Indep Women's Forum IWF
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some bad code see 7 22 bak/capt
SEE TWO
see voices 501c4 bs (long claim non-partisan but FUND gop
3-4 shuffle [pass thru to CFG?]
see heather higgins
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ORIGIN: women for thomas;
IWF Board Chair Heather R. Higgins has held senior positions in numerous right-wing foundations, including the Randolph Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Philanthropy Roundtable.
Kellyanne Conway, White House advisor and former Trump campaign manager, is an IWF board member. Directors Emeritae include Lynne V. Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney and Kimberly O. Dennis, president of the board of directors of Donors Trust and president and CEO of Searle Freedom Trust.
Nancy M. Pfotenhauer, a former Koch Industries lobbyist, left Koch Industries to become president of IWF in 2001 and she later served as Vice Chairman of IWF’s Board of Directors. She has a long history of promoting dirty energy and pushing for deregulation of polluting industries.
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see new legal arm: Independent Women's Law Center IWLC
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thot this was defunct, i assoc with phyLis schlafly, but keeps showing up lately in GMO background? ACTA
cf renta-tom: ideological entrepreneur can find a niche to spin counter-narrative, often mirroring?
is it training? a hub?
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https://truthout.org/articles/the-not-so-independent-women-s-forum-was-born-in-defense-of-clarence-thomas-and-the-far-right/
hBO’s new film on demand, Confirmation, revisits the painful battle over the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court in spite of the testimony of Anita Hill that he sexually harassed her.
Some pundits have attempted to
the film, even though it has several scenes that portray Thomas and his wife Ginny as quiet, sympathetic figures and not as the outspoken right-wing political activists that they were and are.
One of the harshest critics of the film is a group that calls itself the “Independent Women’s Forum” (IWF).
IWF is hardly independent though, despite its name.
It is deeply imbedded in the right-wing political infrastructure.
In fact, IWF began as part of the coordinated effort to get Thomas confirmed so he could advance the right-wing’s legal agenda on the courts, in the face of deep fears by many that he would limit individual rights as a judge—fears later validated by his rulings and extreme dissents as a Justice.
As Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson wrote in their book Strange Justice: “the falsehoods and distortions involved in the selling of Clarence Thomas to the American people neither started nor ended with the treatment of Anita Hill’s accusations. From the beginning, the placement of Thomas on the high court was seen as a political end justifying almost any means.”
Central to the efforts to get Thomas confirmed were not only the attacks on Hill by GOP Senators but also press outreach used to discredit her that was orchestrated by a small group of powerful right-wing women.
That confirmation battle put one of the most reactionary judges in modern history on the Court, and it also led to the creation of IWF, an ultra reactionary women’s group opposing women’s rights in numerous ways.
IWF’s creators defended Thomas, despite the detailed evidence against him, and the organization they founded has defended him and continued to attack Hill since 1991.
The Thomas hearings also led to a backlash from voters to a US Senate that had 98 men and only two women as Senators.
In spite of a temporary majority supporting the confirmation of Thomas based on the incomplete information provided in the Senate hearings, American voters resoundingly rejected the idea of an all-white male Senate Judiciary Committee examining a woman’s testimony about sexual harassment.
The 1992 election that followed swept out President George H.W. Bush and swept in four women as new Senators and more women in other offices, making that election “the Year of the Woman.”
Today, 20 US Senators are women; and IWF leaders and alums have regularly attacked the most powerful woman elected Senator since the Thomas hearings, Hillary Clinton.
IWF — which has had close ties to the billionaire Koch Brothers, before they were infamous, and to other rightwing donors — has used its well-funded platform to secure numerous press appearances without much scrutiny of its record and sometimes because of its reactionary positions.
That’s in part because media outlets have defaulted to point-counterpoint “reporting” that gives equal weight both to facts IWF opposes and to outlier claims that are IWF’s stock in trade.
Part of the playbook was set as IWF came into being, as its founders deployed women in the press to counter a fellow woman whose testimony threatened their political agenda and ally.
Much of that claim boiled down to denying her experience as inauthentic and deceitful because Thomas had not sexually harassed them. It was a brutally effective tactic.
This is the story of IWF’s roots.
IWF: Born to Give a Woman’s Voice to Defending Clarence Thomas
On June 28, 1991, the first black man to serve on the US Supreme Court, Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall — an icon to the civil rights community — announced his retirement.
Ten days later, President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a 43-year old African American judge who had a controversial tenure as President Reagan’s Chairman of the Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC), where he challenged core ideas about equal economic opportunity for women, such as equal pay andcomparable worth.
Although it was only 16 months before the next presidential election and even though the choice of a young right-winger like Thomas to fill the beloved Justice Marshall’s seat was a lightening rod for controversy, the Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled hearings on his nomination for September.
As the controversy over Thomas’ nomination grew, a small group of right-wing women began meeting for lunch to discuss the nomination at the offices ofTed Olson in the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
One of the women at those lunch meetings was Barbara Kay Bracher, a lawyer who married Olson in 1996.
Following the Thomas confirmation, she would go on to staff investigations of the Clinton Administration as a congressional aide and to write a diatribe called “Hell to Pay: the Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” which was published by the right-wing bookseller Regnery shortly before Olson perished on a plane in the 9/11 attacks on her way to a taping for Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” TV show.
(Ted Olson became famous for taking theBush v. Gore case to the US Supreme Court, where Justice Clarence Thomas sided with him and four other GOP Justices in stopping the Florida recount in 2000, making Republican George W. Bush president despite Democrat Al Gore winning the popular vote. Bush then named Ted Olson Solicitor General of the United States.)
The driving force at those pro-Thomas strategy sessions in Olson’s office back in 1991 was Rosalie “Ricky” Silberman, who had worked with Thomas as Vice-Chair of the EEOC and was one of his confidantes.
Before that, Silberman had worked as the press secretary for GOP SenatorBob Packwood, who later resigned in 1995 in the wake allegations that he harassed and assaulted numerous women he worked with.
(Ricky Silberman was also married to Thomas’ mentor from Thomas’ brief time as a judge on the DC Circuit: Judge Laurence Silberman, a very political judge who among other things later tried to clear George W. Bush of culpability for lying about Iraq’s weapons and was later given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by Bush.)
The third major figure in these lunches was Anita K. Blair, who was a lawyer who became General Counsel for IWF. President George W. Bush made her Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and in 2011 she was hired as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department on human resources in the Obama Administration.
In the later 1990s during the Republican effort to impeach Democratic President Bill Clinton, Blair claimed on behalf of IWF that:
“nothing ever did more to trivialize sexual harassment than the sorry spectacle surrounding Anita Hill … Given prime-time exposure on national television Hill told a bizarre, uncorroborated story about Thomas, her boss at two federal agencies. Hearing her belated complaints about off-color jokes allegedly told about 10 years before, millions of Americans wondered, ‘What on earth does this have to do with sexual harassment?’ Americans learned the answer from Hill and her supporters: ‘Sexual harassment isn’t about sex, it’s about power.’ The Anita Hill spectacle wasn’t about sexual harassment; it was about the exercise of pure partisan political power. The media circus surrounding Hill and Thomas was produced and directed by liberal operatives, includingfifth-columnistslike NPR’s Nina Totenberg.” [jewish?]
Those three right-wing politicos—Silberman, Olson, and Blair—formed an ad hoc committee called “Women for Judge Thomas,” which ultimately became a non-profit group dubbed the “Independent Women’s Forum.”
The Clarence Thomas Nomination Begins and IWF’s Founders Step Forward
But even before Anita Hill was in the picture — discovered by Senate Judiciary Committee staffers vetting the Bush nominee — allies of Thomas knew his controversial record as President Reagan’s chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) could play poorly with many women and others concerned about equality.
The Women for Judge Thomas committee began holding press conferences the month President Bush announced Thomas’ nomination to a lifetime position on the Court in July.
Thomas was in his early 40s and had never argued a case before the US Supreme Court, and he had only had 16 months of experience as a sitting judge on any court.
His selection was considered a tactical masterstroke by C. Boyden Gray,President Bush’s White House Counsel, who had been criticized for letting the first vacancy in Bush’s term go to New Hampshire Justice David Souter, who was considered by the far right to be not “conservative” or activist enough to deliver judicial votes to change the law in the ways they wanted.
By putting forward an African American with right-wing bona fides, at Gray’s urging the Bush White House sought to mute Democratic objections for fear of offending a major constituency over fighting a nominee with a rags-to-riches life story.
(Gray is the grandson and also the nephew of three presidents of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. After President George H.W. Bush lost his bid for another term in the 1992 “Year of the Woman” election, Gray became chairman of David Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy, which would later officially join forces with IWF.)
But Thomas’ limited judicial experience and the hearings on his nomination deepened concerns of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
As the New York Times reported: “‘Judge Thomas lacks the experience and qualifications that a Supreme Court Justice ought to have,’ said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. ‘He fled from his record and he refused to answer legitimate questions.'”
Leahy also noted: “‘Nothing in Judge Thomas’s record or testimony suggests the level of professional distinction or constitutional grounding appropriate for a Supreme Court nominee. His legal and judicial experiences are limited. His speeches and writings have shown little in the way of analysis or scholarship.'”
So, when his nomination was considered, the Committee deadlocked 7-7 on his nomination but then voted to send the nomination to the full Senate for a vote without a recommendation for or against confirmation. Although the Democrats had a 57-43 majority, a number of Southern Democrats had already pledged to vote for Thomas to be confirmed.
Hill Comes Forward and IWF’s Founders Step Up to Counter Her in the Press
Before the Senate vote could be held, however,National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg broke the story that the Senate investigation had uncovered allegations that Thomas had made unwanted advances toward some of his subordinates in his leadership positions in the Reagan Administration.
Totenberg received a tip that Professor Anita Hill, a conservative black law professor, had told the Senate that Thomas had made sexual comments to her when he was her supervisor when they both worked for the Reagan Administration.
This shocking development increased the volume of concern about confirming Thomas to a lifetime job on the highest court in the land, and the Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled another round of hearings to examine the allegations.
Under the guidance of Ricky Silberman, the Women for Judge Thomas Committee identified women who worked with Thomas who said they had not been sexually harassed by him and that he had behaved professionally toward them.
Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigators—including a Democrat named Ricki Seidman—identified another staffer who said she had been subject to sexual advances in the workplace by Thomas and also interviewed colleagues of Professor Hill, whom she confided in about the inappropriate things she said Thomas said.
As Steve Kornacki noted in Salon:
“Three Hill friends — Susan Hoerchner, Ellen Wells and John Carr — testified under oath that she had told them about Thomas’ conduct as it happened between 1981 and 1983. ‘Anita said that Clarence Thomas had repeatedly asked her out … that he wouldn’t seem to take ‘no’ for an answer,’ Hoerchner told senators. ‘The thing Anita told me that struck me particularly and that I remember almost verbatim was thatMr. Thomas had said to her, “You know, if you had witnesses, you’d have a perfect case against me.”‘”
On October 11, 1991, in nationally televised hearings, Hill testified in detail about things Thomas had said to her when she worked for him. While many observers were shocked by the graphic details, the Republicans on the Committee and other Thomas proxies strongly attacked Hill’s character and her decision to continue working for Thomas rather than file a legal complaint, despite her concerns that doing so would destroy her career and her future.
Hill had explained on NPR that her decision to testify was a difficult one, and was made on moral grounds because Thomas, as Chair of the EEOC, the agency that enforces federal workplace discrimination laws, had been “in charge of protecting rights of women and other groups in the workplace” but instead was “using his position of power for personal gain.”
Simply put, by sexually harassing her as she described, Thomas was alleged to be engaging in the kind of workplace discrimination that his agency was tasked with stopping.
Many women believed that such behavior demonstrated that Thomas was unfit for a position of power and a lifetime position on the nation’s highest court.
But the Senate’s hearing about her allegations morphed into an inquisition of her, much like how criminal defense attorneys attempt to discredit rape victims in order to prevent the conviction of their clients.
What people saw on TV was an all-white Senate Judiciary Committee filled with several men who impugned Hill’s character, doubted her intelligence, and attacked her motives — despite her conservative credentials — instead of treating her with respect and giving any credit to her eye-witness accounts of Thomas’ behavior. The attack on Hill was led by Republican Senators Arlen Specter, Orrin Hatch, and Alan Simpson on the Committee, and by Missouri’s John Danforth, Thomas’ champion in the Senate.
More than 20 million American households tuned in to watch Hill testify at hearings chaired by then-Senator Joe Biden, who is now Vice President.
As Politico noted last fall when Vice President Biden was considering running for president: “Biden’s done a lot over the past 24 years, including authoring the landmark Violence Against Women Act … But that hasn’t erased the memories of how Biden presided over those hearings … blamed for doing little to stop the attacks on Hill.”
He has also been criticized for opting not to call Angela Wright, an African American who worked in the press office at the EEOC, whose testimony would have echoed Hill’s charges of sexual harassment.
Wright had “detailed a pattern of harassing behavior, including an instance in which Thomas asked her what her bra size was.” Wright had also told her colleague, Rose Jourdain, at the time that Thomas made comments about “her figure, her body, her breasts, her legs, how she looked in certain suits and dresses.”
Wright’s statement was allowed to go into the official hearing record but she was not allowed to testify to help rebut Thomas’ denial.
In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, another Thomas aide “Sukari Hardnett wrote that many black women at the agency felt they were ‘an object of special interest’ to their boss. ‘If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive,’ her letter read, ‘you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female,'” as noted by Kornacke.
But the Senate and the country did not get to hear from these women.
When Mayer and Abrahamson conducted a full investigation for their book, rather than the rushed examination that occurred in the Senate, they also discovered that classmates of Thomas reported:
“that he often recounted sexually explicit films in lurid detail. Kaye Savage, a former colleague, reports that the walls of his bachelor apartment were covered with Playboy nude centerfolds. The owner of a video store near the EEOC [called Graffiti] said Thomas was a regular customer for pornographic movies.”
This evidence would have corroborated Hill's testimony and refuted Thomas’ denial, but none of this was part of the Senate’s hearings.
Years later, another woman “Lillian McEwen, who had dated Thomas in the 1980s and who was promoted by Thomas backers as something of an alibi during his confirmation hearings, spoke publicly about her relationship with him for the first time [in 2010]. Now retired, McEwen said that ‘Hill’s allegations that Thomas had pressed her for dates and made lurid sexual references rang familiar,’ as the [Washington] Post put it—as detailed by Kornacke in Salon.
Kornacke added: “McEwen said that Thomas had been ‘obsessed with porn’ and ‘would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films, if there was something worth noting.’ She also said that Thomas would tell her about the women he worked with — even commenting to her about one’s bra size. ‘He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners,’ McEwen told the Post. ‘It was a hobby of his.'”
That information was not known to the Senate at the time Clarence Thomas’ nomination was being considered, but none of that has changed IWF’s line of attack against Hill.
Thomas Fires Back
In response to Hill’s testimony, Thomas attacked the Senate for what he flamboyantly described as a “high-tech lynching” of an “uppity” black man who dared to be conservative.
He used the televised broadcast of the hearings to portray the Senate’s consideration of Hill’s allegations against him as racist and as promoting racial stereotypes—even though his accuser was also a conservative African American.
GOP senators like Arlen Specter were given wide leeway to attack Hill with incredibly derogatory and personal claims such as suggesting she had “fantasies about sexual interest in her” and that she “was having a problem being rejected by men she was attracted to.”
Hill took and passed a lie detector test, but Republican Senators smeared her further claiming she passed because she believed her “fantasies” about Thomas pursuing her.
Many women were disgusted by the way the Senate treated Hill and by the words and actions of Thomas, but not Silberman and her committee of Women for Judge Thomas, which held press conferences and other outreach buttressing the Republican attacks on Hill.
The IWF predecessor did so by pressing the claim that because he had not harassed the women they assembled he could not have harassed Hill and by arguing that she had “other” motives, which fueled the right-wing narrative that she had made up the allegations supposedly because she wanted to be with Thomas.
Meanwhile, the Judiciary Committee hearings ended by effectively giving Clarence Thomas the last word, as Hill did not testify again to rebut Thomas’ denial of her allegations.
Thomas Was Confirmed in One of the Closest Votes in History
Given how forcefully the GOP Senators sought to discredit Hill and the deployment of women in defense of Thomas, perhaps it should come as no surprise that the public remained divided over Thomas’ confirmation. Several polls indicated that a majority favored his confirmation, while the remainder were split between opposing and being undecided.
In a contest of he-said-she-said, it appeared that a majority of those polled believed Thomas, who had so evocatively taken umbrage at the allegations against him. Having other women, like Ricky Silberman, defend him certainly helped his case.
And, at the same time, the public was denied the chance to hear from another woman willing to testify that she had also been sexually harassed by Thomas.
Also lost in the hot-button national conversation was the message that no one is entitled to a lifelong job on the US Supreme Court.
So, on October 15, 1991, the Senate handed Thomas a lifetime job on the Court, with narrow 52-48 vote (with 11 Democrats joining 41 Republicans and 2 Republicans — Senator Jeffords (R-VT) and Senator Packwood (R-OR) — joining the Democrats).
Hill was home in Oklahoma, and Thomas, after he was confirmed for the lifetime post at the youthful age of 43, reportedly swore he would stay on the Court for 43 years to get his revenge on his enemies.
It was out of the ugliness of the Clarence Thomas nomination fight that the “Independent Women’s Forum” was born.
IWF Continued to Fight Hill Even After Thomas Was Confirmed
If the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had sought to incapacitate Anita Hill with an array of punches at her reputation, Ricky Silberman seemed determined to throw the knockout blow.
A year to the day after her senate testimony, Hill returned to Washington DC to recount her experience. At a conference at Georgetown Law, she spoke in academic terms while analyzing the structures that had colluded against her, and received a standing ovation for her bravery.
Across the city on that same day, Ricky Silberman held a counter-conference at the Federalist Society.
Speaking to that audience, Silberman accused Hill of being a liar, labeled the assembled group of academics at Georgetown “the extreminists,” and proclaimed that Hill’s “unsubstantiated charge of sexual harassment launched the mother of all gender wars.”
Later that year, in 1992, Silberman formally founded IWF with Barbara Bracher (Olson), Anita Blair and Lynn Cheney to fight that so-called “gender war.”
However neither Silberman nor IWF would let the Anita Hill testimony rest.
In 1993, David Brock published the book “The Real Anita Hill,” an alleged investigation into the “true motives” of Hill’s testimony.
Silberman helped Brock edit, assemble, and advertise the book, which by all accounts was an orchestrated hit piece.
Brock, who had repeatedly referred to Hill in the media as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” would later apologize for his actions, and label himself as a “witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine.” (Brock has disavowed his past as a political hit man for the right-wing and now leads groups challenging the right-wing and is also now aligned with Hillary Clinton.)
Silberman, who passed away in 2007, never apologized. The IWF tribute to her included a tribute from her memorial by Clarence Thomas.
Beyond Attacking Anita Hill, IWF Routinely Peddles Reactionary Claims
As documented by Barbara Spindel in Slate, five years after Hill’s testimony, IWF ran a cover-story in its 1996 “Women’s Quarterly” magazine where Elizabeth Larson, an IWF staffer, speculated that women were “spurred on by Anita Hill’s example” and now found “it more profitable to litigate than to work.”
In that article, Larson also suggested that women should simply “deal with” sexual harassment, a position the organization would advocate for in the 1990s time and again.
As detailed by researcher Lee Cokorinos in his book, “The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice,”IWF received substantial financial underwriting by right-wing funders like the Scaife Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation to focus many of its efforts on Silberman’s “gender war.”
In the words of Anita Blair, who served as an IWF leader from 1992 until 2000, “it was in 1977 or 1978 that feminism should have declared victory and gone home… All that was needing to be done had been done.”
In keeping with this fictitious worldview, IWF opposed a host of women equality initiatives throughout the 1990s using misleading data and taking some extreme positions:
- when lobbying against the Senator Biden’s “Violence Against Women Act,” IWF claimed “wives instigate violence, including severe violence, against husbands more often than husbands do against wives.”
- IWF argued that gender integration of the Virginia Military Institute would cripple national defense,
- IWF asserted that the problem of sexual assault on college campuses was overblown, since it is “inherently incredible” that female college students “are unable to report assaults to authorities,”
- and much more, including assailing key Title IX protections for female athletes.
Like every GOP-aligned group in the 1990s, IWF also supported efforts to impeach President Clinton, reaching out to Kenneth Starr for legal assistance as early as 1994. Barbara Olson and other IWF-ers helped carry the torch against Bill and Hillary Clinton.
IWF also provided Republicans in Congress with women’s voices to testify against affirmative action, social safety net programs, and gun violence mitigation measures.
As a whole, IWF was focused on combatting a caricature of what it described as “radical feminism.” [strict fr vs nurture mo?]
Over the past 25 years since the Clarence Thomas hearings, IWF has given a female face and voice to opposing almost every mainstream and common sense protection for equality that’s been advanced — opposing equal pay, paid sick leave, increasing the minimum wage, and protecting women’s reproductive privacy and freedom, and much more —many of which Thomas has also sought to weaken or strike down from the Supreme Court.
Over the years, IWF has not lost its interest in attacking Hill, even though its latest spin is about its supposedly “family-friendly” policies that put Wall Street in the driver’s seat and would take away responsibilities from employers regarding maternity leave, despite overwhelming business support for expanding employer-paid maternity and family leave, as the Center for Media and Democracy recently documented in a story broken by Lydia DiPillis in The Washington Post.
IWF’s kind of outlier, free-market fundamentalist approach should come as no surprise since IWF and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity have been close partners—even sharing space and leadership for a number of years—and because the Koch network of billionaires uses an array of vehicles to push an anti-government, anti-science, anti-worker agenda.
But the claim that IWF is merely a “right-leaning think tank,” given its legacy and extreme positions, ignores the history of a group that began with efforts to discredit Anita Hill and that continues to traffic in denial and disdain, despite the evidence that has mounted against so many of its claims.
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cmd 50 pp report
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3026994/Independent-Womens-Forum-Voice-Report-by-CMD-08.pdf
http://www.exposedbycmd.org/independent-womens-voice-known-donors-men/
The Independent Women’s Voice touts its “independent” brand in reaching potential voters.
But is it even women‘s voices it is throwing? Let alone independent women?
The reported data from the Federal Election Commission data says no.
New research shows that the overwhelming majority of its known donors are men.
Very rich men.
Yes, men have provided most of the disclosed donations to fund election-related expenditures under the name of the “Independent Women’s Voice.”
(IWV is a (c)(4) that operates out of the same offices as the Koch-tied “Independent Women’s Forum.”)
How do we know? Because IWV disclosed donors to the FEC in connection with the Scott Brown special election for the Senate in filings here and here.
Because before the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated clean election reforms in the Citizens Unitedcase in 2010 along with related decisions, IWV took a different approach to disclosure.
89% OF DONORS TO INDEPENDENT WOMEN‘S VOICE IN BROWN RACE WERE MEN
In January 2010 in that spending, IWV reported that more than 89% of its donors were men.
Late last year, Heather Higgins, the President of IWV, told potential donors about the first race she deployed her strategy to use the “independent” brand: the race to fill the seat of the late Senator Ted Kennedy.
She said: “[W]e have worked hard to create a branded organization that does not carry partisan baggage. It’s called Independent Women’s Voice. Being branded as neutral, but actually having the people who know know that you’re actually conservative puts us in a unique position. Our value here (and what is needed in the Republican conservative arsenal) is a group that can talk to those cohorts that wouldn’t otherwise listen but can do it in a way that is taking a conservative message and packaging it in a way that will be acceptable and will get a hearing.”
She noted that the “independent” brand of IWV was successful in the politically diverse state of Massachusetts in 2010.
Higgins added that in Brown’s election, IWV was successful “redefining that as being about healthcare in the 41st vote” to filibuster the health insurance reforms that President Obama was seeking. She claimed that IWV helped “close his 20‑point gap” with his opponent, Martha Coakley, a Democrat.
INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S VOICE FUNDERS FOR BROWN? NOT “INDEPENDENT WOMEN”
But who really funded that effort?
Not actually independent women.
THE BIGGEST DONOR: FOSTER FRIESS, A MULTI-MILLIONAIRE GOP GUY
The largest reported funder of the Independent Women’s Voice that January wasFoster Friess [CNP?]. He gave $87,000 to the effort, nearly 33% of the funding.
The 73-year old investment fund manager describes himself as a “billionaire wannabe” because he has a net worth of only about $500 million.
And, he’s no independent.
He funded the Super PAC of evangelical GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum (R-PA) in 2012.
Friess gave at least $1 million to advance the Koch Brothers’ agenda, making that pledge at one of their political strategy session in preparation for the 2012 elections.
The billionaire wannabe has spent at least $3 million to underwrite the Daily Caller operation. It provides daily fodder for Donald Trump’s claims. And the Trump operation pays Daily Caller to email its subscribers to promote his presidential campaign.
He also spent at least $100,000 to help Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) win his recall election in 2011.
And, he’s no feminist.
Friess told journalist Andrea Mitchell his position on birth control: “[T]his contraceptive thing, my gosh, it’s so … inexpensive, you know, back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”
That’s Friess. Definitely not an independent woman.
But he does have close ties to Higgins. She contacted Friess to get funding to begin James O’Keefe’s controversial campaign against ACORN.
He threw his voice (money) through IWV in the Scott Brown race for the Senate.
Friess is now “all-in” for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
MULTI-MILLIONAIRE MAN: RICHARD SHARP, GOP DONOR
The next largest donor to the Independent Women’s Voice for the Scott Brown effort was also not a woman and not an independent.
Richard Sharp gave Higgins $50,000 to help, which was almost 22% of the funding IWV reported that January.
Sharp, the former CEO of Circuit City, helped develop CarMax and invested first in Crocs, according to his obituary in 2014.
He was also an active Republican backer of President George W. Bush.
He notoriously tried to use his influence “to suppress a study … that correctly predicted that [Virginia’s GOP Governor] Gilmore’s car-tax rollback would create a $1 billion hole in the state budget.”
BILLIONAIRE MAN: JACK TEMPLETON, ANOTHER GOP DONOR
Dr. John (Jack) M. Templeton, Jr., was the next largest disclosed donor to IWV underwriting its efforts to help Brown beat Coakley in her bid to become the first woman Senator of the Bay state.
He gave $30,000.
Dr. Templeton was the son of billionaire investor John Templeton, one of the richest men in the world before his death in the Bahamas.
Dr. Templeton, an evangelical Republican, ran the Templeton Foundation.
In 2008 alone he gave nearly half a million dollars to the National Organization for Marriage, which fought marriage equality in Massachusetts and spent big on California Proposition 8. Regulatory agencies have pursued the group for failing to comply with requirements for private disclosure of donors.
NOM has been called an anti-gay group that demonizes LGBTQ Americans. And, internal documents revealed that one of it’s goals was to divide black Americans over gay rights and to “to ‘sideswipe’ President Barack Obama by depicting him as a ‘social radical’ via issues including child protection and pornography.”
Dr. Templeton also spent a million dollars launching “Let Freedom Ring,” a right-wing group that helped launch the Tea Party protests, pushed for a huge fence between on the Mexican border, and promoted myths about the Iraq War.
He died in 2015.
Like the most of the disclosed donors to IWV, he was not ever a woman, and he was not independent.
MULTI-MILLIONAIRE MAN: THOMAS PATRICK, GOP DONOR
The next largest donor to IWV was Thomas Patrick.
He gave it $25,000.
He’s a former Merrill Lynch executive, who joined a venture capital firm: New Vernon Capital. He has appeared on the show of Higgins’ ally, Larry Kudlow.
He backed Mitt Romney’s bid for the White House in 2012, was a major donor to Bush-Cheney 2004, and has funded the National Republican Congressional Committee and other GOP-aligned groups.
Patrick, like the other bigger donors, is not a woman and not an independent.
MULTI-MILLIONAIRE WOMAN: RANDY KENDRICK, GOP DONOR
One woman did give about 10% of the funds to help IWV in the Scott Brown effort: Randy Kendrick.
As noted by the Arizona press, she is “in a league of her own in her support for the political right, giving more than $130,000 to state political efforts in the 2014 election cycle, according to the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office, and, at the federal level, more than $290,000 to Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives and other conservative political action committees, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.”
She’s a lawyer who has been active in the Koch billionaire network, working with Higgins to help launch Sean Noble’s controversial money shuffling operation, the Center to Protect Patient Rights (which has been renamed American Encore).
Kendrick gave IWV $23,435 in January 2010.
Although she is a woman, she is not an independent. She is very active in federal and state GOP activities, although she opposes Trump along with some other “conservative” Republicans.
The other remaining four donors to IWV in January 2010 gave less than 10% to the effort cumulatively.
THREE MORE VERY RICH MEN, GOP DONORS
Tom Klingenstein, who has been the managing partner of an investment firm that shares his name, gave $10,000 (4%). Klingenstein describes himself as a “conservative,” and he is not a woman.
Ron Gidwitz gave $5,000 (2%). The Illinois press has described him as “easily the Illinois Republican Party’s most consistent contributor, fundraiser and cheerleader, dating back four decades when he was finance chair for Rep. Henry Hyde.” Again, he is not a woman or an independent.
Myles Pollin gave $1,000. He practices law as a partner with the big firm Sidley, focusing on “Collateralized Debt Obligations” (CDOs) and distressed assets, like those discussed in the film “The Big Short.” He helped raise funds
Cugnasca has made a number of political contributions toGOP candidates, including to Republican U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, before his controversial comments about rape, pregnancy, and “God’s will.” She has also donated to the campaigns of Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Allen West.WERE FROM MASSACHUSETTS
In all, more than 89% of the reported donations to IWV in January 2010 when it was working to help Scott Brown win a seat in the Senate were made by men. And the two women whose donations constituted a small minority of the funding have been GOP donors, not donors to “independent” candidates.
And none of those IWV donors even resided in Massachusetts.
MAJORITY OF OTHER REPORTED INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S VOICE AD DONORS WERE NOT WOMEN
The only other FEC reported donors to IWV under Higgins’ control occurred in late 2011.
Again, the majority of disclosed donors were not women, as shown here and here.
In September and October of that year, the group disclosed six donors. Two of whom are women whose donations constituted a minority of the funding.
The largest donor was a group called “One Jerusalem,” which was founded by 18 people, three of whom are women.
Its founders included David Horowitz, a right-winger and friend of Higgins; some famous Rabbis; a movie star; and the comedian Jackie Mason. It held a huge rally in Israel in 2001. One Jerusalem, as its name indicates, focuses on maintaining Jerusalem as an undivided capital of the country.
It gave IWV $37,859.87 in late 2011.
Parker Collier, an active donor to the GOP and the wife of a Florida real estate investor, gave $29,060.69.
Virginia James, a wealthy investor who lives in New Jersey and an active donor to GOP candidates (like Richard Mourdock), gave $10,000.
James is also a major donor to right-wing groups that run ads to influence elections to help Republicans, like Club for Growth and Templeton’s Let Freedom Ring.
The other disclosed donors were Pollin, the law firm partner, $3000; Donald Tober, the Chairman of the Sugar Foods Corporation, $1000; and Lewis van Amerongan, a wealthy investor, $1000.
OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF FEC DISCLOSED INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S VOICE DONORS? MEN
The donations to IWV disclosed to the FEC in 2010 and 2011 total $313,654, and 80% of those donations were not from women.
And, none of them appear to be from people who are politically “independent.”
Indeed, all of them, other than the one foundation, are active GOP donors.
WHAT NOW FOR THE INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S VOICE?
Since the change in the interpretation of FEC reporting requirements, there is no comparable public snapshot of who has underwritten other ads and election-related activities of IWV
But that fact did not deter IWV from posing as the voice of independent women in the Brown election, even though most of its donors for that effort were wealthy Republican men.
So, will IWV disclose who has been bankrolling its efforts to be an asset in the “Republican conservative arsenal” since then?
If a majority of its documented donors actually are women and actually are independent that would be newsworthy.
This snapshot of the known funding reported to the FEC tells a different story, as Heather Higgins launched this chapter of IWV’s activities to influence the results in American elections.
Furthermore, part of Higgins’ pitch last November at the David Horowitz event was for men to fund the election activities of IWV: “So for the men in the audience who think that the last thing they want to do is support a women’s group, understand that if you have any interest in … winning elections you have to think of this as a market segmentation issue and you can’t leave out that part of the market if you want to win.”
Therefore, the real question is: when IWV “speaks” to influence our elections, is it really just throwing the voice of billionaire wannabees like Foster Friess or of actually independent women?...IWV has positioned itself to influence the XXX< the president of IWV and the chair of the
IWF board—appeared at an ACU event titled
“Will Conservatives Support Trump?” That
your kids.”) She called the “#NeverTrump”
group “#EverSnob,” admitting that Trump
“can seem very nouveau” riche.
But, she said, “don’t let perfect be the enemy
of the good…your choice is Hillary Clinton...advisors who will lead us to the best possible...outcomes on a wide range of [issues] and his >judicial picks….”
(Higgins’ fellow panelists were Sen. Jeff
Sessions (R-AL), infamous for his leniency
toward the Ku Klux Klan; Trump election
lawyer Doug McGahn, an advisor to House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay; and FOX pundit
KT McFarland, who almost ran against Sen.
Hillary Clinton in 2006.Another IWF board
member was at a second ACU/CPAC panel,
claiming the GOP is the “party of workers.”)
Despite the hard push within the GOP to
reach out to women, a related “Women Vote
Trump” event at the RNC was so poorly
attended that the press shared photos of a
sea of empty chairs.
Jezebel quoted IWF/V’s Ashley Carter
asserting that: “Undecided women voters
see [Trump] as having the ability to make
real change happen by simply saying
what needs to be said.”
She emphasized that, "Many will not say
they are Trump supporters, a statement
which may reflect on their own beliefs and
associations, but they say [in IWV polling]
they will vote for Trump.”
According to Rolling Stone, one of the
event organizers responded told the room:
“‘We want to thank Ashley for that
incredible information… ‘Independent
Women's Voice has just proved all the
naysayers incorrect, right?’ ‘Right?’”
“Incredible” is an apt description. Truly
independent polling—not from IWV—has
shown that about 70% of American
women disfavor Trump, the “largest
gender gap” in polling history.
In response, Trump hired IWF Board
Member Kellyanne Conway, a pollster;
and then he made her campaign manager
after reshuffling Paul Manafort, amidst
controversy over his ties to Russia.
As the Washington Post noted, for
Conway Trump’s “history of bullying
women wasn’t a deal breaker. Trump’s
string of biting comments shouldn’t hurt
him more than it already has.”
“’The more that people keep repeating the
same insults, the more it invites him to
very legitimately defend himself,’”
Conway said. ‘Women look at the full
measure of the man, not just one
comment.’” Conway’s past clients include
“Trump’s pick for vice president, Indiana
Gov. Mike Pence, who lost women by five
points in his 2012 race,” the Post not...
talk to those cohorts [women do not identify as GOP or rightwing] that would
not otherwise listen but can do it in a way that is taking a conservative message and
packaging it in a way that will be acceptable and will get a hearing….”
“Women are … 54% of the electorate.
Women also vote at a higher rate than men do.
So for the men in the audience who think that the last thing they
want to do is support a women’s group, understand that if you
have any interest in … winning elections you have
to think of this as a market segmentation issue and
you can’t leave out that part of the market if you want to win.”
“For the last five years, I have been working to provide the margin
that matters in races that are toss-ups or worse….
And we approach it much the way the NRA [the National Rifle
Association] does.
When the NRA decides that they want a particular candidate
because he’s good on their issue, sometimes they run ads on guns
but very often they runs ads on something entirely different and
never even mention guns because their goal is to win the race not to
make to make themselves feel good about the ads they have run.”
“Similarly, we try to think about what is it we need to say to have impact
with these people [independent women]. It’s been remarkably
successful…. [People who like us include] donors who want a high return
on their investment for their political dollars….”
IWV Spends Dark Money to Aid Rightwing Candidates
Here are some of the examples Higgins
highlighted of how IWV has used its
independent branding (to help the GOP):
• In South Carolina, IWV was the
only significant independent
expenditure inMark Sanford’s
House race. Higgins said, after
the NRCC pulled out, IWV got
“evangelicals to hold their nose
and vote for Mark in order to be
able to hold onto that seat and
not have the liberal win it.” (He
had cheated on his wife.)
• In Kentucky, when it looked like
Matt Bevin was going to lose the
governorship, IWV “focused on
Democrats, liberals, and
independents” and took credit for
turning things around because,
she said, the Republican
Governors Association and
“partisan”-named groups could
not reach those voters.
• In Wisconsin, IWV did a pushpoll/survey
challenging the idea
that Scott Walker was being
unfair to union members, by
claiming public sector workers
were overpaid by 30% compared
with the private sector. Higgins
asserted IWV moved the dial by
31 points in favor of Gov. Walker
in the recall.
• In 2012, she said IWV moved
“women who were soft Obama
approvers into being
disapproving” by nine points
through an ad “they would like,
that they would think was
speaking to them, from
somebody who understood
them”--the “boyfriend” ad about a
“relationship” that had not
worked.
Republican candidates imploded with a series
of anti-woman claims in 2012. While IWF
argued that there was “no Republican War on
Women,” IWV was quietly making independent
expenditures to aid the GOP candidates fueling
the controversy with their anti-choice claims.
• For example, Missouri U.S. Senate
candidate Todd Akin claimed rape
victims can’t get pregnant because “If
it’s a legitimate rape, the female body
has ways to try to shut that whole thing
down.” On the eve of the election, IWV
spent $67,242.43 to aid Akin with robocalls,
but he lost. (Akin was also a
client of IWF Board Member, the
pollster Kellyanne Conway.)
• Indiana’s Richard Mourdock was
slated to win a Senate seat until he
asserted that when a woman is raped
and gets pregnant, she carries a “gift
from God,” “something that God
intended to happen.” Two weeks later,
IWV spent $176,991 on “Romney wants
Mourdock” ads and more.
• IWV also spent money to try to help
Joe Walsh, a GOP congressman from
Illinois who claimed abortions
performed to save a mother’s life are
never necessary: "there is no such
exception as 'life of the mother,' and as
far as 'health of the mother,' same
thing." The American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists
scolded Walsh for his “inaccurate
statements.” Two weeks later, IWV
spent over $5K on robo-calls to aid him,
but he lost to vet Tammy Duckworth.
In 2014, IWV also spent money to aid other
U.S. Senate candidates, including:
• Joni Ernst (R-IA), whose win was
made possible by the investment of
billionaires in the Koch network (as
CMD has documented in a complaint to
the IRS about the “Trees of Liberty”);
8
• Koch politicians Sen. Mitch
McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Pat
Roberts (R-KS). (Kansas is the
home state of Koch Industries.);
• Upstarts Tom Tillis (R-NC), an
alum of the controversial pay-toplay
ALEC; Cory Gardner (RCO),
another ALEC alum; and
David Perdue (R-GA);
• An unsuccessful Tea Party
challenger to long-time Sen.
Thad Cochran (R-MS); and
• Losing GOP candidate Scott
Brown, of New Hampshire and
late of Massachusetts. In 2010, it
also aided him. The majority of
those funds for the “Independent
Women’s Voice” came from men.
• IWV also spent money against
Stephen Colbert’s sister,
Elizabeth Colbert Busch, in a
House race in South Carolina.
And that’s not all. In 2012, IWV spent:
• more than $70K aiding Tommy
Thompson against Tammy
Baldwin, who became the first
openly LGBTQ person and
Wisconsin woman elected to the
U.S. Senate; IWV backed
Thompson. He had briefly
defended anti-gay discrimination;
• nearly $100K that year aiding
losing Senate candidate Tom
Smith in Pennsylvania who
supported a total abortion ban
and exceptions for rape or incest;
• on expenditures that aided Pete
Hoekstra’s failed bid for the U.S.
Senate for Michigan. He had called the
Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act a
“nuisance” and said equal pay
“shouldn’t be the law” (IWF opposes it);
• aiding failed Illinois U.S. Senate
candidate Josh Mandel, who defended
Mourdock’s claims, opposed any
abortion exception for rape or incest,
and opposed reauthorization of the
Violence Against Women Act (VAWA);
• aiding Robert Turner, who created
Rush Limbaugh’s TV show;
• and trying to help Jane Corwin, who
supported shackling prisoners while
they give birth.
In 2010, as Higgins took over IWV, it had
expenditures for successful but controversial
congressional candidates, such as:
• Andy Harris of Maryland, who equated
non-discriminatory funding for
contraceptives under the Affordable
Care Act to church arson;
• David Schweikert of Arizona, who
voted against VAWA;
• Ben Quayle of Arizona, who used a
pseudonym to criticize women’s
appearances online; and
• self-described “anti-feminist” Renee
Elmers on North Carolina, who urged
the GOP to bring policy discussions.In all, IWV reported spending more than $850K on 2014 Senate races: almost all of it for
GOP candidates with 0% NARAL ratings. It spent more than $5 million that year on related
advocacy. In 2012, it reported independent expenditures totaling nearly $1 million, out of its
more than $5 million in other spending. In 2010, it reported independent expenditures of
more than $500K out of its more than $1.5 million spent. [A list of races is in the appendix
==
Confirmation Bias
:{
How “Women for Judge Thomas” turned into a conservative powerhouse.}:
By Barbara Spindel
clarence thomas anita hill.
Anita Hill’s televised testimony that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her is credited for ushering in the Year of the Woman. But it also has another, less visible legacy.
Right on the heels of FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson, the HBO film Confirmation offers another opportunity to relive a depressing ’90s spectacle—in this case, Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court hearings. Anita Hill’s televised testimony that Thomas sexually harassed her, and her poor treatment at the hands of the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, are often credited with raising awareness of the issue of workplace sexual harassment and ushering in the so-called Year of the Woman, the 1992 election of four women to the Senate. (Confirmation premieres April 16 and stars Scandal’s Kerry Washington as Hill and The Wire’s Wendell Pierce as Thomas.)
But the Thomas hearings have another, less visible legacy. A small group of prominent Washington women rallied around the nominee; they were headed by the late Ricky Silberman, a friend of Thomas’ who, like Hill, had worked with him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Calling themselves Women for Judge Thomas, they pointedly demonstrated that not all women, simply by virtue of their sex, were ready to don an “I Believe Anita Hill” pin.This ad-hoc bunch—which included Anita Blair, Barbara Ledeen, and the late Barbara Olson—went on to form the Independent Women’s Forum, a D.C. nonprofit devoted to waging war on mainstream feminism.
[Stills of Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce in Confirmation.
Kerry Washington as Anita Hill and Wendell Pierce as Clarence Thomas in Confirmation.]
Back in the 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly and her allies had whipped up fears of unisex public bathrooms and female military conscription in order to help kill the Equal Rights Amendment. After that, groups such as Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America railed against reproductive rights and gay rights and championed traditional gender roles. But among conservative women’s groups, the IWF was something new. If you squinted, its members—enterprising, educated professionals—looked like they could belong to the National Organization for Women. Instead, they had an extreme loathing for the feminist movement.
The IWF argued that second-wave feminism had solved the problem of sex discrimination. In a 1997 interview with now-defunct conservative magazine Insight, Blair, who was by then IWF president, said that current feminists were “playing out their own Freudian drama on the policy stage, saying, ‘Well, my first husband walked out on me, or I never had dates in high school, so all men are bad.’ ” A 1997 IWF press release called National Pay Inequity Awareness Day “a cruel hoax … designed to brainwash girls and young women into believing that they are victims.”
The IWF’s Elizabeth Larson, in the organization’s Women’s Quarterly magazine, called sexual harassment an issue drummed up by “a growing number of women, many spurred on by Anita Hill’s example … [who] find it more profitable to litigate than to work.”After the 1994 passage of the Violence Against Women Act—spearheaded by then-Sen. Joe Biden in what was widely seen as atonement for his mishandling of the Thomas hearings—the IWF argued that the legislation should be repealed or receive zero funding; IWF spokeswoman (and ’90s right-wing It Girl) Laura Ingraham referred to VAWA as feminist “pork” with a “tear-jerker” title. The group also took on affirmative action, headlining a Women’s Quarterly article on the topic “That’s No White Male, That’s My Husband”—a phrase that revealed a lot about IWF constituents’ racial identities and loyalties. (“You can’t have white guys saying you don’t need affirmative action,” Ledeen told the Washington Post when asked why the anti-feminist IWF had organized as women in the first place.)
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[Laura Ingraham appears with Sen. George Allen at a fundraiser on Oct. 7, 2006, in Maidens, Virginia.
In 1995, NOW President Patricia Ireland, in a considerable understatement, called it “a little startling” that the new and tiny conservative upstart IWF, with fewer than 2,000 members, was garnering media coverage to rival that of Ireland’s mass-membership organization. It surely helped that stalwart right-wing donors including Richard Scaife and the Koch brothers were funding the IWF, and that its well-connected roster included former National Endowment for the Humanities chairwoman (and wife of Dick Cheney) Lynne Cheney, Who Stole Feminism? author Christina Hoff Sommers, neoconservative writer (and wife of Norman Podhoretz) Midge Decter, and Wendy Lee Gramm and Mary Ellen Bork, married, respectively, to Texas Sen. Phil Gramm and rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.
Hill was often dismissed as overreacting to a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can.
While much of the IWF’s campaign against feminism was waged in the media, the group also took the fight to Capitol Hill; the IWF testified before Congress against the Violence Against Women Act and affirmative action, and filed amicus briefs opposing the enforcement of Title IX and the coeducation of the Virginia Military Institute.
After the election of George W. Bush, the IWF’s clout grew as its members received posts within the new administration, among them Elaine Chao as labor secretary, Diana Furchtgott-Roth as chief of staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Blair as deputy assistant secretary of the Navy. Most absurdly, twoIWF members, then-president Nancy Pfotenhauerand board member Margot Hill, were appointed to the administration’s National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women.
Despite engaging in serious business, the IWF’s spokeswomen never appeared to take themselves too seriously; they loved to bait feminists but always with a smile. Blair said, “There’s a telltale way to find a liberal feminist: It’s the nasty wrinkles around her mouth that she gets from frowning. You’ll probably find my side with laugh lines.” “We have no angry agenda,” Grace Paine Terzian, then publisher of Women’s Quarterly, told a journalist in 1995. When Wendy Kaminer wrote on right-wing challenges to feminism in the American Prospect the following year, the IWF’s Elizabeth Lurie responded in a letter to the editor that she had found the piece “howlingly funny.” All of this forced cheer was intended to highlight the contrast between the IWF’s anti-feminism and its caricatured version of feminism, which, according toHoff Sommers in a 1996 60 Minutes profile of the IWF, had come to mean “that you’re chronically offended, that you’re looking for oppression and bias under every tree.”
Plenty of people still see Hill as fitting this description, even 25 years after the Thomas hearings. Although she accused Thomas of repeated graphic descriptions of pornographic films, including scenes of rape and bestiality, and of detailed boasts about his own sexual prowess, Hill was and is often dismissed as overreacting to a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can. Indeed, IWF managing director Carrie Lukas recently described Hill’s allegations against Thomas as “rather PG-rated.”
Of course, the IWF exists not because its founders thought Hill was overreacting but because, as friends of Thomas, they thought she was lying. In the years since—when downplaying the existence and impact of sex discrimination and of gender-based crimes such as harassment, rape, and domestic violence—the IWF doesn’t suggest that all women are lying. The group has frequently suggested, however, that women who speak out about these issues are whining, and should stop playing the victim, and ought to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In that sense the IWF, whose current mission is to “improve the lives of Americans byincreasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty,” has ties to Thomas that are not merely personal but philosophical as well.
The women of the IWF continue to stand by Clarence Thomas, and he by them. After Silberman’s 2007 death, Thomas sat down with the group’s Michelle Bernard and Charlotte Hays to talk about his friend for the IWF newsletter. “Sometimes at IWF we are accused of being anti-women and anti-feminist, because our mantra is that all issues are women’s issues,” his interviewers noted. “I wouldn’t worry about that too much,” Thomas responded, proceeding to describe his own experiences being called “traitor” and “Uncle Tom.” “When I am criticized, I take it as a compliment,” he said. “If I weren’t relevant, they wouldn’t talk about me. Don’t worry about it. You just wish them good health and do it with a smile.”
==
===
https://www.thenation.com/article/gops-long-war-against-women-and-sex/
Valenti 2012
Aspirins and short skirts and contraception, oh my! The last few weeks have seen a slew of Republican gaffes concerning women’s sexuality. From Rick Santorum’s billionaire supporter Foster Friess’s waxing nostalgic about the good old days when women put aspirin "between their knees” in lieu of contraception to an online furor over whether the young conservative women at CPAC dressed too provocatively—the GOP has a major woman problem on their hands.
Their fear of sex—of women’s sexuality in particular—has become a major media talking point, and a source of outrage among American women. But what I don’t understand is why anyone is surprised. Republicans have long based their agenda for women in a deep-rooted disdain for all things female. We’ve been down this road many, many times before.
When a picture of Congressman Darrell Issa’s all-male panel on birth control (the make-up of which prompted several Democratic women to walk out of the hearing) hit the Internet and mainstream media—I couldn’t help but be reminded of a similar picture of George W. Bush signing the “partial birth” abortion ban, surrounded by a group of smiling clapping men. All men. (Santorum was one of them.)
Dahlia Lithwick reported last week in *Slate* on a law that’s poised to pass in Virginia that would make it legal to penetrate abortion-seeking women against their wills by requiring a medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasound—a procedure that would count as rape under state law. Delegate David Englin told Lithwick that one Republican lawmaker told him that the invasive ultrasound wasn’t an issue because women seeking abortions had already made the decision to be “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.” Apparently once women have been penetrated, all other future penetrations should be no problem, consent notwithstanding.
If this attitude sounds radical, consider that up until 2008, it was the basis for Maryland rape law. If a woman initially agreed to sex, but later withdrew consent, any sex that followed wasn’t rape. The justification was based on archaic legislation that said after the initial “de-flowering” of a woman, nothing could be considered rape because “the damage was done,” she was no longer a virgin and couldn’t be “re-flowered.”
The focus on birth control is not new either. Conservatives and Republican appointees successfully held up emergency contraception for over-the-counter status for three years in the FDA, despite a recommendation from an independent joint advisory committee to the agency to make the drug available. Dr. W. David Hager—appointed by then President Bush to the FDA’s Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs—told the New York Times about why he voted against the drug’s approval, noting, “What we heard today was frequently about individuals who did not want to take responsibility for their actions and wanted a medication to relieve those consequences.” (Hager also penned a book in which he argued that prayer could cure PMS—quite the expert on women’s health!)
It also came out that in an internal memo FDA medical official Janet Woodcock argued against making the contraceptive available over the counter for fear that it would cause “extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an ‘urban legend’ status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.” (The same fear-based rhetoric over young women becoming promiscuous was used when conservatives tried to hold up Gardasil, the HPV vaccine that prevents cervical cancer.)
But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that this is just a problem of men attacking women’s rights. Conservative women’s rights groups, always eager for a patriarchal pat on the head, have long thrown other women under the bus under the guise of protecting them from their own wanton sexuality. TheIndependent Women’s Forum—who oppose the Violence Against Women Act, Title IX and who don’t believe pay inequity exists—started a campaign years ago to get the award-winning play The Vagina Monologues banned from college campuses, arguing that it’s pornographic and reduces women to their body parts. (Specifically, the one they’d rather not think about.)The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, another right-wing women’s organization, launched a campaign and contest in 2008 to “Bringing Back the Dowry and Hope Chest.” The winner received a “cedar-lined hope chest filled with $1000 worth of dowry items” as well as $500 toward her future wedding. Retro-chic!
Given this long history of paternalism and efforts to rollback women’s rights—I think the calls that the GOP is launching a “war on women” are right on, but years late.
Perhaps today, with the Internet moving information faster than ever before, Republican and conservative sexism doesn’t go as easily unnoticed (just ask the folks at Komen). Perhaps the influx of young women and feminists into self-directed and social media activism has changed the course of the national debate. Or maybe women are just fed up with yet another legislator dictating how they should run their lives and use their bodies.
Whatever the reason, we need to ensure that Republicans are held accountable and don’t get to brush these comments and actions off as mistakes or misunderstandings. Because they’re not simple gaffes, they’re a crystal clear window into the future that the GOP wants for women
==
==
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13091/confirmation-how-not-so-independent-womens-forum-was-launched-aid-clarence
By Lisa Graves and Calvin Sloan
HBO's new film on demand, "Confirmation," revisits the painful battle over the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court in spite of the testimony of Anita Hill that he sexually harassed her.
Some pundits have attempted to the film, even though it has several scenes that portray Thomas and his wife Ginny as quiet, sympathetic figures and not as the outspoken right-wing political activists that they were and are.
One of the harshest critics of the film is a group that calls itself the "Independent Women's Forum" (IWF).
IWF is hardly independent though, despite its name.
It is deeply imbedded in the right-wing political infrastructure.
In fact, IWF began as part of the coordinated effort to get Thomas confirmedso he could advance the right-wing's legal agenda on the courts, in the face of deep fears by many that he would limit individual rights as a judge--fears later validated by his rulings and extreme dissents as a Justice.
As Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson wrote in their book Strange Justice: "the falsehoods and distortions involved in the selling of Clarence Thomas to the American people neither started nor ended with the treatment of Anita Hill's accusations. From the beginning, the placement of Thomas on the high court was seen as a political end justifying almost any means."
Central to the efforts to get Thomas confirmed were not only the attacks on Hill by GOP Senators but also press outreach used to discredit her that was orchestrated by a small group of powerful right-wing women.
That confirmation battle put one of the most reactionary judges in modern history on the Court, and it also led to the creation of IWF, an ultra reactionary women's group opposing women's rights in numerous ways.
IWF's creators defended Thomas, despite the detailed evidence against him, and the organization they founded has defended him and continued to attack Hill since 1991.
The Thomas hearings also led to a backlash from voters to a U.S. Senate that had 98 men and only two women as Senators.
In spite of a temporary majority supporting the confirmation of Thomas based on the incomplete information provided in the Senate hearings, American voters resoundingly rejected the idea of an all-white male Senate Judiciary Committee examining a woman's testimony about sexual harassment.
The 1992 election that followed swept out President George H.W. Bush and swept in four women as new Senators and more women in other offices, making that election "the Year of the Woman."
Today, 20 U.S. Senators are women; and IWF leaders and alums have regularly attacked the most powerful woman elected Senator since the Thomas hearings, Hillary Clinton.
IWF—which has had close ties to the billionaire Koch Brothers, before they were infamous, and to other rightwing donors—has used its well-funded platform to secure numerous press appearances without much scrutiny of its record and sometimes because of its reactionary positions.
That's in part because media outlets have defaulted to point-counterpoint "reporting" that gives equal weight both to facts IWF opposes and to outlier claims that are IWF's stock in trade.
Part of the playbook was set as IWF came into being, as its founders deployed women in the press to counter a fellow woman whose testimony threatened their political agenda and ally.
Much of that claim boiled down to denying her experience as inauthentic and deceitful because Thomas had not sexually harassed them. It was a brutally effective tactic.
This is the story of IWF's roots.
IWF: Born to Give a Woman's Voice to Defending Clarence Thomas
On June 28, 1991, the first black man to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall—an icon to the civil rights community—announced his retirement.
Ten days later, President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a 43-year old African American judge who had a controversial tenure as President Reagan's Chairman of the Equal Opportunity Commission (EEOC), where he challenged core ideas about equal economic opportunity for women, such as equal pay and comparable worth.
Although it was only 16 months before the next presidential election and even though the choice of a young right-winger like Thomas to fill the beloved Justice Marshall's seat was a lightening rod for controversy, the Democratic-led Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled hearings on his nomination for September.
As the controversy over Thomas' nomination grew, a small group of right-wing women began meeting for lunch to discuss the nomination at the offices of Ted Olson in the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
One of the women at those lunch meetings was Barbara Kay Bracher, a lawyer who married Olson in 1996.
Following the Thomas confirmation, she would go on to staff investigations of the Clinton Administration as a congressional aide and to write a diatribe called "Hell to Pay: the Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton," which was published by the right-wing bookseller Regnery shortly before Olson perished on a plane in the 9/11 attacks on her way to a taping for Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect" TV show.
(Ted Olson became famous for taking the Bush v. Gore case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Justice Clarence Thomas sided with him and four other GOP Justices in stopping the Florida recount in 2000, making Republican George W. Bush president despite Democrat Al Gore winning the popular vote. Bush then named Ted Olson Solicitor General of the United States.)
The driving force at those pro-Thomas strategy sessions in Olson's office back in 1991 was Rosalie "Ricky" Silberman, who had worked with Thomas as Vice-Chair of the EEOC and was one of his confidantes.
Before that, Silberman had worked as the press secretary for GOP Senator Bob Packwood, who later resigned in 1995 in the wake allegations that he harassed and assaulted numerous women he worked with.
(Ricky Silberman was also married to Thomas' mentor from Thomas' brief time as a judge on the D.C. Circuit:Judge Laurence Silberman, a very political judge who among other things later tried to clear George W. Bush of culpability for lying about Iraq's weapons and was later given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by Bush.)
The third major figure in these lunches was Anita K. Blair, who was a lawyer who became General Counsel for IWF. President George W. Bush made her Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and in 2011 she was hired as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department on human resources in the Obama Administration.
In the later 1990s during the Republican effort to impeach Democratic President Bill Clinton, Blair claimed on behalf of IWF that:
"nothing ever did more to trivialize sexual harassment than the sorry spectacle surrounding Anita Hill ... Given prime-time exposure on national television Hill told a bizarre, uncorroborated story about Thomas, her boss at two federal agencies. Hearing her belated complaints about off-color jokes allegedly told about 10 years before, millions of Americans wondered, ‘What on earth does this have to do with sexual harassment?' Americans learned the answer from Hill and her supporters: ‘Sexual harassment isn't about sex, it's about power.' The Anita Hill spectacle wasn't about sexual harassment; it was about the exercise of pure partisan political power. The media circus surrounding Hill and Thomas was produced and directed byliberal operatives, including fifth-columnists like NPR's Nina Totenberg."
Those three right-wing politicos--Silberman, Olson, and Blair--formed an ad hoc committee called "Women for Judge Thomas," which ultimately became a non-profit group dubbed the "Independent Women's Forum."
The Clarence Thomas Nomination Begins and IWF's Founders Step Forward
But even before Anita Hill was in the picture--discovered by Senate Judiciary Committee staffers vetting the Bush nominee--allies of Thomas knew his controversial record as President Reagan's chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) could play poorly with many women and others concerned about equality.
The Women for Judge Thomas committee began holding press conferences the month President Bush announced Thomas' nomination to a lifetime position on the Court in July.
Thomas was in his early 40s and had never argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, and he had only had 16 months of experience as a sitting judge on any court.
His selection was considered a tactical masterstroke by C. Boyden Gray,President Bush's White House Counsel, who had been criticized for letting the first vacancy in Bush's term go to New Hampshire Justice David Souter, who was considered by the far right to be not "conservative" or activist enough to deliver judicial votes to change the law in the ways they wanted.
By putting forward an African American with right-wing bona fides, at Gray's urging the Bush White House sought to mute Democratic objections for fear of offending a major constituency over fighting a nominee with a rags-to-riches life story.
(Gray is the grandson and also the nephew of three presidents of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. After President George H.W. Bush lost his bid for another term in the 1992 "Year of the Woman" election, Gray became chairman of David Koch's Citizens for a Sound Economy, which would later officially join forces with IWF.)
But Thomas' limited judicial experience and the hearings on his nomination deepened concerns of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
As the New York Times reported: "'Judge Thomas lacks the experience and qualifications that a Supreme Court Justice ought to have,' said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. ‘He fled from his record and he refused to answer legitimate questions.'"
Leahy also noted: "‘Nothing in Judge Thomas's record or testimony suggests the level of professional distinction or constitutional grounding appropriate for a Supreme Court nominee. His legal and judicial experiences are limited. His speeches and writings have shown little in the way of analysis or scholarship.'"
So, when his nomination was considered, the Committee deadlocked 7-7 on his nomination but then voted to send the nomination to the full Senate for a vote without a recommendation for or against confirmation. Although the Democrats had a 57-43 majority, a number of Southern Democrats had already pledged to vote for Thomas to be confirmed.
Hill Comes Forward and IWF's Founders Step Up to Counter Her in the Press
Before the Senate vote could be held, however, National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg broke the story that the Senate investigation had uncovered allegations that Thomas had made unwanted advances toward some of his subordinates in his leadership positions in the Reagan Administration.
Totenberg received a tip that Professor Anita Hill, a conservative black law professor, had told the Senate that Thomas had made sexual comments to her when he was her supervisor when they both worked for the Reagan Administration.
This shocking development increased the volume of concern about confirming Thomas to a lifetime job on the highest court in the land, and the Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled another round of hearings to examine the allegations.
Under the guidance of Ricky Silberman, the Women for Judge Thomas Committee identified women who worked with Thomas who said they had notbeen sexually harassed by him and that he had behaved professionally toward them.
Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee's investigators--including a Democrat named Ricki Seidman--identified another staffer who said she had been subject to sexual advances in the workplace by Thomas and also interviewed colleagues of Professor Hill, whom she confided in about the inappropriate things she said Thomas said.
As Steve Kornacki noted in Salon:
"Three Hill friends—Susan Hoerchner, Ellen Wells and John Carr—testified under oath that she had told them about Thomas' conduct as it happened between 1981 and 1983. ‘Anita said that Clarence Thomas had repeatedly asked her out … that he wouldn't seem to take ‘no' for an answer,' Hoerchner told senators. ‘The thing Anita told me that struck me particularly and that I remember almost verbatim was that Mr. Thomas had said to her, "You know, if you had witnesses, you'd have a perfect case against me."'"
On October 11, 1991, in nationally televised hearings, Hill testified in detail about things Thomas had said to her when she worked for him. While many observers were shocked by the graphic details, the Republicans on the Committee and other Thomas proxies strongly attacked Hill's character and her decision to continue working for Thomas rather than file a legal complaint, despite her concerns that doing so would destroy her career and her future.
Hill had explained on NPR that her decision to testify was a difficult one, and was made on moral grounds because Thomas, as Chair of the EEOC, the agency that enforces federal workplace discrimination laws, had been "in charge of protecting rights of women and other groups in the workplace" but instead was "using his position of power for personal gain."
Simply put, by sexually harassing her as she described, Thomas was alleged to be engaging in the kind of workplace discrimination that his agency was tasked with stopping.
Many women believed that such behavior demonstrated that Thomas was unfit for a position of power and a lifetime position on the nation's highest court.
But the Senate's hearing about her allegations morphed into an inquisition of her, much like how criminal defense attorneys attempt to discredit rape victims in order to prevent the conviction of their clients.
What people saw on TV was an all-white Senate Judiciary Committee filled with several men who impugned Hill's character, doubted her intelligence, and attacked her motives—despite her conservative credentials--instead of treating her with respect and giving any credit to her eye-witness accounts of Thomas' behavior. The attack on Hill was led by Republican Senators Arlen Specter, Orrin Hatch, and Alan Simpson on the Committee, and by Missouri's John Danforth, Thomas' champion in the Senate.
More than 20 million American households tuned in to watch Hill testify at hearings chaired by then-Senator Joe Biden, who is now Vice President.
As Politico noted last fall when Vice President Biden was considering running for president: "Biden's done a lot over the past 24 years, including authoring the landmark Violence Against Women Act … But that hasn't erased the memories of how Biden presided over those hearings … blamed for doing little to stop the attacks on Hill."
He has also been criticized for opting not to call Angela Wright, an African American who worked in the press office at the EEOC, whose testimony would have echoed Hill's charges of sexual harassment.
Wright had "detailed a pattern of harassing behavior, including an instance in which Thomas asked her what her bra size was." Wright had also told her colleague, Rose Jourdain, at the time that Thomas made comments about "her figure, her body, her breasts, her legs, how she looked in certain suits and dresses."
Wright's statement was allowed to go into the official hearing record but she was not allowed to testify to help rebut Thomas' denial.
In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, another Thomas aide "Sukari Hardnett wrote that many black women at the agency felt they were ‘an object of special interest' to their boss. ‘If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive,' her letter read, ‘you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female,'" as noted by Kornacke.
But the Senate and the country did not get to hear from these women.
When Mayer and Abrahamson conducted a full investigation for their book, rather than the rushed examination that occurred in the Senate, they also discovered that classmates of Thomas reported:
"that he often recounted sexually explicit films in lurid detail. Kaye Savage, a former colleague, reports that the walls of his bachelor apartment were covered with Playboy nude centerfolds. The owner of a video store near the EEOC [called Graffiti] said Thomas was a regular customer for pornographic movies."
This evidence would have corroborated Hil''s testimony and refuted Thomas' denial, but none of this was part of the Senate's hearings.
Years later, another woman "Lillian McEwen, who had dated Thomas in the 1980s and who was promoted by Thomas backers as something of an alibi during his confirmation hearings, spoke publicly about her relationship with him for the first time [in 2010]. Now retired, McEwen said that ‘Hill's allegations that Thomas had pressed her for dates and made lurid sexual references rang familiar,' as the [Washington] Post put it--as detailed by Kornacke in Salon.
Kornacke added: "McEwen said that Thomas had been ‘obsessed with porn' and ‘would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films, if there was something worth noting.' She also said that Thomas would tell her about the women he worked with — even commenting to her about one's bra size. 'He was always actively watching the women he worked with to see if they could be potential partners,' McEwen told the Post. ‘It was a hobby of his.'"
That information was not known to the Senate at the time Clarence Thomas' nomination was being considered, but none of that has changed IWF's line of attack against Hill.
Thomas Fires Back
In response to Hill's testimony, Thomas attacked the Senate for what he flamboyantly described as a "high-tech lynching" of an "uppity" black man who dared to be conservative.
He used the televised broadcast of the hearings to portray the Senate's consideration of Hill's allegations against him as racist and as promoting racial stereotypes--even though his accuser was also a conservative African American.
GOP senators like Arlen Specter were given wide leeway to attack Hill with incredibly derogatory and personal claimssuch as suggesting she had "fantasies about sexual interest in her" and that she "was having a problem being rejected by men she was attracted to."
Hill took and passed a lie detector test, but Republican Senators smeared her further claiming she passed because she believed her "fantasies" about Thomas pursuing her.
Many women were disgusted by the way the Senate treated Hill and by the words and actions of Thomas, but not Silberman and her committee of Women for Judge Thomas, which held press conferences and other outreach buttressing the Republican attacks on Hill.
The IWF predecessor did so by pressing the claim that because he had not harassed the women they assembled he could not have harassed Hill and by arguing that she had "other" motives, which fueled the right-wing narrative that she had made up the allegations supposedly because she wanted to be with Thomas.
Meanwhile, the Judiciary Committee hearings ended by effectively giving Clarence Thomas the last word, as Hill did not testify again to rebut Thomas' denial of her allegations.
Thomas Was Confirmed in One of the Closest Votes in History
Given how forcefully the GOP Senators sought to discredit Hill and the deployment of women in defense of Thomas, perhaps it should come as no surprise that the public remained divided over Thomas' confirmation. Several polls indicated that a majority favored his confirmation, while the remainder were split between opposing and being undecided.
In a contest of he-said-she-said, it appeared that a majority of those polled believed Thomas, who had so evocatively taken umbrage at the allegations against him. Having other women, like Ricky Silberman, defend him certainly helped his case.
And, at the same time, the public was denied the chance to hear from another woman willing to testify that she had also been sexually harassed by Thomas.
Also lost in the hot-button national conversation was the message that no one is entitled to a lifelong job on the U.S. Supreme Court.
So, on October 15, 1991, the Senate handed Thomas a lifetime job on the Court, with narrow 52-48 vote (with 11 Democrats joining 41 Republicans and 2 Republicans—Senator Jeffords (R-VT) and Senator Packwood (R-OR)—joining the Democrats).
Hill was home in Oklahoma, and Thomas, after he was confirmed for the lifetime post at the youthful age of 43, reportedly swore he would stay on the Court for 43 years to get his revenge on his enemies.
It was out of the ugliness of the Clarence Thomas nomination fight that the "Independent Women's Forum" was born.
IWF Continued to Fight Hill even afterThomas Was Confirmed
If the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had sought to incapacitate Anita Hill with an array of punches at her reputation, Ricky Silberman seemed determined to throw the knockout blow.
A year to the day after her senate testimony, Hill returned to Washington D.C. to recount her experience. At a conference at Georgetown Law, she spoke in academic terms while analyzing the structures that had colluded against her, and received a standing ovation for her bravery.
Across the city on that same day, Ricky Silberman held a counter-conference at the Federalist Society.
Speaking to that audience, Silberman accused Hill of being a liar, labeled the assembled group of academics at Georgetown "the extreminists," and proclaimed that Hill's "unsubstantiated charge of sexual harassment launched the mother of all gender wars."
Later that year, in 1992, Silberman formally founded IWF with Barbara Bracher (Olson), Anita Blair and Lynn Cheney to fight that so-called "gender war."
However neither Silberman nor IWF would let the Anita Hill testimony rest.
In 1993, David Brock published the book "The Real Anita Hill," an alleged investigation into the "true motives" of Hill's testimony.
Silberman helped Brock edit, assemble, and advertise the book, which by all accounts was an orchestrated hit piece.
Brock, who had repeatedly referred to Hill in the media as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty," would later apologize for his actions, and label himself as a "witting cog in the Republican sleaze machine." (Brock has disavowed his past as a political hit man for the right-wing and now leads groups challenging the right-wing and is also now aligned with Hillary Clinton.)
Silberman, who passed away in 2007, never apologized. The IWF tribute to her included a tribute from her memorial by Clarence Thomas.
Beyond Attacking Anita Hill, IWF Routinely Peddles Reactionary Claims
As documented by Barbara Spindel in Slate, five years after Hill's testimony, IWF ran a cover-story in its 1996 "Women's Quarterly" magazine where Elizabeth Larson, an IWF staffer, speculated that women were "spurred on by Anita Hill's example" and now found "it more profitable to litigate than to work."
In that article, Larson also suggested that women should simply "deal with" sexual harassment, a position the organization would advocate for in the 1990s time and again.
As detailed by researcher Lee Cokorinos in his book, "The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice," IWF received substantial financial underwriting by right-wing funders like the Scaife Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation to focus many of its efforts on Silberman's "gender war."
In the words of Anita Blair, who served as an IWF leader from 1992 until 2000, "it was in 1977 or 1978 that feminism should have declared victory and gone home… All that was needing to be done had been done."
In keeping with this fictitious worldview, IWF opposed a host of women equality initiatives throughout the 1990s using misleading data and taking some extreme positions:
• when lobbying against Senator Biden's "Violence Against Women Act," IWF claimed "wives instigate violence, including severe violence, against husbands more often than husbands do against wives."
• IWF argued that gender integration of the Virginia Military Institute would cripple national defense,
• IWF asserted that the problem of sexual assault on college campuses was overblown, since it is "inherently incredible" that female college students "are unable to report assaults to authorities,"
• and much more, including assailing key Title IX protections for female athletes.
Like every GOP-aligned group in the 1990s, IWF also supported efforts to impeach President Clinton, reaching out to Kenneth Starr for legal assistance as early as 1994. Barbara Olson and other IWF-ers helped carry the torch against Bill and Hillary Clinton.
IWF also provided Republicans in Congress with women's voices to testify against affirmative action, social safety net programs, and gun violence mitigation measures.
As a whole, IWF was focused on combatting a caricature of what it described as "radical feminism."
Over the past 25 years since the Clarence Thomas hearings, IWF has given a female face and voice to opposing almost every mainstream and common sense protection for equality that's been advanced—opposing equal pay, paid sick leave, increasing the minimum wage, and protecting women's reproductive privacy and freedom, and much more—many of which Thomas has also sought to weaken or strike down from the Supreme Court.
Over the years, IWF has not lost its interest in attacking Hill, even though its latest spin is about its supposedly "family-friendly" policies that put Wall Street in the driver's seat and would take away responsibilities from employers regarding maternity leave, despite overwhelming business support for expanding employer-paid maternity and family leave, as the Center for Media and Democracy recently documented in a story broken by Lydia DiPillis in the Washington Post.
IWF's kind of outlier, free-market fundamentalist approach should come as no surprise since IWF and David Koch's Americans for Prosperity have been close partners--even sharing space and leadership for a number of years--and because the Koch network of billionaires uses an array of vehicles to push an anti-government, anti-science, anti-worker agenda.
But the claim that IWF is merely a "right-leaning think tank," given its legacy and extreme positions, ignores the history of a group that began with efforts to discredit Anita Hill and that continues to traffic in denial and disdain, despite the evidence that has mounted against so many of its claims.
---
Lisa Graves is CMD's Executive Director, and she is the former Chief Counsel for Nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for Senator Patrick Leahy. Calvin Sloan is a CMD researcher and multi-media specialist who previously worked for People for the American Way.
===
Nancy Pfotenhauer, Koch, and Lobbying 2008?)
Nancy Pfotenhauer (formerly Nancy Mitchell) was an advisor to Senator John McCain during his presidential election campaign, and a former director of Koch Industries’ Washington office. Pfotenhauer was Koch Industries’ chief in-house lobbyist from 1996 to 2001. Her lobbying efforts were focused on gas pipelines. In 2001, Nancy Pfotenhauer left Koch Industries to become the president of the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative research group that receivesfunding from Koch Industries.
In 2003, the Independent Women’s Forum became affiliated with the Citizens for a Sound Economy (now Americans for Prosperity). Pfotenhauer served as president and CEO of Americans for Prosperity and executive vice president of policy for Citizens For a Sound Economy. Citizens for a Sound Economy was co-founded by David H. Kochand has received$12,906,712 in grants from the Koch Family Foundations. Americans for Prosperity has received $1,000,000 in funding.
==
other than koch, no obvious reason to be climate deniers?
===
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Independent_Women%27s_Forum
The Independent Women's Forum (IWF; not to be confused with the International Women's Forum) is an anti-feminist organization predominately funded by conservative U.S. foundations, including the Koch brothers' Claude R. Lambe Foundation.[1] On its website, it describes its mission as being "to rebuild civil society by advancing economic liberty, personal responsibility, and political freedom. IWF builds support for a greater respect for limited government, equality under the law, property rights, free markets, strong families, and a powerful and effective national defense and foreign policy."[2]
An article by Sally Patel in IWF's "scholarly" magazine, The Women's Quarterly, stated that "the battered women's movement has outlived its useful beginnings."[3]
In October 2003, the IWF announced an affiliation with Citizens for a Sound Economy, now the Americans For Prosperity Foundation, with which they were to share premises and staff. "The Affiliation agreement provides for staff and resource sharing between Americans for Prosperity and the Independent Women's Forum. Nancy Pfotenhauer, president of the Independent Women's Forum, will also be president of Americans for Prosperity," the announcement stated. Despite sharing staff and location, the announced stated that each group "will be a separate organization with its own board of directors."[4]
As of 2008, IWF was no longer affiliated with AFP and was seeking its own office space.[5]
Contents [hide] |
History
Founded by Rosalie Gaull (Ricky) Silberman in 1992, the IWF grew out of the ad hoc group, Women for Judge Thomas.
While claiming to challenge "radical feminists," IWF primarily targets mainstream feminists and feminist organizations, as exemplified by such figures as :{Hillary }:Rodham Clinton and such groups as the American Association of University Women.
IWF is a secular counterpart to Religious Right women's groups like Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for America, but these groups often work together. People for the American Way describe IWF as a group that "opposes affirmative action, gender equity programs like Title IX, and the Violence Against Women Act."[6]
IWF members include academic women who are paid to write papers that denigrate the idea of equity for girls and women in education. One of these papers,[1] by Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, has questioned an MIT study[7] on discrimination against women in MIT's science department, calling their findings "junk science."
IWF's constantly-updated web site shows an ever expanding sphere of concerns, all viewed from right-wing perspectives.
In October 2004 the Feminist Majority Foundation has objected to the U.S. Department of State's decision to award part of a $10 million grant to IWF for "leadership training, democracy education and coalition building assistance" to women in Iraq. The funding was from the Iraqi Women's Democracy Initiative.[8]. IWF will be working in Iraq with the American Islamic Conference and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a think tank with neoconservative ties.
IWF's head Michelle Bernard has now re-emerged at the head of the Bernard Center for Women, Politics and Public Policy. The Bernard Center's website lists no donors, no history and no contact information other than a PO box in Potomac, Maryland. Analysts from the Bernard Center have written about 'misguided' food and nutrition policy, and the need for more charter schools.
Efforts to Eradicate Teaching of Global Warming from Schools Nationwide
In May, 2010 IWF started supporting a group called :{Balanced Education for Everyone}: whose goal is to stop the teaching of :{global warming}: in U.S. schools. The group calls global warming ":{junk science}:," and claims teaching it scares children unnecessarily. The group started its national effort at a meeting of the Mesa County, Colorado District 51 School Board, where itpresented the board with a petition containing 600-700 signatures of people who want global warming instruction stopped. [9][10]
Funding
Media Transparency lists IWF as having received $7,651,000 in foundation grants between 1994 and 2006.Funders include:[11]
- Roe Foundation
- Castle Rock Foundation
- Sarah Scaife Foundation
- Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
- William H. Donner Foundation
- Jaquelin Hume Foundation
- Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
- Earhart Foundation
- Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation
- Gilder Foundation
- JM Foundation
- Randolph Foundation
- William E. Simon Foundation
- Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation
- John M. Olin Foundation
- Brady Education Foundation
At the time of its resource sharing announcement withAmericans for Prosperity in October 2003, IWF stated that "we had come through a difficult transition a few years ago and were really hitting our stride after getting a major, million-dollar grant."[4]
According to the group's 2006 Annual return[12] filed with the Internal Revenue Service, the total revenue
- 2002: Revenue $2,582,437
- 2003: Revenue $205,143
- 2004: Revenue $1,045,983
- 2005: Revenue $$948,953
- 2006: Revenue $1,816,131; Expenses $1,964,833 Loss $105,067
Personnel
Staff
- Michelle D. Bernard - President
- Regina Truslow, Executive Assistant to the President
- Erin Grant, Manager of Donor Relations Policy
- Sandy Liddy Bourne, Visiting Fellow
- Jennifer C. Braceras, Visiting Fellow
- Charlotte Hays, Senior Fellow
- Krista Kafer, Visiting Fellow
- Halima :{Karzai:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, Associate Director for Foreign Policy and International Women's Issues
- Allison Kasic, Director of The R. Gaull Silberman Center for Collegiate Studies
- April Lassiter, Visiting Fellow
- Carrie L. Lukas, Vice President for Policy and Economics
- Vicki Murray, Visiting Fellow
- Nina Owcharenko, Visiting Fellow
- Christie Raniszewski Herrera,
- Solveig Singleton, Visiting Fellow
- Princella Smith,
- Anne Trenolone,
- Kate Pomeroy, Vice President of Communications
- Stacy Chin, Director of Programs and On-line Communications
- Carol Eberly, Manager of Media and Online Communications
Board of Directors
- Heather R. Higgins - Chairman
- Mary Arnold
- Carol T. Crawford
- Jennifer Ashworth Dinh
- Randy Parris Kendrick
- Larry Kudlow
- Joanne T. Medero
Directors Emeritae:
- Lynne V. Cheney
- Midge Decter
- Kimberly O. Dennis
- Wendy Lee Gramm
- Elizabeth Lurie
- Kate O’Beirne
- Louise V. Oliver
- Nancy_Pfotenhauer
- R. Gaull Silberman
Contact details
Independent Women's Forum
1726 M Street, NW
Tenth Floor
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: (202) 419-1820
Email: info At iwf.org
Website: http://www.iwf.org/
References
- ↑ Center for Media and Democracy, Koch Family Foundations, SourceWatch.org profile, accessed February 2013.
- ↑ "Our Mission", Independent Women's Forum, accessed February 2008.
- ↑ Sally Patel, "It's Always His Fault: Femininist Ideology Dominates Perpetrator Programs", The Women's Quarterly, Independent Women's Forum, Summer 1997 - Number 12.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Independent Women's Forum, "IWF Announces Exciting New Partnership", Media Release, October 28, 2003. (This is a copy archived in the Internet Archive, accessed March 2008.
- ↑ Americans for Prosperity - research and background information, DeSmog Blog, accessed February 2013.
- ↑ People for the American Way, "Fighting the Right: The Right-Wing Affiliations of Bush Administration Officials: Appendix - Right Wing Groups", undated, accessed March 2008.
- ↑ "A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT", Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999.
- ↑ Independent Women's Forum, "IWF Awarded Grant to Support Iraqi Women", Media Release, September 28, 2004.(This page is archived in the Internet Archive).
- ↑ Nancy Lofholm Push to teach "other side" of global warming heats up in Colorado's Mesa County Denver Post, May 26, 2010
- ↑ Emily Anderson Petitions target ‘political’ leanings of teachers Grand Junction, Colorado Daily Sentinel, May 26, 2010
- ↑ "Independent Women's Forum", MediaTransparency, accessed March 2008.
- ↑ Independent Women's Forum, "2006 Annual Return", page 1 and Scheule a Page 4.
Related SourceWatch Articles
- Anne Morse
- Candace de Russy - Member of advisory board
External Articles
- Elinor Burkett, The Right Women: A Journey Through the Heart of Conservative America, Scribner, ; ASIN: 0684833085, March 1998. (This book looks at the IWF, as well as other conservative women's groups).
- IWF heads down the toilet, Alas a Blog, November 28, 2003.
- Feminist Majority Foundation Online, "State Department Funds Anti-Women's Rights Group To Train Iraqi Women", Feminist Daily News Wire, October 5, 2004.
- Independent Womens Forum, "IWF Awarded Grant to Support Iraqi Women", September 28, 2004.
- Ronnee Schreiber, Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics, Oxford University Press, June 2008. ISBN 0195331818 ISBN 978-0195331813
===
grew out of c thomas defence org
funded by e lurie
Independent Women's Forum
ORGANIZATION
Nonprofit conservative thinktank, founded in 1992 by Ricky Silberman and Barbara Olson.
Board of Directors as of October 2006: Chairman Heather R. Higgins, Mary Arnold, Carol T. Crawford, Randy Parris Kendrick, Lawrence Kudlow, Nancy Mitchell Pfotenhauer, Ricky Silberman.
Directors Emeritae: Lynne Cheney, Midge Decter, Kimberly O. Dennis, Wendy Gramm, Elizabeth Lurie, Kate O'Beirne, Louise V. Oliver.
Official Website:
http://www.iwf.org/
| Charlotte Allen | Journalist | ? | Conservative writer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Michelle Bernard | Activist | c. 1964 | Conservative commentator | |
| Elaine Chao | Government | 26-Mar-1953 | US Secretary of Labor, 2001-09 | |
| Linda Chavez | Activist | 17-Jun-1947 | Neoconservative activist, pundit | |
| Lynne Cheney | First Lady | 14-Aug-1941 | Wife of US Vice President Dick Cheney | |
| Barbara Comstock | Government | c. 1959 | Republican opposition research expert | |
| Carol T. Crawford | Business | 25-Feb-1943 | US Intl. Trade Commission, 1991-2000 | |
| Midge Decter | Journalist | 25-Jul-1927 | Neoconservative maven | |
| Kimberly O. Dennis | Activist | ? | Searle Freedom Trust | |
| Wendy Gramm | Business | 9-Jan-1945 | Phil Gramm's wife, ex-Enron board member | |
| Heather R. Higgins | Activist | 1959 | Chairman, Independent Women's Forum | |
| Amy Holmes | Columnist | 1973 | BET host, conservative commentator | |
| Laura Ingraham | Pundit | 19-Jun-1964 | The Hillary Trap | |
| Joan W. Konner | Journalist | c. 1929 | Dean, Columbia School of Journalism, 1988-97 | |
| Lawrence Kudlow | Economist | 20-Aug-1947 | Kudlow & Cramer | |
| Leslie Lenkowsky | Government | 30-Mar-1946 | Philanthropic Studies | |
| Carol Platt Liebau | Pundit | 13-Feb-1967 | Prude | |
| Carrie Lukas | Activist | ? | Independent Women's Forum | |
| Karen J. Mathis | Attorney | c. 1950 | President of the ABA, 2006-07 | |
| Kate O'Beirne | Columnist | c. 1949 | Conservative pundit | |
| Barbara Olson | TV Personality | 27-Dec-1955 | 11-Sep-2001 | Conservative TV pundit |
| Ted Olson | Government | 11-Sep-1940 | US Solicitor General, 2001-04 | |
| Nancy Mitchell Pfotenhauer | Activist | ? | Independent Women's Forum | |
| Sally C. Pipes | Activist | ? | Pacific Research Institute | |
| Richard Scaife | Activist | 3-Jul-1932 | The Republican George Soros | |
| Lisa Schiffren | Activist | c. 1960 | Former Quayle speechwriter | |
| Ricky Silberman | Activist | 1937 | 18-Feb-2007 | Cofounder, Independent Women's Forum |
| Christina Hoff Sommers | Author | 1950 | Who Stole Feminism? | |
| Abigail Thernstrom | Author | 1936 | Opponent of Affirmative Action | |
| Victoria Toensing | Pundit | 16-Oct-1941 | Washington lawyer |