Philadelphia Society

Matthew is Deputy Director at Large of OpenTheBooks.com. Matthew is also an active board member of Project Veritas, where he works closely with founder and modern-day muckraker James O'Keefe. In addition to his domestic issue-based political activism, he is also an engaged Polish dual citizen and advises the current conservative Polish government on an ad hoc basis. Mr. Tyrmand frequently appears in Polish mass media commenting on Polish, American, and European political issues. Moreover, he pens a weekly column for one of Poland's top conservative newsweeklies, Do Rzeczy. He has contributed to Breitbart, Forbes, American Thinker, The American Conservative, The Jerusalem Post, The European Conservative, and numerous other Polish and American outlets and has authored two books in the Polish market. He is a Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow and a member of the Philadelphia Society. Before entering the conservative movement full time, Mr. Tyrmand spent the years following his graduation from the University of Chicago in the finance industry as an equity and equity derivatives trader, analyst, and portfolio manager at some of Wall Street's most well-known hedge funds. https://www.conservativepartnership.org/staff

wapo

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/10/03/controversial-project-veritas-hit-with-restraining-order-sought-by-teachers-union/

no lnx docs

Answer Sheet

Analysis

Controversial Project Veritas hit with restraining order sought by teachers union

James O’Keefe, right, a conservative U.S. activist and head of the Project Veritas group, testifies as a witness in a trial in Warsaw on June 21. O’Keefe testified on behalf of his colleague and friend Matthew Tyrmand, an American activist with his group who is suing a Polish journalist and his publisher for defamation. (Vanessa Gera/AP)]

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wiki

The Philadelphia Society is a membership organization the purpose of which is "to sponsor the interchange of ideas through discussion and writing, in the interest of deepening the intellectual foundation of a free and ordered society, and of broadening the understanding of its basic principles and traditions".^[2] The membership of the Society tends to be composed of persons holding conservative or libertarian political views, and many of those associated with the Society have exercised considerable influence over the development of the conservative movement in the United States.

It was founded in 1964 by Donald Lipsett in conjunction with Bill Buckley, Milton Friedman, Frank Meyer, and Ed Feulner,^{[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]} and the former Presidents of the Society include HenryRegnery, Edwin J. Feulner, Russell Kirk, Mel Bradford, Forrest McDonald, T. Kenneth Cribb, M. Stanton Evans, Ellis Sandoz, Edwin Meese, Claes G. Ryn, Midge Decter, Roger Ream, Steven F. Hayward, Lee Edwards, William F. Buckley, and George H. Nash.^[10]

Notable speakers at past meetings of the Society have included Larry Arnhart, Andrew Bacevich, **Wendell Berry**, Robert Bork, Mel Bradford, Warren T. Brookes, William F. Buckley, Vladimir Bukovsky, Ronald Coase, T. Kenneth Cribb, Midge Decter, M. Stanton Evans, Edwin J. Feulner, Milton Friedman, George Gilder, Victor Davis Hanson, William Hague, S. I. Hayakawa, Friedrich von Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, W.H. Hutt, Herman Kahn, Russell Kirk, Irving Kristol, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Forrest McDonald, Edwin Meese, Frank Meyer, Charles Murray, Robert Nisbet, Michael Novak, Richard Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, Henry Regnery, William A. Rusher, Paul Ryan, Ellis Sandoz, Shelby Steele, George J. Stigler, Terry Teachout, Edward H. Teller, and Eric Voegelin.^[11]

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Burton C Gray:radio and television station owner/executive; He was a trustee of the Philadelphia Society (the foundation supporting the Heritage Society, and various other right-wing think-tanks - all closely associated with Richard Mellon Scaife), and he was a board member of the Reason Foundation, Federalist Society, Libertarian Party, etc..

Richard Mellon Scaife, Pioneering Fundraiser for the Right, Dead at 82

Bill Berkowitz
Thu Jul 10, 2014 at 08:12:14 AM EST	Thu Jul 10, 2014 at 08:12:14 AM EST

Long before the billionaire Koch Brothers and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson began polluting the American political landscape with obscene amounts of money, decades before the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, years before the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth mobilized a platoon of millionaire financiers to put the kibosh on John Kerry's presidential campaign, and before folks like Rex Sinquefield were bound and determined to have their money loom large over the legislative process in the states, there was Richard Mellon Scaife.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Scaife and his family were among the top donors to a myriad of right-wing organizations and causes. Back in the day it didn't take long before researchers following the money behind the conservative movement ran headlong into the Scaife clan.

Up from Pittsburgh

Scaife, the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based heir to the Mellon banking fortune, was a man on a multi-pronged mission. He succeeded in helping build the powerful conservative infrastructure that essentially paved the way for the way for the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the rise of the Religious Right and the institutionalization of such right-wing powerhouses as the Heritage Foundation.

According to The New York Times, Scaife "inherited roughly $500 million in 1965, and with more family bequests and income from trust funds and investments in oil, steel and real estate, nearly tripled his net worth over his lifetime. But unlike his forebears, who were primarily benefactors of museums, public art collections, education and medicine, he gave hundreds of millions to promote conservative political causes."

In 2008, Bruce Wilson, a co-founder of Talk2Action, wrote: "The industrial fortune heir and owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune- Review provided the lion's share of the initial funding which created the Heritage Foundation and has given key funding to The American Spectator, the pro-war Neoconservative Foundation For The Defense Of Democracies, the Heartland Institute, the Institute On Religion and Democracy, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Free Congress Foundation."

Scaife was a member of the U.S. Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy, which oversees the U.S. Information Agency during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. At the time of his death, Scaife was serving as vice chairman of the Heritage Foundation Board of Trustees.

The man who sustained the GOP

The Tribune-Review pointed out that "Many of the nation's leading conservatives considered him to be the man who sustained the Republican Party after its crushing defeat in the 1964 presidential election and the Watergate scandal in 1972. His support for and promotion of a conservative agenda led to Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980 and the nation's turn toward the principles those two men shared."

The man who The New York Times characterized as having a predilection for being "reclusive," and "never ran for public office or gave speeches to promote his political views," wasn't shy about his ideological druthers, nor his hostility for, and obsession with, President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton.

Another of Scaife's lifelong battles was aimed at ripping apart America's social safety net, and destroying gains won by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Veteran researcher Frederick Clarkson told me in an email that Scaife "was the 800 pound gorilla of conservative philanthropy. Without his massive infusions of cash, many of today's established institutions would be smaller and less influential, if they existed at all."

Clarkson, the author of the author of the invaluable Eternal Hostility: the Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, and a co-founder of Talk2Action.org, allowed that Scaife "was also one of the movement's dirty secrets. The official obituaries have been properly polite about it, but in fairness, he also largely got away with concealing his personal hypocrisies behind a billionaire's capacity to preserve his privacy. For a movement that promoted the values of hard work, free enterprise and family values, he lived primarily off his trust funds, and made his mark by redirecting family controlled foundations into conservative political projects. He was also a twice-divorced philanderer who, as The New York Times' obituary politely put it, had 'a longstanding drinking problem.'"

The New York Times also pointed out that despite his penchant for privacy, the family values touting billionaire had numerous personal issues including "bitter feuds with his relatives, friends and employees."

In 1999, Scaife told The Washington Post that he was "not a politician, although like most Americans I have some political views. Basically I am a private individual who has concerns about his country and who has resources that give me the privilege -- and responsibility -- to do something to help my country if I can."

In an e-mail exchange, Rob Levine, the creator of Media Transparency, a website that tracked the funding of right-wing organizations, campaigns and causes, told me that he had never heard of Richard Mellon Scaife until he "began to research the funding of the conservative movement in 1997 after discovering the topic while researching a local right wing think tank."

Levine discovered "thatScaife's foundations comprised one of the four 'Big Sisters' foundations taking a supply-side approach to changing the nation's politics. (The other three were the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Coors Foundation.) Without Scaife's money, we might not have the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and many other pillars of the conservative movement.

"In retrospect," Levine pointed out, "Scaife and the others were wildly successful in changing not just the politics of the United States, but also the way we think about crucial issues in our lives from government regulation to the concept of freedom.

"Today we don't think or hear much about Scaife or Coors, but their legacy lives on through their foundations and their successors, which today include foundations created by the heirs of Walmart (the Walton Family Foundation) and Bill Gates. The wealth generated by the boom years of the 90s and the beginning of this century gave rise to dozens of other right wing foundations that carry on the Scaife legacy. While liberals have begun to create organizations to compete with those created by the conservatives (notably the Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America), the progressive creations don't begin to approach the conservatives in number or in ideological and political focus.

"Just one fact makes this point," Levine added, "conservatives, includingScaife, launched a legal organization called the Federalist Societyin the 1980s to turn the US courts into a conservative tool. Thirty years later a near-controlling block of Federalist Society judges dominate the US Supreme Court - justices Antonin Scalia, John G. Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are all members. Those justices need just one more vote - which they often get - to shift American society to the right. From Bush v. Gore to the recent Hobby Lobby and Women's Health Clinic rulings the Federalist Society has been a huge success for the conservatives. Richard Mellon Scaife may be dead, but his legacy will be with us for years if not decades to come."