Dunleavy keeps paying Outside publicist, whose husband attacks legal immigration, claiming Christian motives
This is a reminder that Gov. Mike Dunleavy continues to send Virginia publicist Mary Vought $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.
Her husband is former federal bureaucrat Russell Vought, 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.
“Trump personally blessed Vought’s agenda at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser for his group and said Vought would “do a great job in continuing our quest to make America great again,” the Washington Post reported.
In a speech that didn’t get enough attention last year, Russell attacked legal immigrants to the United States, claiming they 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.” The Dunleavy payments to Vought continue, according to his office.
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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