I blogged previously about Kash Patel (FBI) and Jay Bhattacharya (NIH) but when I saw an article (below) on Daily Signal about Russ Vought (OMB) by the politics editor, I thought I’d better read it. And after I read it, I though I’d better share it. First of all, Vought is an excellent conservative. Second, he has a lot of experience. And third, he is an outspoken evangelical Christian.

Daily Signal:

The Office of Management and Budget is a less well-known entity within the executive branch, but few are as critical for ensuring the implementation of the president’s agenda. President-elect Donald Trump has once again placed that awesome responsibility in Russ Vought’s hands.

[…]Trump released a statement announcing Vought’s nomination as OMB director on Friday evening. “I am very pleased to nominate Russell Thurlow Vought, from the Great State of Virginia, as the Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget. He did an excellent job serving in this role in my First Term – We cut four Regulations for every new Regulation, and it was a Great Success! Russ graduated with a B.A. from Wheaton College, and received his J.D. from the Washington University School of Law,” Trump’s statement read.

“Russ has spent many years working in Public Policy in Washington, D.C., and is an aggressive cost cutter and deregulator who will help us implement our America First Agenda across all Agencies. Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People. We will restore fiscal sanity to our Nation, and unleash the American People to new levels of Prosperity and Ingenuity. I look forward to working with you again, Russ. Congratulations. Together, we will Make America Great Again!”

So, this is the guy who did the cut four regulations for ever one new regulation. And he graduated from Wheaton College, back when Wheaton was still a conservative Christian school.

More:

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought explained how OMB can… kill the deep state—a death by a thousand cuts.

“OMB is the nerve center of the federal government, particularly the executive branch,” Vought told Carlson. “Office of Management and Budget has the ability to turn off the spending that’s going on at the agencies. It has all the regulations coming through it to assess whether it’s good, or bad, or too expensive, or could be done a different way, or ‘What does the president think?’”

In short, “presidents use OMB to tame the bureaucracy,” Vought said.

“It is the President’s most important tool for dealing with the bureaucracy, the administrative state,” he reiterated. “And you know, the nice thing about President Trump is he knows that, and he knows how to use it effectively.”

And he’s experienced:

Vought was previously atop the OMB, first in an acting capacity and then confirmed by the Senate, for the second half of Trump’s first term.

As Trump and Vought prepared to depart the White House in 2021, Vought told the president of his intention to start the Center for Renewing America, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that sought to keep Trump’s policy vision alive in the nation’s capital. Trump was supportive of Vought’s endeavor, and the pair remained in close contact while Trump was out of power.

Vought’s fingerprints have been all over Republican politics and the conservative movement for the past four years. He wrote the Project 2025 chapter on how to reform the Executive Office of the President of the United States. In the media, he was an outspoken proponent for “draining the swamp” by making the federal agencies once again accountable to the president and the American people. And, over the summer, Vought lead the Republican National Convention’s policy platform committee.

Now, his fingerprints will be all over bringing the bureaucracy to heel.

I was snooping around in far-left communist atheist publications, and found this hand-wringing about Vought’s Christian convictions:

In 2021 he founded the Centre for Renewing America, an organisation whose mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God”.

His religious views have provoked controversy. In Mr Vought’s confirmation hearing in 2017—he squeaked through by a single vote—Senator Bernie Sanders pointed to an article by Mr Vought in which he described Muslims as “condemned” for having rejected Jesus Christ. Mr Vought replied that he respected the right of every person to express their religious beliefs. In the secretly recorded meeting last year he said that elected leaders should discuss whether to prioritise Christian immigrants over those of other faiths. And he has called for a total abolition of abortion—a position that is too extreme for even most American conservatives.

But Mr Vought’s religiosity gives a scorching fervour to his criticism of politics and society, and that appeals to the Republican base. He regularly describes the federal government as “woke and weaponised” and has warned that the Democratic Party is “increasingly evil” because it forces secularism on families. He also was an early combatant in the pushback against diversity policies, which became a potent campaign theme for Mr Trump: in 2020 he wrote an official memo saying that anti-racism training in the federal government was divisive and anti-American.

So, let’s conclude with this. The best Trump pick, the one you’ve probably never heard of, is the most conservative one, and he’s in a great position to smash the secular left Deep State.

I’ve written many times about Facebook’s continuous efforts to alter their products and services to censor Christians and conservatives. And I’ve written about how they have spread misinformation and censored true stories in order to help their allies in the Democrat party. But now Facebook is claiming that they will change their old ways. Should we believe them?

This article from The Federalist collects together many stories of their past actions.

Meta has repeatedly displayed anti-conservative prejudice. For example, it directly censored The Federalist at least 11 times, suspended the Facebook account of the America First Policy Institute, and restricted the account of conservative Hillsdale College.

When asked why users should vote for Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump, Meta AI told users positive things about the Democrat but negative things about the Republican. Research has shown that media bias can shift elections.

Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, also directly poured $350 million through nonprofits into local election offices in 2020. The funding helped boost turnout in mostly Democrat areas, and enabled left-wing groups like the Center for Tech and Civic Life to meddle in local election processes.

That same year, the company engaged in government collusion to exert draconian control over public discussions online about a prudent Covid-19 response. It also caved to pressure from the FBI to censor the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian misinformation” — even though the story proved true.

So, should we think that Zuckerberg and his secular left lackeys have turned over a new leaf? Or, are they just trying to avoid jail time by sucking up to Trump (who is prone to sycophant behavior). Time will tell. I don’t have any faith in Big Tech. You can tell what they think from their political donations, which is disproportionately delivered to Democrat party candidate. And their political convictions definitely do affect their products and services. If it were up to me, they would be charged, tried, fined and imprisoned. For years.

A friend sent me a draft e-mail, that he wrote to a family member, who has rejected historic Christianity for progressive Christianity. He was asked to give the basics of salvation, and his attempt to explain the gospel to her is below. My advice included taking out the Christianese terms. Do you think he did a good job? I think his emphasis on what is not the gospel (what needs to be rejected) makes this a first-class explanation of the gospel.

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So, you’ve asked the 10,000 talent question (alluding to Matthew 18:23-35).  You are basically asking me what I think the Gospel is.  I’ll try to answer that in a minimalistic way, using my own characterization of it rather than just making doctrinal statements.

One must accept that there is a God, who is a higher authority than themselves.  How much one must first believe about that God is debatable, but candidate beliefs would be that He is personal (having a mind like, but greater than, ours), powerful, and the creator of this cosmos and everything in it — He owns it all.  Our natural intuition is to see beauty, order, complexity, and “design” in nature.  There is a difference in belief vs unbelief in that some think it is just the appearance of design and some acknowledge their intuition that it actually is designed.

One must acknowledge their moral intuitions, and recognize that there are actually right and wrong things in this world.  It’s not just whatever you want to do, or whatever society decides in a given time or culture.

Given that morality is then understood to be a transcendent thing (universal and independent of time and culture), the connection is made to God as the author of this moral law.

One must then recognize that he/she regularly fails to live up to this law, even according to just their meager understanding of it, and even by the standards of morality that they make up for other people.

One must not try to suppress this, or therapize it away.  One must recognize there is a problem and real moral culpability.  One must recognize that they feel guilty and have self-esteem issues because they actually do have guilt and issues.

One must make the connection between guilt and their standing before God.  Being good sometimes and in some ways does not erase the bad you do, past, present, or future.  One must be willing to bend the knee to God’s will regarding morality.

One must also come to see the moral failure (sin) in their lives as a bad thing that they’d like to be rid of, rather than excusing it as the fault of others, or revelling in it as part of the pleasure of life, or shrugging it off as just “who I am.”

One must appeal to God in these matters for both forgiveness and help in living as they should.

Given that God has provided a champion for the problem that humanity faces (the backstory of which not all will fully know), one whose heart is truly yielded to all these things will naturally and eagerly receive Word of this as Good News.  God has solved the seemingly irreconcilable demands of both justice and forgiveness in that champion.

Those with ears to hear will receive this solution — Jesus — and believe what He has done in life and on the cross for their sake — the resurrection being both confirmation of His divine authority and also the sign of the defeat of death which awaits us all, and is the only barrier between us and facing this God whom we fail at every turn.  They will believe on (or upon) Jesus as Lord and their means of salvation, surrendering dependence upon their own ideas of self-righteousness and earning the favor of God.

The outward expression that we have understood and accepted these things is that we have made Jesus Lord and committed ourselves to following Him, conform our character to His, resist our sinful inclinations, and are interested in learning all about Who God is and what has been done for us in Christ.

This commitment to the Lordship of Christ naturally leads to the acceptance of subsequent beliefs.  If Jesus is indeed Lord, then He holds all authority, and what He said and taught to His followers is our guide — the New Testament.  And if this is the divine story, as intended by God for men, then we have reason to believe that it is comprehensible to us, and He will insure (in spite of the fallibility of men and demonic plots) that its essential message will not be lost or corrupted until all things are completed.  Given that Jesus affirmed every categorical section of the Old Testament, and claimed to be its promised Messiah, then that, too, is a source of truth and understanding.

Those doctrines that are sometimes characterized as “essential” for salvation, are merely the highlights of this redemption narrative, which are those things being clear and consistent, and which indicate that someone has yielded themselves to the authority of Christ and the scriptures, and understands these things.  It is not that believing them is what saves, but they are what the saved naturally come to believe.  Confessing them is the tangible, verbal act of affirming the Gospel, but is not necessarily identical to a life committed to putting it into practice, which is saving faith.