2025 pres trans pjt

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see unitary pres (roger severino, carrie t shirt?)

uihline $?

no merri

see dans // bak

bad code semafor

bak 7 23

see mike davis artl 3

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AN 3 24 DEPT OF LIFE

Far-right wants 'Department of Life' in second Trump term to further curtail women’s rights - Alternet.org

Two Project 2025 partners are promoting LifeWise, an organization bringing “Bible education” to public schools | Media Matters for America

mma 3 24 natcon

The American Conservative, a right-wing blog and Project 2025 partner, published an article advocating to repeal the 22nd Amendment so that Donald Trump would be able to serve a third term.

The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, limits a president to serving two terms. It was adopted after former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to a third and fourth term amid public concerns about a “long-term president.”

An article headlined “Trump 2028” published in The American Conservative advocates for the amendment’s repeal so that Trump could be eligible to serve a third term should he win the 2024 election. The American Conservative is a partner of Project 2025, the conservative movement’s comprehensive transition plan for the next Republican presidency. Project 2025 — organized and led by The Heritage Foundation, a leading right-wing think tank — is a policy and staffing initiative that threatens to weaken democracy, significantly roll back civil rights, and exacerbate climate change, among other issues.

Peter Tonguette, a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner who also regularly writes for The American Conservative, dubiously argues in his piece that the drafters of the 22nd Amendment could not have anticipated a president who would serve nonconsecutive terms, a possibility that he argues is a reflection of Trump’s supposedly unique popularity. (Polls show that the majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of the former president.) He says voters should not be “denied the freedom” to elect him to a third term.

He describes the 22nd Amendment as “plainly unfair” and places “artificial limits” on “voter choice.” From the blog:

As the primary season has shown us, the Republicans have not moved on from Trump—yet the Twenty-second Amendment works to constrain their enthusiasm by prohibiting them from rewarding Trump with re-election four years from now.

This is plainly unfair.

…

The case of Donald Trump, however, makes an even more forceful ethical argument against the Twenty-second Amendment and for its repeal: If a man who once was president returns, after a series of years, to stand again for the office and proves so popular as to earn a second nonconsecutive term—as Trump seems bound to do—to deny him the right to run for a second consecutive term cuts against basic fair play. If, by 2028, voters feel Trump has done a poor job, they can pick another candidate; but if they feel he has delivered on his promises, why should they be denied the freedom to choose him once more?

He concludes: “Trump in 2028!”

Project 2025 is backed by a coalition of over 100 organizations and individuals, at least two-thirds of which receive funding from the Koch network or conservative philanthropist Leonard Leo. The project has also been heavily promoted by MAGA-connected media figures such as Steve Bannon, who has called it the “blueprint” for Trump's second term on his War Room podcast.

Tonguette is also the author of such luminary blogs as “Long Live the Common Cold,” which he describes as “one of life’s most valuable little trials,” and “My Mother Loved Donald Trump.”

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START AHA DOH

DISRUPTER primary 3 24 on bannon

main chaos disruption is mostly about real stability in physical world, eg ~ global weirding but

this is more about abstraction/ideas social system as of 11/20

see bannon trump admin state

see boom bust oscillation

hype fear/ anger to justify fascism urban migrant biden crime 2 24

tobacco fossil fuel want tosow doubt

putin wants to disrupt faith in elections

inequality --> instability, polarization --> demonization --> violence

gop rw wants to create doubt on ability of gov't to function

an 3 24

according to Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson, former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon will have an outsized influence on a second Trump administration despite no longer being a key architect of his rise.

In a deep dive into Bannon's strong influence on the MAGA movement, Wilson told the Guardian's David Smith that Bannon is a great believer in sowing "chaos" to achieve his goals and his ramping up his rhetoric as the former president makes his third bid for the Oval Office should set off alarms.

With Smith reporting Bannon harped on Trump winning the 2020 presidential election before an enraptured crowd at CPAC recently, he added, "It was a blunt reminder that Bannon, an architect of Trumpism variously compared to Thomas Cromwell, Rasputin and Joseph Goebbels, remains a potent force in American politics as the 2024 US presidential election looms into view and the re-election of Trump looks a clear possibility."

With that in mind, Smith suggested Bannon would cast " a long shadow" over a second Trump administration.

Former GOP strategist Wilson agreed.

“Steve Bannon is a if not the primary spiritual and intellectual force of this nationalist movement that is in control of the Republican party," he explained. "He is a very powerful figure in today’s GOP [Grand Old Party] and it is inescapable in some ways that he will play a central role in whatever Trump administration emerges if Trump wins. He is the architect. As an avowed Leninist, he is a guy who is trying to engineer the revolution in his image.”

Continuing in that vein, he was asked what Bannon likely has in mind for a second Trump go-around.

“Concentration camps," he replied. "This guy keeps saying out loud they’re the enemies of the people, our opponents are deserve what they get, this hyperbolic rhetoric. He believes in power and chaos and will do whatever he can if he gets it. Whatever he could get away with in that circumstance, he will get away with it.”ENDIT

an 2 24 no lnx

Tuesday's episode of MSNBC's The ReidOut, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson spoke with host Joy Reid Tuesday about one of the most "frightening" aspects of a potential second Donald Trump administration.

Reid pointed to a Tuesday Politico report highlighting the fact that Russell Vought, former Trump director of the Office of Management and Budget is spearheading the potential administration's efforts to inject Christian nationalist ideals into the US government.

The MSNBC host emphasized that during a second Trump term, the United States government could eventually mirror Argentina's government — which has become an "the ultra-capitalist state" under its president — if the MAGA hopeful is successful in implementing a Christian nationalist state.

READ MORE: 'Handmaid’s Tale': Biden campaign blasts Trump Christian nationalism plans

"We don't want to do that. We really don't want to do that," Robinson replied. "I lived in Argentina. I love Argentina, the people and everything, but we don't want to follow their terms of government and how they raise their government. Vought wants to give Christian nationalism an image makeover and make it a bright and sunny and good thing. The Constitution — it doesn't really say separation of church and state, according to him. That piece — the Politico piece — about his plans is really frightening."

The longtime Post columnist emphasized, "One of the most frightening things is his apparent plans to bring back one of Trump's worst appointees, Michael Flynn, who pops up in that story later on. And he's become a christian nationalist nut. I guess he always was or has been for a long time. I'll tell you, this is extreme and it is — it's not irreversible, but this is really terrible for the country. And the Republican party is fine with this, and it's not only allowing it, but aiding and abetting it, and pushing it forward in a very deliberate way."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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yikes trump = offense = fascism

AN 12 23 thom 3

if Trump is re-elected, he’d be America’s 47th president, so he’s named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47.” At best, it’s a dystopian nightmare: at worst it means ending our current system of American government; aligning the US with Russia and other autocratic nations; and the USA leading the charge against democracy and in favor of authoritarian, strong-man forms of government across the world.

Over at his website, Trump lays out the details of his governing agenda, complete with short videos promoting each of the steps he plans to take. They, and his many statements about future plans, include:

Part of Agenda 47, Trump says, is “finishing the job” he started as president between 2017 and 2021.

Just two hours after he and Pence were sworn into office, they removed all mention of LGBTQ+ issues from the White House website.

Two days later, his State Department deleted former Secretary of State John Kerry’s apology to the nation for the “Lavender Scare” government persecution of gays and lesbians during the McCarthy era 1950s and early 1960s. A month later, Trump’s Justice Department announced they’d no longer defend the civil rights of trans kids.

His Education and HUD offices both withdrew their court defenses of queer people, particularly students and those in homeless shelters, and his Secretary of State refused to mention to the Russian Foreign Minister the detention and brutal executions of gay men by Russian soldiers in Chechnya. On May 4, 2017 Trump signed an executive order letting the DOJ ignore claims of illegal discrimination against queer people and women throughout every single one of the nation’s federal agencies.

In September, 2017, Trump’s Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, officially ended that agency’s Title IX guidance requiring schools to do something about sexual harassment, including sexual violence, against women and LGBTQ+ kids. In response to a question from the media about the change in policy and gay men, Trump said that his Vice President “wants to hang them all.”

In January of 2018, Trump rolled out the “Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom” at HHS, which would backstop people who wanted to use the excuse of “deeply held religious beliefs” to justify explicit discrimination against queer people and women, or to simply to make life difficult for government agencies.

All of this is just the beginning. The Human Rights Campaign has documented page after page of anti-queer policies put into effect by Trump that will be resurrected and put on steroids in a second term.

In the Agenda 47 section of his website, Trump explains how he’s going to use our schools and colleges to indoctrinate young Americans in rightwing ideology. He explicitly says:

“When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.”

Any colleges that continue to teach “under the guise of [racial] equity will not only have their endowment taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.”

In other words, just like Viktor Orbán did in Hungary and Putin did in Russia, he’s going to bankrupt the nation’s schools and colleges if they continue to teach the true history of America and promote egalitarian values. As Trump notes at his website:

“[W]e are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all.”

Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon said he was going to use “impoundment” to strip funding from agencies his donors didn’t like, claiming that, even though Congress had appropriated budgets for them, he could, as head of the Executive Branch, simply “impound” the money and refuse to spend it. His plan to remake the federal government was interrupted by Watergate.

In 1974, Democrats in Congress got together and passed legislation outlawing this and Jerry Ford signed it into law. But Trump’s lawyers apparently think they can get it overturned through their appointees on the courts or even, if they can take both branches of Congress, through new legislation. As Trump says on his website:

“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”

Since the fossil fuel companies, banks, refineries, anti-union big employers, and their billionaires who fund the GOP hate all of these agencies, it’ll be a bonanza for them.

Not so much for working people, retirees, and those of us concerned about a livable future environment for our kids and grandkids, though.

First, he wants to make it illegal for the federal government’s security services to notify social media platforms about Russian disinformation and other foreign efforts to swing elections, since nearly 100% of those efforts are coming from authoritarian countries in support of Trump and against democracy.

“I will ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as “mis-” or “dis-information,” Trump proclaims on his Agenda 47 website.

He also wants to force social media to carry his buddy Putin’s trolls’ lies and attempts to pit Americans against each other, and limit the companies’ ability to label or block lies and propaganda. As Trump puts it:

“I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business.”

In Hungary, one way Viktor Orbán got rid of actual news media and replaced the ownership of all the nation’s major radio and TV networks, websites, and newspapers was by changing the libel laws so that public figures (like Orbán himself) could sue for libel when they thought they were treated unfairly.

They then sued company after company, commentator after commentator, reporter after reporter, into bankruptcy.

Orbán’s rightwing buddies could buy the media properties out of bankruptcy which is why now virtually all the media in Hungary is like Fox “News,” broadcasting suck-ups to Orbán and criticism of “liberals,” immigrants, and gays 24/7.

Trump wants to do the same here in the US.

When Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury came out with some unflattering characterizations of Trump in it, the then-president said:

“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts. And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.”

Simply reporting on what Trump’s up to could bring lawsuits that would bankrupt even the Times or the Post, and, like in Hungary and Russia, pretty much end the existence of a free and independent press in America.

Trump has promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists who tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House (and whose actions led to the death of four police officers), and put into place a national “stop and frisk” law that upends the 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

It would also — like Duterte in the Philippines who executed over 10,000 people during his reign of terror — authorize the federal government to immediately execute anybody convicted of trafficking in drugs without further due process or appeals.

Republicans in Texas have already pioneered using vigilantes to hunt down women who’ve had abortions and the people who’ve helped them. Expect these vigilante-enforced laws to spread across the country with a second Trump administration, with groups like the Proud Boys and III Percenters becoming the modern-day equivalent of the old west’s 19th century bounty hunters.

In a flashback to Hitler’s “work camps” that preceded the death camps by five years, Trump’s also proposed building concentration camps around the country to house “millions” of undocumented aliens and his political enemies. As he noted in a speech on Veterans’ Day this year:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” adding that Russia isn’t a problem. Instead, he said, “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

Presumably that means people like me and you, who would oppose his fascist agenda.

Way back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but didn’t offer Guiteau a federal speechwriter’s job, which provoked a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.

The explicit and institutionalized practice of exchanging gifts and personal loyalty for federal jobs dated back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), arguably the second-most depraved president in American history behind Trump (which is probably why Trump hung his picture in the Oval Office; Jackson’s favorite nickname for himself — given him by the Cherokee he slaughtered — was “The Indian Killer”).

Jackson had elevated the practice of bribing the president — himself, at the time — to get federal jobs into an art-form: it was called the “spoils” or patronage system and was insanely corrupt. It was also, by Garfield’s presidency in 1881, routine.

It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats, whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time.

It also explicitly outlawed bribing the president for a job. The goal, which it accomplished and has held for 140 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government.

Donald Trump wants to functionally end the Civil Service system and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself.

He tried to do this in the last months of his presidency through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, (which Biden reversed on his first day in office) that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions, doing the same work but now entirely dependent on the good will of the president to keep their jobs.

The next Republican administration will almost certainly put Schedule F back into force, reestablishing the 1829 spoils system for the federal government, and ending any possibility that people in the government will push back against Trump the way they did during his presidency.

The Department of Justice was established by President Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War, in part to enforce federal laws protecting the rights of people who’d recently been freed from slavery.

After Richard Nixon tried to use it against his enemies (and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison for his efforts), Congress in 1978 passed the Ethics in Government Act which put a wall of separation between the DOJ and the White House.

Trump has explicitly proclaimed his intention to tear that wall down and go farther than Nixon ever imagined in using our armed investigative services for personal revenge and harassment of people he perceives as his enemies.

He wants the nation’s premiere police agencies to become his own personal enforcers, and has already said they will be hunting down “liberals,” Black Lives Matter protest participants, and Joe Biden, his family, and members of his administration.

He wants to imprison them, as well as the prosecutors and judges who have been participating in the effort to hold him to account for the crimes he committed over the past 7 years.

This politicization of law enforcement has been a first-order and primary feature of every authoritarian or totalitarian regime that’s risen to power over the past few hundred years, worldwide. It’s always one of the first things fascist leaders do when they seize power.

In an apparent attempt to portray himself as a visionary like JFK, with his promise to send men to the moon and bring them back safely, Trump is promising to build “freedom cities” in his second term. The main feature he’s discussed is that people will get around in them in “flying cars.”

While it’s being portrayed as a goofy stunt designed to make him seem like an imaginative idealist, in fact there has been a movement among rightwing billionaires for some time to create cities that they basically run as little feudal fiefdoms, the same way the morbidly rich run their companies and their football teams.

Some libertarian billionaires assert that the only reason there’s never been a successful libertarian nation in the history of the world is because true libertarianism — government doing nothing but running the police, army, and courts and everything else left to private charity and business owners — “has never been tried.”

The ”freedom cities” could be a new libertarian experiment, or they may be the 21st century version of the old “company town,” where nobody has rights or protection of the law but is subject to the whims of the local billionaire owner. A group backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has already put forward what appears to be a plan to build a new city in California that they may or may not envision running along these lines. The group has so far purchased more than 53,000 acres of land, an area larger than the entire city of Beaumont, Texas, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Trump is also promising that he’ll end the brutal attacks against Ukraine on “day one” by simply turning the country over to his good friend, Vladimir Putin.

For the first time since World War II, this would legitimize a nation attacking another nation simply to seize their land, resources, and people.

It would greenlight China to do the same with Taiwan, and encourage every other tinpot dictator in the world to grab nearby territory that he wants. It would encourage war, and could very easily lead to a world war.

Abandoning Ukraine like this, along with Trump’s oft-stated preference to leave or end NATO and stop support for the UN, would lead the autocracies of the world — particularly Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea — to destroy the democracies in their sphere of influence, replacing those democracies with strongman autocracies.

The democratic experiment on this planet is only 250 years old, more or less, and this would signal a return to the way the world had been ruled for the 7,000 years prior to that: by kings, popes, mullahs, strongman warlords, and the morbidly rich.

Between Agenda 47 and Project 2025, Donald Trump and the rightwing billionaires who own the GOP have big plans for this nation, regardless of which Republican takes the White House next. They’re dead serious and far more well-funded than any of the groups that fight for and advocate democracy.

If you thought it can’t happen here, I have an old Sinclair Lewis book to share with you.

Triple check your voter registration, especially if you live in a Red state where the voter purges have already begun, and make sure everybody you know is registered to vote.

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Project 2025 senior advisor John McEntee on staffing the next Trump administration: "Sometimes experience is bad" | Media Matters for America

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rww January 29, 2024

Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley @ Rolling Stone: Trump’s Secret Plan to Expand Presidential Immunity to ‘King George’ Levels.

Tired of being criminally prosecuted, Donald Trump and his allies are plotting a way to give presidents a legal shield for life if he wins in 2024.

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an 12 23

during his four years in the White House, former President Donald Trump clashed with a long list of conservative Republicans who served in his administration — including a secretary of state (Rex Tillerson), a national security adviser (John Bolton), a U.S. attorney general (Jeff Sessions) and a White House Chief of Staff (John F. Kelly). Former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr (a Sessions successor) were, for months, regarded as dedicated Trump allies, but in the end, even Pence and Barr became Trump critics.

Trump allies' Project 2025 agenda, according to reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post, seeks to avoid such clashes during a possible second Trump Administration by making sure that only avowed loyalists are hired.

In a report published on December 15, the Wall Street Journal's Alex Leary describes some of the MAGA Republicans and loyalists who are helping Trump with plans for a possible return to the White House in 2025.

"When Donald Trump sat down in the office of his Bedminster, NJ golf club late this summer to flesh out his trade and border policy," Leary reports, "familiar faces were across from him: Robert Lighthizer and Russell Vought, two of the architects of the former president's populist first-term record. Trump's former trade representative and White House budget director, respectively, are part of a cadre of allies helping him shape policy proposals across a range of topics, laying the groundwork for what would be an aggressive and controversial second-term agenda."

Leary continues, "The group — which also includes Stephen Miller, driver of hardline immigration policies, former Housing Secretary Ben Carson and John Ratcliffe, former director of national intelligence, among others — is stocked with veterans of Trump's first term who are closely aligned with his vision of protectionist economic policies and an isolationist approach to foreign policy."

The WSJ reporter stresses that Trump and his allies want to make sure people picked for a second administration would be "on the same page" when it comes to immigration, foreign policy and economic policy.

According to Leary, other "key people" who "Trump and his team are in regular communication with over policy ideas" range from Brandon Judd (president of the National Border Patrol Council), Kevin Hassett (who formerly chaired the Council of Economic Advisers) and former Acting U.S. Attorney General Matt Whittaker (who came after Sessions and before Barr).

Leary notes that Trump's "policy agenda" has "excited core supporters while alarming Democrats and some Republicans."

One of those Republicans is Marc Short, who served in Trump's administration and later became an adviser for Pence's presidential campaign before Pence dropped out of the race.

Short told WSJ, "He's been pretty clear in saying he will use the levers of government to go after his political opponents, which is anathema to conservatives."

*Read the Wall Street Journal's full report at this link (subscription required).

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an 12 23

the Washington Post and the New York Times have been providing in-depth, detailed reporting on Project 2025, Donald Trump and his allies' game plan for giving the United States' federal government a total MAGA makeover if he wins the 2024 GOP presidential primary and defeats President Joe Biden in the general election.

Project 2025, according to reporting in the Post and the Times, is designed to undermine the country's system of checks and balances and make sure anyone working in the federal government is an unquestioning Trump loyalist. And critics of Project 2025, from liberals and progressives to right-wing Never Trump conservatives, have been attacking it as a recipe for full-fledged authoritarianism.

In an opinion column published on December 13, MSNBC's Sarah Posner zeros in one of the troubling elements of Trump's Project 2025 agenda for a possible second term: an emphasis on "Christian nationalism."

Posner has had a lot to say about Trump's alliance with far-right white evangelicals; she's the author of the 2021 book "Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind."

"Whatever Republicans like Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota may claim," Posner warns, "Donald Trump was not 'being funny' about governing as a dictator. …. We know he meant it because we saw what he did in his first term, including after his 2020 loss. We also know he's not joking because he has an army of right-wing activists who are bent on carrying out their own authoritarian agenda for the Christianization of the federal government, especially at the Department of Health and Human Services."

Project 2025's "Christian Right agenda," Posner notes, is outlined in the Heritage Foundation's "Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise" — a document she describes as "the blueprint for a possible Trump second term." Some of its proposals for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) come from Trump ally Roger Severino.

"In the Heritage document," Posner explains, "Severino makes clear that punishing blue states remains a key goal. He proposes cutting off Medicaid funding to states like California that require coverage for abortion services in health insurance. Severino also promotes the right-wing trope that protection of LGBTQ rights is a malevolent ideology deployed by soulless bureaucrats to crush the freedom of religious Americans."

*Sarah Posner's full MSNBC column is available at this link.

an 12 23

as part of their Project 2025 agenda, Donald Trump's MAGA allies have — according to reports in the New York Times, the Washington Post and Axios — been thinking long and hard about the type of MAGA Republicans they would like to include in a second Trump Administration if he wins the 2024 GOP presidential nomination and goes on to defeat President Joe Biden in the general election. The idea of Project 2025 is to give the United States' federal government a thorough MAGA makeover and make sure that only devout, unquestioning loyalists are hired.

MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan has been slamming Project 2025 as a dangerous recipe for far-right authoritarianism. During a recent broadcast, the progressive host cited "unhinged" GOP attorney Mike Davis as a troubling example. Donald Trump Jr. and "War Room" host Steve Bannon are among the MAGA Republicans who have been touting Davis as a possible candidate for U.S. attorney general during a second Trump Administration.

To show how extreme Davis is, Hasan showed clips of him on "The Benny Show" promising that as attorney general, he would "put kids in cages" and send political opponents to "the gulag." On October 1, 2023, Davis tweeted, "The violent Black underclass is a danger to America…. We must resume the mass incarceration of these thugs. In the meantime, Americans must arm up. These monsters will kill."

Hasan told viewers, "Mike Davis is on their radar not in spite of, but because of, his unhinged rhetoric…. Mike Davis is something that the Trump Administration lacked the last time around: a skilled, even competent, veteran of Beltway legal politics and right-wing causes — one who seems keen to transform Trump's darkest fascist impulses into an actual policy agenda…. Mike Davis is super-authoritarian and as we've discussed, super competent. That makes him super dangerous."

Hasan added, however, that Davis is only one of the many "authoritarians" Trump and his loyalists would like to hire. The MSNBC host noted that according to Axios, they are hoping to install, in the federal government, a "pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents."

*Watch the full video below or at this link.

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an 12 23

attorney General Stephen Miller? Vice President Tucker Carlson? White House Chief of Staff Steve Bannon? CIA Director Kash Patel? A new report detailing a second Donald Trump presidency’s “loyalty first” potential cabinet nominees is sending shock waves over their extremist positions and in some cases an entirely insufficient level of experience for the job.

“Former President Trump, if elected, would build a Cabinet and White House staff based mainly on two imperatives: pre-vetted loyalty to him and a commitment to stretch legal and governance boundaries, sources who talk often with the leading GOP presidential candidate tell Axios,” the news outlet reported in an exclusive Thursday morning. “If Trump won in 2024, he’d turn to loyalists who share his zeal to punish critics, purge non-believers, and take controversial legal and military action, the sources tell us.”

Some of these possible picks for the very top levels of government hold or have promoted white supremacist, Christian nationalist, authoritarian, or fascistic policies or beliefs.

Axios calls them “full, proud MAGA warriors, anti-GOP establishment zealots, and eager and willing to test the boundaries of executive power to get Trump’s way.”

“They want to target and jail critics, including government officials and journalists; deport undocumented immigrants or put them in detainment camps, and unleash the military to target drug cartels in Mexico, or possibly crack down on criminals or protesters at home,” Axios’ Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei report, adding, “They want to scrap rules that limit their ability to purge government workers deemed disloyal.”

“Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas — a former Army infantry officer known for his hard edge, and who wrote a New York Times op-ed in Trump’s first term supporting use of the Insurrection Act against civil disorder — would be considered to head the Pentagon,” according to Axios.

Most of the names mentioned in the Axios report are well-known, and they are being promoted by many surrounding the disgraced criminally-indicted ex-president.

“Donald Trump Jr. has floated [Mike] Davis, the former chief counsel for nominations to then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), to be Trump’s interim attorney general — saying it would be a ‘shot across the bow of the swamp,'” Axios reports. “In his public auditions for the job, the bombastic Davis has promised a ‘three-week reign of terror‘ in which he would ‘put kids in cages’ and jail prosecutors and journalists who have gone after Trump — even telling MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan that he has ‘his spot picked out in the D.C. gulag.'”

Meanwhile, Melania Trump is pushing for “booted” Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson to be Trump’s running mate.

Other vice presidential possibilities mentioned include Arkansas governor and former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, U.S. Senator J.D Vance, and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Some close to Trump are promoting themselves for the vice presidential role, including U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL).

Axios also reports that “Johnny McEntee,Trump’s loyalty vetter and enforcer, [who] headed presidential personnel in the first term … might return to that role with even more power. He also could be Trump’s gatekeeper as head of Oval Office operations, or could be Cabinet secretary, riding herd on the White House liaisons to each department.”

“By late 2020, McEntee had explicit lists of top officials to fire and hire in a Trump second term, reaching far down the federal bureaucracy in a mission to truly ‘clean out’ the ‘Deep State.’ That project has continued outside of government with a $22 million presidential transition project led by the Heritage Foundation.”

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Axios’ Jim VandeHei, who co-authored the report, dove even further into how concerning these potential picks are, leading the Biden campaign to post a clip of a small portion of his remarks on social media:

IFrame Content twt?

Vandehei went on to say, “you might like that, then you’re going to be electrified by this group but if you don’t like it, you’re probably going to be horrified by some of the picks. But what’s in common with all of these people is they share at least a willingness to do all the things that Donald Trump would say.”

And he reminded that none of Trump’s previous team that guarded the American people against his worst instincts will be part of a second Trump administration.

“None of those shackles will exist. He’s going to come in with a group of enablers and a group of executors. So whatever you thought about the first term, he’s going to be able to do things at a velocity rate he wasn’t capable of because he didn’t really know how to govern,” Vandehei added. “Now he knows a little bit better, but he’s surrounded by people and there’s these multimillion dollar efforts outside of his own orbit at the Heritage Foundation.”

“It’s not necessarily about substance,” he said of how the people choosing who becomes part of any next Trump administration would be, “it’s basically an ideological litmus test. Are you willing to believe wholly in Donald Trump, serve loyalty to Donald Trump and then implement his view of what the world should look like? If you can pass that test you might be one of the 50,000 people who get to come into [his] government.”

Meanwhile, critics responding to the Axios report are voicing extreme concern.

“This is about the most dystopian article ever written,” observed The Bulwark’s Tim Miller. “Like asking ChatGPT to write about a fantasy Trump administration cabinet that blends Nazis and celebrities in the style of 2008 Politico playbook.”

Former Biden Commerce Dept. official Caitlin Legacki wrote, “This Axios reporting should be a 5-alarm fire. Terrifying stuff in here and it’s barely making waves.”

U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) warned, “This is what is at stake in 2024 & lurking behind every single thing the extreme MAGA GOP is doing. Don’t lose the plot in their chaos or we will lose our democracy.”

New Jersey Treasury Dept. official Darryl Isherwood summed up what many seemed to be saying: “If this doesn’t scare you, you’re not paying attention.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

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Donald Trump was hardly the first U.S. president to issue controversial pardons.

A month after President Richard Nixon's resignation, President Gerald R. Ford granted him a full and unconditional pardonfor any Watergate-related crimes he might have committed — a move that Democratic strategists used against Ford in the 1976 election. The 140 pardons that President Bill Clinton issuedon January 20, 2021 during the final hours of his presidency received plenty of scrutiny.

But to Donald Trump's critics, the controversial pardons that he issued during his four years in the White House were uniquely troubling.

Trump pardoned a long list of MAGA Republicans and loyalists who were either convicted of serious crimes or pled guilty to them, including "War Room" host Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort (Trump's 2016 campaign manager), veteran GOP operative Roger Stone, and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

In a report published on December 2, Washington Post reporters Beth Reinhard, Manuel Roig-Franzia and Clara Ence Morse describe the prominent role that pardoned Trump loyalists are playing in his 2024 campaign.

The journalists report, "Donald Trump's clemency orders forgave more white-collar crimes than any other type of offense — tax scofflaws, health-care fraudsters, corrupt politicians and Ponzi schemers all benefited, The Post review found. Several had donated to Trump's campaigns or had the resources to do so in the future. The Post found 26 clemency recipients or their immediate family members have contributed to a Trump campaign account or a pro-Trump political committee. That means more than 1 out of 10 of the people who received pardons and commutations gave money either before they received clemency, afterward or in both periods, for a total of nearly $1.8 million."

According to Reinhard, Roig-Franzia and Morse, "Much of that tally comes from real estate developer Charles Kushner, the father of Trump's son-in-law, who pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns, witness tampering and lying to the Federal Election Commission and served time in prison in 2005 and 2006. He was pardoned in late 2020; he gave $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC this year."

READ MORE:[Trump staff creating 'pre-vetted pro-Trump army' of 54,000 loyalists to staff federal government

Flynn, the reporters note, is a contender for a possible second Trump Administration. And self-pardons, they observe, are a strong possibility should Trump win the 2024 election.

"If he returns to the White House," the journalists explain, "Trump could try to pardon himself in the two federal cases pending against him. In one, he and two co-defendants are accused of mishandling classified documents after he left office. He is the lone defendant in the other federal case, which accuses him of conspiring to subvert the 2020 vote. Trump has denied wrongdoing in both cases. A presidential self-pardon is untested in the courts, and legal experts disagree on whether such a move would be constitutional."

*The Washington Post's full report is available at this link(subscription required).

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charlie Sykes, like other veteran journalists who write for The Bulwark, has spent much of his career promoting conservatism. From a policy standpoint, the Never Trumper has a lot in common with conservative Republicans of the past — including President Ronald Reagan, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona).

But these days, Sykes — who supported President Joe Biden in 2020 — is sounding the alarm about 2024 presidential frontrunner Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, which he views as an authoritarian departure from traditional Reagan/Goldwater conservatism.

In his December 1 column, Sykes laments that way too many Americans are acting like politics are normal in the United States when Trump and his loyalists are laying the groundwork for an authoritarian dictatorship.

On November 30, the Washington Post published a Robert Kagan op-edwith a troubling headline: "A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Inevitable. We Should Stop Pretending." Sykes quotes Kagan's op-ed extensively in his column, arguing that many Americans — including Trump's critics — aren't nearly as worried as they should be.

Sykes writes, "Let's start with Robert Kagan's extraordinary warning: 'Would Trump be a dictator? And can he be stopped?' Spoiler: The answers are: (1) Yes, absolutely, and (2) Maybe not…. When he seals the nomination…. the GOP will fall into line behind a Trump 2.0 presidency. As Kagan notes, Trump is making no secret of his agenda of revenge and retribution."

The Never Trumper goes on to saythat Trump will be "largely unconstrained" if he returns to the White House but laments that "we seem to be sleepwalking toward a worst-case scenario."

Sykes also quotes an article by The Atlantic's David Grahampublished on November 29. Graham warns that many Republicans who aren't Trump loyalists will go along with Trump's worst ideas in the months to come, fearing that they will end up in prison if they alienate him.

Graham wrote, "A candidate who is running to potentially stay out of prison is a dangerous candidate. He is not just running for his own ideology or pride; he's running for his very freedom. That warps his incentives, making him more likely to employ demagogic tactics, less concerned about the way history might judge him, and more inclined to use every avenue possible to win the election — even if it means bending or breaking the law."

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1123 maddow report on jeff clark insurrection act day 1 wapo devlin

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one of the few foreign correspondents to be granted personal access to Adolph Hitler and his inner circle in the dark winter of 1933 was Welsh journalist Garreth Jones. Assigned by his home paper, the Western Mail,to cover Hitler’s push to absolute power, Jones accompanied the newly appointed chancellor and his entourage to Frankfurt for a massive political rally that was held on March 2 of 1933.

*This article originally appeared on Truthdig.

Jones’ eyewitness account of the event is bone-chilling because it looks so much like what we are seeing today at Trump rallies.

“For eight hours, the biggest hall in Germany has been packed with 25,000 people for whom Hitler is the savior of his nation,” Jones began his story. “They are waiting, tense with national fervor…I have never seen such a mass of people; such a display of flags up to the top of the high roof, such deafening roars. It is primitive, mass worship.”

Then Hitler took the stage to a “roar of applause and the thumping and the blare of a military band and the thud of marching feet.” Hitler, Jones observed, “is … a master in repeating [his] leitmotiv in many varied forms, and the leitmotiv is: ‘The republican regime in Germany has betrayed you. Our day of retribution has come.’”

As a form of political behavior, discourse and ideology, Trump and the MAGA movement are clearly fascist.

The rally closed with Hitler’s pledge to “complete the work which I began fourteen years ago as an unknown soldier, for which I have struggled as leader of the party and for which I stand today as Chancellor of Germany. We shall do our duty.”

“Again,” Jones wrote, “the hall resounds.”

Three weeks later, Hitler secured passage of the Enabling Act, bringing the Weimar Republic effectively to an end.

Flash forward some 90 years and you can hear echoes of Hitler’s Frankfurt address in the persistent messaging of Donald Trump. Speaking at the ultra-right Faith and Freedom Coalition’s 14^th annual “Road to the Majority” conference in Washington, D.C. on June 24, the former president proclaimed:

In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.

Trump delivered a similar message earlier in June, telling an audience of enraptured supporters in Columbus, Georgia, that he was being persecuted by federal and state prosecutors. He insisted that the “deep state” was also out to get those who followed him. “In the end,” Trump complained, “they’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.” This was the usual stuff of Trumpian spectacle. In a rambling tirade delivered on Veterans Day in New Hampshire, Trump vowed to “root out…the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

Trump’s fixation on Hitlerian imagery, memes and tropes is not an accident. The orange-haired demagogue has had a longstanding fascination with Hitler. According to a 1990 Vanity Fair article, Trump’s first wife Ivana, who died last year, told her divorce attorney that the former president kept a compilation of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bed. Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender remarked on Trump’s interest in Hitler in his book on the 2020 presidential campaign, “Finally We Did Win This Election.” Bender writes that Trump told his then-chief of staff Gen. John Kelly during a 2018 trip to Europe that “Hitler did a lot of good things,” particularly for the German economy. (Trump vehemently denied Bender’s account.)

The cult-like bond between the movement leader and his most ardent followers, a bond characterized by pledges of mutual aid, threats of revenge and shared delusions of victimization, is one of the bedrock features of fascism. This was graphically illustrated by the ascent to power of the two pillars of 20 ^th-century fascism, Hitler and Bennito Mussolini, whose personal style Trump is often said to emulate.

“Mussolini put his hands on his hips, thrust his chest, jutted his lower jaw,” Jonathan Blitzer wrote in a 2016 New Yorker article that profiled the work of New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of the fore most authorities on fascism. “It’s all about showing that he cannot be contained,” Ben-Ghiat told Blitzer. “It was the same with Mussolini.”

“I’ve been studying cult leaders for a hundred years’ worth of them,” said Ben-Ghiat in an appearance on Democracy Now last June. Trump “has all the signs. He is not a conventional politician of either the Democratic or Republican [Party]… He is a cult leader. And the GOP has long been…submissive to him. He put them under an authoritarian discipline, and then he made them complicit. And this is what corrupt, violent authoritarians do. They make you part of their crimes.”

As I have written before in this column, fascism is an emotionally loaded and often misapplied term. But if understood correctly, it can never be dismissed as a vestige of the past. As a form of political behavior, discourse and ideology, Trump and the MAGA movement are clearly fascist. There is no longer room for debate.

Fascism has deep roots in the United States, from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s, to the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues, and, fast-forward almost a century, the election of Trump in 2016.

There’s a long-running class factor in the current of American fascism. University of London professor Sarah Churchwell’s June 2020 essay in the New York Review of Books exactly nails it when she quotes rabbi Stephen Wise: “The America of power and wealth is an America which needs fascism.”

Churchwell’s essay, fittingly titled, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here,” offers a working definition of fascism. She notes that while fascist movements differ from nation to nation, they are united by “conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared.” These include:

{“[N]ostalgia for a purer, mythic, often rural past; cults of tradition and cultural regeneration; paramilitary groups; the delegitimizing of political opponents and demonization of critics; the universalizing of some groups as authentically national, while dehumanizing all other groups; hostility to intellectualism and attacks on a free press; anti-modernism; fetishized patriarchal masculinity; and a distressed sense of victimhood and collective grievance. Fascist mythologies often incorporate a notion of cleansing, an exclusionary defense against racial or cultural contamination, and related eugenicist preferences for certain ‘bloodlines’ over others.”*}:

If he is reelected next year, Trump could make the January 6 coup attempt look mild. The Washington Post and Politico have reported that Trump and his allies on the extreme right hope to transform the federal government into a virtual presidential dictatorship. Trump and his allies, states Politico, are “collecting the ingredients and refining the recipe for an authoritarian regime.”

The fear is that Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to deploy the military. This vision of horror includes Trump in the Oval Office using his immense power to quash civil unrest and dismantle civil service protections for government workers in order to secure their loyalty. And all this while weaponizing the Justice Department to do his bidding.

The New York Times warns that a second Trump term will be especially dire for undocumented immigrants, with mass arrests and the construction of detention camps on a scale not seen since the racist “Operation Wetback” of the Eisenhower era. The Times also reported that Trump plans to cancel the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Fascism thrives in moments of widespread social anxiety and moral panic, when large segments of the population are persuaded that liberal democracy no longer serves their interests. We are living in such a moment now. The urgency we face cannot be understated.

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Staffers who worked for former President Donald Trump are reportedly now assembling a database of MAGA loyalists in preparation for an unprecedented purge of federal workers, should Trump win a second term in 2024.

According to a new Axios report, former Trump advisors Stephen Miller and Johnny McEntee are working alongside the Heritage Foundation — one of Washington, DC's most established conservative think tanks — to build "a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army" of approximately 54,000 people to quickly staff the federal government in key domestic policy roles. Axios cofounders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen wrote that "social media histories are already being plumbed" to screen potential candidates.

"We're told immense, intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs," VandeHei and Allen wrote. "Those queasy about testing the limits of Trump's power will get flagged and rejected."

VandeHei and Allen added that the undertaking involves "hundreds of people... spending tens of millions of dollars" in order to "rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents."

The effort to pre-screen potential federal workers under a second Trump term is a key part of Project 2025, which Heritage has spearheaded in coordination with dozens of other conservative organizations. Under Project 2025, executive power under a Republican administration would be drastically expanded, and the typically apolitical federal civil service — what Trump calls "the deep state" — would be packed full of far-right apparatchiks with the goal of governing to achieve conservative political goals. Heritage President Kevin Roberts told Axios that Project 2025 is "orders of magnitude" bigger than any other transition plan assembled by a party out of power.

Earlier this year the New York Times reportedthat one of the first priorities of Project 2025 would be to re-enact Trump's "Schedule F" executive order, which was issued just two weeks before the 2020 election and that President Biden rescinded just days after his inauguration. While presidents are usually able to appoint roughly 4,000 people to various administrative roles throughout the federal government, Schedule F would have bulldozed various legal protections for federal workers that would allow a president to replace approximately 50,000 additional staff across all federal agencies. The Times noted that Project 2025's goal of screening potential new staffers has been assisted with AI provided by tech giant Oracle.

Trump has indicated that if elected to a second term, he would carry out various acts of vengeance, including weaponizing the Department of Justice against his political opponents. The Times reported over the weekend that Trump would also greatly expand immigration crackdowns, enabling the Department of Homeland Security to carry out large-scale raids, detain immigrants at industrial-size camps and deport millions of immigrants every year.

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right Wing Watch reported in June 2022 that on the same day the Trump-enhanced right-wing Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade, a coalition of Christian nationalist, voter suppression, anti-LGBTQ-equality, Big Lie-promoting, and Trump-cheerleading groups had publicly launched a project that would “position the movement to take the reins of government” after a Republican victory in the 2024 presidential election.

Since then, the right-wing coalition has expanded, and reporting by national media outlets has fleshed out some frightening specifics of the “Project 2025” plan to conduct an ideological purge of the civil service and turn the entire executive branch into an enforcement arm of the MAGA movement—and if former President Donald Trump is elected, a weapon for personal retribution against his enemies.

The Washington Post reported Nov. 5 that Trump and some former administration officials are scheming with Project 2025 to abandon a rule-of-law principle embraced for decades that the Justice Department’s law enforcement decisions should be free of political pressure from the president.

Russ Vought, a former Trump official who launched a MAGA movement think tank after Trump’s defeat, told the Post, “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.”

Even worse, Jeffrey Clark, who tried in the final days of the Trump administration to throw the weight of the Justice Department behind Trump’s false claims about the stolen election, is leading efforts to set the stage for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens—a step that some far-right leaders had urged Trump to take in 2020 to stay in power.

Politico also reported this month on a complementary project called American Moment launched after Trump’s defeat to recruit and vet young ideological warriors who would be prepared to fill lower level administration jobs created by mass firings of civil service employees. American Moment would provide an army of foot soldiers to carry out the battle plans against the “deep state” ordered by the higher-ranking officials that Project 2025 is preparing to put in place. American Moment is officially part of the Project 2025 coalition. Vought is among the MAGA movement leaders helping train American Moment’s operatives, who have served internships with Sens. J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio.

American Moment was launched with more than $300,000 from the Conservative Partnership Institute, which as Politico noted “has become a sort of administration-in-exile for former Trump staffers.” CPI has been an institutional home to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell, who participated in the notorious call on which Trump badgered Georgia’s secretary of states to “find” him the votes he needed to win the state, and was later picked to head up CPI’s “election integrity” project, which has lobbied against federal voting rights legislation.

Recognizing the threat that Trump and his MAGA Republican allies across the country pose to our rights and freedoms, People For the American Way is encouraging supporters to take a pledge to vote against authoritarian MAGA candidates and for progressive candidates in local, state, and federal elections.

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Bannon’s “War Room” is the media home of Project 2025 and Trump’s retribution plans

Bannon’s show is a staging ground for Trump’s plans to gut the civil service and normalize deploying the military against civilians

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES

PUBLISHED 11/09/23

The podcast hosted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is the media home of a sprawling right-wing effort, known as Project 2025, that’s designed to prepare policy papers and staffing assignments should a Republican win the presidency in next year’s election.

Bannon’s show, War Room, is a hub of election denialism, anti-immigrant bigotry, and promises to carry out retribution against insufficiently loyal Republicans — all hallmarks of former President Donald Trump’s first term in office and his campaign to retake the White House. Although Bannon has at times found himself isolated from Trump, he is once again “one of Trump’s most important advisers,” according to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.

As a leading advocate for the MAGA wing of the conservative movement, Bannon has been a champion of Project 2025, organized by the increasingly far-right think tank The Heritage Foundation. The initiative has brought together more than 80 groups to provide hard-right personnel and white paper proposals for Trump — or another Republican administration — should he win next November.

According to The Washington Post, Trump and his allies at Project 2025 “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.”

From his perch at War Room, Bannon has sought to normalize all of those ideas: deploying the military against protesters, weaponizing the Department of Justice against critics, and replacing the federal civil service with loyalist reactionaries.

Jeffrey Clark, who Trump attempted to install as acting attorney general in January 2021, has been on War Room several times this year and is also reportedly “leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025,” according to the Post. A Heritage spokesperson told the Post that “there are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.”

Heritage’s denial notwithstanding, Clark — who is widely believed to be an unindicted co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment against Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election — has a record of supporting the use of the military to quash dissent. In July, Clark appeared on War Room to explain how he had advocated for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020.

:{Video

CitationFrom the July 3, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“I was actually summoned up to a meeting, you know, to discuss how to proceed in terms of that — what I would call an insurrection, because it was happening night after night,” Clark recalled to Bannon.

“Remember that [former Attorney General William] Barr is the one who had participated, when he was attorney general, in using the Insurrection Act against the L.A. riots, after the Rodney King case,” Clark said. “Why wasn’t that same aggressiveness used against the riots that were all across the country in the summer of 2020?”

Referring to a memo he’d written to Barr that included “some very creative ideas about how to enforce the law against those rioters,” Clark added, “If you want to see the legal advice I gave, it’s all blacked out,” strongly suggesting he’d supported deploying the military against civilian protesters.

The next month, Smith indicted Trump for his actions to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Clark was reportedly referred to in the indictment as “unindicted co-conspirator 4,” and is alleged to have suggested Trump use the military against civilians. On January 3, 2021, White House Council Patrick Philbin told Clark — who had just accepted the job of acting attorney general — that if the Trump-Clark coup plans went forward, “there would be riots in every major city in the United States."

“Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark responded.

In the Bannon interview from July, Clark also rejected the conventional wisdom that the Department of Justice is — or should be — independent from political pressure from the White House. In Clark’s telling, the DOJ shouldn’t be walled off, as it has been by most presidents following Richard Nixon’s targeting of his enemies during the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s.

:{Video

CitationFrom the July 3, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Past administrations put in “post-Watergate ‘norms’ that say the president actually can’t make decisions about law enforcement,” Clark said. “It’s ridiculous, it’s unconstitutional, and the reason why they’re having a meltdown, Steve, is that the queen position in the administrative state is the Justice Department.”

“To say that the Justice Department is not independent is sort of the ultimate heresy,” Clark added. “This is all just post-Watergate ‘norms.’ Who cares about post-Watergate norms?”

Clark is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-aligned think tank run by Christian nationalist Russ Vought — another major player in Project 2025 and frequent War Room guest. Vought wrote the second chapter of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a combination manifesto and outline detailing how the coalition would approach the next Republican administration. In his chapter, Vought levies a broad critique of career staffers at executive branch departments and agencies, writing that “many agencies are not only too big and powerful, but also increasingly weaponized against the public and a President who is elected by the people and empowered by the Constitution to govern.”

Vought’s argument flows directly from Bannon’s long-running goal of a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” In an interview on War Room, Vought advocated for a change to budgeting rules that would allow Congress to target individual government workers, potentially canceling their funding, slashing their salary, or even firing them. He’s also a proponent of using so-called “Schedule F” to reclassify federal employees as at-will workers, an open attack on public unions and career staffers.”

Vought is especially interested in remaking the DOJ into a more explicitly reactionary institution, and his think tank has been clear that its goal is to unleash the FBI against its political enemies. As he told the Post: “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.”

On November 6, Bannon floated a name for attorney general who would fit the bill: “Jeff Clark, you're on the short list of being attorney general for Trump, and I mean the very short list.” Bannon pitched Clark for the role at least once earlier this year and has suggested disgraced former national security advisor and QAnon adherent Michael Flynn serve as secretary of defense.

Bannon isn’t just engaging in a fantasy football-style draft though — he has interviewed Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, several times this year. Although that’s a long way from installing Flynn as secretary of defense, it’s a sign that Bannon’s personnel preferences shouldn’t be dismissed simply as the rantings of a crank.

:{Video

CitationFrom the June 16, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“Let me just say to the [War Room] posse: The posse has landed at Heritage, and, you know, I really respect what your program does,” Dans gushed during an appearance in June. “I’ve been a devotee since 2020.”

Dans added, with a hat tip to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: “He brought me in in April. I started playing the War Room in May. We learned the word ‘based,’ and it's been spreading around the building. But we’re really taking over and infusing America First throughout the whole movement.”

Dans was back on the show in September with a promise to decimate the federal civil service by firing thousands of workers. “With 2025, we’re going to flood the zone,” Dans said, “It’s going to be more than 3,000 people.”

“Schedule F is one of our tools, but really the proposition of Schedule F is just saying: Look, when you come into the office, federal worker, each morning, and you’re in charge of policy, you’re not guaranteed your job when you walk out that afternoon,” Dans continued, “You have to perform. You’re going to become an at-will employee like the rest of us in real life, you know? Let’s make it look a lot more like America."

“Amen,” Bannon repeated as Dans spoke.

According to the Post, one of the top goals of another Trump administration and Project 2025 is investigating “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.” War Room frequently indulges in these impulses.

On June 12, Bannon baselessly argued that FBI director Christopher Wray and former Attorney General Bill Barr had suppressed evidence that proved Joe Biden and his family had committed financial crimes, thereby installing him in the presidency as the result of an illegitimate election.

“You are freaking guilty of treason,” Bannon said, addressing an imaginary Barr.

Back in January, former Trump advisor and right-wing pundit Sebastian Gorka went after Kelly on War Room. “You are an insult to Quantico,” Gorka said, referring to the Marine base. “You were never a Marine.”

“Go to hell, John Kelly,” he concluded.

“Wow,” Bannon responded.

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The shocking Republican plan to dismantle the American government

Thom Hartmann

September 01, 2023

As we learned from last week’s Republican debates, the leading candidates for the GOP nomination all appear to agree on a broad plan to gut American government and replace it with a strongman president and corporate rule.

The modern administrative state, sometimes called the “welfare state” by Republicans, was largely created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in response to the Republican Great Depression of the early 1930s. And every day since FDR was sworn into office on March 4, 1933, the GOP has worked feverishly to dismantle his legacy.

Outside of Russia, China, and Hungary, this isn’t true at all for the rest of the developed world.

Nations across the rest of Europe, South America, and Asia imitated FDR’s and LBJ’s America, most going beyond our simple development of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the legalization of unions to further expand opportunity and social mobility for their citizens.

For example, Taiwan has the most efficient and comprehensive single-payer healthcare system in the world; Germany requires half of the members of every large corporation’s board of directors to come from the ranks of organized labor; Luxembourg has the highest national minimum wage in the world at roughly $19.50 an hour (they calculate it monthly).

All of Europe is pledged to reduce greenhouse gasses to get climate change under control, and they require chemical companies to prove their new compounds are safe before introducing them into food or the environment (the “precautionary principle”).

Prisons across the rest of the developed world are committed to rehabilitation and only in America are run for profit; every other developed country carefully regulates the possession of guns; pharmaceuticals are inexpensive — at least half, and sometimes a tenth of their cost here in the US — in every other developed country in the world.

Republicans and the billionaires who fund them reject all of that.

They want to abandon modern ideas like prohibitions on child labor and the age of consent; worker and workplace protections and unions; free, quality public schools and colleges; civil rights and the power of women to make their own healthcare decisions.

They’re dedicated to taking America back to the era before the New Deal and, as Steve Bannon said, “deconstructing the administrative state.”

Over the years, the GOP has used a series of plans to reach their goal of a billionaire- and-corporate-owned-and-run America with working people turned into serfs and children in factories instead of school.

In 1971, it was the Powell Memo, written by Virginia tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell and delivered to the US Chamber of Commerce. It called for a rightwing takeover of America’s schools and colleges; building out a corporate-friendly media infrastructure; packing the courts with pro-corporate, anti-labor conservatives; and the wholesale purchase of Republican politicians at both the state and federal level.

The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and over the next quarter-century he used that position to put many of his own suggestions into law. In addition to decisions gutting the powers of unions and deregulating industry, Powell’s major achievement was authoring the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision that struck down hundreds of state and federal anti-corruption laws, explicitly allowing corporations and their senior officers to bribe politicians for the first time in American history.

No other developed country in the world tolerates this; outside of the United States, you only find it in developing countries that have been taken over by corrupt autocrats.

Two years later, when Ronald Reagan cut a traitorous deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages in Iran long enough to destroy Jimmy Carter’s chances in the 1980 election, the Heritage Foundation stepped up with a plan to further gut the rights and powers of working-class people and elevate corporate and billionaire power.

They called it the Mandate for Leadership and, at the time, The Washington Post said it was “an action plan for turning the government toward the right as fast as possible.”

Reagan adopted over half of Heritage’s suggestions and in some cases went even farther, cutting enforcement of our anti-trust laws; ending the Fairness Doctrine; slashing the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 27 percent; declaring all-out war on unions; gutting the EPA, Education, and Labor Departments; and selling off federal lands for pennies on the dollar to mining and drilling operations.

Now the partly-billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation has laid out a second-stage plan for the next Republican administration, whether it’s Trump or somebody else, whether it’s next year or in future presidential election cycles.

They call it Project 2025. With it, they intend to finally and fully seize control of and transform America. With it, they will rule.

Ideologues on the right correctly see the Trump administration as having been a bumbling mess. Nobody expected him to win the election, not even Trump himself (he and Roger Stone had already registered the URLs and put together a “Stop the Steal” campaign claiming “election fraud” to distract and kneecap incoming President Hillary Clinton).

Nobody realized how effective Putin’s interventions — his 29 million Facebook ads and message posts targeting a million or so people in six swing states who’d been identified as persuadable by the GOP and passed along to Russian Intelligence via Paul Manafort — would be.

When Trump was declared the winner he didn’t even have a victory speech ready, was totally unprepared to govern, and it took the better part of three years for Trump and his corrupt clown car to get their act together. Most of the time he and his son-in-law were too busy making money out of their connection to the White House. They’ve corruptly taken home billions in the years since 2016.

So this time the rightwing billionaires and their GOP lackeys aren’t taking any chances.

First up, they want to deconstruct the Civil Service, taking much of the federal workforce back to 1882. There’s an amazing backstory here.

Way back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but didn’t offer Guiteau a federal job, which provoked a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.

The explicit and institutionalized practice of exchanging gifts and personal loyalty for federal jobs dates back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), arguably the second-most depraved president in American history behind Trump (which is probably why Trump hung his picture in the Oval Office). His favorite nickname for himself — given him by the Cherokee he slaughtered with the Trail of Tears — was “The Indian Killer.”

Jackson had elevated the practice of bribing the president to get federal jobs into an art-form: it was called the “spoils” or patronage system and was insanely corrupt. It was also, by 1883, routine.

After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883. It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time.

It also outlawed bribing the president for a job. The goal, which it accomplished and has held for 140 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government.

Donald Trump wanted to functionally end the Civil Service and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself. He did this through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, (which Biden reversed on his first day in office) that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions doing the exact same work.

The next Republican administration will almost certainly put Schedule F back into force, reestablishing the 1829 spoils system for the federal government. As Paul Dans, director of Project 2025’s “Presidential Transition Project” and a former Trump administration official, told the Associated Press:

“We need to flood the zone with conservatives.”

Next up, Project 2025 proposes to kill off federal efforts that may inhibit the profits of the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it’s created who are helping fund both the GOP and Heritage.

As Scott Waldman wrote for Politico:

“Called Project 2025, it would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials.

“If enacted, it could decimate the federal government’s climate work, stymie the transition to clean energy, and shift agencies toward nurturing the fossil fuel industry rather than regulating it. It’s designed to be implemented on the first day of a Republican presidency.”

After ensuring fossil fuel industry profits and the further wilding of our weather, Project 2025 would effectively dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, presumably on behalf of the petrochemical and other polluting industries that are also big GOP donors.

It would either end or downsize the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance, and the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education. Like the process Trump began, it would shatter the EPA into pieces, moving regional offices and cutting its workforce by “terminating the newest hires in low-value programs.”

It would also block states from advancing any agenda that may prevent the further expansion of carbon pollutants that are driving global warming by “ensur[ing] that other states can adopt California’s standards only for traditional/criteria pollutants, not greenhouse gasses.”

One of the most disturbing aspects of Project 2025 and other plans for future Republican presidencies is their consolidation of power in the hands of the president, reflecting the way government is run in Hungary, China, and Russia rather than the checks-and-balances envisioned by our nation’s Founders.

They would outright end the operational independence of the of the Department of Justice and the FBI, turning both into tools (or weapons) the president alone could wield.

The Federal Reserve, with its ability to turn on the monetary spigot to ensure “the good times roll” or turn off the spigot to induce a recession would also become the president’s political plaything.

Ditto for the Federal Communications Commission, which has the power to not only regulate but even shut down over-the-air radio and TV broadcasts that displease it, as well as wielding a largely today-unused power of censorship over cable TV and the internet.

And the Federal Trade Commission, which has the power to grant billion-dollar favors or inflict severe punishments on companies, would lose their independence because they could be used to reward or destroy companies that have earned the favor or ire of the president.

As Russell Vought, president of one of the 65 far-right organizations on the Project 2025 advisory board, told The New York Times:

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”

This is all a reflection of what, for several decades, has been called the Unitary Executive Theory. It argues — erroneously — that a strongman president like Putin, Xi, or Orbán is what the Founders and Framers had in mind.

As professors Karl Manheim and Allan Ides of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles famously wrote in 2006:

“In fact, the theory of the unitary executiveis anything but an innocuous or unremarkable description of the presidency. In its stronger versions, it embraces and promotes a notion of consolidated presidential power that essentially isolates the Executive Branch from any type of congressional or judicial oversight.

“And it is much more than an academic theory. Rather it is an operative way of thinking about and applying Executive Branch power that has had and will continue to have real-world consequences for our republic and for the international community. In attempting to understand and appreciate the significance of unitary executive theory, it is worthwhile to keep in mind that it is a product of the late 20th century and not a legacy bequeathed from the founding generation.

“The theory, which in fact is more about power that it is about law, grew out of a somewhat perverse reaction to abuses of presidential power that had come to light during the late sixties and early seventies. Such events as President Johnson’s fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident and President Nixon’s secret war in Cambodia, among many other similar abuses of presidential power, led to efforts to curb what was perceived as an increasingly imperious Executive Branch. …

“The almost immediate response to this reform movement was a redoubling of efforts to consolidate and amplify presidential power. The theory of the unitary executive grew out of this reactionary response.”

Project 2025 and other efforts by the GOP to consolidate power in the Executive branch, as well as their recent successes at packing the courts and buying off Republican members of Congress, should be a clanging five-alarm fire bell for our republic.

This neofascist ideology of “rule by the rich” has been explicitly embraced by both Trump and DeSantis (who, this June, sent a senior advisor, David Dewhirst, to work on Project 2025), and the themes and contents of the plan are also regularly invoked on the campaign trail by Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley.

The merger of billionaire wealth with partisan Republican governance — and their combined efforts to reshape our government in their own corrupt image, the public be damned — threaten the integrity and future of the American experiment.

But it can only come about if we fail to awaken people, mobilize them, and vote.

Step one, then, is to wake people up to what the GOP and its billionaire patrons are planning. Pass it along.

===

donziger 8 23

The frightening blueprint indicates a new Republican Administration in 2025 will:

Repeal Biden’s premier climate bill (the Inflation Reduction Act) which designates $370 billion to fund the transition to clean energy.
Close down the Department of Energy Office responsible for promoting green technologies.
Remove climate change as an issue “worthy of discussion” on the National Security Council.
Allow drilling inside the Arctic wilderness.
Declare that the federal government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources” on America’s public lands.

Protecting the climate isn’t of course just a political issue. It’s also a human rights issue. It is terrifying to me that a large faction of Republicans and the fossil fuel industry are willing to dismantle even the modest efforts made by the Biden Administration to protect our environment.

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/two-reported-co-conspirators-trumps-alleged-coup-plot-are-organizations

two reported co-conspirators in former President Donald Trump’s scheme to remain in office after his loss in 2020 are high-ranking members of organizations working to staff the next Republican administration.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump for allegedly attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election lists six unnamed co-conspirators, two of whom have been widely reported to be John Eastman, Senior Fellow at The Claremont Institute, and Jeffrey Clark, Senior Fellow and Director of Litigation at the Center for Renewing America. According to the indictment, Clark suggested deploying the military to suppress political unrest in the event that the coup proved successful. Eastman appears to have been comfortable with that plan as well.

The Claremont Institute and the Center for Renewing America are both coalition members advising on Project 2025,an effort led by right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation to provide the next Republican president with policy papers and vetted personnel on day one of their administration. The Center for Renewing America is run by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and right-wing media regular guest with sweeping plans to gut the federal civil service and weaponize federal law enforcement against his group’s enemies under a future Republican administration. Both organizations are closely aligned with Trump and the far-right wing of the Republican Party.

If Trump is reelected, he is expected to either pardon himself or appoint an attorney general who would dismiss federal charges against him, meaning that two of the figures most closely associated with Trump’s failed coup could help determine how he quashes the case if given the chance.

Under Trump, Clark was a mid-level Department of Justice official who embraced the former president’s false allegations of voter fraud more than his colleagues did. Like CRA boss Russ Vought, Clark regularly appears on Steve Bannon's War Roomshow. After Trump’s loss, Clark proposed sending letters to election officials in key states claiming, without evidence, that the Department of Justice had “identified significant concerns” about the election results and suggesting that they should send “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump,” according to congressional testimony.

According to the indictment, on the morning of January 3, 2021, Clark also accepted an offer from Trump for the position of acting attorney general, a fact not previously known to the public. That afternoon, deputy White House counsel Patrick Philbin told Clark “there is no world” in which Trump would not leave office on January 20, 2021, and that if Clark pushed forward with the coup attempt “there would be riots in every major city in the United States.”

“Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark responded, referring to the vague and outdated law that gives the president the authority to deploy the military against civilians. Trump later rescinded the appointment following threats of mass resignations from DOJ.

Eastman is a constitutional lawyer who attempted to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to claim authority to invalidate the certification of the election on January 6, 2021. That role is purely ceremonial, and Eastman faced a disbarment hearing in California this summer related to his bogus legal claims. Axios has reported that, between January 4 and January 7, 2021, Eastman sent 101 emails offering advice to Trump and others in his circle detailing strategies to prevent Congress from certifying the election results. On August 2, Eastman appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show, where he doubled down on his theory behind the illegal attempt to over turn the 2020 election.

===

https://www.democracynow.org/2023/7/28/global_heat_climate_crisis_july_2023

...

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, I mean, the short answer is, to limit all of these impacts, we need to reduce carbon emissions very rapidly. And while we have had an incredibly impressive renewable rollout over the last couple of years, all of the graphs are pointing way up. The next decade looks much more promising for renewable energy than most advocates even believed was possible just a few years ago. Nevertheless, they’ve barely dented, if they’ve dented at all, the emissions that we’re producing from fossil fuel generation. So we haven’t actually reduced the share of global power production that comes from fossil fuels from this remarkable renewable rollout. We’re just using those renewables to add to our power capacity.

And that’s really, you know, the change that we need to make. We need to be producing so much renewables now that we can actually draw down fossil fuels, and draw them down relatively rapidly, rather than simply using them to supplement our consumption patterns and power production. And unfortunately, we haven’t really seen a sign of that. At best, it looks like we’re going to be looking at sort of a plateau for emissions over the rest of this decade. And we know from all of the scientific warnings that that’s simply inadequate if we have any hope of meeting some of our more ambitious climate targets.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, David, I want to ask you about what would be the most effective legislation in the United States to deal with climate change. But, Dharna Noor, I wanted to first go to your piece. If you can explain what Project 2025 is and what you found in your investigation?

DHARNA NOOR: Absolutely. So, Project 2025 is, essentially, a group of dozens of right-wing organizations. We’re talking about think tanks, publications and the like. And it was convened by the Heritage Foundation, which is, I think, in the climate world, very well known for promoting climate denial for decades, and for even longer promoting this sort of anti-regulatory stance. So, these groups came together in an attempt, essentially, to advise whoever the next president is, if that person is a Republican, so any Republican who takes office in next year’s presidential election.

This is the second time that the Heritage Foundation has led the creation of a sort of transition plan aimed at a Republican president. In the early ’80s, we saw the Heritage Foundation create one of these plans, that actually went on to have a huge influence on the Reagan administration and was framed as a sort of way of taking on the out-of-control regulatory state.

And in this particular iteration, there’s a lot of focus in their new transition plan on unmaking environmental regulations. I’m happy to talk more about this, but there’s a number of previous Trump appointees who have written, essentially, proposals to undo the many powers of the federal administration, from the EPA to the Department of the Interior, all in an attempt to sort of lessen the federal authority to regulate fossil fuels and, essentially, to boost those polluting industries.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting. Polls show now that Biden and Trump, even though he was indicted again yesterday, are neck and neck in the polls for president. You talk about the Department of the Interior part of the plan, in this 2025 plan, being written byWilliam Perry Pendley.You note he controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump and worked to eliminate drilling regulations. Talk more specifically, and name names.

DHARNA NOOR: Absolutely. So, as you mentioned, William Perry Pendley very controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump, controversially because he was actually never confirmed by the Senate. This was the case for a number of Trump appointees. And he also was known, before he had a role in the Trump administration, for writing this book called Sagebrush Rebel, that was really in praise of Ronald Reagan, of Ronald Reagan’s anti-regulatory sort of agenda. It’s, I think, unsurprising to see his name in a sort of proposal that’s aimed at, you know, ending the ability for federal regulations to have any real impact on the environment.

Previous reporting from E&E News, from Scott Waldman there, found that Mandy Gunasekara had written another chapter focused on remaking theEPA, really focused on shrinking its authority both by laying off staff, by cutting budgets, with an especially big focus on sort of cutting environmental programs, like environmental justice programming and public outreach programming.

Another name that was in the proposal was Bernard McNamee, who wrote a chapter on the Department of Energy, again sort of in an attempt to say we should shrink the authority of the Department of Energy. He previously served as an adviser to Ted Cruz. And before that, he led this far-right organization called the Texas Public Policy Institute — or,Texas Public Policy Foundation, rather, that really aims to undo environmental regulation and fight renewable energy at the state level.

And so, we’re really seeing, I think, a who’s who of the far right in this attempt to, you know, not only sort of be in the next president’s ear if they’re a Republican, but also, you know, sort of recommend personnel and say, “Hey, here’s who you should staff up with.”

AMY GOODMAN: What role does billionaire Charles Koch play in this project, Dharna?

DHARNA NOOR: So, the Heritage Foundation, who, again, are the far-right foundation that sort of convened this group, Project 2025, has historically had ties, financial ties, to the Koch brothers, who are, of course, billionaires who made their fortune in fossil fuels and related industries. The Heritage Foundation is also a member of the State Policy Network, which is a sort of coalition of these extreme right-wing groups that have targeted regulation, especially climate-focused regulation, in states for many years. And I think, you know, I would just say, I guess, it’s no surprise that an organization with ties to people who have made such a great fortune in the industries that must be regulated in order to take on the climate crisis, you know, have historically been tied to a group that is trying to push that agenda to the presidential level.

AMY GOODMAN: As we begin to wrap up, I wanted to ask David Wallace-Wells to respond to what Dharna is describing right now, and also talk about what needs exactly to be done. I mean, we’re speaking today, the day after the Supreme Court has just OK’d, cleared the way for construction of the contested Mountain Valley Pipeline to resume, lifting a halt on a section of the project that had been issued by a lower court earlier this month after a challenge by environmental groups.

...

ref

GUK

https://yyytheguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/27/project-2025-dismantle-us-climate-policy-next-republican-president

‘Project 2025’: plan to dismantle US climate policy for next Republican president

Rightwing groups penned a conservative wish list of proposals for the next conservative Dharna Noor

Thu 27 Jul 2023

An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged.

Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.

[A burned-out car against a background of charred trees and hills

Deadly global heatwaves undeniably result of climate crisis, scientists show

THE NEWS

Think tanks often act as an administration-in-waiting for presidents — a place to stash future appointees, generate policy plans, and flag promising young staffers. This year their role on the right is taking on outsized importance, however, as the 2024 Republican field has made overhauling the bureaucracy with more reliable allies one of their top stated goals.

That’s where the Heritage Foundation, alongside 50-plus conservative organizations in partner roles, hopes to come in. In April, the conservative nonprofit unveiled the start of a new $22 million project intended to staff the next Republican presidential administration from day one — a “private LinkedIn for conservatives,” as Paul Dans, the lead of “Project 2025,” described it.

Their work dovetails with the goals expressed in Donald Trump’s calls to “destroy the deep state,” for example, and his plans to fire and replace federal workers en masse. Rivals like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy have already accused Trump of not going far enough as president in rooting out ineffective or disloyal appointees and civil servants.

“What fundamentally unites our coalition is deconstructing the administrative state,” Dans told Semafor.

“The overall principle of this project is, you know, we've got to reassert political control over the government, reassert presidential control over the executive branch,” the project’s associate director, Spencer Chretien, later added.

besides the database the group is continuing to compile, the conservative think-tank’s ambitious effort is comprised of three additional pillars: A policy book for the next administration, an organized training effort dubbed the “Presidential Administration Academy,” and eventually a “180-day game plan of regulations and executive orders that a president could sign on day one,” Dans explained.

They’ve even recently begun taking the show on the road — some of the project’s top members have already visited Hillsdale College and Florida International University — to try and attract more promising young conservatives to Washington. (There’s also an upcoming visit to Denver for the Western Conservative Summit planned). Eventually, they hope to begin hosting roundtables and debates featuring some of the experts involved in the project’s policy book, and are even considering setting up posts along the campaign trail in key early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

SHELBY'S VIEW

“Project 2025” is, at its core, a response to Trump’s win back in 2016. In an interview, Dans said how his upset victory “took Conservative, Inc., by surprise” and thus the movement was unprepared to properly help him as he took office. Trump, who was superstitious about preparing a transition before winning, struggled to fill in the gaps himself.

“They certainly hadn't done a lot of homework to support them,” Dans said, later adding: “I think we acknowledge, if nothing else, Biden was prepared to go in there.”

Heritage’s efforts also tie into ongoing conservative allegations of “weaponization” of government officials against their priorities (which are fiercely disputed by Democrats.) This is perhaps the most organized effort thus far to respond by trying to pack the executive branch with staff of their choosing.

Prior to this, the most aggressive attempt came from Trump, who issued an executive order dubbed “Schedule F” late in his term, with guidance from former Heritage staffers. The proposal —reversed by President Biden — sought to allow the White House to get rid of huge numbers of civil servants, who are typically protected against the whims of a new president. It’s now a key part of his plans for a second term.

“I think any candidate is going to have to, at a minimum, embrace a Schedule F sort of major reform,” Dans told Semafor. “We're embarking on the 100 year reform period here in the United States.”

Heritage is also distributing its dense 887-page policy booklet, which covers topics ranging from, as Dans put it, “ending the woke military” to establishing “full spectrum energy dominance,” to 2024 presidential hopefuls plus some notable politicians. They’ve passed it on to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin — who closed a door on launching a presidential run this year but has left open a crack that he may still enter as a last minute candidate — as well as Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a critic of COVID-19 policies and a prominent spreader of anti-government conspiracy theories, and former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.px="px"> THE VIEW FROM DEMOCRATS< Democrats and many critics on the left see Trump’s “Schedule F” proposals as an attempt to undermine the basic functionings of government and consolidate power.

“This is a classic case of what Republicans love to do — to tell people that government doesn’t work for them and then work to dismantle and break the government on purpose,” a national Democratic operative said of the latest effort.,,, ;of appointees and staff who have defied his orders — including those who testified about his behavior as part of impeachment trials and federal investigations — have some observers worried his plans would be a step toward silencing his critics (or a Trump-like president’s) and enabling corruption.

“The last thing we need is for a president to fire dedicated and experienced public servants and replace them with sycophants and grifters without the skills to carry out the functions of government within the rule of law,” Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md.said last year after In an op-ed published by **The Hill,** Donald F. Kettl recently ===

===

no lnx

an 7 23

far right Heritage Foundation created a platform for Trump that plots an authoritarian take-over of the country.

Donald Trump nearly destroyed American democracy in his first term in office. If he is reelected, he plans to try to finish the job. This isn’t a matter of speculation; it’s a virtual certainty.

In campaign speeches, TV interviews, posts on Truth Social, and a head-spinning list of promises posted on his official campaign website, Trump has vowed to pressure Congress to pass legislation imposing the death penalty on drug smugglers and human traffickers; purge “Marxists” from the Department of Education; remove civil service protections for federal employees; and “obliterate the deep state [and] rout the fake news media.” He has also pledged to fire Special Counsel Jack Smith, whom he has labeled “a deranged lunatic, [a] psycho, and a “crackhead,” and appoint “a real special prosecutor” to target President Biden and his family, along with a litany of other real and imagined enemies.

It would be bad enough if such threats were simply the ravings of a wannabe dictator desperate to stay out of jail, but they are much more dangerous than that. Trump’s 2024 election bid and his vows of revenge and retribution are backed by a sophisticated and multi-faceted movement that seeks to expand presidential power to unprecedented heights should he or another like-minded GOP extremist win back the Oval Office.

The intellectual heart of the movement is the Heritage Foundation, the well-known and influential Washington-D.C.-based think tank, founded in 1973, that played an integral role in shaping the policies of President Ronald Reagan. From its early days as a pivotal player in the mainstream of the Republican Party, the Heritage Foundation went full MAGA during Trump’s first term. Last year, it launched a new initiative—dubbed the “2025 Presidential Transition Project,” or “Project 2025” for short—to ensure that the next GOP President’s authority will be unchecked.

The project’s webpage describes its vision in ambitious and unambiguous terms:

The actions of liberal politicians in Washington have created a desperate need and unique opportunity for conservatives to start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025.

It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration.

The specific goals of the project are discussed in great detail in the ninth edition of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership. First published in 1981, the Mandate is designed to serve as a guide for conservative governance, and is updated periodically, usually at the outset of each presidential administration. The current version totals some 920 pages.

If you lack the stomach to plow through the entire tome, you can turn to a two-page preface written by Paul Dans, Project 2025’s director who served as the Trump Administration’s Chief of Staff for the Office of Personnel Management.Dans outlines the project’s four basic objectives, which he calls its “four pillars.” These are: the development of a broad “policy agenda” for the next rightwing President to implement; the construction of a “personnel database” to assist the President in making staffing decisions; the creation of a “Presidential Academy” to train the next set of high-level government appointees; and a “Playbook” for the first 180 days of the next administration.

One of the project’s more disturbing aims is to bring all federal agencies under direct presidential control,ending the operational independence not only of the Department of Justice and the FBI, but also the Federal Reserve, which oversees the banking industry and regulates interest rates; the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which oversees television, radio, and the Internet; and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which enforces antitrust and consumer protection laws.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russell Vought told The New York Times in an interview for a lengthy article published earlier this month on Trump’s plans for a second term. Vought ran the Office of Management and Budget for the Trump White House, and currently serves as the president of the Center for Renewing America, one of sixty-five ultra-right organizations that have come together to form Project 2025’s advisory board. (Others include the American Family Project, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, Susan B. Anthony Pro-life America, America First Legal, the Claremont Institute, Moms for Liberty, Freedom Works, the James Madison Institute, and ALEC.)

“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,” John McEntee, another former Trump White House staffer, also told the Times. “Our current executive branch,” McEntee continued, “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.” McEntee joined Project 2025 in May as a senior advisor, working on the initiative’s “personnel” pillar.

Dismantling the New Deal-era regulatory framework of the administrative state, as McEntee advocates, has long been a goal of the radical right. The right has also long advocated a bloated view of presidential power known as the “unitary executive theory.” The doctrine was popularized in the early 1980s by Ed Meese, who served as counselor to the President in Reagan’s first term, and as attorney general in his second term, before assuming a full-time post with the Heritage Foundation in 1988. Bill Barr, Trump’s last Senate-confirmed Attorney General, is another prominent proponent of the theory.

In an oft-quoted 2006 essay, professors Karl Manheim and Allan Ides of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, California, described the theory as inimical to the core tenets of democracy, writing:

[T]he theory of the unitary executive is anything but an innocuous or unremarkable description of the presidency. In its stronger versions, it embraces and promotes a notion of consolidated presidential power that essentially isolates the Executive Branch from any type of Congressional or judicial oversight… Its proponents seek the cover of the Constitution, but in truth their theory wreaks havoc on the most fundamental principles of our constitutional traditions.

In a recent column published online by MSNBC, New York University Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an internationally renowned expert on fascism, compared the programmatic goals of the Trump campaign and Project 2025 to the crippling anti-democratic reforms implemented by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The question for the rest of us, who see democracy teetering on the brink, is how to stop Trump and Project 2025. It is possible, but unlikely, that Special Counsel Jack Smith could derail Trump’s campaign through the multiple prosecutions he is pursuing. It is also possible, but by no means certain, that the Supreme Court, currently stacked with three Trump appointees, could overturn or weaken some aspects of a second-term Trump agenda if Smith fails.

The most effective way to stop Trump and the new movement behind him, however, is to defeat him at the polls, making sure that he never accedes to power again. Sadly, that, too, remains decidedly uncertain.

GOP senator blocking 265 military promotions falsely promoted his father’s WWII service: report

Smith Jan. 6 prosecution

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===

https://www.project2025.org/

https://live-project2025.pantheonsite.io/about/advisory-board/

===

daily sig heil

wow looks like caricature of libtard

eXON HILL, Md.—The Heritage Foundation and a small army of conservative allies on Friday launched the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, also known as Project 2025, calling for reining in federal agencies and curbing political weaponizaiton.

“For the most powerful think tank in America, it would be very easy to go it alone,” said Ed Corrigan, president of the Conservative Partnership Institute, referring to The Heritage Foundation. “This has been really a team effort, 50 different conservative organizations contributed to this. That’s what makes this a historic product.”

Policy and personnel recommendations dot Heritage’s blueprint for the next conservative president. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

The first pillar of the plan is Heritage’s book “Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise,” which sets forth policy proposals touching on virtually every government agency. The second pillar is the concept that personnel is policy. The third is a call for training and the fourth recommends executive orders to advance conservative policy.

“This has never happened. We’ve never had this coming together in our movement to prepare for one thing—Day One, January 2025,” saidPaul Dans, directorof the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, referring to Jan. 21, 2025, when the next president will be sworn into office.

“What brings all these organizations together is our common theme to take down the administrative state, the bureaucracy,” Dans said. “The bottom line is we need to have an army of conservatives ready to march in on Day One.”

Dans stressed that the effort includes examing the 50 states for useful and practical knowledge outside Washington. The alliance of conservatives will be involved in recruiting and training officials.

Ken Cuccinelli, the Trump administration’s acting deputy secretary of homeland security, wrote Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Homeland Security.

“We don’t agree on everything all the time—you may have noticed that in the conservative movement—but we reflect alternative options, and DHS is a good example of this,” said Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general who now is part of The Center for Renewing America. “We start out with a recommendation which may surprise some of you, to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security.”

Cuccinelli said he didn’t want to bet on that:

We don’t mean get rid of the missions. We mean [make them] better managed from the national standpoint, how American security is protected. We go through agency by agency as well, including some of the things we think we should get rid of, like theTSA [Transportation Security Administration]. There should be security, but government doesn’t need to run that.

“The peaceful transition of power is an awesome responsibility. I would have given my right arm to have the book on the tables out there,” Rick Dearborn, former deputy chief of staff for President Donald Trump and also executive director of Trump’s presidential transition team in late 2016 and early 2017.

Dearborn, who was referring to copies of “Mandate for Leadership 2025,” is now a Heritage visiting fellow on the Presidential Transition Project.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

Portrait of Fred Lucas

@FredLucasWH

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is chief news correspondent andmanager of the Investigative Reporting Project for The Daily Signal. Lucas is also the author of "The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left's Assault on Clean Elections." Send an email to Fred.

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no lnx

Think Tank Watch

The World's Top Source for Think Tank News & Information

Friday, April 28, 2023

Heritage Foundation Making Plans to Staff a Republican Administration in 2025

The Heritage Foundation continues to make plans to staff a potential Republican administration in 2025.

Here is more from the New York Times:

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.

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.

The newspaper says that the Heritage Foundation and its partners have already briefed former President Donald Trump as well as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other potential 2024 Republican presidential candidates on their efforts.

It also notes that the Dennis Kirk, a former Trump Administration lawyer who was involved with the adoption of "Schedule F," a plan that 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 policies, is now employed at Heritage and working on Project 2025.

Here is more from Government Executive.

Update: Mr. John McEntee, who was director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in the Trump Administration, has joined the Heritage Foundation's 2025 Presidential Transition Project as a senior adviser.

---

[The Heritage Foundation's] Project 2025 has launched an online questionnaire, asking would-be conservative wonks in a Republican to explain their political philosophy, who influenced it, and asking them a series ofquestions, including whether the United Nations should have authority over sovereign countries, and whether the U.S. president "should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance [sic] from unelected federal officials."

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9 22 MMA https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-and-christian-nationalist-russ-vought-promote-ideological-purity-tests

Christian nationalist Russ Vought recently appeared on Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk’s radio show to discuss plans to purge at least 10% of federal career staffers under a new Trump administration. Vought described that portion of the federal workforce as “the roots of the problem” that prevented former President Donald Trump from fully implementing his agenda. During the interview, Kirk suggested that the next Republican administration subject civil servants to “ideological purity tests.”

Vought ran the powerful Office of Management and Budget under Trump and now heads up a right-wing think tank called the Center for Renewing America, whose mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.”While at OMB, Vought helped develop a policy called “**Schedule F**” as a tool that would allow a new conservative administration to circumvent job protections typically enjoyed by federal workers who aren’t politically appointed.

Speaking on the September 23 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, Vought claimed to have reclassified 90% of the workers in his own office under that job category

CitationFrom the September 23, 2022 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

“Schedule F is an authority that we discovered and developed at the end of the Trump administration to give the president the ability to reclassify career civil servants, who normally have permanency within the bureaucracy, to turn them into essentially at-will employees,” Vought told Kirk.

When asked by Kirk how many career employees he’d like to potentially sack using this authority, Vought set the floor at 10% of current workers, but suggested that he considers as much as 80% of the federal workforce to be ideological opponents.

“I would say that within my agency, we had, you know, 80% of it was left-leaning,” Vought said. “Their paradigms were all rooted in this permanent class, ruling class that defines the milieu of Washington, D.C.”

“And you can reason and work with that crowd, but there is about a 10% of activists that are animated by the wokeism, the anti-racist movement, to be able to come into these agencies and they'rejust activists,” Vought added.

Vought then told Kirk that someone in the human resources department at OMB described themselves and their colleagues as “committed anti-racists.”

Kirk responded by calling that person the leader of “a sleeper cell of a woke communist ideology who's just right there within our federal government.”

“You're going to have to figure out how to solve that, I don’t know,” Kirk continued. “But ideological purity tests are an interesting approach, but let's break up the federal government first and then we'll go from there.”

In July, Axios reported on discussions Trump allies were having about staffing their next administration, with the Schedule F being central to the framework. Vought reportedly has been a leader in these efforts: As Media Matters reported a week prior to Axios’ story, Vought stated publicly that he wants to build an “army” of hard-right activists with “Biblical worldview” to run the federal agencies that he can’t outright destroy. He’s been very clear that the goal is to get “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies,” and he’s been similarly clear that Schedule F is the way to do it.

Right-wing propagandist Christopher Rufo – known for launching bad-faith attacks on critical race theory and targeting children’s hospitals that provide care to trans youth – has pushed for a similar course of action.

“The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it,” Rufo said in an interview with conservative website IM-1776 in July.

In furtherance of those shared goals, Vought has attempted to turn the Center for Renewing America into a shadow government-in-waiting for Trump or another conservative president. In June, Vought brought on Jeffrey Clark, a former Department of Justice environmental lawyer and Trump’s top coup architect, as senior fellow at CRA. Kash Patel, another key figure in Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, is a CRA senior fellow as well.

In the recent interview with Kirk, Vought expressed a common regret among former Trump officials that the administration wasted precious time in its first years adjusting to the steep learning curve of running the government.

“My hope is that we don’t have to do that again because we're laying the groundwork now,” Vought said, later adding, “We want to make sure that can never happen again and make sure that from day one, we can ensure that the agenda is being done.”

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off bs

COMMENTARY BY

Spencer Chretien

Associate Director, 2025 Presidential Transition Project

Spencer is Associate Director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project at The Heritage Foundation.

When conservatives do finally make it into an administration, they often don’t know what to do or how to seize the gears of power effectively.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

It’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.

The policy book Mandate for Leadership represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success.

The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. Will we be ready for them?

With the Biden administration half over and with the immediate dangers inherent to one-party rule in Washington behind us for now, it’s past time to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right. For decades, as the left has continued its march through America’s institutions, conservatives have been outgunned and outmatched when it comes to the art of government.

One reason is because the Republican establishment never moved on from the 1980s. Beltway conservatives still prioritize supply-side economics and a bellicose foreign policy above all else. Belief in small government, strangely enough, has manifested itself in a belief among some conservatives that we should lead by example and not fill all political appointments. Belief in the primacy of the national security state has caused conservative administrations to defer political decisions to the generals and the intelligence community.

The result has been decades of disappointment.

Fortunately, this situation is changing. The conservative movement increasingly knows what time it is in America. More and more of our politicians are willing to use the government to achieve our vision, because the neutrality of “keeping the government out of it” will lose every time to the left’s vast power. The calls for a “new Church Committee” represent a momentous shift in energy; while conservatives used to lament liberal Sen. Frank Church’s original project as a kooky leftist attack against “The Brave Men And Women of Our Intelligence Community,” we’re now the ones agitating for Congress to go after the three-letter agencies.

This new vigor of the right can be found at Project 2025. Organized by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 has brought together 45 (and counting) right-of-center organizations that are ready to get into the business of restoring this country through the combination of the right policies and well-trained people. The Project’s foundation is built on four interconnected pillars.

>>> Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project

The first pillar, the upcoming production of the policy book Mandate for Leadership,represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success at each federal agency during the next administration. Presidential candidates won’t be able to ignore what the conservative movement demands in this book.

The second is our online personnel database.This “Conservative LinkedIn” will launch in March and will provide an opportunity for rock-solid conservatives to place themselves in contention for roles in the next administration. This pillar will bring Mr. (and Mrs.) Smith to Washington.

The third is our Presidential Administration Academy. When conservatives do finally make it into an administration, they often don’t know what to do or how to seize the gears of power effectively. Through their action, inaction, and their encyclopedic knowledge of volumes of technicalities about the federal workforce, certain career federal employees are masterful in tripping us up. Our interactive, on-demand training sessions will change that. They will turn future conservative political appointees into experts in governmental effectiveness.

The fourth and final pillar of Project 2025 is our Playbook, which will take the policy ideas expressed in Mandate for Leadership and transform them into an implementation plan for each agency to advocate to the incoming administration. What regulations and executive orders must be signed on Day One? Where are the greatest needs for more political appointees? How can we effectively use the mechanisms of government to face our most challenging problems? Our Playbook will put our movement to work answering questions like these.

In November 2016, American conservatives stood on the verge of greatness.The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a triumph that offered the best chance to reverse the left’s incessant march of progress for its own sake. Many of the best accomplishments, though, happened only in the last year of the Trump administration, after our political appointees had finally figured out the policies and process of different agencies, and after the right personnel were finally in place.

The usual suspects in the permanent political class will be ready for the next conservative administration. Will we be ready for them? That’s where Project 2025 comes in. We have two years, and one chance, to get this right.

This piece originally appeared in The American Conservative

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off bs

no lnx

TRAINING

Presidential Administration Academy

Preparing Political Appointees to be Ready on Day One

The Presidential Administration Academy is a one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration. This academy provides aspiring appointees with the insight, background knowledge, and expertise in governance to immediately begin rolling back destructive policy and advancing conservative ideas in the federal government.

APPLY TO ENROLL NOW

What You Will Learn

If you are a former political appointee or you’re exploring appointed service for the first time there is something for you to learn. The Presidential Administration Academy covers topics ranging from how to identify appointee positions for which you qualify tonavigating the necessary background and security clearance processes to recognizing and addressing the dangers of the administrative state. Potential appointees will learn the intricacies of the federal budget process, how to work with the media, managing congressional and stakeholder relations, the federal procurement process, and dozens of other topics that provide the knowledge and skills you’ll need to be an effective presidential appointee.

Who Should Attend

If you’re interested in serving the next conservative President, you’ve come to the right place. Presidential Administration Academy participants are professionals at all career levels from across the country and in our nation’s capital who want to learn, engage, get credentialed, and BE PREPARED to serve the next President and the American people by advancing conservative policy at the federal level. Applicants ranging from new college grads to experienced professionals in all career fields are encouraged to apply. We also welcome those who have not previously served in an Administration as well as those who are former appointees.

Program Format

Currently, the Presidential Administration Academy is a fully online program where participants can take courses on-demand. As the presidential election approaches, additional online courses will be added and in-person training sessions will be available. Intense instruction tailored for high-level positions will be in-person.

The Presidential Administration Academy offers individual classes as well as full certificate programs. In order to receive a certificate of completion, all classes within the certificate program must be completed and each quiz must be passed.

Time Commitment

The majority of classes run 30 to 90 minutes. Since the program is largely offered online and on-demand, you can self-pace and cover the material at your convenience over time. Onsite, in-person programs will be intensive learning and run one to two days.

Faculty

You’ll learn from a distinguished roster of former political appointees from four previous presidential Administrations, as well as from policy experts, practitioners, and subject-matter experts representing over 65 partner organizations. The Presidential Administration Academy faculty is a veritable Who’s Who of the conservative movement.

Certificate Programs

PREPARED TO SERVE

Prepared to Serve introduces participants to federal appointed service by reviewing the processes, requirements, and preparations necessary to be a successful appointee candidate.

CONSERVATIVE GOVERNANCE 101

Conservative Governance 101 equips individuals with the institutional knowledge needed to navigate relationships, cut through the bureaucracy, and get to work on Day One as a political appointee.

CONSERVATIVE GOVERNANCE:

ADVANCING POLICY

Conservative Governance: Advancing Policy is designed to instruct future appointees on best practices for drafting and advancing policy. This program primes individuals to start implementing the President’s agenda on Day One.

Other Upcoming Certificate Programs

Conservative Governance: Managing Federal Personnel

The Administrative State and the Regulatory Process

Grants, Contracts, and the Federal Procurement Process

Want to be the first to know when certificate programs are released? Sign up for updates including content release dates and other exciting opportunities!

Frequently Asked Questions

When will I hear back after I apply?

Does the program cost?

Will I earn a certificate of completion that can be highlighted on my resume?

When will I receive my certificate of completion?

I’m already a participant in the Presidential Administration Academy but I can’t find my way back. Where do I go to log back in?

Still have questions? Send us an email at info@project2025.org.

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cornerstone pension plan roe amicus

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jul 29 2021

Brief amicus curiae of The American Cornerstone Instituteand its founder Dr. Benjamin S. Carson filed.

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CPI meadows sinecure w $1mill trump pac $, that he never turns loose of

Since the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, CPI has become a hub for insurrectionists and election deniers. The group made Meadows a senior partner and brought in Mitchell to lead its lead its “Election Integrity Network” network, organizing local GOP activists to engage in the election process based on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

So far, Mitchell has led partisan voter suppression and election subversion events in nine states with fellow Big Lie proponents and election fraud conspiracists like Meadows, DeSantis, Mike Gableman, Arizona Senate President and ALEC National Chair Karen Fann (R), and many others with the goal of subverting the electoral system.

CPI has also launched a number of spin-offs to further right-wing causes, including the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), America First Legal, Center for Renewing America, American Cornerstone Institute, American Moment, and the State Freedom Caucus Network.

american Cornerstone Institute: former Trump cabinet member Ben Carson is founder and chair of American Cornerstone Institute (ACI), where Carsonhosts a podcast and creates YouTube videos, and which created the anti-woke "Little Patriots" platform "to teach children about our founding principles."

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3/20

i:{ don’t want to’:}::{ Ben Carson sparks panic by refusing to reveal ‘plan’ for cruise ship patients}:

A Sunday interview with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben…

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april 2021

ben c unfortunate Cornerstone

Dr. Ben Carson has a new gig as the head of something called the American Cornerstone Institute. It seems that the outfit exists primarily as a funding vehicle for the good doctor himself, but that should hardly raise an eyebrow in today’s Washington, D.C. The greater problem is that the operation’s poorly chosen name echoes an historically freighted pro-slavery declaration, issued on the eve of the Civil War.

The former presidential candidate, ex-secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and retired neurosurgeon’s not-for-profit think tank promises to “champion conservative solutions to the real problems our nation faces.” After four years of quiescence during the Trump administration, Carson now claims to have realized that values such as “compromise, compassion, and civility” have vanished from our political discourse, and he is determined to restore them.

The Cornerstone Institute is basically a one-man show. The website flogs Carson’s accomplishments, with multiple still photographs, video clips and pull-quotes touting his wisdom, insight, and principles, with no mention of anyone else. And of course, there are pitches for contributions. The Cornerstone Institute was only incorporated in February 2021, so it is too soon to obtain the IRS form with information on its top salaries, but it is a pretty safe bet that Carson is paying himself handsomely for what is essentially just a big exercise in self-promotion.

I don’t have any complaints about ex-Trump officials cashing in however they can. Carson wasn’t close enough to the president to write a tell-all book, he doesn’t seem to have the energetic people skills needed for lobbying, and he isn’t a lawyer. So that leaves think-tanking, with Carson evidently betting that he can do better on his own than he can working for one of the established right-wing outfits.

The actually disturbing thing about Carson’s endeavor is its name. “Cornerstone” seems obviously intended as a New Testament reference – although that is unmentioned on the website – but the word also has a much more poisonous association in American political history. It is odd that nobody appears to have warned Carson about it before he went public.

On March 21, 1861, Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the recently formed Confederate States of American, delivered what has come to be known as the Cornerstone Address, explaining the reasons for secession from the Union. He minced no words, defending slavery as the guiding principle of the Confederacy:

Our new government is founded . . . its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition. . . . This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

The Cornerstone Address came just seventeen days after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, at a time when only Georgia and six other states had announced their secession from the Union. As a former Whig, previously a staunch Unionist, and a one-time friend of Lincoln, Stephens’s bold pronouncement did much to brace the Confederate cause. The firing on Fort Sumter was only three weeks later, leading to the secession of four more states.

The Civil War would have happened with or without Stephens’s Cornerstone speech, but it was still a defining moment in the struggle over disunion, leaving no doubt that the purpose of the rebellion was the perpetuation of slavery.

The Cornerstone Address continues to play an important role in our understanding of the Civil War. When contemporary apologists for the Confederacy argue that secession was driven by states’ rights, tariffs, or the so-called “Lost Cause,” it takes only one look at the Cornerstone Address to refute their claims. The Confederacy was premised on White supremacy. It armies were assembled and battles were fought in the commission of treason in defense of slavery.

It is likely that Carson was unaware of the Cornerstone Address when he named his foundation. Perhaps he never studied antebellum history during his pre-med and medical school education at Yale and the University of Michigan. Even so, there may be some words that cannot be reclaimed or repurposed. Nobody today would choose “Confederacy” as the name for a respectable political organization, or “Stasi” for a government office (even though that is merely a German abbreviation for “State Security Service”). “Cornerstone” is not quite so notorious, but its historical association with slavery is nonetheless profound.

Ironically, the American Cornerstone Institute has launched its “A More Perfect Union Project,” aimed at “educating our citizens in civics and history.” The project quotes Lincoln’s reverence for the Declaration of Independence as “the immortal emblem of humanity,” without noting that the Great Emancipator gave his life to destroy Alexander Stephens’s vision for the cornerstone of a government founded on racial subordination.

In a recent oped in the Washington Post, Carson bemoaned a “subtle shift” in the national conversation about race “from equality to equity.” This is “un-American,” he said, because it assumes that “all differential outcomes between groups are solely the result of that bigotry and oppression.” From there, Carson predictably inveighed against affirmative action hiring programs, campaigns to support Black-owned businesses, and even local “anti-poverty stipends” that target people of color.

If the McCarthyist condemnation of liberal causes seems at odds with the Cornerstone Institute’s commitment to restoring civility, well, you just have to figure that Carson didn’t really mean it that way. Our goal, he says, is to “heal the divide that has polarized our great nation,” and the nasty bit must have just slipped out by accident. It seems that you can take the man out of the Trump administration, but it is not so easy to take the Trump administration out of the man.

In that light, I have a suggestion for Dr. Carson, assuming that he is truly concerned about the un-American implications of subtle language. Nothing was ever more un-American than the Confederacy, so he ought to consider dropping Alexander Stephens’s “cornerstone” in favor of a quotation from Abraham Lincoln. How about the “New Birth of Freedom Institute”?

===

thehill yikes clueless, book booster?

would we want the president elected in 2024 to jitterbug through the inaugural balls and arrive to the inauguration in a Ford Edsel? We certainly wouldn’t want to rely on the third quarter of the last century rather than the next quarter of this one.

But that’s just what the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” transition guide recommends, in reaching back to the government of the past instead of forward to the government of the future.

Its guide promises to “eliminate functions and programs that are duplicated across Cabinet departments or spread across multiple agencies.” That, in fact, was the strategy that former president Herbert Hooverfollowed in the two famous commissions he chaired during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. They worked then — but that was the last time a major reorganization effort did.

Since then, we’ve created six Cabinet departments, always with the promise to streamline government and boost its efficiency. They’ve unquestionably boosted the political prominence of key constituencies, from local schools (when the Department of Education was spun off the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1979) to veterans (with the elevation of the Veterans Administration to Cabinet status in 1989). But there’s not much evidence that these reorganizations made government work better or saved much money.

In fact, the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, which brought together 22 agencies into one department following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has created fresh frictions across the vast DHS empire. It has muddled accountability across the more than 100 committees and subcommittees on Capitol Hill that own a piece of the department’s oversight. Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoffreports that, in one year, he had to figure out how to deal with more than 5,000 congressional briefings and 370 hearings. It’s so confusing that Congress has tried — and failed — to create basic ground rules for who ought to oversee which pieces of Homeland Security. That’s led to either too much oversight or, sometimes, to no oversight at all.

The problem — and here’s where the Heritage plan gets things wrong — is that we’re far past the point where we can reorganize our way out of important problems. There’s no problem that matters — no problem at all — that we can comfortably put into the box of any single government organization.

Consider the derailment of the Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio. Local police and fire units immediately responded to the scene. Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency soon arrived. Within hours, the federal Environmental Protection Agency joined teams from the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Railroad Administration, and FEMA. Public health experts from the Department of Health and Human Services added their expertise to toxicologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There’s no way that it’s possible to create a single agency, at any level of government, that could deal with all the issues that caused such devastation for the people of East Palestine. Government’s agencies don’t operate like a top-down vending machine, where taxpayers insert their money and wait for their services.

Rather, they’re more like different pieces of a very big orchestra, where we rely on different instruments to play different music, depending on what the situation demands. Eliminating programs spread across multiple agencies could leave the orchestra without cymbals just when we need an exclamation point in a governmental response.

Moreover, the next issue we face might very well need a different collection of instruments. We’ve learned that any reorganization created to solve one problem would only breed new problems for the next.

We should, of course, constantly be on the prowl for ways of eliminating duplication and overlap. Those opportunities, however, are far fewer than we typically presume, and they’re much harder to accomplish than we might hope. Government’s functions and programs are the product of congressional decisions. That means every single one of them has a friend on the Hill who’s reluctant to give up on something that, at one time or another, was hard-won.

What we need instead are bridgebuilders inside the bureaucracy: a new breed of agile, light-stepping government leaders who focus on the problems to be solved, who identify the organizations that can bring the assets needed to solve them, and who can conduct the orchestra to make the pieces fit seamlessly together.

we know how to do this. It’s the leadership that Admiral Thad Allen brought to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It’s the job that FEMA’s leaders used in south Florida, in concert with Florida’s state emergency managers, when Hurricane Ian struck last year. And it’s the effort that officials in the VA, HUD, nonprofits like the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and state and local officials across the country have brought to the campaign to reduce veterans homelessness, which is now down 11 percent since 2020.

And since we know how to do this, we need to do more of it. Our focus ought to be on building a new generation of bridgebuilders, who forge collaboration across the many barriers that too often separate government agencies — and who focus on producing outcomes for Americans rather than guarding the boundaries that separate government’s bureaucracies.

Donald F. Kettl is the co-author, with William D. Eggers, of the upcoming book ”Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems.”

TAGS HERBERT HOOVER MICHAEL CHERTOFF

rww

on the same day that the Trump-enhanced far right-wing majority on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Heritage Foundation announced that it is leading The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a coalition of Christian nationalist, pro-voter suppression, anti-LGBTQ-equality, anti-government, Big Lie-promoting, and Trump-cheerleading groups to “position the movement to take the reins of government” after what they expect will be a Republican victory in the 2024 presidential election. The project is being headed by former Trump administration official Paul Dans.

From the Heritage Foundation press release:

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is focused on two key fronts—preparing the next administration with conservative policy recommendations and the properly vetted and trained personnel needed to defeat the administrative state, implement those policies, and take back America.”

Notable among the groups represented on the project’s advisory board are religious-right legal giant Alliance Defending Freedom, whose “generational win” goals include banning abortion, reversing marriage equality, and further dismantling church-state separation; the American Legislative Exchange Council, which partners right-wing lawmakers with corporate funders; and the increasingly extremist Claremont Institute, home of Trumpist coup-promoting lawyer John Eastman.

Groups represented on the project’s advisory board so far:

Alliance Defending Freedom
America First Legal
American Accountability Foundation
American Center for Law and Justice
American Legislative Exchange Council
American Moment
American Principles Project
Center for Renewing America
Claremont Institute
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Concerned Women for America
Conservative Partnership Institute
Defense of Freedom Institute
Family Research Council
First Liberty Institute
Foundation for Government Accountability
FreedomWorks
Leadership Institute
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America
Texas Public Policy Foundation
Young America’s Foundation

Tags: Paul Dans Alliance Defending Freedom American Accountability Foundation American Center for Law and Justice American Legislative Exchange Council American Moment American Principles Project Center for Renewing America Claremont Institute Competitive Enterprise Institute Concerned Women for America Conservative Partnership Institute Defense of Freedom Institute Family Research Council First Liberty Institute Foundation for Government Accountability Freedom Works FreedomWorks Heritage Foundation Leadership Institute Susan B. Anthony List Texas Public Policy Foundation Young America's Foundation

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adv bd 7 23 no list just logos

American Accountability Foundation

alabama policy institute

alliance defending freedom

American Center for Law and Justice

american compass

American Cornerstone Institute

The American Conservative

American Council of Trustees and Alumni

American Family Association

America First Legal

American Juris Link

American Legislative Exchange Council

american main street initiative

american moment

American principles project

American Family Project

California Family Council

Center for Equal Oppportunity

center for family and human rights

Center for Immigration Studies

center for renewing america

The Claremont Institute

Coalition for a Prosperous America

competitive enterprise institute

concerned women of america

conservative partnership institute

defense of freedom institute

ethics and public policy center

family policy alliance

family research council

Frederick Douglass Foundation

first liberty

foundation for defense of democracies

Foundation for Government Accountability

Forge Leadership Network

freedom works

The Heartland Institute

the heritage foundation

hillsdale college

Honest Election Project

Independent Women's Forum

Institute for Education Reform

Institute for energy research

Institute for the American Worker

institute for womens health

intercollegiate studies institute

james madison institute

keystone policy

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WEAPONIZE OMB, UNITARY?

mma 7 22

https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/center-renewing-america-preparing-next-republican-administration-govern

over the last several years, the United States has seen a dramatic rise in Christian nationalism, a loosely defined ideology that fuses patriarchy, xenophobia, and pretextual economic populism with an overtly biblical foundation and a deep distrust of democracy. This phenomenon has manifested in many ways, but one of the organizations driving the trend is a far-right think tank called the Center for Renewing America.

Several former Trump administration officials are associated with the group, including its president, Russ Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. Vought led the administration’s efforts to demonize critical race theory, including removing anti-racism training from federal agencies. He is a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room: Pandemic and on Fox News. His organization is one of several far-right groups under the umbrella of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose top officials include former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and right-wing legal activist Cleta Mitchell.Both Meadows and Mitchell were intimately involved in Trump’s attempted insurrection, as were at least 18 other people associated with CPI, including CRA senior fellow Kash Patel, former Trump Pentagon official.

Perhaps the most significant of Trump’s top coup allies is CRA senior fellow Jeffrey Clark,a former environmental lawyer at the Department of Justice who was hired by the think tank in June. About three weeks later, Clark was targeted in a raid by federal law enforcement. Little is publicly known about the investigation into Clark, but it may revolve around his proposal “to send a letter to state officials in Georgia falsely stating that the department had evidence that could lead Georgia to rescind its certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in that key swing state,” according to The New York Times.

CRA works on an array of disparate, seemingly unrelated issues. In addition to CRA-linked individuals’ considerable efforts to justify the January 6 insurrection, the organization has sown doubt about future “election integrity.” Vought has remained at the heart of the anti-critical race theory push even after he left OMB. He is virulently anti-trans, calling trans identity a “contagion” in a 2021 podcast, and CRA has supported anti-trans legislation and opposed laws that would ban discrimination based on sexual and gender identity. Senior fellow and immigration restrictionistKen Cuccinelli and Vought successfully lobbied counties in Texas to declare that they were under “invasion” by migrants. CRA is also an active participant in the conservative legal community, as exemplified by its **senior fellow**Mark Paoletta,who prepared Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas for their confirmation hearings. Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Vought celebrated Paoletta’s central role in the court’s rightward shift.

What unites these issues is what Vought refers to as a “biblical worldview,” a concept that has long been prevalent on the religious right and refers to an all-encompassing ideology derived from a conservative interpretation of the Bible. Although Vought eschews the aesthetics of some of the street-fighting Christian fascists who terrorized Pride events in June, he overtly believes the United States should be a Christian nation. CRA’s mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” Vought is signatory to a national conservative statement affirming that “the Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities.” Most revealingly, in 2021 Vought wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek with the headline: “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?'

Vought argues that, no, there’s nothing wrong with Christian nationalism, so long as it’s defined in a circumscribed, non-threatening way.

“Once stripped of its superimposed liberal scar tissue, ‘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,” Vought writes.

This is a fig leaf. Christian nationalism as it actually operates — sometimes taking the modifier “white” at the beginning — endorses the racist “great replacement theory,” which posits that global elites are fueling non-white immigration to the United States to “replace” white people. The conspiracy theory holds that this upending of power relations will be done through demographic changes, and at the ballot box — which helps to explain CRA’s obsession with “secure borders” and “election integrity.”

For Vought, CRA’s issues of focus are not discrete policy battles. As he made clear recently on a right-wing podcast, he believes the country is in a Manichean war between the forces of good and evil. The battleground is so-called cultural issues, which, properly understood, are liberation movements to end racist and patriarchal oppression, but for Vought they must be opposed at every step of the way.

“These are the issues that if we don’t fight on we lose our civilization,” Vought said. “Critical race theory has to be front and center. Transgender contagion in our schools, impacting our daughters across the country, needs to be a front and center issue."

moment of truth pod]

vought wants to create an “army” of activists ready and waiting to serve in government who can be trusted to carry out a Christian nationalist agenda. And as former director of OMB, Vought has a unique insight into how to implement a whole-of-government approach to enacting a presidential directive, which is what he did with Trump’s initiative against so-called “critical race theory.”

“When the president says, ‘I want to not fund critical race theory through the federal government,’ that’s involving all of the agencies, and we have to then make sure that the president’s agenda is executed,” Vought said in the same interview [aud]

more broadly, Vought lamented that not enough religious right activists “operate on the basis of worldview.” As a result, less dogmatic “elite Christians” have adopted ideologies that “lack clarity at best” and are “damaging at worst.” Vought wants hardliners in the church and in the public sphere. In the context of running the government, that means replacing career staff with “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies.”

That idea aligns with the upcoming plans from the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who, along with Vought and CRA, spearheaded the broader backlash against critical race theory. As Rufo said in a recent interview:

As we approach 2024, I will be publishing a policy paper on “eliminating left-wing ideologies in the federal government,” using the power of the presidency to fundamentally reshape the bureaucracy with a six-part program targeting budget, content, personnel, grantmaking, and oversight. The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House andcreate a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it. We could easily wipe out a significant portion of the infrastructure for the left-wing ideologies within the federal bureaucracy and within the network of federal grantees and contractors, which would shift American politics in the right direction.

These plans are not theoretical. CRA is one of many hard-right organizations involved in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a coalition of zealots determined to avoid some of the shortcomings and incompetencies of the Trump administration. (Vought is a former vice president of the organization’s grassroot and advocacy arm, Heritage Action for America.)

Vought has made no secret of what he would do if given the opportunity to serve as a Cabinet-level appointee in a Republican administration. He would attempt to eliminate or drastically curtail the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and others.

“We got to get after these agencies we talked about before, the administrative state, bigmoney, EPA, CDC, [and] NIH that's weaponized against the American people and we need to put them on the chopping block before we get to some other things down the road,” Vought said on Steve Bannon’s War Room.

A subsequent Supreme Court decision that drastically limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions would likely serve as a template for Vought to dismantle broad swaths of the executive branch’s regulatory authority.

Vought’s antagonism toward the regulatory state extends to aspects of federal law enforcement, but only when those agencies are investigating conservatives for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk asked Vought about the Department of Justice’s supposed persecution of conservatives, including his colleague Jeffrey Clark, and how he thought it should be addressed. The long-term plan is to structurally change it,” Vought said. “We've got to deconstruct the state that is weaponized against the American people.”

Like other organizations that have sprung up to harness Trumpism in the last several years, CRA’s broad influence remains limited. But its success in promoting the backlash against critical race theory shows it shouldn’t be underestimated, even though that topic may not have had the electoral influence Vought and others have claimed. What’s undeniable is that Vought and his fellow travelers have sweeping ambitions and the zeal of a true believer. They are telling us exactly what they are going to do if they return to power at the federal level, and it is a chilling vision of theocracy and repression.

vid Citation From the June 27, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's The Charlie Kirk Show

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