The Princeton Problem and the Trump Administration
The Princeton Problem and the Trump Administration
What's going on with that school?
There are a handful of establishment-approved right-of-center commentators who should have done a better job explaining Donald Trump. It’s not hard to see why they don’t like him—he calls their entire political project into question. I’m not asking them to like him, but they should have done a better job explaining why he happened.
I’d like to focus on two. One is my former colleague Matt Lewis, and the other is Robbie George, at Princeton. Both of these guys are from Appalachia. Lewis is the son of a prison guard in Western Maryland, and George is from West Virginia. I know these guys know perfectly well what Trump meant to to the people they grew up with, but they never ventured to use their substantial public profiles to try to explain it. I consider this a serious professional failure.
I myself have every reason of class and education to despise Donald Trump, and in many ways I find him as frustrating as everyone else does. I went to good schools, almost everyone I grew up with is liberal, most of my friends’ parents growing up were civil servants. But Trump happened because something was very wrong in Washington, and a lot of people are still in denial about that. He disrupted a lot of gravy trains that needed to be disrupted. It led to chaos, and even some heretofore-unseen national security problems. I still think it needed to happen.
Robbie George is in many ways the architect of GOP pro-life strategy, he’s its rhetorician, and this school of natural law thought is sort of the glue that connects social conservatism to ordinary Republican policy views. The irony is it took a politician that was very unlike an ordinary Republican to deliver what he always wanted—the overturning of Roe. Everyone’s sort of wondering where we go from here, and it seems clear to me that these fake Likudnik candidates are not the answer.
I’ve had a vague sense that something is very wrong with Princeton conservatism for some time now, and I would like to articulate my thoughts about that. Rather than trying to think through what comes next, George was in Public Discourse this December reiterating his role as gatekeeper of Israel issues. He advocates a rather expansive understanding of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document touching on relations with other religions. To be clear, it’s a document I accept fully and without reservation.
But George is doing something else here. His final line:
While criticism of Israel, or any political entity, is in bounds, hostility or contempt for Jews and living Judaism, masquerading as mere political differences with the Israeli government or state is out of bounds.
Well, alright Robbie. The rubber has met the road. I’ve shown here that there are real national security issues touching on the Israelis’ penetration of our government. And I think there is an ocean of mischief that can pass beneath this line. It’s very hard to trust him when he has acknowledged none of it. This stuff just doesn’t fly anymore.
Talking About Abortion
For what it’s worth, I sometimes wonder if this right-wing Supreme Court might be the best thing for the left in many years. A lot of the rhetoric from the pro-abortion side is probably unhelpful in reaching the sort of compromise that the U.S. will, in all likelihood, settle into sooner or later. Lefties are going to have to learn how to persuade people again, which is something they need.
A federal abortion law is probably not in the cards in the medium-term, the Graham bill going down in flames is good evidence of that. Much of the pro-life movement wouldn't accept something like a federal 15-week limitation anyway, which would bring the U.S.’s abortion laws in line with much of Europe. It doesn’t bother me to see this fought out at the state level.
I think the conservatives are right that Roe has shaped the way the left talks about this issue in a fairly radical way, and now that it’s gone they’re going to have to talk about it more moderately. That’s no bad thing.
I hesitate to talk about the global implications of this because ultimately it’s a discussion for Americans, to be settled by Americans, but there are global issues here. It is true that large parts of the rest of the world see a Western-style abortion regime as an imposition, a “neo-colonial” one, in the words of Pope Francis. There is a fairly widespread belief that there is, more or less, a Western plot to suppress their birthrates, in the way that aid is sometimes conditioned on the liberalization of abortion regimes. They are certainly aghast at things like late-term abortion, which they find grisly and barbaric. The reader may decide whether their moral sense is better, or worse, than ours.
Much of the benighted rest of the world is still stuck with the strange backward belief that babies are good. I’m not entirely confident in the awesome power of the Mighty Wurlitzer to beat this out of them—the belief that babies are good is a fairly deeply rooted one. Protecting U.S. standing abroad may involve moderating on this stuff.
We just need a new conceptual language here, and the Democratic Party will need one to reach a new consensus. After the government has claimed the authority to stick a needle with an experimental vaccine in everyone’s arm, framing the issue around “bodily autonomy” is no longer especially meaningful. The government already claims the right to take away your bodily autonomy in all sorts of circumstances, as pretty much every government throughout history has.
Back to Princeton
There are a couple of other Princeton institutions that play a big role in the architecture of the right, one is the Teneo Network, which was founded by Evan Baehr. I’ve already been over a little of that, but they were recruiting for all these weird Chinese or Israeli projects, such as the Daily Wire—of which all three founders are members. It appears that Leonard Leo sort of assimilated the network into his operation recently. Hugh Hewitt has called it the “Olympic Village of conservatism.” Dennis Prager considers it quite important.
ProPublica covered it in March, so you can read more about it there. Here’s their annual report from 2015, right before the Trump administration began. This network has a lot to do with how the Trump administration betrayed its iconoclastic promise and became a normie conservative jobs program full of Chisraelis.
You have some tech people at the FBI on this list, which raises questions about their role in the compromising of that agency by the Israelis.
I have several of their emails in my possession that give you a view of the sort of people involved in Teneo. Three billionaires have classifieds up in one of them. Peter Thiel appears to have hired his office manager out of this network.
Lots of these people are involved in various foreign business. There’s an ad for a general counsel for Joe Lonsdale, the 8VC guy who is deep in bed with the Emiratis.
This is pretty interesting:
Gee, I wonder who this is?
Miles Taylor, of course, famously turned his back on Trump, but hasn’t talked about how badly his agency was compromised by Israel.
You can sort of see here how a lot of ideological fights on the right are complete kayfabe, they’re hired out of the same networks. Here’s the Kochs and the natcons right next to each other:
Teneo is a problem. A lot of these people are foreign-compromised.
On Joseph Malchow
Mr. Malchow played a huge role chumming the waters with horseshit, making sure people didn’t understand what Trump was really about. He went to Dartmouth but he’s from Princeton. You can see in this article how Barre Seid’s money is being used for a double game, there’s the above-board strategy of promoting respectable influencers through the RealClear sites, and then there’s the below-board network of ad disinformation. He’s also involved with the neoconservative Power Line blog. Read this:
Publir and RealClear have much in common. They have a track record of not being clear about who is running what, when. And they both have been involved with hidden right-wing disinformation operations.
Publir has two co-founders: one is Joseph Malchow. The other is Anand.
Now a venture capitalist, Joseph first made his name with a popular blog at Dartmouth that criticized the university for alleged schemes to rewrite its constitution with a liberal bias. According to his LinkedIn bio, he then co-founded Publir.
The next year, he also joined the Silicon Valley board of The Federalist Society, a legal organization that advocates for strict textual interpretations of the Constitution. Joseph’s bio says that Publir’s “platform is trusted by publications from The Atlantic to RealClearPolitics” and that its “media properties move minds and markets every day, and represent one of the world’s top-ranked consortia by traffic.”
Anand is the lesser-known founder. Alongside Publir, he’s also worked at RealClearPolitics, which describes itself and its associated titles as an “independent, non-partisan media company.”
In a 2020 piece, The New York Times described how part of RealClear’s operations received dark money funding totaling over $3 milllion in 2018.
RealClear was also using its staff and office space to run secret disinformation and traffic-generating operations, The Daily Beast revealed in 2019, after linking disinformation website Conservative Country to RealClear through a shared Google Analytics code and Anand’s WordPress account. When the Beast asked RealClear about the site, it was Anand, RealClear’s CTO, who replied.
In another sign of the commingled operations between RealClear and Publir, when the Daily Beast contacted American Thinker, one of the sites the disinformation operation was heavily linking to, founder Thomas Lifson said, “We have a contract with Real Clear Holdings to handle some of our non-editorial functions.”
But RealClear doesn’t have an ad network, or at least not that we know of.
American Thinker, a political commentary site which regularly published election lies and has often been cited by Russian state media, does currently work with Publir for advertising, as shown by the ad widget in its source code and its ads.txt listing.
The entire ecosystem of ideas in the conservative world is rigged in favor of foreign interests and influencers, that’s the main point here.
Last But Not Least, Reed Cordish, Come On Down!
Reed Cordish is one of the many people in the Trump administration who looked like this:
Jared Kushner, who belongs in a cage, hired him to do work on the technology underlying the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. He’s another Princeton guy, whose real estate firm helps develop casinos, and a close friend of Jared and Ivanka. You can read about his father here.
There are real questions here, with Jared Kushner’s massive shadow portfolio involving countries like China and Mexico, how much of it really had to do with drugs and other mischief. Eliyahu Weinstein, the mobster freed by Kushner who was preying on Orthodox Jews, has already been charged with a new fraud.
The Cordish Companies developed two Florida casinos in 2004, the Hard Rock Casinos in Tampa and Hollywood, working with the Seminole Tribe, and as of 2020 has gotten into online gambling as well.
This article from 2017 describes Cordish’s role:
In the latest cyber executive order draft, Cordish is tasked with coordinating a report to the president from the secretary of Homeland Security, the secretary of Commerce, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the administrator of General Services, regarding modernization of IT.
Cordish has a lot to consider, including how agencies can get off of legacy IT and reduce the cost of operations and maintenance for systems, to allow agencies to focus on innovation. Cordish also has a voice in recognizing that commercial Software-as-a-Service is a model that government IT should be moving toward and adopting.
SAAS is a way for Silicon Valley to bilk the feds.
Trump and Cordish worked together on some casino projects:
Before the families became friends, Donald Trump sued David Cordish, Reed Cordish’s father, in 2004. David Cordish had obtained an agreement to build two casinos in Florida that Trump had wanted to build. Trump filed a civil suit because one of his former employees had joined Cordish’s company. The suit was settled in 2010 but Trump became friends with his competitor along the way.
The way to understand the relationship here is that Trump was assimilated by the Jewish mafia—he gave up his daughter to them, then they ran much of his administration for him.
This article goes into the modernization effort in 2017:
Each agency head will provide a risk management report to the secretary of Homeland Security and the director of the Office of Management and Budget within 90 days of the date of this order. Then the secretary of DHS, secretary of Commerce, the director of OMB, and the administrator of General Services will report to the president on how to secure the executive branch’s networks. Reed Cordish, assistant to the president for Intragovernmental and Technology Initiatives, will coordinate a report to the president from these executives regarding modernization of IT. Agency heads are required to show preference in their procurement for shared IT services to the extent permitted by law, including email, cloud, and cybersecurity services. …
The secretary of Homeland Security, the secretary of Defense, the attorney general, the director of National Intelligence, and the FBI director are tasked with leading the efforts to secure the nation’s critical infrastructure. They will provide a report to the president, which will state a plan for how to secure these networks within 180 days of the executive order.
Do you think Trump himself would understand the issues here? No, almost certainly not. It’s pretty hard to overstate how insane it is to have a casino guy running IT modernization for federal law enforcement. It’s really insane and irresponsible.