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Tony Perkins Asks God To Dispatch The Holy Spirit To Help Reelect Sen. Roger Marshall

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05/20/2026

by

Peter Montgomery

At a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol Wednesday morning, Rep. Clay Fuller (R-GA) may have unwittingly revealed a basic truth about recent right-wing attacks on the Southern Poverty Law Center: they are part of a broader authoritarian assault by the Trump regime on civil rights groups and the progressive community, or in Rep. Fuller’s words, “this nonprofit-industrial complex that is seeking to destroy our country each and every day.”

The press conference was a prelude to the House Judiciary Committee hearing in which Republicans accused the SPLC of “manufacturing hate.” Speaking to a handful of right-wing media outlets were representatives of right-wing organizations complaining about having been designated as hate groups or included in extremism reporting by the Southern Poverty Law Center, including the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA, and Awake Illinois. Joining them was right-wing journalist Tyler O’Neil, author of an anti-SPLC book.

Before the event started, a correspondent for the Real America’s Voice network could be heard falsely telling listeners that SPLC had “staged” the 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a claim commonly heard in right-wing propaganda promoting and going well beyond the claims in the Justice Department’s bogus indictment of the SPLC for using paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups.

Speaking for the Family Research Council was its executive vice president Jerry Boykin, who falsely claimed that SPLC’s hate map is based on “no criteria” except what might help make money for the group. In reality, whether or not you agree with any particular designation SPLC makes, you can find their reasoning on the website—for example, its report on FRC’s demonization of LGBTQ people and more.

While most of the speakers complained that there were dire consequences for being placed on SPLC’s hate map, the representative of TPUSA’s George Washington University chapter was a bit off-message, dismissing it as a “silly little map” and vowing that his group would not be intimidated by the “lunatic left.”

At the hearing itself—the second one focused on the SPLC—Republican members of the Judiciary Committee trotted out expected claims about SPLC’s paid informants being used to “manufacture hate” and to allege that the SPLC smears Christians and “good pro-family organizations,” in Rep. Jim Jordan’s words. Reflecting that level of discourse was Rep. Glenn Grothman, who sighed, “They just hate Christianity, don’t they?” Rep. Michael Baumgartner said he had favorable memories of the SPLC playing a role in helping people in eastern Washington respond to an Aryan Nations compound, but he charged that the group has now become “an almost militant weaponized arm of a progressive Marxist political project.”

Right-wing witnesses also made clear that their goal is broader than taking down a single organization. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins argued that investigations should not stop with the SPLC, which he called a “hub,” but should expand to other organizations and companies that made decisions about groups based on their SPLC designations—the “spokes.” Tyler O’Neil, a reporter at The Daily Signal, which started as the Heritage Foundation’s news and commentary platform, called for a broader investigation of SPLC “and its offshoots,” naming specifically the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which was started by a former SPLC staffer.

Judiciary Committee Democrats, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin, portrayed the DOJ prosecution as outrageous political persecution, in the memorable words of Rep. Lucy McBath, “charges so flimsy they would make Bull Connor and George Wallace blush.”

While Republicans suggested that the SPLC was somehow responsible for the violence in Charlottesville, several Democrats noted that before the Unite the Right rally, the SPLC gave the FBI a 45-page dossier warning that violence could erupt, and that SPLC had also shared information from informants that led to the conviction of members of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division.

Committee Democrats also effectively used some of their time to focus on the scandalous corruption revealed this week: the DOJ’s creation of a nearly two billion dollar slush fund for the president to dole out to insurrectionists and other allies; and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s apparently related agreement in connection to Trump’s bogus lawsuit against the IRS to drop any current audits or investigations and grant a permanent blanket of immunity for any wrongdoing by Trump, his family, or their massive business networks at any time in the past. Rep. Raskin moved for the committee to subpoena administration officials involved in the creation of the slush fund, but Republicans voted to table his motion.

More than one Democratic member of Congress referred to Monday’s shooting at a San Diego mosque, in which teenagers who bonded online over white supremacist hatred killed three people before killing themselves, as evidence that far-right violent extremism deserves more attention from the committee.

Maya Wiley, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, was the witness called by Democrats. She delivered a powerful opening statement calling the campaign against the SPLC part of “a coordinated attack on civil rights non-profits that work to ensure voters can vote, children can learn history, and unions can protect workers,” and she deftly responded to GOP members’ often ridiculous questions. Here’s more from her opening statement:

But this case and today’s hearing aren’t about how to protect people from violent hate and extremist groups or better understand how we can prevent hate and bias. They are about using the powers of prosecution as a weapon, with the sole aim of stopping speech and activities that this administration dislikes and denying the real threats that we should all be concerned about.

In the past year, we have seen countless examples of this weaponization. This administration is coercing law firms, universities, and media companies. It is threatening to brand advocates as “domestic terrorists.” It is cutting off billions in federal grants to non-profits that do important work to track and prevent hate and bias. It is letting law enforcement off the hook for systemic misconduct that violates rights of people who need protection. It is letting violence and even extrajudicial killings by federal agents go unpunished. In all of this and more, the President has not even tried to hide his motives. And for the past year, he has also been open about his willingness to weaponize criminal law. So cases like this were inevitable. And our concern is that no organization seen as dissenting from administration policy, large or small, will ultimately be safe. …

Each year, the SPLC issues a report on hate and extremism in our country. This report is so important because it tracks organizations promoting the ideologies that brought us the Charlottesville riot that left Heather Heyer dead, and the massacres at the Tree of Life synagogue, the Emanuel AME church, and the El Paso Walmart. It is sadly part of the reason SPLC is being targeted. It is uncomfortable for an administration that has backed away from and cut grants for tracking white nationalism, which the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration defined as our greatest domestic threat.

The SPLC is far too busy fighting hate to “manufacture” it. You don’t have to like or agree with all of its strategies for doing so. But the fact that SPLC is now being criminally charged for its work only shows how much more work it has to do.

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Tyler O'Neil of The Daily Signal reports that he has been speaking with member of Congress about launching investigations into the Southern Poverty Law Center, which MAGA has been targeting in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk.

TONY PERKINS SPLC WORKING WITH ANTIFA

Tyler O’Neil, Managing Editor of The Daily Signal, covers the breaking news about the FBI’s decision to cut all ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Our friends over at the Daily Signal

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reported some very, very welcome news to

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get our Friday off and running.

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According to their exclusive reporting,

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the FBI confirmed that it has severed

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all ties with the Southern Poverty Law

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Center. Now, you may recall that just

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before the assassination of Charlie

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Kirk, the SPLC actually had placed his

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organization Turning Point USA on their

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so-called hate map, which by the way,

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FRC is also on their list as well. But

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now, the FBI is severing relationships

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with the SPLC. And what does all that

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mean in practice? Well, here now to

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discuss more is Tyler O'Neal. He is

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actually the one who broke this story.

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He's a senior editor at the Daily Signal

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and author of Making Hate Pay, the

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corruption of the Southern Poverty Law

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Center. Tyler, welcome back to

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Washington Watch. We appreciate you

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joining us.

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Thanks again for having me, Jody.

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All right, this is this has been a long

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time coming. Uh so for those who may not

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be aware, share with us the impact that

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the SPLC has had on the FBI and others

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for that matter. Yeah. So I think many

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of your viewers will probably remember

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when the FBI's Richmond office released

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that memo targeting radical traditional

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Catholics and telling agents to develop

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sources inside houses of worship. uh

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particularly targeting those specific

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Catholics, more traditional Catholics.

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They were citing the Southern Poverty

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Law Center in that memo. And this is

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just one of many instances where the

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Biden Justice Department had been

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working closely with the Southern

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Poverty Law Center. Uh just today, uh

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actually, America First Legal MILLER is out

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with even more evidence, more documents

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showing this relationship. One of the

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things that really stood out to me most

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was that RG Craravens, who is a staffer

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at the SPLC, who recently was the guy

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they picked to defend their decision to

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add Focus on the Family to the hate map

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earlier this year. RG Cravens was

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himself advising the Department of

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Justice and prosecutors at one of these

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Department of Justice gatherings under

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the Biden administration. So the SPLC

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has had tremendous impact in the Biden

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administration and now we are finally

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seeing I mean thank god Cash Patel is

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coming out there and saying this. By the

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way the statement is not just that they

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cut off ties with the SPLC now but that

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they have not been using SPLC data or

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engaging with the SPLC since the

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beginning of the administration.

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So this is this is a great step forward.

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This reminds me of when Attorney

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General, then Attorney General Jeff

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Sessions, told a group of us who had

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gathered for a free religious freedom

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summit with ADF back in 2018 that the

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DOJ would never work with the SPLC

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again. Unfortunately, that promise was

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broken by the succeeding administration.

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But hopefully we can see a DOJ and an

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FBI that will completely distance

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themselves and remain distanced from

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such a horrific organization.

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Absolutely. Tyler, do you think that the

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assassination of Charlie Kirk was uh the

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the straw that broke the camel's back,

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so to speak, in regard to finally

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removing the SPLC influence from the

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FBI?

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Yes. I think that the fact that and I

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mean, you know, talking with you about

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this, the Family Research Council was

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first targeted after the SPLC put it on

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the hate map and then you had the

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horrific terrorist attack against you.

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Then of course there was the act of

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violence at the congressional baseball

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game where the shooter had liked the

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SPLC on Facebook and now the SPLC puts

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Turning Point USA on the hate map and

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then a couple months later Charlie Kirk

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is assassinated. I mean, this this

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really raises important questions and I

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think the Southern Poverty Law Center

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needs to stop defaming conservatives and

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Christians and this moment have of has

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been an awakening of how dangerous the

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SPLC is and the FBI is now officially se

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separated ties from them. By the way,

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this is also when the FBI is cutting

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ties with the Anti-Defamation League,

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which I I don't know if you'll remember

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this, but back in 2024,

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u they had they were doing a report on

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terrorism in the past year, and they

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said that the transgender shooter who

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targeted the Nashville uh that Nashville

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church was not the Nashville school,

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sorry, the Christian school in

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Nashville, uh was not an instance of

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left-wing terrorism. and they really

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bent over backwards to rewrite history.

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Meanwhile, the ADL was also saying that

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critics of gender ideology are a threat

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to other Americans and they were going

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and going to the FBI and other law

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enforcement saying you need to monitor

5:28

these critics of gender ideology.

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Wow. Really is great great news. We've

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got less than a minute. Uh what happens

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next? What do you think needs to happen

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next?

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Well, I've already been speaking with

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senators and with congressmen who are

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reiterating uh concern that Senator Tom

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Cotton had back in 2019. Tom Cotton

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wrote a letter to the IRS asking them to

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revisit the SPLC's tax status. We also

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have more evidence of the SPLC uh

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working kind of hand in handinand glove

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with Antifa. uh not just keeping Antifa

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off their hate map, but also hiring a

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woman who was described as Antifa's

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secret weapon. And then of course, an

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SPLC attorney was arrested at an Antifa

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riot in 2023 and charged with domestic

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terrorism. So, we might be hearing an

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investigation into the SPLC. And I'm I'm

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hoping that we can have some real

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accountability and some real answers to

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what else they're doing.

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We are all hoping that and I think your

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idea of an investigation is in big

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order. Tyler O'Neal, senior editor,

6:41

Daily Signal.

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10/01/2025

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Kyle Mantyla

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09/12/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins published a commentary Friday describing Charlie Kirk’s assassination and other violence in American life as evidence that “America is reaping what it has sown.” Perkins seemingly placed blame on the separation of church and state, though he did not use those exact words:

This is an incredibly charged moment for our country, but that should not distract from the fact that America is reaping what it has sown. Since the 1960s, a “long march through the institutions” sought to drive God, His word, and His authority from public life. The aim was to relegate faith to the private corners of society, never to influence the classroom, courtroom, or public square. Charlie Kirk and the movement he sparked stood up to the Left’s assault on college campuses, working tirelessly to challenge the godless influence on this generation.

Perkins argued that “returning civility to our nation” requires “confronting the spiritual decay at the heart of our crisis.” To Perkins’ credit, he urged people not to resort to violence in response to Kirk’s murder. “If our nation is to heal, we cannot let our righteous indignation at this unspeakable tragedy rule. We must not answer anger with anger or bloodshed with more bloodshed.”

Perkins cited Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a figure who showed Americans a better way by preaching and living out his belief in the redemptive power of love.

Perkins’ choice to quote King may reflect the wide respect that is shown the slain civil rights leader from across the political spectrum. Notably, Charlie Kirk did not share that respect, at least since December 2023 when his rhetoric shifted from calling MLK a “hero” and icon” to describing King as “awful” and “not a good person.”

Kirk’s public attack on King was part of a strategy to undermine support for the historic civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s, which Kirk labeled “a huge mistake.” Kirk told the audience at Turning Point USA’s 2023 America Fest that King “said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”

Kirk followed his speech with social media attacks calling King “a false ‘god’ of race-obsessed modernity’ and dedicated a chunk of his "Charlie Kirk Show" program on the Jan. 15, 2024 King holiday to a denunciation of the “revolutionary” MLK.

Scholar Jonathan Rauch told WIRED that Kirk and TPUSA’s attack on King and the Civil Rights Act was an example of how “the fringe moves to the center at the speed of light” in right-wing politics.

“These guys are very good at moving the Overton window,” Rauch said. “That's what they do. They push and push and get things into the dialog that, until the day before yesterday, were unthinkable.”

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Media Matters

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Kyle Mantyla

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Kyle Mantyla

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Tony Perkins Calls GOP Platform Process ‘Despicable,’ Slams Chair Marsha Blackburn’s ‘Unbelievable’ and ‘Shocking’ Behavior

July 12, 2024 RWW

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Tony Perkins Calls GOP Platform Process ‘Despicable,’ Slams Chair Marsha Blackburn’s ‘Unbelievable’ and ‘Shocking’ Behavior

July 12, 2024 RWW

Right Wing Watch reported this week that members of the Republican Platform Committee were subjected to heavy-handed authoritarian tactics by the Trump RNC, which refused to allow any questioning of the candidate’s wishes. Rather than drafting and debating the platform in public, Trump’s team closed the doors, shut down debate, took away delegates’ phones, and intimidated them into rubber stamping the language wanted by the Trump campaign. Not surprisingly, that hasn’t gone over too well with some platform committee members.

On Thursday, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins used his Washington Watch show to slam the “despicable” and “disgusting” process and criticize the “heavy-handed” platform committee chairperson, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who apparently acted as the Trump team’s enforcer. She was “unbelievable,” said Perkins:

I mean, it was shocking. They allowed for no amendments or discussion before forcing a scripted vote. Now, this process done in secrecy behind closed doors, quite frankly, is unbecoming of a party that champions free speech and due process.

Ironically, the document itself calls for vigorous defense of free speech and the end of government censorship. Well, deprived of the opportunity to actually discuss this so called draft document and strengthen the weak platform that lacked the party’s historical stand for the unborn, there was a group of us delegates that have submitted a minority report to supplement the platform…

The delegates had a gag, basically a gag rule put on them, their phones taken. Media was not allowed in. So most people don’t know what happened in the room. But fortunately, I have a microphone, and I can tell you. It was despicable. It was disgusting. It was not befitting of a party that claims to be a defender of law and order, due process, and the freedom of speech—and certainly not a party that claims to protect the unborn.

A July 11 action alert from FRC criticized the “highly choreographed” and “unprecedented, tightly scripted process that allowed for no amendments or substantive debate before the vote.”

Perkins and his FRC colleagues aren’t the only ones angry about the process. “They rolled us,” outraged platform committee member Gail Ruzicka told Milwaukee’s WISN12News.

The language rammed through the platform committee is purposefully vague on issues like abortion and marriage. That way, the Trump campaign can send two different messages. Religious-right leaders loyal to the campaign can put the strongest anti-abortion spin on the language, while the campaign encourages headlines about a new “moderate” position to appeal to the majority of voters who don’t share the religious right’s anti-choice and anti-equality obsessions.

Still, the abandonment of more explicit language calling for constitutional bans on abortion and laws defining marriage as one man and one woman is rankling some religious-right leaders.

Perkins called the platform “woefully inadequate in communicating a definitive position on the protection of human life.” He complained that the last GOP platform recognized God 15 times, while the Trump version has just two “passing references” to God. And he noted that the platform contains no reference at all to the Second Amendment—“none, zero.”

Religious right activist Michael Brown complained this week that the platform language was so “watered down” that the GOP can no longer be viewed as “the party of life.” Brown warned that “allowing the platform to be weakened in the name of electoral pragmatism might signal a whole new wave of GOP candidates who are less committed to the pro-life cause but who are allegedly better than the Democrats.” He added, “It might also embolden current GOP congressmen to soften their own stances in the name of electability, thereby continuing to erode the GOP’s stance for life. In the end, there might be little to distinguish the two parties when it comes to abortion.” Brown continued:

My counsel would be that we do not take this new platform lying down, but do our best to work for a change until the last minute possible. If, in the end, we cannot bring change about, then we still work with the GOP for the moment while making it clear behind the scenes that the next GOP candidate will have to embrace our pro-life position — otherwise, they will not make it through the primaries.

Among other religious-right figures unhappy about the platform include former VP Mike Pence, Jason Rapert of the Christian nationalist National Association of Christian Lawmakers, and former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, who went dramatically for a maximalist position, posting, “You cannot be a faithful Christian and a faithful Republican after today.” Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission called it “political malpractice.” Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the platform changes an example of “cowardice.”

Anderson and his mentor Robert George—who has urged the Supreme Court to require all states to treat abortion as homicide—were among a group of anti-abortion activists who released a letter to GOP delegates Friday urging them to “vote down any platform that weakens the party’s pro-life stance.”

At the right-wing Christian outlet The Stream, John Zmirak slammed MAGA politicians and anti-abortion activists who have gone along with Trump:

It’s sickening to see previously pro-life politicians like Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance sell their souls for pennies on the dollar, then watch pro-life groups pretend the miserable half of a moldy loaf tossed to them by the Trump campaign is a wedding cake. It’s both morally repulsive and deeply humiliating.

As Right Wing Watch noted earlier this week, Trump’s team clearly calculated that religious-right activists have nowhere else to go. At The Stream, Zmirak demonstrated the thinking that Trump’s team is counting on. “We must yell our heads off now, try to bluff Trump and his lowbrow cronies into thinking we might sit the election out,” Zmirak wrote, but in the end religious-right voters would have to “quietly go ahead and vote in our own self-defense.”

Other religious-right activists who have worked hard to cement the relationship between conservative evangelicals and the Republican Party warn that even if very few of their constituents would ever vote for a Democratic candidate or sit the election out, many who feel betrayed may feel less motivated to make phone calls and knock on doors to turn out voters.

And maybe some of them, perhaps those who learn how Trump’s team treated his close allies on the platform committee, may be more open to warnings about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies, the authoritarian agenda of Project 2025, and the consequences of giving Trump power after the right-wing Supreme Court ruled that he is virtually immune from accountability for any crimes he commits as president.

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Highlights From The National Gathering For Prayer And Repentance

Kyle Mantyla | February 2, 2024 RWW

Dozens of members of Congress joined with multitudes of religious-right activists for a “National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance” at the Museum of the Bible on Wednesday. Hosted by Jim Garlow of Well Versed ministry and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the hours-long event featured wave after wave of politicians and activists taking the stage to deliver various prayers, many anodyne but some more targeted and political.

The event’s main feature was the prayers delivered by the myriad members of Congress who took to the stage in small groups and delivered their short prayers in turn. Among the participants was Rep. Greg Steube of Florida, who proclaimed that everyone in the nation must repent of immorality and their rejection of God. He was followed by Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, who delivered a prayer entirely dedicated to railing against abortion, and Rep. Randy Weber of Texas who wept as he begged God’s forgiveness because this nation has “trampled on holy marriage and called it an alternative lifestyle.”

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Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida used her time on stage to proclaim that “each person, regardless of their race, nationality, language will serve you and praise you as Lord, and we will preserve this country the way you formed it and the way you envisioned it.”

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The congressional segment of the event was closed out by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who joined all the participants on stage to deliver a prayer, after which they were collectively prayed over by Perkins.

The next few hours featured an array of religious-right activists, many of them connected to the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation, delivering prayers, generally targeting their respective pet issues. For example, Jon Hamill of Lamplighter Ministries who warned that this nation has been “making deals with our enemies through idolatry, witchcraft, false religions, and secret orders, secret societies” and prayed that God will “annul all covenants with Baal, Moloch, Ashtoreth which have bound us.”

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Prophetic intercessor Lou Engle later took to the stage to pray fervently for “a hundred thousand LGBT to be saved and transformed.”

“Loose a new revolution that the LGBT will be saved,” Engle thundered.

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Among the other congressional participants were Reps. Josh Brecheen, Mark Alford, Michael Cloud, Diana Harshbarger, Kevin Hern, Gary Palmer, Rick Allen, Brandon Williams, Bob Good, Tracey Mann, Glenn Grothman, Warren Davidson, Mary Miller, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and Sens. Katie Britt and James Lankford.

Religious-right activists who participated included Jonathan Cahn, Che Ahn, Paul Blair, Gary Hamrick, Lucas Miles, Janet Porter, Mario Bramnick, Dave Kubal, and Dutch Sheets.

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Embattled Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel is launching two advisory groups in an effort to expand the party’s appeal to voters and examine what went wrong in the wake of stunning, historic midterm election losses – and she’s turning to some of the right’s most extreme leaders to perform the investigations.

Political analysts on both sides of the aisle generally agree that Donald Trump, Trumpism, the party’s lurch to far right wing extremism including white nationalism, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, antisemitism, authoritarianism, fascism, and the “Big Lie” of stolen elections hurt, not helped candidates in the 2022 midterms.

McDaniel has now tapped some of the very purveyors of that failed extremism to lead the shrinking party’s efforts to broaden its outreach and correct its errors.

“The RNC is tapping nearly a dozen people to serve in what it’s calling a ‘Republican Party Advisory Council’ – a group that includes former Donald Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, evangelical leader Tony Perkinsand a pair of Senate candidates who ran this year,” Politico reports.

Perkins is a far right wing religious extremist and anti-LGBTQ activist who decades ago reportedly had ties to white supremacist groups, which he has denied. For decades he has been president of the Family Research Council, which appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups.

Deeply embedded in Republican theocratic politics, Perkins was appointed twice by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent federal government body that has a history of advancing the agenda of America’s Evangelical Christian movement.

He is also a past president of the highly-secretive far Christian right organization, Council for National Policy (CNP).

CNP’s members are believed to include far right activist and lobbyist Ginni Thomas, whose attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results have been the subject of numerous reports. Also, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, which has faced allegations of racism, and far right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.

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Other members of the Council for National Policy include two other heads of organizations that appear on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups: Mat Staver, the founder of Liberty Counsel; and Tim Wildmon, President of the American Family Association.

“The panel will also include former Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, who in the wake of his loss has called on the party to move on from ‘consultant one-size-fits-all strategies,'” Politico reports.

Masters is a “Big Lie” purveyor who has also promoted the white nationalist conspiracy theory of the “Great Replacement,” which falsely claims immigrants – people of color – are “replacing” white Americans.

Separately, Politico adds, the RNC is commissioning an investigation into what went wrong, commonly referred to as an “autopsy” to ensure in future elections the same decisions are not made. That work will be lead by current RNC members.

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after right-wing predictions of a “red wave” or “red tsunami” were defeated by voters, some right-wing leaders are predictably calling for new restrictions on early voting and mail-in ballots, both of which have increased access to the ballot and expanded as safe ways for people to vote during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Among those calling for limiting early and mail-in voting is the Family Research Council’s Ken Blackwell, a notorious voter suppresser during his tenure as Ohio secretary of state, who in 2020 participated in former President Donald Trump’s scheme to get Vice President Mike Pence to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after Trump’s loss.

An article published Tuesday by FRC’s “news” outlet, The Washington Stand, said Blackwell called it “crazy” to depend on vote by mail and said he would end early voting if he could. In a conversation with FRC’s Tony Perkins two days after the election, Blackwell declared himself “a 21st Century Luddite” and said he wanted to ditch voting machines for paper ballots and restrict voting to Election Day itself.

Blackwell and Perkins agreed that voting by mail and longer election periods create greater ballot security challenges and more opportunities for human error. “The Democrats want that type of a process,” Perkins claimed. Blackwell agreed, saying, “What they figure is that if you have enough confusion, if you have tight margins, you get vote counts in what I call the area of litigation.” In reality, election experts and studies have shown that vote by mail is safe and reliable.

While making insinuations about Democratic motives, Perkins and Blackwell said that there were fewer reports of “shenanigans” this year, thanks in part, they said, to having additional observers at the polls.

Perkins said the two political parties have worldviews that are 180 degrees apart, claiming that “Our freedoms, our abilities to raise our families, to teach our children to love the Lord and to know him and to live that faith out in the broader society is at risk in every election.” Blackwell agreed, adding, “We know that the difference between our constitutional republic is that God is at the center, is central to it, and all of the totalitarian states that I have ever visited, they tried to run God and faith out of the public square, crush the family, and make people more dependent, not free citizens but subjects.”

Speaking about the midterm elections, Blackwell said that it may not have been a red tsunami, but there were major victories for right-wing candidates. “We cannot let the devil steal our joy,” he said. Perkins responded by quoting or paraphrasing Pastor Gary Hamrick: “Hey, we sawRoeoverturned, and we didn’t expect some kind of backlash from the devil?”

“I think the reason people are opposed to very practical procedures such as a photo ID is because they want to cheat the system,” Perkins said. “They want to be able to manipulate it.”

“They want confusion,” Blackwell added, “They don’t want clarity.”

To be fair, Perkins and Blackwell know something about cheating the system and creating confusion. Both energetically embraced and promoted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. In December 2020, they signed a letter falsely claiming, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.” The letter called on state legislatures in six battleground states won by Biden to appoint pro-Trump electors anyway. At the end of that month, both Perkins and Blackwell signed another letterurging Senate Republicans to contest electors from five states.

As mentioned earlier, Blackwell was also involved in the scheme to pressure Pence to overturn the election. On Dec. 28, 2020, Blackwell sent an email to several right-wing insiders urging that Pence and his staff get a briefing from “John and Ken”—that is,John Eastman and Ken Klukowski. Eastman, a lawyer who pushed illegal schemes to keep Trump in power, has had a long professional association with Klukowski, a former director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty who after Trump’s loss was parachuted into the Justice Department office of Jeffrey Clark, who was plotting to drag the DOJ into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

Two days before the Capitol insurrection, Blackwell tweeted a video message using the “Stop the Steal” hashtag and urging activists to demand that members of Congress address “election irregularities and illegalities” on Jan. 6. “This is not a time for sideline sitters or backbenchers,” he said. “You must do what you can with what you have where you are. Our republic demands it.”

Under Perkins’ leadership, FRC last year launched the Center for Biblical Worldview, which it said would help activists “see the spiritual warbehind the political war.” Pollster and Center for Biblical Worldview senior fellow George Barna told religious right activists at FRC’s “Pray Vote Stand” summit last yearthat it is their duty to try to indoctrinate other people’s children into a “biblical worldview.”

Tags: Ken Blackwell Kenneth Blackwell Tony Perkins Capitol Insurrection Donald Trump Election 2020 Election 2022 Stop the Steal voter suppression Voting Rights Family Research Council

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an 922

Far right wing extremist, Christian nationalist, antisemite Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, the social media platform that is popular with white supremacists, is telling the Republican Party that “80 percent” of its base is Christian nationalists, and warns them to not “condemn” or “disavow” them.

Torba has ties to far right Christian nationalist Doug Mastriano, the Republican party’s nominee for governor of Pennsylvania. Torba has also “endorsed” Arizona GOP secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem, a an election-denier and member of the far-right antigovernment group Oath Keepers, and election-denying Arizona GOP state Senator Wendy Rogers.

“We have the numbers, we are the majority. And we are done being the footstool. We are going to wake up the body of Christ in this country. And we’re going to do something about you castrating our children, about you sexually indoctrinating them in the schools, about, you know, taking over our culture and taking over our government and sending all of our money to foreign countries and allowing our border to be invaded,” he says in video published by Right Wing Watch.

READ MORE: January 6th panel will interview Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial nominee

Gab is home to QAnon and “great replacement” conspiracy theorists, Trump supporters, MAGA and ultra MAGA extremists, white Christian nationalists, white supremacists, antisemites, and anti-LGBTQ extremists.

“We’re done,” Torba continues in his rant.

“We’re done with it, and we’re going to step up and we’re going to rebuild this fallen and corrupt society from scratch, just as Christians have done many times before. And yes, we absolutely are going to get involved in public discourse and in politics, and you’re not going to shut us up,” Torba declared.

“And it’s a message to the Republican party too that they are not to disavow us,” he warned. “They are not to condemn us, because we are 80% of the Republican Party. Christian nationalists are the Republican Party, and they’re going to start doing the will of God,” he says, appearing to order the Republican Party to meet his demands.

“And they’re going to start, you know, supporting biblical policies, and they’re going to start, you know, fighting back against this and not being complacent or they’re going to get out of the way and we’re going to go in there and we’re going to do it ourselves. Those are their two choices.”

READ MORE: 'Are we in China?' Alex Jones refuses to apologize for claiming that Sandy Hook 'might have been staged'

Torba has appeared on Tony Perkins’Washington Watch show. Perkins is the longtime head of the Family Research Council, which appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups.

Last week Jewish Insider reported on an “obscure new book calling for the construction of ‘a parallel Christian society’ to replace ‘the failed secular state'” that seemed to be “performing surprisingly well on Amazon.”

That book, Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations, was written by Torba.

Last month the House Committee on Oversight sent Torba a letter “regarding your company’s response to the surge of online threats against law enforcement following the execution of a court-authorized search warrant by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.”

“We are concerned that reckless statements by the former President and Republican Members of Congress have unleashed a flood of violent threats on social media that have already led to at least one death and pose a danger to law enforcement officers across the United States. We urge you to take immediate action to address any threats of violence against law enforcement that appear on your company’s platforms,” the letter reads.

But that letter also said, “On August 15, a Pennsylvania man was arrested and charged with making threats of violence against FBI personnel. He wrote on the social media platform Gab, ‘If You Work For The FBI Then You Deserve To Die.’ He also wrote, ‘Every single piece of shit who works for the FBI in any capacity, from the director down to the janitor who cleans their fucking toilets deserves to die. You’ve declared war on us and now it’s open season on YOU.'”

Watch below or at this link:

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/jamie-raskin/

pro pub

Forty members of Congress on Monday asked the IRS and the Treasury to investigate what the lawmakers termed an “alarming pattern” of right-wing advocacy groups registering with the tax agency as churches, a move that allows the organizations to shield themselves from some financial reporting requirements and makes it easier to avoid audits.

Reps. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., and Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., raised transparency concerns in a letter to the heads of both agencies following a ProPublica story about the Family Research Council, a right-wing Christian think tank based in Washington, D.C., getting reclassified as a church. Thirty-eight other lawmakers, including Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., signed onto the letter.

“FRC is one example of an alarming pattern in the last decade — right-wing advocacy groups self-identifying as ‘churches’ and applying for and receiving church status,” the representatives wrote, noting the organization’s policy work supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade and its advocacy for legislation seeking to ban gender-affirming surgery.

“Tax-exempt organizations should not be exploiting tax laws applicable to churches to avoid public accountability and the IRS’s examination of their activities,” they wrote.

The Family Research Council did not respond to requests for comment. The IRS told ProPublica that it does not comment on congressional correspondence.

The FRC’s website describes the organization as “a nonprofit research and educational organizationdedicated to articulating and advancing a family-centered philosophy of public life,” noting that it provides “policy research and analysis for the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government.”

The FRC sought and received reclassification from a standard tax-exempt charity to an “association of churches” in 2020.

In its application for church status, the organization said it met 11 of the 14 characteristics that the IRS uses to determine whether an organization is a church, including an established place of worship — a chapel in the organization’s Washington office building, at which it said it holds services attended by more than 65 people. (Someone who answered the phone at the office said the group doesn’t offer church services.)The organization said its association comprises nearly 40,000 “partner churches” that must affirm a statement of faith to join; it did not offer the names of those partners on its form to the IRS or provide them to ProPublica.

The representatives’ letter asks the IRS to review the FRC’s status change and to examine its review process for organizations similarly seeking to switch their status to become a church or association of churches.

“It’s disturbing that a letter like this is even necessary,” Huffman said. “Unfortunately our IRS has been so worn down and beaten up by the right wing that they have essentially ceased all scrutiny of organizations that self-report as churches.”

The IRS classifies churches and associations of churches as tax-exempt charitable organizations, meaning that they do not have to pay federal taxes and that donors can deduct contributions from their own taxes.However, churches are exempt from submitting Form 990, the annual financial disclosure that nonprofit organizations use to list board members, key staffer salaries, large payments to independent contractors and grants given by the organization.

And unlike for other tax-exempt organizations, a high-level Treasury official must sign off on any audit of a church.

“We understand the importance of religious institutions to their congregants and believe that religious freedom is a cherished American value and constitutional right. We also believe that our tax code must be applied fairly and judiciously,” Huffman and DelBene wrote.

In their letter, the representatives asked for feedback from the IRS on whether it needs additional direction from Congress to enforce rules surrounding tax-exempt organizations and churches. Huffman said that he hopes to pursue legislative action if the IRS isn’t able to address these concerns, but that the letter is a first step.

“You need to start here — give the agency a chance to clean up its mess,” he said.

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https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/tony-perkins

[quotes]

...Background

Anthony Richard “Tony” Perkins, who since 2003 has served as president of the anti-LGBT Family Research Council (FRC), was born and raised in Cleveland, Oklahoma. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Liberty University, a far-right Christian college in Lynchburg, Virginia, established by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. He earned a Master of Public Administration degree from Louisiana State University.

After college, Perkins became a Marine. Following his service, he became a Baton Rouge police officer, where he also served as a law enforcement trainer for the State Department’s Antiterrorism Assistance Program, which trains law enforcement around the world.

According to a 2005 article in The Nation, while serving as an officer in Baton Rouge in 1992, Perkins failed to report to his superiors that anti-abortion activists were planning to break through police barriers. That was Operation Rescue’s “Summer of Purpose,” when the group targeted the Delta Women’s Clinic in Baton Rouge. Perkins was splitting his time between his police work and his job as a reporter for “Woody Vision,” a right-wing television station owned by Louisiana State Rep. Louis “Woody” Jenkins, Perkins’ mentor.

Perkins and his camera crew were often outside the clinic, The Nation reported. Victor Sachse, a local business owner and volunteer patient escort for the clinic, said Perkins’ reporting was so skewed and incendiary that the clinic demanded Perkins’ removal from the facility’s grounds.

In order to control an increasingly tense situation, the police chief had a chain-link fence erected to separate anti-abortion activists from pro-choice protesters and called in sheriff’s deputies and prison guards as extra forces. Perkins publicly criticized the department and the chief. After learning about plans by anti-abortion activists to break through police lines, Perkins failed to notify his superiors. As a result of his actions, he was suspended from duty in 1992, according to The Nation, and subsequently quit.

In 1996, Perkins managed the U.S. Senate campaign of Woody Jenkins. During the campaign, former Klan chieftain David Duke contacted Jenkins and suggested he hire Impact Mail & Printing and use the group’s services for automated phone calls, according to a Federal Election Commission (FEC) conciliation agreement, which shows “Jenkins purchased several rounds of calls from Impact Mail.”

People who received the calls from the campaign complained because Duke’s name appeared on caller IDs. Jenkins tried to cancel the transaction with Impact Mail, but could not because Perkins had already signed a contract. Jenkins allegedly instructed Perkins to stop payment on the check to the company and “directed that Impact Mail be paid through Courtney Communications, the campaign’s media firm,” according to the conciliation agreement, which said Jenkins “did not want his campaign to be associated with Impact Mail.”

The Jenkins campaign “knowingly and willfully filed false disclosure reports” showing its media firm as the vendor of $82,500 in services actually provided by Impact Mail, according to the FEC document. The campaign settled with a $3,000 fine.

Beginning in 1998, Perkins served as a Louisiana state representative for eight years. On May 17, 2001, he gave a speech to the state chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist group that advocates against miscegenation and whose website once described black people as a “retrograde species of humanity.” Perkins addressed the group while standing in front of a Confederate flag.

He claimed not to know the group’s ideology at the time, but it had been widely publicized in Louisiana and the nation. In 1999 — two years before Perkins’ speech to the CCC — U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had been embroiled in a national scandal over his ties to the group. GOP chairman Jim Nicholson then urged Republicans to avoid the CCC because of its “racist views.”

Perkins does not mention this scandal on the FRC’s website. Speaking of his political career, he instead claims that he authored and passed the nation’s first covenant marriage law in Louisiana in1997. A covenant marriage, according to the largely Christian movement behind such laws, is a legally distinct marriage, in which spouses agree to obtain premarital counseling and accept more limited grounds for divorce.

As a state legislator, he ran for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2002, but suffered a fourth-place finish in the primaries and ended up joining FRC in the fall of 2003. He left the Louisiana Legislature the next year after serving two terms.

Perkins at the helm

Under Perkins’ leadership, the FRC has continued to peddle false claims about homosexuality and has made combating the “homosexual agenda” a seemingly obsessive interest. Part of the FRC’s strategy is to tout the false claim that gay men are more likely to sexually abuse children. The American Psychological Association, among others, has concluded that, “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.”

That doesn’t matter to the FRC, though. Perkins has defended the “gay men as pedophiles” claim, including in a debate with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok on the November 30, 2010, edition of MSNBC’s “Hardball With Chris Matthews.” As the show ended, Perkins stated, “If you look at the American College of Pediatricians, they say the research is overwhelming that homosexuality poses a danger to children. So Mark is wrong. He needs to go back and do his own research.”

In fact, the SPLC did its research. The college, despite its professional-sounding name, is a tiny, explicitly religious-right breakaway group from the similarly named American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the 60,000-member association of the profession. The American College of Pediatricians (ACP) splintered from the AAP because of the AAP’s support of gay and lesbian parents.

Publications by the ACP, which has only about 200 members, have been roundly attacked by leading scientific authorities who say they are baseless. They also accuse the college of distorting and misrepresenting their work. (MSNBC’s Matthews offered a clarification on a follow-up show that described the American College of Pediatricians and separated it from the AAP.)

In late 2010, Perkins held a webcast to discuss the dire consequences of allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Dubious statistics from a poll commissioned by the FRC and the Center for Security Policy — which was named an anti-Muslim hate group in 2015 — were used during the webcast. The webcast also mentioned the FRC report, Mission Compromised, written by retired Army Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis, the FRC’s senior fellow for national security. The report contended that allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly would undermine morale and discipline and infringe on the religious freedom of military chaplains, who would be forced to accept homosexuality and would no longer be permitted to express their religious beliefs about it.

In addition, Maginnis predicted that heterosexual service members would be forced to take “sensitivity classes” that promote the “homosexual lifestyle.” He added: “Homosexual activists seek to force the U.S. military to embrace their radical views and sexual conduct, no matter the consequences for combat effectiveness.”

Taking on anti-bullying policies

Under Perkins, the FRC also waded into the debate over anti-bullying policies, which became a matter of national discussion after several LGBT children committed suicide in late 2010. On October11, 2010, The Washington Post published a commentary by Perkins in which he repeated his argument that anti-bullying policies are not really intended to protect students. “Homosexual activist groups like GLSEN [Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network] … are exploiting these tragedies to push their agenda of demanding not only tolerance of homosexual individuals, but active affirmation of homosexual conduct and their efforts to redefine the family.”

In 2013, Perkins claimed on CNN that allowing gay people into the Boy Scouts would put children in danger of sexual assault. When pressed by the CNN host, Perkins again resorted to the FRC’s stock claim, as Perkins once put it, that pedophilia “is a homosexual problem.” “They [Boy Scouts] are trying to create an environment that is protective of children,” he said. “This [allowing LGBT Scouts and Scout leaders] doesn’t make it more protective. There is a disproportionate number of male on boy – when we get on pedophilia, male on boy is a higher incident rate of that.”

Despite gains made for LGBT equality, Perkins and the FRC have continued their anti-gay activities, including opposition to the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). According to Perkins, President Obama was working with the “totalitarian homosexual lobby” to sneak ENDA into law and should that happen, freedom of religion will be “destroyed.”

Perkins also has worked to keep America safe from Betty Crocker. In September 2013, he called for a boycott of the iconic brand because General Mills, which produces it, donated custom cakes to three LGBT couples in Minnesota who were married after the state legalized same-sex marriage a month earlier.

In 2014, Perkins made a series of anti-LGBT statements, claiming that LGBT people are a danger to Christians. In June, he said that gay rights advocates are “going to start rolling out the boxcars to start hauling off Christians.” In August, he agreed with a caller who predicted on his Washington Watch radio show that anti-Christian violence will erupt in America. After the caller wondered if we are “going to find ourselves being loaded in cattle cars like it was when the Nazis took over before we realize we are in such terrible danger,” Perkins hailed her claim as an “excellent point.”

“You’ve just hit the nail on the head,” he exclaimed, warning that “isolationist” and “libertarian” politicians like Rand Paul are leaving America’s national security vulnerable and that violent anti-Christian persecution taking place in the Middle East could soon find its way here.

Perkins, with his political experience and connections, has also been part of the executive committee of the secretive and powerful Council for National Policy (CNP), a group of hundreds of the most influential conservatives in the country. The group is so tight-lipped its members are instructed never to admit membership or even name the group.

Perkins was vice president of the organization in 2014 – one of its three executive officers. On the CNP board of governors in 2014 were Michael Peroutka, who served for many years on the board of the neo-Confederate League of the South. Another is Mathew “Mat” Staver, head of the virulently anti-LGBT hate group Liberty Counsel; Joseph Farah of the far-right conspiracist website WND (formerly World Net Daily); and Alan Sears, head of the anti-LGBT Alliance Defending Freedom, which supports the criminalization of homosexuality.

In 2015, as the FRC tilted into anti-Muslim sentiment – especially with the hiring of retired Lt. General William “Jerry” Boykin – Perkins said that Islam is such a danger that Muslim Americans should not have the same religious freedoms as other citizens.

In an email to FRC followers in 2015, Perkins made the strange claim that “only 16 percent of Islam is a religion,” and that the rest is a “military, judicial, economic, and political system.” Perkins warned that “we lose our identity in the shadow of multiculturalism.” He cited France and Britain as examples.

“If people want to live in America — including Muslims — they need to embrace our Constitution and our culture,” he continued. “Others have said in less artful ways what conservatives have been warning for years: there is no such thing as coexistence between Sharia law and our constitutional republic. That isn’t religious prejudice, but an ideological reality.”

After a man with radical Islamic beliefs fatally shot 49 people at an Orlando LGBT nightclub in June 2016, Perkins pointed the finger at the Obama Administration – claiming that the administration marginalized Christians and elevated Islam. “We have to deal with the underlying issue, which is an ideology that’s incompatible with American liberty,” Perkins wrote. “An ideology, tragically, that this administration has empowered through its public policy and private diplomacy.”

Perkins has continued with the anti-LGBT mission of the FRC. He even waded into the battle over allowing transgender people to use public restrooms and facilities in accordance with their gender identities. Perkins, like other anti-LGBT activists, claims that allowing transgender people to use restrooms in this way endangers women because predatory men could pretend to be transgender.

In a 2016 FRC email to followers about the issue, Perkins warned: “If government can force the ‘normalization’ or even the celebration of something as universally unnatural as men using women’s restrooms and vice versa, then it can force the rest of its agenda on the American people very easily,” resulting in “social chaos” and the breakdown of all “sexual inhibition and morality.”

During 2016, Perkins was part of the Republican committee as a delegate from Louisiana that created the GOP platform. Perkins reportedly proposed a plank that supported conversion therapy for minors, though the wording, apparently revised from the original, does not specifically mention conversion therapy – a pseudoscientific practice that claims to change a person’s sexual orientation from gay to straight, and has been denounced by every major U.S. medical and mental health association. The platform committee ultimately passed a resolution affirming “the right of parents to determine the proper treatment or therapy, for their minor children.”

Perkins opted to support then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016, even after Trump’s statements about groping women without consent came to light. Perkins called the candidate’s remarks “immoral” and “very concerning,” but he claimed he wasn’t backing Trump because they have shared values but “shared concerns.”

After Trump’s election, the FRC and Perkins were heavily involved in the formation of policy for the new administration. FRC Senior Fellow Kenneth Blackwell was named the head of domestic policy for the transition team. The FRC also took steps to ensure the new administration would undo President Obama’s work advancing LGBT equality – efforts that come after Perkins’ June 2016 claim that a Trump presidency would be better for the LGBT community than a Hillary Clinton presidency.

FRC and other conservative evangelicals continue to enjoy unprecedented access to the White House since the Trump administration took office. Perkins claimed in August 2017 that he had been there “I don’t know how many more times in the first six months this year than I was during the entire Bush administration.”

Perkins may have been one of the driving forces behind Trump’s ban on transgender troops in the military; he claimed that he had been pressing Trump for months to implement a ban on transgender troops, which eventually resulted in Trump announcing in July 2017 that he would do so. The announcement blindsided the president’s defense secretary and Republican congressional leaders.

In May 2018, Perkins was appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Freedom, where he will serve a two-year term along with fellow anti-LGBT appointee Gary Bauer, who also has a long history of right-wing activism. Perkins will continue to serve as FRC president during his term on the Commission.

The appointment is in line with FRC’s push to treat international religious freedom in U.S. policy as a national security issue rather than simply a human rights issue, as demonstrated in an April 2018 issue analysis paper written by FRC’s Travis Weber. “Despite a pattern of ongoing persecution and instability in various countries around the world, which is clearly related to a lack of religious freedom in those places,” Weber wrote, “we have nevertheless resisted the possibility that homeland security threats exist because we have failed to cultivate religious freedom elsewhere.”

FRC was also part of the July 2018 “Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom” gathering sponsored by the Department of State and hosted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a darling of the U.S. Christian Right. Perkins was in attendance and praised Pompeo for convening the event, which he claimed is a “turning point for millions.” He also stated that religious freedom would somehow decrease the likelihood of terrorism.

On July 19 2018, FRC posted one of Perkins’ “Washington Watch” columns on its website on the twenty-fifth anniversary of President Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” announcement, which prohibited military officials from discriminating against or harassing closeted service members). Perkins lamented that announcement as a “turning point in a bigger war,” and claimed that it was the “first major crack in the foundation of marriage and human sexuality.” Then, he went on, the 2003 Supreme Court ruling Lawrence v Texas, which overturned sodomy bans in the U.S., was “the next shoe to drop,” ostensibly because it overturned the criminalization of sex between adults of the same sex. Citing late Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent, Perkins stated, “With prophetic insight, [Scalia] explained how six justices had just given the far-Left the only hammer they'd need to destroy thousands of years of human history.” He continued, “Anyone being intellectually honest knew this was where LGBT extremists were pushing America.”

And three years after the legalization of same-sex marriage in the U.S., Perkins claimed in the “Washington Watch” piece that “the Left is still bulldozing their way through every possible social norm.” The goal of the Left, he said, “Isn’t same-sex marriage, but any kind of marriage” and then he went on to link pedophilia to these goals, using a controversial TEDx talk (since removed) as proof that this is happening. The talk, Perkins argued, is “using the same born-that-way playbook as LGBT activists,” and is “trying to legitimize child abuse as the latest acceptable expression of sexuality".

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-family-research-councils-insurrection-connections/

theFamily Research Council, a major player in the religious-right political movement, was deeply involved in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—a fact made all the more apparent by revelations during the June 23 public hearing of the House select committee investigating the conspiracy that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

We had already known that FRC publicly supported Trump’s schemes to unlawfully stay in power. FRC President Tony Perkins and other leaders connected with the secretive Council for National Policy had signed a letter in mid-December 2020falsely claiming, “There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.” That letter called on state legislatures in six battleground states won by Joe Biden to “appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.” It urged the House and Senate to reject pro-Biden electors from those states.

FRC Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin also signed that letter, as did Kenneth Blackwell, FRC’s senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance. Blackwell, a notorious voter suppresser who abused the power of his office when he was Ohio’s secretary of state, was all-in on Trump’s election lies from the earliest days of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement. Just days after the election, Blackwell used wildly false and inflammatory language in support of Trump’s claims, denouncing Pennsylvania’s governor, who defended his state’s election results from false claims of voter fraud, and “his legion of darkness.”

Blackwell and Perkins signed a second open letter at the end of December 2020 urging Senate Republicans to contest the votes from five battleground states.

Two days before the insurrection at the Capitol, Blackwell tweeted a video message using the “Stop the Steal” hashtag. “This is not a time for sideline sitters or backbenchers,” he said. “You must do what you can with what you have where you are. Our republic demands it.”

It turns out that Blackwell was busy behind the scenes, too.

At the Jan. 6 committee’s June 23 hearing, Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney revealed the contents of a Dec.28, 2020, email from Blackwell that read in part, “As I stated last week, I believe the VP and his staff would benefit greatly from a briefing by John and Ken.”

“John” would be John Eastman, the far right-wing lawyer who doggedly pushed illegal schemes to keep Trump in power based on false claims of election fraud and bogus theories about the vice president’s power to single-handedly decide who would become the next president. “Ken” referred to Ken Klukowski, a religious-right lawyer and pundit, longtime associate of Blackwell, and former director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty.

Blackwell’s email was sent to Ed Corrigan, a former Heritage Foundation vice president who served as part of the leadership team of Trump’s transition and now heads up the Conservative Partnership Institute, which promotes voter suppression in the name of “election integrity.” It also went to Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff Connie Hair, whose promotion of Big Lie conspiracies about the election was quoted by Ginny Thomas in her post-election emails to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. Completing the circle, Meadows is now a “senior partner” at the Conservative Partnership Institute, which received $1 million from Trump’s PACshortly after the Jan. 6 committee was created.

Klukowski had joined the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget in the fall of 2019. After the 2020 election, Klukowski was parachuted into the Justice Department office of Jeffrey Clark, who was scheming to drag the DOJ into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in key battleground states. Blackwell clearly seemed to recognize the bad optics of Klukowski’s involvement, urging in his email, “As I also mentioned, make sure we don’t overexpose Ken given his new position.”

Clark has unwillingly played a starring role in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, which has painstakingly exposed his effort to get Trump to name him acting attorney general. Clark and others had originally planned to send a letter to Georgia legislators—a letter that Klukowski helped Clark write—falsely claiming that the DOJ had identified major election problems in the state and encouraging them to convene a special session to consider naming a pro-Trump Electoral College slate. When Clark’s DOJ superiors blocked his scheme, Trump seriously considered making Clark acting attorney general so he could carry it out, abandoning the plan only after other top Justice Department officials threatened a massive leadership resignation that would swamp news of the letter and define Trump’s legacy.

As Rep. Cheney concluded, “This email suggests that Mr. Klukowski was simultaneously working with Jeffrey Clark to draft the proposed letter to Georgia officials to overturn their certified election and working with Dr. Eastman to help pressure the vice president to overturn the election.”

In other words, while a battle raged between principled White House and Justice Department officials who were committed to upholding the election results and facilitating a peaceful transfer of power and the defeated president and his power-at-all-costs supporters, current and former FRC leaders were in the trenches with Trump and the would-be election overthrowers.

Their collusion on Trump’s attempt to overturn the election is far from the first Blackwell-Klukowski collaboration. They co-authored numerous partisan diatribes in the form of op-eds and books, including “Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency” and “Resurgent: How Constitutional Conservatism Can Save America.” In 2016, Klukowksi guest-hosted FRC’s “Washington Watch” radio program and had Blackwell on as a guest.

At FRC’s October 2021 Pray Vote Stand conference—the rechristened activist gathering known for years as the Values Voter Summit—Blackwell slammed federal voting rights legislation and backed new voting restrictions being put in place by Republican state legislators.

The revelations of the Family Research Council’s all-out effort to help Trump stay in power despite his rejection by voters makes it even more appalling to learn from ProPublica that FRC has successfully petitioned the IRS to change its official classification to that of an association of churches, a tactic that Right Wing Watch has reported has been used by other religious-right groups like Focus on the Family and Liberty Counsel to evade public scrutiny and accountability.

Tags: Connie Hair Ed Corrigan Jeffrey Clark Jerry Boykin Ken Blackwell Ken Klukowski Kenneth Blackwell Mark Meadows Tony Perkins Capitol Insurrection House select committee on Jan. 6 Conservative Partnership Institute Council for National Policy Family Research Council

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shad net alice nelson

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Conservative and fundamentalist talk radio served as both the training grounds and meeting place for a new generation of leadership. One beneficiary was a young Indiana lawyer named Mike Pence. Pence, a Catholic who converted to fundamentalist Christianity in college, made two unsuccessful runs for a Congressional seat in 1988 and 1990. In 1991 he accepted a position as president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. This was the Indiana affiliate of the State Policy Network, whose members were described as a “mini-Heritage Foundation in each state,” concentrating on influencing state legislation. The State Policy Network funds its state affiliates, and is heavily funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, whose major backers include the Koch brothers and the CNP’s DeVos family.34^

From 1994 to 1999, Pence worked as a host for conservative radio programs, many of them syndicated across the state. Pence used the job to hone his public speaking skills, build a following and promote his image as a self-described “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.” His folksy baritone was well-suited for radio and his youthful face, prematurely white hair and “aw-shucks” manner sold him as a “safe” baby-boomer who respected his elders and drank milk for a nightcap.But he was a stalwart opponent to abortion, Planned Parenthood, and same-sex marriage.35^ His mild exterior belied a bigoted streak. While he was president of the Indiana Policy Review, it published an article called “Military Necessity and Homosexuality” stating, “The homosexuals are not as a group able-bodied. They are known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices and the promiscuity which is a hallmark of their lifestyle.”36^

In 1998 Pence invited a 35-year-old Louisiana state legislator named Tony Perkins to appear on his radio show.37^ Perkins had come to Indianapolis to testify before the state legislature on the “covenant marriage “ law he had drafted in Louisiana, which created a voluntary marriage contract restricting the right to divorce. Like Pence, Perkins was a fierce opponent of gay marriage and abortion. He was also one of nine Louisianans who belonged to the Council on National Policy.38^

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Perkins and Pence shared a talent for broadcasting and a thirst for power, though it wasn’t initially clear who would pursue each path. In 2000 Pence ran for Congress again, and this time he won. His radio expertise made him a hot commodity among Republicans on Capitol Hill, and his reactionary position on social issues won him favor with the Council for National Policy.

In 2003, 14 fundamentalists, including CNP stalwarts Paul Weyrich, Donald Wildmon, Gary Bauer, Richard Bott and James Dobson, regrouped in Arlington, Virginia. Worried they were losing ground, the group focused on three issues: abortion, gay marriage and gun rights. Polling showed that the topic where they could get the most traction was same-sex marriage.39^

James Dobson, nearing 70, was slowing down, and he was ready to bring in some new blood. The landscape had changed. The Family Research Council’s new visibility as a Washington lobbying force could undermine the non-profit status of Focus on the Family’s multi-million-dollar operations. In 1992 he separated the two organizations again, creating an independent board that shared three members, including Dobson himself.40^

To direct the new FRC in 2003, he turned to Mike Pence’s friend from Louisiana, Tony Perkins: fresh-faced and honey-voiced at 40, with a Southern variant of Pence’s “aw-shucks” manner. Perkins left his tiny hometown of Cleveland, Oklahoma to serve in the Marine Corps. He moved to Baton Rouge, where he joined the police force, then got a job reporting for the television station run by Woody Jenkins, the founding executive director of the CNP. Along the way he attended Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University (though he didn’t graduate until he was nearly 30).

In 1995 Perkins ran successfully for the Louisiana state legislature and was reelected four years later. The CNP’s Richard Viguerie was one of his fundraisers.41^ Perkins also managed the unsuccessful Senate campaign of former CNP director Woody Jenkins. There were bumps along the way. A 1999 federal investigation revealed that Perkins, on behalf of the Jenkins campaign, had contracted the services of a media company partially owned by Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Perkins later reported that he was “profoundly grieved” to learn of the association.42In 2001 Perkins gave a speech to the Baton Rouge chapter of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (sometimes called the “Uptown Klan”).43^ Dobson was unconcerned by the negative press. Such events set a pattern that would be played out in the future. The Council for National Policy and its affiliates would be revealed to associate with unsavory characters, and they would be shocked that such nice folk could harbor such nasty ideology.

As soon as Perkins was hired by the Family Research Council, he launched a new radio program, broadcast on Bott Radio and the American Family Radio network. In the past, the Family Research Council had tried to maintain good relations with Democrats, but “Washington Watch” was unabashedly political, celebrating conservative Republicans and excoriating their Democratic opponents. For all practical purposes, the CNP had anointed the Family Research Council as its public lobbying and organizational front.

Nonetheless, the IRS assigned tax-exempt, 501(c)3 status to both the Family Research Council and American Family Radio—in keeping with the FRC’s stated mission to advance “faith, family and freedom in government and culture from a Christian worldview,” and the American Family Radio’s calling as an “educational organization” devoted to “spiritual development.”44^

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:{:{In recent years, the CNP media affiliates have continued to modernize and proliferate. It’s difficult to say exactly how many there are, or to track all the platforms where they appear. Salem Media, rebranded as the Salem Media Group, has acquired various digital platforms, including TownHall, RedState, and PJ Media.}:

}:

The Daily Caller, co-founded by CNP member Neil Patel and Tucker Carlson, lists Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia (another CNP member) as a “special correspondent,” and Tony Perkins makes frequent appearances on its video channel “American Voices.”

CNSNews (originally the Cybercast News Service) was founded by CNP executive committee member Brent Bozell III in 1998 as a division of his Media Research Center. Like many of the other organizations mentioned, MRC is designated a tax-exempt “non-partisan” 501(c)3 organization, despite its unrelenting stream of partisan content.

The movement has been focusing on developing social media platforms, especially since Donald Trump was banned from Twitter in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot. On May 14 the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump may launch his own platform on July 4, although it’s unclear what form it might take.Tony Perkins has endorsed a relatively new social media platform called Gab, which has been widely reported for providing a haven for QAnon supporters and other extremists.

Other contenders, such as Parler and Frank (launched by My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell) also vie for attention. The CNP has tried to develop its own “celebrity spokespersons” to cultivate specific target audiences, such as CNP member Charlie Kirk, who has his own YouTube channel and a radio program on Salem Media targeting youth. CNP member Alveda King (MLK’s niece) is prominently featured on Salem’s TownHall as an African-American opponent to HR1 and voting rights initiatives.

In the distorted mirror of this media system, the violent storming of the Capitol was a “tourist event,” and the illegal efforts to overturn the electoral results were exercises in “election integrity. Tragically, these media initiatives have not limited themselves to political misinformation; they have also been disseminating deadly misinformation about Covid for over a year, and sowing manufactured doubt about the safety of vaccines.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. The battle against Covid may have peaked, but millions of Americans are still vulnerable. The 2022 midterms will determine the fate of the House and the Senate, and in many ways, the future of the nation. These information systems create a growing chasm in America. Thanks in large part to their efforts, Americans are more sharply divided than they have been in our lifetimes — and as Abraham Lincoln warned, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

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In May 2021, SPLC reported on leaked documents appearing to show Gabriel and other Islamophobic figures as being members of the secretive right-wing coalition Council for National Policy.For 40 years, Council for National Policy has brought together influential right-wing leaders, political operatives, conservative media figures, members of the religious right, free-market fundamentalists and donors.

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https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch**/2021/05**/27/shadowy-right-wing-strategy-group-embraces-islamophobic-figures-policies-presents-challenge

islamophobia has a presence within the Council for National Policy, a secretive and influential right-wing coalition, according to leaked documents reviewed by Hatewatch.

A cache of documents obtained and published by the investigative research organization Documented appears to show anti-Muslim hate group leaders such as Brigitte Gabriel, Frank Gaffney and others who have stoked Islamophobia are involved with the Council for National Policy, or CNP. The documents also reveal that the coalition has promoted policies championed by the broader anti-Muslim network.

Founded in 1981, CNP is a coalition of influential right-wing leaders, political operatives, conservative media figures, members of the religious right, free-market fundamentalists and donors. The coalition operates on multiple fronts and focuses on political strategy, media and grassroots organizing. The goal of the coalition is to advocate for right-wing and anti-rights policies that favor conservatives and the religious right.

CNP has a habit of cozying up to extreme figures, the coalition’s rosters and associations appear to show. This includes figures known for engaging in anti-Muslim hate.

Journalist and author Anne Nelson researches CNP and is the author of “Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right,” which provides an in-depth look into the coalition and its history.

“The Council for National Policy and its affiliates would be revealed to associate with unsavory characters, and they would be shocked that such nice folk could harbor such nasty ideology,” Nelson writes in the book.

In 2016, Hatewatch published CNP’s 2014 membership directory, a 191-page compendium on its over 400 members, some of whom are deceased, and their interests. The directory shows CNP membership included extremists harboring anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ views. It also revealed so-called “Radical Islam” and “Islamic Fascism” to be among the interests identified by several CNP members. “Radical Islam,” a problematic term as detailed later, continues to be a topic among the group.

While the coalition’s existence and some of its officers are public knowledge, CNP works hard to keep its membership and activities shrouded in secrecy, including reportedly encouraging members to keep quiet about the group. The New York Times once described CNP as “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country.” CNP is invitation-only, with new members being nominated by current ones.

Reports and investigations over the years have sought to expose the coalition’s tactics, membership and influence. The cache of materials obtained by Documented provides further insight into the right-wing coalition’s inner workings in recent years, including its strategies, goals and talking points.

The documents also reveal CNP has only expanded the hate and far-right figures in its ranks. The inclusion of these figures puts Islamophobia among other problematic measures pushed by CNP that pose a threat to inclusive democracy.

CNP did not return Hatewatch’s multiple requests for comment.

Islamophobic figures in the mix

[ pix  Brigitte Gabriel, founder and president of ACT for America, speaks at the 2017 Values Voter Summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

One of those listed in CNP’s September 2020 roster is Brigitte Gabriel, an anti-Muslim firebrand who has called Muslims a threat to the civilized world and claimed a practicing Muslim “cannot be a loyal citizen of the United States.” Gabriel is the founder and head of ACT for America, an anti-Muslim hate group that operates a network of chapters across the U.S. that disparage Islam and promote Islamophobic legislation at the state and national level.

Despite Gabriel’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, she operates freely within mainstream conservative circles and maintains allies in Congress such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Scott Perry, R-Penn.

According to Documented’s cache, Gabriel first appears in the January 2018 CNP membership roster. The cache spans back to 2017. She is listed as a member in subsequent rosters up to September 2020, the last list obtained by Documented. Documented did not return requests for comment by time of publication.

Regular members pay an annual fee of $1,750, according to CNP nomination documents published by Political Research Associates, an organization that researches the far right. There are other membership levels, and the higher the level, the higher the fees, up to several thousands of dollars.

Gabriel appears to be actively involved with CNP. In February 2020, she gave an “Update on the Middle East” at CNP’s meeting in Dana Point, California, according to a leaked copy of the agenda. Details about the presentation are unknown, however, the many other speeches of hers available on the Internet are often tinged with anti-Islam bias. The presence of anti-Muslim figures within CNP does not surprise Nelson.

“Islamophobia has been a core value of the Council for National Policy for a long time, an outgrowth of the Christian fundamentalist roots of the organization,” Nelson told Hatewatch in an interview. She posits CNP’s hardline Christian theology holds other religions, such as Islam, as “invalid.”

Gabriel’s relationship with CNP seems to be reciprocal, with the coalition promoting her brand and products.

“Brigitte Gabriel has been somebody who has been promoting and disseminating hate speech against Muslims,” Nelson said. “She’s a very fiery speaker and recently joined the roster of the Council for National Policy, whose member organizations also promote her books and her speaking engagements. It is a tragic decision because Muslims in the United States already face a great deal of prejudice and these figures just make their lives that much harder.”

Gabriel held a book signing at the CNP event she spoke at in February 2020. ACT for America and Gabriel did not return requests for comment.

According to a leaked 2016 copy of CNP’s media and confidentiality policy, “CNP members should not answer media inquiries about CNP. Only the CNP president or his or her designee is authorized to speak to the media about CNP.” Violation of this, according to the policy, “could result in sanctions, up to and including removal from CNP membership.”

Gabriel’s listed interests within CNP include “Radical Islam,” “Terrorism” and “Immigration,” among others, as revealed by Documented. CNP members’ interests are often listed with their names and affiliations and range from a variety of issues from “Judeo-Christian Values” to “Tax Reform” to “Regulatory Reform” to “Homosexual Issues.”

The term “radical Islam” is itself problematic because the descriptor “radical” is not used to describe any other religion and is often deployed to soften anti-Muslim bigotry. Gabriel herself has claimed that there is no such thing as radical Islam and that terrorism is associated with the “purest form” of the religion. Other CNP members view Islam in a similar way.

Gabriel and her group were some of former President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters. CNP also threw its support behind Trump in 2016 after candidates more aligned with its members’ values, such as Ted Cruz and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, dropped out. As Nelson details in “Shadow Network,” Trump’s willingness to adopt retrograde policies aligned with CNP and appoint conservative judges earned the backing of the coalition and its networks.

Gabriel – like several other CNP members – enjoyed unprecedented access to the White House under Trump, meeting with his staff on numerous occasions. The Trump administration implemented policies long promoted by the anti-Muslim network, such as the Muslim ban and a low cap on refugees. Tony Perkins, an influential figure among the religious right, is also president of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Family Research Council, which also traffics in anti-Muslim ideology and is currently avidly supporting voter suppression bills.He also enjoyed extensive access to the Trump administration.

As Nelson notes in “Shadow Network,” “Perkins – the man who declared ‘Islam is not a religion … it is a comprehensive system which is incompatible with the Constitution’ – was named to the U.S. Commission on International Freedom [under Trump].” Perkins is a longtime CNP member, having been with the coalition for 25 to 30 years, according to the September 2020 roster. He also served as the CNP’s president from 2012 to 2019, except for 2013 and 2014 where he was listed as vice president.

In 2017, Gabriel met with then-White House staffer and CNP member Paul S. Teller to hand-deliver a petition in support of Trump’s Muslim ban. Teller previously served as Ted Cruz’s chief of staff. He is also active within CNP. In 2020 , The Washington Post reported he held weekly meetings of the CNP-affiliated Conservative Action Project.According to the Post, the Conservative Action Project helped “choose loyalists to run federal agencies and coordinate outside messages with nonprofit organizations to support [Trump] administration policies and leaders.” Pages from Documented reveal Teller’s interests at CNP include “Immigration,” “Foreign policy” and “Religious freedom.” Teller now serves as the executive director of Advancing American Freedom, a group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence.

Another anti-Muslim figurehead involved with CNP is Frank Gaffney. A former Ronald Reagan administration staffer, Gaffney has since become one of the most prolific anti-Muslim propagandists in the country. He is gripped by paranoid fantasies of foreign entities such as the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating and supplanting the U.S. from within. Gaffney founded the anti-Muslim hate group Center for Security Policy and now serves in an executive chairmanship role at the group.

[pix Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, testifies during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Hatewatch first reported on Gaffney’s CNP membership in the publication of the group’s 2014 roster. He is listed as a “Gold Circle Member” in CNP’s September 2020 membership roster. Gold Circle Members pay a yearly fee of $10,000, as shown by nomination documents. Like Gabriel, Gaffney’s listed interests at CNP include “Radical Islam.”

Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2016, candidate Trump used data from a shoddy survey commissioned by the Center for Security Policy to justify his call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The survey was done by The Polling Company, Kellyanne Conway’s company. Conway served as Trump’s senior counselor and was a member of CNP’s executive committee from 2014 to 2015, tax records show.

Like other anti-Muslim and far-right actors, CNP has begun to frame China as a new Cold War-style adversary. Gaffney and his group are active in stoking alarmism about the supposed threat from China. At a CNP conference in August 2020 in Arlington, Virginia, the coalition’s sister lobbying arm CNP Action, Inc., hosted a panel titled “Reckoning with China: Action Steps,” according to a leaked copy of the agenda obtained by the watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy. The panel featured Gaffney as a participant.

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a right-wing activist who is married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is also a CNP member and counts “Radical Islam” among her interests. In 2013, Mother Jones reported Ginni Thomas and Gaffney were part of another right-wing strategy group known as Groundswell.

CNP has also included Islamophobic figures in its orbit and network. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn,Trump’s former National Security Adviser who was later pardoned by the former president after lying to the FBI, has ties to CNP, though he is not listed as a member. Flynn spoke at a CNP Policy Counsel event in July 2016. His name is also associated with a CNP Zoominfo account, as uncovered by investigative researcher Brent Allpress, suggesting Flynn might be involved more formally with the coalition. Flynn has a history of expressing anti-Islam sentiment, once calling the religion “a cancer.” In 2016, ACT for America advertised Flynn serving on its board of advisers. He was also a keynote speaker at ACT’s 2016 conference in Washington, D.C.

In September 2017, longtime anti-Muslim figurehead David Horowitz (who is not listed as a member) spoke at a CNP conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The theme of the event and Horowitz’s presentation was “Mapping the Left.” Horowitz heads the eponymously named David Horowitz Freedom Center, a hate group known for spreading anti-Muslim sentiment and helping fund other Islamophobic projects such as Jihad Watch and FrontPage Magazine. Once a leftist in the 1960s, Horowitz now tries to smear his former political affiliation as being totalitarian.

Dr. Mark Christian is listed as a member of CNP’s Board of Governors, which carries an annual fee of $6,000. Christian runs the anti-Muslim hate group Global Faith Institute, a group that peddles Islamophobic conspiracy theories while claiming to advocate for “the victims of Islam.” Christian is a former Muslim who converted to Christianity. He joins a cottage industry of former Muslims now disparaging their former faith. Christian is willing to associate with extreme figures in the anti-Muslim network, such as the former FBI agent turned anti-Muslim hate figure John Guandolo. Christian subscribes to the conspiracy theory that Islamic Sharia law is slowly “creeping” into American society.

“Islam has infiltrated all aspects of our life: our schools, churches, media, courts, military and our government,” reads a 2017 Global Faith Institute email to supporters. “Every day we are losing more of our freedom because of creeping sharia law.”

Christian did not answer a request for comment.

CNP’s rosters reveal the membership of other figures known for spreading Islamophobic rhetoric. One isfar-right historian William “Bill” Federer,who treads in Islamophobic and anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theories. According to the watchdog and research group Right Wing Watch, Federer once claimed that an “atheist homosexual gay agenda movement” will “open up” the U.S. “to move into an Islamic future.” Federer has been featured at events such as the Values Voter Summit, an annual conference put on by the Family Research Council. Brigitte Gabriel has also spoken at the Values Voter Summit in recent years, including 2018 and 2019. Family Research Council’s executive vice presidentJerry G. Boykin is also a member of CNP.

Boykin has a track record of making anti-Muslim remarks, once claiming Islam should not be protected by the First Amendment. Boykin used similar rhetoric in a 2014 news briefing for Policy Counsel, a CNP publication and speaker series to inform the public on a “wide range of topics” and “variety of opinions.” Boykin goes heavy on the anti-Islam rhetoric in the article, which touches on the rise and activities of the terrorist group ISIS at the time. Boykin took issue with former President Barack Obama’s attempts to not conflate the terrorist group with a religion of around 1.8 billion people.

“I think most Americans have figured this out,” Boykin said. “When you say Isis [sic] is not Islam the rest doesn’t really matter because if you are laying out a strategy that doesn’t start with an understanding of your enemy and who you are up against and what motivates him to do what he does the rest doesn’t matter.”

Boykin adds elsewhere: “One of the mistakes that we make about Islam is that only 16% of Islam is actually a religion.” He claims the rest is a legal, geopolitical and military system. Claiming Islam is not a religion – or only part one – is a well-tread trope deployed by Islamophobic figures. “But only 16% is an actual religion,” he said. “And we make the mistake of thinking that it’s exactly like Christianity. It is not.”

CNP’s Policy Counsel includes a disclaimer that views expressed in the articles are not always representative of the coalition. “These views should not be construed as the views of the Council for National Policy, as an attempt to aid or hinder the enactment of any legislation, or as an intervention in any political campaign for public office,” the disclaimer reads.

However, as CNP papers brought to light by Documented reveal, the coalition has advocated for policies steeped in Islamophobia.

Turning interest into action

It appears stoking fear of Islam goes beyond merely the interests of CNP members and has manifested into policy recommendations. Documented produced a cache of documents attributed to CNP Action, Inc.

According to Documented:

CNP members meet together in-person three times a year and strategize about their collective goals. A number of the sessions at each meeting are action focussed [sic], and the participants collectively agree on a set of ‘action-steps’ that the members and their organizations (including the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the American Legislative Exchange Council) will carry out before the next meeting.

An action step from a May 2018 session called to “declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.” The session was facilitated by Jerry Boykin and featured Frank Gaffney as a participant. Designating the Muslim Brotherhood has been a longtime goal of Gaffney and the anti-Muslim network. The designation fits into greater paranoia of Muslims being a fifth-column threat in the U.S., or a group that attempts to undermine the country from within.

Prominent Muslim civil rights and advocacy organizations are often accused by Islamophobia peddlers of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Arjun Sethi, a civil rights lawyer and author, noted in a 2017 column for The Washington Post that such a designation could have knock-on effects. “The result is likely to be intimidation, harassment and smears of Muslim and Arab groups here in the United States,” Sethi wrote.

Trump regularly threatened to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group while in office, but never did. Foreign relations experts and government officials have advised against such a designation. But there are still attempts to do so legislatively.

Bills attempting to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist group have been introduced in Congress multiple times in recent years. Sponsors of such bills include Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., and Ted Cruz. Both members of Congress have ties to Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy. Diaz-Balart joined Gaffney on his radio program “Secure Freedom Radio” in 2016 to promote the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation bill. Cruz has longstanding ties to the Center for Security Policy and tapped Gaffney to serve as an adviser during his 2016 presidential run. Cruz also has ties to CNP, having given speeches to the coalition.

Brigitte Gabriel’s ACT for America also lobbies for bills to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group, lobbying disclosure forms show. The group also supported Trump to do so. ACT tweeted in 2019: “President Trump should 100% designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group. Past administrations have promised but failed. MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!”

CNP supports the effort to halt refugees from Muslim majority countries being resettled in the U.S. Leaked copies of the coalition’s newsletters from 2015 and 2016 reveal this support. Halting refugee resettlement has been a tactic pushed by the anti-Muslim network, since many of those displaced are from Muslim majority countries, with many being ones the U.S. has a presence in. In 2015, ACT for America launched a working group to push back against the resettlement program and “ensure that this broken system is fixed, and that potential terrorists are kept on the outside looking in.”

Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy also launched an anti-refugee project for activists interested in “building resistance” to resettlement programs. The group also published two monographs in 2015 about the program steeped in demographic anxieties about Muslim refugees moving and relocating to the United States.

Anti-refugee sentiment features in a December 2015 newsletter of “Heard Around the Hill,” a publication of CNP Action, Inc. The newsletter promotes legislation aimed at curbing refugee resettlement.

“Intelligence officials have determined that Islamic extremists have explored using the refugee resettlement program to enter the United States,” the newsletter reads. This claim was pushed back on by U.S. officials and refugee advocates at the time.

The newsletter adds that House Republicans introduced H.R. 4218, which would suspend refugees from entering the U.S. The bill was introduced by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and did not make it out of committee. Now serving in the U.S. Senate, Blackburn has connections to such anti-Muslim hate groups as ACT for America and Center for Security Policy, having attended ACT’s annual conference and been a guest on Gaffney’s radio program.

The newsletter notes that the anti-LGTBQ hate group Liberty Counsel produced a petition in support of the bill. “If you would like to sign the petition, click here,” it reads with a hyperlink. The newsletter notes, “Mat Staverserves as Chairman of Liberty Counsel Action.” Staver is on CNP’s board of governors and counts “Radical Islam” among his interests.

Another “Heard Around the Hill” newsletter from April 2016 touched on CNP’s opposition to refugees, with the effort being led by Paul Teller.

“At the most recent CNP meeting … CNP member Paul Teller, Chief of Staff for U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), referenced three pieces of immigration-related legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress that conservatives nationwide may want to examine and support,” the newsletter states. “One would suspend the entrance of refugees from terrorist-dominated countries, a second would give states the power to deny the resettling of refugees within their borders, and a third would focus key resources to better enable ICE agents to implement border security.”

The newsletter adds: “Please feel free to contact Paul Teller if you have questions or want to offer support for any or all of these efforts.”

While Islamophobia is at the coalition’s core, its activism and messaging on the issue may ebb and flow with what is politically relevant at the time.

“The political operatives of the Council for National Policy are very strategic,” Nelson said. “They do a great deal of polling, conduct focus groups, and promote inflammatory rhetoric when serves their political purposes. You are likely to see an uptick in their Islamophobic content at moments where the national news environment would favor it, such as periods of tension with Muslim countries or international incidents ascribed to terrorist organizations.”

Nelson says CNP and its network “were instrumental in convincing Trump to institute his infamous Muslim travel ban, which was opposed by foreign policy experts as being counterproductive to our national interests.”

She adds, “But again, this kind of dog whistle is signaling to their base. By lashing out at innocent populations, they are promoting a dangerous form of nationalism.”

‘We could expect a whole raft of measures’

The cache of documents reveals CNP’s willingness to embrace Islamophobic figures, their messaging and policies in its efforts to influence politics in the country. But Islamophobia is only one cog in the CNP machine.

The defeat of Donald Trump and Mike Pence has been a setback for CNP, having lost major allies at the federal level. The coalition continues to operate and reassess its strategy for the future. Nelson notes CNP and its networks will be eyeing the 2022 midterm elections. While the Democrats – who generally lean toward the left ­– narrowly hold both houses of Congress, Nelson notes trends show the party in White House generally does poorly in the midterms. She says the CNP has been active at the state level helping to promote voter suppression measures aiming to suppress “populations that favor the Democrats starting, but not ending with, African Americans.”

A CNP Action, Inc. action step from February 2020 advocated for “government-issued voter ID, including mail-in ballots and verification for residency and citizenship.” Voter ID measures have been criticized by voting rights advocates for disproportionately affecting black voters and other voters of color.

Nelson says that voter suppression efforts can help tip the midterms in favor of Republicans, some of whom have been known to support CNP affiliates’ access to power. A Republican takeover of Congress would derail the Biden administration’s policies and possibly set up a win for another Republican presidency in 2024.

“If the Radical Right of the Republican Party takes Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, there will be very little standing in their [CNP] way from reshaping the United States from the country as we know it,” Nelson says. “We could expect a whole raft of measures that would include not just depriving Muslims of basic rights, but rollbacks of voting rights, LGBT rights, women’s rights – and the list goes on and on.

“They have made no secret of the vision that they have for the United States, which is reminiscent of a 19th-century religious patriarchy. American voters will have to decide what kind of country they want for their children to inherit, and respond accordingly.”

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Alliance Defense Fund To Launch Law School Aimed At Creating "Liberal Chaser" Attorneys

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Wed, 09/28/2011 - 12:56pm

Religious Right leaders are coming together to form yet another law school to train future lawyers of the conservative movement. The right-wing Alliance Defense Fund is helping Louisiana College, a Southern Baptist institution,start the Paul Pressler School of Law, which will join Liberty University, Regent University and others in providing politicized training to the next generation of Religious Right lawyers.

Pressler’s ties to the Alliance Defense Fund will be similar to the Liberty University School of Law’s partnership with Liberty Counsel and the Regent University School of Law’s (originally Oral Roberts University’s Coburn School of Law) alliance with the American Center for Law and Justice. As Sarah Posner notes, such law schools intend to“teach the ‘biblical’ foundations of the law” and create “lawyers unafraid to inject their particular Christian beliefs, not only into the public square, but quite deliberately into legislation, policy, and jurisprudence.”

According to the National Law Journal, the new law school “is named for Paul Pressler III, a former Texas Court of Appeals judge who helped lead the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1970s.”

The founding dean of the Pressler law school, J. Michael Johnson, was previously senior counsel of the ADF and, according to his Townhall.com bio, has “provided legal representation to organizations such as Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, Toward Tradition, the American Family Association, and Coral Ridge Ministries, and numerous family policy councils and crisis pregnancy centers.” In 2005, Johnson won the “Faith, Family and Freedom” award from Family Research Council president Tony Perkins for his work defending the Louisiana Marriage Protection Amendment, which placed a ban on same-sex marriage in the state’s constitution.

Yesterday on Today’s Issues, Perkins, who is a member of Pressler’s board of reference, spoke to Johnson about the new law school. Johnson said the law school would be “not unlike what our colleagues are doing at the Liberty University School of Law and the Regent University School of Law.” Perkins said, “This law school’s not going to be pumping out ambulance chasers, this is going to be pumping out liberal chasers, I mean we’re gonna track them down, wherever they are and we’re gonna defeat them, and if we can’t defeat them in the policy realm we’re gonna defeat them in the courts.” He added, “This law school is gonna be pumping out God-fearing, American-loving, family-defending attorneys”:

The choice of Louisiana College is no surprise. The school claims it “seeks to view all areas of knowledge from a distinctively Christian perspective and integrate Biblical truth thoroughly with each academic discipline” and believes “academic freedom of a Christian professor is limited by the preeminence of Jesus Christ, the authoritative nature of the Holy Scriptures, and the mission of the institution.”

In 2008 the school barred members of the Christian LGBT group Soul Force from appearing on campus. In his decision to bar the group, the college’s president cited a fake James Madison quote propagated by David Barton, which states that the U.S. government was based on “the Ten Commandments.”

Now David Barton is serving on the board of the law school.

Along with Perkins and Barton, Religious Right leaders on the board include Alan Sears of the Alliance Defense Fund, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association,Alveda King of Priests for Life, Religious Right luminary Tim LaHaye and his wife Beverly LaHaye of Concerned Women for America, Kelly Shackleford of the Liberty Institute and Reagan’s Attorney GeneralEdwin Meese. Republican politicians including Reps. Rodney Alexander and John Fleming, former congressman Bob McEwen, and senatorial candidate and Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz are also on the board.

PFAW

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Tags: Josh Bernstein Kandiss Taylor Lauren Witzke Mario Murillo Stew Peters Stewart Rhodes Tony Perkins Capitol Insurrection Leftovers Family Research Council

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// kirp tpusa ~ crt/ maSK

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/family-research-council-raises-money-for-right-wing-school-board-takeover-campaign/

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aha/yikes indist betw xian nat'l, evanG AND QANON?!

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/christian-nationalists-believe-capitol-rioters-as-victims-report/

ME

christian nationalists are attempting to put a different spin on the Jan. 6 insurrection. While most Americans have witnessed some degree of the deadly series of events that have transpired, Christian nationalists believe the rioters who stormed the CApitol are actually the victims, according to Americans United.

"The assault by a pro-Trump crowd should have posed something of a dilemma for Christian nationalists, who often pose as "law and order" conservatives, given that police officers were assaulted by an out-of-control mob," the publication reports. "But the same Christian nationalists who had assailed Black Lives Matter over anti-police-brutality protests just months earlier couldn't bring themselves to condemn the violence at the Capitol."

As a result of their refusal to hold rioters accountable and accept what actually happened, more conspiracies have been birthed.

For example, Jeff Jansen, head of Global Fire Ministries, has repeatedly claimed Trump will rise to power again; a dangerous lie national security experts believe will only infuriate the Trump base more when it does not come to pass.

"The Trump administration is on its way in; the pedophilia Biden administration – the fake administration – Biden's administration is on its way out," Jansen said. "I don't care if you like it or not, it doesn't matter. We all know what took place, and God is going to do something amazing in this nation and through this nation. It's revival time. It's revolution time."

As a result of Christians like Jansen, there is a growing concern that the conspiracy-driven prophetic movement is becoming "one of the fastest-growing corners of Christianity," according to New York Times reporter Ruth Graham.

Offering her perspective of Christian prophets' actions, Graham previously wrote:

"Many are independent evangelists who do not lead churches or other institutions. They operate primarily online and through appearances at conferences or as guest speakers in churches, making money through book sales, donations and speaking fees. And they are part of the rising appeal of conspiracy theories in Christian settings, echoed by the popularity of QAnon among many evangelicals and a resistance to mainstream sources of information."

Although there have been efforts to launch a bipartisan committee to investigate the Capitol insurrection, Christian nationalists have joined Republican lawmakers' plight not to further investigate.

In the normal world, the pushback against the formation of a 1/6 commission also raises questions since Christian nationalists claim to believe rioters were actually victims.

However, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, has praised Republican lawmakers for blocking the effort by way of the filibuster as he described the commission as nothing more than "political theater." He also accused Democratic lawmakers of pushing to change the narrative although footage of the day makes it clear what transpired.

"This is about political theater, plain and simple," Perkins wrote in a column. "It's about creating a narrative, aided by the media, that all Republicans are dangerous extremists. At least GOP leaders are pushing back and insisting that they won't be a part of the Democratic charade."

Christian nationalists' disturbing perspective and continued efforts to support Capitol rioters suggests the movement will not wane anytime soon.

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/family-research-council-launches-center-for-biblical-worldview/

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/matt-gaetz-2651215213/

no lnx twt

att Gaetz blasted after standing up for anti-LGBTQ hate group and promoting a 'fascist sympathizer'

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida speaking at the 2019 Teen Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Washington, D.C., Gage Skidmore

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement March 25, 2021

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on Thursday stood up for the Family Research Council, a hate group that has spent nearly 40 years spreading dangerous lies about LGBTQ people under the cloak of "religious freedom." He also attacked the Southern Poverty Law Center, a decades-old institution that tracks and reports on the more than 800 current hate groups of all kinds across the U.S.

It did not turn out well for the Florida Congressman, as some rushed to remind Gaetz, a top Trump MAGA sympathizer, of his own associations with the far right.

Gaetz tweeted out an article from the conspiracy theory website Gateway Pundit, whose owner was regularly labeled the stupidest man on the Internet. The article, by Cassandra Fairbanks, paints Gaetz in a very favorable light to his far right supporters. Fairbanks previously worked for Sputnik, the Russian government state media site.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate group. The @splcenter's designation of @FRCdc as a "hate group" caused a… https://t.co/QiJ5oaTm1j

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@Rep. Matt Gaetz)1616693100.0

The SPLC is not a hate group.

Fairbanks, according to domestic extremism expert Jared Holt, is a "self-professed fascist sympathizer."

Sharing articles from a self-professed fascist sympathizer to own the SPLC https://t.co/a3kXCUcQ9o https://t.co/gIpDZWqBHo

— Jared Holt (@Jared Holt)1616700329.0

Journalist Christopher Mathias offered up a similar characterization:

Hardly a week goes by without a GOP congressman promoting/citing the propaganda of fascists. This time, it's Gaet… https://t.co/S6pvvRhI0f

— Christopher Mathias (@Christopher Mathias)1616701049.0

Gaetz also suggested MAGA is not a dangerous extremist group:

How long until MAGA hats are considered an "extremist symbol?" How long until Christian or pro-life groups are "to… https://t.co/igtqPlLpTr

— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@Rep. Matt Gaetz)1616697480.0

Here's how some are responding to Congressman Gaetz's attack.

Journalist Daniel Moritz-Rabson posted a graphic of Fairbanks appearing on VDARE with its founder. VDARE is a white nationalist hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

oops pic.twitter.com/R17NOTDOug

— Daniel Moritz-Rabson (@DMoritzRabson) March 25, 2021

Journalist Sam Youngman notes Rep. Gaetz took Holocaust denier Chuck/Charles Johnson to the State of the Union Address and appears to continue to support Trump's attempt to overturn the election:

This person took a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union and voted against honoring the police who fought off… https://t.co/nYQj0c0PJs

— Sam Youngman (@Sam Youngman)1616701347.0

This Twitter user offered up the details:...

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-evangelicals-2649541067/

alexh

Christian Right is in mourning over President Donald Trump being voted out of office. Pat Robertson, the far-right evangelical who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, has declared that the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on January 20, 2021 must be prevented, saying, "We will not give up this great country. And Satan, you cannot have it." But the irony is that the incoming president is much more religious than Trump, who has demonstrated how little he knows about Christianity and the Bible.

Although Trump was raised Presbyterian, religion was never a high priority in his life. But when he ran for president in 2016, Trump realized that the Christian Right was a prominent voting bloc in the GOP and went out of his way to pander to the far-right White evangelicals he had no connection to in the past. The Trump of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s was more of a Blue Dog Democrat than a GOP culture warrior, and he spent a lot more time in casinos than in churches.

Journalist Ed Kilgore, in an article published by New York Magazine on December 17, notes Trump's history of butchering Biblical references during his speeches.

Kilgore explains, "Before Donald Trump became the very favorite politician of White conservative evangelicals, he was regularly a figure of sport for displaying exceptional ignorance in all matters religious. A particularly rich example of his clumsiness occurred when he was campaigning at evangelical stronghold Liberty University early in 2016 and tried to quote a Bible verse that was very familiar to the audience, since it's etched on several buildings there."

Kilgore adds that there were many other "religious gaffes Trump committed while stumping for votes" in 2016.

"On another occasion along the campaign trail," Kilgore recalls, "Trump was asked about his favorite line of scripture. He delivered a word salad for a while and finally tried to recall 'an eye for an eye,' not the sort of thing Christians of any variety consider normative for the faith of the Prince of Peace…... Just prior to the Iowa caucuses, Trump was in a Council Bluffs church when a plate came down the pews with communion bread on it. The billionaire misidentified it as a collection plate and put a couple of bills on it."

Kilgore also notes that in 2017, Trump met with two Presbyterian minsters and was surprised to learn that they didn't consider themselves evangelicals but rather, described themselves as "Mainline Protestants."

Of course, anyone with even a basic knowledge of Christianity realizes that Presbyterians aren't evangelicals any more than Episcopalians or Lutherans — two other examples of Mainline Protestants — are evangelicals. And there's no way that either Biden, a devout Catholic, or former President Barack Obama, a Mainline Protestant, would have made that mistake or confused a communion plate with a collection plate. Unlike Trump, Biden and Obama both have a long history of being churchgoing Christians and obviously have an extensive knowledge of the Bible.

[twt]

if Pat Robertson were to sit down with Biden or Obama, they could have an in-depth conversation about scripture. Yet Robertson, like much of the Christian Right, adores Trump while hating Biden and Obama — which underscores the deeply tribalist nature of the Christian Right.

The Christian Right has long been a hate movement, and it is as much about White nationalism and far-right identity politics as it is about Protestant fundamentalism. The late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., founder of Liberty University and co-founder of the Moral Majority, was a notorious segregationist during the 1950s and 1960s, when he vigorously defended Jim Crow laws in the pulpit and argued that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a not a true Christian because of his anti-segregation views. During the 1980s, Falwell defended the racist apartheid regime in South African and encouraged Christians to buy krugerrands to support it.

The late Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, known for being an arch-conservative in his day, was vehemently critical of Falwell and the Christian Right during the 1980s — describing them as dangerous fanatics and warning that the GOP was making a huge mistake by allying itself with that movement. But many Republicans ignored Goldwater, much to the GOP's detriment.

To the Christian Right and far-right White evangelicals, the fact that Biden and Obama are more religious than Trump is irrelevant. Robertson, the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family) and other evangelical Trump supporters are extreme tribalists, and they view Trump as part of their tribe — which is why Trump got a pass when, according to his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, he had extramarital affairs with a porn star (Stormy Daniels) and a Playboy model (Karen McDougal) and paid them hush money to keep quiet.

Trump repeatedly attacked Biden as anti-Christian during his 2020 presidential campaign. But in 2017, Trump didn't even know the difference between Presbyterians and evangelicals.

The Christian Right will miss Trump dearly when he leaves off on January 20, 2021. And no matter how much Biden goes to church or accurately quotes the Bible, it won't matter to the far-right evangelical extremists who value White identity politics above all else.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/council-for-national-policy/

Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. What is the shadow network behind the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court? Who selected and groomed her for this moment? Who's financing the campaign to get her confirmed? Who's counting on her to side with President Trump if he's losing the election and wants the Supreme Court to declare him the winner? For the answers, Bill Moyers talks to journalist and investigator Anne Nelson about her book: SHADOW NETWORK: MEDIA, MONEY, AND THE SECRET HUB OF THE RADICAL RIGHT. In it, she exposes the powerful and little-known Council for National Policy, the organization behind the conservative movement of the past 40 years – from Ronald Reagan's secret war in Central America to their success in turning the Supreme Court into the Trump Court. Ms. Nelson has received the Livingston Award for her journalism and a Guggenheim Fellowship for historical research. Here to talk with her is Bill Moyers[vid]

MOYERS: Let me begin with the most current part of the story, which comes just a little bit after your book is published when the conservative movement is facing a very decisive encounter with the very forces it's been trying to defeat now for 40 years. How do you think the shadow network reads the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court? What are they making of it?

ANNE NELSON: Well, I think that they consider it a great triumph and a kind of culmination of 40 years of effort. And I demure a bit at the term conservative because this is, for me, the radical right. It is so far to the right of mainstream American public opinion that I feel that it's in a different category both in terms of its ideology and its tactics. But they decided way back in the day of Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the movement that they–

BILL MOYERS: In the early 1970s, right?

Read an excerpt]

ANNE NELSON: We're going back to the '70s and even earlier, because he was active on the Barry Goldwater campaign. And he was frustrated time and again by moderates in the Republican Party and people who were willing to work with Democrats to advance policy and solutions to public problems. And he created organizations and tactics that he openly declared should destroy the regime, as he called it, which would be the U.S. government as we've known it for the last century.

BILL MOYERS: Paul Weyrich is the man I remember saying–

PAUL WEYRICH: I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populous goes down.

BILL MOYERS: He was essentially saying, as a newly anointed leader of the religious right, what their philosophy was. The fewer people vote, the better their chance.

ANNE NELSON: That's right. And from the beginning, in terms of their electoral tactics, it has been a matter of weaponizing certain churches and pastors and really exerting tremendous pressure on them to use churches as instruments of a radical right ideology. And then using similar tactics to suppress votes for Democrats, especially in key battleground states.

BILL MOYERS: So that's why you conclude in your book they were to the right of the Republican Party. They were not just an offshoot of the Republican Party. They were not just fundraisers for the Republican Party, but they were ideologically and organizationally taking the Republican Party far to the right.

ANNE NELSON: Absolutely, and somewhat to my surprise, I found that their prototype was the Southern Baptist Convention, where they decided that in order to move it to the right, they had to use questionable tactics to elevate their supporters to key positions of influence and purge the Southern Baptist Convention of moderates in the seminaries and in the colleges and among the pastors. And it was a fairly ruthless process, and once these tactics were developed, they applied it to the Republican Party. And you had the same kind of tactics going on of purging moderates, some of whom had been in office for years.

BILL MOYERS: I should point out to some of our younger listeners and readers that the Southern Baptist Convention at the time and still today was the largest Protestant denomination in America. You know, something like it eventually reached 16 and a half million members scattered throughout the South and the West.We'll come back to them in a moment. What do you think about the NEW YORK TIMES' assessment that Amy Coney Barrett represents a new conservativism rooted in faith. That's how their headline described a three-page portrait of her life and career. Does that make sense to you?

ANNE NELSON: Not entirely, because as a conservative Catholic, she follows in the footsteps of others such as Brett Kavanaugh and Antonin Scalia. So that's not very new. And what I look at in my book SHADOW NETWORK is how these interlocking organizations support each other. The book is about the Council for National Policy– a radical right-wing organization that is very secretive, and it brings together big donors like the DeVos family and oil interests from Texas and Oklahoma and political operatives. And, for example, members include the leadership of the Federalist Society. Well, Amy Coney Barrett was a member of the Federalist Society for a number of years and is still a speaker at their events. It includes the head of Hillsdale College, which is one of their campus partners. Amy ConeyBarrett was commencement speaker for Hillsdale College this year.So, there are all of these organizations that have been turning their wheels to promote her really for several years going back. She appeared on previous lists of potential nominees for the Supreme Court, and I don't believe she would have been included in those lists had she not confirmed to their traditional idea of an activist judge.

BILL MOYERS: They knew what they were looking for.

ANNE NELSON: And I should add thatone of the most powerful components in the Council for National Policy is the anti-abortion movement.Organizations such as the Susan B. Anthony List and Concerned Women for America and other interests, which are anti-environmentalist interests from the fossil fuels industry. So, I think that we've seen a roadmap of what to expect moving forward.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me, who does make up the Council for National Policy?

ANNE NELSON: So, the Council for National Policy has traditionally been around 400 members. From the beginning, it's included people with big money, a lot of them from the Texas and Oklahoma oil industries, but also the DeVos family of Michigan from the Amway fortune, and Betsy DeVos, of course. So, it has the big money to pay for things. It's got the leaders of so-called grassroots organizations. Now, I say so-called, because they do not spring from the grassroots the way that you would expect from the name. They are organized with a great deal of money from the top down. So, for example, the National Rifle Association– their leadership is part of the CNP. They get money from the donors, they organize their millions of members, and you combine these with the strategists and the media owners. And I spend a lot of time in my book talking about thepower of fundamentalist and conservative radio in swing states. Things that people on the East Coast overlook to a terrible degree. And the same thing with fundamentalist broadcasting, which has really several of these broadcasters — the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Trinity Broadcasting Network have really turned into outlets replicating the messaging from this organization. So, you have them interlocking and interacting and each supporting each other's function. And I should explain something here, which is that they represent historically a white, Protestant, I'm sorry, but male-dominated patriarchy–

BILL MOYERS: No, that's okay.

ANNE NELSON: And I have to say that demographically its time has passed. The United States has become more diverse religiously, ethnically, and racially. And they recognize that their core positions are not supported by the majority of Americans. So, they went to the limit, pulled out all the stops to get Trump elected by a tiny margin, but they doubt that they can do that again. The signs are not good. What they can do is make their hold on the federal courts concrete through the Supreme Court, and therefore, get majorities in cases like gerrymandering, voter suppression, and their political activation of the churches with tax-exempt status. And further their hold on power through the courts.

BILL MOYERS: So which part of the shadow network do you think chose, mentored, and groomed Amy Coney Barrett for this moment?

ANNE NELSON: Well, I have to speculate here. But I would see a fairly straight line from her position toLeonard Leo's. Now, Leonard Leo is a very conservative Catholic. He was the operational figure of the Federalist Society for a number of years, and recently he shifted from that position to an even more activist position. Amy Coney Barrett was already a member of the Federalist Society. The Federalist Society has a pipeline through the lower federal courts, which she benefited from. So, in terms of this Catholic interaction they would be quite close to each other. Another key figure is Carrie Severino, who is from the Judicial Crisis Network, which was co-founded by Leonard Leo. And again, very right-wing Catholics who have tended to be overlooked while people focus on the fundamentalist Protestants.But Ralph Reed, who has been somebody who's been active with the fundamentalist politicization for decades declared openly years ago that the next step to their campaign was to enlist the Catholic vote. And they've been aggressively doing that in recent years.

BILL MOYERS: And then there's Don McGahn who was for three years Donald Trump's chief White House counsel, graduate of Notre Dame, admirer of Amy Coney Barrett, who was scouting himself for recruits to bring up, train, groom, and put into the mix for potential Supreme Court justices. And I read that he was highly enthusiastic about her, had talked to Leo and that they had you had both these White House and legal forces behind her, knowing that she was one of them.

ANNE NELSON: Yes. And I would guess that they suffered enough embarrassment over the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the discussion of possible sexual harassment that was involved, that it was a convenient moment to bring a female to the top of the list to avoid that. So, there were a number of elements in her favor. I should add that in the process of these nominationsTrump cut a deal in 2016 with this movement, and it was publicly reported that he was going to accept lists of nominees from three organizations run by Council for National Policy members: the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the National Rifle Association, believe it or not. And he has actually followed suit with that. The Federalist Society has taken the leadon this, but you will find the Heritage Foundation in the background of all of these proceedings, as well as the NRA.

BILL MOYERS: Did you see anybody from the shadow network at the White House when President Trump announced her nomination? Could you identify any there as members of the Council for National Policy?

ANNE NELSON: Why, as a matter of fact, I could. I've got the September 2020 membership list. So, I went through U.S.A. Today's publication of who was present at that event, which has been called the COVID superspreader event on September 29th. And what I found was that they had six members of the White House staff, nine members of congress, and 14 current members of the Council for National Policy.

BILL MOYERS: Fourteen?

The moment of truth in those hearings came when she [Amy Coney Barrett] was asked if it was against the law to interfere with the vote in a federal election. And she couldn't answer that. Which to me demonstrated either an ignorance of the law or a disregard for the law that is truly alarming on the eve of an election.

ANNE NELSON: Fourteen, and 12 of them were from the leadership bodies, the board of governors, and the gold circle elite members.So, they were there in force. They were having a victory dance this was a culmination of plans that had been in the works for decades.

BILL MOYERS: But if she is willing to put people at risk that way, to go along with the president in ignoring guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, are we okay in asking questions about her judgment? I mean, could she not have said, “Mr. President, I'm honored by this nomination, but can you wait until there's better days for us to do this?"

ANNE NELSON: I think that statement would have required someone who could restrain their ambition. And for me, the moment of truth in those hearings came when she was asked if it was against the law to interfere with the vote in a federal election. And she couldn't answer that either. Which to me demonstrated either an ignorance of the law or a disregard for the law that is truly alarming on the eve of an election.

BILL MOYERS: I was noticing in a story in THE WASHINGTON POST that the Council for National Policy had a three-day meeting in Southern California. And one member — a woman named Rachel Bovard —described Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Thomas as a crucial link to the White House. “She is one of the most powerful and fierce women in Washington. She is really the tip of the spear in these efforts."Did you come across Ginni Thomas in your book?

ANNE NELSON: I came across her repeatedly, and she has risen to the rank of the executive committee of CNP Action, which is their lobbying arm. She also is very active with another CNP member named Charlie Kirk who runs something called Turning Point U.S.A. She's also a so-called correspondent for a right-wing media platform called The Daily Caller, which is owned by members of the Council for National Policy. So, Ginni Thomas, who is from Omaha is married to a Supreme Court justice and is both a public and behind-the-scenes radical right-wing activist across the country. I don't know what the protocol is for spouses of Supreme Court justices, but I find it difficult to believe that people think this is appropriate.

BILL MOYERS: But what struck me about that is that so many of the characters that are now on stage in the third and fourth year of Trump's administration are clearly linked by the Council for National Policy, something few Americans have heard of. How did you come upon it?

ANNE NELSON: In my early 20s, I was a reporter in El Salvador. And from there, I joined the staff of Human Rights Watch. And so, I knew a lot about death squads in El Salvador, and learned in writing this book that the Council for National Policy and its partners had hosted death squad leader, Roberto d'Aubuisson, in Washington. An idea that was just shocking to me. They were heavily involved in the Contras during the Reagan administration. The support for the extreme right wing in El Salvador. I didn't know that at the time. I circled back to them decades later. I was in my hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma, driving to Walmart and had the radio on. And started hearing some radio accusations against John Kerry who was running for president at the time, that shocked me, because the local preacher was claiming thatJohn Kerry would make heterosexual marriages unsanctified by promoting marriage equality. And it was a very strange statement. So later I started tracking who owned that radio station, and then I found out it belonged to a group of radio stations owned by members of the Council for National Policy. And then I said, “Well, what's that?" And, as you know, an investigative reporter just keeps pulling at the thread until something emerges.They were incredibly secretive, and I think it's only thanks to the internet and things that they've inadvertently published online that's made this research even possible.

BILL MOYERS: Let me summarize what I take away from your book the SHADOW NETWORK. You say that, for thesepast four decades, it's been a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes out of sight, correct?

ANNE NELSON: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: How did they get away with that?

ANNE NELSON: Well, I say a few times in the book that I think the Democrats have been asleep at the wheel. But part of the problem is rooted in our crisis in journalism. Because when I was growing up, you had lots of vibrant local newspapers that published AP and New York Times syndicate stories on international and national news, as well as the local news and the basketball scores. And you had a population across the country that was working from the same page, as it were. These newspapers have been dying off. They have lost their business model due to the digital revolution and the economic crises. And nature abhors a vacuum. In their place, these fundamentalist radio stations and this engine for misinformation has taken their place. And it makes me angry. When you lose the local professional news organizations, the substitutes can lead people down a terribly damaging path.TIMPONE LOVAL LABS

BILL MOYERS: How do you connect that to the growth of the Council for National Policy.

ANNE NELSON: They use a lot of stalking horses in terms of their organizations. So, I think most people wouldn't think of the National Rifle Association as primarily a political organization. Certainly, they didn't in the 1970s. It was kind of a shooting club. It's been converted into a political organization. And that has happened with tens of thousands of churches. And I grew up in those communities. I don't think my friends and neighbors and family members went to church thinking, “We're going to go get told how to vote." That's not what they went for. But now that's what they get. And they are given voting guides in the sanctuaries inserted into the church bulletin, right? You turn the page from the hymn, and there you get the voting guide basically telling you to vote for a Republican. But it doesn't have the signature of the Council for National Policy. It just says, iVoterGuide produced by the Family Research Council, whose president has been the president of the Council for National Policy. So, you've got t0 connect the dots, but the dots are all there and highly connectable. You have people who are identifying with organizations, and they're looking at news media such as The Daily Caller, such as the Christian Broadcasting Network, such as Salem Media, which are tied into this system.And it's not about journalism. It's about messaging: we're going to tell you what to think.

BILL MOYERS: But this organization started, with a handful of people. How did they multiply their effect so thoroughly throughout our political system that they now dominate. How did that happen?

ANNE NELSON: Well, I think that what you had is this odd element of our electoral system where theelectoral collegecarries this weight. And a lot of candidates for national office focus on the popular vote, but the strategists like Paul Weyrich and others realize that the popular vote is actually irrelevant. The electoral college is what elects our president. So, what they figured out how to do was identify critical bands of voters who were corresponding to these mostly religious organizations in critical states. If you could reach these millions of voters, many of whom were not engaged, and convince them that it was a sin to vote for a Democrat, then you could win the state. And if you won the right states, you'd win the electoral college. And they worked on this approach over various decades. And they kept going to various Republican candidates and bringing their voters to them and trying to cut a deal where they would deliver the response in terms of power.

And I have to say that, a number of presidents including Reagan and the first President Bush had those conversations and reneged on the deal, right? They did not deliver the cabinet appointments. They did not deliver the reactionary social policies. And what they found with Trump was a transactional president who didn't really care about abortion or gay marriage or any of the rest of it. He just wanted the office. So, he cut a deal and he honored it. And he gave the former president of the Council for National Policy, Tony Perkins, carte blanche to write elements of the Republican Party platform in 2016, which have been just renewed for 2020 without amendment. So, they worked behind the scenes. It's been influence peddling, and it's been big, big money. The book traces hundreds of millions of dollars that have sloshed around in this circular way where the DeVoses fund the Koch brothers' operations. And the Koch brothers fund the DeVoses and Foster Friess funds The Daily Caller. And when you have the Democrats not paying sufficient attention to the swing states, when you have the local media in a state of collapse, that is the window of opportunity.

Strategists like Paul Weyrich and others realize that the popular vote is actually irrelevant. The electoral college is what elects our president. So, what they figured out how to do was identify critical bands of voters.]

BILL MOYERS: So, we have the pastors on one side and the plutocrats on the other side. You have this alliance between very dogmatic, religious zealots and men of huge wealth whose interest is not in piety. What joins them?

ANNE NELSON: Well, I think that, in religious terms, it's all about mammon.

BILL MOYERS: Mammon being the biblical term for money.

ANNE NELSON: That's right.

BILL MOYERS: The biblical metaphor for money.

ANNE NELSON: Yes. I keep looking at their so-called positions of principle. And, you know, you scratch at them and they don't go very deep. But what you do have with the Kochs' and the DeVoses and the various fossil fuel interests are people who've made immense fortunes and are terrified of losing their economic power. But also, these people don't want to pay taxes, and so pushing through a tax bill that favored the fraction of a 1% was a priority. And Donald Trump and the Republican Senate delivered it.

BILL MOYERS: The Washington Post last week released some video of the August meeting of the Council for National Policy. Let me just read a few things that were said at that meeting. Videos provided to the Post covering dozens of hours of CNP meetings over three days in February and three in August offer an inside view of participants' obsessions. Here are some of the things that were said:

BILL WALTON: This is a spiritual battle we're in. This is good versus evil. We have to do everything we can to win.

BILL MOYERS: –said the Council for National Policy's executive committee president, Bill Walton.Ralph Reed, chairman of the nonprofit, Faith and Freedom Coalition told the CNP audience that conservatives are going to be harvesting ballots in churches. “We're going to be specifically going in, not only to white evangelical churches, but into Hispanic and Asian churches and collecting those ballots.'"And then, here's the one that really stands out. At that meeting, J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department official and the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a charity, described mail-in voting as the number one left-wing agenda. He urged the activists not to worry about the criticism that might come their way. Quote, “Be not afraid of the accusations that you're a voter suppressor." Any of that surprise you?

ANNE NELSON: Not in the least. On the contrary, you'll find the footprints of those statements in my book. One of the techniques that this movement has used is using data profiles and directing information to voters to either get them to vote for Republicans or to suppress the vote if they're not likely to. The Koch brothers brought state-of-the-art political data operations to the table with an organization called i360. And that was harnessed to organizations that were run by CNP members. 

So, for example, one of them was the Susan B. Anthony List, which is anti-abortion. One of them was the NRA. They also combined data from churches and from political data and consumer data. So that allowed canvassers for these organizations to do their door-to-door canvassing having a huge amount of information about each individual voter, and a tailored individual script for them. So, for example, if you are canvassing in Springfield, Missouri, and you're working for the Susan B. Anthony List, you know that at such-and-such an address, there's a Catholic housewife with six kids there who watched an anti-abortion film on Netflix and ordered LIVES OF THE SAINTS from Amazon. You have all of that in your cell phone, and you also have a script that's been prepared and tailored for that voter, right? But you're going to have a totally different script based on the data for the next-door neighbor who's a gun owner who's all about the second amendment. 

And the Democrats have lagged behind, not in terms of the data they have, but the way they've networked data across state lines and to organizations that are doing their political groundwork. So that's been a factor.The use of data has been very important in the last few campaigns, and not always well-understood. But there's also a really important matter of how data is used to suppress votes. And that's where I would direct people to a news story done by Channel Four in Britain. The Council for National Policy partners and the Koch brothers' data platform i360 used data from Cambridge Analyticawith several hundred million voters, with some2,000 data points for every voter. So that includes you and me, Bill, okay? They know a lot about us, and so what they did in this story documenting what happened with African Americans in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was find that if voters were not likely to vote for Republicans. If they leaned Democratic, they would target them with misinformation that would disincline them to vote at all. And in other cases, such as what's been documented in Michigan, some 90,000 African American voters were persuaded not to vote for the top of the ticket for Hillary Clinton by these methods. So, in these states, they always go by very, very narrow margins. So, I would argue that a lot of these data operations, some of them of questionable legality, have actually changed the course of electoral history.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think they're doing for this election in two weeks?

ANNE NELSON: Well, we know that the Trump 2020 app has highly questionable practices, in terms of its privacy and the way it accesses people's cell phone directories, all of their contacts, friends and family, and then sends messages out to them, often without the user knowing that they're doing it. They also combine that with consumer data. So, for example, if you downloaded their app on one phone that was a different account, they could trace your credit card records back to your own account. They also use geolocation, so once you download the app, they figure out where you are and what kind of messaging would appeal to you and leverage you to attract other voters. And they use this through beacons that are placed around areas like political rallies and churches, right, to locate the people with the apps and then engage them for political purpose. It has been recently revealed that thesebeacons had even been implanted in Trump yard signs. So, they're really, I would say, on the cutting edge of political technology. And it's in this very murky area of law where there are abusive practices involving privacy, but there's no clear legal framework to govern it.

BILL MOYERS: And what stuns me is their ability to connect this very sophisticated information gained by very up-to-date, modern technology to a lot of poor pastors in East Texas and Southern Alabama who are concerned about the state of the world. And here, they've been led into, one of the most sophisticated political campaigns that really has not their interest at heart. And they become soldiers in the crusade–

ANNE NELSON: Absolutely. And again, these are the people I grew up with, and I see a lot of cases where the pastors have been bullied into it. And they say, “Wait a minute, I want people to come to church and reflect on spirituality. We're not here to run a political campaign."

BILL MOYERS: Yet the fact remains, as you make clear in the book, that they have a very acute grasp of electoral college politics. How do you win the 270 votes of the electoral college, even if you lost the popular vote? How did they get there?

ANNE NELSON: Well, they work harder at it. I think they worked harder at it than the Democrats have. They've got a pollster named George Barna.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

ANNE NELSON: And he has paid a lot of attention to these voters. He has identified characteristics to them, and one of them is that older white evangelicals from largely rural areas have a 91% turnout at the polling places. That is powerful. And that's something where it's not exactly fashionable in Democratic circles to talk about that. And why we should have a dialogue with these voters. So, when you get that information, and when you work over and over again to refine messaging that will touch a nerve with these groups, some of it's misinformation, and some of it's just hard work and smart strategy.

BILL MOYERS: And they have enlisted these fundamentalist white churches to serve as their political proxies by doing smart things, like inviting them on junkets that the CNP pays for, writing sermons for them to download, producing their church bulletins for them, and delivering voter guidesto them for distribution to their congregations. That's down at the very grassroots. And they do it.

ANNE NELSON: They've even constructed a multi-million-dollar Museum of the Bible, steps from Capitol Hill. And it's really a kind of monument to conservative fundamentalist political ideology.

BILL MOYERS: It's really a remarkable turn of American politics in the last 40 years, and you have written a very smart, detailed, informative, and narratively-driven book on it. You say, in your epilogue, in the beginning, there were the Southern Baptists, and there were two of them in particular, Pastor Paige Patterson — who became president of the Baptist seminary I had attended long before him — and a state judge named Paul Pressler. In effect, you say, they started it all. The Southern Baptists were the core.

ANNE NELSON: They were kind of the godfathers, I would say, yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Southern Baptists had long believed in the inerrancy of the Bible, that the Bible is literally God's word. But my generation of Baptists were discovering historical criticism of the Bible and began to change the denomination. And what Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler did was to alarm the Baptists who still believed in the literal meaning of the Bible and said, “They're going to take it away from you if you're not careful." And so they were able to drive the moderate leaders out of the Southern Baptist Convention and replace them with literalist, fundamentalist pastors from churches around the country, including some very large churches. And before we knew it, the Southern Baptist Convention had become a radically conservative Republican denomination.

ANNE NELSON: Yeah, and I see that as tragic, because it divides families, it divides communities. It changes the nature of spirituality in these communities. But then you see those tactics, which are all about power, right? And they're replicated in the Republican Party. Same thing happens. You drive out the moderates, you defeat the moderates, and you replace them with ideologues or card-carrying members of the movement. And I think we can look at Amy Coney Barrett as another iteration of the same thing. What you're doing is weeding out the moderate and liberal judges and replacing them with people who will march to this beat. And traditionally, that's not been the principle for our court. People could say, “The courts need to have some kind of standard that's open to all Americans," not something that's driving a particular minority ideology. So, for me, that's the glaring danger that's facing our democracy.

BILL MOYERS: And you sum up the Council for National Policy as, “An elite club of high-powered fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, deploying a media empire to flood the country with propaganda, bankrolling handpicked colleges to promote extremist Libertarian ideas, and to groom up and coming politicians," and I would say judges, “to advance its cause." And you say this is all aimed at the very heart of democracy.

ANNE NELSON: Well, democracy is the blind man and the elephant, because my democracy is an America where people from diverse religions and national backgrounds came together and chose to live together under the rule of law. It aspired to give everyone equal opportunity and rights as citizens. And I don't want another religion imposing its practice on me, that's not my idea of being an American or respecting my fellow Americans. If their idea of the American ideal is so different, I would think they'd have to show some evidence that the majority of Americans saw it their way. And the evidence is all to the contrary and moving in the opposite direction. So that's why we're seeing so many manifestations of questionable maneuvers for securing power, as opposed to winning it through the ballot box. We've got two weeks before the elections. Then we've got another period which is the interregnum until the inauguration. But then we're going to have this entire cohort in the judiciary which is going to be defining our public life for years, perhaps decades to come. So I'm afraid it's going to be no rest for the weary. The cliche is, “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." And I think that eternal vigilance is going to be very important for everyone who wants to defend other people's rights.

BILL MOYERS: Anne Nelson, thank you so much for SHADOW NETWORK: MEDIA, MONEY, AND THE SECRET HUB OF THE RADICAL RIGHT. And thank you for your time today.

ANNE NELSON: Thank you so much, Bill.

ANNOUNCER:Thanks for listening to Moyers on Democracy. On our website, you can read an excerpt from Anne Nelson's book. Until next time, you'll find all this and more at Billmoyers.com.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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https://theconversation.com/faith-and-politics-mix-to-drive-evangelical-christians-climate-change-denial-143145

US Christians, especially evangelical Christians, identify as environmentalists at very low rates compared to the general population. According to a Pew Research Center poll from May 2020, while 62% of religiously unaffiliated U.S. adults agree that the Earth is warming primarily due to human action, only 35% of U.S. Protestants do – including just 24% of white evangelical Protestants.

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Politically powerful Christian interest groups publicly dispute the climate science consensus.A coalition of major evangelical groups, including Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, launched a movement opposing what they describe as “the false worldview” of environmentalism, which supposedly is “striving to put America, and the world, under its destructive control.”

Studies show that belief in miracles and an afterlife is associated with lower estimates of the risks posed by climate change. This raises the question: Does religion itself predispose people against climate science?

Surveys of people around the world, as well as social science research on denial, suggest the answer to this question is more nuanced than a simple yes or no.

Where religion and science can’t be reconciled

An automatic resistance to science would seem to make sense for some religious believers.

There are several ways that core aspects of modern scientific knowledge tend to undermine literalist or fundamentalist readings of religious texts. In particular, evolution by natural selection, the central concept underlying the biological sciences, is utterly incompatible with most creationist faith traditions.

Religion offers the comforts of a measure of control and reassurance via an omnipotent deity that can be placated by ritual. In contrast, the scientist’s naturalistic universe offers neither an intrinsic moral order nor a final reward, which can be unsettling for the devout and in conflict with their faith.

Because of these mismatches, one might expect those with a strong religious affiliation to be reflexively suspicious of scientific findings. Indeed, in a large international survey, 64% of those who described religion as an “important part” of their life said they would side with their religious teachings in a disagreement between science and their religion. Other studies find that, for the faithful, religion and science are at odds as ultimate explanations for natural phenomena.

Climate science denial may stem more from politics than religion

Social scientist Dan Kahan rejects the idea of an automatic link between religiosity and any anti-science bias. He argues that religiosity only incidentally tracks science denial because some scientific findings have become “culturally antagonistic” to some identity groups.

According to Kahan’s data, identification as a political conservative, and as white, is much more predictive of rejecting the climate consensus than overall religiosity. He argues that anti-science bias has to do with threats to values that define one’s cultural identity. There are all kinds of topic areas wherein people judge expert qualifications based on whether the “expert” confirms or contradicts the subject’s cherished view.

Social scientist Donald Braman agrees that science denial is context dependent. He points out that while conservative white males are more likely to be skeptics on global warming, different demographic groups disagree with experts on other particular topics.

For example, where a conservative person invested in the social and economic status quo might feel threatened by evidence for global warming, liberal egalitarians might be threatened by evidence, say, that nuclear waste could be safely stored underground.

As I explain in my book, “The Truth About Denial”, there’s ample evidence for a universal human tendency toward motivated reasoning when faced with facts that threaten one’s ideological worldview. The motivated reasoner begins with a conclusion to which he or she is committed, and assesses evidence or expertise according to whether it supports that conclusion.

White American evangelicals trend very strongly toward political conservatism. They also exhibit the strongest correlation, among any faith group, between religiosity and either climate science denial or a general anti-science bias.

Meanwhile, African-American Protestants, who are theologically aligned with evangelical Protestants but politically aligned with progressives, show some of the highest levels of climate concern.

North America is the only high-income region where people who follow a religion are substantially more likely to say they favor their religious teachings over science when disagreements arise. This finding is driven mainly by politically conservative U.S. religious denominations – including conservative Catholics.

A major new study looking at data from 60 countries showed that, while religiosity in the U.S. is correlated with more negative attitudes about science, you don’t see this kind of association in many other countries. Elsewhere, religiosity is sometimes even correlated with disproportionately positive attitudes about science.

And the U.S. is generally an outlier in terms of attitudes toward human-caused global warming: Fewer Americans accept the climate science consensus than residents of most other countries.

All this would suggest that climate science resistance has more to do with cultural identity politics than religiosity.

Which comes first?

But the available evidence cuts both ways. A landmark study from the 1980s suggested that fundamentalist religious traditions are associated with a commitment to human dominion over nature, and that this attitude may explain anti-environmentalist positions.

Even after controlling for political ideology, those committed to an “end-times theology” – like U.S. evangelicals – still show a greater tendency to oppose the scientific consensus on environmental issues.

Perhaps some specific theologies bias the believer against the idea that human beings could be responsible for the end of humanity. This bias could show up as an automatic rejection of environmental science.

We are left with something of a “chicken and egg” problem: Do certain religious communities adopt politically conservative positions on climate change because of their religious tradition? Or do people adopt a religious tradition that stresses human dominion over nature because they were raised in a politically conservative community? The direction of causation here may be difficult to resolve.

It wouldn’t be surprising to find either religious dogmatism or political conservatism linked with anti-science attitudes – each tends to favor the status quo. Fundamentalist religious traditions are defined by their fixed doctrines. Political conservatives by definition favor the preservation of the traditional social and economic order.

Consider that perhaps the single essential aspect of the scientific method is that it has no respect for cultural traditions or received views. (Think of Galileo’s findings on the motion of the Earth, or Darwin on evolution.) Some would argue that scientific inquiry’s “constant onslaught on old orthodoxies” is the reason both conservatives and frequent churchgoers report a decreasing overall trust in science which continues to this day.

Even if politics and culture rather than religion itself may be driving climate science denial, religious communities – as some religious leaders, including the Roman Catholic Pope, have recognized – bear a responsibility to exercise some self-awareness and concern for well-being rather than blindly denying the overwhelming consensus on a civilization-ending threat like human-caused global warming.

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Perkins Suggests a ‘Criminal Conspiracy’ Is Behind Civil Unrest in America’s Cities

READ MORE

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mARCH 11, 2020 4:40 PM

Tony Perkins Says Coronavirus Response Has Been ‘Irrational’

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but mega and FRC back kurds xian?

Hate group leader Tony Perkinsis openly bragging about his access to the Trump White House.

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1219 schism on djt?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/white-evangelicals-still-view-support-for-trump-as-spiritual-warfare-against-the-demonic-forces-pushing-for-his-impeachment

no lnx

White evangelicals still view support for Trump as ‘spiritual warfare’ against the ‘demonic forces’ pushing for his impeachment

Written by Alex Henderson December 23, 2019

Although President Donald Trump has plenty of critics in Christianity — some Catholics, some Mainline Protestants — he is still quite popular among far-right white evangelical fundamentalists. So when Mark Galli, the retiring editor-in-chief of the evangelical Christianity Today, wrote a scathing anti-Trump op-ed last week, many of Trump’s white evangelical supporters were furious —  including Franklin Graham, son of the late Christianity Today founder Billy Graham.And journalist Ed Kilgore, in a December 23 article for New York Magazine, stresses that Trump’s critics shouldn’t think white evangelical support for him is softening — they still view Trump as their champion.

White evangelical support for Trump, Kilgore observes, goes beyond Trump putting so many far-right judges on the federal judiciary: as they see it, fighting Trump’s impeachment and getting him reelected in 2020 is a form of spiritual warfare.

“Many Christian Right leaders and members of their flocks view political battles involving Trump as spiritual warfare between holy and demonic forces, with the crude, self-idolizing and heathenish POTUS treated as unquestionably the champion of the Prince of Peace,” Kilgore explains.

Kilgore points to a December 19 article by Sarah Posner for Type Investigations as having some of the best reporting in recent days on the amount of unwavering support Trump still enjoys among far-right white evangelicals.

Posner reported, “Trump’s evangelical base is a sprawling, interconnected network of political advocacy groups, megachurches, White House advisers, televangelists and prayer warriors. It also includes a formidable, data-driven get-out-the-vote operation.”

Posner’s article cites some of the well-known Christian Right extremists who remain committed to helping Trump win a second term in 2020, and they range from the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Ralph Reed to the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. Another is Jim Bakker.

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

One of Trump’s top allies in his Christian Right outreach, Kilgore observes, isFlorida-based evangelist Paula White — who preaches an ideology called the Prosperity Gospel. In contrast to all the Catholics and Mainline Protestants who equate greed, materialism and avarice with sinfulness, the Prosperity Gospel associates a fat bank account with being a good Christian and poverty with moral failings.So when Republicans go out of their way to hurt the poor, proponents of the Prosperity Gospel see that as righteous Christian behavior.

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

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Christian pastors praise Trump for speech on ‘religious persecution’ — and ditching UN Summit on ‘imaginary’ climate crisis

Two well-known Christian pastors appeared on “Fox & Friends” Monday morning to praise President Donald Trump’s decision to deliver a speech Monday at the United Nations on “religious persecution” – while snubbing a climate change summit to do so.

Hate ground head Tony Perkins was joined by Dr. Robert Jeffress, a Fox News contributor who had plenty of praise for the President. Both men are among America’s top anti-LGBTQ activists and both are closely tied to Trump and his administration.

Dr. Jeffress called climate change an “imaginary problem” while heralding Trump’s “guts” for ignoring today’s UN summit on the crisis.

“This is the first time any leader of a nation has addressed the UN on religious persecution,” Jeffress said excitedly. “A third of the world is living under religious persecution. 80 percent of it is against Christians,” Jeffress claimed. “It is a remarkable thing that this president would skip a UN climate change summit on an imaginary problem to address the very real problem of global persecution of believers.”

“I mean, think about it: what president in history would have the guts to do what President Trump is doing?” Jeffress asked, laughing because, he said, “it’s absolutely infuriating” Trump’s “enemies” while “energizing his base.”

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Tony Perkins, president of the anti-LGBTQ Religious Right organization Family Research Council, was invited to speak at an event hosted by the State Department this week, where he has been rubbing elbows with some of the Trump administration’s top brass, who have been dropping by his radio studio for exclusive interviews on his show, Washington Watch.

The State Department is hosting a three-day Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom in Washington, where a bipartisan lineup of high-ranking officials is discussing threats to religious liberty across the world. Perkins spoke at the event yesterday, and broadcast his weekday radio program from the State Department.

In addition to his role at Family Research Council, Perkins chairs the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, to which he was appointed on the recommendation of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell despite the fact that Perkins’ group was identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its attacks against the LGBTQ community and brings with it a well-documented track record of anti-Muslim rhetoric.

On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was a guest on Perkins’ show, there to hype the State Department’s event to Perkins’ Religious Right audience. The following day, Mark Green, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), joined Perkins on his radio show to talk about the importance of USAID pairing with religious groups to fulfill their missions abroad.

“For us at USAID, around the world, we are far more effective when we partner with the community of faith,” Green said. “The community of faith, faith-based organizations, help us to reach corners that we could not reach in this world through the government.”

Perkins agreed, praising the Trump administration for its work with religious groups, adding, “Together we can do so much more than if we try to do it alone.” At the end of the interview, Green told Perkins, who has a troubled history regarding racism: “I’m honored to be with you.”

That affirming message is in stark contrast to the elements of Perkins’ public record that raised concerns about his appointment to the USCIRF. As Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery noted after Perkins’ election to USCIRF chair in June:

As recently as 2015, Perkins claimed that Islam “is incompatible with the Constitution.”  That same year, he defended calls to restrict the immigration of Muslims by declaring that “only 16 percent of Islam is a religion.” The year before, he suggested that Christians who support legal equality for LGBTQ people don’t have the same legal protections as more conservative Christians, because a “true religious freedom” has to be “based on orthodox religious viewpoints.”

It’s also worth noting that the Family Research Council is one of the Religious Right groups that have eagerly worked with the most religiously oppressive regimes—those classified by the USCIRF as among the worst for religious liberty—in order to resist international recognition for the rights of LGBTQ people and to defend governments’ right to enforce “traditional” religious views on gender, sexuality, and family.

Scholars have argued that religious intolerance at home undermines the United States’ ability to advocate for human rights overseas.

Tags: Mark GreenMike PompeoTony PerkinsAnti-LGBTReligious RightFamily Research CouncilU.S. State DepartmentUSAID

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'I'm Going to Stop You': CNN Host Shuts Down Evangelical Tony Perkins for Dishonest Claim of 'Violence' from the Left

By Chris Sosa, AlterNet

The far-right Christian leader was not getting away with his absurd claim

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  1. Troy Newman: The president of Operation Rescue jumped aboard the Trump train this week. An anti-choice extremist, Newman even co-authored a book with a would-be domestic terrorist, Cheryl Sullenberger, who in 1988 was sentenced to three years in federal prison for conspiring to blow up an abortion clinic. In that 2003 book, Newman and Sullenberger argue, according to People for the American Way, “that the government has a responsibility to execute abortion providers.”

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Time was when a presidential candidate who played footsie with segregationists and white supremacists would have banished to the fringes of the American political scene. But Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has changed all that.

Oh sure, there have been plenty of codes telegraphed to the anti-black base of the GOP’s southern flank: Ronald Reagan’s choice of Philadelphia, Mississippi, as the place to make a “states’ rights” speech in his 1980 presidential campaign; Richard Nixon’s southern strategy and “Silent Majority” framing. But after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, expressions of outright racism were frowned upon in presidential politics. And articulations of misogyny were generally doled out in the form of withering condescension.

I don’t need to recount for you Trump’s friendliness with the alt-right, the white nationalist movement that was given a platform at Breitbart News by Stephen K. Bannon, the man Trump hired as his campaign CEO. You don’t need to take my word for it; Bannon has boasted of this fact. And you surely know of Trump’s numerous retweets of posts and memes from white supremacist websites. And who can forget all of the lovely things he’s said about women, calling them fat pigs and demeaning them for having menstrual periods?

Just yesterday, Trump’s running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, declined for a second time to say that former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke was “deplorable,” stating that he isn’t “in the name-calling business.” Isn’t it enough, Pence asked, that he and Trump have disavowed Duke’s endorsement?

Trump yesterday won the endorsement of Operation Rescue president Troy Newman, an anti-choice extremist who co-authored a 2003 book, according to People for the American Way, that “argued that the government has a responsibility to execute abortion providers.” In 1988, Newman’s co-author, Cheryl Sullenberger, was sentenced to three years in federal prison for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic.

On Friday, Donald Trump appeared before evangelical Christians assembled at the Values Voter Summit, an annual confab convened by FRC Action, the political arm of the Family Research Council. The conference exhibit hall featured the booths of such co-sponsors as Tradition, Family and Property, a paleo-Catholic cult whose founder described the Spanish Inquisition as the church’s most glorious moment, and the conspiracy-theorist and segregationist John Birch Society, which William F. Buckley thought he had managed to purge from the conservative movement in 1962. This was the first time the JBS appeared in the Values Voter hall of sponsors. It could be said that the Trump candidacy helped pave the way, what with his embrace of the conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones, and his numerous winks to white nationalist extremists.

The following day, FRC President Tony Perkins, who has endorsed Trump, defended the alt-right when I asked him about the movement at a press conference. Its existence, he seemed to say, was the fault of President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for having “snuffed out” the voices of people who disagree with the administration’s policies.

To lay all of this at Trump’s feet would be to give him too much credit. As I’ve argued before, the misogynist, racist, nativist, anti-LGBT right wing that took over the GOP in 1980—of which Perkins himself is evidence—has much to answer for, not least of all, the rise of Donald Trump as the party’s standard-bearer. Trump may not have been the first choice of right-wing leaders, but they created the conditions that cleared his path to the nomination, and most have lined up behind him since he won it.

But mainstream media are also complicit in this normalization of hatred, allowing it to masquerade in the guise political positions. For decades, when reporting on the Christian right, for example, media have treated it as a religious movement, barely mentioning—if at all—the roots of movement positions in the segregationist backlash of the South. Instead, media executives allowed themselves to be cowed by the right wing’s outrage machine, every time it cranked up its conveyor belt of allegations of the anti-religion bent of reporters.

Today, the same tendency is evident in the false-equivalence reporting prevalent in the degrees to which media cover different stories. Questions about Clinton’s emails demand teams of reporters toiling for months; scandals involving Trump are too often written as one-off reports—so fearful are mainstream editors of fielding an accusation of liberal bias.

In the meantime, a monster has been allowed to grow in our midst. Bannon take an obscure fringe of the right and elevates it to a platform that garners tens of millions of pageviews per month. Trump hires Bannon. Media say, hey, that’s interesting, do one story, and say, “Next?”

Covering the Values Voter Summit this September 9 and 10 was downright depressing. Trump addressed the conference on Friday, and Pence on Saturday—meaning that the conference attendees represent a legitimized constituency of the GOP, as they have for 30 years. The founders of the religious right are passing onto their just rewards. Organizers Paul Weyrich and Howard Phillips died in 2008 and 2013, respectively; Phyllis Schlafly died on September 5 (but not before she took the opportunity to endorse Trump). The movement they founded, however, continues to wreak the havoc of hate on the American political landscape, and the media dare not call it by its name.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/normalization-evil-american-politics

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https://www.facebook.com/Mediamatters/videos/10153195511466167/

value voters summit is must go for cands? am family assoc co-spon (even more wacko?)

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http://ecowatch.com/2014/11/03/climate-change-plot-tony-perkins

Anti-gay activists are sounding increasingly unhinged as marriage equality sweeps the U.S.Climate deniers are sounding increasingly unhinged as evidence piles up that we’ve got to do something about the way we’re ravaging our planet.

Put them together and what do you have? An epic level of head-scratching conspiracy-mongering emanating from the master of that craft, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, a man who has been professionally obsessed with LGBT people for years.

According to watchdog group Right Wing Watch, Perkins told a caller to his Washington Watch radio program last week that those who are advocating for action on climate change are behind the push for LGBT rights.

The caller offered him an opening, saying that homosexuality is “promoted” because it doesn’t lead to reproduction and that “there’s this anti-life agenda, there’s a total anti-human, anti-life, human beings are a virus type of mentality.”

Perkins took the opportunity to connect that with people working to stem and reverse climate change.

“Climate change alarmists and those who are pushing population control … promote homosexuality,” he said. “They deny it but the evidence is there; it’s footnoted in my book.”

Undoubtedly with references to the Bible, not scientific literature.

It’s not Perkins’ first waltz at this particular dance. Earlier this year he said on his program,“I remember a few years ago, it might have been Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, who made a reference to a hurricane or a storm being an act of God. It’s interesting that’s how we refer to some of these things in our insurance policies—they were ridiculed, saying ‘how dumb can you be?’ Well, there’s more to back that up than to say what’s happening in our environment, our climate, is because of people driving Suburbans or coal-fired power plants.”

Those who follow the shenanigans of these high-profile evangelical media figures will probably recall that Robertson and the late Falwell blamed those acts of God on gay people. Robertson most notoriously said back in the late ’90s that God would send “hurricanes and other disasters” to smite Florida because DisneyWorld held a Gay Pride Day. Apparently, God wasn’t listening to Robertson because that particular year, Florida experienced no hurricanes.

You won’t find Perkins’ name on the roster of the Evangelical Environmental Network, which believes there is a biblical mandate to care for the Earth. And needless to say, Perkins is an evolution denier as well.

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

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/04/10/on-fox-tony-perkins-distorts-msnbc-ad-to-attack/193566

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Thursday, 10/13/2011 10:40 am

Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance appeared on Janet Parshall’s radio show In The Market on Tuesday to discuss the “Green Dragon” film series which was made by Beisner��s group and hosted by Parshall. As we discussed in our report The ‘Green Dragon’ Slayers: How the Religious Right and the Corporate Right are Joining Forces to Fight Environmental Protection, the “Green Dragon” series represents efforts by the Religious Right and the Corporate Right to paint environmentalism as anti-Christian and ungodly:

During the radio show, Parshall played clips from the“documentary,” including one from Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who argues that in the name of “population control” the government will eventually push “infanticide” and promote “same-sex relations”:

Perkins: Population control is a very loaded term. It includes not only abortion, contraception and sterilization, all at government expense of course, but it also includes infanticide and the promotion of same-sex relations. At the heart of this push for population control is an unbiblical view of children and of life.

Another clip featured right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton. Barton, who has made a career of infusing Religious Right beliefs into politics and American history, accused environmentalism of being “a religion��� with its own rules and “high priests,” and went on to tell people to contest environmental beliefs because “that’s not science, that is the faith position that you’re taking”:

Barton: People say that environmentalism is a religion. Others say, ‘Oh no, that’s not true,’ but it really is. Now how do we know? I’ve been involved in seven cases at the US Supreme Court and I can point to a number of court decisions where the court has said religion is whatever you believe so strongly that it affects the way you live your life. That’s why the court recognizes even atheism as a religion. Environmentalism definitely is a religion, it has its own high priests, it has folks that tell us what we can and can’t do with the environment and how we can treat it and they’re the guardians of it as if it’s a great temple. It’s a religion. And as soon as we recognize that environmentalism is a religion then it helps us to understand better how to respond to what’s being said, how to filter what’s being said, and say, now wait a minute, that’s not science, that is the faith position that you’re taking.

Filed Under

Organizations:

undefined, Religious Right, PFAW, Family Research Council, Cornwall Alliance

People:

Tony Perkins, Calvin Beisner

Topics:

Supreme Court, Science, Religious Right, Religion, Politics, green dragon, Environment, court decisions, Abortion

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First up from the God Machine this week is a strange warning from one of the religious right movement's most prominent voices.

While many faith leaders from a wide variety of traditions support new proposals to reduce gun violence, many leading evangelical Christians are doing the opposite, aligning themselves with the National Rifle Association (because nothing reinforces fealty to Jesus like opposing background checks on gun purchases). Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, went so far as to embrace a truly bizarre conspiracy theory.

"I'm very concerned about this measure; I am concerned about where it may go once it gets to the Senate floor and what might happen in the House. This idea of background checks is very concerning given the fact that the United States military has been increasingly showing hostility toward evangelicals and Catholics as being somehow threats to national security and people that need to be watched.

"Well, what does that have to do with gun control? Well, what happens if all the sudden you are identified as an evangelical, bible-believing fundamentalist and the government decides you've got to be put on a watch list? Part of the provisions of this background check is kind of a system where if a caution comes up when they put your name in, you don't get a chance to buy a gun."

So, to recap, in Perkins' mind, the military is hostile to Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians (a ridiculous claim); Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians have been deemed a potential threat to national security (an equally ridiculous claim); the federal government may be inclined to put these Christians on a watch list (still ridiculous); leading to laws that prevent Christians from buying firearms (you see where I'm going with this).

This nonsense was then picked up by World Net Daily, Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) favorite conspiracy theory website, which never saw a nutty idea it didn't want to publish.