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An Idea for Professors at Elite Schools: Go Teach Republicans Ben Kawaller

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Go west, Harvard professors. (Photo by Don and Melinda Crawford/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

I am not a Republican. I have nothing against Republicans on an individual level—some of my best Twitter followers are Republicans. But I don’t have the temperance for conservatism. I do not conserve; I spew. Liberally. 

But you know what’s nice about Republicans? They raise happy, obedient kids. And as I watch what’s become of our university campuses, where student outrage can curtail curricula, debase administrators, and upend careers, it occurs to me that it would really be something if the best professors at the Stanfords and the MITs of this world left their perches for less cosmopolitan schools. Why not trade the anxious, rebellious spawn of Democrats for the sunny, docile children of Republicans?

Their respect for authority alone is intoxicating. I recently spent a few days in rural Arkansas, where I met a whole bunch of Republicans, and all their kids called me “sir.” I didn’t even have authority over these children, but by the time I left I felt like an army general.

Each of these kids was humbler than the next. For my purposes, in fact, it was less than ideal—I was shooting on-camera interviews and looking for big personalities, and between “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” these were some of the most abbreviated answers ever captured on film. But what else can one expect of children who haven’t forever been told that the world is just dying to hear what they think about every blessed topic? While talking to these kids, I had a real sense that one day they’d be capable of sitting through a biology class or a history lecture without once having the urge to cancel their instructor.

I think Republicans are also better than Democrats at protecting their kids from crazy trends. Last summer I met a father in Iowa who’d decided to homeschool his seven children after hearing that the local school district was accommodating the bathroom needs of a student who identified as a house cat. (This all sounded pretty made-up to me; surely if there’s a classroom with a litter box for a cat child, it’s in Canada.) The point is, all it took was one species-fluid middle schooler for this father to yank his entire family out of society. I spoke with the guy’s twelve-year-old son, who hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom since he was nine. “How many years is that?” I asked the kid. The math was beyond him, but he was very respectful. 

Of course, not everything I’ve seen in red America has been fantastic. In a town outside of Little Rock I witnessed a grown man slap a two-year-old for playing with her food. I admit, it did make me grateful to have been raised among nice liberal people who know not to smack children as a matter of course, and so only ever do it out of uncontrollable rage. But watching this man threaten his sobbing toddler with more corporal punishment, I did have the reassuring thought that at least in twenty years she probably won’t be at Berkeley agitating for an intifada.

I’m not saying liberal parents are to blame for the fact that vast swaths of the supposedly brightest kids of the nation like to spend their free time braying about the uniquely evil state of Israel or tormenting scientists for doing their jobs or destroying people’s livelihoods in the name of fighting bigotry. Liberal students have been attending colleges for decades without craven administrators allowing them to turn their campuses into hotbeds of intolerance.

I should know—I was one of them! I recently came across an email I wrote as an undergrad to a conservative professor in response to an op-ed he’d written against having sex outside of a relationship. I informed him that his argument, which rested on biological differences between men and women, was “careless, demeaning, and unsubstantiated,” before expressing my wish to the seventy-year-old former Guggenheim Fellow that he give “some serious thought” to what he’d dared to express in the school newspaper. At which point in any sane world, an authoritarian dad from Arkansas would have materialized in my dorm room and smacked me about the head.

Of course, this was in 2006, and at no point did it occur to me to try and issue a collegiate fatwa against the offending professor. But forcing myself to read this haughty missive I’d fired off as a 21-year-old, I was struck by how similar I sounded to the adolescent schoolmarms who now set the parameters of their professors’ conduct. I was so righteous. I was also so lost and self-loathing. And, most importantly, I was so eager to avoid the reading my parents had paid these people so much to assign me. (Had my folks only been Republicans, I might have feared them enough to do my homework.) The idea that any college kid with even a fraction of my neuroses should have any kind of power is frightening. I shudder to think of what I might have inflicted in my directionless fury.

What’s enabled this nightmare transformation on college campuses—from what feels like the humanism of my youth to the zealotry of today—is a question other commentators have tackled extensively. All I have to offer is a solution: brain drain. 

I only wish I knew where professors should go! The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s recent 2024 College Free Speech Rankings report isn’t too encouraging; only four schools out of 248—four!—have a speech climate that could be described as even “good.” And their list of “warning schools,” two-thirds of which are conservative, more or less invalidates this whole thought experiment. 

Still, it’s a nice fantasy, no? The idea of Steven Pinker ditching Harvard and taking off for Brigham Young, that bastion of free speech? Look, at least when you’re dealing with Republicans, the fascism comes from above, the way God intended. 

I think it’s worth a thought. Maybe the kids at BYU could stand to hear a bit of evolutionary psychology. And I’ll bet a former Harvard professor could live pretty well in Utah.

Ben Kawaller is an L.A.-based writer and host. His last contribution to The Free Press was a video about learning to be a real man. Watch it here.  

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A Chinese national, charged with fraud by the SEC, just sent Donald Trump $18 million Judd Legum

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Justin Sun, founder of Tron and CEO of BitTorrent, speaks on November 4, 2015 in Beijing, China. (Getty Images/Visual China Group)

Chinese Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun paid $6.2 million for a banana — sold by Sotheby’s as conceptual art — and then ate it last Friday.

The banana is not Sun’s most notable recent purchase.

On November 25, Sun purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, a new crypto venture backed by President-elect Donald Trump. Sun said his company, TRON, was committed to “making America great again.”

World Liberty Financial planned to sell $300 million worth of crypto tokens, known as WLF, which would value the new company at $1.5 billion. But, before Sun’s $30 million purchase, it appeared to be a bust, with only $22 million in tokens sold. Sun now owns more than 55% of purchased tokens.

Sun’s decision to buy $30 million in WLF tokens has direct and immediate financial benefits for Trump. A filing by the company in October revealed that “$30 million of initial net protocol revenues” will be “held in a reserve… to cover operating expenses, indemnities, and obligations.” After the reserve is met, a company owned by Donald Trump, DT Marks DEFI LLC, will receive “75% of the net protocol revenues.”

So before Sun’s purchase, Trump was entitled to nothing because the reserve had not been met. But Sun’s purchase covered the entire reserve, so now Trump is entitled to 75% of the revenues from all other tokens purchased. As of December 1, there have been $24 million WLF tokens sold, netting Trump $18 million.

Sun is also joining World Liberty Financial as an advisor, making Sun and the incoming president business partners.

While Trump has the cash, Sun’s tokens are effectively worthless. To comply with U.S. securities law, WLF tokens are “non-transferable and locked indefinitely in a wallet or smart contract until such time, if ever, [WLF tokens] are unlocked through protocol governance procedures in a fashion that does not contravene applicable law.” The only thing that Sun can do with his tokens is participate in the “governance” of World Liberty Financial. Right now, the only thing World Liberty Financial does is sell tokens.

Any foreign national paying an incoming president $18 million weeks before entering the White House should raise red flags. Sun’s purchase is even more alarming because the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently prosecuting him for fraud.

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The SEC’s ongoing prosecution of Sun

On March 22, 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three companies he owns. The SEC accused Sun of marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a crypto token “through extensive wash trading.” Wash trading involves “the simultaneous or near-simultaneous purchase and sale of a security to make it appear actively traded without an actual change in beneficial ownership.” In other words, according to the SEC, Sun made it seem like there was a lot of interest in crypto tokens he issued when much of the trading was fraudulent and manufactured by Sun.

The SEC also charged Sun with “orchestrating a scheme to pay celebrities to tout” his crypto tokens “without disclosing their compensation.” Federal law requires people who endorse securities to “disclose whether they received compensation for the promotion, and to specify the amount.” The celebrities involved included Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, and Soulja Boy.

Lohan paid $40,000, and Paul paid about $100,000 to settle the charges against them without admitting liability. Soulja Boy did not respond to the lawsuit, and a default judgment was issued against him.

Sun posted on X that he believes the SEC “complaint lacks merit” and complained that “the SEC’s regulatory framework for digital assets is still in its infancy and is in need of further development.”

The litigation against Sun is ongoing, with a federal judge considering a motion by Sun’s attorneys to dismiss the charges. The current SEC Chairman, Gary Gensler, who announced the charges against Sun, will step down when Trump takes office in January. A new SEC commissioner appointed by Trump could settle or dismiss the charges against Sun.

How Trump can use the power of the presidency to unlock hundreds of millions in profits for himself

Through World Liberty Financial, Trump can reap massive personal profits from creating a more permissive regulatory environment for crypto ventures.

In addition to his 75% share of revenues over $30 million, Trump’s company was also awarded 22.5 billion WLF tokens. At the current sale price, these tokens are worth more than $300 million. That is more than 20 billion tokens being offered for sale publicly. (This makes the “governance” value of WLF tokens, which was already questionable, effectively worthless. No matter how many tokens you own, Trump will always be able to outvote other token holders.)

Right now, Trump’s tokens — like those purchased by Sun — are worthless because they cannot be transferred. But Trump could appoint a new SEC chairman who is friendly to the crypto industry and who would create new rules allowing the WLF tokens and similar crypto assets to be legally traded. If the price of the tokens increases when they hit the open market, which is a possibility for a crypto token backed by the President of the United States, the value of Trump’s tokens could be in the billions.

That appears to be exactly the path Trump is taking. WIRED reports that Trump is “asking the crypto industry to weigh in on potential picks.” Among the leading contenders is Paul Atkins, a former SEC Commissioner, who, since leaving the agency in 2008, has run a consulting firm that works with crypto companies. Atkins is also co-chair of the Token Alliance, an initiative of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, the lobbying group for the crypto industry. He is also a member of the Chamber of Digital Commerce’s Board of Directors.

Another top contender, former SEC General Counsel Robert Stebbins, has said that the SEC should “pause most of its crypto lawsuits while clearing a path for the firms to do business without the overhang of litigation.” But Stebbins’ candidacy underscores the need for Sun to forge a favorable relationship with Trump. Stebbins acknowledged that, even if it takes a more permissive view toward the crypto industry, it may want to consider continuing to pursue litigation involving fraud.

Major media outlets obsessed with banana, ignore Sun’s payment to Trump

A foreign national under federal fraud prosecution making a purchase that results in $18 million cash payment to the president-elect has all the makings of a major scandal. But it has been virtually ignored by several major media outlets.

The New York Times, for example, has published five articles about Sun’s purchase of the banana but none about Sun’s $30 million purchase of WLF tokens and his business partnership with Trump. The Washington Post has published three articles about the banana, but its coverage of Sun’s purchase of WLF tokens was limited to one short paragraph in a larger editorial about the crypto industry. (The paragraph does not explain how Trump personally profits from Sun’s token purchase.) The Wall Street Journal did publish a short piece about Sun’s token purchase on its “Live Update” blog, but the piece was not viewed as significant enough to be included in the print edition. The paper published two articles, plus a video, focused on the banana. One of the Wall Street Journal articles about the banana was published on the front page of the paper.

 

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Poetic Justice for Jay Bhattacharya. Plus. . . Joe Nocera

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Poetic Justice for Jay Bhattacharya. Plus. . .

Jay Bhattacharya speaks at the Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York City on December 5, 2023. (Anthony Behar via AP Images)

It’s Monday, December 2. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Biden pardons Hunter, is Tulsi Gabbard really a Russian asset?, a migrant gang member robs a New York prosecutor and smiles about it, plus much more.

But first: Karma comes to the National Institutes of Health.

If you’re a regular reader of The Free Press, you know Stanford University scientist Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s pick to run the NIH, is someone we admire. In 2020, when most scientists who doubted lockdowns and school closings were the right response to Covid-19 were too afraid to speak up, Bhattacharya was fearless in his dissent. In October 2020, he was one of three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which proposed a strategy of protecting the most vulnerable but otherwise reopening the country. For suggesting such “heresy,” Bhattacharya was attacked by the media and dismissed by many of his fellow scientists. He and his co-authors were also the target of fury inside the NIH, with its then-head Francis Collins calling for a “take down” of the declaration’s ideas.

Shamefully, in a country that claims to value free speech, Bhattacharya was also censored by the big social media companies. As we note in an editorial today, “the company now known as X put Bhattacharya’s account on a Trends Blacklist, which dramatically suppressed the visibility of his posts. YouTube, meanwhile, censored a video of a public policy roundtable with Bhattacharya and Florida governor Ron DeSantis because the Stanford scientist suggested—correctly—that the evidence for masking children was weak. Google, Reddit, and Facebook also censored mere mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration.”

We now know that the three authors of the declaration had it right all along. So it feels like poetic justice that a man who was smeared and censored by the country’s medical establishment has been nominated to run the very agency that called for his takedown. The critics are still howling, but we’re convinced he’s the right man for the job.

Read our editorial, “Poetic Justice for Jay Bhattacharya.”

The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful

In the days and weeks to come, Team Trump will announce more nominations, and we will cover the major ones. Today, along with Jay Bhattacharya, we’re looking at the case of Tulsi Gabbard, who was nominated last month for director of national intelligence—a role that will put her in charge of the entire intelligence community.

In the midst of two hot wars and more trouble brewing across the globe, this appointment could not be more important. Consider what’s happening now in Syria, where rebels have overtaken much of Aleppo, the country’s largest city, and continue to make inroads elsewhere in the country amid fierce fighting. It doesn’t inspire confidence that, while serving as a member of Congress in 2017, Gabbard met with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad—the man who killed hundreds of his own people, including children, with chemical weapons four years earlier. Furthermore, after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, rather than rebuking Vladimir Putin for his aggression, Gabbard announced in a video message that “It’s time to put politics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha.”

For Gabbard’s critics, this proves she not only holds contrarian foreign policy views, she’s a full-on Russian asset. Meanwhile, our columnist Eli Lake is having none of it. As he points out in his piece today, Gabbard is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve who served in Iraq, and a patriot who should be given the chance to explain her beliefs in a confirmation hearing. “If she persuasively clarifies how her views have developed, then she should have the chance to serve,” he writes. Read Eli’s piece on why the smears against Gabbard are “unfounded, unfair, and unhelpful.”

“No Wonder He’s Smiling. He’s Gotten Away with It So Many Times.”

Brandon Simosa is one of the nearly 215,000 migrants New York City has taken in since spring 2022—a result of the Biden administration’s lenient border policies. On November 19, the 25-year-old Venezuelan was arrested for robbing a woman in her apartment building and masturbating in front of her while she stood terrified, cowering in the corner of her stairwell.

It gets worse. Simosa is a member of Tren de Aragua, the violent Venezuelan cartel that is sparking a crime wave across the U.S. And even though he arrived in the city only last June, Simosa had previously been arrested six times. Each time, he was set loose upon the city to wreak more havoc.

But this time, Simosa chose the wrong victim. The woman he robbed, who has not been identified, works for Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, the man whose job it is to put criminals like Simosa in prison. And yet here, the irony is extra thick, because Bragg isn’t locking up as many criminals as his predecessors did. In fact, that’s exactly what Bragg set out to achieve. After he took office on January 3, 2022, he explicitly stated that several crimes, like prostitution and resisting arrest, would get a pass on his watch.

Now, New York City “is a great place to set up shop for a criminal,” said Hannah Meyers, a former counterterrorism officer for the NYPD who is now the director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute. She says the case of Simosa is “a striking parable of how completely we’ve ceded law and order in this city.” Read Olivia Reingold’s piece on Simosa and the Big Apple’s big problem with migrant crime.

Joe and Hunter Biden in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on November 29, 2024. (Mandel Ngan via Getty Images)
  • On Sunday, with just 49 days left in his presidency, Joe Biden broke a promise to the American people: He issued a “full and unconditional pardon” to his son Hunter even though he vowed he would never grant him clemency for his crimes. This month, Hunter was due to be sentenced for three gun and tax felonies, for which he faced a total of 42 years in prison and $1.35 million in fines. Instead, Hunter will face no punishment for any offenses “he has committed or may have committed” from January 1, 2024 through December 1, 2024. Explaining his reasoning behind the pardon, Biden used an argument straight out of the Donald Trump playbook: He said his son was “treated differently” by the Justice Department. “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted.” Our own Eli Lake, who has written extensively about the use of lawfare against Trump, believes that Hunter has actually been the beneficiary of the opposite treatment: favoritism. Case in point: The Justice Department hit Trump advisers with charges under the Foreign Agents Registration Act during the bogus Russia hoax scandal, but Hunter was never charged with any wrongdoing under that act even though he made millions lobbying foreign countries when his dad was vice president. As news of the pardon hit, even the Democratic governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, said he was “disappointed” by Biden’s decision to “put his family ahead of the country.” In a tweet late on Sunday, Polis wrote that he understands Biden’s “natural desire to help his son by pardoning him,” but “this is a bad precedent that could be abused by later presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.”

  • One year after Hamas invaded Israel, killing 1,200 and taking over 250 hostage, 63 remain in captivity in Gaza. On Saturday, it was confirmed that 20-year-old Israeli American Edan Alexander is among them, after Hamas released a propaganda video showing him speaking out for the first time. In the video, Alexander begs Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and president-elect Donald Trump not to forget him and his fellow hostages. Afterward, his mother Yael told thousands at a Tel Aviv rally that “My Edan, my love, we miss you so much.” She added that Netanyahu called her and “assured me that now, after the deal in Lebanon, the conditions are ripe to release you and bring you home”—referring to the 60-day ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah that has ended 13 months of armed conflict. Israel’s war with Hamas continues unabated for now.

  • Former presidential candidate—and newly appointed government cost-cutter—Vivek Ramaswamy slammed New York City for spending $220 million to turn the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan into a migrant shelter. The hotel, dubbed the “new Ellis Island,” has been housing illegal immigrants and asylum seekers in its 1,250 rooms since May 2023. In dire need of repair, the hotel is owned by the Pakistani government, which is using the $220 million in rent to avoid defaulting on its international debt, part of a bailout package from the International Monetary Fund.

  • Donald Trump’s latest controversial nomination, Kash Patel for head of the FBI, is getting early support from Republican legislators. In an announcement on Saturday, Trump cited Patel’s efforts to expose “the Russia hoax,” as the president-elect calls it, as an example of his commitment to the Constitution and agency reform. Patel, a former federal prosecutor and public defender, said he would “shut down the FBI Hoover Building on day one, and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.”

  • After months of heated debate, the United Kingdom’s parliament voted to allow medically assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. However, some disabled people are afraid the new law is not neutral, and could put pressure on vulnerable patients to end their lives—creating a slippery slope toward future bills sanctioning euthanasia for the disabled, the poor, and the depressed. For a deeper dive into the national conversation on this bill, read Madeleine Kearns’ piece, “Should a Government Help People Die?

  • Russian and Syrian forces launched air strikes yesterday on rebel territory in northwest Syria, leaving more than 300 dead, including 20 civilians. The rebels, who captured Aleppo in a surprise attack, now control a broad stretch of land in the west and northwest of the country. Their breach of Aleppo has reignited the Syrian civil war and given insurgent militias the first upper hand since their nadir in 2016, when Assad’s government recaptured the part of the city controlled by rebels.

  • In one of those annual rituals that rank right up there with Groundhog Day, the Oxford University Press, which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary, has announced its word of the year: brain rot. According to the BBC, “It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The word’s usage saw an increase of 230 percent in its frequency from 2023 to 2024.” Other contenders included demure, dynamic pricing, and romantasy (romantasy?). We do have one question: Isn’t brain rot two words?

The Making of America’s Most Famous Cheerleaders

The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders aren’t just a famous pom-pom squad. They’re an American icon that has performed live with Dolly Parton and the band Queen, and danced to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” for more than 41.8 million viewers at home. Wannabe members face a lower acceptance rate than most Ivy League schools. But it wasn’t always this way.

Back in 1991, one woman transformed the DCC from a dance team burning through cash into a fully-fledged operation with the brand recognition of a Fortune 500 company.

That woman is Kelli Finglass, the director of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who is somewhere between a drill sergeant and a mama bear. In a new episode of Honestly, Bari met with Finglass and asked her lots of burning questions, such as: How did she create a team culture of dedication and precision? What’s the line between compassion and hard-nosed management? And how does she retain America’s best dancers when any of them could easily achieve TikTok stardom overnight?

“I personally like people that want to be a part of a team and aren’t just trying to get followers,” Finglass told Bari. Click below to hear their full conversation.

Last Call to Save 25% on Your Subscription!

Finally, just in case you missed it (and honestly, how could you have missed it?), The Free Press is offering 25% off a yearlong subscription to all our great content. For just $60, you can access all our journalism—Nellie’s TGIF, Douglas Murray’s Things Worth Remembering, and much more. Plus, you’ll get the satisfaction of knowing you’re helping build a journalistic institution worthy of your trust. Click here to grab this deal before it ends today.

Joe Nocera is the deputy managing editor of The Free Press and the co-author of The Big Fail. Follow him on X @opinion_joe, and read his piece, “How a French Whale Made $85 Million off Trump’s Win.”

If you’re enjoying The Front Page, consider forwarding it to someone else you think might like it.

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December 1, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

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Over the holiday weekend, President-elect Trump continued to name the people he wants in his incoming administration. His picks seem designed to destroy the institutions of the democratic American state and replace those institutions with an authoritarian government whose officials are all loyal to Trump.

Congress—which represents the American people—designed governmental institutions like the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Department of Defense to support the mission of the Constitution, which is the fundamental law of the United States of America. The Constitution is not partisan, and in 1883, after a mentally ill disappointed office seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield, Congress passed a law requiring that the people who staff government offices be hired on the basis of their skills, not their partisanship.

The people who work in governmental institutions—and therefore the institutions themselves—are rather like the ballast that keeps a ship upright and balanced in different weathers. Nonpartisan government officials who clock in to do their job keep the government running smoothly and according to the law no matter whom voters elect to the presidency.

It is precisely that stability of the American state that MAGA leaders want to destroy. In their view, the modern American state has weakened the nation by trying to enforce equality for all Americans, making women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities equal to white, Christian men. But they have been unable to persuade voters to vote away the institutions that support the modern state.

Even in the 2024 campaign, voters so hated the blueprint for destroying the modern government and replacing it with a super-strong president who would impose Christian nationalism that Trump and his allies ran away from that blueprint: Project 2025.

Now, though, with Trump having won the 2024 presidential election by a razor-thin margin, MAGA leaders are claiming a mandate to destroy the American state and replace it with an authoritarian government staffed with partisans whose most obvious quality is their loyalty to Trump.

Russian specialist and military scholar Tom Nichols of The Atlantic notes that the Russians talk about “power ministries,” which are “the departments that have significant legal and coercive capacity.” Nichols notes that in the U.S., those include the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community, all of which Trump is attempting to destroy by placing unqualified loyalists at their head.

For the crucially important post of attorney general, who is responsible for overseeing the enforcement of the rule of law across the nation, Trump first tapped former Florida representative Matt Gaetz, whose association with drug use and sex trafficking forced him to withdraw, and then named Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general who has insisted that the legal cases against Trump are proof that the justice system has been “weaponized” against Trump.

To head the FBI, the bureau Trump has long insisted was persecuting him through its investigation of the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives—ties that Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have confirmed in detail—Trump has tapped loyalist and conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, who has vowed to use the FBI to exact revenge on those Trump considers his enemies.

That Patel’s appointment is designed to destroy the FBI is clear not least because installing him would require Trump to fire current FBI director Christoper Wray. FBI directors serve ten-year terms precisely so they are not tied to any administration, and Wray was Trump’s own appointee in his first term. Indeed, the idea that the FBI is insufficiently right wing for Trump’s new administration speaks volumes: in its entire history, the FBI has never had a Democrat in charge of it. Under Patel, the nation’s chief law enforcement agency would be a tool of the president.

For director of the CIA, Trump has tapped unqualified loyalist attack dog John Ratcliffe; for director of national intelligence, the person who oversees all American intelligence agencies, Trump has tapped former representative Tulsi Gabbard, whose ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin and Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad make her loyalties suspect. Taken together, Trump’s appointments to these powerful departments amount to an attempt to destroy the nation’s fundamental institutions.

As Charlie Sykes points out, Trump’s appointments are not only a “[m]assive Fuq U to institutions…[b]ut also a huge FU to the Supreme Court because Trump doesn’t think they will be a check on his campaign of lawless retribution.”

The Atlantic’s Nichols told MSNBC today that Trump’s appointees are “there to build an authoritarian cadre and to put themselves beyond the reach of the rule of law.”

With loyalty trumping ability and merit under an autocrat, the quality of government officials plummets. This pays off for an autocratic leader because those appointed to serve in an autocratic government are usually unemployable in a merit-based system, making them fiercely loyal to the leader who has elevated them beyond their abilities.

Autocrats start by rewarding family, and Trump has certainly followed that suit. After years in which Republicans went after President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who was never a government employee, over the weekend, Trump announced that he intends to appoint his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law, New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner, as ambassador to France. In 2004, Kushner pleaded guilty to 16 federal crimes and served time in prison before Trump pardoned him in 2020. Trump also announced that he will appoint his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Lebanese-born billionaire Massad Boulos, as White House senior adviser on Arab and Middle East affairs.

This weekend, an email from the mother of Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, came to light. Written in 2018, when Hegseth was in the middle of a divorce from his second wife, who filed for divorce after Hegseth got a co-worker pregnant, the email told Hegseth to “get some help and take an honest look at yourself.” Writing “[o]n behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way,” Penelope Hegseth said: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

Penelope Hegseth has since praised her son.

Meanwhile, those loyal to a rising regime attack public servants to make others afraid to speak out. On Friday, billionaire Elon Musk posted on X that Alexander Vindman, former National Security Council director for European affairs, is “on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States, for which he will pay the appropriate penalty.” Vindman was a key figure in Trump’s first impeachment after being on the phone call in which Trump tried to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear the Democratic opponent he considered most dangerous to his reelection prospects, then–former vice president Joe Biden, before Trump would release money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russian incursions.

But Vindman, who famously told Congress that he had assured his father that he was safe speaking up against the president because “here, right matters,” wasn’t taking such an attack quietly.

“Elon, here you go again making false and completely unfounded accusations without providing any specifics,” Vindman posted back. “That’s the kind of response one would expect from a conspiracy theorist. What oligarch? What treason?

“Let me help you out with the facts: I don’t take/have never taken money from any money from oligarchs Ukrainian or…otherwise.

“I do run a nonprofit foundation. The HereRightMattersFoundation.org to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s unprovoked attack on Feb 24, 2022. I served in the military for nearly 22 years and my loyalty is to supporting the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. That’s why I reported presidential corruption when I witnessed an effort to steal an election. That report was in classified channels and when called by Congress to testify about presidential corruption I did so, as required by law.

“You, Elon, appear to believe you can act with impunity and are attempting to silence your critics. I’m not intimidated.”

As Trump sets out to turn the government into an instrument for his own power and vengeance, President Biden tonight pardoned his son Hunter Biden. Laying out the history of Republicans’ persecution of Hunter to weaken his father, the president said in a statement, “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son—and that is wrong…. [A]nd there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough…. I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice…. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/trump-project-2025.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/30/donald-trump-charles-kushner/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c079y0r1j8po

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/pete-hegseth-mother-email.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/kash-patel-principle/680838/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/us/politics/trump-kash-patel-fbi-republicans.html

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/12/01/statement-from-president-joe-biden-11/

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