Friday, August 16, 2024

The cynical deceit in American radical right authoritarianism



At ~1:54 - 3:10 of this 8:30 video, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought talks about secret plans for killing the deep state and installing authoritarianism in the federal government. 

On its website, CNN posted a 5:23 video of this secretly recorded interview, with more of the interview shown than in the longer YouTube video. Vought thinks he is speaking to family members of a wealthy donor, but instead one is a reporter and the other is an actor.

What needs to be understood is that America's authoritarian radical right have extreme policies and governing tactics that are being kept strictly secret from the public to avoid losing the 2024 election.

In the interview Vought says that DJT distancing himself from Project 2025 is just politics. He calls Project 2025 a liberal boogeyman. He says there are secret plans (350 documents) that are not in Project 2025 that reflect either what DJT wants to do after he is re-elected, or what Vought himself wants. The secret plans include a total ban on abortions with no exceptions for anything, which DJT has said he opposes. Vought concedes that DJT needs to win the election, so the total abortion ban and other unpopular policy goals stay secret. Vought calls himself a Christian nationism person, which is close to Christian nationalism but in some undefined way, and wants America to be a Christian nation, whatever that means. 

Vought envisions a total ban on all pornography and massive deportations of immigrants to save America (presumably from the Great Replacement threat). He says that DJT has the power to deploy the military on the border and everywhere else that law and order needs to be maintained. Vought envisions as shadow bureaucracy to subvert existing institutions, federal bureaucrats and their independence. On this point, he is literally talking about setting up DJT in a dictatorship. He envisions (i) defunding bureaucracies and impounding funds to throttle them, and (ii) forming a shadow Office of Management and Budget and a shadow National Security Council and a shadow Office of Legal Counsel, all of which planning will be kept strictly secret until after the election.

Vought describes Democrats and liberals generally as evil monsters. He claims the demonstrations after George Floyd's death had nothing to do with race. Instead he says it was a liberal attempt to destabilize the Trump administration and pull down "structures" in society for the purposes of revolution, presumably violent revolution. 

American politics does not get much scarier or threatening than this.

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