The Atlantic’s take-over of PBS’s weekly journalist roundtable has formed a closed circle of liberal grievance. After Washington Week with The Atlantic moderator Jeffrey Goldberg cracked jokes about Rep. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) comment about Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought wanting to shut down the government “since puberty." He said "I remember when I was undergoing puberty, I wanted to slash the workforce at Medicare and Medicaid myself, personally."
Goldberg turned to his Atlantic colleague Ashley Parker and asked “Who is Russ Vought? What does he want?”
Ashley Parker, The Atlantic: I mean, he wants, as I mentioned in at the beginning, sort of the deconstruction of the administrative state of the federal bureaucracy.
Jeffrey Goldberg: What are the ideological roots of this?
Parker: He's -- I mean, he's incredibly conservative. He worked in Trump's first administration. So, there are some people, including Stephen Miller, but there are not actually a ton of people who worked in the first Trump administration and then came back for a second tour of duty, but Russ Vought is one of them. And he came back, like the president himself, sort of stronger, bolder, more empowered, more creative with his interpretations of laws and what's acceptable than ever. And he used his --
Goldberg: Russ Vought, faster and furiouser.
Parker: Yes. And he used those years out of power to basically create this document that you mentioned called Project 2025, that -- it's a dense, dense policy document. That is sort of his wheelhouse, his actual policy. And it tell sort of all the ways you can, first of all, just utterly minimize the government, tear away at it, tear it down and use it to push through deeply conservative priorities. And I also, based on my reporting, agree with Senator Lee, that this is squarely in his erogenous zone.
You can understand why defunded PBS would be griping about tearing down government. Then Parker lapsed into sentimental liberalism.
And that when he said what he wants to do, I mean, to use a phrase that was popularized by one of our colleagues at The Atlantic, cruelty is the point. Now, that was in reference to Donald Trump. But Russ Vought also, he said, I want to terrorize the federal bureaucrats. So, some of these choices, the fork in the road email of should you choose to basically resign or risk losing your job, I mean, the way these things were structured were deeply humiliating and devastating and financially devastating to hundreds of thousands of people, and that was an intentional choice by people like Russ Vought.
Is it "devastating" to federal employees if they're off the job for seven or eight days? If it is, aren't the Democrats at least half-responsible?
Parker’s “cruelty is the point” quote comes from a wacky 2018 take by left-wing Atlantic writer Adam Serwer, who compared first-term Trump and his supporters who criticized now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford to the “white men in lynching photos” from the early 20th century.