New Records For Cringe

And two MAGA speechwriters at Department of Education

Welcome back, KTB readers.

I want to encourage you to do two things this week.

First, if you know any career federal employees, do something nice for them. Career federal employees are NOT Trump appointees. Or holdover Biden employees - they serve no political party. They are apolitical professionals whose dilligent efforts deliver government services to the rest of us.

They are the workers who are being furloughed during the shutdown. They are the civil servants who Russel Vought is threatening to fire out of spite. They are the victims whose work emails are being hacked and vandalized by the MAGA fanatics who Trump has appointed to run our government.

Give career feds your support. They need it - and deserve it.

Second, please read (or reread) KTB’s One Big Ground Rule:

Do NOT do anything illegal and/or violent to the individuals who KTB profiles. The phrase “Kill The Body” is an adage and a metaphor, not a command to be taken literally. KTB eschews lawbreaking and violence. You should too. Otherwise, we are no better than Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, or any of the other thugs whom MAGA types crush on.

This week, KTB calls out two speechwriters at the Department of Education, one of whom flirts with political violence. Don’t let your anger toward him make you become like him - you are not MAGA! Internalize our One Big Ground Rule; consciously remind yourself to reject lawbreaking and violence; then fight on via legal means.

The U.S. has a serious MAGA issue

Constantine Stanovich is the Deputy Speechwriter at Department of Education.

Constantine really, really likes X/Twitter.

He has tweeted angry calls to end immigration, using what seems to be his favorite hashtag: #MassDeportationsNow. He tweeted a conspiracy theory about July’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump: “The Deep State attempted to kill the leading Presidential candidate... and nobody seems to care.” And he tweeted this:

Yes, Constantine believes in the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory - but unlike most other Great Replacers, Constantine doesn’t try to hide it. Like when he tweeted this bigoted comment about Indian-Americans:

The West has a serious Indian issue. … These recent arrivals have no allegiance to our nation and seek to replace our culture and history with theirs.

Ah, but Constantine, what about Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy?

About the American-born Ramaswamy, and Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial bid in his American birth state of Ohio, Constantine tweeted this:

The foreigners who reside among you will rise above you higher and higher, but you will sink lower and lower. Deuteronomy 28:43.

It isn’t just Indian-Americans who Constantine dislikes. He hate tweets garbage about a lot of races, whether through indirect dog whistles or very direct racist mockery. Here are a few more examples of his hate tweets:

—About a report on Christian nationalism by reporter Tina Nguyen: “The Founding Fathers were Christian, and none of them had the surname Nguyen.”

—About immigrants and their too-darn-hard-to-pronounce names: “[They are] Star Wars named paperwork Americans” and “This type of naivety is how we ended up with…all the other Stars Wars Americans that occupy our land.”

—And about a video of a woman of color supposedly pushing an ICE agent:

“Chimp out.” Yeah, he went there.

Other tweets of Constantine’s mention the country of Rhodesia - which has become something of a meme/signaling device/coded language among white nationalists. Still others fret about the “South Africanization” of the U.S., i.e. high crime and social breakdown supposedly caused by unsavory African-Americans.

Constantine also hates transgendered people. One of his tweets called them “the common denominator for all the recent political violence.” Another said “the T in LGBT stands for terrorism.” “Insane” and “mentally ill” are his preferred epithets.

Oops, I forgot “demonic” - that is also one of his choice epithets for trans people.

Other than tweeting crazy things, Constantine has done little of interest. He graduated last year from University of Tampa, and he worked for less than a year as the aide to a right-wing State Rep in Florida. In between, he did a three month internship at the alt-right America First Policy Institute.

None of them had the surname Stanovich, either…

AFPI must be where Constantine met his boss, Department of Education’s Chief Speechwriter, Andrew Cuff. Before Trump appointed Andrew to Education, Andrew was a Senior Fellow at AFPI, and before that, a political consultant.

While at AFPI, Andrew wrote several articles for The Federalist, the alt-right, oft-racist, conspiracy-minded ’zine (add Andrew to KTB’s list of Federalist authors who now work for the Trump Administration).

In one article, Andrew defended the police officers who killed George Floyd as “scapegoats” for an “ongoing show trial” and said,

This is not blind justice at work, but Attorney General Merrick Garland’s latest sortie in the culture war. The DOJ is abusing civil rights activism to undermine the rule of law. …

It is another step toward federal anarcho-tyranny: the ruthless suppression of politically disfavored activity by federal law enforcement.…

Um, no, it’s a step toward the suppression of murdering Black people, Andrew.

In another article for The Federalist, Andrew endorsed MAGA’s election fraud conspiracy theories. Andrew assured us that, in 2020, his home state of Pennsylvania “facilitated the casting and counting of illegal ballots,” a scheme that was “allowing unconstitutionality and fraud to determine the course of America’s future.”

Apparently, the FBI was involved, too: in another article for another outlet, Andrew called the FBI “Democrats’ attack dog,” and accused it of “direct interference in our elections and blatant intimidation of Republican voters and activists.”

But Andrew’s most disturbing comments were those he wrote in an article about gun rights. His article is titled “Gun Ownership is Political Violence” - and to Andrew, that relationship is a good thing. In his article, he wrote,

The American right must acknowledge the association of guns with violence, while rejecting the fallacy that all violence is evil.

Um, violence = bad is a fallacy?

Throughout his article, by using vague words such as “acknowledge,” Andrew carefully wordsmiths his way around making any explicit threats…but what his article is implicitly hinting at is very obvious - and very frightening:

The right must unapologetically embrace the substance of the left’s complaint that the 2nd Amendment endorses violence as a pillar of American politics. …

Instead of pretending our guns are only for outdoor sportsmanship…we should acknowledge what they represent and accept the violent responsibility they entail. …

Guns kill people; they are made for violence. But this violent threat is and always has been the load-bearing wall of our house divided.

Instead of begging the destructive and divisive left to allow gun ownership…we should acknowledge the violence implicit in arming ourselves for conflict.

Andrew, Americans do not “acknowledge” political violence; we reject it.

We must acknowledge the association of Andrew with violence

Thanks!

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