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Brad discusses recent developments linking Trump's campaign to election rigging and Project 2025. He highlights Russ Vogt's clandestine plans to build a platform for Trump's return and examines the implications of Trump's team intensifying efforts on the election system over voter canvassing. The episode scrutinizes bombshell revelations and video evidences about election interference and new hardline policies advocated by the Trump camp, capturing the alarming trends surrounding the upcoming election. Additionally, local law enforcement issues tied to conspiracy theories in Millersville, Tennessee, are evaluated as a case study for potential future national implications.
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And he's, you know, think of him as a member version of what we do.
Yeah.
So there's no think tank, no policy organization, no battle plan creator other than us for the worldview that I think Donald Trump has and that J.D.
has.
The best example is like Campaigns elected me to be the platform because of their views on my policy ideas and they're not running from all of the negativity that I get from the press.
That's Russ Vogt, who many think will be Trump's chief of staff if he's re-elected.
A man who is intimately connected to Project 2025 and was one of the most hardline Republicans on Capitol Hill.
He talks here in a secretly recorded video about being selected by the campaign to really build a platform.
He also says that he's not worried about all the negativity he gets in the press and that Trump is not really separating himself from Project 2025.
Today we discuss this in the context of new revelations about the ways the Trump campaign and Trump are inserting themselves, not into winning an election, but into rigging the election system.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Hello, everyone.
Welcome to the Weekly Roundup.
I'm Brad Onishi, back on a Friday after two weeks off.
And unfortunately, Dan Miller not here today.
He is on vacation.
This is our last week, we promise, of one of us being gone.
Nonetheless, much to discuss today, and everything's kind of tied together.
We're going to get into election rigging in Georgia and across the country.
Going to talk about bombshell video from Ross Vogt, who is the One of the shadow leaders of the Trump orbit and somebody who many think will be his chief of staff, he was caught on tape saying everything out loud that we talk about on this show, including the plans for Project 2025 and a Christian nationalist nation.
Finally, we'll zoom in to Millersville, Tennessee and talk about a sheriff and a police department there or a law enforcement agency there that is captured, captivated or captured by QAnon conspiracies and other forms of unreality.
And I want to just use that as a case study for what that might mean for the future of our country.
That may sound strange now, but it'll make sense in a little bit.
So before we get into all that, I want to, I want to just provide, I think, uh, a metaphor that will help tie everything together today.
And that is, some of you know this, but I'm a fourth generation Lakers fan.
My great grandmother, when she came from, uh, she, she was a picture bride, so she was picked out of a book and went from Japan to Maui and met her husband and, um, anyway, they had a long winding journey.
He died.
My dad's dad died.
And so she ended up taking care of my father and they both went from Hawaii or Maui to Los Angeles when he started college and moved in with relatives.
All that to say, when she moved, watching the Lakers became kind of one of the ways she became part of Los Angeles, part of California, part of mainland America, that the Lakers are kind of a thing.
So she could tell you in Japanese about Magic Johnson or Byron Scott or James Worthy, even though she didn't speak English.
That continued with my grandmother, who I would often call at the end of her life when she was in her 90s.
And she'd be telling me how terrible the Lakers were and how much they stunk and all that kind of stuff.
So the Lakers are this like really important family thing for me.
And I am like irrationally attached to them.
And I recognize and I've done this exercise many times that to be attached to professional sports is foolish.
And these guys are making so much money in the game is so this and so that and blah, blah, blah.
I know.
And I've thought about all that.
So you don't have to email me.
Thank you.
But it's still to the point for me with the Lakers that as much as I don't care and I don't want to care and I say I don't care, I do.
And I don't even watch the game sometimes because I get so nervous and so angry.
And if they lose or if they're not playing well or something, my brother and I will talk to each other for an hour on the phone about the Lakers and the whole thing.
One of the things that that's happened over just the long decades of for me of watching basketball and the Lakers is there's a phenomenon where you can get out in sports to a big lead and kind of have a big cushion going into the end of the game right in basketball this would be the fourth quarter and football would be the fourth quarter It could be in volleyball.
It could be in any of the Olympic sports we just watched.
It could be wherever.
And one of the tendencies at the end of a game, if you have a big lead, is to get comfortable and just hope that the clock runs out.
Just hope that you look up and it's five minutes left and then two minutes left and then 10 seconds left and it's over.
And you can kind of freeze up.
And I've watched this happen so many times.
It happened famously with the Lakers in 2008 in a finals game versus the Celtics, which I don't want to talk about ever again.
And so why does that matter?
I think it matters because sometimes you get afraid, you've been ahead and the other team starts to make a push and you don't have it in you to finish out.
And you're just hoping the clock runs out.
But if it doesn't, right, you really have to find a way to kind of regain your mojo, regain your momentum and win the game.
When I think of the Trump campaign right now, I think of a campaign that has been ahead for a long time.
And they're not used to being ahead.
When Trump ran against Clinton, they were the dark horse the entire time.
Nobody thought they'd win in November.
Nobody.
Or very few.
In 2020, Biden was leading.
And despite all of the anxiety and the worry about polls and the worry about what happened in 2016, Biden was ahead.
Before Biden dropped out, the Trump campaign was in a good place.
They were leading.
They were comfortable.
Biden looked listless.
He looked like somebody who wasn't ready for this game.
And we entered the fourth quarter, like we got to August, and all of a sudden, the Dems made a substitute, they put in Kamala Harris, and she is roaring.
And they are now completely leading in the polls when we look at swing states, when we look at All kinds of demographics with voters.
The Harris campaign has turned around so many of them, whether it is black voters, whether it is non-college educated white voters, whether it is everyone in Pennsylvania or the entire state of Wisconsin.
There is just momentum everywhere.
It's hard to find a place with the Harris campaign where there is not good news right now.
Does that mean she's going to win?
No.
Does that mean polls are always right?
Not at all.
Am I going to bed at night thinking, we got this in the bag, it's all great, no more Trump?
Nope.
It's just hard to find a spot though where you don't see something good, okay?
And by contrast, the Trump campaign seems listless.
They now seem like they're in the fourth quarter, they've been ahead, and they just want the clock to run out.
They don't seem to have a strategy to fight, to compete with this new person who's on the other side of them.
Trump gave a press conference the other day, Wednesday of this week, or Thursday, excuse me, and it was a rambling Strange quintessential Trump conference.
Supposed to be press conference was really just him rambling.
He stood in front of props like instant coffee.
He talked all about just every topic imaginable.
And it really was a kind of Cherry on top of a week where he's just really continued to be off message and had no counterpunch to Kamala Harris.
Last night we had video surface where he said that getting the Medal of Honor was better than getting the Medal of Service in the military because when military members get that they are usually dead or shot up.
So yeah, he said basically, it's better to get a Medal of Honor as a civilian because you're not all damaged by the military service, which is incredibly, incredibly denigrating and should be on a Democratic commercial right now.
It should be playing all over the country.
What's the point?
I don't think they have a winning strategy.
And if I, if I zoom out and you're going to hear me talk about this with Matt Taylor on Monday, if I zoom out, I don't see a campaign trying to win.
I don't see a candidate who's doing anything different.
And you could chalk that up to him being Trump.
He doesn't do anything different.
He has like one mode and he's just going to be Trump.
He's not a strategist, right?
He's always just going to be a narcissistic wannabe autocrat who's going to do what he does.
So he doesn't necessarily have a change up in his arsenal.
But I just don't see a campaign that is trying to win.
Now, I'm sure that there's pushback here and we could email and talk to all the campaign folks on Trump's team and they would say we're doing everything possible.
I'll give you one piece of evidence and that's this.
A lot of folks have been noticing that there is very little ground game for the Trump campaign.
There are not many, if any, field offices around the country, like little satellite offices in a office park or in a strip mall where they've set up a Trump campaign Outpost and where folks are canvassing, going to talk to voters, going to talk to the neighborhood, etc.
Anthony Scaramucci, the Trump staffer who was only in part of the team for a few months or a month and a half, tweeted out, it seems like he doesn't have any ground game.
There's no offices.
And he posited that he's broke.
Now that may be the case.
It may be the case that Trump doesn't care about a ground game.
It may be the case that they think their rallies are better than a ground game.
It may be all kinds of stuff.
But you know what Trump is putting a lot of money into?
And a lot of effort into?
A lot of energy into?
The election system.
The Trump team and people around Trump are putting enormous amounts of energy and effort into our election system.
I'm going to talk about two examples here in a minute.
But the thing I want you to consider as I do that is this might be a campaign that doesn't think it needs the play to win.
I think this might be a campaign that thinks it needs the play to tie.
That if they can win enough electoral votes, if they can be within a really slim margin of error, margin of victory, a point here, half a point there in a place like Wisconsin or Georgia or Pennsylvania, that's a tie.
And if it's a tie and they can cast doubt on the election, They can arrive at scenarios through various channels that will lead to any number of authorities, whether it's a governor, whether it's a state legislature, whether it's Mike Johnson, or whether it's the Supreme Court giving Trump the presidency.
I think we're in the fourth quarter, and I think the Trump campaign is thinking this.
If we go to overtime, because it's a tie at the end of the game.
The referees are going to give us the game.
So that's all we need.
All we need is to get to overtime.
Because all we need is a tie.
Let me explain.
Article came out yesterday from Stephen Glawe at Rolling Stone.
And Glawe points to something that others have been reporting on too, but I'm just looking at this article at the moment.
He points to Georgia and he says that the Georgia State Election Board has become a place where Trump has put enormous amounts of energy and the election board now has three out of the five officials that are election deniers and Trump supporters.
Here's Trump himself talking about it.
I don't know if you've heard, but the Georgia State Election Board is in a very positive way.
They're on fire.
They're doing a great job.
This is from August 3rd.
3rd. Rick Jaffer is Dr. Janice Johnson and Janelle King, three pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.
That's what Trump said.
So the election board now has three Trump loyalists and they are changing the rules of the election board and And one of the main ones, and I don't have time to go through every last bit of this, is giving election officials in Georgia's 159 counties the ability to refuse to certify election results.
That if they see what they take to be irregularities or problems or something, they can hold up their hand and say, we're not going to certify.
Now, this is a major change because election officials have long been ministerial rather than discretionary, as Glau puts it in the piece.
They've been there to oversee a process and certify it, like Mike Pence did on January 6th.
This has not been a moment of decision.
This has not been a moment of judgment.
This has been a moment of Do the job, certify the process, and go home.
You're not in place in order to exercise discernment here.
You are in place to make sure the process is finished and then certify it and go home.
But we now have a situation where, as Max Pflugroth says, communication director of Fair Fight, the voting rights group founded by Stacey Abrams, the state election board has become a MAGA government body.
So it's not possible that one person could raise their hand and say, I'm not going to certify this in whatever district around Georgia.
And that may happen.
Here's what Glahl writes.
One of these rules may open the floodgates to county election officials refusing to certify results in November.
Proposed by Michael Heakin, a Republican member of the Fulton County Election Board, the rule says that county election officials in Georgia's 159 counties must certify results only after reasonable inquiry finds that the results are completed and accurate.
So, without going into just comprehensive detail about this, the point I am trying to make is that after losing Georgia, after not finding 11,000 votes as he asked for on that famous phone call after not finding 11,000 votes as he asked for on that famous phone call with Brad Raffensperger, Trump is basically saying, all right, I'm going to make it such that I have loyalists in place that can
They can cast doubt on whether or not this is actually all fair or proper or whatever.
Friends, this is the institutionalization of the big lie.
I've been saying it for four years.
I wrote in the New York Times on the day or the day before that Joe Biden was put in as sworn in as president, that if you do not evaporate the big lie, From our public square.
It will grow like ivy.
It will become something that is uncontrollable.
And eventually it will become part of our institutions.
This is what happened with the Lost Cause after the Civil War.
I wrote about that in that New York Times op-ed.
This is what's happened now.
The big lie is now part of our institutions.
The people overseeing elections are people who think the last election was stolen despite the fact that there's no evidence of it and courts all over the country struck down every attempt to prove it because there was no evidence.
Now, if that is not scary enough, We have a situation happening beyond Georgia in supposedly all 50 states.
Let me take a break.
We'll come back and I'll explain.
Hi, my name is Peter and I'm a prophet in the new novel American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
All right.
Just want to make a correction.
The highest civilian honor is the President's Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the highest military honor is the Medal of Honor.
All right.
Let's talk about the Courage Tour and more election interference and frightening things.
You're going to hear me talk all about this on Monday with Matt Taylor, so I'm not going to go over every detail.
But we've talked about this on the show several times.
Talked about it with Ann Nelson, talked about it with Matt Taylor, talked about it on the Weekly Roundup, talked about it all over the place.
The Courage Tour is a Lance Wallnau production.
Lance Wallnau is, of course, the New Apostolic Reformation figure who has the reach of millions and millions in his audience.
He, according to Matt Taylor, is probably the most effective Trump propagandist in the New Apostolic Reformation.
He is the progenitor of the contemporary form of the Seven Mountain Meme and the Seven Mountain Mandate and that whole idea.
Lance Wallnau started the Courage Tour as an effort in swing states to try to propel Trump to the presidency.
If you remember, and Nelson talking about it, the Courage Tour starts out as a kind of revival.
You go there, you're in a tent outside of a church, and there is about an hour of ministry and prayer and people speaking in tongues, and it really feels like a Pentecostal or charismatic Christian setting.
It then transitions though very quickly into an election mobilization rally for Trump and Lance Wall now leads that charge.
You'll hear, you'll hear me talk about this with Matt, but at the most recent Courage Tour stop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, he talked about January 6th as election interference intervention, as if January 6th was an intervention into the election interference that had been happening.
So that's how Lance Wallnau sees the 2020 election and January 6th.
One of the things that Lance Wallnau does at the Courage Tour is try to get everybody who's in attendance to sign up to be part of the election system in some way.
As a poll worker, as a poll watcher, as an election official.
So there were a couple thousand people in Wisconsin the other day, there was like 50,000 watching online.
And he said, basically, if we don't get everybody signed up to do this, we failed.
So you can see what they want.
And you can see that in the context, it's somebody who thinks 2020 was stolen and January 6th was an intervention, not a riot, not an insurrection, not a coup.
Now, there's another aspect to this that Matt will talk about Monday, but I'll just mention here briefly, and that is a line of Judah initiative started by a man named Joshua Standifer.
Standifer has a background in OPPO research with the Republican Party, but he now leads this organization that he claims is all over the country and has mobilized to get people at the Courage Tour and other places to sign up to be election workers.
What Standifer talks about when he pitches this idea is that you will be inside the room when they're counting the votes and you can let us know and you can let anyone know if you see what you think are irregularities.
I want to recall an image from last election that some of you might have seen.
And that were a couple of women on their knees outside praying fervently of an election center, a place where votes were being counted.
And they're like trying to cast out demons and basically do spiritual warfare such that Trump will win and God's will will be done.
And if you've seen this image, in some ways it's a little bit startling because here are these women just fervently praying on their knees on blacktop in a parking lot right outside of an election center.
And they're crying, they're wailing, and it's quite a scene.
Well, the strategy now is not to do spiritual warfare outside of the elections, but to be the ones counting the votes.
People who believe a couple of things.
You ready?
2020 was stolen.
January 6th was an intervention, not an insurrection.
And that there's literally a spiritual battle between good and evil, God and Satan, raging right now.
People who believe that folks like Lance Wallnau and others hear direct messages from God.
That their prophecies are prophecies about what will happen in the world.
Folks who think that the likes of Tim Walz or Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or others are filled with demons.
You all might remember this, but Lance Wallnau was the one who I talked about a couple of weeks ago saying that he didn't mind Kamala Harris as a person.
He just was at war with the demon speaking inside of her.
It's like, oh, thanks for clearing that up, Lance.
Appreciate it.
We really thought you were castigating Vice President Kamala Harris as a person, but it's just the demon inside her.
So yeah, I feel better.
That's good.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
No problem.
No, no harm done.
This is a guy who talked about her having a Jezebel spirit.
And Dan and I went over this on the Weekly Roundup.
That's Lance Wallnau.
So folks who think in the ways that Lance Wallnau thinks are now the ones, according to Joshua Standifer and his election mobilization efforts with Lion of Judah, are going to be the ones who count your votes.
And if they see something that they think is irregular, they see something that they think is out of line, they're going to call it.
They're going to flag it.
They're going to make an issue out of it.
And they're going to gum up the system.
And all of a sudden there's a system, an election system that has very few irregularities and problems.
An American election system where voter fraud is minuscule, where issues with counts and things are rare.
Now, some of you are going to email me and talk about Al Gore and George Bush.
And I hear, okay, that's fine.
Okay.
But if you just think about every election from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine to Baton Rouge to Albuquerque in this country.
There are very few issues in our national election cycles and so on.
But what if the entire system lights up?
What if you looked at a network that had lights for every election center across the country?
And in a normal cycle, a few of those lit up and there were issues with counts or with ballots or with the polling place closing or they didn't have enough ballots or something.
And all of a sudden, those lights are going up everywhere.
And people who think Kamala Harris literally has a demon inside her, who think January 6th was an intervention, are the ones lighting up those networks.
Do you see what I mean when I think that the Trump campaign is not playing to win, just playing to tie?
Do you see what I mean when I say that I think that their efforts here are really about making sure they just get to election day?
In a close enough position that they can light up those networks, whether it's in Georgia, through the election board, or whether it's around the country.
One of the things that I've thought so much about recently in light of the J.D.
Vance pick, in light of Elon Musk's just horrendous interviews, quote unquote, of Donald Trump this week on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Thinking about Peter Thiel, but also thinking about Donald Trump as a businessman, elitist, and so on.
And something strikes me, right?
There are just so many people in this country who are not used to winning by getting the most votes.
And I know you're like, Brad, okay, genius.
Thanks a lot.
You're really glad I came today.
But here's what I mean.
There's a lot of folks who, from an early age in their career, have been CEOs and founders, have been business leaders, have been politicians, who have gained authority, have gained power, not by persuasion or winning votes, but because they were put at the top of something.
Now, don't get me wrong, this is not me castigating business owners and saying, if you start a successful business, you shouldn't get to be in charge.
Nope, not saying that.
What I'm saying is, is if you're Peter Thiel, if you're Elon Musk, if you're a trust fund kid, if you're a Nepo baby who's been handed a company because your dad started it or something similar, if you're Donald Trump and you were handed a fortune from your dad, if you're that kind of person, it doesn't really register to you to win by getting the most votes.
That's just not something you used to.
And it doesn't really make sense to you.
And you probably think it's stupid.
Because you probably think you're better and smarter than everyone else.
Your position, your power, your authority, your wealth makes you think that.
If you keep that in mind, when you think of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Donald Trump, if you think of J.D.
Vance as somebody who's made a bunch of money in Silicon Valley, the DeVos family, the Koch family, all the billionaires supporting Trump, It starts to make sense that they kind of don't think democracy is that important.
And it kind of starts to make sense that they, that if they could outsmart the system, if they can attack soft tissue in the American political body, such as the election pipeline, well, they should be given the election because they were smart enough to do it.
Like they kind of think they should win because they were clever enough to go about it this way, rather than Trying to get the most votes or trying to win over voters.
And when you think about a Trump campaign investing in the election system, but not in the election, it doesn't sound all that crazy.
This is from CNN.
Last month, Russell Vought sat in a five-star Washington, D.C.
hotel suite, bowing his head in prayer with two men he thought were relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.
Vote, one of the key authors of Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for a second Trump term, expected the meeting would help his think tank secure a substantial contribution.
For nearly two hours, he talked candidly about his behind-the-scenes work to prepare policy for former President Donald Trump, his expansive views on presidential power, his plans to restrict pornography and immigration, and his complaints that the GOP was too focused on religious liberty instead of Christian nation-ism.
play for you a clip from the video that the Center for Climate Reporting, which did this undercover investigation, posted this week.
So obviously you hear Vogt here saying basically everything that we talk about in or on this show every week.
It really does feel like one of those moments where we've been talking about it for 600 episodes and he just said it out loud, but he did.
So let me make a few comments here that I think are really worth hovering on.
Number one, you can see here that he's talking about a Christian nation.
And when he envisions a Christian nation, he's not envisioning more people going to church.
He's not envisioning a revival where hearts and minds have been convinced to follow Jesus.
He's not envisioning a situation where the percentage of Christians in the United States goes up because God's doing something big and changing this country.
Nope.
How does he envision getting a Christian nation?
He envisions getting it by force.
So Russ Vought is like, yeah, we're going to deport 8, 10 million people.
And I want you just to think through what he's saying.
He thinks that he's going to be winning.
A public opinion war, a public opinion battle by sending stormtroopers to kick down doors, to raid factories, to go through neighborhoods, to be in every community and taking anyone they suspect of being undocumented.
So there's questions.
There's, there's questions of economics.
What happens if you, if you take those people out of the economy?
Okay.
I want to talk about a public opinion.
I just wanted to know if you think that this is going to win hearts and minds.
If going through neighborhoods, kicking down doors in the middle of the night in apartment complexes all over America, in homes all over the country.
If you have Latino folks who kind of think that Trumpism might work for them.
If you have folks in the suburbs or in any way adjacent to these communities seeing what it is doing.
I'm just not sure that you're going to be winning a public opinion battle.
I'm just not sure that tracks for me.
Nonetheless, when people say that Christian nationalism is nothing but being patriotic and wanting a country that follows Christ, just turn them to this recording.
Because here's the guy that helped to put together Project 2025.
Here's the guy that might be Trump's chief of staff.
Here's the guy that says in this video that he has incredible relationships with Trump and with the Trump campaign and that the trust is there.
That regardless of what happens with his position, he will be the one or at least one of the people that the Trump cabinet turns to to install their government, to put forth their policy agenda.
For him, a Christian nation is deporting 10 million people.
And then he says that anyone who comes into the country as an immigrant should be a Christian.
Shouldn't they come from Christian nations?
Can't we control that?
So he wants to take people out.
Many of whom are probably identify as Christian somehow.
Many of whom might identify.
As Catholic or Pentecostal or anything else.
And he's like, you're out.
And then if you come in, I don't really want you unless you're a Christian person.
That's the vision of the Christian nation.
Not love, not, not liberty, not, not like convincing hearts and minds of the right way, the right path of Christ.
Nope.
This, this is the thing.
Now, one of the other things that becomes abundantly clear in this video, in this recording, is that there is no real effort that there never was.
And we've said it on the show.
We've said it as soon as it happened.
They are not abandoning Project 2025.
He says it here.
You know, that's a political disavowal.
It's a strategy.
That's what Kevin Roberts, leader of the Heritage Foundation also said.
When you hear Russ Vought speaking here, there is no way, there is no indication that this Project 2025 has gone away from the Trump orbit, the Trump plans, anything.
What becomes even more clear, actually, Is that there's this real sense that Trump is their instrument.
That they know from the first administration he's not good at governing, he doesn't really care, he wants to play golf, he wants to be on TV, he wants to look good when he shakes hands with world leaders or anyone else.
That's what he's into.
So because of that, Vote and all the other folks surrounding Project 2025 are getting ready to install their government when Trump is elected.
Here's another quote from the CNN article.
Vote said his group, the Center for Renewing America, was secretly drafting hundreds of executive orders, regulations and memos that would lay the groundwork for rapid action on Trump's plans if he wins, describing his work as creating shadow agencies.
He claimed that Trump has blessed his organization and he's very supportive of what we do.
80% of my time is working on the plans of what's necessary to take control of these bureaucracies, Votes said.
And we are working doggedly on that, whether it's destroying their agency's notion of dependence, whether that is thinking through how the deportation would work.
One of the things that we have talked about Multiple times about Project 2025 is it wants to make every government agency a loyalist agency such that you cannot work there unless you pass a loyalist test.
A test that shows you share the ideology and worldview of Donald Trump and you support what he wants to do.
Essentially, you cannot work there unless you are on board with everything they want to do.
Now, that's much different than how the various agencies in our government work now.
There are policies, there are processes, there are people who have dedicated their lives to carrying out the mission of those agencies.
They do not want to break the law, and they want to make sure that everything functions bureaucratically as it is supposed to.
Here, they'll be made into loyalists who need to do the work that Vogt himself and his center, along with everyone else involved in Project 2025, is planning.
That could be deportation, That could be things surrounding gender and sexuality.
That could be things surrounding reproductive rights.
That could be things like, and this is part of the plan for Project 2025, is eliminating all references to climate change in the government's documents and public facing articles.
Now, this emerged the same week that Andy Kroll and others at ProPublica, who continue just to do incredible, astounding journalistic work, published Training videos related to Project 2025.
So these are videos training people to implement Project 2025.
And Kroll and his colleagues at ProPublica have just done a great service by putting these in the public domain.
So not only do we have a vote talking about what's going to happen when Trump is elected and how Project 2025 and everything will be implemented, we now know how those Who are part of this whole machine will be trained.
So here's some things that Kroll says he learned watching the 14 hours of the Project 2025 training videos.
Bethany Kozma, a former Trump-era USAID official, says future appointees will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.
Kate Sullivan, a former DOJ acting AG general under Trump, takes aim at gender advisory roles created by Biden to advance equal rights and opportunities.
That position has to be eradicated, Sullivan says.
In another video, Dan Huff, a former legal advisor in the Trump White House, says future appointees are right to be worried about personal and professional blowback.
That's a real danger.
One of the things that they encourage people to do is not to send emails, but to talk to people in person, because there will be no paper trail.
As Kroll notes, 29 of the 36 people who appear in these videos We're part of the Trump campaign, or have worked for Trump in some capacity.
Carolyn Leavitt, the Trump spokesperson, quoted in a story about Project 2025, who claimed that Trump was disincentive from it, wasn't involved, etc., appears in one of the videos.
One of the aspects of the videos is something we've talked about a lot on the show, and I've been kind of on a roll with, and that's expanding the government and the federal workforce.
One thing that I've been, and if you listen to the show, you know this, and you might be tired of it by now.
J.D.
Vance represents a school of conservatism that really sees the government as needing to impose itself on the social order in order to create the common good as they imagine it.
This is not a small government conservatism.
It's not a conservatism that says the less government, the better, the more free.
It's a conservatism that says we need way more government, a big overreaching government, a government that is going to regulate everything from a woman's body and uterus all the way to How you identify in terms of your gender, whether or not those with certain sexualities can be married, and so on and so forth.
A government that regulates a social order.
And, as Russ Vogt said in the video we've just been talking about, that yeah, perhaps we don't let non-Christians in the country.
That kind of conservatism does not want to do something like leave federal appointed positions vacated, right?
There's one school of hardcore libertarian Tea Party thought that says, don't fill the government positions, just leave them.
That's how you kill the deep state.
Project 2025 training videos say the opposite.
They say we need to fill those in.
Here's what the ProPublica piece says.
Expanding the federal workforce, even an office tasked with scrutinizing regulations, would seem to cut against the conservative movement's longstanding 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 Kretien, a former Trump White House aide who is now Project 2025's associate editor, 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, not fill certain political positions.
I suggest that it'll be almost impossible to bring any conservative change to America if the president did that.
One of the places that they, about doing this is with Oira.
David Burton is an economic policy expert at the Heritage Foundation.
And he discusses, according to ProPublica, the importance of this kind of obscure agency, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
you But he argues that that is an agency that can regulate the United States when it comes to economics and environmental issues, fiscal issues, and it can be really effective if it's expanded.
Think about that.
These are conservatives calling for expanded government.
Why?
So they can reverse Biden's policies and efforts on combating housing discrimination.
So they can reverse the ban of the sale of ghost guns.
So they can roll back renewable fuel targets.
So they can do all kinds of things when it comes to economics and environment and other fiscal issues in the country.
All right, what ties these two together?
What ties them together?
The election stuff with the Courage Tour in Georgia and Russ Vote and Project 2025 and these training videos is this.
It's not about winning a majority.
It's about gaming the system so that you can become those who are in power and then to use that power To expand the executive branch, the power of one, so they will reflect what you want for the entire nation.
Now they would say, an expanded executive branch will represent the people and take power away from career bureaucrats and administrators in the deep state.
Those aren't elected officials.
We should let the most prominent elected official, the president, have all the power.
Okay, I understand the gesture.
But what's behind it and what will play out is that president imposing, by way of every government lever possible, a certain understanding of what's good for the whole country that really represents a minority of United States citizens.
If you take Trump's vote from the last two elections, it's nowhere near 50% of the country.
It's closer to 25% than it is to 50.
So when you think about Trump as this unbound executive with loyalists everywhere in every agency in DC, hiring more people, expanding the federal government, and basically creating a fiefdom where he does what he wants, puts in place every policy and executive order,
Whether it's on immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, sexuality, gender, school, and so on.
And then, as J.D.
Vance said, and I've talked about this on the show if you've been listening, when the Supreme Court or anyone else tries to hold him in check or balance out the power, he'll say, what are you going to do about it?
What are you going to do about it, Supreme Court?
What are you going to do about it, Chuck Schumer?
You think Mike Johnson's going to stand up to Donald Trump on this?
No.
It's not about winning.
It's about power.
It's not about democracy.
It's about imposition.
It's not about a government getting out of your life.
It's about a government that is in your life at such that you conform to how the way of life is supposed to be.
Let's take a break.
Let's finish today talking about something out of Millersville, Tennessee.
Millersville is just a little bit north of Nashville.
This is not a place that's super rural.
My mom's family is from Dyersburg, Tennessee, the very west part of Tennessee.
A lot of my family from that side is in Portageville, Missouri, or Missouri, I should say, in the boot heel of Missouri.
And those places are rural.
Uh, when I, whenever I've gone there to visit folks, uh, you kind of drive three hours out of Memphis and you feel like you've, you're really eight hours out of Memphis or you're three hours out of St.
Louis.
And you, again, you feel like you're just nowhere.
Millersville is not that.
Millersville is a 25 minute drive from the Nashville airport.
You can get an Uber for about 40 bucks.
So that's where it is.
The story out of, out of Millersville was, was really broken by Phil Williams, who's a kind of veteran reporter and somebody who just investigates these things and is fantastic.
So kudos to Phil Williams at News Channel 5 in Nashville.
What he reported is about the, the law enforcement there, the, the, the chief of police, the, the, the deputies and so on.
And what he found was a police department completely Enveloped in QAnon conspiracies.
Folks who believe that the Pizzagate story is alive and well.
Folks who believe in child sex rings all over the place.
Whether it's George H.W.
Bush or Bill Clinton or whoever.
Folks who enlisted civilians to basically hunt down these sex rings that they thought were in their in their midst.
Now it got so bad that the department was cut off from using various law enforcement Databases and reporting mechanisms in order to gain information on suspects and on people of interest.
Basically, they were cut off from federal databases and other things because it had been found out that they were so down these conspiratorial rabbit holes that they were no longer able to be trusted using these databases that law enforcement all over the country rely upon in order to conduct their investigations and so on.
I'm not going to go on.
We only have a few minutes.
Here's what I want to say.
And somebody on Twitter said this the other day, and I've been looking for it here and I can't find it.
But I have been asked, I don't know how many times since January 6th, are we going to have another civil war?
Are we going to have another civil war?
What's going to happen?
And one of the things I've said, and Sarah Posner says this and others, is that there are already little fires everywhere.
That we can look from 2020 to 2024 and we can find all these little things across the country that signal how our public square is in many ways unsafe for a lot of folks, whether they are election workers, whether they are gay folks trying to have brunch, whether they are trans people trying to exist, whether they are immigrants trying to walk down the street and so on.
Okay.
But I want you to imagine that you have police departments like this one.
And in the wake of Trump losing, Kamala Harris and Tim Wells take office.
And these folks just don't believe that that is legitimate.
And they form networks with other police departments and sheriffs across the country.
And they essentially, I should say, revolt against a federal government that they think is illegitimate.
They essentially revolt against any state authorities that were willing to certify an election result that went for Harrison Walls.
My point is that you can have local collapse, you can have local Civil wars, or at least you can have situations where local authorities, local officials, people in county positions, law enforcement positions, begin to conduct their business such that they don't recognize the authority of the government.
This is where this starts.
Like for me, when we get to November, if Trump loses, and let's just play it out.
Let's just play out something that I don't want to tempt people into because I don't want you daydreaming.
And I don't want you thinking that we should get into some sort of lackadaisical, whatever kind of mode.
But let's just say Harris wins the state she needs to win.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.
Wow.
Good job.
Let's say Arizona goes that way.
Oh man, bonus.
Okay, cool.
Guess what?
North Carolina flipped too.
Holy moly.
Look at that.
It's a blue wave.
Good Lord.
All right.
Florida?
Oh, okay.
Now again, people don't, don't, don't turn off this podcast and start dreiduming about that.
Turn off this podcast and go do whatever you're going to do to organize, get people to vote, sign up folks to, to, to, to make sure they're on their voter roll.
Go check your voter registration.
Go do whatever.
Why am I using the example?
I'm using the example because let's say that happens.
Let's say there's just this.
A win that's way bigger than what Biden got in 2020.
You know what?
I can see folks like the Millersville PD, the police chief, the deputy chief.
I can see constitutional sheriffs.
I can see local governments in parts of Idaho saying, nah, we're done.
You stole it from us once in 2020.
You stole it again in 2024.
Come get us.
Let's have it.
You remember Ammon Bundy standing in the wildlife refuge?
Well, that's what we're doing.
Come make us.
Come make us conform.
Because that's the mood we're in.
So for me, when I think about like what happens if Trump loses and Trump just goes away.
As a political figure, Millersville is a really kind of case in point of like a QAnon saturated police chief who lives in an alternative reality such that his department can't even access federal databases to do investigations because they're not trusted.
Because they think that they should be, I mean, if you listen to the interviews with folks and I can put these in the show notes, they, they talk about how they have dirt on Marshall Blackburn.
They talk about how they think all kinds of people are part of child sex ring.
So the indication here is like, well, who are you, who are you searching?
What do you invest?
I mean, there, there's kind of an indication here that we don't really trust you not to use these databases for the wrong purposes.
That to me is like a little window into the kind of revolt we might see in January, 2025.
If Trump not only loses, but if the attempts to claim he's won, if it's not a tie, you know, I've been talking all day about a tie.
If it's not a tie, if Kamala Harris just wins and there's no way for Trump to do any of the BS in a, in a manner that gains any traction and don't get me wrong, they're going to do everything they can to gain traction.
My point, though, is a Millersville PD 20 minutes from Nashville might be a kind of emblem of what's to come.
What kind of collapse might we have with our infrastructure when it comes to police, law enforcement, county governments, city governments?
Well, I think this is maybe a window into that future.
All right.
Reasons for hope this week.
There are some really good ones in our Discord server.
So one of them is the Supreme Court in Montana has upheld a citizen's right to privacy and rules that minors don't need parental permission to get an abortion in the state.
Some others.
This is the first one was from Handel and Fibustaf, sorry.
And the second one here is from Nathan.
Initiative to enshrine abortion rights in Missouri will be on the docket in November.
So what that means is this is, this is a ballot initiative that gained enough signatures to be on the ballot in November.
So there will be a chance for Missourians to vote and decide what happens with abortion in the state when it comes to the election time.
Some other good news is also from Nathan, Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona.
A lifelong Republican says he no longer recognizes his own party and he's taken a stand and is basically coming out in favor of Harris and Walz.
Finally, some good news out of the Biden administration.
They have announced 10 more drugs that will be, whose prices will be cut drastically, and that will help Americans all over the country.
Kamala Harris has released some economic platform priorities, and those include a $6,000 child tax credit, $25,000 in government assistance for first-time homebuyers, universal $35 insulin cap, and $2,000 out of pocket for prescription drugs.
Also calling for the construction of 3 million new housing units, taking on corporate and major landlords, and other things.
Now, One thing you might hear from Uncle Ron this week is that when Kamala Harris tries to do this and when she gets up and talks about it in Chicago at the convention, it's Marxism.
This is what Tim Pool said on X the other day.
It's communism, like literally the government price controls on consumer goods and all this stuff.
One thing you might want to share with them is that Michael Haddam, who's an historian, clapped back really well.
He says, 75 years before Marx's manifesto, the First Continental Congress passed by their Articles of Association in 1774, which instituted price controls on certain goods to keep merchants from price gouging, and it was signed by Washington, Lee, Henry, Dickinson, and later Jefferson.
So if you want originalism, Seems like the founders originally wanted this to happen and that's probably a good thing to say.
Don't go wrong.
Dan will be back next week and we'll be basically back to normal for the rest of the year and summer travel will be done.
I want to thank Dr. Tiffany Wicks for help with today's episode and research background.
Want to make a few announcements about places I'll be.
You can see some of these on our Instagram account.
So check that out.
August 26th, I'll be speaking at the Star King Consortium Seminary Annual Gathering, and that is in Berkeley.
You can check that out.
On September 7th, I'll be speaking in Sonoma, California with a group of folks who are educating voters about Project 2025.
If you are near Sonoma, if you're in Napa or Marin or anywhere else, come hang out.
September, I should have said this before, September 5th and 6th, I'll be in Omaha, Nebraska.
So if you're in Omaha, Nebraska, come hang out and the details are on our Instagram page.
I'll be speaking at United Methodist Church and doing a book signing at a bookstore.
At the end of September, September 7th, I will be at the Freedom from Religion Foundation annual meeting in Denver.
So if you're going to be in Denver, come hang out there, September 27 and 28.
October 1, I'll be giving the endowed lecture on religious tolerance at UC Berkeley.
So if you're around Berkeley on October 1st, please plan to come hang out.
With me at the Cal and the Ethnic Studies and Religious Studies Department, or the Committee on the Program in Religion.
Sorry.
October 7th, I'll be speaking virtually at an event from Princeton Seminary and the Center for Asian American Christianity is there again on Project 2025 and the upcoming election.
That'll do it for us today.
We'll be back next week with all our regular programming, including my sit down with Matt Taylor and our discussion of the New Apostolic Reformation.
Thanks for being here.
If you haven't already, sign up to be a subscriber and get all the benefits of our archive, ad-free listening, bonus content, and getting to hang out with us in the Discord, which is really amazing.
