The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1044: What Would Trump's Cabinet Look Like in 2025 w/ Wendell From Cozy.TV

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

72 MinutesPG-13Wendell is a researcher and livestreamer on the Cozy.TV platform. Wendell joins Pete to discuss the extensive research he's done about the people who are trying to insinuate themselves into Trump's potential White House and cabinet.Wendell's Cozy ChannelVIP Summit 3-Truth To Freedom - Autonomy w/ Richard GroveSupport Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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even more than it already has. Thank you so much. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekiniano show. I have Wendell here. What's going on, Wendell? Hey, thanks for having me on. It was kind of an abrupt introduction, I guess, a few weeks ago, but I've been looking forward to circling back, as they say.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself. I usually ask people to do that if it's the first time they came on the show. Yeah, I stream over on Cozy.tv, which is the in-house streaming platform of America First, Nicholas J. Fuentes' movement. And I'm there at cozy.tv slash wendell.

And I'm on Twitter at Cozy TV, Wendell, all one word. But I haven't had a lot of time to stream lately, but mostly stream about politics, getting a little more into political economy, which is how we met.

Correct. Yeah. But just kind of your run of the middle America First political streamer. Cool. All right. Well, let's get into this. I do a lot of history on the show. I do a lot of philosophy on the show. So when I talk about current events, it's, you know, I want to, I want to get someone who is really up on everything. And, you know, from our interactions we were doing in DMs, like, it seems you really, you have a grasp of the people that are trying to get into Trump. orbit, the people who are trying to cozy up to Trump so that if Trump does get elected and doesn't end up in jail,

that they can be there. So as far as like the Republican Party, the what some people would call the duopoly, the ones who are ready to vote for Ukraine, ready to vote for, for money to Ukraine, ready to vote for money to Israel. Who do you see trying to get in with Trump right now? Well, that faction has been pretty interesting. They've been doing a lot of content recently. I'll just start with some names, so hopefully your audience is ready to open up the browser tabs if they're not familiar.

But figures like Matthew Pottinger, who was deputy at Trump's National Security Council under his fourth national security, advisor Robert O'Brien. They've been, they've done a series of interviews recently. The Hoover institutions, Lord Roberts, Baron of Belgravia, he's got a show on YouTube where I think you can find it where you can find podcasts. And he is a pretty good source for interviewing some of these edge cases, you know, like you mentioned, guys that could probably have gone either way. They didn't seem to support Trump in the general election, sorry, the primary recently, and they've been

kind of reserved, at least in, you know, they're not acting as surrogates for Trump's campaign right now. So he's had Elliott Abrams on recently, who those, you know, view neo-con watchers would be familiar with Elliot Abrams, one of the handful of Reagan administration officials to be convicted for the Iran-Contra affair, loom large in the W. Bush. administration was an anti-Trump advocate and then somehow ended up in Trump's State Department. So, you know, as far as those guys coming back, it's been difficult to gauge whether or not they're really angling for it. I will say O'Brien and Pottinger represented a kind of Kissingerian view. O'Brien came up under John Bolton, who was his predecessor, is Trump's national

Security Advisor. And so like the Hoover Institution represent a kind of, let's say, realist, internationalist perspective. And O'Brien seems mostly focused on running the Richard Nixon Foundation right now, which is a kind of gathering ground for some of the, you know, more, like I think they can phrase it as where the establishment meets MAGA. So all this is to say there's no never-Trump movement this time around from inside the party. Everyone seems to have had enough time to hedge their bets. There's quite an eclectic arrangement of other elite figures, including the heir of George Soros and his think tank, the ECFR,

that are finding inroads with potential foreign policy staff and Trump's next administration. On the domestic front, you've seen figures like Ken Griffin and Jeff Yass who backed literally any other candidate except for Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024 coming around. There's been some talk about the use of the truth social meme stock, the Trump media meme stock recently for figures like Griffin to kind of get their hooks into Trump's campaign. So it seems like as far as the stumbling block types, they're trying to figure out how to hedge their bets and get in early and kind of create a contingency where they'll be able to influence

the Trump administration during the campaign phase rather than eventually have to throw up their hands and, you know, at the midterms and work their way in that way. So there's a lot going on with most of those camps. I'm mostly aware of the foreign policy side of things where Pottinger is at the foundation for defensive democracies right now, which is a neo-conservative think tank. And he's laser focused on the defense of China, or sorry, defense of Taiwan from China. One of his main inroads seems to be bringing together the Israeli military and the Taiwanese military, so the Israelis can shed some of their expertise in the conscription of troops and surveillance-based defenses. I don't know how useful that'll be as a selling point after October 7th.

And, you know, they fit pretty neatly into this total bipartisan agreement that China is America's major competitor. And that seems to be the single rallying point for a lot of this activity is that they can share a focus on opposing China. Yeah, it's interesting that you would, they would want the Taiwanese to trust the Israelis to be able to. to teach them how to defend against China when they can't defend against guys who basically live underground. Well, that wing of the party, I guess you'd call it, it's kind of difficult to describe them. You know, we can use phrases like neoconservative or establishment, but they kind of mean the same thing.

You may have noticed an emerging trend from the kind of, you know, ardently pro-Israel faction of the GOP toward, you know, unhinging or unleashing. unclasping the golden handcuffs of the $3.8 billion in USA per year to Israel, to leave Israel to its own strategic imperatives. Jacob Siegel at Tablet Magazine, which is heavily funded by figures connected to like Roger Hurtog. It's mostly funded by Mem Bernstein, who is the widow of Hurtog's mentor, Zalman Bernstein, who created the Tickpa Foundation that Hurtag heavily funds. And Siegel, you guys may have read his profiles of Curtis Jarvin.

He profiled Kevin McDonald at one point. So he kind of represents the edgier side of institutionalized GOP voter Zionists that, you know, are kind of willing to cut deals perhaps with other types of nationalists. And Tablet had a whole compendium months ago about ending USA to Israel for Israel's behalf. Ted Cruz was the figurehead of the, I guess, the articles against that in the compendium. And so, you know, there's this need to delink Israel from China's Belt and Road Initiative. Since we can't confront China, it makes no sense to confront China and still allow our security partners to engage in, you know, economic interdependence with them. So there's been a lot of activity by, I guess we'll just call them the neo-conservative,

establishment, although they have shifted priorities away from the traditional moralizing or the lack of separation from facts and values that define neoconservative foreign policy versus realism. So they no longer hew toward the need for regime change or subservience to democratic ideals to work with these partner nations. So that's been a major change. So these are not the same old neocons. I'd encourage your listeners, if they want a little more perspective on that to listen, I think, to the most recent episode of Hudson Institute's podcast with Peter Rao that's spelled Rough, R-O-U-G-H, and Mike Duran, where they rebrand themselves as real realists instead of neoconservatives. So, and they make the point of, you know,

delinking themselves from this moral imperative and moving more toward what Walter Russell Mead and many of the DeSantis' 2024 campaign staff on the foreign policy. policy side, we're calling Jacksonian realism. So that's kind of the neoconservative rebrand that's underway. There's a need from these people to delink Israel from the vicissitudes of very uneven American partisan processes where under a Biden administration, they may not get what they want out of unlimited, unrestricted aid to Israel. And under a Trump administration, it might be warm and fuzzy and nice, but the problem is weathering the difference between the two. So linking Israel to Japan as an infrastructural partner, to keep China from developing Israel's ports any further,

to keep China from developing Israel's infrastructure. Indian companies are buying a lot of Israeli startups right now. So there are links being tied between the BJP Nationalist Leadership Party of India, and they're being marketed as India's Lakud Party by that same Walter Russell Mead to try, I guess, and make it to translate for the American GOP voting public, that they're friendly. So these international ties are being drawn to try and, I guess, keep Israel away from China and also draw Israel into kind of a backdoor into U.S. defense technology that's being co-developed with Japan's new military and South Korea.

So there was a presentation to the Asia Society several months ago by Ambassador Cohen, Israel's ambassador to Japan, and he talks about all the links he'd go to secure a free trade agreement with Japan, where Israel receives infrastructure from Japan, maybe railroads, certainly automotives, and what they can trade in return is cybersecurity. Japan has notoriously poor cybersecurity. The United States wants to give Japan the so-called Pillar 2 technologies from the August agreement. you may have seen Prime Minister Kashita's state visit to Washington last week. This was on the table.

Hypersonic missiles, quantum computing, the so-called J-Jocq, where Japan will have a joint Japanese operations center headed by an American general. And to transfer this high-end technology to Japan, we're going to want them to have cybersecurity. Israel can provide that. And that also would allow Israel to have another. another pathway for high-end anti-ballistic missile systems and other weaponry by securing ties with Japan.

So as part of the activity around Japan last week, their state visit, Super Spook Richard Armatage and his, I think it was Joseph Nye. It's the Armidage Nye report, which comes out every four years, I think. The most recent edition came out and they recommended that Japan's growing fleet of American developed anti-ballistic missile destroyers, so their surface ships, be sent to the Red Sea to protect, of course, not Israel from Houthi missiles, but protect Japanese oil interests from there. So there's this need to try and secure Asia, and I'll point this out, too, the neo-conservatives

defended themselves in 2003 from accusations that they were focused on defending Israel, by squeezing Iran between Iraq and Afghanistan, and they said, you know, we've intended all along to pivot to the Pacific and work against China back since the 1980s. This was a major bone of contention between Paul Wolfowitz and the Kisangerian Secretary of State Alexander Haig in the early 1980s. So they've always wanted to pivot to Asia, but the Middle East keeps getting in the way. So that's what, I guess that's how I would, I'll come up for air here, but that's part of the nuance, I guess, of the old school establishment crowd. Well, the Middle East is always easier.

I mean, in Asia, what are you, the Middle East offers you violence. I mean, it's very easy to provoke them to violence, where, you know, in Asia, they're usually just doing their thing and everything. So, you know, that's one of the reasons why I believe that the Middle East is such a focus of the military industrial complex is because you can always, always counts on provoking, you know, people who certain groups within who have a tendency towards radicalism and it's easy to radicalize them. Whereas if you're looking to provoke, if you're looking to provoke violence or some kind of, some kind of, of reaction. Japan and China is not the one you're going to go after. You're going to have to either try Vietnam again or even go further south. Well, part of the provocation isn't just, you know, elevating the militaries of Japan and India to act as a kind of bookend for Chinese regional ambitions. It's also this new startup-based kind of infusion of next-generation

military technology into the American arsenal of democracy. They've brought that term back. And this arsenal of democracy won't be FDRs, you know, Liberty ships. It will be something like, you know, the devices offered by Anderil, the startup, you know, from Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen-backed, startup funded or created by Palantir staffers, which was their earlier kind of intelligence networking startup. run by Matt Gates' brother-in-law, who is a veteran of Facebook through his creation of Oculus, the infamous VR headset company.

And Anderil is going after a lot of these emerging government contracts for counter-surveillance and counter-reconnaissance technology. The United States Marine Corps has a new strategy based on what they call force design 2030, where they are going to, and already are, placing groups of Marines known as, Litoral Regiment, Litoral, I think it's called the Marine Litoral Regiment, sorry, the MLR. They're going to keep them in place inside the tens of thousands of islands in the contested first island chain or nine dash line in the South China Sea. And they'll, you know, they're counting on being able to conceal themselves, a variety of

automated anti-ship weapons and sensors that will be there already and are already in place. And if China feels like, you know, their Davidson window, Admiral Davidson, you know, believes that China's peak military capability in the region will come about around 2007 as the United States military capacity in the region and its regional partnerships ability to project force will temporarily hit a decline and then redouble through the 2030s. So there's this short window of opportunity where China may believe they have to take Taiwan to reunify with them at all. Yet if they begin to move into that territory, if United States forces are already there as the stand in force, not only did this confuse potential Chinese targeting to prepare the environment for this amphibious assault in that they'll have to go and find, it'll be impossible to do like a shell game, right? Where are these dozens of marine groups could be scattered to thousands of islands? So having counter-surveillance technology like Anderil offered initially to the United States Border Patrol, these are like camera towers, small radars, passive systems. You know, this is the kind of provocation that the United States is encircling or containing China militarily.

It's like the stop-hitting-yourself strategy executed in Ukraine. led to the war there. So there's just, you know, new methods of, I guess we're poking the dragon besides just freedom of navigation operations that we conduct through the Taiwan Strait. There's the Akis Agreement where we're going to forward-deploy nuclear submarines to Australia now. We've already got them forward-deployed to Guam. It came out a few weeks ago. You may have seen that United States Special Operations Forces are on Kinmen, the island that's miles. that Taiwanese island that's miles from China. So and Biden has said four times now that, you know, we'll defend Taiwan with force.

So there's, there are other provocations afoot. I mentioned Matthew Pottinger, the book he's got coming out soon that includes selections from the Israeli military guys that are there advising the Taiwanese, that the United States is putting together with the Taiwanese. It's called the Boiling Mote. So this is the kind of containment strategy. Elbridge Colby, who he may be familiar with, is another kind of national conservative foreign policy guru through the Israeli Yeram Hazoni's national conservative camp.

And, you know, I guess we're on a gradient, we're kind of moving a little further toward Trump from the establishment now, right? And he's got the strategy of denial where, you know, this military encirclement that we can achieve by bringing regional partners in. India is a heavy focus of Elbridge Colby's, you know, give India the technology it needs. You know, he does a lot of content with Indians. He did a great panel with the American Hindu Association not so long ago. So, you know, create regional partnerships to this lattice work of interlocking alliances

that will contain China in a way that prevents it from believing. It can seize Taiwan and give them an out, right? give them a place to retreat to. And that may not force regime change, but it may kind of induce China into becoming a docile member of the rules-based international order once again. Let's switch gears a little bit. So those are the people who are probably the furthest away from Trump who are trying to insinuate themselves. As we get a little closer, who are we looking at next? What group would you say is? Well, you know, I'm not. led off with Colby. So the national conservatives are in pretty good position now. You guys may have

been following. Your viewers may have been following the national conservatism conferences that sought to create a kind of new fusionism or a new big tent. The most recent additions at their last U.S. conference were the Southern Baptist Convention, also the Heritage Foundation, which used to be kind of this establishment legacy think tank within conservatism and is now pivoted toward this national conservative inflection, fighting the culture war, but also taking a step back from globalism on economic lines. So they really sit in between Trump's kind of unconstrained id, right, where Trump wants total protectionism, focus on the American domestic market, you know, Trump trotting out the campaign

line of calling himself a tariff man like McKinley did eons before. This kind of sits in the middle. Heritage is convening the Project 2020. staffing operation to try and, you know, I guess, instantiate rule by think tank in Trump's administration with their 900-something-page policy manual, the mandate for leadership. And they turned some heads in there by hedging Trump's economic advisor Peter Navarro's chapter. He's a fair trader. Now, fair traders seek to use tariffs only to create balance among nations on trade levels. So you meet a tariff with a tariff to dissolve both country's tariffs. So they don't end up

doing anything to solve the age-old problem of the income tax, right, which replaced the tariff. It doesn't create tariff-based income in, you know, the kind of utopian sense. But, you know, fair trade sits between protectionism and free trade. And that was balanced with a second chapter. I think it was the only mirrored chapter in that whole text where it was responsible. to by the kind of legacy neoliberal free trader wing of the Republican Party where they were basically, you know, combating the Trumponomics impulse. So national conservatism kind of sits in the middle ground, as you might expect from the name, right? It's not nationalism. It's not conservatism. It's national conservatism. So, you know, they represent the kind of middle ground.

They hit a stumbling block in the 2022 midterms where their only real major candidate to get through was Senator Vance, the one time Peter Thiel employee. The other Peter Thiel employee, Blake Masters, he couldn't make it through after some machinations by Mitch McConnell at the last minute, withdrawing Senate leadership funding from his ad campaign in Arizona. But they've been storming back. Well, the other stumbling block was they really seemed to go all in on DeSantis, at least tacitly. And the Trump world, AFPI, America First Policy Institute, doesn't get along with Project 2025,

which is this NatCon staffing institution. So you do have these staffing wars underway where Trump is going to need to announce his transition team soon. And I'm sure both these camps are vying to have a hand in that. The AFPI seems quite a bit closer to Trump than NatCon did due to little things like Heritage Foundation President Roberts continuing to do interviews with Ron DeSantis deep into the primary, bringing him to the Heritage Foundation's 50th anniversary gala. These are direct sides to President Trump, Claremont Institute, which is a major backer of the National Conservatism Conference as well as a participant in Project 2025. During the primary season, opened up a branch campus of Claremont in Tallahassee with

Governor DeSantis and his wife. So there were many signals that were, were read as, you know, attempt to kind of brute force DeSantis' candidacy into existence. Of course, we all saw that crash and burn. So where they've come storming back, though, is through a lot of the buzz around Vance as a vice presidential candidate. I caught some of the show you did with Kane Pilled, and he brought up, you know, maybe the PayPal Mafia has some kind of leverage they're trying to use to get, you know, to get a vice president.

And I think he literally said that. You can correct me if I'm wrong. And, you know, I was listening to it over the last week, and it's like you're seeing the Vance thing shape up. National Conservative Conference is underway right now in Brussels. It's tied to Georgia Maloney's leadership of the European Conservatives, the ECR faction of the EU Parliament. They're aligned with Eric Zamore, who was a guest there today. His Renaissance Party or Reconquest, actually, is what it's called. European politics is a whole different animal.

And they're going to do pretty well in the upcoming June European parliamentary elections, especially if they align with the governing EPP, which is the centrist's conservative party of the EU run by Ursula von der Leyen, current EU leader. And they're courting Orban to join ECR, who was thrown out of EPP. So that faction together, very friendly with Vance. if you go check Vance's Twitter page, he's retweeting an outrage Rod Dreher, who's very close with the Hungarian leadership and Senator Vance about how J.D. Vance is going to investigate how the Belgian police have tried to shut down NACCON Brussels too. So there's a significant amount of leverage as far as perhaps being able to offer Trump a turnkey European faction that sees eye to eye with Trump's impulse. to draw American support away from NATO if NATO doesn't back American ambitions in the Pacific.

So Trump's got some cards to play there. The CRA, I think it's the Center for Renewing America. That's a think tank close to Trump. They've got a peculiar Indian realist on board by the name of Sumatra Matra, who writes at the American Conservative. It's very concerned with the Bengali Renaissance, you know, and other ethnic issues. But he wants a, he's a kind of a pro-multipolar realist. So, you know, a lot of Indian nationalists think that the multipolar world

that isn't governed, you know, in the throes of the thrall of China and the United States will benefit India. So he's got this concept of the dormant NATO where the United States will withdraw, support necessarily from NATO and it will be up to the Europeans to deal with their own security matters toward Russia. And that falls in line, as I mentioned, figures like, like Soros' think tank, the ECFR. It falls in line with their strategy of seeing U.S. politics now is too unreliable to back a deterrence against Russia. And there may be a rising need for a European Union military.

There's all these questions being raised by the ECEFR about who will control a European-wide nuclear deterrent. Will it be Francis force defrapp since they're the only nuclear military in the EU now that Britain left with Brexit. So you can see how these interests align. The Soros movement into the NatCon foreign policy wing is pretty remarkable. It's, I think, an artifact of what you may have heard bemoaned is this counter-elite strategy, just not having enough time to take flight yet. You know, I watched part of your interview with Triple Seven eulogizing Kissinger, and he had to point out to one of your superchatters who didn't quite get it that, you know, we're talking about a globalist here, right?

So for a long time, all of American foreign policy has been constrained by globalist discourse, and we don't have nationalist foreign policymakers in any pipelines. There are no institutions providing these people. When you look into the background of foreign policy guys at Heritage or National Conservatism Conference, they come out of Obama-era liberal realist think tanks like the Center for New American Security. They're very friendly with the Council on Foreign Relations. They are still ardent globalists. They are globalists driving the speed limit. But, you know, Trump does not have a sufficient enough pipeline or institutions yet

to really see in America First Policy through in the national. need to have thousands of policymakers in these positions. So, you know, coupled with Vance's background in Silicon Valley or, you know, PayPal Mafia, he's kind of a part of the PayPal Mafia. This is the name that founders of PayPal have given themselves for like a quarter century, right? A large network of tech investors who seem to be signaling a shift across from centrism maybe to some kind of emerging national conservatism or, I don't know, nascent right-wing indications. It's quite hard to read.

You know, Vance comes from that world. He's got a lot of cultural clout through hillbilly elegy, which was made into a movie, you know, starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close. I think it went to the Oscars, a Ron Howard biopic. So he's got a lot of profile. He's got a lot of potential to tap into these very wealthy and, investors that the CHOP sought to kind of co-align to remove the, I believe, eighth of a billion dollar a cycle hole that Sheldon Adelson may have left upon his passing.

But no one would be surprised to learn that, you know, none of these individual donors find it within them to act as a single unit. So like Larry Ellison, he's a major tech donor, runs Oracle. he's trying to get Tim Scott in. He doesn't want to act in concert with some of his Silicon Valley cohort. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see. Vance clearly has a huge push behind him. He does balance the ticket in a way.

He's quite flexible on a lot of issues. He's got a very eclectic, almost Nixon-like mixture of policies. So a good match for Trump there. He can also help Trump court this rising mix. of Protestant, so-called Christian Nationalists, like the ones brought into the National Conservatism Conference, the third NatCon, NatCon 3 through the Southern Baptist Convention, as well as traditionalist Catholics. And both of these groups weren't polities at all when Trump won his election in 2016, which is around the same time NatCon got started. So, yeah, this, I don't know

if you're familiar with fusionism, but the old fusionists, you know, the three legs of the stool, right, that built Reaganism, big business, Southern Baptists who wanted to and run segregation and the neoconservatives. And I guess the new legs on the new fusionism of national conservatism would be like tech donors, traditionalist Catholic slash Christian nationalist Protestants. And I guess whatever the Gen X former water carriers of neoconservatism The guys who are like the 25 to 40-year-old functionaries of the neocons are carving their own course now. A lot of people don't know that figures like David Sachs and Peter Thiel initially got their start as neo-conservative pundits in the 1990s before they were tech investors. You know, they were brought through this Hoover Institution, Stanford pipeline, former Reagan officials who were kind of building the next generation Reaganites.

So Irving Crystal funded Peter Teal's student newspaper, the Stanford Review, which as figures like Keith Rabeau came through there, Josh Hawley. Irving Crystal also funded Yeram Hazzoni's student newspaper that he created the Princeton Tory, Dinesh D'Souza's student newspaper, Laura Ingramham, Ann Coulter. They were all cultivated through what became known as the MCEA and was eventually run by a troika of Straussians, and these were East Coast Straussians. So Bill Bennett, who went on to become Secretary of Education, who famously prevailed early in the Reagan administration against Mel Bradford over the National Endowment for Humanities position. Teal went to be his, I guess you'd call it, what, an intern at the Department of Education

during the H.W. Bush administration under Bennett, Harvey Mansfield. he's a mentor of Elbridge Colby. He's got quite the coaching tree, I guess you would call it. Bill Crystal, a certain kind of provocative shit poster on Twitter. He sat on his dissertation committee. So Mansfield ran MCEA. And Alan Bloom, the kind of Straussian mentor of Paul Wolfowitz, Arch Neocon there.

So, yeah, it's interesting kind of tracking. the separation, I guess, or independent course being plotted by these guys. But, you know, it does lead a lot of, I guess, more cautious observers to say, you know, this is just the same thing updated to remain in power. So I guess, yeah, I don't know. That's how I would try and qualify the next step inward. You know, and Trump's inner circles, even stranger. And, you know, I don't know necessarily if your audience would think,

they're better. So I wanted to ask you about whether Vivek is now in basically a surrogate for Trump because was it his plan to go up on the debate stage and be Trump surrogate? Or do you think that that came from somewhere else that it was planned that Trump would have somebody up there basically going after his talking, you know, repeating his talking points since he wasn't going to be in any of the debates. The DeSantis camp certainly hanged that millstone around Vivek's neck early on, that he was just a stalking horse for DeSantis meant to knock him down in the polls, and that, you know, he was just kind of a Trump plant from the start. I would say I was sympathetic toward that argument, because about six months before that, the one of the most colorful

Trump assassins, the Zumer assassin, the Zuma assassin, improbably named Joshua White House, which is a great case for nominative determinism. Josh Whitehouse was one of the most ardent killers brought in by Johnny McEntee when he took over Trump's Office of Presidential Personnel, which is a very interesting story behind all that stuff there. But Josh White House was chronicled as terrorizing the anti-Trump fifth column within his own government, going to famously DHS headquarters and removing the portrait of Miles Taylor, who was known as anonymous. And I think New York Times or Washington Post, he was the chief of staff to the, I think,

to the Secretary of Homeland Defense and was acting as a kind of mole within the Trump administration. When he was uncovered, White House went there, tore down his portrait from the lobby with a claw hammer, while Secretary of Homeland Defense, Wolf, tried to keep it up, you know, told him like, I'm in control here. But Josh Whitehouse, you know, I noticed he went dark on Twitter for like a year. He locked his account up, stopped posting, and then resurfaced on Vivek's campaign. White House is kind of a player in New Hampshire politics. So I thought that was kind of interesting, right?

The most diehard Trump loyalist on Vivek's early. team. So I was sympathetic to that argument, but I think we all saw Vivek slip the leash. If that was truly the intent from the Trump camp on the eve of the Iowa caucus, there was the bizarre tack that Vivek took where he was telling Trump voters, they're going to, you know, I don't even want to say it, but basically implying Trump would get JFK'd if he was nominated, and the only man who could save Trump was Vivek. And that if Vivek was, Vivek was elected, he could pardon Trump, he could keep Trump safe. There was a particularly disconcerting video of Vivek, you know, I don't even know how to qualify.

It was like a Ted Bundy moment, right, talking to some elderly Trump voter telling you like, I know, but you know what they're going to do to him if he gets nominated. Only I can save Trump. He had his team out with those shirts that said like save Trump vote Vivek. And the Trump team responded with Fury. It didn't seem like K-Faveh, right? It didn't seem like a setup. So Vivek may have thought, you know, that Trump believed he was in his pocket, but he was just drafting Trump, right, waiting to spring ahead.

So I'm not quite sure what the deal was. The Trump campaign seems to be polling a kind of similar push-pull tactic with the RFK Jr. campaign, where in some polling, they seem to benefit from, RFK juniors run in other, but in public messaging, they're attacking them. Probably to try and build more credibility with the anti-VACs hippie moms or whatever, the target audience of this bizarre JFK Jr. Nicole Shanahan ticket is going to be. So, yeah, that's a mysterious question. Of course, Vivek comes from the same circles that J.D. Vance does.

There's a lot of speculation that due to an early fleeing with Vivek, Lady Vance's wife, Usha, named their son that. So some even personal crossover between those worlds. Why would, why do you think Trump would basically as soon as Vovake suspends his, you know, drops his campaign, he basically becomes Trump's opening act? Why do you think that is? I mean, he's up on stage with Vivek, Vovake's opening for him, Vovake's parroting. saying things that Trump is going to say, you know, three, four hours before, and then Trump

will say it if Vivek was doing that. And, you know, Vivek, you were expecting him to get two or three percent in Iowa. He actually got eight percent. Why do you think Trump would, or Trump's campaign would want him to come on and be like the opening act? Well, he built up quite a bit of popularity. And I would assume, you know, whatever polling they have, very granular polling that these campaigns spend tons of money on might indicate. that Vivek has an end with the sector of voters that Trump wants to harvest. And so this could just be the typical election cycle trope of a backbencher, throwing his support behind a candidate, hoping for his choice of cabinet positions,

you know, being able to horse trade by doing that. I don't know if your audience is familiar with how Vivek made his money, but you can imagine how wealthy Vivek and his family would become if he was, say, made FDA commissioner. So I'll just put that out there. I was thinking more along the lines that he seemed like he'd be Secretary of Treasury. Yeah, that would be interesting. I would, I'd say the celebrations around Vivek, you know, at Mises or something, of Vivek being made Secretary of Treasury would dwarf even the Malay election.

That'd be interesting. Yeah, I mean, Vivek, what's funny is, I know that a lot of the libertarians are like a lot of what he has to say, but also Vivek, it very much echoes James Burnham in a lot of his rhetoric, especially when he talks about, you know, tearing government down and one person running. He seems to be echoing that whoever runs the, whoever gets elected should be more Machiavelli and how they run the country. Yeah, and that lines right up.

with what we've seen from the competing staffing wars outfits, right? Project 2025 and America First Policy Institute has been a lot of talk about Trump's Schedule F reforms where he can basically, you know, change the employment category of so-called careers. So career public bureaucrats who have worked their way into policymaking people. positions. And he can now, you know, reschedule their employment protections to the newly created Schedule F. James Shirk, that's spelled like Shrek, if you're dyslexic, S-H-E-R-K. He's the mastermind behind that. There's a great interview he did with Jeffrey Tucker, you guys are probably familiar with at the Brownstone Institute that laid out the whole saga of his almost like,

it's almost like a sword and sorcery discovery of Schedule F. the U.S. Code alone in a giant federal office building, you know, after coming back early to work from Christmas break 2018. So the saga there is quite interesting, but he's at America First Policy Institute. Schedule F seeks to potentially reclassify as many as 50,000 federal employees. The Biden administration's putting the brakes on it with an executive order, I believe last week that will just make it take longer for that to wind through the courts. And Blake Masters had a pretty interesting campaign strategy. During the midterms, when he was running for Senate,

he was using Yarvin's take on the Schedule F, basically the slogan, which Curtis Jarvin's slogan, which was rage, retire all government employees. So if you make slots pretty well into that, you know, into that kind of need. So, yeah, he definitely interfaces. with that sentiment. And that, you know, speaking of big tense and fusionism, it's interesting where there is

co-alignment among, let's say, libertarians and even the hardcore nationalists. You know, I mentioned abolition of the income tax. A tariff could provide an opportunity to do that, kind of restate or resettle that. Opposition to central bank, you know, for protectionists or nationalists, they're in favor of reinstituting a national bank that's fed by tariff revenue. and is responsible for infrastructure rather than, you know, the bizarre churning of, you know, leveraging income tax revenues by fractions into dollarizing the world, right, through fiat printing that a central bank does.

You know, that's one point of confluence. Another is right-sizing the government. Now, of course, minarchists or, you know, many handcaps would say, yeah, you know, it's right-sized when it's gone. But it's interesting that these groups are in fact. fact, kind of drawn together around Trump's gravity, that he's really the only leader of the GOP. And so any chance for any kind of reform is going to have to be done by staffing his administration. He doesn't seem particularly ideological beyond his fixation on trade issues and personal loyalty.

But that seems mostly to be secured by his favorite act, bending the knee after he opposed him. So it'll be interesting to see, you know, like you mentioned, if Trump can win, if he's allowed to win, if he's not in prison or whatever. But then the real staffing wars, of course, are going to unfold through the transition. And, you know, we're just talking about the guys either trying to kick their door back in. But there's also a third camp, and they're the people that stayed around Trump and are still in his good graces. And unlike figures like O'Brien or Pottinger, who kind of renounced them right after Chase Six and didn't come out of campaign surrogates, there are figures like Richard Grinnell, who, you know, by all means seem like they're going to be coming right back in and maybe leveling up.

The Washington Post tipped Grinnell is heading around as Trump's shadow secretary of state right now, going all over the world, striking sideline deals. I mentioned Soros' think tank ECFR in all of its ties, kind of strange confluences with the national conservative foreign policy thinkers like Elbridge Colby, mostly through his Emanuensis, Alex Veles Green, who had Heritage's Foreign Policy Shop. You know, one of the ways that Americans try to explain the peculiarity of the 2024 presidential election to Europeans is that think of America as having two presidents right now. You know, Biden is president of the Democrats and Trump is president of the Republicans.

So, you know, it is a very strange election. And I think that makes the vice president pick watching even more important to start. due to who is Trump going to set someone up as his heir apparent? Or is he going to put a weaker candidate in there like Tim Scott, who no one will vote for as president in 2008, and therefore kind of open up another kitchen sink primary, you know, kind of return things to a fair footing where Trump won't be, you know, the obvious total victor.

Well, you already started talking about people who are immediately in Trump's orbit now, who are these people who who specifically do you think is going into the White House with him? Because we know from history that the people who go into the White House with him, if he wins, are not necessarily going to be around five or six months later. Yeah. That's been pretty funny to watch. I'll say like a year ago, Steve Bannon came like swinging back in on a rope.

You know, if you guys watch CPAC, 2023. Bannon went out on stage. This was about a month before DeSantis actually announced. There was that long shadow campaign from after the election until May where DeSantis just didn't announce. And Bannon, you know, he was all of a sudden. Sloppy Steve was Trump's strongest soldier again. Going after the Murdox for backing DeSantis, basically drawing a line on the sand. He began to blacklist all of the DeSantis supporters who were routine guests on his war room show.

Pedro Gonzalez, Paul Gottfried's protege, the number three guy. I think he runs Chronicles at the Charlemagne Institute. He was blacklisted for backing DeSantis. Oddly enough, the son of the founder of Chronicles, Matthew Tiermand, Leopold Tierman's son. He was blacklisted from Bannon's show. You guys may remember Tiermand as the figure that ousted James O'Keefe from the Project Veritas board, and that was seen as jockeying for position in favor of DeSantis, you know, ahead of DeSantis versus Trump,

basically sidelining O'Keefe as a pro-Trump presence before that. Steve Cortez, who was a Trump world figure, he backed DeSantis. He was demoted from being called Brother on War Room every week and blacklisted, sent to the wastes. So Bannon might be a curious case of a figure who had come in quite late in 2016, you know, helped manage Trump campaign over the finish line around August of 2016 and was thrown out like a month, I think right after Seaville. I think it was like in late August, 2017 that Bannon was out around that time frame.

He didn't last long, but he may be back in. We'll see. But as far as the consistent figures around him, I mentioned Richard Grinnell. Grinnell is pretty interesting. He had a checkered, let's say, experience as Trump's ambassador to Germany, where he was kind of the bearer of bad news, right? To the Merkel government that, you know, you're going to have to, the days of the maximum in Germany of cheap security from the United States, cheap energy from Russia and cheap labor from China, like they're over. Time to stop free writing. and then went on to be an interim director of national intelligence for Trump. And Grinnell, a lot of people believe and are just straight up tipping at CPAC that Grinnell is going to be Secretary of State.

If Trump wins, he's, you know, he basically has the same foreign policy chops as the Robert O'Brien's and Mike Pompeo's. He's, you know, almost indistinguishable from a neo-conservative, but he's loyal to Trump. Unlike John Bolton, who in his term as National Security Advisor, conflicted with Trump, you know, openly conflicted with Trump, a figure like Grinnell is a loyalist and he's willing to go to the map for Trump. But how is he going to get along with the national conservatives? Grinnell is a standard bearer for the log cabin Republican movement, the out and proud gay Republican faction. Kleda Mitchell, who's a very powerful Trump world attorney. I believe she's at CRA, which I mentioned earlier.

she infamously kept, was like the last bulwark against the log cabin Republicans participating in CPAC for years. So, you know, it's going to be a brutal, it's already a strange bedfellows coalition around Mara Lago. Morgan Ortegis, try saying that 10 times. You know, she managed to work her way up consistently in the Trump administration. You know, she's former intelligence official. kind of an interesting background.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg married her to her Jewish husband. Ortegages converted to Judaism after while working for the Bush administration in Iraq. It was a bit of like an odd couple with CNN, now CNN contributor Sam VinaGrod. They're like the kosher sandwich, girl boss edition, I guess, even had a consulting firm together. One's a Democrat, one's a Republican.

Ortegis is like Grinnell, you know, basically represents the bog standard neoconservative foreign policy positions, devout, obvious, you know, supporter of Israel, no matter the cost, but also I believe she's still in Taiwan right now. She's been in Taiwan with Elbridge Colby of the National Conservatism Conference. Her and Colby have common roots in the Center for New American Security, which is set up by Obama. Major Foreign Policy Deans, Michelle Flournoy and Kurt Campbell, who's now the Asia Tsar at Biden's Secretary or Biden's State Department. He's the deputy assistant. He's deputy secretary of state now. So, you know, Ortegis is out there as a hardcore Trump surrogate. I think that's probably your biggest clue. It's like who's out there on the Sunday shows. Who's out there doing Fox News hits,

basically making the case for another Trump presidency who also had good standing by the end of his administration. That's, you know, who's left at the inner circle. But there's been a lot of strange departures. You know, it seemed like a lot of those people who were there at the end were sure perhaps that DeSantis was going to be the guy next time. And that, like you mentioned at the beginning of the show, the sheer weight of the legal action against Trump by the Democrats,

was just going to make it impossible. And also Trump's Nixonian-like, lack of discernment of the character of people who are supposed to be loyal to him, you know, may make him seem like a less stable administrator of government as someone like Ron DeSantis who could talk about the Chevron deference in his rollout space, right? So it just didn't happen. And when you had figures like Johnny McEntee,

who was a vital part of Trump's presidential personnel office, go to Project 2025, James Bacon, who was advising Teal and his midterm donation strategy who had worked at PPO with McEntee, also part of Project 2025. You know, it's just interesting. There's no real guarantees that even though they've built this big fierce staffing beast, that it will be let through the door. Jared Kushner could obviously reenter the fray at any time.

And, you know, I guess we're kind of beyond. on the scope of people who are still in Trump's good graces, you know, and may go back in immediately. Now we're kind of talking about people that renounce Trump but could easily come back in or showing signs that they might. Peter Thiel resurfaced recently. An interview with Ann Coulter, who was recently backing DeSanthus to the Hill, right? And then he's just done an interview with kind of, I guess you'd probably call him like a small L. Libertarian Tyler Cowan that I think released just today.

you know, and it seems like he's, he's interested in political donation again. So a lot of, a lot of figures emerging, re-emerging. And as I mentioned, all the way back at the beginning of this, there are a lot of elites that are just deciding to hedge bets and buy in. And, you know, they figure it's better to get the bad taste out of their mouth with nearly a year to go if Trump's going to be president and just start dealing with it now. What do you think the odds are that, and what would it take? Who would he have to have around him for a project, if he were elected and he were to take office for a project 2025 for that kind of plan to be implemented?

Well, I think the key there is probably, and they may be doing this as part of the second pillar of Project 2025. mentioned Larry Ellison earlier from Oracle. Oracle is running all the tech side of Project 2025. Oracle's the benefactor under Trump of the receipt of all the TikTok data in Project Texas in 2020. So while Larry Ellison, you know, there have been some confusion. Ellison has not given to the general election yet. He backed Scott, but through PAC funding transfers. He is also embroiled as a witness in the ongoing Netanyahu corruption trial in Israel. So he's got all kinds of other difficulties. But the second, the first pillar of Project 2025 is the ninth edition of the mandate for leadership,

which is their massive policy manual that presidents are expected to use to govern the country. You have these 85 different conservative think tanks convened under Heritage Foundation. That's another way you can see some kind of teal influence, even though he's, you know, was said to have withdrawn political spending through Teneo Network, which is affiliated, you know, with him as kind of one of his brainchild's brainchild, I guess. But there's a lot of, I guess, talk about the mandate for leadership because it's been out there the longest as the first pillar. And it's this big book. You can paw through and see policies for everything from NPR to, you know, the DOD. The second pillar is this online education portal, and that's closed off, right? You have to have applied for Project 2025 and be in the pipeline to know what they're teaching people right now to prepare for that. I would assume that would be stories from the guys that went in there and came back. You know, P-2025 is being spearheaded by Paul Dan's, D-A-N-S, and he was an attorney at the Office of Management and Budget. He was chief counsel there. And he has some interesting interviews about,

his experience in government and figuring out how the careers strip power away, executive power vested in these political appointees from the president, from their grasp, basic red tape maneuvers, you know, oh, the paperwork's too complex, you wouldn't want to handle that, you know, things like that, just these little deft career-based maneuvers that ended up in this total perversion of what is supposed to be an executive-controlled bureaucracy. Instead, it's now led by this permanent, unelected bureaucracy. And they do that as Dan's identified by stripping away, kind of pecking away powers from unprepared political appointees. So this is what they identified as the need.

You know, we need to have an educated appointee force in reserve, waiting to be slotted in, in the transition that, you know, is also network and communication with each other and can prepare to counteract a lot of these issues. But I don't think it's going to be some one-size-fits-all solution. It'll just go in there, turn-key, start the car and go. Obviously, the reason why presidential personnel office was useless to Democrats and was hidden from the use of Republicans until really the last year of Trump's administration since Nixon invented it to end run the deep state staffing issues of his time, which is a whole different story. I don't want to get into contrasting Erlichman.

Romano Clef and Haldeman's diaries, right, to get into that whole story. But, you know, the reason it's useless to Democrats is because something like 90% of the professional bureaucracy, the permanent bureaucracy are Democrats. And they have a very functional party system. I think that's probably why a lot of Republicans misread the nomination of Joe Biden. They thought, based on mirroring, right? That, you know, they'll have a candidate, like we have a candidate. They'll have their Trump, like we have our Trump.

Trump is a singular force. We saw it in his foreign policy. He managed to strike a lot of remarkable reprochement with leaders that were beyond the pale like Kim Jong-un by going and meeting them personally and working out deals as a statesman to another statesman. The Democrats, they have this massive governmental apparatus that works. doesn't work really in lockstep to hear them talk about it internally if you watch the think tank content

that in the post-COVID era has just been dumped for anyone to watch on YouTube Mike Benz has talked about this how difficult they think it is to achieve consensus within a group of liberal so they don't see themselves as a stodgy you know like a stolid stodgy

uniparty. They think about all the problems they have and trying to get the entire world to be micromanaged You know, the elite dream that Burnham was one of the first to identify, right? This idea that you could literally micromanage the world stage. You know, they don't see that as particularly fulfilling experience. So they don't have any sympathy for the Republican Party thinking about destroying the livelihoods of 50,000 career employees that are the secret enduring power of, you know, like what Yarvin would qualify is the ratchezer. it only turning one way, right? So, you know, there's this incentive to really resist that. David Azarad, a Canadian Jewish guy from the Claremont Institute that was put in at the National Endowment

for Humanities, came back and talked about, you know, I went in there as a small government conservative as my training here at Claremont, and they could tell, right? All the careers at NEH could tell, and they acted like a virus, you know, or they were. I was the virus and they were rejecting me. So I think there's going to have to be a second run. They're going to need to figure out how to do this. And at the end of the day, this is cynical, but it's reality. A lot of these prime appointments are just going to go to political donors, not to this, I guess you'd call it, you know, the next permanent bureaucracy, the Republican edition.

There's a lot of talk about a counter-elite. Claremont's Jeremy Carl has written about it at length. And, you know, it's really something that Hazoni was appointed to do in the early 1990s, the creation of Shalem Center in Israel to create what is now Shalem College, Israel's first liberal arts college to solve the problem they were having there with, their version of wokeness, right? Their culture war, this predilection for the elites of Israel who are going to replace their parents in power toward post-Zionism, you know, that there was no longer a need to be Zionist.

And we could accommodate the Palestinians. And this is seen as a, you know, pervasive threat by wealthy diaspora financiers in Wall Street. And so there's been a focus, you know, this drives Netanyahu into power at the midpoint of that. And now that Shillem College is up and running and it took 30 years or 25 years, you know, it's probably starting to produce ready-made technocrats that can go into the system and countervail the legacy system that they have over there. Now here, how long is it going to take to build institutions along those same lines? You know, I mentioned Roger Hurtag. He's the patron of Chris Rufo. Hurtag is the chairman of Meritus at Rufus Manhattan Institute, along with the arch scientist financier Paul Singer.

And, you know, they seem to be focused on a two-pronged approach. Hurtog is all about educating, you know, in the same fashion that he is provided for Hizoni's project for 30 years, educating a rising counter elite through the Tickva Fund and through the Hurtag Foundation, where they'll bring in Bill Crystal to teach you, you know, how to interpret the founding fathers as mid-20th century American Jewish liberals or whatever, right? And then on the other side, you have Singer going after the legacy institutions. You've seen this in, you know, Rufo's campaign against Claudine Gay at Harvard, being quarterbacked by Cub reporters and muckrakers out of Singer's Washington Free Beacon.

And the vibe shift since 2016 is pretty remarkable, because in 2016, Singer's Washington Free Beacon was commissioning the Fusion GPS report that led to the Russia Gate scandal, which I believe is on behalf of Marco Rubio. Now Marco Rubio is not a neocon. He's in with the American Compass, American Moment, National Conservatives. He's, you know, much more of an ideological. Trumpian now. You know, a big government for common good conservatism against free trade guy now. And Paul Singer's, uh-oh, am I still on? I guess I switch tabs here. It's okay.

Paul Singer is going after instead of Trump, he's going after the elites of the Ivy League for, you know, using AI to scrape plagiarism out or whatever. So, you know, Rufo had proved his medal by going to work for Governor DeSantis at New College in Florida as a test case, if you remember that. He went down there, sat on the board, and began to evict kind of the most troublesome culture warriors of the left who are poisoning the student body there. But even in, and you see Joe Lonsdale, you know, Zionist founder of Palantir, close with Peter Thiel. He runs 8VC, venture capital. He's very close with Barry Weiss. They're creating the University of Austin, the so-called UATX, but how long is it going to take for a first class of alumnus to get through there?

How much money is that going to cost? And, you know, maybe it takes three generations, right? A first generation to build a mass of alumni. A second generation, you know, for those people to go out and influence policy, you know, assuming a generation, say, 18 to 20 years. And a third generation for those career policymakers to return to the institution and train the forthcoming, you know, technocrats of the new elite to go and inhabit that system based on the inductive principle,

right? What's been observed and not what the theory is. It takes forever. And if you look at the new implementations of schools based on previous presidential systems, I mentioned the Hoover institution at Stanford being taken over by the Reaganites in the 80s, leading directly to the PayPal Mafia. That's a 40-year arc at this point. And not just the PayPal Mafia, right? Like I mentioned Dinesh DeSouza, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingram. Now, right now you're seeing the implementation of George W. Bush era veterans at schools like the University of Texas. I can't remember which one. But they're focused on creating the next generation of, I guess, I suppose, neo-conservative intelligence technocrats. So they set up a kind of

intelligence school there. That's taken now, what, 20 years, almost a quarter century, just to start churning out graduates. So I would say the timelines to mimic the traditional system or whatever are going to be very long. Maybe this two-pronged approach of bringing the ivies to heal, you know, the elite theory quality of getting high-level defections, you know, maybe using leverage over those institutions to create academic boltholes, you know, paying for professorships that will then create cadres of students to go in the system, et cetera. But you're not going to build Harvard too. What a lot of people don't know about the ivies is that they were the only American universities or only British universities in the colonies for a long time. And they still

endure and they still have the superlative quality. And they've always been a thorn in the side. of American nationalists. So I don't want to black pill here. I just want to say, buckle up. And remember that whoever's paying for this stuff is really old. And they're very out of touch. And it actually will go toward the people who are in the system who are changing it, not the guys who hold the purse strings.

It's kind of like the classic patron and client model between a wealthy, Renaissance Lord and his artist, right? He's just a source of money. It's probably easier for them to micromanage the day to day now, but these guys are powerful because they do other things outside of politics. Peter Thiel didn't make any money in politics until he sent Tray Stevens in the transition to rewrite DOD acquisition procedures, come back to California and build Anderrill and staff it with Palantir staffers to fill the needs he created within the gun. government. Now they're making billions of dollars and a whole flight of hard tech startups is taking off to try and replicate that performance. But the path, and then maybe that's just

the consolation prize that instead of reforming a counter elite, we'll just make billions of dollars off, you know, becoming the new, I guess the new generation of indispensable government-only contracted companies or something. So the track record of seeing things through is not great. What happened to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, right? What happened to C-steading? Charter cities have yet to take off. So, you know, it's also a reminder that,

especially when you're counting on hedge funders like Paul Singer or venture capitalists like Thiel or Andresen, their strategy is to throw 100 darts at the board hoping one will hit the bullseye. And if you're going to hit your wagon to the government reform one, you know, you better hope that's the one with 100 X returns. Because if it's something else, they might leave you to die on the vine. Well put. Well put.

Let's end it right there. Leave it open for a return. I love to have you come back on and sometime soon and talk about, I think we need to go back in time and visit 19th century economics in the United States because I know that's what we basically met and how we were introduced. And I think you have some great knowledge there that people should hear, especially as we're coming out of this, as we're saying that neoliberalism can't work.

And we may have to revisit some things from the past. So remind everybody where they can find your work and we'll end this. I stream at cozy.tv slash Wendell. And there's an about section there on that page that has a bunch of links to different replay telegrams and things like that for my past content. And I'm on Twitter infrequently at Cozy TV Wendell, all one word, is my handle there. And thanks for having me on, Pete. It was a lot of fun.

You know, I'll be glad to be back anytime. Just reach out. Yeah, real soon. Thank you very much, Wynneville.