­er­ty as a new group worth of the CNP’s sup­port was the same May 2019 meet­ing where Gin­ni and Cle­ta paid the ground­work of the CNP’s 2020 elec­tion strate­gies. Strate­gies that we now know includ­ed foment­ing wide­spread claims of vot­er fraud and all of the var­i­ous post-elec­tion attempts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion results. And note how the Crowd­sourcers “part­ners” cit­ed by Gin­ni at this meet­ing includ­ed Mitchell, as well as James O’Keefe and Richard Viguerie. Recall how Richard Viguerie isn’t just a CNP mem­ber. He’s one of its co-founders. And, again, don’t for­get that the CRC lead­er­ship includes CNP mem­bers Edwin Meese III and Scott Water. So key CNP mem­bers Gin­ni Thomas and Cle­ta Mitchell pitched the Crowd­sourcers for Cul­ture and Lib­er­ty group to the broad­er CNP mem­ber­ship at a May 2019 gath­er­ing where the CNP was devel­op­ing its 2020 elec­tion strat­e­gy, and CNP co-found Richard Viguerie was on already on board. And the group play­ing the “fis­cal spon­sor­ship” role that helped shield the iden­ti­ties of Crowd­sourcers donors was the CRC, itself led by CNP mem­bers Meese and Wal­ter. It gives us a big clue as to who was ulti­mate­ly mak­ing these anony­mous dona­tions to the group and what the ulti­mate intent was:

    ...
    Seek­ing ‘cul­ture war­riors’

    On May 18, 2019, Thomas told influ­en­tial right-wing donors and activists about Crowd­sourcers in a pri­vate meet­ing, video from the event shows. The left, she said, was push­ing “cul­tur­al Marx­ism” and “erod­ing the pil­lars of our coun­try.”

    “We have some cul­ture war­riors, but we have a lot more to do,” Thomas said at a meet­ing of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy in North­ern Vir­ginia, accord­ing to the video, which was obtained by the non­prof­it watch­dog Doc­u­ment­ed and has been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed. “Con­ser­v­a­tives and Repub­li­cans are tired of being the oppressed minor­i­ty.”

    The con­cept for Crowd­sourcers had tak­en shape dur­ing dis­cus­sions with “35 of the best thinkers about what the left is doing,” she said.

    Thomas said part­ners in the effort includ­ed Cle­ta Mitchell, chair of the Pub­lic Inter­est Legal Foun­da­tion, a non­prof­it that sub­mits ami­cus briefs to the Supreme Court in elec­tion law cas­es. Mitchell planned to estab­lish a polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee to “pro­tect Pres­i­dent [Don­ald] Trump,” accord­ing to a slide Thomas dis­played dur­ing the closed-door meet­ing. James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Ver­i­tas — known for hid­den-cam­era stings that aim to embar­rass lib­er­als — would lead an effort to “pro­tect our heroes,” she said. And Richard Viguerie, a pio­neer in con­ser­v­a­tive direct-mail cam­paigns, would head up an effort to “brand the left,” she said.

    Mitchell said in a brief phone inter­view that she did not know any­thing about Crowd­sourcers and that noth­ing ever came of the polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee.

    “Gin­ni has asked me over the years to do a lot of dif­fer­ent things,” she said. “I always try to respond.”
    ...

    It’s hard to think of a more con­nect­ed polit­i­cal ‘elite’ in DC today than Gin­ni Thomas. The CNP is as elite a pow­er net­work as you’re going to find in DC. It’s part of what makes the per­se­cu­tion com­plex at the root of the whole ‘cul­ture war­riors’ nar­ra­tive such a cyn­i­cal strat­e­gy. A cyn­i­cal strat­e­gy that was at the core of the GOP’s plans for win­ning the 2020 elec­tion. Plans to wage a cul­ture war focused on the idea that white Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives are being sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly per­se­cut­ed by a cul­tur­al Marx­ist ‘woke’ elites in league with the Deep State. In oth­er words, there’s no con­tra­dic­tion between Crowd­sourcers hav­ing an osten­si­ble focus on cul­ture wars and the CNP’s goal of get­ting Trump reelect­ed through any means nec­es­sary. The GOP’s con­tem­po­rary ‘cul­ture war’ isn’t just an updat­ed ver­sion of the polit­i­cal cud­gel of the past. Today’s ‘cul­ture war’ is a cov­er sto­ry too. A cov­er sto­ry that fueled the Jan 6 insur­rec­tion and con­tin­ues to fuel the GOP’s ongo­ing cur­tail­ing of democ­ra­cy at seem­ing­ly every oppor­tu­ni­ty. An ongo­ing cov­er sto­ry.

    So as we watch the coverup of Crowd­sourcers for Cul­ture and Lib­er­ty pro­ceed under veils of dark­money secre­cy, it’s going to be worth keep­ing in mind that we’re look­ing at a coverup sur­round­ing a group ded­i­cat­ed to devel­op­ing the cov­er sto­ry for the over­turn­ing the 2020 elec­tion and future elec­tions to come. They’re craft­ing a ‘cul­ture war’ designed to win back pow­er and keep it for good. Not save democ­ra­cy.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 5, 2023, 11:53 pm
  17. That did­n’t take long: Fresh on the heels of the report about the con­flict-of-inter­est ques­tions swirling around the $600k in anony­mous dona­tions to Gin­ni Thomas’s Crowd­sourcers of Cul­ture and Lib­er­ty and the extra lay­ers of dark mon­ey secre­cy around the dona­tions and the activ­i­ties of the group, there’s a new ProP­ub­li­ca report on anoth­er set of Thomas fam­i­ly-relat­ed con­flicts of inter­est. This time it’s con­flicts of inter­est cen­tered around Clarence Thomas, although there are some ques­tions about Gin­ni too. It’s a fam­i­ly affair.

    At the fore­front of this sto­ry is a kind of flip-side ver­sion of con­flict-of-inter­est ques­tions: can a friend can be too gen­er­ous? Because, boy, is Har­lan Crow a gen­er­ous guy. At least he was to his appar­ent­ly very good friend Clarence Thomas, who has enjoy annu­al lux­u­ry week long vaca­tions at Crow’s invi­ta­tion for over two decades. Lux­u­ry vaca­tions we are only now just learn­ing about thanks to a com­plete lack of any code of ethics for the Supreme Court and vir­tu­al­ly no report­ing require­ments. And also thanks to Jus­tice Thomas’s deci­sion not to dis­close the trips.

    But these annu­al trips, esti­mat­ed at being worth over $500k each, aren’t the extent of Crow’s gen­eros­i­ty to the Thomases. Crow — a con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor who has long focused on push­ing the courts to the right — has been lav­ish­ing the Thomases with gifts ever since he first met them three decades ago. Notable, this first meet­ing was after Thomas ascend­ed to the Supreme Court. The gifts include a $19k Bible that belonged to Fred­er­ick Dou­glass — which Thomas did choose to dis­close — and a por­trait of Clarence and Gin­ni. There was even a $105k gift to Yale Law School, Thomas’ alma mater, for the “Jus­tice Thomas Por­trait Fund”. Crow likes por­traits it seems.

    Telling­ly, the fea­tured por­trait in great hall of the Crow’s pri­vate lake­side resort, Camp Topridge, depicts Crow and Thomas smok­ing cig­ars out­side, sur­round­ed by a cir­cle of con­ser­v­a­tive fig­ures includ­ing Leonard Leo, the per­son who has arguably had more influ­ence over the shape of the Supreme Court than any­one ever. Again, the fea­tured por­trait depicts Crow, Thomas, and Leonard Leo smok­ing cig­ars. It’s like a shrine to judi­cial cor­rup­tion in the great hall of his pri­vate com­pound. A very troll­ish shrine.

    But Crow’s gen­eros­i­ty to the Thomases isn’t lim­it­ed to annu­al trips and lav­ish gifts. As we saw, when Gin­ni Thomas first set up her Lib­er­ty Cen­tral non­prof­it in 2010, it received an anony­mous $500k dona­tion that ulti­mate­ly raised so many con­flict of inter­est ques­tions of Gin­ni that she stepped away from the group and start­ed the for-prof­it Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing, which has few­er report­ing require­ments. That $500k back in 2010 came from Har­lan Crow.

    Alarm­ing­ly, fol­low­ing this ProP­ub­li­ca report, old reports about Crow’s col­lec­tion of unusu­al his­tor­i­cal pieces. Pieces like a signed copy of Mein Kampf, one of Hitler’s paint­ings, and oth­er Nazi mem­o­ra­bil­ia. It sounds like there’s a whole room filled with Nazi his­tor­i­cal pieces. Plus a gar­den full of stat­ues of the 20th century’s worst despots. As Crow describes it, he has the memen­tos because he hates com­mu­nism and fas­cism.

    Now, in fair­ness, he owns a much larg­er col­lec­tion of his­toric pieces. He’s not exclu­sive­ly a col­lec­tor of author­i­tar­i­an­ism. But as we’re also going to see, it sounds like Crow has a his­to­ry of creep­ing out vis­i­tors to his home with the promi­nence giv­en to the Nazi stuff on dis­play. Col­lec­tors can end up own­ing Nazi mem­o­ra­bil­ia for a vari­ety of rea­sons, but hav­ing a room that creeps out vis­i­tors with your Nazi stuff is a bit of a red flag.

    So that’s the update on the ongo­ing saga of the Thomas fam­i­ly’s adven­tures in judi­cial ethics: Clarence and Gin­ni have an extreme­ly gen­er­ous fam­i­ly friend with an extreme­ly provoca­tive col­lec­tion. Is it a prob­lem that this extreme­ly gen­er­ous friend has spent decades try­ing to reshape the courts while lav­ish­ing the Thomases to gifts and trips? Gin­ni and Clarence clear­ly don’t see the prob­lem. And aren’t required to report one whether they see it or not, which is part of the obvi­ous prob­lem:

    ProP­ub­li­ca

    Clarence Thomas and the Bil­lion­aire

    by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mier­jes­ki
    April 6, 2023 5 a.m. EDT

    Update, April 7, 2023: Since pub­li­ca­tion, Jus­tice Clarence Thomas has made a pub­lic state­ment defend­ing his undis­closed trips.

    In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opin­ion of the term, Jus­tice Clarence Thomas board­ed a large pri­vate jet head­ed to Indone­sia. He and his wife were going on vaca­tion: nine days of island-hop­ping in a vol­canic arch­i­pel­ago on a supery­acht staffed by a coterie of atten­dants and a pri­vate chef.

    If Thomas had char­tered the plane and the 162-foot yacht him­self, the total cost of the trip could have exceed­ed $500,000. For­tu­nate­ly for him, that wasn’t nec­es­sary: He was on vaca­tion with real estate mag­nate and Repub­li­can megadonor Har­lan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.

    For more than two decades, Thomas has accept­ed lux­u­ry trips vir­tu­al­ly every year from the Dal­las busi­ness­man with­out dis­clos­ing them, doc­u­ments and inter­views show. A pub­lic ser­vant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vaca­tioned on Crow’s supery­acht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bom­bardier Glob­al 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemi­an Grove, the exclu­sive Cal­i­for­nia all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawl­ing ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typ­i­cal­ly spends about a week every sum­mer at Crow’s pri­vate resort in the Adiron­dacks.

    The extent and fre­quen­cy of Crow’s appar­ent gifts to Thomas have no known prece­dent in the mod­ern his­to­ry of the U.S. Supreme Court.

    These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ finan­cial dis­clo­sures. His fail­ure to report the flights appears to vio­late a law passed after Water­gate that requires jus­tices, judges, mem­bers of Con­gress and fed­er­al offi­cials to dis­close most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have dis­closed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.

    ...

    In a state­ment, Crow acknowl­edged that he’d extend­ed “hos­pi­tal­i­ty” to the Thomases “over the years,” but said that Thomas nev­er asked for any of it and it was “no dif­fer­ent from the hos­pi­tal­i­ty we have extend­ed to our many oth­er dear friends.”

    Through his largesse, Crow has gained a unique form of access, spend­ing days in pri­vate with one of the most pow­er­ful peo­ple in the coun­try. By accept­ing the trips, Thomas has bro­ken long-stand­ing norms for judges’ con­duct, ethics experts and four cur­rent or retired fed­er­al judges said.

    “It’s incom­pre­hen­si­ble to me that some­one would do this,” said Nan­cy Gert­ner, a retired fed­er­al judge appoint­ed by Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton. When she was on the bench, Gert­ner said, she was so cau­tious about appear­ances that she wouldn’t men­tion her title when mak­ing din­ner reser­va­tions: “It was a ques­tion of not want­i­ng to use the office for any­thing oth­er than what it was intend­ed.”

    Vir­ginia Can­ter, a for­mer gov­ern­ment ethics lawyer who served in admin­is­tra­tions of both par­ties, said Thomas “seems to have com­plete­ly dis­re­gard­ed his high­er eth­i­cal oblig­a­tions.”

    “When a justice’s lifestyle is being sub­si­dized by the rich and famous, it absolute­ly cor­rodes pub­lic trust,” said Can­ter, now at the watch­dog group CREW. “Quite frankly, it makes my heart sink.”

    ProP­ub­li­ca uncov­ered the details of Thomas’ trav­el by draw­ing from flight records, inter­nal doc­u­ments dis­trib­uted to Crow’s employ­ees and inter­views with dozens of peo­ple rang­ing from his superyacht’s staff to mem­bers of the secre­tive Bohemi­an Club to an Indone­sian scu­ba div­ing instruc­tor.

    Fed­er­al judges sit in a unique posi­tion of pub­lic trust. They have life­time tenure, a priv­i­lege intend­ed to insu­late them from the pres­sures and poten­tial cor­rup­tion of pol­i­tics. A code of con­duct for fed­er­al judges below the Supreme Court requires them to avoid even the “appear­ance of impro­pri­ety.” Mem­bers of the high court, Chief Jus­tice John Roberts has writ­ten, “con­sult” that code for guid­ance. The Supreme Court is left almost entire­ly to police itself.

    There are few restric­tions on what gifts jus­tices can accept. That’s in con­trast to the oth­er branch­es of gov­ern­ment. Mem­bers of Con­gress are gen­er­al­ly pro­hib­it­ed from tak­ing gifts worth $50 or more and would need pre-approval from an ethics com­mit­tee to take many of the trips Thomas has accept­ed from Crow.

    Thomas’ approach to ethics has already attract­ed pub­lic atten­tion. Last year, Thomas didn’t recuse him­self from cas­es that touched on the involve­ment of his wife, Gin­ni, in efforts to over­turn the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. While his deci­sion gen­er­at­ed out­cry, it could not be appealed.

    Crow met Thomas after he became a jus­tice. The pair have become gen­uine friends, accord­ing to peo­ple who know both men. Over the years, some details of Crow’s rela­tion­ship with the Thomases have emerged. In 2011, The New York Times report­ed on Crow’s gen­eros­i­ty toward the jus­tice. That same year, Politi­co revealed that Crow had giv­en half a mil­lion dol­lars to a Tea Par­ty group found­ed by Gin­ni Thomas, which also paid her a $120,000 salary. But the full scale of Crow’s bene­fac­tions has nev­er been revealed.

    Long an influ­en­tial fig­ure in pro-busi­ness con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics, Crow has spent mil­lions on ide­o­log­i­cal efforts to shape the law and the judi­cia­ry. Crow and his firm have not had a case before the Supreme Court since Thomas joined it, though the court peri­od­i­cal­ly hears major cas­es that direct­ly impact the real estate indus­try. The details of his dis­cus­sions with Thomas over the years remain unknown, and it is unclear if Crow has had any influ­ence on the justice’s views.

    In his state­ment, Crow said that he and his wife have nev­er dis­cussed a pend­ing or low­er court case with Thomas. “We have nev­er sought to influ­ence Jus­tice Thomas on any legal or polit­i­cal issue,” he added.

    In Thomas’ pub­lic appear­ances over the years, he has pre­sent­ed him­self as an every­man with mod­est tastes.

    “I don’t have any prob­lem with going to Europe, but I pre­fer the Unit­ed States, and I pre­fer see­ing the reg­u­lar parts of the Unit­ed States,” Thomas said in a recent inter­view for a doc­u­men­tary about his life, which Crow helped finance.

    “I pre­fer the RV parks. I pre­fer the Wal­mart park­ing lots to the beach­es and things like that. There’s some­thing nor­mal to me about it,” Thomas said. “I come from reg­u­lar stock, and I pre­fer that — I pre­fer being around that.”

    “You Don’t Need to Wor­ry About This — It’s All Cov­ered”

    Crow’s pri­vate lake­side resort, Camp Topridge, sits in a remote cor­ner of the Adiron­dacks in upstate New York. Closed off from the pub­lic by ornate wood­en gates, the 105-acre prop­er­ty, once the sum­mer retreat of the same heiress who built Mar-a-Lago, fea­tures an arti­fi­cial water­fall and a great hall where Crow’s guests are served meals pre­pared by pri­vate chefs. Inside, there’s clear evi­dence of Crow and Thomas’ rela­tion­ship: a paint­ing of the two men at the resort, sit­ting out­doors smok­ing cig­ars along­side con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal oper­a­tives. A stat­ue of a Native Amer­i­can man, arms out­stretched, stands at the cen­ter of the image, which is pho­to­graph­ic in its clar­i­ty.

    The paint­ing cap­tures a scene from around five years ago, said Sharif Tarabay, the artist who was com­mis­sioned by Crow to paint it. Thomas has been vaca­tion­ing at Topridge vir­tu­al­ly every sum­mer for more than two decades, accord­ing to inter­views with more than a dozen vis­i­tors and for­mer resort staff, as well as records obtained by ProP­ub­li­ca. He has fished with a guide hired by Crow and danced at con­certs put on by musi­cians Crow brought in. Thomas has slept at per­haps the resort’s most ele­gant accom­mo­da­tion, an opu­lent lodge over­hang­ing Upper St. Reg­is Lake.

    The moun­tain­ous area draws bil­lion­aires from across the globe. Rooms at a near­by hotel built by the Rock­e­fellers start at $2,250 a night. Crow’s invi­ta­tion-only resort is even more exclu­sive. Guests stay for free, enjoy­ing Topridge’s more than 25 fire­places, three boathous­es, clay ten­nis court and bat­ting cage, along with more eccen­tric fea­tures: a life­size repli­ca of the Har­ry Pot­ter char­ac­ter Hagrid’s hut, bronze stat­ues of gnomes and a 1950s-style soda foun­tain where Crow’s staff fix­es milk­shakes.

    Crow’s access to the jus­tice extends to any­one the busi­ness­man choos­es to invite along. Thomas’ fre­quent vaca­tions at Topridge have brought him into con­tact with cor­po­rate exec­u­tives and polit­i­cal activists.

    Dur­ing just one trip in July 2017, Thomas’ fel­low guests includ­ed exec­u­tives at Ver­i­zon and Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers, major Repub­li­can donors and one of the lead­ers of the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute, a pro-busi­ness con­ser­v­a­tive think tank, accord­ing to records reviewed by ProP­ub­li­ca. The paint­ing of Thomas at Topridge shows him in con­ver­sa­tion with Leonard Leo, the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety leader regard­ed as an archi­tect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right.

    In his state­ment to ProP­ub­li­ca, Crow said he is “unaware of any of our friends ever lob­by­ing or seek­ing to influ­ence Jus­tice Thomas on any case, and I would nev­er invite any­one who I believe had any inten­tion of doing that.”

    “These are gath­er­ings of friends,” Crow said.

    Crow has deep con­nec­tions in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics. The heir to a real estate for­tune, Crow over­sees his family’s busi­ness empire and recent­ly named Marx­ism as his great­est fear. He was an ear­ly patron of the pow­er­ful anti-tax group Club for Growth and has been on the board of AEI for over 25 years. He also sits on the board of the Hoover Insti­tu­tion, anoth­er con­ser­v­a­tive think tank.

    A major Repub­li­can donor for decades, Crow has giv­en more than $10 mil­lion in pub­licly dis­closed polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions. He’s also giv­en to groups that keep their donors secret — how much of this so-called dark mon­ey he’s giv­en and to whom are not ful­ly known. “I don’t dis­close what I’m not required to dis­close,” Crow once told the Times.

    Crow has long sup­port­ed efforts to move the judi­cia­ry to the right. He has donat­ed to the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety and giv­en mil­lions of dol­lars to groups ded­i­cat­ed to tort reform and con­ser­v­a­tive jurispru­dence. AEI and the Hoover Insti­tu­tion pub­lish schol­ar­ship advanc­ing con­ser­v­a­tive legal the­o­ries, and fel­lows at the think tanks occa­sion­al­ly file ami­cus briefs with the Supreme Court.

    On the court since 1991, Thomas is a deeply con­ser­v­a­tive jurist known for his “orig­i­nal­ism,” an approach that seeks to adhere to close read­ings of the text of the Con­sti­tu­tion. While he has been res­olute in this gen­er­al approach, his views on spe­cif­ic mat­ters have some­times evolved. Recent­ly, Thomas harsh­ly crit­i­cized one of his own ear­li­er opin­ions as he embraced a legal the­o­ry, new­ly pop­u­lar on the right, that would lim­it gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion. Small evo­lu­tions in a justice’s think­ing or even select words used in an opin­ion can affect entire bod­ies of law, and shifts in Thomas’ views can be espe­cial­ly con­se­quen­tial. He’s tak­en unortho­dox legal posi­tions that have been adopt­ed by the court’s major­i­ty years down the line.

    Soon after Crow met Thomas three decades ago, he began lav­ish­ing the jus­tice with gifts, includ­ing a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, which Thomas dis­closed. Recent­ly, Crow gave Thomas a por­trait of the jus­tice and his wife, accord­ing to Tarabay, who paint­ed it. Crow’s foun­da­tion also gave $105,000 to Yale Law School, Thomas’ alma mater, for the “Jus­tice Thomas Por­trait Fund,” tax fil­ings show.

    Crow said that he and his wife have fund­ed a num­ber of projects that cel­e­brate Thomas. “We believe it is impor­tant to make sure as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble learn about him, remem­ber him and under­stand the ideals for which he stands,” he said.

    To trace Thomas’ trips around the world on Crow’s supery­acht, ProP­ub­li­ca spoke to more than 15 for­mer yacht work­ers and tour guides and obtained records doc­u­ment­ing the ship’s trav­els.

    On the Indone­sia trip in the sum­mer of 2019, Thomas flew to the coun­try on Crow’s jet, accord­ing to anoth­er pas­sen­ger on the plane. Clarence and Gin­ni Thomas were trav­el­ing with Crow and his wife, Kathy. Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, decked out with motor­boats and a giant inflat­able rub­ber duck, met the trav­el­ers at a fish­ing town on the island of Flo­res.

    Tour­ing the Less­er Sun­da Islands, the group made stops at Komo­do Nation­al Park, home of the epony­mous rep­tiles; at the vol­canic lakes of Mount Kelimu­tu; and at Pan­tai Meko, a spit of pris­tine beach acces­si­ble only by boat. Anoth­er guest was Mark Pao­let­ta, a friend of the Thomases then serv­ing as the gen­er­al coun­sel of the Office of Man­age­ment and Bud­get in the admin­is­tra­tion of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.

    Pao­let­ta was bound by exec­u­tive branch ethics rules at the time and told ProP­ub­li­ca that he dis­cussed the trip with an ethics lawyer at his agency before accept­ing the Crows’ invi­ta­tion. “Based on that counsel’s advice, I reim­bursed Har­lan for the costs,” Pao­let­ta said in an email. He did not respond to a ques­tion about how much he paid Crow.

    (Pao­let­ta has long been a pugna­cious defend­er of Thomas and recent­ly tes­ti­fied before Con­gress against strength­en­ing judi­cial ethics rules. “There is noth­ing wrong with ethics or recusals at the Supreme Court,” he said, adding, “To sup­port any reform leg­is­la­tion right now would be to val­i­date these vicious polit­i­cal attacks on the Supreme Court,” refer­ring to crit­i­cism of Thomas and his wife.)

    The Indone­sia vaca­tion wasn’t Thomas’ first time on the Michaela Rose. He went on a riv­er day trip around Savan­nah, Geor­gia, and an extend­ed cruise in New Zealand rough­ly a decade ago.

    As a token of his appre­ci­a­tion, he gave one yacht work­er a copy of his mem­oir. Thomas signed the book: “Thank you so much for all your hard work on our New Zealand adven­ture.”

    Crow’s pol­i­cy was that guests didn’t pay, for­mer Michaela Rose staff said. “You don’t need to wor­ry about this — it’s all cov­ered,” one recalled the guests being told.

    There’s evi­dence Thomas has tak­en even more trips on the supery­acht. Crow often gave his guests cus­tom polo shirts com­mem­o­rat­ing their vaca­tions, accord­ing to staff. ProP­ub­li­ca found pho­tographs of Thomas wear­ing at least two of those shirts. In one, he wears a blue polo shirt embroi­dered with the Michaela Rose’s logo and the words “March 2007” and “Greek Islands.”

    Thomas didn’t report any of the trips ProP­ub­li­ca iden­ti­fied on his annu­al finan­cial dis­clo­sures. Ethics experts said the law clear­ly requires dis­clo­sure for pri­vate jet flights and Thomas appears to have vio­lat­ed it.

    Jus­tices are gen­er­al­ly required to pub­licly report all gifts worth more than $415, defined as “any­thing of val­ue” that isn’t ful­ly reim­bursed. There are excep­tions: If some­one hosts a jus­tice at their own prop­er­ty, free food and lodg­ing don’t have to be dis­closed. That would exempt din­ner at a friend’s house. The exemp­tion nev­er applied to trans­porta­tion, such as pri­vate jet flights, experts said, a fact that was made explic­it in recent­ly updat­ed fil­ing instruc­tions for the judi­cia­ry.

    Two ethics law experts told ProP­ub­li­ca that Thomas’ yacht cruis­es, a form of trans­porta­tion, also required dis­clo­sure.

    “If Jus­tice Thomas received free trav­el on pri­vate planes and yachts, fail­ure to report the gifts is a vio­la­tion of the dis­clo­sure law,” said Kedric Payne, senior direc­tor for ethics at the non­prof­it gov­ern­ment watch­dog Cam­paign Legal Cen­ter. (Thomas him­self once report­ed receiv­ing a pri­vate jet trip from Crow, on his dis­clo­sure for 1997.)

    The experts said Thomas’ stays at Topridge may have required dis­clo­sure too, in part because Crow owns it not per­son­al­ly but through a com­pa­ny. Until recent­ly, the judiciary’s ethics guid­ance didn’t explic­it­ly address the own­er­ship issue. The recent update to the fil­ing instruc­tions clar­i­fies that dis­clo­sure is required for such stays.

    How many times Thomas failed to dis­close trips remains unclear. Flight records from the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion and FlightAware sug­gest he makes reg­u­lar use of Crow’s plane. The jet often fol­lows a pat­tern: from its home base in Dal­las to Wash­ing­ton Dulles air­port for a brief stop, then on to a des­ti­na­tion Thomas is vis­it­ing and back again.

    ProP­ub­li­ca iden­ti­fied five such trips in addi­tion to the Indone­sia vaca­tion.

    On July 7 last year, Crow’s jet made a 40-minute stop at Dulles and then flew to a small air­port near Topridge, return­ing to Dulles six days lat­er. Thomas was at the resort that week for his reg­u­lar sum­mer vis­it, accord­ing to a per­son who was there. Twice in recent years, the jet has fol­lowed the pat­tern when Thomas appeared at Crow’s prop­er­ties in Dal­las — once for the Jan. 4, 2018, swear­ing-in of Fifth Cir­cuit Judge James Ho at Crow’s pri­vate library and again for a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank con­fer­ence Crow host­ed last May.

    Thomas has even used the plane for a three-hour trip. On Feb. 11, 2016, the plane flew from Dal­las to Dulles to New Haven, Con­necti­cut, before fly­ing back lat­er that after­noon. ProP­ub­li­ca con­firmed that Thomas was on the jet through Supreme Court secu­ri­ty records obtained by the non­prof­it Fix the Court, pri­vate jet data, a New Haven plane spot­ter and anoth­er per­son at the air­port. There are no reports of Thomas mak­ing a pub­lic appear­ance that day, and the pur­pose of the trip remains unclear.

    Jet char­ter com­pa­nies told ProP­ub­li­ca that rent­ing an equiv­a­lent plane for the New Haven trip could cost around $70,000.

    ...

    ———–

    “Clarence Thomas and the Bil­lion­aire” by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mier­jes­ki; ProP­ub­li­ca; 04/06/2023

    If Thomas had char­tered the plane and the 162-foot yacht him­self, the total cost of the trip could have exceed­ed $500,000. For­tu­nate­ly for him, that wasn’t nec­es­sary: He was on vaca­tion with real estate mag­nate and Repub­li­can megadonor Har­lan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.”

    Yes, it sure was ‘for­tu­nate’ for Jus­tice Thomas how he did­n’t have to pay over $500k for the char­tered plane and trip on a 162-foot yacht owned by a con­ser­v­a­tive mega donor who has long pushed to make US courts fur­ther to the right. Even more for­tu­nate that Thomas has appar­ent­ly tak­en these trips every year for over two decades. So very for­tu­nate. The only unfor­tu­nate part of this whole sto­ry is the fact that these secret lux­u­ry trips were final­ly revealed. At least unfor­tu­nate for Jus­tice Thomas. There’s plen­ty in this sto­ry that’s obvi­ous­ly very unfor­tu­nate for the pub­lic. At least the mem­bers of the pub­lic who don’t share the pri­or­i­ties of this right-wing bil­lion­aire heir to a real estate for­tune:

    ...
    For more than two decades, Thomas has accept­ed lux­u­ry trips vir­tu­al­ly every year from the Dal­las busi­ness­man with­out dis­clos­ing them, doc­u­ments and inter­views show. A pub­lic ser­vant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vaca­tioned on Crow’s supery­acht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bom­bardier Glob­al 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemi­an Grove, the exclu­sive Cal­i­for­nia all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawl­ing ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typ­i­cal­ly spends about a week every sum­mer at Crow’s pri­vate resort in the Adiron­dacks.

    The extent and fre­quen­cy of Crow’s appar­ent gifts to Thomas have no known prece­dent in the mod­ern his­to­ry of the U.S. Supreme Court.

    These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ finan­cial dis­clo­sures. His fail­ure to report the flights appears to vio­late a law passed after Water­gate that requires jus­tices, judges, mem­bers of Con­gress and fed­er­al offi­cials to dis­close most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have dis­closed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.

    ...

    In a state­ment, Crow acknowl­edged that he’d extend­ed “hos­pi­tal­i­ty” to the Thomases “over the years,” but said that Thomas nev­er asked for any of it and it was “no dif­fer­ent from the hos­pi­tal­i­ty we have extend­ed to our many oth­er dear friends.”

    ...

    Crow has deep con­nec­tions in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics. The heir to a real estate for­tune, Crow over­sees his family’s busi­ness empire and recent­ly named Marx­ism as his great­est fear. He was an ear­ly patron of the pow­er­ful anti-tax group Club for Growth and has been on the board of AEI for over 25 years. He also sits on the board of the Hoover Insti­tu­tion, anoth­er con­ser­v­a­tive think tank.

    A major Repub­li­can donor for decades, Crow has giv­en more than $10 mil­lion in pub­licly dis­closed polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions. He’s also giv­en to groups that keep their donors secret — how much of this so-called dark mon­ey he’s giv­en and to whom are not ful­ly known. “I don’t dis­close what I’m not required to dis­close,” Crow once told the Times.

    Crow has long sup­port­ed efforts to move the judi­cia­ry to the right. He has donat­ed to the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety and giv­en mil­lions of dol­lars to groups ded­i­cat­ed to tort reform and con­ser­v­a­tive jurispru­dence. AEI and the Hoover Insti­tu­tion pub­lish schol­ar­ship advanc­ing con­ser­v­a­tive legal the­o­ries, and fel­lows at the think tanks occa­sion­al­ly file ami­cus briefs with the Supreme Court.
    ...

    But these annu­al lux­u­ry trips aren’t the only eye­brow-rais­ing ‘gifts’ from Har­low Crow to his ‘old friend’ Clarence Thomas. Flight records indi­cate Thomas has used Crow’s pri­vate jets to make trips as short as a few hours to Crow’s Dal­las prop­er­ties. Pri­vate jet trips that would have cost $70k if Thomas was pay­ing:

    ...
    How many times Thomas failed to dis­close trips remains unclear. Flight records from the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion and FlightAware sug­gest he makes reg­u­lar use of Crow’s plane. The jet often fol­lows a pat­tern: from its home base in Dal­las to Wash­ing­ton Dulles air­port for a brief stop, then on to a des­ti­na­tion Thomas is vis­it­ing and back again.

    ProP­ub­li­ca iden­ti­fied five such trips in addi­tion to the Indone­sia vaca­tion.

    On July 7 last year, Crow’s jet made a 40-minute stop at Dulles and then flew to a small air­port near Topridge, return­ing to Dulles six days lat­er. Thomas was at the resort that week for his reg­u­lar sum­mer vis­it, accord­ing to a per­son who was there. Twice in recent years, the jet has fol­lowed the pat­tern when Thomas appeared at Crow’s prop­er­ties in Dal­las — once for the Jan. 4, 2018, swear­ing-in of Fifth Cir­cuit Judge James Ho at Crow’s pri­vate library and again for a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank con­fer­ence Crow host­ed last May.

    Thomas has even used the plane for a three-hour trip. On Feb. 11, 2016, the plane flew from Dal­las to Dulles to New Haven, Con­necti­cut, before fly­ing back lat­er that after­noon. ProP­ub­li­ca con­firmed that Thomas was on the jet through Supreme Court secu­ri­ty records obtained by the non­prof­it Fix the Court, pri­vate jet data, a New Haven plane spot­ter and anoth­er per­son at the air­port. There are no reports of Thomas mak­ing a pub­lic appear­ance that day, and the pur­pose of the trip remains unclear.

    Jet char­ter com­pa­nies told ProP­ub­li­ca that rent­ing an equiv­a­lent plane for the New Haven trip could cost around $70,000.
    ...

    As bad as this pic­ture looks, it gets troll­ish­ly worse when we see the paint­ing fea­tured in the great hall of Camp Topridge: a paint­ing depict­ing Crow and Thomas smok­ing cig­ar along­side a cir­cle of con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal oper­a­tives includ­ing Leonard Leo, the fig­ure who has prob­a­bly done more to move the fed­er­al courts to the far right than any­one else on the plan­et. As Crow puts it, “These are gath­er­ings of friends.” The most influ­en­tial friends one can find at shap­ing the courts along­side Jus­tice Thomas. This is trolling:

    ..
    Crow’s pri­vate lake­side resort, Camp Topridge, sits in a remote cor­ner of the Adiron­dacks in upstate New York. Closed off from the pub­lic by ornate wood­en gates, the 105-acre prop­er­ty, once the sum­mer retreat of the same heiress who built Mar-a-Lago, fea­tures an arti­fi­cial water­fall and a great hall where Crow’s guests are served meals pre­pared by pri­vate chefs. Inside, there’s clear evi­dence of Crow and Thomas’ rela­tion­ship: a paint­ing of the two men at the resort, sit­ting out­doors smok­ing cig­ars along­side con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal oper­a­tives. A stat­ue of a Native Amer­i­can man, arms out­stretched, stands at the cen­ter of the image, which is pho­to­graph­ic in its clar­i­ty.

    The paint­ing cap­tures a scene from around five years ago, said Sharif Tarabay, the artist who was com­mis­sioned by Crow to paint it. Thomas has been vaca­tion­ing at Topridge vir­tu­al­ly every sum­mer for more than two decades, accord­ing to inter­views with more than a dozen vis­i­tors and for­mer resort staff, as well as records obtained by ProP­ub­li­ca. He has fished with a guide hired by Crow and danced at con­certs put on by musi­cians Crow brought in. Thomas has slept at per­haps the resort’s most ele­gant accom­mo­da­tion, an opu­lent lodge over­hang­ing Upper St. Reg­is Lake.

    The moun­tain­ous area draws bil­lion­aires from across the globe. Rooms at a near­by hotel built by the Rock­e­fellers start at $2,250 a night. Crow’s invi­ta­tion-only resort is even more exclu­sive. Guests stay for free, enjoy­ing Topridge’s more than 25 fire­places, three boathous­es, clay ten­nis court and bat­ting cage, along with more eccen­tric fea­tures: a life­size repli­ca of the Har­ry Pot­ter char­ac­ter Hagrid’s hut, bronze stat­ues of gnomes and a 1950s-style soda foun­tain where Crow’s staff fix­es milk­shakes.

    Crow’s access to the jus­tice extends to any­one the busi­ness­man choos­es to invite along. Thomas’ fre­quent vaca­tions at Topridge have brought him into con­tact with cor­po­rate exec­u­tives and polit­i­cal activists.

    Dur­ing just one trip in July 2017, Thomas’ fel­low guests includ­ed exec­u­tives at Ver­i­zon and Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers, major Repub­li­can donors and one of the lead­ers of the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute, a pro-busi­ness con­ser­v­a­tive think tank, accord­ing to records reviewed by ProP­ub­li­ca. The paint­ing of Thomas at Topridge shows him in con­ver­sa­tion with Leonard Leo, the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety leader regard­ed as an archi­tect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right.

    In his state­ment to ProP­ub­li­ca, Crow said he is “unaware of any of our friends ever lob­by­ing or seek­ing to influ­ence Jus­tice Thomas on any case, and I would nev­er invite any­one who I believe had any inten­tion of doing that.”

    “These are gath­er­ings of friends,” Crow said.
    ...

    Adding to the troll­ish nature of the sit­u­a­tion is the fact Crow did­n’t actu­al­ly meet Thomas until after Thomas was a Supreme Court jus­tice. And it was short­ly after that meet­ing that Crow start­ed show­ing the Thomases with gifts. Includ­ing half a mil­lion dol­lars to Gin­ni Thomas’s Tea Par­ty group that paid her a $120k salary. Recall how we saw this group, Lib­er­ty Cen­tral, come up in the recent sto­ry about Gin­ni Thomas’s own con­flicts of inter­est via her ‘char­i­ty’ Crowd­sourcers for Cul­ture and Lib­er­ty and her for-prof­it con­sult­ing firm Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing. Gin­ni first set up Lib­er­ty Cen­tral in 2010 as a “non­par­ti­san” group, but quick­ly aban­doned it in 2011 after Crow’s large dona­tion raised ques­tions about poten­tial con­flicts of inter­est­ing. It was then that Gin­ni set up Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing as a for-prof­it enti­ty. A for-prof­it enti­ty that is now poten­tial­ly involved with Gin­ni’s cur­rent con­flict-of-inter­est ques­tions. We don’t know very much about the Thomases rela­tion­ship with Crow. But vir­tu­al­ly every­thing of the lit­tle that we do know just screams of a rela­tion­ship that only exists because of Thomas’s prox­im­i­ty to pow­er. Or to put it anoth­er way, what are the odds that Clarence Thomas would have made these lux­u­ry trips every year for over two decades if he was­n’t a Supreme Court jus­tice but remained an appeals court judge:

    ...
    Crow met Thomas after he became a jus­tice. The pair have become gen­uine friends, accord­ing to peo­ple who know both men. Over the years, some details of Crow’s rela­tion­ship with the Thomases have emerged. In 2011, The New York Times report­ed on Crow’s gen­eros­i­ty toward the jus­tice. That same year, Politi­co revealed that Crow had giv­en half a mil­lion dol­lars to a Tea Par­ty group found­ed by Gin­ni Thomas, which also paid her a $120,000 salary. But the full scale of Crow’s bene­fac­tions has nev­er been revealed.

    ...

    On the court since 1991, Thomas is a deeply con­ser­v­a­tive jurist known for his “orig­i­nal­ism,” an approach that seeks to adhere to close read­ings of the text of the Con­sti­tu­tion. While he has been res­olute in this gen­er­al approach, his views on spe­cif­ic mat­ters have some­times evolved. Recent­ly, Thomas harsh­ly crit­i­cized one of his own ear­li­er opin­ions as he embraced a legal the­o­ry, new­ly pop­u­lar on the right, that would lim­it gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion. Small evo­lu­tions in a justice’s think­ing or even select words used in an opin­ion can affect entire bod­ies of law, and shifts in Thomas’ views can be espe­cial­ly con­se­quen­tial. He’s tak­en unortho­dox legal posi­tions that have been adopt­ed by the court’s major­i­ty years down the line.

    Soon after Crow met Thomas three decades ago, he began lav­ish­ing the jus­tice with gifts, includ­ing a $19,000 Bible that belonged to Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, which Thomas dis­closed. Recent­ly, Crow gave Thomas a por­trait of the jus­tice and his wife, accord­ing to Tarabay, who paint­ed it. Crow’s foun­da­tion also gave $105,000 to Yale Law School, Thomas’ alma mater, for the “Jus­tice Thomas Por­trait Fund,” tax fil­ings show.

    Crow said that he and his wife have fund­ed a num­ber of projects that cel­e­brate Thomas. “We believe it is impor­tant to make sure as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble learn about him, remem­ber him and under­stand the ideals for which he stands,” he said.
    ...

    It’s also note­wor­thy that we’re see­ing close Thomas-fam­i­ly friend Mark Pao­let­ta attend­ing these same retreats dur­ing the peri­od when Pao­let­ta was the gen­er­al coun­sel of the OMB. Recall how Pao­let­ta is one of the fig­ures involved with the ongo­ing Sched­ule F schem­ing. But when it came to that trip while serv­ing at the OMB, Pao­let­ta reim­bursed the costs. Because not doing so would obvi­ous­ly vio­late ethics rules. Rules that exist for every branch of the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry except the Supreme Court:

    ...
    Tour­ing the Less­er Sun­da Islands, the group made stops at Komo­do Nation­al Park, home of the epony­mous rep­tiles; at the vol­canic lakes of Mount Kelimu­tu; and at Pan­tai Meko, a spit of pris­tine beach acces­si­ble only by boat. Anoth­er guest was Mark Pao­let­ta, a friend of the Thomases then serv­ing as the gen­er­al coun­sel of the Office of Man­age­ment and Bud­get in the admin­is­tra­tion of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.

    Pao­let­ta was bound by exec­u­tive branch ethics rules at the time and told ProP­ub­li­ca that he dis­cussed the trip with an ethics lawyer at his agency before accept­ing the Crows’ invi­ta­tion. “Based on that counsel’s advice, I reim­bursed Har­lan for the costs,” Pao­let­ta said in an email. He did not respond to a ques­tion about how much he paid Crow.

    (Pao­let­ta has long been a pugna­cious defend­er of Thomas and recent­ly tes­ti­fied before Con­gress against strength­en­ing judi­cial ethics rules. “There is noth­ing wrong with ethics or recusals at the Supreme Court,” he said, adding, “To sup­port any reform leg­is­la­tion right now would be to val­i­date these vicious polit­i­cal attacks on the Supreme Court,” refer­ring to crit­i­cism of Thomas and his wife.)
    ...

    But also note how, despite there not being an explic­it code of ethics over­see­ing Supreme Court jus­tices, Thomas still vio­lat­ed long-stand­ing norms. In oth­er words, even if he tech­ni­cal­ly could do what he did, no one actu­al­ly expect­ed him to be this sleazy. Now we know bet­ter. Not that know­ing about it seems to mat­ter:

    ...
    Through his largesse, Crow has gained a unique form of access, spend­ing days in pri­vate with one of the most pow­er­ful peo­ple in the coun­try. By accept­ing the trips, Thomas has bro­ken long-stand­ing norms for judges’ con­duct, ethics experts and four cur­rent or retired fed­er­al judges said.

    “It’s incom­pre­hen­si­ble to me that some­one would do this,” said Nan­cy Gert­ner, a retired fed­er­al judge appoint­ed by Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton. When she was on the bench, Gert­ner said, she was so cau­tious about appear­ances that she wouldn’t men­tion her title when mak­ing din­ner reser­va­tions: “It was a ques­tion of not want­i­ng to use the office for any­thing oth­er than what it was intend­ed.”

    Vir­ginia Can­ter, a for­mer gov­ern­ment ethics lawyer who served in admin­is­tra­tions of both par­ties, said Thomas “seems to have com­plete­ly dis­re­gard­ed his high­er eth­i­cal oblig­a­tions.”

    “When a justice’s lifestyle is being sub­si­dized by the rich and famous, it absolute­ly cor­rodes pub­lic trust,” said Can­ter, now at the watch­dog group CREW. “Quite frankly, it makes my heart sink.”

    ...

    Fed­er­al judges sit in a unique posi­tion of pub­lic trust. They have life­time tenure, a priv­i­lege intend­ed to insu­late them from the pres­sures and poten­tial cor­rup­tion of pol­i­tics. A code of con­duct for fed­er­al judges below the Supreme Court requires them to avoid even the “appear­ance of impro­pri­ety.” Mem­bers of the high court, Chief Jus­tice John Roberts has writ­ten, “con­sult” that code for guid­ance. The Supreme Court is left almost entire­ly to police itself.

    There are few restric­tions on what gifts jus­tices can accept. That’s in con­trast to the oth­er branch­es of gov­ern­ment. Mem­bers of Con­gress are gen­er­al­ly pro­hib­it­ed from tak­ing gifts worth $50 or more and would need pre-approval from an ethics com­mit­tee to take many of the trips Thomas has accept­ed from Crow.
    ...

    Final­ly, keep in mind this one last aspect of the sit­u­a­tion described in this inves­ti­ga­tion: while these lux­u­ry trips were a secret to the pub­lic at large for the last two decades, they weren’t entire­ly a secret. That’s evi­denced by the fact that the inves­ti­ga­tion was based in part on inter­views with dozens employ­ees pro­vid­ing these lux­u­ry ser­vices, from Crow’s supery­acht staff and tour guides to an Indone­sian scu­ba div­ing instruc­tor. Peo­ple knew about this. Not many, but some. Which rais­es the obvi­ous ques­tion as to who else knew this whole time? More specif­i­cal­ly, who else knew who was also try­ing to influ­ence the court. It’s a reminder that this isn’t just a sto­ry about the secret cor­rupt rela­tion­ship between the Thomases and Har­lan Crow. It’s also about the poten­tial for black­mail cre­at­ed by this secret rela­tion­ship. Crow was­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly the only per­son who gained lever­age over Jus­tice Thomas as a result of this high­ly gen­er­ous ‘friend­ship’:

    ...
    ProP­ub­li­ca uncov­ered the details of Thomas’ trav­el by draw­ing from flight records, inter­nal doc­u­ments dis­trib­uted to Crow’s employ­ees and inter­views with dozens of peo­ple rang­ing from his superyacht’s staff to mem­bers of the secre­tive Bohemi­an Club to an Indone­sian scu­ba div­ing instruc­tor.

    ...

    To trace Thomas’ trips around the world on Crow’s supery­acht, ProP­ub­li­ca spoke to more than 15 for­mer yacht work­ers and tour guides and obtained records doc­u­ment­ing the ship’s trav­els.

    On the Indone­sia trip in the sum­mer of 2019, Thomas flew to the coun­try on Crow’s jet, accord­ing to anoth­er pas­sen­ger on the plane. Clarence and Gin­ni Thomas were trav­el­ing with Crow and his wife, Kathy. Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, decked out with motor­boats and a giant inflat­able rub­ber duck, met the trav­el­ers at a fish­ing town on the island of Flo­res.

    ...

    The Indone­sia vaca­tion wasn’t Thomas’ first time on the Michaela Rose. He went on a riv­er day trip around Savan­nah, Geor­gia, and an extend­ed cruise in New Zealand rough­ly a decade ago.

    As a token of his appre­ci­a­tion, he gave one yacht work­er a copy of his mem­oir. Thomas signed the book: “Thank you so much for all your hard work on our New Zealand adven­ture.”
    ...

    Who knows what all hap­pens on these lux­u­ry vaca­tions and what could make for good black­mail mate­r­i­al. But at a min­i­mum, it’s not a a great look. Espe­cial­ly after the 2014 reports in the Dal­las Morn­ing News about the room of Nazi memem­tos on dis­play in Crow’s Dal­las home and the gar­den of 20th cen­tu­ry dic­ta­tors in the back­yard. In the hands of a his­to­ry buff it would be an inter­est­ing col­lec­tion of pieces. But in the hands of an oli­garch who has been bankrolling the US’s decades-long lurch to the far right, it’s the kind of col­lec­tion that feels less like the col­lec­tion of a his­to­ry buff and more the col­lec­tion of fas­cism buff. Again, it’s, at a min­i­mum, not a great look. For Crow or the Thomases:

    Wash­ing­ton­ian

    Clarence Thomas’s Bil­lion­aire Bene­fac­tor Col­lects Hitler Arti­facts
    Har­lan Crow also report­ed­ly has a gar­den full of dic­ta­tor stat­ues.

    Writ­ten by Sylvie McNa­ma­ra
    Pub­lished on April 7, 2023

    When Repub­li­can megadonor Har­lan Crow isn’t lav­ish­ing Jus­tice Clarence Thomas with free trips on his pri­vate plane and yacht (in pos­si­ble vio­la­tion of Supreme Court ethics rules), he lives a qui­et life in Dal­las among his his­tor­i­cal col­lec­tions. These col­lec­tions include Hitler arti­facts—two of his paint­ings of Euro­pean cityscapes, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, and assort­ed Nazi memorabilia—plus a gar­den full of stat­ues of the 20th century’s worst despots.

    Crow, the bil­lion­aire heir to a real estate for­tune, has said that he’s filled his prop­er­ty with these memen­toes because he hates com­mu­nism and fas­cism. Nonethe­less, his col­lec­tions caused an uproar back in 2015 when Mar­co Rubio attend­ed a fundrais­er at Crow’s house on the eve of Yom Kip­pur. Rubio’s crit­ics thought the tim­ing was inap­pro­pri­ate giv­en, you know, the Hitler stuff.

    “I still can’t get over the col­lec­tion of Nazi mem­o­ra­bil­ia,” says one per­son who attend­ed an event at Crow’s home a few years ago and asked to remain anony­mous. “It would have been help­ful to have some­one explain the sig­nif­i­cance of all the items. With­out that con­text, you sort of just gasp when you walk into the room.” One mem­o­rable aspect was the paint­ings: “some­thing done by George W. Bush next to a Nor­man Rock­well next to one by Hitler.” They also said it was “star­tling” and “strange” to see the dic­ta­tor sculp­tures in the back­yard.

    [see pho­to of A set of Nazi linens dis­played in Har­lan Crow’s home. The pho­to was tak­en by some­body who attend­ed an event there a few years ago.]

    [see pho­to of Nazi arti­facts on dis­play in Har­lan Crow’s home, also pho­tographed by the per­son who attend­ed an event there a few years ago]

    In 2014, when Crow’s house was includ­ed in a pub­lic tour of his­toric homes, a reporter from the Dal­las Morn­ing News vis­it­ed. Appar­ent­ly, Crow was vis­i­bly uncom­fort­able with ques­tions about his dic­ta­tor stat­ues and Hitler mem­o­ra­bil­ia, pre­fer­ring to dis­cuss his oth­er his­tor­i­cal col­lec­tions: doc­u­ments signed by the likes of Christo­pher Colum­bus and George Wash­ing­ton; paint­ings by Renoir and Mon­et; stat­ues of two of Crow’s heroes, Win­ston Churchill and Mar­garet Thatch­er.

    ...

    These are appar­ent­ly not stat­ues that Crow has commissioned—Crow has said that they’re bona-fide arti­facts from pub­lic squares across Europe and Asia that cit­i­zens top­pled at the end of dic­ta­to­r­i­al regimes. Accord­ing to Crow, the white streaks on the Lenin stat­ue are the rem­nants of paint thrown by furi­ous Rus­sians, and the chunks miss­ing from Stal­in are evi­dence of the wrath of the anti-Com­mu­nist hordes. Crow says that the Gavri­lo Prin­cip stat­ue had to be smug­gled across the bor­der between Ser­bia and Croa­t­ia dis­guised as rub­ble for fear that the Croa­t­ian bor­der guards might destroy it in a rage.

    The per­son we talked to who vis­it­ed Crow’s home says that it felt sort of like a muse­um (“just a bunch of col­lectibles every­where from major his­tor­i­cal events”) and describes the Crows as “such hos­pitable Texas hosts.” The evening wasn’t unpleas­ant, they say, “just strange—they had fam­i­ly pho­tos in one room, then all this WWII stuff in anoth­er room, and dic­ta­tors in the back­yard.”

    ———-

    “Clarence Thomas’s Bil­lion­aire Bene­fac­tor Col­lects Hitler Arti­facts” by Sylvie McNa­ma­ra; Wash­ing­ton­ian; 04/07/2023

    “In 2014, when Crow’s house was includ­ed in a pub­lic tour of his­toric homes, a reporter from the Dal­las Morn­ing News vis­it­ed. Appar­ent­ly, Crow was vis­i­bly uncom­fort­able with ques­tions about his dic­ta­tor stat­ues and Hitler mem­o­ra­bil­ia, pre­fer­ring to dis­cuss his oth­er his­tor­i­cal col­lec­tions: doc­u­ments signed by the likes of Christo­pher Colum­bus and George Wash­ing­ton; paint­ings by Renoir and Mon­et; stat­ues of two of Crow’s heroes, Win­ston Churchill and Mar­garet Thatch­er.”

    It was kind of an acci­den­tal pub­lic peak into the pri­vate col­lec­tion of one of Dal­las’s oli­garchs. In 2014, the Crow’s home was includ­ed in a pub­lic tour of his­toric homes, prompt­ing a Dal­las Morn­ing News reporter to show up and get a tour. But as the anony­mous atten­dees of events as the home describe, this was a col­lec­tion guests at the home were reg­u­lar­ly exposed to, includ­ing a paint­ing by Hitler next to a paint­ing by Nor­man Rock­well next to a paint­ing by George W. Bush. It is a gen­uine­ly fas­ci­nat­ing col­lec­tion of works. But dark­ly fas­ci­nat­ing for dark­money oli­garch:

    ...
    “I still can’t get over the col­lec­tion of Nazi mem­o­ra­bil­ia,” says one per­son who attend­ed an event at Crow’s home a few years ago and asked to remain anony­mous. “It would have been help­ful to have some­one explain the sig­nif­i­cance of all the items. With­out that con­text, you sort of just gasp when you walk into the room.” One mem­o­rable aspect was the paint­ings: “some­thing done by George W. Bush next to a Nor­man Rock­well next to one by Hitler.” They also said it was “star­tling” and “strange” to see the dic­ta­tor sculp­tures in the back­yard.

    [see pho­to of A set of Nazi linens dis­played in Har­lan Crow’s home. The pho­to was tak­en by some­body who attend­ed an event there a few years ago.]

    [see pho­to of Nazi arti­facts on dis­play in Har­lan Crow’s home, also pho­tographed by the per­son who attend­ed an event there a few years ago]

    ...

    The per­son we talked to who vis­it­ed Crow’s home says that it felt sort of like a muse­um (“just a bunch of col­lectibles every­where from major his­tor­i­cal events”) and describes the Crows as “such hos­pitable Texas hosts.” The evening wasn’t unpleas­ant, they say, “just strange—they had fam­i­ly pho­tos in one room, then all this WWII stuff in anoth­er room, and dic­ta­tors in the back­yard.”
    ...

    We haven’t heard about Crow gift­ing any Nazi mem­o­re­bil­ia to the Thomases, we can be pret­ty con­fi­dent they toured that home and seen the col­lec­tion. Many, many times. After fly­ing there on Crow’s pri­vate jet. With­out any pub­lic dis­clo­sure.

    But don’t call it a con­flict of inter­est. It’s just a man lav­ish­ing his pow­er­ful friend with gifts and ask­ing noth­ing in return. A real­ly gen­er­ous man. The kind of man you want to befriend. Which just might hap­pen. Right after Leonard Leo selects you to ascend to the Supreme Court.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 8, 2023, 10:57 pm
  18. It’s good to be Har­lan Crow’s friend. That’s become abun­dant­ly clear fol­low­ing the recent Pro Pub­li­ca report on the lav­ish gifts and vaca­tions Crow has been show­er­ing Clarence and Gin­ni Thomas for decades. Large­ly undis­closed lav­ish vaca­tions and gifts. Har­lan Crow’s gen­eros­i­ty knows no bound when it comes to his friends.

    Nor does it hurt to be his friends’ moms, appar­ent­ly. That’s one of the many fun facts we learned in the lat­est Pro Pub­li­ca report on Har­lan Crow’s remark­able friend­ship with the Thomases. A friend­ship that extends beyond Gin­ni and Clarence and includes Clarence’s mom and also includes a land­lord role. A very gen­er­ous land­lord, of course. Yes, it turns out Har­lan Crow pur­chased Clarence Thomas’s child­hood home in 2014, with the pro­vi­sion that she be allowed to live in it rent free for the rest of her life. So at this point, Har­lan Crow real­ly is Clarence Thomas’s mom’s land­lord.

    And that land­lord gen­eros­i­ty goes beyond the free rent and includes the exten­sive upgrades he imme­di­ate­ly invest­ed in the prop­er­ty after mak­ing the pur­chase. Invest­ments that are pre­sum­ably in part in antic­i­pa­tion for Crows declared future plans for the home: mak­ing it into a pub­lic muse­um ded­i­cat­ed to Clarence Thomas and his lega­cy.

    All of that alone would make this the kind of sto­ry that rais­es all sorts of obvi­ous con­flict of inter­est ques­tions for Jus­tice Thomas. But it’s of course worse. Because just like the lav­ish vaca­tions, none of this was dis­closed on Thomas’s fed­er­al dis­clo­sure forms.

    As we’re going to see in the CNN piece below, an anony­mous source close to Thomas gives two expla­na­tions — both some­what mutu­al­ly exclu­sive — for the lack dis­clo­sure: first, an aide nor­mal­ly helps him with these dis­clo­sures and the source sug­gests the aide some­how messed up. But then this same source also asserts that Thomas did­n’t think he need­ed to dis­close the pur­chase because he lost mon­ey on the deal. Now, accord­ing to var­i­ous ethics experts, the require­ments for the dis­clo­sure of trans­ac­tions isn’t depen­dent on whether or not they are prof­itable. But that’s the excuse Thomas is appar­ent­ly going with accord­ing to this source.

    So how it is it that Thomas net lost mon­ey? Well, we are told he and Gin­ni spent $50–70k on cap­i­tal invest­ments on the home before the sale to Crow for $133k. A sale that net­ted Thomas $44k in net pro­ceeds. So with $44k in net pro­ceeds fol­low­ing $50–70k in invest­ments, it was a loss and there­fore not required for dis­clo­sure. That appears to be the log­ic Thomas went with. And, who knows, while the net-loss cal­cu­la­tions may be accu­rate, it rais­es the ques­tion of why sell to Crow at a net loss. But we have our answer: free rent for mom for life and then after she dies the place gets turned into a Clarence Thomas muse­um. It’s a pret­ty huge pay­ment. But not part of that $133k sale. In oth­er words, the ‘net-loss’ dis­clo­sure loop­hole Thomas relied on to avoid dis­clos­ing the sale to Crow itself relied on anoth­er kind of loop­hole: not dis­clos­ing the val­ue of the sale came in the form of free rent for mom for life fol­lowed by turn­ing the place into a Clarence Thomas muse­um. It’s not clear how to put a mar­ket val­ue on that.

    Oh, accord­ing to the anony­mous source in the CNN piece, while Thomas’s mom gets to live rent free for life as part of the 2014 deal, she still has to pay prop­er­ty tax­es and insur­ance. But Crow quick­ly assumed the prop­er­ty tax­es, which Gin­ni and Clarence had pre­vi­ous­ly been pay­ing.

    All in all it’s not a great look. Which is pre­sum­ably the real rea­son Thomas did­n’t dis­close it in the first place:

    Pro Pub­li­ca

    Bil­lion­aire Har­lan Crow Bought Prop­er­ty From Clarence Thomas. The Jus­tice Didn’t Dis­close the Deal.

    The trans­ac­tion is the first known instance of mon­ey flow­ing from Crow to the Supreme Court jus­tice. The sale net­ted the GOP megadonor two vacant lots and the house where Thomas’ moth­er was liv­ing.

    by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mier­jes­ki
    April 13, 2023 2:20 p.m. EDT

    In 2014, one of Texas bil­lion­aire Har­lan Crow’s com­pa­nies pur­chased a string of prop­er­ties on a qui­et res­i­den­tial street in Savan­nah, Geor­gia. It wasn’t a mar­quee acqui­si­tion for the real estate mag­nate, just an old sin­gle-sto­ry home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it note­wor­thy were the peo­ple on the oth­er side of the deal: Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas and his rel­a­tives.

    The trans­ac­tion marks the first known instance of mon­ey flow­ing from the Repub­li­can megadonor to the Supreme Court jus­tice. The Crow com­pa­ny bought the prop­er­ties for $133,363 from three co-own­ers — Thomas, his moth­er and the fam­i­ly of Thomas’ late broth­er, accord­ing to a state tax doc­u­ment and a deed dat­ed Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham Coun­ty cour­t­house.

    The pur­chase put Crow in an unusu­al posi­tion: He now owned the house where the justice’s elder­ly moth­er was liv­ing. Soon after the sale was com­plet­ed, con­trac­tors began work on tens of thou­sands of dol­lars of improve­ments on the two-bed­room, one-bath­room home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The ren­o­va­tions includ­ed a car­port, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, accord­ing to city per­mit records and blue­prints.

    A fed­er­al dis­clo­sure law passed after Water­gate requires jus­tices and oth­er offi­cials to dis­close the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas nev­er dis­closed his sale of the Savan­nah prop­er­ties. That appears to be a vio­la­tion of the law, four ethics law experts told ProP­ub­li­ca.

    The dis­clo­sure form Thomas filed for that year also had a space to report the iden­ti­ty of the buy­er in any pri­vate trans­ac­tion, such as a real estate deal. That space is blank.

    “He need­ed to report his inter­est in the sale,” said Vir­ginia Can­ter, a for­mer gov­ern­ment ethics lawyer now at the watch­dog group CREW. “Giv­en the role Crow has played in sub­si­diz­ing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, you have to won­der if this was an effort to put cash in their pock­ets.”

    ...

    In a state­ment, Crow said he pur­chased Thomas’ mother’s house, where Thomas spent part of his child­hood, to pre­serve it for pos­ter­i­ty. “My inten­tion is to one day cre­ate a pub­lic muse­um at the Thomas home ded­i­cat­ed to telling the sto­ry of our nation’s sec­ond black Supreme Court Jus­tice,” he said. “I approached the Thomas fam­i­ly about my desire to main­tain this his­toric site so future gen­er­a­tions could learn about the inspir­ing life of one of our great­est Amer­i­cans.”

    Crow’s state­ment did not direct­ly address why he also bought two vacant lots from Thomas down the street. But he wrote that “the oth­er lots were lat­er sold to a vet­ted builder who was com­mit­ted to improv­ing the qual­i­ty of the neigh­bor­hood and pre­serv­ing its his­tor­i­cal integri­ty.”

    ProP­ub­li­ca also asked Crow about the addi­tions on Thomas’ mother’s house, like the new car­port. “Improve­ments were also made to the Thomas prop­er­ty to pre­serve its long-term via­bil­i­ty and acces­si­bil­i­ty to the pub­lic,” Crow said.

    Ethics law experts said Crow’s inten­tions had no bear­ing on Thomas’ legal oblig­a­tion to dis­close the sale.

    The justice’s fail­ure to report the trans­ac­tion sug­gests “Thomas was hid­ing a finan­cial rela­tion­ship with Crow,” said Kath­leen Clark, a legal ethics expert at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St. Louis who reviewed years of Thomas’ dis­clo­sure fil­ings.

    There are a hand­ful of carve-outs in the dis­clo­sure law. For exam­ple, if some­one sells “prop­er­ty used sole­ly as a per­son­al res­i­dence of the report­ing indi­vid­ual or the individual’s spouse,” they don’t need to report it. Experts said the exemp­tions clear­ly did not apply to Thomas’ sale.

    The rev­e­la­tion of a direct finan­cial trans­ac­tion between Thomas and Crow casts their rela­tion­ship in a new light. ProP­ub­li­ca report­ed last week that Thomas has accept­ed lux­u­ry trav­el from Crow vir­tu­al­ly every year for decades, includ­ing pri­vate jet flights, inter­na­tion­al cruis­es on the businessman’s supery­acht and reg­u­lar stays at his pri­vate resort in the Adiron­dacks. Crow has long been influ­en­tial in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics and has spent mil­lions on efforts to shape the law and the judi­cia­ry. The sto­ry prompt­ed out­cry and calls for inves­ti­ga­tions from Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers.

    In response to that report­ing, both Thomas and Crow released state­ments down­play­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of the gifts. Thomas also main­tained that he wasn’t required to dis­close the trips.

    “Har­lan and Kathy Crow are among our dear­est friends,” Thomas wrote. “As friends do, we have joined them on a num­ber of fam­i­ly trips.” Crow told ProP­ub­li­ca that his gifts to Thomas were “no dif­fer­ent from the hos­pi­tal­i­ty we have extend­ed to our many oth­er dear friends.”

    It’s unclear if Crow paid fair mar­ket val­ue for the Thomas prop­er­ties. Crow also bought sev­er­al oth­er prop­er­ties on the street and paid sig­nif­i­cant­ly less than his deal with the Thomases. One exam­ple: In 2013, he bought a pair of prop­er­ties on the same block — a vacant lot and a small house — for a total of $40,000.

    In his state­ment, Crow said his com­pa­ny pur­chased the prop­er­ties “at mar­ket rate based on many fac­tors includ­ing the size, qual­i­ty, and liv­abil­i­ty of the dwellings.”

    He did not respond to requests to pro­vide doc­u­men­ta­tion or details of how he arrived at the price.

    Thomas was born in the coastal ham­let of Pin Point, out­side Savan­nah. He lat­er moved to the city, where he spent part of his child­hood in his grandfather’s home on East 32nd Street.

    “It had hard­wood floors, hand­some fur­ni­ture, and an indoor bath­room, and we knew bet­ter than to touch any­thing,” Thomas wrote of the house in his mem­oir, “My Grandfather’s Son.”

    He inher­it­ed his stake in that house and two oth­er prop­er­ties on the block fol­low­ing the death of his grand­fa­ther in 1983, accord­ing to records on file at the Chatham Coun­ty cour­t­house. He shared own­er­ship with his broth­er and his moth­er, Leo­la Williams. In the late 1980s, when Thomas was an offi­cial in the George H.W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion, he list­ed the address­es of the three prop­er­ties in a dis­clo­sure fil­ing. He report­ed that he had a one-third inter­est in them.

    Thomas was con­firmed to the Supreme Court in 1991. By the ear­ly 2000s, he had stopped list­ing spe­cif­ic address­es of prop­er­ty he owned in his dis­clo­sures. But he con­tin­ued to report hold­ing a one-third inter­est in what he described as “rental prop­er­ty at ## 1, 2, & 3” in Savan­nah. He val­ued his stake in the prop­er­ties at $15,000 or less.

    Two of the hous­es were torn down around 2010, accord­ing to prop­er­ty records and a foot­note in Thomas’ annu­al dis­clo­sure archived by Free Law Project.

    In 2014, the Thomas fam­i­ly sold the vacant lots and the remain­ing East 32nd Street house to one of Crow’s com­pa­nies. The jus­tice signed the paper­work per­son­al­ly. His sig­na­ture was nota­rized by an admin­is­tra­tor at the Supreme Court, Per­ry Thomp­son, who did not respond to a request for com­ment. (The deed was signed on the 23rd anniver­sary of Thomas’ Oct. 15 con­fir­ma­tion to the Supreme Court. Crow has a Sen­ate roll call sheet from the con­fir­ma­tion vote in his pri­vate library.)

    Thomas’ finan­cial dis­clo­sure for that year is detailed, list­ing every­thing from a “stained glass medal­lion” he received from Yale to a life insur­ance pol­i­cy. But he failed to report his sale to Crow.

    Crow pur­chased the prop­er­ties through a recent­ly formed Texas com­pa­ny called Savan­nah His­toric Devel­op­ments LLC. The com­pa­ny shares an address in Dal­las with Crow Hold­ings, the cen­ter­piece of his real estate empire. Its for­ma­tion doc­u­ments were signed by Crow Hold­ings’ gen­er­al coun­sel. Busi­ness records filed with the Texas sec­re­tary of state say Savan­nah His­toric Devel­op­ments is man­aged by a Delaware LLC, HRC Fam­i­ly Branch GP, an umbrel­la com­pa­ny that also cov­ers oth­er Crow assets like his pri­vate jet. The Delaware company’s CEO is Har­lan Crow.

    A Crow Hold­ings com­pa­ny soon began pay­ing the rough­ly $1,500 in annu­al prop­er­ty tax­es on Thomas’ mother’s house, accord­ing to coun­ty tax records. The tax­es had pre­vi­ous­ly been paid by Clarence and Gin­ni Thomas.

    Crow still owns Thomas’ mother’s home, which the now-94-year-old con­tin­ued to live in through at least 2020, accord­ing to pub­lic records and social media. Two neigh­bors told ProP­ub­li­ca she still lives there. Crow did not respond to ques­tions about whether he has charged her rent. Soon after Crow pur­chased the house, an award-win­ning local archi­tec­ture firm received per­mits to begin $36,000 of improve­ments.

    Crow’s pur­chas­es seem to have played a role in trans­form­ing the block. The bil­lion­aire even­tu­al­ly sold most of the oth­er prop­er­ties he bought to new own­ers who built upscale mod­ern homes, includ­ing the two vacant lots he pur­chased from Thomas.

    Crow also bought the house imme­di­ate­ly next door to Thomas’ moth­er, which was owned by some­body else and had been known for par­ties and noise, accord­ing to prop­er­ty records and W. John Mitchell, for­mer pres­i­dent of a near­by neigh­bor­hood asso­ci­a­tion. Soon the house was torn down. “It was an eye­sore,” Mitchell said. “One day mirac­u­lous­ly all of them were put out of there and they scraped it off the earth.”

    “The sur­round­ing prop­er­ties had fall­en into dis­re­pair and need­ed to be demol­ished for health and safe­ty rea­sons,” Crow said in his state­ment. He added that his com­pa­ny built one new house on the block “and made it avail­able to a local police offi­cer.”

    Today, the block is com­posed of a dwin­dling num­ber of long­time elder­ly home­own­ers and a grow­ing pop­u­la­tion of young new­com­ers. The vacant lots that the Thomas fam­i­ly once owned have been replaced by pris­tine two-sto­ry homes. An arti­sanal cof­fee shop and a Mediter­ranean bistro are with­in walk­ing dis­tance. Down the street, a mul­ti­col­ored pride flag blows in the wind.

    ———-

    “Bil­lion­aire Har­lan Crow Bought Prop­er­ty From Clarence Thomas. The Jus­tice Didn’t Dis­close the Deal.” by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mier­jes­ki; Pro Pub­li­ca; 04/13/2023

    The pur­chase put Crow in an unusu­al posi­tion: He now owned the house where the justice’s elder­ly moth­er was liv­ing. Soon after the sale was com­plet­ed, con­trac­tors began work on tens of thou­sands of dol­lars of improve­ments on the two-bed­room, one-bath­room home, which looks out onto a patch of orange trees. The ren­o­va­tions includ­ed a car­port, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, accord­ing to city per­mit records and blue­prints.”

    Yeah, that is indeed an unusu­al posi­tion to pur­chase the home of a Supreme Court jus­tice’s elder­ly moth­er and con­tin­ue hav­ing her live their. Even more awk­ward when you’ve already been caught lav­ish­ing this same Supreme Court jus­tice and his wife with annu­al lux­u­ry trips. But it’s the fact that Thomas nev­er dis­close the 2014 sale of three fam­i­ly homes to Crow that puts Crow in an espe­cial­ly awk­ward posi­tion. All the more awk­ward now that we’re learn­ing Clarence Thomas did­n’t ever dis­close this sale despite the fact that he pre­vi­ous­ly used to list the prop­er­ty. It’s the kind of awk­ward sit­u­a­tion that has eth­nics experts ask­ing whether or not Crow has been effec­tive­ly sub­si­diz­ing the Thomases’ lifestyle. In secret:

    ...
    The trans­ac­tion marks the first known instance of mon­ey flow­ing from the Repub­li­can megadonor to the Supreme Court jus­tice. The Crow com­pa­ny bought the prop­er­ties for $133,363 from three co-own­ers — Thomas, his moth­er and the fam­i­ly of Thomas’ late broth­er, accord­ing to a state tax doc­u­ment and a deed dat­ed Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham Coun­ty cour­t­house.

    ...

    A fed­er­al dis­clo­sure law passed after Water­gate requires jus­tices and oth­er offi­cials to dis­close the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas nev­er dis­closed his sale of the Savan­nah prop­er­ties. That appears to be a vio­la­tion of the law, four ethics law experts told ProP­ub­li­ca.

    The dis­clo­sure form Thomas filed for that year also had a space to report the iden­ti­ty of the buy­er in any pri­vate trans­ac­tion, such as a real estate deal. That space is blank.

    “He need­ed to report his inter­est in the sale,” said Vir­ginia Can­ter, a for­mer gov­ern­ment ethics lawyer now at the watch­dog group CREW. “Giv­en the role Crow has played in sub­si­diz­ing the lifestyle of Thomas and his wife, you have to won­der if this was an effort to put cash in their pock­ets.”

    ...

    He inher­it­ed his stake in that house and two oth­er prop­er­ties on the block fol­low­ing the death of his grand­fa­ther in 1983, accord­ing to records on file at the Chatham Coun­ty cour­t­house. He shared own­er­ship with his broth­er and his moth­er, Leo­la Williams. In the late 1980s, when Thomas was an offi­cial in the George H.W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion, he list­ed the address­es of the three prop­er­ties in a dis­clo­sure fil­ing. He report­ed that he had a one-third inter­est in them.

    Thomas was con­firmed to the Supreme Court in 1991. By the ear­ly 2000s, he had stopped list­ing spe­cif­ic address­es of prop­er­ty he owned in his dis­clo­sures. But he con­tin­ued to report hold­ing a one-third inter­est in what he described as “rental prop­er­ty at ## 1, 2, & 3” in Savan­nah. He val­ued his stake in the prop­er­ties at $15,000 or less.
    ...

    Adding to the awk­ward nature of the sit­u­a­tion is the fact that Crow report­ed­ly pur­chased two oth­er lots on the same block for far less than the $133k paid for the Thomas fam­i­ly prop­er­ties. And while Crow seems to be rely­ing on the expla­na­tion of plans to turn the into a Thomas-fam­i­ly muse­um, it’s hard to see how promis­ing to open a muse­um ded­i­cat­ed to Thomas does­n’t still con­sti­tute a major con­tri­bu­tion to a Supreme Court jus­tice:

    ...
    In a state­ment, Crow said he pur­chased Thomas’ mother’s house, where Thomas spent part of his child­hood, to pre­serve it for pos­ter­i­ty. “My inten­tion is to one day cre­ate a pub­lic muse­um at the Thomas home ded­i­cat­ed to telling the sto­ry of our nation’s sec­ond black Supreme Court Jus­tice,” he said. “I approached the Thomas fam­i­ly about my desire to main­tain this his­toric site so future gen­er­a­tions could learn about the inspir­ing life of one of our great­est Amer­i­cans.”

    ...

    ProP­ub­li­ca also asked Crow about the addi­tions on Thomas’ mother’s house, like the new car­port. “Improve­ments were also made to the Thomas prop­er­ty to pre­serve its long-term via­bil­i­ty and acces­si­bil­i­ty to the pub­lic,” Crow said.

    Ethics law experts said Crow’s inten­tions had no bear­ing on Thomas’ legal oblig­a­tion to dis­close the sale.

    The justice’s fail­ure to report the trans­ac­tion sug­gests “Thomas was hid­ing a finan­cial rela­tion­ship with Crow,” said Kath­leen Clark, a legal ethics expert at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St. Louis who reviewed years of Thomas’ dis­clo­sure fil­ings.

    There are a hand­ful of carve-outs in the dis­clo­sure law. For exam­ple, if some­one sells “prop­er­ty used sole­ly as a per­son­al res­i­dence of the report­ing indi­vid­ual or the individual’s spouse,” they don’t need to report it. Experts said the exemp­tions clear­ly did not apply to Thomas’ sale.

    ...

    It’s unclear if Crow paid fair mar­ket val­ue for the Thomas prop­er­ties. Crow also bought sev­er­al oth­er prop­er­ties on the street and paid sig­nif­i­cant­ly less than his deal with the Thomases. One exam­ple: In 2013, he bought a pair of prop­er­ties on the same block — a vacant lot and a small house — for a total of $40,000.
    ...

    Also note how Thomas’s own sig­na­ture on 2014 sale was nota­rized by an admin­is­tra­tor at the Supreme Court. And that same year, his finan­cial dis­clo­sure was so detailed it includ­ed a “stained glass medal­lion” from Yale. Some­how the sale of the three fam­i­ly prop­er­ties to Crow, which was nota­rized by a Supreme Court admin­is­tra­tor, got left off the dis­clo­sure that year. Some­how:

    ...
    Two of the hous­es were torn down around 2010, accord­ing to prop­er­ty records and a foot­note in Thomas’ annu­al dis­clo­sure archived by Free Law Project.

    In 2014, the Thomas fam­i­ly sold the vacant lots and the remain­ing East 32nd Street house to one of Crow’s com­pa­nies. The jus­tice signed the paper­work per­son­al­ly. His sig­na­ture was nota­rized by an admin­is­tra­tor at the Supreme Court, Per­ry Thomp­son, who did not respond to a request for com­ment. (The deed was signed on the 23rd anniver­sary of Thomas’ Oct. 15 con­fir­ma­tion to the Supreme Court. Crow has a Sen­ate roll call sheet from the con­fir­ma­tion vote in his pri­vate library.)

    Thomas’ finan­cial dis­clo­sure for that year is detailed, list­ing every­thing from a “stained glass medal­lion” he received from Yale to a life insur­ance pol­i­cy. But he failed to report his sale to Crow.
    ...

    And then there’s this bizarre side-note: as part of Crow’s expla­na­tion for pur­chas­ing the house imme­di­ate­ly next door to the Thomas fam­i­ly home and tear­ing it down, Crow explained how his com­pa­ny built a new house on the block “and made it avail­able to a local police offi­cer.” What exact­ly does he mean by mak­ing the home “avail­able” to a local police offi­cer? Is there a cop liv­ing for free next to Thomas’s mom? It’s a strange sit­u­a­tion:

    ...
    Crow’s pur­chas­es seem to have played a role in trans­form­ing the block. The bil­lion­aire even­tu­al­ly sold most of the oth­er prop­er­ties he bought to new own­ers who built upscale mod­ern homes, includ­ing the two vacant lots he pur­chased from Thomas.

    Crow also bought the house imme­di­ate­ly next door to Thomas’ moth­er, which was owned by some­body else and had been known for par­ties and noise, accord­ing to prop­er­ty records and W. John Mitchell, for­mer pres­i­dent of a near­by neigh­bor­hood asso­ci­a­tion. Soon the house was torn down. “It was an eye­sore,” Mitchell said. “One day mirac­u­lous­ly all of them were put out of there and they scraped it off the earth.”

    “The sur­round­ing prop­er­ties had fall­en into dis­re­pair and need­ed to be demol­ished for health and safe­ty rea­sons,” Crow said in his state­ment. He added that his com­pa­ny built one new house on the block “and made it avail­able to a local police offi­cer.”
    ...

    But as we can see, it’s not just that 2014 pur­chase of those three Thomas fam­i­ly prop­er­ties that is rais­ing con­flict of inter­est ques­tions. Crow has been pay­ing the rough­ly $1,500 in prop­er­ty tax­es, which had pre­vi­ous­ly been cov­ered by Clarence and Gin­ni, at the same time Crow began a series to major ren­o­va­tions on the home. And Thomas’s mom remained liv­ing there the whole time. So is she at least pay­ing rent? Crow would­n’t say when direct­ly pressed:

    ...
    Crow pur­chased the prop­er­ties through a recent­ly formed Texas com­pa­ny called Savan­nah His­toric Devel­op­ments LLC. The com­pa­ny shares an address in Dal­las with Crow Hold­ings, the cen­ter­piece of his real estate empire. Its for­ma­tion doc­u­ments were signed by Crow Hold­ings’ gen­er­al coun­sel. Busi­ness records filed with the Texas sec­re­tary of state say Savan­nah His­toric Devel­op­ments is man­aged by a Delaware LLC, HRC Fam­i­ly Branch GP, an umbrel­la com­pa­ny that also cov­ers oth­er Crow assets like his pri­vate jet. The Delaware company’s CEO is Har­lan Crow.

    A Crow Hold­ings com­pa­ny soon began pay­ing the rough­ly $1,500 in annu­al prop­er­ty tax­es on Thomas’ mother’s house, accord­ing to coun­ty tax records. The tax­es had pre­vi­ous­ly been paid by Clarence and Gin­ni Thomas.

    Crow still owns Thomas’ mother’s home, which the now-94-year-old con­tin­ued to live in through at least 2020, accord­ing to pub­lic records and social media. Two neigh­bors told ProP­ub­li­ca she still lives there. Crow did not respond to ques­tions about whether he has charged her rent. Soon after Crow pur­chased the house, an award-win­ning local archi­tec­ture firm received per­mits to begin $36,000 of improve­ments.
    ...

    And as we’re going to see in the fol­low­ing CNN piece, there’s a pret­ty obvi­ous rea­son Crow prob­a­bly did­n’t want to dis­close the rent paid by Thomas’ moth­er: she’s been liv­ing there rent free ever since the 2014 pur­chase. And yet, accord­ing to one source, while that 2014 agree­ment allows her to live there rent free for the rest of her life, it still includ­ed the pro­vi­sion that she is respon­si­ble for pay­ing the prop­er­ty tax­es and insur­ance. And yet, as we just saw, Crow has been pay­ing the $1,500 in annu­al prop­er­ty tax­es — which had pre­vi­ous­ly been paid by Clarence and Gin­ni — since short­ly after the 2014 pur­chase. More awk­ward­ness. Like­ly ille­gal awk­ward­ness cen­tered around their bil­lion­aire’s rela­tion­ship with a Supreme Court jus­tice:

    CNN

    Clarence Thomas to amend finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms to reflect sale to GOP megadonor

    By Ari­ane de Vogue, CNN Supreme Court Reporter
    Updat­ed 8:02 PM EDT, Mon April 17, 2023

    CNN —

    Jus­tice Clarence Thomas intends to amend his finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms to reflect a 2014 real estate deal he made with a GOP megadonor – an acknowl­edg­ment that the trans­ac­tion should have been dis­closed almost a decade ago, a source close to Thomas tells CNN.

    The deal between Thomas and Har­lan Crow, a Dal­las real estate mag­nate and long-time friend of Thomas, involves the sale of three Geor­gia prop­er­ties, includ­ing the home where Thomas’ moth­er, Leo­la Williams, 94, cur­rent­ly lives.

    The source said Thomas has always filled out his forms with the help of aides, and that it was an over­sight not to report the real estate trans­ac­tion. Thomas believed he didn’t have to dis­close because he lost mon­ey on the deal, accord­ing to the source.

    Thomas will review the forms and amend as appro­pri­ate, the source said.

    The real estate deal was first report­ed by ProP­ub­li­ca, a non­prof­it news orga­ni­za­tion that has been inves­ti­gat­ing ties between Thomas and Crow. Accord­ing to ProP­ub­li­ca, Crow has giv­en more than $10 mil­lion in pub­licly dis­closed polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions and sup­port­ed efforts to move the judi­cia­ry to the right.

    Thomas also has come under fire for not report­ing lux­u­ry trav­el that he and his wife, Gin­ni Thomas, took with the Crows, includ­ing trips on the donor’s yacht and pri­vate jet. The jus­tice defend­ed the deci­sion not to dis­close, say­ing in a rare state­ment that he was advised at the time that he did not have to report it.

    The lat­est rev­e­la­tions about Thomas’ ties with Crow come as crit­ics say Supreme Court jus­tices should be more trans­par­ent about their lives off the bench. In addi­tion, crit­ics and mem­bers of Con­gress have repeat­ed­ly asked the court to adopt a for­mal ethics code, some­thing it has declined to do.

    Sen. Shel­don White­house of Rhode Island and Rep. Hank John­son of Geor­gia have led about two dozen Demo­c­ra­t­ic mem­bers of Con­gress in ask­ing Chief Jus­tice John Roberts to launch an inves­ti­ga­tion, and they are call­ing on the Judi­cial Con­fer­ence – a pol­i­cy­mak­ing body for the fed­er­al courts – to refer Thomas to the US attor­ney gen­er­al for poten­tial vio­la­tions of the Ethics in Gov­ern­ment Act of 1978..

    “There is at least rea­son­able cause to believe that Jus­tice Thomas inten­tion­al­ly dis­re­gard­ed the dis­clo­sure require­ment to report the sale of his inter­est in the Savan­nah prop­er­ties in an attempt to hide the extent of his finan­cial rela­tion­ship with Crow,” White­house and John­son said in a joint state­ment.

    The deal at issue involved the sale of three prop­er­ties in Savan­nah, Geor­gia, that were owned by Thomas; his moth­er, Leo­la Williams, and his late brother’s fam­i­ly. Crow bought Thomas’ mother’s home at 542 East 32nd Street in Savan­nah and two homes that were rent­ed for a time.

    Jus­tice Clarence Thomas failed to dis­close 2014 real estate deal with GOP megadonor, ProP­ub­li­ca report finds

    As a part of the nego­ti­at­ed sale price, Williams, who was 85 at the time of the deal, was giv­en an occu­pan­cy agree­ment to be able to live in the home for the rest of her life, the source said. She lives rent free but is respon­si­ble for pay­ing the prop­er­ty tax­es and insur­ance.

    Crow said in a state­ment to CNN last week that he pur­chased the prop­er­ties to “one day cre­ate a pub­lic muse­um at the Thomas home ded­i­cat­ed to telling the sto­ry of our nation’s sec­ond black Supreme Court Jus­tice.”

    He added that he made the pur­chas­es at “mar­ket rate based on many fac­tors includ­ing the size, qual­i­ty, and liv­abil­i­ty of the dwellings.”

    While Crow still owns the home of Thomas’ moth­er, the oth­er two prop­er­ties were lat­er sold.

    Thomas and his wife put $50,000 to $70,000 into his mother’s home in cap­i­tal improve­ments, and once the sale was com­plet­ed, Thomas’ pro­ceeds were $44,000, accord­ing to the source. Because there was no gain, Thomas thought there was no need to report, the source said.

    Sec­tion VII of the finan­cial dis­clo­sure form clear­ly indi­cates, how­ev­er, that a “trans­ac­tion” needs to be list­ed irre­spec­tive if there was a loss.

    Gabe Roth who heads Fix the Court, which advo­cates for greater trans­paren­cy on the court, said fail­ure to dis­close the real estate deal appears to be a vio­la­tion of fed­er­al law – the Ethics in Gov­ern­ment Act of 1978.

    “He should have list­ed the trans­ac­tion in Part VII of his 2014 dis­clo­sure, but he didn’t,” Roth said in an email.

    “If you’re a Supreme Court jus­tice, and you sell a prop­er­ty you own, you have to list the trans­ac­tion in your annu­al dis­clo­sure. That’s the law — even if Jus­tice Thomas lost mon­ey, and even if the sale was to build a muse­um one day,” Roth said.

    “The pub­lic has every right to know when top offi­cials are buy­ing and sell­ing prop­er­ty,” Roth added.

    ...

    Thomas has yet to pub­licly com­ment on the real estate deal. Fol­low­ing the first reports about his lux­u­ry trav­el with the Crows, he not­ed the reg­u­la­tions had recent­ly changed and that going for­ward, it was his “intent to fol­low the guid­ance in the future.”

    This is not the first time that Thomas has had to amend his finan­cial dis­clo­sures. In 2011, he amend­ed pri­or forms to reflect income his wife earned between 1998 and 2003 from the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank. In a state­ment at the time, Thomas said the infor­ma­tion was “inad­ver­tent­ly omit­ted.” The fil­ing came after ques­tions were raised by the group Com­mon Cause.

    In 2017, Thomas left off reim­burse­ments relat­ed to time spent teach­ing at Creighton Uni­ver­si­ty School of Law. He also amend­ed his 2018 dis­clo­sure to reflect trans­porta­tion and meals while teach­ing at two uni­ver­si­ties. Thomas made those changes after inquiries were raised by the group Fix the Court.

    ———–

    “Clarence Thomas to amend finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms to reflect sale to GOP megadonor” By Ari­ane de Vogue; CNN; 04/17/2023

    “The source said Thomas has always filled out his forms with the help of aides, and that it was an over­sight not to report the real estate trans­ac­tion. Thomas believed he didn’t have to dis­close because he lost mon­ey on the deal, accord­ing to the source.

    Blame the aide. That’s part of the mes­sage from this anony­mous source close to the Thomases. But then there’s the oth­er half of that denial: the claim that Thomas did­n’t dis­close the 2014 deal because he some­how lost mon­ey on the deal. It’s a high­ly sus­pect expla­na­tion for a num­ber of rea­sons. For starters, whether or not it was a loss is beside the point. It was a trans­ac­tion Thomas was oblig­at­ed to report accord­ing to the law.

    But then there’s the claim they net lost mon­ey on the sale, with Clarence and Gin­ni spend­ing $50k to $70k on cap­i­tal improve­ments, more than the $44k in net pro­ceeds they appar­ent­ly got from the $133k sale. If that’s true, what does that tell us about the nature of this trans­ac­tion? Was Crow giv­en a deal on the prop­er­ty in exchange for let­ting Thomas’s mom live there rent free for the rest of her life and then turn­ing the home into a muse­um cel­e­brat­ing Thomas? It’s an arrange­ment that per­haps made busi­ness at the time of sale but it would have also obvi­ous­ly cre­at­ed an ongo­ing arrange­ment between the Thomases and Crow going for­ward, year after year. And, impor­tant­ly, it would be an ongo­ing arrange­ment that would jus­ti­fy the rel­a­tive­ly cheap sale price that end­ed up result­ing in the net loss Thomas thought would shield him from dis­clo­sure oblig­a­tions. How awk­ward­ly con­ve­nient.

    In oth­er words, that 2014 sale to Crow was­n’t a sin­gle sim­ple trans­ac­tion but, rather, the deep­en­ing of an ongo­ing rela­tion­ship. A rela­tion­ship that already includ­ed lav­ish annu­al vaca­tions around the globe. It’s the kind of rela­tion­ship that just might lead to Thomas ‘acci­den­tal­ly’ for­get­ting to dis­close the sale — which he now blames on the aide — while also ‘acci­den­tal­ly’ con­fus­ing the law and con­clud­ing that he did­n’t have to dis­close the sale because he lost mon­ey. Lost mon­ey on the sale of the house that came with the pro­vi­sion that his mom could live there free for the rest of her life:

    ...
    Thomas and his wife put $50,000 to $70,000 into his mother’s home in cap­i­tal improve­ments, and once the sale was com­plet­ed, Thomas’ pro­ceeds were $44,000, accord­ing to the source. Because there was no gain, Thomas thought there was no need to report, the source said.

    Sec­tion VII of the finan­cial dis­clo­sure form clear­ly indi­cates, how­ev­er, that a “trans­ac­tion” needs to be list­ed irre­spec­tive if there was a loss.

    Gabe Roth who heads Fix the Court, which advo­cates for greater trans­paren­cy on the court, said fail­ure to dis­close the real estate deal appears to be a vio­la­tion of fed­er­al law – the Ethics in Gov­ern­ment Act of 1978.

    “He should have list­ed the trans­ac­tion in Part VII of his 2014 dis­clo­sure, but he didn’t,” Roth said in an email.

    “If you’re a Supreme Court jus­tice, and you sell a prop­er­ty you own, you have to list the trans­ac­tion in your annu­al dis­clo­sure. That’s the law — even if Jus­tice Thomas lost mon­ey, and even if the sale was to build a muse­um one day,” Roth said.

    “The pub­lic has every right to know when top offi­cials are buy­ing and sell­ing prop­er­ty,” Roth added.
    ...

    But it’s not just that the 2014 deal grant­ed Thomas’s mom the right to live their for the rest of her life rent free, accord­ing to this anony­mous source. That agree­ment came with the oblig­a­tion that she still pay the prop­er­ty tax­es of insur­ance. And yet, as we saw in the ProP­ub­li­ca report above, Crow start­ed pay­ing the prop­er­ty tax­es short­ly after the sale the Clarence and Gin­ni had pre­vi­ous­ly been cov­er­ing. We don’t know who’s pay­ing for the insur­ance at this but it’s hard to imag­ine it’s not a sim­i­lar arrange­ment. It’s a reminder that we aren’t just look­ing at an eth­i­cal­ly ques­tion­able 2014 deal. We’re also look­ing at the even more eth­i­cal­ly ques­tion­able imple­men­ta­tion of that deal:

    ...
    The deal at issue involved the sale of three prop­er­ties in Savan­nah, Geor­gia, that were owned by Thomas; his moth­er, Leo­la Williams, and his late brother’s fam­i­ly. Crow bought Thomas’ mother’s home at 542 East 32nd Street in Savan­nah and two homes that were rent­ed for a time.

    Jus­tice Clarence Thomas failed to dis­close 2014 real estate deal with GOP megadonor, ProP­ub­li­ca report finds

    As a part of the nego­ti­at­ed sale price, Williams, who was 85 at the time of the deal, was giv­en an occu­pan­cy agree­ment to be able to live in the home for the rest of her life, the source said. She lives rent free but is respon­si­ble for pay­ing the prop­er­ty tax­es and insur­ance.
    ...

    So we have a pic­ture emerg­ing of Crow being sold a home for a bar­gain price that had already $50–70k in cap­i­tal improve­ments put into it, caus­ing Thomas to claim he net-lost mon­ey on the sale and there­fore did­n’t have to dis­close the deal. But that bar­gain price came with the notable strings attached of allow­ing Thomas’s mom to live their rent free for the rest of her life. Despite that, Crow insists he made the pur­chas­es at the “mar­ket rate based on many fac­tors includ­ing the size, qual­i­ty, and liv­abil­i­ty of the dwellings.” It sure would be inter­est­ing to get more clar­i­ty on those many fac­tors that went into that $133k price:

    ...
    Crow said in a state­ment to CNN last week that he pur­chased the prop­er­ties to “one day cre­ate a pub­lic muse­um at the Thomas home ded­i­cat­ed to telling the sto­ry of our nation’s sec­ond black Supreme Court Jus­tice.”

    He added that he made the pur­chas­es at “mar­ket rate based on many fac­tors includ­ing the size, qual­i­ty, and liv­abil­i­ty of the dwellings.”

    While Crow still owns the home of Thomas’ moth­er, the oth­er two prop­er­ties were lat­er sold.
    ...

    And it’s not like any of this is real­ly new. Includ­ing the “inad­ver­tent omis­sion” part. Clarence Thomas has been flout­ing dis­clo­sure rules for years. Flout­ing and occa­sion­al­ly get­ting caught:

    ...
    Thomas has yet to pub­licly com­ment on the real estate deal. Fol­low­ing the first reports about his lux­u­ry trav­el with the Crows, he not­ed the reg­u­la­tions had recent­ly changed and that going for­ward, it was his “intent to fol­low the guid­ance in the future.”

    This is not the first time that Thomas has had to amend his finan­cial dis­clo­sures. In 2011, he amend­ed pri­or forms to reflect income his wife earned between 1998 and 2003 from the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank. In a state­ment at the time, Thomas said the infor­ma­tion was “inad­ver­tent­ly omit­ted.” The fil­ing came after ques­tions were raised by the group Com­mon Cause.

    In 2017, Thomas left off reim­burse­ments relat­ed to time spent teach­ing at Creighton Uni­ver­si­ty School of Law. He also amend­ed his 2018 dis­clo­sure to reflect trans­porta­tion and meals while teach­ing at two uni­ver­si­ties. Thomas made those changes after inquiries were raised by the group Fix the Court.
    ...

    It’s a pat­tern of non-dis­clo­sure going back almost as far as Thomas’s rela­tion­ship with Crow. Arguably ille­gal non-dis­clo­sure accord­ing to experts. But we’ll prob­a­bly nev­er real­ly get this cleared out because Thomas is a Supreme Court jus­tice oper­at­ing out­side any appar­ent eth­i­cal guide­lines. We just have to trust Clarence. He’s a Supreme Court Jus­tice, after all. That’s part of what makes this such a fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry: the only thing dis­suad­ing these kinds of back­room deals with a bil­lion­aire like Crow is pub­lic expo­sure. It’s not like Thomas is going to face any actu­al pro­fes­sion­al reper­cus­sions beyond the embar­rass­ment of these ques­tions. Because as Clarence Thomas keeps demon­strat­ing, the Supreme Court is an iron­i­cal­ly placed legal gray zone. A place where it’s not the crime, or the coverup. It’s just a rela­tion­ship with a real­ly gen­er­ous friends and that’s all we need to know until the next embar­rass­ing belat­ed dis­clo­sure.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 18, 2023, 2:09 am
  19. Why has Clarence Thomas been so con­sis­tent­ly inac­cu­rate in his fed­er­al dis­clo­sures for the past two decades? Is it just bad advice? Incom­pe­tence? Or some sort of active cor­rup­tion? These aren’t the kinds of painful ques­tions we have to ask. Painful because it does­n’t real­ly seem to mat­ter what the answer is since there’s seem­ing­ly no means for mean­ing­ful­ly address­ing the sit­u­a­tion. Jus­tice Thomas can flout dis­clo­sure laws all he wants and there’s no real recourse oth­er than to point it out and hope­ful­ly shame him into amend­ing his dis­clo­sure.

    And that brings us to the lat­est ‘oop­sy’ sto­ry involv­ing Jus­tice Thomas’s annu­al fed­er­al dis­clo­sures. As we’ve seen, a num­ber of ques­tions have already been raised about the lav­ish all-expens­es-paid trips the Thomases have tak­en for years thanks to con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor Har­lan Crow. And then there was the rev­e­la­tions that Crow’s rela­tion­ship with the Thomas’s was even clos­er to pre­vi­ous­ly known after we learned that Crow pur­chased Thomas’s moth­er’s home in an 2014 real estate trans­ac­tion. A rather odd 2014 trans­ac­tion that saw Thomas sell Crow his fam­i­ly home for $133k, which was appar­ent­ly a net-loss for the Thomases, but with a pro­vi­sion that his moth­er can live there rent free for the rest of her life. That ‘net-loss’ sale price was, in turn, used by Thomas as an excuse to not dis­close the deal since he appar­ent­ly thought, incor­rect­ly, that only prof­itable trans­ac­tions need­ed to be report­ed.

    So what’s the lat­est dis­clo­sure deba­cle? It’s anoth­er real estate-relat­ed sit­u­a­tion, in part: for what­ev­er strange rea­son, Clarence Thomas has been list­ing a fam­i­ly real estate man­age­ment com­pa­ny on his annu­al dis­clo­sure forms that’s been defunct since 2006 and replaced with a dif­fer­ent firm. Yes, Gin­ger, Ltd., Part­ner­ship, a firm found­ed in 1982 by Gin­ni’s fam­i­ly, went defunct in 2006 ant the same time Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC was formed. And yet, Thomas has been list­ing Gin­ger, Ltd., Part­ner­ship on his dis­clo­sure forms every year since. Thomas has report­ed receiv­ing between $270k-$750k in income from the real estate over that 2006–2021 peri­od

    But using the wrong name is just part of where this gets weird. It also turns out that Gin­ni Thomas’s name does­n’t show up at all on the doc­u­ments for Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC, despite this being her fam­i­ly’s real estate com­pa­ny.

    But there’s anoth­er anom­aly in Thomas’s dis­clo­sures involv­ing Gin­ni: from 2003–2009, Thomas did­n’t list any income at all for Gin­ni. This, despite the fact that she earned $686k from the Her­itage Foun­da­tion from 2003 to 2007 and worked for Hills­dale Col­lege from 2008–2009. Thomas only cor­rect­ed the error in 2011, cit­ing a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the fil­ing instruc­tions, after the group Com­mon Cause flagged the issue, despite Thomas cor­rect­ly list­ing her employ­ment in pre­vi­ous years. It’s worth recall­ing at this point how Gin­ni found­ed the non-prof­it Lib­er­ty Cen­tral in 2010 to shape the nascent Tea Par­ty move­ment with a $500k anony­mous dona­tion, prompt­ing con­flict of inter­est ques­tions. Gin­ni stepped away from Lib­er­ty Cen­tral in Novem­ber of 2010 and found­ed the for-prof­it Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing.

    Would Thomas have vol­un­tar­i­ly report­ed Gin­ni’s Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing income had Com­mon Cause not raised the issue in 2011? We have no idea. Well, we sort of have an idea. Because the dis­clo­sure issues con­tin­ued. For starters, there was the 2014 sale of his moth­er’s home to to Har­lan Crow that Thomas did­n’t dis­close cit­ing that ‘no net-prof­it’ loop­hole that does­n’t exist. Beyond that, Thomas con­tin­ued to claim own­er­ship of the home in 2015.

    And then in 2018, the non­prof­it Fix the Court flagged Thomas for not report­ing reim­burse­ment for trans­porta­tion, meals, and lodg­ing while teach­ing at the uni­ver­si­ties of Kansas and Geor­gia that year. Thomas end­ed up amend­ing that year’s dis­clo­sure along with his 2017 dis­clo­sure which also left out sim­i­lar reim­burse­ments.

    So, at best, Clarence Thomas does­n’t seem capa­ble of cor­rect­ly inter­pret­ing fed­er­al dis­clo­sure guide­lines. That’s the best expla­na­tion. What are the less-than-best expla­na­tions? Those are just some of the trou­bling ques­tions we have to ask. And will pre­sum­ably still have to ask after the next sto­ry about Jus­tice Thomas’s improp­er dis­clo­sures:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Clarence Thomas has for years claimed income from a defunct real estate firm

    The mis­state­ments, which began when a fam­i­ly busi­ness trans­ferred its hold­ings to anoth­er com­pa­ny, are part of a pat­tern that has raised ques­tions about how the Supreme Court jus­tice views his oblig­a­tion to accu­rate­ly report details about his finances to the pub­lic.

    By Shawn Boburg and Emma Brown
    April 16, 2023 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

    Over the last two decades, Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas has report­ed on required finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms that his fam­i­ly received rental income total­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars from a firm called Gin­ger, Ltd., Part­ner­ship.

    But that com­pa­ny — a Nebras­ka real estate firm launched in the 1980s by his wife and her rel­a­tives — has not exist­ed since 2006.

    That year, the fam­i­ly real estate com­pa­ny was shut down and a sep­a­rate firm was cre­at­ed, state incor­po­ra­tion records show. The sim­i­lar­ly named firm assumed con­trol of the shut­tered company’s land leas­ing busi­ness, accord­ing to prop­er­ty records.

    Since that time, how­ev­er, Thomas has con­tin­ued to report income from the defunct com­pa­ny — between $50,000 and $100,000 annu­al­ly in recent years — and there is no men­tion of the new­er firm, Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC, on the forms.

    The pre­vi­ous­ly unre­port­ed mis­state­ment might be dis­missed as a paper­work error. But it is among a series of errors and omis­sions that Thomas has made on required annu­al finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms over the past sev­er­al decades, a review of those records shows. Togeth­er, they have raised ques­tions about how seri­ous­ly Thomas views his respon­si­bil­i­ty to accu­rate­ly report details about his finances to the pub­lic.

    Thomas’s dis­clo­sure his­to­ry is in the spot­light after ProP­ub­li­ca revealed this month that a Texas bil­lion­aire took him on lav­ish vaca­tions and also bought from Thomas and his rel­a­tives a Geor­gia home where his moth­er lives, a trans­ac­tion that was not dis­closed on the forms. Thomas said in a state­ment that col­leagues he did not name told him he did not have to report the vaca­tions and that he has always tried to com­ply with dis­clo­sure guide­lines. He has not pub­licly addressed the prop­er­ty trans­ac­tion.

    In 2011, after the watch­dog group Com­mon Cause raised red flags, Thomas updat­ed years of his finan­cial dis­clo­sure reports to include employ­ment details for his wife, con­ser­v­a­tive activist Vir­ginia “Gin­ni” Thomas. The jus­tice said at the time that he had not under­stood the fil­ing instruc­tions. In 2020, he was forced to revise his dis­clo­sure forms after a dif­fer­ent watch­dog group found he had failed to report reim­burse­ments for trips to speak at two law schools.

    A judi­cial ethics expert said the pat­tern was trou­bling.

    “Any pre­sump­tion in favor of Thomas’s integri­ty and com­mit­ment to com­ply with the law is gone. His assur­ances and promis­es can­not be trust­ed. Is there more? What’s the whole sto­ry? The nation needs to know,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York Uni­ver­si­ty.

    Gillers said all three branch­es of gov­ern­ment should inves­ti­gate Thomas’s com­pli­ance or non­com­pli­ance with fed­er­al ethics law. “The Supreme Court has been the glue that has held the repub­lic togeth­er since 1790 with the Civ­il War the only inter­rup­tion. We need the pub­lic to respect it even when it dis­agrees with it and to under­stand why it is impor­tant. Gen­er­al­ly, the pub­lic has,” he said. “But that respect is now in seri­ous jeop­ardy, and oth­ers must do some­thing to stop the free fall.”

    ...

    Thomas’s income from the firm he describes as “Gin­ger, Ltd., Part­ner­ship” on the finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms has grown sub­stan­tial­ly over the last decade, though the pre­cise amounts are unknown because the forms require only that ranges be report­ed. In total, he has report­ed receiv­ing between $270,000 to $750,000 from the firm since 2006, describ­ing it as “rent.” Thomas’s salary as a jus­tice this year is $285,000.

    ...

    Gin­ger Lim­it­ed Part­ner­ship was cre­at­ed in 1982 to sell and lease real estate, state incor­po­ra­tion records show, and its part­ners were Gin­ni Thomas, her par­ents and her three sib­lings. The firm owned and leased out res­i­den­tial lots in two devel­op­ments, Gin­ger Woods and Gin­ger Cove, col­lect­ing rent annu­al­ly from each occu­pied plot of land, accord­ing to copies of lease agree­ments on file with the coun­ty.

    When he was nom­i­nat­ed to a fed­er­al appeals court in 1990, Thomas list­ed the firm in a finan­cial state­ment as one of his wife’s assets — worth $15,000 at the time.

    The firm was dis­solved in March 2006. Around the same time, Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC was cre­at­ed in Nebras­ka, accord­ing to state records, which list the same busi­ness address as the shut­tered com­pa­ny and name Joanne K. Elliott, the sis­ter of Gin­ni Thomas, as man­ag­er.

    The same month, the leas­es for more than 200 res­i­den­tial lots in Gin­ger Woods and Gin­ger Cove were trans­ferred from Gin­ger Lim­it­ed Part­ner­ship to Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC, prop­er­ty records in Dou­glas Coun­ty show.

    Reached by phone, Elliott referred ques­tions about the two com­pa­nies to Gin­ni Thomas.

    “You could call her and she could answer any­thing that she wants you to know,” Elliott said before hang­ing up.

    Gin­ni Thomas is not named in state incor­po­ra­tion records relat­ed to Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC.

    In his most recent dis­clo­sure, in 2021, Thomas esti­mat­ed that his family’s inter­est in Gin­ger Lim­it­ed Part­ner­ship, the defunct firm, was worth between $250,000 and $500,000. He report­ed receiv­ing an income from it between $50,000 and $100,000 that year.

    On Fri­day, con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats with over­sight of fed­er­al courts cit­ed Thomas’s “appar­ent pat­tern of non­com­pli­ance with dis­clo­sure require­ments” in call­ing on the Judi­cial Con­fer­ence — the pol­i­cy­mak­ing body for the fed­er­al courts — to refer him to the attor­ney gen­er­al for an inves­ti­ga­tion into whether he vio­lat­ed fed­er­al ethics laws.

    In addi­tion to the recent rev­e­la­tions about Thomas’s finan­cial rela­tion­ship with Har­lan Crow, the Texas bil­lion­aire, they cit­ed a peri­od in the 2000s in which Thomas failed to dis­close his wife’s employ­ment as required by law until the omis­sion was report­ed by the watch­dog group Com­mon Cause.

    Gin­ni Thomas earned more than $686,000 from the con­ser­v­a­tive Her­itage Foun­da­tion from 2003 until 2007, accord­ing to the nonprofit’s tax forms. Clarence Thomas checked a box labeled “none” for his wife’s income dur­ing that peri­od. He had done the same in 2008 and 2009 when she worked for con­ser­v­a­tive Hills­dale Col­lege.

    Thomas acknowl­edged the error when he amend­ed those fil­ings in 2011. He wrote that the infor­ma­tion had been “inad­ver­tent­ly omit­ted due to a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the fil­ing instruc­tions.”

    In some years before those omis­sions, how­ev­er, Thomas had cor­rect­ly report­ed his wife’s employ­ment.

    Thomas failed to report the sale of the three Geor­gia prop­er­ties to Crow in 2014, and he also con­tin­ued to report that he owned a share of those prop­er­ties as late as 2015, his dis­clo­sure forms show. In addi­tion, begin­ning in 2010, his dis­clo­sures described the prop­er­ties as being locat­ed in Lib­er­ty Coun­ty, Ga., even though they were actu­al­ly locat­ed in Chatham Coun­ty.

    Thomas also did not report reim­burse­ment for trans­porta­tion, meals and lodg­ing while teach­ing at the uni­ver­si­ties of Kansas and Geor­gia in 2018. After the omis­sion was flagged by the non­prof­it Fix the Court, Thomas amend­ed his fil­ing for that year. He also amend­ed his 2017 fil­ing, on which he had left off sim­i­lar reim­burse­ments while teach­ing at Creighton Law School, his wife’s alma mater.

    ———–

    “Clarence Thomas has for years claimed income from a defunct real estate firm” By Shawn Boburg and Emma Brown; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 04/16/2023

    “The pre­vi­ous­ly unre­port­ed mis­state­ment might be dis­missed as a paper­work error. But it is among a series of errors and omis­sions that Thomas has made on required annu­al finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms over the past sev­er­al decades, a review of those records shows. Togeth­er, they have raised ques­tions about how seri­ous­ly Thomas views his respon­si­bil­i­ty to accu­rate­ly report details about his finances to the pub­lic.”

    The ‘inno­cent paper­work error’ strikes again! Every year for near­ly two decades. This time, the ‘inno­cent mis­take’ involves Thomas’s repeat­ed list­ing of a defunct real estate com­pa­ny — Gin­ger, Ltd., Part­ner­ship, formed in 1982 by Gin­ni’s fam­i­ly — that was dis­solved in 2006 and replaced with Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC. For some rea­son, Clarence has been report­ing Gin­ger, Ltd., Part­ner­ship on his finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms every year since 2006:

    ...
    Over the last two decades, Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas has report­ed on required finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms that his fam­i­ly received rental income total­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars from a firm called Gin­ger, Ltd., Part­ner­ship.

    But that com­pa­ny — a Nebras­ka real estate firm launched in the 1980s by his wife and her rel­a­tives — has not exist­ed since 2006.

    That year, the fam­i­ly real estate com­pa­ny was shut down and a sep­a­rate firm was cre­at­ed, state incor­po­ra­tion records show. The sim­i­lar­ly named firm assumed con­trol of the shut­tered company’s land leas­ing busi­ness, accord­ing to prop­er­ty records.

    Since that time, how­ev­er, Thomas has con­tin­ued to report income from the defunct com­pa­ny — between $50,000 and $100,000 annu­al­ly in recent years — and there is no men­tion of the new­er firm, Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC, on the forms.

    ...

    Gin­ger Lim­it­ed Part­ner­ship was cre­at­ed in 1982 to sell and lease real estate, state incor­po­ra­tion records show, and its part­ners were Gin­ni Thomas, her par­ents and her three sib­lings. The firm owned and leased out res­i­den­tial lots in two devel­op­ments, Gin­ger Woods and Gin­ger Cove, col­lect­ing rent annu­al­ly from each occu­pied plot of land, accord­ing to copies of lease agree­ments on file with the coun­ty.

    When he was nom­i­nat­ed to a fed­er­al appeals court in 1990, Thomas list­ed the firm in a finan­cial state­ment as one of his wife’s assets — worth $15,000 at the time.

    The firm was dis­solved in March 2006. Around the same time, Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC was cre­at­ed in Nebras­ka, accord­ing to state records, which list the same busi­ness address as the shut­tered com­pa­ny and name Joanne K. Elliott, the sis­ter of Gin­ni Thomas, as man­ag­er.

    The same month, the leas­es for more than 200 res­i­den­tial lots in Gin­ger Woods and Gin­ger Cove were trans­ferred from Gin­ger Lim­it­ed Part­ner­ship to Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC, prop­er­ty records in Dou­glas Coun­ty show.
    ...

    Now, on one lev­el, this seems like a poten­tial­ly inno­cent and irrel­e­vant mis­take. As long as Thomas was cor­rect­ly report­ing the income from the real estate firm, of course. And that brings us to the scale of the dis­closed real estate income here. We’re told that Thomas report­ed receiv­ing between $270k to $750k from the real estate firm since 2006, so that 270–750k range is for 15 years (pre­sum­ably end­ing in 2021) which would trans­late to $18k to $50k aver­age annu­al income range. We’re also told that in his most recent dis­clo­sure, for 2021, Thomas report­ed receiv­ing an income between $50–100k. So it looks like his income from the rental prop­er­ties has been above aver­age in recent years:

    ...
    Thomas’s income from the firm he describes as “Gin­ger, Ltd., Part­ner­ship” on the finan­cial dis­clo­sure forms has grown sub­stan­tial­ly over the last decade, though the pre­cise amounts are unknown because the forms require only that ranges be report­ed. In total, he has report­ed receiv­ing between $270,000 to $750,000 from the firm since 2006, describ­ing it as “rent.” Thomas’s salary as a jus­tice this year is $285,000.

    ...

    In his most recent dis­clo­sure, in 2021, Thomas esti­mat­ed that his family’s inter­est in Gin­ger Lim­it­ed Part­ner­ship, the defunct firm, was worth between $250,000 and $500,000. He report­ed receiv­ing an income from it between $50,000 and $100,000 that year.
    ...

    Anoth­er wrin­kle in this sto­ry is how Gin­ni Thomas’s name does­n’t show up at all in the incor­po­ra­tion records for Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC, the firm that replaced Gin­ger Lim­it­ed Part­ner­ship in 2006. And that omis­sion of her name over­laps with a peri­od of 2003–2007 when she earned more than $686k from the Her­itage Foun­da­tion and yet Clarence Thomas checked a box labeled “none” for her income and did the same in 2008 and 2009 while she was earn­ing an income at Hills­dale Col­lege (which has now become the GOP’s tem­plate col­lege for the par­ty’s ‘anti-woke’ cru­sade). So we have to ask: did Gin­ni receive any income from these real estate firms dur­ing this peri­od? If so, was it even report­ed?

    ...
    Reached by phone, Elliott referred ques­tions about the two com­pa­nies to Gin­ni Thomas.

    “You could call her and she could answer any­thing that she wants you to know,” Elliott said before hang­ing up.

    Gin­ni Thomas is not named in state incor­po­ra­tion records relat­ed to Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC.

    ...

    In addi­tion to the recent rev­e­la­tions about Thomas’s finan­cial rela­tion­ship with Har­lan Crow, the Texas bil­lion­aire, they cit­ed a peri­od in the 2000s in which Thomas failed to dis­close his wife’s employ­ment as required by law until the omis­sion was report­ed by the watch­dog group Com­mon Cause.

    Gin­ni Thomas earned more than $686,000 from the con­ser­v­a­tive Her­itage Foun­da­tion from 2003 until 2007, accord­ing to the nonprofit’s tax forms. Clarence Thomas checked a box labeled “none” for his wife’s income dur­ing that peri­od. He had done the same in 2008 and 2009 when she worked for con­ser­v­a­tive Hills­dale Col­lege.

    Thomas acknowl­edged the error when he amend­ed those fil­ings in 2011. He wrote that the infor­ma­tion had been “inad­ver­tent­ly omit­ted due to a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the fil­ing instruc­tions.”

    In some years before those omis­sions, how­ev­er, Thomas had cor­rect­ly report­ed his wife’s employ­ment.
    ...

    It was only in 2011 after Com­mon Cause raised these dis­clo­sure issues that Thomas revised the pre­vi­ous years to include Gin­ni’s employ­ment details. This is a good time to recall how Gin­ni found­ed the non-prof­it Lib­er­ty Cen­tral in 2010 to shape the nascent Tea Par­ty move­ment with a $500k anony­mous dona­tion, prompt­ing con­flict of inter­est ques­tions. Gin­ni stepped away from Lib­er­ty Cen­tral in Novem­ber of 2010 and found­ed the for-prof­it Lib­er­ty Con­sult­ing. So when we see these employ­ment details for Gin­ni mys­te­ri­ous­ly left out Clarence’s annu­al dis­clo­sures in the years lead­ing up to 2011, keep in mind there are some oth­er unsolved mys­ter­ies regard­ing her actu­al income dur­ing this peri­od:

    ...
    In 2011, after the watch­dog group Com­mon Cause raised red flags, Thomas updat­ed years of his finan­cial dis­clo­sure reports to include employ­ment details for his wife, con­ser­v­a­tive activist Vir­ginia “Gin­ni” Thomas. The jus­tice said at the time that he had not under­stood the fil­ing instruc­tions. In 2020, he was forced to revise his dis­clo­sure forms after a dif­fer­ent watch­dog group found he had failed to report reim­burse­ments for trips to speak at two law schools.
    ...

    And then there’s the tru­ly bizarre dis­clo­sure issue that pops up in rela­tion to the high­ly irreg­u­lar 2014 sale of his moth­er’s home to con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor Har­lan Crow in a deal that allows Thomas’s moth­er to live there rent-free for the rest of her life. It appears that Thomas not only failed to report the sale of the home but con­tin­ued to report own­er­ship of that prop­er­ty as late as 2015. In addi­tion, he was appar­ent­ly incor­rect­ly report­ing the loca­tion of the prop­er­ties since 2010. Thomas sure has a hard time with real estate-relat­ed dis­clo­sures!

    ...
    Thomas failed to report the sale of the three Geor­gia prop­er­ties to Crow in 2014, and he also con­tin­ued to report that he owned a share of those prop­er­ties as late as 2015, his dis­clo­sure forms show. In addi­tion, begin­ning in 2010, his dis­clo­sures described the prop­er­ties as being locat­ed in Lib­er­ty Coun­ty, Ga., even though they were actu­al­ly locat­ed in Chatham Coun­ty.
    ...

    And then we get the addi­tion­al dis­clo­sure vio­la­tions from 2017 and 2018 where he left off var­i­ous teach­ing reim­burse­ments. It’s like he’s views every year’s dis­clo­sure as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to inno­vate new ways to do it wrong:

    ...
    Thomas also did not report reim­burse­ment for trans­porta­tion, meals and lodg­ing while teach­ing at the uni­ver­si­ties of Kansas and Geor­gia in 2018. After the omis­sion was flagged by the non­prof­it Fix the Court, Thomas amend­ed his fil­ing for that year. He also amend­ed his 2017 fil­ing, on which he had left off sim­i­lar reim­burse­ments while teach­ing at Creighton Law School, his wife’s alma mater.
    ...

    So has Thomas just been increas­ing­ly care­less with his fed­er­al dis­clo­sures for the last two decades? Or has he been active­ly try­ing to hide some­thing? We don’t know, but there’s not deny­ing the pat­tern. The kind of pat­tern that judi­cial ethics expert Stephen Gillers call­ing for an inves­ti­ga­tion. An inves­ti­ga­tion that, impor­tant­ly, should take place among all three branch­es of gov­ern­ment. In oth­er words, this can’t be anoth­er instance of the Supreme Court polic­ing itself, which obvi­ous­ly has­n’t worked so far:

    ...
    A judi­cial ethics expert said the pat­tern was trou­bling.

    “Any pre­sump­tion in favor of Thomas’s integri­ty and com­mit­ment to com­ply with the law is gone. His assur­ances and promis­es can­not be trust­ed. Is there more? What’s the whole sto­ry? The nation needs to know,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York Uni­ver­si­ty.

    Gillers said all three branch­es of gov­ern­ment should inves­ti­gate Thomas’s com­pli­ance or non­com­pli­ance with fed­er­al ethics law. “The Supreme Court has been the glue that has held the repub­lic togeth­er since 1790 with the Civ­il War the only inter­rup­tion. We need the pub­lic to respect it even when it dis­agrees with it and to under­stand why it is impor­tant. Gen­er­al­ly, the pub­lic has,” he said. “But that respect is now in seri­ous jeop­ardy, and oth­ers must do some­thing to stop the free fall.”
    ...

    But, of course, there’s like­ly going to be no such inves­ti­ga­tion. At least there’s no rea­son to expect one any time soon. Things will have to get worse for that to hap­pen. How much worse? Who knows. But at the rates these sto­ries are accru­ing, we won’t have to wait long for things to get worse. In fact, they already got worse. Prob­a­bly not worse enough to prompt real inves­ti­ga­tions. But still worse:

    Bloomberg

    Clarence Thomas’s Bil­lion­aire Friend Did Have Busi­ness Before the Supreme Court

    * Jus­tice didn’t recuse from rejec­tion of archi­tec­ture firm case
    * Har­lan Crow said he had no knowl­edge of or involve­ment in case

    By Zoe Till­man
    April 24, 2023 at 1:02 PM CDT
    Updat­ed on April 24, 2023 at 1:54 PM CDT

    Jus­tice Clarence Thomas said he was advised he didn’t have to dis­close pri­vate jet flights and lux­u­ry vaca­tions paid for by bil­lion­aire Har­lan Crow because, although a close friend, Crow “did not have busi­ness before the court.”

    But in at least one case, Crow did.

    Bloomberg reviewed dozens of state and fed­er­al cas­es involv­ing com­pa­nies that the Crow fam­i­ly has owned or had a finan­cial stake in since Thomas’ 1991 con­fir­ma­tion. Near­ly all of these dis­putes played out at the tri­al and appel­late lev­el and didn’t reach the Supreme Court.

    In Jan­u­ary 2005, though, the court declined to hear an appeal from an archi­tec­ture firm that want­ed more than $25 mil­lion from Tram­mell Crow Res­i­den­tial Co. for alleged­ly mis­us­ing copy­right­ed build­ing designs. When the court issued a one-sen­tence order deny­ing the peti­tion, there were no not­ed recusals — indi­cat­ing that Thomas par­tic­i­pat­ed — and no not­ed dis­sents.

    The Crow fam­i­ly had a non-con­trol­ling inter­est in the com­pa­ny at the time, accord­ing to a state­ment to Bloomberg from Har­lan Crow’s office. Thomas had already report­ed a 1997 pri­vate flight and high-dol­lar gifts from Crow, both doc­u­ment­ed in a Decem­ber 2004 report from the Los Ange­les Times. The jus­tice had described Crow and his wife Kathy as “per­son­al friends.”

    Tram­mell Crow Res­i­den­tial was found­ed in 1977, part of the real estate empire cre­at­ed by Har­lan Crow’s father, Tram­mell Crow. Dur­ing the time when the archi­tec­ture firm’s case was mak­ing its way through the courts in the ear­ly 2000s, Crow Hold­ings, a pri­vate­ly owned devel­op­ment and invest­ment firm that man­ages the Crow family’s cap­i­tal, held less than a 50% stake in Tram­mell Crow Res­i­den­tial, and wasn’t involved in its oper­a­tions, Har­lan Crow’s office told Bloomberg.

    When the archi­tec­ture firm filed its appeal to the Supreme Court, Har­lan Crow was Crow Hold­ings’ chief exec­u­tive offi­cer and chair of its board, a posi­tion he still holds; he stepped down as CEO in 2017. Crow Hold­ings’ web­site cites the res­i­den­tial company’s found­ing as a key moment in its his­to­ry and one of its pri­ma­ry “devel­op­ment plat­forms.”

    “At the time of this case, Tram­mell Crow Res­i­den­tial oper­at­ed com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent­ly of Crow Hold­ings with a sep­a­rate man­age­ment team and its own inde­pen­dent oper­a­tions,” Crow’s office said in a state­ment. “Crow Hold­ings had a minor­i­ty inter­est in the par­ties involved in this case and there­fore no con­trol of any of these enti­ties. Nei­ther Har­lan Crow nor Crow Hold­ings had knowl­edge of or involve­ment in this case, and a search of Crow Hold­ings legal records reveals no involve­ment in this case. Har­lan Crow has nev­er dis­cussed this or any oth­er case with any jus­tice.”

    ...

    A ProP­ub­li­ca report ear­li­er this month detailed how Crow, a long­time donor to Repub­li­can polit­i­cal cam­paigns and con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es, has bestowed lav­ish trips on Thomas for more than two decades. By their own accounts, the two men had been friends for at least eight years when the archi­tec­ture firm’s peti­tion reached the Supreme Court in 2004.

    Court fil­ings in the 2004 case don’t name Har­lan Crow or Crow Hold­ings, which rais­es the ques­tion of whether Thomas would have rec­og­nized Crow’s con­nec­tion to Tram­mell Crow Res­i­den­tial, or seen the full list of par­ties, said Arthur Hell­man, a judi­cial ethics expert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh School of Law.

    The jus­tices main­tain their own lists of names and com­pa­nies that get checked for con­flicts as new cas­es come in. They typ­i­cal­ly don’t read all of the ini­tial briefs if they reject a case based on a sum­ma­ry draft­ed by a law clerk, a sys­tem used by most of the jus­tices. Although there were mul­ti­ple par­ties in the 2004 case, the cor­po­rate enti­ty list­ed first didn’t have “Tram­mell Crow” in its name.

    Giv­en Crow’s sta­tus as “a close friend and a gen­er­ous bene­fac­tor,” Thomas should have recused him­self from cas­es where he knew or should have known that Crow had a direct finan­cial inter­est, Hell­man said. But he said it seemed unlike­ly that the jus­tice would have been on notice or had rea­son to inves­ti­gate the archi­tec­ture firm’s peti­tion at the time, he said.

    Close friend­ships can war­rant recusals, Hell­man said. He said that the key ques­tion is: “Would a rea­son­able per­son, know­ing all of the cir­cum­stances, ques­tion the judge’s impar­tial­i­ty?”

    Stephen Gillers, a judi­cial ethics expert at New York Uni­ver­si­ty School of Law, said that giv­en the close rela­tion­ship between the Thomases and the Crows over 25 years and the many com­mer­cial inter­ests of Crow and his com­pa­nies, Thomas should have been “hyper­vig­i­lant to the prospect of a Crow inter­est show­ing up on the Court’s dock­et.”

    Dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tions and Dis­clo­sures

    US law does lay out spe­cif­ic sce­nar­ios where the jus­tices and fed­er­al judges are dis­qual­i­fied from cas­es – such as if they or a close rel­a­tive stand to finan­cial­ly gain from the out­come. Beyond those, mem­bers of the judi­cia­ry get wide dis­cre­tion to decide if they should step aside. The law doesn’t include a penal­ty for vio­la­tions.

    The recent rev­e­la­tions about Thomas and Crow’s friend­ship have prompt­ed renewed calls for the Supreme Court to adopt a code of con­duct and dis­ci­pli­nary process sim­i­lar to the one that cov­ers low­er fed­er­al court judges. Even under the exist­ing rules for the low­er courts, though, a judge’s deci­sion to not recuse wouldn’t pro­vide grounds for an ethics com­plaint, accord­ing to Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion senior fel­low Rus­sell Wheel­er.

    Thomas hasn’t not­ed free trav­el on Crow’s pri­vate jet and super-yacht and oth­er hos­pi­tal­i­ty in his annu­al finan­cial reports since at least 2000, the ear­li­est year the fil­ings are avail­able through watch­dog groups Fix The Court and Open Secrets. ProP­ub­li­ca also revealed an unre­port­ed 2014 real estate deal in which Crow bought three prop­er­ties owned by Thomas and his fam­i­ly mem­bers, includ­ing the justice’s child­hood home.

    Crow said in response to the reports that he and his wife had nev­er dis­cussed court busi­ness with Thomas or “sought to influ­ence Thomas on any legal or polit­i­cal issue.” He has scoffed at the idea that his con­nec­tion with Thomas is trans­ac­tion­al, say­ing in a recent Dal­las Morn­ing News inter­view that he and the jus­tice have dif­fer­ent views on a vari­ety of top­ics, includ­ing abor­tion. Crow called the recent spate of report­ing a “polit­i­cal hit job.”

    ...

    NYU’s Gillers said there’s no ques­tion in his mind, giv­en that Thomas con­firmed the nature of his rela­tion­ship with Crow in his defense to the ProP­ub­li­ca report, that “he need­ed to recuse him­self from decid­ing a case in which his good friend had an obvi­ous finan­cial inter­est.”

    ———–

    “Clarence Thomas’s Bil­lion­aire Friend Did Have Busi­ness Before the Supreme Court” By Zoe Till­man; Bloomberg; 04/24/2023

    The jus­tices main­tain their own lists of names and com­pa­nies that get checked for con­flicts as new cas­es come in. They typ­i­cal­ly don’t read all of the ini­tial briefs if they reject a case based on a sum­ma­ry draft­ed by a law clerk, a sys­tem used by most of the jus­tices. Although there were mul­ti­ple par­ties in the 2004 case, the cor­po­rate enti­ty list­ed first didn’t have “Tram­mell Crow” in its name.”

    Yes, the jus­tices get to main­tain their own lists of names and com­pa­nies that get checked for con­flicts of inter­est. What could pos­si­bly go wrong?

    Now, in the case of Har­lan Crow’s direct finan­cial inter­ests in Tram­mell Crow Res­i­den­tial, we have no idea if Jus­tice Thomas was being sin­cere in his fail­ure to iden­ti­fy the obvi­ous con­flict of inter­est here. But that’s kind of the larg­er sto­ry here: the stench of cor­rup­tion is so strong at this point it’s hard to con­fer the ben­e­fit of doubt. What looks like a poten­tial­ly inno­cent mis­take when con­sid­ered alone looks a lot less inno­cent in the larg­er con­text of one dis­clo­sure ‘oop­sy’ after anoth­er. Espe­cial­ly when this ‘oop­sy’ was to the poten­tial ben­e­fit of some­one like Crow who has their own secret his­to­ry of show­er­ing Thomas with lav­ish trips and mys­te­ri­ous real estate trans­ac­tions. As judi­cial ethics expert Stephen Gillers puts it, Thomas should have been “hyper­vig­i­lant to the prospect of a Crow inter­est show­ing up on the Court’s dock­et.” Instead, he’s appar­ent­ly been hyper­vig­i­lant about hid­ing his rela­tion­ship with Crow. The ben­e­fit of the doubt dis­si­pat­ed a few ‘oop­sies’ ago:

    ...
    Tram­mell Crow Res­i­den­tial was found­ed in 1977, part of the real estate empire cre­at­ed by Har­lan Crow’s father, Tram­mell Crow. Dur­ing the time when the archi­tec­ture firm’s case was mak­ing its way through the courts in the ear­ly 2000s, Crow Hold­ings, a pri­vate­ly owned devel­op­ment and invest­ment firm that man­ages the Crow family’s cap­i­tal, held less than a 50% stake in Tram­mell Crow Res­i­den­tial, and wasn’t involved in its oper­a­tions, Har­lan Crow’s office told Bloomberg.

    When the archi­tec­ture firm filed its appeal to the Supreme Court, Har­lan Crow was Crow Hold­ings’ chief exec­u­tive offi­cer and chair of its board, a posi­tion he still holds; he stepped down as CEO in 2017. Crow Hold­ings’ web­site cites the res­i­den­tial company’s found­ing as a key moment in its his­to­ry and one of its pri­ma­ry “devel­op­ment plat­forms.”

    ...

    Giv­en Crow’s sta­tus as “a close friend and a gen­er­ous bene­fac­tor,” Thomas should have recused him­self from cas­es where he knew or should have known that Crow had a direct finan­cial inter­est, Hell­man said. But he said it seemed unlike­ly that the jus­tice would have been on notice or had rea­son to inves­ti­gate the archi­tec­ture firm’s peti­tion at the time, he said.

    Close friend­ships can war­rant recusals, Hell­man said. He said that the key ques­tion is: “Would a rea­son­able per­son, know­ing all of the cir­cum­stances, ques­tion the judge’s impar­tial­i­ty?”

    Stephen Gillers, a judi­cial ethics expert at New York Uni­ver­si­ty School of Law, said that giv­en the close rela­tion­ship between the Thomases and the Crows over 25 years and the many com­mer­cial inter­ests of Crow and his com­pa­nies, Thomas should have been “hyper­vig­i­lant to the prospect of a Crow inter­est show­ing up on the Court’s dock­et.”

    Dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tions and Dis­clo­sures

    US law does lay out spe­cif­ic sce­nar­ios where the jus­tices and fed­er­al judges are dis­qual­i­fied from cas­es – such as if they or a close rel­a­tive stand to finan­cial­ly gain from the out­come. Beyond those, mem­bers of the judi­cia­ry get wide dis­cre­tion to decide if they should step aside. The law doesn’t include a penal­ty for vio­la­tions.
    ...

    It sure would be inter­est­ing to see Thomas’s per­son­al­ly main­tained list of con­flicts of inter­est. We can be pret­ty con­fi­dent Gin­ger Hold­ings, LLC nev­er made it onto the list, but how about Gin­ger, Ltd., Part­ner­ship?

    You also have to won­der if Gin­ni’s employ­ment at Her­itage and Hills­dale would have been seen as a rea­son for recusal from any cas­es involv­ing those two enti­ties. Just put “Her­itage Foun­da­tion v.” or “Hills­dale Col­lege v.” into a search engine and see all the legal cas­es they’ve waged. Was Jus­tice Thomas per­haps avoid­ing any such poten­tial recusal sit­u­a­tions involv­ing those two impor­tant con­ser­v­a­tive enti­ties by leav­ing Gin­ni’s names off those forms? Again, we don’t know and we’ll pre­sum­ably nev­er know. And to a large extent the par­tic­u­lars of Clarence Thomas’s chron­ic dis­clo­sure vio­la­tions are beside the point. The bla­tant cor­rup­tion of the high court isn’t the pri­ma­ry issue here. It’s the fact that there’s seem­ing­ly noth­ing that’s going to be done about the bla­tant cor­rup­tion that’s the big issue here. That said, the bla­tant cor­rup­tion is cer­tain­ly an impor­tant sec­ondary issue. And not at all just a Jus­tice Thomas issue.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 25, 2023, 10:32 pm
  20. Ali Alexan­der’s polit­i­cal career is either over or unstop­pable. We don’t know which yet, but we’re prob­a­bly going to find out in com­ing months now that a sala­cious gay child groom­ing scan­dal that has been swirling around in right-wing cir­cles for years has final­ly bub­bled up into main­stream. It’s so out in the open that Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene was call­ing for the FBI to inves­ti­gate both Ali Alexan­der and Nick Fuentes. Yes, this child groom­ing scan­dal is real­ly both an Ali Alexan­der and Nick Fuentes scan­dal, with Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP) mem­ber Alexan­der doing the groom­ing and Fuentes doing the cov­er­ing up. Groom­ing that goes back at least as far back as 2017 and involved a kind of quid pro quo trans­ac­tion­al nature, where under­age aspir­ing con­ser­v­a­tive boys would be offered access to Alexan­der’s per­son­al net­work in exchange for sex­u­al favors that appear to range from send­ing sex­u­al­ly explic­it pic­tures to serv­ing as ‘arm can­dy’ at con­ser­v­a­tive events.

    Not Ali Alexan­der’s arm can­dy. Milo Yiannopoulos’s arm can­dy. Keep in mind that this would have been well before Yiannopoulos’s March 2021 ‘con­ver­sion’ to being a straight Catholic who sup­ports ‘con­ver­sion ther­a­py’. Recall how Yiannopou­los, Steve Ban­non, and Voris held a Church Mil­i­tant ral­ly in Bal­ti­more in Novem­ber 2021 accus­ing the Catholic Church lead­er­ship of cov­er­ing up sys­temic child sex abuse. The same brand or rad­i­cal Catholi­cism that Nick Fuentes claims to sub­scribe. Also note that Alexan­der, him­self a recent Catholic con­vert, did an inter­view with Church Mil­i­tant on Jan 10, 2021, four days after Jan 6, to dis­cuss his role in the ‘Stop the Steal’ move­ment. Alexan­der, Yiannopou­los, and Fuentes are all recent con­verts to the same brand of far right Catholi­cism. And that brings us to one of the more remark­able aspects of this sto­ry: Milo Yiannopou­los is the pri­ma­ry source. This sto­ry is an intra-rad­i­cal Catholic ‘groomer’ fight that has spilled into the main­stream. As we’re going to see, Yiannopou­los was tex­ting Fuentes warn­ing Alexan­der was using Fuentes’s events to groom teenage boys and at this point he’s pub­licly denounc­ing both.

    There’s anoth­er direct ties to Nick Fuentes’s “Amer­i­ca First” orga­ni­za­tion in this sto­ry: both of the young men who have come for­ward describ­ing this groom­ing behav­ior are part of Fuentes’s Amer­i­ca First move­ment. First, the then-15-year old who was groomed by Alexan­der start­ing in 2017 is Aidan Dun­can, aka “Smi­ley”, who went on to become a rel­a­tive­ly high pro­file mem­ber of Nick Fuentes. A groom­ing peri­od that went into 2019 and includ­ed Alexan­der invit­ing Dun­can to Texas for a one week “intern­ship”. Dun­can’s sta­tus with­in the Amer­i­can First move­ment is pre­sum­ably in ques­tion at this point giv­en that Dun­can now claims that Fuentes was “100 per­cent aware” of Alexan­der’s groom­ing at his events.

    Claims that are backed up by the oth­er young con­ser­v­a­tive who has also come for­ward describ­ing Alexan­der’s groom­ing behav­ior: then-17-year-old Tik­Tok star Lance John­ston describes being approached by Alexan­der in what seemed like ini­tial­ly inno­cent polit­i­cal-ori­ent­ed con­ver­sa­tion but quick­ly turned to requests for sex­u­al­ly explic­it pics. And here’s where we get to one of the details in this sto­ry that sug­gests there’s a much big­ger sto­ry here. When John­ston was first approached by Alexan­der, a friend warned him that Alexan­der had a his­to­ry of request­ing sex­u­al­ly explic­it pics. It was short­ly after that warn­ing that Alexan­der sent John­ston the first of the ‘egg­plant emo­ji’ requests. John­ston also now claims that Fuentes per­son­al­ly asked him to not speak about the whole thing, even mak­ing vague job offers if John­ston com­plied. As John­ston put it, “Basi­cal­ly they want­ed me to lie, apol­o­gize to Ali, and then they said they would try to get me a job.”

    Oh, and there’s one more source for these alle­ga­tions: Ali Alexan­der him­self, who basi­cal­ly has­n’t real­ly denied any of this but instead explains that he is a bisex­u­al who strug­gles with same sex attrac­tion. Alexan­der also defends his inter­ac­tions with John­ston by insist­ing that, “You can have any con­ver­sa­tion you want with some­one who’s 17.”

    Fuentes has dis­avowed Alexan­der’s behav­ior, call­ing it gross. But he also alleges that Dun­can and John­ston were both flirt­ing with Alexan­der to fur­ther their polit­i­cal careers. And that’s all why we’re about to find out if Ali Alexan­der has real polit­i­cal Teflon or is about to enter the polit­i­cal wilder­ness. So far he’s still wear­ing Teflon, despite MTG’s calls for an FBI inves­ti­ga­tion. This is a good time to recall the net­work­ing around plan­ning the ‘wild’ Jan 6 ral­ly that Ali Alexan­der was doing with Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lau­ren Boe­bert, Mo Brooks, Madi­son Cawthorn, Andy Big­gs, and Louie Gohmert and the alle­ga­tions the mem­bers of con­gress were ped­dling blan­ket par­don offers on behalf of the White House.

    And that net­work­ing with that far right cau­cus of GOP mem­bers of con­gress was just one ele­ment of Alexan­der’s key role in the orga­niz­ing that went into Jan 6. Orga­niz­ing and plan­ning that appears to include last minute plan­ning for the vio­lence that unfold­ed. As we’ve seen, it was Alexander’s planned “Stop the Steal” ral­ly out­side the Capi­tol that actu­al­ly devolved into the insur­rec­tionary mob. Amy Kre­mer of “Women for Amer­i­ca First” was report­ed­ly work­ing close­ly with the Trump White House in the lead up to Jan 6 plan­ning the Ellipse ral­ly, and had become con­cerned about pos­si­ble vio­lence com­ing from the sec­ond ‘Wild’ ral­ly being planned by Alexan­der. Kre­mer claims she expressed these con­cerns to the Trump White House and got Alexan­der to agree that the Ellipse real­ly would be the only major ral­ly that day. And yet Kre­mer became con­cerned when she learned that Alexan­der was going ahead with plans a sec­ond ral­ly after their agree­ment. Kre­mer appar­ent­ly became aware on Decem­ber 31 of the pos­si­ble vio­lence ema­nat­ing from Alexander’s Jan 6 ral­ly. As we also saw, Both Ali Alexan­der and Kylie Kre­mer, Amy Kre­mer’s daugh­ter, knew Trump was going to make the last minute call to march to the Capi­tol at the Jan 6 crowd at the end of his speech at the ellipse, with one Jan 5 Alexan­der text say­ing “Trump is sup­posed to order us to the capi­tol at the end of his speech but we will see.”

    Fur­ther hints of Alexan­der’s fin­ger­prints on the vio­lence that unfold­ed are seen with the Jan 6 actions of Car­o­line Wren — the for­mer deputy to Don Jr.‘s girl­friend Kim­ber­ly Guil­foyle — who had been rais­ing mon­ey for the ral­ly at the Ellipse specif­i­cal­ly from Pub­lix heiress Julie Jenk­ins Fan­cel­li. Fancelli’s financ­ing was report­ed­ly facil­i­tat­ed by Alex Jones. And in the week lead­ing up to the ral­ly, there were a num­ber of changes in the plans. Changes pushed by Wren. We lat­er learned Wren and Guil­foyle unsuc­cess­ful­ly pushed for last minute changes to the sched­ule of speak­ers at the Ellipse ral­ly in order to get fig­ures like Roger Stone, Alex Jones and Ali Alexan­der added to the speak­ers list. When Jones and Alexan­der left the ral­ly ear­ly (to begin the march to the “Wild Protest”), it was Wren who escort­ed them away as they pre­pared to lead the march on the Capi­tol.

    And when Ali Alexan­der’s text mes­sages from Jan 5–6th were released, the very first of the released text mes­sages, from mid­night on Jan 5, was from Nick Fuentes. This whole scan­dal around Alexan­der and Fuentes points direct­ly towards Jan­u­ary 6th and their lead­er­ship roles played in the lead up to Jan­u­ary 6. Espe­cial­ly the fact that nei­ther has faced any legal reper­cus­sions. Remem­ber what Nick Fuentes said back in Feb­ru­ary when asked about the lack of fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tion and the charges of ‘fed asset’ that fol­lowed: “Trump may be charged, Don Jr. may be charged, Alex Jones, Ali [Alexan­der] may be charged, I may be charged, but nobody in that cat­e­go­ry has been seen charged,” he con­tin­ued. “My sus­pi­cion is that they are build­ing a con­spir­a­cy case against these types.” That’s a huge part of this scan­dal and the con­ser­v­a­tive mixed freak­out of simul­ta­ne­ous­ly decry­ing and ignor­ing the whole thing. This isn’t just a GOP groom­ing scan­dal right when the par­ty has spent months whip­ping up a nation­al ‘anti-groom­ing’ hys­te­ria. It’s also a the kind of scan­dal that can draw atten­tion to a range of oth­er scan­dals, includ­ing the gen­er­al scan­dal of how close­ly Nick Fuentes’s neo-Nazi Amer­i­can First orga­ni­za­tion is work­ing with Trump World and the CNP. It’s all one big scan­dalous­ly hap­py fam­i­ly. And, so far, it’s unclear if this scan­dal is going to suc­ceed at tear­ing that big scan­dalous hap­py fam­i­ly apart:

    The Dai­ly Beast

    ‘Stop the Steal’ Orga­niz­er Apol­o­gizes After Being Accused of Ask­ing Teen Boys for D*ck Pics

    “I apol­o­gize for any inap­pro­pri­ate mes­sages sent over the years,” said Ali Alexan­der, an ally of for­mer Pres­i­dent Trump and white nation­al­ist Nick Fuentes.

    Will Som­mer
    Pol­i­tics Reporter
    Updat­ed Apr. 17, 2023 7:41PM ET / Pub­lished Apr. 17, 2023 2:07PM ET

    A key fig­ure in the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” cam­paign has apol­o­gized after being accused of ask­ing teenage boys for sex­u­al pic­tures.

    Ali Alexan­der has become one of the most ubiq­ui­tous fig­ures in the MAGA move­ment. Trump him­self report­ed­ly request­ed that Alexan­der speak at his ral­ly before the riot, with his appear­ance only quashed by a last-minute inter­ven­tion from Trump’s aides. But this week, Alexan­der stands at the cen­ter of a scan­dal that rais­es ques­tions about how pow­er­ful men in the far-right treat their younger acolytes.

    “This is too gay,” Alexan­der said in a state­ment issued Fri­day night that addressed the alle­ga­tions in broad terms.

    Alexan­der, who has described him­self as bisex­u­al in the past, added that he was “bat­tling with same-sex attrac­tion.”

    The bud­ding online scan­dal has also roiled the pro-Trump and white suprema­cist “Amer­i­ca First” move­ment, just months after it reached new lev­els of noto­ri­ety after its leader, Nick Fuentes, dined with Don­ald Trump and rap­per Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago. Now Fuentes is fac­ing back­lash from his own sup­port­ers over whether he ignored warn­ings that Alexan­der, his friend and ally, was alleged­ly solic­it­ing nude pic­tures from young men with­in Fuentes’s move­ment.

    On Fri­day night, Alexander—who was ques­tioned by the House Jan. 6 Com­mit­tee about his role orga­niz­ing a can­celed ral­ly dubbed the “Wild Protest” out­side the Capi­tol, which drew crowds to the build­ing right before the riot began—issued a state­ment Fri­day offer­ing a gen­er­al apol­o­gy.

    “I apol­o­gize for any inap­pro­pri­ate mes­sages sent over the years,” Alexan­der wrote, adding lat­er, “When I’ve flirt­ed or oth­ers have flirt­ed with me, I’ve flexed my cre­den­tials or dropped corny pick up lines. Oth­er times, I’ve been care­less and should’ve qual­i­fied those com­ing up to me’s (sic) iden­ti­ties dur­ing flir­ta­tious ban­ter at the start.”

    Alexan­der didn’t respond to requests for com­ment from The Dai­ly Beast. In his state­ment, he claimed he had also been tar­get­ed by false accu­sa­tions and edit­ed screen­shots of his mes­sages, but declined oppor­tu­ni­ties to point out which accusers or screen­shots aren’t legit­i­mate.

    Rumors about Alexander’s alleged sex­u­al behav­ior towards younger men have cir­cu­lat­ed in con­ser­v­a­tive online cir­cles since at least 2015. But they reached a new lev­el late last month after Milo Yiannopou­los —the con­tro­ver­sial British provo­ca­teur and one-time Alexan­der ally—turned on Alexan­der after Alexan­der and Fuentes pushed him out of a poten­tial­ly lucra­tive posi­tion in West’s nascent pres­i­den­tial cam­paign.

    Yiannopou­los start­ed releas­ing video inter­views and oth­er evi­dence meant to prove that Alexan­der sex­u­al­ly propo­si­tioned both adult men in their 20s and at least two teenagers. Yiannopou­los, whose own career as a far-right pun­dit implod­ed in 2017 after remarks he had made down­play­ing the seri­ous­ness of pedophil­ia sur­faced, claims he has more dam­ag­ing videos to release about Alexan­der and Fuentes.

    Yiannopou­los claims he’s releas­ing the video against Alexan­der because Alexan­der dropped Yiannopou­los’ name to entice young men. One screen­shot pur­ports to show Alexan­der dan­gling the prospect of a meet­ing with Yiannopou­los to a teenage boy.

    “The rea­son I’m doing this is because he used my name,” Yiannopou­los told The Dai­ly Beast.

    ***‘Who Will Be My Arm Can­dy’***

    In 2017, Aidan Duncan—a 15-year-old boy in Col­orado inter­est­ed in right-wing politics—sent Alexan­der nude pic­tures after the MAGA activist asked him for them, accord­ing to an account Dun­can gave in a March 2023 pod­cast appear­ance.

    While Dun­can was a high-school sopho­more just start­ing out in pol­i­tics, Alexan­der was a 32-year-old with a decade of polit­i­cal work for the Repub­li­can Par­ty behind him. And now he was will­ing to share the con­nec­tions he had gained through that work with Dun­can, as long as the teenag­er met cer­tain pre­con­di­tions, includ­ing secre­cy.

    “You’ll have [me] shar­ing my entire net­work with you,” Alexan­der told Dun­can, accord­ing to Snapchat screen­shots reviewed by The Dai­ly Beast.

    Orig­i­nal­ly from Dal­las, Alexan­der plead­ed guilty to felony prop­er­ty theft in 2007 and felony cred­it card abuse in 2008. But despite his crim­i­nal back­ground, Alexander—who was then using his legal name, Ali Akbar—managed to rise in the GOP dur­ing the online con­ser­v­a­tive back­lash to the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion. Lever­ag­ing his posi­tion writ­ing for blogs with names like “Hip Hop Repub­li­can,” Alexan­der received fund­ing from bil­lion­aire con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor Robert Mer­cer, orga­nized a nation­al club for blog­gers that lat­er faced ques­tions about how Alexan­der spent the mon­ey he raised, and host­ed an annu­al par­ty at the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence.

    By 2017, Alexan­der had become an ardent Trump sup­port­er with a pas­sion for social-media trash talk. He became a pro­tege of MAGA fig­ures like Roger Stone and InfoWars chief Alex Jones, and ran with a group of oth­er young MAGA inter­net provo­ca­teurs, includ­ing anti-Mus­lim activist Lau­ra Loomer and blun­der­ing smear artist Jacob Wohl.

    But in his mes­sages to Dun­can, accord­ing to the screen­shots, there was one name Alexan­der dan­gled as a perk for the teenag­er if he kept up con­tact with Alexan­der: Milo Yiannopou­los. In a Sept. 4, 2017 exchange about an upcom­ing trip Alexan­der was plan­ning, Alexan­der pur­port­ed­ly told Dun­can he would intro­duce the teenag­er to Yiannopou­los and spec­u­lat­ed about whether the boy would be Alexander’s “arm can­dy” and sug­gest­ed the boy would have to be “enter­tain­ing.”

    “Rolling with me?” Alexan­der wrote, accord­ing to the mes­sage. “Most­ly. I’ll have an Entourage. Depends. Ha. I mean, depends—if it’s me babysit­ting you dur­ing the day, then no. I don’t have kids. If it’s some­thing more enter­tain­ing, then maybe. All depends on what we’re up to. No mat­ter what, I’ll let you meet Milo. There’s prob­a­bly five ppl I’ll intro­duce to him. But who will be my arm candy—the one with me always in VIP and in/out? Well that is to be deter­mined by the boy who plays his cards the most cor­rect.”

    “Arm can­dy > baby sit­ting,” Alexan­der added, accord­ing to the screen­shot.

    Oth­er screen­shots show Dun­can send­ing Alexan­der a pic­ture, which was redact­ed in the ver­sion of the screen­shot reviewed by The Dai­ly Beast. Alexan­der respond­ed with the “face with heart eyes” emo­ji and ask­ing the teenag­er which app Alexan­der should use to send him mon­ey.

    An undat­ed series of screen­shots pur­port to show Alexan­der lay­ing out rules for his con­tact with the teenag­er, many of them stress­ing secre­cy and a sort of quid pro quo rela­tion­ship between sex­u­al avail­abil­i­ty and career oppor­tu­ni­ties.

    “Every­thing is secret and pri­vate,” one rule read. “We’re fam­i­ly.”

    Anoth­er said that Dun­can was “allowed to say no,” but that Alexan­der might “deprive” him of some­thing unspec­i­fied in return.

    “Bound­aries are cool,” the mes­sage reads. “Allowed to say no. How­ev­er, the less you deprive me of, the less I deprive you of. I’m a big shar­ing per­son unless it’s not even.”

    Final­ly, accord­ing to the mes­sages, Alexan­der asked Dun­can to “be mind­ful of each other’s rep­u­ta­tion.”

    In an appear­ance last month on a pod­cast host­ed by white suprema­cist Richard Spencer, Dun­can claimed that Alexan­der want­ed him to fly to Texas and “be his intern,” assur­ing the teenag­er that the boy could just lie to his par­ents and say that he was going to a swim meet.

    But Alexan­der had grown frus­trat­ed by May 2019, claim­ing that the still-under­age Dun­can wouldn’t send him “good jack off mate­r­i­al,” accord­ing to the screen­shots.

    “You don’t even send me videos any­more,” Alexan­der wrote, accord­ing to the mes­sage. “No good jack off mate­r­i­al. Don’t even wan­na be my side piece.”

    A day lat­er, accord­ing to the screen­shots, he asked Dun­can to come to Texas for a week for an “intern­ship.”

    Dun­can, now 21, has since become a rel­a­tive­ly high-pro­file mem­ber of Fuentes’s racist “Amer­i­ca First” move­ment, going by the name “Smi­ley.” On Spencer’s pod­cast, Dun­can said he believed Fuentes knew about the rumors about Alexander’s alleged solic­i­ta­tion of nude pho­tos.

    “I think Nick is 100 per­cent aware,” Dun­can said on the pod­cast.

    Last Thurs­day, Dun­can post­ed a state­ment on Twit­ter about his com­mu­ni­ca­tions with Alexan­der.

    “When I was 15 I was naive and des­per­ate,” Dun­can wrote. “I thought I had no choice but to coop­er­ate with inap­pro­pri­ate and humil­i­at­ing requests if I want­ed to make it in pol­i­tics. I fig­ured that was just the nature of the game.”

    ***‘Show Me Your ...’***

    Alexan­der start­ed mes­sag­ing 17-year-old Lance John­ston in the sum­mer of 2019, accord­ing to John­ston. The flop­py-haired teen was a ris­ing star on con­ser­v­a­tive Tik­Tok com­mu­ni­ties, amass­ing more than 140,000 fol­low­ers under the screen­name “Lance­v­ideos.”

    John­ston and Alexan­der start­ed exchang­ing mes­sages about pol­i­tics. John­ston claims that a friend warned him ear­ly into their com­mu­ni­ca­tions that Alexan­der has a his­to­ry of ask­ing for sex­u­al­ly explic­it pic­tures.

    “My friend at the time had told me that he had heard some weird rumors about him,” John­ston told The Dai­ly Beast. “At first I was kind of like ‘I don’t know.’ I was 17, I had just got­ten into pol­i­tics.”

    Alexan­der moved “odd­ly quick­ly” towards dis­cussing sex with the teenag­er, accord­ing to John­ston. In July 2019, in what John­ston claims was the night of the White House “Social Media Sum­mit” where Trump fet­ed Alexan­der and oth­er con­ser­v­a­tives as vic­tims of online cen­sor­ship, the 34-year-old Alexan­der used the egg­plant emo­ji to ask the teenag­er for a pic­ture of his penis, accord­ing to a screen­shot.

    ...

    John­ston says he refused and quick­ly blocked Alexan­der. John­ston took a screen­shot of the exchange, but he was fear­ful of rais­ing the issue more broad­ly on the far-right.

    “I thought in my mind that he would try his best to try to dis­cred­it me and ruin me polit­i­cal­ly and influ­en­tial­ly with my time in pol­i­tics,” John­ston said.

    Still, a friend of Johnston’s pub­li­cized the screen­shot, which began cir­cu­lat­ing in con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles. Alexan­der took to a video livestream­ing app to defend him­self.

    “You can have any con­ver­sa­tion you want with some­one who’s 17,” Alexan­der said.

    The egg­plant-emo­ji screen­shot gained new cir­cu­la­tion in far-right cir­cles in 2022, as Alexan­der and Fuentes achieved promi­nence as mem­bers of West’s entourage. That’s when, John­ston claims, Fuentes asked him to say in a text mes­sage to Alexan­der that the screen­shot had been doc­tored and apol­o­gize. Pre­sum­ably, that text mes­sage could then itself be screen­shot­ted and used to dis­cred­it John­ston.

    “Nick per­son­al­ly asked me to apol­o­gize to Ali for sup­pos­ed­ly fak­ing the mes­sages,” John­ston said.

    But John­ston insists the egg­plant screen­shot is legit­i­mate. In exchange for dis­own­ing the egg­plant exchange, accord­ing to John­ston, Fuentes and Alexan­der offered to get him a job in pol­i­tics.

    “Basi­cal­ly they want­ed me to lie, apol­o­gize to Ali, and then they said they would try to get me a job,” John­ston said.

    Fuentes denied Johnston’s claims about him in an email to The Dai­ly Beast.

    “I nev­er offered Lance John­ston a job nor did I urge him to dis­avow that screen­shot,” Fuentes wrote.

    In a post on the social media app Telegram, Fuentes claimed John­ston was using the screen­shot to “extort” Alexan­der into giv­ing him a job on West’s cam­paign.

    Four years lat­er, John­ston thinks Alexan­der used his promi­nence in the MAGA move­ment for “very creepy” ends.

    “No per­son like Ali should be even near pol­i­tics,” he said.

    ***‘The Real Vic­tim In This Entire Saga Is Me’***

    Alexan­der, who has described his eth­nic­i­ty as half-Black and half-Arab and says he’s bisex­u­al, might seem like an unusu­al ally for the avowed­ly racist and homo­pho­bic “Amer­i­ca First” move­ment led by Fuentes.

    But Fuentes, a 24-year-old who marched at the white suprema­cist ral­ly in Char­lottesville with a long his­to­ry of racist, anti­se­mit­ic, and sex­ist remarks, has appeared fre­quent­ly with Alexan­der at events like a “Stop the Steal” ral­ly in Geor­gia in 2020.

    The pair would lat­er become arguably the most promi­nent far-right fig­ures in West’s short-lived, vir­u­lent­ly anti­se­mit­ic pres­i­den­tial cam­paign after Yiannopoulos’s ouster.

    In text mes­sages reviewed by The Dai­ly Beast, Yiannopou­los warned Fuentes in broad terms about his ally’s rep­u­ta­tion.

    “Alexan­der wants to come to your events to have sex with under­age boys,” Yiannopou­los wrote in a Jan­u­ary 2022 text to Fuentes. “Snap out of it. “

    As the alle­ga­tions mount­ed against Alexan­der over the week­end, Fuentes said he “dis­avowed” Alexander’s actions and called them “gross,” but accused Yiannopou­los of sit­ting on the claims until he could use them to get revenge on his rivals from the West cam­paign. In a Telegram post, Fuentes also blamed Dun­can and John­ston for “flirt­ing” with Alexan­der to advance their careers.

    “[Dun­can] and Lance were will­ing to go along flirt­ing with Ali (to vary­ing degrees) with­out any protest because they thought it would advance their polit­i­cal careers,” Fuentes wrote. “If you are flirt­ing with adult gay men because you think it’s going to land you a job, you know full well what you’re doing and it’s gross. Sor­ry but even at 15, I would have nev­er sent nudes to an adult gay man. There’s some­thing wrong there.”

    Fuentes added that “the real vic­tim in this entire saga is me.” In a self-pity­ing post, he referred to him­self as an “incel”—internet slang for “invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate.”

    “Sounds like every­body involved got what they want­ed,” Fuentes wrote. “Except me, the incel, who is now some­how being blamed for things I had noth­ing to do with.”

    This isn’t the first time Fuentes’s racist group has been dogged by accu­sa­tions of inap­pro­pri­ate sex­u­al behav­ior regard­ing chil­dren. In August, Fuentes asso­ciate Ale­jan­dro Richard Velasquez Gomez was arrest­ed and charged with pos­sess­ing child pornog­ra­phy. Velasquez, who went by “Lati­no­Zoomer” online and has been pho­tographed with Fuentes, also faces charges over alleged­ly threat­en­ing a con­fer­ence held by a rival con­ser­v­a­tive group.

    The accu­sa­tions against Alexan­der and his apol­o­gy have already alien­at­ed sev­er­al far-right fig­ures. Anthime Gionet, the far-right provo­ca­teur known as “Baked Alas­ka” who was recent­ly released from a prison term for his role in the Capi­tol riot, post­ed a state­ment Sun­day say­ing he would not “work­ing with Ali in any capac­i­ty mov­ing for­ward.”

    “So Ali admit­ted to send­ing inap­pro­pri­ate mes­sages and flirt­ing with young boys?” pro-Trump rap­per Bryson Gray tweet­ed. “Dis­gust­ing.”

    ...

    ————

    “‘Stop the Steal’ Orga­niz­er Apol­o­gizes After Being Accused of Ask­ing Teen Boys for D*ck Pics” by Will Som­mer; The Dai­ly Beast; 04/17/2023

    “The bud­ding online scan­dal has also roiled the pro-Trump and white suprema­cist “Amer­i­ca First” move­ment, just months after it reached new lev­els of noto­ri­ety after its leader, Nick Fuentes, dined with Don­ald Trump and rap­per Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago. Now Fuentes is fac­ing back­lash from his own sup­port­ers over whether he ignored warn­ings that Alexan­der, his friend and ally, was alleged­ly solic­it­ing nude pic­tures from young men with­in Fuentes’s move­ment.

    How will the overt­ly neo-Nazi branch of the Amer­i­ca First move­ment respond to the fes­ter­ing gay teen-groom­ing cri­sis cre­at­ed by Ali Alexan­der’s repeat­ed attempts to extort sex­u­al pics and acts from con­ser­v­a­tive teenage boys? It’s not exact­ly an ‘on brand’ scan­dal for MAGA-world. Espe­cial­ly now when hys­te­ria over ‘groom­ing’ has been turned into a major plank of the GOP’s plat­form. Well, ok, it’s kind of on brand for Nick Fuentes, who declared sex with women to be ‘gay’ last year because all sex­u­al activ­i­ty is ‘gay’. Yep. But for the most part, this is a very incon­ve­nient sto­ry, as evi­denced by Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene’s calls for the FBI to inves­ti­gate both Ali Alexan­der and Nick Fuentes. Again, don’t for­get that MTG was one of the GOP mem­bers of con­gress ped­dling blan­ket par­don offers on behalf of the White House as part of their plan­ning for the ‘wild’ Jan 6 ral­ly that Ali Alexan­der was orga­niz­ing. So when MTG tries to put dis­tance between her­self and Ali Alexan­der, her direct prox­im­i­ty to his Jan 6 activ­i­ties is part of the rea­son.

    But it’s not just MTG. As the arti­cle notes, Trump him­self tried to get Alexan­der a speak­er’s slot for the Jan 6 ral­ly at the Ellipse. Don’t for­get how Car­o­line Wren — the for­mer deputy to Don Jr.‘s girl­friend Kim­ber­ly Guil­foyle — had been rais­ing mon­ey for the ral­ly specif­i­cal­ly from Pub­lix heiress Julie Jenk­ins Fan­cel­li. Fancelli’s financ­ing was report­ed­ly facil­i­tat­ed by Alex Jones. And in the week lead­ing up to the ral­ly, there were a num­ber of changes in the plans. Changes pushed by Wren. We lat­er learned Wren and Guil­foyle unsuc­cess­ful­ly pushed for last minute changes to the sched­ule of speak­ers at the Ellipse ral­ly in order to get fig­ures like Roger Stone, Alex Jones and Ali Alexan­der added to the speak­ers list. When Jones and Alexan­der left the ral­ly ear­ly (to begin the march to the “Wild Protest”), it was Wren who escort­ed them away as they pre­pared to lead the march on the Capi­tol. So while Alexan­der may not have ulti­mate­ly spo­ken at the Ellipse, he was in real­i­ty play­ing a much big­ger role: get­ting the march to the Capi­tol start­ed where the sec­ond ‘Wild’ ral­ly was to be held.

    But it’s also the fact that Alexan­der isn’t real­ly deny­ing any of this. Instead, he’s declar­ing his ‘bat­tle with same sex attrac­tion’ as a kind of expla­na­tion:

    ...
    Ali Alexan­der has become one of the most ubiq­ui­tous fig­ures in the MAGA move­ment. Trump him­self report­ed­ly request­ed that Alexan­der speak at his ral­ly before the riot, with his appear­ance only quashed by a last-minute inter­ven­tion from Trump’s aides. But this week, Alexan­der stands at the cen­ter of a scan­dal that rais­es ques­tions about how pow­er­ful men in the far-right treat their younger acolytes.

    “This is too gay,” Alexan­der said in a state­ment issued Fri­day night that addressed the alle­ga­tions in broad terms.

    Alexan­der, who has described him­self as bisex­u­al in the past, added that he was “bat­tling with same-sex attrac­tion.”
    ...

    And we still have no idea how much more con­tent like this Milo Yiannopou­los is plan­ning on releas­ing. Again, don’t for­get that Yiannopou­los declared him­self ‘ex-gay’ in March of 2021, seem­ing­ly in response to a chal­lenge to renounce his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty from Church Mil­i­tan­t’s Michael Voris. Also recall how Yiannopou­los, Steve Ban­non, and Voris held a Church Mil­i­tant ral­ly in Bal­ti­more in Novem­ber 2021 accus­ing the Catholic Church lead­er­ship of cov­er­ing up sys­temic child sex abuse. It’s a reminder that this whole thing is, in part, a con­se­quence of the pop­u­lar­i­ty of rad­i­cal Catholi­cism among Alt Right cir­cles in recent years. Fuentes, Yianop­pou­los, and Alexan­der are all self-declared rad­i­cal Catholics:

    ...
    Rumors about Alexander’s alleged sex­u­al behav­ior towards younger men have cir­cu­lat­ed in con­ser­v­a­tive online cir­cles since at least 2015. But they reached a new lev­el late last month after Milo Yiannopou­los —the con­tro­ver­sial British provo­ca­teur and one-time Alexan­der ally—turned on Alexan­der after Alexan­der and Fuentes pushed him out of a poten­tial­ly lucra­tive posi­tion in West’s nascent pres­i­den­tial cam­paign.

    Yiannopou­los start­ed releas­ing video inter­views and oth­er evi­dence meant to prove that Alexan­der sex­u­al­ly propo­si­tioned both adult men in their 20s and at least two teenagers. Yiannopou­los, whose own career as a far-right pun­dit implod­ed in 2017 after remarks he had made down­play­ing the seri­ous­ness of pedophil­ia sur­faced, claims he has more dam­ag­ing videos to release about Alexan­der and Fuentes.

    Yiannopou­los claims he’s releas­ing the video against Alexan­der because Alexan­der dropped Yiannopou­los’ name to entice young men. One screen­shot pur­ports to show Alexan­der dan­gling the prospect of a meet­ing with Yiannopou­los to a teenage boy.

    “The rea­son I’m doing this is because he used my name,” Yiannopou­los told The Dai­ly Beast.

    ...

    In text mes­sages reviewed by The Dai­ly Beast, Yiannopou­los warned Fuentes in broad terms about his ally’s rep­u­ta­tion.

    “Alexan­der wants to come to your events to have sex with under­age boys,” Yiannopou­los wrote in a Jan­u­ary 2022 text to Fuentes. “Snap out of it. “
    ...

    But it’s also the fact that this has appar­ent­ly been going on for years. Since at least 2017, if Aidan Dun­can’s account is accu­rate. And Milo Yiannopou­los was direct­ly involved. That’s the sce­nario depict­ed in the text mes­sages released by Dun­can, with Alexan­der lay­ing down ‘arm can­dy’ guide­lines that describe a quid quo pro arrange­ment: if Dun­can ‘enter­tains’ Milo and keeps it secret, he’ll be intro­duced into Ali’s entire polit­i­cal net­work:

    ...
    ***‘Who Will Be My Arm Can­dy’***

    In 2017, Aidan Duncan—a 15-year-old boy in Col­orado inter­est­ed in right-wing politics—sent Alexan­der nude pic­tures after the MAGA activist asked him for them, accord­ing to an account Dun­can gave in a March 2023 pod­cast appear­ance.

    While Dun­can was a high-school sopho­more just start­ing out in pol­i­tics, Alexan­der was a 32-year-old with a decade of polit­i­cal work for the Repub­li­can Par­ty behind him. And now he was will­ing to share the con­nec­tions he had gained through that work with Dun­can, as long as the teenag­er met cer­tain pre­con­di­tions, includ­ing secre­cy.

    “You’ll have [me] shar­ing my entire net­work with you,” Alexan­der told Dun­can, accord­ing to Snapchat screen­shots reviewed by The Dai­ly Beast.

    ...

    But in his mes­sages to Dun­can, accord­ing to the screen­shots, there was one name Alexan­der dan­gled as a perk for the teenag­er if he kept up con­tact with Alexan­der: Milo Yiannopou­los. In a Sept. 4, 2017 exchange about an upcom­ing trip Alexan­der was plan­ning, Alexan­der pur­port­ed­ly told Dun­can he would intro­duce the teenag­er to Yiannopou­los and spec­u­lat­ed about whether the boy would be Alexander’s “arm can­dy” and sug­gest­ed the boy would have to be “enter­tain­ing.”

    “Rolling with me?” Alexan­der wrote, accord­ing to the mes­sage. “Most­ly. I’ll have an Entourage. Depends. Ha. I mean, depends—if it’s me babysit­ting you dur­ing the day, then no. I don’t have kids. If it’s some­thing more enter­tain­ing, then maybe. All depends on what we’re up to. No mat­ter what, I’ll let you meet Milo. There’s prob­a­bly five ppl I’ll intro­duce to him. But who will be my arm candy—the one with me always in VIP and in/out? Well that is to be deter­mined by the boy who plays his cards the most cor­rect.”

    “Arm can­dy > baby sit­ting,” Alexan­der added, accord­ing to the screen­shot.

    Oth­er screen­shots show Dun­can send­ing Alexan­der a pic­ture, which was redact­ed in the ver­sion of the screen­shot reviewed by The Dai­ly Beast. Alexan­der respond­ed with the “face with heart eyes” emo­ji and ask­ing the teenag­er which app Alexan­der should use to send him mon­ey.

    An undat­ed series of screen­shots pur­port to show Alexan­der lay­ing out rules for his con­tact with the teenag­er, many of them stress­ing secre­cy and a sort of quid pro quo rela­tion­ship between sex­u­al avail­abil­i­ty and career oppor­tu­ni­ties.

    “Every­thing is secret and pri­vate,” one rule read. “We’re fam­i­ly.”

    Anoth­er said that Dun­can was “allowed to say no,” but that Alexan­der might “deprive” him of some­thing unspec­i­fied in return.

    “Bound­aries are cool,” the mes­sage reads. “Allowed to say no. How­ev­er, the less you deprive me of, the less I deprive you of. I’m a big shar­ing per­son unless it’s not even.”

    Final­ly, accord­ing to the mes­sages, Alexan­der asked Dun­can to “be mind­ful of each other’s rep­u­ta­tion.”
    ...

    And notice how Alexan­der’s courtship of Dun­can con­tin­ued into 2019, with Alexan­der at one point com­plain­ing that “You don’t even send me videos any­more,” imply­ing that videos were indeed sent ear­li­er. Inter­est­ing­ly, Dun­can, who now goes by “Smi­ley” and went on to become a rel­a­tive­ly high-pro­file mem­ber of Fuentes’s group, has gone on to assert that Fuentes is “100 per­cent aware” of this kind of behav­ior on Alexan­der’s part. It’s part of what makes this scan­dal so poten­tial­ly explo­sive for the “Amer­i­ca First” move­ment and Trump world:

    ...
    In an appear­ance last month on a pod­cast host­ed by white suprema­cist Richard Spencer, Dun­can claimed that Alexan­der want­ed him to fly to Texas and “be his intern,” assur­ing the teenag­er that the boy could just lie to his par­ents and say that he was going to a swim meet.

    But Alexan­der had grown frus­trat­ed by May 2019, claim­ing that the still-under­age Dun­can wouldn’t send him “good jack off mate­r­i­al,” accord­ing to the screen­shots.

    “You don’t even send me videos any­more,” Alexan­der wrote, accord­ing to the mes­sage. “No good jack off mate­r­i­al. Don’t even wan­na be my side piece.”

    A day lat­er, accord­ing to the screen­shots, he asked Dun­can to come to Texas for a week for an “intern­ship.”

    Dun­can, now 21, has since become a rel­a­tive­ly high-pro­file mem­ber of Fuentes’s racist “Amer­i­ca First” move­ment, going by the name “Smi­ley.” On Spencer’s pod­cast, Dun­can said he believed Fuentes knew about the rumors about Alexander’s alleged solic­i­ta­tion of nude pho­tos.

    “I think Nick is 100 per­cent aware,” Dun­can said on the pod­cast.

    Last Thurs­day, Dun­can post­ed a state­ment on Twit­ter about his com­mu­ni­ca­tions with Alexan­der.

    “When I was 15 I was naive and des­per­ate,” Dun­can wrote. “I thought I had no choice but to coop­er­ate with inap­pro­pri­ate and humil­i­at­ing requests if I want­ed to make it in pol­i­tics. I fig­ured that was just the nature of the game.”
    ...

    And then we get to these details that hint at many more scan­dalous rev­e­la­tions to come: there have been rumors about Ali Alexan­der’s groom­ing of teenage boys for years. That’s what we learned from the oth­er young con­ser­v­a­tive who has also come for­ward to share his groom­ing expe­ri­ences: Lance John­ston, then a 17 year old Tik­Tok star when Alexan­der first mes­saged him. As John­ston describes it, a friend warned him ear­ly on that Alexan­der has a his­to­ry of ask­ing for sex­u­al­ly explic­it pic­tures, which is exact­ly what Alexan­der pro­ceed­ed to do with John­ston. How many oth­er peo­ple has he attempt­ed to groom? We still have no idea:

    ...
    Alexan­der start­ed mes­sag­ing 17-year-old Lance John­ston in the sum­mer of 2019, accord­ing to John­ston. The flop­py-haired teen was a ris­ing star on con­ser­v­a­tive Tik­Tok com­mu­ni­ties, amass­ing more than 140,000 fol­low­ers under the screen­name “Lance­v­ideos.”

    John­ston and Alexan­der start­ed exchang­ing mes­sages about pol­i­tics. John­ston claims that a friend warned him ear­ly into their com­mu­ni­ca­tions that Alexan­der has a his­to­ry of ask­ing for sex­u­al­ly explic­it pic­tures.

    “My friend at the time had told me that he had heard some weird rumors about him,” John­ston told The Dai­ly Beast. “At first I was kind of like ‘I don’t know.’ I was 17, I had just got­ten into pol­i­tics.”

    Alexan­der moved “odd­ly quick­ly” towards dis­cussing sex with the teenag­er, accord­ing to John­ston. In July 2019, in what John­ston claims was the night of the White House “Social Media Sum­mit” where Trump fet­ed Alexan­der and oth­er con­ser­v­a­tives as vic­tims of online cen­sor­ship, the 34-year-old Alexan­der used the egg­plant emo­ji to ask the teenag­er for a pic­ture of his penis, accord­ing to a screen­shot.

    ...

    John­ston says he refused and quick­ly blocked Alexan­der. John­ston took a screen­shot of the exchange, but he was fear­ful of rais­ing the issue more broad­ly on the far-right.

    “I thought in my mind that he would try his best to try to dis­cred­it me and ruin me polit­i­cal­ly and influ­en­tial­ly with my time in pol­i­tics,” John­ston said.
    ...

    And then we get to John­ston’s claims about the direct role Nick Fuentes is play­ing in help­ing to cov­er up Alexan­der’s behav­ior. Accord­ing to John­ston, “Nick per­son­al­ly asked me to apol­o­gize to Ali for sup­pos­ed­ly fak­ing the mes­sages,” and “Basi­cal­ly they want­ed me to lie, apol­o­gize to Ali, and then they said they would try to get me a job”. Again, this isn’t just an Ali Alexan­der scan­dal. It’s very much a Nick Fuentes scan­dal too. One that syn­er­gizes well with the ‘Nick Fuentes is gay’ rumors he’s been deal­ing with for years:

    ...
    Still, a friend of Johnston’s pub­li­cized the screen­shot, which began cir­cu­lat­ing in con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles. Alexan­der took to a video livestream­ing app to defend him­self.

    “You can have any con­ver­sa­tion you want with some­one who’s 17,” Alexan­der said.

    The egg­plant-emo­ji screen­shot gained new cir­cu­la­tion in far-right cir­cles in 2022, as Alexan­der and Fuentes achieved promi­nence as mem­bers of West’s entourage. That’s when, John­ston claims, Fuentes asked him to say in a text mes­sage to Alexan­der that the screen­shot had been doc­tored and apol­o­gize. Pre­sum­ably, that text mes­sage could then itself be screen­shot­ted and used to dis­cred­it John­ston.

    “Nick per­son­al­ly asked me to apol­o­gize to Ali for sup­pos­ed­ly fak­ing the mes­sages,” John­ston said.

    But John­ston insists the egg­plant screen­shot is legit­i­mate. In exchange for dis­own­ing the egg­plant exchange, accord­ing to John­ston, Fuentes and Alexan­der offered to get him a job in pol­i­tics.

    “Basi­cal­ly they want­ed me to lie, apol­o­gize to Ali, and then they said they would try to get me a job,” John­ston said.

    Fuentes denied Johnston’s claims about him in an email to The Dai­ly Beast.

    “I nev­er offered Lance John­ston a job nor did I urge him to dis­avow that screen­shot,” Fuentes wrote.

    In a post on the social media app Telegram, Fuentes claimed John­ston was using the screen­shot to “extort” Alexan­der into giv­ing him a job on West’s cam­paign.

    Four years lat­er, John­ston thinks Alexan­der used his promi­nence in the MAGA move­ment for “very creepy” ends.

    “No per­son like Ali should be even near pol­i­tics,” he said.
    ...

    Also note how, while Fuentes has “dis­avowed” Alexan­der’s actions, he also blamed Dun­can and John­ston for “flirt­ing” with Alexan­der to advance their careers. In oth­er words, Fuentes isn’t real­ly back­ing down or tru­ly aban­don­ing Alexan­der. This sit­u­a­tion is poised to con­tin­ue fes­ter­ing:

    ...
    ***‘The Real Vic­tim In This Entire Saga Is Me’***

    Alexan­der, who has described his eth­nic­i­ty as half-Black and half-Arab and says he’s bisex­u­al, might seem like an unusu­al ally for the avowed­ly racist and homo­pho­bic “Amer­i­ca First” move­ment led by Fuentes.

    But Fuentes, a 24-year-old who marched at the white suprema­cist ral­ly in Char­lottesville with a long his­to­ry of racist, anti­se­mit­ic, and sex­ist remarks, has appeared fre­quent­ly with Alexan­der at events like a “Stop the Steal” ral­ly in Geor­gia in 2020.

    The pair would lat­er become arguably the most promi­nent far-right fig­ures in West’s short-lived, vir­u­lent­ly anti­se­mit­ic pres­i­den­tial cam­paign after Yiannopoulos’s ouster.

    ...

    As the alle­ga­tions mount­ed against Alexan­der over the week­end, Fuentes said he “dis­avowed” Alexander’s actions and called them “gross,” but accused Yiannopou­los of sit­ting on the claims until he could use them to get revenge on his rivals from the West cam­paign. In a Telegram post, Fuentes also blamed Dun­can and John­ston for “flirt­ing” with Alexan­der to advance their careers.

    “[Dun­can] and Lance were will­ing to go along flirt­ing with Ali (to vary­ing degrees) with­out any protest because they thought it would advance their polit­i­cal careers,” Fuentes wrote. “If you are flirt­ing with adult gay men because you think it’s going to land you a job, you know full well what you’re doing and it’s gross. Sor­ry but even at 15, I would have nev­er sent nudes to an adult gay man. There’s some­thing wrong there.”

    Fuentes added that “the real vic­tim in this entire saga is me.” In a self-pity­ing post, he referred to him­self as an “incel”—internet slang for “invol­un­tar­i­ly celi­bate.”

    “Sounds like every­body involved got what they want­ed,” Fuentes wrote. “Except me, the incel, who is now some­how being blamed for things I had noth­ing to do with.”
    ...

    Will Fuentes con­tin­ue sup­port­ing Alexan­der now that this sto­ry final­ly broke into the main­stream? Time will tell. But when we see how Alexan­der’s rise was fueled, in part, with financ­ing from Robert Mer­cer, it’s a reminder that Ali Alexan­der’s rise in con­ser­v­a­tive cir­cles was a spon­sored rise with insti­tu­tion­al back­ing in con­ser­v­a­tives cir­cles. Nick Fuentes isn’t the only con­ser­v­a­tive leader who should be answer­ing ques­tions about whether or not they con­tin­ue to sup­port Ali Alexan­der’s polit­i­cal activism:

    ...
    Orig­i­nal­ly from Dal­las, Alexan­der plead­ed guilty to felony prop­er­ty theft in 2007 and felony cred­it card abuse in 2008. But despite his crim­i­nal back­ground, Alexander—who was then using his legal name, Ali Akbar—managed to rise in the GOP dur­ing the online con­ser­v­a­tive back­lash to the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion. Lever­ag­ing his posi­tion writ­ing for blogs with names like “Hip Hop Repub­li­can,” Alexan­der received fund­ing from bil­lion­aire con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor Robert Mer­cer, orga­nized a nation­al club for blog­gers that lat­er faced ques­tions about how Alexan­der spent the mon­ey he raised, and host­ed an annu­al par­ty at the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence.

    By 2017, Alexan­der had become an ardent Trump sup­port­er with a pas­sion for social-media trash talk. He became a pro­tege of MAGA fig­ures like Roger Stone and InfoWars chief Alex Jones, and ran with a group of oth­er young MAGA inter­net provo­ca­teurs, includ­ing anti-Mus­lim activist Lau­ra Loomer and blun­der­ing smear artist Jacob Wohl.
    ...

    Is Robert Mer­cer still financ­ing Alexan­der’s polit­i­cal ‘activism’?

    And, of course, we can’t for­get the biggest con­ser­v­a­tive insti­tu­tion that has embraced and ele­vat­ed Ali Alexan­der’s rise: the CNP. Ali Alexan­der was some­how allowed into the CNP accord­ing to the leaked mem­ber­ship lists. Is he still a mem­ber? Either way, should­n’t the CNP be asked to issue a state­ment? Or at least get asked a ques­tion about it? We’ll see if that ever hap­pens. And hope­ful­ly a few ques­tions about the still unre­solved CNP roll in Jan 6 can get asked in the process.

    But also keep in mind that Ali Alexan­der prob­a­bly has black­mail mate­r­i­al are all sorts of peo­ple inside the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment by now. Milo isn’t the only one who can play the scan­dal-at-will game. So while there’s undoubt­ed­ly a num­ber of con­ser­v­a­tive fig­ures who would prob­a­bly pre­fer to see Alexan­der just qui­et­ly fade away at this point, there are alter­na­tive sce­nar­ios. Don’t for­get Alexan­der’s men­tor: Roger Stone. Ali Alexan­der is a ris­ing con­ser­v­a­tive dirty trick spe­cial­ist trained by a mas­ter. And if any­one knows who the fel­low egg­plant emo­ji fans are in the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, it’s Ali Alexan­der. He’s got the goods. Prob­a­bly. Don’t expect him to go down qui­et­ly. And that’s what we’re about to find out whether or not Ali Alexan­der’s ris­ing polit­i­cal career as a con­ser­v­a­tive dirty tricks oper­a­tive is com­ing to an end or estab­lished as untouch­able. And so far he’s untouch­able, MTG’s lone­ly protest aside.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 1, 2023, 2:18 am
  21. Once is a sto­ry. Twice is a scan­dal. Three times is a huge scan­dal. And then after a cer­tain point it’s a depress­ing reminder of our col­lec­tive help­less­ness, we all get desen­si­tized, and it’s no long a sto­ry. It’s long how chron­ic crises play out in Amer­i­ca. And it’s what’s going to hap­pen again if the pace of new rev­e­la­tions about eth­i­cal laps­es at the Supreme Court keep com­ing at this pace. Every week now, we get at least one new rev­e­la­tion about the kind of eth­i­cal con­flict of inter­est that would have oth­er fed­er­al employ­ees writ­ing res­ig­na­tion let­ters. But not Supreme Court jus­tices, who don’t have an actu­al­ly code of ethics. They’re above that kind of stuff. It’s a sit­u­a­tion that’s both out­ra­geous and desen­si­tiz­ing. An out of con­trol sta­tus quo that no one can do any­thing about.

    So get ready for the lat­est desen­si­tiz­ing new round of rev­e­la­tions regard­ing Clarence Thomas’s remark­able ‘friend­ship’ with bil­lion­aire Har­lan Crow. As we’ve seen, it’s a friend­ship that includes:

    * Lav­ish annu­al vaca­tions worth hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars

    * A 2011 $500k anony­mous dona­tion to Gin­ni Thomas’s Lib­er­ty Cen­tral Tea Par­ty group

    * Crow’s 2014 pur­chase of Clarence Thomas’s child­hood home that came with the pro­vi­sion that his moth­er would be allowed to live there for the rest of her life. And after her death, the home would be turned into a muse­um ded­i­cat­ed to cel­e­brat­ed Clarence Thomas’s life and lega­cy.

    It’s that kind of friend­ship. A friend­ship that start­ed in 1996, after Thomas was already on the court. As Crow recent­ly told the Dal­las Morn­ing News, they met dur­ing what he char­ac­ter­ized as a chance encounter when Thomas was trav­el­ing to an anti-reg­u­la­tions think tank and Crow decid­ed to offer him a lift there on his pri­vate jet. That was the begin­ning of a deep friend­ship. The kind of deep friend­ship that involves the seem­ing­ly rou­tine trans­fer of hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars worth of ‘gifts’ and ‘dona­tions’.

    And that brings us to the lat­est round remark­able ‘gift-giv­ing’ on part of Har­land Crow: it turns out Crow paid near­ly the entire cost of some very expen­sive pri­vate school­ing for Mark Mar­tin, Clarence Thomas’s grand­nephew up until his high school grad­u­a­tion in 2010. Clarence and Gin­ni took cus­tody of Mar­tin in 1998 when he was 6 years old and raised him like a son. It’s not clear when exact­ly Crow start­ed pay­ing for Mar­t­in’s pri­vate school, but we do know that Mar­tin spent his junior year at Hid­den Lake acad­e­my, which at the time, had a tuition of rough­ly $73,000 a year, plus fees. His fresh­man, sopho­more, and senior years were spent at Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my, a pri­vate mil­i­tary board­ing school that charged between $25–30k per year. So assum­ing Crow cov­ered all four years that would trans­late to over $150k in addi­tion­al ‘gifts’ from 2007–2010.

    But we can’t nec­es­sar­i­ly assume the gift-giv­ing start­ed in 2007. That’s because we’ve also learned that Thomas accept­ed $5k from some­one else in 2002 to help pay for Mar­t­in’s edu­ca­tion. Inter­est­ing­ly, Thomas dis­closed that $5k. And yet, for some rea­son, he chose not to dis­close those much larg­er dona­tions from Crow. This is a good time to recall how one of the com­mon themes of all of Clarence Thomas’s var­i­ous ‘eth­i­cal oop­sies’ sto­ries is a lack of dis­clo­sure, includ­ing his strange deci­sion to list “none” for Gin­ni’s income from 2003–2009 despite the sub­stan­tial income she made from groups like the Her­itage Foun­da­tion. So dur­ing the same peri­od that Thomas was inex­plic­a­ble leav­ing Gin­ni’s income off his fed­er­al dis­clo­sures, he was the cou­ple was hav­ing Mar­t­in’s expen­sive tuition cov­ered by Crow.

    As we’ve also seen, there’s also been excus­es for the lack of dis­clo­sure, which usu­al­ly comes down to Thomas claim­ing con­fu­sion. In the case of the undis­closed real estate trans­ac­tions, we got both the expla­na­tion that some aides mis­in­formed him about the need to dis­close and the expla­na­tion that he thought he did­n’t need to dis­close because he net lost mon­ey on the deal (which con­ve­nient­ly ignored the val­ue of his mom liv­ing there rent free and Crow then turn­ing it into a muse­um ded­i­cat­ed to glo­ri­fy­ing Thomas’s lega­cy). So what’s the expla­na­tion for the lack of dis­clo­sure for the tuition? Well, as ethics experts point out, the only tech­ni­cal­ly legal excuse Thomas could pos­si­bly rely on is mak­ing the case that dona­tions weren’t to a direct fam­i­ly mem­ber like a spouse or child since Mar­tin was tech­ni­cal­ly not their child mak­ing them a dona­tion to Mar­tin per­son­al­ly. And sure enough, that’s the expla­na­tion Thomas fam­i­ly friend Mark Pao­let­ta gave in response to this report. Again, don’t for­get that Thomas dis­closed the $5k he got for Mar­t­in’s edu­ca­tion in 2002. And then, in 2003, his dis­clo­sure prac­tices changed sud­den­ly changed. What’s the real sto­ry there? We still don’t know. Although at this point it’s pret­ty obvi­ous Har­lan Crow’s excep­tion­al friend­ly is at least part of what changed.

    There’s anoth­er inter­est­ing detail that emerges from all this: accord­ing to Mar­tin, the Thomases did cov­er his pri­vate school at least one year. He recalls this because he also recalls how Clarence sold his prized Corvette to pay for the tuition. Again, keep in mind that he gets a Supreme Court Jus­tice’s salary and his wife is a high paid con­ser­v­a­tive activist. Why do they need to sell a prized Corvette to cov­er these costs? It’s the kind of detail that, if true, rais­es the fas­ci­nat­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty that Thomas has some sort of hid­den debt prob­lem. We’ve seen no direct sign of mon­ey prob­lems. Quite the oppo­site giv­en how many of their expens­es are get­ting cov­ered by ‘fam­i­ly friends’.

    But still, this is a very wealthy cou­ple we’re talk­ing about. What made them so ready and will­ing to accept so much from a sin­gle bil­lion­aire? Was it need or greed? It’s the ques­tion we are con­tin­u­al­ly forced to asked with each new rev­e­la­tion. Until some­thing is done. Or, more like­ly, no one cares any­more:

    ProP­ub­li­ca

    Clarence Thomas Had a Child in Pri­vate School. Har­lan Crow Paid the Tuition.
    Crow paid for pri­vate school for a rel­a­tive Thomas said he was rais­ing “as a son.” “This is way out­side the norm,” said a for­mer White House ethics lawyer.

    by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mier­jes­ki
    May 4, 2023 6 a.m. EDT

    Update, May 4, 2023: This sto­ry has been updat­ed to reflect that Mark Pao­let­ta, a long­time friend of Clarence Thomas who has also served as Gin­ni Thomas’ lawyer, acknowl­edged Har­lan Crow’s tuition pay­ments.

    In 2008, Supreme Court Jus­tice Clarence Thomas decid­ed to send his teenage grand­nephew to Hid­den Lake Acad­e­my, a pri­vate board­ing school in the foothills of north­ern Geor­gia. The boy, Mark Mar­tin, was far from home. For the pre­vi­ous decade, he had lived with the jus­tice and his wife in the sub­urbs of Wash­ing­ton, D.C. Thomas had tak­en legal cus­tody of Mar­tin when he was 6 years old and had recent­ly told an inter­view­er he was “rais­ing him as a son.”

    Tuition at the board­ing school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cov­er the bill. A bank state­ment for the school from July 2009, buried in unre­lat­ed court fil­ings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition pay­ment for that month: the com­pa­ny of bil­lion­aire real estate mag­nate Har­lan Crow.

    The pay­ments extend­ed beyond that month, accord­ing to Christo­pher Grim­wood, a for­mer admin­is­tra­tor at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a stu­dent there, which was about a year, Grim­wood told ProP­ub­li­ca.

    “Har­lan picked up the tab,” said Grim­wood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school finan­cial infor­ma­tion through his work as an admin­is­tra­tor.

    Before and after his time at Hid­den Lake, Mar­tin attend­ed a sec­ond board­ing school, Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my in Vir­ginia. “Har­lan said he was pay­ing for the tuition at Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my as well,” Grim­wood said, recall­ing a con­ver­sa­tion he had with Crow dur­ing a vis­it to the billionaire’s Adiron­dacks estate.

    ProP­ub­li­ca inter­viewed Mar­tin, his for­mer class­mates and for­mer staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s edu­ca­tion over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceed­ed $150,000, accord­ing to pub­lic records of tuition rates at the schools.

    Thomas did not report the tuition pay­ments from Crow on his annu­al finan­cial dis­clo­sures. Sev­er­al years ear­li­er, Thomas dis­closed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s edu­ca­tion from anoth­er friend. It is not clear why he report­ed that pay­ment but not Crow’s.

    The tuition pay­ments add to the pic­ture of how the Repub­li­can megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his fam­i­ly.

    “You can’t be hav­ing secret finan­cial arrange­ments,” said Mark W. Ben­nett, a retired fed­er­al judge appoint­ed by Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton. Ben­nett said he was friend­ly with Thomas and declined to com­ment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.

    ...

    ProP­ub­li­ca sent Crow a detailed list of ques­tions and his office respond­ed with a state­ment that did not dis­pute the facts pre­sent­ed in this sto­ry.

    “Har­lan Crow has long been pas­sion­ate about the impor­tance of qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion and giv­ing back to those less for­tu­nate, espe­cial­ly at-risk youth,” the state­ment said. “It’s dis­ap­point­ing that those with par­ti­san polit­i­cal inter­ests would try to turn help­ing at-risk youth with tuition assis­tance into some­thing nefar­i­ous or polit­i­cal.” The state­ment added that Crow and his wife have “sup­port­ed many young Amer­i­cans” at a “vari­ety of schools, includ­ing his alma mater.” Crow went to Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my.

    Crow did not address a ques­tion about how much he paid in total for Martin’s tuition. Asked if Thomas had request­ed the sup­port for either school, Crow’s office respond­ed, “No.”

    Last month, ProP­ub­li­ca report­ed that Thomas accept­ed lux­u­ry trav­el from Crow vir­tu­al­ly every year for decades, includ­ing inter­na­tion­al supery­acht cruis­es and pri­vate jet flights around the world. Crow also paid mon­ey to Thomas and his rel­a­tives in an undis­closed real estate deal, ProP­ub­li­ca found. After he pur­chased the house where Thomas’ moth­er lives, Crow poured tens of thou­sands of dol­lars into improv­ing the prop­er­ty. And rough­ly 15 years ago, Crow donat­ed much of the bud­get of a polit­i­cal group found­ed by Thomas’ wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.

    “This is way out­side the norm. This is way in excess of any­thing I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, for­mer chief White House ethics lawyer for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, refer­ring to the cas­cade of gifts over the years.

    Painter said that when he was at the White House, an offi­cial who’d tak­en what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undis­closed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the gov­ern­ment.”

    A fed­er­al law passed after Water­gate requires jus­tices and oth­er offi­cials to pub­licly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProP­ub­li­ca they believed Thomas was required by law to dis­close the tuition pay­ments because they appear to be a gift to him.

    Jus­tices also must report many gifts to their spous­es and depen­dent chil­dren. The law’s def­i­n­i­tion of depen­dent child is nar­row, how­ev­er, and like­ly would not apply to Mar­tin since Thomas was his legal guardian, not his par­ent. The best case for not dis­clos­ing Crow’s tuition pay­ments would be to argue the gifts were to Mar­tin, not Thomas, experts said.

    But that argu­ment was far-fetched, experts said, because minor chil­dren rarely pay their own tuition. Typ­i­cal­ly, the legal guardian is respon­si­ble for the child’s edu­ca­tion.

    “The most rea­son­able inter­pre­ta­tion of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be report­ed. It’s com­mon sense,” said Kath­leen Clark, an ethics law expert at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St. Louis. “It’s all to the finan­cial ben­e­fit of Clarence Thomas.”

    Mar­tin, now in his 30s, told ProP­ub­li­ca he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defend­ed Thomas and Crow, say­ing he believed there was no ulte­ri­or motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his inten­tions behind every­thing is just a friend and just a good per­son,” Mar­tin said.

    [After this sto­ry was pub­lished, Mark Pao­let­ta, a long­time friend of Clarence Thomas who has also served as Gin­ni Thomas’ lawyer, released a state­ment. Pao­let­ta con­firmed that Crow paid for Martin’s tuition at both Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my and Hid­den Lake, say­ing Crow paid for one year at each. He did not give a total amount but, based on the tuition rates at the time, the two years would amount to rough­ly $100,000.

    Pao­let­ta said that Thomas did not have to report the pay­ments because Mar­tin was not his “depen­dent child” as defined in the dis­clo­sure law. He crit­i­cized ProP­ub­li­ca for report­ing on this and said “the Thomases and the Crows are kind, gen­er­ous, and lov­ing peo­ple who tried to help this young man.”]

    Crow has long been an influ­en­tial fig­ure in pro-busi­ness con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics. He has giv­en mil­lions to efforts to move the law and the judi­cia­ry to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that pub­lish schol­ar­ship advanc­ing con­ser­v­a­tive legal the­o­ries.

    Crow has denied try­ing to influ­ence the jus­tice but has said he extend­ed hos­pi­tal­i­ty to him just as he has to oth­er dear friends. From the start, their rela­tion­ship has inter­twined expen­sive gifts and con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics. In a recent inter­view with The Dal­las Morn­ing News, Crow recount­ed how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the jus­tice was sched­uled to give a speech in Dal­las for an anti-reg­u­la­tion think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his pri­vate jet. “Dur­ing that flight, we found out we were kind of sim­pati­co,” the bil­lion­aire said.

    The fol­low­ing year, the Thomases began to dis­cuss tak­ing cus­tody of Mar­tin. His father, Thomas’ nephew, had been impris­oned in con­nec­tion with a drug case. Thomas has writ­ten that Martin’s sit­u­a­tion held deep res­o­nance for him because his own father was absent and his grand­par­ents had tak­en him in “under very sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances.”

    Thomas had an adult son from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage, but he and wife, Gin­ni, didn’t have chil­dren of their own. They pitched Martin’s par­ents on tak­ing the boy in.

    “Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of every­thing — his own room, a pri­vate school edu­ca­tion, lots of extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties,” jour­nal­ists Kevin Meri­da and Michael Fletch­er report­ed in their biog­ra­phy of Thomas.

    Thomas gained legal cus­tody of Mar­tin and became his legal guardian around Jan­u­ary 1998, accord­ing to court records.

    Mar­tin, who had been liv­ing in Geor­gia with his moth­er and sib­lings, moved to Vir­ginia, where he lived with the jus­tice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.

    Liv­ing with the Thomases came with an unusu­al perk: lav­ish trav­el with Crow and his fam­i­ly. Mar­tin told ProP­ub­li­ca that he and Thomas vaca­tioned with the Crows “at least once a year” through­out his child­hood.

    That includ­ed vis­its to Camp Topridge, Crow’s pri­vate resort in the Adiron­dacks, and two cruis­es on Crow’s supery­acht, Mar­tin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Mar­tin recalled rid­ing jet skis off the side of the billionaire’s yacht.

    Rough­ly 20 years ago, Mar­tin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Rus­sia and the Baltics, accord­ing to Mar­tin and two oth­er peo­ple famil­iar with the trip. The group toured St. Peters­burg in a rent­ed heli­copter and vis­it­ed the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin’s mur­der, said one of the peo­ple. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the pres­i­dent of the con­ser­v­a­tive think tank the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute. (Thomas’ trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not pre­vi­ous­ly been report­ed.)

    Thomas recon­fig­ured his life to bal­ance the demands of rais­ing a child with serv­ing on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Mar­tin up after class and help him with his home­work. By 2001, the jus­tice had moved Mar­tin to pri­vate school out of frus­tra­tion with the Fair­fax Coun­ty pub­lic school system’s lax sched­ule, The Amer­i­can Lawyer mag­a­zine report­ed.

    For high school, Thomas sent Mar­tin to Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my, a mil­i­tary board­ing school 75 miles west of Wash­ing­ton, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre cam­pus in the Shenan­doah Val­ley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Mar­tin played foot­ball and bas­ket­ball, and the jus­tice some­times vis­it­ed for games.

    Ran­dolph-Macon was also Crow’s alma mater. Thomas and Crow vis­it­ed the cam­pus in April 2007 for the ded­i­ca­tion of an impos­ing bronze sculp­ture of the Air Force Hon­or Guard, accord­ing to the school mag­a­zine. Crow donat­ed the piece to Ran­dolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a class­room build­ing named after the Dal­las billionaire’s fam­i­ly.

    Mar­tin some­times chafed at the stric­tures of mil­i­tary school, accord­ing to peo­ple at Ran­dolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hid­den Lake Acad­e­my, a ther­a­peu­tic board­ing school in Geor­gia. Hid­den Lake boast­ed one teacher for every 10 stu­dents and activ­i­ties rang­ing from horse­back rid­ing to canoe­ing. Those ser­vices came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was rough­ly $73,000, plus fees.

    The July 2009 bank state­ment from Hid­den Lake was filed in a bank­rupt­cy case for the school, which lat­er went under. The doc­u­ment shows that Crow Hold­ings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition. The wire is marked “Mark Mar­tin” in the ledger.

    Crow’s office said in its state­ment that Crow’s fund­ing of stu­dents’ tuition has “always been paid sole­ly from per­son­al funds, some­times held at and paid through the fam­i­ly busi­ness.”

    Grim­wood, the admin­is­tra­tor at Hid­den Lake, told ProP­ub­li­ca that Crow wired the school mon­ey once a month to pay Martin’s tuition fees. Grim­wood had mul­ti­ple roles on the cam­pus, includ­ing over­see­ing an affil­i­at­ed wilder­ness pro­gram. He said he was speak­ing about the pay­ments because he felt the pub­lic should know about out­side finan­cial sup­port for Supreme Court jus­tices. Mar­tin returned to Ran­dolph-Macon his senior year.

    Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy mem­bers of the Supreme Court. Still, when Mar­tin was in high school, he and Gin­ni Thomas had income that put them com­fort­ably in the top ech­e­lon of Amer­i­cans.

    In 2006 for exam­ple, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The fol­low­ing year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas’ salary from the court, Gin­ni Thomas’ pay from the Her­itage Foun­da­tion and book pay­ments for the justice’s mem­oir.

    It appears that at some point in Martin’s child­hood, Thomas was pay­ing for pri­vate school him­self. Mar­tin told ProP­ub­li­ca that Thomas sold his Corvette — “his most prized car” — to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn’t remem­ber when that occurred.

    In 2002, a friend of Thomas’ from the RV com­mu­ni­ty who owned a Flori­da pest con­trol com­pa­ny, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin’s edu­ca­tion. Thomas’ dis­clo­sure of that ear­li­er gift, sev­er­al experts said, could be viewed as evi­dence that the jus­tice him­self under­stood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.

    “At first, Thomas was wor­ried about the pro­pri­ety of the dona­tion,” Thomas biog­ra­phers Meri­da and Fletch­er recount­ed. “He agreed to accept it if the con­tri­bu­tion was deposit­ed direct­ly into a spe­cial trust for Mark.” In his annu­al fil­ing, Thomas report­ed the mon­ey as an “edu­ca­tion gift to Mark Mar­tin.”

    ———-

    “ProP­ub­li­ca inter­viewed Mar­tin, his for­mer class­mates and for­mer staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s edu­ca­tion over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceed­ed $150,000, accord­ing to pub­lic records of tuition rates at the schools.

    We can just throw that $150k in tuition pay­ments onto the ever-grow­ing pile of ‘friend­ly gifts’ from Har­lan Crow to his good friends the Thomases.

    So what’s the time­frame from these tuition gifts? That’s not entire­ly clear. We’re told about a July 2009 bil­lion from Hid­den Lake school that Mar­tin attend­ed for his junior year of high school. He attend­ed Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my pri­or to that junior year, as well as for his senior year, grad­u­at­ing in 2010. So it appears we’re look­ing at a peri­od start­ing at some point in the 2000s and end­ing in 2010:

    ...
    Tuition at the board­ing school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cov­er the bill. A bank state­ment for the school from July 2009, buried in unre­lat­ed court fil­ings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition pay­ment for that month: the com­pa­ny of bil­lion­aire real estate mag­nate Har­lan Crow.

    The pay­ments extend­ed beyond that month, accord­ing to Christo­pher Grim­wood, a for­mer admin­is­tra­tor at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a stu­dent there, which was about a year, Grim­wood told ProP­ub­li­ca.

    ...

    Before and after his time at Hid­den Lake, Mar­tin attend­ed a sec­ond board­ing school, Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my in Vir­ginia. “Har­lan said he was pay­ing for the tuition at Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my as well,” Grim­wood said, recall­ing a con­ver­sa­tion he had with Crow dur­ing a vis­it to the billionaire’s Adiron­dacks estate.

    ...

    For high school, Thomas sent Mar­tin to Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my, a mil­i­tary board­ing school 75 miles west of Wash­ing­ton, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre cam­pus in the Shenan­doah Val­ley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Mar­tin played foot­ball and bas­ket­ball, and the jus­tice some­times vis­it­ed for games.

    Ran­dolph-Macon was also Crow’s alma mater. Thomas and Crow vis­it­ed the cam­pus in April 2007 for the ded­i­ca­tion of an impos­ing bronze sculp­ture of the Air Force Hon­or Guard, accord­ing to the school mag­a­zine. Crow donat­ed the piece to Ran­dolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a class­room build­ing named after the Dal­las billionaire’s fam­i­ly.

    Mar­tin some­times chafed at the stric­tures of mil­i­tary school, accord­ing to peo­ple at Ran­dolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hid­den Lake Acad­e­my, a ther­a­peu­tic board­ing school in Geor­gia. Hid­den Lake boast­ed one teacher for every 10 stu­dents and activ­i­ties rang­ing from horse­back rid­ing to canoe­ing. Those ser­vices came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was rough­ly $73,000, plus fees.
    ...

    Inter­est­ing­ly, these mas­sive ‘gifts’ that the Thomases chose to nev­er dis­close are jux­ta­posed against the dis­clo­sure of a $5,000 gift they accept­ed in 2002 from a dif­fer­ent friend to help with the cost of Mar­t­in’s edu­ca­tion. So they were accept­ing gifts for his edu­ca­tion since at least 2002:

    ...
    Thomas did not report the tuition pay­ments from Crow on his annu­al finan­cial dis­clo­sures. Sev­er­al years ear­li­er, Thomas dis­closed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s edu­ca­tion from anoth­er friend. It is not clear why he report­ed that pay­ment but not Crow’s.

    ...

    In 2002, a friend of Thomas’ from the RV com­mu­ni­ty who owned a Flori­da pest con­trol com­pa­ny, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin’s edu­ca­tion. Thomas’ dis­clo­sure of that ear­li­er gift, sev­er­al experts said, could be viewed as evi­dence that the jus­tice him­self under­stood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.

    “At first, Thomas was wor­ried about the pro­pri­ety of the dona­tion,” Thomas biog­ra­phers Meri­da and Fletch­er recount­ed. “He agreed to accept it if the con­tri­bu­tion was deposit­ed direct­ly into a spe­cial trust for Mark.” In his annu­al fil­ing, Thomas report­ed the mon­ey as an “edu­ca­tion gift to Mark Mar­tin.”
    ...

    It’s an arrange­ment that is “way out­side the norm”, as ethics experts put it. But still an arrange­ment with a loop­hole: the Thomases aren’t tech­ni­cal­ly Mar­t­in’s par­ents, just his guardians. As such, fed­er­al dis­clo­sure laws that man­date the dis­clo­sure of gifts to chil­dren may not tech­ni­cal­ly apply to a legal depen­dent who is not a child. Instead, the gifts could be deemed to be giv­en direct­ly to Mar­tin. That’s the best-case defense for this arrange­ment. And sure enough, we find Thomas fam­i­ly-friend Mark Pao­let­ta defend­ing the Thomases by mak­ing that exact claim: they did­n’t have to dis­close the gifts because Mar­tin was tech­ni­cal­ly only a depen­dent and not a child:

    ...
    The tuition pay­ments add to the pic­ture of how the Repub­li­can megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his fam­i­ly.

    “You can’t be hav­ing secret finan­cial arrange­ments,” said Mark W. Ben­nett, a retired fed­er­al judge appoint­ed by Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton. Ben­nett said he was friend­ly with Thomas and declined to com­ment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.

    ...

    Last month, ProP­ub­li­ca report­ed that Thomas accept­ed lux­u­ry trav­el from Crow vir­tu­al­ly every year for decades, includ­ing inter­na­tion­al supery­acht cruis­es and pri­vate jet flights around the world. Crow also paid mon­ey to Thomas and his rel­a­tives in an undis­closed real estate deal, ProP­ub­li­ca found. After he pur­chased the house where Thomas’ moth­er lives, Crow poured tens of thou­sands of dol­lars into improv­ing the prop­er­ty. And rough­ly 15 years ago, Crow donat­ed much of the bud­get of a polit­i­cal group found­ed by Thomas’ wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.

    “This is way out­side the norm. This is way in excess of any­thing I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, for­mer chief White House ethics lawyer for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, refer­ring to the cas­cade of gifts over the years.

    Painter said that when he was at the White House, an offi­cial who’d tak­en what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undis­closed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the gov­ern­ment.”

    A fed­er­al law passed after Water­gate requires jus­tices and oth­er offi­cials to pub­licly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProP­ub­li­ca they believed Thomas was required by law to dis­close the tuition pay­ments because they appear to be a gift to him.

    Jus­tices also must report many gifts to their spous­es and depen­dent chil­dren. The law’s def­i­n­i­tion of depen­dent child is nar­row, how­ev­er, and like­ly would not apply to Mar­tin since Thomas was his legal guardian, not his par­ent. The best case for not dis­clos­ing Crow’s tuition pay­ments would be to argue the gifts were to Mar­tin, not Thomas, experts said.

    But that argu­ment was far-fetched, experts said, because minor chil­dren rarely pay their own tuition. Typ­i­cal­ly, the legal guardian is respon­si­ble for the child’s edu­ca­tion.

    “The most rea­son­able inter­pre­ta­tion of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be report­ed. It’s com­mon sense,” said Kath­leen Clark, an ethics law expert at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St. Louis. “It’s all to the finan­cial ben­e­fit of Clarence Thomas.”

    ...

    [After this sto­ry was pub­lished, Mark Pao­let­ta, a long­time friend of Clarence Thomas who has also served as Gin­ni Thomas’ lawyer, released a state­ment. Pao­let­ta con­firmed that Crow paid for Martin’s tuition at both Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my and Hid­den Lake, say­ing Crow paid for one year at each. He did not give a total amount but, based on the tuition rates at the time, the two years would amount to rough­ly $100,000.

    Pao­let­ta said that Thomas did not have to report the pay­ments because Mar­tin was not his “depen­dent child” as defined in the dis­clo­sure law. He crit­i­cized ProP­ub­li­ca for report­ing on this and said “the Thomases and the Crows are kind, gen­er­ous, and lov­ing peo­ple who tried to help this young man.”]
    ...

    Anoth­er detail that we have yet to fill in is just how many oth­er “at-risk youth” Har­lan Crow and his wife have sup­port­ed like this over the years. Because they are now claim­ing to have “sup­port­ed many young Amer­i­cans” at a “vari­ety of schools, includ­ing his alma mater.” And who knows, maybe that’s true. They are bil­lion­aires and could cer­tain­ly afford to sup­port the expen­sive pri­vate edu­ca­tions for many at-risk youth. But it sure would help to get a more exact num­ber of that kind of giv­ing:

    ...
    ProP­ub­li­ca sent Crow a detailed list of ques­tions and his office respond­ed with a state­ment that did not dis­pute the facts pre­sent­ed in this sto­ry.

    úHar­lan Crow has long been pas­sion­ate about the impor­tance of qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion and giv­ing back to those less for­tu­nate, espe­cial­ly at-risk youth,” the state­ment said. “It’s dis­ap­point­ing that those with par­ti­san polit­i­cal inter­ests would try to turn help­ing at-risk youth with tuition assis­tance into some­thing nefar­i­ous or polit­i­cal.” The state­ment added that Crow and his wife have “sup­port­ed many young Amer­i­cans” at a “vari­ety of schools, includ­ing his alma mater.” Crow went to Ran­dolph-Macon Acad­e­my.

    Crow did not address a ques­tion about how much he paid in total for Martin’s tuition. Asked if Thomas had request­ed the sup­port for either school, Crow’s office respond­ed, “No.”
    ...

    Inter­est­ing­ly, it was 1997, the year after Thomas and Crow first met — when Crow just hap­pened to offer Thomas a trip to an anti-reg­u­la­tion think tank on his pri­vate jet — when the Thomases first con­sid­ered tak­ing cus­tody of Mar­tin and gained cus­tody in Jan­u­ary of 1998. So giv­en that we are con­tin­u­al­ly learn­ing about new pre­vi­ous­ly unknown instances of Crow’s ‘friend­ly gifts’ to the Thomases, it’s worth keep­ing in mind that the Thomases extra Mar­tin-relat­ed-expens­es began in 1998, two years after the start of their finan­cial­ly intense friend­ship with Crow:

    ...
    Mar­tin, now in his 30s, told ProP­ub­li­ca he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defend­ed Thomas and Crow, say­ing he believed there was no ulte­ri­or motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his inten­tions behind every­thing is just a friend and just a good per­son,” Mar­tin said.

    ...

    Crow has long been an influ­en­tial fig­ure in pro-busi­ness con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics. He has giv­en mil­lions to efforts to move the law and the judi­cia­ry to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that pub­lish schol­ar­ship advanc­ing con­ser­v­a­tive legal the­o­ries.

    Crow has denied try­ing to influ­ence the jus­tice but has said he extend­ed hos­pi­tal­i­ty to him just as he has to oth­er dear friends. From the start, their rela­tion­ship has inter­twined expen­sive gifts and con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics. In a recent inter­view with The Dal­las Morn­ing News, Crow recount­ed how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the jus­tice was sched­uled to give a speech in Dal­las for an anti-reg­u­la­tion think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his pri­vate jet. “Dur­ing that flight, we found out we were kind of sim­pati­co,” the bil­lion­aire said.

    The fol­low­ing year, the Thomases began to dis­cuss tak­ing cus­tody of Mar­tin. His father, Thomas’ nephew, had been impris­oned in con­nec­tion with a drug case. Thomas has writ­ten that Martin’s sit­u­a­tion held deep res­o­nance for him because his own father was absent and his grand­par­ents had tak­en him in “under very sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances.”

    Thomas had an adult son from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage, but he and wife, Gin­ni, didn’t have chil­dren of their own. They pitched Martin’s par­ents on tak­ing the boy in.

    “Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of every­thing — his own room, a pri­vate school edu­ca­tion, lots of extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties,” jour­nal­ists Kevin Meri­da and Michael Fletch­er report­ed in their biog­ra­phy of Thomas.

    Thomas gained legal cus­tody of Mar­tin and became his legal guardian around Jan­u­ary 1998, accord­ing to court records.

    Mar­tin, who had been liv­ing in Geor­gia with his moth­er and sib­lings, moved to Vir­ginia, where he lived with the jus­tice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.

    Liv­ing with the Thomases came with an unusu­al perk: lav­ish trav­el with Crow and his fam­i­ly. Mar­tin told ProP­ub­li­ca that he and Thomas vaca­tioned with the Crows “at least once a year” through­out his child­hood.

    That includ­ed vis­its to Camp Topridge, Crow’s pri­vate resort in the Adiron­dacks, and two cruis­es on Crow’s supery­acht, Mar­tin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Mar­tin recalled rid­ing jet skis off the side of the billionaire’s yacht.
    ...

    Final­ly, we get to this very inter­est­ing detail pro­vid­ed by Mar­tin: At one point, the Thomases were pay­ing for his pri­vate school­ing them­selves, which appar­ent­ly required the sale of a prized Corvette to pay for just one year’s tuition. And while we don’t know the exact year of this sale, we do know he was mak­ing a very com­fort­able Supreme Court Jus­tice’s salary at the time. And that’s not includ­ing Gin­ni’s salary which, when com­bined, had them mak­ing more than $500k in 2006 and more than $850k in 2007. This is a good time to recall how Thomas was inex­plic­a­bly list­ing “none” for Gin­ni’s income on his fed­er­al dis­clo­sure forms from 2003–2009. So we can add large undis­closed ‘tuition gifts’ from Har­low Crow to the list of income sources dur­ing this peri­od:

    ...
    Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy mem­bers of the Supreme Court. Still, when Mar­tin was in high school, he and Gin­ni Thomas had income that put them com­fort­ably in the top ech­e­lon of Amer­i­cans.

    In 2006 for exam­ple, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The fol­low­ing year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas’ salary from the court, Gin­ni Thomas’ pay from the Her­itage Foun­da­tion and book pay­ments for the justice’s mem­oir.

    It appears that at some point in Martin’s child­hood, Thomas was pay­ing for pri­vate school him­self. Mar­tin told ProP­ub­li­ca that Thomas sold his Corvette — “his most prized car” — to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn’t remem­ber when that occurred.
    ...

    Again, what kind of debts were the Thomases incur­ring dur­ing this peri­od if the prized Corvette had to be sold to cov­er the tuition? They were a very wealthy cou­ple objec­tive­ly speak­ing and had been so for years. We know they enjoy lav­ish trips. How about the rest of the time? How lav­ish a lifestyle were they liv­ing? Is this like a secret gam­bling debt sit­u­a­tion or some­thing? We have to ask. Well, we don’t have to ask. We can just not care and for­get about it. Stranger things have hap­pened.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 7, 2023, 8:36 pm
  22. It’s got a new name: Project 2025. That’s the new title for the con­ser­v­a­tive move­men­t’s ongo­ing Sched­ule F schem­ing, with the Her­itage Foun­da­tion lead­ing the way. That was the mes­sage last month from Her­itage Foun­da­tion Pres­i­dent — and CNP mem­ber — Kevin Roberts, who announced Project 2025’s goal of assem­bling a list of up to 20,000 peo­ple who will be avail­able to fill posi­tions in 2025 should a Repub­li­can win the White House. That unprece­dent­ed staffing effort is 5 times the 4,000 posi­tions nor­mal­ly seen as “polit­i­cal appointees”.

    And yet, as the fol­low­ing New York Times arti­cle notes, then-Pres­i­dent Trump’s team esti­mat­ed that there were up to 50,000 posi­tions that could be resched­uled as “polit­i­cal”, back when his admin­is­tra­tion was first for­mu­lat­ing its Sched­ule F schem­ing. So while the Her­itage Foun­da­tion’s declared 20,000 goal is indeed unprece­dent­ed, it’s also less than half of what Trump’s Sched­ule F schemers pre­vi­ous­ly had in mind.

    It also turns out that one of the orig­i­nal schemers, James Bacon, is lead­ing Her­itage’s Project 2025 efforts. Recall how the ques­tion­naire Bacon helped devel­op as part of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s ini­tial Sched­ule F efforts pri­or­i­tized a sense of griev­ance against the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment over actu­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions for the posi­tion. It’s a reminder that the loy­al­ists who are going to be select­ed for Project 2025 aren’t just intend­ed to loy­al­ly fol­low Trump’s every desire. They are also select­ed to wage their own own per­son­al vendet­tas and just foment gen­er­al chaos. Dis­rup­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­men­t’s abil­i­ty to enforce pol­i­cy is a big part of the agen­da here, and not just Trump’s agen­da. That’s how the insti­tu­tion­al chaos is going to be del­e­gat­ed.

    And then we get to this intrigu­ing detail: Ora­cle is appar­ent­ly con­tract­ed to build Project 2025’s data­base. Now, on the sur­face, it might make sense to hire a data­base com­pa­ny like Ora­cle to build a data­base of poten­tial hires. But unless the plan is to cre­ate a high­ly detailed data­base on every poten­tial vot­er in the US, it’s hard to imag­ine why Ora­cle’s ser­vices are actu­al­ly need­ed for this project. Why is Ora­cle involved at all? And that brings us to one of that e under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed aspects of the plan­ning that at went into the events that led up to Jan­u­ary 6: it turns out Ora­cle founder and for­mer CEO Lar­ry Elli­son isn’t just a major GOP mega-donor and huge Trump sup­port­er. Elli­son also par­tic­i­pat­ed in a Novem­ber 14, 2020, con­fer­ence call with fig­ures like include Sean Han­ni­ty, Trump attor­ney (and CNP mem­ber) Jay Seku­low, and attor­ney (and CNP mem­ber) James Bopp, Jr. In addi­tion to being one of the key legal archi­tects of the suc­cess­ful push to over­turn Roe v Wade, Bopp is also the lead attor­ney for True the Vote, one of the main con­ser­v­a­tive enti­ties push­ing mass vot­er fraud claims.

    Recall how True the Vote emerged from the Tea Par­ty move­ment in 2012 for its attempts to assem­ble an army of poll watch­ers for the 2012 elec­tion amidst con­ser­v­a­tive alle­ga­tions of mass vot­er fraud. Also recall how both Cather­ine Engel­brecht and Ani­ta Mon­Crief of True the Vote were ear­ly mem­bers of the Groundswell Group found­ed in 2013 by CNP mem­bers Gin­ni Thomas and Steve Ban­non. We also saw how True the Vote’s legal coun­sel dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion was none oth­er than key elec­tion-deny­ing strate­gist and CNP mem­ber Cle­ta Mitchell. Final­ly, note that it was True the Vote that of co-pro­duced Dinesh D’Souza­’s noto­ri­ous­ly unground­ed “2000 Mules” doc­u­men­tary osten­si­bly prov­ing mas­sive 2020 elec­tion fraud.

    What was Lar­ry Elli­son doing on that Novem­ber 14, 2020, con­fer­ence call? Inter­est­ing­ly, one anony­mous source claims Elli­son may have been brought in to help vet Syd­ney Pow­ell’s mass vot­er fraud claims. If true, it’s not hard to see why Elli­son would want that kept a secret. Bizarrely, we are told that even True the Vote’s main finan­cial backer, Fred Eshel­man, was­n’t ever able to get an expla­na­tion for what Elli­son was going on the call. What was Ellison’s rea­son for being there? We still don’t know. But it sure would be nice to get an answer now that we’re learn­ing that Ora­cle is play­ing some sort of data­base-build­ing role for the ongo­ing “Project 2025” Sched­ule F plot:

    The New York Times

    Her­itage Foun­da­tion Makes Plans to Staff Next G.O.P. Admin­is­tra­tion

    No mat­ter the Repub­li­can, the effort has set a goal of up to 20,000 poten­tial offi­cials in a data­base akin to a right-wing LinkedIn.

    By Jonathan Swan and Mag­gie Haber­man
    April 20, 2023

    If a Repub­li­can enters the Oval Office in 2025, whether it’s Don­ald J. Trump or some­one else, there is a good chance that pres­i­dent will turn to the same elec­tron­ic data­base to staff the White House and fed­er­al agen­cies.

    Think of it as a right-wing LinkedIn. This so-called Project 2025 — part of a $22 mil­lion pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion oper­a­tion at a scale nev­er attempt­ed before in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics — is being led by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, a group that has been staffing Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions since the Rea­gan era.

    Her­itage usu­al­ly com­piles its own per­son­nel lists, and spends far less doing so. But for this elec­tion, after con­ser­v­a­tives and Mr. Trump him­self decried what they viewed as ter­ri­ble staffing deci­sions made dur­ing his admin­is­tra­tion, more than 50 con­ser­v­a­tive groups have tem­porar­i­ly set aside rival­ries to team up with Her­itage on the project, set to start Fri­day.

    They have already iden­ti­fied sev­er­al thou­sand poten­tial recruits and have set a goal of hav­ing up to 20,000 poten­tial admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials in their data­base by the end of 2024, accord­ing to Kevin Roberts, the pres­i­dent of Her­itage. Her­itage has con­tract­ed the tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny Ora­cle to build a secure per­son­nel data­base, Dr. Roberts said.

    “In 2016, the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment was not pre­pared to flood the zone with con­ser­v­a­tive per­son­nel,” Dr. Roberts said. “On Jan. 20, 2025, things will be very dif­fer­ent. This data­base will pre­pare an army of vet­ted, trained staff to begin dis­man­tling the admin­is­tra­tive state from Day 1.”

    ...

    The glar­ing prob­lem with such an effort is that the var­i­ous Repub­li­can hope­fuls would most like­ly use dif­fer­ent staffing cri­te­ria. Mr. Trump, the clear front-run­ner, cares far more about per­son­al loy­al­ty than ide­o­log­i­cal con­vic­tions.

    Indeed, he spent the bulk of his pres­i­den­cy try­ing to root out peo­ple whom he per­ceived as aligned with polit­i­cal crit­ics, such as the Bush fam­i­ly, or Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials.

    In meet­ings at Mar-a-Lago over the past two years, Mr. Trump has repeat­ed­ly com­plained that his first admin­is­tra­tion was full of “snakes” and “trai­tors.” Those he com­plains about the most are not career bureau­crats but instead peo­ple like William P. Barr, a for­mer Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter sup­port­er whom Mr. Trump him­self select­ed as his attor­ney gen­er­al.

    Dr. Roberts has antic­i­pat­ed the Trump chal­lenge — and, though he doesn’t adver­tise it this way, he has built his project around it. The key peo­ple involved with the Her­itage-led data­base served in the for­mer president’s admin­is­tra­tion. They include James Bacon, a Trump loy­al­ist who worked in the White House Office of Pres­i­den­tial Per­son­nel under one of Mr. Trump’s most trust­ed aides, John McEn­tee. In the final year of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, Mr. Bacon helped Mr. McEn­tee over­haul the government’s hir­ing process. They devel­oped a ques­tion­naire to vet gov­ern­ment employ­ees’ loy­al­ty to Mr. Trump and his “Amer­i­ca First” agen­da.

    Typ­i­cal­ly, a new pres­i­dent is allowed to replace around 4,000 “polit­i­cal appointees” — a revolv­ing lay­er that sits atop the fed­er­al work force. Below the polit­i­cal lay­er lies a long-term work force of more than two mil­lion, who have strong employ­ment pro­tec­tions meant to make it hard­er for a new pres­i­dent of a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal par­ty to fire them. These pro­tec­tions, enshrined in law, estab­lished a civ­il ser­vice that is sup­posed to be apo­lit­i­cal — with fed­er­al offi­cials accu­mu­lat­ing sub­ject mat­ter and insti­tu­tion­al exper­tise over long careers in the ser­vice of both Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dents.

    Mr. Trump wants to demol­ish that career civ­il ser­vice — or what he pejo­ra­tive­ly calls “the deep state.” He has pri­vate­ly told allies that if he gets back into pow­er he plans to fire far more than the 4,000 gov­ern­ment offi­cials that pres­i­dents are typ­i­cal­ly allowed to replace. Mr. Trump’s lawyers already have the legal instru­ment in hand.

    ...

    Mr. Trump’s staff esti­mat­ed that Sched­ule F would give the pres­i­dent the pow­er to ter­mi­nate and replace as many as 50,000 career gov­ern­ment offi­cials who served in roles that influ­enced fed­er­al pol­i­cy.

    Pres­i­dent Biden rescind­ed the Sched­ule F order on his third day in office, but over the past two years, sev­er­al of Mr. Trump’s con­fi­dants, includ­ing his for­mer bud­get direc­tor Rus­sell T. Vought, have been work­ing on a plan to re-enact the order and gut the fed­er­al civ­il ser­vice in a sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

    Now, the two plans — Mr. Trump’s and Heritage’s — are dove­tail­ing, even as Mr. Trump him­self has shown no inter­est in the details. Con­ve­nient­ly, Den­nis Kirk, a for­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion lawyer who was involved with the adop­tion of Sched­ule F, is now employed by Her­itage. Mr. Kirk is busy at work on Project 2025, Dr. Roberts said.

    ———-

    “Her­itage Foun­da­tion Makes Plans to Staff Next G.O.P. Admin­is­tra­tion” By Jonathan Swan and Mag­gie Haber­man; The New York Times; 04/20/2023

    “Think of it as a right-wing LinkedIn. This so-called Project 2025 — part of a $22 mil­lion pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion oper­a­tion at a scale nev­er attempt­ed before in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics — is being led by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, a group that has been staffing Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions since the Rea­gan era.

    Project 2025, the right-wing LinkedIn for the next Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion. And while the cre­ation of data­bas­es of peo­ple in antic­i­pa­tion of an upcom­ing White House vic­to­ry is entire­ly rou­tine, the scale of this ini­tia­tive is any­thing but nor­mal. It’s unprece­dent­ed, with Her­itage pres­i­dent Kevin Roberts declar­ing a goal of hav­ing up to 20,000 admin­is­tra­tion can­di­dates ready by the end of 2024. It’s 5 times 4,000 posi­tions nor­mal­ly treat­ed as “polit­i­cal appointees”. And yet that’s still less than half of the 50,000 posi­tions Trump report­ed­ly had in mind for fir­ing when he first imple­ment­ed Sched­ule F back in Octo­ber of 2020, which is a reminder that Robert­s’s boast­ing could be mask­ing even larg­er goals.

    And then we get to one of gen­uine mys­ter­ies in this sto­ry: Ora­cle is appar­ent­ly con­tract­ed to con­struct the data­base. A data­base of like 20,000 peo­ple, which is absolute­ly triv­ial. A Microsoft Excel doc­u­ment could arguably get the job done. It’s the kind of detail that rais­es a ques­tion as to whether or not we’re see­ing a reflec­tion of Ora­cle CEO Lar­ry Ellison’s GOP mega-donor sta­tus:

    ...
    Her­itage usu­al­ly com­piles its own per­son­nel lists, and spends far less doing so. But for this elec­tion, after con­ser­v­a­tives and Mr. Trump him­self decried what they viewed as ter­ri­ble staffing deci­sions made dur­ing his admin­is­tra­tion, more than 50 con­ser­v­a­tive groups have tem­porar­i­ly set aside rival­ries to team up with Her­itage on the project, set to start Fri­day.

    They have already iden­ti­fied sev­er­al thou­sand poten­tial recruits and have set a goal of hav­ing up to 20,000 poten­tial admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials in their data­base by the end of 2024, accord­ing to Kevin Roberts, the pres­i­dent of Her­itage. Her­itage has con­tract­ed the tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny Ora­cle to build a secure per­son­nel data­base, Dr. Roberts said.

    ...

    Typ­i­cal­ly, a new pres­i­dent is allowed to replace around 4,000 “polit­i­cal appointees” — a revolv­ing lay­er that sits atop the fed­er­al work force. Below the polit­i­cal lay­er lies a long-term work force of more than two mil­lion, who have strong employ­ment pro­tec­tions meant to make it hard­er for a new pres­i­dent of a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal par­ty to fire them. These pro­tec­tions, enshrined in law, estab­lished a civ­il ser­vice that is sup­posed to be apo­lit­i­cal — with fed­er­al offi­cials accu­mu­lat­ing sub­ject mat­ter and insti­tu­tion­al exper­tise over long careers in the ser­vice of both Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dents.

    Mr. Trump wants to demol­ish that career civ­il ser­vice — or what he pejo­ra­tive­ly calls “the deep state.” He has pri­vate­ly told allies that if he gets back into pow­er he plans to fire far more than the 4,000 gov­ern­ment offi­cials that pres­i­dents are typ­i­cal­ly allowed to replace. Mr. Trump’s lawyers already have the legal instru­ment in hand.

    ...

    Mr. Trump’s staff esti­mat­ed that Sched­ule F would give the pres­i­dent the pow­er to ter­mi­nate and replace as many as 50,000 career gov­ern­ment offi­cials who served in roles that influ­enced fed­er­al pol­i­cy.
    ...

    And regard­ing the lead­ing role James Bacon is play­ing in the Project 2025 effort, recall how the ques­tion­naire Bacon helped devel­op as part of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s ini­tial Sched­ule F efforts pri­or­i­tized a sense of griev­ance against the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment over actu­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions for the posi­tion. It’s a reminder that the loy­al­ists that are going to be select­ed for Project 2025 aren’t just intend­ed to loy­al­ly fol­low Trump’s every desire. They are also select­ed to wage their own own per­son­al vendet­tas and just foment gen­er­al chaos. Dis­rup­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­men­t’s abil­i­ty to enforce pol­i­cy is a big part of the agen­da here, and not just Trump’s agen­da:

    ...
    In meet­ings at Mar-a-Lago over the past two years, Mr. Trump has repeat­ed­ly com­plained that his first admin­is­tra­tion was full of “snakes” and “trai­tors.” Those he com­plains about the most are not career bureau­crats but instead peo­ple like William P. Barr, a for­mer Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter sup­port­er whom Mr. Trump him­self select­ed as his attor­ney gen­er­al.

    Dr. Roberts has antic­i­pat­ed the Trump chal­lenge — and, though he doesn’t adver­tise it this way, he has built his project around it. The key peo­ple involved with the Her­itage-led data­base served in the for­mer president’s admin­is­tra­tion. They include James Bacon, a Trump loy­al­ist who worked in the White House Office of Pres­i­den­tial Per­son­nel under one of Mr. Trump’s most trust­ed aides, John McEn­tee. In the final year of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, Mr. Bacon helped Mr. McEn­tee over­haul the government’s hir­ing process. They devel­oped a ques­tion­naire to vet gov­ern­ment employ­ees’ loy­al­ty to Mr. Trump and his “Amer­i­ca First” agen­da.
    ...

    And that’s the update we got on the ongo­ing Sched­ule F schem­ing. Over­all, it’s not a par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­pris­ing update, with the excep­tion of that detail about Ora­cle’s involve­ment in cre­ation of the Project 2025 data­base of poten­tial hires. Again, why on earth would Ora­cle’s ser­vices be need­ed for what sounds like a tiny triv­ial data­base of peo­ple? Is Project 2025’s data­base actu­al­ly much larg­er than it sounds? Or is this a reflec­tion of deep­en­ing ties between Elli­son, Ora­cle, and the Repub­li­can Par­ty? Hope­ful­ly we’ll even­tu­al­ly get more details on the nature of these data­bas­ing ser­vices. But those unan­swered ques­tions just under­score how Elli­son has­n’t sim­ply proven him­self to be a ded­i­cat­ed con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor in recent years. As was first revealed in May of 2022, Elli­son was direct­ly involved in at least one post-2020 elec­tion strate­giz­ing con­fer­ence call tak­ing place among the then-Trump White House legal team and con­ser­v­a­tive groups scram­bling to chal­lenge the elec­tion results.

    It was a Novem­ber 14, 2020, call that Elli­son sat in on along with Sen­a­tor Lind­sey Gra­ham, Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty, Trump attor­ney — and CNP mem­ber — Jay Seku­low. Also on the call was CNP mem­ber James Bopp Jr., wh was serv­ing as an attor­ney for True the Vote. Recall how True the Vote emerged from the Tea Par­ty move­ment in 2012 for its attempts to assem­ble an army of poll watch­ers for the 2012 elec­tion amidst con­ser­v­a­tive alle­ga­tions of mass vot­er fraud. Also recall how both Cather­ine Engel­brecht and Ani­ta Mon­Crief of True the Vote were ear­ly mem­bers of the Groundswell Group found­ed in 2013 by CNP mem­bers Gin­ni Thomas and Steve Ban­non. We also saw how True the Vote’s legal coun­sel dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion was none oth­er than key elec­tion-deny­ing strate­gist and CNP mem­ber Cle­ta Mitchell. Final­ly, note that it was True the Vote that of co-pro­duced Dinesh D’Souza­’s noto­ri­ous­ly laugh­ably fal­la­cious “2000 Mules” doc­u­men­tary osten­si­bly prov­ing mas­sive 2020 elec­tion fraud.

    True the Vote is an extreme­ly well-financed bad faith actor in the area of elec­tion fraud claims. So what was Lar­ry Elli­son doing on that Novem­ber 14, 2020, con­fer­ence call with Trump attor­ney Jay Seku­low and True the Vote attor­ney James Bopp, Jr? We’ve nev­er got­ten an answer. Inter­est­ing­ly, nei­ther did True the Votes major donor, Fred Eshel­man, who report­ed­ly nev­er received a clar­i­fi­ca­tion when he asked about Ellison’s involve­ment. But accord­ing to an anony­mous source who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the call, Elli­son may have been enlist­ed to assess the wild claims about vot­ing machines made by Sid­ney Pow­ell. If true, it’s not hard to imag­ine whey Elli­son would want any role involv­ing vet­ting of Pow­ell’s claims to be cov­ered up entire­ly giv­en the extreme­ly low qual­i­ty of Pow­ell’s accu­sa­tions.

    That’s all part of the ongo­ing mys­tery about Ora­cle’s Project 2025 ser­vices: Ora­cle’s Project 2025 involve­ment is only the lat­est exam­ple of Lar­ry Elli­son get­ting involved with the GOP’s efforts to effec­tive­ly cap­ture what’s left of the US’s democ­ra­cy:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Oracle’s Lar­ry Elli­son joined Nov. 2020 call about con­test­ing Trump’s loss
    The bil­lion­aire GOP donor par­tic­i­pat­ed along with Fox’s Sean Han­ni­ty and Sen. Lind­sey Gra­ham, accord­ing to court fil­ings and a par­tic­i­pant

    By Isaac Stan­ley-Beck­er and Shawn Boburg
    May 20, 2022 at 3:04 p.m. EDT

    Lar­ry Elli­son, the bil­lion­aire co-founder and chair­man of the soft­ware com­pa­ny Ora­cle and the biggest backer of Elon Musk’s attempt­ed Twit­ter takeover, par­tic­i­pat­ed in a call short­ly after the 2020 elec­tion that focused on strate­gies for con­test­ing the legit­i­ma­cy of the vote, accord­ing to court doc­u­ments and a par­tic­i­pant.

    The Nov. 14 call includ­ed Sen. Lind­sey O. Gra­ham (R‑S.C.); Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty; Jay Seku­low, an attor­ney for Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump; and James Bopp Jr., an attor­ney for True the Vote, a Texas-based non­prof­it that has pro­mot­ed dis­put­ed claims of wide­spread vot­er fraud.

    Ellison’s par­tic­i­pa­tion illus­trates a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown dimen­sion in the mul­ti­fac­eted cam­paign to chal­lenge Trump’s loss, an effort still com­ing into focus more than 18 months lat­er. It is the first known exam­ple of a tech­nol­o­gy indus­try titan join­ing pow­er­ful fig­ures in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics, media and law to strate­gize about Trump’s post-loss options and con­fer with an activist group that had already filed four law­suits seek­ing to uncov­er evi­dence of ille­gal vot­ing.

    ...

    Elli­son is the 11th-rich­est per­son in the world, with a net worth of about $85 bil­lion, accord­ing to the Bloomberg Bil­lion­aires Index. He became a major polit­i­cal pow­er bro­ker dur­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, host­ing the pres­i­dent in 2020 for a fundrais­er at his estate in California’s Coachel­la Val­ley and con­tribut­ing mil­lions to Repub­li­can can­di­dates and com­mit­tees, includ­ing to Gra­ham, accord­ing to fil­ings with the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion.

    Dur­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, in 2020, Ora­cle part­nered with the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices to col­lect data from doc­tors treat­ing coro­n­avirus infec­tions with hydrox­y­chloro­quine, the anti-malar­ia drug tout­ed by the pres­i­dent, among oth­er drugs. That fall, it won praise from Trump as a “great com­pa­ny” as it became the pre­ferred U.S. buy­er of Tik­Tok, in a poten­tial deal with Chi­nese com­pa­ny ByteDance that did not come to fruition.

    Details of the Novem­ber 2020 call and ques­tions about Ellison’s role in it were revealed in new fil­ings made in lit­i­ga­tion brought against True the Vote and its rep­re­sen­ta­tives by Fair Fight, a polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee asso­ci­at­ed with the vot­ing rights orga­ni­za­tion found­ed by Geor­gia Demo­c­ra­t­ic guber­na­to­r­i­al can­di­date Stacey Abrams.

    “Jim was on a call this evening with Jay Seku­low, Lind­sey O. Gra­ham, Sean Han­ni­ty, and Lar­ry Elli­son,” True the Vote’s founder, Cather­ine Engel­brecht, wrote to a donor on the night of the call, refer­ring to Bopp, her organization’s lawyer. “He explained the work we were doing and they asked for a pre­lim­i­nary report asap, to be used to ral­ly their troops inter­nal­ly, so that’s what I’m work­ing on now.”

    Ellison’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the call was con­firmed by a par­tic­i­pant, who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss pri­vate mat­ters. This per­son said Elli­son, as a tech­nol­o­gy exec­u­tive, may have been enlist­ed to assess claims about vot­ing machines made by Sid­ney Pow­ell, a one­time mem­ber of Trump’s legal team. And the per­son said the GOP megadonor was prob­a­bly looped in by Gra­ham, as part of a dis­cus­sion about whether the Trump cam­paign had assem­bled an effec­tive legal team.

    When asked why the sen­a­tor would have sought the tech­nol­o­gy magnate’s par­tic­i­pa­tion, Gra­ham spokesman Kevin Bish­op said, “Prob­a­bly because Elli­son sup­port­ed Trump,” but did not respond to fol­low-up ques­tions about Ellison’s input and would not say direct­ly whether Gra­ham had invit­ed Elli­son.

    Bopp, in an inter­view, said he could not remem­ber all the par­tic­i­pants but recalled being asked to join the con­ver­sa­tion by Seku­low. He had a dif­fer­ent rec­ol­lec­tion of the call’s pur­pose than did the oth­er par­tic­i­pant.

    “The ques­tion that I think was being dis­cussed was whether or not con­gres­sion­al hear­ings on how the 2020 elec­tion was being con­duct­ed would be ben­e­fi­cial to what­ev­er peo­ple were doing,” he said, refer­ring to efforts to uncov­er evi­dence that could cause a “change in elec­tion results,” as he put it, a pur­suit that involved many dif­fer­ent groups. “And my opin­ion was yes.”

    Seku­low said his involve­ment in elec­tion-relat­ed lit­i­ga­tion was lim­it­ed, large­ly end­ing after he helped file a motion with the Supreme Court seek­ing to sep­a­rate out mail-in bal­lots that arrived in Penn­syl­va­nia after Elec­tion Day from those that had come before. Jus­tice Samuel A. Ali­to Jr. grant­ed the motion on Nov. 6. A Fox spokes­woman declined to com­ment.

    It is not clear from the court fil­ings whether Elli­son took part in sub­se­quent calls. But his par­tic­i­pa­tion puz­zled Fred Eshel­man, the major donor to True the Vote who received Englebrecht’s email describ­ing the call. In an email to Engel­brecht two days lat­er, he asked for more infor­ma­tion about Ellison’s involve­ment.

    “Why was he on call with Sen­a­tor Gra­ham? Is he part of data/analysis solu­tion, is he a poten­tial large donor, oth­er?” Eshel­man wrote in a Nov. 16 email to Engel­brecht and Bopp in advance of a planned call among them.

    An Eshel­man asso­ciate said they nev­er got an answer. The lack of clar­i­ty inflamed ten­sions between Eshel­man and True the Vote.

    True the Vote’s law­suits sought expe­dit­ed dis­cov­ery of poll lists and oth­er infor­ma­tion that the group said could prove that enough ille­gal votes had been cast to jus­ti­fy block­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the results in numer­ous states. But the lit­i­ga­tion failed to gain imme­di­ate trac­tion in courts, Bopp said, and the non­prof­it with­drew the com­plaints on Nov. 16.

    The com­plaints were among scores of unsuc­cess­ful post-elec­tion law­suits filed by Trump or his allies. Eshel­man became dis­il­lu­sioned with True the Vote’s efforts and sought the return of his $2.5mil­lion dona­tion — suing the non­prof­it in fed­er­al court and then in Texas state court, where the case was dis­missed and is now pend­ing on appeal.

    True the Vote has raised its pro­file sig­nif­i­cant­ly in recent weeks by col­lab­o­rat­ing with con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tor Dinesh D’Souza on a film that alleges there was wide­spread “bal­lot har­vest­ing” in the 2020 elec­tion. The film, “2000 Mules,” was shown at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club last month and has become a focal point of ongo­ing efforts to deny the legit­i­ma­cy of the elec­tion.

    Sev­er­al such claims were dis­missed this week by the Geor­gia State Elec­tions Board, cast­ing doubt on the premise of the movie.

    Elli­son does not appear to have made pub­lic com­ments about the results of the 2020 vote.

    But Ora­cle has con­tributed siz­able sums to con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es, includ­ing as much as $499,000 in 2019 to the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety and as much as $499,000 in 2021 to the Inter­net Account­abil­i­ty Project, a non­prof­it that accus­es major tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies of anti-con­ser­v­a­tive bias, accord­ing to cor­po­rate dis­clo­sures.

    Elli­son per­son­al­ly has invest­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly in Repub­li­can can­di­dates and caus­es. He host­ed Trump for a fundrais­er for his 2020 reelec­tion cam­paign on the same day the admin­is­tra­tion took Oracle’s side in a high-stakes copy­right dis­pute with Google unfold­ing at the Supreme Court. Elli­son backed Graham’s reelec­tion in 2018 to the tune of hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars. And this year, he donat­ed $15 mil­lion to a super PAC aligned with Sen. Tim Scott (R‑S.C.), among the largest indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tions this cycle.

    This month, Elli­son pledged $1 bil­lion to sup­port Musk’s $44 bil­lion Twit­ter takeover, accord­ing to a fil­ing with the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion. That makes him the largest sin­gle backer of the bid, which has been cheered by Trump allies because of com­ments Musk and his asso­ciates have made about loos­en­ing rules on con­tent mod­er­a­tion and pos­si­bly let­ting the for­mer pres­i­dent back on the plat­form.

    Elli­son stepped down as Oracle’s chief exec­u­tive in 2014 but remains chair­man of its board and chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer. He is also its largest indi­vid­ual share­hold­er. Elli­son joined the board of Tes­la, Musk’s elec­tric-car com­pa­ny, in 2018, dis­clos­ing that he had pur­chased 3 mil­lion shares ear­li­er that year, which earned him 12 mil­lion addi­tion­al shares in a stock split in 2020. He owns near­ly all of the Hawai­ian island of Lanai.

    ...

    ————-

    “Oracle’s Lar­ry Elli­son joined Nov. 2020 call about con­test­ing Trump’s loss” by Isaac Stan­ley-Beck­er and Shawn Boburg; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 05/20/2022

    “Ellison’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the call was con­firmed by a par­tic­i­pant, who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss pri­vate mat­ters. This per­son said Elli­son, as a tech­nol­o­gy exec­u­tive, may have been enlist­ed to assess claims about vot­ing machines made by Sid­ney Pow­ell, a one­time mem­ber of Trump’s legal team. And the per­son said the GOP megadonor was prob­a­bly looped in by Gra­ham, as part of a dis­cus­sion about whether the Trump cam­paign had assem­bled an effec­tive legal team.”

    What was the pur­pose of Lar­ry Ellison’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in an phone call days after the 2020 elec­tion that includ­ed Trump attor­ney Jay Seku­low and True the Vote attor­ney James Bopp? We’ve nev­er learned that pur­pose. And nei­ther did major True the Vote donor Fred Eshel­man ever learn, despite his requests for clar­i­ty. What’s up with the secre­cy?

    ...
    The Nov. 14 call includ­ed Sen. Lind­sey O. Gra­ham (R‑S.C.); Fox News host Sean Han­ni­ty; Jay Seku­low, an attor­ney for Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump; and James Bopp Jr., an attor­ney for True the Vote, a Texas-based non­prof­it that has pro­mot­ed dis­put­ed claims of wide­spread vot­er fraud.

    Ellison’s par­tic­i­pa­tion illus­trates a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown dimen­sion in the mul­ti­fac­eted cam­paign to chal­lenge Trump’s loss, an effort still com­ing into focus more than 18 months lat­er. It is the first known exam­ple of a tech­nol­o­gy indus­try titan join­ing pow­er­ful fig­ures in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics, media and law to strate­gize about Trump’s post-loss options and con­fer with an activist group that had already filed four law­suits seek­ing to uncov­er evi­dence of ille­gal vot­ing.

    ...

    It is not clear from the court fil­ings whether Elli­son took part in sub­se­quent calls. But his par­tic­i­pa­tion puz­zled Fred Eshel­man, the major donor to True the Vote who received Englebrecht’s email describ­ing the call. In an email to Engel­brecht two days lat­er, he asked for more infor­ma­tion about Ellison’s involve­ment.

    “Why was he on call with Sen­a­tor Gra­ham? Is he part of data/analysis solu­tion, is he a poten­tial large donor, oth­er?” Eshel­man wrote in a Nov. 16 email to Engel­brecht and Bopp in advance of a planned call among them.

    An Eshel­man asso­ciate said they nev­er got an answer. The lack of clar­i­ty inflamed ten­sions between Eshel­man and True the Vote.
    ...

    Regard­less of the pur­pose of that con­fer­ence call, it’s obvi­ous that Elli­son remains a major con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor with an inter­est in shap­ing the next Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion. And that’s why it’s so inter­est­ing to find Ora­cle’s con­tract to build the Project 2025 data­base. It’s hard to imag­ine Project 2025 actu­al­ly needs Ora­cles data­base ser­vices for what sounds like a triv­ial data­base. Unless, of course, there’s some sort of undis­closed Big Data side-project that involves the cre­ation of mass data­bas­es on, for exam­ple, all US vot­ers. But bar­ring some­thing like that, it’s not at all clear what could legit­i­mate­ly require Ora­cle’s exper­tise.

    It’s also worth keep­ing in mind that if Lar­ry Elli­son is keen­ly inter­est­ed in shap­ing the Repub­li­can Par­ty and influ­enc­ing US elec­tions, it stands to rea­son that Elli­son might also have an inter­est in influ­enc­ing who actu­al­ly gets hired for the thou­sands of fed­er­al jobs at risk of being reas­signed as “polit­i­cal appointees” under the Sched­ule F scheme. So while it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble that Ora­cle’s Project 2025 efforts are sim­ply the next step in Lar­ry Ellison’s influ­ence-ped­dling inside the Repub­li­can Par­ty, don’t for­get that Trump may not be the only Amer­i­can oli­garch with a keen inter­est in stack­ing the gov­ern­ment with as many loy­al­ist cronies as pos­si­ble.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 15, 2023, 7:46 pm
  23. The polit­i­cal the­atrics over the House GOP Jan­u­ary 6 ‘inves­ti­ga­tions’ had an unex­pect­ed twists this week: House Repub­li­cans had a pair of FBI ‘whistle­blow­ers’ — agents Mar­cus Allen and Stephen Friend — sched­uled to tes­ti­fy before Con­gress about the “weaponiza­tion” of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment against con­ser­v­a­tives. Weaponiza­tion against Trump and Trump sup­port­ers in par­tic­u­lar. A day before their tes­ti­monies, the FBI sent a let­ter inform­ing Con­gress that the secu­ri­ty clear­ances for three FBI agents who either took part in Jan 6 or lat­er expressed views that ques­tioned their “alle­giance to the Unit­ed States.” The three agents were Allen, Friend, and agent Brett Gloss, who was actu­al­ly at the Capi­tol among the riot­ers. So two of the GOP’s FBI whistle­blow­ers had their secu­ri­ty clear­ances revoked after ques­tions were raised about their loy­al­ty to the Unit­ed States.

    So what did Friend and Allen say to elic­it these ques­tions about loy­al­ty? In Allen’s case, it sounds like he actu­al­ly sent an email from his bureau account to sev­er­al col­leagues just months after Jan 6 urg­ing them to “exer­cise extreme cau­tion and dis­cre­tion in pur­suit of any inves­tiga­tive inquiries or leads per­tain­ing to the events of” Jan. 6. That’s on top of reports that Allen “expressed sym­pa­thy for per­sons or orga­ni­za­tions that advo­cate, threat­en or use force or vio­lence.”

    Agent Friend straight up refused to par­tic­i­pate in the arrest of Jan 6 par­tic­i­pant, and Three-Per­center, Tyler Ben­sch. In case it’s not clear why author­i­ties might have been inter­est­ed in Ben­sch, he post­ed a video of him­self out­side the Capi­tol wear­ing body armor and a gas mask and car­ry­ing an AR-15-style rifle. Despite that, Friend refused to par­tic­i­pate in his August 24, 2022, arrest. We’re also told that Friend down­loaded doc­u­ments to an unau­tho­rized flash dri­ve in Sep­tem­ber 2022. And yet, despite all that, the revo­ca­tion of his secu­ri­ty clear­ance only hap­pened on Tues­day of this week. That’s part of the con­text of this sto­ry about the revok­ing of these three FBI agents’ secu­ri­ty clear­ances: it was­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly time­ly revo­ca­tions and rather belat­ed in the case of Agent Friend. A belat­ed revo­ca­tion that almost seems like an attempt to avoid the inevitable ques­tion of why Friend had­n’t had his secu­ri­ty clear­ance revoked despite all the red flags Friend had raised over the last year.

    And while this sto­ry is obvi­ous­ly direct­ly relat­ed to the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, it’s also impor­tant to keep in mind the implic­it Sched­ule F‑related angle to this sto­ry. Because when it comes to the upcom­ing GOP Sched­ule F mass purge of fed­er­al employ­ees, it’s going to be the exist­ing employ­ees like Agents Friend, Allen, and Gloss who are most like­ly to be tapped for high lev­el agency posi­tions under the next Repub­li­can White House. They’re the ones demon­strat­ing loy­al­ty to MAGA-land. Hold­ing the view that the US gov­ern­ment as being hope­ful­ly cor­rupt­ed by ‘wok­e­ness’ and at war with con­ser­v­a­tives is going to be one of the chief qual­i­fi­ca­tions for fed­er­al employ­ees when Sched­ule F becomes real­i­ty. And we know the lists of poten­tial job can­di­dates are already being gen­er­at­ed, with the Her­itage Foun­da­tion’s “Project 2025” oper­at­ing with the goal of 20,000 can­di­dates by Jan 2025. What are the odds these three agents aren’t already in Project 2025’s rolodex? So as the House GOP’s Jan 6‑related antics play out, it’s going to be impor­tant to keep in mind that we aren’t just watch­ing an attempt to re-write his­to­ry. We’re also watch­ing a pre­view of Project 2025’s ide­al Sched­ule F can­di­dates to fill key fed­er­al rolls under the next Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion.

    At the same time, it’s also worth not­ing that the sto­ry of these three FBI agents is the most alarm­ing recent sto­ry about extrem­ist sym­pa­thies in US nation­al secu­ri­ty agen­cies. That award goes to the sto­ry of Hatch­et Speed, a Naval reservist with top secret clear­ance who man­aged to main­tain that clear­ance for 18 months fol­low­ing Jan 6 despite being a geno­ci­dal admir­er of Hitler who was plan­ning on car­ry­ing out a cam­paign of kid­nap­ping and mass mur­der with the goal of wip­ing out all the Jews in the Unit­ed States. Yes, Hatch­et Speed, a mem­ber of the Proud Boys who was at the Capi­tol on Jan 6, man­aged to keep his job in the US Navy as a a pet­ty offi­cer first class in the U.S. Naval Reserves and was assigned to the Naval War­fare Space Field Activ­i­ty at the Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office (NRO). A Navy reservist for more than 20 years, Speed is the longest-serv­ing offi­cial in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty to be charged with Jan 6‑related crimes so far. In addi­tion to his role as a Navy reservist, Speed also had a job at Novet­ta, a defense con­trac­tor in the US intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty.

    Why did Speed lose his top secret secu­ri­ty clear­ances? Not Jan 6. No, it was Speed’s refusal to take a COVID vac­cine — mak­ing him deemed unable to per­form his duties — that report­ed­ly result­ed in him get­ting his access to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion cut off in August of 2021. We are told that Speed was giv­en a “dead end” job with no access to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion at the NRO was with the Naval Infor­ma­tion War­fare Sys­tems Com­mand in Octo­ber of 2021, and his enlist­ment con­tract expired in Novem­ber 2022.

    How do we know Speed was plot­ting geno­ci­dal kid­nap­ping and mur­der cam­paigns? Because that’s what he told an under­cov­er FBI agent dur­ing mul­ti­ple meet­ings in 2022, in addi­tion to mak­ing clear to the agent that he felt the US gov­ern­ment was con­trolled by Jews and lib­er­als and mak­ing clear that he want­ed to enlist Chris­tians who would join him in a cam­paign of vio­lence to rid the US of these ene­mies. The forth­right­ness with which Speed shared these view report­ed­ly led the FBI agent to won­der how some­one with such views man­aged to keep a posi­tion with top secret clear­ances.

    Speed was ulti­mate­ly sen­tenced to four years in prison for Jan 6‑related charges, more or less in line with the con­vic­tions giv­en to the oth­er low-lev­el insur­rec­tion­ists there that day. He also got three addi­tion­al years in a sep­a­rate con­vic­tion relat­ed to weapons charges over the three silencers he pur­chased post-Jan 6 as part of a larg­er arse­nal Speed was build­ing at this time. Those charges over the silencers are vir­tu­al­ly the only charges in rela­tion to the kidnapping/genocide plot Speed dis­cussed with the under­cov­er FBI agent last year.

    And this is all, of course, hap­pen­ing at the same time we’re still learn­ing about Jack Teix­eira’s top secret clear­ances as he plot­ted for a race war and mass shoot­ings. It was only 2019 when we learned about Christo­pher Has­son, lieu­tenant in the US Coast Guard plot­ting Nazi-inspired geno­ci­dal mass vio­lence. As the GOP rolls out its nar­ra­tive about a “woke” fed­er­al gov­ern­ment at war with con­sti­tu­tion-lov­ing con­ser­v­a­tives, it’s going to be impor­tant to not for­get about the reg­u­lar­i­ty with which we get these sto­ries about an unad­dressed cri­sis of far right extrem­ists in the mil­i­tary and law enforce­ment. An under-addressed cri­sis that will pre­sum­ably become a Sched­ule F‑fueled exis­ten­tial threat as soon as Jan 2025.

    Ok, first, here’s a NY Times piece look­ing on the FBI’s sur­prise let­ter inform­ing Con­gress that two of the FBI whistle­blow­ers the GOP invit­ed to dis­cuss the “weaponiza­tion” of fed­er­al agen­cies against Trump sup­port­ers had their secu­ri­ty clear­ances revoked over con­cerns about their loy­al­ty to the Unit­ed States. Exact­ly the kind of loy­al­ty con­cerns that will undoubt­ed­ly have future GOP admin­is­tra­tions enam­ored:

    The New York Times

    F.B.I. Revokes Secu­ri­ty Clear­ances of 3 Agents Over Jan. 6 Issues

    At least two of the three agents are sched­uled to tes­ti­fy on Thurs­day to a House pan­el inves­ti­gat­ing what Repub­li­cans con­tend is the “weaponiza­tion” of fed­er­al agen­cies against con­ser­v­a­tives.

    By Alan Feuer
    May 17, 2023

    The Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion has revoked the secu­ri­ty clear­ances of three agents who either took part in the riot at the Capi­tol on Jan. 6, 2021, or lat­er expressed views about it that placed into ques­tion their “alle­giance to the Unit­ed States,” the bureau said on Wednes­day in a let­ter to con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tors.

    The let­ter, writ­ten by a top offi­cial at the F.B.I., came one day before at least two of the agents — Mar­cus Allen and Stephen Friend — were set to tes­ti­fy in front of a House Judi­cia­ry sub­com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing what Repub­li­cans con­tend is the “weaponiza­tion” of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment against con­ser­v­a­tives.

    For sev­er­al months, Repub­li­can law­mak­ers have been court­ing F.B.I. agents who they believe sup­port their con­tentions that the bureau and oth­er fed­er­al agen­cies have been turned against for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump and his sup­port­ers both before and after the Capi­tol attack.

    Some of the agents have come for­ward as self-described whis­tle-blow­ers and tak­en steps like writ­ing a let­ter to the lead­ers of the F.B.I. com­plain­ing about ways in which the bureau has dis­crim­i­nat­ed against con­ser­v­a­tives.

    The agents who had their secu­ri­ty clear­ances revoked — Mr. Allen, Mr. Friend and a third man, Brett Gloss — have all been sus­pend­ed by the F.B.I. as the bureau reviews their cas­es, accord­ing to con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tors.

    ...

    Mr. Gloss’s top-secret clear­ance was revoked two weeks ago after bureau inves­ti­ga­tors deter­mined that while mov­ing with the pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, he entered a restrict­ed area of the Capi­tol grounds — a vio­la­tion of fed­er­al law.

    While he has not been charged with any crimes, Mr. Gloss was found by the F.B.I. to have pro­vid­ed “false and/or mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion” about what he saw on Jan. 6 and about whether he was in a restrict­ed area that day, accord­ing to the let­ter, which was sent to Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Jor­dan, Repub­li­can of Ohio and the chair­man of the weaponiza­tion sub­com­mit­tee, by Christo­pher Dun­ham, the F.B.I.’s act­ing assis­tant direc­tor.

    Mr. Gloss denied wit­ness­ing vio­lence or being in the restrict­ed area at the Capi­tol, but those state­ments were incon­sis­tent with pho­tographs he took on Jan. 6 as well as with pub­licly avail­able videos, the let­ter said. Mr. Gloss also failed to report his pres­ence near the Capi­tol, the let­ter added, even after being warned by one of his super­vi­sors to do so.

    “Mr. Gloss’s refusal to pro­vide full, frank and truth­ful answers to law­ful ques­tions of secu­ri­ty offi­cials in con­nec­tion with a per­son­nel secu­ri­ty or trust­wor­thi­ness deter­mi­na­tion should result in an adverse clear­ance action,” the let­ter said.

    A spokesman for Mr. Jor­dan, Rus­sell Dye, char­ac­ter­ized the F.B.I.’s action as “a des­per­ate attempt to sal­vage their rep­u­ta­tion” that was com­ing “before brave whis­tle-blow­ers tes­ti­fy about the agency’s politi­cized behav­ior and retal­i­a­tion against any­one who dares speak out.”

    Mr. Allen’s top-secret secu­ri­ty clear­ance was revoked after the bureau found that he had “expressed sym­pa­thy for per­sons or orga­ni­za­tions that advo­cate, threat­en or use force or vio­lence,” the let­ter said. F.B.I. inves­ti­ga­tors deter­mined that Mr. Allen had sent an email from his bureau account to sev­er­al col­leagues months after the Capi­tol attack, urg­ing them to “exer­cise extreme cau­tion and dis­cre­tion in pur­suit of any inves­tiga­tive inquiries or leads per­tain­ing to the events of” Jan. 6, the let­ter said.

    Mr. Allen also sent an email link­ing to a web­site stat­ing that “fed­er­al law enforce­ment had some degree of infil­tra­tion among the crowds gath­ered at the Capi­tol,” lead­ing Mr. Allen to com­ment that this sup­posed fact raised “seri­ous con­cerns” about the U.S. government’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the riot.

    F.B.I. inves­ti­ga­tors also found that Mr. Allen, who filed a law­suit against Mr. Wray last year con­test­ing the ini­tial sus­pen­sion of his clear­ance, failed to pro­vide rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion to fel­low agents inves­ti­gat­ing the riot about peo­ple who alleged­ly took part in the attack, the let­ter said.

    The let­ter not­ed that when anoth­er agent asked Mr. Allen to con­duct open source research about a Jan. 6 sus­pect, he report­ed back that he had found no infor­ma­tion that the per­son had engaged in any crim­i­nal activ­i­ty or had any “nexus to ter­ror­ism.”

    Based on Mr. Allen’s reports, the let­ter said, the oth­er agent closed the case, but it was lat­er reopened after a dif­fer­ent F.B.I. employ­ee dis­cov­ered pub­licly avail­able infor­ma­tion show­ing that the tar­get of the inquiry had assault­ed police offi­cers at the Capi­tol.

    Mr. Friend, whose secu­ri­ty clear­ance was revoked on Tues­day, had refused last sum­mer to take part in a SWAT arrest of a Jan. 6 sus­pect who was fac­ing mis­de­meanor charges. Mr. Friend had tak­en the posi­tion that the raid rep­re­sent­ed an exces­sive use of force.

    “I have an oath to uphold the Con­sti­tu­tion,” Mr. Friend, a 12-year vet­er­an of the bureau, told his super­vi­sors when he declined to join the oper­a­tion on Aug. 24 in Jack­sonville, Fla. “I have a moral objec­tion and want to be con­sid­ered a con­sci­en­tious objec­tor.”

    Accord­ing to Jus­tice Depart­ment records, there was only one Jan. 6‑related arrest in the Jack­sonville area on Aug. 24: that of Tyler Ben­sch, who was accused of being a mem­ber of a right-wing mili­tia group con­nect­ed to the Three Per­center move­ment.

    What Mr. Friend omit­ted from his account was that while Mr. Ben­sch was charged with only mis­de­meanors, doc­u­ments in his case say that on Jan. 6, he post­ed a video of him­self out­side the Capi­tol wear­ing body armor and a gas mask and car­ry­ing an AR-15-style rifle. The doc­u­ments also say that wit­ness­es lat­er told the F.B.I. that they had seen pho­tographs of Mr. Ben­sch car­ry­ing a sim­i­lar rifle at oth­er times.

    Accord­ing to the let­ter, Mr. Friend “espoused an alter­na­tive nar­ra­tive about the events at the U.S. Capi­tol” dur­ing his com­mu­ni­ca­tions with his super­vi­sors about refus­ing to par­tic­i­pate in the arrest of Mr. Ben­sch.

    The let­ter also not­ed that in Sep­tem­ber 2022, Mr. Friend down­loaded doc­u­ments from F.B.I. com­put­er sys­tems to “an unau­tho­rized remov­able flash dri­ve.” The let­ter did not spec­i­fy what sorts of doc­u­ments Mr. Friend had tak­en with him.

    ———-

    “F.B.I. Revokes Secu­ri­ty Clear­ances of 3 Agents Over Jan. 6 Issues” by Alan Feuer; The New York Times; 05/17/2023

    “The let­ter, writ­ten by a top offi­cial at the F.B.I., came one day before at least two of the agents — Mar­cus Allen and Stephen Friend — were set to tes­ti­fy in front of a House Judi­cia­ry sub­com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing what Repub­li­cans con­tend is the “weaponiza­tion” of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment against con­ser­v­a­tives.”

    All three FBI ‘whistle­blow­ers’ had their secu­ri­ty clear­ances revoked pend­ing inves­ti­ga­tions. That was the sur­prise notice deliv­ered to con­gress a day before the agents were sched­uled to tes­ti­fy as part of the Repub­li­can Par­ty’s ongo­ing efforts to por­tray Jan­u­ary 6 as a gov­ern­ment plot tar­get­ing con­ser­v­a­tives. Brett Gloss lied about being in the Capi­tol on Jan 6. Mar­cus Allen sent let­ters to agents encour­ag­ing them to “exer­cise extreme cau­tion and dis­cre­tion in pur­suit of any inves­tiga­tive inquiries or leads per­tain­ing to the events of” Jan. 6. And Stephen Friend not only refused to par­tic­i­pate in the arrest of a Jan 6 par­tic­i­pant last sum­mer but he also appar­ent­ly down­loaded a num­ber of doc­u­ments to “an unau­tho­rized remov­able flash dri­ve” months lat­er in Sep­tem­ber 2022. Those all seem like pret­ty rea­son­able rea­sons to sus­pend their secu­ri­ty clear­ances con­sid­er­ing the cir­cum­stances:

    ...
    The agents who had their secu­ri­ty clear­ances revoked — Mr. Allen, Mr. Friend and a third man, Brett Gloss — have all been sus­pend­ed by the F.B.I. as the bureau reviews their cas­es, accord­ing to con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tors.

    ...

    While he has not been charged with any crimes, Mr. Gloss was found by the F.B.I. to have pro­vid­ed “false and/or mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion” about what he saw on Jan. 6 and about whether he was in a restrict­ed area that day, accord­ing to the let­ter, which was sent to Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Jor­dan, Repub­li­can of Ohio and the chair­man of the weaponiza­tion sub­com­mit­tee, by Christo­pher Dun­ham, the F.B.I.’s act­ing assis­tant direc­tor.

    Mr. Gloss denied wit­ness­ing vio­lence or being in the restrict­ed area at the Capi­tol, but those state­ments were incon­sis­tent with pho­tographs he took on Jan. 6 as well as with pub­licly avail­able videos, the let­ter said. Mr. Gloss also failed to report his pres­ence near the Capi­tol, the let­ter added, even after being warned by one of his super­vi­sors to do so.

    ...

    Mr. Allen’s top-secret secu­ri­ty clear­ance was revoked after the bureau found that he had “expressed sym­pa­thy for per­sons or orga­ni­za­tions that advo­cate, threat­en or use force or vio­lence,” the let­ter said. F.B.I. inves­ti­ga­tors deter­mined that Mr. Allen had sent an email from his bureau account to sev­er­al col­leagues months after the Capi­tol attack, urg­ing them to “exer­cise extreme cau­tion and dis­cre­tion in pur­suit of any inves­tiga­tive inquiries or leads per­tain­ing to the events of” Jan. 6, the let­ter said.

    ...

    Mr. Friend, whose secu­ri­ty clear­ance was revoked on Tues­day, had refused last sum­mer to take part in a SWAT arrest of a Jan. 6 sus­pect who was fac­ing mis­de­meanor charges. Mr. Friend had tak­en the posi­tion that the raid rep­re­sent­ed an exces­sive use of force.

    ...

    What Mr. Friend omit­ted from his account was that while Mr. Ben­sch was charged with only mis­de­meanors, doc­u­ments in his case say that on Jan. 6, he post­ed a video of him­self out­side the Capi­tol wear­ing body armor and a gas mask and car­ry­ing an AR-15-style rifle. The doc­u­ments also say that wit­ness­es lat­er told the F.B.I. that they had seen pho­tographs of Mr. Ben­sch car­ry­ing a sim­i­lar rifle at oth­er times.

    Accord­ing to the let­ter, Mr. Friend “espoused an alter­na­tive nar­ra­tive about the events at the U.S. Capi­tol” dur­ing his com­mu­ni­ca­tions with his super­vi­sors about refus­ing to par­tic­i­pate in the arrest of Mr. Ben­sch.

    The let­ter also not­ed that in Sep­tem­ber 2022, Mr. Friend down­loaded doc­u­ments from F.B.I. com­put­er sys­tems to “an unau­tho­rized remov­able flash dri­ve.” The let­ter did not spec­i­fy what sorts of doc­u­ments Mr. Friend had tak­en with him.
    ...

    So assum­ing these charges pan out, it appears the FBI had rea­son for sus­pend­ing their secu­ri­ty clear­ances. The still-unan­swered ques­tion is when exact­ly did these clear­ances ulti­mate­ly get revoked? Was it short­ly after the FBI dis­cov­ered these vio­la­tions? Or short­ly before the three agents were sched­uled to tes­ti­fy? In the case of Agent Friend, it sounds like the revo­ca­tion took place just a cou­ple of days ago. Bet­ter late than nev­er, assum­ing there was a real secu­ri­ty issue. Still, the fact that Friend only had his secu­ri­ty clear­ance revoked this week for refus­ing to par­tic­i­pate in a raid last sum­mer and lat­er down­load­ing files to an unau­tho­rized flash dri­ve fur­ther rais­es the ques­tion of why did the FBI allow Friend to keep his clear­ances at all?

    And that brings us to the inves­ti­ga­tion of anoth­er Jan 6 fig­ure who man­aged to main­tain a top secret secu­ri­ty clear­ance for 18 months fol­low­ing Jan 6 despite being a geno­ci­dal admir­er of Hitler who was plan­ning on car­ry­ing out a cam­paign of kid­nap­ping and mass mur­der with the goal of wip­ing out all the Jews in the Unit­ed States. Yes, Hatch­et Speed, a mem­ber of the Proud Boys who was at the Capi­tol on Jan 6, man­aged to keep his job in the US Navy as a a pet­ty offi­cer first class in the U.S. Naval Reserves and was assigned to the Naval War­fare Space Field Activ­i­ty at the Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office (NRO). A Navy reservist for more than 20 years, Speed is the longest-serv­ing offi­cial in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty to be charged with Jan 6‑related crimes so far. In addi­tion to his role as a Navy reservist, Speed also had a job at Novet­ta, a defense con­trac­tor in the US intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty.

    So why did Speed lose his top secret secu­ri­ty clear­ances? Not Jan 6. No, it was Speed’s refusal to take a COVID vac­cine — mak­ing him deemed unable to per­form his duties — that report­ed­ly result­ed in him get­ting his access to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion cut off in August of 2021. We are told that Speed was giv­en a “dead end” job with no access to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion at the NRO was with the Naval Infor­ma­tion War­fare Sys­tems Com­mand in Octo­ber of 2021, and his enlist­ment con­tract expired in Novem­ber 2022.

    So how do know Speed was plot­ting geno­ci­dal kid­nap­ping and mur­der cam­paigns? Because that’s what he told an under­cov­er FBI agent dur­ing mul­ti­ple meet­ings in 2022, in addi­tion to mak­ing clear to the agent that he felt the US gov­ern­ment was con­trolled by Jews and lib­er­als and mak­ing clear that he want­ed to enlist Chris­tians who would join him in a cam­paign of vio­lence to rid the US of these ene­mies. The forth­right­ness with which Speed shared these view report­ed­ly led the FBI agent to won­der how some­one with such views man­aged to keep a posi­tion with top secret clear­ances.

    Speed was ulti­mate­ly sen­tenced to four years in prison for Jan 6‑related charges, more or less in line with the con­vic­tions giv­en to the oth­er low-lev­el insur­rec­tion­ists there that day. He also got three addi­tion­al years in a sep­a­rate con­vic­tion relat­ed to weapons charges over the three silencers he pur­chased post-Jan 6 as part of a larg­er arse­nal Speed was build­ing at this time. Those charges over the silencers are vir­tu­al­ly the only charges in rela­tion to the kidnapping/genocide plot Speed dis­cussed with the under­cov­er FBI agent last year.

    So as the polit­i­cal fight­ing over the three FBI Jan 6 ‘whistle­blow­ers’ con­tin­ues to play out, it’s going to be worth keep­ing in mind that the longest-serv­ing offi­cial in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty to be charged with Jan 6‑related crimes so far man­aged to keep his top secret secu­ri­ty clear­ances for 18 months fol­low­ing Jan 6 and did­n’t even ulti­mate­ly lose that clear­ance over Jan 6 but instead the COVID vac­cine. A despite being a Nazi:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Vet­er­an ‘enam­ored’ with Hitler gets 4 years for Capi­tol riot

    By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN
    Mon­day May 8 2023, 14:41:04 CST

    A mil­i­tary vet­er­an who told an under­cov­er FBI agent about his admi­ra­tion for Adolf Hitler and dis­cussed a plan to “wipe out” the nation’s Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion was sen­tenced on Mon­day to four years in prison for storm­ing the U.S. Capi­tol.

    U.S. Dis­trict Judge Trevor McFad­den ordered Vir­ginia res­i­dent Hatch­et Speed to serve the four-year sen­tence after he com­pletes a sep­a­rate three-year prison term for a con­vic­tion on firearms offens­es, court records show.

    The FBI record­ed Speed’s con­ver­sa­tions with the under­cov­er agent more than a year after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capi­tol. The agent posed as “a like-mind­ed indi­vid­ual” while meet­ing with Speed at least three times in 2022.

    Speed, 41, was “deeply wor­ried” about Demo­c­rat Joe Biden’s pres­i­den­cy and believed false claims that the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion had been stolen from Don­ald Trump, the Repub­li­can incum­bent, pros­e­cu­tors wrote in a court fil­ing. He told the under­cov­er agent that he believes Jew­ish peo­ple con­trol Biden.

    Speed expressed his admi­ra­tion for Hitler dur­ing the record­ed con­ver­sa­tion, call­ing him “one of the best peo­ple that’s ever been on this earth.” He also “out­lined a plan to enlist Chris­tians to wipe out the country’s entire Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion,” pros­e­cu­tors said in a court fil­ing.

    “It is not clear why this mil­i­tary vet­er­an with a (secu­ri­ty) clear­ance became enam­ored with Hitler, began to embrace street fight­ing, and call for the exe­cu­tion of the country’s entire Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion,” pros­e­cu­tors wrote. “What is clear, though, is that this defen­dant com­mit­ted a seri­ous offense and con­tin­ues to threat­en the safe­ty of the com­mu­ni­ty, pos­ing a seri­ous dan­ger.”

    McFad­den heard tri­al tes­ti­mo­ny with­out a jury before con­vict­ing Speed of all five charges in his indict­ment, includ­ing a felony count of obstruct­ing the Jan. 6 joint ses­sion of Con­gress for cer­ti­fy­ing the Elec­toral Col­lege vote. The judge also con­vict­ed Speed of four mis­de­meanors.

    Speed’ four-year sen­tence matched the prison term rec­om­mend­ed by pros­e­cu­tors. McFad­den also sen­tenced Speed to three years of super­vised release after his prison term and ordered him to pay a $10,000 fine plus $2,000 in resti­tu­tion.

    The under­cov­er agent tes­ti­fied under a pseu­do­nym at a sep­a­rate tri­al for Speed in Vir­ginia on gun charges. After a retri­al in Jan­u­ary, a jury con­vict­ed Speed of three counts of unlaw­ful pos­ses­sion of an unreg­is­tered firearm silencer. In April, U.S. Dis­trict Judge Michael Nach­manoff sen­tenced Speed to three years in prison.

    Speed was a mem­ber of the Proud Boys, join­ing the far-right extrem­ist group in 2020, accord­ing to pros­e­cu­tors. He also was a pet­ty offi­cer first class in the U.S. Naval Reserves and was assigned to the Naval War­fare Space Field Activ­i­ty at the Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office, the FBI said.

    The Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office oper­ates U.S. spy satel­lites used by the Pen­ta­gon and intel­li­gence agen­cies. The agency said Speed was not part of the reserve unit at the time of the Capi­tol riot.

    On Jan. 6, Speed drove to Wash­ing­ton, D.C, from his home in Vien­na, Vir­ginia. After attend­ing the “Stop the Steal” ral­ly, where Trump addressed a crowd of sup­port­ers, Speed joined oth­er Proud Boys in march­ing to the Capi­tol.

    Around 3 p.m., Speed entered the build­ing through a door to the Sen­ate wing of the Capi­tol after oth­er riot­ers breached it. He remained inside the Capi­tol for rough­ly 40 min­utes.

    ...

    Speed’s con­duct on Jan. 6 ”was one step on a dis­turb­ing path toward racial­ly moti­vat­ed crim­i­nal con­duct — that ulti­mate­ly fea­tured plans for the kid­nap­ping and mass mur­der of civil­ians,” pros­e­cu­tors wrote.

    ———–

    “Vet­er­an ‘enam­ored’ with Hitler gets 4 years for Capi­tol riot” by MICHAEL KUNZELMAN; Asso­ci­at­ed Press; 05/08/2023

    “Speed’s con­duct on Jan. 6 ”was one step on a dis­turb­ing path toward racial­ly moti­vat­ed crim­i­nal con­duct — that ulti­mate­ly fea­tured plans for the kid­nap­ping and mass mur­der of civil­ians,” pros­e­cu­tors wrote.

    Kid­nap­pings and mass mur­ders of his per­ceived polit­i­cal oppo­nents. Those were the plans Hatch­et Speed was devel­op­ing after Jan­u­ary 6. Plans he was mak­ing while still serv­ing as a pet­ty offi­cer first class in the US Navy and after get­ting assigned to the Naval War­fare Space Field Activ­i­ty at the Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office:

    ...
    Speed was a mem­ber of the Proud Boys, join­ing the far-right extrem­ist group in 2020, accord­ing to pros­e­cu­tors. He also was a pet­ty offi­cer first class in the U.S. Naval Reserves and was assigned to the Naval War­fare Space Field Activ­i­ty at the Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office, the FBI said.

    The Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office oper­ates U.S. spy satel­lites used by the Pen­ta­gon and intel­li­gence agen­cies. The agency said Speed was not part of the reserve unit at the time of the Capi­tol riot.

    On Jan. 6, Speed drove to Wash­ing­ton, D.C, from his home in Vien­na, Vir­ginia. After attend­ing the “Stop the Steal” ral­ly, where Trump addressed a crowd of sup­port­ers, Speed joined oth­er Proud Boys in march­ing to the Capi­tol.

    Around 3 p.m., Speed entered the build­ing through a door to the Sen­ate wing of the Capi­tol after oth­er riot­ers breached it. He remained inside the Capi­tol for rough­ly 40 min­utes.
    ...

    Speed even kept his posi­tion at the NRO despite the FBI open­ing an under­cov­er inves­ti­ga­tion into Speed where he expressed his desire to wipe out the entire US Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion:

    ...
    The FBI record­ed Speed’s con­ver­sa­tions with the under­cov­er agent more than a year after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capi­tol. The agent posed as “a like-mind­ed indi­vid­ual” while meet­ing with Speed at least three times in 2022.

    Speed, 41, was “deeply wor­ried” about Demo­c­rat Joe Biden’s pres­i­den­cy and believed false claims that the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion had been stolen from Don­ald Trump, the Repub­li­can incum­bent, pros­e­cu­tors wrote in a court fil­ing. He told the under­cov­er agent that he believes Jew­ish peo­ple con­trol Biden.

    Speed expressed his admi­ra­tion for Hitler dur­ing the record­ed con­ver­sa­tion, call­ing him “one of the best peo­ple that’s ever been on this earth.” He also “out­lined a plan to enlist Chris­tians to wipe out the country’s entire Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion,” pros­e­cu­tors said in a court fil­ing.

    “It is not clear why this mil­i­tary vet­er­an with a (secu­ri­ty) clear­ance became enam­ored with Hitler, began to embrace street fight­ing, and call for the exe­cu­tion of the country’s entire Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion,” pros­e­cu­tors wrote. “What is clear, though, is that this defen­dant com­mit­ted a seri­ous offense and con­tin­ues to threat­en the safe­ty of the com­mu­ni­ty, pos­ing a seri­ous dan­ger.”
    ...

    And as we’re going to see in the fol­low­ing Inter­cept piece by James Risen from back in March — weeks before the Jack Teix­eira leaks made the news — it’s not sim­ply the case that Speed man­aged to keep his Naval intel­li­gence job despite being a geno­ci­dal Nazi. It turns out that the under­cov­er FBI agen­t’s inves­ti­ga­tion into Speed that doc­u­ment­ed all of this geno­ci­dal intent and ties to the Proud Boys did­n’t actu­al­ly change the charges Speed faces in rela­tion to Jan 6. Instead, he’s fac­ing charges in Vir­ginia over his ille­gal pur­chase of silencers. That appears to be the extent of the addi­tion­al charges brought as a result of the under­cov­er FBI inves­ti­ga­tion that revealed Speed’s geno­ci­dal plans:

    The Inter­cept

    Pen­ta­gon Ana­lyst Kept Intel Job After Join­ing Jan. 6 Mob, Planned to Kid­nap Jew­ish Lead­ers
    Hatch­et Speed built a career as a Belt­way con­trac­tor and Navy reservist while prais­ing Putin and Hitler.

    James Risen
    March 13 2023, 12:48 p.m.

    In 2018, a new­ly hired soft­ware engi­neer at a defense and intel­li­gence con­trac­tor in the Wash­ing­ton, D.C., sub­urbs was assigned to a team led by a senior devel­op­er named Hatch­et Speed.

    At first, the new engi­neer, Richard Ngo, got along well with Speed. They some­times went out to lunch togeth­er and social­ized away from the office. “Speed was my men­tor at Novet­ta as the soft­ware lead,” Ngo lat­er said in court tes­ti­mo­ny. “We worked togeth­er every day.”

    But after the insur­rec­tion at the U.S. Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6, 2021, Ngo noticed that Speed, a long­time Navy reservist who had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as an intel­li­gence ana­lyst and held oth­er sen­si­tive cyber and intel­li­gence posts in con­nec­tion with Naval Spe­cial War­fare units, seemed to be chang­ing. Ngo had always known that Speed was a gun enthu­si­ast, but after the Capi­tol riot, he became more open­ly anti-gov­ern­ment than he had ever been before. “He was just frus­trat­ed with just how every­thing was going,” Ngo tes­ti­fied, adding that Speed was “pan­ic-buy­ing” guns.

    What Ngo didn’t real­ize was that Speed, who had legal­ly changed his first name from Daniel to Hatch­et in 2007, accord­ing to Utah court records, had been an apoc­a­lyp­tic far-right extrem­ist long before Jan­u­ary 6.

    In fact, Hatch­et Speed was a self-described mem­ber of the Proud Boys work­ing deep inside the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. He joined oth­er Proud Boys mem­bers to storm the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6, but he got away unde­tect­ed and con­tin­ued to work in sen­si­tive jobs in the months after the insur­rec­tion, even as he amassed a huge arse­nal of weapons and began to think about kid­nap­ping Jew­ish lead­ers and oth­ers he con­sid­ered an exis­ten­tial threat. He wasn’t arrest­ed until 18 months after the insur­rec­tion, and no inves­ti­ga­tion has been con­duct­ed to deter­mine whether he com­pro­mised clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion, a Navy spokesper­son said. Offi­cials at the Office of the Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence declined to com­ment on any pos­si­ble dam­age to U.S. intel­li­gence result­ing from Speed’s decades­long access to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion.

    A spokesper­son for Accen­ture Fed­er­al Ser­vices, which now owns Speed’s for­mer employ­er, Novet­ta, and which has clas­si­fied con­tracts with the Defense Depart­ment and the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, includ­ing U.S. Cyber Com­mand, did not respond to requests for com­ment.

    Final­ly, more than a year after the Capi­tol riot, the FBI launched an inves­ti­ga­tion of Speed. The Bureau of Alco­hol, Tobac­co, Firearms, and Explo­sives was also involved, which sug­gests that records of Speed’s mas­sive weapons pur­chas­es and his efforts to acquire unreg­is­tered silencers in the imme­di­ate after­math of Jan­u­ary 6 may have prompt­ed the inquiry. In Feb­ru­ary 2022, an under­cov­er FBI agent pos­ing as a like-mind­ed, right-wing gun enthu­si­ast began meet­ing with Speed. That March, the Navy, aware of the FBI inves­ti­ga­tion, removed Speed’s access to sen­si­tive Navy facil­i­ties and gave him what amount­ed to a fake job with Naval War­fare Space Field Activ­i­ty at the Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office, the agency that devel­ops America’s spy satel­lites. Speed, who pre­vi­ous­ly held a Top Secret/Sensitive Com­part­ment­ed Infor­ma­tion clear­ance, was not giv­en access to NRO’s build­ings nor its sys­tems, a spokesper­son for the NRO said. In addi­tion to the FBI probe, Speed was also under inves­ti­ga­tion for two per­son­nel-relat­ed cas­es with­in the Navy, a spokesper­son said.

    Speed was thus kept away from sen­si­tive work while the FBI inves­ti­ga­tion was under­way, until his arrest in June 2022. Yet Speed’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Jan­u­ary 6 assault on the Capi­tol, and his abil­i­ty to avoid detec­tion for so long despite a series of red flags, are part of a dis­turb­ing pat­tern. Three active-duty Marines were giv­en new intel­li­gence assign­ments even after they were involved in the Jan­u­ary 6 mob, The Inter­cept report­ed in Feb­ru­ary, includ­ing one who was reas­signed to work inside the head­quar­ters of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency at Fort Meade, Mary­land. The three Marines were final­ly arrest­ed two years after they stormed the Capi­tol.

    Speed, 41, has been con­vict­ed in two sep­a­rate tri­als on charges stem­ming from his extrem­ism. In Jan­u­ary, a fed­er­al jury in Vir­ginia found him guilty on weapons charges for ille­gal­ly pur­chas­ing three silencers as part of a $50,000 weapons-buy­ing spree in the months after Jan­u­ary 6. And last week, in a bench tri­al in fed­er­al court in Wash­ing­ton, Judge Trevor McFad­den found Speed guilty of charges stem­ming from his activ­i­ties on Jan­u­ary 6. He will be sen­tenced lat­er this spring.

    ...

    Speed’s case is sig­nif­i­cant because he is the longest-serv­ing offi­cial in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty to be charged so far in con­nec­tion with Jan­u­ary 6. A Navy reservist for more than 20 years, with a bachelor’s degree in applied physics with an empha­sis in com­put­er sci­ence from Brigham Young Uni­ver­si­ty, Speed served as a cryp­to­log­ic tech­ni­cian and intel­li­gence ana­lyst in the Navy reserves. He deployed to Iraq in 2009 and Afghanistan in 2011, and held oth­er sen­si­tive cyber and intel­li­gence posts in con­nec­tion with Naval Spe­cial War­fare units, which include the Navy SEALs. His last role before being sent to the dead-end posi­tion at the NRO was with the Naval Infor­ma­tion War­fare Sys­tems Com­mand, where he was assigned in Octo­ber 2021. Pri­or to that, he had been assigned to the Naval Crim­i­nal Inves­tiga­tive Ser­vice head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton. The Navy says that Speed was cut off from access to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion begin­ning in August 2021, when he was unable to per­form his duties because he had refused to com­ply with the U.S. military’s Covid-19 vac­ci­na­tion man­date. His enlist­ment con­tract expired in Novem­ber 2022, and he is now being processed out of the Navy reserves, accord­ing to a Navy spokesper­son. In a pub­lic state­ment, the Navy said that it “does not and will not tol­er­ate suprema­cist or extrem­ist con­duct.”

    Mean­while, Speed’s job at Novet­ta placed him in the north­ern Vir­ginia hub of the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty; when Speed worked there, the com­pa­ny had offices near the head­quar­ters of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, the Office of the Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence, the Nation­al Coun­tert­er­ror­ism Cen­ter, the NRO, and the Pen­ta­gon. When it acquired Novet­ta in 2021, Accen­ture described it as a firm that “applies dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies includ­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, machine learn­ing, cyber, cloud and infor­ma­tion exploita­tion to trans­form how defense, intel­li­gence and law enforce­ment orga­ni­za­tions use data to bet­ter meet their mis­sions.”

    Speed’s abil­i­ty to build a career in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty while align­ing him­self with the Proud Boys rais­es ques­tions about whether mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence offi­cials are con­tin­u­ing to turn a blind eye to far-right extrem­ism in their ranks, despite Pen­ta­gon orders to root it out.

    Speed joined with “100 of us Proud Boys” at a pro-Trump ral­ly in Wash­ing­ton in Novem­ber 2020 to protest the out­come of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, he told the under­cov­er FBI agent. On Jan­u­ary 6, he went to the Capi­tol with oth­er Proud Boys, not­ing that doing so “was always the plan,” but he only decid­ed to enter the build­ing when he heard from oth­ers out­side that Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence was cer­ti­fy­ing Joe Biden’s elec­tion, which Speed saw as a betray­al. “It was like, I’m going in there,” he told the under­cov­er agent, accord­ing to court records. “Like, I have no respect for peo­ple in this build­ing. They have no respect for me, I have no respect for them.” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tar­rio and four oth­er top mem­bers of the group have been charged with sedi­tious con­spir­a­cy and are cur­rent­ly on tri­al in Wash­ing­ton.

    Speed met eight times with the FBI under­cov­er agent, who secret­ly record­ed their con­ver­sa­tions. Begin­ning at a Star­bucks near his home in Vien­na, Vir­ginia, in Feb­ru­ary 2022, Speed expressed such vir­u­lent­ly anti­se­mit­ic, racist, and geno­ci­dal views that it is dif­fi­cult to under­stand how he could have remained in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty for so long with­out draw­ing more scruti­ny. Speed expressed admi­ra­tion for Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin, even after Putin invad­ed Ukraine. He told the FBI agent that he “would love to see [Putin] just real­ly be the leader that the world needs right now,” but that might not hap­pen because “he has a lot of Jews around him who advise him,” accord­ing to court records.

    Speed spoke forth­right­ly about his belief that vio­lence would be required to retake Amer­i­ca from the con­trol of Jews and lib­er­als. He told the FBI agent that he want­ed to kid­nap Jew­ish lead­ers, includ­ing bil­lion­aire phil­an­thropist George Soros and lead­ers of the Anti-Defama­tion League, who he blamed for cre­at­ing the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment. Dur­ing one con­ver­sa­tion, Speed said, “Jews for some rea­son love gang rap­ing peo­ple. It doesn’t mat­ter what they are doing, they always have time to gang rape … white girls.” He described Hitler as “one of the best peo­ple that’s ever been on this earth,” accord­ing to court doc­u­ments, adding that he want­ed “some­body like Hitler to stand up and say we’re going to stand against this moral incin­er­a­tion.”

    “I’m look­ing for peo­ple who are will­ing to say how do we do some­thing more than just com­plain­ing on Telegram, which I’m guilty of. I scroll through Telegram way too much. But you know, what do we do in the real world to make some­thing real­ly hap­pen?” Speed asked the under­cov­er agent at one point.

    The lead­ers of the Anti-Defama­tion League drew Speed’s ire because “they spend all their time push­ing for laws like this anti-lynch­ing law that Biden just signed,” he said. The ADL was push­ing anti-lynch­ing leg­is­la­tion because “they know things are going to get bad enough that peo­ple like us are going to band togeth­er and straight up start lynch­ing peo­ple.”

    When it came to choos­ing kid­nap­ping tar­gets, Speed told the under­cov­er agent, he planned to go after “peo­ple that are actu­al­ly reach­able by some­one like me. Peo­ple who don’t have body­guards.”

    At about the same time he began meet­ing with the under­cov­er agent in ear­ly 2022, Speed quit his job at Novet­ta. He had always thought of him­self as a good patri­ot because he worked for the gov­ern­ment, he told the under­cov­er agent, but he no longer saw it that way and had come to believe that he was “lend­ing his skill set to evil.” In March 2022, Speed admit­ted to the under­cov­er agent that he had gone to the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6 with oth­er Proud Boys and then entered the build­ing, mak­ing it to the Rotun­da.

    But the intense under­cov­er inves­ti­ga­tion by the FBI — dur­ing which Speed revealed his apoc­a­lyp­tic views, his will­ing­ness to engage in anti­se­mit­ic car­nage, and his ties to the Proud Boys — did not lead to expan­sive charges against him. The weapons case in Vir­ginia was lim­it­ed to straight­for­ward charges relat­ed to his pur­chase of unreg­is­tered silencers; the Jan­u­ary 6 charges were sim­i­lar to those brought against many oth­er rank-and-file intrud­ers in the Capi­tol attack. He was found guilty of felony and mis­de­meanor charges includ­ing obstruc­tion of an offi­cial pro­ceed­ing; enter­ing and remain­ing in a restrict­ed build­ing; dis­or­der­ly and dis­rup­tive con­duct in a restrict­ed build­ing; dis­or­der­ly con­duct in a Capi­tol build­ing; and parad­ing, demon­strat­ing, or pick­et­ing in a Capi­tol build­ing. The fact that the gov­ern­ment gath­ered so much evi­dence of Speed’s inter­est in becom­ing a domes­tic ter­ror­ist but then only brought rel­a­tive­ly mod­est charges against him con­trasts stark­ly with the much more aggres­sive pros­e­cu­tions faced by Mus­lim Amer­i­can defen­dants caught up in sim­i­lar under­cov­er oper­a­tions in coun­tert­er­ror­ism cas­es brought in the years after Sep­tem­ber 11.

    But per­haps the great­est irony in Speed’s case came dur­ing the tri­al on the Jan­u­ary 6 charges. In the case in the U.S. Dis­trict Court for the Dis­trict of Colum­bia, Speed was rep­re­sent­ed by pub­lic defend­ers: two Black women.

    ———–

    “Pen­ta­gon Ana­lyst Kept Intel Job After Join­ing Jan. 6 Mob, Planned to Kid­nap Jew­ish Lead­ers” by James Risen; The Inter­cept; 03/13/2023

    “In fact, Hatch­et Speed was a self-described mem­ber of the Proud Boys work­ing deep inside the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. He joined oth­er Proud Boys mem­bers to storm the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6, but he got away unde­tect­ed and con­tin­ued to work in sen­si­tive jobs in the months after the insur­rec­tion, even as he amassed a huge arse­nal of weapons and began to think about kid­nap­ping Jew­ish lead­ers and oth­ers he con­sid­ered an exis­ten­tial threat. He wasn’t arrest­ed until 18 months after the insur­rec­tion, and no inves­ti­ga­tion has been con­duct­ed to deter­mine whether he com­pro­mised clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion, a Navy spokesper­son said. Offi­cials at the Office of the Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence declined to com­ment on any pos­si­ble dam­age to U.S. intel­li­gence result­ing from Speed’s decades­long access to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion.”

    He was­n’t just plot­ting the kid­nap­pings and mass mur­der of Jew­ish lead­ers and oth­ers Speed con­sid­ered an exis­ten­tial threat. He was amass­ing an arse­nal too. And, again, this was all after Jan­u­ary 6. It was only 18 months after the insur­rec­tion that Speed was final­ly arrest­ed. And yet, is sounds like no inves­ti­ga­tion had been con­duct­ed — as of March — to deter­mine whether or not Speed com­pro­mised clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion. It’s worth keep­ing in mind that this arti­cle was writ­ten sev­er­al weeks before the sto­ry of Jack Teix­eira’s Dis­cord leaks and far right ide­ol­o­gy became pub­lic.

    We are told that the Navy did indeed respond to the FBI’s inves­ti­ga­tion into Speed in March of 2022 by assign­ing Speed to what amount­ed to a fake job with the Naval War­fare Space Field Activ­i­ty at the Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office in a posi­tion that did­n’t give Speed access to the NRO’s clas­si­fied sys­tems. That denial of access to clas­si­fied data appar­ent­ly came despite the fact that Speed pre­vi­ous­ly held a Top Secret/Sensitive Com­part­ment­ed Infor­ma­tion clear­ance. That NRO assign­ment in March of 2022 was­n’t the first reas­sign­ment Speed got after Jan 6. He was assign to the Naval Infor­ma­tion War­fare sys­tems com­mand in Octo­ber 2021 in a posi­tion that is not described as a dead end role and yet the Navy still tells us that Speed was cut off from access to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion in August of 2021 after refus­ing to com­ply with the mil­i­tary’s COVID vac­cine man­date. So while Speed did even­tu­al­ly lose his top secret clear­ance 18 months after Jan 6, it was­n’t even for any­thing relat­ed to Jan 6. Inter­est­ing­ly, it sounds like he was assigned to a role at the Naval Crim­i­nal Inves­tiga­tive Ser­vice head­quar­ters in DC at this time:

    ...
    A spokesper­son for Accen­ture Fed­er­al Ser­vices, which now owns Speed’s for­mer employ­er, Novet­ta, and which has clas­si­fied con­tracts with the Defense Depart­ment and the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, includ­ing U.S. Cyber Com­mand, did not respond to requests for com­ment.

    Final­ly, more than a year after the Capi­tol riot, the FBI launched an inves­ti­ga­tion of Speed. The Bureau of Alco­hol, Tobac­co, Firearms, and Explo­sives was also involved, which sug­gests that records of Speed’s mas­sive weapons pur­chas­es and his efforts to acquire unreg­is­tered silencers in the imme­di­ate after­math of Jan­u­ary 6 may have prompt­ed the inquiry. In Feb­ru­ary 2022, an under­cov­er FBI agent pos­ing as a like-mind­ed, right-wing gun enthu­si­ast began meet­ing with Speed. That March, the Navy, aware of the FBI inves­ti­ga­tion, removed Speed’s access to sen­si­tive Navy facil­i­ties and gave him what amount­ed to a fake job with Naval War­fare Space Field Activ­i­ty at the Nation­al Recon­nais­sance Office, the agency that devel­ops America’s spy satel­lites. Speed, who pre­vi­ous­ly held a Top Secret/Sensitive Com­part­ment­ed Infor­ma­tion clear­ance, was not giv­en access to NRO’s build­ings nor its sys­tems, a spokesper­son for the NRO said. In addi­tion to the FBI probe, Speed was also under inves­ti­ga­tion for two per­son­nel-relat­ed cas­es with­in the Navy, a spokesper­son said.

    Speed was thus kept away from sen­si­tive work while the FBI inves­ti­ga­tion was under­way, until his arrest in June 2022. Yet Speed’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Jan­u­ary 6 assault on the Capi­tol, and his abil­i­ty to avoid detec­tion for so long despite a series of red flags, are part of a dis­turb­ing pat­tern. Three active-duty Marines were giv­en new intel­li­gence assign­ments even after they were involved in the Jan­u­ary 6 mob, The Inter­cept report­ed in Feb­ru­ary, includ­ing one who was reas­signed to work inside the head­quar­ters of the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency at Fort Meade, Mary­land. The three Marines were final­ly arrest­ed two years after they stormed the Capi­tol.

    ...

    Speed’s case is sig­nif­i­cant because he is the longest-serv­ing offi­cial in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty to be charged so far in con­nec­tion with Jan­u­ary 6. A Navy reservist for more than 20 years, with a bachelor’s degree in applied physics with an empha­sis in com­put­er sci­ence from Brigham Young Uni­ver­si­ty, Speed served as a cryp­to­log­ic tech­ni­cian and intel­li­gence ana­lyst in the Navy reserves. He deployed to Iraq in 2009 and Afghanistan in 2011, and held oth­er sen­si­tive cyber and intel­li­gence posts in con­nec­tion with Naval Spe­cial War­fare units, which include the Navy SEALs. His last role before being sent to the dead-end posi­tion at the NRO was with the Naval Infor­ma­tion War­fare Sys­tems Com­mand, where he was assigned in Octo­ber 2021. Pri­or to that, he had been assigned to the Naval Crim­i­nal Inves­tiga­tive Ser­vice head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton. The Navy says that Speed was cut off from access to clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion begin­ning in August 2021, when he was unable to per­form his duties because he had refused to com­ply with the U.S. military’s Covid-19 vac­ci­na­tion man­date. His enlist­ment con­tract expired in Novem­ber 2022, and he is now being processed out of the Navy reserves, accord­ing to a Navy spokesper­son. In a pub­lic state­ment, the Navy said that it “does not and will not tol­er­ate suprema­cist or extrem­ist con­duct.”

    Mean­while, Speed’s job at Novet­ta placed him in the north­ern Vir­ginia hub of the U.S. intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty; when Speed worked there, the com­pa­ny had offices near the head­quar­ters of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, the Office of the Direc­tor of Nation­al Intel­li­gence, the Nation­al Coun­tert­er­ror­ism Cen­ter, the NRO, and the Pen­ta­gon. When it acquired Novet­ta in 2021, Accen­ture described it as a firm that “applies dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies includ­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, machine learn­ing, cyber, cloud and infor­ma­tion exploita­tion to trans­form how defense, intel­li­gence and law enforce­ment orga­ni­za­tions use data to bet­ter meet their mis­sions.”

    Speed’s abil­i­ty to build a career in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty while align­ing him­self with the Proud Boys rais­es ques­tions about whether mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence offi­cials are con­tin­u­ing to turn a blind eye to far-right extrem­ism in their ranks, despite Pen­ta­gon orders to root it out.
    ...

    And while ques­tions about how a Naval intel­li­gence offi­cer could have man­aged to keep his top secret clear­ance after attend­ing the Jan­u­ary 6 riots loom large over this sto­ry, per­haps a big­ger ques­tion is how some­one who was so open with their extrem­ism man­aged to become a Naval intel­li­gence offi­cer in the first place. Accord­ing to the under­cov­er FBI agent, Speed expressed such vir­u­lent geno­ci­dal views that it’s dif­fi­cult to under­stood how he could have remained in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty for so long with­out draw­ing more scruti­ny. Keep in mind that Speed is the longest-serv­ing offi­cial in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty to be charged so far in con­nec­tion with Jan­u­ary 6. In oth­er words, the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty has had plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ty to be exposed to Speed’s ide­ol­o­gy:

    ...
    Speed, 41, has been con­vict­ed in two sep­a­rate tri­als on charges stem­ming from his extrem­ism. In Jan­u­ary, a fed­er­al jury in Vir­ginia found him guilty on weapons charges for ille­gal­ly pur­chas­ing three silencers as part of a $50,000 weapons-buy­ing spree in the months after Jan­u­ary 6. And last week, in a bench tri­al in fed­er­al court in Wash­ing­ton, Judge Trevor McFad­den found Speed guilty of charges stem­ming from his activ­i­ties on Jan­u­ary 6. He will be sen­tenced lat­er this spring.

    ...

    Speed joined with “100 of us Proud Boys” at a pro-Trump ral­ly in Wash­ing­ton in Novem­ber 2020 to protest the out­come of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, he told the under­cov­er FBI agent. On Jan­u­ary 6, he went to the Capi­tol with oth­er Proud Boys, not­ing that doing so “was always the plan,” but he only decid­ed to enter the build­ing when he heard from oth­ers out­side that Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence was cer­ti­fy­ing Joe Biden’s elec­tion, which Speed saw as a betray­al. “It was like, I’m going in there,” he told the under­cov­er agent, accord­ing to court records. “Like, I have no respect for peo­ple in this build­ing. They have no respect for me, I have no respect for them.” Proud Boys leader Enrique Tar­rio and four oth­er top mem­bers of the group have been charged with sedi­tious con­spir­a­cy and are cur­rent­ly on tri­al in Wash­ing­ton.

    Speed met eight times with the FBI under­cov­er agent, who secret­ly record­ed their con­ver­sa­tions. Begin­ning at a Star­bucks near his home in Vien­na, Vir­ginia, in Feb­ru­ary 2022, Speed expressed such vir­u­lent­ly anti­se­mit­ic, racist, and geno­ci­dal views that it is dif­fi­cult to under­stand how he could have remained in the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty for so long with­out draw­ing more scruti­ny. Speed expressed admi­ra­tion for Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin, even after Putin invad­ed Ukraine. He told the FBI agent that he “would love to see [Putin] just real­ly be the leader that the world needs right now,” but that might not hap­pen because “he has a lot of Jews around him who advise him,” accord­ing to court records.

    Speed spoke forth­right­ly about his belief that vio­lence would be required to retake Amer­i­ca from the con­trol of Jews and lib­er­als. He told the FBI agent that he want­ed to kid­nap Jew­ish lead­ers, includ­ing bil­lion­aire phil­an­thropist George Soros and lead­ers of the Anti-Defama­tion League, who he blamed for cre­at­ing the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment. Dur­ing one con­ver­sa­tion, Speed said, “Jews for some rea­son love gang rap­ing peo­ple. It doesn’t mat­ter what they are doing, they always have time to gang rape … white girls.” He described Hitler as “one of the best peo­ple that’s ever been on this earth,” accord­ing to court doc­u­ments, adding that he want­ed “some­body like Hitler to stand up and say we’re going to stand against this moral incin­er­a­tion.”

    “I’m look­ing for peo­ple who are will­ing to say how do we do some­thing more than just com­plain­ing on Telegram, which I’m guilty of. I scroll through Telegram way too much. But you know, what do we do in the real world to make some­thing real­ly hap­pen?” Speed asked the under­cov­er agent at one point.

    The lead­ers of the Anti-Defama­tion League drew Speed’s ire because “they spend all their time push­ing for laws like this anti-lynch­ing law that Biden just signed,” he said. The ADL was push­ing anti-lynch­ing leg­is­la­tion because “they know things are going to get bad enough that peo­ple like us are going to band togeth­er and straight up start lynch­ing peo­ple.”

    When it came to choos­ing kid­nap­ping tar­gets, Speed told the under­cov­er agent, he planned to go after “peo­ple that are actu­al­ly reach­able by some­one like me. Peo­ple who don’t have body­guards.”
    ...

    Final­ly, there’s the fact that no addi­tion­al charges appear to have been brought against Speed despite the under­cov­er FBI agent record­ing his plans that includ­ed kid­nap­ping, mass mur­der, and geno­cide:

    ...
    At about the same time he began meet­ing with the under­cov­er agent in ear­ly 2022, Speed quit his job at Novet­ta. He had always thought of him­self as a good patri­ot because he worked for the gov­ern­ment, he told the under­cov­er agent, but he no longer saw it that way and had come to believe that he was “lend­ing his skill set to evil.” In March 2022, Speed admit­ted to the under­cov­er agent that he had gone to the Capi­tol on Jan­u­ary 6 with oth­er Proud Boys and then entered the build­ing, mak­ing it to the Rotun­da.

    But the intense under­cov­er inves­ti­ga­tion by the FBI — dur­ing which Speed revealed his apoc­a­lyp­tic views, his will­ing­ness to engage in anti­se­mit­ic car­nage, and his ties to the Proud Boys — did not lead to expan­sive charges against him. The weapons case in Vir­ginia was lim­it­ed to straight­for­ward charges relat­ed to his pur­chase of unreg­is­tered silencers; the Jan­u­ary 6 charges were sim­i­lar to those brought against many oth­er rank-and-file intrud­ers in the Capi­tol attack. He was found guilty of felony and mis­de­meanor charges includ­ing obstruc­tion of an offi­cial pro­ceed­ing; enter­ing and remain­ing in a restrict­ed build­ing; dis­or­der­ly and dis­rup­tive con­duct in a restrict­ed build­ing; dis­or­der­ly con­duct in a Capi­tol build­ing; and parad­ing, demon­strat­ing, or pick­et­ing in a Capi­tol build­ing. The fact that the gov­ern­ment gath­ered so much evi­dence of Speed’s inter­est in becom­ing a domes­tic ter­ror­ist but then only brought rel­a­tive­ly mod­est charges against him con­trasts stark­ly with the much more aggres­sive pros­e­cu­tions faced by Mus­lim Amer­i­can defen­dants caught up in sim­i­lar under­cov­er oper­a­tions in coun­tert­er­ror­ism cas­es brought in the years after Sep­tem­ber 11.
    ...

    Speed pre­sum­ably won’t be return­ing to any gov­ern­ment-relat­ed jobs after he gets out of prison, although who knows these days. Per­haps more charges for Speed are on the way. If not, it sounds like he’s going to be out of prison in sev­en years or less. At which point he’ll have lit­tle trou­ble rebuild­ing his ille­gal arse­nal while prepar­ing for mass vio­lence and geno­cide. While also pre­sum­ably net­work­ing with his Proud Boy bud­dies. And their bud­dies.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 19, 2023, 12:59 am
  24. Ye 2024! It’s hap­pen­ing. Well, ok, we’ll see if any­thing ever comes of Kanye West­’s star-crossed 2024 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign that was declared all but dead back in April amid reports of internecine fight­ing between cam­paign fig­ures like Ali Alexan­der and Milo Yiannopou­los. And as we saw, those reports about the qui­et death of West­’s cam­paign hap­pened right around the same time the scan­dal over Ali Alexan­der’s alleged groom­ing of teenage boys was erupt­ing into the media.

    That’s all part of con­text that made the fol­low­ing report about the rekin­dling of West­’s cam­paign all the more remark­able. But let’s not for­get the most remark­able, in infa­mous, chap­ter of West­’s 2024 cam­paign: the Novem­ber 22, 2022, din­ner at Mar-a-Lago between Don­ald Trump, West, and Nick Fuentes. It was the defin­ing event of West­’s cam­paign to date. An event that more or less defined West as a self-declared Hitler lover suf­fer­ing from pro­found men­tal health issues.

    And, until recent­ly, it seemed like the din­ner was also the nail in the cof­fin of this cam­paign. But nope. It’s back. At least those were the claims made last month by Alt Right provo­ca­teur Milo Yiannopou­los, who was basi­cal­ly pushed out of the West cam­paign back in Jan­u­ary as part of that internecine fight­ing with Fuentes and Alexan­der. As we saw, it was Yiannopou­los who was one of main sources of the alle­ga­tions about Alexan­der’s teen groom­ing. So a cou­ple weeks after the Alexan­der groom­ing alle­ga­tions hit the news we get reports that Milo Yiannopou­los is back in charge of West­’s 2024 cam­paign while Alexan­der and Fuentes are out.

    But what about the reports that West him­self has lost all inter­est in the cam­paign? Well, he’s once again inter­est­ed in pol­i­tics, accord­ing to two sources close to West’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion.

    So is that it? The West 2024 cam­paign is back on with Yiannopoulos’s return? Not nec­es­sar­i­ly. The rival crew isn’t leav­ing with­out tak­ing a few shots. In par­tic­u­lar, the trea­sur­er of the West 2024 cam­paign, Patrick Kra­son, resigned short­ly after those reports of Yiannopoulos’s return. And then Kra­son informed fed­er­al reg­u­la­tors about pos­si­ble cam­paign finance vio­la­tions com­mit­ted by Yiannopou­los as part of his pri­or work for the West 2024 cam­paign back in Novem­ber. Specif­i­cal­ly, Kra­son cites an unusu­al­ly $10k pay­ment made to Yiannopou­los by the Kanye 2020 cam­paign for “domain trans­fers” ser­vices. What were those ser­vices? Well, Yiannopou­los over­saw the pur­chas­ing of the ye24.com web domain from GoDaddy.com from almost $7k. So he was appar­ent­ly paid $10k for a $7k pur­chase. But it gets worse, because it turns out Yiannopou­los made that pur­chase using the cam­paign cred­it card of Mar­jorie Tay­lor-Greene (MTG)‘s con­gres­sion­al office. So MTG’s office buys the ye24.com web domain for $7k and Yiannopou­los gets paid by the Kanye 2020 cam­paign for trans­fer­ing that domain to the West cama­paign. It’s more than a lit­tle sus­pi­cious.

    So how did MTG’s office get involved with West­’s web domains? Well, Yiannopou­los did indeed intern in MTG’s office for six months in 2022, so it’s pos­si­ble this was part of that work. But Yiannopou­los also claims to have done con­tract­ing work for her office too last year. And while one source claims that Yiannopou­los over­saw the pur­chase of ye24.com using the cam­paign cred­it card, the source did­n’t know if MTG’s office was itself aware the cred­it card was being used for these pur­pos­es. We’re also told that it was some­one work­ing for Yiannopou­los per­son­al­ly who made the trans­ac­tion with MTG cam­paign cred­it card. In oth­er words, it’s pos­si­ble Yiannopou­los was effec­tive­ly just steal­ing cam­paign funds. At the same time, as ethics experts point out, even if MTG’s cam­paign was aware of the pur­chase, it could still rep­re­sent an ille­gal use of cam­paign funds for the facil­i­ta­tion of per­son­al enrich­ment. That’s the eth­i­cal mess Kra­son is rais­ing with reg­u­la­tors on his way out of the cam­paign.

    It’s also worth not­ing that this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Patrick Kra­son’s name pop up in rela­tion to what appears to be a con­ser­v­a­tive astro­turf­ing cam­paign tar­get­ing black vot­ers: Recall how Kra­son, a long­time polit­i­cal con­sul­tant from West Vir­ginia, appears to have been one of the fig­ures behind the Black Con­ser­v­a­tives Fund PAC, a PAC that was pro­mot­ing the same ‘Stop the Steal’ Jan­u­ary 6 pro-Trump ral­ly that mor­phed into what appears to be a planned insur­rec­tion. While it’s not known who exact­ly is behind the fund­ing of this group, records show Robert Mer­cer donat­ed $150k to the group in 2014. And while Kra­son was list­ed as the trea­sur­er for the group, he denied to reporters that he was involved with run­ning the group. Kra­son sim­i­lar­ly denied hav­ing any involve­ment with set­ting up a Stop the Steal PAC that records show he start­ed in in Novem­ber 2020 fol­low­ing the elec­tion. And as we also saw, it appears Ali Alexan­der was the per­son actu­al­ly run­ning both PACs. Kra­son knows a thing or two about the dark side of pol­i­tics.

    But then there’s the remark­able tim­ing of all of this that should raise all sorts of addi­tion­al ques­tions about the nature of these Yiannopou­los-enrich­ing trans­ac­tions: the pur­chase of the ye24.com domain on GoDad­dy and trans­fer­ence of the domain to the Kanye 2020 cam­paign all hap­pened on Novem­ber 22, 2022, the same date as the infa­mous Mar-a-Lago din­ner. A din­ner that Yiannopou­los ulti­mate­ly took cred­it for arrang­ing in the first place. In fact, Yiannopou­los told reporters that he orches­trat­ed the din­ner “to make Trump’s life mis­er­able”, although the fuller quote from Yiannopou­los at the time was “I want­ed to show Trump the kind of tal­ent that he’s miss­ing out on by allow­ing his ter­ri­ble han­dlers to dic­tate who he can and can’t hang out with...I also want­ed to send a mes­sage to Trump that he has sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly repeat­ed­ly neglect­ed, ignored, abused the peo­ple who love him the most, the peo­ple who put him in office, and that kind of behav­ior comes back to bite you in the end.” Those com­ments were appar­ent­ly the basis for West let­ting Yiannopou­los go at the time. But now he’s back, along with a new slew of cam­paign finance alle­ga­tions that raise the ques­tion of whether or not he was effec­tive­ly get­ting paid off for arrang­ing that infa­mous din­ner at Mar-a-Lago:

    The Dai­ly Beast

    Milo Yiannopou­los Is Back Head­ing Up Kanye’s Polit­i­cal Oper­a­tions

    The far-right provocateur’s return at the helm of Kanye West’s tumul­tuous polit­i­cal oper­a­tion comes at the expense of his one-time friends Nick Fuentes and Ali Alexan­der.

    Will Som­mer
    Pol­i­tics Reporter
    Pub­lished May. 04, 2023 3:17PM ET

    Rap­per Kanye West’s on-and-off polit­i­cal oper­a­tion is back on, with right-wing provo­ca­teur Milo Yiannopou­los at the helm once again five months after being oust­ed by his far-right rivals.

    West’s vir­u­lent­ly anti-Semit­ic media tour last year gen­er­at­ed head­lines more for West’s din­ner with white suprema­cist leader Nick Fuentes and Don­ald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and his effu­sive praise for Adolf Hitler than for any con­crete polit­i­cal moves. Last month, a film­mak­er hired by West said the rap­per had lost inter­est in becom­ing any can­di­date for office, claim­ing that West said “I just want to be left alone.”

    But now two sources close to West’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion tell The Dai­ly Beast that he’s once again inter­est­ed in pol­i­tics, and is bring­ing Yiannopou­los back into his orbit while push­ing two oth­er far-right lead­ers out.

    Yiannopoulos’s return as West’s “direc­tor of polit­i­cal oper­a­tions” marks the lat­est twist in the treach­er­ous inter­nal pol­i­tics of West’s polit­i­cal shop. Yiannopou­los was the first far-right fig­ure asso­ci­at­ed with West’s poten­tial pres­i­den­tial ambi­tions last year, din­ing with Trump, West, and Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. But Yiannopou­los found him­self pushed out in ear­ly Decem­ber, replaced by Fuentes and Jan. 6 ral­ly orga­niz­er Ali Alexan­der.

    Now, accord­ing to sources affil­i­at­ed with West, the tables have turned once again.

    “Ye is an artist of dis­tinc­tion, refine­ment and taste, so nat­u­ral­ly for this next chap­ter of his polit­i­cal endeav­ors he has ditched the Nutel­la and cracked out the caviar,” Yiannopou­los told The Dai­ly Beast in a text mes­sage.

    In Wednes­day night emails to Fuentes and Alexan­der that were reviewed by The Dai­ly Beast, Yiannopou­los told his one-time friends that he was now back in charge of West’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tions. Fuentes and Alexan­der, in Yiannopoulos’s telling, were fired. In exchange, Yiannopou­los offered them the prospect of unpaid “advi­sor” roles, but for­bade them from acknowl­edg­ing any con­nec­tion to West pub­licly.

    “Your ser­vices on Ye’s explorato­ry team are ter­mi­nat­ed as of this let­ter, and will not be required for any pos­si­ble future cam­paign,” Yiannopou­los wrote.

    In an email to The Dai­ly Beast, Alexan­der said Yiannopou­los was “full of sh it” and declined to com­ment on whether he’s still work­ing for West.

    “I don’t dis­cuss my friend­ship with Ye or oth­ers to the press,” Alexan­der wrote. “He is a genius and sam­ples many views from many peo­ple.”

    ...

    While West’s polit­i­cal ambi­tions are unclear, appear­ing with the rap megas­tar pro­vid­ed Yiannopou­los, Alexan­der, and Fuentes with an enor­mous plat­form for their own polit­i­cal ambi­tions, espe­cial­ly after the Mar-a-Lago din­ner with Trump.

    Work­ing for West was also poten­tial­ly very lucra­tive. After being fired from the oper­a­tion, Yiannopou­los invoiced West for more than $100,000 for just a few weeks of work, and was ulti­mate­ly paid rough­ly $40,000. Fuentes, mean­while, has received more than $30,000 from West’s oper­a­tion, accord­ing to cam­paign finance records.

    Since last year’s media fren­zy around West and his anti-Semit­ic remarks, Alexan­der has been ham­strung by alle­ga­tions that he asked teenage boys for nude pic­tures. In April, Alexan­der apol­o­gized broad­ly for send­ing “inap­pro­pri­ate mes­sages.”

    In his Wednes­day email to Alexan­der, Yiannopou­los added that Alexan­der would not be “per­mit­ted phys­i­cal access to the can­di­date or any staff or vol­un­teers in our orga­ni­za­tion from this moment.”

    ————

    “Milo Yiannopou­los Is Back Head­ing Up Kanye’s Polit­i­cal Oper­a­tions” by Will Som­mer; The Dai­ly Beast; 05/04/2023

    “But now two sources close to West’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion tell The Dai­ly Beast that he’s once again inter­est­ed in pol­i­tics, and is bring­ing Yiannopou­los back into his orbit while push­ing two oth­er far-right lead­ers out.”

    Ye 2024 is back! At least that’s accord­ing to two anony­mous sources report­ed­ly close to West­’s cam­paign. And it appears Milo Yiannopolous is back too as part of this rein­vig­o­rat­ed oper­a­tion, after being seem­ing­ly forced out in Decem­ber and replaced with none oth­er than Ali Alexan­der:

    ...
    Yiannopoulos’s return as West’s “direc­tor of polit­i­cal oper­a­tions” marks the lat­est twist in the treach­er­ous inter­nal pol­i­tics of West’s polit­i­cal shop. Yiannopou­los was the first far-right fig­ure asso­ci­at­ed with West’s poten­tial pres­i­den­tial ambi­tions last year, din­ing with Trump, West, and Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. But Yiannopou­los found him­self pushed out in ear­ly Decem­ber, replaced by Fuentes and Jan. 6 ral­ly orga­niz­er Ali Alexan­der.

    Now, accord­ing to sources affil­i­at­ed with West, the tables have turned once again.
    ...

    And that brings us to the very inter­est­ing tim­ing of this news: it came less than a month after all of the reports about Ali Alexan­der being charged with groom­ing con­ser­v­a­tive teenage boys while he was work­ing for Nick Fuentes’s Amer­i­ca First orga­ni­za­tion. Alle­ga­tions that were orig­i­nal­ly lev­eled by Milo Yiannopou­los after Fuentes and Alexan­der got Yiannopoulous pushed out of Ye’s 2024 cam­paign back in Decem­ber. It’s hard to believe the tim­ing is just a coin­ci­dence:

    ...
    “Ye is an artist of dis­tinc­tion, refine­ment and taste, so nat­u­ral­ly for this next chap­ter of his polit­i­cal endeav­ors he has ditched the Nutel­la and cracked out the caviar,” Yiannopou­los told The Dai­ly Beast in a text mes­sage.

    In Wednes­day night emails to Fuentes and Alexan­der that were reviewed by The Dai­ly Beast, Yiannopou­los told his one-time friends that he was now back in charge of West’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tions. Fuentes and Alexan­der, in Yiannopoulos’s telling, were fired. In exchange, Yiannopou­los offered them the prospect of unpaid “advi­sor” roles, but for­bade them from acknowl­edg­ing any con­nec­tion to West pub­licly.

    ...

    Since last year’s media fren­zy around West and his anti-Semit­ic remarks, Alexan­der has been ham­strung by alle­ga­tions that he asked teenage boys for nude pic­tures. In April, Alexan­der apol­o­gized broad­ly for send­ing “inap­pro­pri­ate mes­sages.”

    In his Wednes­day email to Alexan­der, Yiannopou­los added that Alexan­der would not be “per­mit­ted phys­i­cal access to the can­di­date or any staff or vol­un­teers in our orga­ni­za­tion from this moment.”
    ...

    But that’s not the only coin­ci­den­tal tim­ing in this sto­ry. As the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, Yiannopou­los is already fac­ing accu­sa­tions of fraud­u­lent cam­paign finance trans­ac­tion. Accu­sa­tions com­ing from the per­son who replaced Yiannopou­los on the Ye 2024 cam­paign back in Decem­ber: Patrick Kra­son.

    Recall how Patrick Kra­son, a long­time polit­i­cal con­sul­tant from West Vir­ginia, appears to have been one of the fig­ures behind the Black Con­ser­v­a­tives Fund PAC, a PAC that was pro­mot­ing the same ‘Stop the Steal’ Jan­u­ary 6 pro-Trump ral­ly that mor­phed into what appears to be a planned insur­rec­tion. While it’s not known who exact­ly is behind the fund­ing of this group, records show Robert Mer­cer donat­ed $150k to the group in 2014. And while Kra­son was list­ed as the trea­sur­er for the group, he denied to reporters that he was involved with run­ning the group. Kra­son sim­i­lar­ly denied hav­ing any involve­ment with set­ting up a Stop the Steal PAC that records show he start­ed in in Novem­ber 2020 fol­low­ing the elec­tion. And as we also saw, it appears Ali Alexan­der was the per­son actu­al­ly run­ning both PACs. In oth­er words, Kra­son is an expe­ri­enced prac­tic­tion­er of the polit­i­cal dark arts. But that does­n’t mean his accu­sa­tions against Yiannopou­los aren’t true. Accu­sa­tions about a pos­si­ble ille­gal cam­paign finance vio­la­tion involv­ing the Kanye 2020 cam­paign going back to Novem­ber of 2022, when MTG’s cam­paign office paid almost $7k for the ye24.com domain and the Kanye 2020 cam­paign then paid Yiannopou­los near­ly $10k the “domain trans­fer”. Yes, MTG’s cam­paign bought the web domain but Yiannopou­los was the per­son paid for it. That’s the shady trans­ac­tion Kra­son informed fed­er­al reg­u­la­tors about:

    Politi­co

    Kanye West trea­sur­er resigns, alleges pos­si­ble ‘unlaw­ful’ cam­paign trans­ac­tion

    The head of the rapper’s polit­i­cal oper­a­tion denies any wrong­do­ing.
    Ye, bet­ter known as Kanye West, answers ques­tions.

    By Jes­si­ca Piper
    05/08/2023 06:55 PM EDT

    Patrick Kra­son, the trea­sur­er for Ye’s, bet­ter known as Kanye West, still-active pres­i­den­tial cam­paign account, told a fed­er­al reg­u­la­tor he had resigned on Mon­day, alleg­ing in a let­ter to the rap­per-turned-can­di­date that cam­paign advi­sor Milo Yiannopou­los had pos­si­bly bro­ken fed­er­al cam­paign finance law. Yiannopou­los denied the alle­ga­tion.

    The change sig­nals a broad­er polit­i­cal shake­up for the rap­per, also known as Ye, who has float­ed run­ning for pres­i­dent again in 2024, although he has not filed a for­mal state­ment of can­di­da­cy with the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion. The Dai­ly Beast report­ed last week that Yiannopou­los had returned to lead. Yiannopou­los, a long­time far-right provo­ca­teur, had pre­vi­ous­ly worked with Ye’s cam­paign but depart­ed in Decem­ber, short­ly before Kra­son was hired.

    Kra­son had served as the cam­paign trea­sur­er since Decem­ber, and told the FEC that he had resigned in a Mon­day let­ter. All cam­paigns are required to have a trea­sur­er to accept dona­tions, make dis­burse­ments and file man­dat­ed reports with the agency.

    In a sep­a­rate let­ter addressed to Ye and obtained by POLITICO, Kra­son said he had been told he was going to be ter­mi­nat­ed by Yiannopou­los but was resign­ing before that was made offi­cial. He also said he had recent­ly learned of a “poten­tial­ly seri­ous crim­i­nal trans­ac­tion” involv­ing the Kanye 2020 cam­paign, say­ing that Yiannopou­los “sub­mit­ted fal­si­fied invoic­es and for expen­di­tures that would be deemed unlaw­ful” in Novem­ber 2022, before Kra­son assumed the role as trea­sur­er. He added that there was too much “per­son­al ani­mos­i­ty” for a pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ship with Yiannopou­los.

    Reached by phone, Kra­son said he felt he need­ed to leave Ye’s cam­paign fol­low­ing the per­son­nel changes and due to con­cerns about Yiannopou­los out­lined in his let­ter to Ye.

    Yiannopou­los denied any wrong­do­ing by him­self or the Kanye 2020 cam­paign to POLITICO, say­ing he was not going to “give any cre­dence or ridicu­lous, ridicu­lous and eas­i­ly dis­proven claims.” He sug­gest­ed the alle­ga­tions were a “ven­omous” attempt by the for­mer trea­sur­er to lash out while leav­ing the cam­paign. Ye could not be reached for com­ment direct­ly.

    The res­ig­na­tion let­ter cit­ed an expense for a dig­i­tal asset where Yiannopou­los alleged­ly sought reim­burse­ment from both Kanye 2020 and the cam­paign of Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene, a Repub­li­can from Geor­gia for whom Yiannopou­los had pre­vi­ous­ly worked, though not recent­ly.

    The Kanye 2020 cam­paign pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed pay­ing $40,000 to Yiannopou­los in Decem­ber 2022 for “cam­paign wrap up ser­vices” as well as near­ly $10,000 a month pri­or for a “domain trans­fer,” accord­ing to FEC fil­ings. But there are no direct pay­ments to Yiannopou­los in Greene’s cam­paign fil­ings from that time. A spokesper­son for Greene did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to a POLITICO inquiry.

    ...

    ————-

    “Kanye West trea­sur­er resigns, alleges pos­si­ble ‘unlaw­ful’ cam­paign trans­ac­tion” By Jes­si­ca Piper; Politi­co; 05/08/2023

    The change sig­nals a broad­er polit­i­cal shake­up for the rap­per, also known as Ye, who has float­ed run­ning for pres­i­dent again in 2024, although he has not filed a for­mal state­ment of can­di­da­cy with the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion. The Dai­ly Beast report­ed last week that Yiannopou­los had returned to lead. Yiannopou­los, a long­time far-right provo­ca­teur, had pre­vi­ous­ly worked with Ye’s cam­paign but depart­ed in Decem­ber, short­ly before Kra­son was hired.”

    It’s not just that Milo Yiannopoulous has returned to the Ye 2024 cam­paign. It’s all part of a broad­er shake­up that includes the depar­ture of var­i­ous Ali Alexan­der-affil­i­ates like Patrick Kra­son. So we should­n’t be too sur­prised to learn about these ‘part­ing gifts’ from Kra­son direct­ed at Yiannopou­los:

    ...
    Kra­son had served as the cam­paign trea­sur­er since Decem­ber, and told the FEC that he had resigned in a Mon­day let­ter. All cam­paigns are required to have a trea­sur­er to accept dona­tions, make dis­burse­ments and file man­dat­ed reports with the agency.

    In a sep­a­rate let­ter addressed to Ye and obtained by POLITICO, Kra­son said he had been told he was going to be ter­mi­nat­ed by Yiannopou­los but was resign­ing before that was made offi­cial. He also said he had recent­ly learned of a “poten­tial­ly seri­ous crim­i­nal trans­ac­tion” involv­ing the Kanye 2020 cam­paign, say­ing that Yiannopou­los “sub­mit­ted fal­si­fied invoic­es and for expen­di­tures that would be deemed unlaw­ful” in Novem­ber 2022, before Kra­son assumed the role as trea­sur­er. He added that there was too much “per­son­al ani­mos­i­ty” for a pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ship with Yiannopou­los.
    ...

    So is this is a sim­ple cam­paign finance fraud sto­ry that’s only belat­ed­ly com­ing to light as a result of this far right in-fight­ing? Nope. It’s messier. Because as the fol­low­ing arti­cle points out, there are a cou­ple of inter­est­ing coin­ci­dences with that Novem­ber 22, 2022, ye24.com web domain pur­chase, where MTG’s cam­paign cred­it card pay $7k for the domain and then the Kanye 2020 com­mit­tee paid Yiannopou­los $10k for “domain trans­fer”. For starters, there’s the ques­tion of whether or not the MTG cam­paign even knew if Yiannopou­los was using its cred­it card to make that pur­chase in the first place. While Yiannopou­los was indeed an intern in MTG’s office for six months in 2022, we’re also told he was work­ing as a paid con­trac­tor. Plus, the per­son who actu­al­ly made the pur­chase was report­ed­ly some­one work­ing direct­ly under Yiannopou­los and not work­ing for MTG. So it’s pos­si­ble Kra­son is point­ing to a gross­ly ille­gal sce­nario where Yiannopou­los just engaged in out­right fraud. But as experts point out, even if MTG’s cam­paign was aware that its cred­it card was being used for these pur­pos­es that’s still a poten­tial­ly ille­gal use of cam­paign funds to facil­i­tate per­son­al gain.

    But then there’s the remark­able tim­ing of that Novem­ber 22 web domain pur­chase: that’s the same day of the now infa­mous Mar-a-Lago din­ner between Don­ald Trump, West, and Fuentes. A din­ner that Milo Yiannopoulous took cred­it for arrang­ing. And that’s why we have to ask: was Yiannopou­los paid in this seem­ing­ly illic­it trans­ac­tion for set­ting up the ye24.com domain, or paid for arrang­ing that infa­mous din­ner:

    The Dai­ly Beast

    Milo Yiannopou­los Caught in Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene-Kanye West Cam­paign Cash Scan­dal

    In the mid­dle of the Venn Dia­gram between Kanye West and Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene is alt-right influ­encer Milo Yiannopou­los and a cam­paign cred­it card.

    Roger Sol­len­berg­er
    Polit­i­cal Reporter
    Updat­ed May. 09, 2023 8:46PM ET / Pub­lished May. 09, 2023 11:52AM ET

    Alt-right agi­ta­tor Milo Yiannopou­los used the cred­it card for Rep. Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene’s (R‑GA) cam­paign last Novem­ber to pur­chase an inter­net domain for Kanye West’s still unan­nounced 2024 pres­i­den­tial bid, and he was reim­bursed for “domain trans­fer” by the West cam­paign the same day for $3,000 above cost, accord­ing to receipts obtained by The Dai­ly Beast and a per­son with knowl­edge of the events.

    The receipts match Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion fil­ings from both cam­paigns. Those fil­ings show that on Nov. 22, the Greene cam­paign report­ed a $7,020.16 expense to the GoDad­dy host­ing ser­vice for “domain reg­is­tra­tion and host­ing.” That same day, the Kanye 2020 com­mit­tee report­ed pay­ing Yiannopou­los $9,955 for “domain trans­fer.”

    Legal experts told The Dai­ly Beast that the trans­ac­tions raise a num­ber of ques­tions, includ­ing about pos­si­ble theft and con­ver­sion of cam­paign funds to per­son­al use.

    Accord­ing to the receipts, GoDad­dy billed Greene senior advis­er Isa­iah Wart­man for a $7,020.16 pur­chase of the “ye24.com” domain on Nov. 22. The per­son with direct knowl­edge of the events said that Yiannopou­los over­saw the trans­ac­tion with the Greene cam­paign card, but the per­son did not know whether the Greene cam­paign was aware at the time of the expense.

    The trans­ac­tions occurred on the same day that West—now known as Ye—infamously dined at Mar-a-Lago with for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and white suprema­cist Nick Fuentes, who had been advis­ing Ye through­out the rapper’s high­ly pub­li­cized Hitler-lov­ing melt­down last fall.

    Yiannopou­los, who has tak­en cred­it for arrang­ing the Mar-a-Lago evening, told The Dai­ly Beast that mul­ti­ple media reports plac­ing him at the din­ner were inac­cu­rate and that he did not per­son­al­ly attend. Ye fired Yiannopou­los after the provo­ca­teur told NBC News he orches­trat­ed the din­ner with the noto­ri­ous Fuentes “to make Trump’s life mis­er­able,” but the dis­graced hip-hop mogul rehired him as polit­i­cal direc­tor last week, The Dai­ly Beast report­ed.

    The trans­ac­tions are com­ing to light after Ye’s lat­est trea­sur­er, Patrick Kra­son, resigned on Monday—the sec­ond trea­sur­er to jump ship with­in the last six months. A leaked inter­nal email, first report­ed by Politi­co, shows Kra­son express­ing con­cern that Yiannopou­los had “sub­mit­ted fal­si­fied invoic­es for expen­di­tures that would be deemed unlaw­ful.” And the receipts were first pub­lished on Twit­ter by far-right activist Lau­ra Loomer, though The Dai­ly Beast obtained them from a dif­fer­ent source. Trea­sur­ers car­ry per­son­al lia­bil­i­ty for the accu­ra­cy and truth­ful­ness of each report they sub­mit to the gov­ern­ment, under penal­ty of law.

    ...

    Bren­dan Fis­ch­er, a cam­paign finance law spe­cial­ist and deputy exec­u­tive direc­tor at watch­dog Doc­u­ment, told The Dai­ly Beast that if the Greene cam­paign paid for Kanye’s web domain, “that’s an exces­sive and unre­port­ed in-kind con­tri­bu­tion to his cam­paign.”

    Fis­ch­er also not­ed that if Yiannopou­los charged the Greene campaign’s card with­out the campaign’s knowl­edge, “then he may have com­mit­ted a range of seri­ous violations—including, poten­tial­ly, caus­ing Greene’s cam­paign to file false reports with the gov­ern­ment.”

    Paul S. Ryan, a cam­paign finance expert and deputy direc­tor of the Funder’s Com­mit­tee for Civic Par­tic­i­pa­tion, told The Dai­ly Beast that Ye’s cam­paign pur­chase of the domain would appear to offi­cial­ly estab­lish him as a can­di­date for elec­tion, since the expense exceed­ed the $5,000 spend­ing thresh­old that trig­gers a reg­is­tra­tion require­ment. While Ye has in recent months used the con­text of his 2020 cam­paign to court media atten­tion around a poten­tial 2024 run—spending hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars while rais­ing none—he has still not declared his can­di­da­cy or reg­is­tered with the FEC.

    Ryan also point­ed to a 2018 FEC rul­ing in favor of MAGA rap-met­al star Kid Rock, in which the com­mis­sion, reject­ing the agency’s own inter­nal legal analy­sis, dis­missed sim­i­lar alle­ga­tions. The deci­sion cit­ed in part Rock’s claims that his Sen­ate “can­di­da­cy” was part of an “artis­tic and com­mer­cial under­tak­ing” to pro­mote a new album and tour.

    But Ryan also raised the ques­tion of whether Yiannopou­los had con­vert­ed Greene dona­tions to per­son­al use.

    “The law is broad­ly under­stood as pre­vent­ing can­di­dates from con­vert­ing funds to their per­son­al use, but the plain lan­guage of the statute sug­gests that this ban applies to any­one, not just the can­di­date,” Ryan said. “This is arguably Milo con­vert­ing Greene cam­paign funds to his per­son­al benefit—and for a prof­it on top of that. Was Milo steal­ing $7,000 from the Greene cam­paign for his ben­e­fit?”

    Jor­dan Libowitz, com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for gov­ern­ment watch­dog Cit­i­zens for Respon­si­bil­i­ty and Ethics in Wash­ing­ton, told The Dai­ly Beast that “this is a new one for me,” say­ing the trans­ac­tion appeared “fraud­u­lent” and pos­si­bly a crim­i­nal vio­la­tion of the per­son­al use ban.

    “It’s con­cern­ing that the domain appears to have been sold to per­son­al­ly ben­e­fit Milo. You can­not use cam­paign funds to ben­e­fit your­self. That’s the kind of thing that [for­mer Rep.] Dun­can Hunter was con­vict­ed of doing,” Libowitz said. “You can’t use the cam­paign card for your per­son­al ben­e­fit. That’s about as clear-cut as it gets.”

    He observed that the trans­ac­tion on its face “looks fraud­u­lent,” adding that if Yiannopou­los used the cam­paign card for his own pur­pos­es, “he would need to repay the Greene campaign—otherwise, it’s poten­tial­ly a crim­i­nal area.”

    “First, there’s the ques­tion of Milo using the Greene cam­paign cred­it card with­out autho­riza­tion, which could amount to theft,” he said. “Then there’s the per­son­al use ques­tion. Cam­paign funds can­not be used for per­son­al ben­e­fit, and if it’s acci­den­tal it needs to be repaid imme­di­ate­ly.”

    Libowitz added that if the Greene cam­paign had been aware of the transaction—which was con­duct­ed in the cam­paign manager’s name, and which Greene’s trea­sur­er signed off on in the campaign’s post-gen­er­al report—then “the Greene cam­paign would appear to be com­plic­it in facil­i­tat­ing the con­ver­sion of cam­paign funds to Milo’s per­son­al use.”

    Asked for com­ment, Yiannopou­los—who last year served six months as an intern in Greene’s office—told The Dai­ly Beast that “the sto­ry is absolute­ly false from start to fin­ish.” How­ev­er, he also pro­vid­ed a state­ment he had pre­vi­ous­ly shared on his Telegram social media account that appears to con­firm the events and acknowl­edged to The Dai­ly Beast that the Greene cred­it card pur­chase was made through his per­son­al GoDad­dy account.

    But the state­ment also sloughed the blame off on a “junior staffer” and attempt­ed to throw doubt on a “sup­posed con­nec­tion between a Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene cred­it card and a domain con­nect­ed to YE24.”

    “The truth is a junior staffer made an error with the stored cred­it cards on a third-par­ty ven­dor GoDad­dy account, pick­ing the one end­ing 2032 instead of 2002,” the state­ment said. “The acci­dent was quick­ly rec­ti­fied and the cor­rect card charged. I have apol­o­gized pri­vate­ly to Mar­jorie for the mix­up.”

    Asked on Mon­day when the pay­ment had been “rec­ti­fied,” Yiannopou­los would only tell The Dai­ly Beast that “I can tell you that it has been refund­ed.” If he had refund­ed the mon­ey before March 31, how­ev­er, that trans­ac­tion would appear to have gone unre­port­ed in the campaign’s FEC fil­ings.

    Yiannopou­los also claimed to The Dai­ly Beast that the “junior staffer” in his state­ment was not him­self or a Greene employ­ee, but some­one who was work­ing under him per­son­al­ly. He also stat­ed that in addi­tion to his intern­ship, the Greene cam­paign had paid him direct­ly for his polit­i­cal work, claim­ing he had “set up her pod­cast and asso­ci­at­ed web­sites,” which is why, he said, his per­son­al card and the Greene cam­paign card were stored in his GoDad­dy account.

    FEC fil­ings do not show any pay­ments from the Greene cam­paign to Yiannopou­los. Asked how he was paid, Yiannopou­los told The Dai­ly Beast that “you under­stand how ven­dors work,” and declined to elab­o­rate.

    Ryan point­ed out that if the trans­ac­tion were in fact a mis­take, “it should have been flagged imme­di­ate­ly, and cor­rect­ed on the next report.”

    The Greene cam­paign has filed two reports since the trans­ac­tion, with­out such a cor­rec­tion. If Yiannopou­los paid the cam­paign back in recent weeks, it will appear in Greene’s next fil­ing, due July 15.

    ———–

    “Milo Yiannopou­los Caught in Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene-Kanye West Cam­paign Cash Scan­dal” by Roger Sol­len­berg­er; The Dai­ly Beast; The Dai­ly Beast; 05/09/2023

    “The receipts match Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion fil­ings from both cam­paigns. Those fil­ings show that on Nov. 22, the Greene cam­paign report­ed a $7,020.16 expense to the GoDad­dy host­ing ser­vice for “domain reg­is­tra­tion and host­ing.” That same day, the Kanye 2020 com­mit­tee report­ed pay­ing Yiannopou­los $9,955 for “domain trans­fer.”

    Yes, the anom­alous details sur­round­ing the Novem­ber 22, 2022, pur­chase of the ye24.com web domain start with the fact that Milo Yiannopou­los appears to get paid near­ly $10k by the Yaye 2020 cam­paign for a web domain pur­chased with the MTG cam­paign cred­it card. And it’s hard not to notice this came on the 59th Anniver­sary of the JFK assas­si­na­tion.

    But then there’s the fact that the pay­ment hap­pened on the same day Nick Fuentes and West dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, some­thing Yiannopou­los has tak­en cred­it for arrang­ing. Notably, Yiannopoulous was ulti­mate­ly fired by West for set­ting up this meet­ing, which Yiannopou­los told reporters that he orches­trat­ed the din­ner “to make Trump’s life mis­er­able”, although the fuller quote from Yiannopou­los at the time was “I want­ed to show Trump the kind of tal­ent that he’s miss­ing out on by allow­ing his ter­ri­ble han­dlers to dic­tate who he can and can’t hang out with...I also want­ed to send a mes­sage to Trump that he has sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly repeat­ed­ly neglect­ed, ignored, abused the peo­ple who love him the most, the peo­ple who put him in office, and that kind of behav­ior comes back to bite you in the end” While Yiannopou­los was appar­ent­ly paid for set­ting up the ye24.com web domain, we have to ask if that was actu­al­ly the big ‘ser­vice’ he was paid for at that time. Set­ting up the din­ner with Trump is a much big­ger deal:

    ...
    The trans­ac­tions occurred on the same day that West—now known as Ye—infamously dined at Mar-a-Lago with for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and white suprema­cist Nick Fuentes, who had been advis­ing Ye through­out the rapper’s high­ly pub­li­cized Hitler-lov­ing melt­down last fall.

    Yiannopou­los, who has tak­en cred­it for arrang­ing the Mar-a-Lago evening, told The Dai­ly Beast that mul­ti­ple media reports plac­ing him at the din­ner were inac­cu­rate and that he did not per­son­al­ly attend. Ye fired Yiannopou­los after the provo­ca­teur told NBC News he orches­trat­ed the din­ner with the noto­ri­ous Fuentes “to make Trump’s life mis­er­able,” but the dis­graced hip-hop mogul rehired him as polit­i­cal direc­tor last week, The Dai­ly Beast report­ed.
    ...

    It’s also worth not­ing that some­one appears to be going through a lot of effort to ensure the media picks up this sto­ry about Yiannopou­los fil­ing poten­tial­ly fraud­u­lent cam­paign trans­ac­tions. Because while the receipts for these trans­ac­tions were first pub­lished on Twit­ter by far right activist Lau­ra Loomer, the Dai­ly Beast also received them from a dif­fer­ent unnamed source:

    ...
    Accord­ing to the receipts, GoDad­dy billed Greene senior advis­er Isa­iah Wart­man for a $7,020.16 pur­chase of the “ye24.com” domain on Nov. 22. The per­son with direct knowl­edge of the events said that Yiannopou­los over­saw the trans­ac­tion with the Greene cam­paign card, but the per­son did not know whether the Greene cam­paign was aware at the time of the expense.

    ...

    The trans­ac­tions are com­ing to light after Ye’s lat­est trea­sur­er, Patrick Kra­son, resigned on Monday—the sec­ond trea­sur­er to jump ship with­in the last six months. A leaked inter­nal email, first report­ed by Politi­co, shows Kra­son express­ing con­cern that Yiannopou­los had “sub­mit­ted fal­si­fied invoic­es for expen­di­tures that would be deemed unlaw­ful.” And the receipts were first pub­lished on Twit­ter by far-right activist Lau­ra Loomer, though The Dai­ly Beast obtained them from a dif­fer­ent source. Trea­sur­ers car­ry per­son­al lia­bil­i­ty for the accu­ra­cy and truth­ful­ness of each report they sub­mit to the gov­ern­ment, under penal­ty of law.
    ...

    So giv­en that Yiannopou­los used MTG’s cam­paign cred­it card for the pur­chase of the ye24.com domain on the same day the din­ner hap­pened, we have to ask: was the arrang­ing of the Mar-a-Lago din­ner with Fuentes and Ye a goal of MTG’s office? The fact that Yiannopoulous served six months an MTG intern while also pro­vid­ing some sort of paid ven­dor work only adds to those ques­tions:

    ...
    Jor­dan Libowitz, com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for gov­ern­ment watch­dog Cit­i­zens for Respon­si­bil­i­ty and Ethics in Wash­ing­ton, told The Dai­ly Beast that “this is a new one for me,” say­ing the trans­ac­tion appeared “fraud­u­lent” and pos­si­bly a crim­i­nal vio­la­tion of the per­son­al use ban.

    ...

    Libowitz added that if the Greene cam­paign had been aware of the transaction—which was con­duct­ed in the cam­paign manager’s name, and which Greene’s trea­sur­er signed off on in the campaign’s post-gen­er­al report—then “the Greene cam­paign would appear to be com­plic­it in facil­i­tat­ing the con­ver­sion of cam­paign funds to Milo’s per­son­al use.”

    Asked for com­ment, Yiannopou­los—who last year served six months as an intern in Greene’s office—told The Dai­ly Beast that “the sto­ry is absolute­ly false from start to fin­ish.” How­ev­er, he also pro­vid­ed a state­ment he had pre­vi­ous­ly shared on his Telegram social media account that appears to con­firm the events and acknowl­edged to The Dai­ly Beast that the Greene cred­it card pur­chase was made through his per­son­al GoDad­dy account.
    ...

    Final­ly, giv­en the ques­tions of whether or the MTG cam­paign even knew its cred­it card was being used at all for these pur­pos­es, note who exe­cut­ed the pur­chase: some­one work­ing under Yiannopou­los per­son­al­ly:

    ...
    Yiannopou­los also claimed to The Dai­ly Beast that the “junior staffer” in his state­ment was not him­self or a Greene employ­ee, but some­one who was work­ing under him per­son­al­ly. He also stat­ed that in addi­tion to his intern­ship, the Greene cam­paign had paid him direct­ly for his polit­i­cal work, claim­ing he had “set up her pod­cast and asso­ci­at­ed web­sites,” which is why, he said, his per­son­al card and the Greene cam­paign card were stored in his GoDad­dy account.

    FEC fil­ings do not show any pay­ments from the Greene cam­paign to Yiannopou­los. Asked how he was paid, Yiannopou­los told The Dai­ly Beast that “you under­stand how ven­dors work,” and declined to elab­o­rate.
    ...

    It was all just an inno­cent mis­take by a “junior staffer” work­ing direct­ly under him per­son­al­ly. Who is the mys­tery ven­dor that was used by MTG’s office to pay Yiannopou­los for his polit­i­cal work and who was this junior staff? FEC fil­ings yield no clues. So let’s hope the fed­er­al reg­u­la­tors who received Patrick Kra­son’s tip are try­ing to come up with answers. You also have to won­der if West him­self is even famil­iar with how exact­ly Yiannopoulous pulled this off giv­en that we’re talk­ing about the use of cam­paign funds for self-enrich­ment. There’s pre­sum­ably going to be a lot more pay­ments for vague ‘ser­vices’ billed to the ‘Ye 24’ cam­paign now that Milo is back in charge of Kanye’s weird ongo­ing adven­ture in far right pol­i­tics that’s poised only to get weird­er the clos­er we get to the 2024 elec­tion.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 8, 2023, 12:33 am
  25. Pat Robert­son died. Yep, the tel­e­van­ge­list. Of course, the for­mer can­di­date for the 1988 Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion was a lot more than just a tel­e­van­ge­list. He was a leader of the ‘Chris­t­ian Coali­tion’ that was behind the explo­sion of politi­cized con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tian­i­ty in Amer­i­ca and was even the Coun­cil on Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP)‘s pres­i­dent from 1985–1986. Recall how he even pre­dict­ed god was going to steal the elec­tion for Trump in Decem­ber of 2020. He was that kind of tele­vi­sion preach­er. And as the fol­low­ing TPM Cafe piece writ­ten by Sarah Pos­ner reminds us, Pat Robert­son was one of the key archi­tects behind the cre­ation of the whole ‘bib­li­cal world­view’ legal move­ment that ani­mates the form of politi­cized Chris­tian­i­ty that has effec­tive­ly cap­tured the US Supreme Court. The same Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist world­view expressed by fig­ures like David Bar­ton, where the US is a con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly-enshrined Chris­t­ian nation with a god-giv­en man­date to impose bib­li­cal law.

    While Leonard Leo gets a lot of the atten­tion for lead­ing the con­ser­v­a­tive move­men­t’s judi­cial nom­i­na­tion strate­gies, it’s a move­ment that Pat Robert­son spent the last four decades build­ing. Pat Robert­son was­n’t just a theo­crat. He built the kinds of insti­tu­tions that could make that theo­crat­ic vision — the CNP’s shared vision — come to fruition.

    Impor­tant­ly, Pat Robert­son built the Regents Uni­ver­si­ty law school, whose notable grad­u­ates include Michelle Bach­mann. And while Bach­mann may be kind of a joke, the move­ment behind her is no joke. They are very seri­ous. Again, they cap­tured the Supreme Court.

    A Regents grad­u­ate who went on to play a very sig­nif­i­cant role in the the CNP’s con­tem­po­rary agen­da is Kris­ten Wag­goner, who now serves as the pres­i­dent and CEO of the Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom (ADF) (for­mer­ly known as the Alliance Defense Fund), the group behind the recent push to out­law mifepri­s­tone and effec­tive­ly remove nation­al access to abor­tion pills. Recall how the ADF has received mil­lions of dol­lars in dona­tions from Erik Prince and Bet­sy DeVoss, help­ing to finance the group’s exten­sive spend­ing pro­mot­ing nation­al­ist Chris­tian­i­ty in Europe in recent decades. But its inter­na­tion­al work isn’t lim­it­ed to Europe and includes sup­port­ing a 2016 law in Belize that pun­ish­es homo­sex­u­al sex with 10 years of jail time. Also recall how Wag­goner is just one of a num­ber of CNP mem­bers involved with the ADF, which has played a key role in for­mu­lat­ing the cur­rent ‘anti-trans kids’ far right man­u­fac­tured pan­ic. So when we see a Regents graduate/CNP mem­ber lead­ing an insti­tu­tion like the ADF, it’s a reminder that the fights the ADF are fight­ing and win­ning today were the same fights they planned on wag­ing back when Pat Robert­son was set­ting up his “bib­li­cal world­view” law school four decades ago.

    Anoth­er Regents grad­u­ate of note was Mon­i­ca Goodling, who was caught up in the 2007 scan­dal over quizzing puta­tive Jus­tice Depart­ment employ­ees over their polit­i­cal beliefs, result­ing in her rep­ri­mand by the Vir­ginia state bar in 2011. This kind of ide­o­log­i­cal quizzing of fed­er­al employ­ees was, of course, the exact same kind of polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy screen­ing ques­tion­naire devel­oped as part of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s Sched­ule F schem­ing. Also recall how James Bacon, who devel­oped that ques­tion­naire along­side Andrew Kloster, went on to play a lead­ing role in the Her­itage Foun­da­tion’s “Project 2025” ongo­ing Sched­ule F schem­ing. Ide­o­log­i­cal ques­tion­naires are the plan going for­ward the Repub­li­can Par­ty. The CNP is behind. The MAGA move­ment is behind it. It’s the plan now and was the plan back in 2007 when the Bush admin­is­tra­tion was try­ing to do it in the Jus­tice Depart­ment. It’s a reminder that Sched­ule F is high­ly com­pat­i­ble with Domio­n­ion­ist ambi­tions. Stack­ing the gov­ern­ment with those who pass a the­o­log­i­cal lit­mus test is a lot eas­i­er to do with the Sched­ule F scheme in place.

    But as we’re also going to see, Pat Robert­son did­n’t sim­ply cre­ate a law school that pro­mot­ed a “bib­li­cal world­view” theo­crat­ic inter­pre­ta­tion of the law. He based it on a fun­da­men­tal­ly neo-Con­fed­er­ate inspired bib­li­cal world­view. The same Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ist world­view artic­u­lat­ed by the god­fa­ther of con­tem­po­rary Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ism, RJ Rush­doony. Yes, Rush­doony is a CNP mem­ber in good stand­ing. Or rather was, while he was still alive.

    And as we’re going to see in a 2011 piece by Sarah Pos­ner below, Rush­doony’s Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ism was influ­enced by the teach­ings of 19th cen­tu­ry cler­gy­man Robert Lewis Dab­ney, who wrote a the­o­log­i­cal dis­ser­ta­tion on the mean­ing of the Civ­il war, in which he used pas­sages from the Bible to defend slav­ery, claim­ing it was “a nec­es­sary good for what he called the ‘depraved’ low­er class­es.” Rush­doony applaud­ed Dab­ney’s defense of slav­ery and believed that the Union vic­to­ry was a “defeat for Chris­t­ian ortho­doxy and paved the way for the rise of an unortho­dox Social Gospel in the post­bel­lum Unit­ed States.”

    And that the­ol­o­gy was­n’t just shared between Dab­ney and Rush­doony. It was the the­ol­o­gy of the Con­fed­er­a­cy, which had the kind of theo­crat­ic con­sti­tu­tion that met Rush­doony’s approval. It’s all points to one of the most impor­tant dimen­sions of the broad­er CNP agen­da that con­tin­ues to be ascen­dant in cor­ri­dors of pow­er: the CNP’s theo­crat­ic agen­da is fun­da­men­tal­ly neo-Con­fed­er­ate in nature.

    And Pat Robert­son played a key role 40 years ago in the build­ing of the legal wing of that neo-Con­fed­er­ate theo­crat­ic move­ment. It’s an often glossed over chap­ter of his biog­ra­phy, but in terms of long-term impact it might be the most last­ing part of Pat Robert­son’s lega­cy. A fun­da­men­tal­ly theo­crat­ic un-Amer­i­can lega­cy that suc­cess­ful­ly weaponized large swathes of Chris­tian­i­ty for polit­i­cal pur­pos­es in what was ulti­mate­ly a Domin­ion­ist vision of church and state:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    Cafe

    How Pat Robert­son Helped Cre­ate The Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist Lawyer Brigade Reshap­ing Amer­i­can Life

    The legal move­ment that is today erod­ing church-state sep­a­ra­tion, abor­tion rights, and the rights of LGBTQ peo­ple may be Robert­son’s most last­ing lega­cy.

    By Sarah Pos­ner
    June 9, 2023 6:39 a.m.

    Chris­t­ian Coali­tion and Chris­t­ian Broad­cast­ing Net­work founder Pat Robert­son, who died Thurs­day at the age of 93, is best known for his failed for­ay into the 1988 GOP pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry, his train­ing of evan­gel­i­cals to be both suc­cess­ful can­di­dates and reli­able vot­ers, and his decades-long high­light reel of homo­pho­bia, misog­y­ny, racism, con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, apoc­a­lyp­tic warn­ings, and pro­nounce­ments of God’s impend­ing wrath on Amer­i­ca for the sins of the left.

    Less well under­stood, though, was Robertson’s sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the Chris­tian­iza­tion of the legal pro­fes­sion, and the devel­op­ment of a Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist legal brigade that has set its sights on end­ing the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state, abor­tion and LGBTQ rights. In 1986, he came to the res­cue of a fledg­ling Chris­t­ian law school, over the years turn­ing it into the pow­er­house Regent Uni­ver­si­ty School of Law that has pro­duced lawyers who have gone on to become state court judges, appel­late lit­i­ga­tors, Repub­li­can law­mak­ers, and polit­i­cal appointees in Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions.

    The roots of Robertson’s law school can be traced to Tul­sa, Okla­homa, where, in 1979, his friend and fel­low tel­e­van­ge­list Oral Roberts found­ed its orig­i­nal iter­a­tion at his epony­mous uni­ver­si­ty, with seed mon­ey from O.W. Coburn, a local entre­pre­neur and father of future Okla­homa Sen­a­tor Tom Coburn ®. Also key to the devel­op­ment of a law school that would teach the law from a “bib­li­cal world­view” was Herb Titus, a Har­vard-trained lawyer who became an acolyte of R.J. Rush­doony, the founder of Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ism, the rad­i­cal move­ment at the core of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist legal think­ing that asserts that bib­li­cal law must gov­ern every facet of pub­lic and pri­vate life. Reject­ing sec­u­lar law after read­ing Rushdoony’s sem­i­nal book, The Insti­tutes of Bib­li­cal Law, Titus believed he had a “domin­ion man­date” to “restore the bible to legal edu­ca­tion.” One of the law school’s first stu­dents was future GOP con­gress­woman and pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Michele Bach­mann, who is now the dean of the Robert­son School of Gov­ern­ment at Regent.

    The law school’s first con­flict with the sec­u­lar world por­tend­ed the bat­tles that have defined the reli­gious right’s ongo­ing quest to expand reli­gious free­dom for con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians and shrink it for every­one else. Because the law school required both stu­dents and fac­ul­ty to sign a state­ment of Chris­t­ian faith and pro­fess belief in Jesus as their sav­ior, the Amer­i­can Bar Asso­ci­a­tion refused it accred­i­ta­tion, say­ing the require­ment ran afoul of ABA’s pro­hi­bi­tion against dis­crim­i­na­tion in the pro­fes­sion. The denial posed an exis­ten­tial threat to the school, since most states require grad­u­ates to have a degree from an accred­it­ed law school in order to sit for the bar exam. To Titus, who believed the ABA’s refusal to accred­it the school was “pure reli­gious prej­u­dice,” Roberts was a hero because he refused to “bow down to the estab­lish­ment.” The school sued the ABA, even­tu­al­ly forc­ing it to amend its stan­dards to per­mit the type of faith state­ment ORU required, and paving the way to its accred­i­ta­tion.

    Even with this vic­to­ry, the law school strug­gled, some­thing Titus chalked up to the idea of a Chris­t­ian law school being ahead of its time, a coun­try wracked by anti-Chris­t­ian sen­ti­ment, and stu­dents unwill­ing to take a chance on this rad­i­cal new kind of legal train­ing. But Robert­son, from over a thou­sand miles away in Vir­ginia Beach, Vir­ginia, was a believ­er. By 1985, when the school found itself with just eight fac­ul­ty mem­bers and 129 stu­dents, Robert­son rode in on a prover­bial white horse.

    The announce­ment of the trans­fer of the law school from ORU to Regent (then known as CBN Uni­ver­si­ty) was laden with lan­guage typ­i­cal of both Robertson’s and Roberts’s charis­mat­ic, pros­per­i­ty gospel faith. Roberts described it as a “seed-faith gift” to CBN, imply­ing not only ORU’s gen­eros­i­ty, but the prospect of God’s bless­ing and return on the invest­ment. (Roberts taught God would bless the sow­er of a “seed” gift by meet­ing all their spir­i­tu­al, mate­r­i­al, and health needs.) With­out much evi­dence, Robert­son pro­nounced the gift worth $10 mil­lion, a dubi­ous val­u­a­tion giv­en it had a small­er fac­ul­ty than many preschools. Robert­son, who two years lat­er would launch his pres­i­den­tial run, called it “a his­toric moment in Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty” and “a tes­ti­mo­ny before Amer­i­ca that those who work for Jesus are co-labor­ers.”

    Near­ly forty years lat­er, Oral Roberts’ pre­dic­tion that the law school would grow “stronger and stronger under Pat’s lead­er­ship” cer­tain­ly proved true. It is the train­ing ground for Chris­t­ian lawyers who oppose LGBTQ rights in the name of reli­gious free­dom for anti-LGBTQ Chris­tians, and who ques­tion the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state. “The fac­ul­ty at Regent were on the front lines against mar­riage equal­i­ty, and they are some of the lead­ing voic­es oppos­ing LGBTQ rights,” Josi­ah Robin­son, a 2021 grad­u­ate who was clos­et­ed for most of his time there and is now a queer rights activist, told me last year. “They’re the law review schol­ars and the legal pro­fes­sion­als on reli­gious lib­er­ty used as a tool to dis­crim­i­nate.” One of its most acclaimed grad­u­ates is Kris­ten Wag­goner, who, as coun­sel for Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom, the top Chris­t­ian right lit­i­ga­tion firm in the coun­try, suc­cess­ful­ly argued Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop v. Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion before the Supreme Court, notch­ing a sig­nif­i­cant “reli­gious free­dom” vic­to­ry for a bak­er who had refused to make a cake for a gay cou­ple. Wag­goner is now CEO and pres­i­dent of ADF, which, in recent months, has led the legal fight to reverse the FDA’s approval of the abor­tion pill mifepri­s­tone and to oth­er­wise restrict access to safe abor­tion.

    Regent has pro­duced a lot of Chris­t­ian lawyers, and also its fair share of scan­dals. Mon­i­ca Goodling, a polit­i­cal appointee in George W. Bush’s Depart­ment of Jus­tice, was at the cen­ter of a polit­i­cal scan­dal for lead­ing an effort to query job appli­cants about their polit­i­cal beliefs in the quest to staff the agency with peo­ple with con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian val­ues. She was lat­er rep­ri­mand­ed by the Vir­ginia State Bar. Mark Mar­tin, a for­mer chief jus­tice of the North Car­oli­na Supreme Court, and then the dean of Regent School of Law, helped write a brief for for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump in his failed legal effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion results in four states. Dan Cox, the far-right, elec­tion-deny­ing Repub­li­can nom­i­nee for gov­er­nor of Mary­land last year, who had char­tered three bus­es to the insur­rec­tion and tweet­ed (and lat­er delet­ed) that Mike Pence was a trai­tor, is a 2006 grad­u­ate.

    ...

    ————-

    “How Pat Robert­son Helped Cre­ate The Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist Lawyer Brigade Reshap­ing Amer­i­can Life” By Sarah Pos­ner; Talk­ing Points Memo; 06/09/2023

    Less well under­stood, though, was Robertson’s sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the Chris­tian­iza­tion of the legal pro­fes­sion, and the devel­op­ment of a Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist legal brigade that has set its sights on end­ing the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state, abor­tion and LGBTQ rights. In 1986, he came to the res­cue of a fledg­ling Chris­t­ian law school, over the years turn­ing it into the pow­er­house Regent Uni­ver­si­ty School of Law that has pro­duced lawyers who have gone on to become state court judges, appel­late lit­i­ga­tors, Repub­li­can law­mak­ers, and polit­i­cal appointees in Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions.”

    The patron saint of the Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist cap­ture of the US legal sys­tem. It’s one of Pat Robert­son’s less­er known accom­plish­ments. But, of course, he can’t take all the cred­it. as the Pres­i­dent of the CNP from 1985–1986, Pat Robert­son was­n’t work­ing alone. The idea for of cre­at­ing a law school from a “bib­li­cal world­view” came from Herb Titus, a Har­vard-trained lawyer and acolyte of arch-theo­crat R.J. Rush­doony. Both Titus and Rush­doony show up along­side Robert­son on the CNP mem­ber­ship list, because of course:

    ...
    The roots of Robertson’s law school can be traced to Tul­sa, Okla­homa, where, in 1979, his friend and fel­low tel­e­van­ge­list Oral Roberts found­ed its orig­i­nal iter­a­tion at his epony­mous uni­ver­si­ty, with seed mon­ey from O.W. Coburn, a local entre­pre­neur and father of future Okla­homa Sen­a­tor Tom Coburn ®. Also key to the devel­op­ment of a law school that would teach the law from a “bib­li­cal world­view” was Herb Titus, a Har­vard-trained lawyer who became an acolyte of R.J. Rush­doony, the founder of Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ism, the rad­i­cal move­ment at the core of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist legal think­ing that asserts that bib­li­cal law must gov­ern every facet of pub­lic and pri­vate life. Reject­ing sec­u­lar law after read­ing Rushdoony’s sem­i­nal book, The Insti­tutes of Bib­li­cal Law, Titus believed he had a “domin­ion man­date” to “restore the bible to legal edu­ca­tion.” One of the law school’s first stu­dents was future GOP con­gress­woman and pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Michele Bach­mann, who is now the dean of the Robert­son School of Gov­ern­ment at Regent.

    The law school’s first con­flict with the sec­u­lar world por­tend­ed the bat­tles that have defined the reli­gious right’s ongo­ing quest to expand reli­gious free­dom for con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians and shrink it for every­one else. Because the law school required both stu­dents and fac­ul­ty to sign a state­ment of Chris­t­ian faith and pro­fess belief in Jesus as their sav­ior, the Amer­i­can Bar Asso­ci­a­tion refused it accred­i­ta­tion, say­ing the require­ment ran afoul of ABA’s pro­hi­bi­tion against dis­crim­i­na­tion in the pro­fes­sion. The denial posed an exis­ten­tial threat to the school, since most states require grad­u­ates to have a degree from an accred­it­ed law school in order to sit for the bar exam. To Titus, who believed the ABA’s refusal to accred­it the school was “pure reli­gious prej­u­dice,” Roberts was a hero because he refused to “bow down to the estab­lish­ment.” The school sued the ABA, even­tu­al­ly forc­ing it to amend its stan­dards to per­mit the type of faith state­ment ORU required, and paving the way to its accred­i­ta­tion.
    ...

    And it was 1985, the year Robert­son became CNP Pres­i­dent, when Oral Roberts Uni­ver­si­ty trans­ferred its tiny flail­ing bib­li­cal law school to Robert­son’s CBN Uni­ver­si­ty (new Regents), plac­ing Pat Robert­son at the cen­ter of a Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment that was still in the ear­ly phas­es of insti­tu­tion build­ing:

    ...
    Even with this vic­to­ry, the law school strug­gled, some­thing Titus chalked up to the idea of a Chris­t­ian law school being ahead of its time, a coun­try wracked by anti-Chris­t­ian sen­ti­ment, and stu­dents unwill­ing to take a chance on this rad­i­cal new kind of legal train­ing. But Robert­son, from over a thou­sand miles away in Vir­ginia Beach, Vir­ginia, was a believ­er. By 1985, when the school found itself with just eight fac­ul­ty mem­bers and 129 stu­dents, Robert­son rode in on a prover­bial white horse.

    The announce­ment of the trans­fer of the law school from ORU to Regent (then known as CBN Uni­ver­si­ty) was laden with lan­guage typ­i­cal of both Robertson’s and Roberts’s charis­mat­ic, pros­per­i­ty gospel faith. Roberts described it as a “seed-faith gift” to CBN, imply­ing not only ORU’s gen­eros­i­ty, but the prospect of God’s bless­ing and return on the invest­ment. (Roberts taught God would bless the sow­er of a “seed” gift by meet­ing all their spir­i­tu­al, mate­r­i­al, and health needs.) With­out much evi­dence, Robert­son pro­nounced the gift worth $10 mil­lion, a dubi­ous val­u­a­tion giv­en it had a small­er fac­ul­ty than many preschools. Robert­son, who two years lat­er would launch his pres­i­den­tial run, called it “a his­toric moment in Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty” and “a tes­ti­mo­ny before Amer­i­ca that those who work for Jesus are co-labor­ers.”
    ...

    Four decades lat­er, and we find the Regents grad­u­ates play­ing lead­ing roles in the ascen­dant Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist move­ment that has now effec­tive­ly cap­tured the Supreme Court. For exam­ple, there’s Regents grad­u­a­tion Kris­ten Wag­goner who now serves as the pres­i­dent and CEO of the Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom (ADF) (for­mer­ly known as the Alliance Defense Fund), the group behind the recent push to out­law mifepri­s­tone and effec­tive­ly remove nation­al access to abor­tion pills. Recall how the ADF has received mil­lions of dol­lars in dona­tions from Erik Prince and Bet­sy DeVoss, help­ing to finance the group’s exten­sive spend­ing pro­mot­ing nation­al­ist Chris­tian­i­ty in Europe in recent decades. But its inter­na­tion­al work isn’t lim­it­ed to Europe and includes sup­port­ing a 2016 law in Belize that pun­ish­es homo­sex­u­al sex with 10 years of jail time. Also recall how Wag­goner is just one of a num­ber of CNP mem­bers involved with the ADF, which has played a key role in for­mu­lat­ing the cur­rent ‘anti-trans kids’ far right man­u­fac­tured pan­ic. So when we see a Regents graduation/CNP mem­ber lead­ing an insti­tu­tion like the ADF, it’s a reminder that the fights the ADF are fight­ing and win­ning today were the same fights they planned on wag­ing back when Pat Robert­son was set­ting up his “bib­li­cal world­view” law school four decades ago:

    ...
    Near­ly forty years lat­er, Oral Roberts’ pre­dic­tion that the law school would grow “stronger and stronger under Pat’s lead­er­ship” cer­tain­ly proved true. It is the train­ing ground for Chris­t­ian lawyers who oppose LGBTQ rights in the name of reli­gious free­dom for anti-LGBTQ Chris­tians, and who ques­tion the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state. “The fac­ul­ty at Regent were on the front lines against mar­riage equal­i­ty, and they are some of the lead­ing voic­es oppos­ing LGBTQ rights,” Josi­ah Robin­son, a 2021 grad­u­ate who was clos­et­ed for most of his time there and is now a queer rights activist, told me last year. “They’re the law review schol­ars and the legal pro­fes­sion­als on reli­gious lib­er­ty used as a tool to dis­crim­i­nate.” One of its most acclaimed grad­u­ates is Kris­ten Wag­goner, who, as coun­sel for Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom, the top Chris­t­ian right lit­i­ga­tion firm in the coun­try, suc­cess­ful­ly argued Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop v. Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion before the Supreme Court, notch­ing a sig­nif­i­cant “reli­gious free­dom” vic­to­ry for a bak­er who had refused to make a cake for a gay cou­ple. Wag­goner is now CEO and pres­i­dent of ADF, which, in recent months, has led the legal fight to reverse the FDA’s approval of the abor­tion pill mifepri­s­tone and to oth­er­wise restrict access to safe abor­tion.
    ...

    And when we see how Regent grad Mon­i­ca Goodling was caught up in the 2007 scan­dal over quizzing puta­tive Jus­tice Depart­ment employ­ees over their polit­i­cal beliefs, result­ing in her rep­ri­mand by the Vir­ginia state bar in 2011, keep in mind that Goodling was sim­ply imple­ment­ing the exact same kind of polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy screen­ing ques­tion­naire devel­oped as part of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s Sched­ule F schem­ing. Also recall how James Bacon, who devel­oped that ques­tion­naire along­side Andrew Kloster, went on to play a lead­ing role in the Her­itage Foun­da­tion’s “Project 2025” ongo­ing Sched­ule F schem­ing. In oth­er words, from the per­spec­tive of this Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment, Mon­i­ca Goodling’s only real trans­gres­sion was get­ting caught:

    ...
    Regent has pro­duced a lot of Chris­t­ian lawyers, and also its fair share of scan­dals. Mon­i­ca Goodling, a polit­i­cal appointee in George W. Bush’s Depart­ment of Jus­tice, was at the cen­ter of a polit­i­cal scan­dal for lead­ing an effort to query job appli­cants about their polit­i­cal beliefs in the quest to staff the agency with peo­ple with con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian val­ues. She was lat­er rep­ri­mand­ed by the Vir­ginia State Bar. Mark Mar­tin, a for­mer chief jus­tice of the North Car­oli­na Supreme Court, and then the dean of Regent School of Law, helped write a brief for for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump in his failed legal effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion results in four states. Dan Cox, the far-right, elec­tion-deny­ing Repub­li­can nom­i­nee for gov­er­nor of Mary­land last year, who had char­tered three bus­es to the insur­rec­tion and tweet­ed (and lat­er delet­ed) that Mike Pence was a trai­tor, is a 2006 grad­u­ate.
    ...

    Pat Robert­son and his fel­low CNP activists built an endur­ing theo­crat­ic con­ser­v­a­tive legal move­ment. Trag­i­cal­ly.

    But as we’re going to see in the fol­low­ing pair of arti­cle excerpts, he did­n’t sim­ply build a theo­crat­ic con­ser­v­a­tive legal move­ment. It was a theo­crat­ic con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment built on the same theo­crat­ic bib­li­cal world­view that under­pinned the Con­fed­er­a­cy. It’s some­thing to keep in mind when we see the CNP’s fin­ger­prints all over things like the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion:

    Patheos

    The Con­fed­er­a­cy’s “Chris­t­ian Nation”

    April 26, 2011 by John Fea

    The Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca claimed to be a Chris­t­ian nation. They man­aged to suc­ceed where today’s Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists have failed. The Con­fed­er­a­cy had a Con­sti­tu­tion that rec­og­nized God. (When John McCain said in 2008 that the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion estab­lished Amer­i­ca as a Chris­t­ian nation, per­haps he was con­fus­ing it with the Con­fed­er­ate Con­sti­tu­tion.) The lead­ers of the Con­fed­er­a­cy had no qualms about claim­ing that God had unique­ly raised the South up to do His work in the world. Chris­tian­i­ty held an exalt­ed and pow­er­ful place in Con­fed­er­ate cul­ture.

    As we have seen in pre­vi­ous arti­cles in this series, dur­ing the Civ­il War north­ern cler­gy believed that their cause was ordained by God. Part of their mis­sion in this con­flict was to pun­ish the South for seced­ing from the Unit­ed States, a polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty that was indi­vis­i­ble because it was cre­at­ed by God. But as North­ern pro­pa­gan­dists extolled the Chris­t­ian virtues of their nation­al Union and the spir­i­tu­al supe­ri­or­i­ty of their soci­ety over a sin­ful South in need of God’s repen­tance, the reli­gious and polit­i­cal lead­ers of the Con­fed­er­a­cy were build­ing what they per­ceived to be their own Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion.

    Indeed, the “Chris­t­ian nation” theme was even more promi­nent in the South than it was in the North. South­ern­ers were con­vinced that the Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca was a Chris­t­ian nation. They viewed the Con­fed­er­a­cy as a refuge for the god­ly amid the “infi­deli­ty” of the Union to which they once belonged. One hun­dred fifty years ago this month, South­ern­ers pre­pared to engage in a war that would prove God was on their side. This men­tal­i­ty is clear in the Con­fed­er­a­cy’s deci­sion to adopt the Latin phrase Deo Vin­dice (“With God as our defend­er”) as its nation­al mot­to.

    South­ern­ers look­ing for evi­dence that the Con­fed­er­a­cy was a Chris­t­ian nation need­ed to look no fur­ther than their Con­sti­tu­tion. Unlike the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, which does not men­tion God, the pre­am­ble of the Con­sti­tu­tion of the Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca made a direct appeal to “Almighty God”:

    We, the peo­ple of the Con­fed­er­ate States, each State act­ing in its sov­er­eign and inde­pen­dent char­ac­ter, in order to form a per­ma­nent and fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, estab­lish jus­tice, insure domes­tic tran­quil­i­ty, and secure the bless­ing of lib­er­ty to our­selves and our posterity—invoking the favor and guid­ance of Almighty God—do ordain and estab­lish this Con­sti­tu­tion for the Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca.

    South­ern cler­gy were absolute­ly gid­dy over this inser­tion of such God-lan­guage. Ben­jamin Mor­gan Palmer, the min­is­ter of the First Pres­by­ter­ian Church of New Orleans, called it “a tru­ly Chris­t­ian patri­ot’s prayer.” He blast­ed the “per­ilous athe­ism” of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, adding that its framers had been too tinc­tured with the kind of “free-think­ing” and “infi­del spir­it” that was often asso­ci­at­ed with the “hor­ror of the French Rev­o­lu­tion.”

    ...

    With a Con­sti­tu­tion that rec­og­nized “Almighty God,” it was not much of a leap for South­ern cler­gy and politi­cians to affirm that the cit­i­zens of the Con­fed­er­a­cy were the new cho­sen peo­ple of God. Ref­er­ences to the Old Tes­ta­ment “covenant” between God and Israel were a sta­ple of Con­fed­er­ate writ­ings.

    O.S. Barten, the rec­tor of St. James Church in War­ren­ton, Vir­ginia, invoked this theme in 1861: “In the grad­ual unrolling of the mighty scroll, on which God has writ­ten the sto­ry of our future, as fold after fold is spread before the nation, may there stand, embla­zoned in let­ters of liv­ing light, but this one tes­ti­mo­ny: ‘They are my peo­ple, and I am their God.’ ”

    In an 1861 ser­mon to a group of Geor­gia mili­ti­a­men, J. Jones began his defense of the Con­fed­er­a­cy as God’s cho­sen peo­ple with an appeal to the Old Tes­ta­ment book of Jere­mi­ah, the prophet of the “New Covenant.” Oth­er cler­gy con­nect­ed the Con­fed­er­a­cy to sim­i­lar claims made by 17th-cen­tu­ry Puri­tans, even going as far as to ref­er­ence John Winthrop’s famous call for Mass­a­chu­setts Bay Colony to be a “city set upon a hill.” The Con­fed­er­ate gov­ern­ment, under the lead­er­ship of Jef­fer­son Davis, affirmed this spe­cial covenant with reg­u­lar days of fast­ing and prayer.

    Today’s Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists like to talk and write about the ways in which the Unit­ed States has moral­ly suf­fered by aban­don­ing its so-called “Chris­t­ian her­itage.” They want the Bible back in schools and the gov­ern­ment to pro­mote Chris­tian­i­ty. But I am not sure all of them would have embraced the Con­fed­er­a­cy’s attempt to estab­lish a Chris­t­ian repub­lic. At least I hope not.

    ———–

    “The Con­fed­er­a­cy’s “Chris­t­ian Nation”” by John Fea; Patheos; 04/26/2011

    “Indeed, the “Chris­t­ian nation” theme was even more promi­nent in the South than it was in the North. South­ern­ers were con­vinced that the Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca was a Chris­t­ian nation. They viewed the Con­fed­er­a­cy as a refuge for the god­ly amid the “infi­deli­ty” of the Union to which they once belonged. One hun­dred fifty years ago this month, South­ern­ers pre­pared to engage in a war that would prove God was on their side. This men­tal­i­ty is clear in the Con­fed­er­a­cy’s deci­sion to adopt the Latin phrase Deo Vin­dice (“With God as our defend­er”) as its nation­al mot­to.”

    It’s no sur­prise that both sides of the Civ­il War claimed God was on their side. But these invo­ca­tions of God’s favor weren’t two sides of same coin. The Con­fed­er­a­cy was a con­sti­tu­tion­al theoc­ra­cy enshrined in the kind of lan­guage that sounds awful­ly sim­i­lar to the bib­li­cal world­views of fig­ures like RJ Rush­doony:

    ...
    South­ern­ers look­ing for evi­dence that the Con­fed­er­a­cy was a Chris­t­ian nation need­ed to look no fur­ther than their Con­sti­tu­tion. Unlike the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, which does not men­tion God, the pre­am­ble of the Con­sti­tu­tion of the Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca made a direct appeal to “Almighty God”:

    We, the peo­ple of the Con­fed­er­ate States, each State act­ing in its sov­er­eign and inde­pen­dent char­ac­ter, in order to form a per­ma­nent and fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, estab­lish jus­tice, insure domes­tic tran­quil­i­ty, and secure the bless­ing of lib­er­ty to our­selves and our posterity—invoking the favor and guid­ance of Almighty God—do ordain and estab­lish this Con­sti­tu­tion for the Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca.

    South­ern cler­gy were absolute­ly gid­dy over this inser­tion of such God-lan­guage. Ben­jamin Mor­gan Palmer, the min­is­ter of the First Pres­by­ter­ian Church of New Orleans, called it “a tru­ly Chris­t­ian patri­ot’s prayer.” He blast­ed the “per­ilous athe­ism” of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, adding that its framers had been too tinc­tured with the kind of “free-think­ing” and “infi­del spir­it” that was often asso­ci­at­ed with the “hor­ror of the French Rev­o­lu­tion.”
    ...

    And in case it’s not clear that RJ Rush­doony was an overt neo-Con­fed­er­ate defend­er of slav­ery, here’s a 2011 piece by Sarah Pos­ner that should leave no doubt. The piece describes the impor­tant find­ings in an essay, “The US Civ­il War as a The­o­log­i­cal War: Con­fed­er­ate Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism and the League of the South,” authored by Edward Sebesta — co-edi­tor of two books on neo-con­fed­er­ates, Neo-Con­fed­er­a­cy: A Crit­i­cal Intro­duc­tion and The Con­fed­er­ate and Neo-Con­fed­er­ate Read­er: The “Great Truth” About the “Lost Cause” — Euan Hague and pub­lished in the Cana­di­an Review of Amer­i­can Stud­ies. The essay basi­cal­ly points out the direct con­nec­tions between the Con­fed­er­ate theoc­ra­cy described in the above piece with the con­ser­v­a­tive legal move­ment cham­pi­oned by Pat Robert­son. In par­tic­u­lar, it hap­pens to be the case that the god­fa­ther of this con­ser­v­a­tive “bib­li­cal world­view” legal move­ment, RJ Rush­doony, the Union vic­to­ry was a “defeat for Chris­t­ian ortho­doxy and paved the way for the rise of an unortho­dox Social Gospel in the post­bel­lum Unit­ed States.” As Sebesta and Hague write, “Rush­doony has con­demned pub­lic edu­ca­tion and con­tend­ed that the Civ­il War was not about slav­ery, but the con­sol­i­da­tion and cen­tral­iza­tion of fed­er­al gov­ern­ment pow­er.” Beyond that, Rush­doony even “applaud­ed” the the­o­log­i­cal defense of slav­ery made by Robert Lewis Dab­ney, a 19th cen­tu­ry cler­gy­man who pub­lished a the­o­log­i­cal dis­ser­ta­tion on the mean­ing of the Civ­il war, in which he used pas­sages from the Bible to defend slav­ery, claim­ing it was “a nec­es­sary good for what he called the ‘depraved’ low­er class­es.” Again, Rush­doony, CNP mem­ber, was the god­fa­ther of the ‘bib­li­cal world­view’ legal move­ment Pat Robert­son built at CBN/Regents Uni­ver­si­ty over the past 40 years. It has­n’t just a theo­crat­ic legal move­ment. It’s been a neo-Con­fed­er­ate theo­crat­ic legal move­ment:

    Reli­gion Dis­patch­es

    Neo-Con­fed­er­ates and the Revival of “The­o­log­i­cal War” for the “Chris­t­ian Nation”

    By Sarah Pos­ner
    July 13, 2011

    After my piece on Michele Bachmann’s Chris­t­ian (Recon­struc­tion­ist) legal edu­ca­tion was pub­lished, I received a note from Edward Sebesta, co-edi­tor of two books on neo-con­fed­er­ates, Neo-Con­fed­er­a­cy: A Crit­i­cal Intro­duc­tion (Univ. of Texas Press, 2008), and The Con­fed­er­ate and Neo-Con­fed­er­ate Read­er: The “Great Truth” About the “Lost Cause” (Univ. Press of Mis­sis­sip­pi 2010). He passed along one of his own essays, “The US Civ­il War as a The­o­log­i­cal War: Con­fed­er­ate Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism and the League of the South,” co-writ­ten with Euan Hague and pub­lished in the Cana­di­an Review of Amer­i­can Stud­ies, an eye-open­ing and extreme­ly use­ful look at the ties between Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ists and the League of the South.

    As I dis­cuss in my Bach­mann piece, the Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ists behind the Insti­tute on the Con­sti­tu­tion as well as the frame­work for teach­ing “bib­li­cal law” at Chris­t­ian law schools like the one Bach­mann attend­ed at Oral Roberts Uni­ver­si­ty, have ties to the neo-con­fed­er­ate group League of the South. At Salon, Justin Elliott has a sto­ry, also based in part on Sebesta’s research, about the ties between Rick Per­ry, who has advo­cat­ed for seces­sion, and the LOS (which endorsed his 1998 run for lieu­tenant gov­er­nor) and the neo-con­fed­er­ate group Sons of Con­fed­er­ate Vet­er­ans (of which he was a mem­ber).

    For the ties between the neo-con­fed­er­ates and the Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ists, Sebesta and Hague’s essay is illu­mi­nat­ing, and (with­out doing so explic­it­ly) explains a great deal about how the “Chris­t­ian nation” mythol­o­gy pro­mot­ed by David Bar­ton and oth­ers has become enmeshed with a white­wash­ing of the his­to­ry of slav­ery in the Unit­ed States. Sebesta and Hague main­tain that the League of the South, which advo­cates for seces­sion and a sec­ond con­fed­er­a­cy, bases its posi­tion on a nation­al­is­tic read­ing of the Bible:

    This posi­tion is cen­tred upon what we iden­ti­fy as the the­o­log­i­cal war the­sis, an assess­ment that inter­prets the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry CSA [Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca] to be an ortho­dox Chris­t­ian nation and under­stands the 1861–1865 US Civ­il War to have been a the­o­log­i­cal war over the future of Amer­i­can reli­gios­i­ty fought between devout Con­fed­er­ate and hereti­cal Union states. In turn, this rea­son­ing leads to claims that the “stars and bars” bat­tle flag and oth­er Con­fed­er­ate icons are Chris­t­ian sym­bols and the asser­tion that oppo­si­tion to them equates to a rejec­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty.

    Sebesta and Hague main­tain that in the 19th cen­tu­ry, the­olo­gians with the South­ern Pres­by­ter­ian Church advo­cat­ed for this “the­o­log­i­cal war,” but by the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, their work had been marginalized—until pop­u­lar­ized by the­olo­gians and activists, includ­ing Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ism founder R.J. Rush­doony:

    [T]he the­o­log­i­cal war the­sis orig­i­nat­ed in texts by the­olo­gians who between them con­tend­ed that the Con­fed­er­a­cy com­prised an ortho­dox Chris­t­ian nation, at times inter­twin­ing this reli­gious view­point with, amongst oth­er things, defences of slav­ery, denun­ci­a­tions of pub­lic edu­ca­tion and mass school­ing, and pro­pos­als to main­tain a hier­ar­chi­cal and unequal soci­ety. . . .

    Once a mar­gin­al revi­sion­ist read­ing of the Civ­il War, we con­tend that groups as diverse as the Sons of Con­fed­er­ate Vet­er­ans her­itage orga­ni­za­tion, Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ist bod­ies such as the Chal­cedon Foun­da­tion, and the League of the South now gen­er­al­ly accept the the­o­log­i­cal war the­sis. Reach­ing a broad audi­ence at con­fer­ences, through pub­li­ca­tions and on web sites, one of the League’s found­ing direc­tors, Steven Wilkins, con­tin­ues to devel­op the­o­log­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tions of the Civ­il War. Oper­at­ing with­in this his­tor­i­cal tra­jec­to­ry, there­fore, the League of the South has uti­lized the the­o­log­i­cal war the­sis to pro­mote a Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist com­mit­ment to con­struct­ing a new Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca.

    An ear­ly advo­cate of the the­o­log­i­cal war the­o­ry, Sebesta and Hague main­tain, was Robert Lewis Dab­ney, a 19th cen­tu­ry cler­gy­man who pub­lished a biog­ra­phy of Stonewall Jack­son, and a the­o­log­i­cal dis­ser­ta­tion on the mean­ing of the Civ­il war, in which he used pas­sages from the Bible to defend slav­ery, claim­ing it was “a nec­es­sary good for what he called the ‘depraved’ low­er class­es.” He sup­port­ed seces­sion as “the only rela­tion of domes­tic slav­ery as autho­rized by God, that we defend,” denounced abo­li­tion as “infi­del” and “anti-scrip­tur­al,” and argued that oppos­ing slav­ery was “tan­ta­mount to reject­ing Chris­tian­i­ty.”

    Dab­ney, large­ly mar­gin­al­ized and reject­ed out­side his South­ern Pres­by­ter­ian cir­cles by the end of his life, was revived, Sebesta and Hague argue, as “since the mid-1960s con­ser­v­a­tive schol­ars and activists, at times oper­at­ing with­in reli­gious cir­cles, have reeval­u­at­ed and repub­lished these mar­gin­al writ­ings.” One of these schol­ars was C. Gregg Singer, who played a role in the for­ma­tion of the Pres­by­ter­ian Church of Amer­i­ca (PCA), which “envis­aged itself as a suc­ces­sor to the Pres­by­ter­ian Church in the Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca (PCCSA), a denom­i­na­tion that had also formed in response to per­ceived heresy.” And R.J. Rush­doony, Sebesta and Hague dis­cuss, believed the Union vic­to­ry was a “defeat for Chris­t­ian ortho­doxy and paved the way for the rise of an unortho­dox Social Gospel in the post­bel­lum Unit­ed States.” In addi­tion, “Rush­doony has con­demned pub­lic edu­ca­tion and con­tend­ed that the Civ­il War was not about slav­ery, but the con­sol­i­da­tion and cen­tral­iza­tion of fed­er­al gov­ern­ment pow­er.” Rush­doony, Sebesta and Hague write, “applaud­ed” Dabney’s defense of slav­ery.

    Fast for­ward to the 1990s, and Sebesta Hague find the “the­o­log­i­cal war” gain­ing trac­tion among neo-Con­fed­er­ates, like the League of the South, which was formed in 1994. One of its found­ing direc­tors, Wilkins, is a mem­ber of the PCA who main­tains that, accord­ing to Sebesta and Hague, “the cause of the Civ­il War was the­o­log­i­cal incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty between North and South, the for­mer hav­ing ‘reject­ed Bib­li­cal Calvin­ism.’” Wilkins has writ­ten that “there was rad­i­cal hatred of Scrip­ture and the old the­ol­o­gy [and] North­ern rad­i­cals were try­ing to throw off this Bib­li­cal cul­ture and turn the coun­try in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion,” and that “the War Between the States was a war between two dif­fer­ent world views: The old way of Bib­li­cal Con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism and the ‘new’ way of Human­is­tic Cen­tral­ism.”

    As the “the­o­log­i­cal war” hatched in the 19th cen­tu­ry became increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar­ized in the late 20th cen­tu­ry, Sebesta and Hague con­clude that “by the turn of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, there­fore, this once periph­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the Civ­il War as a the­o­log­i­cal strug­gle between ortho­dox Chris­t­ian Con­fed­er­ate states and hereti­cal Union states has gained cred­i­bil­i­ty and adher­ents, becom­ing inter­twined with wider Con­fed­er­ate her­itage and con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian opin­ion.

    ...

    Per­ry has links to neo-Con­fed­er­ate groups, and has him­self pro­mot­ed seces­sion and lam­bast­ed fed­er­al gov­ern­ment pow­er. Tim Mur­phy picked up a gem of a Per­ry quote yes­ter­day at Moth­er Jones, in which Per­ry describes the eco­nom­ic cri­sis in decid­ed­ly Recon­struc­tion­ist terms:

    “I think we’re going through those dif­fi­cult eco­nom­ic times for a pur­pose, to bring us back to those Bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples of … not spend­ing all of our mon­ey, not ask­ing for Pharaoh to give every­thing to every­body and to take care of folks, because at the end of the day, it’s slav­ery. And we become slaves to gov­ern­ment.”

    Per­ry is host­ing a prayer ral­ly because “a his­toric cri­sis fac­ing our nation and threat­en­ing our future demands a his­toric response from the church.” Does he see him­self as a gen­er­al of sorts in the neo-Con­fed­er­ate the­o­log­i­cal war?

    ————

    “Neo-Con­fed­er­ates and the Revival of “The­o­log­i­cal War” for the “Chris­t­ian Nation”” By Sarah Pos­ner; Reli­gion Dis­patch­es; 07/13/2011

    As I dis­cuss in my Bach­mann piece, the Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ists behind the Insti­tute on the Con­sti­tu­tion as well as the frame­work for teach­ing “bib­li­cal law” at Chris­t­ian law schools like the one Bach­mann attend­ed at Oral Roberts Uni­ver­si­ty, have ties to the neo-con­fed­er­ate group League of the South. At Salon, Justin Elliott has a sto­ry, also based in part on Sebesta’s research, about the ties between Rick Per­ry, who has advo­cat­ed for seces­sion, and the LOS (which endorsed his 1998 run for lieu­tenant gov­er­nor) and the neo-con­fed­er­ate group Sons of Con­fed­er­ate Vet­er­ans (of which he was a mem­ber).”

    As Sarah Pos­ner was writ­ing back in 2011, the Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ism that under­pinned the legal edu­ca­tion of Domin­ion­ists like Michelle Bach­mann — who grad­u­at­ed from Oral Roberts Uni­ver­si­ty in 1986, right when that law school was being hand­ed over to Pat Robert­son’s CBN Uni­ver­si­ty — was itself under­pinned by the same “the­o­log­i­cal war” claimed by the Con­fed­er­a­cy. When RJ Rush­doony brought that 19th cen­tu­ry con­cept of a the­o­log­i­cal war into late 20th cen­tu­ry con­ser­v­a­tive, he was oper­at­ing as a neo-Con­fed­er­ate. An unam­bigu­ous neo-Con­fed­er­ate who defend­ed slav­ery on the­o­log­i­cal grounds and argued that defeat of the Con­fed­er­a­cy was a “defeat for Chris­t­ian ortho­doxy and paved the way for the rise of an unortho­dox Social Gospel in the post­bel­lum Unit­ed States.” The theo­crat­ic the­ol­o­gy that uni­fies the CNP is fun­da­men­tal­ly neo-con­fed­er­ate in nature. The CNP’s end vision is basi­cal­ly a 21s cen­tu­ry ver­sion of Amer­i­ca mod­eled on the Con­fed­er­a­cy’s theoc­ra­cy:

    ...
    Sebesta and Hague main­tain that in the 19th cen­tu­ry, the­olo­gians with the South­ern Pres­by­ter­ian Church advo­cat­ed for this “the­o­log­i­cal war,” but by the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, their work had been marginalized—until pop­u­lar­ized by the­olo­gians and activists, includ­ing Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ism founder R.J. Rush­doony:

    [T]he the­o­log­i­cal war the­sis orig­i­nat­ed in texts by the­olo­gians who between them con­tend­ed that the Con­fed­er­a­cy com­prised an ortho­dox Chris­t­ian nation, at times inter­twin­ing this reli­gious view­point with, amongst oth­er things, defences of slav­ery, denun­ci­a­tions of pub­lic edu­ca­tion and mass school­ing, and pro­pos­als to main­tain a hier­ar­chi­cal and unequal soci­ety. . . .

    Once a mar­gin­al revi­sion­ist read­ing of the Civ­il War, we con­tend that groups as diverse as the Sons of Con­fed­er­ate Vet­er­ans her­itage orga­ni­za­tion, Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ist bod­ies such as the Chal­cedon Foun­da­tion, and the League of the South now gen­er­al­ly accept the the­o­log­i­cal war the­sis. Reach­ing a broad audi­ence at con­fer­ences, through pub­li­ca­tions and on web sites, one of the League’s found­ing direc­tors, Steven Wilkins, con­tin­ues to devel­op the­o­log­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tions of the Civ­il War. Oper­at­ing with­in this his­tor­i­cal tra­jec­to­ry, there­fore, the League of the South has uti­lized the the­o­log­i­cal war the­sis to pro­mote a Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist com­mit­ment to con­struct­ing a new Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca.

    An ear­ly advo­cate of the the­o­log­i­cal war the­o­ry, Sebesta and Hague main­tain, was Robert Lewis Dab­ney, a 19th cen­tu­ry cler­gy­man who pub­lished a biog­ra­phy of Stonewall Jack­son, and a the­o­log­i­cal dis­ser­ta­tion on the mean­ing of the Civ­il war, in which he used pas­sages from the Bible to defend slav­ery, claim­ing it was “a nec­es­sary good for what he called the ‘depraved’ low­er class­es.” He sup­port­ed seces­sion as “the only rela­tion of domes­tic slav­ery as autho­rized by God, that we defend,” denounced abo­li­tion as “infi­del” and “anti-scrip­tur­al,” and argued that oppos­ing slav­ery was “tan­ta­mount to reject­ing Chris­tian­i­ty.”

    Dab­ney, large­ly mar­gin­al­ized and reject­ed out­side his South­ern Pres­by­ter­ian cir­cles by the end of his life, was revived, Sebesta and Hague argue, as “since the mid-1960s con­ser­v­a­tive schol­ars and activists, at times oper­at­ing with­in reli­gious cir­cles, have reeval­u­at­ed and repub­lished these mar­gin­al writ­ings.” One of these schol­ars was C. Gregg Singer, who played a role in the for­ma­tion of the Pres­by­ter­ian Church of Amer­i­ca (PCA), which “envis­aged itself as a suc­ces­sor to the Pres­by­ter­ian Church in the Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca (PCCSA), a denom­i­na­tion that had also formed in response to per­ceived heresy.” And R.J. Rush­doony, Sebesta and Hague dis­cuss, believed the Union vic­to­ry was a “defeat for Chris­t­ian ortho­doxy and paved the way for the rise of an unortho­dox Social Gospel in the post­bel­lum Unit­ed States.” In addi­tion, “Rush­doony has con­demned pub­lic edu­ca­tion and con­tend­ed that the Civ­il War was not about slav­ery, but the con­sol­i­da­tion and cen­tral­iza­tion of fed­er­al gov­ern­ment pow­er.” Rush­doony, Sebesta and Hague write, “applaud­ed” Dabney’s defense of slav­ery.

    Fast for­ward to the 1990s, and Sebesta Hague find the “the­o­log­i­cal war” gain­ing trac­tion among neo-Con­fed­er­ates, like the League of the South, which was formed in 1994. One of its found­ing direc­tors, Wilkins, is a mem­ber of the PCA who main­tains that, accord­ing to Sebesta and Hague, “the cause of the Civ­il War was the­o­log­i­cal incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty between North and South, the for­mer hav­ing ‘reject­ed Bib­li­cal Calvin­ism.’” Wilkins has writ­ten that “there was rad­i­cal hatred of Scrip­ture and the old the­ol­o­gy [and] North­ern rad­i­cals were try­ing to throw off this Bib­li­cal cul­ture and turn the coun­try in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion,” and that “the War Between the States was a war between two dif­fer­ent world views: The old way of Bib­li­cal Con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism and the ‘new’ way of Human­is­tic Cen­tral­ism.”
    ...

    And as Pos­ner reminds us, this is the same the­ol­o­gy behind David Bar­ton’s Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist ver­sion of Amer­i­can His­to­ry that the CNP has been fight­ing to inject into US class­rooms through ini­tia­tives like Project Blitz. When groups like the AFD foment hys­ter­ics around trans kids, it’s this neo-Con­fed­er­ate move­ment that is ulti­mate­ly behind it and poised to exploit it:

    ...
    For the ties between the neo-con­fed­er­ates and the Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ists, Sebesta and Hague’s essay is illu­mi­nat­ing, and (with­out doing so explic­it­ly) explains a great deal about how the “Chris­t­ian nation” mythol­o­gy pro­mot­ed by David Bar­ton and oth­ers has become enmeshed with a white­wash­ing of the his­to­ry of slav­ery in the Unit­ed States. Sebesta and Hague main­tain that the League of the South, which advo­cates for seces­sion and a sec­ond con­fed­er­a­cy, bases its posi­tion on a nation­al­is­tic read­ing of the Bible:

    This posi­tion is cen­tred upon what we iden­ti­fy as the the­o­log­i­cal war the­sis, an assess­ment that inter­prets the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry CSA [Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca] to be an ortho­dox Chris­t­ian nation and under­stands the 1861–1865 US Civ­il War to have been a the­o­log­i­cal war over the future of Amer­i­can reli­gios­i­ty fought between devout Con­fed­er­ate and hereti­cal Union states. In turn, this rea­son­ing leads to claims that the “stars and bars” bat­tle flag and oth­er Con­fed­er­ate icons are Chris­t­ian sym­bols and the asser­tion that oppo­si­tion to them equates to a rejec­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty.

    ...

    As the “the­o­log­i­cal war” hatched in the 19th cen­tu­ry became increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar­ized in the late 20th cen­tu­ry, Sebesta and Hague con­clude that “by the turn of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, there­fore, this once periph­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the Civ­il War as a the­o­log­i­cal strug­gle between ortho­dox Chris­t­ian Con­fed­er­ate states and hereti­cal Union states has gained cred­i­bil­i­ty and adher­ents, becom­ing inter­twined with wider Con­fed­er­ate her­itage and con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian opin­ion.
    ...

    Final­ly, when we see these 2011 warn­ings about for­mer Texas gov­er­nor Rick Per­ry’s ties to neo-Con­fed­er­ate theo­crat­ic groups like League of the South, keep in mind that we are get­ting reports that Rick Per­ry is con­sid­er­ing a seem­ing­ly insane 2024 run for the White House. We’ll see if that hap­pens, but if it does, keep in mind his neo-Con­fed­er­ate fel­low trav­el­ers who are prob­a­bly going to influ­enc­ing these kinds of deci­sions:

    ...
    Per­ry has links to neo-Con­fed­er­ate groups, and has him­self pro­mot­ed seces­sion and lam­bast­ed fed­er­al gov­ern­ment pow­er. Tim Mur­phy picked up a gem of a Per­ry quote yes­ter­day at Moth­er Jones, in which Per­ry describes the eco­nom­ic cri­sis in decid­ed­ly Recon­struc­tion­ist terms:

    “I think we’re going through those dif­fi­cult eco­nom­ic times for a pur­pose, to bring us back to those Bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples of … not spend­ing all of our mon­ey, not ask­ing for Pharaoh to give every­thing to every­body and to take care of folks, because at the end of the day, it’s slav­ery. And we become slaves to gov­ern­ment.”

    Per­ry is host­ing a prayer ral­ly because “a his­toric cri­sis fac­ing our nation and threat­en­ing our future demands a his­toric response from the church.” Does he see him­self as a gen­er­al of sorts in the neo-Con­fed­er­ate the­o­log­i­cal war?
    ...

    How much talk of seces­sion should we expect from pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Rick Per­ry this time around. It’s easy to see how such threats might be espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar right now with the GOP pri­ma­ry elec­torate in the post-Trump indict­ment polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment. Dis­tin­guish­ing between Rick Per­ry’s gen­uine luna­cy and gen­uine Chris­t­ian neo-Con­fed­er­a­cy sym­pa­thies is once again sad­ly nec­es­sary. But if he does run, he’s undoubt­ed­ly going to be seen by Domin­ion­ist and neo-Con­fed­er­ate groups as a fel­low trav­el­er. One of many fel­low trav­el­ers of a Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ment that now basi­cal­ly con­trol the Repub­li­can Par­ty and the Supreme Court. A move­ment Pat Robert­son played a lead­ing role in build­ing for decades, includ­ing the build­ing of the insti­tu­tion­al home base for a legal edu­ca­tion from a that neo-Con­fed­er­ate theo­crat­ic ‘bib­li­cal world­view’. When he was­n’t fleec­ing audi­ences on TV.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 11, 2023, 3:24 am
  26. It was inevitable, awful, and now it hap­pened. It’s an over­ar­ch­ing theme of sto­ries com­ing out of the Supreme Court this year. Because it just keeps hap­pen­ing exact­ly as rea­son­ably pre­dict­ed: the Roberts con­ser­v­a­tive super-major­i­ty is plan­ning on rolling the US back to the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry and maybe the 19th cen­tu­ry. A roll­back of civ­il rights but also a roll­back of any real curbs on the pow­er of the Amer­i­can oli­garchy. The Roberts Court is an ‘end game’ kind of court. Total vic­to­ry is at hand. Total vic­to­ry by the net­work of dark mon­ey mega-donors and their polit­i­cal patrons who installed — and pam­pered — the cur­rent Supreme Court major­i­ty and know exact­ly what they are going to get in return. That kind of total vic­to­ry.

    And that promise of total vic­to­ry by the Supreme Court major­i­ty’s oli­garch patrons — wrapped in a bow in the form of one prece­dent-revers­ing his­toric rul­ing after anoth­er — is a big piece of con­text to keep in mind when hear­ing about the end of affir­ma­tive action at all pub­lic and pri­vate uni­ver­si­ties as a result of Thurs­day’s Stu­dents for Fair Admis­sions Inc. v. Pres­i­dent & Fel­lows of Har­vard Col­lege rul­ing. The end­ing of affir­ma­tive action in col­lege admis­sions is a very big deal on its own. And also just one of step in the oli­garchy’s path to total vic­to­ry. A total vic­to­ry that includes not just the near com­plete cap­ture of the US’s eco­nom­ic wealth but a near com­plete insti­tu­tion­al cap­ture too. With col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties clear­ly on the front lines of this insti­tu­tion­al takeover. Not exclu­sive­ly on the front lines, obvi­ous­ly. All sorts of insti­tu­tions are under assault, most notably demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions, whether it’s the legal drown­ing of US pol­i­tics in dark mon­ey thanks to Roberts Court’s 2010 Cit­i­zens Unit­ed rul­ing or the out-of-con­trol sanc­tioned par­ti­san ger­ry­man­der­ing thanks to the court’s 2019 Rucho v Com­mon Cause rul­ing. And then there’s the planned ide­o­log­i­cal purg­ing of the fed­er­al work­force with the ongo­ing Sched­ule F plot. Or Ron DeSan­tis’s ide­o­log­i­cal purge at lib­er­al New Col­lege. And, of course, there was Jan­u­ary 6, a shock­ing­ly direct insti­tu­tion­al assault brought to us by the same net­work of politi­cians and oli­garchs and theocrats behind the rest of these insti­tu­tion­al assaults. The end­ing of affir­ma­tive action did­n’t hap­pen in a vac­u­um. It hap­pened as part of a high­ly-orga­nized decades-long soci­ety-wide insti­tu­tion­al assault backed by the same polit­i­cal that has cap­ture most of the rest of the US gov­ern­ment.

    An ongo­ing cap­ture that isn’t stop­ping with affir­ma­tive action. Or col­leges. As we’ve seen with the Sched­ule F plot — osten­si­bly focused on purg­ing just gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions but clear­ly in line with Cur­tis Yarv­in’s broad­er vision of a public/private insti­tu­tion­al purge — the goal of this net­work isn’t just to purge the gov­ern­ment of any­one who isn’t a fel­low trav­el­er. All insti­tu­tions of influ­ence are to be purged, from col­leges to large pri­vate employ­ers.

    And that brings us to the fol­low­ing set of arti­cles that, tak­en togeth­er, add some inter­est­ing addi­tion­al con­text to accel­er­at­ing right-wing insti­tu­tion­al takeover and purge agen­da. For starters, as experts warn, Thurs­day’s Supreme Court rul­ing isn’t just going to have a chill­ing effect on the recruit­ing of diverse stu­dent bod­ies. It’s implic­it­ly going to ampli­fy the ongo­ing push to purge all US insti­tu­tions of Diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion (DEI) ini­tia­tives. And espe­cial­ly US cor­po­ra­tions, where DEI ini­tia­tives have drawn the ire of con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians look­ing to pick a ‘pop­ulist’ fight by pick­ing a fight with ‘woke cor­po­ra­tions’ over their DEI poli­cies.

    But as the fol­low­ing USA Today arti­cle also notes, the new rul­ing is going to implic­it­ly have a chill­ing effect on cor­po­rate DEI poli­cies in anoth­er very impor­tant way: there’s sim­ply going to be few­er minori­ties grad­u­at­ing from Ivy League insti­tu­tions. And in a world where who you know is often more impor­tant than what you can do in terms of career advance­ment and an Ivy League edu­ca­tion is one of the few avail­able tick­ets into that elite world, drain­ing elite US col­leges of minor­i­ty grad­u­ates is obvi­ous­ly going to be drain­ing cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca of minor­i­ty exec­u­tives too. It’s a fore­see­able down­stream effect. And it’s going to be hap­pen­ing at the same time the US is on track to become a ‘major­i­ty minor­i­ty’ nation by 2043. Twen­ty years isn’t that long when it comes to a soci­ety, but it’s a very long time when it comes to an oli­garchy in a posi­tion to purge every major insti­tu­tion in the US. It’s a mas­sive ten­sion at work in this dynam­ic. The kind of ten­sion that makes fur­ther cur­tail­ment of demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions and democ­ra­cy in gen­er­al anoth­er fore­see­able out­come on the path to total vic­to­ry.

    And as we’re going to be remind­ed of in the sec­ond arti­cle below, pub­lished in the Atlantic on Jan­u­ary 5, 2022 — the anniver­sary eve of the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion- the net­work behind Jan 6 and this larg­er insti­tu­tion­al purge agen­da is, itself, a prod­uct of Amer­i­ca’s elite insti­tu­tions. And in par­tic­u­lar the elite net­works formed at Amer­i­c­as Ivy League schools, which in turn serve as invi­ta­tions into Amer­i­ca’s exec­u­tive and man­age­r­i­al class. That’s anoth­er part of the con­text of the Supreme Court’s gut­ting of affir­ma­tive action: this rul­ing did­n’t sim­ply dra­mat­i­cal­ly cur­tail access to elite col­lege edu­ca­tions to his­tor­i­cal­ly dis­ad­van­taged minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties. It also cut off access to those invi­ta­tions into Amer­i­ca’s man­age­r­i­al and exec­u­tive class that comes with such edu­ca­tions. Amer­i­ca’s unof­fi­cial aris­toc­ra­cy runs through the Ivy Leagues, which is some­thing that makes the Supreme Court’s rul­ing all the more bit­ter when we con­sid­er the fact that the rul­ing did­n’t rule out lega­cy admis­sions. The chil­dren of oli­garchs can still access those invi­ta­tions to the cor­ri­dors of pow­er. Poor minori­ties can take a hike.

    Final­ly, as we’re going to see in the third arti­cle excerpt below — an inter­view of com­plex­i­ty sci­ence researcher Peter Turchin in the con­ser­v­a­tive UnHerd pub­lished a few weeks ago — there was a fas­ci­nat­ing set of find­ings by Turch­in’s research team that are worth keep­ing in rela­tion to this rul­ing and the large ongo­ing right-wing insti­tu­tion­al purge. As Turchin describes, his team built a data­base of the events lead­ing up to over 200 soci­etal col­laps­es over the past 5,000 years. Turch­in’s team found the same pat­tern play­ing out over and over: soci­eties go through a gold­en age peri­od when soci­etal gains are broad­ly shared by the pop­u­la­tion, but then a kind of elite rot seems to set in and the rot comes from the top. The “iron law of oli­garchy”, as Turchin puts it, seems to kick in and a rot ensures. Elites in a posi­tion to direct more and more of soci­ety’s wealth to them­selves unchecked begin to do so, result­ing in a “wealthy pump” effect that inevitably dis­torts the econ­o­my and impov­er­ish­es the work­ing class. This cycle of oli­garchic greed and self-destruc­tion just keeps hap­pen­ing, across space and time.

    But it’s not a dis­con­tent­ed work­ing class that ulti­mate­ly brings about soci­ety cri­sis and col­laps­es, accord­ing to Turch­in’s analy­sis. It’s feud­ing elites who do it. In par­tic­u­lar, a dynam­ic cre­at­ed by a process Turchin dubs “elite over­pro­duc­tion” — the cre­ation of too many aspir­ing elites for the num­ber of posi­tions of pow­er and influ­ence — ulti­mate­ly brings about the kinds of fac­tion­al schisms and zero-sum schem­ing that can result in civ­il wars, coups, and of course days like Jan­u­ary 6. In oth­er words, Jan­u­ary 6 was a man­i­fes­ta­tion, in part, of this ‘elite over­pro­duc­tion’ phe­nom­e­na Turchin sees pop­ping up through­out his­to­ry. But it’s not an over pro­duc­tion of elites caused by the invi­ta­tion of too many ‘non-elite’ stu­dents into these elite cir­cles of pow­er. And an elite over­pro­duc­tion caused by the exis­tence of a high­ly orga­nized pow­er net­work of mega-donor bil­lion­aires who grew fab­u­lous­ly wealthy from the ‘wealth pump’ turned on by Rea­gan and have turned that fab­u­lous wealth into a suc­cess­ful cap­ture of most of the US’s insti­tu­tions. The iron law of the oli­garchy play­ing out over the last gen­er­a­tion in the US. There’s a group play­ing for total vic­to­ry and total vic­to­ry is at hand now that they’ve got the Supreme Court for the next gen­er­a­tion. That’s the source the ‘elite over­pro­duc­tion’ at work here. Total pow­er grabs tend to pro­duce a sup­ply and demand imbal­ance for avail­able posi­tions of influ­ence. So while there’s obvi­ous­ly a back­lash to the wel­com­ing of tra­di­tion­al­ly mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties into the halls of pow­er going on here, it’s also impor­tant to real­ize that there’s a raw pow­er grab going on too. End­ing affir­ma­tive action is just one more box to be checked for the groups behind this.

    But it’s Turch­in’s final analy­sis — that all soci­eties that go down this path ulti­mate­ly col­lapse — that makes the obvi­ous suc­cess of this pow­er net­work so grim for the future of the US. Because if Turchin is cor­rect, we should­n’t expect Amer­i­ca’s elites to reign them­selves in. Quite the oppo­site, we should expect oli­garchs to grab as much as they pos­si­bly can. And that means a large­ly white male oli­garchy is poised to be reclaim­ing a greater and greater share of posi­tions of pow­er and influ­ence for decades to come, at the same time the US is becom­ing more diverse and non-white than ever. What will a far right insti­tu­tion­al pow­er grab that includes every­thing from schools, to employ­ers, to democ­ra­cy itself mean for the per­ceived legit­i­ma­cy of not just the US gov­ern­ment but basi­cal­ly all US insti­tu­tion­al for future gen­er­a­tions? Because this does­n’t just feel like a per­fect storm for a right-wing pow­er grab. This also feels like the per­fect storm for the gen­er­al pub­lic loss of faith in US insti­tu­tions in gen­er­al. And a loss of faith direct­ly relat­ed to this Supreme Court-blessed right-wing pow­er grab that we’re all wit­ness­ing. It’s a remark­able dynam­ic unfold­ing. The decades-long oli­garchic pow­er grab of Amer­i­ca’s con­ser­v­a­tive ‘Old Guard’ using white Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist pop­ulism is com­ing to fruition and play­ing out at the same the coun­try is on track to become a ‘major­i­ty minor­i­ty’ soci­ety in terms of both race and reli­gion. It’s hard to see how that isn’t going to be deeply desta­bi­liz­ing.

    Then again, soci­etal desta­bi­liza­tion is kind of the theme here too for this pow­er net­work. Or at least one of the themes. Desta­bi­liza­tion in the forms of faux pop­ulist rag­ing against ‘woke elites’, car­ried out in the pur­suit of the cap­ture and con­sol­i­da­tion of more pow­er. Those are twin themes that we’re see­ing play out. And while they aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, an anti-elit­ist pow­er grab car­ried out by a net­work of bil­lion­aires is a tricky line to walk. But walk­ing that line isn’t real­ly an option if you’re a right-wing bil­lion­aire intent on hav­ing it all. Total vic­to­ry awaits.

    Ok, first, here’s that USA Today piece that points out that Thurs­day’s Supreme Court rul­ing isn’t just an attack on diver­si­ty on elite cam­pus­es and the edu­ca­tions offered by those cam­pus­es. It’s an attack on the tick­ets to the cor­ri­dors of pow­er that such edu­ca­tions brings thanks to the unof­fi­cial real­i­ty that Amer­i­ca runs on who you know, not what you can do. An ongo­ing attack that includes now-embold­ened law­suits tar­get­ing cor­po­rate DEI poli­cies. And while many cor­po­ra­tions are cur­rent­ly vow­ing to ‘stick to their val­ues’ and remain com­mit­ted to DEI poli­cies, the whole point of this cam­paign is to ulti­mate­ly cre­ate a larg­er envi­ron­ment so hos­tile to DEI poli­cies that they are deemed too cost­ly and unpalat­able to main­tain. It’s a strat­e­gy pred­i­cat­ed on the assump­tion that prof­it max­i­miza­tion is the one true cor­po­rate val­ue; every­thing else is just pub­lic rela­tions. A strat­e­gy that, if cor­rect, sug­gests cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca’s the good ol’ boy gold­en age is yet to come, as the US is more diverse than ever:

    USA Today

    Supreme Court just reversed affir­ma­tive action. What that means for work­place diver­si­ty.

    Jes­si­ca Guynn
    Pub­lished 10:44 a.m. ET June 29, 2023 | Update 3:42 p.m. ET June 29, 2023

    For years, Marc Benioff, CEO of Sales­force, has cru­sad­ed for stake­hold­er cap­i­tal­ism, the idea that busi­ness lead­ers should val­ue the well-being of peo­ple and the plan­et along with the inter­ests of share­hold­ers.

    These “woke” beliefs – Sales­force offered to relo­cate employ­ees con­cerned about being able to get an abor­tion in Texas, stopped sell­ing soft­ware to retail­ers that stock mil­i­tary-style rifles and Benioff spoke out against Geor­gia and North Car­oli­na for pass­ing laws that would allow LGBTQ+ dis­crim­i­na­tion – have got­ten this activist CEO in hot water with con­ser­v­a­tives who say he’s sac­ri­fic­ing prof­its for pol­i­tics.

    But Benioff hasn’t backed off. Last fall, Sales­force sided with Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na in a pair of cas­es before the Supreme Court chal­leng­ing the prac­tice of con­sid­er­ing race in admis­sions to build diver­si­ty on col­lege cam­pus­es.

    In a 6–3 deci­sion writ­ten by Chief Jus­tice John Roberts, the high court on Thurs­day struck down affir­ma­tive action in col­lege admis­sions.

    The deci­sion is lim­it­ed to high­er edu­ca­tion and won’t direct­ly affect employ­ers like Sales­force, which are gov­erned by a dif­fer­ent statute. But the rip­ple effects from the rul­ing could come quick­ly, start­ing with a decline in col­lege grad­u­ates from under­rep­re­sent­ed back­grounds, mean­ing the loss of “a pipeline of high­ly qual­i­fied future work­ers and busi­ness lead­ers,” com­pa­nies from Google to Gen­er­al Elec­tric warned the Supreme Court.

    Legal experts say the move to restrict affir­ma­tive action could also lead to more chal­lenges in how cor­po­ra­tions make hir­ing and pro­mo­tion deci­sions.

    What’s more, the affir­ma­tive action rever­sal could emerge as the lat­est flash­point in the nation’s cul­ture wars. Observers expect the rul­ing to embold­en attacks on cor­po­rate diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion ini­tia­tives as ten­sions rise over how cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca should address lin­ger­ing work­place inequal­i­ty.

    In response, com­pa­nies are hold­ing dis­cus­sions and con­tem­plat­ing changes to diver­si­ty pro­grams. Some are sec­ond-guess­ing set­ting pub­lic tar­gets for racial diver­si­ty in their exec­u­tive ranks or run­ning lead­er­ship train­ing pro­grams exclu­sive­ly for under­rep­re­sent­ed groups. Oth­ers are won­der­ing if they should remove “diver­si­ty” from job titles to avoid scruti­ny.

    But many employ­ers – includ­ing Sales­force – say they plan to stay the course.

    The com­pa­ny says one of its core val­ues is equal­i­ty and it has built diver­si­ty ini­tia­tives from recruit­ing indi­vid­u­als from under­rep­re­sent­ed back­grounds to cre­at­ing an employ­ee advo­ca­cy pro­gram for peo­ple of col­or that take into account that tal­ent is spread even­ly but oppor­tu­ni­ty is not.

    ...

    Affir­ma­tive action deci­sion will increase scruti­ny of diver­si­ty pro­grams

    Com­ing as con­ser­v­a­tive groups push back against diver­si­ty pro­grams and con­sumers vent frus­tra­tions over cor­po­ra­tions becom­ing more vocal on pro­gres­sive issues like LGBTQ+ rights, abor­tion and racial equi­ty, the Supreme Court deci­sion will like­ly invite greater scruti­ny of the strate­gies com­pa­nies use to increase diver­si­ty, accord­ing to Andrew Turn­bull, a labor and employ­ment part­ner at law firm Mor­ri­son & Foer­ster.

    Fed­er­al law pro­hibits employ­ers from con­sid­er­ing race and oth­er pro­tect­ed char­ac­ter­is­tics in employ­ment deci­sions. Diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion ini­tia­tives, on the oth­er hand, help employ­ers make their work­forces less homo­ge­neous and their work­places more inclu­sive by cast­ing a wide net for qual­i­fied work­ers from dif­fer­ent back­grounds, Turn­bull said.

    “We may see an increase in chal­lenges to those pro­grams because some employ­ees may incor­rect­ly assume this means that their employ­ers can no longer have work­place affir­ma­tive action or DEI pro­grams,” he said.

    The debate swirling around diver­si­ty pro­grams has increased the pos­si­bil­i­ty that cor­po­ra­tions will be hit with dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suits – from those who sup­port these ini­tia­tives and those who oppose them.

    In the decade from 2011 to 2021, the num­ber of reverse dis­crim­i­na­tion claims filed with the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­ni­ty Com­mis­sion dropped from about 4,000 to 2,000 a year, accord­ing to data USA TODAY obtained from the EEOC. While white peo­ple account for about two-thirds of U.S. work­ers, those claims made up about 10% of over­all race-based dis­crim­i­na­tion claims.

    Lawyers see an uptick in reverse dis­crim­i­na­tion claims as GOP back­lash esca­lates

    But Turn­bull says lawyers are see­ing an uptick in reverse dis­crim­i­na­tion claims. Ear­li­er this month, a fed­er­al jury in New Jer­sey ordered Star­bucks to pay $25.6 mil­lion to a for­mer region­al man­ag­er after deter­min­ing that the com­pa­ny fired her because she was white.

    As the GOP back­lash increas­ing­ly tar­gets the pri­vate sec­tor, leg­isla­tive chal­lenges to diver­si­ty poli­cies in red states are also pro­lif­er­at­ing, Turn­bull said.

    Much depends on how employ­ers respond to the rul­ing, said Stan­ford law pro­fes­sor Richard Thomp­son Ford. Robert’s major­i­ty opin­ion leaves room for col­leges to con­sid­er how race affect­ed an appli­can­t’s life.

    “As far as I know work­place DEI is indi­vid­u­al­ized so even if the court’s log­ic were applied to work­place pro­grams, it would not seem to pro­hib­it the kinds of poli­cies most employ­ers use,” he said.

    Few employ­ers engage in the type of affir­ma­tive action that was used by selec­tive col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, accord­ing to Ford.

    In employ­ment, affir­ma­tive action means “act­ing affir­ma­tive­ly” to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that is wel­com­ing and fair to all work­ers and that encour­ages diverse can­di­dates to apply for posi­tions, said Christy Kiely, a labor and employ­ment part­ner with law firm Sey­far­th. Employ­ment deci­sions are then based on mer­it, Kiely said.

    “It is law­ful for employ­ers to affir­ma­tive­ly recruit peo­ple so that they have the widest range of appli­cants and pick the most tal­ent­ed can­di­dates,” said Amalea Smirniotopou­los, senior pol­i­cy coun­sel at NAACP Legal Defense and Edu­ca­tion­al Fund. “I don’t think that will change.”

    Affir­ma­tive action is lat­est GOP tar­get after CRT and ESG

    Cor­po­ra­tions have turned to diver­si­ty pro­grams to right decades of lost oppor­tu­ni­ties for Black peo­ple and oth­er groups who have been his­tor­i­cal­ly under­rep­re­sent­ed, espe­cial­ly in lead­er­ship roles. Those efforts inten­si­fied fol­low­ing the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

    Pledges from cor­po­ra­tions to address racial inequities drew a sharp back­lash, from leg­is­la­tion in GOP-con­trolled state hous­es restrict­ing how cor­po­ra­tions talk to employ­ees about racism to the tar­get­ing of tril­lions of dol­lars in invest­ments that take into account ESG, short for envi­ron­men­tal, social and gov­er­nance prin­ci­ples.

    If there is any sense in these C‑suites, com­pa­nies will take this as the cat­a­lyst, the cat­a­pult, the warn­ing they need to get back to not dis­crim­i­nat­ing.

    Scott Shep­ard, direc­tor of the Nation­al Cen­ter for Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Research’s Free Enter­prise Project

    The Supreme Court rul­ing is a warn­ing to cor­po­rate elites to stop foist­ing their lib­er­al agen­da on the nation, said Scott Shep­ard, direc­tor of the Nation­al Cen­ter for Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Research’s Free Enter­prise Project.

    In August, the con­ser­v­a­tive think tank sued Star­bucks exec­u­tives and direc­tors on behalf of a Star­bucks share­hold­er, claim­ing that by set­ting hir­ing goals for Black peo­ple and oth­er peo­ple of col­or, award­ing con­tracts to diverse sup­pli­ers and tying exec­u­tive pay to diver­si­ty, the cof­fee chain is engag­ing in racial dis­crim­i­na­tion.

    Stephen Miller’s Amer­i­ca First Legal has filed com­plaints with the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­ni­ty Com­mis­sion ask­ing for inves­ti­ga­tions into the hir­ing and employ­ment prac­tices at com­pa­nies includ­ing Star­bucks, McDon­ald’s and Mor­gan Stan­ley.

    “If there is any sense in these C‑suites, com­pa­nies will take this as the cat­a­lyst, the cat­a­pult, the warn­ing they need to get back to not dis­crim­i­nat­ing,” Shep­ard said.

    Affir­ma­tive action rul­ing chill­ing effect? ‘I’m already see­ing this down­turn in DEI’

    Natal­ie Gillard, who cre­at­ed Fac­tu­al­i­ty – an employ­ee train­ing tool used by com­pa­nies such as Google, Nike and Amer­i­can Express – says she’s wor­ried the affir­ma­tive action deci­sion will have a chill­ing effect, much like Pres­i­dent Trump’s 2020 exec­u­tive order ban­ning the U.S. gov­ern­ment and fed­er­al con­trac­tors from teach­ing employ­ees about sys­temic racism caused some pri­vate employ­ers to pause train­ing.

    “I’m already see­ing this down­turn around DEI efforts in insti­tu­tions, orga­ni­za­tions and cor­po­ra­tions,” said Gillard, who has lost busi­ness in Flori­da and Texas where pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties are barred from spend­ing mon­ey on diver­si­ty pro­grams.

    Alvin B. Tillery Jr., direc­tor of the Cen­ter for the Study of Democ­ra­cy and Diver­si­ty at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty, says he’s con­cerned about what con­ser­v­a­tives may have planned next. He expects they will dou­ble down on efforts to rid the pub­lic sec­tor of affir­ma­tive action, from gov­ern­ment hir­ing to con­tract­ing.

    Sup­pli­er diver­si­ty pro­grams and fed­er­al con­tract­ing, that’s the big prize,” said Tillery, founder of the 2040 Strat­e­gy Group, which works close­ly with For­tune 500 clients. “It’s real­ly about tak­ing away set-aside pro­grams and racial equi­ty pro­grams, includ­ing at the local gov­ern­ment lev­el. Those are things that have a much big­ger impact on soci­ety than affir­ma­tive action at col­leges.”

    Will big busi­ness­es like Apple, Google, Nike and Star­bucks back off diver­si­ty efforts?

    Last fall, some of the nation’s largest com­pa­nies, includ­ing Apple, Google par­ent Alpha­bet and Star­bucks, filed briefs sid­ing with col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties that con­sid­er race as one of the fac­tors in their admis­sions process.

    ...

    Will cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca shrink from diver­si­ty ini­tia­tives under grow­ing pres­sure from the polit­i­cal right? Eve­lyn Carter, pres­i­dent of diver­si­ty firm Par­a­digm, doubts it.

    A Bain & Com­pa­ny sur­vey of CEOs showed that 85% of the near­ly 300 busi­ness lead­ers view social issues — labor stan­dards, human rights, DEI, health; and prod­uct safe­ty — as “urgent” con­cerns for their com­pa­nies. When asked about the pri­ma­ry role of their busi­ness, 60% said either cre­at­ing “pos­i­tive out­comes for soci­ety” or “bal­anc­ing the needs of all stake­hold­ers.”

    “Our clients are com­ing to us, not say­ing how do we stop this, but say­ing, how do we edu­cate our team around why this is still impor­tant,” Carter said.

    Cor­po­ra­tions are just start­ing to see the ben­e­fits from the progress they’ve made in diver­si­fy­ing their work­forces and lead­er­ship, said Lanaya Irvin, CEO of Coqual, a think tank that research­es work­place diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion.

    Data shows that cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca still has very lit­tle diver­si­ty, espe­cial­ly at the top.

    White men rep­re­sent 7 in 10 exec­u­tives at the very top of the nation’s 100 largest pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­nies, accord­ing to a USA TODAY analy­sis of named exec­u­tive offi­cers. In fact, they are even more like­ly today than their grand­fa­thers to be man­agers despite a diver­si­fy­ing work­force.

    ...

    ———–

    “Supreme Court just reversed affir­ma­tive action. What that means for work­place diver­si­ty.” by Jes­si­ca Guynn; USA Today; 06/29/2023

    “The deci­sion is lim­it­ed to high­er edu­ca­tion and won’t direct­ly affect employ­ers like Sales­force, which are gov­erned by a dif­fer­ent statute. But the rip­ple effects from the rul­ing could come quick­ly, start­ing with a decline in col­lege grad­u­ates from under­rep­re­sent­ed back­grounds, mean­ing the loss of “a pipeline of high­ly qual­i­fied future work­ers and busi­ness lead­ers,” com­pa­nies from Google to Gen­er­al Elec­tric warned the Supreme Court.

    The Supreme Court’s rul­ing strik­ing down affir­ma­tive action pro­grams did­n’t include the cor­po­rate hir­ing affir­ma­tive action. But as experts warn, the impact is inevitable. You can’t sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly roll back col­lege diver­si­ty pro­grams with­out that trans­lat­ing into a less diverse pool of can­di­dates for cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca. So at the same time the US is on fac­ing long-term demo­graph­ic shifts towards a less and less white pop­u­lace, cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca’s pool of col­lege edu­cat­ed can­di­dates — espe­cial­ly can­di­dates from Ivy League uni­ver­si­ties — is poised to col­lapse. But as experts also warn, this rul­ing isn’t just going to lead to a dwin­dling pool of diverse col­lege grad­u­ates. It’s also an invi­ta­tion for direct legal chal­lenges against cor­po­rate DEI hir­ing pro­grams:

    ...
    Legal experts say the move to restrict affir­ma­tive action could also lead to more chal­lenges in how cor­po­ra­tions make hir­ing and pro­mo­tion deci­sions.

    What’s more, the affir­ma­tive action rever­sal could emerge as the lat­est flash­point in the nation’s cul­ture wars. Observers expect the rul­ing to embold­en attacks on cor­po­rate diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion ini­tia­tives as ten­sions rise over how cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca should address lin­ger­ing work­place inequal­i­ty.

    In response, com­pa­nies are hold­ing dis­cus­sions and con­tem­plat­ing changes to diver­si­ty pro­grams. Some are sec­ond-guess­ing set­ting pub­lic tar­gets for racial diver­si­ty in their exec­u­tive ranks or run­ning lead­er­ship train­ing pro­grams exclu­sive­ly for under­rep­re­sent­ed groups. Oth­ers are won­der­ing if they should remove “diver­si­ty” from job titles to avoid scruti­ny.

    ...

    Com­ing as con­ser­v­a­tive groups push back against diver­si­ty pro­grams and con­sumers vent frus­tra­tions over cor­po­ra­tions becom­ing more vocal on pro­gres­sive issues like LGBTQ+ rights, abor­tion and racial equi­ty, the Supreme Court deci­sion will like­ly invite greater scruti­ny of the strate­gies com­pa­nies use to increase diver­si­ty, accord­ing to Andrew Turn­bull, a labor and employ­ment part­ner at law firm Mor­ri­son & Foer­ster.

    Fed­er­al law pro­hibits employ­ers from con­sid­er­ing race and oth­er pro­tect­ed char­ac­ter­is­tics in employ­ment deci­sions. Diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion ini­tia­tives, on the oth­er hand, help employ­ers make their work­forces less homo­ge­neous and their work­places more inclu­sive by cast­ing a wide net for qual­i­fied work­ers from dif­fer­ent back­grounds, Turn­bull said.

    “We may see an increase in chal­lenges to those pro­grams because some employ­ees may incor­rect­ly assume this means that their employ­ers can no longer have work­place affir­ma­tive action or DEI pro­grams,” he said.

    The debate swirling around diver­si­ty pro­grams has increased the pos­si­bil­i­ty that cor­po­ra­tions will be hit with dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suits – from those who sup­port these ini­tia­tives and those who oppose them.

    ...

    Cor­po­ra­tions have turned to diver­si­ty pro­grams to right decades of lost oppor­tu­ni­ties for Black peo­ple and oth­er groups who have been his­tor­i­cal­ly under­rep­re­sent­ed, espe­cial­ly in lead­er­ship roles. Those efforts inten­si­fied fol­low­ing the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

    Pledges from cor­po­ra­tions to address racial inequities drew a sharp back­lash, from leg­is­la­tion in GOP-con­trolled state hous­es restrict­ing how cor­po­ra­tions talk to employ­ees about racism to the tar­get­ing of tril­lions of dol­lars in invest­ments that take into account ESG, short for envi­ron­men­tal, social and gov­er­nance prin­ci­ples.

    If there is any sense in these C‑suites, com­pa­nies will take this as the cat­a­lyst, the cat­a­pult, the warn­ing they need to get back to not dis­crim­i­nat­ing.

    Scott Shep­ard, direc­tor of the Nation­al Cen­ter for Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Research’s Free Enter­prise Project

    The Supreme Court rul­ing is a warn­ing to cor­po­rate elites to stop foist­ing their lib­er­al agen­da on the nation, said Scott Shep­ard, direc­tor of the Nation­al Cen­ter for Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Research’s Free Enter­prise Project.

    In August, the con­ser­v­a­tive think tank sued Star­bucks exec­u­tives and direc­tors on behalf of a Star­bucks share­hold­er, claim­ing that by set­ting hir­ing goals for Black peo­ple and oth­er peo­ple of col­or, award­ing con­tracts to diverse sup­pli­ers and tying exec­u­tive pay to diver­si­ty, the cof­fee chain is engag­ing in racial dis­crim­i­na­tion.

    Stephen Miller’s Amer­i­ca First Legal has filed com­plaints with the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­ni­ty Com­mis­sion ask­ing for inves­ti­ga­tions into the hir­ing and employ­ment prac­tices at com­pa­nies includ­ing Star­bucks, McDon­ald’s and Mor­gan Stan­ley.

    “If there is any sense in these C‑suites, com­pa­nies will take this as the cat­a­lyst, the cat­a­pult, the warn­ing they need to get back to not dis­crim­i­nat­ing,” Shep­ard said.

    ...

    Data shows that cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca still has very lit­tle diver­si­ty, espe­cial­ly at the top.

    White men rep­re­sent 7 in 10 exec­u­tives at the very top of the nation’s 100 largest pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­nies, accord­ing to a USA TODAY analy­sis of named exec­u­tive offi­cers. In fact, they are even more like­ly today than their grand­fa­thers to be man­agers despite a diver­si­fy­ing work­force.
    ...

    And note the big prize con­ser­v­a­tive think tanks are already eying: fed­er­al con­trac­ing DEI poli­cies. It’s hard to imag­ine those poli­cies are going to with­stand a care­ful­ly craft­ed Supreme Court chal­lenges:

    ...
    Alvin B. Tillery Jr., direc­tor of the Cen­ter for the Study of Democ­ra­cy and Diver­si­ty at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty, says he’s con­cerned about what con­ser­v­a­tives may have planned next. He expects they will dou­ble down on efforts to rid the pub­lic sec­tor of affir­ma­tive action, from gov­ern­ment hir­ing to con­tract­ing.

    Sup­pli­er diver­si­ty pro­grams and fed­er­al con­tract­ing, that’s the big prize,” said Tillery, founder of the 2040 Strat­e­gy Group, which works close­ly with For­tune 500 clients. “It’s real­ly about tak­ing away set-aside pro­grams and racial equi­ty pro­grams, includ­ing at the local gov­ern­ment lev­el. Those are things that have a much big­ger impact on soci­ety than affir­ma­tive action at col­leges.”
    ...

    And that brings us to the fol­low­ing arti­cle pub­lished right on the eve of the one year anniver­sary of the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion that makes the obser­va­tion that almost all of the fig­ures around then-Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump who were instru­men­tal in orga­niz­ing and jus­ti­fy­ing the insur­rec­tion and have assumed in pol­i­tics of right-wing pop­ulist ‘anti-elit­ism’ — fig­ures like Sen­a­tors Josh Haw­ley, Mike Pom­peo, and Ted Cruz — are, them­selves, Ivy League edu­cat­ed and some of the biggest elites in the coun­try. Fig­ures who are all pre­sum­ably high­ly sup­port­ive of the ongo­ing Sched­ule F plot to mass purge pro­gres­sives out of as many insti­tu­tions as pos­si­ble. It’s an impor­tant part of the con­text of the Stu­dents for Fair Admis­sions Inc. v. Pres­i­dent & Fel­lows of Har­vard Col­lege rul­ing: the anti-elit­ism cul­ture war pol­i­tics that under­gird this rul­ing are being cham­pi­oned by one of the most pow­er­ful net­work of elites in the world. An Ivy League-edu­cat­ed net­work of pow­er­ful elites intent on grab­bing a lot more pow­er and keep­ing it for them­selves:

    The Atlantic

    How Ivy League Elites Turned Against Democ­ra­cy

    Some of the best-edu­cat­ed peo­ple in the coun­try have over­seen the destruc­tion of their insti­tu­tions.

    By Stephen Marche
    Jan­u­ary 5, 2022
    Updat­ed at 11:59 a.m. ET on Jan­u­ary 5, 2022.

    One of the most indeli­ble images from the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol riot was of Josh Haw­ley, junior sen­a­tor for Mis­souri, grad­u­ate of Stan­ford and Yale Law, rais­ing his fist in sup­port of a riotous mob that would short­ly endan­ger his own life and the life of the insti­tu­tion to which he belonged. Almost imme­di­ate­ly after he encour­aged the riot­ers, he found him­self in a secured room, being defend­ed from them.

    At that moment of supreme cri­sis, Haw­ley rep­re­sent­ed one of the deep­est mys­ter­ies of the cur­rent Amer­i­can predica­ment: why some of the best-edu­cat­ed men and women in the coun­try, the most invest­ed in its pow­er, the luck­i­est, have over­seen the destruc­tion of their insti­tu­tions like spoiled teenagers smash­ing up their par­ents’ house on a week­end ben­der.

    “At what point then is the approach of dan­ger to be expect­ed?” Abra­ham Lin­coln asked in his Lyceum Address. “I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it can­not come from abroad. If destruc­tion be our lot, we must our­selves be its author and fin­ish­er. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by sui­cide.” Amer­i­ca is approach­ing the ful­fill­ment of this calami­tous pre­dic­tion. But Lin­coln could nev­er have pre­dict­ed that America’s destruc­tion would come from its most priv­i­leged peo­ple, that it would be a sui­cide of the elites.

    Amer­i­can pop­ulism has always been some­thing of a mis­nomer. For one thing, Don­ald Trump nev­er won the pop­u­lar vote. For anoth­er, pop­ulists tend to be eco­nom­i­cal­ly left-wing, and the poli­cies of Trump’s gov­ern­ment did noth­ing to restrict cor­po­rate inter­ests or the tech monop­o­lies. His inner cir­cle was every bit as much a part of the Amer­i­can elite as its oppo­nents—Steven Mnuchin (Yale ’85), Ben Car­son (Yale ’73), Wilbur Ross (Yale ’59), Stephen Schwarz­man (Yale ’69), Jared Kush­n­er (Har­vard ’03), Steve Ban­non (Har­vard ’85), Mike Pom­peo (Har­vard Law ’94), and, of course, Trump him­self (Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, ’68). Trump’s inau­gur­al Cab­i­net had more Har­vard alum­ni than Obama’s. In the after­math of Jan­u­ary 6, many of the strongest sup­port­ers of the stolen-elec­tion the­o­ry have been Ivy League grad­u­ates. Ted Cruz (Prince­ton ’92) was one of the first to chal­lenge the election’s cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, and Kayleigh McE­nany (Har­vard Law ’16) active­ly spread fraud claims as the president’s press sec­re­tary. Elise Ste­fanik, who grad­u­at­ed from Har­vard in 2006 and is the youngest Repub­li­can woman elect­ed to Con­gress, has described Don­ald Trump as the “strongest sup­port­er of any pres­i­dent when it comes to stand­ing up for the Con­sti­tu­tion.”

    Trump’s most remark­able abil­i­ty as a leader was, and is, his capac­i­ty to con­vince elite peo­ple, the peo­ple his van­i­ty demands he hire, to destroy their rep­u­ta­tion and their career in his ser­vice. No few­er than 11 Trump sup­port­ers who ran his pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns or his admin­is­tra­tion have been indict­ed, yet he nev­er lacks high­ly edu­cat­ed and suc­cess­ful peo­ple to work for him. The death dri­ve has entered Amer­i­can pol­i­tics.

    The icon of this peri­od is not Trump but Ore­gon State Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mike Near­man (not an Ivy Lea­guer, to be clear), who opened the back door of the Ore­gon leg­is­la­ture to riot­ers after post­ing a video say­ing he would let them in, call­ing it “Oper­a­tion Hall Pass.” The crazy part isn’t even that Near­man pro­mot­ed the van­dal­ism of his own insti­tu­tion. The crazy part is that, after Near­man opened the door at the back of the leg­is­la­ture, he walked around to the front entrance, to await the vio­lence that he had encour­aged. In that fol­ly, Near­man rep­re­sents a generation—one feed­ing the rage that will even­tu­al­ly con­sume it.

    The Josh Haw­leys and Mike Near­mans of this world embody an inher­ent con­tra­dic­tion. They are try­ing to be gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives for anti-gov­ern­ment patri­ots. They are attempt­ing to be the elite of the anti-elites. In 2020, Joe Biden won 60 per­cent of col­lege-edu­cat­ed vot­ers. Biden-vot­ing coun­ties were respon­si­ble for 70 per­cent of the GDP. America’s less-edu­cat­ed and less-pro­duc­tive cit­i­zens dri­ve anti-gov­ern­ment patri­o­tism, both in its armed and elect­ed wings, but they most­ly, despite them­selves, pick their rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the ranks of the Ivy League and oth­er sim­i­lar­ly elite insti­tu­tions around the coun­try. Even in their rage against elites, the anti-elit­ists fall back on the deep struc­ture of Amer­i­can pow­er.

    Despite the hyper-par­ti­san­ship that is roil­ing the Unit­ed States, Ivy League dom­i­nance tran­scends polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion. And many of the most promi­nent peo­ple fight­ing to keep Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions alive come from the Ivy League, too. But what I’ve described so far—GOP elites turn­ing with petu­lant feroc­i­ty on the insti­tu­tions from which they derive their power—is new. The fail­ure of the elites who have always run the country—on the left, in the mid­dle, and on the right—is not. The great­est study of the fail­ure of Amer­i­can exper­tise is still David Halberstam’s The Best and the Bright­est; it was writ­ten before I was born, but the process it describes, in rich detail, has been more or less com­plete­ly repli­cat­ed twice in my life­time. Insti­tu­tion­al­ly approved peo­ple, the top men and women, with the best inten­tions and the fullest edu­ca­tion and access to the best avail­able infor­ma­tion, cre­ate elab­o­rate poli­cies that mis­un­der­stand the most basic facts about the world, lead­ing to immense suf­fer­ing for ordi­nary peo­ple. That is the Ivy League way— “bril­liant poli­cies that defied com­mon sense,” in Halberstam’s phras­ing.

    Once, after Lyn­don B. John­son rat­tled off the list of experts who were help­ing fight the Viet­nam War, his friend Sam Ray­burn replied, “Well, Lyn­don, you may be right and they may be every bit as intel­li­gent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot bet­ter about them if just one of them had run for sher­iff once.” The Afghan and Iraq Wars were a con­sen­sus pol­i­cy among both Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic elites in the civ­il ser­vice, in the polit­i­cal class, and in the media. The rep­e­ti­tion pos­es an impor­tant ques­tion: Giv­en that Amer­i­ca has been let down, repeat­ed­ly, by mem­bers of the same expert class, why does it keep rely­ing on them?

    The answer lies in the spe­cif­ic nature of Ivy League elit­ism, which is an aris­toc­ra­cy of net­works. Ivy League grad­u­ates make up 0.4 per­cent of the coun­try. They are sig­nif­i­cant­ly over­rep­re­sent­ed in For­tune 500 C‑suites, in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, in the Sen­ate, in acad­e­mia, and in the media. Biden/Harris was the first pres­i­den­tial tick­et in 44 years with­out an Ivy League alum­nus on board. For a decade, the U.S. Supreme Court con­sist­ed of noth­ing but Ivy League grad­u­ates. And these enti­ties are exclu­sive and self-per­pet­u­at­ing. Lega­cies at Har­vard are accept­ed at a rate of near­ly 34 per­cent, com­pared with just 5.9 per­cent of ordi­nary peo­ple. Being born to it isn’t the only way in: Buy­ing admit­tance is the sim­plest. (Charles Kush­n­er gave Har­vard $250,000 a year for 10 years to guar­an­tee admis­sion for his mer­it­less son.)

    Who­ev­er attends has been estab­lished in the archi­tec­ture of pow­er before they have had a chance to do any­thing, and that is key: The net­work gives pow­er. The aris­toc­ra­cy of the net­work pro­vides oppor­tu­ni­ty and secu­ri­ty, both mate­ri­al­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly. The net­work cra­dles and pro­tects. None of the politi­cians or jour­nal­ists or intel­lec­tu­als who set in motion the past 70 years of failed wars faced any sig­nif­i­cant con­se­quences for their fail­ures. Quite the oppo­site. Those who resist­ed those wars demon­strat­ed that they weren’t part of the net­work and there­fore remained exclud­ed even after they were proved right, while those who failed showed that they were reli­ably part of the net­work and there­fore remained inside. The net­work responds to exter­nal threats by tight­en­ing. As long as you belong, you’ll be fine.

    What the Ivy League pro­duces, in spades, on both the left and the right, is unwar­rant­ed con­fi­dence. Its insti­tu­tions are hubris fac­to­ries. At the bot­tom of the cur­rent col­lapse of the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal order is a very basic, very wide­spread dis­trust of all kinds of insti­tu­tions, and that dis­trust is based on ordi­nary Amer­i­cans’ dis­trust of the hubris­tic peo­ple who run those insti­tu­tions. Can you blame them? The same peo­ple who told Amer­i­cans that Sad­dam Hus­sein pos­sessed weapons of mass destruc­tion are now telling them to get vac­ci­nat­ed. Mis­trust is inevitable.

    For Repub­li­cans, the pow­er of the net­work explains, at least in part, the per­verse psy­chol­o­gy of the sui­ci­dal elites. The net­work gives them mean­ing, and to be cast out of that net­work is to suf­fer mean­ing­less­ness, so they do what­ev­er it takes, become who­ev­er they need to become, to stay inside the cir­cuits of pow­er. Their behav­ior appears para­dox­i­cal from the outside—Josh Haw­ley, sen­a­tor, rais­ing his fist to sup­port the rav­aging of the Sen­ate—but from the inside, the log­ic is immac­u­late: The clear­est way he can keep him­self in the Sen­ate is to pro­mote its rav­aging.

    In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gib­bon could not decide on the ulti­mate cause of the empire’s destruc­tion. Was it the result of indi­vid­ual fail­ures, such as those of Lucius Cor­nelius Sul­la and Caligu­la? Or were trends beyond anyone’s con­trol, such as the rise of Chris­tian­i­ty and the geo­graph­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions of expan­sion, to blame? In the case of the Unit­ed States, the deep­er trends are clear—the hyper-par­ti­san­ship ren­der­ing the coun­try ungovern­able on a fed­er­al lev­el, the high lev­els of ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal inequal­i­ty, the envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion. But the truth is that no coun­try can sur­vive when the lead­ers of its insti­tu­tions active­ly work toward the destruc­tion of those insti­tu­tions. Mike Pom­peo grad­u­at­ed first in his class from West Point and served as edi­tor of the Har­vard Law Review. When a man of those advan­tages over­sees the hol­low­ing out of the State Depart­ment, allows the pres­i­dent to fire inspec­tors gen­er­al who dis­please him by their inspec­tion, uses his posi­tion to cul­ti­vate donors for his par­ty, and con­sis­tent­ly bends the norms and destroys the tra­di­tions that have lift­ed him to pow­er, what hope can there be for his coun­try? If he can­not man­age to keep faith with the sys­tem, who can?

    ...

    Lenin famous­ly said that “the cap­i­tal­ists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” He didn’t get it quite right. The ene­mies of the Unit­ed States have nowhere near as much capac­i­ty to dam­age its inter­ests as do its most edu­cat­ed and most cel­e­brat­ed cit­i­zens. Nobody needs to sell Amer­i­cans rope; they are braid­ing it them­selves.

    ———

    “How Ivy League Elites Turned Against Democ­ra­cy” by Stephen Marche; The Atlantic; 01/05/2022

    “In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gib­bon could not decide on the ulti­mate cause of the empire’s destruc­tion. Was it the result of indi­vid­ual fail­ures, such as those of Lucius Cor­nelius Sul­la and Caligu­la? Or were trends beyond anyone’s con­trol, such as the rise of Chris­tian­i­ty and the geo­graph­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions of expan­sion, to blame? In the case of the Unit­ed States, the deep­er trends are clear—the hyper-par­ti­san­ship ren­der­ing the coun­try ungovern­able on a fed­er­al lev­el, the high lev­els of ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal inequal­i­ty, the envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion. But the truth is that no coun­try can sur­vive when the lead­ers of its insti­tu­tions active­ly work toward the destruc­tion of those insti­tu­tions. Mike Pom­peo grad­u­at­ed first in his class from West Point and served as edi­tor of the Har­vard Law Review. When a man of those advan­tages over­sees the hol­low­ing out of the State Depart­ment, allows the pres­i­dent to fire inspec­tors gen­er­al who dis­please him by their inspec­tion, uses his posi­tion to cul­ti­vate donors for his par­ty, and con­sis­tent­ly bends the norms and destroys the tra­di­tions that have lift­ed him to pow­er, what hope can there be for his coun­try? If he can­not man­age to keep faith with the sys­tem, who can?”

    It’s both iron­ic and more or less what we should expect: the great­est threat fac­ing the US’s insti­tu­tions is posed by the elites gen­er­at­ed by those insti­tu­tions. It’s like a kind of intra-insti­tu­tion­al elite civ­il war, with the com­plete cap­ture of the US’s demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions as the spoils. That’s all part of the con­text of the Jan­u­ary 6th Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. But not just the insur­rec­tion. With the Supreme Court cap­tured by con­ser­v­a­tives for the next gen­er­a­tional or longer, this insti­tu­tion­al civ­il war is poised to be extend­ed to effec­tive­ly every major insti­tu­tion in the US, pub­lic or pri­vate. An insti­tu­tion­al insur­rec­tion being waged by pow­er­ful con­ser­v­a­tive net­works of grad­u­ates from the same elite Ivy League insti­tu­tions that were the key tar­gets of this Supreme Court rul­ing:

    ...
    At that moment of supreme cri­sis, Haw­ley rep­re­sent­ed one of the deep­est mys­ter­ies of the cur­rent Amer­i­can predica­ment: why some of the best-edu­cat­ed men and women in the coun­try, the most invest­ed in its pow­er, the luck­i­est, have over­seen the destruc­tion of their insti­tu­tions like spoiled teenagers smash­ing up their par­ents’ house on a week­end ben­der.

    ...

    Amer­i­can pop­ulism has always been some­thing of a mis­nomer. For one thing, Don­ald Trump nev­er won the pop­u­lar vote. For anoth­er, pop­ulists tend to be eco­nom­i­cal­ly left-wing, and the poli­cies of Trump’s gov­ern­ment did noth­ing to restrict cor­po­rate inter­ests or the tech monop­o­lies. His inner cir­cle was every bit as much a part of the Amer­i­can elite as its oppo­nents—Steven Mnuchin (Yale ’85), Ben Car­son (Yale ’73), Wilbur Ross (Yale ’59), Stephen Schwarz­man (Yale ’69), Jared Kush­n­er (Har­vard ’03), Steve Ban­non (Har­vard ’85), Mike Pom­peo (Har­vard Law ’94), and, of course, Trump him­self (Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, ’68). Trump’s inau­gur­al Cab­i­net had more Har­vard alum­ni than Obama’s. In the after­math of Jan­u­ary 6, many of the strongest sup­port­ers of the stolen-elec­tion the­o­ry have been Ivy League grad­u­ates. Ted Cruz (Prince­ton ’92) was one of the first to chal­lenge the election’s cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, and Kayleigh McE­nany (Har­vard Law ’16) active­ly spread fraud claims as the president’s press sec­re­tary. Elise Ste­fanik, who grad­u­at­ed from Har­vard in 2006 and is the youngest Repub­li­can woman elect­ed to Con­gress, has described Don­ald Trump as the “strongest sup­port­er of any pres­i­dent when it comes to stand­ing up for the Con­sti­tu­tion.”

    ...

    The Josh Haw­leys and Mike Near­mans of this world embody an inher­ent con­tra­dic­tion. They are try­ing to be gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives for anti-gov­ern­ment patri­ots. They are attempt­ing to be the elite of the anti-elites. In 2020, Joe Biden won 60 per­cent of col­lege-edu­cat­ed vot­ers. Biden-vot­ing coun­ties were respon­si­ble for 70 per­cent of the GDP. America’s less-edu­cat­ed and less-pro­duc­tive cit­i­zens dri­ve anti-gov­ern­ment patri­o­tism, both in its armed and elect­ed wings, but they most­ly, despite them­selves, pick their rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the ranks of the Ivy League and oth­er sim­i­lar­ly elite insti­tu­tions around the coun­try. Even in their rage against elites, the anti-elit­ists fall back on the deep struc­ture of Amer­i­can pow­er.

    Despite the hyper-par­ti­san­ship that is roil­ing the Unit­ed States, Ivy League dom­i­nance tran­scends polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion. And many of the most promi­nent peo­ple fight­ing to keep Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions alive come from the Ivy League, too. But what I’ve described so far—GOP elites turn­ing with petu­lant feroc­i­ty on the insti­tu­tions from which they derive their power—is new. The fail­ure of the elites who have always run the country—on the left, in the mid­dle, and on the right—is not. The great­est study of the fail­ure of Amer­i­can exper­tise is still David Halberstam’s The Best and the Bright­est; it was writ­ten before I was born, but the process it describes, in rich detail, has been more or less com­plete­ly repli­cat­ed twice in my life­time. Insti­tu­tion­al­ly approved peo­ple, the top men and women, with the best inten­tions and the fullest edu­ca­tion and access to the best avail­able infor­ma­tion, cre­ate elab­o­rate poli­cies that mis­un­der­stand the most basic facts about the world, lead­ing to immense suf­fer­ing for ordi­nary peo­ple. That is the Ivy League way— “bril­liant poli­cies that defied com­mon sense,” in Halberstam’s phras­ing.

    ...

    For Repub­li­cans, the pow­er of the net­work explains, at least in part, the per­verse psy­chol­o­gy of the sui­ci­dal elites. The net­work gives them mean­ing, and to be cast out of that net­work is to suf­fer mean­ing­less­ness, so they do what­ev­er it takes, become who­ev­er they need to become, to stay inside the cir­cuits of pow­er. Their behav­ior appears para­dox­i­cal from the outside—Josh Haw­ley, sen­a­tor, rais­ing his fist to sup­port the rav­aging of the Sen­ate—but from the inside, the log­ic is immac­u­late: The clear­est way he can keep him­self in the Sen­ate is to pro­mote its rav­aging.
    ...

    And this attempt to insti­tu­tion­al­ly purge Amer­i­ca’s top uni­ver­si­ties of demo­graph­i­cal­ly diverse stu­dent bod­ies is hap­pen­ing at the same time lega­cy admis­sions are left in place. A sys­tem that effec­tive­ly allows the ultra-wealthy to pur­chase admis­sion for their chil­dren, as was done for Jared Kush­n­er’s admis­sion into Har­vard. And that’s why it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that this insti­tu­tion­al purge is coin­cid­ing with the ongo­ing decades-long trend of more and more wealthy being sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly chan­neled into the hands of the wealth­i­est. In oth­er words, we should­n’t be sur­prised if the future Ivy League class­es aren’t not just less diverse but also a lot wealth­i­er and less qual­i­fied over­all. There’s sim­ply a lot more chil­dren of the ultra-wealthy these days:

    ...
    Once, after Lyn­don B. John­son rat­tled off the list of experts who were help­ing fight the Viet­nam War, his friend Sam Ray­burn replied, “Well, Lyn­don, you may be right and they may be every bit as intel­li­gent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot bet­ter about them if just one of them had run for sher­iff once.” The Afghan and Iraq Wars were a con­sen­sus pol­i­cy among both Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic elites in the civ­il ser­vice, in the polit­i­cal class, and in the media. The rep­e­ti­tion pos­es an impor­tant ques­tion: Giv­en that Amer­i­ca has been let down, repeat­ed­ly, by mem­bers of the same expert class, why does it keep rely­ing on them?

    The answer lies in the spe­cif­ic nature of Ivy League elit­ism, which is an aris­toc­ra­cy of net­works. Ivy League grad­u­ates make up 0.4 per­cent of the coun­try. They are sig­nif­i­cant­ly over­rep­re­sent­ed in For­tune 500 C‑suites, in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, in the Sen­ate, in acad­e­mia, and in the media. Biden/Harris was the first pres­i­den­tial tick­et in 44 years with­out an Ivy League alum­nus on board. For a decade, the U.S. Supreme Court con­sist­ed of noth­ing but Ivy League grad­u­ates. And these enti­ties are exclu­sive and self-per­pet­u­at­ing. Lega­cies at Har­vard are accept­ed at a rate of near­ly 34 per­cent, com­pared with just 5.9 per­cent of ordi­nary peo­ple. Being born to it isn’t the only way in: Buy­ing admit­tance is the sim­plest. (Charles Kush­n­er gave Har­vard $250,000 a year for 10 years to guar­an­tee admis­sion for his mer­it­less son.)

    Who­ev­er attends has been estab­lished in the archi­tec­ture of pow­er before they have had a chance to do any­thing, and that is key: The net­work gives pow­er. The aris­toc­ra­cy of the net­work pro­vides oppor­tu­ni­ty and secu­ri­ty, both mate­ri­al­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly. The net­work cra­dles and pro­tects. None of the politi­cians or jour­nal­ists or intel­lec­tu­als who set in motion the past 70 years of failed wars faced any sig­nif­i­cant con­se­quences for their fail­ures. Quite the oppo­site. Those who resist­ed those wars demon­strat­ed that they weren’t part of the net­work and there­fore remained exclud­ed even after they were proved right, while those who failed showed that they were reli­ably part of the net­work and there­fore remained inside. The net­work responds to exter­nal threats by tight­en­ing. As long as you belong, you’ll be fine.

    What the Ivy League pro­duces, in spades, on both the left and the right, is unwar­rant­ed con­fi­dence. Its insti­tu­tions are hubris fac­to­ries. At the bot­tom of the cur­rent col­lapse of the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal order is a very basic, very wide­spread dis­trust of all kinds of insti­tu­tions, and that dis­trust is based on ordi­nary Amer­i­cans’ dis­trust of the hubris­tic peo­ple who run those insti­tu­tions. Can you blame them? The same peo­ple who told Amer­i­cans that Sad­dam Hus­sein pos­sessed weapons of mass destruc­tion are now telling them to get vac­ci­nat­ed. Mis­trust is inevitable.
    ...

    And that surge in ultra-wealthy elites over the past four decades — and result­ing surge their ultra wealthy chil­dren who will all need spots in elite Ivy League uni­ver­si­ties some­day — and the result­ing cap­ture of the US’s demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions like the Supreme Court brings us to the fas­ci­nat­ing find­ings by com­plex­i­ty sci­en­tist Peter Turchin. As Turchin describes in the fol­low­ing inter­view with the con­ser­v­a­tive UnHerd, his team has built a large his­tor­i­cal data­base of when past soci­eties got into a state of cri­sis. Based on their find­ings, all com­plex soci­eties over the past 5,000 years have gone through phas­es of peace and pros­per­i­ty fol­lowed by cri­sis. A cri­sis invari­ably cre­at­ed by the soci­ety’s elites them­selves. A kind of civ­il war among the elites that can tear a soci­ety apart. That’s what Turch­in’s team found over and over in one soci­ety after anoth­er.

    But these elite civ­il wars did­n’t devel­op at ran­dom. Instead, Turch­in’s team found an appar­ent dri­ver of this phe­nom­e­na: elite over­pro­duc­tion. That’s the term Turchin used to describe the process of too many ‘aspir­ing elites’ scram­bling for too few posi­tions of pow­er and influ­ence. As Turchin puts it, it’s a phe­nom­e­na that inevitably results in dis­grun­tled elites and dis­grun­tled elite-wannabes are far more threat­en­ing to soci­etal sta­bil­i­ty than dis­grun­tled work­ers.

    We should­n’t be sur­prised to find that Turchin very much sees the polit­i­cal dys­func­tion and malaise in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca as a con­se­quence of elite over­pro­duc­tions. But it’s notable in terms of what he views as the dri­ving force of that elite over­pro­duc­tion. Because while Turch­in’s def­i­n­i­tion of a soci­ety’s ‘elite’ is a way of describ­ing the ‘top 1%’ in Amer­i­can that would obvi­ous­ly include the stu­dents of Ivy League schools, Turchin does­n’t point towards the grow­ing diver­si­ty of stu­dent bod­ies at Ivy League schools over the past four decades as being the source of this abun­dance of aspir­ing elite. No, Turchin instead points to the ‘wealth pump’ start­ed under Ronald Rea­gan that fun­da­men­tal­ly dis­man­tled the New Deal econ­o­my par­a­digm of shared soci­ety wealth. A wealth pump that upend­ed a rel­a­tive­ly labor-friend­ly worker/employer rela­tion­ship and ensured that almost all of the wealth gen­er­at­ed by the US econ­o­my flowed to very top. In oth­er words, trick-down eco­nom­ics, with all of the new mega-mil­lion­aires and bil­lion­aires, has been the under­ly­ing fac­tor dri­ving Amer­i­ca’s “elite over­pro­duc­tion”. And it’s been going on for so long now, there’s a net­work of elites now ready to effec­tive­ly take it all for them­selves. And this net­work runs installed the Supreme Court’s con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty:

    UnHerd

    Will the elites ever behave?

    Aspi­ra­tional oli­garchs could spark a rev­o­lu­tion

    BY Peter Turchin and Mary Har­ring­ton

    Peter Turchin is a com­plex­i­ty sci­en­tist. His lat­est book is End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Polit­i­cal Dis­in­te­gra­tion.
    Mary Har­ring­ton is a con­tribut­ing edi­tor at UnHerd.
    June 10, 2023

    Why do even the might­i­est soci­eties col­lapse? In his new book End Times, com­plex­i­ty sci­en­tist Peter Turchin blames both “elite over­pro­duc­tion” and a malign “wealth pump” that fun­nels spoils to the super rich. His the­o­ry of soci­etal apoc­a­lypse is root­ed in sci­ence: using math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els drawn from vast datasets of human his­to­ry, he claims to be able to pre­dict future tumult. He has been proved right before: in 2010, in an arti­cle for Nature, he pre­dict­ed the West’s decade of pop­ulist insta­bil­i­ty.

    ...

    Mary Har­ring­ton: Peter, tell us the the­sis behind your fas­ci­nat­ing new book.

    Peter Turchin: Ever since the ancient Greek his­to­ri­an Poly­bius wrote about how the Roman Empire was able to grow quite so relent­less­ly, peo­ple have also tried to explain why soci­eties col­lapse.

    There are many dif­fer­ent the­o­ries, but the only way to adju­di­cate is with math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el­ling. First of all, you trans­late those the­o­ries into math­e­mat­i­cal lan­guage, so that the pre­dic­tions fol­low inevitably from their premis­es. Then you bring on lots of data to work out which the­o­ry best fits the real­i­ty.

    My col­leagues and I are cur­rent­ly work­ing on build­ing a large his­tor­i­cal data­base — our “Cri­sis DB” — in which we log inci­dents when past soci­eties got into a state of cri­sis. What we have found is that all com­plex soci­eties in the past 5,000 years have expe­ri­enced an inte­gra­tive phase, when peace and order reigned — and then an inevitable descent into an “end times”.

    I hope that, with all this infor­ma­tion, even­tu­al­ly we will make it pos­si­ble for soci­ety to escape this cycle. But why do these end times hap­pen at all? One com­mon theme that we see over and over again, in all of the dif­fer­ent routes to cri­sis, is a con­di­tion that we call “elite over­pro­duc­tion”.

    Let me explain what I mean by that. First of all, who are the elites? Put sim­ply, they are nei­ther good peo­ple or bad peo­ple, they are sim­ply a small pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion who con­cen­trate social pow­er in their hands — whether that’s in the mil­i­tary, eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, or ide­o­log­i­cal sphere. In medieval times, the elites were the mil­i­tary nobil­i­ty of Eng­land or France, for exam­ple; or in Impe­r­i­al Chi­na, they were the class of man­darins. In the Unit­ed States, where I live, sim­ply put, it’s the prover­bial 1%.

    Of course, it’s all a bit more com­pli­cat­ed than that. Com­plex human soci­eties are organ­ised as pyra­mids, and so there are dif­fer­ent lev­els of elites; the 0.1% rule with­in the one-per­centers, and so on. There are no sharp bound­aries nec­es­sar­i­ly, unless you live in a soci­ety like medieval France, where legal­ly you were either nobil­i­ty or a peas­ant.

    The next big ques­tion is how are elites pro­duced and repro­duced? They’re repro­duced by ambi­tious young peo­ple, or, to use the tech­ni­cal term, “elite aspi­rants”, who want to gain posi­tions of pow­er. Elite over­pro­duc­tion occurs when, dur­ing some his­tor­i­cal peri­ods, we get too many elite aspi­rants for the slow­ly chang­ing num­ber of pow­er posi­tions. That cre­ates intense com­pe­ti­tion, and while some com­pe­ti­tion is very help­ful and good, exces­sive com­pe­ti­tion is harm­ful as it cor­rodes the social norms and insti­tu­tions of the soci­ety.

    When you have huge num­bers of losers in this game, a pro­por­tion of frus­trat­ed elites will decide to break the rules. We saw that very clear­ly in the 2016 US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. At that point, the num­ber of can­di­dates in the Repub­li­can pri­maries was the largest in his­to­ry.

    Dis­grun­tled elite-wannabes are far more threat­en­ing to soci­etal sta­bil­i­ty than dis­grun­tled work­ers. In Eng­land dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages, there was a huge peas­ant upris­ing led by Wat Tyler. And what hap­pened? A small group of armoured knights on horse­back destroyed them with­out rais­ing so much as a sweat, because non-elites are not organ­ised. As long as the state is strong and the elites are uni­fied, they can keep a lid on pop­u­lar dis­con­tent.

    MH: In the book, you use the arrest­ing phrase “the iron law of oli­garchy” to describe why we end up pro­duc­ing too many elites. Once you have a bunch of peo­ple in charge of the levers of pow­er and mon­ey, they will start fun­nelling resources towards them­selves because they can.

    PT: Exact­ly. What we see in the his­tor­i­cal record is that all com­plex soci­eties go through peri­ods of good times, maybe a cen­tu­ry or so long on aver­age, and then peri­ods of dis­in­te­gra­tion. Dur­ing the good times, after a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions, the elites get used to the fact that life is good and sta­ble, and that’s when the iron law of oli­garchy kicks in. The elites are very strong­ly tempt­ed to con­vert their pow­er into good­ies for them­selves — and if there’s noth­ing stop­ping them, that’s what they do. They basi­cal­ly recon­fig­ure the econ­o­my in a way that depress­es the wages of work­ers and cre­ates a “wealth pump” that fun­nels rich­es direct­ly to the own­ers and man­agers of cor­po­ra­tions.

    MH: You’ve described this hap­pen­ing under Thatch­er and Rea­gan, after sev­er­al decades of the post-war con­sen­sus.

    PT: Pre­cise­ly. Those elites in the US and the UK had 30 glo­ri­ous years. But by the late Sev­en­ties, they start­ed get­ting self­ish. That’s when we began to see the sep­a­ra­tion between work­er pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and work­er com­pen­sa­tion. And imme­di­ate­ly — with­in anoth­er 30 years — the num­bers of uber-rich peo­ple explod­ed in the Unit­ed States. The num­ber of decamil­lion­aires, those with $10 mil­lion or more, increased ten­fold from the Eight­ies to 2010.

    That’s the wealth pump at work.. And that’s what dri­ves one part of elite over­pro­duc­tion in the US, which is the over­pro­duc­tion of wealthy peo­ple who try to become can­di­dates for polit­i­cal office. That’s one of the rea­sons why the cost of cam­paign­ing for polit­i­cal office has com­plete­ly explod­ed.

    MH: You say in End Times that “Amer­i­ca is in a rev­o­lu­tion­ary sit­u­a­tion”. In your view, is it too late to avert the pre­dict­ed cri­sis?

    PT: We are in cri­sis, but it’s not too late to avert the worst out­comes. I’m not a col­lap­sol­o­gist. The pos­si­bil­i­ty of a social rev­o­lu­tion in the US seems to me out­landish. But the Ancien Régime nobil­i­ty in France could not imag­ine that in 1789 they would be put under the guil­lo­tine, just as ante­bel­lum Amer­i­cans could not imag­ine a bloody war that would leave 600,000 dead. It is typ­i­cal that we can­not ful­ly see the pos­si­ble nas­ti­ness of a sit­u­a­tion before it unfurls.

    We have close to 200 cas­es of soci­etal cri­sis right now, and the major­i­ty are fair­ly severe — some lead­ing to out­right col­lapse. But there are also maybe 10–15% of cas­es where the elites pull togeth­er and, coop­er­at­ing with the rest of the pop­u­la­tion, they find the right mix of reforms and avoid the worst out­comes. For exam­ple, in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry, the British Empire was the only large Euro­pean state that was not affect­ed by a rev­o­lu­tion. Of course, there were bad moments, like the Peter­loo mas­sacre, but there was no civ­il war. That’s part­ly because a group of social elites got togeth­er and con­vinced the rest of their num­ber of the need to reform.

    MH: What about elite dis­si­dents today? In your book, you give a fic­tion­alised exam­ple of a young, far-Left, woke, upper-mid­dle class rev­o­lu­tion­ary who wants to smash the sys­tem from with­in. She joins Antifa, the autonomous anti-fas­cist move­ment, and wants to abol­ish the police — even if that makes life worse for the work­ing class. But is she real­ly a rev­o­lu­tion­ary at all if none of her opin­ions have any res­o­nance with the work­ing class?

    PT: She is a failed rev­o­lu­tion­ary, clear­ly, because she can­not har­ness pop­u­lar dis­con­tent. In fact, it’s the pop­ulists on both the Left and the Right who res­onate far more with the work­ing class in the Unit­ed States.

    Antifa is real­ly quite inef­fec­tu­al, except at beat­ing up Right-wing extrem­ists and smash­ing things. That’s why Jane, this char­ac­ter in my book, grows dis­en­chant­ed after some years in the Antifa move­ment because it’s not going any­where. She then realis­es that the way to get ahead in the US, if you want to have a rev­o­lu­tion, is through the legal chan­nels because the state is very strong. I am Russ­ian, and I can tell you that noth­ing like a Bol­she­vik Par­ty is pos­si­ble in the US. We don’t want a vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion, real­ly. Instead, peo­ple on both the Left and Right work their way through the struc­tures of pow­er.

    MH: Do you think the elites who want to abol­ish the police are gen­uine believ­ers?

    PT: Yes. Antifa is fair­ly secre­tive, and for good rea­son, because they don’t want to be pen­e­trat­ed by the FBI. So let’s look back 50 years, at the Marx­ist mil­i­tant group the Weath­er­man Under­ground, because many of those peo­ple have now writ­ten mem­oirs, and we have a pret­ty good idea of what moti­vat­ed them. They were clear­ly fight­ing against what they saw as an unjust Amer­i­can soci­ety, where the poor went hun­gry and where minori­ties and women were oppressed. They had a gen­uine cause — but they were com­plete­ly unre­al­is­tic about their abil­i­ty to start a rev­o­lu­tion. And so they start­ed blow­ing up mon­u­ments, killing peo­ple, all because they want­ed to trig­ger the out­pour­ing of pop­u­lar anger against the elites.

    But there was no pop­u­lar anger at that time. This was before the wealth pump got turned on: Amer­i­can work­ers were doing very well, and every new gen­er­a­tion was doing bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous one, so they were com­plete­ly turned off by these wannabe rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies. Just because some­body is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary doesn’t mean that they are going to be a suc­cess­ful rev­o­lu­tion­ary.

    ...

    MH: In cas­es where the elite view is in con­flict with the pop­u­lar view, do the elites always win?

    PT: The great polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Mar­tin Gilens con­duct­ed some fas­ci­nat­ing research into the leg­is­la­tion passed through Con­gress. He found that 90% of the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion had zero effect on the actu­al leg­is­la­tion that passed — zilch, nada. Their tech­nique was not fine enough to dis­tin­guish between the final 10 per­centiles, but they sus­pect that it’s real­ly the 1% who dri­ves every­thing. This is why I argue in my book that the US is not a democ­ra­cy any­more, it’s a plu­toc­ra­cy.

    MH: Did those lib­er­al demo­c­ra­t­ic norms ever do any­thing in the first place? What’s the point of democ­ra­cy at all?

    PT: Democ­ra­cy works — just look at the qual­i­ty of life in Den­mark and oth­er social­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic Nordic coun­tries. Of course, it’s all com­par­a­tive: autoc­ra­cies are even more dys­func­tion­al than democ­ra­cies. But even the US plu­toc­ra­cy has, in the past, been capa­ble of pro-social action. Dur­ing the pro­gres­sive era, reformist Amer­i­can elites per­suad­ed and brow­beat their cohort into pass­ing the New Deal reforms, which essen­tial­ly shut down the wealth pump for three glo­ri­ous decades.

    MH: Can you envi­sion a coali­tion in the present day with the capac­i­ty to hold the elites to account — and per­haps even fright­en them into shut­ting off the wealth pump?

    PT: Let me first say that I am com­plete­ly non-par­ti­san, and reg­u­lar­ly crit­i­cise both the Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats. I think that the pop­ulist fac­tions, both on the Left and the Right, often talk a good talk, but they have not yet deliv­ered.

    There was an Amer­i­can pop­ulist par­ty in the 1890s, which nev­er won elec­tions but did put pres­sure on the estab­lish­ment at a time of polit­i­cal ten­sion. Riots and insur­rec­tions were becom­ing more fre­quent. By the ear­ly Twen­ties, it seemed to many that Amer­i­ca had reached a rev­o­lu­tion­ary moment, espe­cial­ly with the Sovi­et Union pre­sent­ing an alter­na­tive mod­el to the US sys­tem. The first Red Scare broke out in 1921, when a seg­ment of Amer­i­can elites were con­vinced that a Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion was immi­nent.

    It was this com­bi­na­tion of inter­nal and exter­nal pres­sures that pro­pelled Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reforms. He must have realised, like the Russ­ian tsar Alexan­der II before him, that you either make reforms from above or you end up hav­ing rev­o­lu­tion from below.

    MH: The entire the­sis of your book is that we have always had elites — and, in fact, the impor­tant thing is not to get rid of them, but to hold their feet to the fire to make sure they’re behav­ing. But it’s my obser­va­tion that the cur­rent reign­ing elite is overt­ly anti-hier­ar­chi­cal, and that we must get rid of hier­ar­chies, wher­ev­er there are, wher­ev­er they exist. Where do you stand on the sacred val­ues of anti-hier­ar­chi­cal­ism?

    PT: For 95% of our evo­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry, we humans lived in small-scale soci­eties, which were very egal­i­tar­i­an — unusu­al­ly egal­i­tar­i­an — when you com­pare us to the great apes, for exam­ple. The first elites appeared about 7,500 years ago, in chief­doms. My argu­ment is that a large-scale soci­ety can only func­tion in a rea­son­able way if we have hier­ar­chies of man­agers and admin­is­tra­tors, because we are not ants. We can­not deal with­out elites. Elites are nec­es­sary because, with­out them, we wouldn’t be able to coop­er­ate and coor­di­nate in large num­bers.

    But let’s sep­a­rate their man­age­r­i­al needs from huge dif­fer­ences in wealth. In prin­ci­ple — and, in fact, in his­to­ry — many elites who start at the begin­ning of those inte­gra­tive eras, they’re fair­ly unselfish. They live quite mod­est­ly. Just think about Repub­li­can Rome and the sen­a­tor class: they were just farm­ers that were some­what a lit­tle bit wealth­i­er than the cit­i­zens. The eco­nom­ic dif­fer­ences were quite min­i­mal.

    In prin­ci­ple, it is pos­si­ble to have elites and have them act in pro­ce­dur­al man­ners. But it is like rid­ing a bicy­cle: you have to bal­ance all the time. So in order to keep elites from act­ing in self­ish ways, there have to be con­straints on them. Demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions pro­vide a set of such con­straints, but they have to be sup­ple­ment­ed — by oth­er things that we have not yet evolved. Because, inevitably, even demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety gets into a sit­u­a­tion where inequal­i­ties start to grow.

    My main point is that we can sep­a­rate the man­age­r­i­al parts of the elites from their accu­mu­lat­ing huge wealth and unfet­tered pow­er.

    MH: But what do you make of this soci­etal insis­tence that we must abol­ish all hier­ar­chy?

    PT: Okay, you want to abol­ish hier­ar­chies? First, pay your­self the same salary as the medi­an work­er in your 500 For­tune com­pa­ny. Put your mon­ey where your mouth is.

    ———-

    “Will the elites ever behave?” by Peter Turchin and Mary Har­ring­ton; UnHerd; 06/10/2023

    “I hope that, with all this infor­ma­tion, even­tu­al­ly we will make it pos­si­ble for soci­ety to escape this cycle. But why do these end times hap­pen at all? One com­mon theme that we see over and over again, in all of the dif­fer­ent routes to cri­sis, is a con­di­tion that we call “elite over­pro­duc­tion”.

    Are the grow­ing num­ber of insti­tu­tion­al crises fac­ing the US the result of some sort of human pat­tern of behav­ior that’s been man­i­fest­ing through­out his­to­ry, over and over like a dement­ed sui­ci­dal instinct? Yes, accord­ing to the find­ings of Peter Turch­in’s team. In over 200 cas­es of soci­ety col­lapse stud­ied by Turch­in’s team, “elite over­pro­duc­tion” kept pre­dictably hap­pen­ing with pre­dictable results:

    ...
    My col­leagues and I are cur­rent­ly work­ing on build­ing a large his­tor­i­cal data­base — our “Cri­sis DB” — in which we log inci­dents when past soci­eties got into a state of cri­sis. What we have found is that all com­plex soci­eties in the past 5,000 years have expe­ri­enced an inte­gra­tive phase, when peace and order reigned — and then an inevitable descent into an “end times”.

    ...

    Let me explain what I mean by that. First of all, who are the elites? Put sim­ply, they are nei­ther good peo­ple or bad peo­ple, they are sim­ply a small pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion who con­cen­trate social pow­er in their hands — whether that’s in the mil­i­tary, eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, or ide­o­log­i­cal sphere. In medieval times, the elites were the mil­i­tary nobil­i­ty of Eng­land or France, for exam­ple; or in Impe­r­i­al Chi­na, they were the class of man­darins. In the Unit­ed States, where I live, sim­ply put, it’s the prover­bial 1%.

    ...

    The next big ques­tion is how are elites pro­duced and repro­duced? They’re repro­duced by ambi­tious young peo­ple, or, to use the tech­ni­cal term, “elite aspi­rants”, who want to gain posi­tions of pow­er. Elite over­pro­duc­tion occurs when, dur­ing some his­tor­i­cal peri­ods, we get too many elite aspi­rants for the slow­ly chang­ing num­ber of pow­er posi­tions. That cre­ates intense com­pe­ti­tion, and while some com­pe­ti­tion is very help­ful and good, exces­sive com­pe­ti­tion is harm­ful as it cor­rodes the social norms and insti­tu­tions of the soci­ety.

    When you have huge num­bers of losers in this game, a pro­por­tion of frus­trat­ed elites will decide to break the rules. We saw that very clear­ly in the 2016 US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. At that point, the num­ber of can­di­dates in the Repub­li­can pri­maries was the largest in his­to­ry.

    Dis­grun­tled elite-wannabes are far more threat­en­ing to soci­etal sta­bil­i­ty than dis­grun­tled work­ers. In Eng­land dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages, there was a huge peas­ant upris­ing led by Wat Tyler. And what hap­pened? A small group of armoured knights on horse­back destroyed them with­out rais­ing so much as a sweat, because non-elites are not organ­ised. As long as the state is strong and the elites are uni­fied, they can keep a lid on pop­u­lar dis­con­tent.

    ...

    We have close to 200 cas­es of soci­etal cri­sis right now, and the major­i­ty are fair­ly severe — some lead­ing to out­right col­lapse. But there are also maybe 10–15% of cas­es where the elites pull togeth­er and, coop­er­at­ing with the rest of the pop­u­la­tion, they find the right mix of reforms and avoid the worst out­comes. For exam­ple, in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry, the British Empire was the only large Euro­pean state that was not affect­ed by a rev­o­lu­tion. Of course, there were bad moments, like the Peter­loo mas­sacre, but there was no civ­il war. That’s part­ly because a group of social elites got togeth­er and con­vinced the rest of their num­ber of the need to reform.
    ...

    But, of course, ‘elite over­pro­duc­tion’ is a some­what sub­jec­tive met­ric inher­ent­ly tied to the scope of the aspir­ing elite ambi­tions. And that brings us to the under­ly­ing shift in the US that Turchin sees as fun­da­men­tal­ly dri­ving an over­pro­duc­tion of elites: the ‘wealth pump’ cre­at­ed by Reaganomics over the past four decades. The social con­tract of shared ben­e­fits between elite and every­one else that defined the New Deal econ­o­my of the post-war peri­od was flipped on its head, with almost all of the eco­nom­ic gains cap­tured by a tiny sliv­er of the pop­u­la­tion. The sliv­er that was already at the top. As Turchin describes, the cre­ation of the ‘wealth pump’ also put in place the ‘iron law of oli­garchy’: when elites are allowed to con­vert their pow­er into wealth with noth­ing stop­ping them, they will inevitably do exact­ly that. And that’s why it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that the dynam­ics Turchin describes — a trend of of few­er and few­er posi­tions of pow­er and influ­ence rel­a­tive­ly to the pop­u­la­tion of ‘aspir­ing elites’ — is a dynam­ic being cre­at­ed by an ever greater con­cen­tra­tion of wealth into few­er and few­er hands. Which makes sense if you think about it: the eas­i­er it is for indi­vid­u­als to achieve mas­sive pools of wealth, the few­er posi­tions of pow­er and influ­ence there are over­all because it’s just going to be a rel­a­tive hand­ful of peo­ple with almost all the real eco­nom­ic influ­ence. Let that process keep play­ing out decade after decade and even­tu­al­ly you’ll end up with a coun­try like the mod­ern US which is effec­tive­ly run by net­works of polit­i­cal mega-donors:

    ...
    MH: In the book, you use the arrest­ing phrase “the iron law of oli­garchy” to describe why we end up pro­duc­ing too many elites. Once you have a bunch of peo­ple in charge of the levers of pow­er and mon­ey, they will start fun­nelling resources towards them­selves because they can.

    PT: Exact­ly. What we see in the his­tor­i­cal record is that all com­plex soci­eties go through peri­ods of good times, maybe a cen­tu­ry or so long on aver­age, and then peri­ods of dis­in­te­gra­tion. Dur­ing the good times, after a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions, the elites get used to the fact that life is good and sta­ble, and that’s when the iron law of oli­garchy kicks in. The elites are very strong­ly tempt­ed to con­vert their pow­er into good­ies for them­selves — and if there’s noth­ing stop­ping them, that’s what they do. They basi­cal­ly recon­fig­ure the econ­o­my in a way that depress­es the wages of work­ers and cre­ates a “wealth pump” that fun­nels rich­es direct­ly to the own­ers and man­agers of cor­po­ra­tions.

    MH: You’ve described this hap­pen­ing under Thatch­er and Rea­gan, after sev­er­al decades of the post-war con­sen­sus.

    PT: Pre­cise­ly. Those elites in the US and the UK had 30 glo­ri­ous years. But by the late Sev­en­ties, they start­ed get­ting self­ish. That’s when we began to see the sep­a­ra­tion between work­er pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and work­er com­pen­sa­tion. And imme­di­ate­ly — with­in anoth­er 30 years — the num­bers of uber-rich peo­ple explod­ed in the Unit­ed States. The num­ber of decamil­lion­aires, those with $10 mil­lion or more, increased ten­fold from the Eight­ies to 2010.

    That’s the wealth pump at work.. And that’s what dri­ves one part of elite over­pro­duc­tion in the US, which is the over­pro­duc­tion of wealthy peo­ple who try to become can­di­dates for polit­i­cal office. That’s one of the rea­sons why the cost of cam­paign­ing for polit­i­cal office has com­plete­ly explod­ed.
    ...

    And if it’s tempt­ing to view­ing this in a ‘elite from both sides’ frame­work, note Turch­in’s idea of the con­tem­po­rary left-wing elite: Antifa mem­bers, which Turchin acknowl­edges are large­ly pow­er­less:

    ...
    MH: What about elite dis­si­dents today? In your book, you give a fic­tion­alised exam­ple of a young, far-Left, woke, upper-mid­dle class rev­o­lu­tion­ary who wants to smash the sys­tem from with­in. She joins Antifa, the autonomous anti-fas­cist move­ment, and wants to abol­ish the police — even if that makes life worse for the work­ing class. But is she real­ly a rev­o­lu­tion­ary at all if none of her opin­ions have any res­o­nance with the work­ing class?

    PT: She is a failed rev­o­lu­tion­ary, clear­ly, because she can­not har­ness pop­u­lar dis­con­tent. In fact, it’s the pop­ulists on both the Left and the Right who res­onate far more with the work­ing class in the Unit­ed States.

    Antifa is real­ly quite inef­fec­tu­al, except at beat­ing up Right-wing extrem­ists and smash­ing things. That’s why Jane, this char­ac­ter in my book, grows dis­en­chant­ed after some years in the Antifa move­ment because it’s not going any­where. She then realis­es that the way to get ahead in the US, if you want to have a rev­o­lu­tion, is through the legal chan­nels because the state is very strong. I am Russ­ian, and I can tell you that noth­ing like a Bol­she­vik Par­ty is pos­si­ble in the US. We don’t want a vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion, real­ly. Instead, peo­ple on both the Left and Right work their way through the struc­tures of pow­er.

    MH: Do you think the elites who want to abol­ish the police are gen­uine believ­ers?

    PT: Yes. Antifa is fair­ly secre­tive, and for good rea­son, because they don’t want to be pen­e­trat­ed by the FBI. So let’s look back 50 years, at the Marx­ist mil­i­tant group the Weath­er­man Under­ground, because many of those peo­ple have now writ­ten mem­oirs, and we have a pret­ty good idea of what moti­vat­ed them. They were clear­ly fight­ing against what they saw as an unjust Amer­i­can soci­ety, where the poor went hun­gry and where minori­ties and women were oppressed. They had a gen­uine cause — but they were com­plete­ly unre­al­is­tic about their abil­i­ty to start a rev­o­lu­tion. And so they start­ed blow­ing up mon­u­ments, killing peo­ple, all because they want­ed to trig­ger the out­pour­ing of pop­u­lar anger against the elites.

    But there was no pop­u­lar anger at that time. This was before the wealth pump got turned on: Amer­i­can work­ers were doing very well, and every new gen­er­a­tion was doing bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous one, so they were com­plete­ly turned off by these wannabe rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies. Just because some­body is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary doesn’t mean that they are going to be a suc­cess­ful rev­o­lu­tion­ary.

    ...

    MH: In cas­es where the elite view is in con­flict with the pop­u­lar view, do the elites always win?

    PT: The great polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Mar­tin Gilens con­duct­ed some fas­ci­nat­ing research into the leg­is­la­tion passed through Con­gress. He found that 90% of the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion had zero effect on the actu­al leg­is­la­tion that passed — zilch, nada. Their tech­nique was not fine enough to dis­tin­guish between the final 10 per­centiles, but they sus­pect that it’s real­ly the 1% who dri­ves every­thing. This is why I argue in my book that the US is not a democ­ra­cy any­more, it’s a plu­toc­ra­cy.
    ...

    Also note Turch­in’s inter­est­ing asser­tion regard­ing a pos­si­ble solu­tion to the seem­ing inevitabil­i­ty of warn­ing elites: large com­plex soci­eties require ‘elites’ sim­ply to func­tion. But these elites don’t actu­al­ly have to be eco­nom­ic elites who are allowed to use their influ­ence to accrue greater per­son­al wealth. That’s a soci­etal choice and there’s noth­ing stop­ping soci­eties from sep­a­rat­ing the man­age­r­i­al parts of the elites from their accu­mu­lat­ing huge wealth and unfet­tered pow­er. What the US has done to itself has been a choice. A pro­found­ly stu­pid and greedy choice that threat­ens the basic integri­ty of the insti­tu­tions this soci­ety runs on. But it real­ly does­n’t have to be this way. We don’t have to be pro­le suck­ers for­ev­er. It’s per­haps the most impor­tant aspect of Turch­in’s analy­sis: the col­laps­es of human soci­eties isn’t inevitable. It’s human soci­eties allow for the mass con­cen­tra­tions wealth and pow­er that will inevitably col­lapse:

    ...
    MH: The entire the­sis of your book is that we have always had elites — and, in fact, the impor­tant thing is not to get rid of them, but to hold their feet to the fire to make sure they’re behav­ing. But it’s my obser­va­tion that the cur­rent reign­ing elite is overt­ly anti-hier­ar­chi­cal, and that we must get rid of hier­ar­chies, wher­ev­er there are, wher­ev­er they exist. Where do you stand on the sacred val­ues of anti-hier­ar­chi­cal­ism?

    PT: For 95% of our evo­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry, we humans lived in small-scale soci­eties, which were very egal­i­tar­i­an — unusu­al­ly egal­i­tar­i­an — when you com­pare us to the great apes, for exam­ple. The first elites appeared about 7,500 years ago, in chief­doms. My argu­ment is that a large-scale soci­ety can only func­tion in a rea­son­able way if we have hier­ar­chies of man­agers and admin­is­tra­tors, because we are not ants. We can­not deal with­out elites. Elites are nec­es­sary because, with­out them, we wouldn’t be able to coop­er­ate and coor­di­nate in large num­bers.

    But let’s sep­a­rate their man­age­r­i­al needs from huge dif­fer­ences in wealth. In prin­ci­ple — and, in fact, in his­to­ry — many elites who start at the begin­ning of those inte­gra­tive eras, they’re fair­ly unselfish. They live quite mod­est­ly. Just think about Repub­li­can Rome and the sen­a­tor class: they were just farm­ers that were some­what a lit­tle bit wealth­i­er than the cit­i­zens. The eco­nom­ic dif­fer­ences were quite min­i­mal.

    In prin­ci­ple, it is pos­si­ble to have elites and have them act in pro­ce­dur­al man­ners. But it is like rid­ing a bicy­cle: you have to bal­ance all the time. So in order to keep elites from act­ing in self­ish ways, there have to be con­straints on them. Demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions pro­vide a set of such con­straints, but they have to be sup­ple­ment­ed — by oth­er things that we have not yet evolved. Because, inevitably, even demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety gets into a sit­u­a­tion where inequal­i­ties start to grow.

    My main point is that we can sep­a­rate the man­age­r­i­al parts of the elites from their accu­mu­lat­ing huge wealth and unfet­tered pow­er.
    ...

    So is there any hope that the elites seem­ing­ly intent on com­plete­ly insti­tu­tion­al cap­ture and ‘total vic­to­ry’ over their fel­low cit­i­zens will pull back from play­ing out Turch­in’s dooms­day sce­nario? Well, note the kinds of sce­nar­ios Turchin iden­ti­fied as ade­quate putting the ‘fear of God’ into the elites and forc­ing them to restrain them­selves before they tore every­thing apart: the grow­ing very real threat of a com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion. That’s what it takes to get the oli­garchy to take note of the rest of the pop­u­lace. Torch­es and pitch­forks:

    ...
    MH: Can you envi­sion a coali­tion in the present day with the capac­i­ty to hold the elites to account — and per­haps even fright­en them into shut­ting off the wealth pump?

    PT: Let me first say that I am com­plete­ly non-par­ti­san, and reg­u­lar­ly crit­i­cise both the Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats. I think that the pop­ulist fac­tions, both on the Left and the Right, often talk a good talk, but they have not yet deliv­ered.

    There was an Amer­i­can pop­ulist par­ty in the 1890s, which nev­er won elec­tions but did put pres­sure on the estab­lish­ment at a time of polit­i­cal ten­sion. Riots and insur­rec­tions were becom­ing more fre­quent. By the ear­ly Twen­ties, it seemed to many that Amer­i­ca had reached a rev­o­lu­tion­ary moment, espe­cial­ly with the Sovi­et Union pre­sent­ing an alter­na­tive mod­el to the US sys­tem. The first Red Scare broke out in 1921, when a seg­ment of Amer­i­can elites were con­vinced that a Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion was immi­nent.

    It was this com­bi­na­tion of inter­nal and exter­nal pres­sures that pro­pelled Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reforms. He must have realised, like the Russ­ian tsar Alexan­der II before him, that you either make reforms from above or you end up hav­ing rev­o­lu­tion from below.
    ...

    It’s worth keep­ing mind the last time there was any­thing even remote­ly approach­ing a ‘torch­es and pitch­forks’ moment: Occu­py Wall Street. Which did­n’t seem to leave a last­ing impres­sion on Amer­i­ca’s aspir­ing elites. In par­tic­u­lar, the elites who aspire to more less con­trol all of the wealth, pow­er, and social influ­ence across insti­tu­tions and soci­ety at large. The same elite net­works that plot­ted the Jan 6 insur­rec­tion, got away with it, and con­tin­ue to plot their Sched­ule F mass insti­tu­tion­al purge at the ear­li­est oppor­tu­ni­ty. Or, who knows, maybe the increas­ing­ly rad­i­cal­ized elite actions of the last decade was itself a response to Occu­py Wall Street. A plan to go ‘torch­es and pitch­forks’ before the rab­ble could final­ly fig­ure out how to do it them­selves. Either way, less than a decade lat­er we get the Trumpi­fi­ca­tion of the GOP, the far right cap­ture of the Supreme Court, and then Jan 6, with the GOP’s Ivy League edu­ca­tion elites almost entire­ly adopt­ing the rad­i­cal faux-pop­ulist anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic ‘anti-elite’ pol­i­tics of the peri­od. It’s Turchins elite fac­tion­al­ism play­ing out, except in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca the pow­er imbal­ance is so skewed that the left wing ‘elites’ are com­prised of groups like the pow­er­less Antifa. Because Amer­i­ca in 2023 is an oli­garchy about erupt into fac­tion­al civ­il war. It’s an oli­garchy that erupt­ed into that war decades ago in response to the New Deal and oth­er pro­gres­sive vic­to­ries. An ‘elite civ­il war’ that was large­ly won by right-wing bil­lion­aires decades ago, with Rea­gan’s ‘wealth pump’ get­ting tur­bo charged in 2017. It’s that his­to­ry of decades of oli­garchs work­ing towards this moment of near total vic­to­ry, total vic­to­ry play­ing out one Supreme Court rul­ing at a time these days, that points towards one of most depress­ing aspects of Thurs­day’s Supreme Court rul­ing: while Trump’s 2016 vic­to­ry and sub­se­quent sleazy cap­ture of the Supreme Court did indeed solid­i­fy this net­work’s near total cap­ture of the levers of polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic pow­er in the US, the insti­tu­tion­al sack­ing is real­ly more like a crown­ing cap­stone on an eco­nom­ic sack­ing that took place a long time ago. The kind of eco­nom­ic sack­ing that could cre­ate a nasty desta­bi­liz­ing aspir­ing elite sup­ply and demand imbal­ance.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | July 1, 2023, 12:47 am
  27. It hap­pened again. We got anoth­er update on the ongo­ing Sched­ule F schem­ing. And anoth­er con­fir­ma­tion that the schemes go well beyond just purg­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment of non-loy­al­ists. The ‘Sched­ule F+’ soci­ety-wide purge long-advo­cat­ed by Cur­tis Yarvin is the goal, and there are already plans in place to make it hap­pen. Plans that could be described as a max­i­mal­ist vision of the uni­tary exec­u­tive the­o­ry. Yep, remem­ber the ‘Uni­tary Exec­u­tive’ the­o­ries of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion? Well, they’re back and report­ed­ly under­gird­ing this new expand­ed vision of a mass purge that goes far beyond purg­ing the gov­ern­ment.

    As the fol­low­ing NY Times report describes, the expand­ed vision of pres­i­den­tial pow­ers being devel­op­ing by Project 2025 — the rebrand­ed expand­ed Sched­ule F plot that is now being direct­ed by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, and includes key Sched­ule F play­ers John McEn­tee and Russ Vought — now includes the idea that there are no reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies can­not be estab­lished in a man­ner that leaves them rel­a­tive­ly inde­pen­dent of pres­i­den­tial over­sight. As such, fed­er­al reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies like the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion and the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion will fall under direct pres­i­den­tial con­trol. That, in turn, means that all of the busi­ness reg­u­lat­ed by these agen­cies will also fall under direct pres­i­den­tial reg­u­la­to­ry con­trol too. Just imag­ine the kind of ‘war on work’ that could be waged with those kinds of pow­ers. Every sin­gle busi­ness in the US would sud­den­ly have to fol­low the dai­ly whims of a reelect­ed Pres­i­dent Trump.

    As we’re going to see, the big plans for the use of this expand­ed pres­i­den­tial pow­er appears to be gut­ting of fed­er­al busi­ness reg­u­la­tions. But if you’re assum­ing these pow­ers will be used in a high­ly ‘pro-busi­ness’ man­ner, also note that it appears the plans include direct pres­i­den­tial man­age­ment of the Fed­er­al Reserve. As Russ Vought put it, “It’s very hard to square the Fed’s inde­pen­dence with the Con­sti­tu­tion.” Yep, the US busi­ness cycle is set to become high­ly syn­chro­nized with its elec­toral cycle. It’s one of the many dra­mat­ic changes Trump and his Project 2025 allies have in mind. That’s, of course, assum­ing there are going to still be elec­tions after this is all put in place:

    The New York Times

    Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Pres­i­den­tial Pow­er in 2025

    The for­mer pres­i­dent and his back­ers aim to strength­en the pow­er of the White House and lim­it the inde­pen­dence of fed­er­al agen­cies.

    By Jonathan Swan, Char­lie Sav­age and Mag­gie Haber­man
    July 17, 2023 Updat­ed 7:31 a.m. ET

    Don­ald J. Trump and his allies are plan­ning a sweep­ing expan­sion of pres­i­den­tial pow­er over the machin­ery of gov­ern­ment if vot­ers return him to the White House in 2025, reshap­ing the struc­ture of the exec­u­tive branch to con­cen­trate far greater author­i­ty direct­ly in his hands.

    Their plans to cen­tral­ize more pow­er in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the for­mer president’s recent remarks that he would order a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion into his polit­i­cal rival, Pres­i­dent Biden, sig­nal­ing his intent to end the post-Water­gate norm of Jus­tice Depart­ment inde­pen­dence from White House polit­i­cal con­trol.

    Mr. Trump and his asso­ciates have a broad­er goal: to alter the bal­ance of pow­er by increas­ing the president’s author­i­ty over every part of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment that now oper­ates, by either law or tra­di­tion, with any mea­sure of inde­pen­dence from polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence by the White House, accord­ing to a review of his cam­paign pol­i­cy pro­pos­als and inter­views with peo­ple close to him.

    Mr. Trump intends to bring inde­pen­dent agen­cies — like the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion, which makes and enforces rules for tele­vi­sion and inter­net com­pa­nies, and the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion, which enforces var­i­ous antitrust and oth­er con­sumer pro­tec­tion rules against busi­ness­es — under direct pres­i­den­tial con­trol.

    He wants to revive the prac­tice of “impound­ing” funds, refus­ing to spend mon­ey Con­gress has appro­pri­at­ed for pro­grams a pres­i­dent doesn’t like — a tac­tic that law­mak­ers banned under Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon.

    He intends to strip strip employ­ment pro­tec­tions from tens of thou­sands of career civ­il ser­vants, mak­ing it eas­i­er to replace them if they are deemed obsta­cles to his agen­da. And he plans to scour the intel­li­gence agen­cies, the State Depart­ment and the defense bureau­cra­cies to remove offi­cials he has vil­i­fied as “the sick polit­i­cal class that hates our coun­try.”

    “The president’s plan should be to fun­da­men­tal­ly reori­ent the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEn­tee, a for­mer White House per­son­nel chief who began Mr. Trump’s sys­tem­at­ic attempt to sweep out offi­cials deemed to be dis­loy­al in 2020 and who is now involved in map­ping out the new approach.

    “Our cur­rent exec­u­tive branch,” Mr. McEn­tee added, “was con­ceived of by lib­er­als for the pur­pose of pro­mul­gat­ing lib­er­al poli­cies. There is no way to make the exist­ing struc­ture func­tion in a con­ser­v­a­tive man­ner. It’s not enough to get the per­son­nel right. What’s nec­es­sary is a com­plete sys­tem over­haul.”

    Mr. Trump and his advis­ers are mak­ing no secret of their inten­tions — pro­claim­ing them in ral­lies and on his cam­paign web­site, describ­ing them in white papers and open­ly dis­cussing them.

    “What we’re try­ing to do is iden­ti­fy the pock­ets of inde­pen­dence and seize them,” said Rus­sell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Man­age­ment and Bud­get in the Trump White House and now runs a pol­i­cy orga­ni­za­tion, the Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca.

    The strat­e­gy in talk­ing open­ly about such “par­a­digm-shift­ing ideas” before the elec­tion, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to lat­er be able to claim a man­date. He said he was delight­ed to see few of Mr. Trump’s Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry rivals defend the norm of Jus­tice Depart­ment inde­pen­dence after the for­mer pres­i­dent open­ly attacked it.

    ...

    The two dri­ving forces of this effort to reshape the exec­u­tive branch are Mr. Trump’s own cam­paign pol­i­cy shop and a well-fund­ed net­work of con­ser­v­a­tive groups, many of which are pop­u­lat­ed by for­mer senior Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials who would most like­ly play key roles in any sec­ond term.

    Mr. Vought and Mr. McEn­tee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 mil­lion pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion oper­a­tion that is prepar­ing poli­cies, per­son­nel lists and tran­si­tion plans to rec­om­mend to any Repub­li­can who may win the 2024 elec­tion. The tran­si­tion project, the scale of which is unprece­dent­ed in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics, is led by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, a think tank that has shaped the per­son­nel and poli­cies of Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions since the Rea­gan pres­i­den­cy.

    That work at Her­itage dove­tails with plans on the Trump cam­paign web­site to expand pres­i­den­tial pow­er that were draft­ed pri­mar­i­ly by two of Mr. Trump’s advis­ers, Vin­cent Haley and Ross Wor­thing­ton, with input from oth­er advis­ers, includ­ing Stephen Miller, the archi­tect of the for­mer president’s hard-line immi­gra­tion agen­da.

    ...

    The agen­da being pur­sued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by con­ser­v­a­tive legal thinkers to under­cut what has become known as the admin­is­tra­tive state — agen­cies that enact reg­u­la­tions aimed at keep­ing the air and water clean and food, drugs and con­sumer prod­ucts safe, but that cut into busi­ness prof­its.

    Its legal under­pin­ning is a max­i­mal­ist ver­sion of the so-called uni­tary exec­u­tive the­o­ry.

    The legal the­o­ry rejects the idea that the gov­ern­ment is com­posed of three sep­a­rate branch­es with over­lap­ping pow­ers to check and bal­ance each oth­er. Instead, the theory’s adher­ents argue that Arti­cle 2 of the Con­sti­tu­tion gives the pres­i­dent com­plete con­trol of the exec­u­tive branch, so Con­gress can­not empow­er agency heads to make deci­sions or restrict the president’s abil­i­ty to fire them. Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion lawyers devel­oped the the­o­ry as they sought to advance a dereg­u­la­to­ry agen­da.

    “The notion of inde­pen­dent fed­er­al agen­cies or fed­er­al employ­ees who don’t answer to the pres­i­dent vio­lates the very foun­da­tion of our demo­c­ra­t­ic repub­lic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the pres­i­dent of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, adding that the con­trib­u­tors to Project 2025 are com­mit­ted to “dis­man­tling this rogue admin­is­tra­tive state.”

    Per­son­al pow­er has always been a dri­ving force for Mr. Trump. He often ges­tures toward it in a more sim­plis­tic man­ner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheer­ing crowd, “I have an Arti­cle 2, where I have the right to do what­ev­er I want as pres­i­dent.”

    Mr. Trump made the remark in ref­er­ence to his claimed abil­i­ty to direct­ly fire Robert S. Mueller III, the spe­cial coun­sel in the Rus­sia inquiry, which primed his hos­til­i­ty toward law enforce­ment and intel­li­gence agen­cies. He also tried to get a sub­or­di­nate to have Mr. Mueller oust­ed, but was defied.

    Ear­ly in Mr. Trump’s pres­i­den­cy, his chief strate­gist, Stephen K. Ban­non, promised a “decon­struc­tion of the admin­is­tra­tive state.” But Mr. Trump installed peo­ple in oth­er key roles who end­ed up telling him that more rad­i­cal ideas were unwork­able or ille­gal. In the final year of his pres­i­den­cy, he told aides he was fed up with being con­strained by sub­or­di­nates.

    Now, Mr. Trump is lay­ing out a far more expan­sive vision of pow­er in any sec­ond term. And, in con­trast with his dis­or­ga­nized tran­si­tion after his sur­prise 2016 vic­to­ry, he now ben­e­fits from a well-fund­ed pol­i­cy­mak­ing infra­struc­ture, led by for­mer offi­cials who did not break with him after his attempts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capi­tol.

    One idea the peo­ple around Mr. Trump have devel­oped cen­ters on bring­ing inde­pen­dent agen­cies under his thumb.

    Con­gress cre­at­ed these spe­cial­ized tech­no­crat­ic agen­cies inside the exec­u­tive branch and del­e­gat­ed to them some of its pow­er to make rules for soci­ety. But it did so on the con­di­tion that it was not sim­ply hand­ing off that pow­er to pres­i­dents to wield like kings — putting com­mis­sion­ers atop them whom pres­i­dents appoint but gen­er­al­ly can­not fire before their terms end, while using its con­trol of their bud­gets to keep them part­ly account­able to law­mak­ers as well. (Agency actions are also sub­ject to court review.)

    Pres­i­dents of both par­ties have chafed at the agen­cies’ inde­pen­dence. Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt, whose New Deal cre­at­ed many of them, endorsed a pro­pos­al in 1937 to fold them all into cab­i­net depart­ments under his con­trol, but Con­gress did not enact it.

    Lat­er pres­i­dents sought to impose greater con­trol over non­in­de­pen­dent agen­cies Con­gress cre­at­ed, like the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, which is run by an admin­is­tra­tor whom a pres­i­dent can remove at will. For exam­ple, Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan issued exec­u­tive orders requir­ing non­in­de­pen­dent agen­cies to sub­mit pro­posed reg­u­la­tions to the White House for review. But over­all, pres­i­dents have large­ly left the inde­pen­dent agen­cies alone.

    Mr. Trump’s allies are prepar­ing to change that, draft­ing an exec­u­tive order requir­ing inde­pen­dent agen­cies to sub­mit actions to the White House for review. Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his cam­paign web­site, vow­ing to bring them “under pres­i­den­tial author­i­ty.”

    Such an order was draft­ed in Mr. Trump’s first term — and blessed by the Jus­tice Depart­ment — but nev­er issued amid inter­nal con­cerns. Some of the con­cerns were over how to car­ry out reviews for agen­cies that are head­ed by mul­ti­ple com­mis­sion­ers and sub­ject to admin­is­tra­tive pro­ce­dures and open-meet­ings laws, as well as over how the mar­ket would react if the order chipped away at the Fed­er­al Reserve’s inde­pen­dence, peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

    The Fed­er­al Reserve was ulti­mate­ly exempt­ed in the draft exec­u­tive order, but Mr. Trump did not sign it before his pres­i­den­cy end­ed. If Mr. Trump and his allies get anoth­er shot at pow­er, the inde­pen­dence of the Fed­er­al Reserve — an insti­tu­tion Mr. Trump pub­licly railed at as pres­i­dent — could be up for debate. Notably, the Trump cam­paign website’s dis­cus­sion of bring­ing inde­pen­dent agen­cies under pres­i­den­tial con­trol is silent on whether that includes the Fed.

    Asked whether pres­i­dents should be able to order inter­est rates low­ered before elec­tions, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the econ­o­my, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Con­gress. But “at the bare min­i­mum,” he said, the Fed­er­al Reserve’s reg­u­la­to­ry func­tions should be sub­ject to White House review.

    “It’s very hard to square the Fed’s inde­pen­dence with the Con­sti­tu­tion,” Mr. Vought said.

    Oth­er for­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials involved in the plan­ning said there would also prob­a­bly be a legal chal­lenge to the lim­its on a president’s pow­er to fire heads of inde­pen­dent agen­cies. Mr. Trump could remove an agency head, tee­ing up the ques­tion for the Supreme Court.

    The Supreme Court in 1935 and 1988 upheld the pow­er of Con­gress to shield some exec­u­tive branch offi­cials from being fired with­out cause. But after jus­tices appoint­ed by Repub­li­cans since Rea­gan took con­trol, it has start­ed to erode those prece­dents.

    Peter L. Strauss, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of law at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and a crit­ic of the strong ver­sion of the uni­tary exec­u­tive the­o­ry, argued that it is con­sti­tu­tion­al and desir­able for Con­gress, in cre­at­ing and empow­er­ing an agency to per­form some task, to also include some checks on the president’s con­trol over offi­cials “because we don’t want autoc­ra­cy” and to pre­vent abus­es.

    “The regret­table fact is that the judi­cia­ry at the moment seems inclined to rec­og­nize that the pres­i­dent does have this kind of author­i­ty,” he said. “They are claw­ing away agency inde­pen­dence in ways that I find quite unfor­tu­nate and dis­re­spect­ful of con­gres­sion­al choice.”

    Mr. Trump has also vowed to impound funds, or refuse to spend mon­ey appro­pri­at­ed by Con­gress. After Nixon used the prac­tice to aggres­sive­ly block agency spend­ing he was opposed to, on water pol­lu­tion con­trol, hous­ing con­struc­tion and oth­er issues, Con­gress banned the tac­tic.

    On his cam­paign web­site, Mr. Trump declared that pres­i­dents have a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to impound funds and said he would restore the prac­tice — though he acknowl­edged it could result in a legal bat­tle.

    Mr. Trump and his allies also want to trans­form the civ­il ser­vice — gov­ern­ment employ­ees who are sup­posed to be non­par­ti­san pro­fes­sion­als and experts with pro­tec­tions against being fired for polit­i­cal rea­sons.

    The for­mer pres­i­dent views the civ­il ser­vice as a den of “deep staters” who were try­ing to thwart him at every turn, includ­ing by rais­ing legal or prag­mat­ic objec­tions to his immi­gra­tion poli­cies, among many oth­er exam­ples. Toward the end of his term, his aides draft­ed an exec­u­tive order, “Cre­at­ing Sched­ule F in the Except­ed Ser­vice,” that removed employ­ment pro­tec­tions from career offi­cials whose jobs were deemed linked to pol­i­cy­mak­ing.

    Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Sched­ule F, near the end of his pres­i­den­cy, but Pres­i­dent Biden rescind­ed it. Mr. Trump has vowed to imme­di­ate­ly rein­sti­tute it in a sec­ond term.

    Crit­ics say he could use it for a par­ti­san purge. But James Sherk, a for­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial who came up with the idea and now works at the Amer­i­ca First Pol­i­cy Insti­tute — a think tank stocked heav­i­ly with for­mer Trump offi­cials — argued it would only be used against poor per­form­ers and peo­ple who active­ly imped­ed the elect­ed president’s agen­da.

    “Sched­ule F express­ly for­bids hir­ing or fir­ing based on polit­i­cal loy­al­ty,” Mr. Sherk said. “Sched­ule F employ­ees would keep their jobs if they served effec­tive­ly and impar­tial­ly.”

    Mr. Trump him­self has char­ac­ter­ized his inten­tions rather dif­fer­ent­ly — promis­ing on his cam­paign web­site to “find and remove the rad­i­cals who have infil­trat­ed the fed­er­al Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion” and list­ing a litany of tar­gets at a ral­ly last month.

    “We will demol­ish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the ral­ly in Michi­gan. “We will expel the war­mon­gers from our gov­ern­ment. We will dri­ve out the glob­al­ists. We will cast out the com­mu­nists, Marx­ists and fas­cists. And we will throw off the sick polit­i­cal class that hates our coun­try.”

    ————

    “Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Pres­i­den­tial Pow­er in 2025” by Jonathan Swan, Char­lie Sav­age and Mag­gie Haber­man; The New York Times; 07/17/2023

    “Mr. Trump and his asso­ciates have a broad­er goal: to alter the bal­ance of pow­er by increas­ing the president’s author­i­ty over every part of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment that now oper­ates, by either law or tra­di­tion, with any mea­sure of inde­pen­dence from polit­i­cal inter­fer­ence by the White House, accord­ing to a review of his cam­paign pol­i­cy pro­pos­als and inter­views with peo­ple close to him.”

    It just keeps grow­ing. As expect­ed. The plan isn’t just a mass purge of the civ­il ser­vice. We’re look­ing at a max­i­mal­ist ver­sion of uni­tary exec­u­tive the­o­ry. A vision of the US con­sti­tu­tion that enshrines the US pres­i­dent with unchecked pow­ers over all aspects of the exec­u­tive branch. Includ­ing com­plete pow­er over how the exec­u­tive branch enforces laws and reg­u­la­tions passed by Con­gress. In oth­er words, the Sched­ule F plot is turn­ing into the ulti­mate dereg­u­la­tion plot. The purge is just a warm up:

    ...
    The agen­da being pur­sued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by con­ser­v­a­tive legal thinkers to under­cut what has become known as the admin­is­tra­tive state — agen­cies that enact reg­u­la­tions aimed at keep­ing the air and water clean and food, drugs and con­sumer prod­ucts safe, but that cut into busi­ness prof­its.

    Its legal under­pin­ning is a max­i­mal­ist ver­sion of the so-called uni­tary exec­u­tive the­o­ry.

    The legal the­o­ry rejects the idea that the gov­ern­ment is com­posed of three sep­a­rate branch­es with over­lap­ping pow­ers to check and bal­ance each oth­er. Instead, the theory’s adher­ents argue that Arti­cle 2 of the Con­sti­tu­tion gives the pres­i­dent com­plete con­trol of the exec­u­tive branch, so Con­gress can­not empow­er agency heads to make deci­sions or restrict the president’s abil­i­ty to fire them. Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion lawyers devel­oped the the­o­ry as they sought to advance a dereg­u­la­to­ry agen­da.

    “The notion of inde­pen­dent fed­er­al agen­cies or fed­er­al employ­ees who don’t answer to the pres­i­dent vio­lates the very foun­da­tion of our demo­c­ra­t­ic repub­lic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the pres­i­dent of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, adding that the con­trib­u­tors to Project 2025 are com­mit­ted to “dis­man­tling this rogue admin­is­tra­tive state.”
    ...

    And as part of that com­plete cap­ture and gut­ting of fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions, the inde­pen­dence of fed­er­al agen­cies will end too. Agen­cies that reg­u­late pri­vate busi­ness like the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion and the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion. In oth­er words, this is a huge step towards Cur­tis Yarv­in’s ‘Sched­ule F+’ soci­ety-wide purge that goes far beyond gov­ern­ment. Pri­vate enter­prise will fall under the pres­i­den­t’s direct over­sight. Just imag­ine the kind of ‘war on woke’ that will be pos­si­ble at that point:

    ...
    Mr. Trump intends to bring inde­pen­dent agen­cies — like the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion, which makes and enforces rules for tele­vi­sion and inter­net com­pa­nies, and the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion, which enforces var­i­ous antitrust and oth­er con­sumer pro­tec­tion rules against busi­ness­es — under direct pres­i­den­tial con­trol.

    ...

    One idea the peo­ple around Mr. Trump have devel­oped cen­ters on bring­ing inde­pen­dent agen­cies under his thumb.

    Con­gress cre­at­ed these spe­cial­ized tech­no­crat­ic agen­cies inside the exec­u­tive branch and del­e­gat­ed to them some of its pow­er to make rules for soci­ety. But it did so on the con­di­tion that it was not sim­ply hand­ing off that pow­er to pres­i­dents to wield like kings — putting com­mis­sion­ers atop them whom pres­i­dents appoint but gen­er­al­ly can­not fire before their terms end, while using its con­trol of their bud­gets to keep them part­ly account­able to law­mak­ers as well. (Agency actions are also sub­ject to court review.)

    ...

    Mr. Trump has also vowed to impound funds, or refuse to spend mon­ey appro­pri­at­ed by Con­gress. After Nixon used the prac­tice to aggres­sive­ly block agency spend­ing he was opposed to, on water pol­lu­tion con­trol, hous­ing con­struc­tion and oth­er issues, Con­gress banned the tac­tic.
    ...

    And note how even the Fed­er­al Reserve’s inde­pen­dence is tar­get­ed under these evolv­ing schemes. It’s a reminder that fas­cism isn’t actu­al­ly as inter­est­ed in ‘free-mar­kets’ as cor­po­ratists like to claim. It’s about pow­er and always has been:

    ...
    Pres­i­dents of both par­ties have chafed at the agen­cies’ inde­pen­dence. Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt, whose New Deal cre­at­ed many of them, endorsed a pro­pos­al in 1937 to fold them all into cab­i­net depart­ments under his con­trol, but Con­gress did not enact it.

    Lat­er pres­i­dents sought to impose greater con­trol over non­in­de­pen­dent agen­cies Con­gress cre­at­ed, like the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, which is run by an admin­is­tra­tor whom a pres­i­dent can remove at will. For exam­ple, Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan issued exec­u­tive orders requir­ing non­in­de­pen­dent agen­cies to sub­mit pro­posed reg­u­la­tions to the White House for review. But over­all, pres­i­dents have large­ly left the inde­pen­dent agen­cies alone.

    Mr. Trump’s allies are prepar­ing to change that, draft­ing an exec­u­tive order requir­ing inde­pen­dent agen­cies to sub­mit actions to the White House for review. Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his cam­paign web­site, vow­ing to bring them “under pres­i­den­tial author­i­ty.”

    Such an order was draft­ed in Mr. Trump’s first term — and blessed by the Jus­tice Depart­ment — but nev­er issued amid inter­nal con­cerns. Some of the con­cerns were over how to car­ry out reviews for agen­cies that are head­ed by mul­ti­ple com­mis­sion­ers and sub­ject to admin­is­tra­tive pro­ce­dures and open-meet­ings laws, as well as over how the mar­ket would react if the order chipped away at the Fed­er­al Reserve’s inde­pen­dence, peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

    The Fed­er­al Reserve was ulti­mate­ly exempt­ed in the draft exec­u­tive order, but Mr. Trump did not sign it before his pres­i­den­cy end­ed. If Mr. Trump and his allies get anoth­er shot at pow­er, the inde­pen­dence of the Fed­er­al Reserve — an insti­tu­tion Mr. Trump pub­licly railed at as pres­i­dent — could be up for debate. Notably, the Trump cam­paign website’s dis­cus­sion of bring­ing inde­pen­dent agen­cies under pres­i­den­tial con­trol is silent on whether that includes the Fed.

    Asked whether pres­i­dents should be able to order inter­est rates low­ered before elec­tions, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the econ­o­my, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Con­gress. But “at the bare min­i­mum,” he said, the Fed­er­al Reserve’s reg­u­la­to­ry func­tions should be sub­ject to White House review.

    “It’s very hard to square the Fed’s inde­pen­dence with the Con­sti­tu­tion,” Mr. Vought said.
    ...

    And, of course, there’s the ongo­ing Sched­ule F schem­ing to strip fed­er­al employ­ees of employ­ment pro­tec­tions. Plans that are pre­sum­ably only going to keep grow­ing giv­en that Trump con­tin­ues to vow to imme­di­ate­ly rein­sti­tute his Sched­ule F decree:

    ...
    He intends to strip strip employ­ment pro­tec­tions from tens of thou­sands of career civ­il ser­vants, mak­ing it eas­i­er to replace them if they are deemed obsta­cles to his agen­da. And he plans to scour the intel­li­gence agen­cies, the State Depart­ment and the defense bureau­cra­cies to remove offi­cials he has vil­i­fied as “the sick polit­i­cal class that hates our coun­try.”

    ...

    On his cam­paign web­site, Mr. Trump declared that pres­i­dents have a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to impound funds and said he would restore the prac­tice — though he acknowl­edged it could result in a legal bat­tle.

    Mr. Trump and his allies also want to trans­form the civ­il ser­vice — gov­ern­ment employ­ees who are sup­posed to be non­par­ti­san pro­fes­sion­als and experts with pro­tec­tions against being fired for polit­i­cal rea­sons.

    The for­mer pres­i­dent views the civ­il ser­vice as a den of “deep staters” who were try­ing to thwart him at every turn, includ­ing by rais­ing legal or prag­mat­ic objec­tions to his immi­gra­tion poli­cies, among many oth­er exam­ples. Toward the end of his term, his aides draft­ed an exec­u­tive order, “Cre­at­ing Sched­ule F in the Except­ed Ser­vice,” that removed employ­ment pro­tec­tions from career offi­cials whose jobs were deemed linked to pol­i­cy­mak­ing.

    Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Sched­ule F, near the end of his pres­i­den­cy, but Pres­i­dent Biden rescind­ed it. Mr. Trump has vowed to imme­di­ate­ly rein­sti­tute it in a sec­ond term.
    ...

    And, of course, we find key Sched­ule F oper­a­tives John McEn­tee and Russ Vought play­ing a lead­er­ship role in this whole ongo­ing, ever grow­ing, effort. The ongo­ing effort that merged with the Her­itage Foun­da­tion and was recent­ly renamed ‘Project 2025’. Recall how Ora­cle is report­ed­ly play­ing some sort of data­base-build­ing role for Project 2025. It’s a big project that only seems to keep grow­ing:

    ...
    “The president’s plan should be to fun­da­men­tal­ly reori­ent the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEn­tee, a for­mer White House per­son­nel chief who began Mr. Trump’s sys­tem­at­ic attempt to sweep out offi­cials deemed to be dis­loy­al in 2020 and who is now involved in map­ping out the new approach.

    “Our cur­rent exec­u­tive branch,” Mr. McEn­tee added, “was con­ceived of by lib­er­als for the pur­pose of pro­mul­gat­ing lib­er­al poli­cies. There is no way to make the exist­ing struc­ture func­tion in a con­ser­v­a­tive man­ner. It’s not enough to get the per­son­nel right. What’s nec­es­sary is a com­plete sys­tem over­haul.”

    Mr. Trump and his advis­ers are mak­ing no secret of their inten­tions — pro­claim­ing them in ral­lies and on his cam­paign web­site, describ­ing them in white papers and open­ly dis­cussing them.

    “What we’re try­ing to do is iden­ti­fy the pock­ets of inde­pen­dence and seize them,” said Rus­sell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Man­age­ment and Bud­get in the Trump White House and now runs a pol­i­cy orga­ni­za­tion, the Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca.

    The strat­e­gy in talk­ing open­ly about such “par­a­digm-shift­ing ideas” before the elec­tion, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to lat­er be able to claim a man­date. He said he was delight­ed to see few of Mr. Trump’s Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry rivals defend the norm of Jus­tice Depart­ment inde­pen­dence after the for­mer pres­i­dent open­ly attacked it.

    The two dri­ving forces of this effort to reshape the exec­u­tive branch are Mr. Trump’s own cam­paign pol­i­cy shop and a well-fund­ed net­work of con­ser­v­a­tive groups, many of which are pop­u­lat­ed by for­mer senior Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials who would most like­ly play key roles in any sec­ond term.

    Mr. Vought and Mr. McEn­tee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 mil­lion pres­i­den­tial tran­si­tion oper­a­tion that is prepar­ing poli­cies, per­son­nel lists and tran­si­tion plans to rec­om­mend to any Repub­li­can who may win the 2024 elec­tion. The tran­si­tion project, the scale of which is unprece­dent­ed in con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics, is led by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, a think tank that has shaped the per­son­nel and poli­cies of Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions since the Rea­gan pres­i­den­cy.
    ...

    Final­ly, note this omi­nous warn­ing about how the inevitable legal chal­lenges to this agen­da will play out: The regret­table real­i­ty is that this is a Supreme Court that appears to be ready to play ball with Project 2025:

    ...
    Oth­er for­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials involved in the plan­ning said there would also prob­a­bly be a legal chal­lenge to the lim­its on a president’s pow­er to fire heads of inde­pen­dent agen­cies. Mr. Trump could remove an agency head, tee­ing up the ques­tion for the Supreme Court.

    The Supreme Court in 1935 and 1988 upheld the pow­er of Con­gress to shield some exec­u­tive branch offi­cials from being fired with­out cause. But after jus­tices appoint­ed by Repub­li­cans since Rea­gan took con­trol, it has start­ed to erode those prece­dents.

    Peter L. Strauss, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of law at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and a crit­ic of the strong ver­sion of the uni­tary exec­u­tive the­o­ry, argued that it is con­sti­tu­tion­al and desir­able for Con­gress, in cre­at­ing and empow­er­ing an agency to per­form some task, to also include some checks on the president’s con­trol over offi­cials “because we don’t want autoc­ra­cy” and to pre­vent abus­es.

    The regret­table fact is that the judi­cia­ry at the moment seems inclined to rec­og­nize that the pres­i­dent does have this kind of author­i­ty,” he said. “They are claw­ing away agency inde­pen­dence in ways that I find quite unfor­tu­nate and dis­re­spect­ful of con­gres­sion­al choice.”
    ...

    Will the Supreme Court sur­prise the cyn­ics and act as the ulti­mate ‘check’ in this push to effec­tive­ly elim­i­nate fed­er­al checks and bal­ances? LOL. We’re well past that.

    So that’s the lat­est update on the ever grow­ing Sched­ule F/Project 2025 plot. And plot designed to enshrine a future Pres­i­dent Trump with the kind of unchecked pow­er and craved but also designed to achieve the cor­po­ra­tions long-held dream of elim­i­nat­ing vir­tu­al­ly all fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions. This goes way beyond ‘Trump’.

    But let’s also keep in mind that, in mak­ing these changes, the stakes asso­ci­at­ed with win­ning and los­ing the White House are only going to explode. Vot­ers won’t be elect­ing a pres­i­dent. They’ll effec­tive­ly be elect­ing a kind of king-like fig­ure. A fig­ure with the kind of immense pow­ers that can make or break vast eco­nom­ic for­tunes. The kind of fig­ure who could poten­tial­ly imple­ment their own New Deal and utter­ly crush the kind of eco­nom­ic forces behind Project 2025 and this clear pow­er grab. In oth­er words, future pres­i­dents are going to have the kinds of pow­ers that the Pow­ers that Be can’t leave up to elec­tions. Which is a reminder that this ever-evolv­ing pow­er grab is going to have a lot more grab­bing to do after Project 2025 becomes a real­i­ty.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | July 17, 2023, 6:00 pm
  28. Is Ron DeSan­tis’s 2024 run already over? It’s the big ques­tion hang­ing over the Flori­da gov­er­nor’s once opti­mistic cam­paign that recent­ly found itself near­ly tied with long-shot Rivek Ramaswamy at 12% while Trump dom­i­nates 48%. And then the per­sis­tent reports about top donors aban­don­ing DeSan­tis cam­paign. And to top it all off, he’s forced to fend off ques­tions about the sur­pris­ing­ly slav­ery-pos­i­tive new Flori­da edu­ca­tion­al guide­lines that are a prod­uct of his sig­na­ture anti-woke state agen­da. An anti-woke agen­da that is at the cen­ter of his polit­i­cal brand at this point and that his cam­paign was seem­ing­ly ‘lean­ing into’ when DeSan­tis defend­ed a bizarre homo­erot­ic attack ad tar­get­ing Trump that seemed to por­tray him as too LGBTQ-friend­ly. And to top that off, the cam­paign just had to fire Nate Hochman, a young con­ser­v­a­tive ris­ing star, for pro­duc­ing a video with fas­cist imagery includ­ing the Son­nen­rad.

    But putting aside Ron DeSan­tis’s per­son­al polit­i­cal career, what about those under­ly­ing ‘anti-woke’ pol­i­tics? What does DeSan­tis’s lack of trac­tion after defin­ing him­self as the most ‘anti-woke’ can­di­date say about the brand of pol­i­tics he’s now best known for? Because as the fol­low­ing Vice arti­cle from back in March reminds us, Ron DeSan­tis’s pol­i­tics of anti-wokeism isn’t just a per­son­al brand­ing deci­sion. It’s the man­i­fes­ta­tion of the deeply ‘anti-woke’ world­view of the con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor class. A world­view made man­i­fest through groups like the Clare­mont Insti­tute. Yes, the same Clare­mont Insti­tute deeply involved with cre­at­ing the var­i­ous jus­ti­fi­ca­tions and schem­ing that led up to Jan­u­ary 6.

    As the arti­cle reminds us, DeSan­tis’s anti-woke cru­sade in Flori­da’s col­leges has already been heav­i­ly out­sourced to the Clare­mont Insi­tute, with Clare­mont fig­ures Matthew Spald­ing and Charles Kesler, and Chris Rufo join­ing the board of New Col­lege to lead the anti-woke insti­tu­tion­al purge. In fact, in turns out that the Clare­mont Insti­tute recent­ly opened up its first even state-lev­el out­post in Flori­da.

    And as the arti­cle also remind­ed us, the Clare­mont Insti­tute alums in DeSan­tis’s orbit include the recent­ly fired cam­paign staffer Nate Hochman. It’s a dis­turb­ing reflec­tion of our times that the cam­paign staffer behind the fascis­tic cam­paign video was­n’t just a ris­ing con­ser­v­a­tive media star. He was a ris­ing insti­tu­tion­al star. But these are our times.

    There’s anoth­er real­ly remark­able detail in this Vice arti­cle that shows just how rapid­ly DeSan­tis’s polit­i­cal star has fall­en in four months: a num­ber of these Clare­mont Institue fig­ures who have cozied up to DeSan­tis were will­ing to cross a line that one does not cross today. That would be cross­ing Trump. In par­tic­u­lar, open­ly endors­ing DeSan­tis over Trump. And sure, on one lev­el that’s to be expect­ed giv­en that DeSan­tis has out­sourced much of his edu­ca­tion­al anti-woke purge to Clare­mont Insti­tute affil­i­ates. But this is still the era of Don­ald Trump’s GOP. It’s kind of an insti­tu­tion­al death­wish in con­tem­po­rary GOP pol­i­tics to defy Trump like that. But that’s how high DeSan­tis’s expec­ta­tions were just four months ago, at least in the views of these insti­tu­tion­al play­ers. Deeply ‘anti-woke’ insti­tu­tion­al play­ers who are ded­i­cat­ed to exe­cut­ing the vision of their deeply ‘anti-woke’ mega-donors. Because, again, Ron DeSan­tis’s anti-woke cam­paign is much more than just a series of DeSan­tis’s per­son­al polit­i­cal brand. His brand is the will of reac­tionary theo­crat­ic mega-donors:

    Vice

    Trump’s Favorite Extreme Think Tank Is Jump­ing Ship for DeSan­tis

    The Clare­mont Institute’s lead­ers helped engi­neer Don­ald Trump’s efforts to stay in office after his 2020 loss. They’re now most­ly sid­ing with Gov. Ron DeSan­tis.

    by Cameron Joseph
    Wash­ing­ton, US
    March 27, 2023, 5:45am

    As the Clare­mont Insti­tute launched its new office in Tal­la­has­see last month, Flori­da Gov. Ron DeSan­tis rolled out the red car­pet.

    DeSan­tis met with the lead­er­ship of the right-wing think tank, pos­ing for pic­tures. His wife and clos­est polit­i­cal advis­er Casey tweet­ed out con­grat­u­la­tions.

    The get-togeth­er show­cased a bud­ding part­ner­ship between DeSan­tis and mem­bers of the Clare­mont Insti­tute, whose lead­ers are now cham­pi­oning and work­ing with DeSan­tis.

    The think tank’s schol­ars played a cru­cial role in nor­mal­iz­ing for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, shap­ing his admin­is­tra­tion and aid­ing his attempts to over­turn his 2020 elec­tion loss—but in DeSan­tis they appear to have found a bet­ter match: an actu­al con­ser­v­a­tive ide­o­logue who sees things in the same exis­ten­tial terms they do, but has a lev­el of com­pe­tence that Trump sore­ly lacked.

    Many are work­ing hard to help his efforts in Flori­da, and are eager to sup­port his like­ly pres­i­den­tial bid.

    Thrilled to wel­come @scottyenor from the Clare­mont Insti­tute to his new home in Tal­la­has­see. Pro­tect­ing Amer­i­cans from infring­ing woke ide­ol­o­gy is impor­tant work, and we are grate­ful Scott and the Clare­mont Insti­tute picked Flori­da to con­tin­ue their mis­sion. pic.twitter.com/vvh8XofQoc— Casey DeSan­tis (@CaseyDeSantis) Feb­ru­ary 8, 2023

    “They’re quite a few [at the Clare­mont Insti­tute] who per­son­al­ly pre­fer DeSan­tis as the next can­di­date. And I would count myself among that group,” Clare­mont Insti­tute Senior Fel­low Charles Kesler told VICE News.

    Kesler, who is one of the trustees DeSan­tis appoint­ed to exe­cute his hos­tile takeover of the pub­lic lib­er­al arts school New Col­lege, said that DeSan­tis’ com­pe­tence as a chief exec­u­tive is “very impressive”—as is his ide­o­log­i­cal approach.

    “On a whole range of issues where wok­e­ness is a threat he has risen to the occasion—rhetorically, but he’s also try­ing to do some­thing about it leg­isla­tive­ly. That com­bi­na­tion is quite rare,” Kesler con­tin­ued. “I would expect DeSan­tis to be a much bet­ter, more real­is­tic and more effi­cient chief exec­u­tive than the for­mer pres­i­dent.”

    The Clare­mont Insti­tute is no run-of-the-mill con­ser­v­a­tive think tank, how­ev­er.

    The orga­ni­za­tion took a hard right turn dur­ing the Trump years, and played a cru­cial role in his efforts to stay in pow­er after he lost. And their rhetoric has grown even more incen­di­ary since he left office.

    Clare­mont Insti­tute Pres­i­dent Ryan Williams has declared the institute’s mis­sion is “to save West­ern civ­i­liza­tion,” and has sug­gest­ed “the Con­sti­tu­tion is real­ly only fit for a Chris­t­ian peo­ple.”

    The head of the Clare­mont Institute’s new Flori­da office, Scott Yenor, said career-focused women are “more med­icat­ed, med­dle­some and quar­rel­some than women need to be.”

    His boss Arthur Milikh, who heads the Clare­mont Institute’s Wash­ing­ton, D.C office, told Tuck­er Carl­son that women’s strength lay in “the pow­er of sex­u­al­i­ty” and argued pro­gres­sives are push­ing for an “androg­y­nous” and “re-fem­i­nized world” that destroys soci­ety.

    They and oth­er Clare­mont-affil­i­at­ed schol­ars and activists have been close­ly tied to DeSan­tis’ project to purge Florida’s edu­ca­tion sys­tem of any­thing they deem “woke.”

    “Pro­tect­ing and restor­ing the Amer­i­can way of life is the most impor­tant work Gov­er­nors and state leg­is­la­tors can do right now,”Williams said while announc­ing Clare­mont was open­ing its first state-lev­el out­post in the think tank’s four-decade his­to­ry. “Gov­er­nor DeSan­tis has shown fear­less intel­lec­tu­al and polit­i­cal lead­er­ship in the fight against woke left­ism. We are thrilled to help him and his leg­isla­tive allies con­tin­ue this impor­tant work.”

    As DeSan­tis expands his small inner cir­cle and pre­pares for a like­ly bid for the pres­i­den­cy, the views of Clare­mont-affil­i­at­ed con­ser­v­a­tives may soon mat­ter more and more to the rest of the coun­try.

    The Clare­mont Insti­tute was once a staid aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tute that most­ly focused on abstract polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. But that all changed in the Trump era.

    As Trump strug­gled to unite the GOP in the fall of 2016, the think tank pub­lished “The Flight 93 Elec­tion,” an incen­di­ary essay demand­ing that con­ser­v­a­tives unite behind Trump by com­par­ing it to the choice faced by pas­sen­gers of the hijacked plane on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001.

    “Charge the cock­pit or you die,” the piece began, warn­ing Trump was the only per­son that could stop the ruina­tion of Amer­i­ca by “the cease­less impor­ta­tion of Third World for­eign­ers with no tra­di­tion of, taste for, or expe­ri­ence in lib­er­ty.”

    The piece went viral. Michael Anton, a Clare­mont Fel­low and for­mer speech­writer for Trump advis­er and for­mer New York May­or Rudy Giu­liani, soon claimed author­ship.

    Trump reward­ed Anton with a spot on the pow­er­ful Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil. The for­mer pres­i­dent soon had asso­ciates of the insti­tute all over his admin­is­tra­tion.

    Trump appoint­ed Clare­mont Insti­tute Pres­i­dent Michael Pack, a close ally of Trump advis­er Steve Ban­non, to head the U.S. Agency for Glob­al Media, where he tried to turn Voice of Amer­i­ca and its sis­ter out­lets into pro-Trump pro­pa­gan­da oper­a­tions.

    When Trump launched the 1776 Com­mis­sion late in his pres­i­den­cy to rebuke the 1619 Project and the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment, two of the three peo­ple Trump picked to run it were on Claremont’s board of direc­tors; Kesler, who’d penned an op-ed call­ing the civ­il unrest that fol­lowed George Floyd’s mur­der “the 1619 riots,” was a con­trib­u­tor.

    Many alum­ni of the institute’s week­long fel­low­ships got admin­is­tra­tion jobs too.

    And most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Trump brought in John East­man, the head of the Clare­mont Institute’s con­sti­tu­tion­al law cen­ter, to be the archi­tect of Trump’s attempt­ed legal coup plot after he lost the 2020 election—a plot that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 Capi­tol riot.

    In late 2019, Trump hon­ored the Clare­mont Insti­tute with the pres­ti­gious Nation­al Human­i­ties Medal. “One of America’s lead­ing think tanks, the Clare­mont Insti­tute has made invalu­able con­tri­bu­tions to the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tive thought,” Trump said at a White House cer­e­mo­ny. “Clare­mont edu­cates, reminds, and informs Amer­i­cans about the found­ing prin­ci­ples that have made our coun­try the great­est nation any­where on Earth. Through pub­li­ca­tions, sem­i­nars, and schol­ar­ship, they fight to ‘recov­er the Amer­i­can idea.’ I know it well.”

    Giv­en all of Claremont’s Trump ties, it’s high­ly notable to see so many lead­ers of the Clare­mont Insti­tute grav­i­tat­ing towards DeSan­tis.

    Their ties have been build­ing for years. The Flori­da gov­er­nor deliv­ered the keynote speech at the Clare­mont Institute’s fall 2021 din­ner, where the orga­ni­za­tion pre­sent­ed him with its states­man­ship award. Williams, Claremont’s pres­i­dent, intro­duced him with glow­ing praise, call­ing DeSan­tis “America’s finest gov­er­nor.”

    DeSan­tis cit­ed a Clare­mont schol­ar to show he was sim­pati­co. “Biden’s fail­ures need to end up being the swan song for what the late Ange­lo Codev­il­la called the ‘rul­ing class’ in this coun­try. He saw this prob­a­bly before any­body, but he was right on the mon­ey. This rul­ing class is a tox­ic com­bi­na­tion of man­age­r­i­al incom­pe­tence and cul­tur­al rad­i­cal­ism,” he said at the $400-a-plate event.

    Their over­lap­ping views don’t end there. DeSan­tis and the Clare­mont Insti­tute have declared war on a com­mon ene­my: Wokeism. They share a view that it’s cru­cial to use the levers of gov­ern­ment to beat it back in the most aggres­sive way possible—targeting indi­vid­u­als, pri­vate com­pa­nies and schools at every lev­el.

    DeSan­tis reg­u­lar­ly brags that Flori­da is “where woke goes to die,” and uses the term “woke” 46 times in his new book—attacking “woke cap­i­tal,” “the woke machine,” “woke cor­po­ra­tions,” and “the woke mob.” His chap­ter on his feud with Dis­ney is titled “The Mag­i­cal King­dom of Woke Cor­po­ratism.” He bragged about call­ing out the nation­al guard dur­ing Black Lives Mat­ter protests, which he labeled “BLM and Antifa riots” in his speech at the Clare­mont Insti­tute, and passed what he called “the strongest anti-riot­ing leg­is­la­tion in the coun­try. That leg­is­la­tion was blocked by a fed­er­al judge for vio­lat­ing the First Amend­ment, and is cur­rent­ly on appeal. His “Stop WOKE” Act, which lim­its how race can be dis­cussed on col­lege cam­pus­es, has also been blocked by fed­er­al judgess.

    His use of the pow­er of gov­ern­ment to tar­get pri­vate busi­ness isn’t just aimed at big com­pa­nies like Dis­ney: The DeSan­tis admin­is­tra­tion recent­ly moved to strip the liquor license from a Mia­mi hotel because it host­ed a Christ­mas show fea­tur­ing per­form­ers from RuPaul’s Drag Race and allowed in minors if they were accom­pa­nied by an adult.

    That mir­rors the rhetoric and work of the Clare­mont Insti­tute.

    Last week, the Clare­mont Insti­tute launched a data­base to track cor­po­ra­tions’ dona­tions to Black Lives Mat­ter-affil­i­at­ed move­ments, which an accom­pa­ny­ing Newsweek op-ed op-ed called “repa­ra­tions made to self-declared ene­mies of the Amer­i­can nation and way of life” that called on Con­gress to block com­pa­nies from donat­ing to BLM caus­es.

    Thomas Klin­gen­stein, the Clare­mont Institute’s largest donor and chair­man of its board of direc­tors, says that Amer­i­ca is in a “cold civ­il war” between his side and the “woke comms,” short for woke com­mu­nists. Dur­ing the Black Lives Mat­ter protests, he and Williams pub­lished an op-ed that labeled Black Lives Mat­ter a “rev­o­lu­tion­ary and total­i­tar­i­an move­ment” bent on “the destruc­tion of the Amer­i­can way of life.”

    Klin­gen­stein said last sum­mer he had nar­rowed his 2024 options to Trump and DeSantis—and voiced what many at the Clare­mont Insti­tute seem to feel: that DeSan­tis has “a lot of his virtues with­out a lot of Trump’s vices.”

    “DeSan­tis under­stands that we’re in a war, and that’s the most impor­tant thing,” Klin­gen­stein said. “And if you don’t under­stand that we’re in a war, almost noth­ing else mat­ters.”

    Soon after DeSan­tis’ 2021 speech to the Clare­mont Insti­tute, their lead­ers began pop­ping up in Flori­da to help his sys­tem­at­ic cru­sade to push edu­ca­tion to the right, a task that Trump occa­sion­al­ly talked about but did lit­tle to achieve dur­ing his pres­i­den­cy.

    Kesler told VICE News his first con­tri­bu­tion to the effort was a pair of record­ed lec­tures he made for DeSan­tis’ over­haul of its K‑12 civics pro­gram, an effort spear­head­ed by Hills­dale Col­lege, a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ty in Michi­gan with close Clare­mont ties.

    Then, as he esca­lat­ed his edu­ca­tion pro­gram this year, DeSan­tis launched a hos­tile takeover of New Col­lege, a tiny pub­lic lib­er­al arts school that he pledged in a speech a few weeks ago to make “the top clas­si­cal lib­er­al arts school in America—along the lines of Hills­dale Col­lege.”

    To do so, DeSan­tis removed six mem­bers of its board of trustees and replaced them with allies. Three of them have Clare­mont ties: Kesler, Christo­pher Rufo, a for­mer Clare­mont Insti­tute Lin­coln Fel­low and the nation’s most effec­tive cru­sad­er against what he claims is Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry teach­ing in schools; and Matthew Spald­ing, a for­mer stu­dent, Clare­mont Fel­low and dean at Hills­dale Col­lege who helped run Trump’s 1776 Com­mis­sion and who had brought in Kesler to con­tribute to the state’s civics pro­gram. The board prompt­ly fired the school’s pres­i­dent, replaced her with a DeSan­tis ally, and shut­tered the school’s Diver­si­ty, Inclu­sion and Equi­ty office, moves decried by its most­ly lib­er­al stu­dent body.

    DeSan­tis also pushed through a law that cre­at­ed pub­licly fund­ed pri­vate-school schol­ar­ships in 2019; since then, Hills­dale has great­ly expand­ed, and now has sev­en affil­i­at­ed union-free, Chris­t­ian K‑12 “clas­si­cal acad­e­mies” across the state.

    DeSan­tis sin­gled out Hillsdale’s “inno­v­a­tive means of edu­ca­tion” as a paragon of Florida’s future edu­ca­tion sys­tem in a speech to the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence last fall. In response, the Clare­mont Insti­tute pub­lished a full tran­script of DeSan­tis’ hour­long speech.

    Nat­Con, as it’s known, is a con­fer­ence of Clare­mont schol­ars and like-mind­ed activists and politi­cians who advo­cate for a of nation­al­is­tic right-wing pop­ulism that’s much more ground­ed in a polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy and even more aggres­sive than MAGA-brand Trump­ism.

    It was at the pre­vi­ous year’s con­ven­tion that Yenor called inde­pen­dent work­ing women “more med­icat­ed, med­dle­some and quar­rel­some than women need to be.” He also said soci­ety should stop think­ing of young women “as a future work­er or a future achiev­er, and start think­ing of them as future wives and moth­ers,” called uni­ver­si­ties “the citadels of gynoc­ra­cy,” sug­gest­ed “manda­to­ry gun train­ing” for all men, and declared: “We need a sex­u­al coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tion.”

    “Instead of paint­ing an androg­y­nous pic­ture of the future, the future of a great nation needs to be thor­ough­ly sexed when it comes to fam­i­ly pol­i­cy. Part of our edu­ca­tion project is prepar­ing young men and young women for dif­fer­ent des­tinies,” he said.

    The speech led to fierce protests at Boise State Uni­ver­si­ty, where Yenor is a tenured pro­fes­sor. It was the sec­ond time his com­ments trig­gered protests. While Yenor has com­plained that he was can­celed, the school hasn’t tak­en any dis­ci­pli­nary action against him.

    A few weeks ago, DeSan­tis brought Yenor onstage at a round­table to talk about their fight against Diver­si­ty, Equi­ty & Inclu­sion efforts—and Yenor said he first got inter­est­ed in the field because he believed his “two can­cel­la­tion attempts” were trig­gered by DEI.

    Yenor was there to unveil his new report with his ideas on how to change Florida’s sys­tem, with the very gram­mat­i­cal title “Flori­da Uni­ver­si­ties: From Woke to Pro­fes­sion­al­ism,” in which he calls the Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da, the system’s flag­ship school, an “DEI indoc­tri­na­tion machine.”

    His pro­pos­als include the repeal of a Flori­da statute that “requires each Flori­da Col­lege Sys­tem insti­tu­tion to devel­op a plan for increas­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion of minori­ties and females” on fac­ul­ty; leg­is­la­tion to ban Florida’s gov­ern­ment from col­lect­ing data on the basis of race or sex; clos­ing all DEI offices in Flori­da col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties; uncov­er­ing “any anti-male ele­ments of cur­ricu­lum or pro­gram­ming;” and end­ing majors that had “DEI-infused dis­ci­plines” like gen­der stud­ies.

    DeSan­tis is already on his way to mak­ing some of these poli­cies into law. Flori­da Repub­li­cans are fast-track­ing leg­is­la­tion to ban DEI pro­grams and dra­mat­i­cal­ly weak­en tenure pro­tec­tions for pro­fes­sors; anoth­er bill backed by DeSan­tis would ban gen­der stud­ies and teach­ing crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.

    And they’re not just help­ing on the pol­i­cy side. DeSan­tis recent­ly hired Nate Hochman, a for­mer Clare­mont Insti­tute fel­low and intern for one of its pub­li­ca­tions who has palled around with white nation­al­ist Nick Fuentes, to join his polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions team. Clare­mont Insti­tute schol­ars also spoke on a pan­el at DeSan­tis’ pri­vate polit­i­cal fundrais­ing retreat in late Feb­ru­ary, accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post.

    ...

    Some of DeSan­tis’ loud­est key­board war­riors are Clare­mont-affil­i­at­ed activists, too.

    Clare­mont Insti­tute Fel­low David Reaboi, a body­builder and for­mer lob­by­ist for Hungary’s right-wing gov­ern­ment, recent­ly told Politi­co that he’d been infor­mal­ly advis­ing DeSan­tis on nation­al secu­ri­ty issues—and has been a vocal sup­port­er on Twit­ter.

    For­mer Clare­mont Insti­tute fel­lows who’ve loud­ly and repeat­ed­ly boost­ed DeSan­tis include Newsweek opin­ion edi­tor Josh Ham­mer, pod­cast­er and “manos­phere” influ­encer Jack Mur­phy, and sub­stack author Pedro Gon­za­lez. Accord­ing to the Dai­ly Beast, Reaboi and Mur­phy are among the con­ser­v­a­tive micro-influ­encerss that DeSan­tis’ team recruit­ed to help mag­ni­fy his mes­sage online.

    Cer­tain­ly, some Clare­mont lead­ers may still back Trump over DeSan­tis. Anton recent­ly met with DeSan­tis as they opened their new office in Tal­la­has­see, but he also spoke at the pro-Trump Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence where he tout­ed Trump’s for­eign pol­i­cy approach.

    But it’s clear that most of Claremont’s lead­ers are enam­ored with the Flori­da gov­er­nor.

    ...

    ———-

    “Trump’s Favorite Extreme Think Tank Is Jump­ing Ship for DeSan­tis” by Cameron Joseph; Vice; 03/27/2023

    “The think tank’s schol­ars played a cru­cial role in nor­mal­iz­ing for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, shap­ing his admin­is­tra­tion and aid­ing his attempts to over­turn his 2020 elec­tion loss—but in DeSan­tis they appear to have found a bet­ter match: an actu­al con­ser­v­a­tive ide­o­logue who sees things in the same exis­ten­tial terms they do, but has a lev­el of com­pe­tence that Trump sore­ly lacked.

    The Clare­mont Insti­tute was clear­ly more than will­ing to work with Don­ald Trump to accom­plish their shared goals. But they nev­er loved Trump. They love Ron DeSan­tis. And aren’t afraid to say it, which itself is rather remark­able giv­en Trump’s ten­den­cy to vicious­ly attack Repub­li­cans who don’t demon­strate com­plete loy­al­ty. It real­ly was as if the Clare­mont Insti­tute was ful­ly expect­ing Ron DeSan­tis to win the GOP pri­ma­ry when they made all these com­ments to Vice back in March. But as we can also see, it’s clear the Clare­mont Insti­tute was ful­ly behind DeSan­tis’s strat­e­gy of win­ning the pri­ma­ry by furi­ous­ly wag­ing a ‘war on woke’ too. DeSan­tis’s polit­i­cal strat­e­gy for win­ning the GOP nom­i­na­tion was the Clare­mont Insti­tute’s strat­e­gy too:

    ...
    They’re quite a few [at the Clare­mont Insti­tute] who per­son­al­ly pre­fer DeSan­tis as the next can­di­date. And I would count myself among that group,” Clare­mont Insti­tute Senior Fel­low Charles Kesler told VICE News.

    Kesler, who is one of the trustees DeSan­tis appoint­ed to exe­cute his hos­tile takeover of the pub­lic lib­er­al arts school New Col­lege, said that DeSan­tis’ com­pe­tence as a chief exec­u­tive is “very impressive”—as is his ide­o­log­i­cal approach.

    “On a whole range of issues where wok­e­ness is a threat he has risen to the occasion—rhetorically, but he’s also try­ing to do some­thing about it leg­isla­tive­ly. That com­bi­na­tion is quite rare,” Kesler con­tin­ued. “I would expect DeSan­tis to be a much bet­ter, more real­is­tic and more effi­cient chief exec­u­tive than the for­mer pres­i­dent.”

    ...

    Giv­en all of Claremont’s Trump ties, it’s high­ly notable to see so many lead­ers of the Clare­mont Insti­tute grav­i­tat­ing towards DeSan­tis.

    Their ties have been build­ing for years. The Flori­da gov­er­nor deliv­ered the keynote speech at the Clare­mont Institute’s fall 2021 din­ner, where the orga­ni­za­tion pre­sent­ed him with its states­man­ship award. Williams, Claremont’s pres­i­dent, intro­duced him with glow­ing praise, call­ing DeSan­tis “America’s finest gov­er­nor.”

    ...

    DeSan­tis cit­ed a Clare­mont schol­ar to show he was sim­pati­co. “Biden’s fail­ures need to end up being the swan song for what the late Ange­lo Codev­il­la called the ‘rul­ing class’ in this coun­try. He saw this prob­a­bly before any­body, but he was right on the mon­ey. This rul­ing class is a tox­ic com­bi­na­tion of man­age­r­i­al incom­pe­tence and cul­tur­al rad­i­cal­ism,” he said at the $400-a-plate event.

    Their over­lap­ping views don’t end there. DeSan­tis and the Clare­mont Insti­tute have declared war on a com­mon ene­my: Wokeism. They share a view that it’s cru­cial to use the levers of gov­ern­ment to beat it back in the most aggres­sive way possible—targeting indi­vid­u­als, pri­vate com­pa­nies and schools at every lev­el.

    ...

    Last week, the Clare­mont Insti­tute launched a data­base to track cor­po­ra­tions’ dona­tions to Black Lives Mat­ter-affil­i­at­ed move­ments, which an accom­pa­ny­ing Newsweek op-ed op-ed called “repa­ra­tions made to self-declared ene­mies of the Amer­i­can nation and way of life” that called on Con­gress to block com­pa­nies from donat­ing to BLM caus­es.

    Thomas Klin­gen­stein, the Clare­mont Institute’s largest donor and chair­man of its board of direc­tors, says that Amer­i­ca is in a “cold civ­il war” between his side and the “woke comms,” short for woke com­mu­nists. Dur­ing the Black Lives Mat­ter protests, he and Williams pub­lished an op-ed that labeled Black Lives Mat­ter a “rev­o­lu­tion­ary and total­i­tar­i­an move­ment” bent on “the destruc­tion of the Amer­i­can way of life.”

    Klin­gen­stein said last sum­mer he had nar­rowed his 2024 options to Trump and DeSantis—and voiced what many at the Clare­mont Insti­tute seem to feel: that DeSan­tis has “a lot of his virtues with­out a lot of Trump’s vices.”

    “DeSan­tis under­stands that we’re in a war, and that’s the most impor­tant thing,” Klin­gen­stein said. “And if you don’t under­stand that we’re in a war, almost noth­ing else mat­ters.”
    ...

    And notice how the Clare­mont Insti­tute’s com­mit­ment to DeSan­tis is so deep that the group set up its first state-lev­el out­post in the its four-decade his­to­ry in Flori­da. So when we see Clare­mont Insti­tute affil­i­ates flock­ing to var­i­ous DeSan­tis appoint­ments as he car­ries out his anti-woke purge, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that the Clare­mont Insti­tute is lit­er­al­ly set­ting up infra­struc­ture and pro­vid­ing man­pow­er in sup­port of DeSan­tis’s purge. It’s a joint effort:

    ...
    Clare­mont Insti­tute Pres­i­dent Ryan Williams has declared the institute’s mis­sion is “to save West­ern civ­i­liza­tion,” and has sug­gest­ed “the Con­sti­tu­tion is real­ly only fit for a Chris­t­ian peo­ple.”

    The head of the Clare­mont Institute’s new Flori­da office, Scott Yenor, said career-focused women are “more med­icat­ed, med­dle­some and quar­rel­some than women need to be.”

    His boss Arthur Milikh, who heads the Clare­mont Institute’s Wash­ing­ton, D.C office, told Tuck­er Carl­son that women’s strength lay in “the pow­er of sex­u­al­i­ty” and argued pro­gres­sives are push­ing for an “androg­y­nous” and “re-fem­i­nized world” that destroys soci­ety.

    They and oth­er Clare­mont-affil­i­at­ed schol­ars and activists have been close­ly tied to DeSan­tis’ project to purge Florida’s edu­ca­tion sys­tem of any­thing they deem “woke.”

    “Pro­tect­ing and restor­ing the Amer­i­can way of life is the most impor­tant work Gov­er­nors and state leg­is­la­tors can do right now,”Williams said while announc­ing Clare­mont was open­ing its first state-lev­el out­post in the think tank’s four-decade his­to­ry. “Gov­er­nor DeSan­tis has shown fear­less intel­lec­tu­al and polit­i­cal lead­er­ship in the fight against woke left­ism. We are thrilled to help him and his leg­isla­tive allies con­tin­ue this impor­tant work.”

    ...

    Soon after DeSan­tis’ 2021 speech to the Clare­mont Insti­tute, their lead­ers began pop­ping up in Flori­da to help his sys­tem­at­ic cru­sade to push edu­ca­tion to the right, a task that Trump occa­sion­al­ly talked about but did lit­tle to achieve dur­ing his pres­i­den­cy.
    ...

    And don’t for­get that none oth­er than Christo­pher Rufo — the strate­gic archi­tect behind the ‘war on woke’ back when it was the ‘war on CRT’ — served as a Clare­mont Insti­tute Lin­coln Fel­low. So when we see Rufo tak­ing a direct role in DeSan­ti’s anti-woke purge of New Col­lege along with oth­er Clare­mont Insti­tute fig­ures like Charles Kesler, it’s anoth­er big hint as to why the Clare­mont Insti­tute is will­ing to open­ly endorse DeSan­tis in over Trump. DeSan­tis is more or less oper­at­ing from the Clare­mont Insti­tute’s play­book. A play­book they are now direct­ly writ­ing as the appointees exe­cut­ing DeSan­tis’s war on woke:

    ...
    Kesler told VICE News his first con­tri­bu­tion to the effort was a pair of record­ed lec­tures he made for DeSan­tis’ over­haul of its K‑12 civics pro­gram, an effort spear­head­ed by Hills­dale Col­lege, a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ty in Michi­gan with close Clare­mont ties.

    Then, as he esca­lat­ed his edu­ca­tion pro­gram this year, DeSan­tis launched a hos­tile takeover of New Col­lege, a tiny pub­lic lib­er­al arts school that he pledged in a speech a few weeks ago to make “the top clas­si­cal lib­er­al arts school in America—along the lines of Hills­dale Col­lege.”

    To do so, DeSan­tis removed six mem­bers of its board of trustees and replaced them with allies. Three of them have Clare­mont ties: Kesler, Christo­pher Rufo, a for­mer Clare­mont Insti­tute Lin­coln Fel­low and the nation’s most effec­tive cru­sad­er against what he claims is Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry teach­ing in schools; and Matthew Spald­ing, a for­mer stu­dent, Clare­mont Fel­low and dean at Hills­dale Col­lege who helped run Trump’s 1776 Com­mis­sion and who had brought in Kesler to con­tribute to the state’s civics pro­gram. The board prompt­ly fired the school’s pres­i­dent, replaced her with a DeSan­tis ally, and shut­tered the school’s Diver­si­ty, Inclu­sion and Equi­ty office, moves decried by its most­ly lib­er­al stu­dent body.
    ...

    Final­ly, note who else hap­pens to be a for­mer Clare­mont Insti­tute fel­low to join the DeSan­tis 2024 cam­paign: Nate Hochman, the DeSan­tis staffer fired this week after he was out­ed as the cre­ator of a cam­paign video filled with fas­cist imagery, includ­ing an end­ing that has an image of DeSan­tis with a Son­nen­rad behind him and sol­diers march­ing. Hochman was­n’t just a clos­et Nazi con­ser­v­a­tive ris­ing star. He was also a clos­et-Nazi Clare­mont Insti­tute mem­ber who open­ly palled around with Nick Fuentes. In oth­er words, he was kind of already an open Nazi. And then Ron DeSan­tis hired him:

    ...
    And they’re not just help­ing on the pol­i­cy side. DeSan­tis recent­ly hired Nate Hochman, a for­mer Clare­mont Insti­tute fel­low and intern for one of its pub­li­ca­tions who has palled around with white nation­al­ist Nick Fuentes, to join his polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions team. Clare­mont Insti­tute schol­ars also spoke on a pan­el at DeSan­tis’ pri­vate polit­i­cal fundrais­ing retreat in late Feb­ru­ary, accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post.
    ...

    So is Ron DeSan­tis cam­paign’s strat­e­gy final­ly back­fir­ing? The strat­e­gy of dis­tin­guish­ing him­self from the rest of the pri­ma­ry pack with thin­ly-veiled fas­cist mes­sages designed to frame his anti-woke brand as part of some sort of com­ing soci­etal fas­cist purge just did­n’t stick? Let’s hope so. But don’t kid your­self. The fas­cists ulti­mate­ly behind that video are mega-donor-fund­ed insti­tu­tion­al fas­cists like Nate Hochman. Their polit­i­cal rel­e­vance and pow­er does­n’t depend on pri­ma­ry vot­er. Ron DeSan­tis’s 2024 bid may or may not implode. Time will tell. But the insti­tu­tion­al fas­cism he’s chan­nel­ing and pla­cat­ing with his anti-woke brand of pol­i­tics is very patient and has plans that go well past Ron DeSan­tis’s polit­i­cal shelf life.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | July 30, 2023, 11:29 pm
  29. It was just a tech­ni­cal quib­ble, real­ly. A mis­un­der­stand­ing at worst. The kind of minor infrac­tion, if an infrac­tion at all, that does­n’t nor­mal­ly face any sort of crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion. If Trump vio­lat­ed any­thing, it was mere­ly a tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion of con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­ce­dures. No crim­i­nal vio­la­tions hap­pened, espe­cial­ly since Trump gen­uine­ly believed the elec­tion was stolen. A belief he con­tin­ues to hold. A belief that fun­da­men­tal­ly jus­ti­fied his actions. That was the pre­view we got from Don­ald Trump’s lawyer, John Lau­ro, in response to last week’s crim­i­nal indict­ment over Trump’s attempts to ille­gal­ly over­turn the elec­tion. As such, argued Lau­ro, the indict­ment is a vio­la­tion of Trump’s First Amend­ment rights to express that opin­ion that the elec­tion was stolen.

    Keep in mind that this ‘free speech’ fram­ing came at the same time the Trump cam­paign is defend­ing threat­en­ing Truth Social posts — like ““IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”” — as free speech too. Trump is dou­bling down on esca­la­tion. Which is a hint that esca­lat­ing the sit­u­a­tion is also going to be part of the defense strat­e­gy.

    But that was­n’t the only pre­view we got this week. The Clare­mont Insti­tute made the remark­able deci­sion to release an inter­view of insti­tute fel­low John East­man, the fig­ure who arguably lead the way in craft­ing the legal the­o­ries jus­ti­fy­ing extra­or­di­nary actions reject­ing state elec­tors. An inter­view that was actu­al­ly held before Jack Smith’s indict­ment. But what makes its release so remark­able is what East­man open­ly admits in the inter­view: the Trump admin­is­tra­tion real­ly was engaged in what amount to rev­o­lu­tion­ary actions. Rev­o­lu­tion­ary actions that he framed as being in keep­ing with same under­ly­ing fight for free­dom and democ­ra­cy that ani­mat­ed the Found­ing Fathers’ 1776 Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. A fight against a tyran­ni­cal gov­ern­ment that every pop­u­lace inher­ent­ly pos­sess­es.

    Keep in mind that Trump was in fact in charge of the exec­u­tive branch of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment at the time of all these events, which rais­es the ques­tion as to who exact­ly is the source of the tyran­ny in East­man’s view? Well, as he put it in his inter­view, the mod­ern day left wing is the source of the tyran­ny. Rev­o­lu­tion­ary actions against ‘the left’ are now jus­ti­fied in John East­man’s mind. He laid it all out in an inter­view just released by the Clare­mont Insti­tute. This is a good time to recall how the Clare­mont Insti­tute appears to be the insti­tu­tion­al force behind much of Ron DeSan­tis’s increas­ing­ly rad­i­cal ‘anti-woke’ brand of pol­i­tics, with Clare­mont Insti­tute fel­lows like Christo­pher Rufo play­ing a direct role in the pro­gres­sive purge of New Col­lege. A New Col­lege purge that serves as a warn­ing that the ongo­ing Sched­ule F schem­ing (rebrand­ed ‘Project 2025’) goes well beyond the a purge of the fed­er­al work­force of left-wing and includes using the force of gov­ern­ment to trig­ger a broad­er broad­er pri­vate sec­tor purge that impacts cor­po­ra­tion and pri­vate insti­tu­tions.

    So giv­en that the Clare­mont Insti­tute decid­ed to release this inter­view — an inter­view of one of the unin­dict­ed co-con­spir­a­tors in Trump’s case, con­duct­ed by Clare­mon­t’s Chair­man Tom Klin­gen­stein — just days after Jack Smith’s indict­ment where East­man is more or less open­ly endors­ing and retroac­tive­ly jus­ti­fy­ing not just the schem­ing to over­turn the elec­tion but the full blown use of rev­o­lu­tion­ary force, at the same time Trump’s legal team is sig­nalling a legal­ly strat­e­gy that cen­ters around ‘Trump thought the elec­tion was stolen and still thinks that’, we have to ask whether or not the pros­e­cu­tion of Don­ald Trump is poised to be turned into the almost-open call for the next insur­rec­tion. Because they already seem to have adopt­ed a ‘right wing insur­rec­tions are jus­ti­fi­able these days giv­en all the Demo­c­ra­t­ic cheat­ing’ legal defense:

    NBC News

    If Trump com­mit­ted ‘a tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion,’ it’s not a crime, his lawyer says

    Lat­er on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, who sat on the House pan­el that inves­ti­gat­ed the Capi­tol riot, said Lauro’s argu­ment was “deranged.”

    By Adam Edel­man
    Aug. 6, 2023, 10:26 AM CDT / Updat­ed Aug. 6, 2023, 1:53 PM CDT

    ormer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump com­mit­ted a “tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion,” it doesn’t mean he nec­es­sar­i­ly broke any crim­i­nal laws, John Lau­ro, Trump’s crim­i­nal defense attor­ney, argued Sun­day on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

    Lau­ro appeared to sig­nal how he’d defend the for­mer pres­i­dent in a tri­al that will stem from the four-count crim­i­nal indict­ment returned last week by a fed­er­al grand jury that had been exam­in­ing Trump’s pos­si­ble role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capi­tol riot and his alleged attempts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion.

    Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd about Trump’s alleged pres­sure cam­paign to get for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to reverse the elec­tion, Lau­ro claimed that Trump and Pence had mere­ly dis­agreed over whether a vice pres­i­dent could con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly take actions that could lead to a pres­i­den­tial election’s being over­turned.

    “A tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion is not a vio­la­tion of crim­i­nal law,” Lau­ro con­tend­ed, say­ing it was “just plain wrong” to sug­gest that Trump had pressed Pence to break the law.

    “And to say that is con­trary to decades of legal statutes,” he con­tin­ued.

    “These kinds of con­sti­tu­tion­al and statu­to­ry dis­agree­ments don’t lead to crim­i­nal charges,” Lau­ro said. “And one thing that Mr. Pence has nev­er said is that he thought Pres­i­dent Trump was act­ing crim­i­nal­ly.”

    In response to the lat­est indict­ment, Pence said he believes “that any­one who puts him­self over the Con­sti­tu­tion should nev­er be pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States.” He said Wednes­day that Trump sur­round­ed him­self after the 2020 elec­tion with “crack­pot lawyers” who told him only what his “itch­ing ears” want­ed to hear.

    “I was ful­ly pre­pared to make sure that we heard all the argu­ments and con­cerns the mem­bers of Con­gress had brought,” Pence said. “But because of the riot and because of — because of the asser­tion by the pres­i­dent and his crack­pot lawyers that I could over­turn the elec­tion, the vio­lence that ensued eclipsed all of that.”

    Pence elab­o­rat­ed on the sub­ject Sun­day, say­ing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that Trump, “from some­time in the mid­dle of Decem­ber” 2020 “began to be told that I had some author­i­ty to reject or return votes back to the states.”

    “I had no such author­i­ty,” Pence said. “No vice pres­i­dent in Amer­i­can his­to­ry had ever assert­ed that author­i­ty, and no one ever should.”

    In a fol­low-up email to NBC News, Lau­ro said he “nev­er said that Pres­i­dent Trump com­mit­ted a tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion.”

    Fur­ther pre­view­ing his defense, Lau­ro argued that Trump did noth­ing crim­i­nal because Trump believed that he’d won the 2020 elec­tion and that the charges against him were a vio­la­tion of his First Amend­ment rights to express that opin­ion.

    “Trump believed in his heart of hearts that he had won that elec­tion, and, as any Amer­i­can cit­i­zen, he had a right to speak out under the First Amend­ment,” Lau­ro said.

    The indict­ment acknowl­edges Trump’s right under the First Amend­ment to “speak pub­licly about the elec­tion and even to claim, false­ly, that there had been out­come-deter­mi­na­tive fraud dur­ing the elec­tion and that he had won.” He was also “enti­tled to for­mal­ly chal­lenge the results of the elec­tion through law­ful and appro­pri­ate means,” the indict­ment says, includ­ing through recounts and law­suits.

    But it accus­es Trump of going fur­ther and tak­ing part in three crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cies: “to defraud the Unit­ed States by using dis­hon­esty, fraud and deceit” to obstruct the elec­toral vote process; to “impede the Jan­u­ary 6 con­gres­sion­al pro­ceed­ing at which the col­lect­ed results of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion are count­ed and cer­ti­fied”; and to con­spire “against the right to vote and to have that vote count­ed.”

    The alle­ga­tion that Trump used “dis­hon­esty, fraud, and deceit” to sub­vert the elec­tion with “per­va­sive and desta­bi­liz­ing lies about elec­tion fraud” came after a sprawl­ing inves­ti­ga­tion in which dozens of White House aides and advis­ers rang­ing in senior­i­ty up to Pence tes­ti­fied.

    The indict­ment cit­ed con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous notes Pence took about meet­ings in which Trump pushed him to reject the Elec­toral Col­lege votes in mul­ti­ple states.

    ...

    Rep. Jamie Raskin, D‑Md., a mem­ber of the Jan. 6 com­mit­tee who was lead man­ag­er in Trump’s sec­ond impeach­ment tri­al, slammed Lauro’s argu­ment as “deranged” and “a griev­ous con­sti­tu­tion­al defense” in a sep­a­rate inter­view Sun­day on “Meet the Press.”

    “First of all, a tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion is a vio­la­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion. The Con­sti­tu­tion in six dif­fer­ent places oppos­es insur­rec­tion,” Raskin said.

    “Our Con­sti­tu­tion is designed to stop peo­ple from try­ing to over­throw elec­tions and try­ing to over­throw the gov­ern­ment,” he con­tin­ued.

    “He con­spired to defraud the Amer­i­can peo­ple out of our right to an hon­est elec­tion by sub­sti­tut­ing the real legal process we have under fed­er­al and state law with coun­ter­feit elec­tors,” Raskin said. “There are peo­ple in jail for sev­er­al years for coun­ter­feit­ing one vote, if they try to vote ille­gal­ly once. He tried to steal the entire elec­tion.

    “That is a deranged argu­ment,” Raskin said of Lauro’s com­ments.

    At least one promi­nent Repub­li­can said Sun­day that the charges did­n’t vio­late Trump’s free speech rights.

    “It’s cer­tain­ly a chal­leng­ing case, but I don’t think it runs afoul of the First Amend­ment,” William Barr, who was Trump’s attor­ney gen­er­al, said on “Face the Nation.” “From a prosecutor’s stand­point, I think it’s a legit­i­mate case.”

    Trump’s actions, Barr said, went far beyond just express­ing his opin­ion about the 2020 elec­tion.

    “This involved a sit­u­a­tion where the states had already made the offi­cial and author­i­ta­tive deter­mi­na­tion as to who won in those states and they sent the votes and cer­ti­fied them to Con­gress,” he said. “The alle­ga­tion, essen­tial­ly, by the gov­ern­ment is that at that point, the pres­i­dent con­spired, entered into a plan, a scheme, that involved a lot of deceit, the object of which was to erase those votes, to nul­li­fy those law­ful votes.”

    Mean­while, Trump said Sun­day he’d seek a recusal for the judge assigned to his case, as well as a change of venue for a future tri­al, alleg­ing that both the judge and the cur­rent tri­al loca­tion of Wash­ing­ton, D.C., are unfair to him.

    “There is no way I can get a fair tri­al with the judge ‘assigned’ to the ridicu­lous free­dom of speech/fair elec­tions case,” Trump wrote in an all-cap­i­tal­ized post on his Truth Social plat­form. “We will be imme­di­ate­ly ask­ing for recusal of this judge on very pow­er­ful grounds, and like­wise for venue change.”

    ———-

    “If Trump com­mit­ted ‘a tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion,’ it’s not a crime, his lawyer says” by Adam Edel­man; NBC News; 08/06/2023

    “Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd about Trump’s alleged pres­sure cam­paign to get for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to reverse the elec­tion, Lau­ro claimed that Trump and Pence had mere­ly dis­agreed over whether a vice pres­i­dent could con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly take actions that could lead to a pres­i­den­tial election’s being over­turned.

    It was mere­ly a tech­ni­cal dis­agree­ment over whether or not Mike Pence had the con­sti­tu­tion­al author­i­ty to reject elec­toral votes. Noth­ing crim­i­nal about it. That was the argu­ment trot­ted out by Trump’s attor­ney John Lau­ro, in a pre­view of Trump defense. A pre­view that indi­cates that his defense is going to hedge on the asser­tion that Trump tru­ly believed the elec­tion was stolen and tru­ly believe that Mike Pence had the author­i­ty to address it. That’s the legal spin Trump’s team is going with. It was all just an hon­est dis­agree­ment:

    ...
    “A tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion is not a vio­la­tion of crim­i­nal law,” Lau­ro con­tend­ed, say­ing it was “just plain wrong” to sug­gest that Trump had pressed Pence to break the law.

    “And to say that is con­trary to decades of legal statutes,” he con­tin­ued.

    “These kinds of con­sti­tu­tion­al and statu­to­ry dis­agree­ments don’t lead to crim­i­nal charges,” Lau­ro said. “And one thing that Mr. Pence has nev­er said is that he thought Pres­i­dent Trump was act­ing crim­i­nal­ly.”

    ...

    In a fol­low-up email to NBC News, Lau­ro said he “nev­er said that Pres­i­dent Trump com­mit­ted a tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion.”

    Fur­ther pre­view­ing his defense, Lau­ro argued that Trump did noth­ing crim­i­nal because Trump believed that he’d won the 2020 elec­tion and that the charges against him were a vio­la­tion of his First Amend­ment rights to express that opin­ion.

    “Trump believed in his heart of hearts that he had won that elec­tion, and, as any Amer­i­can cit­i­zen, he had a right to speak out under the First Amend­ment,” Lau­ro said.
    ...

    Of course, as none oth­er than Bill Barr point­ed out, the charges aren’t that Trump had a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the Con­sti­tu­tion’s tech­ni­cal details. The charges are that he engaged in a flat out decep­tive scheme to negate the votes that had been valid­ly cer­ti­fied by the states. That’s a crime that goes way beyond just speech:

    ...
    At least one promi­nent Repub­li­can said Sun­day that the charges did­n’t vio­late Trump’s free speech rights.

    “It’s cer­tain­ly a chal­leng­ing case, but I don’t think it runs afoul of the First Amend­ment,” William Barr, who was Trump’s attor­ney gen­er­al, said on “Face the Nation.” “From a prosecutor’s stand­point, I think it’s a legit­i­mate case.”

    Trump’s actions, Barr said, went far beyond just express­ing his opin­ion about the 2020 elec­tion.
    “This involved a sit­u­a­tion where the states had already made the offi­cial and author­i­ta­tive deter­mi­na­tion as to who won in those states and they sent the votes and cer­ti­fied them to Con­gress,” he said. “The alle­ga­tion, essen­tial­ly, by the gov­ern­ment is that at that point, the pres­i­dent con­spired, entered into a plan, a scheme, that involved a lot of deceit, the object of which was to erase those votes, to nul­li­fy those law­ful votes.”

    ...

    And that schem­ing that Barr referred brings us to the ‘free speech’ Trump was appar­ent­ly engag­ing in when he was repeat­ed­ly telling Pence that Pence had the author­i­ty to reject elec­toral votes. But, of course, Trump was­n’t only telling Pence that Pence had this author­i­ty. He was telling his sup­port­ers Pence had this pow­er too. Includ­ing right before the insur­rec­tion, when Trump told the crowd at the Ellipse that Pence had these pow­ers and that will be “very dis­ap­point­ed” with Pence if he does­n’t use those pow­ers. It under­scores how the ‘free speech’ defense oper­ates as both a shield for the behind-the-scenes schem­ing but also the out-in-the-open foment­ing:

    ...
    In response to the lat­est indict­ment, Pence said he believes “that any­one who puts him­self over the Con­sti­tu­tion should nev­er be pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States.” He said Wednes­day that Trump sur­round­ed him­self after the 2020 elec­tion with “crack­pot lawyers” who told him only what his “itch­ing ears” want­ed to hear.

    “I was ful­ly pre­pared to make sure that we heard all the argu­ments and con­cerns the mem­bers of Con­gress had brought,” Pence said. “But because of the riot and because of — because of the asser­tion by the pres­i­dent and his crack­pot lawyers that I could over­turn the elec­tion, the vio­lence that ensued eclipsed all of that.”

    Pence elab­o­rat­ed on the sub­ject Sun­day, say­ing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that Trump, “from some­time in the mid­dle of Decem­ber” 2020 “began to be told that I had some author­i­ty to reject or return votes back to the states.”

    “I had no such author­i­ty,” Pence said. “No vice pres­i­dent in Amer­i­can his­to­ry had ever assert­ed that author­i­ty, and no one ever should.”
    ...

    So with ‘free speech’ appar­ent­ly the slat­ed as the over­ar­ch­ing theme of Trump’s legal defense, it’s worth not­ing the absolute­ly incred­i­ble com­ments made by Clare­mont Insti­tute lawyer John East­man about his own thoughts on the legal­i­ty of Trump’s post-elec­tion activ­i­ties. Well, not just Trump’s actions. East­man was, of course, one of the cen­tral fig­ures work­ing on the legal the­o­ries the whole scheme was based on. He was very much defend­ing him­self too, even if he’s mere­ly an unin­dict­ed co-con­spir­a­tor at this point. A defense that amount­ed to, ‘yes, we were try­ing to over­throw the gov­ern­ment, in keep­ing with the proud Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of oppos­ing tyran­ny’:

    Talk­ing Points Memo

    John East­man Comes Clean: Hell Yes We Were Try­ing to Over­throw the Gov­ern­ment

    By Josh Mar­shall
    August 5, 2023 11:33 a.m.

    I want to return to this rev­e­la­to­ry inter­view with co-con­spir­a­tor John East­man, the last por­tion of which was pub­lished Thurs­day by Tom Klin­gen­stein, the Chair­man of the Trumpite Clare­mont Insti­tute and then high­light­ed by our Josh Koven­sky. There’s a lot of atmos­pher­ics in this inter­view, a lot of book­shelf-lined tweedy gen­til­i­ty mixed with com­plaints about OSHA reg­u­la­tions and Drag Queen sto­ry hours. But the cen­tral bit comes just over half way through the inter­view when East­man gets into the core jus­ti­fi­ca­tion and pur­pose for try­ing to over­turn the results of the 2020 elec­tion and over­throw the con­sti­tu­tion­al order itself. He invokes the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and says quite clear­ly that yes, we were try­ing to over­throw the gov­ern­ment and argues that they were jus­ti­fied because of the sheer exis­ten­tial threat Amer­i­ca was under because of the elec­tion of Joe Biden.

    Jan­u­ary 6th con­spir­a­tors have spent more than two years claim­ing either that noth­ing real­ly hap­pened at all in the weeks lead­ing up to Jan­u­ary 6th or that it was just a peace­ful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just mak­ing a good faith effort to fol­low the legal process. East­man cuts through all of this and makes clear they were try­ing to over­throw (“abol­ish”) the gov­ern­ment; they were jus­ti­fied in doing so; and the war­rant for their actions is none oth­er than the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence itself.

    “Our Founders lay this case out,” says East­man. “There’s actu­al­ly a pro­vi­sion in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence that a peo­ple will suf­fer abus­es while they remain suf­fer­able, tol­er­a­ble while they remain tol­er­a­ble. At some point abus­es become so intol­er­a­ble that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abol­ish the exist­ing gov­ern­ment.”

    “So that’s the ques­tion,” he tells Klin­gen­stein. “Have the abus­es or the threat of abus­es become so intol­er­a­ble that we have to be will­ing to push back?”

    The answer for East­man is clear­ly yes, and that’s his jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for his and his asso­ciates extra­or­di­nary actions.

    Let’s dig in for a moment to what this means, because it’s a frame­work of thought or dis­course that was cen­tral to many con­tro­ver­sies in the first decades of the Amer­i­can Repub­lic. The Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence has no legal force under Amer­i­can law. It’s not a legal doc­u­ment. It’s a pub­lic expla­na­tion of a polit­i­cal deci­sion: to break the colonies’ alle­giance to Great Britain and form a new coun­try. But it con­tains a num­ber of claims and prin­ci­ples that became and remain cen­tral to Amer­i­can polit­i­cal life.

    The one East­man invokes here is the right to over­throw gov­ern­ments. The claim is that gov­ern­ments have no legit­i­ma­cy or author­i­ty beyond their abil­i­ty to serve the gov­erned. Gov­ern­ments shouldn’t be over­thrown over minor or tran­si­to­ry con­cerns. But when they become tru­ly oppres­sive peo­ple have a right to get rid of them and start over. This may seem com­mon­sen­si­cal to us. But that’s because we live a cou­ple cen­turies down­stream of these events and ideas. Gov­ern­ments at least in the­o­ry are jus­ti­fied by how they serve their pop­u­la­tions rather than coun­tries being essen­tial­ly owned by the kings or nobil­i­ties which rule them.

    But this is a high­ly pro­tean idea. Who gets to decide? Indeed this ques­tion came up again and again over the next cen­tu­ry each time the young repub­lic faced a major polit­i­cal cri­sis, whether it was in the late 1790s, toward the end of the War of 1812, in 1832–33 or final­ly dur­ing the Amer­i­can Civ­il War. If one side didn’t get its way and want­ed out what bet­ter author­i­ty to cite than the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence? There is an obvi­ous dif­fer­ence, but Amer­i­can polit­i­cal lead­ers need­ed a lan­guage to describe it. What they came up with is straight­for­ward. It’s the dif­fer­ence between a con­sti­tu­tion­al or legal right and a rev­o­lu­tion­ary one. Abra­ham Lin­coln was doing no more than stat­ing a com­mon­place when he said this on the eve of the Civ­il War in his first inau­gur­al address (empha­sis added): “This coun­try, with its insti­tu­tions, belongs to the peo­ple who inhab­it it. When­ev­er they shall grow weary of the exist­ing Gov­ern­ment, they can exer­cise their con­sti­tu­tion­al right of amend­ing it or their rev­o­lu­tion­ary right to dis­mem­ber or over­throw it.

    In oth­er words, yes, you have a rev­o­lu­tion­ary right to over­throw the gov­ern­ment if you real­ly think its abus­es have got­ten that intractable and grave. But the gov­ern­ment has an equal right to stop you, to defend itself or, as we see today, put you on tri­al if you fail. The Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies of 1776 knew full well that they were com­mit­ting trea­son against the British monar­chy. If they lost they would all hang. They accept­ed that. They didn’t claim that George III had no choice but to let them go.

    ...

    In a way I admire East­man for com­ing clean. I don’t know whether he sees the writ­ing on the wall and fig­ures he might as well lay his argu­ment out there or whether his grad school polit­i­cal the­o­ry pre­ten­sions and pride got the bet­ter of him and led him to state open­ly this inde­fen­si­ble truth. Either way he’s done it and not in any way that’s retriev­able as a slip of the tongue. They knew it was a coup and they jus­ti­fied it to them­selves in those terms. He just told us. They believed they were jus­ti­fied in try­ing to over­throw the gov­ern­ment, whether because of OSHA chair size reg­u­la­tions or drag queens or, more broad­ly, because the com­mon herd of us don’t under­stand the country’s “found­ing prin­ci­ples” the way East­man and his weirdo clique do. But they did it. He just admit­ted it. And now they’re going to face the con­se­quences.

    ————

    “John East­man Comes Clean: Hell Yes We Were Try­ing to Over­throw the Gov­ern­ment” by Josh Mar­shall; Talk­ing Points Memo; 08/05/2023

    “Jan­u­ary 6th con­spir­a­tors have spent more than two years claim­ing either that noth­ing real­ly hap­pened at all in the weeks lead­ing up to Jan­u­ary 6th or that it was just a peace­ful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just mak­ing a good faith effort to fol­low the legal process. East­man cuts through all of this and makes clear they were try­ing to over­throw (“abol­ish”) the gov­ern­ment; they were jus­ti­fied in doing so; and the war­rant for their actions is none oth­er than the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence itself.

    Yes, it was an insur­rec­tion, but a legal insur­rec­tion ground­ed in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. That was more or less the argu­ment laid out by John East­man, who was arguably the key legal archi­tect behind the scheme to over­turn the elec­tion results. It was in effect a sec­ond Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, declared in response to the appar­ent intol­er­a­ble abus­es of gov­ern­ment pow­er. Deep state pow­er, implic­it­ly, since Trump was obvi­ous­ly in con­trol of the exec­u­tive branch.

    It points to how this legal the­o­ry syn­er­gizes with the ongo­ing Sched­ule F scheme to purge the gov­ern­ment of any non-MAGA loy­al­ists. The idea being that if a pres­i­dent can’t get the entire exec­u­tive branch to bend to their will, no mat­ter how ille­gal that will may be, it rep­re­sents a rebel­lious deep state and an intol­er­a­ble abuse of pow­er that, in turn, jus­ti­fy a new ‘Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence’ with all the insur­rec­tionary activ­i­ty that may entail:

    ...
    “Our Founders lay this case out,” says East­man. “There’s actu­al­ly a pro­vi­sion in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence that a peo­ple will suf­fer abus­es while they remain suf­fer­able, tol­er­a­ble while they remain tol­er­a­ble. At some point abus­es become so intol­er­a­ble that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abol­ish the exist­ing gov­ern­ment.”

    “So that’s the ques­tion,” he tells Klin­gen­stein. “Have the abus­es or the threat of abus­es become so intol­er­a­ble that we have to be will­ing to push back?”

    The answer for East­man is clear­ly yes, and that’s his jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for his and his asso­ciates extra­or­di­nary actions.
    ...

    And as Josh Mar­shall points out, while the US’s civic fab­ric is stitched togeth­er, in part, with the claims and prin­ci­ples found in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence which do indeed include an inher­ent right for a pop­u­lace to over­throw a tyran­ni­cal gov­ern­ment, the actu­al con­sti­tu­tion­al law is also quite clear that the gov­ern­ment has a right to quell an insur­rec­tion. Includ­ing the implic­it right to pun­ish those who engage in an insur­rec­tion for trea­son. So, yes, in a sense, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion had an implic­it right to wage an insur­rec­tion. The same right any group has to do so if it gen­uine­ly feels it’s being oppressed and liv­ing under tyran­ny. But that’s paired with the right of the gov­ern­ment to sup­press an insur­rec­tion and pun­ish the per­pe­tra­tors with trea­son. You can’t claim one with­out the oth­er. Well, you can claim the right to an insur­rec­tion with­out the threat of fac­ing an reper­cus­sions should that insur­rec­tion fail, as John East­man appears to be doing. Free speech and all. But it’s still a non­sense claim:

    ...
    Let’s dig in for a moment to what this means, because it’s a frame­work of thought or dis­course that was cen­tral to many con­tro­ver­sies in the first decades of the Amer­i­can Repub­lic. The Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence has no legal force under Amer­i­can law. It’s not a legal doc­u­ment. It’s a pub­lic expla­na­tion of a polit­i­cal deci­sion: to break the colonies’ alle­giance to Great Britain and form a new coun­try. But it con­tains a num­ber of claims and prin­ci­ples that became and remain cen­tral to Amer­i­can polit­i­cal life.

    The one East­man invokes here is the right to over­throw gov­ern­ments. The claim is that gov­ern­ments have no legit­i­ma­cy or author­i­ty beyond their abil­i­ty to serve the gov­erned. Gov­ern­ments shouldn’t be over­thrown over minor or tran­si­to­ry con­cerns. But when they become tru­ly oppres­sive peo­ple have a right to get rid of them and start over. This may seem com­mon­sen­si­cal to us. But that’s because we live a cou­ple cen­turies down­stream of these events and ideas. Gov­ern­ments at least in the­o­ry are jus­ti­fied by how they serve their pop­u­la­tions rather than coun­tries being essen­tial­ly owned by the kings or nobil­i­ties which rule them.

    But this is a high­ly pro­tean idea. Who gets to decide? Indeed this ques­tion came up again and again over the next cen­tu­ry each time the young repub­lic faced a major polit­i­cal cri­sis, whether it was in the late 1790s, toward the end of the War of 1812, in 1832–33 or final­ly dur­ing the Amer­i­can Civ­il War. If one side didn’t get its way and want­ed out what bet­ter author­i­ty to cite than the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence? There is an obvi­ous dif­fer­ence, but Amer­i­can polit­i­cal lead­ers need­ed a lan­guage to describe it. What they came up with is straight­for­ward. It’s the dif­fer­ence between a con­sti­tu­tion­al or legal right and a rev­o­lu­tion­ary one. Abra­ham Lin­coln was doing no more than stat­ing a com­mon­place when he said this on the eve of the Civ­il War in his first inau­gur­al address (empha­sis added): “This coun­try, with its insti­tu­tions, belongs to the peo­ple who inhab­it it. When­ev­er they shall grow weary of the exist­ing Gov­ern­ment, they can exer­cise their con­sti­tu­tion­al right of amend­ing it or their rev­o­lu­tion­ary right to dis­mem­ber or over­throw it.

    In oth­er words, yes, you have a rev­o­lu­tion­ary right to over­throw the gov­ern­ment if you real­ly think its abus­es have got­ten that intractable and grave. But the gov­ern­ment has an equal right to stop you, to defend itself or, as we see today, put you on tri­al if you fail. The Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies of 1776 knew full well that they were com­mit­ting trea­son against the British monar­chy. If they lost they would all hang. They accept­ed that. They didn’t claim that George III had no choice but to let them go.
    ...

    So what exact­ly was the tyran­ny that East­man was cit­ing as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for what he admits was a rev­o­lu­tion? Well, as the fol­low­ing describes, beyond claims that the elec­tion was stolen, East­man repeat­ed­ly seemed to insin­u­ate in his inter­view with the Clare­mont Institute’s Board of Direc­tors Tom Klin­gen­stein that “the mod­ern left” pos­es a kind of exis­ten­tial threat to Amer­i­ca with its appar­ent attempts to “com­plete­ly repu­di­ate every one of our found­ing prin­ci­ples.” In oth­er words, this was­n’t a ‘dec­la­ra­tion of inde­pen­dence’ declared sim­ply in response to an elec­tion stolen by deep state bureau­crats. It was intend­ed to a ‘dec­la­ra­tion of inde­pen­dence’ from ‘the left’, which gives some big clues as to the plans for Trump’s sec­ond term. Plans that would pre­sum­ably look a lot like the ongo­ing Sched­ule F scheme to purge the gov­ern­ment, and even­tu­al­ly every major insti­tu­tion, of any­one still will­ing to iden­ti­fy with ‘the left’:

    Talk­ing Points Memo

    East­man Reit­er­ates Sup­port For Full Insur­rec­tion

    By Josh Koven­sky
    August 4, 2023 3:54 p.m.

    In an inter­view released on Thurs­day, John East­man restat­ed that he’s an unre­con­struct­ed believ­er that the 2020 elec­tion was stolen by the left.

    Chair­man of the Clare­mont Institute’s Board of Direc­tors Tom Klin­gen­stein con­duct­ed the inter­view, which was released in three parts, the last of which was pub­lished on Thurs­day.

    Klin­gen­stein asked East­man whether he would have act­ed in the same way in 1960 as he did in 2020, ref­er­enc­ing the belief on the right that John F. Kennedy stole that year’s elec­tion from Richard Nixon.

    East­man replied no, and added that the stakes of 2020 rep­re­sent­ed an “exis­ten­tial threat to the very sur­viv­abil­i­ty, not just of our nation, but of the exam­ple that our nation, prop­er­ly under­stood, pro­vides to the world.”

    The Trump 2020 lawyer went on to ref­er­ence the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, say­ing that “our founders lay this case out.”

    “There’s actu­al­ly a pro­vi­sion in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence that a peo­ple will suf­fer abus­es while they remain suf­fer­able, tol­er­a­ble while they remain tol­er­a­ble,” he said. “At some point abus­es become so intol­er­a­ble that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abol­ish the exist­ing gov­ern­ment.”

    “So that’s the ques­tion,” he added. “Have the abus­es or the threat of abus­es become so intol­er­a­ble that we have to be will­ing to push back?”

    The inter­view was record­ed before Spe­cial Coun­sel Jack Smith charged Pres­i­dent Trump with four counts relat­ed to his efforts to reverse the 2020 elec­tion. Though East­man does not appear in the indict­ment by name, his attor­ney con­firmed to mul­ti­ple media out­lets that the doc­u­ment refers to him as “Co-Con­spir­a­tor 2.”

    ...

    East­man made the stun­ning remarks, which appear to repeat the sug­ges­tion that over­throw­ing the gov­ern­ment is a legit­i­mate means to stop what East­man described as “the mod­ern left wing,” in the last of a series of inter­views with Klin­gen­stein. Part one, pub­lished in June, address­es Eastman’s belief that the elec­tion was stolen. Part two cov­ers what East­man saw as the legal rem­e­dy, while part three asks, as Klin­gen­stein put it, “should you and the pres­i­dent have pur­sued that legal rem­e­dy?”

    ...

    But it’s the threat that East­man sees the left as pos­ing which runs through the inter­view. He at one point describes it broad­ly as an attempt to “com­plete­ly repu­di­ate every one of our found­ing prin­ci­ples,” and in more detail as an attack on every­thing from sex­u­al and gen­der norms to gas stoves. He warns of “OSHA telling me what kind of chair I can have in my home office.”

    East­man dropped spe­cif­ic claims of vot­er fraud in the third inter­view, and instead piv­ot­ed to claims that gov­ern­ment agen­cies had worked to thwart the 2020 elec­tion and would do the same in 2024. He cit­ed the Twit­ter Files, as well as claims that the intel­li­gence sup­pressed infor­ma­tion about Hunter Biden’s lap­top.

    “If those are the stakes, what are you sup­posed to do?” he asked. “Sit around and twid­dle your thumbs?”

    ————

    “East­man Reit­er­ates Sup­port For Full Insur­rec­tion” By Josh Koven­sky; Talk­ing Points Memo; 08/04/2023

    East­man made the stun­ning remarks, which appear to repeat the sug­ges­tion that over­throw­ing the gov­ern­ment is a legit­i­mate means to stop what East­man described as “the mod­ern left wing,” in the last of a series of inter­views with Klin­gen­stein. Part one, pub­lished in June, address­es Eastman’s belief that the elec­tion was stolen. Part two cov­ers what East­man saw as the legal rem­e­dy, while part three asks, as Klin­gen­stein put it, “should you and the pres­i­dent have pur­sued that legal rem­e­dy?””

    Yes, it was “the mod­ern left wing” that need­ed to be over­thrown. The oppres­sive mod­ern left wing that presents an “exis­ten­tial threat to the very sur­viv­abil­i­ty, not just of our nation, but of the exam­ple that our nation, prop­er­ly under­stood, pro­vides to the world.” A left wing that is attempt­ing to to “com­plete­ly repu­di­ate every one of our found­ing prin­ci­ples.” That’s how East­man decid­ed to frame the insur­rec­tion: as a sec­ond dec­la­ra­tion of inde­pen­dence, this time inde­pen­dence from ‘the mod­ern left wing’ which has been threat­en­ing the very idea of democ­ra­cy with its com­plete repu­di­a­tion of nation’s found­ing prin­ci­ples:

    ...
    East­man replied no, and added that the stakes of 2020 rep­re­sent­ed an “exis­ten­tial threat to the very sur­viv­abil­i­ty, not just of our nation, but of the exam­ple that our nation, prop­er­ly under­stood, pro­vides to the world.”

    ...

    But it’s the threat that East­man sees the left as pos­ing which runs through the inter­view. He at one point describes it broad­ly as an attempt to “com­plete­ly repu­di­ate every one of our found­ing prin­ci­ples,” and in more detail as an attack on every­thing from sex­u­al and gen­der norms to gas stoves. He warns of “OSHA telling me what kind of chair I can have in my home office.”
    ...

    Rev­o­lu­tion­ary force was jus­ti­fi­able in 2020 accord­ing to John East­man. Which obvi­ous­ly means it’s still jus­ti­fi­able, right? It’s the kind of legal defense that many will find offen­sive. And yet it’s hard to ignore how this defense serves as a call for offen­sive action in the form of the next insur­rec­tion. An insur­rec­tion pre­sum­ably slat­ed for 2024 should Trump not win the elec­tion out­right.

    And offen­sive action that will then trans­late into the ‘Sched­ule F+’ mass purges that they also keep get­ting warn­ing is being planned. It’s part of why, as the tri­al of Don­ald Trump plays out, the ever-devel­op­ing Sched­ule F/Project 2025 is poten­tial­ly going to increas­ing­ly become part of the sto­ry. Because we appear to be look­ing at a legal defense for the upcom­ing 2024 insur­rec­tion as well as the sub­se­quent mass purges after it suc­ceeds.

    It’s also pre­sum­ably all a pre­emp­tive legal defense for any jail­breaks, should that become nec­es­sary.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 6, 2023, 10:27 pm
  30. The mug shots are trick­ling in. The while the light­ing was­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly great for John East­man’s mug shot at the Ful­ton Coun­ty jail dur­ing his arraigned over the lat­est round of Jan 6‑related indict­ments, there’s still some­thing remark­able in see­ing the peo­ple who actu­al­ly planned and orga­nized the Jan 6 plot actu­al­ly get booked at all in the first place. This isn’t how it nor­mal­ly works in mod­ern Amer­i­ca.

    Except, of course, that’s how jus­tice does actu­al­ly con­tin­ue to work for the vast major­i­ty of the peo­ple who were involved with the Jan­u­ary 6 schem­ing. We’re still only see­ing the most promi­nent fig­ures face any sort of pros­e­cu­tion. It’s progress, but we should­n’t kid our­selves about the scale of that plot. A LOT of very pow­er­ful peo­ple were keen­ly inter­est­ed in see­ing Trump remain in office through any means nec­es­sary.

    And that brings us to a very inter­est­ing, and time­ly, report in The Guardian about one of those ‘plot-adja­cent’ fig­ures. A fig­ure who we’ve already seen pop in in con­nec­tion to Jan 6 report­ing and who isn’t hid­ing his desire to see some­thing much big­ger than Jan 6 in the future: Charles Hay­wood.

    As we’ve seen, Hay­wood was one of the fig­ures who showed in in con­nec­tion with one of the more incrim­i­nat­ing sto­ries about what the Clare­mont Insti­tute was up to dur­ing this peri­od. That would be the “79 Days to Inau­gu­ra­tion” report joint­ly pre­pared by the Clare­mont Insti­tute and the Texas Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Foundation’s (TPPF) in mid-Octo­ber 2020. A report that gamed out dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios for how the 2020 elec­tion might play out, includ­ing a sce­nario with­out a clear vic­to­ry that involved large street protests by ‘antifa’ and oth­er left-wing groups try­ing to dis­rupt the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the vote on Jan 6, and a result­ing mass crack­down on ‘the left’ by the gov­ern­ment in response. A response that includ­ed dep­u­tiz­ing groups like the Oath Keep­ers and Three Per­centers so they could assist in the left­wing crack­down. Hay­wood’s pres­ence in this milieu was notable since he was known for call­ing for an “Amer­i­can Cae­sar”. It was basi­cal­ly a right-wing fas­cist crack­down fan­ta­sy report. Joint­ly pro­duced by the Clare­mont Insti­tute and the TPPF. With Charles Hay­wood play­ing a role, for some rea­son.

    But also recall how it was Kevin Roberts of the TPPF who was specif­i­cal­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in this report. As we saw, Roberts — a mem­ber of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP) — went on to become the pres­i­dent of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion. And as we’ve also seen, the Her­itage Foun­da­tion’s inter­est in these kinds of ‘rev­o­lu­tion­ary’ agen­das has­n’t exact­ly dis­si­pat­ed. In fact, it was back in April when Roberts announced that Her­itage was lead­ing “Project 2025”, the new­ly rebrand­ed ver­sion of the ongo­ing “Sched­ule F” plot. A plot that goes well beyond purg­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment of non-MAGA-loy­al­ists and includes pri­vate insti­tu­tion­al purges done under gov­ern­ment pres­sure.

    So the now-pres­i­dent of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion was par­tic­i­pat­ing in this dis­turb­ing exer­cise with the Clare­mont Insti­tute and Charles “Amer­i­can Cae­sar” Hay­wood weeks before the 2020 elec­tion. That’s all part of the con­text of the fol­low­ing report about Hay­wood’s oth­er club. A pri­vate club that he’s cre­at­ed with a pri­vate mem­ber­ship list and a sim­ple goal: get­ting ready for the col­lapse of the US gov­ern­ment. Or rather, a col­lapse of a cen­tral author­i­ty.

    A col­lapse of a cen­tral author­i­ty that appar­ent­ly includes Hay­wood wag­ing an armed con­flict against the US fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. Or as Hay­wood put it, he would like to emerge as a “war­lord” who will lead an “armed patron­age net­work” or “APN”, defined as an “orga­niz­ing device in con­di­tions where cen­tral author­i­ty has bro­ken down” in which the warlord’s respon­si­bil­i­ty is “the short- and long-term pro­tec­tion, mil­i­tary and oth­er­wise, of those who rec­og­nize his author­i­ty and act, in part, at his behest”. Hay­wood adds that the “pos­si­bil­i­ties involv­ing vio­lence” that APNs might face include “more-or-less open war­fare with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, or some sub­set or rem­nant of it”.

    How did an open wannabe war­lord end up as one of the par­tic­i­pants in that “79 Days to Inau­gu­ra­tion” report? Well, he’s quite sim­ply very chum­my with the Clare­mont Insti­tute. In fact, it appears that the ‘non-prof­it’ Hay­wood had cre­at­ed ded­i­cat­ed to a ‘nation­al rebirth’ is both a donor to the Clare­mont Insti­tute and recip­i­ent of Clare­mont Insti­tute mon­ey.

    So while it’s great to see fig­ures like John East­man actu­al­ly booked for foment­ing an insur­rec­tion, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that it real­ly does appear that a much larg­er net­work of very wealthy and pow­er­ful fig­ures were ful­ly behind that effort to sub­vert the elec­tion through any means nec­es­sary. And, impor­tant­ly, they had plans for the nation­al chaos and poten­tial civ­il war that could have erupt­ed had they suc­ceed­ed. And pre­sum­ably still have those plans, based on Charles Hay­wood’s ongo­ing war­lord dreams:

    The Guardian

    US busi­ness­man is wannabe ‘war­lord’ of secre­tive far-right men’s net­work

    Revealed: Charles Hay­wood, cre­ator of the Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al, has said he might serve as ‘war­lord’ at the head of an ‘armed patron­age net­work’

    Jason Wil­son
    Tue 22 Aug 2023 06.00 EDT
    Last mod­i­fied on Tue 22 Aug 2023 11.39 EDT

    The founder and spon­sor of a far-right net­work of secre­tive, men-only, invi­ta­tion-only fra­ter­nal lodges in the US is a for­mer indus­tri­al­ist who has fre­quent­ly spec­u­lat­ed about his future as a war­lord after the col­lapse of Amer­i­ca, a Guardian inves­ti­ga­tion has found.

    Fed­er­al and state tax and com­pa­ny fil­ings show that the Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al (SACR) and its cre­ator, Charles Hay­wood, also have finan­cial ties with the far-right Clare­mont Insti­tute.

    SACR’s most recent IRS fil­ing names Hay­wood as the nation­al organization’s prin­ci­pal offi­cer. Oth­er fil­ings iden­ti­fy three lodges in Ida­ho – in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Moscow – and anoth­er in Dal­las, Texas.

    SACR’s pub­lic-fac­ing pres­ence is con­fined to a slick one-page web­site adver­tis­ing the organization’s goal as “civ­i­liza­tion­al renais­sance”, and a soci­ety “with strong lead­er­ship com­mit­ted to fam­i­ly and cul­ture”.

    The site claims SACR is “rais­ing account­able lead­ers to help build thriv­ing com­mu­ni­ties of free cit­i­zens” who will rebuild “the fron­tier-con­quer­ing spir­it of Amer­i­ca”. It con­demns “those who rule today”, say­ing that they “cor­rupt the sinews of Amer­i­ca”, “[alien­ate] men from fam­i­ly, com­mu­ni­ty, and God” and promis­ing to “counter and con­quer this poi­son”.

    It also promi­nent­ly fea­tures SACR’s cross-like insignia or “mark” which it describes var­i­ous­ly as sym­bol­iz­ing “sword and shield” and the rejec­tion of “Mod­ernist philoso­phies and here­sies”.

    Final­ly, the site advis­es that SACR mem­ber­ship “is orga­nized pri­mar­i­ly around local groups over­seen by a nation­al super­struc­ture” and “is by invi­ta­tion only”, offer­ing an email address for those “inter­est­ed in learn­ing more”.

    ...

    Hei­di Beirich is co-founder of the Glob­al Project on Hate and Extrem­ism and an expert of the far right. She char­ac­ter­ized the rhetoric on the web­site as “palin­genet­ic ultra­na­tion­al­ism”, a fea­ture of fas­cism that pro­pos­es a rev­o­lu­tion as a means of nation­al rebirth.

    Hay­wood has become more active and promi­nent as a blog­ger and com­men­ta­tor on the far-right pod­cast cir­cuit since sell­ing his sole­ly owned Indi­anapo­lis-based sham­poo man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny, Mans­field-King, to a com­peti­tor for an undis­closed price in Sep­tem­ber 2020.

    On his per­son­al web­site, The Wor­thy House, where he styles him­self “Max­i­mum Leader”, Hay­wood has writ­ten that the sale made him “rich beyond the dreams of avarice and look­ing to cause trou­ble”. Mans­field-King was report­ed­ly “on track to do $45m in rev­enue” in the year before its sale.

    He has fea­tured on Clare­mont Insti­tute pod­casts like The Amer­i­can Mind and shows run by Clare­mont Insti­tute staffers and alum­ni, like the New Found­ing pod­cast. He has also writ­ten for Claremont’s web­site, The Amer­i­can Mind.

    Indi­ana com­pa­ny records show that Hay­wood incor­po­rat­ed SACR as a domes­tic non-prof­it in Indi­ana on 22 July 2020, just ahead of the sale of his com­pa­ny. IRS records show that on SACR was approved as a non-prof­it fra­ter­nal orga­ni­za­tion – with pro­vi­sion to cre­ate sub­sidiary lodges – under sec­tion 501(c)(10) of the Inter­nal Rev­enue code.

    The organization’s struc­ture, aims and appar­ent secre­cy are strik­ing in the light of some of the ideas Hay­wood has pro­mot­ed in arti­cles on the Wor­thy House web­site.

    One idea he has repeat­ed­ly raised on the web­site is that he might serve as a “war­lord” at the head of an “armed patron­age net­work” or “APN”, defined as an “orga­niz­ing device in con­di­tions where cen­tral author­i­ty has bro­ken down” in which the warlord’s respon­si­bil­i­ty is “the short- and long-term pro­tec­tion, mil­i­tary and oth­er­wise, of those who rec­og­nize his author­i­ty and act, in part, at his behest”.

    The “pos­si­bil­i­ties involv­ing vio­lence” that APNs might face, Hay­wood writes include “more-or-less open war­fare with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, or some sub­set or rem­nant of it”.

    Fur­ther on, Hay­wood writes: “At this moment I pre­side over what amounts to a extend­ed, quite size­able, com­pound, which when com­plete I like to say, accu­rate­ly, will be imper­vi­ous to any­thing but direct orga­nized mil­i­tary attack”, adding that “it requires a group of men to make it work … what I call ‘shoot­ers’ – say fif­teen able-bod­ied, and ade­quate­ly trained, men.”

    These “shoot­ers”, Hay­wood explains, “can oper­ate my com­pound, both defen­sive­ly and admin­is­tra­tive­ly”, mean­while, “I have the per­son­al­i­ty, and skills, to lead such a group.”

    Hay­wood was one of the first on the right to try to reha­bil­i­tate the riot­ers who stormed the US Capi­tol on 6 Jan­u­ary 2021. Just over two months after that inci­dent, he praised it as an “elec­toral jus­tice protest”, com­ment­ing that “the Protest was pret­ty awe­some in every way. Its most pre­cise ana­log in Amer­i­can his­to­ry … is the Boston Tea Par­ty.”

    ...

    Lau­ra K Field is a polit­i­cal the­o­rist and a senior fel­low at the Wash­ing­ton DC-based think­tank the Niska­nen Cen­ter who has writ­ten and spo­ken exten­sive­ly about the “reac­tionary con­ser­vatism” of the Clare­mont Insti­tute and those in its milieu.

    In a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion, Field said that “some of the Clare­mont Institute’s lead­ers have tak­en on an apoc­a­lyp­tic view of Amer­i­ca and think we’re already in a sit­u­a­tion where our soci­ety is more con­flict-rid­den than we were before the civ­il war”.

    Their fears of “unyield­ing tech­no­crat­ic tyran­ny” mean that some in Clare­mont cir­cles have been “dab­bling in talk of seces­sion for years”, and “believe they need to use what­ev­er they might need, includ­ing para­mil­i­taries”.

    Haywood’s ideas have seen him char­ac­ter­ized as an extrem­ist even by oth­ers on the far right includ­ing the for­mer Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive colum­nist Rod Dreher, who wrote last Decem­ber that Hay­wood was “seri­ous­ly, bat­shit crazy” and char­ac­ter­ized him as writ­ing from a “Mid­west­ern Führerbunker”.

    State and fed­er­al tax fil­ings, how­ev­er, indi­cate that Hay­wood has suc­ceed­ed in attract­ing men to help him build a net­work in line with his ideas. Although there is no pub­lic mem­ber­ship list avail­able, fed­er­al and state fil­ings from region­al lodges iden­ti­fy their offi­cers along with those who ini­tial­ly incor­po­rat­ed each lodge.

    In par­tic­u­lar, Skyler Kressin of Coeur d’Alene, Ida­ho, appears to serve a key role in SACR. Ida­ho and Texas com­pa­ny records show that Kressin incor­po­rat­ed lodges in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Dal­las; serves as a direc­tor of the Coeur d’Alene and Dal­las lodges; and was named as the prin­ci­pal offi­cer of the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion on its 2020–2021 tax return.

    Like oth­er mem­bers revealed as offi­cers in the fil­ings, Kressin appears to be an afflu­ent pro­fes­sion­al work­ing as a tax accoun­tant.

    ...

    Accord­ing to tax records Hay­wood has fund­ed SACR through his Howdy Doo­dy Good Times foun­da­tion, for which he and his wife, Ali­son Mur­phy, are both list­ed as direc­tors. In the 2020–2021 tax year the foun­da­tion gave $30,000 to SACR, fol­lowed by $10,000 the fol­low­ing year, accord­ing to its 990 fil­ings.

    Fur­ther fund­ing for SACR was pro­vid­ed by the Clare­mont Insti­tute, which gave $26,248 in 2021 in one of only two grants the orga­ni­za­tion dis­trib­uted that year, per its own IRS fil­ings.

    In anoth­er indi­ca­tion of what appears to be a mutu­al­ly sup­port­ive rela­tion­ship, Haywood’s foun­da­tion con­tributed $50,000 to the Clare­mont Insti­tute in 2020–2021.

    ...

    On Haywood’s spon­sor­ship of SACR and his Clare­mont ties, Field, the polit­i­cal the­o­rist, said: “What’s creepy about the local-lev­el stuff is that this coun­try has a his­to­ry of local autoc­ra­cy … the way they’re act­ing under­mines the rule of law.”

    ———–

    “US busi­ness­man is wannabe ‘war­lord’ of secre­tive far-right men’s net­work” by Jason Wil­son; The Guardian; 08/22/2023

    “Hei­di Beirich is co-founder of the Glob­al Project on Hate and Extrem­ism and an expert of the far right. She char­ac­ter­ized the rhetoric on the web­site as “palin­genet­ic ultra­na­tion­al­ism”, a fea­ture of fas­cism that pro­pos­es a rev­o­lu­tion as a means of nation­al rebirth.”

    Palin­genet­ic ultra­na­tion­al­ism. Promis­es of a ‘nation­al rebirth’. With Charles Hay­wood — the founder of the Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al (SACR) — play­ing a Cae­sar-like role. It’s a brand of fas­cism that has obvi­ous popoular appeal these days. That is, after all, kind of the ide­o­log­i­cal core of the whole ‘MAGA’ brand. A brand that con­tin­ues to dom­i­nate and define con­tem­po­rary con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics.

    But unlike much of the rest of the ‘MAGA’-stye pol­i­tics of this time filled with pop­ulist fer­vor and appeals to the down­trod­den every­man, the SACR is an overt­ly elit­ist invi­ta­tion-only orga­ni­za­tion with a pri­vate mem­ber­ship list. And based on the mem­ber­ship we can infer, it appears to be a pri­vate club of afflu­ent pro­fes­sion­als:

    ...
    SACR’s most recent IRS fil­ing names Hay­wood as the nation­al organization’s prin­ci­pal offi­cer. Oth­er fil­ings iden­ti­fy three lodges in Ida­ho – in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Moscow – and anoth­er in Dal­las, Texas.

    SACR’s pub­lic-fac­ing pres­ence is con­fined to a slick one-page web­site adver­tis­ing the organization’s goal as “civ­i­liza­tion­al renais­sance”, and a soci­ety “with strong lead­er­ship com­mit­ted to fam­i­ly and cul­ture”.

    The site claims SACR is “rais­ing account­able lead­ers to help build thriv­ing com­mu­ni­ties of free cit­i­zens” who will rebuild “the fron­tier-con­quer­ing spir­it of Amer­i­ca”. It con­demns “those who rule today”, say­ing that they “cor­rupt the sinews of Amer­i­ca”, “[alien­ate] men from fam­i­ly, com­mu­ni­ty, and God” and promis­ing to “counter and con­quer this poi­son”.

    It also promi­nent­ly fea­tures SACR’s cross-like insignia or “mark” which it describes var­i­ous­ly as sym­bol­iz­ing “sword and shield” and the rejec­tion of “Mod­ernist philoso­phies and here­sies”.

    Final­ly, the site advis­es that SACR mem­ber­ship “is orga­nized pri­mar­i­ly around local groups over­seen by a nation­al super­struc­ture” and “is by invi­ta­tion only”, offer­ing an email address for those “inter­est­ed in learn­ing more”.

    ...

    Indi­ana com­pa­ny records show that Hay­wood incor­po­rat­ed SACR as a domes­tic non-prof­it in Indi­ana on 22 July 2020, just ahead of the sale of his com­pa­ny. IRS records show that on SACR was approved as a non-prof­it fra­ter­nal orga­ni­za­tion – with pro­vi­sion to cre­ate sub­sidiary lodges – under sec­tion 501(c)(10) of the Inter­nal Rev­enue code.

    ...

    State and fed­er­al tax fil­ings, how­ev­er, indi­cate that Hay­wood has suc­ceed­ed in attract­ing men to help him build a net­work in line with his ideas. Although there is no pub­lic mem­ber­ship list avail­able, fed­er­al and state fil­ings from region­al lodges iden­ti­fy their offi­cers along with those who ini­tial­ly incor­po­rat­ed each lodge.

    In par­tic­u­lar, Skyler Kressin of Coeur d’Alene, Ida­ho, appears to serve a key role in SACR. Ida­ho and Texas com­pa­ny records show that Kressin incor­po­rat­ed lodges in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Dal­las; serves as a direc­tor of the Coeur d’Alene and Dal­las lodges; and was named as the prin­ci­pal offi­cer of the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion on its 2020–2021 tax return.

    Like oth­er mem­bers revealed as offi­cers in the fil­ings, Kressin appears to be an afflu­ent pro­fes­sion­al work­ing as a tax accoun­tant.
    ...

    And Charles Hay­wood isn’t wag­ing his fas­cist cru­sade on his own. He’s part­ner­ing with appar­ent­ly like-mind­ed groups. Like the Clare­mont Insti­tute. As we’ve seen, Hay­wood was one of the fig­ures work­ing with the now-indict­ed John East­man in devel­op­ing the “79 Days Report” in 2020, where sce­nar­ios involv­ing mass polit­i­cal vio­lence that pre­vent­ed the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the vote on Jan­u­ary 6 were gamed out. Oth­er par­tic­i­pants in this ‘exer­cise’ includ­ed Kevin Roberts, now the head of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion. Yes, in the months before the 2020 elec­tion, Charles Hay­wood was col­lab­o­rat­ing with these main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive insti­tu­tions and fig­ures in gam­ing out Jan 6‑like sce­nar­ios:

    ...
    He has fea­tured on Clare­mont Insti­tute pod­casts like The Amer­i­can Mind and shows run by Clare­mont Insti­tute staffers and alum­ni, like the New Found­ing pod­cast. He has also writ­ten for Claremont’s web­site, The Amer­i­can Mind.

    ...

    Hay­wood was one of the first on the right to try to reha­bil­i­tate the riot­ers who stormed the US Capi­tol on 6 Jan­u­ary 2021. Just over two months after that inci­dent, he praised it as an “elec­toral jus­tice protest”, com­ment­ing that “the Protest was pret­ty awe­some in every way. Its most pre­cise ana­log in Amer­i­can his­to­ry … is the Boston Tea Par­ty.”

    ...

    Lau­ra K Field is a polit­i­cal the­o­rist and a senior fel­low at the Wash­ing­ton DC-based think­tank the Niska­nen Cen­ter who has writ­ten and spo­ken exten­sive­ly about the “reac­tionary con­ser­vatism” of the Clare­mont Insti­tute and those in its milieu.

    In a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion, Field said that “some of the Clare­mont Institute’s lead­ers have tak­en on an apoc­a­lyp­tic view of Amer­i­ca and think we’re already in a sit­u­a­tion where our soci­ety is more con­flict-rid­den than we were before the civ­il war”.

    Their fears of “unyield­ing tech­no­crat­ic tyran­ny” mean that some in Clare­mont cir­cles have been “dab­bling in talk of seces­sion for years”, and “believe they need to use what­ev­er they might need, includ­ing para­mil­i­taries”.
    ...

    And note that it’s not just that Hay­wood found­ed the SACR and also hap­pens to work with the Clare­mont Insti­tute. The rela­tion­ship is deep­er, with some sort of ‘mutu­al­ly sup­port­ive rela­tion­ship’ between the Clare­mont Insti­tute and SACR involve mutu­al dona­tions. Beyond rais­ing ques­tions about the nature of the rela­tion­ship between these two groups, the mutu­al dona­tions also raise some rather inter­est­ing ques­tions about what kind of dark mon­ey laun­der­ing is going on? Why the mutu­al dona­tions on the same years:

    ...
    Accord­ing to tax records Hay­wood has fund­ed SACR through his Howdy Doo­dy Good Times foun­da­tion, for which he and his wife, Ali­son Mur­phy, are both list­ed as direc­tors. In the 2020–2021 tax year the foun­da­tion gave $30,000 to SACR, fol­lowed by $10,000 the fol­low­ing year, accord­ing to its 990 fil­ings.

    Fur­ther fund­ing for SACR was pro­vid­ed by the Clare­mont Insti­tute, which gave $26,248 in 2021 in one of only two grants the orga­ni­za­tion dis­trib­uted that year, per its own IRS fil­ings.

    In anoth­er indi­ca­tion of what appears to be a mutu­al­ly sup­port­ive rela­tion­ship, Haywood’s foun­da­tion con­tributed $50,000 to the Clare­mont Insti­tute in 2020–2021.
    ...

    And, final­ly, we get to the overt calls for a peri­od of ‘war­lordism’ as part of this palin­genet­ic ultra­na­tion­al­is­tic rebirth. As Hay­wood puts it, he’s ready to serve as the “war­lord” at the head of an “armed patron­age net­work” that will be serve as an “orga­niz­ing device in con­di­tions where cen­tral author­i­ty has bro­ken down”, includ­ing “more-or-less open war­fare with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, or some sub­set or rem­nant of it.” He’s not minc­ing words here:

    ...
    The organization’s struc­ture, aims and appar­ent secre­cy are strik­ing in the light of some of the ideas Hay­wood has pro­mot­ed in arti­cles on the Wor­thy House web­site.

    One idea he has repeat­ed­ly raised on the web­site is that he might serve as a “war­lord” at the head of an “armed patron­age net­work” or “APN”, defined as an “orga­niz­ing device in con­di­tions where cen­tral author­i­ty has bro­ken down” in which the warlord’s respon­si­bil­i­ty is “the short- and long-term pro­tec­tion, mil­i­tary and oth­er­wise, of those who rec­og­nize his author­i­ty and act, in part, at his behest”.

    The “pos­si­bil­i­ties involv­ing vio­lence” that APNs might face, Hay­wood writes include “more-or-less open war­fare with the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, or some sub­set or rem­nant of it”.

    Fur­ther on, Hay­wood writes: “At this moment I pre­side over what amounts to a extend­ed, quite size­able, com­pound, which when com­plete I like to say, accu­rate­ly, will be imper­vi­ous to any­thing but direct orga­nized mil­i­tary attack”, adding that “it requires a group of men to make it work … what I call ‘shoot­ers’ – say fif­teen able-bod­ied, and ade­quate­ly trained, men.”

    These “shoot­ers”, Hay­wood explains, “can oper­ate my com­pound, both defen­sive­ly and admin­is­tra­tive­ly”, mean­while, “I have the per­son­al­i­ty, and skills, to lead such a group.”
    ...

    It sure sounds like he’s still active­ly build­ing some sort of dooms­day “APN” head­quar­ters. Is that hap­pen­ing? Is he still prepar­ing to house loy­al “shoot­ers” to pro­tect his com­pound dur­ing the antic­i­pat­ed civ­il war?

    And how has the book­ing of John East­man impact­ed these plans? Are the ongo­ing Jan 6 pros­e­cu­tions slow­ing down Hay­wood’s ‘Amer­i­can war­lord’ plans? Or speed­ing them up in antic­i­pa­tion for the next elec­tion?

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 23, 2023, 5:12 pm
  31. It might be theo­crat­ic, but it’s ‘pro-work­er’ too. At least that’s the appar­ent intend­ed spin planned from the still devel­op­ing “Project 2025” rebrand­ed ver­sion of the Sched­ule F plot. Yes, we got a new Project 2025 update. In one sense, it’s a sur­pris­ing­ly detailed update in the form of a book pub­lished by the group lay­ing out its planned agen­da. The book itself was actu­al­ly pub­lished months ago. Sur­pris­ing, in part, because it does­n’t real­ly hide the theo­crat­ic inspi­ra­tion for the doc­u­ment. It’s right there in the lan­guage, with ref­er­ences to Amer­i­c­as Judeo-Chris­t­ian foun­da­tions and alarmist cries about left-wing plots to attack chris­t­ian insti­tu­tions. And that theo­crat­ic lan­guage and agen­da is get­ting noticed. The fact that Project 2025 is all heav­i­ly orches­trat­ed by Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP) mem­bers remains unac­knowl­edged. But at least the CNP’s theoc­ra­cy is get­ting noticed.

    Much of the theo­crat­ic agen­da is focused on what we should expect at this point. Some with the kind of ‘pop­ulism’ that may not sell eas­i­ly. For exam­ple, in the For­ward writ­ten by Her­itage Foun­da­tion Pres­i­dent (and CNP mem­ber) Kevin Roberts, Roberts con­flate pornog­ra­phy with the ‘trans­gen­der ide­ol­o­gy and the sex­u­al­iza­tion of chil­dren’. He goes on to call for the out­law­ing of all pornog­ra­phy and jail­ing of those who pro­duce it. Edu­ca­tors and librar­i­ans who ‘pur­vey’ it should be reg­is­tered as sex offend­ers. As Roberts puts it in the For­ward:

    ...
    Pornog­ra­phy, man­i­fest­ed today in the omnipresent prop­a­ga­tion of trans­gen­der ide­ol­o­gy and sex­u­al­iza­tion of chil­dren, for instance, is not a polit­i­cal Gor­dian knot inex­tri­ca­bly bind­ing up dis­parate claims about free speech, prop­er­ty rights, sex­u­al lib­er­a­tion, and child wel­fare. It has no claim to First Amend­ment pro­tec­tion. Its pur­vey­ors are child preda­tors and misog­y­nis­tic exploiters of women. Their prod­uct is as addic­tive as any illic­it drug and as psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly destruc­tive as any crime. Pornog­ra­phy should be out­lawed. The peo­ple who pro­duce and dis­trib­ute it should be impris­oned. Edu­ca­tors and pub­lic librar­i­ans who pur­vey it should be classed as reg­is­tered sex o!enders. And telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and tech­nol­o­gy firms that facil­i­tate its spread should be shut­tered.
    ...

    Ban­ning all pornog­ra­phy. That’s not exact­ly pop­u­lar. Unless you’re a theo­crat. And here we’re see­ing it spun as part of ‘pro­tect­ing the chil­dren from the trans pedo threat’. Project 2025 is as much about giv­ing this agen­da an image makeover as it is about purg­ing the gov­ern­ment and soci­ety of ‘the left’. An image makeover in the form of a right­eous purge sav­ing the pub­lic from a dia­bol­i­cal left-wing plot to sub­vert fam­i­lies and destroy soci­ety. It’s not theoc­ra­cy. It’s sal­va­tion. Or as Roberts puts it:

    ...
    But the pro-fam­i­ly promis­es expressed in this book, and cen­tral to the next con­ser­v­a­tive President’s agen­da, must go much fur­ther than the tra­di­tion­al, nar­row def­i­n­i­tion of “fam­i­ly issues.” Every threat to fam­i­ly sta­bil­i­ty must be con­front­ed.
    ...

    Every threat to fam­i­ly sta­bil­i­ty must be con­front­ed. That’s pret­ty expan­sive. So we should­n’t be sur­prised to find that Roberts takes a sim­i­lar­ly expan­sive view when it comes to the pol­i­tics of abor­tion and call­ing for the next pres­i­dent to pass what­ev­er fed­er­al abor­tion ban con­gress is will­ing to allow:

    .
    ...
    Final­ly, con­ser­v­a­tives should grate­ful­ly cel­e­brate the great­est pro-fam­i­ly win in a gen­er­a­tion: over­turn­ing Roe v. Wade, a deci­sion that for five decades made a mock­ery of our Con­sti­tu­tion and facil­i­tat­ed the deaths of tens of mil­lions of unborn chil­dren. But the Dobbs deci­sion is just the begin­ning. Con­ser­v­a­tives in the states and in Wash­ing­ton, includ­ing in the next con­ser­v­a­tive Admin­is­tra­tion, should push as hard as pos­si­ble to pro­tect the unborn in every juris­dic­tion in Amer­i­ca. In par­tic­u­lar, the next con­ser­v­a­tive Pres­i­dent should work with Con­gress to enact the most robust pro­tec­tions for the unborn that Con­gress will sup­port while deploy­ing exist­ing fed­er­al pow­ers to pro­tect inno­cent life and vig­or­ous­ly com­ply­ing with statu­to­ry bans on the fed­er­al fund­ing of abor­tion. Con­ser­v­a­tives should ardent­ly pur­sue these pro-life and pro-fam­i­ly poli­cies while rec­og­niz­ing the many women who find them­selves in immense­ly di“cult and often trag­ic sit­u­a­tions and the hero­ism of every choice to become a moth­er. Alter­na­tive options to abor­tion, espe­cial­ly adop­tion, should receive fed­er­al and state sup­port.
    ...

    This is a good time to recall how Her­itage’s Vice Pres­i­dent of Domes­tic Pol­i­cy, Roger Sev­eri­no, declar­ing last Octo­ber that he wants to see “heart­beat or bet­ter for the next pres­i­den­tial can­di­date that is con­ser­v­a­tive.”, which is effec­tive­ly a call for a 6‑weeks (or less) nation­al abor­tion ban from the next GOP can­di­date. Sev­eri­no was effec­tive­ly speak­ing for the Her­itage Foun­da­tion in mak­ing that state­ment. Also recall how Sev­eri­no’s wife, Car­rie Sev­eri­no, is a CNP mem­ber too. He’s effec­tive­ly mar­ried into the group at this point. And while Roberts was as explic­it about those goals in the above pas­sage, he was pret­ty clear the pol­i­cy was ‘was many abor­tion restric­tions as they can man­aged to pass into law’. That’s the Project 2025 plat­form on abor­tion. A max­i­mal­ist posi­tion, in keep­ing with the pro­jec­t’s theo­crat­ic CNP roots.

    And then there’s the rather inter­est­ing ‘pop­ulist’ theoc­ra­cy angle we find in Chap­ter 18 the Project 2025 book. It’s the chap­ter on the Depart­ment of Labor, authored by con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer Jonathan Berry. On top of a slew of pre­dictable union-bust­ing pro­pos­als, the chap­ter con­tains a num­ber of ‘pro-fam­i­ly’ labor pro­pos­als like pro­tect­ing the Sab­bath by man­dat­ing that time and a half be paid on Sun­days. The osten­si­ble idea is to dis­cour­age employ­ment on Sun­days so more peo­ple will go to church.

    As we’re going to see, Berry actu­al­ly bor­rowed a num­ber of his ideas from Amer­i­can Com­pass, a group found­ed by con­ser­v­a­tive econ­o­mist Oren Cass, and even thanks Cass in a foot­note for all his con­tri­bu­tions to the chap­ter. Faux pop­ulism appears to be part of Cass’s own agent, hav­ing start­ed Amer­i­can Com­pass with the goal of mov­ing con­ser­vatism away from lib­er­tar­i­an­ism and toward a more ‘com­mu­ni­tar­i­an con­ser­vatism’. It’s the kind of ‘new con­ser­vatism’ that has obvi­ous poten­tial syn­er­gy with Project 2025, and sure enough there it is in their book.

    And that all brings us to anoth­er ‘fea­ture’ of Project 2025 and the CNP’s upcom­ing purge plans: Oren Cass has anoth­er big idea that he’s been pro­mot­ing to Repub­li­cans and it appears to have some very impor­tant fans. Ideas about how the US can fight Chi­nese influ­ence over US com­pa­nies. Espe­cial­ly Hol­ly­wood. Cass recent­ly called for con­gres­sion­al show tri­als for Amer­i­ca’s CEOs where they can make clear to every­one what they think of Chi­na. The idea is to have con­gress — specif­i­cal­ly, the House Select Com­mit­tee on the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty that was formed in Jan­u­ary — sub­poe­na CEOs to come to the spe­cial hear­ings and explain their views and poli­cies on Chi­na and the CCP. As Cass put it, the idea is to trans­form the com­mit­tee into a plat­form where those who are hon­est “earn wide­spread praise” and those who stay silent or lie would face “high­er rep­u­ta­tion­al costs.” Busi­ness lead­ers would be asked or sub­poe­naed to tes­ti­fy under oath about their expe­ri­ences with the CCP and what they real­ly think about Chi­na. Con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­monies under oath about what you real­ly think about the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.

    And not just one hear­ing. Lots of them. “We’re going to have a Hol­ly­wood hear­ing. We’re going to have a sports hear­ing. We’re going to have a finance hear­ing. And we’re going to kind of move our way con­sis­tent­ly through dif­fer­ent sec­tors,” Cass told Rea­son Mag­a­zine in a July inter­view we’re going to look at below. “The only per­il you’re in is if you have real­ly dumb and inde­fen­si­ble ideas, which is exact­ly how a democ­ra­cy is sup­posed to work,” he claimed. “It’s not like some kind of witch hunt project to try to embar­rass peo­ple. It’s, in a sense, quite the oppo­site. All you have to do to have a tri­umphant appear­ance is show up and say what you think.” LOL, yes, this is all the oppo­site of a witch hunt, accord­ing to Cass.

    That’s Cass’s big plan, and it sounds like the cur­rent chair of the House Select Com­mit­tee on the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, Rep. Mike Gal­lagher (R–Wis.), is on ten­ta­tive­ly board, hav­ing issued a warn­ing back in May that com­pa­nies should be pre­pared to defend their poli­cies regard­ing Chi­na.

    So if you were won­der­ing if the upcom­ing Project 2025 theo­crat­ic purge was going to include McCarthy-style hys­ter­i­cal anti-com­mu­nist witch hunts, the answer is prob­a­bly yeah, those are com­ing. At least when it comes to Chi­na. The anti-Chi­na show tri­als may not be for­mal­ly part of Project 2025 but it would pre­sum­ably be all hap­pen­ing while the rest of Project 2025 is going on. One big planned purge. And there’s no rea­son to assume so show tri­als would be lim­it­ed to Chi­na. It’s a tem­plate that could be applied to all sorts of top­ics. McCarthy-style show tri­als over Chi­na and maybe more of a Salem witch tri­al themed even for the LGBTQ/trans kid issues. The scripts write them­selves at this point. A point where the theo­crat­ic far right that has been qui­et­ly accru­ing pow­er for decades is final­ly ready to open­ly flex those mus­cles its been build­ing and bend soci­ety to its will. For the chil­dren, of course:

    MSNBC

    The right’s Project 2025 wants to make faith the gov­ern­men­t’s job
    A well-fund­ed coali­tion wants to put the Bible ahead of the Con­sti­tu­tion.

    Sept. 8, 2023, 12:02 PM CDT
    By Guthrie Graves-Fitzsim­mons, author of “Just Faith: Reclaim­ing Pro­gres­sive Chris­tian­i­ty”

    A coali­tion of far-right groups, led by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, is plan­ning for the next Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion. Project 2025 has received con­sid­er­able media atten­tion for its $22 mil­lion bud­get, for its plans to expand pres­i­den­tial pow­er over fed­er­al agen­cies, and for spe­cif­ic poli­cies, like rolling back envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions.

    How­ev­er, the plan’s theo­crat­ic ele­ments have gone unscru­ti­nized.

    Project 2025 pub­lished a book of pol­i­cy pro­pos­als, titled “Man­date for Lead­er­ship: The Con­ser­v­a­tive Promise,” for the next Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion. Her­itage Foun­da­tion Pres­i­dent Kevin Roberts opens the book by pri­or­i­tiz­ing the secur­ing of “our God-giv­en indi­vid­ual rights to live freely” against a “woke” threat. “Today the Left is threat­en­ing the tax-exempt sta­tus of church­es and char­i­ties that reject woke pro­gres­sivism,” he claims with­out evi­dence. “They will soon turn to Chris­t­ian schools and clubs with the same total­i­tar­i­an intent.”

    Roberts’ view that pro­gres­sives are out to get Chris­tians sets the tone for indi­vid­ual chap­ters on var­i­ous fed­er­al agen­cies. While anti-abor­tion and anti-LGBTQ poli­cies run through­out the book, sev­er­al pol­i­cy areas stand out.

    ...

    Roger Sev­eri­no’s chap­ter on the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices urges the next con­ser­v­a­tive pres­i­dent to “main­tain a bib­li­cal­ly based, social science–reinforced def­i­n­i­tion of mar­riage and fam­i­ly.” Sev­eri­no is con­cerned that fed­er­al pro­grams will be sub­ject­ed to “non­re­li­gious def­i­n­i­tions of mar­riage and fam­i­ly as put for­ward by the recent­ly enact­ed Respect for Mar­riage Act.”

    The Respect for Mar­riage Act, passed last year by Con­gress with strong bipar­ti­san sup­port, requires the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and states to rec­og­nize same-sex and inter­ra­cial mar­riages. The law is not reli­gious or non­re­li­gious; it is a con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly enact­ed law of the Unit­ed States.

    Project 2025 appears to call on the next Repub­li­can pres­i­dent to draw dis­tinc­tions between parts of the law as “reli­gious” and “non­re­li­gious.” The Bible is not a high­er author­i­ty than laws passed by Con­gress, and far-right groups do not have to like Amer­i­can laws to respect that those laws are not over­ruled by their per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible.

    Anoth­er star­tling sec­tion by Sev­eri­no con­cerns Covid-19 poli­cies, oppo­si­tion to which has gal­va­nized con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians. He crit­i­cizes the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Prevention’s actions and won­ders “how much risk mit­i­ga­tion is worth the price of shut­ting down church­es on the holi­est day of the Chris­t­ian cal­en­dar and far beyond as hap­pened in 2020? What is the prop­er bal­ance of lives saved ver­sus souls saved?”

    That’s not a tough ques­tion to answer: The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment does not need to wor­ry about sav­ing souls.

    Mean­while in his chap­ter on the U.S. Depart­ment of Labor, Jonathan Berry frames his pro­pos­als as part of divine his­to­ry. “The Judeo-Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion, stretch­ing back to Gen­e­sis, has always rec­og­nized fruit­ful work as inte­gral to human dig­ni­ty, as ser­vice to God, neigh­bor, and fam­i­ly,” he writes, while claim­ing the Biden admin­is­tra­tion “has been hos­tile to peo­ple of faith.”

    Berry wor­ries that “God ordained the Sab­bath as a day of rest, and until very recent­ly the Judeo-Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion sought to hon­or that man­date by moral and legal reg­u­la­tion of work on that day” and blames con­sumerism and sec­u­lar­ism for the decline in Sab­bath obser­vance.

    But he’s not con­tent to rem­i­nisce about the good ol’ days when Amer­i­cans went to church. He wants the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to push peo­ple back to church, and calls on Con­gress to “encour­age com­mu­nal rest by amend­ing the Fair Labor Stan­dards Act (FLSA) to require that work­ers be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sab­bath.” Berry argues this would lead to high­er costs that would reduce work on the Sab­bath.

    Con­ser­v­a­tives often frame their pol­i­cy cru­sades as part of an effort to expand “reli­gious free­dom,” a nar­ra­tive deployed across the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to gut civ­il rights pro­tec­tions. But now “Project 2025” is say­ing the qui­et part out loud: Right-wing groups do not want to ensure all Amer­i­cans have reli­gious free­dom, but want to impose con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian views on our reli­gious­ly-diverse coun­try.

    Insti­tut­ing “bib­li­cal­ly based” poli­cies, sav­ing souls and induc­ing Sab­bath obser­vance con­sti­tute a direct attack on reli­gious free­dom, a free­dom guar­an­teed by the First Amend­ment, which keeps the gov­ern­ment out of reli­gion.

    In the chap­ter on the U.S. Depart­ment of State, Kiron K. Skin­ner writes: “Spe­cial atten­tion must be paid to chal­lenges of reli­gious free­dom, espe­cial­ly the sta­tus of Mid­dle East­ern Chris­tians and oth­er reli­gious minori­ties, as well as the human traf­fick­ing endem­ic to the region.”

    There are cer­tain­ly inter­na­tion­al reli­gious free­dom issues that the pres­i­dent should pay atten­tion to, but our abil­i­ty to advo­cate for reli­gious free­dom abroad is enabled by our respect for peo­ple of all faiths — and non­re­li­gious peo­ple — at home. A U.S. pres­i­dent who enacts “bib­li­cal­ly based” domes­tic poli­cies has lit­tle to say to heads of gov­ern­ment abroad who pur­sue their own reli­gion-based poli­cies.

    Con­cerns about poli­cies of this kind aren’t only about the pos­si­ble return of for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump to office — this is about the next Repub­li­can pres­i­dent, who­ev­er it may be, who push­es Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism. Project 2025 is pro­vid­ing a blue­print for any Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion.

    ...

    —————

    “The right’s Project 2025 wants to make faith the gov­ern­men­t’s job” By Guthrie Graves-Fitzsim­mons; MSNBC; 09/08/2023

    “How­ev­er, the plan’s theo­crat­ic ele­ments have gone unscru­ti­nized.”

    Yeah, like vir­tu­al­ly all the of the CNP’s projects, the theo­crat­ic ele­ment has gone unscru­ti­nized. In part because any men­tion of the CNP’s role in these mat­ter is almost always glossed over or ignored entire­ly. Despite all the reminders that this is a CNP-guid­ed agen­da with the ulti­mate goal of mak­ing the CNP’s theo­crat­ic agen­da law, like the fact that Her­itage Foun­da­tion Pres­i­dent Kevin Roberts is a mem­ber of the CNP, along with Roger Sev­eri­no’s wife Car­rie Sev­eri­no. Find­ing out that Project 2025 has theo­crat­ic agen­da behind is kind of like dis­cov­er­ing that water is wet at this point. So it should come as no sur­prise to dis­cov­er that the new­ly pub­lished Project 2025 pol­i­cy book advo­cates for cre­at­ing a legal dis­tinc­tion between “reli­gious” and “non­re­li­gious” parts of the law. Con­flat­ing reli­gious doc­trine with the law is a part of the long-term agen­da:

    ...
    Project 2025 pub­lished a book of pol­i­cy pro­pos­als, titled “Man­date for Lead­er­ship: The Con­ser­v­a­tive Promise,” for the next Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion. Her­itage Foun­da­tion Pres­i­dent Kevin Roberts opens the book by pri­or­i­tiz­ing the secur­ing of “our God-giv­en indi­vid­ual rights to live freely” against a “woke” threat. “Today the Left is threat­en­ing the tax-exempt sta­tus of church­es and char­i­ties that reject woke pro­gres­sivism,” he claims with­out evi­dence. “They will soon turn to Chris­t­ian schools and clubs with the same total­i­tar­i­an intent.”

    Roberts’ view that pro­gres­sives are out to get Chris­tians sets the tone for indi­vid­ual chap­ters on var­i­ous fed­er­al agen­cies. While anti-abor­tion and anti-LGBTQ poli­cies run through­out the book, sev­er­al pol­i­cy areas stand out.

    ...

    Roger Sev­eri­no’s chap­ter on the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices urges the next con­ser­v­a­tive pres­i­dent to “main­tain a bib­li­cal­ly based, social science–reinforced def­i­n­i­tion of mar­riage and fam­i­ly.” Sev­eri­no is con­cerned that fed­er­al pro­grams will be sub­ject­ed to “non­re­li­gious def­i­n­i­tions of mar­riage and fam­i­ly as put for­ward by the recent­ly enact­ed Respect for Mar­riage Act.”

    The Respect for Mar­riage Act, passed last year by Con­gress with strong bipar­ti­san sup­port, requires the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and states to rec­og­nize same-sex and inter­ra­cial mar­riages. The law is not reli­gious or non­re­li­gious; it is a con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly enact­ed law of the Unit­ed States.

    Project 2025 appears to call on the next Repub­li­can pres­i­dent to draw dis­tinc­tions between parts of the law as “reli­gious” and “non­re­li­gious.” The Bible is not a high­er author­i­ty than laws passed by Con­gress, and far-right groups do not have to like Amer­i­can laws to respect that those laws are not over­ruled by their per­son­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible.

    ...

    Con­cerns about poli­cies of this kind aren’t only about the pos­si­ble return of for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump to office — this is about the next Repub­li­can pres­i­dent, who­ev­er it may be, who push­es Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism. Project 2025 is pro­vid­ing a blue­print for any Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion.
    ...

    But it’s in the chap­ter on the U.S. Depart­ment of Labor, authored by Jonathan Berry, where we find this very inter­est­ing ear­ly indi­ca­tion of how this theo­crat­ic agen­da is going to be sold to the broad­er pub­lic: Berry called for paid time and a half specif­i­cal­ly on Sun­days, osten­si­bly to dis­cour­age employ­ment on Sun­days and more peo­ple going to church. It’s like a sug­ar-coat­ed first step towards reori­en­ta­tion US towards spe­cial­ly bib­li­cal­ly-based laws:

    ...
    Mean­while in his chap­ter on the U.S. Depart­ment of Labor, Jonathan Berry frames his pro­pos­als as part of divine his­to­ry. “The Judeo-Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion, stretch­ing back to Gen­e­sis, has always rec­og­nized fruit­ful work as inte­gral to human dig­ni­ty, as ser­vice to God, neigh­bor, and fam­i­ly,” he writes, while claim­ing the Biden admin­is­tra­tion “has been hos­tile to peo­ple of faith.”

    Berry wor­ries that “God ordained the Sab­bath as a day of rest, and until very recent­ly the Judeo-Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion sought to hon­or that man­date by moral and legal reg­u­la­tion of work on that day” and blames con­sumerism and sec­u­lar­ism for the decline in Sab­bath obser­vance.

    But he’s not con­tent to rem­i­nisce about the good ol’ days when Amer­i­cans went to church. He wants the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to push peo­ple back to church, and calls on Con­gress to “encour­age com­mu­nal rest by amend­ing the Fair Labor Stan­dards Act (FLSA) to require that work­ers be paid time and a half for hours worked on the Sab­bath.” Berry argues this would lead to high­er costs that would reduce work on the Sab­bath.

    Con­ser­v­a­tives often frame their pol­i­cy cru­sades as part of an effort to expand “reli­gious free­dom,” a nar­ra­tive deployed across the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to gut civ­il rights pro­tec­tions. But now “Project 2025” is say­ing the qui­et part out loud: Right-wing groups do not want to ensure all Amer­i­cans have reli­gious free­dom, but want to impose con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian views on our reli­gious­ly-diverse coun­try.

    Insti­tut­ing “bib­li­cal­ly based” poli­cies, sav­ing souls and induc­ing Sab­bath obser­vance con­sti­tute a direct attack on reli­gious free­dom, a free­dom guar­an­teed by the First Amend­ment, which keeps the gov­ern­ment out of reli­gion.
    ...

    A for­mal gov­ern­men­tal embrace of the Sab­bath spun as ‘pro-God and pro-work­er.’ That’s the spin on the Project 2025 union-bust­ing labor agen­da that Jonathan Berry appears to have worked out. Spin that, as the fol­low­ing Moth­er Jones arti­cle points out, Berry appears to have bor­rowed from a par­tic­u­lar source: Amer­i­can Com­pass, a think-tank formed in 2020 by con­ser­v­a­tive econ­o­mist Oren Cass, with a goal of reori­ent­ing the GOP away from lib­er­tar­i­an­ism and toward a more com­mu­ni­tar­i­an con­ser­vatism. A sup­pos­ed­ly more work­er friend­ly com­mu­ni­tar­i­an con­ser­vatism. So when we find some­one like Cass — a fig­ure already push­ing a kind of ‘kinder, gen­tler’ com­mu­ni­tar­i­an con­ser­vatism polit­i­cal brand — behind the Project 2025 labor pro­pos­al, it’s a hint that we should prob­a­bly expect a broad­er ‘anti-lib­er­tar­i­an/pro-com­mu­ni­ties-of-faith’ pati­na used in the sell­ing of this theo­crat­ic agen­da:

    Moth­er Jones

    Trump Loy­al­ists Lay Out Plan for Sec­ond Term: Gut Work­er Pro­tec­tions

    A new­ly released “bat­tle plan” reveals the faux-pop­ulist labor agen­da if Trump wins in 2024.

    Noah Lanard
    August 1, 2023

    If Don­ald Trump wins the White House in 2024, loy­al­ists have writ­ten a bat­tle plan for how to change labor laws and reg­u­la­tions: make it hard­er for work­ers to form unions, make it eas­i­er for com­pa­nies to clas­si­fy employ­ees as inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors, and ban the gov­ern­ment from col­lect­ing race-based employ­ment data in the name of stop­ping anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suits. These poli­cies would be com­bined with a grab bag of cul­ture war items—like a push for com­pa­nies to close on the Sabbath—so that Repub­li­cans could por­tray them­selves as a tra­di­tion­al­ist, but still pro-work­er alter­na­tive to Democ­rats.

    ...

    After that’s accom­plished, the plan would be for a new crop of Trump bureau­crats to imple­ment the poli­cies out­lined in the agen­da released by Project 2025 ear­li­er this year. “Project 2025 is not a white paper,” Paul Dans, the group’s direc­tor,told Politi­co last week. “We are not tin­ker­ing at the edges. We are writ­ing a bat­tle plan, and we are mar­shal­ing our forces.”

    ...

    The 37-page chap­ter on the Depart­ment of Labor and relat­ed agen­cies has received hard­ly any atten­tion. It reveals just how lit­tle recent Repub­li­can pos­tur­ing about becom­ing a pro-work­er par­ty is trans­lat­ing into pol­i­cy, despite Sen. Mar­co Rubio (R‑Fla.) and oth­ers align­ing them­selves with a New Right that occa­sion­al­ly says nice things about union dri­ves. The Project 2025 labor agen­da is the same-old union-bust­ing, with a bit more anti-woke, pro-Chris­t­ian rhetoric.

    The labor sec­tion was writ­ten by Jonathan Berry, who led the Labor Department’s reg­u­la­to­ry office under Trump. Dur­ing that time, he helped deny guar­an­teed over­time pay to mil­lions of peo­ple and made it hard­er for work­ers to hold com­pa­nies like McDonald’s liable for actions tak­en by indi­vid­ual stores, allow­ing com­pa­nies to hide behind the pro­tec­tions afford­ed to fran­chis­es. Berry is a fair­ly typ­i­cal GOP insid­er: He attend­ed the 2000 GOP con­ven­tion as a page, served as the head of Colum­bia Law School Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety (it was award­ed chap­ter of the year under his lead­er­ship), and clerked for Supreme Court Jus­tice Samuel Ali­to after a stint in cor­po­rate law.

    Berry begins the Project 2025 chap­ter on labor right­eous­ly, not­ing that “Judeo-Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion, stretch­ing back to Gen­e­sis, has always rec­og­nized fruit­ful work as inte­gral to human dig­ni­ty.” The ene­my, in his telling, is a “mas­sive admin­is­tra­tive state” that is impos­ing a left-wing agen­da that favors “human resources bureau­cra­cies, cli­mate-change activists, and union boss­es” over ordi­nary work­ers. The Biden Labor Depart­ment and Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board, which are the most pro-union in decades, are por­trayed as uni­form­ly bad.

    The first sec­tions have lit­tle to do with labor pol­i­cy as tra­di­tion­al­ly under­stood. Instead, they focus on how a Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion and Con­gress could block crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, lim­it anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suits, and pro­mote pro-life poli­cies in the work­place. Anoth­er buck­et the­o­ret­i­cal­ly focus­es on pro­tect­ing fam­i­lies. As part of that, Berry calls on Con­gress to pass the Work­ing Fam­i­lies Flex­i­bil­i­ty Act, a Repub­li­can bill that labor advo­cates oppose because it would let employ­ers pro­vide comp time instead of time-and-a-half over­time pay.

    In a sim­i­lar vein, the plan calls for rein­stat­ing a Trump-era rule that made it eas­i­er to clas­si­fy peo­ple as inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors who lack many of the pro­tec­tions enjoyed by employ­ees. Berry labels this plan, which the Eco­nom­ic Pol­i­cy Insti­tute esti­mat­ed would cost work­ers more than $3 bil­lion per year, a part of “Mak­ing Fam­i­ly-Sus­tain­ing Work Acces­si­ble.”

    It takes 19 pages for Berry to address the role of unions. The title of the first sec­tion, “Non-Union Work­er Voice and Rep­re­sen­ta­tion,” gives the game away. The topline rec­om­men­da­tion is to pass the Team­work for Employ­ees and Man­agers Act intro­duced by Sen. Mar­co Rubio (R‑Fla.). The bill would sig­nif­i­cant­ly weak­en a sec­tion of the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act that bans com­pa­ny-con­trolled unions. In exchange, work­ers would get to be part of “employ­ee involve­ment orga­ni­za­tions” (whose rec­om­men­da­tions com­pa­nies would be free to ignore) and gain one non-vot­ing seat on the boards of big com­pa­nies. The TEAM Act is a rehash of a bill by the same name that Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton vetoed near­ly three decades ago fol­low­ing strong oppo­si­tion from the labor move­ment.

    At the same time, the plan would make it hard­er to form tra­di­tion­al unions. Project 2025 asks Con­gress to ban card check, the process by which a union can be estab­lished if a major­i­ty of employ­ees sign cards in favor of union­iza­tion and an employ­er vol­un­tar­i­ly rec­og­nizes the union. In 2016, the Oba­ma Labor Depart­ment issued a rule that required employ­ers and con­sul­tants to dis­close anti-union activ­i­ty. Trump’s DOL repealed the rule; Project 2025 pre­emp­tive­ly asks the DOL to re-repeal it if the Biden admin­is­tra­tion rein­states it.

    When it comes to col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ments, Berry asks Con­gress to amend the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act so that fed­er­al laws and reg­u­la­tions can be set aside if both sides agree to do so as part of a com­pro­mise. As an exam­ple, Berry says work­ers could for­go some over­time pay in exchange for get­ting more pre­dictable sched­ules. The hypo­thet­i­cal is reveal­ing. It imag­ines employ­ers agree­ing to some­thing they should already be doing—providing work­ers with rea­son­able notice for upcom­ing shifts—in exchange for get­ting out of a long­stand­ing legal oblig­a­tion.

    Through­out, the plan is heavy on polic­ing that flows in one direc­tion. Berry calls for inves­ti­gat­ing work­er cen­ters, and increas­ing fund­ing for the Labor office that mon­i­tors union finances, but cut­ting the department’s over­all bud­get. Project 2025 calls for the Occu­pa­tion­al Health and Safe­ty Admin­is­tra­tion to get no new pow­er or fund­ing.

    One of the few poli­cies that could rea­son­ably be con­strued as pro-work­er in the doc­u­ment would require manda­to­ry over­time on Sun­day, unless some­one observed the Sab­bath at a dif­fer­ent time. As Berry has explained, the goal is not to increase pay for work­ers but to push more busi­ness­es to stay closed on the Chris­t­ian day of rest.

    Anoth­er asks Con­gress to elim­i­nate the “BA box” on job post­ings that require appli­cants to have bachelor’s degrees. That accom­plish­es two goals at once: It pokes at the col­lege grad­u­ates who have increas­ing­ly aban­doned the Repub­li­can par­ty and trolls pro­gres­sives who’ve pushed to “ban the box” ask­ing about an applicant’s crim­i­nal his­to­ry. There’s lit­tle rea­son to believe it would have much effect on who com­pa­nies hire. (The move­ment to “ban the box” is a pol­i­cy still debat­ed among lib­er­als.)

    Like many of the pro­pos­als, the idea for the “BA box” came from Amer­i­can Com­pass, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank for which Berry serves as an advis­er. The group was found­ed by Oren Cass as part of an effort to reori­ent the Repub­li­can par­ty away from lib­er­tar­i­an­ism and toward a more com­mu­ni­tar­i­an con­ser­vatism It was found­ed as part of Cass’ evo­lu­tion from being a man­age­ment con­sul­tant at Bain & Com­pa­ny and a Mitt Rom­ney cam­paign pol­i­cy advis­er to a pro­po­nent of a con­ser­v­a­tive labor move­ment. (In an author’s note, Berry thanks Cass and Rachel Gres­zler, a Her­itage Foun­da­tion senior fel­low who has been a Repub­li­can wit­ness at Sen­ate hear­ings orga­nized by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.) on anti-union prac­tices by Ama­zon and Star­bucks.)

    Cass’ most impor­tant break with Repub­li­can labor ortho­doxy has been to call for sec­toral bar­gain­ing in the Unit­ed States. That would allow work­ers to nego­ti­ate col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ments that cov­er entire indus­tries. There are many rea­sons to be skep­ti­cal of what sec­toral bar­gain­ing would look like in the hands of Cass and his asso­ciates. Still, the idea at least has the poten­tial to be a pos­i­tive shift for work­ers. The Project 2025 agen­da makes no men­tion of it.

    ————

    “Trump Loy­al­ists Lay Out Plan for Sec­ond Term: Gut Work­er Pro­tec­tions” by Noah Lanard; Moth­er Jones; 08/01/2023

    “If Don­ald Trump wins the White House in 2024, loy­al­ists have writ­ten a bat­tle plan for how to change labor laws and reg­u­la­tions: make it hard­er for work­ers to form unions, make it eas­i­er for com­pa­nies to clas­si­fy employ­ees as inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors, and ban the gov­ern­ment from col­lect­ing race-based employ­ment data in the name of stop­ping anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suits. These poli­cies would be com­bined with a grab bag of cul­ture war items—like a push for com­pa­nies to close on the Sabbath—so that Repub­li­cans could por­tray them­selves as a tra­di­tion­al­ist, but still pro-work­er alter­na­tive to Democ­rats.

    Cul­ture war to cov­er for the oli­garchic pow­er grab. It’s not a new strat­e­gy. But with the pro­pos­al to push com­pa­nies to close on the Sab­bath, we’re see­ing how the GOP’s long-stand­ing reliance on con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian-themed cul­ture war top­ics is being retooled for the planned Project 2025 polit­i­cal blitzkrieg. Or as Paul Dans puts it, “We are not tin­ker­ing at the edges. We are writ­ing a bat­tle plan, and we are mar­shal­ing our forces.” Spin­ning theoc­ra­cy as ‘pro-work­er’ is part of that bat­tle plan:

    ...
    After that’s accom­plished, the plan would be for a new crop of Trump bureau­crats to imple­ment the poli­cies out­lined in the agen­da released by Project 2025 ear­li­er this year. “Project 2025 is not a white paper,” Paul Dans, the group’s direc­tor,told Politi­co last week. “We are not tin­ker­ing at the edges. We are writ­ing a bat­tle plan, and we are mar­shal­ing our forces.”
    ...

    Yes, it’s going to be a ‘pro-labor’ bat­tle plan that focus­es declar­ing ene­mies of a “mas­sive admin­is­tra­tive state” that is impos­ing a left-wing agen­da that favors “human resources bureau­cra­cies, cli­mate-change activists, and union boss­es” over ordi­nary work­ers. And also busts unions:

    ...
    The 37-page chap­ter on the Depart­ment of Labor and relat­ed agen­cies has received hard­ly any atten­tion. It reveals just how lit­tle recent Repub­li­can pos­tur­ing about becom­ing a pro-work­er par­ty is trans­lat­ing into pol­i­cy, despite Sen. Mar­co Rubio (R‑Fla.) and oth­ers align­ing them­selves with a New Right that occa­sion­al­ly says nice things about union dri­ves. The Project 2025 labor agen­da is the same-old union-bust­ing, with a bit more anti-woke, pro-Chris­t­ian rhetoric.

    The labor sec­tion was writ­ten by Jonathan Berry, who led the Labor Department’s reg­u­la­to­ry office under Trump. Dur­ing that time, he helped deny guar­an­teed over­time pay to mil­lions of peo­ple and made it hard­er for work­ers to hold com­pa­nies like McDonald’s liable for actions tak­en by indi­vid­ual stores, allow­ing com­pa­nies to hide behind the pro­tec­tions afford­ed to fran­chis­es. Berry is a fair­ly typ­i­cal GOP insid­er: He attend­ed the 2000 GOP con­ven­tion as a page, served as the head of Colum­bia Law School Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety (it was award­ed chap­ter of the year under his lead­er­ship), and clerked for Supreme Court Jus­tice Samuel Ali­to after a stint in cor­po­rate law.

    Berry begins the Project 2025 chap­ter on labor right­eous­ly, not­ing that “Judeo-Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion, stretch­ing back to Gen­e­sis, has always rec­og­nized fruit­ful work as inte­gral to human dig­ni­ty.” The ene­my, in his telling, is a “mas­sive admin­is­tra­tive state” that is impos­ing a left-wing agen­da that favors “human resources bureau­cra­cies, cli­mate-change activists, and union boss­es” over ordi­nary work­ers. The Biden Labor Depart­ment and Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board, which are the most pro-union in decades, are por­trayed as uni­form­ly bad.

    ...

    It takes 19 pages for Berry to address the role of unions. The title of the first sec­tion, “Non-Union Work­er Voice and Rep­re­sen­ta­tion,” gives the game away. The topline rec­om­men­da­tion is to pass the Team­work for Employ­ees and Man­agers Act intro­duced by Sen. Mar­co Rubio (R‑Fla.). The bill would sig­nif­i­cant­ly weak­en a sec­tion of the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act that bans com­pa­ny-con­trolled unions. In exchange, work­ers would get to be part of “employ­ee involve­ment orga­ni­za­tions” (whose rec­om­men­da­tions com­pa­nies would be free to ignore) and gain one non-vot­ing seat on the boards of big com­pa­nies. The TEAM Act is a rehash of a bill by the same name that Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton vetoed near­ly three decades ago fol­low­ing strong oppo­si­tion from the labor move­ment.
    ...

    And then we get to the fig­ure who has inspired many of these ‘pro-labor’ pro­pos­als: Oren Cass, founder of Amer­i­can Com­pass. Berry even thanks Cass in a foot­note (at the bot­tom of page 36) of his Project 2025 chap­ter on labor:

    ...
    Like many of the pro­pos­als, the idea for the “BA box” came from Amer­i­can Com­pass, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank for which Berry serves as an advis­er. The group was found­ed by Oren Cass as part of an effort to reori­ent the Repub­li­can par­ty away from lib­er­tar­i­an­ism and toward a more com­mu­ni­tar­i­an con­ser­vatism It was found­ed as part of Cass’ evo­lu­tion from being a man­age­ment con­sul­tant at Bain & Com­pa­ny and a Mitt Rom­ney cam­paign pol­i­cy advis­er to a pro­po­nent of a con­ser­v­a­tive labor move­ment. (In an author’s note, Berry thanks Cass and Rachel Gres­zler, a Her­itage Foun­da­tion senior fel­low who has been a Repub­li­can wit­ness at Sen­ate hear­ings orga­nized by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.) on anti-union prac­tices by Ama­zon and Star­bucks.)

    Cass’ most impor­tant break with Repub­li­can labor ortho­doxy has been to call for sec­toral bar­gain­ing in the Unit­ed States. That would allow work­ers to nego­ti­ate col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ments that cov­er entire indus­tries. There are many rea­sons to be skep­ti­cal of what sec­toral bar­gain­ing would look like in the hands of Cass and his asso­ciates. Still, the idea at least has the poten­tial to be a pos­i­tive shift for work­ers. The Project 2025 agen­da makes no men­tion of it.
    ...

    So the founder of Amer­i­can Com­pass — a group set up to reori­ent the Repub­li­can par­ty away from lib­er­tar­i­an­ism and toward a more com­mu­ni­tar­i­an con­ser­vatism — is the inspi­ra­tion for at least part of the Project 2025 agen­da. It’s the kind of detail that rais­es a broad­er ques­tion giv­en: is Project 2025 intend­ed to purge the Repub­li­can Par­ty of its non-theo­crat­ic lib­er­tar­i­an wing too? It’s clear­ly a very ambi­tious project. But is it that ambi­tious? It’s the kind of ques­tion that under­scores the often con­tra­dic­to­ry rela­tion­ship between lib­er­tar­i­ans and author­i­tar­i­an­ism.

    And that brings us to the fol­low­ing excerpt from a rather inter­est­ing Rea­son Mag­a­zine opin­ion piece pub­lished back in July. A piece crit­i­ciz­ing anoth­er big plan Oren Cass has in mind with a dis­tinct­ly non-lib­er­tar­i­an bent. A bat­tle plan to wage war on Chi­na’s influ­ence over US com­pa­nies. In par­tic­u­lar, influ­ence over Hol­ly­wood. What’s the big plan? McCarthy-style con­gres­sion­al hear­ings, pow­ered by sub­poe­nas. The idea being that US CEO will be sub­poe­naed to appear before Con­gress and explain their poli­cies towards Chi­na, with a focus on pub­lic ridicule for the CEOs who don’t give an ade­quate­ly anti-Chi­na stance. Or as Cass put it, a solu­tion to “re-nor­mal­ize free speech,” is to “raise the rep­u­ta­tion­al stakes by cre­at­ing a high-pro­file forum that embar­rass­es peo­ple who toe the CCP line.” New McCarthy Hear­ings. That’s Cass’s big plan.

    And while we haven’t yet heard about Hol­ly­wood-style con­gres­sion­al hear­ings as part of the Project 2025 agen­da, it’s hard to ignore the obvi­ous syn­er­gy. Project 2025 is all about cre­at­ing a kind of sys­temic shock to both gov­ern­ment and soci­ety. To purge cer­tain ele­ments out of polite soci­ety. An agen­da that almost screams for con­gres­sion­al show tri­als. So with Cass already influ­ence Project 2025’s big plans, we have to ask: are those big plans going to include con­gres­sion­al show tri­als too?:

    Rea­son

    The Solu­tion to Chi­nese Cen­sor­ship Is Not Show Hear­ings

    Gov­ern­ment bul­ly­ing won’t fix cen­sor­ship caused by gov­ern­ment bul­ly­ing.

    Jonas Du | 7.9.2023 6:00 AM

    Amer­i­can pub­lic fig­ures and cor­po­ra­tions are increas­ing­ly self-cen­sor­ing to please the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (CCP). One con­ser­v­a­tive advo­cate wants Con­gress to fight back by drag­ging busi­ness lead­ers and oth­ers to Wash­ing­ton, D.C., for pub­lic hear­ings.

    But Chi­na’s gov­ern­ment bul­ly­ing can’t be fixed by U.S. gov­ern­ment bul­ly­ing.

    Fear­ing loss of access to the Chi­nese mar­ket, com­pa­nies rou­tine­ly avoid speech that may anger the CCP. For exam­ple, an inves­tiga­tive report from the free speech group PEN Amer­i­ca revealed that Hol­ly­wood stu­dios write and pro­duce with CCP guide­lines in mind in hopes of retain­ing access to its $2.46 bil­lion box-office mar­ket.

    From 2016 to 2021, the Swedish Nation­al Chi­na Cen­tre com­piled data on for­eign busi­ness­es in Chi­na from Eng­lish and Chi­nese lan­guage news sites, com­pa­ny state­ments, and social media posts and found that Chi­nese con­sumers rou­tine­ly boy­cott com­pa­nies that con­tra­dict CCP doc­trine. More than 80 per­cent of the com­pa­nies that con­sumers boy­cotted for vio­lat­ing Chi­nese ter­ri­to­r­i­al claims, such as sov­er­eign­ty over Tai­wan, Tibet, and Hong Kong, issued apolo­gies in response.

    Actors, sports offi­cials, and oth­er pub­lic fig­ures also reg­u­lar­ly apol­o­gize to Chi­na and self-cen­sor when they offend the CCP. In 2019, Hous­ton Rock­ets gen­er­al man­ag­er Daryl Morey tweet­ed his sup­port for Hong Kong pro­test­ers, cost­ing the NBA hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in deals and lead­ing Chi­nese broad­cast­ers to can­cel broad­casts. The league described the com­ment as “regret­table” and LeBron James said Morey “was­n’t edu­cat­ed on the sit­u­a­tion,” while Morey apol­o­gized for “offend­ing or mis­un­der­stand­ing” Chi­nese fans. In 2021, actor John Cena apol­o­gized for call­ing Tai­wan a coun­try on social media while film­ing Fast & Furi­ous 9. That same year, JPMor­gan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon apol­o­gized after jok­ing that his com­pa­ny would out­last the CCP, stat­ing that “it’s nev­er right to joke” about anoth­er coun­try.

    The con­sis­tent self-cen­sor­ship U.S. com­pa­nies and pub­lic fig­ures engage in to appease an author­i­tar­i­an regime led Oren Cass, founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the con­ser­v­a­tive think tank Amer­i­can Com­pass, to argue that Con­gress should inter­vene. Cass sees Chi­na’s eco­nom­ic influ­ence as under­min­ing the Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of free speech.

    “The pur­suit of prof­it often calls for kow­tow­ing to the CCP. As a result, Amer­i­can movie stu­dios and sports leagues self-cen­sor in keep­ing with the CCP’s preferences…and Amer­i­can busi­ness lead­ers fall over them­selves apol­o­giz­ing for any pos­si­ble slight,” Cass writes in a recent pol­i­cy paper, A Hard Break from Chi­na. “Amer­i­cans are most­ly obliv­i­ous to the real­i­ty that they are see­ing only what the CCP will allow, except when the occa­sion­al mis­step by a star or exec­u­tive leads to grov­el­ing.”

    One solu­tion to “re-nor­mal­ize free speech,” Cass argues, is to “raise the rep­u­ta­tion­al stakes by cre­at­ing a high-pro­file forum that embar­rass­es peo­ple who toe the CCP line.” Enter the House Select Com­mit­tee on the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.

    Cass’ pro­pos­al seeks to trans­form the com­mit­tee into a plat­form where those who are hon­est “earn wide­spread praise” and those who stay silent or lie would face “high­er rep­u­ta­tion­al costs.” Busi­ness lead­ers would be asked or sub­poe­naed to tes­ti­fy under oath about their expe­ri­ences with the CCP and what they real­ly think about Chi­na.

    “We’re going to have a Hol­ly­wood hear­ing. We’re going to have a sports hear­ing. We’re going to have a finance hear­ing. And we’re going to kind of move our way con­sis­tent­ly through dif­fer­ent sec­tors,” Cass tells Rea­son, argu­ing that the prospect of pub­lic humil­i­a­tion would encour­age exec­u­tives to stop self-cen­sor­ing.

    “The only per­il you’re in is if you have real­ly dumb and inde­fen­si­ble ideas, which is exact­ly how a democ­ra­cy is sup­posed to work,” Cass says. “It’s not like some kind of witch hunt project to try to embar­rass peo­ple. It’s, in a sense, quite the oppo­site. All you have to do to have a tri­umphant appear­ance is show up and say what you think.”

    Oth­er crit­ics of Chi­na’s influ­ence strong­ly dis­agree. Hav­ing a House com­mit­tee ques­tion busi­ness lead­ers “is not a good step,” Angeli Datt, PEN Amer­i­ca’s Chi­na research and advo­ca­cy lead, tells Rea­son. “We can’t counter Chi­nese gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship or restric­tions on free expres­sion by restrict­ing free expres­sion. We have to show that with­in a democ­ra­cy and with­in the con­fines and prin­ci­ples that we believe in—democratic norms and free expression—that there’s ways to put pres­sure and expose and ulti­mate­ly shame com­pa­nies into not mak­ing cen­sor­ship deci­sions.”

    Cass, who sees his pro­pos­al as a coun­ter­bal­ance to the CCP’s cen­sor­ship pres­sures, denies that the com­mit­tee would have its own chill­ing effect on inter­na­tion­al busi­ness rela­tions. “What’s coer­cive about the sub­poe­na?” Cass says. “The only thing you’re being asked to do is, again, say what you actu­al­ly think.”

    The House Select Com­mit­tee on the CCP, formed in Jan­u­ary and chaired by Rep. Mike Gal­lagher (R–Wis.), has not sum­moned any busi­ness lead­ers or celebri­ties to speak about Chi­nese cen­sor­ship. How­ev­er, when asked at a U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce con­fer­ence in May if the com­mit­tee would seek tes­ti­mo­ny from busi­ness exec­u­tives, Gal­lagher said “Com­pa­nies should be pre­pared to defend their invest­ment strat­e­gy in Chi­na, their man­u­fac­tur­ing pres­ence in Chi­na,” accord­ing to The Wall Street Jour­nal. “My goal is not to have some sort of bomb-throw­ing viral moment,” he added.

    The com­mit­tee fol­lows sev­er­al leg­isla­tive efforts to curb CCP-induced cen­sor­ship. In 2019 and again in 2021, a bipar­ti­san group of sen­a­tors intro­duced a bill that would have set up the Chi­na Cen­sor­ship Mon­i­tor and Action Group, an inter­a­gency task force ded­i­cat­ed to report­ing on CCP-relat­ed free expres­sion con­cerns. In May 2020, Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) intro­duced the SCRIPT Act which would block fed­er­al agen­cies from assist­ing pro­duc­tions that alter con­tent for CCP cen­sors. In Feb­ru­ary 2022, Rep. Mark Green (R–Tenn.) intro­duced the SCREEN Act, which would have a sim­i­lar effect.

    Their pro­pos­als touch on an under­ly­ing irony of Amer­i­can con­cerns about Chi­nese soft pow­er. As PEN Amer­i­ca not­ed in its report, “The Hol­ly­wood-Pen­ta­gon rela­tion­ship” affords Hol­ly­wood stu­dios “con­di­tion­al access to mil­i­tary facil­i­ties and experts” for films that the gov­ern­ment “believes will reflect well on the coun­try’s armed forces.” The report right­ly notes, how­ev­er, that “this gov­ern­men­tal influ­ence does not bring to bear a heavy-hand­ed sys­tem of insti­tu­tion­al­ized cen­sor­ship, as Bei­jing’s does.”

    ...

    ———–

    “The Solu­tion to Chi­nese Cen­sor­ship Is Not Show Hear­ings” by Jonas Du; Rea­son; 07/09/2023

    The con­sis­tent self-cen­sor­ship U.S. com­pa­nies and pub­lic fig­ures engage in to appease an author­i­tar­i­an regime led Oren Cass, founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the con­ser­v­a­tive think tank Amer­i­can Com­pass, to argue that Con­gress should inter­vene. Cass sees Chi­na’s eco­nom­ic influ­ence as under­min­ing the Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of free speech.”

    A gov­ern­ment anti-self-cen­sor­ship man­date. That appears to be what Cass is call­ing for under a slo­gan of ‘pro­tect­ing free speech.’ Get sub­poe­naed, trash Chi­na, or get trashed your­self. That’s the plan Cass is pitch­ing. A plan that Rep. Mike Gal­lagher, head of the new­ly formed House Select Com­mit­tee on the CCP, hint­ed CEOs should pre­pare for back in May:

    ...
    “The pur­suit of prof­it often calls for kow­tow­ing to the CCP. As a result, Amer­i­can movie stu­dios and sports leagues self-cen­sor in keep­ing with the CCP’s preferences…and Amer­i­can busi­ness lead­ers fall over them­selves apol­o­giz­ing for any pos­si­ble slight,” Cass writes in a recent pol­i­cy paper, A Hard Break from Chi­na. “Amer­i­cans are most­ly obliv­i­ous to the real­i­ty that they are see­ing only what the CCP will allow, except when the occa­sion­al mis­step by a star or exec­u­tive leads to grov­el­ing.”

    One solu­tion to “re-nor­mal­ize free speech,” Cass argues, is to “raise the rep­u­ta­tion­al stakes by cre­at­ing a high-pro­file forum that embar­rass­es peo­ple who toe the CCP line.” Enter the House Select Com­mit­tee on the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.

    Cass’ pro­pos­al seeks to trans­form the com­mit­tee into a plat­form where those who are hon­est “earn wide­spread praise” and those who stay silent or lie would face “high­er rep­u­ta­tion­al costs.” Busi­ness lead­ers would be asked or sub­poe­naed to tes­ti­fy under oath about their expe­ri­ences with the CCP and what they real­ly think about Chi­na.

    “We’re going to have a Hol­ly­wood hear­ing. We’re going to have a sports hear­ing. We’re going to have a finance hear­ing. And we’re going to kind of move our way con­sis­tent­ly through dif­fer­ent sec­tors,” Cass tells Rea­son, argu­ing that the prospect of pub­lic humil­i­a­tion would encour­age exec­u­tives to stop self-cen­sor­ing.

    “The only per­il you’re in is if you have real­ly dumb and inde­fen­si­ble ideas, which is exact­ly how a democ­ra­cy is sup­posed to work,” Cass says. “It’s not like some kind of witch hunt project to try to embar­rass peo­ple. It’s, in a sense, quite the oppo­site. All you have to do to have a tri­umphant appear­ance is show up and say what you think.”

    ...

    Cass, who sees his pro­pos­al as a coun­ter­bal­ance to the CCP’s cen­sor­ship pres­sures, denies that the com­mit­tee would have its own chill­ing effect on inter­na­tion­al busi­ness rela­tions. “What’s coer­cive about the sub­poe­na?” Cass says. “The only thing you’re being asked to do is, again, say what you actu­al­ly think.”

    The House Select Com­mit­tee on the CCP, formed in Jan­u­ary and chaired by Rep. Mike Gal­lagher (R–Wis.), has not sum­moned any busi­ness lead­ers or celebri­ties to speak about Chi­nese cen­sor­ship. How­ev­er, when asked at a U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce con­fer­ence in May if the com­mit­tee would seek tes­ti­mo­ny from busi­ness exec­u­tives, Gal­lagher said “Com­pa­nies should be pre­pared to defend their invest­ment strat­e­gy in Chi­na, their man­u­fac­tur­ing pres­ence in Chi­na,” accord­ing to The Wall Street Jour­nal. “My goal is not to have some sort of bomb-throw­ing viral moment,” he added.
    ...

    “My goal is not to have some sort of bomb-throw­ing viral moment.” LOL! That’s about as believ­able as Cass’s denials that this is all the oppo­site of a witch hunt.

    While the ques­tion of “how long before the first ‘have you no shame?’ moment?” looms large, it’s real­ly more a ques­tion of how many ‘have you no shame?’ moments are we in store for and will they have any effect? This is an era where polit­i­cal shame­less­ness and gaslight­ing con­tin­ue to ani­mate the mass­es, the . And that’s a big part of what what makes these open plans so omi­nous. It’s not just that the CNP and its allies are open­ly plan­ning a big spec­ta­cle to sell the pub­lic on their com­ing purge. It’s also the giant audi­ence that can’t get enough spec­ta­cle. The more dan­ger­ous­ly shame­less, the bet­ter. Fas­cist shame­less spec­ta­cle all for God’s greater glo­ry and the cre­ation of a pious God-fear­ing nation, of course.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | September 10, 2023, 11:34 pm
  32. It’s pret­ty obvi­ous that Oren Cass’s Amer­i­can Com­pass is run­ning some sort of astro­turf­ing scam in its push for the cre­ation of a new ‘pro-work­er’ Repub­li­can labor pol­i­cy. But just how big of a scam is this, real­ly? That’s the ques­tion raised in the fol­low­ing set of arti­cles describ­ing not only the cre­ation of Cass’s Amer­i­can Com­pass but many of its fel­low trav­el­ers too. Fel­low trav­el­ers in what is being por­trayed as some sort of allies in a deep­en­ing ide­o­log­i­cal strug­gle inside the Repub­li­can Par­ty. A strug­gle between the old neolib­er­als and a ‘kinder, gen­tler’ New Right that isn’t so afraid of using gov­ern­ment inter­ven­tion to improve the lot of work­ing class.

    Fel­low trav­el­ers that just hap­pen to be many of the very same Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP)-backed insti­tu­tions cre­at­ed post-2020 as part of the ongo­ing Sched­ule F/Project 2025 plot to blow up soci­ety. Insti­tu­tions like the Amer­i­ca First Pol­i­cy Insti­tute (AFPI), Amer­i­can Moment, and the Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca (CRA). Along with the Clare­mont Insti­tute. As The Econ­o­mist described it last year, Amer­i­can Com­pass is work­ing to turn these ‘New Right’ ide­olo­gies into pol­i­cy.

    And while all of this is more or less what we should expect at this point, there’s a very impor­tant twist. Because it appears that these groups all have anoth­er thing in com­mon: They’ve been fund­ed by two enti­ties gen­er­al­ly though of ‘pro­gres­sive’. The Hewlett Foun­da­tion and the Omid­yar Net­work.

    Yes, it appears that Pierre Omid­yar’s ‘char­i­ty’ has been fund­ing a num­ber of these ‘New Right’ enti­ties in recent years. The spooked up oli­garch is fund­ing this far right nation­al takeover plot. A plot that is increas­ing­ly adopt­ing a ‘pro­gres­sive’ veneer. Sur­prise!

    Keep in mind that the Omid­yar Net­work announced a vision for a ‘new ver­sion of cap­i­tal­ism’ in Sep­tem­ber of 2020, so it appears that the new vision is now being devel­oped in coor­di­na­tion with the CNP and the GOP.

    Beyond that, it sounds like fig­ures like Sen­a­tors Josh Haw­ley, Mar­co Rubio, and even Ted Cruz are get­ting in on the ‘pro-labor’ act, echo­ing the kind of rhetoric Cass’s Amer­i­can Com­pass has been putting out about the need to help Amer­i­can labor. Not through empow­er­ing labor unions, mind you. As we’ll see when we take a look at the kind of pro­pos­als Cass is putting for­ward, there’s a vari­ety of alter­na­tive labor rela­tion mod­els he’s open to. For exam­ple, there’s the “Ghent Sys­tem” used in Europe where the labor unions them­selves pro­vide social-safe­ty-net ser­vices for mem­bers, instead of the gov­ern­ment. Cass sees this as a nice free-mar­ket alter­na­tive to “Medicare-for-all”. Anoth­er idea Cass sug­gest­ed was the kind of “sec­toral bar­gain­ing” seen in places like France where the unions are nego­ti­at­ing wages for union and non-union mem­bers alike for a giv­en indus­try. Both inter­est­ing pro­pos­als on their own.

    But as Cass then asserts:

    ...
    The most impor­tant first step to find­ing a bet­ter sys­tem is sim­ply allow­ing inno­va­tion to occur. Cur­rent­ly, the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act bars for­mal coop­er­a­tion between man­age­ment and work­ers, such as works coun­cils, out­side the con­fines of tra­di­tion­al unions; Con­gress should revise the law to elim­i­nate that pro­vi­sion. Like­wise, the NLRA is famous­ly aggres­sive in pre­empt­ing states from depart­ing from its nation­al frame­work, while antitrust law makes indus­try coor­di­na­tion sus­pect, and employ­ment law leaves too few issues open for the par­ties to resolve. Con­gress should cre­ate exemp­tions.
    ...

    And that right there gives it away: it’s a plan to promise some­thing bet­ter than labor unions...but only AFTER we get rid of the cur­rent sys­tem.

    So with the alleged­ly pro­gres­sive Omid­yar Net­work financ­ing both Cass’s Amer­i­can Com­pass AND a num­ber of Sched­ule F/Project 2025 enti­ties still open­ly work­ing on a mass purge of Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment and soci­ety at the ear­li­est oppor­tu­ni­ty, try not to be sur­prised if this upcom­ing plot ends up get­ting a lot of “well, maybe it’s not so bad since the Omid­yar Net­work sup­ports it?” press when this all plays out.

    Ok, first, here’s an August 2021 Nation­al Review piece rais­ing con­ser­v­a­tive alarms over Cass’s Amer­i­can Com­pass and its sur­pris­ing­ly ‘pro­gres­sive’ finan­cial back­ers. Now, as we’ll see, it’s real­ly more of a cause of right-wing cel­e­bra­tion if we look close­ly at what’s going on here. Because it’s pret­ty obvi­ous that the Omid­yar Net­work is now work­ing to give pro­gres­sive cov­er for Oren Cass’s big plans for a ‘pro-work­er’ con­ser­v­a­tive plat­form:

    The Nation­al Review

    Does Amer­i­can Com­pass Point Left

    When nom­i­nal con­ser­v­a­tives start rush­ing to the left as left-wing dol­lars flow into their insti­tu­tions, skep­ti­cism is war­rant­ed.

    By Michael Wat­son
    August 16, 2021 6:30 AM

    ‘The Con­ser­v­a­tive Case for [Lib­er­al Thing]” is a punch­line. These “con­ser­v­a­tive cas­es” are draft­ed by think-tankers in the metaphor­i­cal hot-take mines who in many cas­es are paid to do so by a left-of-cen­ter foun­da­tion seek­ing to bam­boo­zle Repub­li­can pol­i­cy-mak­ers and con­ser­v­a­tive sup­port­ers into empow­er­ing lib­er­al inter­est groups, under­min­ing long-stand­ing con­ser­v­a­tive prin­ci­ples, or just doing what­ev­er lib­er­als want to do any­way.

    Is that what is going on with Amer­i­can Com­pass, the think tank led by ex–Mitt Rom­ney advis­er Oren Cass that presents sup­posed con­ser­v­a­tive cas­es for orga­nized labor, indus­tri­al pol­i­cy, and calls to “reimag­ine cap­i­tal­ism in Amer­i­ca”? The think tank is the most promi­nent ele­ment of the “labor con­ser­v­a­tives” who form a “redis­tri­b­u­tion­ist right,” with Politi­co and oth­er D.C. out­lets fram­ing it as the van­guard of a new, cap­i­tal­ism-skep­ti­cal Right that would emerge in the wake of Don­ald Trump’s rise and fall.

    But peek­ing behind the cur­tain of Amer­i­can Compass’s fund­ing rais­es con­cerns as to what that com­pass holds as its north. Two major lib­er­al fund­ing net­works, the William and Flo­ra Hewlett Foun­da­tion and the Omid­yar Net­work, have pro­vid­ed major grants to Amer­i­can Com­pass as part of projects to “reimag­ine” cap­i­tal­ism. The foun­da­tion fun­ders’ rhetoric and the fel­low trav­el­ers they fund along­side Amer­i­can Com­pass raise ques­tions about what these foun­da­tions are hop­ing to achieve with their fund­ing.

    ...

    While Hewlett’s Madi­son Ini­tia­tive has fund­ed some right-lean­ing orga­ni­za­tions in the spir­it of full debate, that is not how the foun­da­tion is pro­mot­ing its sup­port for Amer­i­can Com­pass. The Chron­i­cle of Phil­an­thropy, the trade pub­li­ca­tion for the multi­bil­lion-dol­lar non­prof­it indus­try in which the Hewlett Foun­da­tion is a major play­er, por­trayed Hewlett’s efforts “to iden­ti­fy a suc­ces­sor to neolib­er­al­ism,” which it defined as “the mar­ket-based eco­nom­ic the­o­ry that has guid­ed aca­d­e­m­ic and pol­i­cy debate for sev­er­al decades,” claimed that this the­o­ry was expound­ed by F. A. Hayek and Mil­ton Fried­man, and alleged that its promi­nence was “sup­port­ed by grants to schol­ars and think tanks by a suc­ces­sion of con­ser­v­a­tive phil­an­thropists such as Charles Koch.”

    For its part, the Omid­yar Net­work report­ed giv­ing Amer­i­can Com­pass $200,000 as part of its “reimag­in­ing cap­i­tal­ism” project. Omid­yar is a famil­iar name to stu­dents of right­ies-push­ing-lib­er­al­ism-for-hire: Pierre Omid­yar, who cre­at­ed and fund­ed the Omid­yar Net­work as part of a grow­ing net­work of grant­mak­ing and advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tions that include Democ­ra­cy Fund, Democ­ra­cy Fund Voice, and Omid­yar Net­work, is notable for fund­ing lib­er­al-in-con­ser­v­a­tive-cloth­ing groups that tar­get for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and his sup­port­ers. Stand Up Repub­lic, the left-wing elec­tion-admin­is­tra­tion orga­ni­za­tion head­ed by for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Evan McMullin? Omidyar’s groups fund­ed it. The Bul­wark, the online mag­a­zine cre­at­ed by castoffs from the Week­ly Stan­dard’s clo­sure that attacks Mike Rowe for oppos­ing anti-COVID man­dates? Until recent­ly, it was iden­ti­fied as a project of the Defend­ing Democ­ra­cy Togeth­er Insti­tute, whose 501c(4) orga­ni­za­tion, Defend­ing Democ­ra­cy Togeth­er, Omid­yar has fund­ed through his non­prof­it Democ­ra­cy Fund Voice. This is part of a broad­er effort to attack main­stream Repub­li­cans through a wide array of oth­er dark-mon­ey groups. The Omid­yar net­work of orga­ni­za­tions isn’t exact­ly the out­fit one would expect to fund the devel­op­ment of a “post-Trump Trump-ism.”

    And the fel­low trav­el­ers of Amer­i­can Com­pass receiv­ing Omidyar’s “reimag­in­ing cap­i­tal­ism” sup­port are a glar­ing warn­ing light that Cass may be more of a Bill Kris­tol than an Irv­ing. Also receiv­ing Omid­yar funds for “Build­ing align­ment around a coher­ent new vision and set of eco­nom­ic val­ues” are Demos, a social­ist think tank; the Roo­sevelt Insti­tute, a think tank that cheer­leads New Deal–style sta­tist pol­i­cy; and Eco­nom­ic Secu­ri­ty Project, a cam­paign backed by Face­book co-founder and for­mer New Repub­lic pub­lish­er Chris Hugh­es to cre­ate a uni­ver­sal- basic-income wel­fare pro­gram. Omid­yar Net­work itself pro­mot­ed its “Our Call to Reimag­ine Cap­i­tal­ism in Amer­i­ca” in the lan­guage of rad­i­cal aca­d­e­m­ic Ibram X. Ken­di and crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, with its sec­ond of five “key pil­lars of change” being “an explic­it­ly anti-racist and inclu­sive econ­o­my.”

    With bed­fel­lows that fit more com­fort­ably at a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca meet­ing than the Knights of Colum­bus or Elks Lodge that Cass and oth­er right-lean­ing pop­ulists might call to mind, for what does Amer­i­can Com­pass stand? It is hard to say, but there’s evi­dence that Cass has shift­ed left since he pub­lished The Once and Future Work­er, a col­lec­tion of essays expound­ing his pop­ulist, work­er-focused eco­nom­ic-pol­i­cy approach­es.

    In the chap­ter on labor orga­niz­ing, titled “More Per­fect Unions,” Cass offered reforms that lim­it­ed the polit­i­cal author­i­ty of Big Labor while increas­ing work­ers’ col­lec­tive pow­ers, propos­ing that work­er coop­er­a­tives take over gov­ern­ment social-safe­ty-net func­tions and rec­om­mend­ing that the gov­ern­ment rec­og­nize inde­pen­dent “works coun­cils” to con­duct col­lec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion out­side the adver­sar­i­al union sys­tem. Through­out, Cass rec­og­nized that reform of labor orga­niz­ing had to sep­a­rate the inter­ests of work­ing fam­i­lies from those of labor boss­es,whose activist lib­er­al pol­i­tics union mem­bers often do not share.

    But now, Cass endors­es “sec­toral bar­gain­ing,” best known for being prac­ticed in France. In this sys­tem, labor unions nego­ti­ate con­tracts nation­wide not for the 8 per­cent of French work­ers who are union mem­bers but for over 98 per­cent of the work­force. So while the Cass of Once and Future Work­er could rec­og­nize that “Democ­rats prize union boss­es’ Midas-like abil­i­ty to trans­form the dol­lars and ener­gy of a bipar­ti­san work­force into homoge­nous left-wing sup­port,” $811,000 in Big (lib­er­al) Phil­an­thropy mon­ey lat­er Amer­i­can Com­pass would give those union boss­es more coer­cive pow­er than even the Democ­rats’ PRO Act, which is itself lit­tle more than a vehi­cle to fun­nel even more mon­ey from unwill­ing work­ing fam­i­lies to the Left’s Midas­es.

    ...

    ———-

    “Does Amer­i­can Com­pass Point Left?” By Michael Wat­son; The Nation­al Review; 08/16/2021

    “But peek­ing behind the cur­tain of Amer­i­can Compass’s fund­ing rais­es con­cerns as to what that com­pass holds as its north. Two major lib­er­al fund­ing net­works, the William and Flo­ra Hewlett Foun­da­tion and the Omid­yar Net­work, have pro­vid­ed major grants to Amer­i­can Com­pass as part of projects to “reimag­ine” cap­i­tal­ism. The foun­da­tion fun­ders’ rhetoric and the fel­low trav­el­ers they fund along­side Amer­i­can Com­pass raise ques­tions about what these foun­da­tions are hop­ing to achieve with their fund­ing.”

    A ‘reimag­in­ing’ of cap­i­tal­ism. That’s how the Nation­al Review decid­ed to char­ac­ter­ize the goal of Amer­i­can Com­pass back in 2021, just a year after the think tank’s found­ing. And as this piece insin­u­at­ed, it’s a decid­ed­ly non-con­ser­v­a­tive vision for the future of cap­i­tal­ism, cit­ing the gen­er­ous dona­tions from osten­si­bly ‘left-wing’ insti­tu­tions like the Omid­yar Net­work and Hewlett Foun­da­tion. Strange bed­fel­lows indeed. Or at least that’s the spin:

    ...
    While Hewlett’s Madi­son Ini­tia­tive has fund­ed some right-lean­ing orga­ni­za­tions in the spir­it of full debate, that is not how the foun­da­tion is pro­mot­ing its sup­port for Amer­i­can Com­pass. The Chron­i­cle of Phil­an­thropy, the trade pub­li­ca­tion for the multi­bil­lion-dol­lar non­prof­it indus­try in which the Hewlett Foun­da­tion is a major play­er, por­trayed Hewlett’s efforts “to iden­ti­fy a suc­ces­sor to neolib­er­al­ism,” which it defined as “the mar­ket-based eco­nom­ic the­o­ry that has guid­ed aca­d­e­m­ic and pol­i­cy debate for sev­er­al decades,” claimed that this the­o­ry was expound­ed by F. A. Hayek and Mil­ton Fried­man, and alleged that its promi­nence was “sup­port­ed by grants to schol­ars and think tanks by a suc­ces­sion of con­ser­v­a­tive phil­an­thropists such as Charles Koch.”

    For its part, the Omid­yar Net­work report­ed giv­ing Amer­i­can Com­pass $200,000 as part of its “reimag­in­ing cap­i­tal­ism” project. Omid­yar is a famil­iar name to stu­dents of right­ies-push­ing-lib­er­al­ism-for-hire: Pierre Omid­yar, who cre­at­ed and fund­ed the Omid­yar Net­work as part of a grow­ing net­work of grant­mak­ing and advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tions that include Democ­ra­cy Fund, Democ­ra­cy Fund Voice, and Omid­yar Net­work, is notable for fund­ing lib­er­al-in-con­ser­v­a­tive-cloth­ing groups that tar­get for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and his sup­port­ers. Stand Up Repub­lic, the left-wing elec­tion-admin­is­tra­tion orga­ni­za­tion head­ed by for­mer pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Evan McMullin? Omidyar’s groups fund­ed it. The Bul­wark, the online mag­a­zine cre­at­ed by castoffs from the Week­ly Stan­dard’s clo­sure that attacks Mike Rowe for oppos­ing anti-COVID man­dates? Until recent­ly, it was iden­ti­fied as a project of the Defend­ing Democ­ra­cy Togeth­er Insti­tute, whose 501c(4) orga­ni­za­tion, Defend­ing Democ­ra­cy Togeth­er, Omid­yar has fund­ed through his non­prof­it Democ­ra­cy Fund Voice. This is part of a broad­er effort to attack main­stream Repub­li­cans through a wide array of oth­er dark-mon­ey groups. The Omid­yar net­work of orga­ni­za­tions isn’t exact­ly the out­fit one would expect to fund the devel­op­ment of a “post-Trump Trump-ism.”

    And the fel­low trav­el­ers of Amer­i­can Com­pass receiv­ing Omidyar’s “reimag­in­ing cap­i­tal­ism” sup­port are a glar­ing warn­ing light that Cass may be more of a Bill Kris­tol than an Irv­ing. Also receiv­ing Omid­yar funds for “Build­ing align­ment around a coher­ent new vision and set of eco­nom­ic val­ues” are Demos, a social­ist think tank; the Roo­sevelt Insti­tute, a think tank that cheer­leads New Deal–style sta­tist pol­i­cy; and Eco­nom­ic Secu­ri­ty Project, a cam­paign backed by Face­book co-founder and for­mer New Repub­lic pub­lish­er Chris Hugh­es to cre­ate a uni­ver­sal- basic-income wel­fare pro­gram. Omid­yar Net­work itself pro­mot­ed its “Our Call to Reimag­ine Cap­i­tal­ism in Amer­i­ca” in the lan­guage of rad­i­cal aca­d­e­m­ic Ibram X. Ken­di and crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, with its sec­ond of five “key pil­lars of change” being “an explic­it­ly anti-racist and inclu­sive econ­o­my.”
    ...

    And note the evi­dence for the sup­posed sud­den left-wing shift of Amer­i­can Com­pass founder Oren Cass: Case one called for work­er coop­er­a­tives that not only replace unions but also replace gov­ern­ment social-safe­ty-net pro­grams. A plan to gut unions and social secu­ri­ty at the same time. But now, we’re told, Cass has com­plete­ly flipped and endorsed the kind of “sec­toral bar­gain” found in France:

    ...
    With bed­fel­lows that fit more com­fort­ably at a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca meet­ing than the Knights of Colum­bus or Elks Lodge that Cass and oth­er right-lean­ing pop­ulists might call to mind, for what does Amer­i­can Com­pass stand? It is hard to say, but there’s evi­dence that Cass has shift­ed left since he pub­lished The Once and Future Work­er, a col­lec­tion of essays expound­ing his pop­ulist, work­er-focused eco­nom­ic-pol­i­cy approach­es.

    In the chap­ter on labor orga­niz­ing, titled “More Per­fect Unions,” Cass offered reforms that lim­it­ed the polit­i­cal author­i­ty of Big Labor while increas­ing work­ers’ col­lec­tive pow­ers, propos­ing that work­er coop­er­a­tives take over gov­ern­ment social-safe­ty-net func­tions and rec­om­mend­ing that the gov­ern­ment rec­og­nize inde­pen­dent “works coun­cils” to con­duct col­lec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion out­side the adver­sar­i­al union sys­tem. Through­out, Cass rec­og­nized that reform of labor orga­niz­ing had to sep­a­rate the inter­ests of work­ing fam­i­lies from those of labor boss­es,whose activist lib­er­al pol­i­tics union mem­bers often do not share.

    But now, Cass endors­es “sec­toral bar­gain­ing,” best known for being prac­ticed in France. In this sys­tem, labor unions nego­ti­ate con­tracts nation­wide not for the 8 per­cent of French work­ers who are union mem­bers but for over 98 per­cent of the work­force. So while the Cass of Once and Future Work­er could rec­og­nize that “Democ­rats prize union boss­es’ Midas-like abil­i­ty to trans­form the dol­lars and ener­gy of a bipar­ti­san work­force into homoge­nous left-wing sup­port,” $811,000 in Big (lib­er­al) Phil­an­thropy mon­ey lat­er Amer­i­can Com­pass would give those union boss­es more coer­cive pow­er than even the Democ­rats’ PRO Act, which is itself lit­tle more than a vehi­cle to fun­nel even more mon­ey from unwill­ing work­ing fam­i­lies to the Left’s Midas­es.
    ...

    So did Cass, fel­low of the lib­er­tar­i­an Man­hat­tan Insti­tute until he sud­den­ly quit in 2019 and start­ed Amer­i­can Com­pass, expe­ri­ence some sort of ide­o­log­i­cal epiphany? What’s going on here?

    Well, to get a bet­ter idea of what Cass is actu­al­ly push­ing, let’s take a clos­er look at that opin­ion piece Cass authored back in April of 2021 where he laid out the case for “sec­toral bar­gain­ing” or hav­ing labor unions pro­vide safe­ty-net func­tions instead of the gov­ern­ment. As we’re going to see, while Cass did indeed make those sug­ges­tions, the reforms them­selves weren’t his top objec­tive. Instead, it was the dis­man­tling of exist­ing labor laws that were the top objec­tive, osten­si­bly so new ‘inno­va­tions’ in labor rela­tions can be exper­i­ment­ed with. In oth­er words, we’re look­ing at the con­tours of a major bait-and-switch gam­bit:

    Politi­co

    Opin­ion | What Amer­i­can Work­ers Real­ly Want Instead of a Union at Ama­zon

    After Besse­mer, mean­ing­ful labor reform is more like­ly to come from the polit­i­cal right than the polit­i­cal left.

    Opin­ion by Oren Cass
    04/20/2021 04:30 AM EDT

    Oren Cass is the exec­u­tive direc­tor of Amer­i­can Com­pass. From 2015 to 2019, Cass was a senior fel­low at the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute.

    After an inten­sive, months-long elec­tion, only one-eighth of the work­ers at Amazon’s Besse­mer, Alaba­ma ware­house vot­ed in favor of a union. More than twice as many vot­ed against. Rough­ly half didn’t vote at all.

    The election’s losers are incred­u­lous that they could have fall­en short on the mer­its. Chal­lenges are already under­way, accus­ing Ama­zon of unfair labor prac­tices such as posi­tion­ing a mail­box improp­er­ly. And to be sure, Ama­zon appears to have behaved obnox­ious­ly, and per­haps even unlaw­ful­ly in some instances.

    But when near­ly 6,000 work­ers have two months to cast bal­lots, and the union secures few­er than 750 “yes” votes, the idea that it has what work­ers want looks a bit ridicu­lous. Before there was Besse­mer there was Chat­tanooga, where the UAW had Volkswagen’s active sup­port in pur­su­ing a two-year orga­niz­ing cam­paign, and the work­ers vot­ed “no” any­way.

    Maybe, Big Labor, they’re just not that into you?

    Labor activists see “pro-union” as syn­ony­mous with “pro-work­er” and cel­e­brate work­ers as tena­cious fight­ers when they vote one way and as manip­u­lat­ed pawns when they vote the oth­er. But faith in work­ers to under­stand and pur­sue their own inter­ests should be a first prin­ci­ple of any­one claim­ing to rep­re­sent them.

    None of which sug­gests that Big Busi­ness is in the right. Cor­po­rate lead­ers and their polit­i­cal allies have cheered the decline of pri­vate-sec­tor orga­niz­ing and pre­fer an eco­nom­ic arrange­ment in which management’s pre­rog­a­tives go unchecked. In this think­ing, “pro-busi­ness” and “pro-mar­ket” are syn­ony­mous, and unions have lit­tle role to play so long as work­ing con­di­tions are tol­er­a­ble. That mis­un­der­stands orga­nized labor’s vital role in a well-func­tion­ing mar­ket econ­o­my.

    ...

    Rather than cel­e­brate the Ama­zon work­ers’ deci­sion as vin­di­ca­tion for the cor­po­ra­tion or con­demn it (and, by impli­ca­tion, the work­ers) as not pos­si­bly in their inter­est, we should rec­og­nize it for the tragedy it is. We know that work­ers would like to have orga­ni­za­tions that can rep­re­sent them effec­tive­ly. We know that Ama­zon is among America’s most aggres­sive employ­ers when it comes to push­ing the enve­lope on labor prac­tices. And yet our nation’s sys­tem of labor law and our exist­ing unions can­not come close to pro­vid­ing some­thing palat­able.

    Busi­ness lead­ers are miss­ing out too. They under­stand­ably resist let­ting Big Labor in the door. But if they think that they can main­tain indef­i­nite­ly the sta­tus quo of min­i­mal work­er pow­er, stag­nant wages, and ris­ing inequal­i­ty, they are sore­ly mis­tak­en. The end result will be high­er tax­es, more reg­u­la­tion, poor­er con­sumers, and an unsta­ble polit­i­cal sys­tem. Beyond pro­vid­ing the foun­da­tion for healthy cap­i­tal­ism, robust work­er rep­re­sen­ta­tion can also lead to high­er pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, bet­ter train­ing, and the gen­uine part­ner­ship nec­es­sary to a firm’s long-run suc­cess.

    For­tu­nate­ly, our dys­func­tion­al sys­tem is not the only one. To the con­trary, the Amer­i­can idea of a union as some­thing that orga­nizes work­place-by-work­place in the face of employ­er hos­til­i­ty, of Sal­ly Field as Nor­ma Rae stand­ing on the table with her hand-scrawled sign that says “UNION,” is some­thing of an out­lier. In most west­ern democ­ra­cies, mod­els look quite dif­fer­ent, with unions serv­ing work­ers across an indus­try, who join and pay dues vol­un­tar­i­ly for the ben­e­fits offered. At the com­pa­ny lev­el, firms often have col­lab­o­ra­tive arrange­ments such as “works coun­cils” that give work­ers a mean­ing­ful role in set­ting pol­i­cy and run­ning oper­a­tions.

    One such mod­el is the “Ghent Sys­tem,” most pop­u­lar in north­ern Europe, that assigns unions respon­si­bil­i­ty for pro­vid­ing unem­ploy­ment insurance—funded by work­ers them­selves as well as employ­ers and the gov­ern­ment. Sim­i­lar­ly, unions in many coun­tries, and even some in the Unit­ed States, are heav­i­ly involved in work­force train­ing sys­tems, which tends to increase the lev­el and qual­i­ty of train­ing pro­vid­ed. U.S. busi­ness­es that com­plain about a lack of skilled job appli­cants should con­sid­er the ben­e­fits of empow­er­ing work­ers to assume a greater role in build­ing a tal­ent pipeline.

    Anoth­er mod­el is “sec­toral bar­gain­ing,” in which unions rep­re­sent­ing all of an industry’s work­ers bar­gain with trade groups rep­re­sent­ing all of an industry’s employ­ers. Rather than Ama­zon fight­ing tooth-and-nail against a union that might place it at a dis­ad­van­tage against Wal­mart, a ware­house-work­ers’ union and a retail­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion could work to reach agree­ment on terms and con­di­tions of employ­ment that would apply to every­one. Ama­zon and Wal­mart would both be com­mit­ted to treat­ing their work­ers well, and rather than com­pete on who could cut costs fur­thest they could focus more on boost­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and inno­vat­ing to serve cus­tomers well.

    The most impor­tant first step to find­ing a bet­ter sys­tem is sim­ply allow­ing inno­va­tion to occur. Cur­rent­ly, the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act bars for­mal coop­er­a­tion between man­age­ment and work­ers, such as works coun­cils, out­side the con­fines of tra­di­tion­al unions; Con­gress should revise the law to elim­i­nate that pro­vi­sion. Like­wise, the NLRA is famous­ly aggres­sive in pre­empt­ing states from depart­ing from its nation­al frame­work, while antitrust law makes indus­try coor­di­na­tion sus­pect, and employ­ment law leaves too few issues open for the par­ties to resolve. Con­gress should cre­ate exemp­tions.

    Mean­ing­ful labor reform is more like­ly to start on the right than on the left. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty remains reliant on Big Labor’s polit­i­cal and finan­cial sup­port and seems des­tined to dou­ble down on the fail­ing mod­el. Con­ser­v­a­tives, by con­trast, are shift­ing away from their cor­po­rate alle­giance and giv­ing much greater atten­tion to work­ers’ con­cerns. They are also begin­ning to con­sid­er the many ways that a vibrant labor move­ment could help to advance their core val­ues: broad­en­ing pros­per­i­ty through the mar­ket rather than rely­ing on redis­tri­b­u­tion, posi­tion­ing the par­ties to gov­ern work­places them­selves rather than rely­ing on reg­u­la­tion, and rebuild­ing a vital social insti­tu­tion that can strength­en com­mu­ni­ties and bol­ster sol­i­dar­i­ty.

    Exper­i­men­ta­tion could start in one location—say, a red-state gov­er­nor bring­ing a trade group and a work­er orga­ni­za­tion togeth­er to nego­ti­ate a new sys­tem for ben­e­fits and train­ing; in one industry—say, the gig econ­o­my; or on one issue—say, min­i­mum wages. Con­gress, or even a state leg­is­la­ture, could help by offer­ing fund­ing and oth­er incen­tives for labor-man­age­ment rela­tion­ships that pro­vide work­ers with real rep­re­sen­ta­tion and valu­able ser­vices, revers­ing the cur­rent dynam­ic where firms see a union’s pres­ence as a dire fate. Ulti­mate­ly, it will require rep­re­sen­ta­tives from both man­age­ment and labor to rec­og­nize the sta­tus quo as unsus­tain­able and take the leap toward try­ing some­thing new.

    A Ghent-like approach to pro­vid­ing health­care ben­e­fits is a lim­it­ed-gov­ern­ment, mar­ket-based approach that could reduce pres­sure for gov­ern­ment-spon­sored options like Medicare-for-All. Sec­toral bar­gain­ing might raise the specter of “cor­po­ratism” or “crony cap­i­tal­ism” that would throw sand in the economy’s gears, but plac­ing work­ers and man­age­ment on equal foot­ing to set their own wage scales should be prefer­able to a nation­al Fight for $15.

    The Repub­li­can Par­ty has already begun rethink­ing some of the stale ortho­dox­ies of free-mar­ket fun­da­men­tal­ism that went large­ly unques­tioned since the Rea­gan era, and in par­al­lel its coali­tion has begun broad­en­ing. In a vir­tu­ous cycle, the growth of a mul­ti-eth­nic, work­ing-class con­ser­v­a­tive base push­es polit­i­cal lead­ers fur­ther toward con­cern for work­ers, which in turn accel­er­ates the trans­for­ma­tion of the coali­tion. Skep­ti­cism will right­ly per­sist about the scle­rot­ic unions that our nation’s Great-Depres­sion-era labor law offers, but the Cham­ber of Commerce’s pref­er­ence for end­ing the dis­cus­sion there could give way to enthu­si­asm for reforms that would serve work­ers and the econ­o­my well.

    Bessemer’s work­ers found them­selves caught between Big Busi­ness and Big Labor. At the bal­lot box, though, they may soon have the option to vote for some­thing else.

    ———–

    “Opin­ion | What Amer­i­can Work­ers Real­ly Want Instead of a Union at Ama­zon” by Oren Cass; Politi­co; 04/20/2021

    The most impor­tant first step to find­ing a bet­ter sys­tem is sim­ply allow­ing inno­va­tion to occur. Cur­rent­ly, the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Act bars for­mal coop­er­a­tion between man­age­ment and work­ers, such as works coun­cils, out­side the con­fines of tra­di­tion­al unions; Con­gress should revise the law to elim­i­nate that pro­vi­sion. Like­wise, the NLRA is famous­ly aggres­sive in pre­empt­ing states from depart­ing from its nation­al frame­work, while antitrust law makes indus­try coor­di­na­tion sus­pect, and employ­ment law leaves too few issues open for the par­ties to resolve. Con­gress should cre­ate exemp­tions.

    Yep, as Oren Cass lays out, the par­tic­u­lars of which labor ‘reform’ gets adopt­ed isn’t the most impor­tant part of this plan. The most impor­tant part is “sim­ply allow­ing inno­va­tion to occur”. Which is anoth­er way is say­ing exist­ing labor laws need to be dis­man­tled. What will be built in their place? Who knows? Maybe it will be a “Ghent Sys­tem” where the union assume respon­si­bil­i­ty for health­care ben­e­fit. Or per­haps sec­toral bar­gain­ing could be used. Either way, the impor­tant part is that the cur­rent sys­tem get dis­man­tled first:

    ...
    One such mod­el is the “Ghent Sys­tem,” most pop­u­lar in north­ern Europe, that assigns unions respon­si­bil­i­ty for pro­vid­ing unem­ploy­ment insurance—funded by work­ers them­selves as well as employ­ers and the gov­ern­ment. Sim­i­lar­ly, unions in many coun­tries, and even some in the Unit­ed States, are heav­i­ly involved in work­force train­ing sys­tems, which tends to increase the lev­el and qual­i­ty of train­ing pro­vid­ed. U.S. busi­ness­es that com­plain about a lack of skilled job appli­cants should con­sid­er the ben­e­fits of empow­er­ing work­ers to assume a greater role in build­ing a tal­ent pipeline.

    Anoth­er mod­el is “sec­toral bar­gain­ing,” in which unions rep­re­sent­ing all of an industry’s work­ers bar­gain with trade groups rep­re­sent­ing all of an industry’s employ­ers. Rather than Ama­zon fight­ing tooth-and-nail against a union that might place it at a dis­ad­van­tage against Wal­mart, a ware­house-work­ers’ union and a retail­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion could work to reach agree­ment on terms and con­di­tions of employ­ment that would apply to every­one. Ama­zon and Wal­mart would both be com­mit­ted to treat­ing their work­ers well, and rather than com­pete on who could cut costs fur­thest they could focus more on boost­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and inno­vat­ing to serve cus­tomers well.

    ...

    A Ghent-like approach to pro­vid­ing health­care ben­e­fits is a lim­it­ed-gov­ern­ment, mar­ket-based approach that could reduce pres­sure for gov­ern­ment-spon­sored options like Medicare-for-All. Sec­toral bar­gain­ing might raise the specter of “cor­po­ratism” or “crony cap­i­tal­ism” that would throw sand in the economy’s gears, but plac­ing work­ers and man­age­ment on equal foot­ing to set their own wage scales should be prefer­able to a nation­al Fight for $15.
    ...

    And how does Cass envi­sion the replace­ment of US labor laws will actu­al­ly hap­pen? Well, a sin­gle gov­er­nor could set it in motion. But not with­out some ‘help’ in the form of new labor laws from con­gress and state leg­is­la­tures. It’s like a plan to just dis­man­tle the exist­ing sys­tem and see what hap­pens:

    ...
    Mean­ing­ful labor reform is more like­ly to start on the right than on the left. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty remains reliant on Big Labor’s polit­i­cal and finan­cial sup­port and seems des­tined to dou­ble down on the fail­ing mod­el. Con­ser­v­a­tives, by con­trast, are shift­ing away from their cor­po­rate alle­giance and giv­ing much greater atten­tion to work­ers’ con­cerns. They are also begin­ning to con­sid­er the many ways that a vibrant labor move­ment could help to advance their core val­ues: broad­en­ing pros­per­i­ty through the mar­ket rather than rely­ing on redis­tri­b­u­tion, posi­tion­ing the par­ties to gov­ern work­places them­selves rather than rely­ing on reg­u­la­tion, and rebuild­ing a vital social insti­tu­tion that can strength­en com­mu­ni­ties and bol­ster sol­i­dar­i­ty.

    Exper­i­men­ta­tion could start in one location—say, a red-state gov­er­nor bring­ing a trade group and a work­er orga­ni­za­tion togeth­er to nego­ti­ate a new sys­tem for ben­e­fits and train­ing; in one industry—say, the gig econ­o­my; or on one issue—say, min­i­mum wages. Con­gress, or even a state leg­is­la­ture, could help by offer­ing fund­ing and oth­er incen­tives for labor-man­age­ment rela­tion­ships that pro­vide work­ers with real rep­re­sen­ta­tion and valu­able ser­vices, revers­ing the cur­rent dynam­ic where firms see a union’s pres­ence as a dire fate. Ulti­mate­ly, it will require rep­re­sen­ta­tives from both man­age­ment and labor to rec­og­nize the sta­tus quo as unsus­tain­able and take the leap toward try­ing some­thing new.
    ...

    So can we real­ly expect mean­ing­ful labor reform to start on the right? Well, if mean­ing­ful labor reform is defined as the kind of leg­is­la­tion that con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians like Josh Haw­ley and Mar­co Rubio sup­port, sure, that could hap­pen. Because as the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, those are some of Cass’s big allies in con­gress on his quest to devise a ‘post-neo-lib­er­al’ strain of eco­nom­ics. Allies with long track records of anti-labor posi­tions. It’s a reminder that vir­tu­al­ly all of the fig­ures lead­ing this ‘pro-labor’ move­ment were ardent­ly anti-labor until this song and dance got under­way:

    Politi­co

    A Big Pol­i­cy Fight Is Brew­ing on the Right. And It’s Not All About Trump.

    Self-styled “com­mon good cap­i­tal­ists” want the gov­ern­ment to take a more active role in the econ­o­my. Their free-mar­ket crit­ics say it’s bad pol­i­cy and pol­i­tics for the GOP.

    By Eliana John­son
    08/05/2021 04:30 AM EDT

    Over the past few months, a hand­ful of Repub­li­can law­mak­ers have embraced eco­nom­ic poli­cies that, not long ago, would have been unthink­able in the GOP.

    In Feb­ru­ary, Sens. Mitt Rom­ney and Tom Cot­ton — past and like­ly future Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, respec­tive­ly — intro­duced a bill propos­ing a path to a $10 min­i­mum wage. The fol­low­ing month, Flori­da Sen. Mar­co Rubio announced his sup­port for an Ama­zon union­iza­tion effort in Alaba­ma. Else­where, Mis­souri Sen. Josh Haw­ley has pushed far-reach­ing antitrust bills that have made tra­di­tion­al con­ser­v­a­tives shud­der, and the best­selling author-turned-Ohio Sen­ate can­di­date J.D. Vance has called for rais­ing tax­es on com­pa­nies that send jobs over­seas.

    It’s easy to attribute these moves to the Trumpi­fi­ca­tion of the GOP — and that is part of the expla­na­tion. But there’s more to it than that. While most of the ink spilled on the divides with­in the con­tem­po­rary Repub­li­can Par­ty focus­es on its pro-Trump and anti-Trump wings, a stark ide­o­log­i­cal divide on eco­nom­ic issues is also emerg­ing over how to chart a post-Trump future for the GOP.

    The debate cen­ters on what lessons to draw from Don­ald Trump, who talked like a pop­ulist but gov­erned — with the excep­tion of trade pol­i­cy — more like a Rea­gan­ite. The divide doesn’t quite fall along pro- and anti-Trump lines. The pro-Trump for­mer Unit­ed Nations ambas­sador Nik­ki Haley, for exam­ple, has emerged as a lead­ing cham­pi­on of tra­di­tion­al free-mar­ket poli­cies in oppo­si­tion to oth­er pro-Trumpers like Vance and Haw­ley. The bat­tle is like­ly to play out in the 2024 pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry, and shape the future of Repub­li­can pol­i­tics long after Trump exits stage left.

    The emer­gence of the new eco­nom­ic coun­ter­cul­ture is loose­ly con­nect­ed to the two-year-old think tank, Amer­i­can Com­pass, whose founder, the Har­vard-trained lawyer and for­mer Bain con­sul­tant Oren Cass, rou­tine­ly derides his adver­saries as “mar­ket fun­da­men­tal­ists” ped­dling “stale pieties” from the 1980s. Cass left the free-mar­ket Man­hat­tan Insti­tute in 2019 to launch Amer­i­can Com­pass, the first right-of-cen­ter think tank ded­i­cat­ed to push­ing the gov­ern­ment to get more, rather than less, involved in nation­al eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy in order to help advance a cer­tain set of social and cul­tur­al goals — a view Cass and his ilk have termed “com­mon good cap­i­tal­ism.” The group’s mis­sion: “To restore an eco­nom­ic con­sen­sus that empha­sizes the impor­tance of fam­i­ly, com­mu­ni­ty, and indus­try to the nation’s lib­er­ty and pros­per­i­ty.”

    In order to become the par­ty of the work­ing class, Cass has argued, the GOP must aban­don its doc­tri­naire attach­ment to free-mar­ket prin­ci­ples in favor of tra­di­tion­al­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic caus­es like orga­nized labor, the min­i­mum wage and an indus­tri­al pol­i­cy in which the gov­ern­ment boosts par­tic­u­lar indus­tries over oth­ers. He also favors a stricter immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy with an eye toward migrants’ impact on the wages of Amer­i­can work­ers, argu­ments echoed by Vance and Fox News host Tuck­er Carl­son.

    “It’s a very dif­fer­ent set of things to put togeth­er and sup­port, cer­tain­ly from Repub­li­cans,” Cass told me recent­ly, describ­ing his posi­tion as “in all respects anti­thet­i­cal to the Cham­ber of Com­merce view.”

    Cass’ crit­ics say he is mere­ly a more intel­lec­tu­al ver­sion of the crass polit­i­cal oppor­tunists look­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on the Trump lega­cy. Why else would the 2012 Rom­ney cam­paign advis­er turn his back on the free-mar­ket prin­ci­ples he once cham­pi­oned? Why else would the pop­ulist agi­ta­tors of the pre­vi­ous decade, includ­ing the Tea Par­ty dar­ling Mar­co Rubio and his chief of staff, the for­mer Her­itage Action enfant ter­ri­ble Michael Need­ham, shift their focus from restrain­ing gov­ern­ment and con­trol­ling spend­ing to find­ing new ways for the feds to med­dle in the econ­o­my, or the one­time Trump crit­ic Vance trans­form him­self into an avatar of pop­ulist eco­nom­ics?

    “A lot of peo­ple have tried to assign mean­ing to the Trump phe­nom­e­non, and a lot of that mean­ing is self-serv­ing,” says Michael Strain, direc­tor of eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy at the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute. “Pres­i­dent Trump did not expose some deep prob­lem in Amer­i­can soci­ety” that requires a rethink­ing of the eco­nom­ic sys­tem, Strain adds, argu­ing that the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis and the reces­sion that fol­lowed led to the sorts of pop­ulist upris­ings around the globe that have his­tor­i­cal­ly fol­lowed eco­nom­ic cat­a­clysms.

    Oth­ers, includ­ing the polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Richard Hana­nia, say Cass is draw­ing the wrong lessons from Trump’s polit­i­cal suc­cess, which Hana­nia believes had more to do with cul­ture than eco­nom­ics. In an essay pub­lished after the 2020 elec­tion and titled, unsub­tly, “The Nation­al Pop­ulist Illu­sion,” Hana­nia called out Cass and Rubio by name, argu­ing that atti­tudes toward issues like polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and immi­gra­tion were more close­ly linked to Trump votes than eco­nom­ic sta­tus.

    Hedge funds, pri­vate equi­ty firms and ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, many of them long­time Repub­li­can donors, have been on the receiv­ing end of many of Cass’ barbs, and the titans of indus­try, broad­ly speak­ing, argue that Cass has no more busi­ness chart­ing the country’s eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy than any oth­er Ivy League con­sul­tant. See last month’s nasty Twit­ter tan­gle between Cass and the hedge fund bil­lion­aire Clif­ford Asness, a top GOP donor, that began when Cass argued that Asness’ firm “hasn’t been good at deliv­er­ing results for its own investors.” Describ­ing Amer­i­can Com­pass as a “blood and soil orga­ni­za­tion,” Asness urged his fol­low­ers to famil­iar­ize them­selves with Cass’ work: “It’s every pop­ulist piece of utter non­sense all in one place. Very con­ve­nient,” he wrote.

    Twit­ter bat­tles notwith­stand­ing, Cass cites as his chief intel­lec­tu­al adver­saries Haley, the for­mer U.N. ambas­sador, as well as the out­go­ing Penn­syl­va­nia sen­a­tor Pat Toomey, who has been a lead­ing voice on eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, and the mem­bers of the Wall Street Jour­nal edi­to­r­i­al board.

    Toomey deliv­ered a speech last year — titled “In Defense of Cap­i­tal­ism” — that took aim not at “the old threat that comes from the left” but rather at the “hyphen­at­ed cap­i­tal­ism” trend­ing on the right. “When I look at this and I look at where this is com­ing from,” he said in the speech, “it strikes me as maybe the most seri­ous threat to eco­nom­ic free­dom and pros­per­i­ty in a long time, because it’s com­ing from our allies. … It is meant to be a dag­ger thrust into the heart of the tra­di­tion­al cen­ter-right con­sen­sus that max­i­miz­ing eco­nom­ic growth is all about.”

    Haley, a like­ly 2024 pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, made the debate the sub­ject of her own remarks at the con­ser­v­a­tive Hud­son Insti­tute last Feb­ru­ary and lat­er in a Wall Street Jour­nal op-ed slam­ming “those who are push­ing a watered-down or hyphen­at­ed cap­i­tal­ism.”

    Oth­er 2024 prospects — among them, Mike Pom­peo, Ron DeSan­tis, Ted Cruz and Rick Scott — haven’t yet staked out strong posi­tions on the GOP’s intra­party eco­nom­ics debate, but they will inevitably need to do so. The one thing on which both groups agree is that an eco­nom­ic brawl on the right is like­ly to play out in the next Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry. Cass pre­dicts a fight “for the future of right of cen­ter” between his allies, like Rubio and Haw­ley, and those he describes as “pre-Trump,” includ­ing Haley.

    ...

    ———-

    “A Big Pol­i­cy Fight Is Brew­ing on the Right. And It’s Not All About Trump.” By Eliana John­son; Politi­co; 08/05/2021

    “It’s easy to attribute these moves to the Trumpi­fi­ca­tion of the GOP — and that is part of the expla­na­tion. But there’s more to it than that. While most of the ink spilled on the divides with­in the con­tem­po­rary Repub­li­can Par­ty focus­es on its pro-Trump and anti-Trump wings, a stark ide­o­log­i­cal divide on eco­nom­ic issues is also emerg­ing over how to chart a post-Trump future for the GOP.”

    A a stark ide­o­log­i­cal divide on eco­nom­ic issues. A stark ide­o­log­i­cal divide on eco­nom­ic issues with Amer­i­can Com­pass lead­ing the way on the cre­ation of this ‘pro-work­er’ fac­tion of the Repub­li­can Par­ty. A fac­tion that alleged­ly includes fig­ures like Josh Haw­ley, JD Vance, and Mar­co Rubio, with politi­cians like Nik­ki Haley on the oth­er side of this ide­o­log­i­cal divide. That the nar­ra­tive we were see­ing get pushed over two years ago. The Amer­i­can Com­pass agen­da isn’t sim­ply work of Oren Cass. Instead, he’s speak­ing for this ‘pro-Trump’ fac­tion of elect­ed offi­cials. That’s the utter­ly absurd nar­ra­tive about the Amer­i­can Com­pass agen­da that was already being devel­oped back in August of 2021:

    ...
    The debate cen­ters on what lessons to draw from Don­ald Trump, who talked like a pop­ulist but gov­erned — with the excep­tion of trade pol­i­cy — more like a Rea­gan­ite. The divide doesn’t quite fall along pro- and anti-Trump lines. The pro-Trump for­mer Unit­ed Nations ambas­sador Nik­ki Haley, for exam­ple, has emerged as a lead­ing cham­pi­on of tra­di­tion­al free-mar­ket poli­cies in oppo­si­tion to oth­er pro-Trumpers like Vance and Haw­ley. The bat­tle is like­ly to play out in the 2024 pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry, and shape the future of Repub­li­can pol­i­tics long after Trump exits stage left.

    The emer­gence of the new eco­nom­ic coun­ter­cul­ture is loose­ly con­nect­ed to the two-year-old think tank, Amer­i­can Com­pass, whose founder, the Har­vard-trained lawyer and for­mer Bain con­sul­tant Oren Cass, rou­tine­ly derides his adver­saries as “mar­ket fun­da­men­tal­ists” ped­dling “stale pieties” from the 1980s. Cass left the free-mar­ket Man­hat­tan Insti­tute in 2019 to launch Amer­i­can Com­pass, the first right-of-cen­ter think tank ded­i­cat­ed to push­ing the gov­ern­ment to get more, rather than less, involved in nation­al eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy in order to help advance a cer­tain set of social and cul­tur­al goals — a view Cass and his ilk have termed “com­mon good cap­i­tal­ism.” The group’s mis­sion: “To restore an eco­nom­ic con­sen­sus that empha­sizes the impor­tance of fam­i­ly, com­mu­ni­ty, and indus­try to the nation’s lib­er­ty and pros­per­i­ty.”
    ...

    And notice how Cass’s crit­ics char­ac­ter­ize his work: They also cast his agen­da as part of some sort of Trumpian con­ser­v­a­tive re-think on eco­nom­ics. A cyn­i­cal re-think, per­haps, but one still Trumpian in its essence. Cass, in turn, declared Nik­ki Haley to be his chief adver­sary in this ide­o­log­i­cal fight. It’s like pro-wrestling fake fight­ing the­atrics for Repub­li­can pol­i­tics:

    ...
    In order to become the par­ty of the work­ing class, Cass has argued, the GOP must aban­don its doc­tri­naire attach­ment to free-mar­ket prin­ci­ples in favor of tra­di­tion­al­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic caus­es like orga­nized labor, the min­i­mum wage and an indus­tri­al pol­i­cy in which the gov­ern­ment boosts par­tic­u­lar indus­tries over oth­ers. He also favors a stricter immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy with an eye toward migrants’ impact on the wages of Amer­i­can work­ers, argu­ments echoed by Vance and Fox News host Tuck­er Carl­son.

    “It’s a very dif­fer­ent set of things to put togeth­er and sup­port, cer­tain­ly from Repub­li­cans,” Cass told me recent­ly, describ­ing his posi­tion as “in all respects anti­thet­i­cal to the Cham­ber of Com­merce view.”

    Cass’ crit­ics say he is mere­ly a more intel­lec­tu­al ver­sion of the crass polit­i­cal oppor­tunists look­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on the Trump lega­cy. Why else would the 2012 Rom­ney cam­paign advis­er turn his back on the free-mar­ket prin­ci­ples he once cham­pi­oned? Why else would the pop­ulist agi­ta­tors of the pre­vi­ous decade, includ­ing the Tea Par­ty dar­ling Mar­co Rubio and his chief of staff, the for­mer Her­itage Action enfant ter­ri­ble Michael Need­ham, shift their focus from restrain­ing gov­ern­ment and con­trol­ling spend­ing to find­ing new ways for the feds to med­dle in the econ­o­my, or the one­time Trump crit­ic Vance trans­form him­self into an avatar of pop­ulist eco­nom­ics?

    ...

    Hedge funds, pri­vate equi­ty firms and ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, many of them long­time Repub­li­can donors, have been on the receiv­ing end of many of Cass’ barbs, and the titans of indus­try, broad­ly speak­ing, argue that Cass has no more busi­ness chart­ing the country’s eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy than any oth­er Ivy League con­sul­tant. See last month’s nasty Twit­ter tan­gle between Cass and the hedge fund bil­lion­aire Clif­ford Asness, a top GOP donor, that began when Cass argued that Asness’ firm “hasn’t been good at deliv­er­ing results for its own investors.” Describ­ing Amer­i­can Com­pass as a “blood and soil orga­ni­za­tion,” Asness urged his fol­low­ers to famil­iar­ize them­selves with Cass’ work: “It’s every pop­ulist piece of utter non­sense all in one place. Very con­ve­nient,” he wrote.

    Twit­ter bat­tles notwith­stand­ing, Cass cites as his chief intel­lec­tu­al adver­saries Haley, the for­mer U.N. ambas­sador, as well as the out­go­ing Penn­syl­va­nia sen­a­tor Pat Toomey, who has been a lead­ing voice on eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, and the mem­bers of the Wall Street Jour­nal edi­to­r­i­al board.

    ...

    Oth­er 2024 prospects — among them, Mike Pom­peo, Ron DeSan­tis, Ted Cruz and Rick Scott — haven’t yet staked out strong posi­tions on the GOP’s intra­party eco­nom­ics debate, but they will inevitably need to do so. The one thing on which both groups agree is that an eco­nom­ic brawl on the right is like­ly to play out in the next Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry. Cass pre­dicts a fight “for the future of right of cen­ter” between his allies, like Rubio and Haw­ley, and those he describes as “pre-Trump,” includ­ing Haley.
    ...

    Final­ly, note the com­men­tary from “polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Richard Hana­nia” in this August 2021 arti­cle. This was, of course, two years before Hana­ni­a’s ear­li­er life as an anony­mous Nazi blog­ger was exposed. It’s anoth­er reminder of the lay­ers of decep­tion often at work when we’re talk­ing about the movers and shak­ers in Amer­i­ca’s polit­i­cal class:

    ...
    “A lot of peo­ple have tried to assign mean­ing to the Trump phe­nom­e­non, and a lot of that mean­ing is self-serv­ing,” says Michael Strain, direc­tor of eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy at the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute. “Pres­i­dent Trump did not expose some deep prob­lem in Amer­i­can soci­ety” that requires a rethink­ing of the eco­nom­ic sys­tem, Strain adds, argu­ing that the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis and the reces­sion that fol­lowed led to the sorts of pop­ulist upris­ings around the globe that have his­tor­i­cal­ly fol­lowed eco­nom­ic cat­a­clysms.

    Oth­ers, includ­ing the polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Richard Hana­nia, say Cass is draw­ing the wrong lessons from Trump’s polit­i­cal suc­cess, which Hana­nia believes had more to do with cul­ture than eco­nom­ics. In an essay pub­lished after the 2020 elec­tion and titled, unsub­tly, “The Nation­al Pop­ulist Illu­sion,” Hana­nia called out Cass and Rubio by name, argu­ing that atti­tudes toward issues like polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and immi­gra­tion were more close­ly linked to Trump votes than eco­nom­ic sta­tus.
    ...

    But as we’re going to see, it’s not just sen­a­tors like Josh Haw­ley or Mar­co Rubio who are now por­trayed as fel­low trav­el­ers of Cass and his ‘kinder, gen­tler’ form of con­ser­vatism. The same net­work of CNP-backed enti­ties that we’ve seen behind the Sched­ule F/Project 2025 plot — The Amer­i­ca First Pol­i­cy Insti­tute, the Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca, Amer­i­can Moment, and the Clare­mont Insti­tute — are all seen as fel­low ‘New Right’ enti­ties work­ing in con­cert to devel­op this new ‘pop­ulist’ form of con­ser­vatism. With Amer­i­can Com­pass tasked with turn­ing those ideas into poli­cies. And the Omid­yar Net­work and Hewlett Foun­da­tion help­ing to finance it all. Yes, it appears that the Omid­yar Net­work and Hewlett Foun­da­tion aren’t just financ­ing Amer­i­can Com­pass. Groups like Amer­i­can Moment are get­ting Omid­yar and Hewlett fund­ing too. That was how The Econ­o­mist described this con­stel­la­tion of ‘New Right’ enti­ties in the fol­low­ing July 2022 piece. All work­ing togeth­er towards a shared goal. Which is rather big hint that we prob­a­bly should­n’t sep­a­rate Oren Cass’s vision for blow­ing up US labor laws with the broad­er Sched­ule F/Project 2025 plot to blow up the rest of soci­ety:

    The Econ­o­mist

    In prepa­ra­tion for pow­er, America’s new right builds new insti­tu­tions

    The move­ment inspired by Don­ald Trump entrench­es itself in Wash­ing­ton, DC

    Jul 5th 2022 | Wash­ing­ton, DC

    A gild­ed con­fer­ence room stocked with cof­fee and lan­yard-wear­ing men in dark suits is a com­mon enough sight in Wash­ing­ton. Only a sign at the door read­ing “The Lies of the Rul­ing Class”, host­ed by the Clare­mont Institute’s year-old Cen­tre for the Amer­i­can Way of Life, marks this event at the Mayflower Hotel as some­thing more unusu­al. “America’s elites are not bright, not com­pe­tent and not qual­i­fied,” says Michael Anton, a for­mer nation­al-secu­ri­ty aide to Don­ald Trump, in the day’s first ses­sion. Unit­ed in favour of eco­nom­ic nation­al­ism, a restrained for­eign pol­i­cy and restrict­ed immi­gra­tion, many of the room’s self-described nation­al con­ser­v­a­tives see the “threat” to Amer­i­ca from the left in exis­ten­tial terms. Yet they are brim­ming with con­fi­dence.

    Come Novem­ber, when Repub­li­cans expect to retake one if not both cham­bers of Con­gress, the nation­al con­ser­v­a­tives hope to trans­late their bud­ding movement’s ener­gy into a share of that pow­er. Thrilled by Mr Trump’s elec­tion but dis­ap­point­ed by his inabil­i­ty to con­vert unortho­dox instincts into action, they are intent on shap­ing a new con­ser­v­a­tive elite and agen­da. Like-mind­ed wonks and for­mer Trump-admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials are busy build­ing think-tanks and advo­ca­cy organ­i­sa­tions, to pro­vide the poli­cies and, cru­cial­ly, the per­son­nel for a new Repub­li­can right.

    ...

    Among the first to act was the Clare­mont Insti­tute, based in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia. It shot to promi­nence for its affil­i­ates’ defence of Mr Trump. One of these was Mr Anton. Anoth­er, John East­man, was the legal the­o­rist behind Mr Trump’s bid to cling to pow­er after the 2020 elec­tion. The insti­tute has a high­brow jour­nal, the Clare­mont Review of Books, and a cen­tre on Capi­tol Hill near oth­er new-right insti­tu­tions. A few blocks away is the Wash­ing­ton out­post of the con­ser­v­a­tive Hills­dale Col­lege, where Mr Anton is a lec­tur­er. Near­by is the town­house of a for­mer Trump advis­er, Steve Ban­non, con­ven­er of new-right per­son­al­i­ties and backer of nation­al con­ser­v­a­tives abroad like Italy’s Mat­teo Salvi­ni.

    A clutch of jour­nals now pro­motes the new right’s ideas. First pub­lished in 2017, the quar­ter­ly Amer­i­can Affairs defends indus­tri­al pol­i­cy and rejects the lais­sez-faire of con­ser­v­a­tives past; it exem­pli­fies the new right’s inter­est in using state pow­er to reshape the econ­o­my and soci­ety. First Things and the Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive are old­er but rep­re­sent the salience of reli­gious and nation­al­ist think­ing. First Things has pub­lished essays in favour of a pro-fam­i­ly wel­fare state to com­ple­ment abor­tion bans. The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive has argued for lim­its on Amer­i­can sup­port for the war in Ukraine. Their tiny cir­cu­la­tion belies their sig­nif­i­cance in stir­ring debate and giv­ing new-right thinkers a chance to bur­nish their rep­u­ta­tions.

    Part wonk­ish, part anti-woke

    To trans­late such ideas into pol­i­cy, new think-tanks have sprung up. Among the more sophis­ti­cat­ed is Amer­i­can Com­pass, found­ed in 2020. “There was this white space in the insti­tu­tion­al land­scape to put out new ideas in a rig­or­ous way,” says Oren Cass, its founder. He has no love for Mr Trump, whose actions fol­low­ing the 2020 elec­tion he called “impeach­able offences”. Mr Cass prefers to focus on wonk­ish pro­pos­als in sup­port of the Repub­li­can Party’s turn towards sta­tism, which have been influ­en­tial among law­mak­ers.

    Last year Sen­a­tor Mitt Rom­ney pro­posed a uni­ver­sal child allowance to cut pover­ty and encour­age fam­i­ly for­ma­tion. It shared many char­ac­ter­is­tics with a scheme from Amer­i­can Com­pass, but Mr Cass and his col­leagues crit­i­cised the absence of an incen­tive for work. A new ver­sion of the bill released on June 15th incor­po­rat­ed an earn­ings require­ment. Anoth­er pro­pos­al from the think-tank to cre­ate firm-based work­ers’ coun­cils, rather than labour unions, has been tak­en up by Sen­a­tor Mar­co Rubio.

    For­mer offi­cials from the Trump admin­is­tra­tion have also cre­at­ed think-tanks, per­haps for com­bat in the cul­ture wars as much as for pol­i­cy work. The Amer­i­ca First Pol­i­cy Insti­tute and the Cen­tre for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca (cra) churn out reports on right-wing bug­bears: the lat­ter, for exam­ple, has draft­ed tools for school boards to clamp down on the teach­ing of crit­i­cal race the­o­ry. Amer­i­ca First Legal, found­ed by Stephen Miller, a for­mer Trump aide, is chal­leng­ing the Biden admin­is­tra­tion in court, most­ly over any loos­en­ing of immi­gra­tion rules.

    These out­fits are per­haps the most loy­al on the new right to Mr Trump per­son­al­ly. The cra employs Jef­frey Clark, whom the for­mer pres­i­dent attempt­ed to install as attor­ney-gen­er­al to help him remain in office. After the fbi searched Mr Clark’s home on June 22nd in con­nec­tion with the plot, Russ Vought, pres­i­dent of the cra and Mr Trump’s for­mer bud­get direc­tor, decried the raid as “crim­i­nal­is­ing pol­i­tics”.

    Whether poli­cies become real­i­ty depends on attract­ing and devel­op­ing cadres, par­tic­u­lar­ly young ones. The most promi­nent of these efforts is the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence, begun dur­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and held annu­al­ly. It has drawn not only the new right’s lead­ing thinkers, but also many ambi­tious politi­cians like Sen­a­tors Josh Haw­ley and Ted Cruz. The oppor­tu­ni­ty to rub shoul­ders with new-right icons has made the con­fer­ence huge­ly pop­u­lar with young con­ser­v­a­tives. That enthu­si­asm is evi­dent in some old­er con­ser­v­a­tive insti­tu­tions that cater to the young and to activists, includ­ing Turn­ing Point usa and the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence, which have embraced Mr Trump to retain their clout.

    The Clare­mont Institute’s long-stand­ing fel­low­ship has alum­ni spread across the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. But Amer­i­can Moment, launched in Feb­ru­ary 2021, has made it its mis­sion to iden­ti­fy and train young nation­al con­ser­v­a­tives for careers in Wash­ing­ton. “We’re look­ing for peo­ple who share our beliefs and moti­va­tions, to get them involved in the fight,” says Saurabh Shar­ma, the organisation’s pres­i­dent.

    All of these ini­tia­tives require mon­ey. Some comes from donors that have long fund­ed con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es, such as the Bradley, DeVos and Scaife foun­da­tions. Old­er insti­tu­tions will com­pete for these funds: under a new pres­i­dent, the Her­itage Foun­da­tion is shift­ing towards new-right posi­tions and rhetoric, in part to retain access to donors; Trump-scep­ti­cal redoubts such as aei may fade into irrel­e­vance in the par­ty even as many remain for­mi­da­ble fundrais­ers.

    But the new right has also proved adept at mobil­is­ing new fun­ders. Peter Thiel, a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and ear­ly backer of Mr Trump, has become a major bene­fac­tor to the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence. Two Sil­i­con Val­ley-based phil­an­thropies, the Hewlett Foun­da­tion and the Omid­yar Net­work, have ear­marked mil­lions of dol­lars for organ­i­sa­tions to devel­op alter­na­tives to mar­ket-friend­ly poli­cies. Amer­i­can Affairs, Amer­i­can Com­pass and Amer­i­can Moment have each man­aged to secure some of these grants.

    The effec­tive­ness of all this activ­i­ty will become clear­er after November’s mid-term elec­tions. If Repub­li­cans retake both cham­bers, the par­ty may need over 1,000 addi­tion­al staff; the new right aims to con­tribute many of them. They will spread ideas and craft leg­is­la­tion. And they will even­tu­al­ly pop­u­late the exec­u­tive branch under the next Repub­li­can pres­i­dent.

    Where the new right may stum­ble is in its affil­i­a­tion with Mr Trump. Many pol­i­cy wonks are ambiva­lent about his con­tin­ued involve­ment in Repub­li­can Par­ty pol­i­tics; they are more con­cerned about the long-term prospects of their own move­ment. Repub­li­can vot­ers’ feal­ty to the errat­ic for­mer pres­i­dent may thwart any hopes by new-right elites for a more dis­ci­plined suc­ces­sor, such as Florida’s gov­er­nor, Ron DeSan­tis. But any future new-right pres­i­dent will have a Wash­ing­ton army in wait­ing.

    ———-

    “In prepa­ra­tion for pow­er, America’s new right builds new insti­tu­tions”; The Econ­o­mist; 07/05/2022

    “A clutch of jour­nals now pro­motes the new right’s ideas. First pub­lished in 2017, the quar­ter­ly Amer­i­can Affairs defends indus­tri­al pol­i­cy and rejects the lais­sez-faire of con­ser­v­a­tives past; it exem­pli­fies the new right’s inter­est in using state pow­er to reshape the econ­o­my and soci­ety. First Things and the Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive are old­er but rep­re­sent the salience of reli­gious and nation­al­ist think­ing. First Things has pub­lished essays in favour of a pro-fam­i­ly wel­fare state to com­ple­ment abor­tion bans. The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive has argued for lim­its on Amer­i­can sup­port for the war in Ukraine. Their tiny cir­cu­la­tion belies their sig­nif­i­cance in stir­ring debate and giv­ing new-right thinkers a chance to bur­nish their rep­u­ta­tions.”

    Amer­i­can Com­pass isn’t some out­lier. No, it’s part of the grow­ing num­ber of ‘New Right’ enti­ties that have been sprout­ing up in recent years as ‘Trumpian’ pol­i­tics took cen­ter stage. So who are the oth­er new enti­ties seen as fel­low trav­el­ers of Amer­i­can Com­pass? The Clare­mont Insti­tute. Recall how the fun­ders behind the Clare­mont Insti­tute are like a ‘Who’s Who’ of right-wing oli­garchs. Also recall how it was the Clare­mont Review of Books where Michael Anton pub­lished his “Flight 93 Elec­tion” essay in 2016, argu­ing that any means nec­es­sary to keep Democ­rats out of office were jus­ti­fied. A sen­ti­ment echoed in the recent Clare­mont Insti­tute inter­view of John East­man where he jus­ti­fied the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion as a fight against left-wing tyran­ny. So when we find fig­ures like Anton and orga­ni­za­tions like the Clare­mont Insti­tute being described as oper­at­ing under the same ‘New Right’ umbrel­las as Cass’s Amer­i­can Com­pass, it’s clue as to just how ‘new’ all of this real­ly is:

    ...
    Among the first to act was the Clare­mont Insti­tute, based in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia. It shot to promi­nence for its affil­i­ates’ defence of Mr Trump. One of these was Mr Anton. Anoth­er, John East­man, was the legal the­o­rist behind Mr Trump’s bid to cling to pow­er after the 2020 elec­tion. The insti­tute has a high­brow jour­nal, the Clare­mont Review of Books, and a cen­tre on Capi­tol Hill near oth­er new-right insti­tu­tions. A few blocks away is the Wash­ing­ton out­post of the con­ser­v­a­tive Hills­dale Col­lege, where Mr Anton is a lec­tur­er. Near­by is the town­house of a for­mer Trump advis­er, Steve Ban­non, con­ven­er of new-right per­son­al­i­ties and backer of nation­al con­ser­v­a­tives abroad like Italy’s Mat­teo Salvi­ni.
    ...

    Sim­i­lar­ly, the oth­er ‘New Right’ enti­ties list­ed in the arti­cle — the Amer­i­can First Pol­i­cy Insti­tute, the Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca, and Amer­i­can Moment — are the very same CNP-backed we’ve seen behind the ongo­ing Sched­ule F/Project 2025 plot. Cass’s actu­al fel­low trav­el­ers are the Sched­ule F plot­ters. It’s a rather impor­tant detail:

    ...
    For­mer offi­cials from the Trump admin­is­tra­tion have also cre­at­ed think-tanks, per­haps for com­bat in the cul­ture wars as much as for pol­i­cy work. The Amer­i­ca First Pol­i­cy Insti­tute and the Cen­tre for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca (cra) churn out reports on right-wing bug­bears: the lat­ter, for exam­ple, has draft­ed tools for school boards to clamp down on the teach­ing of crit­i­cal race the­o­ry. Amer­i­ca First Legal, found­ed by Stephen Miller, a for­mer Trump aide, is chal­leng­ing the Biden admin­is­tra­tion in court, most­ly over any loos­en­ing of immi­gra­tion rules.

    These out­fits are per­haps the most loy­al on the new right to Mr Trump per­son­al­ly. The cra employs Jef­frey Clark, whom the for­mer pres­i­dent attempt­ed to install as attor­ney-gen­er­al to help him remain in office. After the fbi searched Mr Clark’s home on June 22nd in con­nec­tion with the plot, Russ Vought, pres­i­dent of the cra and Mr Trump’s for­mer bud­get direc­tor, decried the raid as “crim­i­nal­is­ing pol­i­tics”.

    ...

    The Clare­mont Institute’s long-stand­ing fel­low­ship has alum­ni spread across the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. But Amer­i­can Moment, launched in Feb­ru­ary 2021, has made it its mis­sion to iden­ti­fy and train young nation­al con­ser­v­a­tives for careers in Wash­ing­ton. “We’re look­ing for peo­ple who share our beliefs and moti­va­tions, to get them involved in the fight,” says Saurabh Shar­ma, the organisation’s pres­i­dent.
    ...

    Also note how Amer­i­can Com­pass is described as a think-tank set up to trans­late these ‘New Right’ ideas into pol­i­cy. Ideas like set­ting up work­ers’ coun­cils in place of labor unions. Ideas already get­ting adopt­ed by politi­cians like Mar­co Rubio:

    ...
    To trans­late such ideas into pol­i­cy, new think-tanks have sprung up. Among the more sophis­ti­cat­ed is Amer­i­can Com­pass, found­ed in 2020. “There was this white space in the insti­tu­tion­al land­scape to put out new ideas in a rig­or­ous way,” says Oren Cass, its founder. He has no love for Mr Trump, whose actions fol­low­ing the 2020 elec­tion he called “impeach­able offences”. Mr Cass prefers to focus on wonk­ish pro­pos­als in sup­port of the Repub­li­can Party’s turn towards sta­tism, which have been influ­en­tial among law­mak­ers.

    Last year Sen­a­tor Mitt Rom­ney pro­posed a uni­ver­sal child allowance to cut pover­ty and encour­age fam­i­ly for­ma­tion. It shared many char­ac­ter­is­tics with a scheme from Amer­i­can Com­pass, but Mr Cass and his col­leagues crit­i­cised the absence of an incen­tive for work. A new ver­sion of the bill released on June 15th incor­po­rat­ed an earn­ings require­ment. Anoth­er pro­pos­al from the think-tank to cre­ate firm-based work­ers’ coun­cils, rather than labour unions, has been tak­en up by Sen­a­tor Mar­co Rubio.
    ...

    Final­ly, if it was­n’t total­ly obvi­ous­ly how not ‘new’ this ‘New Right’ actu­al­ly is, note how the mon­ey for these ‘New Right’ ini­tia­tives is com­ing from sources like the Bradley, DeVos and Scaife foun­da­tions. It’s hard to get much more ‘estab­lish­ment’ than that. Even the Her­itage Foun­da­tion is get­ting cast as some sort of ‘New Right’ wannabe enti­ty under the lead­er­ship of its new pres­i­dent. That would, of course, be CNP mem­ber Kevin Roberts. And there, among groups like the Scaife foun­da­tion, we find the osten­si­bly ‘pro­gres­sive’ Hewlett Foun­da­tion and Omid­yar Net­work. Some­thing is not adding up in this pic­ture:

    ...
    All of these ini­tia­tives require mon­ey. Some comes from donors that have long fund­ed con­ser­v­a­tive caus­es, such as the Bradley, DeVos and Scaife foun­da­tions. Old­er insti­tu­tions will com­pete for these funds: under a new pres­i­dent, the Her­itage Foun­da­tion is shift­ing towards new-right posi­tions and rhetoric, in part to retain access to donors; Trump-scep­ti­cal redoubts such as aei may fade into irrel­e­vance in the par­ty even as many remain for­mi­da­ble fundrais­ers.

    But the new right has also proved adept at mobil­is­ing new fun­ders. Peter Thiel, a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and ear­ly backer of Mr Trump, has become a major bene­fac­tor to the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Con­fer­ence. Two Sil­i­con Val­ley-based phil­an­thropies, the Hewlett Foun­da­tion and the Omid­yar Net­work, have ear­marked mil­lions of dol­lars for organ­i­sa­tions to devel­op alter­na­tives to mar­ket-friend­ly poli­cies. Amer­i­can Affairs, Amer­i­can Com­pass and Amer­i­can Moment have each man­aged to secure some of these grants.
    ...

    It just does­n’t add up. At least tak­en at face val­ue. But when tak­en as just anoth­er instance of decep­tive Machi­avel­lian polit­i­cal the­ater, it makes a lot of sense. Much too much sense for com­fort.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | September 13, 2023, 12:52 am
  33. Gov­ern­ment shut­down threats are noth­ing new for the US. They nev­er work and are almost always a failed polit­i­cal spec­ta­cle. But is this time dif­fer­ent? It’s one of the many dis­turb­ing ques­tions we get to ask as the going shut­down show­down plays out. And as we’re going to see, while much of what we’re hear­ing should sound very famil­iar, this time real­ly is dif­fer­ent. Dif­fer­ent and stu­pid. But dan­ger­ous­ly stu­pid in ways that should also now sound very famil­iar:

    It’s war on the ‘weaponiza­tion’ of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is doing the “politi­cians’ work, not the peo­ples’ work,” and they have a plan to change that. At least that’s the spin we’re get­ting. Spin that has coa­lesced into a kind of unit­ed mes­sag­ing front for both con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans and the Trump reelec­tion cam­paign. Trump wages his cru­sade against the ‘weaponiza­tion’ of gov­ern­ment against him per­son­al­ly, while the rest of the GOP warns con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers in gen­er­al that the threats fac­ing Trump are fac­ing them too. All con­ser­v­a­tives are under threat from a weaponized fed­er­al gov­ern­ment out to get them and destroy them all. The only defense is a pow­er­ful offense in the form of get­ting Trump elect­ed and purg­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment of all dis­loy­al bureau­crats. That is now the dom­i­nant Repub­li­can mes­sage head­ing into the 2024 elec­tion cycle. Oh, and Trump just declared that Com­cast — the own­er of MSNBC — “should be inves­ti­gat­ed for its ‘Coun­try Threat­en­ing Trea­son’”. He’s dou­bling and tripling down on the crazy and it’s still not even 2024 yet.

    And, of course, this is all a mes­sag­ing strat­e­gy that implic­it­ly puts the Sched­ule F/Project 2025 plot to purge the gov­ern­ment (and soci­ety) of all things ‘left­ist’. A plot that, as we’ve seen, is designed to more or less deliv­er every sin­gle item on the right-wing mega-donors’ wish list, includ­ing a mass gut­ting of reg­u­la­tions.

    So giv­en that the Sched­ule F/Project 2025 scheme is becom­ing increas­ing­ly cen­tral to the entire GOP’s 2024 elec­toral strat­e­gy (and pre­sum­ably cen­tral to their post-2024 gov­ern­ing strat­e­gy), it’s worth not­ing how the emerg­ing rhetoric cen­tered around this grow­ing Sched­ule F plot is play­ing into the ‘shut­down show­down’ fias­co cur­rent­ly play­ing out as the GOP-con­trolled House nego­ti­ates with the Demo­c­ra­t­ic-con­trolled Sen­ate and White House in work­ing out some sort of bud­get agree­ment. A fias­co pri­mar­i­ly play­ing out inside the GOP House cau­cus, with ‘Free­dom Cau­cus’ hold outs fram­ing the cur­rent threat to shut­down the gov­ern­ment until their demands are met as a means of wag­ing a war on the ‘weaponiza­tion’ and ‘politi­ciza­tion’ of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.

    As we’re going to see in the fol­low­ing arti­cle by the right-wing ‘Just the News’ media out­let, one Repub­li­can con­gress­man after anoth­er is explain­ing their sup­port for a gov­ern­ment shut­down in terms of using the shut­down to ‘fight the weaponiza­tion and politi­ciza­tion’ of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and the ‘two tiers of jus­tice’. One tier for Trump and all con­ser­v­a­tives and anoth­er tier for Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and Democ­rats. That real­ly is the rhetoric they are using now. The inves­ti­ga­tions of Trump fore­tell a mass legal crack­down on con­ser­v­a­tives for being con­ser­v­a­tive.

    Or as Sen­a­tor Mar­sha Black­burn put it, “Peo­ple look at this, and they say, ‘Two tiers of justice,’...Why is it that you have two tiers of access, two tiers of enforce­ment, two tiers of com­pli­ance, two tiers of jus­tice? And you see this from all your fed­er­al agen­cies, whether it’s the EPA, the IRS, DOJ, FBI.” Yes, the fed­er­al agen­cies like the IRS and EPA are part of this ‘two tiers’ of jus­tice too. Black­burn goes on to lament how small busi­ness own­ers are con­cerned that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is pick­ing which busi­ness­es sur­vive based on this ‘two tiers of jus­tice’, assert­ing that, “it con­cerns small busi­ness own­ers” because if the gov­ern­ment bureau­cra­cy “get[s] their way, they can manip­u­late what busi­ness­es sur­vive and which busi­ness­es sink, what peo­ple are held to account for wrong­do­ing and what peo­ple are not.”

    Sim­i­lar­ly, as Rep Eli Crane described the sen­ti­ments he was hear­ing from con­stituents regard­ing the shut­down threats, “they fear what this gov­ern­ment is turn­ing into, and that’s why they want a reckoning...And they know the only way that hap­pens is if we exer­cise the pow­er of the purse and say, ‘No, we’re not going to pay for that any­more. We’re actu­al­ly going to make some cuts in this town, we’re going to start turn­ing this thing around.’”

    So as we can see, this increas­ing­ly apoc­a­lyp­tic rhetoric com­ing out of the GOP about a weaponized gov­ern­ment and the need to fight that weaponiza­tion is syn­er­giz­ing remark­ably well with the threats to just blow up the econ­o­my under a shut­down threat. These are mem­bers of con­gress from extreme­ly con­ser­v­a­tive states and dis­tricts oper­at­ing in a polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment extreme­ly divorced from real­i­ty. A polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment where, accord­ing to Repub­li­can offi­cials, the US is on the verge of some sort of LGBTQ+ dic­ta­tor­ship of trans-chil­dren led by Hunter Biden and a cabal of pedo-democ­rats or some­thing. In oth­er words, this is a polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment where one par­ty is already open­ly plan­ning on ‘burn­ing it all down’ should they win! It’s part of their plat­form at this point! And their con­stituents are ful­ly on board with this agen­da. So when ‘burn is all down’ is basi­cal­ly what they’re cam­paign on, what are the odds they’re not going to burn it all down now that they have to chance to do so in a man­ner that can poten­tial­ly be blamed on ‘every­one’?

    But who knows, maybe this shut­down show­down will end like they always do, with a last minute capit­u­la­tion by the hold outs under a bunch of rhetor­i­cal cov­er and blus­ter. But either way, the weaponiza­tion of “weaponiza­tion” rhetoric isn’t going away. It’s what the GOP stands for now: an exis­ten­tial ‘all of noth­ing’ win­ner-take-all cul­ture war that has become so aggres­sive it’s become a planned fas­cist purge of soci­ety. A purge that is now planned out in the open. Again, they are open­ly cam­paign­ing on this now.

    And when you have a fas­cist move­ment open­ly plan­ning on burn­ing it all down and cap­tur­ing soci­ety once and for all, it’s also impor­tant to keep in mind that this is a plan that will obvi­ous­ly include a lot of spec­ta­cle. Incred­i­ble spec­ta­cle designed to keep the mass­es entranced and enthralled with what is unfold­ing.

    And that’s why it’s also impor­tant to keep in mind that when Trump laid out his ’10 point plan to dis­man­tle the deep state’ back in March, that plan include a lot of spec­ta­cle. Spec­ta­cle like a ‘Truth and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion’ com­mis­sion for the deep state, which sure sounds a lot like Oren Cass’s calls for Joe McCarthy-style con­gres­sion­al hear­ings.

    The point being that, while ‘shut­ting down the gov­ern­ment’ over these bud­get nego­ti­a­tions has nev­er been a very plau­si­ble threat in the past, it’s a lot more plau­si­ble today, thanks large­ly to the fact that ‘shut­ting down the gov­ern­ment’ is kind of what the GOP is now open­ly cam­paign­ing on under the guise of ‘fight­ing the weaponiza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment’. The mega-donors who have spent decades try­ing to come up with a polit­i­cal­ly palat­able excuse for break­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment have final­ly found their excuse: end­ing the ‘weaponiza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment’ against con­ser­v­a­tives. Sure, it’s a non­sense nar­ra­tive, but its the non­sense nar­ra­tive guid­ing the par­ty at this point and they are all in:

    Just the News

    Gov­ern­ment shut­down? Repub­li­cans clash over spend­ing bill, want to ban fed­er­al weaponiza­tion

    “The real­i­ty is we’re head­ed to a shut­down here unless we can get some­thing togeth­er and hold these Democ­rats’ feet to the fire,” Rep. Bri­an Babin said.

    By Natalia Mit­tel­stadt
    Sep­tem­ber 19, 2023 11:00pm
    Updat­ed: Sep­tem­ber 19, 2023 11:39pm

    Con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans seek to use appro­pri­a­tions bills to end what many call “the weaponiza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment” as they clash over a spend­ing mea­sure that could lead to a gov­ern­ment shut­down.

    Some House Repub­li­cans are seek­ing to pass a con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion for the fed­er­al bud­get to pre­vent a gov­ern­ment shut­down on Oct. 1, as mem­bers from both the House Free­dom Cau­cus and Main Street Cau­cus nego­ti­at­ed a pro­pos­al to reduce dis­cre­tionary spend­ing by 8%.

    Accord­ing to the con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion, which would fund the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment until Oct. 31, there would be an 8.1285% reduc­tion in dis­cre­tionary spend­ing, specif­i­cal­ly for all the fed­er­al agen­cies except the Depart­ment of Defense and Depart­ment of Vet­er­ans Affairs depart­ments.

    In June, a debt lim­it deal became law with pro­vi­sions that if all 12 appro­pri­a­tions bills are not passed by Jan. 1, 2024, then there would be a 1% cut to the fed­er­al bud­get. The House has passed one bill but none have passed the Sen­ate.

    Rep. Bryan Steil (R‑Wis.), chair­man of the Admin­is­tra­tion Com­mit­tee, told the “ Just the News, No Noise ” TV show on Mon­day that he believes the appro­pri­a­tions bills can be used to lim­it the politi­ciza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.

    There “is a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty on the appro­pri­a­tions bills com­ing before us to actu­al­ly put for­ward con­ser­v­a­tive poli­cies that make sure that we’re hav­ing every fed­er­al agency, includ­ing the Depart­ment of Jus­tice, doing their job and not drift­ing into oth­er polit­i­cal realms,” Steil said.

    “And so, as we have this big spend­ing fight in Wash­ing­ton over the com­ing two weeks, I think it’s essen­tial that we get our spend­ing bills done, that we’re not liv­ing under Nan­cy Pelosi and Demo­c­ra­t­ic one-par­ty con­trol spend­ing bills and their pri­or­i­ties. We have con­ser­v­a­tive poli­cies at the helm to make sure that our fed­er­al agen­cies are doing the peo­ple’s work, not politi­cians’ work,” he con­tin­ued.

    Repub­li­cans have repeat­ed­ly said that there are two tiers of jus­tice in the U.S., par­tic­u­lar­ly in instances such as when for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump was inves­ti­gat­ed by the Jus­tice Depart­ment for alleged Russ­ian col­lu­sion and claim­ing there was elec­tion fraud in 2020 while inves­ti­ga­tions into Hunter Biden were pur­pose­ly stalled.

    Sen. Mar­sha Black­burn (R‑Tenn.) told the “John Solomon Reports” pod­cast on Tues­day that Amer­i­cans are con­cerned about the dis­parate treat­ment.

    “Peo­ple look at this, and they say, ‘Two tiers of jus­tice,’” Black­burn said. “Why is it that you have two tiers of access, two tiers of enforce­ment, two tiers of com­pli­ance, two tiers of jus­tice? And you see this from all your fed­er­al agen­cies, whether it’s the EPA, the IRS, DOJ, FBI.”

    She added that her con­stituents have said that they are afraid of the pos­si­ble con­se­quences of a two-tiered jus­tice sys­tem.

    Black­burn said that Ten­nesseans told her last Fri­day, “The two tiers of jus­tice real­ly fright­en us because if they can do cer­tain things to Don­ald Trump, but then they can turn around and say to the Clin­tons, to the Bidens and to their cronies, ‘Oh, we’re just going to turn a blind eye to that and let you skate,’ that real­ly con­cerns peo­ple.”

    She explained that “it con­cerns small busi­ness own­ers” because if the gov­ern­ment bureau­cra­cy “get[s] their way, they can manip­u­late what busi­ness­es sur­vive and which busi­ness­es sink, what peo­ple are held to account for wrong­do­ing and what peo­ple are not.”

    Rep. Eli Crane (R‑Ariz.) told the “John Solomon Reports” pod­cast on Tues­day that because of the weaponiza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, he has received com­ments from con­stituents say­ing to shut down the gov­ern­ment.

    “They fear what this gov­ern­ment is turn­ing into, and that’s why they want a reck­on­ing,” Crane said. “And they know the only way that hap­pens is if we exer­cise the pow­er of the purse and say, ‘No, we’re not going to pay for that any­more. We’re actu­al­ly going to make some cuts in this town, we’re going to start turn­ing this thing around.’”

    Crane said that he is “not vot­ing for a res­o­lu­tion,” which he sees as a form of “kick[ing] the can down the road.”

    Rep. Jim Jor­dan (R‑Ohio) toldJust the News, No Noise” on Tues­day, “[W]e want cer­tain lan­guage on these appro­pri­a­tion bills, when we get to those, that says, you know, no mon­ey can be used to cen­sor Amer­i­cans — that kind of lan­guage — no mon­ey can be used to devel­op a dis­in­for­ma­tion gov­er­nance board at the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty like they tried to do a year ago.”

    Jor­dan added that secur­ing the U.S.-Mexico bor­der should be the main issue with regard to the con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion.

    ...

    Some Repub­li­cans believe the con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion should be passed but acknowl­edge the hur­dles between the GOP cau­cus­es in get­ting the bill through the House.

    Rep. Bri­an Babin (R‑Texas) told “Just the News, No Noise” on Tues­day, “The real­i­ty is we’re head­ed to a shut­down here unless we can get some­thing togeth­er and hold these Democ­rats’ feet to the fire — espe­cial­ly Pres­i­dent Biden — because, if we don’t put our bill on the floor, that means we’re going to leave it up to them to put [up] a bill.”

    He added, “We need the most con­ser­v­a­tive bill pos­si­ble.

    “This was one of the most con­ser­v­a­tive I’ve seen since I’ve been serv­ing up here,” Babin not­ed, say­ing that he “was amazed that we still can’t get to yes and unite.

    “We’re not going to win this thing by not unit­ing, we’re going to be dis­joint­ed. And I cer­tain­ly hope that they will come around and that we will do the right thing.”

    ...

    A group of five House Repub­li­cans on Tues­day vot­ed with Democ­rats to block the advance­ment of a Pen­ta­gon fund­ing mea­sure over the dis­agree­ments on the con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion.

    ———-

    “Gov­ern­ment shut­down? Repub­li­cans clash over spend­ing bill, want to ban fed­er­al weaponiza­tion” By Natalia Mit­tel­stadt; Just the News; 09/19/2023

    “Rep. Bryan Steil (R‑Wis.), chair­man of the Admin­is­tra­tion Com­mit­tee, told the “ Just the News, No Noise ” TV show on Mon­day that he believes the appro­pri­a­tions bills can be used to lim­it the politi­ciza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.”

    Yes, as Rep Bryan Steil put it, the lever­age House Repub­li­cans have in this shut­down show­down can be used to ‘lim­it the politi­ciza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.’ That was the fram­ing he used to tout the “con­ser­v­a­tive poli­cies at the helm to make sure that our fed­er­al agen­cies are doing the peo­ple’s work, not politi­cians’ work.” Demo­c­ra­t­ic poli­cies are, in this fram­ing, designed sole­ly for what we can pre­sume are the deep state cabal of pedophiles pro­tect­ing cor­rupt Joe Biden and relat­ed spe­cial inter­est groups like trans­gen­der minor­i­ty chil­dren, while the con­ser­v­a­tive poli­cies Steil is push­ing will ensure the gov­ern­ment ‘works for the peo­ple’. It’s like the decades of intel­lec­tu­al degra­da­tion in US pol­i­tics get­ting dis­tilled into a talk­ing point. This is where we are:

    ...
    There “is a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty on the appro­pri­a­tions bills com­ing before us to actu­al­ly put for­ward con­ser­v­a­tive poli­cies that make sure that we’re hav­ing every fed­er­al agency, includ­ing the Depart­ment of Jus­tice, doing their job and not drift­ing into oth­er polit­i­cal realms,” Steil said.

    “And so, as we have this big spend­ing fight in Wash­ing­ton over the com­ing two weeks, I think it’s essen­tial that we get our spend­ing bills done, that we’re not liv­ing under Nan­cy Pelosi and Demo­c­ra­t­ic one-par­ty con­trol spend­ing bills and their pri­or­i­ties. We have con­ser­v­a­tive poli­cies at the helm to make sure that our fed­er­al agen­cies are doing the peo­ple’s work, not politi­cians’ work,” he con­tin­ued.
    ...

    And as we can see, the same con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donor wish-list of pri­or­i­ties that’s part of every shut­down show­down: mas­sive spend­ing cuts. In this case, an 8% cut across the board except for Defense and Vet­er­ans. Which are, at the end of the, mas­sive cuts that will nev­er pos­si­bly hap­pen. But those are the demands, framed as cuts that will pre­vent the Deep State from doing the ‘politi­cians’ work’ instead of the peo­ple’s work:

    ...
    Some House Repub­li­cans are seek­ing to pass a con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion for the fed­er­al bud­get to pre­vent a gov­ern­ment shut­down on Oct. 1, as mem­bers from both the House Free­dom Cau­cus and Main Street Cau­cus nego­ti­at­ed a pro­pos­al to reduce dis­cre­tionary spend­ing by 8%.

    Accord­ing to the con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion, which would fund the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment until Oct. 31, there would be an 8.1285% reduc­tion in dis­cre­tionary spend­ing, specif­i­cal­ly for all the fed­er­al agen­cies except the Depart­ment of Defense and Depart­ment of Vet­er­ans Affairs depart­ments.

    In June, a debt lim­it deal became law with pro­vi­sions that if all 12 appro­pri­a­tions bills are not passed by Jan. 1, 2024, then there would be a 1% cut to the fed­er­al bud­get. The House has passed one bill but none have passed the Sen­ate.
    ...

    Sim­i­lar­ly, Sen­a­tor Black­burn is tak­ing the ‘two-tiers of jus­tice’ nar­ra­tive focused around the alleged selec­tive gov­ern­ment per­se­cu­tion of Don­ald Trump and extend it to a gen­er­al per­ceived threat to all small busi­ness ema­nat­ing from agen­cies like the EPA and IRS. And that’s how the clas­sic mega-donor wish list items like the gut­ting of the IRS and EPA gets spun into the ‘two-tiered jus­tice’ nar­ra­tive. And it’s a very flex­i­ble, adap­tive nar­ra­tive. As all make-is-up-as-you-go nar­ra­tives tend to be. It may not be coher­ent, but it’s flex­i­ble:

    ...
    Repub­li­cans have repeat­ed­ly said that there are two tiers of jus­tice in the U.S., par­tic­u­lar­ly in instances such as when for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump was inves­ti­gat­ed by the Jus­tice Depart­ment for alleged Russ­ian col­lu­sion and claim­ing there was elec­tion fraud in 2020 while inves­ti­ga­tions into Hunter Biden were pur­pose­ly stalled.

    Sen. Mar­sha Black­burn (R‑Tenn.) told the “John Solomon Reports” pod­cast on Tues­day that Amer­i­cans are con­cerned about the dis­parate treat­ment.

    “Peo­ple look at this, and they say, ‘Two tiers of jus­tice,’” Black­burn said. “Why is it that you have two tiers of access, two tiers of enforce­ment, two tiers of com­pli­ance, two tiers of jus­tice? And you see this from all your fed­er­al agen­cies, whether it’s the EPA, the IRS, DOJ, FBI.”

    She added that her con­stituents have said that they are afraid of the pos­si­ble con­se­quences of a two-tiered jus­tice sys­tem.

    Black­burn said that Ten­nesseans told her last Fri­day, “The two tiers of jus­tice real­ly fright­en us because if they can do cer­tain things to Don­ald Trump, but then they can turn around and say to the Clin­tons, to the Bidens and to their cronies, ‘Oh, we’re just going to turn a blind eye to that and let you skate,’ that real­ly con­cerns peo­ple.”

    She explained that “it con­cerns small busi­ness own­ers” because if the gov­ern­ment bureau­cra­cy “get[s] their way, they can manip­u­late what busi­ness­es sur­vive and which busi­ness­es sink, what peo­ple are held to account for wrong­do­ing and what peo­ple are not.”
    ...

    And, of course, we find the neb­u­lous demand of ‘secur­ing the US-Mex­i­can bor­der’ among the list of fear-of-the-fed­er­al-gov­er­ment demands. Or as Rep Jim Jor­dan puts it, the main issue. Or at least the main issue with regards to the imme­di­ate con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion. It’s all part of the bizarre max­i­mal­ist chest thump­ing com­ing from the ‘Free­dom Cau­cus’ right now as the dead­lines grow clos­er. Max­i­mal­ist chest thump­ing in the form of demands for sweep­ing con­ser­v­a­tive poli­cies across the board in the name of ‘fight­ing the politi­ciza­tion of gov­ern­ment’:

    ...
    Rep. Eli Crane (R‑Ariz.) told the “John Solomon Reports” pod­cast on Tues­day that because of the weaponiza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, he has received com­ments from con­stituents say­ing to shut down the gov­ern­ment.

    “They fear what this gov­ern­ment is turn­ing into, and that’s why they want a reck­on­ing,” Crane said. “And they know the only way that hap­pens is if we exer­cise the pow­er of the purse and say, ‘No, we’re not going to pay for that any­more. We’re actu­al­ly going to make some cuts in this town, we’re going to start turn­ing this thing around.’”

    Crane said that he is “not vot­ing for a res­o­lu­tion,” which he sees as a form of “kick[ing] the can down the road.”

    Rep. Jim Jor­dan (R‑Ohio) toldJust the News, No Noise” on Tues­day, “[W]e want cer­tain lan­guage on these appro­pri­a­tion bills, when we get to those, that says, you know, no mon­ey can be used to cen­sor Amer­i­cans — that kind of lan­guage — no mon­ey can be used to devel­op a dis­in­for­ma­tion gov­er­nance board at the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty like they tried to do a year ago.”

    Jor­dan added that secur­ing the U.S.-Mexico bor­der should be the main issue with regard to the con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion.
    ...

    And then there’s the calls for par­ty uni­ty from House Rep Bri­an Babin, whose warn­ing that “we’re head­ed to a shut­down here unless we can get some­thing togeth­er and hold these Democ­rats’ feet to the fire” appeared to be direct­ed at Repub­li­cans not on board with the Free­dom Cau­cus’s arch-con­ser­v­a­tive bud­get pro­pos­al. A pro­pos­al that has zero chance of pas­sage since it would require Democ­rats to agree and could only pos­si­bly work if Democ­rats ‘blinked’ under duress of an end­less shut­down that destroys the econ­o­my even more than the bud­get cuts would have.
    It’s the kind of sce­nario that, on its face, makes so lit­tle sense you have to won­der what Babin and his fac­tion is real­ly hop­ing to pull off here. So it’s worth not­ing that Babin was one of the mem­bers of con­gress whose text mes­sages to Mark Mead­ows in the weeks lead­ing up to Jan­u­ary 6 was rather, shall we say, sup­port­ive of an ‘any means nec­es­sary’ approach to avoid­ing a Biden pres­i­dent. As TPM dis­cov­ered, Babin implored Mead­ows — a fig­ure long seen as cen­tral to the Trump White House­’s post-elec­tion strat­e­gy coor­di­na­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion among the many involved par­ties — days after the 2020 elec­tion to, “Fight like hell and find a way. We’re with you down here in Texas and refuse to live under a cor­rupt Marx­ist dic­ta­tor­ship. Lib­er­ty!” In late Decem­ber 2020, he texted Mead­ows about an “objec­tor meet­ing” he was plan­ning on attend­ing at the CNP’s Con­ser­v­a­tive Pol­i­cy Insti­tute (CPI) and hoped Mead­ows would also attend. So Babin was play­ing a kind of mid­dle­man role between the CPI — which oper­ates as a kind of moth­er­ship for CNP-backed MAGA-aligned groups — and the Trump White White. It’s a reminder that there’s no short­age of mem­bers of con­gress who took what could prob­a­bly now be seen as a trea­so­nous turn post-2020 and, as such, may be extra eager to par­tic­i­pate in the upcom­ing ‘Project 2025’ defang­ing of the Jus­tice Depart­ment against Repub­li­cans. There’s a lot of poten­tial con­sti­tu­tion­al sub­ver­sion that has yet to be ful­ly cov­ered up or exon­er­at­ed and that keep con­gress mem­bers who sent lots of incrim­i­nat­ing texts like Bri­an Babin up at night:

    ...
    Some Repub­li­cans believe the con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion should be passed but acknowl­edge the hur­dles between the GOP cau­cus­es in get­ting the bill through the House.

    Rep. Bri­an Babin (R‑Texas) told “Just the News, No Noise” on Tues­day, “The real­i­ty is we’re head­ed to a shut­down here unless we can get some­thing togeth­er and hold these Democ­rats’ feet to the fire — espe­cial­ly Pres­i­dent Biden — because, if we don’t put our bill on the floor, that means we’re going to leave it up to them to put [up] a bill.”

    He added, “We need the most con­ser­v­a­tive bill pos­si­ble.

    “This was one of the most con­ser­v­a­tive I’ve seen since I’ve been serv­ing up here,” Babin not­ed, say­ing that he “was amazed that we still can’t get to yes and unite.

    “We’re not going to win this thing by not unit­ing, we’re going to be dis­joint­ed. And I cer­tain­ly hope that they will come around and that we will do the right thing.”
    ...

    So with ‘fight­ing the weaponiza­tion of the gov­ern­ment’ now the theme that both Trump and the rest of the MAGA-ori­ent­ed GOP has decid­ed to ral­ly around, it’s worth tak­ing a look at the ’10 point’ plant to ‘dis­man­tle the deep state’ that was shared by the Trump cam­paign back in March deliv­ered via Twit­ter video. It was both a typ­i­cal Trumpian unhinged rant about the deep state and a very real warn­ing of what’s to come when Trump returns to office. Because as we’re going to see, Trump’s ’10 point plan’ to ‘dis­man­tle the deep state’ is real­ly a plan to ‘clean house’ of any­one inclined to push back again ille­gal orders, staff the bureau­cra­cy with cronies, and ensure it can nev­er be ‘cleaned’ again:

    Newsweek

    Trump to ‘Dis­man­tle Deep State’ with ‘Truth and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Com­mis­sion’

    By Aila Slis­co On 3/21/23 at 8:08 PM EDT

    For­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump is plan­ning to form a “truth and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion com­mis­sion” as part of an effort to fight the “deep state.”

    Trump announced a “10-point plan to dis­man­tle the deep state” in a video shared to the Trump War Room Twit­ter account on Tues­day. The for­mer pres­i­dent said the plan would “reclaim our democ­ra­cy from Wash­ing­ton once and for all” by elim­i­nat­ing the deep state —a sup­posed net­work of shad­owy and pow­er­ful fig­ures secret­ly con­trol­ling the gov­ern­ment and a fre­quent fea­ture of right-wing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

    Although Trump men­tioned the deep state dur­ing his time in the White House, the for­mer pres­i­dent said in a video ear­li­er this year that he “was­n’t a believ­er” in the the­o­ry until recent­ly. The estab­lish­ment of a com­mis­sion to expose the sup­posed net­work was just one ele­ment of the plan announced by his 2024 cam­paign on Tues­day. Here are all 10 points of the plan:

    Exec­u­tive Order to Fire ‘Rogue Bureau­crats’

    “I will imme­di­ate­ly re-issue my 2020 exec­u­tive order restor­ing the pres­i­den­t’s author­i­ty to remove rogue bureau­crats,” Trump said in the video on Tues­day. “And I will wield that pow­er very aggres­sive­ly.”

    The exec­u­tive order issued by Trump in Octo­ber 2020, which was nev­er ful­ly imple­ment­ed, estab­lished a new employ­ment cat­e­go­ry for fed­er­al work­ers called “Sched­ule F.”

    Under the new cat­e­go­ry, civ­il ser­vants with jobs tied to “pol­i­cy-deter­min­ing, pol­i­cy-mak­ing, or pol­i­cy-advo­cat­ing” effec­tive­ly lost civ­il ser­vice employ­ment pro­tec­tion for fed­er­al employ­ees that had been in place for more than 135 years.

    Trump has made it clear that he intends to rein­state the order if elect­ed in 2024. Democ­rats intro­duced a pro­vi­sion to last year’s Nation­al Defense Autho­riza­tion Act that would have blocked the order, but the pro­vi­sion was removed from the final ver­sion of the bill passed in Decem­ber.

    Over­haul Fed­er­al Agen­cies, Fire ‘Cor­rupt’ Offi­cials

    “We will clean out all of the cor­rupt actors in our nation­al secu­ri­ty and intel­li­gence appa­ra­tus, and there are plen­ty of them,” Trump said.

    “The depart­ments and agen­cies that have been weaponized will be com­plete­ly over­hauled,” he con­tin­ued. “So that face­less bureau­crats will nev­er again be able to tar­get and per­se­cute con­ser­v­a­tives, Chris­tians, or the left­’s polit­i­cal ene­mies, which they’re doing now at a lev­el that nobody can believe even pos­si­ble.”

    Trump’s pledge to oust the “cor­rupt” offi­cials that are sup­pos­ed­ly in ser­vice to “the left” echoes recent Repub­li­can rhetoric claim­ing that con­ser­v­a­tives en masse are fac­ing per­se­cu­tion from pow­er­ful Democ­rats.

    The GOP-led House estab­lished a select com­mit­tee to inves­ti­gate the “weaponiza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment” this year, although the com­mit­tee has failed to uncov­er evi­dence of a con­spir­a­cy, while fac­ing crit­i­cism over cred­i­bil­i­ty and the qual­i­ty of its wit­ness­es.

    Clean Up ‘Cor­rupt’ FISA Courts

    “We will total­ly reform FISA courts which are so cor­rupt that the judges seem­ing­ly do not care when they are lied to in war­rant appli­ca­tions,” Trump said. “So many judges have seen so many appli­ca­tions that they know were wrong, or at least they must have known. They do noth­ing about it, they’re lied to.”

    Fed­er­al courts estab­lished under the For­eign Intel­li­gence Sur­veil­lance Act (FISA) are respon­si­ble for review­ing and approv­ing gov­ern­ment wire­tap­ping requests. The courts have faced crit­i­cism from both ends of the polit­i­cal spec­trum for rarely refus­ing requests and alleged­ly “rub­ber stamp­ing” sur­veil­lance on U.S. cit­i­zens.

    Trump has been call­ing for an over­haul since accus­ing the courts of aid­ing a Demo­c­ra­t­ic “witch hunt” by grant­i­ng a war­rant to the FBI for sur­veil­lance on his for­mer cam­paign aide Carter Page, as part of the inves­ti­ga­tion into Russ­ian med­dling in the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

    ‘Truth and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Com­mis­sion’

    “We will estab­lish a truth and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion com­mis­sion to declas­si­fy and pub­lish all doc­u­ments on deep state spy­ing, cen­sor­ship and cor­rup­tion,” said Trump. “And there are plen­ty of them.”

    What was like­ly the best-known “truth and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion com­mis­sion” was estab­lished in post-apartheid South Africa in 1995, to iden­ti­fy and expose human rights abus­es dur­ing more than four decades of the racial seg­re­ga­tion pol­i­cy.

    Details of Trump’s pro­posed com­mis­sion are unclear. It is also unclear why Trump did not declas­si­fy the sup­posed deep state doc­u­ments while he was in office from 2017 to 2021.

    ‘Crack­down on Gov­ern­ment Leak­ers,’ ‘Fake News’

    “We will launch a major crack­down on gov­ern­ment leak­ers who col­lude with the fake news to delib­er­ate­ly weave false nar­ra­tives and to sub­vert our gov­ern­ment and our democ­ra­cy,” Trump said. “When pos­si­ble, we will press crim­i­nal charges.”

    The for­mer pres­i­dent has fre­quent­ly lashed out at the “fake news.” He was par­tic­u­lar­ly crit­i­cal of “gov­ern­ment leak­ers” who were crit­i­cal of him.

    In 2018, he tweet­ed that “leak­ers are trai­tors and cow­ards” after The New York Times pub­lished an anony­mous opin­ion arti­cle titled, “I Am Part of the Resis­tance Inside the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion.” It was lat­er revealed that the arti­cle was authored by for­mer Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty offi­cial Miles Tay­lor.

    Make Inspec­tors Gen­er­al Offices Inde­pen­dent

    “We will make every Inspec­tor Gen­er­al’s Office inde­pen­dent and phys­i­cal­ly sep­a­rat­ed from the depart­ments they over­see so they do not become the pro­tec­tors of the deep state,” Trump said.

    Inspec­tors gen­er­al are tasked with over­see­ing gov­ern­ment and root­ing out poten­tial cor­rup­tion. Trump fired mul­ti­ple inspec­tors gen­er­al dur­ing his admin­is­tra­tion, includ­ing his own appointee Michael Atkin­son, who had informed Con­gress of the whistle­blow­er com­plaint that led to the for­mer pres­i­den­t’s first impeach­ment.

    ‘Con­tin­u­al­ly’ Con­duct Audits of Intel­li­gence Agen­cies

    “I will ask Con­gress to estab­lish an inde­pen­dent audit­ing sys­tem to con­tin­u­al­ly mon­i­tor our intel­li­gence agen­cies to ensure they are not spy­ing on our cit­i­zens or run­ning dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns against the Amer­i­can peo­ple,” said Trump. “Or that they are not spy­ing on some­one’s cam­paign like they spied on my cam­paign.”

    Trump has repeat­ed­ly accused intel­li­gence agen­cies in league with the deep state of spy­ing on his 2016 cam­paign. Details of how a Con­gress-approved audit­ing sys­tem would work are unclear.

    Move Agen­cies Away from ‘Wash­ing­ton Swamp’

    “We will con­tin­ue the effort launched by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to move parts of the sprawl­ing fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy to new loca­tions out­side the Wash­ing­ton swamp,” Trump said. “Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Man­age­ment to Col­orado.”

    “As many as 100,000 gov­ern­ment posi­tions can be moved out,” he added. “And I mean imme­di­ate­ly out of Wash­ing­ton, to places filled with patri­ots who love Amer­i­ca. And they real­ly do love Amer­i­ca.”

    The Bureau of Land Man­age­ment moved its head­quar­ters in 2020 to Grand Junc­tion, in Col­orado’s heav­i­ly Repub­li­can-lean­ing Mesa Coun­ty.

    The for­mer pres­i­dent has sug­gest­ed in the past that res­i­dents of Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and oth­er large Demo­c­rat-lean­ing cities do not “love Amer­i­ca” as much as res­i­dents of those in areas dom­i­nat­ed by Repub­li­can pol­i­tics.

    Ban Ex-Offi­cials From Tak­ing Jobs in Indus­tries They Reg­u­lat­ed

    “I will work to ban fed­er­al bureau­crats from tak­ing jobs at the com­pa­nies they deal with and that they reg­u­late,” said Trump. “They deal with these com­pa­nies and they reg­u­late these com­pa­nies, and then they want to take jobs from these com­pa­nies.”

    “Does­n’t work that way,” he added. “Such a pub­lic dis­play can­not go on and it’s tak­ing place all the time, like with big phar­ma.”

    Trump is not alone in crit­i­ciz­ing the “revolv­ing door” of for­mer fed­er­al employ­ees work­ing pri­vate sec­tors jobs in indus­tries they pre­vi­ous­ly reg­u­lat­ed, due to the poten­tial for improp­er use of gov­ern­ment con­nec­tions and con­flicts of inter­est.

    How­ev­er, the for­mer pres­i­dent also faced crit­i­cism for alleged­ly keep­ing the revolv­ing door open in the oth­er direc­tion while he was in office, appoint­ing a mul­ti­tude of ex-lob­by­ists to key posi­tions with­in his own admin­is­tra­tion.

    Term-Lim­it Mem­bers of Con­gress by Con­sti­tu­tion­al Amend­ment

    “Final­ly, I will push a Con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment to impose term lim­its on mem­bers of Con­gress,” Trump said. “This is how I will shat­ter the deep state and restore gov­ern­ment that is con­trolled by the peo­ple and for the peo­ple. Thank you very much.”

    There are cur­rent­ly no term lim­its for mem­bers of either house of Con­gress. Calls to change the rules are not a par­ti­san issue, with both Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers hav­ing spo­ken in favor of impos­ing lim­its. Polls also sug­gest that a large major­i­ty of the pub­lic would sup­port term lim­its.

    Pass­ing and rat­i­fy­ing a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment is noto­ri­ous­ly dif­fi­cult, how­ev­er, requir­ing a two-thirds major­i­ty in the House and Sen­ate and rat­i­fi­ca­tion from at least 38 states.

    ...

    ———-

    “Trump to ‘Dis­man­tle Deep State’ with ‘Truth and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Com­mis­sion’ ” by Aila Slis­co; Newsweek; 03/21/2023

    ““I will imme­di­ate­ly re-issue my 2020 exec­u­tive order restor­ing the pres­i­den­t’s author­i­ty to remove rogue bureau­crats,” Trump said in the video on Tues­day. “And I will wield that pow­er very aggres­sive­ly.””

    Imme­di­ate Sched­ule F. It’s Step 1 in Trump’s “10-point plan to dis­man­tle the deep state” shared from the “Trump War Room” back in March. And of course its step 1. Sched­ule F is all about ini­ti­at­ing the pow­er grab:

    ...
    The exec­u­tive order issued by Trump in Octo­ber 2020, which was nev­er ful­ly imple­ment­ed, estab­lished a new employ­ment cat­e­go­ry for fed­er­al work­ers called “Sched­ule F.”

    Under the new cat­e­go­ry, civ­il ser­vants with jobs tied to “pol­i­cy-deter­min­ing, pol­i­cy-mak­ing, or pol­i­cy-advo­cat­ing” effec­tive­ly lost civ­il ser­vice employ­ment pro­tec­tion for fed­er­al employ­ees that had been in place for more than 135 years.

    Trump has made it clear that he intends to rein­state the order if elect­ed in 2024. Democ­rats intro­duced a pro­vi­sion to last year’s Nation­al Defense Autho­riza­tion Act that would have blocked the order, but the pro­vi­sion was removed from the final ver­sion of the bill passed in Decem­ber.
    ...

    And right after the Sched­ule F rul­ing, we get to the purge. The ‘face­less bureau­crats’ who are cur­rent­ly ‘per­se­cut­ing con­ser­v­a­tives and Chris­tians’ will be gone and pre­sum­ably replaced with MAGA loy­al­ists. And it’s not just Trump’s rhetoric. The House GOP’s “weaponiza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment” com­mit­tee set up back in Jan­u­ary was cre­at­ed to basi­cal­ly ampli­fy this mes­sage:

    ...
    Over­haul Fed­er­al Agen­cies, Fire ‘Cor­rupt’ Offi­cials

    “We will clean out all of the cor­rupt actors in our nation­al secu­ri­ty and intel­li­gence appa­ra­tus, and there are plen­ty of them,” Trump said.

    “The depart­ments and agen­cies that have been weaponized will be com­plete­ly over­hauled,” he con­tin­ued. “So that face­less bureau­crats will nev­er again be able to tar­get and per­se­cute con­ser­v­a­tives, Chris­tians, or the left­’s polit­i­cal ene­mies, which they’re doing now at a lev­el that nobody can believe even pos­si­ble.”

    Trump’s pledge to oust the “cor­rupt” offi­cials that are sup­pos­ed­ly in ser­vice to “the left” echoes recent Repub­li­can rhetoric claim­ing that con­ser­v­a­tives en masse are fac­ing per­se­cu­tion from pow­er­ful Democ­rats.

    The GOP-led House estab­lished a select com­mit­tee to inves­ti­gate the “weaponiza­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment” this year, although the com­mit­tee has failed to uncov­er evi­dence of a con­spir­a­cy, while fac­ing crit­i­cism over cred­i­bil­i­ty and the qual­i­ty of its wit­ness­es.
    ...

    Now, when we get to the ‘clean­ing up’ of the FISA courts, it’s worth keep­ing in mind that this basi­cal­ly entails stack­ing the FISA courts with Trump lack­eys who won’t just shield con­ser­v­a­tives from valid wire­taps. Those judges are going to be a rub­ber stamp too for any Trump admin­is­tra­tion wire­tap requests. There’s going to be a field day of ille­gal spy­ing on Trump’s ene­mies. So when we also see a call for ‘con­tin­u­al audit­ing of the intel­li­gence agen­cies’ as one of the oth­er ‘points’, keep in mind how those ‘con­tin­u­al audits’ will also act as cov­er for the ram­pant abus­es of FISA court war­rants they are no doubt plan­ning:

    ...
    Clean Up ‘Cor­rupt’ FISA Courts

    “We will total­ly reform FISA courts which are so cor­rupt that the judges seem­ing­ly do not care when they are lied to in war­rant appli­ca­tions,” Trump said. “So many judges have seen so many appli­ca­tions that they know were wrong, or at least they must have known. They do noth­ing about it, they’re lied to.”

    Fed­er­al courts estab­lished under the For­eign Intel­li­gence Sur­veil­lance Act (FISA) are respon­si­ble for review­ing and approv­ing gov­ern­ment wire­tap­ping requests. The courts have faced crit­i­cism from both ends of the polit­i­cal spec­trum for rarely refus­ing requests and alleged­ly “rub­ber stamp­ing” sur­veil­lance on U.S. cit­i­zens.

    Trump has been call­ing for an over­haul since accus­ing the courts of aid­ing a Demo­c­ra­t­ic “witch hunt” by grant­i­ng a war­rant to the FBI for sur­veil­lance on his for­mer cam­paign aide Carter Page, as part of the inves­ti­ga­tion into Russ­ian med­dling in the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

    ...

    ‘Con­tin­u­al­ly’ Con­duct Audits of Intel­li­gence Agen­cies

    “I will ask Con­gress to estab­lish an inde­pen­dent audit­ing sys­tem to con­tin­u­al­ly mon­i­tor our intel­li­gence agen­cies to ensure they are not spy­ing on our cit­i­zens or run­ning dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns against the Amer­i­can peo­ple,” said Trump. “Or that they are not spy­ing on some­one’s cam­paign like they spied on my cam­paign.”

    Trump has repeat­ed­ly accused intel­li­gence agen­cies in league with the deep state of spy­ing on his 2016 cam­paign. Details of how a Con­gress-approved audit­ing sys­tem would work are unclear.
    ...

    And then we get to the ‘Truth and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Com­mis­sion’ about the deep state. It would be fun to think that this would include truth and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion about real deep state scan­dals like the assas­si­na­tions of JFK, RFK, and MLK. But we can be pret­ty con­fi­dent it will be Trump and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion about Trump and any Trump-relat­ed inves­ti­ga­tion. It’s also a reminder that a seri­ous acknowl­edge­ment of the deep state polit­i­cal assas­si­na­tion crimes of the 60s and the many oth­er relat­ed crimes by the US intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty (vir­tu­al­ly all direct­ed against the left domes­ti­cal­ly and glob­al­ly) is a mas­sive lost oppor­tu­ni­ty by main­stream left­wing media. The ‘deep state’ is very real. And it real­ly hates ‘the left’. Some­how every­one for­got that. And regard­less of how that hap­pen, Trump is prey­ing on that col­lec­tive lapse in his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry:

    ...
    ‘Truth and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion Com­mis­sion’

    “We will estab­lish a truth and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion com­mis­sion to declas­si­fy and pub­lish all doc­u­ments on deep state spy­ing, cen­sor­ship and cor­rup­tion,” said Trump. “And there are plen­ty of them.”

    What was like­ly the best-known “truth and rec­on­cil­i­a­tion com­mis­sion” was estab­lished in post-apartheid South Africa in 1995, to iden­ti­fy and expose human rights abus­es dur­ing more than four decades of the racial seg­re­ga­tion pol­i­cy.

    Details of Trump’s pro­posed com­mis­sion are unclear. It is also unclear why Trump did not declas­si­fy the sup­posed deep state doc­u­ments while he was in office from 2017 to 2021.
    ...

    LOL! Fol­low­ing a dec­la­ra­tion for a ‘Truth and Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion’ com­mis­sion about the ‘deep state’ we get a crack­down on gov­ern­ment leak­ers. The only ide­o­log­i­cal coheren­cy here is a Trump First ide­ol­o­gy:

    ...
    ‘Crack­down on Gov­ern­ment Leak­ers,’ ‘Fake News’

    “We will launch a major crack­down on gov­ern­ment leak­ers who col­lude with the fake news to delib­er­ate­ly weave false nar­ra­tives and to sub­vert our gov­ern­ment and our democ­ra­cy,” Trump said. “When pos­si­ble, we will press crim­i­nal charges.”

    The for­mer pres­i­dent has fre­quent­ly lashed out at the “fake news.” He was par­tic­u­lar­ly crit­i­cal of “gov­ern­ment leak­ers” who were crit­i­cal of him.

    In 2018, he tweet­ed that “leak­ers are trai­tors and cow­ards” after The New York Times pub­lished an anony­mous opin­ion arti­cle titled, “I Am Part of the Resis­tance Inside the Trump Admin­is­tra­tion.” It was lat­er revealed that the arti­cle was authored by for­mer Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty offi­cial Miles Tay­lor.
    ...

    And then we get to anoth­er LOL with Trump’s calls to make every fed­er­al Inspec­tor Gen­er­al “phys­i­cal­ly sep­a­rat­ed from the depart­ments they over­see so they do not become the pro­tec­tors of the deep state.” The deep state cor­rup­tion is like COVID appar­ent­ly. Just stay out of direct prox­im­i­ty of the infect­ed in your day to day work envi­ron­ment and you’re fine. It’s the kind of non­sense that syn­er­gizes well with the plan to move agen­cies away from the ‘Wash­ing­ton Swamp’. With all the fed­er­al agen­cies get­ting sent off to dif­fer­ent cities in the ‘Heart­land’ while inspec­tors Gen­er­al are man­dat­ed to be in dif­fer­ent loca­tions from their agen­cies, It rais­es the ques­tion as to whether or not all the inspec­tors gen­er­al will be relo­cat­ed to a par­tic­u­lar city or scat­tered to inde­pen­dent loca­tions. These are the stu­pid ques­tions we have to ask:

    ...
    Make Inspec­tors Gen­er­al Offices Inde­pen­dent

    We will make every Inspec­tor Gen­er­al’s Office inde­pen­dent and phys­i­cal­ly sep­a­rat­ed from the depart­ments they over­see so they do not become the pro­tec­tors of the deep state,” Trump said.

    Inspec­tors gen­er­al are tasked with over­see­ing gov­ern­ment and root­ing out poten­tial cor­rup­tion. Trump fired mul­ti­ple inspec­tors gen­er­al dur­ing his admin­is­tra­tion, includ­ing his own appointee Michael Atkin­son, who had informed Con­gress of the whistle­blow­er com­plaint that led to the for­mer pres­i­den­t’s first impeach­ment.

    ...

    Move Agen­cies Away from ‘Wash­ing­ton Swamp’

    “We will con­tin­ue the effort launched by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to move parts of the sprawl­ing fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy to new loca­tions out­side the Wash­ing­ton swamp,” Trump said. “Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Man­age­ment to Col­orado.”

    “As many as 100,000 gov­ern­ment posi­tions can be moved out,” he added. “And I mean imme­di­ate­ly out of Wash­ing­ton, to places filled with patri­ots who love Amer­i­ca. And they real­ly do love Amer­i­ca.”

    The Bureau of Land Man­age­ment moved its head­quar­ters in 2020 to Grand Junc­tion, in Col­orado’s heav­i­ly Repub­li­can-lean­ing Mesa Coun­ty.

    The for­mer pres­i­dent has sug­gest­ed in the past that res­i­dents of Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and oth­er large Demo­c­rat-lean­ing cities do not “love Amer­i­ca” as much as res­i­dents of those in areas dom­i­nat­ed by Repub­li­can pol­i­tics.
    ...

    The ban on the ‘revolv­ing door’ is anoth­er one of those propo­si­tions that sound great on paper but will real­is­ti­cal­ly prob­a­bly just be used to fur­ther pun­ish fired bureau­crats forced to hunt for work in indus­tries relat­ed to what they built their now-fin­ished gov­ern­ment careers around:

    ...
    Ban Ex-Offi­cials From Tak­ing Jobs in Indus­tries They Reg­u­lat­ed

    “I will work to ban fed­er­al bureau­crats from tak­ing jobs at the com­pa­nies they deal with and that they reg­u­late,” said Trump. “They deal with these com­pa­nies and they reg­u­late these com­pa­nies, and then they want to take jobs from these com­pa­nies.”

    “Does­n’t work that way,” he added. “Such a pub­lic dis­play can­not go on and it’s tak­ing place all the time, like with big phar­ma.”

    Trump is not alone in crit­i­ciz­ing the “revolv­ing door” of for­mer fed­er­al employ­ees work­ing pri­vate sec­tors jobs in indus­tries they pre­vi­ous­ly reg­u­lat­ed, due to the poten­tial for improp­er use of gov­ern­ment con­nec­tions and con­flicts of inter­est.

    How­ev­er, the for­mer pres­i­dent also faced crit­i­cism for alleged­ly keep­ing the revolv­ing door open in the oth­er direc­tion while he was in office, appoint­ing a mul­ti­tude of ex-lob­by­ists to key posi­tions with­in his own admin­is­tra­tion.
    ...

    And final­ly, the plank about amend­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion to lim­it con­gres­sion­al terms, don’t for­get that exe­cut­ing a right-wing ‘run­away con­ven­tion’ under Arti­cle V of the Con­sti­tu­tion is one of the right-wing mega-donors’ biggest wish list item of all and they are per­ilous­ly close to being able to pull that off. Term lim­its, on their own, are a pro­vi­sion worth con­sid­er­ing but don’t kid your­self about the scope of what is at play here. Just wait for Trump to start chat­ter­ing about Arti­cle V. It’s just a mat­ter of time:

    ...
    Term-Lim­it Mem­bers of Con­gress by Con­sti­tu­tion­al Amend­ment

    “Final­ly, I will push a Con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment to impose term lim­its on mem­bers of Con­gress,” Trump said. “This is how I will shat­ter the deep state and restore gov­ern­ment that is con­trolled by the peo­ple and for the peo­ple. Thank you very much.”

    There are cur­rent­ly no term lim­its for mem­bers of either house of Con­gress. Calls to change the rules are not a par­ti­san issue, with both Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers hav­ing spo­ken in favor of impos­ing lim­its. Polls also sug­gest that a large major­i­ty of the pub­lic would sup­port term lim­its.

    Pass­ing and rat­i­fy­ing a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment is noto­ri­ous­ly dif­fi­cult, how­ev­er, requir­ing a two-thirds major­i­ty in the House and Sen­ate and rat­i­fi­ca­tion from at least 38 states.
    ...

    And that’s all why we prob­a­bly should­n’t assume that this shut­down show­down is going to go the way they always go. The entire GOP has basi­cal­ly nation­al­iz­ing the ‘we need to shut down and purge the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to pro­tect con­ser­v­a­tives from the evil trans-Demo­c­rat assaults on con­ser­v­a­tives’ nar­ra­tive. Shut­ting down the gov­ern­ment ‘to pro­tect con­ser­v­a­tives’ is the open plan now. It’s all they are talk­ing about at this point. And unlike 2025, when the GOP is hop­ing to hav­ing full con­trol, any shut­downs that hap­pen now can at least be par­tial­ly blamed on Biden and Democ­rats, fair­ly or not. Sure, it would be a polit­i­cal gam­ble. But nom­i­nat­ing Trump so he can wage a fas­cist vengeance cam­paign is a pret­ty big polit­i­cal gam­ble too. So the ques­tion this ‘shut­down show­down’ should­n’t sim­ply be, “does it make polit­i­cal sense to shut­down the gov­ern­ment right now?” Because it’s real­ly a ques­tion of whether or not it makes polit­i­cal sense to shut­down the gov­ern­ment giv­en the real­i­ty that Trump’s cam­paign has already framed the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment as the ‘ene­my of the peo­ple’ and the entire GOP is already on board.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | September 25, 2023, 4:41 pm
  34. Check out the new trend in con­ser­v­a­tive US pol­i­tics: age ver­i­fi­ca­tion laws for adult web­sites. Yep, it’s hap­pen­ing. At least at the state-lev­el, with Ten­nessee Repub­li­can law­mak­ers report­ed­ly now con­sid­er­ing such a law, fol­low­ing the states of Louisiana, Utah, and Texas.

    It’s not clear if Ten­nessee will fol­low through on the idea. For starters, such laws based on indi­vid­ual states aren’t exact­ly dif­fi­cult to get around. A sim­ple vir­tu­al pri­vate net­work (VPN) will do the trick. Beyond that, it’s not even clear such laws are con­sti­tu­tion­al, with a judge strik­ing down Tex­as­’s law as a pri­va­cy vio­la­tion last month.

    But as we’re also going to see, we should­n’t assume that the logis­tics of enforc­ing the law or even its con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty are real­ly major con­cerns here. Because the push to ‘pro­tect the chil­dren’ from online pornog­ra­phy isn’t hap­pen­ing in a vac­u­um. It’s hap­pen­ing in the mid­dle of broad­er polit­i­cal cli­mate where ‘pro­tect­ing the chil­dren’ has been merged with tra­di­tion­al anti-LGBTQ sen­ti­ments and weaponized as a ‘pro­tect­ing kids from the per­vert­ed trans ide­ol­o­gy’ man­u­fac­tured nation­al freak out. Polit­i­cal the­atrics designed to equate the mere expo­sure of chil­dren to the very exis­tence of mem­bers of the LGBTQ com­mu­ni­ty as a form of child abuse. In oth­er words, try not to be shocked if the ‘age ver­i­fi­ca­tion for adult web­sites’ trend is soon applied to any LGBTQ con­tent online.

    Beyond that, we also should­n’t assume that these trends are going to be lim­it­ed to deep ‘red states’. Because as the sec­ond arti­cle below points out, the Sched­ule F/Project2025 is already pub­lish­ing con­tent hint­ing at how they are plan­ning on deal­ing with ‘blue state’ local gov­ern­ments that aren’t will­ing to play ball on the planned purges. Because Sched­ule F/Project2025 isn’t just about a fed­er­al purge: as we find in the “The Man­date for Lead­er­ship” book recent­ly pub­lished by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion describ­ing Project2025’s plans, those plans include using the Depart­ment of Jus­tice to threat­en local offi­cials who refuse to enforce the range of new rules they are plan­ning on impos­ing at the local lev­el. DOJ staff who refuse to go along with this enforce­ment scheme will, of course, be ‘Sched­ule F’-ed them­selves and replaced with some­one who will.

    And that’s all why we prob­a­bly should­n’t assume that the Ten­nessee GOP just has a ran­dom plan to ‘pro­tect the chil­dren from pornog­ra­phy’. There are much larg­er plans afoot:

    WKRN

    Ten­nessee House Repub­li­cans look­ing at age ver­i­fi­ca­tion law to access adult web­sites

    by: Ken­ley Har­gett

    Post­ed: Sep 20, 2023 / 05:54 PM CDT
    Updat­ed: Sep 21, 2023 / 05:10 AM CDT

    NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Age ver­i­fi­ca­tions to access porno­graph­ic web­sites could soon come to Ten­nessee. House Repub­li­cans con­firm they’re con­sid­er­ing a new law, that’s already get­ting crit­i­cism.

    Ten­nessee Rep. Jere­my Fai­son told News 2 he is still gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion and will pro­vide more once the bill is draft­ed and filed.

    A lead­ing oppo­nent of this pro­posed law is the Free Speech Coali­tion, an adult enter­tain­ment indus­try trade asso­ci­a­tion. They have mon­i­tored these types of laws since 1991.

    “Adult sites have talked about this for years, as they work for an effec­tive way of keep­ing kids off,” said Mike Sta­bile, Free Speech Coali­tion Direc­tor of Pub­lic Affairs.

    A com­mon argu­ment among sup­port­ers of these kinds of laws is that they help pro­tect kids from access­ing adult con­tent. Louisiana was the first to require age ver­i­fi­ca­tion to enter web­sites with a sub­stan­tial por­tion of adult con­tent. Utah and Texas have both fol­lowed in issu­ing their own laws.

    A per­son has to use a ver­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tem that checks their gov­ern­ment ID or trans­ac­tion­al data to con­firm they are at least 18 years old. Sta­bile believes this is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al and invades someone’s pri­va­cy.

    “98% of con­sumers won’t ver­i­fy their age and will use a VPN to get around it,” Sta­bile said. “I think leg­is­la­tors need to do this to find solu­tions that are effec­tive and don’t make con­sumers risk sur­veil­lance and pri­va­cy vio­la­tions.”

    The Amer­i­can Col­lege of Pedi­atrics cities pornog­ra­phy as very neg­a­tive to a child’s devel­op­ment and view on rela­tion­ships. Sta­bile stressed the impor­tance of stop­ping kids from access­ing adult con­tent and work­ing with law­mak­ers to achieve that goal.

    ...

    ———–

    “Ten­nessee House Repub­li­cans look­ing at age ver­i­fi­ca­tion law to access adult web­sites” by Ken­ley Har­gett; WKRN; 09/20/2023

    “A per­son has to use a ver­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tem that checks their gov­ern­ment ID or trans­ac­tion­al data to con­firm they are at least 18 years old. Sta­bile believes this is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al and invades someone’s pri­va­cy.”

    Legal ID ver­i­fi­ca­tion will be required for any site deemed to host pornog­ra­phy. That’s the law Ten­nessee Repub­li­cans are report­ed­ly con­sid­er­ing, fol­low­ing Repub­li­can state law­mak­ers in states like Louisiana, Utah, and Texas:

    ...
    A com­mon argu­ment among sup­port­ers of these kinds of laws is that they help pro­tect kids from access­ing adult con­tent. Louisiana was the first to require age ver­i­fi­ca­tion to enter web­sites with a sub­stan­tial por­tion of adult con­tent. Utah and Texas have both fol­lowed in issu­ing their own laws.
    ...

    And while it’s pos­si­ble that this law real­ly is intend­ed to reduce the vol­umes of porno­graph­ic con­tent that kids are now rou­tine­ly exposed to via the inter­net, here’s a reminder that when the GOP talks about ‘pro­tect­ing the chil­dren’ these days, it’s prob­a­bly the wind up for a new law attack­ing the LGBTQ com­mu­ni­ty. Like­ly an attack on the trans com­mu­ni­ty these days. In oth­er words, try not to be super sur­prised if the trend of ‘pro­tect­ing the chil­dren’ by putting ID checks on porno­graph­ic web­sites is soon fol­lowed by a push to clas­si­fy all things LGBTQ as inher­ent­ly porno­graph­ic:

    Dame Mag­a­zine

    The GOP Has a Mas­ter Plan to Crim­i­nal­ize Being Trans

    A coali­tion of pow­er­ful con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions have put togeth­er a 900-plus-page play­book that maps out their strat­e­gy to enact a sweep­ing “Don’t Say Gay” pol­i­cy that will erad­i­cate queer and trans lives and destroy democ­ra­cy, if giv­en the pow­er. We can’t let them.

    Brynn Tan­nehill Aug 14, 2023

    Most peo­ple aren’t aware of Project 2025, or its play­book, “Man­date for Lead­er­ship: The Con­ser­v­a­tive Promise”—but you need to be. In stark terms, Project 2025 reveals the con­ser­v­a­tives’ plan to enact a sweep­ing “Don’t Say Gay” pol­i­cy that will effec­tive­ly blot out all LGBTQ con­tent on the inter­net as well as any pub­lished mate­r­i­al with LGBTQ con­tent, no mat­ter how benign.

    Project 2025 is a coali­tion of promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions that includes the Clare­mont Insti­tute, Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom, Fam­i­ly Research Coun­cil, Hills­dale Col­lege, Her­itage Foun­da­tion, Free­dom Works, Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil, Amer­i­can Prin­ci­ples Project, and dozens of oth­ers. The organization’s goal is to lay out a “first 180 days” agen­da for the next admin­is­tra­tion, and to recruit con­ser­v­a­tives to fill posi­tions with­in the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment appoint­ed by the exec­u­tive branch.

    “The Man­date for Lead­er­ship” is a 920-page doc­u­ment that details how the next Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion will imple­ment rad­i­cal and sweep­ing changes to the entire­ty of gov­ern­ment. This blue­print assumes that the next pres­i­dent will be able to rule by fiat under the uni­tary exec­u­tive the­o­ry (which posits that the pres­i­dent has the pow­er to con­trol the entire fed­er­al exec­u­tive branch). It is also based on the premise that the next pres­i­dent will imple­ment Sched­ule F, which allows the pres­i­dent to fire any fed­er­al employ­ee who has pol­i­cy-mak­ing author­i­ty, and replace them with a pres­i­den­tial appointee who is not vot­ed on in the Sen­ate.

    The doc­u­ment is basi­cal­ly a wish list for social con­ser­v­a­tives and mega cor­po­ra­tions. The busi­ness wish list calls for elim­i­nat­ing fed­er­al agen­cies, strip­ping those that remain of reg­u­la­to­ry pow­er, and dereg­u­lat­ing indus­tries. The pres­i­dent would direct­ly man­age and influ­ence Depart­ment of Jus­tice and FBI cas­es, which would allow him to pur­sue crim­i­nal cas­es against polit­i­cal ene­mies. Envi­ron­men­tal law would be gut­ted, and states would be pre­vent­ed from enforc­ing their own envi­ron­men­tal laws.

    The social con­ser­v­a­tive wish list calls for end­ing abor­tion, diver­si­ty and inclu­sion efforts, pro­tec­tions for LGBTQ peo­ple, and most impor­tant­ly, ban­ning any and all LGBTQ con­tent. In fact, “The Man­date for Lead­er­ship” makes erad­i­cat­ing LGBTQ peo­ple from pub­lic life its top pri­or­i­ty. Its No. 1 promise is to “restore the fam­i­ly as the cen­ter­piece of Amer­i­can life and pro­tect our chil­dren.” They are explic­it in how they plan to do so, as you’ll see in the para­graph below. They plan to pro­ceed by declar­ing any and all LGBTQ con­tent to be porno­graph­ic in nature.

    “Pornog­ra­phy, man­i­fest­ed today in the omnipresent prop­a­ga­tion of trans­gen­der ide­ol­o­gy and sex­u­al­iza­tion of chil­dren, for instance, is not a polit­i­cal Gor­dian knot inex­tri­ca­bly bind­ing up dis­parate claims about free speech, prop­er­ty rights, sex­u­al lib­er­a­tion, and child wel­fare. It has no claim to First Amend­ment pro­tec­tion. Its pur­vey­ors are child preda­tors and misog­y­nis­tic exploiters of women. Their prod­uct is as addic­tive as any illic­it drug and as psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly destruc­tive as any crime. Pornog­ra­phy should be out­lawed. The peo­ple who pro­duce and dis­trib­ute it should be impris­oned. Edu­ca­tors and pub­lic librar­i­ans who pur­vey it should be classed as reg­is­tered sex offend­ers. And telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and tech­nol­o­gy firms that facil­i­tate its spread should be shut­tered.”

    When they talk about pornog­ra­phy, this includes any con­tent dis­cussing or por­tray­ing LGBTQ fig­ures from the children’s books I Am Jazz and And Tan­go Makes Three to the Trevor Project’s sui­cide hot­line. We know this by look­ing at how “don’t say gay” laws have been imple­ment­ed in Flori­da: This is lit­er­al­ly their mod­el. It’s been tried in Vir­ginia. It’s also arguable that LGBTQ par­ents would be sub­ject to arrest, impris­on­ment, and being put on sex-offend­er reg­istries for “expos­ing chil­dren to pornog­ra­phy” sim­ply by being LGBTQ and hav­ing chil­dren.

    It would also like­ly crim­i­nal­ize any ther­a­pist, doc­tor, or coun­selor who pro­vid­ed affirm­ing ther­a­py to trans youth. Indeed, the doc­u­ment makes it explic­it­ly clear they want nation­wide bans on abor­tion and access to affirm­ing care for trans youth, while call­ing for con­ver­sion ther­a­pies to be the only avail­able treat­ments. It could be argued as well that peo­ple who are vis­i­bly trans in pub­lic are porno­graph­ic or obscene, because they might be seen by a minor. This under­stand­ing of intent is in line with the call to “erad­i­cate trans­gen­derism from pub­lic life.”

    There’s also the mat­ter of the inter­net: Any Inter­net Ser­vice Provider (ISP) that trans­mits or receives data about trans­gen­der peo­ple could poten­tial­ly be liable if con­ser­v­a­tives have their way. When you read the final sen­tence of the excerpt­ed para­graph, the clear intent is that the same would apply to any social media com­pa­ny that allows any (pos­i­tive) dis­cus­sion or depic­tion of trans­gen­der indi­vid­u­als, as it would be con­sid­ered porno­graph­ic and con­tribut­ing to harm­ing a minor. The orga­ni­za­tions that draft­ed “The Man­date for Lead­er­ship” under­stand that blue states, which have sanc­tu­ary laws for trans­gen­der peo­ple, are unlike­ly to com­ply. It’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine Cal­i­for­nia arrest­ing and pros­e­cut­ing teach­ers, librar­i­ans, doc­tors, ther­a­pists, book­stores (vir­tu­al or phys­i­cal), LGBTQ par­ents, and espe­cial­ly LGBTQ peo­ple mere­ly for exist­ing in pub­lic. This is why they includ­ed the fol­low­ing para­graph:

    “Where war­rant­ed and prop­er under fed­er­al law, ini­ti­ate legal action against local officials—including Dis­trict Attorneys—who deny Amer­i­can cit­i­zens the “equal pro­tec­tion of the laws” by refus­ing to pros­e­cute crim­i­nal offens­es in their juris­dic­tions. This holds true par­tic­u­lar­ly for juris­dic­tions that refuse to enforce the law against crim­i­nals based on the Left’s favored defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of the would-be offend­er (race, so-called gen­der iden­ti­ty, sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, etc.) or oth­er polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions (e.g., immi­gra­tion sta­tus).”

    This is call­ing for the exec­u­tive branch to use the Depart­ment of Jus­tice to threat­en pros­e­cu­tion of any local or state offi­cials if they do not charge LGBTQ peo­ple and their allies with crimes under the pre­tense that they are break­ing fed­er­al and state laws against expos­ing minors to pornog­ra­phy. If peo­ple at the Depart­ment of Jus­tice refuse to go along with this, then they can sim­ply be replaced under Sched­ule F. While the excerpt­ed para­graph above includes ref­er­ences to immi­gra­tion, the fact that it explic­it­ly includes gen­der iden­ti­ty, and fits in with the pre­vi­ous calls to des­ig­nate any­thing trans-relat­ed as porno­graph­ic, clear­ly telegraphs their intent.

    The result of these actions will be per­haps the biggest pow­er play against states rights in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, and the threat is clear. If blue states refuse to turn on their own trans­gen­der cit­i­zens, then the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment will do every­thing in its pow­er to decap­i­tate the lead­er­ship of those states using the Depart­ment of Jus­tice. Con­ser­v­a­tives are mak­ing the bet that indi­vid­ual dis­trict attor­neys will not risk pros­e­cu­tion, and prison, on behalf of a tiny, despised minor­i­ty. They’re bet­ting that state gov­er­nors will not be will­ing to risk both pros­e­cu­tion and a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis over trans­gen­der peo­ple.

    ...

    ———-

    “The GOP Has a Mas­ter Plan to Crim­i­nal­ize Being Trans” by Brynn Tan­nehill; Dame Mag­a­zine; 08/14/2023

    The result of these actions will be per­haps the biggest pow­er play against states rights in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, and the threat is clear. If blue states refuse to turn on their own trans­gen­der cit­i­zens, then the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment will do every­thing in its pow­er to decap­i­tate the lead­er­ship of those states using the Depart­ment of Jus­tice. Con­ser­v­a­tives are mak­ing the bet that indi­vid­ual dis­trict attor­neys will not risk pros­e­cu­tion, and prison, on behalf of a tiny, despised minor­i­ty. They’re bet­ting that state gov­er­nors will not be will­ing to risk both pros­e­cu­tion and a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis over trans­gen­der peo­ple.”

    A giant pow­er grab by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment against states. It’s just one of the many planned fea­tures of Project2025. As we’ve seen, the plan laid out in Project2025’s “Man­date for Lead­er­ship” includes a call for a dis­tinc­tion between “reli­gious” and “non­re­li­gious” parts of the law. And as the arti­cle points out, the social con­ser­v­a­tive wish list laid out in “The Man­date for Lead­er­ship” appears to include a dec­la­ra­tion of all things LGBTQ as inher­ent­ly porno­graph­ic in nature. And there­fore crim­i­nal­ly porno­graph­ic in nature:

    ...
    The doc­u­ment is basi­cal­ly a wish list for social con­ser­v­a­tives and mega cor­po­ra­tions. The busi­ness wish list calls for elim­i­nat­ing fed­er­al agen­cies, strip­ping those that remain of reg­u­la­to­ry pow­er, and dereg­u­lat­ing indus­tries. The pres­i­dent would direct­ly man­age and influ­ence Depart­ment of Jus­tice and FBI cas­es, which would allow him to pur­sue crim­i­nal cas­es against polit­i­cal ene­mies. Envi­ron­men­tal law would be gut­ted, and states would be pre­vent­ed from enforc­ing their own envi­ron­men­tal laws.

    The social con­ser­v­a­tive wish list calls for end­ing abor­tion, diver­si­ty and inclu­sion efforts, pro­tec­tions for LGBTQ peo­ple, and most impor­tant­ly, ban­ning any and all LGBTQ con­tent. In fact, “The Man­date for Lead­er­ship” makes erad­i­cat­ing LGBTQ peo­ple from pub­lic life its top pri­or­i­ty. Its No. 1 promise is to “restore the fam­i­ly as the cen­ter­piece of Amer­i­can life and pro­tect our chil­dren.” They are explic­it in how they plan to do so, as you’ll see in the para­graph below. They plan to pro­ceed by declar­ing any and all LGBTQ con­tent to be porno­graph­ic in nature.

    “Pornog­ra­phy, man­i­fest­ed today in the omnipresent prop­a­ga­tion of trans­gen­der ide­ol­o­gy and sex­u­al­iza­tion of chil­dren, for instance, is not a polit­i­cal Gor­dian knot inex­tri­ca­bly bind­ing up dis­parate claims about free speech, prop­er­ty rights, sex­u­al lib­er­a­tion, and child wel­fare. It has no claim to First Amend­ment pro­tec­tion. Its pur­vey­ors are child preda­tors and misog­y­nis­tic exploiters of women. Their prod­uct is as addic­tive as any illic­it drug and as psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly destruc­tive as any crime. Pornog­ra­phy should be out­lawed. The peo­ple who pro­duce and dis­trib­ute it should be impris­oned. Edu­ca­tors and pub­lic librar­i­ans who pur­vey it should be classed as reg­is­tered sex offend­ers. And telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and tech­nol­o­gy firms that facil­i­tate its spread should be shut­tered.”

    When they talk about pornog­ra­phy, this includes any con­tent dis­cussing or por­tray­ing LGBTQ fig­ures from the children’s books I Am Jazz and And Tan­go Makes Three to the Trevor Project’s sui­cide hot­line. We know this by look­ing at how “don’t say gay” laws have been imple­ment­ed in Flori­da: This is lit­er­al­ly their mod­el. It’s been tried in Vir­ginia. It’s also arguable that LGBTQ par­ents would be sub­ject to arrest, impris­on­ment, and being put on sex-offend­er reg­istries for “expos­ing chil­dren to pornog­ra­phy” sim­ply by being LGBTQ and hav­ing chil­dren.

    It would also like­ly crim­i­nal­ize any ther­a­pist, doc­tor, or coun­selor who pro­vid­ed affirm­ing ther­a­py to trans youth. Indeed, the doc­u­ment makes it explic­it­ly clear they want nation­wide bans on abor­tion and access to affirm­ing care for trans youth, while call­ing for con­ver­sion ther­a­pies to be the only avail­able treat­ments. It could be argued as well that peo­ple who are vis­i­bly trans in pub­lic are porno­graph­ic or obscene, because they might be seen by a minor. This under­stand­ing of intent is in line with the call to “erad­i­cate trans­gen­derism from pub­lic life.”
    ...

    And that brings us to the part of this pow­er grab that could end up as an inter­net bat­tle: state and local offi­cials who refuse to enforce the var­i­ous dic­tates that will be com­ing from the Sched­ule F‑empowered White House will face a Depart­ment of Jus­tice ready to threat­en pros­e­cu­tion. And if the staff at the DOJ refuse to go along with this pow­er play, they can be ‘Sched­ule F’-ed away:

    ...
    There’s also the mat­ter of the inter­net: Any Inter­net Ser­vice Provider (ISP) that trans­mits or receives data about trans­gen­der peo­ple could poten­tial­ly be liable if con­ser­v­a­tives have their way. When you read the final sen­tence of the excerpt­ed para­graph, the clear intent is that the same would apply to any social media com­pa­ny that allows any (pos­i­tive) dis­cus­sion or depic­tion of trans­gen­der indi­vid­u­als, as it would be con­sid­ered porno­graph­ic and con­tribut­ing to harm­ing a minor. The orga­ni­za­tions that draft­ed “The Man­date for Lead­er­ship” under­stand that blue states, which have sanc­tu­ary laws for trans­gen­der peo­ple, are unlike­ly to com­ply. It’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine Cal­i­for­nia arrest­ing and pros­e­cut­ing teach­ers, librar­i­ans, doc­tors, ther­a­pists, book­stores (vir­tu­al or phys­i­cal), LGBTQ par­ents, and espe­cial­ly LGBTQ peo­ple mere­ly for exist­ing in pub­lic. This is why they includ­ed the fol­low­ing para­graph:

    “Where war­rant­ed and prop­er under fed­er­al law, ini­ti­ate legal action against local officials—including Dis­trict Attorneys—who deny Amer­i­can cit­i­zens the “equal pro­tec­tion of the laws” by refus­ing to pros­e­cute crim­i­nal offens­es in their juris­dic­tions. This holds true par­tic­u­lar­ly for juris­dic­tions that refuse to enforce the law against crim­i­nals based on the Left’s favored defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of the would-be offend­er (race, so-called gen­der iden­ti­ty, sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, etc.) or oth­er polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions (e.g., immi­gra­tion sta­tus).”

    This is call­ing for the exec­u­tive branch to use the Depart­ment of Jus­tice to threat­en pros­e­cu­tion of any local or state offi­cials if they do not charge LGBTQ peo­ple and their allies with crimes under the pre­tense that they are break­ing fed­er­al and state laws against expos­ing minors to pornog­ra­phy. If peo­ple at the Depart­ment of Jus­tice refuse to go along with this, then they can sim­ply be replaced under Sched­ule F. While the excerpt­ed para­graph above includes ref­er­ences to immi­gra­tion, the fact that it explic­it­ly includes gen­der iden­ti­ty, and fits in with the pre­vi­ous calls to des­ig­nate any­thing trans-relat­ed as porno­graph­ic, clear­ly telegraphs their intent.
    ...

    Keep in mind that many web­sites fac­ing pub­lic offi­cials demand­ing they put up an age pay­wall or remove LGBTQ con­tent will just take the eas­i­est path of remov­ing that con­tent. Or maybe mak­ing a spe­cial 18+ ver­sion of their site where offend­ing con­tent can be host­ed sep­a­rate­ly. And the more chaot­ic it all gets at the state lev­el, the more calls there will be for some sort of fed­er­al solu­tion. The kind of fed­er­al solu­tion the Project 2025 net­work is no doubt already craft­ing.

    There’s undoubt­ed­ly going to be a surge of ‘sanc­tu­ary Blue state’ announce­ments should Don­ald Trump return to office. A fall back to the fed­er­al­ism and the sep­a­ra­tion of pow­ers as a last resort. And as we can see, there’s a plan for that too. Sanc­tu­ary states and cities will not be allowed. This is going to be a nation­al purge.

    And in relat­ed news, dig­i­tal fake ID tech­nol­o­gy is pre­sum­ably going to expe­ri­ence some sort of inno­va­tion bonan­za in com­ing years.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | September 27, 2023, 1:25 am
  35. It’s one of those lessons one would rather not learn sev­er­al cen­turies into a gov­ern­ing sys­tem: it turns out the US sys­tem of gov­ern­ment does­n’t actu­al­ly work when there’s no par­ty with a clear major­i­ty and one of the par­ties is filled with enough bad faith actors put in posi­tions of pow­er. It’s a vol­un­tar­i­ly break­able sys­tem at that point. If one of the par­ties sim­ply can’t get its house in order, it can break every­thing. It’s the kind of les­son one does­n’t expect to have to learn. Par­ties tend to want to throw a gear in the works when they’re out of pow­er, not in it. But as we keep learn­ing with this year’s House Repub­li­can cau­cus, it’s pos­si­ble for the par­ty in pow­er to self-immo­late for no clear rea­son. Repeat­ed­ly.

    Or at least seem­ing­ly almost self-immo­late. The group of hold outs can threat­en to bring every­thing to a halt unless they get their way, and the rest of the cau­cus is just forced to make the deter­mi­na­tion of whether or not its worth giv­ing in to the extor­tion this time in the hopes of just mov­ing past the cri­sis. Along with the hopes that it’s the last time but with the recog­ni­tion that it’s only fuel­ing a next time. Rule via the polit­i­cal sui­cide vest: give in to our demands or we blow it all up. A cred­i­ble threat of self-immo­la­tion is required for this ‘minor­i­ty rule’ tac­tic to work.

    And here we are, for the sec­ond time in 2023, watch­ing a group of House GOP hold outs trig­ger­ing an intra-par­ty cri­sis that is pred­i­cat­ed on a cred­i­ble threat of being will­ing to burn it all down. A group of hold outs that appears to have quite a bit of over­lap with the same group of ‘Free­dom Cau­cus’ hold outs who waged the first round of chaot­ic con­ces­sions from Kevin McCarthy in exchange for their sup­port back in Jan­u­ary. Who knows why exact­ly Rep Matt Gaetz decid­ed to trig­ger the vote of con­fi­dence on Kevin McCarthy, result­ing in the first no-con­fi­dence ouster of Speak­er in US his­to­ry. But he did it. And now the same ‘Free­dom Cau­cus’ fac­tion that raked McCarthy over the coals back in Jan­u­ary is at it again.

    Recall how Kevin McCarthy’s 15-round vote/­con­ces­sion-o-rama to this large­ly same group of ‘Free­dom Cau­cus’ Repub­li­can hold­outs back in Jan­u­ary was clear­ly a CNP-orches­trat­ed affair once we looked at the play­ers involved with plan­ning it and whip­ping up sup­port for it. As we saw, it was the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute (CPI) — a kind of CNP front-group orga­ni­za­tion­al moth­er­ship — that lit­er­al­ly host­ed the many of strat­e­gy meet­ings held by the ‘Nev­er Kevin’ House Repub­li­can cau­cus at the CPI’s DC head­quar­ters. Meet­ings that had been reg­u­lar­ly held there by this group for months. The CPI even held a four-per­son pan­el meet­ing a week after the 2022 mid-terms where the pan­el (of four CNP mem­bers) basi­cal­ly told the ‘Nev­er Kevin’ cau­cus to pur­sue the hold out strat­e­gy against McCarthy hey ulti­mate­ly pur­sued. Con­ces­sions that empow­ered a sin­gle House Repub­li­can to trig­gered a vote of con­fi­dence. And here we are, after Matt Gaetz decid­ed for what­ev­er rea­son to trig­ger more or less the same polit­i­cal cri­sis. A cri­sis that has once again result­ed in a hand­ful of hold­outs wield­ing out­sized pow­er in nego­ti­a­tions over who will wield the pow­er of the Speak­er. And, maybe, promi­nent ‘Free­dom Cau­cus’ mem­ber Jim Jor­dan as the next Speak­er.

    But while we don’t know how the cur­rent House Speak­er cri­sis will pan out, we can be con­fi­dent the CNP is fever­ish­ly work­ing in the back­ground to deter­mine that out­come. An out­come that will some­how result in some­one win­ning the Speak­er­ship who could­n’t oth­er­wise win it with­out such a cri­sis. It’s a key detail to keep in mind: these ‘minori­ties rule’ crises are excel­lent excus­es for cau­cus mem­bers to ulti­mate­ly vote for a polit­i­cal­ly unpalat­able fig­ure to become House Speak­er because that’s what was required to resolve the cri­sis. Per­haps Jim Jor­dan is the fig­ure the CNP has in mind, or maybe it’s some­one else. But who­ev­er it is would­n’t have had a chance were it not for this cri­sis. The kind of cri­sis the CNP has a proven track record of suc­cess­ful­ly exploit­ing as they demon­strat­ed back in Jan­u­ary. It’s the under­ly­ing log­ic to chaos: cre­at­ing and exploit­ing this kind of polit­i­cal chaos is a CNP spe­cial­ty:

    Wash­ing­ton Post

    Some House Repub­li­cans try to change the rules so losers become win­ners

    Once obsessed with the ‘major­i­ty of the major­i­ty,’ the House GOP is now ruled by small minor­i­ty fac­tions

    Analy­sis by Paul Kane
    Con­gres­sion­al bureau chief
    Octo­ber 14, 2023 at 4:21 p.m. EDT

    House Repub­li­cans live in a world where math is upside down.

    In this fan­ta­sy land, five can be as pow­er­ful as 217; eight as big as 433; and, in a new twist this past week, 99 out of 223 can some­how be turned into a strong major­i­ty.

    This lat­est exam­ple came Fri­day, when Rep. Jim Jor­dan (R‑Ohio) claimed the nom­i­na­tion for GOP House speak­er, despite a clear major­i­ty of the full House not want­i­ng him to be their pick.

    On Wednes­day, Jor­dan lost the nom­i­na­tion, run­ning a com­pet­i­tive race but only get­ting 99 votes — about 44 per­cent of the 223 bal­lots cast. He offered a tepid endorse­ment, at best, to the win­ner, Rep. Steve Scalise (R‑La.), and then sat back as his allies sab­o­taged the front-run­ner.

    They told Scalise that they would re-cre­ate the dra­ma of Jan­u­ary when Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R‑Calif.) failed on the first 14 bal­lots because about 20 hard-right con­ser­v­a­tives vot­ed for some­one else, forc­ing him to make key con­ces­sions until they let him win on the 15th roll call.

    After endur­ing about 30 hours of this tor­ture, Scalise said no thanks. He will stay put as major­i­ty leader and watch as Jor­dan now faces the same strug­gles.

    Before Friday’s new vote, Jordan’s allies, includ­ing McCarthy, who was deposed ear­li­er this month, hyped his can­di­da­cy enough that expec­ta­tions were set for him to blow past Scalise’s ini­tial tal­ly. Instead, a last-minute entrant, Rep. Austin Scott (R‑Ga.), a back­bencher focused on nation­al secu­ri­ty issues who nev­er sought a lead­er­ship post, embar­rassed Jor­dan with a strong sec­ond-place show­ing.

    Jor­dan received only 124 votes, claim­ing about 10 of the protest votes from Wednes­day that went to write-in can­di­dates or sim­ply stat­ed “present.” He flipped only about 15 of Scalise’s ini­tial sup­port­ers. In a sec­ond secret bal­lot that asked Repub­li­cans how they would vote in the required pub­lic roll call for speak­er, 55 dou­bled down and said they would not sup­port Jor­dan.

    This sets up the same conun­drum that felled McCarthy and prompt­ed Scalise to aban­don the race: With 221 on their side, Repub­li­cans have just four votes to spare if all 212 Democ­rats vote the oth­er way.

    Jordan’s allies have sig­naled a polit­i­cal-roughshod cam­paign that will dare his oppo­nents to vote against the far-right Repub­li­can in the pub­lic, alpha­bet­i­cal roll call on the House floor. They hope they will crum­ble from fear of ret­ri­bu­tion from con­ser­v­a­tive pri­ma­ry vot­ers.

    “I think there’s a clear path to get him to 217. But as long as you’re doing secret bal­lots, it’s a lot hard­er to get 217. We’ve got to break cov­er,” Rep. Dusty John­son (R‑S.D.), a leader of a main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive cau­cus, told reporters Fri­day.

    But Jordan’s staunchest oppo­nents warned that a pres­sure cam­paign would back­fire. “Look, when you’re doing it in a pos­i­tive way, you can usu­al­ly get a lot,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R‑Fla.), a staunch Scalise backer, told reporters.

    ...

    After nine months of watch­ing their hard-right flank essen­tial­ly extort McCarthy, this band of estab­lish­ment Repub­li­cans has declared that it’s time to stop reward­ing the hostage-tak­ers. Instead of giv­ing in to Jor­dan, they want to adopt the very same strat­e­gy: minor­i­ty-rule tac­tics to sab­o­tage him.

    If as few as five refuse to back Jor­dan, he can’t win. That’s what hap­pened on mul­ti­ple key pro­ce­dur­al votes last month, when just five Repub­li­cans opposed McCarthy’s defense spend­ing bill and vot­ed against the par­lia­men­tary vote, sab­o­tag­ing the leg­is­la­tion.

    When the hard right decid­ed to take down McCarthy, those Repub­li­cans used the obscure motion to vacate that served as a vote of no con­fi­dence. As is cus­tom in votes for speak­er, all Democ­rats vot­ed against the GOP option. Then eight Repub­li­cans effec­tive­ly deter­mined for the rest of the House — cur­rent­ly at 433 mem­bers because of two vacan­cies — that McCarthy would no longer be speak­er by sid­ing with Democ­rats.

    John­son, nor­mal­ly one of the more reserved and earnest law­mak­ers, pro­posed forc­ing the full House to vote ear­ly in the week even if Jor­dan is expect­ed to lose. They would then go through round after round after round, re-cre­at­ing the chaot­ic Jan­u­ary scene to ramp up the pres­sure on Diaz-Balart’s group.

    “Jim Jor­dan should con­tin­ue this fight all the way through,” Rep. Chip Roy (R‑Tex.) said on Fox News on Fri­day evening.

    That high-risk sce­nario has some Jor­dan sup­port­ers urg­ing restraint, includ­ing Rep. Byron Don­alds (R‑Fla.), who has pre­vi­ous­ly called for no floor vote until the out­come is cer­tain.

    “Right now, we just need cool heads and log­ic to pre­vail. I think that can occur,” Don­alds said Fri­day.

    Jordan’s oppo­nents view the John­son-Roy approach as anoth­er act of deceit.

    Before Scalise’s vic­to­ry Wednes­day, Roy tried to change rules so that the nom­i­nee would not go to a full vote in the House until secur­ing 217 Repub­li­can votes.

    Adopt­ing the look and style of a Hol­ly­wood movie mad sci­en­tist, Roy reg­u­lar­ly plots com­plex strate­gies, focused on obscure rules and con­found­ing process­es. This time, he want­ed to force many bal­lots in the speak­er vote: the first involv­ing both can­di­dates, then the win­ner would go through more grilling and anoth­er secret bal­lot or two, before final­ly a pub­lic roll call in front of all his GOP col­leagues.

    It seemed designed to deny Scalise, or per­haps any­one oth­er than Jor­dan, the req­ui­site sup­port to win — which is why Roy’s pro­pos­al got trounced by almost 50 votes.

    Scalise then won the actu­al vote, 113–99, but rather than accept­ing the humil­i­at­ing defeat, Roy declared he would vote only for Jor­dan.

    A dozen Jor­dan back­ers quick­ly declared they would nev­er vote for Scalise, while about a dozen more lurked in the back­drop, as well as a half-dozen or so mod­er­ates who remained loy­al to McCarthy.

    Pret­ty quick­ly, Scalise’s sup­port­ers — who include most tra­di­tion­al con­ser­v­a­tives on the Armed Ser­vices and Appro­pri­a­tions com­mit­tees — felt that Jor­dan had revert­ed back to his orig­i­nal form. In his first dozen years, before McCarthy brought him into his inner cir­cle, Jor­dan served as the rab­ble-rouser, threat­en­ing to expel speak­ers and try­ing to take down bipar­ti­san, must-pass leg­is­la­tion.

    Jor­dan did not offer Scalise an endorse­ment and left the closed-door meet­ing with­out talk­ing to the hun­dred or more reporters out­side the room.

    His aides sent word that he offered to give a nom­i­nat­ing speech on Scalise’s behalf, but Scalise sup­port­ers report­ed that the offer required him to only stand for one bal­lot and, if he failed, turn around and nom­i­nate Jor­dan on the next bal­lot.

    Jordan’s sup­port­ers denied any dou­ble-deal­ing. “He has said in the most plain, pos­si­ble Eng­lish to the con­fer­ence, entire­ly wide, that he would sup­port Steve,” Rep. Bri­an Mast (R‑Fla.) told reporters after a Thurs­day meet­ing with Scalise.

    Still, Mast acknowl­edged that his plan to sup­port Scalise after he won “just ran into some things” and that he was still with Jor­dan.

    Once Scalise with­drew on Thurs­day evening, Jor­dan jumped back into the race anew, this time as the front-run­ner.

    In pub­lic, Jordan’s oppo­nents have walked a care­ful line to avoid accus­ing him of treach­ery.

    Instead, they take him at his word that he tru­ly did sup­port Scalise. But they fault the for­mer nation­al col­le­giate cham­pi­on wrestler, giv­en his mytho­log­i­cal clout with­in far-right cir­cles, for being weak.

    “There’s two alter­na­tives: Either you lied, or you couldn’t deliv­er,” Diaz-Balart said. “I’ve nev­er been lied to, I’ve nev­er been lied to by him. So there­fore, to me, it’s got to be the oth­er alter­na­tive, which is he has not been able to deliv­er on a rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple thing.”

    So now the Diaz-Balart wing plans to force Jor­dan to swal­low some of the same med­i­cine he has deliv­ered through­out the years.

    All these minor­i­ty-rule moments turn the tables on a GOP con­fer­ence that used to assert the “Hastert rule,” an unof­fi­cial stan­dard often imposed by J. Den­nis Hastert (R‑Ill.), the House speak­er from 1999 into 2007. It said leg­is­la­tion that did not have the sup­port of “the major­i­ty of the major­i­ty” would not get a vote on the House floor.

    Now, the major­i­ty of the major­i­ty no longer rules, giv­en that both McCarthy and Scalise had such sup­port, as Jor­dan now does.

    Instead, a small bloc — some­times five, some­times eight, some­times 20, per­haps 99 — has turned the math upside down.

    With the new “Jor­dan rule,” it’s the minor­i­ty of the major­i­ty that mat­ters most.

    ————

    “Some House Repub­li­cans try to change the rules so losers become win­ners” by Paul Kane; Wash­ing­ton Post; 10/14/2023

    “All these minor­i­ty-rule moments turn the tables on a GOP con­fer­ence that used to assert the “Hastert rule,” an unof­fi­cial stan­dard often imposed by J. Den­nis Hastert (R‑Ill.), the House speak­er from 1999 into 2007. It said leg­is­la­tion that did not have the sup­port of “the major­i­ty of the major­i­ty” would not get a vote on the House floor.”

    It’s Minor­i­ty Rule, achieved through the exploita­tion of every tech­ni­cal­i­ty and loop­hole avail­able cou­pled with an abil­i­ty to project a will­ing­ness to burn the sys­tem down if you don’t get your way. Gov­ern­ing by one game of ‘Chick­en’ after anoth­er. We did­n’t real­ly know the US sys­tem was set up to work this way until now. But now we know it: a minor­i­ty of the House major­i­ty can rule through a cred­i­ble threat of let­ting it all burn down. That was the cred­i­ble threat that got the House Repub­li­can ‘hold outs’ all their con­ces­sions — like the one-vote trig­ger for a vote a con­fi­dence — when Kevin McCarthy was forced to go through the CNP-direct­ed 15 humil­i­at­ing rounds of failed votes back in Jan­u­ary as part of the plan that was hatched at the CPI’s DC head­quar­ters months ear­li­er. They keep doing it because it works. As long as the cur­rent dynam­ic holds — the dynam­ic being the GOP con­trol­ling the House — this group of CNP-direct­ed House Repub­li­cans can effec­tive­ly rule through cred­i­ble threat. Flash for­ward to now, and it’s large­ly the same group of hold outs respon­si­ble for Steve Scalise’s failed bid and who are now putting for­ward Jim Jor­dan as the only remain­ing option:

    ...
    This lat­est exam­ple came Fri­day, when Rep. Jim Jor­dan (R‑Ohio) claimed the nom­i­na­tion for GOP House speak­er, despite a clear major­i­ty of the full House not want­i­ng him to be their pick.

    On Wednes­day, Jor­dan lost the nom­i­na­tion, run­ning a com­pet­i­tive race but only get­ting 99 votes — about 44 per­cent of the 223 bal­lots cast. He offered a tepid endorse­ment, at best, to the win­ner, Rep. Steve Scalise (R‑La.), and then sat back as his allies sab­o­taged the front-run­ner.

    They told Scalise that they would re-cre­ate the dra­ma of Jan­u­ary when Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R‑Calif.) failed on the first 14 bal­lots because about 20 hard-right con­ser­v­a­tives vot­ed for some­one else, forc­ing him to make key con­ces­sions until they let him win on the 15th roll call.

    After endur­ing about 30 hours of this tor­ture, Scalise said no thanks. He will stay put as major­i­ty leader and watch as Jor­dan now faces the same strug­gles.

    ...

    Now, the major­i­ty of the major­i­ty no longer rules, giv­en that both McCarthy and Scalise had such sup­port, as Jor­dan now does.

    Instead, a small bloc — some­times five, some­times eight, some­times 20, per­haps 99 — has turned the math upside down.

    With the new “Jor­dan rule,” it’s the minor­i­ty of the major­i­ty that mat­ters most.
    ...

    And as we can see, it’s not sim­ply that Steve Scalise failed in his attempt to get enough cau­cus sup­port, leav­ing Jor­dan as the next nom­i­nee in line. There was report­ed­ly a demand by Jor­dan-ally Chip Roy that the even­tu­al nom­i­nee go through a secret grilling and more rounds of secret bal­lots before a final vote. Which sure sounds like an attempt to extract anoth­er round of extreme con­ces­sions from whomev­er is ulti­mate­ly cho­sen. And when Roy’s pro­pos­als were shot down, and Scalise beat Jor­dan in the first round of vot­ing 113–99, Roy led a del­e­ga­tion of a dozen Jor­dan sup­port­ers who declared they won’t sup­port Scalise, more than enough to sink Scalise’s chances. Half a dozen ‘mod­er­ates’ even joined them for ‘rea­sons’. It was a strange out­come for a strange sit­u­a­tion, and at the end of it all, Jim Jor­dan is being pre­sent­ed to the cau­cus as the last hope. It’s Free­dom Cau­cus Jim or chaos:

    ...
    Jordan’s oppo­nents view the John­son-Roy approach as anoth­er act of deceit.

    Before Scalise’s vic­to­ry Wednes­day, Roy tried to change rules so that the nom­i­nee would not go to a full vote in the House until secur­ing 217 Repub­li­can votes.

    Adopt­ing the look and style of a Hol­ly­wood movie mad sci­en­tist, Roy reg­u­lar­ly plots com­plex strate­gies, focused on obscure rules and con­found­ing process­es. This time, he want­ed to force many bal­lots in the speak­er vote: the first involv­ing both can­di­dates, then the win­ner would go through more grilling and anoth­er secret bal­lot or two, before final­ly a pub­lic roll call in front of all his GOP col­leagues.

    It seemed designed to deny Scalise, or per­haps any­one oth­er than Jor­dan, the req­ui­site sup­port to win — which is why Roy’s pro­pos­al got trounced by almost 50 votes.

    Scalise then won the actu­al vote, 113–99, but rather than accept­ing the humil­i­at­ing defeat, Roy declared he would vote only for Jor­dan.

    A dozen Jor­dan back­ers quick­ly declared they would nev­er vote for Scalise, while about a dozen more lurked in the back­drop, as well as a half-dozen or so mod­er­ates who remained loy­al to McCarthy.

    Pret­ty quick­ly, Scalise’s sup­port­ers — who include most tra­di­tion­al con­ser­v­a­tives on the Armed Ser­vices and Appro­pri­a­tions com­mit­tees — felt that Jor­dan had revert­ed back to his orig­i­nal form. In his first dozen years, before McCarthy brought him into his inner cir­cle, Jor­dan served as the rab­ble-rouser, threat­en­ing to expel speak­ers and try­ing to take down bipar­ti­san, must-pass leg­is­la­tion.

    Jor­dan did not offer Scalise an endorse­ment and left the closed-door meet­ing with­out talk­ing to the hun­dred or more reporters out­side the room.

    His aides sent word that he offered to give a nom­i­nat­ing speech on Scalise’s behalf, but Scalise sup­port­ers report­ed that the offer required him to only stand for one bal­lot and, if he failed, turn around and nom­i­nate Jor­dan on the next bal­lot.

    Jordan’s sup­port­ers denied any dou­ble-deal­ing. “He has said in the most plain, pos­si­ble Eng­lish to the con­fer­ence, entire­ly wide, that he would sup­port Steve,” Rep. Bri­an Mast (R‑Fla.) told reporters after a Thurs­day meet­ing with Scalise.
    ...

    And now, it appears that the pro-Scalise ‘mod­er­ates’ are plan­ning on ‘turn­ing the tables’ and using this same ‘minor­i­ty rule’ tac­tic against the pro-Jor­dan cau­cus. At least that’s the nar­ra­tive we’re get­ting. And who knows, per­haps they real­ly are plan­ning on doing exact­ly that. But giv­en the real­i­ty that the CNP holds sway over the entire Repub­li­can House cau­cus and there does­n’t real­ly exist a cau­cus will­ing to stand up against the CNP’s wish­es, it’s hard to view all this as much more than the­atrics. The kind of the­atrics designed to give the House GOP polit­i­cal cov­er to ulti­mate­ly sup­port who­ev­er it is the CNP wants as speak­er. Maybe that’s Jim Jor­dan. Or maybe they have the real can­di­date wait­ing in the wings. But one thing is clear by now: the CNP is orches­trat­ing the strat­e­gy behind the scenes and its min­ions in the House will duti­ful­ly exe­cute what­ev­er the CNP comes up with. Of that we can be sure:

    ...
    Jor­dan received only 124 votes, claim­ing about 10 of the protest votes from Wednes­day that went to write-in can­di­dates or sim­ply stat­ed “present.” He flipped only about 15 of Scalise’s ini­tial sup­port­ers. In a sec­ond secret bal­lot that asked Repub­li­cans how they would vote in the required pub­lic roll call for speak­er, 55 dou­bled down and said they would not sup­port Jor­dan.

    This sets up the same conun­drum that felled McCarthy and prompt­ed Scalise to aban­don the race: With 221 on their side, Repub­li­cans have just four votes to spare if all 212 Democ­rats vote the oth­er way.

    Jordan’s allies have sig­naled a polit­i­cal-roughshod cam­paign that will dare his oppo­nents to vote against the far-right Repub­li­can in the pub­lic, alpha­bet­i­cal roll call on the House floor. They hope they will crum­ble from fear of ret­ri­bu­tion from con­ser­v­a­tive pri­ma­ry vot­ers.

    “I think there’s a clear path to get him to 217. But as long as you’re doing secret bal­lots, it’s a lot hard­er to get 217. We’ve got to break cov­er,” Rep. Dusty John­son (R‑S.D.), a leader of a main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive cau­cus, told reporters Fri­day.

    But Jordan’s staunchest oppo­nents warned that a pres­sure cam­paign would back­fire. “Look, when you’re doing it in a pos­i­tive way, you can usu­al­ly get a lot,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R‑Fla.), a staunch Scalise backer, told reporters.

    ...

    After nine months of watch­ing their hard-right flank essen­tial­ly extort McCarthy, this band of estab­lish­ment Repub­li­cans has declared that it’s time to stop reward­ing the hostage-tak­ers. Instead of giv­ing in to Jor­dan, they want to adopt the very same strat­e­gy: minor­i­ty-rule tac­tics to sab­o­tage him.

    If as few as five refuse to back Jor­dan, he can’t win. That’s what hap­pened on mul­ti­ple key pro­ce­dur­al votes last month, when just five Repub­li­cans opposed McCarthy’s defense spend­ing bill and vot­ed against the par­lia­men­tary vote, sab­o­tag­ing the leg­is­la­tion.

    When the hard right decid­ed to take down McCarthy, those Repub­li­cans used the obscure motion to vacate that served as a vote of no con­fi­dence. As is cus­tom in votes for speak­er, all Democ­rats vot­ed against the GOP option. Then eight Repub­li­cans effec­tive­ly deter­mined for the rest of the House — cur­rent­ly at 433 mem­bers because of two vacan­cies — that McCarthy would no longer be speak­er by sid­ing with Democ­rats.
    ...

    Will the ‘mod­er­ates’ tru­ly give the Free­dom Cau­cus a ‘taste of its own med­i­cine’? We’ll see. But if so, that only ratch­ets up the pres­sure and focus­es the cri­sis on the under­ly­ing gam­bit: who has the most cred­i­ble threat to burn it all down if they don’t get their way?

    And it’s that under­ly­ing gam­bit of a cred­i­ble threat that only under­scores the impor­tance of under­stand­ing the role the CNP is play­ing in all of this. Because think about: who as the most cred­i­ble threat in these nego­ti­a­tions? The GOP fac­tion with the back­ing of the far right GOP’s shad­ow over­lords at the CNP who were will­ing to go as far as back­ing the insur­rec­tion and are cur­rent­ly plot­ting the Sched­ule F/Project 2025 purge of the gov­ern­ment? Or the fac­tion that does­n’t have that shad­ow lord sup­port? In oth­er words, we aren’t see­ing a real show­down unless we’re see­ing a fac­tion of the GOP will­ing to stare down the CNP. And there’s no indi­ca­tion we’re see­ing that. Which sug­gests we’re see­ing a whole lot of chaot­ic the­atrics, pre­sum­ably to give the House GOP cau­cus the polit­i­cal cov­er it needs to install a new speak­er. Some­one desired by the CNP, and almost no one else. Hence all the chaot­ic cov­er.

    Because if there’s one thing minor­i­ty rule uses more than schem­ing, it’s strate­gic the­atrics. The more chaot­ic the the­atrics, the bet­ter the results, typ­i­cal­ly. At least that’s the les­son the CNP keeps learn­ing. And no one else. Rinse and repeat.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 16, 2023, 3:00 am
  36. Fol­low­ing up on the ongo­ing sto­ry of fight for House Speak­er­ship and the role played by Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP) in both orga­niz­ing the first ‘Nev­er Kevin’ cau­cus back in Jan­u­ary and now the ‘Nev­er Steve’ cau­cus speak­er­ship cau­cus that appears to be ded­i­cat­ed to derail­ing Steve Scalise’s bid and turn­ing the far right Free­dom Cau­cus leader Jim Jor­dan into the next Speak­er of the House, here’s a report under­scor­ing how the CNP is play­ing the same role it played back in Jan­u­ary.

    As the fol­low­ing NY Times arti­cle describes, a pres­sure cam­paign is already under­way by Jim Jor­dan’s allies, tar­get­ing the rough­ly 55 Repub­li­can hold outs in the ‘Nev­er Jim’ cau­cus. Allies that include some now famil­iar names: CNP mem­ber Amy Kre­mer and Russ Vought (mar­ried to CNP mem­ber Mary Vought). Kre­mer’s office is report­ed­ly list­ing the phone num­bers of ‘Nev­er Jim’ Repub­li­cans and urg­ing her fol­low­ers to call them. Russ Vought, described as ‘close to Jor­dan’, is urg­ing Repub­li­cans to call a floor vote on the speak­er­ship and, “take it to the floor & call their bluff.”

    As we’ve seen, both Kre­mer and Vought have been very active is exe­cut­ing the CNP’s agen­da in recent years. It was Amy and her daugh­ter Kylie who orga­nized the ‘Women for Amer­i­ca First’ Jan­u­ary 6 ral­ly at the Ellipse that even­tu­al­ly devolved into the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. A role that put the Kre­mers in a kind of col­lab­o­ra­tive role with Ali Alexan­der’s par­al­lel ‘Wild’ ral­ly plan­ning. And Russ Vought not only played a direct role in the orig­i­nal Sched­ule F plot­ting, but he’s extend­ed that role as the head of the Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca (CRA), one of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Part­ner­ship Insti­tute’s (CPI) many spin­offs. Recall how the plan­ning for the ini­tial ‘Nev­er Kevin’ speak­er­ship show­down was con­duct­ed at the CPI’s DC head­quar­ters for months fol­low­ing the Novem­ber 2022 elec­tion.

    And as we saw back in Jan­u­ary, both Kre­mer and Vought were two of the near­ly 50 CNP mem­bers (or mem­ber spous­es) who signed an open let­ter in sup­port of the ‘Nev­er Kevin’ cau­cus’s actions. And they’re at it again, pre­sum­ably along with the rest of their CNP brethren.

    Also of inter­est is one of the areas of pol­i­cy dis­agree­ment between the pro- and anti-Jor­dan cau­cus­es: fund­ing for Ukraine, with the pro-Jor­dan cau­cus tak­ing a strong stance against more fund­ing for Ukraine and the anti-Jor­dan cau­cus tak­ing the oppo­site stance. Which rais­es the intrigu­ing ques­tion: what is the CNP’s stance on not just the war in Ukraine but the prospect of war in places like Tai­wan and the Mid­dle East? Is the pro-Jor­dan cau­cus’s oppo­si­tion to more Ukraine fund­ing pure­ly polit­i­cal the­atrics (very pos­si­ble)? Or could there be a real CNP-backed oppo­si­tion to more fund­ing? And if so, how should we inter­pret that oppo­si­tion, giv­en the grow­ing prospects of wars else­where? The CNP isn’t exact­ly a force for peace and sta­bil­i­ty in the world. What’s the plan here?

    It’s all part of why we can’t real­ly make sense of the cur­rent GOP civ­il war until we rec­og­nize that this is a CNP-dri­ven polit­i­cal cri­sis. The lat­est in a long string of CNP-dri­ven polit­i­cal crises that, some­how, are nev­er rec­og­nized as CNP cre­at­ed fias­cos. It’s just part of the pre­sumed joy of being a pow­er­ful secret soci­ety that no one talks about for some rea­son:

    The New York Times

    Jor­dan Acti­vates Right-Wing Pres­sure Cam­paign in Push to Win Speak­er­ship

    Allies of the Ohio Repub­li­can, who must per­suade scores of his col­leagues to sup­port his bid for speak­er, are threat­en­ing right-wing ret­ri­bu­tion to any G.O.P. law­mak­ers who dare oppose him.

    By Karoun Demir­jian
    Report­ing from Wash­ing­ton
    Oct. 14, 2023

    Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Jor­dan and his allies have begun a right-wing pres­sure cam­paign against Repub­li­cans opposed to elect­ing him speak­er, work­ing to unleash the rage of the party’s base vot­ers against any law­mak­er stand­ing in the way of his elec­tion.

    Even after Mr. Jor­dan, the hard-right Ohio Repub­li­can, won his party’s nom­i­na­tion for the post on Fri­day, he remained far short of the 217 votes he need­ed to win the gav­el, with scores of his col­leagues refus­ing to back him.

    In efforts to close the gap, law­mak­ers and activists close to him have tak­en to social media and the air­waves to blast the Repub­li­cans they believe are block­ing his path to vic­to­ry and encour­age vot­ers to brow­beat them into sup­port­ing Mr. Jor­dan.

    It is an extra­or­di­nary instance of Repub­li­can-on-Repub­li­can fight­ing that under­scores the divi­sions that have wrought chaos inside the par­ty, par­a­lyz­ing the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives in the process. Sev­er­al of Mr. Jordan’s sup­port­ers have post­ed the phone num­bers of main­stream G.O.P. law­mak­ers they count as hold­outs, encour­ag­ing fol­low­ers to flood the Capi­tol switch­board with calls demand­ing they back Mr. Jor­dan — or face the wrath of con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers as they gear up for pri­ma­ry sea­son.

    “You want to explain to your vot­ers why you blocked Jor­dan?” Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Anna Pauli­na Luna, Repub­li­can of Flori­da, wrote on X. “Then bring it.”

    The strat­e­gy is rem­i­nis­cent of the bul­ly­ing tac­tics that Mr. Jor­dan and his allies have used over the past decade to pull the G.O.P. fur­ther to the right, and bor­rows a page from for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump, who is back­ing Mr. Jor­dan.

    It is also an approach that helped pro­pel the House G.O.P. into its cur­rent lead­er­ship cri­sis. Repub­li­cans last year field­ed sev­er­al extreme-right con­gres­sion­al can­di­dates who were pop­u­lar with the base but ulti­mate­ly could not win gen­er­al elec­tions in com­pet­i­tive dis­tricts, leav­ing them with a razor-thin major­i­ty in the House. A new gen­er­a­tion of hard-lin­ers has been able to exploit the tiny gov­ern­ing mar­gin, dethron­ing one speak­er and scut­tling the bid of his heir appar­ent.

    Mr. Jordan’s close­ness with the for­mer pres­i­dent has giv­en him unpar­al­leled cachet with the par­ty base, and his back­ers were count­ing on that to help him pre­vail in a vote that could come as ear­ly as Tues­day.

    While Friday’s votes were secret bal­lots, by Sat­ur­day, right-wing activists appeared to have iden­ti­fied about a dozen hold­outs against Mr. Jor­dan as top tar­gets for their onslaught.

    Amy Kre­mer, a polit­i­cal activist affil­i­at­ed with the Tea Par­ty move­ment and Mr. Trump who also leads Women for Amer­i­ca First, which orga­nized a “Stop the Steal” ral­ly in 2021, post­ed a hit list of 12 mem­bers on Fri­day. She list­ed their office phone num­bers and urged her fol­low­ers to call them and tell them to sup­port Mr. Jor­dan. The list includ­ed Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Ann Wag­n­er of Mis­souri, Mike Rogers of Alaba­ma and Car­los Gimenez of Flori­da, all of whom have pub­licly stat­ed their oppo­si­tion to Mr. Jor­dan.

    “Call him and tell him this is not accept­able,” Ms. Kre­mer wrote about Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Greg Mur­phy of North Car­oli­na. “He needs to get onboard with Jor­dan and stop adding to the chaos.”

    Mr. Jordan’s sup­port­ers said his deci­sion to send law­mak­ers home to their dis­tricts over the week­end rather than keep­ing them in Wash­ing­ton for one-on-one meet­ings to drum up sup­port was a delib­er­ate move to inten­si­fy grass-roots pres­sure on them to fall into line.

    “Everybody’s going to go home, lis­ten to their con­stituents, and make a deci­sion,” said Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Tim Burchett of Ten­nessee, pre­dict­ing that hear­ing from the par­ty base would help sway hold­outs in Mr. Jordan’s direc­tion. “Hon­est­ly, the grass roots, there’s nobody stronger.”

    Despite being revered by hard-lin­ers and brand­ed a “leg­isla­tive ter­ror­ist” by a for­mer Repub­li­can speak­er, Mr. Jor­dan has more recent­ly allied him­self with his party’s lead­ers.

    The Ohio law­mak­er backed the debt lim­it deal that for­mer Speak­er Kevin McCarthy struck with Pres­i­dent Biden and did not join the far right’s move to grind the House floor to a halt in protest of that agree­ment, or their effort to oust Mr. McCarthy. He has already said he intends to have the House vote on a stop­gap spend­ing mea­sure to keep the gov­ern­ment open — the sin that got Mr. McCarthy boot­ed — and has man­aged to keep con­ser­v­a­tive hard-lin­ers in his camp.

    But some main­stream Repub­li­cans are oppos­ing Mr. Jor­dan on prin­ci­ple. They dif­fer with him on mat­ters of pol­i­cy, nowhere more sharply than on con­tin­u­ing to fund the war in Ukraine, a pri­or­i­ty for many of them to which Mr. Jor­dan and his “Amer­i­ca First” allies are deeply opposed.

    ...

    It was unclear whether the pres­sure cam­paign would be able to net Mr. Jor­dan the votes he need­ed as the sec­ond can­di­date put forth in recent days as the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee.

    Repub­li­cans first nom­i­nat­ed Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Steve Scalise of Louisiana over Mr. Jor­dan by a vote of 113 to 99 on Wednes­day, but on Thurs­day night, with no clear path for­ward, Mr. Scalise with­drew him­self from con­sid­er­a­tion. Mr. Jor­dan sought to quick­ly con­sol­i­date sup­port.

    Then on Fri­day, 81 Repub­li­cans backed a late entry to the race, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Austin Scott of Geor­gia, to lodge a protest vote against Mr. Jor­dan. Mr. Scott quick­ly swung in line behind Mr. Jor­dan after his defeat. But on a sec­ond bal­lot ask­ing sim­ply whether G.O.P. law­mak­ers would sup­port the Ohio Repub­li­can if the speak­er nom­i­na­tion went to the floor, 55 still said no.

    Some con­ser­v­a­tive strate­gists close to Mr. Jor­dan believe he will eas­i­ly be able to win over his detrac­tors, insti­tu­tion­al­ists who put a high pre­mi­um on a func­tion­ing gov­ern­ment and pro­ject­ing nor­mal­cy. Unlike the hard right, the strate­gists argue, stag­ing a floor revolt sim­ply isn’t in their nature.

    “These 60 mem­bers are not vot­ing against Jor­dan on the floor,” Rus­sell T. Vought, pres­i­dent of the Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca, a think tank with ties to Mr. Trump, and a strate­gist close to Mr. Jor­dan, wrote on X. “Take it to the floor & call their bluff.”

    ———-

    “Jor­dan Acti­vates Right-Wing Pres­sure Cam­paign in Push to Win Speak­er­ship” by Karoun Demir­jian; The New York Times; 10/14/2023

    “The strat­e­gy is rem­i­nis­cent of the bul­ly­ing tac­tics that Mr. Jor­dan and his allies have used over the past decade to pull the G.O.P. fur­ther to the right, and bor­rows a page from for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump, who is back­ing Mr. Jor­dan.”

    He’s got Trump’s sup­port. Will that be enough to push Jim Jor­dan over the fin­ish line? Trump is the par­ty’s pre­sump­tive 2024 nom­i­nee after all. But as we can see, Jor­dan has a lot more than just Trump’s open sup­port. CNP stal­warts are ral­ly­ing to his cause too, like Amy Kre­mer and Rus­sel Vought. Recall how both Kre­mer and Vought played a sim­i­lar role back in Jan­u­ary when they signed that open let­ter — along with near­ly 50 oth­er CNP mem­bers — 8in sup­port of the hard line that was being tak­en against Kevin McCarthy. And as this arti­cle makes clear, that same CNP net­work has been been acti­vat­ed to wage a new pub­lic pres­sure cam­paign:

    ...
    Mr. Jordan’s close­ness with the for­mer pres­i­dent has giv­en him unpar­al­leled cachet with the par­ty base, and his back­ers were count­ing on that to help him pre­vail in a vote that could come as ear­ly as Tues­day.

    While Friday’s votes were secret bal­lots, by Sat­ur­day, right-wing activists appeared to have iden­ti­fied about a dozen hold­outs against Mr. Jor­dan as top tar­gets for their onslaught.

    Amy Kre­mer, a polit­i­cal activist affil­i­at­ed with the Tea Par­ty move­ment and Mr. Trump who also leads Women for Amer­i­ca First, which orga­nized a “Stop the Steal” ral­ly in 2021, post­ed a hit list of 12 mem­bers on Fri­day. She list­ed their office phone num­bers and urged her fol­low­ers to call them and tell them to sup­port Mr. Jor­dan. The list includ­ed Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Ann Wag­n­er of Mis­souri, Mike Rogers of Alaba­ma and Car­los Gimenez of Flori­da, all of whom have pub­licly stat­ed their oppo­si­tion to Mr. Jor­dan.

    “Call him and tell him this is not accept­able,” Ms. Kre­mer wrote about Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Greg Mur­phy of North Car­oli­na. “He needs to get onboard with Jor­dan and stop adding to the chaos.”

    Mr. Jordan’s sup­port­ers said his deci­sion to send law­mak­ers home to their dis­tricts over the week­end rather than keep­ing them in Wash­ing­ton for one-on-one meet­ings to drum up sup­port was a delib­er­ate move to inten­si­fy grass-roots pres­sure on them to fall into line.

    “Everybody’s going to go home, lis­ten to their con­stituents, and make a deci­sion,” said Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Tim Burchett of Ten­nessee, pre­dict­ing that hear­ing from the par­ty base would help sway hold­outs in Mr. Jordan’s direc­tion. “Hon­est­ly, the grass roots, there’s nobody stronger.”

    ...

    Some con­ser­v­a­tive strate­gists close to Mr. Jor­dan believe he will eas­i­ly be able to win over his detrac­tors, insti­tu­tion­al­ists who put a high pre­mi­um on a func­tion­ing gov­ern­ment and pro­ject­ing nor­mal­cy. Unlike the hard right, the strate­gists argue, stag­ing a floor revolt sim­ply isn’t in their nature.

    “These 60 mem­bers are not vot­ing against Jor­dan on the floor,” Rus­sell T. Vought, pres­i­dent of the Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca, a think tank with ties to Mr. Trump, and a strate­gist close to Mr. Jor­dan, wrote on X. “Take it to the floor & call their bluff.”
    ...

    And then we have Repub­li­cans like Anna Pauli­na Luna ral­ly­ing around Jor­dan. Recall how Luna was actu­al­ly tar­get­ed in a mur­der plot orches­trat­ed by her GOP pri­ma­ry oppo­nent, William Brad­dock, who was record­ing telling anoth­er local Repub­li­can to stay away from Luna because Brad­dock was going to have his ‘Russ­ian Ukrain­ian’ mafia friends assas­si­nate Luna. Why did Luna need to be assas­si­nat­ed? Luna didn’t stand a chance of win­ning in the high­ly com­pet­i­tive dis­trict, accord­ing to Brad­dock. It’s a reminder that when we’re talk­ing about the kinds of per­sua­sion tac­tics deployed by the con­tem­po­rary GOP, we’re basi­cal­ly talk­ing about an orga­ni­za­tion with the moral­i­ty of the mafia. Which is also a reminder that the behind-the-scenes per­suad­ing going on right now on behalf of Jim Jor­dan is prob­a­bly a lot more intense than any­thing we’re see­ing in pub­lic:

    ...
    “You want to explain to your vot­ers why you blocked Jor­dan?” Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Anna Pauli­na Luna, Repub­li­can of Flori­da, wrote on X. “Then bring it.”
    ...

    Final­ly, note this inter­est­ing point of divi­sion between the pro- and anti-Jor­dan fac­tions: fund­ing for Ukraine, with Jor­dan and his “Amer­i­ca First” allied being vehe­ment­ly opposed to more Ukrain­ian fund­ing. Giv­en the CNP-back­ing for Jor­dan’s speak­er­ship, we have to ask: what kind of war plans does the CNP have in mind? Is oppo­si­tion to more fund­ing for Ukraine pure­ly the­atrics? Because there’s no rea­son to assume an oppo­si­tion to more fund­ing for Ukraine is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of an oppo­si­tion to war. It’s not like there’s a short­age of alter­na­tive con­flicts for the US to get involved in right now:

    ...
    Despite being revered by hard-lin­ers and brand­ed a “leg­isla­tive ter­ror­ist” by a for­mer Repub­li­can speak­er, Mr. Jor­dan has more recent­ly allied him­self with his party’s lead­ers.

    The Ohio law­mak­er backed the debt lim­it deal that for­mer Speak­er Kevin McCarthy struck with Pres­i­dent Biden and did not join the far right’s move to grind the House floor to a halt in protest of that agree­ment, or their effort to oust Mr. McCarthy. He has already said he intends to have the House vote on a stop­gap spend­ing mea­sure to keep the gov­ern­ment open — the sin that got Mr. McCarthy boot­ed — and has man­aged to keep con­ser­v­a­tive hard-lin­ers in his camp.

    But some main­stream Repub­li­cans are oppos­ing Mr. Jor­dan on prin­ci­ple. They dif­fer with him on mat­ters of pol­i­cy, nowhere more sharply than on con­tin­u­ing to fund the war in Ukraine, a pri­or­i­ty for many of them to which Mr. Jor­dan and his “Amer­i­ca First” allies are deeply opposed.
    ...

    It’s also worth keep­ing in mind that, with the ‘counter-offen­sive’ in Ukraine thor­ough­ly stalled at this point and the prospects for Ukraine actu­al­ly win­ning the war dwin­dling by the day, we could be see­ing some sort of pre­emp­tive GOP polit­i­cal ass-cov­er­ing for anoth­er failed for­eign adven­ture going on as part of this push to get an ardent­ly anti-Ukraine-fund­ing Speak­er installed. Either way, the CNP has a plan and it’s exe­cut­ing it. It’s the CNP’s world and we’re just liv­ing in it. Too bad no one seems to notice this.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 16, 2023, 10:22 pm
  37. Thoughts and prayers. And noth­ing more. It’s more or less what we could expect from the new­ly elect­ed House Speak­er Mike John­son in the wake of the dev­as­tat­ing mass shoot­ings in Lewis­ton, Maine. Far more expect­ed than the fact that John­son, a back­bencher with no expe­ri­ence in par­ty lead­er­ship roles, was elect­ed speak­er in the first place. With unan­i­mous sup­port from his frac­tious cau­cus, no less. In fact, it was none oth­er than Rep Matt Gaetz, who trig­gered the whole lead­er­ship cri­sis in the first place, who was crow­ing about John­son’s vic­to­ry, declar­ing “If you don’t think that mov­ing from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike John­son shows the ascen­dance of this move­ment and where the pow­er in the Repub­li­can Par­ty tru­ly lies, then you’re not pay­ing atten­tion,” on Steve Ban­non’s pod­cost.

    How did an obscure back­bencher end up resolv­ing a lead­er­ship cri­sis that, until recent­ly, showed now signs of wan­ing? Is it sim­ply that the GOP House cau­cus ‘got tired’ of all the tur­moil and spon­ta­neous­ly decid­ed to ral­ly around who­ev­er was next in line? Is it real­ly the case that John­son won by virtue of being an obscure back­bencher who has­n’t yet had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to ruf­fle feath­ers? Because those are the expla­na­tions we’re hear­ing. John­son sim­ply won as a result of all the exhaus­tion and frus­tra­tion, as the nar­ra­tive goes.

    And while all that exhaus­tion and frus­tra­tion no doubt played a role in how this process played out, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind the major behind-the-scenes role played by the same group that’s rou­tine­ly plays behind-the-scenes roles and gets away with it: the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP). As we saw, it was the CNP-backed Free­dom Cau­cus that orches­trat­ed the giant intra-par­ty show­down over Kevin McCarthy’s speak­er­ship nom­i­na­tion back in Jan­u­ary with exten­sive CNP sup­port. And once again, it was the Free­dom Cau­cus lead­ing ‘anti-estab­lish­ment’ oppo­si­tion in the lat­est round of vot­ing, with CNP affil­i­ates like Amy Kre­mer and Russ Vought again play­ing a sup­port­ing role. So it should come as no sur­prise to find that, at the end of all this chaos, we have a new CNP-backed speak­er. One who calls Jim Jor­dan a men­tor. Fun­ny how that hap­pens.

    Yes, Mike John­son isn’t just a bla­tant theo­crat. He’s a CNP-backed theo­crat who pre­vi­ous­ly worked as an attor­ney and spokesper­son for the Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom (ADF). Recall how the ADF received large dona­tions from the Bet­sy DeVos and Erik Prince and fun­neled that mon­ey into sup­port­ing Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ments in Europe and backed a 2016 Belize law that pun­ished homo­sex­u­al sex with 10 years in prison. Also recall how the ADF has been play­ing a major behind the scenes roll in shap­ing the cur­rent man­u­fac­tured anti-trans pan­ic. At the same time, the ADF shows up on the list of orga­ni­za­tions involved with the Sched­ule F/Project 2025. CNP mem­ber Michael Far­ris has served as the Pres­i­dent and CEO of the ADF.

    And then there’s a Youtube video of a rough­ly 30 minute speech John­son gave at one of the CNP’s con­fer­ences back in Octo­ber 2019. And not only to John­son heap praise on the CNP for all the sup­port it’s giv­en him, but at approx­i­mate­ly 19:30 in the video he actu­al­ly refers to anoth­er men­tor of his who just hap­pened to become the CNP’s Vice Pres­i­dent in 2020: Kel­ly Shack­elford. Recall how Shack­elford was also one of the signees of that long list of con­ser­v­a­tive lumi­nar­ies (most of whom were CNP mem­bers) who came out in sup­port of the hard line tak­en by the Free­dom Cau­cus over Kevin McCarthy’s speak­er­ship nom­i­na­tion back in Jan­u­ary.

    Fol­low­ing John­son’s speech, the CNP event ends with some clos­ing com­ments by CNP Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee mem­ber Mil­lie Hal­low, who also hap­pened to be per­son­al assis­tant of Wayne LaPierre at the NRA. This is a good time to recall the num­ber of known NRA lead­ers who hap­pen to be mem­bers of the CNP:

    * Car­olyn D. Mead­ows: Pres­i­dent of the NRA
    * Michael “Mike” Baller
    * Joseph P. DeBer­galis, Jr.
    * San­dra S. Fro­man: Board Mem­ber & For­mer Pres­i­dent
    * Mil­lie Hal­low: NRA liai­son to The White House, Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee, Nation­al Repub­li­can Con­gres­sion­al Com­mit­tee
    * Wayne LaPierre: Exec­u­tive VP & CEO
    * Willes K. Lee

    So while many are point­ing out the ill-timed tweet John­son sent out last week of his meet­ing with the Women for Gun Rights lead­er­ship, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that, as a crea­ture of the CNP, the new House Speak­er is an extreme­ly loy­al foot­sol­dier of the gun man­u­fac­tur­ers lob­by, itself a key com­po­nent of the theo­crat­ic hard right:

    The New York Times

    In John­son, House Repub­li­cans Ele­vate One of Their Staunchest Con­ser­v­a­tives

    The new speak­er played a piv­otal role in con­gres­sion­al efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion and oppos­es abor­tion rights and gay mar­riage.

    By Annie Karni
    Report­ing from the Capi­tol
    Oct. 25, 2023
    Updat­ed 5:49 p.m. ET

    When Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Mike John­son of Louisiana want­ed to make the case against abor­tion rights last year dur­ing a Capi­tol Hill com­mit­tee hear­ing, he grilled a wit­ness in graph­ic fash­ion.

    “Do you sup­port the right of a woman who is just sec­onds away from birthing a healthy child to have an abor­tion?” he asked at a Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee hear­ing.

    When the wit­ness, Dr. Yashica Robin­son, a board mem­ber for Physi­cians for Repro­duc­tive Health, respond­ed that such a sit­u­a­tion had nev­er occurred, Mr. John­son only dou­bled down.

    “Nev­er hap­pened in your prac­tice, ma’am,” Mr. John­son fired back. “But it hap­pens. How about if a child is halfway out of the birth canal? Is an abor­tion per­mis­si­ble then?”

    The exchange reflect­ed the lawmaker’s deeply con­ser­v­a­tive views, par­tic­u­lar­ly on social issues, and his ten­den­cy to express them in inflam­ma­to­ry ways.

    Mr. John­son, the evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian who won the speak­er­ship on Wednes­day with the unan­i­mous sup­port of House Repub­li­cans, has also spo­ken out sharply against homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, call­ing it “inher­ent­ly unnat­ur­al” and a “dan­ger­ous lifestyle” and link­ing it to bes­tial­i­ty, accord­ing to opin­ion essays unearthed on Wednes­day by CNN.

    “Experts project that homo­sex­u­al mar­riage is the dark har­bin­ger of chaos and sex­u­al anar­chy that could doom even the strongest repub­lic,” he wrote in one such arti­cle in 2004.

    The views are sharply at odds with those of most Amer­i­cans, accord­ing to opin­ion polls that have found the pub­lic is broad­ly sup­port­ive of gay rights. Mr. Johnson’s abrupt rise to the speak­er post this week in the depressed and divid­ed House Repub­li­can con­fer­ence under­scores the right­ward lurch of the G.O.P., which dumped his more main­stream pre­de­ces­sor, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Kevin McCarthy of Cal­i­for­nia.

    “If you don’t think that mov­ing from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike John­son shows the ascen­dance of this move­ment and where the pow­er in the Repub­li­can Par­ty tru­ly lies, then you’re not pay­ing atten­tion,” Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Matt Gaetz, the Flori­da Repub­li­can who engi­neered Mr. McCarthy’s down­fall, said in an inter­view on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” pod­cast.

    Elect­ed to Con­gress in 2016, Mr. John­son, a lawyer and for­mer chair­man of the con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can Study Com­mit­tee, has nev­er led a pow­er­ful com­mit­tee in Con­gress or served in the top tier of House lead­er­ship. Democ­rats imme­di­ate­ly pounced on the piv­otal role he played in con­gres­sion­al efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion. (As a loy­al sup­port­er of for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump, he has con­tin­ued to use a pod­cast he hosts with his wife, a licensed pas­toral coun­selor, to rail against the pros­e­cu­tion of Mr. Trump for his efforts to inter­fere in the 2020 elec­tion.)

    But even more than his elec­tion denial­ism, Mr. Johnson’s polit­i­cal career has been defined by his reli­gious views.

    “I don’t believe there are any coin­ci­dences,” he said on Wednes­day in his first speech on the House floor as speak­er, adding: “I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this spe­cif­ic moment in this time. This is my belief.”

    He added that his wife “spent the last cou­ple weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord, and she’s a lit­tle worn out.”

    ...

    In Con­gress, Mr. John­son has vot­ed for a nation­al abor­tion ban and co-spon­sored a 20-week abor­tion ban, earn­ing him an A‑plus rat­ing from the anti-abor­tion group Susan B. Antho­ny Pro-Life Amer­i­ca. After the Supreme Court vot­ed to over­turn Roe v. Wade in June last year, he cel­e­brat­ed.

    He said that mil­lions of unborn chil­dren had lost their lives because of what he called a “legal fic­tion that the Supreme Court foist­ed upon this coun­try” and said that “God will bless us” for the court’s deci­sion.

    Last year, Mr. John­son intro­duced a bill that pro­hib­it­ed the use of fed­er­al funds for pro­vid­ing edu­ca­tion to chil­dren under 10 that includ­ed L.G.B.T.Q. top­ics — a pro­pos­al that crit­ics called a nation­al ver­sion of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Mr. John­son called the leg­is­la­tion “com­mon sense.”

    He also opposed leg­is­la­tion to man­date fed­er­al recog­ni­tion for same-sex mar­riages — a bill that passed with strong bipar­ti­san sup­port in both the House and the Sen­ate.

    In the years before he was elect­ed to Con­gress in 2017, Mr. John­son worked as an attor­ney and spokesman for the anti-abor­tion-rights and anti-gay group Alliance Defense Fund — now called the Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom. Dur­ing that time, he expressed some of his hard-line views in edi­to­ri­als in the local news­pa­per in his home­town of Shreve­port, La.

    Writ­ing in 2004 in sup­port of a state amend­ment ban­ning same-sex mar­riage, he assert­ed that with­out it, “There will be no legal basis to deny a bisex­u­al the right to mar­ry a part­ner of each sex, or a per­son to mar­ry his pet.”

    Mr. John­son was only able to emerge as his party’s nom­i­nee for speak­er this week after three oth­er G.O.P. nom­i­nees before him were unable to ral­ly enough sup­port. It was unlike­ly to have hap­pened in any oth­er sce­nario.

    Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Repub­li­can and the first to be nom­i­nat­ed for speak­er fol­low­ing Mr. McCarthy’s ouster, was ulti­mate­ly seen as insuf­fi­cient­ly pro-Trump by too many of his col­leagues.

    Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Jor­dan of Ohio, a founder of the hard-right House Free­dom Cau­cus and some­one Mr. John­son has described as a men­tor, was the next mem­ber to be elect­ed speak­er des­ig­nate in a secret bal­lot. He had Mr. Trump and the far right in his cor­ner, but ulti­mate­ly failed to win over more cen­trist mem­bers of his par­ty who stead­fast­ly refused to sup­port him.

    Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Tom Emmer of Min­neso­ta, the major­i­ty whip and the third can­di­date for the speak­er­ship, had the biggest prob­lems of any of the speak­er-des­ig­nates that pre­ced­ed him: the hard-right wing of the par­ty rose up to oppose him and for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump brand­ed him a “glob­al­ist RINO.”

    Mr. Johnson’s quick ascent came when mem­bers of the con­fer­ence were worn down and ready to accept some­one whom they did not view as an obvi­ous choice or the party’s nat­ur­al leader in wait­ing. Instead, he cleared a low­ered bar: They view him as some­one suf­fi­cient­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and who they do not per­son­al­ly despise.

    Mr. Johnson’s hall­mark in Con­gress has been com­bin­ing his hard-line views with a gen­tle per­son­al style. That was on dis­play on Wednes­day, when he vowed to try to find com­mon ground with Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Hakeem Jef­fries of New York, the minor­i­ty leader.

    “I know we see things from dif­fer­ent points of view, but I know in your heart you want to do what’s right, so we’ll find com­mon ground there,” he said.

    To show sup­port for racial equal­i­ty, Mr. John­son in the past has told audi­ences that he and his wife adopt­ed a Black teenag­er they met through an evan­gel­i­cal youth group — like the movie “The Blind Side” but with­out the N.F.L. prospects, he has quipped.

    He once shared the sto­ry with a most­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic audi­ence at a con­gres­sion­al hear­ing on slav­ery repa­ra­tions, and he was sur­prised to hear boos as he spoke, he lat­er recount­ed to the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, an assem­bly of con­ser­v­a­tive donors known for its strict secre­cy.

    “I had my feel­ings sur­gi­cal­ly removed back in the ’80s,” he joked, accord­ing to a record­ing of the event, and then sug­gest­ed the hear­ing had been packed with Black Pan­thers who dis­ap­proved of the mix­ing of races. (The Black Pan­ther Par­ty dis­solved decades ago.)

    On Wednes­day, Mr. John­son was toil­ing to help Repub­li­cans turn the page from the chaos of the past few weeks. He said there would be none of the typ­i­cal cel­e­bra­tions that accom­pa­ny the elec­tion of a new speak­er.

    Instead, he moved quick­ly to bring up a res­o­lu­tion express­ing sol­i­dar­i­ty and sup­port for Israel. His next order of busi­ness, he said, would be address­ing what he called the country’s “bro­ken bor­der” with Mex­i­co. He made no men­tion of the impeach­ment inquiry into Pres­i­dent Biden, or of the impend­ing gov­ern­ment shut­down that will begin next month if Con­gress fails to pass leg­is­la­tion to keep the gov­ern­ment fund­ed.

    “These last few weeks prob­a­bly look like total chaos, con­fu­sion, no end in sight,” Mr. Emmer, who tried and failed to become speak­er, said on Wednes­day. “But from my per­spec­tive, this is one of the great­est expe­ri­ences of the recent his­to­ry of our repub­lic.”

    __________

    “In John­son, House Repub­li­cans Ele­vate One of Their Staunchest Con­ser­v­a­tives” By Annie Karni; The New York Times; 10/25/2023

    “Mr. John­son, the evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian who won the speak­er­ship on Wednes­day with the unan­i­mous sup­port of House Repub­li­cans, has also spo­ken out sharply against homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, call­ing it “inher­ent­ly unnat­ur­al” and a “dan­ger­ous lifestyle” and link­ing it to bes­tial­i­ty, accord­ing to opin­ion essays unearthed on Wednes­day by CNN.”

    Who knows what enti­ty Mike John­son ulti­mate­ly prayed to in his quest to gain the speak­er­ship, but those prayers deliv­ered. He got unan­i­mous sup­port from a House Repub­li­can cau­cus that did­n’t appear capa­ble of any­thing approach­ing una­nim­i­ty for weeks. Rep Matt Gaetz, who trig­gered the whole lead­er­ship cri­sis, was even crow­ing about what a great win this was to see ‘MAGA Mike John­son’ ascend to the speak­er­ship. A ‘back­bencher’ with no pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence in any House lead­er­ship posi­tions. And it nev­er would have hap­pened had it not been for the whole speak­er­ship fias­co drag­ging on for weeks. A fias­co that includ­ed the failed speak­er­ship big by Free­dom Cau­cus leader Jim Jor­dan, some­one John­son has described as a men­tor. In oth­er words, while Jim Jor­dan may not have won the speak­er­ship, his Free­dom Cau­cus fac­tion was the ulti­mate win­ner here. The fias­co worked:

    ...
    The views are sharply at odds with those of most Amer­i­cans, accord­ing to opin­ion polls that have found the pub­lic is broad­ly sup­port­ive of gay rights. Mr. Johnson’s abrupt rise to the speak­er post this week in the depressed and divid­ed House Repub­li­can con­fer­ence under­scores the right­ward lurch of the G.O.P., which dumped his more main­stream pre­de­ces­sor, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Kevin McCarthy of Cal­i­for­nia.

    “If you don’t think that mov­ing from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike John­son shows the ascen­dance of this move­ment and where the pow­er in the Repub­li­can Par­ty tru­ly lies, then you’re not pay­ing atten­tion,” Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Matt Gaetz, the Flori­da Repub­li­can who engi­neered Mr. McCarthy’s down­fall, said in an inter­view on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” pod­cast.

    ...

    Mr. John­son was only able to emerge as his party’s nom­i­nee for speak­er this week after three oth­er G.O.P. nom­i­nees before him were unable to ral­ly enough sup­port. It was unlike­ly to have hap­pened in any oth­er sce­nario.

    Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Repub­li­can and the first to be nom­i­nat­ed for speak­er fol­low­ing Mr. McCarthy’s ouster, was ulti­mate­ly seen as insuf­fi­cient­ly pro-Trump by too many of his col­leagues.

    Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Jor­dan of Ohio, a founder of the hard-right House Free­dom Cau­cus and some­one Mr. John­son has described as a men­tor, was the next mem­ber to be elect­ed speak­er des­ig­nate in a secret bal­lot. He had Mr. Trump and the far right in his cor­ner, but ulti­mate­ly failed to win over more cen­trist mem­bers of his par­ty who stead­fast­ly refused to sup­port him.

    Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Tom Emmer of Min­neso­ta, the major­i­ty whip and the third can­di­date for the speak­er­ship, had the biggest prob­lems of any of the speak­er-des­ig­nates that pre­ced­ed him: the hard-right wing of the par­ty rose up to oppose him and for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump brand­ed him a “glob­al­ist RINO.”

    Mr. Johnson’s quick ascent came when mem­bers of the con­fer­ence were worn down and ready to accept some­one whom they did not view as an obvi­ous choice or the party’s nat­ur­al leader in wait­ing. Instead, he cleared a low­ered bar: They view him as some­one suf­fi­cient­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and who they do not per­son­al­ly despise.
    ...

    And as we can see John­son, not only was John­son one of the many sup­port­ers of the CNP-orches­trat­ed attempts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion, but his polit­i­cal career are large­ly defined by his asso­ci­a­tion with the theo­crat­ic far right, includ­ing his work as an attor­ney and spokesper­son for the Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom (ADF). Recall how the ADF received large dona­tions from the Bet­sy DeVos and Erik Prince and fun­neled that mon­ey into sup­port­ing Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist move­ments in Europe and backed a 2016 Belize law that pun­ished homo­sex­u­al sex with 10 years in prison. Also recall how the ADF has been play­ing a major behind the scenes roll in shap­ing the cur­rent man­u­fac­tured anti-trans pan­ic. At the same time, the ADF shows up on the list of orga­ni­za­tions involved with the Sched­ule F/Project 2025. CNP mem­ber Michael Far­ris has served as the Pres­i­dent and CEO of the ADF. And in case John­son’s CNP ties aren’t com­plete­ly obvi­ous, there’s even a Youtube video from a rough­ly 30 minute speech John­son gave at one of the CNP’s con­fer­ences back in Octo­ber 2019:

    ...
    But even more than his elec­tion denial­ism, Mr. Johnson’s polit­i­cal career has been defined by his reli­gious views.

    “I don’t believe there are any coin­ci­dences,” he said on Wednes­day in his first speech on the House floor as speak­er, adding: “I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this spe­cif­ic moment in this time. This is my belief.”

    He added that his wife “spent the last cou­ple weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord, and she’s a lit­tle worn out.”

    ...

    In Con­gress, Mr. John­son has vot­ed for a nation­al abor­tion ban and co-spon­sored a 20-week abor­tion ban, earn­ing him an A‑plus rat­ing from the anti-abor­tion group Susan B. Antho­ny Pro-Life Amer­i­ca. After the Supreme Court vot­ed to over­turn Roe v. Wade in June last year, he cel­e­brat­ed.

    He said that mil­lions of unborn chil­dren had lost their lives because of what he called a “legal fic­tion that the Supreme Court foist­ed upon this coun­try” and said that “God will bless us” for the court’s deci­sion.

    Last year, Mr. John­son intro­duced a bill that pro­hib­it­ed the use of fed­er­al funds for pro­vid­ing edu­ca­tion to chil­dren under 10 that includ­ed L.G.B.T.Q. top­ics — a pro­pos­al that crit­ics called a nation­al ver­sion of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Mr. John­son called the leg­is­la­tion “com­mon sense.”

    He also opposed leg­is­la­tion to man­date fed­er­al recog­ni­tion for same-sex mar­riages — a bill that passed with strong bipar­ti­san sup­port in both the House and the Sen­ate.

    In the years before he was elect­ed to Con­gress in 2017, Mr. John­son worked as an attor­ney and spokesman for the anti-abor­tion-rights and anti-gay group Alliance Defense Fund — now called the Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom. Dur­ing that time, he expressed some of his hard-line views in edi­to­ri­als in the local news­pa­per in his home­town of Shreve­port, La.

    Writ­ing in 2004 in sup­port of a state amend­ment ban­ning same-sex mar­riage, he assert­ed that with­out it, “There will be no legal basis to deny a bisex­u­al the right to mar­ry a part­ner of each sex, or a per­son to mar­ry his pet.”

    ...

    He once shared the sto­ry with a most­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic audi­ence at a con­gres­sion­al hear­ing on slav­ery repa­ra­tions, and he was sur­prised to hear boos as he spoke, he lat­er recount­ed to the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, an assem­bly of con­ser­v­a­tive donors known for its strict secre­cy.

    “I had my feel­ings sur­gi­cal­ly removed back in the ’80s,” he joked, accord­ing to a record­ing of the event, and then sug­gest­ed the hear­ing had been packed with Black Pan­thers who dis­ap­proved of the mix­ing of races. (The Black Pan­ther Par­ty dis­solved decades ago.)
    ...

    And, again, in case it’s still not clear that Mike John­son is a crea­ture of the CNP, it’s worth tak­ing a clos­er look at that Octo­ber 2019 speech. Because in addi­tion to the effu­sive praise he deliv­ers to the CNP audi­ence along with acknowl­edg­ments of how much he owes to the group, at 19:30 in the speech, John­son name drops Kel­ly Shack­elford as a per­son­al men­tor. Shack­elford became the Vice Pres­i­dent of the CNP in 2020. Recall how Shack­elford was also one of the signees of that long list of con­ser­v­a­tive lumi­nar­ies (most of whom were CNP mem­bers) who came out in sup­port of the hard line tak­en by the Free­dom Cau­cus over Kevin McCarthy’s speak­er­ship nom­i­na­tion back in Jan­u­ary. Fol­low­ing John­son’s speech, the video ends with some clos­ing com­ments by CNP Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee mem­ber Mil­lie Hal­low, who also hap­pened to be per­son­al assis­tant of Wayne LaPierre at the NRA.

    So that’s how this speak­er­ship cri­sis appears to have panned out. We did­n’t know who would even­tu­al­ly win that posi­tion. But we could be very con­fi­dent about who they would ulti­mate­ly serve.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 26, 2023, 7:10 pm
  38. The new House Speak­er is a theo­crat. It’s not exact­ly shock­ing news in the con­text of con­tem­po­rary US pol­i­tics, but it’s news. Mike John­son is a crea­ture of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP). And while it’s obvi­ous that impli­ca­tions of hav­ing a theo­crat in such a posi­tion of pow­er isn’t good, the spe­cif­ic impli­ca­tions may not be so obvi­ous. Like an increased chance for some sort of apoc­a­lyp­tic con­fla­gra­tion in the Mid­dle East. For exam­ple, it may not be obvi­ous that the con­se­quences of installing a nut job like Mike John­son in that posi­tion could include a reli­gious-fueled region­al war. And yet, as we’re going to see, the impli­ca­tions of John­son’s speak­er­ship just might include an exac­er­ba­tion of the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict.

    How so? Well, that brings us to one of facets of the evan­gel­i­cal move­ment that has only become more and more promi­nent in recent decades: Chris­t­ian Zion­ism. In par­tic­u­lar, the very US-cen­tric form of Chris­t­ian Zion­ism cham­pi­oned by promi­nent theocrats like John Hagee, mak­ing it a kind of Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist Zion­ism. Recall Hagee’s open embrace of insur­rec­tion lead­ers like Mike Fly­nn and Fly­n­n’s calls for an overt­ly Chris­t­ian US gov­ern­ment dur­ing one of Hagee’s reli­gious events less than a year after the CNP-orches­trat­ed Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion. As Hagee has long espoused, the US’s sup­port for Israel is a God-ordained enter­prise, all lead­ing up to a series of End Times apoc­a­lyp­tic events that will ush­er in the return of Jesus. With the destruc­tion of Israel and the Jew­ish peo­ple in the process. That’s the Bib­li­cal prophe­cy Hagee and oth­er Chris­t­ian Zion­ist lead­ers have long pro­mot­ed, along­side their pro­fessed sup­port for Israel and the Jew­ish peo­ple. It’s more than a lit­tle warped.

    And as we should expect, CNP-backed Mike John­son is very much a part of this Chris­t­ian Zion­ist move­ment. Notably, John­son took a trip to Israel back in Feb­ru­ary of 2020 spon­sored by a group called the 12Tribe Film Foun­da­tion. The group’s CEO, Avi Abe­low, has become a sup­port­ing fig­ure in Israel’s far right. John­son’s first stop on this trip was to the Kohelet Pol­i­cy Forum, a far right think tank that is now close­ly aligned with the Netanyahu gov­ern­ment and help­ing to for­mu­late many of its most con­tro­ver­sial poli­cies includ­ing the high­ly divi­sive judi­cial ‘reforms’. And as we’re going to see, the Kohelet Pol­i­cy Forum finances anoth­er think tank, the Mis­gav Insti­tute for Nation­al Secu­ri­ty and Zion­ist Strat­e­gy, which is already devis­ing pol­i­cy with tru­ly omi­nous impli­ca­tions: the mass eth­nic cleans­ing of all the Pales­tini­ans from the Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries. The plans are in place and the oppor­tu­ni­ty is, arguably, here with the onset of this con­flict.

    John­son lat­er described his Israeli trip vis­it as “the ful­fill­ment of a bib­li­cal prophe­cy.” He also blamed “the rad­i­cal left” for the Tem­ple Moun­t’s cur­rent non-rebuilt sta­tus. And that, right there, is how Mike John­son’s ele­va­tion to the Speak­er­ship is threat­en­ing to make a very bad sit­u­a­tion in the Mid­dle East much worse. Because the real­i­ty is that the more you have open Chris­t­ian Zion­ist cham­pi­ons like John­son in posi­tions of author­i­ty in the US gov­ern­ment who can make clear their com­plete back­ing for any­thing the Netanyahu gov­ern­ment does, the more like­ly we are to see some­thing tran­spire that is so hor­rif­ic it shocks the con­science of the world and utter­ly erodes what is left of Israel’s inter­na­tion­al sup­port. Even more so should sup­port for Israeli mil­i­tary excess­es be turned into a kind of polit­i­cal foot­ball for the upcom­ing 2024 US elec­toral sea­son. This is a con­flict that could go on for a long time and get a lot blood­i­er. Hav­ing some­one like Mike John­son in posi­tion where he can speak on behalf of the US gov­ern­ment is an inher­ent­ly desta­bi­liz­ing sit­u­a­tion. John­son wants an apoc­a­lypse, along with his pow­er­ful CNP allies. And it’s hard to imag­ine a quick­er cat­a­lyst for some sort of apoc­a­lyp­tic con­fla­gra­tion than an Israeli far right gov­ern­ment that con­cludes now is the win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty to deal with the Pales­tini­ans once and for all.

    It’s also worth keep­ing in mind that when we are tak­ing about the CNP-backed Mike John­son, we’re talk­ing about the same net­work behind the Sched­ule F/Project 2025 planned purge of Amer­i­ca. It’s part of the grim con­text of this whole state of affairs: at the same time the CNP is plan­ning its metaphor­i­cal purge of all pro­gres­sives out of posi­tions of pow­er and influ­ence in the US, the CNP’s far right Israeli allies are plan­ning a very lit­er­al phys­i­cal purge of the Pales­tini­ans. Which is also a reminder that when you’re deal­ing with apoc­a­lypse-focused cults, you’re typ­i­cal­ly also deal­ing with a group of peo­ple out to purge the world of large swathes of human­i­ty. It’s a pack­age deal.

    Ok, first, here’s a Haaretz arti­cle look­ing at that inter­est­ing Feb­ru­ary 2020 trip Mike John­son made to Israel that includ­ed a first stop at the Kohelet Pol­i­cy Forum. Or as John­son lat­er put it, a trip that was “the ful­fill­ment of a bib­li­cal prophe­cy”:

    Haaretz

    New House Speak­er Mike John­son, an Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, Holds Ties to Israel’s Far Right

    Louisiana Rep. Mike John­son described his 2020 vis­it to Jerusalem’s Tem­ple Mount as ‘the ful­fill­ment of a bib­li­cal prophe­cy’; his elec­tion is the most sig­nif­i­cant vic­to­ry to date for evan­gel­i­cals in D.C.

    Ben Samuels
    Wash­ing­ton Oct 25, 2023

    WASHINGTON – House Speak­er Mike John­son, con­firmed Wednes­day after three failed pre­vi­ous Repub­li­can choic­es and weeks of inner par­ty tur­moil, is an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian whose con­nec­tions to Israel reflect the move­men­t’s deep ties to the Israeli right, which has become increas­ing­ly main­stream over the years.

    John­son’s con­fir­ma­tion brought to an end weeks of Repub­li­can Par­ty tur­moil after three pre­vi­ous choic­es failed to win enough votes to replace Kevin McCarthy.

    But it is also the most sig­nif­i­cant vic­to­ry to date for evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians’ pro-Israel move­ment.

    Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu and his allies – includ­ing for­mer Israel ambas­sador to the U.S. Ron Der­mer – have pub­licly and pri­vate­ly stressed the impor­tance of evan­gel­i­cal sup­port as U.S. Jews have grown increas­ing­ly crit­i­cal of Israel’s right­ward shift.

    This dynam­ic has large­ly fueled Israel becom­ing an increas­ing­ly par­ti­san issue where Repub­li­cans have adopt­ed increas­ing­ly pro-Israel sen­ti­ments – both with­in inter­na­tion­al geopol­i­tics and local domes­tic pol­i­tics.

    ...

    Louisiana Rep. John­son trav­eled to Israel in Feb­ru­ary 2020 with an under-the-radar group called the 12Tribe Films Foun­da­tion. The organization’s CEO is a social media activist named Avi Abe­low, who emi­grat­ed from New York more than 30 years ago at age 18 and lives in the West Bank set­tle­ment of Efrat.

    Abe­low switched his vote from right-wing Likud to far-right Reli­gious Zion­ism in last November’s gen­er­al elec­tion, help­ing ele­vate Beza­lel Smotrich to a posi­tion where he could demand a key role in Ben­jamin Netanyahu’s gov­ern­ing coali­tion. He told Haaretz fol­low­ing the elec­tion that his deci­sion was moti­vat­ed by his deep dis­trust of the Arabs serv­ing in the Israeli par­lia­ment and gen­uine fears for his own safe­ty liv­ing in the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries.

    Johnson’s first stop on his Abe­low-orga­nized vis­it was to the Kohelet Pol­i­cy Forum – the con­ser­v­a­tive think tank that has been an essen­tial part­ner to the government’s efforts to weak­en the judi­cia­ry.

    The fourth-term con­gress­man also vis­it­ed the Tem­ple Mount com­pound along­side Yehu­dah Glick, a for­mer Likud law­mak­er who has led the fight to change the sta­tus quo and per­mit Jew­ish prayer at the flash point Jerusalem holy site – in oppo­si­tion to both offi­cial Israeli gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy as well as that of the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Biden admin­is­tra­tion and Jor­dan.

    John­son lat­er described his vis­it as “the ful­fill­ment of a bib­li­cal prophe­cy,” while blam­ing the Tem­ple Mount sta­tus quo on “the rad­i­cal left” on col­lege cam­pus­es and the boy­cott, divest­ment and sanc­tions move­ment against Israel.

    John­son is expect­ed to bring rhetoric emerg­ing from lead­ing evan­gel­i­cals in the weeks since the Hamas attack to the high­est lev­els of Repub­li­can lead­er­ship.

    Nine­ty evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers – lat­er joined by near­ly 2,000 oth­ers – signed a state­ment stat­ing: “In keep­ing with Chris­t­ian Just War tra­di­tion, we also affirm the legit­i­ma­cy of Israel’s right to respond against those who have ini­ti­at­ed these attacks as Romans 13 grants gov­ern­ments the pow­er to bear the sword against those who com­mit such evil acts against inno­cent life.”

    Top evan­gel­i­cal preach­ers such as John Hagee – whose Chris­tians Unit­ed For Israel has evolved into per­haps the most impor­tant pro-Israel orga­ni­za­tion among the GOP – and Greg Lau­rie have both invoked end times and Armaged­don when dis­cussing the Hamas attack and the result­ing war.

    Oth­er Chris­t­ian orga­ni­za­tions, how­ev­er, such as the Unit­ed States Con­fer­ence of Catholic Bish­ops, have tak­en a more uni­ver­sal­ist approach, stat­ing: “May all who love the Holy Land seek to bring about among all the par­ties engaged in the fight­ing a ces­sa­tion of vio­lence, respect for civil­ian pop­u­la­tions and the release of hostages. As we pray urgent­ly for peace, we recall espe­cial­ly all the fam­i­lies and indi­vid­u­als suf­fer­ing from these events.”

    ———–

    “New House Speak­er Mike John­son, an Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, Holds Ties to Israel’s Far Right” by Ben Samuels; Haaretz; 10/25/2023

    Louisiana Rep. John­son trav­eled to Israel in Feb­ru­ary 2020 with an under-the-radar group called the 12Tribe Films Foun­da­tion. The organization’s CEO is a social media activist named Avi Abe­low, who emi­grat­ed from New York more than 30 years ago at age 18 and lives in the West Bank set­tle­ment of Efrat.”

    A trip to Israel spon­sored by a far right Zion­ist group. Mike John­son was able to take trips like that with­out any­one notic­ing back in Feb­ru­ary of 2020 when he was a House back­bencher. But it’s a lot hard­er to ignore these kinds of Chris­t­ian Zion­ist rela­tion­ships now that he’s the new­ly elect­ed House Speak­er at the same time the Mid­dle East is embroiled in a deep­en­ing con­flict. Espe­cial­ly when that con­flict appears to be dri­ven heav­i­ly by the aggres­sive actions of a Netanyahu gov­ern­ment that includes these same far right groups as coali­tion part­ners and threat­ens to tear the Israeli civ­il soci­ety apart. And that’s why it’s hard not to notice that the first stop on John­son’s Feb 2020 vis­it was to the Kohelet Pol­i­cy Forum. As we’re going to see, the Kohelet Forum isn’t just a far right think tank. It’s also the fun­der of the Mis­gav Insti­tute for Nation­al Secu­ri­ty and Zion­ist Strat­e­gy, which is already float­ing a pro­pos­al that amounts to the com­plete eth­nic cleans­ing of the Pales­tini­ans out of both Gaza and the West Bank:

    ...
    Abe­low switched his vote from right-wing Likud to far-right Reli­gious Zion­ism in last November’s gen­er­al elec­tion, help­ing ele­vate Beza­lel Smotrich to a posi­tion where he could demand a key role in Ben­jamin Netanyahu’s gov­ern­ing coali­tion. He told Haaretz fol­low­ing the elec­tion that his deci­sion was moti­vat­ed by his deep dis­trust of the Arabs serv­ing in the Israeli par­lia­ment and gen­uine fears for his own safe­ty liv­ing in the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries.

    Johnson’s first stop on his Abe­low-orga­nized vis­it was to the Kohelet Pol­i­cy Forum – the con­ser­v­a­tive think tank that has been an essen­tial part­ner to the government’s efforts to weak­en the judi­cia­ry.

    ...

    And as the arti­cle reminds us, Mike John­son enthu­si­asm for Chris­t­ian Zion­ism isn’t an anom­aly with­in evan­gel­i­cal cir­cles. Top evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers like John Hagee have been mak­ing Chris­t­ian Zion­ist-themed End Times pre­dic­tions about staunch for years. Recall Hagee’s open embrace of insur­rec­tion lead­ers like Mike Fly­nn and Fly­n­n’s calls for an overt­ly Chris­t­ian US gov­ern­ment dur­ing one of Hagee’s reli­gious events. So when we see John­son refer to his trip to the Tem­ple Mount as “the ful­fill­ment of a bib­li­cal prophe­cy,” it’s impor­tant to rec­og­nize that John­son is refer­ring to a par­tic­u­lar Chris­t­ian Zion­ist End Times prophe­cy that entails the com­plete destruc­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple:

    ...
    The fourth-term con­gress­man also vis­it­ed the Tem­ple Mount com­pound along­side Yehu­dah Glick, a for­mer Likud law­mak­er who has led the fight to change the sta­tus quo and per­mit Jew­ish prayer at the flash point Jerusalem holy site – in oppo­si­tion to both offi­cial Israeli gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy as well as that of the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Biden admin­is­tra­tion and Jor­dan.

    John­son lat­er described his vis­it as “the ful­fill­ment of a bib­li­cal prophe­cy,” while blam­ing the Tem­ple Mount sta­tus quo on “the rad­i­cal left” on col­lege cam­pus­es and the boy­cott, divest­ment and sanc­tions move­ment against Israel.

    John­son is expect­ed to bring rhetoric emerg­ing from lead­ing evan­gel­i­cals in the weeks since the Hamas attack to the high­est lev­els of Repub­li­can lead­er­ship.

    Nine­ty evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers – lat­er joined by near­ly 2,000 oth­ers – signed a state­ment stat­ing: “In keep­ing with Chris­t­ian Just War tra­di­tion, we also affirm the legit­i­ma­cy of Israel’s right to respond against those who have ini­ti­at­ed these attacks as Romans 13 grants gov­ern­ments the pow­er to bear the sword against those who com­mit such evil acts against inno­cent life.”

    Top evan­gel­i­cal preach­ers such as John Hagee – whose Chris­tians Unit­ed For Israel has evolved into per­haps the most impor­tant pro-Israel orga­ni­za­tion among the GOP – and Greg Lau­rie have both invoked end times and Armaged­don when dis­cussing the Hamas attack and the result­ing war.
    ...

    And that brings us to the fol­low­ing Tikun Olam Blog entry by Richard Sil­ver­stein that describes a plot that, if exe­cut­ed, could very well ush­er in the end or Israel. Or rather, could be such a gross­ly immoral act that even Israel’s staunch allies would no longer be able to main­tain their sup­port. A plan for the mass eth­nic cleans­ing of both Gaza and the West Bank of all the Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tions, using the cur­rent con­flict as the pre­text for the mass expul­sion. It’s a plan devised by Mis­gav Insti­tute for Nation­al Secu­ri­ty and Zion­ist Strat­e­gy, itself fund­ed by the Kohelet Forum, which is now clos­er to the Israeli gov­ern­ment than ever before. So when we see the fer­vent sup­port for Israel’s far right from Chris­t­ian Zion­ists like John Hagee or Mike John­son, its impor­tant to keep in mind that these Chris­t­ian Zion­ists are specif­i­cal­ly sup­port­ing the Israeli move­ments that, them­selves, are so extreme they are pre­cip­i­tat­ing the destruc­tion of Israel’s inter­na­tion­al sup­port amidst the orgy of blood­shed and eth­nic cleans­ing they are facil­i­tat­ing:

    Tikun Olam Blog

    Israeli Secu­ri­ty Think Tank Pro­pos­es Expelling 2‑Million Gaza Pales­tini­ans Mis­gav Insti­tute, fund­ed by Kohelet Forum pro­pos­es expelling 1.5‑million Gazans to Egypt

    Richard Sil­ver­stein Octo­ber 22, 2023

    URGENT: Gaza is burn­ing. The MSM is not just miss­ing the sto­ry, it’s a pro­pa­gan­da arm of Israel as it pre­pares a geno­cide. I break Gaza sto­ries that Israel doesn’t want any­one to know, includ­ing its own cit­i­zens.

    ...

    For weeks, Israeli gen­er­als and jour­nal­ists have been debat­ing how Israel should pro­ceed in Gaza, espe­cial­ly on the “day after.” Does Israel con­duct a ground inva­sion and fight to elim­i­nate Hamas com­plete­ly? If it does, who will rule? Who takes Hamas’ place? Does Israel reoc­cu­py Gaza?

    The Israeli secu­ri­ty think tank, Mis­gav (the Insti­tute for Nation­al Secu­ri­ty and Zion­ist Strat­e­gy or INSZL) is fund­ed by the far-right Kohelet Forum. Its direc­tor is Meir Ben Shab­bat, a for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty advi­sor and 25 year vet­er­an of the Shin Bet. Mis­gav has answered the ques­tion. Its pro­pos­es an Israeli form of the Final Solu­tion of the the “Gaza Prob­lem”: expul­sion. The think tank pro­duced a paper, writ­ten by Ari Vait­man enti­tled, A plan for reset­tle­ment and final reha­bil­i­ta­tion in Egypt of the entire pop­u­la­tion of Gaza: eco­nom­ic aspects. The full paper (pdf in Hebrew) is here.

    Lest any­one think this is a delu­sion­al, even geno­ci­dal pro­pos­al, remem­ber it was the Kohelet Forum that pro­duced papers like this one, which are now gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy and being imple­ment­ed by law; papers which argued for destroy­ing the Israeli judi­cia­ry, and con­sol­i­dat­ing pow­er in the hands of the far-right fas­cist min­is­ters. Its pro­pos­als are being enacted–against the will of much of Israel.

    On a sub­ject like Gaza, which Israelis see as Trump’s equiv­a­lent of a “shit­hole coun­try,” Mis­gav could con­vince Israelis much more eas­i­ly of the pro­pri­ety of its plans.

    Nak­ba 2.0: the plan

    Here is an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the Hebrew tweet below:

    There is cur­rent­ly a unique and rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to evac­u­ate [sic] the entire Gaza Strip in coor­di­na­tion with the Egypt­ian gov­ern­ment. An imme­di­ate, real­is­tic and sus­tain­able plan for the reset­tle­ment and human­i­tar­i­an reha­bil­i­ta­tion of the entire Arab pop­u­la­tion in the Gaza Strip is required which aligns well with the eco­nom­ic and geopo­lit­i­cal inter­ests of Israel, Egypt, the USA and Sau­di Ara­bia.

    • In 2017, it was report­ed that there are about 10 mil­lion vacant hous­ing units in Egypt, of which about half are built and half are under con­struc­tion. For exam­ple, in the two largest satel­lite cities of Cairo…there is a huge amount of built and emp­ty apart­ments owned by the gov­ern­ment and pri­vate par­ties, and con­struc­tion areas suf­fi­cient to house about 6 mil­lion inhab­i­tants.

    • The aver­age cost of a 3‑room apart­ment with an area of ??95 square meters for an aver­age Gazan fam­i­ly con­sist­ing of 5.14 peo­ple in one of the two cities indi­cat­ed above is about $19,000. Tak­ing into account the cur­rent­ly known size of the entire pop­u­la­tion liv­ing in the Gaza Strip, which ranges from about 1.4 For approx­i­mate­ly 2.2 mil­lion peo­ple, one can esti­mate that the total amount required and to be trans­ferred to Egypt to finance the project, will be on the order of $5–8 bil­lion.

    • Inject­ing an imme­di­ate stim­u­lus of such size into the Egypt­ian econ­o­my would pro­vide a tremen­dous and imme­di­ate ben­e­fit to al-Sisi’s regime. These sums, in rela­tion to the Israeli econ­o­my, are min­i­mal. Invest­ing a few bil­lion dol­lars (even if it is $20- or $30-bil­lion) to solve this dif­fi­cult issue is an inno­v­a­tive, cheap and sus­tain­able solu­tion.

    • There is no doubt that in order for this plan to be real­ized, many con­di­tions must exist con­cur­rent­ly. Cur­rent­ly, these con­di­tions are opti­mal, and it is unclear when anoth­er such an oppor­tu­ni­ty will arise, if ever.

    ???? ????: ????? ?????? ???? ?????? ???? ?????? ?? ?? ????????? ???: ?????? ???????

    ??? ???? ??????

    ??????:

    • ????? ???? ??????? ?? ????? ?????? ????? ?? ??? ????? ??? ?????? ?? ????? ?????. ????? ????? ??????, ?????? ????-????? ?????? ???? ?????? ??????????? ?? ???… pic.twitter.com/3tAM7IblGE

    — ???? ???? ??????? ????? ?????????? ?????? (@MisgavINS) Octo­ber 17, 2023

    Israel’s fas­cist min­is­ters and MKs have boast­ed about Nak­ba 2.0 in recent speech­es. This is Nak­ba on steroids. It doesn’t mat­ter if this plan is nev­er enact­ed (though it very well might). The main goal is to inject these ideas like a tox­in into the body politic. To nor­mal­ize eth­nic cleans­ing in Israel dis­course. That isn’t a dif­fi­cult propo­si­tion at all, giv­en that every Israeli poll ask­ing about views on “trans­fer” (i.e. expul­sion) of the Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tion, finds up to 40% of Israeli Jews agree. So there is already a built-in con­stituen­cy for it.

    One glar­ing weak­ness of the plan is how it would be car­ried out. There is no men­tion of vol­un­tary trans­fer. Pre­sum­ably, Gazans would have no choice but to leave. How would you force 1.5‑million peo­ple to aban­don their homes and move to a for­eign coun­try? Put them on cat­tle cars?

    The dif­fer­ence between the polls men­tioned above and this plan is that the for­mer ask the respon­dents a gen­er­al ques­tion, with­out ask­ing for con­crete means of car­ry­ing it out. So Israelis answer a the­o­ret­i­cal ques­tion, not a prac­ti­cal one.

    This plan, on the oth­er hand, offers a clear roadmap how to car­ry out full-scale eth­nic cleans­ing. That is some­thing new. Chekhov is reput­ed to have said that if there is a gun on stage in the first act, it will be fired by the third. This is the first act of Gaza eth­nic cleans­ing.

    The sec­ond stage would be doing the same to the Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tion on the West Bank, Again, this is not a the­o­ret­i­cal issue. It is a very con­crete one. Dur­ing the Gaza War, set­tlers have tak­en advan­tage of the world’s atten­tion being focused else­where to forcibly expel near­ly 1,000 Gazans liv­ing in 12 small vil­lages. They did so by destroy­ing live­stock, olive trees and even mur­der­ing res­i­dents. All with total impuni­ty. In fact, with the pro­tec­tion of the IDF. Imag­ine Judeo-ter­ror­ists with guns need the added pro­tec­tion of the IDF to car­ry out their pogroms! Once they suc­ceed in depop­u­lat­ing the small­er vil­lages they will move on to the larg­er ones. Final­ly, there will be inex­orable momen­tum to expel all West Bank Pales­tini­ans.

    The set­tler min­is­ters, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, read­i­ly and enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly endorse these acts of Judeo-ter­ror. They would cer­tain­ly endorse full-scale eth­nic cleans­ing of the entire pop­u­la­tion of 2.5‑million Pales­tini­ans. Where would they go? Where hun­dreds of thou­sands of expellees went after the 1967 War: to Jor­dan.

    Egypt and Jor­dan: no way!

    Imag­ine what King Abdul­lah, whose coun­try is already 50% Pales­tin­ian, thinks about absorb­ing that many immi­grants. The kingdom’s pop­u­la­tion is 11-mil­lion. Adding that many peo­ple means a 25% pop­u­la­tion increase. It would tax the resources and infra­struc­ture, not to men­tion foment a huge amount of social unrest, includ­ing resent­ment of the new­com­ers.

    ...

    The plan is daft. The prod­uct of a way of think­ing that treats human beings as live­stock to be herd­ed out of one cor­ral and into anoth­er. Pales­tini­ans are a “prob­lem.” A prob­lem needs a solu­tion.

    They pose an ongo­ing threat to a Judeo-suprema­cist state envi­sioned by the Kohelet Forum and its fas­cist cultists. The eas­i­est and best answer is sim­ply to get rid of them, final­ly. A neat and sim­ple and final solu­tion.

    It does present at least one prob­lem: it is geno­cide. The forced removal of an entire pop­u­la­tion from its homes is not only a vio­la­tion of inter­na­tion­al law (which Israel ignores) but geno­cide. The world can coun­te­nance vir­tu­al­ly any Israeli atroc­i­ty. But this may be on too many. The world may, and should step in and stop this. Then, it may be time for imple­men­ta­tion of BDS, an inter­na­tion­al boy­cott.

    ...

    ———-

    “Israeli Secu­ri­ty Think Tank Pro­pos­es Expelling 2‑Million Gaza Pales­tini­ans Mis­gav Insti­tute, fund­ed by Kohelet Forum pro­pos­es expelling 1.5‑million Gazans to Egypt” by Richard Sil­ver­stein; Tikun Olam Blog; 10/22/2023

    The Israeli secu­ri­ty think tank, Mis­gav (the Insti­tute for Nation­al Secu­ri­ty and Zion­ist Strat­e­gy or INSZL) is fund­ed by the far-right Kohelet Forum. Its direc­tor is Meir Ben Shab­bat, a for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty advi­sor and 25 year vet­er­an of the Shin Bet. Mis­gav has answered the ques­tion. Its pro­pos­es an Israeli form of the Final Solu­tion of the the “Gaza Prob­lem”: expul­sion. The think tank pro­duced a paper, writ­ten by Ari Vait­man enti­tled, A plan for reset­tle­ment and final reha­bil­i­ta­tion in Egypt of the entire pop­u­la­tion of Gaza: eco­nom­ic aspects. The full paper (pdf in Hebrew) is here.”

    As Richard Sil­ver­stein points out, the Mis­gav Insti­tute for Nation­al Secu­ri­ty and Zion­ist Strat­e­gy is a Kohelet Forum spin­off. And it’s now wild­ly influ­en­tial with a Netanyahu far right coali­tion gov­ern­ment. So in case it’s not clear that the Netanyahu gov­ern­ment already had plans for a mass eth­nic cleans­ing, the explic­it road maps cre­at­ed by these groups for a ‘Nak­ba 2.0’ and the eth­nic cleans­ing of both Gaza and the West Bank should make it very clear:

    ...
    Lest any­one think this is a delu­sion­al, even geno­ci­dal pro­pos­al, remem­ber it was the Kohelet Forum that pro­duced papers like this one, which are now gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy and being imple­ment­ed by law; papers which argued for destroy­ing the Israeli judi­cia­ry, and con­sol­i­dat­ing pow­er in the hands of the far-right fas­cist min­is­ters. Its pro­pos­als are being enacted–against the will of much of Israel.

    ...

    Israel’s fas­cist min­is­ters and MKs have boast­ed about Nak­ba 2.0 in recent speech­es. This is Nak­ba on steroids. It doesn’t mat­ter if this plan is nev­er enact­ed (though it very well might). The main goal is to inject these ideas like a tox­in into the body politic. To nor­mal­ize eth­nic cleans­ing in Israel dis­course. That isn’t a dif­fi­cult propo­si­tion at all, giv­en that every Israeli poll ask­ing about views on “trans­fer” (i.e. expul­sion) of the Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tion, finds up to 40% of Israeli Jews agree. So there is already a built-in con­stituen­cy for it.

    ...

    This plan, on the oth­er hand, offers a clear roadmap how to car­ry out full-scale eth­nic cleans­ing. That is some­thing new. Chekhov is reput­ed to have said that if there is a gun on stage in the first act, it will be fired by the third. This is the first act of Gaza eth­nic cleans­ing.

    The sec­ond stage would be doing the same to the Pales­tin­ian pop­u­la­tion on the West Bank, Again, this is not a the­o­ret­i­cal issue. It is a very con­crete one. Dur­ing the Gaza War, set­tlers have tak­en advan­tage of the world’s atten­tion being focused else­where to forcibly expel near­ly 1,000 Gazans liv­ing in 12 small vil­lages. They did so by destroy­ing live­stock, olive trees and even mur­der­ing res­i­dents. All with total impuni­ty. In fact, with the pro­tec­tion of the IDF. Imag­ine Judeo-ter­ror­ists with guns need the added pro­tec­tion of the IDF to car­ry out their pogroms! Once they suc­ceed in depop­u­lat­ing the small­er vil­lages they will move on to the larg­er ones. Final­ly, there will be inex­orable momen­tum to expel all West Bank Pales­tini­ans.
    ...

    And as Sil­ver­stein also reminds us, this is an insane, bloody plan that is like­ly to turn Israel into an inter­na­tion­al pari­ah and more or less con­firm the views of Israel’s worst crit­ics. Mass eth­nic cleans­ing of the Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries is an absolute­ly insane idea, and yet it cur­rent seems more plau­si­ble now than ever:

    ...
    The plan is daft. The prod­uct of a way of think­ing that treats human beings as live­stock to be herd­ed out of one cor­ral and into anoth­er. Pales­tini­ans are a “prob­lem.” A prob­lem needs a solu­tion.

    They pose an ongo­ing threat to a Judeo-suprema­cist state envi­sioned by the Kohelet Forum and its fas­cist cultists. The eas­i­est and best answer is sim­ply to get rid of them, final­ly. A neat and sim­ple and final solu­tion.

    It does present at least one prob­lem: it is geno­cide. The forced removal of an entire pop­u­la­tion from its homes is not only a vio­la­tion of inter­na­tion­al law (which Israel ignores) but geno­cide. The world can coun­te­nance vir­tu­al­ly any Israeli atroc­i­ty. But this may be on too many. The world may, and should step in and stop this. Then, it may be time for imple­men­ta­tion of BDS, an inter­na­tion­al boy­cott.
    ...

    And this insane­ly bloody agen­da is ful­ly backed by Israel’s ‘close allies’ in the Chris­t­ian Zion­ist com­mu­ni­ty. Allies who, of course, ful­ly intend on see­ing the destruc­tion of Israel and Jew­ish peo­ple soon­er rather than lat­er. And as the fol­low­ing June 2020, Wash­ing­ton Post excerpt reminds us, when Mike John­son referred to his 2020 vis­it to the Tem­ple Mount as the ful­fill­ment of bib­li­cal prophe­cy, he was­n’t just using the same lan­guage embraced by Chris­t­ian Zion­ist leader John Hagee. He was also using the same lan­guage about bib­li­cal prophe­cy and US for­eign pol­i­cy now embraced by a num­ber of Chris­t­ian Zion­ist fig­ures in Repub­li­can Par­ty includ­ing for­mer Sec­re­tary of State Mike Pom­peo and for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence. In oth­er words, the con­tem­po­rary Repub­li­can Par­ty is a Chris­t­ian Zion­ist par­ty, at least when it comes to its polit­i­cal lead­er­ship. In that sense, Mike John­son’s Chris­t­ian Zion­ism isn’t an anom­aly. The embrace of a Bib­li­cal prophe­cy cen­tered on the destruc­tion of Israel and the Jew­ish peo­ple is actu­al­ly very ‘on brand’ for today’s theo­crat­i­cal­ly dom­i­nat­ed GOP:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    The main­stream­ing of Chris­t­ian Zion­ism could warp for­eign pol­i­cy

    How the his­to­ry of dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ism shapes U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy today.

    Per­spec­tive by Jef­frey Rosario
    Jef­frey Rosario is a PhD can­di­date at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge research­ing Amer­i­can reli­gious and polit­i­cal his­to­ry.
    June 30, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

    This week, Chris­tians Unit­ed for Israel (CUFI), the nation’s largest pro-Israel orga­ni­za­tion, will host a vir­tu­al sum­mit in lieu of what was orig­i­nal­ly expect­ed to be a major con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton. Fea­tured speak­ers include a line­up of top U.S. and Israeli offi­cials: Israeli Pres­i­dent Reuven Rivlin, U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Mike Pom­peo, and Repub­li­can Sens. Ted Cruz, Mar­co Rubio and Tom Cot­ton.

    In a recent ser­mon, John Hagee, founder and chair­man of CUFI, alleged that the coro­n­avirus “was not an acci­dent, it was planned.” He claimed that lib­er­al Amer­i­can politi­cians, the media and Chi­na have con­spired to extend the pan­dem­ic into Novem­ber to fur­ther dis­rupt the U.S. econ­o­my and under­mine Pres­i­dent Trump’s reelec­tion cam­paign. On a CUFI video, host Erick Stakel­beck com­plained that the pan­dem­ic has dis­tract­ed the U.S. gov­ern­ment from its role in the Mid­dle East.

    We can’t sim­ply dis­miss Hagee and his con­spir­a­to­r­i­al rhetoric, because CUFI rep­re­sents a for­mi­da­ble con­stituen­cy that lob­bies politi­cians and oth­er reli­gious groups in sup­port of Israel. Hagee claims to have influ­enced Trump’s trans­fer of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and offered a prayer at its ded­i­ca­tion, praised the assas­si­na­tion of Iran­ian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and was present in the East Room of the White House when Trump dis­cussed his Mid­dle East peace plan.

    Hagee believes that his move­ment is a ful­fill­ment of Bible prophe­cy. His rhetoric is often nation­al­is­tic, claim­ing that Amer­i­ca plays a God-ordained role in Israel’s pol­i­tics.

    But revis­it­ing the his­tor­i­cal back­ground of CUFI’s ide­ol­o­gy — called dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ism — reveals an apoc­a­lyp­tic moti­va­tion that should make peo­ple even more wary of CUFI’s influ­ence than Hagee’s extrem­ist rhetoric, which has the poten­tial to warp U.S. pol­i­cy.

    Most mod­ern evan­gel­i­cals who believe that the Unit­ed States has a divine­ly sanc­tioned mis­sion to secure the state of Israel can trace their world­view to William E. Black­stone, a Chica­go busi­ness­man turned preach­er. Between the 1870s and 1890s, Black­stone became a key pro­po­nent of dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ism, the the­o­log­i­cal view that Israel will play a cen­tral role in the final events of Earth’s his­to­ry.

    In 1878, Black­stone pub­lished “Jesus Is Com­ing,” which built on pre­vi­ous iter­a­tions of dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy. He laid out a sweep­ing fore­cast of future events. First on the agen­da was the return of the Jews to the land that was then Pales­tine. Once that was accom­plished, the “rap­ture” would take place, mean­ing Chris­t­ian believ­ers phys­i­cal­ly would be tak­en to heav­en while unbe­liev­ers and Jews would be left behind.

    In his sto­ry, the Antichrist then emerges to take con­trol of the Mid­dle East and pre­tends to offer peace to Israel by allow­ing the Jews to rebuild their tem­ple. But before long the Antichrist turns on the Jews, out­laws their reli­gion, demands wor­ship from them and leads a glob­al mil­i­tary con­glom­er­ate against Israel.

    Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists deem this phase “the time of Jacob’s trou­ble,” in which one-third of Jews con­vert to Chris­tian­i­ty and are saved accord­ing­ly, while the major­i­ty are killed.

    Jesus then returns from heav­en with the pre­vi­ous­ly rap­tured believ­ers, defeats the Antichrist at the bat­tle of Armaged­don and estab­lish­es his king­dom on Earth.

    Black­stone cared lit­tle about the details of how only a third of Jews would con­vert to Chris­tian­i­ty, but what was cer­tain to him was the “awful time of trou­ble await­ing” Israel.

    The cat­a­lyst in the whole dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ist pro­gram was the estab­lish­ment of Israel as a Jew­ish state.

    His­to­ri­an Matthew Sut­ton has shown how the pub­li­ca­tion of Blackstone’s book “sig­naled the begin­ning of a rad­i­cal new reli­gious move­ment that even­tu­al­ly trans­formed the faith of mil­lions in the Unit­ed States.” It sold more than 1 mil­lion copies and was print­ed in 48 lan­guages, “mak­ing it one of the most influ­en­tial reli­gious books of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.”

    What set Black­stone apart from pre­vi­ous dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists — and what still res­onates — was his insis­tence that the Unit­ed States was God’s appoint­ed polit­i­cal agent to ensure that the prophet­ic scheme would be ful­filled. Before the rise of polit­i­cal Zion­ism and the work of Theodore Her­zl, Black­stone peti­tioned suc­ces­sive pres­i­dents to estab­lish a Jew­ish state of Israel.

    A promis­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty came dur­ing World War I when Britain’s Bal­four Dec­la­ra­tion pledged to cre­ate a nation­al home for Jews. Britain’s lead­ing polit­i­cal strate­gists were not dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists; they were moti­vat­ed more by polit­i­cal fac­tors, includ­ing the hope that Amer­i­can Jews would influ­ence the Unit­ed States to join the Allies in the war. Notwith­stand­ing their dif­fer­ent motives, Black­stone urged Pres­i­dent Woodrow Wil­son to endorse the Bal­four Dec­la­ra­tion and empha­sized that Amer­i­ca was “God’s cho­sen instru­ment in these last days” to secure Pales­tine for the Jews.

    ...

    Black­stone died in 1935, but his dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ist suc­ces­sors kept alive the famil­iar refrain of their end-time sce­nario. Most influ­en­tial would be John Hagee, com­ing on the scene in the 1970s, who revived the polit­i­cal aspect of Blackstone’s dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ism with enor­mous impact. He too sees Amer­i­ca as God’s tool for car­ry­ing out this prophe­cy in geopo­lit­i­cal terms. Hagee even wel­comes the har­ness­ing of mil­i­tary pow­er to car­ry out a mis­sion he believes to be ful­fill­ing God’s will.

    While Blackstone’s gen­er­a­tion of dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists nev­er estab­lished a cen­tral­ized orga­ni­za­tion capa­ble of lever­ag­ing polit­i­cal or eco­nom­ic might behind the Chris­t­ian Zion­ist cause, Hagee has. He has sup­port­ed a con­ser­v­a­tive agen­da on social issues, and his orga­ni­za­tion has been aid­ed by the rise of the evan­gel­i­cal right in the Repub­li­can Par­ty, giv­ing it increas­ing influ­ence in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics.

    When Sec­re­tary of State Mike Pom­peo spoke at the 2019 CUFI con­ven­tion in Wash­ing­ton, he praised Blackstone’s lob­by­ing that “helped con­vince” Wil­son to sup­port a home­land for Jews. Black­stone, Pom­peo con­tin­ued, laid the ground­work for the estab­lish­ment of Israel in 1948. Pom­peo has pub­licly stat­ed his belief in the rap­ture and believes that God may have raised up Trump to defend Israel. Vice Pres­i­dent Pence is also an out­spo­ken sup­port­er of CUFI and imbibes this type of Chris­t­ian Zion­ism.

    ...

    ———–

    “The main­stream­ing of Chris­t­ian Zion­ism could warp for­eign pol­i­cy” by Jef­frey Rosario; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 06/30/2020

    “Hagee believes that his move­ment is a ful­fill­ment of Bible prophe­cy. His rhetoric is often nation­al­is­tic, claim­ing that Amer­i­ca plays a God-ordained role in Israel’s pol­i­tics.”

    Yes, Mike John­son isn’t the only polit­i­cal fig­ure see­ing signs of Bib­li­cal prophe­cy all over the US’s sup­port for Israel. That’s kind of at the core of John Hagee’s brand of Chris­t­ian Zion­ism. It’s a US-cen­tric Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist Zion­ism that assumes the sup­port of US evan­gel­i­cals for Israel is part of some sort of God ordained sequence of events. Events that, again, will lead to the destruc­tion of Israel and the Jew­ish peo­ple:

    ...
    We can’t sim­ply dis­miss Hagee and his con­spir­a­to­r­i­al rhetoric, because CUFI rep­re­sents a for­mi­da­ble con­stituen­cy that lob­bies politi­cians and oth­er reli­gious groups in sup­port of Israel. Hagee claims to have influ­enced Trump’s trans­fer of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and offered a prayer at its ded­i­ca­tion, praised the assas­si­na­tion of Iran­ian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and was present in the East Room of the White House when Trump dis­cussed his Mid­dle East peace plan.

    ...

    Black­stone died in 1935, but his dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ist suc­ces­sors kept alive the famil­iar refrain of their end-time sce­nario. Most influ­en­tial would be John Hagee, com­ing on the scene in the 1970s, who revived the polit­i­cal aspect of Blackstone’s dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ism with enor­mous impact. He too sees Amer­i­ca as God’s tool for car­ry­ing out this prophe­cy in geopo­lit­i­cal terms. Hagee even wel­comes the har­ness­ing of mil­i­tary pow­er to car­ry out a mis­sion he believes to be ful­fill­ing God’s will.

    While Blackstone’s gen­er­a­tion of dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists nev­er estab­lished a cen­tral­ized orga­ni­za­tion capa­ble of lever­ag­ing polit­i­cal or eco­nom­ic might behind the Chris­t­ian Zion­ist cause, Hagee has. He has sup­port­ed a con­ser­v­a­tive agen­da on social issues, and his orga­ni­za­tion has been aid­ed by the rise of the evan­gel­i­cal right in the Repub­li­can Par­ty, giv­ing it increas­ing influ­ence in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics.

    When Sec­re­tary of State Mike Pom­peo spoke at the 2019 CUFI con­ven­tion in Wash­ing­ton, he praised Blackstone’s lob­by­ing that “helped con­vince” Wil­son to sup­port a home­land for Jews. Black­stone, Pom­peo con­tin­ued, laid the ground­work for the estab­lish­ment of Israel in 1948. Pom­peo has pub­licly stat­ed his belief in the rap­ture and believes that God may have raised up Trump to defend Israel. Vice Pres­i­dent Pence is also an out­spo­ken sup­port­er of CUFI and imbibes this type of Chris­t­ian Zion­ism.
    ...

    So will Mike John­son, Mike Pom­peo, Mike Pence, and any of the oth­er Chris­t­ian Zion­ists US politi­cians get their big wish? Time will tell, but it’s a good time to recall that trig­ger­ing an apoc­a­lypse and trig­ger­ing the apoc­a­lypse that ush­ers in the Sec­ond Com­ing are not nec­es­sar­i­ly the same thing. Flam­ing a giant hor­ren­dous con­flict in the hopes of cat­alyz­ing the Rap­ture and actu­al­ly cat­alyz­ing the Rap­ture are two very dif­fer­ent things. Which also makes this a good time to start pon­der­ing just what these apoc­a­lyp­tic cults will do once they get their giant con­fla­gra­tion with­out the desire ful­fill­ment of their desired prophe­cies. Because you can always plan for big­ger con­flict. Well, until you can’t.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 28, 2023, 6:38 pm
  39. Chris­t­ian Zion­ism is obvi­ous­ly a prob­lem­at­ic the­ol­o­gy. It’s not the alleged affin­i­ty for Israel and the Jew­ish peo­ple that’s the prob­lem­at­ic part, but rather the real­i­ty that it’s a the­ol­o­gy pred­i­cat­ed on bring­ing about the proph­e­sied end of Israel and the Jew­ish peo­ple. And, as we’re going to see, the destruc­tion of pret­ty much every­one else. Chris­t­ian Zion­ism is an End Times the­ol­o­gy, after all. It real­ly is focused on the end. And in par­tic­u­lar, ush­er­ing in those End Times as soon as pos­si­ble through the ful­fill­ment of those proph­e­sied events. Major trig­ger point events like the rebuild­ing of the Tem­ple Mount in Jerusalem.

    But while it’s obvi­ous that Chris­t­ian Zion­ism is a dan­ger­ous the­o­log­i­cal move­ment, it may not be obvi­ous just how deeply inter­twined Chris­t­ian Zion­ism is with the entire his­to­ry and found­ing of Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP). That’s what we’re going to take a look at in the fol­low­ing 2007 Van­i­ty Fair piece by Craig Unger. A his­to­ry of the ori­gins of Chris­t­ian Zion­ism in the US that can­not be sep­a­rat­ed from the found­ing of the CNP and the rise of the Likud Par­ty as a force in Israeli pol­i­tics. As we’re going to see, It was 1977 when Men­achem Begin became the first Likud Par­ty Israeli prime min­is­ter and imme­di­ate­ly began reach­ing out to Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cals, in par­tic­u­lar Jer­ry Fal­well. In 1979, Fal­well launched the Moral Major­i­ty, inject­ing a pow­er­ful theo­crat­i­cal­ly-dri­ven polit­i­cal force in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. By 1980, not only had Fal­well received the Jabotin­sky Award but Begin even gave his min­istry a pri­vate jet. Their rela­tion­ship was so close Begin warned Fal­well about the upcom­ing bomb­ing of Iraq’s Osir­ak nuclear rec­tor in June of 1981.

    1981 also hap­pens to be the year of the found­ing of the CNP, which includ­ed major Chris­tians min­is­ters like Fal­well, Pat Robert­son, and Tim LaHaye as founders, along with LaHaye’s wife Bev­er­ly. LaHaye, the author of wild­ly pop­u­lar “Left Behind” series, served as the CNPs first Pres­i­dent from 1981–82. Robert­son served the same role from 85–86. All espoused the same kind of Chris­t­ian Zion­ist End Times the­ol­o­gy. Because as the fol­low­ing piece makes clear, the the­ol­o­gy behind the CNP is the same the­ol­o­gy ani­mat­ing these co-found­ing min­is­ters. An End Times the­ol­o­gy that puts Israel and the Jew­ish peo­ple at the cen­ter of the story...at least until Jesus returns and the Jews are destroyed along with the rest of the world.

    And that brings us to anoth­er impor­tant angle to this sto­ry: the ongo­ing CNP-dri­ven Sched­ule F/Project 2025 plot to purge the gov­ern­ment of all ‘sec­u­lar human­ists’ (who are seen as the most evil force in the world accord­ing to this the­ol­o­gy) is very much aligned with this same End Times the­ol­o­gy. As LaHaye argued in his book, The Bat­tle for the Mind, “We must remove all human­ists from pub­lic office and replace them with pro-moral polit­i­cal lead­ers.” It’s impor­tant con­text for under­stand­ing just how seri­ous these groups are about their planned purges. The Sched­ule F/Project 2024 plot is End Times-com­pat­i­ble.

    So with the CNP-backed open­ly theo­crat­ic Mike John­son serv­ing as the new Speak­er of the House at the same time Israel and Pales­tine are lit­er­al­ly going up in flames, it’s going to be worth keep­ing in mind that Mike John­son is far from the only per­son with pro­found influ­ence over the US gov­ern­ment who also hap­pens to be a theo­crat ded­i­cat­ed to the ful­fill­ment of an End Times prophe­cy and the destruc­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple and almost every­one else. It’s a shock­ing­ly pop­u­lar the­ol­o­gy in the halls of pow­er and has been for over four decades:

    Van­i­ty Fair

    Amer­i­can Rap­ture

    Best-sell­ing author and evan­gel­i­cal leader Tim LaHaye has con­tacts that extend to the White House. That could spell trou­ble, since his the­ol­o­gy espous­es a bloody apoc­a­lypse in Israel.

    By Craig Unger
    Jan­u­ary 1, 2007

    On a scorch­ing after­noon in May, Tim LaHaye, the 79-year-old co-author of the “Left Behind” series of apoc­a­lyp­tic thrillers, leads sev­er­al dozen of his acolytes up a long, wind­ing path to a hill­top in the ancient fortress city of Megid­do, Israel. LaHaye is not a house­hold name in the sec­u­lar world, but in the par­al­lel uni­verse of evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians he is the ulti­mate cul­tur­al icon. The author or co-author of more than 75 books, LaHaye in 2001 was named the most influ­en­tial Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal leader of the past 25 years by the Insti­tute for the Study of Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cals. With more than 63 mil­lion copies of his “Left Behind” nov­els sold, he is one of the best-sell­ing authors in all of Amer­i­can his­to­ry. Here, a group of about 90 evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians who embrace the aston­ish­ing the­ol­o­gy he espous­es have joined him in the Holy Land for the “Walk­ing Where Jesus Walked” tour.

    Megid­do, the site of about 20 dif­fer­ent civ­i­liza­tions over the last 10,000 years, is among the first stops on our pil­grim­age, and, giv­en that LaHaye’s spe­cial­ty is the apoc­a­lypse, it is also one of the most impor­tant. Alexan­der the Great, Sal­adin, Napoleon, and oth­er renowned war­riors all fought great bat­tles here. But if Megid­do is to go down in his­to­ry as the great­est bat­tle­field on earth, its real test is yet to come. Accord­ing to the book of Rev­e­la­tion, the hill of Megiddo—better known as Armageddon—will be the site of a cat­a­clysmic bat­tle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist.

    To get a good look at the bat­tle­fields of the apoc­a­lypse, we take shel­ter under a makeshift lean-to at the top of the hill. Wear­ing a flop­py hat to pro­tect him from the blaz­ing Israeli sun, LaHaye yields to his col­league Gary Fra­zier, the tour orga­niz­er and founder of the Texas-based Dis­cov­ery Min­istries, Inc., to explain what will hap­pen dur­ing the Final Days.

    “How many of you have read the ‘Left Behind’ prophe­cy nov­els?” asks Fra­zier.

    Almost every­one rais­es a hand.

    “The thing that you must know,” Fra­zier tells them, “is that the next event on God’s prophet­ic plan, we believe, is the catch­ing away of the saints in the pres­ence of the Lord. We call it ‘the Rap­ture.’”

    Fra­zier is refer­ring to a key bib­li­cal pas­sage, in the first book of Thes­sa­lo­ni­ans, that says the Lord will “descend from heav­en with a shout.… The dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up togeth­er with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.”

    The words “caught up” are some­times trans­lat­ed as “rap­tured.” As a result, adher­ents cite this as the essen­tial scrip­tur­al depic­tion of the Rap­ture.

    “Christ is going to appear,” Fra­zier con­tin­ues. “He is going to call all of his saved, all of his chil­dren, home to be with him.”

    ...

    “I’m going to tell you with zeal and enthu­si­asm and pas­sion Jesus is com­ing on the clouds of glo­ry to call us home.… Now, ladies and gen­tle­men, I want you to know, if you’ve read the ‘Left Behind’ books, [but] more impor­tant­ly, if you’ve read the Bible, you know … that Christ is com­ing, and we believe that that day is very, very near.”

    For miles around in all direc­tions the fer­tile Jezreel Val­ley, known as the bread­bas­ket of Israel, is spread out before us, an end­less vista of lush vine­yards and orchards grow­ing grapes, oranges, kumquats, peach­es, and pears. It is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a more beau­ti­ful pas­toral panora­ma.

    The sight LaHaye’s fol­low­ers hope to see here in the near future, how­ev­er, is any­thing but bucol­ic. Their vision is fueled by the book of Rev­e­la­tion, the dark and fore­bod­ing mes­sian­ic prophe­cy that fore­sees a grue­some and bloody con­fronta­tion between Christ and the armies of the Antichrist at Armaged­don.

    Address­ing the group from the very spot where the con­flict is to take place, Fra­zier turns to Rev­e­la­tion 19, which describes Christ going into bat­tle. “It thrills my heart every time that I read these words,” he says, then begins to read: “‘And I saw heav­en stand­ing open.… And there before me was a white horse, whose rid­er is called Faith­ful and True. With jus­tice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blaz­ing fire.’”

    Fra­zier paus­es to explain the text. “This doesn’t sound like com­pas­sion­ate Jesus,” he says. “This doesn’t sound like the suf­fer­ing ser­vant of Isa­iah 53. This is the War­rior King. He judges and makes war.”

    Fra­zier returns to the Scrip­ture: “He has a name writ­ten on him that no one but he him­self knows. He is dressed in a robe that is dipped in blood and his name is the word of God.”

    This is the moment the Rap­tur­ists eager­ly await. The mag­ni­tude of death and destruc­tion will make the Holo­caust seem triv­ial. The bat­tle final­ly begins.

    Those who remain on earth are the unsaved, the left behind—many of them dis­solute fol­low­ers of the Antichrist, who is mass­ing his army against Christ. Accom­pa­ny­ing Christ into bat­tle are the armies of heav­en, rid­ing white hors­es and dressed in fine linen.

    “This is all of us,” Fra­zier says.

    Fra­zier points out that Christ does not need high-tech weapon­ry for this con­flict. “‘Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword,’ not a bunch of mis­siles and rock­ets,” he says.

    Once Christ joins the bat­tle, both the Antichrist and the False Prophet are quick­ly cap­tured and cast alive into a lake of fire burn­ing with brim­stone. Huge num­bers of the Antichrist’s sup­port­ers are slain.

    Mean­while, an angel exhorts Christ, “Thrust in thy sick­le, and reap.” And so, Christ, sick­le in hand, gath­ers “the vine of the earth.”

    Then, accord­ing to Rev­e­la­tion, “the earth was reaped.” These four sim­ple words sig­ni­fy the end of the world as we know it.

    Grapes that are “ful­ly ripe”—billions of peo­ple who have reached matu­ri­ty but still reject the grace of God—are now cast “into the great wine­press of the wrath of God.” Here we have the ori­gin of the phrase “the grapes of wrath.” In an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly mer­ci­less and bru­tal act of jus­tice, Christ crush­es the so-called grapes of wrath, killing them. Then, Rev­e­la­tion says, blood flows out “of the wine­press, even unto the horse bri­dles, by the space of a thou­sand and six hun­dred fur­longs.”

    With its high­ly fig­u­ra­tive lan­guage, Rev­e­la­tion is sub­ject to pro­found­ly dif­fer­ing inter­pre­ta­tions. Nev­er­the­less, LaHaye’s fol­low­ers insist on its lit­er­al truth and accu­ra­cy, and they have gone to great lengths to cal­cu­late exact­ly what this pas­sage of Rev­e­la­tion means.

    As we walk down from the top of the hill of Megid­do, one of them looks out over the Jezreel Val­ley. “Can you imag­ine this entire val­ley filled with blood?” he asks. “That would be a 200-mile-long riv­er of blood, four and a half feet deep. We’ve done the math. That’s the blood of as many as two and a half bil­lion peo­ple.”

    ...

    If such views sound extra­or­di­nary, the peo­ple who hold them are decid­ed­ly not. For the most part, the peo­ple on the tour could pass for a ran­dom selec­tion culled from almost any shop­ping mall in Amer­i­ca. There are warm and lov­ing mid­dle-aged cou­ples who hold hands. There is a well-coiffed Texas matron with an Her­mès scarf. There’s a duck­tailed sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­an and a host of post-teen mall rats. There are young sin­gles. One cou­ple even chose this trip for their hon­ey­moon. A big-haired plat­inum blonde with a white sequined cow­boy hat adds a touch of Dal­las glam­our. There is a com­put­er-secu­ri­ty expert, a legal assis­tant, and a real-estate bro­ker; a con­struc­tion exec­u­tive, a retired pas­tor, a care­giv­er for the elder­ly, and a grad­u­ate stu­dent from Jer­ry Falwell’s Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty. They hail from Peo­ria, Illi­nois, and Longview, Texas, as well as San Diego and San Anto­nio. Most are fans of the “Left Behind” books. Some have attend­ed the Left Behind Prophe­cy Con­fer­ence on one of its tours of the U.S.

    And while their beliefs may seem astound­ing to sec­u­lar Amer­i­cans, they are not unusu­al. Accord­ing to a Time/CNN poll from 2002, 59 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe the events in the book of Rev­e­la­tion will take place. There are as many as 70 mil­lion Evan­gel­i­cals in the U.S.—about 25 per­cent of the population—attending more than 200,000 evan­gel­i­cal church­es. Most of these church­es are run by pas­tors who belong to con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions that make sure their flocks vote as a hard-right Repub­li­can bloc.

    A fas­ci­na­tion with Rev­e­la­tion, the Rap­ture, and Chris­t­ian Zion­ism has always been a potent, if often unseen, com­po­nent of the Amer­i­can con­scious­ness. More than three cen­turies ago, Puri­tans from John Winthrop to Cot­ton Math­er saw Amer­i­ca as a mil­len­ni­al king­dom linked to both the apoc­a­lypse and ancient Israel in a divine way that pre­fig­ured the Sec­ond Com­ing of Christ. Amer­i­ca was to be the New Jerusalem, the Redeemer Nation, a peo­ple blessed with divine guid­ance.

    Imagery from the book of Rev­e­la­tion has inspired poets and writ­ers from William Blake and William But­ler Yeats to Joan Did­ion and Bob Dylan. “The Bat­tle Hymn of the Repub­lic” draws ref­er­ences from Rev­e­la­tion. Ele­ments of the book of Revelation—secularized or otherwise—turn up in movies star­ring Gary Coop­er (High Noon), Gre­go­ry Peck (The Omen), Clint East­wood (Pale Rid­er), and Mimi Rogers (The Rap­ture), as well as in NBC’s Rev­e­la­tions. Already, there have been two “Left Behind” movies—available most­ly on video—and a third is in pro­duc­tion. LaHaye’s “Left Behind” series of books, co-authored with Jer­ry Jenk­ins, has brought in $650 mil­lion to Tyn­dale House, its now afflu­ent Chris­t­ian pub­lish­er.

    ...

    For all that, the new wave of Rap­ture­ma­nia is more than just anoth­er mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar addi­tion to America’s cul­tur­al junk heap. In the 60s, how you felt about the Bea­t­les and Rolling Stones, mar­i­jua­na and LSD, and civ­il rights and the Viet­nam War told peo­ple whose side of Amer­i­can soci­ety you were on. Like­wise, Jer­ry Fal­well and Tim LaHaye, the pro-life move­ment and mar­riage-pro­tec­tion amend­ment, and the book of Rev­e­la­tion and George W. Bush are equal­ly reli­able gauges through which evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians today can dis­tin­guish friend from foe.

    As befits the man­i­festo of a coun­ter­cul­ture, the “Left Behind” series is a revenge fan­ta­sy, in which right-wing Chris­tians win out over the ratio­nal, sci­en­tif­ic, mod­ern, post-Enlight­en­ment world. The books rep­re­sent the apoth­e­o­sis of a cul­ture that is wag­ing war against lib­er­als, gays, Mus­lims, Arabs, the U.N., and “mil­i­tant sec­u­lar­ists” of all stripes—whom it accus­es of destroy­ing Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca, mur­der­ing mil­lions of unborn chil­dren, assault­ing the Chris­t­ian fam­i­ly by pro­mot­ing promis­cu­ity and homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, and dri­ving Christ out of the pub­lic square.

    It’s a coun­ter­cul­ture that sees Jews as key play­ers in a Chris­t­ian mes­sian­ic dra­ma, a premise that has led to a remark­able alliance between Chris­t­ian Evan­gel­i­cals and the Israeli right. As a result, polit­i­cal views drawn from an apoc­a­lyp­tic vision—once dis­missed as extrem­ist and delusional—have not mere­ly swept mass cul­ture but have shaped the polit­i­cal dis­course all the way to Jerusalem and the White House. And if they are tak­en too seri­ous­ly, the geopo­lit­i­cal con­se­quences could be cat­a­stroph­ic.

    The city of Jerusalem has a pro­found sig­nif­i­cance in the tra­di­tions of Judaism, Chris­tian­i­ty, and Islam. And to all three reli­gions no place in Jerusalem is more full of apoc­a­lyp­tic and mes­sian­ic mean­ing than the Tem­ple Mount—the mas­sive, 144,000-square-meter plat­form, 32 meters high, built by King Herod as a base for the biggest and most grandiose reli­gious mon­u­ment in the world, the shin­ing white stone Tem­ple of the Jews.

    To Jews, the Tem­ple Mount marks the holy of holies, the sacred core of the Tem­ple, where Jews wor­shipped for cen­turies. Beneath it, Ortho­dox Jews believe, is the foun­da­tion stone of the entire world. The Mount is the dis­put­ed piece of land over which Cain slew Abel. It is where Abra­ham took his son, Isaac, when God asked him to sac­ri­fice the boy. At its out­er perime­ter is the West­ern Wall, or Wail­ing Wall, where Jews wor­ship today. And mes­sian­ic Jews believe the Mount is where the Tem­ple must be rebuilt for the com­ing Mes­si­ah.

    To Chris­tians, the Tem­ple is where Jesus threw out the mon­ey chang­ers. Its destruc­tion by the Romans in 70 A.D. came to sym­bol­ize the birth of Chris­tian­i­ty, when a new Tem­ple of Jesus, eter­nal and divine, replaced the earth­ly Tem­ple made and destroyed by men.

    And to Mus­lims the Tem­ple Mount’s Dome of the Rock is where Muham­mad ascend­ed to heav­en near­ly 1,400 years ago, mak­ing it the third-holi­est site in Islam, behind Mec­ca and Med­i­na.

    After its vic­to­ry over Arab forces in the Six-Day War, in June 1967, Israel briefly seized the Tem­ple Mount, there­by real­iz­ing the dream of restor­ing Judaism’s holi­est place to the Jew­ish peo­ple. But Moshe Dayan, the ven­er­at­ed Israeli defense min­is­ter who won the bat­tle, soon vol­un­tar­i­ly relin­quished con­trol of it to the Waqf, a Mus­lim admin­is­tra­tive body.

    Over the next gen­er­a­tion, some 250,000 most­ly Ortho­dox Jews, cit­ing God’s promise to Abra­ham in Genesis—“all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever”—moved into West Bank ter­ri­to­ries occu­pied by Israel after the 1967 war, and vowed to keep the gov­ern­ment from giv­ing the land back to the Pales­tini­ans.

    Since Dayan’s his­toric deci­sion, Mus­lim author­i­ties have usu­al­ly allowed non-Mus­lims to come to the Tem­ple Mount, as long as they don’t move their lips in ways that sug­gest they are pray­ing. As a result, the Tem­ple Mount is one of the most explo­sive tin­der­box­es on earth. A vis­it to the site in Sep­tem­ber 2000 by Ariel Sharon inflamed ten­sions that soon erupt­ed into the sec­ond intifa­da.

    To evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians, the Mount is an ele­men­tal part of mes­sian­ic the­ol­o­gy, because a com­plete restora­tion of the nation of Israel, includ­ing the rebuild­ing of the Tem­ple and the reclaim­ing of Judea and Samaria, is a pre­req­ui­site to the Sec­ond Com­ing of Christ. Like­wise, to Ortho­dox Jews, noth­ing is more impor­tant to their mes­sian­ic vision than reclaim­ing the Tem­ple Mount and rebuild­ing the Temple—yet no sin­gle event is more like­ly to pro­voke a cat­a­stro­phe.

    No one knows this bet­ter than Yit­shak Fhan­tich, an inde­pen­dent secu­ri­ty, pro­tec­tion, and intel­li­gence con­sul­tant who spent 28 years in Israeli intel­li­gence, many as head of the Jew­ish Depart­ment of Shin Bet. From 1992 to 1995, he was the man in charge of inves­ti­gat­ing right-wing extrem­ists, many of them strong­ly reli­gious, who posed a threat to the Tem­ple Mount.

    “The vast major­i­ty of set­tlers in the West Bank are pos­i­tive peo­ple with sin­cere reli­gious beliefs,” says Fhan­tich. “But when you com­bine reli­gious beliefs with right-wing polit­i­cal views, you have a bomb. The hard core among them will go to any extreme. They are ready to do anything—from killing Yitzhak Rabin to blow­ing up the mosques at the Tem­ple Mount.”

    Indeed, in 1984, Fhan­tich and his team of 25 Shin Bet mem­bers assist­ed in the arrest of 26 Jew­ish ter­ror­ists for plan­ning to blow up the mosques on the Tem­ple Mount in an attempt to dis­rupt the peace process with Egypt, and in hopes that the Jews would then rebuild the Tem­ple so that the Mes­si­ah would come.

    And in 1995, Fhan­tich per­son­al­ly warned Prime Min­is­ter Yitzhak Rabin about the dan­ger he faced from mil­i­tant groups out­raged by his agree­ment, as part of the 1993 Oslo accords, to relin­quish the West Bank and Gaza ter­ri­to­ries to the Pales­tini­ans. “I told him, on the hit list, you’re No. 1,” Fhan­tich says. On Novem­ber 4, 1995, Rabin was assas­si­nat­ed by a young Ortho­dox law stu­dent named Yigal Amir, whose activ­i­ties Fhan­tich had been mon­i­tor­ing for more than a year.

    In the 90s, Fhan­tich says, Israeli intel­li­gence began watch­ing Chris­t­ian Evan­gel­i­cals. “As the mil­len­ni­um approached, you had many peo­ple wait­ing for the appear­ance of Jesus Christ.… And Jerusalem, of course, is the home of the Jerusalem syn­drome,” he says, refer­ring to the phe­nom­e­non where­by obses­sive reli­gious ideas can trig­ger vio­lent behav­ior. “If some­one believes God told him to do some­thing, you can­not stop him.

    “The mosques on the Tem­ple Mount are like the red flag for the bull. You have to be pre­pared minute by minute. These Chris­tians, they believe what they are doing is sacred. Some of them are so naïve they can be tak­en advan­tage of. If some­thing hap­pens to the Tem­ple Mount, I think these Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cals will wel­come such an act. After all, reli­gion is the most pow­er­ful gun in the world.”

    )More­over, a poten­tial attack on the Tem­ple Mount, as dis­as­trous as it would be, pales in com­par­i­son to the long-term geopo­lit­i­cal goals of some right-wing reli­gious groups. Ortho­dox Jews, Chris­t­ian Evan­gel­i­cals, and the heroes of the “Left Behind” series share a belief that the land bor­dered by the Nile and Euphrates Rivers and the Mediter­ranean Sea and the wilder­ness of Jor­dan has been covenant­ed to Israel by God. Tak­en to its lit­er­al extreme, this belief oblig­es Israel not only to retain con­trol of Gaza and the West Bank but also to annex all or parts of Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syr­ia. Such a cam­paign of con­quest would be cer­tain to pro­voke a spec­tac­u­lar con­flict.

    The Carter Glass Man­sion, in Lynch­burg, Vir­ginia, is a hand­some manor house that serves as an admin­is­tra­tive office for Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty and offers a mag­nif­i­cent view of the Blue Ridge Moun­tains. Inside is the office of Jer­ry Fal­well, chan­cel­lor of the uni­ver­si­ty, found­ing father of the Chris­t­ian right, and long­time friend and col­league of Tim LaHaye, one of Liberty’s most gen­er­ous donors.

    Recent­ly recov­ered from a res­pi­ra­to­ry ill­ness, Fal­well, 72, is as serene and self-con­fi­dent as ever, answer­ing ques­tions with the dis­arm­ing can­dor that has enabled him to build per­son­al friend­ships with even his fiercest ide­o­log­i­cal foes, from the Rev­erend Jesse Jack­son to pornog­ra­ph­er Lar­ry Fly­nt. Behind his desk is a mount­ed page from the Pales­tine Post, dat­ed May 16, 1948, head­lined STATE OF ISRAEL IS BORN.

    ...

    The spe­cial polit­i­cal rela­tion­ship between the Israeli right and Evan­gel­i­cals dates back to 1977, when, after three decades of Labor rule in Israel, Men­achem Begin became the first prime min­is­ter from the con­ser­v­a­tive Likud Par­ty. A roman­tic nation­al­ist and seri­ous bib­li­cal schol­ar, Begin point­ed­ly referred to the lands of the West Bank by their bib­li­cal names of Judea and Samaria, and he reached out to Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cals at a time when they were just com­ing out of a polit­i­cal hiber­na­tion that dat­ed back to the Scopes tri­al of 1925 and Pro­hi­bi­tion. “The prime min­is­ter said a per­son who has got the Bible in his home and reads it and believes it can­not be a bad per­son,” recalls Yechiel Kadishai, a long­time per­son­al aide to Begin. “He said the Evan­gel­i­cals have to know that we are root­ed in this piece of land. There should be an under­stand­ing between us and them.” One of the first peo­ple Begin sought out was Jer­ry Fal­well, who was achiev­ing nation­al recog­ni­tion through his grow­ing tele­vi­sion min­istry.

    In 1980, Begin pre­sent­ed Fal­well with the pres­ti­gious Jabotin­sky Award, gave his min­istry a pri­vate jet, and shared vital state secrets with the tel­e­van­ge­list. Begin even called him before bomb­ing Iraq’s Osir­ak nuclear reac­tor, in June 1981. “He said, ‘Tomor­row you’re going to read some strong things about what we are going to do. But our safe­ty is at stake,’” Fal­well recalls. “He said, ‘I want­ed you, my good friend, to know what we are going to do.’ And, sure enough, they put one down the chim­ney.”

    In the ear­ly days of his min­istry, Fal­well, like oth­er Evan­gel­i­cals, had made a pol­i­cy of not mix­ing reli­gion and pol­i­tics at all—much less on a glob­al scale. “I had been taught in the sem­i­nary that reli­gion and pol­i­tics don’t mix,” he says. “Con­ser­v­a­tive the­olo­gians were absolute­ly con­vinced that the pul­pit should be devot­ed to prayer, preach­ing, and exclu­sive­ly to spir­i­tu­al min­istry.

    “But in the 60s the U.S. Supreme Court had decid­ed to remove God from the pub­lic square, begin­ning with the school-prayer issue. Then, in 1973, the Supreme Court had ruled 7‑to‑2 in favor of abor­tion on demand. And I won­dered, ‘What can I do?’”

    Sev­er­al years lat­er, Fal­well got a call from Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer. An elec­tri­fy­ing Pres­by­ter­ian evan­ge­list and author, Scha­ef­fer is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant reli­gious fig­ure that sec­u­lar Amer­i­ca has nev­er heard of. Wide­ly regard­ed by Evan­gel­i­cals as one of their lead­ing the­olo­gians of the 20th cen­tu­ry, Scha­ef­fer, who died in 1984, was to the Chris­t­ian right what Marx was to Marx­ism, what Freud was to psy­cho­analy­sis. “There is no ques­tion in my mind that with­out Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer the reli­gious right would not exist today,” says Fal­well. “He was the prophet of the mod­ern-day faith-and-val­ues move­ment.”

    A pow­er­ful influ­ence on Fal­well, LaHaye, Pat Robert­son, and many oth­ers, Scha­ef­fer assert­ed in the wake of Roe v. Wade that Evan­gel­i­cal­ism could no longer pas­sive­ly accom­mo­date itself to the deca­dent val­ues of the sec­u­lar-human­ist world, now that it had sanc­tioned the mur­der of unborn babies. Almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly, he prod­ded Evan­gel­i­cals out of the pul­pit and into a full-scale cul­tur­al war with the sec­u­lar world. “I was in search of a scrip­tur­al way that I, as pas­tor of a very large church, could address the moral and social issues fac­ing Amer­i­can cul­ture,” Fal­well says. “Dr. Scha­ef­fer shat­tered that world of iso­la­tion for me, telling me that, while I was preach­ing a very clear gospel mes­sage, I was avoid­ing 50 per­cent of my min­istry.… He began teach­ing me that I had a respon­si­bil­i­ty to con­front the cul­ture where it was fail­ing moral­ly and social­ly.”

    In 1979, Fal­well was still “look­ing for a plan to mobi­lize peo­ple of faith in this coun­try” when Tim LaHaye, then a pas­tor in San Diego, called him. LaHaye had just found­ed Cal­i­for­ni­ans for Bib­li­cal Moral­i­ty, a coali­tion of right-wing pas­tors who fought against gay rights and even sought to ban the fan­ta­sy game Dun­geons & Drag­ons in a Glen­do­ra com­mu­ni­ty col­lege on the grounds that it was an “occult” game.

    When he vis­it­ed San Diego, Fal­well was impressed with how LaHaye had orga­nized the pas­tors to con­front the state gov­ern­ment on moral and social issues. “When he told me how he did it, I won­dered why we couldn’t do it on a nation­al basis,” says Fal­well.

    And so, in 1979, Fal­well launched the Moral Major­i­ty with LaHaye and oth­er lead­ing fun­da­men­tal­ist strate­gists to lob­by for prayer and the teach­ing of cre­ation­ism in pub­lic schools and against gay rights, abor­tion, and the Equal Rights Amend­ment. LaHaye’s wife, Bev­er­ly, also entered the fray that year by found­ing Con­cerned Women for Amer­i­ca, to “bring bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples into all lev­els of pub­lic pol­i­cy” and oppose the “anti-mar­riage, anti-fam­i­ly, anti-chil­dren, anti-man” fem­i­nism put forth by the Nation­al Orga­ni­za­tion for Women.

    Court­ly, gen­teel, and soft-spo­ken, LaHaye hard­ly looks the part of a fero­cious right-wing cul­ture war­rior. In pub­lic or in pri­vate, LaHaye is under­stat­ed, the antithe­sis of the fire-and-brim­stone preach­er one might expect to deliv­er prophe­cies of the apoc­a­lypse and Armaged­don. Yet even Fal­well has said that LaHaye has done more than any­one to set the agen­da for Evan­gel­i­cal­ism in the U.S.

    LaHaye’s belief in the Rap­ture dates back to his father’s funer­al, in Detroit, when he was just nine years old. “The min­is­ter at the funer­al said these words: ‘This is not the end of Frank LaHaye,’” he told The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor. “‘Because he accept­ed Jesus, the day will come when the Lord will shout from heav­en and descend, and the dead in Christ will rise first and then we’ll be caught up togeth­er to meet him in the air.’”

    Then the pas­tor point­ed to the sky and the sun unex­pect­ed­ly came out. “All of a sud­den, there was hope in my heart I’d see my father again,” LaHaye said.

    From then on, LaHaye was entranced with Rap­tur­ist the­ol­o­gy, which was pop­u­lar­ized in the U.S. in the 19th cen­tu­ry by a rene­gade Irish Angli­can preach­er named John Nel­son Dar­by. A pro­po­nent of a prophet­ic branch of the­ol­o­gy known as pre­mil­len­ni­al dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ism, Dar­by assert­ed that a series of signs—including wars, immoral­i­ty, and the return of the Jews to Israel—signal the End of Days. Once the end is nigh, all true believ­ers will be rap­tured to meet Christ. After that, Dar­by taught, the world will enter a hor­ri­fy­ing sev­en-year peri­od of Tribu­la­tion, dur­ing which a charis­mat­ic Antichrist will seize pow­er. But in the end, he proph­e­sied, the Antichrist will be van­quished by Christ at Armaged­don, and Christ’s 1,000-year reign of peace and jus­tice will begin. This, in brief, is the the­ol­o­gy taught by evan­ge­lists such as Jer­ry Fal­well, John Hagee, and many others—including Tim LaHaye.

    After grad­u­at­ing from the ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Bob Jones Uni­ver­si­ty, in Greenville, South Car­oli­na, LaHaye began preach­ing in near­by Pump­kin­town at a salary of $15 a week. For 25 years, he served as pas­tor at Scott Memo­r­i­al Bap­tist Church, in San Diego, trans­form­ing it from a con­gre­ga­tion of 275 into one with 3,000 mem­bers.

    Along the way, LaHaye avid­ly read Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer. “Scha­ef­fer taught me the dif­fer­ence between the Renais­sance and the Ref­or­ma­tion,” he says dur­ing the tour of Israel. “And you know what the dif­fer­ence is? The Renais­sance was all about the cen­tral­i­ty of man. The Ref­or­ma­tion was all about clear­ing up the ways the [Catholic] Church had mucked up Christianity—and get­ting back to the cen­tral­i­ty of God.”

    In The Bat­tle for the Mind, his 1980 homage to Scha­ef­fer, LaHaye lays out his world­view far more force­ful­ly than he does in per­son, depict­ing Amer­i­ca as a Bible-based coun­try under siege by an elite group of sec­u­lar human­ists con­spir­ing to destroy the nuclear fam­i­ly, Chris­tian­i­ty itself, and even “the entire world.” There are no shades of gray in this Manichaean tract, which asserts that sec­u­lar human­ism is “not only the world’s great­est evil but, until recent­ly, the most decep­tive of all reli­gious philoso­phies.”

    Life, LaHaye argues, has always been a bat­tle between good and evil. “The good way has always been called ‘God’s way,’” he writes, and evil has been the way of man—specifically, the post-Renais­sance, post-Enlight­en­ment world of art, sci­ence, and rea­son. And, in his view, noth­ing man has come up with is worse than sec­u­lar human­ism, which he defines as “a God­less, man-cen­tered phi­los­o­phy” that rejects tra­di­tion­al val­ues and that has “a par­tic­u­lar hatred toward Chris­tian­i­ty.”

    “LaHaye writes as if there’s a human­ist brain trust sit­ting around read­ing [Amer­i­can philoso­pher and edu­ca­tion­al reformer] John Dewey, try­ing to fig­ure out ways to destroy Chris­tian­i­ty,” says Chip Berlet, a senior ana­lyst with Polit­i­cal Research Asso­ciates and the co-author of Right-Wing Pop­ulism in Amer­i­ca: Too Close for Com­fort.

    In truth, while tens of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans might accu­rate­ly be called sec­u­lar human­ists, very few char­ac­ter­ize them­selves as mem­bers of a human­ist move­ment. But to LaHaye that only proves the devi­ous­ness of the human­ist project. Instead of open­ly advo­cat­ing their point of view, he writes, human­ists have used the mass media and Hol­ly­wood, the gov­ern­ment, acad­e­mia, and orga­ni­za­tions such as the A.C.L.U. and NOW to indoc­tri­nate unsus­pect­ing Chris­tians.

    As a result, LaHaye argues, good Evan­gel­i­cals should no longer think of human­ists as harm­less cit­i­zens who hap­pen not to attend church. In The Bat­tle for the Mind, he spells out his polit­i­cal goals: “We must remove all human­ists from pub­lic office and replace them with pro-moral polit­i­cal lead­ers.”

    “In LaHaye’s world, there are the god­ly peo­ple who are on their way to the Rap­ture,” says Berlet. “And the rest of the world is either com­plic­it with the Antichrist or, worse, active­ly assist­ing him. If you real­ly believe in End Times, you are con­stant­ly look­ing for agents of Satan. . . . [And if] polit­i­cal con­flicts are root­ed in the idea that your oppo­nent is an agent of the Dev­il, there is no com­pro­mise pos­si­ble. What decent per­son would com­pro­mise with evil? So that removes it from the demo­c­ra­t­ic process.

    “Con­ser­v­a­tive think tanks like the Her­itage Foun­da­tion want to roll back the New Deal. LaHaye wants to roll back the Enlight­en­ment.”

    Like Schaeffer’s writ­ings, LaHaye’s book went large­ly unno­ticed by the sec­u­lar world, but the Chris­t­ian right hearti­ly embraced its dec­la­ra­tion of war against sec­u­lar­ism. Pres­by­ter­ian tel­e­van­ge­list D. James Kennedy hailed The Bat­tle for the Mind as “one of the most impor­tant books of our time.” Fal­well wrote that all Chris­tians must fol­low its tenets if Amer­i­ca is to be saved from becom­ing “anoth­er Sodom and Gomor­rah.”

    In 1981, LaHaye took up the chal­lenge, resign­ing his pas­tor­ship to devote him­self full-time to build­ing the Chris­t­ian right. He began by meet­ing with mon­eyed ultra-con­ser­v­a­tives includ­ing Nel­son Bunker Hunt, the right-wing oil bil­lion­aire from Dal­las, and T. Cullen Davis, anoth­er wealthy Texas oil­man who became a born-again Chris­t­ian after being acquit­ted of charges of mur­der­ing his wife’s lover and his step­daugh­ter.

    Though still in its infan­cy, the Moral Major­i­ty had more than sev­en mil­lion peo­ple on its mail­ing list and had already played a key role in elect­ing Ronald Rea­gan pres­i­dent. Bev­er­ly LaHaye’s Con­cerned Women for Amer­i­ca was on its way to build­ing a mem­ber­ship of 500,000 peo­ple, mak­ing her “the most pow­er­ful woman in the new reli­gious right,” accord­ing to the Hous­ton Chron­i­cle. She and her hus­band also co-authored a best-sell­ing mar­riage man­u­al for Chris­tians, The Act of Mar­riage, full of clin­i­cal advice such as the fol­low­ing: “Cun­nilin­gus and fel­la­tio have in recent years been giv­en unwar­rant­ed pub­lic­i­ty [but] the major­i­ty of cou­ples do not reg­u­lar­ly use it as a sub­sti­tute for the beau­ti­ful and con­ven­tion­al inter­ac­tion designed by our Cre­ator to be an inti­mate expres­sion of love.” And in the mid-80s, LaHaye cre­at­ed the Amer­i­can Coali­tion for Tra­di­tion­al Val­ues, which played an impor­tant role in re-elect­ing Ronald Rea­gan, in 1984. He lat­er became co-chair­man of Jack Kemp’s 1988 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign but was forced to resign when anti-Catholic state­ments he had writ­ten came to light.

    With right-wing groups expand­ing at such a dizzy­ing pace, LaHaye helped to found the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (C.N.P.) as a low-pro­file but pow­er­ful coali­tion of bil­lion­aire indus­tri­al­ists, fun­da­men­tal­ist preach­ers, and right-wing tac­ti­cians. Fund­ed by Hunt and Davis, among oth­ers, the orga­ni­za­tion set out to cre­ate a coher­ent and dis­ci­plined strat­e­gy for the New Right.

    Though its mem­ber­ship is secret, the rolls have report­ed­ly includ­ed Fal­well and Pat Robert­son; top right-wing polit­i­cal strate­gists Richard Viguerie, Ralph Reed, and Paul Weyrich; Repub­li­can sen­a­tors Jesse Helms and Lauch Fair­cloth (both of North Car­oli­na), Don Nick­les (Okla­homa), and Trent Lott (Mis­sis­sip­pi); and Repub­li­can rep­re­sen­ta­tives Dick Armey and Tom DeLay (both of Texas). The late Rousas John Rush­doony, the right-wing the­olo­gian who hoped to recon­fig­ure the Amer­i­can legal sys­tem in accor­dance with bib­li­cal law, was said to be a mem­ber, as was John White­head of the Ruther­ford Insti­tute, who was co-coun­sel to Paula Jones in her law­suit against Bill Clin­ton.

    “Ronald Rea­gan, both George Bush­es, sen­a­tors and Cab­i­net members—you name it. There’s nobody who hasn’t been here at least once,” says Fal­well, who con­firms that he is a mem­ber. “It is a group of four or five hun­dred of the biggest con­ser­v­a­tive guns in the coun­try.”

    The C.N.P. has access to the high­est pow­ers in the land. In 1999, George W. Bush court­ed evan­gel­i­cal sup­port for his pres­i­den­tial can­di­da­cy by giv­ing a speech before the coun­cil, the tran­script of which remains a high­ly guard­ed secret. And since the start of his pres­i­den­cy, Fal­well says, the C.N.P. has enjoyed reg­u­lar access to the Oval Office. “With­in the coun­cil is a small­er group called the Arling­ton Group,” says Fal­well. “We talk to each oth­er dai­ly and meet in Wash­ing­ton prob­a­bly twice a month. We often call the White House and talk to Karl Rove while we are meet­ing. Every­one takes our calls.” Accord­ing to The Wall Street Jour­nal, two high-rank­ing Texas judges who spoke to the Arling­ton Group in Octo­ber at the sug­ges­tion of Karl Rove alleged­ly assured its mem­bers that Supreme Court nom­i­nee Har­ri­et Miers would vote to over­turn Roe v. Wade.

    Some­time in the mid-80s, Tim LaHaye was on an air­plane when he noticed that the pilot, who hap­pened to be wear­ing a wed­ding ring, was flirt­ing with an attrac­tive flight atten­dant, who was not. LaHaye asked him­self what would hap­pen to the poor unsaved man if the long-await­ed Rap­ture were to tran­spire at that pre­cise moment.

    Soon, LaHaye’s agent dug up Jer­ry Jenk­ins, a writer-at-large for the Moody Bible Insti­tute and the author of more than 150 books, many on sports and reli­gion. In exchange for shared billing, Jenk­ins signed on to do the actu­al writ­ing of the “Left Behind” series—a mul­ti-vol­ume apoc­a­lyp­tic fan­ta­sy thriller com­posed in the breezy, fast-paced style of air­port bodice rip­pers but based on bib­li­cal prophe­cy.

    The first vol­ume, Left Behind, begins with a vari­a­tion of what LaHaye observed in real life. While pilot­ing his 747 to London’s Heathrow Air­port, Cap­tain Ray­ford Steele decides he’s had just about enough of his wife’s infu­ri­at­ing reli­gios­i­ty. Thanks to Chris­t­ian influ­ences, she now believes in the Rap­ture. He puts the plane on autopi­lot and leaves the cock­pit to flirt with a “drop-dead gor­geous” flight atten­dant named Hat­tie Durham.

    But Hat­tie advis­es him that dozens of pas­sen­gers have sud­den­ly and mys­te­ri­ous­ly van­ished. They have left behind their clothes, eye­glass­es, jew­el­ry, even their hear­ing aids.

    The Rap­ture has come. Mil­lions of Chris­tians who have accept­ed Christ as their savior—including Ray­ford Steele’s wife and young son—have been caught up into heav­en to meet Him. Left behind are the vast armies of the Antichrist—those ungod­ly, evo­lu­tion­ist, pro-abor­tion sec­u­lar humanists—and a small­er group of peo­ple like Steele, who are just begin­ning to see that Christ is the answer.

    So begin the sev­en years of Tribu­la­tion fore­cast in the book of Rev­e­la­tion. Ray­ford Steele and his band of Tribu­la­tion war­riors are most­ly ordi­nary folks right out of the heartland—not unlike the par­tic­i­pants in LaHaye and Frazier’s tour of Israel. Doubters no more, they begin to form the Tribu­la­tion Force, to take on the armies of the Antichrist and win redemp­tion.

    Soon, the Force learns that the Antichrist is none oth­er than Nico­lae Carpathia, the daz­zling­ly charm­ing sec­re­tary-gen­er­al of the Unit­ed Nations and Peo­ple magazine’s “Sex­i­est Man Alive.” Carpathia turns the U.N. into a one-world gov­ern­ment with one glob­al cur­ren­cy and one reli­gious order. Try as they might, the Force can’t stop him from killing bil­lions by bomb­ing New York, Los Ange­les, Lon­don, Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and sev­er­al oth­er cities, or from estab­lish­ing him­self as dic­ta­tor and implant­i­ng biochips that scar mil­lions of peo­ple with the num­ber of the beast.

    In fact, Carpathia and his Uni­ty Army seem all but unstop­pable until Glo­ri­ous Appear­ing, the last vol­ume in the series, when it becomes clear that God has anoth­er plan—the Sec­ond Com­ing of Jesus. The bat­tles between the forces of Christ and of the Antichrist begin in Jor­dan, with Carpathia urg­ing his troops to attack, only to be con­front­ed with the ulti­mate deus ex machi­na: “Heav­en opened and there, on a white horse, sat Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the liv­ing God.… Jesus’ eyes shone with con­vic­tion like a flame of fire, and He held His majes­tic head high.… On His robe at the thigh a name was writ­ten: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.”

    LaHaye is not the first author to cash in on the apoc­a­lypse. Hal Lindsey’s 1970 Chris­t­ian End Times book, The Late Great Plan­et Earth, which pre­dict­ed that the world would come to an end around 1988, was the No. 1 non­fic­tion best-sell­er of the 70s. Nev­er­the­less, LaHaye, Jenk­ins, and their apt­ly named lit­er­ary agent, Rick Chris­t­ian, had a tough time inter­est­ing pub­lish­ers in their con­cept. Final­ly, LaHaye’s non­fic­tion pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny, Tyn­dale House, put up $50,000, boast­ing that it could mar­ket the book well enough to sell half a mil­lion copies.

    Kick­ing off the series in 1995, as the mil­len­ni­um clock ran down, pro­vid­ed a con­ve­nient mar­ket­ing device. Accord­ing to The Wash­ing­ton Post, by 2001, 27 mil­lion copies of “Left Behind” books had been sold, along with 10 mil­lion relat­ed prod­ucts such as post­cards and wall­pa­per. Thanks to the astound­ing growth of Evan­gel­i­cal­ism in Amer­i­ca, even the unevent­ful pass­ing of the mil­len­ni­um failed to damp­en sales, which increased so greatly—to a pace of 1.5 mil­lion copies a month—that the series, orig­i­nal­ly planned to be 7 books, was extend­ed to 12. By now, accord­ing to Busi­ness­Week, the “Left Behind” series has brought in more than $650 mil­lion to the Illi­nois-based Tyn­dale House, the largest pri­vate­ly owned Chris­t­ian pub­lish­er in the coun­try. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, LaHaye has sought to extend his brand with children’s ver­sions, a pre­quel (The Ris­ing) writ­ten with Jenk­ins, and a new series, “Baby­lon Ris­ing,” about an Indi­ana Jones–like hero who uncov­ers the secrets of bib­li­cal prophe­cies.

    When Jer­ry Fal­well reflects on the past 25 years, even he is astound­ed at how far the Chris­t­ian right has come. “I was not at all sure in 1979 when I start­ed Moral Major­i­ty that we real­ly could make a dif­fer­ence. But I knew we had to try,” he says. “A quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry lat­er, I’m amazed at how a huge nation like Amer­i­ca could be so affect­ed and even turned around by the New Tes­ta­ment Church.

    “We’re gain­ing ground every time the sun shines. I don’t think this phe­nom­e­non is crest­ing, because there is a spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing in Amer­i­ca right now.”

    When he start­ed out, Fal­well recalls, he was thrilled if 35 peo­ple came to church and left more than $100 on his offer­ing plate. Today, rev­enue at his Thomas Road Bap­tist Church tops $200 mil­lion a year—and is like­ly to exceed $400 mil­lion in the near future.

    The evan­gel­i­cal mar­ket is so big now that main­stream cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca doesn’t dare ignore it. The Pur­pose-Dri­ven Life, by Cal­i­for­nia pas­tor Rick War­ren, pub­lished in 2002, has already sold 23 mil­lion copies, mak­ing it the fastest-sell­ing non­fic­tion book of all time. Now reli­gion is the hottest cat­e­go­ry in pub­lish­ing, bring­ing in more than $3 bil­lion a year. Time Warn­er, Ran­dom House, and Harper­Collins have all put togeth­er reli­gious imprints. There are more than 2,000 Chris­t­ian radio sta­tions. Chris­t­ian music now out­sells all clas­si­cal and jazz releas­es com­bined. The EMI Group and Sony BMG Music Enter­tain­ment have acquired reli­gious labels.

    And the peak is nowhere in sight. “This is just the begin­ning,” says Tim LaHaye. “Now we have media like we’ve nev­er had before—alternative media, the Inter­net, and Fox News.”

    Through­out Amer­i­ca, espe­cial­ly the South, a mas­sive, ful­ly devel­oped sub­cul­ture has emerged. In Greenville, South Car­oli­na, more than 700 church­es serve just 56,000 peo­ple. On a high­way not far from town, a bill­board reads, LET’S MEET ON SUNDAY AT MY HOUSE BEFORE THE GAME. —GOD.

    And it’s not about just going to church. There are movie nights for Chris­tians, sum­mer camps for Chris­t­ian kids, Chris­t­ian “pok­er runs,” Chris­t­ian mar­riage-coun­sel­ing ses­sions, Chris­t­ian Caribbean vaca­tions, Chris­t­ian spe­cial­ty stores, and Chris­t­ian min­istries for sin­gles, seniors, and the divorced.

    “It plays exact­ly the same role in shap­ing your beliefs that the coun­ter­cul­ture of the 60s did for the left,” says a for­mer Evan­gel­i­cal. “Polit­i­cal­ly, you end up vot­ing for that which rein­forces your belief sys­tem. How you will appear in the eyes of the God you believe in—that’s your anchor.”

    It is an insu­lar world that is almost com­plete­ly seg­re­gat­ed from the sec­u­lar world, includ­ing the main­stream media. “No one in our fam­i­ly read news­pa­pers,” says anoth­er for­mer Evan­gel­i­cal, who left her church in Yuba City, Cal­i­for­nia, and even­tu­al­ly moved to New York. “Grow­ing up, our only source of infor­ma­tion in my life was the pas­tor. We believed in what God had told him to say because we were chil­dren, and he was our shep­herd, and he had been cho­sen by God.”

    A cru­cial part of that the­ol­o­gy dic­tates a love for Israel, an affec­tion based on faith more than on infor­ma­tion. “When I grew up, I did not know Jews walked the face of the earth,” she says. “I thought they lived only in bib­li­cal times. They were my broth­ers and sis­ters in the Lord, but I didn’t know they still exist­ed.”

    That love of Israel is some­times accom­pa­nied by racist hatred of Arabs. On sev­er­al occa­sions, an Israeli guide on LaHaye and Frazier’s tour told the group that Arabs “breed like fleas” and would soon be forced into the desert. LaHaye’s fol­low­ers respond­ed with warm laugh­ter and applause.

    From Israel’s point of view, there are many rea­sons to wel­come Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cals, regard­less of how well-informed they may be. Tourism is one. Last year, 400,000 Chris­t­ian tourists vis­it­ed Israel, where they spent more than $1.4 bil­lion. “Dur­ing the intifa­da, loy­al Chris­tians still came as tourists. We have to go to the grass roots. It is so impor­tant to make them lovers of Israel,” says Ben­ny Elon, Ortho­dox leader of the right-wing Nation­al Union, for­mer tourism min­is­ter, and a fre­quent guest of the Chris­t­ian Coalition’s in the U.S.

    And giv­en that there are more than 10 times as many Evan­gel­i­cals in Amer­i­ca as Jews, it is under­stand­able that Israel might seek their polit­i­cal sup­port. “Israel’s rela­tion­ship with Amer­i­ca can’t be built only on the AIPAC [Amer­i­can Israel Pub­lic Affairs Com­mit­tee] and the 2.5 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion in Amer­i­ca who are Jews,” says Elon.

    “When Israel enjoys sup­port because it is the land of the Bible, why should we reject that?” adds Uzi Arad, who served as for­eign-pol­i­cy advis­er to for­mer prime min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu and now heads the Insti­tute for Pol­i­cy and Strat­e­gy, a think tank in Her­zliya, Israel. “Whether it is because of expe­di­en­cy or because on some lev­el we may be soul­mates, each side offers the oth­er some­thing they want. And the Chris­t­ian right is a polit­i­cal force to be reck­oned with in Amer­i­ca.”

    But Evan­gel­i­cals have also played a role in dis­rupt­ing the peace process. “I was ambas­sador for four years of the peace process, and the Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists were vehe­ment­ly opposed to the peace process,” says Ita­mar Rabi­novich, who served as Israeli ambas­sador to the U.S. between 1993 and 1996, under the Labor gov­ern­ments of Rabin and Shi­mon Peres. “They believed that the land belonged to Israel as a mat­ter of divine right. So they imme­di­ate­ly became part of a cam­paign by the Israeli right to under­mine the peace process.”

    No one played that card more force­ful­ly than Ben­jamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who as prime min­is­ter used the Chris­t­ian right to fend off pres­sure from the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion to pro­ceed with the peace process.

    On a vis­it to Wash­ing­ton, D.C., in 1998, Netanyahu hooked up with Jer­ry Fal­well at the Mayflower Hotel the night before his sched­uled meet­ing with Clin­ton.

    “I put togeth­er 1,000 peo­ple or so to meet with Bibi and he spoke to us that night,” recalls Fal­well. “It was all planned by Netanyahu as an affront to Mr. Clin­ton.”

    That evening, Fal­well promised Netanyahu that he would mobi­lize pas­tors all over the coun­try to resist the return of parts of the occu­pied West Bank ter­ri­to­ry to the Pales­tini­ans. Tel­e­van­ge­list John Hagee, who gave $1 mil­lion to the Unit­ed Jew­ish Appeal the fol­low­ing month, told the crowd that the Jew­ish return to the Holy Land sig­naled the “rapid­ly approach­ing … final moments of his­to­ry,” then brought them to a fren­zy chant­i­ng, “Not one inch!”—a ref­er­ence to how much of the West Bank should be trans­ferred to Pales­tin­ian con­trol.

    The next day, Netanyahu met with Clin­ton at the White House. “Bibi told me lat­er,” Fal­well recalls, “that the next morn­ing Bill Clin­ton said, ‘I know where you were last night.’ The pres­sure was real­ly on Netanyahu to give away the farm in Israel. It was dur­ing the Mon­i­ca Lewin­sky scan­dal.… Clin­ton had to save him­self, so he ter­mi­nat­ed the demands [to relin­quish West Bank ter­ri­to­ry] that would have been forth­com­ing dur­ing that meet­ing, and would have been very bad for Israel.”

    In the end, no one played a big­ger role in thwart­ing the prospect for peace than the Pales­tin­ian leader, Yass­er Arafat, who reject­ed a deal with Netanyahu’s suc­ces­sor, Ehud Barak, in 2000. In gen­er­al, the Chris­t­ian right has not gone to the mat to fight a two-state solu­tion to the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. But when the peace process final­ly resumed dur­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, the Chris­t­ian right made cer­tain its the­ol­o­gy was not ignored. In March 2004, accord­ing to The Vil­lage Voice, a del­e­ga­tion from the Apos­tolic Con­gress, a reli­gious group that believes in the Rap­ture, met with Elliott Abrams, then the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Council’s senior direc­tor for Near East and North African affairs, to dis­cuss its con­cern that Israel’s dis­en­gage­ment from Gaza would vio­late God’s covenant with Israel. As it hap­pens, Netanyahu, for non-the­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, shared the Chris­t­ian right’s con­cern about the Gaza pull­out to such an extent that he resigned from Sharon’s cab­i­net last sum­mer and has vowed to chal­lenge him for the prime minister’s post.

    But this intru­sion of End Times the­ol­o­gy is of deep con­cern to Israelis who are not as hawk­ish as Netanyahu. “This is incred­i­bly dan­ger­ous to Israel,” says Ger­shom Goren­berg, a Jerusalem-based jour­nal­ist and the author of The End of Days, a chron­i­cle of mes­sian­ic Chris­tians and Jews and their strug­gle with Mus­lim fun­da­men­tal­ists over the Tem­ple Mount. “They’re not inter­est­ed in the sur­vival of the State of Israel. They are inter­est­ed in the Rap­ture, in bring­ing to fruition a cos­mic myth of the End Times, prov­ing that they are right with one big bang. We are mere­ly actors in their dreams. LaHaye’s vision is that Jews will con­vert or die and go to hell. If you read his books, he is look­ing for­ward to war. He is not an ally in the safe­ty of Israel.

    Far from being a Prince of Peace, the Christ depict­ed in the “Left Behind” series is a venge­ful Messiah—so venge­ful that the death and destruc­tion he caus­es to uncon­vert­ed Jews, to sec­u­lar­ists, to any­one who is not born again, is far, far greater than the crimes com­mit­ted by the most bru­tal dic­ta­tors in human his­to­ry. When He arrives on the scene in Glo­ri­ous Appear­ing, Christ mere­ly has to speak and “men and women, sol­diers and hors­es, seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had super­heat­ed their blood, caus­ing it to burst through their veins and skin.” Soon, LaHaye and Jenk­ins write, tens of thou­sands of foot sol­diers for the Antichrist are dying in the gori­est man­ner imag­in­able, their inter­nal organs ooz­ing out, “their blood pool­ing and ris­ing in the unfor­giv­ing bright­ness of the glo­ry of Christ.”

    After the ini­tial blood­let­ting, Nico­lae Carpathia gath­ers his still-vast army, cov­er­ing hun­dreds of square miles, and pre­pares for the con­flict at Megid­do. As the bat­tle for Armaged­don is about to start, Ray­ford Steele climbs atop his Hum­mer to watch Christ har­vest the grapes of wrath. Steele looks at the hordes of sol­diers assem­bled by the Antichrist, and “tens of thou­sands burst open at the words of Jesus.” They scream in pain and die before hit­ting the ground, their blood pour­ing forth. Soon, a mas­sive riv­er of blood is flow­ing through­out the Holy Land. Carpathia and the False Prophet are cast into the eter­nal lake of fire.

    Accord­ing to LaHaye and Jenk­ins, it is God’s intent “that the mil­len­ni­um start with a clean slate.” Com­mit­ting mass mur­der hun­dreds of times greater than the Holo­caust, the Lord—not the Antichrist, mind you—makes sure that “all unbe­liev­ers would soon die.”

    One of Steele’s col­leagues decides he’ll have to talk to God about what to do next. After all, now that the sec­u­lar human­ists are gone and only believ­ers remain, Amer­i­ca is a very, very sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed coun­try. But if enough peo­ple are left, he won­ders, isn’t this the per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty “to start rebuild­ing the coun­try as, final­ly for real, a Chris­t­ian nation?”

    ———–

    “Amer­i­can Rap­ture” By Craig Unger; Van­i­ty Fair; 01/01/2007

    As befits the man­i­festo of a coun­ter­cul­ture, the “Left Behind” series is a revenge fan­ta­sy, in which right-wing Chris­tians win out over the ratio­nal, sci­en­tif­ic, mod­ern, post-Enlight­en­ment world. The books rep­re­sent the apoth­e­o­sis of a cul­ture that is wag­ing war against lib­er­als, gays, Mus­lims, Arabs, the U.N., and “mil­i­tant sec­u­lar­ists” of all stripes—whom it accus­es of destroy­ing Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca, mur­der­ing mil­lions of unborn chil­dren, assault­ing the Chris­t­ian fam­i­ly by pro­mot­ing promis­cu­ity and homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, and dri­ving Christ out of the pub­lic square.”

    They aren’t just fun bib­li­cal­ly inspired sto­ries. The Left Behind series is a far right revenge fan­ta­sy. One where God purges vir­tu­al­ly all of the groups per­ceived as ene­mies of right-wing Chris­tian­i­ty. And at the heart of this revenge fan­ta­sy is vio­lent con­fla­gra­tion that will take place in Israel, but only after the Tem­ple on the Mount is rebuilt. A bat­tle that will con­sume the entire Mid­dle East as a “Greater Israel” com­prised of all or parts of Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syr­ia is estab­lished. It’s a reli­gious revenge fan­ta­sy with poten­tial­ly mas­sive real-world impli­ca­tions:

    ...
    It’s a coun­ter­cul­ture that sees Jews as key play­ers in a Chris­t­ian mes­sian­ic dra­ma, a premise that has led to a remark­able alliance between Chris­t­ian Evan­gel­i­cals and the Israeli right. As a result, polit­i­cal views drawn from an apoc­a­lyp­tic vision—once dis­missed as extrem­ist and delusional—have not mere­ly swept mass cul­ture but have shaped the polit­i­cal dis­course all the way to Jerusalem and the White House. And if they are tak­en too seri­ous­ly, the geopo­lit­i­cal con­se­quences could be cat­a­stroph­ic.

    The city of Jerusalem has a pro­found sig­nif­i­cance in the tra­di­tions of Judaism, Chris­tian­i­ty, and Islam. And to all three reli­gions no place in Jerusalem is more full of apoc­a­lyp­tic and mes­sian­ic mean­ing than the Tem­ple Mount—the mas­sive, 144,000-square-meter plat­form, 32 meters high, built by King Herod as a base for the biggest and most grandiose reli­gious mon­u­ment in the world, the shin­ing white stone Tem­ple of the Jews.

    To Jews, the Tem­ple Mount marks the holy of holies, the sacred core of the Tem­ple, where Jews wor­shipped for cen­turies. Beneath it, Ortho­dox Jews believe, is the foun­da­tion stone of the entire world. The Mount is the dis­put­ed piece of land over which Cain slew Abel. It is where Abra­ham took his son, Isaac, when God asked him to sac­ri­fice the boy. At its out­er perime­ter is the West­ern Wall, or Wail­ing Wall, where Jews wor­ship today. And mes­sian­ic Jews believe the Mount is where the Tem­ple must be rebuilt for the com­ing Mes­si­ah.

    To Chris­tians, the Tem­ple is where Jesus threw out the mon­ey chang­ers. Its destruc­tion by the Romans in 70 A.D. came to sym­bol­ize the birth of Chris­tian­i­ty, when a new Tem­ple of Jesus, eter­nal and divine, replaced the earth­ly Tem­ple made and destroyed by men.

    And to Mus­lims the Tem­ple Mount’s Dome of the Rock is where Muham­mad ascend­ed to heav­en near­ly 1,400 years ago, mak­ing it the third-holi­est site in Islam, behind Mec­ca and Med­i­na.

    After its vic­to­ry over Arab forces in the Six-Day War, in June 1967, Israel briefly seized the Tem­ple Mount, there­by real­iz­ing the dream of restor­ing Judaism’s holi­est place to the Jew­ish peo­ple. But Moshe Dayan, the ven­er­at­ed Israeli defense min­is­ter who won the bat­tle, soon vol­un­tar­i­ly relin­quished con­trol of it to the Waqf, a Mus­lim admin­is­tra­tive body.

    Over the next gen­er­a­tion, some 250,000 most­ly Ortho­dox Jews, cit­ing God’s promise to Abra­ham in Genesis—“all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever”—moved into West Bank ter­ri­to­ries occu­pied by Israel after the 1967 war, and vowed to keep the gov­ern­ment from giv­ing the land back to the Pales­tini­ans.

    Since Dayan’s his­toric deci­sion, Mus­lim author­i­ties have usu­al­ly allowed non-Mus­lims to come to the Tem­ple Mount, as long as they don’t move their lips in ways that sug­gest they are pray­ing. As a result, the Tem­ple Mount is one of the most explo­sive tin­der­box­es on earth. A vis­it to the site in Sep­tem­ber 2000 by Ariel Sharon inflamed ten­sions that soon erupt­ed into the sec­ond intifa­da.

    To evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians, the Mount is an ele­men­tal part of mes­sian­ic the­ol­o­gy, because a com­plete restora­tion of the nation of Israel, includ­ing the rebuild­ing of the Tem­ple and the reclaim­ing of Judea and Samaria, is a pre­req­ui­site to the Sec­ond Com­ing of Christ. Like­wise, to Ortho­dox Jews, noth­ing is more impor­tant to their mes­sian­ic vision than reclaim­ing the Tem­ple Mount and rebuild­ing the Temple—yet no sin­gle event is more like­ly to pro­voke a cat­a­stro­phe.

    ...

    More­over, a poten­tial attack on the Tem­ple Mount, as dis­as­trous as it would be, pales in com­par­i­son to the long-term geopo­lit­i­cal goals of some right-wing reli­gious groups. Ortho­dox Jews, Chris­t­ian Evan­gel­i­cals, and the heroes of the “Left Behind” series share a belief that the land bor­dered by the Nile and Euphrates Rivers and the Mediter­ranean Sea and the wilder­ness of Jor­dan has been covenant­ed to Israel by God. Tak­en to its lit­er­al extreme, this belief oblig­es Israel not only to retain con­trol of Gaza and the West Bank but also to annex all or parts of Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syr­ia. Such a cam­paign of con­quest would be cer­tain to pro­voke a spec­tac­u­lar con­flict.
    ...

    Nor is it a hypo­thet­i­cal as to whether or not the pow­er­ful Evan­gel­i­cal lob­by would play a spoil­er role in any attempts to arrive at a peace set­tle­ment that might avoid this revenge fan­ta­sy sce­nario. Evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers like promi­nent Chris­t­ian Zion­ist John Hagee and Jer­ry Fal­well helped ral­ly sup­port for Ben­jamin Netanyahu’s 1998 oppo­si­tion to the peace plan. And then again, in 2004, we have del­e­ga­tion from the Apos­tolic Con­gress — a Chris­t­ian Zion­ist group that believes in the Rap­ture — met with Elliott Abrams to express express its con­cern that Israel’s dis­en­gage­ment from Gaza would vio­late God’s covenant with Israel:

    ...
    It is an insu­lar world that is almost com­plete­ly seg­re­gat­ed from the sec­u­lar world, includ­ing the main­stream media. “No one in our fam­i­ly read news­pa­pers,” says anoth­er for­mer Evan­gel­i­cal, who left her church in Yuba City, Cal­i­for­nia, and even­tu­al­ly moved to New York. “Grow­ing up, our only source of infor­ma­tion in my life was the pas­tor. We believed in what God had told him to say because we were chil­dren, and he was our shep­herd, and he had been cho­sen by God.”

    A cru­cial part of that the­ol­o­gy dic­tates a love for Israel, an affec­tion based on faith more than on infor­ma­tion. “When I grew up, I did not know Jews walked the face of the earth,” she says. “I thought they lived only in bib­li­cal times. They were my broth­ers and sis­ters in the Lord, but I didn’t know they still exist­ed.”

    That love of Israel is some­times accom­pa­nied by racist hatred of Arabs. On sev­er­al occa­sions, an Israeli guide on LaHaye and Frazier’s tour told the group that Arabs “breed like fleas” and would soon be forced into the desert. LaHaye’s fol­low­ers respond­ed with warm laugh­ter and applause.

    ...

    But Evan­gel­i­cals have also played a role in dis­rupt­ing the peace process. “I was ambas­sador for four years of the peace process, and the Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists were vehe­ment­ly opposed to the peace process,” says Ita­mar Rabi­novich, who served as Israeli ambas­sador to the U.S. between 1993 and 1996, under the Labor gov­ern­ments of Rabin and Shi­mon Peres. “They believed that the land belonged to Israel as a mat­ter of divine right. So they imme­di­ate­ly became part of a cam­paign by the Israeli right to under­mine the peace process.”

    No one played that card more force­ful­ly than Ben­jamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who as prime min­is­ter used the Chris­t­ian right to fend off pres­sure from the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion to pro­ceed with the peace process.

    On a vis­it to Wash­ing­ton, D.C., in 1998, Netanyahu hooked up with Jer­ry Fal­well at the Mayflower Hotel the night before his sched­uled meet­ing with Clin­ton.

    “I put togeth­er 1,000 peo­ple or so to meet with Bibi and he spoke to us that night,” recalls Fal­well. “It was all planned by Netanyahu as an affront to Mr. Clin­ton.”

    That evening, Fal­well promised Netanyahu that he would mobi­lize pas­tors all over the coun­try to resist the return of parts of the occu­pied West Bank ter­ri­to­ry to the Pales­tini­ans. Tel­e­van­ge­list John Hagee, who gave $1 mil­lion to the Unit­ed Jew­ish Appeal the fol­low­ing month, told the crowd that the Jew­ish return to the Holy Land sig­naled the “rapid­ly approach­ing … final moments of his­to­ry,” then brought them to a fren­zy chant­i­ng, “Not one inch!”—a ref­er­ence to how much of the West Bank should be trans­ferred to Pales­tin­ian con­trol.

    The next day, Netanyahu met with Clin­ton at the White House. “Bibi told me lat­er,” Fal­well recalls, “that the next morn­ing Bill Clin­ton said, ‘I know where you were last night.’ The pres­sure was real­ly on Netanyahu to give away the farm in Israel. It was dur­ing the Mon­i­ca Lewin­sky scan­dal.… Clin­ton had to save him­self, so he ter­mi­nat­ed the demands [to relin­quish West Bank ter­ri­to­ry] that would have been forth­com­ing dur­ing that meet­ing, and would have been very bad for Israel.”

    In the end, no one played a big­ger role in thwart­ing the prospect for peace than the Pales­tin­ian leader, Yass­er Arafat, who reject­ed a deal with Netanyahu’s suc­ces­sor, Ehud Barak, in 2000. In gen­er­al, the Chris­t­ian right has not gone to the mat to fight a two-state solu­tion to the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. But when the peace process final­ly resumed dur­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion, the Chris­t­ian right made cer­tain its the­ol­o­gy was not ignored. In March 2004, accord­ing to The Vil­lage Voice, a del­e­ga­tion from the Apos­tolic Con­gress, a reli­gious group that believes in the Rap­ture, met with Elliott Abrams, then the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Council’s senior direc­tor for Near East and North African affairs, to dis­cuss its con­cern that Israel’s dis­en­gage­ment from Gaza would vio­late God’s covenant with Israel. As it hap­pens, Netanyahu, for non-the­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, shared the Chris­t­ian right’s con­cern about the Gaza pull­out to such an extent that he resigned from Sharon’s cab­i­net last sum­mer and has vowed to chal­lenge him for the prime minister’s post.

    But this intru­sion of End Times the­ol­o­gy is of deep con­cern to Israelis who are not as hawk­ish as Netanyahu. “This is incred­i­bly dan­ger­ous to Israel,” says Ger­shom Goren­berg, a Jerusalem-based jour­nal­ist and the author of The End of Days, a chron­i­cle of mes­sian­ic Chris­tians and Jews and their strug­gle with Mus­lim fun­da­men­tal­ists over the Tem­ple Mount. “They’re not inter­est­ed in the sur­vival of the State of Israel. They are inter­est­ed in the Rap­ture, in bring­ing to fruition a cos­mic myth of the End Times, prov­ing that they are right with one big bang. We are mere­ly actors in their dreams. LaHaye’s vision is that Jews will con­vert or die and go to hell. If you read his books, he is look­ing for­ward to war. He is not an ally in the safe­ty of Israel.
    ...

    Impor­tant­ly, this rela­tion­ship between the right-wig Chris­t­ian lead­er­ship in the US and the Israel hard right goes back to the 1970s, right around the same time the US Evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty was becom­ing a high­ly polit­i­cal­ly active demo­graph­ic. In oth­er words, you can’t real­ly sep­a­rate the con­tem­po­rary polit­i­cal­ly charged con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty in the US from this spe­cial rela­tion­ship with the Israeli hard right. A spe­cial rela­tion­ship pred­i­cat­ed on the ful­fill­ment of the End Times and the ulti­mate destruc­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple. Jer­ry Fal­well, Pat Robert­son, and Tim LeHaye were key founders of this move­ment and all deeply devot­ed to the same End Times-cen­tric Chris­t­ian Zion­ist the­ol­o­gy. A the­ol­o­gy that does­n’t just assume the Jew­ish peo­ple will be destroyed dur­ing the End Times but tasks Chris­tians with help­ing to bring these events to fruition:

    ...
    The spe­cial polit­i­cal rela­tion­ship between the Israeli right and Evan­gel­i­cals dates back to 1977, when, after three decades of Labor rule in Israel, Men­achem Begin became the first prime min­is­ter from the con­ser­v­a­tive Likud Par­ty. A roman­tic nation­al­ist and seri­ous bib­li­cal schol­ar, Begin point­ed­ly referred to the lands of the West Bank by their bib­li­cal names of Judea and Samaria, and he reached out to Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cals at a time when they were just com­ing out of a polit­i­cal hiber­na­tion that dat­ed back to the Scopes tri­al of 1925 and Pro­hi­bi­tion. “The prime min­is­ter said a per­son who has got the Bible in his home and reads it and believes it can­not be a bad per­son,” recalls Yechiel Kadishai, a long­time per­son­al aide to Begin. “He said the Evan­gel­i­cals have to know that we are root­ed in this piece of land. There should be an under­stand­ing between us and them.” One of the first peo­ple Begin sought out was Jer­ry Fal­well, who was achiev­ing nation­al recog­ni­tion through his grow­ing tele­vi­sion min­istry.

    In 1980, Begin pre­sent­ed Fal­well with the pres­ti­gious Jabotin­sky Award, gave his min­istry a pri­vate jet, and shared vital state secrets with the tel­e­van­ge­list. Begin even called him before bomb­ing Iraq’s Osir­ak nuclear reac­tor, in June 1981. “He said, ‘Tomor­row you’re going to read some strong things about what we are going to do. But our safe­ty is at stake,’” Fal­well recalls. “He said, ‘I want­ed you, my good friend, to know what we are going to do.’ And, sure enough, they put one down the chim­ney.”

    In the ear­ly days of his min­istry, Fal­well, like oth­er Evan­gel­i­cals, had made a pol­i­cy of not mix­ing reli­gion and pol­i­tics at all—much less on a glob­al scale. “I had been taught in the sem­i­nary that reli­gion and pol­i­tics don’t mix,” he says. “Con­ser­v­a­tive the­olo­gians were absolute­ly con­vinced that the pul­pit should be devot­ed to prayer, preach­ing, and exclu­sive­ly to spir­i­tu­al min­istry.

    “But in the 60s the U.S. Supreme Court had decid­ed to remove God from the pub­lic square, begin­ning with the school-prayer issue. Then, in 1973, the Supreme Court had ruled 7‑to‑2 in favor of abor­tion on demand. And I won­dered, ‘What can I do?’”

    Sev­er­al years lat­er, Fal­well got a call from Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer. An elec­tri­fy­ing Pres­by­ter­ian evan­ge­list and author, Scha­ef­fer is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant reli­gious fig­ure that sec­u­lar Amer­i­ca has nev­er heard of. Wide­ly regard­ed by Evan­gel­i­cals as one of their lead­ing the­olo­gians of the 20th cen­tu­ry, Scha­ef­fer, who died in 1984, was to the Chris­t­ian right what Marx was to Marx­ism, what Freud was to psy­cho­analy­sis. “There is no ques­tion in my mind that with­out Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer the reli­gious right would not exist today,” says Fal­well. “He was the prophet of the mod­ern-day faith-and-val­ues move­ment.”

    A pow­er­ful influ­ence on Fal­well, LaHaye, Pat Robert­son, and many oth­ers, Scha­ef­fer assert­ed in the wake of Roe v. Wade that Evan­gel­i­cal­ism could no longer pas­sive­ly accom­mo­date itself to the deca­dent val­ues of the sec­u­lar-human­ist world, now that it had sanc­tioned the mur­der of unborn babies. Almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly, he prod­ded Evan­gel­i­cals out of the pul­pit and into a full-scale cul­tur­al war with the sec­u­lar world. “I was in search of a scrip­tur­al way that I, as pas­tor of a very large church, could address the moral and social issues fac­ing Amer­i­can cul­ture,” Fal­well says. “Dr. Scha­ef­fer shat­tered that world of iso­la­tion for me, telling me that, while I was preach­ing a very clear gospel mes­sage, I was avoid­ing 50 per­cent of my min­istry.… He began teach­ing me that I had a respon­si­bil­i­ty to con­front the cul­ture where it was fail­ing moral­ly and social­ly.”

    In 1979, Fal­well was still “look­ing for a plan to mobi­lize peo­ple of faith in this coun­try” when Tim LaHaye, then a pas­tor in San Diego, called him. LaHaye had just found­ed Cal­i­for­ni­ans for Bib­li­cal Moral­i­ty, a coali­tion of right-wing pas­tors who fought against gay rights and even sought to ban the fan­ta­sy game Dun­geons & Drag­ons in a Glen­do­ra com­mu­ni­ty col­lege on the grounds that it was an “occult” game.

    When he vis­it­ed San Diego, Fal­well was impressed with how LaHaye had orga­nized the pas­tors to con­front the state gov­ern­ment on moral and social issues. “When he told me how he did it, I won­dered why we couldn’t do it on a nation­al basis,” says Fal­well.

    And so, in 1979, Fal­well launched the Moral Major­i­ty with LaHaye and oth­er lead­ing fun­da­men­tal­ist strate­gists to lob­by for prayer and the teach­ing of cre­ation­ism in pub­lic schools and against gay rights, abor­tion, and the Equal Rights Amend­ment. LaHaye’s wife, Bev­er­ly, also entered the fray that year by found­ing Con­cerned Women for Amer­i­ca, to “bring bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples into all lev­els of pub­lic pol­i­cy” and oppose the “anti-mar­riage, anti-fam­i­ly, anti-chil­dren, anti-man” fem­i­nism put forth by the Nation­al Orga­ni­za­tion for Women.
    ...

    And then we get to the for­mal chris­ten­ing of the hyper-politi­ciza­tion of this grow­ing Chris­t­ian move­ment: the cre­ation of the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy in 1981, where theocrats, busi­ness titans, and politi­cians can qui­et­ly get togeth­er and for­mu­late a joint strat­e­gy. A joint strat­e­gy that includes some sort of End Times con­fla­gra­tion, as evi­denced by the inclu­sion of Pat Robert­son, Jer­ry Fal­well, and Tim and Bev­er­ly LaHaye as found­ing mem­bers. In fact, Tim LaHaye served as the CNP’s first pres­i­dent from 1981–82, and Robert­son served as Pres­i­dent from 1985–86. It’s worth noth­ing oth­er CNP mem­bers with ties to this net­work of extrem­ist min­is­ters includes Dr. Jan­ice Shaw Crouse (Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Bev­er­ly LaHaye Insti­tute), Eliz­a­beth R. Waller (Research Fel­low, Bev­er­ly LaHaye Insti­tute). So when we com­ments from Fal­well about how he was part of the CNP’s elite “Arling­ton Group” that was reg­u­lar­ly meet­ing with the George W. Bush White House, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that these End Times min­is­ters have been play­ing key lead­er­ship roles in the CNP from its very con­cep­tion:

    ...
    Like Schaeffer’s writ­ings, LaHaye’s book went large­ly unno­ticed by the sec­u­lar world, but the Chris­t­ian right hearti­ly embraced its dec­la­ra­tion of war against sec­u­lar­ism. Pres­by­ter­ian tel­e­van­ge­list D. James Kennedy hailed The Bat­tle for the Mind as “one of the most impor­tant books of our time.” Fal­well wrote that all Chris­tians must fol­low its tenets if Amer­i­ca is to be saved from becom­ing “anoth­er Sodom and Gomor­rah.”

    In 1981, LaHaye took up the chal­lenge, resign­ing his pas­tor­ship to devote him­self full-time to build­ing the Chris­t­ian right. He began by meet­ing with mon­eyed ultra-con­ser­v­a­tives includ­ing Nel­son Bunker Hunt, the right-wing oil bil­lion­aire from Dal­las, and T. Cullen Davis, anoth­er wealthy Texas oil­man who became a born-again Chris­t­ian after being acquit­ted of charges of mur­der­ing his wife’s lover and his step­daugh­ter.

    Though still in its infan­cy, the Moral Major­i­ty had more than sev­en mil­lion peo­ple on its mail­ing list and had already played a key role in elect­ing Ronald Rea­gan pres­i­dent. Bev­er­ly LaHaye’s Con­cerned Women for Amer­i­ca was on its way to build­ing a mem­ber­ship of 500,000 peo­ple, mak­ing her “the most pow­er­ful woman in the new reli­gious right,” accord­ing to the Hous­ton Chron­i­cle. She and her hus­band also co-authored a best-sell­ing mar­riage man­u­al for Chris­tians, The Act of Mar­riage, full of clin­i­cal advice such as the fol­low­ing: “Cun­nilin­gus and fel­la­tio have in recent years been giv­en unwar­rant­ed pub­lic­i­ty [but] the major­i­ty of cou­ples do not reg­u­lar­ly use it as a sub­sti­tute for the beau­ti­ful and con­ven­tion­al inter­ac­tion designed by our Cre­ator to be an inti­mate expres­sion of love.” And in the mid-80s, LaHaye cre­at­ed the Amer­i­can Coali­tion for Tra­di­tion­al Val­ues, which played an impor­tant role in re-elect­ing Ronald Rea­gan, in 1984. He lat­er became co-chair­man of Jack Kemp’s 1988 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign but was forced to resign when anti-Catholic state­ments he had writ­ten came to light.

    With right-wing groups expand­ing at such a dizzy­ing pace, LaHaye helped to found the Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (C.N.P.) as a low-pro­file but pow­er­ful coali­tion of bil­lion­aire indus­tri­al­ists, fun­da­men­tal­ist preach­ers, and right-wing tac­ti­cians. Fund­ed by Hunt and Davis, among oth­ers, the orga­ni­za­tion set out to cre­ate a coher­ent and dis­ci­plined strat­e­gy for the New Right.

    Though its mem­ber­ship is secret, the rolls have report­ed­ly includ­ed Fal­well and Pat Robert­son; top right-wing polit­i­cal strate­gists Richard Viguerie, Ralph Reed, and Paul Weyrich; Repub­li­can sen­a­tors Jesse Helms and Lauch Fair­cloth (both of North Car­oli­na), Don Nick­les (Okla­homa), and Trent Lott (Mis­sis­sip­pi); and Repub­li­can rep­re­sen­ta­tives Dick Armey and Tom DeLay (both of Texas). The late Rousas John Rush­doony, the right-wing the­olo­gian who hoped to recon­fig­ure the Amer­i­can legal sys­tem in accor­dance with bib­li­cal law, was said to be a mem­ber, as was John White­head of the Ruther­ford Insti­tute, who was co-coun­sel to Paula Jones in her law­suit against Bill Clin­ton.

    “Ronald Rea­gan, both George Bush­es, sen­a­tors and Cab­i­net members—you name it. There’s nobody who hasn’t been here at least once,” says Fal­well, who con­firms that he is a mem­ber. “It is a group of four or five hun­dred of the biggest con­ser­v­a­tive guns in the coun­try.”

    The C.N.P. has access to the high­est pow­ers in the land. In 1999, George W. Bush court­ed evan­gel­i­cal sup­port for his pres­i­den­tial can­di­da­cy by giv­ing a speech before the coun­cil, the tran­script of which remains a high­ly guard­ed secret. And since the start of his pres­i­den­cy, Fal­well says, the C.N.P. has enjoyed reg­u­lar access to the Oval Office. “With­in the coun­cil is a small­er group called the Arling­ton Group,” says Fal­well. “We talk to each oth­er dai­ly and meet in Wash­ing­ton prob­a­bly twice a month. We often call the White House and talk to Karl Rove while we are meet­ing. Every­one takes our calls.” Accord­ing to The Wall Street Jour­nal, two high-rank­ing Texas judges who spoke to the Arling­ton Group in Octo­ber at the sug­ges­tion of Karl Rove alleged­ly assured its mem­bers that Supreme Court nom­i­nee Har­ri­et Miers would vote to over­turn Roe v. Wade.
    ...

    Final­ly, note how this all ties back into the ongo­ing CNP-direct­ed Sched­ule F/Project 2025 plans to exe­cute mass purges of all sus­pect­ed lib­er­als from gov­ern­ment posi­tions and even­tu­al­ly even pri­vate insti­tu­tions. The Sched­ule F plot may have for­mal­ly emerged out of the Trump White House in 2019, but the idea behind it goes back to Tim LaHaye’s theo­crat­ic revenge fan­ta­sy. The purg­ing of all “sec­u­lar human­ists” from pub­lic office is a bib­li­cal man­date accord­ing to this the­ol­o­gy. Which hap­pens to be the the­ol­o­gy ani­mat­ing one of the most pow­er­ful net­works in the world:

    ...
    After grad­u­at­ing from the ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Bob Jones Uni­ver­si­ty, in Greenville, South Car­oli­na, LaHaye began preach­ing in near­by Pump­kin­town at a salary of $15 a week. For 25 years, he served as pas­tor at Scott Memo­r­i­al Bap­tist Church, in San Diego, trans­form­ing it from a con­gre­ga­tion of 275 into one with 3,000 mem­bers.

    Along the way, LaHaye avid­ly read Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer. “Scha­ef­fer taught me the dif­fer­ence between the Renais­sance and the Ref­or­ma­tion,” he says dur­ing the tour of Israel. “And you know what the dif­fer­ence is? The Renais­sance was all about the cen­tral­i­ty of man. The Ref­or­ma­tion was all about clear­ing up the ways the [Catholic] Church had mucked up Christianity—and get­ting back to the cen­tral­i­ty of God.”

    In The Bat­tle for the Mind, his 1980 homage to Scha­ef­fer, LaHaye lays out his world­view far more force­ful­ly than he does in per­son, depict­ing Amer­i­ca as a Bible-based coun­try under siege by an elite group of sec­u­lar human­ists con­spir­ing to destroy the nuclear fam­i­ly, Chris­tian­i­ty itself, and even “the entire world.” There are no shades of gray in this Manichaean tract, which asserts that sec­u­lar human­ism is “not only the world’s great­est evil but, until recent­ly, the most decep­tive of all reli­gious philoso­phies.”

    Life, LaHaye argues, has always been a bat­tle between good and evil. “The good way has always been called ‘God’s way,’” he writes, and evil has been the way of man—specifically, the post-Renais­sance, post-Enlight­en­ment world of art, sci­ence, and rea­son. And, in his view, noth­ing man has come up with is worse than sec­u­lar human­ism, which he defines as “a God­less, man-cen­tered phi­los­o­phy” that rejects tra­di­tion­al val­ues and that has “a par­tic­u­lar hatred toward Chris­tian­i­ty.”

    “LaHaye writes as if there’s a human­ist brain trust sit­ting around read­ing [Amer­i­can philoso­pher and edu­ca­tion­al reformer] John Dewey, try­ing to fig­ure out ways to destroy Chris­tian­i­ty,” says Chip Berlet, a senior ana­lyst with Polit­i­cal Research Asso­ciates and the co-author of Right-Wing Pop­ulism in Amer­i­ca: Too Close for Com­fort.

    In truth, while tens of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans might accu­rate­ly be called sec­u­lar human­ists, very few char­ac­ter­ize them­selves as mem­bers of a human­ist move­ment. But to LaHaye that only proves the devi­ous­ness of the human­ist project. Instead of open­ly advo­cat­ing their point of view, he writes, human­ists have used the mass media and Hol­ly­wood, the gov­ern­ment, acad­e­mia, and orga­ni­za­tions such as the A.C.L.U. and NOW to indoc­tri­nate unsus­pect­ing Chris­tians.

    As a result, LaHaye argues, good Evan­gel­i­cals should no longer think of human­ists as harm­less cit­i­zens who hap­pen not to attend church. In The Bat­tle for the Mind, he spells out his polit­i­cal goals: “We must remove all human­ists from pub­lic office and replace them with pro-moral polit­i­cal lead­ers.”

    “In LaHaye’s world, there are the god­ly peo­ple who are on their way to the Rap­ture,” says Berlet. “And the rest of the world is either com­plic­it with the Antichrist or, worse, active­ly assist­ing him. If you real­ly believe in End Times, you are con­stant­ly look­ing for agents of Satan. . . . [And if] polit­i­cal con­flicts are root­ed in the idea that your oppo­nent is an agent of the Dev­il, there is no com­pro­mise pos­si­ble. What decent per­son would com­pro­mise with evil? So that removes it from the demo­c­ra­t­ic process.

    “Con­ser­v­a­tive think tanks like the Her­itage Foun­da­tion want to roll back the New Deal. LaHaye wants to roll back the Enlight­en­ment.”
    ...

    We must remove all human­ists from pub­lic office and replace them with pro-moral polit­i­cal lead­ers.” Those were the words of Tim LaHaye in a book pub­lished back in 1980, who went on to become the first CNP pres­i­dent the fol­low­ing year. And here we are in 2023, with the CNP furi­ous­ly lead­ing a major orga­niz­ing effort to turn the Sched­ule F/Project 2025 plot into a real­i­ty at the ear­li­est oppor­tu­ni­ty. At the same time Israel is on the verge of mov­ing a few steps clos­er to the long-await­ed End Times con­fla­gra­tion as we wait to see whether or not the cur­rent con­flict ends up dimin­ish­ing the Israeli hard right or instead mak­ing it more pow­er­ful than ever. More pow­er­ful and there­fore more able to engage in major provo­ca­tions like the rebuild­ing of the Tem­ple Mount. The pieces are falling into place. They may not be the pieces for the actu­al­ly End Times bib­li­cal prophe­cy. But the pieces for a major esca­la­tion of glob­al tur­moil are indeed falling into place, thanks in no small part to the CNP’s net­work of lead­ing theocrats and their decades-long mis­sion to bring to spark a con­flict big enough to end the world.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 1, 2023, 2:13 am
  40. They aren’t wast­ing any time. And aren’t plan­ning on wast­ing any time either. That’s the pre­dictably dis­turb­ing update we got from the Wash­ing­ton Post about the ongo­ing Sched­ule F/Project 2025 mass purges planned for the next Repub­li­can White House. Plans for how to remove all obsta­cles to the planned purges are already under­way, with Jef­frey Clark play­ing a lead­ing role in the obsta­cle-remov­ing efforts. Efforts that will include an invo­ca­tion of the Insur­rec­tion Act, poten­tial­ly on Inau­gu­ra­tion Day. In fact, we are told the Insur­rec­tion Act pro­pos­al was iden­ti­fied in inter­nal dis­cus­sions as an imme­di­ate pri­or­i­ty.

    As the arti­cle notes, Clark already showed an open­ness to the Insur­rec­tion Act back when he was work­ing in Trump White House Jus­tice Depart­ment on the efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion. Accord­ing to a fed­er­al indict­ment, a deputy White House coun­sel warned Clark that Trump’s refus­ing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” “That’s why there’s an Insur­rec­tion Act,” Clark respond­ed Recall how Trump tried to make Clark the act­ing Attor­ney Gen­er­al in late Decem­ber of 2020.

    Amus­ing­ly, Project 2025 direc­tor Paul Dans put out a state­ment stand­ing by Clark’s involve­ment in Project 2025, declar­ing “We are grate­ful for Jeff Clark’s will­ing­ness to share his insights from hav­ing worked at high lev­els in gov­ern­ment dur­ing try­ing times.” But then after the pub­li­ca­tion of the sto­ry, a Her­itage Foun­da­tion spokesman put out a the denial that, “There are no plans with­in Project 2025 relat­ed to the Insur­rec­tion Act or tar­get­ing polit­i­cal ene­mies.” Don’t for­get that Project 2025 is being orga­nized by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion.

    So it appears that Project 2025 is work­ing on an imme­di­ate imple­men­ta­tion of the Insur­rec­tion Act once Trump takes office. And while the Her­itage Foun­da­tion is putting out belat­ed denials, we can’t say we haven’t been warned. Which, of course, is pre­sum­ably part of the whole point about the exten­sive warn­ings and updates we’ve been get­ting for years now. Updates and warn­ings that just keep get­ting more omi­nous as it becomes clear­er and clear­er how Trump is plan­ning on run­ning and win­ning with this nation­al purge as his cam­paign pledge to the vot­ers. And the full GOP estab­lish­ment is in on it, whether they are ready to pub­licly admit it or not:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Trump and allies plot revenge, Jus­tice Depart­ment con­trol in a sec­ond term

    Advis­ers have also dis­cussed deploy­ing the mil­i­tary to quell poten­tial unrest on Inau­gu­ra­tion Day. Crit­ics have called the ideas under con­sid­er­a­tion dan­ger­ous and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.

    By Isaac Arns­dorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Bar­rett
    Updat­ed Novem­ber 6, 2023 at 1:27 p.m. EST|Published Novem­ber 5, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST

    Don­ald Trump and his allies have begun map­ping out spe­cif­ic plans for using the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to pun­ish crit­ics and oppo­nents should he win a sec­ond term, with the for­mer pres­i­dent nam­ing indi­vid­u­als he wants to inves­ti­gate or pros­e­cute and his asso­ciates draft­ing plans to poten­tial­ly invoke the Insur­rec­tion Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the mil­i­tary against civ­il demon­stra­tions.

    In pri­vate, Trump has told advis­ers and friends in recent months that he wants the Jus­tice Depart­ment to inves­ti­gate one­time offi­cials and allies who have become crit­i­cal of his time in office, includ­ing his for­mer chief of staff, John F. Kel­ly, and for­mer attor­ney gen­er­al William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attor­ney Ty Cobb and for­mer Joint Chiefs of Staff chair­man Gen. Mark A. Mil­ley, accord­ing to peo­ple who have talked to him, who, like oth­ers, spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions. Trump has also talked of pros­e­cut­ing offi­cials at the FBI and Jus­tice Depart­ment, a per­son famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

    In pub­lic, Trump has vowed to appoint a spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor to “go after” Pres­i­dent Biden and his fam­i­ly. The for­mer pres­i­dent has fre­quent­ly made cor­rup­tion accu­sa­tions against them that are not sup­port­ed by avail­able evi­dence.

    To facil­i­tate Trump’s abil­i­ty to direct Jus­tice Depart­ment actions, his asso­ciates have been draft­ing plans to dis­pense with 50 years of pol­i­cy and prac­tice intend­ed to shield crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tions from polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. Crit­ics have called such ideas dan­ger­ous and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.

    “It would resem­ble a banana repub­lic if peo­ple came into office and start­ed going after their oppo­nents willy-nil­ly,” said Saikr­ish­na Prakash, a con­sti­tu­tion­al law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia who stud­ies exec­u­tive pow­er. “It’s hard­ly some­thing we should aspire to.”

    Much of the plan­ning for a sec­ond term has been unof­fi­cial­ly out­sourced to a part­ner­ship of right-wing think tanks in Wash­ing­ton. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is devel­op­ing a plan, to include draft exec­u­tive orders, that would deploy the mil­i­tary domes­ti­cal­ly under the Insur­rec­tion Act, accord­ing to a per­son involved in those con­ver­sa­tions and inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions reviewed by The Wash­ing­ton Post. The law, last updat­ed in 1871, autho­rizes the pres­i­dent to deploy the mil­i­tary for domes­tic law enforce­ment.

    The pro­pos­al was iden­ti­fied in inter­nal dis­cus­sions as an imme­di­ate pri­or­i­ty, the com­mu­ni­ca­tions showed. In the final year of his pres­i­den­cy, some of Trump’s sup­port­ers urged him to invoke the Insur­rec­tion Act to put down unrest after the mur­der of George Floyd in the sum­mer of 2020, but he nev­er did it. Trump has pub­licly expressed regret about not deploy­ing more fed­er­al force and said he would not hes­i­tate to do so in the future.

    Trump cam­paign spokesman Steven Che­ung did not answer ques­tions about spe­cif­ic actions under dis­cus­sion. “Pres­i­dent Trump is focused on crush­ing his oppo­nents in the pri­ma­ry elec­tion and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden,” Che­ung said. “Pres­i­dent Trump has always stood for law and order, and pro­tect­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion.”

    The dis­cus­sions under­way reflect Trump’s deter­mi­na­tion to har­ness the pow­er of the pres­i­den­cy to exact revenge on those who have chal­lenged or crit­i­cized him if he returns to the White House. The for­mer pres­i­dent has fre­quent­ly threat­ened to take puni­tive steps against his per­ceived ene­mies, argu­ing that doing so would be jus­ti­fied by the cur­rent pros­e­cu­tions against him. Trump has claimed with­out evi­dence that the crim­i­nal charges he is fac­ing — a total of 91 across four state and fed­er­al indict­ments — were made up to dam­age him polit­i­cal­ly.

    “This is third-world-coun­try stuff, ‘arrest your oppo­nent,’” Trump said at a cam­paign stop in New Hamp­shire in Octo­ber. “And that means I can do that, too.”

    Spe­cial coun­sel Jack Smith, Attor­ney Gen­er­al Mer­rick Gar­land and Biden have all said that Smith’s pros­e­cu­tion deci­sions were made inde­pen­dent­ly of the White House, in accor­dance with depart­ment rules on spe­cial coun­sels.

    Trump, the clear polling leader in the GOP race, has made “ret­ri­bu­tion” a cen­tral theme of his cam­paign, seek­ing to inter­twine his own legal defense with a call for pay­back against per­ceived slights and offens­es to right-wing Amer­i­cans. He repeat­ed­ly tells his sup­port­ers that he is being per­se­cut­ed on their behalf and holds out a 2024 vic­to­ry as a shared redemp­tion at their ene­mies’ expense.

    ‘He is going to go after peo­ple that have turned on him’

    It is unclear what alleged crimes or evi­dence Trump would claim to jus­ti­fy inves­ti­gat­ing his named tar­gets.

    Kel­ly said he would expect Trump to inves­ti­gate him because since his term as chief of staff end­ed, he has pub­licly crit­i­cized Trump, includ­ing by alleg­ing that he called dead ser­vice mem­bers “suck­ers.” Kel­ly added, “There is no ques­tion in my mind he is going to go after peo­ple that have turned on him.”

    Barr, anoth­er Trump appointee turned crit­ic, has con­tra­dict­ed the for­mer president’s false claims about the 2020 elec­tion and called him “a very pet­ty indi­vid­ual who will always put his inter­ests ahead of the country’s.” Asked about Trump’s inter­est in pros­e­cut­ing him, Barr dead­panned, “I’m quiv­er­ing in my boots.”

    “Trump him­self is more like­ly to rot in jail than any­one on his alleged list,” said Cobb, who accused Trump of “sti­fling truth, mak­ing threats and bul­ly­ing weak­lings into doing his bid­ding.”

    ...

    Oth­er mod­ern pres­i­dents since the Water­gate scan­dal — when Richard M. Nixon tried to sup­press the FBI’s inves­ti­ga­tion into his campaign’s spy­ing and sab­o­tage against Democ­rats — have sought to sep­a­rate pol­i­tics from law enforce­ment. Pres­i­dents of both par­ties have imposed a White House pol­i­cy restrict­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions with pros­e­cu­tors. An effort under the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion to remove U.S. attor­neys for polit­i­cal rea­sons led to high-lev­el res­ig­na­tions and a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion.

    Rod J. Rosen­stein, the Trump-appoint­ed deputy attor­ney gen­er­al who over­saw the inves­ti­ga­tion by spe­cial coun­sel Robert S. Mueller III into Russ­ian inter­fer­ence in the 2016 elec­tion, said a polit­i­cal­ly ordered pros­e­cu­tion would vio­late the 14th Amendment’s guar­an­tee of equal pro­tec­tion under law and could cause judges to dis­miss the charges. That con­sti­tu­tion­al defense has rarely been raised in U.S. his­to­ry, Rosen­stein said.

    ...

    But Trump allies such as Russ Vought, his for­mer bud­get direc­tor who now leads the Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca, are active­ly repu­di­at­ing the mod­ern tra­di­tion of a mea­sure of inde­pen­dence for the Depart­ment of Jus­tice, argu­ing that such inde­pen­dence is not based in law or the Con­sti­tu­tion. Vought is in reg­u­lar con­tact with Trump and would be expect­ed to hold a major posi­tion in a sec­ond term.

    “You don’t need a statu­to­ry change at all, you need a mind-set change,” Vought said in an inter­view. “You need an attor­ney gen­er­al and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view them­selves as try­ing to pro­tect the depart­ment from the pres­i­dent.”

    A fix­a­tion on pros­e­cut­ing ene­mies

    As pres­i­dent, Kel­ly said, Trump would often sug­gest pros­e­cut­ing his polit­i­cal ene­mies, or at least hav­ing the FBI inves­ti­gate them. Kel­ly said he would not pass along the requests to the Jus­tice Depart­ment but would alert the White House Counsel’s Office. Usu­al­ly, they would ignore the orders, he said, and wait for Trump to move on. In a sec­ond term, Trump’s aides could respond to such requests dif­fer­ent­ly, he said.

    ...

    Although aides have worked on plans for some oth­er agen­cies, Trump has tak­en a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in the Jus­tice Depart­ment. In con­ver­sa­tions about a poten­tial sec­ond term, Trump has made pick­ing an attor­ney gen­er­al his num­ber one pri­or­i­ty, accord­ing a Trump advis­er.

    “Giv­en his recent tri­als and tribu­la­tions, one would think he’s going to pick up the plan for the Depart­ment of Jus­tice before doing some light read­ing of a 500-page white paper on reform­ing the EPA,” said Matt Mow­ers, a for­mer Trump White House advis­er.

    Jef­frey Clark, a fel­low at Vought’s think tank, is lead­ing the work on the Insur­rec­tion Act under Project 2025. The Post has report­ed that Clark is one of six unnamed co-con­spir­a­tors whose actions are described in Trump’s indict­ment in the fed­er­al elec­tion inter­fer­ence case.

    Clark was also charged in Ful­ton Coun­ty, Geor­gia, with vio­lat­ing the state anti-rack­e­teer­ing law and attempt­ing to cre­ate a false state­ment, as part of the dis­trict attorney’s case accus­ing Trump and co-con­spir­a­tors of inter­fer­ing in the 2020 elec­tion. Clark has plead­ed not guilty. As a Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cial after the 2020 elec­tion, Clark pres­sured supe­ri­ors to inves­ti­gate nonex­is­tent elec­tion crimes and to encour­age state offi­cials to sub­mit pho­ny cer­tifi­cates to the elec­toral col­lege, accord­ing to the indict­ment.

    In one con­ver­sa­tion described in the fed­er­al indict­ment, a deputy White House coun­sel warned Clark that Trump’s refus­ing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” Clark respond­ed, accord­ing to the indict­ment, “That’s why there’s an Insur­rec­tion Act.”

    Clark had din­ner with Trump dur­ing a vis­it to his Bed­min­ster, N.J., golf club this sum­mer. He also went to Mar-a-Lago on Wednes­day for a screen­ing of a new Dinesh D’Souza movie that uses false­hoods, mis­lead­ing inter­views and drama­ti­za­tions to allege fed­er­al per­se­cu­tion of Jan. 6 riot­ers and Chris­tians. Also attend­ing were fringe allies such as Stephen K. Ban­non, Roger Stone, Lau­ra Loomer and Michael Fly­nn.

    “I think that the sup­pos­ed­ly inde­pen­dent DOJ is an illu­sion,” Clark said in an inter­view. Through a spokes­woman he did not respond to fol­low-up ques­tions about his work on the Insur­rec­tion Act.

    Clark’s involve­ment with Project 2025 has alarmed some oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive lawyers who view him as an unqual­i­fied choice to take a senior lead­er­ship role at the depart­ment, accord­ing to a con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe pri­vate talks. Project 2025 com­pris­es 75 groups in a col­lab­o­ra­tion orga­nized by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion.

    Project 2025 direc­tor Paul Dans stood by Clark in a state­ment. “We are grate­ful for Jeff Clark’s will­ing­ness to share his insights from hav­ing worked at high lev­els in gov­ern­ment dur­ing try­ing times,” he said.

    After online pub­li­ca­tion of this sto­ry, Rob Bluey, a Her­itage spokesman, said: “There are no plans with­in Project 2025 relat­ed to the Insur­rec­tion Act or tar­get­ing polit­i­cal ene­mies.”

    How a sec­ond Trump term would dif­fer from the first

    There is a heat­ed debate in con­ser­v­a­tive legal cir­cles about how to inter­act with Trump as the like­ly nom­i­nee. Many in Trump’s cir­cle have dis­par­aged what they view as insti­tu­tion­al­ist Repub­li­can lawyers, par­tic­u­lar­ly those asso­ci­at­ed with the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety. Some Trump advis­ers con­sid­er these indi­vid­u­als too soft and accom­mo­dat­ing to make the kind of changes with­in agen­cies that they want to see hap­pen in a sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

    Trump has told advis­ers that he is look­ing for lawyers who are loy­al to him to serve in a sec­ond term — com­plain­ing about his White House Counsel’s Office unwill­ing­ness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him in his bid to over­turn his 2020 elec­tion defeat.

    In repeat­ed com­ments to advis­ers and lawyers around him, Trump has said his biggest regrets were nam­ing Jeff Ses­sions and Barr as his attor­neys gen­er­al and lis­ten­ing to oth­ers — he often cites the “Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety” — who want­ed him to name lawyers with impres­sive pedi­grees and Ivy League cre­den­tials to senior Jus­tice Depart­ment posi­tions. He has men­tioned to sev­er­al lawyers who have defend­ed him on TV or attacked Biden that they would be a good can­di­date for attor­ney gen­er­al, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with his com­ments.

    The over­all vision that Trump, his cam­paign and out­side allies are now dis­cussing for a sec­ond term would dif­fer from his first in terms of how quick­ly and force­ful­ly offi­cials would move to exe­cute his orders. Alum­ni involved in the cur­rent plan­ning gen­er­al­ly fault a slow start, bureau­crat­ic resis­tance and lit­i­ga­tion for hin­der­ing the president’s agen­da in his first term, and they are deter­mined to avoid those hur­dles, if giv­en a sec­ond chance, by con­cen­trat­ing more pow­er in the West Wing and select­ing appointees who will car­ry out Trump’s demands.

    Those groups are in dis­cus­sions with Trump’s cam­paign advis­ers and occa­sion­al­ly the can­di­date him­self, some­times cir­cu­lat­ing pol­i­cy papers or draft exec­u­tive orders, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the sit­u­a­tion.

    ...

    Trump’s core group of West Wing advis­ers for a sec­ond term is wide­ly expect­ed to include Stephen Miller, the archi­tect of Trump’s hard-line immi­gra­tion poli­cies includ­ing fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion, who has gone on to chal­lenge Biden admin­is­tra­tion poli­cies in court through a con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tion called Amer­i­ca First Legal. Miller did not respond to requests for com­ment.

    Alum­ni have also saved lists of pre­vi­ous appointees who would not be wel­come in a sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion, as well as career offi­cers they viewed as unco­op­er­a­tive and would seek to fire based on an exec­u­tive order to weak­en civ­il ser­vice pro­tec­tions.

    For oth­er appoint­ments, Trump would be able to draw on line­ups of per­son­nel pre­pared by Project 2025. Dans, a for­mer Office of Per­son­nel Man­age­ment chief of staff, likened the data­base to a “con­ser­v­a­tive LinkedIn,” allow­ing appli­cants to present their resumes on pub­lic pro­files, while also pro­vid­ing a shared work­space for Her­itage and part­ner orga­ni­za­tions to vet the can­di­dates and make rec­om­men­da­tions.

    “We don’t want careerists, we don’t want peo­ple here who are oppor­tunists,” he said. “We want con­ser­v­a­tive war­riors.”

    ———-

    “Trump and allies plot revenge, Jus­tice Depart­ment con­trol in a sec­ond term” By Isaac Arns­dorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Bar­rett; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 11/05/2023

    “Much of the plan­ning for a sec­ond term has been unof­fi­cial­ly out­sourced to a part­ner­ship of right-wing think tanks in Wash­ing­ton. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is devel­op­ing a plan, to include draft exec­u­tive orders, that would deploy the mil­i­tary domes­ti­cal­ly under the Insur­rec­tion Act, accord­ing to a per­son involved in those con­ver­sa­tions and inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions reviewed by The Wash­ing­ton Post. The law, last updat­ed in 1871, autho­rizes the pres­i­dent to deploy the mil­i­tary for domes­tic law enforce­ment.”

    Yes, dis­cus­sions of the Insur­rec­tion Act are report­ed­ly an imme­di­ate pri­or­i­ty for the “Project 2025” col­lab­o­ra­tors, with none oth­er than Jef­frey Clark lead­ing that work. Clark, of course, was the then-obscure Jus­tice Depart­ment fig­ure who advo­cat­ed a num­ber of extreme steps that could be tak­en to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion results and whom Trump tried to make the act­ing Attor­ney Gen­er­al in late Decem­ber of 2020. That’s the guy lead­ing the efforts to explore how Trump might use the Insur­rec­tion Act dur­ing his sec­ond term. But Clark is just the guy lead­ing the effort. It’s not Jef­frey Clark’s pri­or­i­ty. It’s a Project 2025 pri­or­i­ty, which includes all the 75 groups involved with the Project 2025 col­lab­o­ra­tion:

    ...
    The pro­pos­al was iden­ti­fied in inter­nal dis­cus­sions as an imme­di­ate pri­or­i­ty, the com­mu­ni­ca­tions showed. In the final year of his pres­i­den­cy, some of Trump’s sup­port­ers urged him to invoke the Insur­rec­tion Act to put down unrest after the mur­der of George Floyd in the sum­mer of 2020, but he nev­er did it. Trump has pub­licly expressed regret about not deploy­ing more fed­er­al force and said he would not hes­i­tate to do so in the future.

    ...

    Jef­frey Clark, a fel­low at Vought’s think tank, is lead­ing the work on the Insur­rec­tion Act under Project 2025. The Post has report­ed that Clark is one of six unnamed co-con­spir­a­tors whose actions are described in Trump’s indict­ment in the fed­er­al elec­tion inter­fer­ence case.

    Clark was also charged in Ful­ton Coun­ty, Geor­gia, with vio­lat­ing the state anti-rack­e­teer­ing law and attempt­ing to cre­ate a false state­ment, as part of the dis­trict attorney’s case accus­ing Trump and co-con­spir­a­tors of inter­fer­ing in the 2020 elec­tion. Clark has plead­ed not guilty. As a Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cial after the 2020 elec­tion, Clark pres­sured supe­ri­ors to inves­ti­gate nonex­is­tent elec­tion crimes and to encour­age state offi­cials to sub­mit pho­ny cer­tifi­cates to the elec­toral col­lege, accord­ing to the indict­ment.

    In one con­ver­sa­tion described in the fed­er­al indict­ment, a deputy White House coun­sel warned Clark that Trump’s refus­ing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” Clark respond­ed, accord­ing to the indict­ment, “That’s why there’s an Insur­rec­tion Act.”

    Clark had din­ner with Trump dur­ing a vis­it to his Bed­min­ster, N.J., golf club this sum­mer. He also went to Mar-a-Lago on Wednes­day for a screen­ing of a new Dinesh D’Souza movie that uses false­hoods, mis­lead­ing inter­views and drama­ti­za­tions to allege fed­er­al per­se­cu­tion of Jan. 6 riot­ers and Chris­tians. Also attend­ing were fringe allies such as Stephen K. Ban­non, Roger Stone, Lau­ra Loomer and Michael Fly­nn.

    “I think that the sup­pos­ed­ly inde­pen­dent DOJ is an illu­sion,” Clark said in an inter­view. Through a spokes­woman he did not respond to fol­low-up ques­tions about his work on the Insur­rec­tion Act.
    ...

    And then there’s the plans for the open politi­ciza­tion of the Jus­tice Depart­ment, which will appar­ent­ly be explic­it­ly jus­ti­fied as a kind of revenge move for all the inves­ti­ga­tions into Trump. Or as Trump put it, “This is third-world-coun­try stuff, ‘arrest your oppo­nent,’ And that means I can do that, too.” And accord­ing to key Sched­ule F/Project 2025 oper­a­tive Russ Vought, the polit­i­cal inde­pen­dence of the Jus­tice Depart­ment isn’t actu­al­ly cov­ered by the Con­sti­tu­tion or law already today. No statu­to­ry changes would be required:

    ...
    In pri­vate, Trump has told advis­ers and friends in recent months that he wants the Jus­tice Depart­ment to inves­ti­gate one­time offi­cials and allies who have become crit­i­cal of his time in office, includ­ing his for­mer chief of staff, John F. Kel­ly, and for­mer attor­ney gen­er­al William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attor­ney Ty Cobb and for­mer Joint Chiefs of Staff chair­man Gen. Mark A. Mil­ley, accord­ing to peo­ple who have talked to him, who, like oth­ers, spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions. Trump has also talked of pros­e­cut­ing offi­cials at the FBI and Jus­tice Depart­ment, a per­son famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

    In pub­lic, Trump has vowed to appoint a spe­cial pros­e­cu­tor to “go after” Pres­i­dent Biden and his fam­i­ly. The for­mer pres­i­dent has fre­quent­ly made cor­rup­tion accu­sa­tions against them that are not sup­port­ed by avail­able evi­dence.

    To facil­i­tate Trump’s abil­i­ty to direct Jus­tice Depart­ment actions, his asso­ciates have been draft­ing plans to dis­pense with 50 years of pol­i­cy and prac­tice intend­ed to shield crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tions from polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions. Crit­ics have called such ideas dan­ger­ous and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.

    “It would resem­ble a banana repub­lic if peo­ple came into office and start­ed going after their oppo­nents willy-nil­ly,” said Saikr­ish­na Prakash, a con­sti­tu­tion­al law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia who stud­ies exec­u­tive pow­er. “It’s hard­ly some­thing we should aspire to.”

    ...

    The dis­cus­sions under­way reflect Trump’s deter­mi­na­tion to har­ness the pow­er of the pres­i­den­cy to exact revenge on those who have chal­lenged or crit­i­cized him if he returns to the White House. The for­mer pres­i­dent has fre­quent­ly threat­ened to take puni­tive steps against his per­ceived ene­mies, argu­ing that doing so would be jus­ti­fied by the cur­rent pros­e­cu­tions against him. Trump has claimed with­out evi­dence that the crim­i­nal charges he is fac­ing — a total of 91 across four state and fed­er­al indict­ments — were made up to dam­age him polit­i­cal­ly.

    “This is third-world-coun­try stuff, ‘arrest your oppo­nent,’” Trump said at a cam­paign stop in New Hamp­shire in Octo­ber. “And that means I can do that, too.”

    Spe­cial coun­sel Jack Smith, Attor­ney Gen­er­al Mer­rick Gar­land and Biden have all said that Smith’s pros­e­cu­tion deci­sions were made inde­pen­dent­ly of the White House, in accor­dance with depart­ment rules on spe­cial coun­sels.

    Trump, the clear polling leader in the GOP race, has made “ret­ri­bu­tion” a cen­tral theme of his cam­paign, seek­ing to inter­twine his own legal defense with a call for pay­back against per­ceived slights and offens­es to right-wing Amer­i­cans. He repeat­ed­ly tells his sup­port­ers that he is being per­se­cut­ed on their behalf and holds out a 2024 vic­to­ry as a shared redemp­tion at their ene­mies’ expense.

    ...

    But Trump allies such as Russ Vought, his for­mer bud­get direc­tor who now leads the Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca, are active­ly repu­di­at­ing the mod­ern tra­di­tion of a mea­sure of inde­pen­dence for the Depart­ment of Jus­tice, argu­ing that such inde­pen­dence is not based in law or the Con­sti­tu­tion. Vought is in reg­u­lar con­tact with Trump and would be expect­ed to hold a major posi­tion in a sec­ond term.

    “You don’t need a statu­to­ry change at all, you need a mind-set change,” Vought said in an inter­view. “You need an attor­ney gen­er­al and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view them­selves as try­ing to pro­tect the depart­ment from the pres­i­dent.”
    ...

    And then we get to the rather hilar­i­ous the­atrics at work. Omi­nous­ly hilar­i­ous: there’s some sort of ‘the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety is a bunch of squish­es who won’t go full MAGA’ meme­ing going on here. Again, as stat­ed in this same arti­cle, Project 2025 is a mas­sive col­lab­o­ra­tive effort involv­ing 75 orga­ni­za­tions and led by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion. Try­ing to sep­a­rate the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety from this net­work is just sil­ly the­atrics. But it’s the kind of the­atrics that will be excep­tion­al­ly use­ful should the hard right con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty on the Supreme Court — which is basi­cal­ly a prod­uct of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety’s decades of efforts — end up mak­ing key rul­ings val­i­dat­ing the planned purges. And it will obvi­ous­ly be use­ful to cre­ate some dis­tance between the MAGA world and the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety should the planned purges go hor­ri­bly awry and end up gen­er­at­ing a new round of inves­ti­ga­tions. They are plan­ning on effec­tive­ly end­ing what’s left of the US demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions, after all. That’s a real gam­ble, as Jan­u­ary 6 made clear:

    ...
    There is a heat­ed debate in con­ser­v­a­tive legal cir­cles about how to inter­act with Trump as the like­ly nom­i­nee. Many in Trump’s cir­cle have dis­par­aged what they view as insti­tu­tion­al­ist Repub­li­can lawyers, par­tic­u­lar­ly those asso­ci­at­ed with the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety. Some Trump advis­ers con­sid­er these indi­vid­u­als too soft and accom­mo­dat­ing to make the kind of changes with­in agen­cies that they want to see hap­pen in a sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion.

    Trump has told advis­ers that he is look­ing for lawyers who are loy­al to him to serve in a sec­ond term — com­plain­ing about his White House Counsel’s Office unwill­ing­ness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him in his bid to over­turn his 2020 elec­tion defeat.

    In repeat­ed com­ments to advis­ers and lawyers around him, Trump has said his biggest regrets were nam­ing Jeff Ses­sions and Barr as his attor­neys gen­er­al and lis­ten­ing to oth­ers — he often cites the “Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety” — who want­ed him to name lawyers with impres­sive pedi­grees and Ivy League cre­den­tials to senior Jus­tice Depart­ment posi­tions. He has men­tioned to sev­er­al lawyers who have defend­ed him on TV or attacked Biden that they would be a good can­di­date for attor­ney gen­er­al, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with his com­ments.

    ...

    Trump’s core group of West Wing advis­ers for a sec­ond term is wide­ly expect­ed to include Stephen Miller, the archi­tect of Trump’s hard-line immi­gra­tion poli­cies includ­ing fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion, who has gone on to chal­lenge Biden admin­is­tra­tion poli­cies in court through a con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tion called Amer­i­ca First Legal. Miller did not respond to requests for com­ment.

    Alum­ni have also saved lists of pre­vi­ous appointees who would not be wel­come in a sec­ond Trump admin­is­tra­tion, as well as career offi­cers they viewed as unco­op­er­a­tive and would seek to fire based on an exec­u­tive order to weak­en civ­il ser­vice pro­tec­tions.

    For oth­er appoint­ments, Trump would be able to draw on line­ups of per­son­nel pre­pared by Project 2025. Dans, a for­mer Office of Per­son­nel Man­age­ment chief of staff, likened the data­base to a “con­ser­v­a­tive LinkedIn,” allow­ing appli­cants to present their resumes on pub­lic pro­files, while also pro­vid­ing a shared work­space for Her­itage and part­ner orga­ni­za­tions to vet the can­di­dates and make rec­om­men­da­tions.

    “We don’t want careerists, we don’t want peo­ple here who are oppor­tunists,” he said. “We want con­ser­v­a­tive war­riors.”
    ...

    Sim­i­lar­ly, note the belat­ed denials by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion about the reports on Jef­frey Clark’s Project 2025 work on the Insur­rec­tion Act. Her­itage insists “There are no plans with­in Project 2025 relat­ed to the Insur­rec­tion Act or tar­get­ing polit­i­cal ene­mies.” That’s despite the fact that Project 2025 direct Paul Dans put out a state­ment defend­ing Jef­frey Clark’s role in the project. So, much like the CNP’s behind-the-scenes orga­niz­ing role behind the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, it appears that the mas­sive con­ser­v­a­tive estab­lish­ment insti­tu­tion­al involve­ment with Project 2025 is going to remain hid­den too. It’ll be an ‘all MAGA’ affair, despite the mas­sive col­lab­o­ra­tive effort involv­ing 75 dif­fer­ent groups being orga­nized by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion:

    ...
    Clark’s involve­ment with Project 2025 has alarmed some oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive lawyers who view him as an unqual­i­fied choice to take a senior lead­er­ship role at the depart­ment, accord­ing to a con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to describe pri­vate talks. Project 2025 com­pris­es 75 groups in a col­lab­o­ra­tion orga­nized by the Her­itage Foun­da­tion.

    Project 2025 direc­tor Paul Dans stood by Clark in a state­ment. “We are grate­ful for Jeff Clark’s will­ing­ness to share his insights from hav­ing worked at high lev­els in gov­ern­ment dur­ing try­ing times,” he said.

    After online pub­li­ca­tion of this sto­ry, Rob Bluey, a Her­itage spokesman, said: “There are no plans with­in Project 2025 relat­ed to the Insur­rec­tion Act or tar­get­ing polit­i­cal ene­mies.”
    ...

    And let’s not for­get: this is a GOP estab­lish­ment plan to be imple­ment­ed by the next Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion, who­ev­er that may be. If Trump ends up going to prison next year there’s still going to be a Repub­li­can nom­i­nee. Arguably some­one with an even bet­ter shot of win­ning the gen­er­al elec­tion. Project 2025 — and any Insur­rec­tion Act plans that go along with it — is the Repub­li­can estab­lish­men­t’s plan, despite all the pre­emp­tive MAGA-brand­ing.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 6, 2023, 8:09 pm
  41. Don­ald Trump did­n’t have a plat­form when he ran for reelec­tion in 2020. The whole GOP ditched a plat­form that year. And while there isn’t any sort of pol­i­cy plat­form that’s emerg­ing from the Trump 2024 cam­paign, it’s becom­ing increas­ing­ly clear that there is going to be a plat­form for 2024: the impend­ing Trumpian purges of the ‘deep state’ and ‘the left’ in gov­ern­ment. That’s the plat­form. Pol­i­cy is kind of a side note when that’s your plat­form. The plan is to break and cap­ture gov­ern­ment, not use it to do stuff.

    Dis­turbing­ly, it’s also becom­ing increas­ing clear that the pro­vok­ing of ‘lib­er­al tears’ through the threat of those purges is going to be a big part of how the 2024 Trump cam­paign, as recent­ly evi­denced from MAGA sur­ro­gates like con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer Mike Davis. Davis has been mak­ing news this year for his glee­ful antic­i­pa­tion of the mass jail­ings he would exe­cute after Pres­i­dent Trump makes him attor­ney gen­er­al. As Davis recent­ly put it, he’d toss polit­i­cal oppo­nents in “the gulag,” called caging migrant kids “glo­ri­ous,” and told his fol­low­ers to “arm up” against “the vio­lent black under­class.”

    And while it would be nice to think that Mike Davis is just a right-wing talk­ing head who would­n’t actu­al­ly be cho­sen to be Trump’s next attor­ney gen­er­al, espe­cial­ly after say­ing stuff like that in pub­lic, that’s unfor­tu­nate­ly not the case. Don­ald Trump Jr. just cit­ed Davis as the kind of per­son his father would be tap­ping to exe­cute his 2025 vision. A vision of ret­ri­bu­tion, purges, and cap­ture.

    But as the fol­low­ing Philadel­phia Inquir­er arti­cle excerpt points out, there’s anoth­er rea­son Davis could be the next Repub­li­can AG: he has an exquis­ite pedi­gree. At least on paper. Davis is a Fed­er­al Soci­ety mem­ber, worked as a con­sul­tant to boost the con­fir­ma­tion of Supreme Court Jus­tice Neil Gor­such and lat­er clerked for him, then became chief coun­sel for nom­i­na­tions to the GOP chair of the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee Chuck Grass­ley dur­ing the Brett Kavanugh hear­ings. It sounds great if ignore the extrem­ism of Gor­such and the fact that he was fill­ing a seat stolen from Barack Pres­i­dent Oba­ma. And ignore the many still valid ques­tions about Brett Kavanaugh­’s char­ac­ter includ­ing his deep ties to the cor­rupt antics of George W. Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion, like ques­tions about whether or not Kavanaugh lied to Con­gress over the role he may have played in a 2002 GOP scan­dal over the theft of Demo­c­ra­t­ic doc­u­ments from a con­gres­sion­al serv­er the ‘Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal’). And then you would have to ignore the Fed­er­al Soci­ety’s suc­cess­ful cap­ture of the US judi­cia­ry on behalf of preda­to­ry bil­lion­aires. Along with ignor­ing how Chuck Grass­ley appears to have been far more involved with the efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion than is gen­er­al­ly rec­og­nized. Recall how it wasn’t obvi­ous that Mike Pence was going to refuse to go along with the plan until the evening of Jan 5. It was only then that some sort of ‘Plan B’ to get Pence out of the way was need­ed. And that Plan B appeared to cen­ter around get­ting Chuck Grass­ley to replace Pence in the elec­toral count pro­ceed­ings. A role Grass­ley even hint­ed at with reporters on Jan 5. And that Plan B appeared to cen­ter around get­ting Chuck Grass­ley to replace Pence in the elec­toral count pro­ceed­ings. A role Grass­ley even hint­ed at with reporters on Jan 5. Mike Davis’s resume looks great on paper. ‘MAGA’ Mike Davis is con­ser­v­a­tive estab­lish­ment Mike Davis too. They are the same per­son because the con­ser­v­a­tive estab­lish­ment is ful­ly on board plat­form of purges, ret­ri­bu­tion, and cap­ture.

    So giv­en Davis’s con­ser­v­a­tive pedi­gree and fas­cist polit­i­cal activism, we have to ask if he’s a CNP mem­ber. Well, Mike Davis’s name does­n’t show up on avail­able leaked CNP mem­ber­ship lists, but Davis was one of sig­na­to­ries of that let­ter of con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers back in Jan­u­ary of 2023 dur­ing the House speak­er­ship intra-GOP squab­bles over Kevin McCarthy’s nom­i­na­tion. Squab­bles that, as we saw, were very much orches­trat­ed and sup­port­ed by the CNP as evi­denced by the fact that the vast major­i­ty of the dozens of sig­na­to­ries of that let­ter were CNP mem­bers. Mike Davis may not be offi­cial­ly CNP, but he’s obvi­ous­ly a close fel­low trav­el­er. And that glee­ful­ly fas­cist rhetoric about what he’ll do as Trump’s AG has prob­a­bly got him on the short-list to be Trump’s next AG:

    Philadel­phia Inquir­er

    Mike Davis wants to cage kids, put Trump ene­mies in a ‘gulag.’ He could be our next AG.

    Lawyer Mike Davis vows to pun­ish Trump’s ene­mies, migrants. No won­der Team Trump is eye­ing him as attor­ney gen­er­al in 2025.

    by Will Bunch | Colum­nist
    Pub­lished Nov. 19, 2023, 9:47 a.m. ET

    Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy was at a a near-break­ing point on Jan. 3, 2021, as then-pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump stepped up his efforts to over­turn Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s elec­tion vic­to­ry. Trump’s new plan was to install a fanat­i­cal ally named Jef­frey Clark — a vir­tu­al­ly unknown Jus­tice Depart­ment lawyer — as act­ing attor­ney gen­er­al. Clark had draft­ed a let­ter with a bla­tant­ly false claim that Jus­tice had found sub­stan­tial vot­er fraud in Geor­gia — with sim­i­lar let­ters planned for oth­er key states — in a last-ditch effort to urge state leg­is­la­tures to replace Biden elec­tors before the Jan. 6 cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

    Trump’s dan­ger­ous scheme was thwart­ed — but only after all of the top career pros­e­cu­tors in Jus­tice, includ­ing the cur­rent act­ing AG Jef­frey Rosen, told the pres­i­dent they would resign en masse and go pub­lic with what was hap­pen­ing. “With­in 24–48-72 hours, you could have hun­dreds and hun­dreds of res­ig­na­tions of the lead­er­ship of your entire Jus­tice Depart­ment because of your actions,” Richard Donoghue, the act­ing assis­tant AG who was at that day’s con­tentious Oval Office meet­ing, recalled telling the 45th pres­i­dent. “What’s that going to say about you?”

    ...

    Flash for­ward three years, and Trump is the over­whelm­ing front-run­ner to again become the GOP pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee in 2024, with ear­ly polls giv­ing him a chance of defeat­ing Biden in a rematch. And if he does indeed become America’s 47th pres­i­dent on Jan. 20, 2025, Trump seems to have two main goals: revenge against his polit­i­cal ene­mies, and cre­at­ing a gov­ern­ment teem­ing with fer­vent loy­al­ists who won’t block his path the way those career gov­ern­ment lawyers did in 2021.

    That’s where Mike Davis comes in. Most folks, except for the most polit­i­cal­ly obsessed, have nev­er heard of Davis, but it’s time for peo­ple to learn. The mid-40s-ish Davis takes the abstract warn­ings that U.S. democ­ra­cy is on the line in the 2024 elec­tion and brings them to life.

    He’s said he’d toss oppo­nents in “the gulag,” called caging migrant kids “glo­ri­ous,” and told his fol­low­ers to “arm up” against “the vio­lent black underclass.”Meet Mike Davis, a far-right lawyer with an inside track to run­ning a future Trump DOJ: https://t.co/CJ4NuOaAzH pic.twitter.com/4UywfDhdoT— The Meh­di Hasan Show (@MehdiHasanShow) Novem­ber 16, 2023

    Actu­al­ly, there are two Mike Davis­es.

    The first you might call “resumé Mike Davis,” with the Des Moines, Iowa, native hit­ting all the right marks for rapid advance­ment in today’s con­ser­v­a­tive legal move­ment. A mem­ber of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, Davis worked as a con­sul­tant to boost the con­fir­ma­tion of Supreme Court Jus­tice Neil Gor­such, then became chief coun­sel for nom­i­na­tions to the GOP chair of the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee, fel­low Iowan Chuck Grass­ley. He served Grass­ley dur­ing the con­tentious hear­ings over even­tu­al Jus­tice Brett Kavanaugh and the push by Trump and then-Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Mitch McConnell to pack the judi­cia­ry with right-wing judges. He now heads two ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive efforts, the Arti­cle III Project and the inter­net Account­abil­i­ty Project.

    On paper, it wouldn’t be a stretch for a Repub­li­can pres­i­dent to give some­one like Davis a top post. But the attorney’s resume doesn’t tell you about the oth­er Mike Davis — now a ver­bal pit bull for Trump and his MAGA move­ment, mak­ing increas­ing­ly out­ra­geous state­ments seem­ing­ly aimed at get­ting the atten­tion of the boss and his inner cir­cle.

    In late Sep­tem­ber, Davis appeared on a right-wing pod­cast, the Ben­ny John­son Show, and described what he might do giv­en three weeks as an inter­im attor­ney gen­er­al by a vic­to­ri­ous Trump in 2025. He joked — per­haps — that the new pres­i­dent would have to grant him a par­don as he left town after what Davis described as “a reign of ter­ror” dur­ing which he would “unleash hell on Wash­ing­ton, D.C.”

    What came next was an agen­da very much in line with Trump’s over­heat­ed ral­ly rhetoric, the not-secret Project 2025 blue­print, and recent news leaks. Davis claimed he would demol­ish the “deep state” of career politi­cians, indict the cur­rent pres­i­dent “and every oth­er scum­ball, sleaze­ball Biden,” and help to par­don the Jan. 6 insur­rec­tion­ists.

    “We’re gonna deport a lot of peo­ple, 10 mil­lion peo­ple and grow­ing — anchor babies, their par­ents, their grand­par­ents,” Davis added. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glo­ri­ous. We’re gonna detain a lot of peo­ple in the D.C. gulag and Git­mo.”

    Look, we can all agree there’s some­thing about the pod­cast for­mat and its jokey ban­ter that encour­ages guests to make out­ra­geous, over-the-top state­ments (just ask Charis­sa Thomp­son, right?). The real­i­ty, though, of what Davis told Ben­ny John­son is that per­haps it should not be tak­en lit­er­al­ly, but seri­ous­ly. This ambi­tious right-wing lawyer may or may not be a true believ­er but he knows how to audi­tion for Trump, and it’s work­ing.

    “There are a cou­ple peo­ple you could put in posi­tions like that, we talk about Mike Davis as attor­ney gen­er­al,” Don­ald Trump Jr. said dur­ing his own pod­cast. “You almost have to, just put them in as inter­im even, just to send that shot across the bow to the swamp … let Mike Davis and Kash Patel to be like inter­im AG’s. Put Lau­ra Loomer as press sec­re­tary for just a cou­ple of days.”

    That’s because Team Trump has coa­lesced around a world­view that its leader was denied imple­ment­ing his rad­i­cal vision — includ­ing enforc­ing the Big Lie of 2020 elec­tion fraud — in his first term because too many polit­i­cal func­tionar­ies from what it calls “the admin­is­tra­tive state” stood in his way. That’s not wrong. In addi­tion to the Jan. 3 revolt among the Jus­tice Depart­ment, you had prin­ci­pled lead­ers like now-retired Gen. Mark Mille, then the Joint Chiefs chair, who stood in the way of improp­er­ly call­ing in troops on Jan. 6 to per­haps block the elec­tion cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

    Now, the dri­ving force for a revenge-mind­ed sec­ond Trump term has noth­ing to do with fight­ing infla­tion or fix­ing rela­tions with Chi­na. The POTUS 45 inner cir­cle is deter­mined to oust those pesky bureau­crats and career pols from Jus­tice, the Pen­ta­gon, Fog­gy Bot­tom and who­ev­er else stands in the way of the dream for a “Red Cae­sar” to smash both “the deep state” and Amer­i­can lib­er­al­ism. It would sure­ly take more than one Mike Davis, after all, to deport 10 mil­lion peo­ple and enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly put “kids in cages” at the south­ern bor­der again.

    Last week, Axios report­ed that a mas­sive and unprece­dent­ed oper­a­tion is already under­way — cost­ing tens of mil­lions of dol­lars and using AI devel­oped by Ora­cle — to pre­screen can­di­dates to replace a whop­ping 54,000 entrenched offi­cials through­out the gov­ern­ment. It’s an army of Trump loy­al­ists who — in the polite main­stream media phras­ing of Axios — are “will­ing to stretch tra­di­tion­al bound­aries.”

    In recent days, Trump has increas­ing­ly alarmed folks with rhetoric that direct­ly echoes 20th-cen­tu­ry fas­cist dic­ta­tors like Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni or Adolf Hitler — describ­ing any left-wing foes as “ver­min” and claim­ing that refugees are “poi­son­ing the blood” of Amer­i­ca. But the over­heat­ed words of a dic­ta­tor still need an army of storm troop­ers to make it hap­pen, as well as a devot­ed inner cir­cle of pro­pa­gan­dists, tor­tur­ers, and eager “yes men.”

    Mike Davis is a sad exam­ple of how this down­ward spi­ral works. It shows how a guy with a sol­id resume for an increas­ing­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can Par­ty devolves moral­ly to the lev­el where lock­ing up des­per­ate chil­dren from Cen­tral Amer­i­ca in cages becomes “glo­ri­ous.” He will say any­thing to cur­ry favor and advance in the eyes of the Dear Leader.

    To be sure, there are still big ques­tions about whether and how this all hap­pens. Even with the Democ­rats in real dan­ger of los­ing their slim con­trol of the Sen­ate in the 2024 elec­tions, and with the retire­ment of the last sen­si­ble Repub­li­cans like Sen. Mitt Rom­ney, would a man who promised to put polit­i­cal ene­mies in a “gulag” be able to win a con­fir­ma­tion vote? If not, how far would a Trump 47 be will­ing to bend the rules or break the Con­sti­tu­tion to get his way?

    That’s why the time to talk about Mike Davis as attor­ney gen­er­al — and the all-too real stakes of anoth­er Trump pres­i­den­cy — is not on Jan. 21, 2025, but right now. If Trump gets the keys to the Oval Office for a sec­ond time, it’s clear he will use any means nec­es­sary to get his way — to pun­ish his ene­mies, par­don his friends, and inflict real pain on migrants and oth­ers. And there’s only one way to stop him — on Elec­tion Day.

    ———–

    “Mike Davis wants to cage kids, put Trump ene­mies in a ‘gulag.’ He could be our next AG.” by Will Bunch; Philadel­phia Inquir­er; 11/19/2023

    “The first you might call “resumé Mike Davis,” with the Des Moines, Iowa, native hit­ting all the right marks for rapid advance­ment in today’s con­ser­v­a­tive legal move­ment. A mem­ber of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, Davis worked as a con­sul­tant to boost the con­fir­ma­tion of Supreme Court Jus­tice Neil Gor­such, then became chief coun­sel for nom­i­na­tions to the GOP chair of the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee, fel­low Iowan Chuck Grass­ley. He served Grass­ley dur­ing the con­tentious hear­ings over even­tu­al Jus­tice Brett Kavanaugh and the push by Trump and then-Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Mitch McConnell to pack the judi­cia­ry with right-wing judges. He now heads two ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive efforts, the Arti­cle III Project and the inter­net Account­abil­i­ty Project.

    Even on paper his resume is trou­bling. Sure, it’s offi­cial­ly impres­sive, but con­tex­tu­al­ly trou­bling: Mike Davis, Fed­er­al Soci­ety mem­ber, worked as a con­sul­tant to boost the con­fir­ma­tion of Supreme Court Jus­tice Neil Gor­such and lat­er clerked for him, then became chief coun­sel for nom­i­na­tions to the GOP chair of the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee Chuck Grass­ley dur­ing the Brett Kavanugh hear­ings. It sounds great if ignore the the stolen seat Gor­such was fill­ing. And if you ignore the ques­tions about whether or not Kavanaugh lied to Con­gress over the role he may have played in a 2002 GOP scan­dal over the theft of Demo­c­ra­t­ic doc­u­ments from a con­gres­sion­al serv­er the ‘Sen­ate hack­ing scan­dal’). Mike Davis’s resume looks great on paper despite being a clear and present dan­ger to Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy because that’s how rot­ten the con­ser­v­a­tive legal estab­lish­ment has become over decades of Davis’s legal and polit­i­cal career. It’s not like the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety has kicked him out for these com­ments. Mike Davis is just will­ing to be loud and clear that he’s ready to go to that next step in author­i­tar­i­an­ism, which is why this is his moment to shine:

    ...
    Flash for­ward three years, and Trump is the over­whelm­ing front-run­ner to again become the GOP pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee in 2024, with ear­ly polls giv­ing him a chance of defeat­ing Biden in a rematch. And if he does indeed become America’s 47th pres­i­dent on Jan. 20, 2025, Trump seems to have two main goals: revenge against his polit­i­cal ene­mies, and cre­at­ing a gov­ern­ment teem­ing with fer­vent loy­al­ists who won’t block his path the way those career gov­ern­ment lawyers did in 2021.

    That’s where Mike Davis comes in. Most folks, except for the most polit­i­cal­ly obsessed, have nev­er heard of Davis, but it’s time for peo­ple to learn. The mid-40s-ish Davis takes the abstract warn­ings that U.S. democ­ra­cy is on the line in the 2024 elec­tion and brings them to life.

    He’s said he’d toss oppo­nents in “the gulag,” called caging migrant kids “glo­ri­ous,” and told his fol­low­ers to “arm up” against “the vio­lent black underclass.”Meet Mike Davis, a far-right lawyer with an inside track to run­ning a future Trump DOJ: https://t.co/CJ4NuOaAzH pic.twitter.com/4UywfDhdoT— The Meh­di Hasan Show (@MehdiHasanShow) Novem­ber 16, 2023

    Actu­al­ly, there are two Mike Davis­es.

    ...

    On paper, it wouldn’t be a stretch for a Repub­li­can pres­i­dent to give some­one like Davis a top post. But the attorney’s resume doesn’t tell you about the oth­er Mike Davis — now a ver­bal pit bull for Trump and his MAGA move­ment, mak­ing increas­ing­ly out­ra­geous state­ments seem­ing­ly aimed at get­ting the atten­tion of the boss and his inner cir­cle.

    In late Sep­tem­ber, Davis appeared on a right-wing pod­cast, the Ben­ny John­son Show, and described what he might do giv­en three weeks as an inter­im attor­ney gen­er­al by a vic­to­ri­ous Trump in 2025. He joked — per­haps — that the new pres­i­dent would have to grant him a par­don as he left town after what Davis described as “a reign of ter­ror” dur­ing which he would “unleash hell on Wash­ing­ton, D.C.”

    What came next was an agen­da very much in line with Trump’s over­heat­ed ral­ly rhetoric, the not-secret Project 2025 blue­print, and recent news leaks. Davis claimed he would demol­ish the “deep state” of career politi­cians, indict the cur­rent pres­i­dent “and every oth­er scum­ball, sleaze­ball Biden,” and help to par­don the Jan. 6 insur­rec­tion­ists.

    “We’re gonna deport a lot of peo­ple, 10 mil­lion peo­ple and grow­ing — anchor babies, their par­ents, their grand­par­ents,” Davis added. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glo­ri­ous. We’re gonna detain a lot of peo­ple in the D.C. gulag and Git­mo.”

    ...

    Last week, Axios report­ed that a mas­sive and unprece­dent­ed oper­a­tion is already under­way — cost­ing tens of mil­lions of dol­lars and using AI devel­oped by Ora­cle — to pre­screen can­di­dates to replace a whop­ping 54,000 entrenched offi­cials through­out the gov­ern­ment. It’s an army of Trump loy­al­ists who — in the polite main­stream media phras­ing of Axios — are “will­ing to stretch tra­di­tion­al bound­aries.”

    In recent days, Trump has increas­ing­ly alarmed folks with rhetoric that direct­ly echoes 20th-cen­tu­ry fas­cist dic­ta­tors like Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni or Adolf Hitler — describ­ing any left-wing foes as “ver­min” and claim­ing that refugees are “poi­son­ing the blood” of Amer­i­ca. But the over­heat­ed words of a dic­ta­tor still need an army of storm troop­ers to make it hap­pen, as well as a devot­ed inner cir­cle of pro­pa­gan­dists, tor­tur­ers, and eager “yes men.”
    ...

    And in case it’s not clear that Mike Davis could seri­ous­ly become Trump’s attor­ney gen­er­al, Don Jr. just put Davis in the group of peo­ple his dad would be inter­est­ed in trust­ing to exe­cute his vision, along with maybe Kash Patel and Lau­ra Loomer. Recall how Kash Patel was a key play­er in Trump’s efforts to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion and remains a key play­er in the grow­ing Sched­ule F/Project2025 effort. Patel and Davis are clear­ly that enthu­si­as­tic about fascis­ti­cal­ly break­ing the sys­tem in order to cap­ture it:

    ...
    Look, we can all agree there’s some­thing about the pod­cast for­mat and its jokey ban­ter that encour­ages guests to make out­ra­geous, over-the-top state­ments (just ask Charis­sa Thomp­son, right?). The real­i­ty, though, of what Davis told Ben­ny John­son is that per­haps it should not be tak­en lit­er­al­ly, but seri­ous­ly. This ambi­tious right-wing lawyer may or may not be a true believ­er but he knows how to audi­tion for Trump, and it’s work­ing.

    “There are a cou­ple peo­ple you could put in posi­tions like that, we talk about Mike Davis as attor­ney gen­er­al,” Don­ald Trump Jr. said dur­ing his own pod­cast. “You almost have to, just put them in as inter­im even, just to send that shot across the bow to the swamp … let Mike Davis and Kash Patel to be like inter­im AG’s. Put Lau­ra Loomer as press sec­re­tary for just a cou­ple of days.”

    That’s because Team Trump has coa­lesced around a world­view that its leader was denied imple­ment­ing his rad­i­cal vision — includ­ing enforc­ing the Big Lie of 2020 elec­tion fraud — in his first term because too many polit­i­cal func­tionar­ies from what it calls “the admin­is­tra­tive state” stood in his way. That’s not wrong. In addi­tion to the Jan. 3 revolt among the Jus­tice Depart­ment, you had prin­ci­pled lead­ers like now-retired Gen. Mark Mille, then the Joint Chiefs chair, who stood in the way of improp­er­ly call­ing in troops on Jan. 6 to per­haps block the elec­tion cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

    Now, the dri­ving force for a revenge-mind­ed sec­ond Trump term has noth­ing to do with fight­ing infla­tion or fix­ing rela­tions with Chi­na. The POTUS 45 inner cir­cle is deter­mined to oust those pesky bureau­crats and career pols from Jus­tice, the Pen­ta­gon, Fog­gy Bot­tom and who­ev­er else stands in the way of the dream for a “Red Cae­sar” to smash both “the deep state” and Amer­i­can lib­er­al­ism. It would sure­ly take more than one Mike Davis, after all, to deport 10 mil­lion peo­ple and enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly put “kids in cages” at the south­ern bor­der again.
    ...

    And that loom­ing threat of “gulags” from Mike Davis is why we have to unfor­tu­nate­ly take seri­ous­ly the kind of mes­sag­ing com­ing out of Davis’s Arti­cle III Project. Start­ed no-holds-barred advo­ca­cy group for con­ser­v­a­tive judi­cial nom­i­nees under Trump, it’s now a no-holds-barred advo­ca­cy group for mak­ing the case that Trump’s legal threats are part of some sort of deep state plot. The kind of deep state plot nar­ra­tive that will be trot­ted out over and over by a future Trump admin­is­tra­tion as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the purge Davis might over­see as attor­ney gen­er­al:

    NBC News

    Trump legal ally fights ‘activist pros­e­cu­tors’ in 2024 mes­sag­ing pre­view

    First to NBC News: The new dig­i­tal ad from the Arti­cle III Project hits out at dis­trict attor­neys in Geor­gia and New York as well as fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors.

    Nov. 17, 2023, 9:31 AM CST
    By Kather­ine Doyle

    A group fight­ing against for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s legal chal­lenges is push­ing back with a dig­i­tal video accus­ing those who have brought charges against him of abus­ing their legal pow­er to obstruct his efforts to retake the White House.

    It’s the lat­est entry in a heat­ed area that’s only going to get more charged as Trump’s crim­i­nal tri­als get start­ed next year. Already, the for­mer pres­i­dent has faced a gag order in his New York civ­il tri­al (which was tem­porar­i­ly lift­ed Thurs­day) pre­vent­ing him from attack­ing court staff.

    The 60-sec­ond dig­i­tal spot from the Arti­cle III Project accus­es “activist” judges and pros­e­cu­tors of weaponiz­ing the legal sys­tem for polit­i­cal gain. The video opens with a fig­ure of Lady Jus­tice, fol­lowed by a gav­el and pair of hand­cuffs, and nar­ra­tion that says, “Activist pros­e­cu­tors and judges have destroyed the rule of law, the scales of jus­tice for­ev­er bro­ken and imbal­anced. The worst offend­ers? Those who have weaponized the legal sys­tem for polit­i­cal gain against Pres­i­dent Trump.”

    It ticks through the cas­es against Trump in Geor­gia, New York, Wash­ing­ton, and Flori­da, sin­gling out Ful­ton Coun­ty, Geor­gia, Dis­trict Attor­ney Fani Willis for “using a witch hunt as a guise to arrest a for­mer pres­i­dent and make him take a mugshot,” and Man­hat­tan Dis­trict Attor­ney Alvin Bragg of Man­hat­tan for let­ting the city “fall to pieces,” while Judge Arthur Engoron “laughed and smirked” as Trump await­ed tri­al.

    “Even now they’re resort­ing to insane legal the­o­ries to take him off the bal­lot,” the ad con­tin­ues. “They’ve gone after a Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. Do you think they’ll stop there?”

    It’s a mes­sage that mir­rors Trump’s efforts to cast his legal woes as the work of a weaponized jus­tice sys­tem that won’t hes­i­tate to turn on its polit­i­cal adver­saries — and a pre­view of what’s to come next year.

    Led by Mike Davis, Arti­cle III Project was found­ed in an effort to press for con­ser­v­a­tive judi­cial and oth­er key nom­i­nees but evolved into an attack vec­tor tar­get­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tions after Biden took office. It took a bare-knuck­le approach to the con­fir­ma­tion of Supreme Court Jus­tice Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son over her sen­tenc­ing record in child porn cas­es.

    The for­mer chief coun­sel for nom­i­na­tions to GOP Sen. Chuck Grass­ley, Davis has worked to con­firm Jus­tices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gor­such, for whom he lat­er clerked on the Supreme Court.

    ...

    In a state­ment to NBC News, Davis said Trump’s polit­i­cal oppo­nents are using their legal pow­ers to thwart the for­mer president’s reelec­tion prospects, attacks that could upend our polit­i­cal sys­tem.

    “These judges and pros­e­cu­tors are left­wing par­ti­san activists mas­querad­ing as pub­lic ser­vants,” Davis said. “They’ve weaponized law enforce­ment and the judi­cia­ry to take out the lead­ing can­di­date for Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. Amer­i­cans need to know what is hap­pen­ing in their coun­try.”

    A com­bat­ive for­mer Repub­li­can White House and Sen­ate aide and cable news fix­ture, Davis has been at the fore­front of the pub­lic defense of Trump since the FBI exe­cut­ed a search war­rant at the for­mer president’s Mar-a-Lago res­i­dence in August 2022 to seize more than 100 clas­si­fied doc­u­ments he had pre­vi­ous­ly been asked to return.

    ...

    ———–

    “Trump legal ally fights ‘activist pros­e­cu­tors’ in 2024 mes­sag­ing pre­view” By Kather­ine Doyle; NBC News; 11/17/2023.

    Led by Mike Davis, Arti­cle III Project was found­ed in an effort to press for con­ser­v­a­tive judi­cial and oth­er key nom­i­nees but evolved into an attack vec­tor tar­get­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tions after Biden took office. It took a bare-knuck­le approach to the con­fir­ma­tion of Supreme Court Jus­tice Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son over her sen­tenc­ing record in child porn cas­es. ”

    The Arti­cle III Project start­ed off under Trump as a no-holds-barred out­fit for get­ting con­ser­v­a­tive judges appoint­ed. And now it’s ‘evolved’ into a no-holds-barred out­fit for smear­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nees and por­tray­ing any attempts to hold Trump legal­ly account­able as part of a deep state plot to pre­vent Trump from win­ning a sec­ond term. Because Trump’s legal defense now appears to pri­mar­i­ly con­sist of plans to win a sec­ond term through any means nec­es­sary and then tap peo­ple like Mike Davis to enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly car­ry out his ‘deep’ purge of soci­ety’s insti­tu­tions. There won’t be a legal sys­tem left that isn’t under the thumb of Trump and his Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety fel­low trav­el­ers of which Mike Davis is just one. An increas­ing­ly promi­nent Fed­er­al­ist fel­low trav­el­er, but just one of many. The upcom­ing purge is a MAGA/Conservative estab­lish­ment joint project:

    ...
    The 60-sec­ond dig­i­tal spot from the Arti­cle III Project accus­es “activist” judges and pros­e­cu­tors of weaponiz­ing the legal sys­tem for polit­i­cal gain. The video opens with a fig­ure of Lady Jus­tice, fol­lowed by a gav­el and pair of hand­cuffs, and nar­ra­tion that says, “Activist pros­e­cu­tors and judges have destroyed the rule of law, the scales of jus­tice for­ev­er bro­ken and imbal­anced. The worst offend­ers? Those who have weaponized the legal sys­tem for polit­i­cal gain against Pres­i­dent Trump.”

    It ticks through the cas­es against Trump in Geor­gia, New York, Wash­ing­ton, and Flori­da, sin­gling out Ful­ton Coun­ty, Geor­gia, Dis­trict Attor­ney Fani Willis for “using a witch hunt as a guise to arrest a for­mer pres­i­dent and make him take a mugshot,” and Man­hat­tan Dis­trict Attor­ney Alvin Bragg of Man­hat­tan for let­ting the city “fall to pieces,” while Judge Arthur Engoron “laughed and smirked” as Trump await­ed tri­al.

    “Even now they’re resort­ing to insane legal the­o­ries to take him off the bal­lot,” the ad con­tin­ues. “They’ve gone after a Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. Do you think they’ll stop there?”

    ...

    The for­mer chief coun­sel for nom­i­na­tions to GOP Sen. Chuck Grass­ley, Davis has worked to con­firm Jus­tices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gor­such, for whom he lat­er clerked on the Supreme Court.

    ...

    A com­bat­ive for­mer Repub­li­can White House and Sen­ate aide and cable news fix­ture, Davis has been at the fore­front of the pub­lic defense of Trump since the FBI exe­cut­ed a search war­rant at the for­mer president’s Mar-a-Lago res­i­dence in August 2022 to seize more than 100 clas­si­fied doc­u­ments he had pre­vi­ous­ly been asked to return.
    ...

    And again, don’t for­get that, while Mike Davis’s name does­n’t show up on avail­able leaked CNP mem­ber­ship lists, Davis was one of sig­na­to­ries of that let­ter of con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers back in Jan­u­ary of 2023 dur­ing the House speak­er­ship intra-GOP squab­bles over Kevin McCarthy’s nom­i­na­tion. Squab­bles that, as we saw, were very much orches­trat­ed and sup­port­ed by the CNP as evi­denced by the fact that the vast major­i­ty of the dozens of sig­na­to­ries of that let­ter were CNP mem­bers. Mike Davis may not be offi­cial­ly CNP, but he’s obvi­ous­ly a close fel­low trav­el­er. MAGA, CNP, Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety ‘estab­lish­ment’ Repub­li­cans. The mod­ern GOP is fas­cist gum­bo. There’s a lot of fel­low trav­el­ing in fas­cist gum­bo. Mike Davis is a par­tic­u­lar­ly vocal piece of this gum­bo but he’s cer­tain­ly not the only one plan­ning on need­ing a par­don.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 27, 2023, 2:38 am
  42. Cred­it where cred­it’s due: Chris Rufo did it again. This time, he man­aged to com­pel Har­vard pres­i­dent Clau­dine Gay into a res­ig­na­tion. Just six months after Gay became the first female black pres­i­dent of Har­vard. Grant­ed, this is cred­it for the kind of achieve­ment only a cyn­i­cal pro­pa­gan­dist would be proud of. But this is Chris Rufo we’re talk­ing about. He’s undoubt­ed­ly extreme­ly proud.

    Not that Rufo did­n’t have help. He had exten­sive help, start­ing with the appalling­ly poor answer Gay — along with the pres­i­dents of MIT and Penn — gave dur­ing a con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny to a ques­tion about calls for geno­cide against the Jews on cam­pus. There was­n’t too much more fuel need­ed after that PR deba­cle to keep that fire grow­ing. But Rufo found that fuel in the form of a pla­gia­rism charge against Gay that end­ed with her res­ig­na­tion less than a month after Rufo first pub­lished the alle­ga­tions.

    Now, when it comes to the pla­gia­rism alle­ga­tions them­selves, it does appear there are some instances that could be con­sid­ered pla­gia­rism found in Gay’s PhD the­sis. Although, as D. Stephen Voss- an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tucky who is one of the peo­ple whose works were pla­gia­rized by Gay — point­ed out, the kinds of pla­gia­rism Gay engaged in are the aca­d­e­m­ic equiv­a­lent of speed­ing. In oth­er words, this was a bor­der­line case of pla­gia­rism. But in the con­text of all the uproar of Gay’s tone deaf con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny, a bor­der­line case was all that was required.

    Chris Rufo isn’t hid­ing the fact that he set out to bring about Gay’s res­ig­na­tion. Inter­est­ing­ly, he’s also not hid­ing the fact that he was lead­ing a well orga­nized and coor­di­nat­ed media cam­paign that “shows a suc­cess­ful strat­e­gy for the polit­i­cal right...How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pres­sure and how we have to sequence our cam­paigns in order to be suc­cess­ful.” Rufo actu­al­ly bragged to Politi­co in a recent inter­view that, “I’ve run the same play­book on crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, on gen­der ide­ol­o­gy, on DEI bureau­cra­cy. For the time being, giv­en the struc­ture of our insti­tu­tions, this is a uni­ver­sal strat­e­gy that can be applied by the right to most issues.” Rufo went on to express how he now is seek­ing new exper­i­men­ta­tion “on how we can cycle up some of these cam­paigns very quick­ly”, describ­ing his end goal as the elim­i­na­tion of “the DEI bureau­cra­cy in every insti­tu­tion in Amer­i­ca and to restore truth rather than racial­ist ide­ol­o­gy as the guid­ing prin­ci­ple of Amer­i­ca.”

    Now, should we now expect a wave of new pla­gia­rism alle­ga­tions brought against the top aca­d­e­mics in the US? Well, on the one hand, that kind of depends on how much real pla­gia­rism there actu­al­ly is going on. But as we’re going to see in a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle excerpt from The Atlantic, one author decid­ed to run his own PhD the­sis through the iThen­ti­cate pla­gia­rism soft­ware, con­sid­ered by experts to be the best pla­gia­rism detec­tion soft­ware on the mar­ket today. The soft­ware returned a score of 74, imply­ing that 74 per­cent of the the­sis was pla­gia­rized. But then the author start­ed man­u­al­ly review­ing all of the var­i­ous instances flagged by the soft­ware and dis­cov­ered an array of false pos­i­tives. They even dis­cov­ered that papers are penal­ized in the iThen­ti­cate algo­rithm for sim­i­lar lan­guage found in work pub­lished after the paper’s pub­li­ca­tion date. Final­ly, by the take they fil­tered out all the false pos­i­tives, their score dropped to 0. Again, iThen­ti­cate is con­sid­ered the best of this soft­ware, cost­ing rough­ly $300 to run a the­sis through it.

    So we have Christo­pher Rufo pub­licly engaged in media vic­to­ry laps about his big score and pre­dict­ing more such sto­ries to come, at the same time we’re learn­ing that pla­gia­rism alle­ga­tions are appar­ent­ly going to be incred­i­bly easy to gen­er­ate on just about any­one Rufo decides to tar­get. They may not be cred­i­ble pla­gia­rism alle­ga­tions, but it does­n’t sound like it will be dif­fi­cult for Rufo and his allies to gen­er­ate alarm­ing iThen­ti­cate scores about basi­cal­ly any­one with a pub­li­ca­tion. What are the odds Rufo and his allies can resist the temp­ta­tion to go pub­lic with garbage pla­gia­rism scores? It’s a part of this sto­ry to keep an eye on.

    But as we’re going to also see, there’s anoth­er key piece of con­text to keep in mind as we’re watch­ing Rufo’s attack on acad­e­mia unfold: This is all hap­pen­ing in the wake of the appar­ent implo­sion of anoth­er one of Rufo’s big ideas from yes­ter­year. That would be Moms for Lib­er­ty, the ‘grass­roots’ astro­turf group of ‘con­cerned par­ents’ that has been bom­bard­ing school boards across the US with protests about ‘Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry’ (CRT) in Amer­i­can pub­lic schools. As we’ve seen, CRT hys­te­ria start­ed pop­ping up in 2021, with exten­sive Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP) sup­port. And foment­ing of that at anti-CRT hys­te­ria, with a focus on trans kids, is more or less what Moms for Lib­er­ty (M4L) exists to do and has done for a cou­ple of years now. But if the 2023 off year elec­tion results are any indi­ca­tion of the dura­bil­i­ty of this strat­e­gy, the strat­e­gy of whip­ping of anti-CRT hys­te­ria among par­ents for polit­i­cal gain has already run its course. Almost all of the Moms for Lib­er­ty backed can­di­dates lost their races for school board in 2023.

    The strat­e­gy was a bust. A strat­e­gy that Rufo played a major role in advo­cat­ing and advanc­ing over the last few years. In fact, Rufo first saw this strat­e­gy of focus­ing on CRT picked up by then-Pres­i­dent Trump in the final months of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Inter­est­ing­ly, it was only the Novem­ber and Decem­ber of 2020, after it was clear that Trump had lost, that was saw Rufo begin advo­cat­ing that state and local gov­ern­ments take up the charge of fight­ing these CRT bat­tles. It was Decem­ber of 2020 when Moms for Lib­er­ty was first incor­po­rat­ed. By the sum­mer of 2021, Moms for Lib­er­ty bat­tles were pop­ping up across the US at local school boards.

    Keep in mind that Rufo has­n’t exact­ly been shy about the intent of this anti-CRT backed cam­paign. As Rufo put it in a speech at Hills­dale Col­lege in 2021, “To get to uni­ver­sal school choice, you real­ly need to oper­ate from a premise of uni­ver­sal pub­lic school dis­trust.” And that right there is the grand prize: the pri­va­ti­za­tion of pub­lic schools. That’s the goal. A goal that appeared to be mov­ing fur­ther and fur­ther away with Moms for Lib­er­ty’s 2023 elec­toral bust.

    At the same time, despite that elec­toral wipe out, Moms for Lib­er­ty isn’t going any­where. It still has a mes­sage that ani­mates the Repub­li­can base and it still has the exten­sive dark mon­ey mega-donor sup­port need­ed to field new ‘grass­roots’ cam­paigns designed to whip up parental pan­ic. And with the over­turn­ing of Roe v Wade, the need for some sort of counter nar­ra­tive that can ani­mate young female vot­ers espe­cial­ly is absolute­ly cru­cial for the GOP’s 2024 prospects. Quite sim­ply, Chris Rufo and his fel­low trav­el­ers at the CNP need a nar­ra­tive about the hor­ri­ble per­ils of pro­gres­sivism that sticks and res­onates with vot­ers. And they need that nar­ra­tive now, in a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year.

    That’s all part of the fas­ci­nat­ing­ly cyn­i­cal con­text of the lead­er­ship fias­co that just tran­spired. Rufo and his allies received a polit­i­cal gift in the form of that deba­cle of con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny and they used that gift to great effect. And now they face the temp­ta­tion of try­ing work the same mod­el again, and again, and again, as Rufo is so keen on point­ing out. Are pla­gia­rism charges going to be gift that keeps on giv­ing? Or will it go the way of Moms for Lib­er­ty and the anti-CRT hys­ter­ics of yes­ter­year that just don’t play like they used to? Time will tell, but keep in mind that what­ev­er scheme Rufo has in mind does­n’t need to remain effec­tive for­ev­er. Just until Novem­ber of 2024. Try not to be super sur­prised of we see waves of pla­gia­rism accu­sa­tions dom­i­nat­ing the head­lines in 2024, just as we should­n’t be sur­prised to dis­cov­er that the pla­gia­rism accu­sa­tions lose steam after being revealed to large­ly be trumped up hoax­es. But nor should we be sur­prised of those accu­sa­tions don’t lose steam until after the 2024 elec­tion, when it will poten­tial­ly be too late to mat­ter. Don’t for­get: the whole ‘Moms for Lib­er­ty’ focus on state and local school boards was only deemed nec­es­sary by Rufo after Trump lost the White House.

    So let’s hope acad­e­mia is ready for an extreme­ly well orga­nized dark-mon­ey financed smear cam­paign intent on con­vinc­ing Amer­i­can vot­ers that col­leges rep­re­sent some sort of exis­ten­tial threat to soci­ety that only Don­ald Trump can fix. Because that well coor­di­nat­ed media cam­paign com­ing, as Chris Rufo loves telling jour­nal­ists for some rea­son:

    Politi­co

    We Sat Down With the Con­ser­v­a­tive Mas­ter­mind Behind Clau­dine Gay’s Ouster

    Christo­pher Rufo explains the moti­va­tions behind his lat­est cru­sade to top­ple the Har­vard pres­i­dent.

    By Ian Ward
    01/03/2024 11:20 AM EST

    Christo­pher Rufo has done it again.

    On Tues­day, the con­ser­v­a­tive activist — best known for launch­ing the cru­sade against “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” — was in a cel­e­bra­to­ry mood after Clau­dine Gay announced her res­ig­na­tion as pres­i­dent of Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.

    In recent weeks, Rufo has been at the fore­front of a sprawl­ing cam­paign to force Gay to resign, which began after she deliv­ered con­tro­ver­sial tes­ti­mo­ny before Con­gress in ear­ly Decem­ber about Harvard’s han­dling of alleged instances of anti­semitism stem­ming from the war in Gaza. On Dec. 10, Rufo and the con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal­ist Christo­pher Brunet pub­li­cized accu­sa­tions that Gay — the first Black woman to serve as Harvard’s pres­i­dent and a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist held in high regard by her peers — had pla­gia­rized oth­er schol­ars’ work. Togeth­er with pres­sure from donors about Gay’s response to the war in Gaza, those accu­sa­tions ulti­mate­ly led to Gay los­ing her job this week.

    None of that hap­pened by acci­dent. As Rufo acknowl­edged to me, Gay’s res­ig­na­tion was the result of a coor­di­nat­ed and high­ly orga­nized con­ser­v­a­tive cam­paign. “It shows a suc­cess­ful strat­e­gy for the polit­i­cal right,” he told me. “How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pres­sure and how we have to sequence our cam­paigns in order to be suc­cess­ful.”

    While the extent of Gay’s alleged pla­gia­rism is being dis­put­ed in the aca­d­e­m­ic com­mu­ni­ty, Rufo’s cam­paign worked because instances in which Gay appar­ent­ly bor­rowed lan­guage from oth­er schol­ars were fre­quent and cred­i­ble enough that the alle­ga­tions stuck.

    For an oper­a­tive who works most­ly behind the scenes of Repub­li­can pol­i­tics, Rufo isn’t shy about reveal­ing the true motives behind his influ­ence oper­a­tions. Last month, he told me that his efforts to reha­bil­i­tate Richard Nixon’s lega­cy are part of broad­er ploy to exon­er­ate for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tues­day after­noon, he was equal­ly frank about what moti­vat­ed his efforts to get Gay fired.

    The fol­low­ing has been edit­ed for clar­i­ty and con­ci­sion.

    How much cred­it do you think you deserve for Gay’s res­ig­na­tion?

    I’ve learned that it nev­er hurts to take the cred­it because some­times peo­ple don’t give it to you. But this real­ly was a team effort that involved three pri­ma­ry points of lever­age. First was the nar­ra­tive lever­age, and this was done pri­mar­i­ly by me, Christo­pher Brunet and Aaron Sibar­i­um. Sec­ond was the finan­cial lever­age, which was led by Bill Ack­man and oth­er Har­vard donors. And final­ly, there was the polit­i­cal lever­age which was real­ly led by Con­gress­woman Elise Stefanik’s mas­ter­ful per­for­mance with Clau­dine Gay at her hear­ings.

    When you put those three ele­ments togeth­er — nar­ra­tive, finan­cial and polit­i­cal pres­sure — and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the res­ig­na­tion of America’s most pow­er­ful aca­d­e­m­ic leader. I think that this result speaks for itself.

    How close­ly have you been coor­di­nat­ing with the oth­er peo­ple in those three camps?

    I know all the play­ers, I have vary­ing degrees of coor­di­na­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, but —

    What does that mean, “var­i­ous degrees of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and coor­di­na­tion?” Have you been active­ly work­ing togeth­er?

    Some peo­ple I speak to a lit­tle more fre­quent­ly, some peo­ple a lit­tle less fre­quent­ly. But my job as a jour­nal­ist and even more so as an activist is to know the polit­i­cal con­di­tions, to under­stand and devel­op rela­tion­ships with all of the polit­i­cal actors, and then to work as hard as I can so that they’re suc­cess­ful in achiev­ing their indi­vid­ual goals — but also to accom­plish the shared goal, which was to top­ple the pres­i­dent of Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.

    On Decem­ber 19, you tweet­ed that it was your plan to “smug­gle [the pla­gia­rism sto­ry] into the media appa­ra­tus from the left, which legit­imizes the nar­ra­tive to cen­ter-left actors who have the pow­er to top­ple [Gay].” Can you explain that strat­e­gy in more detail?

    It’s real­ly a text­book exam­ple of suc­cess­ful con­ser­v­a­tive activism, and the strat­e­gy is quite sim­ple. Christo­pher Brunet and I broke the sto­ry of Claudine’s pla­gia­rism on Decem­ber 10. It drove more than 100 mil­lion impres­sions on Twit­ter, and then it was the top sto­ry for a num­ber of weeks in con­ser­v­a­tive media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objec­tive, we had to get the nar­ra­tive into the left-wing media. But the left-wing uni­form­ly ignored the sto­ry for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of a thought­ful and sub­stan­tive cam­paign of sham­ing and bul­ly­ing my col­leagues on the left to take seri­ous­ly the sto­ry of the most sig­nif­i­cant aca­d­e­m­ic cor­rup­tion scan­dal in Harvard’s his­to­ry.

    Final­ly, the nar­ra­tive broke through with­in 24 hours of my announce­ment about smug­gling the nar­ra­tive into the left-wing media. You see this domi­no effect: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Wash­ing­ton Post and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions start­ed to do the actu­al work of expos­ing Gay’s pla­gia­rism, and then you see this beau­ti­ful kind of flow­er­ing of op-eds from all of those pub­li­ca­tions call­ing on Gay to resign. Once my posi­tion — which began on the right — became the dom­i­nant posi­tion across the cen­ter-left, I knew that it was just a mat­ter of time before we were going to be suc­cess­ful.

    ...

    Do you think that play­book works on any issue, or do you think that the Israel-Pales­tine issue is unique, inso­far as it’s already divid­ing elite lib­er­al orga­ni­za­tions?

    I’ve run the same play­book on crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, on gen­der ide­ol­o­gy, on DEI bureau­cra­cy. For the time being, giv­en the struc­ture of our insti­tu­tions, this is a uni­ver­sal strat­e­gy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demon­strat­ed that it can be suc­cess­ful.

    Why do you think you can be so open about your strat­e­gy and still have it work? Why don’t you feel like you need to be covert about it?

    First, and most sim­ply, because I’m telling the truth — and the truth has an inher­ent and innate pow­er. I believe that if it’s prop­a­gat­ed cor­rect­ly, it has the pow­er to defeat lies.

    The rea­son that I announced my strat­e­gy in advance is both to demor­al­ize my oppo­nents — and it cer­tain­ly does a good job at that — but also to teach my poten­tial friends and allies how the game works. Machi­avel­li wrote The Prince not to teach peo­ple who already knew the prin­ci­ples of how pow­er works, but to teach peo­ple who need to know — and in real­i­ty, the peo­ple who need to know about how pol­i­tics works are Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives. So I tried to pub­licly nar­rate what I’m doing in order to teach my friends how to do it them­selves. I think that this is a big ser­vice — with the added ben­e­fit that it demor­al­izes and deranges my ene­mies.

    Do you think you under­stand how the left-wing influ­ence ecosys­tem works bet­ter than the peo­ple inside it do?

    Well, I spent 10 years direct­ing doc­u­men­taries for PBS, lived in large, left-wing Amer­i­can cities, and I’ve stud­ied how the media, NGOs and uni­ver­si­ties cir­cu­late and legit­imize infor­ma­tion regimes. I’ve just applied that knowl­edge — and in some sens­es, I’ve stolen some of the ear­li­er tac­tics from pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions of the Amer­i­can left and weaponize them against the cur­rent regime.

    What I’m doing is teach­ing con­ser­v­a­tives how to hack that sys­tem and to use our asym­met­ri­cal dis­ad­van­tages to our strate­gic advan­tage. We need to be very light­weight and very aggres­sive, and we need to be faster and smarter and rhetor­i­cal­ly more sophis­ti­cat­ed than our oppo­nents — who, unfor­tu­nate­ly for them, have grown com­pla­cent, lazy, enti­tled and ripe for dis­rup­tion.

    What is your broad­er objec­tive here, beyond forc­ing the pres­i­dent of Har­vard to resign?

    My pri­ma­ry objec­tive is to elim­i­nate the DEI bureau­cra­cy in every insti­tu­tion in Amer­i­ca and to restore truth rather than racial­ist ide­ol­o­gy as the guid­ing prin­ci­ple of Amer­i­ca.

    ...

    How sig­nif­i­cant of a vic­to­ry do you con­sid­er this cam­paign for the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment?

    I worked on crit­i­cal race the­o­ry for a very long time before it yield­ed fruit, but this Clau­dine Gay sto­ry has shown that we can dri­ve major, par­a­digm-shift­ing vic­to­ries over a com­pressed time­frame. I’d like to engage in more exper­i­men­ta­tion on how we can cycle up some of these cam­paigns very quick­ly.

    ———

    “We Sat Down With the Con­ser­v­a­tive Mas­ter­mind Behind Clau­dine Gay’s Ouster” by Ian Ward; Politi­co; 01/03/2024

    “None of that hap­pened by acci­dent. As Rufo acknowl­edged to me, Gay’s res­ig­na­tion was the result of a coor­di­nat­ed and high­ly orga­nized con­ser­v­a­tive cam­paign. “It shows a suc­cess­ful strat­e­gy for the polit­i­cal right,” he told me. “How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pres­sure and how we have to sequence our cam­paigns in order to be suc­cess­ful.””

    A high­ly orga­nized and coor­di­nat­ed cam­paign. That’s how Chris Rufo char­ac­ter­ized this effort. Three key ele­ments — nar­ra­tive, finan­cial, and polit­i­cal pres­sure — were need­ed to get it done. And it worked. So well that Rufo is now enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly pre­dict­ing that this is a “uni­ver­sal strat­e­gy” that can used to ulti­mate­ly unwind DEI depart­ments at uni­ver­si­ties and oth­er insti­tu­tions across the US. But not just for DEI. The three pronged strat­e­gy can be applied by the right to most issues, accord­ing to Rufo:

    ...
    How much cred­it do you think you deserve for Gay’s res­ig­na­tion?

    I’ve learned that it nev­er hurts to take the cred­it because some­times peo­ple don’t give it to you. But this real­ly was a team effort that involved three pri­ma­ry points of lever­age. First was the nar­ra­tive lever­age, and this was done pri­mar­i­ly by me, Christo­pher Brunet and Aaron Sibar­i­um. Sec­ond was the finan­cial lever­age, which was led by Bill Ack­man and oth­er Har­vard donors. And final­ly, there was the polit­i­cal lever­age which was real­ly led by Con­gress­woman Elise Stefanik’s mas­ter­ful per­for­mance with Clau­dine Gay at her hear­ings.

    When you put those three ele­ments togeth­er — nar­ra­tive, finan­cial and polit­i­cal pres­sure — and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the res­ig­na­tion of America’s most pow­er­ful aca­d­e­m­ic leader. I think that this result speaks for itself.

    ...

    Do you think that play­book works on any issue, or do you think that the Israel-Pales­tine issue is unique, inso­far as it’s already divid­ing elite lib­er­al orga­ni­za­tions?

    I’ve run the same play­book on crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, on gen­der ide­ol­o­gy, on DEI bureau­cra­cy. For the time being, giv­en the struc­ture of our insti­tu­tions, this is a uni­ver­sal strat­e­gy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demon­strat­ed that it can be suc­cess­ful.

    ...

    What is your broad­er objec­tive here, beyond forc­ing the pres­i­dent of Har­vard to resign?

    My pri­ma­ry objec­tive is to elim­i­nate the DEI bureau­cra­cy in every insti­tu­tion in Amer­i­ca and to restore truth rather than racial­ist ide­ol­o­gy as the guid­ing prin­ci­ple of Amer­i­ca.
    ...

    And note how Rufo appears to be admit­ting that hedge fund bil­lion­aire Bill Ack­man was an active par­tic­i­pant in this orga­nized push. Rufo is coy about the degree of coor­di­na­tion, but he seems to be admit­ting that this was a joint effort:

    ...
    How close­ly have you been coor­di­nat­ing with the oth­er peo­ple in those three camps?

    I know all the play­ers, I have vary­ing degrees of coor­di­na­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, but —

    What does that mean, “var­i­ous degrees of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and coor­di­na­tion?” Have you been active­ly work­ing togeth­er?

    Some peo­ple I speak to a lit­tle more fre­quent­ly, some peo­ple a lit­tle less fre­quent­ly. But my job as a jour­nal­ist and even more so as an activist is to know the polit­i­cal con­di­tions, to under­stand and devel­op rela­tion­ships with all of the polit­i­cal actors, and then to work as hard as I can so that they’re suc­cess­ful in achiev­ing their indi­vid­ual goals — but also to accom­plish the shared goal, which was to top­ple the pres­i­dent of Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.
    ...

    There’s also the rather com­i­cal Rufo gives for his very pub­lic depic­tions of this strat­e­gy in action. Rufo describes it as edu­ca­tion­al truth telling. But it’s hard to ignore the real­i­ty that Rufo’s pub­lic nar­ra­tive basi­cal­ly amounts to por­tray­ing this high­ly coor­di­nat­ed media cam­paign — a cam­paign that includ­ed mem­bers of con­gress and a bil­lion­aire who was orga­niz­ing CEOs to threat­en the job prospects of stu­dents — as some sort of prin­ci­pled right­eous strug­gle of truth and light against an oppres­sive all-pow­er­ful lib­er­al bureau­cra­cy intent on impos­ing lib­er­al fas­cism on soci­ety. When that’s your nar­ra­tive, it’s not hard to see why you’re so vocal about it:

    ...
    Why do you think you can be so open about your strat­e­gy and still have it work? Why don’t you feel like you need to be covert about it?

    First, and most sim­ply, because I’m telling the truth — and the truth has an inher­ent and innate pow­er. I believe that if it’s prop­a­gat­ed cor­rect­ly, it has the pow­er to defeat lies.

    The rea­son that I announced my strat­e­gy in advance is both to demor­al­ize my oppo­nents — and it cer­tain­ly does a good job at that — but also to teach my poten­tial friends and allies how the game works. Machi­avel­li wrote The Prince not to teach peo­ple who already knew the prin­ci­ples of how pow­er works, but to teach peo­ple who need to know — and in real­i­ty, the peo­ple who need to know about how pol­i­tics works are Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives. So I tried to pub­licly nar­rate what I’m doing in order to teach my friends how to do it them­selves. I think that this is a big ser­vice — with the added ben­e­fit that it demor­al­izes and deranges my ene­mies.

    Do you think you under­stand how the left-wing influ­ence ecosys­tem works bet­ter than the peo­ple inside it do?

    Well, I spent 10 years direct­ing doc­u­men­taries for PBS, lived in large, left-wing Amer­i­can cities, and I’ve stud­ied how the media, NGOs and uni­ver­si­ties cir­cu­late and legit­imize infor­ma­tion regimes. I’ve just applied that knowl­edge — and in some sens­es, I’ve stolen some of the ear­li­er tac­tics from pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions of the Amer­i­can left and weaponize them against the cur­rent regime.

    What I’m doing is teach­ing con­ser­v­a­tives how to hack that sys­tem and to use our asym­met­ri­cal dis­ad­van­tages to our strate­gic advan­tage. We need to be very light­weight and very aggres­sive, and we need to be faster and smarter and rhetor­i­cal­ly more sophis­ti­cat­ed than our oppo­nents — who, unfor­tu­nate­ly for them, have grown com­pla­cent, lazy, enti­tled and ripe for dis­rup­tion.
    ...

    Also note Rufo’s antic­i­pa­tion about “more exper­i­men­ta­tion on how we can cycle up some of these cam­paigns very quick­ly.” In oth­er words, we should expect the res­ig­na­tions of a lot more col­lege pres­i­dents by the time this is over:

    ...
    How sig­nif­i­cant of a vic­to­ry do you con­sid­er this cam­paign for the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment?

    I worked on crit­i­cal race the­o­ry for a very long time before it yield­ed fruit, but this Clau­dine Gay sto­ry has shown that we can dri­ve major, par­a­digm-shift­ing vic­to­ries over a com­pressed time­frame. I’d like to engage in more exper­i­men­ta­tion on how we can cycle up some of these cam­paigns very quick­ly.
    ...

    And as the fol­low­ing piece in The Atlantic warns, the pla­gia­rism accu­sa­tions may not be lim­it­ed to peo­ple who arguably engaged in real pla­gia­rism, even edge cas­es as appears to be the case with Gay. Thanks to mod­ern pla­gia­rism detec­tion tools, vir­tu­al­ly any­one can earn a pla­gia­rism accu­sa­tion. At least that was the appar­ent expe­ri­ence by Ian Bogost, who decid­ed to test out the lead­ing iTheni­cate pla­gia­rism detec­tion soft­ware on his own PhD the­sis, writ­ten back in 2002–2004. Bogost’s score? A 74, which is the equiv­a­lent of accus­ing Bogost of pla­gia­riz­ing around 74% of his the­sis. Upon clos­er inspec­tion of the indi­vid­ual instances of alleged pla­gia­rism, Bogost dis­cov­ered a vari­ety of dif­fer­nt forms of false pos­i­tive hits, includ­ing being penal­ized for pub­li­ca­tions with sim­i­lar lan­guage that were pub­lished after his the­sis. After fil­ter­ing out all the bogus hits, Bogost’s score dropped to 0.

    It was just one exam­ple, but a pret­ty com­pelling one. Almost any­one with any pub­lished aca­d­e­m­ic work can be accused of pla­gia­rism using today’s pla­gia­rism detec­tion tools. Or rather, a bad-faithed appli­ca­tion of those pla­gia­rism detec­tion tools.

    Will Chris Rufo and his many fel­low trav­el­ers be able to resist the temp­ta­tion to start lev­el­ing pla­gia­rism accu­sa­tions to every ‘woke’ aca­d­e­m­ic they can find? We’ll see, but the temp­ta­tion has go to be there. Because as the arti­cle warns, this iThen­ti­cate pla­gia­rism detec­tion soft­ware is con­sid­ered the best pla­gia­rism detec­tion tool avail­able today:

    The Atlantic

    The Pla­gia­rism War Has Begun

    Clau­dine Gay was tak­en down by a polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed inves­ti­ga­tion. Would the same approach work for any aca­d­e­m­ic?

    By Ian Bogost
    Jan­u­ary 4, 2024

    Updat­ed at 4:10 p.m. ET on Jan­u­ary 4, 2024.

    When the con­ser­v­a­tive authors Christo­pher Rufo and Christo­pher Brunet accused Harvard’s Clau­dine Gay last month of hav­ing com­mit­ted pla­gia­rism in her dis­ser­ta­tion, they were clear­ly moti­vat­ed by a cul­ture-war oppor­tu­ni­ty. Gay, the school’s first Black president—and, for some crit­ics, an avatar of the iden­ti­ty-pol­i­tics bureau­cra­cy on col­lege campuses—had just flubbed tes­ti­mo­ny before Con­gress about anti-Semi­tism on cam­pus. She was already under pres­sure to resign. Evi­dence of schol­ar­ly mis­con­duct was just the pars­ley dec­o­rat­ing an anti-wok­e­ness blue-plate spe­cial.

    But soon enough, the integri­ty of Gay’s research became the cen­tral issue in a scan­dal that appears to have led to her res­ig­na­tion on Tues­day. It turned out that the New York Post had gone to Har­vard in Octo­ber with sep­a­rate alle­ga­tions of pla­gia­rism in her pub­lished arti­cles; and then, ear­li­er this week, still more exam­ples were pro­duced. “My crit­ics found instances in my aca­d­e­m­ic writ­ings where some mate­r­i­al dupli­cat­ed oth­er schol­ars’ lan­guage, with­out prop­er attri­bu­tion,” Gay wrote in a New York Times op-ed short­ly after she’d stepped down. She acknowl­edged hav­ing made “cita­tion errors,” and has in recent weeks request­ed a hand­ful of for­mal cor­rec­tions to pub­lished works. Still, she avowed in her op-ed, “I have nev­er mis­rep­re­sent­ed my research find­ings, nor have I ever claimed cred­it for the research of oth­ers.”

    I haven’t either—at least as far as I know. For the past cou­ple of decades, I’ve been a pro­fes­sor at elite research uni­ver­si­ties; I’ve pub­lished 150 or so schol­ar­ly arti­cles and con­fer­ence papers, and 10 books. Might any of these con­tain the sort of impro­pri­eties that led to a uni­ver­si­ty president’s down­fall? I felt sure the answer was no, but the ques­tion lin­gered in my mind and was echoed in the claims of the oth­er aca­d­e­mics who have late­ly rushed to Gay’s defense. Some peo­ple argued that her cita­tion prac­tices were not egre­gious or even that they rep­re­sent busi­ness as usu­al. “If that’s going to count as pla­gia­rism,” one pro­fes­sor wrote, “all writ­ers are vul­ner­a­ble to it, and any­one who writes any­thing con­tro­ver­sial can expect to suf­fer for it.” If all writ­ers were vul­ner­a­ble, was I?

    A ver­sion of this ques­tion lies at the core of many dis­agree­ments over Gay’s depar­ture. Does her now-acknowl­edged slop­pi­ness real­ly stand out among her peers? What would hap­pen if the same degree of scruti­ny were applied to the work of any oth­er schol­ar? In short: Is the base­line rate of these trans­gres­sions in acad­e­mia high or low?

    I had no idea. So, as a sim­ple exper­i­ment, I decid­ed to launch a tar­get­ed pla­gia­rism inves­ti­ga­tion of myself to see if sim­i­lar scruti­ny of my dis­ser­ta­tion, per­formed for no good rea­son, could deliv­er sim­i­lar results. Per­haps I, too, am guilty of some care­less­ness that might be taken—maybe out of con­text, per­haps in bad faith—as a sign of schol­ar­ly malfea­sance. I promised my edi­tor ahead of time that I’d come clean about what­ev­er I found, report­ing any mis­deeds to my university’s research-integri­ty office and fac­ing applic­a­ble con­se­quences.

    ...

    ****

    How to do it? The instances of copy­ing in Clau­dine Gay’s dis­ser­ta­tion that I’ve seen are not the kind that jump right out at you, but they are near-direct quo­ta­tions of oth­er schol­ars’ work, pre­sent­ed in the form of para­phras­es. Brunet and Rufo appear to have reviewed her rough­ly 200-page text sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, and I want­ed to hew as close to their meth­ods as pos­si­ble. When I reached out to ask how they’d per­formed their analy­sis, Brunet said “No com­ment” and Rufo didn’t answer. (Isabel Vin­cent, the Post reporter who had received sep­a­rate pla­gia­rism alle­ga­tions from an anony­mous source in Octo­ber, also declined to offer any details.)

    I sus­pect­ed that the probe had been car­ried out using one of the sev­er­al pla­gia­rism-detec­tion soft­ware pack­ages that are now avail­able for pri­vate use. Jonathan Bai­ley, a copy­right and pla­gia­rism con­sul­tant who also runs the pla­gia­rism-news web­site Pla­gia­rism Today, told me that the analy­sis of Gay’s dis­ser­ta­tion is like­ly to have been car­ried out with iThen­ti­cate, an online ser­vice run by the same com­pa­ny that oper­ates the pop­u­lar stu­dent-ori­ent­ed pla­gia­rism detec­tor Tur­nitin. “When deal­ing with cas­es of research integri­ty, the best tool is iThen­ti­cate,” he said. Tur­nitin has coop­er­a­tive agree­ments with aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ers, which allows the soft­ware to check a doc­u­ment for text shared with sources that would oth­er­wise be hid­den behind pay­walls or in library archives. “It’s a pricey tool, but in this space, it’s eas­i­ly the best one out there,” Bai­ley added. (Tur­nitin didn’t respond when I asked whether iThen­ti­cate might have been used to inves­ti­gate Gay’s work.)

    On Decem­ber 29, I down­loaded my the­sis from the insti­tu­tion­al repos­i­to­ry at UCLA, where I had earned my doc­tor­ate, signed up for an iThen­ti­cate account, and arranged for The Atlantic to pay the stan­dard rate of $300 to ana­lyze my dissertation’s 68,038 words.

    ...

    On the prin­ci­ple that only a cow­ard hides from the truth, I pressed the “Upload” but­ton on the iThen­ti­cate web­site, wait­ed for the progress bar to fill, then closed my lap­top. When I came back for my report the next day, it felt a lit­tle like call­ing up my doctor’s office for the news, pos­si­bly bad, about what­ev­er test they had run on my aging, mor­tal body. I took a breath and clicked to see my result.

    It was 74. Was I a pla­gia­rist? This, appar­ent­ly, was my answer. Pla­gia­rism isn’t nor­mal­ly summed up as a num­ber, so I didn’t know quite how to respond. It seemed plau­si­ble that 74 might be a good score. Turns out it wasn’t: The num­ber describes what per­cent­age of a document’s mate­r­i­al is sim­i­lar to text from its data­base of ref­er­ence works. My result—my 74—suggested that three-quar­ters of my dis­ser­ta­tion had been copied from oth­er sources. “What the heck?” I said aloud, except I didn’t say “heck.”

    This seemed wrong to me. I was there when I wrote the thing, and I’d have remem­bered copy­ing sev­en out of every 10 words from oth­er sources, even 20 years lat­er. Turns out it was wrong. I wrote the dis­ser­ta­tion from 2002 to 2004, and the pla­gia­rism soft­ware checks a work against what­ev­er it finds—even if the com­pared text was pub­lished lat­er. As Bai­ley told me, “iThen­ti­cate doesn’t detect pla­gia­rism. It detects copied or sim­i­lar text.” From there, Bai­ley said, “You have to do a lot of man­u­al work.”

    *****

    So I start­ed doing the man­u­al work.

    The first, most obvi­ous source of my pla­gia­rism score was the fact that I’d sub­se­quent­ly pub­lished a book based on my dis­ser­ta­tion (a com­mon prac­tice in acad­e­mia), which itself appeared in many forms through­out the iThen­ti­cate data­base. In oth­er words, the soft­ware sug­gest­ed that I’d pla­gia­rized my dis­ser­ta­tion from a future ver­sion of myself. But to con­firm each of these false-pos­i­tives, a pla­gia­rism sleuth like myself has to go through the report and click on each alleged­ly copied source indi­vid­u­al­ly.

    Once I’d exclud­ed the lit­er­al copies of (and com­men­taries upon) my own work from the analy­sis, my sim­i­lar­i­ty index dropped to 26 per­cent. Phew! But iThen­ti­cate still list­ed 288 pos­si­ble sources of copy­ing. Exon­er­at­ing myself was going to take a while.

    I noticed that a lot of the match­es were cita­tions of oth­er books, arti­cles, or mate­ri­als. iThen­ti­cate has a check­box to “Exclude bib­li­og­ra­phy,” so I ticked it. Now my score was down to 23. Oth­er match­es were lit­er­al quotes, which I had quot­ed with foot­notes to their sources. Tick­ing anoth­er check­box, “Exclude quotes,” brought my sim­i­lar­i­ty index to 9.

    Most of the remain­ing match­es were boil­er­plate chaff. The insti­tu­tion­al-archive copy of my dis­ser­ta­tion had added a line to the foot­er of each page, “Repro­duced with per­mis­sion of the copy­right own­er. Fur­ther repro­duc­tion pro­hib­it­ed with­out per­mis­sion.” iThen­ti­cate had matched a dozen or more oth­er dis­ser­ta­tions with the same notice, includ­ing “Patho­gen­e­sis of Bar­tonel­la Hense­lae in the Domes­tic Cat” and “Hyper­de­pri­va­tion and Race-Spe­cif­ic Homi­cide, 1980–1990.” Labo­ri­ous­ly exclud­ing those and sim­i­lar mate­ri­als left me with 87 poten­tial instances of pla­gia­rism, and a sim­i­lar­i­ty index of 3.

    I care­ful­ly reviewed the match­es that remained. Some were just cita­tions of my work. Oth­ers were appro­pri­ate­ly foot­not­ed quo­ta­tions that I’d used, but that iThen­ti­cate hadn’t con­strued as such because they were indent­ed in the text. I also had to click through titles or oth­er prop­er names that were show­ing up as copied phras­es. Bib­li­o­graph­ic cita­tions that the fil­ter hadn’t caught came up too. So did a lot of tex­tu­al noise—phrases such as to pre­serve the, which appeared in sim­i­lar pat­terns across unre­lat­ed mate­ri­als.

    After a cou­ple of hours of work, I still had 60 indi­vid­ual entries to review, each requir­ing pre­ci­sion mou­s­ing to assess and exclude. Deter­mined to see if I’d copied any orig­i­nal work accord­ing to the soft­ware, I persisted—after all, some of the instances of pla­gia­rism that had sunk Clau­dine Gay were mea­sured in the tens of words. But not one sin­gle match that iThen­ti­cate had found amount­ed to ille­git­i­mate copy­ing. In the end, my dissertation’s fraud fac­tor had dropped from 74 per­cent to zero.

    ...

    Does this imply that Gay’s record is unusu­al among pro­fes­sors? Not in and of itself. Her field of quan­ti­ta­tive social sci­ence may have dif­fer­ent stan­dards for tex­tu­al ref­er­ence. The sci­ences are more con­cerned with the orig­i­nal­i­ty of research find­ings than the descrip­tions of exper­i­ments. But it does at least refute the case that this was noth­ing more than aca­d­e­m­ic jay­walk­ing, or, in its purest straw-man form, that every­body does it.

    But even if there’s sub­stance to this Har­vard scan­dal, I’m more afraid of what it may por­tend. The result of my exper­i­ment brought me no relief, only a new anx­i­ety. The very ease of the self-inves­ti­ga­tion, con­duct­ed at a rel­a­tive­ly mod­est cost with the help of pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy, hints at how a full-bore pla­gia­rism war could end up play­ing out. In her New York Times op-ed, Gay admit­ted that she’d been wrong to copy text with­out attri­bu­tion. She also char­ac­ter­ized the cam­paign against her as part of a coor­di­nat­ed attempt to under­mine edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions and their lead­ers. On both counts, she was right.

    Sim­i­lar probes are sure to fol­low. Busi­ness Insid­er has already pub­lished alle­ga­tions that Neri Oxman, a for­mer pro­fes­sor at MIT and the wife of the Har­vard donor and vocif­er­ous Gay crit­ic Bill Ack­man, pla­gia­rized in her dis­ser­ta­tion, too. (In a post on X, for­mer Twit­ter, Oxman acknowl­edged some improp­er cita­tions and wrote, “I regret and apol­o­gize for these errors.”) And after Gay resigned, Rufo announced that he would con­tribute $10,000 to a “‘pla­gia­rism hunt­ing’ fund” meant to “expose rot” and “restore truth.” That’s enough dough to test a few dozen dis­ser­ta­tions or a few hun­dred arti­cles with iThen­ti­cate, and their authors wouldn’t be able to dis­miss the find­ings sole­ly as the prod­uct of “bad faith.” I sup­pose that’s good news for com­pa­nies such as Tur­nitin. (Aca­d­e­mics may be get­ting their just deserts for sub­ject­ing stu­dents to con­stant sur­veil­lance with the company’s stu­dent-focused pla­gia­rism-detec­tion soft­ware.)

    If a pla­gia­rism war does break out, I sus­pect that uni­ver­si­ties and their lead­ers will end up fight­ing it defen­sive­ly, with bureau­crat­ic weapons direct­ed inward. “If I were a school look­ing to appoint a new pres­i­dent,” Bai­ley told me, “I’d con­sid­er doing this kind of analy­sis before doing so.” To run stan­dard pla­gia­rism checks on top brass may end up seem­ing rea­son­able, but with that pol­i­cy in place, what’s to stop belea­guered and embat­tled admin­is­tra­tors from insist­ing on the same—best practices!—before any fac­ul­ty hire or award of tenure? Aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ers could demand iThen­ti­cate-style checks on all sub­mis­sions. Leg­is­la­tures could demand pla­gia­rism-assess­ment reports from state col­leges, with a spe­cial focus on fields that are pur­port­ed­ly “woke.”

    Pla­gia­rism assess­ment, with auto­mat­ed accu­sa­tions and man­u­al rebut­tals, could become a way of life, a nec­es­sary evil brought about by, yes, the bad actors who seek to under­mine edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions and their lead­ers. That isn’t like­ly to improve aca­d­e­m­ic work, but it would cer­tain­ly make high­er edu­ca­tion worse.

    ———–

    “The Pla­gia­rism War Has Begun” By Ian Bogost; The Atlantic; 01/04/2024

    “After a cou­ple of hours of work, I still had 60 indi­vid­ual entries to review, each requir­ing pre­ci­sion mou­s­ing to assess and exclude. Deter­mined to see if I’d copied any orig­i­nal work accord­ing to the soft­ware, I persisted—after all, some of the instances of pla­gia­rism that had sunk Clau­dine Gay were mea­sured in the tens of words. But not one sin­gle match that iThen­ti­cate had found amount­ed to ille­git­i­mate copy­ing. In the end, my dissertation’s fraud fac­tor had dropped from 74 per­cent to zero.

    Well look at that: when Ian Bogost put his 2004 dis­ser­ta­tion through the iThen­ti­cate pla­gia­rism detec­tion too, it gave him a score of 74, imply­ing that 74 per­cent of his the­sis was pla­gia­rized. And yet, after sift­ing through all the false pos­i­tives, the score was reduced to 0. It’s the kind of exam­ple that sug­gests is going to be exceed­ing­ly easy to gen­er­ate alarm­ing pla­gia­rism scores. Gen­er­at­ing authen­ti­cal­ly alarm­ing cas­es of pla­gia­rism might not be that easy, but cre­at­ing new head­lines based on spe­cious pla­gia­rism accu­sa­tions is going to be like a walk in the park. And this iThen­ti­cate soft­ware is appar­ent­ly the best in the field, cost­ing $300 just to use for a dis­ser­ta­tion. But also note this incred­i­ble detail about how iThen­ti­cate’s algo­rithm works: you get penal­ized for works pub­lished after your work that have sim­i­lar ver­biage. So the pla­gia­rism of your own work by oth­ers could end up ele­vat­ing your own pla­gia­rism score:

    ...
    I sus­pect­ed that the probe had been car­ried out using one of the sev­er­al pla­gia­rism-detec­tion soft­ware pack­ages that are now avail­able for pri­vate use. Jonathan Bai­ley, a copy­right and pla­gia­rism con­sul­tant who also runs the pla­gia­rism-news web­site Pla­gia­rism Today, told me that the analy­sis of Gay’s dis­ser­ta­tion is like­ly to have been car­ried out with iThen­ti­cate, an online ser­vice run by the same com­pa­ny that oper­ates the pop­u­lar stu­dent-ori­ent­ed pla­gia­rism detec­tor Tur­nitin. “When deal­ing with cas­es of research integri­ty, the best tool is iThen­ti­cate,” he said. Tur­nitin has coop­er­a­tive agree­ments with aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lish­ers, which allows the soft­ware to check a doc­u­ment for text shared with sources that would oth­er­wise be hid­den behind pay­walls or in library archives. “It’s a pricey tool, but in this space, it’s eas­i­ly the best one out there,” Bai­ley added. (Tur­nitin didn’t respond when I asked whether iThen­ti­cate might have been used to inves­ti­gate Gay’s work.)

    On Decem­ber 29, I down­loaded my the­sis from the insti­tu­tion­al repos­i­to­ry at UCLA, where I had earned my doc­tor­ate, signed up for an iThen­ti­cate account, and arranged for The Atlantic to pay the stan­dard rate of $300 to ana­lyze my dissertation’s 68,038 words.

    ...

    On the prin­ci­ple that only a cow­ard hides from the truth, I pressed the “Upload” but­ton on the iThen­ti­cate web­site, wait­ed for the progress bar to fill, then closed my lap­top. When I came back for my report the next day, it felt a lit­tle like call­ing up my doctor’s office for the news, pos­si­bly bad, about what­ev­er test they had run on my aging, mor­tal body. I took a breath and clicked to see my result.

    It was 74. Was I a pla­gia­rist? This, appar­ent­ly, was my answer. Pla­gia­rism isn’t nor­mal­ly summed up as a num­ber, so I didn’t know quite how to respond. It seemed plau­si­ble that 74 might be a good score. Turns out it wasn’t: The num­ber describes what per­cent­age of a document’s mate­r­i­al is sim­i­lar to text from its data­base of ref­er­ence works. My result—my 74—suggested that three-quar­ters of my dis­ser­ta­tion had been copied from oth­er sources. “What the heck?” I said aloud, except I didn’t say “heck.”

    This seemed wrong to me. I was there when I wrote the thing, and I’d have remem­bered copy­ing sev­en out of every 10 words from oth­er sources, even 20 years lat­er. Turns out it was wrong. I wrote the dis­ser­ta­tion from 2002 to 2004, and the pla­gia­rism soft­ware checks a work against what­ev­er it finds—even if the com­pared text was pub­lished lat­er. As Bai­ley told me, “iThen­ti­cate doesn’t detect pla­gia­rism. It detects copied or sim­i­lar text.” From there, Bai­ley said, “You have to do a lot of man­u­al work.”
    ...

    Now, when Rufo ini­tial­ly pub­lished his alle­ga­tions against Gay, he did­n’t sim­ply list an iThen­ti­cate score. Rufo cit­ed actu­al­ly instances where para­graphs from Gay’s the­sis appeared to be using lan­guage with­out attri­bu­tion. They were fair­ly triv­ial vio­la­tions by any rea­son­able stan­dard, but it was enough to keep the flames fanned and Gay’s even­tu­al res­ig­na­tion. Which is part of what makes this new enthu­si­asm by Rufo over repeat­ing this whole fias­co so grim­ly inter­est­ing. It’s not actu­al­ly clear that the pla­gia­rism Gay is accused of is very wide­spread. But it’s abun­dant­ly clear that tools like iThen­ti­cate will be it exceed­ing­ly easy to lev­el such accu­sa­tions. Almost every aca­d­e­m­ic is poten­tial­ly vul­ner­a­ble to an unfil­tered iThen­ti­cate score:

    ...
    Does this imply that Gay’s record is unusu­al among pro­fes­sors? Not in and of itself. Her field of quan­ti­ta­tive social sci­ence may have dif­fer­ent stan­dards for tex­tu­al ref­er­ence. The sci­ences are more con­cerned with the orig­i­nal­i­ty of research find­ings than the descrip­tions of exper­i­ments. But it does at least refute the case that this was noth­ing more than aca­d­e­m­ic jay­walk­ing, or, in its purest straw-man form, that every­body does it.

    But even if there’s sub­stance to this Har­vard scan­dal, I’m more afraid of what it may por­tend. The result of my exper­i­ment brought me no relief, only a new anx­i­ety. The very ease of the self-inves­ti­ga­tion, con­duct­ed at a rel­a­tive­ly mod­est cost with the help of pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy, hints at how a full-bore pla­gia­rism war could end up play­ing out. In her New York Times op-ed, Gay admit­ted that she’d been wrong to copy text with­out attri­bu­tion. She also char­ac­ter­ized the cam­paign against her as part of a coor­di­nat­ed attempt to under­mine edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions and their lead­ers. On both counts, she was right.

    Sim­i­lar probes are sure to fol­low. Busi­ness Insid­er has already pub­lished alle­ga­tions that Neri Oxman, a for­mer pro­fes­sor at MIT and the wife of the Har­vard donor and vocif­er­ous Gay crit­ic Bill Ack­man, pla­gia­rized in her dis­ser­ta­tion, too. (In a post on X, for­mer Twit­ter, Oxman acknowl­edged some improp­er cita­tions and wrote, “I regret and apol­o­gize for these errors.”) And after Gay resigned, Rufo announced that he would con­tribute $10,000 to a “‘pla­gia­rism hunt­ing’ fund” meant to “expose rot” and “restore truth.” That’s enough dough to test a few dozen dis­ser­ta­tions or a few hun­dred arti­cles with iThen­ti­cate, and their authors wouldn’t be able to dis­miss the find­ings sole­ly as the prod­uct of “bad faith.” I sup­pose that’s good news for com­pa­nies such as Tur­nitin. (Aca­d­e­mics may be get­ting their just deserts for sub­ject­ing stu­dents to con­stant sur­veil­lance with the company’s stu­dent-focused pla­gia­rism-detec­tion soft­ware.)
    ...

    Can Rufo and the rest of his high­ly orga­nized net­work resist what must be an enor­mous temp­ta­tion to unleash these pla­gia­rism accu­sa­tions across acad­e­mia? It’s a polit­i­cal cud­gel just sit­ting right there, wait­ing for some­one to pick it up and start thump­ing their ene­mies. Time will tell, but it’s not like Rufo does­n’t have exten­sive expe­ri­ence wag­ing high pro­file pro­pa­gan­da cam­paigns pred­i­cat­ed on dis­in­for­ma­tion and decep­tion. That’s kind of what his career is based on at this point. It’s Rufo, after all, who helped to devel­op the Right’s fix­a­tion on Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry (CRT) and trans­gen­der chil­dren. Strate­gi­cal­ly whip­ping up mul­ti-spec­trum faux pop­ulist hys­ter­ics is kind of Rufo’s spe­cial­ty at this point.

    But, of course, as Rufo repeat­ed­ly reminds us, he isn’t work­ing alone. He’s part of a well orga­nized net­work. And that net­work includes a lot more peo­ple than bil­lion­aire Bill Ack­man. Rufo’s work­ing is part of the larg­er CNP cul­ture war play­book. A play­book that includes the aggres­sive use of ‘pop­ulist’ groups like Moms for Lib­er­ty focused on whip­ping up parental out­cry over any­thing they can think of in pub­lic edu­ca­tion.

    As we should expect, Rufo was inte­gral fig­ure in the devel­op­ment of Moms for Lib­er­ty. Which brings us to an inter­est­ing aspect of this whole sto­ry about the take down of Clau­dine Gay that we should keep in mind as Rufo pub­lic plots his next move: Moms for Lib­er­ty, which first appeared in 2021, start­ed off strong but has turned out to be a polit­i­cal bust. At least that appears to be the case so far, based on the 2023 off year elections...elections that typ­i­cal­ly work against the par­ty in the White House. Almost all — 12 out of 13 — of the Moms for Lib­er­ty school board can­di­dates in the state of Vir­ginia lost, which was reflec­tive of the group’s nation elec­toral results. 2023 was not a year Chris Rufo can real­ly brag about as a proof of con­cept suc­cess.

    And yet, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle also notes, there’s not indi­ca­tion the deep-pock­et­ed back­ers for the group have any plans of with­draw­ing sup­port. For starters, the group’s mes­sage still plays very well in GOP pri­maries even if it does­n’t res­onate with the gen­er­al elec­torate. But also because the goals of the group aren’t just about win­ning school board elec­tions. It’s also about erod­ing sup­port for pub­lic schools in gen­er­al, with an eye on the core long-term prize the deep-pock­et­ed back­ers are ulti­mate­ly play­ing for: the pri­va­ti­za­tion of schools.

    We don’t have to read between the lines to infer those grand pri­va­ti­za­tion plans. One of the archi­tects of this plan laid it all out in April of 2022 dur­ing a speech at Hills­dale Col­lege when he sim­ply stat­ed that “To get to uni­ver­sal school choice, you real­ly need to oper­ate from a premise of uni­ver­sal pub­lic school dis­trust.” And that speak­er was, of course, Chris Rufo. And that’s why Moms for Lib­er­ty isn’t going any­where despite its poor elec­toral per­for­mance in 2023. The oli­garchs behind Moms for Lib­er­ty that Rufo was speak­ing for are play­ing a long game:

    The Nation

    Moms for Lib­er­ty Isn’t Going Any­where

    The more bit­ter­ness and resent­ment about pub­lic schools the group can gen­er­ate, the eas­i­er it will be to pri­va­tize education—a long-stand­ing goal for its deep-pock­et­ed back­ers.

    Jen­nifer C. Berk­shire and Jack Schnei­der
    Decem­ber 15, 2023

    The ver­dict is in. Moms for Lib­er­ty is over. News of a tawdry sex scan­dal involv­ing one of the group’s cofounders, com­ing on the heels of a drub­bing at the hands of vot­ers last month, has cement­ed con­ven­tion­al wis­dom that the con­ser­v­a­tive “parental rights” orga­ni­za­tion is flail­ing. Yet, despite the poor per­for­mance with vot­ers, not to men­tion a steady stream of head­lines wild­ly at odds with the group’s moral cru­sad­ing, the obit­u­ary is pre­ma­ture. Moms for Lib­er­ty isn’t going any­where.

    “We’re just get­ting start­ed,” founder Tiffany Jus­tice pro­claimed in a recent inter­view, boast­ing that the group plans to ramp up its efforts in 2024. That’s because Moms for Lib­er­ty isn’t designed to win elec­tions; its real mis­sion is to under­mine pub­lic edu­ca­tion.

    For a short peri­od, Moms for Lib­er­ty did seem like it could be the key­stone of the Repub­li­can Party’s elec­toral strat­e­gy. In the wan­ing days of the pan­dem­ic, frus­tra­tion over school clo­sures helped pow­er Glenn Youngkin’s upset win in Vir­ginia, and lead­ers with­in the GOP seized on the cause. Wag­ing cul­ture war in the schools, many thought, could lure back the dis­af­fect­ed sub­ur­ban moms who had fled the par­ty dur­ing the Trump years. Yet, amid all the sound and fury, polls con­sis­tent­ly flashed warn­ing signs about the appeal of cul­ture war issues to vot­ers. Now the evi­dence is clear: Most Amer­i­cans aren’t inter­est­ed in the parental rights cru­sade or the para­noid extrem­ism that it seeks to ush­er into the schools.

    Vir­tu­al­ly every­where the group field­ed can­di­dates for a school board last month, they lost. In Iowa, 12 of 13 Moms for Liberty–endorsed can­di­dates lost their races. In Penn­syl­va­nia, New Mex­i­co, Vir­ginia, and Kansas, the sto­ry was much the same. As it turns out, projects like ban­ning books and tar­get­ing trans­gen­der stu­dents aren’t the gal­va­niz­ing issues that the GOP had pre­sumed.

    So why con­tin­ue run­ning on a los­ing plat­form? One rea­son is the divide between mod­er­ates and hard-lin­ers in the Repub­li­can par­ty. While sub­ur­ban vot­ers may be reject­ing efforts to purge books from libraries, restrict how his­to­ry is taught, and cur­tail the rights of stu­dents, these issues still res­onate deeply with the GOP base. More­over, the right-wing media ecosys­tem is ded­i­cat­ed to ampli­fy­ing tales of zeal­ous Marx­ist teach­ers and out-of-con­trol trans ath­letes. Com­bine those fac­tors with a par­ty pri­ma­ry struc­ture that rewards extrem­ism, and it means that these issues aren’t going any­where.

    But there’s anoth­er key rea­son Moms for Lib­er­ty and their allies are like­ly to remain a fix­ture in our pol­i­tics. While the stat­ed goal of these groups is to win seats on local school boards and push edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy in a more con­ser­v­a­tive direc­tion, their insti­tu­tion­al back­ers have always had a more expan­sive vision: dis­man­tling pub­lic edu­ca­tion. The Her­itage Foun­da­tion, a key sup­port­er of Moms for Lib­er­ty since its incep­tion, sees relent­less cul­ture war­ring as key to its work ped­dling school vouch­ers. The more bit­ter­ness and resent­ment in and around the pub­lic schools that groups like Moms for Lib­er­ty can gen­er­ate, the eas­i­er it will be to pri­va­tize edu­ca­tion. The Man­hat­tan Institute’s Christo­pher Rufo summed up this strat­e­gy quite frankly in a speech at Hills­dale Col­lege in 2021: “To get to uni­ver­sal school choice, you real­ly need to oper­ate from a premise of uni­ver­sal pub­lic school dis­trust.”

    ...

    Most Amer­i­cans hap­pen to actu­al­ly like pub­lic edu­ca­tion. Despite decades of attacks on the schools—from sys­tem­at­ic under­fund­ing to over­heat­ed claims about declin­ing test scores—most par­ents have been con­sis­tent­ly pos­i­tive about their own children’s schools. And the pub­lic con­tin­ues to express con­fi­dence in pro­fes­sion­al edu­ca­tors and demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance of the schools.

    ...

    ———-

    “Moms for Lib­er­ty Isn’t Going Any­where” by Jen­nifer C. Berk­shire and Jack Schnei­der; The Nation; 12/15/2023

    “Vir­tu­al­ly every­where the group field­ed can­di­dates for a school board last month, they lost. In Iowa, 12 of 13 Moms for Liberty–endorsed can­di­dates lost their races. In Penn­syl­va­nia, New Mex­i­co, Vir­ginia, and Kansas, the sto­ry was much the same. As it turns out, projects like ban­ning books and tar­get­ing trans­gen­der stu­dents aren’t the gal­va­niz­ing issues that the GOP had pre­sumed.”

    There’s no deny­ing it. Moms for Lib­er­ty crashed and burned in 2023. Despite all the efforts on the part of the back­ers of this move­ment. Back­ers include Christo­pher Rufo, who summed up the Moms for Lib­er­ty strat­e­gy at a Hills­dale Col­lege even in 2021 as fol­lows which his sig­na­ture ‘say­ing the qui­et part out loud’ flair. Accord­ing to Rufo, “To get to uni­ver­sal school choice, you real­ly need to oper­ate from a premise of uni­ver­sal pub­lic school dis­trust.” And that, right there, gives the game away. At least the Moms for Lib­er­ty CRT hys­te­ria game. It’s about on ongo­ing push to pri­va­tize the pub­lic school sys­tem. Rufo was­n’t minc­ing his words. Say­ing the qui­et part out loud is his thing:

    ...
    For a short peri­od, Moms for Lib­er­ty did seem like it could be the key­stone of the Repub­li­can Party’s elec­toral strat­e­gy. In the wan­ing days of the pan­dem­ic, frus­tra­tion over school clo­sures helped pow­er Glenn Youngkin’s upset win in Vir­ginia, and lead­ers with­in the GOP seized on the cause. Wag­ing cul­ture war in the schools, many thought, could lure back the dis­af­fect­ed sub­ur­ban moms who had fled the par­ty dur­ing the Trump years. Yet, amid all the sound and fury, polls con­sis­tent­ly flashed warn­ing signs about the appeal of cul­ture war issues to vot­ers. Now the evi­dence is clear: Most Amer­i­cans aren’t inter­est­ed in the parental rights cru­sade or the para­noid extrem­ism that it seeks to ush­er into the schools.

    ...

    So why con­tin­ue run­ning on a los­ing plat­form? One rea­son is the divide between mod­er­ates and hard-lin­ers in the Repub­li­can par­ty. While sub­ur­ban vot­ers may be reject­ing efforts to purge books from libraries, restrict how his­to­ry is taught, and cur­tail the rights of stu­dents, these issues still res­onate deeply with the GOP base. More­over, the right-wing media ecosys­tem is ded­i­cat­ed to ampli­fy­ing tales of zeal­ous Marx­ist teach­ers and out-of-con­trol trans ath­letes. Com­bine those fac­tors with a par­ty pri­ma­ry struc­ture that rewards extrem­ism, and it means that these issues aren’t going any­where.

    But there’s anoth­er key rea­son Moms for Lib­er­ty and their allies are like­ly to remain a fix­ture in our pol­i­tics. While the stat­ed goal of these groups is to win seats on local school boards and push edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy in a more con­ser­v­a­tive direc­tion, their insti­tu­tion­al back­ers have always had a more expan­sive vision: dis­man­tling pub­lic edu­ca­tion. The Her­itage Foun­da­tion, a key sup­port­er of Moms for Lib­er­ty since its incep­tion, sees relent­less cul­ture war­ring as key to its work ped­dling school vouch­ers. The more bit­ter­ness and resent­ment in and around the pub­lic schools that groups like Moms for Lib­er­ty can gen­er­ate, the eas­i­er it will be to pri­va­tize edu­ca­tion. The Man­hat­tan Institute’s Christo­pher Rufo summed up this strat­e­gy quite frankly in a speech at Hills­dale Col­lege in 2021: “To get to uni­ver­sal school choice, you real­ly need to oper­ate from a premise of uni­ver­sal pub­lic school dis­trust.”
    ...

    And that brings us to the fol­low­ing Octo­ber 2022 New York­er arti­cle describ­ing the ori­gins of Moms for Lib­er­ty. Ori­gins that, as we should expect, start with Chris Rufo and his quest to turn “Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry” into a gener­ic boogey­man that can be used as an umbrel­la term for any­thing that annoys vot­ers. As the arti­cle describes, Rufo actu­al­ly had the ear of then-Pres­i­dent Trump in 2020, who became an enthu­si­as­tic backer of Rufo’s pro­pos­als to turn CRT hys­te­ria into a nation­al issue that the Trump White House could direct­ly tack­le. But by Decem­ber of 2020 it was clear that Trump may not have a sec­ond term (despite all their efforts). ALEC held a webi­nar ear­li­er that month about “reclaim­ing edu­ca­tion and the Amer­i­can dream,” where Rufo made the case that states and local gov­ern­ments need to take up the cause. Moms for Lib­er­ty was incor­po­rat­ed lat­er that month.

    Rufo ear­ly 2021 con­tin­u­ing to make the case that an anti-CRT cam­paign could bear fruit. As Rufo put it in a March 15, 2021, Twit­ter thread, “We have suc­cess­ful­ly frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion and are steadi­ly dri­ving up neg­a­tive per­cep­tions. We will even­tu­al­ly turn it tox­ic, as we put all of the var­i­ous cul­tur­al insan­i­ties under that brand cat­e­go­ry.” Rufo added, “The goal is to have the pub­lic read some­thing crazy in the news­pa­per and imme­di­ate­ly think ‘crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.’ ”

    On March 22, 2021, one week after Rufo’s tweets, Robin Steen­man made her first appear­ance at a school board meet­ing com­plain­ing about the dan­gers of Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry in places like North Car­oli­na, Ohio, and Penn­syl­va­nia. The Wit & Wis­dom cur­ricu­lum posed a sim­i­lar dan­ger, accord­ing to Steen­man. Sev­er­al weeks lat­er, Steen­man formed the Williamson Coun­ty chap­ter of Moms for Lib­er­ty. It turns out Steen­man does­n’t actu­al­ly have any chil­dren in the Williamson Coun­ty pub­lic schools or any pub­lic schools for that mat­ter. But that did­n’t stop the Williamson Coun­ty chap­ter of Moms for Lib­er­ty from grow­ing and lead­ing a num­ber of high-pro­file and well-financed protests.

    In the end, Williamson Coun­ty’s school board reviewed the deci­sion to adopt in Wit & Wis­dom cur­ricu­lum and con­clud­ed that the con­tent was indeed appro­pri­ate. Beyond that, they inves­ti­gat­ed whether or not Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry was a fac­tor in adopt­ing the cur­ricu­lum and found no indi­ca­tion that CRT played any role at all in the deci­sion. Nonethe­less, the school board decid­ed to impose var­i­ous “guardrails” on some of the new con­tent seem­ing­ly intend­ed to pla­cate their crit­ics.

    The sto­ry of Williamson Coun­ty’s Moms for Lib­er­ty expe­ri­ence is just one local exam­ple of nation­al move­ment. A move­ment designed by Chris Rufo in the wan­ing months of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion with the back­ing of the Repub­li­can mega-donor class. Don’t for­get the num­ber of CNP-mem­bers back­ing Moms for Lib­er­ty’s cam­paign. Or as one Moms for Lib­er­ty spokesper­son told The New York­er — seem­ing­ly chan­nel­ing Rufo’s propen­si­ty for say­ing the qui­et part out loud — the organization—ostensibly a charity—is a “media com­pa­ny”:

    The New York­er

    The Right-Wing Moth­ers Fuelling the School-Board Wars

    Moms for Lib­er­ty claims that teach­ers are indoc­tri­nat­ing stu­dents with dan­ger­ous ide­olo­gies. But is the group’s aim pro­tect­ing kids—or scar­ing par­ents?

    By Paige Williams
    Octo­ber 31, 2022

    In August, 2020, Williamson Coun­ty Schools, which serves more than forty thou­sand stu­dents in sub­ur­ban Nashville, start­ed using an Eng­lish and Lan­guage Arts cur­ricu­lum called Wit & Wis­dom. The pro­gram, which is pub­lished by Great Minds, a com­pa­ny based in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., wasn’t a rene­gade choice: hun­dreds of school dis­tricts nation­wide had adopt­ed it. Both Mass­a­chu­setts and Louisiana—states with sharply dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal profiles—gave Wit & Wis­dom high approval rat­ings.

    The deci­sion had fol­lowed a strict process. The Ten­nessee State Board of Edu­ca­tion gov­erns aca­d­e­m­ic stan­dards and updates them every five or six years, pro­vid­ing school dis­tricts with an oppor­tu­ni­ty to switch cur­ric­u­la. Williamson Coun­ty Schools assem­bled a selec­tion committee—twenty-six par­ents, twen­ty-eight ele­men­tary-school teach­ers of Eng­lish and Lan­guage Arts. The com­mit­tee pre­sent­ed four options to teach­ers, who vot­ed on them in Feb­ru­ary, 2020. Wit & Wis­dom was the over­whelm­ing favorite. After the selec­tion com­mit­tee rat­i­fied the teach­ers’ choice, the school board, which has twelve mem­bers, unan­i­mous­ly adopt­ed Wit & Wis­dom, along with a tra­di­tion­al phon­ics pro­gram, for K‑5 stu­dents.

    Great Minds’s pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als explain that Wit & Wis­dom is designed to let stu­dents “read books they love while build­ing knowl­edge of impor­tant top­ics” in lit­er­a­ture, sci­ence, his­to­ry, and art. By immers­ing stu­dents in “con­tent-rich” top­ics that spark live­ly dis­cus­sion, the cur­ricu­lum pre­pares them to tack­le more com­pli­cat­ed texts. The mate­ri­als are chal­leng­ing by design: stud­ies have shown that stu­dents read bet­ter soon­er when con­front­ed with com­plex sen­tences and advanced vocab­u­lary. Wit & Wisdom’s hun­dred and eigh­teen “core” texts, which range from pic­ture books to non­fic­tion, empha­size diver­si­ty, but not in a stri­dent way. They pro­vide “mir­rors and win­dows,” allow­ing read­ers both to see them­selves in the sto­ries and to learn about oth­er people’s lives. The cur­ricu­lum assigns or rec­om­mends por­traits of her­ald­ed pio­neers: Leonar­do da Vin­ci, Saca­gawea, Clara Bar­ton, Duke Elling­ton, Ada Lovelace. The lessons revolve around read­ings, aug­ment­ed with paint­ings, poet­ry, speech­es, inter­views, films, and music: in the mod­ule “A Hero’s Jour­ney,” stu­dents explore an illus­trat­ed retelling of the Odyssey along­side the Ramayana, a San­skrit epic, while also dis­cussing “Star Wars.” A sec­tion on “Word­play” pairs “The Phan­tom Toll­booth” with Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” rou­tine.

    Else­where in Ten­nessee, teach­ers were say­ing that Wit & Wis­dom improved lit­er­a­cy. The super­in­ten­dent of Laud­erdale Coun­ty, a rur­al area where near­ly a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion lives below the pover­ty line, pub­lished an essay report­ing that his district’s teach­ers had noticed “an enor­mous dif­fer­ence in stu­dents’ writ­ing” after imple­ment­ing the cur­ricu­lum. Wit & Wis­dom encour­ages stu­dents to dis­cuss read­ings with their families—a father in Sum­n­er Coun­ty, north­east of Nashville, was pleased that his daugh­ters now talked about civ­il rights and the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion at din­ner.

    Then, seem­ing­ly out of nowhere, Wit & Wis­dom became the tar­get of intense crit­i­cism. At first, the cam­paign in Williamson Coun­ty was cryp­tic: stray e‑mails, phone calls, pub­lic-infor­ma­tion requests. Eric Welch, who was first elect­ed to the school board in 2010, told me that the com­plain­ers “wouldn’t just e‑mail us—they would copy the coun­ty com­mis­sion, our state leg­isla­tive del­e­ga­tion, and state rep­re­sen­ta­tives in oth­er coun­ties.” He said, “It was obvi­ous­ly an attempt to intim­i­date.”

    The school board is an Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion whose mem­bers, until recent­ly, enjoyed vis­i­bil­i­ty on a par with that of the coun­ty tax col­lec­tor. “There’s no glo­ry in being a school-board member—and there shouldn’t be,” Anne McGraw, a for­mer Williamson Coun­ty Schools board mem­ber, said on a local pod­cast last year. Nor­mal­ly, the district’s pub­lic meet­ings were sedate affairs fea­tur­ing polite exchanges among civic-mind­ed locals. The system’s slo­gan was: “Be nice.”

    In May, 2021, as the dis­trict fin­ished its first aca­d­e­m­ic year with Wit & Wis­dom, women wear­ing “Moms for Lib­er­ty” T‑shirts began appear­ing at school-board meet­ings. They brought large plac­ards that con­tained images and text from thir­ty-one books that they didn’t want stu­dents to read. In pub­lic com­ments and in writ­ten com­plaints, the women claimed that Wit & Wis­dom was teach­ing chil­dren to hate them­selves, one anoth­er, their fam­i­lies, and Amer­i­ca. “Rap a Tap Tap,” an illus­trat­ed sto­ry about the vaude­ville-era tap dancer Bill (Bojan­gles) Robin­son, by the Calde­cott medal­ists Leo and Diane Dil­lon, harped on “skin col­or dif­fer­ences.” A pic­ture book about sea­hors­es, which touched on every­thing from their abil­i­ty to change col­or to the inde­pen­dent move­ment of their eyes, threat­ened to “nor­mal­ize that males can get preg­nant” by explain­ing that male sea­hors­es give birth; the Moms sus­pect­ed a covert endorse­ment of “gen­der flu­id­i­ty.” Gre­co-Roman myths: nudi­ty, can­ni­bal­ism. (Venus emerges naked from the sea; Tan­ta­lus cooks his son.)

    The Moms kept attend­ing school-board meet­ings and issu­ing com­plaints. Curi­ous­ly, though they posi­tioned them­selves as tra­di­tion­al­ists, they often bor­rowed “woke” rhetoric about the dan­gers of trig­ger­ing vul­ner­a­ble stu­dents. Read­ings about Ruby Bridges—who, in 1961, became the first Black child to attend an all-white school in New Orleans—exposed stu­dents to “psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress” because they described an angry white mob. (Bridges, in a mem­oir designed for young read­ers, wrote, “They yelled at me to go away.”) The Moms also declared that, though they admired Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.,’s icon­ic line about judg­ing oth­ers “on the con­tent of their char­ac­ter,” the book “Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. and the March on Wash­ing­ton” was unac­cept­able, because it con­tained his­tor­i­cal photographs—segregated drink­ing foun­tains, fire­fight­ers blast­ing Black Amer­i­cans with hoses—that might make kids feel bad. The Moms con­sid­ered it divi­sive for Wit & Wis­dom to urge instruc­tors to remind stu­dents that racial slurs are “words peo­ple use to show dis­re­spect and hatred towards peo­ple of dif­fer­ent races.”

    ...

    When the women in T‑shirts first showed up, Welch had nev­er heard of Moms for Lib­er­ty, and he didn’t rec­og­nize its mem­bers. The group’s leader, Robin Steen­man, was in her ear­ly for­ties, with shoul­der-length blond hair; in col­or­ing and build, she resem­bled Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene. Board of Edu­ca­tion mem­bers strug­gled to under­stand why she’d insert­ed her­self into a mat­ter that didn’t con­cern her: Steen­man had no chil­dren in the pub­lic schools.

    Moms for Lib­er­ty mem­bers soon esca­lat­ed the con­flict, pub­licly assert­ing that Williamson Coun­ty Schools had adopt­ed Wit & Wis­dom hur­ried­ly, and in vio­la­tion of state rules. The school board still wasn’t sure what Moms for Lib­er­ty was—who found­ed it, who fund­ed it. Nev­er­the­less, the dis­trict assem­bled a reassess­ment team to review the cur­ricu­lum and the adop­tion process. At a pub­lic “work ses­sion” in June, 2021, the team announced that, after a pre­lim­i­nary review, it hadn’t found any vio­la­tions of pro­to­col. Teach­ers had spent a full work­day famil­iar­iz­ing them­selves with Wit & Wis­dom before imple­ment­ing it. As Jen­ny Lopez, the district’s cur­ricu­lum direc­tor, explained, “Teach­ers actu­al­ly had more time than they’ve ever had to look at mate­ri­als.”

    ...

    The review com­mit­tee ulti­mate­ly con­clud­ed that Wit & Wis­dom had been an over-all suc­cess; still, admin­is­tra­tors decid­ed to sur­vey teach­ers quar­ter­ly about how the cur­ricu­lum was work­ing. They lim­it­ed access to the gori­er images in one Civ­il War book and imposed sim­i­lar “guardrails” involv­ing “Hatch­et,” a pop­u­lar young-adult nov­el in which a char­ac­ter attempts sui­cide. “Walk Two Moons,” a nov­el by the New­bery Medal win­ner Sharon Creech, about a daughter’s quest to find her miss­ing moth­er, was even­tu­al­ly removed from the Williamson ver­sion of the pro­gram, not because its con­tent was deemed objec­tion­able but, rather, to adjust the pac­ing of one fourth-grade mod­ule. Gold­en, who is tall and genial, told the board mem­bers, “The over­whelm­ing feed­back that we got was: ‘Man, can’t we just read some­thing uplift­ing in fourth grade?’ And we felt the same way!”

    At the work ses­sion, Gold­en shared one end of a con­fer­ence table with Nan­cy Gar­rett, the board’s chair. Gar­rett, who has rec­tan­gu­lar glass­es and a blond bob, is from a fam­i­ly that has attend­ed or worked in Williamson Coun­ty Schools for three gen­er­a­tions. She had won the chair­man­ship, by unan­i­mous vote, the pre­vi­ous August. At one point, she asked an assis­tant super­in­ten­dent who had over­seen the selec­tion and review of Wit & Wis­dom whether “the con­cept of crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” had come up dur­ing the process. No, the assis­tant super­in­ten­dent said.

    Moms for Lib­er­ty mem­bers were por­tray­ing Wit & Wis­dom as “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” in dis­guise. Gar­rett found this baf­fling. C.R.T., a com­plex aca­d­e­m­ic frame­work that exam­ines the sys­temic ways in which racism has shaped Amer­i­can soci­ety, is explored at the uni­ver­si­ty lev­el or high­er. As far as the board knew, Williamson Coun­ty Schools had nev­er intro­duced the con­cept. Yet there had been such a del­uge of ref­er­ences to it that Gar­rett had delved into her old e‑mails, in an unsuc­cess­ful attempt to iden­ti­fy the ori­gins of the out­rage. She told her col­leagues, “I guess I’m won­der­ing what hap­pened.”

    In Sep­tem­ber, 2020—four months after the mur­der of George Floyd, two months before the Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, and a month into Williamson Coun­ty Schools’ use of Wit & Wis­dom—Christo­pher Rufo, a con­ser­v­a­tive activist, appeared on Tuck­er Carl­son’s show, on Fox News, and called crit­i­cal race the­o­ry “an exis­ten­tial threat to the Unit­ed States.” Rufo cap­i­tal­ized on the fact that, giv­en C.R.T.’s aca­d­e­m­ic prove­nance, few Amer­i­cans had heard of the con­cept. He argued that lib­er­al edu­ca­tors, under the bland ban­ner of “diver­si­ty,” were manip­u­lat­ing stu­dents into think­ing of Amer­i­ca not as a vibrant cham­pi­on of democ­ra­cy but as a shame­ful embod­i­ment of white suprema­cy. (As he framed things, there were no in-between posi­tions.) Rufo lat­er called C.R.T. “the per­fect villain”—a term that “con­notes hos­tile, aca­d­e­m­ic, divi­sive, race-obsessed, poi­so­nous, elit­ist, anti-Amer­i­can views.”

    Rufo found a recep­tive ear in Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, who was already rant­i­ng about “The 1619 Project,” the col­lec­tion of Times Mag­a­zine essays in which slav­ery is placed at the heart of the nation’s found­ing. On Twit­ter, Trump had warned that the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion would defund any school whose class­room taught mate­r­i­al from the project. Trump con­ferred with Rufo and banned fed­er­al agen­cies from con­duct­ing “un-Amer­i­can pro­pa­gan­da train­ing ses­sions” involv­ing “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” or “white priv­i­lege.” Trump said that Black Lives Mat­ter protests were pro­lif­er­at­ing not because of anger over police abus­es but because of “decades of left-wing indoc­tri­na­tion in our schools.” Estab­lish­ing a “1776 Com­mis­sion,” he urged “patri­ot­ic moms and dads” to demand that schools stop feed­ing chil­dren “hate­ful lies about this coun­try.” (The Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion con­demned the Administration’s even­tu­al “1776 Report,” high­light­ing its many inac­cu­ra­cies and argu­ing that it attempt­ed to air­brush his­to­ry and “ele­vate igno­rance about the past to a civic virtue.”)

    Near­ly nine hun­dred school dis­tricts nation­wide were soon tar­get­ed by anti‑C.R.T. cam­paigns, many of which adopt­ed lan­guage that close­ly echoed Trump’s order not to teach mate­r­i­al that made oth­ers “feel dis­com­fort, guilt, anguish, or any oth­er form of psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress on account of his or her race or sex.” In some red states, the vague word­ing was enshrined as law. Repub­li­cans filed what became known as “anti‑C.R.T.” bills; they were seem­ing­ly cut and past­ed from tem­plates, with sim­i­lar­ly phrased ref­er­ences to such terms as “divi­sive con­cepts” and “indoc­tri­na­tion.”

    Williamson Coun­ty Schools was unevent­ful­ly wrap­ping up its first term with Wit & Wis­dom when, in ear­ly Decem­ber, 2020, the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil, which gen­er­ates mod­el leg­is­la­tion for right-lean­ing law­mak­ers, host­ed a Webi­nar about “reclaim­ing edu­ca­tion and the Amer­i­can dream.” A rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, the con­ser­v­a­tive think tank, warned that ele­ments of a “Black Lives Mat­ter cur­ricu­lum” were “now in our schools.” Rufo—correctly pre­dict­ing that Joe Biden, then the Pres­i­dent-elect, would abol­ish Trump’s exec­u­tive order—urged state leg­is­la­tors and gov­er­nors to take up the fight.

    Con­tin­u­ing the agi­ta­tion wasn’t just an act of feal­ty to Trump; it was cun­ning pol­i­tics. The fear that C.R.T. would cause chil­dren to become fix­at­ed on race has res­onat­ed with enough vot­ers to help tip impor­tant elec­tions. Last Novem­ber, Glenn Youngkin, a can­di­date for the gov­er­nor­ship of Vir­ginia, won an upset vic­to­ry after repeat­ed­ly warn­ing that the “cur­ricu­lum has gone haywire”—and promis­ing to sign an exec­u­tive order ban­ning C.R.T. from schools. Jatia Wright­en, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Vir­ginia Com­mon­wealth Uni­ver­si­ty, told the Wash­ing­ton Post that Youngkin had “acti­vat­ed white women to vote in a very spe­cif­ic way that they feel like is pro­tect­ing their chil­dren.”

    Days after the alec Webi­nar on “reclaim­ing edu­ca­tion,” three women in Flori­da filed incor­po­ra­tion papers for Moms for Lib­er­ty, Inc., lat­er declar­ing that their “sole pur­pose” was to “fight for parental rights” to choose what sort of edu­ca­tion was best for their kids. One of the organization’s founders, Tina Descovich—who had recent­ly lost reëlec­tion to the school board of Bre­vard Coun­ty, Flori­da, after oppos­ing pan­dem­ic safe­ty protocols—soon appeared on Rush Limbaugh’s show. Declar­ing plans to “start with school boards and move on from there,” she said of like-mind­ed par­ents, “It sounds a lit­tle melo­dra­mat­ic, but there is evil work­ing against us on a dai­ly basis.” maga media—“Tucker Carl­son Tonight,” Breitbart—showcased Moms for Lib­er­ty. Media Mat­ters, the lib­er­al watch­dog, argued that influ­en­tial right-wing media fig­ures were essen­tial­ly “recruit­ing their eager audi­ence” for the Moms’ cam­paign.

    Moms for Lib­er­ty, which is some­times referred to as M4L or MFL, is so new that it is hard to parse, from pub­lic doc­u­ments, what its lead­ers are get­ting paid. (The founders say that the chairs of local chap­ters are vol­un­teers.) The group describes itself as a “grass­roots” orga­ni­za­tion, yet its instant absorp­tion by the con­ser­v­a­tive medi­a­s­phere has led some crit­ics to sus­pect it of being an Astro­turf group—an oper­a­tion secret­ly fund­ed by mon­eyed inter­ests. Moms for Lib­er­ty reg­is­tered with the I.R.S. as the kind of social-wel­fare non­prof­it that can accept unlim­it­ed dark mon­ey.

    The lead­ers had deep G.O.P. con­nec­tions. One, Marie Roger­son, was a suc­cess­ful Repub­li­can polit­i­cal strate­gist. The oth­er, Brid­get Ziegler, a school-board mem­ber in Sara­so­ta Coun­ty, is mar­ried to the vice-chair of the Flori­da G.O.P., Chris­t­ian Ziegler, who told the Wash­ing­ton Post, “I have been try­ing for a dozen years to get twen­ty- and thir­ty-year-old females involved with the Repub­li­can Par­ty, and it was a heavy lift to get that demo­graph­ic. . . . But now Moms for Lib­er­ty has done it for me.” Moms for Lib­er­ty worked with the office of Florida’s gov­er­nor, Ron DeSan­tis, to help craft the state’s infa­mous “Don’t Say Gay” leg­is­la­tion, which DeSan­tis signed into law this past March; it for­bids instruc­tion on “sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion or gen­der iden­ti­ty” in “kinder­garten through grade 3 or in a man­ner that is not age-appro­pri­ate.”

    A nation­al pha­lanx of inter­con­nect­ed organizations—including the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute, where Rufo is a fel­low, and a group called Moms for America—supported the suite of talk­ing points about C.R.T. Accord­ing to NBC News, in a sin­gle week last year Bre­it­bart alone pub­lished sev­en hun­dred and fifty posts or arti­cles in which the the­o­ry was men­tioned. Glenn Beck, the right-wing pun­dit, declared that C.R.T. is a “poi­son,” urg­ing his audi­ence, “Stand up in your com­mu­ni­ty and fire the teach­ers. Fire them!”

    On March 15, 2021, Rufo, in a tweet thread, overt­ly described a key ele­ment of the far right’s evolv­ing strat­e­gy: “We have suc­cess­ful­ly frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion and are steadi­ly dri­ving up neg­a­tive per­cep­tions. We will even­tu­al­ly turn it tox­ic, as we put all of the var­i­ous cul­tur­al insan­i­ties under that brand cat­e­go­ry.” He added, “The goal is to have the pub­lic read some­thing crazy in the news­pa­per and imme­di­ate­ly think ‘crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.’ ”

    Williamson Coun­ty has some of Tennessee’s top-ranked schools. “That’s why peo­ple move here,” Eric Welch, the long­time school-board mem­ber, told me. He describes the school sys­tem as an eco­nom­ic “asset that pays off.” Williamson Coun­ty has the state’s sec­ond-low­est unem­ploy­ment rate and the high­est prop­er­ty val­ues: the medi­an home val­ue exceeds eight hun­dred thou­sand dol­lars.

    ...

    In 2018, sev­er­al par­ents joined forces to point out that schools in Williamson Coun­ty could work hard­er to be wel­com­ing to chil­dren of col­or. The group, which became known as the Cul­tur­al Com­pe­ten­cy Coun­cil, includ­ed Black, Asian Amer­i­can, Jew­ish, and L.G.B.T.Q.+ res­i­dents. A school-dis­trict offi­cial who served as a liai­son to the coun­cil cre­at­ed videos for teacher train­ing and devel­op­ment, includ­ing one about priv­i­lege. That video’s lan­guage had clear­ly been cal­i­brat­ed to preëmpt defen­sive reac­tions: a nar­ra­tor under­scored that the con­cept of priv­i­lege was “not meant to sug­gest that some­one has nev­er strug­gled or that suc­cess is unearned.” Even so, the con­ser­v­a­tive media pounced: the Ten­nessee Star said that the video took view­ers on a guilt trip about “the perks white males sup­pos­ed­ly have that oth­ers do not, America’s sup­posed dys­func­tion­al his­to­ry, and how unfair it all is.” Such views have played well in a coun­ty that Trump car­ried twice, both times by more than twen­ty points. (The Cul­tur­al Com­pe­ten­cy Coun­cil has been dis­band­ed.)

    In 2020, Rev­i­da Rah­man and anoth­er par­ent co-found­ed an anti-racism group, One Will­Co, after Black par­ents chap­er­on­ing field trips to local plan­ta­tions were aston­ished to see slav­ery depict­ed as benign. Rah­man told me that some pre­sen­ta­tions sug­gest­ed that “the slaves didn’t real­ly have it that bad—they lived bet­ter than we do, they had their food pro­vid­ed, they had hous­ing.” She added, “I beg to dif­fer.” At a school that one of Rahman’s sons attend­ed, some white class­mates had mock­ing­ly linked arms as if to rep­re­sent Trump’s bor­der wall.

    One Will­Co espe­cial­ly want­ed the school sys­tem to address the fact that it had a record of dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly pun­ish­ing stu­dents of color—a recent rev­e­la­tion. More­over, some teach­ers used racial­ly insen­si­tive mate­ri­als in their class­rooms: in an assign­ment about the ante­bel­lum econ­o­my, stu­dents were instruct­ed to imag­ine that their fam­i­ly “owns slaves,” and to “cre­ate a list of expec­ta­tions for your family’s slaves.”

    On Feb­ru­ary 15, 2021, the school board hired a moth­er-and-son team of diver­si­ty con­sul­tants to gauge the depth of the district’s prob­lems with racism, bul­ly­ing, and harass­ment, and to rec­om­mend solu­tions. A con­ser­v­a­tive board mem­ber, Jay Gal­breath, for­ward­ed infor­ma­tion about the con­sul­tants to influ­en­tial local Repub­li­cans, includ­ing Gregg Lawrence, a coun­ty com­mis­sion­er, and Bev Burg­er, a long­time alder­man in Franklin. In an e‑mail, Lawrence com­plained to Gal­breath that hir­ing the con­sul­tants was the type of thing that would lead to “the politi­ciza­tion of teach­ing in Amer­i­ca where every sub­ject is taught through the lens of race.” He wrote, “These young peo­ple who have been protest­ing, loot­ing and burn­ing down our cities in Amer­i­ca are doing so because they don’t see any­thing about Amer­i­ca worth pre­serv­ing. And why is that? Because our pub­lic schools and uni­ver­si­ties taught them that Amer­i­ca is a sys­tem­i­cal­ly racist nation found­ed by a bunch of big­ot­ed slave own­ing col­o­niz­ers.”

    This exchange was even­tu­al­ly made pub­lic through an open-records request, which also revealed that Burg­er had helped edit what has been called the foun­da­tion­al com­plaint against Wit & Wis­dom: a month after the diver­si­ty con­sul­tants were hired, the par­ents of a bira­cial sec­ond grad­er e‑mailed school offi­cials to com­plain that the cur­ricu­lum had caused their son to be “ashamed of his white half.” Burg­er wrote of her edits, “See what you think.” She cc’d Lawrence, who for­ward­ed the com­mu­ni­ca­tions to Gal­breath and anoth­er school-board mem­ber, Dan Cash, a fel­low-con­ser­v­a­tive who had won his seat in 2014, dur­ing a Tea Par­ty wave. The coun­ty com­mis­sion­er told the school-board mem­bers, “Here is more evi­dence that we are teach­ing crit­i­cal race the­o­ry,” and urged them to “get rid of” Wit & Wis­dom.

    A few weeks lat­er, on March 22nd, the school board’s month­ly meet­ing took place on Zoom, because of the pan­dem­ic. Robin Steen­man appeared before the board for the first time. Wear­ing a cream-col­ored sweater and dan­g­ly ear­rings, she pre­sent­ed her­self sim­ply as a con­cerned res­i­dent who want­ed school offi­cials to reject any diver­si­ty pro­pos­al that involved “The 1619 Project, crit­i­cal race train­ing, inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty.” She wor­ried aloud that a recent pro­pos­al in Cal­i­for­nia to man­date a semes­ter of eth­nic stud­ies would be “parad­ed as a blue­print for the rest of the coun­try.”

    Steen­man, who appeared to be read­ing from notes, assert­ed that par­ents in Vir­ginia were being black­list­ed for “speak­ing out.” In Penn­syl­va­nia, an ele­men­tary school had “forced fifth graders to cel­e­brate Black com­mu­nism and host a Black Pow­er ral­ly.” In North Car­oli­na, a teacher had described par­ents as “an imped­i­ment to social jus­tice.” In Ohio, C.R.T. “had to be removed from the cur­ricu­lum, because the stu­dents were lit­er­al­ly turn­ing on each oth­er.” Steen­man cit­ed no sources. She said, “If you give them an inch”—then changed course. Drop­ping the “them,” she declared, “If you give one inch to this kind of teach­ing, then you’re gonna sub­ject your­self to the whole spec­trum.”

    Sev­er­al weeks lat­er, Steen­man start­ed the Williamson Coun­ty chap­ter of Moms for Lib­er­ty, build­ing on the e‑mail sent by the par­ents of the bira­cial child and har­ness­ing the furi­ous ener­gy of fam­i­lies who were already accus­ing the school board of “med­ical tyran­ny” for requir­ing stu­dents to wear masks. This vocal minor­i­ty had been par­tic­u­lar­ly incensed at one school-board mem­ber, Brad Fis­cus, a for­mer sci­ence teacher whose wife, Michelle, a pedi­a­tri­cian, was Tennessee’s chief vac­cine offi­cer. Williamson Coun­ty is a Repub­li­can pipeline to state and nation­al office: the gov­er­nor, Bill Lee, is from there; Mar­sha Black­burn, the maga sen­a­tor, began her polit­i­cal career as a coun­ty com­mis­sion­er there. In July, 2021, the state fired Michelle Fis­cus after con­ser­v­a­tive law­mak­ers object­ed to her “mes­sag­ing” in sup­port of covid-19 vac­ci­na­tions; after­ward, Brad Fis­cus resigned from the school board and the fam­i­ly moved to the East Coast. For right-wing extrem­ists, the obvi­ous les­son was that rage tac­tics worked. That August, one school-board meet­ing near­ly end­ed in vio­lence when two enraged men fol­lowed a pro­po­nent of masks to his vehi­cle, scream­ing, “We can find you!”

    Moms for Lib­er­ty empha­sizes the impor­tance of being “joy­ful warriors”—relatable women who can ral­ly their com­mu­ni­ties. A founder once explained, “This fight has to be fought in their own back­yard.” The orga­ni­za­tion may have seen Steen­man as par­tic­u­lar­ly well suit­ed to win­ning over Williamson Coun­ty res­i­dents: she was a for­mer B‑1-bomber pilot now rais­ing three small chil­dren. Her hus­band, Matt, was also ex-Air Force—fighter jets. They moved to Williamson Coun­ty five years ago, from Texas.

    Anoth­er mem­ber of their fra­ter­ni­ty was John Ragan, a for­mer Air Force fight­er pilot who’d been elect­ed as a Repub­li­can to the Ten­nessee Gen­er­al Assem­bly in 2010. Ragan, a for­mer busi­ness con­sul­tant from the city of Oak Ridge, had been list­ed as an alter­nate on alec’s edu­ca­tion task force. (He says that he does not recall attend­ing any meet­ings.) He’d once craft­ed leg­is­la­tion to ban K‑8 teach­ers from using mate­ri­als “incon­sis­tent with nat­ur­al human repro­duc­tion” in the class­room. (It failed.)

    Ear­ly last year, as Moms for Lib­er­ty was receiv­ing its first wave of nation­al media atten­tion, Ragan intro­duced “anti‑C.R.T.” leg­is­la­tion. He want­ed to ban teach­ing about white priv­i­lege or any oth­er con­cepts that might cause stu­dents “dis­com­fort or oth­er psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress” because of their race or sex. The word­ing par­rot­ed talk­ing points from Moms for Lib­er­ty, which par­rot­ed Trump, who par­rot­ed Rufo. Around the time that Moms for Lib­er­ty mem­bers began show­ing up at Williamson Coun­ty school-board meet­ings, Steve Ban­non, the for­mer Trump advis­er, said on his video pod­cast that “the path to save the nation is very simple—it’s going to go through the school boards.” Call­ing moth­ers “patri­ots,” he urged a “revolt.”

    At a com­mit­tee meet­ing of Ten­nessee House mem­bers, Ragan pro­mot­ed his leg­is­la­tion by claim­ing that he’d heard about a sev­en-year-old Williamson Coun­ty girl who had had sui­ci­dal thoughts, and was now in ther­a­py, because she was ashamed of being white. (No such fam­i­ly has ever pub­licly come for­ward.) Two Black Democ­rats sharply chal­lenged Ragan. Harold Love, a con­gress­man from Nashville, asked him whether the pro­posed leg­is­la­tion would make it ille­gal for teach­ers to even men­tion “The 1619 Project.” When Ragan replied that instruc­tors could talk about it as long as they taught “both for and against,” Love said, “It’s kind of hard to be ‘for or against’ slav­ery.” G. A. Hard­away, a con­gress­man from Mem­phis, argued on the House floor that a law lim­it­ing dis­cus­sion of race, eth­nic­i­ty, dis­crim­i­na­tion, and bias con­tra­dict­ed “the very prin­ci­ples that our coun­try was formed on.”

    Ragan pushed ahead, argu­ing that “sub­ver­sive fac­tions,” “sedi­tious char­la­tans,” and “mis­guid­ed souls” were cre­at­ing “arti­fi­cial divi­sions” in a “shame­less pur­suit of polit­i­cal pow­er.” His bill passed. Sen­a­tor Raumesh Akbari, who chairs the Ten­nessee Sen­ate Demo­c­ra­t­ic Cau­cus, said, “This offen­sive leg­is­la­tion pre­tends skin col­or has nev­er mat­tered in our coun­try,” adding that “our chil­dren deserve to learn the full sto­ry.”

    Once the Gov­er­nor signed the bill into law, Moms for Lib­er­ty would be able to devise com­plaints argu­ing that cer­tain ele­ments of pub­lic instruc­tion vio­lat­ed a Ten­nessee statute. Vio­la­tors could be fined hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars, poten­tial­ly drain­ing resources. Steen­man, appear­ing on Blackburn’s video pod­cast, “Unmut­ed with Mar­sha,” let slip a tac­ti­cal detail: the moment Tennessee’s new law took effect, Moms for Lib­er­ty would have a com­plaint against Wit & Wis­dom “ready to go” to the state. Black­burn praised Steen­man as “the point of the spear.”

    ...

    Steen­man raised Moms for Liberty’s vis­i­bil­i­ty by putting on events—rented plants, live music, char­cu­terie. One of them, C.R.T. 101, took place in May, 2021, before a large audi­ence at Lib­er­ty Hall, a Franklin audi­to­ri­um in a ren­o­vat­ed stove fac­to­ry filled with shops and restau­rants. A clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist from Utah, Gary Thomp­son, came onstage and declared that C.R.T. engen­ders shame, which can trig­ger depres­sion, which could “be push­ing your kids to sui­cide.” Thomp­son, who is Black, showed pho­tographs of his mul­tira­cial fam­i­ly: he and his wife, a white pedi­atric neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist, have six chil­dren. Thomp­son joked, awk­ward­ly, that the over­whelm­ing­ly white audi­ence sure didn’t look like mem­bers of the K.K.K. He not­ed that he’d vot­ed for Barack Oba­ma, and said that he approved of Williamson Coun­ty Schools’ hir­ing of diver­si­ty con­sul­tants to assess such prob­lems as racial bul­ly­ing. He opposed C.R.T., though, because it framed peo­ple of col­or as “vic­tims.” Chok­ing up, Thomp­son said, “That is not the lega­cy that my par­ents left me.”

    Moms for Lib­er­ty often advances its cause by enlist­ing Black con­ser­v­a­tives, or by bor­row­ing snip­pets from their pub­lic com­ments. The orga­ni­za­tion has post­ed a video clip of Con­doleez­za Rice say­ing that white kids shouldn’t have to “feel bad” in order for Black chil­dren to feel empow­ered. Steen­man has col­lab­o­rat­ed with Car­ol Swain, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Van­der­bilt, who vocal­ly oppos­es same-sex mar­riage and once described Islam as “dan­ger­ous to our soci­ety.” This past Jan­u­ary, Moms for Lib­er­ty spon­sored a con­fer­ence orga­nized by Swain, Amer­i­can Dream, whose brand­ing heav­i­ly fea­tured images of Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Before the event, King’s daugh­ter Ber­nice tweet­ed an admo­ni­tion about those who took her father’s “words out of con­text to pro­mote ideas that oppose his teach­ings,” adding that Steenman’s chap­ter, hav­ing “sought to erase him,” was now “using him to make mon­ey.”

    At the C.R.T. 101 gath­er­ing, the author of the orig­i­nal com­plaint against Wit & Wis­dom revealed her­self onstage to be Chara Dixon, a mom in her for­ties. Ner­vous­ly hold­ing a copy of her speech, she intro­duced her­self as a nat­u­ral­ized cit­i­zen. (She had emi­grat­ed, decades ear­li­er, from Thai­land.) Dixon, whose hus­band, Bri­an, is white, recalled help­ing their sev­en-year-old son with a Wit & Wis­dom assign­ment about a “lone­ly lit­tle yel­low leaf.” The audi­ence laughed when she declared, “It was bor­ing.” A book about a chameleon: “Anoth­er bor­ing sto­ry!” Her son had also read about King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which was “beau­ti­ful and uplift­ing”; but the tale of Ruby Bridges and the “angry white mob” was depress­ing. Dixon said that in her son’s child­hood world “there’s no col­or.” (She soon became Moms for Liberty’s trea­sur­er.)

    ...

    The Williamson Coun­ty chap­ter of M4L held its next big event, Let’s Talk Wit & Wis­dom, at a Harley-David­son fran­chise in Franklin. Steen­man had been hav­ing trou­ble find­ing a venue when the dealership’s own­er offered his show­room. Call­ing the man a “true patri­ot,” Steen­man pre­sent­ed him with a fold­ed and framed Amer­i­can flag that, she said, had accom­pa­nied her on a bomb­ing mis­sion in Afghanistan.

    Moms for Lib­er­ty had invit­ed the entire school board to the event, but the only mem­bers who showed up were the group’s three clear allies. One, a for­mer kinder­garten teacher who opposed mask­ing, liked to hug peo­ple dur­ing breaks at school-board meet­ings. The oth­er two were Cash and Gal­breath, both of whom were up for reëlec­tion on August 4, 2022.

    Steen­man, ges­tur­ing toward a large screen behind her, showed the “find­ings” of a Moms for Lib­er­ty “deep dive” into Wit & Wis­dom. She elicit­ed gasps from the audi­ence by say­ing that the cur­ricu­lum con­tained books that depict­ed “graph­ic mur­der,” “rape,” “promis­cu­ity,” “tor­ture,” “adul­tery,” “still­birth,” and “scalp­ing and skin­ning,” along with con­tent that her orga­ni­za­tion con­sid­ered to be “anti-police,” “anti-church,” and “anti-nuclear fam­i­ly.” Rhetoric about “empow­er­ing the stu­dents” was sud­den­ly “every­where,” she com­plained. With­out pre­sent­ing any evi­dence, she claimed that ele­men­tary-school stu­dents now need­ed coun­sel­lors to help them “over­come the emo­tion­al trau­ma” caused by Wit & Wis­dom.

    Steenman’s events often strayed far from the par­tic­u­lars of Williamson Coun­ty Schools. At one of them, the pro­ceed­ings were inter­rupt­ed when some­one walked onstage and breath­less­ly announced news from Vir­ginia: Glenn Youngkin, the can­di­date for gov­er­nor who’d cru­sad­ed against C.R.T., had won. The audi­ence cheered as if Youngkin were one of their own.

    Steenman’s claims about Wit & Wis­dom were so ten­den­tious that sev­er­al ardent sup­port­ers of the pub­lic schools looked her up on social media. Among oth­er things, they dis­cov­ered a Twit­ter account, @robin_steenman. On August 9, 2020, Matt Walsh—a colum­nist for the Dai­ly Wire, the con­ser­v­a­tive media site co-found­ed by the pun­dit Ben Shapiro—had shared a thread by a Philadel­phia teacher who expressed con­cern that med­dle­some par­ents might over­hear class­room con­ver­sa­tions dur­ing online learn­ing and under­mine “hon­est con­ver­sa­tions about gender/sexuality.” (The Dai­ly Wire is head­quar­tered in Nashville, and Shapiro has prop­a­gat­ed Moms for Liberty’s mes­sag­ing.) In a retweet of Walsh, @robin_steenman had post­ed, “You lit­tle brain­wash­ing ass­holes will nev­er get hold of my kids!” After Eric Welch and oth­ers pub­licly chal­lenged Steen­man about the tweet—and anoth­er one declar­ing that her chil­dren would nev­er attend pub­lic schools—the account van­ished. (Steen­man agreed to an inter­view, but did not keep the appoint­ment. A Moms for Lib­er­ty spokesper­son, call­ing my ques­tions “per­son­al in nature,” large­ly declined to pro­vide answers.)

    Pri­vate­ly, cer­tain defend­ers of Wit & Wis­dom referred to Moms for Lib­er­ty mem­bers as the Antis. In a sly move, some adopt­ed the sea­horse as a sym­bol of what one par­ent described to me as “the resis­tance.” This sum­mer in Williamson Coun­ty, I saw sea­horse stick­ers on cars and lap­tops. When I met Rah­man for lunch, she was wear­ing sea­horse ear­rings. At a school-board cam­paign event for a can­di­date who opposed Moms for Lib­er­ty, a vol­un­teer wore a sea­horse pen­dant on a neck­lace, along­side a gold cross. At least one per­son con­nect­ed to Moms for Lib­er­ty had become con­cerned about the group’s motives and tac­tics, and was secret­ly mon­i­tor­ing them from the inside. This per­son told me, “I’m the one in the trench, and I don’t want to get caught.”

    Many Moms and like-mind­ed par­ents want­ed both Wit & Wis­dom and Super­in­ten­dent Gold­en gone. Golden’s con­tract was up for annu­al review before the 2021–22 school year began. (One Moms for Lib­er­ty oppo­nent recent­ly tweet­ed, “The m.o. nation­wide is to fire Supt’s and hire ide­o­logues.”) At a meet­ing where the board planned to vote on Golden’s future, one of the superintendent’s many sup­port­ers implored the elect­ed offi­cials to “hold the line” against the “steady attack on our pub­lic schools.” The Antis were loud­er. A man wear­ing an Amer­i­can-flag-themed shirt shout­ed, “We, the par­ents, are awake, we’re orga­nized, and we’re extreme­ly pissed off.” He declared, “We’re gonna replace every board mem­ber in here with peo­ple just like me. Noth­ing would make us hap­pi­er than to sur­round you with a room­ful of Amer­i­can patri­ots who believe in the Con­sti­tu­tion of the Unit­ed States and Jesus Christ above!”

    The Antis jeered at speak­ers who expressed sup­port for Gold­en or the district’s diver­si­ty efforts. They mocked a woman whose daugh­ters had expe­ri­enced anti-Asian slurs at school. The mom told the board, “I’ve heard peo­ple say that teach­ing these parts of our his­to­ry is ‘racist’ or ‘trau­mat­ic.’ What’s trau­mat­ic is Black, Lati­no, Asian, and L.G.B.T.Q. kids going to schools where they face dis­crim­i­na­tion and don’t feel safe.” A local psy­chol­o­gist, Alan­na Truss, said, “I’m yet to see a child in my prac­tice who’s been trau­ma­tized by our county’s cur­ricu­lum choic­es. I have, how­ev­er, seen many stu­dents expe­ri­enc­ing trau­ma due to being dis­crim­i­nat­ed against and bul­lied with­in our schools, relat­ed to race, reli­gion, gen­der, and sex­u­al­i­ty.”

    Six of the school-board mem­bers, who serve four-year terms, were com­ing up for reëlec­tion in August of 2022. (The oth­er six will fin­ish their terms in 2024.) As the Wit & Wis­dom furor grew, anoth­er com­po­nent of the right-wing assault on schools locked into place: last fall, state law­mak­ers passed a bill legal­iz­ing par­ti­san school-board elec­tions. Moms for Lib­er­ty called the change “a HUGE step for­ward.”

    Edu­ca­tors and pol­i­cy­mak­ers have long believed that pub­lic edu­ca­tion should oper­ate inde­pen­dent­ly of polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. As the mag­a­zine Gov­ern­ing put it last year, “The goal of hav­ing non­par­ti­san elec­tions is not to remove all pol­i­tics” but “to remove a con­flict point that keeps the school board from doing its job.” For peo­ple who tar­get school boards, con­flict has become a tool. In Texas, a PAC linked to a cell-phone com­pa­ny which recent­ly fund­ed the maga takeover of sev­er­al school boards paid for an inflam­ma­to­ry mail cam­paign blam­ing a class­room shoot­ing on admin­is­tra­tors who had “stopped dis­ci­plin­ing stu­dents accord­ing to Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry prin­ci­ples.” In August, dur­ing a pan­el at cpac, the gath­er­ing of con­ser­v­a­tives, the for­mer Trump offi­cial Mer­cedes Schlapp warned that, though Repub­li­cans were focussed on fed­er­al and state elec­tions, “school board elec­tions are crit­i­cal.” The panel’s title, “We Are All Domes­tic Ter­ror­ists,” deri­sive­ly referred to recent instruc­tions from Attor­ney Gen­er­al Mer­rick Gar­land to the F.B.I. for devis­ing a plan to pro­tect school employ­ees and board mem­bers from threats of vio­lence.

    Join­ing Schlapp onstage was Ryan Gir­dusky, the founder of the 1776 Project pac, which fun­nels mon­ey to G.O.P. can­di­dates in par­ti­san school-board races. Gir­dusky boast­ed that, in 2021, his pac “did fifty-eight elec­tions in sev­en states and we won forty-two.” Gir­dusky said that his goal this year is to boost at least five hun­dred school-board can­di­dates nation­wide. He urged the audi­ence to “vote from the bot­tom up—go from school board and then go all the way up to gov­er­nor and sen­a­tor, and we’ll have con­ser­v­a­tive majori­ties across the entire elec­torate.”

    Last Novem­ber, mere weeks after Ten­nessee law­mak­ers vot­ed to allow par­ti­san school-board races, Steen­man launched a pac, Williamson Fam­i­lies. Its approach was marked­ly sim­i­lar to that of South­lake Fam­i­lies, a Texas pac whose orches­trat­ed takeover of a school board in that state has led to attempt­ed book bans. Both pacs have worked with Axiom Strate­gies, a polit­i­cal-con­sult­ing firm that has helped seat high-pro­file Repub­li­cans, includ­ing maga fig­ures. Allen West, the chair of the Texas G.O.P., has urged South­lake Fam­i­lies to export its takeover blue­print to sub­urbs nation­wide. Wealthy sub­urbs are some of America’s pur­plest dis­tricts, and win­ning them may be key to con­trol­ling the House, the Sen­ate, and the Pres­i­den­cy. Anne McGraw, the for­mer Williamson Coun­ty Schools board mem­ber, told me that the advent of Moms for Lib­er­ty “shows how hyper­local the nation­al machine is going with their tac­tics.” She observed, “Moms for Lib­er­ty is not in Podunk, Amer­i­ca. They’re going into hyper-edu­cat­ed, wealthy coun­ties like this, and try­ing to get those peo­ple to doubt the school sys­tem that brought us here.”

    ...

    Pro­gres­sives and pol­i­cy experts have long sus­pect­ed that right-wing attacks on school boards are less about chang­ing cur­ric­u­la than about under­min­ing the entire pub­lic-school sys­tem, in the hope of pri­va­tiz­ing edu­ca­tion. Dur­ing the alec Webi­nar about “reclaim­ing edu­ca­tion,” the Her­itage Foun­da­tion rep­re­sen­ta­tive declared that “school choice” would become “very impor­tant in the next cou­ple of years”; con­tro­ver­sies about cur­ric­u­la, he said, were “open­ing up oppor­tu­ni­ty for pol­i­cy­mak­ers at the state lev­el” to con­sid­er options like char­ter schools.

    This isn’t the first time that the cul­ture wars have tak­en aim at pub­lic edu­ca­tion. But Rebec­ca Jacob­sen, a pro­fes­sor of edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty, believes that this era is dif­fer­ent, because social media has made it easy for nation­al oper­a­tives to stage “a coör­di­nat­ed, con­crete” scare cam­paign designed to dri­ve par­ents toward alter­na­tives to pub­lic schools: “The mes­sage, at its core, is: ‘Beware of your pub­lic-edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Make sure your kid’s teach­ers aren’t up to some­thing.’ ”

    The tim­ing of “anti‑C.R.T.” leg­is­la­tion is no coin­ci­dence. Instead of putting forth a plat­form, the Repub­li­can Par­ty has tried to main­tain pow­er by demo­niz­ing its oppo­nents and crit­ics as sin­is­ter and un-Amer­i­can. In the lead-up to the midterms, the G.O.P.’s alarmism about crit­i­cal race the­o­ry has accom­pa­nied fear-mon­ger­ing about L.G.B.T.Q.+ teach­ers being “groomers.” Con­ser­v­a­tive media aggres­sive­ly pro­mote both cam­paigns. From Fox News to the Twit­ter account Libs of Tik­Tok, the mes­sag­ing has been con­sis­tent: many pub­lic-school teach­ers are dan­ger­ous.

    Lee, the Ten­nessee gov­er­nor, has lever­aged this dis­cord while try­ing to refor­mu­late school fund­ing: in Jan­u­ary, he announced plans to cre­ate fifty new char­ter schools in part­ner­ship with Hills­dale Col­lege, a pri­vate Chris­t­ian school in Michi­gan, whose pres­i­dent, Lar­ry Arnn, head­ed Trump’s 1776 Com­mis­sion. The plan par­tial­ly col­lapsed after a Ten­nessee tele­vi­sion sta­tion aired footage of Arnn, dur­ing a pri­vate appear­ance in Williamson Coun­ty, com­par­ing pub­lic edu­ca­tion to “the plague” and argu­ing that teach­ers are edu­cat­ed in “the dumb­est parts of the dumb­est col­leges in the coun­try.” J. C. Bow­man, the exec­u­tive direc­tor and C.E.O. of Pro­fes­sion­al Edu­ca­tors of Ten­nessee, called Arnn’s com­ments “rep­re­hen­si­ble and irre­spon­si­ble.” Even Repub­li­can politi­cians backed away. The speak­er of the Ten­nessee House, Cameron Sex­ton, acknowl­edged that Arnn had “insult­ed gen­er­a­tions of teach­ers who have made a dif­fer­ence for count­less stu­dents.”

    Moms for Liberty’s role in the broad­er war on pub­lic schools became ever clear­er in July, at the group’s inau­gur­al nation­al sum­mit, in Tam­pa. DeSan­tis, who deliv­ered a key address, was pre­sent­ed with a “lib­er­ty sword.” Anoth­er head­lin­er was Trump’s for­mer Edu­ca­tion Sec­re­tary, Bet­sy DeVos, whose fam­i­ly has con­nec­tions to Hills­dale. To an enthu­si­as­tic crowd that includ­ed Steen­man, DeVos declared that the U.S. Depart­ment of Education—the agency that she once oversaw—should not exist.

    Ear­ly this year, Eric Welch, the school-board mem­ber, was lean­ing against seek­ing reëlec­tion. Both of his sons had graduated—he was the one who hand­ed them their high-school diplo­mas when they crossed the stage. His wife, Andrea, want­ed him to take it easy for a while.

    School-board ser­vice, which is time-con­sum­ing and can be tedious, requires diplo­ma­cy, a breadth of knowl­edge, and the abil­i­ty to make com­plex, well-informed deci­sions. At meet­ings, Welch, who con­sid­ered ide­o­logues and bul­lies a threat to pub­lic edu­ca­tion, often rebutted mis­in­for­ma­tion about covid-19 and Wit & Wis­dom. At one meet­ing, he’d point­ed­ly read aloud from a title that he found on a Moms for Lib­er­ty site: the book, writ­ten by a fol­low­er of the John Birch Soci­ety, referred to Black peo­ple as “pick­anin­nies.” Rah­man, the co-founder of One Will­Co, the anti-racism orga­ni­za­tion, told me, “He came with all the receipts.” Welch’s detrac­tors had declared him arro­gant and rude; Rah­man called him “a strong advo­cate for what’s right.”

    For Welch’s seat, Steenman’s pac backed William (Doc) Hol­la­day, an optometrist who, like Steen­man, had no chil­dren in Williamson Coun­ty Schools. Hol­la­day had shown up at school-board meet­ings to denounce C.R.T. as “racist.” On Face­book, where he’d railed against pan­dem­ic pro­to­cols, his posts were rou­tine­ly flagged or removed because they con­tained mis­in­for­ma­tion. His top “news” sources includ­ed the Epoch Times, which reg­u­lar­ly pro­motes right-wing false­hoods.

    Last year, Char­lie Wil­son, the pres­i­dent of the Nation­al School Boards Asso­ci­a­tion, char­ac­ter­ized local school-board mem­bers as fun­da­men­tal guardians “of democ­ra­cy, of lib­er­ty, of equal­i­ty, of civil­i­ty and com­mu­ni­ty, and of the Con­sti­tu­tion and the rule of law.” Hol­la­day, a felon who believes the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that Trump is still the “legit­i­mate Pres­i­dent,” seemed more like an oppor­tunist. In 2008, he’d plead­ed guilty to mul­ti­ple counts of pre­scrip­tion fraud and forgery; the Ten­nessee Depart­ment of Health had put him on pro­ba­tion for “immoral, unpro­fes­sion­al or dis­hon­or­able con­duct,” not­ing that he had also worked “while impaired.” The state licen­sure board lat­er added five more years of pro­ba­tion upon dis­cov­er­ing that he’d made “untruth­ful” claims about “pro­fes­sion­al excel­lence or abil­i­ties.” (Hol­la­day told me that he has turned his life around.)

    ...

    As Hol­la­day cam­paigned, he repeat­ed­ly invoked the nation­wide par­ti­san divide. In an inter­view that appeared on YouTube, he declared that con­ser­v­a­tives were flee­ing blue states for places like Williamson Coun­ty because the left was try­ing to “destroy the last remain­ing refuges of con­ser­vatism and patri­o­tism.” If Williamson Coun­ty “goes blue,” he said, the rest of the state would fol­low, and if Ten­nessee “doesn’t stay red” it will be “a huge blow to the coun­try.”

    On Elec­tion Day, Welch, a wiry ex-wrestler, erect­ed a pole tent out­side Hunters Bend Ele­men­tary School, a vot­ing precinct. Holladay’s sup­port­ers set up near­by. I arrived to find Welch, wear­ing kha­ki shorts and a “re-elect eric welch” T‑shirt, squar­ing off in the park­ing lot with a Hol­la­day sup­port­er who was say­ing, angri­ly, “I’ve laid peo­ple out for less than that!”

    The man, Bri­an Rus­sell, described Welch as the aggressor—“He shoul­der-checked me”—but mul­ti­ple wit­ness­es char­ac­ter­ized the alter­ca­tion dif­fer­ent­ly. Meghan Guf­fee, a Repub­li­can run­ning for reëlec­tion to the coun­ty com­mis­sion, told me that Rus­sell had demand­ed to know why Welch had blocked him on social media. Welch, try­ing to walk away, had respond­ed, “I’m end­ing this con­ver­sa­tion. You’re an ass.”

    In a pub­lic Face­book post, Rus­sell had declared Welch to be “as bad as a pedophile.” Guf­fee said that she’d heard Rus­sell, in the park­ing lot, accuse Welch of hav­ing “vot­ed to teach third graders how to mas­tur­bate.” (Rus­sell denies this.) Guf­fee was par­tic­u­lar­ly appalled that her six-year-old daugh­ter, who was with her at the vot­ing site, had wit­nessed Russell’s hos­til­i­ty. She told me, “That is not how this com­mu­ni­ty does things.”

    Before leav­ing the school grounds, Rus­sell, a paint­ing con­trac­tor in his ear­ly fifties, told me that he was angry about Wit & Wis­dom: “When my daugh­ter comes home and her best friend is Black, and she’s won­der­ing why ‘I’m bad because I’m white. . . . ’ ” This and oth­er com­ments sug­gest­ed that his chil­dren attend­ed local schools. In fact, Russell’s three chil­dren lived in his native state of Ohio.

    Through­out Amer­i­ca, maga types were tar­get­ing edu­ca­tion offi­cials. In Maine, a man plas­tered a school-board member’s pho­to­graph on a sign and sur­round­ed it with rat traps, telling NBC News, “This is a war with the left,” and “In war, tac­tics and strat­e­gy can become blur­ry.” A mem­ber of the Proud Boys ran for a school-board seat in Cal­i­for­nia. On Sep­tem­ber 27th, the Amer­i­can Libraries Asso­ci­a­tion sent an open let­ter to the F.B.I. direc­tor, Chris Wray, ask­ing for help: in the pre­vi­ous two weeks alone, “bomb­ing or shoot­ing threats” had forced the tem­po­rary clos­ing of libraries in five states. Ten­nessee was one of them.

    In Williamson Coun­ty, Moms for Lib­er­ty mem­bers couldn’t claim igno­rance of the beliefs of some of the can­di­dates they and Steenman’s pac sup­port­ed. Williamson Fam­i­lies donat­ed a thou­sand dol­lars to the cam­paign of an ex-marine who was run­ning for coun­ty com­mis­sion­er, and who had pub­licly warned the school board, “In the past, you dealt with sheep. Now pre­pare your­selves to deal with lions! I swore an oath to pro­tect this coun­try from all enemies—foreign and domes­tic. You harm my chil­dren, you become a domes­tic ene­my.”

    That guy lost. So did Hol­la­day. Welch beat him by five hun­dred and fifty-nine votes. Welch was sur­prised that any­body had vot­ed for Hol­la­day, lat­er telling me, “If you had to design a can­di­date who is unqual­i­fied and should not be on a board of edu­ca­tion, that’s what he’d look like.”

    Can­di­dates backed by Moms for Lib­er­ty mem­bers won, how­ev­er, in two oth­er dis­tricts. A Repub­li­can who appeared to have no con­nec­tion to the pub­lic schools beat Ken Chilton, who ran as an inde­pen­dent and who, the day after the elec­tion, tweet­ed that Ten­nessee law­mak­ers’ deci­sion to allow par­ti­san school-board elec­tions had “cre­at­ed a mon­ster.”

    Jay Gal­breath, the board mem­ber who had for­ward­ed the e‑mails about diver­si­ty con­sul­tants to oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians, had found him­self chal­lenged from the right flank—by a M4L-affil­i­at­ed can­di­date whose cam­paign signs said “reject crt.” As if to prove his oppo­si­tion to Wit & Wis­dom, Gal­breath had post­ed pub­licly, on Face­book, that pro­gres­sives were “con­stant­ly look­ing at ways to inject and nor­mal­ize things like gen­der iden­ti­ty, the black lives mat­ter move­ment, and LGBTQ by weav­ing it into cur­ricu­lum.” Williamson Strong, a pac com­posed of local pro­gres­sives who have long defend­ed the pub­lic schools, called for Galbreath’s res­ig­na­tion, not­ing, “This is pure hate speech, and it has NO place in a posi­tion of influ­ence or pow­er over 40,000+ chil­dren and their edu­ca­tion. It has no place in Williamson Coun­ty, peri­od.” The group, whose lead­ers include Anne McGraw, the for­mer school-board mem­ber, observed, “All fil­ters have appar­ent­ly been oblit­er­at­ed now that he’s com­pet­ing for votes against an MFL-endorsed can­di­date.” Despite the con­tro­ver­sy, Gal­breath won reëlec­tion.

    A month before the vote, a civ­il action was filed against Wit & Wis­dom: the par­ents of an ele­men­tary-school stu­dent sued the school board and var­i­ous admin­is­tra­tors in the dis­trict on behalf of a con­ser­v­a­tive non­prof­it that they had just launched, Par­ents’ Choice Ten­nessee. The lawsuit’s com­plaint echoed Moms for Liberty’s asser­tions that the curriculum’s “harm­ful, unlaw­ful and age-inap­pro­pri­ate con­tent” rep­re­sent­ed a “clear vio­la­tion of Ten­nessee code.” If the law­suit suc­ceeds, Williamson Coun­ty Schools may have to find a new cur­ricu­lum and pay fines. (Cit­ing the lit­i­ga­tion, Williamson Coun­ty Schools offi­cials declined to com­ment for this arti­cle.)

    The law­suit may have been designed, in part, to give the impres­sion that there was more local oppo­si­tion to Wit & Wis­dom than actu­al­ly exist­ed. There are eigh­teen thou­sand stu­dents in the district’s ele­men­tary schools, but accord­ing to a dis­trict report only thir­ty-sev­en peo­ple had com­plained about the new cur­ricu­lum. Four­teen of the com­plainants had no chil­dren in the sys­tem.

    Rebec­ca Jacob­sen, the Michi­gan schol­ar, looks for clues in such data. She said, of the vit­ri­ol toward school boards, “Is this a blip, and we’ll rebound? Or are we chip­ping away at our largest pub­lic insti­tu­tion and the sys­tem that has been at the cen­ter of our democ­ra­cy since the found­ing of this coun­try?” She not­ed that some Amer­i­cans “don’t trust their schools and teach­ers any­more,” adding, “That’s rad­i­cal.”

    Moms for Liberty’s cam­paign, mean­while, con­tin­ues to widen. The orga­ni­za­tion now claims two hun­dred and forty chap­ters in forty-two states, and more than a hun­dred thou­sand mem­bers. It has thrown a fund-rais­ing gala, fea­tur­ing Meg­yn Kel­ly, in which the top tick­et cost twen­ty thou­sand dol­lars. In late Octo­ber, a spokesper­son for the Moms told me that the organization—ostensibly a charity—is a “media com­pa­ny.”

    The slick roll­out of Moms for Lib­er­ty has made it seem less like a good-faith col­lec­tive of informed par­ents and more like a well-fund­ed oper­a­tion vying to sway Amer­i­can vot­ers in a piv­otal elec­tion year. Steenman’s chap­ter recent­ly announced a slate of upcom­ing talks: “Gen­der Ide­ol­o­gy,” “Restora­tive Jus­tice,” “Com­pre­hen­sive Sex Ed,” “His­to­ry of Marx­ism in Edu­ca­tion.” I asked Jacob­sen whether she thinks that Moms for Lib­er­ty mem­bers actu­al­ly believe that a cur­ricu­lum like Wit & Wis­dom dam­ages chil­dren. “I don’t know what any­body believes any­more,” she replied. “We seem to have lost a sense of hon­esty. It may just be about pow­er and mon­ey.”

    ————-

    “The Right-Wing Moth­ers Fuelling the School-Board Wars” By Paige Williams; The New York­er; 10/31/2024

    In May, 2021, as the dis­trict fin­ished its first aca­d­e­m­ic year with Wit & Wis­dom, women wear­ing “Moms for Lib­er­ty” T‑shirts began appear­ing at school-board meet­ings. They brought large plac­ards that con­tained images and text from thir­ty-one books that they didn’t want stu­dents to read. In pub­lic com­ments and in writ­ten com­plaints, the women claimed that Wit & Wis­dom was teach­ing chil­dren to hate them­selves, one anoth­er, their fam­i­lies, and Amer­i­ca.Rap a Tap Tap,” an illus­trat­ed sto­ry about the vaude­ville-era tap dancer Bill (Bojan­gles) Robin­son, by the Calde­cott medal­ists Leo and Diane Dil­lon, harped on “skin col­or dif­fer­ences.” A pic­ture book about sea­hors­es, which touched on every­thing from their abil­i­ty to change col­or to the inde­pen­dent move­ment of their eyes, threat­ened to “nor­mal­ize that males can get preg­nant” by explain­ing that male sea­hors­es give birth; the Moms sus­pect­ed a covert endorse­ment of “gen­der flu­id­i­ty.” Gre­co-Roman myths: nudi­ty, can­ni­bal­ism. (Venus emerges naked from the sea; Tan­ta­lus cooks his son.)”

    By May of 2021, Moms for Lib­er­ty activists seemed to have popped out of nowhere in Williamson Coun­ty, TN, ready for a big polit­i­cal fight over local schools. The Wit & Wis­dom cur­ricu­lum adopt­ed in August of 2020 was the source of their ire. Williamson Coun­ty was the lat­est front in the grow­ing ‘CRT’ wars. The coun­ty ordered a review of the new cur­ricu­lum:

    ...
    In August, 2020, Williamson Coun­ty Schools, which serves more than forty thou­sand stu­dents in sub­ur­ban Nashville, start­ed using an Eng­lish and Lan­guage Arts cur­ricu­lum called Wit & Wis­dom. The pro­gram, which is pub­lished by Great Minds, a com­pa­ny based in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., wasn’t a rene­gade choice: hun­dreds of school dis­tricts nation­wide had adopt­ed it. Both Mass­a­chu­setts and Louisiana—states with sharply dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal profiles—gave Wit & Wis­dom high approval rat­ings.

    ...

    Else­where in Ten­nessee, teach­ers were say­ing that Wit & Wis­dom improved lit­er­a­cy. The super­in­ten­dent of Laud­erdale Coun­ty, a rur­al area where near­ly a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion lives below the pover­ty line, pub­lished an essay report­ing that his district’s teach­ers had noticed “an enor­mous dif­fer­ence in stu­dents’ writ­ing” after imple­ment­ing the cur­ricu­lum. Wit & Wis­dom encour­ages stu­dents to dis­cuss read­ings with their families—a father in Sum­n­er Coun­ty, north­east of Nashville, was pleased that his daugh­ters now talked about civ­il rights and the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion at din­ner.

    Then, seem­ing­ly out of nowhere, Wit & Wis­dom became the tar­get of intense crit­i­cism. At first, the cam­paign in Williamson Coun­ty was cryp­tic: stray e‑mails, phone calls, pub­lic-infor­ma­tion requests. Eric Welch, who was first elect­ed to the school board in 2010, told me that the com­plain­ers “wouldn’t just e‑mail us—they would copy the coun­ty com­mis­sion, our state leg­isla­tive del­e­ga­tion, and state rep­re­sen­ta­tives in oth­er coun­ties.” He said, “It was obvi­ous­ly an attempt to intim­i­date.”

    ...

    Moms for Lib­er­ty mem­bers soon esca­lat­ed the con­flict, pub­licly assert­ing that Williamson Coun­ty Schools had adopt­ed Wit & Wis­dom hur­ried­ly, and in vio­la­tion of state rules. The school board still wasn’t sure what Moms for Lib­er­ty was—who found­ed it, who fund­ed it. Nev­er­the­less, the dis­trict assem­bled a reassess­ment team to review the cur­ricu­lum and the adop­tion process. At a pub­lic “work ses­sion” in June, 2021, the team announced that, after a pre­lim­i­nary review, it hadn’t found any vio­la­tions of pro­to­col. Teach­ers had spent a full work­day famil­iar­iz­ing them­selves with Wit & Wis­dom before imple­ment­ing it. As Jen­ny Lopez, the district’s cur­ricu­lum direc­tor, explained, “Teach­ers actu­al­ly had more time than they’ve ever had to look at mate­ri­als.”
    ...

    That review did­n’t find a prob­lem, but the flag had been plant­ed. Moms for Lib­er­ty was­n’t going any­where in this new­ly ener­gized cul­ture war front and the school board respond­ed as if it was on notice and imposed var­i­ous “guardrails” over some con­tent. But one thing the review com­mit­tee did­n’t find was any indi­ca­tion that ‘CRT’ came up at all dur­ing the cur­ricu­lum selec­tion process, despite Moms for Lib­er­ty accus­ing the dis­trict of push­ing a CRT agen­da. As Nan­cy Gar­rett, the board’s chair, put it, in response to the del­uge of anti-CRT email she received, “I guess I’m won­der­ing what hap­pened.”

    And as we can see, Chris Rufo hap­pened. Rufo was already talk­ing about the exis­ten­tial threat of CRT on rightwing media out­lets like Tuck­er Carl­son’s Fox News show dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion cycle. Rufo even described CRT as “the per­fect villain”—a term that “con­notes hos­tile, aca­d­e­m­ic, divi­sive, race-obsessed, poi­so­nous, elit­ist, anti-Amer­i­can views.” What hap­pened in Williamson Coun­ty in 2021 was the appli­ca­tion of the strat­e­gy of going after that “per­fect vil­lain” that Rufo was push­ing nation­al­ly a year ear­li­er dur­ing the final months of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Rufo had Trump’s ear. He just did­n’t have enough time to get big things done at the fed­er­al lev­el, which is part of the rea­son local school boards became major bat­tle­grounds in 2021 after Trump was out of the White House. Moms for Lib­er­ty was formed in Decem­ber of 2020, days after an ALEC webi­nar about “reclaim­ing edu­ca­tion and the Amer­i­can dream”. The group was obvi­ous­ly cre­at­ed by the CNP and the rest of the right-wing mega-donor estab­lish­ment for the school board fights they know were. Williamson Coun­ty was just one of those fights in the nation­al anti-CRT cam­paign Chris Rufo was call­ing for:

    ...
    The review com­mit­tee ulti­mate­ly con­clud­ed that Wit & Wis­dom had been an over-all suc­cess; still, admin­is­tra­tors decid­ed to sur­vey teach­ers quar­ter­ly about how the cur­ricu­lum was work­ing. They lim­it­ed access to the gori­er images in one Civ­il War book and imposed sim­i­lar “guardrails” involv­ing “Hatch­et,” a pop­u­lar young-adult nov­el in which a char­ac­ter attempts sui­cide. “Walk Two Moons,” a nov­el by the New­bery Medal win­ner Sharon Creech, about a daughter’s quest to find her miss­ing moth­er, was even­tu­al­ly removed from the Williamson ver­sion of the pro­gram, not because its con­tent was deemed objec­tion­able but, rather, to adjust the pac­ing of one fourth-grade mod­ule. Gold­en, who is tall and genial, told the board mem­bers, “The over­whelm­ing feed­back that we got was: ‘Man, can’t we just read some­thing uplift­ing in fourth grade?’ And we felt the same way!”

    At the work ses­sion, Gold­en shared one end of a con­fer­ence table with Nan­cy Gar­rett, the board’s chair. Gar­rett, who has rec­tan­gu­lar glass­es and a blond bob, is from a fam­i­ly that has attend­ed or worked in Williamson Coun­ty Schools for three gen­er­a­tions. She had won the chair­man­ship, by unan­i­mous vote, the pre­vi­ous August. At one point, she asked an assis­tant super­in­ten­dent who had over­seen the selec­tion and review of Wit & Wis­dom whether “the con­cept of crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” had come up dur­ing the process. No, the assis­tant super­in­ten­dent said.

    Moms for Lib­er­ty mem­bers were por­tray­ing Wit & Wis­dom as “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” in dis­guise. Gar­rett found this baf­fling. C.R.T., a com­plex aca­d­e­m­ic frame­work that exam­ines the sys­temic ways in which racism has shaped Amer­i­can soci­ety, is explored at the uni­ver­si­ty lev­el or high­er. As far as the board knew, Williamson Coun­ty Schools had nev­er intro­duced the con­cept. Yet there had been such a del­uge of ref­er­ences to it that Gar­rett had delved into her old e‑mails, in an unsuc­cess­ful attempt to iden­ti­fy the ori­gins of the out­rage. She told her col­leagues, “I guess I’m won­der­ing what hap­pened.”

    In Sep­tem­ber, 2020—four months after the mur­der of George Floyd, two months before the Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, and a month into Williamson Coun­ty Schools’ use of Wit & Wis­dom—Christo­pher Rufo, a con­ser­v­a­tive activist, appeared on Tuck­er Carl­son’s show, on Fox News, and called crit­i­cal race the­o­ry “an exis­ten­tial threat to the Unit­ed States.” Rufo cap­i­tal­ized on the fact that, giv­en C.R.T.’s aca­d­e­m­ic prove­nance, few Amer­i­cans had heard of the con­cept. He argued that lib­er­al edu­ca­tors, under the bland ban­ner of “diver­si­ty,” were manip­u­lat­ing stu­dents into think­ing of Amer­i­ca not as a vibrant cham­pi­on of democ­ra­cy but as a shame­ful embod­i­ment of white suprema­cy. (As he framed things, there were no in-between posi­tions.) Rufo lat­er called C.R.T. “the per­fect villain”—a term that “con­notes hos­tile, aca­d­e­m­ic, divi­sive, race-obsessed, poi­so­nous, elit­ist, anti-Amer­i­can views.”

    Rufo found a recep­tive ear in Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, who was already rant­i­ng about “The 1619 Project,” the col­lec­tion of Times Mag­a­zine essays in which slav­ery is placed at the heart of the nation’s found­ing. On Twit­ter, Trump had warned that the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion would defund any school whose class­room taught mate­r­i­al from the project. Trump con­ferred with Rufo and banned fed­er­al agen­cies from con­duct­ing “un-Amer­i­can pro­pa­gan­da train­ing ses­sions” involv­ing “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” or “white priv­i­lege.” Trump said that Black Lives Mat­ter protests were pro­lif­er­at­ing not because of anger over police abus­es but because of “decades of left-wing indoc­tri­na­tion in our schools.” Estab­lish­ing a “1776 Com­mis­sion,” he urged “patri­ot­ic moms and dads” to demand that schools stop feed­ing chil­dren “hate­ful lies about this coun­try.” (The Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion con­demned the Administration’s even­tu­al “1776 Report,” high­light­ing its many inac­cu­ra­cies and argu­ing that it attempt­ed to air­brush his­to­ry and “ele­vate igno­rance about the past to a civic virtue.”)

    Near­ly nine hun­dred school dis­tricts nation­wide were soon tar­get­ed by anti‑C.R.T. cam­paigns, many of which adopt­ed lan­guage that close­ly echoed Trump’s order not to teach mate­r­i­al that made oth­ers “feel dis­com­fort, guilt, anguish, or any oth­er form of psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress on account of his or her race or sex.” In some red states, the vague word­ing was enshrined as law. Repub­li­cans filed what became known as “anti‑C.R.T.” bills; they were seem­ing­ly cut and past­ed from tem­plates, with sim­i­lar­ly phrased ref­er­ences to such terms as “divi­sive con­cepts” and “indoc­tri­na­tion.”

    Williamson Coun­ty Schools was unevent­ful­ly wrap­ping up its first term with Wit & Wis­dom when, in ear­ly Decem­ber, 2020, the Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil, which gen­er­ates mod­el leg­is­la­tion for right-lean­ing law­mak­ers, host­ed a Webi­nar about “reclaim­ing edu­ca­tion and the Amer­i­can dream.” A rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion, the con­ser­v­a­tive think tank, warned that ele­ments of a “Black Lives Mat­ter cur­ricu­lum” were “now in our schools.” Rufo—correctly pre­dict­ing that Joe Biden, then the Pres­i­dent-elect, would abol­ish Trump’s exec­u­tive order—urged state leg­is­la­tors and gov­er­nors to take up the fight.

    ...

    Days after the alec Webi­nar on “reclaim­ing edu­ca­tion,” three women in Flori­da filed incor­po­ra­tion papers for Moms for Lib­er­ty, Inc., lat­er declar­ing that their “sole pur­pose” was to “fight for parental rights” to choose what sort of edu­ca­tion was best for their kids. One of the organization’s founders, Tina Descovich—who had recent­ly lost reëlec­tion to the school board of Bre­vard Coun­ty, Flori­da, after oppos­ing pan­dem­ic safe­ty protocols—soon appeared on Rush Limbaugh’s show. Declar­ing plans to “start with school boards and move on from there,” she said of like-mind­ed par­ents, “It sounds a lit­tle melo­dra­mat­ic, but there is evil work­ing against us on a dai­ly basis.” maga media—“Tucker Carl­son Tonight,” Breitbart—showcased Moms for Lib­er­ty. Media Mat­ters, the lib­er­al watch­dog, argued that influ­en­tial right-wing media fig­ures were essen­tial­ly “recruit­ing their eager audi­ence” for the Moms’ cam­paign.
    ...

    And by March of 2021, just two months before all the uproar start­ed in Williamson Coun­ty, Rufo was, true to form, open­ly describ­ing on Twit­ter his plans for turn­ing ‘Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry’ into a gener­ic catch all term for “var­i­ous cul­tur­al insan­i­ties”. “The goal is to have the pub­lic read some­thing crazy in the news­pa­per and imme­di­ate­ly think ‘crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.’ ” It was part of Rufo’s curi­ous habit of being shock­ing­ly hon­est about his dis­hon­est schemes. The guy knows how to troll:

    ...
    A nation­al pha­lanx of inter­con­nect­ed organizations—including the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute, where Rufo is a fel­low, and a group called Moms for America—supported the suite of talk­ing points about C.R.T. Accord­ing to NBC News, in a sin­gle week last year Bre­it­bart alone pub­lished sev­en hun­dred and fifty posts or arti­cles in which the the­o­ry was men­tioned. Glenn Beck, the right-wing pun­dit, declared that C.R.T. is a “poi­son,” urg­ing his audi­ence, “Stand up in your com­mu­ni­ty and fire the teach­ers. Fire them!”

    On March 15, 2021, Rufo, in a tweet thread, overt­ly described a key ele­ment of the far right’s evolv­ing strat­e­gy: “We have suc­cess­ful­ly frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion and are steadi­ly dri­ving up neg­a­tive per­cep­tions. We will even­tu­al­ly turn it tox­ic, as we put all of the var­i­ous cul­tur­al insan­i­ties under that brand cat­e­go­ry.” He added, “The goal is to have the pub­lic read some­thing crazy in the news­pa­per and imme­di­ate­ly think ‘crit­i­cal race the­o­ry.’ ”
    ...

    On March 22, 2021 — one week after Rufo’s March 15, 2021, tweet thread describ­ing this “evolv­ing strat­e­gy” — we see Robin Steen­man mak­ing her first appear­ance before the Williamson Coun­ty school board. Steen­man was­n’t just com­plain­ing about Williamson Coun­ty’s cur­ricu­lum. Instead, it was a rant about Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry in places like North Car­oli­na, Ohio, and Penn­syl­va­nia. Sev­er­al weeks lat­er, Steen­man start­ed the Williamson Coun­ty chap­ter of Moms for Lib­er­ty:

    ...
    A few weeks lat­er, on March 22nd, the school board’s month­ly meet­ing took place on Zoom, because of the pan­dem­ic. Robin Steen­man appeared before the board for the first time. Wear­ing a cream-col­ored sweater and dan­g­ly ear­rings, she pre­sent­ed her­self sim­ply as a con­cerned res­i­dent who want­ed school offi­cials to reject any diver­si­ty pro­pos­al that involved “The 1619 Project, crit­i­cal race train­ing, inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty.” She wor­ried aloud that a recent pro­pos­al in Cal­i­for­nia to man­date a semes­ter of eth­nic stud­ies would be “parad­ed as a blue­print for the rest of the coun­try.”

    Steen­man, who appeared to be read­ing from notes, assert­ed that par­ents in Vir­ginia were being black­list­ed for “speak­ing out.” In Penn­syl­va­nia, an ele­men­tary school had “forced fifth graders to cel­e­brate Black com­mu­nism and host a Black Pow­er ral­ly.” In North Car­oli­na, a teacher had described par­ents as “an imped­i­ment to social jus­tice.” In Ohio, C.R.T. “had to be removed from the cur­ricu­lum, because the stu­dents were lit­er­al­ly turn­ing on each oth­er.” Steen­man cit­ed no sources. She said, “If you give them an inch”—then changed course. Drop­ping the “them,” she declared, “If you give one inch to this kind of teach­ing, then you’re gonna sub­ject your­self to the whole spec­trum.”

    Sev­er­al weeks lat­er, Steen­man start­ed the Williamson Coun­ty chap­ter of Moms for Lib­er­ty, build­ing on the e‑mail sent by the par­ents of the bira­cial child and har­ness­ing the furi­ous ener­gy of fam­i­lies who were already accus­ing the school board of “med­ical tyran­ny” for requir­ing stu­dents to wear masks. This vocal minor­i­ty had been par­tic­u­lar­ly incensed at one school-board mem­ber, Brad Fis­cus, a for­mer sci­ence teacher whose wife, Michelle, a pedi­a­tri­cian, was Tennessee’s chief vac­cine offi­cer. Williamson Coun­ty is a Repub­li­can pipeline to state and nation­al office: the gov­er­nor, Bill Lee, is from there; Mar­sha Black­burn, the maga sen­a­tor, began her polit­i­cal career as a coun­ty com­mis­sion­er there. In July, 2021, the state fired Michelle Fis­cus after con­ser­v­a­tive law­mak­ers object­ed to her “mes­sag­ing” in sup­port of covid-19 vac­ci­na­tions; after­ward, Brad Fis­cus resigned from the school board and the fam­i­ly moved to the East Coast. For right-wing extrem­ists, the obvi­ous les­son was that rage tac­tics worked. That August, one school-board meet­ing near­ly end­ed in vio­lence when two enraged men fol­lowed a pro­po­nent of masks to his vehi­cle, scream­ing, “We can find you!”
    ...

    And when we see a Moms for Lib­er­ty co-founder crow­ing about how the group has helped get twen­ty- and thir­ty-year-old females involved with the Repub­li­can Par­ty, it’s a reminder that Moms for Lib­er­ty’s strate­gic val­ue has only grown in the wake of the over­turn­ing of Roe v Wade and the GOPs increas­ing­ly polit­i­cal tox­ic stance on abor­tion. Man­u­fac­tured hys­te­ria over pub­lic schools is exact­ly what the par­ty need­ed. Also, yes, that co-founder was Brid­get Ziegler, now known for her secret three-way romance between Brid­get, her hus­band Chris­t­ian, and a third woman that end­ed in a rape alle­ga­tion against Chris­t­ian. It’s not clear how that whole sto­ry is going to play out with the young female demo­graph­ic Ziegler has been focused on:

    ...
    Moms for Lib­er­ty, which is some­times referred to as M4L or MFL, is so new that it is hard to parse, from pub­lic doc­u­ments, what its lead­ers are get­ting paid. (The founders say that the chairs of local chap­ters are vol­un­teers.) The group describes itself as a “grass­roots” orga­ni­za­tion, yet its instant absorp­tion by the con­ser­v­a­tive medi­a­s­phere has led some crit­ics to sus­pect it of being an Astro­turf group—an oper­a­tion secret­ly fund­ed by mon­eyed inter­ests. Moms for Lib­er­ty reg­is­tered with the I.R.S. as the kind of social-wel­fare non­prof­it that can accept unlim­it­ed dark mon­ey.

    The lead­ers had deep G.O.P. con­nec­tions. One, Marie Roger­son, was a suc­cess­ful Repub­li­can polit­i­cal strate­gist. The oth­er, Brid­get Ziegler, a school-board mem­ber in Sara­so­ta Coun­ty, is mar­ried to the vice-chair of the Flori­da G.O.P., Chris­t­ian Ziegler, who told the Wash­ing­ton Post, “I have been try­ing for a dozen years to get twen­ty- and thir­ty-year-old females involved with the Repub­li­can Par­ty, and it was a heavy lift to get that demo­graph­ic. . . . But now Moms for Lib­er­ty has done it for me.” Moms for Lib­er­ty worked with the office of Florida’s gov­er­nor, Ron DeSan­tis, to help craft the state’s infa­mous “Don’t Say Gay” leg­is­la­tion, which DeSan­tis signed into law this past March; it for­bids instruc­tion on “sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion or gen­der iden­ti­ty” in “kinder­garten through grade 3 or in a man­ner that is not age-appro­pri­ate.”
    ...

    Final­ly, as just a final look at the gross dis­hon­esty at the core of the whole astro­turfed Moms for Lib­er­ty cam­paign, note how the woman who ini­ti­at­ed the com­plaints in Williamson Coun­ty back in May of 2021 over the Wit & Wis­dom cur­ricu­lum, Robin Steen­man, did­n’t even have chil­dren in the pub­lic schools. She was basi­cal­ly an actor. Because that’s what this is: polit­i­cal the­ater. Specif­i­cal­ly, the the­ater of ‘local con­cerned par­ents’ paid for by the bil­lion­aire-financed right-wing dark mon­ey:

    ...
    When the women in T‑shirts first showed up, Welch had nev­er heard of Moms for Lib­er­ty, and he didn’t rec­og­nize its mem­bers. The group’s leader, Robin Steen­man, was in her ear­ly for­ties, with shoul­der-length blond hair; in col­or­ing and build, she resem­bled Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene. Board of Edu­ca­tion mem­bers strug­gled to under­stand why she’d insert­ed her­self into a mat­ter that didn’t con­cern her: Steen­man had no chil­dren in the pub­lic schools.

    ...

    Moms for Liberty’s cam­paign, mean­while, con­tin­ues to widen. The orga­ni­za­tion now claims two hun­dred and forty chap­ters in forty-two states, and more than a hun­dred thou­sand mem­bers. It has thrown a fund-rais­ing gala, fea­tur­ing Meg­yn Kel­ly, in which the top tick­et cost twen­ty thou­sand dol­lars. In late Octo­ber, a spokesper­son for the Moms told me that the organization—ostensibly a charity—is a “media com­pa­ny.”

    The slick roll­out of Moms for Lib­er­ty has made it seem less like a good-faith col­lec­tive of informed par­ents and more like a well-fund­ed oper­a­tion vying to sway Amer­i­can vot­ers in a piv­otal elec­tion year. Steenman’s chap­ter recent­ly announced a slate of upcom­ing talks: “Gen­der Ide­ol­o­gy,” “Restora­tive Jus­tice,” “Com­pre­hen­sive Sex Ed,” “His­to­ry of Marx­ism in Edu­ca­tion.” I asked Jacob­sen whether she thinks that Moms for Lib­er­ty mem­bers actu­al­ly believe that a cur­ricu­lum like Wit & Wis­dom dam­ages chil­dren. “I don’t know what any­body believes any­more,” she replied. “We seem to have lost a sense of hon­esty. It may just be about pow­er and mon­ey.”
    ...

    Robin Steen­man was basi­cal­ly oper­at­ing as a kind of right-wing actor in a kind of real-life the­ater pro­duc­tion. The fact that act­ed like she had chil­dren in the pub­lic schools was real­ly the most benign of her lies. The whole thing was a fab­ri­ca­tion. A the­atri­cal pro­duc­tion brought to us by the same folks cur­rent­ly work­ing on an edu­ca­tion hys­ter­ics sequel. It’ll be high­er edu­ca­tion hys­ter­ics in the sequel, but oth­er­wise the plot will more or less be the same.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 8, 2024, 11:28 pm
  43. It’s no secret that net­works of bil­lion­aires wield enor­mous influ­ence over the US gov­ern­ment and soci­ety. They don’t real­ly hide that, despite all the dark mon­ey. But just because Amer­i­cans know they’ve long lived in a soci­ety run by and for bil­lion­aires, that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean the pub­lic is actu­al­ly aware of the vision these bil­lion­aires have for the future. Or aware of just how extreme that vision tru­ly is, which brings us to the fol­low­ing New York Times report about the net­work of bil­lion­aires behind the cur­rent cam­paign to expunge all ves­tiges of ‘DEI’ (Diver­si­ty, Equi­ty, and Inclu­sion) from US col­lege cam­pus­es. A cam­paign that’s scored some notable wins with the recent res­ig­na­tion of Har­vard pres­i­dent Clau­dine Gay.

    As we’ve seen, the archi­tect behind Gay’s down­fall is exact­ly who we should have expect­ed: Christo­pher Rufo of the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute, the same fig­ure behind the ‘anti-CRT’ hys­te­ria asso­ci­at­ed with groups like Moms for Lib­er­ty. It all hap­pened rather quick­ly, with the Octo­ber 7 attacks in Israel and ensu­ing con­flict trig­ger­ing waves of protests on US cam­pus­es, along with a well-fund­ed pub­lic back­lash lead by bil­lion­aire Bill Ack­man. But as the fol­low­ing report describes, the anti-DEI orga­niz­ing by the bil­lion­aires behind Rufo began long before. It was in ear­ly 2021 when the Clare­mont Insti­tute began scour­ing around for a new issue to cham­pi­on. Col­lege DEI pro­grams became the new scape­goat of choice.

    Ear­ly 2023 was, of course, months after the Jan­u­ary 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, an event which the Clare­mont Insti­tute was inti­mate­ly involved with. As we saw, the Clare­mont Insti­tute was deeply involved with cre­at­ing the var­i­ous jus­ti­fi­ca­tions and schem­ing that led up to Jan­u­ary 6, with the Clare­mont Insti­tute’s John East­man play­ing a key role in for­mu­lat­ing the Trump White House­’s strat­e­gy for over­turn­ing the 2020 elec­tion results. We should­n’t be sur­prised the Clare­mont Insti­tute was keen­ly inter­est­ed in pick­ing up a new cause to cru­sade in ear­ly 2021.

    Nor should we be at all sur­prised to find Clare­mont Insti­tute as the enti­ty lead­ing this anti-DEI effort. Recall how Ron DeSan­tis’s ‘anti-woke’ takeover of New Col­lege includ­ed bring­ing Clare­mont fig­ures Matthew Spald­ing and Charles Kesler onto the New Col­lege board, along with Rufo, in order to exe­cute the anti-woke insti­tu­tion­al purge. The Clare­mont Insti­tute has been very pub­lic in recent years about its desire to exe­cute this insti­tu­tion­al purge, and at a lot more insti­tu­tions than just New Col­lege.

    But as we’re going to see in the fol­low­ing report, the extrem­ists fund­ing and exe­cut­ing this move­ment still have plen­ty ambi­tions that have large­ly remained hid­den. Sort of. It’s not actu­al­ly any more extreme than the kind of extrem­ism we often see with con­ser­v­a­tive mega-donors and activists. For exam­ple, there’s Texas mega-donor Tim Dunn, who has almost cap­tured con­trol of the Texas GOP. Dunn is the kind of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist does­n’t believe Jews should hold office, and he was­n’t afraid to tell that to Jew­ish then-Speak­er of the Texas House, Robert Strauss. Dunn is appar­ent­ly also the kind of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist who does­n’t mind cozy up to Nazis like Nick Fuentes. Or CNP mem­ber and inter­net per­son­al­i­ty Tim Wild­mon who rou­tine­ly host guests call­ing for the out­law­ing of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. There is plen­ty of evi­dence of gen­uine­ly held extrem­ist views on the part of the mega-donor and activist class. But it’s not noticed very often. That’s part of the val­ue of the arti­cle, based on thou­sands on doc­u­ments of con­ver­sa­tions, grant pro­pos­als, and oth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tions among a net­work of right-wing activists and mega-donors who planned and financed the ‘anti-DEI’ pub­lic rela­tions cru­sade we are see­ing play­ing out today. Com­mu­ni­ca­tions the authors obvi­ous­ly nev­er expect­ed to be released to the pub­lic in many cas­es, like when they shared views like a desire to ban homo­sex­u­al­i­ty or return to times of hier­ar­chy of overt patri­archy.

    So how did the NY Times get all these com­mu­ni­ca­tions? It’s not entire­ly clear oth­er than pub­lic-record requests some­how got them turned over. Which may be due to the fact that one of the mem­bers of this net­work — Dr. Scott Yenor — is a pro­fes­sor at Boise State Uni­ver­si­ty in Ida­ho, mak­ing his emails and oth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tions poten­tial­ly sub­ject to pub­lic-record laws. Yenor made nation­al news in 2021 over his argu­ments that fem­i­nism had made women “more med­icat­ed, med­dle­some and quar­rel­some than women need to be.”

    Regard­less of where exact­ly the doc­u­ments came from, the NY Times got them, and pub­lished a sto­ry depict­ing an ear­ly 2021 world of cranky elder­ly bil­lion­aires con­cerned about what ‘wokeism’ will do to their grand­chil­dren and reel­ing from the real­i­ty of the 2020 elec­tion loss and the shock of the George Floyd protests. A pow­er­ful net­work of wealthy extrem­ists in des­per­ate need of a mes­sage that would win over vot­ers and ener­gize the con­ser­v­a­tive base. Clare­mon­t’s chair­man, Thomas D. Klin­gen­stein — who is also a New York investor and major Repub­li­can donor — decried how, “rhetor­i­cal­ly, our side is get­ting absolute­ly murdered...We have not even come up with an agreed-on name for the ene­my.”

    As Yenor warned Klin­gen­stein, terms like “diver­si­ty” and “inclu­sion” tend to be pret­ty well receive by the pub­lic. Still, they found a name for “the ene­my”, thanks to Chris Rufo’s “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” rhetoric.

    But despite hav­ing ‘named the ene­my’ and launch­ing an anti-CRT cru­sade, Yenor still warned this net­work that purg­ing ‘CRT’ out of the schools isn’t enough. The DEI offices of uni­ver­si­ties need to be defund­ed entire­ly and DEI poli­cies need to be reversed. Only then can the ‘social jus­tice’ genie be put back in the bot­tle. A new, broad­er strat­e­gy emerged: part­ner­ing with state think-tanks and its many for­mer fel­lows scat­tered across the con­ser­v­a­tive estab­lish­ment and on Capi­tol Hill, the Clare­mont Insti­tute was going to lead a lob­by­ing effort designed to acti­vate state leg­is­la­tures and lead to the pas­sage of anti-DEI leg­is­la­tion. The legal purg­ing of DEI from pub­lic insti­tu­tions under the force of state law. That was the plan put in place and it’s already yield­ing results, with states like Texas and Flori­da, hav­ing already passed laws ban­ning ‘DEI’ from all pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties.

    But as we’re also going to see revealed in the com­mu­ni­ca­tions, the ulti­mate goal of this net­work goes beyond ban­ning all traces of DEI from edu­ca­tion. The goal is basi­cal­ly the purg­ing of ‘lib­er­al’ pro­fes­sors out of pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties and the man­dat­ing a spe­cif­ic form of edu­ca­tion with spe­cif­ic ‘patri­ot­ic’ lessons. An exam­ple of these plans were revealed in com­mu­ni­ca­tions between Yenor and Hills­dale Col­lege pro­fes­sor David Azer­rad and that were strate­giz­ing a pub­lic rela­tions strat­e­gy for defend­ing con­ser­v­a­tive pro­fes­sor Amy Way over the out­cry over her com­ments about how the US would be “bet­ter off with few­er Asians and less Asian immi­gra­tion,” and that Black peo­ple felt “resent­ment and shame and envy” over the “West­ern peo­ples’ out­sized achieve­ments and con­tri­bu­tions.” Yenor encour­aged Azer­rad to appeal to lib­er­al audi­ences against the fir­ing of Wax by cau­tion­ing that such a prece­dent could allow red state leg­is­la­tures to demand the fir­ing of pro­fes­sors they deem to be too lib­er­al. Azer­rad replied, “But don’t we want this to hap­pen?” “Yes,” Yenor admit­ted. “But your audi­ence doesn’t want it to hap­pen.”

    Sim­i­lar­ly, in August 2021 com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Klin­gen­stein wrote, “In sup­port of rid­ding schools of C.R.T., the Right argues that we want non­po­lit­i­cal education...No we don’t. We want our pol­i­tics. All edu­ca­tion is polit­i­cal.” Dr. Yenor replied that an “alter­na­tive vision of edu­ca­tion must replace the cur­rent vision of edu­ca­tion. In the short-term, state leg­is­la­tures could get out of the busi­ness of ban­ning and get into the busi­ness of demand­ing — demand­ing the cer­tain con­clu­sions about Amer­i­can his­to­ry be deliv­ered.

    Despite all these anti-DEI efforts and the suc­cess­es at the state lev­el, the ‘anti-DEI’ nar­ra­tive did­n’t seem to real­ly take hold with the pub­lic. At least that’s what we might infer from the GOP’s rel­a­tive­ly poor elec­toral results in 2022 and 2023 com­pared to his­toric expec­ta­tion. Sim­i­lar­ly, the stun­ning burnout of Ron DeSan­tis’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign — a cam­paign seem­ing­ly defined by DeSan­tis’s com­mit­ment to this anti-DEI/CRT nar­ra­tive — sug­gests this nar­ra­tive may not have the broad­er appeal they were hop­ing to find. And then Octo­ber 7 hap­pened, along with the ham­fist­ed con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­monies of col­lege pres­i­dents like Clau­dine Gay that, along with the pla­gia­rism charges, gave enough fuel to reignite this issue. And here we are, with bil­lion­aire Bill Ack­man now seem­ing­ly part of this anti-DEI net­work intent on purg­ing any sem­blance of DEI pro­grams from high­er edu­ca­tion.

    Also keep in mind that they aren’t just inter­est­ed in chang­ing the con­tent of high­er edu­ca­tion’s cur­ricu­lum. Chang­ing the make­up of the stu­dent bod­ies is also part of the agen­da. As Yenor wrote an in exchange, “My big wor­ry in these things is that we do not make ‘the good of minori­ties’ the stan­dard by which we judge pub­lic pol­i­cy or the effects of pub­lic policy...Whites will be over­rep­re­sent­ed in some spheres. Blacks in oth­ers. Asians in oth­ers. We can­not see this as some moral fail­ing on our part.”

    So as we watch the cur­rent Octo­ber 7‑fueled anti-DEI cru­sade con­tin­ue to march along as it picks its next tar­get, it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that the fig­ures behind this effort have been work­ing on sell­ing this anti-DEI cru­sade to the pub­lic for a num­ber of years now. And it’s more impor­tant to real­ize that the groups and fun­ders behind this are, them­selves, exact­ly the kinds of extrem­ists intent on revert­ing US high­er edu­ca­tion back to a peri­od of overt racial hier­ar­chies and patri­archy. It’s in their own words. But they don’t just have these ambi­tions. They have a plan that’s already see­ing suc­cess in states like Flori­da. Or Texas, where a sin­gle Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist bil­lion­aire — Tim Dunn — has near­ly cap­tured com­plete con­trol of the state’s Repub­li­can Par­ty. And it’s a plan that does­n’t require broad pub­lic approval or Repub­li­can con­trol at the fed­er­al lev­el. Cap­tured ger­ry­man­dered state leg­is­la­tures will do the dirty work. It’s a plan we know can work because it’s already work­ing:

    The New York Times

    ‘Amer­i­ca Is Under Attack’: Inside the Anti‑D.E.I. Cru­sade

    By Nicholas Con­fes­sore
    Jan. 20, 2024

    In late 2022, a group of con­ser­v­a­tive activists and aca­d­e­mics set out to abol­ish the diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion pro­grams at Texas’ pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties.

    They linked up with a for­mer aide to the state’s pow­er­ful lieu­tenant gov­er­nor, Dan Patrick, who made ban­ning D.E.I. ini­tia­tives one of his top pri­or­i­ties. Set­ting their sights on well-known schools like Texas A&M, they researched which offices and employ­ees should be expunged. A well-con­nect­ed alum­nus con­veyed their find­ings to the A&M chan­cel­lor; the for­mer Patrick aide cit­ed them before a State Sen­ate com­mit­tee. The cam­paign quick­ly yield­ed results: In May, Texas approved leg­is­la­tion ban­ish­ing all such pro­grams from pub­lic insti­tu­tions of high­er learn­ing.

    Long before Clau­dine Gay resigned Harvard’s pres­i­den­cy this month under intense crit­i­cism of her aca­d­e­m­ic record, her con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny about cam­pus anti­semitism and her efforts to pro­mote racial jus­tice, con­ser­v­a­tive aca­d­e­mics and politi­cians had begun mak­ing the case that the decades-long dri­ve to increase racial diver­si­ty in America’s uni­ver­si­ties had cor­rupt­ed high­er edu­ca­tion. Gath­er­ing strength from a back­lash against Black Lives Mat­ter, and fueled by crit­i­cism that doc­trines such as crit­i­cal race the­o­ry had made col­leges engines of pro­gres­sive indoc­tri­na­tion, the erad­i­ca­tion of D.E.I. pro­grams has become both a cause and a mes­sage suf­fus­ing the Amer­i­can right. In 2023, more than 20 states con­sid­ered or approved new laws tak­ing aim at D.E.I., even as polling has shown that diver­si­ty ini­tia­tives remain pop­u­lar.

    Thou­sands of doc­u­ments obtained by The New York Times cast light on the play­book and the think­ing under­pin­ning one nexus of the anti‑D.E.I. move­ment — the activists and intel­lec­tu­als who helped shape Texas’ new law, along with mea­sures in at least three oth­er states. The mate­r­i­al, which includes casu­al cor­re­spon­dence with like-mind­ed allies around the coun­try, also reveals unvar­nished views on race, sex­u­al­i­ty and gen­der roles. And despite the movement’s marked suc­cess in some Repub­li­can-dom­i­nat­ed states, the doc­u­ments chart the activists’ strug­gle to gain trac­tion with broad­er swaths of vot­ers and offi­cials.

    2021 draft pro­pos­al from the Clare­mont Insti­tute

    Attempts to rea­son with uni­ver­si­ties have failed. The mon­ey pay­ing for their bad behav­ior must be tak­en away. Only then will the behav­ior stop.

    Cen­tered at the Clare­mont Insti­tute, a Cal­i­for­nia-based think tank with close ties to the Trump move­ment and to Gov. Ron DeSan­tis of Flori­da, the group coa­lesced rough­ly three years ago around a sweep­ing ambi­tion: to strike a killing blow against “the left­ist social jus­tice rev­o­lu­tion” by elim­i­nat­ing “social jus­tice edu­ca­tion” from Amer­i­can schools.

    The doc­u­ments — grant pro­pos­als, bud­gets, draft reports and cor­re­spon­dence, obtained through pub­lic-records requests — show how the activists formed a loose net­work of think tanks, polit­i­cal groups and Repub­li­can oper­a­tives in at least a dozen states. They sought fund­ing from a range of right-lean­ing phil­an­thropies and fam­i­ly foun­da­tions, and from one of the largest indi­vid­ual donors to Repub­li­can cam­paigns in the coun­try. They exchanged mod­el leg­is­la­tion, pub­lished a slew of pub­lic reports and coor­di­nat­ed with oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive advo­ca­cy groups in states like Alaba­ma, Maine, Ten­nessee and Texas.

    In pub­lic, some indi­vid­u­als and groups involved in the effort joined calls to pro­tect diver­si­ty of thought and intel­lec­tu­al free­dom, embrac­ing the argu­ment that D.E.I. efforts had made uni­ver­si­ties intol­er­ant and nar­row. They claimed to stand for mer­i­to­crat­ic ideals and against ide­olo­gies that divid­ed Amer­i­cans. They argued that D.E.I. pro­grams made Black and His­pan­ic stu­dents feel less wel­come instead of more.

    2021 email from Scott Yenor

    The core of what we oppose is ‘anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion.’ That is too much of a sacred cow.

    Yet even as they or their allies pub­licly advo­cat­ed more aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom, some of those involved pri­vate­ly expressed their hope of purg­ing lib­er­al ideas, pro­fes­sors and pro­gram­ming wher­ev­er they could. They debat­ed how care­ful­ly or quick­ly to reveal some of their true views — the belief that “a healthy soci­ety requires patri­archy,” for exam­ple, and their broad­er oppo­si­tion to anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion laws — in essays and arti­cles writ­ten for pub­lic con­sump­tion.

    In can­did pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions, some wrote favor­ably of laws crim­i­nal­iz­ing homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, mocked the appear­ance of a female col­lege stu­dent as over­ly mas­cu­line and crit­i­cized Peter Thiel, the promi­nent gay con­ser­v­a­tive donor, over his sex life. In email exchanges with the Clare­mont orga­niz­ers, the writer Heather Mac Don­ald derid­ed work­ing moth­ers who employed peo­ple from “the low IQ 3rd world” to care for their chil­dren and lament­ed that some Repub­li­cans still cel­e­brat­ed the idea of racial­ly diverse polit­i­cal appoint­ments.

    Lag­ging achieve­ment for African Amer­i­cans and oth­er racial minori­ties, some argued pri­vate­ly, should not be a mat­ter of pub­lic con­cern. “My big wor­ry in these things is that we do not make ‘the good of minori­ties’ the stan­dard by which we judge pub­lic pol­i­cy or the effects of pub­lic pol­i­cy,” wrote Scott Yenor, a con­ser­v­a­tive Ida­ho pro­fes­sor who would come to lead the anti‑D.E.I. project for Clare­mont. “Whites will be over­rep­re­sent­ed in some spheres. Blacks in oth­ers. Asians in oth­ers. We can­not see this as some moral fail­ing on our part.”

    ...

    The insti­tute added: “Repeat­ed­ly, and in pub­lic, we make these argu­ments to pre­serve jus­tice, com­pe­tence and the progress of sci­ence.”

    Nam­ing ‘the Ene­my’

    In recent decades, amid con­cerns about the under­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of racial minori­ties on cam­pus, Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties have presided over a vast expan­sion of diver­si­ty pro­grams. These have come to play a pow­er­ful — and increas­ing­ly con­tro­ver­sial — role in aca­d­e­m­ic and stu­dent life. Crit­ics have come to view them as tools for advanc­ing left-wing ideas about gen­der and race, or for sti­fling the free dis­cus­sion of ideas. In response, offi­cials in some states have banned D.E.I. offices alto­geth­er. Oth­ers have lim­it­ed class­room dis­cus­sion of con­cepts like iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics or sys­temic racism. A grow­ing num­ber of states and schools have also begun elim­i­nat­ing require­ments that job appli­cants fur­nish “diver­si­ty state­ments” — writ­ten com­mit­ments to par­tic­u­lar ideas about diver­si­ty and how to achieve it that, at some insti­tu­tions, have func­tion­al­ly served as lit­mus tests in hir­ing.

    But in ear­ly 2021, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump’s re-elec­tion defeat, the Clare­mont orga­niz­ers were on the defen­sive. The doc­u­ments show them debat­ing how to frame their attacks: They need­ed not only to per­suade the polit­i­cal mid­dle but to ener­gize con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians and thinkers, many of whom they regard­ed as too timid, or even com­plic­it with a lib­er­al regime infect­ing Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment and busi­ness.

    Thomas D. Klin­gen­stein, a New York investor who is both Claremont’s chair­man and a top Repub­li­can donor, offered a glum per­spec­tive in March that year.

    “Rhetor­i­cal­ly, our side is get­ting absolute­ly mur­dered,” Mr. Klin­gen­stein wrote to Dr. Yenor and anoth­er Clare­mont offi­cial. “We have not even come up with an agreed-on name for the ene­my.”

    One prob­lem, Dr. Yenor report­ed to his col­leagues, was that many law­mak­ers were reluc­tant to take on any­thing called “diver­si­ty and inclu­sion.” Terms like “diver­si­ty,” he argued, need­ed to be sad­dled with more neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions.

    “I obvi­ous­ly think social jus­tice is what we should call it,” he wrote. “We should use the term that is most like­ly to stig­ma­tize the move­ment that is accu­rate and aris­es from com­mon life.” While nobody want­ed to seem in favor of dis­crim­i­na­tion, he argued, “social jus­tice” could be “stig­ma­tized so that when peo­ple hear it they can act on their sus­pi­cions.”

    At the time, a like-mind­ed activist, Christo­pher Rufo of the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute, was pop­u­lar­iz­ing an alter­na­tive catchall with his attacks on “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” — a once-obscure aca­d­e­m­ic frame­work that exam­ines how racism can be struc­tural­ly embed­ded in seem­ing­ly neu­tral laws or insti­tu­tions.

    In short order, Repub­li­can offi­cials and activists around the coun­try set out to ban crit­i­cal race the­o­ry — or any­thing that could be suc­cess­ful­ly labeled “C.R.T.” — from schools. But Dr. Yenor believed such bans were not far-reach­ing enough.

    To com­bat left­ism in Amer­i­ca, con­ser­v­a­tives would need to wage a much broad­er war. The Clare­mont group kept tin­ker­ing.

    2021 email from Scott Yenor

    Bans on CRT and its asso­ci­at­ed ide­olo­gies are a lot of smoke or boob-bait for the bub­bas, but they are obvi­ous­ly (I would say) not some­thing that is going to change the edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence.

    By 2022, as Clare­mont and allies like the Maine Pol­i­cy Insti­tute and a Ten­nessee group called Veloc­i­ty Con­ver­gence rolled out ear­ly research, the approach had changed. Their pub­lic reports began to bor­row from Mr. Rufo’s rhetoric, attack­ing “crit­i­cal social jus­tice” or “crit­i­cal social jus­tice edu­ca­tion.”

    When Clare­mont and the Texas Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Foun­da­tion turned to the state’s pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties in ear­ly 2023, they cir­cled back to “diver­si­ty,” but with a twist.

    “Aca­d­e­mics and admin­is­tra­tors are no longer mere­ly push­ing pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics but are trans­form­ing uni­ver­si­ties into insti­tu­tions ded­i­cat­ed to polit­i­cal activism and indoc­tri­nat­ing stu­dents with a hate­ful ide­ol­o­gy,” warned a report on Texas A&M. “That ide­ol­o­gy is Diver­si­ty, Equi­ty, and Inclu­sion (DEI).”

    A Dona­tion Oppor­tu­ni­ty

    “Woke” pol­i­tics was not just a threat to Amer­i­can life. It was also a fund-rais­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty. By spring 2021, as par­ents grew impa­tient with Covid school clo­sures, or skep­ti­cal of “anti-racist” cur­ricu­lums in the wake of the Floyd protests, Clare­mont offi­cials had begun cir­cu­lat­ing urgent grant requests to right-lean­ing foun­da­tions.

    “Amer­i­ca is under attack by a left­ist rev­o­lu­tion dis­guised as a plea for jus­tice” rem­i­nis­cent of “Mao Zedong’s Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion,” Claremont’s pres­i­dent, Ryan P. Williams, wrote in a draft pro­pos­al to the Jack Miller Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion.

    ...

    Lib­er­als dom­i­nat­ed the world of high­er edu­ca­tion, the Clare­mont pro­pos­als said. What was need­ed was a frontal attack on pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty sys­tems in states where con­ser­v­a­tives dom­i­nat­ed the leg­is­la­tures.

    2021 draft pro­pos­al for the Jack Miller Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion

    Amer­i­ca is under attack by a left­ist rev­o­lu­tion dis­guised as a plea for jus­tice [...] This is, in fact, the goal: to pro­duce swarms of anti-Amer­i­can zealots who will work to reshape the cul­ture, cus­toms, and polit­i­cal prin­ci­ples of the coun­try, using strate­gies rem­i­nis­cent of Mao Zedong’s Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion.

    Clare­mont offi­cials would part­ner with state think tanks, and with the hun­dreds of for­mer fel­lows scat­tered through con­ser­v­a­tive insti­tu­tions and on Capi­tol Hill. They would cat­a­log the D.E.I. pro­grams and per­son­nel hon­ey­combed through pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties. Then they would lob­by sym­pa­thet­ic pub­lic offi­cials to gut them.

    In the pro­pos­als, Clare­mont set a first round of tar­gets, in states includ­ing Flori­da, Louisiana, North Car­oli­na, Okla­homa, Ten­nessee and Texas.

    “Our project will give leg­is­la­tors the knowl­edge and tools they need to stop fund­ing the sui­cide of their own coun­try and civ­i­liza­tion,” Clare­mont pledged in an August 2021 draft pro­pos­al to the Taube Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion.

    2021 draft pro­pos­al to the Taube Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion

    Our project will give leg­is­la­tors the knowl­edge and tools they need to stop fund­ing the sui­cide of their own coun­try and civ­i­liza­tion.

    The Wis­con­sin-based Sear­le Free­dom Trust had sep­a­rate­ly agreed to fund a Clare­mont effort to inven­to­ry what it con­sid­ered “C.R.T. cours­es” that had “metas­ta­sized through­out High­er Ed,” accord­ing to the draft pro­pos­al. Anoth­er pro­pos­al, draft­ed for the Arthur N. Rupe Foun­da­tion in May 2022, aimed to dis­sect how red states could dis­en­tan­gle them­selves from fed­er­al fund­ing and man­dates that, in Claremont’s view, advanced social jus­tice ide­ol­o­gy. Relat­ed pro­pos­als went to at least eight foun­da­tions in total. (Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Taube and Rupe foun­da­tions did not reply to emails and phone mes­sages seek­ing com­ment.)

    2021 email from Chris Ross

    I will fin­ish pol­ish­ing up the bud­get along with the rest of the pro­pos­al, almost all of which is pre­vi­ous­ly-blessed lan­guage from the lat­est Scaife, Dock­weil­er, Dar­ling, and Ver­heij pro­pos­als, and send that to you tomor­row.

    Ulti­mate­ly, accord­ing to one doc­u­ment, the Clare­mont orga­niz­ers hoped state law­mak­ers across the coun­try would pass sweep­ing pro­hi­bi­tions on teach­ing “social jus­tice pro­gram­ming.”

    2021 draft pro­pos­al to the Taube Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion

    In the pro­jec­t’s first year, our goal is to help at least one state to pass leg­is­la­tion to defund and ban spend­ing mon­ey on social jus­tice pro­gram­ing, sim­i­lar to, or bet­ter than, what has been accom­plished in Ida­ho. By the end of the third year, our goal is to get anoth­er six states to do the same.

    As the project pro­gressed, Clare­mont made plans to prospect for donors at a Dal­las coun­try club and at the Palm Beach home of Eliz­a­beth Ailes, the wid­ow of the Fox News co-founder Roger Ailes. Grow­ing anger among old­er con­ser­v­a­tives helped open the spig­ot. “The Sear­le kids don’t like wok­ery,” wrote Chris Ross, a Clare­mont fund-rais­ing offi­cial, in a Decem­ber 2021 email, appar­ent­ly refer­ring to adult chil­dren of the trust’s late bene­fac­tor, Daniel C. Sear­le. (A rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Sear­le trust dis­put­ed whether Clare­mont offi­cials had knowl­edge of the Sear­les’ polit­i­cal views.)

    2021 email from Chris Ross

    Ryan, I’d like your feed­back on whether the por­tion in yel­low high­light is nec­es­sary for con­text, or whether we can safe­ly assume that since we know the Sear­le kids don’t like wok­ery, it could safe­ly be sum­ma­rized in the cov­er let­ter.

    Among oth­er efforts, the Sear­le trust agreed to back a project exam­in­ing crit­i­cal race the­o­ry at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy. The school had been roiled that fall by the can­cel­la­tion of a sci­ence lec­ture by Dori­an Abbot, a geo­physi­cist who, like a plu­ral­i­ty of Amer­i­cans, opposed aspects of affir­ma­tive action in high­er edu­ca­tion.

    The fol­low­ing year, a Utah sci­en­tist and renew­able-ener­gy con­sul­tant, along with his wife, kicked in $25,000 for the project. It had “real­ly caught their imag­i­na­tion,” Mr. Ross wrote, because of their “ongo­ing con­cerns about their grand­chil­dren and wokeism.” Secre­cy was essen­tial. “This work will be done more eas­i­ly if the woke­sters at MIT don’t see it com­ing,” he wrote.

    2022 email from Chris Ross

    This project real­ly caught their imag­i­na­tion, not only because of their back­grounds, but because of their ongo­ing con­cerns about their grand­chil­dren and wokeism. With the under­stand­ing that this work will be done more eas­i­ly if the woke­sters at MIT don’t see it com­ing, they have vol­un­teered to stay qui­et about the project until it is pub­li­cized.

    Under the Ban­ner of Free­dom

    The Clare­mont effort seemed to diverge from oth­ers on the right who had long urged aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions to renew their com­mit­ment to ide­o­log­i­cal diver­si­ty. In one exchange, some of those involved dis­cussed how to mar­shal polit­i­cal pow­er to replace left-wing ortho­dox­ies with more “patri­ot­ic,” tra­di­tion­al­ist cur­ricu­lums.

    “In sup­port of rid­ding schools of C.R.T., the Right argues that we want non­po­lit­i­cal edu­ca­tion,” Mr. Klin­gen­stein wrote in August 2021. “No we don’t. We want our pol­i­tics. All edu­ca­tion is polit­i­cal.”

    Dr. Yenor appeared to agree, respond­ing with some ideas for reshap­ing K‑12 edu­ca­tion. “An alter­na­tive vision of edu­ca­tion must replace the cur­rent vision of edu­ca­tion,” he wrote back.

    2021 email from Scott Yenor

    An alter­na­tive vision of edu­ca­tion must replace the cur­rent vision of edu­ca­tion. In the short-term, state leg­is­la­tures could get out of the busi­ness of ban­ning and get into the busi­ness of demand­ing — demand­ing the cer­tain con­clu­sions about Amer­i­can his­to­ry be deliv­ered.

    State leg­is­la­tures, he pro­posed, could strip “edu­ca­tion­al pro­fes­sion­als” of the pow­er to decide what to teach and even short­en the school day so that young peo­ple would spend less time in class.. They might pass laws let­ting pri­vate cit­i­zens sue school board mem­bers with finan­cial ties to the “edu­ca­tion indus­try.”

    At the same time, indi­vid­u­als and groups involved in the effort seemed to grasp that aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom could be a polit­i­cal­ly use­ful frame for their attacks.

    In a 2023 exchange, Dr. Yenor and two asso­ciates dis­cussed how to defend Amy Wax, a con­ser­v­a­tive law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia. Dr. Wax had drawn the ire of admin­is­tra­tors and stu­dents there for once opin­ing, among oth­er things, that the Unit­ed States would be “bet­ter off with few­er Asians and less Asian immi­gra­tion,” and that Black peo­ple felt “resent­ment and shame and envy” over the “West­ern peo­ples’ out­sized achieve­ments and con­tri­bu­tions.”

    Fil­ing a griev­ance claim against the uni­ver­si­ty, Dr. Wax’s lawyer appar­ent­ly asked David Azer­rad, a pro­fes­sor at Hills­dale Col­lege, for a state­ment of sup­port. Dr. Azer­rad, in turn, sought his Clare­mont friends’ advice.

    Dr. Yenor had expe­ri­ence with such sit­u­a­tions. Two years ear­li­er, he had faced Title IX com­plaints at Boise State Uni­ver­si­ty fol­low­ing a speech in which he argued that fem­i­nism had made women “more med­icat­ed, med­dle­some and quar­rel­some than women need to be.” Amid the uproar, Boise State offi­cials defend­ed the right of fac­ul­ty to “intro­duce uncom­fort­able and even offen­sive ideas.”

    2023 email from Scott Yenor

    I think the main point is that the effect of fir­ing Amy Wax will have rip­ple effects on aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom every­where.

    You are appeal­ing to left­ies, so you should tar­get them, both on free speech grounds and on grounds that impli­cate their fears.

    Now, Dr. Yenor advised his friend Dr. Azer­rad to aim his state­ment at a lib­er­al audi­ence — to defend Dr. Wax on the grounds that if she were fired, it would only embold­en red-state law­mak­ers to fire con­tro­ver­sial left-wing pro­fes­sors.

    “But don’t we want this to hap­pen?” Dr. Azer­rad asked.

    “Yes,” replied Dr. Yenor. “But your audi­ence doesn’t want it to hap­pen.”

    In an email, Dr. Azer­rad described the exchanges as “flip­pant ban­ter” that “do not dis­cuss sub­stan­tive pol­i­cy mat­ters.” A spokesman for Clare­mont said that both Dr. Yenor and Mr. Klin­gen­stein believed that “intel­lec­tu­al diver­si­ty and free speech are not ends in them­selves but means to oth­er impor­tant ends, includ­ing a vision of edu­ca­tion.”

    ‘More Whole­some Poli­cies’

    Even as they sought to stig­ma­tize and defeat left-wing ideas, aca­d­e­mics and activists in the Clare­mont orbit seemed cog­nizant that some of their own views were out­side the main­stream.

    In a 2021 exchange among aca­d­e­mics at Clare­mont, Hills­dale and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin-Eau Claire, Dr. Yenor dis­cussed edits to an essay he was plan­ning to pub­lish in First Things, a con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal. His edi­tor, he said, want­ed Dr. Yenor to be less “pru­dent” in his writ­ing about homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, encour­ag­ing him to voice ideas like — as Dr. Yenor char­ac­ter­ized it — “Our sex­u­al cul­ture will not heal until ‘fag­got’ replaces ‘big­ot’ as the slur of choice,” or “Our sex­u­al cul­ture will not be healed until we once again agree that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty belongs in the clos­et and that a healthy soci­ety requires patri­archy.” (“Since they are my views, I have tried to do that,” Dr. Yenor wrote. In the end, he set­tled for tamer lan­guage.)

    In casu­al dis­cus­sions with like-mind­ed aca­d­e­mics and activists, some those involved in the anti‑D.E.I. effort mocked what they con­sid­ered lib­er­als’ obses­sion with hier­ar­chies of oppres­sion. Some evinced a frank dis­like of gay peo­ple.

    In an exchange last May, Dr. Yenor, two for­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials with Clare­mont ties and Ms. Mac Don­ald dis­cussed a court case in India about same-sex mar­riage. Ms. Mac Don­ald — a fel­low at the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute who last spring pub­lished a book titled “When Race Trumps Mer­it: How the Pur­suit of Equi­ty Sac­ri­fices Excel­lence, Destroys Beau­ty and Threat­ens Lives” — was not for­mal­ly con­nect­ed to Claremont’s anti‑D.E.I. efforts but cor­re­spond­ed fre­quent­ly with those who were.

    She spec­u­lat­ed in the May exchange that it would be “fun to see” what lib­er­als would say about Indi­ans if the court con­ferred gay mar­riage rights but Indi­ans refused to “go along.” “How will west­ern elites explain the benight­ed­ness of yet anoth­er group of POCs?” In response, Dr. Yenor not­ed that “not tons of asian coun­tries have SSM” but rather “more whole­some poli­cies like prison” for gays.

    2023 email from David Azer­rad

    Heather, that’s an easy one. Indi­ans are Asians who are white-adja­cent so at the bot­tom of the totem poll. Gays are sec­ond after blacks.

    Last spring, Ms. Mac Don­ald emailed some of the same peo­ple about news reports that a boyfriend of Mr. Thiel — nom­i­nal­ly their ally in the ris­ing “nation­al con­ser­vatism” move­ment — had com­mit­ted sui­cide after a con­fronta­tion with Mr. Thiel’s hus­band at a par­ty. Call­ing the episode “a scan­dal,” she opined that gay men “are much more prone” to extra­mar­i­tal affairs “on the empir­i­cal basis of testos­terone unchecked by female mod­esty.” She added mock­ing­ly that a friend had once tried to con­vince her “how won­der­ful Thiel’s ‘hus­band’ was.”

    2023 email from Heather Mac Don­ald

    Some female over the last year or so, eager to show her open­mind­ed­ness, was crow­ing to me about how won­der­ful Thiel’s “hus­band” was, mak­ing them out to be the most prop­er cou­ple.

    I won­der if he will feel any shame in pub­lic. Prob­a­bly not.

    ...

    Dr. Yenor and his allies bris­tled at the con­ven­tions of aca­d­e­m­ic life as over­ly solic­i­tous toward female and non­white stu­dents. He some­times shared rou­tine emails from admin­is­tra­tors at his home insti­tu­tion, Boise State, derid­ing them as exam­ples of being “ruled by women.” On one occa­sion, he for­ward­ed a Boise State email fea­tur­ing a pho­to of a female com­put­er sci­ence stu­dent with close-cropped hair and a plaid shirt. “Gynoc­ra­cy update!” Dr. Yenor wrote.

    Riff­ing on the woman’s mas­cu­line appear­ance, his friend Dr. Azer­rad chimed in with a cor­rec­tion: “Androg­y­no­coc­ra­cy update.”

    In anoth­er email to Dr. Yenor, Ms. Mac Don­ald reflect­ed on a fur­ther “curse of fem­i­nism”: the pro­lif­er­a­tion of “nan­nies of col­or” in her Man­hat­tan neigh­bor­hood and the “bizarreness” of women entrust­ing their chil­dren to care­givers from “the low IQ 3rd world” while devot­ing them­selves to mak­ing part­ner at a law firm.

    2023 email from Heather Mac Don­ald

    As I was tak­ing my evening pow­er walk in the hood here (upper east side) and see­ing all the nan­nies of col­or walk­ing school chil­dren back to their apart­ments, it struck me again the bizarreness of females decid­ing that their com­par­a­tive advan­tage is in being an asso­ciate in a law firm, say, and thus that they should out­source the once in a life­time undu­plic­a­ble unre­peat­able expe­ri­ence of rais­ing a unique child to some one else, espe­cial­ly some­one from the low IQ 3rd world, while they do the drone work of mak­ing part­ner. The child is evolv­ing so quick­ly, absorb­ing so many influ­ences, and yet they would rather absent them­selves from its life to show that they are as good as males. such a dis­tri­b­u­tion of labor is alleged­ly pare­to opti­mal. Anoth­er curse of fem­i­nism.

    Ms. Mac Don­ald, some Clare­mont friends and a con­ser­v­a­tive Cana­di­an pro­fes­sor also dis­cussed a rou­tine in which the come­di­an Bill Burr took fem­i­nists to task for the low atten­dance at WNBA games. (“None of you showed up! Where are all the fem­i­nists?”)

    When Ms. Mac Don­ald asked why the come­di­an hadn’t been “can­celed,” Mr. Williams, Claremont’s pres­i­dent, point­ed out that Mr. Burr was “mar­ried to a black woman, which helps.”

    Ms. Mac Don­ald replied, “We are all just SO grate­ful if there is a black who does not overt­ly hate us.” She went on to rail against a lib­er­tar­i­an pod­cast that praised for­mer Pres­i­dent George W. Bush for select­ing Black peo­ple for his cab­i­net, “as if there is any tal­ent required to make quo­ta appoint­ments.”

    2023 email from Heather Mac Don­ald

    Hilar­i­ous. the usu­al pet black phe­nom­e­non. We are all just SO grate­ful if there is a black who does not overt­ly hate us.

    The Move­ment Grows

    Since 2021, the network’s anti‑D.E.I. cam­paign has spread to at least a dozen states, accord­ing to the doc­u­ments.

    In Ten­nessee, where Clare­mont part­nered with Veloc­i­ty Con­ver­gence, one of the anti‑D.E.I. reports they pro­duced report­ed­ly cir­cu­lat­ed among Repub­li­can state law­mak­ers as they worked to pass a bill lim­it­ing how uni­ver­si­ties could teach or train stu­dents about “divi­sive con­cepts.” A spokes­woman for the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ten­nessee said in a state­ment that the report’s con­clu­sions “seem to be based on sub­jec­tive cri­te­ria, made-up def­i­n­i­tions and the opin­ions of the authors,” who obtained infor­ma­tion from online search­es and pub­lic records but “made no attempt to under­stand the infor­ma­tion through ques­tions or inter­views.” Tennessee’s gov­er­nor signed the new law in April 2022.

    Susan Kaest­ner, Velocity’s founder and a vet­er­an Repub­li­can oper­a­tive in the state, said that “the obses­sive focus on diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion is effec­tive­ly reduc­ing view­point diver­si­ty on Ten­nessee cam­pus­es.”

    Last year, Clare­mont orga­niz­ers forged con­nec­tions with the Arkansas Senate’s Repub­li­can leader. In Alaba­ma, they part­nered with a group called Alabami­ans for Aca­d­e­m­ic Excel­lence and Integri­ty. Jeff Ses­sions, the for­mer U.S. attor­ney gen­er­al and a sup­port­er of the Alaba­ma group, was among those who pro­vid­ed funds for a Clare­mont report, “Going Woke in Dix­ie?,” that focused on Auburn Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alaba­ma.

    After it was released last sum­mer, accord­ing to anoth­er email, Samuel Ginn, a wealthy Auburn alum­nus and donor to both the school and Clare­mont, con­front­ed the university’s pres­i­dent, Christo­pher B. Roberts, and pressed him to address the report’s find­ings.

    “The pres­i­dent then told him, ‘Things will change,’” a Clare­mont fund-rais­er wrote to Dr. Yenor and oth­er offi­cials there.

    ...

    Ahead of the 2022 midterm elec­tions, the group also teamed with Repub­li­can polit­i­cal oper­a­tives and a think tank in Maine — where Mr. Klin­gen­stein owns a vaca­tion com­pound — to gath­er exam­ples of “D.E.I. in action” in the state’s pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties and K‑12 schools. Mr. Klin­gen­stein sug­gest­ed high­light­ing exam­ples of puta­tive­ly odd-sound­ing col­lege cours­es, as anoth­er con­ser­v­a­tive group had done in a report about left-wing influ­ence at Bow­doin Col­lege in Maine. (Among them were “Queer Gar­dens” and “Sex in Colo­nial Amer­i­ca.” Bow­doin respond­ed by defend­ing its course­work and call­ing the report dis­tort­ed and “mean­spir­it­ed.”)

    2022 email from Thomas Klin­gen­stein

    When NAS reviewed the Bow­doin cur­ric­u­la NAS high­light­ed cours­es such as “Queer Gar­dens, ” “Sex in Colo­nial Amer­i­ca”. These were the sorts of thing that got peo­ples’ atten­tion. How do we show a video of DEI in action?

    After the group pub­lished a report on “crit­i­cal social jus­tice” in Maine’s K‑12 class­rooms, Mr. Klin­gen­stein not­ed in one email that despite the need to reform pub­lic schools, the group faced dif­fi­cul­ty fig­ur­ing out what was “actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing on the ground.” He praised the report but acknowl­edged it was “nec­es­sar­i­ly rather anec­do­tal.” Even so, the work could be wield­ed as a blud­geon. By fall 2022, the effort had expand­ed to include an adver­tis­ing cam­paign against the state’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nor, Janet Mills. The cam­paign, fund­ed by Mr. Klin­gen­stein, was spear­head­ed by a nation­al advo­ca­cy group called the Amer­i­can Prin­ci­ples Project, which in turn oper­at­ed through a front group called Maine Fam­i­lies First.

    2022 email from Thomas Klin­gen­stein

    As you know, Scott Yenor did a report on K‑12 edu­ca­tion in Maine. It was very good but nec­es­sar­i­ly rather anec­do­tal. Could we do, would it make sense to do, an in-depth analy­sis of one school or one school dis­trict a la the Bow­doin report. We might ana­lyze one school/district in Port­land, which is all in on social jus­tice, and one in North­ern Maine which is more tra­di­tion­al. I won­der if we could get enough infor­ma­tion to do this.

    Cit­ing the Maine K‑12 report, among oth­er sources, ads from the group mis­lead­ing­ly claimed that Ms. Mills was “dis­trib­ut­ing pornog­ra­phy to our chil­dren,” refer­ring to “Gen­der Queer,” a graph­ic mem­oir for young adults that includes sex­u­al­ly explic­it scenes. (In fact, accord­ing to a report by Maine Pub­lic Radio, the book had appeared on one Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion list of gay-themed lit­er­a­ture, a link to which could be found on the web­site of the Maine Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion.) All told, the group would spend near­ly $3 mil­lion on ads attack­ing Ms. Mills.

    ‘Just the Begin­ning’

    Ms. Mills went on to win re-elec­tion. But the anti‑D.E.I. cam­paign has gained ground in more Repub­li­can-lean­ing states. Clare­mont has claimed cred­it for help­ing pass the most wide-rang­ing bans, in Flori­da as well as in Texas. Last Jan­u­ary, Gov. Sarah Huck­abee Sanders of Arkansas issued an exec­u­tive order ban­ning “indoc­tri­na­tion and crit­i­cal race the­o­ry in schools.” In North Car­oli­na in June, Repub­li­can law­mak­ers passed a law bar­ring pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties and oth­er agen­cies from requir­ing employ­ees to state their opin­ions on social issues, a move Demo­c­ra­t­ic law­mak­ers said was aimed at D.E.I. pro­grams more broad­ly. Oklahoma’s Repub­li­can gov­er­nor, Kevin Stitt, issued a sim­i­lar exec­u­tive order in Decem­ber.

    Last year, Clare­mont offi­cials also court­ed Mr. DeSan­tis, then a lead­ing con­tender for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion and the gov­er­nor most close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with anti‑D.E.I. poli­cies. The insti­tute dis­patched Dr. Yenor to Flori­da to run a new office in Tal­la­has­see, appoint­ing him as its “senior direc­tor of state coali­tions.” (On Sun­day, Mr. DeSan­tis sus­pend­ed his pres­i­den­tial bid.)

    In ear­ly April, as Mr. DeSan­tis pre­pared to announce his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, he vis­it­ed Mr. Klin­gen­stein. In an email, Mr. Klin­gen­stein told Clare­mont offi­cials that Mr. DeSan­tis had agreed to give Dr. Yenor access to his top polit­i­cal and gov­ern­ment aides. Mr. Klin­gen­stein also said he’d urged the gov­er­nor to do a bet­ter job explain­ing to vot­ers why “wokeism” was dan­ger­ous.

    Appear­ing on the cam­paign trail in sub­se­quent weeks, Mr. DeSan­tis began to offer a more expan­sive def­i­n­i­tion of the term — while men­tion­ing “woke” so many times that some reporters began keep­ing count.

    2023 email from Thomas Klin­gen­stein

    I was unsure. He was much more pas­sion­ate about win­ning the elec­tion than he was in sav­ing the coun­try. He knew pol­i­cy stuff in great detail. But there was no vision. I asked him how he defines “woke.” He said “you know it when you see it.” I sug­gest­ed gen­tly that he might improve on that. I quot­ed Glenn, “all action no talk.”

    I sug­gest­ed he should explain bet­ter than he has why wokeism is so dan­ger­ous.

    But as Mr. DeSantis’s pres­i­den­tial bid sput­tered and con­ser­v­a­tive cam­paigns against left-wing edu­ca­tion began to lose trac­tion in some parts of the coun­try, peo­ple involved in the anti‑D.E.I. effort began to retool once again. In June, the Amer­i­can Prin­ci­ples Project cir­cu­lat­ed a memo detail­ing the results of sev­er­al focus groups held to test dif­fer­ent cul­ture-war mes­sages.

    For all the con­ser­v­a­tive attacks on diver­si­ty pro­grams, the group found, “the idea of woke or DEI received gen­er­al­ly pos­i­tive scores.” Most vot­ers didn’t know the dif­fer­ence between equal­i­ty and the more vogu­ish term “equi­ty,” oft-mocked on the right, which sig­ni­fies poli­cies intend­ed to achieve equal out­comes for dif­fer­ent peo­ple, not sim­ply equal oppor­tu­ni­ties.

    2023 memo from the Amer­i­can Prin­ci­ples Project

    Sim­i­lar­ly DEI was thought to con­sist more of com­fort with diverse work­places than affir­ma­tive action or anti-white hir­ing prac­tices. When we got into the details of spe­cif­ic DEI ini­tia­tives (race-based quo­tas, affir­ma­tive action, diver­si­ty for diver­si­ty’s sake), they were most­ly opposed. We also test­ed the idea of equal­i­ty vs. equi­ty, and lit­tle to no dif­fer­ence was seen between the two words.

    The memo was sent by an asso­ciate to Mr. Klin­gen­stein and Mr. Williams, along with an undat­ed draft speech appar­ent­ly writ­ten for Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Banks, an Indi­ana Repub­li­can who found­ed the House Anti-Woke Cau­cus last Jan­u­ary. (Mr. Banks’s spokesman did not reply to an email seek­ing com­ment.)

    For Mr. Banks and oth­er Repub­li­cans, the con­tro­ver­sies over anti­semitism on cam­pus this fall pro­vid­ed a fresh oppor­tu­ni­ty to make their case. With some stu­dent pro­test­ers defend­ing or even val­oriz­ing the Oct. 7 ter­ror­ist attacks on Israel by Hamas, crit­i­cisms of cam­pus D.E.I. pro­grams began to gain more of an audi­ence among lib­er­als. In Decem­ber, when House Repub­li­cans sum­moned Dr. Gay to Capi­tol Hill, along with the pres­i­dents of M.I.T. and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, they argued that diver­si­ty pro­grams were the root cause of anti­se­mit­ic rhetoric on cam­pus.

    As the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion looms, Repub­li­cans are embark­ing on a renewed cam­paign against the high­er-edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions they have long crit­i­cized, now under the ban­ner of erad­i­cat­ing anti-Jew­ish hate. The House Com­mit­tee on Edu­ca­tion and the Work­force is inves­ti­gat­ing Har­vard and oth­er schools, and the scope of the inquiry is expect­ed to expand.

    “This is just the begin­ning,” pledged Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Elise Ste­fanik, the New York Repub­li­can whose ques­tion­ing of Dr. Gay helped set in motion the Har­vard president’s res­ig­na­tion. “Our robust con­gres­sion­al inves­ti­ga­tion will con­tin­ue to move for­ward to expose the rot in our most ‘pres­ti­gious’ high­er-edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions and deliv­er account­abil­i­ty to the Amer­i­can peo­ple.”

    ———-

    “‘Amer­i­ca Is Under Attack’: Inside the Anti‑D.E.I. Cru­sade” By Nicholas Con­fes­sore; The New York Times; 01/20/2024

    “Thou­sands of doc­u­ments obtained by The New York Times cast light on the play­book and the think­ing under­pin­ning one nexus of the anti‑D.E.I. move­ment — the activists and intel­lec­tu­als who helped shape Texas’ new law, along with mea­sures in at least three oth­er states. The mate­r­i­al, which includes casu­al cor­re­spon­dence with like-mind­ed allies around the coun­try, also reveals unvar­nished views on race, sex­u­al­i­ty and gen­der roles. And despite the movement’s marked suc­cess in some Repub­li­can-dom­i­nat­ed states, the doc­u­ments chart the activists’ strug­gle to gain trac­tion with broad­er swaths of vot­ers and offi­cials.

    Thou­sands of mes­sages from a nexus of the anti-DEI move­ment. Frank mes­sages reveal­ing unvar­nished views on race, sex­u­al­i­ty and gen­der roles. Views like a desire to return to a time where open­ly gay peo­ple were put into prison and ‘the patri­archy’ was again overt­ly embraced. Extreme­ly con­ser­v­a­tive bil­lion­aires anx­ious to turn back the clock on soci­ety and will­ing to spend what it takes.

    Amaz­ing­ly, it sounds like these thou­sands of doc­u­ments — grant pro­pos­als, bud­gets, draft reports and cor­re­spon­dence — con­tain­ing all this frank con­ver­sa­tion were obtained through pub­lic-record requests, which is a sign of just how many of the peo­ple involved with this net­work were at pub­lic insti­tu­tions. Fig­ures like pro­fes­sor Scott Yenor at Boise State Uni­ver­si­ty, a pub­lic insti­tu­tion . And as these doc­u­ments make clear, the orga­niz­ing for this anti-DEI move­ment appears to have start­ed in ear­ly 2021, short­ly after Trump grud­ing­ly left office. It was Thomas Klin­gen­stein — Repub­li­can mega-donor and the Clare­mont Insti­tute’s chair­man — who sought out a means or refram­ing terms like “diver­si­ty”, which tends to be pret­ty pop­u­lar, in a neg­a­tive way that would res­onate with the pub­lic. So, of course, they turned to Christo­pher Rufo, who pro­vid­ed them with the new def­i­n­i­tions for DEI that the pub­lic could more eas­i­ly learn to hate and fear. Terms like “crit­i­cal social jus­tice” or “crit­i­cal social jus­tice edu­ca­tion”:

    ...
    Cen­tered at the Clare­mont Insti­tute, a Cal­i­for­nia-based think tank with close ties to the Trump move­ment and to Gov. Ron DeSan­tis of Flori­da, the group coa­lesced rough­ly three years ago around a sweep­ing ambi­tion: to strike a killing blow against “the left­ist social jus­tice rev­o­lu­tion” by elim­i­nat­ing “social jus­tice edu­ca­tion” from Amer­i­can schools.

    The doc­u­ments — grant pro­pos­als, bud­gets, draft reports and cor­re­spon­dence, obtained through pub­lic-records requests — show how the activists formed a loose net­work of think tanks, polit­i­cal groups and Repub­li­can oper­a­tives in at least a dozen states. They sought fund­ing from a range of right-lean­ing phil­an­thropies and fam­i­ly foun­da­tions, and from one of the largest indi­vid­ual donors to Repub­li­can cam­paigns in the coun­try. They exchanged mod­el leg­is­la­tion, pub­lished a slew of pub­lic reports and coor­di­nat­ed with oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive advo­ca­cy groups in states like Alaba­ma, Maine, Ten­nessee and Texas.

    In pub­lic, some indi­vid­u­als and groups involved in the effort joined calls to pro­tect diver­si­ty of thought and intel­lec­tu­al free­dom, embrac­ing the argu­ment that D.E.I. efforts had made uni­ver­si­ties intol­er­ant and nar­row. They claimed to stand for mer­i­to­crat­ic ideals and against ide­olo­gies that divid­ed Amer­i­cans. They argued that D.E.I. pro­grams made Black and His­pan­ic stu­dents feel less wel­come instead of more.

    2021 email from Scott Yenor

    The core of what we oppose is ‘anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion.’ That is too much of a sacred cow.

    ...

    In recent decades, amid con­cerns about the under­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of racial minori­ties on cam­pus, Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties have presided over a vast expan­sion of diver­si­ty pro­grams. These have come to play a pow­er­ful — and increas­ing­ly con­tro­ver­sial — role in aca­d­e­m­ic and stu­dent life. Crit­ics have come to view them as tools for advanc­ing left-wing ideas about gen­der and race, or for sti­fling the free dis­cus­sion of ideas. In response, offi­cials in some states have banned D.E.I. offices alto­geth­er. Oth­ers have lim­it­ed class­room dis­cus­sion of con­cepts like iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics or sys­temic racism. A grow­ing num­ber of states and schools have also begun elim­i­nat­ing require­ments that job appli­cants fur­nish “diver­si­ty state­ments” — writ­ten com­mit­ments to par­tic­u­lar ideas about diver­si­ty and how to achieve it that, at some insti­tu­tions, have func­tion­al­ly served as lit­mus tests in hir­ing.

    But in ear­ly 2021, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump’s re-elec­tion defeat, the Clare­mont orga­niz­ers were on the defen­sive. The doc­u­ments show them debat­ing how to frame their attacks: They need­ed not only to per­suade the polit­i­cal mid­dle but to ener­gize con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians and thinkers, many of whom they regard­ed as too timid, or even com­plic­it with a lib­er­al regime infect­ing Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment and busi­ness.

    Thomas D. Klin­gen­stein, a New York investor who is both Claremont’s chair­man and a top Repub­li­can donor, offered a glum per­spec­tive in March that year.

    “Rhetor­i­cal­ly, our side is get­ting absolute­ly mur­dered,” Mr. Klin­gen­stein wrote to Dr. Yenor and anoth­er Clare­mont offi­cial. “We have not even come up with an agreed-on name for the ene­my.”

    One prob­lem, Dr. Yenor report­ed to his col­leagues, was that many law­mak­ers were reluc­tant to take on any­thing called “diver­si­ty and inclu­sion.” Terms like “diver­si­ty,” he argued, need­ed to be sad­dled with more neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions.

    “I obvi­ous­ly think social jus­tice is what we should call it,” he wrote. “We should use the term that is most like­ly to stig­ma­tize the move­ment that is accu­rate and aris­es from com­mon life.” While nobody want­ed to seem in favor of dis­crim­i­na­tion, he argued, “social jus­tice” could be “stig­ma­tized so that when peo­ple hear it they can act on their sus­pi­cions.”

    At the time, a like-mind­ed activist, Christo­pher Rufo of the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute, was pop­u­lar­iz­ing an alter­na­tive catchall with his attacks on “crit­i­cal race the­o­ry” — a once-obscure aca­d­e­m­ic frame­work that exam­ines how racism can be struc­tural­ly embed­ded in seem­ing­ly neu­tral laws or insti­tu­tions.

    In short order, Repub­li­can offi­cials and activists around the coun­try set out to ban crit­i­cal race the­o­ry — or any­thing that could be suc­cess­ful­ly labeled “C.R.T.” — from schools. But Dr. Yenor believed such bans were not far-reach­ing enough.

    ...

    By 2022, as Clare­mont and allies like the Maine Pol­i­cy Insti­tute and a Ten­nessee group called Veloc­i­ty Con­ver­gence rolled out ear­ly research, the approach had changed. Their pub­lic reports began to bor­row from Mr. Rufo’s rhetoric, attack­ing “crit­i­cal social jus­tice” or “crit­i­cal social jus­tice edu­ca­tion.”

    When Clare­mont and the Texas Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Foun­da­tion turned to the state’s pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties in ear­ly 2023, they cir­cled back to “diver­si­ty,” but with a twist.

    “Aca­d­e­mics and admin­is­tra­tors are no longer mere­ly push­ing pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics but are trans­form­ing uni­ver­si­ties into insti­tu­tions ded­i­cat­ed to polit­i­cal activism and indoc­tri­nat­ing stu­dents with a hate­ful ide­ol­o­gy,” warned a report on Texas A&M. “That ide­ol­o­gy is Diver­si­ty, Equi­ty, and Inclu­sion (DEI).”
    ...

    Also note the irony of this cam­paign giv­en that it start­ed in the wake of the George Floyd protests char­ac­ter­ized by calls for “defund­ing the police”: This anti-DEI effort is lit­er­al­ly an attempt to ‘defund DEI’. In their own words:

    ...

    2021 draft pro­pos­al from the Clare­mont Insti­tute

    Attempts to rea­son with uni­ver­si­ties have failed. The mon­ey pay­ing for their bad behav­ior must be tak­en away. Only then will the behav­ior stop.

    ...

    Ulti­mate­ly, accord­ing to one doc­u­ment, the Clare­mont orga­niz­ers hoped state law­mak­ers across the coun­try would pass sweep­ing pro­hi­bi­tions on teach­ing “social jus­tice pro­gram­ming.”

    2021 draft pro­pos­al to the Taube Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion

    In the pro­jec­t’s first year, our goal is to help at least one state to pass leg­is­la­tion to defund and ban spend­ing mon­ey on social jus­tice pro­gram­ing, sim­i­lar to, or bet­ter than, what has been accom­plished in Ida­ho. By the end of the third year, our goal is to get anoth­er six states to do the same.

    ...

    But the irony of this ‘defund­ing’ effort pales in com­par­i­son to the gross decep­tion and hypocrisy the orga­niz­ers were engag­ing in when they used calls for “aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom” at the same time they were plot­ting to purge not just left-wing pol­i­tics but also pro­fes­sors out of acad­e­mia:

    ...
    The Clare­mont effort seemed to diverge from oth­ers on the right who had long urged aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions to renew their com­mit­ment to ide­o­log­i­cal diver­si­ty. In one exchange, some of those involved dis­cussed how to mar­shal polit­i­cal pow­er to replace left-wing ortho­dox­ies with more “patri­ot­ic,” tra­di­tion­al­ist cur­ricu­lums.

    “In sup­port of rid­ding schools of C.R.T., the Right argues that we want non­po­lit­i­cal edu­ca­tion,” Mr. Klin­gen­stein wrote in August 2021. “No we don’t. We want our pol­i­tics. All edu­ca­tion is polit­i­cal.”

    Dr. Yenor appeared to agree, respond­ing with some ideas for reshap­ing K‑12 edu­ca­tion. “An alter­na­tive vision of edu­ca­tion must replace the cur­rent vision of edu­ca­tion,” he wrote back.

    2021 email from Scott Yenor

    An alter­na­tive vision of edu­ca­tion must replace the cur­rent vision of edu­ca­tion. In the short-term, state leg­is­la­tures could get out of the busi­ness of ban­ning and get into the busi­ness of demand­ing — demand­ing the cer­tain con­clu­sions about Amer­i­can his­to­ry be deliv­ered.

    State leg­is­la­tures, he pro­posed, could strip “edu­ca­tion­al pro­fes­sion­als” of the pow­er to decide what to teach and even short­en the school day so that young peo­ple would spend less time in class. They might pass laws let­ting pri­vate cit­i­zens sue school board mem­bers with finan­cial ties to the “edu­ca­tion indus­try.”

    At the same time, indi­vid­u­als and groups involved in the effort seemed to grasp that aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom could be a polit­i­cal­ly use­ful frame for their attacks.

    In a 2023 exchange, Dr. Yenor and two asso­ciates dis­cussed how to defend Amy Wax, a con­ser­v­a­tive law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia. Dr. Wax had drawn the ire of admin­is­tra­tors and stu­dents there for once opin­ing, among oth­er things, that the Unit­ed States would be “bet­ter off with few­er Asians and less Asian immi­gra­tion,” and that Black peo­ple felt “resent­ment and shame and envy” over the “West­ern peo­ples’ out­sized achieve­ments and con­tri­bu­tions.”

    Fil­ing a griev­ance claim against the uni­ver­si­ty, Dr. Wax’s lawyer appar­ent­ly asked David Azer­rad, a pro­fes­sor at Hills­dale Col­lege, for a state­ment of sup­port. Dr. Azer­rad, in turn, sought his Clare­mont friends’ advice.

    Dr. Yenor had expe­ri­ence with such sit­u­a­tions. Two years ear­li­er, he had faced Title IX com­plaints at Boise State Uni­ver­si­ty fol­low­ing a speech in which he argued that fem­i­nism had made women “more med­icat­ed, med­dle­some and quar­rel­some than women need to be.” Amid the uproar, Boise State offi­cials defend­ed the right of fac­ul­ty to “intro­duce uncom­fort­able and even offen­sive ideas.”

    2023 email from Scott Yenor

    I think the main point is that the effect of fir­ing Amy Wax will have rip­ple effects on aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom every­where.

    You are appeal­ing to left­ies, so you should tar­get them, both on free speech grounds and on grounds that impli­cate their fears.

    Now, Dr. Yenor advised his friend Dr. Azer­rad to aim his state­ment at a lib­er­al audi­ence — to defend Dr. Wax on the grounds that if she were fired, it would only embold­en red-state law­mak­ers to fire con­tro­ver­sial left-wing pro­fes­sors.

    “But don’t we want this to hap­pen?” Dr. Azer­rad asked.

    “Yes,” replied Dr. Yenor. “But your audi­ence doesn’t want it to hap­pen.”

    In an email, Dr. Azer­rad described the exchanges as “flip­pant ban­ter” that “do not dis­cuss sub­stan­tive pol­i­cy mat­ters.” A spokesman for Clare­mont said that both Dr. Yenor and Mr. Klin­gen­stein believed that “intel­lec­tu­al diver­si­ty and free speech are not ends in them­selves but means to oth­er impor­tant ends, includ­ing a vision of edu­ca­tion.”
    ...

    And then there’s the depths of the extrem­ism at work here: as Pro­fes­sor Yenor described in 2021 email, Yenor con­firmed his views like “Our sex­u­al cul­ture will not heal until ‘fag­got’ replaces ‘big­ot’ as the slur of choice,” or “Our sex­u­al cul­ture will not be healed until we once again agree that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty belongs in the clos­et and that a healthy soci­ety requires patri­archy.” And as Yenor replied to one email exchange with Heather Mac Don­ald, “not tons of asian coun­tries have [same sex mar­riage]” but rather “more whole­some poli­cies like prison” for gays. It was just one of many ‘col­or­ful’ exchanges between Yenor and Mac Don­ald, includ­ing her com­ments about “The low IQ 3rd world”. Prison for gays and “the lw IQ 3rd world” may not be the pub­lic slo­gan they are going with at this point, but this is who they are:

    ...
    Even as they sought to stig­ma­tize and defeat left-wing ideas, aca­d­e­mics and activists in the Clare­mont orbit seemed cog­nizant that some of their own views were out­side the main­stream.

    In a 2021 exchange among aca­d­e­mics at Clare­mont, Hills­dale and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin-Eau Claire, Dr. Yenor dis­cussed edits to an essay he was plan­ning to pub­lish in First Things, a con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal. His edi­tor, he said, want­ed Dr. Yenor to be less “pru­dent” in his writ­ing about homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, encour­ag­ing him to voice ideas like — as Dr. Yenor char­ac­ter­ized it — “Our sex­u­al cul­ture will not heal until ‘fag­got’ replaces ‘big­ot’ as the slur of choice,” or “Our sex­u­al cul­ture will not be healed until we once again agree that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty belongs in the clos­et and that a healthy soci­ety requires patri­archy.” (“Since they are my views, I have tried to do that,” Dr. Yenor wrote. In the end, he set­tled for tamer lan­guage.)

    ...

    In casu­al dis­cus­sions with like-mind­ed aca­d­e­mics and activists, some those involved in the anti‑D.E.I. effort mocked what they con­sid­ered lib­er­als’ obses­sion with hier­ar­chies of oppres­sion. Some evinced a frank dis­like of gay peo­ple.

    In an exchange last May, Dr. Yenor, two for­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials with Clare­mont ties and Ms. Mac Don­ald dis­cussed a court case in India about same-sex mar­riage. Ms. Mac Don­ald — a fel­low at the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute who last spring pub­lished a book titled “When Race Trumps Mer­it: How the Pur­suit of Equi­ty Sac­ri­fices Excel­lence, Destroys Beau­ty and Threat­ens Lives” — was not for­mal­ly con­nect­ed to Claremont’s anti‑D.E.I. efforts but cor­re­spond­ed fre­quent­ly with those who were.

    She spec­u­lat­ed in the May exchange that it would be “fun to see” what lib­er­als would say about Indi­ans if the court con­ferred gay mar­riage rights but Indi­ans refused to “go along.” “How will west­ern elites explain the benight­ed­ness of yet anoth­er group of POCs?” In response, Dr. Yenor not­ed that “not tons of asian coun­tries have SSM” but rather “more whole­some poli­cies like prison” for gays.

    2023 email from David Azer­rad

    Heather, that’s an easy one. Indi­ans are Asians who are white-adja­cent so at the bot­tom of the totem poll. Gays are sec­ond after blacks.

    ...

    In anoth­er email to Dr. Yenor, Ms. Mac Don­ald reflect­ed on a fur­ther “curse of fem­i­nism”: the pro­lif­er­a­tion of “nan­nies of col­or” in her Man­hat­tan neigh­bor­hood and the “bizarreness” of women entrust­ing their chil­dren to care­givers from “the low IQ 3rd world” while devot­ing them­selves to mak­ing part­ner at a law firm.

    2023 email from Heather Mac Don­ald

    As I was tak­ing my evening pow­er walk in the hood here (upper east side) and see­ing all the nan­nies of col­or walk­ing school chil­dren back to their apart­ments, it struck me again the bizarreness of females decid­ing that their com­par­a­tive advan­tage is in being an asso­ciate in a law firm, say, and thus that they should out­source the once in a life­time undu­plic­a­ble unre­peat­able expe­ri­ence of rais­ing a unique child to some one else, espe­cial­ly some­one from the low IQ 3rd world, while they do the drone work of mak­ing part­ner. The child is evolv­ing so quick­ly, absorb­ing so many influ­ences, and yet they would rather absent them­selves from its life to show that they are as good as males. such a dis­tri­b­u­tion of labor is alleged­ly pare­to opti­mal. Anoth­er curse of fem­i­nism.

    ...

    Relat­ed to this intense hatred of gays is the pal­pa­ble loathing of GOP mega-donor Peter Thiel over his sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion. The fact that Thiel’s ‘boyfriend’ com­mit­ted sui­cide last year did­n’t help. And Thiel sure­ly knows his polit­i­cal allies vis­cer­al­ly hate his guts and would pre­fer to pun­ish open homo­sex­u­al­i­ty with prison. Which rais­es the ques­tion: are Thiel’s ‘dooms­day’ bunkers in places like New Zealand part­ly in antic­i­pa­tion of his polit­i­cal allies effec­tive­ly out­lay­ing his lifestyle in the US? Again, he has to know the out­law­ing of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty will be a con­se­quence if his polit­i­cal allies ever man­age to ush­er in US-style fas­cism. Because US-style fas­cism is obvi­ous­ly going to be deeply evan­gel­i­cal in nature. Wrapped in flag and car­ry­ing a cross and all that:

    ...
    Last spring, Ms. Mac Don­ald emailed some of the same peo­ple about news reports that a boyfriend of Mr. Thiel — nom­i­nal­ly their ally in the ris­ing “nation­al con­ser­vatism” move­ment — had com­mit­ted sui­cide after a con­fronta­tion with Mr. Thiel’s hus­band at a par­ty. Call­ing the episode “a scan­dal,” she opined that gay men “are much more prone” to extra­mar­i­tal affairs “on the empir­i­cal basis of testos­terone unchecked by female mod­esty.” She added mock­ing­ly that a friend had once tried to con­vince her “how won­der­ful Thiel’s ‘hus­band’ was.”

    2023 email from Heather Mac Don­ald

    Some female over the last year or so, eager to show her open­mind­ed­ness, was crow­ing to me about how won­der­ful Thiel’s “hus­band” was, mak­ing them out to be the most prop­er cou­ple.

    I won­der if he will feel any shame in pub­lic. Prob­a­bly not.

    ...

    But while this was an effort orga­nized by the Clare­mont Insti­tute, it’s ulti­mate­ly the mega-donors pay­ing for it. And as we can see, those mega-donors appear to be elder­ly bil­lion­aires dis­turbed at the prospect of ‘wokeism’ impact­ing their grand­chil­dren’s lives. In oth­er words, there’s a ‘pity the poor bil­lion­aires’ sen­ti­ment dri­ving much of this, in addi­tion to all the open big­otry:

    ...
    A Dona­tion Oppor­tu­ni­ty

    “Woke” pol­i­tics was not just a threat to Amer­i­can life. It was also a fund-rais­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty. By spring 2021, as par­ents grew impa­tient with Covid school clo­sures, or skep­ti­cal of “anti-racist” cur­ricu­lums in the wake of the Floyd protests, Clare­mont offi­cials had begun cir­cu­lat­ing urgent grant requests to right-lean­ing foun­da­tions.

    ...

    Clare­mont offi­cials would part­ner with state think tanks, and with the hun­dreds of for­mer fel­lows scat­tered through con­ser­v­a­tive insti­tu­tions and on Capi­tol Hill. They would cat­a­log the D.E.I. pro­grams and per­son­nel hon­ey­combed through pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties. Then they would lob­by sym­pa­thet­ic pub­lic offi­cials to gut them.

    In the pro­pos­als, Clare­mont set a first round of tar­gets, in states includ­ing Flori­da, Louisiana, North Car­oli­na, Okla­homa, Ten­nessee and Texas.

    ...

    As the project pro­gressed, Clare­mont made plans to prospect for donors at a Dal­las coun­try club and at the Palm Beach home of Eliz­a­beth Ailes, the wid­ow of the Fox News co-founder Roger Ailes. Grow­ing anger among old­er con­ser­v­a­tives helped open the spig­ot. “The Sear­le kids don’t like wok­ery,” wrote Chris Ross, a Clare­mont fund-rais­ing offi­cial, in a Decem­ber 2021 email, appar­ent­ly refer­ring to adult chil­dren of the trust’s late bene­fac­tor, Daniel C. Sear­le. (A rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Sear­le trust dis­put­ed whether Clare­mont offi­cials had knowl­edge of the Sear­les’ polit­i­cal views.)

    2021 email from Chris Ross

    Ryan, I’d like your feed­back on whether the por­tion in yel­low high­light is nec­es­sary for con­text, or whether we can safe­ly assume that since we know the Sear­le kids don’t like wok­ery, it could safe­ly be sum­ma­rized in the cov­er let­ter.

    ...

    The fol­low­ing year, a Utah sci­en­tist and renew­able-ener­gy con­sul­tant, along with his wife, kicked in $25,000 for the project. It had “real­ly caught their imag­i­na­tion,” Mr. Ross wrote, because of their “ongo­ing con­cerns about their grand­chil­dren and wokeism.” Secre­cy was essen­tial. “This work will be done more eas­i­ly if the woke­sters at MIT don’t see it com­ing,” he wrote.

    2022 email from Chris Ross

    This project real­ly caught their imag­i­na­tion, not only because of their back­grounds, but because of their ongo­ing con­cerns about their grand­chil­dren and wokeism. With the under­stand­ing that this work will be done more eas­i­ly if the woke­sters at MIT don’t see it com­ing, they have vol­un­teered to stay qui­et about the project until it is pub­li­cized.

    ...

    Notably, one of those mega-donor groups fund­ing a close­ly relat­ed Clare­mont effort is the Sear­le Free­dom Trust, whose pres­i­dent is Kim­ber­ly O. Den­nis. Den­nis also hap­pens to be the pres­i­dent of Donors Trust, the pri­ma­ry mega-donor dark mon­ey out­fit for the Koch donor net­work. It’s reminder that the thou­sands of doc­u­ments detail­ing the activ­i­ties of this net­work is real­ly just a peek behind the cur­tain as a much larg­er polit­i­cal machine at work:

    ...
    The Wis­con­sin-based Sear­le Free­dom Trust had sep­a­rate­ly agreed to fund a Clare­mont effort to inven­to­ry what it con­sid­ered “C.R.T. cours­es” that had “metas­ta­sized through­out High­er Ed,” accord­ing to the draft pro­pos­al. Anoth­er pro­pos­al, draft­ed for the Arthur N. Rupe Foun­da­tion in May 2022, aimed to dis­sect how red states could dis­en­tan­gle them­selves from fed­er­al fund­ing and man­dates that, in Claremont’s view, advanced social jus­tice ide­ol­o­gy. Relat­ed pro­pos­als went to at least eight foun­da­tions in total. (Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Taube and Rupe foun­da­tions did not reply to emails and phone mes­sages seek­ing com­ment.)

    2021 email from Chris Ross

    I will fin­ish pol­ish­ing up the bud­get along with the rest of the pro­pos­al, almost all of which is pre­vi­ous­ly-blessed lan­guage from the lat­est Scaife, Dock­weil­er, Dar­ling, and Ver­heij pro­pos­als, and send that to you tomor­row.

    ...

    Final­ly, we find how this effort that start­ed in 2021 was ful­ly embraced by Ron DeSan­tis’s pres­i­den­tial bid. DeSan­tis was sup­posed to be the polit­i­cal vehi­cle to bring these pol­i­tics into the White House. Until his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign sput­tered out. And then Octo­ber 7 hap­pened, with all the anti-Israeli col­lege protests and the incred­i­bly tone deaf con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny of sev­er­al Ivy League col­lege pres­i­dents. In short order, a coali­tion of activists man­aged to get Har­vard pres­i­dent Clau­dine Gay to resign. A new oppor­tu­ni­ty to repack­age the anti-DEI cru­sade arrived:

    ...
    Last year, Clare­mont offi­cials also court­ed Mr. DeSan­tis, then a lead­ing con­tender for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion and the gov­er­nor most close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with anti‑D.E.I. poli­cies. The insti­tute dis­patched Dr. Yenor to Flori­da to run a new office in Tal­la­has­see, appoint­ing him as its “senior direc­tor of state coali­tions.” (On Sun­day, Mr. DeSan­tis sus­pend­ed his pres­i­den­tial bid.)

    In ear­ly April, as Mr. DeSan­tis pre­pared to announce his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, he vis­it­ed Mr. Klin­gen­stein. In an email, Mr. Klin­gen­stein told Clare­mont offi­cials that Mr. DeSan­tis had agreed to give Dr. Yenor access to his top polit­i­cal and gov­ern­ment aides. Mr. Klin­gen­stein also said he’d urged the gov­er­nor to do a bet­ter job explain­ing to vot­ers why “wokeism” was dan­ger­ous.

    Appear­ing on the cam­paign trail in sub­se­quent weeks, Mr. DeSan­tis began to offer a more expan­sive def­i­n­i­tion of the term — while men­tion­ing “woke” so many times that some reporters began keep­ing count.

    ...

    But as Mr. DeSantis’s pres­i­den­tial bid sput­tered and con­ser­v­a­tive cam­paigns against left-wing edu­ca­tion began to lose trac­tion in some parts of the coun­try, peo­ple involved in the anti‑D.E.I. effort began to retool once again. In June, the Amer­i­can Prin­ci­ples Project cir­cu­lat­ed a memo detail­ing the results of sev­er­al focus groups held to test dif­fer­ent cul­ture-war mes­sages.

    For all the con­ser­v­a­tive attacks on diver­si­ty pro­grams, the group found, “the idea of woke or DEI received gen­er­al­ly pos­i­tive scores.” Most vot­ers didn’t know the dif­fer­ence between equal­i­ty and the more vogu­ish term “equi­ty,” oft-mocked on the right, which sig­ni­fies poli­cies intend­ed to achieve equal out­comes for dif­fer­ent peo­ple, not sim­ply equal oppor­tu­ni­ties.

    2023 memo from the Amer­i­can Prin­ci­ples Project

    Sim­i­lar­ly DEI was thought to con­sist more of com­fort with diverse work­places than affir­ma­tive action or anti-white hir­ing prac­tices. When we got into the details of spe­cif­ic DEI ini­tia­tives (race-based quo­tas, affir­ma­tive action, diver­si­ty for diver­si­ty’s sake), they were most­ly opposed. We also test­ed the idea of equal­i­ty vs. equi­ty, and lit­tle to no dif­fer­ence was seen between the two words.

    The memo was sent by an asso­ciate to Mr. Klin­gen­stein and Mr. Williams, along with an undat­ed draft speech appar­ent­ly writ­ten for Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Banks, an Indi­ana Repub­li­can who found­ed the House Anti-Woke Cau­cus last Jan­u­ary. (Mr. Banks’s spokesman did not reply to an email seek­ing com­ment.)

    For Mr. Banks and oth­er Repub­li­cans, the con­tro­ver­sies over anti­semitism on cam­pus this fall pro­vid­ed a fresh oppor­tu­ni­ty to make their case. With some stu­dent pro­test­ers defend­ing or even val­oriz­ing the Oct. 7 ter­ror­ist attacks on Israel by Hamas, crit­i­cisms of cam­pus D.E.I. pro­grams began to gain more of an audi­ence among lib­er­als. In Decem­ber, when House Repub­li­cans sum­moned Dr. Gay to Capi­tol Hill, along with the pres­i­dents of M.I.T. and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, they argued that diver­si­ty pro­grams were the root cause of anti­se­mit­ic rhetoric on cam­pus.

    As the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion looms, Repub­li­cans are embark­ing on a renewed cam­paign against the high­er-edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions they have long crit­i­cized, now under the ban­ner of erad­i­cat­ing anti-Jew­ish hate. The House Com­mit­tee on Edu­ca­tion and the Work­force is inves­ti­gat­ing Har­vard and oth­er schools, and the scope of the inquiry is expect­ed to expand.
    ...

    How will the anti-DEI cru­sade play into the 2024 pres­i­den­tial race? Time will tell, but it’s hard to imag­ine the Trump cam­paign is going to ignore an issue so ani­mat­ing to his con­ser­v­a­tive base.

    But beyond the poten­tial elec­toral util­i­ty of this issue for Trump, let’s not for­get that the whole Sched­ule F/Project 2025 plans for a nation­al lib­er­al purge start­ed in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and remains one of the sig­na­ture ele­ments of his cam­paign plat­form. If Trump wins a sec­ond term, it will be a win achieved after cam­paign­ing on a plat­form of mass insti­tu­tion­al purges.

    And that’s all why it’s going to be increas­ing­ly impor­tant to rec­og­nize that Trump’s 2024 cam­paign pledges of revenge and purges aren’t just going to be Don­ald Trump’s revenge purges. The bil­lion­aire Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist extrem­ists behind him — the base Trump tru­ly served dur­ing his first term — have revenge purge plans of their own. Yes, those purge plans are already under­way, but they’re just warm­ing up.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 25, 2024, 7:17 pm
  44. It keeps hap­pen­ing. For what­ev­er rea­son, indi­vid­u­als close­ly aligned with the ongo­ing Sched­ule F/Project 2025 far right plot to purge the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment — and even­tu­al­ly the rest of soci­ety — of any­one not deemed loy­al enough to the move­ment keep talk­ing to the press, lay­ing out their plans. Increas­ing­ly extreme plans. It start­ed with the pair of giant Axios pieces from July of 2022 lay­ing out, with details pro­vid­ed by insid­ers, who was lead­ing the plot and its even­tu­al goals. And here we are again, with a new chill­ing update thanks to a pair of anony­mous insid­ers hap­py to share this new with Politi­co.

    What’s the update? Well, it’s focused on Rus­sell Vought and his Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca (CRA). Recall how Vought, serv­ing as the head of the Office of Bud­get and Man­age­ment (OMB) under Don­ald Trump, was the only head of a fed­er­al agency who real­ly attempt­ed to start imple­ment­ing the Sched­ule F exec­u­tive order Trump issued sev­er­al weeks before the 2020 elec­tion. Vought obvi­ous­ly still has big Sched­ule F plans for 2025. But as these two anony­mous sources warn, Vought’s plans now include an overt Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist agen­da that entails cre­at­ing a new social joint agree­ment that Chris­tian­i­ty should be the ulti­mate force shap­ing Amer­i­can soci­ety, for Chris­tians and non-Chris­tians alike.

    On one lev­el, none of this is real­ly news. Vought penned a piece back in March of 2021 where he open­ly defend­ed Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism as a mis­un­der­stood con­cept that was being smeared by crit­ics. But, again, the news is that Vought’s allies are now telling the press that Vought is very seri­ous about putting that vision into action under the next Trump admin­is­tra­tion. Who knows why these anony­mous sources are feed­ing these reports but it keeps hap­pen­ing.

    As we’re also warned in the Politi­co report, Vought has a close affil­i­a­tion with William Wolfe, a for­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial who, like Vought, has tak­en up the cause of pro­mot­ing open Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism as the polit­i­cal path for­ward for Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives. And as we’re going to see, one of the mes­sages Wolfe has been shar­ing with audi­ences has been the need to get ready for a Chris­t­ian “call to arms”. It’s not a metaphor­i­cal call to arms. He’s talk­ing about polit­i­cal vio­lence.

    Final­ly, let’s not for­get how Vought’s wife, Mary Vought, is one of the assumed mem­bers of the secre­tive Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy (CNP), which, as we’ve seen, oper­ates as the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist moth­er­ship behind the larg­er Sched­ule F plot. In oth­er words, we should­n’t view this report as sim­ply Rus­sell Vought’s plans to use the next Trump admin­is­tra­tion to for­mal­ly impose Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism on soci­ety. Vought is just one of many CNP-con­nect­ed indi­vid­u­als and enti­ties work­ing on this agen­da:

    Politi­co

    Trump allies pre­pare to infuse ‘Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism’ in sec­ond admin­is­tra­tion

    Spear­head­ing the effort is Rus­sell Vought, pres­i­dent of The Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca, part of a con­ser­v­a­tive con­sor­tium prepar­ing for Trump’s return to pow­er.

    By Alexan­der Ward and Hei­di Przy­by­la
    02/20/2024 05:00 AM EST

    An influ­en­tial think tank close to Don­ald Trump is devel­op­ing plans to infuse Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist ideas in his admin­is­tra­tion should the for­mer pres­i­dent return to pow­er, accord­ing to doc­u­ments obtained by POLITICO.

    Spear­head­ing the effort is Rus­sell Vought, who served as Trump’s direc­tor of the Office of Man­age­ment and Bud­get dur­ing his first term and has remained close to him. Vought, who is fre­quent­ly cit­ed as a poten­tial chief of staff in a sec­ond Trump White House, is pres­i­dent of The Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca think tank, a lead­ing group in a con­ser­v­a­tive con­sor­tium prepar­ing for a sec­ond Trump term.

    Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists in Amer­i­ca believe that the coun­try was found­ed as a Chris­t­ian nation and that Chris­t­ian val­ues should be pri­or­i­tized through­out gov­ern­ment and pub­lic life. As the coun­try has become less reli­gious and more diverse, Vought has embraced the idea that Chris­tians are under assault and has spo­ken of poli­cies he might pur­sue in response.

    One doc­u­ment draft­ed by CRA staff and fel­lows includes a list of top pri­or­i­ties for CRA in a sec­ond Trump term. “Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism” is one of the bul­let points. Oth­ers include invok­ing the Insur­rec­tion Act on Day One to quash protests and refus­ing to spend autho­rized con­gres­sion­al funds on unwant­ed projects, a prac­tice banned by law­mak­ers in the Nixon era.

    CRA’s work fits into a broad­er effort by con­ser­v­a­tive, MAGA-lean­ing orga­ni­za­tions to influ­ence a future Trump White House. Two peo­ple famil­iar with the plans, who were grant­ed anonymi­ty to dis­cuss inter­nal mat­ters, said that Vought hopes his prox­im­i­ty and reg­u­lar con­tact with the for­mer pres­i­dent — he and Trump speak at least once a month, accord­ing to one of the peo­ple — will ele­vate Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism as a focal point in a sec­ond Trump term.

    The doc­u­ments obtained by POLITICO do not out­line spe­cif­ic Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist poli­cies. But Vought has pro­mot­ed a restric­tion­ist immi­gra­tion agen­da, say­ing a person’s back­ground doesn’t define who can enter the U.S., but rather, cit­ing Bib­li­cal teach­ings, whether that per­son “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and under­stand­ing of his­to­ry.”

    Vought has a close affil­i­a­tion with Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist William Wolfe, a for­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial who has advo­cat­ed for over­turn­ing same-sex mar­riage, end­ing abor­tion and reduc­ing access to con­tra­cep­tives.

    Vought, who declined to com­ment, is advis­ing Project 2025, a gov­ern­ing agen­da that would ush­er in one of the most con­ser­v­a­tive exec­u­tive branch­es in mod­ern Amer­i­can his­to­ry. The effort is made up of a con­stel­la­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive groups run by Trump allies who’ve con­struct­ed a detailed plan to dis­man­tle or over­haul key agen­cies in a sec­ond term. Among oth­er prin­ci­ples, the project’s “Man­date for Lead­er­ship” states that “free­dom is defined by God, not man.”

    ...

    Trump is not a devout man of faith. But Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists have been among his most reli­able cam­paign activists and vot­ing blocs. Trump formed a polit­i­cal alliance with evan­gel­i­cals dur­ing his first run for office, deliv­ered them a six to three con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty on the Supreme Court and is now espous­ing the Chris­t­ian right’s long-run­ning argu­ment that Chris­tians are so severe­ly per­se­cut­ed that it neces­si­tates a fed­er­al response.

    In a Decem­ber cam­paign speech in Iowa, he said “Marx­ists and fas­cists” are “going hard” against Catholics. “Upon tak­ing office, I will cre­ate a new fed­er­al task force on fight­ing anti-Chris­t­ian bias to be led by a ful­ly reformed Depart­ment of Jus­tice that’s fair and equi­table” and that will “inves­ti­gate all forms of ille­gal dis­crim­i­na­tion.”

    On the eve of the Iowa cau­cus­es, Trump pro­mot­ed on his social media a video that sug­gests his cam­paign is, actu­al­ly, a divine mis­sion from God.

    In 2019, Trump’s then-sec­re­tary of state, Mike Pom­peo, set up a fed­er­al com­mis­sion to define human rights based on the pre­cepts Vought describes, specif­i­cal­ly “nat­ur­al law and nat­ur­al rights.” Nat­ur­al law is the belief that there are uni­ver­sal rules derived from God that can’t be super­seded by gov­ern­ment or judges. While it is a core pil­lar of Catholi­cism, in recent decades it’s been used to oppose abor­tion, LGBTQ+ rights and con­tra­cep­tion.

    Vought sees his and his organization’s mis­sion as “renew[ing] a con­sen­sus of Amer­i­ca as a nation under God,” per a state­ment on CRA’s web­site, and reshap­ing the government’s con­tract with the gov­erned. Free­dom of reli­gion would remain a pro­tect­ed right, but Vought and his ide­o­log­i­cal brethren would not shy from using their admin­is­tra­tion posi­tions to pro­mote Chris­t­ian doc­trine and imbue pub­lic pol­i­cy with it, accord­ing to both peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter, grant­ed anonymi­ty to avoid retal­i­a­tion. He makes clear ref­er­ence to human rights being defined by God, not man.

    Amer­i­ca should be rec­og­nized as a Chris­t­ian nation “where our rights and duties are under­stood to come from God,” Vought wrote two years ago in Newsweek.

    “It is a com­mit­ment to an insti­tu­tion­al sep­a­ra­tion between church and state, but not the sep­a­ra­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty from its influ­ence on gov­ern­ment and soci­ety,” he con­tin­ued, not­ing such a frame­work “can lead to ben­e­fi­cial out­comes for our own com­mu­ni­ties, as well as indi­vid­u­als of all faiths.”

    He went on to accuse detrac­tors of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism of invok­ing the term to try to scare peo­ple. “’Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism’ is actu­al­ly a rather benign and use­ful descrip­tion for those who believe in both pre­serv­ing our country’s Judeo-Chris­t­ian her­itage and mak­ing pub­lic pol­i­cy deci­sions that are best for this coun­try,” he wrote. “The term need not be sub­ject­ed to such intense scorn due to mis­un­der­stand­ing or slan­der.”

    ...

    As OMB direc­tor in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, Vought became a dis­ci­ple of the “Amer­i­ca First” move­ment. He has been a stead­fast pro­po­nent of keep­ing the U.S. out of for­eign wars and slash­ing fed­er­al spend­ing.

    CRA is already wield­ing influ­ence on Trump’s posi­tions. His think­ing on with­draw­ing the U.S. from NATO and using mil­i­tary force against Mex­i­can drug car­tels is part­ly inspired by sep­a­rate CRA papers, accord­ing to reports by Rolling Stone.

    “Rus­sell Vought did a fab­u­lous job in my admin­is­tra­tion, and I have no doubt he will do a great job in con­tin­u­ing our quest to make Amer­i­ca great again,” reads a Trump quote promi­nent­ly placed on CRA’s web­site.

    Trump will have a major plat­form to con­vey his vision for Chris­t­ian pol­i­cy in a sec­ond term when, on Feb. 22, he address­es a Nation­al Reli­gious Broad­cast­ers forum in Nashville. The group is the world’s largest asso­ci­a­tion of Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ca­tors.

    Trump is also talk­ing about bring­ing his for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er Michael Fly­nn, a vocal pro­po­nent of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, back into office. Fly­nn is cur­rent­ly focused on recruit­ing what he calls an “Army of God” — as he barn­storms the coun­try pro­mot­ing his vision of putting Chris­tian­i­ty at the cen­ter of Amer­i­can life.

    Vought’s beliefs over time have been informed by his rela­tion­ship with Wolfe. The two spent time togeth­er at Her­itage Action, a con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­cy advo­ca­cy group. And Vought has praised their years­long part­ner­ship. “I’m proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scop­ing out a sound Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism,” he post­ed on X, then Twit­ter, in Jan­u­ary 2023..

    Vought often echoes Wolfe’s prin­ci­ples, includ­ing on immi­gra­tion. “Jesus Christ wasn’t an open-bor­ders social­ist,” Wolfe wrote for The Dai­ly Caller in April while a vis­it­ing CRA fel­low. “The Bible unapolo­get­i­cal­ly upholds the con­cept of sov­er­eign nations.”

    While speak­ing in Sep­tem­ber at Amer­i­can Moment’s “ The­ol­o­gy of Amer­i­can State­craft: The Chris­t­ian Case for Immi­gra­tion Restric­tion” on Capi­tol Hill in Sep­tem­ber, Vought defend­ed the wide­ly-crit­i­cized prac­tice of fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion at the bor­der dur­ing the Trump years, telling the audi­ence “the deci­sion to defend the rule of law neces­si­tates the sep­a­ra­tion of fam­i­lies.”

    The Her­itage Foundation’s Project 2025 offers more vis­i­bil­i­ty into what pol­i­cy agen­da a future Trump admin­is­tra­tion might pur­sue. It says poli­cies that sup­port LGBTQ+ rights, sub­si­dize “sin­gle-moth­er­hood” and penal­ize mar­riage should be repealed because sub­jec­tive notions of “gen­der iden­ti­ty” threat­en “Amer­i­cans’ fun­da­men­tal lib­er­ties.”

    It also pro­pos­es increas­ing sur­veil­lance of abor­tion and mater­nal mor­tal­i­ty report­ing in the states, com­pelling the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion to revoke approval of “chem­i­cal abor­tion drugs” and pro­tect­ing “reli­gious and moral” objec­tions for employ­ers who decline con­tra­cep­tion cov­er­age for employ­ees. One of the groups that part­ners with Project 2025, Turn­ing Point USA, is among con­ser­v­a­tive influ­encers that health pro­fes­sion­als have crit­i­cized for tar­get­ing young women with mis­lead­ing health con­cerns about hor­mon­al birth con­trol. Anoth­er pri­or­i­ty is defund­ing Planned Par­ent­hood, which pro­vides repro­duc­tive health care to low-income women.

    Wolfe, who has delet­ed sev­er­al posts on X that detail his views, has a more extreme out­look of what a gov­ern­ment led by Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists should pro­pose. In a Decem­ber post, he called for end­ing sex edu­ca­tion in schools, sur­ro­ga­cy and no-fault divorce through­out the coun­try, as well as forc­ing men “to pro­vide for their chil­dren as soon as it’s deter­mined the child is theirs” — a clear incur­sion by the gov­ern­ment into Amer­i­cans’ pri­vate lives.

    “Chris­tians should reject a Christ-less ‘con­ser­vatism,’” he expand­ed in anoth­er X mis­sive, “and demand the polit­i­cal move­ment we are most close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with make a return to Christ-cen­tered foun­da­tions. Because it’s either Christ or chaos, even on the ‘Right.’”

    ———–

    “Trump allies pre­pare to infuse ‘Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism’ in sec­ond admin­is­tra­tion” By Alexan­der Ward and Hei­di Przy­by­la; Politi­co; 02/20/2024

    “Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists in Amer­i­ca believe that the coun­try was found­ed as a Chris­t­ian nation and that Chris­t­ian val­ues should be pri­or­i­tized through­out gov­ern­ment and pub­lic life. As the coun­try has become less reli­gious and more diverse, Vought has embraced the idea that Chris­tians are under assault and has spo­ken of poli­cies he might pur­sue in response.”

    The drop in reli­gios­i­ty in the US is an assault on Chris­tians that needs to be coun­tered with Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist gov­ern­ment poli­cies. Those aren’t warn­ings com­ing from observers of these move­ments. It’s the plan ema­nat­ing from Rus­sel Vought’s Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca (CRA), one of the many groups that’s spent the last few work­ings devel­op­ing the ongo­ing Sched­ule F/Project 2025 plot. Inter­est­ing­ly, like so much of the report­ing on this plot, we have peo­ple speak­ing direct­ly to the press about it. Two anony­mous indi­vid­u­als in this case. Peo­ple involved or famil­iar with the plot keep talk­ing to the press about it. And now they’re talk­ing to the press about the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism shap­ing this plot. And long with the plans to invoke the Insur­rec­tion Act to squash any protests. It’s a remark­able pat­tern:

    ...
    Spear­head­ing the effort is Rus­sell Vought, who served as Trump’s direc­tor of the Office of Man­age­ment and Bud­get dur­ing his first term and has remained close to him. Vought, who is fre­quent­ly cit­ed as a poten­tial chief of staff in a sec­ond Trump White House, is pres­i­dent of The Cen­ter for Renew­ing Amer­i­ca think tank, a lead­ing group in a con­ser­v­a­tive con­sor­tium prepar­ing for a sec­ond Trump term.

    ...

    One doc­u­ment draft­ed by CRA staff and fel­lows includes a list of top pri­or­i­ties for CRA in a sec­ond Trump term. “Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism” is one of the bul­let points. Oth­ers include invok­ing the Insur­rec­tion Act on Day One to quash protests and refus­ing to spend autho­rized con­gres­sion­al funds on unwant­ed projects, a prac­tice banned by law­mak­ers in the Nixon era.

    CRA’s work fits into a broad­er effort by con­ser­v­a­tive, MAGA-lean­ing orga­ni­za­tions to influ­ence a future Trump White House. Two peo­ple famil­iar with the plans, who were grant­ed anonymi­ty to dis­cuss inter­nal mat­ters, said that Vought hopes his prox­im­i­ty and reg­u­lar con­tact with the for­mer pres­i­dent — he and Trump speak at least once a month, accord­ing to one of the peo­ple — will ele­vate Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism as a focal point in a sec­ond Trump term.

    ...

    Vought sees his and his organization’s mis­sion as “renew[ing] a con­sen­sus of Amer­i­ca as a nation under God,” per a state­ment on CRA’s web­site, and reshap­ing the government’s con­tract with the gov­erned. Free­dom of reli­gion would remain a pro­tect­ed right, but Vought and his ide­o­log­i­cal brethren would not shy from using their admin­is­tra­tion posi­tions to pro­mote Chris­t­ian doc­trine and imbue pub­lic pol­i­cy with it, accord­ing to both peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter, grant­ed anonymi­ty to avoid retal­i­a­tion. He makes clear ref­er­ence to human rights being defined by God, not man.

    ...

    As OMB direc­tor in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, Vought became a dis­ci­ple of the “Amer­i­ca First” move­ment. He has been a stead­fast pro­po­nent of keep­ing the U.S. out of for­eign wars and slash­ing fed­er­al spend­ing.

    CRA is already wield­ing influ­ence on Trump’s posi­tions. His think­ing on with­draw­ing the U.S. from NATO and using mil­i­tary force against Mex­i­can drug car­tels is part­ly inspired by sep­a­rate CRA papers, accord­ing to reports by Rolling Stone.

    ...

    Amer­i­ca should be rec­og­nized as a Chris­t­ian nation “where our rights and duties are under­stood to come from God,” Vought wrote two years ago in Newsweek.

    “It is a com­mit­ment to an insti­tu­tion­al sep­a­ra­tion between church and state, but not the sep­a­ra­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty from its influ­ence on gov­ern­ment and soci­ety,” he con­tin­ued, not­ing such a frame­work “can lead to ben­e­fi­cial out­comes for our own com­mu­ni­ties, as well as indi­vid­u­als of all faiths.”

    He went on to accuse detrac­tors of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism of invok­ing the term to try to scare peo­ple. “’Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism’ is actu­al­ly a rather benign and use­ful descrip­tion for those who believe in both pre­serv­ing our country’s Judeo-Chris­t­ian her­itage and mak­ing pub­lic pol­i­cy deci­sions that are best for this coun­try,” he wrote. “The term need not be sub­ject­ed to such intense scorn due to mis­un­der­stand­ing or slan­der.”
    ...

    And in case it’s not clear that Trump him­self and more than hap­py to embrace a Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist agen­da, all we have to do is look at his recent behav­ior. Or past behav­ior. Trump has been engaged in Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ist dog-whistling for years:

    ...
    Trump is not a devout man of faith. But Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists have been among his most reli­able cam­paign activists and vot­ing blocs. Trump formed a polit­i­cal alliance with evan­gel­i­cals dur­ing his first run for office, deliv­ered them a six to three con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty on the Supreme Court and is now espous­ing the Chris­t­ian right’s long-run­ning argu­ment that Chris­tians are so severe­ly per­se­cut­ed that it neces­si­tates a fed­er­al response.

    In a Decem­ber cam­paign speech in Iowa, he said “Marx­ists and fas­cists” are “going hard” against Catholics. “Upon tak­ing office, I will cre­ate a new fed­er­al task force on fight­ing anti-Chris­t­ian bias to be led by a ful­ly reformed Depart­ment of Jus­tice that’s fair and equi­table” and that will “inves­ti­gate all forms of ille­gal dis­crim­i­na­tion.”

    On the eve of the Iowa cau­cus­es, Trump pro­mot­ed on his social media a video that sug­gests his cam­paign is, actu­al­ly, a divine mis­sion from God.

    In 2019, Trump’s then-sec­re­tary of state, Mike Pom­peo, set up a fed­er­al com­mis­sion to define human rights based on the pre­cepts Vought describes, specif­i­cal­ly “nat­ur­al law and nat­ur­al rights.” Nat­ur­al law is the belief that there are uni­ver­sal rules derived from God that can’t be super­seded by gov­ern­ment or judges. While it is a core pil­lar of Catholi­cism, in recent decades it’s been used to oppose abor­tion, LGBTQ+ rights and con­tra­cep­tion.
    ...

    And in case it’s also not obvi­ous that the type of Chris­tian­i­ty Vought is plan­ning on impos­ing on soci­ety is going to be the kind of utter­ly heart­less Chris­tian­i­ty we should expect from far right move­ments, all we have to do is look at Vought’s stances on issues like sep­a­rat­ing migrant par­ents from chil­dren. Or the fact that he’s heav­i­ly influ­enced by William Wolfe. As we’re going to see below, Wolfe recent­ly warned that Chris­tians are going to have to “heed the call to arms” soon:

    ...
    The doc­u­ments obtained by POLITICO do not out­line spe­cif­ic Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist poli­cies. But Vought has pro­mot­ed a restric­tion­ist immi­gra­tion agen­da, say­ing a person’s back­ground doesn’t define who can enter the U.S., but rather, cit­ing Bib­li­cal teach­ings, whether that per­son “accept[ed] Israel’s God, laws and under­stand­ing of his­to­ry.”

    Vought has a close affil­i­a­tion with Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist William Wolfe, a for­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial who has advo­cat­ed for over­turn­ing same-sex mar­riage, end­ing abor­tion and reduc­ing access to con­tra­cep­tives.

    ...

    Vought’s beliefs over time have been informed by his rela­tion­ship with Wolfe. The two spent time togeth­er at Her­itage Action, a con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­cy advo­ca­cy group. And Vought has praised their years­long part­ner­ship. “I’m proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scop­ing out a sound Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism,” he post­ed on X, then Twit­ter, in Jan­u­ary 2023..

    Vought often echoes Wolfe’s prin­ci­ples, includ­ing on immi­gra­tion. “Jesus Christ wasn’t an open-bor­ders social­ist,” Wolfe wrote for The Dai­ly Caller in April while a vis­it­ing CRA fel­low. “The Bible unapolo­get­i­cal­ly upholds the con­cept of sov­er­eign nations.”

    While speak­ing in Sep­tem­ber at Amer­i­can Moment’s “ The­ol­o­gy of Amer­i­can State­craft: The Chris­t­ian Case for Immi­gra­tion Restric­tion” on Capi­tol Hill in Sep­tem­ber, Vought defend­ed the wide­ly-crit­i­cized prac­tice of fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion at the bor­der dur­ing the Trump years, telling the audi­ence “the deci­sion to defend the rule of law neces­si­tates the sep­a­ra­tion of fam­i­lies.”

    ...

    The Her­itage Foundation’s Project 2025 offers more vis­i­bil­i­ty into what pol­i­cy agen­da a future Trump admin­is­tra­tion might pur­sue. It says poli­cies that sup­port LGBTQ+ rights, sub­si­dize “sin­gle-moth­er­hood” and penal­ize mar­riage should be repealed because sub­jec­tive notions of “gen­der iden­ti­ty” threat­en “Amer­i­cans’ fun­da­men­tal lib­er­ties.”

    It also pro­pos­es increas­ing sur­veil­lance of abor­tion and mater­nal mor­tal­i­ty report­ing in the states, com­pelling the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion to revoke approval of “chem­i­cal abor­tion drugs” and pro­tect­ing “reli­gious and moral” objec­tions for employ­ers who decline con­tra­cep­tion cov­er­age for employ­ees. One of the groups that part­ners with Project 2025, Turn­ing Point USA, is among con­ser­v­a­tive influ­encers that health pro­fes­sion­als have crit­i­cized for tar­get­ing young women with mis­lead­ing health con­cerns about hor­mon­al birth con­trol. Anoth­er pri­or­i­ty is defund­ing Planned Par­ent­hood, which pro­vides repro­duc­tive health care to low-income women.

    Wolfe, who has delet­ed sev­er­al posts on X that detail his views, has a more extreme out­look of what a gov­ern­ment led by Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists should pro­pose. In a Decem­ber post, he called for end­ing sex edu­ca­tion in schools, sur­ro­ga­cy and no-fault divorce through­out the coun­try, as well as forc­ing men “to pro­vide for their chil­dren as soon as it’s deter­mined the child is theirs” — a clear incur­sion by the gov­ern­ment into Amer­i­cans’ pri­vate lives.

    “Chris­tians should reject a Christ-less ‘con­ser­vatism,’” he expand­ed in anoth­er X mis­sive, “and demand the polit­i­cal move­ment we are most close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with make a return to Christ-cen­tered foun­da­tions. Because it’s either Christ or chaos, even on the ‘Right.’”
    ...

    And in case it’s not clear that Trump and this larg­er move­ment is keep­ing a “call to arms” in its back pock­et as an option should the need arise, note how Michael Fly­nn is con­tin­u­ing to recruit an “Army of God” for Trump and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism:

    ...
    Trump is also talk­ing about bring­ing his for­mer nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er Michael Fly­nn, a vocal pro­po­nent of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, back into office. Fly­nn is cur­rent­ly focused on recruit­ing what he calls an “Army of God” — as he barn­storms the coun­try pro­mot­ing his vision of putting Chris­tian­i­ty at the cen­ter of Amer­i­can life.
    ...

    And as the fol­low­ing RightWing­Watch piece from back in Octo­ber describes, Fly­nn isn’t the only lead­ing fig­ure in this move­ment already engag­ing in mil­i­tant rhetoric. As William Wolfe implored an audi­ence at a “Jesus And Pol­i­tics” con­fer­ence “If we have ever lived in a point in time in Amer­i­can his­to­ry since then that we could argue that now is the time to arms again, I think we are get­ting close”:

    Right Wing Watch

    For­mer Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Offi­cial William Wolfe Says ‘We Are Get­ting Close’ to Chris­tians Tak­ing Up Arms

    By Kyle Manty­la | Octo­ber 31, 2023 3:58 pm

    For­mer Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial and unabashed Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist William Wolfe spoke at a “Jesus And Pol­i­tics” con­fer­ence ear­li­er this month, where he railed against “cow­ard­ly” Chris­tians and warned that “we are get­ting close” to a point where Chris­tians will have to “heed the call to arms.”

    Wolfe framed his remarks by quot­ing exten­sive­ly from a 1758 ser­mon deliv­ered by Vir­ginia evan­ge­list Samuel Davies to a mili­tia dur­ing the French And Indi­an War.

    ...

    Wolfe then read a por­tion from the 1758 ser­mon in which Davies declared that in a time of war when Chris­tians are “in dan­ger by the loss of our reli­gion,” then “even the God of Peace pro­claims by His prov­i­dence, ‘To arms!’ Then the sword is, as it were, con­se­crat­ed to God; and the art of war becomes a part of our reli­gion.”

    “If we have ever lived in a point in time in Amer­i­can his­to­ry since then that we could argue that now is the time to arms again, I think we are get­ting close,” Wolfe then pro­claimed. “Even though as Chris­tians we seek peace, when the ene­my is pressed upon us, if we fail to heed the call to arms, then we are act­ing as cow­ards.”

    ...

    ————

    “For­mer Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Offi­cial William Wolfe Says ‘We Are Get­ting Close’ to Chris­tians Tak­ing Up Arms” By Kyle Manty­la; Right Wing Watch; 10/31/2023

    ““If we have ever lived in a point in time in Amer­i­can his­to­ry since then that we could argue that now is the time to arms again, I think we are get­ting close,” Wolfe then pro­claimed. “Even though as Chris­tians we seek peace, when the ene­my is pressed upon us, if we fail to heed the call to arms, then we are act­ing as cow­ards.””

    William Wolfe in his own words. Seem­ing­ly insur­rec­tionary words. Wolfe is itch­ing to declare war on, well, basi­cal­ly Amer­i­can who isn’t already a Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist. To do oth­er­wise would appar­ent­ly be an act of cow­ardice.

    We’ve been warned. Again. We def­i­nite­ly can’t say we weren’t warned at this point. Which might be the point of all these pre­emp­tive warn­ings.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 21, 2024, 11:30 pm

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