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mta? doku ‘Bad Faith’ a Must-See for Americans Concerned About Christian Nationalism

as the aggressive Christian nationalism that infuses the MAGA movement and Republican Party intensifies, journalists and filmmakers are paying closer attention to the threat this political ideology and its adherents pose to freedom in America. A must-watch new documentary, “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy,” will be available for streaming on AppleTV, Amazon Prime, and Google Play beginning Friday, April 26.

Directed by Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones and narrated by Peter Coyote, “Bad Faith” makes masterful use of archival and current footage of Christian nationalist religious and political figures, infographics, and interviews with scholars, religious leaders, political analysts, and even a former Trump administration official.

The film draws a compelling through line from the scheming power-building of Paul Weyrich, the right-wing operative who recruited Jerry Falwell and other evangelical preachers to create the religious-right as a political movement in the late 1970s, to the institution-destroying antidemocratic ambitions of MAGA insiders like Steve Bannon, as well as Donald Trump’s dominionist “prophets” and “apostles” and the Jan. 6 insurrectionists they inspired.

As Owen Gleiberman noted in a review for Variety, “what sounded like crackpot raving” from Weyrich’s tear-it-all-down manifesto 15 years ago is “now the cutting edge of the mainstream Republican Party.”

“Bad Faith” explains how that transformation happened, documenting the role played by the Council for National Policy, a partnership between anti-regulation, economically libertarian oil barons and the religious-right leaders who intended to remake the Republican Party, take over the Supreme Court, and use their political power to enforce “traditional” views of family, sexuality, and gender on the rest of the nation.

The Koch brothers poured tens of millions of dollars into “a state-of-the-art political data platform” that Council for National Policy groups use to collect personal information—including personal mental health, behavioral health, and treatment data—and use that information to micro-target individuals. (In “God & Country,” another documentary released earlier this year, Ralph Reed is shown bragging that his organization tracked “147 different data points” on the conservative Christians they targeted for turnout operations.)

“Bad Faith” also connects the modern Christian nationalist movement to a longer history. As the Rev. William Barber points out in the film, the use of religion to justify “all kinds of evils” is not a new phenomenon. At its peak in 1924, the KKK claimed 8 million members, mostly white evangelicals. Linda Gordon, author of “The Second Coming of the KKK,” describes that movement’s belief that new immigrants were subverting the destiny of America to be a white Protestant country. Sound familiar?

Sociologist Samuel Perry notes in the film that Christian Nationalism emerges at times of cultural conflict when those in power—mostly White Christian men—think their power is threatened. Randall Balmer, author of a 2021 book that shares the “Bad Faith” title, describes how court rulings challenging the tax-exempt status of racially segregationist schools, not abortion, motivated evangelical leaders to seek political power in the 1970s. They settled on abortion as a more politically palatable motivator than the defense of racial segregation. As “Freedom Road” author Lisa Sharon Harper notes, religious-right activists targeting the Supreme Court waved the banner of abortion in order to advance white supremacy.

As “Bad Faith” makes clear, religious-right leaders viewed Trump as a powerful blunt weapon in a long-term political and spiritual war against the federal government and institutions dominated by progressive forces. “The Council’s gambit had paid off,” the film notes about Trump’s time in office. “Christian nationalists were firmly embedded at the highest levels of government. The Supreme Court had an absolute majority of justices poised to overturn landmark civil and women’s rights decisions. Paul Weyrich’s vision of a Christian nation was becoming a reality.”

That explains why Christian nationalist leaders were willing to dismantle democracy to keep Trump in power. Members of the Council for National Policy and its political action arm went into “full combat mode” to promote Trump’s big lie, and, as Right Wing Watch documented, they supportedhis efforts to keep power after the 2020 election, portraying it as a holy war between the forces of good and evil. As Samuel Perry notes in the film, viewing politics as spiritual warfare between the forces of God and Satan makes it easy for those who see themselves on God’s side to “justify just about anything.”

While Rev. William Barber offers “Bad Faith” viewers hope that a nationwide justice-seeking movement can reach some of the people who have embraced the Christian nationalist movement, the documentary also argues that our democracy is more fragile that most Americans understand. The Republican Party, says strategist Steve Schmidt, is “more extreme, more dangerous, more committed to the autocratic project of gaining power than it was on Jan. 6, 2021. And this has to be confronted. And there is no issue that supersedes it.”

The Christian nationalist movement is going all-out to put Trump back in power, and its Project 2025 is preparing to “take the reins of government” if he wins. But the political infrastructure built by the Christian right and its allies is far bigger than Trump himself. “Regardless of what happens to Donald Trump, it’s the machinery of the Council for National Policy that has the staying power,” says Anne Nelson, author of “Shadow Network.” “And it’s that machinery that presents the lasting threat to our democracy.”

*“Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy”is a Panarea Production. Directed, Produced and Written by Stephen Ujlaki. Co-Director/Co-Producer: Chris Jones. Executive Producers: Peter D. Graves, John Ptak, Todd Stiefel, Mike Steed. Co-Producer: Doug Blush.

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former President Donald Trump received a rapturous hero’s welcome Saturday night as he delivered the closing keynote address to a room packed with religious-right activists in Washington, D.C. for the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference.

Trump knew his audience. “We are warriors in a righteous crusade to stop the arsonists, atheists, globalists, and the Marxists,and we will restore our republic as one nation under God with liberty and justice for all,” Trump said. As part of his typically long and rambling speech, he denounced his recent indictments, bragged about his administration’s accomplishments–including his Supreme Court justices cementing the right-wing majority to overturn Roe v. Wade—and declared that Democrats have become “monsters.”

Trump thrilled the crowd with promises about what he would do as the 47th president, saying, “When I get back in the Oval Office,I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”And he vowed to push “school choice” plans—which divert public education dollars into private and religious schools and homeschooling—and, oddly, called for public school principals to be chosen by direct election by parents.

Trump’s speech and others at the conference signaled the issues and strategies around which the MAGA movement is mobilizing to try to take power in the 2024 elections: waging war on “wokeness,” demeaning transgender people and calling for institutionalized discrimination against them, mocking corporate support for diversity, equity, and environmental protection, and, in the name of parents’ rights,purging schools and libraries of materials that do not align with MAGA activists’ political and religious worldviews.

Trump’s speech was preceded byawards given to right-wing movement fundraising godfather Richard Viguerie and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Viguerie declared that the nation is in “a spiritual civil war” that “the left has launched against Western civilization, America, our Constitution, Judeo-Christian moral values, and much else we value at home.” Viguerie encouraged activists to get more involved in any way they can, signing off with, “Good night, ladies and gentlemen. See you on the battlefield of the spiritual civil war, and don’t be late!”

Viguerie was not the only speaker equating American politics with spiritual warfare. Huckabee said that “the battle that we’re facing in this country is not a political battle. And it’s not an economic fight. And it’s not a sociological fight. It is a spiritual battle between the forces of evil and good.” Huckabee concluded with, “Let’s not give up, because the battle is not over, folks. It’s just getting started.”

Earlier in the conference, Christian nationalist and anti-LGBTQ North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson drew cheers when he declared, “This nation is at war, and we need a warrior at the helm,” and endorsed Trump’s bid to return to the White House. Robinson noted his own campaign for governor, and compared himself to the Union soldiers at Gettysburg, the Marines on Iwo Jima, and civil rights marchers, and insisted that he only looks “crazy” to people who are “insane.”

Before Saturday night’s gala, activists heard from nearly all the Republican presidential candidates, hard-right Republican elected officials, and MAGA movement activists likeKari Lake, the defeated-but-still-refusing-to-admit-it candidate for Arizona governor in 2022.

Trump’s major contender for the Republican nomination, Florida’s authoritarian Gov. Ron DeSantis, was greeted enthusiastically on Friday—giving a stump speech attacking “the woke mind virus” and declaring “We did not start this fire, but as president of the United States, I will lead the effort to extinguish the fire of cultural Marxism once and for all.”DeSantis pledged to “discipline” the federal bureaucracy, “impose our will on it,” and turn the Justice Department “inside out.”

At the beginning of Road to Majority, Reed urged participants to treat all speakers respectfully, which most did until former New JerseyGov. Chris Christie had the audacity to question Trump’s character and tell activists that Trump had let them down—eliciting a chorus of boos.

The conference kicked off at a Thursday afternoon “town hall” on Capitol Hill, where Faith and Freedom founder Ralph Reed told the audience that God told him to create the organization because Christians who love this country and love God “should be the head and not the tail, and at the top and not the bottom of our political system.” Among the members of Congress who spoke were Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty and Reps. Jim Banks, Patrick McHenry, Burgess Owens, Alex Mooney, and Tom Emmer—who spent much of his speech attacking the government of his own state of Minnesota.

Other speakers sounded Christian nationalist themes, including former Trump faith advisor Paula White, who declared, “We were established as a nation under God,” and Lake, who said, “With God on our side, nothing can stop us from taking back this government.”

At a panel featuring African American speakers representing the seven “mountains” in Seven Mountains Dominionism, Florida congressional candidate Carla Spalding declared that public officials must “write laws that are going to be according to the Bible” and if they don’t, “one by one we get them out.” Other speakers on the panel include anti-abortion activist Alveda King and failed congressional candidates Kim Klacik and Mark Burns. Burns is a Trump-promoting Christian nationalist pastor fond of warfare rhetoric; he spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally on the eve of the Capitol insurrection, where he declared that the attempt to deny Trump a second term was “a demonic attack from the gates of Hell” and insisted that Joe Biden would “never” become president.

In addition to the relentless invocations of “wokeness” and its variants—Indiana representative and Senate candidate Jim Banks bragged about creating an “Anti-Woke Caucus” among House Republicans—speakers frequently denounced transgender people and their supporters, the “deep state,” and corporations that consider diversity and environmental consequences in their investment decision-making.

Another theme running through the conference—which fell on the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade—was the need for Republican candidates to deflect focus from their unpopular abortion ban laws by portraying pro-choice Democrats as the “real extremists”—complete with lies from Trump and others that Democrats support killing babies after they are born.

Feminism itself—now “woke feminism”—continues to be a target of the religious-right movement. Nick Adams, a right-wing activist who immigrated to the U.S. from Australia, claimed that men are the most persecuted and maligned demographic in the world. “Every single problem in America today can be traced back to the absence of strength, strength that can come only from real men, genuine masculinity, and an alpha male mindset,” he said.

Also on display was the right-wing political strategy of “parents’ rights” as a rallying cry and voter mobilization tool. Moms for Liberty, a group founded to resist mask requirements that moved quickly into promoting book bans, school board takeovers, anti-LGBTQ smears, and authoritarian politics in general, had a significant presence at Road to Majority, which was held just a week before their own national summit in Philadelphia. During Q&A at a panel on school choice, M4L’s national director Catalina Stubbe calledteachers unions “enemies” and claimed that public schools are “abusing” and “indoctrinating” children.From the main stage, M4L cofounder Tiffany Justice claimed that “our parental rights are being obliterated by our government every single day.” She said that the group’s 135,000 members in close to 300 chapters spread out over 45 states are “unifying” their communities, a laughable assertion given the anger and chaos they have created at school board meetings and after they take over school boards.

In its speakers and panels, the Faith and Freedom Coalition made an effort to highlight its outreach to conservative Black and Hispanic Christians, a group that the Republican Party hopes to win over in greater numbers in 2024 and beyond. The 2024 elections were a major focus of conference speakers, and not just the presidential candidates. Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Adam Pipkin described the organization’s turnout strategies, including its use of postal change of address data to track targeted voters and make sure they update their registrations, and evangelical church-based ballot harvesting operations in Californiaand other states where permitted by law.

While Reed and the Faith and Freedom Coalition gave a platform to major, minor and relatively unheard of Republican presidential candidates,Road to Majority made it utterly clear that it is Donald Trump who has won the hearts of these activists, and that they will do everything they can to once again put him in the White House so that he can wage merciless war against the Americans they view as their common enemies.

Tags: Alex Mooney Bill Hagerty Burgess Owens Carla Spalding Catalina Stubbe Donald Trump Jim Banks Kari Lake Kimberly Klacik Mark Burns Mark Robinson Marsha Blackburn Mike Huckabee Patrick McHenry Paula White Ralph Reed Richard Viguerie Ron DeSantis Tiffany Justice Tom Emmer Anti-Abortion Anti-Choice Anti-LGBTQ Christian Nationalist Civil War Election 2024 Road to Majority Conference Spiritual Warfare Faith and Freedom Coalition Moms for Liberty Republican Party

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/libre-initiative-promotes-ideology-over-evidence-on-d-c-vouchers/

The LIBRE Initiative, the Koch brothers’ organization that promotes right-wing economic ideology to Latinos, put out a press releaseon Friday celebrating that Congress had tucked into the recent budget bill a three-year reauthorization for the private school voucher program that it had originally imposed on the District of Columbia during the George W. Bush administration.

While LIBRE President Daniel Garza claimed that “educational choice programs offer tremendous potential benefits to Latinos and others around the country,” the evidence suggests that the D.C. voucher program hurts rather than helps student achievement.

LIBRE’s press release claimedthat “there is growing evidence that this program is effective at breaking the link between poverty and poor education.” Really? The press release links “growing evidence” to an article from 2009. Meanwhile, just last month, the U.S. Department of Education published an evaluation that found that students using a voucher to attend private schools score worse in math a year later than their counterparts who applied for a voucher but were not offered one. Reading scores for voucher students were also lower, but not by a statistically significant amount.

As PFAW’s blog noted at the time:

These results throw more cold water on voucher supporters’ enthusiasm for the program, but history suggests that privatization advocates are not deterred by dismal data. That’s whyone scholar called the nomination of voucher cheerleader Betsy DeVos to be Secretary of Education “a triumph of ideology over evidence that should worry anyone who wants to improve results for children.”

In March, members of the DC Council sent a letter to Rep Jason Chaffetz, chair of the Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, opposing reauthorization of the program, which the councilmembers wrote “should be phased out because participation in the program and similar initatives has not only failed to improve students’ academic performance, but worsened it, as found in a series of recent studies.”

People For the American Way and the African American Ministers In Action were among 62 organizations that signed a National Coalition for Public Education letter opposing reauthorization of the program, which the signers said “has proven ineffective and unaccountable to taxpayers.”

The recent Department of Education analysis wasn’t the first bad news for the D.C. voucher program. A 2012 Washington Post investigation found that quality control and accountability were lacking.

Last year People For the American Way worked with Brave New Films to release “Koch Brothers Exposed,” which explains how LIBRE fits the Koch Brothers’ larger strategy to promote right-wing economic policies.

LIBRE’s Daniel Garza was listed earlier this year at #19 on right-wing site Newsmax’s list of 50 most influential Latino Republicans; Garza ally Samuel Rodriguez was next on the list at #20. Two other LIBRE spokespersons, Marilinda Garcia and Rachel Campos-Duffy, also made the top 50. In 2013, at a prayer breakfast organized by Religious Right operative Ralph Reed,Campos-Duffy criticized school breakfast programs for low-income students, saying they hurt family bonding by giving parents an excuse not to make breakfast for their own kids.

Although LIBRE and the Koch Brothers have had their disputes with Trump, a high-level former LIBRE and Americans for Prosperity staffer Andeliz Castillo joined Vice President Mike Pence’s staff this year, part of a wave of Koch-connected people moving into senior administration positions.

More information on the LIBRE Initiative is available in our 2015 Right Wing Watch In Focus report.

Tags: Andeliz Castillo Daniel Garza Donald Trump Marilinda Garcia Mike Pence Rachel Campos Duffy Koch Brothers Public Education Vouchers LIBRE Initiative

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/chrisitan-nationalism/

Most of the far-right extremist movements that arose online and then in real life over the past decade—the alt-right, white nationalists, and other authoritarian proto-fascists—have been generally ecumenical and areligious in their rhetorical appeals and organizing, other than their frequent expressions of antisemitism. But that’s beginning to change, as Jack Jenkins explored this week at the Washington Post.

With “Groyper” leader Nick Fuentes leading the way, it’s becoming much more common to hear them embracing Christian nationalism—an ideology long embraced by the larger radical right, particularly the so-called “Patriot” movement. Moreover, a number of these white nationalists appear to be pushing even farther into a particularly ugly—and previously stagnant—brand of religious nationalism: Christian Identity, the bigoted theological movement claiming that white people are the true “Children of Israel,”that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan, and that all nonwhite people are soulless “mud people.”

As Jenkins reports, since the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, Fuentes’ white-nationalist “America First” organization has increasingly employed Christian nationalist rhetoric: Chanting “Christ is King” at the antiabortion “March for Life” last week and at anti-vaccine protests, using crucifixes as protest symbols, and similar rhetorical appeals. In a speech at the America First conference in Orlando in March at which he declared America “a Christian nation,” Fuentes warned his audience that America will cease to be America “if it loses its White demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ.”

“Christian nationalism—and even the idea of separatism, with a subtext of White, Christian and conservative-leaning [influences]—took a more dominant role in the way that extremist groups talk to each other and try to propagandize in public,” Jared Holt of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab told Jenkins.

Christian nationalism has long been a feature of the nation’s extremist right, dating back to the original Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and its later version in the 1920s.Fuentes’s rhetoric “could have come word-for-word from a Klan speech in 1922,” historian Kelly J. Baker told Jenkins. “The Klan’s goal here was patriotism and nationalism, but it was combined with their focus on White Christianity.”

This worldview was a powerful animating force at the Jan. 6 insurrection, embodied by the moment when the self-described “Patriots” entered the vacated Senate chambers, took over the dais, and proceeded to share a prayer led by Jacob “QAnon Shaman” Chansley.

captured by The New Yorker shows the moment: One insurrectionist shouts, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” The men bellow “Amen!” Then Chansley begins to lead them in prayer, saying: “Thank you heavenly father for gracing us with this opportunity tostand up for our God-given inalienable rights.” He also thanks God for allowing them to “exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.”

He concluded: “Thank you for allowing the United States of America to bereborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”

As historian Katherine Stewart explained in the New York Times:

A final precondition for the coup attempt was the belief, among the target population, that the legitimacy of the United States government derives from its commitment to a particular religious and cultural heritage, and not from its democratic form. It is astonishing to many that the leaders of the Jan. 6 attack on the constitutional electoral process styled themselves as “patriots.” But it makes a glimmer of sense once you understand that their allegiance is to a belief in blood, earth and religion, rather than to the mere idea of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A number of the groups, notably the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who led the insurrection similarly voiced their affinity for Christian nationalism. The morning of Jan. 6, as Jenkins reports, a group of Proud Boys led by Ethan Nordean—the primary leader of the men who later spearheaded the siege of the Capitol, were seen praying together.

At a gathering of Proud Boys near the Washington Monument on Dec. 11 by independent journalist Dakota Santiago for Religion News Service,Nordean had spoken about “sacrificing ourselves for our country” while speaking at an impromptu Proud Boys rally near the Washington Monument, according to footage provided to Religion News Service (RNS) by independent journalist Dakota Santiago.

Nordean—a notorious street brawler nicknamed “Rufio Panman”—described an epiphany he had during a protest about Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross:

I had a moment of realization where I was like, “You know what, I’m going to be diehard about everything in my life. I’m gonna be real.” Because everything that we have sacrificed—because you know how hard it is in this environment that we live in—it is time that you rise to the occasion. Be real.

Now you may not believe in that, but it’s important in the very least for my case for me, because this man did this thing. Just as we sacrifice ourselves for our country. A man provides and protects even when he’s not loved. That is what we do. We are hated but we do it in anyway, we keep showing up every day and we protect these people from these tyrannical dictators.

The same religious fervor has intensified in the aftermath of the insurrection, particularly as “Patriot” movement believers and their mainstream Republican enablers have doubled down with a gaslighting narrative insisting that what happened Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection, it was a righteous protest by Real Americans.

That narrative has been ardently adopted by Christian nationalists like the Trump supporters interviewed earlier this month by NPR:

Outside on the walkway, Murray Clemetson stands with an armful of hand-made signs he brought to church, such as, "Set the DC Patriots Free" and "We Are Americans, Not Terrorists." The law-school student and father of three —all home-schooled— was at the "Stop The Steal" rally in Washington, D.C., last year.

"The only insurrection that happened on Jan. 6 was by the agent provocateurs, paid actors, and corrupt police and FBI," he says, disputing all the evidence made public in the more than 700 criminal cases that the rioters were Trump fanatics.

The church the interviewers reported from is Ken Peters’ Patriot Church in Tennessee, one of the nation’s most prominent Christian nationalist congregations. Peters is a rabidly pro-Trump pastor who has appeared onstage in recent months with Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” conspiracy theorist who claims Donald Trump was the victim of election fraud. Peters also spoke to the crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5 at a pre-rally for the next day’s “Stop the Steal” protest that devolved into the Capitol insurrection.

Peters’ predilection for linking arms with violent white-nationalist thugs like the Proud Boys manifested itself in summer 2021 in Salem, Oregon, outside a Planned Parenthood clinic targeted by Peters’ “Church at Planned Parenthood” campaign. A phalanx of Proud Boys provided “security” for the event, including notorious brawler Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, currently in jail awaiting trial on assault charges.

The sermon Peters delivered during NPR’s visit to his church turned asimilarly convenient blind eye to Donald Trump’s manifest flaws as a Christian hero."We consider the left in our nation today to be a giant bully,” Peters said. “And when there is a bully on the schoolyard and somebody rises up and punches back, 'Hallelujah!' So we are thankful for Trump."

Then he added: "But you know what? If Trump passes away tomorrow, God forbid, does that stop us? Does that slow us down? Not one bit. We'll be looking for the next guy to lead the way."

Indeed, the long-term determination of Christian nationalists to impose a narrow sectarian view on American government and society are reflected in its legislative assault on state laws, an attempt to reshape U.S. laws from the ground up as well as the top down. Their program “Project Blitz,” revealed by journalist Frederick Clarkson in 2018—a detailed and complex system of proposed legislation with which Christian nationalist beliefs are gradually embedded within state laws—is only one example of the breadth and depth of their assault on liberal democracy.

"The use of Christian symbols, iconography, Scripture in efforts to dominate and exclude are as old the republic itself," Rev. Fred Davie, executive vice president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, told Trevor Hughes of *USA Today*. "It's deeply baked into our nation. It's deep, but it's also been proven time and time again to be wrong."

While many Christian nationalists are grounded in more traditional evangelical views, there is also a component who are cynically embracing religious fervor as a way of broadening their community of white supremacists and expanding their recruitment base.

"For them, it's just shorthand for identity," Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Hughes. "There absolutely is a connection between far-right political extremism and far-right religious extremism, but I doubt these people are showing up at church every Sunday and reading their Bibles."

Research sociologist Matthew DeMichele told Hughes that many of today's religious displays are an "intense redeployment of old tactics."

"People don't want to say that this is a country founded on white supremacy. But we know that to be true," DeMichele said. "It's very important to understand that it's not new for white supremacists to have a Christian identity. But it is intriguing there has been the strengthening overlap of the white nationalists and those of Christian Identity."

The striking aspect of the surge of Christian nationalism has been its ability to unify sectors of the radical right, from militia-oriented “Patriots” to bigoted white nationalists to conspiracists like the authoritarian QAnon cult.Alex Newhouse, deputy director of theCenter on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies . Besides faith, told Jenkins that social media have been powerful vectors for this confluence.

“This unification is pretty unprecedented,” Newhouse said. “The infusion of Christian nationalism throughout that unification process has been particularly interesting and, in my opinion, is going to end up being pretty dangerous.”

Newhouse particularly has noticed a sudden uptick, since 2019, of interest in Christian Identity, the infamous religious movement long associated with neo-Nazis, particularly the Aryan Nations operation in the northern Idaho Panhandle between 1978 and 2000, which was an Identity church. Newhouse noted that Christian nationalist appeals may “disguise a much more dangerous uptick in adoption of Christian Identity.”

One of the leading voices in this resurgence of Identity beliefs, Newhouse says, is Kyle Chapman, the cofounder of the Proud Boys-affiliated Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knightswho later attempted to create an explicitly racist and antisemitic offshoot called “Proud Goys.” (Chapman is currently awaiting trial in Idaho on charges of assaulting a health-care worker when he was hospitalized last November.)

Newhouse said Chapman has been interacting with Christian Identity influencers on the encrypted chat platform Telegram, while “blasting out Christian Identity propaganda.” Another key Trumpist figure—Qanon influencer GhostEzra,who has 300,000 followers on Telegram—posted explicit Identity messages. Identity theology—including references to the “two seedline theory,” which claims that Eve also mated with Satan in the Garden of Eden and thus gave birth to Jews—has been popping up with regularity on QAnon and Proud Boys channels on Telegram, Newhouse reported.

“There’s this gradual move toward a more revolutionary, burn-it-all-down posture, and I think Christian Identity for a lot of these people has become a way for them to organize their thoughts,” he said.

As Stewart explained in the NYT,Christian nationalist beliefs are not merely spreading among far-right extremists. Perhaps even more pernicious is their spread among mainstream conservatives in the media and especially within the Republican Party:

National organizations like the Faith & Freedom Coalition and the Ziklag Group, which bring together prominent Republican leaders with donors and religious right activists, feature “Seven Mountains” workshops and panels at their gatherings. Nationalist leaders and their political dependents in the Republican Party now state quite openly what before they whispered to one another over their prayer breakfasts. Whether the public will take notice remains to be seen.

As I’ve observed previously (while reviewing Stewart’s excellent review of Christian nationalism, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism):When viewed through the lens of its real-world outcomes, fundamentalist Christianity is less a coherent theology than it is a form of spiritual or religious totalitarianism, one that requires abject submission to what is actually a very perverse and narrow interpretation of the meaning of Scripture.

This approach translated naturally into political authoritarianism—the kind that Donald Trump practices. And Trump in turn has proven very adept at feeding the psychological needs of the kinds of personalities that adhere to such movements.

Many leaders of the Christian right like to dress up in red, white, and blue and announce themselves as true patriots. But they are the same people who seek to pervert our institutions, betray our international alliances, treat the Constitution as a subcategory of their holy texts, demean whole segments of the population, foist their authoritarian creed upon other people’s children, and celebrate the elevation of a “king” to the presidency who made a sport out of violating democratic laws and norms.

We can only be grateful that he is out of power now. And it will be incumbent on everyone who treasures their democratic institutions to do everything in their power to defend them against this lethal tide of extremism now.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trump-is-bleeding-support-from-the-only-voters-who-have-stuck-with-him-since-2016/

620 an raw story

Donald Trump is losing support from his evangelical base as he lurches from one crisis into another.

Numerous polls show that religious Americans, like most other Americans, disapprove of the president’s performance, and that could imperil his re-election chances, reported the New York Times.

Nearly 80 percent of white evangelicals — a group that’s already shrinking as a share of the electorate — approved of Trump’s performance in March, but his handling of the coronavirus pandemic has bled 15 points from their support, according to a new poll from Public Religion Research Institute.

“He had an opportunity in March when people were looking to him,” said Robert Jones, the institute’s chief executive, “and then within four weeks he squandered it.”

Those losses could be offset by efforts from activist group’s such as Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition, which plans to spend tens of millions of dollars to identify and register new religious conservative voters and rallying right-wing Christians.

And another PRRI poll from last year found that 31 percent of white evangelical voters said there was almost nothing Trump could do to lose their support.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rise-of-a-shadow-political-party-how-christian-nationalists-worship-power-and-why-they-love-trump/

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Rise of a ‘shadow political party’: How Christian nationalists worship power — and why they love Trump

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon March 4, 2020

It’s one of the most enduring conundrums of the Donald Trump era: How is it that the Christian right, the self-appointed monitors of American morality, have come to so enthusiastically back a thrice-married chronic adulterer who lies as easily as he breathes?

Author Katherine Stewart has the answer: Because the true god these folks worship is power. In her book, “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” Stewart details how she traveled around the country, getting to know the various Christian conservative figures that are whipping support for Trump and his agenda. She deems the “Christian nationalists” and demonstrates how their supposedly Christian values always come second to their endless quest for power.

Stewart spoke with Salon about her new book. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In the intro of the book you write that most Americans view the Christian right as a “cultural movement centered on a set of social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.” But in fact, it’s a political movement and its ultimate goal is power. What do you mean by that?

I think when we think of the religious right, we’re often thinking of a cultural movement or social movement that works from the bottom up, expressing the anxieties and reactions of a particular group in American society to change social realities, focused on issues like reproductive rights or same-sex marriage.But Christian nationalism really works from the top down. It actively shapes and manipulates its target population, and it often shifts its target.

When movement leaders are talking to the congregants or to pastors who speak to congregants, it’s all abortion all the time. The foot soldiers may even believe that they’re fighting for things like a ban on abortion or same-sex marriage, but the leaders have actually consciously reframed these issues in such a way that they can control the vote of a large subsection of the American public. They use that to solidify and maintain political power for themselves and their allies, to increase the flow of public and private money in their direction, and to enact economic policies that are favorable to their funders.

When you dig a little deeper into what the movement leaders talk about when they talk with one another, they actually advocate for a very wide range of policy issues that don’t just have to do with abortion or same-sex marriage. A lot of it has to do with economic policy. A lot of it has to do with foreign policy, social policy. It’s important to look at the movement in this broader fashion as a political movement that wants power.

Tell me more about that. How does someone argue that there’s something Christian about, say, low tax and low regulation?

They say that the Bible favors minimal government or no government. The Bible is against regulation, against the social safety net. Unless the social safety net is managed by the church.

Someone like Ralph Drollinger — who targets political leaders at the top levels of government — he’s got this Bible study group in the Capitol that’s been attended by at least 11 members of Trump’s cabinet, including Mike Pence. He also has Bible study groups targeting the Senate and House of Representatives, and they’re very well-attended. So he’s arguably one of the most politically influential pastors in America.

He argues that social welfare programs have no basis in Scripture. He says that the government should not directly fund needs for the poor. He says the responsibility to meet the needs of the poor lies first with a husband and a marriage, second with a family if the husband is absent, and third with the church. He says nowhere does God command the institutions of government or commerce to fully support those with genuine needs.

These policies are incredibly favorable to the plutocratic fortunes that are funding the movement. The movement wouldn’t be what it is without some subsection of very wealthy individuals and extended families that are supporting the movement financially. I’m thinking of like theDeVos, Prince families, the Green family, and so many others that I described in my book.

These families, in turn, benefit from a deregulation of lack of environmental control regulation, low taxation, and minimal workers’ rights. Drollinger himself derived a lot of his early funding from agribusiness kings, people who own large agribusiness conglomerates in Central Valley,California, and the San Joaquin Valley. So it’s a kind of economic policy that actually is favorable to many of the big-picture funders of the movement.

We also have to recognize that the role of public money is absolutely huge. A lot of the calls for “religious freedom” that characterize much of the activism of the movement today are often seen, rightly so, as a demand that conservative Christians should be able to discriminate against LGBT Americans, nonreligious women and members of the religious minority groups. But even more than that, activists have their eye on a vast potential flow of public funds in the future. This is one of the reasons why the calls for religious freedom are just like this ever-louder drum beat that we’re hearing in so many places.

This agenda has been made really explicit in the field of public educationwhere activists are determined to expand access to public funds in the form of vouchers. They’ve actually placed a key voucher case before the Supreme Court, which they hope will allow a greater funnel of funds in their direction.

The United States spends something like $700 billion a year on K-12. So Christian nationalists realize that, if they can get their hands on a small portion of that in the name of religious liberty, the money will flow without end. So when you look at the larger demands of the movement, it’s not just about these culture war issues, it’s about public policy, foreign policy, and it’s about money.

You call it a Christian nationalist movement, not a white nationalist movement, not the Christian right even. Why do you call it a Christian nationalist movement?

Christian nationalism is a political ideology. It says that what makes the United States distinctive is not our democratic system of government, or our Constitution, or our history of assimilating diverse people in a pluralist society. Instead, it insists that the foundation of legitimate government is bound up inextricably with the reactionary understanding of a particular religion. It basically says that the U.S. was founded on the Bible, and can only succeed if it stays true to that foundation.

It’s also not just an ideology, but a device for mobilizing and often manipulating large segments of the population and for concentrating power in the hands of this new elite. Vladimir Putin in Russia, or Viktor Orban in Hungary, or Erdogan in Turkey tie themselves closely to religious conservatives in their countries, to consolidate an authoritarian form of power. We’re seeing this today with Trump’s alliances, with our own religious conservatives.

You write that America’s conservative churches have been converted into “loyal cells of a shadow political party.” What do you mean by that?

Leaders of the movement have figured out that pastors drive votes, and so they organize pastors into these networks, to get them on the same page politically.They give themtools through networks of conservative churchesin order to do that, to help them turn out votes for hyper-conservative candidates.

Recently, I found myself at a small church in rural North Carolina, with dozens of evangelical pastors from the area. I was at an event sponsored by an organization called Watchmen on the Wall, which is an initiative of the Family Research Council, which is one of the largest and most powerful policy groups of the Christian right.

Watchmen on the Wall claims to have over 25,000 pastor members. They get all these pastors networked together, and they have these presentations where they tell them what issues matter and how to turn out the vote on these “biblical issues.” There wasn’t a slightest doubt about which way these pastors were expected to tell their congregations to vote.

They were instructed to form what they call culture impact teamswithin their churches. They have to figure out which members of their congregation are politically active, well-connected with other members, and motivated to get them to vote according to “biblical values.” They gave these pastors these booklets, 200 pages of material that help them form these culture impact teams.

They actually give them tools to get them out to vote. They give them tens of thousands of voter guides, and pastors were encouraged to take as many as they could use and hand out.

Your chapter on the anti-abortion movement in the book is titled “Inventing Abortion.” You write that it’s a myth that the movement was a reaction to a sincere belief in protecting fetal life. Tell me more. What is this Christian right obsession with abortion? Where does it come from? What is it actually about?

When Roe v. Wade was passed, the liberalization of abortion laws was something that many, if not most, Republican partisans supported. The early battles over abortion tended to be between Catholics and Protestants, with Protestants largely on the side of liberalization of abortion laws. Even though Catholic hierarchy is opposed to abortion, many Catholic individuals supported some form of liberalization based on sort of lived experience.

At that time that Roe v. Wade passed, the abortion law reform really conformed with the Republican party’s support for Protestant values, birth control. Billy Graham in 1968 said, “In general, I would disagree with the Catholic stance. I believe in Planned Parenthood.”

The most liberal abortion law in the country was signed in 1967 by California’s Republican governor, Ronald Reagan. Barry Goldwater, who is this great conservative hero, supported abortion law liberalization early in his career. His wife, Peggy, was a co-founder of Planned Parenthood in Arizona.

When Roe v. Wade passed, in fact, there was a wire service run by the Southern Baptist Convention. The bureau chief of the Baptist Press wrote a piece saying that religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court decision.

This was not an issue that united the Republican party at all, until activists from the new right got involved and were really searching for an issue that could unite the party.

At the time, they’d come together out of concern that institutions like Bob Jones University would be deprived of their lucrative tax advantage. But they knew that preserving tax advantages for racially segregated academies is not going to be an issue that could really unite the party. So they kind of looked around for an issue that could unite conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants.

Bit by bit, they settled on abortion and sort of purged the Republican party of its pro-choice representatives. They needed a single issue that they could get people to vote on, and abortion became that issue.

Let’s talk about Donald Trump. He’s obviously not a religious man. He knows little of Christian theology. He can’t even get the terminology right. He can’t really even be bothered to pretend otherwise. So how is a man like that such a hero to the Christian nationalists?

First, the movement realizes that much of their agenda is advanced through the courts and he’s delivering them everything that he promised.

I was at a Road To Majority conference, that’s Ralph Reed’s conference, right before the election. Trump held up a list of justices and he said, “I’m going to choose Supreme Court justices from this list,” and every single one of them was pro-life. Of course, the issue wasn’t just abortion, but abortion becomes code for the entire agenda.

There’s that transactional side of it. But I think that there’s another side too. Trump’s anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction for this movement.

This movement doesn’t really believe in modern representative democracy. At bottom, they sound as though they prefer autocrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. Paula White is always calling Trump a king. Ralph Drollinger is always talking about kinging and kings. Trump has been referred to as King Cyrus.

The thing about kings like Cyrus is that they don’t have to follow the rules. They are the law. Trump understands this longing for the hard hand of the despot. That is what has made him such an attractive leader to this movement.

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ref 1 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/christian-right-fighting-impeachment-as-spiritual-warfare.html

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When the conservative evangelical publication Christianity Today called for the president’s removal from office last week, it sent a familiar thrill through secular circles where there’s always a willingness to believe that the Christian Right is dying or divided. As my colleague Sarah Jones pointed out, however, CT is not all that influential these days in conservative politico-religious precincts, and in addition, the op-ed in question narrowly focused on Trump’s behavior in the Ukraine scandal and not on the immorality of his policies.

If you doubt white Evangelicals are still on Team Trump in a big way, I recommend you read a recent investigative piece from Sarah Posner that demonstrates how the abiding loyalty so many of them have to the president is not just a matter of him “keeping his promises” on judges, opposition to reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and support for “religious liberty” (interpreted as broad exemptions from anti-discrimination laws). Many Christian Right leaders and members of their flocks view political battles involving Trump as spiritual warfare between holy and demonic forces, with the crude, self-idolizing, and heathenish POTUS treated as unquestionably the champion of the Prince of Peace.

In mid-October, less than a month into the House Democrats’ formal impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, Jim Bakker, the televangelist and convicted fraudster, was in front of a studio audience at his Morningside Church complex in Blue Eye, Missouri, a remote village of less than 200 people in the Ozarks. As the crew prepared the semicircular desk where the 79-year-old conducts freewheeling interviews with evangelical celebrity guests, Bakker took a moment to deliver an important message to the hundred or so people who had come to watch the taping: “God’s sending judgment.”

God, Bakker continued, “anointed your president.” Anyone who crosses the divinely chosen leader, he implied, is risking God’s wrath.

That morning, news had broken of the unexpected death of Democratic Congressman and House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings, who aggressively investigated Trump and who would have played a key role in impeachment proceedings. But there would be no prayers or condolences for the civil rights advocate from Bakker, who would only call Cummings “that man.” Instead, Bakker concluded with satisfaction, “one of the number-one enemies of our president fell dead last night. A man who insists on impeaching the president of the United States, he fell dead.”

This isn’t an unusual attitude, at all. As Trump has tweeted and raged and blustered his way through the impeachment crisis, conservative Evangelical leaders are mobilizing to support him, right through 2020, when they plan an even more impressive turnout on his behalf than the remarkable numbers they posted in 2016, Posner reports:

Trump’s evangelical base is a sprawling, interconnected network of political advocacy groups, megachurches, White House advisers, televangelists and prayer warriors. It also includes a formidable, data-driven get-out-the-vote operation. Top names in this circle include Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Ralph Reed of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. The two are part of a group of about two dozen Christian leaders who meet regularly at the White House and who blast out full-throated defenses of the president through their organizations’ mailing lists, radio shows, podcasts and television programs.

Inside this ecosystem, impeachment is, at best, a partisan sideshow concocted by Democrats to distract the public from Trump’s many important accomplishments. At worst, it is a satanic scheme to upend God’s plan for America, which was to install Trump in office in order to ensure the nation is governed by Christians who espouse “biblical” values.

At the apex of the army marching to Zion for Trump is his top Evangelical adviser, Florida televangelist and prosperity-gospel prophet Paula White, who is also his chief ambassador to the less conventional Evangelicals who are comfortable with bringing apocalyptic visions into daily political life. Posner describes White directly invoking divine power in a recent conference call designed to mobilize prayer warriors for Trump:

On the [One Voice Prayer Movement launch] call, White prayed for 10 minutes, during which she asked God to protect Trump and deliver him from his enemies. “Lord, we ask you to deliver our president from any snare, any trap, any setup of the enemy according to Ephesians 6:12,” a verse in the Bible that forms the core of the “spiritual warfare” that Trump’s prayer warriors say they are engaged in on his behalf. (“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”)

… “Any persons, entities, that are aligned against the president,” she said on the [call,] “will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus.”

No, these people are not going to abandon Donald Trump. They are now so complicit in his presidency that to question him is to condemn themselves to a judgement too terrible to contemplate.

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God, Bakker continued, “anointed your president.” Anyone who crosses the divinely chosen leader, he implied, is risking God’s wrath.

KEY FINDINGS

As Trump faces impeachment challenges, white evangelicals have dug in as his most loyal defenders; two-thirds believe he did nothing wrong in Ukraine.

The president has secured the loyalty of the evangelical base by handing the movement control over personnel and policy at a level they’ve never seen before.

Evangelical leaders talk about Trump as divinely anointed, and call impeachment a satanic scheme to upend God’s plan to have Trump lead a Christian nation.

Evangelical leaders across the country are laying the groundwork for a historic effort to support Trump’s reelection campaign.

As Trump faces increasingly grim polling numbers over impeachment, white evangelicals have dug in as his most loyal defenders. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted in late October, about a month after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the official launch of the impeachment probe, 80% of white evangelicals opposed impeaching Trump and removing him from office (compared to just 47% of the public at large). Two-thirds of white evangelicals believed Trump did nothing wrong in his dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Among white evangelicals who identify as Republican, 99% of them opposed impeachment, according to an October analysis by the Public Religion Research Institute.

This unwavering support is consistent with white evangelical voters’ attitude toward Trump in general. In 2016, 81% of them voted for him, and over the course of his tumultuous presidency, polling has consistently shown white evangelicals to be unfazed by Trump’s scandals and corruption — from pussy grabbing to Stormy Daniels to family separations to Russian election interference. Moreover, white evangelicals approve of Trump’s job performance more than any other demographic does ? a rate 20 and 30 points higher than those of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics, respectively. These numbers have remained static even in the face of House Democrats’ probe into Trump’s efforts to shake down Zelensky for the public announcement of a corruption probe against Joe Biden and his son.

In early December, as the House Judiciary Committee held impeachment hearings, Mark Meadows, the Republican congressman from North Carolina, accepted an award at the Impact Luncheon, hosted by Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Speaking at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, Meadows drew enthusiastic applause for his shoutout to his “two buddies,” Jim Jordan of Ohio and Andy Biggs of Arizona, who were “fighting the impeachment fight as we speak.” With Thomas at his side, Meadows said he wanted to figure out how “to compete with mainstream media, when they’re out there each and every day trying to form a narrative that would suggest that this president should be impeached.” He then credited grassroots activists for retweeting his and Jordan’s tweets enough times that they received 163 million impressions, “which is more than the viewership of all the networks combined.”

As impeachment moves to the Senate, where a Republican majority will control the trial, GOP lawmakers are acutely aware of the clout wielded by the Christian right ? not only in the upcoming elections, but in the Trump White House. For them, crossing Trump does not just mean facing his wrath, but also, by extension, the wrath of his most devoted base in the voting booth.

An Evangelical Bubble

Just before Thanksgiving, as the House Intelligence Committee completed its crucial round of public hearings, Reed made a plea for donations, promising that “while we fight to defend the President from the Democrats’ ongoing political assassination attempt, we’re also laying the groundwork for a historic effort that will secure his reelection next year.” In December, as the House Judiciary Committee began a new phase of the impeachment proceedings, Perkins warned followers that “the radical Left is rallied around a single goal: impeaching this president to stop his pro-life, pro-family values, pro-religious liberty agenda, so they can force their radical, anti-American agenda onto voters.”

This rear guard has been poised at every turn of the impeachment investigation to defend Trump. The Family Research Council’s marquee annual event, the Values Voter Summit, came this year in October, just days after FBI agents arrested Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, associates of presidential attorney Rudy Giuliani, as they were attempting to leave the country. The two were charged in a scheme to violate election laws by funneling foreign money to Republicans including then-Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, who in turn pressed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to recall the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. (Both men have pled not guilty.) As the Values Voter Summit got underway, Yovanovitch testified that she had been told by a top State Department official that she was recalled from her post prematurely due to “a concerted campaign against me, and that the Department had been under pressure from the President to remove me since the Summer of 2018.”

[TOM PENNINGTON/GETTY IMAGES

Pastor Robert Jeffress leads the Pledge of Allegiance before President Trump speaks during a "Keep America Great" Rally on October 17, 2019 in Dallas, Texas.]

To Values Voter Summit attendees, however, this tumble of calamitous news was only evidence of a partisan attack against a divinely anointed president. Carly Eli, an attendee from Atlanta, said in an interview that God has told her that Trump is “chosen” and “anointed,” and that she believes God has placed a “hedge of protection” around Trump. Eli claims to have received visions of God placing a crown on Trump’s head twice — something she interprets as a prophecy that Trump will serve two terms.

Another attendee, Jason Farris, came from Colorado, where he is a volunteer with the Truth & Liberty Coalition, a new political advocacy group that is based on 7 Mountains theology, which holds that Christians must take control of the seven major spheres of society — religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. When Farris read the July 25 call summary, he said it was “easy for me to see he [Trump] didn’t do anything wrong.” Echoing an increasingly common GOP talking point, Farris claimed that the impeachment proceedings were instigated by Democrats who are disappointed that “the Mueller report didn’t give them what they wanted. ... Even since before the inauguration, the progressive left has wanted to undermine and remove him from office,” he said.

Another attendee, Eric Swanson, a graduate of Liberty University and host of a podcast called All-In America, called the impeachment probe “disgusting” and “the biggest witch hunt in American history.” Instead, he insisted, Joe Biden should be investigated for bribery, echoing a widespread conspiracy theory that Biden “confessed” to bribery in a 2018 appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

In this evangelical bubble, the Republican lawmakers who disrupt the impeachment investigation and confuse the public about both the process and the facts of the case are heroes. On Oct. 23, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and other Republican lawmakers stormed the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility where a closed-door deposition was about to take place. That same day, former Arkansas Gov. and onetime Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was taping his flagship weekly television program for Trinity Broadcasting Network. In a segment Huckabee calls “Facts of the Matter,” during which he tries “to make sense of some of the certified Washington, D.C., insanity,” a viewer named Carlos asked whether Gaetz had accomplished anything with his stunt.

In response, Huckabee, who is the father of former Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, proceeded to spout disinformation about what had happened. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, Huckabee claimed, “was so frightened by” the Republicans’ entry “that he shut the meeting down, got up and he walked out.” (In fact, the room had to be swept for security reasons after the Republican lawmakers broke security rules by bringing their cellphones inside.) Huckabee further misled his audience that “this was all happening behind closed doors, where only one side even got to call witnesses, one side got to hear the full testimony.” (This also was not true; Republicans could and did attend the depositions and ask questions.) To applause, Huckabee declared that such proceedings might take place “in North Korea, maybe in China, maybe in Iran, but not in America.”

Trump’s evangelical base is a sprawling, interconnected network of political advocacy groups, megachurches, White House advisers, televangelists and prayer warriors.

In the eyes of evangelical loyalists, Trump is a salvific figure who must be defended to save Christian America from a catastrophic downfall at the hands of overweening Democrats. After 25 evangelical advisers met with him at the White House in late October, participants, including the Christian public relations guru Johnnie Moore, whom Trump appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, pushed out photographs of them praying with the president on social media. (Moore did not respond to interview requests for this article.) In an interview the day after the meeting, evangelical adviser Robert Jeffress, the Dallas megachurch pastor and Fox News personality, said that most evangelicals “believe this impeachment is an attempt to overthrow the 2016 election and therefore negate the votes of millions of evangelical Christians.” These voters, he went on, “see it as a war for the soul of our nation.” Jeffress predicted that evangelicals would react “very poorly” to Republican senators voting to convict Trump in an impeachment trial.

Trump’s evangelical boosters have also mobilized their foot soldiers into a spiritual army of prayer warriors who fervently believe their intercession will aid Trump against demonic enemies. This effort fans out far beyond leading Beltway players like Perkins or Reed, or popular television stars like Huckabee or Jeffress. In fact, Trump’s validation has meant greater celebrity for a proliferating network of “prophets” and televangelists, like Lance Wallnau, a speaker and author known for comparing Trump to the biblical King Cyrus, who restored Jerusalem. Wallnau claims to receive divine revelations about Trump, his power, and the attacks on him from a demonic left. Bakker’s Prophetic Encounter conference also featured the evangelist Jeremiah Johnson, who claims to have received many visions from God about Trump, and wrote a book called “Trump, 2019, & Beyond,” in which he claims, among other things, that God warned him about Hillary Clinton in 2012, telling him to “take careful notice of the secrecy that she operates in,” and warning, “The Church must resist her. She has plans to control, plans to influence. Beware!”

As the impeachment probe intensified and the House approved a resolution laying out its procedures, Trump actively sought to reward powerful evangelical figures for their support. In late October, for example, he elevated controversial Florida televangelist Paula White to an official White House post as the adviser to his Faith and Opportunities Initiative, a reinvention of George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. White, Trump’s top spiritual adviser and friend, hails from the world of the prosperity gospel, where God is portrayed as blessing believers with finances and good health, and where prophecies from God — about Trump and otherwise — are commonplace. She has long been a key emissary between Trump and this world, elevating his profile in this community while he in turn has expanded theirs.

Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called White “unfit” for her new position, and denounced the appointment as “yet another example of President Trump pandering to his evangelical Christian supporters as he scrambles to secure his base amidst an impeachment investigation.”

Forming A Defense

The blueprint for the evangelical defense of Trump against impeachment was crafted during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and obstruction of justice by Trump and his associates. In early May, a few weeks after Mueller released his report, Trump assembled his closest evangelical supporters for a Rose Garden ceremony for the National Day of Prayer. There, White declared the White House “holy ground” and prayed that Trump would “fulfill all the will of the Lord and do the assignment God has carried him to do.” Later that month, Franklin Graham organized a group of more than 250 pastors to make June 2 a special day of prayer for the president because his “enemies continue to try everything to destroy him, his family, and the presidency.” (White did not respond to interview requests for this article.)

While the Christian right has, since Ronald Reagan’s presidential run in 1980, rallied around GOP nominees, the tenor and nature of the mobilization for Trump’s reelection is markedly new.

Evangelical leaders also freely weighed in on the substance of the Mueller report itself. “No collusion,” Jeffress told me in June during the Faith & Freedom Coalition Road to Majority Conference in Washington. “I’ve said to the president several times … unless Bob Mueller can produce a photograph of you holding the flashlight while the Russians were breaking into a voting machine — anything short of that he won’t need to worry about,” Jeffress said.

At the Faith & Freedom Coalition Road to Majority Conference in June, attended by a thousand grassroots activists from around the country, administration officials and evangelical activists portrayed Washington as a bubble disconnected from reality and obsessed by the “phony Russian collusion scandal.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell accused Democrats of having “Trump derangement syndrome.” Marsha Blackburn, the Republican senator from Tennessee, told the audience, “Fewer and fewer people believe what they hear on the evening news. They listen to it with skepticism and doubt.” But this conference will “shore you up and give you the information you need to talk to your friends and neighbors,” Blackburn said, because the “most important name in news is you and your circle of friends.”

Conference attendees also heard from John Solomon, the Fox contributor and former opinion writer for The Hill, who reportedly was at the center of spreading disinformation about Joe Biden and his son Hunter. His articles fomented the recall of Ambassador Yovanovitch based on a false claim by a Ukrainian prosecutor who later recanted it, and they promoted the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton. At the Faith & Freedom conference, Solomon took aim at his mainstream media peers, lamenting that they had lost their neutrality in reporting the news. “If the media had been neutral, it would have taken a deep breath at the beginning of this Russia scandal and they would have had reason to pause, and say, some of this doesn’t add up, it’s too easy, it doesn’t make sense,” Solomon told the audience. “Instead they just went on this bandwagon and drove off. They eventually drove off a cliff, and they have a story that today is overtly wrong.”

David Brody, political correspondent for the Trump-cheerleading Christian Broadcasting Network, who was moderating the panel on which Solomon spoke, left that comment unchallenged — even though the intelligence community had concluded that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump. After Mueller gave a press conference about his report in late May, stating, “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Brody’s network ran a story headlined, “Case Closed: Special Counsel Mueller Says Russia Investigation Is Over, Nothing More to Say.”

Unprecedented Power

Whether Trump’s evangelical boosters actually believe he is anointed by God or that the evidence really does exonerate him, they have one powerful motive for their unflagging support: Trump has given evangelicals unprecedented power. With him in the White House, Christian right ideologues have virtual carte blanche to run his administration, as he has handed them control over personnel and policy at a level they could have only dreamed of, even under admired presidents like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Trump has handed them conservative judicial nominees, from the Supreme Court down to federal trial courts, and also has installed longtime evangelical allies at key Cabinet posts, including Mike Pompeo at the State Department, Bill Barr at the Department of Justice, Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development, and Betsy DeVos at Education. Ralph Reed has told his followers, “There are more Christians serving” in the Trump administration “than all previous presidents combined.”

At the Faith & Freedom conference in June, Mercedes Schlapp, who at the time served in the White House but later moved over to the Trump reelection campaign, described her office as “the West Wing Chapel.” Derek Kan, a political appointee at the Office of Management and Budget, recounted how the books of Leviticus, Joshua and Genesis shape his views on regulation and taxes.

Health and Human Services has been ground zero for Trump administration efforts to scale back reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and eroding church-state separation and framing it as “religious freedom” for Christians. HHS Secretary Alex Azar then delivered a speech enumerating “many of the ways that under President Trump HHS has protected life, conscience and faith.” The department, he said, has “never fought more fiercely to protect life at all stages, from conception until natural death. That is thanks above all to the work, the leadership and the courage of President Trump, the most pro-life president in American history.” At the Values Voter Summit, two officials from HHS — Shannon Royce, the head of the department’s Office of Faith and Opportunity Initiatives, and Roger Severino, the head of the Office of Civil Rights, which in 2018 launched a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division — were given front-row seats and a shoutout from Tony Perkins.

In turn, evangelical organizations provide top Trump deputies a platform to tout their Christian credentials to the base ? and shield them from the glare of mounting scandals. The same day that Yovanovitch testified in her closed-door deposition, Pompeo delivered a speech, “Being a Christian Leader,” to the American Association of Christian Counselors, which is led by Tim Clinton, another top evangelical ally to Trump. (Clinton did not respond to a request for comment.) A week and a half later, Pompeo touted religious freedom initiatives carried out by the State Department to a Heritage Foundation President’s Club Meeting in Washington, D.C., joking that the gathering had provided him “shelter from the storm.”

Reelecting A ‘Christian’ President

While the Christian right has, since Ronald Reagan’s presidential run in 1980, rallied around GOP nominees, the tenor and nature of the mobilization for Trump’s reelection is markedly new. While many of the expressed fears — that a Democratic president would nominate pro-Roe v. Wade judges or take away Christians’ religious freedom — are familiar, the motivation now is not just to avert liberal judges and policies. It is much more deliberately an imperative to reelect a singularly “Christian” president. As Ralph Reed reportedly will argue in a book to be published this spring, evangelicals “have a moral obligation to enthusiastically back” Trump in 2020.

With Trump’s reelection once again hinging on slim margins in a few key states, a multifaceted get-out-the-vote operation is getting underway. Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition is aiming to raise $42.7 million for its 2020 Project, aimed at bolstering its “unparalleled values-voter database, supporting field offices, and coordinating volunteers and staff to get out the vote.” It will be, Reed promised supporters, the “largest Christian Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort in history,” necessary because “the left is already turning the re-election of Donald Trump into a three-ring circus, aimed at impeaching our president and reversing all progress for voters of faith.”

Reed’s organization is not alone. United In Purpose, an organization that provides polling and voter data to Christian right organizations, helped organize a pivotal 2016 meeting between a thousand evangelical leaders and Trump, during which he sealed an alliance by promising to nominate judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches from using tax-exempt resources to endorse political candidates. Although his organization is “still in the planning stages” for the 2020 election cycle, UIP’s president, Bill Dallas, said in an interview that the conservative Christian get-out-the-vote operation ? as well as its opposition’s ? will exceed 2016 in terms of “the sophistication, not just the data mining, using every technique to get the votes out.”

Maximizing white evangelical turnout for Trump will be key in Michigan and Wisconsin, two states he won in 2016 by narrow margins. White evangelicals made up 27% and 28% of the electorate in those states, respectively, according to exit polling data. Other closely watched states with high percentages of white evangelical turnout in 2016 include North Carolina (38%), Iowa (34%) and Ohio (33%).

According to Dallas, the views driving Trump’s support among the Christian voters that United in Purpose targets have already begun to solidify. “The reason why Trump has such a strong support base is because he did what he said he would do,” said Dallas. “I don’t see that [impeachment] turning off Christian voters. What would turn off Christian voters is if he didn’t fulfill his promises and commitments that he said he would do if he was elected.”

For the 2020 cycle, My Faith Votes, an organization that boasts Huckabee as its honorary national chairman, has also been organizing voter registration drives. “As Christians,” Jason Yates, the group’s CEO claims, “we must always look to elect leaders who defend our values and believe that God is the ultimate authority in this nation.” (Yates did not respond to interview requests.) In an email to My Faith Votes supporters, Huckabee described the group’s efforts in more detail. Over the course of the year, he wrote, “TV and radio PSAs will be running around the country reaching millions; millennials and Generation Z will be reached on Christian campuses; hundreds of thousands of Christians will be mobilized using peer-to-peer texting and door-to-door outreach, all in an effort to motivate and equip Christians with everything they need to take action.”

In November, Yates announced a partnership with Intercessors for America, an organization based in Purcellville, Virginia, that hosts weekly prayer calls and enlists supporters to engage in prayer against supposed deep-state and George Soros-led schemes against Trump and his allies. In a webcast, Yates and Dave Kubal, Intercessors for America’s president, announced they were developing a phone app to identify Christian voters with a “low propensity” to vote. But apps and microtargeting of voters are not the only way to keep evangelical voters in the Trump camp. The next day, Kubal was on a conference call with Paula White, her chief of staff, Todd Lamphere, and the evangelists Jon and Jolene Hamill announcing the launch of the One Voice Prayer Movement, carrying out, according to Kubal, White’s “vision to see the church of Jesus Christ come together, and pray for this administration and pray for our country.” (Kubal did not respond to an interview request. The Hamills, who are hosting a “Revolution” conference on New Year’s Eve at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, also did not respond to interview requests.)

On the call, White prayed for 10 minutes, during which she asked God to protect Trump and deliver him from his enemies. “Lord, we ask you to deliver our president from any snare, any trap, any setup of the enemy according to Ephesians 6:12,” a verse in the Bible that forms the core of the “spiritual warfare” that Trump’s prayer warriors say they are engaged in on his behalf. (“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”)

But White has a plan to protect Trump from those dark forces, vanquish his enemies, and to defend the “biblical” government that has elevated Christian right personnel and policy priorities. And she left no doubt that the multiple roles she plays — presidential personal pastor, White House employee and defender of Trump against his enemies — have merged into a single message of God’s wrath against anyone who dares criticize him. “Any persons, entities, that are aligned against the president,” she said on the One Voice Prayer Movement launch call, “will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus.”

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations.

ABOUT THE REPORTER

SARAH POSNER

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations and author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters

mma no lnx

On the May 23 edition of her prime-time show, Fox News host Laura Ingraham aired a deceptively edited clip of a speech by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to imply that she opposes people practicing their religious faith, despite the fact that Omar is a practicing Muslim.

On May 22, Omar gave a speech on the House floor about the wave of anti-abortion bills being pushed in states across the country and criticized the hypocrisy among the “religious right” on such policy decisions. Omar called out “religious fundamentalists” who she said are “trying to manipulate state laws in order to impose their beliefs on an entire society.” She mentioned a recently defeated Texas bill that would have opened the possibility of giving the death penalty to people who get an abortion, saying, “If that was being proposed by any other country, we would be calling it a dangerous violation of human rights. But because it’s happening here, with the support of the ultra-conservative religious right, we call it religious freedom.” Omar also listed Republicans whose personal actions contradicted policies that they fought to push on the American public, and said, “How could it be that an entire century has passed [since women got the right to vote] and we are still forced to fight for our rights as women, as human beings, and as Americans. This should outrage every single person. It certainly outrages me, and we can no longer stand for it.”

Embedded video

jordan

@JordanUhl

Absolutely disgusting.

Laura Ingraham just deliberately butchered a vid of @IlhanMN talking about how the GOP is hypocritical with "religious freedom."

Ingraham made it look like Omar said she hates all religion.

Ingraham's distorted clip followed by the whole thing:

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On her show, Ingraham aired the clip of Omar saying, “I am frustrated every single time I hear people speaking about their faith and pushing that onto other people.” Ingraham also played a clip from earlier in the speech in which Omar criticized “those that talk about their faith and want to push policies because of their faith” when they are “the ones that simply are caught with the hypocrisy of not living it out in their personal lives.” Ingraham mischaracterized her comments by saying, “I guess we are offending her by speaking about faith.” Ingraham also questioned Omar’s understanding of what it means to be American, saying, “This is a fundamental misunderstanding, purposeful or not, of what we are.” Her guest, Faith & Freedom Coalition Chairman Ralph Reed, agreed, adding, “There are few things, Laura, that are more distinctly and characteristically American than bringing your faith into the public square and using it to impact the culture for the common good.”

This isn’t the first time that Fox figures have questioned Omar’s understanding of American values: Hosts have repeatedly doubted Omar’s loyalty to America, going as far as calling her “anti-American” and suggesting that her hijab means that she’s against the constitution. It's also not the first time Fox has deceptively edited a video of a sitting member of Congress to misrepresent their words -- last year, Fox & Friends aired a deceptively edited clip of Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) to claim she was “confused” about Trump’s family separation policy.

From the May 23 edition of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle:

LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Did you know that we were talking about faith and that -- just the fact that we were talking about faith upsets a certain congresswoman. Watch.

[BEGIN CLIP]

REP. ILHAN OMAR (D-MN): I am frustrated every single time I hear people speaking about their faith and pushing that onto other people. Those that talk about their faith and want to push policies because of their faith are the ones that simply are caught with the hypocrisy of not living it out in their personal lives.

[END CLIP]

INGRAHAM: So I guess we are offending her by speaking about faith.

RALPH REED (CHAIRMAN, FAITH & FREEDOM COALITION): Wow. Wow. So the people who poured out of African-American churches in the 50s and 60s and marched on Washington and sat at church counters because of their faith, because they believe that God's law and natural law required that they be treated the same as whites.

INGRAHAM: Well America wouldn't have been founded if we didn’t have people of faith who prayed for strength and resolve in every battle, at the end of every war, to bring the country together. I mean, this is -- but this is a fundamental misunderstanding, purposeful or not, of what we are and who we are as a people.

REED: Of American character. I mean, there are few things, Laura, that are more distinctly and characteristically American than bringing your faith into the public square and using it to impact the culture for the common good.

INGRAHAM: Yeah, and inform who we are. I mean, what’s supposed to inform who we are? You know, Hollywood? Ralph, great conversation, I’m sure it offended all the right people.

From Omar’s May 22 speech on the House floor:

REP. ILHAN OMAR (D-MN): I rise today to defy the horrifying attacks happening against women’s reproductive rights all across this country. Religious fundamentalists are currently trying to manipulate state laws in order to impose their beliefs on an entire society, all with complete disregard for voices and the rights of American women. The recent efforts, like those in Alabama and Georgia, are only the latest in a long history of efforts to criminalize women for simply existing -- to punish us when we don’t conform to their attempts to control us. A new proposal in Texas would go as far as to threaten women who obtain an abortion with the capital punishment. If that were not being proposed by -- If that was being proposed by any other country, we would be calling it a dangerous violation of human rights. But because it’s happening here, with the support of the ultra-conservative religious right, we call it religious freedom. It’s simply unthinkable. But this anti-choice movement isn’t only unjust, it is dangerous because history has proven that when abortion is criminalized, the number of abortions do not simply go down. The number of deaths and injuries to women increase.

Let’s just be honest. For the religious right, this isn’t simply about their care of concern for life. If they cared about, or were concerned about, children, they would be concerned about the children that are being detained and those that are dying in camps across our borders. Or the children who are languishing in hunger and facing homelessness. This isn’t about religious morality or conviction, because we’ve seen time and time again those that talk about their faith and want to push policies because of their faith are the ones that simply are caught with the hypocrisy of not living it out in their personal lives. I just remember recently, not too long ago, a Republican congressman who had to retire -- Tim Murphy -- because he asked his mistress to abort their baby while pushing for a ban on abortion. Or I remember the anti-LGBT rights Republican Larry Craig who was found soliciting sex in a bathroom in Minneapolis airport.

I am frustrated every single time I hear people speaking about their faith and pushing that onto other people because we know those so-called religious politicians, when it comes to their life, their choices, they want to talk about freedom. But when it comes to other people’s lives and other people’s choices, they want to talk about religion. I feel that we must point out how ironic it is that women now are facing these challenges to their freedom in the week that we’re marking the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. How could it be that an entire century has passed and we are still forced to fight for our rights as women, as human beings, and as Americans. This should outrage every single person. It certainly outrages me, and we can no longer stand for it.

matt t on abramoff:

Reed, meanwhile, was recovering from the trauma of an April 1983 incident in which he was reportedly caught plagiarizing for his student newspaper a Commentary article denouncing Mohandas Gandhi. A few months after that setback, however, Reed found Jesus in a phone booth outside the Bullfeathers pub in Washington - and by 1985 he, too, had found his calling, terrorizing abortion clinics with the Students for America, a sort of pale precursor to the Christian Coalition.

...

At a conference of mostly evangelical Christians convened in Washington, DC, by Republican political operative Ralph Reed, Trump reminded attendees of the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference of their agenda and his. If he made any reference to the drama unfolding before the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was this: “As you know, we’re under siege; you understand that,” the president said. “But we will come out bigger, better and stronger than ever — you watch.”

Expressing his appreciation to members of the Faith and Freedom Coalition for their work on his behalf during the 2016 presidential race, Trump cited some 22 million pieces of mail sent, 16 million videos shared, 10 million phone calls made and 1.2 million doors knocked on “in the key battleground states.” He quoted the Book of Isaiah from the teleprompter.

He went on to recount what he had already delivered for his religious supporters: a drastic reduction in illegal crossings on the southern border; the appointment of Neil Gorsuch, a foe of abortion rights, to the Supreme Court; an “executive action” on religious freedom, a withdrawal of aid to overseas humanitarian groups that dare to speak of abortion, and withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. That last one elicited a raucous and sustained cheer from the assembled, seeing as how its very name combines two mutually repugnant ideas: the fact of climate change and a city in which people speak French.

Without naming it as such, Trump noted the leaked draft of a rule revision, dated May 27, under consideration at the Department of Health and Human Services that would appear to definitively permit religious orders that run hospitals and social service agencies to flout the current mandate that employer-provided health insurance include coverage for prescription contraceptives. “The Little Sisters of the Poor,” Trump said, referring to a Catholic religious order that brought a lawsuit against the Obama administration that challenged the mandate, had just won big with his executive actions on behalf of “religious freedom.” The president pointed at two nuns in the audience. “Stand up,” he instructed them. “You don’t mess with the Little Sisters,” he quipped. Never mind that the nuns obediently standing were from an entirely different order (the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist); they were old women in habits. They would do. The optics worked.

He went on at length to describe his instruction to the IRS to refrain from investigating houses of worship for political activity that would threaten their non-profit status as an unleashing of free speech from the pulpits of the nation.

The audience then received an accounting of the agenda yet to be undertaken—the part that requires legislation by Congress. Trump came to Road to Majority to set its army of socially conservative, mostly white churchgoers to work on Capitol Hill, lobbying senators and members of the House, as many groups do during national conference. But few get their marching orders directly from the president, even if not said in so many words.

First on the president’s list was the health care bill that is currently stalled in the Senate.

“Restoring freedom and opportunity also means repealing and replacing the disaster—known as—” He put his hand to is ear.

“Obamacare!” the crowd shouted.

“That was easy,” Trump replied. “Something—I hope great—is going to come out through [Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell in the Senate.”

The next big item was tax reform—“the biggest tax cut ever,” he said. But sadly, Trump added, they would have to pass each of these measures without a single Democratic vote, because Democrats are obstructionists who are “bad, right now, for the country.”

“The entrenched interests and failed bitter voices in Washington will do everything in their power to try and stop us from this righteous cause—to try to stop all of you,” Trump said. “They will lie, they will obstruct, they will spread their hatred and their prejudice, but we will not back down from doing what is right. Because, as the Bible tells us, we know that the truth will prevail, that God’s glorious wisdom will shine through, and that the good and decent people of this country will get the change they voted for, and that they so richly deserve.”

He patted himself on the back for deporting people he deemed “gang members” and “drug dealers,” and characterized his “summit” with Saudi leaders as a blow against global terrorism.

He made a call for unity, noting that “whether we are black, brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood.”

In America, he said, “we don’t worship government; we worship God.”

The speech, delivered at the conference luncheon, was well-received. Afterward, attendees boarded busses headed for the Capitol—the Senate’s Dirksen Office Building, to be exact. There they would be treated to a town hall-style meeting with House Speaker Paul Ryan, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other Republican lawmakers. The meeting was closed to the press.

Once it concluded, members of the group would lobby the senators from their respective states.

Milling outside the hearing room where the town hall would take place, Rebecca Clutter, a woman who looked to be in her 50s or 60s, offered her assessment of the president’s speech. “[I]t was amazing and awesome and it hit all the points,” said Clutter, who had traveled to Washington from Ohio, where she had knocked on doors during the campaign under the aegis of Women for Trump.

Casey Matta, a student at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, also loved the president’s speech, naming as his favorite points Trump’s anti-abortion rhetoric and “something about the Paris [climate accord].”

Asked how the US withdrawal from the climate accord agreement fit in with the religious purpose of the Faith and Freedom Coalition event, Matta thought a minute. “Well, I think it’s like a Republican religious convention so when he brings that kind of stuff for conservatives … I agree with that.”

What did he make of the probe of Russian meddling in the US election, and contacts between Trump campaign figures and Russian officials? Matta said he didn’t believe that Russia had intervened in the election. By his lights, it was all a put-up job by Democrats.

“I think [Trump] definitely is being targeted, with the Democrats and everything. I mean, they need to cool it,” he said. “Give him some time to worry about what he’s got to worry about now.”

Right now, Trump is worrying about, among other things, getting a legislative win. And Casey Matta, Rebecca Clutter, and hundreds of others came to the nation’s capital to help him get it, all in the name of Go

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/ralph-reed-christians-you-must-vote-trump

rump has had no bigger fan and friend on the Religious Right than Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. On Monday, Falwell invited political operative Ralph Reed, another Trump booster, to speak to Liberty’s students in the wake of a very bad week for Trump. In his speech to the Christian school, Reed made the case that Christians have a duty to vote for Trump.

Reed’s speech offered brief criticism of Trump’s recently unearthed bragging about getting away with kissing and groping women without their consent, saying he did not “appreciate” the “offensive and inappropriate” comments. He then shifted immediately into a much longer discussion of the controversies around Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

Reed criticized those tempted to sit out the election or vote for a third party candidate, drawing an analogy to Ronald Reagan’s statement that Christians who portrayed capitalism and communism as equally flawed chose to remove themselves “from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” Said Reed:

We must confront the choice before us and vote for someone who actually has a chance to become president. We dare not and we cannot surrender our vote during such an important election. Retreating to the stained-glass ghetto from whence we came, refusing to muddy our boots with the mire and muck of politics is not an option for followers of Christ. We are called to put away our “my way or the highway” pride, forsake cynicism and negativity, and participate fully as citizens, always cheerful, always winsome, always ready to defend our faith.

Reed argued that “on issue after issue on matters involving grave and intrinsic moral evil, there are stark differences between the two major-party nominees for president.” Among the issues he cited were abortion, religious freedom, the Hobby Lobby case, judges, the Iran nuclear deal, repeal of Obamacare, education reform and school choice, the “redefinition” of marriage and “rebuilding our hollowed-out military.” He said Trump “has pledged to protect life from conception to natural death” and praised Trump’s list of “20 outstanding conservative jurists” for future Supreme Court appointments.

Reed told the Liberty students not to be discouraged by the election, saying that the “pro-family, religious conservative movement is only about 40 years old” in contrast to the centuries of slavery and Jim Crow that preceded the passage of federal civil rights laws.

Reed said evangelical Christians have it in their power to win elections if they would only turn out in greater numbers:

According to exit polls, self-identified evangelical Christians comprise roughly 27 percent of the electorate; faithful, frequently Mass-attending Roman Catholics made up another 10 percent of the electorate. Together they are the largest, most vibrant, and most dynamic single constituency in the electorate today; a larger force than the Latino, the African-American, and the union vote combined.

Reed recalled that Falwell’s father, Jerry Falwell Sr., described his mission as getting people born again, baptized, and registered to vote. Falwell Jr. has said before that Trump reminds him of his father, and in reality the similarity is getting stronger as a super-Bannonized Trump ramps up hisattacks on Hillary and Bill Clinton and says that if he were in charge she would be in jail. After all, it was Jerry Falwell Sr. who in the 1990s used his Old Time Gospel Hour to hawk videotapes that accused Bill Clinton of being involved in drug smuggling and murder when he was governor of Arkansas.

There’s at least one way in which Trump himself does not seem to be taking the advice Reed offered Liberty students: “Honey attracts more than vinegar, and a winsome attitude wins our fellow citizens more than harsh language or angry words.”

https://www.publicintegrity.org/news/NRA%E2%80%99s-Freedom-Action-Foundation

apr 2012 GOTV

...

These outside allied drives are intended to complement voter mobilization operations by the national party committees and the presidential campaigns where Obama and the Democrats have an early money and infrastructure edge.

Plainly, both sides are aiming for a big turnout this fall.

“This election is going to be won on the ground,” said Chris Cox, the top lobbyist for NRA which has recently launched what appears to be its biggest registration drive ever with a multimillion-dollar price tag. “There are millions of gun owners who aren’t registered,” Cox said, noting that about 100 million Americans own guns.

“We’ll go door to door to do voter registration, education and outreach,” said Cox in describing how the NRA is mounting its “Trigger the Vote” drive. The NRA, whose vaunted grassroots clout is based on its 4 million members, has hired about two dozen “campaign field representatives” who are helping coordinate drives in over a dozen battleground states including Florida, Ohio and Virginia, Cox said.

The NRA registration drive will “work gun shows and retailers” and includes a six-figure television advertising blitz that it launched in February, Cox added. “Voter registration is a very expensive and difficult undertaking.”

Most of the voter registration funding comes from the NRA’s Freedom Action Foundation, a nonprofit arm that doesn’t have to disclose its donors, Cox said. The Center has reported that one prominent foundation donor is Texas energy magnate Clayton Williams, who last year boasted at a Houston luncheon that drew top NRA officials, that he gave $1 million to the foundation in 2010 and intended to do so again in 2012.

Three GOP lobbyists familiar with the expanded NRA registration and mobilization operations this year say that some sizable funds are expected to come from other conservative groups — or possibly major donors such as the billionaire Koch brothers — which are trying to share their largesse with allies with effective grassroots operations.

Cox declined to comment about funding for the NRA foundation, except to say that it mainly comes from small donors.

Likewise, other conservative stalwarts are trying to recoup their political fortunes from the 2008 elections.

Ralph Reed, who is trying to emerge from the cloud he was under because of his close ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, said that his Faith and Freedom Coalition has chapters in 30 states and boasts some 500,000 members — of which 185,000 have made donations.

Reed said coalition chapters in key states such as Florida, Virginia and Wisconsin have begun registration efforts. The coalition will also buy ads and and focus on “earned media” in about 20 states where there are important multiple contests—presidential, congressional and gubernatorial — Reed said.

The conservative coalition, which reported in tax forms that it raised more than $5 million in 2010, hopes to spend about twice that amount this year with the bulk targeted for registration and get out the vote drives, Reed said.

To facilitate various conservative get-out-the-vote drives, two multimillion dollar data banks (one of which is reportedly bankrolled by the Kochs) filled with voter information have been assembled.

The more robust spending on voter mobilization work by the right is generating buzz among GOP operatives, some of whom attend periodic meetings hosted by American Crossroads. Crossroads and many other super PACs, both conservative and liberal, were spawned by court rulings in 2010 that gave the green light for corporations, unions and individuals to write unlimited checks for ads and other electoral drives that directly back or oppose candidates.

Crossroads President Steven Law has told the Center that it spent about $10 million in 2010 on voter mobilization operations. Some GOP consultants expect it will do more this cycle given that the super PAC and its nonprofit affiliate are aiming to raise $300 million — more than quadruple the $71 million that the two groups corralled in 2010. Jonathan Collegio, a Crossroads spokesman, said the groups “will be engaged” again in voter mobilization, but that it won’t be a “core function.”

Meanwhile, it’s expected that labor’s ground operations which have been energized this year by big battles in Ohio and Wisconsin against GOP led attempts to curtail public unions, could be more formidable.

...

Christian Coalition 2.0, Or The Triumphant Return of Ralph Reed

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Tuesday 06/23/2009, 1:26pm

Literally, just yesterday as I was doing my right-wing monitoring, I thought to myself "you know who's name I never see any more? Ralph Reed."And for good reason, given his deep ties to Jack Abramoff. Actually, the last time he made any news was when he was forced to skip a fund-raiser with John McCain last year thanks to the fact that he has been permanently tainted by his association with Abramoff.But, as Dan Gilgoff reports, Reed is now back with a new organization called The Faith and Freedom Coalition:Ralph Reed, the Republican operative who...MORE >

wreck crew:

Abramoff, Norquist and Reed were all in their mid-to-late twenties, and all were experiencing paradigmatic life changes. While Abramoff was joining such groups as the Council for National Policy, the CFA and the United States of America Foundation, Norquist was founding Americans for Tax Reform, the organization he would later ride to prominence as a fat, hygienically deficient tax-policy oracle. Reed, meanwhile, was recovering from the trauma of an April 1983 incident in which he was reportedly caught plagiarizing for his student newspaper a Commentary article denouncing Mohandas Gandhi. A few months after that setback, however, Reed found Jesus in a phone booth outside the Bullfeathers pub in Washington - and by 1985 he, too, had found his calling, terrorizing abortion clinics with the Students for America, a sort of pale precursor to the Christian Coalition.... Once Congress was conquered, Abramoff, Norquist, et al., apparently discovered a means for turning it into a pure engine for profit. The game they may have discovered worked like this: One lobbyist (Abramoff, say) represents one group of interests - for example, the Malaysian government. Then, a lobbyist friend of Abramoff's (say, Norquist) represents an antagonist to Abramoff's client, in this case, let's say dissident leader Anwar Ibrahim. Ibrahim asks Norquist to press his case against the Malaysian state in Washington; Norquist complies and uses his contacts to raise a stink on the Hill. Abramoff's client, unnerved, turns to Abramoff to make the problem go away. Abramoff dutifully goes to the same friends Norquist applied to in the first place, and the problem does indeed go away. In the end, everyone is happy and both lobbyists have performed and gotten paid. Abramoff apparently pulled this kind of double-dealing scheme more than once, as he and Ralph Reed appear to have run a similar con on the Coushatta and Tigua Indian tribes, who were on opposite sides of a gaming dispute.

reed

ney

Everyone sold themselves on the cheap. They apparently got Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), and many others in the House, to lie back and open their legs all the way for a few thousand dollars in campaign contributions. In the Third World, corrupt politicians at least get something for selling out the people - boats, mansions, villas in the south of France. If you offered the lowest, most drunken ex-mobster in the Russian Duma $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 in soft money for his vote, he would laugh in your face; he might even be insulted enough to shoot you. But Jack Abramoff apparently got any number of congressmen to play ball for the same kind of money.

They paid journalists to change their opinions; as it turns out, the right to free speech is worth about $2,000 a column to America's journalists like Doug Bandow of Copley News Service. And now it comes out that Diebold, the notorious voting-machine company, paid some $275,000 to Abramoff's firm, Greenberg Traurig, with the apparent aim of keeping legislation requiring paper trails in the voting process from getting into the Help America Vote Act. Conveniently, Abramoff pal Bob Ney, one of the HAVA architects, blocked every attempt to put paper trails into law, even after the controversial electoral debacles of 2000 and 2004.

Full Show: The Resurrection of Ralph Reed | Moyers & Company ...

billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-the-resurrection-of-ralph-reed/?

Aug 31, 2012 - Full Show: The Resurrection of Ralph Reed ...... are now the party's real power-brokers — Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist — were ...

Prior to the election, Greg Dworkin and I were having a chat about implications of white evangelicals doing better at the polls than they did in 2004. Greg noted that Ralph Reed, white evangelical huckster plenipotentiary, would be in big trouble if they didn't duplicate their performance of 2004. Well, they did even better than 2004 and they still lost.

You need no better proof than Ralph Reed himself:

A national post-election survey commissioned by the Faith and Freedom Coalition last night found that the evangelical vote increased in 2012 to a record 27% of the electorate and that white evangelicals voted roughly 78% for Mitt Romney to 21% for Barack Obama. This was the highest share of the vote in modern political history for evangelicals, Reed said.

“Evangelicals turned out in record numbers and voted as heavily for Mitt Romney yesterday as they did for George W. Bush in 2004,” Reed observed. “That is an astonishing outcome that few would have predicted even a few months ago. But Romney underperformed with younger voters and minorities and that in the end made the difference for Obama.”

Republicans cannot use the excuse that their base voters didn't turn out for this election as they did in 2008. White evangelical conservatives did turn out exactly as they said they would over and over again this election cycle. The problem for Republicans is there are not enough of them to win a national election anymore. At least not in the states that count. Detroit isn't bankrupt, but the 'Southern Strategy' is.

mojo

Ralph Reed's Teavangelicals

Does the GOP slam-dunk herald a Christian conservative revival? Not so fast.

By Stephanie Mencimer | Thu Nov. 4, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

How did the tea party movement affect the outcome? It's a question that's been debated to death over the past 24 hours, and former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed was in DC on Wednesday, bleary-eyed but jubilant, to add his two cents. Armed with post-election survey data [1]he'd commissioned through his new Faith and Freedom Coalition [2], Reed declared that, yes, the tea party was a factor, but the real engine of the GOP's blowout victory Tuesday was—wait for it—evangelical voters, most of whom co-identify as tea partiers.

At a press conference with pollster Glen Bolger from Public Opinion Strategies, Reed insisted that the largest single voting constituency was social conservatives, and they went overwhelmingly for Republicans. "The socially conservative faith-based vote was the fuel and engine of the biggest midterm victory in our history," he said. His survey data, he said, indicates that 52 percent of self-identified tea partiers are also conservative evangelicals, while two-thirds of evangelical Christians call themselves tea party supporters. Which makes the voting trend nearly impossible to parse.

His take-home: The "tea party and evangelicals are not at odds. These movements are inextricably intertwined…Either party that ignores or opposed them does so at their peril at the ballot box." Reed also sent a shot across the bow of his GOP brethren, warning them to "stop apologizing" for being pro-family, because far from hurting the party, evangelicals were helping to keep its candidates in office. Bolger added, incidentally, that two-thirds of the GOP pickup came in places where about two-thirds of white evangelicals live.

From all of this, Reed concludes that the evangelical movement "is in the middle stages of a fascinating evolution." He predicted that the movement would broaden its agenda to focus more on economic issues, which, Reed noted, have a moral component. After all, he said, the old Christian Coalition helped pass welfare reform in the 1990s and tax cuts for families. "Teavangelicals" might focus on extending the Bush tax cuts, repealing health care, and cutting federal spending, he suggested.

Reed might be reading a little too much from the tea leaves, however. His data, he claimed, suggests that in 20 years, evangelicals would be an even more powerful voting bloc—what unions are to the Democratic Party, or the NRA to the GOP. "Democrats are going to have to figure out how to reach these voters," he warned.

But other data, even from evangelical researchers, offer a different picture: that of a movement in its death throes. Not only is America becoming less religious as a whole, but younger people—the Millennials [3]—tend to oppose the movement on key issues like gay marriage. Evidence collected by the Barna Group, a market research group catering to Christian clients, suggests that these 18- to 29-year-olds see evangelical churches' treatment of gays as a major turnoff. Millennials will make up the nation's single largest voting bloc by 2020, and they are a lot more liberal than the over-60 crowd that turned out in droves on Tuesday.

Reed, though, was having none of this. To my question, he dismissed research by Barna and others predicting evangelical doom. "Lots of people are falling for that," he said. Young people may start out liberal, but once they start getting married, having babies, and paying taxes, "We got 'em," he said.

The median age of the respondents in his post-election survey was 44, he noted, claiming evangelicals skew younger than the general population because they are families with children. Tuesday's evangelical turnout—5 points higher than in 2006, Reed says—shows that Democratic outreach to evangelicals on issues like Sudan and climate change has probably had little effect.

Despite all the triumphant talk, Robert Jones, CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, [4]thinks Reed should take his own numbers with a grain of salt. The methodology was flawed, Jones believes. Reed's survey relied on election-night phone polling, which isn't the best way to conduct a poll, because it tends to catch the low-hanging fruit—people who happen to be home on the first call, and who don't reflect the population at large or who haven't even voted yet. "It skews the sample," Jones explains. One night's worth of calls, he adds, doesn't give you a large enough spread to get accurate results.

Reed is wrong, Jones says, to suggest that evangelicals are bringing in younger people. According to most polling data, he says, they are older than the general population, as are the tea partiers. (Less than a quarter of under-30 voters support the tea party, compared with nearly half of voters over age 60.) The teavangelicals may be the turning point of this particular midterm, but it's going to be hard to pin the future of the GOP on a movement whose current members will mostly be dead in 20 years.

Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/11/ralph-reeds-tea-party-evangelicals

Links:

[1] http://www.ffcoalition.com/2010/11/03/ffc-national-survey/

[2] http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/09/rights-geriatric-gotv-gameplan

[3] http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/GOP-hipster-makeover

[4] http://www.publicreligion.org/

mojo on tobacco Use political allies to silence moral critics, including religious conservatives. William Saletan found that Ralph Reed's Christian Coalition (see

Sin of Omission [7]) is particularly cooperative.

REED also sold evangelicals to abramoff for gambling

Sin of Omission

How long can religious conservatives go on about protecting kids from dangerous drugs without saying anything about smoking?

—By William Saletan

May/June 1996 IssueSeveral years ago, Forest Jones, the youth minister at the First Assembly of God in Raleigh, North Carolina, joined a local campaign against teen smoking. He counseled his young flock about the temptations of tobacco, enlisting the teens to lobby local merchants to stop selling cigarettes to kids. "The tobacco industry started taking note," Jones recalls. Soon afterward, when he moved to a church five counties away, Jones got a creepy phone call from the local officer of a tobacco company. "It was somebody in management," the minister remembers. "He wanted to know if I was here to pastor, or was I going to start any trouble?"Similar questions confront a growing number of conservative Christian clergy and political activists as they grapple with the contradiction between their beliefs about the sanctity of life and the Christian right's conspicuous silence about the tobacco industry. Successive revelations about smoking-induced death and disease, the marketing of cigarettes to children, and the manipulation of nicotine to encourage addiction are gradually reducing cigarette purveyors from the status of honest businesspeople to that of pushers, pimps, and pornographers. Yet the industry provides the Christian right with a vast grassroots base and a staunch Republican ally. Will religious conservatives continue to accept tobacco's support in exchange for their silence? Or will they start making trouble?...H Y P O C R I S Y O N T H E R I G H TOrdinarily, the religious right doesn't hesitate to support federal regulation of substances it considers harmful. The conservative lobby Concerned Women for America teaches that "protecting its citizens from drug trafficking is part of the responsibility of the federal government." In regard to pornography, the Family Research Council notes, "Society has long embraced the principle that those who peddle harmful material have the obligation to keep the material from children." Pro-lifers routinely demand an end to federal subsidies of abortion services abroad, calling it an export of death. The American Life League argues that the Food and Drug Administration should restrict RU486, the French abortion pill, because "this chemical effectively kills children who live in the womb and is not safe for the mother, according to many scientific reports."mojoIt's hard to see how groups that say such things can remain silent about tobacco. Protecting kids? Tobacco purveyors hook 3,000 American children every day. Exporting death? More Colombians die annually from American cigarettes than Americans die from Colombian cocaine. Saving unborn life? Smoking may cause more than 100,000 miscarriages in the United States every year (see sidebar).Liberal and moderate religious denominations, led by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility and the Interreligious Coalition on Smoking OR Health, have begun to speak out against tobacco, as have the conservative National Association of Evangelicals and a handful of Mormons and pro-life Catholics in Congress. But the vast majority of the religious right is AWOL in the war against tobacco."We don't take any positions on the tobacco and smoking industry," says Christian Coalition spokesperson Monica Hildebrandt. The Family Research Council's assistant press secretary, Kristin Hansen, deflects questions about tobacco by arguing that premarital sex is the real root of teenagers' problems. Similarly, Christine O'Donnell of Concerned Women for America suggests tobacco restrictions are "putting the cart before the horse. Right now, they are trying to ram sex education down kids' throats; they are trying to ram other kinds of unhealthy things down kids' throats. We need to address those things first."How long can religious conservatives go on about "unhealthy things down kids' throats" without mentioning cigarettes? The Rev. Patrick Mahoney, executive director of the pro-life Christian Defense Coalition, finds the oversight curious. "The pro-family, pro-life movement has been tragically silent on the whole issue of tobacco," says Mahoney. "You don't hear it from the Christian Coalition, you don't hear it in the ÔContract With the American Family,' you don't hear it from the National Right to Life Committee.... It's very disappointing that larger groups, people like Pat Robertson or Ralph Reed or others, have not been more forceful and articulate in addressing this issue."W H E R E A R E R E E D & R O B E R T S O N ?Tobacco-control activists were crestfallen when the November 1994 Republican landslide put the brakes on legislative efforts to control tobacco. But Scott Ballin, former chairman of the Coalition on Smoking OR Health, saw an opportunity. "I went through the Contract With America' and looked at the underlying themes," he explains. "Many of the religious right groups were involved in shaping that document. And a lot of what was in there was focused on children, ethics, and families."So in December 1994, Ballin began writing letters to Christian Coalition Executive Director Ralph Reed and Coalition founder Pat Robertson, soliciting their help in the tobacco-control movement. "I went through the [Contract's] sections on families and pornography and ethics and children and used the same terminology," says Ballin. He also appealed to Reed and Robertson's pro-life views, enclosing a study and a surgeon general's report that linked smoking to fetal damage and miscarriages.Over several months of correspondence, Ballin noticed a discrepancy between Reed and Robertson. Reed, who runs the Christian Coalition on a day-to-day basis, failed to acknowledge letters or sent back noncommittal responses. By contrast, Robertson, who had spoken out against tobacco in the past (he had even been docked on a religious right scorecard in 1988 for supporting a tax hike on liquor and cigarettes), replied promptly and effusively: "I totally concur on your splendid effort to reduce smoking. The Christian Broadcasting Network [Robertson's television ministry] has repeatedly broadcast programs highlighting the dangers of smoking, and we will indeed do more as materials are made available to us."But despite his supportive words, Robertson made no visible effort to bring the Christian Coalition's political muscle into the fight against tobacco. In the bimonthly magazine column through which he speaks to Coalition members, he has commented only once on Clinton's order to entrust the FDA with tobacco regulation, calling it the latest in "a dangerous trend" of executive overreaching.When Ballin created the "Contract for the Protection of America's Families and Children From Tobacco Use," which mimicked the language of the "Contract With the American Family," Robertson signed it but skipped the August 1995 press conference at which anti-smoking groups unveiled it. (Aides explained that he was too busy.) He also declined to sign a statement released at the press conference.Reed, meanwhile, openly criticizes tobacco-control efforts. Last August, he dismissed President Clinton's "tobacco crusade" as a political stunt and gloated that it had "created a lot of problems" for Democrats in Kentucky. Two weeks later, in his address to the Christian Coalition's annual convention, Reed derided Clinton for preaching against "the dangers of tobacco" after having "gutted the drug czar's office."Why has Reed resisted confronting tobacco? And why doesn't Robertson overrule Reed, as he reportedly did two years ago when Reed strayed from Robertson's anti-NAFTA position? The answer may be that Reed's motives and responsibilities differ from Robertson's. Robertson is a minister and broadcaster, accustomed to speaking his mind freely. Reed, however, is primarily a political strategist, who wants to avoid the mistake he attributes to Clinton: supporting tobacco regulations that create "problems" for those in his own party. In this case, Robertson evidently won't--or can't--overrule Reed.Reed's stance is reflected in the Christian Coalition's grassroots. "I haven't gotten any calls from county leaders or the field [saying] we've got to do something," reports Phil Crowson, the Coalition's North Carolina field director. "Our big issues are more saving unborn lives and reducing the amount of illegal pornography." But when asked about the thousands of unborn lives extinguished each year by smoking-induced miscarriages, Crowson expresses genuine shock. He's never been told about the research on miscarriages, which Ballin provided to Reed and Robertson a year before.A C O N S P I C U O U S S I L E N C EIf Reed and the Christian Coalition were serious about putting their muscle behind Robertson's words, they'd start by adding tobacco to the Coalition's "Congressional Scorecard," which implicitly tells conservative churchgoers which candidates to support. The Coalition distributed 40 million copies of the scorecard in 1994. While penalizing lawmakers who permit the distribution of condoms and pornography to kids, the scorecard overlooks those who permit the similar purveyance of cigarettes.On his cable TV show, Robertson has wondered aloud how his "dear friend," Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), can simultaneously be a leading tobacco apologist. Yet again Robertson fails to back up his words with the muscle of the Christian Coalition. On the Coalition's 1994 Senate scorecard, Helms gets a perfect grade, while Bob Bennett (R-Utah), a consistent supporter of measures to keep cigarettes away from kids, is docked for ratifying the appointment of a Clinton nominee who happened to be a lesbian.Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, which speaks for hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians and is the darling of Pat Buchanan, also omits tobacco from its agenda. In monthly reports that target corporations for boycotts or lobbying campaigns, the AFA often criticizes Philip Morris for sponsoring TV shows (e.g., "Frasier") which "[present] homosexuality as a normal, acceptable, alternative lifestyle." But when it comes to Philip Morris' presentation of smoking as a normal lifestyle, the AFA says nothing. In fact, a 1994 listing of Philip Morris products to be boycotted suggested Jell-O, Kool-Aid, and Cool Whip, conspicuously ignoring the company's 28 cigarette brands. (When the AFA has included tobacco products on its boycott list of Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco products, it's done so not because the companies' cigarette ads promote smoking, but because the ads appear in porn magazines.)Former drug czar Bill Bennett, the country's leading moral lecturer, seems to share the AFA's blind spot. In a television ad aired last December, Bennett called on "companies and products...like Philip Morris" to stop sponsoring "cultural rot" on prurient daytime talk shows. As to the more lethal rot caused by Philip Morris' own products, Bennett said nothing. And while the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility lobbies Time Warner to restrict the cigarette ads in its youth-oriented magazines, Bennett has confined his campaign against Time Warner to the more figurative pollution spread by its violent gangsta rap music.W H Y T H E R I G H T N E E D S T O B A C C OWhy are these activists silent about tobacco? One reason is party politics. Several Christian right leaders, when pressed by Patrick Mahoney, have conveyed discomfort about embracing a cause so loudly championed by liberals. "This is something that the president supports, and he could use it to manipulate us," one activist warned Mahoney. Taking on tobacco would also stir up trouble with pro-tobacco Republican allies in Congress. Christian right activists "don't want to offend people," scoffs Mahoney.It would also create problems with key party donors. In the 1993-94 election cycle, for example, tobacco companies gave $259,027 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which in turn reportedly gave $175,000 to the National Right to Life political action committee. "While I don't think R.J. Reynolds is giving money to Focus on the Family or anybody," says Richard Cizik, a policy analyst at the National Association of Evangelicals, "there is enough tobacco money floating around that it's probably inhibited some groups from speaking out."The principal channels through which tobacco money flows into church-based organizations are too small and numerous to trace. Conservative Christian lobbies and denominations get much of their support from Southern communities that rely heavily on the tobacco economy. After Clinton announced his FDA proposal last year, even liberal denominations were barraged with angry phone calls from members whose livelihoods depended on tobacco. "If the tobacco income was no longer donated to the church, many churches would completely go under," says Steve Sumerel, the director of the North Carolina Baptist State Convention's substance abuse and family life division. "The Baptist pastors out there know that. Why pick on an issue where you know you're going to lose your job?"T H E C O M I N G B A T T L EIf conservative Christians found the courage to take on tobacco, a number of politicians up for re-election this year might lose their jobs--including several politicians who pose as champions of human life and family values while taking tobacco money and opposing tobacco restrictions.Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.), the head of the House Commerce Committee who has led the charge against the FDA's regulation of tobacco, is particularly compromised. A year ago, while pro-life supporters were releasing a petition he signed demanding strict FDA scrutiny of the abortion-inducing drug RU486, pro-business advocates at a press conference next door were pushing forward his goal to gut the FDA.Still, when it comes to irony, no one can touch Helms. While denouncing homosexuality as a threat to public health, he has staunchly defended tobacco. His office even seems to help the tobacco industry keep an eye on pro-life groups. In a memo published last December by the Washington Post, a Philip Morris lobbyist informed his superiors during the 1989 search for a new surgeon general that "the pro-life community has coalesced around a Massachusetts physician who has assured Sen. Helms she has no strong anti-tobacco bias."At least one pro-life activist, the Rev. Patrick Mahoney, is outraged at Helms and his collaborators. "Why major pro- family, pro-life organizations have not put more pressure on Sen. Helms is just beyond me," says Mahoney. "It's obvious that Sen. Helms is more concerned about contributions from Philip Morris than standing for the dignity of human life."Helms, Bliley, and others may find themselves in a fix this year. Bill Clinton seems intent on making teenage smoking a family values issue in the presidential election. Ironically, he can thank Bob Dole for turning corporate corruption of children into a hot political topic. A year ago, in his now-famous jeremiad against Hollywood, Dole challenged Time Warner executives: "Must you debase our nation and threaten our children for the sake of corporate profits?"Several weeks later, a coalition of Republican doctors and scientists called on Speaker Newt Gingrich to "step up to the bully pulpit, as Sen. Bob Dole did concerning Hollywood violence, and denounce tobacco advertisingÉwhen it obviously targets children." Gingrich (who only weeks before had attended a tobacco-sponsored "Salute to Newt" that netted him $100,000 each from the chairmen of Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and Brown & Williamson) ignored the challenge, but within days, Clinton took it up.On August 9, Clinton chose a religious setting to announce that the government intended to restrict tobacco through the FDA. Speaking to the Progressive National Baptist Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, Clinton preached against smoking, drugs, violence, and teen pregnancy, calling them the four "deadly sins" that "are threatening our children." And in this year's State of the Union address, Clinton called on the tobacco industry as well as the entertainment industry to stop corrupting children.Are Dole, Gingrich, and other conservatives who champion the protection of kids from smut and drug peddlers ready to kick the habit of taking tobacco money and shielding its purveyors? A few months ago, when Bill Bennett blasted Philip Morris for sponsoring trash TV, he conceded to the Washington Post that such companies "have been friendly to the Republican Party. Too bad. You've got to go after your friends. It's not just grungy records and horrible shows. Corporate America has a big responsibility here."The emerging debate over tobacco and family values will tell us whether conservatives like Bennett are serious, or just blowing smoke.William Saletan is a contributing writer to Mother Jones. He profiled Bob Dole in the February 1996 issue.http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1996/05/sin-omission=Faith and Freedom Coalition updates at rww: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/search/node/Faith%20and%20Freedom%20Coalition=Bill Moyers: Christian Right Hypocrite Ralph Reed Has Resurrected Himself in the GOP -- He Must Be Praying We'll Forget His PastAugust 31, 2012

As the sun slowly sets over the Republican National Convention in Tampa, we settle back in the chairs that nice Mr. Eastwood just gave us and ponder some of the other oddities of the week. Like this item in the official GOP platform pointed out by Brad Plumer of The Washington Post:

“No minimum wage for the Mariana Islands.‘The Pacific territories should have flexibility to determine the minimum wage, which has seriously restricted progress in the private sector.’” This caught our attention (and thanks to colleague Theresa Riley for sending) because it once again reminds us of the sordid past of evangelical and political entrepreneur Ralph Reed who, as this week’s edition of Moyers & Company reports in detail, has emerged from the ashes of epic career fail to reestablish himself as a powerful figure in Republican politics. As head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Reed boasts he’s building a political dynamo of five million members with a massive database, an annual budget of $100 million and full-time lobbyists in all fifty state capitals, a colossal effort aimed at putting in place a right-wing social agenda and identifying and establishing contact with what it estimates as 27 million conservative voters in America. As you can imagine, with clout like that, Reed and his coalition were in high cotton at the Tampa convention.

Which brings us to that curious Mariana Islands minimum wage plank in the Republican platform. Some years ago, our government made an effort to clean up sweatshops on the islands – including Saipan -- that have been under the control of the United States since the end of World War II. Chinese women were brought over to the islands to work under awful conditions – subject to forced abortions and prostitution and paid pennies for producing garments labeled “Made in the USA.” Corrupt local officials hired the firm of infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- for more than four million dollars -- to try to stop the reforms proposed back in Washington. Abramoff, in turn, hired Ralph Reed and his political direct mail company, Millennium Marketing, to conduct a phony grass roots campaign urging Alabama Christians to write their local congressman to oppose the reforms. Of course, Reed didn’t tell those Christians he was being paid to help keep running sweatshops that exploited women. Instead, he told them the reforms were a trick orchestrated by the left and organized labor. Limits on Chinese workers would keep them from being “exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ.” His company explained it was just trying to encourage “grass roots citizens to promote the propagation of the Gospel” and that many of the workers were “converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand.”

With the explosion of the Jack Abramoff scandals and exposes by Ms. Magazine and other publications, the spotlight on the Marianas sweatshops finally did lead to congressional action, including a raise of the minimum wage and a law to federalize labor and immigration rules in the Marianas. The minimum wage now is $5.05 an hour, increasing to $5.55 on September 30, but many in the Marianas business sector continue to oppose the amount – hence the platform plank. Meanwhile, increasingly vocal calls have come for the impeachment of the islands’ longtime governor, Benigno Fitial, an old Abramoff pal. Nonetheless, there Fitial was in Tampa, unrepentant and front and center, head of the islands’ official Republican delegation. “Having too much fun in Tampa… to worry about this supposed impeachment waiting for me back home,” he tweeted his followers, and “I guarantee you no one is going to impeach me. I own this Legislature! No one will dare defy me!” Wow. As for Reed, once exposed, his shameful ruse came back to haunt him when he tried to run for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Georgia in 2006 – his opponent told the Marianas story in a devastating attack ad. Reed’s was a monstrous lie by one of the monumental hypocrites of our time. Yet he marches on, Christian soldier to the end, turning the temple of faith into one big ATM. There’s a word for this in the Bible: Abomination.

Tom DeLay, Out on Bail, Reunites with Abramoff buddy Ralph Reed at Faith and Freedom Rally

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Thu, 03/08/2012 - 1:50pm

Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX) is out on bail after he was found guilty of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. DeLay was also subject to an investigation over his links to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. In fact, DeLay played a central role in the Abramoff scandal on the illegal use of Indian gambling money.

Another member of the Abramoff’s crooked scheme was Religious Right activist Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition. Abramoff stealthily financed Reed’s anti-gambling organization in Alabama with money from casinos in Mississippi that were afraid of increased competition. Reed claimed he didn’t know it was gambling money, claims Abramoff laughed off as “ridiculous.” In a humiliating defeat, Reed lost his 2006 race to be the Republican nominee of Lt. Governor of Georgia, and in 2009 founded the Faith and Freedom Coalition.

Does it come as a surprise to anyone that DeLay, while out on bail, will be speaking at a Faith Freedom Coalition rally in Texas?

Surely, DeLay and Reed are the best people to talk about the importance of America’s “time-honored values” and “sound public policy at every level of government.”

The only thing that could make DeLay and Reed’s Texas rally more perfect would be if Jack Abramoff himself made an appearance. Too bad he now works for the ethics watchdog United Republic.

moyers:

Ralph Reed leaves the Christian Coalition to form Century Strategies, a political consulting/public affairs firm which claims to only accept clients who oppose abortion, higher taxes and gambling.

1999: Abramoff and Reed begin a campaign to protect the Choctaw casino against competition. Coordinating with Abramoff, Reed organizes Christians to oppose threats to Abramoff's client on moral grounds. In return, Abramoff funnels over $1 million of the Choctaw's payments to Reed through Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, allegedly to hide its origin.

(See how Abramoff made payments to Reed's company through a series of intermediaries from 1999 through 2002, including Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform)

Religious Right's Ralph Reed Field-Tests Plan for Beating Obama

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet

Posted on July 10, 2012, Printed on July 19, 2012

http://www.alternet.org/story/156141/religious_right%27s_ralph_reed_field-tests_plan_for_beating_obama

A mere 10 days since Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Lieutenant Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch survived the recall election launched against them by state's liberal coalition, Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, is ebullient as he takes the stage at his organization's Washington, D.C., gala on the final night of FFC's national conference at the Renaissance Hotel.

Reed has good reason to be happy; his return to the religious-right spotlight is a turn of events that few would have bet on. Since he first burst on the political scene in the 1990s as the wunderkind executive director of Rev. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition, Reed's political trajectory took him so close to the sun that his wings nearly melted. When George W. Bush signed him as a strategist for the 2000 presidential campaign, Reed's career soared -- only to crash four years later with revelations of his involvement in the Jack Abramoff scandal. Along the way, he made a lot of money, and is reported to live with his wife and two of his four children (the other two are grown) in a house in Duluth, Ga., worth $2.2 million.

The boyish contours of his face now marked with the occasional line, Reed, at 51, still conveys a youthful vigor, fit and trim in a well-tailored dark suit, his full head of hair brushed neatly back to display a smooth forehead. Taking no small measure of credit for the triumph of Walker and Kleefisch, Reed boasts of the 600,000 voter contacts he says his organization made to get conservative Wisconsinites to the polls on June 5. Later that evening, Reed will present to Kleefisch, who is billed as Wisconsin's answer to Sarah Palin, FFC's Courage in Leadership Award. (Kleefisch will also accept the same award for Walker, who did not attend.)

If you like what happened in Wisconsin, Reed implies, you're going to love the 2012 presidential race, when FFC reaches out to 27.1 million conservative voters; he promises that FFC will contact each of them between seven to 12 times to either get them to the polls, or better yet, vote early in states that permit it. Consider it payback, if you will, for the outcome of the 2008 presidential election.

The day after the election Barack Obama won by a wide margin, Reed says, he woke up feeling "like I'd been hit by a truck." Speaking of the Obama campaign, Reed explains: "We were embarrassed. They ran circles around us."

"I founded Faith and Freedom Coalition because I vowed that as long as I was alive, we were never going to get out-hustled on the ground again," he told a group of activists earlier in the day.

Reed has described FFC, launched in 2009, as "a 21st century version of the Christian Coalition on steroids." Reed's new organization seeks to meld the religious right with the Tea Party movement through the use of voter turnout strategies. But however successful he was in bringing right-wing evangelical voters to the polls during his tenure at the Christian Coalition, his managerial skills and business ethics appeared to be less than stellar.

When Reed left the Christian Coalition in 1997, the organization was in tatters, under investigation by the FEC for the kind of "electioneering" prohibited for tax-exempt non-profits by the I.R.S., and internally riven due to allegations made by chief financial officer Judy Liebert that a firm whose principals were friends of Reed's had over-billed the coalition to the tune of $1 million -- and been paid.

In 2004, Reed was implicated, though not charged, in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal when his role as a lobbyist on behalf of the gambling interests of a Choctaw Indian tribe was disclosed in a damaging Senate investigation. While the revelations derailed his attempt to win the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in the State of Georgia, the very religious-right friends he snookered in the Abramoff scandal appear to have forgiven him, according to Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches

Once again cloaked in the cape of a Christian crusader, Reed is back on the trail, doing what he does best: getting religious right-wingers to the polls.

Back at the Faith and Freedom Coalition gala, and with an eye to the media, perhaps, Reed issues what sounds like both a promise and a warning. "We're not just playing around," he says. "We're not shadowboxing; we are playing for keeps. We're playing for the most valuable prize in the history of the human race and that's the United States of America -- and we are not going to lose."

Eyes on the Prize

For Reed, however, there's likely another prize to collect, win or lose. It may be wrapped up in the old Red, White and Blue, but this prize comes in a distinctive shade of green. AlterNet learned that, in order to identify and make its 600,000 voter contacts in Wisconsin -- many of them by text messaging and e-mail subscriptions -- Faith and Freedom Coalition contracted with Millennium Marketing, a division of Century Strategies, a political consulting firm whose CEO happens to be Ralph Reed.

...

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/156141

Reed gave seminars to corporate public relations executives, coaching them on how to use electronic technologies and grassroots organizing to foil environmentalists who interfere with polluter profits" (Crimes 29). ref2 CONSULTING CO PARTNER IS AFP TIM PHILLIPS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_E._Reed,_Jr.

High school and college education

Born in Portsmouth, Virginia, to Navy ophthalmologist Ralph Reed and his mother Marcy, Reed moved often as a child. Reed spent a majority of his childhood in Miami, Florida. He moved with his family to Toccoa, Georgia, in 1976, graduating from Stephens County High School in 1979. He attended the University of Georgia where he earned a BA in history in 1985. After failing to properly cite an article as his role as editor of the college newspaper, Reed was discharged from his duties. Reed was a member of the Demosthenian Literary Society, the Jasper Dorsey Intercollegiate Debate Society, and College Republicans. He was also a columnist for The Red & Black student newspaper. Later, Reed attended Emory University where he received his Ph.D in American History in 1989.

[edit] Early days as political activist

Reed spent much of his college career as a political activist, taking six years to earn his undergraduate degree. He started with the University of Georgia College Republicans, steadily rising to state and then national leadership. He was later profiled in Gang of Five by Nina Easton, along with Grover Norquist and other young activists who got their start in that era.

[edit] The triumvirate

In 1981, Reed moved to Washington, D.C., to intern at the College Republican National Committee (CRNC). At the CRNC, Abramoff, Norquist and Reed formed what was known as the "Abramoff-Norquist-Reed triumvirate." Abramoff promoted Reed in 1983, appointing him to succeed Norquist as Executive Director of the CRNC. Norquist would later serve as President of Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax nonprofit lobbying firm in Washington, D.C.

[edit] College Election Controversy

In the spring of 1987, Reed was accused of rigging the election of Sam Harben as his successor as president of the College Republicans at the University of Georgia. Promising a party, Reed recruited a number of new members to vote in the election, submitting their membership paperwork on the night before the deadline for the election. The defeated presidential candidate, Lee Culpepper, complained to the College Republican National Committee. The CRNC investigated the matter, reprimanded Reed and ordered a new election.

[edit] Religious experience

Reed has said that, in September 1983, he had a religious experience while at Bullfeathers, an upscale pub in Capitol Hill that was popular with staffers (and, to a lesser extent, members) of the House of Representatives. Regarding the experience, Reed said "the Holy Spirit simply demanded me to come to Jesus". He walked outside the pub to a phone booth, thumbed through the yellow pages under "Churches," and found the Evangel Assembly of God in Camp Springs, Maryland. He visited the next morning and became a born-again Christian.[1]

[edit] Students for America

After receiving his B.A. in History in 1984, he moved that same year to Raleigh, North Carolina to help start Students for America, a conservative activist group supported by U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. Reed emerged as a leader of SFA.

SFA became largely dominated by members of Maranatha Campus Ministries, and this brought Reed into contact with Ed Buckham and Jim Backlin, the current Legislative Director of the Christian Coalition. This forged Ralph Reed's links to Tom DeLay through Buckham and Backlin.

Students for America established chapters on college campuses up and down the East Coast and held conferences. Among other issues, SFA supported Helms' bid for re-election and organized abortion clinic protests. Reed was temporarily arrested during an abortion protest at the Fleming Center Abortion Clinic in Raleigh but was not charged with any crime. After Ralph Reed left SFA for a bigger job at the Christian Coalition, SFA faded out of existence by the early 1990s.

[edit] Role in the Christian Coalition

Reed was then hired by religious broadcaster and unsuccessful Presidential candidate Pat Robertson as the first executive director of the Christian Coalition, headquartered in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Even though the Christian Coalition resulted from Robertson's campaign for President, Reed had played no role in Americans for Robertson.

Reed led the organization from 1989 to 1997, achieving national prominence which included an appearance on the cover of TIME. He resigned and moved to Georgia after federal prosecutors began investigating allegations by the Christian Coalition's chief financial officer, Judy Liebert. At this point, the group's finances were collapsing, and the IRS and Federal Election Commission were investigating it.

Building on the remnants of Robertson's Presidential campaign, the Coalition organized former Robertson supporters and other conservative people of faith to oppose political liberalism. Eschewing the confrontational tactics of street protest learned as a College Republican, Reed projected a "softer" public face for Christian conservatism. Reed apparently described himself as a "guerrilla fighter" who "traveled at night" and put "enemies" in "body bags" before they even realized he had struck.[2]

Both Reed and the Christian Coalition rose to national prominence in the early 1990s, protesting against the Clinton administration's policies. Reed and the Coalition were widely credited with helping mobilize Christian conservatives in support of Republican candidates in the 1994 Congressional elections.[citation needed]

At the pinnacle of his power, Reed appeared on the cover of TIME on May 15, 1995, under the banner "The Right Hand of God: Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition."

In 1996, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) brought an enforcement [3] alleging that the Christian Coalition "violated federal campaign finance laws during congressional elections in 1990, 1992 and 1994, and the presidential election in 1992." Reed called the action "baseless."

...

Reed was endorsed by the "Confederate Republican Caucus," a block of almost 500 "heritage" activists who had participated in the state convention as a protest against the removal of the Confederate battle emblem from the State Flag. The organization would later claim that they were "double-crossed" by Reed.[6]

Documents released by federal investigators in June 2005 show that Reed's 2001 campaign for State Chairman was partially financed with contributions from the Choctaws, an Indian gaming tribe represented by Abramoff.

The party experienced success in the 2002 elections under Reed's leadership. Saxby Chambliss was elected as U.S. Senator, and Sonny Perdue was elected as Governor. Reed, however, was asked to relinquish his job as State Chairman by Perdue, whose long-shot candidacy was largely ignored by Reed in favor of Chambliss.

http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Ralph_Reed

Serving God and Enron

In January 2002, it was revealed that "Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, recommended the Republican strategist Ralph Reed to the Enron Corporation for a lucrative consulting contract as Mr. Bush was weighing whether to run for president ..."

Rove associates said "the recommendation, which Enron accepted, was intended to keep Mr. Reed's allegiance to the Bush campaign without putting him on the Bush payroll. Mr. Bush, they say, was then developing his compassionate conservativism message and did not want to be linked too closely to Mr. Reed, who had just stepped down as executive director of the Christian Coalition, an organization of committed religious conservatives.

At the same time, they said, "the contract discouraged Mr. Reed, a prominent operative who was being courted by several other campaigns, from backing anyone other than Mr. Bush."

Reed was paid "$10,000 to $20,000 a month, the amount varying by year and the particular work, people familiar with the arrangement [said]. He was hired in September 1997 and worked intermittently for Enron until the company collapsed." [10]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ralph_Reed

Century Strategies LLC was founded in 1997 by Ralph Reed and Timothy R. Phillips. The company describes itself as "one of the nation's leading political and corporate consulting firms. Century Strategies has provided consulting services to Fortune 500 corporations, members of the United States House and Senate leadership, numerous Governors, and the campaign of President George Walker Bush ..

Century provides strategic consulting and long-range planning for numerous corporate clients as well as political campaign management consulting to candidates in every region of the country.... Century Strategies is a full-service firm providing Strategic Business Development Assistance, Organizational Development, Direct Mail and Voter Contact Services, Fundraising Management, Research and Analyisis, Creative Media Planning, Public and Media Relations, and List Management and Procurement."[1] [2]

According to a July 2004 profile in The National Journal, Century Strategies "has raked in millions of dollars by mounting grassroots lobbying drives and other campaigns -- as well as doing some inside-the-Beltway advocacy -- for two dozen or so Fortune 100 companies and lesser-known enterprises."[3]

In 2003, the Georgia-based firm opened a Washington DC office. Century Strategies "is poised to earn handsome fees from the [Bush-Cheney '04] re-election campaign and from the Republican National Committee as a key vendor for voter contact and mobilization. ... Reed's firm received a total of $4.3 million from the RNC and the Bush campaign in 2000 for doing voter calls and direct mail."[citation needed]

Again according to The National Journal, when Reed formed Century Strategies, he "decided to focus on political and business consulting, an arena in which he could apply his legendary talents for mobilizing grassroots drives, often with religious and other conservatives, to assist political campaigns and business interests. Early on, Reed discovered the potential for synergy between the business and political worlds. For instance, one of his first and highest-profile consulting jobs was for Enron, a client that he garnered in 1997, reportedly through his connections to Karl Rove, who later made Reed a consultant in the 2000 presidential campaign. Century Strategies earned more than $300,000 from Enron for mounting grassroots lobbying campaigns to help build backing for energy deregulation."[citation needed] Other clients have included the school-focused media company Channel One, Verizon and casino interests working with Reed friend Jack Abramoff in an effort to block Native American tribes from opening new, competing casinos.[citation needed]

Contents

[hide]

1 Contact Details

2 Team

3 Articles and resources

4 Related SourceWatch Resources

4.1 References

4.2 External resources

Contact Details

Website: http://www.censtrat.com

Team

Ralph E. Reed, Jr., President

Timothy R. Phillips, Vice President

Eric Criss, Vice President of Corporate Affairs

Robert Randolph, President, Millennium Marketing

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch Resources

David Kuo

References

? Century Strategies, "Welcome to Century Strategies", Century Strategies website, accessed August 2008.

? "About AFP - Tim Phillips: Timothy R. Phillips, President", Americans for Prosperity website, accessed August 2008.

? Bill Berkowitz, "Ralph & the Rabbi: a thinner Reed?", Media Transparency, May 22, 2007.

External resources

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ralph_E._Reed,_Jr.

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Century_Strategies"

Categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements | United States | Public relations firms | Needs review

Ralph Reed: The Crash of the Choir-Boy Wonder

Ralph Reed's Bid for Elected Office Cut Short by Casino Corruption Scandal

Religious Right power-broker Ralph Reed’s first bid for elected office crashed and burned on July 18 amid the stench of the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal. Losing in the Georgia Republican primary race for Lt. Governor was a stunning defeat for the man who helped build a GOP majority in Congress and oversaw the rise of the Religious Right’s political power in the 1990s. And it’s an embarrassment for the movement he once led.

Ralph Reed entered politics as a youthful, ambitious right-wing activist in the late 1970’s, eager to root out the rampant “moderation” he found at the University of Georgia.[1] Within a decade, he had gone from local right-wing activist to national head of the College Republicans. But he did not stop there; by the late-1980s he was the executive director of the fledgling Christian Coalition, quickly turning it into one of the most effective right-wing political organizations in the country. After a series of setbacks and scandals, Reed left the Christian Coalition in the late 1990’s to found a consulting and public relations firm through which he earned millions of dollars only to become deeply embroiled in a widespread corruption scandal link to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff [2] - a scandal that stopped his transformation from a behind-the-scenes, right-wing operative to respectable Republican candidate is dead in its tracks.[3]

Reed’s campaign for Lt. Governor of Georgia was merely the latest manifestation of his decades-long quest to merge his grassroots right-wing political clout with his personal desire for recognition as a member of the Republican establishment. By portraying himself as a “mainstream … conservative” running on a “faith, family, and freedom” platform,[4] Reed sought to capitalize upon the network of support he had built over his years in the right-wing trenches while simultaneously downplaying his controversial past. But it was not to be, as the very enthusiasm for hard-nosed and duplicitous tactics that had catapulted him to right-wing political stardom ultimately became his undoing.

The Beginnings of a Right-Wing Dirty-Trickster

Arriving on the campus of the University of Georgia in the fall of 1979, Reed became entranced with right-wing political activism and street theater after witnessing a vitriolic protest in response to the hostage crisis in Iran, where participants chanted “nuke ‘em ‘til they glow,” demanding that Iranian students in the US quit “taking our jobs and go home.”[5]

Reed soon began to attend College Republican meetings on campus but was nonplussed by the organization’s apparent moderation. Setting out to counter it, Reed quickly created a network of supporters within the organization and got himself elected president, a position from which he then became the center of ultra-conservative activism on campus. With the College Republicans behind him, Reed threw himself into campus, local and national politics; holding “mock elections” and, at one point, even convincing the University Union to co-sponsor a supposedly nonpartisan event during which Reed and others passed out flyers that made it appear as if the Union was attacking a Democratic senate candidate for failing to appear.[6] Reed eventually apologized to the Union for the “error,” but as Nina Easton explained in her book Gang of Five, “after-the-fact apologies and explanations issued too late to alter the victory that Ralph craved, would become a hallmark of his career – from College Republican shenanigans in the 1980s to the Christian Coalition’s stealth campaigns and biased portrayals of opponent’s political records in the 1990s.” As one of Reed’s political allies would say years later, “[Reed] is completely Machiavellian. He will do anything to win.”[7]

In college, Reed was also a columnist for the school newspaper The Red and Black, but was fired after writing a column attacking Mohandas Gandhi as a man who “urged the entire Jewish race to commit collective suicide … and spent his mornings rolling around in bed with naked teen-age girls.” It was not for spouting these outrageous views that Reed was fired, but rather for the unethical practice of plagiarizing them from an article that had earlier appeared in Commentary magazine.[8]

When Reed petitioned to join the University of Georgia’s prestigious debating society, his “win at all costs” approach actually got him “blackballed” by members who worried about his enthusiasm for dirty tricks and hard-ball politics and feared that he would attempt to use the organization to further his own political agenda.[9] Though he was eventually accepted, the rebuke did not convince him to change his ways, at least when it came to politics. As Reed was preparing to graduate, he rewrote the organization’s bylaws to allow new members to register up until the day of the vote. He and his supporters then promised a keg party to more than a hundred “new members” and one-time voters willing to support Reed’s chosen candidate, who handily won the election. Reed was eventually reprimanded by the national chapter of the College Republicans, but his candidate remained in office (and later conceded that they “ran a dirty election.”) [10]

[5] Gang of Five, p.113

[6] Gang of Five, p. 115-117

[7] Gang of Five, p.117

[8] Gang of Five, p.131

[9] Gang of Five, p125

[10] Gang of Five, p.130

Source URL: http://www.pfaw.org/media-center/publications/ralph-reed-the-crash-of-the-choir-boy-wonder/the-beginnings-of-right-wing-

The College Republicans Re-Created as Right-Wing Revolutionaries

Upon graduating, Reed moved to Washington, DC to join hard-core right-wing activists Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff, where he even slept upon the latter’s couch, as he joined their quest to both purge the national College Republicans of “in-house dissenters” and “destroy the enemy Left.”[11] Some twenty years later, both Reed and Norquist have been closely linked to the corruption scandal surrounding Abramoff.

Working closely with Norquist, Reed helped turn the College Republicans, which had been, since its inception, little more than a party-building organ and farm system for the Republican National Committee, into “a place for hard-core ideologues” which Norquist dominated with Stalin-like control.[12] Whereas Norquist was a nose-to-the-grindstone, right-wing revolutionary, Abramoff preferred to use his personal connections and wealth to build relationships with established Republican players, which he then parlayed into his campaign for national chairman of the College Republicans. Abramoff’s election to the post was assured when his campaign convinced the only challenger, Amy Ridenour (nee Moritz), to drop out in exchange for a promise to make her executive director under Abramoff. But after Abramoff’s election, Norquist decided that she was not loyal enough and her desk went instead to Reed.[13]Years later, Ridenour went on to become president of the right-wing National Center for Public Policy Research, which has also been connected to the Abramoff scandal.[14]

Working at the College Republicans “for the Ambramoff-Norquist-Reed triumvirate,” wrote Easton, “required slavish devotion.” With Reed serving as Norquist’s acolyte, new recruits were tested for ideological loyalty by being peppered with questions about whether they supported the death penalty for adultery and were required to memorize passages from the movie “Patton” with the word “Democrats” replacing references to “Nazis”: “The Democrats are the enemy. Wade into them! Spill their blood! Shoot them in the belly!”[15] To Reed and the others, politics was war; a view he seems to have held onto throughout his career.

The College Republicans cultivated close relationships with like-minded up-and-coming House members such as Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich; so much so that their ultimate mission became to get Kemp elected President of the United States and Gingrich Speaker of the House. Blinded by their ambitious goals and ideological zeal, the College Republicans under Norquist, Reed, and Abramoff had no time for trivial tasks such as bill paying and operating within budget, leading a one-time Republican National Committee deputy director to accuse them of hypocrisy for “spouting the conservative message [when] they don’t even pay their own bills. They were totally, totally irresponsible fiscally.”[16]

[11] Gang of Five, p.135

[12] Gang of Five, p.138

[13] Gang of Five, p.140

[14] R. Jeffrey Smith, “DeLay Airfare Was Charged To Lobbyist's Credit Card,” The Washington Post, April 24, 2005

[15] Gang of Five, p.143

[16] Gang of Five, p.145

Ralph Reed: The Crash of the Choir-Boy Wonder

Born Again Politics

In 1983, Ralph Reed found God. Or rather, as one of his college classmates put it, “He didn’t change his views. He just found out that God agreed with him.”[17] Reed’s newfound faith reportedly compelled him to seek forgiveness for some of his past transgressions and ultimately led to the founding of Students for America (SFA), a spin-off of Young Americans for Freedom that sought to get college-aged evangelicals involved in politics.[18]

The skills and contacts he had developed during his stint with the College Republicans came in handy as the head of Students for America, an organization which he claimed - just one year after it was founded –consisted of more than “7,000 students on approximately 200 college campuses in 41 states.”[19]

Reed’s love of political theater and right-wing activism served him well at SFA. For instance, when he found out that there was a women’s health clinic just down the street from SFA’s headquarters, Reed rented a powder blue Cadillac to serve as a hearse and organized protests and “pray-ins” outside the clinic, even going so far as to picket the home of the doctor who had founded the clinic.[20]

Reed’s Washington connections were a big draw for SFA, which held training sessions for activists that featured right-wing stalwarts such as Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Bill Bennett, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Jesse Helms.[21]

Reed eventually became “burned out” on politics and retreated to Emory University where he obtained a PhD. in American History.[22] But he would soon return to right-wing politics as the man behind the newly formed “Christian Coalition.”

Ralph Reed: The Crash of the Choir-Boy Wonder

The Christian Coalition Rises From Robertson’s Political Ashes

The Christian Coalition was born out of Rev. Pat Robertson’s failed 1988 campaign for president.

Though Reed had volunteered for Jack Kemp’s campaign that year, he was seated next to Robertson at a Students for America dinner during the inaugural festivities for the eventual victor, President George H.W. Bush. Robertson was reportedly so impressed with Reed that he offered him a job running his fledgling organization. The scandalous fall of televangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, along with the decline of Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” had left a vacuum that Robertson was eager to fill and he set out to do so by turning his campaign supporters and mailing list into a political grassroots powerhouse.[23]

Reed was initially hired as the “acting executive director” and was in charge of ensuring that the organization lived up to its mission to “reverse the moral decline and encroaching secularism in this country.”[24] Reed plotted a course designed to create an organization that would have three million members, 350 chapters, and a $10 million budget by the 1992 election.[25] After receiving more than $60,000 in “seed money” from the National Republican Senatorial Committee,[26] the organization began modestly in a Virginia warehouse, and soon, through a Reed-orchestrated direct mail campaign blasting the National Endowment for the Arts for funding supposedly offensive works, quickly managed to raise more than $80,000.[27]

With this initial money, Reed focused on building a massive grassroots organization that trained activists across the country on how to draw crowds, hold rallies, and run political campaigns.[28] As he was building the Coalition from the ground up, Reed pored over demographic surveys and hit upon the “faith, family, and freedom” platform he continued to use right up through his primary election defeat; a platform that targeted nervous suburbanites with children who were worried about the state of American schools, culture, and morals. Rather than presenting the Christian Coalition as just another right-wing organization seeking to impose its political agenda on America, Reed chose a “totally different kind of marketing”; one that advertised the Christian Coalition as an organization that would stand up for the political, moral, and religious values of average Americans.[29]

As the organization grew, Reed sought to navigate the fine line between catering to Robertson’s and the Coalition’s hard-core right-wing base and the less-radical baby-boomer conservatives he hoped to reach. It would be a balance he would struggle to maintain throughout his time at the Christian Coalition. And even as he hoped to reach out to a wider audience, Reed could not let go of the combat mentality that drove his political work, as evidenced by his claims that much of the Coalition’s success was based on “stealth … It’s like guerilla warfare. If you reveal your location, all it does is allow your opponent to improve his artillery bearings. It’s better to move quietly, with stealth, under cover of night.” Elsewhere he stated “I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.”[30]

Despite a $12 million budget and a quarter-million dues paying members, the Christian Coalition could not successfully help George H.W. Bush win re-election in 1992. At the time, Reed was preaching to the Coalition that “the first strategy [for success], and in many ways the most important strategy, for evangelicals is secrecy.”[31] But the chapters Reed was creating around the country were anything but subtle about their right-wing agendas and quickly began writing party platforms that called for everything from mandatory reporting of AIDS “carriers” to bans on homosexuals in health care, day care and teaching positions. The Washington state chapter even went so far as to demand US reoccupation of the Panama Canal.[32]

Reed’s stealth strategy did not work and after Bill Clinton won the election, he, the Coalition, and the rest of the right-wing were forced to shoulder much of the blame - mainly because they had taken over the Republican National Convention and turned it into a prime-time, right-wing pep rally, frightening off many of the voters Reed had been hoping to court.[33]

Reed’s goal of making the Religious Right a key part of the Republican mainstream had failed, at least temporarily, and the loss prompted Reed to contemplate getting out of politics all together. But such thoughts were fleeting, because when President Clinton attempted to lift the ban on gays serving in the US military, Reed sensed an opportunity and pounced. Via Robertson’s “700 Club” broadcast, Reed orchestrated a flurry of opposition to the move, generating so many calls that they managed to jam the Capitol Hill switchboard.[34] Reed had managed to politically and powerfully mobilize the right-wing grassroots by exploiting Robertson’s reach into the homes of evangelicals and was quickly back in the game.

Yet he still maintained his hopes of “casting a wider net,” to quote the title of one of his own articles, beyond the Coalition’s right-wing, evangelical base.[35] But that proved difficult with Robertson publicly making statements such as “the feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."[36]

With the mid-term elections in 1994, the Christian Coalition was revitalized and back at work, helping to elect right-wing candidates to Congress. The Republican take-over prompted Reed to boast that the election “signaled our political arrival.” [37] Yet the Coalition’s election work was so blatantly political that it led to an investigation by the Federal Election Commission. As a tax-exempt organization, it was illegal for the Coalition to engage in express political advocacy, yet the organization had distributed more than 30 million voters’ guides that distorted candidates’ positions in a manner that inevitably benefited Republican candidates.[38] Because of this and other political activities, the organization was finally stripped of its tax-exempt status by the IRS in 1999.[39]

After the “Republican Revolution” in 1994, Reed closely aligned the Coalition’s agenda with that of the right-wing Republicans who had just captured control of the House of Representatives, even introducing his own “Contract With the American Family” that echoed the Republicans’ “Contract With America.”[40] After the election, Reed stated that passage of a school prayer amendment was “not our top priority,” but when Reed appeared, flanked by a mass of high-ranking Republican leaders, at a press conference unveiling the “Contract With the American Family,” the prayer amendment was listed as its “top priority.”[41] For Reed, the election signaled that “we have finally gained what we have always sought: a place at the table.”[42]

Still, Reed was growing worried that the Right had allowed itself to become defined and, in his words, “ghettoized by a narrow band of issues like abortion, homosexual rights and prayer in school” that hampered its ability to become a mainstream force. To counter this “ghettoization,” Reed set out to broaden the Coalition’s agenda to include issues like health care. Thus, when President Clinton announced his health care plan, Reed unleashed the Coalition’s most expensive grassroots campaign ever. The organization spent $1.4 million opposing the plan by focusing primarily on its supposed ramifications for abortion, homosexual rights, and sex education, with Reed warning at one point that it was nothing but “a Trojan Horse for a not-so-hidden agenda to …promote a radical social agenda.”[43]

Just as Reed worked to put the Coalition’s muscle behind the Republican leadership’s agenda, he likewise continued his efforts to make the organization a key player within the Republican Party and, in 1996, turned the Coalition into a driving force behind Sen. Bob Dole’s presidential campaign. The more moderate Dole was not the Right’s first choice – that honor went to ideologue Pat Buchanan, who managed to place second in the Iowa Republican primary and win the primary in New Hampshire. It was at that point that Reed pulled out all the stops and delivered South Carolina, and the nomination, to Dole.[44] But it came at a price.

Ralph Reed: The Crash of the Choir-Boy Wonder

The Coalition’s Public and Private Decline

While Reed was being hailed in the mainstream press as a political wunderkind, the Coalition’s right-wing base was growing increasingly uneasy with Reed’s willingness to soften its positions on controversial social issues, especially abortion, in exchange for political power and a place at the Republican table. After Reed refused to criticize Colin Powell’s support for abortion rights, other right-wing leaders like James Dobson publicly lashed out at him, asking “is power the motivator of this great crusade?” and warning him not to give in to the “temptation … to bend to the pressures of pragmatism and personal ambition.”[45] When he wrote a book in which he seemed to distance himself from calls for a “human life amendment,” he was likewise pilloried and told he “no longer represents those … who feel very strongly about family values and life.” Reed issued an “urgent statement” stating that the Coalition “opposed abortion in every case except when a mother’s life is in danger” and would “oppose with every fiber of our being any effort to include a rape and incest exception in the [Republican National Committee’s] platform.” [46] But the damage had been done. And when Bob Dole lost the election, much of the Coalition’s clout evaporated again.

But Reed soldiered on. In 1996, in an attempt to reach out to religious African American voters and bring them into the right wing movement, Reed announced that the Coalition was going to raise one million dollars to help rebuild black churches in the South that had been destroyed in a series of fire bombings. What had initially been planned as a one-day fundraising event ended up taking seven months. Similarly, Reed announced in 1997 the creation of the Samaritan Project, “A bold plan to break the color line and bridge the gap that separates white evangelicals and Roman Catholics from their Latino and African American brothers and sisters.” Reed pledged that the Coalition would raise $10 million for inner city churches, but less than a year later the project was abandoned after raising less than $50,000.[47]

Around the same time, a scandal erupted within the organization over allegations by the Coalition’s chief financial officer that the organization’s direct-mail vendor, run by one of Reed’s close friends and business associates, had been routinely over-billing the organization to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. She also alleged that Reed had turned over the Coalition’s mailing list, valued at nearly a million dollars, to the vendor free of charge. When the CFO took her concerns to the US Attorney’s office, she was suspended by the Coalition and eventually fired. Reed denied the allegations, but after his departure from the organization, the Coalition filed suit claiming that its mailing list had been fraudulently obtained and used by the vendor to solicit donations for other organizations.[48]

After Reed’s 1997 exit, the Christian Coalition continued to deteriorate and, by 1999, found itself $2.5 million in debt, as well as facing the repayment of back taxes after having had its tax-exempt status revoked and fines for having improperly supported Newt Gingrich’s election and sharing its mailing list with right-wing Senate candidate Oliver North.[49]

The Coalition moved its headquarters to Washington, DC in 2000 and just a few months later was sued by 10 black employees who alleged that they had been forced to eat in a segregated section and enter the office through the back door. The Coalition settled the suit for a reported $300,000 and its decline continued. Revenue shrank from a high of $26 million in 1996 to just $1.3 million in 2004 and the organization soon found itself facing lawsuits from landlords, lawyers, and clients for failure to pay its bills. In 2002, nearly broke and in shambles, the organization was forced to relocate to South Carolina, and was even sued by its moving company as it tried to collect $1,890 on an unpaid bill.[50]

While the Christian Coalition crumbled, Reed was off raking in hefty consulting fees from some of the most successful and influential corporations in the nation.

Dirty Ticks Once Again – For Profit

After leaving the Christian Coalition, Reed founded Century Strategies, a “public relations and public affairs firm with offices in Atlanta and Washington,”[51] but his political consulting business got off to an inauspicious start. In 1998, only 50 percent of Reed’s clients had won their election races, and that figure was only derived by counting a number of clients that Reed would not identify.[52] In fact, “just about every one of his publicly known clients who faced an even remotely competitive opponent went down to defeat.” Reed’s candidates were often reduced to relying on outrageous, last-minute attacks, such as running an ad featuring an actor resembling one candidate’s opponent shuffling down a hallway in a psychiatric hospital clad in a tattered bathrobe.[53]

Despite these political setbacks, Reed served as an advisor to the Bush campaign in 2000[54] and stepped up to play a key role during the Republican primary in South Carolina. After then-Governor George W. Bush lost the New Hampshire primary to Sen. John McCain by nearly twenty points, Reed went to work targeting evangelical voters in South Carolina, just as he had done for Bob Dole four years earlier. Relying on a network of grassroots activists and radio ads, Reed orchestrated a campaign that launched some 400,000 phone calls and mailings attacking McCain on everything from abortion to campaign finance reform.[55] Bush won the state handily. [56] [black love child]

Reed went on to become chairman of the Georgia Republican Party in 2002 and served as the Southeast director for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004. But in between his high-profile election work, Reed was busy building his consulting business. Shortly after starting Century Strategies, Reed wrote to his long-time friend, Jack Abramoff, of his “need to start humping in corporate accounts” saying “I'm counting on you to help me with some contacts." [57]

Reed eventually landed contracts, thanks to Karl Rove, with the likes of Enron, which paid Reed in excess of $300,000 for work on energy deregulation before it went bankrupt.[58] But it was through his personal ties to Abramoff that Reed eventually earned millions of dollars and found himself implicated in one of the largest corruption scandals in recent history.

Moolah, Monkeys, Morons – and Reed

Jack Abramoff and his business partner, public affairs specialist Michael Scanlon, are at the center of a complex, multi-million dollar scandal that involves several high-ranking government officials and members of Congress. Scanlon has already pled guilty to conspiring to bribe public officials,[59] while Abramoff has pled guilty to conspiracy, tax evasion and mail fraud.[60] Both of these guilty pleas came from cases unrelated to their work with Reed, which is still under investigation.

As part of their “business strategy,” Abramoff and Scanlon worked together to rake in more than $80 million in lobbying and public relations fees from six Indian tribes over a three year period. Abramoff, a lobbyist, was required by law to disclose his clients and fees, whereas Scanlon, a former press secretary for Rep. Tom DeLay, was merely a “public affairs strategist” and not required to make any such disclosures. Together, the two developed a system, nicknames “Gimme Five,” whereby Abramoff would get hired by a tribe and urge them to hire Scanlon’s firm to handle PR at a cost of millions of dollars.[61] The money paid to Scanlon was then funneled through a series of fraudulent foundations and think tanks, including one that operated out of the basement of a beach house in Delaware and was run by two of Scanlon’s childhood friends; one a lifeguard, the other a former yoga instructor.[62] The money would then be sent back to Scanlon and split between him and Abramoff.[63]

But in some cases, the money was passed on to others – such as Ralph Reed. Given Reed’s close personal ties to Abramoff and his position as the head of an influential “public affairs firm,” it seems only natural that Scanoln and Abramoff would turn to Reed when they needed the right-wing base ginned up in order to help their casino-owning clients - in Scanlon’s words, to “bring out the wackos to vote against something.”[64]

For his part, Abramoff dismissed his Indian clients as “morons,” “monkeys,” and “troglodytes” in widely publicized emails to Scanlon[65] and was primarily concerned with getting his “mitts on [their] moolah.”[66] But in order to do that, he needed to show the tribes that he could actually deliver something in exchange for the millions he and Scanlon were being paid.

Beginning in 1999, Reed, who had once called gambling “a cancer on the American body politic,” was hired by Abramoff on more than one occasion to employ his expertise in mobilizing the right-wing grassroots to help shut down gambling initiatives that threatened the interests of Abramoff’s casino-owning clients.

Reed’s Lucrative “Stealth Campaign”

In 1999, Abramoff subcontracted Reed’s firm to generate opposition to attempts to legalize a state-sponsored lottery and video poker in Alabama, an effort that was bankrolled by the Choctaw Tribe in order to eliminate competition to its own casino in neighboring Mississippi.[67] Reed promised that Century Strategies was “opening the bomb bays and holding nothing back” and his firm ultimately received $1.3 million from the Choctaws for this effort, which included engaging the Alabama chapter of the Christian Coalition, as well as influential right-wing figures such as James Dobson, to work to defeat the proposals. [68]

The strategy had one small problem: the Alabama Christian Coalition had an explicit policy that it “will not be the recipient of any funds direct or in-direct or any in-kind direct or indirect from gambling interests.” (Emphasis in original.)[69] Knowing this, Reed and Abramoff worked to hide the source of the $850,000 paid to the Christian Coalition for its anti-gambling efforts by funneling money from the Choctaws through Americans for Tax Reform, a Washington, DC anti-tax organization headed by their old College Republican friend Grover Norquist.[70] When asked why the tribe’s money had to be funneled through conduits such as ATR, a Choctaw representative stated it was because Reed did not want it known that casino money was funding his operation: “It was our understanding that the structure was recommended by Jack Abramoff to accommodate Mr. Reed’s political concerns.”[71]

Nonetheless, Reed repeatedly assured the Christian Coalition that the funding for its work was not coming from gambling interests. This was technically true as the Choctaws were paying for it out of their non-gambling revenue, though their objective was obviously to protect their own gambling interests and revenue.[72] According to emails obtained during a Senate investigation into Abramoff’s activities and reported in the media, Reed was well aware of who was paying for this anti-gambling effort. When the information began to surface in the press and the Christian Coalition learned of the source of the $850,000 it had received, it demanded an explanation from Reed who apologized in a letter saying he should have “explained that the contributions came from the Choctaws,”[73] this admitting that he had been fully aware of the source of the funding. But by the time Reed offered his “after-the-fact apology,” the gambling initiative had been defeated and the Christian Coalition had been duped.[74]

When word of Reed’s work for Abramoff first broke, Reed claimed that he had “no direct knowledge of [Abramoff’s lobbying firm’s] clients or their interests.”[75] But according to the report recently released by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee on Abramoff’s bilking of the tribes, Reed was informed by Abramoff as early as 1999 that the money that was funding his anti-gambling operations was coming from the casino-owning Choctaw tribe.

The report published an email Abramoff sent to Reed instructing him to “page me with a page of no more than 90 words ... informing me of your completion of the budget and giving me a total budget figure with category breakdowns. Once I get this, I will call Nell [Rodgers] at Choctaw and get it approved.” A subsequent email to Reed asked him to send “invoices as soon as possible so I can get Choctaw to get us checks asap.”[76]

Thus, Reed was clearly aware that the funding for his anti-gambling work was coming from the Choctaw and that he was indirectly working to protect the tribe’s multi-million dollar gambling interests. Despite the repeated references to the Choctaw in Abramoff’s emails, Reed continued to publicly insist that he did not know the source of the funding.[77]

Playing the eLottery – Faith, Family and Fraud

In 2000, Abramoff was hired by eLottery, an online gambling services company, to fight the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act. The legislation was designed to make it easier to stop online gambling and appeared headed for easy passage, at least until Abramoff and Reed went to work. Abramoff seized on language in the bill that exempted jai alai and horse racing and worked to portray the bill, because of these exemptions, as actually expanding legalized gambling.[78]

Abramoff instructed eLottery, just as he had with the Choctaw Tribe, to send money to Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform; only this time, the money went from Norquist to a small right-wing group in Virginia called the Faith and Family Alliance before finally ending up at Century Strategies.[79]

The money went to the Faith and Family Alliance at Reed’s insistence. The organization had been set up by two of Reed’s colleagues and was headed by a former Regent University Law student who is now serving a seven-year term in prison for soliciting sex with minors. Prior to his incarceration, he acted as a “shell” for the eLottery money, telling the Washington Postthat Century Strategies had called him and told him to expect a package from Americans for Tax Reform. When the package arrived, it contained a check for $150,000, which he was instructed to deposit and then write a check for the same amount to Century Strategies.[80]

Abramoff was also working closely with Tony Rudy, then a senior aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, and Rev. Lou Sheldon of the right-wing Traditional Values Coalition. Thanks to the combination of Rudy’s inside access and Sheldon’s outside agitation, the bill failed to get the requisite number of votes on the House floor, much to the bafflement of its many anti-gambling supporters.[81]

While Abramoff and his eLottery clients were ecstatic, many on the right, such as James Dobson and the Christian Coalition, were outraged and the bill’s supporters went to work to bring it up for another vote. To fight this new effort, Abramoff instructed eLottery to send another $150,000 to American Marketing Inc. because “This is the company Ralph is using.” A few weeks later, a mailer was issued by the Traditional Values Coalition attacking Rep. Robert Aderholt, a vocal opponent of gambling, for having initially cast his vote in favor of the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act or, in the twisted words of Abramoff’s scheme, “in support [of a bill] the gamblers want on horse and dog racing.” The bulk rate stamp on the mailing stated that it had been paid for by American Marketing, and though Reed’s spokesperson insists that the American Marketing responsible for the mailing was “a different company,” theWashington Post reports that “records show that the company is run by … the president of Reed's direct-marketing subsidiary.” [82] The anti-gambling bill never came up for another vote.

Reed claimed that he was unaware that his work for Abramoff was being done on behalf of eLottery and didn’t even learn of it until 2005, but emails obtained by The Atlanta Journal Constitution show that he was told of “the elot project” as early as 2000. In early 2001, after the eLottery project had succeeded, Reed even mentioned the company by name in an email to Abramoff about the White House’s choice for “technology czar,” teasing him to “Tell your elottery friends that the next czar will be an anti-gambling [Pentecostal] Christian whose main interest in life is banning smut from the Internet.”[83]

Mobilizing the Right – For Profit

In 2001, Reed was involved in another Abramoff-driven effort to fight a loosening of restrictions on riverboat gambling in Louisiana, which would increase competition to a casino operated by the Coushatta tribe in that state. Again, the funding for Reed’s operation was funneled through a third party because, according to the tribe’s former vice-chairman, “it wouldn’t look good if [he’s] receiving money from a casino-operating tribe to oppose gambling. It would be kind of like hypocritical.”[84] This time around Reed sought to help protect the Coushattas‘ gambling interests by reaching out to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Tony Perkins, then a state representative who now heads the Family Research Council.[85] While Perkins lobbied his colleagues in the legislature, Reed launched a phone-banking operation that targeted tens of thousands of Louisianans with calls from Robertson and Falwell opposing the bill. When the bill went down in defeat, Reed received an ecstatic email from Abramoff reading “You are the greatest!!!”[86]

The following year, Reed again worked with Abramoff to fight a proposed casino to be operated by the Jena Band of Choctaws in Louisiana that threatened the interests of Louisiana’s Coushatta tribe.[87] Again Reed tapped into his network of right-wing leaders to oppose the effort, getting the American Family Association, the Eagle Forum, American Values and Focus on the Family to besiege Interior Secretary Gale Norton with opposition to the casino.[88]

The involvement of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson was, according to Abramoff’s emails, an especially important accomplishment. The Jena Tribe had reportedly hired former RNC chairman Haley Barbour to lobby on its behalf, and Reed worked to get Dobson to publicly attack Barbour on his daily radio program heard by millions. Abramoff was thrilled, writing to Reed: “Let me know when Dobson hits him. I want to savor it." He also e-mailed Scanlon, "[Dobson] is going to hit Haley by name! He is going to encourage people to call Norton and the [White House]. This is going to get fun."[89] Though Reed took credit for this coup, Focus on the Family insists that it became active on the issue at the request of the Louisiana Family Forum and that FOF’s involvement was, according to World Magazine, limited to recording “a segment for a state-only broadcast, and FOTF did so, with Rep. Perkins appearing in a February 2002 ‘drop-in’ on FOTF's radio program and urging listeners to contact Secretary Norton to oppose the casino.”[90]

Reed also worked with then-Representative David Vitter of Louisiana, reporting to Abramoff that Vitter was “feeling the love” and was also contacting Norton in opposition to the casino. In turn, Reed’s misleadingly named Committee Against Gambling Expansion mailed out thousands of postcards to voters praising Vitter’s stand and gave Vitter permission to use the organization’s name in his own phone-banking efforts. The increased profile Vitter obtained from taking on the gambling issue helped him win election to the US Senate in 2004.[91]

[84] Committee on Indian Affairs, “Gimme Five: Investigation of Tribal Lobbying Matters,” June 22, 2006, p.56

[85] Max Blumenthal, “Abramoff’s Evangelical Soldiers,” The Nation, February 20, 2006

[86] Ibid.

[87] Susan Schmidt, “Casino Bid Prompted High-Stakes Lobbying,” The Washington Post, March 13, 2005

[88] Max Blumenthal, “Abramoff’s Evangelical Soldiers,” The Nation, February 20, 2006

[89] Ibid.

[90] Jamie Dean and Marvin Olasky, “Ideologue for Hire,” World Magazine, July 1, 2006

[91] Susan Schmidt, “Casino Bid Prompted High-Stakes Lobbying,” The Washington Post, March 13, 2005

Taking the Tiguas to the Bank

Perhaps the most audacious of all of Abramoff’s efforts on which Reed worked was the successful attempt on behalf of the Coushatta Tribe to shut down a rival casino in Texas. After doing so, Abramoff then sold his lobbying services for $4 million to the same Texas tribe – the Tiguas - vowing to reopen the very casino he had just managed to shut down.[92]

Reed was instrumental in the initial effort, building public support for then-Texas Attorney General, now a US Senator, John Cornyn’s drive to close the casino. Reed organized a group of Texas pastors to “provide cover” for Cornyn’s effort to shutter the casino, at one point pledging to send “50 pastors to give him moral support” when it appeared as if Cornyn was going to be confronted by protestors.[93]

Reed also developed close ties with sources in Cornyn’s office who kept him informed on developments, which he shared with Abramoff. When Reed found out from Cornyn’s office that a court decision shutting down the casino was expected soon, he emailed Abramoff. Thinking ahead, Abramoff was already preparing to fly to Texas to meet with the tribe whose casino was about to be closed thanks, in large part, to his handiwork. In an email he sent to Reed just before his trip, he wrote “I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions. I’d love to get my hands on that moolah!! Oh well, stupid folks get wiped out.”[94]

Just days after the Tigua’s casino was closed, Abramoff met with them and offered to work to reopen the casino at no charge, though Scanlon’s PR work was going to cost them more than $4 million. Abramoff declared himself outraged by the “gross indignity perpetuated by the Texas state authorities” – an “indignity” that he had helped orchestrate and for which he had been well paid. [95]

Abramoff sold the Tiguas a plan where he would get the law that had shut their casino amended by using his Capitol Hill connections to slip language into an entirely unrelated bill, the Help America Vote Act, then working its way through Congress. Abramoff reportedly got Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) to agree to insert the language, after which Abramoff instructed the Tiguas to make $300,000 worth of political donations to political action committees controlled by Republican Reps. Tom DeLay, Roy Blunt, and Ney.[96]

The plan was doomed to failure as Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) refused to insert the language into the Senate version of the bill, but that did not stop Abramoff from attempting to get the Tiguas to fork over $50,000 to pay for a golfing trip to St. Andrews Scotland for himself, Scanlon, Ney, and Reed. The tribe declined, but Abramoff managed to set up a meeting two months later between Ney and the tribe, which still held out hope of getting its casino reopened. But it was not to be, as the language was never included in the bill. The Tiguas were out $4 million, their $60 million in annual revenue was gone, their casino remained closed and nearly every one of its 1000 employees had lost their medical insurance, retirement programs and jobs.[97]

Reed himself came under investigation for his Abramoff-related work in Texas for failing to register as a lobbyist with the Texas Ethics Commission as required by law, but the case was dropped because the two-year statute of limitations had expired.[99]

[92] Susan Schmidt, “Insiders Worked Both Sides of the Game,” The Washington Post, September 26, 2004

[93] Lou Dubose, “No Picnic at Speaking Rock,” The Texas Observer, December 17, 2004

[94] Ibid.

[95] Susan Schmidt, “Insiders Worked Both Sides of the Game,” The Washington Post, September 26, 2004

[96] Lou Dubose, “No Picnic at Speaking Rock,” The Texas Observer, December 17, 2004

[97] Josephine Hearn, “Rep. Ney says he was 'duped' by Abramoff,” The Hill, November 18, 2004, Fox Butterfield, “For a Tribe in Texas, an Era of Prosperity Undone by Politics,” The New York Times, June 13, 2005

[98] Associated Press, “Prosecutors Conclude Reed Investigation,” March 27, 2006

With news about the Abramoff scandal severely damaging Reed’s campaign for Lieutenant Governor, he insisted that he was not aware that his anti-gambling activities were being funded by competing gambling interests or the extent of Abramoff’s corruption. The latter may be true, but the former has been proven demonstrably false. Emails that have emerged from the investigation of Abramoff’s lucrative lobbying business have made it clear that Reed was fully aware that his anti-gambling activities were being bankrolled by casino-owning tribes and that his work fighting the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act in 2000 was being funded by eLottery.

The Reed campaign’s insistence, despite evidence to the contrary, that he “did not know who [Abramoff’s] specific clients were or their specific interests”[99] ultimately did serious damage to his campaign, at one point reducing him to offering to cover the entrance fee and hotel costs in an attempt to get his supporters to attend the Georgia Christian Coalition’s annual conference.[100] It didn’t help that Reed was sued in a high profile Abramoff-related lawsuit just a week before his primary.[101]

Reed’s ambition, his right-wing ideology, and his willingness to use dirty tricks to further his own personal and political agenda have been in evidence ever since he first became involved in politics. From his days as a right-wing rabble-rouser on the campus of the University of Georgia, through his years at the College Republicans and Christian Coalition, and on into his consulting business, Reed has tried to balance his history of operating as a right-wing “guerilla” who leaves his enemies in rhetorical body bags with his preferred image of himself as a moderate, family-friendly Republican.

One of the most audacious elements of that public relations strategy was his 1996 book,Active Faith, which brought him a lot of attention for his call for more civility in politics. Reed wrote that “politics is a contact sport. I have a job to do, and it involves trying to advance my agenda. In that combat, I play hard and I try to win. But I never hit below the belt, I play according to the rules of fairness and courtesy.”[102] Of course, at the time, he was running the Christian Coalition, and his boss Pat Robertson was on the air every day violating this principle. And all evidence is that when push comes to shove and money or power are on the line, Reed tends to default to what he knows best: right-wing zealotry and political dirty tricks.

It did not bode well for Reed when it was revealed that admitted felon Abramoff wrote to Scanlon, his partner in crime, to complain about Reed’s business practices, grumbling that he “is a bad version of us! No more money for him.”[103]

That probably didn’t sit well with Reed’s church-going base, who may have found his hypocrisy too much to take. Or maybe a lot of potential supporters made the hard political calculation – backed by polls – that Reed’s presence on the ticket would have been a drag on the GOP’s chances of holding on to the governorship.[104]

Either way, Reed’s willful participation in Abramoff’s schemes, coupled with his refusal to own up to his role, meant that it would have taken a minor miracle for him to have escaped the scandal unscathed – a miracle that even the man dubbed “The Right Hand of God” ultimately couldn’t pull off. Of course, Reed is still young. And American politics is full of redemption stories. No doubt Reed is already writing his.

[99] David Kirkpatrick & Philip Shenon, “Ralph Reed’s Zeal for Lobbying is Shaking His Political Faithful,” The New York Times, April 18, 2005

[100] Jim Galloway, “Reed Drums Up Crowd for Evangelical Event,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,” January 21, 2006

[101] Rick Lyman., “Abramoff and 4 Others Sued by Tribe Over Casino Closing,” The New York Times, 7/13/06

[103] Thomas B. Edsall, “In Ga., Abramoff Scandal Threatens a Political Ascendancy,” The Washington Post, January 16, 2006

[104] Tom Baxter and Jim Galloway, “Political Insider: Legislature 2006: Poll: Reed a drag on GOP ticket,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 22, 2006

Her chapters on Reed's youth vividly portray him as a close approximation of the monster liberals imagine. In his rural Georgia high school, he was known for ''correcting the grammar of black kids.'' Once, he rode in the back of a friend's pickup, shooting blanks, ''laughing his hyena bark as his targets panicked.'' At the University of Georgia, his political tactics earned him the nickname ''tricky Ralph.'' gang of 5

Where exactly did Toby Roth go when he left Governor Riley’s service? Roth is one of an entire platoon of Riley staffers who departed in order to take up work for Indian gaming interests. Others are: Michael Scanlon, Dan Gans, Dax Swatek, Twinkle Andress. Roth went to work with former Trent Lott chief-of-staff John Lundy at a Jackson, Mississippi-based lobbying firm named Capitol Resources. Among the firm’s principal clients are the casinos owned and operated by the Mississippi Choctaw Indian, whom they represented jointly with Jack Abramoff.

...

Michael Scanlon – he was Riley’s Congressional press secretary. Scanlon left Riley to work for Tom DeLay and then went to work for Jack Abramoff. He has since pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe a member of Congress. A Senate Report prepared under the supervision of John McCain details how Scanlon and Abarmoff funnelled Choctaw funds into the Alabama gubernatorial race in 2002.

Dan Gans – served as Riley’s chief of staff both in Washington and Montgomery. He left Riley to work with Ed Buckham and Christine DeLay at the Alexander Strategy Group, which has been repeatedly implicated in the Abramoff Scandal. Gans is a Republican “voting technology expert” who played a mysterious role in the 2002 gubernatorial election – he was in Republican controlled Bay Minette, Alabama, when 6,000 votes inexplicably shifted from Siegelman’s column to Riley’s due to a “computer glitsch.”

Twinkle Andress – is the former Executive Director of Alabama GOP. She was elected State GOP chair while signing up with Capitol Resources. She is now Riley’s Deputy Chief of Staff.

Dax Swatek – a key Riley campaign consultant in the 2006 race. Swatek has been identified as working with former William Canary partner Pat McWhorter in the formation of a fictitious non-profit organization in 1999 to benefit Abramoff’s client “Channel One,” a scheme which also involved Ralph Reed.

Governor Riley – the McCain report found that millions of dollars from the Choctaw Indians came into Alabama during the 2002 governor’s race – a fact denied by Riley until the report was released. In emails released by the Senate, former Riley congressional staffer Michael Scanlon partnered with Jack Abramoff to funnel Choctaw Indian funds into the 2002 Alabama Governor’s race, supporting Riley. The report contained emails detailing conversation regarding the 2002 race in which Abramoff tells Scanlon that he has been in touch with “Nell” (Nell Rogers) of the Choctaws and “had it not been for what you did in Alabama, we would have had to spend millions in Alabama over the next four years.” The conversation then details what “Nell” wanted Riley to do in return for the “help” he had received. The email states Rogers made it clear that she “definitely wants Riley to shut down the Porch Creek operation.” The Alabama Porch Creek Indians were competitors of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. Subsequently, Riley met with Attorney General John Ashcroft about the Porch Creek Indians, and Alabama Attorney General Troy King wrote a letter on behalf of Riley to the Department of the Interior requesting denial of Porch Creek Indians request for Class III gaming. A commission to evaluate the Porch Creek application for Class III (table game) license was created.

And who should be appointed to that commission but William Canary’s “girl” and U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama, Leura Canary?

F&F BAK

see ralph reed F&F

capt 1219 bak

ref 1 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/christian-right-fighting-impeachment-as-spiritual-warfare.html

kilgore

God, Bakker continued, “anointed your president.” Anyone who crosses the divinely chosen leader, he implied, is risking God’s wrath.

… “Any persons, entities, that are aligned against the president,” she said on the [call,] “will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus.”

No, these people are not going to abandon Donald Trump. They are now so complicit in his presidency that to question him is to condemn themselves to a judgement too terrible to contemplate.

kilgore ref

https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2019/12/19/the-army-of-prayer-warriors-fighting-trumps-impeachment/

posner

no lnx

God, Bakker continued, “anointed your president.” Anyone who crosses the divinely chosen leader, he implied, is risking God’s wrath.

KEY FINDINGS

As Trump faces impeachment challenges, white evangelicals have dug in as his most loyal defenders; two-thirds believe he did nothing wrong in Ukraine.

The president has secured the loyalty of the evangelical base by handing the movement control over personnel and policy at a level they’ve never seen before.

Evangelical leaders talk about Trump as divinely anointed, and call impeachment a satanic scheme to upend God’s plan to have Trump lead a Christian nation.

Evangelical leaders across the country are laying the groundwork for a historic effort to support Trump’s reelection campaign.

An Evangelical Bubble

[TOM PENNINGTON/GETTY IMAGES

Pastor Robert Jeffress leads the Pledge of Allegiance before President Trump speaks during a "Keep America Great" Rally on October 17, 2019 in Dallas, Texas.]

Trump’s evangelical base is a sprawling, interconnected network of political advocacy groups, megachurches, White House advisers, televangelists and prayer warriors.

Forming A Defense

While the Christian right has, since Ronald Reagan’s presidential run in 1980, rallied around GOP nominees, the tenor and nature of the mobilization for Trump’s reelection is markedly new.

Unprecedented Power

Reelecting A ‘Christian’ President

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations.

ABOUT THE REPORTER

SARAH POSNER

Sarah Posner is a reporting fellow with Type Investigations and author of God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters

719

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/religious-right-activists-meet-the-gops-red-new-scare/

Republican senators joined Religious Right activists at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C., today, where they warned that if Democrats are successful in obtaining a supermajority in the 2020 elections, socialism will be implemented in America.

Hysterical warnings about creeping socialism have been a routine staple in conservative messaging for decades. Republicans regularly labeled President Obama a socialist during his time in office, despite no indication that the label was accurate. During this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), speakers renewed their devotion to plastering the socialist label on politicians and policies they oppose, and expressed their continued commitment to the scaremongering as the race to 2020 begins.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel told MSNBC yesterday, before the first round of Democratic debates, that she wasn’t sure if there was a single Democrat pursuing the presidency that she would not consider a socialist. Currently, the only Democrat seeking the 2020 nomination for president who has labeled himself a socialist is Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

At Road to Majority, the GOP’s strategy met face-to-face with the Religious Right. As plates of chicken and salad were served at the opening session, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas addressed the group, and he warned that “the fate of the nation is being debated.” Cruz asked the audience if they had watched last night’s Democratic Party debate between candidates for president and asked those in attendence to memorize a mantra: “defend freedom.” He criticized Democrats for proposing higher tax rates for wealthy Americans and universal access to health care.

“We saw, last night, an embrace of socialism,” Cruz said. He went on to praise Alliance Defending Freedom, a powerful conservative legal group founded in the 1990s that has argued in favor of anti-LGBTQ discrimination practices in the name of “religious liberty.”

After a brief intermission while attendees ate, Sen. David Perdue of Georgia took the podium. His speech centered on warning that Democrats are hellbent on waging an “ideological war” on the historically conservative values of the American political system.

“Democrats want to convert America to a socialist state,” Perdue said, soliciting boos from the audience. “This socialism talk didn’t just start with Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Over the last 100 years, America has been on a slow slide towards socialism.”

Perdue claimed that social programs like the New Deal, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and the Affordable Care Act had failed to help working people in America, and he praised President Trump for working to roll back regulations and boost fossil fuel production in the United States. He called the Trump administration’s economic policies a “miracle.”

“I never thought in my lifetime I’d be standing here having to defend capitalism, but I have to tell you this, our way of life is in jeopardy,” Perdue said. “I didn’t ask for this fight, but like you, I’m up for it. This is our time. If we don’t do it, who will? If we don’t do it now, when will we do it?”

He added that Democrats won’t use the word “socialism” but that proposed policies were “indeed that.” He said, “What’s at stake here is our freedom. … You and I just cannot let this radical left take our country down that road to socialism. The only thing standing in their way right now is you and me.”

He said repeatedly: “The price of socialism is freedom.”

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky did not fear-monger about creeping socialism in America, but instead stated his anti-choice bona fides and took issue with President Trump on the matter of selling arms to Saudi Arabia. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, however, picked up the fear-stoking tone when he followed Paul with a speech that contained similar warnings about socialism coming to America. Rubio told activists in the audience that America was facing a “pivot moment in history” during which “Judeo-Christian principles” were being questioned with regard to their morality and righteousness. During his speech, Rubio said that Democrats wanted to solve problems facing America with socialist policies.

“Is the answer to [those problems] socialism? Of course it’s not. The answer to that is still free enterprise and limited government,” Rubio said.

Reps. Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Steve Scalise of Louisiana were scheduled to speak at the luncheon but were unable to attend due to obligations on Capitol Hill.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/christian-right-donald-trump

The so-called alt-right may have grabbed most of the attention since Donald Trump’s victory, but it’s the Christian right that got him over the line. And experts say they are much more likely to influence how he governs.

Frederick Clarkson, a senior fellow at Political Research Associates, has studied the Christian right for decades. He says that when it comes to their relationship with the morally erratic Trump, it’s all about the art of the deal.

“The Christian right has matured as a political movement. They recognize that you can’t always get political leaders who conform with your beliefs as consistently and wholly as you’d like.”

“Even though he doesn’t appear to be their guy, they can make deals with him that would make him into their guy in a way that no one else has ever been.”

Ralph Reed, chairman of the evangelical Faith and Freedom Coalition, appeared to confirm Clarkson’s analysis when he spoke to Fox News. “They were never under any illusions that Donald Trump was one of them,” he said [3] of his evangelical flock. “And by the way, they never asked him to be. All they asked was that he shared their issues agenda and that he would fight for it. He persuaded them on both of those points.”

A lot of post-election coverage (some of it unnecessarily fawning [4]) has considered the newer, shinier, openly white supremacist alt-right movement. And people are right to be concerned about the influence of its White House sympathizers like Steve Bannon [5]. But the fascist core of the movement likely numbers around 10,000 or less. Trump, ever the opportunist, has already cut loose some of the more outre leaders, like Richard Spencer [6]. Also, the wide variety of right-wing actors who lay claim to the alt-right tag are already riven by infighting.

The upsurge of hate crimes [7] around the country should be monitored and resisted, but it seems possible that the “hipster fascists” have already peaked in terms of their national political clout. Recent bizarre speeches[8] by Richard Spencer presage a future of increasing isolation.

The Christian right’s adherents, on the other hand, include tens of millions of the most disciplined voters in the country. And there’s a very good case to be made that they won Trump the election. Just look at the numbers.

In 2016, white evangelical Christians composed [9] 26 percent of the electorate—just as they did in 2012, 2008, and 2004.

And their quarter of the total vote in 2016 went 81-16 percent for the Republican. This gave Donald Trump a slightly bigger share of evangelicals than Mitt Romney, the pious Mormon, in 2012, or war hero John McCain in 2008. Trump even slightly outdid George W. Bush’s 2004 share, even though W identified as a born-again Christian.

According to exit polls, these numbers and proportions meant that the evangelical vote alone almost entirely negated Clinton’s advantage among nonwhites. (Of the 29 percent of voters who were nonwhite, Clinton got 74 percent of the vote.)

And while there’s been a lot of talk about the “white working class” and its grievances, other figures suggest that the combination of race and religious identity may have been even more potent.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute [10], “the proportion of white Christians in each of the 50 states is more strongly correlated with support for Trump than is the proportion of white residents without a college degree in the state.” If we use education as a proxy for class, in the states that flipped Trump it mattered less than religion.

The places where Trump outperformed expectations to clinch the election—like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa—all have white Christian majorities.

As the PRRI’s CEO Robert P. Jones points out, in 2016, when we measure the United States as a whole, white Christians (a category that includes white evangelicals, but is not limited to them) are only 43 percent of the population.

His recent book, The End of White Christian America [11], predicted that white Christians would, on the whole, decline in their demographic and electoral dominance. He stands by the overall argument, but admits 2016 didn’t exactly bear out his conclusions.

“Where I was wrong, where I was surprised, is that I said in the book that Mitt Romney’s campaign was the last one in which you could plausibly stack up enough white Christian voters to get you over the line.”

“I would say that what you are seeing is that last gasp of this particular group, rather than any reversal of major trends.”

The key this year was turnout. The Obama coalition, faced with an uninspiring Democratic candidate, stayed home in droves in key states. The Christian right—losing ground demographically and in the culture wars—came out to vote. While Clinton piled up redundant votes in safe states like California, evangelicals helped to pry loose the upper Midwest for Trump.

The fact that they did may seem puzzling. Trump is on his third wife, cheerfully admits to serial adultery and even sexual assault [12], and has been inconsistent over time on the kinds of moral issues—abortion, homosexuality—that exercise evangelicals. His own expressions of faith seemed pro forma; he generally gives the appearance of being the most godless candidate in living memory.

As a result, some evangelical leaders, like Russell Moore [13], were firmly in the #nevertrump camp, seeing the candidate’s moral flaws as disqualifying. (Moore declined the opportunity to comment on this story.)

Millions of evangelicals were able to get past this, in part, because of their fear and loathing of Hillary Clinton. Clarkson says they voted from similar sentiments to many other voting blocs, choosing, as they saw it, the lesser of two evils.

“One candidate was beyond the pale and another candidate was acceptable to them.”

Despite Trump’s apparent “lack of a serious religiosity,” and a very mixed record on abortion and homosexuality, Clinton was more feared on the grounds of policy.

“She was not just pro-choice but seen as pro-abortion, she was seen as pro-marriage equality, she was seen as pro-gay rights, she was seen as anti-family. She represented the kind of demonized feminism that has animated their movement for a couple of decades now. It’s hard for liberals to see how people are affected by those issues, but they are.”

Clinton has held her place as a bete noire of the Christian right for decades.

Carin Robinson, a political scientist who coauthored Onward Christian Soldiers? The Christian Right in American Politics [14] recalls that when she was studying the Christian right in the 1990s, “On numerous occasions I received mailings from these groups that said Hillary Clinton was going to take away my Bible. She has been used as a means of mobilizing, inspiring fear and getting evangelicals to vote.“

Having her appoint a Supreme Court justice was the worst propsect of all. Robinson says that “The evangelicals I have spoken to, it just came down to that Supreme Court nomination, and having that crystallized by the death of Scalia. It was all about that empty chair.”

But even with this hostility to Clinton as a baseline, how did they come to terms with Trump? How did they come to select him in the primary above candidates with other Christian candidates? Jones thinks it was because his campaign messages were not in fact at odds with evangelicals’ values—in fact he was speaking straight to them.

“It was really this bigger argument Trump was making about turning the clock back. If you’re a white evangelical your numbers are slipping due to immigration, and because your children and grandchildren are leaving the church. Trump’s rhetoric gave a sense of turning the clock back to a time when your values, your demographic had sway in the country.”

“He converted values voters into nostalgia voters.”

He says “the data doesn’t really support” the idea that these voters were holding their noses as they voted for Trump. In pre-election surveys, white evangelicals expressed opinions that chimed with Trump’s key messages. The evinced hostility to migrants, and a belief in pervasive “reverse” racism and a sense that the country is adrift.

“When you look at him on the stump, he was saying to evangelicals, ‘your numbers used to be increasing, now they’re decreasing. If you elect me, you’ll have a friend in the white house who will restore power to the Christian churches. I’m you’re last chance, folks.’

But Clarkson instead points to Trump’s concrete offerings.

“To some extent it didn’t matter who the non-Hillary candidate was. The question was, what kind of deal could they strike? This was the most openly transactional electorate for the Christian right we have ever seen. What did they get? We don’t know the answer exactly, but let’s look at the results so far.”

During the campaign, Clarkson said, Trump made all the right noises about easing Christians’ sense of persecution in an increasingly liberal cultural and legal climate. One key issue carried a particular weight. “He said he was going to be very forceful about religious liberty, and particularly the Johnson Amendment.”

This was a change President Johnson made to the tax code, preventing certain kinds of nonprofits, like churches, from endorsing or opposing political candidates. Trump has called for its repeal.

It’s not just the tax code that concerns them, though. “There’s a deeper agenda” for the big evangelical organizations, according to Clarkson.

“They don’t want to comply with civil rights and labor laws, or “complicit,” as they see it, with abortion in any way, or see taxes go into things they don’t support.”

These beliefs frame attitudes from everything from healthcare to gay marriage. Evangelical organizations and their adherents don’t want to participate in healthcare plans that fund birth control or abortion, any more than they want to bake cakes for gay couples or be forced to consider them for employment.

Religious liberty so defined “is a banner they are willing to follow. If he is prepared to appoint Supreme Court justices that support that view, cases like the Bob Jones decision would be vulnerable.”

That was the decision made back in 1983, where the Supreme Court ruled that the IRS could revoke Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status for banning interracial relationships.

Trump’s promises on these issues have been taken very seriously by Christian right leaders.

Jim Daly, of Focus on the Family, wrote in a newsletter [15] the day after the election, “We are grateful for Mr. Trump’s pro-life pledge and look forward to his promise of a pro-life administration, which includes de-funding Planned Parenthood. We’re also optimistic about the president-elect’s pledge to champion pro-religious liberty policies and once again welcome faith in the public square.”

The elevation of Mike Pence as Trump’s running-mate was a big reassurance to leaders like Dobson, and his millions of followers. Pence identifies as an evangelical Christian, and according to Robinson, “has great credentials among Christian right leaders.” Clarkson says that during the campaign, Pence “personally reassured” evangelical voters. “He spoke to voters at the values voters summit and reassured of them of Trump’s bona fides. He told them that he is in favour of religious liberty. And he had the standing to say that.”

Trump has put Pence in charge of the transition team, giving him enormous power over determining the shape of Trump’s cabinet. His decisions have already pleased the faithful.

The Faith and Freedom Coalition has issued statements welcoming the appointment of Tom Price as Health and Human Services Secretary, anticipating [16] that, “he will lead the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare and its unconstitutional mandate.” Similarly, they welcomed [17] Jeff Sessions as someone who would “to make our country a better place and ensure that the concerns of people of faith are upheld at the highest level of our government.” (AlterNet reached out to the Faith and Freedom Coalition for further comments, but its spokesman did not respond to emails before the deadline for this story.)

As for Jerry Falwell Jr., who heads up the evangelical Liberty University, he says that the transition team offered him the Education Secretary gig, before handing it off to billionaire ideologue Betsy DeVos [18]. He was a strong backer of Trump during the campaign, and even censored anti-Trump material in the University’s newspaper.

But Pence may wind up with even more heft after Inauguration Day.

Reports that Trump offered John Kasich [19] a slew of hitherto presidential powers when he was wooing him as a potential running mate gives Frederick Clarkson pause. If Pence got the same offer, “that would make him the most powerful vice president in American history.”

Meanwhile, the things the administration doesn’t do might be as significant as its positive moves. For example, any relaxation of enforcement of the Voting Rights Act by a Sessions Department of Justice will only give white Christian voters greater relative sway. And refusing to fund Planned Parenthood will just make it harder for women to maintain control over their reproductive rights, especially in red states that aren’t inclined to make up the shortfalls.

Trump owes evangelicals, and the early signs are that he will deliver. He will need them again in 2020, and again they might be crucial to the election result.

While it’s true that America is no longer a majority white Christian country, and is grinding toward a minority-majority future, what counts in elections is voters. While Jones thinks that white Christian America is on the slide, Clarkson points to their resiliency, and the way that in spite of population changes, they are still able to make themselves a part of winning electoral coalitions.

“There is a certain wishful thinking that has attended the rise and continuation of the religious right.”

“Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing sector of American Christianity. It is a grouping of people who have gone from being the least political to the most political. They are organized.”

They may be a much more serious long-term danger than the outright fascists, because one of the things they are best at organizing is the vote.

Jason Wilson is a writer and photographer based in Portland, Oregon. His internationally published work has appeared in many outlets including The Guardian (where he is a columnist), AlterNet, The Atlantic, and Religion Dispatches.

http://www.madisonstrategiesllc.com/team.html

Gary Marx is co-founder of Madison Strategies. He launched Madison Strategies with his long-time friend Jason Miyares after serving almost three years at the helm of the Faith & Freedom Coalition as Executive Director. Prior to joining FFC he was Vice President at Century Strategies heading up their Washington D.C. office while also leading the Judicial Crisis Network which works to confirm judges to the nation’s courts who follow judicial restraint and written words of the Constitution.

His career path has included high level posting as Conservative Coalitions Director for the Romney presidential campaign in 2008 and also at the Bush-Cheney 04 national campaign headquarters where he spearheaded outreach to social conservatives. His coalitions program helped increase the President’s share of the “values voters” to 21.3 million or 36 percent of the total Bush vote. His corporate affairs work over the years has included industry leaders such as Wal-Mart, Ford, Christian Mingle.com, and Boeing.

Gary is a media veteran and has done hundreds of television, print, and radio interviews including CNN, CBN, CSPAN and FOX NEWS. He has also been a featured speaker for prominent organizations such as The Federalist Society, The Leadership Institute, Hanns Seidel Foundation, The International Republican Institute and The Council for National Policy.

Marx has a degree in Political Science from James Madison University. Gary holds a Master’s degree in Political Management from Regent University. He is married to Aimee and is the father of three children.

Travis Korson

Travis Korson is a veteran of politics with years of experience in campaigns, communications, public policy and fundraising and serves as National Committeeman of the District of Columbia Young Republicans.

Recent roles include Communications Director for Special Projects at Frontiers of Freedom and Virginia Field Director for the Faith and Freedom Coalition (2013). Travis is also a guest lecturer with the Leadership Institute and has previously served in the leadership of the District of Columbia Republican Party.

Travis has also served in the Bush White House and has spent time at various public policy organizations and government institutions including the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity and the Rhode Island General Assembly. Travis has spoken at several conferences, including the Conservative Political Action Conference, the Road to Majority Conference, Freedom Fest and the State Policy Network annual gathering. His expertise has been quoted in several publications including the Washington Post and he has been published at various outlets including Daily Caller, Human Events, American Spectator, CNS News, and Breitbart. He is a graduate of the George Washington University where he studied International Affairs with a focus on International Economics.

Anthony J. “A.J.” Ferate, J.D.

Anthony J. “A.J.” Ferate has built a multi-faceted background in the areas of the law, policy, elections and defense over the last 20 years.

Currently employed as Vice President of Regulatory Affairs for the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association (“OIPA”), A.J. maintains responsibilities over all government efforts outside of the legislative branch on matters as broad as water, electric generation, commodity marketing, land matters and seismicity. A.J. also maintains responsibility for legal matters at OIPA.

Prior to working for OIPA, A.J. managed public policy strategy for Fortune 500 Company Devon Energy. Other previous employment includes management of the Oklahoma City office of Ryan Glover LLP, a Houston-based energy law firm. A.J. also served as general counsel and chief financial officer of the American Clean Skies Foundation, where his primary responsibilities included all legal, financial, and policy matters of the Foundation.

A.J.’s practice areas include oil and gas law, utility law, energy regulation, campaign finance and election law, state and federal Constitutional matters and practicing in the public policy arena.

For the past five years, A.J. has volunteered as General Counsel to the Oklahoma Republican Party and has represented a number of elected officials, including U.S. Senator James Lankford as well as a number of state legislators and members of Congress. A.J. also holds current representation of Coach Joe Kennedy, a football coach for the Bremerton (WA) School District. The district recently suspended Coach Kennedy for praying on the field after football games.

Additionally, A.J. has assisted elected officials serve their constituents in all branches of government. Early in his career, A.J. held legislative aide duties in the Nebraska Legislature, then went on to work for Former Nebraska Treasurer David Heineman. A.J. gained experience in the judiciary while serving Judge Gary L. Lumpkin at the Oklahoma Court of Appeals, the highest criminal appellate court in Oklahoma. Following this service, A.J. began work with Denise A. Bode of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, assisting her in her duties regulating 80 per cent of Oklahoma’s economy, including oil and gas and electric utilities.

A.J. honorably served ten years as an intelligence analyst for the United States Naval Reserve, including time at the Office of Naval Intelligence in the greater Washington DC area.

A native of Bremerton, Washington and an alumnus of the University of Nebraska and the Oklahoma City University School of Law, A.J. holds licenses to practice law in Oklahoma and before the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

Chase Reed

Chase Reed is a native of Georgia where he works tirelessly to get conservatives elected at all stations of government. Chase specializes in grassroots mobilization and has worked on several statewide campaigns in Georgia including: Martha for Congress, Jack Kingston for U.S. Senate, and Governor Deal’s 2014 re-election campaign. Chase also works closely with the Georgia Republican Party both state and county wide. Chase is a seasoned face under the Gold Dome where he assists Legislators on various issues.

Reed is a graduate of several leadership institutes including Hall County Youth Mentorship, The Georgia Young Republicans Leadership Basecamp, The National Youth Leadership Council, The Israeli Aramaic Christian Association (ICAA), and most recently became an Inaugural Fellow in the Philos Leadership Institute.

Chase is a frequent commentator on Georgia Politics. He has been published in several different places including marthazoller.com, zpolitcs, and Voices Magazine. Chase has written on several different topics such as education reform, news under the Gold Dome, and policy analyzation.

Chase currently studies Political Science at the University of North Georgia. He serves the Georgia Federation of Young Republicans as the North Georgia Regional Director and also as a GYR County Chairman.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has hired two leading conservative operatives to join his political committee Our American Revival, the Washington Examiner has learned.

Gregg Keller and Gary Marx, who both have deep ties to national conservative groups and have worked previously on high-profile presidential campaigns, will serve as senior advisers overseeing national conservative outreach.

Keller is a former executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the social conservative group founded in 2009 by Ralph Reed, and is a former executive director of the American Conservative Union, which hosts the Conservative Political Action Conference. He last year founded a consulting firm, Atlas Strategy Group.

Marx, a senior partner at Madison Strategies, is a veteran of both of former President George W. Bush’s campaigns and a former executive director of the Judicial Crisis Network.

Both Keller and Marx worked for Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign: Keller as national coalitions director, and Marx as director of conservative outreach.

Walker’s positive reputation among conservatives nationally, established when he took on teachers unions in Wisconsin and won a recall election, will face a strength test should he run for president in 2016, as is expected. To shore up his appeal among the base, Walker will likely rely upon a classic anti-Washington message — as in a speech to the American Action Network in Washington on Friday, when Walker described D.C. as “68 square miles surrounded by reality.”

Keller and Marx will help drive that message home, along with a robust and growing campaign team for Walker, who has not yet announced his candidacy for president but has been moving deliberately and publicly in that direction, as evidenced by an aggressive hiring spree in the past month.

Rick Wiley, a former Republican National Committee political director, signed on last month as executive director of Our American Revival, with the intent to serve as campaign manager once Walker launches a bid for president. Walker has also snagged a political director, former RNC national field director Matt Mason, and David Polyansky as senior Iowa adviser.

Earlier this week, Our American Revival also announced it would bring on RNC press secretary Kirsten Kukowski as its communications director, the GOP pollster Ed Goeas as a senior adviser, and Joni Ernst alum Mark Stephenson as chief data officer. Brian Tringali and BJ Martino, of the Tarrance Group, will conduct Walker’s polling.