The Grim Reaper of the US Government: Russ Vought - Part 2

Welcome back to the overlap podcast. If you failed to, um, check back with last week on part one of Russ Vaught, the grim reaper of the American government, you might want to go back and listen to part one kind of the history in the background of Russ and what brought us to today, including with project 2025.

So today we're going to start in the middle from where we ended up last time, make sure to check out our website, Fof foundation. And look forward to you returning back to this episode. If you need to listen to the first part first talk to you soon, folks. Thanks so much for being a listener.

Yeah. So project 2025 is, I mean, if you don't know it by now, we've talked about it so incredibly often. There, there are trackers. You can check it out. Uh, I think it's project 2025 tracker.com.

I'm gonna double check here real quick. This is live folks. Um, project 2025 dot observer. We're currently at 48% completed. Um, but yeah, so it's the conservative movement sort of detailed step by step playbook. And I think you can see that this is a very, very, very, very complex project.

So it's the conservative movement sort of detailed step by step playbook for Trump's second term. He lied and said he didn't, he didn't hear about it. He wasn't familiar with it. He didn't know anything about it. But he knew it was put together by the heritage foundation, which again, we've, we've talked about before and a coalition of right wing deplorables.

And the truth is Russ Vought is kind of the chief architect of the whole document. He didn't just like help with project 2025. He like chaired the transition portion and wrote a single, the single most important chapter, the one on the executive office of the president and the powers that sort of, uh, are underneath the executive through all of these strange legal loopholes.

Right. And surprise, surprise his grand vision is that the OMB director's job is quote, the best, most comprehensive approximation of the president's mind. He in fact, first the OMB as the president's air traffic control system and argues it must become powerful enough to override implementing agencies, bureaucracies.

This is the will of the president given form and shape in the existence of the OMB. He declares himself to be the most important person in this whole system.

I mean, this is, this is basically the Vought doctrine right here, right? Like the president is the unitary executive, the OMB, which he happens to head up, you know, like amazingly is this all powerful instrument of the will of the executive.

Every policy, every dollar, every regulation must flow through this central bottleneck choke point controlled by one man who acts as the gatekeeper of the president's intent of the president's will of the president's desire.

Now there's one little problem here, or potentially a problem, and that's that you have a federal workforce of over 2 million people who are deliberately have been given protections against political machinations, right?

It's very hard to keep things like the IRS or the FDA or things like that running if people are afraid of losing their jobs every four years, you know, if they're subject to being dismissed at every level.

So they have these civil service protections, but don't worry. Vought has a plan for that too. It's called Schedule F.

Yeah. So unfortunately, I know quite a bit about this because of my recent employment, but Schedule F is an executive order that Vought not just helped to write.

It was actually wrote it entirely during the first Trump term. So it's basically a bureaucratic kill switch, like a full stop work.

It basically reclassifies tens of thousands of lifelong career civil servants, policy experts, scientists, lawyers as political appointees.

It creates from what was a non-partisan position into partisan appointees.

Basically, this will strip them of their job protections, effectively making every single person who works for the federal government and at-will employee fireable for any reason, or no reason at all.

It's basically a mechanism for a purge, politically motivated, full of drippy syrupy rhetoric to purge the federal government of every single employee.

So Vought's master plan is brought to you by the letter F or fascism.

I mean, look, it's crucial to understand this is not Project 2025 isn't some thing that Vought dreamt up in the latter years of the first term.

This is the culmination of everything he's been building towards his entire life. This is his life's mission.

Exactly. Back in the first term, Vought was already trying to do most of this stuff, but a former OMB staffer actually told ProPublica that Vought wanted to eliminate entire agencies like the US Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Check. Right. He's done both of those things. He wanted to fold the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development into a new deliberately insulting Department of Welfare.

And if that's not racist, you haven't been paying attention.

Those plans were mostly blocked by the Cabinet Secretaries at the time, whether it had some institutional pride or they were stopped by legal challenges. And the former OMB staffer said, "I didn't realize it then, but I was writing the first draft of Project 2025."

Ugh. It's so gross, right? Like you can see it. It's 3D chess.

And seeing it laid out like this, like you see the moves and you're like, "God, that's so dirty. Ugh, that's so ugly. Ugh." You know, like they used this guy.

And because-

It's like one of the people on the Death Star, right? Like, you know, you have those funny, you know, "Hey, you're the people building the Death Star."

You know, you're just the janitor. You write papers. You didn't think that it would eventually end up in trying to destroy the universe.

So, you know, Project 2025, which we're currently living in, is in its current second draft. Don't worry. We'll build the car as we're driving it.

It's the polished, weaponized product of four years of trial and error and refinement by Vought. Now, Vought isn't just an ideologue, you know? Like, normally, if you deal with somebody who has a whole lot of weird dogma around specific things, you don't give it a whole lot of thought.

But the fact that Russ Vought is also a strategist and he's incredibly intelligent, which makes it worse, he learns from his mistakes. All of these are good qualities. Of course, unless you are a garbage human.

And he has spent years engineering legal loopholes and legal earmarks as tools to make sure that next time, nobody can stop him for any reason.

But to effectively carry out a purge, whether you learned about this from history books or from watching the Purge or one of its many sequels, you need a justification for purging.

You can't just go around, you know, wantonly murdering people. Killing the Jews?

You gotta have a justification, though. I mean, you can do it, but you just have to have the right slogan, right? That paints your targets as enemies of the people. You have to have a banner for your crusade.

So Russ knew this and he created one. Like Eddie Izzard said, "Yes, but you have a flag. No flag, no country."

In a private speech later obtained by ProPublica, Vought said that after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, President Trump gave him a direct assignment to come up with a way for conservatives to counter the movement.

The Black Lives Matter movement. The movement that says Black people matter.

Can't have that.

No, surely not.

So Mr. Vought took his assignment seriously, of course, and popularized a phrase that you now hear everywhere.

Turn it on channel, you'll hear it in a matter of minutes on any of the right speaking microphones or speakers.

The woke and weaponized government. Now we've got the- we figured out who the enemy is. These woke and weaponized people who are trying to carry out their agenda.

Destroy the government, destroy the United States of America.

And all of our values, our Western values.

He's created an enemy. You know, he actually even even kind of bragged about how he came up with it. He told his audience that if you're if you're watching television and the words woke and weaponized come out of a politician's mouth, you can know that this is coming from the strategies we're putting out.

And that was a direct quote from Mr. Vought.

Dog whistle much? Uh huh. It was a brilliant piece of political branding by all accounts, which takes any government function you don't like. Environmental regulations, the initiatives, public health, public education.

And you frame it as a hostile attack on ordinary Americans by a politically correct elite. And you turn your policy disagreements into a culture war. And there you go. You have the full on weapon for destroying the US government.

And what did he do? He immediately fused this new language into his old obsession, the budget.

The legislature for renewing America released its own federal budget blueprint, a plan that calls for a staggering $9 trillion in cuts over 10 years. The word woke appeared 77 times in only 103 pages.

This is a fiscal policy blueprint, right? Like a budget blueprint.

Yes.

That's insane. Imagine you're looking through your spreadsheets and you keep going across like woke.

You know, it's like what happened to you?

Why is this in a cell? How do you even do a sum on woke?

Exactly. Yeah. The woke factor.

Yeah.

So, I mean, at this point, the budget is no longer a fiscal document. It's a propaganda tool. And probably so, right? I mean, he's made it clear that we're going to use this term, this phrase, "woke and weaponized" to defund the enemies within the government. So you cross us, suddenly you're woke and weaponized and we're going to hit you right where it hurts, right in the wallet.

And we're just going to defund you and see what you can do without any money.

So the blueprint was now written and all that's left is to take power and execute the plan.

The trauma campaign.

When Donald Trump returns to the White House, much to real American chagrin, Russ Vought is confirmed as the permanent director of the OMB on a party line 53 to 47 vote.

And the theories and plans he workshopped for four years, and that's all it took him, was four years looking into this document, creating this project, creating this plan and immediately puts it into a terrifying practice.

And we know it was intentional because the speeches tell us that, right? His private speeches that have been now found and brought to light.

Basically.

Thanks ProPublica.

Thank you.

If you want to sponsor us, let us know.

If you're not hiding somewhere right now.

Yeah, I mean, they basically opened a window into the soul of this project where Vought lays out his plan to inflict trauma on federal workers.

Remember that quotes in the beginning.

Subject them to trauma.

Let's, let's be very clear about what he said.

Okay.

He wants federal employees to be, quote, viewed as villains.

He wants their funding shut down so that, you know, for example, the environmental protection agency, quote, can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

I mean, this is way beyond policy disagreements, right?

This is not about how much, you know, warming is man or how much global climate change is manmade.

This is psychological warfare.

He's not trying to change what the government does.

He's trying to break the will of those people who work there.

He's literally going after individuals.

He's taking the human, putting the human side of this deliberately into it and saying, we're going to traumatize the people who are running these agencies and we're going to make them into the villains.

Yeah, think about it.

I mean, an employee who is traumatized.

I mean, and I think honestly in 2020, we were probably already getting there.

And now we're five years into this nightmare of a government and a nightmare of a world.

But you're already hurting.

You're already disheveled and tired and exhausted and annoyed.

And then you're publicly branded as a literal villain.

Of course, you're going to dread going into work every morning.

Right?

Like that employee cannot actively and effectively carry out their agency's mission, whatever that might be.

Even if they technically still have a job, okay, great.

You're showing up to your office every day.

But if there's nothing to actually do, even if there is, you're not going to be very effective at it.

It's a way of disabling the government without having to actually fire anybody.

You just demoralize them into paralysis.

Exactly.

I mean, these are the people who keep in mind, like just kept the country, kept the lights on for the country through COVID-19 and the aftermath of COVID-19.

They're not, I think it's safe to say that they weren't focused on a woke agenda at that point.

They were just trying to keep us all alive.

And then the thank you that they get is to be labeled as woke and weaponized, which is just the public justification for this campaign of literal psychological terror and abuse.

And it gives the public a simple repeatable reason to view their own public servants with suspicion and hostility.

Right?

So now when you're having a wait in line at the social security office or something goes wrong with whatever it might be, now you just throw out the, well, that's the woke and weaponized US government for you right there.

And you can justify just about anything by repeating that often enough.

This is without a doubt the most sinister part of votes, votes, excuse me, entire strategy.

It's an attack on the very idea of public service.

Yeah.

And look, realistically, I think anybody who, who is honest with themselves knows that there are likely some inefficiencies within our government.

There's some inefficiencies within our, our public workforce.

We know that.

Sometimes there are actually valid reasons for disconnected systems.

Right?

Like you don't necessarily want the IRS to have direct access to social security database.

You don't, there are, there are both legislative as well as conflict of interest causes and reasons why you might not want to have those, those databases affected or connected, but it works so incredibly well to just keep repeating it.

Even when it's proven wrong, even when we have direct evidence that it's not really happening the way that they say it's happening, they still just keep saying it and eventually it even gets into the minds of people who are already not big fans of Russ Vought.

Right?

Like, and not big fans of the president.

It makes even me has gone.

Well, you know, maybe, maybe there's more waste than I think there is because that's how propaganda works.

You just keep repeating the same line over and over, and it doesn't matter if it's true.

And they continue to do it.

And they know exactly what they're doing because it's part of the plan.

So for most of Washington, right?

Like a government shutdown, which we are currently experiencing is a crisis, and it's a failure of governance.

According to Donald Trump's own words, it's a failure of the president.

If they cannot reach an agreement and it leads to a shutdown, and it has been weaponized by both sides over the last few years as a means of getting done what you want to get done.

But for Russ Vought, a government shutdown is an opportunity.

It's actually a weapon.

Right.

I mean, it becomes his chance to seize the role of the undisputed face of the White House's response, right? Because he's again the embodied will of the president.

So he seizes on chaos to do what he couldn't do otherwise.

Right.

Well, it couldn't happen if everybody's at their at their desk watching this all happen.

There's nobody at that point, you know, people can resist.

People can challenge things.

But if they're all at home furloughed, then, you know, suddenly they don't have to ever come back to work.

Right.

Maybe.

And who do they call if they wanted to complain?

Right.

Nobody's in the office.

Exactly.

Maybe we just make everybody redundant and we just shut it all down.

Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, you know, the bastion of liberal policy, a Vought ally, was practically giddy about it on Fox News.

He said Vought, quote, has been dreaming about this moment, preparing for this moment since puberty.

That's an odd place to connect.

I agree. It's kind of weird.

It makes it creepy.

Yeah, it makes it super creepy.

But, you know, it's true.

Vought is not randomly making cuts now.

He's not just reacting.

He is making surgical incisions that are deeply political.

When he announced the cancellation of eight billion with a B, eight billion dollars.

And climate related projects over 16 states, all of which had voted for the opposition.

And when he terminates 18 billion dollars in funding for New York City's rail system, this is a blatant political attack on Democratic leaders.

Right.

And the targets are chosen carefully.

I mean, it's not just the leaders.

This is an attack on democracy.

Right.

But I mean, here, we're specifically talking about the party, though, the Democratic Party is being targeted for these cuts.

Right.

So he's not cutting new oil pipelines or new, you know, whatever.

Whatever conservatives love.

I don't know.

Whatever. Yeah.

Baby, baby roasters, orphan crushing machines.

They're not cutting those programs.

They're cutting the Democratic funding programs that keep those states up and running.

And that's a capital D Democrat.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And look, it's not just abstract numbers.

Right.

It's not just abstract numbers.

It's a lot of information.

And so he's trying to use his power to inflict maximum pain on the people and programs that he views as the enemy within.

Let me.

Well, we're going to read you here a partial list of the things his OMB cut or froze during these manufactured crises.

Under Vought, the OMB terminated over 1000 research grants.

1000 research grants.

These are the people that are looking for right.

People are looking for cures for cancer, Alzheimer's disease, HIV, AIDS, heart disease, vaccines, Parkinson's.

I mean, he's targeting all these things, right.

These are the people who are having their grants cut.

He blocks more than $5 billion from being spent on biomedical research and disease prevention.

He defunds the police by refusing to provide $2.5 billion to state and local crime fighting efforts.

I want to just earmark that.

I just want to make clear when they said that we were trying to defund the police as capital D Democrats in the wake of George Floyd, in the wake of Black Lives Matter movements,

in the wake of black people being murdered by police, he actually defunded the police in real time.

Anyway, keep going.

I mean, what do you say to that, right.

He withheld $45 billion in energy programs, increasing utility costs.

This is hitting everybody's direct bottom line.

If your rates went up for your utilities, there's one place to point to that.

I think there's only one person responsible for blocking this $45 billion.

If your rates didn't go up, send us an email.

I would like to hear that because I have not heard of one person who didn't have a dramatic increase in their electricity rates since this took place.

Meanwhile, if you want to try to become self-sufficient and get solar panels in your house or something, now see how much more those cost without the federal subsidies or anything.

I mean, it's just exactly crazy.

Blocked small businesses.

No, it's small businesses.

Which side of those normally line up?

Isn't that what Republicans stand for?

I mean, but suddenly they're not receiving $110 million in development funds.

We're canceling over a billion dollars in USDA food assistance.

A billion dollars in USDA food assistance.

I mean, that's pretty clear, right?

That's literally feeding human beings in America.

Right.

He even unlawfully defunded the Council of the Inspectors General, which is the internal government watchdog whose entire job, the watchdog agency, whose entire job is to prevent the kind of abuse he was committing.

So, you know, who watches the Watchers?

Well, nobody because they've been defunded.

Not anymore.

So this wasn't cutting waste, right?

Like this is targeted demolition.

This was taking a scalpel to the very programs that hold our society.

Together.

He's not balancing a budget, right?

Like he's he's settling scores.

He is actioning the president's hit list.

But even more so than the president, he is dismantling our entire government right now under our very noses.

This is that montage in Godfather Part II, right?

When Michael Corleone comes back or maybe in the Godfather Part I maybe. But basically, like your organized crime scenario when when the target that escaped comes back with a vengeance and people just start getting off at every turn?

That's what we're seeing happen here.

This is settling the score to see the impact of Russ Fogg's crusade.

You have to go back to where it all began in a way.

Wheaton College.

After his confirmation as OMB director, his alma mater did what schools always do for prominent alumni.

They put up simple pro forma congratulatory message on social media, and all hell broke loose.

The post was flooded with thousands of hostile comments, quote unquote hostile comments from other Wheaton alumni who were horrified that their Christian college would celebrate the man behind Project 2025.

The backlash was so intense, the college deleted the post within a day.

Again, this is like one of those like pro forma.

This is just like the Wheaton College would like to congratulate its alum from whatever.

Just the weakest sort of acknowledgement, trying to get promoted.

Like this is what our alumni go on to do. And they were so upset about it. They made him pull down the post.

Yeah. And these weren't... keep in mind these were Wheaton College graduates.

This wasn't Antifa, right? Like this wasn't like the Democratic party, you know, DDoSing or the website to get it taken down.

These are conservative Christian graduates from Wheaton College that were like, this is garbage.

You've got to take it down.

So an open letter eventually signed by over 1300 current students and alumni was actually published.

It called Vought's positions antithetical to Christian charity and declared that quote,

"Silence in the face of such as anti-Christian vision is complicity."

It's a sad day when Wheaton College becomes woke and weaponized, isn't it, folks?

It's woke.

Of course. There was immediately the other side responded with a counter letter from other alumni who defended Vought

and accused the college of capitulating to the spirit of our age, which is another like dog whistle thing from those who've read Revelation or studied eschatology.

But they accused the college of capitulating to the spirit of our age and upholding a DEI regime.

I'm trying to...

Wheaton, I mean, I just can't like at Wheaton.

If you hear silence, that's me just trying to not vomit in my own mouth here. I'm trying to like hold it back, choke it down.

Right.

Vought himself commented on the whole affair with a single word that he learned from his master. Sad. Sad.

It's a perfect microcosm of the war that Vought is raging himself on a national scale, right?

It's a battle for the soul of American institutions, not just the government, right?

But the very religious and educational bodies that even shaped him.

He is so radical of a figure that he forces a wedge even within the heart of evangelical Christianity, which has torn apart our nation since the 1970s.

He can even split them that have been historically so cohesive in their beliefs that they've been able to basically transform our country.

It's basically like a force of nature. It's like antimatter, right?

Yeah.

Just wherever it collides with anything.

Antimod.

Certainly got the weaponized part down, but not woke to be clear.

Yeah, right.

So where does that leave us?

Well, we've traced the journey of Russ Vought from the son of a frugal electrician in Connecticut,

to the intellectual author and chief executioner of a plan to systematically unmake the American government.

He's the quiet, bookish man who turns out to be the grim reaper.

Trump describes himself as Darth Vader.

He's more than the OMB budget director, right?

He's a true believer.

And you know the kind of person I'm talking about.

It's a Christian nationalist armed with a full set of Britannica encyclopedic knowledge of every weakness,

of what he perceives as his enemy.

He represents a new and uniquely potent threat in American life.

A technocratic revolutionary.

If you want to know more about that, go check out our series on the dark enlightenment.

Because even Curtis Yarvin is a little bit upset about what's happening.

He thinks that it's not enough and it's not fast enough.

And he's looking for political asylum in other countries as we speak.

Good leave.

We don't want you here.

But he basically represents a new and potent threat in our American life.

He doesn't need a mob or like we saw on January 6th to storm the barricades when he holds the keys to the Treasury.

The authority over the bureaucracy and a 900 page blueprint for the demolition of our country.

To throw one more nerd reference out there, this is what happens when the Iron Bank takes over.

Right?

They go for the purse strings.

But hey look, it's not like he didn't, he was hiding all of this right?

I mean from that first encounter with Bernie Sanders for his first approval in the first term, he's been calling his shot.

Vought wants a government run by people loyal to the President's will.

He wants to use the vast powers, as he sees them, of the executive branch aggressively.

He doesn't want to waste, waste all that power.

I mean that would be the ultimate waste right?

To have all that power and do nothing but carry on business as usual?

No, no, no.

He wants to put the people who dedicate their lives to public service in trauma.

And he has spent his entire career acquiring the knowledge, the power, and we're needed inventing the justification to do exactly that.

The final question isn't actually about Russ Vought anymore.

It's kind of about us.

What happens to a country when the man who believes its government is a quote "woke and weaponized villain" is given absolute control over it?

I guess we'll see, because that's all we can do now is wait and see, because it's already been done.

The die has been cast.

And that, my friends, is the overlap.

Maybe for today.

Maybe for this week.

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Will, thanks so much for being here with me today.

Thank you as always, Joshua.

It's been a pleasure.

Of course.

And it's a pleasure to be here with you, listeners.

Thank you so much for listening to The Overlap, and we will see you later.

Until next time.

Bye now.

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