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Move Fast and Break Us: The Alt-Right’s War on “Woke”

  • Justine Verigin
  • Mar 10
  • 4 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

On January 20th, I watched it. I knew it would be nonsensical, absurd, and violent. I knew that watching that room of billionaires clap and congratulate each other, knowing the chaos that was bound to follow, would make my skin crawl. But I was not prepared to watch the stacks of executive orders, each neatly bound in their very own official black embossed leather binder, grow into a small library atop the Resolute Desk. Each new order was announced by name, like members of the court being presented to the King.1 And wow, the names. Defending Women from Radical Gender Ideology. In the Oval Office presser, Trump proudly, yet absent-mindedly, signed each executive order. It was not only an attempt to challenge the law and norms of the office. It was a ceremony. A display. A demonstration of power. Like a cat taking a dump right in the middle of your pillow. Shock and awe.  

 

“I want to put them in trauma.”

 

  And then, one by one, the E.O.s turned into action. On February 6th, 2025, the Senate confirmed one of Project 2025’s architects, Russell Vought, as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). He was confirmed along party lines, despite public outcry and pushback from Senate Democrats. The confirmation marked Vought’s triumphant return to OMB since his previous appointment to the same position during the first Trump administration. In Vought’s view, OMB should be the “most comprehensive approximation of the President’s mind,” and should be involved in “all aspects” of the administration’s policy and rule-making. Vought declared that OMB could become “powerful enough to override implementing agencies’ bureaucracies.”2 

 

  In 2024, ProPublica revealed a series of previously unreleased speeches from Vought, who is also an architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, in which he detailed his plans for Trump 2.0. In these speeches, Vought advocated for the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy. Vought explained that his plan of attack would not be isolated to eliminating federal jobs alone–it would also target the minds of federal workers. The goal: to make the jobs of disfavored government bureaucrats so intolerable, that they would simply stop showing up for work. To, literally, “put them in trauma.”3  

   

  Like its architect, Project 2025 also advocates for a purge of federal bureaucrats, through the expansion and consolidation of power under the executive branch,4 in order to “take down the Deep State and return the government to the people.”5 Just as long as “the people” are wealthy white Chistian nationalist conservatives.   

 

  The marriage of Vought’s Project 2025 and Trump’s MAGA is synergistic. Both crave power, fear oversight, and champion the same authoritarian view of government, embodied in an agile, strong, unencumbered national leader. A Daddy President.6 I won’t opine as to particular legal theorists’ views on daddies, but the Unitary Executive theory provides the flexibility necessary to bring about a more, “robust” sort of leadership. Since the early 80s, alt-right conservatives have been “it depends-ing” their way through the Constitution to build this theory of executive supremacy.7 Proponents of UET believe the executive has sole authority over the executive branch, and therefore is not subject to control by Congress or the judiciary.8   

 

  Though UET bemoans interagency limitations on the President’s freedom, its adherents do not seem to have a problem with limiting the freedom of those they disagree with. The Trump administration and its loyalists have no issue imposing government controls on individual freedom. The administration has issued multiple E.O.s that seek to limit bodily autonomy and censor discussions of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, abortion, gender identity, or any other topic that the regime considers anti-American, unpatriotic, or falling under the general umbrella of “wokeness.”9 This is clearly demonstrated by the administration’s particular obsession with eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.10 In August 2024, Vought was caught on tape, saying that the second Trump administration’s goal would be to get America “off multiculturalism.”11 Which, to me, sounds a lot like a return to the America of the 1950’s.  

 

A Paper Coup  

 

  When a helicopter and airplane collided over D.C. on January 29th, Trump took the opportunity to blame DEI, citing the F.A.A.’s policy of seeking to hire workers with “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”12 Instead of responding with compassion for the 67 people who died in the incident,13 he seized the opportunity to support his absurd anti-DEI agenda.  

 

  Trump’s new hires are certainly eager to weaponize this anti-DEI executive agenda to fire incredibly competent people in the name of “merit.” In the words of former Fox News host, and newly-appointed Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, “Any general that was involved, general, admiral, or whatever, that was involved in any of that DEI woke shit has got to go.” And so, on February 21st, Trump fired the incredibly accomplished Air Force general and renowned fighter pilot CQ Brown Jr, a Black general known for speaking openly about his experience breaking racial barriers within the military, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Before Hegseth was appointed, he repeatedly accused General Brown Jr. of being hired solely on account of his and of “playing the race card.” Hegseth is so obsessed with this grievance that he put it in one of his books.14 

 

  Too often, especially in this administration, fringe legal theories provide a foil for abject cruelty, racism, or a simple power grab. This flood of executive orders and successive policy memos, which draw directly from Project 2025’s agenda, is a blatant attempt to purge resistance in the ranks to this authoritarian expansion of executive power. The alt-right is flooding the administrative state with pseudo-policy, hoping to kill dissent by a thousand papercuts. And while they’re at it, they’re leaving a turd on everyone’s pillow, just because they can.  

 

  Image from Etsy "Preppy Daddy's Home Shirt" from KAOCustomDesigns, New Jersey, U.S.,  


SOURCES: 

 

3. https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trum p-russ-vought-center-renewing-america-maga   

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