Correction: Ex-husband of Dunleavy publicist wants Trump to use military against political opponents
The office of Gov. Mike Dunleavy contacted me today to report a “glaring error” in this blog post and suggest that I take down the post and rewrite it. According to the governor’s spokesman, Russell and Mary Vought ended their long-time marriage in 2023.
Now we know more about the Vought relationship than we do about what Mary is doing for $5,000 a month under a no-bid public relations contract that has been extended time after time since 2020.
The governor’s spokesman did not suggest that I delete the post entirely, as I said in a version of this correction that I posted at about 2 p.m.
The Vought contract calls for her to develop a national communications plan for Dunleavy, but the governor and his staff have never explained why that work isn’t handled by the state public relations employees hired by Dunleavy to communicate.
Mary Vought is in charge of PR for the Heritage Foundation, which led Project 2025. Russell Vought is a key contributor to Project 2025. They have two children.
“Families comprised of a married mother, father and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” says Project 2025.
ProPublica has a frightening update on the plotting of Trump loyalist Russell Vought, who suggests using the military against political opponents and trying to make federal employment so miserable that employees will be traumatized.
Vought, whose ex-wife is a Dunleavy publicist in Washington, D.C., claims this is needed because of the “Marxist takeover” of the government that has taken place.
“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” Vought said in one speech.
“Vought’s plans track closely with Trump’s campaign rhetoric about using the military against domestic protesters or what Trump has called the ‘enemy within.’ Trump’s desire to use the military on U.S. soil recently prompted his longest-serving chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, to speak out, saying Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,’” the investigation found.
Here is the ProPublica report on Vought.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in one speech. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”
“We want to put them in trauma.”
Vought, a former federal bureaucrat, is a Christian nationalist radical who is central to the Trump 2025 drive to remake the federal government and cater to Trump’s dictatorial whims. “Post-constitutional” is the euphemism in which Russell cloaks his scheme.
Meanwhile, the state of Alaska continues to pay Vought’s ex-wife $5,000 a month for public relations work in Washington, D.C. under a questionable no-bid contract that has been extended or amended eight times without public justification or discussion.
After her first no-bid contract expired in May 2020, Dunleavy’s office gave Vought a second no-bid contract on June 18, 2020 that was to last until the end of that year. Vought said it was a “continuation” of her earlier deal.
Near the end of 2020, the state gave her a third six-month deal, which later was extended until May 2022 and then November 2022, December 2022, December 2023 and now December 2024, with renewals to December 2025 and December 2026 pending at $60,000 a year.
In a speech that didn’t get enough attention last year, Russell attacked legal immigrants to the United States, claiming they refuse to assimilate.
There is a link to his full speech below. I suspect his real targets are not all legal immigrants, just those from what Trump calls “shithole countries.”
Russell claims the nation is in the midst of a “cold civil war” and immigrants make it worse.
Russell, formerly Trump’s budget director, says the federal budget office should be the keeper of “commander’s intent,” a bit of military jargon he has injected into his extremist vision.
The Project 2025 playbook is a venture of the Heritage Foundation. In April, the Heritage Foundation hired Mary Vought as vice president of “strategic communications.”
Russell spoke last fall on the “Christian case for immigration restriction” and claimed that this is all based on the Bible.
He described a radical view of the world and a narrow one in which he expects everyone to cater to his mindset.
“Thus a Christian immigration ethic that presses for great immigration restrictions does so out of the understanding that the sovereign distinct nation is a good thing. And not only does the Bible support national sovereignty and borders, but the Bible also has profound principles for thoughtful limited immigration and emphasizing assimilation,” Vought claimed.
He claimed there are two different Hebrew words for foreigners in the Bible. One refers to the “alien who is a person who entered Israel with permission and followed legal procedures,” while another word refers to someone who “not a legal resident, could be an invading enemy, squatter, temporary worker or merchant or someone simply passing through.”
He says that mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants should be a top priority for all “Christian-based immigration policies.”
But Russell wouldn’t stop at rounding up the usual suspects.
He said that because of the “cold civil war” even legal immigrants are not becoming assimilated. And “statesmen” need to see that.
“How does assimilation occur in this environment? The reality is that it doesn’t. And in this environment immigration only increases and exasperates the divisions that we face in the country,” he said.
“America is in crisis. It’s unrecognizable. And both legal and illegal immigration is playing a leading role in that progression. And what the nation needs more than anything, and I’ll close on this, is not Christians getting on their uninformed moral high horse, but Christians insisting on being responsible stewards of the blessing that has been God given to live in this land, this particular land, and to secure the blessings of liberty for this generation and future generations. And that’s the work that we gather to talk about and that’s the work that’s ahead of us,” he said.
He compared this situation to a church that only takes in new members who believe in what the church teaches.
Russell is not someone who deserves to be trusted on this or any other topic, arrogantly astride his uninformed moral high horse. Listen to his full speech here.
“Vought’s views amount to a kind of Anglo-Protestant cultural supremacism, said Paul D. Miller, a Georgetown University professor who published a book critiquing Christian nationalism,” the Washington Post reported June 8.
“The Civil War taught us that America is big and broad and strong enough to include non-Christians and non-Whites,” Miller wrote to The Post for that story. “It also should have taught us that the greatest threat to the American vision are racial and religious supremacists.”
In 2016, Russell wrote that “Muslims do not simply have a deficient theology. They do not know God because they have rejected Jesus Christ his Son, and they stand condemned.”
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