Thomas Zimmer
speaker
49 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Thomas Zimmer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
This idea that there's so little time left is just pervasive in these circles. They will constantly say this. This is our last chance. This is the one chance we got now with Trump coming back to power. If we can't reverse course now and make this counter-revolution happen, it's not going to happen. I think the fact that he says Marxist, I think this was a lengthy post on ex-Twitter or something.
what you just quoted, that is so revealing. He really doesn't make any difference between socialism, Marxism, communism, liberalism, progressivism. It's all the same. It's all this kind of subversion of the quote-unquote natural order. You can't come to an agreement with those people. This is not
This is not someone who thinks about the political conflict in like democratic, small d democratic terms, right? Oh, you have a political opponent, you disagree with them and you kind of, you know, you kind of work it out. No, this is a fundamentally illegitimate, fundamentally anti-American project that he sees on the quote unquote left that doesn't need to be like bargained with.
It needs to be destroyed.
Again, this is not dismantling the state, right? They want to do that. They want to get rid of the Department of Education, whatever. But what you heard there was, no, we're going to take over government. And we're going to do it by, A, purging the government, purging the state of the leftists, the bureaucrats.
And by the way, he sees all of these career bureaucrats, experts as just part of the leftist takeover of government. And so he was, even in the first Trump administration, the biggest proponent of Schedule F, this presidential executive order that would convert thousands, maybe tens of thousands of career civil servants into political appointees and then make them fireable.
That's what that is about, right? And so that's what they want to do again, purge government, purge all these agencies, departments, every part of the administrative state of government. what they see as the enemy within, and replace them with loyalists.
That was very much part of all the big right-wing planning, Project 2025 being one of the big planning operations on the right, is of this idea, we need to get rid of these people and we need to find our people to replace them with. That's one part of it. The second part is, they're very clear that their project is fundamentally not popular.
If you tell the American people what they actually want to do, people will say, that sounds not great. So they know this will lead to protests, or they are expecting protests. And I think when you hear Russell Vogt talk about his biggest regret from the first Trump administration is precisely that in the summer of 2020, during the George Floyd protests, they did not...
invoke the Insurrection Act to use the military to suppress those protests. And they're 100% clear this will not happen again. Next time we'll be ready. They think they had too many of those Federalist Society, RINO lawyers in and around the White House who kind of talked them out of this. Trump wanted to do this in the summer of 2020, but they didn't.
They were sort of talked out of it by lawyers, legal counsel, whatever. And so they're 100% clear, this must not happen to us again. Next time, we will absolutely use the military. We will invoke the Insurrection Act. And so that is what they've been preparing. One of his biggest frustrations is precisely this. We were much too lenient. We allowed protests. We shouldn't do this.
Yeah, he himself calls OMB the nerve center of the federal government. And I think he's kind of right about this, or at least you can use it that way. It's always a question of what do you want to do with these institutions and agencies? And for him, and I think you saw this again in the first Trump administration, he became director of OMB in 2019. And
Some of his greatest hits were he held up military aid to Ukraine because Trump wanted to pressure the Ukrainian government in terms of delivering dirt on Joe Biden. He directed billions of dollars from the Pentagon to Trump's border wall fever dream. He was the most aggressive proponent of Schedule F. So this is a powerful position if you want to use it that way.
And he absolutely sees it as a kind of position where you can bend the entire machinery to the will of Donald Trump. And that is, I mean, to be clear, he really sees Donald Trump as a gift from God. That's how he describes him, literally a gift from God, someone who is precisely the right kind of radical figure to lead this counter-revolution.
He is entirely devoted to, again, bending the entire machine to Trump's will.
This is another reason why vote is important or interesting, because he is competent, right? He knows how government works. And I think, you know, in the first Trump administration, there was this saying, oh, malevolence of tempered by incompetence, right? As we're once again, sort of looking at... What we're in for with the second Trump administration.
And we see a lot of fundamentally incompetent people because Trump insists on nominating them. But then on the other end of the spectrum, there's people like Russell Vogt who he knows how government works and he knows how to make it work. I mean, I think people tend to think that's of the extreme. Extremists, the nutty MAGA people are also incompetent.
And conversely, when you go up on the competence scale, you tend to go down on the nutty ideology scale. But that's, again, if you look at someone like this, this is a truly committed ideologue. He really means this kind of stuff. He's fundamentally not on board with any kind of ideology.
pluralistic vision of a democracy in which people have disagreements and they kind of, you know, try to come to some sort of, I don't know, consensus or understanding. No, he's not on board with that. He's a truly committed ideologue, but he's also very competent. And so these are the more, in that sense, I think these are the more dangerous people that we need to worry about.
I'm concerned about this also, honestly frustrated, because I think modern society and complex modern societies and modern states are difficult for any authoritarian regime to bring in line, even if they're fully competent. But since the election, I think ostensibly anti-MAGA political leaders and liberal institutions have...
Showing 21–40 of 49 · page 2 of 3
← Previous
Next →