Running Out of Time.

Russell Vought, Stephen Miran, Stephen Miller, Mike Johnson, John Thune. The people driving the true policy agenda of this White House are white Christian nationalists hellbent on destroying liberalism.

Hard fucking stop.

They want more white babies and no new Brown people. And they want to expel as many brown people that immigrated to this country as humanly possible. This conclusion led a few commenters on UNFTR recently to ask the obvious follow up question: “What about Black people?”

This is going to sound brutal but this is where we are. There’s nowhere to send Black people because they were robbed of their homelands and history. So they want the next best thing. Put them down and keep them there. Corral communities back into the inner cities and heighten the police presence. Strip away any economic mobility they’ve been able to achieve. Let a few past the post to use as exceptions to the rule. Make no mistake, this is what they mean by making America great again.

In the first section of today’s essay I’m dissecting the recent discussion between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates as they attempt to find common ground in their perspectives surrounding the death of Charlie Kirk. Then to prove my point I want to run through some economic maneuvers to demonstrate the lengths this administration will go to promote their vision of a white nationalist economy.

Ezra Klein Doesn’t Listen

I strapped in with a cup of coffee to endure the conversation between New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and writer Ta-Nehsis Coates, and after an hour realized that I probably should have taken a Xanax instead. I’ll sum it up for those of you who don’t have the patience, though some of my additional thoughts will weave into a larger narrative. This was a conversation between a man trying desperately to find a home for a centrist ideology and someone who represents a population that has never been allowed to live in the center.

Also, Ezra Klein has a listening problem. Over the course of the hour, Klein attempts to understand why the world can’t see what he sees. I lost track of the number of times he interrupted the flow of conversation to restart with, “I guess what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is…” He is so deep in his own head and steeped in utter disbelief that liberalism just isn’t enough for everyone, even though it has failed people along the political divide that he cannot attend to the answers being given directly to him.

America is a deeply racist place. It’s built on fear and precarity and othering. The countless examples of halted progress given to him by Coates were treated with a shrug and determination that there must be some other answer. There simply isn’t. Klein continues to practice the politics of compromise from a privileged position to find balance in the center. In doing so he completely misses the reality that there are those in the country who have never tasted the benefits of this strategy because any center implies that there are outliers. In the case of America, these outliers are winners and losers and to be Black in this country is to be dealt a losing hand. Moreover, he fails to realize that the center is no longer where he imagines it to be.

This could have been a transformational moment for Klein and his audience. But Klein wasn’t looking to genuinely learn from this experience; he was looking for an ally to let him off the hook because his feelings were “well-intended.”

Klein has become the avatar of liberal guilt.

It was evident throughout the subtext of the conversation. He was essentially mourning the loss of an America that never truly worked for the person sitting across from him. He even started the conversation with the notion that Democrats lost the plot when Hillary Clinton uttered the words, “basket of deplorables” to identify supporters of Donald Trump. When Coates countered with the institution of slavery, the violent end of Reconstruction, the entirety of Jim Crow, and the two-tier economic system that developed after World War Two, Klein pivoted the conversation to McCarthyism. When that line was exhausted, he turned to Trumpism.

In every example, Klein searched for a time when things were bad but we ultimately came out ahead; looking for clues from the past for how to guide our politics in this moment. He was searching for answers to questions that Coates doesn’t even have the luxury of asking. Klein offered examples when America overcame extremism before. But each was an example of the liberal establishment coming under attack and ultimately prevailing in a way that preserved the status quo while the battle for Black Americans endured.

We won the Civil War. We can do it again.

We fought the Civil War to prevent secession because it would have meant utter economic collapse. In the aftermath, there was a brief window of optimism for the Black community, with several formerly enslaved people rising up to participate in the economy and even serve as representatives. The advances were too much for the white establishment so it was almost immediately crushed and the Jim Crow era began.

New Deal reforms helped lift millions out of poverty and the Great Depression, leading to the Civil Rights era.

From banking regulations and housing rights, New Deal reforms specifically excluded Black Americans. There was a pecking order in the recovery. Upon returning from the war, Black Americans were once again specifically excluded—in writing and in legislation—from the benefits of the post war economic policies and legislation. But we needed labor and everyone participated, including Black Americans, despite being blocked from suburban mobility and the expansion of credit.

But at least Civil Rights happened, right?

Sure. Twenty years after the end of World War Two. Followed by 20 more tumultuous years with FBI witch hunts, Civil Rights assassinations, more Black bodies in foreign wars leading to the era of mass incarceration.

Obama?

And that’s where Klein, along with every other establishment liberal usually lands. How about that Obama? But even Coates acknowledges how Obama couldn’t really be a Black man in power. That’s not how power in America works. He even mentioned how he can’t truly represent the Black experience in his own writing at times, because so many still cannot hear what he has to say. Just as Ezra Klein cannot.

There have always been two Americas. But when figures like Klein and others taste the bitterness of life in the other America, it shakes them to the core. It shakes me to the core. I’m scared in a way that I’ve never felt, but at least I have the decency to acknowledge that it’s because the privilege that I’ve enjoyed is in danger of being taken away.

Coates gave the answer to it all on a couple of occasions. There have been advances, but sometimes it’s exogenous forces that make them obvious. Sometimes the change doesn’t come in our lifetimes no matter how hard we work to achieve it. Klein repeatedly called this perspective “pessimistic” and “fatalistic.” The quizzical way that Coates responded each time to this characterization tells us everything we need to know about the divide that remains between white liberal America and Black and Brown people in America.

One person’s pessimism is another’s lived experience.

Paying for a White America

If you have the time, a year ago Democracy Now! did a segment that I urge you to watch or perhaps revisit. Here is the description:

“In July, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought met with two people he believed to be relatives of a wealthy conservative donor interested in funding the effort. In fact, he was meeting with two reporters with the U.K.-based Centre for Climate Reporting as part of an undercover sting captured on video. Over the course of two hours, Vought described Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 as mere theater and laid out plans for mass deportations, restricting abortion, gutting independent government bureaucracies, using the military against racial justice protesters and more.”

Bear this in mind as we continue. While it might seem disconnected from the topics of racism, abortion, dismantling agencies, mass deportation and policing the streets, consider the recent moves at the Federal Reserve.

At the most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, the Fed cut the Federal Funds rate by 25 basis points. On the surface, it seems like any other Fed maneuver, but the real story wasn’t the cut. It was the lone dissenting voice on the 12 person board who argued that the cuts should have been far more substantial.

That lone voice was that of Stephen Miran, who was confirmed as a Federal Reserve Governor to replace Adriana Kugler who departed for reasons that have yet to emerge.

Recall that Miran got the job in the White House as the head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors from a white paper he wrote in 2024 claiming that tariffs would level the trade imbalance between the U.S. and other major economies without causing inflation. So not only is he at the Fed now, but he’s the architect of Trump’s tariff regime.

The Federal Reserve is supposed to maintain complete independence and many feared that Miran would be anything but given his close ties to the White House. Indeed, in Miran’s very first meeting, he essentially carried water for the president and went against the other 11 members—some of whom are considered Trump allies—to call for steeper rate cuts.

This is important. Before I explain why, let’s talk about Fed independence.

While his white paper on tariffs is cited as the reason he got the job in the administration, another paper Miran co-authored and published for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, probably sealed the deal. In it he laid out a plan to completely reform the Federal Reserve and made some claims that raised eyebrows. And this is where it gets interesting.

In this paper, Miran accused past Fed governors of being too political, saying, “to pretend that one can easily shift between highly political and allegedly nonpolitical roles without letting political biases inform policy is, at best, naïve, at worst, sinister.”

Miran is literally on leave from the White House.

He goes on to say this:

“Excessive control by elected, political actors (like the president) interferes in good policy and results in bad economic outcomes.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

So here’s where the whole thing comes unraveled. In the report he calls for a prohibition on Fed governors serving in the executive branch for four years after their term. He attacks the Fed for having DEI policies (like investigating whether monetary policy has a negative impact on structural racism; a waste of time according to Miran). He lauds chairs like Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan even though Volcker prescribed the opposite remedy in a stagflation crisis than the one Miran just put forward, and most people recognize that Alan Greenspan presided over an expansive monetary environment followed by extreme tightening that led to the mortgage crisis.

But here’s where it gets sinister, to borrow a word.

To fix the Fed, Miran suggests the following:

• The Fed’s operating budget should be brought under House appropriations.
• The Fed shouldn’t have the ability to fight monetary crises; rather, this decision should belong to the executive.
• Reserve banks should be nationalized with the heads of them being appointed by governors of states that they’re located in.

Let’s take these one by one.

The Fed is self-sustaining because it makes money from seigniorage, the fees associated with printing money and the spread from money they lend into the market. He wants that to go away so that Congress can authorize the Fed budget. But we’ve seen from the collaboration with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought that their plan is to strip appropriations away from Congress and place it under executive authority. Under this scheme, the president would control funding of the Fed by default.

The president would also have the ability to determine when and if the Fed intervenes in the markets during a crisis, which would make the president the sole arbiter of winners and losers in the event of a crash.

Control of the board would be given to state governors. And conveniently there are more red state governors than blue ones.

Essentially, Miran’s plan to ensure Fed independence is to strip it of all independence and put its powers in the hands of the president.

Their hubris never gets old.

Now, let’s put his rate cut stance in the context of the five pillars of their project—tax cuts, deregulation, mass deportation, restricting access to birth control and policing the streets with the military.

In his first remarks at the NY Economic Club as a Fed governor, Miran made a technical argument that the Federal Funds rate should be 1.3%. In making his case he references “R-star” and provides a mathematical rationale for cutting. (R-star is the term for what the Fed considers to be a neutral rate under something called the Taylor Rule. Basically, the rate the governors believe will maintain inflation and unemployment at their preferred targets.)

Miran adjusts several inputs in the formula to suggest that everyone else is wrong on the economy and that rates should be 1.3%. But he goes on to graciously allow for other opinions and states that settling around 2% would be fair.

So why is this important and how does it all tie together?

Deep breath. You ready?

They want to drastically cut rates to stimulate the top end of the corporate economy to cover for the other areas of the administration’s agenda that are going to tank it for the vast majority of us. And they want to take control of Fed operations and powers so they have exclusive authority to print money and direct it when the shit hits the fan.

Let’s go through the Trump agenda one at a time.

Tax Cuts. Cutting taxes is a gift to the corporate class and the wealthy. We know this. But it depletes the treasury and creates a huge budget deficit. Thus, tariffs. They know we, as consumers, will ultimately pick up the tab for that. But tariffs are a short-term budget gap closer because they bring in unattached funds. Meaning, pure revenue for the government even if the taxes on goods are initially paid by the importing corporations.

Deregulation. Tariffs are an unsustainable way to manage an economy, so corporations need a little give and take in this equation. Therefore, the administration is removing as many administrative costs and barriers for corporations as possible to offset the cost of tariffs. So corporations are free to price gouge without the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) breathing down its neck, to form monopolies without the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stopping them, to pollute freely without the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) fining them, and so on. Regulations also cost money so whatever losses mega corporations sustain from paying tariffs, they can partially offset by not paying to remain compliant with federal regulations. Even still, it’s short-term.

Mass Deportation. In the pursuit of re-establishing a white America, the Christian nationalists who compiled Project 2025 proposed mass deportation of immigrants under the guise of ridding the nation of criminals. But we’ve already seen that it’s gone far beyond that. Asians, Latinos and other Brown populations are the sole targets irrespective of criminality, with most following our immigration laws to the letter and are awaiting adjudication of their cases. By eliminating immigrant labor, the low end of the labor market will be destroyed leaving job seekers with no alternative but to fill those low wage jobs that are typically done by first generation immigrant populations.

Reproductive Rights. How do you rebuild a white America given birth rates are declining? You remove reproductive health care like abortion and access to birth control for the remaining white population. Then you give every newborn baby $1,000 in something called a Trump account (which is now law by the way), to incentivize babies born to U.S. born residents. It’s sick. But that’s what’s up.

Domestic Militarization. There will be pain on the way to realizing a white nationalist vision for America. There will be dissent. Uprisings. Protests. So you summon the top military brass from around the globe and tell them their hands are no longer tied and that they should practice the art of war on the streets of the United States. You provide ICE with as much funding as the other branches of the military. Send troops to Washington DC and Chicago as a primer. Then to Portland. Threaten New York. Prior to taking over at OMB, Russell Vought had already provided the Trump transition team with the legal rationale to police the streets and effectively end Posse Comitatus.

How does this all relate to slashing the Federal Funds rate and stripping the Fed of its independence?

Pain. We’re going to endure a tremendous amount of economic pain.

In order to continue bulldozing ahead with their dystopian plans, they’ll need a short term boost to align with the corporate class and keep the government afloat. They’ll need to sell a fuck ton of short-term treasury notes to do this and prop up the stock market for as long as possible before we descend into utter chaos. And it all starts with getting rates close to zero.

They’ll tell you that it will bring down credit card rates because these are tied to the Federal Funds Rate, but the average spread on credit cards is 14.5%. So at best, credit card debt holders can look forward to reducing interest rates from 20% to 16%. Sub-prime borrowers have even higher rates.

They’ll tell you it will help student borrowers. While there’s a correlation between student loan debt and the federal funds rate, it affects new borrowers mostly. As a practical matter, they’re looking to cut back on federal student loan guarantees and Pell Grants which should tell you that they’re not serious about tackling this issue either.

They’ll tell you it will bring down the cost of your mortgage. Mortgages are tied to the 10 year rate, not the federal funds rate. As the economy worsens, the more expensive our mid-term and long-term debt becomes, and that includes the 10 year. The 10 year is at 4.1% and the last time it hit this rate was the global financial crisis. So despite the rate cut and the signal that two more are coming, the most recent data show that the market still isn’t budging because investors know the long-term health of the economy is in question.

So, no. Your mortgage rate isn’t going down.

Short-term rates are what matters most to this administration. It’s why Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is bulking up short-term treasury notes in the recent auctions rather than relying on the longer-term bonds.

That’s why Miran is desperately advocating for a massive cut. These short term yields are directly tied to the federal funds rate. (A side benefit for the wealthy is that if the Fed suddenly cut rates, it might wreak havoc in the bond markets, but it would produce immediate gains in the stock market because investors would be desperate for yields and a quick place to park cash.)

Ultimately, if the bond market doesn’t cooperate, the plan is to do something called yield curve control, like we did in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. Basically we would over-purchase our own short term treasuries. It’s a quick fix to refinance debt but it has disastrous inflationary consequences.

They do not care. They are willing to increase inflation and sacrifice the job market in order to get the debt partially under control and deliver cash to corporate America by allowing it to refinance more expensive debt and take advantage of the flow of cash into the stock market. It’s all going to work. Until it doesn’t. After that, we’re in the hands of the military.

All to realize Russell Vought’s vision of a white America.