Trump's Deep State
Trump's Deep State
The cultural revolution is coming!
Washington DC 25 July 2022
In a pre-election meeting with Richard Branson, Trump spent the entire time complaining about a handful of people who had upset him. Branson was perplexed that Trump would waste their first meeting with childish grievances. Then he was stunned when Trump told him “he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people.” Like any person or organization that upsets him, he has added the US civil service to this list.
Trump hated the civil service because it did not do what it was told. The reason for this was most of what he told it to do was impracticable, illegal, unethical, corrupt, dangerous or deranged. Who can forget the order to nuke a hurricane, build a reptile-filled moat at the border, shoot protestors, shoot immigrants, bomb Mexico and “pretend” the missiles came from “somewhere else”, drink bleach, or “just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me”. In Trump’s imperial mind the only possible explanation for this refusal to do stupid and illegal things was a vast insubordination conspiracy mounted by disloyal plotters hell bent on derailing his vision for America. This “deep state” was a shadow government stopping him at every turn. His revenge? Destroy them by emulation. He is building his very own revenge deep state. If you care about not getting nuked you should be really worried.
Everyone hates bureaucracy
An apolitical bureaucracy is fat, lazy, ponderous and deeply risk adverse. In Civil War II’s extensive experience in western bureaucracies ~10% of the staff do 100% of the work. It stifles innovation by worshipping replication (standard operating procedure or SOP). Its eternal motto is “do what we did last year”. One of its worst evils is its members have tenure. This unpleasant but necessary firewall usually prevents manipulation and intimidation of staff to take short cuts or worse, break the law. We know what comes next when that happens: Iran Contra, Iraq WMDs, and Watergate. It is why federal judges have tenure. The most powerful reform of government without breaking it, would be to make all positions, elected or not, fixed term.
Bureaucracy’s one saving grace is mostly avoiding obvious mistakes. In fairness, there is a lot of deconfliction / coordination of policies, people, things, activities, and messaging required in any big enterprise. Size, complexity and fairness, imposes a need for standardization (SOP). A good bureaucracy tries to follow norms of acceptable conduct, conventions of avoiding disaster in the administration of policy, and the regulations and laws of the nation. It will resist doing things that are obviously corrupt or dangerous. As that is Trump’s baseline SOP, it was inevitable that he would see it as an enemy.
If you cant bend you enemy to your will by firing individuals, the only answer is to destroy it. We are on the cusp of a scorched earth, Maoist cultural revolution in the federal bureaucracy. “Donald J Trump thought” will be imposed at every level of the system. If you thought the politicization of the secret service was a disaster, you ain’t seen nothing yet! When Trump is returned to power he will ensure that the Nuremberg defense will be reinstated along with him. Following his orders will be a defense against any accusation (until he denies making the order that led to catastrophe then its on the poor schlub ‘just following orders’). "I think the first thing you need to hire for is loyalty," said Andrew Kloster one of the leaders of the recently discovered future cultural revolution coming to the federal workforce. "You can learn policy. You can't learn loyalty."
Learning from the best
In the Peoples Republic of China, as the saying goes, the “Party commands the gun.” Unlike America, the Chinese armed forces are an institution of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), not the state. This is a distinction with a huge difference.
The CMC [Central Military Commission - the Chinese Pentagon - demands] that the PLA must “unswervingly uphold the absolute leadership of the Party over the army,” guarantee “absolute loyalty and reliability'.” In November 2014 the CMC highlighted the need for “reliable” Party cadres in the army, defined in one document as those who have “resolute” political views, carry out military and political orders “without hesitation,” and are able to resist “incorrect ideological trends.” Senior PLA officers were also required to biaotai, or publicly pledge their dedication to the Party and its leadership. The need for Party education and bona fides will remain central to the PLA’s personnel system. Indeed, one PLA officer suggested in a 2017 conversation that political loyalty has become the most important factor in promotions.
As in most things, Donald Trump has learned from the communists. His plan, unironically titled Schedule F, will destroy the centuries old American apolitical civil service and replace it with an actual deep state comprised of party apparatchiks who have sworn personal allegiance to Trump. Stunning new reporting from Jonathan Swan at Axios, reveals how far these plans have already advanced. Maga have built databases of ideologically vetted cadres loyal to the leader who will be pushed down to the lowest levels of the policy making apparatus of the federal government as soon as he retains control.
The civil service today
There are over 2 million federal civil servants. They are lead by ~12000 senior executives. Of those ~8000 are members of the Senior Executive Service (SES) holding “impartial positions that can only be filled by career appointees” selected on merit and subject to a kaleidoscope of federal regulations in the conduct of their profession. The remaining 4000 senior positions are held by political appointees “of which about 1200 require Senate confirmation.” Thus political appointees are mixed in with career civil servants at the very top levels of government departments, are outnumbered 2:1, and have titles like Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for XYZ. (This note will use the DOD for illustrative purposes.) Policy is made by a very small segment of the civil service, around 50,000 positions. These functions tend to be concentrated in Washington DC where all government departments are headquartered.
The civil service of tomorrow
The civil service is about to be Schedule F’ed. Again. The first time was short lived. It was an executive order late in the Trump Administration and quickly rescinded by Biden. It didn’t have time to take effect. It will be the first major executive order when Trump re-enters the legal protections of executive privilege following successful completion of the coup.
Focused on policy making (at first), it will remove all apolitical career civil servants from the system. Not just at the top but all the way down to around the GS-13 level which is the equivalent of a Major in the Army. They will be replaced with maga loyalists. Schedule F will be devoid of any of the protections of the current system. Perfect for control. The mere imposition of this system will send the message that loyalty is uber alles. The change will be lightening fast and total.
Trump loved “acting” positions in the civil service. Acting positions didn’t need confirmation, could be easily replaced, and the tenuousness of their situation and aspiration for confirmation, guaranteed complete obedience. In effect, Schedule F will make the entire policy making world ‘actings’. The only criteria for a job well done will be obedience to orders at the pleasure of the ruler.
This is impossible. You cant fire bureaucrats!
Not so. Simplifying things, there are two systems - the competitive service and exempted service. The former has all the protections normally associated with the civil service. The latter does not. Employees in that system are “exempted” from the protections.
Getting rid of someone in the protected system depends on poor conduct or poor performance. Termination for conduct violations is relatively easy and includes “misconduct, neglect of duty, malfeasance or refusal to accept a directed reassignment”. Poor performance is much harder. As the Government Accountability Office notes ”the time and resource commitment needed to remove a poor-performing permanent employee can be substantial.”
But there are still ways, more creative ways, to get rid of protected bureaucrats. Make their lives hell so they seek a transfer. Promotion to a different unit - “up and out” (most common and why so many leaders are useless).
Or, make their role redundant.
The cultural revolution will simply make all “policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” roles in the competitive (protected) service redundant and “recode” those positions under the excepted service. There is already a largely unused provision in existing law to facilitate and justify the revolution. As Axios noted
Section 7511 of Title 5 of the U.S. Code… exempts from firing protections employees "whose position has been determined to be of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character by the President for a position that the President has excepted from the competitive service."
There is also another pathway - make those positions AD (Administratively Determined) instead of GS (General Schedule). But we wont go down that rabbit hole. We have come deep enough!
The recoding from competitive to excepted service will be sold as necessary to be legally compliant with 5 U.S. Code § 7511. Incumbents will be eligible to apply for their jobs or transfer to protected non-policy positions. Of course there will be black lists and everyone will know who is in or out. Subtlety is not a maga strong suit. Being cautious creatures the incumbent bureaucrats will transfer to other jobs inside the protected system. In time, once post-coup elections become window dressing, a future maga congress will eliminate the protected system altogether.
Thanks to Axios, we know how maga intends to fill thousands of positions opened up by the cultural revolution.
I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience
A bunch of LLCs have sprung up with patriotic sounding names designed to find young and ambitious recent college grads to staff senior roles. This is a deliberate strategy. Foreign officials visiting DC are sometimes surprised to attend meetings where their American interlocutors are the age of the visitor’s adult children back home. This is so prevalent that it was lampooned in the excellent satire on the Iraq war, In the loop.
Saurabh Sharma, the age appropriate 24-year-old leader of “American Moment”, a startup maga Schedule F recruitment service interviewed by Axios explained “Reagan hired young, he hired ideological, and he hired underqualified.” Sharma is wisely following the Reagan model for his maga clients.
So what skills are required to be a senior policy maker in the cultural revolution?
Sharma is prescriptive about what gets a person on his list. He wants applicants who want to cut not just illegal but also legal immigration into the United States. He favors people who are protectionist on trade and anti-interventionist on foreign policy. They must be eager to fight the “culture war.” Credentials are almost irrelevant.
Obedience is key
The exemplar of hiring an ideological and under qualified cadre is the man picked to oversee the Schedule F’ing of the civil service. John McEntee was Trump’s presidential body man (gofer) who was fired for suspected financial crimes that forced his security clearance to be rescinded. Later brought back at 29 years of age to be Director of White House Office of Presidential Personnel (~a 4 star general equivalent) “McEntee had the authority to overrule Trump's own Cabinet secretaries” as he zealously applied loyalty tests to staff and ousted all known or suspected thought criminals.
In their place, McEntee and his colleagues in the personnel office recruited die-hard Trump supporters from outside Washington to serve in important government positions. Some had barely graduated from college and had few, if any, of the credentials usually expected for such positions.
They had something much more valuable than credentials, knowledge, or experience. They were house trained.
He brought in "America First" conservatives who thought of themselves as having been "red-pilled" about the evils of the Left. They believed, by and large, that the American republic needed saving from a range of domestic enemies and an embedded "deep state" sabotaging Trump from within.
Sharma and McEntee were following in the finest traditions of Mao and the Republican party. During the reign of Bush II, Iraq became a science project for viceroy L. Paul Bremer III and a “fleet of twentysomethings” dispatched to the far corners of the empire to rule the ill disciplined hordes by building “a Jeffersonian democracy” in Babylon.
Described in achingly funny and equally tragic detail in the instant classic Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran recounts how at the height of the insurgency, in a failed state, with things blowing up all over the country
Bremer ignores what Iraqis tell him they want or need and instead pursues irrelevant neoconservative solutions—a flat tax, a sell-off of Iraqi government assets... a new traffic code and a law protecting microchip designs… [Other examples include]: the case of the twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance put in charge of reestablishing Baghdad’s stock exchange; a contractor with no previous experience paid millions to guard a closed airport; a State Department employee forced to bribe Americans to enlist their help in preventing Iraqi weapons scientists from defecting to Iran.
The people selected for these positions were
screened by White House officials for their views on Roe v. Wade; people with prior expertise in the Middle East [were] excluded in favor of lesser-qualified Republican Party loyalists.
The personnel model was replicated in the corporate sector. In Bush’s America a couple of college drop out dopeheads (21 and 25 yr old), bullshitted their way into becoming international arms dealers landing multi million dollars contracts to supply ammo to US forces in Afghanistan. Their first post-award meeting with US Army officials
proved to be a formality. Diveroli had the contracting jargon down, and he sailed through the technical aspects of the transaction with confidence: supply sources, end-user certificates, AEY’s experience. No one ever asked his age. “We were supremely confident,” says Packouz. “I just think it never occurred to the Army people that they were dealing with a couple of dudes in their early twenties.”
The story was first recounted in an epic feature article in Rolling Stone and later made into a film, War Dogs.
All of these cases illustrate how useful underqualified inexperience people can be to a system that prioritizes loyalty and obedience above common sense. It also illustrates the trajectory of unseriousness in governance that continues a pace. It should go without saying that this is not how a superpower should be responsibility operated.
Launching a nuclear war
The scheduled F’ing of the civil service will impact the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community and domestic law enforcement (DHS, FBI etc).
“Sources close to the former president said that he will — as a matter of top priority – go after the national security apparatus, ‘clean house’ in the intelligence community and the State Department, target the ‘woke generals’ at the Defense Department, and remove the top layers of the Justice Department and FBI.”
Civil-military relations are founded on the bedrock idea that the uniformed services and their supporting elements are subject to the control of civilian authority. Georges Clemenceau said “war is too important to be left to the generals”. The danger being that life-long immersion in the culture of war, a general might not see the bigger picture. This concept is brilliantly illustrated in Dr Strangelove.
In Trumpworld everything is upside down. Consequently, the insane side is the civilian authority. There is no protection for that! This will only get worse under Schedule F. The closest we come to any protections in the long term is an apolitical civil service, and in the short term, the 25th Amendment. Neither are fast enough to stop an order to launch nuclear weapons.
Today the President can launch a massive nuclear strike on a whim. There is no check on this authority. He does not have to justify it, explain his motives, plans or expectations of what will be achieved. It only takes around 30 mins to end the world.
Thirty minutes is how long ICBMs take to fly between Russia (and China) and the US. It is essential that the response ICBMs are launched before they are destroyed in their silos. Launch detection is not immediate, therefore the president has only ~20 mins to complete the following response launch protocol. First, the football and associated “biscuit” with the codes have to verify the president’s identity. Second, a very brief and highly scripted 5 min “decision conference” call is arranged to ‘brief’ the president on a menu of options. Third, there is no debate, just a choice of which target package to deploy. Finally, an order transmitting the target package is dispatched to the shooters. End of story. All within 5 mins.
Civil War II has sat in on a nuclear war “decision conference” call drill while in the bunker at Strategic Command in Omaha. This process is constantly practiced. It’s a muscle memory exercise. Humans are involved but it might as well be automated. All of this must be accomplished in under 20 mins, day or night. To understand how hard it would be to comply with this task in 20 mins remember Bush reading the goat book. He must have spent 5 mins staring at the back wall of the classroom taking in the enormity of what he had just been told (and who could blame him).
The Trump first use scenario has not been practiced. On paper, a launch order, whether a first strike or a retaliation, cannot be debated. The inflexible launch protocol described above applies in all cases. However, the absence of incoming missiles gives the system something it never expects to have. Time. The only hope is that debate might break into the open about the purpose of a first strike launch order. As the rules and norms stand today, that debate might occur but the military has to obey lawful orders.
A lengthly debate whether a first strike is lawful or not is simply not within the parameters of a “decision conference”. The system is not designed for that to happen. It is only designed to give the president a menu of strike options and to follow orders. When it was created decades ago, the assumption behind it was that the president would be a rational actor and an order would really only come in retaliation to an attack on America. As in everything else, no one ever imagined a Trump figure ever getting anywhere near the nuclear launch codes.
[Actually, thats unfair to the creators of the film Idiocracy which looks more and more like a documentary than satire. President Camacho “a former pro wrestler and porn star, delivers over-the-top, vulgar speeches when he addresses the nation, and gets people's attention by firing a machine gun into the air” is pretty close to the key themes in Trump’s life.]
Schedule F would dramatically lower the odds that someone in that highly rehearsed sequence might even think to speak up.
This is not an academic debate. In 2020 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, feared Trump might order a “wag the dog” nuclear strike as a distraction to his attempts to continue to hold power. Milley intervened in the chain of command and asked officers at the National Military Command Center to personally pledge to him that they would make sure Milley was included in the emergency call if a nuclear launch order came. As the president’s senior military adviser, he is entitled to be in the call. However, his power in that scenario would be limited to persuasion. The chain of command for a nuclear launch is the shortest one in government. The Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff is not in it.
I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ’s sake!
In one of the many parallels between the Trump and Nixon Administrations, Kissinger and Schlesinger both gave standing orders to aides in the national security system to call them in the event Nixon lost it in a drunken rage and wanted to lash out.
They were worried about this because during a spring offensive by the North Vietnamese in 1972, while completely sober in an Oval Office meeting, Nixon told Kissinger:
We’re going to do it. I’m going to destroy the goddamn country, believe me, I mean destroy it if necessary. And let me say, even the nuclear weapons if necessary. It isn’t necessary. But, you know, what I mean is, what shows you the extent to which I’m willing to go. By a nuclear weapon, I mean that we will bomb the living bejeezus out of North Vietnam and then if anybody interferes we will threaten the nuclear weapons.
A week later, he continued to a somewhat horrified Kissinger:
Nixon: I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready?
Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.
Nixon: A nuclear bomb, does that bother you?… I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ’s sake!
Schedule F would ensure a future General Milley or Secretary Kissinger would be forced to think big! Educated national security professionals would never make it past captain, let alone be the sole voice of reason in the room when the leader orders a nuclear strike on another country because it upset him over its media coverage or whatever the crisis of the day might be.
“Turns out Trump wasn’t fighting the deep state, he was installing it”. Aside from the 25th Amendment, the only thing that might stop a dictator is an apolitical civil service willing to resist extreme measures. This is precisely why Trump and maga are hell bent on eliminating it.
Building A Party Army
The extension of Schedule F into the active duty military system is the logical next step once it is embedded in the civilian side. At first it will be fairly subtle. Promotions will slow for anyone that does not overtly agree with the agenda. Because of its incoherence, the agenda will be whatever it is the leader says in the moment. For a system as huge as the US DOD that will quickly end in all sorts of blow ups, both figurative and literal. But it wont matter. Just like the PLA, the only criteria for success will be loyalty to party and its leadership. In reality, this means strict adherence to Xi Jinping thought and is, in effect, a pledge of allegiance to the man. As in China and the DPRK, over time the requirement for agreement will escalate to praise. From the start, any criticism will result in passive aggressive treatment, social avoidance, delayed advancement and early career termination. Basically, all the maga loyalty trends already evident in the GOP will transfer to the government civilian work force and end up in the military.
It wont take long for the message to be heard up and down the lines at all echelons. The troops will quickly appreciate that their livelihood will depend on the need to readily respond positively to whatever it is ordered to do. Yet again, Upton Sinclair is instructive “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” It will be impossible to slow roll or ignore orders that are inconsistent with national security, like shooting missiles into Mexico (an act of war) and pretending nothing happened. The already rare examples of moral courage to say or do what is morally right will evaporate like a rain shower in Death Valley in August.
Maga political correction
This trend of maga political correction is already visible. Maga apparatchiks in congress were furious that the military had reacted to Jan 6 by initiating counter-extremist programs across the DOD. The last thing maga wants is for their sleeper cells in the military and law enforcement to be discovered and outed. They are the base - “al Qaeda” in Arabic - of the future party army.
At a congressional hearing the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff got berated for creating a “woke” military, whatever that is supposed to mean. The response from the Chairman was a master class in civil military relations and the importance of having a well educated national security policy-making work force capable of independent reasoning - meaning free of political dogma.
"I do think it's important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely-read," Milley said during the House Armed Services Committeehearing. "The United States Military Academy is a university, and it is important that we train and we understand ... and I want to understand white rage. And I'm white," he added. "I've read Mao Tse-tung. I've read Karl Marx. I've read Lenin. That doesn't make me a communist. So, what is wrong with understanding ... having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend? [One might add, and the countries we maybe required to fight]. And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military of being, quote, 'woke' or something else because we're studying some theories that are out there." [emphasis added]
General Milley then drove the point home
"What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?" Milley said of the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump. "What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind here, and I do want to analyze it."
Gaetz knows all too well what caused that and he will do anything to prevent that from being analyzed and coming to light. He caused that! He was an active participant in planning, executing, and covering up a coup against the constitution of the United States of America.
The modern oath of office that instructs speakers to defend against ‘all enemies foreign and domestic’ is established in law at 5 U.S. Code § 3331. It is derived from Article VI of the Constitution. Gaetz knows he is a domestic enemy of the United States in the context of that oath. His violation of that oath is a crime. But not his only one. Guilt weighs heavily on Representative Gaetz. Why else seek a presidential pardon? And not just the run of the mill pardon like those requested by Mo Brooks (Alabama), Andy Biggs (Arizona), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Scott Perry (Pennsylvania), Jim Jordan (Ohio), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia). White House lawyer Eric Herschmann testified that the pardon Gaetz requested was unusual because it “was as broad as you could describe, from the beginning of time up until today, for any and all things”.
It is beyond outrage that Gaetz used his position on this committee in an dirty self-serving attempt to impugn the reputations of combat veterans Gen Milley and Secretary Austin (himself a retired 4 star) and in so doing abuse all those who serve in uniform - which Gaetz has not done - as a way to distract from his crimes and the crimes against the people and constitution of the United States committed by his idol. The only way Gaetz will be freed from a jail cell is a pardon by Trump - this is why Gaetz is doing all he can to coup.
Gaetz’s conduct is indicative of the corrosive impact Trump in general and Schedule F in particular would have on the effective administration of US national security by making everyone in the national security system political. In “the Tank” in the Pentagon all the way down to the carrier in the South China Sea, serious matters would be overwhelmed by ridiculous posturing between propagandistic narratives. The real business of national security, if it happened at all, would be a tertiary concern to people more interested in political entertainment and point scoring than protecting the United States. As retired Colonel Jeff McCausland has written,
As a result, culture war debates may occur at the expense of serious discussions about rising threats posed by China, hybrid warfare and North Korea, as well as ongoing efforts to modernize the nation’s strategic nuclear deterrent, which may cost $1 trillion.
Schedule F would make the Pentagon and the intelligence community obsessed with winning the culture wars against each other rather than winning a shooting war against our enemies out there on the frontiers of the real world.
Max Boot agrees
“F” might as well stand for “fascism,” because that is what we will get if Trump were to appoint his most fanatical acolytes to the most powerful positions in government. I wish I could say that such a scenario is implausible, but it is all too realistic. I used to be an optimist about America’s future. Not anymore.
Outdoing the PLA
In the PLA there is a bifurcated system. A political commissar class shadow the warrior class from the highest levels down to battalion and squadron command. The commissar looks over the shoulder of the warrior to make sure he is at all times loyal to Chairman Xi. Both swear allegiance to the General Secretary of the CCP. There is no independent thought. No initiative. Only obedience. We see the results of this type of system in Russian troops getting bogged down in Ukraine and crying to momma on the phone because Putin does not send blankets or gas for their trucks. How do they respond? They disable their vehicles so they dont have to fight. There is no NCO cadre in either the Russian army or the PLA in the sense that it exists in US and allied forces. When there is a problem, grunts go direct to colonels to complain. By contrast, the free thinking, agile and adaptive Ukrainians, using next to no resources by comparison to the mighty red army, are crushing the Russians on land, in the air and at sea, using unique and innovative sensor to shooter loops way beyond the comprehension of their enemy. Meanwhile the red army communicates in the clear, making it easy to target them and kill them. Right down to individual unit leaders and generals.
In order for the PLA to be competitive against the current US joint force, the Chinese are currently trying to emulate American civil-military relations or at least adapt elements of it (like the NCO corps and war college programs) to their system. Its not working. Its trying to put a square peg in a round hole. They know their inability to think is their Achilles heel. How ironic then that maga would emulate the most unthinking aspects of the PLA system, resulting in leveling the paying field so that the Chinese might have a chance at beating us in a fight.
Not to be outdone by foreigners in shithole countries, in post coup America, Trump would trump even the PLA’s ideology dictatorship. As noted, the Chinese have parallel systems - political and warrior. Trump would do away with the American warrior class altogether and have only political commissars. That is the mission of Schedule F. It is a guaranteed recipe for military disaster abroad and dictatorship at home.
Not even the ChiComs are that ideologically blinkered!
There was one major western country that had a system like that envisaged by Schedule F. Unlike the ChiCom’s, there was no bifurcated system, just a military run solely by political commissars. This was their oath
I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.
In Civil War II’s favorite Churchill speech, in 1938 he placed the need for the capacity of independent thought above possession of weapons - as badly needed as they were by Britain as it rapidly stumbled towards its darkest hour. “But arms are not sufficient by themselves. We must add to them the power of ideas.”
Tying the importance of the capacity for independent thought to the outcome of the future war, Churchill identified the essential weakness of the enemy who in 1938 had vast superiority in planes and tanks compared to Britain.
They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?
He continued
Alexander the Great remarked that the people of Asia were slaves because they had not learned to pronounce the word “No.” Let that not be the epitaph of the English-speaking peoples or of Parliamentary democracy, or of France, or of the many surviving liberal States of Europe.
Let it also not be the epitaph of the American Republic that for hundreds of years staved off rebellion, nationalism, fascism, communism, and terrorism. Half of America has already become enslaved to Trumpism. It is up to us, the free thinking remaining half to reject maga efforts to “bar our thoughts and words” and use the system of democracy and the rule of law to avert the tragedy that is staring us in the face.
Update - New articles coming out now regularly alerting readers to the dangers in Project 2025 and Schedule F.
Update - The Mainstream Media are finally waking up to 2025 - 8 July 2024
Update - Trump and allies plot revenge - 6 NOV 2023
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
Trump has publicly expressed regret about not [using the] Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.
As president, Kelly said, Trump would often suggest prosecuting his political enemies, or at least having the FBI investigate them.
But Trump allies such as Russ Vought, his former budget director who now leads the Center for Renewing America, are actively repudiating the modern tradition of a measure of independence for the Department of Justice, arguing that such independence is not based in law or the Constitution. Vought is in regular contact with Trump and would be expected to hold a major position in a second term.
Jeffrey Clark, a fellow at Vought’s think tank, is leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025. The Post has reported that Clark is one of six unnamed co-conspirators whose actions are described in Trump’s indictment in the federal election interference case.
As a Justice Department official after the 2020 election, Clark pressured superiors to investigate nonexistent election crimes and to encourage state officials to submit phony certificates to the electoral college, according to the indictment.
In one conversation described in the federal indictment, a deputy White House counsel warned Clark that Trump’s refusing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” Clark responded, according to the indictment, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
Trump has told advisers that he is looking for lawyers who are loyal to him to serve in a second term — complaining about his White House Counsel’s Office unwillingness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him in his bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
Update - the Full Fascist Plan - 27 OCT 2023
Update 19 Sept 2023 - OPM Moves to Limit Trump’s Schedule F Plan
Though off the books, the initiative has continued to loom like a specter over the federal workforce, thanks to renewed efforts by former Trump administration staffers, who have spent the last two years preparing to immediately reinstateSchedule F upon the election of a Republican president.
Multiple Republican presidential candidates, particularly Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and, most recently, Vivek Ramaswamy, have endorsed Schedule F or analogous plans to fire large portions of the federal workforce, while activists and conservative lawmakers have proposed making the entire civil service at-will employees.
OPM’s newly proposed regulations, which will be published Monday in the Federal Register, seek to at least slow down a future administration from reviving Schedule F. It stipulates that when a federal employee’s job is converted from the competitive service to the excepted service, the employee retains “the status and civil service protections they had already accrued,” unless they voluntarily transfer into an excepted service position.
Update 9 Sept 2023 - Schedule F stories starting to get noticed in MSM
“Conservatives aim to restructure U.S. government and replace it with Trump’s vision”
UPDATE 25 APL 2023
Don Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and former dean of its School of Public Policy, described the transition initiative’s policy agenda as a “crystallization” of a number of proposals that have been circulating in conservative academia for years. And there is a broader effort underway—more quietly—there are discussions and debates that would hold the entire civil service system as unconstitutional on the grounds that it abridges the president’s power to take care that laws are faithfully executed.”