morton blackwell bak leadership
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
=
html 233–234
bak 722
ntbcw Ken (related?)
anti-hillary: In the fall of 2000, when Morton Blackwell established a group called the Emergency Committee to Stop Hillary Rodham Clinton, he sent an e-mail that read in part: “As you know, the establishment media have protected Bill and Hillary Clinton from the worst of their crimes, corruption and cover-ups.” To underscore his sense of urgency, Blackwell, who in 1979 founded The Leadership Institute, recruited such high-powered right wing luminaries as Edwin Meese III, Ronald Reagan's Attorney General during the Iran/Contra scandal, Lynn Nofsinger, longtime Republican Party activist, Oklahoma Republican Congressman Ernest Istook and Alan Keyes, the recently failed Senatorial candidate from Illinois.
=
=
https://newrepublic.com/article/165984/10-people-destroying-democracy
Anne Nelson/April 18, 2022
10 People You’ve Never Heard of Who Are Destroying Democracy
They’re sowing disruption and disinformation, and they have their eyes on 2024.
Democracy in Peril
[Will the Democrats Fight to Save Democracy?
10 People You’ve Never Heard of Who Are Destroying Democracy
The Six States That Could Determine Whether Republicans Steal the 2024 Election
View All ]
In recent years, America’s democracy has faced countless challenges. Some seemed to materialize out of thin air, but many have been the fruit of secretive networks such as the 40-year-old Council for National Policy. Here are 10 individuals who have sown the seeds of disruption and disinformation—and who are setting their sights on the 2024 presidential election.
Larry Arnn
President, Hillsdale College
For decades, Michigan-based Hillsdale has served as an academic partner for the religious right. The college has had a close relationship to the Council for National Policy, the secretive Christian right umbrella organization that directs so much right-wing activism, through Arnn and his predecessor, George Roche III (who left in a cloud of scandal). Hillsdale’s major donors have constituted a who’s who of the radical right, including the Koch network and leading figures from the CNP. Arnn has expanded Hillsdale’s role as a platform for the CNP’s network of megadonors, fundamentalist activists, and media outlets, providing their policy prescriptions with a thin veneer of academic respectability. The college enrolls around 1,500 students, but its leaves an outsize footprint in political messaging. Its highly politicized publication Imprimis is sent to more than six million recipients. Hillsdale operates the Kirby Center in Washington, D.C., where it has groomed young conservatives at the Capitol Hill Staff Training School, run by the Leadership Institute (see Morton Blackwell, below). Hillsdale is also playing a role in the current disruption of public education, which has been used for political leverage in Virginia and beyond. In 2020, Donald Trump appointed Arnn chair of the 1776 Commission, to promote a “patriotic” rebuttal to the 1619 Project’s racially inclusive approach to U.S. history. Hillsdale has led an ongoing campaign to politicize public schools, promoting anti–critical race theory campaigns and assisting in the launch of “affiliate” charter schools in 11 states.
Joe Seales
CEO, Right Side Broadcasting Network
RSBN serves as the equivalent of a Trump-specific C-SPAN that has carried nearly every Trump speech, rally, and town hall since July 2015, as well as full coverage of the pro-Trump Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). It also broadcasts a show called The Right View, with Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump. On January 6, it livestreamed Trump’s speech inciting the march on the Capitol, and it gave live coverage to the Florida “Freedom Rally to Show Support for President Trump and January 6th Political Prisoners” a year later. In July 2021, RSBN was temporarily suspended by YouTube, but the network looked to its own app and the new pro-Trump platform Rumble to continue to carry Trump’s rallies. The radical right has been assiduously constructing a parallel media system in recent decades. RSBN, Rumble, and Trump’s new Truth Social platform complement other media initiatives, ranging from traditional fundamentalist broadcasters like American Family Radio to social sites like Gettr and Parler, in the ongoing construction of an alternate political reality for millions of followers. In March 2022, after the height of the Ottawa truckers’ protests, RSBN promoted a truckers’ convoy roundtable hosted by Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and it has offered ongoing amplification of Trump’s false election fraud claims. We can be sure that whatever Trump fabricates for future news cycles, RSBN will be repeating it.
Introductory offer: 50% off fearless reporting.
1 year for $10.
Subscribe
Neil Patel
Co-founder and publisher of The Daily Caller
The Caller website was launched in 2010 by Patel and Tucker Carlson, his college roommate, with a $3 million investment from Patel’s fellow CNP member Foster Friess. (Carlson served as editor in chief until 2016 and left the publication in 2019, when Patel bought him out.) The site claims more than 20 million monthly readers, and the Daily Caller News Foundation licenses its content free of charge to almost 300 outlets. Patel has used the site as a platform for voices of the radical right, including Jason Kessler, the white supremacist who organized the Charlottesville rally, as well as climate denial and disinformation, such as a falsified “nude” photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The site favors members of the CNP, including Supreme Court spouse Ginni Thomas (a Caller “special correspondent”) and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. The Daily Caller has recently launched a Facebook video platform called American Voices, with three million followers, that partners with media platforms of the religious right. It also boosts Carlson’s Fox News broadcasts. The Caller’s YouTube channel features additional Carlson content, comedy and sports programming, as well as regular attacks on Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, and CNN. It has given ample space to Trump’s false claims of election fraud, and positive coverage of voter suppression legislation.
Jenny Beth Martin
Co-founder and CEO, Tea Party Patriots
Martin launched the Tea Party Patriots in March 2009 in collaboration with Amy Kremer and Mark Meckler, with funding from FreedomWorks, a “grassroots service center” founded with Koch backing. The Tea Party Patriots spent the Obama administration organizing various “spontaneous” anti-government, anti-tax rallies. Martin, Meckler, and Kremer also joined the CNP; by 2020, Martin had risen to the executive committee and Meckler to the status of Gold Circle member. Martin’s Tea Party Patriots became the meeting ground for the secular Koch brothers and the Christian nationalist CNP. She became the go-to woman for organizing campaigns, including political canvassing and public protests. Martin was a key point person for the CNP in Trump’s reelection campaign. In April 2020, she organized “100 Business Executives” in support of Trump, along with fellow CNP members Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks and Lisa Nelson of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Trump acknowledged Martin by name in his speech before the CNP on the eve of the 2020 GOP convention. On November 4, 2020, Martin announced that her organization was going to hold “Protect the Vote” rallies in swing states. On December 30, she tweeted that she would be speaking at the January 6 Stop the Steal rally: “We must demand Congress to challenge the Electoral College votes and fight for President Trump!” (Martin was present at the rally, but didn’t end up speaking.) Most recently, Martin has spoken out in support of the Canadian truckers’ protest. “We are all truckers now,” she told The Hill in February.
Simone Gold
Founder, America’s Frontline Doctors
Gold was an emergency physician in Los Angeles who was tapped by the CNP leadership to serve as a point person for a massive Covid disinformation campaign. The plan was advanced on a conference call in May 2020, while the pandemic was first raging, and after Trump held his increasingly erratic press conferences that included CNP president William Walton and Trump aide Mercedes Schlapp. The goal was to use physicians to persuade the public that the economy could be opened up in time to benefit the Trump campaign. Gold began a series of appearances on media platforms run by CNP members, disparaging the idea that Covid was a “huge medical crisis,” pushing the false hydroxychloroquine “cure,” and attacking Anthony Fauci.
On July 27, 2020, Jenny Beth Martin introduced Gold and a dozen colleagues standing before the U.S. Supreme Court building, repeating a litany of falsehoods about the virus. Their statements, livestreamed by Breitbart News, quickly went viral, and the video was enthusiastically retweeted by Donald Trump. On January 6, Gold joined the mob that breached the Capitol. She was recorded in the Rotunda denouncing the Covid vaccine as “an experimental biological agent deceptively named a vaccine.” She was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct (she pleaded guilty in March and will be sentenced in June). Over 2021, she appeared in a series of “Health and Freedom Conferences” across the country, sharing the bill with Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell. In 2020, she set up a profitable online prescription service for bogus Covid “cures.”
Morton Blackwell
Founder and president, the Leadership Institute
Blackwell, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie were young Goldwater activists when they joined forces in the 1960s. Together, they helped to create a constellation of conservative groups, including the CNP umbrella organization and its partner CPAC. Blackwell took on the task of training future generations of right-wing political candidates and activists. His Leadership Institute, launched in 1979, claims that it has trained more than 200,000 people over its history, many of them in county- and state-level sessions in battleground districts. The courses include fundraising, speechwriting, social media, and candidate development.
Graduates of the institute include Mike Pence, Representative Jim Jordan, and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe. The institute’s training is ongoing, especially in contested states. In 2021, the GOP, noting that it needed to net only five congressional districts to take the House, targeted 47 districts, five of them in Texas. That year, the Leadership Institute blanketed Texas, scheduling around 40 training workshops between March and November 2021—many months before the midterm elections. The national Democrats, in contrast, have tended to enter the state campaign arenas a few months or even weeks before the elections, offering minimal training on the ground, limited digital campaign tools, and poorly coordinated data. The institute’s menu of courses reflects the right’s current initiatives, including School Board Campaign Training and a School Board Activist Workshop.
Cleta Mitchell
Attorney
Mitchell is a longtime member of the CNP board of governors. More recently, she appeared on panels at 2020 CNP meetings speaking on “Election Integrity: Securing the Ballot Box” and “Election Integrity: Action Steps.” Mitchell also serves on the board of directors of the Bradley Foundation, run by fellow CNP board member Richard Graber. Following Biden’s victory, Mitchell tweeted that the Georgia recount was “A FAKE!!!” She traveled to Georgia as a volunteer legal adviser for Trump’s campaign and helped to file a December 2020 lawsuit challenging the returns. According to The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr., “On December 30, Mitchell wrote to [then–White House chief of staff] Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud.” On January 2, Mitchell took part in Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, of whom Trump famously demanded, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” The call was leaked, and when Mitchell’s role was disclosed, she was obliged to resign from her position at the Foley & Lardner law firm. But Mitchell continues her work through her strategy sessions at the CNP, her board membership at the Bradley Foundation, her Apple podcast Who’s Counting?, and her November 2021 appointment to the Board of Advisors of the federal Election Assistance Commission, which certifies voting systems—including voting machines—and advises local officials on compliance with federal regulations.
Richard Graber
CEO, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
This Milwaukee foundation has assets of some $900 million. Graber is a member of the board of governors of the CNP, while CNP election strategist Cleta Mitchell is one of the foundation’s 11 board members. The Koch network and the DeVos family philanthropies may have received more attention, but the Bradley Foundation’s strategic, longtime focus on state-level politics has allowed it to make a major impact, using its home state of Wisconsin as a laboratory. In 2012 to 2013, the foundation spent more than $8 million on a network of groups promoting a right-to-work law also supported by then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (a fellow CNP board member) and attacking Wisconsin trade unions. The resulting right-to-work law crippled the unions and contributed to Wisconsin’s shift from a Democratic to a swing state. In 2021, the Bradley Foundation earmarked $600,000 for the American Legislative Exchange Council’s voter management campaign software and other activities, bringing its ALEC contributions to $5.4 million over the previous decade. In 2020 and 2021, the foundation gave $200,000 to the Claremont Institute. Claremont has played a critical role in the radical right’s promotion of false claims of fraud and the efforts to rewrite voting laws in advance of the 2024 elections; John Eastman, who drafted the infamous six-point memo used by Trump to challenge the Electoral College on January 6, is a Claremont senior fellow. The foundation also contributed $300,000 to the Public Interest Legal Foundation (chaired by Cleta Mitchell) and $175,000 to the Heritage Foundation’s election law initiative, both of which promoted Trump’s false claims of fraud.
Lisa Nelson
CEO, American Legislative Exchange Council
Nelson came to ALEC in 2014 after previous stints on Newt Gingrich’s staff and at GOPAC, the Republican state and local political training organization. ALEC was co-founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, also a co-founder of the CNP. ALEC convenes corporate sponsors and Republican state legislators to “collaborate” on model bills—including legislation to oppose environmental regulation and gun control. In April 2020, The Washington Post reported that Nelson, Jenny Beth Martin, and Adam Brandon were leading an effort to organize a group of businesspeople to help Trump “jump-start” the economy in the depths of the Covid epidemic. Nelson continued her efforts over 2020 and doubled down after the Biden’s victory. From December 2 to 4, 2020, ALEC hosted a secret “process working group” for Republican state legislators, election commissioners, and attorneys to develop strategies on election oversight and redistricting. In July 2021, ALEC hosted and financed an “academy” under the rubric of the “Honest Elections Project” in conjunction with its annual meeting, with panels featuring Cleta Mitchell and other CNP strategists. Nelson offered a preview of their project to rewrite election laws at the CNP’s May 2021 meeting: “We’ve been targeting our efforts on those states that have had issues—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Florida to a certain degree.” Currently, Republicans control 30 state legislatures, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If successfully implemented, the independent state legislature initiative could determine the outcome of the 2024 elections, regardless of the popular vote.
Daniel J. Schultz
Attorney and founder, Precinct Strategy
Schultz was an early proponent of the idea that Republican-controlled legislatures could overturn election results—later promoted as the “independent state legislature doctrine.” In some interpretations, Republican-controlled state legislatures could nullify the popular vote and send their own electors to put Trump in office. The key to his strategy? Purging from the Republican Party inconveniently ethical officials like Brad Raffensperger, starting at the precinct level. “We can take over the party if we invade it,” Schultz told Steve Bannon on his podcast in February 2021. Over the following months, there was a surge in candidates for precinct chairman positions across the country. Schultz has pointed to the strategy’s success in Arizona as a model. ProPublica reported that in one Maricopa district, the precinct roster grew by 63 percent in less than six months. Schultz’s website asks: “Can we get 3/10 of 1% of the 74 M Trump America Firsters to Become Republican Precinct Committeemen? To TAKE OVER The Republican Party? To Save the Republic?” He points out that precinct committeemen are the ones who elect the state party leaders and are the only ones who can vote to endorse primary candidates; in some states, they are the only ones who can nominate candidates to fill vacancies in state legislatures. The logic is that full slates of pro-Trump precinct chairs could guarantee pro-Trump candidates on the Republican state-level ballots in 2022, who could be activated to enact the independent state legislature doctrine in 2024—subject to judicial review. Donald Trump approves. On February 27, 2022, he issued a statement endorsing Schultz’s project.
Anne Nelson @anelsona
Anne Nelson is the author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She has taught at Columbia University for over 20 years and is currently a research scholar at Columbia’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.
Read More: Magazine, May 2022, Politics, The Soapbox, Feature, Democracy, January 6, Republican Party, Donald Trump, Right Wing Extremism
=
=
Morton C. Blackwell has served (circa 2000) as Treasurer of the Free Congress Foundation.
According to one biographical sketch of Blackwell,
Blackwell is "Executive director, Council for National Policy; founder and president, the Morton Blackwell Leadership Institute, a foundation which trains young people for youth leadership; founder and chairman, Conservative Leadership PAC; Republican National Committeeman from Virginia; treasurer, Reagan Mumni Association; youngest delegate to Barry Goldwater RNC in 1964; alternative delegate for Reagan in 1968 and 1976 and a delegate in 1980; former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan on the White House staff; former staff member, Senate Republican Policy Committee; serves on the Republican National Convention's Standing Committee on Rules; former policy director, U.S. Senator Gordon J. Humphrey; overseer, 1980 Youth for Reagan effort; former editor, The NewRight Report; former contributing editor, Conservative Digest. Formerly with The Viguerie Company. Spouse: Helen R. Blackwell, Virginia state chairman, Eagle Forum; chairman, Voting Integrity Project; former member, State Central Committee, Republican Party of Virginia.
"With Paul M. Weyrich and Richard Viguerie, Blackwell met with Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority. 'Finally, on the verge of realizing his right-wing utopia, Weyrich harvested what his friend Morton Blackwell termed the greatest track of virgin timber on the political landscape: evangelicals. Out there is what you might call a moral majority, he told Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. That's it, Falwell exclaimed. That's the name of the organization.' [Robespierre of the Right]
"Morton Blackwell works with Plinio de Correa de Olivier's Tradition, Family & Property and endorsed Olivier's book, Nobility & Analagous Traditional Elites, on the necessity of restoring traditional Nobility & Elites to rule the world. In the Forward Blackwell wrote: 'One does not have to accept Papal infallibility to appreciate a case persuasively made, using theological, moral, and prudential arguments. This book will convince many readers, whatever their faith, that good elites are legitimate, desirable and, yes, necessary.' The Secret Story of a Cult Apologist features a picture of Paul Weyrich and Morton Blackwell with the American head of TFP, which is the parent organization of CESNUR, the cult apology network for cults such as Scientology."
In his Letter to a Just Elected Conserative, Mr. Blackwell says, "Your constituency is the voters, especially the coalition which elected you. You can't count on the news media to communicate your message to your constituency. You must develop ways to communicate with your coalition which avoids the filter of the media. Focus on your base. Write to them. Meet with them. Honor them. Show yourself to be proud of them. Support their activities. Show up at their events. Help other politicians and activist who share their priorities. People expect politicians to be selfish, so they specially love politicians whose actions show them to be unselfish. Liberals in the media failed to defeat you. Now they will use carrots and sticks to tempt and to intimidate you. They will define any betrayal of your coalition as a sign of "growth." Don't fall for that nonsense. The only way you can get the liberal media on your side is always to betray your supporters, which you know would be political suicide. Media people on the left operate on a double standard They can forgive a liberal politician almost anything. They hold conservatives to an absolute standard." See: http://leadershipinstitute.org/04RESOURCES/Speeches.htm
=
http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Morton_Blackwell
Blackwell, as it turns out, is one of the founding members of the ugly side of the American Conservative movement. He was there at the creation with jokers like Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley, and Phyllis Schlafly. His "non-partisan" Leadership Institute has trained thousands of conservative footsoldiers, including Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, and Jack Abramoff. When they were young adults, he taught them, "A stable movement requires a healthy, reciprocal I.O.U. flow among its participants." He was also a major supporter of Tom DeLay in DeLay's last days in the U.S. House of Representatives. (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1374139/posts)
So, he's no mere activist like your local Rotarians or county NRA secretary-treasurer. He's in the inner circle of Republican power, having worked his way in as a leader in the Draft Goldwater movement and bought his way in with thousands of dollars in contributions ($16000 over the last four years alone; see the FEC database).
* Heres initial info link from a DailyKos Diary
Band-Aid Goon No Garden Variety Activist
* Heres another DailyKos Diary
GOP DELEGATES WEAR BAND-AIDS TO MOCK EVERY VETERAN
* Virginia GOP National Committeeman Morton Blackwell, a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana - Is this the same Morton Blackwell ?
This guy Blackwell is a long time GOP operative. Started as a Young Republican and since the 70's has run an outfit called the Leadership Institute. I wonder who gave him the $8,230,655 budget they spent in 2000 grooming young people to train tens of thousands of students to be GOP activists?
=
starroute Sep-23-04 - http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...
"Perhaps the most important constituent body of the New Right network after the Heritage Foundation is the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), also founded in 1975 by John Terry Dolan, ... Charles Black and Roger Stone with the help of Richard Viguerie."
I posted that .... My general conclusion was that Viguerie is closely linked to the Young Republic/dirty tricks/Karl Rove wing of the New Right. Scaife is much closer to the southern/racist/anti-Clinton wing -- both Harry MacDougald and many of the SwiftBoat figures have Scaife connections.
=
Morton C. Blackwell, founder and chairman, Conservative Leadership PAC, has served (circa 2000) as Treasurer of the Free Congress Foundation.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Morton_C._Bl...
Blackwell is "Executive director, Council for National Policy; founder and president, the Morton Blackwell Leadership Institute, a foundation which trains young people for youth leadership; founder and chairman, Conservative Leadership PAC; Republican National Committeeman from Virginia; treasurer, Reagan Mumni Association; youngest delegate to Barry Goldwater RNC in 1964; alternative delegate for Reagan in 1968 and 1976 and a delegate in 1980; former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan on the White House staff; ...
"With Paul M. Weyrich and Richard Viguerie, Blackwell met with Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majoritation.' .....
AnIndependentTexan Sep-22-04 - http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...
The term 'New Right' was coined by Kevin Phillips in 1975 and refers to the amalgam of organisations and institutes spawned by Richard A. Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips and John Terry Dolan with heavy funding from such financial magnates as Joseph Coors, Nelson Bunker Hunt and Richard Mellon Scaife. ... In 1973 Coors, with the help and advice of Paul Weyrich ... founded the Heritage Foundation. .....
Blackwell ... trained a teen-aged Karl Rove as a field organizer ...
Rove Consults With Blackwell on Political Strategy. At the 2000 convention, Bush strategist Karl Rove consulted with Morton Blackwell of Virginia, who supported a plan that emphasized primaries in small states when the Republican Party selects its presidential nominee.y. 'Finally, on the verge of realizing his right-wing utopia, Weyrich harvested what his friend Morton Blackwell termed the greatest track of virgin timber on the political landscape: evangelicals. Out there is what you might call a moral majority, he told Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. That's it, Falwell exclaimed. That's the name of the organiz
wiki
Morton C. Blackwell (born November 16, 1939, La Jara, Colorado) is an American conservative political activist. He is president and founder of the Leadership Institute (established 1979), a 501(c)3 non-profit educational foundation that teaches political technology.
Contents
1 Biography
2 Political activism
3 Council for National Policy
4 Affiliations
5 Controversy
6 References
7 Sources
Biography
In youth politics, Blackwell was a College Republican state chairman and a Young Republican state chairman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He served on the Young Republican National Committee for more than a dozen years. He rose to the position of national vice chairman at-large of the Young Republican National Federation. Off and on for five and half years, 1965 to 1970, he worked as executive director of the College Republican National Committee under four consecutive College Republican national chairmen. For eight years, he was a member of the Louisiana Republican State Central Committee.
Blackwell worked for seven years under conservative Richard Viguerie, the specialist in direct mail.
Blackwell was first elected to the Arlington County Republican Committee in 1972. He is a member of the Republican Party of Virginia's state central committee and was first elected in 1988 as Virginia’s Republican National Committeeman, a post he still holds. In 2004 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the RNC.
Political activism
Blackwell was Barry Goldwater’s youngest elected delegate to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, California. His Louisiana delegation was headed by former gubernatorial Charlton Lyons of Shreveport. In the spring of 1966, he worked for the election of the late Roderick Miller of Lafayette as only the third Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives since Reconstruction.
He was a national convention alternate delegate for Ronald W. Reagan in 1968 and 1976, and a Ronald Reagan delegate at the 1980 Republican National Convention. In 1980, he organized and oversaw the national youth effort for Reagan. From 1981 to 1984, Blackwell was a special assistant to President Reagan.
Blackwell is considered something of a specialist in matters relating to the rules of the Republican Party. He served on rules committees of the state Republican parties in Louisiana and Virginia. He serves now on the RNC’s Standing Committee on Rules and has attended every meeting of the Republican National Conventions’ Rules Committees since 1972.[1]
On January 24, 2008, following the departure of Fred Thompson from the field of candidates seeking the nomination, Blackwell threw his support behind former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.
Council for National Policy
Blackwell has been a member since 1984 of the Council for National Policy, a group of politically active conservatives. Founders included Richard Viguerie, the Virginia direct-mail specialist, Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips of the Constitution Party, and Phyllis Schlafly, a St. Louis activist who led the opposition to the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. Another founder was Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind novels. The council does not make its proceedings public. When he first ran for president, George W. Bush addressed the Council for National Policy. His remarks from 2000 have never been unveiled.
Affiliations
The Mont Pelerin Society
The Council for National Policy
Executive Director of The Council for National Policy, 1991–2000
White House Staff as Special Assistant to President Reagan for Public Liaison, 1981–1984
Former Staff Member, Senate Republican Policy Committee
Former Staff Member, U.S. Senator Gordon Humphrey
Founder (1979) and President, The Leadership Institute
Founder and Chairman, Conservative Leadership PAC
Board member, Reagan Alumni Association
Former Editor, The New Right Report
Board member, American Conservative Union
Board member, Free Congress Foundation
Director, Free Congress Foundation
Chairman, Legislative Studies Institute
Director, National Right to Work Committee
Trustee, The Philadelphia Society
Controversy
Blackwell was at the center of controversy during the 2004 Republican National Convention, when he passed out purple heart bandages which were perceived by some as denigrating the award. The Kerry campaign attacked the activity as the Republican Party mocking United States soldiers.[2] Karl Rove called Blackwell's bandages "inappropriate".[3]
References
^ "Leadership Institute--Morton Blackman". Retrieved June 3, 2011.
^ "Delegates mock Kerry with 'purple heart' bandages". CNN. September 1, 2004. Retrieved May 13, 2010.
^ Rutenberg, Jim (September 1, 2004). "Delegates Mock Kerry's Wounds, Angering Veterans". The New York Times. Retrieved May 13, 2010.
Sources
</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Byron York, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy (New York, Crown Forum, 2005), pp. 233–234</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">main
see also morton blackwell
capt 318
Arlington va beachhead?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_Leadership_Institute
The Leadership Institute is a Virginia based training organisation for potential conservative political leaders.
According to the groups website The Leadership Institute is "the premier training ground for tomorrow's conservative leaders. Conservative leaders, organizations and activities rely on the Institute for the preparation they require for success."
"Since 1979 the Institute's unique seminars and workshops have enrolled more than 61,000 students and taught them how to win. Each year hundreds of Institute graduates obtain positions of influence in public policy because of their Leadership Institute training," its website states.[1]
Contents
[hide]
1 Overview
2 Past Students
3 Staff
4 Contact information
5 Articles and Resources
5.1 Sources
5.2 Related SourceWatch articles
Overview
The Leadership Institute was started in 1979 by Morton C. Blackwell as a "non-partisan" educational institute that has been preparing conservatives for success in politics, government and the news media.
They have trained more than 39,000 students.
They have a staff of 47
They have revenue of about $7 million.
They claim to have more than 1000 active groups [1]. However, it appears that most do not exist.
They list Fox News; MSNBC; CNN; CBS as examples of media placements available through the school.
Their latest event was the Ronald Reagan Tribute Collection on May 19, 2004. They have future events and workshops that focus on grassroots activism.
Another quote from their website: "The Institute is a non-partisan educational foundation".
Past Students
Mitch McConnell: U.S. Senator from Kentucky
Jim Gilmore: former governor of Virginia
Karl Rove: Bush 43 political strategist[2]
James Guckert: Talon News "reporter"
David McIntosh: Congressman from Indiana
Mark Souder: Congressman from Indiana
JoAnn Davis: Congresswoman from Virginia
Joe Wilson: Congressman from South Carolina
Grover Norquist: President, Americans for Tax Reform
Ralph Reed: former Executive Director Christian Coalition
Jason Miller: Young conservative leader
Staff
Steve Cassarino: Director of Member Services
Jim Eltringham: Director of Public Relations
Erin Krueger: Director of Recruitment
Geoff Woliner: Youth Education Coordinator
Rebekka James Turko: Director of Campus Coordination
Ryan James Nickels: Director of Youth Outreach
Benjamin J. Norquist: Campus Services Coordinator
Andrew J. Tomar: Facilities Coordinator
Contact information
1101 North Highland Street
Arlington, VA 22201
Phone: (703) 247-2000
Fax: (703) 247-2001
Web: http://www.leadershipinstitute.org
Articles and Resources
Sources
↑ "About Us", The Leadership Institute, accessed February 2008.
Related SourceWatch articles
Project for California's Future
Categories: Conservatives | Politics | United States
=
all started w/ incubators:
Stein describes how the message machine works. If Rush Limbaugh wants something on vouchers – it's immediately in his hands; if Fox News' Bill O'Reilly needs a guest to talk about the "death tax," he's got him from one of the think tanks. Stein estimates that 36,000 conservatives have been trained on values, issues, leadership, use of media and agenda development. These are not the elected officials, but rather the cadre of the conservative network. Stein figures that the core leaders of the Big 80 groups he studied are about 2,000 people who make between $75,000 and $200,000 and have all been trained in the Leadership Institute.
stein on alternet
-----
----
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/andrew-breitbarts-nixonian-okeefe-ratfk
O'Keefe and his crew are only following in the footsteps of the worst of the worst. They are funded by a right wing outfit called The Leadership Institute.
Founded in 1979 by veteran Republican activist Morton Blackwell, the Leadership Institute has worked with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Karl Rove and Grover Norquist. The group raked in $6.6 million in 2008, according to its most recent publicly available IRS filings, which doesn’t list donors.
“What we teach is to use creative and imaginative ways to make your points, to reveal what we think is political correctness run amuck, liberal hypocrisy and double standards” on left-leaning college campuses, said Sutton, who supervised O’Keefe at the institute until O’Keefe was asked to leave because his investigative work could interfere with the Institute’s Internal Revenue Service standing...read on
Poor James is ordered to stay at mommy and daddy's house to keep him out of trouble.
James O'Keefe, the 25-year-old conservative filmmaker who was arrested this week in connection with a plot to tamper with phone lines in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office, is out of jail on $10,000 bond, Talking Points Memo reports. The judge ordered O'Keefe to live with his parents until a preliminary hearing set for Feb. 13.
And notice the high powered lawyer O'Keefe immediately received. He's backed by big conservative money.
Michael Madigan, O'Keefe's lawyer, said Wednesday that his client was not trying to wiretap or interfere with Landrieu's phones, but he would not explain why O'Keefe was there. He also would not say whether O'Keefe was working for someone or was on his own.
"The truth will come out," said Madigan, a Washington lawyer who represented Sen. Howard Baker, the Republican who famously asked during the Watergate investigation, "What did the President know and when did he know it?"
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/02/03/james_okeefe_white_nationalists
James O'Keefe's race problem
A photo of the righty stuntman at a white-nationalist confab illustrates a career marked by racial resentment
By Max Blumenthal
James O'Keefe, photographed at a white nationalist conference by One People's Project.
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
(This article has been corrected since publication.)
Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James O’Keefe’s past political stunts are feigning shock at his arrest on charges that he and three associates planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed the 25-year-old O’Keefe as a creative genius and model of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe, called him one of the all-time “great journalists” and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his undercover ACORN video. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared he should have earned a “congressional medal.”
His right-wing admirers don't seem to mind that O’Keefe's short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O'Keefe at a 2006 conference on "Race and Conservatism" that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30 on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People's Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O'Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. O'Keefe's fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein organized the event, which gave anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.
One People's Project covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Project director Daryle Jenkins told O'Keefe manned a literature table filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly. The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. "We can say for certain that James O'Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that," Jenkins said. O'Keefe's attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client's role in the conference.
[Subsequent to publication, freelance photographer Isis told Salon she saw O'Keefe helping with the event and believed he staffed the literature table, but her only photograph of O'Keefe was cropped so that the literature table isn't evident. "He was helping Marcus Epstein in the execution of the event," the photographer recalls. "O’Keefe was involved the same way you would be involved if you went to a party and you put out the cups and stocked the cooler.”]
O'Keefe's racial issues can be seen in many of his prior stunts The notorious ACORN videos highlighted images of himself dressed as a pimp, deceptively edited through hidden camera footage as he baited African-American office workers into making statements that could be perceived as incriminating. There were also lesser-known but equally inflammatory spectacles like the “affirmative action bake sale” O’Keefe and his conservative comrades held when they were students at Rutgers University. During the event, O’Keefe stood at a table in the center of campus offering baked goods at reduced prices to Latinos and African-Americans while whites were forced to pay exorbitant amounts. (Native Americans, he announced, would eat free.)
By O’Keefe’s own account, his racial troubles became acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of Rutgers University’s dormitory system. In an online diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially assigned. O’Keefe claimed his next roommate was “an Indian midget ... who smelled like shit.” The roommate left, however, and was replaced by “a greek kid.” The new roommate complained to a residential administrator that O’Keefe had called his neighbors “niggers,” prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He rejected the accusation as a “complete lie,” writing, “I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call anyone any names.”
The following year, despite this record, O’Keefe secured a dream job in the conservative movement, employed by the Leadership Institute, a Northern Virginia-based outfit that serves as the movement’s most prolific youth training operation. There, O’Keefe met Marcus Epstein, a fellow ideologue who as editor of a conservative publication at the College of William and Mary assailed Martin Luther King Jr. for “philandering and plagiarism” and challenged his patriotism and Christianity.
In August 2006 Epstein planned an event that would wed his extreme views on race with his ambitions. Epstein invited white nationalist Jared Taylor and homophobic white-grievance peddler John Derbyshire of the National Review to speak at the Leadership Institute’s Northern Virginia headquarters, at a mock symposium called “Race and Conservatism.”
According to a post on the white supremacist Web site Stormfront, Taylor and Derbyshire debated "the role of race in policy decisions and the racial future of the Republican party."
When the Southern Poverty Law Center denounced Taylor’s participation in the event, sparking damaging publicity for the Institute, Epstein shifted it across the street, where he played host under the auspices of a “traditionalist” group he founded called the Robert A. Taft Club. O’Keefe joined him after the last-minute move. A speaker from the right-wing black front group Project 21, led by white conservative David Almasi, was added at the last minute.
According to One People's Project, which dispatched an undercover reporter to the event, about 40 people attended the event, including several white supremacists. They included Michael Hart, a Jewish astrophysicist and advocate of racially partitioning the U.S., who once clashed with David Duke at a conference over the Ku Klux Klan leader's anti-Semitism.
The event’s headline speaker, Jared Taylor, is the publisher of one of the white supremacist movement’s foremost journals, American Renaissance, which seeks to apply an academic gloss to the racialist screeds contained on its pages. According to a report on the conference published in Taylor's magazine, Taylor argued that a taboo against discussing the alleged criminal behavior and lower intelligence of blacks and Latinos twisted political discourse, and he advocated a strong white nationalism to counter it. Derbyshire denounced “this whole rickety apparatus of affirmative action, discrimination lawsuits, corporate shakedowns, profiling protests and 'speech codes.'” But the National Review editor expressed doubt that a sufficiently large white nationalist movement could be mustered to do much about it.
Epstein and O'Keefe moved on from the "Race and Conservatism" conference to better things. After graduating from the Leadership Institute, Epstein held jobs as executive director of both former Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo’s Team America PAC and Pat Buchanan’s American Cause. He also started a group called Youth for Western Civilization that dedicated itself to “defending the West on campus.” An essay featured on the group’s Web site complaining that “largely Jewish intellectual elites have utterly transformed American social and political discourse” suggested that Epstein’s outfit was only his latest attempt to push white nationalism and anti-Semitism into the conservative mainstream.
Epstein’s career unraveled in June 2009, when a violent racial assault he committed two years earlier was disclosed. According to a court affidavit, Epstein had karate-chopped a random African-American woman in the face and called her a “nigger” during a drunken late-night romp bar-hopping on Washington’s M Street in 2007, leading to his arrest by an off-duty Secret Service agent. He signed a plea bargain requiring him to attend alcohol rehabilitation courses and donate $1,000 to the United Negro College Fund as a token of his contrition.
Meanwhile, O’Keefe lost his job at the Leadership Institute in 2007 after a prank call he made to an Ohio-based Planned Parenthood clinic. During the call, O’Keefe offered a donation to the clinic on the condition that it would be earmarked to pay for aborting African-American fetuses. “Because there's definitely way too many black people in Ohio,” O’Keefe remarked to the receptionist. “So, I'm just trying to do my part.” Leadership Institute founder Morton Blackwell said O'Keefe's stunts went beyond the right-wing group's standards. “He wanted to do sting operations that would affect legislation; he made some calls which have been covered in the news media to Planned Parenthood," Blackwell told the New York Times. "That was beyond the scope of what we had hired him to do. We are an educational organization. We are not an activist organization.” Blackwell told O'Keefe he had to choose between his job and his activism, "and he said he was committed to the activism," according to the Times.
O’Keefe’s termination by the Leadership Institute hardly ended his career as a conservative activist. Right-wing online publicist Andrew Breitbart, hearing of the merry prankster’s exploits, hired him to carry out the ACORN operation that would make him famous. Since his arrest, however, some of O’Keefe’s former associates are scrambling to save face. "I am shocked by the reports of this behavior,” declared O’Keefe’s collaborator on the ACORN operation, Hannah Giles. (Giles had tarted up as a prostitute for the stunt.)
O’Keefe has now hired a defense attorney and is waging a high publicity battle against charges that could land him in prison for nearly a year. Some of his old allies, like Breitbart, remain in his corner. Fox News' Sean Hannity hosted O'Keefe for a sympathetic sitdown Feb. 1, where the young right-winger played victim, claiming he was being persecuted by "flat-out slandering" and "journalistic malpractice."
Max Blumenthal is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. More Max Blumenthal
----
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/the_leadership_institute_the_group_that_helped_lau.php
$ but no donors named
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Blackwell
----
offocial bio
Morton Blackwell
Professionally, Morton Blackwell is the president of the Leadership Institute, a non-partisan educational foundation he founded in 1979.
His institute prepares conservatives for success in politics, government and the news media. Over the years the Leadership Institute has trained more than 86,000 students. It currently has revenue of $8.7 million per year and a staff of 53.
In youth politics, Mr. Blackwell was a College Republican state chairman and a Young Republican state chairman in Louisiana.
He served on the Young Republican National Committee for more than a dozen years, rising to the position of Young Republican National Federation national vice chairman at large.
Off and on for five years, 1965-1970, he worked as executive director of the College Republican National Committee under four consecutive College Republican national chairmen.
He served on the Louisiana Republican state central committee for eight years.
First elected to the Arlington County (Virginia) Republican Committee in 1972, he is a member of the Virginia Republican state central committee and was first elected in 1988 as Virginia’s Republican National Committeeman (RNC), a post he still holds. In 2004 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the RNC and served for four years.
Having worked actively in politics for more than forty years, he has probably trained more political activists than any other conservative. Starting in the 1960s, he has trained thousands of people who have served on staff for conservative and Republican candidates in every state.
Mr. Blackwell was Barry Goldwater’s youngest elected delegate to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco.
He was a national convention Alternate Delegate for Ronald Reagan in 1968 and 1976, and a Ronald Reagan Delegate at the 1980 national convention.
In 1980, he organized and oversaw the national youth effort for Ronald Reagan.
He served as Special Assistant to the President on President Reagan’s White House Staff 1981-1984.
Mr. Blackwell is something of a specialist in matters relating to the rules of the Republican Party. He served on rules committees of the state Republican parties in Louisiana and in Virginia. He serves now on the RNC’s Standing Committee on Rules and has attended every meeting of the Republican National Conventions’ Rules Committees since 1972.
Morton's Speeches and Writings
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/05/25/blackwell/
When the state or national candidate you're backing wins by a suitably large margin, as he or she surely will, have the nonpartisan group that sponsored the election sign off on your prewritten celebratory press release and send it statewide. Reporters will almost certainly ignore it, but after a dozen similar victories, they'll start dashing off articles about the youth phenomenon behind your candidate's campaign -- or better yet, just start plagiarizing your press releases.
There is no better place to master the art of mock-election rigging -- and there is no better master than Morton Blackwell, who invented the trick in 1964 and has been teaching it ever since. Blackwell's half-century career in conservative grass-roots politics coincides neatly with the fortunes of the conservative movement: He was there when Goldwater lost, when Southern voters abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, and when the Moral Majority began its harvest of evangelical Christian voters. In the 1970s, Blackwell worked with conservative direct-mail king Richard Viguerie; in 1980, he led Reagan's youth campaign. Recently, he's been fighting to save Tom DeLay's job.
Yet Blackwell's foundation, the Leadership Institute, is not a Republican organization. It's a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charity, drawing the overwhelming majority of its $9.1 million annual budget from tax-deductible donations. Despite its legally required "neutrality," the institute is one of the best investments the conservative movement has ever made. Its walls are plastered with framed headshots of former students -- hundreds of state and local legislators sprinkled with smiling members of the U.S. Congress, and even the perky faces of two recently crowned Miss Americas. Thirty-five years ago, Blackwell dispatched a particularly promising 17-year-old pupil named Karl Rove to run a youth campaign in Illinois; Jeff Gannon, a far less impressive student, attended the Leadership Institute's Broadcast Journalism School....
It's an approach, Murray believes, that has long since paid off. "Sure, [Blackwell] has trained Karl Rove and Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist and 223 other legislators and members of Congress," Murray notes, "but more importantly, he's trained 40,000 other local organizers." The institute's graduates, in other words, are part of a movement. "We spent $2 billion trying to win this last election," Murray says of progressives. "They already spent 25 years, and nearly $100 million, building the talent pool that won the election. And which will consistently win them elections for the next several decades."
The structure of Blackwell's Campus Leadership Program is simple. The Leadership Institute trains promising conservative college graduates over the summer and dispatches them to campuses in the fall with a mandate to start conservative student organizations. Need $500 and some ideas to start a combative right-wing campus publication? The institute would love to help you. Is the campus administration discriminating against your Second Amendment club? The institute will help you take your cause to the Internet. No one on campus at your Christian college has ever heard of the institute? Staffers will be glad to drive down, take you to a steakhouse, and talk it up. Last year, the CLP doubled in size, to 418 clubs and counting. By the end of 2006, Blackwell is confident he will have created 1,000 conservative campus organizations.
----
http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Morton_Blackwell
---
Members of the Leadership Institute have been known to promote racist and radical events. Morgan Brooke Wilkins, a former CRNC field representative, was hired by the group as a Campus Services Coordinator. She was fired from the CRNC for promoting the racist "catch an illegal immigrant day" and an activity where students would shoot cutouts John Kerry and other Democrats. Apparently, when she was too extreme for the College Republicans, she fit right in at the Leadership Institute.
----
My right-wing degree [52], Jeff Horwitz, Salon, May 24, 2005
"Yet Blackwell's foundation, the Leadership Institute, is not a Republican organization. It's a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charity, drawing the overwhelming majority of its $9.1 million annual budget from tax-deductible donations. Despite its legally required "neutrality," the institute is one of the best investments the conservative movement has ever made.
[. . .] Some progressives have come to that conclusion as well. "This was certainly needed 25 years ago," says Peter Murray, of the Center for Progressive Leadership. "Investing beyond any individual election cycle is the way that we're going to develop the progressive movement into a more robust, coordinated, compact force that can win elections." But getting donors to think beyond 2008 is a tough sell."
---
all
From Salon.com
My Right-wing Degree
How I learned to convert liberal campuses into conservative havens at Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, alma mater of Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Jeff Gannon and two Miss Americas.
By Jeff Horwitz
May 24, 2005 | One recent Sunday, at Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, a dozen students meet for the second and final day of training in grass-roots youth politics. All are earnest, idealistic and as right wing as you can get. They take careful notes as instructor Paul Gourley teaches them how to rig a campus mock election.
It's nothing illegal -- no ballot stuffing necessary, even at the most liberal colleges. First you find a nonpartisan campus group to sponsor the election, so you can't be accused of cheating. Next, volunteer to organize the thing. College students are lazy, and they'll probably let you. Always keep in mind that a rigged mock election is all about location, location, location.
"Can anyone tell me," asks Gourley, a veteran mock electioneer, "why you don't want the polling place in the cafeteria?"
Stephen, a shy antiabortion activist sitting toward the rear of the class, raises his hand: "Because you want to suppress the vote?"
"Stephen has the right answer!" Gourley exclaims, tossing Stephen his prize, a copy of Robert Bork's "Slouching Toward Gomorrah."
The students, strait-laced kids from good colleges, seem unconvinced. The lesson -- that with sufficient organization, the act of voting becomes less a basic right than a tactical maneuver -- doesn't sit easy with some students at first. Gourley, a charismatic senior from South Dakota and the treasurer of the College Republican National Committee, assures them: "This is not anti-democracy. This is not shady. Just put [the polling place] somewhere where you might have to put a little bit of effort into voting." The rest, Gourley explains, is just a matter of turnout.
When the state or national candidate you're backing wins by a suitably large margin, as he or she surely will, have the nonpartisan group that sponsored the election sign off on your prewritten celebratory press release and send it statewide. Reporters will almost certainly ignore it, but after a dozen similar victories, they'll start dashing off articles about the youth phenomenon behind your candidate's campaign -- or better yet, just start plagiarizing your press releases.
There is no better place to master the art of mock-election rigging -- and there is no better master than Morton Blackwell, who invented the trick in 1964 and has been teaching it ever since. Blackwell's half-century career in conservative grass-roots politics coincides neatly with the fortunes of the conservative movement: He was there when Goldwater lost, when Southern voters abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, and when the Moral Majority began its harvest of evangelical Christian voters. In the 1970s, Blackwell worked with conservative direct-mail king Richard Viguerie; in 1980, he led Reagan's youth campaign. Recently, he's been fighting to save Tom DeLay's job.
Yet Blackwell's foundation, the Leadership Institute, is not a Republican organization. It's a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charity, drawing the overwhelming majority of its $9.1 million annual budget from tax-deductible donations. Despite its legally required "neutrality," the institute is one of the best investments the conservative movement has ever made. Its walls are plastered with framed headshots of former students -- hundreds of state and local legislators sprinkled with smiling members of the U.S. Congress, and even the perky faces of two recently crowned Miss Americas. Thirty-five years ago, Blackwell dispatched a particularly promising 17-year-old pupil named Karl Rove to run a youth campaign in Illinois; Jeff Gannon, a far less impressive student, attended the Leadership Institute's Broadcast Journalism School.
The institute's classes aren't tickets into an exclusive and shadowy club, however: I am also an institute graduate. In March, I attended its Youth Leadership School, a one-weekend, 28-hour crash course in political organizing. Registration was open to the public and cost $60, which got me a sourcebook, six free meals, up to three nights in a dorm, and a six-hour lecture on political principles delivered by the 65-year-old Blackwell himself. The morning I arrived at the Leadership Institute, I identified myself as a reporter for Salon. "That's great," said communications director Michelle Miller. By the end of the weekend, Blackwell took me on a tour of the headquarters, chatted with me for nearly an hour, and gave me a copy of the institute's antisocialism in-house film, "The Roots of the Ultra Left." The institute is a very friendly place.
Over the last 25 years, more than 40,000 young conservatives have been trained at the institute's Arlington, Va., headquarters in everything from TV makeup for aspiring right-wing talking heads to prep courses for the State Department's Foreign Service exam. Classes are taught by volunteers recruited from the ranks of the conservative movement's most talented organizers, operatives and communicators.
The Leadership Institute has succeeded, in part, because it's had little to no competition from the left. College campuses may still be havens for liberal thought, but the right-wing students are the ones organized enough to win major battles. Perhaps expecting that American youth would organize themselves as they did in decades past, progressive organizations have been outstripped by their conservative counterparts in professionalizing the ragtag world of college activism. "When it comes to campus controversy, from affirmative action to free speech, the right wing pumps in money and expertise and shows [students] how to out-hustle their opponents," says David Halperin of the liberal Center for American Progress.
Still, Blackwell says conservatives are underdogs on college campuses. Conservative students may be better organized, but they're still outnumbered. The Leadership Institute contends that liberal higher education is robbing the conservative movement of new blood -- and thereby handicapping the institute's efforts. "You know, the most conservative students are the freshmen," Blackwell told me. "There is an acculturation there."
And that's where the institute is taking its fight. For most of its 25-year history, it has focused on grooming students to work in conservative politics; it's now increasingly devoting its efforts to making campuses more conservative places. Through its Campus Leadership Program, the institute is leading a growing effort to found and support a national network of conservative student groups and publications capable of permanently altering the intellectual and social environment of universities to conservatives' advantage. That goal alone is a stark rejection of the standard conservative complaint that post-Vietnam War higher education is not just grossly liberal, but irredeemably so. Already, the program has shown considerable success. Asked about his campus initiative, Blackwell simply says, "You're talking about the major project for the rest of my life."
In the wake of the 2004 election, some progressive groups have been working to reinforce their positions on campus. Last February, the Center for American Progress launched Campus Progress, a student activism support center, to combat what Halperin describes as "30 years of effective organizing" by conservative groups like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Young Americans for Freedom, and of course, the Leadership Institute. But Blackwell is unfazed by the competition. "If they asked me, which they haven't, I could let them know that it's a lot harder than it appeared on the surface," he told me. "You've got to work years before you see any results."
And Blackwell has put in those years. A young Louisiana Republican in the days when Democrats owned every statewide office, he cut his political teeth on Barry Goldwater's doomed 1964 presidential bid. "Don't fully trust anyone until he has stuck with a good cause which he saw was losing," is an institute maxim rooted in Blackwell's own political education. "After Goldwater's defeat, the number of people who would admit to being movement conservatives could all have fit into an average phone booth," Blackwell said in an interview. "And among us, we didn't have a dime for a telephone call."
That was a long time ago. According to Blackwell, allied "movement conservatives" took the first steps toward outmaneuvering their party's moribund minority leadership in the '70s. More than a test of character, conservatism's formerly abject status provided the key to those gains. With a wealth of political talent but few resources or constituencies, conservatives had no choice but to look beyond the two- and four-year cycles that dictate traditional political strategy. Instead of fighting an intra-party struggle they were certain to lose, they built an infrastructure outside the Republican Party dedicated to promoting talent, not winning the next election.
The Leadership Institute is a perfect example of that strategy, according to Peter Murray, a progressive management trainer who studied the institute's model before launching his own nonprofit political training organization, the Center for Progressive Leadership, last year. "Being a 501(c)(3) not only means they can get tax deductions for their donors and build endowments, but they're forced to look long term," Murray says. "They're not allowed to endorse candidates and get sucked into electoral politics. Year in and year out, all they do is build leaders."
It's an approach, Murray believes, that has long since paid off. "Sure, [Blackwell] has trained Karl Rove and Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist and 223 other legislators and members of Congress," Murray notes, "but more importantly, he's trained 40,000 other local organizers." The institute's graduates, in other words, are part of a movement. "We spent $2 billion trying to win this last election," Murray says of progressives. "They already spent 25 years, and nearly $100 million, building the talent pool that won the election. And which will consistently win them elections for the next several decades."
The structure of Blackwell's Campus Leadership Program is simple. The Leadership Institute trains promising conservative college graduates over the summer and dispatches them to campuses in the fall with a mandate to start conservative student organizations. Need $500 and some ideas to start a combative right-wing campus publication? The institute would love to help you. Is the campus administration discriminating against your Second Amendment club? The institute will help you take your cause to the Internet. No one on campus at your Christian college has ever heard of the institute? Staffers will be glad to drive down, take you to a steakhouse, and talk it up. Last year, the CLP doubled in size, to 418 clubs and counting. By the end of 2006, Blackwell is confident he will have created 1,000 conservative campus organizations.
Unlike chapter-based political organizations, CLP clubs are unaffiliated with either the Leadership Institute or each other. According to Blackwell, this trait offers a serious advantage: "No purges." The clubs' independence also comes with the benefit of plausible deniability. "You can get away with stuff that you would take a lot of flak for doing in the College Republicans," says CLP director Dan Flynn. "Because we're independent, we can do activities that push the envelope," agrees University of Miami senior Sarah Canale, whose CLP-organized Advocates for Conservative Thought threw an affirmative action bake sale last year in which the price of a cupcake varied according to the race of its buyer. That it was controversial, she believes, was a victory in itself.
The Leadership Institute teaches the same principle. Controlled controversy -- making your point in a manner so bombastic that your opponents blow their cool -- is a Blackwell specialty. Before the 2004 Republican Convention, the conservative elder personally went to a drugstore and bought little pink heart stickers, bandages and purple nail polish. At home, he made the "Purple Heart Band-Aids" that he later distributed in Madison Square Garden to mock John Kerry's war wounds. From Blackwell's perspective, the Kerry camp's outrage at the gag was a tactical disaster. Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe, Blackwell says, kept the story alive for days by "running around like a chicken with its head cut off."
A stunt is one way to get press -- but a more effective and sustainable method is to start your own publication. The Leadership Institute trains around 250 students yearly in its student publication workshop, and CLP staff assisted in launching 22 campus publications last year alone.
The Rutgers Centurion is a conservative monthly that got off the ground this fall with institute help. Rutgers student James O'Keefe founded the magazine after coming across a conservative publication at Tufts. "I said, why don't we have this?" O'Keefe remembers. He taught himself a page-layout program and got in touch with the Leadership Institute, which dispatched a staffer to take him and his coeditors to dinner at an upscale local brewery. The institute gave O'Keefe books on starting a publication, awarded him a $500 "Balance in Media Grant," and suggested never-fail places on campus to ferret out liberal excess. "They were really excited," O'Keefe recalls.
The Rutgers Centurion has since analyzed faculty campaign contributions that favored John Kerry over George W. Bush 104 times over, and it accused one of Rutgers' most esteemed alumni, African-American author and actor Paul Robeson, of being a Stalinist. The magazine has published poetry about abortion from a fetus's point of view and run allegations of prejudice against Condoleezza Rice, "The Black Woman Liberals Love to Hate."
The Centurion's favorite subject, however, seems to be people who don't like the Centurion. Rutgers student Tabitha Rice earned the February "Liberal of the Month" title for allegedly defacing copies of the Centurion's previous issue, and in the spirit of Valentine's Day, the editors framed an excerpt from their hate mail -- "'F* [The editors of The Centurion.] F* Them till they're dead'" -- in a heart-shaped box.
The Centurion's assertion that campus liberals are intolerant lends its vitriolic criticism of leftists the veneer of the free speech movement. CLP coordinator Flynn, the author of "Why the Left Hates America," recalls that during a speech at Berkeley, he encountered "a Nazi-style book burning" of his work and an attempt to rip his microphone cord from the wall. That might not have quite the allure of Mario Savio's rallying a crowd from a squad car's roof during Berkeley's student protests, but it's a start.
CLP publications play a crucial role in publicizing such run-ins. Right-wing watchdog groups like Accuracy in Media have railed against liberal bias in the classroom for years, but as outsiders, they lack both standing and a direct connection to campus life. CLP publications have both, allowing them to monitor bias in every classroom. In December, the editor of the Louisville Patriot, a CLP-organized publication at the University of Louisville, reported that sociology lecturer John McTighe had made a very, very tasteless joke about how religious conservatives who had voted for Bush ought to be shot. With sufficient outrage, the story jumped from the Patriot to the local media and the Internet, resulting in McTighe's suspension and a thoroughly public debate of liberal bias in, of all places, Kentucky.
Sparking such scandals is "absolutely" a part of CLP's plan, Blackwell says. "In the last year or so, not taking into account the flap over Ward Churchill, you have no doubt noticed more news coverage about complacent leftists' abuses on campus," he says. "Academia is the last unbreached citadel of the left, and I believe we are today over the moat."
There's still plenty to do before then. Chris Stio, an institute staffer who directed the Bush-Cheney field operations in northeast Michigan, warns his students not to buy into second-term crowing about America's irrevocable slide into conservatism. "Enough people were yelling and screaming about the president that if they'd actually picked up the phone book and started calling, they might have won," he says. "They went to concerts, they bashed the president, but they didn't work. If enough people had, maybe we'd have a different president. The election was not inevitable. And too many think it was."
Some progressives have come to that conclusion as well. "This was certainly needed 25 years ago," says Peter Murray, of the Center for Progressive Leadership. "Investing beyond any individual election cycle is the way that we're going to develop the progressive movement into a more robust, coordinated, compact force that can win elections." But getting donors to think beyond 2008 is a tough sell. "Our budget this year will be just over a million. We'd love to be bigger than that," he says. "It's really going to be up to the progressive donor community as to whether they're going to look long term and invest in a superstructure. If they do, we can build it relatively quickly."
In the meantime, the Leadership Institute will continue its work. Blackwell has found plenty of humor in his recent vilification as the evil genius that smoothed fake reporter Jeff Gannon's path to White House press briefings. "If they want to believe that there's a vast conspiracy, and they want to waste their time trying to decide who gives all the orders to the conservative movement, well, let 'em spend their time on that," he says, laughing.
The Leadership Institute has better things to do, Blackwell says, than conspire to put a male escort up to lobbing softballs to White House spokesman Scott McClellan. For example, training the next generation of Karl Roves.
"Everyone knows that for certain breeds of dogs it is customary to cut their tails short when they are a few weeks old," begins Blackwell's lecture to us on the importance of releasing negative information on your opponent incrementally. "Every time you clip the puppy's tail it hurts. It hurts. You might traumatize the puppy for life."
"The moral is that if it's your tail that's being clipped, you want it clipped once," concludes Blackwell. "But if you get a chance to clip your opponent's tail, clip that puppy as often as you can."
It may be hardball, but it isn't cheating, and it would be far less effective if it were. "These are powerful techniques," Blackwell tells the class at the end of his marathon lecture. "So I don't want anyone going out of here and acting unethically. It's not necessary."
About the writer
Jeff Horwitz, a former editorial fellow at Salon, writes for the Washington City Paper.
TWO
=
see main and morton blackwell
also incubators
capt 722
stalking horse TP USA?
=
=
9/20 billed as alt to cpac for the hep kids?
-----
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/its-back-after-2019-outrage-american-priority-festival-and-conference-2020-promises-golf-tournament-and-a-whos-who-of-far-right-speakers/
doral
It’s Back: After 2019 Outrage, American Priority Festival and Conference 2020 Promises Golf Tournament—and a Who’s Who of Far-Right Speakers
By Kristen Doerer | September 15, 2020
Simona Papadopoulos (left) poses with her husband George Papadopoulos (center) and another model after her bathing suit fashion show at the American Priority Festival and Conference. Screenshot of Simona Papadopoulos' since deleted tweet.]
At last year’s American Priority Festival and Conference, a macabre video that superimposed President Donald Trump’s face on a figure shooting the president’s perceived political opponents in a mass killing spree, reported on by The New York Times, caused outrage. This year, the AMP festival, unhindered by the global coronavirus pandemic, will feature a who’s who of right-wing and far-right speakers, all gathered together at the Trump National Doral Miami Oct. 8-11.
The “YUGE lineup”—their words, not ours—includes returning speakers, such as far-right Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, convicted felon Roger Stone, whose sentence was commuted by President Donald Trump, and far-right activist and One America News Network figure Jack Posobiec, who pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, according to an organizer’s email Monday.
Anti-Muslim activist and right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer will also return to the stage. After winning the GOP nomination to represent Florida’s 21st Congressional District in the U.S. House in August, Loomer received Trump’s congratulations as she rubbed shoulders with a series of far-right figures at her victory party. Failed congressional candidate and QAnon conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine, who recently accused Trump of “taking his base for granted” by wearing a mask, is another featured speaker. (We’ll see how many COVID-19 cases come out of this year’s festival.)
George Papadopoulos—who went to federal prison for making false statements to FBI agents about the timing of his contact with Russian intermediaries in 2016—will return to Trump Doral as well. Last year, Papadopolous spoke on an “Unmasking the Russian Hoax” panel, while his wife Simona Papadopolous held a swimsuit fashion show during the pool party portion of the festival.
Described as “Four days of God, country, and MAGA at the spectacular Trump National Doral resort in Miami, FL,” the conference promises “everything you could want in a patriot event.” And in case that description doesn’t excite you, the email promotes a golf tournament for an additional cost, a “MAGA pool party”—which no doubt means more patriotic swimsuits—and even spa deals:
AMP is also hosting a celebrity golf tournament on the world-famous Blue Monster course with net proceeds benefiting the American Priority Foundation! Come play golf with some of the most patriotic names in sports, TV, and politics. Tournament entry is $500 and available as an option when you register. This makes a great gift for those golf fans!
AMP is also hosting a screening of Dinesh D’Souza’s blockbuster new film ‘Trump Card’, shooting a music video for a brand new patriot anthem by Alex Jordan, kicking off with a MAGA pool party, and hosting many surprise special guests.
The festival and conference was conceived as a pro-Trump, millennial-focused alternative to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference held in Washington, D.C., by Ali Alexander, a right-wing political operative, and Alex Phillips, a conservative donor who owns a small telecom company in Virginia. Alexander—who previously went by Ali Akbar and who has ties to far-right figures such as Unite the Right white supremacist attendee Matt Colligan—has recently floated the idea of revamping a 2018 effort discredit mail-in voting ahead of the 2020 presidential election, dispatching Trump supporters to places where ballots are being counted?. Posobiec, who helped announce the first AMP festival in 2018, also promoted Alexander’s latest ploy to discredit mail-in voting.
The first AMP festival, held in 2018 in Washington, D.C., was effectively a flop, with one speaker even canceling after seeing the dismal turnout. Last year’s event, held in Doral, managed to attract more attendees but not quite the millennial and Gen Z crowd that was intended. Though younger conservatives were in attendance, the event attracted plenty of Generation X and baby boomer attendees, featuring such groups as the graying “Bikers for Trump.” Millennial MAGA stars were featured, including the Deplorable Choir, Ricky Rebel, a singer-songwriter known for being unapologetically both pro-Trump and gay, and right-wing activist Scott Presler.
It also ironically prevented reporters from covering its events—centered around the concept of free speech and the First Amendment—by allowing only “invited” media, barring Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt from entry. In 2018, Alexander had explained the “invite only” policy this way: “Frankly, any press reporter who writes a hit piece on us is not getting a press credential.”
An Aug. 7 email promises panels with “leading experts on Medical Tyranny, Tech Censorship, Educational Freedom, The China Threat, Pandemic Response, and much more!” Last year, speakers peddled conspiracy theories and called for civil war. After coverage of the events and the crude video by the New York Times, ProPublica, and other outlets, AMP temporarily took down its page.
As Right Wing Watch reported last year, “The conference could have been dismissed as a meeting of the fringe, but big-ticket speakers like Don Trump Jr. and Sarah Huckabee Sanders lent legitimacy to the conference, as did more respectable Republican groups like the Leadership Institute, which held a series of trainings in side rooms.” While AMP 2020 has yet to secure high-profile Trump administration or Trump family speakers, its location at the Trump Doral and the degree of coziness Trump has gotten with such formerly fringe figures say enough.
=
=
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/hiding-in-plain-sight-the-white-nationalist-who-toiled-inside-a-right-wing-media-powerhouse
no lnx pix many
Right Wing Watch
Trending Donald Trump Impeachment Immigration White Nationalism
Hiding in Plain Sight: The White Nationalist Who Toiled Inside a Right-Wing Media Powerhouse
By Jared Holt | February 3, 2020 9:00 am By Angry White Men | February 3, 2020 9:00 am
The following article was reported in collaboration with Angry White Men. It also appears on Angry White Men.
Michael J. Thompson demanded that someone turn down the “horrifying music” so that he could introduce Scott Greer, then editor of The Daily Caller, whose first book Thompson had helped publish. He took nervous pulls from a can of Coors Light beer as he addressed the crowd assembled in the offices of the right-wing publication, mixing self-deprecating jokes about the “Walmart spread” of food offered to guests and seemingly earnest calls to action.
“Do not underestimate the value of your voice in influencing people in the Trump administration. You’ve got to keep fighting, because guess what, no one else is gonna do it. You have to do it,” Thompson told the crowd of people assembled on a March 2017 evening in downtown Washington, D.C., in remarks captured in a Periscope video.
Less than 24 hours before the party, an article appeared on a blog operated by Thompson; the author, writing under the name Paul Kersey, claimed to know why people were supposedly afraid to go travel to Baltimore, Maryland: “Blacks. Nothing more. Nothing less.” The closing kicker of the blog post stated the writer’s prejudice in stark terms: “No blacks, know peace; know blacks, no peace. It’s really this simple.” It is just one of more than 3,500 analogous articles that exist today on Thompson’s blog, “Stuff Black People Don’t Like.”
Thompson is just one of many members of the white nationalist movement in the United States that attempted to reinvent its public image with the “alt-right” moniker and rose to a flash of influence in Republican politics amid the 2016 presidential campaign of? Donald J. Trump. Leading up to that political moment, a clique of the movement’s believers had situated themselves inside GOP-aligned institutions and media outlets in and around Washington, where they used the resources at their disposal to advance their cause. Thompson’s career took him inside the Leadership Institute, a pillar of the conservative movement for more than 40 years, and ultimately to the right-wing tabloid-style website, WorldNetDaily.
The story of Thompson’s career is not one of a random internet blogger; it’s a blueprint that others have followed.
A barely underground member of the white nationalist movement, Thompson has toiled undisturbed, until recently, in conservative spaces, even as a number of his associates have since been exposed for supporting the movement that left blood in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, at the 2017 Unite the Right white supremacist gathering.
Right Wing Watch and Angry White Men, a not-for-profit blog tracking figures in the white supremacist movement, can report that Thompson is the previously unknown author of racist material that has appeared on blogs and the best-known white nationalist publications for more than a decade under the Paul Kersey pen name. Angry White Men contributed in-depth research to this article while Right Wing Watch completed the investigative reporting.
Entering the Nucleus of Conservative Media
Michael J. Thompson with friends, including white nationalists Kevin DeAnna and Scott Greer. (Photo courtesy of Katie McHugh)]
The halls of The Leadership Institute’s headquarters are lined with photographs of its distinguished alumni, visual markers of its place in conservative politics. Headshots of notable graduates–figures including Ralph Reed, Rep. Jim Jordan, and even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Vice President Mike Pence, among others–are arranged in a single row on each side of a long corridor, all in identical frames. On any given week, young conservatives can attend events in its offices in Arlington, Virginia, for training in skills like public speaking, creative design, campaigning, and fundraising, and opportunities to hear distinguished guests from Capitol Hill and conservative media. On its website, the Leadership Institute claims to have “trained more than 200,000 conservative activists, leaders, and students” since its founding in 1979. It was there that Michael Thompson appears to have entered conservative politics, working as a member of the organization’s Campus Services Program, according to a 2010 press release.
During his tenure at the Leadership Institute, it also appears Thompson wrote articles for its Campus Reform media outlet. Articles bearing his byline have since been deleted but were cached via Google site-search results. Working at the Leadership Institute, Thompson grew close to white nationalist Kevin DeAnna, who was a leader of the Leadership Institute’s campus leadership program and began writing his blog, “Stuff Black People Don’t Like” (a play on the name of an internet-famous early 2000s satire blog, “Stuff White People Like”). In 2011, Thompson authored his first column for the racist publication VDARE, whose editor, Peter Brimelow, is a regular speaker at far-right conferences and has participated in panel discussions with Jared Taylor, founder of the white supremacist American Renaissance website, and Richard B. Spencer, the alt-right impresario who led the 2017 tiki-torch march at the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville on the eve of a violent gathering of far-right groups in the center of town.
You will barely find a trace of Thompson’s years at the Leadership Institute on its website—or anywhere, really. Neither Leadership Institute Communications Coordinator Sarah Morrison nor Campus Reform Editor-in-Chief Cabot Phillips responded to inquiries from Right Wing Watch seeking basic information on Thompson’s position with the organization.
After he left the Leadership Institute, Thompson joined the staff of WorldNetDaily, a right-wing conspiracy-theory website aligned with the Republican Party, where he worked in the marketing department. The site is helmed by founder Joseph Farah, a Trump associate who helped the then-presidential hopeful advance the false claim that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
Thompson’s name appeared on WorldNetDaily’s masthead as early as Jan. 29, 2012, and as late as Nov. 18, 2018, as preserved in online snapshot archives. Throughout his entire tenure at the digital publication run by one of Trump’s loudest boosters, Thompson was moonlighting under a pseudonym at racist and white nationalist publications run by Brimelow and Taylor. Thompson’s work was scrubbed from the WorldNetDaily site, but some of it ?was archived. WorldNetDaily editors, including Farah, ?failed to respond to Right Wing Watch’s emailed requests for comment.
Thompson found himself at WorldNetDaily during the pinnacle of its ascendance in the Republican Party. In its heyday, Farah sought to expand WorldNetDaily into a conservative media powerhouse, publishing books by? Rep. Devin Nunes?, who is now the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly, ?who died in 2016, not long after she endorsed Trump for president. Farah even launched a documentary filmmaking company? that produced feature-length movies about gun issues, Christianity, and the supposed secret plots to undermine Western civilization. When Thompson was employed there, Farah and his outlet were enjoying a renaissance of sorts, establishing WorldNetDaily as a mill for the “birther movement,” as the racist narrative questioning Obama’s birth certificate came to be known.
Using his WorldNetDaily position for access, Thompson rubbed shoulders with high-profile Republican politicians and publishers. In 2012, Thompson interviewed Joe Arpaio, then the sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County, about Barack Obama’s birth certificate and other birtherism theories for WorldNetDaily (the video has since been deleted from WorldNetDaily’s website?).
During an appearance on “The Hagmann Report” in 2017, Thompson boasted that he had been in contact with former White House Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon before Bannon joined the Trump campaign. Bannon did not respond to our request for comment.
“You know, I used to share emails three or four times a week with Steve Bannon before he was invited to become part of the Trump campaign,” Thompson told “The Hagmann Report” hosts Joe Hagmann and Jon Robberson.
In one email provided to Right Wing Watch and Angry White Men by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh, Thompson can be seen pitching conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi as a potential guest on the SiriusXM radio program produced by Breitbart News, which Bannon hosted at the time. Bannon declined, writing back, “Zero interest,” and “Not a fan.”? However, Bannon also instructed Thompson to send “all your other books” from WorldNetDaily authors, presumably for their radio-guest potential.
=
jep. Jim Jordan of Ohio addressed a group of conservatives at the Leadership Institute this morning in Arlington, Virginia, for the organization’s Wednesdays Wake-Up Club breakfast series, where he advised those in attendance to avoid talking about socialism and instead frame conversations that would otherwise involve the topic around “the loss of freedom.”
Jordan is a member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, which was responsible for pushing former speaker John Boehner from power, and has evolved as a group that reliably attacks those who challenge President Donald Trump.
The Leadership Institute is a Washington, D.C., organization that trains right-wing activists, often college-aged or younger, on messaging and activism for conservative causes, and recruits future candidates for elected office with training on how to run a campaign. Scheduled workshops for the month of May include sessions on fundraising, grant writing, communications, debate, and media appearances. The group aims to train mainstream conservative groups, but occasionally far-right activists have enrolled in its training workshops and used those lessons for their own causes. Among those who have received training from LI are James O’Keefe of Project Veritas and Ralph Reed, the Republican political operative who leads the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
Leadership Institute president Morton C. Blackwell opened up the event by talking about ongoing conflicts in Venezuela, where the United States has voiced its support for forces in the country that oppose the embattled President Nicolas Maduro.
“I choose not to predict what is going to happen, but if I had to bet, I would put my money on Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton,” Blackwell said.
Bolton claims that “key figures” in the Maduro regime “committed to support ousting Maduro,” and has been calling on them to “fulfill their commitments.”
After reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and listening to remarks by an intern and a program director at the Leadership Institute, audience members heard from Jordan. The Ohio congressman began his remarks by praising the Leadership Institute, where he said he received media training there early in Congressional career. He went on to say that policies being pushed by prominent figures in the Democratic Party—measures on immigration and voting rights—were among “some of the most radical positions” he had ever seen.
“The reason I think the left is so crazy—they don’t start from the same premise we do. They really don’t, and I think this is important to understand. I think everyone in this room believes that we live in the greatest nation in history. The left doesn’t start there. They think America is just one of the 190-some countries on the planet,” Jordan said. “And when you start from the wrong premise, I think that leads to all kinds of problems.”
Then Jordan told Leadership Institute attendees that the message from the right, when you boil it all down, is: “Freedom is under attack right now in this country.” He cited the debunked notion that conservatives were being “shadow banned” by the social media platforms of technology companies, the rise of “politically correct” environments on college campuses, and Democrats advocating for “big government” and using that power to attack conservatives. Jordan went on advise that conservatives find ways to re-frame their critiques of socialism.
“Don’t talk about socialism. Talk about the loss of freedom,” Jordan told Leadership Institute.
He continued, “It’s about a system that takes away freedom. When you don’t have capitalism, free markets, free enterprise, liberty, freedom, fundamental rights protected, bad things happen, and we are seeing it play out on TV right now in Venezuela. So, our charge is talk what the loss of freedom looks like and how great we’ve had it in this country. If we do that, we’ll be just fine.”
Tags: Jim JordanLeadership Institute
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/rep-jim-jordan-to-leadership-institute-dont-talk-about-socialism/
CNN)
The Alameda County District Attorney's Office has filed three felony charges and one misdemeanor against Zachary Greenberg after an attack on the University of California Berkeley campus against a conservative activist. The attack was caught on video.
UC Berkeley campus police arrested Greenberg on Friday. He bonded out of jail and his arraignment is set for Wednesday. CNN has reached out to Greenberg's representatives for comment.
The attack occurred at Sproul Plaza on February 19, officials said. Turning Point USA identified the alleged victim to CNN as Hayden Williams, who had been invited to UC Berkeley to help recruit students for a yet-to-be-formed chapter on campus.
Deputy District Attorney Rebecca Warren filed the charges against Greenberg. They include felony assault, felony battery, felony criminal threats and a misdemeanor vandalism charge. The criminal threats charge says it is a "serious felony" and further alleges "that the threatened crime, on its face and under the circumstances in which it was made, was so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate and specific as to convey to Hayden Williams a gravity of purpose and an immediate prospect of execution."
Before the charges were filed, a media representative for Williams said he is a field representative for the Leadership Institute, an organization that helps train conservative leaders. Williams is not a UC Berkeley student, the representative said.
"The fact that the victim was not a campus affiliate has no bearing on this case. He had every right to be on campus, and every right to express his point of view," said university spokesman Dan Mogulof.
Incident caught on video, shows two attackers
A short video recorded by a witness shows Williams and a man struggling before the man punches Williams in the face, knocking his hat off. The alleged suspect then gets close to Williams' face, calls him "racist," and shouts profanities before punching Williams again and walking away.
Williams told CNN shortly after the assault that he was fine but declined to answer other questions. He was treated at the scene, his media representative said.
Arda Erbil, the student who shot the footage provided to CNN, said he saw two men harassing Williams. As one of the men became physical, Erbil began to record video.
"Seeing something like that happen in such an open place was disheartening," he said.
The University of California Police Department said in a statement that officers responded to a "report of a disturbance" on upper Sproul Plaza, a center of student activity on campus, where they found the injured victim. According to the police statement, the victim said that two men approached him, a verbal altercation ensued and he began recording the interaction on his phone.
One of the men "slapped the phone out of the victim's hand," police said. "The suspect then knocked over the table the victim was at and the two men struggled over the phone. During the incident, the suspect punched the victim several times causing injury to the victim's eye and nose."
Williams told Fox News' Sean Hannity shortly after the attack that some students were upset by a sign he had displayed at his recruitment table that said, "Hate Crime Hoaxes Hurt Real Victims" -- apparently a reference to "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett, who has been accused of staging what he maintains was a hate crime against him.
What's next for Jussie Smollett, in his case and his career
"This person claimed we were promoting violence on campus and proceeded to take his aggression out on us," Williams told Hannity.
University condemns assault
UC Berkeley's chancellor and vice chancellor condemned the assault in a statement February 21, calling it "reprehensible."
"That sort of behavior is intolerable and has no place here," the statement said. "Our commitment to freedom of expression and belief is unwavering."
The statement added that university officials have "no information indicating" the perpetrators are affiliated with UC Berkeley.
The incident illustrates the "hate and anger so many on the left harbor and that our student activists encounter on a daily basis," Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA's founder and president, said in a statement last month.
"Our amazing grassroots organizers courageously face threats of violence and discrimination as they fight for the right for conservative voices to be heard on college campuses," Kirk said, adding he was proud of how the group's student activists handled the situation.
Campus known for promoting free speech accused of bias against conservative views
While UC Berkeley has a long history of promoting the tenants of free speech, in recent years there have been protests against conservatives and far right ideologues that have turned violent.
In 2017, a number of protests broke out ahead of speaking engagements by conservative commentators such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. Neither of those events went forward.
Later that year, conservative radio host Ben Shapiro gave a talk as protesters swarmed outside. Nine people were arrested, but the protests appeared to be mostly peaceful.
CNN's Sarah Moon and Margaret Shuttleworth contributed to this report.
namebase
http://www.nndb.com/org/798/000122432/
=
bossie worked there between elections? after fired?
https://www.salon.com/2005/05/25/blackwell_9/
=
https://www.desmogblog.com/leadership-institute
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2010/2/1/831311/-
American politics is a battle between the Right Wing GOP gang and the public interest.
The GOP's long-term campaign people include a large number of thugs and shysters.
The 300 largest Rightie organizations run through $500-million a year. A third of that is legitimate policy research. The rest focuses on hate messages and promoting "dirty tricks" and other dishonest acts.
For example, the 501(c)(3) "charity" Leadership Institute has turned out 40,000 "graduate" dirty tricks specialists. Karl Rove was one, but also Jeff Gannon, three of the Louisiana Plumbers, and individuals who have interfered with elections from California to Minnesota to New Jersey.
Disrupting pro-democracy campaigns is standard fare. Manufacturing fake scandals is the current fad.
Welcome to American fascism. If you can't use our own Camp Wellstone... infiltration works, too.
Let Leadership Institute train you... all over the country.
For defense against the Dark Arts. MBTF Strategy, Tactics and Money =VERSUS= America's Issues & Character.
That's pretty much what we've got to deal with. The big money interests are throwing in $300-million from corporations and $200-million from individuals. Most through 501(c)(3) "charity" non-profits.
The office burglary in Louisiana -- aimed to bug or disrupt the telephone system of Senator Mary Landrieu -- is typical of Rightie scams.
Even when they are not breaking laws, this bunch have a particular disdain for democracy. For example. related to Alabama:
"The real crisis is a crisis of leadership," he said. "It’s a lack of understanding [by officeholders] of what things constitute the basis of government by a free people."
Toward that end, he said he is particularly encouraged that an Alabama group led mostly by conservative women launched in May the Alabama Legislative Leadership Initiative, with a goal, like that of the American Majority, of identifying and electing leaders well grounded in conservative philosophy. The group intends to find 15,000 people each to commit $2 per week to a political action committee so that, every four years, some $6 million will be available for conservative candidates in a state whose Legislature heretofore has remained controlled by old-line liberal machine politics.
Alabama, "controlled by old-line liberal machine politics." Sure thing.
The objective is to grab $1,500,000 a year with no strings attached. A mechanism to assure government by a "free people," not exactly.
Its one lie after another.
LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
Morton Blackwell has run this operation since the 1960s. When the big money came in to save the GOP after 1972, Blackwell expanded his college system. Leadership Institute was started in 1979 and got its share of the pie.
Blackwell came in originally as a teenage Goldwater supporter, then moved over to Ron Reagan. He was a Special Assistant for Reagan in the White House with a portfolio related to outreach to campus conservatives. This connection led to LI taking the lead for training of Rightie activists.
Blackwell is the guy who had the Band-Aid hand outs at the 2004 Republican National Convention. A lifelong chicken hawk.... Vote suppression related to minorities is a special treat for Blackwell activists.
Here's the February schedule -- locations vary month to month:
02 -- Political Communications Workshop -- Reno, NV
03 -- Wednesday Wakeup Club Breakfast ---- Arlington, VA
03 -- Fundraising Workshop --------------- Reno, NV
05 -- Campaign School ------------------- Winnemuca, NV
05 -- Fundraising Workshop --------------- Las Vegas, NV
06 -- Campaign School -------------------- Fallon, NV
06 -- Campaign School -------------------- Dover, DE
06 -- Campaign School -------------------- Las Vegas, NV
06 -- Youth Leadership School ------------ Tulsa, OK
08 -- Campaign Manager School ------------ Arlington, VA
09 -- Political Voter Mail Workshop ------ Arlington, VA
11 -- Youth Leadership School ------------ Raleigh, NC
18 -- CPAC Grassroots Activist Workshop -- Washington, DC
18 -- CPAC Student Activist Workshop ----- Washington, DC
18 -- CPAC Internet Activist Workshop ---- Washington, DC
19 -- Youth Leadership School ----------- Cedar City, UT
19 -- CPAC Public Speaking Workshop ------ Washington, DC
19 -- CPAC Fundraising Workshop ---------- Washington, DC
19 -- 2010 CPAC Job & Internship Fair ---- Washington, DC
19 -- CPAC Television Training ----------- Washington, DC
20 -- Youth Leadership School ----------- Des Moines, IA
22 -- Campaign School -------------------- Anchorage, AK
23 -- Grant Writing Workshop ------------- Arlington, VA
24 -- Campaign School -------------------- Wasilla, AK
27 -- Youth Leadership School ------------ Seattle, WA
27 -- Campaign School -------------------- Secretary, MD
27 -- Youth Leadership School ------------ Los Angeles , CA
27 -- Campaign School -------------------- Fairbanks, AK
27 -- Youth Leadership School ------------ Pocatello, ID
Campaign School (free) and Fundraising (free) are useful for anyone looking to do grass roots politics.
CPAC Grassroots Activist Workshop (free) is the sure winner. Difficult for any Kossack to keep quiet and take notes. CPAC is where you see the wilder folks.
Fees run max at $75 a course -- $50 for early registration -- for the Political Voter Mail Workshop.
Grant Writing costs $50 -- $35 early registration.
Do well at these courses, you'll get invitations to other LI programs for activists. The interesting stuff is free -- including tickets to CPAC as a volunteer.
BTW: If you can't find a hostel, there's usually a Motel 6 nearby. No conventions, very few drunks at an M6. Trucks can leave a little early.
CONSERVATIVE THINKING
Judge LI by what they recommend.
Its not all crazy. But the majority of the LI book list is either apocalyptic or whiny.
The Seven Fat Years
by Robert Bartley
The Law
by Frederic Bastiat
Up from Liberalism
by William F. Buckley, Jr.
Selected Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke collected
by Dr. Peter Stanlis
Suicide of the West
by James Burnham
Witness
by Whittaker Chambers
Ronald Reagan
by Dinesh D'Souza
Advise and Consent
by Allen Drury
The Theme Is Freedom
by M. Stanton Evans
Capitalism and Freedom
by Milton Friedman
Conscience of a Conservative
by Barry Goldwater
The Road to Serfdom
by F. A. Hayek
The Fatal Conceit
by F. A. Hayek
Economics in One Lesson
by Henry Hazlitt
Dedication and Leadership
by Douglas Hyde
Modern Times
by Paul Johnson
The Conservative Mind
by Dr. Russell Kirk
Liberty and Tyranny
by Mark Levin
The Rise of Radicalism
by Eugene Methvin
Defense of Freedom
by Frank Meyer
What Is Conservatism?
by Frank Meyer
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
Plunkitt of Tammany Hall
by William Riordon
Knowledge and Decisions
by Thomas Sowell
The New Right: We're Ready To Lead
by Richard Viguerie
Ideas Have Consequences
by Richard Weaver
Buckley was far from crazy. Same for Allen Drury, who was friends with my father. Friedman and Goldwater were honest writers.
But the most of this is pitiable. Paranoia and worship of narcissism. Finding a suitable leader changes everything....
What the public interest needs, now, is defense against these propaganda memes.
Present yourself as a middle-of-the-road Ron Paul libertarian-flavor Republican and they'll leave you alone.
Know your enemy. Make friends while you're at it.
Being wrong doesn't make people any less likeable... some of them anyway.
=
=
=
see also morton blackwell
capt 318
Arlington va beachhead?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_Leadership_Institute
The Leadership Institute is a Virginia based training organisation for potential conservative political leaders.
According to the groups website The Leadership Institute is "the premier training ground for tomorrow's conservative leaders. Conservative leaders, organizations and activities rely on the Institute for the preparation they require for success."
"Since 1979 the Institute's unique seminars and workshops have enrolled more than 61,000 students and taught them how to win. Each year hundreds of Institute graduates obtain positions of influence in public policy because of their Leadership Institute training," its website states.[1]
Contents
[hide]
1 Overview
2 Past Students
3 Staff
4 Contact information
5 Articles and Resources
5.1 Sources
5.2 Related SourceWatch articles
Overview
The Leadership Institute was started in 1979 by Morton C. Blackwell as a "non-partisan" educational institute that has been preparing conservatives for success in politics, government and the news media.
They have trained more than 39,000 students.
They have a staff of 47
They have revenue of about $7 million.
They claim to have more than 1000 active groups [1]. However, it appears that most do not exist.
They list Fox News; MSNBC; CNN; CBS as examples of media placements available through the school.
Their latest event was the Ronald Reagan Tribute Collection on May 19, 2004. They have future events and workshops that focus on grassroots activism.
Another quote from their website: "The Institute is a non-partisan educational foundation".
Past Students
Mitch McConnell: U.S. Senator from Kentucky
Jim Gilmore: former governor of Virginia
Karl Rove: Bush 43 political strategist[2]
James Guckert: Talon News "reporter"
David McIntosh: Congressman from Indiana
Mark Souder: Congressman from Indiana
JoAnn Davis: Congresswoman from Virginia
Joe Wilson: Congressman from South Carolina
Grover Norquist: President, Americans for Tax Reform
Ralph Reed: former Executive Director Christian Coalition
Jason Miller: Young conservative leader
Staff
Steve Cassarino: Director of Member Services
Jim Eltringham: Director of Public Relations
Erin Krueger: Director of Recruitment
Geoff Woliner: Youth Education Coordinator
Rebekka James Turko: Director of Campus Coordination
Ryan James Nickels: Director of Youth Outreach
Benjamin J. Norquist: Campus Services Coordinator
Andrew J. Tomar: Facilities Coordinator
Contact information
1101 North Highland Street
Arlington, VA 22201
Phone: (703) 247-2000
Fax: (703) 247-2001
Web: http://www.leadershipinstitute.org
Articles and Resources
Sources
↑ "About Us", The Leadership Institute, accessed February 2008.
Related SourceWatch articles
Project for California's Future
Categories: Conservatives | Politics | United States
=
all started w/ incubators:
Stein describes how the message machine works. If Rush Limbaugh wants something on vouchers – it's immediately in his hands; if Fox News' Bill O'Reilly needs a guest to talk about the "death tax," he's got him from one of the think tanks. Stein estimates that 36,000 conservatives have been trained on values, issues, leadership, use of media and agenda development. These are not the elected officials, but rather the cadre of the conservative network. Stein figures that the core leaders of the Big 80 groups he studied are about 2,000 people who make between $75,000 and $200,000 and have all been trained in the Leadership Institute.
stein on alternet
-----
----
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/andrew-breitbarts-nixonian-okeefe-ratfk
O'Keefe and his crew are only following in the footsteps of the worst of the worst. They are funded by a right wing outfit called The Leadership Institute.
Founded in 1979 by veteran Republican activist Morton Blackwell, the Leadership Institute has worked with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Karl Rove and Grover Norquist. The group raked in $6.6 million in 2008, according to its most recent publicly available IRS filings, which doesn’t list donors.
“What we teach is to use creative and imaginative ways to make your points, to reveal what we think is political correctness run amuck, liberal hypocrisy and double standards” on left-leaning college campuses, said Sutton, who supervised O’Keefe at the institute until O’Keefe was asked to leave because his investigative work could interfere with the Institute’s Internal Revenue Service standing...read on
Poor James is ordered to stay at mommy and daddy's house to keep him out of trouble.
James O'Keefe, the 25-year-old conservative filmmaker who was arrested this week in connection with a plot to tamper with phone lines in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office, is out of jail on $10,000 bond, Talking Points Memo reports. The judge ordered O'Keefe to live with his parents until a preliminary hearing set for Feb. 13.
And notice the high powered lawyer O'Keefe immediately received. He's backed by big conservative money.
Michael Madigan, O'Keefe's lawyer, said Wednesday that his client was not trying to wiretap or interfere with Landrieu's phones, but he would not explain why O'Keefe was there. He also would not say whether O'Keefe was working for someone or was on his own.
"The truth will come out," said Madigan, a Washington lawyer who represented Sen. Howard Baker, the Republican who famously asked during the Watergate investigation, "What did the President know and when did he know it?"
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/02/03/james_okeefe_white_nationalists
James O'Keefe's race problem
A photo of the righty stuntman at a white-nationalist confab illustrates a career marked by racial resentment
By Max Blumenthal
James O'Keefe, photographed at a white nationalist conference by One People's Project.
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
(This article has been corrected since publication.)
Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James O’Keefe’s past political stunts are feigning shock at his arrest on charges that he and three associates planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed the 25-year-old O’Keefe as a creative genius and model of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe, called him one of the all-time “great journalists” and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his undercover ACORN video. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared he should have earned a “congressional medal.”
His right-wing admirers don't seem to mind that O’Keefe's short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O'Keefe at a 2006 conference on "Race and Conservatism" that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30 on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People's Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O'Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. O'Keefe's fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein organized the event, which gave anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.
One People's Project covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Project director Daryle Jenkins told O'Keefe manned a literature table filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly. The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. "We can say for certain that James O'Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that," Jenkins said. O'Keefe's attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client's role in the conference.
[Subsequent to publication, freelance photographer Isis told Salon she saw O'Keefe helping with the event and believed he staffed the literature table, but her only photograph of O'Keefe was cropped so that the literature table isn't evident. "He was helping Marcus Epstein in the execution of the event," the photographer recalls. "O’Keefe was involved the same way you would be involved if you went to a party and you put out the cups and stocked the cooler.”]
O'Keefe's racial issues can be seen in many of his prior stunts The notorious ACORN videos highlighted images of himself dressed as a pimp, deceptively edited through hidden camera footage as he baited African-American office workers into making statements that could be perceived as incriminating. There were also lesser-known but equally inflammatory spectacles like the “affirmative action bake sale” O’Keefe and his conservative comrades held when they were students at Rutgers University. During the event, O’Keefe stood at a table in the center of campus offering baked goods at reduced prices to Latinos and African-Americans while whites were forced to pay exorbitant amounts. (Native Americans, he announced, would eat free.)
By O’Keefe’s own account, his racial troubles became acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of Rutgers University’s dormitory system. In an online diarythat has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially assigned. O’Keefe claimed his next roommate was “an Indian midget ... who smelled like shit.” The roommate left, however, and was replaced by “a greek kid.” The new roommate complained to a residential administrator that O’Keefe had called his neighbors “niggers,” prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He rejected the accusation as a “complete lie,” writing, “I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call anyone any names.”
The following year, despite this record, O’Keefe secured a dream job in the conservative movement, employed by the Leadership Institute, a Northern Virginia-based outfit that serves as the movement’s most prolific youth training operation. There, O’Keefe met Marcus Epstein, a fellow ideologue who as editor of a conservative publication at the College of William and Mary assailed Martin Luther King Jr. for “philandering and plagiarism” and challenged his patriotism and Christianity.
In August 2006 Epstein planned an event that would wed his extreme views on race with his ambitions. Epstein invited white nationalist Jared Taylor and homophobic white-grievance peddler John Derbyshire of the National Review to speak at the Leadership Institute’s Northern Virginia headquarters, at a mock symposium called “Race and Conservatism.”
According to a post on the white supremacist Web site Stormfront, Taylor and Derbyshire debated "the role of race in policy decisions and the racial future of the Republican party."
When the Southern Poverty Law Center denounced Taylor’s participation in the event, sparking damaging publicity for the Institute, Epstein shifted it across the street, where he played host under the auspices of a “traditionalist” group he founded called the Robert A. Taft Club. O’Keefe joined him after the last-minute move. A speaker from the right-wing black front group Project 21, led by white conservative David Almasi, was added at the last minute.
According to One People's Project, which dispatched an undercover reporter to the event, about 40 people attended the event, including several white supremacists. They included Michael Hart, a Jewish astrophysicist and advocate of racially partitioning the U.S., who once clashed with David Duke at a conference over the Ku Klux Klan leader's anti-Semitism.
The event’s headline speaker, Jared Taylor, is the publisher of one of the white supremacist movement’s foremost journals, American Renaissance, which seeks to apply an academic gloss to the racialist screeds contained on its pages. According to a report on the conference published in Taylor's magazine, Taylor argued that a taboo against discussing the alleged criminal behavior and lower intelligence of blacks and Latinos twisted political discourse, and he advocated a strong white nationalism to counter it. Derbyshire denounced “this whole rickety apparatus of affirmative action, discrimination lawsuits, corporate shakedowns, profiling protests and 'speech codes.'” But the National Review editor expressed doubt that a sufficiently large white nationalist movement could be mustered to do much about it.
Epstein and O'Keefe moved on from the "Race and Conservatism" conference to better things. After graduating from the Leadership Institute, Epstein held jobs as executive director of both former Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo’s Team America PAC and Pat Buchanan’s American Cause. He also started a group called Youth for Western Civilization that dedicated itself to “defending the West on campus.” An essay featured on the group’s Web site complaining that “largely Jewish intellectual elites have utterly transformed American social and political discourse” suggested that Epstein’s outfit was only his latest attempt to push white nationalism and anti-Semitism into the conservative mainstream.
Epstein’s career unraveled in June 2009, when a violent racial assault he committed two years earlier was disclosed. According to a court affidavit, Epstein had karate-chopped a random African-American woman in the face and called her a “nigger” during a drunken late-night romp bar-hopping on Washington’s M Street in 2007, leading to his arrest by an off-duty Secret Service agent. He signed a plea bargain requiring him to attend alcohol rehabilitation courses and donate $1,000 to the United Negro College Fund as a token of his contrition.
Meanwhile, O’Keefe lost his job at the Leadership Institute in 2007 after a prank call he made to an Ohio-based Planned Parenthood clinic. During the call, O’Keefe offered a donation to the clinic on the condition that it would be earmarked to pay for aborting African-American fetuses. “Because there's definitely way too many black people in Ohio,” O’Keefe remarked to the receptionist. “So, I'm just trying to do my part.” Leadership Institute founder Morton Blackwell said O'Keefe's stunts went beyond the right-wing group's standards. “He wanted to do sting operations that would affect legislation; he made some calls which have been covered in the news media to Planned Parenthood," Blackwell told the New York Times. "That was beyond the scope of what we had hired him to do. We are an educational organization. We are not an activist organization.” Blackwell told O'Keefe he had to choose between his job and his activism, "and he said he was committed to the activism," according to the Times.
O’Keefe’s termination by the Leadership Institute hardly ended his career as a conservative activist. Right-wing online publicist Andrew Breitbart, hearing of the merry prankster’s exploits, hired him to carry out the ACORN operation that would make him famous. Since his arrest, however, some of O’Keefe’s former associates are scrambling to save face. "I am shocked by the reports of this behavior,” declared O’Keefe’s collaborator on the ACORN operation, Hannah Giles. (Giles had tarted up as a prostitute for the stunt.)
O’Keefe has now hired a defense attorney and is waging a high publicity battle against charges that could land him in prison for nearly a year. Some of his old allies, like Breitbart, remain in his corner. Fox News' Sean Hannity hosted O'Keefe for a sympathetic sitdown Feb. 1, where the young right-winger played victim, claiming he was being persecuted by "flat-out slandering" and "journalistic malpractice."
Max Blumenthal is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. More Max Blumenthal
----
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/the_leadership_institute_the_group_that_helped_lau.php
$ but no donors named
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Blackwell
----
offocial bio
Morton Blackwell
Professionally, Morton Blackwell is the president of the Leadership Institute, a non-partisan educational foundation he founded in 1979.
His institute prepares conservatives for success in politics, government and the news media. Over the years the Leadership Institute has trained more than 86,000 students. It currently has revenue of $8.7 million per year and a staff of 53.
In youth politics, Mr. Blackwell was a College Republican state chairman and a Young Republican state chairman in Louisiana.
He served on the Young Republican National Committee for more than a dozen years, rising to the position of Young Republican National Federation national vice chairman at large.
Off and on for five years, 1965-1970, he worked as executive director of the College Republican National Committee under four consecutive College Republican national chairmen.
He served on the Louisiana Republican state central committee for eight years.
First elected to the Arlington County (Virginia) Republican Committee in 1972, he is a member of the Virginia Republican state central committee and was first elected in 1988 as Virginia’s Republican National Committeeman (RNC), a post he still holds. In 2004 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the RNC and served for four years.
Having worked actively in politics for more than forty years, he has probably trained more political activists than any other conservative. Starting in the 1960s, he has trained thousands of people who have served on staff for conservative and Republican candidates in every state.
Mr. Blackwell was Barry Goldwater’s youngest elected delegate to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco.
He was a national convention Alternate Delegate for Ronald Reagan in 1968 and 1976, and a Ronald Reagan Delegate at the 1980 national convention.
In 1980, he organized and oversaw the national youth effort for Ronald Reagan.
He served as Special Assistant to the President on President Reagan’s White House Staff 1981-1984.
Mr. Blackwell is something of a specialist in matters relating to the rules of the Republican Party. He served on rules committees of the state Republican parties in Louisiana and in Virginia. He serves now on the RNC’s Standing Committee on Rules and has attended every meeting of the Republican National Conventions’ Rules Committees since 1972.
Morton's Speeches and Writings
==
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/05/25/blackwell/
When the state or national candidate you're backing wins by a suitably large margin, as he or she surely will, have the nonpartisan group that sponsored the election sign off on your prewritten celebratory press release and send it statewide. Reporters will almost certainly ignore it, but after a dozen similar victories, they'll start dashing off articles about the youth phenomenon behind your candidate's campaign -- or better yet, just start plagiarizing your press releases.
There is no better place to master the art of mock-election rigging -- and there is no better master than Morton Blackwell, who invented the trick in 1964 and has been teaching it ever since. Blackwell's half-century career in conservative grass-roots politics coincides neatly with the fortunes of the conservative movement: He was there when Goldwater lost, when Southern voters abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, and when the Moral Majority began its harvest of evangelical Christian voters. In the 1970s, Blackwell worked with conservative direct-mail king Richard Viguerie; in 1980, he led Reagan's youth campaign. Recently, he's been fighting to save Tom DeLay's job.
Yet Blackwell's foundation, the Leadership Institute, is not a Republican organization. It's a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charity, drawing the overwhelming majority of its $9.1 million annual budget from tax-deductible donations. Despite its legally required "neutrality," the institute is one of the best investments the conservative movement has ever made. Its walls are plastered with framed headshots of former students -- hundreds of state and local legislators sprinkled with smiling members of the U.S. Congress, and even the perky faces of two recently crowned Miss Americas. Thirty-five years ago, Blackwell dispatched a particularly promising 17-year-old pupil named Karl Rove to run a youth campaign in Illinois; Jeff Gannon, a far less impressive student, attended the Leadership Institute's Broadcast Journalism School....
It's an approach, Murray believes, that has long since paid off. "Sure, [Blackwell] has trained Karl Rove and Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist and 223 other legislators and members of Congress," Murray notes, "but more importantly, he's trained 40,000 other local organizers." The institute's graduates, in other words, are part of a movement. "We spent $2 billion trying to win this last election," Murray says of progressives. "They already spent 25 years, and nearly $100 million, building the talent pool that won the election. And which will consistently win them elections for the next several decades."
The structure of Blackwell's Campus Leadership Program is simple. The Leadership Institute trains promising conservative college graduates over the summer and dispatches them to campuses in the fall with a mandate to start conservative student organizations. Need $500 and some ideas to start a combative right-wing campus publication? The institute would love to help you. Is the campus administration discriminating against your Second Amendment club? The institute will help you take your cause to the Internet. No one on campus at your Christian college has ever heard of the institute? Staffers will be glad to drive down, take you to a steakhouse, and talk it up. Last year, the CLP doubled in size, to 418 clubs and counting. By the end of 2006, Blackwell is confident he will have created 1,000 conservative campus organizations.
----
http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Morton_Blackwell
---
Members of the Leadership Institute have been known to promote racist and radical events. Morgan Brooke Wilkins, a former CRNC field representative, was hired by the group as a Campus Services Coordinator. She was fired from the CRNC for promoting the racist "catch an illegal immigrant day" and an activity where students would shoot cutouts John Kerry and other Democrats. Apparently, when she was too extreme for the College Republicans, she fit right in at the Leadership Institute.
----
My right-wing degree [52], Jeff Horwitz, Salon, May 24, 2005
"Yet Blackwell's foundation, the Leadership Institute, is not a Republican organization. It's a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charity, drawing the overwhelming majority of its $9.1 million annual budget from tax-deductible donations. Despite its legally required "neutrality," the institute is one of the best investments the conservative movement has ever made.
[. . .] Some progressives have come to that conclusion as well. "This was certainly needed 25 years ago," says Peter Murray, of the Center for Progressive Leadership. "Investing beyond any individual election cycle is the way that we're going to develop the progressive movement into a more robust, coordinated, compact force that can win elections." But getting donors to think beyond 2008 is a tough sell."
---
all
From Salon.com
My Right-wing Degree
How I learned to convert liberal campuses into conservative havens at Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, alma mater of Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Jeff Gannon and two Miss Americas.
By Jeff Horwitz
May 24, 2005 | One recent Sunday, at Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute, a dozen students meet for the second and final day of training in grass-roots youth politics. All are earnest, idealistic and as right wing as you can get. They take careful notes as instructor Paul Gourley teaches them how to rig a campus mock election.
It's nothing illegal -- no ballot stuffing necessary, even at the most liberal colleges. First you find a nonpartisan campus group to sponsor the election, so you can't be accused of cheating. Next, volunteer to organize the thing. College students are lazy, and they'll probably let you. Always keep in mind that a rigged mock election is all about location, location, location.
"Can anyone tell me," asks Gourley, a veteran mock electioneer, "why you don't want the polling place in the cafeteria?"
Stephen, a shy antiabortion activist sitting toward the rear of the class, raises his hand: "Because you want to suppress the vote?"
"Stephen has the right answer!" Gourley exclaims, tossing Stephen his prize, a copy of Robert Bork's "Slouching Toward Gomorrah."
The students, strait-laced kids from good colleges, seem unconvinced. The lesson -- that with sufficient organization, the act of voting becomes less a basic right than a tactical maneuver -- doesn't sit easy with some students at first. Gourley, a charismatic senior from South Dakota and the treasurer of the College Republican National Committee, assures them: "This is not anti-democracy. This is not shady. Just put [the polling place] somewhere where you might have to put a little bit of effort into voting." The rest, Gourley explains, is just a matter of turnout.
When the state or national candidate you're backing wins by a suitably large margin, as he or she surely will, have the nonpartisan group that sponsored the election sign off on your prewritten celebratory press release and send it statewide. Reporters will almost certainly ignore it, but after a dozen similar victories, they'll start dashing off articles about the youth phenomenon behind your candidate's campaign -- or better yet, just start plagiarizing your press releases.
There is no better place to master the art of mock-election rigging -- and there is no better master than Morton Blackwell, who invented the trick in 1964 and has been teaching it ever since. Blackwell's half-century career in conservative grass-roots politics coincides neatly with the fortunes of the conservative movement: He was there when Goldwater lost, when Southern voters abandoned the Democratic Party in droves, and when the Moral Majority began its harvest of evangelical Christian voters. In the 1970s, Blackwell worked with conservative direct-mail king Richard Viguerie; in 1980, he led Reagan's youth campaign. Recently, he's been fighting to save Tom DeLay's job.
Yet Blackwell's foundation, the Leadership Institute, is not a Republican organization. It's a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charity, drawing the overwhelming majority of its $9.1 million annual budget from tax-deductible donations. Despite its legally required "neutrality," the institute is one of the best investments the conservative movement has ever made. Its walls are plastered with framed headshots of former students -- hundreds of state and local legislators sprinkled with smiling members of the U.S. Congress, and even the perky faces of two recently crowned Miss Americas. Thirty-five years ago, Blackwell dispatched a particularly promising 17-year-old pupil named Karl Rove to run a youth campaign in Illinois; Jeff Gannon, a far less impressive student, attended the Leadership Institute's Broadcast Journalism School.
The institute's classes aren't tickets into an exclusive and shadowy club, however: I am also an institute graduate. In March, I attended its Youth Leadership School, a one-weekend, 28-hour crash course in political organizing. Registration was open to the public and cost $60, which got me a sourcebook, six free meals, up to three nights in a dorm, and a six-hour lecture on political principles delivered by the 65-year-old Blackwell himself. The morning I arrived at the Leadership Institute, I identified myself as a reporter for Salon. "That's great," said communications director Michelle Miller. By the end of the weekend, Blackwell took me on a tour of the headquarters, chatted with me for nearly an hour, and gave me a copy of the institute's antisocialism in-house film, "The Roots of the Ultra Left." The institute is a very friendly place.
Over the last 25 years, more than 40,000 young conservatives have been trained at the institute's Arlington, Va., headquarters in everything from TV makeup for aspiring right-wing talking heads to prep courses for the State Department's Foreign Service exam. Classes are taught by volunteers recruited from the ranks of the conservative movement's most talented organizers, operatives and communicators.
The Leadership Institute has succeeded, in part, because it's had little to no competition from the left. College campuses may still be havens for liberal thought, but the right-wing students are the ones organized enough to win major battles. Perhaps expecting that American youth would organize themselves as they did in decades past, progressive organizations have been outstripped by their conservative counterparts in professionalizing the ragtag world of college activism. "When it comes to campus controversy, from affirmative action to free speech, the right wing pumps in money and expertise and shows [students] how to out-hustle their opponents," says David Halperin of the liberal Center for American Progress.
Still, Blackwell says conservatives are underdogs on college campuses. Conservative students may be better organized, but they're still outnumbered. The Leadership Institute contends that liberal higher education is robbing the conservative movement of new blood -- and thereby handicapping the institute's efforts. "You know, the most conservative students are the freshmen," Blackwell told me. "There is an acculturation there."
And that's where the institute is taking its fight. For most of its 25-year history, it has focused on grooming students to work in conservative politics; it's now increasingly devoting its efforts to making campuses more conservative places. Through its Campus Leadership Program, the institute is leading a growing effort to found and support a national network of conservative student groups and publications capable of permanently altering the intellectual and social environment of universities to conservatives' advantage. That goal alone is a stark rejection of the standard conservative complaint that post-Vietnam War higher education is not just grossly liberal, but irredeemably so. Already, the program has shown considerable success. Asked about his campus initiative, Blackwell simply says, "You're talking about the major project for the rest of my life."
In the wake of the 2004 election, some progressive groups have been working to reinforce their positions on campus. Last February, the Center for American Progress launched Campus Progress, a student activism support center, to combat what Halperin describes as "30 years of effective organizing" by conservative groups like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Young Americans for Freedom, and of course, the Leadership Institute. But Blackwell is unfazed by the competition. "If they asked me, which they haven't, I could let them know that it's a lot harder than it appeared on the surface," he told me. "You've got to work years before you see any results."
And Blackwell has put in those years. A young Louisiana Republican in the days when Democrats owned every statewide office, he cut his political teeth on Barry Goldwater's doomed 1964 presidential bid. "Don't fully trust anyone until he has stuck with a good cause which he saw was losing," is an institute maxim rooted in Blackwell's own political education. "After Goldwater's defeat, the number of people who would admit to being movement conservatives could all have fit into an average phone booth," Blackwell said in an interview. "And among us, we didn't have a dime for a telephone call."
That was a long time ago. According to Blackwell, allied "movement conservatives" took the first steps toward outmaneuvering their party's moribund minority leadership in the '70s. More than a test of character, conservatism's formerly abject status provided the key to those gains. With a wealth of political talent but few resources or constituencies, conservatives had no choice but to look beyond the two- and four-year cycles that dictate traditional political strategy. Instead of fighting an intra-party struggle they were certain to lose, they built an infrastructure outside the Republican Party dedicated to promoting talent, not winning the next election.
The Leadership Institute is a perfect example of that strategy, according to Peter Murray, a progressive management trainer who studied the institute's model before launching his own nonprofit political training organization, the Center for Progressive Leadership, last year. "Being a 501(c)(3) not only means they can get tax deductions for their donors and build endowments, but they're forced to look long term," Murray says. "They're not allowed to endorse candidates and get sucked into electoral politics. Year in and year out, all they do is build leaders."
It's an approach, Murray believes, that has long since paid off. "Sure, [Blackwell] has trained Karl Rove and Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist and 223 other legislators and members of Congress," Murray notes, "but more importantly, he's trained 40,000 other local organizers." The institute's graduates, in other words, are part of a movement. "We spent $2 billion trying to win this last election," Murray says of progressives. "They already spent 25 years, and nearly $100 million, building the talent pool that won the election. And which will consistently win them elections for the next several decades."
The structure of Blackwell's Campus Leadership Program is simple. The Leadership Institute trains promising conservative college graduates over the summer and dispatches them to campuses in the fall with a mandate to start conservative student organizations. Need $500 and some ideas to start a combative right-wing campus publication? The institute would love to help you. Is the campus administration discriminating against your Second Amendment club? The institute will help you take your cause to the Internet. No one on campus at your Christian college has ever heard of the institute? Staffers will be glad to drive down, take you to a steakhouse, and talk it up. Last year, the CLP doubled in size, to 418 clubs and counting. By the end of 2006, Blackwell is confident he will have created 1,000 conservative campus organizations.
Unlike chapter-based political organizations, CLP clubs are unaffiliated with either the Leadership Institute or each other. According to Blackwell, this trait offers a serious advantage: "No purges." The clubs' independence also comes with the benefit of plausible deniability. "You can get away with stuff that you would take a lot of flak for doing in the College Republicans," says CLP director Dan Flynn. "Because we're independent, we can do activities that push the envelope," agrees University of Miami senior Sarah Canale, whose CLP-organized Advocates for Conservative Thought threw an affirmative action bake sale last year in which the price of a cupcake varied according to the race of its buyer. That it was controversial, she believes, was a victory in itself.
The Leadership Institute teaches the same principle. Controlled controversy -- making your point in a manner so bombastic that your opponents blow their cool -- is a Blackwell specialty. Before the 2004 Republican Convention, the conservative elder personally went to a drugstore and bought little pink heart stickers, bandages and purple nail polish. At home, he made the "Purple Heart Band-Aids" that he later distributed in Madison Square Garden to mock John Kerry's war wounds. From Blackwell's perspective, the Kerry camp's outrage at the gag was a tactical disaster. Democratic Party chairman Terry McAuliffe, Blackwell says, kept the story alive for days by "running around like a chicken with its head cut off."
A stunt is one way to get press -- but a more effective and sustainable method is to start your own publication. The Leadership Institute trains around 250 students yearly in its student publication workshop, and CLP staff assisted in launching 22 campus publications last year alone.
The Rutgers Centurion is a conservative monthly that got off the ground this fall with institute help. Rutgers student James O'Keefe founded the magazine after coming across a conservative publication at Tufts. "I said, why don't we have this?" O'Keefe remembers. He taught himself a page-layout program and got in touch with the Leadership Institute, which dispatched a staffer to take him and his coeditors to dinner at an upscale local brewery. The institute gave O'Keefe books on starting a publication, awarded him a $500 "Balance in Media Grant," and suggested never-fail places on campus to ferret out liberal excess. "They were really excited," O'Keefe recalls.
The Rutgers Centurion has since analyzed faculty campaign contributions that favored John Kerry over George W. Bush 104 times over, and it accused one of Rutgers' most esteemed alumni, African-American author and actor Paul Robeson, of being a Stalinist. The magazine has published poetry about abortion from a fetus's point of view and run allegations of prejudice against Condoleezza Rice, "The Black Woman Liberals Love to Hate."
The Centurion's favorite subject, however, seems to be people who don't like the Centurion. Rutgers student Tabitha Rice earned the February "Liberal of the Month" title for allegedly defacing copies of the Centurion's previous issue, and in the spirit of Valentine's Day, the editors framed an excerpt from their hate mail -- "'F* [The editors of The Centurion.] F* Them till they're dead'" -- in a heart-shaped box.
The Centurion's assertion that campus liberals are intolerant lends its vitriolic criticism of leftists the veneer of the free speech movement. CLP coordinator Flynn, the author of "Why the Left Hates America," recalls that during a speech at Berkeley, he encountered "a Nazi-style book burning" of his work and an attempt to rip his microphone cord from the wall. That might not have quite the allure of Mario Savio's rallying a crowd from a squad car's roof during Berkeley's student protests, but it's a start.
CLP publications play a crucial role in publicizing such run-ins. Right-wing watchdog groups like Accuracy in Media have railed against liberal bias in the classroom for years, but as outsiders, they lack both standing and a direct connection to campus life. CLP publications have both, allowing them to monitor bias in every classroom. In December, the editor of the Louisville Patriot, a CLP-organized publication at the University of Louisville, reported that sociology lecturer John McTighe had made a very, very tasteless joke about how religious conservatives who had voted for Bush ought to be shot. With sufficient outrage, the story jumped from the Patriot to the local media and the Internet, resulting in McTighe's suspension and a thoroughly public debate of liberal bias in, of all places, Kentucky.
Sparking such scandals is "absolutely" a part of CLP's plan, Blackwell says. "In the last year or so, not taking into account the flap over Ward Churchill, you have no doubt noticed more news coverage about complacent leftists' abuses on campus," he says. "Academia is the last unbreached citadel of the left, and I believe we are today over the moat."
There's still plenty to do before then. Chris Stio, an institute staffer who directed the Bush-Cheney field operations in northeast Michigan, warns his students not to buy into second-term crowing about America's irrevocable slide into conservatism. "Enough people were yelling and screaming about the president that if they'd actually picked up the phone book and started calling, they might have won," he says. "They went to concerts, they bashed the president, but they didn't work. If enough people had, maybe we'd have a different president. The election was not inevitable. And too many think it was."
Some progressives have come to that conclusion as well. "This was certainly needed 25 years ago," says Peter Murray, of the Center for Progressive Leadership. "Investing beyond any individual election cycle is the way that we're going to develop the progressive movement into a more robust, coordinated, compact force that can win elections." But getting donors to think beyond 2008 is a tough sell. "Our budget this year will be just over a million. We'd love to be bigger than that," he says. "It's really going to be up to the progressive donor community as to whether they're going to look long term and invest in a superstructure. If they do, we can build it relatively quickly."
In the meantime, the Leadership Institute will continue its work. Blackwell has found plenty of humor in his recent vilification as the evil genius that smoothed fake reporter Jeff Gannon's path to White House press briefings. "If they want to believe that there's a vast conspiracy, and they want to waste their time trying to decide who gives all the orders to the conservative movement, well, let 'em spend their time on that," he says, laughing.
The Leadership Institute has better things to do, Blackwell says, than conspire to put a male escort up to lobbing softballs to White House spokesman Scott McClellan. For example, training the next generation of Karl Roves.
"Everyone knows that for certain breeds of dogs it is customary to cut their tails short when they are a few weeks old," begins Blackwell's lecture to us on the importance of releasing negative information on your opponent incrementally. "Every time you clip the puppy's tail it hurts. It hurts. You might traumatize the puppy for life."
"The moral is that if it's your tail that's being clipped, you want it clipped once," concludes Blackwell. "But if you get a chance to clip your opponent's tail, clip that puppy as often as you can."
It may be hardball, but it isn't cheating, and it would be far less effective if it were. "These are powerful techniques," Blackwell tells the class at the end of his marathon lecture. "So I don't want anyone going out of here and acting unethically. It's not necessary."
About the writer
Jeff Horwitz, a former editorial fellow at Salon, writes for the Washington City Paper.
</font></div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font>