Today's (Not So) Weird Shit

The standard thing here would be something like - "There's something wrong with this guy". But we know that. We've known that for a long time now.

And we know that he craves the attention so he'll do whatever weird thing he can think of to get it. Plus, we know he craves the attention because that's how he gains power and money - and money and power - and first one and then the other - and sometimes both at the same time.

So if we just blow him off, it could mean we're ignoring a signal of real danger.

We have to keep looking for the method of his madness, which may be nefarious (probable), or benign (doubtful), or just plain looney because there is, in fact, something wrong with that son of a bitch.

But we also get to watch out for his madness being used as cover for the extreme plutocratic shit that his henchmen and supporters are trying to inflict on us.

I hate living in interesting times.

Those Sneaky Bastards

Republicans can't get their policies through Congress if they tell us what they're really trying to do, so they have to disguise it.

Melanie Stansbury (D - NM 01) unmasks another shitty thing Republicans are trying to pull.

That Slippery Slope Thing

The kicker here of course is that they're creating a new agency to grace this fucked up racist shit with the appropriate official imprimatur.

And I realize this is the classic Slippery Slope Fallacy, but if this thing is left to its own devices, it will morph into a spoils system, where people can point at an immigrant-owned business or property, make whatever claims of illegality that seem to fit, and confiscate that commercial entity, splitting the proceeds with the coin-operated asshole running the Missouri Illegal Alien Certified Bounty Hunter Program.

Sure hope everybody's ready for an American version of Kristallnacht. Cuz that's where we're headed if we don't wise up and stop it.

Missouri Republican proposes $1,000 bounty program to turn in undocumented immigrants

State Representative An incoming Missouri Republican lawmaker introduced a bill this week that would offer $1,000 bounties to residents who turn in undocumented immigrants to the state highway patrol.

The bill, filed by Sen.-elect David Gregory, a St. Louis-area Republican, would require the Missouri Department of Public Safety to create phone and email hotlines as well as an online portal where Missourians would be able to report alleged undocumented immigrants.

The bill is among several pieces of legislation that deal with illegal immigration ahead of next month’s legislative session. They come as President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans across the country have made frustrations with immigration, and the U.S.-Mexico border, a hot-button issue.

In addition to the payouts, Gregory’s bill would require the Department of Public Safety to create a “Missouri Illegal Alien Certified Bounty Hunter Program.” The program would certify people to become bounty hunters to find and detain undocumented immigrants.

Individuals who are licensed as bail bond agents or surety recovery agents would be able to apply to become bounty hunters under Gregory’s bill.

Undocumented immigrants who are caught by the bounty hunters would be considered guilty of “trespass by an illegal alien.” Those found guilty of the offense could face jail time and would be prohibited from voting and other rights.

Gregory, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, had made illegal immigration one of the central focuses of his Senate campaign. He filmed a campaign ad at the southern border with Mexico and has promoted media coverage of his bill on social media.

Edgar Palacios, executive director of Revolución Educativa, a Kansas City group focused on education issues in the Latino community, said Gregory’s bill was “horrendous.”

“Immigrants are human and humans aren’t meant to be hunted,” Palacios said in an interview. “This idea of having a bounty hunter for immigrants is wild and I think it displays a narrative that, again, people see, not everybody, but certain people see immigrants as inhuman.”

Nimrod Chapel, president of the Missouri NAACP State Conference, drew parallels between Gregory’s bill and legislation historically aimed at marginalized groups such as the 1820 Missouri Compromise which admitted Missouri as a slave state.

“This bill by our new senator has returned exactly to those roots,” Chapel said. “You’re going to create a system that is not only going to differentiate people based on how God made them, which, in my spiritual belief, is just fundamentally wrong, but then you’re going to try to create in a system…that seeks to differentiate people in much the same way that some of the Jim Crow laws did.”

Chapel referred to the bill as “a really draconian and racist piece of legislation.”

“It scares the hell out of me,” he said. “And the reason it does is because I already know that Black and brown people have been catching hell in the state of Missouri for a very long time.”

Impact on Kansas City

While Gregory faces blowback for his bill, it comes as Missouri politics have been awash in rhetoric about migrants. The focus on immigration would have an outsized impact on the Kansas City region, which has become a center of migrant arrivals over the last decade, according to U.S. immigration court data analyzed by The Washington Post.

Since 2014, roughly 8,300 migrants have settled in Jackson County since 2014 and 37% came from Honduras.

Earlier this year, Republican Gov. Mike Parson sent Missouri National Guard troops to aid Texas, which has promoted a plan dubbed “Operation Lone Star” that uses Texas state resources to combat illegal border crossings.

Parson, who will term out of office next month, heavily promoted the deployment, even though he later vetoed funding to continue it.

Candidates for office in both major parties emphasized illegal immigration on the campaign trail, including Democrat Lucas Kunce. But the issue was perhaps the most prevalent in the race to succeed Parson as governor, with all three major GOP candidates touting immigration frustrations in campaign ads and public statements.

Each of the three candidates, including Gov.-elect Mike Kehoe, also seized on comments Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas made in April welcoming migrant workers who are in the United States legally.

Amid the campaign rhetoric, outgoing House Speaker Dean Plocher, a Des Peres Republican, also created a committee that focused on “Illegal Immigrant Crimes.” The committee held hearings across the state, including in Kansas City, to maximize public attention on the issue.

For Palacios, with Revolución Educativa, immigrants are coming to the U.S. in search of a better life and to pursue “the American dream.” He said politicians should be focused on ensuring everyone has access to education and opportunities.

“I think the narrative is harmful. I think it’s designed to create fear amongst certain members of our community,” Palacios said. “It riles up a base that may not fully appreciate, again, the value that immigrants and folks from the migrant community bring, not to our state, but to our country.”

Today's Warning

The Bulwark

"The time for cautious restraint is over."

Things we know about Trump:

• he's a vindictive prick
• he loves to stir the shit - sometimes, just for the hell of it - to scare people in order to massage his own ego. Or to look for something that will accrue to his benefit
• he rarely goes thru with anything that doesn't put money in his pocket
• he's a fuckup

And that last point is what worries me the most because now he's installing people who know how to do the shitty things he wants done, which will serve to distract us from his blatant pilferage, while they go about actually tearing down the democracy - which is what the plutocrats are pushing for.

More On Patel

... or: Moron Patel.

I think we all know the FBI needs work. We've given it much too much leeway in its mission to protect us from the bad guys.

It's a very old concept:

Who's going to protect us from the bad guys who're working for the guys who're supposed to be protecting from the bad guys?

Reform is one thing, but Kash Patel would be working for people who intend to tear it all down and rebuild it into exactly the kind weapon we all know it shouldn't be.

ed note: This is the kind of "reporting" we need to be wary of. It takes an obviously grave threat and turns it into a casual observation - as if it was little more than a piece about red light cameras or pot holes.

I've subscribed to DenPo because it's my hometown paper now - and $6 for the first year is a pretty good deal - but it has the same problems as most of legacy media, in that it's decided to prioritize its revenue stream in the guise of "fair and straight reportage".

 

Taking a neutral stance in the face

of a clear and present danger

puts your ass on the wrong fucking side.

Trump’s FBI pick has plans to reshape the bureau. This is what Kash Patel has said he wants to do.

WASHINGTON — Kash Patel has been well-known for years within Donald Trump’s orbit as a loyal supporter who shares the president-elect’s skepticism of the FBI and intelligence community. But he’s receiving fresh attention, from the public and from Congress, now that Trump has picked him to lead the FBI.

As he braces for a bruising and likely protracted Senate confirmation fight, Patel can expect scrutiny not only over his professed fealty to Trump but also for his belief — revealed over the last year in interviews and his own book — that the century-old FBI should be radically overhauled.

Here’s a look at some of what he’s proposed for the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency. How much of it he’d actually follow through on is a separate question.

He’s mused about shutting down the FBI’s Washington headquarters
The first FBI employees moved into the current Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters 50 years ago. The building since then has housed the supervisors and leaders who make decisions affecting offices around the country and overseas.

But if Patel has his way, the J. Edgar Hoover Building could be shut down, with its employees dispersed.

“I’d shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state,’” Patel said in a September interview on the “Shawn Ryan Show.” “Then, I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops — go be cops.”

Such a plan would undoubtedly require legal, logistical and bureaucratic hurdles and it may reflect more of a rhetorical flourish than a practical ambition.

In a book last year titled, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth and the Battle for Our Democracy,” he proposed a more modest reform of having the headquarters moved out of Washington “to prevent institutional capture and curb FBI leadership from engaging in political gamesmanship.”

As it happens, the long-term fate of the building is in flux regardless of the leadership transition. The General Services Administration last year selected Greenbelt, Maryland, as the site for a new headquarters, but current FBI Director Christopher Wray has raised concerns about a potential conflict of interest in the site selection process.

He’s talked about finding ‘conspirators’ in the government and media
In an interview last year with conservative strategist Steve Bannon, Patel repeated falsehoods about President Joe Biden and a stolen election.

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said. The same applies for supposed “conspirators” inside the federal government, he said.

It’s not entirely clear what he envisions, but to the extent Patel wants to make it easier for the government to crack down on officials who disclose sensitive information and the reporters who receive it, it sounds like he’d back a reversal of current Justice Department policy that generally prohibits prosecutors from seizing the records of journalists in leak investigations.

That policy was implemented in 2021 by Attorney General Merrick Garland following an uproar over the revelation that the Justice Department during the Trump administration had obtained phone records of reporters as part of investigations into who had disclosed government secrets.

Patel himself has said that it’s yet to be determined whether such a crackdown would be done civilly or criminally. His book includes several pages of former officials from the FBI, Justice Department and other federal agencies he’s identified as being part of the “Executive Branch Deep State.”

Under the FBI’s own guidelines, criminal investigations can’t be rooted in arbitrary or groundless speculation but instead must have an authorized purpose to detect or interrupt criminal activity.

And while the FBI conducts investigations, the responsibility of filing federal charges, or bringing a lawsuit on behalf of the federal government, falls to the Justice Department. Trump intends to nominate former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi as attorney general.

He wants ‘major, major’ surveillance reform

Patel has been a fierce critic of the FBI’s use of its surveillance authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and in his “Shawn Ryan Show” interview, called for “major, major reform. Tons.”

That position aligns him with both left-leaning civil libertarians who have long been skeptical of government power and Trump supporters outraged by well-documented surveillance missteps during the FBI’s investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.

But it sets him far apart from FBI leadership, which has stressed the need for the bureau to retain its ability to spy on suspected spies and terrorists even while also implementing corrective steps meant to correct past abuses.

If confirmed, Patel would take over the FBI amid continued debate over a particularly contentious provision of FISA known as Section 702, which permits the U.S. to collect without a warrant the communications of non-Americans located outside the country for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence.

Biden in April signed a two-year extension of the authority following a fierce congressional dispute centered on whether the FBI should be restricted from using the program to search for Americans’ data. Though the FBI boasts a high compliance rate, analysts have been blamed for a series of abuses and mistakes, including improperly querying the intelligence repository for information about Americans or others in the U.S., including a member of Congress and participants in the racial justice protests of 2020 and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Patel has made clear his disdain for the reauthorization vote.

“Because the budget of FISA was up this cycle, we demanded Congress fix it. And do you know what the majority in the House, where the Republicans did? They bent the knee. They (reauthorized) it,” Patel said.

In his book, Patel said a federal defender should be present to argue for the rights of the accused at all FISA court proceedings, a departure from the status quo.

He has called for reducing the size of the intelligence community
Patel has advocated cutting the federal government’s intelligence community, including the CIA and National Security Agency.

When it comes to the FBI, he said last year that he would support breaking off the bureau’s “intel shops” from the rest of its crime-fighting activities.

It’s not clear exactly how he would intend to do that given that the FBI’s intelligence-gathering operations form a core part of the bureau’s mandate and budget. Wray, who’s been in the job for seven years, has also recently warned of a heightened threat environment related to international and domestic terrorism.

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller faced down calls from some in Congress who thought the FBI should be split up, with a new domestic intelligence agency created in its wake.

The idea died, and Mueller committed new resources into transforming what for decades had been primarily a domestic law enforcement agency into an intelligence-gathering institution equally focused on combating terrorism, spies and foreign threats.

Frank Montoya Jr., a retired senior FBI official who served as the U.S. government’s national counterintelligence executive, said he disagreed with the idea of breaking out the FBI’s “intel shops” and viewed it as a way to defang the bureau.

Doing so, he said, “makes the bureau less effective at what it does, and quite frankly, it will make the intelligence community less effective at what it does.”

Mr Orwell

Normal people will read this and take it as the warning it was meant to be. The bad guys will see it as a roadmap - a guidebook they can use to achieve the ends Mr Orwell told us we needed to watch out for, and to resist.

Today's Belle

So Trump loses one in the Senate, and I worry that people will think the guardrails have held, so we can all relax and slip back into our default apathetic haze.

But standing up and torpedoing one nomination does not a rebellion make.

For one thing, Trump turned around and nominated Pam Bondi for USAG. You may remember that Bondi (Florida AG at the time) declined to charge Trump with anything over his "Trump University" flimflam, and it was learned not too much afterward that she had taken a $25,000 "donation" from the Trump Foundation.

So the improvement here is that we've gone from "Dude-What-The-Actual-Fuck?" to "Wow-Really?"

The Senate gets up on its hind legs for a change and strikes the heroic pose, but there's a real possibility that "winning" this one could turn out to be cover for a less egregious-looking capitulation later.

BTW, Matt Gaetz could be right back in the House in January. It's pretty murky, but I keep hearing that having resigned from the 118th Congress, he could be sworn in to the 119th because he won re-election for it.

So, I think we may be in store for a whole new fucked up side show as Gaetz tries to sue his way back into his seat.

It's Creeping Up On Us

When the word "democracy" becomes a partisan term.

When you're a partisan hack if you're in favor of a Pro-Democracy Movement.

When resisting authoritarianism makes you "unpatriotic".

When you're quiet in the face of someone threatening violence in support of bigotry.

When you hedge your bets just in case the bad guys win.

We're being trained. This is the run up to minority rule.

Dr Trump

What must it be like for Mary Trump - who holds an honest-to-god doctorate - to be called stupid by her Uncle Donald? A guy who runs around telling everybody that he's really smart simply because he had a relative who taught at MIT - so he has these great genes and blah blah blah.

Anyway, Mary Trump has the guy's number.

And we should be listening for Donald Trump's use of some very fascist tropes. Although he always paraphrases them, and speaks in code.

The Fourteen Words:

The primary slogan in the Fourteen Words is,

We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children ...

Followed by the secondary slogan,

... because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.

That shit is always there. He never says it straight out, but it's always there.

He has to keep people alarmed and on edge, so they'll run to Daddy for comfort and protection. Which is odd in itself, because he's always carping about "the government" being worthless, even as he tells people to look to the government - his government - for help.

Anyway.

• He wildly overstates the "problem" by using a ridiculously inflated number. ie: "30,000 Haitian immigrants."
• Then he says Biden used "a trick" to give them legal status.
• And then he puts himself above the law - again - as always - by saying they're illegal as far as he's concerned.

And that's how it works.

• Amp up the fear and anger
• "There oughta be a law" 
• Make it a law

It doesn't matter if you can pull it off or not. It doesn't matter if it's constitutional or not. The expectation of the mob is that you should be allowed to do it. As long as you've got the mob, you've got the power.

The Bromance

Democracy has to constrain the majority, even as it delivers power to the majority.

The Big Hack

This is a small piece of the whole. And while I doubt it's some kind of big time key, it's an additional thread that runs through the whole sorry fucked up mess that is the Trump cabal's effort to break us down and take us over.

Trump Didn’t Call the FBI Because He Refused to Meet the Standard to Which He Held Hillary Clinton

In a piece laying out how Trump tried to undermine rule of law with a press release stating that the former President wanted the State of Florida, not the FBI, to investigate the suspected Ryan Routh assassination, WaPo provides more explanation for why Trump’s campaign didn’t call the FBI after Microsoft or Google told them they had been hacked: Because they feared sharing their email server with the FBI.

Trump’s mistrust of federal agencies has complicated the investigation into Iran’s cyberattack on his campaign. When a technology firm first discovered the breach, campaign aides huddled to discuss what they should do. After hours of discussions in July, they decided they trusted the software experts to handle the matter and did not call the FBI. Co-campaign manager Susie Wiles, whose email account was targeted, was among those who questioned whether they could trust the Justice Department. The fears centered on giving federal officials access to campaign email servers and whether they would leak information out publicly.

Donald Trump and his Republican allies spent years spinning conspiracies off of misleading Jim Comey testimony about how the FBI conducted the investigation into the Russian hack of Hillary’s campaign, claiming that because (they claimed) FBI had not obtained Hillary’s server, any attribution to Russia must be suspect. This was a key prong of Roger Stone’s criminal defense. Republicans spent years suggesting that Hillary, a victim of a nation-state attack, somehow failed to meet the standards of responsible victim.

Yet Hillary, in 2016, was in fact situated in the place Trump claims to currently be: facing a counterintelligence investigation stemming out of a partisan witch hunt in Congress.

Hillary was, in fact, faced with the prospect of having to ask for help from the very same people who had been criminally investigating her for years.

And any precedent that information shared with the FBI would “leak” (as opposed to get shared in court filings)? Trump’s the guy who did that, leaking materials from the investigation that resulted, going so far as to prepare his entire Crossfire Hurricane binder to release to the press.

Trump did that, not the FBI.

I am genuinely sympathetic about the plight Trump faces, trying to run an election campaign while facing real threats, including assassination attempts, from a hostile foreign actor.

The ongoing burden of trying to reclaim digital security and stave off physical threats takes a lot of energy that would otherwise be focused on running a campaign.

I know that, because I’ve heard a bit about how much time Hillary’s team had to spend fighting serial hacks, all the way through election day.

But understand: This decision not to call the FBI because Susie Wiles was afraid the FBI might ask to access the compromised server, what amounts to a decision to delay taking necessary steps to try to fight back?

That decision stems from a refusal to abide by the standards Republicans have demanded of Hillary for eight years.

Project 2025

A list of shitty things Trump plans to do if elected in 2024.

Most every drop of lunacy in this clip gets space in Project 2025, Agenda 47, been parroted by House Republicans & some have been on the Republican fantasy list since the Bush years.

Crazy is who they are & what enables him.#DemCast #DemVoice1 #wtpBLUE pic.twitter.com/eG3C5YEWkb

— Scorched Earth Dem (@progavalanche) September 15, 2024

Let's See That Again

Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey,

Reporting Highlights

• Deep State Battle: Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could fight the so-called deep state on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.
• New Videos: Dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025 were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.
• Advice Given: “If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”

Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track.

One centerpiece of that program is dozens of never-before-published videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy. The vast majority of these videos — 23 in all, totaling more than 14 hours of content — were provided to ProPublica and Documented by a person who had access to them.

The Project 2025 videos coach future appointees on everything from the nuts and bolts of governing to how to outwit bureaucrats. There are strategies for avoiding embarrassing Freedom of Information Act disclosures and ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges.” Some of the content is routine advice that any incoming political appointee might be told. Other segments of the training offer guidance on radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.

In one video, Bethany Kozma, a conservative activist and former deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Trump administration, downplays the seriousness of climate change and says the movement to combat it is really part of a ploy to “control people.”

“If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” Kozma says.

In the same video, Kozma calls the idea of gender fluidity “evil.” Another speaker, Katie Sullivan, who was an acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice under Trump, takes aim at executive actions by the administration of President Joe Biden that created gender adviser positions throughout the federal government. The goal, Biden wrote in one order, was to “advance equal rights and opportunities, regardless of gender or gender identity.”

Sullivan says, “That position has to be eradicated, as well as all the task forces, the removal of all the equity plans from all the websites, and a complete rework of the language in internal and external policy documents and grant applications.”

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, falsely saying that he knew nothing about it and had “no idea who is behind it.” In fact, he flew on a private jet with Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025. And in a 2022 speech at a Heritage Foundation event, Trump said, “This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

A review of the training videos shows that 29 of the 36 speakers have worked for Trump in some capacity — on his 2016-17 transition team, in the administration or on his 2024 reelection campaign. The videos appear to have been recorded before the resignation two weeks ago of Paul Dans, the leader of the 2025 project, and they are referenced on the project’s website. The Heritage Foundation said in a statement at the time of Dans’ resignation that it would end Project 2025’s policy-related work, but that its “collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels — federal, state, and local — will continue.”

The Heritage Foundation and most of the people who appear in the videos cited in this story did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests for comment. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign who features in one of the videos, said, “As our campaign leadership and President Trump have repeatedly stated, Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda from our campaign.”

Project 2025’s 887-page “Mandate for Leadership” document lays out a vast array of policy and governance proposals, including eliminating the Department of Education, slashing Medicaid, reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be more easily fired and replaced, giving the president greater power to control the DOJ and further restricting abortion access.

Democrats and liberal groups have criticized the project’s policy agenda as “extreme” and “authoritarian” while pointing out the many connections between Trump and the hundreds of people who contributed to the project.

“Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 have always been disingenuous,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “The discovery that the vast majority of speakers in Project 2025 training videos are alumni of the Trump administration or have other close ties to Trump’s political operation is unsurprising further evidence of the close connection there.”

Several speakers in the videos acknowledge that the Trump administration was slowed by staffing challenges and the inexperience of its political appointees, and they offer lessons learned from their stumbles. Some of the advice appears at odds with conservative dogma, including a suggestion that the next administration may need to expand key government agencies to achieve the larger goal of slashing federal regulations.

Rick Dearborn, who helped lead Trump’s 2016 transition team and later served in the Trump White House as deputy chief of staff, recalled in one video how “tough” it was to find people to fill all of the key positions in the early days of the administration.

The personnel part of Project 2025 is “so important to the next president,” Dearborn says. “Establishing all of this, providing the expertise, looking at a database of folks that can be part of the administration, talking to you like we are right now about what is a transition about, why do I want to be engaged in it, what would my role be — that’s a luxury that we didn’t have,” referring to a database of potential political appointees.

Dan Huff, a former legal adviser in the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, says in another video that future appointees should be prepared to enact significant changes in American government and be ready to face blowback when they do.

“If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it,” Huff says. “That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out.”

“Eradicate Climate Change References”

The project’s experts outline regulatory and policy changes that future political appointees should prepare for in a Republican administration.

One video, titled “Hidden Meanings: The Monsters in the Attic,” is a 50-minute discussion of supposed left-wing code words and biased language that future appointees should be aware of and root out. In that video, Kozma says that U.S. intelligence agencies have named climate change as an increasingly dire threat to global stability, which, she says, illustrates how the issue “has infiltrated every part of the federal government.”

She then tells viewers that she sees climate change as merely a cover to engage in population control. “I think about the people who don’t want you to have children because of the” — here she makes air-quotes — “impact on the environment.” She adds, “This is part of their ultimate goal to control people.”

Later in the video, Katie Sullivan, the former acting assistant attorney general under Trump, advocates for removing so-called critical race theory from public education without saying how the federal government would accomplish that. (Elementary and secondary education curricula are typically set at the state and local level, not by the federal government.)

“The noxious tenets of critical race theory and gender ideology should be excised from curriculum in every single public school in this country,” Sullivan says. (Reached by phone, Sullivan told ProPublica to contact her press representative and hung up. A representative did not respond.)

In a different video, David Burton, an economic policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the importance of an obscure yet influential agency called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The Trump administration used OIRA to help roll back regulations on economic, fiscal and environmental issues. Under Biden, OIRA took a more aggressive stance in helping review and shape new regulations, which included efforts to combat housing discrimination, ban the sale of so-called ghost guns and set new renewable fuel targets.

Burton, in the Project 2025 video, urges future political appointees to work in OIRA and argues that the office should “increase its staffing levels considerably” in service of the conservative goal of reining in the so-called administrative state, namely the federal agencies that craft and issue new regulations.

“Fifty people are not enough to adequately police the regulatory actions of the entire federal government,” Burton says. “OIRA is one of the few government agencies that limits the regulatory ambitions of other agencies.” (Burton confirmed in a brief interview that he appeared in the video and endorsed expanding OIRA’s staffing levels.)

Expanding the federal workforce — even an office tasked with scrutinizing regulations — would seem to cut against the conservative movement’s long-standing goal of shrinking government. For anyone confused by Project 2025’s insistence that a conservative president should fill all appointee slots and potentially grow certain functions, Spencer Chretien, a former Trump White House aide who is now Project 2025’s associate director, addresses the tension in one video.

“Some on the right even say that we, because we believe in small government, should just lead by example and not fill certain political positions,” Chretien says. “I suggest that it would be almost impossible to bring any conservative change to America if the president did that.”

A Trump Government-in-Waiting

The speakers in the Project 2025 videos are careful not to explicitly side with Trump or talk about what a future Trump administration might do. They instead refer to a future “conservative president” or “conservative administration.”

But the links between the speakers in the videos and Trump are many. Most of those served Trump during his administration, working at the White House, the National Security Council, NASA, the Office of Management and Budget, USAID and the departments of Justice, Interior, State, Homeland Security, Transportation and Health and Human Services. Another speaker has worked in the Senate office of J.D. Vance, Trump’s 2024 running mate.

Sullivan, the former DOJ acting assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s Office of Justice Programs, which oversees billions in grant funding, appears in three different videos. Leavitt, who is in a training video titled “The Art of Professionalism,” worked in the White House press office during Trump’s first presidency and is now the national press secretary for his reelection campaign.

A consistent theme in the advice and testimonials offered by these Trump alums is that Project 2025 trainees should expect a hostile reception if they go to work in the federal government. Kozma, the former USAID deputy chief of staff, says in one video that “many” of her fellow Trump appointees experienced “persecution” during their time in government.

In a video titled “The Political Appointee’s Survival Guide,” Max Primorac, a former deputy administrator at USAID during the Trump administration, warns viewers that Washington is a place that “does not share your conservative values,” and that new hires will find that “there’s so much hostility to basic traditional values.”

In the same video, Kristen Eichamer, a former deputy press secretary at the Trump-era NASA, says that the media pushed false narratives about then-President Trump and people who worked in his administration. “Being defamed on Twitter is almost a badge of honor in the Trump administration,” she says.

Outthinking “the Left”

The videos also offer less overtly political tutorials for future appointees, covering everything from how a regulation gets made to working with the media, the mechanics of a presidential transition process to obtaining a security clearance, and best practices for time management.

One recurring theme in the videos is how the next Republican administration can avoid the mistakes of the first Trump presidency. In one video, Roger Severino, the former director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Trump-era Department of Health and Human Services, explains that failure to meticulously follow federal procedure led to courts delaying or throwing out certain regulatory efforts on technical grounds.

Severino, who is also a longtime leader in the anti-abortion movement, goes on to walk viewers through the ins and outs of procedural law and says that they should prepare for “the left” to use every tool possible to derail the next conservative president. “This is a game of 3D chess,” Severino says. “You have to be always anticipating what the left is going to do to try to throw sand in the gears and trip you up and block your rule.” (In an email, Severino said he would forward ProPublica’s interview request to Heritage’s spokespeople, who did not respond.)

Operating under the assumption that some career employees might seek to thwart a future conservative president’s agenda, some of the advice pertains to how political appointees can avoid being derailed or bogged down by the government bureaucrats who work with them.

Sullivan urges viewers to “empower your political staff,” limit access to appointees’ calendars and leave out career staff from early meetings with more senior agency officials. “You are making it clear to career staff that your political appointees are in charge,” Sullivan says.

Other tips from the videos include scrubbing personal social media accounts of any content that’s “damaging, vulgar or contradict the policies you are there to implement” well before the new administration begins, as Kozma put it.

Alexei Woltornist, a former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, encourages future appointees to bypass mainstream news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Instead, they should focus on conservative media outlets because those are the only outlets conservative voters trust.

“The American people who vote for a conservative presidential administration, they’re not reading The New York Times, they’re not reading The Washington Post,” Woltornist says. “To the contrary, if those outlets publish something, they’re going to assume it’s false. So the only way to reach them with any voice of credibility is through working with conservative media outlets.”

And in a video about oversight and investigations, a group of conservative investigators advise future appointees on how to avoid creating a paper trail of sensitive communications that could be obtained by congressional committees or outside groups under the Freedom of Information Act.

“If you need to resolve something, if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?’ Talk through the decision,” says Tom Jones, a former Senate investigator who now runs the American Accountability Foundation.

Jones adds that it’s possible that agency lawyers could cite exemptions in the public-records law to prevent the release of certain documents. But appointees are best served, he argues, if they don’t put important communications in writing in the first place.

“You’re probably better off,” Jones says, “going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”

It Is And It Ain't

... at the same time.

It's Schrodinger's GOP Platform.

Trump has repeatedly made statements very similar to what the Project 2025 playbook says.

But the Daddy State lies - all the time about everything - so when he feels the need, he claims he knows nothing about it at all.

Trump seeks to disavow 'Project 2025' despite ties to conservative group

July 5 (Reuters) - Former President Donald Trump tried to distance himself on Friday from a conservative group's sweeping plans for the next Republican presidency, days after its leader claimed a second American Revolution was underway that would "remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

(Emphasis added)

The Republican presidential candidate renounced any connection with Project 2025, a plan Democrats have been attacking to highlight what they say is Trump's extreme policy agenda for a second term should he beat President Joe Biden in the Nov. 5 election.

Many people involved in the project lead by the Heritage Foundation, America's top conservative think tank, worked in the Trump White House and would likely help fill out his administration if he wins in November.

But Trump said on his Truth Social platform he had nothing to do with the plan.

"I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it," he wrote.

"I disagree with some of the things they're saying," he continued, adding some of their assertions were "absolutely ridiculous and abysmal."

Trump's post came three days after Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts' comments on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast about a second American Revolution. Democrats and others criticized what they viewed as a veiled threat of violence.

In a statement provided by a Project 2025 spokesperson on Friday, Roberts repeated his claim that Americans were carrying out a revolution "to take power back from the elites and despotic bureaucrats" and said it was the political left that had a history of political violence.

The spokesperson said that while Project 2025 provided recommendations for the next Republican president, it would be up to Trump, should he win, to decide whether to implement them.

Trump's move to create distance with Project 2025 could in part reflect an effort to moderate his message in the final months of the race, especially with Biden's campaign faltering after the Democratic candidate's June 27 debate, said James Wallner, a political science professor at Clemson University.

"Trump is basically now seeking to appeal to a broader audience," Wallner said.

The Biden campaign has stepped up its efforts to tie Trump's campaign to Project 2025.
“Project 2025 is the extreme policy and personnel playbook for Trump’s second term that should scare the hell out of the American people," campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement.

The 900-page blueprint calls for drastic reform of the federal government, including a gutting of some federal agencies and a vast expansion of presidential power. Trump's statements and policy positions suggest he is aligned with some but not all of the project's agenda.

The plans have been drawn up by the Heritage Foundation in coordination with a collection of other like-minded groups.

A number of people who worked on Project 2025 have close ties to the former president. Russ Vought, who was Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget and is heading up a key committee at the Republican National Convention, authored one of the project's chapters.

Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump who is widely expected to be tapped for a top job in a second Trump administration, heads up a legal group on Project 2025's advisory board.

It Bears Repeating

Here's the full set that I posted about a few days ago.

"We need to do better than this."

PROJECT 2025

• Prosecute political rivals
• Fire 50,000 federal employees & replace them with MAGA loyalists
• Remove America from NATO
• Pardon himself and Jan 6 insurrectionists
• Slash DOJ budget
• Dismantle the FBI and DHS
• Eliminate Dept of Commerce
• Sharply reduce EPA regulations to favor Fossil Fuels
• End the independence of federal agencies such as FCC and FTC
• Tax cuts
• Tariffs
• Abolish the Dept of Education
• Cut funding for climate research
• Reform NIH along conservative principles
• Reject abortion as health care
• Eliminate the Affordable Care Act's coverage of emergency contraception
• Infuse the government with elements of Christianity
• Criminalize pornography
• Remove legal protections against discrimination based on sexual or gender identity
• Terminate DEI programs and Affirmative Action
• Immediately deploy the military for domestic law enforcement
• Direct the DOJ to pursue Donald Trump's adversaries by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807
• Arrest, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants
• Capital punishment and the speedy "finality" of such sentences

Project director, Paul Dans, explained that Project 2025 is "systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state."

Dans admitted it was "counterintuitive" to recruit so many to join the government to shrink it, but pointed out the need for a future president to "regain control" of the government. Although the project does not promote a specific presidential candidate, many contributors have close ties to Trump and his 2024 campaign.

Project 2025

Keep this up front.

John Oliver on Project 2025 and a second Trump term.

I was going to clip this segment out into shorter sections but decided to keep it together because it's too important and, frankly, it should terrify you. pic.twitter.com/Kaqo07lurB

— Blue Georgia (@BlueATLGeorgia) June 18, 2024

Ain't Nuthin' New Here

Trump has not remade the GOP in his image. He is the perfect reflection of what that party has been morphing into for 60 years.

How the GOP Surrendered to Extremism

Sixty years ago, many GOP leaders resisted radicals in their ranks. Now they’re not even trying.

When Jackie Robinson Confronted a Trump-Like Candidate

At its core, Barry Goldwater’s campaign threatened blacks’ ability to fully engage in a two-party system.

“The danger of the Republican party being taken over by the lily-white-ist conservatives is more serious than many people realize,” Jackie Robinson cautioned in his syndicated column in August 1963. He was worried about the rise of Barry Goldwater, whose 1964 presidential bid laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement. Today, Goldwater’s shadow looms over Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican Party’s nomination.

“During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake,” Robinson wrote in 1967. “One of them was the National Republican Convention in San Francisco, which produced the greatest disaster the Republican Party has ever known—Nominee Barry Goldwater.” Robinson, a loyal Republican who campaigned for Richard Nixon in 1960, was shocked and saddened by the racism and lack of civility he witnessed at the 1964 convention. As the historian Leah Wright Rigueur describes in The Loneliness of the Black Republican, black delegates were verbally assaulted and threatened with violence by Goldwater supporters. William Young, a Pennsylvania delegate, had his suit set on fire and was told to “keep in your own place” by his assailant. “They call you ‘nigger,’ push you and step on your feet,” New Jersey delegate George Fleming told the Associated Press. “I had to leave to keep my self-respect.”

The 1964 campaign was pivotal for Republicans because, despite Goldwater’s loss, the GOP came away with a dedicated network of people willing to work between election cycles to build the party. The GOP has won more presidential elections than it has lost since Goldwater. Donald Trump’s campaign plays on fears and resentments similar to those that fueled Goldwater’s presidential bid five decades ago. It is not yet clear, however, how this strategy will play out with an electorate that will be the most racially and ethnically diverse in U.S. history (over 30 percent of eligible voters will be racial or ethnic minorities).

As the Draft Goldwater campaign expanded in early 1963, the editors at the Chicago Defender warned that Goldwater’s “brand of demagoguery has a special appeal to ultra conservative Republicans” and that he “cannot be laughed off as a serious possibility as is being done in some quarters unfriendly to him.” After the 1964 Republican National Convention, the Defender suggested, “Goldwater in the White House would be a nightmare from which the nation and the world would not soon recover.” Another editorial two days later struck a stronger tone: “The conviction is universal that Goldwater represents the most diabolical force that has ever captured the leadership of the Republican Party. After 108 years of exhortation to freedom, liberty, and justice, the GOP now becomes the label under which Fascism is oozed into the mainstream of American politics.”

Recalling the applause line in Goldwater’s acceptance speech—“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”—the Defender argued, “Goldwater’s extremist pronouncement is an invitation to violence and race riots.” On the eve of the election, Defender editors wrote that Goldwater “is in a frantic search for an issue that can stir the voter to an emotional pitch. He tries to frighten the people into believing the country is not in safe hands.” (These and other editorials cited here can be found at Black Quotidian, a digital archive of black newspapers.)

In 1964, unlike 2016, it was not a foregone conclusion that the vast majority of black voters would support the Democratic Party. Republicans Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon received 39 percent and 32 percent of the black vote in the 1956 and 1960 presidential elections, compared to 6 percent for Goldwater in 1964. No Republican candidate since Goldwater has earned support from more than 15 percent of black voters.

“A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP,” Robinson wrote just after Goldwater claimed his party’s nomination. “It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind—the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy.” He continued, “If I could couch in one single sentence the way I felt, watching this controlled steam-roller operation roll into high gear, I would put it this way, I would say that I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

In a statement published in the New York Amsterdam News, Martin Luther King Jr. described Goldwater’s nomination as “both unfortunate and disastrous.” “While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to racists,” King argued. “His candidacy and philosophy will serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes will stand.” King issued his statement a month after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legislation that Goldwater opposed. “On the urgent issue of civil rights,” King wrote, “Senator Goldwater represents a philosophy that is morally indefensible and politically and socially suicidal.” For his part, Robinson described Goldwater as a “bigot” and “an advocate of white supremacy” who “seeks to gain the Presidency by capitalizing on white resentment to demands for Negro justice.”

In the 1964 election, Robinson, a stalwart Republican, backed New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, moderate Republican rivals to Goldwater, before eventually launching a Republicans and Independents for Lyndon Johnson organization after Goldwater secured the Republican nomination.​

“From Dr. King on down, we plan to get out the largest Negro vote in history,” Robinson said. “We want to believe in the two-party system but if Goldwater is the candidate we won’t be able to vote for him.” Robinson was relieved that Johnson defeated Goldwater by a landslide, but he was worried when he surveyed the wreckage of the Republican Party. “We must have a two-party system,” Robinson argued. “The Negro needs to be able to occupy a bargaining position. If Goldwater has been defeated, but Goldwaterism remains triumphant in GOP councils, America faces a difficult future.” As Robinson foresaw, the post-Goldwater Republican Party was only occasionally interested in competing for black voters.

Jackie Robinson, Chicago Defender editors, and Martin Luther King Jr. watched Goldwater’s rise with a mix of anger, fear, and dismay. Their criticisms of Goldwater contained skepticism about the long-term implications of the racism and xenophobia espoused by the candidate. Today, Latino, Muslim, Asian American, and Arab American voters who hear echoes of Goldwater in the rhetoric of Donald Trump also fear that they might find themselves in a one-party system—to their detriment, and that of the party.

There's A Plan

PROJECT 2025

• Prosecute political rivals
• Fire 50,000 federal employees & replace them with MAGA loyalists
• Remove America from NATO
• Pardon himself and Jan 6 insurrectionists
• Slash DOJ budget
• Dismantle the FBI and DHS
• Eliminate Dept of Commerce
• Sharply reduce EPA regulations to favor Fossil Fuels
• End the independence of federal agencies such as FCC and FTC
• Tax cuts
• Tariffs
• Abolish the Dept of Education
• Cut funding for climate research
• Reform NIH along conservative principles
• Reject abortion as health care
• Eliminate the Affordable Care Act's coverage of emergency contraception
• Infuse the government with elements of Christianity
• Criminalize pornography
• Remove legal protections against discrimination based on sexual or gender identity
• Terminate DEI programs and Affirmative Action
• Immediately deploy the military for domestic law enforcement
• Direct the DOJ to pursue Donald Trump's adversaries by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807
• Arrest, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants
• Capital punishment and the speedy "finality" of such sentences

Project director, Paul Dans, explained that Project 2025 is "systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army of aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state."

Dans admitted it was "counterintuitive" to recruit so many to join the government to shrink it, but pointed out the need for a future president to "regain control" of the government. Although the project does not promote a specific presidential candidate, many contributors have close ties to Trump and his 2024 campaign.

Get your ass out there

and vote, dammit