Russ Vought’s bio in the Mandate for Leadership lists him as “Founder and President of the Center for Renewing America.” The center’s web page features this prominent text: “For God. For Country. For Community.” The words do not link to any specific policy proposals. On a page titled Healthy Communities, however, this appears: “parents are forced to fight against a radical transgender movement that rejects fundamental truths about human biology and pushes children down a path of despair.” Does this imply that parents who accept their transgender children and understand that allowing children to express their gender identity has been shown to improve their mental health are part of the “societal poisons” that threaten the community?
On the center’s “woke and weaponized” page, the first sentence reads: “The threat of radical philosophies, rooted in Marxism, such as critical race theory, is vast, real, and increasingly existential.” The association of critical race theory (CRT) with Marxism is a trope or phantasm of the far right. In reality, the originators of CRT were academics such as Derrick Bell. The word “critical” in CRT is a reference to a type of philosophy known as critical theory. Critical theory has origins in what is known as the Frankfurt school of philosophy, which examined power structures in society and referenced, among other things, the thought of Marx. This school of philosophers has become a bête noire of conservatives, who seem to think that is has influence far beyond university philosophy departments. To say that CRT is Marxist (and therefore scary and un-American) is akin to saying that the U.S. Constitution is Lockean. CRT is an academic discipline; it is not some “vast,” “existential” threat.
The center’s 2023 Annual Report uses the term “woke and weaponized government” frequently and lists a three-step strategy for winning political battles. Step one is “Pick big national fights.” With those words, the center makes its ambition and interest in picking fights (rather than, say, building consensus) clear. The report goes on to credit Vought with initiating the effort to end the House speakership of Kevin McCarthy at the behest of the House Freedom Caucus. Pew Research Center has this to say about the members of the Freedom Caucus: “Ideologically speaking, they’re among the most conservative of House Republicans.”
The report then goes on to credit the center as being instrumental in “changing the national narrative” regarding the border from the term “border crisis” to “invasion.” Regarding the nonexistent invasion of the United States by some army that does not exist, the center also features an article in defense of the great replacement theory. The article’s subhead states: “By tying the Great Replacement Theory to white-nationalist and anti-Semitic violence, the establishment condemns any recognition of ongoing demographic transformation as racist.” The article goes on to claim that “demographic replacement of American citizens is clearly not just a theory, but a reality.” The article is careful to shift from framing the great replacement theory as having to do with “nonwhite people replacing white people” to framing it as “illegal aliens replacing citizens.” According to the Department of Homeland Security, “undocumented immigrants made up about 1.9 percent of the total U.S. population.” It seems that illegal immigrants have quite a way to go before they can replace more than 90 percent of the population.
Another section of the report is titled “Combatting Weaponization of the FBI.” The section mentions former special agent Steve Friend, who is described as a “whistleblower.” The government has a procedure to obtain whistleblower protections. Under that procedure, Friend is not a whistleblower. As a MSNBC article puts it: “It’s important, first, to dispel the myth that [Friend and other] agents count as whistleblowers. To be officially designated whistleblowers, FBI employees must follow specific procedures. None [of the agents in question]…did so, thus, none of them was granted whistleblower status.” The article goes on to state that “according to the FBI, Friend’s clearance was revoked after he refused to take part in a court-authorized arrest of a Jan. 6 subject affiliated with the Three Percenters organization.” According to the Guardian, “Friend was suspended from the FBI after filing an official complaint alleging that the “politicised” bureau was using “overzealous” January 6 investigations to “harass conservative Americans.” In sum, Friend lost his FBI job not because of any supposed bias in the FBI against conservatives but rather for taking the side of January 6 suspects.
The Guardian article goes on to state that “Friend has a record of collaborating with Trump’s closest allies. He received payments and legal counsel, and even received a job, from a Maga group affiliated with former senior Trump administration official Russ Vought. [Trump ally] Kash Patel sent Friend $5,000 almost immediately after they connected in November 2022, and gave Friend a job at a far-right thinktank.”
It is false to claim that the FBI has “anti-conservative and anti-Christian biases.” (According to the Washington Post, “Dating back to the 1920s, the FBI has had a culture saturated by Christian conservatism.”) The reality is that the FBI has arrested criminal suspects who participated in the January 6 assault on the Capitol and are presumably conservative. The FBI also searched the property of Donald Trump. The claim of bias against Christians presumably has to do with, for example, the arrest of “Catholic pro-life activist Mark Houck,” as he is described in an article in the National Review. While Houck was later acquitted, six other pro-life activists were convicted on federal charges.
The report goes on to claim that the “federal bureaucracy has become a significant funder of the woke cultural revolution.” It is absurd to claim that the federal bureaucracy has funded a nonexistent woke cultural revolution. One may casually describe “woke” as a catch-all term for conservatives to describe things they do not like. The CRA has a different definition, however, that does not align with that provided by what it describes as the “activists who now run the Merriam-Webster dictionary.” In an essay that is, frankly, a prime example of what psychologists call projection, the CRA defines “woke” with this whopper: “a neo-Marxist view that all of Western society is intentionally structured to oppress. Every socioeconomic disparity between groups illustrates that oppression. This alleged oppression is itself defined through the lens of neo-Marxist concepts like Critical Race Theory, Gender Ideology, and Queer Theory. Wokeness also states that the only way of correcting these injustices is to abolish the old oppressive society and rebuild a just society through the implementation of ‘equity,’ wherein there is proportional representation and rewards provided to oppressed groups without regard to performance or merit.” Take that, Merriam-Webster! “Cultural revolution” harkens back to communist China; the center’s use of the term is propagandistic.
The center’s 2023 report goes on to express support for “CRA’s Jeffrey Clark.” The center lists him as “Senior Fellow and Director of Litigation.” According to PBS, Clark has been charged with violation of the “Georgia RICO act” and a “criminal attempt to commit false statements and writings.” These two charges stem from “what prosecutors describe as a wide-ranging effort to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.” This is the way the center’s report describes it: “The phony charges against Clark…were brought on by a radical prosecutor in the state of Georgia who targeted [him] as part of a witch hunt.”
The center’s employment of Friend and Clark may be seen as evidence of what critics of conservatives call the “wingnut welfare circuit.” This colloquial term is used to describe the practice of providing jobs to conservatives in any one of many conservative entities.
The center’s report goes on to decry “woke generals” in the U.S. military before touting the number of the CRA’s website visits and impressions on Twitter. To give credit where it is due, judging by online posts and discourse, the CRA and the many conservative organizations behind Project 2025 have had success in shifting the terms of popular discourse in a more conservative direction.
The report claims that the CRA has received $225,000 in online donations. Surely this sum is paltry when considering what the CRA’s expenses are likely to be. For example, the report lists 17 staff members, and presumably those staff members have administrative help. As of this writing, the Influence Watch web site has no information on the CRA’s funding. According to a Detroit News article titled “Trump acolytes craft parallel GOP universe so Trumpism lives on,” Vought “wouldn’t release figures on [the CRA’s] fundraising or finances.” So, as of this writing, dark money is funding the CRA, which as shown above, deals in tropes and phantasms that, while often not aligned with reality, have nevertheless captured the imaginations of many behind Project 2025.
