The American Moment
A JD Vance-backed project wants to smash the institutions of liberal democracy. That's not good.
“I think the basic idea is that we have to seize the institutions and make them actually work for our people.”
Failing that, J.D. Vance told the podcast hosts, it would be better to just smash the institutions altogether.
“Universities, I really believe, are the gatekeepers,” Vance explained. “Everything runs through the universities — the ideas, the fancy credentials. Why is it that we listen to Dr. Fauci? Because he has a university degree that confers legitimacy.”1
All the horrors of our modern age — Fauci’s iron grip on our collective psyche, “the gender stuff and the critical race stuff,” the atheism, the denigration of the family — it can all be traced back to the same spot.
“There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we're willing to strike at the heart of the beast: That's the universities,” Vance continued, coloring in exactly what he meant by our people.
And there’s no half-measures to be had. This can’t be solved by affirmative action for conservatives, or better funding campus conservative clubs: “No. No, unless we’re willing to deinstitutionalize the left in those institutions — or destroy the institutions — absent that, we are going to continue to make the most powerful academic actors in our society actively aligned against us.”
Far from defeatist, Vance was actually bullish: “The only way it’ll work is to actually take some of these institutions over.”
While he got started talking about universities, Vance was really talking about everything. This was 2021, and he was mounting his bid for an open senate seat in Ohio. And he was positioning himself as a running-back: Someone who was concerned only with taking the Trump football as far as humanly possible.
Vance didn’t start out as much of a MAGA Republican, explaining in one message that “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler." But he eventually prostrated himself at the altar of Trump, snagged the ex-president’s endorsement, and eked out the party nomination. Vance had since gone all-in on Trump.
The only criticism that Vance had for the former president is that he failed to purge the naysayers from his ranks when he had the chance.
“When Obama was president from 2012 to 2016, 90% of his appointees in the administrative bureaucracy were Democrats…When Trump was in office, 50% of his appointments were Republicans2…If we're not actually willing to even work the institution's when our guy is in power, we're not serious about governing the country,” Vance explained. “History is going to run over us unless we actually change the driver.”
The two young men sitting across from Vance, Nick Solheim and Saurabh Sharma, were terribly impressed. Reflecting on the interview after the fact, Solheim gleefully endorsed Vance’s view of seizing power back from these dreaded elites: “There's no reason to be ruled by these people!”
Sharma agreed. “Life is made worth living by having a family — and that involves getting married as quickly as possible, it ultimately means having children. And that's what we need. A lot more than, ultimately, being ruled by people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Kamala Harris, who have no children of their own. This is no path forward for civilization, because ultimately, those people are out for themselves.” (Harris is stepmother to her husband’s two children.)
Solheim and Sharma were not, like so many podcasters of the American right, just talk. They are the co-founders and leaders of American Moment, an organization dedicated to capturing the institutions of government exactly as Vance had described. That’s probably why Vance joined American Moment’s board of advisors from their very inception.
In March of this year, Senator Vance, as he had become since their first interview, appeared at a fundraiser held by American Moment — dubbed the Gala for American Statecraft — to reiterate the point he had made on their podcast three years prior.
“If we want to have a second Trump administration — or any administration — where we have people at the level of Capitol Hill, people in the administration, who weren't complete traitors to the cause, what would you need to actually put that in place?”3
The answer to that question was rhetorical. In the seats was a veritable who’s-who of the American hard-right — Solheim, Sharma, as well as financier David Sacks, pugilist Steve Bannon, ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, and a whack of others tied to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. They all knew the answer.
You need, they must have thought, us.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, a look at American Moment: One of the myriad groups trying to take over Washington for real this time — and their very special friend who could make it all a reality.
“When Trump came in, he brought the entire party with him,” Sharma explained on Bannon’s War Room podcast in 2021. “But he did not bring political elites in Washington with him. And they spent four years undermining him and subverting him at every turn.”
And so American Moment would fix that.
Saurabh Sharma: What American moment is set up to do is to build up — over the next year, five years, 10 years, 15 years — a new cadre of capable, loyal, intelligent, solid-on-policy young people who are going to go in to the ranks of staffing in D.C. and be the sorts of people that are brought in, in a presidential administration, to help augment and force multiply the influence that a populist-nationalist president can have. Because, without it, we're gonna see a repeat of what happened under the Trump administration where, despite his best efforts, he was constantly undermined and constantly defeated — in many cases by his own bureaucracy.4
If this concept sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve probably heard of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — a sprawling policy book and gameplan for how to take over the bureaucratic state and have it help, not hinder, an anti-democratic and regressive plan to remake the whole country. The nuts and bolts of this plan, and how it could functionally dismantle the checks and balances of American democracy in the span of just one presidential term, has been very well explained by others: John Oliver delivered a fun, easily-digestible version of it on his show; while
has broken down the agenda in granular detail here on Substack. Even People magazine is covering it.Trump recently disavowed Project 2025, claiming “I know nothing about Project 2025.” He has insisted it has no sway over his plans for a second term — it’s a denial that few believe. His effort to distance himself from the plan, in fact, backfired, helping push coverage of the Heritage Foundation’s plans into the mainstream.
While the Heritage Foundation gets ample coverage as the progenitors of the plan, they are just one the many groups behind this effort to radically remake the American state into one that serves only the interests of a hypothetical President Trump. This rogue’s gallery of right-wing groups includes Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s misinformation machine; Mark Meadows’ Conservative Partnership Institute; the anti-Queer Family Policy Alliance and Mom’s For Liberty; and a hodgepodge of anti-abortion, anti-woke, anti-liberal groups — many financed by the usual suspects of the American far-right.
As Vance himself, tapped on Monday to join Trump’s ticket as candidate for Vice President of the United States, explained at the gala: “This organization is extremely, extremely important. Because if Trump wins office, and we don't have the people to staff the administration with, that's not going to be — ultimately, it'd be better than Joe Biden, certainly — but that is not going to be as good as it could be.”
The idea of adopting a more aggressive slash-and-burn approach to governing — chiefly by purging the bureaucracy, appointing more loyalists and ideologues, and centralizing more powers into the office of the president — isn’t new. Politicians like Pat Buchanan and George Wallace, political outsiders and noted racists, warned that no conservative could truly govern unless the entrenched liberalism of the state was rooted out. Many had promised it over the years, but none delivered.
Trump embraced this idea in rhetoric when he first campaigned for president, with conspiratorial warnings of a hidden deep state, but his time in office was so marred by dysfunction that he didn’t get very far on his pledge to drain the swamp.
And so before his term even ended, but particularly after he lost the 2020 race, this plethora of conservative activists began to assemble their think tanks, political action committees, and 501(c)(3) organizations to start readying for their next shot.
That’s where American Moment comes from. When it registered with the IRS in 2020, as a tax-exempt non-profit, it declared just shy of $180,000 in contributions. (While we don’t know their individual contributors, we know right-wing rich guy David Sacks provided seed capital.)
The following year, American Moment posted just over $730,000 in contributions. In 2022, the last year for which we have data, it grew to more than $1 million.
Sharma once remarked that “most of the work we're doing is behind the scenes. I like to say that we're like an iceberg: You only see 10% of it.”
That 10% is still pretty ample. There’s the podcast, The Moment of Truth; a series of luncheons hosted for young congressional staffers featuring guests like Trump’s immigration czar Stephen Miller; and their galas.
Their inaugural gala was no small affair. Vance wasn’t even the headliner of the $1,000-a-plate dinner. Sacks was there to accept some made-up award, and took to the stage to deliver a meandering bit of Vladimir Putin apologia. He delivered a speech littered with praise for Russia’s strong economy, strong leader, and strong military — which also invoked the dreaded “network of biolabs.” (This, I should say, doesn’t have a lot to do with American Moment, but I think it’s really interesting.)
David Sacks: This would be a really good time to seek detente with Russia. There is simply no reason for us to, basically, be courting World War Three with the Russians. We do not have any vital interests that are at odds with their vital interests. This is basically a manufactured conflict that I think really started with Russiagate — where somehow this fantasy was created, that somehow Putin was controlling our elections. I think everyone here knows this is all nonsense. But somehow, this Russiagate hoax has metastasized into a new Cold War with Russia. And I think that it's going to be hard to defuse this, but I think that we could take steps to try and negotiate a new European security architecture, take their security concerns seriously, and work out a modus vivendi with Russia. We do not need to be in a cold war with them, we certainly don't need to be in a hot war with them.5
Sacks, often joined by his longtime buddy Peter Thiel, has becoming an incredibly influential figure and financier in Trumpworld. He helped finance Vance’s senate run, and was instrumental in his being tapped as Trump’s VP. Sacks is a core reason that groups like American Moment are financed, and connected with so many influential figures.
Another of Sacks’ protégés, failed Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters, also took the stage.
Blake Masters: A couple years ago, out of the blue, I get a call from my friend JD Vance: “Hey, how you doing? How you been? Okay. So I got this guy I need you to meet, his name is Saurabh, and he's really cool.” I say: “Okay, great. What's he working on?” And JD told me. And there was a long silence. And JD said: “I know, man, that sounds crazy.” And I'm like: “Yeah, it sounds crazy. Read it back to me again. They want to take over the government by training up an army of young staffers to go and throw them into all these Capitol Hill positions?” And JD said: “Precisely, but trust me on this.”
Masters recalled meeting with Sharma and having his pants charmed off. He arranged the financing for American Moment, using Thiel’s Sacks’ money, and watched as the group snagged a series of big fish to continue funding the organization, while also training up this army of young ideologically-committed staffers. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Masters added. He continued: “When Trump wins in November, I fully expect American Moment is going to be there ready to staff hundreds, if not thousands, of administration positions. It's going to be really, really breathtaking.” (Edit: I initially wrote that Sacks, via Masters, provided the seed capital. In fact, Masters was working for Thiel at the time, so the funding likely came from Thiel Capital. Sacks is, however, a financier of the group.)
At a conceptual level, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to help a new presidential administration hire the best and the brightest who support the leader’s agenda. Where things get weird is if the architects of this new bureaucratic state want to dismantle the very guardrails and safety valves meant to constrain unchecked power. What’s more, if state capture can be a key way to implement an agenda that the voters may not actually be cool with. Certainly, the Heritage Foundation’s vision for the country — banning pornography and birth control, radically expanding the president’s power to fire and appoint civil servants, abandoning efforts to fight climate change, leading a wholesale attack on public schooling, and so on — fits that bill. So does Trump’s own policy agenda.
But it’s also worth appreciating just how politically radical American Moment itself is. They are not just a tool, but a machine in their own right. They want to continue pushing Trump towards a hyper-nationalist sphere, where liberalism can’t just be defeated but must be purged entirely. That concern is what motivates “90%” of what American Moment does behind the scenes.
This has also been the life work of Steven Bannon, one-time Trump consigliere and strategist. Since he was defenestrated from the White House, he has been marshalling forces from the outside to plot his return. While he may not be terribly linked up with the Heritage Foundation, a long-standing organization with its own cast of characters, he has made common cause with the hungry neophytes at American Moment.
Climbing onstage at the Gala for American Statecraft, Bannon delivered his vision for their partnership.
“It's not just America First — it's American citizens first,” Bannon wheezed. “But this is what American Moment is. And this is why I've been a huge supporter of this from day one…You can't just talk about deconstructing the administrative state, you have to do it. You have to take on the deep state. You have to do it. You have to be prepared to go to prison.”
The day he was speaking to the gala attendees, Bannon and his lackeys had just been acquitted by an Italian court. Bannon had been embroiled in messy civil and criminal wrangling over his plans to turn a 700-year-old monastery near Rome into a training school for “Judao-Christian values.” Its parallels to American Moment didn’t need to be stated, but he did anyway.
This “gladiator school,” he said, would not be some wishywashy think-tank, “but something that would be like American Moment.”
Bannon went on to explain why training fighters was so key.
Steve Bannon: Trump, he's no constitutional scholar. He's not a particularly church-y guy. But I will tell you he is an instrument of divine will. And it's upon you. You're the hoplites. Right? You're the footsoldiers. This can't get changed just by a leader, we saw that in the first term. This is why Heritage [Foundation] and others — Ross Vought’s group, Saurabh’s working on it — are training people up for Project 2025. On the day that we hit the beach, of the 4000 people that will actually do the work inside the government, 3000 can be a landing team, and go in on day one. Only Donald Trump has to approve ‘em…That is what you can be part of. That is how you deconstruct the administrative state. That's how you take down the deep state.
You may have seen some clips, recently: They feature prominent right-wing figures standing at a lectern, in front of a blue-and-orange backdrop, underneath two words in bold typeface: “NATIONAL CONSERVATISM.”
This year’s conference featured Senator Josh Hawley finally saying the quiet part loud: “Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say that I am advocating for Christian nationalism. And so I do.” Others speakers and attendees were a mix of reactionary racists and establishment Republicans, like Vance.
This National Conservatism conference was put on by the right-wing Edmund Burke Foundation. Look at their board and you’ll see two familiar faces: Saurabh Sharma and Nick Solheim.
Sharma actually spoke at the National Conservatism conference in 2022, and he delivered a particularly unnerving vision for how his movement will not just seize power in Washington, but how it will reach even further and not let go. The oil and gas industry, he explained, is a prime of example of where the political right has done “patronage politics” to great political effect. Conservatives have advocated for the onshoring of energy infrastructure while putting up protectionist walls against other countries’ energy products. The domestic oil and gas industry — both the corporate interests and their blue collar workers — are therefore “willing to be serious and engaged patrons for building the other infrastructure that the right needs.” (See: The Koch brothers.)
A bit more of this “unprincipled politicking” is needed, he continued.
Saurabh Sharma: Not only because it helps reward the members of our base, who would profitably be employed in these industries, but because creating these client interests — of companies and industries that are focused on building things here — would create the client interests committed to the right’s political success. That could bolster the tools available to us, in terms of corporate power or financial resources and more. So, as we acquire new political power in these next few months and years, let's be a little bit less principled and build an interconnected web of interests committed to our political success, rather than expecting to constantly fight that tide of power allied against us. It'll take time, but we need to start now, otherwise we're going to be hopelessly outgunned
Congrats! You re-invented Benito Mussolini’s concept of fascism.
Another great brain of the National Conservatism conference (a name that sounds more ominous the more you hear it) is Theo Wold, formerly a senior official in the Trump White House. He delivered remarks this year entitled “Decolonizing America: The Necessity of Deportation.” In it, he dispenses with the idea that America should deport some eight million people just because they commit crimes6, as Trump once did; but instead demands that all support for undocumented migrants and refugees be abolished and they be removed from the country forthwith.
Wold is, surprise, a big supporter of American Moment. He attended the gala, and joined Sharma and Solheim on their podcast — who gleefully introduced him as a “very, very, very, very based man.”
As he explained to the podcasting duo:
Theo Wold: One of the most damning criticisms of the conservative legal movement is: It stamped out any kind of creativity, any kind of aggression, any kind of will to exercise political power. […]
I'm not saying that Republican [Attorneys General] or Republican governors should engage in illegality, or tip the hand fraudulently to a Republican candidate. But it's just basic blocking and tackling of politics, that when you hold the top job in a state, there's an organizational strength that comes with that. You've got supporters, you have patronage. You have a system in place that's already produced your victories.
Saurabh Sharma: You have a set of neutral institutions. At a very crass level, people put money into your statewide PAC and everything, because they want access. And that can be used to fund the political infrastructure of the entire state.[…]
Wold: That's exactly right. And then coupled with that, then on the ground, we don't have any of these sort of tertiary actors, like the trade unions, like the Fair Housing agency folks, or any of the Soros Open Society-funded organizations that do: ‘Look, we’ll get you food stamps. And here's a ballot while you're at it, register to vote Democrat,’ right? 7
Let’s stop and deconstruct that for a second, because I think it illustrates exactly the fight American Moment and their ilk are pursuing. They believe that our society has been so co-opted by progressivism — the atheistic, Marxist, transgender, radical kind — that everything they don’t like in the state can trace their roots back to this many-tentacled octopus. They imagine a fifth column: Not of foreign subversives, per se, but of domestic and international actors who conspire to dismantle the traditional values of America. The country accepts these changes not because they want to, but because they are cajoled, bullied, and bought off. The only way to fight this hydra is to steal its power. If the left has client charities, and corporations, and trade unions — then the right must do the same, with even more vigor.
This, of course, is pure fiction. The left wishes it could wield such power — if it did, it wouldn’t know what to do with it. This is the byproduct of conspiratorial thinking, it mistakes latent beliefs, soft consensus, and steady social progress with shadowy machinations and devious subterranean plots. It is also damn useful rhetorical framing to drive recruitment, motivate a base, and excuse all manner of unscrupulous politics. If Republicans really want to criminalize abortion, Wold pointed out, then state Republicans need to get moving on stacking state courts with more pro-life judges and combatting ballot initiatives. (Wold, it’s worth noting, now heads the Claremont Institute — another Project 2025 group.)
This plan to capture every lever of government extends to immigration too, of course. On Vance’s first appearance on the podcast, he went to some strange places in imagining what assimilation means. “Do I really want a new Americans to have their preferred pronouns and their email signature? No. But that's what assimilation means, given how broken our elite culture is.” His ideal image of the wrong kind of immigrant was Representative Ilhan Omar:
JD Vance: They gave her an incredible amount of opportunity. And there's just a complete lack of gratitude. My family has been here, as far as I can tell, for nine, ten — like, many generations. I've never heard a person in my family express the ingratitude towards this country that Ilhan Omar does towards this country. And look, this is the way the laws works. This country belongs to Ilhan Omar in the same way that it belongs to me but, my god, show a little appreciation for the fact that you would be living in a in a craphole if this country didn't bring you to a place that has obviously its problems, but has a lot of prosperity, too.
Vance came back on the podcast for its 100th episode to brag about just how far Sacks’ money had gone.
JD Vance: Let's just take the Ukraine issue where…we've gotten just in a year, a majority of the Republican base, now, is skeptical of our posture in Ukraine. Whereas it was probably two senators in the last Congress, it's now at least 10 senators in this Congress who are closer to where I am.
On another podcast episode, the American Moment duo had on Stephen Wolfe, author of The Case for Christian Nationalism. In their conversation, he makes that case pretty bluntly, imaging a state that says: “This is a Christian land, and we're going to force you to obey some sort of Christian law.”8 That means, for example, bringing back Sabbath laws. (Wolfe is such an old-school nutjob that he spent a shocking amount of time musing about whether Irish Catholics belong in America given their loyalty to the Pope.)
On another was Paul Dans, Trump’s Chief of Staff at the Office of Personnel Management — he now runs the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a front for Project 2025. As Dans explained to the gang, Republicans just weren’t ready for the legal fight that came after Trump refused to concede the 2020 election. It should be a wakeup call, he said, as Republicans get ready to do it all again. “The real work is before the election…that starts with getting the right people in the secretaries of state offices, right people into political parties, right people into national parties as well.”9 (You’ll be surprised to learn that another coalition of right-wing groups, albeit with plenty of overlap to Project 2025, are already planning on how to contest the 2024 election, regardless of the results.)
The Moment of Truth has had on a who’s who of the kookiest Republicans, including Senator Ron Johnson. He packed a lot of crazy into their hour-long interview, suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccine had killed at least 7,000 people; that the CIA killed John F. Kennedy Jr, and that Bill Gates use the World Health Organization to control the world.10
Representative Dan Bishop joined the podcast to extol the virtues of having Tucker Carlson serve as an rhetorical guiding light for the Republican Party. And he did it in the weirdest way possible:
Dan Bishop: [Carlson] has correctly articulated that he's not going to be shut up by people who say something about him, who smear him with terms that are inapt. They try to conflate the lunatic who acted in Buffalo and the replacement theory — that is a grotesque racist idea, the notion that whites are being replaced by Blacks — they try to conflate that with what Tucker Carlson has talked about.11 Which is that Democrats have articulated, repeatedly and over a long period of time, that they want to draw in immigrants from abroad — has nothing to do with the race, but people from abroad — to replace their voters because they know that they're offending people in the United States. They're not serving the interest of political interests of the people in the United States. 12
But these middle-aged political eggheads, activists, and politicians, some of whom are in the twilight of their careers, aren’t ambitious enough for people like Sharma. As he explained on the editorially-bonkers One America News network, conservatives will never win if they adhere to a “live and let live” approach to family, culture, and religion. Conservatives will never implement their desired state if they think rolling the clock back a few years, even a couple of decades, will be enough:
Saurabh Sharma: So we have a choice: We can either use the true religions that the West has had undergirded for thousands of years, or we can allow for left wing religion — which is wokeness, critical race theory, all this stuff — to infect instead. And it's really important to be vigilant about this point. This did not begin just a couple of years ago. This is part of what concerns me about the fight against critical race theory. Look, I want to get critical race theory out of our schools, but I would hate for all of this energy, all of this drive by parents to fix their children’s schools, to think that 2013 was somehow the halcyon days, and everything was great and fine and dandy then. No, the problems root much earlier. Because, guess what? If you have schools where faith is not taught, where these true values are not taught, the kids that will come out of them will then raise children who are much more affirmatively left wing. Because they had no value system in which to route people. And so it's really critical to realize that the 90s weren't some utopia, the early 2000s weren't some utopia. And the dystopia we're starting to see now in the United States has its roots in choices that we made long before that, and choices that hopefully we can start to turn back on.13
[edit: While going over some of these transcripts again, I came across this particularly bonkers quote from Sharma, as he reflected on his conversation with Vance in 2021, that I think really well encapsulates the derangement of his worldview. So I’m adding it in after-the-fact. It’s below. The emphasis is mine.]
Sharma: Look, I mean, there's there's two primary kind of levers that make our elites extremely dumb. One is that they have no sort of worldview beyond basic materialism. They're atheist or agnostic in most cases. And so they have no sense of the transcendent, they have no conception of life after death or anything else. And so they they are very much focused on the here and now in a way that's detrimental to any sense of long-term building. And then you add on to that the fact that they have no children, so they don't even have kind of a base biological or deterministic sense of longevity beyond their own life. And they basically become sociopaths, they become people who only think for themselves or construct elaborate ideologies for why living alone, childless with two cats and an SSRI addiction, are actually good — it's actually bad to have children because there is an impending climate catastrophe, or what have you. They're demented, and power needs to be taken away from them by any means necessary in order to ensure that we have a thriving civilization or really any civilization at all.
That is the rather terrifying philosophy that underpins all of this.
These political activists, particularly the young zealots, aren’t just hoping to capture the administrative bureaucracy: They want to fuse church, party, corporate America, and state to impose a narrow and prescriptive view of morality, society, and law onto the entire population. This is explicitly Christian nationalist, xenophobic (occasionally white nationalist), and anti-democratic. It closely resembles Mussolini’s description of Italian fascism.
It has become a la mode in recent days to say, following the attempt on Trump’s life, that the criticism of the Republican plan needs to cool down. As Democratic Congressman Jared Golden phrased it: “We can start by dropping hyperbolic threats about the stakes of this election. It should not be misleadingly portrayed as a struggle between democracy or authoritarianism.”
But the election is exactly that.
There’s no point in forecasting the future. Perhaps Donald Trump will ascend back to the presidency with a popular mandate and a diverse team of functionaries and weirdos and will, like his first term, do some good things, plenty of bad things, and will otherwise trip over his own shoelaces so often that he will be unable to enact the radical agenda he’s currently campaigning on. Yes, maybe the Heritage Foundation and American Moment will fall on their face as soon as they try and exercise their agenda. America and the world liberal order will survive.
But that version of reality requires an enormous amount of optimism. Looking back on the last decade should give us no reason for that kind of optimism.
In 2020, there was a struggle going on. It began inside the Republican Party, between those afraid of Trump’s cult of personality and his disregard for the rule of law, and those loyal to the former president. The latter camp won. The struggle occurred on the bench of the Supreme Court, between real jurists and those captured by their party. The latter camp won. It happened on social media and in the institutional press, between those fighting to preserve public faith in journalism as a non-partisan tool to keep power in check, and those trying to weaponize mass media into a tool of partisanship. The latter camp won.
If Trump wins again, this struggle will come to the civil service, the agencies, and the departments that wield power in the United States. Championed by JD Vance and a coalition of Christian nationalists and hard-right ideologues, there is good reason to think that American Moment will do exactly as they promised. There is no particular reason to think the status quo will win. And it won’t stop there.
This is how democracy fails.
That’s it for this week.
If you’re looking for more details about the composite groups that make up Project 2025, Accountable.us has begun compiling research on the various groups represented on the advisory board.
In the Toronto Star this week, I wrote about how the attempted assassination of Trump cannot be allowed to quiet legitimate criticism of his campaign.
As I noted previously, the pace of these dispatches has slowed a little bit this summer, but trust that I’m pumping ‘em out as fast as I can!
Until next time.
The Hillbilly Has A Moment (feat. J.D. Vance), the Moment of Truth podcast
I was very curious about the specifics of this claim, but I absolutely cannot find any source that backs up this claim. The whole thing is rather curious: Political appointments, apart from those with bipartisan requirements, are supposed to be along party lines. So Trump would seem to be the outlier here: And he did famously have trouble filing vacancies. So this may be less a function of Obama trying to capture the state and more of a function of the Trump administration being incompetent.
Episode 947 – Vaccine Vacillation, War Room podcast
There is so much wrong with this that there’s no point in trying to go point-by-point. So I’ll just say: No.
Your periodic reminder that migrants are less likely to commit crime than native-born people.
How A President Could Get It Done (feat. Theo Wold), Moment of Truth
What Is Christian Nationalism? (ft. Stephen Wolfe), Moment of Truth
RonJon's Revolt (ft. Senator Ron Johnson) — Season 3 Finale, Moment of Truth
The Buffalo shooter himself wrote in his manifesto that he opted for terrorism specifically to fight “mass immigration and the higher fertility rates of the immigrants themselves.”
Bishop's Battle in Washington (feat. Congressman Dan Bishop), Moment of Truth
“It should not be misleadingly portrayed as a struggle between democracy or authoritarianism.”
But the election is exactly that.”
I’m hearing this from other wise, intelligent and worldly pundits. I’ve respectfully disagreed with you Justin Ling in the past but not this time.
I can’t recall ever being so nervous about a US election. I consider myself a centrist and definitely not “woke”, but the trump party (I don’t think the old Republican party exists anymore) is seriously frightening. My stomach is in flip-flops. I can’t imagine living above an evangelical nation where women suffer the consequences of rape and sexual abuse. I see putin’s army of degenerates storming Ukraine unchecked, raping, killing, and carrying out putin’s genocide with the approbation of snotty, ignorant american isolationism. And I don’t like emotional commentary yet here I am.
Wow! Thanks for this detailed overview of behind the scenes activity.
This calls for some very sober thought here in Canada and reflection on how easily this spills over the border with the likes of current rhetoric. Very troubling.